Jordan stares at me and I grope for some sort of placating language, wishing more than anything in the world that I didn’t need help from this particular person—and then he drops the stone face and giggles like a hyena.
“I’m jerking your chain, man.” He points back over his shoulder at the committee meeting. “These dingleberries are in there for forty-five minutes arguing about toilet paper rationing, even though the world is about to explode. It’s fucking retarded.”
“I see,” I say, speaking slowly to control the anger in my voice. “If that’s how you feel, why are you here?”
“Resources. Recruitment. And because I happen to know that the world is not about to explode. Right Nico?”
“Damn right,” she says.
“The woman that I’m looking for is named Julia Stone.” I give him the campus address that I have from the file: Hunter Hall 415.
“She won’t be there,” he says. “Nobody’s stayed put.”
“I figured. I need to know where she is.”
“You got a picture?”
“I do not.”
He whistles, jogs his head back and forth, blows out a plume of smoke.
“Well, Nico’s brother the cop, it shan’t be easy. Everything is scrambled like an egg around here. I’ll do what I can.”
“Okay,” I say. I’m thinking of Brett slipping away, further and further into the future—thinking, too, of the four hours I’ve been given by my new friends at the entrance to Thompson Hall. That dog has suffered enough already. “How long?”
“How long?” Jordan turns to Nico. “Is that how policemen say thank you?”
“God,” she says, laughing, shoving him lightly in the chest. “You’re such a prick.”
“Meet me in the grub tent in an hour and a half,” Jordan tells me. “If I don’t have something by then, I never will.”
Around the corner from Dimond Library is a cluster of residence halls, each shaped like a parenthesis and arranged around a shared courtyard, where, at present, there’s a dozen or so young people playing a game. A kid in some sort of Victorian derby hat shakes a Styrofoam cup to spill dice out onto the sidewalk with a loud clatter, and the other players cheer and then start racing around the courtyard. A chalk sign says ANTIPODAL VOLCANISM WORKING GROUP.
“Do you know what that means?” I ask Nico, and she shrugs, lights a cigarette, disinterested.
The players aren’t just running, they’re drawing, stopping to make marks on a massive game board that’s been drawn out on the pavement. The kid with the hat gathers up the dice, puts them back in the cup, and hands it to the next player, a homely girl in a flowing skirt and Dr. Who T-shirt. These kids remind me of certain people in high school I was never friends with but always liked, the ones who played D&D and worked backstage: scruffy, unstylish, ill-fitting clothes and glasses, deeply uncomfortable outside their small group. The girl tosses the dice, and this time everyone yells “ka-boom!” I take a step closer, and now I can see that it’s a map of the world they’ve drawn, laid out on the hot unshaded pavement of the courtyard, a big blown-up Mercator projection of the earth. Now they’re unspooling long loops of ribbon along the map, tracing trajectories somehow keyed to the numbers that came up on the roll of the dice. The ribbons go off in various directions, out from the impact site: one wave of destruction rolling over southern Europe; another through Tokyo and on across the Pacific. A dark-haired young man is squatting over cities, one after another, joyfully marking them with big red X’s.
“No! Not San Francisco!” says another, a girl with an awkward pixie haircut, snorting laughter. “That’s my old apartment!”
At last I let Nico lead me away, follow her back through the paths of what used to be UNH. Again I find myself imagining O. Cavatone, if he really was here, picturing him navigating these tortuous paths. What did he make of it, the tents, the kids, the antipodal volcanism working group? The tough and righteous state trooper in the land of the permanent asteroid party? Then I stop myself, shake my head. What do you think, Henry? You think that if you imagine him hard enough, you can make him appear?
All the food in the grub tent is free and hot and delicious. There is a no-nonsense woman in a stained yellow apron, serving tea and miso soup and gooey chocolate desserts from a long table. Dinner rolls and cups of tea are help-yourself. I look down the buffet line, daring to hope—it’s a different world, a different infrastructure, you never know—but there is no coffee. People drift in and out of the tent, pushing back the flap and saying “hey” to the cook and grabbing food and trays; most of the citizens of the Free Republic are of college age or even younger, although there are a handful of grown-ups. In fact, there’s a middle-aged man with a long gray beard and a potbelly seated next to Nico and me at our picnic table, wearing a loud-print bowling shirt and shooting what I presume to be heroin into the veins of his forearm, having tied off above the elbow with an extension cord.
I try to ignore him. I break my roll and open a small foil packet of margarine.
“So,” I say to Nico. “Jordan. Is he your boyfriend?”
She grins. “Yes, Dad. He’s my boyfriend. And I’m thinking about going all the way. Don’t tell Jesus, okay?”
“That’s hilarious.”
“I know.”
“Well, just for the record…” I dab on the margarine with a plastic knife. “I don’t like him.”
“For the record, I do not care.” Nico laughs again. “But, to tell you the truth, I don’t like him much, either. Okay? He’s part of my thing, that’s all. He’s a teammate.”
I lean back and bite into the roll. This whole time Nico has been lugging around her mysterious duffel bag, large and ungainly, and now it is slung on the bench beside her. The potbellied heroin addict at the end of the table makes a low grunt and depresses his plunger, grits his teeth, and throws back his head. There is something horrifying and mesmerizing about him doing this in front of us, almost as if he were performing a sexual act or a murder. I look away, back to Nico.
We chat. We catch up. We tell each other stories from the old days: stories about Grandfather, about our mom and dad, about Nico and her screw-up friends from high school, stealing cars, drinking beer in homeroom, shoplifting. I remind her of our mother’s zealous and misplaced encouragement of Nico’s early-life interest in gymnastics. My comically uncoordinated little sister would do some poorly executed somersault, land painfully on her tiny butt, and my mother would clap wildly, cup her hands into a megaphone: “Nico Palace, ladies and gentlemen! Nico Palace!”
We finish our soup. I check my watch. Jordan said an hour and a half. It’s been fifty-five minutes. The heroin addict babbles to himself, murmuring his way through his private ecstasies.
“So, Henry,” says Nico, in that same tone of voice that Culverson always used, fake casual, innocent, to ask if I’d been in touch with her. “How are you?”
“In what sense?”
“The girl,” she says. I look up. The roof of the grub tent is not properly joined; there’s a diagonal slash of open air, blue sky. “The one who died.”
“Naomi,” I say. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Nico sighs and pats me on the back of the hand, a sweet simple gesture glowing faintly with the ghost light of our dead mother. I can imagine my sister and me in some future that never will exist, some alternate dimension, Nico appearing on my doorstep on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Eve, whatever dipshit husband she ended up with still parking the car, my beautiful sarcastic nieces and nephews tearing through the house, demanding their presents.