Pandemonium

“Does that mean crazies or TB?” I asked. “I can never keep them straight.”

“TB, I think.”

We rolled back down the drive, past a small parking lot that held about a dozen cars, and came out at the highway again. “So I guess . . . pizza,” I said. It was the only type of restaurant we’d seen in Olympia. O’Connell pointed us back toward town. She’d almost gotten up to speed when we passed a dirt road that I hadn’t noticed from the other side of the highway. The fields were unmown, and dried brush nearly engulfed an old mailbox. If it had been summer I never would have seen it through the foliage.

“Wait! Go back!” I said.

She pulled over without arguing. I hopped out and jogged back toward the dirt road. O’Connell put the truck in reverse and backed up to follow me.

I looked at the name on the mailbox again, then scanned the fields. In the distance, a picket of blackened timbers and a gleam that could have been the tin roof of a house. No silo. O’Connell stepped out of the truck.

I showed her the name on the mailbox, a palindrome spelled out in faded blue paint: noon.

“We’re here,” I said.

O’Connell maneuvered the pickup slowly down the uneven road. Tall grass whisked the doors.

Forms took shape. The line of thick posts became the charred bones of a barn, without roof or walls. And stretching away from the barn, a ragged jumble of curled and twisted sheet metal, half hidden by weeds and small trees: the silo’s cylinders, knocked apart and rusted by rain and years.

“You’re sure about this?” O’Connell said.

“Not a bit.”

She parked in a patch of former lawn that hadn’t grown quite as wild as the fields.

I stepped out of the truck, holding one of the plastic sheets from the Painter binder, and slowly turned: the gray farmhouse and its rusting tin roof, two stories tall but cringing against the wind. The outline of the barn, the disassembled remains of the silo. I kept lifting the sheet, measuring it against the scene in front of me. The Painter’s drawings captured a vibrant, living farm, and this place was long dead. The barn and silo had burned, and the heat must have been tremendous. All that was left were the massive posts and beams of the barn, the heat-twisted skins of the silo. The damage had been done long ago—decades maybe.

But the bones were right. The buildings were the right distance from each other. In my mind’s eye, the silhouettes matched. The house’s windows were unbroken except for one in the center of the second floor: a starburst of cracks that caught the light, and a small hole in the middle like a dark pupil.

I stepped up onto the porch and looked back at O’Connell. She leaned against the hood of the truck, arms crossed, watching me. Behind her, the highway was hidden by the high grass, but the top floors of the hospital were visible a quarter mile away. I grinned and tried the front door. The knob rattled but didn’t turn all the way. I moved along to a window, cupped a hand to the dirty glass. It was too dark inside to see anything. I pushed up against the window frame, but it didn’t budge. “Have you got a hammer or something?” I called.

O’Connell fished under the truck bed’s tarp and brought me a jack handle. “Now you’re adding breaking and entering to your list,” she said.

“No, we are.”

A couple weeks ago I might have hesitated to break the law. Mom had raised me to be a good boy. Or at least a conventional one. But after Dr. Ram, after the Shug, after all the varieties of shit that had gone down in the past ten days, I didn’t give a damn anymore. I could raise a little hell.

I smashed in the window, then ran the jack back and forth along