The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  She wakes to darkness and a sensation of dread. The sensation is active, alert, as though it had woken before her and waited, watching her for an hour with living eyes. She scrutinizes it, gives it a name: it’s the feeling that she’s forgotten something about the job, or, worse, that there was some important piece of information that she never picked up on in the first place. The sense that something has failed to be found.

  She thinks about Unger and Pig, lets their faces float before her in the darkness. She remembers what she said to the Archive, back at Zingers: I’m not scared.

  Are you not, says the Archive to her, now.

  No, she’s not. There’s no reason why she should be. Unger and Pig want something, like all her clients. They have money, they have weapons, and this makes them dangerous, sure, to someone, definitely, but not to her. She’s on their side. They want something, and she’s willing to find it for them. It doesn’t matter that the job involves a gun. Most of her jobs do. All that matters is that she stay on the right end of it. And she always does.

  So what is it? What is she missing?

  Nothing, she says.

  Is it something about the thing itself? The item they want, this blade, this special blade? What makes it worth the money, the time, the trouble?

  But clients want all sorts of things, for all kinds of reasons. She once found a particular mannequin torso for a Tokyo nori manufacturer. Trying to speculate too much about motive just clouds the work, mires her in the muck of other people’s personalities. She doesn’t ask. It keeps things simple. It’s likely that the blade is just one more weird thing, in a world full of them.

  Except, says the Archive.

  Except what?

  Well, I don’t know, it says. You’re the expert. You tell me.

  Except nothing, she thinks. Go back to sleep.

  She huddles beneath the comforter again, directs her awareness back to the memory of humming washers and dryers embodied within it, but it’s not enough to get her back to sleep. She opens her eyes, rolls over, looks at the clock on the bedside table. Half past three. She gives up, reaches out, turns on the light. The book on Boston is still in the bed, and she picks it up, begins to read a chapter about Paul Revere. The famous midnight ride. The marks he made on silver. Eventually the sun rises and the dread goes away.

  She leaves her rental in its downtown garage, instead walks to South Station, where she sits in front of a monitor and blankly watches a video about police dogs until her commuter rail train is announced. She boards, and naps fitfully in the rocking car, until a little over an hour later when the train reaches the end of the line. Plymouth. She disembarks, drags her bag blearily across the platform, blinking against the oppressive August light. She knows that Plymouth is important to the American Story, and everything she knows about this country led her to expect that she’d stumble directly into some kind of tourist village, someplace hawking stuffed Pilgrims or replicas of the famous rock, but all she sees is an empty parking lot and an enormous abandoned department store. In the middle of the lot is a beat-up green town car, and sitting on its hood, cross-legged, is Pig. Something is over his face.

  As she draws nearer she can tell what it is. It’s a wooden pig mask. It has a lean, tapered snout. Long tangles of braided cord descend from its jawline and the back of its head, forming a kind of bristled mane. The thing has circular eyeholes, ringed with daubs of white paint, and as she approaches she gets the unsettling sensation that she’s being peered at, or, worse, peered into. She stops, about twenty paces away.

  Pig tilts the mask back so that it rests on his forehead. It casts a shadow on his face but it doesn’t hide his grin. “Goood morning,” he says.

  “Good morning,” she replies, evenly. “Nice mask.”

  “Thanks,” Pig says. “Call it my good-luck charm.”

  “Wonderful,” she says, although to be honest she’s always hated the notion of luck. “Where’d you get it?” So far she has very deliberately resisted reading it.

  Pig looks away, squints up into the sun. “I took it off some dead African,” he says, casually.

  She’s not sure whether he intends for that answer, couched in that casualness, to shock, impress, or intimidate, but in reality it does none of the above: it makes her feel a little irritated and a little bored. She doubts that it’s true and she knows that can find out the real answer by giving the object just a little bit of sustained attention, by looking into it for just one moment.

  And so she does.

  What she gets is a chaotic picture of mud, agitated by boots and heavy rain. Often her reading of objects starts off with her visualizing a moment just like this, but typically what happens next is she gets more: she gets the adjacent moments, and she strings them together, and when she’s strung enough of them together, she has a story. But she can’t do that with this mud: she can’t attach it to anything, can’t place it on the string of time. It just loops in her head, a meaningless snippet, three seconds of violently churning muck.

  Maja frowns. She dips in again. She gets a different image: a helicopter, squatting on a landing pad, black and low-slung and chitinous, its rotors roaring, a group of men striding through kicked-up vortices of trash. She tries to connect one image to the other. She should be able to. She’s always been able to. But she can’t. The disjunction looms in her mind like a wound, unable to be healed. It’s as though the object has been severed from its own past. As though time itself has been cut.

  He did something, she thinks, and the dread from last night rushes back into her, pours in, a dank wave. Pig did something to the mask so that I can’t read it. But that can’t be right. She’s never seen anyone do anything like that before.

  Pig looks away from the sun, turns his eyes back to her, looks over her frown. He maintains the same bland expression, and she can’t be sure whether he knows that she has just tried—and failed—to learn something about him. She wishes he would at least put on a satisfied face.

