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Dave Eggers' The Wild Things is available for preorder, in regular hardcover and
limited-edition fur-covered.
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BY ALISON SMITH- - - - The first one said it was incurable. The next agreed. "Incurable," he sighed. The third one looked and looked and found nothing. He tapped her temple. "It's all in your head," he said. The fourth one put his hand in and cried, "Mother! Mother!" The fifth never saw anything like it. "I never saw anything like it," he gasped as he draped his fingers over his stethoscope. The sixth agreed with the first and the seventh agreed with the third. He parted her legs and said, "There's nothing wrong with you." Alice sat up. The paper gown crinkled. Her feet gripped the metal stirrups. "But it hurts," she said and she pointed. "Maybe it's a rash," Number Seven said and he gave her some small white pills. They did not help. "Maybe it's spores," he said and he gave her a tube of gel. This made it worse. "Maybe it's a virus." He gave her a bottle of yellow pills. When Alice returned for the fourth time and told Number Seven it was not better, he slumped against the examining table, his white coat trailing. "There's nothing left," he said. "Nothing?" Alice asked. "What am I going to do?" He put his finger to her lips and shook his head. "Not here," he said. That evening, Number Seven took Alice out to dinner. He leaned in over the herb-encrusted salmon croquettes. "Do you mind if I call you Alice?" he asked. Alice frowned. "What's wrong with me?" Number Seven pushed the fish around his plate. "I don't know," he said and then he started to cry. "It's OK," Alice murmured. "At least you tried." He touched her hand. She held her napkin. She could not eat. Everything tasted incurable. The rice, the saffron asparagus soufflé, the flaming liquor in the dessert—all of it, incurable. The eighth told her it was the feminine bleeding wound. "All women have it," he said. The ninth told her she didn't use it enough. "It's atrophied," he said as he peeled off his latex gloves with a little shiver. "But," said Alice as she sat up on her elbows, "it hurts." The tenth said, "Call me Bob, why don't you?" He looked inside and shook his head. He sat next to her. Alice held on to the edge of the metal table. "I've been thinking," he whispered. She could smell the Scope on his breath. "I've got something that could fix this." "Oh?" said Alice and she brightened. She felt the hair on his arm brush against her thigh. "Yes," said Bob. He nodded his head up and down. It was then that she caught sight of the bulge inside Number Ten's slacks. Alice decided to try a new town, a larger one. Back east, she thought, where the civilized people live. This town had underground tunnels with trains inside. On her first day, Alice descended the cement stairs, walked onto a waiting car and sat down. The orange plastic seat cupped her thighs. The doors sighed shut. The rails rushed along beneath her. She liked the dark, jerking movement of it, the idea of the ground flying by, right beside her. When the car stopped and the doors flew open, Alice emerged. She walked up another cement staircase and found herself in an entirely different part of the city. "Brilliant," Alice thought. She road the underground trains for days. Then Alice discovered take-out. As she did not have a phone in her one-room walk-up, she had to call from the payphone on the corner when she wanted to place an order. But she did not mind. Alice liked everything about take-out. She liked the warm white boxes with their fold-away lids, the plastic utensils, the stiff paper bags that held in the gooey warmth. She believed that a city which could deliver such delicacies right to your door was a city of great promise. Alice stayed up late, ate Indian lentil soup from a box and said, out loud, "This is it. This is where I'll find it." She found a job stocking shelves in a book store. The eleventh told her try something different. "I've seen this before. There's nothing for it," he said and he gave her a card with a number on it. "Try this anyway." Under the number were printed the words, "Psychic Healer." This card led Alice to Number Twelve. She was alternative. "Find a piece of gold," Number Twelve said, "real gold. Boil it for three days and keep the water. Store it in a cool place. Drink this water every day for a month." Number Twelve nodded. Alice nodded. "It aches," she said. A pinched smile lighted across Number Twelve's face. She clasped her hands together. Gold bangles tripped down her arms and she nodded some more. Alice did not have any gold. No ring, no broach, not even a