Surveillance

1

AFTER THE EXPLOSION, the driver of the overturned school bus stood beside the wreckage, his clothes in shreds. He was cupping his hands to his ears, as if to spare himself the noise of sirens, car alarms, bullhorns, whistles, and tumbling masonry. When he brought his hands away and held them in front of his face, both palms were dripping blood. His mouth opened wide in a scream that was lost in the surrounding din.

Beyond the bus, a tire dump had caught fire. Swirls and billows of black smoke, looking as thick and glossy as oil in the early morning sunshine, rose in a fast-climbing plume above the flames. The painted letters of the company sign, PACIFIC AUTO RECYCLING, swelled and popped in the heat.

A child was scrambling from a blown-out window on the bus — a towheaded boy of nine or ten, his face framing a disheveled grin. Half in, half out of the bus, he sat on the window’s edge, gazing at the lurid inferno of burning tires and the screaming driver as if the catastrophic nature of the occasion quite eluded him.

Rescue workers came running — sexless toddlers in silver spacesuits — their giant feet slipping and sliding on the pulverized glass that coated the road inches deep like a freak hail-fall. Shards of glass were still dropping from the windows of buildings that had taken the full force of the blast.

The hollow whoomph of an exploding gas tank came from inside the auto-wrecking yard, followed by another a couple of seconds later. A spaceman with a machine gun shouted, “Keep down! Keep down!” at the rescue team, his voice muffled and distorted as he yelled through his respirator into a bullhorn. Bent low, stumbling through glass, they reached the bus, from which silvery tendrils of smoke or steam were now drifting skyward.

“Get in there! Get every live kid out of it, now!”

Silver-suited fatties clambered onto the axle casing, hoisted themselves atop the side of the yellow bus, and dropped inside through the windows. Two pairs of rescuers half carried, half hustled the grinning boy and the driver along the road, splashing through a small turbulent river that issued from a ruptured water main. The driver’s head flopped against his chest, blood from his ears spattering what was left of his shirtfront.

A body in a torn tracksuit lay on its back in the path of the rescue party, her mouth and eyes open as if she’d been saying something important when sudden death interrupted. Dust, fine and pale as talcum powder, was settling on her face, as it settled on the parked cars and curbside dandelions, graying everything on which it fell.

The ground quaked to the sound of a bigger whoomph from the wrecking yard. The bus driver’s head jerked upright from between the shoulders of his rescuers, and he let out a throaty, gargling howl. “Oh my Christ!” The word “Christ” was drawn out over several seconds, mingling in the air with the echoing rumble of the latest explosion.

“Not there! There! Get them on the Decon van! The Red Cross van, assholes. Move it! I said move it!”

“Go fuck yourself,” said one of the rescuers from inside his hazmat hood, his voice audible only to the bus driver and, by a stretch, to his fellow rescuer. “Fucking National fucking Guard.”

The stumbling trio broke into an ungainly trot, closely followed by the rescuers with the boy, like competitors in a three-legged race making the final dash for the tape.

THE TARRY CHEMICAL stink of the fire filled the Red Cross van taking them to the Decon tent at Harborview. The rear windows looked out on boiling flames and on the dense black overcast, rifted here and there by scraps of flawless blue, that now darkened the streets. In the foreground, a camo Humvee, spacemen with gurneys, running stick figures, splayed bodies, liberated papers seesawing in air, drifts of toxic dust, smoking heaps of bricks and torn Sheetrock.

The driver of the school bus, Tad, was trying to assign the name of a painter to the scene. Goya, maybe. Or Hieronymus Bosch. He tipped his head and jiggled his pinkie in his right ear to clear the canal of stage blood.

“How’re you doing, kid?”

“Good.”

“Better than school, huh?”

The boy’s nose was squashed against the glass. The transfixed grin hadn’t left his face since the moment when he’d first climbed out of the bus.

“You wait,” Tad said. “You wait till you go through Decon. That’s something else.”

In Decon the boy would be stripped naked and hosed down before being admitted to the hospital. Tad had gone through it a couple of exercises ago. Never again: he’d written that into his contract. Today, as soon as the van reached Harborview, he’d be into his next part. After Bus Driver with Burst Eardrums came Psychotic Homeless Man Disrupting Work of Rescue Team, then Dying Amputee, Man Having Coronary, and — the one he seriously dreaded — Man Being Dug from Rubble.

Tad Zachary was one of the six professional stars of the show titled TOPOFF 27 by the Department of Homeland Security. Most victims were played by volunteers from government offices and by homeless people getting minimum wage and a free lunch. Tad and his fellow actors were scoring $1,000 of federal money apiece for their day’s work. They were the ones who’d be filmed in close-up, their images beamed by satellite to the bunker in D.C. where the exercise was being monitored.

He needed the job. His last appearance on stage had been sixteen months ago, when he’d played Willy Loman in the ACTrevival of Death of a Salesman. Since the downturn in the economy, one Seattle theater after another had gone dark, and Tad was scraping by on residuals, commercials, voiceovers, PSAs, vilely written parts in spec indie movies at $250 a throw, management-and-training films, the rare gig as MC at a corporate junket, and the interest on the proceeds of the sale of his mother’s house in Portland. He had to remind himself most days that he was lucky: he had a strong local name and good connections. Even jobs in retail, the usual standby of the out-of-work actor, were in short supply now. His friend Gilda Hahn, who’d played opposite him as Linda Loman, had been on food stamps before she found her current role, working the midnight shift at a 7-Eleven on Denny Way.

