Absolute Fiction

On the seventeenth day of the impasse—’the siege,’ as everyone now called it—Betty’s station manager had sent in an RV for the news team to use as a base. Watching the monster ease through a maze of tents and porta-potties, Betty’s spirits lifted for the first time since the crisis began. No more driving into town for a shower and a decent nap. No more days of searing heat without an air conditioner in sight. But as the RV parked, it seemed like a symbol of her fate: a metal cage for a trapped prisoner. Three days earlier, her executive producer had told her that she would remain at the compound until the siege ended—or until the viewers lost interest. Other reporters from her station would be rotated in and out, but the top execs had decided to keep one reporter on location from start to finish.

“It’s important for continuity,” Fred had told her. “You were on-site the day of the firefight. The networks all picked up our footage, so you’re identified with the story. Roll with it, Betty. Stardom awaits.”

Firefight. Fred never stopped talking in broadcast jargon. Sitting on a slatted peach crate, a cellular phone clamped to one ear, she searched for an argument. “What about my documentary on the gas explosion in the sewers, Fred? It’s still scheduled to air in a few days, isn’t it?”

“Haw!” His good-old-boy guffaw. “You think that can’t wait a month or two, Bet? Gotta go now, ace.”

“Wait!” She swung her foot at an empty tin can, thinking fast. “This assignment creeps me out, Freddy.” She tried to strike a plaintive, needy tone. “I’ve been sick to my stomach the whole time, I can’t sleep, and I …” Could she tell Freddy anything so personal? “Maybe … maybe those people are putting a hex on me,” she continued, wondering if she was serious.

“Haw! Put it on the air!” Fred shouted. “I bet none of the network hotshots would report something like that!” Then, suddenly earnest: “Have you checked with other reporters for similar symptoms?”

She stood up, kicked the crate over. “Look, Fred, I truly do not feel well out here. The sunstroke I got here the first day still—”

“No, you look, Betty. You’re the only reporter who covered the shoot-out and you interviewed Phillip Lorica less than a month before this craziness started and the FBI says that he might select a reporter to come inside the compound. He’ll probably choose the biggest name who happens to be there that day, the damn publicity-hound, but maybe he’ll remember you. So go and enjoy your RV and get some rest. And pray that Lorica hasn’t stockpiled enough food to last for years. Oh, make sure you look better the next time you broadcast, okay? The windblown hair works for the camera, but no more jeans and T-shirts, okay?”

Years, Betty thought, standing at the edge of the media encampment, staring across the open desert at the high fence in the distance. Phillip’s people had trucked in the logs from Utah, had built the wall themselves. Then they filled every chink and slit with a mortar they mixed inside the compound. Now no one knew what went on behind the black-faced walls. Only one structure was visible above the walls, an abandoned water tower that had belonged to the Gila Bend Indian Reservation. At night, using a telescope, Betty sometimes saw light inside the tank. Shining beneath the conical roof through a single window, it spilled in pallid sheets across the flat roofs of surrounding buildings.

Every day, she and the other reporters spent long hours observing the wordless barrier. What are we waiting for? she asked herself. A surrender? More shooting? A conflagration? She winced at the last thought, remembering the fiery disaster that had ended a similar standoff between a religious group and the government. If this really goes on for years, will I still be here? Me and this hobo jungle that already smells like sewage? And the sixty-odd anti-government fanatics behind that damn wall? She walked over to the RV and pulled the door open with both hands, fighting the hot desert wind. For once, she found herself alone. She locked the door, then shed her sandals, jeans, and halter top, relishing the cooled air. Enough time for some solitude before she had to dress for the next update.

She looked around at the detritus from the most recent poker game. All her co-workers were men, all of them slobs. She knew they would let the rubbish accumulate indefinitely. Maybe for years, she reflected, laughing bitterly. Her need for order told her to clean up the mess, but suddenly she was nauseous and weak. Even though she had done nothing since the morning broadcast except search the net for more background on Lorica and his followers, she collapsed onto a bench in the kitchen nook. Her vacant gaze fell on a calendar taped to the wall. Maybe the wait is over, she thought, counting the days since her last cycle began. There’s no reason to think a sight will come, she thought. Still, dread would not leave her.

She had glimpsed the future for the first time when she was fourteen. Like her first period, which had started only days before, the sight arrived with not warning, unwanted. Driving home with her parents from a basketball game, thinking about the decades of menstruation lying ahead, she dozed off in the back seat. When she opened her eyes, lifted her head and stared into the empty gap between the bucket seats, she found that the windshield had disappeared. In its place, a swirling thick liquid of dark red, green, and purple. Her first thought was of the spin-art paintings she made each year at the state fair. Then, more alert, she guessed that the strange lights came from emergency vehicles at some accident scene around the curve. She tried to speak, to warn her parents, but her jaw was frozen. When she tried to shake her mother’s shoulder, she felt the cold spread through all her joints and muscles. A seizure, she thought. She hoped her mother would turn and see her paralyzed. Then the colors on the windshield had parted and a long narrow aperture with tapered ends began to open, bulging at the middle. Shades of dark red lined the inner sides. From beyond, bright, yellow light shone into her eyes. Her eyes locked open, she stared as a black speck floated toward her, gaining outline and definition as it moved, bathed the yellow glow. When Betty finally screamed, the colors flew away as suddenly as soapsuds hit by a bucket of clear water. She remembered her mother trying to hold her still, then the car slamming to a stop, her father’s face twisted around, shouting.

