pomegranate. The phone clicks and goes dead. Olivia hangs up, a newly minted orphan. A thing reaching toward the sun, ready for anything.
SHE LEAVES THE TRUCK STOP, in love with aimless humanity. Back on the interstate, the sun rises again in her rearview mirror. Drumlins lift and fall. The road cuts a double trench through winter’s white, all the way to the horizon. Attractions are few, but each one delights her. The Herbert Hoover Library and Museum. Sharpless Auction. Amana Colonies. The interstate exits sound like characters in a novel about wayward, fey southern aristocracy: Wilton Muscatine, Ladora Millersburg, Newton Monroe, Altuna Bondurant . . .
Something comes over her, strange and beautiful courage. She has no resources, only a name for a destination, and no real clue about what she must do once there. Outside the car, it’s bleak and arctic, and all her worldly possessions are back in her rooming house. Yet she has a bank card linked to a small war chest, a sense of destiny that won’t quit, and friends in what she can only assume are very high places.
Hours pass like the rolling clouds. She’s a ways down that flattening surveyor’s line between Des Moines and Council Bluffs, with nothing in any direction except endless frozen-over chaff, when something beckons from the side of her eye. She turns to see a phantom hitchhiker standing in the snow beyond the interstate’s right shoulder. He waves more arms than Vishnu. One of them holds a banner she can’t read.
She pulls her foot off the gas and taps the brake. The hitchhiker turns into a tree so big it could fill an entire car of that lumber death train back in Indiana. The fissured trunk corkscrews up for dozens of feet before fountaining into several hulking limbs. The tree stands back from the interstate, a column against the sky, the only thing taller than a farmhouse for miles around. Presences stir in the passenger seat. As she draws abreast of the tree, Olivia makes out words painted on the shingle hanging from one enormous branch: FREE TREE ART. The presences run their twigs up the back of her neck.
She pulls off at the next exit. Under the stop sign where the ramp meets a county highway, a hand-painted poster with the same vine-like lettering signals her to turn right. A second sign, half a country mile along, points her back toward the fabulous tree. Down the rolling road, Eden leaps out at her—a glade of broadleaf trees flowering as if it’s May. It’s like an opening in the side of this frozen, forgetting Earth onto a hidden summer. A hundred yards closer, the glade becomes the wall of an old barn, transformed by fabulous tromp l’oeil. She heads up the gravel drive into a pull-off alongside the barn and gets out. She stands staring at the mural. Even up close, the illusion knocks her out.
“You’re here about the sign?”
She whirls. A man in jeans and a gray-white waffle shirt with hair like a Bronze Age prophet regards her. His breath steams. Bare hands clasp each opposite elbow. He’s a few years older than she is, sad and wild, frightened to see a customer. The door of the farmhouse twenty feet behind him hangs open. The tree stands off alongside the house. It strikes Olivia that someone planted it here a very long time ago simply to attract her attention. “Yes. I think I might be.”
She stands shivering, wanting her parka from the car. He studies her as if he means to flee. His chin rises and falls twice. “Well. You’re the first.” He points a long finger toward the painted barn, hand of a Renaissance Crucifixion. “Would you like to see the gallery?”
He leads her up a slight rise and ducks into the building. A flick of a switch reveals a space half homeless-person’s midden, half pharaonic tomb. Talismans everywhere: totems, drawings, and cargo cult, laid out on plywood planks spread across sawhorses. They look like the work of an autistic Neolithic pantheist, unearthed by archaeology.
Olivia swings her head, baffled. “You’re giving these away?”
“It’s not going to work, is it?”
“I don’t understand.” She wants to say, This is crazy. But since she started hearing voices, the word has become less useful. It occurs to her to worry, here in the middle of nowhere with a man who by any generous measure would count as strange. But a glance is enough to verify: the strangest thing about him is his