by Rodney Jones
Leaving the chair, she wandered through the house, hunting a distraction. She picked up a paperback, plopped down into a thickly cushioned armchair in the living room and began reading from where she’d left off. She read for almost half an hour, but the nagging awareness of Roland’s uncharacteristic behavior made it difficult to remain in the story. She set the book down and picked up the TV remote.
Because they’d never subscribed to a cable service—one of Roland’s eccentricities, which Dana had reluctantly agreed to—there were only three stations she could tune in, and only after fiddling with a pair of rabbit ears. Switching back and forth between her limited options, she disregarded the less-than-perfect reception and settled on a snowy sitcom—amazed at the sacrifices one makes in the name of love and compromise.
The flickering images on the TV proved more effective at keeping the ghosts at bay than the book had. Commercials interrupted her program—so many that it became unclear as to what was interrupting what. The device, nonetheless, worked its magic, so she stayed with it, while a subtle but persistent foreboding continued nibbling at the edges of her mind.
As the next commercial arrived, she pushed herself up from her seat, went to the kitchen and again checked the clock—10:18.
What the fuck?
She stood over the stove, glaring at the four annoying digits, while various hypothesis competed in her mind, with conflicts resulting in dissolution, leaving mostly holes. She stepped over to the phone, stared at it as though willing it to ring, the muffled chatter of the TV mocking its silence. She considered calling her mother, but then realized she’d be in bed. She thought of her older sister Mary—She’ll think I’m being ridiculous—and then her brother. Maybe I am being ridiculous. It had only been a few hours, after all.
She stepped out the back door onto the dimly lit porch, where a cool, light breeze swept in from across the tiny backyard. The chirping of a cricket hiding in the flowers near her feet drew her attention. As if in denial of the season, the ground cover bordering the walkway held onto a sprinkle of tiny pink blossoms.
She sighed. “Stupid note.” A gentle dong came from the wind chimes hanging next to her, as if in agreement. He just screwed up on the “soon” part of it, she thought. Patience.
Rubbing the chill from her arms, she returned to the house, poured herself a vodka and tonic, then slouched on the couch in front of the TV. The image of a young boy jumping from a boat dock into a lake glowed on the tube—a life insurance commercial. She pointed the remote toward the TV and selected a different station—the local PBS, an animal documentary. She watched a bird, which resembled a crow, push twigs into the ground with its beak. The bird constructed a wall around what appeared to be a pile of bones and other small white objects. Its construction brought to mind a cage; it even had an arched opening from which the animal could enter and leave. She watched, taking occasional sips from her drink. As interesting as the program was, Roland’s absence continued to plague her mind. She countered with a sip of vodka, then stretched out on the sofa and watched with fresh determination as some brutish, furry creature, for no apparent reason, annihilated the structure the bird had worked so hard at creating.
The day had piled up hour upon hour. As she dozed off, the bird on the TV screen began rebuilding. In her last moment of consciousness, she imagined herself being awakened by Roland, returning from his walk.
Chapter twenty-eight – four flats
A patchwork of random, senseless dreams came to a sudden end the instant Roland cracked an eye open. He lifted the other eyelid and squinted toward a sheet of gray, stretching the width of the world. A noise, a persistent drone, like a field of crickets, filled his head. The light, all around, began to brighten—the buzz intensified, irritating, and mocking. The gray gradually turned to blue as it morphed into a cloudless sky. His heart raced—a galloping allegretto—bum bump, bum bump, bum bump—a pressure behind his eyes with each pulse—pushing, pinging, chattering inside his skull, as if in competition with the buzzing. He turned his head to the left. A dark form, inches from his face, blocked his view. Attempting to bring it into focus, he blinked and stared. A pillow? A vase? He squeezed his eyes shut, then again opened them. A cactus?
He worked at establishing his orientation—up, down, left, right—like the arrow of a compass seeking north. He lifted his head and glanced down the length of his body, surrounded by thin, scraggly plants, red rocks and sand. He turned to his right. A pine tree stood about fifty feet away—a mass of rock sat in the distance behind it.
