by Dan Chaon
—
But now, with my eyes opened in the dark, the clicks and hums of the house settling, the radiators stirring, the appliances doing their secret nighttime work, with my heart beating in an uncomfortably noticeable way, I couldn’t help but think: What if the dots are connected?
DECEMBER 18, 2012
THE PACKAGE WAS in the mail when I got home from work. It was a padded manila envelope, nine by six inches, with my name and address printed out on a label. No return address. But I noticed that the stamps on it looked oddly old, like something robbed from a philatelist’s collection.
The stamps were lined up, each with the picture of a bald white man etched in blue-gray ink. Eisenhower. USA. 6c. There were three rows of five, and they’d been hand-canceled, aggressively, no doubt by a bored and irritated postal employee.
—
I opened the envelope with a knife and my wallet fell out. At first, I felt only vague irritation. All the credit cards had been canceled already, and I’d spent a dull three-hour stint at the DMV to replace the driver’s license.
And then I opened the billfold and saw that my money was still there—seventy-eight dollars in twenties, tens, fives, and ones—and I felt a twinge of guilt.
This was a nice person, who took the time to mail your wallet back to you! Without stealing from you, without even asking for thanks! How many people are there like that anymore?
I sifted through the mail for a moment. A water bill. A Christmas card from Jill’s law firm. A flyer from the grocery store.
—
They must have gotten my address off my driver’s license? I thought.
—
I opened the wallet, and, yes, the license was still tucked behind its plastic protector. There was a photo of Jill and me and the boys there, too, and I felt a pang of unease. They know what all of you look like. They know where you live.
I lifted my head and glanced toward the front window. Our street was not a main thoroughfare, and though our block was not close-knit, we were considerate neighbors. We loaned each other tools, we kept our lawns mowed and scooped our sidewalks right away after it snowed. We noticed if there were strangers in the neighborhood. I didn’t have a house alarm, but I kept the doors locked and dead-bolted.
—
Then I noticed that a thin rectangle of plastic had been inserted into one of the folds in my wallet. I took it out. It was just a plain black plastic USB flash drive.
SANDISK: cruzer micro 1GB
DECEMBER 18, 2012
I OPENED THE door and Aqil was standing on the steps, his hands balled in the pockets of his oilskin drover jacket. The porch light was off. Aaron was staying over at Rabbit’s house—studying together for a final, he said.
“Come in,” I said. I whispered—I didn’t know why. But he glanced over his shoulder, as if he, too, thought someone may be watching.
It was the first time I’d ever had a patient inside my house, and it was awkward. From the beginning, I felt strongly about this—I never wanted to practice out of my home; I was very careful about any kind of overlap between the professional and the private. I had developed a few semi-fictional personal anecdotes that I would occasionally trot out to humanize myself, but for the most part I felt that borders were important. Lines needed to be drawn between the different aspects of our lives. The idea of a patient walking into my house was as unnerving as encountering a character from a television show coming down the sidewalk toward you.
But Aqil, I realized, was no longer really my patient. We shook hands, and I ushered him in, and it occurred to me that I probably needed him more than he needed me. There was not another person I could talk to.
—
No doubt, he was as uncomfortable as I was. I noticed him glance around in short flicks of his eyes. He wiped his boots on the mat, and, seeing the shelf for shoes in the foyer, he asked me if I wanted him to take his shoes off.
“Well,” I said. “Generally. We do. Leave the shoes in the”
“Front porch,” he said.
“Yes.”
There was still a wilting orchid on the dining room table, something someone sent for the funeral, and he took note of it. He looked at the big framed family photograph from two years ago—me, Jill, the boys, standing in front of the blooming wisteria in the backyard.
He looked at the Christmas tree in the living room, which I’d decorated the night before with small, winking yellow lights. No help from Aaron. There were a few presents underneath it.
“That’s a nice-looking tree,” he said.
DECEMBER 18, 2012
“IT’S HARD TO explain what it is,” I said. I was in a state that I recognized as being close to panic—the kind of hollow, jittery dread that might come from too much coffee and no sleep. “It’s—I don’t know what the purpose of sending something like this is,” I said.
“Let me take a look at it,” he said, in a firm, calm voice.
He watched as I knelt down and plugged the flash drive into the back of my computer, and then the two of us sat side by side in chairs and looked at the big screen attached to my PC monitor. There was a single file on the drive, an MP4 video, and when I clicked on it, it opened in Windows Media Player, full screen.
—
It starts with darkness, low-end static, and then light opens up in a rounded cone. The image is blurry, gray scale, but you can see some kind of movement—quivering, almost gelatinous. It might be an image of a distant galaxy, or the inside of a cell, the shapes pixelating and growing fuzzy and then sharpening abruptly, briefly.
—
“What is it?” Aqil said. “Night vision?”
“Actually,” I whispered, “I think it might be an ultrasound.”
—
Beneath the static is a distinct, irregular thrashing. At first it seems as if it might be some kind of musical instrument, but it slowly becomes clearer. It’s the wet, hollow squeaking sound of a hand rubbing a window, a bare foot on the floor of a bathtub.
