Mission to America by Walter Kirn Read Free Book Online

the beginnings of ruinous cracks. Eating as Adam was thought to have was perilous, but at least it warded off the bloating that I was suffering from that night.
    â€œThey're saying there's no sign of life inside the clinic. It's over. The SWAT team is taking off its breastplates. I feel like we should go back to the lobby and give that poor girl with the cross another chance.”
    â€œThis stuff needs to sit on my teeth for fifteen minutes.”
    â€œShiny beautiful teeth look strange on men. That blond guy in Bozeman—the one who bought us coffee and said we could stay anytime in his spare room—his teeth were so white they were almost clear, like glass.”
    â€œI'll stop before that.”
    â€œCome watch with me. I'm lonesome.”
    â€œSo sleep, then. Turn it off.”
    â€œI can't,” he said. “I'm lonesome without it. I don't know how that happened.”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œIt's hard to put it into words. You forget how quiet it was before, or something. The quiet scared you, but you didn't know it. After you turn off the screen, you know it, though.”
    â€œWe've never turned it off.”
    â€œIt's a prediction.”
    Lonesomeness was a problem with Elder Stark. I'd known him before as a schoolmate and a Church friend but I'd only grown close to him during the last few training seminars, after we'd moved into Lauer's house so we could spend more time practicing being Person One. I'd learned that my new friend couldn't sleep in stretches longer than two hours due to nightmares, and sometimes, in the middle of the night, waking up on my bunk in the makeshift basement dormitory, I'd hear him sucking cough drops or crunching almonds as though trying to drown out troubling thoughts. A few times I heard him talking to himself in a croaky old man's voice. I got the tones and the rhythms but not the words. When I asked Elder Stark about this in the morning his face tightened up and he told me I'd been dreaming. A few hours later he confessed, “The Hobo paid me a visit. He keeps me company. Was he being critical or kind?” I told him the voice sounded very faintly critical and asked him what the Hobo looked like, afraid to ask him how real the Hobo was.
    â€œHe wears an old floppy hat. It shades his face. I made him up when I was five or six to look in a barn I was scared of going into for a cat I'd lost.”
    â€œThe Hobo went in and you stayed outside?” I said.
    â€œNo. He made fun of me for being scared until I had something to prove. We went together. Afterward, he clapped me on the back and I felt prouder than I ever had, so I asked him to stay. He promised to pop in sometimes. My mother told me when I was twelve, once I was old enough to understand, that I didn't really invent him, either. She used to see him standing over my crib. The same floppy hat. You probably have one, too. She told me most boys in Bluff do.”
    â€œI don't have one.”
    â€œMaybe a sea pirate or a cattle rustler?”
    â€œWhy are these types all vagabonds or crooks? Do they have to be?”
    â€œThey just always are.”
    I let the gel dry and watched the nighttime interstate out the recessed, cell-like bathroom window. Each car and truck represented another soul out of reach of our influence, lost to its true nature. Growing up, it had always bothered me how easily we consigned non-AFAs to lives of dissatisfaction and insignificance. The universe pivoted on our heads solely, even though we'd just recently organized ourselves. The older I grew and the more I read, the more confusing it all seemed. How could a settlement tucked up in the woods at the edge of the power grid and the zip code system have a bigger lever to shift history than the millions of people who voted for the government, farmed the Great Plains, and administered the markets?
    â€œHow white are they?” Elder Stark asked me from the bedroom. His voice had brightened;