These Nameless Things

by Shawn Smucker

  “I had a memory last night,” I told him, and I was trembling with the strangeness of it. I told him about my birth, my twin brother, my mother holding me in her weakness, and my father far away, distant, unconcerned with me. I told him about the vague knowledge that came along with the memory, the sort of knowing that it brought: the realization of the distance between me and my father, the line down the middle of our family, my mother’s devotion.

  Abe’s eyes were soft, and I nearly told him about the woman, but that was becoming something I could never tell anyone, a secret too deep to unearth. I lied to myself, reasoning that I could keep her from everyone.

  He mumbled one word. “Interesting.” He said it over and over again, and he was pacing when I finished, like a metronome, back and forth, back and forth. This went on for some time, and when he finished pacing, he collapsed into a different chair, one I hadn’t noticed before in all the mess. There was a silence in his house that reminded me of the silence in my own house. A silence full of nameless things.

  I cleared my throat, and Abe came back from wherever his mind had taken him.

  “This is all very interesting,” he said.

  I could tell by the hesitance in his voice that he was weighing his words carefully, trying to decide if he was going to tell me more, if he could tell me more, or if the things he knew were best kept close.

  “You will remember more soon.” He motioned toward his old gray couch, indicating for me to join him among the books and crates of garden equipment and half-finished carvings. So many carvings. There were crosses that circled in on themselves and walking sticks with curving vines and eerie houses with tall windows and elven doors.

  I pushed a few things to the side and sat down. Despite all the things on the cushions, despite the pressing nature of all these unfinished things, Abe’s couch was the most comfortable spot in the village. I sank into it and remembered my short night’s sleep in the armchair. I wanted to close my eyes.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “It would seem that something is happening,” he said in a vague, wandering voice. “Ever since this last storm, that is. Everyone seems to be . . . remembering.”

  “Remembering?”

  “Remembering. Things from life before the mountain.”

  “Like my memories of my birth?”

  “Yes, like that, but not always births. Other memories. Sadness. Joy. Other things. Death.” He looked like he was going to say something more, but he shook his head. “Other things. And they’re coming quickly now. Hard and fast and not always welcome.”

  “Has anyone told you? What they’re dreaming? What they’re seeing?” I tried to ask this innocently. I even had a small hope that he would use my questions as a launching pad to tell me the part of Mary’s story I had missed. But I knew he wouldn’t. When you told Abe something, it went into a heavy chest with a lock on it, and no one besides you could ever bring it out.

  As expected, Abe didn’t answer me. He stared at a lamp beside the sofa where I sat, a lamp that also served as a coat hook for various scarves, bags, and woolen hats.

  “I can’t tell you other people’s memories,” he said slowly. “I’m sure you understand. Maybe they will share them soon. But something is happening.”

  “In this place where nothing ever happens?” I asked him, remembering our earlier conversation.

  “Yes,” he said in a curious voice, as if that was the most alarming part. “Even here. Something is happening.”

  7 Another Arrival

  I STOPPED AT the corner of Miho’s house and lifted the binoculars that hung around my neck, staring out into the plains. It was the middle of the day, but the town remained quiet. Everyone was staying close to home. Maybe they were getting ready for Mary’s leaving party. Some days in town were like that, though, so it didn’t feel completely out of the ordinary. Some days, we all just wanted to be alone. But I couldn’t help wondering if these swirling new memories were driving people into seclusion.

  Miho and I had eaten a quiet lunch together, neither of us wanting to ask the other about their dream. She seemed to have softened since our encounter in the garden that morning. She seemed to be more herself. I was still flustered from what I had heard Mary telling Abe. I so badly wanted to tell Miho what Mary had said, ask her what she thought about the story. But that meant I would have to tell her I had been eavesdropping. The secrets piled up inside of me. They hibernated into cocoons, transforming into things that had lives of their own.

  Lunch had been earlier. Now, the two of us planned to go looking for firewood for Mary’s ceremony.

  At first I had trouble finding the oak tree in the binoculars as I scanned along the horizon. I made my way slowly from left to right along that distant line, and there it appeared: massive, thick enough that the trunk could have been carved out and turned into a hut. Where we lived at the edge of the mountain and the plains, the leaves were perpetually green, although we had miniature seasons where the trees faded to something like yellow or darkened into a lush color nearly black. But on that day, the sky was bright, the plains rustling and alive, and the tree’s leaves were a lively green. Far beyond the tree, the storm that had come through the night before sat like a blot on the horizon.

  Miho stepped in front of the binoculars, basically a huge blob of blurry color, and held up her hand in front of the lenses.

  “And then it grew dark,” she said in a mysterious voice, laughing.

  I shook my head in mock annoyance. “Very funny.” I lowered the binoculars and pushed her arm to the side.

  “What are you looking for, anyway? You’re always staring east.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not really looking for anything specifically. I’m just looking to see if there’s anything to see.”

  “But there never is,” she said, smiling again, looking at me as if I was a puzzle.

