From the Blood of the Cannibal Moon: He Borara Part 3 Chapter 1

          The move into the mythic past encompasses a transition from existence to essence. When the events in these stories told by great shamans took place, the characters and places described in them had no beginnings and no ends. You must understand, if you want to appreciate the underlying truth of the stories, that the boundaries separating the mythic realm from the time-bound world are sometimes porous, but never more so than they were in the time of Moonblood. So there’s no contradiction when a shaman says, in a time before men, two men drew their bows and fired arrows at the moon.

            These two brothers, Uhudima and Suhirima, were not men as we know them today, men like you and me. They were no badabö, which means “those who are now dead,” but also means “the original humans,” and they were part human, part animal, and part spirit. The moon, Peribo, likewise partook of multiple essences, and he nightly stole away with members of the no badabö village to press them between two pieces of cassava bread and devour them, until the two brothers decided Peribo must be stopped. As the moon retreated toward the horizon, Uhudima aimed his bow and loosed an arrow. He missed. Then he missed again. The Yąnomamö say Uhudima was sina—a lousy shot.

            But his brother Suhirima was an excellent marksman. Even after Uhudima missed shot after shot, allowing Peribo to escape nearly all the way the horizon, Suhirima was able to take steady aim with his own bow and shoot an arrow that planted itself deep in Peribo’s belly. The wound disgorged great gouts of blood that fell to the earth as Peribo’s screams echoed across the sky. Wherever the blood landed sprang up a Yąnomamö—a true human being like the ones in these villages today. Something of the moon’s essence, his fury and bloodthirst, transferred to these newly born beings, making them waiteri, fearless and fiercely protective of their honor.

            The first Yąnomamö no sooner sprang forth from the blood of the cannibal moon than they set about fighting and killing each other. They may have gone on to wipe themselves entirely out of existence, but in some parts of the hei kä misi, the layer of the cosmos we’re standing on now, the blood of the moon was diluted by water from streams and ponds and swamps. The Yąnomamö who arose from this washed blood were less warlike, fighting fiercely but not as frequently. The purest moon blood landed near the center of the hei kä misi, and even today you notice that the Yąnomamö in this area are far fiercer than those you encounter as you move toward the edges of the layer, a peripheral region where the ground is friable and crumbling.

            Even the more peaceful Yąnomamö far from where the purest moon blood landed would have died out eventually because there were no women among them. But one day, the headman from one of the original villages was out with his men gathering vines for making hammocks and for lashing together support beams for their shabono. He was pulling a vine from the tree it clung to when he noticed an odd-looking fruit. Picking it from the tree and turning it in his hand, he saw that the fruit, which is called wabu, had a pair of eyes that were looking back at him.

            The headman wondered aloud, “Is this what a woman looks like?” He satisfied his curiosity, examining the fruit closely for several long moments, but he knew there was still work to be done, so he tossed the wabu on the ground and went back to pulling vines from trees.

            What he didn’t see was that upon hitting the ground the wabu transformed into a woman, like the ones we see today, only this one’s vagina was especially large and hairy, traits that fire Yąnomamö men’s lust. When the men finished pulling down their vines and began dragging the bundles back along the jungle trail to their shabono, this original woman succumbed to her mischievous streak. She followed behind the men, jumping behind trees whenever they turned back, which they did each time she ran up to the ends of the vines dragging behind them and stepped on them, causing the men to drop their entire bundle. They grew frustrated to the point of rage. Finally, when the men had nearly reached their shabono, the woman stepped on the end of a vine and remained standing there when the men turned around.

            Seeing this creature with strange curves and with her great, hairy vagina in place of an up-tied penis, the men felt their frustration commingle with their lust, whipping them into a frenzy. They surrounded her and took turns copulating with her. Once they’d each taken a turn, they brought her back to their shabono, where the rest of the men of the village were likewise overcome with lust and likewise took turns copulating with her. The woman stayed in the shabono for many months until her belly grew round and she eventually gave birth to a baby, a girl. As soon as this girl came of age, the men took turns copulating with her, just as they had with her mother. And so it went. Every daughter conceived through such mass couplings mothered her own girl, and the cycle continued.

            Now there are women in every shabono, and all Yąnomamö trace their ancestry back to both Moonblood and Wabu, though it’s the male line they favor.

            Around this time, back when time wasn’t fixed on its single-dimensional trajectory, a piece of the hedu kä misi—the sky layer, the underside of which we see whenever we look up—fell crashing into hei kä misi. The impact was so powerful that the shabono the piece of sky landed on, Amahiri-teri, was knocked all the way through and out the bottom of the layer, finally coming to form a subterranean layer of its own. Unfortunately, the part of hei kä misi that fell through the crater consisted only of the shabono and the surrounding gardens, so the Amahiri-teri have no jungles in which to hunt. Since these people are no badabö, they are able to send their spirits up through the layer separating us. And without jungles to hunt in, they’ve developed an insatiable craving for meat.

            Thus the Amahiri-teri routinely rise up from under the ground to snatch and devour the souls of children. Most of the spirits the shamans do battle with in their daily rituals are sent by shamans from rival villages to steal their children’s souls, but every once in a while they’re forced to contend with the cannibalistic Amahiri-teri.

            When Yąnomamö die, their buhii, their spirits, rise up through to the surface of the sky layer, hedu kä misi, to the bottom of which are fixed the daytime and nighttime skies as we see them, but the top surface of which mirrors the surface of this layer, with jungles, mountains, streams, and of course Yąnomamö, with their shabonos and gardens. Here too reside the no badabö, but since their essences are mixed they’re somewhat different. Their spirits, the hekura, regularly travel to this layer in forms part animal and part human. It is with the hekura that the shamans commune in their daily sessions with ebene, the green powder they shoot through blowguns into each other’s nostrils.

            The shamans imitate particular animals to call forth the corresponding hekura and make requests of them. They even invite the hekura to take up residence inside their bodies—as there seems to be an entirely separate cosmos within their chests and stomachs. This is possible because the hekura, who travel down to earth from high mountains on glittering hammock strings, are quite tiny. With the help of ebene, they appear as bright flashes flitting about like ecstatic butterflies over a summertime feast.

            “Sounds a bit like our old notion of fairies,” says the padre. “Fascinating. I’ve heard bits and pieces of this before, but it’s truly fantastic—and it’s quite impressive you were able to pick all of this up in just over a month.”

            “Oh, don’t write it down yet,” Lac says. “It’s only preliminary. Even within Bisaasi-teri, there’s all kinds of disagreement over the details. And I’m still struggling with the language—to put it mildly. Lucky for me, they do the rituals and reenact the myths every day when they take their hallucinogens. I think many of the details of the stories actually exists primarily because they’re fun to reenact, and fun to watch. You should see the shamans doing the bit about the first woman stepping on the ends of the vines. Or the brothers shooting their arrows at the moon.”

            “Sex and violence and cannibalism. The part about the woman and the fruit—wabu, did you call it?—is familiar-sounding to us Bible readers, no? But there’s no reference to, no awareness of sin or redemption. Sad really.”

            The two men sit in chairs, in an office with clean white walls, atop a finished wood floor.

            “They also have a story about a flood that rings a bell,” Lac says. “When they realized I was beginning to understand a lot of what they were saying, they started asking me if I had drowned and been reincarnated. They explained there was once a great flood that washed away entire villages. Some Yąnomamö survived by finding floating logs to cling to, but they were carried away to the edges of hei kä misi. When they didn’t return, everyone figured they must have drowned. But one of their main deities, Omawä, went to the edge and fished their bodies out of the water. He wrung them out, breathed life back into them, and sent them back home on their floating logs—which may be a reference to the canoes they see Ye’kwana traveling in. Of course, we come by canoe as well. They conclude we must be coming from regions farther from the center of this layer, because we’re even more degenerated from the original form they represent, and our speech is even more ‘crooked,’ as they call it.”

            The padre rolls his head back and laughs from his belly. Lac can’t help laughing along. Father Santa Claus here.

            “Their myths do seem to capture something of their character,” the padre says, “this theme of a free-for-all with regard to fighting and killing and sex, for instance.”

            Lac resists pointing out the ubiquity of this same theme throughout the Old Testament, which to him is evidence that both sources merely reflect the stage of their respective society’s evolution at the time of the stories’ conceptions. He says instead, “It’s not a total free-for-all. They find the Amahiri-teri truly frightening because they feel they’re always at risk of turning to cannibalism themselves—and they find the prospect absolutely loathsome and disgusting. I think that’s why they prefer their meat so well-done. I ate a bloody tenderloin I cut from a tapir I’d shot in front of some of the men. It was barely cooked—how I like it. The men were horrified, accusing me of wanting to become a jaguar, an eater of raw human flesh. So they do have their taboos.”

            Lac wishes he could add that the moral dimension of the story of Genesis is overstressed. By modern, civilized standards, the original sin stands out as a simple act of disobedience, defiance. You live in paradise, but a lordly presence commands you not to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: this sounds a bit like, “You have it made, just don’t ask questions.” Or else, “I’ve given you so much, don’t you dare question me!” One could argue you’d have a moral obligation to eat the fruit. Or you could even take morality out of the interpretation altogether and look at the story as an allegory of maturation from a stage of naïve innocence to one of more worldly cynicism, like when your parents can no longer protect you from the harsh realities of the world—in no small part because you insist on going forth to investigate them for yourself.

            Had Laura eaten from the Tree of Knowledge when she discovered the other women she encountered at U of M were only there to meet prize marriage prospects? Was that her banishment from paradise? Did I eat the same fruit by coming to Bisaasi-teri and witnessing firsthand how much of what I’d learned from my professors was in dire need of questioning and revision? Of course, I’d eaten that fruit before. We probably all have once or twice by the time we’re approaching our thirties.

            “Taboos and temptations, indeed,” says the padre. “I wonder,” he adds somberly, “what the final mix of beliefs will look like when my time in the territory has come to an end. Hermano Mertens says the Indians he speaks to across the river from you at Mavaca confuse the name Jesus with the name of one of the figures from their myths.”

            “Yes, Yoawä—he’s Omawä’s twin brother.” Lac forbears to add that Yoawä is usually the uglier, clumsier, and more foolish of the pair in the stories. But he does say, “Chuck Clemens did once tell me it was all but impossible to convince the Yąnomamö to reject their religion wholesale. The best he could hope for was to see them incorporate the Bible stories into their own stories about the no badabö.”

            The kindly padre chuckles. “Ah, that’s how it looks for the first generation. For the children, the balance will have shifted. For the grandchildren, the stories they tell now will be mere folktales—if they’re not entirely forgotten… I can tell that prospect disturbs you. You find fascination in their culture and their way of life. That’s only natural, you being an anthropologist. And your friend is a Protestant. Here we all are in the jungle, battling it out for the savages’ souls. It was ever thus.”

            It was not ever thus, Lac thinks. Those savages used to be exterminated by the hundreds for their land, and for their madohe if they had any. People like me were called heretics and burned at the stake. “One of my informants,” he says, “tells me the hekura find it repulsive when humans have sex. He says he’d like to become a shabori, a shaman, himself, but the initiation entails a year of fasting, which reduces the men to walking skeletons, and a year of sexual abstinence. See, to become hekura oneself, you must first invite the hekura spirits into your chest. And they won’t come if you’re fooling around in hammocks or in the back of the garden with women. The hekura believe sex is shami, filthy. You can’t help but heed the similarity with the English word shame.”

            The padre laughs and Lac laughs easily alongside him. There’s no tension between him and this priest, obviously a beneficent man. “I suspect,” Lac says, “the older shabori tell the initiates the hekura think sex is shami because they want to neutralize the competition for a year. So many of their disputes are over jealousy, liberties taken with wives, refusals to deliver promised brides.”

            “They receive no divine injunction to seek peace and love their fellow man?” the padre asks, though the utterance hovers in the space between question and statement.

            “That’s not entirely true. One of my informants tells me they face judgement when they die. A figure named Wadawadariwä asks if they’ve been generous in mortal life. If they say yes, they’re admitted into hedu, the higher layer. But if not they are sent to Shobari Waka, a place of fire.” Lac pauses to let his Spanish catch up with his thoughts. The Yąnomamö terms keep getting him tangled up, making him lose track of which word fits with which language. He imagines that, while in his mind he’s toggling back and forth between each tongue somewhat seamlessly, in reality he’s probably speaking a nearly incoherent jumble. “But when I asked the man how seriously the Yąnomamö take this threat of a fiery afterlife, he laughed. You see, Wadawadariwä is a moron, and everyone knows to tell him what he wants to hear. They lie. He has no way of knowing the truth.”

            Now the padre’s attention is piercing; he’s taking note. Lac half expects him to get up from his straight-backed wicker chair and find a notepad to jot down what he’s heard. Nice work, Shackley. You just helped the Church make inroads toward frightening the Yąnomamö into accepting a new set of doctrines.

            “Curious that they’d have such a belief,” the padre says. “I wonder if it’s not a vestige of some long-ago contact with Christians—or some rumor passed along from neighboring tribes that got incorporated into their mythology in a lukewarm fashion.”

            “I had the same thought. The biggest question I have now though is whether my one informant is giving me reliable information. You work with the Yąnomamö; you know how mischievous they are. They all want to stay close to me for the prime access to trade goods, but I can tell they don’t think much of me. Ha! I’m no better off than Wadawadariwä, an idiot they’ll say anything to to get what they want.”

            This sets the padre to shuddering with laughter again. “Oh, my friend, what do you expect? You show up, build a mud hut, and start following them around all day, pestering them with questions. You can see why they’d be confused about your relative standing. But I understand you want to report on their culture and their way of life. Maybe you really are doing that the most effective way, but maybe you could learn just as much while being much more comfortable.” He stretches and swings his arm in a gesture encompassing his own living conditions. “It’s hard to say. But since the Church’s goal is different—our goal is first to persuade them—we feel it best to establish clear boundaries, clear signals of where we stand, how our societies would fare if forced to battle it out, in a manner of speaking. And battle it out we must, for the sake of their immortal souls.” He makes a face and wiggles his fingers in accompaniment to this last sentiment.

            Lac appreciates him making light of such a haughty declamation, but he’s at a loss how to interpret the general message. Does the padre not really believe he has to demonstrate the superiority of his culture if he hopes to save the Yąnomamö’s souls? Or does he simply recognize how grandiose this explanation of his mission must sound to a layman, a scientist no less—or a man aspiring to be one at any rate.

            “But naturally we’ve had our difficulties,” the padre continues, pausing to scowl over his interlaced fingers. “I hope however that once we’ve established a regular flight schedule, landing and taking off from Esmeralda, many of those difficulties will be resolved.”

            “A regular flight schedule?”

            “Yes, we’re negotiating with the Venezuelan Air Force to start making regular flights out here, maybe make some improvements to the air strip. Ha ha. I’m afraid I’m not the adventurer you are, Dr. Shackley. I like my creature comforts, and those comforts are often critical to bringing the natives to God. As Hermano Mertens is discovering now at Boca Mavaca.”

            Lac remembers standing knee-deep in the Orinoco, watching smoke twist up in its gnarled narrow column, wondering who it could be, wondering if whoever it was might have some salvation on offer. He’d only been in Bisaasi-teri a few days. It was a rough time. The padre, naturally enough, asked after the lay brother setting up a new mission outpost across the river from Bisaasi-teri soon after they’d introduced themselves. “Honestly,” Lac answered, “I just managed to get my hands on the dugout because the Malarialogìa are trying to get pills to all the villages. It’s a really bad year for malaria. Many of the children of Bisaasi-teri are afflicted. I did hear some rumors about a construction project of some sort going on across the river, but I have yet to visit and check it out for myself.”

            “Hermano Mertens had such high hopes for what he could accomplish there,” the padre says now. He pauses. One of the traits that Lac has quickly taken to in the padre is his allowance for periods of silence in conversation. Back in the States, people are so desperate to fill gaps in dialogue that they pounce whenever you stop to mull over a detail of what’s been said. The Yąnomamö are worse still. With them, you can forget the difficulty of getting a word in; every syllable you utter throughout the whole conversation will be edgewise, if not completely overlain. No one ever speaks without two or three other people speaking simultaneously.

            The padre is thoughtful, curious, so he offers any interlocutor opportunities for contemplation. Lac is relieved that the one shortwave radio in the region isn’t guarded by a man who’s succumbed to the madness of the jungle, a man who’s filled with delusions and completely unpredictable in his demands and threats, like the ones the Venezuelans downriver had described to him in warning—to encourage him to both watch out for it in others and to avoid succumbing to it himself—a reprising of the warning he originally received from his Uncle Rob when they were trekking across the UP. Lac is glad to have instead found in Padre Morello a man who’s warm, friendly, thoughtful—thoughtful enough to speak clearly and at a measured pace to help Lac keep up with the Spanish—and kind, a perspiring Santa of the tropics, with a round belly, scraggly white beard, and exiguous hair thinning to a blur of floating mist over the crown of his head. The figure he cuts is disarming in every aspect, except the incongruously dark and sharp-angled eyebrows, a touch of Mephistopheles to his otherwise jolly visage.

            Still—first Clemens, now Morello, both hard to dislike, both hard to wish away from the jungle, away from the Yąnomamö, whose way of life it is their mission to destroy. Yet how many nights over the past month have I, he thinks, lain awake in my hammock listening to the futile bellicose chants of the village shabori trying to wrest the soul of some child back from the hekura sent by the shabori of some rival village? Every illness is for the Yąnomamö the result of witchcraft. And there’s a reason the demographic age pyramid is so wide at the base and narrow at the top. There are kids everywhere you go, everywhere you look, but how many of them will live long enough to reach the next age block?

            As much as Lac abhors the image of so many Yąnomamö kids sitting at desks lined up in neat rows, wearing the modest garb of the mission Indian, he’s begun to see that those kids at least won’t have to worry about missing out on their entire adolescence and adulthood because they picked up a respiratory infection that could easily be cured with the medicine a not-too-distant neighbor has readily on hand.

            “You know, every president in the history of Venezuela has attended a Catholic Salesian school,” the padre says. “It shouldn’t be too difficult convincing the officials in Caracas how important it is that we are able to supply ourselves.” He’s talking about his airstrip in Esmeralda. The influx has begun; now it will want to gather momentum. How long before the region bears not even the slightest resemblance to what it is now? How long before Yąnomamöland is a theme park for eager and ingenuous young Jesus lovers?

            Soon after he’d docked the new dugout—newly purchased anyway—here at the mission, the padre led him to the office with the shortwave. As both men suspected would be the case, no one answered their calls. Regular check-ins are scheduled for 6 am every day. Outside of that, you’re unlikely to reach anyone. Lac had left Bisaasi-teri with the Malarialogìa men at first light. They said they were returning to Puerto Ayacucho, so Lac agreed to take them as far as Esmeralda after buying their motorized canoe. They passed Ocamo about halfway through the trip, but Lac pressed on to fulfill his promise. He was tempted to stay in Esmeralda, but instead turned around to make sure he could make it back to the mission outpost, with its large black cross prominent against the white gable you could see from the river, before it was too late in the day. He had doubts about his welcome among the Salesians. Had they heard of his dealings with the New Tribes missionaries? Would they somehow guess, perhaps tipped off by his profession, that he was an atheist?

            He was in the canoe all day, still feels swimmy in his neck and knees, still feels the vibrating drone of the motor over every inch of his skin, but nowhere so much as in his skull, like a thousand microscopic termites boring into the bone, searching out the pulpy knot behind his eyes. He’s a wraith, wrung of substance, a quivering unsubstantial husk, with heavy eyelids. But all his vitality would return in an instant were he to hear Laura’s voice—or any mere confirmation of her existence on the other side of these machines connecting them through their invisible web of pulsing energy. Just an acknowledgement that while she may not be available at that particular instant, she is still at the compound, clean and safe and well provided for, her and the kids; that would pull him back from what he fears is the brink of being lost to this hallowed out nonexistence forever. They’ll try the radio again before he retires to the hammock he’s hung in the shed where the good padre has let him store his canoe. Their best bet of reaching someone, though, will be in the morning. He can talk to Laura, say his goodbyes to the padre, perhaps set a time for his next visit, and be back to Bisaasi-teri well before noon, before the villagers are done with the day’s gardening, before it’s too sweltering to do anything but gossip and chat.

            He yawns. The padre is still talking about the airstrip, about how convenient it will be to them both, about how silly the persistent obstacles and objections are. They’re going to win, Lac thinks: the Catholics. A generation from now there will be but a few scattered villages in the remotest parts of the jungle. The rest of the Yąnomamö will be raised in or near mission schools, getting the same education as all the past presidents of Venezuela. Could I be doing more to stop this? Should I be? At least this man’s motives seem benign, and he’s offering so many children a better chance of reaching adulthood—maybe not the children of this generation but more surely those of the next.

            The padre has access to a small airstrip here at Ocamo too, and he’s always sending for more supplies to build up the compound, including the church, the school, the living quarters, and the comedor, which is like a cafeteria. You can’t really get much in, he complained, on the planes that can land here. But it’s the steady trickle that concerns Lac. Morello talks about his role here in the jungle as consisting mainly of helping to incorporate the Indian populations into the larger civilization. Not extermination, of course—we’re past that—but assimilation. It’s either that or they slowly die off as ranchers, loggers, and miners dispossess them of their territories, or poison their water, a piece at a time, introducing them all the while to diseases they have no antibodies to combat, and taking every act of self-defense as a provocation justifying mass slaughter.

            The padre wants the Indians to be treated the same as everyone else, afforded all the same rights: a tall order considering Venezuela as a country has a giant inferiority complex when it comes to its own general level of technological advancement. You take some amenity that’s totally lacking in whatever region you’re in, and that’s exactly what the officials, and even the poorest among the citizenry, will insist most vociferously they have on offer, more readily available than anywhere else you may visit in the world. Just say the word. The naked Indians running around in the forests are an embarrassment, so far beneath the lowermost rung on the social ladder they’d need another ladder to reach it, barely more than animals, more like overgrown, furless monkeys. That’s the joke you hear, according to the Malarialogìa men. The funny thing is, to the Yąnomamö, it’s us nabä who are subhuman. Look at all the hair we have on our arms and legs, our chests and backs. We’re the ones who look like monkeys—and feel like monkeys too after spending enough time in the company of these real humans.

            Without our dazzling and shiny, noisy and deadly technology, there’d be no way to settle the conflicting views. But we know it will be the nabä ways that spread unremittingly, steamrolling all of Yąnomamöland, not the other way around. Insofar as the padre and his friends are here to ease the transition, saving as many lives as possible from the merciless progress of civilization and all the attendant exploitation and blind destruction, who is Lac to fault him for being inspired by backward beliefs? Of course, it’s not the adoption of nabä ways in general the Salesians hope to facilitate; it’s the ways of the Catholic Church. The Salesians had no interest in the Indians’ plight—particularly not a foot people like the Yąnomamö, living far from the main waterways—until the New Tribes began proselytizing here. The Christians, Lac thinks, are plenty primitive in their own way; they’ve carried on their own internecine wars for centuries.

            “Don Pedro will be there when I check in at 6 tomorrow morning. I’ll have him try to reach the institute in Caracas by phone and then patch us through so you can talk to your wife.” The padre pauses thoughtfully, and then, donning a devilish grin, says, “I wonder: you said both you and your wife attended Catholic schools in Michigan. Did you also have a Catholic wedding ceremony?”

            Lac appreciates the teasing; the padre is charming enough to pass it off as part of a general spirit of play, one he infuses at well-timed points throughout the conversation. Ah, to speak to a civilized man, Lac savors, whose jokes are in nowise malicious. Smiling, he answers, “Oh, Laura’s mother would never have accepted anything else as binding.” The two men laugh together. “And you?” Lac counters. “How does the Church view your readiness to converse with people of other faiths?”

            “Other faiths?” the padre asks skeptically.

            So he has guessed I’m an atheist.

            “Miraculously enough,” the padre says without waiting for a response, “I’ve just read in our newsletter that the pope recently issued an edict declaring priests are free to pursue open dialogue with Protestants and nonbelievers, and that such exchanges may even bear spiritual fruit in our quest to become closer to God. What this means, my friend, is that I don’t have to feel guilty about enjoying this conversation so much.”

            “And many more thereafter I hope.”

            The padre smiles, his teeth flashing whiter than his scraggly beard. “You know,” he says, “throughout he war, I lived in the rectory of a church in my hometown near Turin. Now this was Northern Italy, so there were planes flying overhead all the time. We’d often hear their guns rattling like hellish thunder chains in the sky, and on many occasions we felt obliged to rush to the site of a crash. For years, the Germans had the upper hand, but if we found an Allied pilot at the crash site, we’d bring him back to the church, shelter him, and keep him hidden from any patrols. Had we been caught harboring these enemy pilots, feeding them, nursing their injuries, it would have meant the firing squad for us for sure. But what could we do?

            “When the tides shifted and it was the Allied forces who dominated the skies, we started finding Axis pilots at the crash sites, and now it was the Allied firing squads we feared.” The padre leans forward with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, holds a hand up to his mouth and whispers, “Here’s the best part: a couple years after the war, I started receiving a pension, an expression of gratitude from the military for what I’d done saving the lives of their pilots, in recognition of what I’d risked—first from the Axis side, then another one later from the Allied side.” He leans away, his head rolling back to release a booming peel of laughter. 

            Lac too laughs from deep in his belly, wondering, could this story be true? The doubt somehow makes it funnier. Does it even matter? He’s already regretting his plans to leave the mission outpost tomorrow after talking to Laura, already looking forward to his next visit to Ocamo.

The padre has told him he’s writing a book about his life in the jungle, prominently featuring his mission work among the Yąnomamö, and he’s interested in any photographs Lac may be able to provide from his own fieldwork. In exchange, Lac will be free to visit the outpost at Ocamo anytime and make use of the shortwave. He will also be free to store extra supplies and fuel for his dugout’s motor—which will make it easier for him to reach all the towns downstream.

You help me with my book; I’ll help you with yours. Sounds like an excellent bargain to me. But now that you have all these ways of reaching and communicating with the world outside the Yąnomamö’s, you really need to forget about them and get back to work.

*

            “—chlan –ell me –u’re alight.” Laura’s voice. English. Bliss.

            One candle bowing across the vast distance to light another. The hollowness inside him fills with the warm dancing glow.

Padre Morello discreetly backs out of the room upon hearing the voice come through, and Lac is grateful because he has to choke back a sob and draw in a deliberately measured breath before he can say, “I’m alright Laura. Healthy and in one piece. Though I’ve lost a bunch of weight. How are you and the kids?”

            “Healthy and in one piece. They miss you. I think we’re all feeling a little trapped here. There’s another family, though, the Hofstetters—they’ve been a godsend.”

            Lac’s mind seamlessly mends the lacunae in the transmission—one of the easier linguistic exercises he’s been put to lately—but every missing syllable elevates his heartrate. He leans forward until his cheek is almost touching the surface of the contraption. He asks, “Are you getting everything you need by way of supplies and groceries?” He feels a pang in recognition of his own pretense at having any influence whatsoever over his family’s provisioning; the question is really a plea for reassurance.

            “The Hofstetters have been taking us in their car every week to a grocery store down in the city.” Lac is already imagining a strapping husband, disenchanted with marriage, bored with his wife; he’d be some kind of prestigious scientist no doubt, handsome, over six feet. “Dominic had a fever last week, but it went down after we gave him some aspirin and put him to bed.” We? “He misses French fries, says the ones here aren’t right. He wants McDonalds.”

            Lac decides to break the news preemptively, before she has a chance to mention the plan for them to come live with him in the field. “Laura, I have some bad news. The conditions are more prim… it’s rougher than I anticipated.” He proceeds with a bowdlerized version of his misadventures among the Yąnomamö to date, adding that with time he should be able to learn the ropes of the culture and secure regular access to everything they need. “Don’t worry, honey, I’m through the most risky part myself, but even I have to be cautious at all times. I need to make absolutely sure you’ll all be safe before I bring you here.”

            “Are the Indians dangerous?” she asks innocently. “When they’re demanding your trade goods like you described, do they ever threaten you?”

“Oh yes.” She knows I’m holding back, he thinks. Am I just making her worry even more? He hurries to add, “They’re full of bluster and machismo. It was intimidating at first, but I picked up on the fact that they’re mostly bluffing.”

            “Mostly?”

“You have to understand, all the men are really short. If they get too aggressive I can stand looking down at them. Ha. It’s the first time in my life I’ve been the tallest guy around. And the key I’ve found is to stand your ground, not budge, make sure it’s known to everyone that you’re no easy mark. Now I worry more about the kids making off with anything I leave out in the open.” He turns away and curses himself. Until that last sentence, he’d managed to stick to the technical truth, however misleading the delivery. But he intuited a need in Laura for him to segue onto a more trivial threat, so he brought up the kids, even though it’s the grown men who have the stickiest fingers.

So now I’m officially lying to my wife; I got carried away weaving true threads into a curtain of falsehood and I lost sight of which threads were which. Now I can’t pull out that last thread without the whole thing unraveling, revealing the stark reality. He foresees being haunted by the guilt from his little fib for weeks, or until he’s able to show her firsthand that he really is safe, safe enough to keep her and the kids safe too.

He’s got his work cut out.

*

Padre Morello sees at a glance that Lac has no wish to speak; he makes no effort to continue the conversation from the night before, though doing so would be in keeping with his natural disposition. The men exchange a few words as the padre guides him part of the way back to the shed, where Lac will repack his belongings, do some preventative maintenance on his motor—or pretend to, as he knows embarrassingly little about engines, for a Shackely—and drag the dugout down to the riverbank for the trip back to Bisaasi-teri, back to his hut, back to Rowahirawa and all the others. Rowahirawa, formerly Waddu-ewantow, has taken over the role of chief informant, even though Lac still reckons the chances that he’ll turn violent toward him someday rather high.

The padre never asked him questions like that, about how much danger he felt he was in. That’s the other reason for recreating your own cultural surroundings, or at least a simulacrum of them, when you come to live in this territory—the safety. The dogs living at the Ocamo outpost would alert the inhabitants of any unwanted guests, and the offer of rich food would make it relatively easy to demand visitors disarm themselves before entering the area. Morello had focused on the symbolism, the message sent to the natives about how much more advanced our ways are than theirs, but what if the real reason was more practical, myopic even? You’d have to be insane to come out here and live next to one of their shabonos in a dank and gloomy mud hut. By contrast, even the creak of the wood floor beneath his feet in this place speaks of deliverance.

If it ever gets too bad, he thinks, I’m not too proud to come back here and hole up with the padre. He’ll be able to arrange transportation out of the territory—if it comes to that. “The people of Bisaasi-teri are talking about some trouble brewing to the south of them,” Lac says without having decided to speak.

“Ah, I’ve heard that the Yąnomamö often attack one another’s villages.” Lac can tell the padre has more to add but decides against it, maybe to let Lac finish his thought.

“My first day in the village, I ducked under the outside edge of the wall and stood up to see a dozen arrows drawn back and aimed at my face. I learned later that the Patanowä-teri were visiting to try to form a trading partnership with Bisaasi-teri, and that’s when the men from a third village, Monou-teri, attacked and stole seven of the Patanowä-teri women. The Patanowä-teri in turn went to Monou-teri, less than a day’s walk, and challenged them to a chest-pounding tournament, which they must’ve won because they returned to Bisaasi-teri with five of the seven women.”  

The padre nods in thoughtful silence as he walks alongside Lac, who has an inchoate sense of remorse at relaying these most unsavory of his research subjects’ deeds to a representative of the Church. “When Clemens and I arrived, we spooked them. The headman of the Monou-teri had been incensed and swore he’d take vengeance, and the two groups at Bisaasi-teri feared he was making good on his vow. For days, I looked around and it was obvious that something had them on edge, but it wasn’t like I had a baseline to compare their moods against. When the Patanowä-teri left after two days, though, I noted the diminished numbers.”

“You know,” the padre says, “if things get too tense at the village, you’re always welcome to stay here for a while.” This echo of his own earlier thought floods Lac with gratitude. He remembers once silently declaring that he’d never say a word against Chuck Clemens; he now has the same conviction about Padre Morello, though in this case it’s more of the moment, whereas with Clemens, well, he’s still sure he’ll never have anything bad to say about the man.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that, Padre. I’m not expecting it to come to that, but it’s reassuring to know I have a friend to turn to if it does.”

The men shake hands. Lac continues on to the shed and his dugout canoe, while the padre goes back to his day, back to his routine as the head of the mission, directing the ghostly white-clad sisters, feeding and clothing the Indians, swaddled in his nimbus of mirth, like a saint from a bygone era. Isn’t everything out here from one bygone era or another, Lac thinks, including you? He chuckles at the thought, then comes abruptly to the verge of tears—because it’s a joke Laura would enjoy, but he’ll almost certainly have forgotten it by the time he talks to her again.

*

Lac returns in time for another commotion inside Bisaasi-teri’s main shabono. Until docking his canoe, he’d been considering landing on the far shore and journeying inland to introduce himself to the Dutch lay brother who’s building a comedor across the river to attract the Yąnomamö for food and proselytizing. It’ll have to wait for another day. Lac already feels guilty for having been away for so long, a day and a half, imagining the villagers to have engaged in myriad secret rites while he was downriver, or merely some magnificent ceremony no outsider had ever witnessed. Smiling bitterly, bracing himself for whatever chaos he’s about to thrust himself into, he thinks: every ceremony they perform has never been seen by outsiders; the big secret is that they’re not like you’d imagine; they’re like nothing so much as a bunch of overgrown boys getting high and playing an elaborate game of make-believe, boys who could throw a tantrum at random and end up maiming or killing someone, starting a war of axes and machetes, bows and arrows.

He squats under the outermost edge of the thatched roof, sidling and bobbing his way into the headman’s house, where he sees a very pregnant Nakaweshimi, the eldest wife. Since he’s begun addressing the headman with a term that means older brother, he’s obliged to likewise refer to Nakaweshimi as kin, as a sister. “Sister,” he calls to her. “I’ve returned to your shabono. I’m glad to see you. What is happening? What is causing excitement?” Not much like her fellow Yąnomamö speak to her, but they’ve learned to give him extra leeway in matters of speech and etiquette, like you would the village idiot. He’s even been trying to get everyone to tell him all their names, this addled-brained nabä.

Nakaweshimi nearly smiles upon seeing him—at least he thinks she does—but then waves him off. “Rowahirawa will tell you what Towahowä has done now,” she says. Her expression baffles him, showing an undercurrent of deep concern overlain with restrained merriment, like she may have almost laughed. Could she be that happy to see me, he wonders, maybe because she thinks I’ll ward off the raiders with my shotgun and other articles of nabä magic? Or maybe I’m such an object of derision the jokes following in my wake set people to laughing whenever they see me.

He continues through the house out into the plaza, sees the men, some squatting, others standing, pacing. High above them, he looks out to see the thick blur of white mist clinging to the nearly black leaves of the otherworldly canopy and is struck by the devastating beauty, feeling a pang he can’t immediately source and doesn’t have the time to track down. The syllables and words of the men he’s approaching rise up in a cloud around him, a blinding vortex that simultaneously sweeps up the identifiable scents of individual men, bearing aloft the broken debris of shattered meanings, all the pieces just beyond his reach. Straining, he lays a finger on one, then another. He envies these men, naked but for strings, arm bands, sticks driven through their ears, their faces demoniacally distorted by the thick wads of green tobacco tucked behind their bottom lips—envies them because the words swirling away from him flow into their ears in orderly streams.

He sees a squatting man scratch the bottom side of his up-tied penis; another spits, almost hitting a companion’s foot. They’re discussing war and strategy, but we’re a long way from the likes of Churchill and Roosevelt—and yet, probably not as far as us nabä might like to think. Bahikoawa is telling them about his relationship to some man from Monou-teri: he lives in a different village and yet descends from the same male progenitor, meaning they’re of the same lineage. Lac reaches for his back pocket but finds it empty, his notebook, he then recalls, still tucked in a backpack full of items he brought along for the trip to Ocamo.

When the men finally notice Lac’s presence—or finally let on that they’ve noticed him, some of them walk over with greetings of shori, brother-in-law, asking after his efforts to procure more of his splendid nabä trade goods, which they’re sure he’ll want to be generous in divvying out among them. He haltingly replies that he was merely visiting Iyäwei-teri and the other nabä who lives there and is building a great house. He adds that he asked this other nabä to bring him back some medicines—a word borrowed from Spanish, with some distorting effects—he can administer to the Yąnomamö, but it will be some time before they arrive. They respond with aweis and tongue clicks. One man, a young boy really, tells Lac to give him a machete in the meantime—“and be quick about it!”

Ma. Get your own machete.

Among the Yąnomamö, Lac has learned, it’s seen as stingy, almost intolerably so, not to give someone an item he requests. What they normally give each other, though, is tobacco—often handing over the rolled wads already in their own mouths—germ theory still being millennia in the future, or at least a few years of acculturation at the hands of the missionaries. Lac has to appreciate his madohe make him rich, after a fashion, but his refusal to give them away freely makes him a deviant, a sort of reprobate. They don’t exactly condemn him as such. They struggle to work out the proper attitude to have toward him, just as he does toward them. The culture has no categories to accommodate the bizarre scenario in which an outsider in possession of so many valuable goods comes to live among them.

For the most part, they make allowances; they’re flexible enough to recognize the special circumstance. They tolerate his egregious tight-fistedness—what do you expect from a subhuman? And this particular subhuman appears to be trying to learn what it means to be a real human, translated Yąnomamö. Why else would he be so determined to speak their language? Though they seem to think there’s only one language with varying degrees of crookedness. The Yąnomamö to the south speak a crooked dialect for instance, but at least it’s not so crooked as to be indecipherable. Lac must have traveled far beyond those southern villages when he was washed to the edge of the earth by the Great Flood. Really, though, Lac isn’t sure how to gauge what percentage of the villagers actually believes this story, or to what degree they believe it. He’s noted a few times that their beliefs in general seem to be malleable, changing according to the demands of the situation.

Their attitudes toward the Patanowä-teri, for example, have undergone a dramatic shift in the brief time he’s been among them. The Patanowä-teri had come to attend a feast at Bahikoawa’s invitation, hoping to establish regular trade in goods like bows, clay pots, dogs, tobacco, and ebene—or rather the hisiomo seeds used to make it. The Monou-teri, meanwhile, were invited to be fellow guests at the feast, but on their way to Bisaasi-teri they happened upon those seven Patanowä-teri women hiding in the forest, a common precaution, Lac’s been told, to keep them safe from the still suspect host villagers. The Monou-teri couldn’t resist. This led to the chest-pounding duel he’d heard about, though it must have been several separate duels, more like a tournament, the outcome of which was that the Patanowä-teri returned to Bisaasi-teri with five of the seven women, just before Lac and Clemens arrived. The Patanowä-teri then left the village early to avoid further trouble with the Monou-teri, who, if he’s hearing correctly, are now determined to raid the Patanowä-teri at their shabono on the Shanishani River. This despite their having come out ahead by two women.

Now, even though the Patanowä-teri have in no way wronged the people of Bisaasi-teri, Bahikoawa is considering whether he and some of the other men should accompany the Monou-teri on their raid. It seems Bahikoawa is related to the headman of Monou-teri, the one who’s causing all the trouble. This man is waiteri: angry or aggressive, eager to project an air of menace and invincibility, traits considered to be manly virtues rather than political liabilities.

Bahikoawa, it seems, is related to many of the Patanowä-teri as well, but more distantly. The men argue over whether Towahowä, the Monou-teri headman, is justified in launching the raid—not in the moral sense, but in a strategic one—and over whether they should send someone to participate. Bahikoawa, drawing on the juice from his tabacco, looks genuinely distraught, like he’s being forced to choose between two brothers, and Lac feels an upwelling of sympathy. He couldn’t speak for anyone else in any of these villages; he’d be loath to turn his back to any of them. Bahikoawa, on the other hand, is a good man; it’s plain for anyone to see. He also appears to be sick. He keeps clutching his side, as though he’s having sharp pains in his abdomen. Fortunately, the war counsel is breaking up, partly in response to Lac showing up to distract them.

The men have all kinds of questions about the villagers at Ocamo, the Iyäwei-teri, almost none of which Lac can answer: How are their gardens producing? Was everyone at the shabono, or were some of them off hunting? Did they appear well-supplied with tobacco? Lac, realizing he could have easily stopped to check in with the villagers—he’ll want their genealogical information too at some point—tries to explain that he merely went for a chance to speak with his wife and ask after his children. When they assume, naturally enough, his wife must be living at Iyäwei-teri, he’s at a loss as to how he can even begin to explain she’s somewhere else.

Lac asks where Rowahirawa is: out hunting for basho for his in-laws. So there’s little chance of clearing things up about where Laura is and why Lac could nonetheless speak to her from Ocamo. Lac decides to step away and go to his hut to relax for a bit before starting his interviews and surveys again. He’s shocked by his own oversight, not anticipating that the people of Bisaasi-teri would be eager to hear about what’s going on at Iyäwei-teri. Travelers are the Yąnomamö’s version of newspapers; it’s how they know what’s brewing at Monou-teri; it’s the only way for them to know what’s going on in the wider world—their own wider world anyway. But is what the Bisaasi-teri are after best characterized as news, gossip, or military intel?

