Miss Wyoming

It all had to do with the brain — which upon dissection struck Vanessa as a large flat gooey sheet of omelet elaborately folded over onto itself into the gray clumpen hemisphere. Vanessa had decided that twenty thousand years ago the human brain decided to fold itself over one more time, and it was that single extra fold that empowered brains to create the modern world. So simple. So elegant. And it also helped to explain why Vanessa was such a freakazoid, so cosmically beyond the others in her school. Vanessa realized that her brain had made the next fold — that she, in some definite and origamilike way, represented the next evolutionary step of Homo sapiens — Homo transcendens — and that her goal in life was to seek out fellow Homo transcendens and with them form colonies that would bring Earth into a new golden age.

At Princeton she encountered fellow advanced humanoids and she no longer felt so alone. But she was disappointed to discover that such petty failings as jealousy, political infighting, fragile egos and social ineptitude were just as prominent among her new colleagues as they were among the old. Phil from the Superstrings Theory group was a pig. Jerome the structural linguist was a pedantic bore who lied about meeting Noam Chomsky. Teddy the quark king was a misogynist. Vanessa correctly surmised that her life needed balance, and one polar afternoon, when ducking into an arts building for a dash of heat, she attended a surprisingly enlightening lecture on the Abstract Expressionist paint dribblers. From this lecture she decided that balance in her life would come from the arts, and that fellow Homo transcendens must surely await her in that arena.

She sought out any artistic gesture that proposed human evolution beyond Homo suburbia . She attended The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight screenings for two years running, dressed as Susan Sarandon, which left her with a lifelong yen for midwestern twin-set outfits. She read sci-fi. She tried joining Mensa but was turned off by the bunch of balding men who wanted to discuss nudism, and women who refused to stop punning or laughing at their own spoonerisms.

Half a year before graduation, a dozen companies battled to employ Vanessa, but she chose the Rand Corporation because they were in Santa Monica, California, close to Hollywood and what could only be a surplus of advanced geniuses. She was not above movies — they were the one genuinely novel art form of the twentieth century.

Her work in California was pleasure, and at night she went out into the coffee bars of Los Angeles, meeting dozens of young men with goatees and multiple unfinished screenplays. Some were smart and some were cute, and some were quick to charm, but it was Ryan, three years later, whom she deigned to be the first other member of the new species. She found him by accident late one night, at West Side Video after an evening of hmm ing and uh-huh ing her way through another round of goatees-with-screenplays. She was returning a copy of an obscure but technically interesting early eighties documentary,Koyaanisqatsi, and muttered, more to herself than to anybody nearby, that the film's repetitive minimalist soundtrack didn't induce the alpha-state high she'd read about.

«Oh, then you'll have to listen to it again, but you have to watch it at a proper theater, and it will work, you know. You'll reach alpha every time.»

«You did?»

«Well, yes. That's one of my favorite films.»

Vanessa spoke with pleasure. «I liked it, too, but …»

«Oh, you know — you have to see it on a big screen. You really do . Maybe I'm being too forthright here, but let me ask you this — would you come with me tomorrow night? There's a nine-thirty showing of Koyaanisqatsi at the NuArt. If you came here at eight, we could eat something vegetarian beforehand. You are vegetarian, aren't you? I mean, your skin… .»

There was a weighted pause in which emotion and options blossomed before them like time-lapse flowers.

And they were off. They went to Koyaanisqatsi the next night. They went to more movies. Vegetarians, they refused to eat any food that might have tried to resist capture. Ryan was a screenwriter and woodworker, and he was the only Hollywood writer Vanessa had yet encountered who didn't feel as if the world owed him both a Taj Mahal and a large clear rotating lottery ball stuffed with fluttering residual checks. «Tungaska» was genius. Vanessa twinged with the urgency felt throughout the ages by all women who have struggled to put their loved ones through med school or its equivalent. Vanessa was determined to be the one who discovered him, who pollinated his talents and supported him during his rise.

Then one night she snuck into the video store and found Ryan entwining his signature into that of her own. She felt sure it must be love. She had a few doubts about him — his Susan Colgate worship, his Caesar hairdo and his underwear, which looked not merely freshly laundered but freshly removed from the box. But no one whom she found tolerable had ever enjoyed her company before.

«Vanny look — it's a Class 3 electrical substation with» (gasp) «a WPA bas-relief on the doors. Pull over!» They were on the way to a Hal Hartley re-release Ryan insisted they not miss. Ryan let Vanessa drive. Their children would be magnificent.

Chapter Thirty

The morning after John, Vanessa and Ryan had their numbers read by Dreama, John sat on a towel outside the guesthouse and bombarded Vanessa and Ryan with phone calls. It was an effort to spur progress in the hunt for Susan. On John's fourth call to Vanessa's office, her patience was taxed.

«John, I could get fired if the company learned I was using their system to track down two nut cases across south central Wyoming.»

«So they're still in Wyoming?»

«Three hundred miles west of Cheyenne, passing through … at this moment … Table Rock, Wyoming.»

John then phoned Ryan and grilled him about Susan's history in Wyoming.

«Susan's mother returned to Wyoming after Susan left TV. But Susan's originally from Oregon.»

«So her mother may be in Wyoming, then?»

«She was a few years ago, back when Susan recovered from her amnesia.»

«Amnesia — pffft.» John sounded disgusted. «Amnesia's bullshit, Ryan. It's only a movie device.»

«Either way, nobody knows where she went for that year. For that matter, where did you go when you dropped out of sight, John? You've still never told me.»

«I went nowhere.»

«Brush me, Daddy-O. Jack Kerouac,man !»

«No — Ryan — you know where I went? I really went nowhere. I ate out of dumpsters. I slept under bridges. I traipsed around the Southwest and got gum disease and my skin turned into pig leather and I didn't learn a goddam thing.»

John hung up. He mulled the morning's information over and became convinced the key to the mystery of Susan's whereabouts lay in finding Marilyn. He phoned Vanessa and ran this idea past her.

«John, the LAPD tried locating Susan's mother and they couldn't find her. And besides, Susan and her mother hate each other. I've had two solid years of Sue Colgate trivia drizzled onto my brain. I've had to drive Ryan to the twenty-four-hour Pay-Less at two-thirtyA.M. to buy two-sided mounting tape for his shrine. I've been forced to watch Meet the Blooms reruns on tape instead of going to chick flicks since around the death of grunge. Sure, I know all that stuff I pulled out of databases. But I know the tabloid stuff, too, and Sue Colgate hates her mother.»

A neighbor's leaf blower turned off and John marveled at how quickly the world became silent. He walked back inside the house with the cordless phone. «Vanessa,please. Wherever the mother is, we'll find Susan. You know it, don't you, Vanessa?» Vanessa didn't answer. «I know you know it, Vanessa. You're the professional finder, not me.» He sat down on a couch and watched sun break through woven slots in the curtain, like a cheap hotel in Reno back in the seventies. An unwashed dish in John's