Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “Gas you?” The dark spaces of the boy’s eyes betrayed no life. Jeff found himself grunting an affirmative. The boy nodded, replying with a series of expressions, gestures, even simple looks Jeff could not fully understand. It made him uncomfortable. So perhaps he wasn’t so different from his father at all, only marginally better educated. Educated enough to feel the guilt.

  In Jeff’s mirror, Susan was layered in shadow and light, her deep-set eyes unreadable. But he suspected she felt it, too. He’d always wanted to blame his own father for teaching him such profound unease. But he suspected it wasn’t upbringing. Unease was bred in the womb.

  He tipped the boy much too generously and hurried back to the main highway. He passed through several similar villages. He changed routes several times, and still the worn out houses and patchwork faces continued, the accumulation of them sloughing off his mirror into memory.

  In Jeff’s rear-view mirror shadowed faces appeared in backwards perspective, layer after layer of them in grey doorways and open windows and behind polarized windshields. But what disturbed him more than the faces themselves were the eyes they held—as a bare setting might hold its jewel—too small to see and yet which themselves might see so much. Thousands of eyes glittering with dark color, moving slowly, scanning, telescoping, perhaps jittering a wild, drug-induced dance within the ravaged face within a ravaged hovel. The eyes his rear-view mirror could not catch in the act.

  He knew such things weren’t safe to talk about. Early in his graduate history studies he had been interested in the writings of such American nativists as Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and H. P. Lovecraft. He’d wanted to know if they had had certain perceptions, and if perhaps they’d so misunderstood these perceptions that their rather bizarre racial theories had come about. He’d wanted to know what they saw when they looked into the mirror.

  Regularly he checked on Susan in the mirror. She slept off and on, slumped against the right hand door. Now and then she would wake up and gaze into the mirror with bewildered eyes, as if this were something she had never seen before, as if she had seen her adult self, her mutantcy, her lone animal self. Then she would nod off again. Children were blessed with an expansive capacity for sleep, because the world was too complicated a place for them to take in all at once. Now and then she would wake again and look, and as it grew darker outside the car there came a time when Jeff could not see her eyes in the mirror, although he sensed their heat.

  It was night by the time they’d reached the outskirts of Providence. But not the complete dark he would have experienced at home, surrounded by open fields and with the nearest streetlight miles away. This was the brown dark that surrounded large cities, diluted by chemical smoke and exotic lighting.

  He’d always found driving at night to be disorientating. Each vehicle was a bubble of dim light, a marginally sufficient and self-contained ecosystem. You wandered up and down grey ribbons of highway you could barely see, seeking clues as to your route. It was a wonder any one of you reached your destination. Night driving seemed a matter of blind, ancient instinct, aided by appeals to the gods of luck.

  He remembered being lost one time and driving with the window down, seeking some sort of guidance from the local smells: wet salt, cedar smoke, or a thick, treacly plasma that seemed to cling to his clothing. He’d read somewhere that smells often had a powerful impact on people’s moods. Especially the moods of children. He wondered how many sociopaths had grown up with stale, evil fragrances.

  Now he rolled the window up tight, cursing himself for exposing Susan to the air of the highway. He searched for her in his rear-view mirror, eventually finding her curled up against the right hand door, the top half of her face eaten by shadow. “Susan?” She didn’t move. He spoke it again, louder, and still no response. He felt her panicky, screamed name rising swiftly up his throat, but held it back. He should have been watching her all the time. Then she stirred in her sleep. He was relieved, and then suddenly a little irritated with her. He needed to have her alert, and charming, for his reunion. He pulled off the road and into a small convenience store on the northeast edge of the city.

  The man behind the counter seemed too old for the long silver chain dangling from his left ear. His eyes were greasy. He gazed past Jeff out the front window. “Your little girl sick?” he asked, with minimal movement of his lips.

