"Who's Tina?"

"The CEO's wife. They leave a sloppy trail behind them, too.And I wouldn't have dragged Tina into this except that she's the one who made sure that Gary got the credit for my ideas."

"Clover seeds quickly penetrate the turf," said Ryan. "And once they seed, their roots are like tentacles-the shoots show up a deep, dark green in about ten days."

"Just a few days before Gary returns from Bermuda. What acoincidence," said Vanessa. She finished her large, graceful la.s.so-ing of letters.

"The only way to get rid of the words is to remove the turf,"said Ryan. "Smart, eh?"

"Done." She headed back to the car.

"That "sit?"

"Chop-chop. Let's get a move on."

A minute later they were on the freeway again. Vanessa wa.s.still driving. John was getting the jitters. He was having dark thoughts about what could have happened to Susan. Though hismovies were violent and their characters often sick, John hadnever thought of them as being real. For the first time in his life he began visualizing the violence of his films entering hislife and it made him feel queasy, and now he knew a bit of whatthe people who sent him letters chiding him for gore might befeeling.

Ryan said, "Vanessa and I are going to help you find Susan."

"Leave it to the cops," said Vanessa, "and she'll be luncheonmeat before anybody finds her. Let me put out a dragnet to-night. Come over to my place tomorrow afternoon at five. I'llgive you the results and throw in dinner." She paused. "Are youokay, John?"

"Why?"

"You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I'm fine. Vanessa," he said, "I have a question for you."

"Uh-huh?"

"Why are you helping me? I mean, you don't know me-you don't-"

"Oh, stop right there. My angle is Ryan. You helped him, andso I'm helping you."

"And?" asked John.

"And that's all. Please, why don't you tell me the real reasonyou're so obsessed with finding Susan Colgate, huh? For all Iknow, she could be wearing a Girl Guide costume and decom-posing underneath your front porch-and maybe all of thissearch stuff we're doing is a ruse designed to deflect attention away from you."

John was dismissive: "Not the case."

"Okay then, why look for Susan Colgate, John?"

"It's because . . ."

"Yes?"

John squeezed and squeezed his brain with his fingers like ahard-to-open bottle of olives. "It's because she knows thatpeople were meant to change. She knows it's inevitable. Andshe seems to recognize I'm at a point in my life where Ican't transform anymore. I sound like a country-western song.Sorry."

"Well, to me it looks like you're stalking her. It could seem kind of creepy to her."

"I'm not stalking her, Vanessa. I'm trying to find her. n.o.body'staking this disappearance seriously, except us."

"Hey, what's in this for Susan?" Ryan asked. "a.s.suming werescue her from being tied up on top of the railway tracks."

John glared at him.

"Sorry.

But Ryan's question got John to thinking. What did he bring toSusan's table? Was he just another f.u.c.ked-up Hollywood guy forher to take care of? No, because-because what? John reacheddown deep into the hole of his mind, trying to grasp onto anugget of reason. He thought of the desperately lonely womanreading theArchitectural Digest, and he thought of the woman he'dmet outside the Pottery Barn who'd fed him dinner, the secretnation of Eleanor Rigbys who existed just under the thresholdof perception. That this secret nation existed was new to him.That he might help fix it was even newer. "We have a lot incommon," he blurted out.

"Huh?" Both Ryan and Vanessa had each gone on to newthoughts.

"Haven't you noticed that the couples who stick together the longest in life are the ones who shared some intense, freaky ex-perience together? Jobs-school-a circle of friends?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, Susan and I did that, too."

"But you have no idea where Susan went after the crash,John. I mean, you're talking about disappearance, right?"

"Ryan, that's what we learned about each other during ourwalk-that we both went to the same place.

At the moment I don't know her specifics, but that'll happen once I find her."They fell silent. Vanessa was frozen at the wheel, as if drivingthrough a snowstorm. They were in one of thousands of cars ona ten-lane freeway jammed with cars, even in the darkest part ofthe night, rivers of cars headed G.o.d knows where.

n.o.bodyspoke.

John slept all of the next day. That night, over a simple pastaprimavera, Vanessa emptied out her net for John and Ryan to seeher bounty. "Susan Amelia Colgate was born on March 4, 1970,in Corvallis, Oregon. Her mother, Marilyn, was married to aDuran Deschennes, but never actually got divorced."

"She's a polyandrist," said Ryan.

"A what?" asked John.

