Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1

by Laird Barron

  When Prin realized the change in me—which is to say, when she sat down to the computer and saw one of the e-mails from my ex open on the screen—she attributed it to that cliché of our parents’ generation, the mid-life crisis. This was during the first conversation we had over the phone, which had to wait a week after I came downstairs to the sight of her suitcase standing at the front door and the sting of her hand slapping my face. Had the twins not already left for their year abroad in Paris, no doubt they, too, would have been packed and waiting in the car. My cheek hot from her blow, all I could do was ask her what was wrong, what had happened. Of course, the instant my eyes fell on that black case, its rolling-handle extended, the explanation flashed through my brain: She found out. As she was stamping out the door, Prin’s “Why don’t you ask Joyce?” confirmed that she in fact had found out. A check of the computer showed my e-mail account open, the latest semi-flirtatious message from my ex on the screen. It had been forwarded, as had all the others from her, but I deleted them, anyway, then logged out of my e-mail, which I was certain I’d done the previous night—though it appeared I’d been mistaken.

  That, or I’d been trying to force the moment to its crisis. I wasn’t sure. The last few years, I’d largely abandoned the nuances of introspection in favor of the simplicity of action. Yet there had been something almost paradoxically private about my acts; rarely had I considered them in relation to anyone except myself. Mostly, I had luxuriated in the excess of emotion that had given rise to them and to which they, in turn, contributed. Now, left alone, my thoughts turned outward, to Prin, to the marriage which had canted suddenly to one side, its hull torn by the iceberg it had scraped against—the half-submerged danger I had been steering it toward. Back from the job at which I was subdued, distracted, I wandered the empty house, examining my behavior of the last several months—years—with the eye of an investigator attempting to reconstruct the precise sequence of events that had led to the jagged ice piecing the steel plates, the ocean’s cold water pouring through the gap. I could identify a lengthy report’s worth of instances, large and small, when Prin and I had been out of sync with one another, but I could not assemble those moments into a coherent and adequate narrative, one that explained not just my ongoing, secret communication with my ex, but my withdrawal from my children, my belligerence at work. There was only the great animal baying inside me, a torrent of emotion.

  For the first time since I’d run out after the twins, however, that terrible awe was challenged by another feeling, by a fear more prosaic in its origins, but no less potent in its effects. Prin, Nina and Eddie, even my job: all had come to seem incidental to my life, barely-connected to its actual substance, to the fabulous tree burning in my memory. As if a lens had dropped in front of my eyes, I saw my wife, my children, my work, not as ornaments, but as the girders and beams giving my days what shape and order they had. To be the inhabitant of such a structure seemed the remarkable thing, the momentary tree and huge silhouette typical of a world that tended to formlessness and chaos. With my actions, I had steadily undermined the base of that construction, to the point that it was swaying perilously. How near to collapse my life was, I couldn’t estimate with much accuracy, but it was certainly close enough for me to be overtaken by crushing sadness at the prospect of its fall. I was afraid, not of the sublime unknown, but for the domestic familiar, and the emotion transfixed me like a pin through an insect.

  So absorbed was I by what appeared the imminent and inevitable end of my life as I had known it, that I barely registered the approach of Hurricane Eileen. Prior to Prin’s discovery of my correspondence with my ex, I had watched the reports of the storm sweeping the northwest edge of the Caribbean, on path to make landfall somewhere between mid-Florida and north-Georgia, its course after that likely a coastal one, though the specifics would have to wait until the storm drew nearer. I heard the cashiers talking about the hurricane in the break room, directed customers to the bottled water, the propane tanks, the portable generators, agreed with my assistant manager’s suggestion that we try to scare up some more portable jennies from the warehouse, but none of it registered as it would have only days before. I was absorbed by the fact that four days had passed since Prin’s departure, and there was still no reply from her to any of the e-mails I’d sent, one a day. I wasn’t sure if she’d headed to her parents, who were close but would require some measure of explanation, or to one of her friends’, or to a motel. There’d been no word from the twins, either, which was probably due to late-adolescent obliviousness, but which I was afraid signified that Prin had contacted them, already.

  Not until the end of my long conversation with Prin a week after she’d left, when she asked me if I were prepared for Eileen, did it dawn on me that this storm might be a cause for concern. A search online turned up articles about the mandatory evacuations of low-lying areas of New York City, the extra utility workers placed on standby, the state of emergency that had been declared for the area. Another click of the mouse brought me a satellite photo of the hurricane itself, a vast comma of thick, gray clouds whose margins reached from Virginia to Massachusetts. Rendered in the National Weather Service’s color-coded pixels, Eileen was a wall of deep green sweeping around bands of yellow and orange, all of it arcing in front of the well-defined blank of the eye. Downgraded from a Category 2 to a Category 1 hurricane, the storm was still considered a serious threat to the City. Already, the first wave of showers was washing into the region, the winds were rising, the TV stations throughout the region had deployed whatever reporters had drawn the short straws to the locations that had been deemed suitably photogenic—the majority of which appeared to be located on or near the beach. Outside my window, the weather was quiet. I considered a run to Wal-Mart to pick up a few supplies, only to reject the idea as so much media-inspired hysteria. Likely, the storm would either skirt the City or miss it entirely, leaving me with a portable propane stove I could have bought for half the price using my employee discount at work. Anyway, I was preoccupied with my talk with Prin, the upshot of which was that, while far from happy, she accepted my assurance that my e-mail exchanges with my ex had not led to any other kinds of exchanges, and was willing to consider continuing our marriage. At least for the moment, our life together was not going to come crashing down; though how much repair would be required remained to be seen.

