The Chronoliths

I spent much of every night awake, staring out the motel window and drinking, alternately, beer and diet cola (and peeing every half hour), until sleep broke over me like a glutinous wave. What dreams I had were chaotic and futile. Waking up to the brutal irony of spring, of sunlight in a bottomless blue sky, was like waking from a dream into a dream.

I had figured my contact with Ashlee Mills was a one-shot, but she called me on my pocket phone ten days after Kaitlin’s disappearance. Her voice was businesslike and she came to the point quickly: “I arranged to meet someone,” she said, “a man who might know something about Adam and Kaitlin, but I don’t want to meet him alone.”

“I’m free this afternoon,” I said.

“He works nights. If you call what he does work. This might not be pretty.”

“What is he, a pimp?”

“Uh-uh,” she said. “He’s a sort of a drug dealer.”

I had spent much of the last week on the net, researching the phenomenon of “haj youth” and the Kuinist movement, tu

There was, of course, no unified Kuinist movement. Lacking a flesh-and-blood Kuin, the “movement” was a patchwork of utopian ideologies and quasi-religious cults, each competing for the title. What they had in common was simply the act of veneration, the worship of the Chronoliths. For the hajists, any Chronolith was a holy object. Hajists attributed all sorts of powers to the physical proximity of a Kuin stone: enlightenment, healing, psychological transformation, epiphanies great and small. But unlike the pilgrims at Lourdes, for instance, the vast majority of hajists were young. It was, in the twentieth century term, a “youth movement.” Like most such movements, it was as much style as substance. Very few Americans ever made a physical pilgrimage to a Chronolith site, but it was not uncommon to see a teenager with a Kuinist logo on his hat or shirt — most often the ubiquitous “K+” in a red or orange circle. (Or any of the subtler and supposedly secret signs: scarred nipples or earlobes, silver ankle bracelets, white headbands.)

The K+ symbol abounded in Ashlee’s neighborhood, chalked or painted on walls and sidewalks. I pulled up outside the Chinese restaurant at the appointed time, and Ashlee scurried out of her apartment door and into the passenger seat. “It’s good you have a cheap car,” she said. “It won’t attract attention.”

“Where are we going?”

She gave me an address five blocks farther into the city, where the only surviving businesses were stock-houses, window-service fast-food outlets, and liquor stores.

“The guy’s name,” Ashlee said without preamble, “is Cheever Cox, and he’s tied into pretty much all the trade you can’t report on your IRS form. I know him because I used to buy tobacco from him.” She said this in a carefully neutral tone but glanced at me for signs of disapproval. “Before I got my addict’s license, I mean.”

“What does he know about Kait and Adam?”

“Maybe nothing, but when I called him yesterday he said he’d heard about a cut-rate haj and some new rumor about Kuin and he didn’t want to talk about it over an unencrypted line. Cheever’s kind of paranoid that way.”

“You think this is legitimate?”

“Tell you the truth? I don’t really know.”

She rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, almost defiantly, waiting for my reaction. Mi

“Oh, please.”

“I’m not passing judgment, I’m making conversation.”

“I don’t especially want to talk about it.” She exhaled noisily. “There hasn’t been a whole lot holding me together the last few years, Mr. Warden.”

“Scott.”

“Scott, then. It’s not that I’m a weak person. But… did you ever smoke?”

“No.” I had been spared the anti-abuse vaccines that were pushed on so many young people in those days (and the resultant risk of adult antibody disorders), but tobacco simply wasn’t my vice.

“It’s probably killing me, but I don’t have much else.” She seemed to struggle after a thought, then let it go. “It calms me down.”

“I’m not condemning you for it. Actually, I always liked the smell of burning tobacco. At least from a distance.”

She smiled wryly. “Uh-huh. You’re a real degenerate, I can tell that about you.”

“You miss California?”

“Do I miss California?” She rolled her eyes. “Is this a real conversation or are you just nervous about meeting Cheever? Because you don’t have to be. He’s a little shady but he’s not a bad person.”

“That’s reassuring,” I said.

“You’ll see.”

The address was a run-down semidetached wood-frame house. The porch light was out, probably permanently. The stairs sagged. Ashlee pulled open the rusty fly screen and rapped at the door.

Cheever Cox opened up when Ashlee identified herself. Cox was a bald man of about thirty-five, wearing Levis and a pale blue shirt with what looked like marinara sauce dribbled down the collar. “Hey, Ashlee,” he barked, hugging her. He gave me a brief glance.

Ashlee introduced me and said, “It’s about what we talked about on the phone.”

The front room contained a faded sofa, two wooden folding chairs, and a coffee table with ashtray. Down the dim hallway I could see a corner of the kitchen. If Cox made a lot of money in the illicit drug trade, he wasn’t spending it on decor. But maybe he had a country house.

He spotted the pack of cigarettes sticking out of Ashlee’s shirt pocket. “Shit, Ashlee,” he said, “you on a script, too? Fucking government’s taking away my business with those little pussy prescription sticks.”

“I’ll lose my script next year,” Ashlee said, “if I’m not on a patch or a program. Worse, I’ll lose my health insurance.”

He gri

“Not a chance.” She glanced at me. “I’ll get my teeth whitened and find a good job.”

“Be a citizen,” Cox said.

“Damn right.”

“Marry your boyfriend, too?”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Okay, Ash, I’m sorry, don’t mind me. You want something? A little more than the druggist is willing to sell you?”

“I want to ask you some questions about Adam.”

“Yeah, but that can’t be all you want.”

Cox made it obvious that he would have nothing to say unless Ashlee bought something from him. Business is business, he said.

“It’s about my son, Cheever.”

“I know, and I love you and Adam both, but Ashlee, it’s business.”

So she paid him for a carton of what she called “loose smokes,” which Cox fetched from the basement. She held the box in her lap. The box reeked.

Cox settled into his chair. “What it is,” he told Ashlee, “is, I go into the squatters’ buildings a lot, especially down on Franklin, or Lowertown, or the old Cargill warehouses, so I see these kids. And, you know, Adam hung with that crowd, too. It’s not a big market for me because these kids don’t have any money, basically. They’re shoplifting food. But every once in a while one of ‘em comes by some cash, I don’t ask how, and they want a carton, two cartons, smokes and drinks and chemicals and so forth. A lot of times it was Adam who would come to me, because I knew him from when you and I did business on a more regular basis.”

Ashlee lowered her eyes at this assertion but said nothing.

“Also, frankly, Adam has a little more on the ball than most of those people. They call themselves hajists or Kuinists but they’re about as political as bricks. You know who does the real haj thing? Rich kids. Rich kids and celebs. They go to Israel or Egypt and burn their scented candles or whatever. Downtown, it’s different. Most of these kids wouldn’t go out of their way for Kuin if he was holding a coronation ball in their back yard. Well, Adam figured that out. That’s why he was fooling around with the Copperhead clubs in Wayzata, Edina — looking for people who think the way he does but are maybe a little more gullible and a little more flush than the downtown crowd.”