Chapter Three, The Doves

CHAPTER THREE: Los Alamos, Early Spring, 1994
Olivia passed the weeks leading up to her exit debriefing from Los Alamos in a slight daze, experimenting with a mixture of pain killers and tranquilizers. A very small dose of valium combined with a very small dose of codeine, taken as needed, seemed to work best. She knew from experience that seeking to eliminate the pain tended to render her mostly non-functional, which amused her when she realized that her colleagues never noticed and her work rarely suffered. Still, she preferred the pain. But following that moment of insight at that wretched DC arms show, she had become interested only in distancing herself from the pain when it crossed the threshold from discomfort. She wanted it to be just pain and not suffering.
Her success in gaining some distance for her pain meant that she had also succeeded in gaining some distance from the rest of the world around her, and she was not slow to recognize the benefits when it came to being polygraphed. Like most women, especially young women, Olivia had begun by finding the polygraph a violation: an inept violation and for that reason even more offensive. But as she had matured, she had come, like most men, to find it merely an ugly, untrustworthy process, from which she was now detatched.
Having been 'polyed' several times in her career, she knew what to expect, including the questions she'd be asked. She also knew her examiner, a brush-cut, bespectacled former Marine and retired FBI agent named Barry O'Dwyer. She was hardly fooled by his mild, professorial demeanor. A polygraph is not an interrogation, but it may lead to one, and while most polygraphists were not skilled interrogators, O'Dwyer had been and still was. In that sense, she had less latitude with him than she would have had with a simple polygrapher out of school, however brutishly prurient that man might have been, or wanted to seem to be But because O'Dwyer had far too much self-respect to abuse his position in that way or any other, she had more latitude with him. So it was, she sensed with bemused distaste, a fair fight, even though it would have been a lot more fair, had she not had-this time-something to conceal.
The room was barely furnished with a few nondescript items. Nothing on the walls. No distractions. Not even much to focus on. As she approached the straight-backed government-issue chair, which looked a little like an old-fashioned electric chair with padding, she nodded to him to begin. He nodded back, then went into the prescribed routine. After he hooked her up, starting with the pneumographs across her chest, to the polygraph on his table a few feet away, he explained how the polygraph could detect a lie. But they both knew that his explanation was meant to inspire fear in her, less the fear of being caught in a lie than the fear that the machine would start registering false positives and become her tormentor-a tormentor with a human attached.
She knew that the control questions he asked were meant to trigger her sense of scrupulosity and establish her patterns under stress: patterns that could be compared with ten years of previous tests, should the need arise.
Before she went into the interview, Olivia had taken a light mixture of valium and codeine. The obvious and very true reason was that she had a great deal of difficulty remaining stationary for any length of time and prolonged sitting was almost intolerable. Of course, the drugs combined with the pain she would experience from sitting motionless for so long would skew her reactions to the whole polygraph procedure. Including the relevant question: have you ever been approached by a known agent of a foreign power?

O'Dwyer had pondered Dr. Tolchin's results for quite some time. He'd polygraphed her before her injury, and even then he had found her hard to read because she was both calm and intense. After this latest polygraph, he went back to her older tests, ones that he hadn't done, and reviewed them. One of the polygraph examiners had deliberately attempted to provoke her in an attempt to get a clear read on her. He had succeeded with a few unauthorized questions on what she liked in men. But even then, clearly angry, Dr. Tolchin's physiological responses were subdued. She didn't work herself into a sweating lather, her breathing and heart rate stayed relatively normal, and her blood pressure didn't spike.
This time, her responses to control and relevant questions, and even when giving answers O'Dwyer knew were factually true or false, were virtually identical. No doubt, a result of the drugs, but he'd spoken with her physician. Most people with similar injuries used high dosages of something like hydracodone, not minimal doses of valium and codeine, which intensified each other, but still left her more functional than a stronger opiate. And her close-to-flat-line readings, while definitely influenced by the drugs, were consistent with her fundamental character
The control questions had gone smoothly. Is your name Olivia Tolchin? Yes. Are you 37 years old? Yes. Were you born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Yes. Do you hold a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? Have you ever stolen anything?
Yes. That box of pretty plastic paper clips two years ago.
Lie to me, Dr. Tolchin. Have you ever stolen anything?
No.
Same responses.
Then on to the questions to determine whether she had become a security risk, vulnerable to blackmail or other pressures, or a loyalty risk: someone who had or might betray her country.
