"I don't know what's best to say to you. It's just not something I've experienced. I know you must find it tough. It's not your fault."
"See, there is something..."
"I'm not saying that."
"I just can't help it,"
"I know. But you know what there was a book about it at the last house. That's why your mother was saying what she did."
"".
"Remember I told you? How we said that place must have belonged to a doctor, once?"
The boy folded his arms. He felt the car shifting beneath him into the outside lane.
"You don't even want to hear about it?"
"I don't care."
"It's nothing bad..."
Outside, a broken down house had somehow snuck into the mid-distance. It had sides that sloped into the top -- the way roofs were designed to let rain come off them -- but it wasn't just the roof sloping; the whole house had fallen in on itself. The boy gazed at it for a while through the glass. When it was clear his father wasn't going to say anything else until he gave some sort of response, he looked over, just for a moment, and that was enough.
"It said there was a study that found when people answered questions they did better if they didn't make eye contact... Said it must use less brain power, not trying to read facial expression, or whatever. That's kind of good, right?"
"I guess."
The boy felt his chair growing in size to swallow him. He wanted to reach down and turn the handle on the side, fold the seat forward to snap closed around him. The words now started to take hold; he could imagine them spreading through his head like dye in a river, poisoning his soul, his hope. He couldn't read faces? Was that it? Was that why he was strange? He was strange, wasn't he? But strange compared to what exactly, he fought back inside himself, a rare energy starting to well up from within... maybe he didn't want to read faces, didn't need to.
There were no other faces.
"I don't want you to think it's ever a criticism of you," his father said.
"Sure."
"Come on, don't be like that."
"I'm not."
"Don't get defensive."
"How else am I meant to get when you're picking on me for nothing."
"I'm not. You just think I am..."
"Maybe I can't help that, either?"
"".
"Forget it."
The boy started poking around in the recess under his seat to get out of the conversation. Down there were some maps spread across the floor with green and brown and blue colours, intermingled with the red boxes of grid lines and the letters and numbers on the side. He kicked at them with his foot, lifted up one side and then hid his toe beneath it like a blanket.
"I know I'm not making this any better, but I just wanted to say that whatever is going on, it's no bad thing either way."
"I said, it's fine."
"I'm not trying to be condescending. I know you've had it pretty rough... Who's to say what causes this or that. Some book?"
"Just tell me where we're going," the boy said.
"North."
"North?"
"I'm not completely certain of the way."
He sighed. "How far is it?"
"I'd say a few hours. I'm hoping I remember it when we get near."
"A few hours?"
"There's a place where the bottom of two mountain ranges come together. And then we'll turn off and follow above a dried up river to what was a national park. A place we can leave the car before we go on foot."
"On foot?"
"Yeah. On foot. To camp. How else would we?"
"I don't know..."
"It'll only be for a couple of miles. Won't be too bad."
"We don't have to go to the same exact spot do we?"
"Huh?"
"The same spot as you and your Dad?"
"Oh no, not the exact spot, but close, I hope. You'll like it. Near. I also wanted to show you something when we get to higher land, when it gets a bit darker."
"Is that a surprise too?"
"Just easier to explain when you see it."
The boy rolled his eyes.
"Like the time you showed me how to work the power saw?"
"Yeah, something like that..."
"It didn't end well."
"I know."
The boy laughed. "Mom was so mad."
"Right... So how about you just enjoy the ride."
"I can do that."
"And remember: I want you to be you. I don't want to change you. That isn't what this trip is about..."
"Dad! You just said..."
"I know, but it's important..."
"Ok."
"It's about bonding, quality time. You and me. It's about teaching you things for when you become a man, for when you become your own man, growing up. I don't know what to call it. Does that make sense?"
"'I don't know what to call it'?"
"Right," he said. "You don't... But soon you will. So sit tight."
CHAPTER THREE
The boy's world became speed. The chair rushed up to him and took hold, wrapping its thumbs around his neck and pinning him in place, spine molded to the curves, lost legs, eyes glued by the imagined rush of wind impacting the glass, throwing momentary balls of dust and rock at the front of the car that pitted for a moment and then skipped up like tiny meteors tossed out into space without tether. His world became speed. And speed existed. It was a thing spun from the engine like blue silk. It was a sensation of burning needles poking holes in the sky, a bolt of lightning rolling down a well. The edges dropped away. Nothing else. No things or feelings or thoughts outside. Anything not in the car with him shrunk to points. No time to see. The borders of a filmstrip pulled fast through a projector until it burned. Like the one he had once watched in one of the old houses, lifted from a box out in the loft and brought down the stairs, hot lamped, dust streaked, a hundred windows in the black thread framing the strange life on show inside, all smiles and wide eyes, and love. The main event. The show. The show of speed.
