Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,25

between his legs.

“Nice rumor,” he said.

“Do you think it’s crazy?”

“Probably. The Helix is dangerous? Far as I know, they’re just trying to help.”

Then again, it was possible. Anything was possible now that so many people had thrown in their lot with a weirdo cult whose galvanizing and inexhaustible resource was loneliness in America.

There was a pause on the line. He could hear her thinking. She was worried; he’d have liked her to worry more. Finally, she came out with it. “Do you need help, Neddy? Because I know some people in D.C., and if your insurance won’t cover it, your father and I have, you know, the funds for it.”

He laughed. “You want to palm me off on a shrink?” He laughed again until he noticed a slick of peanut oil on his X-wing fighter jumpsuit.

“No,” she said wearily. “I think it’d be better if you just kept it all inside.”

“The Helix is harmless,” he said. “But even if it weren’t, that stuff never goes down well. What are they going to do? Storm the castle?”

“There’s a castle?”

“Compound. Whatever.”

“They have a compound? How do you know?”

“Mom, stop. I don’t know. I’m just saying.”

“It’s amazing,” she said. “The passion is there. Everyone seems so excited about the Helix.”

“Are you seriously wondering why?”

He knew she was staring at the family photos ordered atop the piano—her, Max, Ned, year after year—because when she said, “No, not really,” it was plangent for all the ways those photos betokened what had been lost to them as a family.

“I gotta go, Mom,” he said. And even though she had not said bye, he hung up.

Esme turned off the TV. She was peeling a clementine. The rind was clotted under her nails and tinting them orange. She was not surprised news of ARDOR had gotten out. Security leaks were a D.C. special, ever since that megalomaniac sprung the Pentagon Papers. These days you couldn’t piss on a toilet seat without someone telling the Washington Post. Still, it pained her to imagine the project name on someone else’s lips and contextualized poorly. It wasn’t even her idea, this name, just some guy at the Joint Chiefs tapping the JANAP 299 for a suitable word, the irony being that these words traditionally hewed to projects that did not bear out their meaning (Manhattan Project, anyone?). And yet there it was, ARDOR, which classified Jim Bach’s stint to dismantle the Helix and its guru.

Esme heard a phone ring, but since it was not her phone—cell, inhouse, or the secure line—she looked up at screen two just as Anne-Janet considered the name on her caller ID—Do I answer? Do I have the stamina? Can I alchemize my mood from depressed to effervescent?—and then listened to the dial tone on the machine. Ned had hung up. Damn. Double damn, since now she couldn’t call him back. If she called him back, he’d know she was screening. What sort of a woman screens? A reclusive, awkward woman who doesn’t know how to wear makeup or to feather the underside of a man’s penis with her tongue.

Anne-Janet pressed her feet into Lyndon / Lady Bird slippers. They looked like cots wrapped in the American flag, and at the head of each, on a pillow, a rubber face that couldn’t sleep; the future of the country was on their minds.

She plunked on the couch and flipped on the TV, except that the TV was broken, what the fuck? She was big on visualization and tried, immediately, to picture herself at the bottom of the ocean among fish and kelp. It was placid there, and all was well. All was well except for the part where her TV was broken, and OH MY GOD, her TV was broken! Maybe the RCA cable had gotten loose. It was not loose. She checked her Internet connection and this, too, was out. So the cable was out in the building. Fixed tomorrow. Or the day after. An inconvenience for some; a fiasco for Anne-Janet. She did not even have a radio. So the question posed by this cable outage was: How will I ever fall asleep tonight and, more alarming, if I cannot sleep, how will I bear the solitude? Anne-Janet could not stand solitude. If left to her own thoughts, she would think of her dad, at which point she’d retreat so far into herself, no one would be able to get her out. And how can you expect to be loved when you can’t even be reached?