For Tad the TOPOFFs were performances, but for the emergency services they were dress rehearsals: FEMA, the National Guard, the firefighters, police, ambulancemen, and civic officials were still plotting out their lines and moves, and still not getting it right. In TOPOFF 26, nearly every rescue worker had been contaminated, fatalities had vastly exceeded predictions, chains of command had broken down, hospitals overwhelmed. The reviews that came down from D.C. were so terrible, Tad had heard, that they were officially classified and never reached the press.

This one was the most realistic yet. A dirty bomb (two thousand pounds of ammonium sulfate, nitrate, and fuel oil, mixed up with fifty pounds of cesium-137 in powdered form) had gone off in a container supposedly holding “cotton apparel” from Indonesia, recently unloaded from a ship docked at Harbor Island. A fireworks expert (the same guy who directed the July Fourth display on Elliott Bay) created the terrific gunpowder explosion and the rockets laden with talc to simulate cesium. The tire fire had been set with gasoline, the broken glass supplied by volunteers standing on the roofs of neighboring buildings. At least the pictures beamed to the other Washington would look great.

A section of Route 99 had been closed for the exercise, which was happening in an area five city blocks square. Yet even in this micro version of nuclear horror, chaos was already breaking out all over, less than fifteen minutes since the bang. Judging by the fire trucks now homing in on it, and by the stream of silver suits running northward, the fire was out of control. Tad heard gunshots, which surely weren’t called for in the script.

He hated working with amateurs. They never understood the fine line dividing real life from theater. They always overdid it. He hoped against hope that the exercise would be called off before he had to be dug out from the rubble.

The Red Cross driver had turned his whooping siren on. They were in regular traffic now, out of the exercise zone, speeding past a jam of diverted drivers on their way to work. This greatly excited the boy, who began to whoop in tune with the siren.

Tad hated working with children, too. “You’re giving me a headache, kid. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Taylor.”

“Taylor, I’ll give you a buck if you chill out and shut up till we get to the hospital, okay?”

“Done deal,” Taylor said. He looked and spoke like one of those kids whose parents dragged them from audition to audition. Too cute by half, and then some.

Tad dug into the back pocket of his pants, removed his billfold, and peeled off a dollar that the boy took without thanks. Professional curiosity made him ask, “You getting paid for this, Taylor? Or are you a volunteer?”

“Fifty bucks,” the boy said with a smirk. “I was a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz at the Fifth Avenue Theatre. And I was in The Nutcracker at the Opera House. How ’bout you?”

“If you’re getting paid, kiddo, if you think you’re an actor, you better learn to wipe that stupid grin off your face. This is a pro speaking. You’re a casualty. You’re probably going to be dead of radiation sickness in a week. Think of your parents. Think of the funeral. You’re one unlucky kid, Taylor. You in Little League?”

“Yes.”

“Well, think about this. You’re never, ever going to play another game. You understand that? You’re history.”

The grin was at last beginning to come unstuck.

“If you’re going to act, act good. Act real. Let me tell you something about the way you played that kid climbing out of my bus: it stank. Every other kid was dead, and you looked like it was Christmas and Santa had just popped out of the chimney. Next time you’ve got to be the character, right?”

“Right.” A chastened mumble.

Tad laid his arm across Taylor’s shoulder. “Just some friendly advice from an old actor. What are you next?”

“I got a dead mom. She’s lying in the road, blown out of our car on the way to school.”

“So you’re in white shock. It’s too early for grieving. You’re a disoriented zombie. A shivering blank. And after Decon, you will be shivering. Think about it, Taylor. Learn to act.”

At Harborview, the boy joined the cheerful line of people queuing at the entrance to the Decon tent: evidently no one had warned them of the intimate humiliations that lay in store. The car with City of Seattle plates and “ZACHARY” posted in the window was waiting to drive him to his next engagement. A change of shirt and trousers was on the backseat, along with a woolen balaclava helmet and his makeup-sponge bag. Before he climbed in he turned and called, “Hey, Taylor! Taylor! Break a leg, kid!”

LUCY BENGSTROM was in luck that morning. The bomb-scare shenanigans going on downtown had freed the suburbs from their usual swarm of officious security types. On the dot of 7:30, aiming to catch the 9:30 ferry from Mukilteo to Whidbey Island, she’d parked her daughter, Alida, in the Early Birds program at her school on Capitol Hill. As it turned out, the drive to Mukilteo was a breeze: no soldiers manning the checkpoint on I-5, and the search of her car at the ferry terminal was merely a command to flip the trunk and an incurious glance inside. She was waved onto the 8:30 boat with nearly ten minutes to spare.

Earliness made her feel she’d won a surprise vacation as she got coffee from the machine in the passenger lounge and took it out onto the stern deck. It was holiday weather. For the entire last week of March, the temperature had been up in the eighties, and today, April 2, they were saying on the radio that it would likely pass ninety. To be wearing a dress that she’d bought for summer in Hawaii on a spring day in the Pacific Northwest was an oddity to add to all the other oddities of life in the last year or so: they steadily accumulated, like snowfall — another thing that wasn’t happening the way it used to.

Water boiled in the dock and the ferry pulled slowly away from the ramp. Sipping at the tepid espresso, Lucy felt properly afloat again, at last.

