by Robert Levy
“Sure.” She waited, then said, “Of course we are. Why? Is there something going on?”
“I don’t even know where to start.” He hung the camera off the back of the chair by its strap. “I’ve been feeling strange, ever since we got here. Like I’m being watched. Or more like I’m being . . . manipulated.” He was holding back from her, something once upon a time they’d both sworn they would never do. “I’ve been getting a feeling like vertigo, or at least what I imagine vertigo must feel like. Except it’s mixed with déjà vu. You know?”
“Not really.” She eyed him doubtfully, and all of a sudden he was unsure any of it had truly happened. “Are you okay?”
“I have those nightmares, right? The ones where I’m buried alive? I think they might actually be memories. Maybe I—Maybe I was underground, you know? Or trapped somewhere, or something. But I don’t just feel it when I’m sleeping. Not up here. I mean . . .” He decided to start over. “That day we were in the woods and ran into Donald? I had this feeling. That first night too, at the ceilidh—I was outside and I kind of spaced out, but there was this sense that . . .”
She scrunched her face; he wasn’t getting through to her. “I found some newspaper clippings at my grandmother’s house,” he said. “They said I disappeared as a child.”
“What?” Her mouth hung open, and for a flickering moment it became a gaping hole, ridged with crooked stalagmite needles. “You’re kidding me.”
“ ‘Boy Goes Missing.’ Actually, boy and girl; it happened to someone else too. ‘Frantic Search Under Way.’ That sort of thing. Pages and pages of this stuff.”
“What happened to you?”
“I don’t know. I mean, obviously I was found. But the strangest part is that even though I seem to have gone missing for days, I don’t have any memory of it. Forget the fact that I’m thirty years old and my mom has never seen fit to mention it to me. She must’ve taken me to the States soon after it happened.”
“Who could blame her? So, where are the clippings?”
“I . . . left them there.” An image of the cage swinging above him, followed by the sound of him kicking the photo album into the hole, the hollow echo as it plummeted into the carved-out depths beneath the house. Elisa couldn’t know about all that, not yet. “Maybe I’ll go back for them. Tomorrow, before we leave.”
“Well, maybe you should ask your mother what happened. She’s the one who seems to be keeping things from you, no?”
“Believe me, I tried. She wasn’t very forthcoming.” He rested his head in his hands. “I feel pretty dead. I can’t really think about it right now.”
His thoughts traveled down a dusky path. A stranger—his father, perhaps—at the foot of Grandma Flora’s drive, beckoning Blue and the little girl Gavina down to his car. A cabin in the woods, a mattress on the floor. The man’s hairy white hand on Blue’s cheek, and then on his inner thigh . . .
But that didn’t happen. Not at all. And if he could imagine such a scenario so vividly, who was to say what was the truth? Even his authentic memories had been distorted to the point of invalidity, like some kind of grotesque funhouse mirror; he might never know what had taken place, not really. Maybe that was for the best.
They both sat in silence, still but close, no sound but the leaky tap as it dripped out water one drab at a time.
“I’m pregnant,” Elisa said. She stared straight ahead at her clear polished toenails, feet crossed on the far edge of the tub.
“Wow.” So there it was. “Is it . . . Jason’s?”
“Of course,” she said, stung; he wished he hadn’t asked. “Why would you bring that up? I told you—”
“Sorry! I’m sorry. That was wrong of me. Really wrong.”
“Forget that,” she said. “Forget it.” She drew her legs up and used her knees to shield herself from him. “I’m six weeks along, as far as I can tell. So relax.”
It had taken him this long to figure out he was secretly holding out hope they were pregnant together. The realization hit him like a body blow. What had he been thinking? That the two of them would run off together? The idea was laughable. Wasn’t it?
“I’m sorry,” she said, her face concealed. “I didn’t mean to interrupt what you were saying before. It just seemed like we were sharing, and . . . I needed to tell someone. Someone besides Gabe, that is.”
