by Emily Brewes
“It is already done,” she replied.
Away they went, arm in arm, to live as well as they might.
“DON’T YOU MEAN ‘happily ever after’?” asks Doggo.
I want to reassure him that yes, that is what I mean. I mean that every story ends happily, or at least it should. I want to say all this and more, but I’m too busy crying to answer him.
ONWARD AND UPWARD
MY AUTOPILOT starts to wind down in the absence of anyone but myself. And what am I? Besides old and tired and lonely, what is Jesse Vanderchuck?
Empty. Out of time.
Yes, that seems almost too apt: out of time. One foot is stuck in a past that cannot be reclaimed, while the other foot tries to step onward into a future on a planet become alien. There is nothing left of the “good old days,” except me.
At some point in the distant future, should humans live on, someone will turn over the stone that covers the Underground. Maybe some people will still live there, gone pale and boneless as worms. That’s what comes of trying to recapture a thing that is long gone and was maybe never yours in the first place.
Damnation.
A DAY DAWNS, like any other. It’s mild and fine with a vast blue sky settled on the hills like an upturned porcelain cup. I could almost believe it’s the old days. That Mum and Dad are downstairs, and that I’ll soon be called down to breakfast. That Olivia’s in the room down the hall, tucked under the dormer eaves in her window bed, still sound asleep.
Sleep’s been rough the past little while. I keep dreaming that I’m in the Underground, that I never left. I’m by the elevator shaft surrounded by rough breathing, wet coughs, and the crackle of aged poly sheeting shrouds. Sometimes I’m tending to those who’re too sick to move. Sometimes others are tending to me. When I ask where Doggo is, they shake their heads and move on.
I look out over the backyard. The slumped form of the workshop taunts me. It’s a burial mound now, having lost its status as a building to the entropic effects of time. Seeing it there, looming over the place between the yard and fields, sagged walls and broken-spine roof softly draped in grasses and vines, goads me to act. Some part of my brain lights up the way it would to see a beautifully made bed piled high with pillows and blankets of purest white.
God, when was the last time I saw actual white fabric?
“FOOD BRINGER?”
Doggo’s ghost trots along behind me as I rattle around the house, pacing the restlessness out of my bones. He left the dog plushie at some point. It’s hard to remember how long ago, since days have started blending together.
There’s a mania to my actions. I could feel adrenalin jitters in my hands as I packed a bag for hunting. Then I set it down and now can’t recall where I left it.
“Food Bringer.” His voice is lower in pitch, with a tone of command it’s never had before. I’m still distracted but nonetheless ask him, “What? What is it, Doggo?”
He sits on the kitchen floor and wags his tail. It makes no sound as it passes through the flaking linoleum surface.
“What do you want, buddy? Show me.”
He hesitates before rising with an inaudible creak and ambling to the back door. Sitting again, he casts a glance over his shoulder.
“Outside? You wanna go outside?” I’m talking like there’s an actual dog that actually needs to go to the bathroom. The insanity of this doesn’t escape me, but it doesn’t bother me, either. Not anymore.
I undo the bolt and grab a doorknob that feels electrified. It sends a tingling jolt singing up my arm and straight into my head. Until it’s over, I can’t think. Or see. Or sense anything. As it ends, all my systems come back online one by one.
Rebooting.
Doggo is still sitting at my feet, staring at the bottom corner of the door, willing it to open. His focus is so complete that his tail is still and straight as an arrow. He doesn’t seem to have noticed my … episode. Seizure?
I pull the door open and he’s gone. Doggo leaps over the threshold and disappears into the daylight. I do my best to catch sight of him, but all I can see is the occasional rustle of tall grasses, which is all but certainly the wind.
The empty stillness of the house is deafening, or maybe it’s the aftermath of my fit. In dumb shock, I begin to close the door. There’s a thump, past which I can’t budge the door. When I try to push it closed, there’s a ghostly yelp.
“Doggo?”
The faintest outline of a doggy shape is sketched in the air between the door and the jamb. He backs up two steps to sit on the porch and looks up at me.
