Generation Loss cn-1

by Elizabeth Hand

  “Cassandra. Good to hear from you. Everything all right?”

  I told him about my conversation with Phil. “Didn’t you used to go up there?” I asked. “Fishing or something?”

  “Sure. Fishing and hunting. Up in the Allagash. I used to go with your grandfather. We’d stop in Freeport in the middle of the night and ring the bell at the little L.L. Bean store, and they’d let us in so we could buy our gear. Beautiful place, Maine. I haven’t been since your mother and I made a few trips down east,” he said, his voice suddenly sad. “That was before you were born.”

  “Do you know how to get there? I’m renting a car.”

  “Maine?” I heard the rattle of ice in his highball glass. “Sure. Drive to the New Hampshire border. Then turn right.”

  We spoke a little longer, catching up. Catching up with him, I mean. I had nothing else to report.

  “Well, Cassandra, I wish you luck,” he said at last. “Anything comes up, call Ken Wilburn. He’s in South Salem now. Here, I’ll give you his number—”

  I wrote it down then said good-bye. Two days later I received a check for a thousand dollars, along with a note.

  buy yourself some gum boots. love, dad

  I blew a big chunk of the money on a pair of Hedi Slimane drainpipe jeans. I do have my little luxuries, and I figured the investment would pay off if I actually sold a story. The rest I stashed in my wallet.

  That night I took out my copies of Deceptio Visus and Mors. I’d bought them cheap in a used bookstore in the city in 1978, when Kamestos’s reputation was in deep decline. Now I thumbed through Deceptio Visus, hoping to find some hint as to what the island might be like in real life, or where.

  It was like trying to get a compass reading from a postcard. So I went back online, poking around till I hit www.maineaway.com, Your News for The Paswegas Peninsula And Beyond! The site banner showed a scroll of cloudless sky and a windjammer racing across a cobalt sea. There were lots of pictures of romping Labrador retrievers, autumn foliage, children eating corn on the cob and lobster, snow-dusted spruce, healthy-looking couples in canoes, loons and moose.

  The headlines told a different story. A rash of teen suicides; support groups for people addicted to Oxy-C and vicodin; two big heroin busts. Another bomb scare at the high school. Another confirmed case of West Nile Virus. A missing persons alert for someone named Martin Graves, last seen August 29th. The police log listed three arrests for domestic assault and another for possession of crack cocaine. A body washed up in Burnt Harbor had been identified as a fisherman lost at sea the previous winter. More bodies were missing from another boat presumed lost in a recent storm. There was also a feature, “The Facts About Bear Baiting,” and notice of a Benefit Bean Supper for the Prout family, who had just lost their home to a fire. Someone was still looking for her husband, last seen driving home to Machias after work at Wal-Mart a month before.

  So much for Vacationland, I thought, and went to bed.

  7

  It was the second week of November; the beginning of the Maine winter. I was naive enough to think it was still fall.

  For a couple of months I’d saved a small stash of crystal meth. Becoming an addict takes a certain amount of organization to dedicate yourself to your need to get high. In this as in other matters I’d lacked ambition. Crank was intermittently fun and useful, but I never could make a serious commitment to it. The afternoon before I left, I picked up my Rent-a-Wreck then went home and packed a map, the directions Phil had given me, a few clothes and my copies of Deceptio Visus and Mors, my old Konica, a few cassette tapes. I went to the fridge and opened the freezer, took out the small Ziploc bag of crystal and another, larger bag. In this was a piece of paper with blurred writing on it—july 2001—along with two plastic canisters of Tri-X film. The date was when I’d bought them; it was also the last time I’d done any serious shooting. They went alongside my camera in the chewed-up leather satchel I’d had since high school.

  Even traveling light, there was room for more. Problem was, I didn’t have much more. I had an old computer, but no laptop, no cell phone. No digital camera or iPod. I never had much spare cash, plus I just hated the stuff on principle: it made everything too easy.

  “You’re a fucking Luddite Looney Tune,” Phil said once. “You got a microwave in that dump of yours?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t eat.”

