by Michael Helm
She dropped her hands from the keyboard and let them fall to her sides. They had never felt so empty. She wanted to run them over Crooner’s back and neck and for a second she could feel him beside her, breathing fast, afraid.
—
All connection to the outer world had disappeared by 3:11. The internet was dead. The landline was out. When the power died at 3:34 she put on her boots and went outside, behind the house to the ravine. Before seeing it, through the sound of the rain, she could hear that the stream was something greater now, and then there it was, the black surface turning dozens of catbacks and fluted shapes, seemingly hand-formed, breaking and overrunning the bend, flooding the small field on the east side of the property with mud and branches. The house was on low ground and if the water rose much farther or the new lake grew in her direction, she would be in trouble.
It was now possible that the day, the landscape, had changed enough to fool Crooner. He wasn’t that bright to begin with. And neither was she, apparently—it had been stupid of her not to have gone online for the forecast. There would have been warnings. She pictured townspeople lining up for provisions or taking to the highways in advance of the occurrence, whatever it was. Was there a name for it, a sudden, obliterating thaw? The seasons had gone out of turn, there’d been a skip in time, some error in the vernal code. The instability was general. Denise held distorted, maybe hallucinatory, perceptions, but it was the murder, the events of the story that gave her away, not the story’s telling. The telling was controlled. And though you didn’t want the story to be true, her voice, intent with concern, made you want to believe her. Ali could still hear the voice inside the sound of the building stream, as if the water itself were striving to make human sense, or as if all sense were drowning. She listened until there was only the rain and the water sounding like a hard summer wind in the trees.
She called Crooner’s name again, then again with full lung, and as if her voice itself had broken it, one of the trees in the ravine began to move. As she looked down at the surge, a fifty-foot maple slid upright into her view, a parallax shift that dizzied her for a moment as if the earth were pitching beneath her rather than beneath the tree, and then the bank gave way altogether and the tree fell, twisting from its anchoring, into the stream. Immediately a dam began to form and it seemed the water was intent on engineering its ascent, eddying higher, then shoring the gaps with whatever it carried, climbing to her, pulling itself up hand by hand.
She found sometime later that she hadn’t taken her eyes from the rising water. She’d been thinking about this place, about what had brought her here, and the way some people felt elected to their misfortunes when their fates emerged slowly. She understood these people now. She was not without empathy, but used to think that there was no mechanism that could deliver one person’s experience and understanding into another’s. Before reading the subjects’ statements about Alph she thought that when people said they empathized they were just saying they felt sorry for someone, not that they felt what the other was feeling. There was little scientific evidence of selflessness. Even grieving death could be seen as self-directed. There was a master design, that much she had always known, but it had seemed disregarding of so paltry a thing as human feeling. Now it was possible to believe in a clear, calm, visionary emotion that connected you to others, maybe to the planet itself. Without belief in true empathy, you would always be utterly alone. Without belief, standing there, she would have been in bigger trouble, without means, nearly cornered into prayer.
Could she trust the run of her thoughts? Her dog was lost and the water was rising, and the day had turned into a dark anomaly. Circumstances were, if anything, a bit too sobering.
Something was moving above her. Birds, dozens and dozens, mostly gulls, flying east in advance of the system. She turned and went through the back door, closed it, removed her boots, and saw on the windows facing her the underbellies of countless insects. She went across and looked closely at one larger than her thumb, with four membranous, spotted, transversely banded wings. It was out of season, out of place, blown in from somewhere far south.
She focused now on the bare maples in the distance waving at her in the wind, a rush in the dendrites. The ramified shape was there in an image from Denise’s story, in the antlers tangled on the floor of Shoad’s house. And there again in the lines on the insect’s wings, though the wings were still, flakes of ice waiting for the warm breath of consciousness and motion. Waiting to wake inside a waking state. She looked at the wings and saw invisible planes, like the pane of glass between her and the insect. And there, across the window, in the crowded peripheries of her attention, insectile, came something brown, not on the glass but moving through the trees up the road. It emerged just as she’d imagined it, had been made to imagine it in Denise’s story. It emerged from its turning, the brown pickup. Emerging as if Denise were rising inside her, as if their times had run together, looking out at the truck with the rust-red hood moving on the property, coming down the road. Carrying its lone soul.
4
It rolled to a stop behind her car. There was barely time to register disbelief, and yet she felt it, and felt it pass into some coiled neurocircuitry. The truck with the rust-red hood was muddied halfway up the doors and on the windshield. She stood staring at the flat-front grille and knew something was about to happen to ruin all scale. Chance favours the prepared mind and the wipers smeared the mud across the glass. The driver was hard to make out but the shape in the seat was a man’s. She stepped back from the window. The image of the self-consuming snake repeated throughout centuries and cultures and the wipers smeared the glass. It appeared in the Book of the Dead. Plato thought it depicted the first living thing. She would have expected the jolt of fear—it was fear, she must call it that—to have tossed words and learning beyond her reach, but Alph was holding them close. If anything she felt even stronger, more intricate connections between these things she’d read or knew in the bone. In Hindu folk myths the snake swallowing its tail was an image of creation calling itself into being and the wipers smeared the glass and stopped.
