Unsound (A Lei Crime Companion Novel)

by Neal, Toby

  Chapter 9

  The next time I woke, I could tell by the sharp shape of the shadows in the cabin that it was evening. I sat up. Headache. Dry mouth. I went into the kitchen and wrestled the pot to the sink, poured the cool, boiled water into a series of abandoned water bottles from under the sink. No need for refrigeration—all I had to do was put them outside the door.

  I drained one of the bottles and poured more water over the dehydrated prunes the Sports Authority woman had recommended “to keep things moving.” While they soaked, I took a big piece of jerky outside.

  The valley was the same, but the angle of the light was different. That was about all the change this place ever saw on a daily basis.

  I meditated on that awhile and considered whether it was too late in the day for coffee. Decided it wasn’t; time was a construct used by people who had to keep a schedule, and I no longer did.

  I made that cup of coffee, ate the jerky, and the body was temporarily appeased. I had brought my phone, useless now, but it had a camera in it. I put the boots back on and walked carefully and gently down a meandering path that led to one of the cinder cones.

  I climbed it and watched the most spectacular sunset I’d ever seen do a wild, heavenly lightshow in a blaze of Technicolor drama, unfettered by anything so mundane as smog, vog, or fog. It made me dizzy and hurt my eyes, but I took a couple of totally inadequate phone pictures anyway.

  Cold and approaching dark finally drove me back toward the cabin—and as I tromped along, I realized there wasn’t going to be anyone waiting for me there, fixing dinner, lighting the stove. No Hector, even, with his questioning tail. No one knew where I was.

  I was truly alone for the first time in my life.

  Terror stole the breath from my lungs. I felt invisible, as if I’d never really existed and didn’t really exist now. I found myself lumbering to the cabin at a run, a graceless rapid stumbling with sore legs, big boots, and fear reactivating the awful personal stink.

  As that lip-curling stench bloomed around me, it put me back in my body and made me feel real again.

  I found myself scanning around the doorway for something left by the stalker—but there was nothing. This is the beginning of detox; common symptoms are anxiety and paranoia, Constance reminded me as I climbed the step and took hold of the knob. Still, I wished I’d remembered to carry my pepper spray with me. It was stowed in a side pocket on the backpack.

  I opened the door slowly, standing back and ready to run. Of course, the cabin was empty and echoing, only slightly warm from leftover sun and the log I’d burned so many hours ago. I was definitely paranoid—but I wouldn’t give in to it and carry the damn pepper spray around, when it was being alone that was scaring me. I got another log going.

  I ate the soft-soaked prunes standing at the sink. Drank another quart of water. Put another pot of water on to boil—water was going to be my salvation in the days to come. Maybe I could even take a bath. That marginally happy idea got me through another joyless trek to the outhouse, this time with a ziplock bag I could use to put the toilet paper in.

  Back at the cabin, which was warming up from the wood-burning stove, I stripped to naked at the sink and washed my reeking body with dish soap found under the sink and the blue T-shirt I’d worn, sacrificing it for the duration.

  It had been a while since I’d really noticed my body. It wasn’t in good shape. I’d always had one of those athletic tennis player builds—tennis being a game I did enjoy—but now my breasts had collapsed into pale little wallets that dangled on my bony rib cage. I’d always had pretty, muscular legs, and this was the first time I ever remembered seeing a gap between my thighs and knees, and the meat of them was jiggly and loose.

  I looked like what I knew I’d look like in a rest home if I lived that long—a flask of bones held together with muscle and sinew that were too stubborn to disappear just yet. This was bottom, I reminded myself. I had to get sober before I could get healthy. But I wept as I washed my poor, abused flesh, the skin the color of animal fat rendered to make candles on a farm.

  I put on a pair of sweatpants, the thick socks, a sweatshirt. This was my other set of clothes, and it now had to last the rest of the week. It was okay, though. I was clean and ready for the night ahead.

  I found a pot to pee in, since constant trips to the outhouse through the dark seemed impossible—and realized I was actually using that hackneyed phrase in a real sentence.