Describing it later to her mother, she couldn’t decide if she had seen her teacher’s body floating in the water through the brilliant rent in the shifting mass of colors or if she had closed her eyes and seen it inside her head. But Mr. Trannier’s image was vivid and stark, the harsh light licking even the thick spray of hair across his shoulder blades into visibility. Heavy and white, he floated face down in water, his arms spread and his hands bobbing lightly near his head.

Three more visions lay scattered through the years, each one framed by a bulging scar in a pool of dark, murky color, each one preceding a new monthly by a few days. Flying home from college one Christmas, she raised the shade on her window and saw the suited figure of a young candidate in a special election for a state senate seat. He was the heavy favorite with students at her school, and Betty was working for his campaign. Miniaturized in the airplane’s concave window, he was standing on a platform before a bank of microphones, the area behind him grey with shadows. Shouting something with a wide smile on his lips, he raised one arm high in the air, his fist clenched. Then the arm fell, the smile dissolved into surprise, and he collapsed as suddenly as though a trapdoor had sprung open, his fingertips clutching at the edge of the podium as the image evaporated. Not quite two years later, she saw her best friend from high school stabbed in the groin by a drug freak in New York. Betty could see white-tipped pimples blossoming like night flowers across the killer’s cheeks and forehead. Next, barely one month into her new job at the Tucson station, her bedroom ceiling transformed into a tableau as vast and detailed as a movie projected in cinemascope. Cold with sweat, feeling as though the image were some intruder descending on her body, she watched a DC-10 cartwheeling down a runway in a festoon of orange flame and black smoke. When it finally collided with a parked plane, both exploded in a burst that left her blinking, sightless, in the dark.

The senate candidate survived the bullet that pierced his right lung two days after her vision. But Tony died in the ambulance on his way to the hospital the day after she saw him stabbed. She had stayed up all night, calling his home in Newark, leaving messages with a dozen common friends. No one knew where he was staying in New York. But the fourth vision brought a new twist. When the jumbo airliner roared noiselessly into her bedroom in the air above her bed, it was already engulfed in smoke, the fuselage so blackened and twisted that even the name of the airlines was lost. But as it flipped over one last time before crashing full-length onto the other plane, the tail section swung forward, gigantic and distorted, like an image seen through an anamorphic lens. 517798. The numbers froze in her mind. She was at work eating a cup of yogurt when news of the crash came in over the wires. Someone had caught it on videotape. Over the next few days, Betty watched the footage obsessively, thinking of the numbers.

“Everybody will laugh at you!” her mother had shouted at her when Betty had told her about seeing the politician shot. “It was just a dream, Elizabeth. You’ll make a fool of yourself if you try to warn anyone, as if you could ‘see the future.’ Go to bed.” She said the last words with scorn, then turned out the light in Betty’s room and left.

Leave it alone, Betty told herself. It’s prideful, like mother said, to think you could have done any good. Could she have made anonymous calls to every airline in the country, telling them a crazy story with only a partial registration number to give it some validity? Or the FAA, the NTSB? She knew, though, that some airlines listened seriously to warning calls from people claiming to be psychic. Could she have used her new reporter credentials to force someone to listen to her? She shook her head and jumped up from the cold bench. Stop being morbid. She began to draw water in the sink, determined to wash up the dirty dishes. But as the water ran, voices shouted from outside the RV, then the door rattled in its loose frame.

“Open up in there, Betty. Hurry!”

She turned off the faucet and began yanking on her clothes. “What is it, Larry?” she hollered. When she unlocked the door, it whipped free from her hand and crashed into the side of the van. “Can’t I get one minute alone here?” she snapped. Three men stared up at her.

“You’re on your way inside, Betty. Grab your gear and let’s go. Phillip’s attorney is going in today, and Phillip wants you to come with him.”

As the lawyer’s open jeep bounced through the gates in the compound’s barrier, he reached over and slapped her on the knee. “Ain’t scared now, are ya?” He gave her a big grin, nicotine-stained teeth peeking through a scraggly fringe of moustache. Bronze reflector lenses hid his eyes; a long green visor jutted out from his bald head like a beak.

“Do you think Phillip Lorica is stable?” Betty asked, squinting into her camcorder’s viewfinder. Panning the compound’s open area and the exterior walls of the clustered buildings, she wondered if she could get the footage to her station before the feds grabbed it.

“He’s just great. Personally, I love the man. But it wouldn’t be his fault if he was nuts, what with all the weird shit those federal cowboys have been blasting through the loudspeakers all night. Where did they dig up those old Nancy Sinatra records, anyhow? How do you reporters sleep with all that God-awful noise?”

