The Possession

by Michael Rutger

  Ken and I headed across to the store. “Are we sure this is going to do anything?”

  “I don’t know what else to try.”

  As we walked into the store I remembered something I’d thought on our first day here, about walls. How I’d been right, but also wrong, and the desire to try to fence something off was little more than a symbolic statement of fear about something you generally couldn’t do much about, and often shouldn’t—and every time you build a wall you’re cutting yourself off from life, from the past, and a future.

  No man is an island, and anybody who tries to be one will slowly sink beneath the waves, alone and forgotten.

  We weren’t alone in the store.

  You could tell, not least because the walls of the place seemed insubstantial. It was misty inside, and there were trees all around in ranks in every direction. I assume they were trees, anyway. They were very treelike. But maybe we’ve simply decided that’s the way those things look, the closest we can get to seeing what they are. They didn’t seem to want to cause trouble, so we let them be.

  But there were other things there, too. Disturbances in the mist. Soft voices on the shelves. Something that looked like a bird but pretty definitely wasn’t: it came arcing out of the corridor, flying sideways. It stopped in front of our faces, hovered in space, not moving its wings, and then sped off again. It seemed to go right through the ceiling.

  I don’t know why they weren’t attacking. Maybe they never had been. Maybe we’d just been scared, and a feeling of being attacked is simply how you interpret the actions of the things that scare you. Fear of the unknown.

  Then we were just standing in a dark and dusty old store. Rocks on the floor, rocks on the shelves. “So what do we do?” Ken said. “Just rebuild the wall?”

  “I guess.”

  We squatted down, picked up a couple of rocks each, started experimenting with placing them on top of each other, ignoring the increasing sense that things were coming closer, watching intently—and some of them didn’t want this to happen.

  “Ow,” Ken said, after a few minutes, turning irritably, and swatting out with his hand. I’d felt it too, something that felt like being stung by tiny bees.

  “Just ignore them.”

  Then we heard it. Music. The same old music, and this time there seemed to be less in the way between me, and it, and I knew what it was. “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” Not the Roberta Flack version. One with a heavier beat.

  “Wait a second.”

  “I hear it, too,” Ken said. “And I’m tired of it. Let’s just finish fixing this bloody wall.”

  “No,” I said. “Look.”

  It was standing in the shadows of the corridor at the back. And I say “it” because however convincing the appearance—that of a man in his late sixties, wearing a black coat, with a gaunt face and sallow bags under his eyes—that wasn’t how it actually was. He looked too sharp around the edges, preternaturally there.

  It looked that way because he meant something, though not to me. I was now pretty sure I knew who he must mean something to.

  “What do you want?”

  “I tried to warn her,” he said. His was dry, not unfriendly. The accent wasn’t from around here. “First night in town. Wouldn’t listen.”

  “Kristy makes her own decisions.”

  “And everybody just loves those who go their own way, right? Let’s hear it for the go-getters, being their best selves every damned day. Only problem being, once in a while they’re going to get it wrong, and other people always pay the price. Some of those go-getters need to learn to walk before they run.”

  “Like Alaina.”

  “Her most of all. Back in the day, things were done different. A lot of head-to-head and war. Especially around here, in the early times. Didn’t work then, sure as hell won’t now. Alaina’s young. She’ll learn. But for now, we need to put the genie back in its box. Last thing we need is this situation spreading further. Not good for you, not good for us.”

  “So who are you? Or what?”

  “Me? I have no idea how I look to you. What I am in reality is our version of an Alaina—but I’ve been doing it a lot longer than she has. I’m not your problem right now and neither is she. But I think you know that. And the woman who is the problem, the one who made me look like this…the only person she’s going to tell, is you.”

  Then he/it was gone.

  I stood there by the half-assed low wall of rocks Ken and I had built, trying to work out what the thing had meant. What I was supposed to do.

  “Nolan.”

  I turned. The door to the store was open. Someone was standing outside. A teenage girl in a hoodie. Her father was behind her, his hand on her shoulder. I thought at first that he was trying to hold her back.

  “Let her do her thing,” he said, however.

  Alaina reached into the back of her father’s truck, and rested her hand on Pierre’s forehead for a moment. Then she came inside. She walked to where I was standing without giving Ken a second glance. She looked very tired, and very young.

  “Just go through the wall, dumbass,” she said. “She’s waiting.”

  And she pushed me.

  Chapter

  62

  Everything was bright and clear. A concourse stretching out in front and behind. Clean tiles on the floor. A fountain ahead, splashing sounds mixing in with the low hubbub of people talking, to the point where it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. People on benches around the pool. Others walking by. Big hair. Palms in big pots. White metal trelliswork. Diamond motifs on the floor and columns, with a pair of initials in each. The nearest store was a Waldenbooks. Next to it, a Radio Shack. From somewhere, the faint smell of Chinese food.

  A couple of women walked past carrying shopping bags. One wore a suit jacket. The other a sweatshirt with a big CK logo. That song in the background. Overlaid for a moment, a peal of laughter. That flat echo of hard surfaces.

  A sign saying WELCOME TO THE GARDEN MALL.

