by Michael Helm
“You’ve signed docs, Ali. Remember your legal position.”
Beside the steps was an unpruned rosebush. The droop-headed blooms were chilled into, what, awkwardness? shame? Were they like kids staring at their feet? No, they were just blighted flowers. As she pictured them in memory now, a shadow grew over them and a whale passed by overhead.
—
She got into her car and saw that her removal from the place was complete. Crooner’s bed and food notwithstanding, if she never returned, she might be traced only as far as her old Protegé, if it was ever found.
The back of Shoad’s head in his truck was an anvil. He started up and eased forward until the chains were taut. She put the car in neutral and felt it coaxed into motion. The anvil shape might have disturbed her or else added to the feeling he was solid, could be trusted, but she let both notions pass by. He was simply part of the system of what was happening to the day. They were moving surely now and the rain thickened on the windshield. She turned the key and switched on her wipers. He accelerated as they approached the washout and his taillights nodded hard and then her car bucked and skidded sideways but they were through it and coming to the paved road. Her wipers and the truck’s up ahead moved in different phases. In brain metastability tests subjects were asked to move their fingers like windshield wipers. She turned off the wipers and the rain on the glass hid her. She looked at her hands, as if they might tell her something. Then she saw on the floor the map she’d used to find the house. It was from a local gas station. Shoad’s taillights slurred on her window, soon he’d stop and come for her. She grabbed the map, looking for the road, for a bending river to the west that would confirm his story, but she couldn’t make sense of it. There were more rivers in the area than she’d realized, but she couldn’t find the one in question, in doubt. Some roads weren’t numbered and the numbers of others couldn’t be followed through their intersections. They seemed to mass like capillaries or neurons. There was a knock on the glass and she dropped the map.
She lowered the window. He stood hatless in the rain. The water on his face made it limestone.
“The road’s already worse. Asphalt’s split open. You won’t make it through. I’ll tow you all the way.”
“I forgot about the gears,” she said. “I need to stay with the car, it slips out of neutral.”
“Not by itself.”
“It’s the clutch. I have to keep my hand on the stick.”
He looked at her, likely trying to decide if she expected him to believe the lie or thought she was explaining something she misunderstood, trying to decide if it was worth correcting her.
“It makes no difference. Brake when I stop. Don’t try to steer.”
They pulled out onto the highway and climbed to speed. The road was empty and the water slanted hard across it. Above were outriders to a black sky, dark clouds flying low from the south and then the black clouds burst. Every rain is all rains past but this one stood alone. She studied the map and looked up now and then at the tailgate of the truck and the chain connecting her to it. The map would not clear for her. She searched for the one town she knew, called Werso or Worso, but it wouldn’t appear. A rain is different stood in than moved through. The other names meant nothing. This was someone else’s rain.
The radio. She hit the scan button. Around the dial it ran and on the third revolution caught a voice. A woman said, “We cannot advise. The connections are generally down…I won’t talk just to keep talking. The authorities have not been in touch. I’m only the producer and we have no information as to this event. There is no ‘we.’ I cannot advise.” The voice went silent and she turned off the radio. Ahead the truck bucked on the broken road and then a half second later she felt the jolt under her as her body shot forward and sprung back and up away from the seat. She rolled down the window for a few seconds to look in the side mirror and saw the dark storm bank marcelled as if atop the heads of classical gods. Before her the truck bounced hard again and now she tucked her chin and when the car shot up it slackened the chain and then slammed it straight and the truck skidded slightly out of true, then hit another washout in the thawed pavement and this time as both vehicles lifted she saw something appear over the lip of the tailgate. The rain obscured her view but something had clawed there, two fingers in the bed hooked the gate. This was an illusion, she knew, and so she didn’t believe it though it fixed her, she couldn’t look away, couldn’t move, even knowing there was no logic in it, not even a horrible logic, and then the fingers were gone.
When the brake lights came up again she slowed the car. What she needed from Alph was a hard jump cut, the getting to the next thing was hell. He turned left along a road that ran into trees at the base of a hill and they stopped. Brown water pooled off the shoulders and curled around the trees at the bottom of the slope. Shoad was unhooking the car. The rain was gone. He stood and beckoned her. She got out and stood behind the open door.
“Too much mud to tow you up. Get your bag.”
She got her bag and computer from the backseat and closed the doors and watched him unhook the chains. She climbed into the truck, the mismatched hood laid out hugely before her. She heard him drop the chains into the bed and then he got in. His hands on the wheel were enormous. As they started up the hill she turned and saw how perfectly her car sealed them away. No one could get past it. She should have left the keys inside but they were in her pocket. The paintings were locked in her trunk. Then she remembered the fingers and looked into the bed just as the climb steepened and a set of clawed antlers slid back against the gate.