“Ear plugs,” Betty answered, concentrating on her work and wishing Larry could have come to operate the camera. “And the air conditioner drowns out most of it.”

“Government bastards are the ones to blame for the shoot-out, too,” he grumbled. “When the hell you think those boys will learn from past mistakes, eh? This is goin’ to the Supreme Court, you just wait and see. Look, there he is! Yo, Phil!” He jabbed a meaty fist at the horn, took off his visor and waved it grandly. Betty trained the camera on Phillip as he came into view, pressing a button for a slow zoom-in. Throwing the jeep into neutral, the lawyer laughed in a snort of roiling phlegm.

“You don’t really think you’ll be leaving with that videotape, now do ya, darlin’?” He wiped his hand across his mouth, then jumped to the ground and strode over to the door, grabbing Phillip in a bear-hug. As Betty approached, Phillip’s wife emerged from the building. When Betty offered her hand, the short, dark woman impulsively embraced her, then pulled back like a shy child, smiling and casting her eyes down.

“Do you remember me, Phillip?” Betty asked when the lawyer finally turned him loose.

“Didn’t I ask for you specifically? Okay if I still call you Betty? It’s a real honor to have you here. Rebecca and I are happy.” He extended his hand forward, the palm upturned and open, fingers spread. His forearm was tanned brown as a nut, finely muscled in sloping planes with ridged veins. His fingers were long but thick and strong. Betty extended her hand and let him take it.

Hours later, final daylight retreated across the putty desert in shifting geometric screens. In the old water tower, high above Phillip’s sleeping followers, Betty sat with Phillip, alone with him for the first time. He had insisted on talking with Betty in private, ignoring his lawyer’s advice.

“Here,” he said to her, “you can photograph me and the room, if you want to.” He opened a metal file cabinet and took out a thirty-five millimeter camera with a flash attachment. “Sorry about taking all your equipment away. You understand the need, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Betty answered. “But the families outside would be glad to see that their relatives are safe. That might have brought you some public sympathy.”

He waved one hand, laughing, then reached into the file cabinet again and retrieved a videocassette. “I’m way ahead of you. One of my guys shot this while we were at the prayer meeting today.” He handed it to her, smiling. “He’s a smart guy, used to shoot documentary films in the Middle East before he moved here. He kept you or Mike in almost every frame so that the FBI can’t say the tape could have been shot weeks ago. I hope it brings some peace to the people waiting outside for news, Betty, I truly do.”

She slipped the cassette into her canvas bag, then began taking shots of Phillip and the room. He gave her some formal, mock-serious poses, then said “Oh, shit” and began clowning. Holding up an old swimming trophy from his days at San Diego State, he pointed at it with a huge grin, told Betty to take a shot. Grinning wide to show two rows of small, even teeth, he pulled back the sleeve of his cotton shirt to expose a smooth, rounded bicep. “Let’s show them we’re not wasting away in here, Betty!” he laughed, pointing at his muscle with one finger.

Phillip’s healthy bicep, like a round stone sheeted with cold water, symbolized for Betty everything she had seen that day. Nothing but images of a prospering, hard-working community. Phillip and Rebecca had ushered her from one scene of activity to another, through groups of happy, polite people busily gardening, cooking, plastering walls, teaching school. At first she tried to keep a tally of the population, but Phillip had also taken her note pad, and after counting sixty-seven different adults and twenty-one children, she lost track. The afternoon had ended with a prayer meeting in the compound’s largest common room. Phillip dedicated the day’s service to the families and friends of the two FBI agents killed by his people in the confrontation that had ended with the community’s declaration of sanctuary.

“Dear God,” Phillip had begun, standing on a raised platform before his people, an acoustic guitar hanging at his waist from an embroidered strap. He seemed like the best student in a group of high school graduates. The smartest, the most handsome, the best-liked. The logical choice for someone to speak hopeful words about the future to his peers. “We ask you to forgive us for the sins we committed that day. Punish me, sweet Lord, and spare the souls of my people. Don’t let their deeds delay them on their journey to join your company. They were frightened and did what they thought I would want. The fault lies with me.”

Betty had watched from the back of the room, standing next to Rebecca. The room was darkened, and a single spotlight shone on Phillip’s long, angular face. One drop of sweat trickled down his brow and onto his nose. For a moment, it hung there, a bluish sparkle on his brown, smooth face.

“Got another roll of film, Phillip?” she asked, snapping open the camera’s magazine.

“Oh, come on, Betty,” he laughed, throwing himself into a chair and letting his arms fall open.

“You want to photograph the floorboards? I’ll be thinking you’re working for the FBI. Sit down and relax. Mike will be taking you back soon, so ask what you want. Here.” He opened a drawer in the desk on his right and tossed a spiral-bound notebook at her. “Take notes, if you want.”

“What do you do up here, Phillip?” she began, getting out her pen. “In this room, I mean.”

