These Nameless Things

by Shawn Smucker

  I was the guilty one.

  I leaned against the rock. The rain came down so hard that I didn’t even hear the person approaching. I didn’t hear their feet on the wet ground. The only reason I knew they were there was because they reached down and touched my shoulder.

  19 Voices

  MY INITIAL RESPONSE to the light touch was terror. I flailed my arms and legs and pushed myself farther down the path. The wall left deep scrapes along my spine, but I didn’t slow down until I was far enough away to stand up. I ran, and all that time the rain was coming down harder and the wind sounded like voices shouting up from the bottom of the abyss.

  I got about twenty feet down the path, moving as fast as I could while keeping one hand on the cliff wall so I didn’t plunge over the edge, before my feet slipped out from under me, my head hit the ground, and a black curtain drifted down, covering me along with the rain. The thunder seemed to be very far away—perhaps I was dreaming it? The sound of it echoed inside my head, a comfort. I moaned and rolled onto my side.

  Again the soft touch of a hand on my shoulder. But this time I was too exhausted, too hurt, to move. The hand was small, but it was filled with strength, and it seemed to be trying to lift me to my feet.

  “I’m not going back without my brother,” I mumbled.

  Again the strong, gentle tug on my arm. I tried to look up, tried to find the face that was behind this soft encouragement, but the rain was blinding. I could barely open my eyes. I was confused. Had Sarah followed me across the river? Was it Kathy?

  “I’m not going back,” I said again, my voice fading. “Not without Adam.”

  I stood and the hand moved down to mine, and the person led me along. The rain stung my face, and as we made our way down, the wind seemed to always be at our back, pushing us farther into the depths. We stayed as close to the rock face as we could. I closed my eyes and let myself be moved along. The farther down we went, the lighter the rain, the calmer the wind.

  Suddenly, all went still. I looked over at the person who had helped me travel down the path.

  It was Lucia.

  THE INSIDES OF my eyelids burned and scratched like sand whenever I blinked. The muscles in my neck ached, and my head felt heavy on my shoulders. Every so often I tried to stretch, arching my back and straining my neck from one side to the other, but nothing loosened up. Every other breath seemed to emerge as a sigh. My legs were heavy and on the verge of cramping. But we kept walking.

  I took off the knapsack and rummaged through it. I pulled out the water, took a swig, and offered it to Lucia. She barely took a drink.

  “Go ahead,” I encouraged her. “Keep drinking.”

  She shook her head, her quiet eyes staring into mine. I couldn’t hold her gaze. It felt like she might see inside of me.

  Ahead of us the path narrowed, became more of a ledge than anything else, and I peered over the edge. There was a gray sort of undulation running toward the other side of the abyss as far as I could see.

  “Is that the bottom?” I asked her. I didn’t know why I kept talking to her. She obviously wasn’t going to speak to me. But there was comfort there, even in the sound of my own voice, even in my own unanswered questions. We both looked over the edge, and Lucia’s mouth drew tight. She shook her head. She didn’t think it was the bottom.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Wait. Are those . . . clouds?”

  A sadness filled her eyes and she nodded. She took a deep breath and let it out, then another.

  “So, you mean that even once we get all the way down there . . . we’ll still only be in the clouds?” I asked, as if it was her fault.

  We stared down into the depths. Lucia didn’t move. She didn’t look at me. She just stood there at the edge of the abyss.

  I sat down. “I can’t,” I said, although I couldn’t even vocalize exactly what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t go on? I couldn’t keep hoping? I couldn’t bring myself to slink along that narrow ledge with the entire abyss waiting for us to fall in? I couldn’t bring back my brother?

  Lucia sat down beside me, put her head back against the cliff that rose at our backs, and quickly fell asleep. The air was clear around us, although up above, high above, the mist we had descended through stretched out like a flat white covering. A breeze came down the path, and wisps of Lucia’s hair trembled around her face, her fair skin, her small ears.