Where the road sprung a little higher they found better purchase and enough speed to carry them through the softer stretches as the truck tore up the surface. They began to plane out near the top and she saw rising ahead not farm buildings but a huge creature. Here it came, then, a final, heaving enigma that she would not survive. As it grew before them the shape resolved into a sculpture made from antlers wired together to form, through some closed loop of conception, a giant deer buck. It was about ten feet high at the shoulder, fourteen or more at the top of its rack. It faced the entrance to the yard as if to stand off visitors. The lines and proportions were exact. The head, she now saw, was slightly tilted, the shoulder striated, as if the body had been captured mid-movement. There was life in the object. Inside it the horns were a frenzy. They passed by.
The yard was more or less as she’d pictured it from Denise’s story but the barn looked new. A weather vane on its roof spun crazily, she couldn’t tell what it was. Over the house the wind tore smoke from a chimney. They stopped before the house and Shoad stared out for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He got out of the truck and walked into tall, matted grass at the corner of the house. On mounted pipes he’d tied a rope. He picked it up and lifted it from the grass until he’d walked it to the end and held the open collar. He untied it from the rope and brought it to her.
She held it. The collar was muddy and wet. She nodded.
“I gave him bread. Watered him.” What a strange way to say it, as if Crooner were a farm animal or a houseplant. “He might come back.”
He would be trying to find his way home to her, and if he did she wouldn’t be there. She pictured him standing at the door, barking, lying down.
“You should have left him in the house,” she said.
“He wouldn’t come in. He held still for food. I tied him. Maybe the barn. We’ll look in there.”
Ali was still catching up. Crooner had been here but wasn’t. Had Shoad made the stag and how and why was it absent from Denise’s account? Where had the day landed her? Where was the forge?
Shoad was in the rearview, walking to the barn. Something shivered in the side window and there it was again, a wire of lightning in the black distance.
—
She had a memory of crossing the yard, trailing Shoad, but no sense she’d actually done it. She’d been sitting in the truck, looking at the collar,
and the next second she was standing before the barn. It stood in a rock-salt light. A concrete floor extended past the walls. The wood looked reclaimed, old, mismatched, only partly painted, with fresh gleaming galvanized nailheads. The planed timber boards joined truly. A pile of ash and scorched wood sat beyond the far end.
The swinging door was ajar. Shoad pulled it open and hit the lights and they stepped into the space. The barn was not a barn. There were no animals—Crooner wasn’t here either—or stalls, no hayloft, no sawdust and straw on the floor. They stood in a workshop that gave way to a sort of gallery. The sculptures were wood and bone, copper, clay, forged metal. There must have been thirty or forty. The figures were human or nearly so, emerging from some chaos or returning to it, in agony. Their faces contorted in sole notes of pain. Air ducts led to a far wall and a huge fan high up that turned slowly and strobed the figures in light and shadow so that they seemed in motion. They were mismatched in size and height, the larger, standing ones maybe seven feet, others only three or four. Some were on their hands and knees, some lying on their sides. In many the bones were half-exposed, partial skulls, rib cages made from wood or curving antlers.
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know. I dream them.”
There were men and women, two children she could see. He said they weren’t separate pieces. He called the whole thing Descendant.
She said something she herself didn’t hear, could not recover. Then another question.
“What’s happening to them?”
“I don’t know. The same thing happens to all. Has happened or will happen soon.”
The words led her to one clear thought. There was something monstrous about Shoad—Denise was right—but in showing her these creations, he wanted Ali to know it. What else she needed to know, to find a way of knowing, was if the monstrous was of him, of his nature, or only in him, as it might be in anyone under the common burden of those awake to certain truths. There was some receding shadow upon the edge of the distinction. He wanted her to see that truly monstrous things are real, even when they’re not.
“They began after the accident,” he said. “A road in the Black Forest. I hit a deer. Then came reconstruction. My face. I learned to speak again.”
He said that before the accident he was a sculptor of abstract forms, “a sculptor of ideas,” but that after the weeks in the hospital, with each successive surgery, each anaesthetized dropping-off, he became ever more crazed with the forms of living things. The life survived into the sculptures. She’d never seen anything like them.
“You have these lives in you,” he said. “These people. You know them.”
“I’ve never dreamt about these people.”
“They’re strangers you recognize.”
He presumed to know her forgotten dreams or unadmitted fears. She recognized the pieces, not as sculptures but as living-dying things. Moment to moment she was getting no more used to looking at them. They seemed about to turn their eyes to her. The standing and crawling ones stirred in perpetual advance. Here was a problem to record, that if the drug expanded an imagination already apprehensive, it could, in so many words, disturb you to death. But the record didn’t matter now. The record was well past mattering.
She needed out and said so. For a second it seemed he might touch her, take her by the arm, but then he presented his back and he was leading her into the yard. She saw her footprints in approach as they returned the way they had come, to the truck and past it, over new ground, onward to the house.
6
He came and went, making tea on a woodstove.
They were in a large central room with a stone fireplace full of embers. She was sunk into an armchair. The handle of the knife on her belt pressed on the ball of her hip.
He put two cups on a coffee table and sat opposite her.
All day, little rounded stories had simply come to her, alive, dragonflies lit on the hand, each with its colour and engine. Now she heard Shoad’s. He said he’d been living in France and Spain for a summer, looking at prehistoric cave art. There’d been the deer through the windshield in Germany, a return home, here, a place he’d moved to years ago to be alone with his work.
