Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  He was beginning to think he might have no choice but to take a chance and stop before he passed out at the wheel, when the steep dirt track with a hint of gravel that led to the lake suddenly appeared in the left corner of his windshield.

  He jerked the wheel, making the car rock. Tires squealed. He hadn’t even realized there had been cars following. But as he made the turn he could feel their mass moving behind his back. He stretched as best he could while crouched in front of the wheel. Everything ached, and he remembered the main reason he didn’t like to drive anymore: there had come a point when he was no longer very good at it.

  The trees thinned out even more as he climbed the narrow mountain road. There used to be weekend cabins along this stretch, and small mountain homes for fishers and trappers and loggers, but most had burned down long before he and Janet had bought their place. He never found out for sure what started the fire, “One fella’s blame and every fella’s misery, I reckon,” was the way the old timer—something Baxter, who lived two cabins down—put it.

  Here and there Tom saw a free-standing, broken chimney, sorrowful in its nudity. Scattered brick and metal, piles of shattered and melted glass—memories ill-treated. His father used to say—with bitterness, it seemed, glaring at Tom as if he was sure to fail him—that the main reason people had children was so that someone might remember them a scant couple of decades. After those twenty years the most you might expect were a few old photographs of people no one recognized, an odor of dust or mildew, maybe a few words remembered incorrectly and without attribution.

  His father’s impressions had seemed exaggerated, until Janet died, and as much as he’d adored his wife he’d had to study her pictures regularly to refresh and enliven the ghost of her in his head. When even that level of dedication began to fail him, and the vividness of her image continued its inevitable erosion, he’d begun this slow slide into an indefinable sort of desperation which continued to this very day, and was now passenger on his trip to the place Janet had loved most.

  After that long ago fire nothing was ever the same around the lake. The economics in the area at the time had not made rebuilding possible. These houses most likely wouldn’t have been much to begin with, but it still bothered him that the cradles of so many children’s memories had been wiped away.

  The sun felt too hot against the back of his neck. He wondered if that was the age of his skin, the loss of trees, or perhaps a general wearing down of the very atmosphere itself.

  Actually he was quite surprised how familiar everything still was: the same big trees bent low over the road, the same sharp turns through naked clay banks, the same rusted-out car in somebody’s front yard, the same smell of pine, and water, and sunny days with nothing scheduled but each other. As he neared what he knew to be the top of his climb, the smell of water became more pronounced, and with one more turn the great weight of the dark lake presented itself, road-to-cliff-to-sky, an impossible miracle at this rare elevation.

  Tom pulled over onto a widened shoulder marked by exclamations of wooden signs: Indian Village! Gifts Galore! Sky Dreams Dock! Dance At Midnight Under The Stars! He got out of the car and felt alarm as it shuddered, shuddered again, and sighed. But he was here now, so what did it matter if it died?

  The lake deepened in color as heavy clouds settled for the night into the natural bowl of the encircling pale shore for the night. It rained every night here, if only for seconds, if only for the time required to blink an eye. Janet used to speak of how it cleaned off the day before the night could begin.

  He missed those things profoundly: something to clean the day, and her to notice it.

  The dark raced the sun across the water, so quick it would disorientate someone who’d never seen the phenomenon before. The distant shore was already deep in gloom. The sun fell swiftly, and the suddenness of the shadows made the world seem too busy, as if nothing ever stopped and the dead were not dead at all, but rushing off to hide.

  He climbed back into the car and turned the ignition. The car hesitated, then started. He moved slowly to the first turnoff, then more slowly still to the second, remembering how complicated the route to the cabin had been from this point on, even with Janet beside him to help navigate. No way he could remember … no way. And yet his hands guided the car through its requisite moves almost automatically. Like sleepwalking in a car, he thought. And there was the cabin, surfacing from the pool of greenish-gold vegetation like the rise of a sunken boat, its paint bubbling up and floating away after a season underwater.

  He drove through the weeds that clogged the dirt driveway, backing up and moving forward in progressive movements to flatten the growth. He realized he should spend a few days at yard work while he was up here—the untended growth was the thickest in his memory—but at the moment such a chore seemed quite out of reach. And he really couldn’t afford to pay anyone. His kids would be glad to do the job for him, but of course he could never ask such a thing.

  The first thing he noticed when he stepped up onto the front porch was that all the blinds were up, the curtains open. Probably not a good thing, but he wasn’t sure why. Janet was the one who’d always handled the whys of such matters. He must have left the cabin this way—it wasn’t the sort of thing a vandal or a burglar might do, unless they did their jobs differently here in the mountains. Stole all your belongings but then washed your windows.

  He tried to think back to the morning he and Janet had last been here, but it was like searching for gems in soup. They hadn’t expected to leave until afternoon, but she’d taken a bad turn in the night. She’d insisted on fixing him breakfast, however, taking some juice for herself that she hadn’t been able to keep down. He wanted to leave instantly, but she slowed him down, tried to keep him calm. That, too, had been part of her job, and making the world real, giving it a face he would speak to.

