by Ted Kosmatka
The other riders were already rising to their feet. We followed the stragglers out the doors and down the ramp. We walked the sidewalks into the rain. I turned my face up to the sky.
* * *
It was raining when my mother parked next to his car in the sandy lot.
It was cold that day, a drizzly October, so perhaps my mother pulled her jacket collar up as she stepped out of the car. Perhaps she turned her face into the rain. I can see her walking around the back of his red Chevy Cavalier. Perhaps she was formulating what she was going to say. She’d tease him for being forgetful, or she’d ask why he was parked there near the sand.
I can see her reaching for his door, her fingers curling slightly in anticipation of the handle. And then I see no more.
It was a passerby in another car who finally stopped and helped a few minutes later. An old dockworker who pulled my mother from where she stood screaming in the middle of the street. She’d tried to stop other cars, but they swerved away, wanting no part.
The police found him in the front seat, gun in his lap. The note read only, It was the wave with my name.
* * *
As we walked into the town, we found most of the businesses already closed for the night. Another tourist district at the edge of the water.
Farther down the street, I spotted a hotel, but when I pointed to it, she said, “Not that one.”
“Why?”
“Not the first one we come to.”
A bit farther out, another hotel sign glowed red in the rain. VACANCY. CABLE TV.
We paid with cash.
“Ice maker’s at the end of the hall.”
The room was clean and no frills. A floral pattern on the blankets. I turned the heat up as far as it would go. The double beds were soft.
I slept like the dead.
* * *
When I woke in the morning, Mercy was already up and dressed, sitting at the tiny round table in the corner. She had coffee and a doughnut put aside for me.
“Continental breakfast,” she said. “I was afraid you would miss it.”
I noticed a small plastic bag on the bed.
“Toothbrush and toothpaste,” she said. “A razor. They sell them at the little store just up the road.”
* * *
She put the news on the TV—the steady drone of international politics. The Koreas. The stock market. The upcoming election.
I sat up, and my clothes stuck to me. Everything hurt. My shirt still stiff and coarse, pleated into the shape I’d slept it into. My skin was raw. I wanted a shower and a shave.
“We’ll need new clothes,” I told her.
She nodded. “There’s a shop up the street. A rental car company, too. The sooner we leave, the better.”
“We’re renting a car?”
“Unless you know how to steal one.”
I climbed to my feet and crossed the room to my coffee. It was hot and good. I drank it down. The doughnut I couldn’t make myself eat.
“When they catch us, they’ll kill us,” she said.
When, she had said. Not if.
“So what do we do? We can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
“We go to the other hide, like Vickers said.”
“How far is it?”
“Far enough. Two days’ drive. We meet up with her and decide what to do.”
“And if she’s not there?”
“She’ll be there.”
46
We drove west and west, through two states, and into the night. We took turns driving, eating up the miles. The rise and fall of the hills like the waves of some impossible sea. The hypnotic thrum of the engine carried us to dawn.
The plains brought heat and an endless expanse. The doldrums. Horse latitudes.
We ate at a Denny’s outside Topeka, and then six hours’ sleep at a Super 8 just off the highway.
We hit the badlands at midday. Bright sun shining down. Here the land became alien. As bare and inhospitable as the surface of the moon. The badlands, full of gullies and arid hills. Land that would not level. We drove west for hours more, and then we went south.
* * *
“Vickers,” I prompted her.
The sun had gone down, and the world was now defined by what I could see in the headlights. The dotted white line spooled out in front of us and then disappeared behind us again.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Do you believe what she says about Brighton? What he is?”
“You saw them. Make up your own mind.”
She leaned her face against the passenger window, watching the night.
“And the cascade?” I asked.
“The what?”
“Matryoshka dolls, nested universes. Finite volume but an infinite surface area.”
“I don’t know physics. Vickers had a different story for me.”
“What story?”
“The story of an island,” she said. “The most beautiful place you could imagine, unchanging, until one day rats came to its shores.”
“Rats?” I asked.
She nodded. “Never mind how they got there. But the point was they got there. These rats were different from the other animals and disrupted the harmony if left unchecked. They had to be controlled, do you understand?”
“Yeah.”
“So those in charge of the island tried to control the rats, but the rats were too fast. Traps were attempted, but the rats were too smart. So it was decided that predators would be introduced to prey on the rats. And so it came to pass that snakes were released on the island. Big venomous snakes that could kill the rats with a single bite. What do you think happened?”
“The snakes didn’t control the rats.”
She nodded. “The snakes slithered deep into the heart of the island and did what snakes do, and so now the island had two vermin upon it. Did the keepers of the island stop there?”
“I guess no.”
“No, they did not. And a new beast was brought in to solve the problem. The sly mongoose. Faster than a snake. Smarter than a rat. They shipped them in and set them loose, and what do you think happened?”
“They didn’t kill the snakes.”
“Oh, they killed some. The slowest, the weakest. A war was waged. But over time, the mongooses became their own problem, as big as the rats and snakes. And many snakes died, and many mongoose, too, as all around them the rats scurried. And so after that the laws were changed—an unbreakable decree for all time. No more mongooses. No more outsiders. The age of miracles was ended. Nothing new would be added to the island. The curators of the island washed their hands and said, ‘What will be will be.’”