  Now I went over to my old vinyl records and pulled out a portfolio wedged between The Idiot and Fear And Whiskey. It was filled with plastic sleeves holding dozens of black-and-white 8x10s. Not the pictures from Dead Girls; the stuff I’d been working on after that, the photos Linda Kalman had turned down. I still couldn’t bring myself to look at any of them, just stared at the cover sheet, a white page with my name typed on it and the title I’d given the collection: Hard To Be Human Again. I put it back, turned and found my bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Very early the next morning, while it was still dark and I was still drunk, I began to drive north.

  The buzz from the Jack Daniel’s got me about an hour out of the city before it wore off. Just past the wooded exurban badlands where I’d grown up, I pulled over and snorted the remaining blue-white crystals from my stash, then shot back onto the interstate.

  At some point I must’ve stopped for gas, but I didn’t have another fully conscious thought until I looked up, blinking, and saw brilliant sun, the span of a bridge before me and a broad, glittering blue sheet of water below. A sign at the highway’s edge read leaving new hampshire. I was halfway over the bridge, reading another sign—welcome to maine, the way life should be—before I began to wonder what had happened to Connecticut and Massachusetts.

  That was my crossing into Maine. What little thought I’d ever given to the place was faintly contemptuous: Vacationland, snow. I didn’t understand yet how this place works on you, how it splinters your sensorium. All I knew was that it was midmorning of a November day, and I was fucking freezing.

  Somehow it had never crossed my mind that it might be cold. Back in the city it was Indian summer. Here it felt like midwinter. Even with the heat cranked, the little Ford Taurus exuded only a thread of warmth that smelled of antifreeze. The rear windows wouldn’t close completely, and frigid air whistled through.

  By the time I was fifty miles north of Portland my hands were numb. I pulled over and rummaged through my bag, pulled on a long-sleeved T-shirt, a moth-eaten black cashmere sweater, my battered motorcycle jacket. I replaced my sneakers with my old black cowboy boots. This was my entire wardrobe, except for socks and underwear, another T-shirt, and a backup pair of black jeans nearly indistinguishable from the ones I’d blown a small fortune on.

  I had no gloves, no boots save my ancient Tony Lamas, no winter coat. Over the years, I’d spent a few Thanksgivings with my aunt’s family in Boston, chilly days, nights warmed by firelight and Irish Mist. I figured Maine would be like that. I was wrong.

  * * *

  I drove for another hour before forcing myself to stop and eat at a convenience store. A table full of old men in flannel shirts and Carhart jackets glanced up when I entered then returned to low conversation. There was a sheet of orange poster board behind the cash register, two columns neatly written in Magic Marker:

  Jeff Stonestreet Buck

  Missy Weed Buck

  Brandon Johnston Doe

  Barbara Johnston Buck

  Wallace Tun Doe

  “Hunting season?” I asked as I handed over my money.

  The girl behind the counter stared at me. “That’s right.”

  I bought a pair of heavy yellow work gloves. They made my hands feel clumsy and thumbless, and they weren’t even very warm. But they were better than nothing. I bought a beer, too, then started for the door. There were a bunch of notices tacked to it: snowplowing, firewood, Little Munchkins childcare, along with numerous photocopies for Lost Cats. Beneath the missing cats, someone had taped another photocopy, of a young man in a Nike T-shirt and woolen watch cap.

 
HAVE YOU SEEN MARTIN GRAVES?

  LAST SEEN AUGUST 29 SHAKER HARBOR

  REWARD FOR INFORMATION

  PLEASE CALL 247-9141

  I returned to the car, sat inside and drank my beer, watching as two guys in orange vests wrestled a buck from their pickup and weighed it on a hook outside the store.

  “Supposed to have snow up to Calais,” said one of them.

  His friend lit a cigarette. “Good place for it.”

  I set my empty bottle on the ground and drove off.

  The road began to veer east. After two wrong turns, I realized the MapQuest directions Phil had given me were useless. I pulled over and opened my map.

  On the page, the road appeared to hug the coast. In reality the sea seemed distant and ghostly, hoving in and out of sight like mist. Now and then I saw the raw wood scaffolding of a McMansion-in-progress, its mammoth exoskeleton dwarfing the trailers and modular homes beside it, or mobile-home churches with signs reading don’t wait for 6 strong men to take you to church. to be almost saved is to be totally lost.