pendant. So she bought a set of gold-rimmed plates at the Salvation Army and boiled them for three days. The painted flowers dissolved into the water, turning it pink, then green and then, finally, the color of mud. Alice slurped at her box of green lentil soup and stared into the murky liquid. The thirteenth was also alternative. He said, "Imagine a white light entering your body. Its energy fills you. Imagine this white light healing your internal wound." "A wound?" Alice thought. "Is that what I have?" Alice ordered more take-out. The fourteenth was recommended by the thirteenth. This one did not even have a card. Instead, he had fountains, dozens of them. In the waiting room tiny gurgling pumps sprouted out of copper bowls. Held in place with river stones, they bubbled and chattered all around her. Number Fourteen was a mumbler. He swallowed his words, half-spoken. He talked into the collar of his shirt. Alice leaned in. She could not hear him over the sound of running water. "I beg your pardon?" she asked. "Become one with the water," Number Fourteen mumbled, "and you will find your cure." "How?" asked Alice. Number Fourteen spread his arms. He smiled. He closed his eyes. Alice leaned in and waited. He said nothing. She thought perhaps he had fallen asleep. "Sir," she whispered. "Sir?" But Number Fourteen did not answer. Alice found an indoor lap pool. After her morning shift at the bookstore, she swam up and down between the ropes. The water soothed her—the buoyancy of it, the soft fingers of cold. That winter, Alice swam and swam. She swam so many laps that her fingers pruned and her shoulders grew broad and taut. Every day, when she had completed her laps, Alice would linger in the pool. She held on to the side, gasping for breath, and floated. She spread her arms, tilted her head back and let the water surround her like a shapeless, soft eraser. But every time she stepped out of the pool, the ache returned. Alice waited. She thought perhaps what she needed was rest. Perhaps what the ache wanted was to be left alone. So for an entire year she tried to ignore it. She did not see a single doctor. She swam up and down between the ropes. She shelved books. She rode the subway. Closing her eyes, she leaned her head against the plastic seat and waited for her life to change. Every night, she called for take-out from the pay phone on the corner. Every day, she gazed down at the neat lines of bills in the bookstore cash register. Through it all, the ache zinged and popped. It burned and festered. And the pain of it began to eat away at her. At times, Alice felt certain there must be little left inside her. And that year, the-year-of-not-trying, something cold and hard slipped inside Alice and her heart became like a knife drawer. Sharp and shining, she kept it closed. Then Alice met the Specialist. "The best in the city," her coworker whispered handing her a card as she adjusted the sale sign by the overstock books. "He's a specialist." Alice shook her head. "I'm done with doctors," she whispered back. "Just try," her coworker said. "Try this one." Alice had to wait a month for an appointment and when she did finally see him, when at last she climbed up onto his metal table and leaned back, the Specialist said she was empty. "Empty!" he shrieked, his head popping up from behind the paper sheet. "There's nothing there!" He probed deeper. "It's cold," he cried. "It's so cold!" And then something strange happened, something entirely new. Alice heard a muffled shrieking and a great sucking sound. The room filled with a gust of cold air and then—silence. The Specialist was gone. Alice sat up on her elbows and looked around her. "Where is he?" she asked the nurse. "In there!" the nurse cried as she pointed between Alice's legs. "And he's caught!" Alice plucked at the sheet, looking beneath it. Nothing. She leaned over and peered under the table. Still nothing. The Specialist was nowhere. Alice sat back on the metal table, her feet suspended in the stirrups. She lay very still and listened. She could hear a distant sound. The Specialist's voice, frantic and screaming, echoed somewhere below her. Alice looked over at the nurse. The nurse shook her head. Alice crossed her arms and waited. After twenty minutes Alice shifted her weight and moved to rise. As she did, the distant echo grew louder. Then, with a terrible rush of cold air, The Specialist reemerged. His head rising above the paper sheet, his teeth chattering, a single icicle hung from the end of his nose. "This is unbelievable," cried the Specialist. He pressed a red button. "Code Blue," he screamed into a mesh speaker in the wall. "I need a second opinion!" He paced. The icicle at the end