  For some reason the very idea that the clerk had noticed his daughter in the car, had used the words “your little girl”, alarmed Jeff. He found himself searching the man’s face for a lascivious wink or tongue across the lips. In the high chrome polish of the cash register, shelves, and counter trim, Jeff could feel a thousand fragments of the clerk’s slick eyes, watching him, sliding closer.

  Jeff turned and found himself looking at his daughter directly, without the protection of reflection. She sat like an elderly doll slumped with a heavy weight of medication, her forehead pressing the car window, staring at him. The red and yellow neon of the store’s sign washed her face, made it seem thinner, the shadows darker. She was his beautiful doll, his Auschwitz doll. He turned and his gaze latched on to the clerk’s greasy eyes almost desperately. “It’s just the reflection from your sign. That damned garish neon. That’s what makes her look so ill.” He said it inviting argument, but there was none. The clerk cast his subhuman eyes down and waited for Jeff’s order.

  When he got into the car he handed the sack of food back to her without looking. He held his breath a beat, anticipating some sort of terrible breakage—the car windows, the store beyond, perhaps even the tight sheen of skin stretched over his skull, but after a moment a hand took the bag from him. “I couldn’t remember what you liked.” He forced a laugh and it sounded oddly falsetto. “So I bought enough for six … six daughters, six little girls.”

  He was embarrassing himself. She said nothing in reply; he thought she must be terribly angry with him now. He was glad Liz wasn’t there to point out how badly he was handling things. It was obviously much too trying a trip for a little girl. He had given her coffee and donuts, cupcakes and a nut bar and two colas in the bag, brands he had never heard of, Rhode Island brands he supposed. He thought she was too young for coffee but he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember any of the things she liked to eat. Suddenly he didn’t know her at all. She had grown up much too fast and soon she would be dead. They all would be dead. Everyone had told him that all his life but he hadn’t believed it until now.

  She didn’t say anything. But he thought he could hear her eating now. Not loudly, but slowly consuming everything he had given her. Good.

  He didn’t recognize any of the streets around Brown University. They were all torn up, decades of asphalt pulled up like geologic strata, detours leading him around the gaping excavations floored with oily liquid to oddly-shaped parking spaces overlooked by black ruins. He thought he recognized the Rockefeller Library but he couldn’t be sure. He finally pulled the car into what may or may not have been a parking space, opened Susan’s door, and reached into the shadows there. Her hand caught his timidly. “We’re late,” he barked nervously, turning his head as he dragged her from the car and started racing up the steps. Her tread grew lighter the harder he pulled. He had a vision of his beautiful daughter entering the reception hand-in-hand with proud poppa. He whispered back into the cool wind blowing off the damp pavement, “You’re beautiful.” He knew her shyness would not permit her to reply to that, and she didn’t.

  The night air in Providence seemed a far more substantial thing than he remembered, but it had been a very long time since he had done more than drive through the city during daylight hours. He supposed there was much more pollution these days, more dust from all the reconstruction. Shadows underwent a congealing process; black spaces solidified. At times it was like walking through veils. The air had a feeling of age, as in a room long kept shut. Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine how as a student here he had ever tolerated such Lovecraftian gloom.

  The printed sign
on the door said that the City Works department had ruled this particular classroom building “unsafe”. Another hastily-scrawled red note on blue paper—Professor Lawrence’s old stationery?—explained that the reunion had been moved to the Biltmore Hotel.

  Rather than trying to maneuver those torn and reshuffled streets again, Jeff decided they would walk. He wouldn’t worry about getting lost; everyone knew where the Biltmore was.

  After several blocks he had to remove his coat. He could not believe the heat. His shirt stuck to his skin like layers of molt—he suspected it was ruined. Liz would be unhappy—she had given it to him last birthday, although it was the only present he could remember receiving. Perhaps an ugly tie from Susan with her child’s taste. He vaguely remembered looking into the mirror and seeing a line of distortion hanging from his neck, squeezing it so tightly he couldn’t breathe. Susan kept slipping from his grasp; he re-gripped her hand so tightly he was surprised when she didn’t cry out. In the dark puddles spotting the pavement his reflection looked bodiless, his head screaming as it flew through the night air.