  So, says the Archive. Maybe a little scary after all.

  Yes. The Archive is right. She looks into the blithe face of this man and she feels fear. Not distrust, not middle-of-the-night dread: fear.

  That means we get to go home, then, yes?

  No, thinks Maja.

  But you said.

  I said we got to go home if we were in danger. And we’re not in danger. We’re just scared. That’s different.

  She knows what to do, when something has scared her. She has one strategy: she looks into it more deeply. It doesn’t matter what the thing is. It doesn’t even need to be a thing. The darkness of winter, some monstrous human, it’s all the same: she looks into it until she understands it. Just like any thing can be found, any unknown can be figured out, and once you figure it out, it loses its power over you.

  I can beat you, she thinks, at Pig and his mask, and all at once her entire face relaxes, breaks into a smile. She notes with some pleasure that, in response, Pig’s face gives up a very small flicker of surprise, almost a flinch, before he checks it, transforms it into a smile of his own.

  “You ready to do this thing?” he says, breaking the silence.

  “When you are,” she says.

  “All right then,” he says. He hops off the hood of the car, takes her bag. “Just point me in the right direction.”

  “Yes,” she says. “That’s the idea.”

  7

  DISTRACTION

  “Ollie?” Victor calls, from the kitchen, as soon as she keys in.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t come in here.”

  “OK,” she says. She sloughs off her messenger bag, lets it fall on the couch.

  “I’m working on something in here. It’s a surprise.”

  “I said OK.”

  “Why are you here, anyway? I thought you were at work.”

  “I was at work,” she says. “I got sick.”

  “Wait, you’re sick?” Victor sticks his head into the room. His brow gleams with a sheen of
sweat; his look is a mixture of irritation and concern.

  “I’m not sick,” says Ollie. “I got sick.”

  “Wait a second,” Victor says, disappearing back into the kitchen.

  “Go,” she says. “Do whatever it is you’re doing. I gotta make a phone call anyway.”

  And she gets out her phone, and for the first time in a year she dials Donald’s number. She knows it’s a long shot, trying to reach him on his cell: the farm is nestled into a deep vale not known for its robust cellular coverage. She remembers an argument they had, right before he first got the phone, in which she told him it was stupid to buy a phone you could only use in the loft over the barn or on the crest of the tallest hill on the property, and she remembers a second argument they had about it a month after he’d bought it, when it had already fallen into disuse. Maybe it’s different now, she tells herself: maybe cellular waves or whatever they are, invisible lines of force, are everywhere now, maybe they penetrate into the insides of everything. But maybe not.

  Sure enough, dialing him yields only twenty seconds of dead silence and then a busy signal. She recognizes this as a category of error but isn’t sure what precisely it means. She hangs up.

  She shifts on the couch. She taps her phone against her kneecap, once, twice, three times, and then she stands up again, paces from the couch to her bedroom door. Taped to the door is something she tore out of a magazine, a supersaturated photograph of a human heart.

  She stares at it until she realizes she’s holding her breath. She forces herself to exhale, and then she lifts her phone and dials the number for the farm’s landline. She’s extra reluctant to call the farm this way, because there’s the chance that Jesse could answer, and she doesn’t know what she’d say to him; there’s a part of her that believes that if she heard his voice, even his voice saying just one word, just hello, then whatever has been holding her together this year would snap, and she would, at long last, go completely to pieces.

  But Jesse doesn’t answer. And Donald doesn’t answer. Instead, after five rings, she hears the heavy clunk of tape heads engaging. Oh right: the landline is still connected to an answering machine. She remembers it, a slab of plastic slowly warping in its dirty little corner, terrifically obsolete.

  “You have reached Illuminated Farms,” a wobbly version of her voice says into her ear. She recoils at hearing this, startled at imagining her voice emerging from a machine, speaking to an empty, dusty sunroom every time someone calls the landline. And, of course, maybe the room’s not empty. Maybe Jesse is there. She tries to imagine what that must feel like, hearing a recording of your mom’s voice, a year after she’s moved out. Trying to imagine it makes her feel like she’s been punched in the chest.

  She does not leave a message. She hangs up, stares down the heart taped to the door. It’s a lovely muscle but it’s got no sense.

  She forces herself to lie down on the couch again. She flips through things on her phone, considers texting Ulysses. She considers this sometimes, when she’s feeling low, and she usually rejects the impulse, exactly as she does now. Eventually Victor enters, balling up an apron in his hands. She lifts her head and he comes and sits on the couch, providing her with a lap to lower back down into. He puts his hand in her hair in the way that she finds comfortable.

  “Now, tell me again, what happened?” he says, once they’re situated. “You threw up?”

  “Yes, Victor, for the tenth time.”

  His hand pauses in her hair. “But you’re not sick.”

  “No. It was from—I don’t know, I guess you would say stress.”

  “What stress?” His hand begins to move again, rubbing tension out of her scalp.

  “Shit is all fucked.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You remember that vision I had at Christmastime?”

  “The seizure.”

  “The vision. The seizure. Whatever. Just—you remember.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, yeah, I did that again.”

