Borderlands 6

by Thomas F Monteleone

  But I didn’t click it. Not yet.

  No “sense of foreboding” stayed my hand, no goose gallivanting over my grave, none of that silliness. It was simply that word.

  Miracle.

  We’d gone to a dermatologist, who excised the damn thing mere minutes after first laying eyes on it, and days later informed us that the tests on the scaly black blob proved it to be a Clark level 4 melanoma: very deadly. He also told us that, in all likelihood, the cancer would recur somewhere else in her body within five years—breasts and lungs being the most likely places. “Seeing as how,” the grim medical man put it, “the lymphatic passages run up the back, over the shoulders, and down the front, and that damn malignancy was big enough and centralized enough to affect both sides.”

  Outside the doc’s office, Heather said, “Miracles happen every day, Michael.”

  After she passed the five-year mark, the doctor, now grayer and grimmer, congratulated her on still being alive. Leaving the office, she butted my shoulder with hers and said, “There’s my miracle, right?”

  I said nothing.

  She collapsed the night of December 24 of that same year, and all the next day I sat with her in the ICU, awaiting the celebrated “Christmas Miracle”.

  I sat with her the day after that awaiting the somewhat less celebrated “Day-After-Christmas Miracle”.

  She died at 4:59 p.m. on December 26 without ever saying another word.

  There are no miracles.

  I rose from the desk and paced the house. I do that a lot since Heather’s death. Punching walls and doorjambs occupies a fair amount of my time as well. Not hard enough to make holes—or even dents, you understand—just enough to make sore, red knuckles. I like to think such restless actions ease my mind, but I know better.

  Other than my footfalls and my duking it out with the walls, the house was quiet; I was on a self-imposed vacation and Kenny was at school.

  My pacing took me back to the laptop, which was still online, still on “The Meaning of Melanoma”. The blue miracle still hovered there.

  I clicked it.

  A rectangle filled with blackness nearly as large as the screen. The laptop informed me (again, in tiny words on the lower-left part of the window) that the site was Loading, then that it was Done. A black window, still. I recalled encountering a similar void where words should be, on a film noir message board I’d gone to during a lunch break. Roger, an associate from down the hall, had been there, looking over my shoulder.

  “Look, Mike,” he’d said. “It says here ‘highlight to read spoilers’.”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “So highlight it.”

  When I didn’t move, he reached for the mouse and did it himself. I don’t remember what the words were, but I do remember being impressed by the way they were revealed.

  “It’s simple,” he’d said, “The color of the font they use is the same as its background. Highlighting changes the color and ta-da, you can read it.”

  So now I highlighted the Miracle Meadows emptiness.

  What are the odds that you are the one?

  Is your path to discovery meant to be run?

  The wounds of love and war do bleed.

  Name the method, the means, the way to proceed.

  Everyone you know has a tag and a plan.

  “Sees the truth, I do,” claims the sailing man.

  “Sewn into the fabric of the night.

  “To begin in the black is to begin in the right.”

  Her fate is but a peeling, a flick of your wrist.

  Imaginary outcomes are done with a twist.

  Shrouds, at burial time, receive their fill.

  Dahlia? Who grew wild, and fought with a will.

  Elizabeth? The maiden we all wish we knew.

  Abby? Who gnashed leaves, wet with dew.

  Trina? Who decorated herself with bows.

  Heather? The wraith bearing one black rose.

  I read it twice, my stomach muscles tightening each time I saw my wife’s name. Some squirmy part of me also reacted at the line about the wounds of love and war bleeding.

  I x-ed off the site, off the web, shut down the computer and returned to the TV, stopping only for a gullet-cleansing beer at the fridge.

  I awoke later with the remains of a French-bread pizza on my lap, beer bottles at my feet, and Murder, She Wrote playing out on the TV. A hand fell on my shoulder.

  Kenny.

  His face was a pale blotch in my lager-warped vision, but not so much so that I didn’t see the disappointment there.

