West of Here

by Jonathan Evison

  “It sounds like the stuff you’re scared of already happened.”

  scoop

  OCTOBER 1890

  Eva marched through the weak light of the warehouse clutching the Commonwealth Register like a baton, liberating her frazzled hair from a bun and shaking it loose as she came.

  Griffin was hunched over his desk, scratching out notes on a legal pad. He didn’t look up as Eva approached, but he’d been expecting her.

  “Yes, Miss Lambert?”

  “Where’s my story?”

  “I didn’t run it,” he said.

  Eva slapped her newspaper on the desktop, where it remained furled. “I can see that. When do you intend to?”

  Dotting an i with gusto, Griffin looked up from his work impatiently. “Frankly, I don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He busied himself writing once more. “Simply put, I’m not interested.”

  “How can you say that? You told me to bring you a cause! You told me —”

  “Not a lost one, Miss Lambert. You’re six months too late.”

  “How is this a lost cause?”

  Griffin paused in his writing and looked up. His lips were bloodless. His eyes were rimmed with thin blue crescents.

  “It’s an avalanche,” he said. “It can’t be stopped. And besides, I’d no sooner stop it than —”

  “It can be regulated!” Eva said. “It can be altered! The structure is not even built yet! They’ve hardly begun! How can you call it a lost cause? You’re talking about the future of this place. You’re talking about the very corporate plundering that inspired you to start this newspaper in the first place! And there’s other things at stake here besides equity. How can you fail to consider the fish? What happens to those fish when they can no longer propagate? What happens to the natives who depend on them? What happens to our economy, which could well depend on fishing. Don’t you see? The designs don’t even allow for —”

  “I’m not interested in fish!” bellowed Griffin. “I’m interested in people. I’m interested in what benefits society. And before you go admonishing the editorial decisions of this newspaper, consider that I’ve been in this business longer than you’ve been alive — long enough to know that you’ve got to choose your battles wisely if you wish to be an instrument of reform.”

  “So you’re backing down?”

  “I’m doing nothing of the sort! This is not my battle, Miss Lambert. It seems to me that this particular battle belongs to you and your husband.”

  “He’s not my husband. And that’s ridiculous! I’m not the one confusing the issues here. The public has a great stake in all of this — and you know it! It’s all spelled out right there in a thousand words.”

  “A thousand sensational words of speculation and innuendo.”

  “I’ve seen the designs, and there’s no passage for the fish! I know the investors, I’ve seen the contractors — and they’re not from around here!”

  “You said all that in your story.”

  “And what about the workers? They’re not from around here either!”

  “At least they’re not coolies.”

  Eva turned and faced the high windows. There was dust swimming in the light. She felt a quavering in her chest and the bitter sting of bile in her throat. “I gave up my daughter to write this story,” she said.

  “Well then, perhaps you owe your daughter an apology, Miss Lambert. That’s beyond my jurisdiction. Whatever the case, I simply cannot allow you to grind your personal axes in my newspaper. I’m concerned with more pressing issues.”

  Eva swung around to face him once more. “This is a labor issue! This is an economic issue! This is a conservation issue!”

  “Conservation?” Straightening up, Griffin looked almost amused. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “Look around you. How do you convince the public to conserve what they cannot even see the end of? You’re taking a narrow view of this issue, Miss Lambert.”

  “I most certainly am not. You know as surely as I do that no resource is unlimited — or none of these people would have come west to begin with. There would be no land rush if land were unlimited! There would be no —”

  “I know that sometimes the benefits of a thing outweigh the unpleasant necessities,” Griffin interjected. “Sometimes the end justifies the means.”

  “You don’t expect to sway me by resorting to cliché?”

  “I don’t care to persuade you one way or another. The decision has already been made.”

  “But the decision defies reason! It defies every intention of this newspaper. The decision is unacceptable!”

  “Well, you’d better start accepting it!” snapped Griffin.