“Are you not coming with me?” Doggo asks.
The jolt of cold that seems paired to that phrase drives into my solar plexus like a fist made from ice and leaves me deprived of air. A catalyst. A trigger. It means something more than what it’s asking.
“Where are we going?” I ask once I’m able to draw breath. The kind of question you ask because you think you might know the answer, but you don’t want to know. You know?
Doggo seems to know this, too, and continues to sit in silence. Waiting for my reply.
When I can push words from my mouth, they sound heavy and resonant. The tolling of a distant windchime that hung from the corner of Grandma’s porch. “I’m not ready.” Some part of me is still convinced I mean my hunting bag. Where the hell did I leave that thing, anyway?
“Aren’t you?”
The question doesn’t come from Doggo or from me. At least I don’t think it does. Everything’s fuzzy, and I start to think that maybe that seizure was more serious than it seemed.
“Jesse. Let’s go.”
Speed is vital. As with suicide, you have to keep yourself distracted long enough to go through with it.
Look at the sky as you climb the bridge railing.
Think about how small the distance is between a trigger at rest and a trigger pulled.
Never mind that you’re looking down the barrel.
The mania of the morning is gone. In its wake, I feel hollowed out and brittle: an eggshell around a void. The best solution seems to be following my feet. Like autopilot, it’s a thoughtless process. Look only as far ahead as needed to avoid tripping or stepping off a ledge. Go until movement becomes unthinkable.
Repeat.
SLAPSTICK
I DON’T HAVE A GOAL in mind, other than to leave. It’s several hours in before I decide to establish one. It may be arbitrary, but so is existence. None of us asked to be here. While some see that as reason to abdicate responsibility, I always saw it as a dictate to help. Or at least not be an asshole.
Try as I might, imagination fails to produce even the shadow of a goal. Maybe, I muse, it’s because I’m not really here. If I was reborn at the ocean’s shore, perhaps I died when we went Underground. This is just the ghost of Jesse Vanderchuck, rambling through the woods of what used to be Northern Ontario, telling stories to nobody but air.
Maybe everything that has happened since leaving the Underground has been a figment of my imagination.
The road is an intermittent companion. It was made to wrap around natural features, whereas I am compelled to push straight through. I’m heading more or less west from home. If I walk long enough, I’ll fall into the ocean. Wouldn’t that be poetical?
My ambition is too blunted to contemplate such a lofty goal. I’ll come across a derelict Tim Horton’s before too long — maybe that’s good enough.
I WAKE ONE MORNING to see the peak of a small mountain brightly lit by the first rays of dawn. It’s on the far side of a nameless town beside a lake. I’m nearly sure I know the name but cannot trust these scrambled eggs I call a brain, and the road sign by the highway exit is long gone. All that comes to mind is the name of the lake. Nipissing. I only recall that much because the kids in class all thought it was the height of comedy that a lake had “pissing” in its name.
The surface of the water glows in the rising light, so that it looks gilded. I watch its gentle shimmer, circled by flocks of gulls,
until I’m interrupted by the growl of my stomach. I’ve been hunting for food since leaving home, with middling success. Never did find that bag of gear. Nor did I have presence of mind to bring supplies. Just Jesse Vanderchuck of Very Little Brain.
“And Doggo” comes a whisper in my ear.
He comes and goes. Thought he was gone for good two nights ago when he took off in the midst of a dramatic retelling of my last day with Olivia. Our relationship is very different, now he’s dead. There’s no need to protect him, to care for him. He’s just a bit of company, which is why I’m pretty certain he’s imaginary.
Not that he seems to know that.
“Is it time for food?”
I unfold my legs and rub some feeling back into them before trying to stand up. A lesson hard learned that I’m not as young as I used to be. We trek along the broken road until we come across the biggest grocery store I’ve ever seen. Like all of them, it’s been picked over, but there’s almost always a lonely can of lima beans for a hungry old beast like myself.