The driveway was in a moment of calm sun, fifty feet from the house, up a short slope. The door opened and the driver stepped out. The sight of him, his frame. He seemed apart, outlined more precisely than the things around him, and yet at this distance his face withheld precise features. He was white, very tall, maybe six and a half feet. She couldn’t tell his age. His head cast shadows on itself. The brow was greatly pronounced and there were indentations around the eyes. He’d turned off the engine. He seemed to be looking above the house, past it, but she couldn’t tell for sure. From where she stood it was maybe twenty steps to the front door, the unlocked door, but the door had a window and he’d see her there trying to lock it. If she had time she’d make a note of this behaviour, the way Alph made her vulnerable to gothic anxieties loosed into the house by a madwoman’s ghost story. Maybe the drug should be sold at multiplex concession counters. She could see the movie playing as she lived it, see herself in peril as the nervous laughter broke.
She waited for him to look away so she could move and then he did, he looked west to the hills and she crossed past the windows and door and went to the bedroom, though she didn’t exactly know why. She stood at the wall, beside the open curtains. She told herself that standing there was reasonable—she was a woman alone, utterly vulnerable, without her useless dog, concealing herself from a man she’d been warned was dangerous. Dangerous to women. His name was Clayton Shoad. Either it was reasonable to go outside and greet him as a visitor, or it was reasonable to hide, even to find a weapon if she had one, though now that she’d left the kitchen she did not have one at hand, and could not quite surmount the absurdity, the desperation she felt at imagining possible weapons in bedside lamps or toothbrushes. What she did have was her wits—she was thinking clearly. Her imagination did not have the best of her, or rather, Alph had directed it groundward. She was imagining herself as clear-th
inking, convincing herself she was able to control her actions rationally, standing there, distracted by her own standing still, as if to trigger a stoppage in time, just standing, afraid to look out the window.
She was trapped quite precisely, thinking fast to no sure end. What her father came to call his “conversion experience” he had first called an “anomalous event.” It began as a storm of intense dreams occurring over nine nights. He was sure it was nine. The dreams were physically punishing but he was unable to wake from them until sunrise. By day he investigated the condition. He couldn’t dismiss the possibility of sleep paralysis but saw it only as a symptom of the dreams’ mysterious intensity. Ali first heard of them when he called her one morning at 6:15 to ask if she was okay. She’d just awoken when the phone rang. He said he’d just woken himself—they were both on Pacific time—and his dreams were still all around him. In the last one he’d been with her on a train platform somewhere and she was holding a woven bag. She kept making him promise that he’d take the bag if anything happened to her. He said that if he made the promise something would happen to her, but she said no, it would happen or it wouldn’t, all he could affect was the fate of the bag and its contents. In the dream he seemed to know what was in the bag but not the words for it, though now, awake, he had no idea what it was. “But are you okay?” She said of course she was and turned the question back on him. She said he spent too much time with grisly details of the TV crime shows he watched every night and that she had to get ready for work. The truth was that the previous night she’d made a hard decision, that she would not become one of those single women who in their early thirties begin to view men only as delivery systems for sperm, that she would not become a desperate seeker of someone just as desperate to have children, and so that very likely, given her dating record, she would never have children. She’d made the decision calmly, she thought, but in one of her own dreams in the night she’d been unable to stop weeping. Now, standing beside the window, she heard his voice as he’d signed off that morning—“So little time to learn so much”—and it was as if they were thinking the same thing at the same moment. She needed him now and closed her eyes as if to petition for his protection and he came to her as a shape floating in a space without contour, motionless, looking out through glass.
One story rises inside another. The truck had come down the driveway and stopped and so, in arriving along the day’s first predictable path, the knocking at the door had meaning. And it made sense that he would try the door, and open it, and then the meaning broke down as he stepped inside and said nothing, called nothing, and his absent voice seemed somehow to match the rust-red hood that didn’t match the truck. She struggled against a powerful need to dispel the silence, to just say something, some unwise assertion of self. He was moving in the pause, either he was there or he wasn’t. In straining to hear she availed herself fully, willing to receive the smallest, telling fragment of sound, an odour, some change in the air, until at last she understood that he was about to appear in the bedroom doorway, she could see three seconds into the future, and then it happened that his form came into view, not in the doorway but his shadow on the floor as he passed by outside the window and out of the frame, into the shadow of the wall she stood against.
She stayed there in a kind of shame, self-indulgent cowardice. After some time she made herself look. The truck blocked her car. Heat waves curled up from the red hood and the roof, distorting the light. The sky to the south behind the line of trees was yellowed in streaks, as if swept with an old corn broom, particles of earth, dense in the atmosphere. The world was laws and conditions. Stillness was a condition—how many women in how many places and times had come to this stillness?—and the laws could be described in models, in shapes and formulas, names and words, and laws were everything and knowing them didn’t matter. Everyone arrived at a day when knowing didn’t matter.
