by Patrick Lee
Rachel had asked him why he had this stuff hidden up here. He’d explained that with his old job, he’d sometimes worked against very powerful people. In a perfect world, those people would never learn his name, but in the real world, stuff happened—shit happened was how he’d phrased it in his thoughts.
What I mean is, this isn’t the first time I’ve had to think about vanishing, he’d said.
Which had made her wonder about something: Was it strange that she’d run into someone—she had literally run into him—who was this good at keeping her safe from Gaul and his people? Wasn’t that a doozy of a coincidence?
On the heels of that thought came another, this one from somewhere deep in her mind: Had it been a coincidence?
She couldn’t imagine what else it could’ve been, but the question unsettled her.
They were standing in front of a shelf full of something called freeze-dried meals: foil packets with pictures of hikers on the fronts, labeled with dish names like Lasagna with Meat Sauce and Chicken Teriyaki with Rice.
“Fair warning,” Sam said. “This stuff’s all going to taste terrible. Very light to carry, though.”
He filled half the cart with them. The other half was already full of clothing, his size and hers. Atop the clothing were two items: a propane cookstove the size of a CD spindle, and a hand-pumped water purifier. Tucked into the space beneath the cart were two backpacks, two sleeping bags, and two pair of hiking boots. Everything they would need to stay in the woods for a week or more. By the time they emerged again, she would know who she really was—if they didn’t find out sooner.
A middle-aged woman walked by. Rachel caught the fragmented spill of her thoughts: Still like the gray one, but … what’s over here? No, those are men’s.
Way in the background, like a radio turned down but endlessly droning, the man at the checkout was still staring at the dirty magazine.
Sam pushed the cart to the next aisle. Rachel followed. She’d found she didn’t like getting too far away from him. Compared to everyone else she’d been near today—even people in other cars on the highway—Sam’s thoughts were unique. No matter what he was thinking at any one moment, there was a feeling that was always there, a feeling that seemed to be pointed right at her. It made her think of the warmth near a fireplace. That was how Sam’s thoughts felt. Like protective heat. Like arms around her.
* * *
They were heading north through the city, ten minutes later, when it happened. They had two more stops to make: an electronics store here in Bakersfield, to buy an audio recorder, and a specialty shop in the city of Visalia, an hour away. What they needed in Visalia were two unusual items—Sam had spent ten minutes on a pay phone, calling places to ask about them. These items would be for emergency use only; Rachel hoped like crazy they wouldn’t need them.
Sam made a left toward a Best Buy half a mile down a cross street. The moment he’d completed the turn, Rachel felt her breath catch. It was like someone had driven an elbow hard into her chest. A choked little sound came out of her mouth.
Sam turned to her. Concern flared in his thoughts.
“What’s wrong? Rachel?”
She forced out a breath, sucked in another.
“I’m fine,” she said. She heard how she sounded, though. She didn’t sound fine. She didn’t really feel fine, either. For another second she had no idea what she did feel. Fear, it seemed like, but why? What was she afraid of?
Then her eyes locked onto it. Just north of the Best Buy, rising out of the city sprawl: a cell phone tower. There was nothing special about it. It was just standing there, its red beacon lights hardly visible in the sun. Yet she could barely make herself look at the thing. It was like staring at a close-up picture of an insect face. Everything about it made her skin prickle.
“Rachel, what is it?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
She didn’t want to tell him. He’d think she was crazy.
Sam put the Toyota’s blinker on and pulled off the road into a strip mall. He put it in park.
“Hey,” he said. His voice was soft. The fireplace feeling was stronger than ever. She looked away from the tower and let that sensation drive the fear away.
“You can tell me,” Sam said. “Whatever it is.”
Rachel nodded. She took a deep breath and explained it the best she could. She expected to hear judgment in his mind when she finished, but there was none there. All he did was stare at the tower and try to make sense of what she’d described.
“Maybe the drugs just made me paranoid,” Rachel said.
Sam was still looking ahead through the windshield.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“What else is there? Why would I be afraid of something like that?”
Now that she’d kept her eyes off of it this long, she found herself unwilling to even glance at it again.
“It sounds like a conditioned response,” Sam said.
“What’s that?”
“It means if there was something you were afraid of before you lost your memory—something you were really afraid of—you’d still be scared of it now, even if you couldn’t remember why.”
The word Pavlov flickered through his thoughts.
“But even before I lost my memory,” Rachel said, “why would I have been scared of cell phone towers?”
“Maybe we’ll know soon enough.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The last good time Owen Carter could remember having, before the Gravel Man started talking in his head, was a day last year when he took his grandfather’s pickup out into the desert and found a turtle, and drew sketches of it all afternoon while it sunned itself. There was peace in drawing. He’d known that since high school, ten years back. He liked the simplicity of the task: Make the drawing look as much like the real thing as you could. Make it feel like the real thing even, the way it felt to be looking at it in person. It was work he could escape into when other things in his life got too hard to get his head around. Which happened all the time.