of his nose began to melt. "I've got to get documentation," he said. "I need pictures. I need verification." He pressed the red button again and called into the mesh speaker. "Please, can I get some help in here!" His icicle dripped on the paper sheet. "I'll help," the nurse said. She set down her clipboard. "No," said the Specialist. "I need a doctor. This is, is…" he looked down at Alice and shook his head, "unprecedented." "I don't know about that," said the nurse and she ducked her head below the paper sheet. "How deep did you get?" she asked. "Deep enough," the Specialist said. "Hmm," said the nurse. "Oh!" said the Specialist, "If you don't believe me, I'll prove it." The Specialist rushed out of the room. He returned moments later with a snowsuit, a pith helmet, and a flashlight. He suited up. "I'm going in," he said. "Do you need anything?" he asked Alice. Alice shrugged. "Why don't you order Chinese," he said. "I may be a while." "Take-out," thought Alice, and she warmed to the Specialist. "Even if he did say I was empty and cold inside." The Specialist put his hand inside Alice, then his arm. Before he could say another word, there was a great sucking sound, the room filled with a gust of cold air and, for the second time that day, the Specialist fell inside Alice. The hours passed. The take-out arrive. Alice slurped her noodles. She asked for a pillow, but the Nurse was busy peering into the pages of an enormous black book. She wondered where the Specialist had gone. She stretched her arms up over her head, sat back, and picked up her box of noodles. An hour later, the Specialist emerged. When she saw him rise up from between her legs, covered in icicles and shivering, Alice set down her chopsticks. "My God, there's nothing in there!" the Specialist cried, his face shining with cold. "Nothing! Miles of it! I could not even find the edges of her." Alice gazed at the Specialist's chapped hands. She had to admit that they did look quite frostbitten. Alice reached for her sweater. The Specialist set down his flashlight and rushed away to record his findings. The nurse followed, waving a clipboard. Alice was alone. One at a time, she removed her feet from the stirrups. She stretched out. She pulled the paper gown tight against herself. She looked around the room. On one wall hung a print of a field of poppies, red and bursting. On the other, a picture of a snowy tundra. After waiting on the table for quite a while, Alice sighed. "They must have forgotten about me," she thought. She looked at her watch. If she didn't leave now, she would be late for her shift at the bookstore. She stood up, found her slacks and blouse, and began to dress. Just as she was stepping into the second pant leg, the Specialist burst into the room holding a camera. "I must have you for my new research project," he cried. "You must stay with me and work." He grasped her shoulders. Alice held on to the waist of her slacks. "A woman with nothing inside but a cold, hard breeze!" he gazed out beyond her, at the field of poppies. Then he looked down at Alice, as if he were seeing her for the first time. "I've never found anything like you," he smiled. "Come with me! We'll travel the world. We'll meet all the great doctors. We'll stay in the best hotels. Separate rooms, of course." Alice thought for a moment. She knew it could not be true. She knew that there was something inside her, something more than a cold, hard breeze. But no one had made this much of a fuss over her before. No one had ever seemed to care like he did. This Specialist may not have understood her, but something about her thrilled him. "Maybe that's more important than understanding," Alice thought. She looked into the Specialist's eyes. They were green, the color of shallow ocean water. She felt a little pull in her chest, a soft tug, as if the drawer of her heart were opening. She saw the roped lane at the swimming pool and the beige mouth of the bookstore cash register, gaping and she realized that she was lonely. "Will you help me, then?" she asked. "If I go with you, will we find a cure for the constant ache? The pain of it, it tires me so." "Pain?" The Specialist tilted his head to one side. No one had told him this. "You have pain?" He paused a moment, then he shrugged and embraced Alice. He picked her up and swung her around twice. The rush of air past her face, the whirl of the white, sanitary room as it flew by, it startled Alice. A new feeling, a feeling she could not quite describe, flooded her veins. It was not happiness, but it was close. The closest she had been in a long time. - - - - In Atlantic City they praised her, treated her like royalty. "The Queen of Emptiness!" they