  Saturday afternoon. Some people here to get things in particular. Many just here to be here. Families wandering along, kids wanting things, parents saying no. Individual women on more of a mission. Couples hand in hand, or with arms around each other. Nobody was talking on a mobile phone, and nobody was staring at a screen. People on benches were speaking to each other or gazing peaceably into space, taking a breather, resting their feet.

  I caught a glimpse of eyes in the crowd, looking at me. A woman’s eyes. Molly’s eyes, I was pretty sure.

  I followed, pausing at the fountain to look down into the pool. Coins glittering in the water. I bent and picked one out. A bright cent. It was wet. It seemed very real, and I wondered how many other things in life had only seemed that way. When I’d thought something was happening when it was not, or the other way around. Someone fails to answer the phone. You assume it’s because they don’t want to talk. That interpretation changes the world, and can’t be wholly reversed even if you later find out they were merely in the shower. You’re forever somewhere else now. You encounter a grim-looking man and assume he’s just a grouchy guy, a pain in the ass. You have no idea he’s lost in regret for the ways in which he feels he could have been a better father. Doesn’t matter. To you, he’s Grouchy Guy. That’s who he is.

  Even though, so far as his son was concerned, he was a pretty good dad.

  I caught someone else looking at me, a man this time, turning to glance back at me in the crowds. Good-looking enough to be Pierre, though it wasn’t his face.

  So I kept walking up to the next intersection, where there was another fountain just like the first. Exactly like it, in fact—even the pattern of coins in the pool was the same. You can’t remember everything, or understand everything either. So you fill in the gaps as best you can.

  A woman with short gray hair separated from the crowd ahead and headed off down the side concourse.

  I hurried after her, but by the time I got there it was em
pty. Or almost so. Ahead on the right was the record store you used to see in every single mall. Seeing its sign now made me realize I couldn’t remember when I’d stopped seeing them, and in fact that so far as I was concerned, all malls still have a Sam Goody. I’d assumed their continued presence even though they weren’t there, thinking that I just kept accidently failing to walk past, when in fact they were gone. Like Faulkner wrote: the past is never dead; it’s not even past.

  Level with the store, in the concourse and facing the other way, was a bench. A teenage girl was sitting on it.

  Her head was lowered. From a distance I thought at first it was Alaina. But as I got closer I saw she was too slight, not tall enough, and her hair a different brown.

  When I came around the side I saw her cheeks were wet. Her right fist was clenched very tight.

  It was Kristy. As she’d been back then.

  As she still was and always would be, out of reach of anybody but herself, in a shard of the universe with a population of one.

  I sat. Didn’t say anything. Wasn’t sure what I should do. Sitting near your wife the way she was over ten years before you even met her will make you unsure of many things. I remained silent, looking ahead along the tiled floor of the empty concourse at pillars that looked like trees.

  “His name was Jim,” she said, eventually. Her voice did not sound like that of a fourteen-year-old. It sounded as she normally did.

  “Jim Vaneski. I wanted him to be mine. I wanted to be his. I wanted that to mark me out. In everybody’s eyes. But especially hers. Helen, I mean. Two sides of the same coin for years. And for a long time that’s what you want, right? Security. But then it’s not. You want to be different. Not too different, not actively strange, but you want the world to get that…you’re unique. You are what you have. Who you have, especially. You want to have things and people that are yours and nobody else’s. You become competitive.”

  It was empty back at the intersection of concourses now. No people. Nothing but us in the entire place. Silence.

  “She’d been weird all day—on the walk, while we’d been wandering around, during lunch. Like she was bubbling to tell a secret. Like something had made her five minutes older than she was before. Senior to me, somehow. Then finally, just as I’m about to go buy the CD for my dad, she holds up her necklace. And yes, I’d already noticed it. I assumed she’d bought it herself. I mean, it was just a cheap thing. But no.

  “‘Guess who,’ Helen said to me. I shrugged. And so she told me. And, I mean, it was like…they’d been on two dates. That’s all. Not exactly married, right? But he’d given her this thing. And for a moment I just stared at her, because, I didn’t even know how to process it. Jim Vaneski was the guy, the one guy in the entire school, the sole guy that we knew from anywhere, that I liked. She knew that. She totally knew it. She did not know I’d spent enough time doodling his name that I’d even come up with a joint monogram for the letters J and K. She didn’t know how many kids we were going to have, or their probable names, or what color we were going to paint our cute little house. I was still undecided on that. But she sure as hell knew what she was doing when she shoved that necklace in my face.”

  “Kristy,” I said. “She—”

  “I know. I know. She was just excited and wanted to share that with me. Her best friend. And it’s not like I owned him, right? I get it. I know that now. But we were so close, Nolan. It was like finding out you couldn’t trust yourself. That you are totally alone in the whole of creation and cannot for a moment ever feel secure that your view of what’s real, or who can be trusted, is true.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I called her a bitch. She…smiled. I can see that smile in my head like a photograph, and I’m old enough now to see the uncertainty in it. The dawning realization that she’d screwed up, really badly. That even if she actually did want Jim—and I have no idea what the truth was there—and even if she really was just happy about the situation, not crowing, she’d blown the delivery.”

