There were sound reasons never to return to Rustling Willows. Nevertheless, a strange yearning for Montana overcame her as she returned to her office and stood staring at the Navajo rug.
The desk phone rang. The first line.
“No,” Joanna said.
When the call went to voice mail, the caller disconnected.
The second line shrilled. Again, the caller left no message—and resorted to the cell phone.
She picked up the mug that she’d earlier set aside. The coffee was cold. She refreshed it with hot brew from the Pyrex pot.
She went to a window and pulled open the curtains. Beyond was the stucco-walled courtyard. By the magic of moonlight, various specimen cactuses—some tall, some squat—seemed to have been imbued with animal life, standing or crouching in wait for her, eyeless sentinels, a few hydra-headed and others with numerous limbs, their moonlight-frosted faces implacable, their bodies barbed and needled.
After closing the curtains, she sat at her desk, staring at the computer screen, at the last sentence she had written: Intelligence is dangerous without common sense, but common sense can never be learned by those who have been educated into arrogance, who lack the humility to believe in and trust their intuition.
Every time she read those words, she knew them to be true, but she also sensed that something was missing from that statement.
Reluctantly—or perhaps not—she picked up the cell phone and found that the caller had left a message this time.
The voice was that of the woman with whom she’d spoken earlier, still oddly calm, considering the words. “I am mentally in a dark place. I’m lost. I’m a danger to myself and others. Only you can help me, Jojo. Please come and help me.”
6
The Montana night is silent except for the occasional cries of coyotes or the inquiries of owls or the shriek of an unidentified night bird, as those creatures mourn the fate of the Earth.
The stars burn toward the heat death of the universe in however many billions of years, and the dead moon sheds cold light on the dark buildings that stand testament to the folly of the human race.
Asher Optime walks the weed-prickled main—and only—street, savoring the cool clean air. He relishes the peace here and regrets the screaming that must come later, though it will be brief.
Most nights he is not awake at this hour. He usually sleeps from midnight to dawn, as soundly as the unborn in the womb. His thrilling dreams take place in three-dimensional evolving versions of the artworks of Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Robert Rauschenberg, and others. In the dreams, those artists of deconstruction wrench from him or cut from him or erase from him pieces of himself, until it seems that he will cease to exist before he wakes. This pleasant expectation is always disappointed, for every dream ends while a part of him remains: one hand crawling past a heavy door framed by brickwork, one sorrowing eye floating in a void where a dog barks in the dark, fragments of his face floating in a field of color. On this night, he will not sleep or dream, because it is his role to be the artist who erases the meaning of a life, the life of a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Ophelia Poole.
Five months earlier, a week before his forty-second birthday, Asher had found the road to nowhere, which had led to everything he wanted.
In Montana, the prairies appear endless, and valleys sprawl as wide as plains. The immense forests are so primeval, it’s possible to believe that creatures said to be extinct for many thousands of millennia still live here in these densely grown and deeply shadowed reaches. The soaring, castellated mountains are forbidding ramparts that, silhouetted in a bloody sunset, might be the strongholds of an evil kingdom in a fantasy novel, and gorges plunge to depths where mist gathers as though to obscure passages to secret civilizations beneath the crust of the planet.
In human terms, Montana offers more lonely places than can be counted, some of which were once occupied by people with pluck and aspirations. They came for gold, found it, exhausted the veins; came for silver; came for copper in the mines that had been depleted of silver. They built small communities that they thought would grow to become hubs of commerce and transportation; some did, many didn’t. In the state’s 147,000 square miles, some of the loneliest places aren’t the farthest from all traces of civilization, but are those where men and women had hoped to make a future before being forced to face reality and abandon what they had built.
Of the several remote settlements that Asher Optime has found and explored during months of preparation for his new life, this one is the most suitable for his purpose. A road of compacted earth and broken shale withers away in a meadow, where decades earlier a high crest of earth in the west, perhaps weakened by heavy rains and dislocated by seismic tremors, collapsed and buried the approach to the abandoned town under thousands of tons of dirt. Where the track continues through a forest, generations of undergrowth obscure it, so a trained eye is required to recognize it. Only a determined seeker in a Land Rover with fortified tires can follow the trail through three miles of thick, descending woods to a hundred or more clear acres by a rushing river, where unknown but hardy settlers once came with some purpose in mind that he cannot confirm.