Since your last polygraph:
Have you had sex with a woman? No. Are you currently involved in a relationship with a man? No. Are you in debt beyond your ability to manage? No. Have you taken any drugs not prescribed by a physician? No. Do you gamble? No. Is there anything else in your life that might make you vulnerable to blackmail? No. Are you in unauthorized possession of any classified material? No. Have you transferred any classified information or material to any unauthorized person? No. Have you approached any unauthorized person for the purpose of doing so? No. Have you been approached by a known agent of any foreign government or organization?
No.
Is it your intention to travel abroad after leaving Los Alamos?
Yes.
Where?
A conference in Vienna. I have already received permission through the security office here.
So. None of her previous polys had indicated deception. Nothing about her indicated that she was a security risk. As for being a loyalty risk-the Cold War was over and what might the Russians, or anyone else, have to offer her?
O'Dwyer seriously considered putting her on the box again to see if he could get a more varied reading, but to really do that, she would have to refrain from using medication for several days. And he had deliberately kept her on the box for so long that, valium and codeine not withstanding, at the end, she had been in real discomfort and still her readings were stable. To ask Dr. Tolchin to sit, entirely unmedicated and relatively motionless, for several hours would have been to ask her to participate in what was functionally her own torture. All things considered, he simply could not justify doing that: O'Dwyer liked power, and he liked control, but not like that. Never had. Probably never would. And anyway, the Cold War was over and, given the projects she'd worked on, she had surprisingly little information of value to take with her.
He signed off on her poly.

Olivia looked around the living room of her Santa Fe apartment. Los Queridos was 35 miles from Los Alamos, on the outskirts of Santa Fe: 45 minutes and blessedly a world away. It was the kind of place she'd never expected to live in: a stucco midrise allegedly attractive to singles, where each apartment had bland beige-and-white berber carpeting, a stylish glassed-in gas fireplace, a stylish but useless balcony and a 'clothing care center,' essentially a washer-dryer combo in a closet with an ironing-board hanger on the wall. Her ironing board hung crookedly, which she'd often thought about fixing, but never did.
There was a communal swimming pool, frequented by residents whose common characteristic seemed to be a nudity not worth revealing, and a rooftop deck with garden furniture and gas grill, where no one ever went, save for an occasional noisy party someone threw. She knew none of the other inhabitants and was happy to have it that way. It was a place to live in after the break-up, with no memories of 'the former'-she no longer thought of him by his name; in her more bitter moments, even conceived that she had taken it from him. What she liked most was how long it took to drive to and from work: the beauty of the mesa, and the silence she shared with it very early in the morning and very late at night.
She'd sold some of her furnishings and given away others. What was important to her, what she might some day have shipped to her in Russia, she had sent to her father in Pennsylvania: her mother's china and silver, her books, extra copies of reprints of her journal articles, a few mementos, some necessary documents, a doll. All her government awards and commendations she'd thought of burning in the fireplace. But the glass doors were fixed, so she'd simply torn up the certificates and mingled them with other trash. No feeling attached to the act, or any other act intended to free her from the material part of her past.
The night before, she had stowed in the trunk of her car, a champagne-colored 1989 Mercedes 560 SL, a small steamer trunk she would take with her to Russia. A carry-on held some spare underthings, her birth certificate and passport, a few photos, toiletries, some favorite perfumes, jewelry, and medications. Her laptop held nothing classified or even remotely sensitive, just her own personal work, nothing to indicate she'd ever worked at a national laboratory on highly classified, albeit pointless, projects. In her mother's black alligator handbag, she carried her current knitting project, a pair of socks for her father, her pistol and two spare magazines, loaded. Her wallet, cell phone, and some lipstick. Nothing more.
She would purchase cold weather gear in Vienna. She had little faith in Russian military supply. In Afghanistan, Soviet Army issue sleeping bags had been cotton: when wet, they had soaked up body heat, producing hypothermia. How do you die of hypothermia, she wondered grimly. Get into a Russian sleeping bag. Oh, well. Russia's not the only place where things work in reverse.
Five AM. Good to go, except for the pain and a hole in her spirit where regret should have been. She looked around the apartment one last time. It was empty, except for the futon mattress she'd slept on, and the polar fleece blanket she'd slept beneath. She could still change her mind. Except that there was nothing in Los Alamos, or for that matter Santa Fe, to stay for. She hauled the futon and blanket outside the apartment into the cold morning and left them on the curb with a 'Free' sign, intended for whoever found them. She went back into her apartment, picked up her black leather jacket, turned down the heat, locked the door behind her, and dropped the keys off at the manager's office. She got into her car, the lovely extravagance she'd allowed herself, purchased for a fraction of its value from a rich divorcee who wanted nothing to remind her of her ex, and drove off. Olivia understood that divorcee.
