In Concert

by Melanie Tem

  “I’m lost,” Frank thought, astonished. Just to be sure, he anchored himself in one spot as best he could by grinding a heel into the dry ground, then rotated slowly in what he intended to be a full circle, though it was hard to tell how far around he went or how many times. Indeed, there was no visible horizon, no directional sense to hint at which way was east or west, no sight or sound of Los Perdidos or of any other human being.

  He shook his heel free and took a step, and the ground fell out from under him. He slid, then lost his balance entirely and fell, maybe briefly lost consciousness, and came to rest hard in a deep dry gulch.

  This used to be a river, and near here there used to be a garden, Frank decided confusedly, gazing at the jumble of toys and hardware and electrical supplies and articles of clothing and glittering amalgams and conglomerates both organic and inorganic. They surrounded him to form a dust-laden bed many yards across at the bottom of this dry wash providing passage through the desert. There appeared to be soft, wave-like movement as well. A sighing undulation. A waltz of many pieces.

  Nearby a baby doll’s head rocked rapidly, a flutter of movement until it at last righted itself. It turned and pointed its painted eyes at Frank, who found he could not bring himself to look inside them. Its smile obscured by a film of dirt, it edged itself up on a roller skate, and used this to ease slowly across the surface of pipes and wires, ball bearings and coat hangers and pill bottles and broken shoes and plastic guns, darts and dinner plates and the thrown-out innards of thousands of happy homes.

  Near here, in some world shared with here, there used to be a garden. Frank remembered that there used to be a garden, full of wonderful things. Full of toys, he thought, full of flowers and friends. Monica had been there, for a little while. Now there was nothing, and the bad things that grow when there is nothing.

  You should never throw away your toys, Frankie. Some day you may need them.

  He followed the doll’s head on the skate, down the river of jumble, joined now and again by clocks with stuffed arms and steaming trains with dolls’ legs. Legless tin monkeys and headless soldiers, spools with mouths full of copper gears, and all the unfathomable activity that still bore his mark, the result of his handiwork, the product of his whims. He’d been near a genius, he mused, in his waste.

  Now the busy river thinned and the exotic conveyances began losing all their parts. Dust swallowed up the skate. The doll’s head rolled and winked, the cavity in its head filling with a nest of determined insects. He sank deeper into the riverbed, which faded and lost its features until it was only outline, only surface.

  Barren outcroppings loomed all around him, giving the strong impression of being porous and pliable but not alive. Something like fungi, or an underwater growth. A devolution.

  Right here, there used to be a garden. This sharp, gritty wind used to smell of flowers. Children used to play here. People used to love. But the garden had been too beautiful, too good to be true, too frightening to cherish, and so it had been lost, disassembled, given away, destroyed.

  The crescent moon, so enormous now he wanted to call it something other than a moon, dominated the swath of jet sky in a way Frank found threatening. The air here was breathable, though he wasn’t confident from one inhalation to the next that it would be. He became aware of a repetitive sound he’d been hearing for a while, slightly different from what he was used to but recognizable as footsteps, quick, light, almost musical, and coming toward him. The taste in his mouth could be blood or dread or only sudden thirst, or something he’d touched and carelessly transferred to lips and tongue; it could be poisonous.

  Moonlight, if that was a moon and not some foreign body fallen too close, and the peculiar perspective of this place allowed him to make out that the approaching figure was a small, naked, long-haired boy. He hadn’t seen Frank yet; Frank didn’t know why that should seem to give him the advantage, but the feeling of relief was keen that there was no connection between them just yet. He was not ready for this. But he got to his feet.

  The possibility occurred to him that the boy had been aware of his presence all along, and that he was being toyed with. The thought of himself as a toy made him smile. Or maybe the child was afraid of him; there was reason to be, though Frank meant no harm. It was possible, too, that the boy didn’t believe Frank was real, or took him for only a part of the landscape.

