Pandemonium

“You secretly ate two—no, four cookies.”

I scooped my loot from the cookie rack and made my escape. I inhaled the first cookie before we left the driveway, and I had the comic books out of the box before we got out of the neighborhood. I absentmindedly waved O’Connell through a few rights and lefts, sending her down Euclid.

“Damn, these are good cookies,” O’Connell said. I wiped my fingers on my shirt and turned pages. I didn’t find what I was looking for in the first comic, set it aside, and opened the next one.

O’Connell shook her head. “You’d better be right about this, Mr. Pierce.” All this way for a comic book. For a page in a comic book. I found it in the third issue. Olympia! “Pull over, now,” I said.

“Jesus Christ,” O’Connell said. She parked in back of the Steak n Shake. I handed her the comic, open to the page I’d found. “Look at that,” I said.

I hopped out of the truck, went around to the bed. My duffel was under the tarp, snug under the cab window. I unzipped it, took out the topmost binder, and carried it back inside.

O’Connell was looking at the full spread across the top of page four. The comic was done in only one color, blue mimeograph lines on white paper, but the picture was clear enough, to my eyes at least. The house was there, the barn, the big silo, the line of trees—and the faint smudge over the house. Then I handed her the binder, where the same farmhouse had been drawn by the Painter.

“See?” I said. “They’re the same.”

“I admit they’re similar,” she said. “But I don’t see what it tells us.”

“The smudge.” I pointed to the comic. The pages had been badly duplicated, but if you looked closely enough you could see lines that looked like outstretched hands, legs, the suggestion of a cape. Once you saw those features in the comic, they became more obvious in the Painter’s rendition.

“See?” I said. “It’s RADAR Man.”

She looked back and forth between the comic book page and the plastic sheeted page from the binder. “Okay,” she said. “If you say so. But once again, so what? You’d already seen that the Painter drew some of your memories. This time he remembered your comic book.”

“No! Some of those pictures were drawn before I was born. He’s not drawing my comic book—we’re drawing the same place.”

“That could be any farm anywhere.”

“No. Not anywhere.” I pointed to the little text box above the drawing in the comic book: Meanwhile, over Olympia Kansas . . .

“RADAR Man’s hometown,” I said.

O’Connell looked at me, eyes narrowed. “Is that a real town?”

“Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.”

She sighed. “I suppose we have to buy a map.”

By eight that night we’d reached the Missouri side of Kansas City. O’Connell swung into the parking lot of a Motel 6, hit the brakes, and triggered a landslide of paper and plastic from the bench seat onto the floorboards: my comics, the binders I’d taken from the Waldheims, newspapers, two maps of the Midwest. The pickup looked like someone had emptied a file cabinet through the passenger window. O’Connell turned off the cassette—the pickup didn’t have a CD, and we’d been listening to her homemade mix-tapes since leaving Chicago—and said, “Do you have any cash?”

I opened my wallet. Inside were my last two twenties, a couple of ones, and the water-damaged Hyatt card where I’d written Tom and Selena’s phone number. She took the twenties.

“Hey!”

“I’ll see if this will pay for a room,” she said. I thought: A room?

I put my comics back in the box, inserted pages back in their binders. I folded the Missouri-Kansas map so that it was open to show a circled and recircled dot of a town. I still hadn’t gotten over the thrill: Olympia, Kansas, was real. All we had to do was follow the yellow brick road.

O’Connell came back with a key, drove us around the side of the