At 6 AM sharp, still not quite functional, she stopped at a highway-exit McDonald's for the facilities and breakfast. She looked at the sloppy, fat patrons, and then looked again involuntarily. She'd never really noticed the morbid obesity of so many Americans before, but now she did. Recoiling from the ugliness, she ordered a large coffee and some sort of breakfast meal, including double hash browns, which she loved but which did not always love her back. Hell, she thought, my stomach acts up, it'll be a good excuse for taking more rest stops that I normally would. Then she smiled at her rationalization, sat down on one of those plastic seats designed to become uncomfortable after fifteen minutes, and took a large bite of something. She thought of the weapon in her purse. She had a concealed carry permit for New Mexico. She wondered whether anyone in the restaurant would ever suspect that she was carrying. No, she decided. Their interests did not seem to extend beyond their own expanding fat, expanding like mud slides of flesh. That and the noises they made in mangled English, mangled Spanish, or some mangled combination of the two.
Then she recalled a news clip she'd seen once, of a deranged man who'd shot up a McDonald's. She felt a strange, unwelcome, momentary inner nastiness, as though the final business of leaving America had triggered a disdain that she'd always before hidden from herself and others. Did the killer perhaps single out the fattest and the loudest for execution first? She could relate. The killer had been killed himself, by a SWAT team sniper. Afterwards, a reporter had asked the police commander who'd authorized the fatal head shot, why he didn't try to negotiate. 'Look,' the cop had replied, 'that guy was walking around in there, shooting people. I wasn't all that interested in hearing his side of the story.'
Olivia could relate to that, too. She gathered up her breakfast and left.

Before she pulled out of the parking lot, she arranged herself comfortably, her leather jacket neatly folded on the passenger seat, her Browning beneath it. Then she looked at her food and found it strange, exotic, the staples of a civilization she little understood. She put the thought aside. The remains of her biscuit got wolfed down immediately, the hash browns devoured with catsup at a more leisurely pace. She picked up US-285 South, bound for Clines Corners, hills of the barren yet vibrant desert she loved rising on either side of the road. It never ceased to fascinate her that a place so seemingly barren could sustain so much life-and how closely humans had to look to see it.
She had planned her route so that her longest driving day, by about an hour, from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Wichita, Kansas, was the first, when she was freshest.
At Clines Corners, she turned left and picked up I-40 East, the old Route 66 and headed east towards Tucumcari, sand and sagebrush unwinding past her windows at a steady 65 miles an hour. In Tucumcari, a town whose major endeavors seemed to be hotels and restaurants for those who thought they'd get farther than they were going to that day, she topped off her gas tank, checked fluids and tire pressure, and stocked up on under-ripe and over-ripe fruit and bottled water. Then she picked up US-54, skirting Tucumcari Lake and a few miles later was crossing the Texas Panhandle, driving through Dalhart and Stratford, then Goodwell, Guymon, and Hooker on the Oklahoma Panhandle: miles and miles of dry rangeland and scrub brush, where water was once so scarce and treasured you might name a small town after it, until she crossed the Kansas state line. Just over the state line, she stopped in Liberal for gas, repeated her checks, and stretched her body aggressively. The tendons and ligaments in her back and upper thighs popped as she worked the knots out of them. She had driven 376 miles in just over 6 hours; another 220 miles, another 4 hours' driving, and she would be in Wichita. She wondered if she would be able to tolerate the pain, but she didn't really have a choice.
Mastering herself, she folded her body back into her car and stopped at the next McDonald's. She started to get out, then headed for the drive-through, wondering why. She needed to stretch. But the thought of mingling with the other customers suddenly nauseated her. It took three attempts-the last one shouted-at the speakerphone for the girl to get her simple order right, and Olivia realized with a sudden stab of mental pain, more vicious than anything her body was doing to her:
These awful, ugly people. They're what's wanted here. Them. Not me. It's not just professional anymore. It's...everything.
She paid her tab, then took her meal from the final window and drove off. Just a Big Mac this time, no fries-the concept of deferred gratification occasionally motivated her; driving wasn't exercise-and a tall cup of iced water. Dessert turned out to be a pithy orange from a gas station/food mart she passed. A midafternoon snack was French fries-gratification must not be deferred forever-from the McDonald's in Kingman, Kansas, along with an overripe banana and more water. She couldn't recall eating so much McDonalds in a day, much less with so little exercise. Her stomach had the inevitable, sullen heaviness of, Why have I done this to myself? But that was what was available.