“You told Gabe?”
She nodded. “The other night. He came right out and asked me, said the two of you had been speculating.” She lowered her knees, her eyes trained on him. “Quite frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t ask me yourself.”
“I just—I guess I thought if you wanted me to know that you’d tell me.”
“Which must be why you don’t exactly look surprised.”
“Well, I’m not. I mean, yes, I thought you might be. You have been acting a little strange lately. No offense.” She was staring at the ceiling again. “So,” he said, “I guess the word I’m looking for is congratulations.”
“I suppose.”
“You don’t sound thrilled.”
“Let’s just say it wasn’t planned. I mean, so much for getting back into dancing, right?”
“Not necessarily. You could start up again, if you really wanted. You could do anything.”
“Sure,” she said, absent of any conviction whatsoever. “Sure I can.”
“What does Jason think?”
“I haven’t told him yet.”
“Elisa . . .”
“I know. But can you imagine what he’d be like if he knew I was pregnant? He’d have me on bed rest by now.”
“He did just sneak into town for an EpiPen.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Okay,” Blue said. “Let me get this straight: You’ve stopped drinking and smoking, which leads me to believe you’re keeping it. But you’re not telling your husband, who, yes, would be irritating and yet obviously supportive and a complete prince. So instead you’re being freaky and passive-aggressively angry at him, even though he’s really done nothing wrong.”
“That pretty much covers it.”
“And you wonder why I won’t settle down.”
“If you had settled down with me, things would be different. For both of us.” She reached out her hand. He took it, traced her palm with his thumb, her heart line, the life line, fate. “We used to have a great time together, didn’t we?”
“We still do,” he replied. “Always.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said, and withdrew her hand, let it fall beneath the surface of the water with a splash. “What you said that first morning? Maybe we should live here forever. Just stay. And leave everything behind.”
“We could do that.” He pulled the cashier’s check from his pocket. “We could go anywhere.”
“What’s that?”
“The proceeds from the house sale. It’s about enough to cover my debts, but fuck it, maybe we should skip town and never look back. Head off to Newfoundland. Or Greenland.”
“Or outer space.” She laughed. “What? It’s just as likely.”
Something rattled and clanged downstairs: the saucepan lid as it slipped off and clattered to the floor. “I shall return,” Blue said, and tucked the check back into his pocket as he leaned down to kiss the crown of her head.
There was a dryness in the air, a barometric shift as he exited the room that made his brain ache for hydration, if not a stiff drink. A tightness pulled at the corners of his cracked lips. Elisa was right, of course. They could never be together, not now, not without the both of them feeling as if they were usurping what was not theirs to take, or give. It would remain a fantasy.
Blue skipped down the stairs to the kitchen and turned the heat off the range, retrieved the fallen lid from the floor where it sat in a ruddy pool of boiled-over tomato sauce. He put the lid down on the counter, turned on the cold water valve, and bowed to drink straight from the faucet, his thirst boundless. Just drink, he thought. Drink and eat and most of all sleep
. And when you wake up, everything will be normal again. No worries, no pain. Tomorrow, you’re out of here.
He turned off the tap, went to put the lid back on the pan, and froze. The sight of the sauce, bubbling gory red and pulped, brought him back to the basement and the boiling water that had burned him, the bloodied gristle mess of his small hands as they clung to the bars of the cage.
He placed the lid on the counter and, without another thought, plunged his hand into the scorching sauce.
He saw white with pain and shut his eyes, nearly blacking out. But only for a moment: just as quickly as it hit him, the pain began to recede. A tiny dark spot formed in his mind’s eye, and he focused upon it; the spot began to grow, until what was once the size of a pencil point became the black mouth of a tunnel through which his consciousness climbed, the hurt already memory. He lifted an eyelid to find his hand still pressed inside the pan, the sauce a stormy red sea around his wrist. There was no pain, not anymore; it had been an illusion.
