Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

Suddenly he was screaming at me to turn the car. I guess I didn’t react quickly enough because he flapped his hands across the wheel and clutched at it, his fingers slipping off, leaving slug-sized dollops of the grease behind. I turned up on a sidewalk and rammed through half a block of accumulated garbage before getting us back onto the pavement, just in time to see the huge, archaically-lettered sign for INNSMOUTH DERMATOLOGY CLINIC looming directly overhead. The car sputtered to a stop and died. There were no other cars in sight, except for an ancient model Studebaker propped up on bricks a couple of blocks ahead.

  My father climbed out of the car and staggered towards the clinic door in a kind of squat. I started after him when he twisted his head and barked back at me in a mucus-filled voice, “Stay here!” The huge iron-bound door opened for him, and he sidled inside.

  I waited in the car a long time, afraid to get out. Then I walked back and forth in front of the building for a time. Several other men did leave the building during that time, all so similar to my father in build and—more importantly—in complexion that they might have been brothers of his. But still no sign of him.

  In my boredom I started examining the wall on either side of the clinic door. Here was the most complex graffiti I had ever seen: curlicues and waves of surf in series overlaid so that they resembled close portraits of scalp hair or fingerprint whorls. Or aquatic life massed so thickly their individual outlines could not be determined. I had to tear myself away from them—they drew my fingers to caress their patterns.

  But the collage of peeled posters was even more seductive than the graffiti. Multiple layers of handbills had been plastered and partially stripped from the outer walls of the clinic. The usual advertisements for cough medicines, numerous campaign posters for elected positions I had never heard of before (First Proposer?), as well as the banners for circuses, carnivals, and freak shows. I could not keep myself from attempting to determine which were the remains of the earliest posters, even which was the first poster to have been applied to the wall. Words and bits of words had been left behind through the continual process of scraping away, but close up they became colorful abstractions, a guttural pre-language with no resemblance to any letter forms I had ever encountered. I had to back up into the street to read any recognizable patterns which might make some sort of contemporary sense: VICK’s OUGH TEXACO estate SALE! McCormack YOG brand SHOGGOTH! Razor Razor RAZOR festival R’LYEH!

  I pulled a nail file from my purse and began digging between the separate edges of aging, stiffened poster paper. The words agitated me even more as they broke apart and disappeared under the nicking blade, revealing more primitive strata of language and color underneath. I had a brief fantasy of digging my way all the way back to the ocean and its even deeper vistas in a kind of reverse evolution when a short man with a broad face ambled up to the door of the clinic and stopped.

  Again, he resembled my father, but seemed more seriously ill somehow. The flesh of his face hung in great brown scabs and peels and his stare was completely unblinking. I watched him staring at the door for some time until it occurred to me that he didn’t know how to use it. But the man gave no hint of moving away.

  I waited for my father for over an hour. Although it should have been mid-afternoon the sky was a dark grey, growing bruised at its edges. Occasionally similarly-built men would approach on the sidewalk, but then would turn away or cross the street when they saw me. The man by the clinic door continued to stare at it, never looking at me, and never blinking once the whole time I watched him. He seemed to be breathing heavily at times, or experiencing some sort of muscle spasm, as now and then there would be a jerking or jumping movement under his clothing.

  Eventually a woman came around the corner and stood beside him. She was slightly shorter than he, and a couple of decades younger (they were both so different-looking it’s hard to be precise), but her features were quite similar, leading me to speculate that they might be related. They might be father and daughter. Even though they didn’t speak I sensed some sort of connection between them. Sometimes when his muscles spasmed under his clothing she would gaze at the movement and smile thinly. Once she touched him in the area of a spasm, stroking the pulsing muscle almost fondly. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. She was ugly, and yet beautifully exotic at the same time. And there was something almost touching in her relationship to the older man, a sense of caretaking, that stirred my jealousy. You’re exactly alike, the two of you. Two peas in a pod. Mother was always saying that when I did something she did not approve of—as if a suggestion that I resembled my father in any way was the ultimate condemnation. You’re a loner just like he was. You never have had any friends. And you’ve got strange ideas just like he did. You’ll both end up the same!

  I watched the younger woman, remembering that it is the things we don’t see which are often the most important. My father was always telling me that. I felt somewhat dizzy. The air between me and the Innsmouth father and daughter seemed to be thinning, as if some other view were trying to scrape its way through.

  You certainly don’t get it from my side of the family!

  My father used to say that most of us are afraid of our true bodies, the ugliness and corruption of them. He said that if we really were to see our bodies as they are it would make it necessary for us to make some difficult choices. But in an indifferent universe our choices are all that might give our lives a moral form. Someday he thought this understanding would result in a new religion which might replace Christianity.

  You two even think alike! You don’t care about the rest of us!

  The young woman standing with her father by the clinic door turned and looked at me. She was hideous—how could I have thought anything else? Her nose had flattened out; her hands were thick and clumsy. She looked just like my father.

  You two should have been twins.

  She stared up at me with her wide, idiot smile, her eyes watery, bulging. She looked just like me.