The call from GQ had come in the nick of time — the first assignment in many months that she could really sink her teeth into. Back in the nineties, when East Coast editors thought of the Pacific Northwest as the new big thing, Lucy was offered far more work than she could possibly take on, but since then the region had lost much of its sexiness and the dateline “Seattle” was beginning to look like déjà vu all over again. The old-new public library, the international toast of 2004, had long slipped into yesterday-land, though a recent string of gruesome serial murders, recalling Ted Bundy’s exploits and the Green River killings, had briefly jolted Seattle back into the news. Lately, she’d been scratching a living out of travel pieces — short trips with Alida in tow, during school breaks — and wry reports from the deep sticks for “Talk of the Town” in The New Yorker. She called editors nowadays, and sometimes her calls were returned.

Before the GQ editor phoned, she hadn’t known that August Vanags lived in her territory, though she knew of his book, of course. Impossible to miss its long bestsellerdom, or the bidding war between DreamWorks/Paramount and Miramax for movie rights; Spielberg had won, if that was the word, and paid gazillions. She’d gone straight out to buy Boy 381, the title superimposed on a creased and grainy black-and-white snapshot of a starveling boy standing against a forbidding barbed-wire fence. Leery of its blockbuster success, she’d begun to read, expecting to find it not half as good as it was cracked up to be.

But she was swept away, almost from the first page. It was amazing that this memoir of an orphaned child caught up in the worst barbarities of World War II could be so light, sweet-tempered, brave, and funny. From his terrible boyhood spent among the displaced and terrorized people of Central Europe, overrun now by Hitler’s armies, now by Stalin’s, Vanags had somehow conjured a magical, inspiring book. It was as if Huck Finn had been set adrift in this refugee world of trains, and labor camps, and trudging columns of shocked, exhausted men and women trying to escape. Like Huck’s, the boy’s voice was clear and true. He was all eyes and ears. Faced with atrocity, he described what he saw in terms that were heartbreakingly simple and exact. Only a child could have such resilience — could have made for himself out of such wretched material a life of boyish mischief and boyish happiness. At the end, when the young Vanags was rescued in Germany by the gruff American sergeant Philip Cahan, Lucy, who never wept over books, found her eyes prickling with tears.

The guy from GQ had said that Vanags was as obstinately reclusive as Salinger: since the book first started showing up on the bestseller lists, he’d declined all interviews and refused to budge from his island. “It’s a unicorn hunt,” he’d concluded, but he somehow had got hold of Vanags’ phone number. He offered $4,000 for preliminary research, and $25,000 if Lucy could talk this reticent hermit into an in-depth interview-profile. “You’re good at that stuff. Like you got Bill Gates…that was a great piece. I don’t know what’s with Vanags. It could be he’s just shy, but he was a history prof before this book happened, so a ton of people at the University of Washington must see him. Maybe it’s an academic thing: you know, this disdain for journalists.”

Biding her time, Lucy had set about researching Vanags in the public library. She read his only other published book, a dry study of the Yalta treaty with the misleadingly catchpenny title of The Treacherous Pact. She tracked down articles he’d written for history journals — more dry stuff, with titles like “The Sovietization of Higher Education in Poland, 1951–1963.” In the 1970s, he wrote, rather less dryly, about the Cold War for Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, but she could make no connection at all between the footnote-happy historian and the author of Boy 381. August Vanags — associate professor of history, University of Washington, as he was billed at the foot of even his most recent articles, published in the mid-1990s, so apparently they never made him a full professor — seemed no more likely to pen this dazzling memoir than he was to sprout wings and fly.

She tried to hunt him down in books — about the war on the eastern front, the camps, the postwar refugees. She Googled “Lebensborn,” for at age six Vanags had been plucked from a Polish transit camp on the strength of his blue eyes and fair hair and taken to a castle in Bavaria to be Nazified. Since the boy didn’t know whether he was German, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Estonian, Ukranian, or even, possibly, Jewish, he was glad of any nationality he could get. “I thought that being German meant that I’d be given a uniform with silver buttons and as much bratwurst as I could eat,” Vanags wrote. The German family to whom he was given for adoption sent him back after a month because, the boy thought, “I ate too much sausage”—the sausages in question being stolen from the butcher’s next door. Soon he was back on another train, bound for Poland and the children’s camp at Dzierzazna. Being six, he thought that being on a train, any train, was ample compensation for having lost yet another set of parents.

He knew he was called August and had taken the Latvian name Vanags as a flag of convenience. It authenticated him as a gentile and gave him a native land. A lucky choice, for Latvian-American voluntary organizations took care of him when the war at last came to an end.

Tad, who lived across the hall from Lucy and Alida, was at supper one evening when he saw the library copy of The Treacherous Pact and said, “I took a class with him at U Dub.” He remembered Vanags, dimly, as a “little guy” and a “tightass.” The one thing that set him apart from the rest of the faculty crowd was that he’d been a hawk on Vietnam, and Tad’s class of ’69 had written him off as a stooge for LBJ and McNamara. All Tad said on hearing that Lucy hoped to seduce Vanags into being interviewed was “Sooner you than me.”

Lucy loved to lose herself in other people’s worlds. It was what she did best, being a chameleon, taking on the color of new and strange surroundings until she could write about them as if they were her natural home. The more alien the world, the happier she was, feeling her way around inside it as a novice and a nobody. Just as she’d plunged into the Seattle rock scene for the profile of Kurt Cobain (last speaking to him three days before his death), into the Microsoft campus, into Colonel “Bo” Gritz’s white-supremacist compound in Idaho, into Jeff Bezos’ online bookselling empire, so now she became an enthralled tourist in the exotic foreign country of World War II, where wild children roamed over the landscape like packs of rats.

