for dozens of miles. They pass no vehicle for half an hour, and the occupants of that first car, a retired couple from Elmhurst, Illinois, with five hours more to drive before sleeping, won’t even remember the white van speeding the other way by the time they see the fire.
The arsonists pass long stretches of silence punctuated by shouting. Adam and Nick threaten each other. Mimi drives in a soundproof bubble. Two hundred miles outside Portland, Douglas demands that they surrender. Something tells them not to. Olivia. That alone they’ll all remember.
“No one saw anything,” Adam tells the others, too many times.
“It’s over,” Nick says. “She’s dead. We’re finished.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Adam orders. “Nothing can trace this back to us. Just stay quiet.”
They have failed to protect anything at all. They agree, at least, to protect each other.
“Say nothing, no matter what. Time is with us.”
But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.
In Portland, they scatter.
NICHOLAS CAMPS on the ghost of Mimas. No tent, no sleeping roll. He lies on his side as night comes on, his head on a wadded jacket near the ring laid down the year Charlemagne died. Somewhere underneath his coccyx, Columbus. Past his ankles, the first Hoel leaves Norway for Brooklyn and the expanses of Iowa. Beyond the length of his body, crowding up to the cut’s cliff, are the rings of his own birth, the death of his family, the roadside visit of the woman who recognized him, who taught him how to hang on and live.
The stump oozes from around its rim, the sap a color that the painter has no name for. He turns on his back and stares into the air, twenty stories straight up, trying to locate that precise spot where he and Olivia lived for a year. He doesn’t want to be dead. He just wants the play of that voice, its eager openness, for a few words more. He just wants the girl who always heard what life wanted from them to rise out of the fire and tell him what he’s supposed to do with himself, from now on. There is no voice. Not hers, not the imaginary beings’. No flying squirrels or murrelets or owls or any other creature that sang to them in their year. His heart contracts back down to the size it was when she found him. Silence, he decides, is better than lies.
He doesn’t sleep much, on his hard campsite. He won’t get many good nights for the next twenty years. And yet, twenty more rings would have been no wider than his ring finger.
MIMI AND DOUG strip the van and destroy every rag, hose, and rubber band. They scrub down the bed with several solvents. She sells the thing for a song and pays cash to buy a tiny Honda. She’s sure the sale will play out like a Poe story. The van’s new owner will turn up some damning paper scrap sitting in plain sight.
She puts her condo on the market. “Why?” Douglas asks.
“We have to split up. It’s safer.”
“How can it be safer?”
“We’ll give each other away if we stay together. Douglas. Look at me. Look at me. We are not going to do that.”
IT MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN anything but a page three item. Arson destroys foundations at resort construction site. Nuisance setback. Work to resume right away. But bone turns up in the sifted ash, a human victim. Every news outlet in nine western states picks up the story and runs it for days.
The investigators can make no identification. A woman, young, five-foot-seven. As for violence, violation, it’s impossible to say. The only leads are the cryptic inscriptions found near the blaze:
CONTROL KILLS
CONNECTION HEALS
COME HOME OR DIE
For you have five trees in Paradise . . .
Collective wisdom settles on the most plausible explanation. It’s the work of a deranged killer.
. . .
ADAM SLIPS BACK into Santa Cruz. Unthinkable, after everything. But dropping out of the program with his thesis at the finish line would only point a spotlight at him. His year-long fellowship is mostly spent. He sits for days in his sublet with the curtains