“Well, I told you, I’m almost one hundred percent certain that it was you. I’ve read your books, especially the one that you said you wrote in high school, and the main character talks a lot about going to the edge and there’s some imagery that feels very similar to what’s in the poster. I just . . . I mean, I honestly think it’s one of the most amazing things. I just . . . It’s you. You told me it was you. On the phone. It’s you.”
The edge, the edge, the edge, the edge . . . the edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us. I said it to myself, exactly in my own voice, and then I looked at Mazzy.
“I made it,” I finally said. “Yes, one hundred percent. I wrote it.”
“You have proof?” she said.
I’d brought the proof. I needed it to be as close to me as possible when I met with this woman who was trying to open up my life and unsteady me and possibly change everything that I’d done to make life possible. I reached into my backpack and I got out the polyester film folder, a museum-grade, top-quality archival sleeve. And I showed it to her, and she made this little sound, like someone had stepped on her chest. “This is the original,” I told her. “The first one. Everything came from this one.”
“This is the one?”
“And that’s my blood,” I said, pointing to the stars.
“Your blood?” she said, her eyes widening. I nodded.
She looked at the poster, the first time that anyone except me had looked at this poster in twenty years. I thought it might melt other people’s faces off, blind them, turn them into statues. But the archival polyester must have been protecting other humans from disaster, I imagined.
Mazzy leaned back against the hard curve of the bench, looked up at the ceiling. And then she smiled. She smiled, all her beautiful teeth, nothing like mine, nothing like Zeke’s, and she touched my hand. “This is amazing,” she finally said.
“I’m scared,” I said. “It’s . . . it’s just very complicated.”
“You said the same thing on the phone that day. You said it was complicated. What do you mean?”
“What do I mean?” I replied. “I mean . . . it’s complicated. I can’t quite explain it all.”
“Did someone else make it with you? Did you have help? Your brothers, maybe?”
“My brothers?” I said, snorting involuntarily with laughter. “Not my brothers, no way.” I thought about my brothers. The triplets had dropped out of college and then worked in kitchens for years and now co-owned a restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, one that made modern twists on southern dishes, and it had appeared in tons of magazines, on the Food Network, and it kept them so busy that I almost never saw them. None of them had married, no children, just three feral boys constantly beating each other up and dating all manner of hip women with tattoos and getting drunk in between appearances on the Today show making saltine cracker toffee or Cheerwine barbecue sauce. They were really into jujitsu now, woodworking, dipping a little into doomsday prep. It was like they made a world unto themselves and they were stunned whenever they saw me, the one who was and wasn’t a part of them.
No, definitely not the triplets.
“Who, then?” she asked.
I looked around. The lunch rush was over; the dining room of the Krystal was totally empty except for us. It was the longest I’d sat in a fast-food restaurant since I was a teenager.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I want to write about this, Frankie,” she told me. “I mean, I am going to write about it. An article for the New Yorker. You can imagine that they are very interested in the story, but no one knows anything yet. Just me. And you. And . . . well, anyone else who knows. But I need you to talk to me about it. I need your help to make sense of it.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I told her. “Like, seriously, are you kidding me? Do you think I had any idea what would happen? It makes no sense.”
“I think it can,” she said. “If you let me help you.”
“I need some time to tell people. I need—fuck—I need to tell my husband. I need to tell my mom. I just . . . I need a little time to figure things out.”
“But then you’ll talk to me?” she asked. “You’ll come forward?”
“Okay,” I finally said. “Okay, yes. I did it. I’ll tell people that I did it.”
She handed me a card. “This is my email and my phone. I know you already have it, but here, if you think of anything, write it down or call me. If you go anywhere and you need me to come with you, I will come with you.”