The tree, a tall ponderosa, looked curiously like the one in his backyard. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, twisted around, expecting to find his house behind him, but saw only more shrubs, cactus, and rocks, which did not look familiar, though the landscape beyond it did. He searched to his left, then his right, and again behind him. No house.
Stumbling, as he got to his feet, he struggled to find his balance. The memory of falling was stuck in his mind, like a random, irrelevant thought. The moments surrounding it had become dislodged—swimming in his head—just so many vague impressions. Chopped vegetables on a cutting board, a car skidding, a cup of coffee on a tabletop, a cigarette butt rolling on asphalt, then the face of an unknown woman—all of it, a stubborn, incoherent tangle. He blinked, gave his head a quick short shake, and swallowed. The taste of blood filled his mind like a rusty-red broth. A burning pain, like a wasp sting at the tip of his tongue. He wiped his lips, slippery with blood, and stared at his fingers, wondering what to do with them. He turned, peering off in one direction, then another.
Wasn’t I just…? No. Yes, the kitchen. I fell… the kitchen? The memory seemed misplaced, as if it had been mistakenly filed, possessing the uncertainty of a distant, older memory. A shiver seized him as it dawned on him that he was standing in the very spot his house should be—or more precisely his kitchen. He turned—“What?”—then again—“No”—and again, turning, searching the landscape, searching his mind for a toehold, a point of reference, a reason. He stumbled, caught himself, then twisted around toward the interior of his imagined home. Any evidence that a house had ever existed there was missing.
He turned—“It’s not… This is not”—turned—“God damn it! What is this?”
He spotted the road, thirty-yards away, and stumbled toward it. Still dizzy with confusion and remonstrance, he stopped near the edge of the road and turned around. He had stood in that same spot with Joyce six years earlier—a year before their house was built. The landscape appeared precisely as he remembered it.
A half-ton boulder sat dead center of the spot where his garage should’ve been. After the corners of his new home were staked, he’d had the rock moved about five yards to the east of the garage. Where the hell am I? He peered down the road to his left. His neighbor’s house, a half-mile away, appeared no different than it ever had. He glanced at the rock again, and the wilderness beyond it, seeking further confirmation that the pine tree and the butte were in fact the landmarks they appeared to be.
“Joyce…” Her name left his lips in a whisper, but was followed by a vise-like panic, squeezing the breath from him. “Joyce.” He spun around, wanting to escape, but couldn’t—not without her. “Joyce!” He scurried about the lot, searching for evidence of a house, its contents, a scrap, a splinter, anything. He came upon the heel marks he’d left in the loose sand where he had awakened, earlier. A flood of images—quick snippets—rushed through his head: the kitchen, his wife upstairs in the office, the computer monitor, a blinking cursor, a falling knife, and then the house peeling away, as though he, himself, had produced the force of an exploding bomb. Nothing in his past, nothing he had ever heard, seen, or read, lent a shred of relevance to the world before him.
“No.” He squeezed his eyes shut, pushing against a mental barrier that he imagined stood between him and reality. “No no no no no!” His heart thumped against his ribs. “JOYCE!” He blasted the desert with her name—“JOYCE!”—then dropped
to his knees and drove his fists into the earth at his sides, gritting his teeth, twisting and grunting with each blow. “No no no no no!”
His eyes quivered at the harshness of daylight as he puzzled over its failure to make things right. “What… what?” His shoulders slumped. “Please.” He gazed off toward the south, unable to form even the beginning of an idea about what had happened, what to do next, how to fix it, or destroy it. He sat back on his heels, everything receding in his mind—dull, tiny, distant—until only thin, passive concepts remained.
Roland sat there, while the shadows of small clouds crept across the Earth. A car flew by—a while later, another. There may have been more traffic after that. He sat there at a complete loss, doing nothing—the vehicles’ occupants apparently unaware of the man kneeling, motionless, so far from the road, or perhaps spooked by his behavior. But then, for no apparent reason, he got to his feet and began walking. Reason and logic had, both, abandoned him as apparently reality, too, had. What possessed him to move in the direction he chose lay hidden in the depths of his subconscious at a place where reason would have been a liability.
