by MLN Hanover
“You’re sure of that?”
“I’m not.”
“I thought this guy was your Yoda.”
“He taught me most of what I know about riders. The occult. I trained with most of the men he’s working with now. I was going to be one of them.”
“So what happened?”
Ex shrugged. The fire muttered to itself. When it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything more, I stopped waiting.
My bedroom was lavish. King-size bed, wide picture window looking out toward the mountains on the horizon. The master bathroom had a Jacuzzi tub with a separate walk-in shower big enough for two. On the other hand, the pillows smelled like dust, and the water was rusty for the first couple of minutes. And there were other things. The television set up for watching movies from bed dated from before the switch to digital. The only input that worked was a black VCR with a half dozen cassettes dating from the late eighties. I’d watched about the first half of The Big Blue while we waited for Father Chapin’s arrival, and while Jean Reno had been pretty cute before he got old, I couldn’t quite bring myself to start it back up.
The only Internet access was a cellular card I’d bought for the laptop, and the signal kept fading in and out with no discernible pattern. Streaming was impossible, and even web stuff was problematic. I felt like I’d been cut off from the world. I propped my laptop on the bedside table, cranked up Pink Martini, and let China Forbes sing to me about losing her head on the Rue St.-Honoré. The music was so relentlessly cheerful that by the time she shifted over to telling Lorenzo that he wasn’t welcome anymore, I was feeling almost human again.
I wondered how much time Uncle Eric had spent in this room, lying on this bed and staring out at the vast emptiness of New Mexico. The wind-paved desert didn’t seem like his kind of joint. As little as I knew him, that might have been accurate or I could have just been making it up. Certainly, with all the places he’d owned, he couldn’t have spent much time in any one of them. The more I looked at it, the more it seemed like anytime he’d needed to go somewhere, he’d bought himself a house or condo—sometimes a couple of them—fitted them out for whatever he needed, then left them in place. If there was a pattern behind it all, a great and secret plan that all these locations fit into, I couldn’t see it. The more I found out about my uncle, the less he seemed like the guy I’d thought he was.
I lay as still as I could, my palms toward the ceiling, and my heels pointing at the bathroom door. I waited for my body to do something—twitch, speak in tongues, leap up in a killing rampage. Say something I hadn’t meant to say or walk someplace I hadn’t meant to walk or pick something up I hadn’t meant to carry. Anything to show me that I wasn’t the only one in my flesh. But if there was a rider there, living with and within me, it was onto the game. Apart from the vague Pavlovian impulse to curl a pillow around my head and sleep, I didn’t feel or do anything.
“Hey. Are you there?” I said to the empty room.
In another lifetime, I would have pushed the words out toward God. Now they were aimed inward at my maybe-rider. Either way, there wasn’t an answer.
In the kitchen, a radio came on announcing the news from Washington. I heard Ex open the refrigerator, then the clank of pots, the clatter of the blue ceramic dishes that we’d bought the last time we were out here. Dinner on its way. I sighed and sat up just as my cell phone rang. Once upon a time, the ringtone had been my uncle’s voice. Now it was the first twenty seconds of Tempo Perdido. I took a deep breath, let it out, and answered the call.
“Hey,” I said, forcing my voice to a brightness I didn’t feel. “How’s the Windy City?”
“Cold,” Chogyi Jake said. “Unpleasantly cold. Damp too.”
“Bummer,” I said. “Sounds like you’re recuperating pretty well, though.”
The pause on the line told me that I’d said something a little weird. I bit my lip.
“I am recuperated,” Chogyi Jake said. “They released me from the hospital five weeks ago. The stitches dissolved three weeks ago. I am as whole, I think, as I will ever be.”
“Didn’t let you keep the spleen, though,” I said. “Could have had it infused with plastic or something. Made a great paperweight.”
“How are you, Jayné?”
“It’d be a little Gothic, maybe, but how many people can hold down their taxes with a spleen? Auditor comes in, you can wave it at her and say, ‘Stand back, I’m not afraid to vent this thing.’ ”
I got a chuckle. I pressed on before I lost the tempo.
