tell, from the Painter possession at the airport, to the handful of other possessed people I’d seen in my life—even Valis. But O’Connell was definitely no demon. I exhaled. Slumped to the floor. The dirty carpet crunched against my butt. “I’m sorry,” I said. I ran a hand through my hair. “I thought . . . I just . . .”
She stood up, walked to me, and crouched so that her face was level with mine. Her hand moved, and I thought she was going to touch my cheek, but she only wrapped her arm around her knee. She studied my face.
“I know what you thought,” she said. “I’ve thought the same things myself.”
“What, with me?”
“With everyone. I was possessed at least fourteen times, Del. I’d wake up in a hospital room holding the face of a dead woman, knowing that my lips had just touched hers. That I’d just murdered her. Sometimes I lost an entire week. The years between my tenth birthday and my twelfth are riddled with holes. I learned that anyone can disappear at any moment, replaced by a monster.”
“You’re too old for the Little Angel now,” I said. “You should be safe from her.”
“Maybe from her, but not the others. I became an exorcist, didn’t I? Looked too many demons in the face. Once you’ve been noticed, once you’re familiar to them, they like to find you again. You come to understand that they can take you at any time, anyone you’re close to. So. You stay on guard. You start watching for that change of expression, that alien voice.”
“Well, you were acting sort of different there,” I said, and laughed, then quickly cleared my throat to stop the laughter. “It’s just that, there’s that vow of celibacy thing.”
O’Connell said nothing. I looked up, and then she laughed. Her own laugh, dry and light. “I never said I was perfect.”
We locked eyes. Maybe trying to figure out if there was anybody else watching. She never looked away from me, but her expression slowly changed.
I could smell her, heady and rich.
I touched her calf, the underside of her thigh. Slid the edge of my palm into the folds of her. She was wet.
I wanted to roll her onto her back right then, but not on that awful carpet. I stood and pulled her to her feet.
I was hard again. So fast, despite all of this. The body has its own imperatives.
She touched my cock through the shorts, ran a fingernail along it, making me shiver. Then she gripped hard and stepped in close, holding me hot against her hip. She spoke softly into my ear. “I don’t want you inside me,” she said, almost whispering. “You have to be all right with that.”
“Okay,” I said, gasping. “Just . . . go easy.”
14
Kansas had the purity of a sixth-grade math problem, an exercise in scale and stark geometry. I couldn’t stop picturing our progress from above: the blue dot of the pickup creeping along a thin black line, bisecting a checkered expanse of barren fields regular as graph paper.
“So, this is Kansas.” It was the first thing O’Connell had said since we’d started driving this morning.
“We’re not in Missouri anymore,” I said. She didn’t get the reference. I glanced down at the map on my lap, then back out through the dust-bright windshield, looking for a mile marker. Playing navigator. Del led, I thought.
Paradoxically, the extreme flatness of the terrain made me acutely aware that we were living on a big round spinning planet. Though the horizon looked as level as a windowsill, I could sense the Earth curving out of sight, the vast sky bending over us. We rode toward an immense wall of clouds, unguessable miles away. My arm rested on the back of the seat. I leaned toward her, started to rub the back of her neck. She didn’t quite flinch, but after a moment she leaned away.
“Okaaay . . . ,” I said. Dropped my arm. “So what’s going on. Last night—”
“Was last night,” she said.
Ah.
After we made love, she rested her head on my chest and I rubbed my hand up and down her fuzzed skull. I told her I’d wanted to do that from the moment I saw her; she mock-sighed and said, “Everybody does.” We fell asleep spooning like old lovers, but I woke up alone, my mouth tasting of cigarettes. O’Connell was already up, dressed, and packed. She didn’t speak during breakfast except to order and to answer my questions about the route we’d take.
“Is this about your vows?” I said. Maybe she was pissed at me for leading her into temptation. Which made no sense—she was the one who’d jumped me while I was sleeping—but I knew well enough that shame and guilt didn’t have much to do with logic.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, and turned on the radio. Ever since we’d left Kansas City we’d been unable to pick up anything on the FM dial except country, Christian, and—weirdly—
seventies hard rock. She quickly switched to cassette and jammed in another of her jarring mix-tapes: Pogues followed by the Clash and Nirvana, then Joan Baez, Lead Belly, and Jan & Dean. She would have loved Lew’s mash-ups.
Twenty miles and thirty minutes later the Beach Boys were dootdooting through “Heroes and Villains” (Part 2). O’Connell turned down the volume, a lit cigarette between her fingers, and said, “I think you’ve misunderstood something.” Her scholarly voice. I tried to keep my expression neutral. “Yes?”
“Last night was about physical desire, Del. A collar doesn’t alter your chemistry, and I haven’t touched a body in six years. I shouldn’t have done what I done, but neither should you construe a physical act as some kind of . . . romantic overture.”
Overture? “I’m not,” I said. “I didn’t. I just thought that—”
“Why is it so hard for men to believe that a woman can just be horny?”
Men? Now I was men?
I turned away from her and stared out the passenger window, a frown holding my mouth in check. It would be a very bad time to laugh. But Jesus, what a relief! O’Connell just might be as fucked up as I was. All the things about her that kept me off balance: the costume changes from high priest to rock chick; the sudden lurches into hard Irish aints and yes; the abrupt swing from pastor to sexual aggressor and back again. She didn’t know who the hell she was, kick-ass exorcist or shell-shocked possession survivor. Maybe everyone in the world was this inconsistent, this fragmented. All we could see of each other—all we could see of ourselves—was a ragged person- shaped outline, a game of connect-the-dots without enough dots.
A sign flashed past my window. “That was our turn,” I said. She slammed on the brakes—which wasn’t a problem, since the highway was empty. We’d passed maybe five cars since leaving the interstate. She made a three-point turn and rolled back to where another two-lane road met the highway.
On the green sign was a white arrow pointing down the road and the words, olympia 15 mi. Below it, a smaller sign that said hospital.
“Hospital?” O’Connell said.
I shrugged. It wasn’t on the map. “Let’s see.”
As O’Connell drove I scanned the distant fields to either side of the road, eyes primed for a red silo, but I saw nothing but bare fields and distant clumps of trees.
The first sign of a town was a white, rusting water tower squatting near railroad tracks. The crossing was unguarded; we nosed up the rise in the road, looked left and right. One thing about Kansas at noon, we could see miles of clear track in either direction. Low buildings rolled into sight ahead of us. We passed a handful of houses,
