Ten Miles One Way

by Patrick Downes

  My father heard me crying. I think he’s awake to me, always, even now. I’ve tried to catch him asleep ten thousand times. In the mornings, I’d tiptoe into my parents’ room, and my dad would raise his hand and wave. My mother? A log. Occasionally, I find my father on the couch or in a chair with his eyes shut, but I never get close enough to catch him asleep. Something in him hears or smells me, and he says, “What can I do for you, Nest?” He doesn’t even open his eyes.

  Seven years old, almost eight. That first horrible night, the bloody dreams: my father came in to help me back to sleep, except I. I couldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t. Nothing he tried helped. After an hour, he said, “O the cunning wiles that creep / In thy little heart asleep! / When thy little heart doth wake, / Then the dreadful light shall break.”

  “What?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Pardon me?” he said, correcting me. I’ve never been too polite. “William Blake. Get dressed, something warm. We’re taking a walk.”

  “Isn’t it late?”

  “Someone once said, ‘Only thoughts won by walking are valuable.’ Now come on.”

  So we walked in the middle of the night.

  We didn’t go very far that first time. He took me to the diner—Stern’s, your favorite—since it’s twenty-four-hour. What’s it, a half mile from my house? He bought me pancakes. It’s around midnight. Midnight’s the actual middle of the night to a kid. Pancakes and sausage and a vanilla milk shake. He said, “Want my help with that, honey?” Pretty much, he ate it, but he got it for me.

  We talked. He told me the history of the diner. It wasn’t always twenty-four-hour. It changed in the late, I don’t know, a long time ago, when people called it the Mayor’s. The mayor at the time had grown up in the neighborhood, and he’d come to the diner once a week around two in the morning for a sandwich. Always liverwurst on rye with mustard and onions, a sour pickle, and a chocolate soda. His chauffeur sat with him, and he’d order, too. “Same, no onions, no mustard, no pickle, hold the liverwurst, wheat, toasted.” A comedian. Oh, and the chauffeur didn’t want a soda. He ordered a regular coffee, which meant with milk and sugar. Stern himself would make the plates and serve them.

  The mayor talked to whoever walked in that time of night. Friends, enemies, night owls, the lonely. He treated some lucky person to a coffee or a plate of eggs, Salisbury steak, pastrami, whatever they wanted. He called the whole spectacle Night Court. Or maybe not that, but something like that. The mayor sat there for an hour, hour and a half. Then he left without paying. The chauffeur paid. “One day,” the driver would say, “I’ll get that son of a gun to pull out his own wallet.”

  “You’ll have to wait until I’m voted out,” the mayor would say, waiting by the door. “My money’s the tax- payer’s.”

  “So’s mine,” the chauffeur grumbled.

  A year or so later, the mayor died in office. For a long time, some folks like me, not too well off in the head, swore they saw the ghost head right on through the glass door for his liverwurst. People still called Stern’s the Mayor’s, even after he died. They’d show up, 2:00 A.M. Not just one night, but night after night. Every night. Patrons, right? Diners. Drunks. Dollar bills with mouths. They’d pound on the door, yelling up to the Sterns, who lived overhead.

  “Let us in, let us in,” shouted the hungry masses. “What’s good for the mayor’s good for us.”

  Unless the liverwurst and onion killed him. You couldn’t pay me enough.

  “Let us in, let us in.”

  “Okay, stop banging,” Old Stern shouted down from the second-floor window. “Hold your horses.” Then, he turned to his son and said, “What are you waiting for, Junior? Get down there already.”

  The people ate their fill.

  “There it is,” my father said. “Stern’s: twenty-four hours, seven days a week.”

  He took over the milk shake and stirred it with a straw.

  “Once,” he went on, “right here, in this booth, I nearly asked your mother to marry me. Luckily, Nest, I came to my senses.” He sucked the last of the shake. Loud, with the straw.

  “What?” I said.

  “Pardon? I’m saying, my little girl, whatever you do, don’t ever let a man propose to you in a restaurant.”