He’s not stupid, he had heard his grandfather say once, years back. Owen had been coming in from the pole barn, his hands greasy from changing out the gearbox on an old Suburban, and he’d caught the end of the conversation from outside the screen door. Grandpa was talking to his friend Carl, who ran the grocery store in Cold Spring, a few miles down the road. That was where Owen always bought his sketch pads and his pencils.
He just needs things explained a certain way, Grandpa said, and nothing distracting him. He can fix anything under a hood as good as I can.
What’s gonna happen to him if you kick it tomorrow, Roger? Carl asked. I mean you’re only sixty-eight, but shit happens. Is he gonna run the shop by himself? Is he gonna handle the money, and the overhead, and upkeep on the equipment? Is he gonna handle these dumbshit rich pricks that have a breakdown on the highway and get towed in, and piss and moan about the labor costs because they’re having a bad day and they need someone to bitch at? And that’s a moot point, anyway, ’cause you need state certification to run the shop, and I don’t see how he’s going to have that. Carl’s voice got a little nicer then. I’m just saying someone’s gonna have to look after him. And it ain’t gonna be me and Tonya. We’re going down to the Gulf Coast after I retire. Look, I get that you don’t want to think about this, but you’re running blindfolded on what happens to him when you’re gone. You need to have a plan.
Owen had stood there outside the door, waiting to hear what Grandpa would say back to all that, but Grandpa hadn’t said anything. The man only let out a long breath and then Owen heard his chair creak, the way it did when he leaned it back and put his hands through his hair.
Now and again that conversation would come back to Owen, when he was having his cereal in the morning, or cleaning up the tools in the shop.
What happens to him when you’re gone?
Memories like that were just the sort of thing that made him want to draw something.
That day in the desert, with the turtle, had ended with the kind of sunset you sometimes saw in magazines. Against the red sky there had been a few high, feathery clouds, and an old jet trail flattening out and unshaping itself in the wind way up there. Owen had made a few quick sketches of that, and then gotten in the pickup to head back to the house, but before he could turn the ignition he heard a voice in his head say, I think I’ve got one.
He stopped. His hand fell away from the key. He turned in his seat and looked into the truck bed, as if the voice had come from there, though he already knew it hadn’t.
Mark it, the voice said. Off-axis three seven … two? Mod track’s pretty strong, but try to dial it in.
It was a man’s voice, coming to him as if from far away, and it was rough and broken, like the man was speaking through a mouthful of gravel.
That’s a little better, the voice said. It sounded much closer now.
Okay, good, yeah. Now just step out. Yeah, leave the room, I’ve got it.
Owen felt his heart banging against his rib cage. Was he going crazy? Was this how it started?
The voice spoke again, as loud as if the man were in the truck’s cab with him, though still garbled and pebbly.
Tell me your name.
“What?” Owen found himself saying aloud.
Tell me your name. Don’t be afraid.
Sweating now. His breathing kicked up into high gear, trying to keep pace with his heartbeat.
You’re not crazy, the gravel voice said. I promise. Please tell me your name.
In a single convulsive move, Owen grabbed the ignition key again and turned it. When the old pickup’s engine rolled over, he goosed it hard, dumped it into drive, and floored it. The truck fishtailed a little and then the tires bit into the desert two-track and Owen was racing along.
You can’t ignore me. You can’t get away from me, either.
Owen stabbed the ON button for the radio and cranked the volume high. The gospel station out of Cold Spring washed out at him. He punched one of the presets and got Ozzy Osbourne singing “Flying High Again,” and turned the volume dial as far up as it would go.
But even over the music, and the scream of the engine and the rattle of the old truck’s suspension, the voice was still there.
You don’t have to be scared of me.
There was maybe a minute or two when Owen almost believed he could make it go away. It wasn’t the music or any other noise that helped; it was the hard concentration it took to drive this fast in the desert. The quick thinking he had to do when little turns and cross-ruts would come sliding into his headlights, and he’d have only half a second to brake or veer. It was the kind of thinking that normally wore him out in no time at all. It was wearing him out right now, too, but it also seemed to push the voice away, if only a little.
Then he saw his grandfather’s house, a mile ahead. A single pool of light in the wide open desert. Owen couldn’t come racing into the dooryard at this speed, with the radio going loud. How would he explain that behavior? It’d been years since he’d really gotten in trouble for anything, but sometimes he’d do something dumb and he could tell Grandpa was disappointed in him. Even with those things, though, Grandpa always understood that he hadn’t meant to do wrong. That helped. But driving like crazy for no reason at all—no reason he could talk about, anyway—would be a different kind of deal. He wasn’t sure what Grandpa would say about that.
A quarter mile out, Owen dropped his speed to twenty and killed the radio. He’d no sooner done it than the voice came back as strong as ever.
Tell me your name and I’ll leave you alone for a while. I promise.
Owen could see Grandpa in the pole barn, the big sodium lights turned on inside. Grandpa was working on the tractor Mr. Seward had brought over last Friday.
Tell me your name. That’s all I want for now.
“Owen,” he said. It came out of him like a cry of pain.
The rest of it, too. Your whole name.
