Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Is that Adam?” Alistair asked. Bryan hadn’t noticed the truck parked on the road just outside of the parkland. It was rusted and red and had FIRE DEPT painted in yellow across its side. A rack of antlers protruded from the open back. Bryan stood up and watched as Adam and two hunting partners emerged through the grasses, their faces painted in paisley smears of green and black. They all had infrared night-vision specs hanging around their necks, and one of them had an air horn hooked on his belt. The group had clearly been hunting for most of the night, right through the prohibited hours. They rested their crossbows on their shoulders. Even under the face paint, they looked tired and hungover. Bryan put his hands on hips and shook his head. He had half a mind to report Adam to park patrol.

  “You know night hunting’s not allowed,” he yelled.

  The whites of Adam Pruitt’s eyes bulged defiantly. “I don’t want to hear it,” he shouted. “There’s enough deer for all of us.” Adam and his two friends, who Bryan couldn’t identify underneath their makeup, marched toward them. They were a younger, thinner, more menacing version of Bryan’s heavyset, middle-aged posse, just a decade or so older than their own sons. Bryan had already given Adam this lecture twice this season.

  “I’m serious, Adam. This isn’t a national park. You go hunting at night, scaring the deer out with your air horns, shooting at whatever moves. There are homes all around here. With children in them. One day you’re going to shoot a kid with one of your crossbows—which also aren’t legal, by the way—and you’re going to wonder why you didn’t listen to me.”

  “Listen, Bryan.” Adam slid right up into the older man’s face. His skin smelled of liquor and his eyes were veined from lack of sleep. “When you get to be sheriff of Suffolk County I might be interested in your instructions. In the meantime, mind your own business.”

  The truth was, Bryan didn’t hate Adam Pruitt. Adam was the head of Orient’s volunteer fire department, an empty title at best, since no house had burned in Orient since Bryan could remember, but he appreciated Adam’s commitment to the community. The real reason for the anger was only known to Bryan and Adam and lost on the other men. Three months ago, Adam had started planning to open his own local home-security business, a direct competitor to Bryan’s time-trusted company. They were now business rivals forced to act like neighbors.

  “And I think you’re drunk on top of it,” Bryan managed, although he took a step back to defuse the encounter. It was an instinctive retreat that he regretted as soon as his feet regained their stillness. He was glad Tommy wasn’t here to watch his father bow before a younger man.

  Bryan wiped the back of his hand over his lip in a tough, masculine motion, but one that also shielded his face in case Adam decided to throw a punch. He searched out the faces of his comrades, the ones not painted green and black against the soft blue dome of the sky. Ted, Alistair, and Chip stood by staring, scared and sympathetic, all of them looking like old men in their embarrassing camouflage suits. Bryan’s fingernails shook against the buttons of his jacket. He was an old man too, or getting there.

  “This is bullshit. Tell him,” one of Adam’s buddies murmured as he relieved his shoulder of the crossbow. “What we found over there.”

  Adam bobbed his head and, in a surprising show of civility, extended his hand. Bryan didn’t want to shake it, but he had little choice.

  “We can agree to disagree,” Adam said, then lifted his finger and pointed to the hillcrest, inviting Bryan and the others to follow.

  They trudged through the phragmites, thick and squirreling as the blades brushed against their faces, lethal with ticks. As they descended the slope to the wet, rocky sand of the beach, gnats and flies clouded the air. An odor of decay struck Bryan’s nose, and he pressed his hand over his mouth.

  Lying on the beach, bubbling as the tide pulled back like a sheet, was something dead. At least it looked dead, if dead meant once alive. Larger than a dog, the size of a deer but with shorter, pudgier legs, the shape of a man but with the spinal crouch of an animal that moved on all fours, the thing sprawled on the shore. Its skin was hairless, icicle blue, and sand-caked, home to a colony of flies. Bryan saw it first and crinkled his lips. But the blast radius of its presence spread outward, and soon Chip and Alistair stiffened behind him, their noses and shoulders recoiling.

  “What the hell is that?” Chip wailed.