At some point, it’s disturbingly easy to imagine, he could unwittingly instigate an intervillage attack simply by relaying the right information—or rather the wrong information. Lac is also amazed by the Yąnomamö’s agility in shifting alliances, and he can’t figure out how to square it with his knowledge about tribal societies vis-à-vis warfare, which is thought to begin when a society reaches a stage in its evolution when the people start to rely on certain types of key resources like cultivable land, potable water, or ready access to game. Intergroup conflicts then intensify when the key resources take on more symbolic than strategic meanings, as when they’re used as currency or as indicators of status. Think gold and diamonds. But Bisaasi-teri was working to establish trade relations with Patanowä-teri when the Monou-teri headman, in a brazen breach of diplomacy, instigated hostilities.  

What resources, he wonders as he steps into his hut, can they possibly be fighting over?

If anything, the fighting seems to be further limiting their access to the goods they may otherwise procure through trade. And why should the Bisaasi-teri men consider sending a contingent to represent their village in the raid? When the first offense occurred, the Bisaasi-teri were seeking to strengthen their ties to Patanowä-teri, and Bahikoawa’s lineage is present in both villages, so why bother picking a side? Why not sit out the fight? What do they hope to gain?

Lac lies back in his hammock, trying to make sense of it. He could easily fall asleep.

As he was preparing to board the ship in New York with Laura and the kids and all the supplies he was going to take with him into the field, he’d read in a newspaper about the U.S. sending military advisors to Southeast Asia, another jungle region, to support a group of people resisting the advance of communism. The Soviet Union apparently has already established a foothold in the country by supporting a rival group, the Vietcong. The threat of a proxy war between the great powers looms.

What resources are the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. fighting over? It seems to Lac to be much more about ideas: capitalism vs. communism. Is it only nations at the most advanced stages of technological advancement that battle over ideologies and economic systems? Dozing off, Lac’s last thought is that for the Bisaasi-teri men at least, the real motivation seems to be the opportunity to assert their own impunity alongside their readiness to punish rivals for any miniscule offense. It’s about projecting an air of superiority, acquiring prestige, for yourself, your village, your lineage, your tribe, your nation, your very way of life.

*

He dozes for maybe twenty minutes, his eagerness to work blunting the edge of his now-chronic exhaustion. Overnighting at the mission afforded him a superb night of sleep, comparatively. The Yąnomamö don’t keep to the strict schedules Westerners do; they have no qualms about late-night visits, even if those visits require rousing the visitee from a deep slumber. They do fortunately happen to be adept at midday dozes, a skill they like to practice during the day’s most oppressively hot stretches, when doing much of anything else is a loathsome prospect. Lac has adapted quickly, hence the short nap when he really felt like a longer sleep.

One good stretch of uninterrupted sleep, he thinks, hardly makes up for the weeks of erratic events, bizarre occurrences, and anxiety-fueled insomnia. When I finally leave this place, in just over a year from now, I may spend the first month home doing nothing but sleeping. What bliss. For now, though, he has work to do, and thanks to the encroachments into Yąnomamöland by the New Tribes and the Salesians, he’s on a diminishing timetable. Already, it will be difficult to tell how closely the population structures he uncovers reflect outside influences versus the true nature of tribal life in the jungle. He keeps hearing about more remote villages to the South, near the headwaters of the Mavaca, where there’s supposedly a single shabono housing over twice as many people as Bisaasi-teri. According to his main informant at least. According to his whilom persecutor, his bully, his now sometimes friend—as reticent as he’s learned to be in applying that term, and as wary as he’s become in allowing for that sentiment.

It’s still hot. The trip from Ocamo took a little over six hours, twice as long coming upriver than it was going downstream. He’s hungry, but the lackluster range of choices on offer dulls his appetite. He guesses that in the little over a month he’s been in the field, he’s lost between ten and fifteen pounds. He may never successfully remove the crusty, bug-bitten, sticky film clinging to his body; he imagines Laura catching a first whiff of him when they’re finally reunited and bursting into tears.

But I’m on to something, he thinks as he stands and moves to the table. From his discussions with Rowahirawa, he’s learned that the proscription against voicing names isn’t a taboo per se; saying someone’s name aloud is more like taking a great liberty with that person, much the way Westerners would think of being groped in public, an outrageous gesture of disrespect. But, while it may be grossly offensive to run your hands over a stranger, or even an intimate if it’s in a public setting, you can often get away with more subtle displays of affection; you can touch another person’s arm, say, or her shoulder; you could reach over and touch her hand.

Remembering a night with Laura, back before Dominic was born, Lac has one of his rare flickers of sexual arousal, a flash of a scene overflowing with the promise sensual indulgence. Lac looks around his hut; it’s only ever moments before someone arrives. He’s probably only been left alone this long because of the excitement in the shabono over the impending conflict to the east. He’s yet to see a single Yąnomamö man or woman masturbate, he notes, but the gardening time of day is when the jokes and all the innuendo he can’t decode suggest is the time for trysting. Someone’s always gone missing, and then it’s discovered someone else has gone missing at the same time. Lac’s never witnessed these paired abscondings. Sexuality is notoriously tricky for ethnographers to study, a certain degree of discretion being universal across cultures. People like to do it in private. It seems this is particularly true of the Yąnomamö, if for no other reason than that they fear detection by a jealous husband.

And Lac himself?

He’s awoken in his hammock from dreams of lying alongside Laura on the smoothest, cleanest sheets he’s ever felt—awoken in a compromised state his unannounced Yąnomamö visitor took no apparent notice of. He feels an ever-present pressure crying out for release, but the conditions could hardly be less conducive to the proper performance of such routine maintenance tasks. He’s never alone, never anything less than filthy—sticky, slimy, and moderately uncomfortable—and the forced press of Yąnomamö bodies he keeps being subjected to has an effect the opposite of sensual. So he feels the tension, physiologically, from having gone so long without release, but nothing in the field comes close to turning him on.

None of the Yąnomamö women? Not one?  

There’s something vaguely troubling to Lac about this, as it seems to have little to do with his devotion to Laura. His devotion to Laura manifests itself through his resistance to temptation, not its absence. So why is he, an aspirant acolyte of Boas, not attracted to, not sexually aroused by any of the women among this unique group of his fellow humans?

Shunning the implications, his mind takes him back in time to some key moments in his budding intimacy with the woman he’d go on to marry. He would enjoy hanging out in his hut and reminiscing like this, but sensing its futility, he decides instead to get to work, get to making something worthwhile out of this expedition, this traumatizing debacle of a first crack at ethnographic fieldwork, get to securing his prospects for a decent career—oh, the bombshells he’ll be dropping on his colleagues—get to securing a living for his family and a valuable contribution to the discipline, his legacy. Maybe Bess and Laura are right, he thinks; maybe I’m incapable of accepting a cause as lost; maybe I have something to prove, a vestige of some unsettled conflict with my father and brothers. So be it. I may as well turn it into something worthwhile.

*

At last, he writes later that night, I’ve succeeded in getting some names, and I’ve begun to fill in some genealogical graphs. My work has begun, my real work. What I couldn’t have known when I decided to study the Yąnomamö was that I would be working with the most frustratingly recalcitrant people ever encountered by an anthropologist. My project of gathering names will be a complex and deeply fraught endeavor, and every mistake will put me in danger: my subjects getting angry with me at best, violent at worst. It doesn’t help that the Yąnomamö also happen to be consummate practical jokers, who see having an ignorant and dimwitted nabä around, someone who’s just learning the basics of their language, as an irresistible opportunity.

One man will casually point me toward another, instructing me to say, “Tokowanarawa, wa waridiwa no modohawa.” When I go to the second man and repeat the phrase, careful to get the diction right, he is furious and begins waving his arms and threatening me—and rightly so since I’ve just addressed him by name and told him he’s ugly. Here’s the peculiar thing: even though the man I’ve insulted witnessed the exchange with the first man—even though he knows I’m merely relaying a message—he directs his anger at me and not the actual source of the insult, a man who is by now in hysterics over the drama he’s instigated. (This prank, along with a few minor variations at other times, was pulled on me by one of my most reliable informants, Rowahirawa.)

The Yąnomamö love drama. They love trouble. And I have to be careful not to give in to my inclination to respond to angry subjects by offering them madohe to make amends, a response that would  make (and to some degree has already made) me appear cowed, and cowardly, encouraging and emboldening them to make more displays and more threats. But, as delicate as one must be in negotiating the intricacies of the name customs, I’ve managed to uncover some underlying threads of logic to them. The worst offense when it comes to names, for instance, is to publicly say those of recently deceased relatives. The second worst offense—which is probably just as dangerous to commit—is using the name of a browähäwä, a politically prominent man, most of whom (all?) are also waiteri, warriors.

What I’ve observed, however, is that when the Yąnomamö refer to one of these men, they usually do so through teknonymy: they imply his identity through his relationship to someone safe to name. They’d never say the headman Bahikoawa’s name out loud, but instead refer to him as “the father of Sarimi,” his daughter. I can therefore begin building out my genealogies in a similar fashion, starting with the names of children and working my way up. Over time, I may light on new methods that will bring me closer to the names of the browähäwä and the ancestors, but by then I hope to already have their relationships with all the other villagers mapped out using the same sort of teknonymy as the Yąnomamö use themselves.

My plan is to create a standard list of questions and then to interview as many of the villagers as possible, offering them fish hooks or nylon line or disinfectant eye drops as payment. I’ll interview them individually, so there will be no witnesses to any sharing of sensitive information, and I’ll encourage each interviewee to whisper the names in my ear, as a demonstration of how much I personally respect the individuals being named. Still, I don’t expect to be able to draw complete charts the first time around. This first round will be more like tryouts. I’ll be looking to identify the most helpful, articulate, and reliable informants, an exercise that will involve checking each candidate’s answers against the others’.

For round two, I’ll stick to the individuals who most readily provided me with the best information in round one. And I’ll offer them more valuable trade goods in exchange for their help: machetes, axes, game meat. Over time, as I build up some trust and establish rapport, I’ll start pressing them for the more sensitive names. I’m estimating that by mid-March I should have everyone’s name on record, along with a chart that fits each village member into the kinship network. I’ll be able to pass these charts along to Dr. Nelson when he and his team arrive for their genetic research next year. And the information will also form the basis of any theorizing on my own part about the nature and evolution of larger societal patterns. At the same time, it will give me a head start on the charts for neighboring villages, and subsequently for the more remote ones I hope to visit on future expeditions. 

Lac closes the notebook, leans his head back, and sighs. A lot of things that could very easily go wrong will need to go right for this plan to work. Thinking about all the variables is overwhelming. But what really scares him now is the thought of those future expeditions, of having to return to the jungle once he’s made it out.

If he makes it out. 

***

Find my author page. 

Posts on Napoleon Chagnon:

NAPOLEON CHAGNON'S CRUCIBLE AND THE ONGOING EPIDEMIC OF MORALIZING HYSTERIA IN ACADEMIA

And:

JUST ANOTHER PIECE OF SLEAZE: THE REAL LESSON OF ROBERT BOROFSKY'S "FIERCE CONTROVERSY"

The Legend of Creepy Santa

         “Who was the craziest woman you ever dated?”

That’s how it started. That’s what inspired Nate to tell our group of frustrated writers what is probably the creepiest Christmas story I’ve ever heard—and that was how the discussion had begun, with each of us trying to come up with ideas for something to write about for the Christmas season. 

The air in Rob’s apartment that night was thick with everyone’s mutual disdain. Ben, Carrie, and Luke were taking turns scowling over a flame as it bowed down to a generously packed bowl they were passing around amongst themselves, each of their choked-back exhalations contributing to the insalubrious stickiness of the air. We were divided into equal groups, one stoned, the other drunk, and the drunk ones kept casting barely disguised looks of disgust at the stoned ones, who each in turn affected a pose bespeaking more supercilious boredom than any stoned person has any cause to feel. Sipping from a glass of whiskey myself, I almost wished we had some yayo. At least then we might have some real drama to inspire us.

Everyone likes meeting at Rob’s because he has a nice fireplace, and no matter how modern or postmodern a writer tries to be he can’t help being nostalgic for an age when the novel was actually novel, longing for the nineteenth century and all the accoutrements of society’s higher orders. Even the two women in our little group thought of themselves as rightful heirs to scotch-swirling, cigar-smoking aristocrats, milling about in the dancing orange light of the hearth in some preposterously outsize manor.

            We’d started talking about Christmas stories because it was late November. (I may have been the one who steered the discussion toward seasonally appropriate stories, but I would’ve done it subtly, since my role in the publications for Encounters, Inc. is something only a few of my closest friends know about.) We’d discussed Dickens of course. Then we’d taken turns taking our principled stances against the commercial dreck of the sort you find on racks in grocery store aisles.

Beneath the surface of all this casual self-assurance, though, I knew there to be a shared sense of disillusionment and failure. Six years after forming our group we were all still eagerly awaiting the moment when even one of us managed to make the tiniest ripple in the publishing world—the actual publishing world. This meeting was our first in over four months. For the first four years we’d met every two weeks. Over the last two, our collective output had diminished precipitously. A couple of us haven’t submitted a single piece of writing to the rest of the group in over a year. (My own efforts have been directed elsewhere, as many of you well know.)

            Gathered around that fireplace in Rob’s hazy and stiflingly overheated apartment, we all looked at each other and saw living, breathing emblems of our own failure, never for a moment suspecting our unvoiced creeping disdain was more for ourselves than anyone else. You felt it when Kristen barked out a laugh in the middle of Luke’s ranting about the “vacuity of the visionless visual media culture.” You saw it in the way Rob turned away during Mike’s peroration on the injustice of this or that middling writer going without some much deserved recognition, like he didn’t want anyone to catch him rolling his eyes. Lately, you heard it in the silence, as though none of us would condescend to contribute anything more substantive than a mumbled witticism.

            “Well,” Luke said, “if we’ve established anything, it’s that nearly all the Christmas stories out there suck ass.”

            Just then, the similarity of the scene to the opening of James’s Turn of the Screw occurred to me. I was about to suggest perhaps narrowing our focus to Christmas ghost stories—again Dickens lent plenty of legitimacy to the genre—when Justin, who till then had barely spoken that night, made a provocative suggestion of his own.

            “Let’s try coming at it from a different angle,” he said. “Let’s try asking ourselves a completely unrelated question and see if it sparks any new associations that might be worth pursuing. Every year at Christmas, I find myself thinking about this crazy girl I dated like ten years ago. She was obsessed with Christmas, wanted to go to every event in the city, watch all the classic movies, had the music on constantly. I mean, it was annoying. It was beyond annoying—it was freaky. I started thinking maybe something traumatic had happened to her, so now she was latching onto the season because it brought her back to a time before things had gone so wrong. I don’t know. I never really found out either way. Anyway, I could start to write a story based on that. So here’s what we should do. Stop trying to think of a Christmas story for now, and instead answer this: Who was the craziest woman you ever dated? Or for you two, who was the craziest man?”

            “What makes you think I haven’t dated crazy women too?” Kristen snipped.

            “Whatever. You get the idea.”

            The two glared at each other for a long moment, making me wonder if something had transpired between them that the rest of us weren’t privy to. Before I could remark on it though, Nate broke in with a sudden booming laugh. “Ha! I’ve got a fucking Christmas story,” he said. “It’s so obvious. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It’s totally Christmas. And it’s one of the most fucked up stories you’ll ever hear.”

            All five of us were looking at him now. At first, he was smiling broadly, the eureka smile of the suddenly unblocked writer. Then his smile faded and he looked as though he’d arrived at a troubling, even painful conclusion in some untraveled corner of his thoughts. “God, I don’t know, though. I don’t know if I should tell that story.” He began shaking his head slowly.

            Carrie groaned dramatically. “Something interesting seemed about to happen for once in these boring ass meetings, and now you’re not going to let us hear about it. I don’t even know why I come anymore.”

            It was the most openly disdainful any of us had been, though we all felt the same way. Before anyone could respond to it, though, Justin approached Nate, put a hand on his shoulder, and said in a solemn tone, “If you feel like telling this story would be revealing too much, then that’s exactly the story you need to tell.”

Now there’s some writer’s logic, I thought. I bet there are some people who’ve had writers in their lives who would bristle at this particular maxim. Nate looked around the room. His expression was now one of unmistakable panic. Then he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and turned back toward the fire. When he began speaking, his voice was low, scarcely more than a whisper.

            “Everyone in West Central knows the Santa playing the organ,” he said. “It’s in this little balcony over the front door of the house catty-corner to the Sheridan Court apartment building. All you see when you pass by is Santa’s back, kind of swaying side-to-side. If you’re on foot you can hear there’s actually music playing.”

            We all knew the Santa he was talking about.

“Honestly,” I said, “that thing creeps me out. I go for walks around the neighborhood all the time, and I always get a chill down my spine when I pass it. The organ music reminds me of a circus. There’s just something bizarre about it. And the fact that Santa is sitting facing away from you so you can’t see his face—I can’t help imagining he’s actually got some psycho grin on his face, like some demon-clown. I mean, I think it’s great. But I seriously doubt that’s the effect the people who live there were going for.”

            “Well,” Nate said, “the people there now aren’t even the ones who originally started putting it up every year. If you remember, it wasn’t there last year.” We all looked at each other and nodded, each of us having taken scant notice of the organist Santa’s absence and then promptly let it slip our minds. “That’s because the new people had just moved in, and they had to be talked into continuing the tradition.”

            “Wait,” I said. “So you dated a woman who lived there? I only ever saw an older guy coming and going from that place.”

            “That was Carl’s dad. Carl bought the place from him a few years earlier. I think his dad was still helping him with some kind of renovations for a long time, so he was there a lot. I don’t know. I’ve never actually seen the inside of the place.”

            Nate went silent. His reluctance to speak, his halting progression—it was unbearably tantalizing for all of us.

            “So who was the girl?” I finally asked. Nate’s demeanor as he nibbled around the edges of his story had me wondering already if what he was about to tell us could be of use to me professionally (in my capacity as story scout for Ashley).

            “The girl was Erica,” he said. “I met her through my friend at school, Bethany. She told me I had to meet this girl who was really pretty and really smart, but who was also stuck with this horrendous boyfriend. A guy who was really possessive and overbearing, not violent or anything, but—what’s the word? Controlling. He was really controlling. In a passive-aggressive kind of way. Later, I found out the guy she was talking about was Carl. They were living together in the big red-brick house with the Santa playing the organ.”

            I was anxious to get more details, but I managed to restrain myself from barraging him with questions. The way Nate had become elated when Justin’s prompt succeeded in helping him think of an idea, only to sink into the somber, neurotically contemplative state he was in now—it had me reviewing all my encounters with him over the past year. Originally, he’d been one of our most active members. I wouldn’t say he was the most talented of our group, but he was a solid amateur who could usually be counted on for a passably competent story. Over the past year, though, he’d only submitted one piece that I could think of, an overstrained prose poem about how trapped he felt in his hometown. Still, I don’t think I was alone in failing to note any change he’d undergone. Hadn’t the whole damn group lost its enthusiasm?

            When at last Nate snapped out of his reverie, his eyes darted, first at me and then onto the others. “Seriously guys,” he said, “I can’t tell this story. Carl’s dad—I shouldn’t have even brought up any of their names. Carl’s dad has a lot of money and he knows a lot of people who…” He trailed off again.

            “Who what?” I asked. “You mean like politicians?”

            “Something like that. There’s a reason none of it was in the news. If I say anything…” He groaned, shaking his head again. Then he laughed nervously before falling silent once more as he stared into the fire, which by now was mostly embers, barely casting any light.

I began forming a plan to meet with him in private so I could give him all the assurances he’d need to share the story. After all, I know some people too. But apparently the urge to unburden himself was busy overpowering whatever trepidation he felt. Without any further coaxing, Nate told us the story.

“Erica told me that when she and Carl had first started dating she was really big into Christmas. So when he invited her to move in with him, she was stoked. She was like, ‘Holy shit, I can’t believe I’m going to be living in the house with the Santa playing his organ.’ I guess Carl’s parents always went all out decorating and all too—obviously. But Erica said Carl himself really wasn’t that into it until he found out she was. Then he took it to an extreme, like he was so eager to please her that it actually got a little disturbing.

“That was the theme for their whole relationship. He was overly solicitous, intrusive—you know, meddlesome. But he acted like it was all for her sake. He interrogated her whenever she left the house. He always tried to find out what she was reading so he could read it too. It was the same with movies and music and everything else. He tried to do everything for her, like she was his delicate little flower. I guess he even spoke to her like a toddler half the time. When I first heard about all this, I thought it was just the kind of stuff you say about an ex when you’re breaking up, figuring it had to be exaggeration. But Bethany told me if anything it was worse than what I was hearing from Erica.

“That was the story I got, that Erica had broken up with Carl—or that she was ‘going through a breakup.’ I had all the reservations any of you would have about moving in on a woman so soon after her last relationship. I mean, she was obviously still living in the house with the poor idiot. But there was something about Erica that I felt really drawn to, a quietness that made me think there were much greater depths to her. I don’t know. Plus Bethany kept insisting we were perfect for each other and that things were completely over between her and her ex.

“I’m embarrassed to say it went on pretty much just like that for about three months. Looking back, I can see that the whole notion that she was breaking up was nothing but a convenient cover. No, we were cheating, plain and simple. Only neither of us wanted to believe it. So one night I get a text from her. I remember it was right after Thanksgiving. Erica had just gotten back to town after going to visit her parents in Grand Rapids. But she said Carl was still in South Bend with his family. Since he wouldn’t be back until late the next night, she wanted to get outside. ‘I want to go for a really long walk through the neighborhood,’ she said. ‘And maybe we can go downtown too. I just want to be outside in the cold and look at all the Christmas decorations.’

“Well, that’s what we did. We bundled up and walked around West Central, over on Main Street as far as the big Santa and his reindeer, down to the giant wreath. We walked for hours, talking about our best and worst Christmas memories from when we were kids, and about what we would want Christmas to be like for our own kids someday. As we were walking back, I felt this thrill—it was like a ball of tension in my stomach. I thought for sure we were passing some milestone in our relationship. I was even starting to wonder if I should ask her to move in with me, even though until then I’d hated the idea of her moving out of Carl’s house directly into my apartment. Anyway, I felt like something had changed between us.

“We walked down Berry Street holding hands, both of us with these stupid grins on our faces like we were a couple of kids who’d just raided the cookie jar. When we got to the front of their house, Erica did this ta-dah, saying, ‘And now we come to West Central’s famous Santa Claus playing his organ.’ For me, that was the first time the thing creeped me out. I don’t know if it was just the significance it had taken on—the only thing I could think about when I looked at it was how Carl had decided he was all about Christmas just because Erica was. Or maybe it was my conscience. I knew I was about to take her away from him, and however weird he sounded to me it wasn’t like I could fucking rejoice in causing anyone so much heartbreak. Maybe it was the cold. Whatever it was, I shuddered as I stood there. But then Erica pulled me to her for a kiss.

“It was one of those times when you’re with a woman and everything feels so perfect you just have to do something. I wanted to tell her I loved her. I wanted to ask her to move in with me. Hell, I wished I could pick her up and carry her away from that place back to my house. We kissed for a long time, and I was thinking the whole time that as soon as she pulled away I would do it, whatever it was. But then I heard something.

“We’d been making out with quite a bit of abandon, you know, right in the middle of the damn sidewalk. So you can imagine how any sound would startle you in that situation. We pulled away from each other a bit, but we just stood there with our eyes still locked on each other. I think I probably still had a grin on my face. Not Erica though. Erica looked terrified. The sound was like this gravely, staccato rumbling at first. Then it started to sound like someone was mumbling. We both turned toward the house. When I realized that the sound was someone laughing—laughing like he was trying to scare us—that’s when it dawned on me why she looked so terrified. But when we looked at the front of the house there was no one there.

“Now I’m a grown man and I’ve never been big on all that Halloween, haunted-house type of shit. But in all of my adult life I’ve never felt the kind of—I don’t even know what to call it. It wasn’t fear, not like the kind you feel when you almost get into an accident in your car, or when you think you’re about to get jumped coming out of a bar. It was a completely different kind of fear, like you’re in the presence of something that’s just not right. Shivers shot all through my body in like a second or two. My limbs felt shaky and weightless. I wasn’t charged up, you know. I didn’t even want to run. All I could do was stand there, every inch of my skin tingling.

“So now I’m looking up at the damn Santa, and the fucker is turning around with this big fucked up smile on his face, still doing his evil laugh. I swear the psycho must’ve rehearsed it. Then Erica mutters to me, ‘You should go.’ So I’m standing there thinking, I’m not going to leave you here with this freak. Before I say anything, though, Carl starts clapping, with his big Santa gloves, making this damn popping sound that echoes off of Sheridan Court. ‘It’s a Christmas miracle,’ he shouts like he wants to be heard all over the neighborhood. ‘True love—how amazing. How beautiful.’ Now he’s sitting on the bench, clenching his hands together in front of his heart like this, still with the big smile, titling his head to the side. Then he turns off the smile and glares at us. He says, ‘You two have been awfully naughty this year.’ I’ve got to hand it to the nutjob—he definitely went all out.

“Next thing he does is throw his leg over the side of the balcony and start climbing down. Erica must’ve sensed that now I actually was getting ready for a fight because she grabbed me by my coat and said, ‘Please trust me. Let me take care of this. Please, the best thing you can do right now is go.’ Of course I was all, ‘Like hell I’m leaving you with him!’ But she was adamant. She kept pushing me away. I looked over and saw Carl struggling to climb down. He must’ve had a rope or something on the side of the balcony. And he didn’t look like he was in very good shape. I half expected him to fall and break his neck. The whole time Erica was pushing me, saying, ‘I’ll be fine. He won’t hurt me. Please, you being here just makes it worse.’

“Finally, I start walking away really slow, looking back the whole time to see what he would do. But she went over to him and as soon as he had both feet on the ground they disappeared through the front door. So what the fuck do you do? I thought about going back and listening at a window or something. I thought about calling the cops. Hell, the guy obviously belonged in a padded cell somewhere. Eventually, I went back and stood in front of the house, listening for shouts or crashing noises or anything. After a while, though, all I could do was go home.

“After that, I kept blowing up her phone, but she wouldn’t respond. I’ll never forget that stretch of time. It was torture having no idea what was going on like that. I called Bethany but she hadn’t heard anything either. It wasn’t for like two weeks until she was finally able to tell me that she’d talked to Erica and she seemed fine. Apparently she said I was blowing everything out of proportion and that what really happened wasn’t that big of a deal. I was shocked. I mean, how many ways are there to interpret seeing a guy dress up like fucking Santa Claus to catch you making out with his girlfriend? I kept pestering her, though, trying to convince her to see me, even though it was obvious whatever plan I had to take things to the next stage with her were moot now.

“What I didn’t know when I finally did see Erica was that Bethany had been putting a lot of pressure on her too. This was about three weeks after Carl’s… whatever. We were supposed to have lunch together. I’d been insisting—pretty much demanding that we needed to talk. But it ended up going down in the alley downtown behind Dash-In. I don’t think she wanted to go inside because she was afraid someone might see us and report back to Carl. Right away she told me she wanted some time to figure out what she needed to do. I couldn’t help myself, you know. Those two weeks I’d been going out of my mind with confusion and worry. ‘What you need to do?’ I said. ‘What you need to do is get as far away from that psychopath as you can.’ ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but what I definitely don’t need is another fucking man telling me what I need to do.’

Nate stood silently jabbing with the poker at the embers in the fireplace for a long time before going on. “I went off on her,” he said at last. “I wasn’t in my right mind, you know. And I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t believe she was staying with him. Unless of course he was threatening her, holding her hostage basically. She insisted he wasn’t. I accused her of defending him, said she must have battered wife syndrome or something. I’m cringing just thinking about that day. I said a lot of really nasty shit. And to think—on the way to Dash-In I had still been planning to tell her I loved her. But I guess she was right. I must’ve sounded almost just like that nutcase. What I remember most is that when it was over and I turned to walk back to my car, I said, ‘Have fun being a fucking doormat for the rest of your life.’

He went silent again, though it was clear the story wasn’t over yet. As I thumbed the phone in my pocket to pause the recording, I thought about how many of the stories I’d been collecting over the past few years featured moments like the one Nate had just told us about. Looking around the room, I wondered if the real problem for our whole group is that fiction—pure fiction—simply holds no interest to anyone anymore. Who cares about a guy getting visits from three ghosts if the whole thing is nothing but make-believe? That’s why we’d all been reviewing memories of our actual lives, trying to find some real-life incident that would make for a good story. People want their narratives to be authentic, at least in some sense true. Or, if not, they’d better have wizards and dragons in them.

The problem is that true stories always involve other people, and everyone disagrees about which version is the most valid. You can’t blame them, I thought. As much as Nate is beating himself up over how he acted and what he said, he’s still telling a story about a woman who’s a doormat, isn’t he? Not many of us possess the self-assurance to sit idly by as someone else puts forth a story that stars us but that we have no control over. You change the names (and in this case expunge all of the physical descriptions), but reputations are so sensitive, and people get so paranoid, the obfuscation as often as not only leads to more suspicion and indignation. People hate hearing the sound of their own voice in a recording because they have no control over how they sound in real time. They hate hearing someone else tell a story they feel is theirs and theirs alone to tell even more. To write good stories that people are actually interested in anymore, you have to be as much a thief as a storyteller.

“It was Christmas Eve,” Nate began again, “when I heard from Bethany. She said Erica and Carl had gotten into a huge fight—apparently over her insufficient enthusiasm for his excessive efforts to make her Christmas unforgettable. I never got the details about what all he did. I can only imagine it was something totally batshit. But here’s the thing—Erica had told Bethany that she was finally ready to leave him. I guess the argument had really escalated. Bethany said she’d never heard Erica sound like that before. This was basically good news, but I was worried about her. I thought the best thing to do was wait a while. With any luck, Erica would get in touch with me and we could go from there. According to Bethany, though, Erica actually wanted me to come see her. She’d said she needed to talk to me. So I texted her. And she responded right away, asking when I could make it over to her house.

“When I walked up to that fucking house on the sidewalk, I saw that she was already outside waiting for me. And Bethany was right—she looked different somehow. Just the way she was standing. I don’t know how to describe it. All I know is that my heart sank as I walked up to her because my intuition told me I wasn’t about to hear any profession of love. If anything, I was about to get told off. But as I approached, she turned and smiled at me and reached out for my hands. I was so relieved I almost felt like crying. I remember she kissed me and I wrapped her up in this big hug, lifting her off the sidewalk. It was one of those experiences that’s like an eternity in the span of a few moments. I had the thought again that I should hold onto her and just walk carrying her like that all the way back to my apartment.

“I asked her where Carl was, and as soon as his name passed my lips I involuntarily shot a glance over at that fucking Santa Claus. She said, ‘I can honestly say I won’t ever have to deal with any of that man’s shit ever again.’ I drew back a little, still holding onto her. Something about the way she was looking at me, or something I’d seen—I didn’t know what it was—started to give me that feeling again, like my heart stopped beating and my blood went cold. Her eyes were locked on mine, and they had this sparkle to them. I would have thought it was like this loving gaze, but there was something off about the way she was smiling at me. I let go of her and stepped away. It was that same horrible feeling, like my limbs were hanging weightless and my skin was on the verge of breaking into a cold sweat. I took another step backwards, and then another, and the whole time she just kept looking at me, with that damn smile fixed in place.

“I think I muttered her name. ‘Erica?’ And, still smiling, she was like, ‘Do you like the modifications I’ve made to the Christmas decorations this year?’ It’s like everything after that point was only a dream. Everything went perfectly silent, except my heart. It started beating again. But I couldn’t hear it so much as just feel it. I turned and looked at the Santa Claus again. Before I knew what I was doing, I had run up to the front of the house to try and get a better look at its face. I stood there staring at it—until something fucking ricocheted of its head. It was a rock or a log or—I don’t know. I never found out. When it hit him, I actually fucking screamed. Erica had thrown whatever it was and hit him right in the head, knocking him over sideways so he slumped over the rail, his vacant eyes staring right at me.

“I had my hand over my mouth and I felt myself backing away slowly, as if I didn’t want her to see me moving. But I kept staring at him—at those fucking dead eyes—even as she marched up to the front door. When she pulled the latch and opened the door, that’s when I finally looked down at her. She stopped before going inside, turned toward me, and said, ‘You can tell Bethany how grateful I am to you both. I really doubt I’d have ever been able to overcome my problem with being a fucking doormat without you two. Merry Christmas asshole. Now get the fuck out of my yard.’” 

More stories like this:

ENCOUNTERS, INC.

THE FIRE HOARDER

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

DERAILED: A REFLECTION ON DATING, DOGS, AND FAMILY

The Fire Hoarder

When the song filling the space of his thoughts cuts out mid-verse, Russell Arden is approaching the incline toward the part of the nature preserve he calls the Orchard. Maintaining his stride, he lifts his arm to check the device strapped to his shoulder and sees nothing but the undulating reflective glare on the clear plastic case, so he reaches across with his other arm to activate the touch screen. But the surface of the device remains blank. “God dammit,” he huffs, charging up the rise, aiming his steps into the winding groove along the side of this otherwise grass-covered section of the trail. The ankle-twisting cant of the track and the backward curve up the hill make this the second least pleasant part of the path for him to run—along with his having to traverse it twice every lap to complete the figure-eight route he takes to cover all the most scenic stretches of the park.

Pulling the buds from his ears and letting the cords drape over the front of his chest, he curses himself for not plugging his phone in to charge as he listened to an audiobook the whole drive from his apartment downtown to Bicentennial Woods, a good twenty-five minutes north on the highway. Nothing to do, he determines, but finish these last two laps in silence. Right away, though, the commotion of his erratic breathing jolts him out of this resignation, momentarily forcing him to work at reconciling his stride with his intakes of air. And no sooner has he reached the top of the rise, just as his breathing fades once more from his attention, than he’s surrounded by the echoes of an argument he’d been carrying on with himself earlier, making him wonder if it’s been continuing in some part of his mind beneath awareness even as he’s been busy concentrating on other matters. It’s stupid, he insists to himself—not worth obsessing over like this. If he’s known me for going on twenty years and still doesn’t understand me, if he’s going to take what I say so completely wrong, well, then, that’s his fault not mine. And what does he contribute to my life anymore at this point anyway?

The grassy trail winds down from the first rise through clusters of tall weeds and slender trees with duck-under branches before lifting up again still higher to a section along the boundary between the nature preserve and some neighboring farmland where the sky opens up and you have a westward view over the Orchard to the billowing tops of the more aged trees of the forest in the distance. Aware now of diffuse aches in his left calf and right hip, Russell looks over the vista backlit by the lowering sun and thinks how running these trails is such an intense, complicated variety of bliss, a Saturday ritual he looks forward to all week, even more than the nights out with his friends that usually ensue later in the evening. Returning his gaze to the trail, he realizes that the app he uses to monitor his average speed and total distance will have ceased functioning along with his MP3 player, and annoyance briefly chokes off his enjoyment of the experience, until he consoles himself that he can probably go in and record the stats by hand on his laptop at home. 

For the past two weeks, he’s been completing the figure-eight through the park three times instead of two—for a total of seven point four miles—in fulfillment of a resolution he made to resist any temptation toward physical and intellectual complacency as he approaches his thirty-ninth birthday, a month and half from now in November. Maintaining an even pace along the curve back toward the shaded paths beneath the forest canopy, he can’t avoid thinking of Jason and how his old friend, back when they were in their late teens and into their twenties, used to do five-mile runs along the stretch of road by his house twice a week—this in addition to the individual regimens they were always comparing notes on and boasting about to each other. Then just last month Jason comes to him asking what he should do about his suspicions that his wife is having an affair. I tried to hedge and be polite, Russell thinks as he plunges into the palpably distinct atmosphere of the woods—cooler, the air thicker, heavier scents of wood and soil and green flesh of plants—but he kept pressing me: We’ve been friends for twenty years and I know there’s something you’re not saying and You’re the one person I count on most to be straight with me. So I tell him what I think. And he promptly forgets that’s exactly what he just asked me to do.

For one moment, Russell doesn’t remember if he should go down the long wooden staircase into the Willow Creek ravine or veer off to complete the top of the figure-eight, but he only has to recall where he was just before his phone battery died and he’s off along the stretch of trail atop the steep embankment. Massive trunks bulwarked with bark in curling, corrugated slabs or peeling flakes or twisting strands stretching brokenly upward into the canopy stand separated by distances of forest floor abounding with plants like tiny neon trees aspiring to the darkly looming heights of their impregnably encased neighbors. He watches the scene pass before him, glancing between the trees and the startling carnage of countless felled limbs and the rotting mushroom-infested wreckage of ill-fated boughs littering the trailside. He calls this part the Graveyard of Trees. This wooden holocaust and the infinite twilit intricacy of living greens and browns speckled with bursts of sunlight in a tableau that stretches out before him up the rise to one side and out over the sheer drop to the creek into the far-off treetops lends to this area of the park an air of dreamlike enchantment, at once hectic and peaceful, and he struggles to absorb it as deeply and lastingly as he can.

Bristling out from behind a smaller tree to the right of the trail at just about head-height, a bundle of straw comes into view, tucked between branch and trunk. He’s passed these bundles—he counts three over a span of twenty or so yards—a few times already today, but until now he’s taken little notice. His first thought is they’re part of some Wiccan incantation. But, he reasons, it’s probably something more prosaic than that. He scans all the trees for more bundles or other artifacts until he’s struck by the oddity of a lone sycamore surrounded by what he assumes are oaks and maples and walnuts. More than once over the past few years, he’s resolved to learn how to identify all the most common species of tree. He went as far as buying a pocket guide from Amazon. He downloaded an app. He even discovered a walkway on the campus of the community college he attended for his software engineering degree that actually has labeled specimens of dozens of trees along it. And yet, to date, he’s never managed to make it a priority.

The trail arcs out over a promontory along a slight downward gradient near the sharpest curve, a gentle prod for him to lengthen his stride before digging his shoes in to make the turn, a practice he calls Tempting the Cliff. Every time he enacts this ritual he smilingly imagines slipping in the loose dirt and tumbling down the stone and branch-strewn slope. As he runs back up the rise away from the drop-off he’s once more successfully avoided, he wonders why no one ever does bother to learn the names of trees. With all the mental energy expended on deciding who deserves to win Dancing with the Stars, or what the quarterback for the Seahawks should have done in the fourth quarter of last night’s game—with the hours upon hours of pointless prattling about indignities suffered at work or at the hands of uncouth spouses, why does nobody put even a miniscule bit of effort into learning about something that’s not exactly the same shit everybody else thinks is so important they simply can’t shut up about it?

The rise he’s on now takes him up over a fold of land that drops back down onto the stretch of trail that will take him once more into the Orchard. Only this time he’ll turn left instead of right once inside, bringing him back into the forest, onto the strip with the straw bundles in the trees, and back to the top of the stairs down to the creek and the bridge taking him across. Years ago, Russell brought Jason to Bicentennial Woods, and he even talked to him about his plan to learn the names of trees. Jason responded by recalling a time when they were teenagers, how they used to go on about all the places they wanted to travel to, all the languages they were sure they would someday learn, all the books, all the women, all the adventures. They were going to learn everything, sample the whole world—or all the really good parts of it anyway. But now whenever he hears about someone doing something that takes some level of discipline and achieves no practical end, Jason said, a category encompassing efforts at things like learning the names of trees, “I just imagine all the things it would take time away from if I actually did it. Time with Kate and Ian. Time to relax and catch up with all the stuff I have to do around the house. Time to relax and just watch some Netflix.”

Two years on, Russell still winces at this. He ponders all the people he knows who used to impress him, people he was sure would go on to do great things, however vague his conception of greatness happened to be. Somehow, to a one, they’d all let life just happen to them. Shamefully out of shape and overweight. Confined to their nearly identical offices all day, their disturbingly similar homes in the evening, prizing the precious moments of silence afforded by their commutes, their chief joys coming from the meager accomplishments and developmentally appropriate discoveries of their kids and the victories of the sports teams they unaccountably identify with. In response to Jason’s pleading for his true take on his marriage problems last month, Russell decided to indulge him.

“Well, here’s what I see. When you guys first met, you were this interesting guy who did things like going on impromptu trips to the Grand Canyon, filming amateur documentaries about truck drivers and lot lizards, and trying to read every book by Philip Roth. You worked out all the time, went out to bars and parties and mingled with all kinds of other interesting people. But then you got married, had a kid, and that interesting guy up and vanished. You were the cool high school teacher who bartended on weekends and summers. You got your dream job teaching literature. But then you just stopped moving. You settled in. You’ve become Typical Small Town Middle Class Guy, putting on another ten pounds every year. Now, I don’t know what Kate is or isn’t getting up to—but can you blame her if her eye is wandering?”