  But as that unreachable morning had worn on—bright and vivid to him now, but more like a movie or a particularly vivid scene in a book than something from day-to-day life—she had become less tangible somehow, as if preparing to disappear. He’d begun to hurry, but tried not to alarm her—at least he could do that much—and she’d let him move her along as if she had no more will. It had been the most frightening time of his life. He’d thrown their clothes into bags—if she’d really been with him she would have complained, told him to slow down—he’d grabbed whatever he knew they’d need in town. Whatever couldn’t be easily replaced. Now and then turning around to look at her, to make sure she was still there, because he could no longer feel her life in the room. What was he going to do? How would he … He watched her close her eyes, and he made some noise—dropped a pan, banged a door—to test for her reaction, to find out if she was still alive. Her eyes fluttered like a dreamer’s. But she moved nothing else.

  “Janet,” he’d said, but for some reason he’d been afraid to say it too loudly. “Janet,” he’d said, fear straining at his words.

  At that moment he was already imagining a life without her. It felt like the worst kind of betrayal.

  He recalled now how she’d wanted the curtains open so that they might see those glorious trees, and the particular way those trees filtered the sunlight before permitting it to lie down upon their little cabin. He’d left so many pots, and plates, and silverware out, he now saw, the truest confirmation of how she’d been that morning. She’d never told him to put them away, never told him to take care. Never said a thing again, not even goodbye.

  Now all their things from their life together—all her things, because this place had really been hers, chosen and decorated and run the way she preferred, not that he minded at all—were washed in grey. He lay his fingers in a large dinner plate and smeared the grey away. He waited for someone to object. Tom, Tom, what am I going to do to get you civilized? The face he’d made in the plate grinned up at him. He could almost imagine that someone still lived here—someone with terrible habits.

  Something wrong with the light, he thought. It was
more than just the curtains left open. It had bothered him since he’d first walked in the door and now he realized why. Something different about the light here. He stared out the sliding glass doors to the deck beyond the dining table. Brilliant light that filled the glass and rubbed the room raw with its intensity. Light like fog on fire. Light as if the air had burned away, where no whisper could survive. And the light of this interior like some preternatural diorama, not a place where human beings might live. Then he knew. The trees were gone.

  The tall, skinny trees that had once shaded this side of the cabin were the main reason Janet had picked it in the first place. They’d grown tall around the lot, and close to the house they spread and bowed as if to spy or embrace. Now there was nothing to see beyond the table but the brilliant deadness of glass.

  Holding his breath, Tom walked to the sliding door, pulled it open with a harsh squeal of metal. Not even locked—he’d been lucky. That ill-fitting thought made him grimace.

  Three steps to the railing and he looked out and down. Far below on the slope, battered columns of wood lay tumbled together, their grey trunks stripped of all trace of green. On the largest, a long scar of lightning, and a spread of char from trunk to branch so clearly defined he imagined he could see the ghosts of flames dancing in the shimmering air. Looking more closely with a forced soberness, he could see that these were clouds of insects, moving up and down the deadfall in clouds that constantly changed shape and weight and pattern of reflection. He would have thought the air too cold, the season too late, but there was no denying their presence here.

  Tom went quickly to the side steps, made his way down the slope through the shattered remains of a forest trail with overhanging canopy that he had walked with Janet every night they’d spent at this place. This trail had always been pleasant, even on the hottest or coldest days, and it had been the quickest way to the lake’s shore—no more than a fifteen minute walk. Birds had lived here by the hundreds, and those huge black mountain squirrels with the upraised ears, and even Tom who did not exercise would say those walks had been too short for his liking.

  Now the sky hung oppressively low. He fought the urge to bow his head. There was no path, at least no direct path to the lake, which he could see clearly, the angle making it look like a high wall of deep blue down between the trees, waves churning dark half-moons in the wall’s rippled surface.

  The air’s insect hum seemed impossibly loud. So loud, in fact, he looked to see if there were bees’ nests in the fallen trees. And saw there were bees, but also mosquitoes and huge dark flies and others he did not recognize, blending the beat and fray of their wings into one huge discordant aria. But then all noise stopped and the clouds of insects fell. And he heard the sounds of distant laughter, and music, and voices raised in song, or was it prayer?

  He stared down the slope and across the water, to a speck perched on the upper edge of the deep blue wall. He remembered there used to be a dock over there—Janet and he had ridden past it in their frail little boat—but back then the dock had been half fallen into the water, and the row of cabins and the hotel called “Journey’s End” just up the slope had been well-collapsed, walls fallen into themselves and into the weed-tangled lanes between.

  Now, so many years later, and oh, he was sure of it, someone was throwing a party there on the far side of the lake, someone was laughing, dancing, having a good time.

  Not that it mattered. He wouldn’t know what to say. Tom wouldn’t know how to be. The party might as well have been in another time and place, for although it was Janet who had died, it had been Janet who had done all the laughing, the singing for the two of them. It was Tom who was the ghost.

  That night Tom tried to clean as little as possible. Not out of laziness, but out of a reluctance to disturb this snapshot of a time lost to him forever.

