Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  The wind coming through the window seemed to rise, the temperature to drop, so that suddenly he was feeling sharp and cold gusts penetrating the room in an almost rhythmical pattern. He walked to the window to shut it, but stopped and stuck his head outside. The position was too awkward to see very much, but no matter how much he strained his head this way or that, he could see no one, hear no one. A few dogs moved quietly through the streets. Cars were parked, empty.

  It took him only a few minutes to slap some water onto his face and get ready for work. He didn’t bother with a shower. He slid into the pickup, started the engine, and pulled out onto Meeker’s main street, waiting for the images of his father to come once again.

  He stopped after two blocks. He got out of his truck.

  Cars and trucks were parked awkwardly on both sides of the street, straddling alleys, parked in the wrong direction, pulled up on the curb, stopped too far out in the street. The engines had been turned off, the doors shut firmly, but it seemed as if the drivers hadn’t really cared where they left them. Maybe it hadn’t mattered where they had left them.

  There was no one in sight. He walked around the main part of town; two dogs raced away when they saw him. The doors to the stores and cafes were wide open. Food still on the tables, but the grills and coffee pots had been turned off. Someone had left the radio on, but there was only static. On all channels. “Where are you hiding now?” he whispered softly.

  Freddy ran out to the pickup and spun the wheels. He stopped, took a deep breath, then headed out toward Rangely. Off in the distance, a tall figure in battered hat and faded jeans was walking toward the mountains.

  “Hey! Hey!” Freddy shouted, but the figure did not turn.

  The wheels took the curves on edge, the arroyos drew him, the washouts beckoned him. He flashed on his broken body, twisted under the wreck down in one of the deeper gulleys, but still he pressed down on the accelerator, spinning the steering wheel.

  But the receding figure was always too far away, and the road did not lead there.

  “Hey! Cowboy!” Freddy shouted.

  The cowboy did not turn, but continued to go away, to vanish.

  He passed other vehicles abandoned at the side of the road. He saw no one on the hillsides but an occasional rabbit.

  For the first time he could remember, the image of his father did not come to him.

  Miles later—he had not kept track of the time—he stopped

  just within the city limits of Rangely, unable to drive on. A cold wind filled the streets with dust. There were no lights in the buildings, even with the overcast skies. A door banged repeatedly. At the periphery of his vision he was aware of the oil wells pumping on, unattended, unwatched.

  He would not go to her house only to find her gone. He would not look at her things, the relics left behind.

  It was well past dark by the time Freddy reached the top of Douglas Mountain. He had seen no human beings along the way. He hadn’t expected to.

  Where did the dinosaurs go? the teacher asked again. Most of the standard answers were covered. The cute little girl in front of Freddy, the one he had such a desperate crush on, said that God had done it, and several in the class agreed. Freddy gave the answer about the plague of caterpillars. He liked caterpillars.

  He stood above the old horse breaker’s grave. Her father’s grave. She wouldn’t have a grave. None of them would. There wouldn’t be anyone left to bury them. But maybe there’d be a quarry full of bones, and whatever might be there in the times ahead would dig them up and arrange them in display cases and dioramas.

  The metal relics in the tree clanged together in the high wind.

  It was dark below, but Freddy thought he could see shadows moving there. Reflections of himself, maybe, inverse shadows. He was sure he could hear the wild horses thundering, the Fremont Indians calling to them, the trappers, the outlaws—or maybe that was his father’s face in the darkness? Maybe that’s where he went …

  all those years …

  “I’m really the most ignorant of dinosaurs,” he whispered to the shadows. “We’re already extinct, and here I am talking to the dark. Here I am, again the one they’ve left.”

  He crouched down and leaned forward, straining his eyes.

  Nothing.

  “Don’t leave me behind!” he shouted. “Don’t abandon me!”

  He touched his head softly, then scratched at his cheeks. He had not heard an echo. “I love you …” he whispered, but he had lost the names.

  The wind seemed to rise, colder, but then he knew it was a wind inside him, and he imagined it starting somewhere near the base of his spine, sweeping up over the intestines, the liver, the heart, picking up odd cells of flesh and bone as it went, taking old memories to the brain …

  “Take me along,” he whispered.

  And he felt his head beginning to fall, as if from a great height. Pulling him somewhere.

  GIANT

  KILLERS

  His name was Walt, but he much preferred Dad, also Daddy, when there was way too much fun to be had. Had with his two little boys, James and Terry, age six and seven, more or less. Every afternoon he was their giant, also mountain, also dragon, also cloud of delicious tickle.

  “I … can’t … stop … tickling!” he cried, and his sons died in laughter.

  He came from a long line of giants, his father, his grandfather, big men who filled a room, big men in control of things, although they didn’t necessarily want to be. Big men who remembered they had once been little boys, but were not too sure of all the details. Little boys who had swollen with time and ripened into giants, and who no longer knew how to fit the tiny spaces they’d been crammed into.

