pass before his superiors—whatever their names and identities—will realize that he has gone renegade. When will they start looking for him, and how will they ever find him if he is no longer operating within his program?
At two o’clock in the morning, traffic is light on Interstate 70, mostly trucks, and he speeds across Kansas in advance of some of the big rigs and in the blustery wakes of others, remembering a movie about Dorothy and her dog Toto and a tornado that plucked them out of that flat farmland and dropped them in a far stranger place.
With both Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, behind him, the killer realizes he’s muttering to himself: “I need, I need.”
This time he feels close to a revelation that will identify the precise nature of his longing.
“I need . . . to be . . . I need to be . . . I need to be . . .”
As the suburbs and finally the dark prairie flash past on both sides, excitement builds steadily in him. He trembles on the brink of an insight that, he senses, will change his life.
“I need to be . . . to be . . . I need to be someone.”
At once, he understands the meaning of what he has said. By “to be someone,” he does not mean what another man might intend to say with those same three words; he does not mean that he needs to be someone famous or rich or important. Just someone. Someone with a real name. Just an ordinary Joe, as they used to say in the movies of the forties. Someone who has more substance than a ghost.
The pull of the unknown lodestar in the west grows stronger by the mile. He leans forward slightly, hunching over the steering wheel, peering intently into the night.
Beyond the horizon, in a town he can’t yet envision, a life awaits him, a place to call home. Family, friends. Somewhere there are shoes into which he can step, a past he can wear comfortably, purpose. And a future in which he can be like other people—accepted.
The car speeds westward, cleaving the night.
11
Half past midnight, on his way to bed, Marty Stillwater stopped by the girls’ room, eased open the door, and stepped silently across the threshold. In the butterscotch-yellow glow of the Mickey Mouse nightlight, he could see both of his daughters sleeping peacefully.
Now and then he liked to watch them for a few minutes while they slept, just to convince himself that they were real. He’d had more than his share of happiness and prosperity and love, so it followed that some of his blessings might prove transitory or even illusory; fate might intervene to balance the scales.
To the ancient Greeks, Fate was personified in the form of three sisters: Clotho, who spun the thread of life; Lachesis, who measured the length of the thread; and Atropos, smallest of the three but the most powerful, who snipped the thread at her whim.
Sometimes, to Marty, that seemed a logical way to look at things. He could imagine the faces of those white-robed women in more detail than he could recall his own Mission Viejo neighbors. Clotho had a kind face with merry eyes, reminiscent of the actress Angela Lansbury, and Lachesis was as cute as Goldie Hawn but with a saintly aura. Ridiculous, but that’s how he saw them. Atropos was a bitch, beautiful but cold—pinched mouth, anthracite-black eyes.
The trick was to remain in the good graces of the first two sisters without drawing the attention of the third.
Five years ago, in the guise of a blood disorder, Atropos had descended from her celestial home to take a whack at the thread of Charlotte’s life and, thankfully, had failed to cut it all the way through. But this goddess answered to many names besides Atropos: cancer, cerebral hemorrhage, coronary thrombosis, fire, earthquake, poison, homicide, and countless others. Now perhaps she was paying them a return visit under one of her many pseudonyms, with Marty as her target instead of Charlotte.
Frequently, the vivid imagination of a novelist was a curse.
A whirring-clicking noise
At two o’clock in the morning, traffic is light on Interstate 70, mostly trucks, and he speeds across Kansas in advance of some of the big rigs and in the blustery wakes of others, remembering a movie about Dorothy and her dog Toto and a tornado that plucked them out of that flat farmland and dropped them in a far stranger place.
With both Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, behind him, the killer realizes he’s muttering to himself: “I need, I need.”
This time he feels close to a revelation that will identify the precise nature of his longing.
“I need . . . to be . . . I need to be . . . I need to be . . .”
As the suburbs and finally the dark prairie flash past on both sides, excitement builds steadily in him. He trembles on the brink of an insight that, he senses, will change his life.
“I need to be . . . to be . . . I need to be someone.”
At once, he understands the meaning of what he has said. By “to be someone,” he does not mean what another man might intend to say with those same three words; he does not mean that he needs to be someone famous or rich or important. Just someone. Someone with a real name. Just an ordinary Joe, as they used to say in the movies of the forties. Someone who has more substance than a ghost.
The pull of the unknown lodestar in the west grows stronger by the mile. He leans forward slightly, hunching over the steering wheel, peering intently into the night.
Beyond the horizon, in a town he can’t yet envision, a life awaits him, a place to call home. Family, friends. Somewhere there are shoes into which he can step, a past he can wear comfortably, purpose. And a future in which he can be like other people—accepted.
The car speeds westward, cleaving the night.
11
Half past midnight, on his way to bed, Marty Stillwater stopped by the girls’ room, eased open the door, and stepped silently across the threshold. In the butterscotch-yellow glow of the Mickey Mouse nightlight, he could see both of his daughters sleeping peacefully.
Now and then he liked to watch them for a few minutes while they slept, just to convince himself that they were real. He’d had more than his share of happiness and prosperity and love, so it followed that some of his blessings might prove transitory or even illusory; fate might intervene to balance the scales.
To the ancient Greeks, Fate was personified in the form of three sisters: Clotho, who spun the thread of life; Lachesis, who measured the length of the thread; and Atropos, smallest of the three but the most powerful, who snipped the thread at her whim.
Sometimes, to Marty, that seemed a logical way to look at things. He could imagine the faces of those white-robed women in more detail than he could recall his own Mission Viejo neighbors. Clotho had a kind face with merry eyes, reminiscent of the actress Angela Lansbury, and Lachesis was as cute as Goldie Hawn but with a saintly aura. Ridiculous, but that’s how he saw them. Atropos was a bitch, beautiful but cold—pinched mouth, anthracite-black eyes.
The trick was to remain in the good graces of the first two sisters without drawing the attention of the third.
Five years ago, in the guise of a blood disorder, Atropos had descended from her celestial home to take a whack at the thread of Charlotte’s life and, thankfully, had failed to cut it all the way through. But this goddess answered to many names besides Atropos: cancer, cerebral hemorrhage, coronary thrombosis, fire, earthquake, poison, homicide, and countless others. Now perhaps she was paying them a return visit under one of her many pseudonyms, with Marty as her target instead of Charlotte.
Frequently, the vivid imagination of a novelist was a curse.
A whirring-clicking noise
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