It required a conscious effort of will for her to unfold herself from the car and slowly straighten up in the driveway of the Wichita Garden Inn Hilton. Her trunk, she left in her car. Her laptop, purse and carry-on went upstairs with her. A hot soak helped her regain her flexibility, as did the walk around Bradley Fair Lake and through the plaza to the restaurant the Hilton had recommended. She wasn't really hungry, but there was nothing else she cared to do and maybe a decent restaurant would serve decent...people.
Sitting outside in the fine, spring evening, she could not help but overhear the other patrons talk about their stock options and initial public offerings. She consulted the menu, ordered an appetizer of tuna and beef carpaccio, every bit as much for the salty capers, mellow black olives and peppery, bitter arugula as for the raw, rich meat and fish, as well as a salad of spring greens, goat cheese, crisp bacon and candied walnuts. After the day's diet of manufactured mash, she craved taste. The bread and the unsalted (and mercifully not too hard) butter were delicious. With a half bottle of nice pinot noir and dessert, she could not but help notice that her entire bill would probably come to a fraction of the cost of a single bottle of wine ordered by the men at the next table. Lawyers? No. Listening to their conversation, it seemed they had launched a high-tech start-up and their initial public offering had netted them $198 a share. What it was they had started seemed unclear, even to them.
Olivia never knew what prompted her to lean towards their table and open her mouth, but lean over and open wide she did. 'Excuse me, but I can't help overhearing your conversation. What did you say you made?'
The two trim men, with their white teeth and impeccable grooming, in their business casual attire of expensive polo shirts and expensive pressed chinos stared at Olivia for a few seconds. Then one of them smiled indulgently at her. 'We don't make anything. We work with Chinese manufacturers and American merchants to connect them. Textiles, mainly. Keep down inventory, responsive to orders, outsource whenever possible for materials, labor, skip the environmental crap. The Chinese work for much less than Americans do, so that means our retailers can make more profit.'
Olivia remembered the country she'd driven though: the isolated farm houses, the trailers, one, memorably, with its siding stripped off, insulation bared to the elements, the yard strewn with the carcasses of children's toys and big old cars. The heart of America's textile industry had never been the West, it had been first the Northeast, with its abundant water sources to drive the mills and work the looms, then the South, with its cheap (first slave, then virtually slave) labor in the aftermath of the war it had worked so long and so hard to bring down so disastrously upon itself. But the value added to the raw materials had been American, and any time the finished product had been purchased in America, the money had stayed in the country. Now she felt a cold chill running through her. 'If Americans don't make what they buy-because the Chinese have not opened their markets to us and there's no reason to assume they will, even assuming Chinese can pay American wages-how do you expect Americans to be able to buy what you're selling?'
There was a long pause. Then one man smiled, as though he were talking to an imbecile. 'On credit.'
Olivia remembered the trailers she'd seen on her drive, more fat people, like the McDonald's customers. Both groups had one thing in common. Theirs was the obesity, not of taking pleasure in life and taste, but giving up on life. Perhaps the farm folk were more understandable. The small family farm was under immense financial pressure because it was less 'efficient' than big agribusiness. The individually owned farms that survived would probably grow more tax deductions than bushels of wheat. And so people are ate what they could afford and fat and sugar were amongst their few modest pleasures. The pleasures of those who no longer cared. She found herself visibly recoiling. 'Thank you. I have no further questions.'
The men, finding her neither attractive nor interesting enough to pursue, turned back to their wine, now talking a bit more loudly. And the thought came to Olivia again. This is what's wanted here. Not me. This is America now. Not me.

Olivia slept until she woke without an alarm to jar her back to consciousness: her habit from all the years when getting up meant another full day of life. She spent half an hour in the shower, systematically stretching, before she went down to a large breakfast: an omelet filled with meat, cheese and vegetables, hash browns-unfortunately, not nearly as good as McDonalds-and plenty of fruit. Since lunch on the road was likely to be more fast food and whatever fruit she could scrounge, she asked the staff to pack her a box of fruit and crackers to take with her, and then she checked out. She was on the road by eight, running north and east on I-35, through Emporia, Ottowa, Gardner, through Overland Park to Kansas City, which she had learned from her eavesdropping the night before was becoming quite a Mecca of high-tech companies. As she passed through Liberty, just northeast of Kansas City, she found herself wondering how many of those high-tech companies made nothing, served only to import foreign goods and siphon off American money, and how many American paper millionaires they would make. As she filled up at a gas station in Cameron before turning east on US-36, she noticed that her own car was doing a pretty good job of siphoning cash. Half of American gasoline was imported from nations that were not American friends and she wondered if, someday, the Trading with the Enemy Act would include oil. Probably not. Her engineer's mind ran briskly over all the things the country ought to be doing in order to stop enriching our enemies. Then she stopped.
