Blind Lake

Vogel said to Elaine, “The Gobi Plateau?”

“When I was writing my biography of Roy Chapman Andrews. In the Footsteps of Time: Paleobiology Then and Now. Admittedly, I was twenty-five. You ever sleep in a tent, Sebastian?”

Vogel was sixty years old. He was pale except for the hectic red of his cheeks, and he wore shapeless sweaters to disguise the awkward generosity of his stomach and hips. Elaine disliked him — he was a parvenu, she had whispered to Chris, a fraud, practically a fucking spiritualist — and Vogel had compounded the sin with his unfailing politeness. “Algonquin Park,” he said. “Canada. A camping trip. Decades ago, of course.”

“Looking for God?”

“It was a coed trip. As I recall, I was looking to get laid.”

“You were what, a divinity student?”

“We didn’t take vows of chastity, Elaine.”

“Doesn’t God frown on things like that?”

“Things like what? Like sexual intercourse? Not so far as I have been able to discern, no. You should read my book.”

“Ah, but I did.” She turned to Chris. “Have you?”

“Not yet.”

“Sebastian is an old-fashioned mystic. God in all things.”

“In some things more than others,” Sebastian said, which struck Chris as both cryptic and typically Sebastian.

“Fascinating as this is,” Chris said, “I’m thinking we should get some di

“I’m game,” Elaine said, “as long as you promise not to pick up the waitress.”

“I’m not hungry,” Vogel said. “Go on without me. I’ll guard the luggage.”

“Fast, St. Francis,” Elaine said, shrugging her jacket on.

Chris knew about Elaine’s Roy Chapman Andrews biography. He had read it as a freshman. Back then she had been an up-and-coming science journalist, shortlisted for an AAAS Westinghouse Award, charting a career path he hoped one day to follow.

Chris’s one and only book to date had also been a biography of a sort. The nice thing about Elaine was that she had not made an issue of the book’s stormy history and seemed to have no objection to working with him. Amazing, he thought, what you learn to settle for.

The restaurant Ari Weingart had recommended was tucked between an interface store and an office-supply shop in the open-air wing of the mallway. Most of these stores were closed for the evening, and the concourse had a vaguely derelict aspect in the cooling autumn air. But the diner, a franchise Sawyer’s Steak Seafood, was doing a brisk business. Big crowd, lots of talk in the air. They grabbed a vinyl booth by the wide concourse window. The decor was chrome and pastel and potted plants, very late-twentieth-century, the fake reassurance of a fake antiquity. The menus were shaped like T-bones.

Chris felt blissfully anonymous.

“Good God,” Elaine said. “Darkest suburbia.”

“What are you ordering?”

“Well, let’s see. The All-Day Breakfast? The Mom’s Comfort Meat Loaf?”

A waiter approached in time to hear her name these offerings in a tone of high irony. “The Atlantic Salmon is good,” he said.

“Good for what, exactly? No, never mind. The salmon will do. Chris?”

He ordered the same, embarrassed. The waiter shrugged and walked away.

“You can be an incredible snob, Elaine.”

“Think about where we are. At the cutting edge of human knowledge. Standing on the shoulders of Copernicus and Galileo. So where do we eat? A truck stop with a salad bar.”

Chris had never figured out how Elaine reconciled her close attention to food with her carefully suppressed middle-age spread. Rewarding herself with quality, he guessed. Sacrificing quantity. Balancing act. She was a Wallenda of the waistline.

“I mean, come on,” she said, “who exactly is being snobbish here? I’m fifty years old, I know what I like, I can endure a fast-food joint or a frozen di

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Confess. Crossbank was a washout for you.”

“I picked up some useful material.” Or at least one totemic quote. It could end at any time. Almost a Baptist piety.

“I have a theory about you,” Elaine said.

“Maybe we should just eat.”

“No, no, you don’t escape the obnoxious old harridan quite as easily as that.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Just be quiet. Have a breadstick or something. I told you I read Sebastian’s book. I read yours, too.”

“Maybe this sounds childish, but I’d really prefer not to talk about it.”

“All I want to say is, it’s a good book. You, Chris Carmody, wrote a good book. You did the legwork and you drew the necessary conclusions. Now you want to blame yourself for not flinching?”

“Elaine—”

“You want to flush your career away, pretending to work and not working and blowing deadlines and screwing waitresses with big tits and drinking yourself to sleep? Because you can totally do that. You wouldn’t be the first. Not by a country mile. Self-pity is such an absorbing hobby.”

“A man died, Elaine.”

“You didn’t kill him.”

“That’s debatable.”

“No, Chris, it’s not debatable. Galliano went over that hill either accidentally or as a willed act of self-destruction. Maybe he regretted his sins or maybe not, but they were his sins, not yours.”

“I exposed him to ridicule.”

“You exposed work that was dangerously shoddy and self-serving and a threat to i

“Jesus, Elaine, how badly does the world need one more fucking good book?”

“ — and a true book, and you wrote it out of a sense of indignity that was not misplaced.”

“I appreciate you saying this, but—”

“And the thing is, you obviously got nothing useful from Crossbank, and what worries me is that you’ll get nothing here, and blame yourself for it, and you’ll blow off the deadline in order to conduct more efficiently this project of self-punishment you’ve embarked on. And that’s so goddamn unprofessional. I mean, Vogel is a crackpot, but at least he’ll produce copy.”

For a moment Chris entertained the idea of getting up and walking out of the restaurant. He could go back to the gym and interview some of the stranded day workers. They would talk to him, at least. All he was getting from Elaine was more guilt, and he’d had enough, thank you.

The salmon arrived, congealing in drizzled butter.

“What you have to do—” She paused. The waiter dangled an enormous wooden pepper mill over the table. “Take that away, thank you.”

The waiter fled.

“What you have to do, Chris, is stop acting like you have something to be ashamed of. The book you wrote, use it. If someone’s hostile about it, confront them. If they’re afraid of you because of it, use their fear. If you’re stonewalled, you can at least write the story of how you were stonewalled and how it felt to walk around Blind Lake as a pariah. But don’t blow this opportunity.” She leaned forward, her sleeves dangling perilously close to the butter sauce. “Because the thing is, Chris, this is Blind Lake. Maybe the great unwashed public has only a vague notion of what goes on here, but we know better, right? This is where all the textbooks get rewritten. This is where the human species begins to define its place in the universe. This is the fulcrum of who we are and what we’ll become.”

“You sound like a brochure.”

She drew back. “Why? You think I’m too wrinkled and cynical to recognize something genuinely awesome when I see it?”

“I didn’t mean that. I—”