  I’m seven.

  “An eatery of any kind. Don’t let it happen.”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  He handed out some wisdom about bad proposals, the dull and impulsive, and good proposals, the true surprises, the grand gestures; I can’t remember exactly what. Then he leaned in close. “Remember,” he said, low and serious, “even the best meals end in the bathroom next morning.”

  Yup. That’s what he said. I thought this was hilarious. The word bathroom killed me. I’m in second grade, so—.

  He asked for the bill, and we walked home, holding hands.

  Home, and my mother dead asleep.

  “Pajamas and bed, Nest.”

  Ever respectful, my father waited outside my room until I called him in. He pulled my covers up and kissed my cheek.

  “That was fun, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “I want to go again,” I said.

  “Next time you can’t sleep, we’ll walk.”

  My father and I, we walked a lot.

  Angers, Minotaur, walks, Stern’s and the mayor, terror, milk shakes, proposals, and.

  We’re going into the park. The cars will disappear. You won’t notice it right away, the silence. It sneaks up on you. And just when you’re about to say, “You hear that? No cars,” the birds will come and the wind. You’ll hear the leaves crash into the ground, our footsteps, and the sun pouring down the trees. All that peacenoise.

  Chickadees and nuthatches. Vroom, vroom to tweet, tweet.

  I’m taking you somewhere important, Q. Important to me. Past the carousel and the old stables, almost out the other side of the park. My walking grounds, my labyrinth.

  My labyrinth.

  A Chimaera, though. Chimaeras don’t haunt labyrinths. I’m just making the connection. Like the Minotaur, I would need a place to prowl.

  I stopped sleeping in bed with my mother when the Minotaur stopped frightening me. The Minotaur stopped frightening me when I—.

  Thirteen when my Angers came. My Angers and my period. Blood and rage and.

  My Chimaera.

  My father has his nostrils and horns. I’m three-faced: lion, goat, and snake. Saber tooth, split hoof, and cobra hood. Roaring and bleating, running, breathing fire. Her six stone eyes, solid turquoise.

  Body of a lion. A goat’s neck and head and one leg growing out of my back. A snake for a tail. A furnace in my heart.

  Sometimes my Chimaera is silent. Silent as the grave. Or almost silent. Crouched and tense, coiled, panting a little.

  Pretty picture, right?

  They’re not connected. My period and my Angers—.

  Sometimes, but.

  I started bleeding, and. Oh my God, so painful. They’re easier now, like you need to know. I’m saying I don’t automatically get the Angers when I bleed. That’s important. One doctor, a man—figures—tried to tell me I suffer from exceptionally serious PMS. So insulting. I was fourteen, and he wanted to put me on the pill, to try—.

  I can’t talk about it.

  My father transforms into the Minotaur over hours. He suffers. My Chimaera arrives between breaths. So quick, the fell swoop. Lion, goat, and snake. Hardly painful at all.

  She’s a fraction and a sum. A fragment of everything I am, and the sum of all the tiny dark gods inside of me speaking at the same time, shouting over each other. Totally maddening: the infinite rudeness of the gods.

  My father said he’d walk miles and miles at night with his Angers. He would end up in places with no memory of h
ow he’d arrived. By the end, he’d be calm again—at least for a little while.

  I walk when I walk, but I wait until sunrise. I’m not like my father, walking in shadows. I’ve always wanted light.

  My father’s walked with my Chimaera. Right next to me—her—without a word. It didn’t start out that way. I mean, we’d be walking, just fine, and something would come over me. She’d slither and climb right up out of me. No warning. We’d walk and walk until the Angers left me, and I’d start to cry. Then I’d shake. I could barely stand, and I’d lean on my dad. He’d hold me up or carry me the rest of the way home.

  “Why did you give this to me?” I asked him once. I was holding on to his arm, so tired but still thinking. Sad, like—. “I mean the Angers.”

  “I never thought,” he said. “My mother gave them to me, but.”

  I cried and cried. “You shouldn’t have had a child if there was even the tiniest chance.”