This time he didn’t even get as far as saying it. All he did was think it—his whole name like it appeared when he signed up for a fishing license—and just like that the voice repeated it back to him.
Owen Carter. Thank you, Owen Carter.
* * *
The voice stayed away all that evening, through dinner and through the TV shows Owen watched, while Grandpa read and checked the computer for e-mails from customers. Owen went to bed at eleven thirty. He turned the light off right away; he’d found himself holding tight to the idea that if he could get to sleep quickly, everything would be fine in the morning. A good sleep could make a lot of troubles go away.
He’d been lying in the dark no more than thirty seconds when that hope came to an end.
Hello, Owen.
No Ozzy Osbourne to distract him here. No wheel ruts or turns to grab his attention either.
“Stop,” Owen whispered. “Please.”
He was sure he was only talking to himself, but pleading felt like the thing to do, all the same.
This doesn’t have to be bad for you, you know. It can be good, if you don’t fight me. Here, I’ll show you.
Owen was breathing fast again. He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt fear like this. Confusion, yes. There had been lots of confusion in his life, and it was always a little scary, but this—
All at once, something happened. Some change of his mood. It came over him so quickly, he didn’t recognize what it was right away. And then he did.
“What in hell?” he whispered.
Go with it, the gravelly voice said. There’s nothing wrong with feeling good.
Owen had felt this way many times in his life, though in recent years the intensity of it had faded a bit. When was the last time it’d felt this strong? Maybe when he was twenty or so.
Beneath his underpants, he felt his erection swelling.
It’s good, right?
Owen only nodded. His mind was filling up with pictures of girls now. He’d never been with one for real, had never even seen one with her clothes off in person, but he’d seen pictures and videos. Back in high school his friend Bobby Campbell had shown him his father’s stash of magazines and DVDs. Bobby was a good guy, and had made Owen copies of three of those discs, and all these years later Owen still had them hidden behind the loose paneling board inside his closet. How long had it been since he’d watched one of those? A couple years, he thought, but the images came back to him now, and so did the feelings those movies had given him.
Go with it. Go on.
It felt real. Not like watching a movie now, but like the real thing—at least like the dreams he’d had a few times in his teens. Like there was a girl here with him. Sliding around on top of him, warm and soft and smooth. Tearing her clothes off, and—oh Lord—
He was still breathing fast, but fear no longer had any part in it. He had his shorts down and his hand around himself in one quick move, and he finished in no more than twenty seconds. He lay there panting afterward, the images in his head still there but fading, every other thought a distant wisp in the dark.
Good for you. You can have that every night if you don’t fight me.
Almost in spite of himself, Owen felt the question rise in his thoughts: What if he did fight? What then?
We’ll see about that tomorrow, the voice said.
* * *
The next day they saw about it. Grandpa went into town for groceries, and when Owen was still watching the dust from his tires settle in the yard, the voice spoke up.
Think of something your grandfather cares about. Some object of his, there in the house.
“What?”
Do it.
Owen wanted to resist, but even the suggestion was hard to ignore. The answer popped into his mind a second later. He thought of the porcelain cat statue on Grandpa’s nightstand. The one Grandpa had bought for Grandma Lilly when they were just kids themselves, way back.
That’s perfect. Go into his room.
“I never go
in there,” Owen said.
Go. Trust me.
Owen felt uneasy but did as he was told. He crossed the living room to the threshold of his grandfather’s bedroom. He could see the cat statue already. A slender little thing, standing upright, the cat frozen in the middle of licking a raised paw.
Knock it over. Shatter it on the floor.
“What are you talking about? I’m not doing that.”
You are. You will.
Owen turned his back on the bedroom and went to the front door. Enough of this. Maybe he was crazy, but he wasn’t about to be a bad person because of it. If he was going to have a voice in his head the rest of his life, well, he’d get through it. He’d gotten through plenty of other things.
He shoved open the screen door and had taken three steps into the yard when the feeling hit. It came on fast again, like the good feeling the night before, but that was all the two feelings had in common.
This one seemed to grab his stomach and twist it. It wasn’t quite pain—not physical pain like from a cut. It was deeper than that. Harder to understand. Not hard to feel, though.
He saw Grandpa standing next to Grandma’s coffin at the funeral, ten years ago. Standing there wiping at his eyes while people came and went, putting a hand on his shoulder and trying to say nice things. He saw Grandpa later that same day, in his bedroom with the curtains pulled, lying there curled on his side, the sunlight filtered ugly blue through the heavy fabric. I’ll come out and fix you dinner in a bit, he had said. His voice sounded awful, like he was sick. Just give me some time, alright? Go out and take a walk or something. Lying in there trying not to full-out cry, and only partway succeeding.
It happened because of you, the gravel voice said.
“What?”
Her heart giving out like that. It was because of you. Because of how hard it was living with you.
That was bullshit.
Still the feeling inside him, deeper than pain and somehow worse, held its grip. It tightened. Twisted harder.
She died because of you. And he was crying because of you. Because how was he going to go on after that, without her and yet still having to put up with you?