The car was fast of course. It was a fast car. A pickup with all the engine turns anyone could want. The boy's father said that it could pull logs if needed. It could handle snow. Even when the snow was deep, or when the snow was compacted. It had a large engine under the hood. The boy had seen it once. And now, as the car drove them away, he could not help but try and turn in his seat and try and watch the bad memories of the previous day get choked in exhaust and fade away. Yet they did not fade. Instead they fed. They fed on his fears and they made the hairs on his arms stiff. He knew that for all the power the car had, the source of it a fire not so far away from him, it was a fire that started with sparks.
The car continued while the road was straight. It processed through the yellow bloom of the low gasp of afternoon sun and then tailed until headlamps part-lit the road north once the blue dropped from the sky. And only then did the boy name the remaining moments they travelled long: long moments spent in near-silence, just the rattle of the axles under the car as the wheels tracked the road and the occasional hit of insects against the glass, as if their voices had been long left behind by the burst. Soon, with the light fading the bug bullets began to muffle his sight and the windscreen wipes juddered over the stains.
The boy lost track of where they were, of where they had been. Beyond the sky was blank, just the light of the twin moons projected in front of them to guide, gliding like two tied pieces of paper on the breeze, ever touching the ground as the road turned from thick grey ribbon into a series of smaller, winding threads that spread and raised through the gentle valleys that led up to the now invisible mountains. He might have slept like this. He might have dreamed some of it. He couldn't be sure.
He'd watched speed born fast, then, mature, and die.
His father slowed the car suddenly and stared across to the side although it was too dark to see. He let the car roll a few more yards before he pulled off the road. The vehicle bucked as it hit a verge. It tipped
one way and the other and the headlamps swept over a grass bank, casting shadows back through the car windscreen from the hundreds of flecks that looked like the dots on the back of an egg. The boy checked the compass for the first time in ages that was stuck to the inside of the windshield with a black sucker. Most of the liquid inside that allowed it to turn had dried but it wobbled from where it had pointed to say they were facing west. A large bubble drifted over the bottom of the semi-luminous dial before it dropped out of view.
He turned the key so that the engine choked and then died. The boy sat forward, catching the last of the air being pumped through the vent to his right side that fell away as if it had turned into water, splashed out of his reach. The key turned further and the headlamps vanished, leaving just the small inner light in the car, another moment before it would pop. The boy knew what was coming next -- or, thought he knew -- blackness as the last light rubbed down. His father put a hand on his knee as if to calm him. The dark outside seemed to throw itself against the window, like a shark trying to break out of its tank. And then they were in it. One and the same, sitting in the car, floating in a void. Everything he held in his head had vanished, the seats, the soft-touch roof, the litter on the floor, the loose string in the ashtray, everything.
"Alright, let's go," his father said, pulling off his seatbelt.
"Where?"
"You'll see."
He opened the door and stepped out. As the handle clicked the interior light came back on, more of a dull orange glow rather than white. He pushed the door closed behind him without another word. The sound of the latch catching, usually reassuring, designed that way, hit flat.
The inner light began to flicker. The boy strained forward to try and see where his father had gone. His seatbelt began to pull at his neck. He pressed the button down at his side to release it. The belt didn't have the elasticity to work itself free, but went slack enough for him to tear it off. He climbed out of the car without closing the door so that the vehicle sat like a metal gull crashed on a grey beach. Outside the air pressed against his temple like ice, like picking salt from the road in the dead of winter, crystals sliding down his fingernails and freezing them. He took a few steps around to the driver's side and his eyes became able to pick out the slight reflection off of his father's back not far away, stood looking into the night.
He reached towards him before the light inside the car went out. He felt as if he had stepped into a deep shaft in the earth that was so narrow it could not even allow a moonbeam to enter, some temple aligned with just a single star in the sky, a single speck of light, not enough to make anything of him. And where were the stars? Had he forgotten them? Did they wait up above like mother birds returning with feed, waiting for him to look?
"Just a few more paces."
The boy tried to anchor himself to the voice. He tried to grab hold of it, as if it carried a long string leading back to his father's mouth to pull on, to follow. He took a step. To his surprise, the blackness started to recede. Not from moving closer to anything, but from his eyes adjusting, growing large and yawning like the black knot in the side of the tree. He knew it was not possible to approach the stars, and yet in merciful gaps, up above him, there they were -- stars in subtle patterns, all around, like some glittering crown held off the head, a halo, a circle of light, and then, something else. Something like star light but also not. Too low. A glimmering bundle of light ahead of them. He stepped and stepped and stepped for it until his father caught him and held on. The bundle could be tiny and close to his face, but more likely it was something far apart.
"Do you see it?"
He didn't dare say at first, as if his voice might ripple the air like a stone in a pond and ruin the scene.
"The lights, down there. Just over to the left?"
"Yes," he replied. "I see it."
"What do you think?"
He didn't know. The closest thing he could imagine was a galaxy spilled out of the back of an old cart with broken spokes, but as he looked closer the number of points seemed to reduce, as if they merged together into bigger dots, more a nest of tangled electrical bulbs. Fairy lights, he thought they could be called. Knitted into some sort of clump, a sprig of bright yellow grass in the dirt of a swamp, a flash of colour, a white tungsten clutch of heavy-headed flowers amongst the drabness of the night. What he imagined he'd see if someone put a lamp inside a tin can and left it near the road. Only it had to be bigger than that. The points were too bright. Too condensed.
