Lexicon

His eggs, aborted chickens.
    “I’ll say this for the Midwest,” Eliot said. “They know how to do a breakfast.”
    Wil poked a bacon strip with his fork. In itsrufescent flesh he saw the man he’d shot on the overturned pickup. The way he’d folded up. He put down his cutlery.
    “Are you all right?” No concern in Eliot’s voice, of course. It was just a question. An inquiry after facts. Wil rose and tottered to the rear of the diner. He found a single, dirty toilet, lowered himself to his knees, and vomited. When he was done, he sat back against the wall, eyes closed, sweat popping all over his body. He decided to stay here awhile. You were safe in a bathroom. It was a four-by-six cubicle of sanctuary, for as long as you wanted.
    When he could no longer believe this, he washed and reentered the diner. A man in a trucker cap with hollow cheeks and serial killer glasses eyed him over hash browns. Wil could read his face clearly: He thought Wil had been doing drugs. The waitress was sneaking looks at him, too. And there was a red-cheeked man wedged into a booth seat, who was watching a burbling TV bolted into the ceiling corner but hadn’t been a moment ago. He felt an urge to explain himself.
It’s not what you think. I’ve just had a really rough day.
But that would be crazy. He would convince no one.
    He shuffled back to the booth. Eliot had finished his own breakfast and switched plates with Wil. “Hey,” he said. “Order more. I’m paying.”
    “Are you?”
    “Well, no,” said Eliot. “But you know what I mean.”
    Wil sat.
    “You could use the protein,” said Eliot, chewing.
    “What’s your plan?”
    “Hmm?”
    “These people, they’re going to find us again, aren’t they? They’re looking for us right now.”
    “No doubt.”
    “So we need a plan.”
    Eliot nodded. “True.”
    “Do you have one?”
    “No.”
    “You don’t?”
    “I have a short-term plan,” Eliot said. “I plan to finish your eggs.” Wil said nothing. “Food is important. I’m serious about the protein.”
    “Do you have a plan or not?”
    “No.”
    “Shouldn’t you, I don’t know, be concerned about that?”
    “I am concerned about that.”
    “You don’t look concerned.”
    “Would it make you feel better if I were sweating? Running to the bathroom to blow my cookies? It shouldn’t. A panic state is not helpful to good decision making.”
    “It would make me feel better if we were
moving
,” Wil said. “Like if you got your eggs to
go
.”
    “Well, I like to know where I’m going before I try to get there. It’s a mistake to try to execute a plan before you’ve thought of one, in my experience.”
    Wil exhaled. “Can you call them?”
    “Pardon me?”
    “Get a poet on the phone. You used to be one of them. Call them.”
    “And say what?”
    “I don’t know. Persuade them to stop chasing us. That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
    “Yes. But it’s also what they do.”
    “Then offer them something. Make a deal. Give them something they want.”
    “But what they want is you.”
    “Something else.”
    Eliot retired his cutlery. “You’re the key to an object of biblical power. They’re not interested in substitutes.” He stretched his arms. “And when I say biblical, I mean literally from the Bible.”
    He rubbed his face. Every time Eliot spoke, Wil felt that he knew less.
    “Keep talking, though,” Eliot said. “I feel like it’s helping, in a process of elimination kind of way.”
    “We should hide, then. Go somewhere, you do your poet thing, make people hide us. That’s possible, right?”
    “Before yesterday, I would have said yes. We thought we were hiding. In light of recent events, though, it seems what we were actually doing was being observed until we led Woolf to you.”
    “So we can’t hide.”
    “We can try. But to date it hasn’t been very successful.”
    The waitress arrived to refill Eliot’s coffee. She was young and pink cheeked. Her name tag said SARAH . She seemed to be in awe of Eliot, although Wil didn’t know why. “Thank you, Sarah,” said Eliot, and she flushed.
    “So we
can’t
hide,” Wil said, once she’d left, “and we can’t negotiate, and we can’t stay here, and you don’t want to leave until we know where we’re going, is that about right?”
    “Yes,” Eliot agreed. “That’s about right.”
    “Then what are we going to do?”
    “I believe our only option is confrontation. Specifically, the kind of confrontation