Lance Olsen: Girl Imagined by Chance

Driving into it from northern Idaho, you do a slow dissolve from a Swedish film into an American Western.

Winding roads straighten out and amplify into generic interstates.

Vegetation withers. Temperatures rise. Topsoil erodes.

Craggy volcanic slabs splitting caked earth.

You feel as if you are watching impressive TV footage telecast from a space probe on an asteroid.

Which is what you are thinking about when you begin picking up local Wenatchee news reports about the miracle.

The announcer sounding as surprised as you by what he is saying.

Miracle being too strong a word, presumably.

While the faithful slept in the bleachers or sprawled on the glazed-wood floor, the semicomatose girl rose two inches into the air above her mattress.

The event lasted seven seconds.

The event purportedly lasted seven seconds.

Fewer than twenty people noticed it and their reports conflict.

But still.

More cars have joined you. Some are choked with people — six, seven, eight of them in a single compact, all tidily dressed, all staring straight ahead with a creepy sense of destination.

I had the most intense dreams, Andi says, adjusting her seat, coming awake beside you. The colors seemed jellied, they were so vivid. You could taste them.

You were twitching, you were sleeping so hard, you tell her.

People walking west along the shoulder, mostly traveling in twos and threes.

Sometimes whole families are on the move.

All the women wearing dresses like Easter, all the men eye-achingly white shirts.

Some carrying colorful paper flowers.

Faces blank with patience and purpose.

Ahead, they are walking down an on-ramp.

They are cutting across the haunted windy desert toward the highway from towns or ranches you cannot see.

I slept so hard my feet are fizzing, Andi says, not taking her eyes off the slow coagulation of people along the roadside as the announcer announces that an old woman with very bad eyesight felt her vision improve marginally shortly after the levitation.

His voice sprightly now, like he is delivering a weather report about a string of flawless days.

A while, and the traffic slows to thirty miles an hour.

Fifteen.

Your speedometer can hardly register your forward progress.

A sixteen-year-old high-school dropout claimed that the Lord touched her uterus during the night and now she is pregnant.

Sleek black patrol cars approaching from the opposite direction slow, flip on their lights, carefully pick their way across the median, set up positions along the shoulder on your side of the highway.

State troopers in mirrorshades.

State troopers like androids in mirrorshades surveying what is happening around them.

It strikes you there is no longer any traffic in the eastbound lanes.

Did you pack my camera? Andi asks.

In back, you say.

Andi unfastens her seatbelt, climbs up onto her knees, turns around, begins digging through a pile of jackets, pillows, Snaggy Scree bars.

Now she is snapping photos.

She is snapping a skinny Native American man in his eighties stooped over his cane like a central European refugee.

Callers start phoning in saying they dreamed of Anya levitating before she actually levitated.

How can everyone dream the same dream? Andi asks.

They’re not, you say. They only think they are.

It doesn’t make sense.

Sure it does. There’s a word for this. A medical term.

What?

I don’t remember. But I’m certain there’s a term.

The oncoming lanes are filling rapidly with traffic heading the wrong way.

Click, click, click .

You pass people riding ten speeds, children being pulled in wagons, people with their arms wrapped around the waists of other people wobbling along at three or four miles an hour on motorcycles.

One family pushes an empty shopping cart before them.

A baby born this morning with its umbilical cord around its neck displayed a purple birthmark on its cheek in the shape of a cross.

A cross or an X.

It depends how you look at it.

You feel giddy at being part of this new westward migration.

Carried along like this.

Time on fire in your car.

What will people do when they finally reach the gym? Andi asks, clicking.

Sit, you say proudly. Stand. Mill around.

She lowers her camera, checking how many shots she has left on this roll, raises it and continues clicking.

Here’s an idea for a series, she says, adjusting the aperture ring: photos featuring famous people, only the famous people are absent, and you only see the reaction shots of the audiences watching them.

Brilliant, you say. How the president’s audience isn’t Radiohead’s audience. That’s brilliant.

You pull even with a motel on the outskirts of Wenatchee.

The town is a small flat enclave sitting north of the Columbia River on the western cusp of this extraterrestrial region.

The motel’s parking lot is jammed with cars halted at myriad angles.

The faithful sitting on curbs, sitting on benches, standing in line to register although it is clear from the sign out front and the numbers of people assembling that there is no vacancy.

You crane back as you roll by and when you face forward again your car is not moving anymore.

Not even a little.

Traffic has stopped.

The palpebral fissure .

The palpebral fissure , you suddenly remember for no reason, is the term for the space between eyelids when they are open.

You examine the padded interior roof of your Honda, listening to Andi work.

Before long, the first car door swings open ahead of you.

Now others.

Feet on the asphalt.

People sniffing air like a landing party checking the atmosphere on a planet to see if it is breathable.

Now, tentative, they are stepping from their cars, testing the road surface for firmness, beginning to move up the highway, wandering among the jumble of abandoned vehicles.

Ten or twenty at first.

Fifty.

Now hundreds.

Sitting behind the wheel, you consider the wide barren arctic-ice sky above you. You have never seen a sky dominate a landscape so forcefully. It feels like the earth has become nothing but nitrogen and oxygen, argon and carbon dioxide, hydrogen and helium.

That you are walking on a crust a millimeter thick beneath an almost infinite blue dome.

The way things simply stop at the photographic edge and the way some narratives simply stop like that, too.

The steady dry breeze.

The blood-brown rocks along the roadside.

How once you strolled along the banks of the Bagmati in Kathmandu, watching cloth-wrapped bodies burn on the funeral pyres.

Families of the dead in prim circles, passing time.

Holy men spattering butter on the fires to help them burn faster.

You could hear steam building in the skulls as you strolled along.

Sadhus cooked bread by burying it among shards of smoking bones.

How guilt and happiness are not mutually exclusive emotions.

How a group of children stood knee-deep in the river.

How a group of children stood knee-deep in the river, oblivious, in the black oily water that used to be strangers.

Throwing a red rubber ball through gusts of coppery haze.

THE REST OF YOUR STORYis as smudged as this photograph.

All the eyes have dropped out and been replaced with mouths.

All the seeing has dropped out and been replaced with speech — only the speech has to do with what has not been seen and cannot be said.