by Laird Barron
Problem now was Ray didn’t have Lisa anymore, had lost her long blonde hair, her freckled cleavage, her Dublin accent that wasn’t all Dublin and only came all the way out when she was drunk. He still had no clue how he blew it, but he had and she was gone. No more Friday night road trips to Princeton for ice cream, no more plying her with Zinfandel for pre-coital readings of Finnegans Wake.
A year earlier, three best friends would’ve closed ranks to carry him through a breakup. But dating Lisa meant losing Luke, and Lisa’s own departure left him without his closest confidante, the one person who stuck by him through three years of breakups. Of course Danny, his original roommate and oldest friend, had already done his own up-and-run.
But now, surprise, surprise, it was Danny to the rescue, calling out of the blue as if he already knew the situation: “Come on out to our place for the weekend! We’ll hang, have some brewskis, watch some movies, take your mind off things! It’ll be just like old times.” And there was the vague suggestion that Colleen had an available friend or sister. Or was it a cousin? Probably some steel-town girl with an ass like a Budweiser Clydesdale. Which, yeah . . . He would. No question. Even sober. He’d gone without for more than a month.
When Ray was a kid, Pennsylvania was a special destination. His dad drove the family out to the Poconos several times each summer. They’d cross the border at the Delaware Water Gap, and Dad always told him to look for the Indian chief’s face on Mt. Tammany. Ray would press his own face against the glass and twist his neck at odd angles, desperate to puzzle any kind of image at all out of that blocky granite ridge while his father cruised by without slowing. It was years before he realized the face was a profile. By then it was a disappointment all round. He was past the age where a face in a rock formation held any magic, and his dad had long since given up on him anyway, in more ways than that. Not like there was anyone better than the old man at missing what was staring him in the face: 10 year old Ray’s mom jetting off to Cali with her boss, or the way a three-pack-a-day habit was going to put him in the ground eight days before exam week Ray’s sophomore year at RU. Least his friends were there for him then.
The night’s black mist soaked through everything by the time Ray entered Lansdale proper but the streetlights were late coming on . . . city fathers probably skimping on electricity. The Interstate T’ed out, forcing him to navigate a broken grid of backstreets to reach Main. Rills of dirty snow lined them all, covering the walks on the side streets and rising up the walls of buildings.
Last time he came through here he hadn’t noticed just how many storefronts were empty. But Lisa rode with him that time, so he wasn’t paying much attention to his surroundings. He was more interested in copping a feel, while she kept shoving his hand away and telling him to keep his eyes on the road. Now he had nothing to feel, nothing to watch except the progression of empty shops, windows soaped or boarded, some even broken. The recession hit Lansdale hard as a Mike Tyson uppercut.
Though it wasn’t much after 5:00 p.m., the streets were all but empty. He passed a handful of gray, shambling figures, heads hunched against the bitter wind, and in some of the more sheltered entrances, vaguely human bundles of rags, but these scattered souls comprised the visible extent of Lansdale’s citizenry.
Here and there where a building flaunted an expanse of wall, rising one or two stories above its neighbors or turning full broadside at a corner, painted advertisements for vanished businesses still clung to the bricks like giant splotches of lichen: Nehi, Something-Something Hardware, “Hickiry” Broom and Cigar Box Factory. Lansdale was a ghost town haunted by its own lost prosperity.
Ray cruised rapidly down Main until a light caught him close to what he took for the center of town. He could’ve run it, there was no other traffic and no cops—at least none he could see. But it would suck ass to get pulled over in this shit berg, so he stopped.
Drumming his impatience against the steering wheel, Ray flicked his eyes left to right. No traffic crossed in front of him, none waited. His gaze caught on a broad building of pale brick to the left. It was vacant like so many others, “FOR RENT” sign taped askew to the inside of its door, but a pale lemony glow from inside highlighted the forlorn arc of gilt uncials that spanned the wide front window. A pair of the scrubby, leafless trees that ran up either side of Main, relics of early ‘80s optimism, blocked parts of the text, but for a moment Ray was sure he read: “EYES EXCHANGE BANK.” Which, no fucking way: that was Roche, not reality. Great. His goddamn thesis was affecting his vision now.