  “And hurt you.”

  “Yes. But I didn’t see that, didn’t see the layers, didn’t know it could mean more than one thing, all at once. I only saw the smile. And…I totally lost it. I swore. I called her everything under the sun. I slapped her. In the face. More than once. And she tried to slap me back but I was faster and blocked her and I slapped her again and then I grabbed at that necklace and yanked it off her dumb neck.”

  The fist in Kristy’s lap was still clenched, so tightly the knuckles were white.

  “I felt a pure black joy and I knew she wanted to hit me now, hit me hard, but there were people coming up the concourse so she couldn’t. I turned and stormed into Sam Goody. Bought the Fugees CD for my dad. Bought it fast, because I was still good and pissed and I got even more pissed while I was in there and thought of a whole bunch more things to say. But when I came out, Helen was gone.”

  “Where?”

  “I didn’t know. Stormed off, I assumed. I waited: thinking, screw her, she needs to come back and apologize to me. Managed to keep my anger stoked for quite a while but then started to get upset, too. With what she’d done, but also over what had happened. Because she was my friend. My very best friend. The Kristy and Helen Show was my entire world. Even mad as I was, I didn’t want it to end. So finally I went looking. Couldn’t find her. Couldn’t ever find her. And so she never left this place.”

  “Did you really think anybody in the world would blame you, if they knew what actually happened?”

  “They blamed me without knowing.”

  I could hear footsteps. In the distance, but heading our way. “Not really, Kristy. And you know it’s not your fault. Not in any way that makes sense. She stormed off, angry and upset and scared by realizing how she’d fucked up. The Helen and Kristy Show was her world, too, remember. She probably just wanted to get home fast. Work out how to start fixing it.”

  “I know.”

  “And who knows what happened then. Maybe some guy in the lot saw a pretty girl stomping home and offered her a ride, and it all went dark after that. Could be that, could be something else. You’re never going to know the truth. And it’s not on you. It’s not your fault.”

  “Yes, it is. If I hadn’t done what I did, she wouldn’t have left, Nolan. Don’t pretend that’s not the truth. I’m the thing that made the next thing happen. I got her killed. I vanished her. One second of my life, boom, and everything’s broken. Forever. I can’t fix it. Never have been able to, and never will.”

  “No,” I said. “You can’t fix it. So you’re just going to have to let it go. If there’s truly nothing that can be done, you have to let it be and let it go.”

  “But it’s my fault.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And that sucks. It is your fault. But it’s also not your fault. That’s even worse. You didn’t do it, but you did. They’re both true at once and the future splits right in that moment. Because in the end you’re the only person who can choose which of those worlds you live in, now and for the rest of your life.”

  “I already live in—”

  “No, Kristy. It’s a choice. Your choice.”

  I put my arm around her, and she rested her head on my shoulder. She cried quietly for a long time. I listened to the sound, and wished I could do more to help.

  Suddenly she stopped.

  I looked up. A woman was standing in front of us.

  Kristy was staring at her. For a moment—as long as it takes to think the thought or perform the action that colors the rest of your life—I saw the woman, or thing, as Kristy did. Not as a woman in her mid-thirties, an age Helen never got to be, but as a young girl who’d made her own mistake. Not even a mistake, really, just an action with repercussions in a world that can be unkind. I glimpsed Helen as she was before she slipped behind a wall and never came back, before she became condemned to live the rest of her life, to grow older, nowhere except in Kristy’s head.

  The woman smiled. It was a small smile, a painf
ul smile. A smile too complex and private for me to read.

  Kristy seemed to know what it meant. “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “So sorry.”

  She opened the hand in her lap and held it up.

  The woman took the necklace that was lying there. Hung it around her own neck. Leaned close and kissed Kristy on the head.

  Then she turned and walked into the darkness at the end of the concourse, where a tall, gaunt old man was waiting.

  Kristy caught her breath.

  Then she was gone, and it was darker and colder, and I was lying facedown on the floor of a disused department store that smelled of dust and rocks.

  “Thank Christ for that,” Ken said, as he helped me up. “Thought we’d lost you this time.”

  Molly, Pierre, and Val were standing to the side. Alaina and her father were outside, with him holding her tight. As I got to my feet I saw Kristy suddenly sit upright in the back of Bryan Hixon’s truck.

  She turned and said to me: “I know who he is.”

  Chapter

  63

  When I got up next morning it was clear and bright. It was early and there was no one else around. I stood outside my motel room with a cup of coffee, looking up at the cold blue sky. Trying to figure out whether it was really clear, or if the town simply felt that way today, and so that’s what I saw. I eventually realized I had no way of knowing.

  I had the same feeling intermittently over the next two days. I still get it sometimes now.

  We spent those two days in Birchlake helping repair the walls. It’s hard to tell whether we got it right. Hard to be sure what getting it right would mean. All I know is that when we left town the walls looked a lot more like they had in the sketches in Sister Maria von Tessen’s notebook, and the one in the old general store was a consistent height along its length. Val had bought the building on behalf of the Knack, it turns out. That wall is now safe.