“And Brighton is a snake?”
“The snakes are snakes. I was speaking of an island.”
I drove in silence for a long time. “What does the snake want?”
“Who can know the wants of a snake.”
“And what of the mongooses?”
“All dead now.”
“And the rats, what do they want?”
“The rats want what rats everywhere want,” she said. She turned her face to the sun. “Just to survive.”
* * *
The heat of the day came on. Mercy offered to drive, but I waved that off. “Sleep,” I told her. “I’ll be fine.”
At a rest stop, we drank from the water fountain and used the bathroom. We found our place on the map. You are here. Low hills hemmed us in on two sides. My eyes in the mirror were tired. Three hours, I told myself. In three more hours, I’d let myself rest. I tried my phone, hoping to get the map working, but it was still glitched from the water. The phone turned on, which was promising, but none of the icons worked. I’d heard that bagging the phone in rice did the trick sometimes, but since I had no rice, I tossed the phone onto the dashboard, figuring the sun might dry it out. I thought of Joy.
Mercy slept as I drove.
The land here defied scale. Defied description. The bad lands. The broken lands. Bright red walls ros
e up in the distance and then fell away. Stone shaped by wind into the flow of a wave. There were no mountains but only strange tables upon which the land resumed. Places where the arid floor of the Earth rose vertically for a hundred feet into the sky, as if God himself couldn’t decide at which level the ground should rest.
The road snaked its way through the lowlands between these plateaus—a single traversable ribbon wending its way through the upheaval. Here and there, the road became a bridge, passing over deep crevasses. Other times the road seemed to be in the crevasses themselves as canyon walls rose up around us. It was a landscape in revolt. I wondered what it must have been like here for the first settlers. How many people reached this place and found there was no way forward, the heat of the sun baking down, and no way back.
The heat muddled my thinking. Or maybe it was the need for sleep.
I drove with the accelerator pressed as hard as I dared, but when I looked again, our speed had dropped to fifty. I pressed on, speeding up again, but every time I looked, the speedometer wouldn’t stay still. I’d lost control of it somewhere. As I’d lost control of my life.
In the backseat, Mercy made a noise, then lay quiet, sleeping again. So quiet that I looked back, checking her breath. The steady rise and fall, like the land around us.
I turned back to watch the road. The winding gray ribbon.
Minutes later, my chin jerked, and I was suddenly awake—the car straddling the lanes, my speed above ninety. I slowed to seventy and shook my head, trying to clear the cobwebs.
The ribbon unspooled. Miles more. Brown shrubs clinging to the edge of a low canyon wall that finally opened to the expanse. A wide red wild.
As I drove, I gradually became aware that there were two of me. The one who drove, and the one who dreamed, and I saw a hare striding out in the scrublands—a loping run that kept pace with the vehicle. A mystical blackness in the shimmering heat, too faint to see with your eyes, though you could feel it was out there—long legs kicking, maw open, red tongue streaming out from a sly, grinning face, while behind it a coyote chased with snapping jaws, and I was the coyote, and I was the hare, and I was the driver, and the woman in the backseat wasn’t anyone, anywhere, not even herself.
The tires squealed as the car followed the curve, and I snapped awake, spinning the wheel, overcorrecting. The sickening pull on my body against the seat belt before finally straightening out, gaining control.
Mercy had come awake but said nothing.
* * *
She drove while I slept.
Three hours later, she shook me awake. “We’re getting close.”
I opened my eyes to the broken landscape. Low hills. It all looked the same. I wondered how she knew.
“How close?”
“Twenty minutes. Maybe less.”
“How many times have you come here?”
“Once,” she said. “A year ago.” She slowed and turned off the main road onto a dusty drive that disappeared over a rise. Brown shrubs covered the stony soil. “I never wanted to come back,” she said.
The car crested another rise. The road went on and on into the distance, brown and dusty, for several miles, following the curve of the upland before seeming to evaporate into the shimmering air. Mercy slowed the vehicle to twenty miles per hour but pressed on.
“Why did you stay with Vickers? You could have walked away, so why didn’t you?”
“You mean live a normal life?”
“Yeah. There are worse things.”
I watched her. Her body rocked with the movement of the car over the pitted road. It seemed a track more fitting to four-wheelers than any kind of car.
“What makes you think I could have?”
I looked at her hand resting on the wheel. The missing parts of fingers.
“What happened to your hand?”
She looked at me, following my gaze. “I don’t remember.”
“How can you not remember?”
“There were worse things. Things I lost far worse than this.” She held her hand up, damaged. “And that’s what I remember. I remember them tearing me apart. Toying with me, like a child might pull the wings off a fly. I remember dying—being right at the edge of it.”
The car rocked on its suspension as we crossed another deep hole. I didn’t understand. “You remember things that didn’t happen?”
Mercy’s eyes were far away, gazing out through the filthy windshield. “They did happen. It’s like there’s a fissure, and the world can pull you, and I was suddenly on a different track—a track where I’d lived, instead of dying and I was left with this hand that I didn’t recognize.” She looked down at her own hand. Her face was grim.