He appeared from the west side of the yard. Not just tall but large, with long strides through the mud and standing water, walking away at an angle, toward his truck. His hair in back was crudely cropped, maybe grey-blond. He wore dirty brass-coloured overalls, a plaid shirt, muddied work boots. His hands were huge, they hung oddly, with the thumbs slightly turned in, barely swinging as he walked. As he approached the truck she stepped farther back into the room and crouched out of the direct windowlight. He went around to the tailgate and was partly obscured by the cab but she saw he was rolling his sleeves and she said to herself, oh well, oh well, he’s not going away. From the truck bed he hauled out a heavy coil of rope and ducked his head and one arm through it and wore the rope across his shoulder and chest. He came around the side and reached again into the bed and lifted out a chainsaw. Then he started back the way he’d come, to the west side of the house, and now she saw his face. He was younger than she would have thought from Denise’s story, though Denise had said nothing about age, maybe late thirties or forty, but the skin around his eyes was lined deeply, as if he’d been staring into the sun his whole life.
For a full minute she didn’t move. Then she went across the hall to the back bedroom, where the Dahls stored their things behind a plastic sheet tacked to the ceiling. She lifted the draping and edged into the narrow aisle between stacks of boxes and along to the north-facing window. He stood at the edge of the ravine, facing the house. The chainsaw nodded from his chest where he’d latched it onto his gaping bib. He had looped the rope around a tree and tied it into a makeshift harness at his waist. He paid out the rope from a coil on his arm and it drew across the maple trunk as he lowered himself over the edge and dropped away.
She was conscious of the drama of it all. There he was, or had been. She’d seen him drop over the edge and thought that if he was harmless then it wouldn’t matter that she show herself and so she should stay out of sight in case he was not harmless. But if he was not harmless then she wasn’t safe even inside the house—he might already have suspected she was inside, and even if she locked the doors now, he had a chainsaw, after all. What he was doing in the ravine was either in aid of her or a misdirection to draw her out or to occupy him in work, loud work that she could hear from wherever he assumed she might have walked to, and so to lure her back to the house, predisposed to be thankful to the helpful neighbour and so to put his benevolence out in front of his appearance, or in case she’d heard of him by name, an arrangement he would have learned to seek out over the course of his life. From the ravine the saw coughed and then shot high and fierce, and the sound seemed to compress the light and the time in it. If he was the man Denise had described, if she believed Denise, then she should run while he was in the ravine in all that noise. But she didn’t believe Denise, or rather she believed only bodily, adrenally, not in her brain. The mistake would be to trust the flight instinct. Even if Shoad was dangerous she should show herself and evince strength and fearlessness, and act in ways he wouldn’t predict to keep him out of reach of his own triggers.
She was about to choose. The brain itself contained a means of foreknowledge—changes in the retrosplenial cortex predicted certain kinds of human errors by about thirty seconds. She thought, I need a live image of my default mode region. She thought, I need a knife.
In the laundry room she found a fishing knife in a sheath in the basket of tools sitting beside the clothes dryer. The note read, “for gardening, set inside for winter D” It was the only tool with a note attached. The blade was curved, flat silver, maybe six inches long, pointed at the tip. It was clean. She squeezed the grip and it did not belong in her hand. The blade closed into the sheath with a single clip that she left open. She undid her belt, pulled it out of the first loop, slipped the sheath on, refastened the belt, and tucked her shirt in so the knife was visible at her hip.
When she crossed through the kitchen she saw another note, in a small, uncertain script, next to the empty fruit platter.
The river will take this house. Clear out now.
Come east one mile.
Up the hill.
I found a dog is it your
C. Shoad
A bolt of breath and expended denial shot out of her and opened wider other fears. Crooner was safe but now the house was in danger. But could the creek really take the house? It didn’t seem possible. Letter to letter the note was half-printed, half in a failing cursive. The lines were oddly narrow, the whole thing over-clipped, right to the last missing letter. It was written on the back of a printout page from the James novel, which meant he’d come in as far as the chair by the woodstove and taken what he needed, the page and the pen she’d used to mark significant lines.
At the back door she again laced on her boots—they were walking boots, low on the ankle, not best for the heavy snow and now just as ill-suited to the mud and slush—and stepped out and walked toward the lip of the ravine and the loud saw thrumming the light. As she drew close to the rope she noticed that he’d positioned it over a small metal tap that was directing a steady drip of sap onto the base of the tree. She looked along the ridge and registered for the first time a dozen other tapped sugar maples, all bleeding out in the sudden heat. What she had thought from the house was one loop was in fact two, one drawn over and across another so the rope pinched itself into place, twice fixed. She thought back to the image of the man lowering himself, the coil on his arm, and could not square it with the mechanics of the system she was looking at. Had he come up and remade the rigging while she was finding the knife? The rope was taut, parallel to the ground, down the slope, and she stepped up and saw it whole to the end running into the harness around his body. His back was to her.
