TEN

SHE WAS IN SANTA FE. She was with Richard. They were ordering something. Red turkeys darting in and out of a bramble. Behind a delivery window, some electric gadget tabulating the price of a meal. The sand over Los Alamos was falling away from the sky, allowing a new colour to slip in, a darkness that gave Nell and Richard a sense of their own short time, a bleeding off of the solid world that could be bought and sold, and a humbleness came over them both, a hunger too. They looked at their clinic menus. She had come for the box. As if in response to this need, warmth puffed out of the ground and while Nell had a chill to her shoulders, her legs felt like they were on a vent. All elements were inverted. Richard Text, as if to apologize for his distracted study of the landscape, turned to Nell and pressed the small of her back. His nails were long and he could not massage her. But she knew he was helpful and was not, in the bones, selfish. He was seeing a man from the research facility. A tank of lit goldfish in the clinic window resumed their fluid circle, and it was this movement that had indicated they had gone still.

But the warmth soon dissipated and Nell was cold. The red mountains lost their colour and dryness was overcome by the thought that sea fossils were in these rocks and they could argue for a long time and be right about the prevailing custom of the land. Nell and Richard too were changed. A scientist arrived with a black valise that carried a beaker of uranium in a nine-pound state-of-the-art machine and he left it on the chair beside Richard as though it too would pick up a menu and order. Someone had bought him the valise, and she wondered who had thought of him, if she could know that person.

So this box, Richard said, has instructions and you need a brain-injury specialist to attach it. You have your papers to transport nuclear material.

No, she said. She didnt have anything.

You won’t get through security without papers, it’s not hospital-grade uranium.

It would not survive the carry-on x-ray machine. It was too vulnerable for checked baggage.

We have a flight, Richard said, heading to Syria. It’s going to refuel in St John’s. This is next Tuesday. I can have the box on board that flight.

There’s one last thing, she said. I might need to see a doctor.

NELL FLEW Albuquerque–Newark, Newark to Halifax and Halifax–St John’s and realized, from the action of her jaw, that she was anxious. Across from her on the plane a musician had bought a seat for her cello, and the airlines have a canvas strap to bind a cello in. She rented a car at the airport and stayed at the Newfoundland Hotel, the same hotel she had stayed in eighteen years before, when Arthur wanted an abortion.

She waited until the flight time and drove back to the airport and parked at arrivals. She asked a guard and Nell said it was an air force flight. An American flight. You’ll have to go to the silo out back just to the left of the doors. She walked out the doors that held artificial flowers and past the car rental lots and found a helicopter landing and three men in air force suits with white gloves holding their helmets on. They were waiting outside a security door. One of the men, a young one, maybe nineteen, took her inside and put a wand to her and she stepped through a metal detector and was told to see a man in a booth. The man was asleep. Hello, she said. And his mouth closed and his eyes opened. He was immediately alert. His arms flexed in a black short-sleeved shirt. She told him who she was. Youre for the American flight yes I have you here. It’s running late. It will be fourteen hundred hours. Please take a seat.

She went out to the coffee shop and had a bagel. She read a magazine. She checked her emails on her laptop. Then she went back out to the silo.

The jet had landed and was turning on the tarmac. It was a grey unmarked plane and the high whine of its jet engines took a while to shut down. For a moment it looked like it had changed its mind and was to take off again. Then a set of stairs was wheeled out and hydraulically manoeuvred and clamped onto the base of the jet beneath the cockpit door. Then nothing happened. About eight minutes went by while the ground crew refuelled from a truck on the other side.

Then the man from the booth came out and said, Come with me.

They walked over the tarmac and up the stairs. The door was opened now on its thick white hinges. And she went in. There were two rows of seats facing each other, like seats on a train, with a group of armed men playing cards. In each of the middle seats of the three back rows sat a man wearing a black hood.

Can you recognize which one, the man from the booth said.

I’m sorry. Recognize.

He laughed. Oh yeah, hoods. You want the Canadian. Which one of you is the Canuck?

The supposed Canadian, said one of the card players.

A man was putting up his wrists. They were handcuffed.

I’m here for a box, Nell said.

Her escort opened his mouth and he softly blinked. He was shorter than her. You dont want to talk to the Canadian.

One of the men playing cards, without taking his eyes off his hand, said the box was strapped in a seat just behind him. He kind of pointed with his elbow.

The man got the box and lifted it out and took Nell’s shoulder and led her back to the stairs. The three hooded men had their heads bowed.

She drove across the island, through the deep basin of the Humber Valley. She noted the cabins in Pasadena where, twenty years ago, she and Arthur had conducted their affair. She realized she was loyal. She hadnt known that. She’d been grateful to Arthur, that he took care of things. A deep side of her had missed her son. She should never have met Joe and had that little boy on the park bench. But again she would not trade that afternoon for anything. Yes she would. If she could not have to think about it. If she did not know she had traded it.

The windows were fogging up and the knobs to get the defogger on were confusing, so she wiped the windows with her sleeve. She remembered once, in the rain, when Arthur took her shopping. It was a day like this and she wiped the condensation off her passenger window. Dont do that, he said.

And she was shocked by his voice. It was a parental voice. That he cared about the Audi. He didnt want marks on the windows—the car’s air-controlled unit took care of condensation. She realized then that he did not love her.

The self, she thought, is more vicious than God.

She passed the junction where you turn off to get to the cabins on Grand Lake. She drove along the river, the yellow tractors to her left that were widening the highway through the old railbed. She pulled into the Mamateek Motor Inn that overlooked the Bay of Islands, and as she stood at the check-in counter waiting for her credit card to be approved, she turned her back to the nineteen-year-old clerk and stared out the seven-foot-tall windows and she might have been looking into the canal of her own birth, remembering nothing. The insane smoke of the mill, the march of white bungalows up to Crow Hill, the dynamited side of mountain making a fresh scar for the new highway that was being built night and day by those yellow tractors mounted with revolving high beam lights behind their own German wipers. The motel was marooned in a phalanx of city-edge growth, no longer on the main road out of town but in a detour and catering to the auto repair shops and furniture upholsterers sprung up to avoid municipal taxes, and on the hill beyond the golf course the three wide, squat schools, sitting like ancient Egyptian foundations uncovered and about to be restored in a nineteenth-century manner. She could not see Arthur Twombly’s house down in its wedge of green, but the hospital where he lay was smoking and, from its head, the shore road wound along the bay into Curling and Mount Moriah, wooded and undeveloped. She was going to see her son.

She phoned me and I was surprised at the sound of her voice. She was here. She was just a mile away. I was going to see her. We had a serious situation that was outside ourselves so we could be close.

How does he look, she said. Can you look at him.

Nell I love you, I said.

There was a pause and something digital that was shortening the pause on the phone. She said, Can I see you. There’s something I have to tell you.

Those were the same words she’d used to tell me about David.

I DROVE UP THERE and I was nervous. When I saw her I realized I was relieved she was here and yet I had to tell her about Anthony. In the flesh. I thought perhaps she’d send a person kitted out in sensory devices, while she stayed safe in another country experiencing Corner Brook through a computer lashed to the waist of an employee.

I held her and we kissed. And something soft came over her. She took a piece of paper from her pocket, paper you associate with reproducing machines. A black-and-white blur of a solar system. It reminded me of the time I’d first met her, when she took my picture on a dot matrix machine. But this looked like the solar system humanity will one day end up in, once we’ve discarded this one. It was an ultrasound.

I’m pregnant, she said.