Chapter 4
Solveig
I have been present at the fall of three cities.
None of them prepared me for a laminated menu.
"Take your time," the waitress said.
"I don't need time."
"Okay, hon, what'll it be?"
And there it was. The trap. Eleven pages of it, in color, with photographs, and every item on it was a decision that would tell the man across the table something about me.
"What are you having?" I said.
"Uh-uh." Crash didn't look up. "No."
"What?"
"You're doing the thing where you make me go first so you can copy my homework." He turned a page. "I've watched you do it in three diners. You ordered soup twice because I ordered soup, and the second time it was ninety degrees out."
"Soup is—"
"Sol, it was ninety degrees."
"I like the bowl," I said, with dignity.
He ordered a chicken fried steak. I ordered the same thing, on principle, which he noted with a small movement of one eyebrow — the surviving one — and then let go, which is his single most dangerous quality.
He'd picked me up at the hangar. That's a thing I'd like recorded, because I have never in my existence been collected, and it turns out there is an entire genre of small humiliations attached to it that nobody warns you about.
He opened the truck door. I stood there.
"It's a door," he said.
"I know it's a door."
"You get in it."
"I know how doors work, Ivar, I've been using doors since—" I stopped.
"Since?"
"They were a newer technology," I said, with what I felt was reasonable dignity, and got in.
He drove the whole way with his wrist on top of the wheel and the radio playing the eleven songs, and at one point he sang three words of one of them under his breath and then stopped, and I have replayed those three words more times than I've replayed the fall of Constantinople.
Here is what nobody tells you about eating.
It's loud. Not the room. The inside of it. There's an enormous amount of machinery involved and all of it is happening in your head, right behind your own face, and the entire time you're expected to maintain a conversation as though a thing is not being dismantled two inches from your ear.
I got through four bites and understood why humans are the way they are about it.
"Good?" he said.
"It's astonishing."
"It's a truck stop."
"I'm aware of what it is."
"You're eating that like you're defusing it."
"I'm being thorough," I said, and he laughed, and I did the thing I had started doing where I said something slightly wrong on purpose to see if I could make it happen again.
That's a confession, incidentally. I want it noted in the file. Somewhere around week three I began performing for him.
"So," Crash said. "Twenty questions."
"No."
"Five questions."
"Two."
"Four, final offer, and you can veto one."
"Three, and you're a nuisance."
"Deal." He set down his fork. "One. Where are you from?"
"North of here."
"Canada?"
"Further north than that, and that's your follow-up gone, so I'd be careful."
"That was not a question, that was a clarification—"
"Two," I said.
He grinned at me. It's a rare event, that grin, and it comes out sideways like it's escaping.
"Fine. Two. What's the oldest thing you remember?"
I ate another bite so I wouldn't have to answer immediately.
"A bell," I said. "Wooden. It was on a goat. It's the first thing I remember hearing and I've heard it maybe nine times since, in nine different places, and every time I've turned around like an idiot."
He didn't say anything smart. That's the thing about Crash. Most men fill.
"Three," he said finally.
"Careful."
"Are you going to be there when I die?"
The waitress went past with a coffee pot. Somebody's phone rang two booths down and played eight bars of a song about a truck.
"Yes," I said.
"Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"What's the other option?" He picked his fork back up. "I've known that since the hangar. I've had four weeks with it. I've been fine about it for maybe six days, which is faster than I've made peace with anything, including Deke's opinions about my diet."
"You should be afraid."
"Probably." He shrugged. "Doesn't take, though. Never has. There's a piece missing and I've stopped shopping for it."
And that is the exact moment — I want the record to show the exact moment — that Deke Marsh arrived carrying a pie.
He'd driven forty minutes. He came through the door sideways because of the cane and the pie, and he clocked our booth from the entrance the way an artillery officer clocks a hill, and he was on us before Crash finished saying a word I won't reproduce.
"Don't get up," Deke said, getting into the booth, forcing Crash to slide over or be sat on. "I brought pie."
"They have pie here."
"They have a pie here. They have a rumor of a pie." He set it down. Sour cream raisin, with a lattice on it that had clearly cost somebody an evening. "You must be Solveig."
"I must be."