  Eva could see the veins of his forehead standing out. She looked for the truth in his eyes, and no sooner did Griffin divert them than Eva experienced a plummeting sensation and the vacuum effect of sudden and unexpected recognition. For a moment she was struck dumb. When she finally spoke it was as though her voice were coming from outside of herself. “He paid you, didn’t he? He paid you not to run the story!”

  Griffin’s eyes sought occupation on the desk top. “Nonsense. Had I received payment, Miss Lambert, I should think I’d invest in a rotary press or at the very least buy a lamp for my desk.”

  Eva felt a numbness washing over her. “I can’t believe he actually paid you.” This time she said it as though to herself.

  shadows and white spaces

  AUGUST 2006

  Your days ran together as one long day, and you took to pacing back and forth down the sterile corridor, speaking in white spaces to nobody, bobbing and dodging the punches as the many worlds shadow-boxed inside your head. Sometimes the light inside your mental room was too bright. Dimly, you knew you were not yourself. But how could you recognize me?

  The white coats were pleased with your appetite, satisfied with your reflexes and the rhythms of your heartbeat. But clearly you vexed them with your behavior. They talked about you as if you were not there, shaking their heads in disappointment.

  If anything, he’s regressing.

  The one with the bad breath became short with you. His curiosity gave way to impatience. His grip became firmer and more forceful as he poked and prodded you, jostled you around on the crinkly paper sheet, held your eyes open and blinded you with sharp pointy lights. Sometimes you tried to slow down the many worlds, tried to pin them in columns on the wall like charts for him to see.

  Take it easy, he would say. Just hold still.

  How could you trust them when they could not see?

  time

  OCTOBER 1890

  When at last Thomas felt the sickness welling up in him, tasted the blood rising in his throat, he understood that his time was near. The Siwash were beckoning him home. Shortly before dawn, wrapped in a goatskin rug, Thomas crept out the back door of Lord Jim’s and into the chill darkness. The air was heavy with moisture, and the ground was not quite frozen beneath his feet. An icy moon still clung to the western horizon. In spite of the chill, Thomas sweated profusely. His body rang with the spirit; it vibrated inside of his bones, it pushed at the back of his eyeballs, it spit at the fire burning in his belly with a hiss. And even before he took his first steps toward the Siwash, Thomas felt the spirit grab hold of his lungs and squeeze. He feared that the spirit would overpower him but resolved himself to fight it. Trudging west along the muddy road, the boy began to hear whispers, voices both human and not human. They circled the inside his head, faster and faster, until they were but a blur, and still they spun faster until they swallowed time, and the world turned to spots and finally to black.

  The boy awoke eighteen miles away at the mouth of the Elwha, where he waded into the icy riffle up to his hips and bathed his feverish body until he could no longer feel himself. He scrubbed his skin until it was raw. Then he huddled on the bank beneath his goatskin and waited, his body racked with shivering.

  The sky turned to snow in the afternoon; giant flakes float
ed through the air like ashes, dissolving as they touched the damp earth. The trees moaned as the wind rolled up through the valley. The spirit began to vibrate in the boy’s jaw as if it were trying to sing through his clattering teeth. The boy tightened his chest and gritted his teeth in an effort to contain the spirit. Then he saw what he was waiting for: a shadowy figure along the bank beckoning him from upriver. His father had come back for him at last. When he stood to greet his father, the world turned to spots, until gradually a black curtain descended, and a warmth expanded inside of him, and the only sound was the thump of a heartbeat from the center of the earth.

  * * *

  SUDDENLY, THOMAS AWOKE to a world he did not recognize. He discovered himself amid an abandoned sea of concrete, spreading in all directions atop a treeless plateau. He recognized at once that he was not himself. His body was a strange and cumbersome thing that moved of its own will yet with a purpose dimly familiar to Thomas. His shoes were odd and also cumbersome, slapping on the hard, black ground. His denim pants hung in tatters, and his baggy shirt smelled of tobacco and sweat.

