And every gesture you witness, from every landscape you observe, has an infinite number of meanings.
It’s like a cancer of analysis: malignant possibilities reproducing themselves without restriction.
If you’re convinced I’m psychotic, Hannah, then you should have no fear taking up this challenge: Go down to Bangkok Park and look for evidence of the gangs. Just walk around and note what you see — things like the graffiti and the tattoos. Then go home. And in an hour more signs will come to your mind — the hand signals, the footwear dangling from the streetlamps, the color of their cars.
And in two hours, more signs will come to you — the earrings their whores wear, the sources of the brand names they hang on their smack, the specific day of the week they shake down the merchants, the peculiar patterns in the bandannas they wear around their smooth shaven skulls, the placement of the knife wounds on the bodies of informants.
Guess what happens after three hours, Hannah?
How does a woman go from being a detective with a methodology, a devotion to the clue and the motive and the conclusive solution, to …
She slaps the book closed and throws it against the bathroom door. It bounces down to the floor and lies there, like a taunt, like one of Lenore’s perfect, stinging put-downs, a fast comment about cowardice or stupidity.
And finally, in that moment, Hannah realizes what she would say to Lenore. The words come to her brain without any effort or preparation. She’d say, “Go to hell, you bitch.”
She’d say, “You’re a goddamn loon. There’s nothing you can show me anymore. You’re over the top. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. And thank God, because there is no one. And it’s a relief to finally understand that. Not just in my brain, but in my heart. In my stomach, where all the real understanding has to come from. There’s no one left, Lenore. No one who could understand how badly, how desperately, I want to leave this city, how many people I’d be willing to hurt just for a chance to escape. And I have no place to escape to. No preplanned destination. No geographical goal. No resting place that I can aim for. I simply, only, want motion. Movement. Distance. From all these familiar streets and buildings and signs. From all these memorized faces. From all these voices playing over and over in my ear until I hear them in my sleep. I want distance from Quinsigamond. I want distance from my own life. From my past. All these years piling up with events and choices, decisions and random crap, until it’s such a weight on the shoulders you feel the ground giving way under your feet. You feel you’ll be pushed straight into the earth, buried alive and then buried dead by the weight of your accumulated past. I want out before this happens. I’m not as brave or smart or obsessed or committed as you, Lenore. I want out. I want movement. I want to be a solo pioneer. I want to head west, toward the next big ocean. I want to maneuver the Mustang onto a series of secondary highways, one leading into the next, roadsides painted with state boundaries and all of them blurring as I speed past. I want no more memory and I want no more prophecy. I want no news-casts or weather reports bleating from my radio. I just want to drive forward, sleep in my seat, buy fruit and crackers in anonymous convenience stores, and sit on my trunk at dusk, pulled into some overgrown field hundreds of miles from red brick, hundreds of days from my point of origin. I want to lie back and look up at the sky and not attempt to recognize and name constellations. I want some peace and I want a lifetime of quiet.”
She starts to cry now, fighting against it and failing, a burning behind the eyeballs as she hunches down over her thighs and knees, her face falling into her hands as a childish sobbing begins to catch and her breathing goes rapid and shallow.
“So I reject you, Lenore. I don’t want you. I don’t want anything to do with you. Let the fucking cock crow, Lenore. Three times. Ten times. I don’t care. I reject you. Just go away. Just leave me alone.”
30
Hazel put out the word to meet at midnight, but by eleven-thirty all her people have arrived at the old airport. They file into the abandoned terminal in groups of two and three and take their seats silently on the long-dead baggage claim conveyor belt.
Gabe has built a small campfire in the center of the semi-circle formed by the belt. The fire is not an original idea. Gabe spotted the debris of several previous fires when he first arrived. He assumes the old airport is probably used by a number of transient groups, from homeless drunks and tramps to moody, horny teenagers. He hopes none of them decide to stop by tonight, but if they do, he’s sure Hazel will handle the situation. He thinks there’s not much Hazel couldn’t handle. His walloping crush on this strange woman is growing daily.
As the group settles in around the fire, Gabe starts to think they look like a mock Indian tribe. Heavy-metal Apaches. Biker-punk Comanches. There are at least a half dozen Mohawk ’dos present, a lot of lampblack around the eyes, pounds of jagged silver jewelry — ear and nose rings and all kinds of symbolic neckwear — and tattoos. The whole crew is big on tattoos. It’s not like it’s a requirement. Hazel says there are no requirements. They just happen to share an intrinsic love of body design. So, underneath all the studded leather and torn denim is a wide variety of well-toned skin canvases exhibiting multicolored scenes of both natural and mythic art. But most of all, engraved across biceps and buttocks, are strange non sequiturs, clipped and illogical phrases, linked words and sometimes numbers whose meaning is a code known only to its bearer and his immediate circle.
There’s a rumor that Hazel wears a male name, done in scarlet ink, on the bottom slope of her left breast. No one will admit to having seen the name and there have been a few drunken guesses as to what it might be. But Gabe doesn’t believe it exists. He can picture Hazel with maybe an exploding microphone on her bottom, maybe even a standard Question authority down the back of one leg. But a man’s name on her breast? That implies a branding of sorts. It’s close to an ownership symbol and Gabe knows for certain that Hazel would have nothing to do with it.
He watches her as she sits up on the ticket counter, staring out the plate glass at the pocked runway in the moonlight. He’d love to know what she’s thinking and then begins to imagine her as a pilot, a bomber pilot, looking so sharp in one of those classic, butter-smooth black leather jackets, maybe one with the fur trim around the collar. He adds himself into the picture as her copilot, maybe the bombardier, the two of them huddled in a tiny cockpit, air masks loose on their chests, talking back and forth in low, assuring voices, consulting maps and waiting for the moment, the instant, when they come down low, snap open the bay doors on the bomber’s underside, dump their missiles, and then cruise upward, full throttle, away from the coming boom of heat and air.
He suddenly realizes Hazel has pivoted on her behind and is staring back at him. There’s no way to read the expression on her face, so he drops his head and begins to tend the campfire.
Someone on the end of the belt sparks a joint and begins to pass it down the line. Gabe doesn’t know how Hazel will react to this. Personally, he thinks the group should know the seriousness of this meeting and hold off partying till they adjourn. But, again, Hazel isn’t here to make rules. She’ll probably ignore the joint, impose seriousness with her voice and body movements.
She slides off the ticket counter now, a definition of ease and grace. She moves to the semicircle at a moderate pace, letting the heels of her secondhand ankle boots ignite an echoing click on the terminal’s mustard tile floor. The sound is like a gavel that brings the meeting to order. There are seven of them in all, including Gabe and Hazel. The oldest, the construction greaser called Eddie G, is probably closing in on thirty. Gabe is the youngest. No one’s really sure of Hazel’s age.