  “What are we going to do, Lucia?” I whispered. The words had barely escaped my lips, hadn’t even risen up in the cool air, before I, too, fell asleep. It was a sweet feeling, giving in to that weariness, resting my head back against the rock, feeling the dust of the path under my palms.

  Sitting there with Lucia, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time: hope. Her unexpected appearance in the abyss, her kind face, her gentle disposition, awakened something lovely in me, something peaceful and patient. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I wasn’t sure how to be. I wondered if this was how it felt to have a daughter. While I sat there, her head against my shoulder, I felt like I could breathe again.

  It was a heavy, dreamless sleep, more like a fog than a darkness. My eyes shot open. I thought I had heard something, and it seemed strange, this idea that a sound had woken me, because everything was so still. The air was clearer than it had been when we were higher up, but there was still a humidity to it, a kind of mistiness, and the cliff walls were damp, shining in the dim light.

  I sat there staring out over the abyss. Lucia was still asleep. My legs were stretched out in front of me, and my feet nearly reached the edge. I looked down the path, and my heart raced again as I saw how narrow the ledge became. If it continued to narrow, we’d never make it down. Even if it stayed the same, I wasn’t sure I could trust myself to walk along it, when one wrong step, one tipping of the balance, would send me into the abyss itself. How long would it take me to fall to the bottom? Could I count to five? Ten? Twenty? One hundred?

  Was there a bottom?

  I heard the sound again, the sound that had woken me up. I sat up straighter, and Lucia slowly lifted her head off my shoulder. She cleared her throat, coming up out of sleep, and it was a tiny sound, pebbles tumbling. I held up my index finger.

  “Quiet,” I whispered. I heard it again. “Voices. Did you hear that, Lucia? Voices. Or at least one voice.”

  She nodded, propping her hands underneath her as if she might spring to her feet at any moment and run. She trembled like a deer aware of a predator, trying to remain still, struggling not to spring away. I could feel the energy of it course through her body, a jolt.

  “Slowly,” I whispered. “Slowly.”

  We stood like children playacting, moving in exaggerated slow motion. I bumped the cliff and a small rock fell out, striking the ground at our feet with a miniscule thud. It terrified me, the thought that I might have given us away. But the faraway sounds I heard didn’t change, didn’t come more quickly.

  We looked up along the cliff, but the way the rocks jutted out and the mist hovering above us meant it was impossible to tell how high above us the path had last circled by that spot. I couldn’t tell if the voices were straight up, which meant they still had a long way to go to catch up to us—one entire revolution of the abyss—or if they were up the path from us, which meant they would see us at any moment.

  “We should go,” I said, adjusting the knapsack on my shoulder and moving toward the place where the path narrowed. It was too thin to walk forward on—with only a foot or two to work with, we had to turn sideways and shuffle, our backs to the cliff, our faces looking out over the abyss. I told myself again and again not to look down, but the gaping space in front of us almost had a personality of its own, one I could not look away from indefinitely, so after we had made our way twenty or thirty yards along the ledge, I looked down.

  The curved cliff walls were wet and shimmering. A fair distance below us, those clouds sat thick as a blanket. Would they hold us if we fell? Maybe Lucia was wrong. Maybe they weren’t clouds but snowdrifts or
rolling plains covered in white ash. Or frost. I wanted to jump, and the desire scared me. I wanted to fly through the air and feel the breeze on my skin, the weightlessness of falling, the plunging into those clouds. The disappearing—that was it. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to feel the end.

  But Lucia was beside me, and again I felt that calm surge of hope. She shook her head, but whether she had read my mind and was telling me not to jump or had heard the same call and was saying no to it, I couldn’t tell. She swatted her hand about her head as if trying to clear off a stinging fly.

  The whole oppressive place, with its shimmering granite rock and its narrow ledge and its mist and its hopelessness, was like a voice in the back of my mind. Jump. You can do it. It would be so easy. Not even a jump—a fall. A slow leaning forward. Go on. Let go.

  “No!” I shouted. I couldn’t help it. I had to do something to scatter the voices, and for a moment I felt that presence, whatever it was, withdraw as if cut. The air cleared, and even the mist seemed to dissipate. A brighter light came down to us from above, through the haze. But only for a moment.