Gathering momentum from the downward slope of the trail until he’s at a full sprint over the tract where his music cut out, Russell lets his mind ride the fierce urgency of its own defenses—he asked me to give it to him straight, I’d gone so long without saying a word, and if he thought he heard a note of disdain in what I said maybe it arose from his unacknowledged betrayal. He had no idea how he’d let me down these past years, because I never said a word. The motion of his legs fades into a blur, a wave of energy like a canon burst propelling him up the hill along the uneven groove through the grass.

“Ouch—tell me what you really think,” Jason had said, forcing a laugh, as if by doing so he could retroactively turn what had passed between them into a joke. Then he stoically withstood Russell’s advice—stop worrying about what Kate’s doing and start doing something yourself, get back in shape, take up some kind of project, go back to being that interesting guy again, insofar as you can manage it anymore, and the relationship issues will work themselves out, either in reconciliation or divorce. It won’t matter either way, Russell insisted, because at least by then you’ll have your own life back. You’ll be yourself again.

Instead of taking the rising path up to the stretch of trail along the edge of the park again, Russell cuts through the short section of the Orchard back into the woods. Jason had listened to what he had to say, protesting limply that things were more complicated than Russell made out because they had Ian, his four-year-old, to consider. Russell was satisfied that he’d served his role as friend and honest observer, feeling no need to press the issue. The next he heard of the matter was at Dupont Bar, where the two of them had gone to have drinks with Russell’s older brother Nick. Russell likes Dupont because he has a longstanding friendship with one of the bartenders, a charming young woman named Amanda who is perennially mired in an endless series of unsatisfying relationships. “She’s been in the process of breaking up with her boyfriend ever since I met her,” Russell told them, “and that was five boyfriends and seven years ago.”  This “in the process” status of hers afforded him certain opportunities. “Still,” he explained, “we’re mostly just friends.”

Whatever Russell and Amanda are to each other, Nick apparently saw being in the presence of one his younger brother’s mystery women—seldom talks about them, never brings them around to meet the family, gets touchy whenever anyone else brings them up—as a chance to get some answers to questions he found pressing. “How do you stand this guy?” he boomed drunkenly over the bar. Amanda responded cutely, “Oh, I can’t really—I just like to have him around because he’s pretty.” Nick, his arms folded on the bar, his impressive middle class paunch protruding into his lap, his blurred features registering scant awareness of his surroundings, proceeded as if she hadn’t spoken. “I mean, he seems really interesting at first, right? Really smart.” “Scary smart,” Amanda agreed. “But then the more you get to know him it’s like the more impossible he is to get along with. He has to tell everyone how wrong they are about everything. And he’ll tell you what book or study he read that proves it. Like he has book smarts but he doesn’t have people smarts. That’s why almost everyone who really gets to know him ends up totally hating his ass. Don’t get me wrong. He’s my brother and I love the bastard. But he really pisses a lot of people off. And even for me, sometimes he’s tough to get along with.”

The annoyance of that night resurfaces undiminished as he reenters the woods overlooking the ravine, prompting him to make an effort at casting his attention out into the surrounding scene. He reminds himself to look out for clues as to the provenance and meaning of the straw bundles tucked into the trees. But he’s already replaying the memory of Jason chiming in after his brother. “Oh man, you should hear what he said to me when I was trying to talk to him about my marriage troubles.” He was addressing Amanda more than Nick, feeling the need to reduce Russell in her eyes, either in retribution or because he couldn’t resist the opportunity to be top guy, if even for a moment. “You come to him for a friendly ear and he breaks it down automatically to the brass tacks, like ‘Here’s what you’re doing wrong.’ I mean, no compassion, no emotion at all. I know he writes software for a living, but I swear that’s how he lives his life too. He treats problems like software bugs, like the answer to everything is some kind of reprogramming.”

Russell knows this is the rap on him, according, he thought, to family members who found it difficult to grant that he could possess any truly useful form of intelligence. Nick is fond of flipping it around though; it’s the people who know him best who know him to be book smart but not people smart—an assessment easily dismissible as the compensatory rationalizing of an older brother. Except now Jason, who really should know better than just about anyone, decides to reinforce this self-protective fantasy of Nick’s. Amanda alone seemed appropriately skeptical. She drew back with a squinting expression that said, “This guy?” Russell, seeing her response, reviewed in his mind his series of successes with women over the past few years, along with the time when one of Amanda’s boyfriends showed up ready to kill him and ended up buying him shots. He looked from Nick to Jason, shaking his head all the while, smiling viciously. “If either of you two especially are thinking that I’m the one here who lacks social skills, you’re in some serious trouble.” He thinks now of the other two women he’s dating, besides Amanda, and how baffled they too would be by his brother’s decades-outdated characterization, newly endorsed by his nominal best friend.

The truth, Russell thinks approaching the head of the wooden staircase, catching a glimpse over his shoulder of a girl standing on the bridge spanning the creek below, the truth is that I piss a lot of people off because I don’t think like them, and because I speak my mind, but there was only ever one person who really hated me the way they’re talking about. And she got pretty much every true thing about me perfectly wrong. He rounds the top of the handrail and starts the halting forward bounce of his descent down the stairs, looking out carefully at every juncture for the next step and trying to keep some semblance of a pace. Why do I bother, he poses to himself. Why continue making the effort to find time for Jason when he no longer does or says anything that interests me? Why go out of my way to spend time with my brother when he clearly has some unspoken beef with me?

He fantasizes about what his life would be like were he to swear off all this pointless sociality. He would still have to attend meetings at work, but he almost never has any interaction with clients. Most of his exchanges are with his managers, as they plan and monitor the progress of development projects. He does peer coding too, but that’s so task-focused that it hardly counts as being social. Besides, he thinks, it’s not shooting the shit with the guys at work that I want to avoid. It’s all the time I squander driving through town to meet friends who either bore me half to death or want me to play some stupid game I have no interest in playing—Boost My Ego, it would be called. Tell Me Everything I Do Is Right and Brilliant. Try Your Hardest to Outshine Me But Fail Every Time. He laughs, leaping from the bottommost stair, remembering how one of his brother’s favorite boasts when he’s winning at cards, or at a board game, or at corn hole, or at any of the other colossal time sucks people around here love, is to say, “It’s called ‘I Win, Bitches.’”

            After the ten or so paces that separate the last flight of stairs from the bridge, he rounds the handrail and thrusts himself up the first three steps up onto the wooden planks. Exerting his beleaguered but still sturdy legs into a full stride once more, he looks ahead to the tree that grows midway between the handrails on either side of the bridge, one of the two-hundred-year-old oaks that give the reserve its name. Russell calls this one the Ghost Tree because its gray trunk stands out against the green foliage and darker bark of the other trees. His lips stretch into a lazy grin because this ancient apparition and the more recent man-made structure that point the way toward it—like some elaborately constructed slingshot hurling you at an elevator into eternity—signal his nearness to the trailhead atop the rise beyond it and the parking lot it opens onto. Only—he has one more lap before returning to it.

He’s over the stream and stepping down off the bridge before it occurs to him that the girl he saw from the top of the stairs—dark hoodie, gray sweat pants, light blonde hair—is nowhere to be seen. “Odd,” he mumbles, turning in either direction to look for her. He finally decides she must also be running and already around the bend a ways down along the bank. He figures he’ll probably cross paths with her on his way back toward the stream.

After leaping down onto an island of gravel and mud in the middle of a tributary of the creek, he launches himself up on the slippery clay bank on the facing side, a maneuver that extends his circuit around the park by maybe twenty yards, giving him the pleasing sense that he’s getting as much out of the trail as he possibly can. Plus, it’s fun. Can’t let a little jump over a stream stop you, now can you?

Savoring the thudding noise of his feet against the dry dirt as he takes to the rise back up toward the park entrance he’ll pass by in stride, he considers how every time he comes here, no matter how long he has to wait in traffic on the way, no matter how sore his muscles are afterward, no matter how muddy his Nikes get, he never feels like he’s wasted his time. Unlike so many other occasions he feels obligated to attend, so many other gatherings he goes out of his way to join. How often, he silently laments, do I leave thinking I didn’t really have to devote those precious moments of this brief window of existence allotted to me to something so dull, something almost physically painful to endure? 

He checks the little parking lot through the stand of trees separating it from this part of the trail and sees his red pickup, bought from his dad after he retired, stretched in its manly, versatile crouch, as if beamingly happy to have the sylvan nook beside the road all to itself. Russell is deep into the woods, hurtling with long, liquid strides down a descending curve toward another, much shorter wooden bridge over a nearly dry brook when it dawns on him the girl on the bridge must have either left already or come here on foot—because there were no vehicles in the lot besides his truck.

He starts the climb up the hill on the other side of the muddy brook, feeling the strain in the backs of his thighs. The third lap brings with it a sense of relief tinged with a reluctance borne of having to overcome the accumulation of fatigue. The second lap used to be when he would really find his rhythm, forget his legs, and let his mind soar. But losing concentration on the final lap, with the exhaustion setting in, could mean catching a toe on an exposed root, or rolling an ankle over an unseen rock. He recognizes though that with increasing physical weariness it also becomes more difficult to deliberately control what you focus your attention on. And his mind seems to want to return to the topic of programs, how the operation of his mind and the exertion of his will themselves depend on a substrate of programs—programs pondering programs, a wearying line of thought for a weary mind.

Leaping forward in bounding strides down another hill, absorbing the impact with the balls of his feet and the muscles of his calves, he does manage to stay vigilant lest he trip or take a misstep. Still, he can’t help reserving space in his consciousness for a lecture serving to set Jason straight on the finer points of his philosophy, which isn’t even his philosophy. It isn’t like some t-shirt he dons because it suits his tastes—it’s his understanding of the work of countless scientists and intellectuals pushing toward ever more refined approximations of the truth. Everyone else, it seems, chooses their beliefs based on what’s in fashion. That doesn’t mean he has to. An image of the girl on the bridge comes to his mind, standing there in her oversized sweat shirt and loose sweat pants. You never see women in sweat pants like that anymore, he thinks. It’s always yoga pants, or those tighter fitting sweats without the elastic around the waistband and the ankles. And where the hell is she?

On an uncustomary whim, Russell begins silently weaving a tale about the girl he saw standing in her outsized, outdated sweats, who only appeared to him because he had unwittingly performed a ritual by running first one way and then the other along the strip of trail atop the steep embankment, the stretch demarcated by the three bundles of straw in the trees. The bundles were put there by the girl’s aunt, a strange woman, one for whom the standard Christian rites held no meaning, one content to live on the margins, no matter how lonely she was there. The ritual of running along the top of the embankment calls the girl back from the realm of the dead because it’s a reenactment of her flight from the man who eventually caught up to and murdered her. And the aunt cast the enchantment with the straw bundles so the mourning mother, her sister, could see her daughter once more.

Russell laughs at himself, at how he managed to go from formulating the perfect response to Jason, one that would get through to him once and for all, clear up all the confusion about whether his beliefs disqualify him from recognition as a human, to whipping up a story starring some girl he barely glimpsed. The thread that unites them, he realizes, is the theme of the outcast, the person who doesn’t think, and who doesn’t live the way most people do—and then he laughs again because that means he’s something of a witch himself. He remembers an occasion when he was getting head from a certain young woman who loved all things Harry Potter—at the last moment he pulled away from her mouth and shouted “Expecto Patronum!” just before coming in her face. “Sorry, I learned Latin in a Catholic school.” She hadn’t found it as amusing as he did. Though of course Jason got a good laugh when he told him.

As he continues his run and his mind sets to roaming as predicted, Russell’s thoughts range from his most memorable sexual encounters of late to the nature and causes of human consciousness, and from who he feels like hanging out with tonight to what he should set as some goals for the next five years. He pumps his legs like a pair of derricks thrusting him up the longest staircase on the opposite side of the park from the one that brings him down toward the bridge, and recovering his breath he glides happily along, marking the absence from his mind of any of the piffling idiocy that’s been preoccupying him. And on he runs as if on the wings of a light-hearted dream, hardly even aware anymore that he’s being forced to do without the music that usually helps maintain his pace. 

He’s already completed the first pass along the embankment and into the Graveyard of Trees to complete the figure eight. So when he returns to the top of the stairs and sees the blonde girl in sweat shirt and sweat pants leaning on the handrail near the far end of the bridge he senses that something strange is going on. He keeps an eye on her as he bounces down the stairs, half expecting her to disappear again as soon as he looks away. She remains in place, resting her elbows atop the rail, as long as it takes him to clear the bottommost stairs and jog over to the steps leading up to the bridge. It’s not until he’s only a few paces from her that she turns to face him. Russell almost draws to a stop, so closely does she resemble someone he knew more than twenty years ago, but he retains the presence of mind to realize the intensity of his gaze may frighten her. The last thing he notices before she turns back to the creek and he passes behind her is her swiping a hand across her cheek, her outstretched fingers dragging under her eye, to wipe away the tears wetting her face. He’s several yards away from the bridge and taking mincing steps to position himself for the leap over the smaller brook before it occurs to him that he needs to talk to her, to tell her about the girl she reminds him of, to ask her what’s wrong, why she’s crying, if there’s anything he can do.

But he struggles up the muddy bank after jumping across the stream and continues up the final rise to the parking lot. An adult male simply can’t walk up to a teenage girl alone in the woods without the gesture being construed as a threat. So he finishes his silent run, emerges from the woods into the gravel of the parking lot, gasping, his heartbeat throbbing in his temples, his legs at once aching and numb, sweat soaking his shirt and the sides of his face. If she walked here, he wonders, will she walk back out through the parking lot?

—————————

Jason was right about Russell believing that if you’re unhappy with your life you really do have to debug your coding somehow. Or else create an entirely new program. Where he goes wrong is in thinking that programming leaves no room for compassion or emotion. Those are just as much a part of your program as anything else. Some people’s genetic coding primes them to be more compassionate than others. Some people pick up habits of thinking and behaving that make them more attuned to other people’s feelings. The mistake most people make is to think of coding as mechanical or mathematic, like logic, and of logic as antithetical to feeling, while emotions are what? Uncaused? Unexplainable? Spontaneous? Supernatural? The reality is that one isn’t either human or machine; rather, humans are a complex breed of organic machine.

Okay, so I could have been more sensitive in my phrasing, Russell decides as he paces across the parking lot after his run, letting his muscles cool down gradually before climbing into his truck for the long drive back to his apartment downtown. But if I sugarcoated it he would’ve dismissed it even more readily than he did. It seemed like a time for some tough love.

            Russell looks at the lifeless gizmo strapped to his arm and feels uneasy about being disconnected for so long—and maybe uneasy too because of the girl on the bridge. He goes over to open the door of his truck and turns on the engine so he can plug in the phone to charge while he finishes his cool-down routine. Jason will likely have texted him, as will have Susanne. Her, he’ll be happy to hear from. Jason, though—ever since that night at Dupont Bar Jason has been especially anxious to get together, as if he wants to make sure everything is copacetic between them. The problem is that he seems to think he offended Russell and so feels it necessary to make amends—but Russell wasn’t offended that night so much as he’s just fed up in general. And not just with Jason, but with his brother, along with most of his other friends. He keeps giving the people in his life the benefit of the doubt, only to see them wallowing in their own shameful mediocrity, and trying to make him feel guilty for not being content to do the same. 

            The wind picks up and whirls some leaves about the lot. Russell tilts back his head to watch their bereaved relatives still aloft in the branches perform their trembling dirge. It’s warm for a late September evening, but he’s sure he can detect a shift, something in the texture of the air that foretells the full ripening of fall, and he imagines the transformation that will take place in the woods. He’s run these trails more this summer than ever before, finding that the ritual sustains him, restores some part of his system that operates in an inaccessible portion of his mind. So even as he looks forward to the splendor of the coming season he can’t help dreading the cold that will eventually make running more unpleasant than it’s worth. Will I still make it out here, he wonders, even if it’s just to hike through the snow?

The previous winter had everyone in the region holed up indoors for longer than they were accustomed, locked away for endless days of record-low temperatures and record volumes of snowfall. By the time the last of the white patches in people’s muddy lawns were trickling away into the blasted unmown grass and down the filthy storm drains, everyone was out of sorts. Even Russell, for all his self-sufficiency, was thrilled to feel himself recharged by his forays into the belated warmth of the approaching summer, only appreciating how depleted he’d been—how much extra difficulty he’d had waking up, moving from any sitting or recumbent position, mustering any enthusiasm for his life or his future—until being granted the welcome reminder of what it was to feel normal.

The difficulty of the past winter, along with the approach of his last birthday before turning forty, was what inspired him to recommit to a proactive way of living. Over the past five years or so it seems, any time he’s succumbed to one or another form of inanition he couldn’t help attributing it to a permanent shift in what it was like—what it would be like from now on—to live life as a man at his current age. It was the same with all the aches and illnesses he suffered. When you’re young, pain and disappointment and listlessness are temporary setbacks. Annoyances. Pull a muscle in your back in your late thirties or beyond, though, and you feel a jolt of terror at the prospect of living with this twanging nerve forever—well, until you die anyway, or until other, more excruciating pains drown it out.

“Ugh,” he groans aloud, turning at the edge of the lot back toward the truck. This is exactly the type of thinking that prompted him to conclude he could either settle complacently into his life, waiting for the next bad thing to happen—and oh they were coming for us all, those bad things—or he could set himself to a series of projects and undertakings to give himself something to occupy his mind and his time, something to look forward to, a sense of progress and improvement—or at least of arrested decline—so he could feel that he was living life instead of recoiling from it. Reprogram? Why not? If you’re not happy with your life or with yourself, you have to change. And about the only things that are really within your power to change are your own habits. Unfortunately for Russell, he seems to have been determining he needed to reprogram himself to be more active and deliberate at about the same time everybody else he knows was deciding they were going to stand up for their right to be lazy and content with their own mediocrity, with all their already meager faculties on the wane.

Still pacing, he thinks of the girl on the bridge, and the old girlfriend she reminds him of. He doesn’t want to get in his truck because he fears the sooner he stops moving his legs, the more the inflammation will set in to his muscles, and the more likely the aches will be to keep him awake later tonight. So he keeps walking back and forth across the lot, thinking back to when he was in high school, when Vicki seemed the point from which all his joys radiated, all his feeling of living a charmed life, all his plans to wring the last drop of life’s piquant elixir from the rind of daily existence at its most banal and disappointing. This beauty, this empathic soul, drunk on the ambrosia of innocence and youthful promise, aglow with the radiance of starlight in his sleeping and waking dreams, glittering night and day. Anybody could see she was someone important, and she recognized in him some fire, some quality of roaring, relentless insatiability. In her adoring gaze he felt the touch of destiny. And since the day he first felt that touch he’s been stoking and protecting his fire like an acolyte in some long-forgotten pagan temple built to house it.

It was Russell who decided to break it off with Vicki the summer before they both started college, not because he loved her any less, not because he feared the effects of distance, but simply because she was his first, first love, first girlfriend, first everything adult and sexual, first taste of what was in store for him—or so he thought. What he couldn’t have anticipated was that he would go on to dream about her for the next twenty years, that he would go through months of heartache, overcome at random moments with bouts of sobbing, gasping. This is life, he told himself, life at its most excruciatingly, exquisitely real. Learn to master these feelings and the world will yield up all its most refined pleasures and mysteries. Succumb to them and be mired in middling miseries for all your days, consoled only by the dullest of commonplace gratifications. Today’s reminder of her brings him no gladness.

He returns to the truck and reaches in over the driver’s seat. His phone shows no messages at first, but as he begins sliding back off the seat he hears the indicator. After typing in his code, he sees three messages, one from Jason, and two from Susanne. “I met ur friend Hallie last night,” the first one reads. The second says, “U r a lying scumbag.” Russell throws the phone in the passenger seat, not bothering to read Jason’s message. He rests his head against the steering wheel between his two hands, and before long he feels himself clenching the wheel in tightened fists, the muscles on the sides of his jaw doing a motionless dance. Finally, he leans back into the seat, exhaling, shaking his head. It was bound to happen, he thinks. We all hang out in the same bars and restaurants. And you knew, he tells himself, Susanne would react this way. You knew not telling her about the others, as far as she would be concerned, is the same as telling her they don’t exist. “But I never fucking lied to anyone,” he says aloud. He leans over to grab his phone again but doesn’t get past the first two digits of his code before he starts imagining how the conversation with her will go. He tosses the phone back into the seat beside him.

Stepping down from his truck, he lifts his hands up to the sides of his face, presses his fingertips into his temples, and begins walking again across the leaf-strewn gravel parking lot. Okay, he thinks, I’ve been having a shit-ton of fun with Susanne, but this isn’t the end of the world. It’s not worth a bunch of fucking drama to try to get her back—especially since I’m not even remotely interested in a serious relationship with her. Hallie I’ve only been out with a few times, so that’s no big deal either. If I decide to go out tonight, I’ll just go to Dupont. Or hell—I’ll go somewhere I don’t usually go and meet someone new.

He stops his pacing in the middle of the lot and looks up to the overcast sky. He doesn’t want to admit it, doesn’t even want to think it, but he’s exhausted. Part of the reason he went out with Hallie was that he wanted an excuse not to answer Susanne’s texts. Part of the reason he tries to keep three or more women at outstretched-arm’s reach but no closer is that aside from a few drinks and a good laugh or two, aside from some make-out sessions and blow jobs in his truck, and every once in a while sex in an actual bed (or on a couch like the last time) he found them each wearisome to be around. As he recently said to Jason, “You know, I don’t think there’s anything sexier than a woman who barely has time for me.” They both got a good laugh out of it.

Russell walks back over to his truck, braces his hands against the back gate of the pickup bed, and leans down as if stretching his calves. But he isn’t stretching. He has no choice but to admit that he’s not happy with his life, not just at the moment but for the past few weeks at least. He’s not sure what the core problem is, but he doesn’t see the trajectory of his life into the near future—autumn, the holidays, another hard winter, and another calendar year—as promising anything worth looking forward to. So what’s keeping you from doing something about it, he asks himself. With that thought, Susanne’s text starts to look like a blessing. Why? Because I feel harried. Because I’ve got so many schedules and routines that by the time I might pause to reflect and plan I’m too mentally exhausted. And lately any time I have reserved for myself to decompress I end up spending at a bar, sustaining a relationship that has no business being sustained.

“I’m done,” he says aloud as he lifts himself up from where he was leaning. I’m done with Susanne, done with Hallie. I can put things on hold with Amanda—that’s one of the great things about her. I’m done with my brother. Russell turns and begins crossing the lot again, feeling a renewed sense of purpose and vitality welling up. Most of all, he thinks, I’m done with Jason.

The plan starts taking shape in his mind. He’s been considering taking some time off from work lately anyway. He imagines what it could be like if he takes all that time for himself, to take stock of his life, to assess the effectiveness of his routines, to reevaluate his goals. He could take on a few short-term projects, catch up on some reading, and most of all do some house cleaning, the figurative kind, to clear away all the time sucks that contribute nothing. From the far corner of the lot, close to the entrance from the road, he marches back to his truck, galvanized, giddy even. This is a perfect fucking idea, he sings silently, a smile stretching over his unwatched face. Yeah, on Monday I’m going to put in for the time off. He figures he can put in for vacation time beginning the second half of October, the week after he’s supposed to visit his dad in Ohio for his birthday. In the meantime, he tells himself, stepping up and sliding into the truck, pulling the door closed beside him, there’s no need to bother with Susanne. You’ll see plenty of Nick in Ohio in a couple weeks. There’s no reason to bother with anyone—at least until, when? The middle of November?

            As he’s pulling out of the lot onto the road, trees on either side reaching up as if to clasp hands with those on the other, his text indicator sounds again, and he can’t help glancing over to see the name on the screen. Ray. He remembers he talked to Ray about possibly meeting out tonight at Mad Anthony Brewery, a bar close to both of their houses. For several moments as he drives through the arched corridor of trees with leaves on the cusp of their fiery celebration of their own departure from life, he wonders whether he should ignore Ray too. The forest passing by through the side windows entrances him, empties his mind. Then abruptly he knows his answer. Ray’s a bit different from my other friends, he thinks. I’ll hang out with him as one last farewell to my nightlife before retreating to my hideaway.  

—————————

The wretched irony of realizing that you’re unfulfilled is that it’s your lack of energy and enthusiasm that makes you realize it, which means you don’t have the energy or enthusiasm it would take to make any lasting change. This may be especially true of people past a certain point in their thirties. Whether you plan to or not, you fall into routines in every area of your life, and even if those routines are physically or cognitively or emotionally demanding you still do them automatically, without deciding, without any exertion of will. But to change your routines, to transition to a new career, to relocate to a new city, to get divorced and start dating again—it all takes an appalling amount of thought and energy and discipline.

Russell often reflects on this and prides himself on having made a drastic change at thirty-two. His entire dating life up till then he had spent looking for women he would have some deep intellectual connection with—women much like him. After the breakup with Sheila, though, he decided the only condition that needed to be met before he would be open to dating a woman was that he feel some physical attraction for her.

“I was shocked to find out how easy it is to get along with most women, and the fact that I was so shocked told me just how disagreeable all the women I had been dating must’ve been—which means I must be really disagreeable too. Now my relationships aren’t all crazy-intense like they used to be. They’re lighter, more fun. I don’t go rolling in the deep nearly as often anymore, and there’s actually something profoundly reassuring in the discovery that I don’t have to reveal my most troubled and my most troubling thoughts to make a connection with another human being. I can get by solely on charm and wit.” He and his friend laugh at this.

Russell’s sitting at the rail in Mad Anthony Brewery next to his friend Ray. They’ve known each other long enough that it wouldn’t be quite right to call them drinking buddies. But Russell also knows his friend tends to lose interest somewhere in the middle of his longer stories or rants. They seldom talk about their childhoods, and when they do they don’t go rummaging around for deeper insights into each other’s personalities. There’s not much back-and-forth between them about their respective philosophies. Sometimes Russell will go on—the way he will with just about anyone—and it’s not like Ray interrupts him or tells him to shut up. He just gets distracted, looks at his phone. Or he dons this expression like, “Whoa! Where did all that come from?”

Russell is never offended by it; he understands rather that it’s he who has breached the tacit agreement between them. He actually finds the limited scope of their conversations to be a great comfort. Nice having a friend who likes being around you when you’re not being impressive, when you’re not talking that much, a friend who likes who you are when you’re quiet. Most people get a taste of Russell and become intrigued. They start asking questions. At some point they start to get the wrong idea about him from what he says. It’s all so strange and unsettling. Lately, he’s had this sense that if someone spends time with him when he’s not talking much, or not answering too many questions, that person will get a truer feel for who he really is—even though the deeper stuff is closer to where lives day-to-day. He realizes now that what he’s saying to Ray verges on violating their contract, but his friend in quietude, the one who’s never been misled by his seemingly inhuman thoughts, doesn’t mind much.

“Yeah,” Ray says, “you start off thinking girls are just around for fun and you just want to sample a big variety. Then you mature and start wanting some kind of deeper connection. And then you have a couple of deeper connections—find out how fucking annoying they are—and you realize you had the right attitude when you were young and stupid.” They share another laugh. Despite the limited nature of their conversations, Russell appreciates Ray’s off-kilter take on things. He’s a man with his own ideas.

When they met seven years ago, Ray was a vice narcotics officer, and they would often hang out when he was on the clock. (“Just don’t bust any of my friends,” Russell often joked.) He was suited to the job because, as a tall rangy guy sporting a mess of light-streaked brown hair and taking his fashion cue from the grunge movement of twenty years ago, he didn’t give off anything remotely resembling a cop vibe. He’s been married most of the time Russell’s known him, but he and his wife enjoy an unconventional arrangement, not exactly an open marriage but one in which free passes are exchanged on rare occasions. Originally educated to be a graphic designer, Ray began a second career in tattooing when he was in his late thirties. A detective now, he plans to retire early from the force to tattoo full-time. Even in his dress clothes, though, you would never peg him for a cop, especially now that he’s nearly sleeved.

“I don’t think men and women were ever meant to live as close as most married couples do,” Ray says. “They didn’t evolve that way. It’s kind of like you can either be best friends with a woman or you can have some torrid romance with her. But if you try to do both with the same woman it’s a recipe for disappointment and frustration on both sides. All married couples learn that. Most of them settle into best-friends situations and pretty much give up on the all-consuming passion stuff. For me, though, I think you have make room for that somehow. Or you’re going to end up resenting the shit out of each other. Your situation is great, though. If I were you, I’d be hooking up with someone different every weekend.”

Russell laughs at this suggestion before saying, “But even with my relaxed requirements it’s not so easy to find women who are cool—and who I’m attracted to. I do alright though. The thing that’s worrying me now is that all my life I sort of assumed I’d settle in to one of those best-friends situations too. I never got around to thinking about how I’d deal with the missing torridity, of course. But over the past two years or so I’ve almost always had multiple casual partners—fuck buddies. I made a point of arranging things so that I wasn’t ever obligated to be anywhere, or do anything, or fucking check in all the time. But whenever I want to do something, whenever I want to have some drinks and get laid, I can call someone. And if she’s not available I can call someone else.”

“Like I said, dude, that’s fucking awesome. I think if I were you I’d be broadening my horizons even more. I see tons of girls you could go talk to. That waitress over there has been checking us out—you should flag her down.”

“I may still. But what I was saying is that I’m worried that having all my base needs met without having to invest anything emotionally, you know, I’m worried I might be spoiling myself. I mean, I don’t feel guilty or anything—I don’t owe any of them anything. I make a point not to make any promises. I’m just worried about the effect it’s going to have on me in the long-term, like if I actually decide at some point that I want something more serious.”

“I think you’re worrying way too much. And this may just be me, but I think you’re deluding yourself about those serious relationships being the most desirable end-point.”

Ray goes on, telling him about how dull the grass is on his side of the marriage divide, but Russell is thinking how all the great fun with fuck buddies is well and good—until you get ass cancer that eats you from the inside out. Or until you simply get to an age when you’re no longer as motivated to chase after the hot young waitresses, or the dolled up nurses out for girls’ night. Or until coming home every day to an empty apartment, with no one to share your life with, no one to tell about your day, no one to make anything that happens to you seem at all significant—or even real—until it makes your life seem so utterly pointless you wonder how you don’t just fade out of existence. Russell won’t go in to any of this, not with Ray.

To keep things light, Russell tells him instead about what happened with Susanne. “The funny thing is, my last committed relationship ended because she was convinced I was screwing around when I wasn’t. Now my casual, uncommitted partner is breaking up with me because she suspects I’m fooling around—and she’s totally right.”

What Russell isn’t telling Ray is how betrayed he felt back then, not just by Sheila, but by his whole family, by almost everyone he knew. Everyone except Jason. She had accused him of something he found loathsome, something he didn’t do—couldn’t do—and yet everyone assumed she had some valid grievance. Even if he hadn’t done what she accused him of precisely, he still deserved whatever punishment she had cooked up for him. His brother Nick had said outright that he was being stupid, that he should just shut up and do whatever it took to earn her forgiveness. As if the accusation weren’t its own offense against him. Because no one wanted to sift through all the he-said-she-said, all the gory details of their competing narratives, but they knew, because everybody who knows Russell knows, that there’s just something off about him. “I don’t know what happened or didn’t happen, but Russell is Russell after all”—bullheaded, stingy with his time, withholding of his affections, always right, a bit superior, book smart, and condescending as hell. Just like his dad, the kind of surly sixth-grade math teacher kids still hate decades later, and before him his grandfather. A family curse—is there a shittier type of guilt by association?

So Russell decided to keep the best of himself to himself—and fuck everyone else. If women bristle because they care more about the social value of beliefs, the value to their own identities, than whether or how much they correspond with reality, then fine, he thought. I can tell some stories, have some laughs, make some wisecracks. You don’t need to know what I really believe.

But Jason knows. Jason of all people should understand why he thinks the way he does and that his thinking that way doesn’t mean what everyone else seems to think it means about him. Russell has always thought the test of a true friend was whether you could be really bad with him without him ever suspecting you’re really bad. Now Jason is toeing Nick’s line. And so fuck him too. Casual, high-turnover hookups and friends like Ray—that should be sufficient, he thinks. That should leave me free.

“Oh, and I wanted to ask you about something,” Russell says to Ray. “Before I got the texts from Susanne, I was running the trails at Bicentennial Woods, and I saw these bundles of straw stuck in the trees. I think they’ve been there for a long time, but I’ve never thought much about them.” He cups his hands in front of him to indicate the dimensions. “There were three of them along about a twenty-yard stretch at the top of an embankment. You ever seen anything like that? It just looked so deliberate—I thought it might be some kind of pagan symbol, or some girls doing witchcraft. I don’t know why, but the first thing that came to mind were those stick effigies hanging from the trees in The Blair Witch Project.”

“Straw bundles in trees? I’ve never heard of anything like that. I’ve gone to some—I don’t even know what to call them—gatherings for neopagans, though, and it’s all pretty improvisational. That’s kind of the appeal. They don’t like the rigidity of the major religions. They like the freedom and open-endedness. A lot of stuff they just make up as they go along.”

“Do you guys ever see much occult stuff? It seems like when I was a kid I was always hearing stories about how the FBI was tracking some satanic cult that did blood rituals with babies or some shit.”

“You’re talking about the Satanic Panic of the 80s,” Ray says leaning back. “It was sparked by all the movies about possession and devil worship—there was also some big thing with recovered memories. Turns out, with hypnotism you can trick people into remembering just about anything, from satanic rituals to alien abductions. There were never any verified cases of a group sacrificing or ritually abusing children. It was all nonsense. The funny thing is, I know of all kinds of cases where kids were abused by Christians who were trying to rid them of demons.

“The real Satanists,” he goes on, “are just inverse Christians, followers of Anton LeVey, you know, angry teenage outcast types who grow up thinking Christianity is corrupt or oppressive or conformist. For them, Satan isn’t a symbol of evil; he’s a symbol of rebellion. The others, the witches, the wiccans, the neopagans, they’re reviving practices deemed satanic by the church as part of a propaganda campaign, to win converts. Those stick figures in Blair Witch, which everyone thought were so creepy—they’re actually for fertility as far as I understand it. Which, when you think about it, actually is pretty creepy, since they were made by a ghost who kills children. But the point is, no matter who you worship you believe you’re right and good. People don’t wake up and decide to be evil one day and then start worshipping Satan.”

“But might people start worshipping Satan and then turn evil?”

“That’s probably closer to how it works. But it depends on how you define evil. People get all worked up about this cult, or that serial killer. But really not much excites people more than the idea of real evil—they love it. Everybody says they want to do something with their lives that helps other people, makes the world a better place. That’s not a terrible thing. That’s admirable. Look at the turnover rates at the jobs that actually do help people, though—the helping jobs like homes for kids who come from fucked up backgrounds, nursing homes, schools in dangerous neighborhoods. And that’s the people who actually try it for a while. Most people, when you get down to it, just want to do whatever they feel like doing and pretend it’s serving some lofty purpose. Even rat fuck Wall Street types, you ask them and they’ll tell you all about how they make as much money as they do because they perform some great service to the economy.

“Evil is pretty much just a fantasy for everybody to ooh and ahh about. When you see the horrible shit that goes on close up, in real life, you know—that’s almost the worst part—how stupid it is, how senseless. You don’t need any grand metaphysical idea like evil to understand it. I mean, it’s usually just sad. But all over TV you see how the solution to the mystery, the criminal at the end of the trail of breadcrumbs, he’s always some mastermind. It’s always some big agenda. The horrible shit cops see—hell, some of these people’s lives are so fucked up you can’t help thinking stray cats live better. The people who hurt kids, they’re not leaders of some criminal syndicate. They don’t have grand schemes. They’re the most pathetic people you’ve ever seen. Guys who hate black people. Guys who hate women. Women who hurt their kids. Nine times out of ten you can tell right away they’re either half retarded or there’s just something wrong with their brains.

“That’s the extreme, though. Most of us hurt people all the time in some minor or indirect way. But we manage to rationalize it, convince ourselves we’re still good people. Honest fucking truth—most people are if you give them the chance. Good people, I mean. That’s the norm. But there’s so much shit that can go wrong. And people latch on to the idea of evil because it makes it easier for them to think they’re the good, worthwhile humans. It gives them a sense of awe, like it’s this cosmic force only they can resist. And it proves that there’s more to existence than genes and shitty parents and teenage boys trying to prove how tough they are. Tell people a story about an honest-to-God evil person, and watch their faces light up. Look at how obsessed people are with Hitler. Whenever people hear about an evil person, they’re like, ‘Let’s all get together and be heroes.’ You’ve seen it. You’ve seen how rabid they can get. Look at all these new Facebook activists. They totally believe they’re battling evil and working to make the world a better place, when most of the time they’re really just adding to the noise. But, no, let’s cut off the balls of some child molester, let’s bring this politician’s cheating to light and publically humiliate him—so we can all feel like heroes. Being a Facebook feminist is way more fun than teaching troubled kids or cleaning bed pans.

“And, dude, I know I’m being cynical right now. I know it’s actually a good thing that people want to believe they’re good, that they want to have some sense of purpose in their lives. But a lot of times to play the role of hero they have to distort their perceptions. They have to exaggerate, or invent, some offense so they can stand up against it. Wanting to be good like that actually inspires people to be evil. Hitler thought he was battling evil. Bin Laden believed he was a great martyr for the holiest of causes. To me, evil isn’t all that scary. To me, it’s people who believe most strongly in evil who are scary. Especially when they can look around and see hundreds of other people believing just like they do.”

Ray falls silent as they simultaneously lift their beer glasses to their mouths. This time, Russell thinks, it’s Ray going off on the rant. I must have hit on a sore spot. He feels his lips pulling tight over the rim of his glass, and he wishes his friend would continue. Of course, Russell doesn’t believe in evil as any kind of cosmic force either. What thrills and delights him about Ray going on like he just did was that he was saying exactly the kind of stuff he says himself that ends up pissing off so many people. And that Ray began at a moderate trickle before releasing the torrent meant that he’d been holding back, probably because he knew the feeling all too well of having thoughts and not being able to share them without giving the wrong impression.

As Ray goes on to say he’ll ask another guy he knows at work who’s a bit of an expert on occult stuff about the straw bundles, Russell is ruminating on those teenage outcasts, the ones attracted to symbols of rebellion and nonconformity. He supposes he’s acquainted with the grownup version of many of these guys from his work. And there must be a female variety too, the ones who balk when everyone else is rushing off to church on Sundays, the ones who make up their own rituals in the woods. Their beliefs, their ideas, their thinking, it doesn’t mesh with the culture for whatever reason, and so they find themselves on the outside of it. Russell has never really identified with the geeks and outcasts before. But there are definitely certain similarities in their situations.

—————————

Taking to the trail which leads over the old wooden bridge into the woods behind his parents’ house in Clarksville, Ohio, as the maniac dog that’s been harassing his nieces and nephews bolts past him with enviable abandon, Russell imagines the relay race of generations, his grandpa in the hospital with the incision down his sternum that looked as though the edge of skin on either side had been folded back under itself before the sewing began, then his dad in the same room almost exactly a year later—and no one noticed until he woke from the quintuple bypass surgery to point it out. “We thought he was doing this,” Russell remembers his dad saying of his grandpa, as he traced an upward trajectory on an invisible graph, “but he was actually doing this”—steep decline. So despite the doctor’s assurances the following year of his own surgery’s success, he felt a dread he couldn’t hide. Someday, it would be Russell’s turn, not from smoking or poor diet or a sedentary lifestyle, but from something, eventually. Then it will be the whole to-do: everyone talking about how he has to fight; everyone acting like it’s some cosmic injustice; everyone going through the motions, as if the outcome, the ultimate outcome, could be altered. His dad has already had almost ten good years since his heart attack. It’s not always a bad idea to hang on. But it is a bad idea more often than people acknowledge.

Us outsiders, he thinks, closing his eyes and lifting his face to the broken beams of light seeping through the countless fizzling pixels of yellow and green and orange, us introverts, for people like us who don’t thrill to the presence of other people, all those visits, all that being trapped in a room, strapped to a bed for doctors and nurses—strangers—to poke and prod you, well, there are worse things than dying a week earlier than you otherwise would. Or a month. Or a year. Where do you draw the line, though? If I’m being honest with myself, Russell thinks, I have to admit that if my life was considerably less pleasant, or considerably more difficult, for a significantly lengthy amount of time, I would consider checking out. That’s the thing about people like us, we’re not as tied in to the world. We don’t feel obligated to live through misery and pain because our kids need us, or our spouses need us, or anyone needs us. We are free to drift away into nonexistence, knowing our family may go through the motions, knowing our few true friends will be genuinely, albeit temporarily, grief-stricken. But jump ahead six months or so and the world keeps turning. You’re nothing but a bunch of fond memories.