“Meditate and pray. And write. That’s what we built the room for. Kooky, eh?”

“Phillip, you know that there’s a great deal of concern about the children you have here. It was reported that one of them was hurt in the shoot-out.”

“The boy only got knocked to the ground, Betty. He’s fine.”

“Can you personally guarantee their safety?”

“No” he answered quickly. “I can only guarantee that the children are happy and loved and nurtured. It’s the people outside who are responsible for making sure they come to no harm in the future.” He picked up his guitar and set it in his lap. “Them and God,” he added, plucking a chord.

“But you could send them out,” Betty persisted. “Then there would be no chance at all they could be hurt.”

“Families can’t be broken up because of religious persecution, Betty. No mother or father here would give up their children, no matter what I told them. Besides, I don’t give my people orders. We all agree democratically on the community’s actions. I’m a spiritual helpmate for these people, not their dictator.” He turned his eyes from hers, his smile gone. Suddenly he looked very tired. Worry lines dug across his forehead. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Are you mentally sound, Phillip?” Her voice was low, almost a whisper, but it echoed off the chamber’s sparse furnishings.

For several seconds, he said nothing, then set down the guitar and rose from his chair, pulling his body up to its well-known height of six feet, three inches. For the first time Betty noticed how long his legs were, how they flowed to a square compactness below a narrow waist. Although he was slender, his shoulders were so broad that she suddenly thought of the famous silhouette shot of Anthony Perkins outside the Bates mansion in Psycho.

“These questions are tedious, Betty,” he answered finally, turning to look at her. “We both know that. Next you’ll be asking me about my ‘free love’ philosophy. He raised his voice from his deep tenor to imitate hers: ‘Do you really have ten wives, Phillip? Do you really have male lovers?’ Or maybe ‘Where’s your arsenal, Phillip? Do you have machine guns? Bazookas? Hydrogen bombs?’ Or how about ‘Which militia groups do you support?’”

“Well, the public is interested in those things, Phillip, even if you choose to ridicule them.” His nagging tone annoyed her. “And I do have a responsibility to—”

“Yeah, right,” he cut in. “It’s just fodder for the tabloid shows, Betty, we both know that. Why don’t you let me show you something special instead? Something no one knows about me yet. Okay?” His voice was earnest and soft again, but with a touch of excitement, like a boy wanting to show off a new trick. He suddenly put both hands on the arms of her chair, bent over until his face was so close to hers they almost touched. “Interested?”

“What is it?” She made her tone sound bland, but suddenly felt a small tongue of fear at her heart. Unable to move, his two arms and lowered like a cage around her, she stared up into Phillip’s eyes. Cold and clear as rainwater, they seemed to mock her. But he pushed himself off her chair like someone doing a push-up, then spun around on one foot, slapping his hands together in the air. Betty laughed nervously, then began scribbling notes in her own tangle of shorthand and abbreviations. As she wrote, Phillip walked to the back of the room and pulled back a floor-length drape. Behind it was a door made from scrap lumber, crudely fixed into an opening in a beaverboard partition.

“Don’t go away, now,” he said over his shoulder, then opened the door and slipped through.

Alone in the room, Betty looked around hastily, still writing, recording her impressions in free-form, trying to remember everything. Nothing seemed noteworthy, other than the four guitars scattered around the room and a set of shelves holding swimming trophies and framed photographs. She leaned closer to the shelf and began listing the book titles, but a noise made her look up. Her pen stopped in mid-stroke. The woman in the wheelchair was certainly the oldest one Betty had ever seen in person. She sat erect with her shoulders straight, but the top of her head was barely even with Phillip’s waist. A snow-white scarf around her head was drawn down in front to the level of her eyebrows. Beneath it, her eyes were black specks entirely surrounded first by clear white, then by concentric circles of deep, grainy wrinkles. Her nose was long and bent, almost touching her upper lip.

“Now, who’s this pretty young gal?” Her voice was so clear and sharp that Betty thought of the bells of Sarna that had hung on the front door in her parents’ home, ringing the arrival of relatives, friends, happy afternoons.

“This is Betty Daniels, Grammy. She works for a television station in Tucson. Betty, this is my great-grandmother, Lillia Rogers.”

Betty rose from her chair, wondering what to say.

“You don’t need to ask,” the woman laughed. “Everybody wants to know the same thing first. One hundred and ten years old next Tuesday.” She pulled one tiny hand from beneath a lap rug and held it out.

Betty stooped to take the woman’s hand. It felt like a feather with a willowy spine, but when she tried to let go, she found strength. “Let me hold your hand a spell, dearie,” Lillia said. “Phillip, push me over there so as Miss Daniels can sit next to me.”

Phillip wheeled her forward as Betty backed up in short steps, still held by the woman’s grip. When she felt the chair hit the back of her legs, she sat down. “Grammy, you’ll only be a hundred and five,” Phillip said loudly, tucking the rug closer around the woman’s waist before he got down on his knees next to her chair. “Don’t be telling Miss Daniels lies, now. She’s a reporter, and she’ll catch you. That’s what they pay her to do, you know.” He winked at Betty, and whispered to her: “Talk very loud. One of her hearing aids is dead.”