“How are Kim and Aubrey settling in? Everything going all right?”
It was a noble effort on my part. I gave myself full marks. It didn’t work.
“I’m worried about you,” Chogyi Jake said. “Since you left, I’ve had the feeling that you didn’t want me to rejoin you.”
“Oh, gimme a break,” I said. “You got hurt. You’ve been healing up. Of course I’m looking forward to getting the gang together again. It’s just …”
The lies backed up in my throat. I had the sudden powerful memory of telling my mother that I didn’t know who’d poured all the milk on my older brother’s bed. The hot, choking feeling of standing by something that we both knew wasn’t true was just as humiliating now as it had been when I was a kid.
“It’s just?” Chogyi Jake said. When he wanted it to, his voice could be like warm flannel. My eyes were tearing up.
“Just not right now,” I said. “I think Ex and I are probably about done here, and I’m not sure where we’re heading next. But as soon as I’ve got a game plan, buddy, we’ll coordinate flights. No problem.”
“Ex isn’t returning my calls either.”
“Isn’t he? There may be a service issue. The connections out here are pretty spotty. I’ll ask him about it, okay?”
The sound wasn’t quite a sigh. It was just an exhalation with a comment at the back. I lost control of one of the tears, and it dripped down my cheek. I felt annoyed by it. They were my eyes. I’d decide when they leaked.
“If you need me, you know I’m here,” Chogyi Jake said. I could picture him just from the way he said the words. Leaning forward a little. The light playing off the stubble of his scalp. He had laugh lines all around his eyes, and when he was being gentle, they almost vanished into his skin.
“I know,” I said.
“All right, then,” he said.
“I’ll call you later. When I know more.”
I dropped the call and sat on the edge of the bed for a while. The voices on the radio chattered and slid around in an increasing and angry sizzle. The smells of garlic and tomato and onion and the dust that the heater kicked up. I wondered if crying without intending to counted as a symptom. Was I crying, or was it someone else? I hated the thought.
Ex knocked gently on the bedroom door and then let it swing open. I looked up at him through my hair. I probably looked like the bad guy from a Japanese horror film, but Ex just leaned against the frame, arms crossed. The light from the kitchen silhouetted him, making his loose white-blond hair look a little more like a halo.
“Chogyi?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you tell him yet?”
“No.”
“Jayné—”
“I don’t want to,” I said. “If we’re right, there’s nothing he can do we aren’t already doing. If we’re wrong, it’d just freak him out for no reason. Besides which, he’d tell Aubrey and Kim, and they have enough on their plates right now without worrying about me, right?”
Besides, I thought, I don’t want him to see me like this. I don’t want anyone to see me like this. Not even you.
“Dinner’s almost ready,” he said. “Fifteen minutes?”
“I’ll be there.”
He closed the door, and I went from feeling intruded on to wanting him to come back, like I was flipping a switch.
The best cook I’d ever known was a vampire. Chogyi Jake and Aubrey were about even for second. If there had been a pizza
delivery that reached this far outside the city, Ex and I would have been smart to put them on speed dial. The evening meal that night consisted of slightly overcooked spaghetti noodles with store-bought marinara and frozen broccoli steamed to within an inch of its life. Ex closed his eyes and folded his hands, saying a silent grace. I just picked up my fork and started in. When he opened his eyes, he poured us both glasses of cheap red wine. Over the past weeks, it had become our ritual, and I couldn’t have said if it was a mutual acceptance—his faith and my doubt making room at the table for each other—or a constant low-level challenge.
When it had been the four of us, there had been a pattern. But now down to just two, and my life with Ex was built around the things we didn’t say. Things like I know you think you’re in love with me and You don’t have to be so patronizing and I need you. That’s what I wasn’t saying, anyway. I didn’t know what his silences meant.
