These Nameless Things

by Shawn Smucker

  “So,” he began again.

  “Yeah. I know why you’re here.”

  He looked at me with a question in his eyes, asking me to prove it.

  “You’re here because we’re postponing the ceremony. The weather is too wet, so Mary will leave tomorrow evening. Or whenever this rain finally clears.”

  “So, you do know,” he said, giving me a wry grin. His face went serious before he said, “One more day.”

  “One more day,” I echoed, resigned. “Abe, why does it bother me so much that Mary is leaving us?”

  “It’s a hard thing, isn’t it? This town has been good to all of us.”

  I could tell it bothered him too, and in some strange way that was a comfort to me, seeing that I wasn’t alone. “Why do we have to go? What could possibly be better about any other place?”

  He leaned his head back in the chair and stared up at the lamp. The whites of his eyes seemed especially white in the dimly lit room, in the flickering lamplight, and his mouth worked this way and that while he thought.

  “You know, this is a wonderful place. I’ll give you that. The friendships, the time we’ve had together. The way we helped each other recover from . . . over there. It’s a special thing, this kind of community. No doubt about that. But can’t you feel the sameness of it, Dan? Do you ever get the sense that time stands still here, that it’s nothing but a place for waiting?”

  I hated to admit it, but he was right. We kept ourselves busy. We grew our own food from seeds the previous harvest had left us. We gathered wood from the base of the mountain and the oak trees that stretched a straight line into the plains. We slept and talked, and the night was followed by the morning. But he was right—nothing ever progressed. If that woman hadn’t stumbled out of the canyon and gone to sleep in my own bedroom, I would have even gone so far as to say nothing ever happened.

  But something had happened. She had arrived. I was hiding her. Miss B had a memory. Something new was taking place. Were things changing? And if they were, why couldn’t Abe feel it too?

  “Yeah,” was all I said. “Yeah, I hear you.”

  He stood up.

  “You don’t have to go, Abe,” I said, although his leaving was a relief to me. I kept waiting for the woman to make a sound.

  “Thanks. But I have a lot to do to get ready for tomorrow. I’m rather relieved Mary’s been delayed. It’s been a while since anyone left.” He said this with a mischievous look in his eye. “And I’m not sure I remember all my lines.”

  “Who was the last to go?” I asked him. “I’m drawing a blank.”

  “You don’t remember?” he asked. He even looked as if my forgetfulness was slightly alarming.

  I shook my head, shrugging. “I can’t. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t remember,” he said, laughing to himself. “What a curious thing, all of this forgetting.”

  And all of this remembering, I thought. “At least give me a hint.”

  He turned to me with a glint in his eye, and his voice changed into a high squeak. “Danny! Oh, Danny! Can I come up and pick out a book to read again?”

  “Oh, wow,” I said, my eyes widening. “I forgot all about her. But I still can’t remember her name.” It was strange to me that I couldn’t remember. Had it been that long?

  “Does the name Moira ring a bell?” he asked.

  Moira. How could I forget Moira? The woman had practically tried to move into my house with me. She had been up at my place all the time, driving both me and Miho crazy. She always wanted to peruse my books, running her pale index finger along the spines, mumbling the title names and authors to herself. She pretended she had read every book I owned—whenever I mentioned something about a book, any book, she replied with the same all-knowing words. “Ah yes,” she would say. “Of course.”

  “Moira,” I said, more to myself than to Abe. “How could I possibly forget Moira?”

  Abe looked at me over his shoulder, his hand on the front door, and his face was serious again. “It’s this place, Dan. It’s not made for remembering. It’s not a settling kind of place—it’s an in-between place. This town has always been that. I know why you’re here and why you’re waiting. Everyone else knows too, and we understand. You want to see your brother again. Everyone else here is waiting for something too. And that’s okay. But don’t forget, you can’t stay here forever.”

  “Have you talked to Miss B?” I blurted out, and he froze in place.

  He turned toward me again. “Yes,” he said, and I knew he was wondering how much she had told me.

  “She shared her memory with me,” I said. “I’m guessing you know about it too.”

  He nodded in a guarded sort of way. “How much did she tell you?”

  I gave him the summary. He listened. After I finished, we stood there in silence.

  “Seems strange,” I said. “All of this in a place not made for remembering.”

  He gave an absent-sounding chuckle, and I could tell his mind was elsewhere. He mumbled a half-hearted goodbye, never completely returning to that place, that moment, and he was back out in the light rain, disappearing in the darkness. I desperately wanted it to be day again—I was tired of people disappearing. I was tired of standing by and being left behind.

  A cold wind blew through the house while the front door was open, swept in through the frame and out the back. It felt like even the wind longed for the east.

  That was the night when everything was set in motion, the night I could have told Abe but didn’t. The night I could have gone down and spent a final evening with Mary. But I didn’t.

  That was also the night I started to remember. Not made-up memories. Real ones.

  I promise. This part is true.

  5 Remembering

  I WISH I could adequately explain how strange this all was—for a long, long time, I had lived in the village and nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Not one thing. I mean, in the early days, people were always coming over from the other side, so I would run down to Abe’s and we would tend to them and help them get acclimated. Every so often someone would leave and head east, so we’d have a little ceremony and some of us would cry, and then we’d return to the same old routine.