Then the shape of a human hand passes through the darkness and swirling white flickers. The image is distinct for a few seconds, though it seems as if it’s partially translucent; it appears that you can see the bones of the fingers through a film of skin.
But it’s clear that we’re watching a creature that is thrashing and struggling. It appears to be curled up like a fetus in a womb, but it’s not a fetus. It’s an adult human figure, and there are flashes of limbs, a hand, the sole of a foot, an openmouthed face half-obscured in darkness.
And all the while, under the hum of static, there is the sound of water splashing, and a young man weeping, calling for help, choking.
The future is fixed
The past ever-changing—
—LYNDA BARRY
FALL 1983
WHEN THE TRIAL was over and Rusty was sent to prison forever, Kate and Wave and Dustin were remanded to the care of their grandma Brody, in Wyoming. No one listened when Kate protested. Their house was the only home they had ever known! It was their senior year of high school! They had been planning to graduate with all of their friends.
“Wave and I are seventeen!” Kate exclaimed. “Why couldn’t we just be declared legal adults? We could take care of Dustin; it’s not that big of a deal.”
But no. Apparently nobody was willing to negotiate.
—
It had all happened so quickly—much more quickly than Kate thought it was supposed to.
The prosecutor was a balding, spidery man who smiled at her as if he were on a children’s show and she were a puppet he was supposed to pretend to talk to. “Our community is eager to be healed of this incident,” he told her. “Our first priority is to make sure justice is meted out as quickly as possible.” He showed her his small white teeth, which to Kate looked like baby teeth.
—
They thought there would be money, but there wasn’t.
“Don’t you get paid if your parents are murdered?
” Dustin wanted to know. Plaintively.
“I guess not,” Kate said.
They had been imagining that they would get to continue living on in their own houses, in their own rooms. It turned out that their homes weren’t even owned by their parents! Their houses were owned by a bank, which their parents paid monthly. The cars, the camper, the appliances—all were purchased on credit. There was no life insurance.
Because they were minors, many things were decided for them—very abruptly, Kate thought—and she was suspicious of the social workers and lawyers who began weaving webs around them. But what could they do? They had no money, no car, no place to go. As it turned out, they didn’t own anything.
What had happened to all the money that Uncle Dave had gotten as a result of his accident? No one alive could tell them.
And so they were sent away, broke and orphaned, and they sat silently on the bus as it traveled toward Gillette, Wyoming. Dustin slept heavily beside Kate, curled into a ball on the seat, his legs tucked under him, his face smushed against the window. Wave sat in a different aisle, because of course one of them had to sit with Dustin.
Wave would glance over her shoulder from time to time; their eyes would meet. Wave kept making expressions that suggested she thought she was owed an apology.
—
They arrived in Gillette at about midnight, and they were dropped off on the outskirts of town. There was a Kum & Go convenience store there, and a sign for Smart Choice Inn, but instead of a motel there was only a gravel lot with some broken-up car parts and a rusted backhoe.
They stood blinking in the halogen lights, watching the semis rush past. It was the middle of September. They each had one suitcase.
—
After a while an old four-door Buick came rolling slowly up and stopped. They watched as the driver’s side window slid down, and a thin, hollow-eyed man in a cowboy hat peered out at them. His glasses were tinted a yellowish-brown, as if they’d been stained by cigarette smoke.
“You the Tillman kids?” he said. He had a surprisingly deep voice for such a small man.
“Who are you?” Kate said.
The man stared at her wordlessly for a moment, to show her that he didn’t like her tone. “My name’s Dolin Culver,” he said at last. “I’m your social worker.”
He lifted a can of Pepsi to his mouth and thoughtfully spit tobacco juice. “Get in,” he said. “I’ll take you to your grandma.”
—
They sat in the back of Dolin Culver’s car, with Dustin between them, and they didn’t speak. They were driving out into the countryside beyond the lights of Gillette, and soon there was nothing to see outside the window but darkness and stars. Kate had never understood why people liked to look at them, constellations and whatever. They were so boring and random.
I don’t have anything to apologize for, Kate thought, and she took Dustin’s left hand and clasped it. Were she and Wave at the stage of actually “not speaking”? Kate wasn’t sure.
“So,” Dolin Culver said, after they had driven in silence for a while. “I reckon that you kids have had a rough time of it. I want to let you know that, anything you need, you should call me.”
He turned around to look at her. She couldn’t see his eyes behind his tinted glasses, but she guessed that he was sizing her up and down. He was younger than her parents, maybe thirty or so, but still old.
“Why are you wearing sunglasses,” she said, in a tone that was polite but still made it clear that she thought he was gross.
“It’s them photosensitive lenses,” he said. “It’s only supposed to go dark in sunlight, but they stopped working.”
“It makes me uncomfortable,” Kate told him.
She could feel Wave staring over at her, probably giving her another judgmental look, but they didn’t make eye contact.
And then they pulled up to the old house.
It was a few miles outside of town, on a barren stretch of county road, a two-story farmhouse from the 1920s, and Kate recognized it right away.