  I suddenly was desperate to leave there before my father came out of the clinic, before I had to see how he might have changed in there, with all those people he’d known since childhood.

  I gripped the nail file tightly in my clumsy fist and sidled slowly away. My body felt squat and awkward to me—I had an urge to fall to my knees and crawl. Moving past the layered posters and graffiti, this side of the street was a solid mass of empty store windows, and yet when I put my face closer to the glass I thought I could see dark shapes moving in distant regions of each building. I pulled the file up closer to my head so that whoever was inside might see what I held.

  A dark, hulking form appeared to separate from the mass of shadows in the back and approached my window from the inside. It stood in front of me in the mirror-like glass, filling my image completely, cancelling out my reflection.

  It moved when I moved.

  I almost wanted to laugh. This was the closest I’d had to a companion in years. I could not love my mother, or my father, or any man, and I knew if I had had children I would have been unable to love them as well. But could I love a shadow that moved when I moved? Love and affection were mere appearances, in any case, codes which I had not yet learned to crack. Innocence was also a code and a mask, and I could clearly see that this dark form contained no innocence. If I had had any doubts before I was now sure that I was my father’s child.

  Just the same, you and he and all those folk from Innsmouth—you’re just the same.

  This was no alien looking out at me now. This was no mysterious, degenerate race which could not be trusted.

  The dark form in the mirrored glass nodded its assent, and I could see now that it, too, had the skin disease: great loose patches of pale skin which, put together, closely resembled my face.

  The dark form reached up and pulled the pieces of my face away, revealing the purity of its shadow in the dusty glass, and behind it a reflection of the skewed perspectives of the decaying city it had created, and which I would perpetuate.

  At t
he End of the Day

  At the end of the day Sam has one final package to deliver, a perfect cube a foot on a side wrapped so tightly in its heavy brown paper that not even a stray microbe could get in, and thinking this increases his sense of urgency more even than the bright red envelope marked URGENT affixed to the top of this package and containing the day’s final, imperative, and unequivocal message.

  For hours Sam has searched his maps of the metropolitan area—maps so complete, complex, and expensive they remain unavailable to the average commuter—but he is still unable to find the address. Earlier calls to the dispatcher have confirmed that the address is a true address although the dispatcher herself—a voice soft, yet utterly convincing—cannot help him with its exact location. A thorough perusal of the twelve volumes of executed and planned revisions to the city’s constantly changing street nomenclature and arrangement—stacked in order within his delivery van’s oversized glove compartment—-provides no significant clues, although there are sixteen similarly named streets, avenues, drives, places, courts, ways, and circles. Despite its apparent futility he has hunted down each one in the seemingly unlikely event that a mistake in address has been made.

  By the end of the day all urgent packages and messages within the city limits (including extended suburbs) must be delivered. At the end of the day who can know what disaster might follow if such a delivery has failed to go through?

  At the end of the day Sam wonders if there will ever be a time when his job ends at the end of the day. At the end of the day Sam is still driving his van up and down the same streets, endlessly circling the same routes where every day he delivers packages wrapped in plain brown paper to people who are rarely at home to accept them. Sam wonders, briefly, if any of these absent recipients might imagine that magic played a part in these timely, mysterious deliveries, but he admits to some difficulty crediting the average person with such imagination.

  At the end of the day Sam tries to remember if his job has ever been any different than it was today. He began the job when he was eighteen, right out of high school, intent on earning a few dollars while he decided what his heart’s work might be. Delivering the packages had been a game, and an opportunity to learn the routes which might someday lead into his future. His father had once told him that sometimes what you like to do has little relation to what you can get paid to do. Sam discovered times had changed—now it had almost no relation.

  At the end of the day Sam dreams about an early morning ambition he once had to be a poet. Now the dispatcher’s soft but unerring patter is the poetry that fills him like alcohol: “Four thirty-two, four thirty-two, Park Avenue, Trader Bill’s, four forty-four, Wilmott Square, three-two, three-two.” But the dispatcher’s voice faded out hours ago, and he is lost with his delivery, packing his lost message through the late afternoon, the message itself no doubt a longed-for poem, and his quest fit subject matter for poetry.

  At the end of the day fatigue is a shadow-self just beginning to separate from his skin, adhering stubbornly to his body, waiting for the dying sun to change its color. Sam wonders what a sun the blue-grey color of death would do to the shape and texture of the human shadow. He suspects that it would do nothing, for the combination of polluted air and skyscrapers filtering the sun has already resulted in many blue-grey sunny days. And he has simply become used to these shadows whose tone and color remind him of the face of his grandmother a few hours after her death.

  Those shadows with legs stagger out of alleyways as if intent on stealing his package and plagiarizing his message, but he is highly skilled at the wheel, sailing around them so closely they spin so quickly that blood flies from their mouths like song.