  “Hi, son. Did Mrs. Marshall bring you home?”

  He nodded.

  I straightened up and tried to smile innocently, as if decorating myself with crusty crumbs and drinking myself into an afternoon nap was still the normal Thursday thing for me. “She’s not still here, is she?”

  He did a combination headshake and shoulder shrug and turned away.

  “Kenny, it’s all right. Really. I just had a hankering for a few beers, that’s all.”

  He turned. My vision had cleared some and I could see his expression had returned to its now-typical vacuousness.

  “How’s the leg?” I asked.

  Somewhere under the faded denim of his right pant leg lay a bandage where the mole used to be (which, according to the doc—a new one, not Heather’s—was benign and absolutely nothing at all to worry about).

  No response from Kenny.

  “Don’t worry about it. You can go to your room now.”

  I returned to the computer the following morning, highlighted the strange doggerel. It hadn’t changed, not in any way I could tell, but I believe that on my last visit I must not have rolled the cursor all the way down, as there lay additional wordage: a paragraph, separate from the stanza and of a different font.

  No choice but to start at the beginning, live your life. Laugh, cry, fuck, watch others die, and rapidly approach your own end. Given enough time, you will look back to your start. Now is that time. Look at the beginning.

  Each. Separate. One.

  Jeez, how many beginnings do we get? I wondered.

  Then it occurred to me the thing might be referring to other kinds of beginnings. The lines of verse glowed on the screen, turned lime green by the highlight I’d given it. “Each separate one,” I said aloud, and there it was, there they were, the beginnings of each line.

  What. Is. The. Name. Everyone. Sees. Sewn. To. Her. Imaginary. Shrouds.

  I formed the words into a proper, if mystifying, query: What is the name everyone sees sewn into her imaginary shrouds?

  Then: Dahlia? Elizabeth? Abby? Trina? Heather?

  Apparently a multiple-choice question in which the reader is expected to either surmise or determine the name to go on someone’s shrouds. It occurred to me that “shrouds” should be singular rather than plural, but then again none of this seemed very real. The whole site had a phony feel about it, a spurious staged-just-for-me feel. Who exactly is “her” referring to (one of the given names, perhaps, or is it the shroud manufacturer)?

  With the entire page still highlighted, I then passed the cursor over the names.

  The pointing finger appeared at every one of them, individually and emphatically, indicating a link.

  Every one except Heather’s.

  I don’t know why I should have felt cheated by that, but I did. The one name I wanted to investigate, and it, apparently, was just text.

  I clicked Trina.

  The image emerged: a photo of an obviously dead woman. The caption beneath: Katrina “Trina” Johnson.

  Her head nearly severed, she had part of a mangled pickup truck on top of her. Blonde hair swam in the surrounding pool of blood—it must have been very long hair, as it seemed to go on and on, finally disappearing beneath the bulk of the tr
uck. Her eyes were open. A bright-orange blur intruded upon the lower-right corner of the photo: a traffic cone, probably.

  I studied this image for a while before clicking the Back arrow.

  I clicked Abby.

  Dead, too, she lay partially across a kitchen table, facedown in what appeared to be a bowl of breakfast cereal, her hair, very curly and very dark, splayed out around her head. The caption: Abigail Finchley Olsen.

  Elizabeth: Not dead, at least not in this picture. It appeared to be a high school yearbook photo, black and white, dating somewhere around ’62 or ’63, judging by the hair and clothing styles. She smiled bravely into the camera lens, but it was obvious she wished it were pointed somewhere else. I was fairly certain that, wherever this girl was, she was no longer among the living. No caption here; I had to take the site’s word for it that this was someone named Elizabeth.

  Dahlia: Rather than a picture, a photocopied image of a death certificate. From it I was able to put together a mental image of a forty-six-year-old housewife who had succumbed to asphyxiation while climbing a tree. Death by misadventure: she’d somehow fallen and wedged her neck into a fork. It was not explained what she was doing up there to start with. Born in New York, she’d died in Indianapolis, Indiana. The document stated that she’d been cremated there as well.

