9

Pace decided to leave Chicago, but before he did he went back to the Art Institute to see once more Seurat’s great painting. He paid particular attention to the monkey in the foreground, and was reminded of something else Dr. Furbo said: If animals have the ability to reason, which they do, why is it that they do not believe in God?

Pace bought a 2003 midnight blue Ford F-150 truck and headed southwest. Twenty years before, when he had lived in Los Angeles and worked as an assistant to various film producers and directors, he’d always meant to take a vacation and explore the other western states but had never found the time. Now there was nothing to prevent him from doing so. Pace felt good driving so he kept at it, stopping only for gas and food and at cheap motels to sleep. He was not in need of conversation, so he kept exchanges with people to a polite minimum. His brief but intense encounter with Dr. Furbo had convinced Pace that the only path to the Up-Down would be of his own devising. Despite Furbo’s oddball theories and strange antics, there was no doubt in Pace’s mind that the man had been sincere in his quest for the answers to the fundamental questions that had puzzled and virtually stupefied man since the Big Three, as the doctor called them, had first sizzled in a human being’s brain pan, those being What? How? and Why?

One morning in Gila Bend, Arizona, Pace woke up and remembered his dream of the night before. In the dream several women were sitting in a room around a table. Three or four of the women were smoking cigarettes, one of whom Pace recognized to be Lula as she was in her twenties. In the room, which was dimly lit by small lamps with red shades, was a dark shape that moved around as the women talked. The women seemed not to notice this dark shape, or at least paid it no attention. Pace could not understand what the women were saying but they all seemed quite contented and calm. One of the women stood up and was immediately absorbed by the dark shape, but the others went on with their conversation. When Pace awakened he realized that the woman who had disappeared was his mother.

The desert was too hot so Pace headed north. His destination was Wyoming, a state he had never visited but whose name had a mythical quality for him. As a child, Pace and Lula had used Wyoming as an imaginary idyll, a place where nothing bad could happen, a kind of magical land. His mother had never been in Wyoming, either; nor, to Pace’s knowledge, had Sailor. Whenever Lula made up a story to tell Pace at bedtime she would end it by saying, “and they all lived happily ever after in Wyoming.” He no longer believed this, of course, but the closer he got to Wyoming, the cooler the air became.