Our enemies? I'm leaving. Probably forever. I'm going to Russia so I can use my brain. Russia. I'm leaving because my brain is not wanted here. I'm not wanted here. Fat people are wanted here. High-tech millionaires who make nothing are wanted here.
She laughed aloud in a bitter, wondering awe at the sheer absurdity of it all. Then she passed a Ford F-250 with 'Sandy the Farrier' painted on its side and a stenciled-on drawing of a horse being shod by a decidedly buxom female. She waved at the driver, a rugged-looking, very pretty blond woman her age, decidedly non-buxom, who smiled and waved back. Sandy the Farrier, thought Olivia, looked happy.

It was just after noon, and the Missouri farmland was extremely open, the blue sky above her huge and high and hard. If the nights were crisp and the mornings cool, the afternoons were starting to get warm, foretelling a hot summer. Olivia hoped that when it came time to harvest the corn and soybeans and send the hogs and cattle to slaughter, the farmers would get a good price for their efforts, although she wondered how much of the money would stay in their pockets, what with having to buy synthetic, petroleum-based fertilizer, rather than recycling manure, which had somehow become a mere waste product. She drove for nearly three hours, not uncomfortably at first. She passed through Pershing State Park, past square field after square field of green cropland, the miles unrolling smoothly past her window as she drove through the small towns of Hamilton and Chilicothe, Brookfield and Macon, Shelbina and Monroe City and on towards Hannibal.
By the time she drove through Hannibal, she was in real pain, so she pulled off US 36 and onto what turned out to be 3rd Street. Driving slowly, she found Becky Thatcher's Restaurant. Even though it was almost closing time at 3PM-they would reopen for dinner-the waitress seated Olivia at a table beside the window and brought her coffee and a slice of pie, fragrant with peaches and cinnamon with some good ginger ice cream, both made in the restaurant. Olivia ate standing up to stretch her legs and back, cleaning her plate carefully of every last crumb of pie and scrap of ice cream, draining her cup of coffee and part of a second. She stared out the window, down at the Mississippi, watching the barges traveling purposefully down the river, loaded with grain, bound for the port at New Orleans and the wide world beyond. Not so many years before, those barges had carried manufactured goods like cars and radios and TV sets, boom boxes, endless consumer electronics for a civilization as addicted to its trashy amusements as to its trashy food. No longer. It was the northbound barges that carried manufactured goods, far greater in value-money value-than the food could ever offset. My God, she thought, I'm sitting here in Mark Twain's home town. What would he make of all this?
What would he think of me?
Unable to answer the first question, unwilling to consider the second, Olivia paid her bill and left a tip for the waitress. The chance to stretch out her legs had done her good. Nevertheless, it was with a sense of sorrow and grief that she crossed the wide, slow-moving river. Across the river, she was into Illinois, which proclaimed itself the Land of Lincoln. At Munger, she picked up US 36, which found itself also named Interstate 72, running east towards Springfield, the Illinois state capitol, and driving through cropland so flat it seemed to have been leveled with a laser, fertilizers doing badly and expensively what silt and manure had once done much better and more cheaply. In her mind, Olivia turned over the possibility of permitting the river to do its traditional work by controlled flooding. Given current settlement patterns, at a minimum, the houses would have to be raised on stilts. But what about the livestock? Chickens could, of course, roost in trees. But they couldn't lay in them. And while goats actually could climb and graze on trees, neither cattle nor pigs could. But Americans weren't great eaters of goat, so no real help there.
Idle thoughts to occupy her mind.
In Springfield, she took drove slowly up 6th Street to the red-brick President Abraham Lincoln Hotel. She parked and checked in; a long, hot soak and a lot of stretching greatly revived her. Afterwards, dry and dressed in fresh blue jeans and white blouse, she went downstairs to the restaurant for dinner. She'd lunched on crackers and fruit, no longer willing to subject herself to the fast food clientele. Her late afternoon snack of pie and ice cream not withstanding, she wanted a substantial dinner. A glass of red wine, a marbled steak cooked so that the fat was molten, salad and a baked potato with butter and blue cheese, so pungent it made the roof of her mouth itch-from Nauvoo, just north on the Mississippi, she learned-and turned the red wine shockingly, wonderfully sweet in her mouth. No, thank you, she did not want dessert, but she would like coffee. Regular, please, with just cream and sugar, nothing else, thank you.
