Tag: Fiction

They roam this sogged landscape through heavy mist burdened with guns and swords and rods, many of them pushing or pulling carts laden with their lives or whatever remains. Some of them ride the backs of bloated horses, the eyes of both man and beast dulled by fatigue and sickness. You hear them before you see them rise up out of the fog like wraiths, clothes wasted and faces caked in mud. And maybe they are wraiths up from some unspeakable depth or maybe you’re the ghost they stare at walking slowly past, gun drawn. Women with long hair carrying alien babies hatched in some far off land and these people have seen hell, their eyes betray giant serpents and beheadings, rivers of blood. You feel guilty and damned just looking at them. A scream from far off and you can’t discern its direction nor its origin. The fog is a spider web on your skin, the ground warm vomit. Gray world without end.

 

I’m writing a letter to you, grown woman, though I know I’ll never send it, I’m writing a letter to you and you’re so far away, you’ve always been so far away, you remind me of my father, just looking at you is like looking at my father, and I often look at you in my mind, I’ve no other option because you’re so far away, you’ve always been far away, and my father’s gone and you’ll soon be gone, too, and do you ever feel like you gain just as much as you lose? Perhaps as you get older you gain less than you lose and when you’re younger you gain far more than you lose, that’s why losing is such a painful revelation to the young, and that’s why I feel as if I gain exactly as much as I lose, for I’m halfway through this life wearing the smiles and scars to prove it, I’m thinking of you, grown woman, wondering how it’s all come to this, me writing you a letter I’ll never send, a letter I wouldn’t even think of sending, communicating with you is so peculiar. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m far away and you’re right where you need to be, I’m the far away one while you’re in the right place, so close to everything. I wouldn’t be surprised, remember when I was a child and you’d come to visit from far away and it was like vacation for me, we used to go to the park together and you told jokes and gave us your paintings but still I felt you were so far away, I never knew you and still don’t, you’re so far away, but despite the distance I still love you and don’t know why, we rarely interact and it’s just like with your mother, my grown grandmother, she’s always been entirely too far away for me to love her, and yet I do, very much, and can’t really say why. I live in a tower of my own inventions and the world continues to roll its odd course despite my protests and I find it heartbreaking that family members so far from one another can love and think of one another and not even know them, not even know why or how or even when the planet will cease its sleepy roll, thunderous vibration and concussive intimidation, this is my life up here in the tower and maybe one day you could visit, we’d have vacation and go to the park, I’d tell you jokes and give you my paintings and things would be like they’ve always been but somehow different, I’d see you as a grown woman instead of the teenager, the young woman I remember from my youth, and you’d listen to me as if I were an adult, independent and healthy, a thinking man in the digital age, we’d talk about my dead father and you could tell me lies about him, tell me lies about him. Meanwhile we’ll have plenty of time to sit and not say any words and grow closer as the days grow longer and the roll slows to a crawl so that soon the sea hisses and rocks and overtakes the land, the sea is all there is, and we’re already making progress up there in your tower of inventions, the airplanes and rockets and e-cards and I’ve never understood your hairy armpits, my mother and my sisters always told me it was strange for a woman to have hair under her arms, but I’m sure you’ll get to that in time, we’ll get to everything in time, I’m certain of it. In the tower we feel the sway of the Earth beneath us, and we’re no longer far away up here with all my books and the memories, do you remember when I was a child I would hate when you came to visit from far away because I had to sleep on the couch, I was displaced and now that we’re up here in my tower of books and memories I can tell you anything, this is how we minimize the distance between us, we shrink the miles from the west to the Midwest, which is where you are, or where you were before and after you’d travel from far away to visit, we’d go to the park and we’d tell each other jokes and we’d make paintings in the wet dirt and as we dug with sticks we’d find trash and once we’d even find bones, old bones from old hands from people our age who dug too long, but we won’t do that because we can’t even dig here, way up here in the tower of the world’s consequence, we’re here and yet so far from one another, and I’m sure you’re out there somewhere not reading this letter I will never send.

We were in Kansas City five days when the skies turned.

Lake Michigan rose up foaming as if from the underworld and it breached the Iowa state line washing out everything in its path, so we knew it was time to head elsewhere. My husband and I packed our twin girls into the van and knowing we wouldn’t ever return we headed west on I-80 out of Iowa City. With everyone else doing the same thing the road was soon clogged and impassible with parked or stalled-out vehicles by the time we arrived in Des Moines.

