like this, this very minute, thread the country in every direction, feeding all the great metro sprawls and their satellites. She thinks: They have arranged this for me. Then she thinks, No: such trains pass by all the time. But now she’s primed to see.
The last of the wood-stacked cars passes, the zebra guard lifts, and the red lights stop flashing. She doesn’t move. Someone behind her honks. She holds still. The honker lays into the horn, then peels out around her, screaming in the sealed cabin and shaking a middle finger at her like he’s trying to ignite it. She closes her eyes; across her lids, small people sit chained together around an enormous tree.
The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.
She laughs and opens her eyes, which fill with tears. Confirmed. I hear you. Yes.
She looks over her left shoulder to see a car pointed the other direction, stopped alongside her with the window down. An Asian man wearing a T-shirt that reads NOLI TIMERE is asking her, for the second time, “Are you all right?” She smiles and nods and waves apology. She starts her engine, which stalled while she was watching the endless river of lumber. Then she rolls out west again. Only now she knows where she’s headed. Solace. The air all around sparks with connections. The presences light around her, singing new songs. The world starts here. This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.
YEARS BEFORE and far to the northwest, Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly Brinkman head back home after midnight from the party following the St. Paul Players’ opening night of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They’ve just played the young couple Nick and Honey, who, over a few drinks with new friends, learn what their species can do.
Months ago, at the start of rehearsals, the four leads savored the play’s viciousness. “I’m nuts,” Dorothy announced to the rest of the cast. “I grant you that. But these people—these people are truly gone.” By opening night, all four of them are frayed and sick of each other and ready to do real damage. It makes for great community theater. The play is the Brinkmans’ best outing, by far. Ray stuns everyone with his petty conniving. Dorothy is brilliant in that two-hour free fall from innocence into knowing. It takes only the slightest Stanislavski to find their inner demons.
Next Friday is Dorothy’s forty-second birthday. Over the course of several years, they’ve spent a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on fertility treatments that turn out to be voodoo. Three days before the play opened, they received the final blow. There’s nothing left to try.
“My life, right?” Dorothy is looped and weepy in the passenger seat, coming home from her triumph. “All mine. I’m supposed to own it, right?”
It has become a sore spot between them, ownership: what Ray spends all day safeguarding. He has never quite convinced his wife that prosecuting the theft of good ideas is the best way to make everyone richer. Drink does not help the level of debate. “My own private personal property. Can I have a fucking garage sale?”
Dorothy’s own job now makes her ill. People suing other people, and she must record every slanderous sentiment with her narrow, chorded keyboard stenotype, word by precise word. All she wants is to have a child. A child would give her meaningful work at last. Barring that, she wants to sue someone.
Ray makes an art of staying still under her attacks. He tells himself, not for the first time, that he has taken nothing away from her. If anything . . . he thinks. But he refuses to think that thought. That’s his right—not to think what it’s only fair to think.
He doesn’t have to. She has the thought for him. He clicks the clicker and the garage opens. They pull in. “You should leave me,” she says.
“Dorothy. Please stop. You’re making me crazy.”
“Really. Leave. Go somewhere. Find somebody where you can have a family. Men do that forever. Guys can knock chicks up when they’re eighty, for fuck’s sake. I wouldn’t mind, Ray. Really. Only fair. You’re the fairness guy, remember? Oop. He says nothing. Got nothing to say. Nothing to say in his defense.”
Silence is what he has. His first and last best weapon.
They come in the front door. What a dump, they both think, though neither needs to say it. They drop their crap on the couch and head