"It's the opposite of bigamy. When a woman has two or morehusbands at once."

"This Duran Deschennes guy got killed in 1983 and themother married Donald Alexander Colgate in 1977, so for sevenyears she was a polyandrist. But my hunch is that Don Colgatehas no idea he was hubby number two. I bet we three, alongwith Marilyn herself, are the only people in on her secret."

Vanessa continued. "Susan grew up in McMinnville, Oregon-in a trailer, at that. She was a frequent entrant, finalist and win-ner in literally hundreds of beauty pageants during her youth.Her biggest win was the 1985 Miss USA Teen pageant in Denver,but she surrendered her crown there onstage, to LuAnn Ramsay,now wife of Arizona's governor, I might add."

"This stuff I already know," said John. "Internet. Library.Magazines. Tell me something new."

"In 1997 she was presumed dead in the Seneca plane crash,but she wasn't, and to this day n.o.body knows where she spentalmost exactly one calendar year. Even I couldn't find anythingthere."

"Such modesty.""Well, I did find something."

"What?" John pounced.

"It may be nothing, but when I was patterning her phonedata-"

"What phone data?"

"Oh, grow up. The era of privacy is over. As I was saying, Iwas patterning her phone data and found an anomaly. Her most-dialed phone number is to a guy named Randy Hexum.He lives out in the Valley. So I did a scan on him, and it turnsout he's from Erie, Pennsylvania. His real name's Randy Mon-tarelli and he lived thirty miles away from the police stationwhere Susan turned herself in and claimed amnesia."

"And?"

"They both arrived back in L.A. at the same time a year ago,and he went to work for Chris Thraice.

Randy Montarelli-slash-Hexum also has almost no data attached to him since leavingErie. It's d.a.m.n hard to have a dead data file, but he's done it. It's b.l.o.o.d.y suspicious."

"He's in the Valley?"

"Yup.

John was up in a second, carrying the emptied plates into thekitchen, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the cap back on the c.o.ke. He put it in thefridge. "Let's go."

Chapter Twenty.

When John was young, back in New York, in the third grade onone of his few nonsick days, a math teacher named Mr. Bird,who also filled the roles of gym teacher and guidance coun-selor, took the entire shivering cla.s.s out onto the playing field.He pointed out white chalk marks which outlined a large square.

Onto each of these marks he made students stand in place, andonce everybody was in their a.s.signed location, he used a mega-phone he'd brought to shout out the following words: "Cla.s.s,look at the area in front of your eyes. This is called an acre. Forthe rest of your lives you're going to be hearing people talk about acres. Five acres. Three thousand acres. An acre and a half.Well, this is an acre. Look at it hard.

Burn it into your memorybecause this is the one time in your life you're going to see a perfect, one-hundred-percent-pure acre."

John remembered that acre, cold and wet and trampled. Itssize did truly stay in his mind, and as he crisscrossed thecountry on foot, he saw nothing but acres, on all horizons,all of them one hundred percent pure, one hundred percent empty and most of them ownerless. He was truly a n.o.bodynow, the land was his. He felt like a king during his few goodmoments, but these decreased as he nose-dived deeper intothe American landscape. The s.e.x had ended. Most forms of J7O.

communication had quieted. Women vanished from his life andhe missed them with the dull hunger of homesickness. Hecaught only glimpses of them, sleek, well fed, possessing cleargoals and usually behind a car window in the process of roll-ing it up. John knew that he'd become the cautionary storytheir mothers had warned them about. He longed for female company and the ability of women to forgive, to care abouthurts, and their readiness to laugh and be amused. His mother,Melody, Nylla and even the Florida twins, whose names he'dforgotten.

Nearly all of the n.o.bodies he saw were men. Women, hethought, had so many more ways to connect themselves to the world-children, families, friends.

John was an expert at looking in people's eyes and knowing when they wanted something from him.

n.o.body gave him thatlook anymore. But he wasn't astute about looking in people'seyes and recognizing when they wanted to give him something.Sometimes he'd see a woman watching him as he walked froma Denny's rest room back to the counter, or in a grocery store,tending to squawking kids and errant grocery carts. What were they offering? A meal and a dose of love to get him to the nextway station?

Women became to him portals back into a betterplace he'd always seemed to have overlooked.