He stumbled past the pine tree, following what the day before had been a well-trodden path, but was now hardly a trace. Eventually he wandered to the backside of the butte, then turned southwest, continuing his pointless trek, one foot and then the next. He stumbled over a rock, and fell to his hands and knees. As he attempted to get up, he slipped and slid down the side of a ditch, tearing his pant leg and scraping the side of his leg. Scrambling to his feet, he plodded on, showing no regard for his injuries.
Nearly two hours passed. The sun, now a low, shimmering sphere, dropped below the rim of the ravine. Ahead, the limbs of a cactus, a gathering of a dozen or more spiny pillars, protruded above an outcropping of red rock. As Roland made his way around a bend in the ravine, the cactus revealed its impressive mass. He stopped and peered up toward the top of the plant. Light from the setting sun struck the peaks of its raised arms, causing the fine, needle-like spines to glow, creating the impression of flames—like a giant, contorted candelabra.
His gaze dropped to the base of the cactus where, some hours before, Joyce had stood. He stared at it, as though he’d penetrate its skin and expose that piece of its history. Darkness began to flood the gully, and with it, the chill of the approaching night. His eyes followed the trunk up to its arms near the center of the cactus, and up to their stubby tops, where the sunlight briefly painted the last few inches before they, too, went cold.
Roland worked his way up to the rim of the ravine, where there was yet enough light to see the ground at his feet, though it wouldn’t last—night was fast approaching. The first stars appeared, but no moon. He plodded on, stumbling, his shoes providing only minimal protection from the rocks and cactus-spines.
By the time he’d covered another mile, what little light remained came from stars, which was not enough. He stopped, and lowered himself to the ground, where the day’s warmth had soaked into the rocks and sand. The Milky Way stretched across the sky, a band of diamonds, though he was only vaguely aware of its presence. He lay there, curled up against the night, while whispers stirred around him—the voice of a chilled, desert breeze, brushing past rocks and sparse vegetation. A stubborn remnant of the buzzing from earlier and the faint chatter of dreams blended with the sound of the desert, creating an abstruse dialogue. As his awareness faded, the message repeated, over and over, in long, slow, wispy breaths. He was too exhausted, however, to extract meaning from the ramblings.
In the east, a meteorite marked the sky. In the last moment of the tiny stone’s multi-billion-year existence, it traversed the path of a man-made satellite leisurely making its way around the Earth. As the meteor burned through the atmosphere, the energy it released produced enough light to be seen a thousand miles away—but for only an instant. Though Roland was not present to witness the phenomenon, it did not go unnoticed. Someone as far away as Buffalo, New York noticed it.
Approaching from the left lane, a vehicle flashed its high beams and then disappeared down the road behind Roland. As he pressed his foot to the gas pedal, the whole car began to shake. A flat tire? He pulled over, got out, stepped away from the car, and peered up and down the road. One direction was no different than the other—nothing, for as far as he could see. He turned and looked at his car. Both tires were flat. Stepping around to the passenger side, he realized the other two were flat, as well.
As he stared off into the desert, an old man wearing a cowboy hat appeared from out of the darkness. He spoke in a deep, muffled voice, as if talking from inside a wooden box. “Take the elevator to the tenth floor,” the man said, “but keep an eye on the time as you return.”
Roland pivoted, expecting to find an elevator, but found nothing, other than what was there before. When he turned back, the old man was gone. He walked over to the spot where the man had stood—a set of footprints led off into the desert. Follow them? He glanced toward his car. Now it was gone. In its place stood Joyce, leaning against a tall tree, a burned down cigarette between her fingertips. He shivered at the cold, and wondered, did I just catch you in a lie? a denial of who you are? of who we are? His thoughts would not congeal into words, however, but instead morphed into shadows, which were then absorbed by the desert.
He wanted to show his wife the footprints in the sand, and waved for her to come closer.
“Don’t worry about the cat,” she said, “it’d make a nice gift for the blind boy.”
