Pandemonium

“Which way?” O’Connell said. It didn’t seem to matter: left, right, and forward, the buildings petered out, giving way to open fields. Unfortunately, nothing looked familiar. I didn’t need a voice whispering to me like in Field of Dreams, but I thought I deserved something. Some sign. At least a vague sense of déjà vu. A Toyota pickup much newer than O’Connell’s pulled up to the intersection opposite us, stopped. The driver, a round-faced woman with long brown hair, waited for us to pull forward.

“A Toyota’s a Toyota,” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind. Just drive up to the edge and then we’ll turn around.” Drawn onward.

As we passed the other driver, she waved, and I waved back. It seemed like the Kansas thing to do.

We covered the entire town in ten minutes. The stores tended toward the practical and cheap: Tire store, used bookstore, fabric shop, pizza place, bars. A tiny grocery. The biggest commercial enterprise was a John Deere dealership: a long sheet-metal building on a gravel lot stocked with a dozen old and new tractors and many large, seriouslooking bladed attachments that, as an American male, I ought to have been able to identify. We only saw a few people on the street, and maybe a dozen parked cars, most of those near the elementary school, a new-looking building a few hundred yards south of the center of town.

“Anything ring a bell?” O’Connell said.

“Not really.” I ran a hand through my hair.

“Pick a direction,” O’Connell said.

“You think I made this up?”

She sighed. “Which way do you want me to go?”

“The town’s here, isn’t it?” I said. “I know that doesn’t mean Dr. Awkward’s secret laboratory is under the John Deere distributor, but it’s got to mean something. You’re the Jungian mystic—you should be digging all this synchronicity. This is your cue to jump into spiritual guide mode. Do some priest stuff.”

“Priest stuff.”

“I don’t know—pray or something. Dish out some ancient wisdom.”

“Fine. You start chanting, and I’ll get out the I Ching and throw some coins. Now which fucking way?”

I pointed north.

The problem was that I didn’t know what we were looking for. My whole thinking was this: the Painter kept drawing the farm; I drew the farm; therefore the farm is important. Back in the Waldheims’ library this had seemed like irrefutable logic. And when I opened that copy of RADAR Man, Olympia was waiting for me like a promise. Jesus. First I’d hung all my hopes on shrinks, then Dr. Ram, then O’Connell. Now I was clinging to a fucking comic book. We passed the mailbox-marked entrances to two farms, both with the name Johnson stenciled on the box. The houses and barns were set far back from the road, but the silos were silver and the configurations of buildings were all wrong.

A mile or so later we came upon a suburban subdivision plopped down in the middle of a field. Eight or nine houses, each of them newer and larger than any of the homes we’d seen so far, huddled together for protection against the wind. The stone and cement slab at the entrance said, castle creek.

I didn’t see any creek, though a quarter mile later the road crossed a narrow cement bridge over a wide, rocky ditch. In the middle of the dry bed was a large round boulder like a hippo’s rump.

“What is it?” O’Connell said. “Did you see something?”

“What? No.”

“Do you want to keep going?”

“Forget it.” I gestured toward the building up ahead. At the top of a slight rise was a square gray building that had to be the hospital.

“Let’s turn around up there and then try to find lunch.”

The circle drive took us up to a 1920s Greek temple: three stories of stone, with a jutting, peaked entrance propped up by white columns. The wooden sign posted out front read olympia sanatorium.