"Deke Marsh. I'm the one who bakes." He shook my hand. His hand was the size of a hymnal. "How's the steak?"
"Loud," I said.
He looked at me. Really looked, the way you look at a load-bearing wall.
"Yeah," he said. "It is."
Then he cut the pie with a knife he had brought with him, and interrogated me for thirty-five minutes.
I have been questioned by a bishop, a Soviet border guard, and a thing with nine mouths. I would like to state for the record that Deke Marsh was the most effective of the four, and he did it entirely by asking simple questions and then leaving silences he had no intention of filling.
"You got family?"
"A sister."
"Close?"
"We work together."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know," I said.
He nodded and cut me another slice I hadn't requested.
Before Deke arrived there was a stretch of about twenty minutes that I have taken out and looked at more often than anything else in a thousand years, and nothing happened in it.
That's what I want understood. Nothing happened.
He told me about a dog he had when he was eleven that could open a gate.
He told me his mother worked nights at a nursing home in Bismarck and that he learned to cook at nine out of necessity and cooks four things very well and nothing else at all.
He asked whether I'd ever broken a bone and I said no and he said, "Ever?
" and I said, "It's never come up," and he laughed so hard the waitress looked over.
I asked him what he'd do if he had money.
"Nothing."
"That's a non-answer."
"No, that's the answer. I'd do nothing." He turned his cup. "Everybody thinks the fantasy is a boat. It's not a boat. It's a Tuesday where nobody needs anything from you and you sit on a step."
"That's the smallest ambition I've ever heard."
"How many have you heard?"
"All of them," I said.
"Then it's probably the best one and you're just not used to hearing a good one," Crash said, and drank his coffee, and I sat in a truck stop off Highway 200 with a man who had eight weeks and found out what it feels like to be argued into a corner by somebody who is right.
"You a religious woman?"
"Professionally."
Deke's fork stopped in the air.
"That's a joke," I said.
"That was not a joke," Deke said. "That was a woman telling the truth and then labelling it a joke because the room went quiet, and I've done it myself about four hundred times, and I want you to know I clocked it and I'm letting it go."
"Deke."
"I'm letting it go, Ivar. Look at me letting it go." He ate. "How long's it been since somebody made you a meal?"
I did the arithmetic honestly, because he was the kind of man you do it honestly for.
"1837," I said.
"Ha," said Deke, with no laugh in it whatsoever, and cut me a slice of pie the size of a shingle. "There you go, then. You're due."
"You know what he is," Deke said. "The job he does."
"Yes."
"You know he'll do it for the rest of his life? He doesn't stop. He's not a stopper. We've tried."
"I'm aware."
"And that doesn't—"
"Deke," Crash said.
"I'm vetting her."
"You're doing a hostage negotiation."
"I've done both and they're similar," Deke said, and then, to me, quieter, and this is the part I did not expect: "He hasn't had anybody in nine years.
I'd like it noted that I'm not asking you to be careful with him.
I'm asking you to be rough with him. Careful's been tried. Careful's what's killing him."
Crash put his forehead on the table.
Then Deke's phone rang and he answered it on speaker without a moment's hesitation and said, "She's here, she's eating, she said the steak was loud," and Nadia Loveless's voice came out of it saying, "What does that mean," and Deke said, "It means she's not from here," and Nadia said, "Put me on with her. "
"No," I said.
"Hi," said Nadia. "Nadia. I run the books and I married the liar.
Two things. One, if he takes you to the lake by the grain elevator, don't, there's a smell.
Two, whatever you're hiding, I've hidden worse, and I'm not going to ask, and when you want to say it out loud I'm at the clubhouse Tuesdays. "
"I'm not hiding anything."
"Sure," Nadia said pleasantly. "Deke, is she doing the face?"
"She's doing a face."
"Tuesdays," said Nadia, and hung up.
I acquired two friends that night against my will and without my consent, and I have never recovered.
They left. The plates went. The rain started somewhere past Sterling and came at us across forty miles of flat, visible the whole way, which is a thing about this country I have loved for a hundred and sixty years.
And I tried to tell him.
I want to be precise about this, because I have been accused since of not trying.