  What could he say?

  “Look at me. I’m a Chimaera—.”

  Nothing.

  I walk through the front door, all girl again, and collapse on the couch. My Chimaera is back inside, sleeping in my chest, behind my heart. I’ve stopped crying finally. My father evaporates; my mother appears. She brings me tea and covers me up with a blanket.

  “This takes a lot out of you.” My mother’s smoothing my hair. “The mood, the inner strife. We couldn’t know this would happen.”

  “It doesn’t make it any easier,” I say. We’ve had this conversation over five years already.

  “You were born from the best of us, Nest. Not from the worst. I can’t claim to understand what either you or your father endures. It’s a suffering for all of us. You most of all.”

  “A suffering.”

  “Is there anything else to call it?”

  My father doesn’t turn into the Minotaur every day of every month. He’s not a Jekyll and Hyde. Have you read that, by the way? The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Holy crap, it’s scary, isn’t it? But it’s even more depressing than frightening.

  My dad’s not on a schedule, like a werewolf at full moon. The Minotaur’s not a constant, not a machine. It’s hard to say. If you average it out, maybe twice a month, but. My father will go for weeks without the Angers. In March and April, though, he might hit the streets as the Minotaur three times in a week. And October? Look out. Tomorrow morning, I might be boiling an egg for my father five minutes after he’s come home from the labyrinth; ordering him to drink a glass of juice; rubbing his temples, right where his horns dissolved. He won’t talk. And you can’t come over. He won’t let you see him like that, with his eyes still black and sad.

  As for me. My Angers, my Chimaera, they’re always faster than the Minotaur, always more complicated, especially now. Angers are only a part of what I—.

  There’s the anger and the joy and the sadness and the inspiration and the tiredness and the energy, all the energy, enough energy to row a boat from here to Istanbul, to walk around the earth twice, to love you long after I’m dead.

  Can you love my Chimaera? Can you love melted iron and a comet? She’s the Equator and the South Pole. She’s a desert and the bottom of the ocean. Completely wild. A bit deadly. Horn, fangs, snow, salt, and sand. Totally strange and mysterious. She can’t speak.

  No, she can speak; she doesn’t like it much, though. She prefers screeching.

  I don’t actually know what she talks about, what she says. My parents tell me she asks after my health. I think that’s a euphemism.

  My Chimaera may show up any moment, even midsentence. You might see her before the end of our walk. If you do, remain calm. Do not engage. If she asks you a question, do not answer. Do not run. You’re a tall drink of water, so let her drink. If she wants, let her take you here, where we walk, the two of us, just a girl and her Chimaera, among the graves.

  The dead cemetery I’d heard about, but had never seen. At the edge of the park, neglected and miserable, talking to itself. Sort of like the madman in the attic, almost entirely forgotten.

  “There’s a gate,” Nest said. “What’s not to like about an abandoned cemetery?”

  The gate was choked with vines, and we had to slide through sideways. Ancient stones and mounds and markers. Trees.

  We stood on opposite sides of an ancient sunlit grave, facing each other. Was anybody else even there? No. We were alone, Nest and I. No sign of her Chimaera.

  The Chimaera. Lion, goat, serpent—. I would have to see the beast myself to understand. But the only way to the Chimaera was through Nest’s Angers. Her Angers twisted—no, even now, they twist her up. They transform her into something terrible, and she suffers. The Chimaera arrives when Nest suffers. What happens to the girl?

  I stole glances at Nest; she stared off at the trees. I heard the birch and cypress sighing behind me.

  “I was watching a yellow leaf shaking on the end of a branch. Behind you: see? Even if that leaf survives winter, it will give itself up to a bud in spring.”

  Nest.

  I wanted to say her name.

  “I think that fact alone, that the leaf might get through winter to die in spring, that fact alone separates earth from heaven.”

  Even if I could’ve answered, even if I had pretended to make sense of what she was talking about, I wouldn’t have said anything more than her name.

  Nest.

