Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  A minute later a pickup appeared ahead of us, halted in the breakdown lane.

  “Pull in behind him,” Rena said. Then, with a puzzled look: “But not too close. I don’t know why.”

  I did that.

  F-250, Oregon plate, the left rear end resting on the rim of a shredded tire. We sat fifty yards or so behind it, engine idling, rain falling through the headlights. No boyfriend in sight.

  “Where is he?”

  Rena shrugged. “I don’t know everything.”

  She popped the passenger door and climbed out. Seizing a moment of passing lucidity and guilt I opened my cell phone but got only a faded signal. Maybe if I wandered around a little I could pick it up. But I left the phone in the car when I got out to join Rena. I felt free. And the guilt and fear that had been building around Marci sloughed away and struck me as inconsequential. We were all bigger than what we appeared.

  My breath steamed in the mountain air. The rain fell icy cold on my head and neck. Rena and I cast long black shadows in the fanned glare of the Subaru’s headlamps.

  A car went by, then another, then it was quiet on the pass. Rena’s drippy pixie hair was flattened to her skull. Still cute, though. She closed her eyes tight. A minute or so elapsed.

  “Rena?”

  “Wait.”

  I sighed deeply then closed my eyes, too, and another world opened around me. This time it wasn’t mountains and grassy vistas. I found myself on a broad promenade encircling midway up a building that might have been a mile tall. Rena was there and we were standing next to an abandoned rickshaw-like contraption with a broken wheel. The sky was painted with sunset clouds.

  You couldn’t see the rest of the city unless you stepped right up to the retaining wall that enclosed the promenade. We were that high up on the side of this stupendous structure. Not a skyscraper but a sky penetrater. The rest of the city spread out below us, densely packed to the horizon in every direction, blocks and towers and spires and buttresses, plumes of venting steam, checkerboard lights, traffic crawling between the buildings like sluggish yellow blood, a distant rumble and clangor.

  I looked away, feeling kind of flickery.

  Rena smiled. “You’re not doing too well this time. You better open your eyes.”

  “They are open.”

  “Here they are. But not back on the road. You’re too porous. I doubt you even know what’s going on.”

  “I’m okay,” I said, though I did feel unsteady and only half comprehended the situation. If that.

  “Yes, you’re okay. But don’t move, huh?”

  She walked away. The promenade was wide as a superhighway and empty except for us. Something big came around the curve, lumbering but fast, like Dumbo the flying elephant. It even looked a bit like an elephant, only the trunk was some kind of articulated cable thick as a telephone pole and bent like an inverted question mark. On the fluted end of it sat a little man in a blue helmet, hands manipulating a pair of levers.

  I was safe by the wall, but Rena had just stepped into Dumbo’s path.

  I bolted for her, yelling, and my eyes opened in the first world, the world of mountain darkness and icy rain. Instead of a midget-driven elephant there came roaring out of the dark curve of the pass a tractor-trailer rig, white lights like a scream. The driver started to swing toward the breakdown lane, but he still would have hit Rena if I hadn’t yanked her out of the way.

  Tumbled on the road, my body covering Rena, I saw the boyfriend. He had his cell phone in hand, keypad lit up periwinkle, his face an astonished white mask just before the semi (missing my Subaru by a comfortable margin) plowed him and his Ford into the side of the mountain. I guess he had a faded signal, too, and had gone off to try to unfade it.

  Dale or whateverthefuck slumped against the fender of his cab, red hat clutched in his ape’s paw, weeping at the mangled pickup and the dead man. Rain fell continuously. Rena and I stood on the other side of the road.

  “Was that supposed to happen?” I said.

  “I guess so.”

  She looked like she had invisible sandbags slung over her shoulders.

  “When you bleed between worlds,” she said, “the trajectories of Fate sharpen. All this makes some kind of had-to-be sense, or it’s supposed to.”

  I held her hand and she squeezed hard and pulled me around. “Hey, Johnny—”

  I looked at her wet face.

  “I’m slipping away, I feel it.”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Can’t help it. We’ll meet again. We already have, already will. Kiss me before we forget who we are.”

  I kissed her mouth, but midway through it I began to feel strange about her, then stranger. We broke apart from each other and I couldn’t really see her face anymore. Dark rain swept between us. Then Rena screamed and lurched toward the wreckage, calling some lost boy’s name in her cracking voice.

  *

  I sat alone in my car and didn’t remember any of the strange stuff. My head hurt. Rain ticked on the roof. Beyond the flooded windshield blue and red and white lights strobed and highway patrolmen in rain slickers milled around watching the tow truck. Rena was in the backseat of one of the cruisers. And I found myself alone in the unguarded fortress of my heart. Moat drained, portcullis raised, etc. Piranha flopped in the mud. A lonely wind blew through the open gate. That’s what was left over. It’s what you get for picking up a hitcher. The end of fun and games, not the beginning. When I shut my eyes I saw only the usual dark.

  *

  I started the car, turned around and headed toward Seattle.