For a lot of people, he knows, this attitude of his would sound terrible, but it’s the flipside of true freedom, the freedom to live your days on your own terms, the freedom not to have to fulfill some role, not to have to support your contribution to the next generation, to live however you decide you want to live. Jason can complain all he wants about how I look at life as nothing but the output of so many programs—at least I’m free to change my programming whenever I want. All those other people, the extroverts, the family types, the ones tied in to the world, their programs are set for them, set for good. Sure, it’s easier not to have to decide what you’re supposed to be doing every day, not to wonder why you bother doing anything at all, to have all those questions answered for you once and for all. But is it worth it to never have a day in your life when you’re truly free? So free you could do anything—even die—and people would barely notice?

The rocky trench dividing the hill he’s climbing in two slopes down for maybe a couple of miles. Once, a couple of years ago, he clambered down to the bottom to find that it curves off anticlimactically into grooved channels that run along the border of some farmer’s fields. Now he decides to cross it and climb up the other side to see if anything but more forest lies over the top of the second rise. The air is chillier than he’d reckoned, making him wish he’d worn that jacket his sister-in-law tried to push on him. His nose is running. But the farther he gets into the woods the less the cold bothers him. The chill feels to him like a type of emptiness, a space where he can float freely, where he can let the contours of his mind and his disembodied essence stretch outward and blur into the vacuum of airy nonexistence. He breathes it in, this release from the pressure cooker of the house full of kids and animals and small talk and pointless screams and crying and petty dramas. Even my family, he thinks, has become too constrictive. They can no longer manage to leave enough space among them for me to be myself in their presence—if they ever could manage it. No, he thinks, I simply decided to be myself despite their poorly suppressed suspicions and not-so-subtle condemnations and self-protective snidery; it wasn’t like they ever allowed for me, sought to understand and accept me on my own terms, because those are the very terms that threaten them. But that’s just how families are. I should’ve known there was no point in coming here this weekend.

Rushing across the hill ahead of him, the rambunctious pit bull-border collie mutt startles him to the point of making him lurch backward on the shale slabs in the trench, nearly tripping over a storm-sheered branch lying in a mess of orange leaves. He’s taken to calling the dog Spaz, or Psycho. It’s another of his stepmom’s rescues, one his dad isn’t particularly fond of. “If you can find a way to make sure he doesn’t come back from the woods with you,” he said to Russell as he was setting out, “it’ll probably keep him from taking a few years off of my life.” Thinking how the dog had bowled over his niece, not just the once but three times so far this weekend, Russell wonders now how he might actually do it—how he would kill this damn dog rampaging obliviously through the woods with him, disappearing for long stretches only to reappear and scare the hell out of him.

The leaves rasping and crunching overhead and underfoot, as well as the wayward falling loners sashaying lazily through the air, put him in the holiday mood like none of the kitschy decorations—inflatable ghosts and pumpkins, green-skinned witches astride their brooms on houses—he passed on the drive through Ohio. Halloween is the one holiday he still enjoys. He remembers a shift occurring every year in his dad about the middle of October when they were kids, in the weeks after his birthday. All summer, as he set about keeping himself busy with lawn care, home maintenance and improvement schemes he had no business taking up, and taking advantage of the luxury of pursuing a few of his own scholarly interests, like biographies of famous explorers or inventors. Toward the middle of August, though, he would start to get sullen and irritable. Russell and Nick simply avoided him for those couple months, insofar as it was possible for people living in the same three-bedroom house to avoid each other. Then as Halloween approached he would undergo another inexplicable change. His spirits would lift. He’d take them on trips to parks to take long hikes along the myriad trails. And they’d all go to The Haunted Castle on some Friday night. More than anything else about that place, an old church done up to provide some starts and scares, Russell remembers waiting in line to get in, and the pleasurable warmth of anticipation. His grandma had hated what they did to that church; she always reminded the grandkids that it was where she had been married to their grandpa. 

Cresting the rise on the opposite side of the trench, Russell looks out over a gradual descent and sees nothing but more trees, promising little else but more leaf-strewn forest for the cost of an hour’s hiking. He turns and starts to climb up toward the source of the rocky trench, and comes after a few minutes to a line of pine trees, beyond which he finds an overgrown grassy trail separated from a stagnant, algae-covered pond by head-high brush. As he picks his way through the line of trees into the tall grass, he shouts loudly for the dog but hears no panting, no crunch of leaves in response. Maybe he’ll just get lost out here, he thinks—because I don’t see any good way to kill the bastard. Before rounding a sharp curve in the track around the pond, Russell sees the back end of a rusted car. His dad had mentioned a junkyard back here.

A half dozen cars hunched atop sagging or absent tires and exhausted suspension, grown over with vines and weeds, giving the illusion of melting into the ground, sit eternally parked along either side of the trail. Imagining how readily his dad would be able to identify the makes from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Russell weaves a path among them, as more come into view the farther along he goes. When he hears someone advancing toward him at a frenzied clip through the weeds and grass, he’s only alarmed for a couple of seconds before remembering Psycho. Sure enough, no sooner does Russell look back than he sees the dog bursting out from the brush along the pond to come hurtling, elated by his own freedom and surging energy, across the trail and back into the woods on the other side of the curve, where he collides—with comical abruptness—against an unseen wire fence, bounces backward into an upright, unmoving, almost chastened stance, a look of bafflement on his piebald, bullet-shaped face. Russell doubles over with laughter. The dog turns toward him, still wearing the high-eared, tilted-head quizzical expression, and Russell knows he won’t kill him. “Psycho, you idiot!” The dog runs off up the trail in the opposite direction, quickly disappearing into the desiccated grass, and before long is out of earshot. 

Looking back toward the woods and the cars he’s passed, he becomes aware of how spooky this place is. The sound of the leaves is muted to an eerie hush. The cars seem like newly lifeless things that at any moment could spring back into motion. And it would be really easy for someone to camp out here—plenty of places to hide and escape the elements. The thought comes unbidden that he could be having a lot of fun in this junkyard if someone else were around to share the experience with. He walks over to push apart a thin spot in the brush separating him from the pond. That’s the whole problem with Halloween, he thinks. That’s the whole problem with any holiday. It’s like they’re designed to force you to hang out with other people, especially kids. You carve pumpkins together. You go trick-or-treating together. Even for adults, it’s parties, pumpkin spice everything, huddling around fires. If ever there were a holiday for us loners and outsiders, he thinks, it should be Halloween. This year, he determines, I’m going to make a point of celebrating it on my own, in my own way.

Turning to continue down the path as it becomes ever more crowded with the carcasses of automobiles, Russell sees something in the trees on the side across from the pond. About head height, bristling out from the trunk, is a bundle of straw folded over one of the branches in the lowermost row. The chills spreading on the back of his neck surprise him, arriving before he’s had a chance to consider what this discovery might imply. He hasn’t, until now, thought of the possibility that other people may actually be in the vicinity. But who would come out here? He approaches the bundle, reaches up to examine it, feel how solid it is so he can get an idea how long it’s been hanging here. It comes apart with the gentlest tug. Russell’s mind goes back to all the searching he did to learn about the bundles, all of which came to naught. Here he is, though, in Clarksville, a good three hours’ drive from Fort Wayne and Bicentennial Woods—and he finds another bundle of straw bound the same way, braced over a branch in the same way. Could there be some cult, or just some group of people, who use this as their symbol?

Continuing along the path, scanning the trees for more bundles, he thinks of what Ray had been saying about all the boys who never manage to assimilate into any of the recognized institutions, the ones who come together around their symbols of rebellion and celebrate, however resentfully, their status as outsiders. Russell’s never really felt like that himself, never really felt excluded or ostracized. For him, it’s always felt like a choice—like please come to church because if you come it’ll be better for all of us. But I just couldn’t bring myself to take it seriously after a certain point, he thinks. So am I a different kind of outsider? And do all those thoughts about how outsiders have the freedom to drift away, to wander off unceremoniously and die, does that apply to the geeky kids who never get laid, who have to marry the first woman who’ll accept them, however horribly she treats them? They have their tight-knit little groups, though, their Dungeons & Dragons gatherings, their network of rivals and teammates for first-person shooter games. They have their own cultures even, like tiny tribes. And what about the survivalist types, the ones who hate the government, hate civilization, choose to live off the grid in their generator-powered, woodstove-heated shacks and lean-tos? So many people the main programs don’t accommodate, who have to, or choose to, make their own way, live by their own lights, play their own games, either because they’re sure to lose the officially sanctioned games or because those official games just don’t mean anything to them.

He spots the second straw bundle, and quickly afterward the third. So again there are three. Who the fuck is putting these here? He wonders first if it could be his brother playing a trick on him. Then he decides that’s too unlikely, that it must just be a common practice that for whatever reason isn’t discussed much online. There’s got to be all kinds of stuff like that. Up ahead, around the curve on the far side of the pond is a large, rusted-out bus, and beyond that he sees what looks like an old tool shed. He stops moving and pricks up his ears for any sound that may indicate the presence of another human being. “Hello,” he calls, without deciding to, following some impulse he catches himself trying to justify after he’s done it—even though he has no idea why he’s done it. He braces himself to receive some punishment for his mistake. But nothing happens. All he hears is the wind soughing through the leaves in the treetops.

“Hello,” he calls again, his actions following some set of actuating principles disconnected from the silent monologue in his mind. He takes a step forward, wondering if the best idea now may be to heed the “No Trespassing” signs he’s been so wantonly disregarding. Still, nothing around him, not the overgrown weeds, not the ruins of the bus, certainly not the barely standing shack with clouded-over windows, none of it suggests any recent visit by a living person. He listens for another beat, and then he continues along the path around the pond as it becomes ever more cluttered with the remains of cars and vans, until he passes a final one, after which there’s nothing to see but more overgrown grass, weeds, and the trees with leaves alight in the middle stages of their resplendent death throes. His steps have become more deliberate, his progress furtive. If he finishes the circuit around the pond, he’ll be far away from the bundles and the shack, emerging on the far side of the rocky trench in the woods, which must, he realizes, together with the pond, form some kind of long-forgotten drainage system. But he decides to overmaster his silly foreboding and turns to head back through the junkyard so he can reenter the woods closer to the trail that leads to his parents’ backyard.

Russell inhales sharply before turning. Amid the cars once again, he reflects on the permanence of their desuetude. They’ll sit here, inert, forgotten, until it comes time for someone to build a neighborhood here, or a city, or a parking lot. Or maybe they’ll be here forever, until they sink into the ground and dissolve into their constituent minerals. Like old, abandoned houses, you can barely begin to imagine the stories—where they’ve been, who’s driven them, the fights, the moves to new cities, the sex in the back seat, the singing, the crying, the near misses, someone’s first car, someone else’s last. Behind the glass grown opaque with grime, you see the driver’s seat, and its emptiness is unconvincing. The headless space before the headrest seems startlingly alive, so much so you almost can’t accept, when you look closer, that the figure you glimpsed hasn’t simply ducked beneath the window. Passing before the shack again, Russell can’t help holding his breath, veering toward the pond to cross in front of the weathered door at as great a distance as he can manage while still retaining an air of nonchalance.

He’s around the bend, on the stretch with the straw bundles in the trees, when his mind finally moves beyond his surroundings to the house he’ll be returning to and some possible methods for coping with its inhabitants. “Hey,” someone behind him calls. Russell’s mind remains divided from his actions as he responds inwardly with an eerie sense of alarm and outwardly with a casual sociability.

“Oh, hey,” he says, turning around.

“Lookin’ for something?” the man behind him asks. Russell sees he’s massive in a way that’s less intimidating than pitiable. But he’s still imposing enough, his posture insistent, his tone unmistakably aggressive.

“I’m actually just exploring,” Russell replies.

“What the fuck are you exploring here for?” he demands.

Russell sees that here is an example of the type of person he’s been thinking about, a grownup version of those kids we all know from high school, the ones who fit no role but that of spectator and bitter outcast, the ones you find at the edge of the party limply criticizing and enviously ridiculing their more engaged classmates. The guy is wearing a black rock-and-roll hoodie with vaguely satanic red etchings that looks like it’s never been washed. His gray jeans, straining at the seams and threadbare in patches near the point of bursting, fray at the bottom in filthy tentacles about a pair of boots that look like lumpy mounds of petrified dough.

“I already told your friends,” he says, stepping toward Russell, “this place happens to currently be occupied by someone who doesn’t give a fuck. I also told them if I ever catch any of you fucks creeping around back here again I was going to fuck ‘em up.”

As much as this man wants to intimidate him, Russell’s fear is concentrated elsewhere, not on any particular danger but arising from a sense that he’s on the verge of uncovering some long-held secret it may be better to leave undisturbed. “I don’t have any friends,” Russell says stupidly. “None that have been out here anyway.” The man steps toward him, raising his right arm. He’s holding what Russell at first thought was a stick or a short club but now sees is an oddly shaped blade. Even as the man shouts a series of curses at him and Russell takes several steps backward through the tall grass, he remains unpanicked, somehow assured that the threats are mere bluffs. “Dude,” Russell calls over the shouts, his hands raised before his face, “I’m fucking leaving.” But the man, stepping forward with his left foot, cants his right shoulder back slightly, enough to make Russell think he may actually try to bring the blade slashing down across his body—and yet he still can’t accept that such a thing could be possible.

In the middle of another backward step, Russell’s left leg is jostled into his right, sending him toppling sideways into the grass. The growl he hears is enough to finally ground his fear in the present crisis, and he frantically parts the weeds to see Psycho lunging up to seize the man’s arm in his jaws, the now lowered arm wielding the machete. Having latched on, the dog swings about and begins jerking violently, so much like a game of tug-o-war with a sock, except there’s nothing playful about it. The man’s screams go from outraged to desperate in the span of seconds. And just as Russell gets to his feet and rushes to pull off the dog, he sees that same arm flinging upward in a rapid arc, prompting him to brace himself for the downward slash that Psycho must have interrupted. But the man is spinning, off-balance, and the blade is nowhere to be seen. Russell comes out of his defensive crouch in time to watch the man disappear into the weeds—and then he hears glass shattering.

Psycho barks twice as the man lets flow a stream of obscenities. Russell picks his way toward the man cautiously, calling along the way, “Are you hurt? What happened? Do you need help?” The only answer he gets is “Fucking dog! Motherfucker!” The first thing Russell sees is the broken driver’s side window of what he thinks is a Studebaker—and a spattering of blood running down the outside of the door. His own blood goes cold. “Oh shit,” he mutters. “Where are you?” he calls again. “Don’t fucking cut me—I’m coming to help you.” No curses or obscenities come in response, certainly no assurances.

Russell follows the blood along a trail out of the weeds and back into the tall grass and sees where the man has fallen. Approaching him, Russell looks first for his hands—finding them immediately, slimy red beneath his chin, his right clutching his left, his left clutching the side of his neck. “Oh fuck.” The man tries to talk but only manages to get out “Mmaaugh.” Russell reaches into his jeans pocket for his phone as pulsing gouts of blood seep out between the man’s fingers. He’ll be dead for sure by the time anyone gets here, he thinks. Standing there, his thumb hovering over the touchscreen, he stares into the man’s eyes. They register no panic. Has he lost too much blood to feel terror? What his expression seems to speak of, though, is not exhaustion or delirium so much as resignation. Russell glances up to see one of the straw bundles in the trees along the trail, and he says aloud, “We’re free, you and I, to simply drift away.”

He slides his phone back into his pocket and looks back to the man’s face as his exiguous splashes of breath turn to ice and scrape and crunch into the air. Russell considers, for a mere few seconds, whether anyone will be able to trace his presence here. He hasn’t touched anything, save for the straw in the tree to gauge how old it was. The broken chunks of breath flow from the man’s gaping mouth at widening intervals, until he chokes out what seems the last—until two more come, one abruptly after the other. Then he lies still and silent. Russell continues watching him. His eyes look the same, like a living person’s eyes, until they don’t. And then Russell has to wonder if they looked this way—uncommunicative, withholding, detached—all along, if he only imaged them conveying some message of vitality from within, that light that people talk about going out.

When he turns to continue back to his parents’ house, he notices blurred splotches along the edges of his vision and a ringing hum suffusing the silence. He immediately realizes that his mind is slipping into a perturbed state, and he wills himself to monitor it. The shock. Is that what it is? He imagines the information processed by each of the modules in his brain leaking into all the others occupying the surrounding tissue. Time begins to progress by lurches, not in its customary smooth unfurling, so he steps into the woods one moment only to find himself twenty feet farther into them the next. Worrying he may lose his balance and fall once more, not from vertigo but because the forest floor itself won’t rest even, he braces himself with an outstretched arm against a tree and holds his eyes steady over what he recognizes as the rocky trench and the hill beyond, meaning he’s somehow gotten himself turned around, facing the direction opposite the house. Holding his gaze in place, the blurred patches moving in ripples along his periphery, he exerts his focus to settle whatever inner turmoil of conscience or shock of fright is bringing about this queasy nightmarish confusion of his senses.

Steadying his breath with deliberate effort, he succeeds after several minutes in calibrating his vision and his feeling for level ground. He stands upright, turning to head back to the house, but before taking a step forward he sees something that holds him in place. It looks at first like a thin, leafless tree, its upper branches twisting around, as if moved by the wind. Russell blinks, squeezing his eyes tight before reopening them to see it standing, human-like. The rotation was its turning to face him. The legs, the arms, even the torso, the entire body is composed of sticks, branches, the living appendages of trees, making it freakishly thin. The joints of the legs are angled backward, like those of a bird, and stretching out from its back are the gnarled arching frames of a pair of wings. Russell squints, struggling to bring the head into focus, seeing only a blur of white—which he thinks may be the skull of some long-snouted animal, like a deer or a horse. It appears to be looking directly back at him. When after several moments it fails to resolve into something more tree-like, more mundane and dismissible, Russell feels a welling up of sickening revulsion and fear which erupts from him in laughter at the sheer preposterousness of what he’s seeing.

He falls to his knees, thinking he must’ve hit his head when he fell back in the junkyard. Lifting his hands to feel for a wound or a swollen lump, he sees that they’re both covered in blood. He reaches frantically for the leaves on the ground in front of him and drags his hands over them top and bottom. “What the fuck? I didn’t touch him,” he says in a whimper. When he squeezes shut his eyes again, though, an image flashes through his mind of his own hands tearing the machete away from the bleeding man’s hands. “No, no, no—what the fuck?” He remembers his right hand, shining with blood now, bringing the machete down on the side of the man’s neck opposite the wound from the broken car window. “It’s not right. It’s a hallucination.” The next memory that surfaces is of the sound the machete made plunking into the middle of the stagnant pond. He laughs again, hunching forward. When he sits back on his heels, he looks up to where the stick monster, the wood demon, that preposterous thing stood, but it’s no longer there. Scanning the trees, he sees that it’s no longer anywhere. “Ha ha ha. What the fuck!”

He makes a plan to get into the house—or better the garage—to wash his hands before anyone can see them. He needs to find the dog too to make sure he has no blood around his maw or anywhere on his coat. Filled now with the urgency of his predicament, he stands up and feels his legs sturdy beneath him. He considers going back to see if the dead man really does have two neck wounds or just the one—so he can be sure. But he’s anxious to be out of these woods, far away from where the wood demon had stood turning to face him, to gaze at him, to look into him, testing him, tricking him. Russell sets off at a pace toward the house, giving wide berth to the spot where it stood. Before long he’s stepping into the grass and moving quickly toward the garage—and the sink inside—calling out for the dog. He stops midway through the yard to look back toward the trail into the woods, scanning the line of trees. The wind picks up just as he’s looking, setting the millions of leaves aflutter. Russell shudders. Then he turns and heads for the garage. 

—————————

Not interested. The mantra of the age. No one is interested in anything. You either like a thing, or you don’t like it. If the slightest effort is involved in learning to appreciate a thing, no one bothers trying to marshal the discipline; no one possesses an adequate flicker of curiosity. Will it make me feel good? Will it make me look good? Will it be fun? Will it be entertaining? If not at first, then too late. We’re not interested. Whether it’s a way to pass the time, a body of knowledge to master, or even a method for coming to the truth, we only evaluate it according to the strictest consumerist and hedonistic principles. You can’t blame us. Life is short. These days there are so many things competing to fill our days. We have so much to choose from. Why choose anything that doesn’t drip succulently down our chins when we bite into it? Tell me of some exquisite pleasure to be had as the culmination of some long struggle and I’ll show you some other way to get a shot of dopamine straight into the reward center of your brain at a fraction of the effort.

The only people who ever take interest thereby alienate themselves. The very interest they take marks them, not as interesting themselves, but as geeky, as if by learning or putting forth effort you can’t help but render yourself awkward, unsexy. Or rather it’s assumed that if you have the time or the inclination to engage in demanding endeavors it must be because you’re incapable of getting laid. And, to be fair, Russell thinks, that’s true enough in many cases. Plenty of guys at work like that.

He sits with his legs folded on the hardwood floor of his apartment, books and magazines strewn around on the floor, the coffee table, the couch. Presently, though, he’s burying a razor through the outer rind and into the moist spongy flesh of a pumpkin. His cut follows a path established earlier by a pencil as part of an intricately detailed monster face—a demon with wizened skin, mirthful malevolence in its eyes, horns, and a mouthful of spiked fangs. The eyes promise to be the most exacting, so he resists an impulse to save them for last—for when he’s had a little practice at wielding his scalpel with the requisite fine precision—and instead goes right for them, on the principle that a pristine surrounding surface will give him more degrees of freedom to make the toughest incisions. This decision occurs in a mind space seeded with ideas about how minds go about making decisions.

On the floor next to the couch are books by “computational neuroscientist” Douglas Hofstadter, philosopher of science Patricia Churchland, and renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose contribution to Russell’s latest research obsession is surprisingly off-topic. This particular work by Sacks isn’t about how neurons create consciousness—not directly anyway. It’s about the causes and meanings of hallucinations, a topic he’s developed a newfound fascination with in the wake of his trip to Clarksville. Russell decided that as part of his swearing off of people he would give up all his social media activity as well, including his blog, where he routinely posts reviews of whatever books he reads on software engineering and various fields of science. So instead of a quick thousand-word post he’s working on a lengthier essay, though what he’ll do with it once he’s finished is a question he’s given little thought to.

Rounding off the first cut to shape the top of the demon’s left eye, Russell marvels at the power of the most subtle alterations in the lineaments of a face to signal such powerful nuances of expression. He fears he’s not capturing the playful sadism he found so appealing in the pattern. But he has no choice but to proceed, hoping if it doesn’t convey the same state of the creature’s mind then it at least gets at another one, equally creepy, equally fun. One the books that brought Sacks to fame was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of essays about patients with rare brain afflictions, minds that by going awry illuminate some incredible facet of the brain’s normal functioning. The title essay is about a man with damage to his fusiform gyrus that has led to a condition called prosopagnosia, which means he doesn’t recognize faces as faces—and therefore often can’t distinguish between people and inanimate objects. Sacks later revealed that he suffers from a much milder form of prosopagnosia himself. The perception of faces, down to the minutest details of individual visages and the dynamic signaling of emotion and intention, is something we take so much for granted it’s hard to wrap our minds around how even a severely malfunctioning brain could possibly fail at it. So much of what we perceive as occurring out there, in the world, is actually a function of what’s going on in here, within our own minds—a theme Sacks reprises in the book Russell is currently reading.

On the TV is a movie called V/H/S, a found-footage horror flick Amazon recommended after he ordered The Blair Witch Project. Aside from the unwatchably obnoxious framing scene, the individual vignettes that make up the movie are each pretty decent. Hanging over the TV is a stick effigy he made after watching Blair Witch for the first time in over ten years. You simply lash a straight horizontal twig to a vertical one that wishbones at the bottom. Then you drape a piece of burlap over the shoulders—with a tiny hole cut for the head—and fold it down like a poncho. Viola. Russell had already made three of them before leaving for Clarksville, and he’d planned to make several more. But what he saw in the woods drove him to Sacks’s book, and from there he was compelled to move onto Hofstadter and Churchland, so he hasn’t had a chance yet to turn back to the stick dolls.

He was surprised to discover, upon arriving home, that he wasn’t frightened or disturbed. Partly, he’s excited, thinking what happened was a good thing—a genuinely mysterious experience. Already it’s pushing him to read books he hasn’t felt like he’s has a good opportunity to read, explore some he hasn’t read in years, and put together disparate ideas to form a more holistic vision, a more comprehensive understanding of things he’s only ever nibbled around the edges of in the past. As for the Death Metaller, what scares Russell most about the incident is how little it scares him. Even when he exerts himself to ruminate on the murky and conflicting images in his memory, he’s protected from guilt and fear of detection by a bizarre and almost cumbersome sense of the appropriateness of his actions. The man had threatened him. He’d played no part in the fall through the window. As for what happened afterward, if anything happened afterward, that could be justified too—would it be better to let him slowly bleed to death?

Still, he couldn’t say he’s completely unfazed. The scary movies and the horror stories in the anthology he’s reading—they’re not bothering him at all, with the minor exception of Hawthorne’s “The Man of Adamant,” about a guy fed up with society who goes to live in a cave. But he feels himself being watchful, like he doesn’t trust the information coming in from the periphery, like he has to constantly check and recheck the static nature of his surroundings. And there’s a bug in his mind driving him to explore the very nature of his mind with all its other bugs. It’s a topic he’s been fascinated with at times in the past, but never with such intensity. He wakes up in the night perturbed, thoughts chasing each other with hectic urgency, as if some danger loomed on the other side of his failure to grasp the mystery. But when he dreams it isn’t about the Death Metaller or the Wood Demon or the nature of conscious experience—all three times he’s woke with a memory of his dreams they’ve been about Vicki.

Completing the last cut for the second eye, Russell sets the razor aside and holds the pumpkin at a distance from his face. The eyes look convincingly eye-ish, he thinks. But the expression—not so much mirthful malevolence as smiling through the pain. He smiles lopsidedly himself. Jason’s voice sounds from somewhere in his mind, making a joke about how looking at your pumpkin shouldn’t be like looking into a mirror. Though Russell is perfectly able to reject his absent friend’s premises, he has to admit his demon—at this stage—is looking a little lonely.

The only people who are trapped by their programs, he takes up arguing again, despite himself, are the ones who aren’t aware of following them. Neurons firing together creates an association, the basic unit of physical reactions and the first stage in forming mental concepts. Crosstalk between different kinds of association in different locales forms the basis of analogical thinking. Hot tempers are like hot kettles. One level of connection bootstraps connections at a separate level. Each layer of abstraction brings us closer to the abstracted self, and having a dynamically updated self-concept makes possible an ongoing awareness of self. And isn’t that consciousness? Once you have a self-concept, moment by moment experience begins to have an ever-ready reference point. You no longer simply look out and wonder what is happening—you wonder what is happening to you.

Nested abstractions, masses of neurons contemplating the nature of neurons underlying the contemplation of neurons, minds imagining themselves, all localized functions, all emerging from a physical, electrochemical substrate operating on the binary logic of to fire or not to fire. Russell sets his pumpkin down and reaches for the remote so he can turn the movie off. He’s exasperated by his inability to fully grasp the theories—or of the theories’ inability to fully account for the phenomenon. Switching to a higher layer of abstraction, he reasons that being aware that you exist is the basic requirement for the sense of having free will, the illusion that our disembodied essence operates independently of the infrastructure that supports it to make choices. The “I” in “I decided.” In the same way, being aware of your routines, which aren’t merely behavioral but perceptual as well—with attendant emotions too of course—being aware of your habits of perception, which to everyone else must seem like delusion, is the first step toward recalibrating your perceptions, escaping your personal demons.

In his book I Am a Strange Loop Hofstadter writes about the intellectual journey he took in the aftermath of his wife Carol’s losing battle with brain cancer—what bitter irony in that, Russell can’t help thinking. He writes about how similar he and Carol were, about how if consciousness, the soul, resides in the brain, if it’s the illusion rendered real through all those self-reflective loops, then there’s no reason one person’s soul can’t reside in another person’s brain, albeit with poorer resolution than the original. Russell, perhaps because he’s been reading about Hofstadter’s loops alongside classic ghost stories, keeps wondering if he’s not reading a scientific description of hauntings and demonic possessions. For someone to become possessed, the locus of control, the will, the executive loop would have to transfer from one reference to another. But for a haunting all that would need to happen would be a transfer of attribution from the inner chambers of the mind to the outside world. He looks over at the drawer under the table by the door—where he stashed his phone so he wouldn’t be tempted to check it, since checking it is one step away from staying connected. He feels uneasy at certain moments thinking so intently at such lengths of time about things like other people in your head—or outside your head—as lonely as he is.

Russell sits up from a reclining position on the carpet next to his lonesome-eyed demon pumpkin. I’m going to keep at this, he thinks, at least until after Halloween. But I’ve definitely learned that my insatiable hunger for solitude isn’t really insatiable. He hasn’t made any more of the stick dolls since returning from Ohio because, for one, he was distracted, but also because it seemed somehow inappropriate, a scanting of his encounter in the woods. But now he feels impelled to continue making them—and he has a new idea. What if I flesh them out with the straw from those trees? He considers the problem of clothes. A toy store. He’ll buy some doll’s clothes. They’ll be like little scarecrows. Maybe I could even find some tiny pumpkins to fix atop the sticks for heads, or some plastic skulls.

He’s been back to Bicentennial Woods already once, but he passed the entrance when he saw that it was overcrowded with vehicles. Now that it’s the height of the season and the trees are mimicking some operatic lament with all the splendor of gold and fire and blood, the forest is drawing its audience—and Russell’s sanctuary is being overrun.

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Russell is in the Orchard when the sky sounds its first low rumbling growl, gently shaking his insides. Emerging from the forest he felt a shock of deeper cold tightening his skin, but he dismissed it because the air of the Orchard is usually more rarefied, as he’d dismissed the sudden dimming of the sunlight owing to the later hour of his visit, meant to avoid the throngs of autumn-leaf tourists, those representatives of lowest humanity, whose mental processing has slowed to a rate essentially bovine—“Whaa? You’re running? You’d like to get by? I have to move out of your way? I have to pull in my dog’s leash? That’s a lot to deal with.” There’s still a chance, he thinks, that the rumble emanated from a large truck, but it’s an outside one. It vibrated down through the trees and reverberated up from the ground. Yet with his intact stream of music how could he be sure? Several paces in among the worryingly denuded trees of the Orchard, with their bare skeletal branches, and he’s already being pelted with tiny droplets, not much more than a mist. But the view of the sky that opens to him tells him all he needs to know about the impending storm. He’s on the third lap. His only choice is between forgoing the turn back to complete the figure eight and heading directly back to his truck.

The sudden darkness reminds him of the first time he visited Bicentennial Woods, all those years ago, with Vicki. They’d passed the parking lot on their bikes earlier and decided to come back with the car because the sun would be setting in a couple of hours. Once on the trails they were enchanted, and couldn’t believe a place like this existed so close to where they lived without them even knowing it was there. Following the trails in the opposite direction Russell always takes on his runs now, they made their way across the big bridge, the Slingshot to Eternity. After getting themselves turned around in the Orchard, they wandered past all the signs reading Private Property and No Trespassing to check out the large storage shed you could see on the old farmland, and beyond it the two-story house. The kids had long since christened the peak-roofed shed with their graffiti—“Death Shed”—and broken a first-story window in the house to provide ready entry. Ducking through the frame and tip-toeing through the rooms of the long-abandoned house, he and Vicki were drunk on the thrill of transgression and the promise of discovery. They felt like a couple of raiders casing a workaday palace, a couple of almost grownup kids up to no good.

“We should come back and decorate this place for Halloween,” Vicki had said. “Then we can have everyone come and tell stories about all the ghosts that live here.” She tugged him by the hand to pull him to her for a mashing together of lips. And now Russell marvels at his own obliviousness, not recognizing how magnificent and precious that moment and countless others like it were.

As dark as the Orchard has become beneath the looming clouds, Russell still isn’t prepared for how difficult it is back in the darker woods to make out the lineaments of the trail under the layers of leaves fresh from their final journey, piling up in shredded papery stacks of glorious carnage. The gleaming of the yellows radiates as if it were its own source of light, the only one under the still seamless canopy, so he can at least anticipate when his steps will collide with the ground. He’s already turned to complete the full figure eight, even though he suspects it’s a bad idea. Only by completing the same pattern of passes along the embankment where the straw bundles still hang can he know if doing so will produce the same effect as last time.

He’s nearing the curve out to the promontory and the Graveyard of Trees when the sound of a footfall on the leaves up ahead of him sets his eyes darting up from the trail. He digs in with his feet and has to draw back to stop. Before him, not ten feet away, is a moving, living shadow, its contours tinged with a glow of silver light. Russell’s heart jolts as if his sudden halt has caused it to crash into his sternum, and tingling spikes shoot through his hands and feet as he retreats a step before realizing what it is rushing across the trail in front of him. No sooner is he watching it safely off than another comes shattering the silence around him, this one passing behind him. Two more pass in front. He turns to watch their stampede down the impossibly steep bank, a heard of deer, their upthrust white tails bouncing erratically, like bursting puffs of popcorn spotlit against a curtain of black. As he watches them, a sky-splitting wedge of thunder cuts off what would’ve been the beginning of a peel of laughter and sends him running at full stride to complete his ritual circuit through this bewitched forest.

While running along the embankment for the first two laps, Russell had looked down at the ravine and thought how it no longer looked full to bursting with the colors of the season. It was looking less like a giant bowl, he thought, overflowing with fruit and sweets, a symbol of the sleepy abundance we associate with the approach of the holidays and all their gustatory temptations, and more like a blast crater, the site of some calamitous impact that spelled doom for every living thing within the radius of its fiery shock wave. But now, turning back into the Graveyard of Trees, the yellow of the leaves on the ground glows like the molten surface of some alien world. As the wind rends the darkness overhead, cascades of the slow falling bits of yellow light, like raining ash, further lend to the otherworldliness of this ominous dreamscape. He trudges up the rise with unflagging urgency, even as the space beneath the trees fills with some medium that lulls the passage of time. 

Intently monitoring the ground before him as he careens in bounding leaps down the opposite side of the fold of land, he hears more diffuse rumbling and tries to gauge the true amount of danger he’s in. Might lightning strike a tree nearby and conduct the charge into his body? Or sheer off a limb that falls on him? His legs pump indefatigably on, powered by the fear and exhilaration, scarcely slowing at all as he climbs the rise into the Orchard. The clouds have yet to break open, but the wind is stirring the creaking and groaning treetops with a fury. The first lightning flashes as he’s entering the woods again, near where he spooked the deer just minutes earlier, and it shows him, right off to the side of the trail, the same wood demon he saw in the woods in Clarksville, turning at the waist to regard him, the plane of its wings rotating with the shoulders just as they did before. But Russell hasn’t even come to a halt when another lightning flash reveals it to be a slender tree, its trunk snapped as if at the neck, so all the complicated outward branchings of its upper limbs dangle upside-down and swaying in the wind.

He watches it as he passes, craning his neck. But it keeps to its amended version of itself until he’s forced to turn back once more and continue picking out the trail through the dark. He’s nearing the head of the stairs down into the ravine when the storm takes up in earnest. The flashes and the obscene bone-splitting cracks make the forest dance and cry as Russell learns firsthand why so many of the trees in Bicentennial Woods stand amputated or lay dismembered. Trundling awkwardly down the stars, all but blind, he drags his hands along the banisters as his feet probe and slide. Both feet on the uneven earth again, he finally thinks to look up toward the bridge to see if the ritual has recalled the apparition of the blonde girl. The rain rattling on the leaves both aground and aloft suddenly becomes deafening, and Russell has to reach up and wipe the drops from his eyes before he can make out anything.

Jumping at the stairs, he manages to miss the last one and tumbles forward, rolling over his shoulder into a supine position a short ways from the middle of the bridge. From here he can see a tiny undulating strip of electrified sky. In the violent whoosh and cracking and rattle and bone-crunch of the storm, he’s found a pocket of peace and feels no need to do anything other than dwell there, alone as he saw he clearly is, indefinitely. He doesn’t even realize he’s laughing until the laughter has nearly bent him in half. And then he doesn’t realize he’s sobbing until he nearly chokes, and rolls over on his side coughing. Rolling onto his back again, he continues looking up, minutes, an hour, until the storm is passed and night falls on his furiously shivering body.

—————————

How many loops can any one mind handle? It must depend to some extent on the individual’s working memory capacity. Maybe too it’s something that can be exercised. We all have countless people’s minds stored in our own minds. Are the actors who do great impressions capturing other minds with greater resolution? Man, just think, if someone were to tell you to do an impression of one of your friends, or of a celebrity, or of your significant other—you may not be able to pull it off all that well, but it’s not like you couldn’t do it well enough for other people to know who you were impersonating. We have bits and pieces of so many people’s habits of thinking and behaving in our minds. And they don’t even have to be real people. They can be fictional people. Or we can make them up ourselves. How often do you have imaginary conversations in your mind with people you know? How often do you wish you could grab some character in a movie by the lapels and tell him to quit being so damn stupid? Writers—fiction writers, screenwriters—must be the most expert at hosting other minds.

Russell is sitting on the wasted wood floor of the abandoned house tucked in behind Bicentennial Woods in the back corner of the vast but fallow fields that expand along the west side of Highway 327 along a stretch the locals know as Coldwater Road. It’s Halloween night, and after waiting around his apartment for an hour for a single trick-or-treater, he’s come to this spooky house which he’s been visiting almost nightly for the past week to prepare for his lonely celebration of the holiday. Along the trail through the park, Russell has hung straw figures from the trees at intervals of a few paces. Anyone following them would come to the house, which was likewise peopled, not with the stick figures, but with tiny scarecrows made from dolls’ clothes and stuffed with straw. Outside in the woods, the figures are meant to be scary. Their heads are demon-faced pumpkins or little plastic skulls. But inside Russell is working on a veritable family of straw children with more traditional dolls’ heads. And there’s also a much larger figure, a life-sized one with features drawn onto a burlap face, propped on a gouged and half-disintegrated couch. This one sits with feet tucked daintily under the legs, in imitation of someone Russell actually used to know. And it wears a hoodie he found at a Goodwill store that closely resembles one routinely worn by this character from his past.

The room is lit by over a dozen jack-o-lanterns and twice as many short white candles. Russell is also making use of the old fireplace, but since the chimney is stopped up he’s restricted his efforts there to a few handfuls of kindling and three larger sticks. The smoky haze hangs in the air, carrying the orange glow of the pumpkin light throughout the room. From a lone speaker wired to a diminutive device in the corner emanates airily distorted alternative rock music from the 90s, back when he was in high school and still coming of age. Just now Russell is taking Snickers and Milky Ways and Twizzlers and stuffing them into the pinned-together arms of the doll-faced scarecrows. His idea is that in the coming days adventurous kids and curious adults will discover the bizarre and mysterious and creepy effigies of stick and straw hanging from the trees, follow them, and then find this unsettling tableau of a frighteningly uncanny family offering Halloween goodies to them as reward for their interest taking.

“Of course,” he says to the figure on the couch, “they’d have to be pretty crazy to eat any of it.” He imagines her laughter, and he laughs along with it. Then he stands up and walks over to a window, one that has yet to experience any cracks and thus provides a murky but still intact view out over the dark and barren fields. He’s been trying to come up with names for all his straw children, but now he begins to try to imagine his way back into his own real life, back into work, back into hanging out with his brother and visiting his dad and talking to his mom on the phone, back into going out to bars with Ray and his other arm’s-reach friends, maybe even back into those endlessly meandering conversations he used to have with his best friend Jason, back before everything go so stupidly and pointlessly complicated between them.

At least that’s what I like to imagine went through his mind then. I imagine him then turning around to consider his handiwork, his entire straw family, a gathering of burlap and plastic and sticks and tiny clothes—and one life-sized figure in an old-fashioned sweat suit watching over them all from the couch. In that final moment I imagine him being fully aware of the irony, maybe even muttering aloud something like, “If there was ever a guy who didn’t need to spend a bunch of time in self-imposed solitude…” Finally, I imagine his laughter, because whenever I think of him I hear his laughter peeling through my mind, wicked, contagious, masking his pain, transforming it into something he could live with—until he couldn’t. I imagine him looking one last time out of the window at the barren fields before turning around, and, almost as if on a whim, kicking over several of the candles. It’s impossible to tell which one first ignited one of the straw figures. By the time anyone even noticed the old house was alight it was already almost burned entirely to the ground.

The words you have been reading about Russell Arden’s last days were written by me, though many of them were either inspired by or directly transferred from the many notebooks-full of writing he left behind. I am the Jason of the story, but that’s not my real name, nor is Russell the real name of the man you’ve been reading about. I wanted to honor my friend without violating either his trust or his privacy. All the names and identifying details have been duly changed. Certain strange circumstances surrounded his death and its discovery, so no news crew ever showed up on the scene to interview the fire marshal or the police detective. No one ever read about it in a newspaper. But I was contacted at one point as part of a police investigation. That’s how I learned what had happened.

I won’t go into how things turned out between my wife and me because that’s not what this is about. Nor can I shed any light on the events he describes in the junkyard in Clarksville. All I can say is if there was a body found or an investigation undertaken I was never informed. (My suspicion is that the detectives never made it that far into his notebooks before turning them over to me, which he made clear was his wish on the inside covers of several of them—the closest thing he left to a will.)