He moved his head forward, back, angling for a clearer view of the floating letters, even pulled up a couple feet, but only made it worse. Now he couldn’t be sure of a single word, couldn’t be sure he’d ever been sure.
But he could see that the light in the building came from a single bare bulb on a sagging wire. It revealed an interior empty except for a crooked stepladder and newspapers spread across the visible portion of the floor. And the shadows. They registered all at once: elongated inky streaks unfurling over the dim, scattered sheets of newsprint. He was positive they weren’t there initially—their appearance was as sudden as if some person or persons unseen hurled broad streamers of black velvet from the near end of the empty lobby. But Ray saw no one. The light was poor, but enough to be almost certain the building’s interior was vacant. And still the shadows moved, angling over each other and lengthening until they stretched up the back wall to the ceiling. Probably vagrants who wanted out of the cold and found an open door, but kept hidden from his sight by some trick of architecture and optics. He oughtta report them. But to whom? He had no idea where to find the local police station. Not that he could picture himself strolling into a Pennsy cop shop to report invisible bums in an empty bank.
The patterns of their movements reminded Ray of searchlights over a dark cityscape, except these were beams of moving, searching darkness. He watched them, forgetting the traffic light, until all at once they poured out from the front window, over the dirty sidewalk and straight toward his car.
His forehead struck the wheel before bouncing back against the headrest. Outside a dark tree trunk not much thicker than his arm rose above a visible crease in the car’s crumpled hood, faintly backlit by the glow from his headlamps. He was on the sidewalk, the better part of a block west of the bank. On the left side of Main. He’d traveled over two hundred feet, crossed the center line, popped the curb, hit a tree. He recalled none of it. The burnt-syrup smell of hot antifreeze stung his nostrils and he knew the radiator was probably leaking.
Had he zoned out, fallen asleep at the wheel? No one had stopped to check him out. No cops, no cars, no pedestrians. Adrenalin took hold and he got wild, restarted the engine and threw the car in reverse, bouncing back over the curb with a loud scrape from the undercarriage. He hoped it wasn’t the oil pan or the tranny. The Slant-6 Duster that served him all through Reagan’s second term and now into Bush’s first wasn’t making it much farther without help. Danny and Colleen’s place was close. His friend would fix the radiator and whatever else was screwed up—he had the skills, he had the technology. This visit might be serendipitous after all. Danny would make it all better. And that was all Ray wanted now: someone to make it better.
Continuing down otherwise empty Main, he looked left and right into storefronts, compelled to search for more of the long shadows. Several times he thought he glimpsed the interplay of dark streaks within other buildings that proclaimed themselves empty, down alleys, even once in a recessed doorway. He wondered if the whole town was infested with the mobile strips of darkness and he’d only now become attuned to their presence. Were they a trick of the light? But there hardly was any light now. Still they showed, dark on dark. Ray shook his head to clear his vision and fixed his gaze straight ahead. He didn’t need this. Whatever caused the shadows, they were not his problem, not something he wanted to see. He had other issues to deal with. Plenty. He kept his eyes on the road and soon emerged f
rom the moribund downtown into the side streets that led to Danny and Colleen’s crummy apartment.
Ray was in full panic mode by the time he steered off Main. His heart pounded and it was all he could do not to pin the accelerator. He glanced at the scribbled sheet from his notebook on the passenger seat, then snatched it up and pressed it to the wheel with his right hand. He’d forgotten the way since that day he helped Danny and Colleen move, so he needed to ask for new directions over the phone. But when he came up on their apartment complex a few minutes later, he immediately recognized the plain brick U, a blocky three-story magnet drawing him back to his last significant human contact. He pulled in beside Danny’s restored ’72 Challenger, braking at the last second so as not to slam the lot’s grimy border of plowed snow. Snow got like rock when it was hard and crusted. The front of his vehicle was already fucked, and the snow would sure as shit mash it worse. No telling how much more his radiator could take before it was a complete write-off. No need to compound his problems.