  “Whatever it is, it washed in with the tide.” Adam pointed to the Sound. Already an armada of sailboats rocked in the deeper channels. The water rolled in, slapping against the monster’s hide and wetting their boots.

  “But what is it?” Chip repeated.

  “What isn’t it?” one of Adam’s friends replied.

  At first Bryan took one of its bloated hooves for a head, but when he looked more closely he noticed a snoutlike protrusion at its far tip, a mouth open like a rabid raccoon, with spiky yellow teeth growing out of spit-white gums. The thing looked like one of Theo’s childhood picture books that split in three panels, where each panel exhibited a different animal part. The game was either to get all the parts to fit a familiar image or to get them wildly wrong. The snout suggested a wild boar, the teeth a dog, its front claw reaching out, as if to pull itself back into the ocean, a badger. It looked like a creature from Bryan’s nightmares, and it wasn’t much of a leap to tilt his eyes from the cadaver, through the jagged band of the Sound, past the white ornament of the lighthouse, and reach the specter of an island where animals were tested for their mutant possibilities. When Bryan looked around, every man on the beach was gazing at the island.

  “You think it came from Plum?” Adam asked, kicking the animal on its rump. The body took the blow with the smallest rigor-mortal quiver. The flies flinched and repositioned themselves.

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Bryan cautioned.

  “Hell if I won’t jump to conclusions,” Chip screamed. “Where else did it come from? That’s what they do to animals in those labs. Genetically reengineering them. Messing with their chromosomes. I don’t care if it’s not kosher to talk about. That fucking island is a disaster area waiting to break loose. There’s nothing natural about it.”

  Adam located a stick of driftwood and started prying the mouth open. Water and seaweed poured from its jaw.

  Bryan raised his hand. “You better leave it,” he said. “We have to notify the park rangers.”

  “But I found it,” Adam whined in a way that reminded Bryan of his youngest son. “I mean, we did. Not you. If there’s reward money, I want to make sure we get that fact straight.”

  “It could be anything,” Alistair said, a surprising voice of reason. “A few weeks floating in the water, even you might look like that.” But even he couldn’t look away from the island in the distance, its hazardous labs the same white of the lighthouse. “Still, I’ll be happy when they shut Plum down. Where did they say they were moving it?” There had been increasing talk of relocating the facility.

  “Somewhere in Kansas,” Ted said.

  “Manhattan, Kansas,” Bryan clarified. It struck him as ironic that the government had chosen a town by that name to relocate operations, as if they couldn’t separate their most covert biowarfare experiments from some lingering link to New York. Bryan pictured the shape of Manhattan scored into Kansan cornfields like the alien crop circles he’d seen on TV. Maybe that pattern would extend so far that it took in all five boroughs, and then the outstretched arm of Long Island, and finally Orient itself. Another Manhattan, he thought. Another New York in the center of the country. Maybe all of New York’s problems could be dumped there too, leaving them alone and safe. “I’ll be glad when it’s gone,” he said aloud.

  They stood on the beach for another minute, bodies black and green and white and mud brown, a motley group of bow hunters straddling the coast, staring into the sea. Their fear of the creature seemed to lift, and they caught each other’s eyes, stunned and eager and a little bit giddy at what they had discovered. The real reward of hunt
ing was not the kill but the story of the kill, not the antlers above the fireplace but the tale of how the antlers got there, and now each of them had a story. They hiked back into the park, searching for someone to tell.

  CHAPTER 6

  His hand was bleeding. Mills had dropped the black trash bag to place the last wedge of an orange in his mouth. When he reached down to reclaim the bag on Paul’s driveway, a nail poking from the plastic sliced his palm. It wasn’t a deep cut, but he couldn’t retract the scream once it cleared his throat.

  The sound echoed against neighboring garage doors, stirring starlings from the trees. Morning church bells droned through the rainless autumn air. A few curtains in nearby houses drew back, and Tommy, seated on his family’s picnic table, plucked the headphones from his ears. As Mills’s palm pooled with blood, Tommy jumped from his lonely downhill-skier crouch and walked across the lawn.

