She had even made a stab at helping him out. “How did the thing go?”
“OK.”
OK? OK! What in the hell! He could have said a million other things. Talked about how weird it had been to do. How he liked most of the people there, but in the long run this was better for them. He could have told her about the Guntersons. Or the woman with the urn full of cat ashes. Or anything. He could have literally said anything. Instead, he went with “OK”. What kind of idiot says OK?
They’d been WhatsApping for a couple of months now. Before that, they’d been leaving each other more unconventional messages. She’d given him a coat delivered via drone. He’d spelled out a message on his roof. One thing had led to another. Sort of. They knew each other pretty well – in the stuff sense. He knew the stuff she liked; she knew the stuff he liked. People think that is unimportant, but Diller didn’t agree.
We live in the age of there being more stuff than ever – more stuff than previous generations could possibly imagine. The sum total of all television, music, books, comics, games, magazines – not just the latest stuff, but the entirety of it – that had ever existed, all of it was available now. You could even get most of it on the phone in your pocket. What bits of this vast cornucopia someone chose to pay attention to told you a lot about that person.
She had turned him on to some cool manga comics. He had recommended to her the cinematic classic that was Bubba Ho-Tep – Bruce Campbell as retirement-home Elvis battling an ancient Egyptian mummy. Stuff had also given them the opportunity to talk about themselves. They’d spent a week watching every Batman movie concurrently so that they could live-comment it to each other.
As part of the process of deciding Michael Keaton was the best one, they had discussed the losing parents’ backstory, and Zoya had revealed how it was basically her backstory too. Diller had let her talk it out without prying, and he’d opened up about his mom’s issues. More than he had with any other person. All thanks to stuff.
She had seen him, via the drone camera, but he had almost no idea what she looked like. He knew she’d been born in Pakistan and so, given that and a comment she’d made about skin colour, he had a rough idea on one tiny element of her appearance. He also knew her age.
Diller wasn’t naive, though. He knew people lied on the internet. Hell, they’d made TV shows about the phenomenon, but he didn’t think she’d been untruthful. If it turned out there was a three-hundred-pound, middle-aged white dude named Keith in the back of the Winnebago, then he really would be shocked. Still, Keith would have awesome taste in movies and manga comics. But no – she hadn’t lied, and he knew that. He also knew he hadn’t.
And that was the problem.
Jackson Diller had been playing roles his whole life, even while supposedly being himself. It was part of his natural defences. Growing up in a tough environment, if you aren’t built for fighting your way through it, then you have to become a master at conflict avoidance. You end up being very good at being a version of yourself that people like or, at the very least, see as neither a threat nor a victim. Diller was always “on”, being some iteration of himself that suited whichever audience he was in front of. This one time, he hadn’t been.
Twice, they’d briefly discussed meeting IRL (In Real Life), but quickly shied away from the subject. Diller knew Zoya didn’t like going outside and he hadn’t pushed it. He figured it would work itself out, eventually.
Then he’d been told he had to pick up a Winnebago with her in the back of it and drive it to the middle of the desert. There had been an explanation of why this was necessary for operational reasons, but he had spaced out and missed it. It was bizarre, how they could talk for hours in one medium and be completely tongue-tied in this one. They weren’t even looking at each other, just sharing the same space.
He was blowing it, and the longer the silence the worse it got. He tried to relax. She was back there working, after all. She was probably doing all kinds of technical stuff. She wasn’t in this Winnebago for a social visit. She had to be here to make the plan work. Maybe he was just being an idiot and thinking this was all about him when it wasn’t. They were trying to help Bunny. He needed to get his head on straight.
He needed to say something. Anything. Get it out of the way.
Do it.
Do it.
Do it.
“It is very sandy outside.”
He wanted to die.
“Yes,” came the response.
He wanted to jump out the door, stagger off into the desert and never be seen again. Like Captain Lawrence Oates, the Antarctic explorer: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”
Diller looked out the window. He noticed the cloud of dust coming towards them. Like a whole load of vehicles coming down a dirt road that didn’t get used that often.
Diller cleared his throat. “They’re here!”
Chapter Fifty
Walter brought the car to a halt and stared out the window. If it weren’t for the purple robes, he’d have thought they were in the wrong place.
It looked like some kind of tailgate party. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes were parked at what appeared to