  “Dan, is that you?” a voice called out, muffled and far away. I thought it was a woman, but I couldn’t tell for sure who it was. Miho? Kathy?

  “Hurry,” I said to Lucia. “Hurry, we have to get going.”

  We descended faster, our feet shuffling, almost reckless. My breathing was labored, and not only from exertion—the air itself became harder to breathe.

  A long time passed—hours? days? weeks?—and we were down among the clouds, disappearing into the fog. Yet always above me, fainter and farther away than the first time, I kept hearing the voice.

  “Dan! Dan! Is that you?”

  20 Dad

  A MEMORY CAME to me there on the ledge, my back to the cliff, my hands sliding along the damp rock. In the memory, a woman came out of my father’s bedroom.

  “You can go in now. He doesn’t have long,” she said. She was a nurse or a caretaker. I nodded, and after she passed by, I took a deep breath and went into the room.

  The lights were dim. It was the house I had grown up in, and the walls were the same dark paneling, the ceiling fan still swaying back and forth as it turned. Mom was long gone by then. I knew that as the memory came back to me. My mother had died. Did she pass before or after the airplane crash? I thought it was before, but I couldn’t be sure. I hoped it was before.

  My father didn’t move when I entered the room. His eyes didn’t open. His hands were still on top of the beige sheet. The place hadn’t changed much. Mother’s old figurines were still on top of the dressers, the old lamps she had chosen still sitting on small bedside tables on either side of the bed. Neither of them were turned on.

  “Dad,” I whispered. It was strange speaking to him like that, calling him “Dad.” We hadn’t spoken in the weeks leading up to that moment—maybe it had been months—and I couldn’t remember the last time I had called him “Dad,” but I didn’t know how else to address him. “Man”? “Mother’s husband”? His name was Virgil, but I never called him that either.

  He stirred, and his lips parted, seemed to mumble some words, but no sound escaped. I moved closer, leaned in over him, and for the first time felt genuinely sad at his passing. We had never understood each other. Had we ever loved each other? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think I could remember ever loving him.

  “Dad,” I whispered again.

  There was a chair positioned beside the bed, and I pulled it over, sat in it, and put my hands on the bed, close to his right arm. He had always been a very hairy person, his arms practically furry in his old age. Hair sprang out of his ears, and his eyebrows were wiry with strands standing up here and there. Tufts of chest hair came up out of his shirt collar. His hands were still the hands of a trucker, cracked and etched with deep lines of dirt, the kinds of stains that would never come out no matter how much soap was applied. His fingers were thick and his hands were powerful. His nails were a mess, chipped and raw around the edges.

  Even as he slept, his hand sought mine out, drifting toward my arm. “My son,” he said, and tears rose to my eyes. He had never, ever called me that. He had always spat my name out like profanity: “Dan!”

  But there, he called me “son.” I leaned closer. His eyes wouldn’t open, although his forehead seemed to be trying to lift his eyelids by sheer force.

  “I’m here, Dad,” I said, and the word “Dad” came easier that time. “Are you okay? Are you in a lot of pain?”

  His head shook, lulled around, and it took some effort for him to steady it. When he spoke, his words were slow and slurred. “No, fine. I’m fine, son.”

  Again, I melted at the title of “son.”

  “Can I get you a drink? Anything?”

  He held tight to my arm and didn’t answer. He took in a breath and moaned the exhale, not a painful sound but a tired one. “Just wait,” he said, trying again to open his eyes, to no avail. “Just wait.”

  I sat there for quite some time, so long that I thought he might have fallen asleep. Or died. Had he died? I put my ear next to his mouth and nose and thought I sensed some stirring, like the air outside a cave that has another entrance miles away.

  “Son,” he said again, the word a balm. “Adam.”

  Wait. What? I wasn’t sure. “What did you say, Dad?”

  “Adam.” The word escaped from him like a breath.

  He thought I was Adam. That’s why he had called me “son.”