said. In Hershey they offered her a complimentary sun-suit with a picture of the arctic printed on it, and a sash that read: "Miss Iceberg," its pink letters marching across the white satin. The Specialist developed a slide show to accompany his demonstration. "Dim the lights," he said. Alice liked this part best. She hated it when he called her up on stage, when he poked and prodded with his cold, clammy hands. Alice sunk back in her seat and watched the photographs glow and shimmer against the white screen. She never tired of looking at them. "A distant landscape," the Specialist barked, his hand on the remote. "Cold, empty, devoid of life as we know it." Alice watched as the mysterious vistas appeared before her: a blue wash of glaciers, a white seamless line of snow. "The Interior of Alice N. is like a frozen tundra. Nothing can live there!" the Specialist bellowed across the darkened room. This is where Alice always lost track. It never failed. Every time the Specialist started in on the part about the cold and the snow stuck up inside her, Alice felt the room begin to spin. Her vision tunneled. She watched the Specialist's mouth move and she knew that he was talking, that he was explaining to the crowd of doctors behind her what it was like to be her, what it was like to be inside of her. But she could not make out what he said. In Gainesville she could smell the ocean, but it was too far to reach. She wanted to swim. The Specialist said, "We have no time for recreation." And so she lay on the bed while he rifled through his papers. She imagined herself in the water, the salt shine rising up, coating her white arms. In Louisville they laughed her off stage and the Specialist after her. "There's no such thing," the doctors said. "No such thing as a woman with nothing inside but a cold, hard breeze!" "You don't believe me?" the Specialist said. He pointed at Alice, "Then why don't you look for yourself?" The room fell silent. The doctors blanched. They stepped away from the stage. Someone dropped a clipboard. It skittered across the concrete floor. The Specialist nodded. He stepped up to the podium once again. "I thought so," he said. "I thought that would stop you." He put his arm around Alice. "When you're ready to do some real research, you'll know where to find us." He guided her off. They headed west. Later, years later, long after the National Guard had captured him, the Specialist would say that it was Los Angeles where it all started to go wrong. For it was there, swept along by the bright lights and the promise of fame, that he decided to put Alice in the talk show circuit. "To broaden your audience," the Specialist said and he spread his arms wide to make his point. The Specialist bought her a new suit. He said it was a present for their success. "Now we've hit the big time!" he beamed at her. Alice met the talk show host in the dressing room moments before she was to go on air. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Empty," he said and he kissed her cheek. His mustache made her sneeze. Alice wiped her nose and asked for a glass of water. The host smiled at Alice. His white teeth shimmered under the green room lights. He leaned in close to Alice and looked at her, into her face, closely. It had been so long since someone had looked at her like that. Alice tipped her head down. She blushed. She placed the rim of the glass against her lips and sipped. "She's going to need make-up!" the Host bellowed. After her make-up session, the host guided her on stage. Under the bright lights, the makeup felt like a thick, gooey mask. "Here's the little lady with the big empty!" the Host said. An applause sign popped up. The Host turned toward the Specialist. He wanted to see all the comparative charts. He wanted the entire history of his research. "Start from the beginning," the host said, leaning forward in his over-stuffed chair, "and don't leave out a thing." The Specialist was happy to oblige. He pulled out statistics on the discrepancy between the size of Alice's outside and her inside. "The circumference of her torso," he said and he pointed at one chart, "as opposed to the circumference of her interior." He pointed to a second chart. "Alice defies logic!" This is where he always got excited. "She's an impossibility!" he cried. "And here she sits before you." The Host smiled. "A woman who laughs in the face of science!" The camera cut to a psychiatrist who spoke about the physical-manifestation-of-a-mental-state-brought-on-by-extreme-stress. He ended with, "It's remarkable. Quite remarkable." The Host opened the discussion up to the audience. Alice was asked questions about her personal life that puzzled her. "How