  The child wasn’t wandering, or stumbling, or playfully skipping along. He strode, small sturdy arms and legs swinging purposefully, strong little back erect, head high. Frank wanted to stand still, but his legs shook violently. He sank to his haunches. It wouldn’t be long before his thigh muscles protested this position, too, and then maybe he would just sit down. The boy was carrying something in his hand. Frank balanced himself with a tent of stiffened fingers on the dusty ground, propped the other forearm on his unsteady thigh, and waited.

  The towering formations pretended to make a path between themselves, but it wasn’t a real path because it didn’t lead anywhere. The boy made the last turn in the false path, and he and Frank were face-to-face.

  “Hi,” Frank said. Then, because he couldn’t think what else to say under the circumstances, “Are you lost?”

  The boy didn’t speak, but he grinned and nodded and was about to go on his jaunty way right past Frank.

  “What have you got there?” Frank was suddenly, coldly, furiously suspicious.

  Just out of reach, the boy held up—in both little fists, so as not to lose it—a small blue-and-white panda bear with a hole in its belly. Quickly, then, he brought it in to his bare chest, where he cradled it lovingly, peering up under long lashes at Frank.

  “Hey.” Anger rose. “That’s mine.” He found he was making an imperious “gimme” gesture with fingers curling toward himself. “I lost it. A long time ago. I really didn’t mean to give it away.”

  The little boy’s wide dark eyes were radiant with tears. Staring at Frank and vehemently shaking his head, he took a faltering step backward and stopped. Through gaps between the small fingers the piquant face and stubby paws of the blue bear poked, and one round ear with a white inside flapped against a grimy thumb. Tendons stood out in the plump wrists from the fiercely tightened grip on the toy.

  “I lost him,” Frank insisted. Incredibly, he felt on the verge of tears himself. “I want him back.” Amazed, he could hear the whine in his voice.

  Tears were streaming down the boy’s round cheeks now, glimmering in too much moonlight. The child took one hand away from the bear, and Frank’s heart leaped, but swiftly the other hand with the bear in it disappeared behind the boy’s back.

  Frank was crying now. The salt of his tears was startling, and their wetness on the dry backs of his hands. A great and hungry mouth was opening up inside him, showing its teeth, desperate for what had escaped it.

  The two of them stayed that way, staring at each other and crying, the toy and the memory of the lost toy connecting them and setting them against each other. Then, with no warning, the child shrieked, rushed forward, and thrust the bear into Frank’s chest.

  Frank wasn’t ready. He didn’t get his hands up in time, and the bear tumbled off his lap. He lunged for it and so did the child, howling in outrage or horror. Neither of them found the toy at first and then both of them did, and then they were clawing at each other, holding each other’s hands, scrabbling over and under each other until the boy had the bear again and, breathing heavily, clutched it to himself.

  Panting, crouched low in the dark dust now, Frank was still considerably taller than the boy, and much bigger, of course. But the boy was faster, and more acclimated to this place. He simply scampered away, tucking Frank’s blue bear under his lowered chin so Frank couldn’t see it anymore. His rapid footsteps vanished on the hard ground. Frank had nothing.

  He looked around at the endless desert. The lost ones chasing their own paths. The long shimmer of the thrown away river, sliding and clicking and chattering across the emptiness. Frank
in the place he’d been heading for all his life, alone. The dying wind. The wolf at the door. The moon too big for the sky.

  NORTH

  He was on his way north. He could have just as well gone south, he supposed; like most faux choices people were faced with, this one wouldn’t have made much difference either way.

  But after the divorce hearing he’d set off north—out of town, across the state line, over the Canadian border, eventually up the Alaska Highway—and it was as good a direction as any. Better than some: despite the earth’s spherical nature, lines of longitude were not the same as lines of latitude, and eastward or westward would have led him to endless circling. This way, north, there would come a point past which he couldn’t travel without changing direction, and when that happened he’d stop. For no good reason, except that maybe, at the very top of the world, he would be alone.