“Shoot, I just want to see what I get from the President when you’re a hundert and ten,” she grumbled, putting her other hand on Phillip’s head and winding her fingers through his loose brown curls. “You’d think he’d send more’n just another card to somebody who’s a hundert and ten! What’s he waiting for?”

“Grammy wants to ask you a favor,” Phillip told Betty. “I told her you might say yes, since it’s her birthday.”

“Yes, I do want a favor,” she agreed brightly, smiling to reveal a set of bright dentures. “Honey, will you call someone and make sure my card from the President gets to me here? And from his wife, too, it comes, you know. Both signatures. She’s pretty, don’t you think? I could ask Phillip’s lawyer to do it, but he’s so busy with all this foolishness. And besides,” she lowered her voice. “I don’t really like Mr. Cannenzi, even if I shouldn’t say so. Reminds me of an eggplant. Makes me think I’ll get squashed.”

“I have a friend who covers the White House,” Betty answered, feeling vaguely relieved. “I’ll make sure to call him about it. And I hope you don’t mind if I say that I’m glad to see you’re in such good health.”

“Yes, thank God, it’s a blessing, ‘specially out here where we …” Her voice trailed off, but she continued staring intensely into Betty’s eyes. She squeezed her hand more tightly on Betty’s fingers, then jerked them toward her breast. Betty darted a look at Phillip, who pulled himself upward a bit, closer to Lillia. “Phillip, you didn’t never tell me this child can see!” The last word broke from her in a small explosion, as though the air had been knocked out of her.

Phillip met Betty’s glance, his smile wavering, then he patted Lillia’s arm. “Why, of course she can see, Grammy. What a strange thing to say.”

“I mean see,” she insisted, as though she were talking to fools. Her lips curled down and her large hooked nose quivered at the tip. She pulled her hand from Phillip’s hair and set it firmly on Betty’s. “There now, Miss Daniels. Lillia will make things all right.”

Betty froze for a moment, caught by the fierce, knowing light in black eyes. Then she quickly turned her face away, but not soon enough to keep Phillip from glimpsing the quiver of realization that vibrated the muscles in her cheeks.

“Oh,” Phillip said slowly, nodding and looking from Betty to Lillia. “I think I see what you mean, Gram.”

“This has been such a pleasure,” Betty said slowly. “Really wonderful to meet you, Mrs. Rogers.” Her words were dry and leaden, her throat parched. “But I believe Mr. Cannenzi must be waiting for me by now.”

“Oh, no,” Lillia said. “Oh, no no no. Now I know the whole thing. You can see, but you don’t know nothin’ ‘bout how to use it. Oh, poor child. You need help, you do. Phillip, she can stay with us, right? You go right now and find a good room for her. One with a good bed.”

Betty slipped her hand free and stood up. “No, no, I need to get back, Mrs. Rogers. Now, tonight. I have a job, you see, and….” She broke off, looking at Phillip for help.

“Betty can’t stay with us, Grammy,” Phillip picked up. “I’m afraid she needs to go back, for many reasons. But maybe she’ll visit us again soon and you can talk with her some more, okay?”

“Later might be too late, Phillip. Lord, you young people! All the time in the world is what you think you have. Don’t you see how anyone with the gift needs to use it right? Look at her, now. Don’t need no gift to see all the suffering it’s caused her. Written on her face clear as day, it is.” She half-rose from her chair, one hand on Phillip’s shoulder and the other on the electric control box. Her temples and cheeks flushed bright red. “Stay here, Miss Daniels.” Her voice was still friendly, but breathless. “We can have a good talk and you can go back in the morning or the next day.”

But Betty was backing away as Phillip, still on one knee, gently supported his great-grandmother with his long arms, waiting patiently until she gave up trying to stand, then lowering her to a soft landing. When Betty saw him begin to fuss over her, his broad hands pulling on her robe and smoothing her kerchief, she felt a sharp, clawing hitch in her chest. She turned her back on them and walked to the door. She felt choked, stifled. But the door was locked.

“Just one second, Betty,” Phillip called. She could picture him bent at the waist over the woman, almost see his firm, red lips drawing close to kiss his great-grandmother’s cheek. She dug her fist between her breasts, pressing hard, waiting. In another minute, he was behind her, his hands pressing lightly on her shoulders. She wanted to pull away from him, but he gently turned her around.

“Please say good-bye to Grammy,” he whispered. “She’s afraid she frightened you.”

When Betty turned and looked across the room, the old woman was smiling. Behind her, the room’s only window had silvered into a glowing square with hard desert moonlight. The tiled floor around Lillia shone with the reflection, her wheelchair like a throne at the center of a forest clearing on a solstice night.

“Bye-bye, now,” she called. Beneath her kerchief, her face was a gnarled wooden knob. “You be careful, Miss Daniels.” She waved one hand up and down, like a child. “The Lord is with you. This old lady knows.”