much do you eat?" "Do you like cold weather?" "Do you have a boyfriend?" Alice squirmed in her seat. The Host broke in. "Don't worry," he patted Alice's hand. "We'll find you a boyfriend," he said. "No doubt about that!" The audience cheered. Then a woman from the back row stood up, tapped the mike, and asked, "Does it ever hurt? I mean, does it ache?" Alice felt her face flush and tingle. Finally, a question that she wanted to answer. She cleared her throat. "As a matter of fact," Alice began and then she lost the thread of her thought. She faltered. The Host tapped his fingers together and waited. The Specialist shifted in his seat. "Go on," he nodded. "As a matter of fact," she tried again, but the words would not come. The Host put his hand on Alice's shoulder. "Hold that thought," he smiled. He turned and spoke to the camera lens. "We'll be right back." - - - - "We're going back to Gainesville," the Specialist said the following morning while they were in a cab on the way to the airport. "You're not ready for the big time. We need to rehearse." As they handed in their boarding passes and headed for the gate, they were intercepted by a man in a black suit with an ear prompt. "Excuse me," he said. "I've been sent by the talk show. They want you back." The Specialist blinked. "Really? They want us?" The man held his ear prompt and nodded. It turned out that Alice was a hit. Alice and her frozen tundra were the topic-of-the-day on every major morning newscast. So Alice and the Specialist returned to the studio. Alice submitted to the creams and cover-up, the blush and shadow of the make-up artist. Once again, Alice and the Specialist found themselves under the hot studio lights, awaiting further instruction. The host beamed at them. The second interview went better than the first. The Specialist showed more slides. Alice was relieved when they dimmed the lights. The monitor flooded with the bright grays and whites of the frozen tundra. A distant sun bounced off all that glacial terrain. Before she knew it, the show was over and Alice found herself in her new suit in the green room once again, scraping make-up off her face. By the end of the week Alice and the Specialist were regulars on the talk show. "It seems like everybody wants a piece of the little girl with the big empty," the host smiled. He winked at Alice. Reporters hounded them. Hotel staff hovered. Crowds formed around them wherever they went. And then, one day, the tide turned. The skeptics arrived—researchers and doctors, lab technicians and the geologists—all of whom did not believe in the cold-and-empty theory. They sat in the studio audience, crossed their arms and waited. "For some solid evidence," they whispered. "For one verifiable fact," they sneered. The skeptics stared dubiously at the Specialist's charts. They recalculated his measurements. They scratched their heads. They lifted their chins. "Impossible," they said. "There's no such thing." The Specialist was right there, his hand on Alice's shoulder, starting in with his challenge. "If you don't believe me," he began, "then why don't you see for yourself?" Again, the room fell silent. Someone dropped a pen. They all stepped back. "I thought so," the Specialist said. But he spoke too soon. From the back, a white-coated lab technician with a shock of bright red hair, stepped out of the crowds and raised his hand. "I'll go," he said. "I'd like to see." And then another stepped forward. And another. And another. They all wanted to see this empty landscape, firsthand. Soon there was a line forming at the edge of the stage. "We'll go," they cried. "We want to see this cold hard breeze for ourselves." "But," the Specialist stammered, waving his arms above his head, "it's too dangerous! It's not for the faint of heart!" They would not listen to reason. In the end, four men suited up and approached Alice. Each one ducked below the paper sheet. Each one slipped in, slowly at first, and then, with a rush of cold air, they disappeared. Only three came back. Snow-crusted and shivering, one by one they climbed out of her, a gust of wind sweeping through the studio as they stepped onto solid ground. They brushed the snow off their shoulders. They straightened their wool caps. They rubbed their chapped hands together. They clapped each other on the back and nodded. "It's true," they said. "It's huge and empty." They nodded. They smiled. They looked around and counted. One. Two. Three. Their smiles faded. The fourth man was not among them. The three men turned around and stared at Alice. They gazed at the modesty sheet draped over her knees. They peeked under it. Nothing. So they sat down and waited. "I'm sure he's just