A wise decision, when she saw the size of the desserts brought forth to other diners: they were absolutely huge, far beyond an amount that could actually be enjoyed. And then the unbidden thought: Of course. Food calms us. Whatever else is wrong, we will not starve.
By the time she finished, the day was slowly turning to cool dusk, so she went up to her room for her jacket. It required no thought at all to check the safety of her Browning and slip it into the back waistband of her jeans. She didn't know the area, and even if she wasn't licensed to carry in Illinois...it didn't matter. Then she began the long walk up Sixth Street to Oak Ridge Cemetery, the grass green, the sky a tender blue. The Cemetery was not quiet, but alive with teenagers playing their boom boxes. It was, of course, the standard corporate/popular garbage, gorged on by boys wearing the baggy jeans that had been cribbed from prison culture, their underwear showing, their caps worn backwards. The girls seemed heavy enough to be pregnant, although the softness of their bodies proclaimed bulk fat, not new life, in their tight jeans and tighter sweaters that exposed tummies that simply shouldn't have been visible.
Olivia walked up the drive, then found herself wandering through the graves of the famous and the anonymous alike. Senators and governors and consuls, with their marble and granite monuments, sometimes with ornate bronze accoutrements. Bishop and Mrs. Rayburn's grave, their obelisk crowned with her figure, for her husband desired her soul to look down upon those who had scorned her in life. Monuments to the dead of World War Two, Korea, in particular the brutal fight for Chosin Reservoir, and Vietnam. Everywhere, graves from the Civil War, indicating its terrible toll, the names on many of them worn by time, the shallow carving indicating the modest means of their survivors.
Finally, she let herself approach Lincoln's tomb, at that hour the burial chamber closed to the public. That was all right. At the entrance, despite a nose rubbed shiny by all who had touched it for luck, the massive bust of Lincoln's face that greeted her showed a man worn by sorrow, reflecting the stark losses of the war, memorialized by the cavalry, artillery, infantry, and naval sculpture groups cast from old bronze cannon. She climbed the stairs on the exterior of the tomb, carved from Massachusetts granite, lit up against the encroaching night. In front of the tall obelisk, beneath the standing statue of a solitary Lincoln, she found a small, irregular stone. The inscription was in Latin; below it, a carved translation that read, 'To Abraham Lincoln, President for the second time of the American Republic, citizens of Rome present this stone from the wall of Servius Tullius by which the memory of each of those brave advocates of liberty may be associated.' She knew from her long-ago child's history of Rome, a no-special-reason present from her father, that Servius Tullius had been born a slave, and manumitted to become a king who gave Roman plebians the rights of citizens, and treated Rome's conquered enemies with mercy. He had paid with his life for his policies.
She was so lost in her own thoughts that she didn't notice the cop walking up behind her. 'Ma'am?'
The very blue eyes she turned on him were not what he expected from a woman alone at night-hard and cold and precise. 'May I help you, officer?' Her voice was equally shocking: calm and self-possessed.
'Ma'am, the park closes at dark.' She opened her mouth to reply, then thought better of it. Openly carrying a loaded weapon with a concealed carry permit in a state like New Mexico was one thing; carrying it concealed without a permit was something else almost anywhere and Illinois was notoriously stringent. 'It's almost dark and it's for your own protection. Predators come out at night.'
And so you think citizens should yield the night to them. Awkwardly, she turned to face him, giving the officer two overwhelming impressions: one of damage, the other of strength. 'And you worry about women out alone at night.'
'I do. Especially if I can tell they've been hurt. Makes them more vulnerable. Don't you think?'
Bemused, she thought about where she was likely to end up and what could happen to her where she was going. But why take unnecessary risks? She wasn't worried about who else would want to visit the floodlit tomb-no matter what kind of prey they were seeking, the Cemetery was too public, too visible. But she didn't need a police body search that would find her pistol. 'All right, son. And I promise to walk straight back to my hotel.'
The policeman winced at the familiarity from a woman clearly not old enough to be his mother. 'You won't let me drive you, would you, ma'am? Or call you a taxi?'
So earnest. 'No, officer. I really can take care of myself.'
