Lance Olsen - Girl Imagined by Chance

Coeur D’Alene, Andi said as you cruised across America.

Orofino, Pocatello, Riggins.

The River of No Return.

That is what you think about, the orderly application of paint appealing deeply to you.

How Moscow is the third-largest town in the panhandle, with a population of 20,000.

Give or take.

How it was settled in 1869 and originally called Paradise Valley, but renamed in 1875 by Almon Ashbury Lieuallen to pair its impending sense of cultural isolation with that of its Slavic double under Ivan the Terrible.

Assuming, it goes without saying, the tourist brochure in the Best Western is accurate.

Assuming such a thing can somehow be verified.

Moving was as easy as changing your mind.

Changing your mind was as easy as moving.

Fake Gothic buildings from the first half of the twentieth century mingle with bland industrial redbrick ones from the second half across the heavily green university campus on one of several hills comprising the town.

Quaint houses surround a tidy park in the old section that less than a hundred years ago was a fort and now exists in a golden fifties televisual nimbus.

From there, newer and larger and blander subdivisions spread out with treeless architectural unruliness.

Malls bookend Moscow to the east and the west and a featureless strip of fast-food restaurants, bunker motels, and floodlit gas stations ellipse down the highway toward the Washington-Idaho state line.

Paradise Valley or Hog Heaven, depending on which source you consult.

Because camas bulbs were abundant.

If you stand next to the concrete fountain on Main Street across from the turn-of-the-century hotel and face north, you can make out one end of town and the wheat fields of the Palouse undulating toward Moscow Mountain.

Camas bulbs being a comestible hogs adore, supposedly.

Palouse being another interesting word.

Native American, presumably.

Presumably, though not positively.

If you stand next to the fountain and face south, you can just make out the other end of town and imagine the wheat fields of the Palouse undulating toward the two-thousand-foot grade down into Lewiston and desert more than twenty miles off.

This fountain is where you and Andi, checking the local real estate guide and enjoying a swimming-pool-blue spring day, spotted the ad for the three-bedroom log cabin with loft, deck, unfinished basement, and small barn on fifteen wooded acres near Deary, population 600, twenty-five miles northeast of Moscow.

Andi mined a felt-tip pen from her purse and handed it to you.

You ovaled the ad in corpulent violet, returned the pen, and, real estate guide tucked under your arm like a European’s newspaper, struck out in search of a pay phone.

A week, and you were overseeing the movers.

The furry man with an indigo-green outline of a disproportionate naked woman tattooed on the inside of his forearm.

This man climbing from the cab, popping his neck, and surveying the gravel driveway he had just navigated in his jumbo rig.

Got yourself far fucking enough away from everything? he asked, right palm resting atop his head.

You and Andi exchanged glances.

You had, you told him.

You honestly had.

You paint the room that will become your office, too, and then the one off the loft that will become your bedroom.

One day you are one place.

One day you are another.

You unroll your Persian rug in the living room in front of the wood-burning stove that will be your only source of heat this winter.

It is this easy.

It always has been.

You unpack dishes, silverware, utensils, hang Andi’s mounted photographs, set up your computer, air out the house, scrub the kitchen floor, sweep the unfinished basement, wash the windows, unbox books and clothes, call a satellite company from town and set up an appointment to have a wireless internet connection installed.

It feels like you are waging a war against spoilage.

It feels like you are subduing space.

You take particular gratification in scouring the bathtub with chlorine cleanser and wiping down the toilet with undiluted lemon ammonia.

Andi dusts and polishes and vacuums the beige wall-to-wall carpet and disinfects the kitchen counter top.

One day you are one person.

One day you are another.

Next you move into the yard and shovel out the fire pit.

You purchase a gas grill, assemble it on the deck, and begin cooking salmon steaks and German sausages on a regular basis.

You haul two cords of split and unsplit tamarack scattered haphazardly around the raspberry patch into the half-size barn and stack it neatly in two rows.

Each row as tall as you.

Tamarack being another interesting word.

Five-foot eight, more or less.

You never heard the word before last week, and now it is part of you.

The previous owner erected several jerryrigged outbuildings from plywood boards. You take these down and make a trash pile out of them.

You dismantle a wobbling half-completed wood-plank fence, a rotting doghouse, a chicken pen, a free-standing gate that leads nowhere.

Mow the lawn atop the worn-out riding mower with a bad case of the flu that the previous owner left behind.

You plant a vegetable garden in a clearing on the south side of the house.

You have your driveway regraveled.

It is this easy changing what you think about.

The following Monday you begin sifting through one hundred eighty-seven e-mail messages that have clustered since you last checked.

What you do not think about.

In the evening, you recommence your work on Virginia Dentatia’s web site. Following her last operation to reduce the bone mass of her chest, her lungs can no longer fully expand. She spends hours a day connected to an oxygen tank. Her fans in various chat rooms are both outraged and exhilarated.

Andi commences looking for a job.

By the end of the week she has placed an ad in the local paper, received an offer to photograph a PR shoot for a band from Pullman, and established her own dark room in what was once the pantry in the basement.

One day you are you, supposedly.

One day you are not.

After dinner Friday, you pour two icy scotches, soak the trash pile in gasoline, turn on the garden hose, and strike a match.

Flames heave twenty feet into the darkening sky.

Red-orange spark-clouds like swarms of glittering bees.

Side by side, Andi and you watch the blaze escalate. The crackling grows so loud you become uneasy. Now, just like that, it peaks, the sound of air forced through a subway tunnel, setting small areas of nearby grass alight, the pile caving in on itself.

You spray the ancillary burns with the hose and pace around the crumbling neon-tangerine wreck, misting the ground.

Andi slips an arm around your waist when you rejoin her and rests her head against your chest.

Your new geography drifts toward congruity.

The dry smoky afterburn of Oban.

You can sense the moment gaining intention and weight.

Over the dying fire’s sizzle and ticks, the phone stutters awake in the kitchen.

Andi hands you her drink and trots up the back stairs to answer. You stay behind, monitoring what is left of the blaze and thinking about Virginia Dentatia.

Some rumors say that the rumors that say she is breathing with difficulty are just rumors. Others point to the fact that this is July, everything reruns, and that Virginia Dentatia may be positioning herself for a higher media profile at a time when there’s nothing else to watch.

When Andi returns, you hand her her scotch and she takes it from you and refocuses her attention on the embers.

Every muscle in her face loose.

The cool night air smelling of damp clover and grass and smoke.