There were hundreds of people walking on the highway shoulder. All of them out of the city and into the immense flatlands beneath the open blue sky and we too fell in line, carrying everything we could with us including two sidearms hidden in our waistbands, one for my husband and one for me. The girls were very frightened and on the verge of tears. Now and then I’d see a dead person in a ditch on the side of the road and I’d point in the other direction at nothing in particular and the girls would look over to where I pointed, their eyes straining past the endless fields and out to the circling birds and webs of clouds. A sky so high and neat and endless. I couldn’t tell if either of the girls had already seen the body. Everything was nothing. There were no airplanes in the air and without the roar of traffic the world was eerily quiet.

We were always thirsty and we often talked with others on the road, exchanging information with the ones that seemed decent and had kids of their own. People told us they’d heard the day after the quake a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania had failed and was contaminating the air. This besides the explosion we all knew about in Washington state. Or where Washington state used to be, now slipped entire into the ocean. Secretly I wondered about the plutonium plants, not to mention the nuke bombs and missiles, wherever they might be. The government wasn’t saying anything but there had to be serious problems. There had to be warheads nestled somewhere deep in the Earth’s mantle, just sitting there where the ground had swallowed them up.

I asked my husband about it that first night on the road. Our legs were tired beyond belief and our nerves frayed. I missed home. The girls were asleep under the moonlight and with the stars brighter than I’d ever seen them I whispered to him, What would happen if there were nukes buried down in the Earth? What would happen if they went off?

My husband had fought in Afghanistan and he said that I shouldn’t worry about such things. He said he’d walked through miles and miles of mine fields before and the worst thing you could do was think about the mines.

The both of us slept badly and the sunshine woke the girls early in the morning. We set off again southbound on US-69 with a thin line of people both in front and behind us, a wasted group of ghosts. I felt as though we were the last wretched souls on Earth, slinking slowly from the damned. Or maybe we were the damned, walking into the mouth of our eternal anguish.

This is an abbreviated chapter.

The girl walked toward the house of mirrors at dusk through the carnival’s aria and the sweet scent of popped corn and cotton candy. Little boys ran all around her. They ran toward her and then past, just dodging her, like those birds she remembered from downtown San Francisco. Those birds that would fly low and dive at your head, pulling up right at the last moment, and you could tell who the tourists were because, like her, when the birds came diving downward the tourists would duck or put their arms up in defense while the veterans of the city would just keep walking or standing in place. They didn’t allow the kamikaze birds to startle them, and it was the same at the carnival only instead of birds it was boys, boys racing each other through the crowd or boys chasing the girls with dirty feet and the lights of the carnival popped on with a thud and then a resounding electric hum, steady and monotonous, like blood in the vein of something horrible.

The pregnant girl walked toward the house of mirrors, alone. I’ll never get used to the stares, she thought. Fiendish laughter played on a recorded loop from the small speaker above the entrance, and she thought, The men stare and the women stare, each of them for different reasons, and the children stare, probably in wonder of how a person so young could have a belly so big.

Through the arched entrance made up like a gothic preservation and plunged suddenly into darkness, the girl took a right at the dead end of the narrow hall, suddenly surrounded by herself ad infinitum in the pulsing white light. Everywhere, the self. That same laughter from the entrance was amplified in the corridor of mirrors and she panicked briefly and began walking, looking past herself and through herself and around herself to discern a break in the labyrinth, to try and find a way through.

*

He sat on the bench eating a hot dog when he heard the cry for help. It sounded like someone was calling for a doctor so he dropped his hot dog on the asphalt and ran over to his little girl in line at the carousel. He grabbed her firmly by the wrist and pulled her and said, Someone needs our help, honey. They jogged to the house of mirrors and an old woman standing by the entrance yelling for someone to help her. I’m a doctor, the man told her.

There’s a woman in there, the old woman said, pointing to the gaping entrance of the house of mirrors. I think she’s having a baby.

Call the paramedics, the doctor told her, and pulled his little girl into the house of mirrors with him, met immediately by anguished screams and darkness. Hello? he said, and turned right at the end of the hall whereupon a room of seemingly infinite size and depth reflected back to him beneath the blinking strobe lights his own image, his right arm at his side connected umbilically to his daughter, whose face was scrunched into a tiny ball of worry or confusion, and he looked down to her as the screams from the woman in labor swelled as did some maniacal cackle of laughter from the speaker system, he looked down to his little girl, the real little girl at his side and not one of her million facsimiles patterned all about him and he said, Don’t be afraid.

He led them to a break in the mirror wall where they turned left, then right, then left again with the woman’s screams taunting them in the labyrinth and they finally found her lying upon a pile of someone’s clothes on the filthy ground. There was amniotic fluid and a great deal of blood. A woman kneeled next to her, holding her hand.