Their faces were pale green with malnutrition. They ate acorns. They robbed dead bodies. They preyed on old people, snatching food from fingers too weak to hold on to the precious mildewed crust. They held make-believe executions. They pelted through the streets on rickety legs, arms outstretched, pretending to be low-flying bombers. They were adept and fantastic liars. Telling lies was their best hope of staying alive, and they lied to everybody, about everything. As Vanags wrote, “I knew that if ever I were caught telling the truth, I’d be sent to the camps.”

Lucy followed these small, wizened-featured survivors across the map of Europe, tracing their wanderings in the old school atlas that used to be hers and was now Alida’s, running her finger from Tallinn to Riga, Vilnius, Grodno, Bialystok, Warsaw, Lodz, Poznan. From history books she pieced together the tidal surges of the Soviet and Nazi armies as they swept east and west across the continent, leaving cities in shock and ruin. She could rattle off the names of the generals — Falkenhorst and Timoshenko, Manstein and Vatutin, Schoerner and Zhukov. She wanted to see the big picture, but the foreground details kept intruding: Hitler and Stalin, wrecking nations, paled beside the image of a boy and two girls hiding in the shell of a bombed-out house, gratefully feeding on the remains of a cat.

At last she was ready to make the call. She took a diazepam so that she wouldn’t stutter on the phone, waited for half an hour for the pill to kick in, and rang Vanags at the unlisted number GQ had given her. The answering voice sounded too young and accentless to be him. His son perhaps, or his partner. She asked whether Professor August Vanags was there.

“Speaking.”

Surprised, Lucy momentarily stumbled on the “c” in “inconvenient,” then recovered and rushed into her pitch. Talk history! was the note she’d scribbled to herself and ringed with a braided doodle on the top of a fresh page of her spiral-bound notebook. She talked history, not mentioning the magazine, careful to say she was a “writer” (not “journalist”), and showed off her seven-day expertise on the displaced children of Europe. She had to engineer a meeting before she could own up to what she really wanted.

He took the bait. Below Talk history! she wrote down the instructions for getting to his island house. Putting down the phone, she felt half triumphant and half ashamed — not for deceiving Vanags, but for catching him so easily.

THE FERRY was halfway across the passage when Lucy saw smoke dirtying the sky to the far south. At first she thought it was another forest fire — they’d begun in March this year — but the slowly twisting plume looked too dark, too dense and liquid to come from burning trees. It took her a moment to figure that it must be coming from the city, twenty-five miles away at least. Instinctively she rummaged through the junk in her bag for the cell phone to call Alida’s school, then stopped herself. Being a neurotic mom, she needed all her reserves of self-control not to act like a neurotic mom.

It would be part of the exercise, of course. She hated these TOPOFF things, their brazen and officious theatricality. Only a week ago she’d seen Omaha come under attack on CNN — a crop duster had sprayed the business district with ricin and killed five thousand imaginary people. The traveling horror show paid regular visits to Seattle, where the scenario was always the same: a shipping container, a bomb, panic in the streets, and the mad orchestra of ambulance, police, and fire sirens.

Alida, home from school with flu during the last TOPOFF, had come to Lucy’s desk in the big kitchen/dining/living room in her nightclothes, pale and shivery, her clammy forehead hot to the hand. “It’s not real, is it?”

“No, sweetheart, it’s not real. It’s just an exercise.”

But, of course, it was real. The administration was in the business of manufacturing fear and methodically spreading its infection from city to city. The lengths they went to — setting fires, showing make-believe corpses to the cameras — surely went far beyond what was needed to test the emergency services. How could you explain to a child that “homeland security” meant keeping the homeland in a state of continuous insecurity? Furious, lost for words, Lucy had packed Alida back under the covers, set her up with Guinness World Records, Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life, and another dose of Tylenol, then had brought her own work to the bedroom, where she sat at the desk that was already too small for Alida, trying to rid her head of the yammering sirens.

“Measures,” they called them, but incremental nuisances was how Lucy saw them — the spreading rash of concrete barriers, barbed wire, magnetometers, spycams, nondescript gray boxes that were supposed to sniff out airborne pathogens. Over the last twelve months, these measures had been multiplying at speed. Lately they’d started mounting roadblocks on interstates. Next up, as the result of an act rushed through Congress, was the hassle of the biometric National ID card, deadline September for Washington state. The measures had driven a wedge between Lucy and Tad. To him they meant “fascism,” a word he used with a maddening carelessness; to her they were just signs of how jumpy and rattled this administration had grown since the attacks, perhaps for good reason. As far as she was concerned, the worst thing they’d done was to turn dinner with Tad into a conversational minefield. One evening last week, they’d found themselves staring daggers at each other across the table over the remains of the wine: “You’re being blind,” Tad had said. “You’re being obsessional,” she’d answered. Their six-year friendship was in peril because of the fucking measures.

This morning, the smoke over Seattle was taking the shape of an enormous many-petaled flower, like a wilting black hydrangea growing on a stalk from behind the green hills and unruffled sea. Fascinated in spite of herself, Lucy watched it grow until the raspy male voice came over the PA system, ordering passengers down to their cars.