“What do you mean, ‘pulled you’? Who pulled you?”
“The world. It’s like a correction that happens. A fracture.”
I thought of Stuart. I think sometimes it can get confused.
“When it happens,” she said, “you remember the track you come from, mostly. Not the one you’re pulled to. Though there’s a little bleed-through. Maybe a quick flash of memory, but it’s like it happened to somebody else. This”—she held up her hand—“happened to somebody else.”
“It looks like it happened to you.”
She shook her head. “A different version of me. What happened to me was much worse.”
* * *
We rounded a bend in the rutted track, and the land opened up, dropping slightly, and I could suddenly see for miles.
You hear about people dying in the wilderness, their car breaking down. I could imagine it easily. Humans are at the mercy of their instruments.
It was a desolate landscape. Dry and inhospitable. More scrub and rock and low, desiccated trees. I squinted through the filthy windshield.
There was something up ahead, maybe half a mile.
Mercy saw it, too. She eased the car to a stop and hit the windshield washer fluid. Precious liquid sprayed across the glass, making streaks in the dust.
The patch of land was maybe thirty yards square, nestled between two low hills. In that spot, the land was greener, with grasses and flowers—and there above it, spread like an umbrella, loomed a huge, gnarled tree, rare in this arid country, and under whose branches crouched a small, dilapidated trailer, shimmering in the summer heat.
We’d seen similar trailers over the last day’s drive, on the outskirts of towns. Often surrounded by junk and broken-down cars. But this was the middle of nowhere.
“It hasn’t changed,” Mercy said.
She shifted the car back into drive, and we continued on, slowly descending the gradual slope. As we approached the settled spot of land, I got a better look at the trailer. Whatever its original color might have been, it had been whitewashed long ago to fight off the sun. Streaked with dust and grime, its chrome trim sandblasted to a cloudy countenance. Even the windows looked fogged—an aging glaucoma, as if the panes had seen too much and wished to see no more. The yard was heaped with castoffs. A small love seat lay tipped on its side. There were two cars, only one of which looked like it was from this lifetime—a familiar gray sedan. Vickers’s car. A small dent in the right front quarter panel. So she’d made it after all. The other car’s wheels were sunk into the ground, so that it rested on its belly in the red dirt. The paint was a faded pink that might have once been red. I saw wheelbarrows, and bicycles, and a large metal bucket whose sides were crushed in.
The front door of the trailer was open to the heat. A screen door swayed crookedly in the breeze.
Mercy pulled the car to a stop thirty yards short of the trailer.
I looked at Mercy’s face, and I could see the fear. She didn’t want to approach.
“What is this place?”
“The last of the hides,” she said. “This is where Vickers brought Hennig when she nursed him back to health.”
47
We sat. The engine idled.
“We didn’t come all this way to stop now,” I said.
She shook her head. �
��The car stays here in case things go wrong.”
“And if they do go wrong?”
She was quiet for a moment, considering my words. “Maybe one of us makes it back to the car.”
I glanced at her. “I don’t think where we park is going to matter.”
She didn’t want to drive any closer, but in the end there was no point not to.
“It’ll be fine,” I said. Which might have been a lie, of course. I had no way of knowing, one way or the other.
She reached for the window buttons.
It was three o’clock and the worst heat of the day was over, but it was still a killing heat that poured through the opening windows. It might have been 105 degrees. I couldn’t imagine the temperature inside that trailer.
She shifted into drive, and the car eased forward. She parked in the shade beneath the tree and after cutting the engine reached under the driver’s seat, and pulled out a gun. She tucked it behind her back and smoothed her shirt over the lump.
When we opened our car doors and stepped outside, a hot breeze lifted my sweaty hair from my forehead. The air was oven dry, and the dust of the badlands hung in the wind.
“Come on,” I said.
We made our way up the path to the trailer. A child’s metal swing set, decades old, swayed in the breeze. On one side of the swing, the chain was frozen in rust; on the other, it had broken and lay strewn on the ground. The hinge made a rusty squeak as the wind moved the sun-bleached wooden seat.
“Vickers hasn’t survived this long by being careless,” Mercy said. “Or without having contingencies.”
The stairs at the front door looked as old and weather-beaten as the swing. Made of plywood and two-by-fours, bleached gray by the sun. We walked up the crooked stairs to the front door.
Mercy had to close the screen in order to knock. “Hello?” she called out, knocking on the fogged glass.
There was no response.
“Anybody here?”
She opened the screen door and stepped inside.
The interior of the trailer looked no better than the exterior. The carpet was worn to its threads in a path between the couch and the kitchen. A small TV sat on top of a larger one in the living room. There was a gray, sagging sofa. Coffee table. Cheap glass knickknacks positioned on a shelf near the front door—ceramic puppies and cats and elephants. I saw a crucifix on the wall. Then another. A statue of Mary stood vigil on a side table by the couch. There were small statues of saints, of various sizes and means of manufacture, located strategically around the room. Some were cheap plastic of the type you saw on car dashboards. Others were larger, hand painted, made of glossy ceramic.