I began writing this story two months after I learned of his death and began reading the contents of all those notebooks. This is the project I undertook to honor my friend, in acknowledgement of how right he was about how I had betrayed him. I truly did let life just happen to me. I justified it to myself by grasping onto the idea that it’s what happens to all adults, especially those with kids. When he punctured that bubble I’d been living in, I lashed out at him the worst way I knew how. He poked at my insecurities with such surgical precision I assumed it had to be deliberate, so I retaliated in kind. But the truth is that behind my insecurities lay the heart of my troubles, not just with my wife, but with a lot of things.

I should have been there for him. Whatever the nature of our falling out, I should have done more than send a few text messages to inquire about his absence. We really do forget how easy it is for these people who live alone to just disappear one day, with no one realizing they’re gone until it’s too late. However intense his preoccupations, however strange his beliefs, he shouldn’t have had any reason to doubt how important he was to me, to his family, to his other friends. We all let him down. So I’ve written this story as the beginning of a larger project to work toward some measure of atonement. I’m going to live a life of my own alongside the life that just happens. I’m going to expend the effort to take interest instead of waiting for it to take me. Most importantly, I’m going to make a point of taking interest in my friends and loved ones. Oh, and I’m going to learn to identify the species of trees—even if it kills me.

This account was already well-underway when I was first contacted by Jim Conway, who was working on his own telling of the story as part of a larger project of collecting strange stories. To him, Russell’s story was of a man who went crazy and made thousands of dolls out of straw to hang in the trees and all through the abandoned house he retreated to, the place where he died under mysterious circumstances. The “urban legend,” as he called it, came to his attention because a bunch of kids he’d surveyed told him about how they were finding newly made straw bundles and straw people hanging from the trees in Bicentennial Woods as recently as this past summer—three years after the fire. (You can still see the house’s foundation today.) Mr. Conway informed me the story was probably as much inspired by the legend that grew up around some Island of the Dolls in Mexico as it was by the real events. (It’s hard to know how many dolls Russell made, but I’m guessing it was closer to a hundred than a thousand.) Still, he was interested in what I had to say. I told him, as much of a kick as Russell would’ve gotten out of being the center of a local ghost story, there were some points I needed to clear up and some other points I needed to add. When I let him know I was writing my own version of the story, he was delighted, and it’s thanks to him that you’re able to read it here. 

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Encounters, Inc.

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THE CREEPY KING EFFECT: WHY WE CAN'T HELP CONFUSING WRITERS WITH THEIR CHARACTERS

And:

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

In the Crowded Moment atop the Fire Wave

Emily had continued ahead of them all along the trail until she was out of sight. Steven had fallen behind, likewise now occluded by the towering red wall of rock. He was sure for a while after he began following Stacy that Steven would be coming along. But when he stepped up onto an escarpment and climbed a ways to a higher vantage he looked and saw no one on the trail behind him. The way Emily plunged forth with no concern for keeping apace the rest of the group and the fact that now Steven was showing a similar disregard gave him the sense that some deadly tension was building between them. But, then, hadn’t they been like this for as long as they’d been together? He turned and continued along a route above the sandy track on the rock surface, thinking of the rough-grained unyielding folds as ripples caught in some time-halting spell as they oozed along, the lower tiers melting out from beneath those stacked above, the solid formation melting from the bottom up.

            Marching at a pace to overtake Stacy, he watched the dull blood-stained bands of the undulating sandstone pass through the space immediately before his feet and thought of Darwin striding across the volcanic rock surface of an island in the Galapagos, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology still resonating in the capacious chambers of his dogged mind, the sense taking hold more solidly that the solid earth beneath his feet had once been, and may again at any moment be, a flowing emblem of impermanence. Later, when the Beagle docked in Chile, the coast only hours before blasted by an earthquake and subsequent tsunami, Darwin, stepping onto the rocky shore, smelled putrefying fish. The quake had lifted what had moments before been seafloor up into the open air, and, seeing the remains of all the stranded marine creatures, he suddenly understood the provenance of the fossil shells and crustaceans he’d found high in the mountains, thousands of feet above sea level.

            A hundred and fifty years later, it seems like such a simple deduction. To advance our understanding of geology or evolution today, he thought, you would have to be much more subtle than that. And yet, he wondered, how many people think of moments in history, the earthshaking conception of earthshattering theories, as they traverse rock formations like these? What do most people think of when they’re walking along this trail? He looked up and saw how the distant mountains bursting up into the sky gave scope to the vast distances, making of the horizon a symbol of the tininess of these individual human bodies tossing imperceptibly about on the tide of eternity, precipitating a vertiginous dropping away of identity, obliteration before the shock wave of detonated timescales.

             Stacy and Emily were still far enough ahead, and Steven far enough behind, that he had the trail to himself. Darwin just isn’t relevant to anyone, he thought. The concentrated heat of the toppling afternoon sun was momentarily chased over the corrugated sandstone by a chill. You can live your whole life, he thought, be moderately happy, and never have to think of evolution or geological timescales even once—hell, you may even be happier that way. And you, he thought to himself, you may have a type of passion teachers think is just delightful—until you let it loose to savage their own lessons. But most people, most of the time, would rather not have to take anything that seriously. Examine the underpinnings to a point. Allow for doubts and objections to a point. The point where having to think about what it could mean isn’t as exciting as it is scary. The way you do it makes people uncomfortable. It made your ex want to kill you.

            He had the thought—before deciding that he wouldn’t be thinking about her anymore this trip—that his ex couldn’t make that final compromise. Whatever disagreement they’d had was years past, but, even though her ability to articulate what this insurmountable barrier in her heart consisted of went no further than “I can’t forgive you,” even though she’d meet the idea with her own detonations, he knew that last unbudgable bit of incompatibility, the ultimate deal-breaker, had everything to do with her gathering recognition that their two worldviews, once so distant, their separate territories so fiercely guarded, had moved steadily closer over the years—and it wasn’t his that was undergoing the displacement. She needed that one refuge of holding out. So I got to be right, he thought. But what’s it worth if I’m alone? And anyway, much as everyone assumes the contrary, I could give a fuck about being right.

            Then there’s Stacy’s easy social grace—masterful really. She has a fine sense of everyone’s perspective, an impressive memory for everyone’s preferences, and, when in doubt, she simply fills the void with the surging energy of her character. Her charms are even such as can accommodate the intensity of his skepticism and passion for science’s refining crucible. What would she be thinking right now? Where she’s going to live in the coming weeks? Whether she’ll be able to find a job in Charlotte? How much she’s going to miss the poor boys she drives so crazy? Or maybe she too is wondering how the rock came to have such clearly demarcated bands, what accounts for the red hues—iron?—and what it means that our human lifespans scarcely even register on the timescale of geology. As vivacious and loquacious as she is, she’s always had an impressively developed inner life. Still, he remembers her nudges under the table that first night he was in L.A., debating with her friends during their apartment gathering about the virtues, or lack thereof, of SSRIs, those nudges which effectively said, “Don’t do that now—don’t be you,” though that last part was more in keeping with what his more recent ex might’ve said.

            As he covered more distance yet failed to overtake the women ahead of him on the trail, he felt increasingly and pleasantly placeless, but the discomfort at leaving Steven behind for all this time began to disrupt the flow his thoughts. Still, he assured himself, it isn’t like any of us will have the chance to pop over again some other time. Steven could’ve come along; it isn’t my responsibility to make sure no one gets stuck waiting for the others—a task that between them Steven and Emily seemed to be going out of their way to make impossible. His mind went back to the party, to Corina, the pretty blonde, talking about how people give her directions out of Compton whenever she drives through to meet with the troubled teens she tries to help. He scanned his memory for evidence that she was offended or unsettled by anything he said. No, she was incredulous—how could someone say antidepressants don’t work? It was such a foreign idea. But she seemed to enjoy grappling with it, batting it back. She seemed exhilarated to be in the presence of someone so confidently misguided. And fine, he would have said, let’s see how far down the rabbit hole you can go before you start to panic. No, he decides, it really is bullshit, all that about me hurting people. The worst that can be said is that I ruined the mood—and even that isn’t true. If anything, I brought some unexpected excitement.

            When he first stepped into the apartment and was introduced to Corina, he put some added effort into answering the question about what it is he does in Fort Wayne, setting his current job within the context of his aspirations, perhaps making it seem more exciting than it really is, as if it were just a way station along the path to his career as a novelist. Speaking of your occupation as a vocation, telling a story about how you came to do what you’re doing and how it will lead to you doing something even more extraordinary—it was something he’d ruminated on as he made the trip westward. All the strangers making small talk on the planes and in the airports, and that question, “What do you do?”, so routine. One or two words couldn’t suffice as an answer. The two words may as well be, “Dismiss me.” Telling a story, though, well, everyone appreciates a good story. You may forget a mere accountant, or programmer, or copywriter, but everyone loves a protagonist.

Maybe, he thinks now, you can do something similar when it comes to your beliefs and your way of thinking and debating and refusing to shy away from disagreements. Present it in the context of a story—how you came to think the way you do—with a beginning, middle, and end.

He imagines himself on a first date saying, I always talk about the importance of science, and I feel it’s often necessary to challenge people on beliefs that they’ve invested a lot of emotion in. So a lot of people assume I’m heartless or domineering—that I get off on proving how smart I am. The truth is I’m so sensitive and so sentimental that half the time I’m disgusted with myself for being so pathetic. If I’m calculating, it would be more like the calculations of someone with second degree burns lowering himself into a tub of ice water. That sensitivity, though, that receptiveness, it’s what makes me so attentive and engaged. I go into these trances when I read or even when I’m watching movies or shows. People are impressed with how well I remember plots and lines from stories. People in school used to ask how I did it. There wasn’t any trick. I sure as hell didn’t apply any formula. I just took the stories seriously—I couldn’t help but take them seriously. The characters came across as real people, and I cared about them. The plots—I knew they weren’t real of course—but in those moments when you’re really into it, they’re real in their own way. It’s like it doesn’t matter if they’re real or not. And that connection I have to novels and shows, you know, it’s like in school they try to tell you that’s not how you should read and they tell you all this bullshit about how you’re supposed to analyze them or deconstruct them. All I can say is when I realized how utterly fucking stupid all that literary theory crap is—it was like this huge epiphany. I felt so liberated. And today a lot of the arguments I get into are with people who want to take this or that writer to task for some supposed sexism or racism, or for not toeing the line of some brain dead theory.

            But the other part of it is that I still remember being sixteen and realizing that the Catholicism I was brought up with was the purest nonsense, nothing but a set of traditions clung to out of existential desperation and unthinking habit. What made that so horrible for me, again, was that up till then I had taken it so seriously. I wasn’t a bible thumper or anything. But I prayed every night. I really believed. So when it came crashing down—well, I can’t describe how betrayed I felt. I remember wondering why no one tried harder to get at the truth before they all conspired to foist this idiocy on so many children. The next big disillusionment came when my friends and I started watching the Ultimate Fighting Championships. At the time, I’d been taking tae kwon do and karate for over four years in a couple of those strip mall dojos MMA guys talk about with such disdain these days. Watching those fights, guys actually going in there and trying beat the shit out each other, I saw—even though I admit it took me a while to accept it—most of the stuff I’d been learning so assiduously all those years was next to worthless. It was like, oh well, at least you learned some discipline and stayed in shape. Yeah, but I could have been learning muay thai or jujitsu. The thing is, when you go in for this type of nonsense, it’s not just your thing. It affects other people. Religious people teach religion to their kids. They proselytize to anyone who’ll listen. Those charlatan karate teachers, they take people’s money. They give them a false sense of control—not to mention wasting their fucking time.

            Then there were the two years in college when I had my heart set on being a clinical psychologist. At the time, everyone just knew childhood trauma was at the root of almost all mental illness. I listened to that Love Lines show on the radio where Dr. Drew and Adam Corolla interrogated the women who called in until they broke down and admitted they’d been abused as children. Then, the summer before my senior year, I start digging into the actual science. Turns out the sexual abuse everyone is so sure fucks kids up for life—its effects can’t even be distinguished from those of physical abuse or neglect. There’s almost no evidence that those childhood traumas lead to psychological issues later in life. Repressed memories? Total bullshit. If you think you underwent some process of recovering long-forgotten memories of sexual abuse you suffered as a child, what you were really doing was going through a ritual induction into a bizarre, man-hating, life-ruining cult. And I was graduating from college at just about the time in the late 90s when all the false accusations and wrongful imprisonments were coming to light. Oh, and did I mention that the first girl I fell in love with—the woman up ahead of me on the trail right now—I couldn’t touch her for years because I was so worried about the harm it might cause, that lost time of my late teens and into my twenties. My mind so full to capacity with all that ridiculous feminist pseudo-psychology.  Instead of coming on to her, I waited for her to initiate, and she wondered what the hell was wrong with me since all the while I kept insisting I didn’t want to be just friends. Oh, the awakenings I had in store, rude and otherwise, when it came to women and desire.

            Then there was a brief flirtation with new age ideas after I took a course on Religion and Culture where the teacher assigned the fucking Celestine Prophecy as a text book—and she treated all the claims as if they were real. Luckily, Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World was recommended by one of my anthropology teachers, so I read it soon afterward. I wanted to leave a copy in the Religion and Culture teacher’s mailbox. Sagan’s book was what showed me, not what ideas I should believe in, but how I could go about finding out which ideas were most likely to be true. That book changed my perspective on society and conventional wisdom in general. I think most people assume if a bunch of teachers tell you something and if enough people believe it there must be something to it. But some ideas, most ideas, sometimes I think nearly all ideas but a precious few are just plain wrong no matter who or how many people believe them. What I couldn’t have known then is how much that kind of thinking would alienate me.

            He stopped, having arrived at the top of a large rise which dropped off precipitously before him. He chuckled, thinking, yeah, maybe you better not say all that on a first date. Looking across to another, somewhat lower rise, he saw Stacy leveling her iPhone for a picture. Two tall and slender women, attired in form-fitting apparel like Stacy’s, were likewise taking turns getting pictures of each other on the various peaks and mounds. He watched the girls, turned back to the jagged mountains on the distant horizon, like the spine of some scarcely corporeal monster cresting the surface of a sand-crusted sea, the air separating the countless miles as perceptibly invisible as the freshly polished crystal of a priceless timepiece, and he thought about how hospitable all the world has become to us humans. Without the cars and the roads and the ready stores of water, this desert would appear so differently to them. In all likelihood, they would even lose something of their humanity, becoming vicious to adapt to the precariousness and harsh brutality of a less trustworthy denizenry.

            He imagined roving bands of Native Americans, then government-sponsored cavalries, cowboys, thieves, marauders, so many varieties of deadly men, barely human. We’ve had to build up, on such a flimsy foundation, a space for men to be more civilized, more peaceful, less desperate. And somehow what we—or our forebears, also mostly men—created has succeeded to such a stupid degree we take it enough for granted that whole schools of thought have grown up to lament the evils of civilization. The truth is, before civilization came, as civilization was still busy coming, there was probably enough bloodshed in this region that the pink of iron glowing in these seasonally layered bands under our feet may have leeched into the rock after leaking from the endless variety of wounds sustained by human flesh.

            Looking over the rim of the bulging rock, he saw it rolling away severely to reveal a drop of several hundred feet. And he was surprised to realize, for the third time in two days, the instinctual anchor preventing him from taking a step, and another, toward that abrupt curving back and away of the rough surface, it had either vanished or simply never existed. He felt his weight pulling against the spongy grip of the soles of his shoes while his breaths continued slow and his heart beat softly on. It wasn’t until turning back to check once again if he could see Steven from this elevated vantage that he felt an impulse to back away from the downward curve. If he was to let himself fall, he’d only do so eyes forward.

            Self-conscious now, he glanced about for Stacy and the handful of other people milling about the outcroppings, nestled pockets, and rolling protuberances of ancient rock. What are we all looking for in these travels and treks to otherworldly places? We’re looking for inspiration, calling forth moments, invoking the powers of transcendence, pushing ourselves forward into what we hope are those periods of our lives when it seems like we’re finally becoming who in our dreamlife hearts we always believed we would be. Set the world alight with enchantment and endless possibility. And we’ve all had those experiences where we’ve met someone, or undertaken some project, or set off to some faraway destination—and all our lives seemed in flux and we were moving at last toward that state of being when we could relax, be ourselves, but work and strive meaningfully at the same time. Usually, though, we miss them. The quake’s upheaval threatens more than it promises. We can’t appreciate these periods in our lives while we’re living them because we’re still caught up in the time and the transformation that occurred previous to this one. Attachments are like habits that way. You could wait till the end of time and they’d never extinguish on their own. Your only hope is to replace the old ones with new ones. But since no love you have can ever match the poignancy of the loves you’ve lost, no civilization lives up to the golden accomplishments of the one that’s vanished, you live looking back, boats against the current and all that. Or, knowing all this, you wait. And you look out. And you wonder all the while if there’s something more you should be doing to bring about that next period of becoming who you are, worrying that you may have already used up all the ones you had coming.

            He walked down the rounded surface, on the side he’d come up, feeling purged, emptied of some burden of long-accustomed ache, as if it had drained from his blood into the banded stone beneath his soft-soled shoes. Drops in time, echoes like living breathing beings, the absent people in our minds. Exes, old friends, Darwin, roving bands of savage men—they have life, existence independent now from the bodies housing their own autonomous searchings and wanderings. Their echoes forever pull and impact us, scour our flesh and turn us inside out—flaring with the red heat of rage and longing and protectiveness and abandonment and loss. These emotions they call forth with their spectral gestures, their faces, their words, they never cease, even with physical absence. Each prod, each tug, each blow gets recorded and replayed forever, the dynamic of our interactions carrying on even when we’re alone, drowning out all the other beckonings at the doorstep of our hearts.

            “Where the hell is Steven?”

            He looks up from where he’d been searching for footholds to see Stacy startlingly close to where he’d finally landed two-footedly in the sand. “I don’t think he’s coming.” His felt snot wetting his mustache, the unaccountable allergic outflow that had been plaguing them all for the past two days. “He’s really missing out.”

Also read: 

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

And 

DERAILED: A REFLECTION ON DATING, DOGS, AND FAMILY

Encounters, Inc. Part 2 of 2

Begin with part 1.

The way it’s going to go down is that some detective will show up at the local headquarters of Marcus’s phone service provider, produce the necessary documents—or the proper dose of intimidation—and in return receive a stack of paper or a digital file listing the numbers of every call and text sent both to and from his phone. The detective will see that my own number appears in connection with the ill-fated outing enough times to warrant bringing me in for questioning. So now I’m wondering for the first time in my life if I have what it takes to lie to police detectives. Does a town like Fort Wayne employ expert interrogators? Of course, if I happen to have mentioned the murder in any of the texts, I can’t very well claim I didn’t know about it. Maybe I should call a lawyer—but if I do that before the detective knocks on my door I’ll have established for everyone that I’m at least guilty of something.

Then there are the emails, where we conducted most of our business. If the NSA can get into emails, it can’t be that difficult for the FWPD to do it. But will they be admissible? If not, do they point the way to any other evidence that is? Just to be safe, it’s probably time to go in and delete all of Marcus’s messages in my inbox—not that it will do much good, not that it will make me feel much better.

Hey Jim,

I love your ideas for the website, esp the one about a section for all the local lore by region—the stuff about how you cross this bridge in your car and turn off your lights to see the ghost of some lady (Lagrange?), or look over the side of the bridge and say some name three times and the eyes appear in the water (Huntertown?). People love that kind of stuff. It may not appeal to grownups as much, but we can still use it to drive traffic—or hell we could even sell the ebooks like you suggest.

You may be getting carried away with the all independent publishing stuff tho. I’m not sure, but it sounds like it’s just getting too far afield, you know? Let’s just say you haven’t sold me on it yet. Is there some way you can tie it all together? My concern is that if we start pushing out fiction it will detract from the… what’s the word? Authenticity? The authenticity of the experiences we’re providing our clients. I don’t know—tell me more about your vision for how this would work.

Anyway, love the dream stuff. You’re cranking this stuff out faster than I could’ve anticipated. One thing—and I’m very serious here—don’t go down there. Don’t go anywhere near the base of the Thieme Overlook. I’ll just say you don’t have all the details, don’t know the whole story yet. Patience my man.

Best,

Marcus

Jim,

Lol. Well, I’m glad you didn’t come to any harm on your little trek down to the Saint Mary’s. That’s all I’ll say about it for now—except you’ll just have to trust me that there not being anything down there doesn’t mean we don’t have a story. You’ve obviously caught the inquisitive bug that’s going around. But I have to say we should probably respect Tom’s wishes and leave Ashley out of it. Let’s focus on the ghost story and not get too carried away with the sleuthing. Besides, you need to have something ready in just a couple weeks for our first outing.

As far as the final details of the story go—I believe Tom might be eager to do some further unburdening.

Best,

Marcus

I had a hard time accepting that Ashley would do anything as outright sadistic as she’d done that night when she provoked those two men—not without giving Tom at least some indication of what had prompted her to do it. Again and again, he swore he really didn’t know what could’ve motivated her, but as I kept pressing him, throwing out my own attempted explanations one after the other, his dismissals began to converge on a single new most likely explanation. “It was like when I yelled at her that same night,” he said. “I always got this sense that she was slightly threatened by me. I’m pretty opinionated and outspoken—and I’m nothing like the people she and I both used to work with at the restaurants.”

Tom had the rare distinction among his classmates in the MBA program of being a fervent liberal. His views had begun to take shape as early as his undergrad years, when he absorbed the attitude toward religion and so-called family values popular among campus intellectuals. The farther he moved ideologically from the Catholicism he was raised to believe, the more resentful he became of Christianity and religion in general. “It’s too complicated to go into now,” he told me. “But it was like I was realizing that what was supposed to be the source of all morality was in reality fundamentally immoral—hypocritical to the core. You know, what’s all this nonsense about Jesus being tortured and executed because Eve ate some damn apple—this horrible crime you’re somehow still guilty of even if you were born thousands of years after it all happened? I mean, it’s completely insane.”

The economic side to Tom’s political leanings was shaped by his experiences with a woman he’d oscillated between dating and being friends with going all the way back to his sophomore year in high school. In her early twenties, she started having severe pain during her periods. It got so bad on a few occasions that it landed her in the ER. She ended up being treated for endometriosis, and to this day (Tom had spoken to her as recently as a month and half before she came up in our interview) her ability to conceive is in doubt. The ordeal lasted for over a year and half, which would have been bad enough, but at the time it began she had just been kicked off her dad’s insurance coverage. Try as she might, it wouldn’t be until five years later, after she’d been forced to declare bankruptcy—and after Tom had devoted a substantial chunk of his own student loans to helping her—that she’d finally have health insurance again. “It’s inhuman,” Tom said. “Tell me, how does supply-and-demand work with healthcare? What’s the demand? Not wanting to die? And how the hell does fucking personal responsibility come into the equation? Do republicans really think they can will themselves healthy?”

Over the course of all the presidential and midterm elections that resulted in Obamacare becoming the law of the land, Tom acquired a reputation as someone to be avoided, particularly if you were a conservative—or maybe I should say particularly if you were only halfheartedly political. And it wasn’t just healthcare. He was known to have brought people to tears in debates over economic inequality, racial profiling, education reform, wage gaps between men and women, whites and minorities, corporatism, plutocracy, white warlike men wearing the mantle of righteousness as they persisted in wielding their unwarranted power—just in ever more subtle and devious ways. Even though I, your humble narrator, voiced no opposition to his charged declamations, he still managed to make me slightly uneasy. I could even see a type of perverse logic in the way Ashley expressed her exasperation, forcing this saintly advocate for all things rational and humane to kick the shit out of a couple white trash wastoids.

It was a lesson for me in the power of circumstance over personality—he’d originally struck me as so humble and mindfully soft-spoken, or perhaps simply restrained—and it set my mind to work disentangling the various threads of his character: fascinated with combat sports but loath to do harm, a marketer with an MBA who rants about the evils of capitalism, a champion for the cause of women and minorities who gives no indication of having a clue when it comes to either. I even weighed the possibility that he may have been less than forthright with me, and with himself, when he spoke of having no blood in his eye. Had he just been trying to prove something?

On the same night he told me the story of the two men who’d attacked him and Ashley outside Henry’s, Tom told me about another encounter he’d had a year earlier that could also have ended in violence. He was clearly trying to prevent an impression of him as a violent man from becoming cemented in my mind, and he was at the same time emphasizing just how impossible it was to figure out what Ashley ever really wanted from him. But it came to mind after I made the discovery about his ardently fractious inclinations as possibly holding some key to his paradoxical character.

Tom and Ashley had walked from West Central to the Three-Rivers Natural Food Co-op and Deli (which they referred to affectionately as “The Coop”) for lunch on a sweltering summer afternoon. As he stood in line to order their sandwiches, he let his eyes wander idly around until they lit on those of another man who appeared to be letting his own eyes wander in the same fashion. Tom gave a nod and turned back to face the counter and the person in front of him in line. But the eye contact hadn’t been purely coincidental; after a moment, the man was sidling up and offhandedly inquiring whether Tom would be willing to buy him a pack of cigarettes. Tom leaned back and laughed through his nose. “What’s so funny?” the man asked, making a performance of his indignation. After Tom explained that they were standing in a health food store that most certainly didn’t sell cigarettes, the man said, “You can still help me out with a couple bucks” in a tone conveying his insufferable grievance.

Ashley appeared beside Tom just as he was saying, “I’ll buy you a sandwich or something, but I’m not giving you any money.” She was either already annoyed by something else, or became so immediately upon hearing him, making him wonder if the offer of the sandwich had been inadvisable, or if maybe he hadn’t rebuffed the supplication with enough force.

“I don’t need no damn sandwich,” the man said, making an even bigger production of how offended he was. He stood watching Tom for several beats before wandering off in a silent huff, like a chided but defiant child appalled by his mother’s impudence in disciplining him.  

By the time he was sitting down on the steel mesh chair across from Ashley at one of the Coop’s patio tables, Tom had decided the man was an experienced, though unskillful, grifter. A middle-aged African American, he’d planned to take advantage of Tom’s liberal eagerness to buddy up with any black guy. When that failed, he did his enactment of taking offense, so Tom might feel obliged and be so gracious as to make monetary amends. Finally, he must’ve considered making a scene but considered it unlikely to do any good now that Tom was stubbornly set on giving him the brush off. Ashley and Tom hadn’t even finished unwrapping their sandwiches when the guy emerged through the glass doors, walked a few steps to the bike rack on the sidewalk, and half-stood, half-sat with one leg resting atop the frame, glaring at Tom as he drank Sprite from its gleaming green bottle in tiny sips. So now the goal has shifted, Tom thought, to saving face.

The guy had a film on his skin that, along with the trickling sweat, evoked in Tom’s mind an image of rain misting in through a carelessly unclosed window onto a dusty finished-wood surface. His clothes looked as though they hadn’t been washed—or even removed—in weeks. With little more than a nudge, Tom figured he could knock the guy off the bike rack, his spindly legs having no chance of finding their way beneath him in time to keep him from landing on his face. Could he have a weapon? Tom considered his waxy eyes. Even if the guy has a gun or a knife, he reasoned, he wouldn’t be able to get to it in time to stop me from bouncing his head off the parking lot. Assured that the guy had no chance of winning a fight, Tom gave up the idea of fighting him. So the guy stayed there staring at the couple almost the whole time they were eating their lunch. As annoyed as Tom was, he was prepared to dismiss it all as a simple misfortune.

But that evening Ashley let him know she didn’t like how he’d handled it.

“What do you think I should have done?”

“I don’t know. I just didn’t like the way you handled it.”  

 ***

            “What I loved most about being with Ashley,” Tom said to me, “was there was always this sense that whatever we came across or encountered together held some special fascination for us. One of the first times I had the thought that things might be getting serious between us was when she took me to visit her grandmother up in… Ah, but you know, I’m going keep her personal details out of this I think. I’ll just say there was this feeling I had—like we were both kind of fusing or intertwining our life stories together. We would go on these walks that would end up lasting all day and take us miles and miles from where we started, and we’d never run out of things to talk about, and every little thing we saw seemed important because it automatically became part of the stories we were weaving together.”

            When Tom and Ashley had been together for a couple of months, soon after the visit to her grandmother, he drove her to Union Chapel Road, in what had until recently been the northernmost part of the city, to show her the house he’d lived in for years and years, the place where he said he felt like he’d really become the man he was. After parking on a street in Burning Tree, the neighborhood whose entrance lies only a few dozen yards from his old driveway, they went for one of those walks, heading east on Union Chapel, the same way Tom used to go when embarking on one of his routine runs down to Metea Park and back, a circuit of about nine and half miles. Already by the time he was introducing the area to Ashley, he knew they would encounter a lot of construction and new housing developments once they crossed the bridge over Interstate 69. But he wasn’t sure if the one thing he most wanted to show her would still be there.

            The area across from his old house had long since been developed, but once you crossed Auburn Road you saw nothing but driveways leading to single residences on either side of the road all the way up the rise to the bridge. On the other side of 69, Tom used to see open expanses of old farmland, but the steady march of development was moving west from Tonkel Road back toward the interstate. Back in the days of his runs, just down the slope on the west side of the bridge, a line of pine trees would come into view beginning on the left side of Union Chapel and heading north. “I ran past it for years and never really noticed it much,” Tom said. “I always go into these trances when I’m running. I think I may have even realized it was a driveway only long after my run one day, when I was back home doing something else.”

            The pines, he would discover, ran along both sides of a gravel drive that took you about a quarter mile up a rise into the old farmland and then split apart to form the base of an enclosed square. “It’s the oddest looking thing, right in the middle of all this open space at the top of a hill you almost can’t see for all the weeds. I can’t believe how many times I just ran right by it and never really thought about how weird it was.” In the middle of the square stood an old two-story house, white with gray splotches, and what used to be a lawn now overtaken by the relentlessly encroaching weeds. Tom had finally decided to turn into the drive one day while on his way back from Metea, and ended up remembering it ever since, even though he never returned—not until the day he walked there with Ashley.

As August was coming to an end that year, Tom had begun to feel a nostalgic longing, not for the classes and schoolwork he’d been so relieved to be done with forever just the year before, but for the anticipation of that abstract sense of personal expansion, the promise every upcoming semester holds for new faces, new books, new journeys. As long as you’re in school, you feel you’re working toward something; your life has a gratifying undercurrent of steady improvement, of progress along the path toward some meaningful goal. Outside of school, as Tom was discovering, every job you start, every habit you allow yourself to carry on, pretty much everything you do comes with the added weight of contemplating that this is what your life is and this is what your life is always going to be—a flat line.

            Back in June of that year, the woman Tom had been in an on-again-off-again relationship with almost his entire adolescent and adult life, the one whose health issues had forced to declare bankruptcy, had moved to Charlotte to live with her mom and little sister. He wanted to see his freshly unattached and unencumbered life as at long last open to the infinite opportunity he’d associated in his mind with adulthood for as long as he could remember, the blank canvas for the masterpiece he would make of his own biography. Instead, all summer he’d been oppressed by incessant misgivings, a paralytic foreboding sense of already knowing exactly where all the paths open before him ultimately led.

It was on a day when this foreboding weighed on him with a runaway self-feeding intensity that Tom determined to go for his customary run despite the forecasted rain. By the time he’d made it all the way to Metea and more than halfway back, finding himself near the entrance of the remarkable but long unremarked tree-lined driveway, after having been all the while in a blind trance more like a dreamless sleep than the meditative nirvana he’d been counting on, he was having hitches in his breath, as if he were on the verge of breaking into sobs. The sky had gone from that rich glassy blue that heralds early fall to an oppressively overcast gray more reminiscent of deepest summer, the air ominously swelling with a heavy pressurized dankness that crowded out all the oxygen and clung to Tom’s chilled and sweat-drenched shoulders in a way that made him feel as though the skin there had been perforated to allow his watery innards to seep upward in a hopeless effort to evaporate. It was a sensation indistinguishable from his thwarted urge to escape this body of his he knew too well, along with the world and everything in it.

Turning into the drive, he maintained his stride and continued running until he was about halfway up the rise, where he surprised himself by pulling back against the rolling momentum of his legs and feet, tamping down the charged fury of his pace, until his numbly agitated legs were carrying him along with harshly chastened steps. “As I walked up to the house, I wondered what the story of the people who’d lived there was. And, seeing how rundown everything was, how the weeds were growing up all over the place, you know, it was just like, what does it even matter at this point what happened here? I had actually thought about showing the house to some of my friends, like one of those old spooky houses you’re fascinated with when you’re a kid. But, I don’t know, somehow it got folded into my mood, and all I saw was a place someone had probably loved that had gone to seed.”

Having lost all interest in further exploring the place, Tom was gearing up to start running again once he reached the end of the driveway. But just when he was about to turn back something caught his eye. “I remember telling Ashley about it as we were walking along the bridge over I-69 because she gave me this weird look. See, I explained that the flowers looked like some you see all the time in late summer and early fall. But whenever I’d seen them before they were always purple. These ones, I told her, were ‘as blue as the virgin’s veil.’ We’re both pretty anti-religion, so she thought the comparison was a bit suspicious. I had to assure her it was just an expression, that I wasn’t lapsing back into my childhood Catholicism or anything. To this day, I have no idea why that particular image popped into my head.”

Sure enough, when Tom returned that day years later with Ashley, the tree-lined drive, the graying house, and the blue wildflowers were all there just as he remembered them. Ashley recognized the species at a glance: “They’re actually called blue lobelias, but you’re right—they’re usually much closer to purple than blue.” Tom went on to recount how when he’d first discovered these three clusters near the head of the driveway he’d been feeling as though his whole body, his whole life, had somehow turned into a rickety old husk he had to drag around every waking hour. Setting out for his run that day, he’d experienced an upwelling of his longing to break out of it—to free himself. The heaviness of the atmosphere and the sight of the house only made it worse though. He’d felt like he was suffocating. When he saw the lobelias, it was at first simply a matter of thinking they looked unusual. But after squatting down for a closer look he stood up and took this gulping breath deep into the lowermost regions of his lungs.

“It was like I was drinking something in, like I no longer needed to escape because my body was being reinvigorated. All that dead weight was coming back to life. The change was so abrupt—I couldn’t have been in that yard for more than a few minutes—but I ended up running the rest of the way home with the cleared head I’d set out for in the first place. Even more than that, though, I experienced a sense of renewal that brought me out of the funk I’d been sunk in for weeks. It was only a few weeks later that I started working at the restaurant.

“Oh, and I can’t leave out how the rain began to fall just as I was within a hundred feet of the driveway at my own house.”

 ***

It was after conducting the interview about the old house on Union Chapel that I first started thinking about pulling out of Marcus’s haunted house business. Was I doing all this work for a story about a house that wouldn’t even be there six months from now? As far as knew, construction had already begun on a junction connecting Union Chapel with I-69. Hadn’t Marcus thought to consult with any locals about the location? And how would using the story for some other location affect the “authenticity” he was so concerned with? But the bigger issue was that, while I didn’t yet know the whole story, I was getting the impression it wasn’t really over—and now I was smack-dab in the middle of it. Looking Marcus up on LinkedIn again, I found that since the time he’d first contacted me, which was apparently only about a month after he moved to Fort Wayne from Terra Haute, he’d opened, ironically enough, his own coffee shop on Wells Street.

Back when he’d told me about the money he had saved up for his business venture, I imagined him sitting on a big pile of cash which would allow him to devote all his time to it. Now I was thinking that the whole endeavor, for all his high-wattage salesmanship, could only be a measly side project of his. Yet I was getting all these emails urging me to hurry up and get the story ready to send to all the people who’d already signed up for the first outing the weekend before Halloween. And then there were all the questions surrounding Tom and how he’d ended up coming into Marcus’s ambit. Tom had given us his consent to use his story, his sharing of which I had interpreted as an attempt at unburdening himself, to make of me and Marcus his surrogate confessors. But now I was no longer sure that what Marcus and I were doing met the strictest Capitalism 2.0 standards. I kept asking myself as I listened to the recordings, am I making myself complicit in some kind of exploitation? Should I be doing something more to help Tom—instead of trying to make money off of him?

 ***

In the days after Ashley broke up with Tom, as he settled into the new apartment by himself, he went nearly mad from lack of sleep. No sooner would he lie down and close his eyes than he would be wracked with jealous anxiety powered by images of Ashley with myriad other men he couldn’t help suspecting were the real motivation behind her decision to abandon him. The searing blade of his kicked-in rib, which flared up as if trying to tear free of his body whenever he lay flat or attempted to roll from one side to the other, robbed him of what little of the night’s sleep was left after the jealous heartbreak had taken its share. Desperate, he contacted an old friend from Munchies who came through for him with some mind-bogglingly potent weed. Over the next week, Tom managed to get plenty of sleep, and mysteriously managed as well to gain seven pounds.

One Sunday, Tom heard a knock on his apartment door, which meant one of his neighbors from the three other apartments in the house wanted something. When he opened the door to a tall, very dark-complexioned black man, he couldn’t conceal his surprise. “It’s okay my friend,” the visitor said with a heavy-consonanted accent Tom couldn’t place. “I’m Sara’s boyfriend—from across the hall.” Tom introduced himself and offered his hand. The man’s name was Luca or Lucas, and Tom would later learn that he’d come from the Dominican Republic or Haiti as a high school student, a move that was undertaken under the auspices of the Fort Wayne diocese of the Catholic church. “I noticed the smell of marijuana coming from your apartment the other night and I was wondering if you’d be willing to sell me a small amount.”

Tom gave Lucas all the weed he still had gratis. He would recount to his landlord two days later the story of how he’d been startled by the big black guy knocking on his door (without of course revealing the reason behind the visit), and in return hear what little the landlord knew about him, but, aside from that, he thought nothing further about it—until the following Sunday when he heard another knock on his door. Impatient, Tom opened the door prepared to explain that he had no more weed and didn’t know Lucas well enough to give him his source’s contact information. But Lucas barely let him open the door fully before thrusting a small green pouch into his chest. “Just a little thank you my friend. You’ll only get a couple of hits from that, but trust me. Save it for when you have no work in the morning.” Tom was ready to refuse the gift, but Lucas withdrew his hand and rushed downstairs and out the front door of the house so quickly all he had time to shout after him was thanks. It turned out Lucas and Sara had just broken up. That was the last Tom ever saw of him.

           ***

            Marcus’s coffee shop was smaller and more dimly lit than Old Crown, but it had a certain undeniable charm. When I got there at a little after four in the afternoon, the place was completely empty except for the two young women working the counter. I asked the taller of the two if Marcus was around, but she responded by casting a worried look at her coworker. They both looked to be in their early to mid-twenties, and they were both strikingly attractive in a breezily unkempt sort of way. The shorter one seemed the sharper of the two, exuding a type of evaluating authority, sizing me up, silently challenging me to convince her I was worth the moment of her attention I had requested. Most restaurants and shops like this have a matriarch or two who are counted on to really run the place, the all-but-invariably male general manager’s official title notwithstanding. I guessed I was looking at just such a matriarch—and I suspected she might be romantically linked to Marcus too, an intuition I couldn’t rationally support, except perhaps by pointing to her seeming defensiveness at mention of his name. “No, he’s not in,” she said. “Is there anything we can help you with?”

            I told her I was a friend and had learned about the coffee shop from Marcus’s LinkedIn profile, but leaving a message or even giving my name would be unnecessary. “I’m sure I’ll be back sometime.” I quickly scanned the chalkboard menu on the wall behind her for something to order, hoping to distract her enough to ward off any further questions. “Could I have a pumpkin spice latte please?” I browsed around while the taller barista made my latte and the shorter one returned to what she’d been doing before I arrived—it looked like she was reading from something concealed behind the counter, a book or a magazine perhaps. I constructed an image of her and a sense of her bearing over the course of several nonchalant sweeps of my eyes. She had what the guys in my circle call a monster face: rounded cheeks that lift high on her smoothly protrusive cheekbones when she smiles, pushing her outsize eyes into squinting crescents, a tiny chin topped by an amazingly expandable and dynamic press of lips. As pretty as she was, her face, especially when she smiled, bore the slightest resemblance to the Grinch’s. All in all, she seemed to have a big and formidable personality animating her small, even dainty body. I could see why Marcus would like her.

            I took my latte over to a couch and set it on a coffee table so I could remove my laptop from my backpack and do some editing for the writing project you’re currently reading. Taking a moment to acknowledge the pumpkin spice’s justifiedly much-touted powers of evocation, I scanned line after line, simultaneously wondering how much Cute Monster Face knew about Marcus’s side venture. I realized that I couldn’t enquire after it though because I was worried about the legal ramifications if Tom’s deed came to light. And that realization transformed quickly into frustration with Marcus for getting me involved without properly disclosing the crucial details of what I was getting involved in. After finishing, as I stepped outside onto the sidewalk running along Wells Street, I considered going back in and penning a message:

Marcus,

I don’t appreciate you getting me tangled up in your shady operation. I’m out.