  Mills hadn’t been looking to draw attention. In fact he would have preferred to finish his morning chore without a single run-in with the Muldoons. But at Tommy’s approach, he didn’t exactly downgrade the emergency to a minor scrape. Mills was experienced enough to understand what gay men were often forced to be in this world: romantic opportunists. It was one of the many exotic boons to being a newcomer in Manhattan to assume that most guys passing on the street might be potential conquests. Like the manicured elms that lined the blocks, every young resident of that city seemed capable of being climbed. Walking had become Mills’s chief pastime. On the sidewalks of New York, the eyes of pedestrians shifted like bulls in pens. Some charged the gate, beating toward their target with ferocious interest, while others remained in their enclosures, swatting sweat. The trick of eye contact was an urban sport. Now, a hundred miles east of Manhattan, in the quiet, windblown village of Orient, POW flags replaced the city’s ubiquitous rainbow streamers, and Mills knew no rules for the game of meaningful stares.

  Still, it was Tommy’s eyes that interested him. They were a sunless sky blue, wide and blank like a sky where the weather never changed. And like such a sky, they were interrupted only briefly by anything that migrated across them. Right now that thing was Mills’s left hand. Tommy squinted as he grabbed it, let the blood trickle through the fingers he opened, and inspected the cut.

  “You don’t need stitches,” Tommy concluded, pressing Mills’s fingers over the wound and squeezing them to stanch the blood. He lifted his head and smirked, almost as if he enjoyed inflicting some small degree of pain under the guise of helping him. “But we should bandage it.”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Mills replied coolly. His voice dipped two octaves. He kicked the trash bag for added effect. Mills still possessed the childhood tic of punishing inanimate objects for their abuses. “Paul must have a first aid kit. He isn’t here though.”

  Tommy nodded and tilted his head toward his family’s house. Mills scanned the area for any sign of Tommy’s mother, expecting to find her cross-armed in one of the doorways. Pam Muldoon was nowhere to be seen.

  Tommy raised his hand in the air. Sunlight drifted between his bloodied fingers. “We’ve got Band-Aids. Come on.”

  Mills had woken late that morning, unsure, for a few grasping seconds, of where on the planet he was. He loved that ten-second feeling of not knowing where or who or how, the brain failing to locate itself with certainty anywhere in the universe. Mills always felt those fleeting seconds upon waking were the closest anyone got to the pure substance of being—before walls closed in and the mind raced to reassemble a specific day and room. But soon he noticed the towel on the dresser, the toothbrush still wrapped in cellophane, and the squawking discord of birds out the window like the sound of wire hangers shuffled on a rack. Mills tried to hold on to that bodily sense of lightness, the feeling of life with no sickly residue of drugs in his system. He had forgotten the joy of waking without an impending sense of collapse.

  By the time he showered and changed in the upstairs bathroom, Paul had already disappeared, leaving a car-shaped gravel patch in the driveway and a note on the kitchen table next to a plate of coagulated eggs. “M, gone into town for groceries. I’m afraid I’m an early riser. If you want to get a start, drag the trash bags to the curb for tomorrow’s collection. P.”

  Mills forked the eggs down the sink’s rubber-throated drain and helped himself to one of the oranges on top of the refrigerator. He peeled its thick, tumorous skin, collecting the rinds in his pocket as he placed a triangle of fruit between his teeth. The bitter taste of the orange reminded him of California. A family of Mexican women had sold oranges by the crate at a stand across the street from his primary school in Modesto. They were probably still lingering on that road, those beetle brown women with their dusty melons penned in the world outside of his school’s wire-netted windows. Mills chewed the seeds and took the unsupervised opportunity to creep back upstairs to explore Paul’s bedroom. It sat on the opposite end of the hallway, a safe, soundproof distance from the one he occupied. It was sparse and chilly and floated with spectral dust. Leaves outside the window were turning cinnamon, and neighboring rooftops had already collected many of the fallen in their gutters.