  I had a pot to pee in. I laughed out loud, and it bounced around the cabin and came back to boomerang off me like a sonar ping. It was the detox, I told myself. I was having a little auditory hallucination.

  I had Advil. I had a lineup of bottles of boiled water. I had my sleeping bag, and I was clean. This was as good as it would get. I used the flashlight to read over Kamani’s file as I lay in the Naugahyde-covered bunk

  I lifted my head. I heard something—a rhythmic crunching sound, like someone was approaching. I switched off the flashlight. I hadn’t locked the doors, and that suddenly seemed a ridiculous oversight.

  I swung my legs out of the sleeping bag. It was very dark, but I could see the outlines of the windows, limned in moonlight. I crept to the front door, twisted the dead bolt. I heard the steps outside, crunching on the path, as loud as if they were going through the room—then a muffled swishy sound—someone was walking on the grass.

  I realized the back door was still unlocked.

  I ran across the room and through the kitchen by feel and memory and felt over the surface of the back door, patting it frantic and blind until I felt the parallel knob of the dead bolt and turned it.

  Unless they had the ranger code, I was safe.

  I crouched below the level of the windows, out of sight, listening. I heard the crunching again, and then the swishing, and then nothing. A series of people were walking by the cabin? The main trail led past it, but it was a bit of a jag to come up to the cabin. I shouldn’t be able to hear them.

  I heard the steps approaching again, steady and the same tempo as the others. With my eyes adjusted, I was pretty sure I’d be able to see whoever it was. I stood cautiously and looked out through the kitchen windowpanes. The moon was high, and the desert floor of the crater was bathed in otherworldly light. The steps crunched to the front of the cabin and then swished by where I stood, moving on past the window through the grass.

  No one was there.

  The scene before me was starkly, beautifully empty, moonlight brazing the outlines of every stone, rock, and blade of grass. I remembered the night marchers, a Hawaiian legend of warriors slain in battle who walked the land at night in a ghostly reenactment.

  I must be hallucinating.

  The hairs all over my body had risen and I trembled, perspiration springing up under my armpits to sully my clean sweatshirt. This is not acceptable, Constance said. You’re going to need something stronger than Advil to get through the night.

  I turned on the flash and dug in the backpack, found my Advil bottle, shook out the brown glossy pellets until I found several big, white Vicodin hiding in the bottom.

  I took two, tossing them back with a swallow of water, climbed into my sleeping bag, and clamped my eyes shut, wishing I had earplugs or a pillow to wrap around my head. I had neither, and the night marchers passed by with terrible regularity until my friend Vicodin dragged me under into sleep.

  I drank that first cup of coffee in the pearly predawn of day three. My brain felt spongy, like a computer with a virus, glitching and rebooting whenever it felt like it. The act of thinking reminded me of the hunt-and-peck typing of my master’s thesis so long ago on an old Olympia: current trends in attribution of attractiveness to facial structures in males.

  I still remembered how hard it had been to come up with something scientific-sounding to describe that early fascination I’d had with handsome men—a thesis that had ended with a close-up anatomical study of Richard. His cheekbones, bold jaw, crystalline blue eyes under symmetrical brow ridges . . . Hi
s beauty had intersected with my attribution of positive characteristics to his looks. I saw that now.

  I’d always had a keen aesthetic sense, and it carried me past my ruminations as my bruised-feeling eyes wandered over the sweep of crater before me. I could almost see the molecules of the air warming before me—the heat of the rising sun making them vibrate faster, light reflecting on minuscule particles of matter, capturing the process and transmuting it into bands of yellow and pink that brightened the stark sky.

  A gentle honking, increasing in volume, heralded the return of my nene friends—but I didn’t believe it was really them until I saw their graceful black arcs against the morning sky. They hove in and splashed down on the lush patch of grass in front of the cabin, trotting toward me, folding their wings and chuckling a greeting.

  “Hi, guys.” The nene bobbed their heads, sidling toward the water spigot and pantomiming drinking. I got up, turned it on for them and watched them paddling their beaks in the drops, lifting their heads so the water ran down their graceful throats.