Jim

But I decided against it because I thought I should be fair and wait until I knew the rest of the story. It would be pretty low of me to leave him high-and-dry this close to the event. And, I admit it, I was just too damn curious about what had happened to Tom, and too damn curious as well about how Marcus’s endeavor would pan out. I went home and prepared for what would be my second-to-last interview with Tom.

 ***

“I’ve heard so many times about how I supposedly like to bully people,” Tom was telling me. “But I’ll never forget the feeling of my knuckles hacking into the flesh right behind that guy’s jaw. It all happened so fast with the two guys outside Henry’s, like it was over before I knew what was happening. With this guy, though—I’d been thinking about Ashley, about how much she misunderstood me, and how she of all people should’ve been able to see past what on the surface probably did look like bullying. I admit it. But that’s not what it was. That’s not ever what it was. Then I started wondering who she might be with at that same moment—I couldn’t help it. You know, you’re mind just sort of goes there no matter how hard you try to rein it in. I had all this rage surging up. All the streetlamps are leaving these slow-motion trails, my heart is banging on my ribs like some rabid ape trying to break out of its damn cage, and I keep closing my eyes—and it’s happening right in front of me. Ashley and some guy. Then I smelled somebody’s menthol cigarette—that’s when I opened my eyes.”

            It had begun one evening in June while Tom was out for one of his nightly walks in West Central. What he found most soothing about these listless meanderings of his was being able to look straight up into the sky and see nothing but endless blue, an incomprehensible vastness the mere recognition of which created a sensation like an upward pull, as if the sheer immensity of the emptiness inhered with its own vacuuming force to counter the gravity of the solid earth. He liked going out when the drop in temperature could be most dramatically felt, when the vibrant azure of the day faded before his eyes to the darker, richer, fathomless hues of twilight—the airy insubstantial sea of white-cast blue drawn out through the gracelessly mended seam of the western horizon, a submerged wound which never heals and daily reopens to spill its irradiated blood into the coursing streams of air as they seep out over the edge of the world. Tom, stopping at the overlook each day for weeks to watch the molten pinks and oranges and startling crimsons bleed away the day’s final residue, was always surprised to be the only one in attendance.

            But one night as he stood resting his elbows on the concrete railing he heard someone addressing him. “You guna jump?” Tom looked back over his shoulder without bothering to stand up from his leaning position and saw a heavy-set man with a bushy mess of a goatee waiting for an answer on the sidewalk behind him. He was shortish and had the look of a walking barrel. “He looked,” in Tom’s words, “quite a bit like Tank Abbott from some of the earlier UFCs.” Seeing that no one else was around for the man to be addressing, Tom turned and said, “Probably not today.”

            “Oh, well, I think you should,” the man said, taking a couple of steps forward. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder and looked to be returning from work somewhere on the other side of the river.

            Tom was reticent but couldn’t help asking, “Yeah, why is that?”

            “Well, you’re probably thinking maybe things will be better tomorrow. But it doesn’t work that way as far as I know. Tomorrow, you’ll still be just as much of a faggot.”

            Tom leaned back, resting both elbows on the rail, and leveled a steady glare at the man as he affected the profoundest boredom. The walking barrel responded by leaning slightly to the side and spitting on the ground between them. Then he continued walking down Thieme, leaving Tom free to wonder what had prompted the insult. His first thought was that this man might know one or both of the two guys he’d beat up that night after leaving Henry’s. But if that were the case he probably would’ve gone further than calling him a faggot. Tom figured it was just one of those things, and set to trying to push it out of his mind. He’d noted the knife clipped to the outside of the man’s right pants pocket, and he reasoned that since he was alone and hence not putting on a show for anyone, his goad must have been a genuine invitation to fight. Tom would have to watch out for him in the future.

            But, as was his wont, Tom had gone into one of his walking trances some minutes before he encountered the barrel a second time. It was later that same week, which made Tom realize afterward that he could probably avoid further encounters by heading out for his walks at a different time of night. This second meeting had them crossing each other’s paths as they headed in opposite directions on the sidewalk along Thieme. “What’s up, faggot?” the barrel called out in greeting. Emerging instantly from his trance, Tom glared back at him. When they were face to face, within striking distance, the man jerked forward with his shoulders, trying to trick Tom into reacting as if he were lunging at him. Tom indeed turned sideways into a subtle crouch, flinching, which produced a broad self-amused grin on the barrel’s scraggly, egg-shaped face. “See you tomorrow faggot,” he said continuing past.

The barrel thus began haunting Tom while he was still very much alive, in the way that all men are haunted by insults they fail to, or choose not to redress. His strategy of avoidance felt like a breed of forced effacement, a step toward submission. He was going out later, missing the crepuscular displays over the treetops on the facing side of the Saint Mary’s, returning to his apartment just before going to bed, aggravating his already too wakeful condition. Every time he rounded the corner from Wayne Street onto Thieme Drive, Tom felt like he was stepping onto a sidewalk in a completely different city. Some evenings, he could even close his eyes and reopen them on an entirely different world. Behind the line of trees across the street, there was a type of void, a pressurized humming emptiness hovering over the imperceptibly slow-coursing river separating his neighborhood from the motley houses beyond the opposite bank. You could often hear the throb of bass in the distance, faraway rhythmical percussions made to seem primitive or otherworldly, catch whiffs of smoke from far-off bonfires, or pick up the tail end of some couple’s shouting match. It all resonated through that strange hollow space framed by the trees on each facing bank, making it seem somehow closer and at the same time farther away.

            The old sycamores and random oaks along the walk, compared to all the other new-growth trees in the city, seemed prehistorically gargantuan, their branches reaching up like monstrous undulating tendrils toward the firmament of a world in which no human rightly belongs, at least not one whose flesh has been scoured under gas-heated water, who dons fabrics composed of meticulously complex fibers weekly cleansed in a chemically stewed machine vortex. Bats lurched and dived to snatch unseen prey, crowding the air with hectic, predatory pursuits which mirrored and amplified the groping chaotic alarm of Tom’s most desperately savage thoughts. Into July, he was becoming increasingly frazzled and gnawed at, beset from all sides by silent curses and unvoiced hatreds.

            Then one Friday he saw Ashley at Henry’s with a group of people he didn’t know, a group which included no less than three men who each might’ve been the one who served as his replacement. They played polite, but Tom told the friends he’d arrived with he was feeling ill and excused himself. Walking back to his apartment, he felt his soul building up the volatile force to explode out of his body through a howling roar whose rippling shockwave would shatter every building and house for miles around him, wipe the slate of the earth clean of this taint permeating his existence down to each individual blood cell and neuron. Up the stairs and through his door, he collapsed to his hands and knees, sowing half-imaginary, half-planned destruction on every object his eyes lit upon: the couch that used to be hers, the picture she’d given him as a birthday gift, the old-fashioned TV she used to tease him about. The wooden shelf beside the door, where he dropped his keys and his wallet when returning home—the middle shelf he never used, with forgotten odds and ends, and the little green pouch his friend from the island of Hispaniola had given him as thanks.

 ***

            “I don’t know if it was just the state I was in before I smoked it, or if the shit was laced with something,” Tom said. By the time he was taking the second of three hits, he knew he had to get outside. “I was queasy, claustrophobic. Every time I moved my eyes the light and colors would streak. I thought I should sit still and try not to move, but it was like my skin was on fire. Now it’s hard to remember what actually happened—I don’t remember leaving the house, or where I went at first. I remember turning onto Thieme and stepping into this alien world, this jungle hell that shouted back in flames at every shouting thought in my head. And I wanted to burn. I wanted to be flayed. I needed something to sever my mind from the fucking sinkhole it was trapped in—no matter where I went I was still back in Henry’s, in her apartment, in some guy’s apartment. No matter where I went Ashley was fucking some guy right in front of me.

            “I smelled his cigarette before I saw him. He probably called me a faggot, but if he did I never heard it. I turned and saw him sitting there on that step. Though all I could really see was the orange light of his cigarette. I think I would’ve just walked past him if my eyes hadn’t locked on it, glowing, swaying, bouncing along with the words I never heard. I must’ve walked right up to him. Then he lunged, thrusting his face at me like he’d done before, trying to get me to flinch. Only I didn’t see his face. I saw something more like a bat’s face, something like an African tribal mask. I saw something with blue and red teeth like broken shards of stained glass trying to bite me, to devour me. I was so charged up with rage, and now with fear, and he was coming up from his sitting position. I came down with a right cross, my whole body twisting, all my weight. I probably smashed his jaw with that first punch. But what I saw was this bat’s face with the shards of stained glass for teeth still trying to bite my face off.

            “I remember a lot of pulling and dragging. And I remember pummeling him in the middle of the street, bouncing his head off the pavement. I kept at it because I was sure somehow that I couldn’t really hurt him. I thought I heard him cackling even after his body had gone limp. It made me think it was all part of some trick he was playing on me—and it was infuriating. When my mind first started to clear, when I looked down and saw the guy—the walking barrel—with his face staved in, we were near the overlook. I knew he was dead. He had to be. But then I heard the fucking cackling again—and it scared the hell out of me. I dragged him to the bank and rolled him down, staying long enough to see his body come to rest at the base of the monument just on the edge of the retaining wall. And I ran.”

 ***

            The lobelias were the last piece of the puzzle—or maybe the second to last. Tom had no faith in the law to expiate his sin. He needed to enact some form of penance, and he believed his demon-haunted dreams were guiding him toward it. “I drove my car over there in the middle of the afternoon, in broad fucking daylight. I figured the whole point was to sort of bring what I had done to light, so if someone saw me and called the police, well, so be it. I popped open the hatchback, took a breath, and went down the bank. I was still holding out the hope that I had hallucinated the whole thing. But there he was, rotting, covered in maggots and swirling flies. But you could still see what I’d done, how I’d smashed in his face. I’m afraid that I’ll be seeing that face every time I close my eyes until the day I die. And the smell… I can’t even look at meat anymore. The smell of fish makes me retch.”

            Tom overmastered his repulsion, leaned down over the corpse, and returned to an upright position with it clasp to his chest, surprised by its lightness, by how much flesh had already rotted away. He hoisted one of the perfectly supple dead arms up and twisted under it. He gripped the wrist of the arm thus draped over his shoulder and began the trudge back up the bank. Midway into the climb, the body no longer seemed so light, and his recently mended rib began to prick again. Sweating, panting, wincing against the pain in his side and the stench of putrescence and shit, Tom crested the bank, paused for a breath, and continued toward the passenger side of his car—having decided against using the hatch. He fumbled with the door, and then made a ramp of his body down which the dead one slid into the passenger seat. After making some final adjustments, he belted in the proof of his crime—upright for anyone to see who cared to look.

            Tom walked back to close the hatch, stood for a moment considering the gore spattered and smeared all over his clothes, and then went to the driver’s side door, got in, started the car, and drove away. No one saw him. He made the twenty-minute drive to the north side of town with the raw meat of the walking barrel’s face variously propped and bouncing against the window across from him, made the drive without incident. “I kept having to reach over and keep it from pitching forward, or from rolling over onto me. I thought for sure it was only a matter of time until I heard sirens. But I just kept driving, putting it in fate’s hands. The risk was part of the punishment I guess. Even when I pulled off to the side of the road to vomit, though, no one seemed to care much. I made it all the way to Union Chapel and into the tree-lined driveway without noticing anyone even looking at us funny.”

 ***

            I met Tom the week after he’d buried the walking barrel’s body beside the cluster of blue lobelias at the head of the driveway to the old abandoned house on Union Chapel. I tried to work out the timeline. I’d met Marcus at Old Crown only days after Tom had moved the body. How the hell how had Marcus even known any of this was going on? Did Tom have a confidante, another confessor, a mutual acquaintance of Marcus’s? I had by now settled on a policy of giving Marcus the benefit of the doubt and proceeding with the project—at least until I had all the information and could tell for sure whether something was amiss. I wonder how many ongoing crimes throughout history have sustained themselves on just this type of moment-by-moment justification. I wrote Tom’s story as if it were completed, even though I had arranged another interview. I tried to heighten all the ghostly elements, considered suggesting the lobelias at the house had been seen glowing, maybe throw in some sightings of a spirit wandering around amid a cloud of flies, the face stove in. But the leap from fresh wound to fun game was difficult to make, reminding me that all ghost stories begin with personal tragedies.

            Then the final interview: Tom has lost his job at EntSol; the Car-Ride of Horror has failed to quell his hallucinations; he’s seeing the bat-featured, tribal mask face with its mouth-full of broken stained glass hovering outside the windows of his apartment; and he’s returned to the house on Union Chapel at least once—to dig up the body he’d buried there, sling it over his shoulder again, and carry it down to the end of the drive and back as further penance. When he told me he took the knife that was still clipped inside the guy’s pocket and used it to carve and dismember the body before reburying it, I wasn’t sure I should believe him. It was too much.  Or maybe I just didn’t want to believe it. I’d already written up the story and sent it as a PDF to Marcus, who in turn had sent it via email to the seven participants in the upcoming inaugural event. I told myself we could go through with it and concentrate on helping Tom once it was over.

Marcus had invited me to attend—or rather insisted that I do. He’d already sent me a check for the PDF.

 ***

From Tom’s description of the place, I’d imagined a desolate beige field with nothing but the pine tree borders marking off the old yard, but there was in fact a stand of aged trees in the back providing enough foliage to encircle the fire pit we constructed there. Marcus’s idea was to let everyone settle in and get cozy until it got dark, when we’d walk as a group up to the spot where the earth was disturbed (what an expression!) and the lobelias bloomed. Once we were all gathered there, I would tell the story, and then everyone would return to the safety and warmth of the fire. And it had all actually gone quite well—I was pleased with my somewhat improvised oral rendition of the tale—but I was getting nervous.

A few of the clients were already there when I arrived, and I hadn’t been afforded any opportunity to pull Marcus aside and put my questions to him. Then the two women I’d seen working the counter at his coffee shop showed up. They were introduced simply as helpers for some of the activities planned for later in the night, and they gave no indication of recognizing me. Still, I figured Marcus must know I’d been checking up on him. After the tale-telling, as we sat circling the fire, strange noises began coming from inside the old house. I confess, my nervousness had less to do with how Marcus might respond to my insubordination or the impropriety of profiting from the ongoing suffering of an imperiled man—and more to do with the likelihood that Marcus had arranged for some hokey theatrics to ensure a memorable experience for his clients so he could count on his precious word-of-mouth endorsements. What ever happened to not being cheap?

There ended up being six clients, two couples and a single of each gender, so with Marcus, me, and the two baristas, we made up a camp of ten, all crowded in a half-circle around the impressive fire Marcus had prudently prepared to keep well fueled long into the night. Now that the principle specter’s story had been rehearsed (hearse?), the ascendency of the walking barrel’s ghost established, I was turned to for more stories to, as it were, get the ball rolling. I told the one about the house in Garrett where men frequently see a gorgeous young woman standing in a second-story window, holding a candle and beckoning to them; as they stand there struck dumb by her spectral beauty, she transforms by imperceptible increments into first an old hag and then finally into an ashen-faced demon. Next, I extemporized a story about a group of boys from Carroll High School who made a game out of prowling through The Bicentennial Woods, a nature preserve up off Shoaff Road, waylaying hikers and ritualistically torturing them to death in the old farmhouse that still stands in the field behind the park; when one of the boys’ conscience got to him, he told a football player about the murders; the football player in turn stalked the killers and picked them off one by one—but of course they still haunt the woods and are thought to be behind occasional disappearances.

Passing the baton to one of the clients—who told the story of the witch in Devil’s Hollow—I glanced over at Marcus and saw that his approving smile was more bemused than amused. His preoccupation increased my worry that he was going to try and pull off some kind of stupid stunt. This was only the second time I’d seen the man in person, and my second impression was starkly different from the first. That smile that contended with the sun was all but impossible to imagine now. Even in his physical dimensions, he looked diminished. There were parts of this story I was not privy to, I was sure, and my mind couldn’t help trying to fill in the gaps. But I also couldn’t help trying to think of more ghost stories in case I was called upon to supply them. It occurred to me then that were I inventing Tom’s story, as opposed to reporting it, I would have him return to hang himself from a rafter in the house—that, or something like it, needed to happen for the story to come full circle, for the seed to be properly sown, for the haunting to be thoroughly, um, haunty. It also occurred to me, as I looked over at the house—remarkably nondescript, fading white siding, boxy—past Marcus who sat in my line of sight, that he didn’t just look distracted; he looked a little frightened. I supposed he too might be nervous about how the event would turn out.

I couldn’t help mulling over the question he’d begun his pitch with, the one I assumed he began all his pitches with: Why do people really get scared? I thought of all the normal stuff, public speaking, plane crashes, murders, shark attacks. Then I tried to think of the actual statistics on what people should be the most afraid of—heart disease, cancer, car accidents, or, hell, lifelong loneliness and disappointment. But the thing is, when you start thinking about what people fear—what you personally fear—it’s hard to separate thoughts of real dangers from feelings about deserts, as if we simply can’t imagine coming to any end other than the one we most deserve, which is probably why most people don’t believe they’ll ever die, not really, not in the sense of utterly ceasing to exist. So I was thinking of how I probably would die—heart disease, car crash—but then I started wondering how I might deserve to die. My biggest sin is working with this guy, I thought, making money from murder and exploitation, even if my complicity is only indirect. And that’s kind of the sin, isn’t it? The one we’re all complicit in to one degree or another.

I looked around and felt walled off from the intimate little gathering with each of its individual mystified gazes forming a spoke radiating outward from the hub of the stone-lined fire pit, all of our clients basking in the lively orange radiance of the bonfire, sharing in that nostalgic storytelling atmosphere we designed the scene to evoke—a wheeling symbol of death and rebirth, seasons and ages. But for me the fire gradually resolved into an image of a street protest rendered in orange and yellow light, the raving throngs arhythmically bouncing with their hands thrust up, clamoring for recognition, reaching, yearning, wildly stretching their coiled arms upward as if to lay hold of divine justice and rip from it from the sky, sparks and embers variously lolling or sashaying or darting up into the overabundance of moribund leaves, or lifting along the flue of the clearing up over the canopy, taking their leave of our little half-circle altogether, rising up to the black star-specked heavens like so many spent prayers. I could almost hear the protesters’ shouts as I overlay the flames with images I’d seen from Egypt, Pakistan, Libya. I thought of a Bangladeshi clothing factory flaring up into a surging conflagration that was its own symbolic prefiguring of the outrage it would go on to ignite. Whole regions of the world seething and simmering with the bounding rage so eloquent of critical volatility in every language on this disturbed earth of ours—we are here, we want our share too, we won’t be the worshipful crowd at the rock concert of western civilization’s slave-making sabbath—if you don’t acknowledge us we’ll make you watch as we wrap these tangled masses of coiling arms around everything you love.

And press a button.

Then, returning to the question of how any of us deserves to die, I imagined Tom stepping out from under the trees with an axe or a machete, running up and hacking Marcus and me to pieces and then throwing them one at time into the fire like logs and kindling for everyone to watch sizzle and ooze and blacken—how’s that for an experience to pass on by word of mouth? But now my attention was being brought back to reality by a female voice commanding more casual authority than those of any of the males who’d been yammering on, including, I suspected, my own.

“This story began at a house a lot like this one but in a smaller town, not far from here. This house had a ghost story to go with it too, a story that went back for at least a generation to a time when a family lived in it. The story was that the husband started hearing voices telling him that his wife was unfaithful. The man couldn’t believe this about his wife. He realized that he must be going crazy, so he struggled to think of the voices as nothing but hallucinations. But then one night the wife was late getting home, and in addition to the voices the husband saw images of his wife with another man. When she got home, he attacked her before she could explain. He ended up beating her to death right in front of their five-year-old daughter. Then the man got a kitchen knife and slit his wrists. When the police arrived, they were all three dead, the five-year-old having died of fright. According to the locals, some nights you can still hear the little girl screaming.”

It was one of Marcus’s baristas telling the story, the one I’ve been referring to as Monster Face, though in the underglow of the flames she looked more leonine than monstrous. She was leveling a steady, placid-faced glare high into the fire as she spoke. I thought I could glean an edge of intensity to her words, despite the slowness with which she rolled them out. Her storytelling was both playful and deliberate—and somehow, I thought, malicious in that deliberateness. It was a unique, uniquely powerful performance, worthy of Cannes.

“That was the original story,” she went on. “The second chapter would lend some ironic symmetry to the developing legend surrounding the old house. What happened was some kids who’d grown up hearing the story of the screaming girl started visiting the house every year around Halloween. Of course, by then everyone was saying that the man who’d beaten his wife to death wasn’t really insane, wasn’t schizophrenic or anything like that, but that it was a demon who’d spoken to him and shown him those images, a demon who still haunted the place. The kids were terrified—but they loved it. By the time they were in high school and had their driver’s licenses, they were starting what would be a yearly tradition of camping in the yard outside the house the weekend before Halloween.”

I felt my mouth fall open as I involuntarily turned my eyes back toward Marcus, who I realized was the focal point through the flames for the barista’s own gaze. His eyes were bulging open, fixed on hers, and he couldn’t have been breathing because there was pressure building up in his neck and behind the strained flesh of his face. Her voice pulled my eyes back in her direction.

“There was a core group of three, two men and one woman. One of the men was a sports jock, a smooth talker, the type who has all kinds of luck with the ladies. Not long after they all three graduated high school, he and the woman fell in love and started planning on getting married. About that time, the other man, the one with all the business sense, came up with a plan for how they could actually make money with their haunted house camping trips. They started bringing other people with them, started hosting the trips not just once a season, but every weekend in October. They even started arranging trips to other houses associated with ghost stories.

“Unfortunately, the smooth talking jock went on one too many forays into that demon-haunted house to prove his mettle. He became convinced that his fiancée was screwing around with his best friend, the guy with the business sense. He became convinced too that they were planning on pushing him out of the operation and keeping all that money to themselves. One night in October, he showed up for the first outing of the season—and he thought he saw them murmuring to each other, with their faces a little too close together. He flew into a rage and murdered them both. Then he hacked them to pieces and buried them in assorted spots surrounding the house. And then he hosted the night’s guests as if nothing had happened. But afterward, just to be safe, he left town, planning to lie low for a while, maybe get started getting a foot in the door for his business in other nearby cities. The only problem was it wasn’t just business sense he was lacking.”

Marcus was standing. There was movement all about the fire, people standing and backing away, running—but I could hardly take my eyes off of our storyteller. “Does that story resonate, Marcus?” she said, grinning her evilest Grinch’s grin. Hearing him grunt, I turned to see him with someone’s arm wrapped around his neck, the upper arm forming a V with the wrist, the elbow directly under his chin. His assailant was clad head to toe in black, with a mask that erased his features, including his eyes. It was a moment before I realized there were in fact two such black-clad figures wrestling Marcus to the ground as the choke quickly relieved him of his consciousness. I was standing now too, but the guys in masks actually diminished my panic, making me think this really was some kind of stunt after all. Stuff like this doesn’t really happen, does it? Maybe if they’d thrown a black hood over his head.

Amid the bustle and shouting, I hadn’t noticed the other barista, the taller one, the minion, circling behind me. “Oh, you don’t need to get up, Mr. Conway.” She pressed something into my kidney, preventing me from turning around. Was she holding me at gunpoint? It was so preposterous I almost burst out laughing. But then I saw Monster Face glancing back and forth between me and the men dragging Marcus toward the trees. Seeing her now made what was happening seem much more serious—nobody was that good of an actor. “Have a seat please,” the minion said. I sat back down on the sectioned tree trunk that had been my chair. She pulled my hands behind me and bound them with what I guessed was a plastic tie-wrap, and then bound the tie-wrap to another she’d threaded through an eye-bolt screwed into the log. I remember saying to myself, “Jim, this is really happening. You shouldn’t have let her do that.”  

The tree they bound Marcus to was directly behind me, so I had to crane my neck to see any of what was happening to him. Monster Face’s minion was standing behind me the whole time too, occluding my view. I think Marcus’s back was against the trunk, his hands tied with the same kind of cable wraps as mine were behind it. Monster Face slapped him on the cheek a few times to bring him to, but he must have had something stuffed in his mouth because aside from sounds of a sort more apt to emerge from a nose I heard little more from him that night. It was the authoritative, matriarchal barista’s voice I heard—and I heard every last fucking word she uttered.

“Sorry, Marcus. But you’re running this little venture into the ground. I’ve decided it’s time for some new management.” She stepped into view beside me. “You did do one thing right, though, I have to say. Mr. Conway here is quite the artistic man of letters. And a good interviewer too. Believe me,” she addressed me now, “I know how hard it can be to get a straight answer out of Tom.”

Staring at her, I dumbly repeated, “Tom.” My imagination was overwhelmed with the task of going back to all those scenes Tom had described with her—filling in the lineaments of her face, the texture of her voice.

“Oh, now I see you’ve figured it out. Wow. That’s a little disappointing. I have to say with your vaunted intellect and all I figured you had it all worked out by the time you came to the coffee shop. How did you think Marcus even knew about Tom in the first place?” She squatted down beside me. “I know you’re worried about him, Jim. But you shouldn’t be. I’ve got some special plans for him. For both of you.

“Now, Mr. Friedman,” she said standing up and moving to a position where I could no longer see her. “To the question you asked me the first time you told me about your little business. You want to know what scares people? It ain’t the paranormal or otherworldly stuff that scares them—tell them a place is haunted and they’ll be lining up, as you and I both well know. And that’s because what really scares them is their own tiny, pointless existences, the realization that in the great flood of humanity they have nothing special to offer, nothing special to say. Here and gone in a blink and you don’t even leave a mark—not so much as a residue. So they all want to be able to say—they’re fucking desperate to be able to say, ‘You think you know?—well, you don’t know shit. Let me tell you what I’ve seen. Let me tell you what I know.’

“Traumatic experiences leave a trace? Ha! What complete bullshit. You and I both know dark experiences are a commodity, a ticket to instant status. Encounters with evil? Trust me, everyone wishes they could have some. Murder doesn’t scare people. What scares people is the thought that they might not have it in them. Oh, Tom is plenty tore up about killing that tubby piece of trash.” I could tell from her voice that she’d turned and was now addressing Marcus and me jointly. “He’ll lose sleep, bitch and moan, threaten to turn himself in. But Tom—he’s smart. He knows what this means. It means he’s gone far beyond me. It means his life is so much more… interesting. It means, for the moment at least, he wins. And I can’t have that.”

Catching her drift, I began pulling at the cable wraps for the first time, feeling them bread knife into the skin of my wrists.

“Mr. Conway, please don’t scream. I see no need to gag you, as you’re just here to be a witness and chronicler.”

“Tom?” I said. “Why do you even still care about Tom? You broke up with him. Why didn’t he tell me you were still talking to him?”

“Because I told him not to. I broke up with him because I thought he was tame. Christ, you’re all so tame these days. And if they’re not tame they’re just pathetic idiots with no more sense or dignity than fucking gorillas. Tom thought I left him because he argued too much. The truth is, I’d never felt as exhilarated as I did that night when he beat the crap out of those two morons. It was like I was having this revelation, this breaking through to a new type of life—and then instead of sharing it with me he starts going off, telling me how reckless I was, how I could have gotten us killed, or worse. I just looked at him and thought—how can you not feel this? How can I be with someone who’s not capable of having an experience like this? I actually remember thinking, if he doesn’t slap me I have to leave him.”

She came back and squatted down beside me again. “You think coming back here to hack up that body makes him crazy?” she asked. “Well, Mr. Conway, I’ve looked into his eyes, and he looked right back into mine in way he never could before. And you know what I saw there for the first time? I saw blood. I saw the blood in his eye and it made me feel my own blood pumping in my veins. Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Conway. I know exactly what Tom needs. Tom’s going to be just fine.”

  She went back to Marcus, saying, “Now, Mr. Moneybags.” I heard grunting and scraping, Marcus thrashing about against the tree. “Oh, I know. I know. I’m so horrible, so evil. Whatever. All I really am is honest with myself in a way almost no other woman is willing to be. And just so you know—I really do have a conscience. That’s why I chose you.”

I spent the next few hours squeezing my eyes shut, listening to the sounds of a slender young woman of about five foot four experimenting with methods for killing a large muscular man bound to a tree, with her bare hands. I kept thinking one of the fleeing guests must’ve called the police by now, kept thinking I should be hearing sirens any minute. But she’d obviously planned this whole thing out meticulously. When she finally cut my cable tie, I was shivering, my wrists were dripping blood, my legs were so achy I could barely stand—and Marcus half-sat, half-lay against the tree, lifeless.

I shambled toward the front of the house, past the blue lobelias, heading for my car down by the entrance to the drive on Union Chapel. Just as I was rounding the front toward the driver’s side, I heard Monster Face shouting from beside the house. “I don’t need to tell you it would be bad for you if you went to the police. Don’t worry, though, I’ll be good to you. I’ll be in touch. We’ve got a lot of work to do.” I watched her turn back toward the backyard and the tree.

I opened the door of my car, but just as I was about to lower myself in on my wobbly legs, I heard her shouting again, “Oh yeah, and Jim—don’t fucking forget to change the names before you post this story.”  

Next, read:

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

Encounters, Inc. Part 1

            When it first occurred to me that I was getting in deep myself, that I too might be culpable, I was listening to a recording of Tom describing one of his nightmares—Tom, whom I knew to be a murderer. The job I’d been hired to do consisted of turning the raw material of all these recordings into something that was part literary thriller and part content marketing, something in between a book and a brochure. I don’t have any of the recordings anymore because I made a point of destroying any and all physical evidence of my association with Marcus Friedman. But I’ve held on to all the writing I did. I can always say it’s just fiction, right?

            Anyway, I was listening to Tom’s voice, turning his words into a story as well as I could—and, to be honest, I didn’t really know what I was doing—when it struck me. This guy has admitted, if not to me yet then to Marcus, that he killed a guy a few blocks from here, some guy who’d harassed him one too many times, killed him and left his body to rot at the base of the concrete overlook tucked in the bend between the Main Street bridge over the Saint Mary's River and Thieme Drive, which runs along the east bank. He’s admitted to murdering someone, and here I am interviewing him for some ill-defined marketing strategy this Marcus guy hired me to implement—and I’m not turning him in.

            The thought that I should probably at least consider diming on Tom came not from any sense that he was dangerous or evil or anything like that. On the contrary, I thought I should encourage him to confess because it seemed the only way to save him from the torments of his own mind. Turning him in might be the only way to save him from complete insanity. It was only after having that thought that I realized I could be in some trouble myself for letting things go on this long without saying anything. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, I’ll end up having to bring the whole story to light to save us both.

For whatever reason, though, I just kept on working on the story:

            …After awaking, Tom couldn’t close his eyes again, making him wonder if he’d been sleeping with them open—and how long could that state of affairs have persisted? He sat up in bed and scanned the darkened room for the disturbance that had woken him. When he lay back down, he assured himself the condition was only a momentary dream echo, but his gaze remained locked on the ceiling and the buzzing, wobbling whirl of the dusty fan blades. He hesitated before reaching up to probe his eyes with his fingers, anticipating something awful. Postponing the discovery, he pushed one leg cautiously out from under the duvet, and then the other. Finally, he folded his body up from the bed, holding his head fixed rigidly atop a neck stiff with apprehension.

            On his feet, moving forward on sturdy legs, he felt more together, leaving behind that seldom remarked feeling of vulnerability we all experience in our places of slumber. He tested the sweep of his eyes beneath the fixed-open lids. Each pass from one side to the other brought a peculiar sensation in its wake, a sort of dragging discomfort approaching the threshold of pain. Already having walked as far as the passage from his meager kitchen to the open space of his living room, he thought to try a darting glance upward, only to find it caused a strange drawing at his lower lids down to the skin atop his cheeks and a fleshy bunching up under his brows. Feeling a simultaneous poke above each eye, he halted mid-step in the corner before stepping through the bathroom doorway, quickly leveling his gaze. Now he could no longer resist examining his face with halting, trembling fingers.

            Rushing toward the mirror, he realized he had to turn back for the light switch. When he finally reached a position hovering over the sink, he felt an odd calm descend on him, as if the shock of what he was seeing with his skewered eyes on the black-flecked glass somehow shattered the surface of the dream’s deception—or as if the gruesomeness, the sheer sadistic inventiveness of the procedure, painless though it was, pushed him toward some state beyond panic. He leant in to investigate the surgically precise mechanism, composed of carved slits in the upper and lower lids of each eye, forming tracks for the tiny bars vertically impaling the delicate white sacks of fluid, preventing them from any fleshly occlusion. First came the slowly widening incision of his lips into a smile. Then the chuff of a laugh.

            “Now who would go and do such a thing?” he posed to the white-lit, echoing vacancy…

 ***

            Aside from the baroque dreams, Tom’s was your typical haunting story: he’d killed a man, and now that man’s ghost was insisting on some type of reckoning. To be fair, Tom claimed not to know for sure that the man was dead because the crime had been committed in a hallucinatory whirl of drug-induced confusion. But it wasn’t long before he determined to settle that uncertainty once and for all by clambering down the river bank to see what he’d left to bake and putrefy in the late summer sun amid the weeds growing up through all that dried mud, reeking of decay, at the base of the crumbling, graffiti-marked monument towering over the brown, insalubrious waters of the Saint Mary's, from which would continue to emanate for a couple of months that invisible miasma, redolent of rotting fish, that only the coldest winters could cleanse from the air. But before I get into any of that I have to tell you about Marcus Friedman and why he was having me write this poor guy’s story.

            Marcus found me on LinkedIn. He’d been searching for a local writer when he came across my profile. After exchanging a few emails, we ended up meeting for the first time at Old Crown, a neat little bar and coffee roaster on Anthony Blvd, one of those painted cinderblock buildings with a ceiling of exposed ductwork. I was at a quaintly light-painted wooden table, admiring a two-page spread for iPads—“The experience of a product. Will it make life better? Does it deserve to exist?”—in the previous week’s New Yorker, when I glanced up and saw this huge rugby player masquerading as a businessman making giant, energetic strides toward my small, elevated table, which was then, at an unaccustomed hour for me, set off in a dull gilded aura by the last light of the day issuing meekly through the shop’s inconspicuous row of out-of-reach windows. Surging into that light, this athlete with a Caribbean air smiled a smile that was like its own dawn competing with the gloaming preview of tomorrow’s truer version. When he reached out his hand, I was surprised to see that it was human in scale, not much larger than mine.

            “Jim Conway?” he half questioned, half insisted. “I recognize you from your LinkedIn profile. Marcus Friedman.” He was already pulling back the opposite chair by the time I could gesture toward it. “God, I love this place,” he said, turning this way and that to devour the ambiance with his eyes, all the while making these big swirling and swimming gestures. “It’s so—warm—and intimate. Like we’re wrapped up in the residue of like a thousand great conversations.”

             I had to smile at this, though I hadn’t yet been able to get out a single word.

            Manifestly responding to my smile, he said, “Ah, but here I am throwing out metaphors to the metaphor master. Well, what do you think? What metaphor would you use for this place?” From a position leaning forward with his arms on the table, he leaned back slowly, draping his right arm over the back of his chair, authoritatively opening the exchange for my contribution. This was, after all, a job interview.

            “Well, Mr. Friedman—”

            “—Marcus, please.”

            “Well, Marcus, it would depend on the context and your goals. The idea of walking into a place and sensing past experiences—good times, stimulating conversations—that’s really intriguing. But if I were writing copy for Old Crown I’d stay away from the word ‘residue.’”

            He smiled his aspiringly solar smile, bringing both hands out over the table, showing me his palms, simultaneously offering me something—recognition, praise—and claiming my entire person. I was torn between wanting to allow myself to be drawn in by his energy and charisma and wanting to throw all that smarm back in his face. And he seemed to embody a mass of similar contradictions. What I’d thought at first was some kind of knit hat were actually dreadlocks, but arranged in a way that was somehow much more businesslike than my own give-a-care gladiator cut. That Caribbean air—he looked to be of largely African ancestry, but his skin had this gilded, gleaming pallor against which my own Scotch-Irish sallowness was as dull as day-old dairy. And most of the salesmen I know don’t have deltoids that strain the seams of their blazers.

            “This place,” I began, suddenly, inexplicably inspired, “this place is an old post-industrial warehouse where the last people on earth came together to ride out the apocalypse. Only that has been so long ago now nobody even remembers. It just feels like it’s been here forever—impossible to imagine a time when there was no Old Crown. The people who come to places like this—and there’s another one pretty similar to it just up the road here on Anthony—they don’t just want a cheap cup of coffee and an occasional beer or mixed drink. They want to try new things, like beer from some small town they’ve never heard of in Germany, or coffee made from beans grown in Papua New Guinea. The reason these coffee houses were built where they are is that our community college is only about a mile and a half from here. These people are educated—and for the first time they actually care how their goods are made. Next door is a health food shop where you can get locally grown poultry and produce. This place, unassuming as it as, represents the promise of a new economy—a sort of Capitalism 2.0. Look, right here on the wall next to us we see the work of local artists. In that room back there past the bathrooms, the one with the blue walls, book clubs meet there, writers’ groups, start-up charities, you name it. It’s not a big corporate chain like Starbucks, because we like places with local flavor. Through the exotic beers and coffees and conversation, we get this tiny window into far-flung regions of the globe. But the window’s built into the wall of what’s unmistakably our own house. We’ve been here all along, surviving the ravages of a less human, more predatory economy. The battle’s not over yet—not by a longshot. But places like this are the beginning. This place doesn’t need any metaphors, Mr. Friedman—Marcus—because this place is a symbol in its own right.”

            Marcus granted me the full dazzling radiance of his too-ready smile and shook his head in faux disbelief as he brought his hands together, once, twice, three times in big sweeps of his bulked-up arms. “And you just came up with that on the spot, huh? You got a gift, Jim. God damn it, you got a gift.” To signal that the preliminaries were over and we were getting down to business, he laid his forearms parallel to each other on the table in front of him and leaned toward me. “Do you know why I like you for this job?”

            “Ha! You haven’t even told me what this job is yet. You said in your emails you needed a content marketer who understood storytelling. You said you were looking for a copywriter who wanted to write novels and short stories. My response to that is you’d probably have a harder time finding one who doesn’t.”

            “I definitely need someone who has an ear for noticing things like residue being a poor choice of word. And I definitely need someone who can write awesome stories. But what you have that everyone else I’ve talked to lacks is optimism. No offense, but most of your fellow English majors are a bunch of pinko commie, whining feminazi fucktards who think the world started off shitty and just keeps getting worse because too few people are pinko feminist fucktards like them.”

            My failure to fully stifle the eruption of a belly laugh encouraged him to proceed. As he did, I realized he must’ve spent quite a bit of time on my blog—though I’m probably more of a pinko myself than he seemed able to glean—and that the interview had progressed from the portion in which Marcus was testing me to the one in which he would pitch me his idea.

            “And why,” I asked, “is it important for you to have someone who doesn’t think we should give up on capitalism—or on letting men roam around freely without gelding them?” 

            “It’s not just that,” he said, leaning back to liberate his untamed hands. “I want someone who will be as excited about my business as I am, someone who’s not afraid of money, who doesn’t think it’s evil or any other ridiculous nonsense like that.”

            Looking back, I realize the thought that occurred to me then—that any of my anti-capitalist collegiate colleagues would’ve made quick work of finding a way to justify taking in a little extra revenue, that I was hardly unique in that regard—should have sparked a wider suspicion. But, to retrospectively justify my own obtuseness, I was just too distracted trying to figure out what Marcus was about to try to sell me on trying to help him sell. Was he starting his own rugby league? Hosting a capoeira tournament?

            “Let me ask you a question, Jim,” he said frowning. After a pause to gather his thoughts—which led me to conclude the ensuing performance was something he’d rehearsed—he locked eyes with me and asked, “What do you think scares people most?”

            “For mothers of young children, it’s that their kids will come to harm. For everyone else, it’s humiliation.”

            “Whoa—ha ha. Thought about this before, huh?”

            I thoroughly enjoyed the brief fluster my ready answer produced in Marcus as he worked out how to segue back into his pitch.

            “Interesting that you jump to little children and their mothers,” he picked up at last. “See, I believe fear falls into two categories. One of them I guess you could say includes humiliation—it’s all the practical things we’re afraid of, the fight or flight type of stuff. But there’s another type of fear, closer to the one that had us running from our bedrooms to our parents’ rooms as kids. Now, Jim, I’m curious—do you really believe all that stuff you were saying about Capitalism 2.0?”

            “Well, for the most part, I do. I think the colloquial expression for what I was doing there is ‘laying it on thick.’”

            “Ha ha—fair enough. Now the second part of the question—what was wrong with the first version of capitalism?”

            “I suppose it was focused too exclusively on profits. Every other human concern got coopted and overridden. If 2.0 is going to work, it’ll be because we come up with ways to include other considerations in our business models—things like working conditions, environmental impacts, and consequences for local communities. Instead of subordinating everything to that one number—the profit—that number will have to incorporate a broader array of concerns.”

            “I couldn’t agree with you more, Jim. Businesses today can’t just exploit people’s weaknesses and desires—”

            “Well, a lot of them still do.”