I opened my mouth and said, "Ivar, in eight—"
And the words did not come out. Not blocked. Not choked. They simply were not there, the way a word in a language you don't speak is not there. My jaw was working and the room was fine and there was no sentence.
Three attempts. Three different phrasings. The third one I got as far as August and then found myself saying the word August by itself, twice, like a woman having a small stroke over pie.
"You okay?"
"There's a rule," I said. "I've just found the edge of it."
"Okay."
"I'm going to tell you a story instead."
"Okay," he said, and put his hands flat on the table and gave me his whole attention, and I hated him for it.
"There was a man in Jutland," I said. "1104. A smith. Bad-tempered, deaf in one ear, three daughters. He had eight weeks. He was told, which almost never happens — a priest told him, and the priest was wrong about nearly everything but right about that."
"How'd he take it?"
"Badly, for about a day and a half. He broke a window in his own house. He rode nine miles to shout at the priest and the priest let him, which I've always thought was the priest's finest hour and he had no idea."
"And the wife?"
"There wasn't one. That's the part people always want and I never have."
"Fair."
"And then?"
The rain hit the windows.
"That's the part I've never understood," I said. "That's why I still have it. A thousand years and I've kept almost nothing and I've kept him."
Crash looked at me for a while.
Then he said, "So what did he do with them?"
I have been asked, since, why that sentence.
I've tried to explain it and I've failed every time, so here's the closest I've come.
Every human being I have ever stood beside asks the same question at the end, in one form or another, and the question is how much longer.
He didn't ask how much longer.
He asked what the man did with it.
"He made a gate," I said. My voice came out wrong. "For a churchyard. It took him seven weeks. It's still there. It's terrible work, technically, it's the worst thing he ever made, his hands were going. And every hinge on it is a bird, because the youngest one liked birds."
"Huh," said Crash.
"That's your response."
"No, I'm — " He rubbed his jaw. "I'm just thinking he should've done six weeks on the gate and one on the daughters."
And I stood up in the middle of a truck stop off Highway 200 in June and said, "I need air," and walked out into the rain.
He came out after me. Of course he did. He came out into the rain with his stupid singed eyebrow and no jacket and he stood there in the lot with the fuel islands lit up green behind him and said, "Say the thing you can't say."
"I can't."
"Then say a different thing."
"There isn't a different thing."
"Sol." He put his hands in his pockets. The rain was coming through his shirt already. "I've got a list of stuff I'm never getting. Some of it I earned. I don't need you to fix any of it. I need to know if this — right now, tonight, this — is real, or if I'm the last item on somebody's checklist."
"Ask me something answerable," I said.
"Fine." Rain in his eyelashes. "Do you want to be here?"
"That's not answerable."
"It's the most answerable question there is—"
"Ivar, I have never wanted anything." I said it too loud.
A trucker on the fuel island glanced over and decided against us.
"Do you understand? Not once. Not in a thousand years.
There has never been a single object or hour or person in the whole of creation that I have looked at and thought I would like to have that, and I have watched every human being who ever lived do it constantly, about sandwiches—"
"Sol."
"—and six weeks ago I started wanting a Thursday," I said.
"It's real," I said. "That's the catastrophe."
I kissed him in a truck stop parking lot in the rain because I had been alive for a thousand years and had never once done anything for no reason.
He was very still for about half a second.
Then his hand came up to the back of my neck, careful, deliberate, the burn on his palm rough against my skin, and he kissed me back like a man signing something.
Rain in North Dakota in June is warm. Nobody tells you that.
He had a hand at my jaw and a hand at my back and he was not careful with me, which I have since learned he had decided about in advance, in a hospital corridor, on the instruction of a man with a cane.
When he stopped he didn't step away. He put his forehead against mine and stood there breathing while the rain came off the awning behind us in a sheet.
"Okay," he said.
"That's your response."
"That's my response. I've been working on it for six weeks and that's where I landed."
"You'll want a better one eventually."
"Sol," he said, "I've got about four good sentences in me a year and I'm going to need to ration."
I did not look up at the roof of the truck stop.
I knew she was there. She'd been there since the pie. And I knew exactly what she was doing, because I have done it nine hundred thousand times and it takes less effort than blinking.
Halla filed it.