Betty said her good-byes, tried to return the wave cheerfully. But when Phillip opened the door and she turned away from Lillia, she felt such despair she thought she might collapse. Beyond the door was a wide metal platform with steep wooden steps descending to the ground. The night air stung her awake, but it was harsh and empty, the sky full of stars cold and unreachable. Phillip stood close beside her, and against her will she leaned slightly into his side. Firm but bending, one warm, living thing in the night. Very slowly, he put one arm around her, letting his hand sit loosely on her shoulder. They stood silently, staring over the flat squares of roof into the arching sky spread before them. Betty thought of herself at college, walking across football fields and hot beaches on the Jersey shore, a group of girls laughing or silent, their thin, bare arms slung around each other’s shoulders in easy, fleeting camaraderie. Phillip’s presence, she thought. A conduit to all her happiest memories.

“I have to get back now,” she said, feeling stronger, but not wanting to leave.

“I suppose you do,” he answered. “But you can come back any day you want. Grammy says we can trust you. Hell, she says you’ll bring us nothing but good fortune. She’s very excited about the idea. Just call Mike when you want to come. Tell him I said to give you his emergency number. He guards it as though it were a direct line to heaven.”

“How do you get your great-grandmother up here?” she asked, looking down the steps.

“I carry her,” he said simply. “I like to have her close by me. And she seems to like it, too.”

She turned to face him, tilting her chin upward, her eyes tearing from the sharp cold. “Take good care of your great-grandmother, Phillip. Promise me you will.”

When he looked down at her, his face was relaxed and open, as receptive as the desert beyond them waiting to be searched. “Funny,” he answered in a whisper. “That’s just what she said to me about you.”

Mike had his jeep warmed up and the canvas roof zipped shut when she and Phillip came walking around the corner. “You two took long enough!” he yelled. “Come on, I still got work to do tonight.”

Betty stepped into the passenger seat and buckled herself in without answering him. The two men embraced again, then Mike lumbered in heavily and gave the accelerator a hard tap. “Quite a man, huh?” He plucked a cigar stub from the ashtray, struck a match.

Betty said nothing, staring through the bug-spattered windshield. Suddenly, she realized that she had never seen any mention of Lillia in all the research she had done on Phillip and his people. How could that have escaped her? Or how had Lillia escaped the news reports? Could Phillip be hiding something about her? Betty watched saw him now, standing motionless before a whitewashed wall, the headlight beams cutting through the darkness on both sides of him like white poles They ended in twin globes of light flattened like paper decorations on the wall.

When she awoke, Larry was sitting next to her in a chair. She turned her head, saw that she was in her narrow bunk in the RV. “Finally you awake,” he said, sounding too cheerful. “We were getting worried.”

“Huh?” she asked stupidly. Looking down, she found herself still dressed in the clothes she had worn to the compound. But that was days ago, wasn’t it?

“No, don’t get up,” he said quickly, putting one hand on her shoulder. “Lay still and let me get you some tea or something.”

“What time is it, Larry?” she asked, sinking back onto the uncomfortable mattress. Did the square of faint daylight in the window belong to morning or dusk?

“Almost six in the evening, Bett. You’ve been asleep for going on fourteen hours now.” He opened several cupboards, leaving all the doors open.

“There’s no teapot, Larry. Use a saucepan. There’s probably one in the oven. What the hell happened to me? And close the damn doors.”

“Well, as far as we can tell, you fell asleep and had a ferocious nightmare while Cannenzi was driving you back from the compound. He says you woke up with a scream that made the hair on his ass stand up. His words, of course. Made him drive right into a ditch.” After a pause: “Doesn’t seem to be working,” he said, peering into the water. She looked at him with one eye

“You have to wait a few minutes, Larry. Find the tea bags. What happened then?”

“I know it takes a spell,” he replied. “I just thought it did something right away. Maybe steam. Anyway, Cannenzi says that then you talked some nonsense he couldn’t understand and fell right back to sleep. You didn’t even wake up when we carried you in here. The doctor staying with the feds came over to look at you, but she diagnosed you as being asleep and told us to let you alone. I must admit, though, that I was just about to send someone into Tucson for another doctor.” He turned to smile at her, then waved his arm around. “Look, we cleaned up the trailer while you were out. All the guys pitched in.”

But she had stopped listening to him. Through the thick anaesthetizing layers of sleep, the images of last night’s incident had begun to filter.

“Why couldn’t Samuels come out to the compound and let you do the interview there?” Fred asked largely, stomping around the room, making useless adjustments to furniture and framed photographs. Wherever he went, he neatened compulsively. Betty wished he had visited the RV a few times. “That would’ve been more dramatic.” He straightened a lampshade. “You think the old hag is afraid of getting shot or just demoisturized?”

“Please shut up, Fred.” In a tiny green room at a network affiliate in Tucson, Betty was staring into a mirror with a large smear of something oily across the center.

“You ain’t nervous are ya, Bet? You’ve got this interview iced, totally iced. That prime time queen mother will eat up your insider information with a spoon. The big honchos are all starved for it.”

