After James

by Michael Helm

  He had cut through the top sections of the fallen tree and thrown them onto a crib of branches he’d laid on the bank and was now bent low over the trunk, his feet in the heavy current. He tilted the tip of the blade upward slightly as he entered the thickest part of the log, drew it downward. At some point that he seemed to know precisely he brought the blade out and made a cut from underneath and just as the two cuts met he pulled the saw free and the part of the tree in the river shifted and was taken up by the waters and drawn away lengthways. He watched it as she did, as it was carried downstream, lodging again a hundred or so feet along, the flow coursing around and over it.

  She watched the stream in hopes it would calm her. Alph was working against her now, telling her she’d made a mistake. Or maybe her brain was telling her to run and Alph was keeping her in place, feeding off dumb suspense.

  He was no longer standing in water, the level had dropped already. He held the low-growling saw in one hand and twisted back to pull himself higher with the other. He looked to his footing as he stepped up once, then again, and stood staring at the rest of the downed tree. Some calculation absorbed him. He killed the saw and held it by one finger. He put his boot to the trunk and seemed to test its position. He looked upstream, then down. Then he took in the northern sky and above the sound of the water he called out,

  “That won’t buy much time.”

  He turned and looked up at her. Though she had seen the face, she now felt its address and it penetrated her breath and seemed to take up in the base of her spine. He turned away and stepped down to the new edge of the water and dipped the saw blade into it for several seconds, then lifted it and tested something in it with the side of his hand. He climbed back to the log, took a length of the slackening rope and tied it around the saw and hitched it over his shoulder, then used both hands to pull himself up the slope. He had murdered and burned his Russian wife or he had not. She moved back as he came closer, came up over the edge. He stood unhitching the rope from the saw and then pulling the line up out of the ravine, and when the rope went slack she knew things had gone off-script and her father was diving amid sea creatures as he’d seen them in dreams but he was drifting farther, deeper, out of touch.

  He stood before her, nodded, and said, “Clay Shoad.” He shifted his eyes to the rope as he worked it. “You rent this place.” A statement not a question.

  She nodded yes.

  “I knocked on the door.”

  She sensed he knew she’d been inside, and knew even now that she was going to lie about it.

  “I was out. Looking for my dog. I saw your note. Is he okay?”

  “He’s all mud. I tied him outside.”

  He drew the rope through his hand as he coiled it. It must have burned in the palm.

  “It was unusual for him to be gone so long.”

  “Nothing usual today.” He tied the coil and looked down at the river. “It’s already rising again. I should have cut smaller. Smaller section. Let it run off.”

  He spoke slowly. There was something in his vowels, a narrow shelf. She guessed he was a native English speaker but his parents were not. Some tongue of northern Europe in a region of his brain.

  “Thank you for helping out.”

  He looked at her only briefly. His eyes paused at the knife on her hip, then slipped away.

  “It’s no help.”

  The angles of his jawline were taken up in his hands, the cocked thumbs. His face was offset by a nose pressed slightly sideways at the bridge. That he wouldn’t look at her directly might be for his sake, she thought. A means of self-control. But it was only Denise who made her think this way. Normally she’d see this man as shy. She needed to get a read on him.

  “You’re in a bad spot,” he said. He wasn’t describing impressions but asserting truths. If she found herself in trouble with him, it would be the asserted truths and half truths that drew her there. “Nothing to be done. Better clear out.”

  “I owe it to Denise and Stefan to stay. If you can bring Crooner back I’ll wait it out with him.”

  “Not here. There’s no electricity.” He seemed to read her surprise, anticipate her question. “All along the road. No power, no phone. Won’t be back for a long time.”

  He said the sky was getting bigger and she felt it was true, that he understood something and the way to say it belonged to a children’s story, the sky’s getting bigger, it’s falling. He was a stater of facts, a maker of pronouncements. Then he said it again.

  “It’s getting bigger. From the west and south. A long ways off. It’s the continent. There’s no break in it.” She couldn’t see in his expression if something was building in him. “You’re in a bad spot here.” He looked to the lake forming again below them in the field. “The house will wash away.”

  “The water might go down.”

  “Too dangerous. You need a tow. Out to the highway. Your road’s washing out. I have change.”

  Not “change.” He’d said “chains,” to tow her car to the highway. The mistake was small, odd, but she wasn’t sure if it was his or her own. Something to pay attention to. Distinguishing between an s and a soft g engaged twenty-two sites in the brain.

  “Well. That’s kind of you. But I feel a duty to the Dahls.”

  “The house can’t be saved.”

  He was overstating the danger. He liked to shock. She said it was just a rising creek. Not even a river, really. If the water reached the house, of course she’d leave.

  “There’s a river. It bends half a mile from here. Soon the water won’t make the curve. Then it’s straight for you. It will show up there”—he pointed to a crotch in the hills across the ravine—“and there.” He pointed to the ridge just west of the house. “I opened the stream to make more time. Now it’s closed.” Without moving he seemed to set himself more squarely. “We need to leave. Go pack your things.”