Waiting for her turn to drive off, she switched on the radio. The morning show on the local NPR station was about salmon recovery, with a guy who’d written the book on it — so nothing too bad could have happened in Seattle if they were deep in a discussion about preserving spawning habitat. On Classic King FM she got a discordant flurry of horns, drums, and trumpets. Stravinsky, she guessed first, then changed her bet to Mahler.

Two lanky National Guardsmen, with machine guns on shoulder straps, stood by the ramp, eyes glazed, faces limp with boredom in the gathering heat. Their armored Humvee, parked at an angle beyond them, had a livelier expression, with its pig-eyed headlights and bared-teeth radiator grille. Humvees were everywhere now, lurking in downtown alleys, snarling at drivers from the median strips on freeways; they seemed to Lucy to possess the worst possible combination of maximal testosterone and minimal IQ. She veered wide left past this one, as if it might spring to life and bite.

Her holiday mood was gone. In a bid to recapture it, she pulled over at a strip mall to drop the top of the car. Madly impractical in every other way, the Spider could still lift Lucy’s spirits with its collapsing roof. Exactly nine months older than Alida, and with 123,000 miles on the clock, it was dear to her because she’d had to battle to hang on to it. There’d been two close encounters with repo men when she’d fallen behind in her payments. Her mother, seeing it for the first time, had let out the tragic shriek for which she’d been famous in Miles City. “Jesus God Almighty, Lucy, are you totally insane?” Then she’d begun to weep. Her mother meant the baby, of course, but it was the car that gave her the cue to reprise the role of Hedda Gabler, or was it Lady Macbeth?

In Alida’s early days, a single package of disposable diapers had filled the Spider’s trunk to capacity and beyond. At pick up time at school, parked in the fleet of minivans and SUVs, the green car drew meaningful looks from the parental crowd. It denoted Lucy’s singleness, selfishness, and general irresponsibility. Faced with the world’s disapproval, she’d grown more and more protective of the car, feeding it premium-grade gas, observing its service intervals as punctually as she did Alida’s medical and dental checkups, taking it to the body shop for cosmetic surgery whenever it got a scrape or ding. Usually careless of possessions, Lucy had the superstitious conviction that if she let the car go, the rest of her precarious life would go the way of the Spider, to rust and ruin.

It was in the car that she’d had her best conversations with Alida: strapped into their red leather bucket seats, both looking ahead, not catching each other’s eyes, they talked as they never did at home. On the run back from school, Alida would keep Lucy abreast of the cruel snakes-and-ladders game of sixth-grade friendships in a breathless stream of gossip, like a confiding sister. But the moment she stepped out of the Spider the talk stopped, mid-sentence, and she put on her new face, drawing the shutters and hanging out the “Closed” sign. So in the last few weeks Lucy had been taking ever more roundabout and eccentric routes through the city, trying to stay in touch with her disappearing daughter.

She loved to drive. She’d had her first lesson at eleven in her father’s white Jeep with government plates, dodging clumps of sagebrush on a stretch of open rangeland. “We won’t tell Mom,” he said, as Lucy, rapt, heart in mouth, hardly daring to breathe, piloted the Jeep in figure eights across the sun-baked gumbo clay. Driving was the nearest she could imagine to doing magic, and being sworn to secrecy doubled its enchantment. All that summer, driving figured thrillingly in her dreams, and by fall she was doing it by instinct, rattling lickety-split over the prairie with her dad in the passenger seat, even though she needed two fat cushions to see over the hood. Thirty-eight years on, she still hadn’t quite managed to entirely part company with that child, bursting with pride and excitement at being behind the wheel. Reading The Wind in the Willows to Alida, Lucy felt a certain rueful kinship to Mr. Toad.

So now, accelerating away from the strip mall, she went from first to fifth without putting her foot on the clutch, flipping the stick to neutral and judging the revs by ear for the moment to shift up — a silly trick, and not one she did often, but it made her smile to get it right. The music on the radio was lost to wind, tire rumble, and the growl of the exhaust. The dashboard clock said 9:14, and she wasn’t due to show up at August Vanags’ place until sometime after 10:30.

The road, barred with the regular shadows of plantation firs, was temptingly free of traffic. Speeding through inky greenery, the sun falling in bolts of white light between the trees, she was already on the lookout for the Useless Bay turnoff when, heeling-and-toeing around a wide bend, she nearly plowed into the backside of a silver sedan going so slowly that it barely seemed to be moving at all. As she braked, the sound of woodwind and strings came up around her in lush, bass-heavy stereo. So far as she could see, the next stretch of road was all bends. Turning on the emergency flashers to warn anyone coming up behind them, she settled behind the silver car, keeping her distance, with an anxious eye on the rearview mirror. The Spider and the sedan crept along in consort, a two-car funeral procession, winding through the woods at a stately twenty mph. Lucy craned her head to the side, looking for a chance to pass these geriatric sightseers, or whatever they were. No such luck. A short straightaway opened up ahead but was immediately occupied by an oncoming car. The music kept her guessing: now sweet, now angry, now like an old-time romantic waltz, now like all-out war, and never the same thing for more than seconds at a time. She’d heard it before but couldn’t place it, though she was still betting, at longish odds, on Mahler.

They were climbing a hill, its crest a liquid mirage-shimmer in the sun, when the accident happened — or, rather, when various bits of the accident presented themselves to Lucy, out of order.