The girls had come here when they were little, when they were five, six, seven. They used to visit in the summers; they used to come for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Then, after Grandpa Brody died, the visits had stopped. Their mother and Dustin’s mother—Vicki and Colleen—had gotten into a disagreement with their mother over some belongings of their father’s that they wanted to have as keepsakes. Grandma Brody had refused, and eventually heated words were exchanged. Things were said that couldn’t be undone.
The place had changed a lot since the last time Kate and Wave had seen it. Ten years had passed, and from the outside it now looked abandoned. One of the front windows was boarded up, and another had plastic sheeting tacked over it. There was a dead crabapple tree in front of it—which, as Kate remembered, had once held a tire swing. The grass had long ago turned to weeds.
Grandma Brody came out of the front door when they arrived, leaning on her cane. She lifted her hand, squinting into Dolin Culver’s headlights, and Kate remembered how Vicki and Colleen used to complain about certain things she had done when they were teenagers.
She would lock them in their room at night, and there was a big thorny rosebush below their second-floor window, so they couldn’t escape that way, either. She had taken jewelry that their father had given them and worn it herself. She had burned letters that Uncle Dave had sent Colleen from Vietnam. “She set the letters on fire in the sink,” Vicki told them. “And then when they were burned, she turned on the water so the ash washed down the drain, and then she smiled at poor Colleen.” Vicki shook her head. “That was just pure sadistic,” she said. “And after a while we came to realize that was the core of her. It made her happy to see other people miserable.”
Kate and Wave hadn’t remembered her that way. She had been nice to them when they were little girls, as they recollected, made them good food and sat with them at the kitchen table and they made dream-catcher wind chimes out of yarn.
She didn’t look that different from what Kate recalled. More wrinkles. A more pronounced hunch in her back. But her hair was still short and permed into a puffball on top of her head. She still had that large, unfeminine nose that belonged on a truck driver or a plumber, and wide ruddy cheeks, and long earlobes that the girls used to like to stroke, when they were small enough to sit in Grandma Brody’s lap.
And she still had the same voice. Even if she was a strikingly ugly woman, her voice was quite lovely. She called out to them as they opened the back door of Dolin Culver’s car and stood in the drifting exhaust, tinted red from his brake lights. “Oh! My poor babies,” she called, and if you closed your eyes and didn’t look at her, you would have thought her voice was the alto of a mother from a long-ago television show, the kind of mother who would stroke your hair as you fell asleep, the kind of voice that could sing a lullaby.
“Oh my Jesus!” she said. “You poor babies.”
And the three of them stood in the gravel driveway under the wide stars, and Dolin Culver drove off without another word.
Hugs were exchanged. She told them all how grown-up they looked, even Dustin, who was thirteen but looked like he was ten. She apologized for making them take the bus. “I have a gal down the road that gives me rides to the grocery store and to church, but I couldn’t ask her to drive all the way to Nebraska. That would be too much.”
Grandma Brody didn’t drive, Kate remembered. Refused to, Vicki and Colleen said. This had been one of the sources of disagreement between Grandma Brody and her daughters. They had wanted their father’s car after he died, but Grandma Brody refused. The car was a beautiful blue and white 1957 Studebaker that Grandpa Brody had loved, that Vicki and Colleen had loved, as well. “But she’d rather let it sit in that garage and rust,” Vicki said. “Spiteful old witch.”
Kate glanced over at the garage—which leaned at such an angle that it seemed about to fall over. She imagined the rusting Studebaker hunched inside. �
�She could sense it there, just as she could sense the house, and the dead tree, and the pulse of crickets—all of them beaming out a soft, malevolent glow.
“Oh! It’s so late,” Grandma Brody said. “Almost one in the morning! I’m usually sound asleep by nine!”
Fuck, Kate thought.
And then she and Wave and Dustin followed Grandma Brody into the house.
—
Based on the condition of the outside, it was about what Kate expected. Maybe a little worse. The living room was like someone’s old attic or storage shed—stacks of magazines and junk mail, furniture that seemed to have been set down haphazardly in various corners, dishes, cardboard boxes, knickknacks, a fuzz of dust on the lampshades that made the light seem dull and dirty. Smell of mildew and some kind of baby powder.
“There’s a bedroom down the hall where you kids will be staying,” Grandma Brody said.
But it wasn’t until they opened the door that they realized that it was the bedroom of their two dead mothers: Twin beds, a vanity dresser with a large oval mirror. Some old stuffed animals resting on the white chenille bedspreads. “Your grandma always bought us the ugliest things she could find,” their mother had told them once. “If she saw something in a catalog that she knew we’d hate, she’d buy it for us.”
Wave was the first one to enter the terrible room. She went silently to one of the beds and lay down without taking off her clothes. Kate and Dustin looked at one another.
“I can sleep on the floor,” Dustin whispered, but Kate shook her head.
“No, no,” Kate said. “I don’t want to sleep in that bed by myself. There’s enough room.” She took his hand and held it. “It’s going to be okay,” she said.
