Mission to America by Walter Kirn Page A

lyrical and beyond anything that I ever could have mustered, and he capped it off by miming a great dive, hands pressed together, head bent, toes curled, back arched.
    â€œAnd so it begins: our swim back to our source,” he said. He'd been taking his drug again; he had that fire.
    The woman he was addressing was in a state, and we'd come to her house on the edge of Snowshoe Springs to sit with her and see her through the night. Two hours earlier, at dinnertime, Lara Shirer had swallowed thirty allergy capsules, drawn a hot bath, perfumed it with lilac bath salts, and climbed into it with a book, prepared to die. Instead she threw up and decided she wished to live. She dialed a crisis hotline but lost her nerve when an intermittent clicking sound convinced her that the call was being taped. Her second call was to our cell phone, whose number she'd gotten from a tract she'd found on her Audi that morning outside a downtown coffee shop.
    â€œIf I've already chosen everything that happens, why can't I see how all this comes out?” said Lara. “Do I try this again tomorrow, but with a gun? Does my mother drive up from Tucson with Dr. Grof and try to commit me to that same place she went where everyone has to hike six miles a day and sing in a big circle and take B vitamins?”
    â€œIt isn't like that,” my partner said. “The moment a person's born a screen comes down. Absolute amnesia. Total blindness.” He looked at me for backup on this point but I was busy with a washcloth, wiping up a splash of foamy vomit stained brilliant blue by the half-digested pills. I set the cloth in the sink, turned on the tap, squirted some liquid soap into my palms, laced my fingers together, rubbed, and rinsed. I dried my hands off on a purple towel and tried to refold it as neatly as I'd found it.
    â€œIf you plan your whole life but forget the plan,” said Lara, “that's the same as no plan. What's the point?”
    Lara didn't look well; she looked crazy. Her knees were tucked up tight against her chest, squashing her breasts out sideways into her armpits, and her head was tipped back against the tub lip, her hair hanging down in a sheet to the wet floor. Her eyes were little tar pits of melted makeup and in one of her nostrils a bubble of bright blood exactly the color of her fingernails inflated and contracted as she breathed. I wished she'd either inhale the bubble completely or let me blot it off with toilet paper, but I doubted she knew it was there.
    â€œWe only choose the big things,” Elder Stark said. “Our relatives, our place of birth, our body. The smaller decisions are made in earth time. What will I eat tonight? Should I paint my bedroom? There's enough that's ordained to give life structure and enough that's left open to keep it interesting.”
    Lara's body slid lower into the cooling gray water. I was becoming impatient with my partner, who couldn't seem to see that what she needed was food and dry clothes, not a lecture on theology. Even to me, Preexistence was a muddle, another sign that the Church had spent too long talking only to itself.
    â€œYou see it?” my partner said. “You grasp it now?”
    â€œI'd like to.”
    â€œThat's good. If you'd like to, then you will.”
    I had to interrupt. “You must be hungry. Can I get you a robe? I think you're chilly, Lara.”
    â€œI won an Emmy once.” Her words were faint, just trembling webs of phlegm. “That trophy out in the hall you must have seen? On the little mahogany pedestal? My Emmy.”
    My partner smiled and nodded, clearly ignorant, but I, for some reason, knew what an Emmy was. The seal around Bluff was loose. A lot leaked through. The other morning in the Billings paper I'd read the name Cher and a face had come to mind that I learned, from TV, was Cher's real face. I'd known she was a singer, too, but how? Solving the puzzle took a while. The faraway radio signals that