I cleared away the dishes, starch and tomatoes sitting high in my stomach. Ex went back to the front room and stoked the fire, throwing on logs of dried cottonwood that burned bright and fast. He sat on the couch reading Thomas Merton. The clock claimed it was eight o’clock, but it was dark enough to be midnight. The single-glazed windows let the cold press in against me. I made myself a couple of slices of cinnamon toast and a cup of decaf tea as dessert. I ate and drank standing in the kitchen, washing the plate as soon as I was done. Then I went to bed.
When I was in middle school, I had a run of pretty spectacular nightmares. In the summer after my one and only year of college, while my love life and circle of friends dissolved around me, my brain had tried insomnia for a while. They were about the worst sleep disturbances I’d had until now.
I lay in the bedroom, wrapped in the dusty sheets. As soon as my head hit the pillow, all signs of fatigue vanished. My mind was more than awake; it was bouncing off the inside of my skull like a rhesus monkey in a caffeine overdose study. My thoughts flickered from the insurance we’d gotten on the new rental car, to whether I needed to fill out any tax paperwork, to my older brother’s impending marriage, to the way the lantern had hissed while I’d buried an innocent man alive, to the sound of Aubrey laughing when he’d just realized something. No thought connected to the one before it. There was no predicting where my mind would leap next. It was like someone had gotten my remote control and was channel surfing my head.
I tried the meditation and breathing exercises that Chogyi Jake had taught me to help focus my qi, the vital energy of life and magic. I couldn’t do it. Every time I started to focus on my breath, I got distracted with how my toe felt or whether my hand had moved on its own or what was going to happen next in Jennifer Aniston’s love life. An animal howled out beyond my window. If might have been a coyote, or it could have been a stray dog. From where I was, I couldn’t tell the difference.
I didn’t know I was falling asleep at all until I felt the shovel in my hand. The lantern hissed like a snake beside me, and something just under my skin shifted like a wave on the surface of a lake. A black coffin was in a hole in front of me. In a grave. Please, a voice shouted. I’m not dead. I’m not dead. I felt myself lifting the shovel, heard the dirt on the coffin. The dread was overwhelming.
I woke up screaming. My heart was racing, and I fumbled for the lights. The bedroom flooded white as daylight and the door burst open. Ex in a pair of dark green sweatpants and black T-shirt, and with a panicked expression. The light turned the windows into mirrors, and I caught a glimpse of myself huddled against the headboard. I was shaking, and I hated that I was shaking. Ex looked around the room, searching for danger.
There wasn’t any. There was nothing there but me. My phone showed 4:30 a.m. I said something obscene, and then, liking the way the words felt, I let loose a slow, steady stream of profanity, like air slowly leaking out of a balloon. The tension left Ex’s shoulders.
RAnother nightmare?” Ex asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
“Are you going to be able to sleep?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
He lifted an eyebrow and walked out of the room. I went to the bathroom, and I was still standing over the sink, washing my face and waiting for my hands to get steady again, when I heard him come back in. The squeak of the bed as his weight pressed it down. The soft, unmistakable zip of playing cards being shuffled. He was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, a legal pad and ballpoint pen beside him. The cards were a standard red-backed poker deck.
“Gin rummy?” he asked.
I pushed the hair back from my eyes. The prospect of trying to force myself back to sleep or else make it through the long hours until dawn with no company apart from my thoughts had been charmless anyway. The sense of relief left me smiling.
“Sure,” I said. “You deal first.”
We didn’t talk about it. Not about the secret thing living in my skin, not about the bad night in Chicago. Not about Eric or the nightmares or the shame that kept me from wanting anyone to know that I was struggling to make it through the day. Everything we said was about the cards or movies we’d seen when we were kids or the relative strengths of Wonder Woman and Superman. We were innocuous together. The anxiety faded slowly over the span of hours, but it faded.