Looking on it brought a feeling he had embraced maybe once or twice before, a feeling of wonder, such as when crouching over a puddle in the yard and seeing the tops of trees, looking down to see something above. Perhaps an interest in the inversion of that, ever trying to shield the surface from all the seeds parachuting through the air, until his body would invariably cover the top of the puddle like a shepherd protecting a lamb, and thereby smother the sight.
"What is it?" the boy said.
"A city," his father replied. "There are people inside."
He gasped. He had seen cities of course. But never with so much light, so much bright spirit. Never breathing in this way, pulsating. The others were all stone dead.
"Can we go there?"
His father shook his head, the basking light from the bundle down away from them caught upon the edge of his face.
"But why?"
"It isn't safe."
"But... Dad?"
"We should get out of the cold."
He opened the car and got back inside.
On his own, the boy could feel them too, the long fingernails of freeze at his face. He took one last look at the lights, at the city, at the beautiful glowing mess, and trudged back to the car, breathing into his hands so that they warmed.
"Why even show this to me?" he said back inside.
His father stared out of the windshield for a moment. "I figure now you're growing up it's wrong of me to just tell you stuff. I have to show you..."
"But why?"
"This isn't easy... Because you have to make up your own mind now... about life, about the world, about the place we live in. And I have to show you whatever I can... to help." He put his hands over his face and pulled them down, dragging his fingers over his cheeks, extending the skin around his eye sockets. "I can't just insist you believe anything anymore, ok? Not like in the past."
"Believe in what?"
"In anything. Like the way we live our life so far. Have I given you any option on that? Huh?"
"I don't understand."
"Of course I haven't. It isn't possible. I just asked you to get in the car with me today and you did it. You could have stayed home."
"With Mom?"
"You could have gone off on your own -- how's that? There are more ways to be than the way we are or the way we can even think of... But now you're getting old, you have to decide. Believe me, I'd love to take you even closer to the city, so that you can see it. But I can't."
"Why?"
"Because. Let's say there are different types of people. And they have shut us out. Do you understand what I mean by that?"
"I think so..."
"So maybe one day you can go there..."
"When?"
"Someday. I guess I just want you to be aware, to know places like this exist. The people there, they aren't going to bother us, and we aren't going to bother them. But one day, maybe. One day you could go to a place like that. You could see for yourself. You'll have to decide. This is just one step along the way. But it's an important one. Just trust me on this alright?"
"Alright."
"... when you're a man you can go where you want to go, see what you want to see, do anything you choose. I always figured ever since you were born, it's my job to prepare you for that. And you have to understand... that I have always got your back, I have... ever since... Ever since before you even know. Well, I mean, you can't know. But you should know. Look, don't worry. I know it's a lot to take in. Too much."
"No. Now we're going to sleep. Tomorrow, we go on foot from here. You see that button up there?"
"Aha."
He pressed it.
"That keeps the light on. You press it again when you're ready. I don't want you to struggle if you need it, but I have to turn the outside lights off, for the battery's sake."
"It's ok."
He turned the key towards him so the headlights died, and then reached down to the side of the seat to recline it. The boy did not say anything as he turned half onto his side, put his hands under his face. He considered the button, unsure how long to wait before he pressed it. How long should he wait. The air felt thick. He didn't wait long.
He must have slept here, but could not remember. It was too fast. Too soon, as the lights of this city they had seen weaved around and under his eyes, balled into a sun that glided over the front window of the car. Imagined and then real.
He woke suddenly, sat forward with a jolt to escape the new light that left a bruise over his vision, as if the dawn had slugged him square on.
Outside, two clumps of thin trees stood either side of a strange purple shape. It was too bright. He pulled down the visor and long blinked to try and wring the light out of his vision. As his view cleared he saw his reflection in the small mirror staring back, brow scrunched, uncomfortable, as if short of breath, as if he had spent the night dreaming of being drowned, swollen flesh pushing over his eyes, ageing him, the corners full of sleep not slept out. Behind his head, in the mirror, the empty beige headrest looked like the side of a rock.
He pushed the shade up and the sun came again, presenting the image of the lion in its place in the sky, king on top of an outcrop of grey straw, clouds choked around the base, the peak of the mountain rising like a jagged rock in the ocean, a savage tooth that threatened to eat the sun, willow white with snow at the top, so high that mist spilled from it, rushing away like the breath of ice that would sometimes crawl out of him and fall in winter, as if the world sucked his soul from his belly, from the place where the urge to act, to eat, often came, like a trail of thirst, a longing for food he felt most days, which he felt now, a sweet desire to bag warmth, to burn, to smoke, to keep the spirits of fear dozy like bees, to set away the flame of frost outside that felt like it might loom over the car, over the trees like clouds. What would the city look like now, beneath this? He would have to leave the car to see it. He should try and see it. They both should.
The Lanyard Page 3