Hello, he told them. I’m a doctor. The woman in labor didn’t look like a woman at all but just a girl, fifteen or maybe sixteen, just a few years older than his own daughter. What’s your name? he asked the girl in labor. She screamed with pain and he looked down and saw the dark matted crown of the baby’s head peeking out from between her legs.

This baby is coming out right now, he said. You’re going to have to push, miss.

This is an abbreviated chapter.

When they came through Morse they were about a hundred strong and it was simply just a matter of packin up and joinin em. I’d been waiting for em to come down through the canyon and was ready to head out on my own when word came they’d be walking through. So I packed up all my essentials, if you will, and waited by morning light on the highway in that quiet valley until I saw them come forth off in the distance like a trickle of dust-burdened Moors. Straight up from the underworld. Then I watched em file past without so much as a nod from any of em and I fell in line and left Morse for good.

We moved our way down into Parachute and Halifax sticking to the quiet highway and some of em spoke to each other while we looked out west to where the Great Smoky Mountains used to reach up to heaven like god’s great violent reminder but were now just a memory. Vacant or discarded. We walked through Joliet and into Slumber where the abandoned mills and factories still hummed because the ghosts of this wasted country still need to work their ten hours to pass the time. By the end of the first day my feet were sore and blistered and our number had grown by almost half and we camped on the side of the highway at the foot of the pines, making small fires and eating canned beans and stew and chili with bread. Coffee bitter and boiling hot on the tongue. A few people had a group reading from their book and we slept in sleeping bags or else on blankets beneath the stars multiplied in the heavens awakened only rarely as a car or rig or van came peeling past us down the highway like thunder.

I’d grown up in Morse and spent my life there fishin like my old man and his before him. I played ball and chased the girls and watched em become women with somethin like fascination and awe. I volunteered for the army and was shipped off across the world to fight in a war I happened to believe in less and less with each passin day. I was over there when the quake happened. Very far from home indeed. I called in as soon as I could and never was able to reach anyone. Two weeks passed before I finally got an e-mail letter from my little sister sayin they were okay but they were all headin south, the whole town, basically the whole region. Or what was left of it. Because the Great Smokies were gone, she wrote, and Lake Morse, too, and the whole country was becoming dry. As if god picked up the world and shook it, she wrote. I remember her words but I don’t remember what I thought about them.

That first night on the road I didn’t sleep and was happy when we finally packed up and started out again with our shadows long and thin beside us down through Othello and the old ghost town of Golden with birdsong and a pallid sun growing higher in the air. We found the Charleston roaring past muddy and brown in the early afternoon just about where it used to be and we walked parallel to it, dipping our dirty hands and arms into it. I took off my boots and socks and set my feet in, feelin debris tickle at my toes and also like maybe it was the best thing I ever felt.

This is an abbreviated chapter.

The woman sat at the table in the empty room, her long blonde hair recently washed and not yet dried. She was younger than I thought. They’d made her dress into some anonymous, large white t-shirt. Bruises pink and not yet ripened into dark blues and blacks set about her eyes and she stared down at the tabletop. I walked over to set an opened pack of cigarettes before her, watching closely, discerning her motionlessness and the subtle calculations therein. The woman said something and I looked over to the translator.

She says she quit, the translator said.

Ask her if she’s thirsty, I said.

The translator asked and the woman shook her head.

I stood for a moment, hands in my trouser pockets.

I’m the investigator, I told her, and sat in the chair opposite her. I said, You can begin whenever you feel comfortable.

The woman stared at the table between us for a very long time, not moving. Her hair hung down brown and clayey and partially hid her face from the light above, a single fluorescent bulb bracketed into its fixture and enclosed in a mesh steel cage, bolted to the ceiling. I imagined that somewhere beneath the table she massaged the soreness from her wrists, thinking about how everything now would be changed, and suddenly she leaned forward, snatching the cigarettes from the table. She fingered one out and put it in her mouth. The translator reached into his pants for a pack of matches and struck one, and the woman inhaled deeply, deliberately. She exhaled and said something.

The translator said, The boy was born in the arid part of the world.

I leaned back in my chair and watched the woman.

Or at least that’s what our predecessors told us, she said through the translator. They said the boy was born somewhere in the arid part of the world and when that boy was born, the very instant the child came into the world, a giant fissure opened in the planet and sheared off vast stretches of land. The fissure caused searing eruptions from the mountain peaks and it caused the planet to shift dramatically upon its axis. Entire regions disappeared into the oceans. Climates changed, social hierarchies were completely overturned. Many people died as a result of this catastrophe.