From the end of the couch he angled himself at her across the shared table, regarding her from just above his high knees, one of which he’d grab to pull himself forward whenever he took a sip from his cup. She found herself refining her sense of his manner of speech. The words and their sounds came slanting across the gaps of dysarthria or aphasia, the sentences neurotraumatically clipped. Their compression had force. She had never understood before the thinness of conjunctions.
The sky was beginning to clear. He studied the trapezoid of sunlight that had narrowed and hardened around them. The set of his eyes, the indentations half-rhymed, rhymed again with the slight asymmetry of features not fully repaired. His face and his interest in cave art made her think of a photo on the wall of her father’s study, a shot of the earliest known artwork, a once-headless human statue carved from a mammoth tusk thirty-some thousand years ago. It was discovered at the onset of World War II in a cave in southern Germany. After the war, other pieces were found, fitted together, completing the head. It turned out to be that of a lion. The earliest artwork was a hybrid, a kind of monster. The repair lines were there in the picture, somehow both ancient and new.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
She answered the usual way, as if he’d asked a different question. She said she was a researcher at a pharmaceutical company. Her training was in genetic science, her thing now was the brain. She used the word hiatus with a vague but present sense of its inaccuracy. He sat there across from her, point-blank. The hiatus had brought her here. She found herself mentioning her father.
“He’s coming to visit,” she said. The transparency of the lie seemed of no concern to him. “He’ll arrive tonight. I left him a note letting him know I might be here.”
In the pause he took in her deception. It was as if he could take hold of her lies and pull her closer with them.
“You don’t know the Dahls,” he said. “You came after they left.”
“We spoke by phone. Quite a bit, actually. How well do you know them?”
She tried not to seem to be gauging him. He no longer looked away from her. The muddled expressions of his speech and face could retract, she saw, leaving a plain, unsettling regard.
“Stefan is a friend. He came here to help. After the accident.”
The wind sounded, beating the house. Beyond a skylight a fleet of dime-edged clouds shot by, and a sensation formed as if her brain were growing down her neck, through her shoulders and arms. The effect was of extending the feeling of normal thought, its housing in the skull, into new territories. Was she thinking faster, better? Shoad’s few words opened in all directions.
“His wife is sick,” he said. “She sees demons.”
—
Stefan had been checking in on Shoad’s house while he was in Europe. After his return he visited every second day, in duty, a good Christian neighbour. Shoad was still physically weak and Stefan helped around the yard. Stefan had bought a donkey from a rescue service and sponsored its boarding at a stables, and he suggested it might make dependable company. He knew that Shoad’s prescribed therapy included writing in a journal and speaking aloud, and reasoned that it would give him a set of ears to talk to. Together they built a stall in the barn and closed it off from the workshop, repaired an old fence that marked the overgrown pasture, arranged for feed deliveries. Stefan collected Aurelius, a large-headed thing with huge black eyes in a face like a furred instrument case. Together they groomed and dewormed the animal, which took to following Shoad around the pasture and watching him from the fenceline, braying in joy or aggrievement. After sunset Shoad would eat his supper in the barn with Aurelius, telling him about his life, things no one knew, and about sculpture and the human arts. He understood that the animal was lonely, and he would either have to get anoth
er donkey or return Aurelius to the stables.
Stefan came by with materials for Shoad’s work. He had begun the stag sculpture, made of antlers and false antlers he constructed from wood, clay, and epoxy. If Shoad was still at work when he arrived Stefan would visit Aurelius or occupy himself with work in the yard. He never left without speaking. Shoad came to realize that Stefan needed someone to talk to about Denise, someone he could trust. She had started into a delusional phase and seemed to be off her meds, though she wouldn’t admit to not taking them. Shoad suggested he bring her to visit Aurelius. Shoad had been to their place three or four times since moving here, though not since the accident, and Denise had asked about his life, his sculptures. Though he kept to himself and didn’t mind being thought of as the local outsider, the Dahls had no investment in feeling apart from him, and now it was hard to reconcile his memory of Denise with the woman Stefan was describing.
The next day they arrived. He watched them from the picture window. She wore a long denim shirt, untucked, over a billowing, rose-patterned skirt with a crooked, scissored hem. She looked around the yard and seemed to fix on the weather vane. Shoad met them at the door and stepped back for them to enter but Denise would not come forward. She said nothing at the sight of him, said nothing to Stefan when he asked her what was wrong. Shoad offered her something to drink. She went back to the car and wouldn’t get out.
A few days later the stories began, relayed by Stefan, of a Russian bride named Irina.
Stefan now devoted his time to Denise, and Shoad was left with Aurelius and an isolation he was used to, had sought most of his life. As if to produce company, his dreams became peopled with figures he recognized as those who’d come to him in the drugged sleeps around his surgeries. He had half-forgotten them but now they returned and asked to be given material form. He began to sketch them, even as he worked on the stag. Rather than visit, Stefan called the house. He said less and less until the only things between them became unspoken. In time the calls stopped.