  I ignored her, pretended to be miffed while I folded up a large tan canvas tarp, tied it into a bundle, and carried it under one arm. We started to walk the long path from the tree beside her house to the first tree out at the horizon. When numbering the oaks, we didn’t count the one by Miho’s house. The first oak tree was the one we could barely see from town.

  “Tell me this: have you ever looked through those binoculars and seen something worth seeing?” Miho insisted as we walked through the tall grass.

  “Of course I have,” I said. “Plenty of things.”

  “Like what? Name one.”

  “Well, it’s not an object. But I like looking through the binoculars because it makes me feel like I’m out there. Out in the plains. Far from the mountain.”

  We both walked quietly for a minute.

  “What else?” she asked, her voice soft.

  “My house is far from the rest of you. I like to keep an eye out, see what you all are up to.”

  “You spy on us a lot, do you, from up in your high castle?” She swatted playfully at me.

  I shrugged. “There’s a beautiful woman I have to keep my eye on.”

  She laughed out loud, a free kind of sound, but it made me feel sad because I remembered everything unsaid between us. She reached over and grabbed my hand, and I glanced at her. Our friendship had grown during our time together. I loved everyone in town, Abe especially, but with Miho it felt different. With her, I felt chosen. I don’t know, it doesn’t make much sense, but she meant a lot to me.

  We got out to the first tree, but as we expected, there was no dead wood for burning. I put my hand against the oak and closed my eyes. What a tree. Its bark was rich with deep grooves. The roots spread into the earth. One side of the tree had a fine layer of moss growing at the base of the trunk. Under the spreading branches lay a thick shade, almost darkness, like an eclipse.

  We’d have to go to the next tree.

  I raised the binoculars again, looking out to the next tree that had now appeared on the horizon. We couldn’t see that second one from the town—it only came into view as we approache
d the first oak. The plains were empty, so silent and vast. I felt the tug of it, a desire to keep going, one tree after another, leave the village behind without even saying goodbye. But I knew I couldn’t. My brother was still over there, behind us, lost in the mountain. The last one. I had to wait for him.

  Miho and I kept walking. The grass was taller in some places, reaching to our waists. In others, it was nothing more than short, green stubble barely covering the brown earth. It took us a little while, but we got all the way out to the second tree, almost identical to the first in size and height. I had only been this far from the village a handful of times. It felt like we were on an island in the middle of an endless ocean.

  “It always makes me feel funny, being out this far,” Miho said, her voice timid and nervous as we gathered kindling.

  The storm had brought down a few large, dead branches, and Miho and I broke them up as best we could and piled them onto the tarp. To be honest, there wasn’t much, and I considered going out to the next tree, but I didn’t know if we’d have enough time. There was a lot to be done before Mary’s leaving ceremony that evening.

  “Feels really far away,” I replied. It was kind of a haunting feeling, like we were the last two people.

  “There’s something good about it, though, don’t you think? It does feel far away, but it also feels nice to get out from under it.”

  She meant the mountain. She was right.

  Once we had the wood arranged, I slid a rope through the eyelets in the tarp and pulled it tight. We could drag it back to the village without too much trouble, but it would take us longer than the walk out.

  Despite our need to hurry, I sat down at the base of the oak tree and took a deep breath, facing south. To my left, the plains stretched on, and at the very edge of my vision, at the very edge of the day, I could see the next oak tree. Nothing else. Only the next oak in a long line of trees that Mary would follow, starting tonight when she left the village. When she left us. Going where? To what?

  “Do you ever want to walk east?” Miho sat down beside me, breathing heavily from the work, gazing past me in the direction I was looking. “Are you ever tempted to leave your brother and go?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “Really? You never seem that interested.”

  I thought about that. I thought about Abe’s words from the night before. They resonated with me. He had named something I didn’t even know I was feeling.

  “Everything is standing still here, you know? In the village. It’s like time stopped. Leaving seems somehow inevitable. It’s about taking that first step.”

  “Yeah, I feel that way too. And I wouldn’t mind getting farther away from the mountain.” Miho reached up tentatively and felt along the edge of her hair where the tattoo was. “Do you ever wonder what they’re doing over there?”

  “What do you mean? What who’s doing?”

  “The ones who ran that place. In the mountain. If everyone’s leaving, escaping, they can’t be happy about that.”

  We sat with that thought for a few minutes. It was an awful thing to think about.

  “Do you mean they might come out, come after us?” I asked, my voice flat.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably not. I mean, they would have come before now if they were going to, don’t you think?”

  “Why do we stick around?” I asked, more to myself than to her.

  “I guess we all have reasons for staying.” Her voice had a strange tone to it, like she wanted to say more. “But it feels safe, doesn’t it?”

  She was right. The plains, even at the edge of that terrible mountain, felt safe.

  “What do you think is out there?” she asked.

  We both stared east, away from town, and I was happy about the change of subject. There was a story, believed in varying degrees depending on who you asked, that if you followed the oak trees all the way across the plains, one after the other, you’d come to a last tree planted at the foot of another mountain, a much different mountain. You’d see an opening that led to a path that would take you up and over, to a different place, a better place. Maybe even a city. I used to believe this story. I used to watch wistfully as friends and neighbors headed east on their way to the far-off place. I used to look forward to the day Adam came over and he and I could head to this new place together.