  If connections existed between these women and my Heather, I didn’t see them, other than their all being dead or presumed dead, of course. I also had no way of knowing whether the Miracle Meadows Heather was my Heather, or what the hell Miracle Meadows had to do with this bunch of dead women, or what the hell the stupid poem meant (despite having busted its first-word code), or what the hell I was worrying about it for in the first place.

  The answer to that last was simple enough, though, and has already been stated: I am a glutton for punishment.

  I’d Sherlock-Holmesed this thing to the point of frustration. I yearned for a little satisfaction. I rolled the cursor through the blank spaces of the web page, through the Northwest Passage above the lame poetry, down and around to the Gulf between said poetry and the prose paragraph, watching the arrow the whole time. As I traversed the Channel beneath the paragraph, it happened: the pointing digit appeared again. Directly beneath the word separate was a hidden hyperlink. I clicked it.

  Welcome to the Miracle Meadows Message Board.

  I am Mrs. Meadows, your hostess on this incredible journey. I advise you now that this board contains no search engines, calendars, member lists, or profiles. There will be no contests here, no games. There is a simple registration process requiring your name, email address (for verification purposes only), birthdate, and birthplace. There are two forums.

  Begin at the beginning.

  REGISTER

  Not one of the more congenial boards I’ve visited (though I haven’t seen many) and a bit less than revealing as to what the hell Miracle Meadows was all about.

  I clicked the Registration button, made entries into the spaces provided (none of which were truthful—was this woman crazy, thinking I’d let her know all that?) and clicked the Proceed button. After about five seconds, this popped up:

  INCORRECT ENTRIES, PLEASE REENTER

  I entered new and equally bogus info, and received the same message. With my third attempt, I entered my name and email address, Kenny’s birthdate, and Heather’s birthplace.

  THANK YOU

  PROCEED

  WHAT YOU DID / WHAT YOU WANT TO DO

  It never occurred to me until later that the verification process (for which the email addy was supposedly needed) never happened.

  I clicked WHAT YOU DID. Deep-sea-blue background with white letters of apparently only one topic:

  WHAT MR. ROSSIER DID

  I clicked it.

  Author: Mrs. Meadows

  Subject: WHAT DID YOU DO?

  Comment: Do tell!

  A conversation ensued. It happened fairly rapidly (the Meadows woman must have been on-site at that moment as well), though there were several long pauses between some of the replies, as much as ten minutes, and mere seconds on others. It involved a lot of page renewing.

  For the purpose of clarity and cadence, I will present the pertinent sections here in dialogue form.

  Me: I’ve done a lot of things. What do you mean, specifically?

  Mrs. M.: What did you do that brought you here? What miracle did you perform?

  Me: There are no miracles, lady. Trust me.

  Mrs. M.: I do trust you. However, you are mistaken on the subject of miracles. Had you not performed one, you wouldn’t be here now.

  Me: Lady, I once sat in a hospital room with the woman I’d planned to spend the rest of my life with expecting a miracle to happen, okay? I suppose I was even trying to make a miracle happen by saying “I believe, I believe”, over and over. It didn’t work. It was Christmas, and if there was a more appropriate time for her to open her eyes, sit up, and be perfectly all right, that was it. There are no miracles.

  Mrs. M.: Heather was your wife?

  Me: Yes.

  Mrs. M.: Perhaps you didn’t really want it to happen.

  Me: Didn’t want what to happen? Didn’t want my wife to live? Are you serious, lady?

  Mrs. M.: Mr. Rossier, I’m sure your conscious mind wanted her to live. I’m suggesting there may have been a deeper urge to see what life would be like if she were gone.

  Me: Fuck off, lady. I’m outta here.

  Mrs. M.: I know, Mr. Rossier, that you have been back twice in the last half hour. Talk to me.

  Me: I loved my wife. Don’t even suggest otherwise.