She heard the crash as a musical explosion of drums and cymbals on the radio before she saw the car ahead wander across the yellow median line into the wrong lane, and the grinning, chrome-encrusted snout of the semi rise from the brow of the hill to meet it. The silver car gave itself a preliminary shake, then leaped, salmonlike, toward the sky. Lucy was momentarily dazzled by this living miracle — framed by the spiky blackness of the fir treetops, the marvelous car sailing scot-free through the blue. It caught the sun, a blinding wink of light. And here, suddenly up close, came the semi’s snout, which had lost its grin, the driver’s face looming behind glass way above her, his mouth a wide, astonished “o.”

Her foot did her thinking for her, stamping hard down on the gas pedal as she raced through the narrowing gap between the slab-sided trailer and the ditch. From behind her, she heard what sounded like a large chest of drawers tumbling down a flight of stone steps, the jarring whoosh of jake brakes, and then the pretty simpering of violins. She brought the Spider to a stop in the grass at the top of the hill. The clock on the dash said 9:21.

Walking back to where the semi was slewed diagonally across the road, she felt lacking in reality, more air than flesh. The Christmassy scent of pine needles mixed with the sinus-stinging reek of gasoline and brake dust. Squeezing around the front of the truck, she saw that its entire face had gone, exposing a welter of naked machinery. Ahead of her, a man stood in the middle of the road, open hand raised above his head, impersonating a traffic cop.

“Stop!” he called, in a voice of tiresome masculine authority. “It could go up at any moment.”

A woman stood behind him, yelling into a cell phone. A man in blue-jean overalls sat on the tarmac, holding his head in his hands. Then Lucy saw the silver car, nose down in the ditch, and for a second she thought the magic trick had really worked, for it looked showroom new, the name “Infiniti” spelled out in relief lettering on the trunk. But beyond its immaculately waxed hindquarters, it stopped being a car and turned into a puzzle of scrambled components. A wheel was where a window ought to be, the engine block stuck out through the crumpled tinfoil of the roof, and a wedge-shaped flange, hanging at an odd angle from the front of the mess, resolved itself into the mutilated remains of a door. From inside the woods came the keening fee-bee, fee-bee of a chickadee.

A man in navy sweats jogged up the centerline of the road from one of the several cars now drawn up on the shoulder. The traffic-cop guy turned on him and shouted “Stop!”

There was a brief standoff between these two alpha take-control types, then the man in sweats, addressing Lucy, said, “I’m trained in CPR,” and walked over to the ruins of the Infiniti. She saw him staring at the wreckage, trying to figure it out like a brainteaser. He got down on his knees, thrust his head inside a jagged hole, then pulled it out and vomited. He came groggily away, head slowly wagging, face squinched, smelling of puke, yellow speckles of it on his T-shirt.

Then everyone, including the man in overalls and the woman who’d been talking on her cell phone, stared at Lucy. Feeling unreasonably accused, she realized she was the only person in this impromptu circle who had no visible role: she wasn’t the truck driver, hadn’t dialed 911, wasn’t conducting nonexistent traffic, and wasn’t trained in CPR.

“I am an eye…” She meant to say “witness” but saw the ever-tricky “w” coming, and swerved to avoid it. “I saw it happen. I was…” As she spoke, she found her notebook in her hand. It had been on the passenger seat. She had no memory of picking it up when she left the car.

“Ah,” the traffic-cop guy said. “You’re the Dodge. Blue pickup.”

“No, I’m the…” She pointed past the truck, but saw that the Spider was hidden behind the brow of the hill. “Green convertible.”

“So where’s the Dodge?”

“I didn’t see a Dodge.”

“There was a Dodge.” There was a totally unnecessary note of exasperation in his voice. “It was making a right. The Infiniti was trying to pass.”

Lucy now saw that beyond the faceless truck was a muddy, fir-enshrouded driveway or logging road that she must have walked past without noticing. Of course the accident would make more sense if—

The man who’d been sick said, “Two people. I think it’s only two. First, when I looked, I thought there was a kid in there as well, but…”

Her memory of the crash seemed already old, like a photograph from another summer. She inspected it. There was no pickup in the picture — just a car drifting across the yellow line and the semi materializing over the crest to join it, in a moment of freakish mechanical ballet. It was a pas de deux, with no one else on stage. But that couldn’t be right. Somehow, somewhere, she’d mislaid the essential third vehicle.

Her search was interrupted by the noise of whooping sirens, like the horns and trumpets of a few minutes before, and what had begun as a weirdly intimate and shameful scene suddenly became a lavish public happening, like a county fair, with two fire trucks, three squad cars, an ambulance, and two tow trucks with cranes. Men and women in uniform, many of them armed, were filling the road, and the annoying man who’d been playing cop was now taking charge of the real police.

When Lucy’s turn to be spoken to arrived, the young cop suggested that she sit with him in the car, where police voices boomed importantly from the radio. Deaf to the cacophony of his job, he turned the volume down only when Lucy, shouting, begged him to. The overheated car smelled of sweat and trouble.

As soon as he had hold of her driver’s license, the cop was first-naming her, in a soothing parental manner that went badly with his acne. His high-schooler’s face was blotted all over with little pink crusts of dried calamine.

“You a reporter, Lucy?”

“No. I mean not exactly. I just…” The notebook required an explanation, but she couldn’t for the life of her begin to provide one.

The cop wrote on his own pad in slow-forming irregular block capitals. Lucy saw the trouble he was having with BENGSTROM, and spelled it out for him.

“So tell me what you saw, Lucy. In your own words.”