  Store windows strangely refused to give up all of his reflection. In passing he would see a cheek and an eye, downward slash of a mouth, an out-thrust leg, one hand trailing back, desperately clutching at a daughter who seemed to have lost her bright image in their flight across town. He tried to attribute the gaps in his own image and his daughter’s complete absence to dust and grease on the glass.

  Now and then he lost track of the Biltmore’s direction in the tangle of disrupted streets and gutted buildings. He stopped and gave a dark passer-by his best “lost” look—the man’s shambling made it impossible to ask him directly. He wasn’t surprised that the man ignored him. He tried this tack again and again, finally working up the courage to at least touch the shoulder of one or two. Some of those citizens obviously didn’t take kindly to his touching them so—some looked as if they might have killed him had there been no witnesses. All his life, he had met people who seemed somehow too cold, too cruel to be human; they behaved in ways Jeff believed no human should behave. A man turned suddenly and gestured awkwardly towards a narrow side street. Jeff was struck by the mouth, which seemed too wide, as if he had undergone one of those mouth surgeries movie stars had had, but in this case the incision had gone much too far. Jeff stared, but the man’s eyes refused to blink, collecting more and more water which caught the dim light and magnified it, making them look heavy with ground glass. Jeff finally turned away.

  The gathering at the Biltmore was sedate, and no one seemed to recognize him. The hotel itself was under reconstruction, tall scaffolding leaning precariously against the walls where workers in white coveralls labored overtime at replastering the cracked and stained surfaces. Or perhaps they themselves were applying the cracks and stains. Jeff drank until the workers and scaffolding disappeared, and then he had a vision of the hotel’s more elegant future firmly in mind.

  “Bill, is that you?” Someone clutched his shoulder, as if desperately seeking directions.

  “No,” Jeff replied to the staggering fat man in front of him. “Tonight I’m not me at all.”

  Now and then a stranger would smile and slap Jeff on the back, chant a few endearments, and then leave again. Jeff thought that in another time and world they might have been his friends. Everyone had always liked him, but he had no talent for friendship.

  Sometime near midnight Jeff discovered Professor Lawrence chatting with some men and women Jeff’s own age whom he vaguely remembered as having been in his classes in graduate school. He watched the elderly man for some time before he could muster enough courage to speak to him. He wore glasses still, but a different, squarer shape. His speech, his entire presentation seemed a bit more hesitant, his former students interrupting frequently to take command of the conversation and discuss their own researches.

  “Professor Lawrence?” he said, pushing himself right up to the old man’s glasses. “Jeff Reynolds. It’s great to see you again!”

  The old man nodded absently, then raised an eyebrow slightly. “Oh, I remember,” he said sounding tired. “You did some work on the nativists, as I recall. Most peculiar. Those old bigots. Most peculiar,” he said again, as if describing Jeff himself, and Jeff watched as his reflected face in his imagined father’s glasses turned dark, broad, lizard-like.

  “Here,” Jeff said suddenly, rocking forward and spilling his drink on Lawrence, who blanched and stepped back. “I have a family now! Me! A wife and a beautiful … beautiful daughter. Susan!” He called, looking around, and suddenly realizing in a panic he had no idea where she was. “Susan!” He tried to grab Lawrence’s hands in both of his but Lawrence stumbled and jerked away from him. As if Jeff’s touch might contaminate the old fraud. “Susan!” He stared at Lawrence in horror. “You have to believe me!” he cried. “You were important to me. I do have a daughter!” But the hotel shimmered so loudly Jeff had no idea if Professor Lawrence heard him at all.

  After a few hours Jeff stopped calling out the name of his beautiful daughter, wondering—helpless not to—whether that was truly her name. If she was alive, if she even existed anymore, he felt she would find him. If only he could cover enough ground in time. The sky had lightened somewhat—dawn would be there soon—but as yet there were only night people out on the Providence streets.