  At the end of the day shadows form with little resemblance to the objects casting them. Behind a street sign looms a giant, upraised fist. Bus benches front a broad torso broken in half. Corner streetlights hang below huge, shadowed eye sockets. The spaces between tall buildings are filled with grey, unfocused limbs attempting to crawl their way back into the roar of evening traffic. Now and then Sam vaguely recognizes a profile or a stance. Over the years he has known some of the men and women who built, formed, and poured these inhuman monuments. But as the pace of the day wears to its end his sense of recognition fades, the transition into night making him an alien plying his vessel through the narrow lanes of fragmented landscape.

  Out on the main streets there are few pedestrians, for this is rush hour and most have retreated to their cars for the long, anxious ride home. But he knows that there are those who cannot afford cars, who take to the sidewalks and the buses. There are those who cannot afford homes, who cannot afford even a shadow, and who look exactly the way their missing shadows would look, grey and smudged as if they had struggled against erasure. These people live in the alleys and doorways and under the bridges, where countless shadows collect. There they blend together and blend with the night. Sometimes streetlights send them running but few of the streetlights work downtown. The city does not pay its bills.

  Someone else is unable to return home at the end of the day, he knows, someone trapped in an office positioned awkwardly between dead streetlights, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the urgent package Sam has been ferrying through every section of the city. His client is late. Sam is even later. But far later still, he suspects, is the city itself, changing its names and hiding from its tired messengers.

  At the end of the day he thinks about his children, and how they must anticipate his arrival. How the three of them will line up at the base of the stairs as he enters the front door, each with a question, a request, or the gift of today’s story. It is the stories he likes best and he will devote the most time to these, the daily retellings of how the world is both the same and constantly changing, perspectives he misses on his repetitive routes delivering messages and packages across the city. The questions are sometimes almost as interesting, inquiries as to the nature of life, the world, and the end of the day. He seldom has answers—his life as deliveryman having limited his insights—but the questions make all of them think, and it is his children thinking that he prizes above all else. The requests are seldom true requests but merely excuses for talking; having been filled by the endless chatter of hot exhaust expanding and contracting metal all day he is more than happy to listen to his children’s aimless talk.

  Awaiting a change of light he stares down at the package also waiting, resting solidly across his right front seat. At the end of the day he again wonders why he never looks inside the packages he delivers, why he never reads the messages. There is always ample time for such surreptitious activity. With the current volume of traffic no one really expects him to deliver either packages or messages on time. And yet so many are marked URGENT. So many, he is told, must be delivered by the end of the day.

  In fact he has long suspected that the messages he delivers are never very urgent, for if they were his clients would use the telephone or the fax machine. He has wondered if, rather, what he delivers are scattered moments of contact, simple statements of existence from random citizens to other random citizens, with the unpredictability of his delivery times an essential part of the message. During holiday seasons there are always many more such messages to deliver. He sometimes considers inserting his own messages into his deliveries for random distribution but thus far has not had the courage.

  But at the end of the day the particular package in question seems much more than this. At the end of the day his final message seems an essential delivery. At the end of the day it seems the job he took on after high school has all come down to this. He can feel his van deteriorating, bolts and washers and scattered bits of metal dropped off from the stress of his final delivery.

  At the end of end of at the end of the rat a tat tat tat.

  At the end of the day he wonders what his wife is cooking for dinner. The traditional role she has taken in their lives has always made him feel guilty, but although he has attempted to convince her many times to continue her ca
reer she has adamantly declined, preferring the company of their children with their endless supplies of questions, requests, and stories. In recent years his attempts to get her out of the house have been rare. At the end of the day he envies her place in their home.

  He suspects his wife could have done his job better. He suspects his wife would have delivered this package by the end of the day. She has always been far more controlled than he, far more organized.

  He maneuvers his van through city divisions which seem to vary greatly in climate. The poorer sections of the urban sprawl always seem colder. At times he switches on his heater. After a few blocks a quick change to the air conditioner engenders a whine of stress in the engine compartment behind the thin metal wall in front of his knees.

  At the end of the day various city walls are coming down, some at the expressed instructions of the city fathers, instructions he himself had delivered on earlier days when he managed to get all messages and packages out before the end of the day. But there are always those which crumble unexpectedly, leaving piles of rubble with which his van must dance.

  At the end of the day the various models of automobile seem to regress, as if the day’s passage has taken years off the streetscape. The foreign cars are the first to disappear. Ancient Fords and Studebakers fill the poorly-paved roads. The bordering buildings warp their architectures in the twilight, as if shifting in earthquake trauma or melting beneath the last rays of a thermonuclear sun. A rain of darkness pours down across his windows. A layer of memory disappears each time the blades wipe across the windshield. Half-forgotten faces fold and gather in the gutter-line. The streets along the edge of darkness become a litany of all that has been lost and that he is likely to lose.

  At the end of the day the pavement begins releasing its heat and the air loses its color a small portion at a time. Darkness fills all empty spaces and someone remembers to turn the stars on. He sometimes wonders if that someone can go home now, his or her job completed. For himself he still has this one more delivery, one more package and message he cannot make himself forget, perched patiently on the front seat of his van.