The lake is closer here. We take ourselves down a trail to a sandy patch of beach. I sit and eat my beans. Doggo snuffles in and out of some low-growing bushes.
That’s when I decide that what I really need to do is climb that mountain.
Who knows why? Because it’s there, because I have nothing else to do …
I make a deal with myself that if I make it to the top of that mountain without dying, I’ll stop. I won’t move from the place I park myself, and that’ll be that.
Maybe I’ll self-mummify like a monk, and years later some other fool who feels the need to climb a fucking mountain will come across my body — cross-legged, at peace — and shit their ever-loving pants from here till next Tuesday.
Hell, kids today probably don’t even know what Tuesday is.
OR LONESOME NO MORE
IN MY DREAMS, I am safe. I wake up in a strange place of warm sounds and sweet air. Everyone I see is radiant with health. They laugh simply because of how wonderful it is to be alive. Food and drink are plentiful, and we partake at every hour of the day because we can.
I make love, in this dream, to anyone who’ll have me. I don’t understand why anyone would, since every reflection I see shows that I am a mildewed skeleton draped in rotting rags. A sexless monster that hungers for warmth, for safety, for companionship.
When I wake, it’s always colder than I think it should be. Doggo, when he’s around, flickers in and out of existence. I can only hear him if I try really hard. Even then, he sounds like a mistuned radio: a stream of patchy chatter, punctuated by stabs of static.
I eat through my meagre supply of lima beans in stages, weaning myself off food. Next I’ll do the same with water but not until the climb is finished.
The way isn’t especially hard. Or perhaps it is, but I take my time, conquering it step by step. I am something inevitable, approaching the mountain as inexorably as a glacier. I feel enormous and unstoppable, which is how I know I am also right.
Over the ripples of smaller hills, dipping down into valleys that flow with countless tributaries, connecting thousands of lakes. As I go, I must angle to the north. Gaining latitude is akin to travelling back in time. Semi-arid plant life of the present day gives way to more temperate flora. The maples and pines of my youth, the dark-green leaves that colour the tales I spin, they surround me. A wind blows down the slope ahead of me, heralding cold rain.
“IT’S NOT ALWAYS ABOUT YOU,” Olivia wrote in her letter to Mum. “You did things, took actions, because you thought you were in control. But the truth is you needed that control to feel less small. So you took it. You stole us away like some kind of monster and left my father — your husband — to fend for himself. And I hate you for that.”
Those words, and many more like them, were thrown with the intent of revealing some great truth. A semblance of justice. But in the end, they read like what they were: the angry words of a hurt little girl who missed her daddy.
Bits of that letter could’ve been aimed at either of us, Mum or me, but she got the brunt of Olivia’s ire. I guess it makes it easier if the blame isn’t spread too thin. More like shooting a laser than a shotgun. You hurt fewer bystanders and more certainly wound your target.
I’m thinking of this as I stir the embers of a fire with a length of broken hockey stick I all but tripped over. The tape around the handle is hard and dry, flaking off in places. Whatever branding was once painted on it is long gone.
Everything I knew is long gone. How can I know if I’m still alive if there’s nothing familiar to measure my existence against? Who’s going to be impressed that I still remember all the lines from Rocky Horror Picture Show? Who’ll mourn the lack of Jesse Vanderchuck in the world?
Then I recall that it’s not all about me. Stir the embers. A flash of sparks shoot into the air and are almost instantly gone.
Too cliché?
I CATCH AND EAT a rabbit beneath the light of a full moon. The wild ones taste of the grasses they eat. Not like the ones we kept for meat. They were enormous things, sturdy yet terrified of everything. In stew, they were tender as anything. A bit like eating silk — if silk were made of meat.
Gaminess aside, I eat the whole thing, down to gnawing the bones. I’m supposed to be abstaining from food. Preparing for my ascendance from mere mortal to mythical creature. Then the tummy rumbles start, and a feral instinct to survive takes over my body and mind. Next thing I know, I’m mowing down on undercooked rabbit beneath the silvered leaves of a sugar maple, like a wolf from a fairy tale.
