two-story showroom. A museum revealing how much of the world depends on trucks. There are game rooms and entertainment alleys, exhibits, lounges, and a fireplace flanked by stuffed chairs. She curls up in one and dozes off. She wakes to a security guard kicking her ankles. “No sleeping.”
“I was just sleeping.”
“No sleeping.”
She returns to the car and dozes under her clothes again until dawn. Back in the food tunnel, she buys a muffin, changes four dollars into quarters, finds a phone, and braces for the worst. But in her chest, a strange and newfound calm. The words will come.
An operator tells her to deposit lots of money. Her father picks up. “Olivia? It’s six in the morning. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing! I’m fine. I’m in Iowa.”
“Iowa? What’s going on?”
Olivia smiles. What’s going on is too big to fit into the phone. “Dad, it’s all right. It’s something good. Very good.”
“Olivia. Hello? Olivia?”
“I’m here.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“No, Dad. Just the opposite.”
“Olivia. What on Earth is happening?”
“I’ve made . . . some new friends. Uh, organizers. They have work for me.”
“What kind of work?”
The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help. It’s simple enough, and self-evident, now that the light-beings have pointed it out. Every reasonable person on the planet should be able to see. “There’s a project. Out West. Important volunteer work. I’ve been recruited.”
“What do you mean, recruited? What about your classes?”
“I won’t be finishing school this term. That’s why I called. I need to take some time off.”
“You what? Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t take time off four months before you graduate.”
Generally true, although saints and soon-to-be billionaires have done exactly that.
“You’re just tired, Ollie. It’s only a few weeks. It’ll be over before you know it.”
Olivia looks out on the motorists gathering in the court for breakfast. Curious beyond saying: In one life, she dies of electrocution. In another, she’s in the world’s largest truck stop, explaining to her father that she’s been chosen by beings of light to help preserve the most wondrous creatures on Earth. The voice on the other end of the phone turns desperate. Olivia can’t help smiling: the life her father begs her to return to—the drugs, the unprotected sex, the psycho parties and life-threatening dares—is hell itself, while this trip westward is bringing her back from the dead.
“You won’t be able to get your rent back. It’s too late for any kind of tuition refund. Just finish up, and you can do your volunteer work in the summer. I’m sure your mother—”
In the background, Olivia’s mother shouts, “I’m sure your mother what?”
Olivia hears her mother yell something about paying for her own education. People mill around her. She feels their anxiety—the moving goal line of hunger. Her own life had been a haze of privilege, narcissism, and impossibly extended adolescence, filled with mean, sardonic hipness and self-protection. Now she has been called.
“Look,” her father whispers into the phone. “Be sensible. If you can’t deal with one more semester right now, just come home.”
More love courses through Olivia than she has felt since childhood. “Dad? Thank you. But I need to do this.”
“Do what? Where? Honey? Are you still there? Sweetheart?”
“I’m here, Daddy.” Bits of the girl that she was only days ago tug at her, chanting, Fight, fight. But the fight is real now, and elsewhere.
“Ollie, sit tight. I’ll come get you. I can be out there by . . .”
Everything is so obvious, so blissfully clear. But her parents can’t see it. There is great, joyous, and essential work to do. But first a person needs to graduate from endless self-love.
“Daddy, I’m good. I’ll call when I have more information.”
A recorded woman cuts in, asking for another seventy-five cents. Olivia has no more change. All she has is a message, spoken by the flashing-eyed woman on the wall of discount televisions and reworked by the light-beings, who dictate to her now as clearly as if they were on the other end of the phone. The most wondrous things alive need you.
Through the front glass doors of the truck stop, Olivia sees the dozens of gas pumps, and beyond them, the flat expanse of I-80 in the dawn, the snowcapped fields, the endless hostage swap of travelers east and west. Her father goes on talking, using all the persuasion techniques they teach you in law school. The sky does amazing things. It bruises a little in the freedom of the west, while to the east it spills open like a