  She tells him the whole thing. Guychardson’s knife: the way that the more she looked at it the more it seemed to destabilize her reality. Throwing up. The new vision. Jesse with green hair and clown makeup.

  “So, in conclusion,” she says, “shit is fucked.”

  “It’s a little bit fucked,” Victor concedes. “But, wait. No. You know what this is? It’s a phase. Kids go through phases. They do stuff that’s difficult for adults to make sense of. That’s the whole point of half of what they do. He’s just been listening to some ICP, now he’s doing a little mini-Juggalo act.”

  “I don’t know what those words mean,” Ollie says.

  “You’re hopeless, my dear. The point is that it’s not serious. The situation is under control.”

  “It doesn’t feel under control.”

  “It’s going to pass. Phases do end, you know, that’s why we call them phases.”

  “Sounds like bullshit,” Ollie says.

  Victor seems to weigh this. “Hey,” he says. “If it’s bullshit you should at least take it as well-meaning bullshit. It is bullshit with a purpose and a function.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is to make you feel better, my darling.”

  “Not everyone wants to feel better all the time, Victor. You ever consider that?”

  “I have not,” Victor says.

  “Well, maybe you should.”

  Victor looks down into her face, pursing his lips as though the idea is distasteful. “I never really understood whatever great merit there is to be found in wallowing endlessly in the swamp of one’s own feelings all day, especially when the ready alternative—to feel better—allows one to, actually, you know, feel better.”

  “You want me to feel better?” she snaps. “Fine. But you’re not going to be able to make that happen by pointing at my problem with your magic wand and saying, ‘Hey, that problem, it doesn’t exist any more.’ ”

  “Remind me,” Victor says, “of exactly what your problem is.”

  “My problem is—my problem is—”

  “Explain it to me this way,” Victor says, delivering her from her spluttering. “Tell me what bothers you the most.”

  Ollie thinks for a moment. She wants to say something about the clown makeup again, she wants to convey just how disturbing her son looked caked with cheap greasepaint, but she pauses. She considers the question put before her: is that really what bothered her the most? Is that really why she feels so gutted right now? And she realizes that it isn’t, not really.

  “I just wish,” she says, “I just wish they hadn’t cut his hair.”

  “It’s hair,” Victor says. “Hair gets cut.”

  Oh, right. Hair gets cut. That’s part of what it means, to go away, to be gone for so long. It means time passes without you. Hair grows, and it gets cut, and it grows again, and none of it has fuck-all to do with you. You get no say.

  It hurts. Tears spring into Ollie’s eyes; she blinks them away, furious that her body would betray her in this way, reveal the extent of her humiliation. She bites her lip.

  Victor sees her reaction, and he knows he’s partly responsible, and his face softens a little.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “Listen,” he says, then, “I’m sorry that I’m being an asshole. I just don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.”

  “Fucking—distract me,” she says, angrily. “Give me something to think about instead of my fucking problem.” As she says this, she realizes that this is effectively the strategy she’s taken with herself over the last year. She has served herself a long sequence of distractions, each one enabling her to forget for a little while longer.

  “Actually,” Victor says, brightening, “I know exactly what will serve this purpose. I was going to wait and show you when it was truly ready, but, what the hell.”

  She raises her eyebrows, faintly optimistic. It’s Victor who’s talking, so she’s expecting this is a buildup to some tasty concoction, a summertime tr
eat of some variety or another. An emergency dessert: deploy in event of shitty day. She envisions a flash-frozen spiral of watermelon, something you could plunk in a tumbler of clear liquor. Who is she to say no? She has no interest in playing the role of gloomy saint, of being wrapped so deeply in the cowl of her woes that she misses out on the world, phenomenal, before her.

  “Up!” says Victor, and they both rise. She heads into the kitchen; he follows along. “Voilà,” he says, once she’s all the way in the room.

  There’s no dessert in here. There’s nothing simmering on the stove, no remnants of production spread out on the steel prep table. The immersion blender and the infuser and the blowtorch are all racked in their usual slots. But then she sees what Victor wants her to see.

  It’s about the size and shape of a wrinkled napkin, and it hangs in the air between the refrigerator and the sink: a tiny cut in space, palpitating gently at its edges. A little vent, opening onto a weird darkness, a darkness that seems more tactile than optical. She recognizes it immediately. It’s a portal to the Inside.

  “Holy shit,” she says.

  “You know what that is,” Victor says, quietly, a half question.

  “Of course I fucking know what that is. I’m just—surprised to see it here in our kitchen.”

  Victor drapes his arms over her shoulders. “This is the part where you tell me how amazing I am, and how you’re very impressed with me,” he says, into her ear, ever the pupil, ever in search of the next pat on the head. Opening a portal, even a tiny one like this, is tricky as hell and this is the first time she’s ever seen anyone do it who wasn’t a street warlock. So, yeah, she is very impressed. But she’s also a little alarmed. She knew that Victor still tinkered with magic; she knew he would use it every now and then to prod his career along, to try to stay on top of the game. But it’s been years since she’s seen him do anything more than some little charm. She didn’t know that he was dabbling in major stuff like this.