The Hidden Back Room

by Jason A. Wyckoff

  I attempted to return to my thoughtless ocean vigil, but I found myself distracted. I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of thing would cause the treasure-seeker to act in that exact way—what was it that could elicit such intense but ultimately ephemeral interest? I could not guess. And I saw no reason to guess, as it couldn’t possibly impact me whatever the thing was. Yet my curiosity remained unabated. I waited while he moved further along the beach. When I thought he was far enough away that he would not notice, I went and retrieved the object. It was a small, metal cup, dented in places, most especially on the base opposite the handle. I judged it to be made of tin, but dark, wet sand clung doggedly all over, despite my own efforts to wipe it clean, which made it difficult to get a sense of feel. Some lustre showed in the polish beneath the earthy patina, and I was surprised the treasure-seeker hadn’t added the cup to his haul for further investigation. I noticed some sort of engraving and rubbed the area vigorously with a thumb. Stippled gothic lettering emerged: Donna Louise.

  Of course, the name was not known to me. I examined the base to see if there was a maker’s mark, but the sand smeared black and would not fall away. Perhaps two minutes passed before I realised I was duplicating the scavenger’s actions exactly—turning the cup over in my hands repeatedly, furrowing my brow in concentration as I peered at it. I even looked away to the horizon as he had, as though it might hold some clue. I realised I was considering the obvious move, which was to rinse the thing in the surf. My deliberation as to whether or not the action was warranted took longer than its accomplishment would have, but I felt frozen, as though the choice would be impossible if I didn’t first appreciate the significance of the decision. I am not easily embarrassed, but I suddenly felt foolish when I noticed a boy of about ten watching me. I looked at the cup again but could see no reason it should hold my attention—and that was irksome, for there was no reason it shouldn’t, for if I chose to be interested by it, then why shouldn’t I act as I pleased? There was a grip of mystery upon me that made me hold the cup longer than I might if I didn’t care about it, but also anchored me from taking it with me for a laugh, as though the short time invested was sufficient that it could no longer be treated as a lark. Finally, I was exasperated by the very weight of the decision. If I should have been embarrassed about anything, it was my exit: I hurled the thing to the ground and stomped away.

  I looked back just before I was to turn up the path over the dune. I saw the boy absorbed in examination, holding the cup near his guileless face.

  I vacationed along that same stretch of beach the following October, but derived no pleasure from my time there. I returned to work wearier than I left. The next three years I vacationed elsewhere, but found no satisfactory replacement.

  The fifth year after I found the cup I decided to stay home. There was no benefit in the idea other than curtailing my disappointment in another destination. I had a mortgage on a condominium in a suburb long past its ‘trendy’ days, and though I had an impressive collection of silent film memorabilia (most of it in storage), I had no creative hobbies—so there were no projects for me to ‘finally have time for’, either having to do with my property or any languishing avocation. I had no particular notion how I would occupy my time, and might have elected not to take my vacation at all if I hadn’t been instructed otherwise.

  Not that I would miss work. I had been bored at my job for some time—possibly from my first day. Oddly, the one aspect of weekdays I did not mind was my commute. The train ride between a place that was barely home and a job I didn’t care for took about fifty minutes each way. You might expect such long, frequent forays into this transit limbo would exacerbate my general malaise, but I was never anxious on the rails. My line was crowded only close to the city, and that fraction went quickly. I read sometimes, or I noted the incremental change in the scenery through the seasons, or I smiled an umpteenth time at the strange stylistic transitions between songs listened to on a playlist arranged alphabetically by title.

  As the train neared my stop to ‘officially’ commence my vacation from the rigmarole, I reached underneath my seat to retrieve my satchel. When I pulled it out, I felt some loose object drag along beside it, and I heard a dull plink of metal against the wall of the car. I thought something might have spilled from my bag, though I couldn’t imagine what it might be. I bent forward and reached beneath my seat, but my hand found nothing. As the car was nearly empty and no one seemed to be watching, I slid to my knees and leaned my head to the floor.

