Idly, without much interest: wondered whether my father was still alive. I assumed not, but I hadn’t bothered to check, the past twenty years.

When I’d finished packing, I drove fifty feet down the driveway, stopped, got out to take one last look at my sanctuary. The place where I’d hidden from the world. The place I’d tried to use to cast off my destiny.

I’d left Silvina’s journal on the kitchen table and Furtown stabbed to the floor. I didn’t need them anymore, for different reasons.

I pushed another button and blew the place to hell.

[87]

Things I could never know. The list kept adding up, as I drove down dirt roads, down roads with no names, heavily rutted. As I let Nora’s car take punishment normally meted out to pickup trucks. The rain wouldn’t stop, and turned to sleet or snow as bands of cold and warmer air battled. I had protein bars and bottled water. I could go to the bathroom roadside; I wasn’t shy. Anymore. Stopped for gas and directions, and that was all. Cut the engine, along a grassy embankment, a graffiti-lined concrete berm, along a deep forest road, when I was tired and couldn’t keep my eyes open.

The air often smelled electric, almost chemical, and maybe the green-gray would never go away. Maybe we wouldn’t even notice it, after a while. Maybe we wouldn’t remember it had been different, until the next thing that happened to us. Until it killed us.

Something fundamental had shifted in the world. Or maybe just in my perception of it. I had to keep the radio on to stay awake, but only to music, because the news seemed like fiction. Sermons and apocalyptic threats from talk shows were no better than news. The thought that maybe even Vilcapampa Senior, from some golden mansion, might one day hide in fear from the future.

As water lashed the car windows, as the wipers struggled to keep up, as more than once I went slow and almost floated off half-flooded bridges, I tried to make sense in my head of what I did know.

Fusk loomed like some sort of original sin. The fact that Ronnie had commissioned the taxidermy. Ronnie and Hillman (I balked at Roger) as siblings, divided in their intent and purpose. That Langer, existing for me in a purgatory, dead alive, had such a fixation on Silvina, after their affair. That he had felt risking the remnants of Contila and killing people meant he was protecting her. He didn’t need answers. He had them already. All of them lost in a maze, or web, of Silvina’s making, or just in the idea of a cause greater than themselves.