He stood there for some time before he yanked his hand free, and in doing so toppled an open bag of flour from the counter. The powder rushed down his legs like an avalanche, hit the floor, and rose up again in a mushroom cloud of white fallout. The smell of seared flesh threaded the air, a taste in his mouth both earthen and sanguinary, as if he’d bitten his tongue. But all he could do was stare at his hand, at the burned, mutilated marrow and the shocking raw pink of his fingers as the skin there stirred, and swelled, and changed.
A few moments later, his hand returned to its familiar state. No blood, no scarring, no sign of being burned at all. Just the persistent smell of cooked meat, and above it that of the tomato sauce, still simmering in the pan. He’d cut and burned himself in the kitchen a thousand times over—as recently as last week—but it only now occurred to him that he bore no scars whatsoever.
He wasn’t who he thought he was, not even close; he’d been wrong the entire time.
He turned to the small window over the farm sink, his reflection transposed over the branches of the pines swaying past the property. Who are you? He gave himself a cold, clinical look, a scientist observing a specimen in a petri dish. Who are you really, underneath it all?
He put a hand to his face. He moved it along his cheek, slowly, in a caress, his fingers touching upon the crooked swell of his nose. It had been broken ten years ago, when he was walking Elisa to a cab and was jumped by some dudes early one morning outside the Roxy. Most of the time, though, his nose didn’t appear broken at all.
He let his hand come to rest below his right eye socket, where he hooked his fingernails into the tender area below. He grasped a fold of skin and pulled downward, tearing into himself, a narrow runnel dug along his flesh. There was no pain this time, not as he stripped away a flap of skin from his cheekbone, the tissue below exposed to light and air. He’d been wearing this camouflage for so long he must have forgotten it was a disguise in the first place.
This isn’t me.
A brackish liquid that stank of seawater squirted from the wound and left a spray of pinkish fluid across the window and the clay sink. He listed at the smell, not because it was repellant but because it was intoxicating, exhilarating. He steadied himself, a pulsing light flashing beneath his skin, his skull surrounded by an undulating membrane of foliage, the leafy tissue interlaced in a tangled briar the color of lichen.
He continued peeling at his face. It was like deboning a fish, or prepping a chicken, something he’d done in the kitchen on countless occasions. The surrendered parts of his disguise lay strewn all about: thick hanks of black hair stuck to the sink, mealy strips of skin run down his pant legs and along the floor in wet slug paths. But as he contemplated these castoffs, the ragged bits shimmered and began to melt, thinning to dewdrop-sized particles before vanishing from sight altogether. Where he had expected carnage, he found beauty; he was beautiful, underneath it all.
I’m not human at all.
All that was left of his old face were two unchanged eyes, two white and green-lensed orbs that stared back at him from the window like a pair of hard-boiled eggs. They were what remained of the masquerade, relics of this too-bright world. And past the twin white orbs, beyond the muscle and protein and all the rest of this pretend human squander, there was his secret self, his real self. Arms sickled like the forelegs of a mantis, his fingers birch-gray branches of transmuted flesh and bone, he tensed and released as his uncovered form rippled like a wave upon the shore. He was made of this place, of the night sky and grass and the woods on the far side of the glass. He was made of this land. And he would never forget that again.
He plucked his eyes from their sockets, and everything changed.
The air went out of the room, as if the entire world had become a vacuum. His mouth fell open and a wall went up. He was a creature caught in a net of feeling beyond feelings, all pervasive and alive, a thousand pricking needles in search of a vein. Chest pulsating with ecstatic sound and energy, he was made of lightness, and light.
The kaleidoscopic visions, refracted images of himself and the woods and the landscape that he’d glimpsed since his first night here: he was seeing out of the eyes of the others that were like him, of him, the many eyes of his kin. Others just as he was, a tribe of himself.
In a multilayered image he saw the outside of the house, through their eyes. They waited beyond the trees, as they’d waited for years, ever since he first left them and emerged from the forest disguised as a little boy. They were the ones from the woods, from the place below the world. His people.