“Stop using that moronic frat boy language!” She slapped her hand down on the dresser, whirling around to face him.

“Hey.” His eyes narrowed, smile faded. “Watch yourself, Bet. You’re not a superstar yet, you know.”

“Just get out, Fred, please.” He began to protest, but she raised her voice. “No, don’t talk anymore, just leave!”

When he slammed the door in her face, she slumped down on a divan and started to shake with dry, gulping sobs. Her face in the mirror was pinched, her camera makeup runny with sweat.

Everybody will laugh at you, Elizabeth.

You can see, child, but you don’t know how to use it.

The day after her visit to the compound, she had met with Arizona’s Assistant Attorney General, the FBI’s commanding officer, and several feds of lesser stature. She had told them that they must end the siege. That she knew it would end in disaster.

“Did you think they would just take your word for it?” she said into the mirror.

When they asked her how she knew, when they accused her of having learned something from Phillip Lorica, she went cold with the memory of her vision. A dam breaking before a dark torrent of colors, the jeep’s windshield shattered. Through a ragged gash, a light shining brighter than any she had seen before. But she had pushed the images from her mind, unable to form the words that would tell her fantastic story. After they waited for long minutes, she had finished miserably. “I don’t have any special knowledge. I simply realized, after being inside the compound, that Phillip Lorica and his followers don’t intend to harm to anyone.” Two of the men had openly laughed.

She glanced at her watch, then locked the door and reached into her purse for a tampon. Exactly three days after her trip inside the compound it had started. Clockwork. When she left the room, she found the set buzzing with pre-broadcast activity. Fred was standing on the sidelines, talking with Larry, while most of the others clustered around Samuels. “Sorry, Freddy,” she whispered in his ear as she passed. “I’m okay now.” She slapped him on the shoulder. “Just consider it a case of OTR.” His face broke into a grin as he gave her a double thumbs-up.

Loretta Samuels was standing at a counter, reading through some notes and ignoring everyone but a man touching up her hair. Betty began to introduce herself, but Samuels only glanced up briefly before returning to her notes and hairdresser. When Betty motioned her away from the man, she made no attempt to cover her irritation, but finally threw the papers down in a heap. For several minutes, the two women stood close together, apart from the others. Betty spoke quietly but rapidly.

“You’re going to say what?” Samuels yelled. She jerked herself away as though Betty had bitten her.

“Two minutes to air, Ms. Samuels,” the director said.

“I’m sorry to bring you together at this hour, friends,” Phillip began. “Yesterday we all agreed to break our ban on watching media coverage of our persecution in order to see Betty Daniels talk to Loretta Samuels. That interview begins in just a few minutes, but my great-grandmother wants to talk to you first. She has something to say concerning Betty Daniels. And most of you know how persistent my Grammy can be.”

“God bless you, Lillia,” someone shouted. Rebecca and others began to applaud.

Phillip stepped lightly off the stage, leaving the woman and her chair alone. She pushed the chair’s control lever and hummed over to the microphone. When she stopped, she looked up at the microphone in disgust, then out at the audience, shaking her head. “Phillip, get back up here and bring this thing down to my size,” she called to him. “You think I’m going to stand up and preach at one hundred and ten?”

Everyone laughed as Phillip, red-faced, jumped back onto the stage and adjusted the microphone. “Shoulda thought o’ that before,” Lillia scolded, making a face.

Phillip flapped both his hands in the air, shaking his head. “I can’t anticipate everything, Gram.” He took a place in the audience next to Rebecca.

Lillia stopped the laughter by raising one small hand. “Children,” she said into the silence, “I don’t talk to you all often, but today is special. There’s a woman out there, a reporter. The one you want to watch on the TV tonight. Phillip and I have met her. Well, two nights ago I touched that woman, and I saw that she has the gift. Clear as glass I knew. She can prophesy, and soon she’s going to see what will happen to all of you. To us, Phillip’s people.”

“Everybody on your marks,” the director announced. “One minute to air, Ms. Samuels.”

She stopped shouting into the phone long enough to give the director a long, cold stare. He wrung his hands, darting glances in all directions. “Are you all as crazy as she is?” Her voice a cracking ice ridge.

“Get your bony ass over to those files and find some footage to kill the first few minutes.” She shook the phone at the director. “Go on, get!”

“I don’t know exactly what she’s gonna see,” Lillia continued. “You all know the Lord saw fit to take away my gift when I got too old. But I got a feeling, people, a feeling so strong it makes me feel young again. Or almost young, leastways. The Lord is telling me this woman will see us leaving this place, going to a new home that Phillip’ll find for us. She’ll be coming back to visit us soon, and Phillip and me, we’re going to pray to the Lord to help her to know what power He gave her. And when that’s done, she’ll see what we gotta do. I ain’t had a vision, mind you, but I know this is true right down in my bones. You all got to pray, too, because we can’t fail this girl. She’s all alone.” She stopped abruptly and took a long breath, wiping at her lips with the corner of a shawl.