  Knowing about delirium tremens was definitely not the same as experiencing it. This morning my skin was exquisitely tender, and the thousands of tiny fibers of my clothing felt rough as sharkskin. Tiny spiders were crawling over me, and I looked, for the hundredth time, at my arms. Still nothing there since the last time I looked two minutes ago.

  I needed to do something today, get out, get my mind off the night that didn’t bear remembering and my current problem with crawlies. The nene dipped their heads, making gentle commentary as they finished drinking. One of them sampled the edge of my sleeping bag, cocked his head at me.

  “No food,” I said, startled by the volume of my voice. “I got nothing for you, guys.”

  They seemed to accept this and walked away, grazing. The dawn gilded their feathers.

  I went back inside the cabin. My paranoia was still pretty bad—I felt like someone was watching me, and I couldn’t stop myself from checking under the beds, in the Pres-to-Log closet, outside the back door.

  Perhaps what I could do for a project was make a video log with my phone of this whole thing—something I could play when I was tempted to drink again. A note to self from “detoxing me” to “tempted to drink” me. I was semishocked my brain had enough juice left in it to come up with such a great idea.

  I turned the phone on. As usual there was no signal, but I set it on the battered table and sat in front of it on video mode. Talked to my future self.

  “Caprice, you’re a wreck. You’ve been given another chance at life. You’ve just been through the longest, darkest, scariest night of your life. Auditory hallucinations—the night marchers went by this cabin like clockwork all night long. Paranoia. Anxiety. The shakes. Right now you’ve got skin hallucinations.” I held my arm up in front of the blinking camera. “See the chicken skin? Something’s crawling on me right now.”

  I looked into that ruthless camera eye. “I’m doing it. I’m suffering right now so you, me in the future, can have a better life. Don’t fuck it up.”

  I reached over and hit Off.

  This was just what I needed. Making this video was the perfect project for the day.

  I shot footage of the cabin, the bottles of water, my precious Advil bottle. I took off my clothes in front of the warm woodstove and shot video of my ravaged body. Then I put the clothes and boots back on, drank my second cup of coffee (much weaker as I reused the grounds), and with some prunes, jerky, and a granola bar, I set off down a side trail to see what I could explore.

  Kapala`oa Cabin is not the farthest cabin out, but it’s far enough to make things interesting in terms of nearby trails, which meandered in various directions from the main trail turnoff. I walked down the path I knew I’d need to take the day after tomorrow to Holua Cabin, the one I’d be staying in for three more days.

  So far, I hadn’t met any other people hiking even though the ranger had said there was a fair amount of foot traffic through the crater.

  I soon left the scrubby grass behind and entered a sweep of astral pebbles, littered with boulders that looked like they’d fallen from space. Cinder cones jutted around me like terrestrial boils, their steep contoured sides streaked with a range of colors from umber to purple. I paused to shoot little video panoramas, even picking up a handful of bright orange pumice, edges of stone light and sharp as my grandmother’s handmade lace. I videoed the pumice in my hand.

  One of my grandmothers had been Swedish, and that crocheted lace she did was amazing. I’d always wanted to learn how.

  No, you didn’t, Constance said. You always were more interested in people.

  Constance was still piping up, with her unique and powerful voice. I’d kept her silent for so long—but in my physical and emotional extremity, I found her strength, her definite opinions comforting.

  “You always knew what to do, Constance,” I murmured aloud. “Even when it was a bad idea.”

  A vivid memory came to me—the time when we were six and Constance decided we should do a “twin” song-and-dance performance for the school talent show. I’d coped by pretending I was Constance, and still I’d flubbed the words and tripped over my feet. That was the beginning of my rebellion against Constance’s stream of ideas for the two of us.

  I hadn’t been sure who I was, but I’d been sure I wasn’t her.

  I stopped and turned the video on. The sun was filling the crater with powdered light, and the crawlies seemed to have been dispelled by gentle exercise. A nearby cinder cone cast a sharp, deep shadow, and I stepped into it. Immediately the air was at least ten degrees cooler.

