But how could she reach them, so far away? That was even more of a fantasy than the one she cherished about invading a penthouse apartment in Bio, with its grand view of Sugarloaf out the picture windows, breaking into the party of tuxedoed men and ball-gowned women, weeping, shouting, showing them the pictures, making them understand.
She wouldn’t even have that fantasy any more, to soothe her into sleep at night, if the tuxedoed men and ball-gowned women were merely dolls, toys, remote-controlled from beyond the horizon. Without the fantasy, without the comforting false belief that remedy was possible, how would she ever sleep again? What fantasy could take its place? “The United Nations is in America,” she said at last.
“What was that?”
She repeated what she’d said, and the pilot nodded, agreeing with her, saying, “In New York, that’s right. What about it?”
“I’ll never get to New York,” she said. Not now. Maria Elena might have someday, but that was all over now.
“Why not? Anyone can go to New York.”
“In this plane?”
“Not in this plane,” he acknowledged. “But there are planes.”
“They cost too much money,” Maria Elena said. “I would never have that much money.” Never again.
“You could win the lottery,” he suggested.
She laughed, her throat aching. “That’s true, I could. But they have quotas in America. Immigration quotas.”
“Not for visitors. Short-term visas.”
“What could a person do with a short-term visa?”
“Well, then you hide,” he said. “You become an illegal resident.”
“What could a person do, of value, who was hiding from the law?”
“Then you apply for a long-term visa,” he advised her. “And save your money while you wait to get on the quota. Or is that too long a time for you?”
“No,” she said slowly, wondering if it was wise to reveal so much to this stranger. But he felt safe, somehow. She said, “I believe my name is on some lists.”
“Lists?”
“As an activist,” she explained. “A few years ago, when my husband — back then, I joined some political groups. Activist groups.”
“Breaking windows,” he suggested, this time openly laughing at her. “Handing out leaflets. Picketing opera openings.”
“It seemed important,” she said miserably. “But now my name is on the lists.”
“There’s one way, of course,” he said, “that none of that matters.”
“What way?”
“If you were married to an American.”
Behind her, John Auston dozed over his filled-in forms. His presence suddenly filled the plane like a life raft inflating. “That’s impossible,” Maria Elena said.
Ananayel
Well; interesting.
My ongoing experiences with machinery, I mean. “Men would be Angels,” as Pope said, in a somewhat different context, and that would certainly appear to be true.
Just look at all these ponderous machines, gawky and oafish, with which latter-day man has surrounded himself. What are they, after all, but efforts to perform, with great cumbersome expenditures of energy, what we do smoothly, effortlessly, and by nature? My first airplane was so much more unwieldy than my normal fashion of traveling through the air as to beggar comparison, and as for these automobiles, like the one with which I drove Li Kwan away from the policemen I’d set on him, what possible advantage can humans believe such monstrosities offer them over their own legs? To get them where faster? To get them where faster? And why? What do they want with time, these ephemera?
All these tangled intricate prosthetics with which these humans try to be us. Telephones. Light bulbs, and lamps to put them into, and huge destructive hydroelectric dams to plug the lamps into. Refrigerators. Oh, the weary toil of it all. They’ll probably be glad to lay their burdens down, poor things.
7
There was a bus stop across the road from the entrance to the prison, but Frank Hillfen didn’t want to wait for the bus there. Everybody going past in cars, and the people on the bus, too, when it came, and the driver of the bus, they would all know what he was. No one ever gets on the bus at that stop except cons — ex-cons, okay — and visitors of cons, and one look would tell anybody in the world that Frank Hillfen was not somebody who visited people. Con, they would say, looking at the slump of his shoulder, the dry hardness of his jaw, the hands as large as a workingman’s but soft and pudgy as a baby’s. Habitual, they would say, driving by, windows rolled up to keep the cold air in. He’ll be back, they would say, and glance once in the rearview mirror, glad they weren’t Frank Hillfen, and drive on.
Frank crossed the road toward the bus stop, to be that much farther away from the tall tan wall in the sunlight. Three P.M., summer, sunny, moderately warm. Walking weather.
A madonna and child were the only people in the shade of the bus shelter. She was short, plump, pretty, black-haired and black-eyed, and she held the infant high in her arms, murmuring to it in some dialect descended a long way from the Latin; some variant of Spanish, probably. She looked up to watch Frank cross toward her, his worldly goods in the black warm-up bag that said HEAD at both ends, handles gripped in his left hand, leaving the right for... emergencies. The madonna watched Frank with the sullen hopeless look of someone who’s been badly treated before and never got revenge for it, and her eyes didn’t soften even when he veered to his left, away from her and her bus shelter. She kept watching his back as he walked away along the verge of the road, watching him mistrustfully as she absently bobbled the fretful baby.
Frank walked south, the sun high above his left temple. There was very little traffic; Nebraska had put the prison on land nobody wanted for anything else. For a long while the blank tan wall remained to his left, across the road, while to his right stretched stony brush-dotted land the same color as the prison wall. That land was fenced from the road with three strands of barbed wire, but didn’t seem to be used for anything.
In the release office, the clerk had told him the bus ran every two hours or so. He had no idea how far apart the bus stops were. If the bus came by before he reached the next one, and if it wouldn’t stop at his wave, he’d have two more hours to wait. Or so. But that didn’t matter, he was in no hurry. Where was he going, anyway? If he followed his usual pattern, he was simply on his way back to that prison behind him, or another one exactly like it; he was merely starting out now on the first leg of a long and tortuous journey that would take him through many places and many experiences to no place and nothing.
If he followed his pattern. But not this time. This time, he’d keep ahead of the odds. Ahead of the odds. Take the bus across the state to Omaha; promote some cash there. If he got that far without fucking up, take a plane to New York. Then we’ll see.
Frank walked for half an hour without finding any more bus stops. He began to regret his self-consciousness. What did he care what the people in passing cars might think? Escaped con, probably, with him walking away from the prison like this, along the empty road, miles from anywhere. At forty-two, his brown hair was thinning, forehead receding, presenting vulnerable pale skin to the hot sun. Gonna start to burn, he told himself, fatalistic about it, and then humorous: Gonna get burned. First thing.
The warm-up bag got heavier. He switched it to his right hand, then back to the left. What do I need with all this shit? Buy new. But Frank always imagined people watching him, careless but vaguely interested people keeping an eye on him, and what would they think if he threw his warm-up bag away?