“Yeah,” I said.
“The lost parents. It’s a helluva coincidence. I don’t mean to sound callous.”
“It’s not really a coincidence,” I said. “It’s a reason.”
“A reason?”
“For why I should do this. Hugo says it’s destiny.”
“He would say that,” Siobhan said.
After my utter failure to fly a plane, I’d only become more determined to be Marian. I needed the relief of being someone who wasn’t afraid. It helped that she wasn’t completely alien, that we were both products of vanishment and orphanhood and negligence and airplanes and uncles. She was like me but wasn’t. She was uncanny, unknowable except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky.
I responded to Redwood Feiffer with the kind of smile you give the money guy. Not explicitly flirtatious but on the road to it. “Yeah?” I asked him. “Big into Archangel?”
“One hundred percent.” I assumed he was kidding, but he leaned forward in his swivel chair, said earnestly, “Those movies are beautifully made and really romantic. Also, I’m always fascinated by things that turn into phenomenons. Like, why, you know? What is it that strikes a chord in so many people? When it happens, it seems so intuitive in retrospect, like you can clearly see the void that was filled, but the real trick is identifying the void when it’s still a void.”
“The billion-dollar void,” Hugo said. “Let’s hope there’s a vanished-lady-pilot void.”
“Okay,” said Ted Lazarus, “should we get started?”
When you’re a movie star, you’re basically a good-looking dingbat running around with headshots, but people don’t see the dingbat. They see the sum of the characters you’ve played: someone who’s time-traveled, who’s saved civilization, who’s been chosen by a beautiful, powerful man as the object of his undying devotion, who’s been rescued from terrorists by her father, Russell Crowe. You take on weight and consequence. It’s like the dance of a thousand veils except with every role you’re putting on another veil, concealing yourself. Still, the effect is more seductive than a striptease.
“Ready when you are,” Hugo said. He was going to read the other parts.
“Good to go,” I said.
I looked at the floor, the blue-gray institutional carpet, and when I looked up, the conference room seemed to become less tangible, blurred as though frames of it were alternating with frames of another life. Manifest, manifest. The memory of the Cessna flickered and went out. I didn’t look at the people at the table, but I felt my glow reflecting off their faces. I was hunkered down in a tent in Antarctica while a blizzard raged, and Hugo was Eddie Bloom, and we were talking about what would happen when we got home, describing what we would eat. I told him I loved him even though I didn’t really, not the way he loved me. It didn’t matter, though, because neither of us thought we’d survive.
“No one will ever find us,” he said.
“We’re not just going to disappear,” I told him. I knew that was a lie, even if I didn’t want it to be.
Millionaire’s Row
Seattle
May 1931
Two months before Marian flew Barclay over Glacier National Park
Inside a tunnel, Jamie clung to the side of a boxcar, hot darkness pressing in, clanking and sulfurous. The glow of the headlight seemed far away, pulling the train along behind like a comet’s tail. When you think the train is slowing, the tramps in Spokane had told him, reach down with your foot and start tapping the cinders to gauge the speed. Best to make your leap before you get to Union Station. The bulls there aren’t pleasant. You’ll end up in jail or beaten or both.
Back in Idaho, Jamie had been awakened in a rail yard by a bull’s nightstick across his shins, had little interest in another encounter.
He’d heard it was possible to suffocate in the long tunnels, but the tramps thought he’d be all right.
The clacking and huffing slowed. He lowered himself until his toe clattered through the cinders. Too fast still. A screeching he thought must be the brakes, and he tried again. This time the ground seemed to grab at his foot, wrenching loose his grip. He fell, landed hard, and rolled away. At least his knapsack cushioned him a little.
Walk along the tunnel, the tramps had said. You’ll find a way out eventually.
One hand on the wall, he limped and stumbled through the darkness until his fingers found a steel door. Behind it, a ladder. After a hatch and another tunnel, he emerged into cool air and, under a gray sky, the biggest city he’d ever seen. Grand buildings wore corbels and pilasters like medals on their puffed-out chests, cornices like epaulets. The wide streets teemed with cars and trolleys. Signs clamored about lunchrooms, tailors, mattresses, Coca-Cola, cigars, canned crab, everything else anyone could sell. A passing man in a suit pointed to his own temple and said, “You’re bleeding, you know.”