It only occurred to me when the sky outside the window started shifting from black to charcoal and the distant mountains started to be a visible horizon that, with my dark hair and white T-shirt, I looked like I was trying to be a photo negative of Ex. I was up 620 points to 570 when Ex put down his cards, stretched, and yawned wide enough that I could see his back teeth.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
He touched my shoulder before he went out. Nothing more. Just a little contact, and then gone. While he banged around in the kitchen, I laid my head down on the pillow. I closed my eyes just for a minute to rest them. When I opened them again, it was almost noon. I heard the front door of the ranch house close, but then nothing, so I figured Ex had been heading outside. I got up, switched out my pajama bottoms for some blue jeans, pulled a thick gray wool sweater over my T-shirt, tugged on my boots, and headed out.
The kitchen and living room were shut down. Cleaned and everything put away the way it’d been when we’d arrived. The ashes were all gone from the fireplace. Ex’s suitcase and laptop carrier were by the door, ready to be packed out. I snagged a rubber band out of my pocket, pulled back my hair, and tied it into a rough ponytail before I walked outside.
The cold felt like being slapped. Sunlight that intense and total didn’t have a right to go with air that frigid. And it was dry enough I could feel my eyes getting gritty just walking across the wide gravel driveway.
Most of the places we’d gone, we’d rented minivans. But most of the places we’d been, there had been four of us and Aubrey had been driving. When I’d place. E met Ex, he’d had a little black sports car, a very pretty motorcycle, and a cot in a barely converted garage. Now he was leaning into a black and silver Mercedes two-seater with a roof that hardly seemed higher than my hips. Some tastes don’t change.
“Hey,” I said.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Ex said. “I’m just trying to figure out how we fit all the luggage in here last time.”
“With difficulty.”
“Yeah, that sounds right. Well, there’s still some coffee in the thermos there. I cleaned out the fridge, but we can stop in Española for some lunch if you’re hungry.”
“I take it we’re going somewhere?”
“We are,” he said. “Taos.”
I crossed my arms. “Taos?”
“Well, not in the city proper,” he said. “We’ll be going through it, though. There’s a little town about twenty minutes northwest of there called San Esteban.”
“I’m not going to see Chapin’s pet shrink,” I said.
“No. You’re not. The Catholic sanctuary in San Esteban is where Father Chapin and the others are. Th
eir base of operations. We’re going to see them.”
“I don’t mean to be dim,” I said. “But why are we doing that?”
“While you were asleep, I figured out my Plan B. Father Chapin is … He’s the best at what he does. Better than I am. Better than those idiots in Hamburg. He and I have a history, but I thought that if I told him everything about your situation, we could ask him for help. That was Plan A, right? Ask for help.”
“That’s what I thought. So Plan B is … what? Ask again?”
Ex closed the car door. I expected it to have a deep, satisfying clump, but some hidden hydraulics kicked in at the last second, slowing the door down and settling it into place with a barely audible click.
“Plan B is insist.”
Since Uncle Eric died, it felt like I’d spent more time traveling than being anywhere. I tried to count up the hours I’d spent in airplanes and airports, and came to the rough conclusion that I could have gone around the world five times. Marco Polo and Magellan were homebodies compared to me. I expected the drive north to Taos to be just another trip: a couple of hours in a vibrating metal box, ending someplace I didn’t know. Instead, going down the two-lane highway pointed out something I hadn’t realized. Pretty nearly all the places I’d been to in my long, slow survey of my domain had been cities with airports. With big hotels filled with smartly dressed people lining up to give me whatever I asked for because I’d bodysurfed in on a wave of money.
Now we drove through a handful of towns that were barely more than a few hundred yards where the speed limit went down. In a couple, I could have counted the buildings on my fingers. Twice, we passed little houses set back from the highway like some kind of suburban dimensional warp. I imagined some anonymous subdivision, thousands of identical houses with one inexplicable lot of mountain and grassland. It wouldn’t have seemed any stranger than this.
The cottonwoods by the roadside were black barked and dead looking. The names on the signs were places I’d never heard of, some of which seemed like jokes. I had a hard time believing there was a Rat, New Mexico, even if they were saying it in Spanish. Ex pointed out that there was Boca Raton in Florida, and Rat’s Mouth wasn’t particularly more dignified.