Whose else? There was little enough to tell, but she found herself skirting cautiously around the magic of the flying car as if she had something serious to hide, and wondered if the boy cop was smart enough to notice. Distracted by the sound of her own voice, coming back to her a fraction of a second out of sync, as if on a bad long-distance line, she jammed on the word “median.”

“That’s okay, Lucy. Take your time.”

People always said that, and it always made her stutter worse. Her head jerked sideways. Chin locked against her shoulder, she fought through the block to get the word out.

The boy showed his embarrassment by gazing through the windshield as if he’d spotted a bank holdup somewhere in the middle distance. Without looking at her, he said, “Relax, Lucy.”

And fuck you, she thought, you pompous asshole. The flare of anger released the word from its trap.

“Median,” she said. “The truck was swinging right across it like a closing gate. I just floored the gas pedal and squeaked through. When I looked back, the truck was sprawled over the entire road like it is now…but everything sort of happened in the same instant — it was all like, simultaneous, you know?”

She’d lost him. But he continued to blacken the page with twiggy, runelike lettering, his lips moving slightly as he wrote. “Erratic,” he said suddenly: “You’d say they were driving erratic?”

“No, just very slowly. Like I said, twenty to twenty-five. I was crawling behind in second gear, looking for a chance to pass. So when I put my foot down…” She stopped, thinking it foolish to explain how lucky she was to have had the surge of acceleration that had carried her clear of the truck, with the tachometer needle going deep into the red zone.

An older officer, who’d been with the ambulance team, came over to the squad car and the boy stepped out. The two talked in ceremoniously low voices, and when the boy came back his face looked physically bigger, enlarged by the weight of the grave news that had been entrusted to him. He looked years too young for his holstered gun.

Lucy spoke to him as she would to Alida. “I know. They couldn’t possibly have been alive. There almost certainly wasn’t time for them to feel anything.” She nearly put her hand on his sleeve to comfort him.

“I didn’t see it say nothing on your driver’s license about ‘doctor,’ Lucy.”

Oh, dear. She’d affronted his precious dignity. She felt the muscles in her cheeks spring taut at the rebuff.

“We better get back to what you seen. Like you haven’t said nothing about the pickup — blue Dodge, right?”

“I didn’t see it.” But as soon as she spoke, memory leaped to contradict, as an image, washed out in color, not quite in focus, came to mind, of a big, mud-spattered pickup with a dented tailgate. But it wasn’t blue. More a sort of rusty orange. Was that it? Why could she not remember what other people had clearly seen? “I mean, I’m not sure…”

“That logging road dead-ends. We’ll be checking it out.”

The orange pickup, surely it was parked at the strip mall where she’d put down the top. That was where she’d seen it. Yet even as she realized its untruthfulness, memory was busy again, slotting the orange truck into the vacant space in the puzzle. She seemed to see it braking to make a sudden unsignaled right, and the Infiniti swerving left to avoid it, heading straight into the path of the rising semi.

“I don’t know.” Orange was turning into blue as treacherous memory got all its ducks in a row. “I’m sorry, I’m blanking out. If I could think it through for a minute or two, I’m sure—”

“It don’t much matter. We got other witnesses.”

He meant better, more trustworthy ones, not tiresome flakes like her.

“That address on your license? It’s still current?”

Grateful for a question that had a certain answer, she said, “Yes, it’s current.”

“Phone number?”

She gave it to him.

“We’ll get back to you if we need to. Where you headed?”

“Useless Bay.”

“You think you’re safe to drive, Lucy?”

“Yes, I’ll be fine.”

“I could get an officer to run you over there, it’s just a couple miles. I could drive the Alfa.”

“No thanks. Honestly, I’m okay.”

She was totally not okay. When the boy insisted on seeing her to the car, she found herself walking like a drunk, with laborious concentration on each clumsy step, fooling the cop into letting her go.

“What year is it?”

For a moment, she took this as a trick question, meant to test her mental state, then it registered. “Oh, the car.” But when she named the date, the boy’s only response was an indifferent grunt.

As she seated herself behind the wheel, the boy stood beside her, hand on the door, watching — or was he just interested in the car? Luckily, she’d left the key in the ignition. Thinking painfully hard about each move, she let in the clutch, shifted the gearstick into neutral, and turned on the engine. She flinched at the sudden sound of the DJ’s voice, loud enough to scare birds from the trees, saying, in a tranquilized, affectless drawl, “We’ve just been listening to Symphony Number 7 by Gustav Mahler, played by the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Christoph—”

She switched him off, distractedly thinking that at least she’d got Mahler right.

The boy was still there, his hand a few inches from her left wrist. His fingernails could do with a trim. She tried smiling at him to show what fine shape she was in to drive, but she botched the job and felt the smile coming out as a lewd stripper’s wink. The boy’s face stiffened into the mask of surly toughness they must have taught him in cop school. “You better drive safe now.” A threat, not a well-wishing.

But she seemed to have forgotten how. The tight steering, usually a pleasure, was her enemy, as she kept overcorrecting, making the car wobble down the road, nose twitching from side to side like a prairie dog’s. Driving by eye, not instinct, she crawled past the stalled traffic that had backed up from the scene of the crash and felt the eyes of every driver on her, as if the whole character of the morning catastrophe were written on her face and in her lousy driving. She risked a glance at the rearview, half expecting to find the boy cop haring after her on foot, but saw only the red, white, and blue flashes of the emergency vehicles putting on their untimely light show against the dark firs.