Five drunk farm kids in a pickup rolled him one eveningat sunset because he was there and they felt like doing it. HisUPS uniform was Rorschached with blood puddles and hehad to throw it into a gas-station litter bin. He spent his ac-c.u.mulated recycling money, fifteen dollars, on a discountedyellow T-shirt that readmy other shirt is Aporsche and aCorona beer wind-breaker that came free with a six-pack, whichhe drank, metabolized and p.i.s.sed away in the s.p.a.ce of onethunderstorm.One night in Winslow, Arizona, he met a friendly-enoughguy, Kevin. They'd both been checking out the pickings around an Exxon station's groceteria. It was around sunset. One or two stars had risen in the sky. John had just found a pack of time-expired hot dogs when Kevin said, " I've got a place not far fromhere. We can go eat there." Kevin seemed friendly enough andJohn missed simple conversation. Truth be told, he hadn't had aprofound thought in weeks.

Home was underneath a sun-rusted bridge that crossed a dry gully, decorated with high school graduation graffiti, so-and-so-was-here felt-pennings, sun-rotted condoms and a mattress soverminous that John consciously swept his way around it, as ifhe might catch athletically hopping crabs.

"Here. Get a fire going." He helped John light a twig fire be-neath an inverted Chevelle hubcap filled with the lame trickle ofwater dripping down the gully's bottom-most rift. The water came to a boil and John put his time-expired hot dogs into itand the two watched them cook and said nothing. John figuredso much for conversation.

They ate the hot dogs, shared only the most cursory ofstories-mostly about planned trips, whether the other washeaded east or west, or what the weather might do; neither of-fered up his past-and then the sky was dark. Kevin went tosleep on the mattress. John found a sandy nook high up in a corner underneath the bridge where it joined the road. He'dlearned that there was little, if anything, for a n.o.body to do pastsundown. He fell asleep to the sound of the occasional vehiclepa.s.sing overhead.

Somewhere in the night he felt a jolt of pain inside hisdream, and he woke up to find Kevin walloping him with abroken-off metal rear flap from a shopping cart. Kevin was spewing out random invective: "Take my hot dogs away fromme, will you? Steal a man's food right from under his nose,you're no better than Detroit automakers . . ."

Blood dripping from a gash in his cheekbone, John ran away,down the road, into flat landscape, nothing on either side, fi-nally far enough away to feel safe. He scuttled off the road, into a patch of desert, found a rut, crept into it, heard small animals scurry away, and then once more slept.

The next day in Flagstaff he ate a discarded hamburger forlunch. The meat tasted strange, but he ignored it. Four hourslater he was walking down a gravel road in what he thoughtwas the direction of a meteorite crater he'd read about as a sickkid in Manhattan, when his gut collapsed as if he'd been judo-chopped, and he keeled over, into a dry ditch alongside theroad. He began to s.h.i.t and vomit as though all the cells in hisbody were screaming to empty themselves of toxins. In the hazeof illness he removed his pants, knowing he had to keep themclean, and clumped his still clean clothes in a heap above him.He lay on the gritty soil and his body exploded. He could seethe mountains and the mesas on the horizons, and billions ofacres. John tried to imagine a bunch of children-all the kids in Arizona-standing around the edge of this landscape so savageand broken and freshly ripped from the kiln, and imagined ashe clutched his stomach that children might one day play onthis desert, this blank s.p.a.ce; but he knew they never would, theland would always outsmart them, always be just one notchmore cruel.

He asked the stars to give him some kind of word, but thestars gave nothing. Then he recalled being in the hospital a fewmonths before-had it been so recently as December?-thenight of his flu and the vision. He remembered seeing SusanColgate on TV-before he conked out completely-and he sud- denly realized that his vision of Susan's face was a rerun that had been playing on his bedside TV, and it meant nothing. His timeon the road was a sham as well. His exercise in going solo was acosmic joke. He was inside a h.e.l.lish one-panelNew Yorker car-toon captioned, "Her face was just some TV actress your neurons glommedonto ." And here he was, near death again, except this time he justdidn't care.

He fell unconscious, and when he woke up, he didn't knowhow much later, he saw the Milky Way and some shooting stars,and knew that the worst had pa.s.sed, but his body felt like achunk of salt licorice, as if all its moisture was gone. Then he heard an idling engine and a woman's voice. The woman wascarrying a flashlight and she told him he was going to be okay,he could come with her. He forgot he was naked and crawledup the crumbling ditch. A man's voice said, "One wrong move,a.s.shole, and I'll blow you into hamburger."