  There was a great deal of responsibility in being a giant. Little people were everywhere, crawling over your shoes, getting into spaces you hadn’t even noticed were there, chattering away in their secret languages, singing of their tiny joys. A distracted little person might easily be crushed because of your one misstep.

  The giant Walt loved the little people in his house. In fact he had no words gigantic enough to express the size of his adoration. He was prouder of their small accomplishments than of the largest things he had ever done. At the same time they made him feel lonely in his isolated mental room high in the clouds. They had magically given uncertainty a physical form. They held it mysteriously in their fragile little bodies and in the regular but unpredictable pace of their hearts. He hated that they were so delicate, so ephemeral. Like fairies. Like dreams. Their impermanence horrified.

  Now and then during the long afternoons of play he became almost convinced they were imaginary creatures, the results of some enchantment, some befuddlement of the senses. If he could only turn around quickly enough he might witness their transparency, their wings, their horns. But a giant’s body is a slow, deliberate thing, hobbled by syrupy circulation and glacial reaction. So sometimes he was too rough with them, hoping to shake them free of spell and charm. He always felt terrible afterwards, and they always giggled.

  When they climbed across his gigantic shoulders or balanced on his enormous knees, he had to restrain his movements in case one might fall. Some days his fears for their safety kept him locked behind the great door to his room, silent and frozen even as they wailed and beat dramatically on the other side.

  “Come out and play with us!” they cried. “We’re so bored!” they insisted. He’d rather lose an eye than wound their feelings, but all he could manage in response was some helpless growl.

  But these minions, these Lilliputians, were not to be dissuaded. These little people were insane—he supposed it was their smallness that made them so. They maintained that chatter and dance until bed and after. Their lives were so much bigger than they could contain, and they did not know what to do with themselves.

  Unable to tolerate their high pitched whining, he would periodically leave his bed and settle on the rug in the great hall, holding himself still as they climbed and hung from his ne
ck and arms. They screamed gleefully as they beat on his massive chest and head. Sometimes he snarled, but only because they wanted him to. Most of the time he simply sat there, measuring out his patience.

  Then in a moment of possibly feigned mania he threw off his children, laid them side by side on the battered floor and hovering over them shouted “I’m going to eat you! I’m going to eat you!” over and over again, putting his lips to their necks, their arms, their bellies, pausing to breathe in their dusty little-boy smells, then considered, considered, before opening his mouth and carefully pretending to bite.

  They screamed, horrified, and laughed until they made themselves dizzy.

  They were clever, these boys, and always got him back: a box of trash tipped from the top of a door, a rug full of marbles, jacks, and tiny, slippery cars. He fell more than once, he fell more than twice, and yet all he could think was how reassuring it was, because this is the way you survive in a world full of giants.

  Today he’s a mountain they can climb. He crouches to make it easier. The first one to the top plants a flag in his eye. He knows he is every impossible job they will ever have, every unreasonable boss. He is the hole that opens in the road, the dark cavern that has no ending, the terrible disappointment at the end of the day.

  He knows that sometimes it is the giant in him that makes them feel so out of control. If they go too far he grabs and bear hugs the madness out of them. His enormous sad eyes see everything. He glares down at their pale, translucent faces from his so-different weather.

  This morning he is their origin and their desire. This afternoon he is the seemingly unyielding shape of their destiny. At evening he is their demise.

  Out of his body came everything they are, and yet to kill him would make them successful beyond their wildest dreams. Of course they should outlast him—giants are too big for their own good. In the final analysis, he is a dysfunction of disproportion.

  When sleep finally comes the giant-killers dream of the giant who lives in these mountains. They can see his legs and arms sprawled into ridges, his enormous head in that peculiar stand of trees. In his sleep and theirs they are safe to live another night inside him. But they all know that other day will come. They pack their bags with crackers and Kool-Aid for the journey. He washes himself until every thread of dead skin has vanished into the drain. They gather their bats and rackets, sharpen the tiny nails at the ends of their skinny fingers. He sits quietly on his great landscape of rug, patiently awaiting the arrival of his beautiful sons.

  THE

  COMPANY

  YOU KEEP

  Richard lived alone in an apartment above a decrepit carriage house off an alley in the oldest part of the city. He believed that once upon a time rich people had occupied the neighbourhood—that’s why there were so many large houses (now divided and re-divided) and oversize utility buildings, like his carriage house. These had been people whose faces and reputations were known, even written about. People who might sneak out in disguise from time to time for a brief vacation in anonymity, that place where he—and most people he knew—lived all their lives.

  Of course, the rich all picked up and drifted away at the first smell of shabbiness, not even waiting until that shabbiness made its actual appearance. Now he survived as best he could, the end recipient of a progression of hand-me-downs.

  He’d been in the carriage house at least twenty years. When he attempted to recollect his move-in day more precisely, he became irretrievably lost in the lies and self deceptions of memory. Surely, it couldn’t have been that long ago. Surely, it had. Surrounded as it was by taller buildings with thicker walls, and a shadowing backdrop of huge trees preserved through some rich woman’s personal campaign, it was quieter here than a room so close to the heart of the city’s commerce had any right to be.