  On one of my walks with my father, he told me why he and my mother had to be together, even why she stayed with him and with the Minotaur.

  “The Japanese,” he said, “actually have a phrase for what your mom and I experienced when we met. Koi no yokan. The sense on first meeting that two people will fall in love. Both know a future love is inevitable.”

  Didn’t this exact same thing happen between us, Q? We’ve never talked about it. I felt it, even when I was telling you my name began with a silent P, but I pretended it never happened. How could anyone—? It’s hopeless, right? I’m crazy, I have a Chimaera inside me, but. It’s inevitable, the love. That’s the point.

  And here we are, in this cemetery. My Chimaera is a secret Chimaera most of the time, until.

  Nest.

  I can hear you. You want to talk. You want to say something kind to me. You’ve always loved me, I know it. You’re kind and patient, and you’ve waited until this exact day. I’ve waited, too.

  Don’t speak, Q. Keep going with me. Walk with me over the graves.

  We drifted among the headstones, reading one after another. Powell, Dyer, Guthrie, Drown, and so on, until we came across a marker sticking up at an angle from between the roots of a tree.

  “I think this is the oldest stone,” Nest said. “I’m almost sure of it, except for the Quaker markers that have no words at all. And you can’t be sure who might have been buried here before there was a cemetery. It’s a nice spot. I imagine people have buried their own here for thousands of years. A hundred wars might have been fought on this pretty little hill, people killed and killed and killed, and we’ll never know. But this stone belongs to a man whose name we can read. An early American, right? Maybe a veteran of the Revolution. Or a Loyalist. He might have cried for the king every day of his life. Who knows?”

  Nest crouched down next to the stone and traced the letters with her fingers. “Obadiah Pilk,” she said. “Died 1798.” For a minute, she fingered a long, mossy crack that ran diagonal. “Some people die hard, Q.”

  The color of the sky was the color of a wasp’s wing. Rain after all.

  On our slow way out of the cemetery, Nest stopped me.

  I know how he died. Pilk, I mean. That crack in the stone. I could tell right through my fingers. He was cutting trees, and one fell on him. He suffered a long time before he died. The whole weight of a tree broke him. Every rib. His hip. His back. A skinny branch went through his eye. But he died slowly, with a leaf tick
ling his ear, torturing him the whole time. With his good eye, he watched a little bit of sky through the leaves. The light fading and fading, the way it is now, until the light, as Mr. Pilk understood it, left.

  We stood there under the black-brown sky, the wind picking up, and the more I looked at Nest, the more I believed her. Chimaera, Pilk, Minotaur, all of it.

  Koi no yokan.

  I admit I didn’t really know what Nest was trying to tell me, except she was afraid of her mind, and afraid of herself. Afraid of her Chimaera and Angers and going totally insane. Afraid of dying insane. Afraid of going unloved and feared. But she still had hope.

  You believe me, Q. I know you do.

  Give praise to the magic of a cemetery.

  MILE FOUR

  We’re inevitable, Q. Funny thing is, you don’t even know my first name, the name I keep secret. But you’re learning my secrets, aren’t you.

  Yes, and—.

  I might want to hear you say my full name.

  I listen to my mother when she talks in her sleep. I call it talking Between, capital B. It’s a real place for her, Between, even though it’s only a horizon: sky above, earth below; not here, not there; not awake, not asleep. She’ll come out with something random, ask a question or. About this and that, whatever’s on her mind. Most of the time, it’s funny. Funny or not, though, it’s honest. Nobody can edit what’s said Between.

  It goes like this.

  “Mom?” Maybe she’s on the couch. Maybe the Minotaur left her behind, and she drifted off while watching TV. “Mom, time for bed.”

  And she says, “Did you butter the toast?”

  Or “I don’t have anything to trade for a diamond.”

  Or “Did you take Jefferson out?” Jefferson was the huge Alsatian-Lab-mastodon hybrid my mother grew up with. A gentle giant, like you and my dad. He died when I was two, after he taught me how to walk. I’d hold on to his ears, his tail, his tusks, and—.