late," said the first man. "He stopped to take some photos," said the second. The third shifted in his seat, brushed the snow off his mittens and said nothing. And so they waited, all of them, the three men, the Specialist and the studio audience. The Host paced. "This is highly irregular," he muttered. Then the network offered him round-the-clock coverage till the fourth man returned and the Host brightened. The hours turned into days and still they waited. A vigil formed around the examination table. Doctors trickled in throughout the day, journalists clamored at the studio doors. The three men sat up front, right next to Alice. They called for him, the lost man, alone and wandering up inside Alice. "I told you," the Specialist cried. "I warned you all!" But no one was listening to him. The three men talked of extreme temperatures, the endless landscape, and lost provisions. "Did he bring any food?" an audience member asked. "Did he pack his canteen?" asked another. "Did he wear his long johns?" his mother cried over the television satellite. Then someone suggested forming a search party. The three men who had survived to tell the story of Alice's insides shook their heads. "Why?" the people asked. "Because it's cold in there," the three who came back said. "It's damn cold." They held their arms and shivered. The Specialist nodded. "That's true," he mumbled as he sidled toward the door. Someone grabbed his arm. "Where are you going?" "I forgot my lunch," he said. "I'll be right back." The doctors all shook their heads. "You'll stay right here," they said, "until you return the Fourth Man." The Specialist threw up his hands. "Don't look at me! I didn't take him." He pointed at Alice. "She did." Alice lay on the studio's examination table. By the third day, her back was in knots. Bedsores formed on Alice's skin. They grew weepy with infection. She asked if she could get up and try shaking him out. The doctors huddled in the corner and discussed the possibility. They nodded at each other. One of them stepped forward. "It might work." Slowly, very slowly, Alice removed her feet from the stirrups, first the right and then the left. She slid her body to the edge of the examination table and placed one foot on the ground. Alice shook and shook. She stomped her feet. She jumped up and down. She walked up the center aisle of the auditorium. She walked down the side aisle. She held on to the edge of the stage and stomped until her feet burned and her breath came hard. But it did not work. The fourth man did not emerge. The three men who made it back alive helped her up onto the examination table. They tried calling his name. They tried playing his favorite music, pressing the speaker against Alice's exposed abdomen. They tried baking his favorite foods. They called in a diviner with his forked stick. They called in a meteorologist. He lined his instruments up and down her body, and shook his head. "Storm's coming," he said. The doctors leaned in. "Storm's coming?" they asked. "Where?" The meteorologist pointed at Alice. "In there." They called in an Eskimo. "There are 437 words for snow," he whispered. "But how do we get him out?" the doctors asked. The Eskimo nodded, his fur cap shining under the examination lamp. "437 words," he said. By then, it was day six. The doctors shook their heads. "There's no way," they whispered, "what with the exposure and the lack of food, there's no way he's still alive." On the seventh day of the vigil, they sent for the lost man's wife. She spread Alice's legs, bent down and shivered. "What do I do?" she trembled. "What do I do down here?" "Call to him," the doctors urged. "Call his name." She called. "Honey?" she crooned. "Come out, come home!" There was no answer. The wife began to sob. She clung to Alice. Her arms wrapped around Alice's bent legs, "Give him back," she pleaded. "Give him back!" - - - - For a while, the story of the girl with nothing but a cold, hard breeze inside her swept through all the news stations. When the drama heightened with the missing fourth man, the networks' ratings went through the roof. It was all anybody could talk about: "What does it mean that she is cold and empty inside," they asked. "Where did the fourth man go?" When Alice and the Specialist disappeared, the story made international news. They had slipped out one night, three weeks into the vigil for the fourth man. It was not a well-planned escape, but somehow it worked. They tip-toed right past the studio security guards, cut the wire that led to the exit alarm and crawled out onto the highway. They flagged down a passing car. The driver took them all the way to the Nevada border. Desert rain washed across the stranger's