  For now, though, he was stuck in the company of an Eskimo guide allegedly named George. Surely that couldn’t be; he must have a secret, real name, studded with k’s and q’s, and “George” was for scamming tourists. Jay had briefly considered telling the smug bastard that his name was, say, Vlad, but he’d paid with a personal check for an exorbitant amount—not many guides would go into the interior this time of year, George had pointed out calmly. The check was rubber, but by the time George discovered that, Jay would be unavailable.

  When he’d left the Lower Forty-Eight he hadn’t thought about needing a guide because he hadn’t thought he was going anywhere in particular except north. He should have known better. Coincidences did not happen, at least not for the likes of him. His life had always had a direction. There had always been a pull.

  There had turned out to be another reason for coming up here, and this was probably what kept him going, what woke him up every morning to utterly lightless dawn. He was searching for someone he didn’t even believe in, whose relationship to him was mythical at best—and of whom, astonishingly, George claimed to have heard.

  Jay didn’t have to believe, it seemed. Just the idea of the man had weight, gravity. Wherever Jay tried to go, all roads would eventually lead to him.

  He had never told Rachel about his fairytale great-grandfather. But then, there were plenty of things he’d never told her about. Vietnam, for instance. His refusal to talk to her about Vietnam had upset her because, she’d accused, it meant he didn’t trust her. Of course he didn’t trust her, and he’d been right not to, as the divorce had proved. What had unnerved him was the thought of how close he’d come, a few times during those sixteen years, to taking a real chance with her.

  But he’d had the sense and self-discipline to restrain himself, said about Vietnam only that it was the reason he would never be responsible for bringing children into this world, and about Dracula nothing at all. Never let her even guess at certain tastes and pulls. Which was why, when the judge had declared it done, he’d been able to walk calmly past the tearful Rachel and just head north.

  In Nome he’d said to George only that he needed a guide through the interior, that he was headed north above the Arctic Circle, that his great-grandfather had once made this trip. This last part he’d made up, of course, but then he’d become convinced it was true. George had nodded once, and Jay had been left with the unpleasant impression that, despite his intentions, he’d been too loquacious, had somehow revealed something.

  “You like stories about my people,” George was saying now, nodding in an offensive, knowing way.

  Jay had no interest at all in folklore, but when George was talking he wasn’t, presumably, listening, and there wasn’t dangerous silence between them. Jay took a modicum of satisfaction in having fooled the man, but satisfaction was risky if it caused you to let your guard down.

  “Especially you like the bloody ones, I think. One man eats another man. A woman eats her husband’s second wife. A ghost sucks all the blood out of an old woman and leaves her skull to go rolling across the ice. A child drinks so much of its mother’s milk that it explodes all over the village.” George laughed, too loud and too long. “You think we Inupiak have the big appetite, eh?”

  “Well,” Jay mocked, turning his head in his bedroll to look pointedly in the direction of George’s belly, which he could see dimly in the firelight reflected off the cabin walls. This caused the Eskimo’s hilarity to increase, and Jay’s irritation with it. “Hell,” he all but shouted, “you guys don’t have any more of an appetite than anybody else. You just talk about it more.”

  “The White Man Who Doesn’t Eat? The man you’re looking for? He’s here, you know.”

  Jay caught himself before he actually glanced around. “Why do you call him that? His reputation is that he eats a lot. Speaking of appetites.”

  George’s face glowed, a red ball in the light of the fire. The walls were a duller red, and beyond them, Jay knew, was absolute dark. Under the crack of the flames and George’s blubbery voice, ice moaned. Jay burrowed into his parka, letting the hood come forward to shield his head until only a small gap remained, completely filled by George’s burning face. There was a rustle as, apparently, the Eskimo shrugged. “I guess he ate all he could eat. Maybe all he needed to eat.”

  “He’s a mythical creature. Not real.”

  “Lots of Outsiders think ice worms aren’t real, either.”

  “Ice worms?” Jay guffawed.