“The blind boy?” he wanted to say, but Joyce’s aloofness kept him from saying anything. She drew on her cigarette—Joyce, but not Joyce. She was somewhere inside that cold, heartless thing—frustratingly inaccessible. Roland folded his arms across his chest. His shivering pulled him back to a world of pain and inescapable cold, a world where his nightmarish reality made less sense than the disjointed dream he had just left—no bed, no walls, no one beside him—nothing familiar or right. A jumble of ephemeral impressions from the day before blended with bits of the world he’d just emerged from, leaving him uncertain as to what was real and what was dreamed.
The cold, the pain, and the threat of worse snapped at Roland’s instincts, awakening his sense of caution and reason. Cringing, he forced himself to his feet, then peered up toward the stars and shivered at their iciness. The first hint of dawn had not yet appeared. He bounced about in an effort to generate warmth, but only provoked more pain.
He had only the vaguest idea of where he was and how he got there, and only a faint inkling of what it meant. Keeping his arms folded tight against his body, he studied the sky, locating the Big Dipper, and the North Star, then scanned the horizon beneath it, searching for familiar landmarks. Lights… How far away they were was difficult to judge—two, five, ten miles?
He shifted his weight from foot to foot, taking in the lights. The glow of a city floated in the distance above them. Turning to the west, he spotted more—possibly street lights, though they appeared even more distant than the first. But then something to his left, a flicker from the corner of his eye, caught his attention. Rubbing his arms, he stared into the distance, searching, and then, for just a brief moment, a dim, yellowish glow appeared. The reflection of car lights off a building? He kept his eyes glued to the spot, trying not to blink, and was about to turn away when he saw it again.
A fire?
He searched for a better vantage point, found a large boulder positioned near the edge of yet another dark chasm, climbed up, and carefully rose to his full height. There it was, maybe a quarter-mile away, a campfire. He climbed down, slowly felt his way to the bottom of the gully, testing each step before committing to it, and then worked his way up the opposite side.
A short while later, he was close enough to see flames licking up from a mound of charred wood and glowing embers. And just beyond the dying fire was an old house trailer. Its chalky white aluminum siding seemed to shift one way then another in the flickering light. Its windows made him think of a
pair of eyes—dead, dull, and nearly as dark as obsidian. He listened for voices, but heard none, so moved closer… then closer still. With the door of the trailer just yards away, he said, “Hello?”
He stood there, concentrating on the sounds in the air. Other than the chatter of his teeth, the occasional snap from the fire was all he heard.
“Hello,” he repeated.
A folding chair lay collapsed on the ground near the fire, along with a couple of empty beer bottles and a small pile of gnarled branches and twigs. Roland moved a few of the branches to the fire, then again turned toward the trailer door; a plastic jug, which appeared to contain water, sat on the wooden steps below it. Next to that was a metal cup and a plate with food crumbs upon it. “Anybody here?” The desert seemed to hush in response.
Returning to the fire, Roland held his hands out over it, rubbed them together, then rubbed their warmth into his arms. He regarded the trailer—a weather-beaten old thing with a single door about a third of the way from the front end. Painted directly above two, small, curtainless windows—one to either side of the door—was a series of three symbols. The left was the reverse of the right. Pima characters, Roland assumed. Hanging below the trailer’s chassis, about midway along its length, was a pair of rusty hubs, missing their wheels. Stacks of flat stones had been placed at the far ends of the trailer and beneath its double-axle, serving as a foundation.
Keeping an eye on the door, Roland approached the steps, grabbed the jug and the cup, then returned to the fire. He lowered himself to the ground, placed the cup down before him, tipped the jug over it, and took a sip. Water. He tipped the cup back and emptied it. Little by little his shivering subsided.
As the fire died down, he moved closer. His mind drifted, skipping from memory to memory as he watched the thin blue flames dance hypnotically across the bed of coals. It came to him that he was lost, but too tired to pursue an explanation—too tired to care. So, he lay down on his side, the glow of embers on his eyelids, and allowed his fatigue to take him.