  Though the tell-tale inscription was pointed away from me, I had no doubt it would be there. I had inspected the cup for only a few minutes on a beach hundreds of miles away five years before, but the contours of the thing, even beneath the now-absent grit, were as familiar to me as the day I’d thrown it to the sand. There was a sudden sharpness to the moment, an acute dread and a falling away simultaneous with an odd exultation and a release of gravity, a sensory experience equivalent to the old ‘rack-focus’ camera trick common to suspense movies.

  Surprising myself, I snatched it up immediately as though there was the danger someone else might do so before me. I was roused from my shock at its presence by the realisation that the train had stopped. I barely made it out before the doors closed.

  My mind raced, trying to define the implications of this thing in my hands finding me again so many years later. No, of course, I found it, I corrected myself. It was no use staring at the thing in the station. I needed private reflection to make sense of it. I looked around as though someone might be watching—who, or why, I had no idea. I squeezed the tiny thing between my forearms and my stomach like a running back with a football, and kept it there the entire walk to my condo.

  When I had the cup ‘safely’ home, I inspected it. It was, as I mentioned, clean of its former residue. What I had mistaken for tin was revealed as silver—‘Sterling’ was stamped on the bottom with the maker’s mark ‘WEB’. Gold wash inside the cup gleamed attractively. A quick internet search identified the manufacturer as the Web Silver Company of Philadelphia, in operation from 1950. The silver ‘baby cup’ was a novelty common to the era; Web Silver Co. sold especially at Wannamaker’s department store. In its less-than-perfect state, I would be lucky to get thirty-five dollars for it. (Admittedly a small sum, but I confess to a moment’s pleasure thinking on the beach-comber’s oversight.) A search on the incomplete name was predictably futile.

  The additional information was intriguing, but unhelpful. The cup belonged to the past. There was no cloudiness to my own past, so I didn’t see how the object could illuminate any part of it. In the present, it might invoke someone else’s nostalgia, but I had no stake in it. I likewise failed to see how someone else’s discarded novelty could have any bearing on my future. And yet, here it was—too, too improbably for me to be contented with marvelling at the coincidence.

  I set it on a coffee table. I sat on the edge of the sofa and regarded the cup. There were several unread magazines laid out next to it; these I pushed to the floor. Looking at it was like watching, when watching is waiting—as though I expected it to move or to speak, to indicate of its own accord what it wanted from me or to instruct me what I should do. It did not, of course. It merely rested there, not quite flat on the lacquered wood. It slowly dawned on me that I should not expect information to be forthcoming from the cup—whatever clues it conveyed were present and contained entirely in its small frame and the markings thereon. I resisted picking it up and turning it over again, as I couldn’t imagine there was anything I could have missed before and there seemed to be no changes beyond a good cleaning made to the object in the five years since my last encounter. I reached for it several times with one or both hands, but I stopped before I touched it. Unwilling to disturb the cup, I turned myself over instead—I squirmed like a schoolboy at his desk, then bounced and wriggled from position to position over the sofa until I was dizzy. Until, again, as I had been at the beach, I was angry at the thing.

  Bu
t what should I do with it? Why care at all, when it was so easily disposed of? This, I tried next, though the cup spent less time in the trash can than it did sitting on the coffee table. No, I could not brush aside the incredible coincidence of finding an object—this object, of which there could not be two. Indeed, the idea of aimless fortune was too incredible to entertain. It was clear other forces were at work, poking and provoking my course, but keeping silent their designs. I knew I must elevate the cup beyond its poor appearance, but I could not interpret the oracle.

  I decided it was a seed. The bloom would be revealed, but for the time being, I should embrace my disquiet as a kind of initiation. I should display the object somewhere in my house and wait for subsequent understanding of its place in my life. Easily done. I put the cup on the mantle beneath the deco print, chiding myself for becoming overwrought.

