it herself. “Do sido in Pyongyang? Think. That last part’s underlined,” she said. “What does it mean?”
He closed his eyes. “It means my ideas are stupid and my life is worthless.”
She came up next to him. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You are so not fine,” and she swiped a tear come down his face with her thumb.
He pointed at the roses boxed on the dresser. “You want those?”
“If they’re from you. So how did it go today? I bet you did great.”
He perked up a little. “Five thousand floes. I think we got them all.”
“Amazing,” she said. “All those people whose lives you’re improving.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“Don’t you?”
He nodded. He knew he was helping people but often lamented that, for his efforts, he hadn’t been more helped himself.
She put her hands on his chest, and when he did not push her away, she got on her knees and unzipped his pants.
He touched her cheek. Traced the flume at the base of her neck and rested the pad of his thumb there. It was always the same with his Traveling Companions, them trying and failing to rout the grief that tyrannized his inner life. And yet for Thurlow, this was the essence of a fetish—maybe, even, of all his doings: their incapacity to resolve a need alongside their aptitude for coming just close enough to sustain hope.
After a minute, she said, “Is it that you don’t want me anymore? Is that what’s happening?”
“Vicki,” and he tried to raise her to her feet, though she would not budge. “I want to say something to you. If what we have here ever comes to an end, if the Helix comes to an end, you should know that you have the right to a lawyer. And that you don’t have to say anything to anyone without one. Because it’s possible—the way things are headed—it’s possible this could all end badly. And soon. I’ve put us in danger.”
She laughed and burrowed deeper between his legs. She worked her lips and jaw and the studs gleamed and his heart cracked because whatever optimism he’d marshaled under the banner of finding his wife in D.C. had starved in the poverty of his chances.
“I’m serious,” he said. “I think you should go home. It’s not safe with me anymore.”
She paused—“Uh-huh”—and then carried on. After a minute more, “This isn’t working, is it?”
He helped her to her feet.
“Can I try again later?” she said.
He shook his head. “Go home, Vick.”
“I am home. Remember? You’re scaring me, Thurlow. Can’t I just sit here with you? Talk for a little, like you say all the time?”
It was dark outside, but he turned off the lights and led her to bed. She got on her side to face him. It was true, she was home. And in this he could take comfort. He could say his TCs had benefited from their association with him. Vicki, and before her Lois, Charlotte, Isolde, Ruth. A girl like Ruth would never have seen Santa Cruz or the Rockies if she hadn’t joined up. When he found her, she was anemic and homeless, trading blow jobs for blow under the BQE in New York. Had her life gotten worse? Or what about Isolde, whose name marked the extent to which she knew anything beyond the one-mile radius around her shack on the banks of the Cache River in Arkansas? He’d taken her to South Korea. He’d taken her to North Korea, where she’d doled out mints to children who’d spent the morning exercising outside the Study House of the People.
Vicki pressed her body up against his and said, “So, you know how my parents are sick and everything?”
“Yes, but tell me again. Tell me everything.”
And she did. She’d been a griddle chef at a diner off I-95 while also teaching adult literacy at the corrections facility in town. Working eighty hours a week to pay off interest on debts acquired from her parents, who had been in a house fire and lived in hospice because neither could breathe on his own.
“But you know what?” she said. “I couldn’t even bring myself to visit them. It was too hard. Isn’t that horrible? That’s my dark secret.”
He looked at the clock. He said that one time, when he was a kid, the Christmas tree had caught fire, and for the seconds he should have been calling for help or getting a bucket, he just watched the flames lash the wall and craze the windows—the bubbles were mesmerizing—but