It was refreshing to get out in the clean air. I’d managed a nap while we were crossing the Great Expanse. At some point I drifted back awake. With my eyes still closed, I wondered what had woken me. Probably my own snoring.
It’s so embarrassing to be heard snoring. I hoped I had not been grinding me teeth and smacking my mouth as well!
I lifted my lids and saw that we were moving at a crawl. I glanced up in the mirror. Rose had contorted herself so she could surreptitiously read Sal’s magazine over her shoulder. Poor girl. I should have stayed awake to talk with her. I mean, I had dragged her off on this outing.
But the warm sun felt incredible on my face. There was no breeze and the only sound I could hear was Sal turning a page of her magazine. I could lounge like this for years, on the verge of slipping back asleep, as the three of us slid across a magical lake of glass in my Jeep.
That was when I heard them. Voices in the distance. I had been expecting them. I went ahead and opened my eyes all the way. There they were, ahead of us on the shore. About fifty people standing in solemn respect. They waited on our Jeep, as it glided across the Great Expanse toward them.
Rose saw them, too. She craned her neck to get a better view.
Three men closest to the edge were talking amongst themselves. We were still a good distance from them, but the odd acoustics of the frictionless glass allowed me to make out some of their words.
“Let us hasten their arrival,” one of them said.
Sal sighed, but she did not look up from her magazine.
“They’re doing it again, aren’t they?” she asked.
“Have they ever not?” I mused.
“What’s going on?” Rose asked.
“Just once, I wish they’d let us cross on our own power,” I said, trying not to sound too peeved. But, really, I wanted my calculations validated.
“There, there,” Sal murmured, closing her magazine and stowing it away. “They do it because they love us so.”
Rose leaned forward between the seats to better watch the activity ahead. A girl of about ten pushed her way through the group. She was barefoot and wore jeans and a faded t-shirt.
“It’s my turn!” we could hear her demand, her voice breathless, excited.
The crowd parted, revealing the two-lane asphalt highway that ended at the Expanse. Two women approached the girl and tied a rope around her waist. The girl, trailing the rope behind her, retreated a distance up the road. She turned to face our Jeep which inched its way towards the road. We were about a hundred yards away, and at our speed we would arrive in a little over seven minutes.
We’d make it to that road fine. If only they’d let us.
Impatience.
Was it one of the deadly sins? And if not, was there some group of lesser moral misdemeanors? The Seven Irritating Peccadilloes, perhaps? Maybe I would lecture these folks on the ills of impatience.
I should be more forgiving. Sal was right. They did love us.
The girl began moving at a languid lope. Then a trot. A sprint. At the point where the road ended, she leapt! With all of the grace and strength of youth she landed confidently upon the glass. Like a surfer, that’s how she held herself—feet apart, knees bent, body angled slightly forward—and she was doing it! She slid out to meet us, her face aglow with a grin of pure exhilaration. The wind lifted her hair.
I turned around and was glad to see Rose enjoying the sight as well.
Sal lowered her sunglasses, peering over the tops.
“The child has excellent form,” she said.
The girl arrived at the Jeep not head-on, but alongside the driver’s door. I stuck out my hand. She grabbed it and swung aboard, landing in the back seat. Rose scooted over to make room, but the girl perched atop the cooler as if it had been placed there just for her.
With her hips braced against the Jeep’s stout roll bar, the girl flicked her wrist so that the slack in the line arched over the windshield, and, with both hands holding firmly to the rope, she shouted to her people on shore.
“Pull!”
The congregation drew together, all hands gripped the rope. As they walked backward up the road, we began moving at a slightly increased speed.
The girl kept her focus on the task of holding her rope. She took a moment to look down with an adoring smile at Rose.
“I know you,” she said. “You’re the girl in the red dress! You’re Rose. My name’s Juliet.”
I tilted up my rearview mirror until I had her face framed surrounded by the lush cerulean Texas sky. The sun glanced off the windshield, causing the bronze highlights throughout her hair to shimmer.
“Juliet,” I said, and was charmed when she glanced down, locking her eyes with mine in the mirror. “What have you thought of Rose’s performance on the show?”
Her face lit up.
“She’s so relatable,” she said. “I do miss Bianca. But she could be cold. Rose makes me feel!”
“That’s because she’s sensitive,” Sal said. “And smart.”
“I have to ask,” Juliet said, looked from Sal to Rose. “Is it real? Can you really get into the minds of those people?”
Rose laughed and said something about not knowing if she could divulge such trade secrets.
“Nonsense,” Sal said. And she began to explain the process to Juliet with the sort of relaxed, casual candor I hadn’t heard from her in a long time. A trip to the country had been an excellent idea. Everyone was benefiting from it.
Sal and Rose were a good team. I was glad. Sal could have a hard time connecting with people, and a tougher time making friends. I wanted her to spend some time with Rose separate from the professional context. Rose should be more than just a work buddy.
I liked Rose, but more than that, she would become a crucial part of my grand plan. I just knew it!
There had been a time when the show was just getting off the ground that I wanted to know more about the people that came through the arrival pods. I wanted to know everything about them.
But Sal refused to delve that deep into their heads. It distressed her. Sal and her intimacy issues. If only I had the gift to be trained in those psychic arts. But I barely registered on Lydia’s silly Fitzroy quiz. As for the handful of Readers we’d had on the show, none of them ever displayed the mental heft to do much more than paddle around in the shallowest regions of the contestants’ minds. With Rose, however, I had hope. Give her time, I told myself, and I was convinced she’d dive deep, all the way down. Who knows what she might find down there?
