the natural world cleanses your soul. From that renewed purity of soul comes the sublime vapor of great poetry.”
“Sublime vapor?” Holly said, as if she wanted to be sure that her tape recorder would correctly register every golden phrase.
“Sublime vapor,” Louise repeated, and smiled.
The inner Louise was the Louise that offended Holly. She had cultivated an otherworldly quality, like a spectral projection, more surface than substance. Her opinions and attitudes were insubstantial, based less on facts and insights than on whims — iron whims, but whims nonetheless — and she expressed them in language that was flamboyant but imprecise, overblown but empty.
Holly was something of an environmentalist herself, and she was dismayed to discover that she and Louise fetched up on the same side of some issues. It was unnerving to have allies who struck you as goofy; it made your own opinions seem suspect.
Louise leaned forward on the picnic bench, folding her arms on the redwood table. “The earth is a living thing. It could talk to us if we were worth talking to, could just open a mouth in any rock or plant or pond and talk as easily as I'm talking to you.”
“What an exciting concept,” Holly said.
“Human beings are nothing more than lice.”
“Lice?”
“Lice crawling over the living earth,” Louise said dreamily.
Holly said, “I hadn't thought of it that way.”
“God is not only
As if moved by the woman's rhetoric, as if she didn't think it was eco-fascism, Holly said, “I give as much as I can every year to the Nature Conservancy, and I think of myself as an environmentalist, but I see that my consciousness hasn't been raised as far as yours.”
The poet did not hear the sarcasm and reached across the table to squeeze Holly's hand. “Don't worry, dear. You'll get there. I sense an aura of great spiritual potentiality around you.”
“Help me to understand…. God is butterflies and rabbits and every living thing, and God is rocks and dirt and water — but God isn't us?”
“No. Because of our one
“Which is?”
“Intelligence.”
Holly blinked in surprise. “Intelligence is unnatural?”
“A high degree of intelligence, yes. It exists in no other creatures in the natural world. That's why nature shuns us, and why we subconsciously hate her and seek to obliterate her. High intelligence leads to the concept of progress. Progress leads to nuclear weapons, bio-engineering, chaos, and ultimately to annihilation.”
“God … or natural evolution didn't give us our intelligence?”
“It was an unanticipated mutation. We're mutants, that's all. Monsters.”
Holly said, “Then the less intelligence a creature exhibits …”
“… the more natural it is,” Louise finished for her.
Holly nodded thoughtfully, as if seriously considering the bizarre proposition that a dumber world was a better world, but she was really thinking that she could not write this story after all. She found Louise Tarvohl so preposterous that she could not compose a favorable article and still hang on to her integrity. At the same time, she had no heart for making a fool of the woman in print. Holly's problem was not her deep and abiding cynicism but her soft heart; no creature on earth was more certain to suffer frustration and dissatisfaction with life than a bitter cynic with a damp wad of compassion at her core.
She put down her pen, for she would be making no notes. All she wanted to do was get away from Louise, off the playground, back into the real world — even though the real world had always struck her as just slightly less screwy than this encounter. But the least she owed Tom Corvey was sixty to ninety minutes of taped interview, which would provide another reporter with enough material to write the piece.
“Louise,” she said, “in light of what you've told me, I think you're the most natural person I've ever met.”
Louise didn't get it. Perceiving a compliment instead of a slight, she beamed at Holly.
“Trees are sisters to us,” Louise said, eager to reveal another facet of her philosophy, evidently having forgotten that human beings were lice, not trees. “Would you cut off the limbs of your sister, cruelly section her flesh, and build your house with pieces of her corpse?”
“No, I wouldn't,” Holly said sincerely. “Besides, the city, probably wouldn't approve a building permit for such an unconventional structure.”
Holly was safe: Louise had no sense of humor — therefore, no capacity to be offended by the wisecrack.
While the woman prattled on, Holly leaned into the picnic table, feigning interest, and did a fast-backward, scan of her entire adult life. She decided that she had spent all of that precious time in the company of idiots, fools, and crooks, listening to their harebrained or sociopathic plans and dreams, searching fruitlessly for nuggets of wisdom and interest in their boobish or psychotic stories.
Increasingly miserable, she began to brood about her personal life. She had made no effort to develop close women friends in Portland, perhaps because in her heart she felt that Portland was only one more stop on herperipatetic journalistic journey. Her experiences with men were, if anything, even more disheartening than her professional experiences with interviewees of both sexes. Though she still hoped to meet the right man, get married, have children, and enjoy a fulfilling domestic life, she wondered if anyone nice, sane, intelligent, and genuinely interesting would ever enter her life.
Probably not.
And if someone like that miraculously crossed her path one day, his pleasant demeanor would no doubt prove to be a mask, and under the mask would be a leering serial killer with a chainsaw fetish.
3
Outside the terminal at Portland International Airport, Jim Ironheart got into a taxi operated by something called the New Rose City Cab Company, which sounded like a corporate stepchild of the long-forgotten hippie era, born in the age of love beads and flower power. But the cabbie — Frazier Tooley, according to his displayed license — explained that Portland was called the City of Roses, which bloomed there in multitudes and were meant to be symbols of renewal and growth. “The same way,” he said, “that street beggars are symbols of decay and collapse in New York,” displaying a curiously charming smugness that Jim sensed was shared by many Portlanders.
Tooley, who looked like an Italian operatic tenor cast from the same mold as Luciano Pavarotti, was not sure he had understood Jim's instructions. “You just want me to drive around for a while?”
“Yeah. I'd like to see some of the city before I check into the hotel. I've never been here before.”
The truth was, he didn't know at which hotel he should stay or whether he would be required to do the job soon, tonight, or maybe tomorrow. He hoped that he would learn what was expected of him if he just tried to relax and waited for enlightenment.
Tooley was happy to oblige — not with enlightenment but with a tour of Portland — because a large fare would tick up on the meter, but also because he clearly enjoyed showing off his city. In fact, it was exceptionally attractive. Historic brick structures and nineteenth-century cast-iron-front buildings were carefully preserved among modern glass high rises. Parks full of fountains and trees were so numerous that it sometimes seemed the city was in a forest, and roses were everywhere, not as many blooms as earlier in the summer but radiantly colorful.
After less than half an hour, Jim suddenly was overcome by the feeling that time was running out. He sat forward on the rear seat and heard himself say: “Do you know the McAlbury School?”