She took another long pull on the cigarette and closed her eyes. The translator looked over at me and then back at her. There was no ashtray on the table, so the woman tapped the ash onto the concrete floor. Looking down at the table, she slowly resumed her story.

The mother held her newborn son that first night and watched the broadcast news about the planetary shift, the quake and the suffering, but she never guessed it had anything to do with her son. She didn’t feel the tremors nor the aftereffects of those tremors, almost as if she were completely removed from the quake. But she certainly endured the anxiety, the sense of doom or foreboding that everyone else felt.

Our predecessors said the woman had terrible nightmares. Most everyone had dreams back then. No matter where they were from, no matter what they believed. You know, their religious persuasions. They all thought their world was revolting against them, that their time was up, the universe or their gods were finally going to cast them into oblivion. They told us that most everyone thought they deserved it.

She took one last long draw on her cigarette and dropped the butt on the floor.

She said, The woman’s dreams always focused on a single man, someone powerful in stature and always cloaked in a peculiar light. She was terrified. Always a man, faceless and indistinguishable, a beacon of trust and hope for many people throughout the world. In her dreams the man would lead a snaking mass of people either in speech or movement, always trailed by or facing the huge crowd. There were flags, giant flags waving wherever he went. Flags red or maroon and perhaps splashed with designs of white. The mother couldn’t really tell.

The woman reached for another cigarette and the translator lit it for her, leaving the pack of matches on the table. She didn’t raise her eyes, as if the history of her planet resided upon the surface of the table, all of it mapped there in the years of wear, the ridged imperfections. Her eyes were deeply hazel, but I had yet to see into them, to endure their strength or feel their resistance. I wanted her to look at me, but she wouldn’t. She spoke even more slowly.

They said the woman knew the man in her dreams was her son. After he’d grown. The adult version of her baby boy. The thought horrified her. They said she would walk into the baby’s room at night when he was asleep and she would stand there, looking down at him, knowing she had to kill him. In order to save the world from something terrible, something unspeakable in the future, she had to murder her son. But she loved him, she just didn’t have the courage. They said one time she even got so far as to carry the child into the bathroom to submerge it into a full tub of warm water, holding him down to watch little bubbles of air crawl from his nostrils and open up at the surface, but she couldn’t do it, she had to pull the baby back out to safety. They said the dreams got so bad and her apparent guilt so severe that one night she slowly submerged her own self into a nearby pond of water and drowned.

 

This is an abbreviated chapter.

It’s an impressive catalog, really, the chief said. And if times were different, believe me.

He trailed off. I knew it was hopeless. It was the third newsroom I’d visited that day, just the first time I was allowed past reception. Nobody was hiring, nobody needed a writer.

The Web’s changed everything, he said. Looking at these clips, you’re a good writer. Very good, in fact. But that’s all you are, son. Nowadays you’ve got to be more.

You know if anyone in the area might be looking for a writer? I asked.

No, I’m afraid not. Not around here. I’ve got a colleague up in Chicago. A former colleague, I mean. He’s trying to start something up, looking for freelancers.

What’s the content?

I don’t know. You’ll have to talk to him.

The chief thumbed through his wallet and pulled out a business card and handed it across the desk.

Could you, you know, maybe put in a word?

The chief just looked at me.

I’m getting pretty desperate here, chief.

He leaned back in his chair and said, I’ll see what I can do.

I thanked him and left and got a cheap room near the bus station. I slept all through the evening, through the drunken shouts and animated coitus and drug abuse taunting me through the walls, I slept through the honky-tonk clamor and the engines roaring in the avenue below. At midnight I woke feeling refreshed and wrote a few pages in my notebook and then showered and walked back over to the bus station to buy a one-way seat to Chicago.

*

When I wasn’t sleeping on the bus I was meditating on the disarray of my life. I pulled the notebook out of my bag and took up where I’d left off back in the room in Nashville, deliberately revisiting the past year, reconstructing the mistakes, all the wrong turns, trying to figure out where to go next. I went all the way back to the layoff and my trip to Las Vegas when I was on the precipice of destruction, then onto the nightmare in California and Colorado’s magnificent relapse, all the way up to today, chasing down the night to Chicago, running after ghosts of opportunities that probably weren’t even half-real, seeking divine providence or luck or a balancing of the scales, so to speak, because I had no idea what I would do if it didn’t work out in the windy city, I didn’t know what I’d become, running and fleeing and chasing specters as I was. But then maybe it wasn’t so much a question of what I’d become as what I’d always been, only now I was completely unmasked, exposed, free of facade or other agents of deception that I’d learned to cloak about myself. What was I looking for? What would I find?