  When I woke late the next morning, it was to wind moaning over the house, rain tapping on the bedroom windows. My prediction had been correct: the hurricane had missed the City. Instead, Eileen had swung inland, rolling over northern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, losing strength as it went, until, by the time it reached the Hudson Valley, it had been demoted to a tropical storm. The difference, however, was academic, since even as a tropical storm, Eileen stirred the air into gusts that pushed against the house in long shrieks, drove the rain horizontally. Lightning stammered, an engine trying to catch, while thunder rumbled like the edges of continents scraping against each other. The cable was out, which was no surprise, but the power was on, which I wouldn’t have expected. I found the transistor radio Prin had bought me last Christmas, slid out the antenna, and turned it on. Everything was already closed or closing. Whoever was responsible for such things had prohibited all non-essential travel. The storm had stalled overhead. Widespread power outages had been reported and more were anticipated; high wind advisories, flash-flood warnings, and tornado watches had been issued. Our house sat on a low ridge, paralleled by other ridges, so I wasn’t worried about much except maybe one of the trees in the front yard falling into it—though none stood tall enough to threaten more than a prolonged inconvenience. Prin’s parents’ house, however—to which she had retreated—was separated from the Hudson by a modest lawn which terminated in a short slope to a narrow and rocky beach. On top of everything else, Eileen was supposed to draw the Hudson up beyond flood stage. I wasn’t sure what the implications of this were for my in-laws’ place, but it was a matter for
concern. Our telephone was tied to our cable, though, as was our internet access, and since Prin had taken the emergency cell-phone with her, there was no way for me to contact her. I toyed with the idea of running out to the truck and navigating the deluge to Prin’s parents’, but couldn’t decide how much peril my wife was actually in. With the slope of the lawn, her mom and dad’s house was up maybe seven or eight feet from the river. Was that high enough? Not to mention, how would it look when I was pulled over for being on the road in the storm, as I probably would be?

  There was nothing to do except to remain where I was and wait out the storm. On the kitchen table, there were stacks of paperwork I had been ignoring for a couple of weeks before Prin had left: sales figures, projections, and goals; a rundown of the coming season’s new products, with suggestions on how best to promote them; three in-house applications for the assistant manager position that had recently opened, and another thirty-five applications for the single part-time job we’d advertised. It was the kind of work I daily found it more difficult to undertake, but which, given my need to fill the next several hours with some type of activity, was not without its use. I set up the coffee maker, switched it on, and dug a set of candles and a box of matches out of the junk drawer while the kitchen filled with the sharp odor of hot coffee. Then I settled down at the table and set to work.

  Of course I wanted to be outside, letting the storm envelop me. Before I had processed the sounds to which I’d awakened, the beast in my chest had known them for what they were and been pawing the ground, pressing its thick shoulder against the wall surrounding it. Over the years, the tail ends of a few hurricanes had struck the area glancing blows on their way out to sea, but as far as I could remember, Eileen was the first storm of this magnitude to line us up in its sights like this. The house shifted and shuddered with the thunder; the bushes in the front yard cringed at the rain beating down on them; the woods behind the house creaked and cracked as the wind pushed them back and forth. The shrill, electric trill of the Emergency Broadcast System spilled from the transistor radio, and a woman’s voice, sounding oddly muffled, announced that a tornado had been spotted on the other side of Wiltwyck, maybe ten miles away. As the voice went on warning about the dangers of a tornado and advising the best spots in a house for sheltering from one, the tips of my fingers, my toes, tingled, my cheeks flushed, and what felt like a space high in my skull opened. When I stood to take a break, I crossed to the kitchen windows and pressed one hand to each. Outside, Eileen was hurling itself against everything, was scouring the very air, wearing it thinner, bringing that other place, the home of the huge silhouette, the astonishing tree, nearer. It was close; I was aware of it at the edge of the space in my head, like something you know you have forgotten, a gap whose outlines you can almost picture. If I threw open the porch door and dashed out into the rain, into the woods, might I not find it? Might I not pass into it? I went so far as to unlock the back door and walk out onto the porch. A gust of wind made me stagger, while the rain drilled my arms, my neck, my head. Lightning filled the air in brilliant sheets; thunder shivered the porch under my feet. Terror as pure and pitiless as a bird of prey, as an eagle plucking a fish out of the water, gripped me. Here I was, on the verge. Already, my hair was soaked, my shirt and jeans drenched. How easy it would be to go the rest of the way into the storm, to let my fear carry me into it.

