two forefingers.
I pulled out a beer and opened it.
“What are you going to do tonight? I don’t mean it in a weird way. I’m just curious.”
“Get drunk. Skate around.”
“Will you go home?”
“Probably.”
“Why? Do you like being there?”
“My dad sucks.”
“Does your dad suck worse than all this?”
I waved my arm across the water and the city and everything I saw.
“Maybe,” he said, “I don’t know.”
I took one more beer and let him have the rest. The sun was setting and I wanted to say something helpful but I knew he wouldn’t understand so I said something stupid that made no sense because I had been thinking things all day and there was no way I could explain them and I shouldn’t even have tried.
“Everything’s on fire,” I said. “The guy who won’t sell you the beer, your dad, the Ravage all around us, your feelings about the music you like, it’s all on fire.”
“Well, I wish it was on fire for real,” he said and kicked his board down, “because this all sucks.”
“Yeah, well, me too. I wish it had all burned away so I wouldn’t have to watch.”
He put the beer under his arm and headed off in one direction toward an apartment complex that I’d passed on my way down. I headed off in another.
It took me an hour to find a pack of crickets imaginative enough to believe that I should be taken in to custody. It wasn’t penitence. It was just a lack of options.
29 Della’s Mosaic
By the time I turned myself in I was pretty run down. No electrolytes at all. My hands and face were chapped and I had a lot of scratches but I was as lucid as I have ever been, clear and attentive. I watched each person who came and talked to me and could almost see the flames licking up around them.
I was held as a possible terrorism suspect. Grace and Miro were so proud they could barely stand it. Like it was lefty Christmas just for them. Viva North Pole Libre.
There was a lot of debate about the timeline of events and my whereabouts. Some of which could have been solved earlier if anybody in my family talked to cops. But they don’t. Years of training. They said Grace wouldn’t even tell them my middle name.
“It’s Rachael,” the FBI guy kept saying, “we know it’s Rachael. It’s a matter of public record. You’re not keeping anything from us. Della Rachael Mylinek. I’m holding her ID right here. Public record.”
Credence said she made him cry but he probably just said that to cheer me up. He said every time they’d ask Miro a question, he’d get that look like he was watching snowflakes fall. Credence gets that look too sometimes.
I saw Grace for a few minutes. My mother is beautiful. Her hair was the color of late fall when all the red and brown leaves are turning black but haven’t yet, should have and haven’t. I bet she did make those crickets cry.
The papers said I was a scientist, which was media code for Nuclear Secrets so everyone had to watch computerized models of mushroom clouds on TV for days. There was even a site where you could type in your zip code and see a model of your local fallout patterns under the current weather conditions. Which were changing.
“I’m wanted in connection with a series of terrorist attacks,” I told the guy who brought me my Gatorade. “You should be scared of me. I’m a geologist.”
Grace always said I was good at entertaining myself.
They put me in alone so that I didn’t convert the masses.
I didn’t ask why they thought I was a terrorist. And I didn’t answer when they asked why I didn’t ask. In one particularly intense interrogation I decided to give them a brief history of the planet. Starting at about 4.6 billion years ago and sweeping gracefully up to the present. My favorite part is the 2 billion years between the prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell. It’s riveting, really. I get excited. I did it once when I was drunk at Davis and nobody talked to me for a week. But the FBI loved it. I could tell.
What became clear after several meetings with the agents was that they didn’t really have anything. It was mostly the panic I caused in the airport when I failed to board at the gate. Apparently, they pulled my bag off the plane to Laos and blew it up on the