  But after a while, even these reminders of the encroaching world disappeared. I finally found the turnoff and passed through a town consisting of a general store with a single gas pump, a shuttered antique shop, and an abandoned gas station. Two boys in baggy pants and T-shirts were riding a Toro lawn mower down the middle of the street. The boys pulled over to let me by, and I turned onto a pocked road with a sign that said paswegas county line and another marked burnt harbor.

  That was when I really began to feel like I was driving off the end of the earth. Now, at last, there was the ocean. The coast fell away and the sea opened like a huge blue eye, lashed with black islands and rocky outcroppings. I switched the car radio on and picked up a weak signal that seemed to come and go with the waves, an alternative station playing snatches of odd music, requests, pleas for information about lost pets.

  And that light! It gave a merciless clarity to everything, clapboards the color of dirty snow, trailers banked with trash bags, pyramids of lobster traps hauled out for the winter. Spruce and pines that looked like they’d been knapped from flint. The orange flare of a hunter on the horizon, the woods behind him black, endless.

  It was as if layers of ash had been blown away until the true sky was revealed, a sky so pure a blue that it no longer seemed a color at all but an emotion, a desolation that tipped over into joy. The cold was like that too, the numbness in my gloved hands no longer something I felt but something I was, a character trait like stubbornness or generosity. I could see the peninsula before me, a ragged, four-fingered hand thrusting into the Atlantic. I hunched over the steering wheel, frozen but exhilarated, and headed toward the sea.

  It was nearly four by now; nightfall. Burnt Harbor, the village at the tip of the peninsula—that was where I was supposed to find the guy who would bring me over to Paswegas Island. Everett Moss, the harbormaster. I didn’t own a cell phone, so I drove until I found a gas station with an ancient pay phone outside. I hunched against the peeling vinyl siding and tried to keep my teeth from chattering as I fed coins into the slot.

  There was another torn flyer taped beside the payphone. No photo on this one, just the words have you seen martin graves? last seen august 29, shaker harbor, please call with any information. I shoved in the last coin and prayed the harbormaster was still around. The wind roared up from the sea so loudly that I could barely hear when someone answered.

  “Is this Everett Moss?” I shouted. The phone reception was for shit.

  “Hay-lo.” The voice was brusque but cheerful. “Yes, it is.”

  “This is Cassandra Neary. Phil Cohen spoke to you about taking me over to Paswegas this afternoon?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “I’ll be there in about half an hour. I’m in—” I craned my neck. “Well, I don’t know where I am, exactly, somewhere past Bealesville. Collinstown, I guess this is. So maybe fifteen miles away?”

  “Oh yes, Collinstown, that’s about fifteen miles. Well, that’s very good, but I can’t take you out today.”

  “What? Why not?” Cold and desperation made my voice crack. “I’ll be there in what? Half an hour?”

  “Well yes, but I’m afraid I couldn’t do it then, neither. It’ll be dark. Could probably do it first thing tomorrow. How’s that?”

  “Tomorrow?” I shivered, staring to where the ocean darkened from indigo to scorched steel. “Jesus! I don’t even know where I am! Is there a place to stay between here and Burnt Harbor?”

  “Well, yes there is,” Moss boomed genially. “You just keep on heading this way, and when you get to just before the bridge, you’ll see there on your right the Lighthouse Motel. He’s open year round. Then first thing tomorrow, you come down here to the harbor and we’ll get you taken care of. Say, six o’clock. All right?”

  “What if he’s not—”

  “All right then!”

  Click.

  I stormed back to the car. My little by-blow of crank had long worn off. I wasn’t hungry or tired yet, but I knew the crash was coming, and I didn’t want to be stuck in a rented Ford Taurus when it did. That crystalline blue sky was now nearly black. Wind rattled the bare trees and sent dead leaves skittering across the parking lot.

  I clambered back into the car and drove on. Once I crossed the bridge spanning an inlet of Hagman’s Bay, I was officially on the Paswegas Peninsula.

  Even in the near dark, I felt a wild sense of space, of sky, the smells of salt and balsam and rotting fish. Wood smoke pooled like fog above the marshes. I peered vainly through the twilight for any sign of the Lighthouse Motel. It was hard enough to see any houses, and when I did spot one it wasn’t reassuring—a small, raised ranch house with what looked like a dog hanging above the garage door. That was weird enough, but it got weirder when I passed the next house and saw three dead dogs hanging alongside a shed. I slowed the car to get a better look.