  “People will judge you by your companions,” Richard’s father once said, responding to one of the countless confessions Richard had made concerning some trouble he and various friends had gotten themselves into. “You become known by the company

  you keep.”

  Good advice, he thought now. Very perceptive. But unbeknown to his father, somewhat off the point, as all of Richard’s confessions had been lies. There had been no trouble. No legal entanglements due to bad influences, no youthful misadventures with peers less conscientious than he, despite dozens of such tales told and retold.

  Richard would much rather have his father think he chose his companions poorly than know that Richard had no companions

  at all.

  Not that he lied out of shame. He simply didn’t want to have to explain himself to his father. Although he’d always desired friends, he wasn’t sure what friendship might mean for him. He’d imagined the state of friendship as one in which your friend understood you, supporting your dreams, empathizing with your failures and imperfections. Someone always on your side. But he’d seldom seen such friendship in the relationships of others. And over the years his idea of a friend seemed increasingly improbable, a creature more at home among unicorns and banshees. Loneliness, on the other hand, was something he could always bank on, a predictable destination at the end of every workday when solitude became total, but more than that, an attitude he might carry with him into the office, out to restaurants, even into one of the increasingly rare social gatherings he might feel duty-bound to attend. He had come to carry that loneliness around with him much the way a monk carried bliss.

  It would be difficult to say precisely when he discovered that his particular brand of solitude might not be as simple as all that. But certainly it solidified the day he met the pale man on the corner by the library.

  Richard had been returning some long-overdue travel guides. He’d been in a hurry—he didn’t like to linger in or near the library. Something about the enforced quiet, and all that wealth of information at your disposal if you knew the right questions to ask. But of course Richard never knew the right questions to ask.

  Although there’d been no particular reason to isolate this one man among the many who gathered there that day, there had been something about the posture—something vaguely anticipatory about the man’s stance—that filled Richard with a sudden, peculiarly overwhelming, and inexplicable empathy for this lone figure awash in the torrents of flesh, bone, leather, and cloth that flooded the sidewalks of this inhospitable concrete sprawl.

  For a brief moment the man had turned to face him, and Richard had been struck immediately by the paleness of the face; then a look as of recognition vaguely distorted the sheet-white features, and the man turned away with a kind of desperate speed, stumbled, and almost fell.

  Richard might have forgotten all about the incident, despite the strong impression of the man’s seemingly bloodless complexion, when several other people in that vicinity made the same stumbling move.

  Nothing remarkable or similar about these individuals in any way, both men and women, a variety of races, dress, and facial types—and yet for some reason they had stumbled almost identically.

  But stranger still had been Richard’s reaction. He felt as if he knew them, although surely he’d never seen them before. They were like him. They were meant for greater things they did not understand. They possessed capacities unrecognized, even to themselves. They had lived their lives as solitary warriors, and now at last their army had begun to form.

  He had no idea why he should think such things. His life had not altered appreciably in years. He had seen no signs of change, had heard no call. No one approached him in the street, and at work he was still known by his last name and the relative coordinates of his cubicle walls.

  When he was a boy he’d imagined himself imbued with superpowers. The drawback had always been that he didn’t know what those powers might entail. But he had faith that they would reveal themselves at the appropriate time: A child would fall from a window and he would suddenly find himself flying up to catch her. Some disaster would occur—a factory explosion, a collapsed parking garage, a ho
spital on fire—requiring his unusual strength and courage. Everyone would be surprised by his transformation, but no one more so than he.

  Richard was due for a two o’clock appointment up on the sixth floor. He found himself at the elevator in the lobby at a quarter till. He’d developed this habit of referring to himself in the third person. Found himself was a deliberate choice of words—often lately he would catch himself that way, find himself in some location or situation with no clear memory of what came immediately before.

  It was a small group gathered before the elevator, staring at the downward progress of numbers over the doors as if in suspense over the outcome. Normally he would fix his own eyes on that fascinating numeric display, but in recent weeks his habit had become to examine the members of any group he might find himself in, looking for some vague confirmation of questions he had no language for, seeking some signal or sign, some indication that he had at last landed in the right place and time.

  There was nothing remarkable about any of these people: four men and three women dressed in grey, black, and brown business attire. The one Hispanic woman who’d attempted to add colour with an orange scarf looked uncomfortable in it, as if the attempt might strangle her. One of the men was taller than the others by a few inches. He appeared to stoop further the longer they waited, as if attempting to reduce himself before anyone noticed.

  They barely left room for the exiting passengers as they rushed into the opening doors, but those they jostled betrayed no discomfort at this, nor did Richard’s group appear aware that they might have created some discomfort.

  Once inside, they fit closely together. The elevator seemed to ascend slowly, as if hauling weight well beyond its posted limits. Richard watched as the man in front of him placed a hand on his right hip, sending a narrow elbow against the Hispanic woman, who in return leaned away and placed her own right hand on her own right hip.

  The man beside her did the same. And the man beside him, all around to Richard, who, so embarrassed he found it difficult to breathe, did the same.