  “Tiny little black buggers live in temperate glaciers. Eat debris that falls through the cracks. If you touch one, your body heat burns him. Shrivels right up.”

  “Probably doesn’t happen very often,” Jay said mock-seriously. “Living in glaciers probably doesn’t bring them into a lot of human contact.”

  George laughed heartily.

  “What are you talking about, he’s here?” Jay demanded, though by pursuing it he was exposing himself. “Where?”

  “In the Brooks Range somewhere. Some people say here, some say there. The Brooks Range, though, somewhere.”

  Jay’s heart had quickened. Not to let George guess at his eagerness, he growled, “I thought you were going to tell another story.”

  “This is a true one,” George began happily. “A true story about my own great-grandfather, who had many children and grandchildren, and who ate at least two of his grandsons during the times of starvation. Now, my own father has said these two boys were sickly and would have died anyway and that my great-grandfather had no choice if he was to survive, but others have told how he always had this taste for human meat, liking it better than fish or walrus fat. Who can know what is true?

  “But the story I heard was that he beat my great-grandmother when he was angry, and he was angry most of the time. Bad weather or stupid dogs, poor hunting or a broken tool, all of these things made him angry and he would beat her. This is an ugly part of the story, but I knew this man when he was very old and I believe this part at least to be true.

  “Finally one day she left him, travelling into another village, leaving the two grandsons behind. At first the old man was nice to them, feeding them walrus fat and the belly of the whale, even when they made mistakes and angered him, which was often. He himself ate almost nothing, except a few caribou turds, sitting most of the time watching his grandsons grow fat and happy.

  “Then one night he fed them all that remained of his store of food and told them stories of the paradise that exists in a deep valley surrounded by ice, and when they were asleep with smiles on their faces he beat them over the head with stones and ate them. When my great-grandmother returned she found him with blood and fat still dripping from his mouth.”

  George paused for such a long time that Jay felt compelled to ask, “And then what happened? What did the people do to him?”

  “Nothing. My great-grandmother went back and she never said a word to him. No one said a word to him. Maybe it was because it was a time of starvation, maybe it was something else, who can know? Things follow their natures. When I knew him he was very old, and very fat, and my father wouldn’t let me near him. I r
emember that every night someone in the family had to stay awake if he was there.”

  Jay found himself beginning eagerly, almost before George had stopped talking, “My great-grandfather once impaled a woman for making her husband’s shirt too short. This was a long time ago, in another age. But I believe the story. I think he used a hot stake of iron, thrust into the vagina, through the body, and out the mouth. He had a strong, if peculiar, sense of morality. Unfaithful wives were skinned alive. Nipples were sliced off, that sort of thing.” Jay paused, a little surprised both that he was telling such things at all and that he wasn’t much bothered by them, as if the tale had nothing to do with him. “Sometimes children were roasted, I believe. And fed to their mothers.”

  He looked up. Regarding him intently, George demanded, “Your great-grandfather did these things? Truly?”

  Jay shrugged, feeling a peculiar sort of pride.

  George nodded slowly. “ ‘A hunger worse than any Inupiak hunger’—that is what they say about The White Man Who Doesn’t Eat.”

  They talked long into the night. When finally George’s breathing deepened into snores, Jay was incensed. At this price, the least the son-of-a-bitch could do was be polite. He lay awake for a long time then, thinking about how dark darkness could be when you knew the sun was not going to rise in the morning, and he was not aware of falling asleep or of sleeping but of waking up to find George gone.

  No note. No kiss-my-ass. Cash, half the amount of his worthless check, stuck in his boot. No directions. Shit, Jay chided himself as he pushed out into the morning cold and dark. What did you expect? Just go north.

  He’d walked and climbed maybe ten minutes before he could think about anything but George’s treachery and how it proved, as if he’d needed more proof, the general and individual calumny of humankind. Then certain details of his situation floated up into his consciousness, and he cursed himself for a fool to have been distracted by yet another scumbag.