I faded in and out of sleep, toward and away from varied episodes of depression, exasperation, longing, desperation, self-loathing, loss of identity, fear, grief, regret, and I also would have experienced some degree of shame, had I not pretended that the dark landscape slipping past the window concealed my pained reflection from the rest of that cold and indifferent world I happened to love with a savage bitterness. The self-critical web I’d spun had caught me at the junction of its thickest strands and I remained stuck there for over seven hours on the approach to Chicago.

Nine other people spread themselves out equidistantly throughout the bus and so it was only natural that I also began to wonder about them. What were they chasing? What would they find? What spoiled plans or delusional dreams had they carried with them on this veiled midnight run from Nashville to Illinois? The sun was just about up at the horizon painting its range of promise and I finally nodded off, sleeping more soundly in those final thirty minutes into Chicago than I can remember.

*

I called the number on the business card from a payphone in the terminal. Maybe we could schedule a brief meeting, said the man on the other end of the line. Would just before lunch work for you?

That’s perfect, I told him. I’ll be right over.

I hailed a cab and the driver was a burly red-haired guy full of Cubs talk and crude jokes. I humored him for the duration of my ride and then tipped him generously. Standing on the sidewalk near the epicenter of Chicago my thoughts navigated once again to time travel, to which way I’d migrated to get to this precise point, which direction did time actually travel, did it travel backward and forward or up and down, or was it more of a wave rather than a straight line, and then out of nowhere I experienced a brief but very powerful episode of déjà vu. I shrugged it off and walked into the building and up to the office where a young man greeted me with a handshake in a room that appeared to be under construction.

Look, we gotta make this fast, he said. I’m having some kind of god-awful crisis with the server.

His desk was a dusty chunk of plywood spread over the top of two empty beer kegs.

Have you got any clips with you, or is everything Online?

I have a few, I said, and pulled from the bag two printouts from my last major daily and a printout from the weekly I’d helped start up in San Francisco. He looked it all over in silence and my eyes wandered about his office, the clutter of books and paper, the dirty floor, the bare walls. I wondered how long it would be before he started sleeping there, if he hadn’t yet.

I see you’ve got some experience with science writing, he said.

A little.

So here’s the thing, he said, handing the papers back to me. I’ve got myself and another full-time writer on board, plus a freelancer, and then maybe you. I won’t be able to pay you anything until the money starts coming in. But by then, hopefully, subscriptions will be upward to where we could at least sign you on full-time.

I nodded.

Basically, we’re all taking a leap of fucking faith here. But you’ve been in the game for long enough. You know how it is.

He motioned to the papers in my hand.

You seem to be a pretty good writer.

Thanks.

So what do you say?

He looked around his office, which must have seemed to him at that moment to be some kind of farce. In a flash he imagined what he would have thought if he was in my shoes and what he thought was that he would probably laugh, he would lean back, cackling mad at the ceiling right before he walked out.

I’m in, I said.

Good, he said, rifling through some papers on his desk. First assignment is, there’s a guy out in Aurora, you know where that is?

No.

It’s about an hour east of here, suburbs. There’s a guy out there been calling up radio shows, telling them he’s building a time machine.

I swallowed hard.

He’s been calling universities, asking if he can borrow their equipment, stuff like that. One of our guys called him up and he said he’d talk to us.

I tried to act natural. I felt flushed and feverish.

I haven’t done any background on it but I’ll bet he’s got a record. Probably currently unemployed. Shit like that. Lives with his mother. May not be a story there, but you’d be the guy to write it if there was.

I smiled and said, You got it.

He gave me the address and phone number and said, How about three days. What is today? Tuesday? How about Saturday at noon?

Okay, yeah.

Just use the e-mail on the business card, he said, and stood to leave.

Can I ask you a question, I said.

You want an advance.

Well, no, I said. But I could sure as hell use one.

Here’s a hundred, he said. I can get you more this weekend.

Thanks, I said, and put the money in my pocket. But that’s not what I was going to ask you.

So what is it?

Are we a magazine or a newspaper? Or is it a strictly Online thing?

He sighed, closed his eyes.

A daily or a weekly or what are we?

Well, he said, and chuckled. We’re still working on all that.

He clapped me on the back and said, Right now we’re nothing, brother. But we’re gonna try to be everything.

Do we even have a name? I asked, standing in the hallway.

Just make something up, he said, and closed the door.