He got out and inspected the damage in the scant light of a single flood high up the side of the building. It was enough to see the deep vertical crease that traversed the grill. Viscous coolant dripped steadily to the pavement. No question the damage breached the radiator. At least the headlights were intact. But what about him? He never blacked out before. Not sober anyway. True, the anxiety attacks came more often since Lisa split—but he never lost consciousness during those.
He cursed and muttered a line of verse: “my wife my car my color and myself.” The final entry in Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, an accounting of everything the poet had lost by then, dying in his hospital bed, jaundiced with liver failure, car repoed, wife dead . . .
This wasn’t like that though. Lisa was gone, but not dead. And Danny would fix his car. He still had his health, of course. He hustled to the entrance and up the stairwell, gripping the rail with one hand and probing lightly at the bruise on his forehead with the other.
Seven rings before Danny answered the door, and when he did, the wave of musty reeking air that rushed out drove Ray back a step. Rank mildew, mixed with something worse. Colleen must not be much into cleaning. Not surprising. He hadn’t pegged her for the type.
Not much of a cook, either. Even in the dim light, Ray could see Danny had lost weight. Slouching and shirtless, skin gone gray and sheened with sweat, short greasy curls glued to his forehead, the man looked like deep-fried shit.
After a blank, awkward moment, Danny stepped aside for Ray to enter. “Oh hey man, come on in. Have a seat. Lemme get you a cold one.” Random sputtering candles provided the only light, but it was enough for Ray to see the junk piled everywhere. The place was a goddamn mess. He squeezed into the only clear space on the sofa. Loose stacks of women’s clothes took up the rest. Heaps and boxes and mounds of clothes and other personal effects sprawled across the floor. The apartment looked about the same as it had when Luke, Lisa, and Ray had first helped Danny and Colleen move in—except for the trash. Had they even unpacked?
Danny returned from the kitchen, an open Bud in each hand. Ray held his to his nose, half-expecting the taste to be as off as the stifling smell in the room, but all he smelled was hops, and the beer was cold and crisp. He relaxed a little. Danny shoved another pile of folded clothes off the easy chair so he could sit.
“So where’s Colleen? Work?”
“Ah. Yeah. Well, basically man, Colleen ain’t here no more. She split. So we’re kind of in the same boat, you know, you and me.”
“She dumped you?”
“Just up and left, man. That’s why I’m glad you’re here. You and me can help each other through this.”
“What the hell? When did all this happen?”
“Oh, ‘bout a month ago.”
“A month ago? You made out like she was still here when you asked me to come down. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Yeah, well I was kinda thinkin’ you might not wanna come if you knew. On the other hand, you never liked her much anyway, so I figured you wouldn’t mind once you got here.”
“So I guess you won’t be hooking me up with her cousin or sister or whatever? What was that all about?”
“Sorry, bro. I just really needed some company, you know? But hey man, if you want chicks, we can go to Pizza Uno. We’ll find some chicks there, guaranteed.”
Ray stared across the room at his friend. Danny looked ill and definitely needed a bath. It bothered Ray to see the man this way: Danny who had always been so fastidious, who even when he was working as a mechanic kept a special brush handy for scrubbing the black grease and dirty engine oil from under his nails. No way he was gonna be picking up any chicks tonight. None with eyes or a nose anyway. And Ray wasn’t going to get any action hanging with him. He really shoulda stayed home. Now his car was fucked and he was looking at doubling down on his loneliness. Or worse.
On the plus side, he at least had someone to drink with, and that was what he and Danny had always done best together. So after finishing their Buds in the parking lot as Danny inspected the damage to Ray’s car, they climbed in the old Challenger and headed to the local mall. It was a relief for Ray just to get out of that reeking apartment.
“How the hell does this dump support a mall anyway? From what I saw downtown, the whole place is pretty dead.”
“Well, people ‘round here say it was the mall killed the downtown. Then again, the mall ain’t exactly hopping neither. Hey, at least it ain’t Scranton. Remember Schmitty?”