  As soon as I cleared the fade zone I speed dialed Marci’s cell. It went straight to voice mail. I retrieved the number for the Kennedy Hotel and asked the front desk to connect me to Marci’s room. The phone started ringing and went on ringing. Well it was almost dawn, and she might have been a deep sleeper. I wouldn’t know, having always left before the night was over, especially this final time; I used to be that way. The phone rang and rang, and inside I was raveled and alone, subjected to memory. That phone rang until the front desk informed me needlessly that the room wasn’t answering, and I told the desk clerk he better get up there with a passkey. Maybe I shouted it. Trajectories of Fate. Everybody bleeds through. Eventually.

  *

  It’s nice here on the lake. The water is sapphire, because that’s Rena’s favorite color. It looks painted. This is a shifting place where memories converge around the core of our beings. A safe place where I am myself and Rena is herself, and we can sort things out. It’s beautiful here but even when Rena steps through the door to join me there will remain a terrible aspect to it. There are a lot of things to sort out.

  The door opens behind me. I smell cinnamon.

  Reunion

  Lawrence Darby sat stiffly in the back of the Lincoln Continental, fighting it, fighting it. His left hand clawed discreetly at the plush leather seat. With his right hand he fondled the small teddy bear in his overcoat pocket.

  Twelve hours earlier, in desperation, he’d instructed his secretary to book him a flight and arrange for a limo to meet him at the airport in Seattle. For a long, puzzled moment there had been silence on the intercom, and then she had said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Darby. Shall I cancel the department meeting?” Darby hadn’t known what to reply, and that frightened him as much as anything else. “Use your best judgment,” he’d finally said. “And Nancy? Get me a window seat.”

  First class on the Boeing 767 red eye out of JFK. He traveled a lot but always requested an inboard seat, not wanting to be distracted from his laptop computer, the details, his work. Darby had a reputation for ruthlessness. He’d heard himself described as cold, humorless. A bastard. But no one could challenge his prominence on Wall Street.

  Always an inboard seat. Except this time. This time he leaned into the window, experienced tingling exhilaration when the plane banked steeply, the long starboard wing pivoting them over doll houses and shrunken trees. It was like something starting to com
e alive in him again, crying out to come alive. It frightened him. The crying out was distant and he was going to it.

  The bear had been left in the slip pocket on the back of the seat in front of him, a stuffed bear small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. It peeked over the top of the slip pocket, its nose caught on the pleated elastic seam, one rudimentary paw raised as if to wave. A toy, a child’s toy. Darby glanced at his seat mate then surreptitiously palmed the bear and tucked it under his coat, not knowing why but feeling he must have it.

  Now the Lincoln ghosted along broad residential streets twenty miles south of Seattle, past old frame houses, the carports and yards cluttered with children’s toys, bikes dead on their sides, cheap molded plastic swimming pools. Darby stared out the window at TV antennas belted to chimneys, flaking paint, a few nice lawns and many that were neglected, weeds sprouting from sidewalk cracks. A working class neighborhood. Lawrence Darby sat in the limo like a visitor from another dimension, though this was the place where he had grown up, the place from which he’d come.

  “Here,” Darby said. “Stop here.”

  The driver pulled into the curb and braked smoothly.

  “Wait for me right here,” Darby said. The driver half turned his head, nodded, a stranger, a man older than Darby and obedient to Darby’s money, the shiny visor of his cap slanted over his eyebrows.

  Darby walked a block then stopped and looked back at the Lincoln parked under the messy shade of elms. What am I doing here? he thought. He felt anxious that the driver would leave him, abandon him. Darby clenched his teeth, fighting it, fighting the encroaching feeling of vulnerability, of helplessness. He had to get a grip, focus. But focus on what?

  He walked around the block and stood before a modest rambler with wood-framed windows and a cinder-block chimney. There was a little girl in the driveway. Five, maybe six years old, wearing a blue jumper and red sneakers, her hair so blonde it was almost white. She sat on a big-wheeled plastic bike that she was much too big for, pushing herself forward and back, her knees higher than the handlebars. Up and down both sides of the driveway the owner of the house had planted giant plastic sunflowers and their petals twirled in the morning breeze.

  The girl was watching him very closely. Darby said, “Hello,” but she didn’t reply, just continued to push herself forward and back on the toddler’s bike.

  This had been Darby’s house. Decades ago he had lived here with his sister and his mother and father. Incredible. Standing there now he sensed he was closer to the crying out, closer than he had been back in New York, but not close enough. This wasn’t the place he needed to be. He was about to turn away when the little girl said a strange thing.

  “Are you lost?” she asked.

  A chill laced up his back.

  Are you lost?

  “Oh my God,” he mumbled.

  Back in the limo he slammed the door, gave the driver a new destination, then slumped down in the seat, stunned by what he was remembering. Not remembering; this was different from remembering. It was as if he had awakened and found a gaping cavity in his chest, had realized that he was not a living man at all but an animated body.

  The Lincoln fled east, toward the Cascade Mountains. Darby squeezed the stuffed bear in his pocket. For a moment back there at his old house he had been tempted to give the bear away to the little girl in the driveway. But now he knew the toy was for another purpose, a purpose he didn’t yet understand.