Then more police, putting out signs and turning cars around. She crept past them fearfully, trying to hide her incompetence as they waved her through. She wanted to apologize for the Spider — its ridiculous air of summer fun, like a dancing clown at a funeral.

At the Useless Bay turnoff, waiting to make a left, Lucy realized with a nauseous jolt that she’d seen the people who’d been killed on the ferry, an older couple, big-city tourist types, overdressed for the casual Pacific Northwest. She’d spotted them first in the lounge — the tall man in a cashmere blazer, the woman with a suede pigskin jacket draped over her shoulders, her hair scraped back from her face and tied behind with a pink silk scarf. Later, in the crush of people going down the stairs to the car deck, the man had held the door open for Lucy; she’d thanked him, and they smiled at her with the perfectly synchronous smile of the long married. She’d warmed to them in that moment, envying them their vacation. Their silver car was parked a few spaces behind the Spider. They must have gone past her while she was taking down the top.

The road was clear. As she crossed, a rush of details came back to her: his gray hair, rather coarse and oily, swept in breaking waves behind his ears; the links of a gold chain against the white of her blouse; a whiff of male cologne; his uxorious stoop as he bent to listen to something she was saying when they were standing by the window in the lounge; her petite boniness and cautious walk, as if she were getting used to a replacement hip. Her voice: on the car deck, Lucy had heard her call across the Infiniti, from the driver’s side, “It’s already open, hon.” So she must have been driving…

She told herself that she was connected to these dead strangers by one random, polite smile, nothing more. It was 10:14, she had a job to do: she must evict the couple from her head, at least for now.

Two horses, a mare and a foal, stood by the barbed-wire fence of an overgrown paddock. Think horses, Lucy instructed herself as she stopped the car, think Montana. The piebald mare stared at her with an expression of vacant solemnity and lifted her tail to drop a turd. The foal, Lucy guessed, was two months old, still a little shaky on his pins — a rich chestnut, except for the white circles around his eyes and an irregular flash on his forehead like a question mark or a scythe. She inhaled the sane smell of horse and cut grass as the foal held her gaze with his comical bespectacled eyes. The bald pink skin around his mouth and nose made him look almost human in his infancy. He swung his big head to his mother’s teat and suckled for a few seconds, then, refreshed, turned his attention back to Lucy, his face full of candid foal-ish curiosity about this new oddity in his young life.

She put the car in gear and drove off, slowly, but without the shakes, feeling more or less restored. She was fully aware of the dead couple, but had managed to put them on hold, where they’d stay until she had time to take their call. So long as she could live in the moment, she’d be okay. Later, she’d get back to them — would feel sorrow for them, if she could. But not yet, not now. Accelerating cautiously through a bend, catching the sudden seaside tang of salt, mud, and tide wrack, she was securely back in the driver’s seat, in control again.

She knew the route. Years ago she’d spent a weekend at the Owens’ tiny cottage on Useless Bay. Alida was still in diapers then. It had been like vacationing inside a Ralph Lauren catalog — wood furniture scraped bare, cabin trunks, cushions, antique fishing stuff hanging on the walls. Not really her thing at all, but Alida had loved it.

Turning right on Sunlight Beach Road, she was shocked by the view. What she remembered as a long row of weatherbeaten shacks, each with its narrow, sandy, crab-trap-littered lawn and scrap of beachfront, was now an architectural freak show. One or two cottages were still left, but not the Owens’—which must have stood somewhere inside the pink-brick French château that looked as if it had escaped from a wine-bottle label. Lucy remembered them telling her they’d sold the place to a Microsoft VP before moving to Denver, but he must’ve bought at least three other lots in order to build that pile. Beside it, a surviving cottage had lost all its funky chic and now looked like a derelict privy. Beyond the château stood a gross chromium and glass affair, partly enclosed in tubular pipes, with goggling circular windows like the eyes of a giant science-fiction beetle. Then another forlorn cottage, then an adobe Spanish mission. And so it went. The late-1990s rich had taken over Useless Bay since Lucy had last been here, and their weekend mansions made their presence look like some famous imperial conquest — but this empire was already fading, with half the buildings up for sale and finding no takers, to judge by real estate agents’ signs that winter gales had blown askew and gulls were whiting out with guano.

She’d written the number of the Vanags place on a Post-It gummed to the dash — and here it was, 2041, in huge bronze figures on a rough-cut granite boulder, as if the house were a condo block, though it was actually smaller and less pretentious than its neighbors: a white clapboard New England colonial farmhouse with green shutters flanking the windows, a spread of fresh gravel out front, and a three-car garage.

Between 2041 and the Alpine ski lodge at 2049, Lucy saw a blinding sliver of sea, or sand, or shining mud: she wasn’t sure which because there was so little of it. The new houses, built out to the last inch of their lots so as to grab the widest sea view possible, were practically joined at the hip, like folk dancers in national costumes doing a sort of Franco-Italian-Hispanic-American-Swiss reel. She willed herself to keep thinking like this as she fought off the lurking image of the car balled up like aluminum foil, and the broken people inside.

Tilting the rearview down, she half expected to find a madwoman reflected in the mirror, but the face that looked back was almost indecently normal; its hair in knots from the wind, color in its cheeks, the face reflected nothing at all of what it had seen.

She set the parking brake, did what little she could with the hairbrush from her bag, and went paddling uncomfortably through Vanags’ gravel, which wasn’t designed to be walked on in flip-flops. She’d already rung the bell when she realized her notebook was still in the car.