  But most days were normal days. Most days I woke up. Ate breakfast. Listened to the wind in the grass. Wrote in my journal. Read. Watched the rain. Walked down to the village and helped in the garden. Shared lunch with someone. Went home and took a nap. Stared at the mountain. Wished my brother would come through the canyon. Met up at someone’s house for dinner. Sat by a fire and told stories or went home and sat in the darkness, staring out over the plains, listening to people sing down among the houses. Fell asleep.

  That was it.

  But then, this strange sequence of days: Mary preparing to leave, Miss B sharing her memory, and the woman asleep in my bedroom.

  That was the night I started to remember things.

  I was in and out of sleep. I thought I was dreaming, the kind of dream I came back to as soon as I drifted off again. I saw scenes from when I was a baby, things you wouldn’t normally remember because you would be too young. But there it was, like a show in my mind: I saw me, and I saw my brother. Both of us. And in that moment, I remembered it had always been both of us. We were twins.

  How could I have forgotten? I was beginning to realize how much the mountain had taken from me. The trauma I had experienced in that abyss had robbed me of any memory of the life that had come before it. In the village, we had always assumed this to be the case, that we had each had a life before the terror of what had happened in the mountain. But none of us could remember. Or if we did, the memories were brief, shallow, and inconsequential.

  On that night, the memory that came back to me was dripping with detail. I saw the moment when my brother was born, and I saw my birth right after his, and even though we looked exactly alike, I could tell which one was me and which one was him. There was somethi
ng wrong with me because all the nurses were crouched around the narrow table I was on, poking at me and prodding my limp arms and fastening a tiny oxygen mask to my face.

  All this time, my brother was in my father’s arms. My mom looked like she had passed out with exhaustion, and I guess because something was wrong with me, they had bundled up Adam and handed him to my dad. My dad stared down into Adam’s eyes, stared hard, as if Adam was the only thing in the whole world, and he kept getting closer and closer until their eyes were only inches apart.

  My dad. I suddenly remembered him too. He was a rough man, wild around the edges. His hands and fingers were thick, and even though they made him wash his hands before he held me, the creases around his knuckles were black from oil. He was a long-haul trucker as well as a mechanic in his spare time.

  Of course, I thought. How could I have forgotten?

  My dad wore a T-shirt, tight around his barrel chest, and his biceps were huge. His face was all blunt edges and flat surfaces. His eyes were dull and young, a strange combination. When he smiled, it looked like his teeth hurt.

  My mother’s beauty was disarming, to the point that men couldn’t look her in the eye and women found her to be either their favorite person in the world or completely insufferable. Her attractive face was placid, like still water. Her hair was blonde, almost white, and her skin the color of milk. Her lips were a rose-petal pink. Her mouth was exquisite.

  She was so still she might have been dying. Or dead. Wait, was that what happened? Was this a memory of my mother’s death?

  But I saw her coming back from darkness, and the movement started around her mouth. She licked her lips. Barely. She moaned. A nurse moved to her side again, and she emerged up into this painful exhaustion. I must have been doing better because some of the nurses cleared off while one wrapped me in a blanket, wrapped me tight. My mom cried as they handed me to her, and she couldn’t stop nodding as they entrusted my small being into her love. And she did love me, fiercely. I could see it there, in her face, her tears. It was so obvious. She loved me.

  The memory started to fade, and I clung desperately to it. It was mine now. I could keep it.

  At the end, I saw an image of my father holding Adam and my mother holding me, and a thousand subtle memories returned, not in sharp images or clear pictures like this one, but in insinuations and deductions. This was how it always was, how it always would be. My mother and me. My father and Adam. Two separate teams in a single family, two sides to every problem. I never had my father, not even from day one, but I always had my mom. Adam and I were left to fend for ourselves across those clear lines, even from a young age, and we sometimes crossed them, but always as representatives seeking some kind of temporary treaty.

  I woke up feeling woozy, drugged. I had slept in my clothes and was still in the armchair. The back doors were wide open, had been open all night. Cool, damp air mingled around the house. I rubbed my eyes and sat up straight. It was nearly morning, and a soft light caressed the plains, the easiest blue, the simplest ivory. The grass was rustling as far as I could see, and I wanted to walk out into it.

  I thought of the woman in my bedroom. I rose up and stretched and listened for her, for any sound coming from the room. But all I heard was the roof creaking in the wind and the rush of air through the grass. It was a lonely, quiet sound. I moved to my bedroom and leaned in, put my ear to the crack where the door met the wall.

  Complete silence.

  I turned the knob carefully and pushed the door open, willed it not to make a sound. I peered into the room. There she was, lying on the bed, as still as ever. Was she dead? I walked in practically on the tips of my toes, trying not to make a sound. I waited beside the bed for what felt like a long time, staring at her face, the angle of her eyes, the depth of her dark hair. If I concentrated on the blanket, I could see it moving up and down ever so slightly with her breathing.

