6
America had never quite caught on about trains. Americans were historically obsessed with individual cars. Maya couldn’t afford a car. She could hitchhike sometimes if she wanted to. Mostly she could walk.
So she was walking through rural Pennsylvania. She had come to love the simple physical process of putting one foot in front of another. She liked the clarity of walking, the way that walking put you outside the rules and deep inside a tangible, immediate world. Nothing illegal about walking all by yourself. Walking cost nothing, and it wasn’t traceable. A sweet and quiet way to drop off somebody else’s stupid official map.
She had a sun hat, and a backpack, and a change of clothes. She had a cheap camera. She had a canteen and a little spare food; the sort of food one could chew on quite a while. She had a rather old but very decent pair of well-engineered and highly indestructible walking shoes. And she had nobody bothering her. She was alone, she was just herself now. To gently become herself, with no one watching and counting her heartbeats, free to savor the infinite thereness of the world, free to get her own grip on the quotidian—it was a series of little astonishments.
She liked Pennsylvania because there was so little fuss made about this particular corner of the world. She much preferred this sort of place now. All the fussy and glamorous places were far too brittle. Of course it was hard to find any genuine place to hide, in an era when all law, almost all media, and even most art could be phoned in; but the places that seemed entirely quotidian were the best locales for an exotic hopeful-monster like herself.
Europe was a boutique. America was a farm. Sometimes there were bicyclists in rural Pennsylvania. Occasionally hikers. There weren’t many like herself, people perfectly enchanted just to walk and look. This wasn’t a popular tourist niche in the North American continent, but the local Amish attracted a certain interest.
A car passed her outside Perkasie. The car pulled over, stopped, and a pair of well-dressed Indonesian tourists stepped out. They shrugged on shiny new backpacks and then headed her way. They walked hastily. Maya, who would not let anyone hurry her now, trudged along peaceably.
As the two approached her, the man tugged the woman’s sleeve. They waved excitedly, then shouted something.
Maya stopped and waited for them. “Ciao,” she said, a little warily.
“Hello?” the woman said.
Maya looked at her, and was thunderstruck. The stranger wore Indonesian couture, rather shiny and chic, but the stranger was American. She was familiar: much more than familiar. She looked and felt fantastically important, absolutely compelling, a personage like destiny. Maya was flooded with occult recognition, an impossible visceral surge of tenderness and heartache. She gaped as if an angel had descended.
“Are you Mia Ziemann?” the man said.
Maya closed her mouth and shook her head resolutely. “No, I’m Maya.”
“Then what have you done with my mother?” the woman demanded.
Maya stared at her. “Chloe!”
Chloe’s eyes widened. She relaxed a bit. She tried to smile. “Mom, it’s me.”
“No wonder I love you so much,” Maya said with relief, and she laughed.
It was funny to have lost so much, and yet lost so very little. The details were all gone sideways, somehow out of her mental reach now, but not the disorienting intensity of her love for her child. She scarcely knew this person, and yet she loved Chloe more than she could have thought possible.
It no longer felt much like motherhood. Motherhood had been very real, very quotidian, a primal human relationship, full of devotion and effort and strain, fraught with bitter calculation and the intimate battle of wills. But now, all those complexities had been blown away like sand. The presence of this strange woman filled her with oceanic joy. The very existence of Chloe was a cosmic triumph. It felt like walking with a boddhisattva.
“I hope you remember Suhaery?” Chloe said. “Surely you must remember him, right?”
“You look so well, Mia,” said Chloe’s husband very gallantly. This Indonesian guy had been married to Chloe for forty years now. That was easily twice as long as Mia had ever been able to manage her. Mia had been—she could still feel this, some dim tingle of ancient resentment—politely horrified to find her daughter running off with an Indonesian. The Indonesians, in their vast island nation, had gotten off rather easily during the plague years. They had played up that advantage enormously in the decades that followed.
But that was all far in the past now. Now Chloe and Suhaery were a middle-aged couple in their sixties. Sleek and rich and completely at ease with one another. They came from the richest country on Earth and they looked as though they were very proud about that.
“How did you manage to find me?” Maya said.
“Oh, it was terribly hard, Mom. We tried the net, the police, everything. Finally we thought to ask Mercedes. Your housekeeper.”
“Oh, I guess Mercedes would know.”
“She had some good guesses. Mercedes says to tell you that she’s sorry she scolded you so much. She still thinks what you did was totally immoral, but so many people have asked her for interviews now … well, you know how it is. Celebrity.”
Maya shrugged. “No, I’m afraid I don’t. How is my celebrity these days?”
“Mom,” said Chloe, and sighed, “you’ve really done it this time. Haven’t you? I always knew you were never as quiet as you looked. I could always tell you were faking it. I always knew someday you’d lose your grip and blow sky-high. That was your problem, Mom: you were never in touch with genuine spirituality.”
Maya looked at Suhaery. Her daughter’s husband was a stout and practical Asian businessman. He was in pillar-of-strength mode, playing the stellar role of psychic anchor. Suhaery was strolling along in his clean and pressed walking shorts on a weedy roadside in an alien country. Maya realized suddenly that Suhaery was finding this all very funny. He thought his wife’s relations were amusingly peculiar. He was right.
“What do you think about all this, Harry?” she asked.
“Mia, you look lovely. You’re like a blossoming rose. You look like Chloe on the first day I met her.”
“You shouldn’t tell her that,” Chloe scolded. “That sounds really strange and bad in about five different ways.”
Suhaery said something wicked in Malay and chuckled heartily.
“We tried to find you in San Francisco,” Chloe said, “but the people in the clinic weren’t helpful at all.”
“Yeah, I, uh, pretty much had it with all the clinic people.”
“It would have been smarter to go back under controlled care, Mom. I mean, obviously you’ve blown most of your value as an experimental subject. But still.”
“I thought about doing that, I really did,” Maya said. “I mean, if I’d run back to those meatheads and humbled myself and lived under medically defined circumstances, I probably could have repaired my medical ratings a lot, but you know something? I got no use for ’em. They’re the bourgeoisie, they’re philistines. I’m sick of ’em. It’s not that I blame them for what happened to me, but … well … I’m busy now. I have better things to do.”
“Such as?”
“I just like to walk around. Earth, sky, stars, sun. You know.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Well, I do photography.… The Amish, they’re such good material and they’re so good about it.… I mean, Amish children look incredibly like normal children, they
Chloe thought about it. “What are you really
“Nothing much. My pictures still stink. I’m a lousy apprentice photographer and I got a lousy camera. But that’s okay; I need a lot of practice. Especially in framing shots properly …”
Suhaery and Chloe exchanged knowing glances. Then Chloe spoke up. “Mom, Harry and I think it would be a good idea if you came back with us to Djakarta for a while.”
“Why on earth would I want to do that?”