windshield as Alice huddled close to the Specialist. They were on the lam together. For once, they were running in the same direction, with the same goal in mind—to get away from the doctors. A week later, he left her. It was an eerily still day. They were holed up in an Econo Lodge outside Las Vegas. "We're going to split up," he had whispered, his hands grasping her shoulders as they had on their first meeting. "I'll go north. You go west." "Why?" she asked. He let go of her, walked over to the motel window. Parting the curtain an inch with his index finger, he stared out at the parking lot. "If you don't know that by now, I'm not going to be the one to tell you." Alice gazed at him. There he stood in his rumpled seersucker suit, pigeon-toed and balding, a slice of desert sunlight cutting across his stricken face. Despite his odd theories, Alice had grown fond of the Specialist. She stood up, smoothed her skirt, and crossed to him. He held a photo in his hand. In it, the Specialist stands in full gear, his bright blue parka shining in the winter sunlight, surrounded by vast fields of snow, miles of it mounding up, soft and seamless and white. He smiles into the camera. Alice took his shaking hand in hers. "That's not really me," she said. She looked into his eyes—warm and moist, green as the sea. "But I have evidence," he whispered back. "I have irrefutable evidence." He looked away again, out at the cactus shivering in the hot wind, just beyond the motel parking lot. He left the next morning, before dawn, with one blue Samsonite carry-on and a hotel face cloth shielding his balding head from the hot Nevada sun. Alice feigned sleep throughout this long departure. As he folded his three dress shirts and zipped up his utility bag, as he combed the last few strands of hair over the crown of his head and trimmed his beard, Alice watched. Through half-closed eyes she saw him place a single envelope on the bedside table, cross to the motel door, unbolt the lock and slip away into the rising heat. After he left, she opened the envelope. There was no note, no instructions, no forwarding address, nothing, but a single photograph of a man standing in a field of snow. That afternoon, Alice dyed her hair. She slipped into the motel laundry facility and quietly removed a pair of jeans and a new T-shirt from one of the dryers. Alice had never stolen anything before and the thrill of it, the getting-away-with-it feeling flooded her veins. Flushing with pleasure, she shimmied into the jeans. She sold her one good suit and bought a bus ticket back to California where she found work at a bakery on a strip right near the boardwalk. From her station behind the kneading tables, she could smell the ocean. Back at the studio the Host was shocked by their disappearance. "How could you let this happen?" he asked his staff. "Right out from under my nose." But the two were gone. Not a single trace of them remained. A search party was formed, the Host leading the effort. "In the name of science," he blustered. "In the name of justice!" The camera recorded it all. Following an anonymous tip, they headed north. They hired dogsleds and glided through the Yukon. They assumed that Alice and the Specialist, partners in this absurd crime, would always be together. The Fourth Man's wife came along. She rode just behind the dogs, a fur-lined parka framing her face. She called his name. Her voice echoed across the frozen landscape. And for a while, that was all Alice saw. Every night before she fell asleep in her little apartment above the bakery, Alice turned on the evening news and there she was, the fourth man's wife. Chilblains had swollen her fingers. Her nose and cheeks were rubbed raw from exposure. She blinked into the camera. "Wherever you are, if you can hear me, call this number," the wife pleaded. "We don't want to hurt you. I just want my husband back." The heat from the large ovens burned the hair off Alice's arms. It opened her pores and sweat ran down her back, formed half moons under her shirtsleeves. She reveled in the sloppy warmth of the bakery, in the easy camaraderie with her coworkers. Evenings, after the baking was done, her coworkers unfolded lawn chairs on the boardwalk and watched the red ball of the sun slide lower in the sky till it sat on the edge of the ocean. When it broke open and began to sink, the colors bled across the water. Alice often joined them. She liked the feel of the ocean breeze on her arms and neck. The wind lifted her hair and fluttered across her cheeks. She closed her eyes, leaned back and listened to the bakery girls talk about their boyfriends. In the mornings, when the other bakers wandered outside for a smoke break, Alice