Drop City

people.” He paused, and though everybody was busy with something, they were all listening, all of them. “Well, it's Premstar,” he said. “Prem hasn't been feeling too well--”
    Again, all eyes went to her. She was glaring out of the cave of herself, bristling with some kind of animus, sure, but she looked as healthy as anybody else. And pretty. Pretty as a beauty queen. Which in itself was unforgivable.
    “And I've had some news about the ranch--which I've been waiting for the right moment to share with you, good news and bad news too. The good news is we've got my attorney in there fighting the county's right to foreclose on the property--I mean, we could sell it yet, clear the back taxes, and have the bread, I mean, the _wherewithal,__ to really do something here. I mean, new buildings, sauna, snow machines, something for everybody--we can really make this place work, people, make it livable, _comfortable,__ even. And self-sufficient, definitely self-sufficient. That's my goal, that's it right there--”
    What's the bad news? Star wanted to say, and her heart was going--she didn't need bad news, not with Marco out there somewhere in the night, maybe lost, maybe hurt--but Bill beat her to it. “So what's the bad news?” he said.
    No hedging now, no going back: Norm thrust his face forward, challenging the room. “I've got to split,” he said. “Me and Prem. But just for like the tiniest little running jump of a hiatus--that's what it is, a _hiatus__--because they want me in court down there, and--well, I fixed it up with Joe Bosky. He's going to fly us to the airport in Fairbanks. I mean, when the weather allows.” He looked into each face around the cabin, ticking them off one by one. “Plus Prem,” he said. “Prem's sick.”
    It took a minute. They were in shock, that was what it was. They were staggered. Punch-drunk. No one could have guessed, not in their wildest--Star watched their faces go up in flames, their eyes turn to ash. They couldn't talk. Nobody could say a word. Norm had just held a glowing torch to the roof of the meeting hall, he'd napalmed the village and scattered the refugees. She felt herself lifting out of her seat as if she were in another dimension altogether, and wasn't that the kind of thing that happened to you when you died, when you had an out-of-body experience, hovering above the scene in pure sentience? She was high up, running with the clouds, and then she burst through them into the barren night of the stars and the planets and their cold, cold heat. And now there were angry voices, frightened voices, flaring out all around her as if they wanted to shoot her down. “But Marco,” she stammered, fighting to be heard, “you don't understand, you can't leave, nobody can--Marco's out there!”
    She went out into the night, shouting for him, but the shouts died in her throat--he wasn't coming back, nobody was coming back, Marco was dead, Drop City was dead, and she might as well have been dead herself. The wind spat snow at her, rammed at her shoulders, thrust a dry tongue up under her collar and down the back of her pants. She hunched herself in the parka and made a circuit of the place, up to the goat pen, down to the river and back, the tracks filling behind her even as she lifted her feet, the clouds stilled, the hills immovable and silent, transfixed on the spearheads of the trees. The snow was nearly to her knees and drifting now, picking up structure and definition. There was no feeling in her toes. Her feet were like blocks, her fingertips numb. She was freezing. She was helpless. There was nothing she could do. She went round a second time, fighting it, screaming, “Marco! Marco!” She paused, listened, called out again. No one answered.
    Then she was in her cabin, laying wood on the fire. She had the place to herself, at least for the moment, because everybody else was in the meeting hall, debating, shouting, glutting themselves on the bad vibes and negativity, and the people who hadn't been there for dinner were there now--she'd seen the hurrying dark forms huddled against the snow, panic time, oh yes indeed. She tried to steady herself. Tried to talk herself down from the ledge she'd stepped out on here. What she needed most of all was to be calm, to think things through in a slow, orderly fashion. Marco was lost. Norm was bailing. _Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.__ She saw herself a Drop City widow, sidling up to Geoffrey or Weird George,