After she returned to the hotel she sat up knitting on the pair of socks for her father. Knitting had been a way out of the maze of drugs and pain in the immediate aftermath of the crash. Knitting was all about math, and it had to be done right, one stitch at a time, stitch after stitch, for thousands of stitches.
What a country this is. We presume to police the world. And yet we police our monuments by running off the law-abiding after dark, who must obtain permission to legally bear arms to defend themselves and others, while the criminals don't worry about little things like gun laws.
My poor country.

The next day took Olivia from Springfield, east past Decatur and Champaign and Danville almost on the state line, then slightly south, past Crawfordsville and south through Indianapolis, where she stopped for gas and a snack of hash browns at McDonalds-she hadn't realized how many McDonalds there were in the world. Or was there only one particular McDonald's, and it was following her? She laughed at a sudden image of approaching the counter and having the order taker address her in Russian-accented English: Your papers, please. What's Russian for hash browns? How do you say, Meal Number Five and Supersize It in Russian? Russia, she knew, was starting to sprout its own McDonald's in the larger cities. Lucky them.
East of Indianapolis, the terrain became more rolling and varied and land use became a little less purely agricultural. But if she thought the factory farms of the Midwest had been grim, the shuttered factories and mills she saw broke her heart.
Just east of Dayton, she pulled off 70, ignoring the usual assortment of fast food restaurants, driving around until she stumbled upon an Indian buffet, which almost surely meant very tasty food. She had begun to pull into the parking lot when she was cut off by a blue Subaru wagon containing two huge women and nearly papered over with bumper stickers-she had to brake hard to avoid being hit by them, which would probably have done far more damage to their Subaru than her Mercedes. 'Free Tibet' and 'It will be a great day when our schools have everything they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.' With what, she wondered, do you expect to free Tibet if you aren't capable of bringing harm to the People's Liberation Army in its own backyard, and do you plan to restore the rule of the lamas? 'A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.' 'If you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?' 'Well behaved women rarely make history.' 'School of the Americas: Training Terrorists since 1946.' 'No blood for oil.' 'There's nothing a woman can do (with a man, Olivia presumed) that two women can't do better' and 'Women make great leaders, you're following one.' There were others. 'Fat is a feminist issue' and 'Sorry I missed church: I was busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian' were also present, along with 'My Goddess gave birth to your God.' And-for emphasis, Olivia presumed-two copies of 'US out of North America.'
Olivia got out and stretched luxuriously, watching the women as they laboriously levered themselves up out of their car. They glared at her as if she, not they, had been rude. Olivia, who as a weight-lifter had been 'overweight' virtually her entire life, had no idea how much they weighed and cared less. They were huge with fat, though, and clearly proud of it-as they were of their quite deliberate ugliness, cropping their hair, wearing shapeless, brilliantly tie-died clothing, and square, geeky glasses. Also, they smelled. Olivia was used to male engineers thinking they were heroes if they went a week without sleeping, showering, or eating anything but Dominos pizza while they 'solved' a problem. It was behavior she refused to indulge because it usually resulted in a 'solution' worse than the original problem, not to speak of being extremely unpleasant for those who actually bathed. And she could not fathom, no matter what her personal problems, making them worse by deliberately making herself ugly-or degrading herself by having sex with someone who had also degraded herself by making herself ugly.
She supposed her disdain showed in her face, because they looked as though they wanted to beat her up. Olivia decided to give herself a treat and provoke them. She let her eyes slowly take in their appearance and the idiocy of their bumper stickers. 'I'm sorry this is the best you chose to do.'
'Why, you rich Fascist btch-'
Olivia, now finding herself helpless before an impish sense of humor, heard herself exaggerating slightly in a lazy Southern drawl. 'Actually, I'm an engineer. Nuclear weapons specialist-worked on Star Wars back when President Raygun called the Soviet Union an evil empire. My hero.' She had not thought a person's face could turn that color, much less the faces of two people simultaneously. Not without having a stroke. Or two.
'Along with the Nazi rocket experts, of course,' one snarled.
'You betcha. Plus some genocidal Israeli war criminals and all the Mexican slave labor I could get my hands on. Your tax dollars at work,' she said, remembering a laugh line from the Beatles' first movie, 'A Hard Day's Night,' which her father had for some unaccountable reason insisted she watch. The group was on an English train when an old passenger muttered, 'I fought the war for your sort!' Replied Ringo: 'Bet you're sorry you won.'
But she thought of failure, of her lone stint into political activism, working for the Equal Rights Amendment, and of-this is what I worked so hard for? 'So tell me, children,' she said, hearing herself as though from a distance and staring at the women with a level gaze they could not meet. 'What does being lesbian and feminist have to do with being fat, ugly, mean and stupid?' She sniffed the air appreciatively. 'Now, if you will excuse me...'