The next night, a brace of fat squirrels donate their bodies to my survival effort. They’re so docile, it’s more or less a matter of walking up to them and doing them in by hand. In no time at all, I’ve become a dab hand at snapping tiny necks.
There are one or two moments when I bitterly mull that Olivia’s missing out on my capability. She could have had someone like me helping her out, but she didn’t believe in me. Not like I do. Except that it took a literal year for me to work up the courage — the desperation — to quit that house and strike out on my own. A big part of that was self-doubt. I didn’t trust myself to keep me alive any more than Olivia did.
AS I WALK, I look for another story. Nothing will allow itself to be conjured from the ether. Everything here is too real. Literal life and death. I get started once or twice, then nearly die from tripping over a tree root or putting my faith in the wrong sapling for stability. To say nothing of the giant footprint I stumbled into, nearly drowning in the water puddled at its bottom.
It’s no use. Whatever magic had found me is gone. Fled, like everyone else.
Doggo’s diminished to a faint wiener-shaped sketch that trucks along beside me. It waits, wagging a ghostly tail, for me to recover from every stumble. It rustles through the ferns as it walks. But it does not speak.
One benefit of this trek is that I’ve stopped dreaming of the Underground. Though the last time I did was a real nightmare. Milky plastic draped over my face, crinkling with each ragged breath. I felt like I couldn’t move. I tried to speak, to tell one of the attendants that I was still alive, but could make no sound come from my throat. Only a thick gurgle from fluid-filled lungs.
They took me from the hospice room to a place lit by deep-sea biolume ropes. The sound of soft machine breaths whispered from a vent shaft. And there were shapes hulking in the half-light. Strange inhuman shapes. They lay on tables and stretched up to the ceiling. Every so often, there was a low groan, as if an old man was settling into his favourite armchair. I was set down on a table. I felt something cold and sharp drawn down my abdomen. It didn’t hurt. When it was done, I only felt wet. Exposed.
Shuffling. People in respirators and gloves lifting gelatinous globs from white plastic pails and putting them on my chest. My belly. No, not on. In.
Real as anything, I could feel the globs slide into open flesh. Numbed by disease but not unfeeling, they oozed into the crevices between shrivelled organs. To
ok root in the fertile bounty of my earthly self.
Haven’t dreamt of the place since. Thank God.
IT’S A TRICKY proposition to keep track of time these days, but I think it’s close to a week before I’m in the foothills. I only know I’ve come close to my goal because I can no longer see the mountain, unless I look up. Close to, it’s certainly taller than it looked at a distance.
My resolve is steeled. This is my mountain, and I will conquer it — come what may.
Were I younger, it might have only taken one day to climb that slope. As it is, I take my time, one foot after the other. It’s less a matter of making straight for the top than of taking a series of shallow switchbacks. Parts of the climb are steep enough that I have to wedge my foot between the roots of a tree and the ground to keep from tumbling down.
I spend the night tied to the thickest bole I can find. No fire, no supper. Before I pass out from a potent combination of hunger and exhaustion, I swear I see a pack of wolves being led by a proud, red-headed woman walk past me. When they’ve gone, bits and pieces of tiger-striped fur peek out from behind every tree trunk, stone, and bush. Facing east, I wake when dawn’s first rays stab into my eyes through closed lids.
There is no pause for food here. The growling beast inside, demanding to be fed, is cowed by the peril of the climb. Besides, it’s not like there’s a ton of critters just lounging around on the side of a mountain or anything. They stick to the flatter ground, like sane things.
What am I doing this for? Am I trying to prove something? If so, to whom?
These questions and similar ones swim through a mind growing ever foggier from want. I see their sides flash out of murky water, like the scales of a wish-granting fish. The one time my dad took me fishing, we went to Wendigo Lake. It was small and flat, almost perfectly silent, tucked away off a back road, surrounded by a fence of evergreens. The water was clear but deep, tapering sharply from brown to black.