Those last five nights I closely watched Rose work. She took my breath away.
She wasn’t just accessing vague memories of our contestants, she was bringing back thick clots of emotional context. Flashbacks to their childhoods. Hopes and aspirations connected to their future.
None of the other Readers ever got close to that level of insight, no matter how long or how hard they trained with Sal and Lydia.
“Can I do it, too?” Juliet asked. It took me a moment to realize she wanted Sal to teach her to read minds.
“Well,” Rose said, “you have to take a test.” She turned to Sal. “Right?”
“Nonsense,” Sal said. “I can tell right away. And you’re a natural, Juliet. Maybe not as gifted as Rose, but, maybe one day….”
“I’d be like a witch,” Juliet mused, tilting her head toward the distant horizon.
Once the front tires touched the asphalt, I turned the engine back on, engaged the four wheel drive, goosed the accelerator to get us over a low hump of gravel, and just like that we were on the good old terra firma. The crowd gave a great cheer, as if they had freed us from the Great Expanse. They beckoned for us to follow. I kept it in a low gear and inched along behind them. Juliet untied the rope from around her waist and stood tall in the back seat.
“I can’t believe I’m riding with you all,” she said with the enthusiasm of one reunited with family thought lost to some savage storm.
Sal twisted around to face Rose.
“This is embarrassing,” she said. “These people…they’ve created a cult. They worship Sy.”
“Not just me,” I protested. “They love you, too, Sal.” Some of the crowd had slowed so that we were completely surrounded by them. Such lovely people! What else could I do? I waved to them and tipped my hat. A parade demanded a certain protocol, no matter how small.
“Don’t patronize me,” Sal told me, but that didn’t stop her from waving, too, in that limp and languid manner of royalty which had always struck me as looking like one is trying to loosen a stubborn lightbulb.
“The first time we tried to slide across,” Sal said to Rose, “they rescued us in much the same fashion. A misguided community, perhaps. But kind and helpful.”
“Rescued?” I turned to face Sal, but she was ignoring me. “Hardly! I keep telling you, we can make it across on our own. What happened to patience? Everyone’s all rush rush rush these days.” I paused and shifted to look up at Juliet. “But, thank you.”
“It was so much fun,” Juliet said, her eyes still wide. She had taken to waving at the crowd as well.
“She has no more shame than you, Sy,” Sal said, not without a smile, as she watched Juliet. Then, she turned back to Rose. “That first encounter, we thought they were being helpful because we’re celebrities. I was wrong. They had no idea who we were. Not a single television set amongst them. Can you imagine?”
“As a gift for their kindness,” I added, “on our next trip out to the country, I brought them a top-of-the-line Magnavox. Along with a white gas generator and the most powerful antenna to be found anywhere in the trans-Expanse region.”
“Now we can watch the great Silverio and Saligia five times a week,” Juliet gushed. “It’s all we ever talk about. And now, we have Rose!”
The crowd led us off the paved road onto a dirt path. The Jeep had no trouble continuing up the limestone incline. And there it was, above the heads of our escorts. Their large colorful canvas tent, the sort that a circus might use.
“This will take only a moment,” I said to Rose. “We’ll be on our way to the cabin soon enough. But first I need to dispense benedictions upon babes, lay hands on the infirm, maybe even perform a rite of matrimony. A ninety-minute diversion, tops.”
They could be clingy, this group. But, over the last few months, I’d established some firm boundaries with them.
I turned off the engine, set the parking brake, and climbed out. The people moved in slow, each one smiling. Reaching out to shake my hand, pat my shoulder.
“Our biggest fans,” I told Rose.
She held her hand to her mouth. Shock? Surprise? Envy? No doubt all of that. And did detect a note of amusement? Ah, she was staring at the art work. It was quite a sight, I’ll admit. That huge mural painted on the side of the tent. It featured me—my pompadour glowing white in the sunlight—astride a winged serpent. Beside me, and somewhat lower, was Sal.
“You might not have noticed,” I heard Sal say to Rose, “but I’m standing on a ladder. Yet, I’m still smaller and lower down.”
“It’s…lovely,” Rose said.
“It’s an embarrassment, is what it is,” Sal muttered. “A shameful travesty.”
“Don’t listen to her,” I told Rose. “Sal loves this! And you will, too. I bet you always wanted to run off and join the circus.”
“Don’t expect any elephants or trapeze artists,” Sal told her. “Probably it’s too late to just drive away.”
It was indeed. No force could stop those sweet devoted folks from sweeping us into their tent. A thrill ran through me I hadn’t felt in weeks. Even though the sermon I had been mentally composing before I dozed off was not polished, I was ready to climb to that pulpit at the far end of the tent and declaim. Testify!
To provide spiritual guidance to those simple country folk was something I felt I did with greater zeal and panache than when I strummed power chords during the final credits of Serpientes y Escaleras. It might have been simple vanity, but I wanted Rose to see me in action.
I came to preaching late in life—if I might call it that—but I immediately discovered it was something I did well. And to be so adored! Parishioners make the hungriest audience.
In moments of optimism, I considered my TV work as fundamentally spiritual. Well, more in the manner of covert spiritual work. But in that tent, on the northern shore of the Great Expanse, I could let it all out. Let my freak flag fly, as an old boyfriend used to put it. And let me just say, delivering extemporaneous admonishments and platitudes with a thick wash of thous and thines gets the heart racing. Try it if you ever get the chance. It’s good for the blood! As we entered the shadows of the tent, I removed my hat, shrugged off my white linen jacket, unbuttoned the waistcoat, and began to roll up my sleeves. Time to get to work. Let me at those poor sinners!