  Mrs. M.: No more suggestions. I do want to get to the miracle, though—the one that did happen. It arose some time before Heather’s death. It had to do with a mole.

  Me: A mole is what started it all. No miracle in melanoma.

  Mrs. M.: Oh, but there was in your wife’s case, right? In your case. You are the one who started it, correct?

  Me: I don’t know what you mean.

  Mrs. M.: Yes, you do. You released the poison into her system. You imagined it, and then you did it.

  Me: No.

  Mrs. M.: Without imagination, there is nothing. Yours, I suspect, is very powerful, though untamed. Uncultivated. But very much something.

  Me: No.

  Mrs. M.: I can help you, Mr. Rossier. I can help you get control.

  The stuff that ran through my head was what you might very well expect: How does she know? How could she know? Is she right? Did I actually initiate the cancer in my wife simply by imagining it?

  A low-grade tingle moved down the back of my neck and settled between my shoulder blades. I came very close to leaving the board then, but again, the glutton prevailed.

  Me: Who are Dahlia, Elizabeth, Abby, Trina?

  Mrs. M.: Like your wife, they were objects of man-made miracles. Targets. Receivers.

  Me: They’re all dead?

  Mrs. M.: Yes.

  Me: Why?

  Mrs. M.: No mental image can be more readily, and powerfully, called up in one’s mind than the death of a loved one. Those five women were loved. Their miracle makers, their senders, were very powerful. Like you, or rather including you.

  Me: Tell me about them.

  This was the longest stretch of inactivity on her side. I wondered whether she’d gotten offline or was merely debating whether or not I had the need to know. I felt a headache coming on, and thought perhaps I should back off myself.

  Mrs. M.: Dahlia suffered from one mental illness or another, supposedly, but her condition wasn’t serious enough to have her institutionalized. She was on medication, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. She had a son. Alberto. He said some things a son shouldn’t say to his mother. Dahlia chased him outside, and, because she had neglected her mellowing medication that morning, she continued to
chase him even when he climbed a tree. She was very persistent, very intent on seeing him punished. Alberto was no weakling, either. He climbed up to where the branches were thinner and swayed with the wind as well as his weight. When he saw his mother wasn’t going to quit, he thought, “I wonder what would happen if . . . ”

  Me: That was it?

  Mrs. M.: Guess the rest.

  Me: He wished her dead?

  Mrs. M.: He pictured his mother slipping, her grip faltering, her body twisting, then becoming wedged into a thick fork about a quarter of the way up the tree. Then it just happened.

  Me: And Elizabeth?

  Mrs. M.: Elizabeth was the Woman Who Knew Too Much. Family secrets. Someone who became aware that she was overly informed decided it sure would be nice if she weren’t around anymore, someone who had significant power. Pity, really, because Elizabeth had a fair amount of power herself, but was never made aware of it.

  Me: Who was the someone?

  Mrs. M.: Her grandfather.

  Me: Did he kill her?

  Mrs. M.: Not in the traditional sense. He wanted her gone and she was just gone.

  Me: How do you know she’s dead?

  Mrs. M.: I know. That’s all.

  Me: And Abby?

  Mrs. M.: She had a sister who wondered what it would be like if the cornflakes in Miss High and Mighty Abigail’s breakfast bowl were hemlock, and while the hemlock leaves alone might not have proved fatal, her sister’s belief that they were did the trick.

  Me: Trina?

  Mrs. M.: Katrina Johnson had a jealous boyfriend. Very prosaic, alas. He imagined her vehicle veering off an overpass, hurtling over the side. He was in the car behind her.

  And I believe you are familiar with the story of Heather Rossier, Michael.

  Me: You think I killed her with a thought.

  Mrs. M.: Don’t you?

  Me: Are you telling me she wouldn’t have died anyway, that the cancer would not have spread?

  Mrs. M.: No. I trust she would have been taken eventually. You saw to it, though, that it would happen sooner rather than later.

  Me: Why just these five cases? There must be a lot more, what with so many sharp imaginers around.