And how glad he was. How thankful that they’d waited with such patience, and his heart, near bursting, swelled with joy. There were no doubts, not anymore. He no longer belonged to this wasted aboveground landscape of iron and greed. His people, they would teach him how to shed the remains of his disguise once and for all, to let go of who he had once believed himself to be, Michael and Blue both. They would show him how to return to all he had forgotten: his real family. And now he would go to them.
Out and down the porch steps, a cold wind whistled over his newly exposed face. The crisp evening air was tinged with the smell of smoke, the acrid odor an affront to his new consciousness that reached him through someplace other than the blunt, barklike coating where his nostrils used to be, but no longer were. And with the recognition of the smoky scent came low whisperings, accompanied by a new spectrum of light visible in the darkness, past blue to bruised purple and darker. He pored through every color now, all the way down beyond black. He saw, really saw, for the first time since he’d left their side.
One was there, by the edge of the property. Its branchlike arms were extended, prehensile bristles tugging back snarled leaves to peer over a hedge. And there was another, high up in the tree canopy, its hind legs curled like snakes around the slender bole of a pine. One more flat to the ground by the peony bushes, with two more beside it, erect and slimmed to the narrowest of widths. They watched him watch them watch him, all with the same honeycomb eyes.
They greeted him in his language, and he in theirs; they shared the same tongue. They shared the same mind as well: a hive mind, alive with unified intelligence. Here with only the sound of rushing wind and buzzing bees, and insects that burrow and bite. He was of another kind, like his not-grandmother had said. This was who he was, finally and at last. They called to him by his secret name. And so he went.
He crept toward the woods, then stopped.
The mind of the tribe drew his attention back toward the house and the whining electric glow from the bathroom window upstairs, its artificial light a glaring impurity against the moonless nighttime sky.
There was another. Like him, or rather soon to be. He wasn’t the only one they had come for.
Part Two
* * *
JASON
Chapter Four
* * *
Jason, hunched over the farm sink, scrubbed at an egregiously burned frying pan with a shred of steel wool. He’d tried making
scrambled eggs, but the result was a brown-and-yellow hash that tasted like a salt lick, its remnants unyielding in their death grip upon the skillet. He was afraid of scratching the bottom—couldn’t damaging the coating cause minute fragments of metal to leach into the food the next time the pan was used? Better to tread lightly, delicately, make smooth, circular gestures and coax the pan clean. Maybe he’d go down the hill and use Maureen’s internet connection to find out the proper way to clean vintage cookware. Vinegar? Baking soda? Or a simple soap-and-water solution?
Jason’s hands started to shake. He placed the pan down carefully in the sink, a tinny reverberation of iron against clay. Ten days gone since they were supposed to be back in New York. But that was another lifetime ago.
Car wheels on gravel and Jason tried to keep his breath steady as he strode to the door; he refused to allow himself to imagine who might be coming up the drive. “Come on, come on,” he said, and stopped, startled to hear the words spoken aloud.
A Cape Breton Regional Police patrol car crept toward the house, and his heart drummed inside his chest. It was Detective Jessed, one of two first responders that night. This time he was unaccompanied and in uniform, a shallow smile and a raised hand behind the windshield.
Only a smile and a wave. Jason’s stomach churned, then settled, a dog jerked on its chain. That means they haven’t found them.
“Good morning,” the officer said, mounting the porch steps. The air was thick with smoke from the forest fires, still visibly raging along a crooked ridge high on Kelly’s Mountain. “Do you have a few minutes?”
Jason invited him inside and offered Jessed a seat at the table while he fetched them both coffee. He wanted to give the detective a minute to survey the room—he’d straightened it up late last night—to show that he had nothing to hide. Of course he would be open, and amenable. He would be beyond reproach.
“Here we are,” Jason said, and set down two mugs, along with a small ceramic pitcher of cream and a matching bowl of sugar cubes. “I take it nothing’s turned up?”