  I next moved it sometime after 3 a.m. that morning. Then once more before sun-up. And several times before noon.

  I brushed my hands over my face and my arms repeatedly throughout the day, as though I’d walked into a cobweb I could not dislodge. When I felt particularly frustrated, I barked monosyllabic nonsense to break the silence. My anxiety about the location of the cup seemed to lend credence to my conviction that its perfect placement was the condition that, once satisfied, would allow whatever next step that waited to finally occur.

  I spent the entire two weeks of my vacation trying to find the right place for the cup. I felt ill by the third day and my degeneration continued without relief. I was exhausted but could not sleep. I ate dry foods absentmindedly. I was distracted to the point I could not derive entertainment from any show I watched on TV, and every detail was lost to me the second a program concluded. I went out often, but never for long. A good feeling would come upon me in the open air, a feeling of clarity—into which erupted an inspiration of where the cup should go that seemed to perfectly resolve the matter. Eager to complete the puzzle and finally be free, I would immediately return home to affect the change. Needless to say, the inspiration never evoked the anticipated response.

  Looks of concern and derision greeted me upon my return to work. Fortunately, routine bolstered my strength, if ever so slightly. I thought for the first time in two weeks of ridding myself of the thing, fate or fortune be damned. Whatever it asked of me was too much for me to give, and I began to plot my release of its influence. The idea of where to put the cup transitioned from placement in my home to disposal far away from it. I considered returning it to where I had found it, leaving it under the seat of the train. But I knew this would only lead to compulsive investigation beneath the seats (to see if I had escaped it), and though I might have little regard for the opinions of others, the compulsion would mean the destruction of my only respite—my commute.

  Understand, I could not destroy it. I don’t feel this was cowardice. It was hard to trace the reason for this, but I could not reconcile myself with the idea that the thing needed destroying. Perhaps I felt it could yet mean something for me, even if I wanted nothing to do with it. Or perhaps it struck me superstitiously—as though damaging the cup might do me even more harm than obsessing over it. It was better to be done with it peaceably. But where should I leave it?

  I decided I must not think about it. If I could find no place for it in my home, then considering where to discard it in the wide world was sure to cripple me. Instead, I ‘tricked’ it. I set it once more on the mantle. And then I moved to the west coast.

  I found it difficult to establish a new life in a new city. I could not get a good recommendation from my previous employer. I took on a string of menial jobs. The work was no better or worse than my lost profession, it simply paid less.

  I lived in a walk-up apartment over a head shop. Both sides of the street were similarly occupied the length of the block: ground floor retail, two storeys of habitation above. Catty-cornered pizzerias bookended my small world.

  After three years, I was fortunate enough to secure a position processing customs forms for a shipping company. I worked in a cramped office in a warehouse, surrounded by three-part carbonless forms, but somehow returned to my apartment every evening smelling of fuel and fish.

  One night, slightly later than usual, I walked down the block past one pizza place, past the travel agency, past the tattoo parlour. When I drew near the recessed door that would lead me to my modest abode, I chanced to glance in the window of the antique shop.

  I know I must have cried out, though I’m sure I formed no intelligible word.

  There it was, in the display, situated among the worthier and more attractive pieces and the hard-to-find nostalgic curiosities:

  The cup.

  I trembled from head to toe. Cold sweat seeped from my brow. I did not ask myself how it could be there, because of course it would be there—for up through the terror of what the thing might do to me came the feeling that here was the thing that had been missing from my life. Here was my second, my third chance! Here was my mystery again, waiting to reveal itself. If only I—if only I—if . . . That was the fear I had sought to define: that no matter what I did, I would fail, I would not discover the thing I needed to do to find the meaning of the thing in my life.

  Because it must mean something.