  For the flint of a second his mouth tightened slightly, unreadable, a faint half smile or not. Then he nodded once in a short, sure movement and walked off. She felt calmer now than when he’d arrived. She had not panicked, she had seen what to do. She detected an interference in her reasoning—Denise was there in the works, telling her to run—but suppressed the thought. Denise had seen evil, but real evil was of the world, not of murder stories, pretended horrors. He’d not hesitated when she’d mentioned the Dahls by name.

  From behind the house she watched him through the bank of back windows, through the front ones. He started his truck, turned it around in three movements, and positioned its rear bumper in front of her car. He took the chains from his truck bed and crouched between the vehicles. Of course she would not run, though yes, whether she ran or left with this man, the terms of her leaving would not be entirely her own. But it was hard to know what exactly was her own anymore, other than her body, her half-exposed, marked-up self, its bondings and reactions.

  Then she remembered the fort. There was a child’s fort upstream set into the embankment. Crooner had found it under some brush and snow, the bones of a small animal inside that she hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of, so to speak. Something the size of a raccoon or opossum had died or been eaten there. The bones would still be inside, of course. Denise would have her run there, now, run and hide, but Ali couldn’t imagine herself running through the woods, not really, and in so failing to imagine, revealed her position. Denise was credulous. Ali was not.

  She walked to the house and this time left her boots on and tracked the mud inside. She packed her computer and stuffed what clothes she could into her bag without folding them and threw in her running shoes. She tucked the bag of Alph under the clothes. In the back bedroom she drew open the plastic sheeting and stared at the stacks of cardboard boxes. She recognized Denise’s writing on them. Fabrics—Israel. Soaps. Old Books, numbered one through seven. Winter Clothes. Leaning against a wall behind the boxes was a large rectangular package wrapped in paper and string, marked My Paintings. Ali carried the package by the string
out into the house and placed it by the doorway with her bag and computer case.

  Shoad was up at the truck smoking a cigarette, looking to the west as if to see the water he’d promised her cresting the far hills. He’d struck an odd posture, resting his jaw in the inward-turned palm of his hand, as if he were going to shot-put his head. She pictured him turning and seeing her in the doorway, throwing his cigarette into the gravel and starting toward her. She saw it as clearly as though it were already happening. The feeling had a disturbing pitch to it, and then, as if she had to burn them off, a series of still images came to her. Her car abandoned in trees, Crooner’s dog tags hanging from the mirror in a truck cab, a badly done oil painting of a blond woman, Irina, standing next to the truck with the rust-red hood. Her brain would not be offering fantasies now if it knew she was in real danger. It would be trying to save her. But it might be doing it indirectly, through suggestion rather than direct analysis. It might, in fact, be trying to relax her analytical regions to enable itself to perform the revelatory leap required for difficult problem-solving. He’d opened the stream to make more time. Time was slowing, as she needed it to slow. Her brain, recognizing duress, was processing at higher than normal speed.

  Maybe the scenarios she imagined were being produced by the drug, a manifestation of the Daffy effect so loathed in the lab. She pictured herself running, hiding, then what? Shoad would return so she couldn’t go back to the house. She saw herself walking toward the bend in the river he’d spoken of, taking too long to reach it. If it wasn’t there, then she’d know she was right not to go with him. If it was, she’d be in a different kind of trouble. And either way the water here would still be rising. She felt what she would feel, wet, cold, trapped in lowlands. Then she imagined she heard the water coming and the spell broke.

  She would have to be careful of these visions. Alph was drawing them from commercial movies and TV, the junk novels of her teen summers. She’d lost her taste for popular horror long ago as she saw more real horrors, met more people who’d endured them. Yes, that was it, she realized. She didn’t believe Denise’s story because its details, the body twisting out of the fireplace and inside the forge, the serpent in the field, the vision of a chase in the ravine, these were too familiar, too easy to picture on-screen. Real terror was surely much stranger, perfectly strange, not familiar at all.

  Under some compulsion she drew the knife and cut open the string and tore the paper off the paintings. There were four canvases framed in unfinished, unpainted wood. The first was of a dark, swirling chaos with red and orange toward the centre. Two others seemed variations on the first, but with half-obscured tendrils of blue and yellow inside—were these pictures of the power line sparking in the field? In the last painting the darkness was crowded to the edges, outside a rectangle that made for a second frame, as if a window onto a scene. Inside were lines like the tendrils, but dozens, maybe hundreds of them, small, curving, crowded together, failing to contain a disorder of mind. Ali sensed Denise’s need to turn away from the madness of the lines, the spectacle of them, yet her inability to face the endless darkness outside the frame. Written in small red letters at the bottom of the canvas, the word “south,” and below, on the black outside, “north.” Ali understood that she herself was there on the border between the two words but she didn’t know why she thought this or what it meant.

  She looked up. The rain had started again. Shoad turned and saw her. He threw his cigarette into the gravel and started down toward her.

  5

  One morning on a small harbour ferry heading to Granville Island she’d watched the boat taking its level with False Creek and felt a kind of weightlessness that seemed telling. Anja had asked if they could meet now, today, and as she’d taken the call Ali felt a flutter in her own voice. It would not be good news from the trial, of course, but that wasn’t what the voice and the weightlessness meant. They meant somehow that she was getting less sure of herself and generally less certain, not just to herself but to others, as if she’d become doubted by higher powers, harder to believe in. Her decision not to seek a pregnancy returned now and then in this way, eroding her supposed selfhood, something she thought of anyway only as a cluster of changing biological conditions. But even self-betrayal is betrayal, an ancient constant that never loses its effect.