The woman said, "Eric, put that thing down and pa.s.s methe bag of groceries. Jeanie, get the blanket from behind myseat." Jeanie, a teenage girl, was videotaping John. "My nameis Beth," the woman said.

"Here . . ." She placed an Ara-paho blanket around his shoulders and then opened a card-board carton of orange juice. "Here, drink this up. You'redehydrated."

John guzzled the juice and collapsed on his knees. His teeth chattered. Beth retrieved his bundled clothing. He saw the manin a truck. "Eric, G.o.ddammit, help this guy out. Get out here."Eric put down the gun and reluctantly helped Beth lift Johnonto the truck bed. She spoke to John over the bed's rim.

"What's your name, hon?"

He said, "John."

"John, you lie down and we'll have you home in a few min-utes, okay?"

John said, "Okay," then lay back and watched the blinking redlight of Jeanie's camcorder taping him.

Then he tilted his headback and looked at the stars, and he began to cry because it hadall been a waste and because the voice of Susan was only a sound buried under a laugh track he'd heard by accident in a stale white room.

Chapter Twenty-one.

Even the most a.n.a.l of the 4a.m. bread-baking monks would beunable to compete with Eugene Lindsay's compulsion for get-ting his postal fraud mail-outs into the local postbox beforemorning pickup. Susan was drafted into this work p.r.o.nto, andeven when she was half a year pregnant, Eugene still had her lugging box loads of heavy doc.u.ments and paper up and down the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs. Susan could have cared less. For the firsttime in her life she felt as if there were no tightly coiled springswaiting to lurch out from beneath her skin. She felt as if shewere on holiday. Added bonus: wild s.e.x, up until the baby gottoo big.

"Yooj, I feel like a Cambodian peasant or something, freight-ing these-what are they?"-she looked down at the envelopesin the box she was holding-"mail-outs to the Greater Tampa,Florida, postal region. I could drop Junior into the rice paddy and be back on threshing duty the next afternoon."

Eugene attended his Xerox 5380 console copier like a sur-geon with a patient, bathed in strobes of Frankenstein greenlight. "Hey, sunshine, G.o.d bless Florida. All those seniors with nothing but free time and too many radio stations. They hand intheir mailing addresses like they were spare change. Now let's get them up to the front door. Mush!"When winter came, the air in the house became drier, but thedaily schedule went on unchanged. In December, when Susanhad realized she was pregnant, Eugene forbid her to go near themicrowave oven or to drink alcohol.

Spring and summer came and went. She liked her job. She opened the daily mail, which Eugene picked up at a post-officeboxa few streets over. Inside the envelopes came crumpledmoney, sent in by superst.i.tious radio enthusiasts whose namesEugene purchased from an old college pal who'd become a tele-marketing whiz-suckers! Most often it consisted of two twentiesand a ten, but sometimes Susan collected wads of ones and fivesin dirty little clumps, likely scrounged from under the front seat of a teenager's car. What did these people want? What kind ofcosmic roulette wheel did they hope to spin by responding toEugene's fraudulent thrusts?

Susan's stomach felt as if it contained a great big ski bootthat rolled around inside her. The Seneca plane crash seemedlike a lifetime ago, her precrash life, a miraculous story of out-rageous behavior relayed to her the morning after a drink-ing binge blackout. The only real reminders she had of herformer days were the pa.s.sing glimpses of herself on TV-reruns of old shows-as well as the image of Marilyn, now dressed like a Fifth Avenue stick insect, hair chignoned regard-less of time of day or season, sc.r.a.pping it out in court with theairline.

The crux of Marilyn's case was that Susan's physical remainswere never found despite indisputable evidence she was on theflight (a GTE Airfone call and the testimony of four groundstaffers) and that, unlike other family members of crash victims,Marilyn was alone in not having so much as a fingernail with which to memorialize her daughter.

Susan saw Marilyn royally milking the situation for all it was S77worth. With public sympathy on her side she was likely to winher case. Eugene would egg Susan on.

"You're going to just sitand let her rake in millions on this and do nothing?" But thetopic was one that made Susan turn remote, and so he stoppedforcing it. To Susan, the sight of her mother on camera was too distant, too unreal to enter into.

Life in Indiana went on. Eugene ventured out to do his mail-ings and make minor shopping runs. Susan occasionally wentalong, but she was much happier cosseted away with her life-long s.e.xual paragon, helping with the family business. It wasn'teven until her third month there that she realized she hadn'tonce had the urge to make a phone call.