  The walls were covered with pictures Janet had chosen herself, all of them landscapes, places she used to say she’d like to live someday. High mountain passes, tropical islands, a farmhouse or two, or three, and one surprise he’d never quite understood: a fantasy landscape of a vast and empty plain, with towering clouds. So lonely, so sad, so unlike everything he understood about his wife.

  When he’d asked her about the painting she’d say, “I just like it, because I like it,” and that would be the end of the conversation.

  She’d given him plenty of opportunities to choose paintings and other furnishings on his own, but he’d declined. He’d always found a certain sadness in most pictures—images of times gone, or people you’d like to be with and cannot, or other lives you’d been denied. In that way, most art, most movies, most books, were haunting. There was a sadness in him that she had not visited these places, and yet a vague uneasiness that perhaps, now, she had.

  At the very least he should remove from the cabin everything she had chosen. In truth, he should rid himself of the place entirely, although he knew he would not. He couldn’t imagine selling it even if he never visited it again. He could see himself paying the bills for years. The abandoned place collapsing within itself from neglect. The fire that would one day take it, or the wrecking crew after the county’s warnings of condemnation were ignored. He could imagine, he could imagine everything, and nothing.

  So he tidied up, cleaning the cabin as he might for a friend, not much more than throwing away the garbage.

  He’d forgotten how quiet the place could be at night. The noisiest things were his thoughts. It was like putting your hands over your ears—all you could hear was your blood beating monotonously.

  There were occasional interruptions—more dogs barking than he remembered, an occasional bang, as from a door, perhaps a distant weapon discharge. Occasional thunder, occasional rain tapping the roof impatiently. Nothing more than that. Nothing more.

  But his other senses were more alive than at any time in memory: the smell of distant blossoms and rain, the strong salty taste when he’d bitten his lips again, the sense of a terrible weight of absence on his chest. Sometimes in the middle of the night he’d come half out of sleep and feel her weight pressing down on the mattress. Shapes and forms hard-wired into the brain, like phantom limbs.

  His least favorite aspect of a stay at the cabin had always been that he woke too early up here, hours before there was anything to do. It was even worse this time. He opened his eyes very early to a grey light painting the bedroom window, and a vague, confused anxiety filling his chest. Something’s happened to the sun, he thought, then shook his head, rubbing his face vigorously as if to rub away the crazy perception. But that brought him fully awake. He’d crossed a subtle but unmistakable line separating half-asleep from wide awake, and he cursed himself, feeling weepy. How he would have loved to have slept. He remembered tossing, dreaming, but it was one of those dreams which would not be remembered, while leaving enough of itself behind—embedded, uninterpretable—that you knew it would disturb you mightily if you remembered all of it. As it was he awakened feeling broken and incomplete.

  When he slipped into old pants he kept up here, they bagged around him. For a moment he was sure they belonged to someone else—some stranger had left his pants here. Then he found the pattern of blue spots from when he’d painted the window trim five years ago. So much weight to lose in five years, especially since his entire adult life he’d had a problem keeping the weight off. The belt was also too large—with an ice pick from the kitchen drawer he made a couple of new holes, not bothering to line them up properly. He stepped out onto the deck.

  He stood quietly as the surrounding trees appeared grudgingly out of the morning fog, as if he were remembering them into place. But even as the first trees emerged, they made the mist seem thicker around those behind them, and thicker still around the trees beyond those, which brought a sense of weight to the surrounding air, as if the fog were some sort of avalanche receding, dropping stones and trees and cabins in its wake.

  Tom felt the urge to go back inside and try sleeping again, but could not leave t
he railing when the world was so strange, much less sleep. He held on tight, waiting for the sun to burn even a little bit of it away, to make it seem less phantasmal.

  When they’d come up together, he and Janet had spent a great deal of time walking. On the few occasions when he’d come up by himself—to do paperwork, to concentrate on his taxes—the idea of walking had never crossed his mind. Long ago he’d concluded that there were people who took walks and people who did not. Janet had been a walker. He had been a waiter. Janet could not wait—“You can’t just wait for the world to come to you.” Tom didn’t know why not.

  Now, he knew better. Now he knew that to wait was to let the shadows of what has gone settle around you. Once the life force had left them, then those shadows demanded something substantial to anchor them. There was no use trying to scrape these things from you. Nothing wants to die. Nothing wants to be forgotten. The only escape from that kind of need was to keep moving. Let your thoughts follow your feet.

  Somewhere a distant phone rang. Too early, of course—it had to be a wrong number. Or bad news.

  So on one of the foggiest mornings Tom had ever seen, he began this walk around the lake and through the woods, out traffic-less dirt roads which promised much but in most cases delivered only some uninhabited ruin where the sole signs of life were flies buzzing and something hidden in low dark brush. Or down paths which might have been human trails or might have been animal, he had no idea with the thick fall of leaves and narrow branches layering the passage. He wasn’t sure how he knew these were paths in the first place, and wondered if he could be seeing patterns from some other place, passages through some other, more abstract difficulty which he was now superimposing over this wild place.