  He did not know what he could tell Elizabeth, if there was ever an Elizabeth to tell. He didn’t think he would ever be able to tell her anything if he could not find Susan.

  The pale light falling between the buildings into the narrow streets had its own kind of solidity, as if there were a clear line between this light and what lay beyond and the ordinary morning this side of it. Like a curtain, or a sheet of glass. He stepped through.

  In the expanding light Providence tried to reveal its secrets to him. Where store fronts had been torn open metal armature was revealed, a multitude of electrical cable and the complex network of plumbing added to and subtracted from so often over the years that he doubted anyone could trace it all. Posters had been rubbed away unevenly from the exterior walls of shops so that the portions of words remaining spelled out bizarre phrases which nonetheless seemed vaguely familiar to him. Ornate architectural decoration had been weathered so that even more ornate subsurfaces showed through. Disparate building styles had been jammed together to create new styles. The city appeared unfinished, and yet already renewing itself.

  Two of the men with too-broad mouths rode huge street cleaning machines, running over the same spots again and again.

  From broken window panes fragments of many eyes reflected down. At the bronzed edges of buildings misshapen limbs attempted to stir from the reflective surfaces. In the finish of a shiny red car he saw his body beginning to warp and catch fire. In the polished tile of a pedestrian plaza he caught a glimpse of his true eyes. In the curve of a broken bottle he watched himself striking again and again at the child he loved so much, whom he could not find in all these mirrors.

  “This is the way it begins,” he thought, as world rubbed against world, and his own skin grew veined and layered. “This is the way it ends,” he thought, as stink and dark erupted from every crack in the pavement, every opening in the walls, and the raw edges of his reality. “This is simply one of those moments,” he thought, “when suddenly and just for the moment you forget that you are a human being within the company of human beings, and you find that you are capable of doing something truly terrible. Just for that moment there seems no reason not to do the worst thing you can think of. There seems to be no one to judge you, and for that moment you are incapable of guilt. A life is defined by the choices made during moments like these.”

  He found Susan’s body somewhere between the world he had always dreamed he lived in and the dark impulses beyond. Her body had been taken apart beyond all hope of reassembly. In the dull mirror of her eye he could see the lizard he had become, and the goat, a lone member of that dark, mysterious race that would forever corrupt the l
ives of the human animal.

  The Sky Come Down to Earth

  The sky was like cotton candy, Russell thought at first. But then it changed somehow, and it was like cotton which had been in water a long time, until it had become fat and swollen, and each time you touched it cold milky water seeped out. Like the body of a dead white cat he had found in a ditch one time. It made the sky seem bigger somehow than it should be; the cotton was filling up everything, soaking up all the sounds, all the smells. His head felt full of the sky.

  He could not be sure, would not be sure how the Suttons felt about him. They’d told him to go out to play, to play in the back yard while they both talked. They said they needed some time to themselves.

  They were busy. And he’d been in their way. He’d seen it in their faces. And seen something else, too, the beginnings of something. The same thing he’d seen in other adults’ faces just before they decided they couldn’t keep him anymore.

  It was cool outside, the sky a milky grey color. As Russell looked up above the porch, trying to find the sun, ice crystals formed in the hair fallen over his left eye. He could feel another one on his nose, and one fell into the corner of his mouth but just as quickly disappeared. As if it had never existed at all.

  The neighborhood was quiet this morning; Russell could hear little. He stood near the cedar fence and looked out over the back lot. The neighbors’ cars were gone; there weren’t the usual kids playing softball and tag. He thought he was going to have to be alone the whole weekend and it made him angry.

  He’d miss the Sutton home: the big back yard, the swing under the mimosa tree that smelled so nicely in the spring, Marge Sutton’s big flowerbeds—he wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but he really liked flowers. It was the nicest place he had lived in yet.