  At least I thought so. I couldn’t be sure. I convinced myself everything was okay. She was okay and the town would be okay, and though Mary would leave, everything would stay as it was. Which was proof that everything would remain okay, because no one else was leaving.

  I leaned over the woman, put my ear right up to her mouth, and only then could I hear her breath coming and going. In and out.

  “Dan,” she whispered.

  I jumped back.

  She smiled. “Did I scare you?”

  “Your breathing was so quiet.”

  “You take good care of me,” she said in a sleepy voice. “Thank you for letting me stay here.”

  I looked up at the ceiling, let my gaze wander around the four walls of the room. The floor creaked as I sat down and shifted my weight in the chair. “I need to go check on some things,” I murmured. “I have to go out. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Oh, Dan,” she said, and her voice startled me, because there was a kind of barely revealed longing in it.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve lost something.”

  I could feel my heart beating. I reached up and rubbed my chest, trying to hide it. I could feel the muscles tense up in my face. “Yeah?” I asked again.

  “A key. I had a key when I arrived here, but I can’t seem to find it.”

  The key was in my pocket. I wondered if she could see it, if there was any sign of its presence. I nearly reached down to hold it, but I managed to keep my hand away from it.

  “I’ll keep my eye out,” I said. “Actually, I’ll walk up to the canyon later. Maybe you dropped it when you came through?”

  “Thank you, Dan.” Her voice was smooth, easy to take in, like sunshine.

  I stood and walked toward the door, but before I got there I turned. “Don’t make any sounds if someone comes into the house. You shouldn’t be here. I should have told someone.”

  She raised one pale finger and pressed it against her lips as if she was saying, “Shhhh.”

  A chill spread down my back. I couldn’t remember if at any point she had asked me not to tell anyone that she was there, but it seemed important whether or not she had made this request. I didn’t think she had. This was a slight relief to me. But I couldn’t be sure.

  I left the room. I paced around the kitchen, stared up at the mountain, paced around the living room. I stared out into the plains and listened for anything coming from the bedroom that might break the silence. The grass was inviting, so I walked out the back doors, my head no longer hazy from sleep. I was tense. Aware. I needed to talk to Abe. I wanted to tell him everything about my memory and the arrival of this woman. I didn’t know if I would go through with it. But I could try.

  On second thought, I went back inside the house and looked over my bookshelves. If I was down in the village all day, I would need something to give to Mary when she left that night. I scanned the shelves for a particular title. There it was, the pocket edition of a book Mary had always enjoyed. I looked at it for a moment, and then I walked out, leaving the back doors open.

  I DIDN’T REALIZE it had gotten so late in the morning, but as I walked down to the village I could see that a few of the others were already out and about. Miss B trimmed the long grass around her house and the neighboring houses, waving absentmindedly to me when I passed, as if nothing had happened the previous day. John was repairing something on his roof, too busy to look up as I passed by. Po sat on his front stoop, smoking a pipe, staring at me. I waved. He nodded in reply and let out a long stream of smoke that clouded around his head. But he didn’t stop staring at me.

  I nearly turned toward Abe’s place situated in the very center of the town, a little bit off the greenway toward the mountain, but I wondered if Miho was outside, so I kept walking, all the way down. I could hear her around back, behind her house. There was a rustling of tall grass, the sound of a basket being dragged along the dirt, and humming. Whenever I found her by herself, she was always humming.

  Miho took me in without her normal smile. There was a strange look on her face, as if she was seeing me for the
first time. “Rough night?” she asked, looking back down at the ground.

  I reached up and tried to flatten my hair, realized it was sticking up in every direction. Maybe that’s why Po had given me that strange stare. I shrugged. “Slept in the armchair.”

  “The armchair? Someone kick you out of bed?”

  Fortunately, she wasn’t looking at me, because I could feel the crimson rising in my face. I walked over to where she was working and joined her. For someone who avoided the truth as often as I did, I was pretty terrible at it.

  She pulled green beans from a series of large, round bushes. The beans were hard to see since they were the same color as the rest of the plant, but if you bumped the fragile stalks lightly, the beans danced and moved in a way that differentiated them from the rest of the plant. I reached in and grabbed one of the larger ones, chewed the end off.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “You going to help or eat?” she asked without looking up. She smiled to herself, but there was sadness in it, and that brought all kinds of questions to my mind.

  “You sleep okay?” I asked.

  She shrugged, standing up straight and wiping her face with the back of her hand. I wanted to tell her what the strange woman had told me, that Adam was on the other side of the mountain, that she had seen him, that he was the last person there, that we had to do something.

  She hesitated, then blurted out, “I had some strange dreams.”

  I kept picking beans, hoping she’d continue. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to share my own. When she didn’t say anything, I tried to encourage her a bit. “And?”

  “And,” she said, drawing out the word so that it pulled her voice higher, “I’m not sure if I’m ready to talk about it. I woke up early and drew some pictures of what I saw. I came out here to try to work it out.”

  “Work what out?”

  She stopped moving—no bean picking, no wiping her face, no dragging the basket. Just her standing there, still. “I’m trying to work out if it was only a dream or if it was a memory.”