  They walked along the seawall. Anja’s news was that, switched to the placebo, through growing despair, Subject 11 had written less and less. The slowing made sense but she couldn’t tell him that his crisis of faith was chemical. Then last week, eighteen days before the trial was to end, he dropped out and disappeared. Anja needed to know that he hadn’t had a seizure, lost his memory or his mind, but he returned no calls or emails. When she went to the apartment he’d listed, she was told by a young landlady that he’d moved out, no forwarding address.

  That morning at the clinic she’d received a small package in the mail, addressed to “Maker,” care of her. It was a box the size of a large basket of strawberries. They took a bench seat.

  “What if he’s cut off his hand or something,” Anja said.

  “He couldn’t have wrapped it so well with the other one. Maybe it’s fresh strawberries. It’s for me, I’ll open it.”

  The box had weight but wasn’t metal-heavy, more fruit than cannonball. The hand-printed letters in the address looked sane, unhurried.

  She opened it to find a glass ball the size of a grapefruit, inside of which was one of the plastic identity bracelets issued to test subjects, with bar-coded personal and vital information. He’d twisted the bracelet once and reattached it into a loop, then suspended the resulting möbius strip inside the clear ball.

  It came with a typewritten note.

  Maker.

  Are you there?

  You’ve left me unfinished.

  So I’ve left you and your pharma con.

  I wanted, then needed what you were making of me.

  But you weren’t up to the making.

  This ball is all you get.

  Take it and fuck off.

  No other ending.

  Eleven.

  “That’s literally twisted,” said Anja. Her voice, though not yet her face, expressed relief. “But I practically expected a bomb.”

  Ali held the object up against the water, the sky, the new ugly condos across the inlet. It maintained a sure beauty. Subject 11 had lost his faith, lost his sense of irony about their relative positions, lost his belief in her.

  “He used to be charming,” said Anja. “You okay?”

  That night Anja called her at home to say that when she’d quoted the note to her unemployed classicist husband, he’d found another twist.

  “He says ‘pharma con’ is a pun on a Greek word.” Somewhere in Plato was a story about an Egyptian god who offers a king a remedy for forgetting, the pharmakon of writing, writing as a memory aid. The king turns down the offer, knowing it will have the opposite effect and cause forgetfulness. The king uses the same word, pharmakon, to mean poison. Remedy and poison. “One and both, so either, depending.”

  The ball sat now on a small china plate on Ali’s dining table. Maybe mornings before work it would catch a little grey windowlight that might, in time, disarm it.

  “So it isn’t just he thinks I conned him. He thinks I poisoned him.”

  “I don’t know, Ali. I don’t see how.”

  “Poisoned by loss. Withdrawn revelation. Before the trial he was happy knowing what he knew, seeing what he saw. Then he took the pills and saw more. Now he knows he’s blind to the real size and intricacy of things. He’s been poisoned with a knowledge of his blindness.”

  “That sounds pretty grand, actually. You haven’t read the pages he sent me. He’s not some great visionary. He’s just a guy telling a story, and then we switched him to the placebo and he couldn’t finish it.”

  When she asked Anja to describe the story, she said she’d put her husband on, said his name, Roland, who was better at these things.

&nbs
p; “There’s nothing so original about it.” Ali remembered him now, his voice, a kind of high-snouted tone. “The usual horror themes and tropes. Violated Nature. Science and Art, fire and flood, madwomen and monsters. It clips along for a while but he never sent the ending.”

  They forwarded the file that night. Ali read the first page. There was already a body, a gun going off, the usual dumb mystery, cheap violence. It settled her to know that the story was only an entertainment. If this was all the vision he’d had, all he’d lost, she’d done Subject 11 a favour, she thought. Four days later he was dead.

  She went to Carl with the news. His house had a cedar porch that in damp weather smelled like a sauna. He invited her to sit on his fraying string chairs but she stayed on her feet. She couldn’t find the words at first and they ended up looking out at the neighbours’ lawns and houses in the soft focus. Even at plus two degrees the grey could get so thick you expected whales to float by. There hadn’t been sun for a week.

  When she told him, he tried to come close but she held both palms out and took a step back.

  “We have to stop the trial.”

  “This has nothing to do with the trial. He wasn’t even on Alph.”

  She knew the line was coming and had tried to prepare but she hit him anyway, slapped him hard. He actually bent over briefly and said fuck.

  “Now we know who you are,” she said. “You’re the bad guy who plays the company angle.”

  She hadn’t known she would slap him, and having done so felt it was dopey, not genuine, a mimicking behaviour. Then she thought she should feel better but didn’t, especially. Maybe he wasn’t the bad guy but the guy who’d sampled the drug and was now a true believer. Either way he was dangerous. As she walked to her car he straightened but didn’t follow. He held one hand to his face where she’d reddened it, as if in thought.