She was back on the road by two, when she realized that she was accessing old, long-forgotten memories-of Beatles movies and Roman history-because she was going home. Home to her father. She'd spent most of the trip tranquillizing herself with food. Now she no longer wanted anything, except maybe something her father might cook her, one time more before she...
The Mercedes suddenly seemed to go on auto-pilot. Inertial guidance. Internal. You know where you are by keeping track of where you've been. You know where you're going by knowing where you are. Olivia offered a momentary thanks that her car knew more about where she was going than she did. A Mercedes can be a good companion.

She and her car drove through Columbus and crossed Wheeling Island in the middle of the Ohio River. Then through Wheeling, where Joe McCarthy had launched the phony anti-communist crap that would eventually ruin him, and too many others who didn't need or deserve ruination. The problem with McCarthy, she thought with real irony, was not that he was an anti-Communist, but that he had given responsible anti-Communists a very bad name. Then she remembered where she'd heard that line before. Her father, a Hungarian immigrant who'd survived the Nazis and the Russians and who very rarely expressed any negative sentiment about America. She shuddered at the realization that she had not yet considered what she was going to tell him, then put the thought aside. No planning for this one. No games. Maybe the Mercedes could come up with something. It was smart.
I'm getting punchy. Long drive, too long. Too much...wrong.
She crossed the rugged neck of West Virginia in about twenty minutes, struck by the evident poverty of people in a state sitting on immense mineral wealth, not so very different from Western Pennsylvania. And then she was, at last, after three long, painful days of driving, heading home through the forested hills where she had hunted deer as a girl, taught by her mother, then hunting with both parents and finally hunting alone with her father, running north on 79, past Canonsburg and Bethel Park and salad diet Carnegie, through twice-blighted Pittsburgh, first by a steel industry that had polluted but also, thanks to a strong and sometimes violent union movement, provided real work at a family wage, then by the destruction of that steel industry. Supposedly something had taken its place. Now high-tech parks stood where mills had been; the downtown skyline gleamed. Or so her father, a retired professor of engineering who still consulted, had told her without much enthusiasm.
Then she was home.
Olivia pulled into the driveway and walked slowly up the poured concrete steps to the house her mother had built over and alongside a creek in a nod to Fallingwater, the local Frank Lloyd Wright icon. The design had been her mother's, and some of the manual labor had been as well. Clean-lined and peaceful, rather than austere and harsh, the building had aged gracefully into a modernist gem. Like her father,
No, not like her father. Oscar, a tall man who had once been immensely strong, now worn by age and grief, met her on the wide, concrete pad of the front entrance. He stood looking at his daughter for a few seconds as she left the car, one of the alligator bags her mother had had such a weakness for carried in the crook of her arm. 'You look very much like your mother when she was your age,' he said, speaking softly across the few feet left between them.
Then Olivia suddenly remembered her mother as she had not for many years, looking at her father as his wife would never see him. Lavinia Lathrop Tolchin had been the daughter of a mainline Philadelphia family. She had not married until she was 35 and prawn salad recipe established as an architect, in a time when few women did such things. Well-bred young women of her station had their debuts, then went to college to prepare for marriage or, as they called it back then, the MRS degree. If they studied anything stringent, it was to have something to dabble in, perhaps some cause to promote. If they worked before marriage, they didn't do so afterwards. And they certainly didn't convert to Judaism to marry junior immigrant-Hungarian-engineers who were not yet even citizens. Lavinia and Oscar had their only child when Lavinia was 40, three years after they had ceased to believe such a thing could happen for her. Fifteen years later, she was gone in six weeks, when what Lavinia had been told were migraines, supposedly brought on by the stress of finishing a major university commission, turned out to be a brain tumor, by then inoperable. She took a week to order her affairs, then spent the rest with her husband and buffalo chicken salad daughter, until the full hideousness of the tumor began to make itself apparent. Then she chose the time and manner of her departure, with her husband administering the lethal dosage and her daughter holding her hand.
Oscar had never remarried; Olivia recalled him once saying that dusk had been her mother's favorite time of the dayhe often expected her to come ambling out of the woods as the sun went down.
Shaking off the sense of strangeness, not quite giving in to the fear, Dr. Oscar Tolchin came forward to embrace his daughter. In the driveway, beside her luxurious Mercedes, they held each other for a long time, then went in.

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