would slip into the back room. Nestled into the tiered rising racks, lay warm mounds of dough, resting like sleeping bodies, between the sheets of metal shelving. She gazed at the pastries. The raw, white buns, dusted in a soft layer of flour, slowly expanded as the yeast pulled in the surrounding air and the soft buns of dough rose. One morning, when the owner was late and the other girls lingered over their cigarettes, taking one last pull, wandering further away from the back door out toward the beach, Alice slipped her hand in between the rising racks and caressed the new, white flesh. All the while, miles away, deep in the north country, a search party combed Alaska and the Northern Territory. They found nothing. No sign of Alice. No trace of the fourth man. For eleven months they rode up and down over the snow-packed ground, the dogs barking in the cold, the fourth man's wife crying into the wilderness. Then, a year later, the Host got a new tip and this one was solid. It led them right to the Specialist. He had taken refuge in a tiny Inuit community, trading his gold watch for the price of a safe haven for twelve months. But, at the end of the year, when he started conducting research, running experiments on the local girls, looking for another Alice, the villagers turned him in. The morning the authorities went out and found him, Alice was in the middle of cutting dough for hot-crossed buns. The girl who ran the cash register rushed in, calling, "They caught him!" "Who?" asked Alice, sliding a baker's knife through the dough. "The Specialist! They caught the Specialist." Alice let her hands fall to her sides. The girl turned on the TV. Once again Alice found herself gazing into the frozen tundra. The dogs barked outside the igloo. The snow was so cold it had turned icy and blue. They had the igloo surrounded and still, The Specialist would not give himself up. In the end, they smoked him out. Alice watched as the Specialist ran, half-naked across the fields of snow. They shot him with a stun gun and he fell like a wild deer, his body sliding across the ice. Alice stepped out onto the beach. The sign above the bakery switched on. Neon flooded the glass tubes, hovering and jumping to life in the crystalline air, calling to her, calling out OPEN. She remembered the poppies, bright and red on the wall in the examination room, and the Specialist's shallow-water eyes. She remembered the hotel in the desert, the stillness of the morning air, the cactus shuddering outside her window and the moment—before he left her, before he was gone—when she held his hands, still and cold, in her own. It had been years of waiting and holding herself, of trying to find the answer, the end, the other side of the mysterious pain, and how it had changed her, carved out her insides. Alice walked toward the shore, stepping closer to the ocean than she had allowed herself to go in a long time. At the edge, she bent down and placed her fingers in the water. Her hands and arms were coated with pastry flour, rendering her whiter than usual, white as a ghost. The flour dissolved off her skin. It shimmered and flickered, falling away from her, toward the sand below. She let her wrists slip into the water, then her forearms, and her elbows. Waves crawled up her skin, licking the clouds of flour until the whiteness shifted. It moved off of Alice and into the water. The air around her grew solid and soft, as if it were made of pillows. And the ocean, which for hundreds of thousands of years had been whining outside the door, falling over and over itself, reaching for the shore, the ocean stopped. The white foaming crests of the waves stilled. The green water, shallow and undulating below her, grew viscous; it grew hard as fine crystal. Slowly, what lived inside Alice—the bright, soft, swelling snow, the cold hard breeze, all of it—slipped out, and the ocean became a field, and the field became a tundra and it rolled out, like a door opening up, swinging loose on its hinges. As Alice gazed out on the tundra she noticed beyond the last snowy hill, something bright and shining, something calling to her, crying, "Alice, Alice, I'm here." She stepped forward, away from the huddle of shops by the boardwalk and the flickering light of the neon sign and onto the white glaciers. She walked toward the tiny speck and as she walked the speck divided into a shock of red hair and a white lab coat and there before her in the distance stood the fourth man. His hand floated above his head as he waved and he called to her, his voice bugling out, a reveille, calling her name, calling out across the frozen fields of snow. |
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