  They weren’t dogs but coyotes. Big ones too. I decided that if the Lighthouse didn’t show up in the next five minutes, I was going to turn around and drive back to Manhattan.

  And then it appeared on a spur of land overlooking a small harbor, your basic American motel circa 1962. A one-story mockup of a lighthouse, minus the light, stood beside a neat white clapboard building with green shutters, lamps lit within, a neon office sign. Three cars were parked in front of a row of attached motel units. A sign hung from a denuded maple.

  LIGHTHOUSE MOTEL

  BEST RATES IN MAINE ALWAYS

  YOUR HOST MERRILL LIBBY

  NO PETS NO GUNS FREE COFFEE

  VACANCY

  That last word was the only one I cared about. I parked alongside the office, pulled my leather jacket tight against the cold, and went inside.

  It was about what I expected, a room furnished in Early Knotty Pine, well-worn but clean. I couldn’t tell if someone had repeatedly spilled coffee on the carpet or if this was a design decision that had never caught on in the lower forty-seven. Still, it was warm. Heat blasted from a propane monitor. I was so cold, I would have slept on that carpet. I hoped I wouldn’t have to.

  There was a little alcove at one end of the room, and here in a swivel chair a teenage girl, maybe fifteen, sat hunched over a computer. I drew close enough to catch a glimpse of a screen full of IM dialog bubbles. Then the girl looked up. A heavyset gothy kid with cropped hair dyed black, black-rimmed eyes, white skin beneath a flaking layer of pinkish foundation. She had a stud beneath her lower lip and what appeared to be a bunch of three-penny nails stuck through one earlobe. She wore a necklace made of the tabs from soda cans laced together on a leather thong and interspersed with bits of sea-glass, a flannel shirt over jeans wide enough to double as body bags, disintegrating lowtop sneakers.

  She smiled shyly. That smile made her look about eight, that and the pink hearts she’d drawn on her wrist.

  “You got a room?” I asked. “The sign says Vacancy.”

  “Oh, yeah—sorry.”

  She clicked
off the IM screen and began rummaging around the desk. “We have lots of rooms. Um, non-smoking only, that okay?”

  “Sure.”

  She pulled out a clunky old credit card machine and handed me a form. “You visiting someone?”

  “Yeah. Nice piercing.”

  “Hey, thanks!” She was cute, in an early Xene Cervenka, bad hair kind of way. “I like your jacket. It looks … real.”

  “It is.” I filled in the form and handed it back to her.

  She read it then looked at me in surprise. “You’re from New York?”

  “Yeah. You’d fit right in there.”

  “I wish. I would love to go to New York.”

  “Yeah? Maybe I could fit you in the trunk on my way back.”

  She laughed, then froze.

  “Mackenzie! I told you, cash only!” A bleating, high-pitched voice echoed from the other side of the room. “No credit cards, sorry—tear it up! Tear it up!”

  I’ve heard that pigs are among the most intelligent mammals. Seeing Merrill Libby, I could believe this was true. A short, bloated man who looked like he’d been carved from a slab of salt pork, he wore brown Dickie overalls and a flannel shirt that billowed around him like a deflated plaid balloon. He had small bright dark eyes, and his cheeks were an unhealthy pink against his white skin.

  I gave the girl a quick sideways look, raising my eyebrow in sympathy, then turned back.

  He waddled up beside the girl and elbowed her out of the way. “I told you, cash only,” he repeated. “Go to your room.”

  Mackenzie started for the door. Her father stared at me balefully.

  “All I want is a room.” I pulled out two twenties and slid them across the counter. “Okay?”

  He took the money and stuck it in a cashbox, keeping his cold little eyes on me the whole time.

  “No smoking,” he said. “Checkout’s eleven. There are no telephones in any of the rooms.”

  By now I was just hoping there’d be heat and a flush toilet. I waited as he turned and began checking a row of keys. Just outside the doorway, Mackenzie stood and watched, her face half-shadowed so that all I could see was the glint of metal along one ear.