  Now I wasn’t so sure what I believed. Another mountain? A city? It all felt so improbable.

  “Will you ever leave?” I asked Miho without looking at her.

  “Me?” She said the word in a whisper, as if it was caught in her throat.

  “Yeah, do you ever want to walk, head east?”

  She let out the tiniest of laughs. “Sure.” She paused. “But not without you.”

  It made me feel good when she said things like that. But it also made me nervous.

  “I don’t know if you should be waiting for me. You know? I might be a while. Besides, I don’t know if I’m worth hanging around for.”

  She didn’t answer, simply reached over and took my hand again, and we sat under the oak. I wouldn’t have minded if time stood still in that moment, the light of another day cresting before it faded, the mountain comfortably far off in the direction we were not looking. Maybe we should head out, Miho and I, leave our ghost town of a village and the mountain, get out of here. See what we could find. Maybe we wouldn’t even have to follow the trees. Maybe we could head north or south and make a new life in the middle of the plains, the two of us in the middle of nowhere.

  But . . . Adam.

  It always came back to my brother.

  I looked to my right, past Miho, in the direction of the village that I knew was there even though I couldn’t see it. And the mountain. There was always the mountain. It rose in a grayish purple ridge with pink hues in the midday light. A thin line of white graced the top. Snow. I imagined that I could even see the black line of the canyon that led to the other side of the mountain. The strangest part of all was how beautiful that range was from this far away.

  Miho stood and stretched. “We should go.”

  I took an extra minute before I stood up, gathered the long rope, and pulled it snug. “Back under the shadow of the mountain.” I sighed.

  As we returned toward the first tree outside the village, Miho glanced back one last time, and I felt a joke rising in me, something about Lot’s wife. I wondered where that phrase came from, what long-ago story I couldn’t quite remember, but before the words came out, she grabbed my arm. “Dan.”

  I peered more closely at her, waiting for the joke or one last deep thought about the distance between here and there. But she didn’t say anything. Her eyes were wide open, staring east, so I turned.

  At first I didn’t see anything. The light was strange, the grass blew in a hypnotic dance, and the third tree was barely visible. A strong wind came down from the mountain and blew our clothes tight up against our bodies. It felt like there might be another storm on the way, ready to spill over.

  “C’mon, Miho. What are you doing?” I took one step away from her, but she didn’t loosen her grip on my arm.

  “Dan,” she said again. “Look.”

  An annoyed look crept onto my face and I nearly argued with her about time running short, how we needed to get back. But I gave her the satisfaction of looking one last time toward the east. The tallest branches of the oak tree lashed this way and that in the strong breeze. I dropped the rope. I took a few steps east, passing her, passing the tree, and staring. I lifted the binoculars to my eyes.

  Far off in the distance, closer to the next tree than to us, I saw someone.

  She was walking in our direction, a girl or a small woman, and she was stumbling with determination but also with uncertainty. A tan cloak covered her, wrapped around her body and head. She pinched it together under her chin, but long hair escaped, billowed around her. She kept looking up as if expecting someone to meet her. I couldn’t tell if she could see us or not. She wiped her forehead, stu
mbled again, leaned hard on a walking stick. She kept coming.

  I handed the binoculars to Miho. Her mouth dropped open when she saw the girl. She turned to me with a million questions in her eyes.

  “We need to go.” I grabbed the rope attached to the tarp and tightened the load.

  “What if she needs help?” she asked. “I think it’s a girl, maybe a teenager.”

  The girl wasn’t stopping either. I shook my head. “No one has ever come back,” I said, my hands shaking so badly I could barely grip the rope. “No one.”

  We moved as fast as we could, dragging the tarp filled with wood behind us.

  8 Someone Is Coming

  ABE MET US out beyond the edge of the village. I guess he noticed our urgency from a long way off. I dropped the rope and collapsed onto the grass, taking deep breaths. Miho bent over, hands on her knees, gasping for air.

  “What are you two doing?” Abe asked with an uncertain grin. “Is everything okay?”

  Still trying to catch my breath, I pointed out toward the first tree. “Someone’s. Coming.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, looking from me to Miho and back to me again.

  Miho stood up straight and held her hands together over her head, trying to make more space for her lungs to work. “Someone’s coming, Abe. From the east.”

  His smile shifted from uncertainty to doubt. He kept looking back and forth between us, as if he was trying to decide which of us would break down and tell him the truth. The fact that we both returned his gaze without hesitation seemed to knock him further off balance.

  “You must have seen something that looked like a person. Maybe a branch fell from the next tree?”

  “It was a person, Abe,” I said. “We saw her in the binoculars.”

  “But no one ever comes back,” he said. “There’s no reason to.”

  It was true. If what waited in the east was so good, why would anyone leave it? Why would anyone return to this mountain?

  “I don’t know what to say, Abe. We saw what we saw.”