“Praise God!” someone yelled, and others echoed the cry.

“Tell us, Mrs. Rogers!”

Rebecca was shaking with tears, her arms wrapped tightly around Phillip’s chest.

“Hallelujah!” Phillip yelled. He squeezed Rebecca tight against his body, at the same time swiftly kissing the forehead of the man on his left.

“Well?” squeaked the director, nearly bowing in front of her.

“Harvey says to go with it, so let’s roll.” She began arranging herself in her chair.

“No!” Fred and Larry yelled in one voice. Both men were trying to lead Betty away from the set.

“Turn that woman loose and get the hell off my set,” Samuels barked, half-rising. Her upswept red hair shook like a shield.

“And we’re on!”

Betty slid into her chair, snapping a mini-mic to her blouse as camera one tightened on Samuels’ face for the intro and update. As she finished, the red light on camera two winked on.

“Betty Daniels, a local television reporter,” Samuels began in her stage-voice, “is the first and only reporter to be allowed into the compound since the siege began. Betty was also the only newsperson at the compound twenty-one days ago when America’s newest bloody battle with anti-government extremists erupted. Eight federal agents were shot that day. Five of them died and a sixth is still in critical condition. Most of you have already heard Betty’s account in her own broadcasts from the site of the battle, but today, three days after her meeting with Phillip Lorica inside his embattled compound, Betty Daniels has more to tell us. She claims to have knowledge of a raid now being planned by federal agents. And she says the siege will end with a new tragedy if the attack is not stopped.”

Heads suddenly turned to the window, which was shaking loudly in its frame.

“Well,” Lillia said calmly. “Sounds like we’ll get some rain, finally. Hope we don’t get no flash floods.”

“—dropped out of a helicopter onto the roof of a building near Phillip’s tower, sometime after dark. They wore black clothing and had their faces striped with black paint. They were armed. I couldn’t see everything they did, but they must have known in advance that the roof had a trapdoor, because they pried it open with a crowbar and began disappearing down the hole.”

“And is that all you saw?” Samuels asked. She leaned closer, intent, encouraging.

“No. The angle of my perception changed then. And that’s something that’s never happened to me before.”

In the pool at San Diego State, his pointed hands would break the water like a knife, his long, stretched body following, a tensed crescent, an arrow. When he graduated, he tried to forget the adrenaline excitement of competition, thinking it prideful and vain. But he could never forget cutting into cold water, the light changing from bright white to aqueous blue. The noise of the meet instantly muffled, lost.

Phillip was diving. He landed full-length between Lillia’s chair and a shower of glass and wood scraps imploding from the wall. Springing up like a cat, he poised for an instant on all fours, then rushed forward and grabbed Lillia from her chair, wrapping his body around her as he jumped off the stage and ran to the back of the room. “Take Grammy and Rebecca into the basement,” he said to the man he had kissed minutes ago. “Listen to me, Curt,” he shouted, grabbing him by one shoulder and shaking hard.

Rebecca reached out for Phillip, wiping her hand across a bright patch of blood on his cheek.

“There’s no time for that,” he said, pulling her hand away. “Stay with Stephen and Grammy.” He quickly transferred Lillia to Curt’s arms, then bent closely over his great-grandmother’s face. “You okay, honey?” he asked. A thin line of blood trailed down to his mouth. He licked it away.

Lillia opened her eyes, most of her face covered by a knitted scarf. She stared up at him for a moment, then Phillip roughly pushed Curt and Rebecca toward the door.

Gathered in a tight knot with Samuels at the center, they watched a studio monitor, silent. But Betty kept apart. When the network had interrupted the interview for a special news bulletin, she had frozen. She stared dully at the backs turned toward her. Beyond them, a garish curtain of flame licked at the glass of the tiny screen. She heard a reporter’s voice shouting “Inferno! Chaos!” More lurid reporter language. After several minutes passed, the others began talking in voices low and dead. Slowly, Betty stood up and left the room.

Someone called after her, maybe Larry. She heard Samuels say something about going back on the air. But Betty was already half-way down the corridor. She pushed against the bar of a heavy fire door leading to a stairwell. The striking of her heels against the iron steps began a chain of percussive echoes. The door’s closing boom made the stairwell vibrate. She crossed one landing, descended another flight, crossed a second landing, and began descending again. Half-way down, she gripped the tubular metal railing, feeling it slip through her hand like a smooth cord connecting her to a distant, unknown place. She leaned heavily on it as she continued, her steps slowing until they stopped completely. Echoes lifted like ghosts through the stairwell, floating toward the ceiling several floors above. Betty began walking again, seeing nothing before her but the last image from her vision. Flame, bedlam. Lillia and Rebecca dead. And Phillip Lorica, his shirt burned from his broad smooth swimmer’s chest. Beneath his feet, the wooden planking of the stairway to his meditation room burned away as he ran up the tower, the fire like a gulf widening to swallow him. A rifle in one hand. In the other, something Betty failed to see.