  “That’s not me,” I whispered. “That’s not who I am. Dad, Adam’s in prison. He killed a lot of people in a plane crash that was his fault.”

  “Adam,” he continued, his voice otherworldly, breathless. “You are the one. I have left everything to you.”

  I tried to speak, but I could no longer use the word “Dad.” It wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t say it. I hated him. In that moment, when he thought I was my brother, when he called me “son” only because he thought I was Adam, I hated him with everything inside of me.

  “You have had a hard time of it,” he mumbled.

  “Yes,” I whispered, even though I knew he wasn’t speaking to me.

  “Oh, Adam.”

  And then he died. I didn’t have to check his pulse or lean in close to know it. There was an incredible stillness that settled in his flesh, a kind of anti-animation where every one of his cells appeared to harden. Lifeless doesn’t even begin to describe it. He seemed to immediately turn gray, a darkening that blended into the wood paneling and wooden furniture. The room dimmed, perhaps because a cloud passed over the sun, or perhaps because the ghost of him shrouded the window on its way out. I didn’t know. To be honest, I didn’t care. He was dead. I thought that might rid me of the voices, the ones that had told me throughout my entire life that I wasn’t quite enough, that my father didn’t love me, that I had no one.

  But the voices never left.

  21 Crossing Over

  THE MIST GREW more and more dense as we made our way down, and the ledge became narrower. My toes reached over its edge at some points, with only my heels finding space to stand. Lucia and I leaned back into the cliff face. I didn’t know how much farther we could go. I kept peering into the fog, hoping to see a place where the ledge opened up again to something the size of a normal path, but I could see nothing beyond the next ten feet.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Lucia over and over again, looking back at her, hoping she had enough bravery for the both of us. She nodded, nothing more than a twitch of her head. Sometimes she looked at me, her soft eyes almost smiling.

  Smiling. And there it was again: hope.

  I could still hear the voice calling my name, but it was much more distant now, faint, and I wondered if it was a real person or some trick of the mountain.

  “Dan!”

  It called to me like something from the past.

  “Dan!”

  When we reached the bottom, at first I thought the ledge had vanished. I thought we had gone all that way for
nothing and would now have to shuffle our way back up to the path or jump. But the ledge hadn’t left us stranded. It had led us to the bottom. There it was. Flat ground.

  The fog still hung about us, but now it held a sickening smell like rotting mud. It was the smell of composting vegetation and dead fish and lingering water. We stumbled off the ledge and I fell to the ground, my legs trembling. Looking up, I could see nothing but mist. The walls of the abyss, the sheer cliffs, spread out and away from us on either side.

  How long had it taken us to get to the bottom? A day? Two days? A month? Without any change in the light, it was impossible to say. We stood there for a moment, both of us completely still. I tried to peer into the fog to see if our tormenters would show up, come racing out of some cave and tie us up, carry us away. But after all the time we had spent in the pit so far, I hadn’t seen signs of anyone. It was so strange.

  “Now where?” I mumbled, but Lucia was already off and running, plowing through the fog. I hoped she wouldn’t run into anything or over any other cliffs, but I could hear her feet in the distance, and they were a continual patter. Searching. Wandering.

  “Come back!” I shouted, and immediately covered my mouth, not wanting the voice that was following us to know we were there, that we had reached the bottom. I had hoped that the narrow cliff would prove to be too much for the person to navigate. But there was no response to my shout. The bottom of the abyss seemed to have the same sound qualities as the area around Sarah’s house—the sound of my voice was immediately swallowed up.

  Lucia emerged from the fog and grabbed my hand, pulling me after her.

  “What?” I asked. “What did you find?”

  I followed her into the haze, and when the ledge disappeared behind us, and then even the walls of the cliffs, I felt disoriented. There was nothing around us but the swirling mist. No sound. Even the light seemed too dim, so that we were cloaked in a grayness. The ground went from rock to packed clay to pebbles on a kind of wet dirt, but we hadn’t walked far before the mist cleared a bit and I saw the water.