Miss Wyoming

paper from her purse, and placed the gum inside the paper, and tucked the result in her purse. It was the cleanest thing he'd ever seen anybody do.

«Look, she's crying,» said Ivan, entranced, as though witnessing the world's smallest rainstorm. He got out of the car.

«Ivan,» John said, «isn't the meeting in the next tower over?» He heard Ivan ask Nylla if she was okay, and then say to her, «Can I help you out here? I'm Ivan. I'm on my way to a meeting, but I saw you here and …»

She said, «Oh God, I must look like an idiot.»

«No you don't. Not at all. What's your name?»

«I'm Nylla.»

«That's a nice name.»

«It's spelled N-Y-L-L-A. My father came to the States from Europe after the war. He wanted to name me after New York State because the States had been so good to him. My mother wanted me named after her mother, Bjalla. And there's the result.»

«I'm Ivan.»

And they were married six months later.

Chapter Seventeen

Eugene Lindsay, Ford dealer of the gods, was alone in bed making a list in a small notepad:

No. 63: You can get almost any food you want at any time of the year.

No. 64: Women do everything men do and it's not that big a deal.

No. 65: Anybody on the planet can have a crystal-clear conversation with anybody else on the planet pretty well any time they want to.

No. 66: You can comfortably and easily wake up in Sydney, Australia, and go to bed in New York.

No. 67: The universe is a trillion billion million times larger than you ever dreamed it would be.

No. 68: You pretty well never see or smell shit.

He was writing a list of things which would astound somebody living a hundred years before him. He was trying to persuade himself that he was living in a miraculous world in a miraculous time. Having taken early retirement from his job as a local TV weatherman, he'd subsequently retreated for a decade inside his mock- Tudor house in Bloomington, Indiana. He made art from household trash and watched TV. He jotted the occasional thought in his notebooks, such as the evening's list. And in his basement he used a Xerox 5380 console copier and a CD-ROM—based computer to execute far more elaborate mail scams than he had ever dreamed of in the eighties.

His wife, Renata, had years ago moved to New Mexico, where she paid the bills burning herbs for neurotic urban refugees. She abandoned decades of starvation dieting, and had grown as big as a pile of empties on the back stoop. She wore no makeup and made a point of letting people know it. When she divorced Eugene, she had asked for nothing, which confused and frightened him more than a nasty divorce fight would have done.

No. 69: We went to the moon and to Mars a few times, and there's really nothing there except rocks, so we quit dreaming about them.

No. 70: Thousands of diseases are quickly and easily cured with a few pills.

No. 71: Astoundingly detailed descriptions of sex acts appear on the front page of The New York Times, and nobody is ruffled by it.

No. 72: By pushing a single button, it's possible to kill 5 million people in just one second.

Eugene looked at number 72. Something was wrong — what? He figured it out:buttons didn't exist a hundred years ago. Or did they? What did people do back then — did they pull chains? Turn cranks? What did they have that they could turn on? Nothing. Electric lights? Eugene didn't think so. Not back then. He made a correction:

No. 72: By pushing a single lever, it's possible to kill five million people in just one second.

He looked at his clock — deepest night — 3:58A .M. He dropped his pen and marveled at his body, lying on the bed, still well proportioned and lean, still dumbly beautiful and betraying no evidence of inner weariness.

His bedsheets felt dry but moist, like the time he lay down on a putting green in North Carolina. Surrounding him was that month's art project — thousands of the past decade's emptied single-portion plastic tublets of no-fat yogurt, their insides washed squeaky clean, stuffed inside each other, forming long wavy filaments that reached to the ceiling like sea anemones. The finished piece was to go inside Renata's old gift-wrapping room, a concept she'd stolen from Candy Spelling, Aaron Spelling's wife — a whole room devoted to wrapping the nonstop stream of trinkets and doodads from her old gown business.

Eugene had to take his weekly bag of trash out to the curb. He looked at his clock — 3:59A .M. now. He procrastinated and added to his list:

No. 73: Bad moods have been eliminated.

No. 74: You almost never see horses.

No. 75: You can store pretty well all books ever published inside a box no larger than a coffin.

No. 76: We made the planet's weather a little bit warmer.

Trash time. Since the episode with the crazy pageant mother back in Saint Louis, giving any thing away to the trashman was cause for personal alarm. Trash night had never been the same since. To make his current bag of garbage seem fuller and hence more normal, he fluffed up its contents and carried the full bag, weighing no more than a cat, down to the front door. Eugene paused and tightened his robe, which bore the embroidered logo of the Milwaukee Radisson Plaza Hotel from which it was stolen during a meteorological conference. He darted out to the curb, lobbed the bag onto the concrete, then ran back to the door.

On the way back to his room he beamed with a creator's joy at his three pillars made of Brawny paper towel shipping boxes, a trio that filled the front hallway from floor to ceiling. Take that, Andy Warhol.

Cozily back in bed, Eugene heard an unmistakable thump from downstairs. He knew the noise couldn't be a tumbling mound of his art — he stacked his goods in stable piles, the way he'd seen them stacked in museums. Perhaps a raccoon had snuck in during his brief trash haul. Eugene reached for his gun in the bedside drawer and released the safety. Seated on the floor between the wall and his bed, he plotted his strategy.

Then came another bump from below. Confident and collected, he slipped through the Brawny towel box totems. Sliding on his buttocks, he lowered himself into the foyer, lit only by the candle power of a half moon in the clear sky. He crouched behind some of the totems and scanned the living room. Somebody or something was rooting behind a 1:4-scale Saber fighter jet made of Bumble Bee tuna and SpaghettiOs tins.

Eugene swept across the foyer like a cartoon detective. Stealthily he maneuvered to the base of the statue, its wheels resting atop a plinth built of stabilized Kraft Catalina saladdressing boxes. He was calm. He stood up and, with kickboxing speed, lunged over to the other side of the base shouting «Freeze!,» and pointed the handgun onto what appeared to be a drifter — a wino — who yipped like a squeak toy, and cowered against the boxes. Eugene flipped on the light switch, shocking the room and flaring his retinas. «Well fuck me, » he said. «If it isn't Miss Wyoming.»

«Put down the gun, Ken Doll.»

«Lordy! Miss Congeniality.»

«Yeah, like I always keep a speech about world peace prepared.»

«Hey — » The adrenaline was wearing off. He grew confused. «You're supposed to be — »

«Dead?» she laughed. «Well, technically yes. »

Eugene paused and crossed his arms while studying Susan, now hoisting herself up. «Boo,» she said. «I'm not a ghost. I'm real. I promise. Nice place you have here.»

Perplexed, Eugene asked how she got in.

«I scampered in while you were on the curb. I was sleeping outside your front door.»

«You were sleeping outside my front door?»