  The sheets on Paul’s bed were monastically tucked and folded, as if by an architect’s ruler, and Mills resisted the urge to dent the pillows just to see if Paul would notice. His eyes traveled the room. Fragments of a personality decorated the rosewood bureau: a ceramic bowl of one-dollar coins, ticket stubs to summer orchestra recitals, a framed photograph of Paul as a squirrel-haired teenager in a gray boarding-school uniform, a mug from a college honorary society bragging “we are the superior beings” in a Gothic font. Also on the bureau was a vial of medication: “Vicodin, to take at the onset of extreme pain,” dated from earlier in the summer. Mills wondered what kind of extreme pain brought Paul to get the prescription—perhaps the same pain that caused his limp in the hallway last night. He debated pocketing two of the pills for later enjoyment—taking Vicodin was like leaning into the curves on a highway—but he decided to leave the medication alone.

  The suitcase Paul had brought from the city was stowed by the closet. On the inside closet door, where most people hung a mirror, were two framed diplomas, one from Columbia and the other from Cornell, as if those certificates were the truer reflection of the man Paul Benchley wanted to see when he dressed.

  Mills had never loved a home, never felt tied or obligated to one, at least not a home made of mortar, wood, and cinder blocks. If any of the houses that defined his childhood were ever demolished, he wouldn’t feel a thing. When he thought of California, his mind tracked oceanic deserts, thickets of woods with trees like unbent staples, strip-mall parking lots, and courthouse steps, places no one really owned, and thus always safely his. In his last years in Modesto, so many new homes were still half-built, their foundations dug and cemented and left to collect rainwater when the mortgage crisis cleared away the construction workers. It was in these open-sky basements that Mills had tried his first cigarettes, learned bicycle tricks like wheelies and endos, and kissed a boy his age. He hoped those houses were never built, magnificent California ruins destroyed only if they were ever conceived.

  He paused before a map of grouse-shaped Orient, which hung on the wall across from Paul’s bed. It was an old map of property lines with large sections penciled in red, before the land was divided and the potato fields replanted with seedling grass, before Paul’s grandfather parceled his plot across the Sound and triggered the spreading patchwork of Suffolk County suburbs. Mills located the Benchley house on the map, pressing his finger on the black, crosshatched square. The picture frame jiggled at his touch, as if something kept it from falling flush with the wall.

  He placed his half-eaten orange on the bureau and lifted the map from its hook. A green matchbook was wedged in the frame’s metal bracket. He pulled it from its lodging. A swordfish curled over a militia of slim black letters that spelled out SEAVIEW RESORTS MOTEL. He opened the book flap and found the name “Eleanor,” and a ten-digit
number written in purple ink. So Paul did have a secret still worth hiding from the ghosts of his parents.

  And now Mills had a possible answer to his own unasked question. He had assumed Paul was gay, and he was surprised at the wave of disappointment he felt upon discovering a woman’s name scrawled on a matchbook advertising “cheap room rates.” Paul was not like him. He was an ally, yes, but not a sharer of similar roads. To discover someone was ordinary always struck Mills as a kind of betrayal. Whenever a man Mills presumed was gay turned out to be straight, the aura about him crumbled, the clues reassembling into the most indistinctive brand of human being—normal, hiding nothing, a mind like a weather vane that moved with the prevailing winds. Mills returned the matchbook to the bracket and steadied the frame against the wall. The loneliness that engulfed him on his way to take out the trash was the loneliness of a clear-cut world.

  The Muldoons’ screen door slammed against his shoulder. Reluctant to get blood on the hallway carpeting, he lifted his arm to his chest and shoved his foot out to catch a drop of blood that fell from his thumb. Tommy laughed at the sight of him, pinned in the doorway, using his own shoe to prevent a cleaning nightmare. Tommy grabbed a towel off the end table and tossed it. Mills caught it with his wounded hand, staining its decorative fall-leaf stitching, marring Pam Muldoon’s seasonal accessory. He wrapped it around his palm and applied his fingers to the cut.

  “Who’s with you?” a little boy shouted, the contours of his head haloed against the ultraviolet glow of a flat-screen television. Tommy’s brother was having a difficult time maneuvering the character of his video game. The man on the screen kept moving, his legs and arms repeating a walking rhythm, but he was thwarted by the obvious barrier of a wall.