Mission to America by Walter Kirn Page B

whizzed through Bluff in certain rare weather conditions were a part of it—and a magazine I'd found fluttering by a road once—but the biggest part was a nicely boxed-up card game, Trivial Pursuit, that I'd rummaged from a trash can outside the co-op ten or eleven years ago. The oddity had dropped out of the stars, it seemed. I stashed the game, wrapped in a tarp, out in the woods, and I played it with myself for several months, until an owl that kept roosting and hooting there, directly above the spot in a dead pine, haunted me into burning it one evening. The cards had a coating that resisted flame, though, and many remained readable, just browned. I left them out there to rot and blow away, but I was still coming across them here and there as recently as a year ago. They'd scattered all over, beyond the woods, and I'm sure quite a number wound up in drawers and pockets. Once I spotted one wedged between two boards in the white fence behind Celestial Hall. I was afraid to remove it for some reason but someone else was unafraid. The singed blue card wasn't there a few nights later when I snuck back with a flashlight to check on it.
    â€œYou're an actress?” I said.
    â€œI did a network soap. I quit because I got heavy and couldn't lose it, and then I moved here to ski and get my head straight. Then I met a guy. Now I'm suicidal. You're right, I might need a meal. Electrolytes. The last thing I ate was a pita chip with salsa after kickboxing on Tuesday. When was Tuesday?”
    â€œThree days ago,” my partner said.
    â€œThen it was Wednesday,” Lara said.
    She gripped the sides of the tub and tried to rise but didn't get far until her second try. I could see from a pale indentation on one of her fingers that she'd worn a ring once, probably recently. I held out the biggest towel I could find as Elder Stark stood behind her in case she slipped. There wasn't much left of her but joints and knuckles—she'd gnawed herself down to the gristle—but once the towel went on I thought I could estimate where the flesh had been. My reconstruction convinced me she'd been a beauty once and could be beautiful again, perhaps, if everything were restored to the same place. Were such backtrackings possible, though? I had my doubts.
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    Lara went upstairs to dress while Elder Stark and I waited in her kitchen. We'd ordered a family-size pizza without the cheese because Lara had said she was sensitive to dairy products. To compensate for the loss in richness we asked for extra sausage and extra ham and added a double thing of Pretzel Puffs. We'd tasted pizza before, but only the yeastless, tomatoless variety prepared in accordance with Revealed Nutritional Science. We were disappointed by the prospect of having to eat our first non-Apostle pizza without its traditional main topping.
    With nothing to do until the food came, we studied the photos on Lara's refrigerator, moving the magnets around to see the faces. I was right, she'd been very pretty once, with lively features and peppery dark eyes, but with something too condensed about her body. She had all the right parts and all were the right size, but they were positioned slightly too close together, as though she'd fallen from a height and been compacted by the crash.
    Seeking a story, we puzzled through the photos—dozens of them that overlapped like shingles. One series seemed to have been taken in California and featured palm trees and houses with red tile roofs. Lara had had a dog then, a German shepherd, with a broad affectionate pink tongue that was always out of its mouth in some capacity, either to lick her hand or happily hang there as the dog stood tight at her side, its ears straight up. There were cars in these pictures, and men and other women, all of them slim and spotless and expensive looking. Every one of the figures, even the machines, glowed all over with promise and ability, and together the photos