            “But who wants to work like that? I’ll tell you, even the most ruthless Wall Street guy, you sit him down, and even though you and I agree he’s not doing anything but exploiting people, he’ll go on and on about how what he does benefits society.”

            “And how does your business benefit society?”

            Marcus drew himself up, his lips stretching slowly into a proud, fatherly smile. “Well, Jim, it’s like you said. What individuals do has an impact on the broader community. I’m basically in the entertainment industry, but the trend in entertainment is toward more and more personalized, more and more individualized experiences. We don’t go to the movies anymore. We watch Netflix. We don’t go to arcades anymore. We have Xboxes. We don’t even have conversations anymore. We post status updates and tweets. A growing number of people aren’t even going to church anymore. So what’s the impact on communities? What’s the fallout?”

            “Are you saying you want to scare people to bring them together, to foster a sense of community, and make money on it somehow? Please tell me you’re not asking me to help recruit people for a cult.”

            “No, no, not a cult. But in your answer to my question about what scares people you forgot about those kids the mothers are afraid will come to harm. What’s it like for them? You see what the purpose of that fear is for them—it’s to get them to run to their parents’ bedroom. And that second, less practical type of fear stays with us our whole lives too. And it serves the same purpose. I notice some of the most popular posts on your blog are ghost stories. Why do you think that is?”

            “Everybody enjoys a good ghost story—well, nearly everybody.”

            “Yeah, but why? Why would people go out of their way to be scared? I’ll tell you, I’ve been asking that question for a long time, and no one really has a good answer for it. But then I started looking at it from a different angle. You know how every fall you start hearing people—predominantly women—talking about pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks? You know how everyone gets excited when the leaves start to change colors? Well, what the hell are they excited about? Sure, the colors are spectacular and all. But what’s the next step? The leaves fall off man. Then the tree stands there, just a big stick in the mud all winter. Fall symbolizes death. Halloween is a time for reconnecting with dead loved ones. What comes next is cold and barren winter—so why do so many people love it all so much?”

            It was at this point that I acknowledged to myself I was finding what Marcus had to say really impressive. “People start thinking about death,” I answered, “and it makes them want to be closer to their loved ones, the ones who are still living. People get frightened of something that goes bump in the night and it makes them want to sleep closer to their parents or spouses. People want to tell scary stories around a campfire because it makes them all feel closer together. That’s why the guy in the movie who says ‘I’ll be right back’ always gets killed. The whole point is to huddle together. The whole point is community.”

            Marcus took this opportunity to ply me with some hyperbolic flattery, something to the effect that anyone who read my work could tell I was smart but seeing my mind work in real time… etc. Then, at long last, he came to his business idea. “We used to have these big harvest celebrations, but not many of us harvest anymore. Even when we do come together for things like football games and concerts, it’s not like we even know most of people in the crowd. Now, Mr. Conway, I’m inviting you to come in on the ground floor here, though I’ve already done quite a few proof-of-concept outings. It has to start with individuals—that’s where you come in. You’re going to hook them with the stories.”

            For the past six years, Marcus had been organizing camping trips to haunted houses every October for a little extra cash. It had started with a place in his hometown in Terra Haute. He and his friends had been going to this house to pitch their tents in the yard every year around Halloween going back to high school. They built campfires, rehearsed the story of the house, dared each other to go in—alone, of course—and bring something out from inside as proof. Everyone loved it. Whenever he talked about it to people outside his closest circle, they all but invariably said they would love to participate in something like that. Marcus’s eyes turned to dollar signs. First, the outings to the house in Terra Haute started getting bigger. Next, Marcus started scoping out other locations, usually no more than abandoned houses on isolated, modestly forested plots. Before long, he was planning months in advance for three separate expeditions on consecutive weekends.

            “Eighty bucks a head, and I supply the location, arrange things with neighbors and law enforcement, maybe throw in someone who can play guitar or hand drums. Most important, I supply the story. Jim, this is pure word-of-mouth so far, and no matter how hard I try I still end up turning a bunch of people down every year. So I finally decided, I’ve got some money saved up, I’m going to go big with this thing. As for the impact on the community, well, it’s just a step, just a little step, but who knows? If it catches on like I think it will, think of all the variations. Every season has its stories and rituals. So you get everyone you know together and share it. And without any of the hellfire or guilt-tripping or boring shit you get at church.”

            “You may run into some thorny dilemmas trying to mix commerce with what people consider sacred. But personally I think it’s a great idea. Whether it’s aboveboard or not, you’re paying for all the feast days and rituals at church too. At least this way it’s honest. You’re kind of branching the vacation industry out into the market for encounters with the supernatural—or at least the extra-mundane.”  

            “I need two things right now,” Marcus said, standing up from his chair. “I need new locations—I’m working on that as we speak. And I need stories—that’s where you come in. In the next couple of days, I’m going to be sending you contact info for a guy who’s had one of those encounters with the supernatural. What I want you to do—if you’re interested in partnering up with me—is talk to the guy, interview him. Bring something to record it if you need to, however you think it’ll work best. You write the story. We get it out there on social media and wherever else we can get people to listen. And then we sit back and watch this thing blow up.”

            I sat watching him make a production of how urgently he needed to get back on the road, assuming it was an element of his recruitment strategy. We shook hands to seal the partnership. As he was walking toward the front door, I called to him. “Marcus, one more question. These stories—are you envisioning them as more literary writings, or more marketing oriented? Because those two styles can end up being at odds.”

            His smile dawned one last time for the night. “That’s your department now. I only ask one thing—make sure it doesn’t sound cheap.”

 ***

            … A human mass beside him as he eased into consciousness set Tom to channeling through his memory of recent events until he decided it must be Ashley. Immediately, under his ribs, a humming warmth began to gather and flow outward, suffusing his limbs with an airy lightness as a thousand meager but incessant doubts, which dogged him even in sleep, blinked out of existence. His consciousness pulsed piece by piece to life in the still darkened room, like an athlete shaking his limbs into readiness before an event. With this stepwise return from oblivion came the intensifying awareness that he was experiencing the very sensation he’d determined to resist, this warm buzzing hollowness and weightless elation—that this was the very feeling he’d decided was the product of a deadly intoxicant. Pure poison. And with that unspoken word poison still echoing among his mist-cloaked thoughts there came a sharp pricking deep inside his nostrils, causing him to grimace and recoil into his pillow, jerking his face to one side then the other. It wasn’t Ashley sleeping next to him. It was someone who’d just smoked a menthol.

            Finding himself in the middle of the room, his hands held out to check the advance of any attacker, he glared down at the bed with its twisted sheets and undecipherable chaos of mounded folds and depressions, each heartbeat bulging under the skin of his temples, each jagged breath ruling out any hope of remaining quietly inconspicuous. He stood there long enough to calm his breathing before stepping forward and smoothing the comically disheveled sheets with his palms. What kept him from being able to reassure himself that the presence he’d sensed was no more than the remnant of a dream borne of his guilty conscience was that he couldn’t recall ever in his life having had a dream that featured a scent of any sort, much less one so recognizable and vividly real. It took him some time to fall asleep again, and when he did he had a perfectly conventional dream about being called before a court, the assembled judges looking over the tops of ridiculously tall and imposing podiums…

*** 

            “I feel like whatever I do or whatever I say it’s bound to be exactly the wrong thing,” Tom said. “It’s like she wants something from me but I never know what it is. Thing is, I don’t even think she knows what it is—what she really wants is for me to figure out what she wants and give it to her as a this perfect surprise. So I’m not only supposed to read her mind—I’m supposed to be able to read it so clearly I know more about what’s going to make her happy than she does. All the while, I’m thinking, does this chick even like me? All I get from her are signs of disapproval and disappointment.” He looked down at the table, shaking his head. “I hate that I’m still talking about it in the present tense.”

            Tom’s voice resonates with a soulfulness at odds with his general air of insouciance—which at times borders on impatience. He experiences his inner dramas in solitude. He’s around six foot tall, and at thirty-three still has a young athlete’s gleaming complexion. As he’s speaking, you have the sense that he’s at once minutely aware of your responses—even anticipating those you’ve yet to make—and prejudiced in favor of some other activity or exchange he could be engaged in, almost as if he’d already participated in several conversations exactly like the one you were currently having. There’s a softness to the flesh around his eyes, but his eyebrows rise outward in subtle curves that create an illusion of severe peaks. The combined effect is of a sympathetic man restraining some bound up energy, perhaps harboring some unspoken rage, one of those generally kind people you know at a glance not to get on the wrong side of. Or maybe these impressions were based on what I already knew. Even through his somewhat loose work shirt you could see his workouts went beyond the simple cardio routines he spoke of to me.

            He was telling me about why he and Ashley had broken up. “We were always at loggerheads, like there was some unresolved issue keeping her from opening up to me—or like I’d done something to really piss her off. That’s what it felt like anyway. But no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t figure out what I’d done, and she wasn’t about to tell me. Once in a while, I’d get pissed off myself—I couldn’t stand her always being ready to go off, having that vague disapproval of hers hanging over my head all the time. We’d have these knockdown-drag-out arguments. I never got physical. Though she hit me and pushed me around quite a bit. For her, I kept getting the sense that it was these arguments that were the deal-breaker. They were pretty intense, and toward the end they were happening pretty often too. But I kept thinking, you know, we can’t work out whatever our issue is if we don’t talk about it, and every time we tried to talk about it we ended up arguing. It’s probably my fault. I always felt like she was just being so unfair so I ended up losing my temper and the next thing you know we’re not talking to each other.”

            Tom and Ashley had been planning on moving in together, at the apartment Tom lives in now, when their final blowup occurred. They had been leaving Henry’s, a low-key old bar on Main Street known for being classier than any of the hole-in-the-wall establishments that predominate in that area, walking back to what was then Tom’s apartment, a one-bedroom on Rock Hill, when two skater kids saw fit to shout a couple of obscenities at them from across the street. “To this day, I can’t figure out why she did it,” Tom told me. “She must’ve already been really pissed off about something—but, if she was, I hadn’t noticed it. And we’d just been talking inside the bar for like an hour.” Ashley had heard the first two or three insults care of the young skaters (an honorary term, since neither had a board) and then stopped to turn toward them. “The weird thing was, I’d never seen that expression on her face before. She had this gleam—it was almost like she was smiling.”

            “Hey,” she shouted back to them. “I know you two.” They stopped, turned, and took a couple of steps back to get a better look at her and hear what she was about to say. “I met these girls who pointed you guys out a while back. They said they tried to date you but you were just too horrible in bed. They said you didn’t know how to fuck.”

            “Ashley, what the hell are you doing?”

            “You must have the wrong guys, cunt. If you want, I’ll show you how I can fuck right now.” The taller of the two kids started walking with these clown-shoe strides toward them, leaning back with his shoulders even as he thrust his hips forward, bobbing his head, and flailing his arms to puff out his elbows. That he was so lanky and dressed in that faux unfashionable apparel that’s so fashionable now—shaved head, wife-beater undershirt, testicle compressing jeans—made it easier for Tom to reserve enough mental space to marvel at Ashley, and to wonder what could possibly have gotten into her, while all but ignoring the threat.

            “Listen guys,” he started to say before Ashley began again.

            “Yeah, they said it was mostly because you both have really tiny dicks. But of course it doesn’t help that you’re illiterate retards.”

            The bald guy actually stopped in the middle of Main Street to look back at his friend, as if expecting to see him doubled over with laughter at the joke he was playing on his buddy. But this guy was looking straight ahead toward Ashley, taking his hands out of his pockets and moving a step forward. “What the fuck Ashley!” Tom shouted, stepping in front of her, glancing quickly at each of the skater kids’ hands to see if they were reaching for weapons.

            “Yeah, Ashley, what the fuck?” the lanky one said, moving forward again. “Now we’re going to have to fuck up Tinker Bell here and have a chat to find out who’s been spreading these lies about us.”

            Tom turned around to see Ashley backing away. “Even then I swear I saw her grinning.” There was nothing behind them but an empty parking lot. Turning back toward the guy in the wife-beater as he backpedaled, Tom said, “Listen man, I’m not sure why she’s trying to mess with you but there’s no reason for either of us to fuck up our lives. Broken teeth. Broken hands. I see cop cars parked here all the time.”

            Now that the guy was charging toward him, Tom saw that he wasn’t sixteen, as he’d looked from across the street, but probably closer to his mid-twenties. His pocked, roughly shaved face and filthy clothes revealed him to be not the child of privilege given to slumming he’d appeared from a distance, but something closer to a skinny, drug-addled convict. “Hey, don’t worry Tinker Bell,” he said, lifting his hands. “It’s just your life we’re going to fuck up. And we’ll be long gone with Ashley here by the time any cops come around.”

            Tom, halting abruptly in his retreat, stepped forward, planting his weight on his right foot before swinging his left leg around in a wide loop and burying the blade of his shin in the boy convict’s thigh, turning and folding him backward like a three-section chaise lounge caught in a torrent of wind. As he collapsed, the convict reached out the arm he’d raised to throw a punch, catching Tom’s collar and pulling him forward. Tom lunged forward, thrusting up with his right knee, blasting it into his assailant’s solar plexus and sending them both tumbling to the asphalt. Taking advantage of the convict’s panic at being struck so hard and knocked from his upright position, Tom made ready and timed a right elbow to coincide with their collision against the asphalt. He threw it with a twisting force gathered from the entire length of his body down to his toes, landing it on the guy’s temple the instant his shoulders hit the ground, feeling that sort of crisp resonating bat-on-ball crack of elbow against temple so familiar to him even though he’d never personally produced it before.

            The boy convict went immediately limp, but his fingers were still wrapped in Tom’s collar. As Tom sat back, pushing the arm aside, sliding a foot into position to push himself back up to his feet, he felt the brutal ax blade of a foot wedging itself into the left side of his torso, lifting him up off his one planted knee. The shock of the blow made everything flash white. Following some vague instinct, Tom rolled onto his back and rotated his body on the asphalt to get his feet between him and this second attacker. This man, whose appearance Tom wouldn’t be able to remember at all, ended up awkwardly forfeiting the brief opening afforded him by his landed shot because, having rushed so frantically to the aid of his fallen comrade, he’d managed to upset his own balance in delivering the kick and was thus forced to scramble after the man he’d just injured in a clumsy attempt to ensure he’d sustained enough damage to render him incapable of any further defense.

            “I would say I threw a triangle on him,” Tom said of the final moments of this seconds-long confrontation, “but it seemed more like he just moved right into it on his own.” As the guy crawled over Tom’s legs so he could climb atop, pin his torso to the ground and pummel him, he quickly found his own torso pinched and immobile. Tom had hooked his right leg over the man’s shoulder, his calf clamped down across the back of the guy’s neck. Reaching up with his hand, Tom tucked his right foot in the crook of his left knee, trapping the man’s head and one of his arms in the constrictive frame of his legs. “I didn’t just choke him out right away like I would have in training. I was so freaked out that these guys were actually attacking us that I wanted to make sure I did some damage. So before really sinking the choke I bloodied up his face pretty good. By then the first guy was trying to stand up on his chicken legs, and I just wanted to get Ashley the hell out of there.

            “I grabbed her wrist and we ran—and I swear I heard her laughing. Once we were a few blocks away and the two skater kids—who were actually more like meth heads as far as I could tell—as soon as we had some houses and buildings between us, I couldn’t help it. I just whipped around and started yelling at her. I mean, I was fucking pissed. At first, she was looking up at me with this dazed look, like she was drunk, or high, or like she’d just been having a fucking ball. But as I explained to her that I’d just given that guy a severe concussion, plus whatever I’d done to his leg—as I’m shouting at her that we were lucky as hell to get away without me getting mauled half to death and worse happening to her, she just starts wilting before my eyes.

            “Pretty soon she’s in tears and I’m starting to notice the little stabbing pain in my ribs. When we finally got to my apartment, she just went straight to her car without saying a word, got in, and drove away. I didn’t hear from her for two days. On the third day, she finally responded to a text asking her to call. She said she couldn’t move in with me, that she didn’t think it could ever work between us. She broke up with me over the phone. I wanted to plead with her to give me an explanation for why she’d done it, why she’d provoked those guys. And I wanted her to explain too what the hell it was she’d wanted that whole time, our whole relationship, that I wasn’t giving her. What had I done to piss her off so damn much? But the call was over before I could say any more. That was it. I moved in to this place by myself.”

 ***

            Tom didn’t have any blood in his eye. He’d begun taking taekwondo at age thirteen from a pear-shaped, middle-aged Korean man who barely spoke English. Then at sixteen he’d transferred high schools and found a place he liked better that was closer to home. Here he learned from a diminutive blue-collar, country-music American with an amateur kickboxing record of 40-2 who’d learned karate from a grand master while stationed with the air force in Japan and Wing Chun from a Chinese man he’d partnered with in the states so they could open their own school. This was all in the 90s. When Tom and his friends saw their first Ultimate Fighting Championship toward the end of the decade, they couldn’t understand why experts in so many different styles were having such a hard time with the skinny and boyish-looking Brazilian named Royce Gracie.

            Before long, they were doing whatever they could to teach themselves Brazilian jujitsu, staying after class at their kickboxing school to practice grappling and submissions, much to their teacher’s consternation. By a few months later, they’d found a guy closer to their own age who traveled around to attend seminars in jujitsu and submission wrestling, and he was looking for guys to train with. They rented a backroom usually reserved for aerobics classes and split the cost of some wrestling mats. A couple years later, they found another guy, one who taught Muay Thai, the style of Thai kickboxing that fighters had the most success with in mixed martial arts competitions, out of a rundown former office building. It had been this guy who’d first taught Tom how to throw leg kicks, knees, and elbows like the ones that would save Ashley and him from their mauling or worse outside Henry’s all those years later.

            Tom discovered he had no blood in his eye after his first and only full-contact fight in the ring. He took a beating nearly the entire five minutes of the first round but landed a big head kick fifteen seconds before the bell—a blow that made his opponent go horrifically rigid before sending him toppling over like a concrete statue, his arms remaining freakishly extended in front of him even after he hit the canvas, bounced, and came to a rest. Tom stood horror-struck. He knew right then he would never step in a ring or octagon or anything else like that again. When he told Mark, one of his best friends back in his corner, that he wouldn’t be pursuing a fight career anymore, Mark responded, “Yeah, we all kind of already knew you never had any blood in your eye,” and went on to explain that was an old boxing expression for fighters who had a hard time overcoming their reluctance to hurt anyone. Tom went on to help a few of his friends prepare for fights, but over time he attended training sessions with diminishing frequency until he was done with marital arts altogether and doing more pacific exercise routines on his own.

            Tom’s single venture into the ring occurred two years after he’d earned his degree in communications at IPFW, which is the affectionate acronym locals apply to the joint satellite campus for Indiana and Purdue Universities in Fort Wayne. Throughout college, he’d delivered pizzas for a place called East of Chicago. After graduating, he moved on to a local franchise called The Munchie Emporium, which had three locations in the city and a reputation for employing and serving hippies and stoners. All the servers and kitchen people Tom worked with were either in a band or had a boyfriend who was. He would go on to remark of his time there, “It was like a second education after college. Everyone was sleeping with everyone else. The whole back of the house was usually taking breaks to pass around a bowl or a joint. The whole front of the house was taking turns going to the bathrooms to do lines off the back of the toilet. So all the servers and bartenders are tweaking and all the cooks are mellowed out. I can’t say I really fit in, but I was having a fucking great time.”

            After it became clear to him that he was never going to be a professional fighter and that he didn’t want to serve and bartend for the rest of his life, Tom decided to go back to IPFW and attend the MBA program that had recently been instituted there. It was as he was nearing completion of his master’s that he began an internship with the three-person marketing department at a web design and custom software company called EntSol (an abbreviation of Enterprise Solutions). Tom finished graduate school, became a project clarity specialist at EntSol, and started dating Ashley, who was working at one of the other Munchies stores across town from the one where he’d worked (though none of them were called Munchies anymore by then), all within the same two-month period. The PCS position, which had him serving as a liaison between EntSol’s tech people and the clients, didn’t really appeal to him. So he decided to take a pay cut and return to the marketing team, where he’s still working on strategy, testing, and analytics—all the stuff that drives copywriters like me a little crazy. He said Ashley was generally supportive, though she let him know she didn’t understand what he found so distasteful about the PCS gig. “You have to do what makes you happy, regardless of the money,” she’d told him. “But I think you could have given it more of a chance.”

 ***

            Tom said he believed the dreams were leading up to something, or trying to tell him something. What he needed, he confided to me, was some form of penance—but then he wasn’t even sure if he’d actually committed any crime. Somehow, notwithstanding his uncertainty, he was convinced the dreams were pointing the way for him. One particular dream I wrote up would end up being of particular importance in this regard:

            …Tom was on one of the nightly walks he’d started taking after moving in to his new apartment alone, whenever he felt like the walls were moving in on him, whenever he feared the heartbreak would suffocate him, whenever he got too antsy from missing workouts as his broken ribs healed. In keeping with the bizarre logic of dreams, he approached the spot on Thieme Drive as if it held no special significance whatsoever, the same spot he passed almost every night for over a month, the spot where the powdery golden light of a streetlamp was split by a thin wedge of darkness edged by an old oak tree standing a few feet away, right between the post and the sidewalk. As he was passing through the wedge, past the three square steps rising away from the tree and along a fenced-in walkway up to a house atop a rise, an aberrant blue light flashed in his periphery, bringing him to a halt. The steps form the base of a nook enclosed by a low-roofed, maroon-painted garage on the left, a wooden crosshatched fence on the right, and the always latched gate at the top. Tom had always grinned passing between the oak and the little nook it cast into almost perfect darkness, thinking it was the ideal spot for someone to hide in ambush for lonely night amblers like him.

            Now he stood examining a gleaming cluster of tiny blue flowers rising up out of an orange ceramic pot positioned square in the middle of the step midway up to the gate, trying to discern the source of the illumination—though it appeared as though it was the flowers themselves giving off the glow—and wondering why anyone would leave them in the middle of this staircase. After a few moments, he could no longer resist stepping forward to examine the flowers. He lifted the pot and turned with it to bring it closer to the oak tree. Sure enough, it continued to give off the blue glow, mesmerizing him into tightly focused oblivion, until he heard a voice, vaguely familiar, demanding to know what he was doing.

            Still transfixed by the flowers, he began to say he was simply appreciating the wondrous phenomenon of the blue glow—like open-air bioluminescence—when he heard the sourceless voice muttering something that sounded like a name, as if the woman—yes, it was a woman’s voice for sure—were addressing someone else, and her tone carried an unmistakable note of impatience. Tom finally broke the trance and turned one way, then the other, scanning for the woman whose voice he’d heard. Most of the house was hidden from view by the fence and a hedge running along the inside of it, but he could see that the front door, lit dimly yellow by a porch light, was sealed and inert. Hearing the muttered, indecipherable name again, he turned looking first toward the far end of the garage, and then farther up the sidewalk and the street that it ran alongside. Before his feet caught up with his side-turned eyes, a shout like an explosion of rage sent him stumbling backward. Fumbling with the flowerpot, he tripped on a sidewalk section pushed up by one of the darkening oak’s roots and began to fall.

            But he didn’t land on the sidewalk. He landed in mud, which was redolent of putrescence. Now with a firm hold of the pot, he started to sit up, and he knew immediately where he was—down by the river across the street from the sidewalk, and down the steep, tree-strewn bank, two blocks up from the oak-shaded nook, at the base of the concrete overlook adjacent to the Main Street Bridge over the Saint Mary's. He knew immediately too that the bioluminescent flowers were no longer in the pot he was holding clasped to his stomach. Desperation overtook him. He had to find those flowers and return them to the pot. Setting the pot aside, he got to his feet, darting glances frantically in all directions. The blue light, he thought. Just look for the blue light. How can you possibly miss it?

            As soon as he stood still for a moment, he noticed a faint glow emanating from around the curved base of the overlook. For some reason, his desperation now turned to apprehension, but he stepped forward to investigate, hoping to find the lost luminescent flowers. Rounding the base of the monument, he had no trouble seeing where they now grew. Tom saw first the light, then the myriad sprouting star-burst petals, and finally the half buried, half rotted human body whose head they were clustered about. The terror didn’t seize him instantly, but rather crept upon him as he approached. As he drew nearer to the body, he could discern the angles of the crowded, tangled stems, right down to where their roots had discovered a new source for their sustenance.

            The left side of the man’s face had decayed down to the skull, but much of the flesh had been replaced by grayish mud that resembled the decomposing skin on the other side. Tom leaned down to see if it would be possible to extricate the roots without disrupting the body—without touching it—but saw that the left eye, partially caked over with mud, partially glaring back at him with that familiar black, empty-socket skull’s glare, had somehow allowed the central stem of a large cluster of glowing blue flowers to grow up from its hollowed depths. Tom had brought himself back to his full height and taken two steps back from the corpse before consciously registering the repugnance and terror which were propelling him away. His awareness of his own intensifying panic grew simultaneously with the dawning realization that he was dreaming. As he hauled himself up from the muddy riverbank and into consciousness, the brightening glow of the flowers merged with the light of the morning sun seeping in through the breaking seal of his lids.

            “Blue lobelias,” he muttered as he sat up in his fully lit bedroom.  

Encounters, Inc. Part 2 of 2

The Smoking Buddha: Another Ghost Story for Adults (and Young Adults too)

            My nephew and three of the kids from the old neighborhood were telling raunchy jokes around the steel mesh fire pit the night of my brother and soon-to-be sister-in-law’s Halloween party. All night, I kept shaking my head in disbelief at the fact that they were all almost old enough to get their driver’s licenses. I used to babysit my nephew during the summers back when I was in college. Let’s just say at the time all these kids had a ways to go before they were teenagers.

            What they were laughing at now were some jokes at the expense of an overweight girl they all knew from school. I had a feeling they were playing up the viciousness because they thought it would make them seem more grownup in my eyes. The jokes were so mean I was sitting there wondering how best to get through to them that I didn’t really care for this brand of humor (though I admit I struggled not to laugh at a couple points, restricting myself to a wry smirk).

            “You guys are being pretty ruthless,” I said finally. “Do you think she deserves all that? I mean, you assume it’s okay because she’ll never hear what you’re saying. But I’d bet real money she would be able to recite back to you quite a few of the really good jokes you think she’s never heard.”

            This suggestion received a surprising and not altogether heartening response, the gist of which was that this poor girl did in fact deserve to be made the butt of their cruel jokes. After all, she did

choose to eat too much, they pointed out. She also chose to sit around being lazy instead of exercising. They even suggested that their heckling could possibly give her some added incentive to change her ways.

            “Uh-ho!” I erupted in incredulous laughter. “I get it—you guys aren’t picking on her because her flaws make you feel better about your own. No, you’re picking on her because you want to help her.” They fell momentarily silent. “You guys are such humanitarians.”

            Before long, the mood leavened once again, and I began to wonder if I’d been too harsh, my efforts to temper my moralizing with sarcasm notwithstanding. But not two minutes later the snide, and now defiant, references to the overweight girl began to sneak back into their banter. I decided my best bet was to leave them to it, and so I got up from the log I’d been sitting on uncomfortably and went into the house to get a beer and see what the old people (some of whom are younger than me) were doing.

            As I stood in the kitchen alongside the table where several people in costumes were playing a trivia game (which I’m no longer allowed to play with them), I considered bringing up the issue of the mean jokes about the obese girl to my brother. The thought had barely entered my mind before I dismissed it though; the only thing worse than a moralizer is a rat. Plus, I wasn’t exactly one to be pointing the finger, I realized, as I had just that morning been cursing my neighbor, who lives in the carriage house behind my apartment, because she’s always sitting on her porch smoking, coughing loudly at predictable intervals, often blaring music through an open window, shouting into her phone to her mother and her lone friend, completely oblivious to how many people in the vicinity can hear her every word, and, well, just being an all-around irksome presence. I also must confess my own impulse is to look at her with some revulsion. Because she’s terribly obese.

*******

            I returned to the backyard and found the boys still at the fire, laughing at each other’s failed attempts at telling a passable ghost story. It wasn’t long before they started reminding me of all the times back in the days when I babysat them that I either read ghost stories to them, or else spun some ridiculously elaborate ones of my own. They pleaded with me to tell them a good one. “We know you know some,” they pressed. “Tell us the best one you can think of.”

            “It just so happens I know a story about some stuff that actually happened pretty recently,” I said. They all turned toward me with eager grins. “This guy I know named Zach lives in an apartment in an old house downtown, a lot like the place I live in, and one night he brings a woman home with him from a bar. Now this is really good news for Zach because he’s been down on his luck lately. He used to live in a ginormous yuppie mansion up closer to this part of town. But then like a year ago the recession caught up to his company and he got laid off. He’d bought the house and a lot of other stuff on credit, so right away he was in trouble. And, on top of losing his house, his fiancé had just up and left him for another guy. So Zach moves into to this cheap one-bedroom apartment in West Central. As you can imagine, he’s not feeling too good about himself.

            “After a while he manages to get a part-time job. Before getting laid off he used to work as a big shot sales guy for a tech company, so one of the hardest parts about finding another job was having to accept working in a less prestigious position. The part-time gig he got was only temporary—he was helping put together contracts for a bank or something—but he was hoping to get a foothold and turn it into something that would get his career back on track.

            “So one night he brings this woman home—and it’s only like the second person he’s dated since his fiancé left him. Things are going well, you know. They start off talking on the couch, lots of eye-contact, the reach-over-and-brush-aside-the-hair deal, hand on her shoulder, cups the back of her neck, pulls her in for the kiss. I’m sure you guys know all about how that stuff works. So they’re kissing for a while, and then she says, ‘Maybe you should show me your bedroom.’ Well, he’s actually embarrassed about his whole tiny and rickety apartment, so he’d rather leave the lights off and not show her anything. But of course he’s about to get laid so it doesn’t take him very long to get over it.

            “They get up from the couch and he leads her by the hand through his embarrassingly dirty kitchen and into his bedroom. Once inside the door, he decides not to bother with the light switch. He just wraps his arms around her and they start making out again. They make their way over to the bed, and, you know, now things are getting hot-and-heavy. Her shirt comes off, then her bra. Zach’s having himself a really good time because, if you can believe what he says, the girl’s got really nice… well, you guys can use your imaginations. Then he’s sitting back on his knees starting to take his own shirt off when he hears a sound. It’s this kind of squeaky ‘ehuh-ehuhm.’

            “Zach knows exactly what it is. He stops in the middle of taking off his shirt to close his eyes and shake his head as he’s heaving this big sigh. Of course, the woman is like, ‘Are you okay? What’s the matter?’ He tries to brush it off and keep things moving along. So he gets his shirt off and starts kissing her again, and, you know, other stuff. Then he sits back and starts unbuckling her belt, and that’s when he hears it again: ‘ehuh-ehuhm.’ This time she hears it too, which is kind of a disaster. ‘What is that?’ she says. So Zach’s like, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Don’t worry.’ He goes back to unbuckling her belt, unbuttons her pants, zipper comes down, and she starts doing that little wiggle with her hips to help him get her jeans off. But before he gets them down, they hear the sound again: ‘Ehuh-ehuhm.’

            “This time he just flips. He jumps out of bed, like, ‘Goddamnit!’ He goes over to the window that looks down on the little yard behind the house and the carriage house apartment behind it. And there she is. Cheryl, his neighbor, sitting at the little table she’s set up on her porch with its neat little patterned table cloth lit up by the single orange bulb in the lamp next to her front door, smoking her cigarette, and looking so completely vacant he’s sure he could run up to her, smack her in the face, and be halfway back to the front door of the house before she even got around to saying, ‘Hey, what was that for?’ Cheryl, who emerged from the carriage house to smoke every twenty-five minutes like clockwork. Cheryl, whose neck and face were so fat she may as well have been holding her head in place with a big pillow. And, as Zach is glaring at her through his upstairs window, she makes the sound again, ‘ehuh-ehuhm,’ the cough that comes at such regular intervals, each repetition sounding so perfectly identical to the all the others, that he imagines it coming from a synthesizer set on a timer.

            “He’s getting ready to lift open his window so he can yell down to her to show some fucking courtesy—it’s after midnight!—when the woman in his bed starts saying, ‘You know, it’s getting really late,’ and all those things women say when the natural progression has been interrupted and they’ve had too much time to think about what they’re doing. So Zach tries to be cool and hands her her bra and walks her out to her car, saying he’ll call her and all that. But he knows the moment is past and his chances are shot. He climbs the stairs, feeling totally defeated, and goes back to his room, where he stands at the window again, just glowering down at Cheryl as she sits smoking in the orange light of her porch, mindlessly lifting her cigarette to her lips.”

            “Let me guess—he kills her.”

            “Shut up and let him tell the story.”

            “Well, he definitely wanted to kill her. You should have heard the way he talked about this woman. I mean he loathed her. He called her the Smoking Buddha because of the totally blank look she always had on her big doughy face. I guess one of the other things she did to annoy him was talk on her phone while she was on the porch smoking. Apparently, she was so loud he could hear just about every word even when his windows were shut. Anyway, one time he overheard her talking to like three different people about how she’d had some kind of panic attack and gone to the emergency room because she thought she was dying. And he was like, ‘You know who pays for it when people like that go to the emergency room? We do. She probably just got winded from lifting her fat ass out of her recliner and freaked out.’

            “Now Zach used to be one of those political guys who think everyone who can’t pay their own bills is just lazy and looking for a handout. Since losing his job, he’s calmed down a bit, but somehow his neighbor managed to get him talking about parasites and worthless slugs and drains on society and all that again. He said over half the phone conversations she broadcasted over the neighborhood were about her health problems. So he’s like, ‘Get off your fat ass and stop eating so much pizza and I bet you feel a lot better—and stop costing us so much in your fucking healthcare bills.’

            “The other thing that pissed him off was that he’d actually tried to get the carriage house a while back. The rent was like thirty bucks less than he was paying for his upstairs apartment, but the place was really cool. He’d gone in to check it out when the girls who lived there before Cheryl were moving out. When he called the landlord, though, he found out that Cheryl had set up a special deal. She and her mom were going to redo all the landscaping in the backyard and get a bit taken off the rent. Of course, the only person Zach ever saw doing any actual work in the yard over the next couple months was the mom. Cheryl just sat there at the little table on her porch, smoking and complaining about all her medical problems.

            “Now, I’ve checked out the backyard Cheryl’s mom worked on for the first half of the summer. The weeds and brush have been cleared away from the hedges. She lined the edges of the grass with stones and put mulch all around the trees. It looks really nice. There’s a sidewalk that goes from the front of the house back to the carriage house and around to an alley behind it. To the left of the sidewalk as you’re walking to the alley, there’s about ten feet of mulch before the hedge. The weird thing is, Cheryl’s mom, who is completely normal by the way, judging from the few times I saw her back there working, she made what I think is a flowerbed right in the middle of the mulch. It’s rectangular and its sides are made up of what look like these tiny headstones. They each poke out of the ground, grayish-white, their tops angled at the corners but curved up in half circles in the middle. There are seven of them on the sides parallel to the sidewalk, and four on the perpendicular sides. So it’s like there’s a six by two and a half foot rectangle of fresh black dirt in the middle of the mulch. The one and only time I ever talked to Cheryl’s mom I jokingly asked her if there wasn’t a body buried in that flowerbed. She jokingly refused to reassure me.

            “Even more, um, interesting, is the statue she has stationed at the back corner of the flowerbed. You can only see its back and some of its profile from Zach’s upstairs window, but coming from the alley you see it’s a cement satyr—they teach you ignorant wretches any mythology in school?—standing with one hand limp at his side, and the other raised to stroke his beard. I think it’s supposed to look relaxed and playful, but maybe because it’s like two and half feet tall—you know, the dimensions are all wrong—its breeziness comes across as mischievous, even a bit sinister. It’s still there. I’ll have to have you guys over to my apartment sometime so we can walk over and I’ll show it to you. You’ll see that it looks like it’s been out in the weather for decades, with mossy blotches and patches of gray. She must have moved it from some other yard.

            “Anyway, there’s an even smaller statue of an angel cupping her hands in front of her beside Cheryl’s front door. There’s nothing scary about that one—just a kind of yard ornament you don’t see very often anymore. Oh, and there’s also this tiny maple tree, maybe four or five feet tall, a little off to one side from Cheryl’s neat little porch arrangement. I just remember that tree because come late September and all through October, its leaves have been this shocking, bright red—almost glowing. It’s actually pretty cool looking.

            “Back to Zach’s story, though. So it’s about the middle of the summer now and he goes to work one day and tries to talk to some of the management figures about the possibility of going full-time and getting a raise. Unfortunately, they tell him instead that once the projects he’s working on now are done, sometime around Christmas, they won’t have any more work for him. Zach tries to take this in stride and starts planning in his mind how he’s going to devote all his free time to looking for another job, a better one. But of course he’s really worried that he’s going to end up working at a gas station or something—and even those types of jobs aren’t guaranteed anymore. To make matters worse, when his work’s done for the day, he goes out to the parking lot, gets in his car, and it won’t start.

            “Now the stress is almost too much, but he just closes his eyes and tries to take some deep breaths. The building he works in is downtown, so it’s like a twenty-five minute walk to his apartment. The whole way he’s trying psych himself out, telling himself all that self-help, bootstrappy crap about how every setback is actually an opportunity, every challenge a chance to develop character and perseverance. They probably give you guys a lot of the same crap at school. I’ll just say Zach was realizing for the first time that perseverance and determination—they only go so far. At some point, no matter how hard you work, the luck factor takes over.

             “This is what he’s thinking about when he’s walking past the carriage house behind his apartment, coming from the alley, and hears dishes crashing inside. He walks around to the front to peek in the window, and there’s Cheryl on the floor in the kitchen, both hands on her throat like she’s choking. Zach steps away. His first thought is that he has to hurry up and call an ambulance. Then he figures that will take too long—he needs to run inside and give her the Heimlich. But he finds himself just standing there doing nothing. He can’t imagine anything worse than having to wrap his arms around that sweaty woman. He says to himself his arms probably aren’t long enough anyway. And he actually laughs. So this woman is inside choking to death and he’s standing there chuckling at a lame fat joke.

            “Finally, as soon as his mind returns to the internet job-searching tasks he’s got lined up in his mind, which he’s been telling himself he’d jump right on the second he got home, he manages to convince himself that he probably didn’t really see anything too out of the ordinary. She probably just tripped or something. He figured he ought to mind his own business and forget whatever he happened to see through her window anyway. And that’s just what he does. He turns around, walks to the door to his apartment, goes upstairs, gets on his computer, and spends the next several hours online looking through job listings.

            “The crazy thing is he actually forgot all about having seen Cheryl on the floor—at least until that night. He’d been asleep for a long time, so he had no idea what time it was. But there was the sound, the ‘ehuh-ehuhm,’ the cough. He remembered it because even though it woke him up in the middle of the night he was still sort of relieved to hear it. Zach’s not a horrible person, you know. He was mostly just having a horrible day. Anyway, he didn’t want to have to think that the poor woman had died because he’d just walked away.

            “He gets out of bed and goes to the window. Sure enough, Cheryl is sitting at her little table and smoke is hanging in the air all around her. The orange light from the lamp behind her is making the big blob of her outline glow, but everything else is in shadow. For several moments, he can’t resist filling in the shadows with the imagined features of a giant orange toad. Then, as he’s standing there, he shivers and feels chills spreading over his back. He can’t tell, but it looks like Cheryl is looking right back up at him—something he’s never seen her do before. She’s always seemed so oblivious to all her neighbors. The more convinced he becomes that she is in fact staring at him, glaring at him even, not even moving enough to take another drag off the cigarette in her hand, the farther he finds himself backing away from the window in tiny shuffling steps.

            “It freaks him out so much it takes him forever to fall back to sleep. But eventually he does, and the morning comes. Of course, he has to walk to work in the morning because his car is still dead in the parking lot. He’s a little uneasy as he’s walking along the sidewalk, around the carriage house toward the alley, trying to keep his eyes forward and not notice anything that might be going on through the windows. But then he turns the corner into the alley and there’s a fucking ambulance parked right outside the carriage house. Zach thinks Cheryl must have choked to death after all, but then he remembers he saw her outside smoking in the middle of the night. He ends up just putting his head down and walking past, rushing to work.”

            “Ooh, creepy. Did this really happen?”

            “Just let him tell it.”

            “When he gets off work later that day, he calls his landlord Tom to see if he’s heard anything. Sure enough, the ambulance was there for Cheryl—who’d choked to death the day before. Now Zach is so freaked out he doesn’t want to walk back home because he doesn’t want to go anywhere near that carriage house again. And this is when all sorts of weird stuff started happening to him. I didn’t hear about it until just a few days ago because I stopped hearing from him at all for a long time. But that day he walked home trying to tell himself that either she hadn’t been choking when he saw her but had choked later, or that he’d dreamt the whole thing about seeing her outside looking up at him. When he gets to the alley, he decides to walk the little extra distance to the road so he can get to the house from the front.