  Near the center of the empty expanse stood, or rather squatted, the largest structure Thomas had ever laid eyes on; slate gray, unadorned, its smooth surface broken by neither window nor door. Squinting through unfamiliar eyes, he now saw beyond the great structure — all the more minuscule in its massive shadow — dozens of tiny, driverless carriages of every shape and color, a few of them moving restlessly about, while the others huddled in rows.

  Thomas could not help but marvel at the great structure, at how and why and where it came to be. It was ten times bigger than the Olympic Hotel, at least. Twenty times bigger than the Belvedere. It was as big as all of Port Bonita. Bigger than Jamestown. Bigger than Hollywood Beach. Its breadth might run the length of Hogback from the livery to the boathouse. Such was its scale that even as his oversized shoes piloted Thomas toward the structure, it did not seem to draw closer.

  At last, after 184 steps, he arrived at what he presumed to be the back of the building and found himself creeping in the shadow of the great gray thing toward a line of heaping metal containers. The building was alive, monstrous, humming from the inside out.

  There were seven heaping containers in all, slick midnight blue like the wing feathers of an eagle, streaked and spattered down their steel fronts with the hardened liquid refuse oozing from their open mouths. Their breath stunk of fish and moldering fruit. Suddenly, his heart was beating out of his chest, and his shivering was such that his teeth set to clacking mechanically. Thomas felt the part of himself that was not himself ease like liquid pressure from behind his eye sockets and slide down the back of his throat with a shiver. Then, the world turned to spots again, and the darkness descended.

  THIS TIME, THOMAS awoke in a place so strange that he was not sure if it was even a place at all, a place suffused with a light that was not the light of the sun but a light just as bright. It burned in even rows running the length of the room. The space was broken into colorful cluttered rows. And at the head of the place stood a glass door that talked when people passed through it, and it always said the same thing:

  doon-doon, doon-doon doon-doon, doon-doon doon-doon, doon-doon

  All but hypnotized by the talking glass door, Thomas stood before a confusion of small colorful things. The things came in various shapes and sizes and were arranged haphazardly in five long rows. None of the items was smaller than two fingers and none of them bigger than the boy’s fist.

  A large man with curly hair and a stomach pressed tight against his shirt leaned in front of Thomas, snatching two orange sticks from the middle row.

  “Curtis?” the man with the belly said. “Dude, what’s with the fish? Is that a shark?”

  The boy said nothing. The belly man looked at him strangely, as though he were from another world.

  sons and daughters

  OCTOBER 1890

  Hoko stood all but invisibly in the light of the doorway, with Minerva silent in her arms. Inside, the room buzzed with electric tension. Cigar smoke hovered in flat blue clouds amid the rafters. Ethan presided over the assembly from the head of the table.

  From Chicago and Seattle and Peoria they came, men of consequence, restless all, checking their pocket watches, shifting in their seats, daubing their brows, fidgeting with their tight collars. Even as Ethan addressed them, they murmured among themselves.

  “Now, I’m not suggesting that the outside firm is in any way incompetent, incapable, or otherwise. And the same applies to any other outside firm that wants this or any other contract. What I’m suggesting is — and Jake and I have figured and refigured the numbers — that the expense of moving all this equipment from the outside is going to result not only in delays but cost overruns, too. Maybe as high as fifty percent. Which is why I’m strongly of the opinion that —” Ethan, unable to ignore Hoko in the doorway any longer, cut himself short. “One moment, gentlemen.” Leaving his station at the head of the table, he met Hoko in the doorway and pulled her aside.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “I have to go,” said Hoko.

  Ethan stole a quick glance over his shoulder, and lowered his voice. “What do you mean ‘go’?”

  “I have to leave now,” Hoko said flatly. She passed him the child, and he opened his arms tentatively to receive her, clutching the bundled girl in front of him like a vase. He stole another look over his shoulder. “For heaven’s sake, can this wait twenty minutes?”