  I couldn’t say what returned me inside. One moment, I was leaning on the porch railing, squinting through the rain at the woods; the next, I had shut and locked the back door and was making my soggy way to the bathroom, where I pulled off my wet clothes and stepped into a hot shower. The terror that had seized me had not relaxed its hold; I could still sense the other place immanent in the air. The thing in my chest bellowed, ramming its head against its prison. But I stood letting the hot water chase the rain’s chill from my skin, and when the water began to lose its heat, I turned it off, toweled dry, and went in search of fresh clothes. Once I’d dug another pair of jeans and long-sleeved t-shirt out of my dresser, I made myself an early lunch and ate it while I resumed my paperwork. At any time, I could have left the house for the storm. I didn’t. It was as if—the very extremity of the emotion raging through me made it feel suddenly unreal. In comparison, the kitchen table at which I was seated, its top scuffed and scored from years of the twins’ employing it as a workbench for school projects, felt solid, as much as the countertop behind me, which bore the scars of all the fruit, the vegetables, the loaves of bread I’d sliced through without using the cutting board. The refrigerator whose freezer tended to ice-up, so that it required defrosting at least twice a year; the electric oven that cooked too hot and that we’d been threatening to replace with a gas range for as long as we’d lived here; the coffee maker whose red CLEAN light blinked no matter how recently we’d cleaned it: none of these things, or any of the others filling the house, was as vivid as the tree I’d glimpsed through the lightning—but they seemed present in a manner I hadn’t recognized before, and that was somehow sufficient to keep me working at the table.

  By early afternoon, Eileen was starting to ebb. By mid-afternoon, the rain had diminished to a light shower. By late afternoon, the storm had slid to the north and east, Vermont and a corner of Massachusetts. I was congratulating myself for not having lost power when the lights went out. Exasperating, yes, but in a way that would I could tell would become funny when I related the event to friends—to Prin. Prin—without warning, I wanted nothing else than to see my wife, to gather her into my arms, to take her someplace, a hotel, a bed-and-breakfast, a motel on the edge of a highway, where we could be alone. I could not think of anything that was more important than this. I checked to be certain I hadn’t left anything on that I shouldn’t have—I hadn’t, but she would ask, and I wanted to be able to say I’d looked—grabbed the keys to the truck, and locked the door behind me.

  From the radio, I knew that 213, the route I usually took to my in-laws, was flooded. If I hadn’t heard it on the news, I would have expected it: there was a stream that flowed right under the road about a mile towards Wiltwyck, and I imagined it would have submerged, if not carried away, the road there. What the news hadn’t reported, and I hadn’t anticipated, was that the road would be closed about a half-mile in the other direction, towards Huguenot, where the picturesque waterfall that descended from the hillside to the left had become a roaring Niagara. It had undermined the road it typically trickled below to the extent that the road’s collapse was judged imminent, and the police had blocked it off already with sawhorses and barrels. I might have risked walking or running, across it, but the truck was far too heavy for any such adventuring. It appeared the only way to my in-laws would be to navigate the back roads that wound through the hills and mountains between here and the Hudson. While this wasn’t something I did on a daily basis, I was reasonably sure I could manage it. When the twins had been infants, the one, guaranteed way to put them to sleep at the same time had been to strap them into their carseats and take them for a ride. As a result, I’d traveled the majority of roads between Huguenot and Wiltwyck, so, although Prin had the GPS in her car, I wasn’t too concerned about being able to find my way. I turned the truck around and drove back to where one of the side roads intersected it at the bottom of a steep rise. I powered up the slope, and set off to join my wife.

  As the crown flies, it was three and half, four miles from our front door to Prin’s parents. Probably that distance doubled if you had to traverse it by car. And if the roads that vehicle was following had just been swept by a tropical storm, that seven or eight miles doubled, maybe tripled. The roads in here were narrow, with no shoulder, and bordered by more streams, swamps, and ponds than I’d realized, all of which had swollen and spilled their confines with the season’s worth of rain that last fourteen hours had brought. Water lapped the edges of the road in some places; in others, it slid across in a glassy sheet; in still others, it covered the road in a new lake. After six, I lost co
unt of the number of times I shifted into reverse for another three-point turn. One road was blocked by a massive tree that had fallen across it; another was fenced by power lines, one of whose poles had tilted toward the road; a third had mostly-disappeared under the hillside that had dissolved onto it. To either side, I saw houses damaged. Here was a raised ranch whose living room window had been staved in by the tree that had toppled through it. Here was a split-level built on a hill, its foundation laid bare by the rain. Here was a cape, an island in the center of a broad lake whose surface was ruffled by the wind.

  When I drove across the black water, I thought I knew where I was. After almost reaching 9W, the major north-south route along the Hudson’s western shore—which was not, as far as I could tell from the radio’s updates, closed—a new stream galloping over the road had forced me to turn around. Feeling as if I were confined in a gigantic maze, I backtracked almost to my starting point for yet another try at the puzzle. It was not yet dark, but the sky was losing its light. On the right, a road t-junctioned the one I was driving. I’d noticed it on the way out, but had ignored it because I’d thought it joined another side road that emptied onto 213 this side of the flooding. Approaching it from this direction, however, I thought I remembered that this road in fact looped in the other direction, intersecting another side road that would bring me to 9W. It was worth a try, so I turned onto it.