            “As you can imagine, he goes on to have a few sleepless nights. But then, maybe three or four days later, he was distracted enough by his work and his fruitless job searching to wander into the alley again on his way home. Naturally, he tenses up when he realizes he’s passing the carriage house, and he can’t help staring at the place as he’s going around it. He’s staring at it so intently by the time he’s in the backyard where the table is still situated between two chairs on the porch, with its neat little table cloth topped with an overfull ashtray, he doesn’t notice that he’s not alone. When he finally turns his head back to the sidewalk, he’s almost nose-to-nose with an older woman. Jumping backward, he ends up tripping over one of the tiny headstones edging the still empty flowerbed and falls right on his ass in the middle of the rectangle. The woman walks over to look down at him, and he sees it’s Cheryl’s mom. But she doesn’t say anything to him. She just stands there beside the statue of the satyr, muttering something he can’t make out. And Zach’s so startled he just lies there braced up on his elbows in the dirt. Now, this is where it gets really freaky—as she’s standing over him, sort of talking under her breath, he swears the sun, which has been out all day, suddenly got blocked by a cloud. So everything gets darker and then these huge gusts of wind start blowing in the trees and scattering leaves all around.

            “Now, when I saw this woman, she looked completely normal. A bit overweight, like most middle-aged people you see around here. Nothing like her daughter. And I usually saw her in jeans and sweatshirts. She had long hair, somewhat gray. She’s actually hard to describe just because you see so many women just like her every day. But right then she was scaring the hell out Zach. After a few minutes of being in a sort of trance, he says he started to stand up while she just turned and walked away toward the front door of the carriage house, still not saying a word to him.”

            “Oh man, is this guy still alive?”

            “He just said he talked him a few days ago, moron.”

            “Maybe he talked to his ghost—ooOOoo.”

            “Seriously, I want to hear what happened after that. How long ago was this?”

            “It was in the middle of September. But you guys are going to have to wait a couple minutes to hear the rest because I have to piss and get another beer. All this yammering is making me parched.”

            “Ha ha, Yammering!”

*******

            After the intermission, we were all back on our logs and lawn chairs, and a few more people were milling around. When one of the boys explained I’d been telling a ghost story, there was a brief discussion about whether or not someone should go over the highlights of the story so far. But then my brother chimed in, assuring everyone, “If it’s any good, he’ll write the whole thing up for his blog tomorrow.” So most of the newcomers wandered away or only listened with one ear from a distance.

             “So let me guess,” one of the boys said, “the Smoking Buddha comes up out of the flowerbed grave and belly flops on him.”

            “No, Zach never saw the Smoking Buddha again—though I think I might’ve. But you’re going to have to wait for that part. What happened first was that Zach was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, or he had a growth on his thyroid, or something like that. So he needs surgery but the insurance program he signed up for after he lost the insurance he got through his last job won’t pay enough of the bill for him to be able to afford it. Now Zach never said anything about this in connection with Cheryl choking to death. But hypothyroidism causes your metabolism to slow down. It can lead to depression and—wait for it—severe weight gain. So of course when I hear about it all I can think is: dude was mean to woman because she’s fat, woman dies, mom cast some kind of fucking revenge curse on dude, and now Zach has some medical condition he can’t afford to get treated—which will probably make him gain weight. Sure enough, in like a month he’s put on about twenty pounds.

            “I know that may just sound like a coincidence, and it probably is. One of the other things that happened was that Zach’s landlord Tom called him and asked if he still wanted to move into the carriage house. Of course, Zach’s not quite as eager anymore, but it’s broad daylight when he gets the call, so he kind of stubbornly insists to himself that there’s no reason he can’t live there. He tells Tom he wants to move, but no sooner does he get off the phone than he starts panicking and hyperventilating. When he described the dread he felt then to me later, he said he’d never felt anything like it before. He was sweating all over and couldn’t catch his breath. He started to dial Tom back like four times but kept telling himself he wanted to wait until he could calm down before trying to talk to anyone.

            “But apparently his stubbornness ultimately won out. I helped move him into the carriage house near the beginning of this month. Now something else happened that, looking back afterward, is really strange. While he was online looking for work, he found a couple of guys he used to hang out with back in college through some networking site. It turns out they’re both big partiers, and Zach used go barhopping with them all the time. They both happen to live pretty close to Zach, so for the past month Zach has been meeting up with these two guys like four or more times a week at Henry’s, the bar that’s maybe four or five blocks from his apartment, which is good because his car is still sitting dead in the parking lot where he works.

            “The first thing that’s weird about him hanging out with these guys is that they get him smoking again—and I hadn’t known Zach was ever a smoker to begin with. It turns out he started back in high school and quit right after graduating from college. Now, hanging out at a bar with his old friends, both of whom go outside all the time to smoke, and doing a bunch of drinking—you know, it’s only a matter of time before he starts up again. When I asked him about it, he said it’s no big deal; it’s just to help him with the stress; he’ll quit again once he gets his job situation sorted out. The second thing that’s weird is that he starts thinking someone’s following him all the time when he walks back and forth from the bar. And of course that’s the part that really freaks him out.

            “One night there’s a guy walking behind him as he’s on his way home. Now Zach is pretty drunk so he tries to play it cool. There’s no law against someone walking around downtown at night, and it’s no big deal they both just happen to be heading in the same direction. But, after the guy makes a few of the same turns as Zach, he starts getting a bit scared. He keeps doing these quick glances over his shoulder to see if the guy’s still back there, because for some reason he doesn’t want to look right at him. It’s like he’s afraid once the guy realizes Zach knows he’s following him he’ll give up the pretense and just run him down to do to him whatever it is he’s planning to do.

            “Now here’s where it gets really freaky. When Zach rounds the corner into the alley that goes to the carriage house, he’s thinking the guy will stop following him for sure. But then after a while he hears footsteps behind him—and there’s something strange about the way the footsteps sound. So Zach does another of those quick glances over his shoulder, and he’s glad for a second because it looks like the guy is quite some distance away from him still. But with his eyes forward he thinks the footsteps sound like they’re coming from much closer. Even before he has a chance to really think out what this means, he’s bolting down the alley as fast as he can, fumbling with his keys in the door, rushing inside and slamming the door behind him. What he realized was that whatever it was following him—it could have only been about two and half feet tall.”

            “What the hell? Is this all true?”

            “What was it? Like some kind of little demon?”

            “He was probably just drunk and freaking himself out.”

            “Will you guys just listen? So he locks the door and just stands there panicking for a while. But eventually he starts trying to peak out the windows to see if anyone—or anything—is still out there. He doesn’t see a damn thing. Now this goes on and on. Not every time he goes out, but often enough that after a while he doesn’t want to go outside after dark anymore. And he never manages to get a good look. It’s always just on the edge of his vision, or in the shadows. Plus, he’s always drunk and too terrified to look directly at it. So like six times in the past month the poor guy has gotten scared shitless in the middle of his walk home from Henry’s and had to sprint home.

            “But the worst was the night he came home from the bar drunk, passed out, and then woke up because he thought someone was in the apartment with him. He opened his eyes thinking he’d heard little running footsteps in the room. When he sat up in his bed though, whatever it was was gone. So he just sits there in his bed for a minute, listening and getting scared, trying to tell himself that it had only been a dream. Then he hears the sound again. Now Zach is completely terrified at this point, but he works up the courage to go out into the living room and kitchen area to check it out. He doesn’t notice anything at first, but as he’s passing the front door he sees that it’s not even pulled all the way shut. So he rushes over and pulls on the knob to close it, but as he’s doing it he looks out through the window and ends up standing there completely frozen.

            “Zach’s standing at the door, looking out into the yard that's lit up by the orange lamp—and he realizes that the satyr statue that stands at the corner of the flowerbed edged with all the little headstones—well, it’s not there. And as he’s standing there petrified he hears the sound of the tiny footsteps behind him again. After an eternity not being able to move, he decides to run to the bathroom as fast as he can, turn on the lights, and lock himself in there. And that’s what he does. He ended up sleeping on the floor in the bathroom all night. When he woke up the next morning, he crept up to the window again, and sure enough the satyr statue was right back where it was supposed to be."

            "Hell no."

            “Yeah, this was just a couple weeks ago. Since all this stuff started, you guys wouldn’t believe how much Zach has changed. I mean, I barely even recognize the dude. He says he’s freaked out all the time, he can’t sleep; I know he’s drinking like a fish even though he can’t afford it. He’s putting on weight—he’s stuffing his face with something every time I see him lately. And he’s smoking again. In fact, the last time I saw him, just a few days ago, he sat there chain-smoking the whole time. He has two chairs sitting on his porch, and I saw him sitting out there when I walked by, so I stopped to sit and chat. He told me it’s all still going on—the guy following him home, the sounds in the house—and he’s basically at wit's end.

            “It was dusk when I stopped by, and the whole time we’re talking I’m looking at that little maple tree with the blazing red leaves blowing in the breeze in front of me. And that’s when I started getting really creeped out myself—because there wasn’t any fucking breeze. I kind of wanted to get up and leave right then, but before I could say anything Zach’s phone starts ringing. He holds up a finger to me as he answers it. But after about ten seconds it’s like he’s completely forgotten I’m even there. It turns out it’s his mom on the phone, and he just starts unloading all these complaints on her, loud enough that anyone on the block could listen in. He tells her about all the weird shit that’s happening and how he’s always waking up in the middle of the night in a panic. Then he starts in on how he can’t find any decent work. Then it’s his insurance. He tells her how he’s trying to get on Medicaid, but there’s no way he can get benefits in time to pay for his procedure. He goes on and on, so finally I stand up and just kind of gesture a goodbye to him.

            “As I’m walking up the sidewalk that runs through the yard and alongside the house up to the street, I look at the satyr statue and feel chills going down my back. And that’s when I hear it, this squeaky ‘ehuh-ehuhm’ coughing sound behind me. I turn back to see Zach, just as the dark triggers the sensor on the lamp beside the door  and the orange light comes on. He’s sitting there in his chair, hunched, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, still talking on the phone, obliviously loud, the orange light showing his rounded outline and casting his face in shadow. As I stood there looking at him in disbelief, I couldn’t help but fill in the shadowed features with those of a toad. I turned around and got the hell out of there. Haven’t heard from him since.

            “Now, speaking of being overweight, which one of you little punks is going to find me some Twizzlers?”

Finis

Also read the first

BEDTIME GHOST STORY FOR ADULTS

And

The Ghost Haunting 710 Crowder Court

And

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

The Tree Climber: A Story Inspired by W.S. Merwin

Image created by Canva’s Magic Media

Everyone in Maplewood knew Clare as the little girl who was always climbing trees. But she was so dainty and graceful and reserved that at first it surprised them all to see how deftly, even artfully, she could make her way up even the most formidable ones. It wasn’t just the trees in her family’s yard either. She climbed everywhere. “Oh, that’s just Clare Glendale,” people would say. “She’s got tree-climbing craziness.” 

            A lot of stories circulated about how Clare first came to love going up and down the trees of the neighborhood and the woods surrounding it. Some said her mother told her stories about how fairies lived up in the canopies, so she was constantly going up to visit them. Some said she once escaped bullies at school by climbing a tree on the playground, so now she feels secure hidden high in the foliage. And some say it began one day when she espied a lost treasure—a toy or an heirloom—from her high perch and now re-experiences that feeling of relief and reconnection whenever she’s up in the highest branches.

            Even when she was still just a little girl, though, what kept her climbing was much more complicated than any of these neighborly conjecturings could comprehend. Every child eventually climbs a tree. Clare did it the first time because she’d seen some girls on her way home from school dangling from a low branch and thought it looked appealing in its manageable absurdity. The girls were squealing and kicking their earth-freed feet.

            Approaching the big sycamore in her own yard just minutes later, she struggled to figure out how to make it up through the lowermost layer of branches. That the sequence of grips and reaches and toeholds she would have to traverse wasn’t clear from the outset yet gradually revealed itself through her concentrated, strenuous, grasping efforts, like a tactile puzzle she needed her whole body to solve—that was what she remembered as the earliest source of pleasure in climbing. There was also a feeling of overabundant energetic joy in the physical exertion, difficult but surmountable, of hoisting herself with her hands and arms, swinging and pushing herself with her toes braced against the bark. When she made it up near the highest tapering branches, too tiny to hold her scanty weight, she felt she’d succeeded in overcoming earthly constraints she’d never even been aware of up till then. As she rested at last, the breeze blew against her light wash of sweat, setting her skin aglow with the dissipating pulsing heat, like soundless music emanating from her blood into the air, even as she felt her strained limbs shimmer with life, discovered anew through the dancing ache. She breathed in the cascading sighs of the dry undulating sun-sparkled leaves, millions of tiny mirages, and thought about how they reminded her of ocean tides she’d only ever seen on TV. She would dream that night of dancing alone by a high-built bonfire on a moonlit beach.

            But whenever she thought about that day over the ensuing years she was never really sure the memory was really of the first time she climbed a tree. She went back to it for an explanation because not having an explanation, a clear motive, some way to justify herself in depth of detail should anyone show a willingness, or even an eagerness, to hear her out—it bothered her, making her feel her youthful isolation as a lifelong sentence, hopeless.

            When high school first started for Clare, she stopped climbing trees because it was too odd a habit, too conspicuous. But then one day she climbed again, after several months, and things seemed right with the world in a way that forced her to realize things weren’t at all right with the world all those months she hadn’t been climbing. She thought, “Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to let them think I’m weird.”

            Maplewood was a good school in a nice neighborhood. Clare’s classmates talked among themselves about how she climbed trees all the time—as something like a hobby. They knew she sometimes took her digital camera with her. They also knew she sometimes did drawings of parts of the neighborhood or the city beyond from the tops of the trees. They knew she brought little notebooks up there sometimes too and wrote what they assumed was poetry. Sometimes, her classmates even tried to talk to Clare about her tree climbing, asking her questions, saying they’d like to see her photographs or drawings, read her poems. No one was ever cruel, not even the boys. She heard herself described as “artistic” in a way that made her inwardly cringe because it sounded dismissive, impatient—artistic even though she’d never shared any art with any of them because she sensed they were just being polite when they said they’d like to see or read it.

            But Clare was glad to have circulating all the stories explaining away her climbing, even though they were all wrong and her not being given to correcting them felt a little like dishonesty, because if someone had simply asked her, “Why do you climb trees all the time?” she wouldn’t have been able to answer. Not that she minded thinking about it. She wouldn’t have minded talking about it either except that it was impossible to discuss, honestly, without being extravagant, self-important, braggy, snobby—all the most horrible things a high school kid could be. She knew for sure she didn’t climb because she wanted to be seen as interesting. More and more she didn’t want to be seen at all.

            Sometimes, though, she imagined whole conversations. “Well, I’d say I climb trees because I like the feeling. But I don’t always. Sometimes my hands hurt, or I get up really high and I’m afraid I’ll fall, or it’s just really hot, or really cold. I get scraped up a lot. The view is often nice, but not always. Sometimes I go into these really peaceful trances, like dreaming while I’m awake. But that’s only rarely. Really, most of the times I go up it’s not pleasant at all. But when I don’t do it for a while I feel strange—like, my soul is stuck in a tight, awful sweater—you know, all itchy.” She imagines herself doing a dance to convey the feeling, all slithering arms and squirming fingers.

            Every time she thinks about her itchy soul she laughs, thinking, “Probably aren’t too many people out there who’d understand that.”

            It was when Clare was fifteen, months away from getting her license, that she overheard an older boy at school, one who wasn’t part of the main group, but sort of cute, sort of interesting, compare her tree climbing to something awful, something that made her face go hot in a way that had her ducking away so no one would see how brightly it burned.  It was an offhand joke for the benefit of his friend. She couldn’t really be mad about it. He didn’t mean it to be hurtful. He didn’t even know she would hear him.

            She went to the woods after school, hesitated before a monster of a tree she knew well but had always been too intimidated by to attempt, gave it a look of unyielding intensity, and then reached out and pulled herself away from the ground. The grips were just out of reach at every step, making her have to grope beyond the span of her arms, strain, and even lunge. But the tree was massive, promising to take her deeper into the bottomless sky than she’d ever yet plunged.

            She paused only long enough at each interval to decide on the best trajectory. In place of fear was a fury of embarrassment and self-loathing. She couldn’t fall, it seemed to her, because there would be a sense of relief if she did, and she just didn’t have any relief coming to her. Somehow she wasn’t deserving, or worthy, of relief. She reached, she lunged, she grasped, she pulled. The ache in her hands and arms enflamed her pathetic fury. And up she flew, gritting her teeth as she pulled down the sky.

            It was a loose flank of bark coming away from the trunk with a curt, agonized cough that left her dangling from one arm, supported only by a couple of cramped and exhausted fingers. Seeing her feet reach out for the trunk, rubbing against it like the paws of a rain-drenched dog scratching the door of an empty house, and feeling each attempt at getting purchase only weaken her lame grip, she began to envisage the impending meeting of her body with the ground. Resignation just barely managed to nudge panic aside.

            But Clare never fully gave up. As reconciled as she was with the fall that felt like justice for the sake of some invisible sacred order she’d blunderingly violated, she nevertheless made one last desperate maneuver, which was to push herself away from the tree with as much force as she could muster with her one leg. What came next was brutal, senseless, lashing, violent, vindictive chaos. The air itself seemed bent on ripping her to shreds. Her tiny voice was again and again blasted out of her in jarring horrific whimpers, each one a portion of her trapped life escaping its vessel. She thought she’d see the razor green streaking crimson so sudden and excruciating were the lacerating clawings of the branches.

            And then it stopped. She stopped. She felt herself breathing. Her legs were hovering powerless, but they were some distance still from the ground, which was obscured by the swaying mass of leaves still separating her from the just end she had been so sure of. Weak and battered, she twisted in the hard, abrasive net that had partly caught her and partly allowed her to catch herself, without her even knowing she was capable of putting forth the effort to catch herself, and saw that she was bouncing some ways out from the trunk of the other tree she’d had the last ditch hope of leaping into. Looking back to the one she’d fallen from, she saw she hadn’t even fallen that far—maybe twenty feet she guessed. She hurried toward the sturdier parts of the branches holding her aloft and then made her way down.

            Both feet on the ground, Clare turned back to retrace the course of her fall with her eyes, almost too afraid to breathe because breathing might reveal the mortal injury she still couldn’t believe she hadn’t sustained. After standing there until the momentousness of the occurrence dissolved into the hush of the forest, silent but for the insects’ evening calls and the millions upon millions of leaves sent atremble by the wayward wind, both of which seemed only to dimensionalize the silence, she began to walk, hesitantly at first but then with a determination borne of an unnamed passion.

            She lay awake all night, upstart thoughts and feelings surging, rolling over each other, crashing into shores of newly imagined possibility. The pain from her several less than severe injuries provoked inner crises and conflicts, setting her mind on a razor’s edge of rushing urgency. She had created a tear in the fabric of commonplace living—the insistent niceness she’d been struggling all her life to fold herself into. When the gray of dawn peeked into her room, she heard herself let loose the first half of a demented laugh before cutting off the second, lest her parents hear and start asking her questions of the sort now more than ever she would be hard-pressed to answer.

            Clare now knew that all her life she had been accustoming herself to a feeling of inevitability, of fatedness, of gradual absorption with growing maturity into the normal flow of life she saw emblems of in every last one of the really nice houses she passed on the way to school. But this morning they all looked different, like so many strained denials of the only true inevitability, a veil protecting everyone from what they assumed could only be some hellish nightmare.

            When after school that day Clare approached Dean Morris, the older boy who’d made the crude joke about her climbing, she managed to startle him with the wild intensity in her unaccustomedly direct glare. “You have to come with me,” she said. “I have something to show you.”

            And that’s how Dean became a crazy tree climber too. At least, that’s what everyone assumed happened to him. He disappeared with Clare that day and kept on disappearing with her almost every day thereafter for the next two years. It was only two weeks after their first climb together that he showed up at home injured for the first time. He told his parents he’d broken his arm in a motorcycle crash, but he refused to name the friend who had allowed him to ride, insisting that he didn’t want to get anyone into trouble and that it was his own fault.

            One or both of them was always showing up at school or the weekend jobs they each had with mysterious welts on their arms or faces. Their parents must have been in an agony of constant exasperated worry those last two years as, despite their best efforts to put an end to the excursions into the woods and the injurious goings on therein, they continued having to deal not only with their children’s defiance but with the looming danger it exposed them to. But everyone at school saw something to admire in the way Clare and Dean so uncompromisingly settled on the existence they would have be theirs. The girls remarked on Dean’s consuming and unselfconscious devotion to Clare and were envious. He always seemed naturally gravitating to a post standing guard close by her, intensely, passionately protective. What would it be like to see your first love nearly fall to her death again and again?

            For those two years, they formed their own region apart from the life of the school and the neighborhood. No trace of teenage self-consciousness or awkwardness remained. They seemed as though they were in the midst of actuating some grand design, some world-saving project only they could be relied on to handle and no one else was even allowed to know about. They knew themselves. They loved each other. And they together exuded an air of contented self-sufficiency that made all the other students somehow more hopeful.

            A lot of people said when it was over that Clare must have run away and started a new life in some far-away place. The truth is no one knows what happened to her. I used to think about those two all the time. When I came back to Maplewood years later, it was just on an odd whim. My parents had moved away soon after I’d left for college. I wasn’t in touch with any friends who still lived there. For some reason, I just up and decided to spend a day driving, get a hotel for the night, and maybe make a weekend of visiting my old home town. The first place I went was the woods where Clare and Dean spent their last moments together.

            Everyone knew the story no one professed to believe. Beyond that, there were quite a few versions of an official account. Some held that an animal, or maybe a few coyotes, had dragged Clare’s body away. Others insisted that she was still alive and that seeing what had just happened to Dean she panicked and fled and never came back. Maybe she was afraid they’d blame her. Maybe she blamed herself and couldn’t bear to face his parents. There was something desperate about this version of the story. The fact seemed plain that Clare had died that day too. I always imagined Dean standing high up in the tree, seeing what happened to Clare, and yet never for a moment hesitating to follow her no matter where it took him.

            I found myself thinking surprisingly little about what had happened on their last trip to the woods together as I drove around town, stopping by the school to see if anyone was still around to let me inside to indulge my nostalgia. What occupied my mind was rather the way those two were together, locked in to each other, suddenly mature. They seemed—what’s the word? Knowing. They both knew something the rest of us, even our teachers and parents, simply didn’t know—or couldn’t know. What that something might be is a question I put to myself with some frequency to this day.

            It was late on a Friday night when I tried the door at the school. It was locked. I ended up wandering around the town in dreamy reverie without running into anyone I recognized and could invite to sit with me somewhere to reminisce. That was fine by me though.

            By Sunday afternoon, I was beginning to question my decision to come. I didn’t exactly have all the time in the world to amble around my old stomping grounds in a feckless daze. Impatient to get back on the road, I responded with mild annoyance to being recognized and addressed at the gas station. When I saw it was Bret Krause, though, the boy Dean had told that crude joke to about Clare’s climbing, his best friend right up until Clare pulled him away into that separate world of theirs, my curiosity got the best of me. I was amused when he pulled out his phone to call his wife and let her know he would be stopping by a bar to have a drink with an old friend from school. Bret hadn’t exactly been a lady’s man back in our glory days, but the picture he showed me was of a striking but kind-eyed beauty. It’s funny how things like that seem to work themselves out.

            I enjoyed hearing all about Bret’s life since high school. We’d never been close friends, but we’d had classes together and knew each other well enough for casual exchanges of greetings and pleasant small talk. I do have to confess, though, I was glad when he spontaneously began to talk about Dean. Anything I knew about the story had come to me in rumors thrice removed, and as curious as I’d been after they found Dean’s body in the woods that day it seemed to me untactful to barrage anyone with questions—though plenty of others apparently hadn’t felt the same scruple.

            Bret had gone away to college and returned to Maplewood to teach Algebra, of all things. He brought back with him the girlfriend he would marry soon afterward. They planned on having a couple kids but weren’t ready just yet. After letting us into the school, he took us directly to the spot where Clare had walked up to Dean and told him to come with her because she had something to show him.

            “I was a little worried coming back here,” he said. “I thought it might be too painful to be reminded of him constantly. At the same time, though—I know it’s a weird thing to say—it was sort of like his memory was one of the things that drew me back.”

            “I know what you mean.”

            “For a long time, I really thought any day we were going to hear that Clare had just shown up somewhere. It’s just such a strange thing in this day and age.”

            Bret turned the key to let us into the classroom where he taught his students quadratic equations, the same classroom where I’d learned pretty much the same lessons all those years ago, with Clare and Dean sitting four rows behind me in the back corner by the windows.

            “What do think happened to her?” I couldn’t help asking.

            Bret laughed good-humoredly. “Everyone knows what happened to her,” he said. “Haven’t you heard the story?” 

******

Inspired (partly) by:

Recognitions

Stories come to us like new senses

a wave and an ash tree were sisters

they had been separated since they were children

but they went on believing in each other

though each was sure that the other must be lost

they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of

as family resemblances features they held in common

the sheen of the wave fluttered in remembrance

of the undersides of the leaves of the ash tree

in summer air and the limbs of the ash tree

recalled the wave as the breeze lifted it

and they wrote to each other every day

without knowing where to send the letters

some of which have come to light only now

revealing in their old but familiar language

a view of the world we could not have guessed at

but that we always wanted to believe

         -from W.S. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius

Also read:

Those Most Apt to Crash: A Halloween Story

And:

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

And:

Bedtime Ghost Story for Adults

Bedtime Ghost Story for Adults

I had just moved into the place on Berry Street with my girlfriend and her two cats. A very old lady lived in the apartment behind us. She came out to the dumpster while I was breaking down boxes and throwing them in. “Can you take those out?” she asked in her creaky voice. I explained I had nowhere else to put them if I did. “But it gets filled up and I can’t get anything in there,” she complained. I said she could come knock on our door if she ever had to throw something in the dumpster and it was too full. I’d help her.

A couple nights later, just as we were about to go to bed, my girlfriend asked me to tell her a story. When we first started dating, I would improvise elaborate stories at her request—to impress her and because it was fun. I hadn’t done it in a while.

******

“There was a couple who just moved into a new apartment,” I began as we climbed into bed.

“Uh-huh,” she said, already amused.

“And this apartment was at the front part of a really old house, and there was a really old lady who lived in the apartment behind theirs. Well, they got all their stuff moved in and they thought their place was really awesome and everything was going great. And the old lady liked the couple a lot… She liked them because she liked their cat.”

“Oh, they have a cat, huh? You didn’t say anything about a cat.”

“I just did.”

“What color is this cat?”

“Orange.”

“Oh, okay.”

“What happened was that one day the cat went missing and it turned out the cat had wandered to the old lady’s porch and she let it in her apartment. And she really liked it. But the girl was like, ‘Where’s my cat?’ and she went looking for it and got all worried. Finally, she knocked on the old lady’s door and asked if she’d seen it.

“The old lady invited the girl in to give her her cat back and while they were talking the old lady was thinking, wow, I really like this girl and she has a really nice cat and I liked having the cat over here. And the old lady had grown up in New Orleans, so she and her sisters were all into voodoo and hoodoo and spells and stuff. They were witches.”

“Oh man.”

“Yeah, so the old lady was a witch. And since she liked the young girl so much she decided to do something for her, so while she was talking to her she had something in her hand. And she held up her hand and blew it in the girl’s face. It was like water and ashes or something. The girl had no idea what it was and she was really weirded out and like, ‘What the hell did she do that for?’ But she figured it was no big deal. The lady was really old and probably a little dotty she figured. But she still kind of hurried up and got her cat and went home.

“Well, everything was normal until the boyfriend came home, and then the girl was all crazy and had to have sex with him immediately. They ended up having sex all night. And from then on it was like whenever they saw each other they couldn’t help themselves and they were just having sex all the time.”

“Oh boy.”

“Eventually, it was getting out of hand because they were both exhausted all day and they never talked to their friends and they started missing work and stuff. But they were really happy. It was great. So the girl started wondering if maybe the old lady had done something to her when she blew that stuff in her face. And then she thought maybe she should go and ask her, the old lady, if that’s what had happened. And if it was she thought, you know, she should thank her. She thought about all this for a long time, but then she would see the boyfriend and of course after that she would forget everything and eventually she just stopped thinking about it.

“Then one day their cat went missing, their other cat.”

“What color is this one?”

“Black. And, since she found the other cat at the old lady’s before, the girl thought maybe she should go and ask the old lady again. So one day when she was getting home from work she saw the old lady sitting on her porch and she goes up to talk to her. And she’s trying to make small talk and tell the old lady about the cat and ask her if she’s seen it when the old lady turns around and, like, squints and wrinkles her nose and kind of goes like this—looking back—and says, ‘You didn’t even thank me!’ before walking away and going in her door.”

“Ahh.”

“Yeah, and the girl’s all freaked out by it too.”

“Oh!—I’m gonna have to roll over and make sure she’s not out there.”

“Okay… So the girl’s all freaked out, but she’s still like, ‘Where’s my cat?’ So one time after they just had sex for like the umpteenth time she tells her boyfriend we gotta find the cat. And the boyfriend is like, ‘All right, I’m gonna go talk to this old lady and find out what the hell happened to our cat.’”

“Oh! What did you do to Mikey?”

“I didn’t do anything. Just listen… Anyway, he’s determined to find out if the cat’s in this old lady’s apartment. So he goes and knocks on her door and is all polite and everything. But the old lady just says, ‘You didn’t even thank me!’ and slams the door on him. He doesn’t know what else to do at this point so he calls the police, and he tells them that their cat’s missing and the last time, when the other cat was missing, it turned up at the old lady’s house. And he told them the old lady was acting all weird and stuff too.

“But of course the police can’t really do anything because there’s no way anyone knows the cat’s in the old lady’s house and they tell him to just wait and see if maybe the cat ran away or whatever. And the girl’s all upset and the guy’s getting all pissed off and trying to come up with some kind of scheme to get into the old lady’s house.

“–But they never actually get around to doing anything because they’re having so much sex and, even though they still miss the cat and everything, a lot of the time they almost forget about it. And it just goes on like this for a long time with the couple suspicious of the old lady and wondering where their cat is but not being able to do anything.

“And this goes on until one day—when the old lady just mysteriously dies. When the police get to her apartment, sure enough there’s the couple’s black cat.”

“Ooh, Mikey.”

“So the police come and tell the guy, you know, hey, we found your cat, just like you said. And the guy goes and gets the cat and brings it home. But while he’s in the old lady’s apartment he’s wondering the whole time about the spell she put on him and his girlfriend, and he’s a little worried that maybe since she died the spell might be broken. But he gets the cat and takes it home. And when his girlfriend comes home it’s like she gets all excited to see it, but only for like a minute, and then it’s like before and they can’t help themselves. They have to have sex.

“Well, this goes on and on and things get more and more out of hand until both of them lose their jobs, their friends just drift away because they never talk to them, and eventually they can’t pay their rent so they lose their apartment. So they get their cats and as much of their stuff as they can and they go to this spot they know by the river where some of their hippie friends used to camp. And they just live there like before, with their cats, just having sex all the time.

“One night after they just had sex again, they’re sitting by the campfire and the guy says, ‘You know, we lost our jobs and our friends and our apartment, and we’re living in the woods here by the river, and you’d think we’d be pretty miserable. But I think I have everything I need right here.’ He’s thinking about having sex again even as he’s saying this. And he’s like, ‘Really, I’m happy as hell. I don’t remember ever being this happy.’

“And the girl is like, ‘Yeah, me too. I actually kind of like living out here with you.’

“So they’re about to start having sex again when the black cat turns and looks at them and says, ‘And you didn’t even thank me!’”

Also read

THE SMOKING BUDDHA: ANOTHER GHOST STORY FOR ADULTS (AND YOUNG ADULTS TOO)

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THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

New Yorker's Talk of the Town Goes Sci-Fi

Dept. of Neurotechnology

Undermin(d)ing Mortality

"Most people's first response," Michael Maytree tells me over lunch, "is, you know, of course I want to live forever." The topic of our conversation surprises me, as Maytree's fame hinges not on his longevity—as remarkable as his ninety-seven years makes him—but on his current status as record-holder for greatest proportion of manmade brain in any human. Maytree says according to his doctors his brain is around seventy percent prosthetic. (Most people with prosthetic brain parts bristle at the term "artificial," but Maytree enjoys the running joke of his wife's about any extraordinary aspect of his thinking apparatus being necessarily unreal.)

He goes on, "But then you have to ask yourself: Do I really want to live through the pain of grieving for people again and again? Is there enough to look forward to to make going on—and on and on—worthwhile?" He stops to take a long sip of his coffee while quickly scanning our fellow patrons in the diner on West 103rd. Only when his age is kept in mind does there seem anything unsettling about his sharp-eyed attunement. Within the spectrum of aging, Maytree could easily pass for a younger guy with poor skin resiliency.

"The question I find most troubling though is, will I, as I get really, really old, be able to experience things, particularly relationships, as…"—he rolls his right hand, still holding a forkful of couscous, as he searches for the mot juste—"as profoundly—or fulfillingly—as I did when I was younger." He smirks and adds, "Like when I was still in my eighties."

When we first sat down in the diner, I asked Maytree if he'd received much attention from anyone other than techies and fellow implantees. Aside from the never-ending cascade of questions posted on the MindFX website he helps run (www.mindfx.gov), which serves as something of a support group listserv for people with brain prostheses and their families, and the requisite visits to research labs, including the one he receives medical care from, he gets noticed very little. The question about his brain he finds most interesting, he says, comes up frequently at the labs.

"I'd thought about it before I got the last implant," he said. "It struck me when Dr. Branson"—Maytree's chief neurosurgeon—"told me when it was done I'd have something like seventy percent brain replacement. Well, if my brain is already mostly mechanical, it shouldn't be that much of a stretch to transfer the part that isn't into some sort of durable medium—and, viola, my mind would become immortal."

It turned out the laboratory where Branson performed the surgery, the latest ("probably not the last," Maytree says) in a series of replacements and augmentations that began with a treatment for an injury he sustained in combat while serving in Iran and continued as he purchased shares in several biotech and neural implant businesses and watched their value soar, already had a division devoted to work on this very prospect. Though the work is being kept secret, it seems Maytree would be a likely subject if experimental procedures are in the offing. Hence my follow-up question: "Would you do it?"

"Think of a friend you've made recently," he enjoins me now, putting down his fork so he can gesticulate freely. "Now, is that friendship comparable—I mean emotion-wise—with friendships you began as a child? Sometimes I think there's no comparison; relationships in childhood are much deeper. Is it the same with every experience?" He rests his right elbow on the table next to his plate and leans in. "Or is the difference just a trick of memory? I honestly don't know."

(Another favorite question of Maytree's: Are you conscious? He says people usually add, or at least imply, "I mean, like me," to clarify. "I always ask then, 'Are you conscious—I mean like you were five years ago?' Naturally they can't remember.")

Finally, he leans back again, looks off into space shaking his head. "It's hard to think about without getting lost in the philosophical…" He trails off a moment before continuing dreamily, with downcast eyes and absent expression. "But it's important because you kind of need to know if the new experiences are going to be worth the passing on of the old ones." And that's the crux of the problem.

"Of course," he says turning back to me with a fraught grin, "it all boils down to what's going on in the brain anyway."

—

Dennis Junk

In Honor of Charles Dickens on the 200th Anniversary of His Birth

DISTRACTION

He wakes up every day and reads

most days only for a few minutes

before he has to work the fields.

He always plans to read more

before he goes to sleep but

the candlelight and exhaustion

put the plan neatly away.

He hates the reading,

wonders if he should find

something other than Great Expectations.

But he doesn’t have

any other books,

and he thinks of reading

like he thinks of church.

And one Sunday after sleeping

through the sermon,

he comes home and picks up

his one book.

He finds his place

planning to read just

those few minutes

but goes on and on.

The line that gets him

is about how “our worst

weaknesses and meanness”

are “for the sake of” those

“we most despise.”

He reads it over and over

and then goes on intent

on making sense of the words

and finding that they make their own.

After a while he stops to consider

beginning the entire book again

feeling he’s missed too much

but he goes back to where he left off.

The next day in the field he puts

everything he sees into silent words

and that night he reads for the first time

before falling asleep.

The next day in the field he describes

to himself his feelings about his work

and later holds things in their places

with words as he moves around in time.

The words are the only constant,

as even their objects can shift

through his life, childhood,

senility, and through the life of the land.

He wants to write down his days on paper

because he believes if he does then he can

go anywhere, do anything, and yet still

there he’ll be.

It’s not that Dickens was right that got him,

but that he was wrong—

even Pip must’ve known his worst

wasn’t for anyone but Estella,

nor his best.

One day could stretch to a whole

book of bound pages like the one

in his hands, or it could start and finish

on just one.

He imagines writing right over

the grand typeset words of Dickens'

on page one, “Hard to believe,

I woke up, excited to read.

I wished I could keep reading all day.”

Sunday, June 22, 2008, 11:43 am.

Also read:

Secret Dancers

And:

Gracie - Invisible Fences

Monks: a Short Riff on Hemingway and Porter

We always talk about work, whether we each can tolerate our individual job or if we should try something new. Since we don’t know anyone who has what sounds from the outside like a dream job, we opt for tolerance. I spent a lot of time talking about lost opportunities. I always seemed to be in love with one woman when I could have been having fun with several.

        He told me the story of a third member of our tribe trying to get him to participate in a threesome. I pretended like I’d never heard it happened. In truth, some new details emerged. As he spoke, I looked over his shoulder to watch the cook through the service window. She was cute, rangy but in a graceful way. She looks really young. They all do.

        We were talking about the woman, the mistress, the third, about whether we should feel sorry for her. I feel sorry, I said, for anyone on the decline. Women have it especially bad. Just imagine part of what makes you special, a large part, a majority, is your youth and your beauty. Only you never fully realize how major a part youth and beauty are playing until yours are on the wane.

        “It would be like coming up with a program for success, having it work really well for years, only to realize that the program you’ve been following is actually useless because your success stems from the fact that you happen to be a genius—and the way you discover this is that you start becoming less and less successful because for whatever reason your genius is fading.”

        “That’s a really depressing thought. That’s depressing me. Why would you be thinking about that? Are you depressed?”

        “No—well, I’d say I’m lonely. A little frustrated that nothing seems to be happening in my life. But, no, I’m not really depressed.”

        I’d brought up a woman I work with and how much of a turnoff it was to hear her talk about how much she wanted to get married—how it always seems like women who talk like that put their preplanned schedule ahead of finding the right guy, and how that doesn’t seem as tragic as it used to because we both have come to the conclusion that even the idea of there being such a thing as the right guy or girl is pretty suspect.

        As much as it still doesn’t sit right with me, I explained, I could see the logic in having your life scheduled out. Women have a briefer window in which to establish their family lives, and their general success tends to begin with healthy family ties. Although, in the context, I was putting two and two together and getting a sum of being a man ain’t no different.

        Walking home from the pub we talked about “making it” and about how we don’t care much for big houses and cars. They’re not worth the work. I guess there was a pretty overt strain of asceticism being expressed. Still, when he said, “We’re monks,” it surprised me a bit. It surprised me because I’d actually anticipated our conversation after inviting him over and thought about saying I was living like a monk to sum up my situation. So, when he said it, I had to wonder if I’d said it in an earlier conversation, or whether he might have said it and I picked it up from him.

        Back at my apartment we got high and talked about how excited we got as kids about skee ball and the prizes you could get with the tickets. He’d been to Cedar Pointe and was talking about the abandoned arcade he’d wandered into when his neck was too sore for any more rides. We laughed at how foolish we’d been.

        “It’s really stupid, but really when’s the last time you got that excited about anything?”

        We talked about Christmas and Star Wars toys and pellet guns—about how all briefly thrilled before all briefly disappointed before all permanently faded into oblivion. Prizes no longer compel us forward. If we move at all, the impetus comes from discipline. I want to lose a little weight. I want to get a better job. I want to meet more people. I want a woman I can love.

        I was drunk, and then I was high. So, naturally I talked too much about the woman I haven’t been with for close to a year and a half. The cook through the service window at the restaurant reminded me of her.

        We talked briefly about politics, about how the free market solution for deadly chemicals and toxic customer service was supposed to be the consumers’ perogative to vote with their feet. But you can’t vote for an option that doesn’t exist, or against one that’s an industry-wide standard. We talked about getting badgered every time we try to buy something. Everyone’s trying to squeeze just a little more out of you. In the short term, they may make a few extra pennies—but, big picture, they’re probably depressing the economy by gently punishing consumers. People in China and India are starting to want more. The seeds of a middle class may have been planted.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

This was me riffing on a theme from Hemingway’s

The Sun Also Rises:

        Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

        I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for anything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.

        Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

And from Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft”:

        In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she had meant to answer with; bitter alternatives and intolerable substitutes worse than nothing, and yet inescapable: the long patient suffering of dying friendships and the dark inexplicable death of love—all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.

Also read:

TAKING THE GRE AGAIN AFTER 10 YEARS

KAYAKING ON A WORMHOLE

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN