SIX

After the death of her boyfriend, the violent, senseless murder of her boyfriend, the blinding horror of his pointless death, Kathy was able to move forward based on a single realization: that the universe, which she referred to like a pronoun, must have a very organized vendetta against frivolous people. Jack had been a lovely, silly person. And Kathy knew that the universe saw him coming from a mile away — then picked him off like a gopher.

To Kathy the entire universe had the heart of an assassin: cold and calculating, with deadly patience, it waited, with a high-powered crossbow resting on its knees like black wings of metal, for someone to flutter out across the road and look up embarrassed. Then it killed that person with a solid titanium arrow right through neck.

It pinned Jack to the heat at the side of the road. He was killed by a stranger. By someone who slips away through the woods, on tiptoe, stopping occasionally to pick up the instruments of torture that he drops, until he is gone, forever.

Like Jack. Forever.

Kathy sometimes wonders if the same gravity that Jack ignored was working on the Mayor, deforming him over the years, pulling him down, making him so bizarrely short. Kathy decided that she would implement her knowledge, and she never strayed far from serious statements, pulling all conversation close to a reckoning, excavating every moment for its direst secrets. She also felt that to protect people she must always remind them, in even the lightest moments — perhaps especially in the lightest moments — that everything was at stake. The end of the world hung its hat at the precise moment when a person laughed in the face of small dangers, white lies, little offences.

In the spring following the death of Dr. Mendez, the vicious murder of the man she loved, and the suicide of a tender young boy made Kathy understand that a gravity, a grave, had slipped under her town. She might be the only person who understood how closely things should be watched from here on in. In the future, or at least after this, Kathy would meet with the council of an adjacent town and discuss the process of amalgamation. Of joining two towns by a hyphen.

She will accomplish this and become the Mayor of the new town of Caesarea–Buddy Holly. She will do this because she believes it’s the only way to save her town from mindlessness and Caesarea’s silly weather-based vacation culture.

Caesarea must be married to the poor, smoke-stained, mourning town of Buddy Holly.

For every ridiculous ribbon she will cut as Mayor, a speech will be given about the day-care crisis in the populated pits within their new town. She’ll crawl toward the assassin, undetected, waving people low in the grass behind her, teaching them to whisper cautions to their neighbours, to take care of each other lest they should be gunned down in their own front yards.

Her vision will catch fire in her constituents’ eyes, and they’ll take on her mission with passionate zeal. The town of Buddy Holly will become a sacred garden, its soil black and bursting with jewels. Its veins of clay, streaking across its lush groves, a pious sign that others before us handed out beach balls while the ground in Buddy Holly burned to ashes beneath children’s feet. The people in Caesarea will mark themselves with this memory by staying religiously out of the sun in the summer. They’ll leave the summer to visitors who do not know better. Eventually, the visitors will stay away, frightened off by a town full of strange, pale people, who hide in the back of their shops.

The following winter her people will feel a vibrating thrill in the cold air: Kathy tells them that they have passed an important mark, that they will no longer be tempted. And on Christmas Eve hundreds will gather shoeless in the deep snows of the Buddy Holly Trailer Park, waiting with beaming faces for the frost to pick their feet from their legs.

The following spring Kathy will sit weeping on the bench in front of Bletcher’s Video.

Many have died. No one would be well again.

She will watch the sun rise on the melting snow and turn her head, exposing her strong veins to the titanium arrow that will soon strike.

Of course this hasn’t happened yet, so there is a version, not even suggested by this account of the future, where the heart of Kathy’s universe isn’t an assassin at all. It’s merely a pronoun, a pointer that can be directed — and can gather itself in the empty spaces that contain our welfare. And so, in this version, Kathy’s town is forced to amalgamate and she is made an unwilling political candidate by the outgoing Mayor.

Neither is likely to happen. In fact, what Kathy does in Caesarea is barely remarkable for anything but its guesswork. It is her guesswork that pulls everything past Caesarea.