Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

She parted her lips, though she wasn’t smiling. Her front teeth were buckled. A capillary small as thread tacked across her forehead.

“Lo, I am just trying to protect you. If you carry on like this, it’s not going to end well.”

He nodded.

“Am I getting through to you?” she said. “If you don’t stop, they will throw you in jail. Or worse. You’re trying to make friends with the wrong people.”

He said he understood but that he knew what he was doing.

“You are crazy making,” she said. “Can’t you just listen to me? People I know are all over this cult of yours. I want you to stop.” By now, she was leaning so far over the table, the edge looked to be severing her in two. Her fingers were braced like a runner at the line. “I’m worried about you,” she said. “Happy now?”

He was. He told her he worried about her, too, her and Ida, which gave him huge pleasure and relief. It was the best thing, really, to be able to speak your heart where it landed.

“Ida is not your concern,” she said. “But thank you just the same.”

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he said. “That you live here. You do, right?”

“Oh, Lo,” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything, us talking like this. I came out of a decent regard for you and our past together, but that’s all.” She folded her arms across her chest and then muttered something about him not bothering to find out more, never mind that he’d been trying since the moment she left him nine years ago. Back then, she had given him a PO box address, which he’d been using to communicate with her ever since. Forget tracing the box or putting eyes on the box — it was in Minnesota, and seemed to forward nowhere — but he hoped she got his letters. Four hundred and eighty-two, so far.

He stood up and reached for her. “How is she, Ez — is she okay? Does she know about me? Does she even ask?”

And he thought: Please. Just bring me traces of my daughter. News of her heartbeat. And with it a small blooming inside, all colors and stars, so I can know something more of fatherhood before my time is up.

She stepped back. “Amazing. For you, it’s like these last few years never happened. It’s like we’re still in our twenties.”

“You were closer to thirty.”

“And should have known better. But, Lo, it’s been forever. Don’t you think you need to move on?”

“I don’t see a ring on your finger, either.”

“There are other ways to move on. You don’t know anything about me.”

He shook his head. He had no tolerance for this kind of talk. He got to the point. “Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I’ve loved you all this time? That you and Ida are my family? ”

She looked away. “Sure, me and all the people you slept with while loving me. So much love, Thurlow. So much. You really are perfect for the job you have.”

It was his turn to look away, but only to conceal the joy overrunning his face. Esme was bitter! And this bitterness was sourced in anger, and anger at someone you once loved can only mean you still love.

“Just so you know,” he said, “the Helix is not a cult. We are a therapeutic movement. We just meet and talk. And it’s not me people are getting behind but the group.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, I know. Share and confess. Want to share something now? Tell me why your therapeutic movement is armed and talking to North Korea. Because that doesn’t sound so harmless to me.”

Ugh, North Korea. He nearly threw up his arms in disgust. For all of their time together, it had always been about North Korea. At least for Esme. At least until Thurlow had decided to go there himself. A month ago on a visa extended to a group of Japanese tourists, which was supposed to indemnify the North Koreans against charges he’d been coerced and to conceal from the Americans news of his trip. One ambition had panned out; the other obviously had not. He had felt the scrutiny of his life and doings intensify the minute he got home. The feds had been on him for years, but this was worse. North Korea had made everything worse. And it had accomplished nothing.

“There are extremists in every movement,” he said. “Doesn’t mean they represent that movement.”

“You’re really going to pretend you’re not responsible for those people? Because last I checked, you’re the one who went to North Korea.”

“We’re not armed. We are a peaceful, therapeutic community. ”

“For now. But what do you think North Korea expects you to do with their investment? Host a social in Pyongyang?”

“Maybe.”

“Oh, Lo. Not even you can believe that. Unless you really have gone mad.”

“Has it even occurred to you,” he said, “that maybe I had a good reason to go there? That maybe I was trying to do something good?”

She took a seat across from him. She looked stricken and tired. “Maybe no one cares, Lo. I shouldn’t even be here, but can’t you listen? You’re in over your head. And I’m not sure how much longer you have. Things aren’t good on the Hill, you know that. They don’t like what you’re doing.”

And this was true. It was a dicey time: January 2005. In December, a tsunami had overrun Sumatra, which mobilized a big relief effort that forefronted just how discrepant was the government’s will to aid victims abroad and those at home. The White House had just been returned to the incumbent, in large part because his opposition was a drip. It was the highest voter turnout since 1968; the electorate was engaged and angry, and finally disappointed. The two-party system was offering up leaders no one wanted to champion. The Helix filled a niche, its membership had spiked a thousand percent, and now North Korea wanted in. To fund what it presumed was a dissident movement poised on revolt.

Not that Thurlow had given them this idea. And yet they had it. Perhaps because he was attracted to the North Korean principle of juche —independence of thought and self-reliance alongside an intermingling of people united behind a common cause, which was to be together. That, or because Thurlow had actually accepted their money in the name of friendship. Sure, North Korea was broke, but only insofar as it refused to fund anything but the military, which is to say that it was not broke but discretionary, and that diverting funds into the Helix coffer from a sale of missiles to Syria was not out of the question.

But that did not make him a militant, never mind what the North Koreans thought. Never mind what half his followers thought. There were the members, steeped in apprehensions of the forlorn, who just wanted to belong. And there were the fringies, who wanted to blow up Capitol Hill.

Dissidence and despair. Should he confess this was not the miscegenation of feelings that had birthed the Helix? That this movement’s origin had, instead, everything to do with her?

He’d been back in the States for three weeks, but his sleep schedule was still a wreck. That, plus regular insomnia, and he could lose track of his thoughts for whole minutes at a time.

“Stop staring at me like that,” she said. “I’m serious,” she said. “Stop it.”

“Did you get my letters, at least?”

“Have you been listening to me? You haven’t changed at all. Always in your head. Always thinking about yourself. What am I even doing here?” And she stared at her palms as if they had an answer.

His mouth opened. His heart frothed. “No, no—” he said, but she cut him off. She had to go. Fine, he said, but would she come to his hotel later? She could yell at him all she wanted at his hotel. He said he was sorry. For everything. Just please come. He had a Helix event this morning, but how about later? Any time this week? He’d cancel Seattle and Eugene and Santa Cruz.