  “Shadow,” in Jungian psychology, is where all the dark, scary, forbidden things about oneself are hidden—and in a healthy psyche, those things are known and accepted. In an unhealthy one, they are denied. I’d been unhealthily denying all the parts of me that were Constance.

  About time you realized that, Constance said. I’m so sorry. I never wanted to leave you.

  Tears prickled my eyes. I stood with my body in the shadow and shone the video eye on my sunlit face. “I never grieved properly for my twin, my beloved sister, Constance. I never acknowledged how the loss of her shaped everything about my life and my career. I never acknowledged the guilt that I lived and she died—when she was so much more than me. And because of that, the tiny bit of relief I felt that she was gone. Oh God.”

  I felt more tears rising up, and I turned off the phone camera and let them come. I folded up into the shadow of the vast cone and wept for her, feeling her nearby, touching my hair, a welcome tactile hallucination.

  Finally, feeling emptied out and shaky, I pushed myself up and headed back toward the cabin. Walking along the fairly even trail, unburdened by the backpack, I was able to let my mind wander over the path of my life—a choice to become someone who was more of an observer than a participant.

  Not that I hadn’t done good work, hadn’t made a difference. I knew I had. But I also knew I’d always played it safe, taken the path of least resistance, and turned away from anything that reminded me of Constance. I was tired and emotionally drained, my legs and lungs still overworked, as I headed back to the cabin. I anticipated drinking a quart of water and taking a nap.

  What I didn’t anticipate was a visitor.

  Chapter 10

  A man was sitting on the top step of the cabin. He was dark, with the overgrown hair of the young and hirsute, and even seated I could see he was enormously tall. The overlong bones of a giant protruded from the sleeves of his anorak, ending in hands the size of baseball mitts. He wore thick glasses, and he pushed them up his nose before he addressed me.

  “I believe there’s been some mistake. I have a reservation for this cabin.”

  “Hello,” I said, my voice rusty. I wasn’t even sure he was real at this point. “Who are you?”

  “Russell Pruitt.” He stood. I backed up, almost stumbling. He was at least seven feet tall, and he’d unfolded in sections like one of those foldable yardstic
ks. “I’m hiking Haleakala. I got here, plugged in my code to the door, and I see you’re already settled in.”

  “Oh.” My brain refused to compute. What a bizarre coincidence—or was it a coincidence? “Russell Pruitt.” I felt overcome by thirst and dizziness. “I need some water. I think I’m a little dehydrated.”

  I brushed past him to the interior. One glance told me Russell Pruitt had moved my backpack; it was turned toward the door, my cabin permit clearly clipped to it. He followed me in, and his head bent a little to accommodate the nearby ceiling.

  “I was looking for who you were, Dr. Wilson, and if you were supposed to be here,” he said, his tone apologetic. “I can see you are supposed to be here, but so am I.”

  “Oh,” I said again, heading for the sink and the water. I took one of my bottles, unscrewed the top, guzzled. My sluggish brain ticked over this new, very unwelcome information.

  Choices: I could share the space with my new roommate. I could pack everything up and go to the next cabin—but it wasn’t “mine” for another two days. I could hike out of the crater, if I had the strength, and abort Mission Detox.

  None of the above appealed.

  “I’m okay with just staying together,” Russell Pruitt said. His voice was unusually deep and had a vibration like a cello. “I’m a journalist. I’m doing a story on the crater. I’m not going to be around the cabin much, anyway.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, turning back to him. His dark eyes were glittery and bright behind those Coke-bottle glasses, and his height was unnerving. I noticed he had dark olive skin and wondered what ethnicity of giant he was. “I’m kind of on a retreat. I hadn’t planned on being around other people. No offense.” I mentally composed my scathing complaint to the Park Service.

  “Well, I’m taking this bunk.” He gestured with one ham hand to a bunk across the room. His backpack already leaned against it, a down sleeping bag rolled out on the bed.