  It was marked at a low price. I could have gone in and bought it right away with what little I had in my pocket. It didn’t matter if the shopkeeper didn’t like the look of me and seemed to vacillate between coming out to shoo me away and calling the authorities to task them with it. My money was as good as anybody’s. It was easily accomplished. But what then?

  I relieved the shopkeeper of his decision and went to my squalor. I sat and tried not to consider every course and outcome in my head, to no avail. I went back into the street late that night and stared at the thing, barely visible in the darkened display. I looked at it and felt the weight of the thin metal in my memory. And I knew I must put opposite on the scale my endurance, and the weight I must measure was itself the act of measuring: how long could I go this time, before I decided I could not decide?

  I do not think it is necessary to describe how my body and soul withered near to nothing. It is likely understood already that I had several run-ins with the shopkeeper, the authorities, and a few innocent passers-by. My ranting was such that the shopkeeper never quite understood what object excited me so—or he knew, and refused to be bullied by my conduct into changing his display.

  I tried to find apathy, convinced that that must be the answer, but I was not born with the temperament. It was a ruse, anyway, destined to fail—hoping that I could get what I wanted by fooling myself into not caring if I didn’t. When that didn’t work, I moaned and wailed every night in my rooms until I was evicted.

  The following night, when I was sure the street was deserted, I kissed the glass. Only after did I understand it was a goodbye kiss.

  Goodbye. I give up.

  I do not know why I expressed the sentiment with affection. Perhaps it was an apology I made to myself.

  I live on the ocean now. I go ashore only when ordered.

  The next time I see the cup will be the last. My prayers now all beseech that the cup be kept from me for as long as possible.

  And when my prayers are finished I think at length about what I might do between now and then.

  THE RAIN-DIRTY VALLEY

  Fog is common to the lowlands of southwestern Ohio. It swells from the Ohio River early in the evening, and then billows back along her tributaries, unfurling and re-twining, reaching to splay broad, eddy-tipped fingers across verdant fields and plump farmland. Finally, it spills thickly over the busy roadways, forcing anxious motorists to slow and build a chain, linked by taillights no farther or closer than the limit of visibility, in a process as familiar as the hindrance necessitating it.

  A more solitary traveller might chance upon another Ohio fog, less common and less frequently plumbed, different in aspect, different in nature. After midnight on clear, summer nights in the Sc
ioto River valley in the foothills of the Appalachians, the fog seeps from the air at the periphery of vision, appearing ever-so-slightly denser with each turn of the head. The fog there does not drift or purl; it thickens to an undifferentiated haze of cotton white, finding form only scant feet into the cone of a headlight as wisps to be quickly chased away. This soft plague smothers little more than two counties; a patient driver will pass through it in an hour; an impatient driver may tarry forever.

  It was this valley fog in which Nathan Shoney found himself immersed shortly after two a.m. on a Sunday morning in June. He was on his way home to Columbus after a session at The Recording Workshop in Massieville. A graduate of the program, Nathan acted as liaison, booking the session as a teaching lab. He tickled the ivories, too, vamping chords under Opie Brooks’ bullfrog-necked trumpet trills. Nathan was impressed with how well the students dealt with the acoustical instruments. He credited their preparedness to the current folk-revival trend embraced by many of the hipster kids. Watching them, Nathan had wondered if ‘his people’ could similarly return to jazz in a big way.

  The school was always happy to have professional musicians for their students to work with and Opie and the boys were happy for the free studio time—opportunity wasn’t knocking down Opie’s door. Nathan knew it never would, which was why he arranged the session. The reason he booked it for that particular night was entirely unrelated to his love of music.

  By the time he got on the road (some time after the others had left), Nathan knew that Charise had traded in her surname and been carried over the threshold into the bridal suite. He did his damnedest not to think any farther than that. He and Charise were old friends, close friends once upon a time, even if they hadn’t talked much in the last few years, and he had been invited to the wedding. There was no real romantic history between them, but he had been in love with her since they’d met, and he was (usually) confident that the feeling had not been entirely one-sided.