  Hoko shook her head. The color began to drain from Ethan’s face. Minerva began to wriggle, and issued a plaintive whimper. He bounced the child gently in his arms a few times for good measure, and she reached up to tug upon his wilting mustache. “And when can I expect you back?”

  “There’s no saying.”

  “Come again?” he said, liberating his seahorse from Minerva’s clutches.

  “I don’t know if I’ll come back.”

  Ethan felt himself go cold. It was happening again. Had he not built the nursery? Had he not rocked the child to sleep for thirty nights or more? Had he not sat Minerva on his knee, cradled her in his flannel embrace through meeting upon meeting with engineers and contractors and shareholders? He had, in fact, run himself to the ragged edges of exhaustion, walking her to sleep at dusk each day, circling and recircling the entire perimeter of the compound until his very being begged for rest, with still more candlelit hours of labor left in front of him. Was it too much to ask for a little help? “But you’ve been contracted,” he said lamely. “You can’t simply leave and not come back.”

  “It’s my son. He’s ill. I must go to him.”

  “But you can’t just … What on earth am I supposed to do about … ?”

  “Good-bye,” said Hoko, turning on her heels.

  Watching Hoko go, Ethan nearly gave in to pessimism but turned instead to greet the future.

  Even as Minerva slumped in his arms, alternately giggling, whining, and fouling herself, Ethan tried to quell the mutinous whispers of his stockholders.

  “Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I’m questioning the fiscal wisdom of Chicago — though I’d be lying if said I didn’t have a few misgivings. My primary concern is local. I put my faith right here in Port Bonita, where it belongs.”

  Ultimately, Ethan found his associates disagreeable and was forced to concede to Chicago, because Chicago had the grease that kept the wheels spinning, Chicago had money — and only money, Ethan came to realize, offered total control.

  “I don’t like this one bit,” he said upon his concession. “The whole idea was to invigorate our own economy, put our own contractors to work, not bring in outside help. This dam was supposed to be for Port Bonita by Port Bonita.”

  After the meeting had adjourned, and the men had filed out of the office, heading for town by carriage, then onward by water and rail to their great cities, Ethan slumped in his chair at the head of the table and sat Minerva on the tabletop before him as the empty room cooled
down and the pale blue smoke began to dissipate. The girl dangled her feet over the edge of the table, sitting upright by her own strength, though Ethan’s hands were there to guide her. A smile played at the corners of his mouth. The child smiled back at him.

  “What are we to do, you and I? What is written in our future, child?”

  Minerva reached out for one of his seahorses and gave it a playful tug. Looking at the girl, her wonder-eyed, expectant face, Ethan tried to see her future written there. He ran a coarse thumb down Minerva’s face, and she batted her eyelids and kicked her legs.

  “We shall see,” he said with a sigh. “We shall see.”

  After the blasting had ceased for the day, Ethan walked Minerva about the little valley as the dust settled, and the afternoon air surrendered its warmth. He walked until the child fell asleep in his arms. Circling back in the direction of the office, Ethan took a detour and cut through the camp that had sprung up along the western fringe of the compound. The workforce had outgrown the bunkhouses, erecting shacks and lean-tos willy-nilly beyond the mess hall. All of it would be thirty feet under water one day. Workers were milling about in doorways and in the road as Ethan walked with Minerva through their midst. Evenin’, Mr. Thornburgh. Howdy, Mr. Thornburgh. Comin’ right along, Mr. Thornburgh. The smell of cooking hung everywhere in the air. A single staccato laugh cut through the evening. And even with his daughter in his arms, Ethan felt a pang of loneliness.

  He came upon Indian George squatting on his haunches in front of the bunkhouse. He was packing a bag.

  “What’s this?”

  George rose to his feet and dusted off his backside. “I’m leaving.”

  Ethan was less shocked than disappointed by the news. “Leaving? You, too?” Indeed, it was an exodus: first his woman, then his helper, now his loyal companion.