Schmitty was a grizzled old laryngectomy in Middlebrook, Ray and Danny’s hometown, a local character who walked the neighborhood and periodically wandered into the service station where Danny worked and Ray joined him most evenings to hang out and drink. No matter what the topic, the old man inevitably began reminiscing about his formative years in Scranton, and when he did, he always came to his tag line: “When I was your age, you could get a blowjob for a quarter in Scranton.”
Neither Ray nor Danny had ever felt the need to test the assertion for themselves, but this and several of Schmitty’s other buzzing pronouncements had entered the long catalog of their personal in-jokes.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Ray replied, “Right now I might go for a 25 cent BJ.”
“Pizza Uno, that’s the place, I’m tellin’ you man.”
“We’ll see man. We’ll see.”
The drive took less than 10 minutes, but they each managed to kill two more beers along the way. The Montgomery County Mall occupied a low rise west of town in an otherwise isolated area. Leafless second growth forest surrounded the hill, the mall, and its broad but almost empty parking lot.
As Danny wove up the serpentine access road, movement to the right caught Ray’s attention. A high tier of business signs rose from the crusted snow on a single whitewashed pole, and the second sign from the bottom was gliding smoothly to the left: “eyelab.” Six thick sans-serif letters, all lower case, black on a yellow background. This gimmick seemed an extravagant expense for any business in such a depressed area. As Ray watched, the sign reached its apogee halfway out and began sliding back. It passed the halfway mark on the right and continued on until it floated unsuspended in the night. “Whoa, fuck man . . . do you see that?” he asked Danny, but at the same moment, he realized the eyelab sign stood on a separate pole behind the others, that the illusion of its motion was the result of its position behind a gap in the first tier of signs and their car’s progress up the mall’s rising, curving entrance drive. Probably also the three beers he sucked down so fast. Still, it was trippy—what were the odds against everything being positioned like that? And the confluence of “eyelab” with “EYES EXCHANGE BANK”. . .of both with Maurice Roche, Poe, and the central focus of his thesis . . . he did not like that at all. Synchronicity could go fuck itself for all he cared right now.
Danny parked near the glass doors of JCPenney’s, which appeared to be this mall’s sole anchor. “Pizza U
no’s down the other end. There’s no parking there. Probably ‘cause it’s the only restaurant and they want people to walk through the whole place to get there.”
Ray followed his friend inside. They traversed the department store in less than a minute and entered the mall proper. Ray kept his attention on the central corridor and avoided looking closely at the stores to either side. He did not want to see any more shadows, not here where he had no vehicle to provide even the illusion of a barrier. What he saw instead was too dreary for reassurance: dry fountains, dusty plastic replicas of tropical plants, abandoned kiosks that should have been selling smoked almonds or blown glass art, shit like that.
They encountered only a handful of shoppers, most headed for the Penney’s exit. The conversation had never really gotten going in the car, and neither of them said a word until they were well into the mall. After several false starts, clearing their throats and grunting, it was Danny who at last managed a legit opener. He asked Ray about his MA thesis, if he still had the same topic. Not that Danny remembered it. The best he could manage was, “That thing about Poe.” Even that much surprised Ray.
So Ray ran with it. Anything to fill the awkward silence. “Yeah, that’s it. Working title is A Long Shadow: Poe’s Legacy in France. I’m focusing on the way Poe controlled his readers’ perceptions to create optical illusions in print. And how the French picked up on that, starting with Baudelaire and Mallarmé. For Poe, think of “The Sphinx” or “The Man of the Crowd.”
Danny nodded as if he understood. Ray knew he had no fucking clue.
“Or take this scene in Pym for example, Poe’s only novel, where the narrator and his friends are trapped on the hull of a wrecked ship. They’re desperate: no water, no food. Finally they see another ship headed right towards them. There’s a guy on the bow smiling and nodding and waving at them . . . only when it gets closer, they see the guy is dead and tangled in the ropes, and a big-ass seagull is pecking out his brains, which was why he was moving. That’s classic Poe horror: what’s worse than being trapped in your own skull because your own eyes betrayed you?”