  It had been thirty-five years but Darby easily directed the limo driver to a trail head in the National Forest north of Mount Rainer. Being a weekday afternoon only a few cars were parked in the vehicle area. The limo coasted into a slot and the driver killed the engine.

  For almost five minutes Darby was unable to move. He cowered in the backseat of the car, working his hands together in his lap, tears spilling from his eyes, overwhelmed by emotions and fears he had not experienced since early childhood. The driver, a perfect professional, did not ask if Darby was all right or if he could do anything. Instead the driver sat rigidly behind the wheel and stared out the windshield. A drowning piece of Darby admired him for it.

  Finally Darby forced himself to open the door. He put one foot out on the gravel, then the other, then stood, still holding onto the door, reluctant to let go. He leaned back inside the car and spoke to the driver.

  “I’ll be back in a little while,” he said, as if to reassure himself.

  “Yes, sir,” the driver said.

  Still Darby couldn’t force himself to leave. Anything was better than enduring by himself the burden of loneliness and fear that was now sweeping over him in wave after wave.

  “You know,” he said to the back of the driver’s head, “When I was a boy I got lost in this forest.”

  At the word “lost” Darby’s voice broke, and the driver twitched almost imperceptibly. Then, because he seemed called upon to say something, the driver asked:

  “Was it for very long, sir?”

  Darby swallowed. “Three days. Almost four.”

  “That’s a very long time to be lost.”

  “It was hell,” Darby said, remembering it, really remembering it for the first time in decades. “Pure hell.”

  “Three days is a long time.”

  “Almost four,” Darby said. “It was getting dark again when I finally gave in and they let me go.”

  In the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes opened a little wider. “Sir?”

  “Never mind.”

  At last Darby withdrew from the limo and walked into the forest. It was dark under the trees, dark for a summer afternoon. Darby hadn’t slept for over twenty-four hours. He kept the small blue bear in his right hand as he walked.

  After fifteen minutes or so he departed from the trail. It happened in a strange way. The bear had seemed to twist in his hand—like the monkey’s paw in a story he’d been required to read in high school—and Darby had known this was the place to leave the trail. The same place where he had deviated from the trail thirty-five years ago. Then he had been a five year old walking behind his older sister and his father, and he had decided impulsively to angle off the trail with the idea of tracking ahead and surprising them by suddenly jumping out in front of them. Instead he had become hopelessly lost. He had seen a chipmunk standing perkily on the trunk of a fallen tree. Not a squirrel—he had seen millions of those—but a real chipmunk; there was no mistaking the tail. It watched him as he approached, its little head cocked to the side, and just when Larry Darby was so close he could have reached out and petted it, the chipmunk jumped from the tree and shot away. He had run after it a little way. That’s all it took. His sense of direction was gone. He had attempted to find the trail again but it was as if there was no trail. He had called out for his father, for Angie, but no one called back. He had been five. Instead of remaining in one spot he had kept moving, his fear growing until he was running and crying and a terrible and hopeless emptiness had opened within him.

  Three days. Almost four.

  Darby saw the rotting trunk of the fallen tree. He was forty years old, not five, but the great cavity had opened inside him again and all the haunted fears of his childhood came thundering back in.

  It was the same tree, of course, almost entirely taken over by green moss and pallid, saucer-shaped mushrooms, rotted and sunken and collapsed—but the same tree.

  Darby sat down on it, the rotted wood cracking softly. He held the bear in his hand. A child’s toy bear covered with nappy blue fur. He was a little frightened of it since it moved. But he held it and listened to the ghostly cries of a lost child that had called him across a continent to be in this place. He looked down at his scuffed Italian shoes, his Wall Street shoes, and he remembered how on the evening of the third day they had come for him, whispering in the voices of a dream, flitting between the trees like gauzy shadows, circling him. Now, thinking about them with the fluttering shreds of his adult intellect, Darby wondered if he had seen them because he had been half-starved. M
ystics fasted in solitude to prepare themselves to receive visitations. Had that been part of it, that hunger combined with his child’s wide open mind? Of course later when he walked out to meet the searchers he had told them about the shadow things, or tried to. His father had explained to him about hallucinations, and he had accepted that, more so with each passing year. But now he knew that it was a lie, that the shadows had been real.

  Darby sensed a presence and stiffened.

  “Mister?”

  Lawrence Darby looked up into the distorted mirror of time, into the face of a boy—his own face.

  “Please, mister, I’m lost.”

  Darby dropped the bear.

  “I want to come home,” the boy said, his voice choked and thin. He was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved checked shirt. He looked hungry, his eyes hideously bright with fear and hope. It was himself, little Larry Darby, the way he had appeared thirty-five years ago when the whispering shadows had slipped from the ancient darkness under the forest and circled him, and Darby had sensed their hunger every bit as intense as his own.

  “I’m sorry,” Darby said. The void within him ached to be filled, to take the child back. But he couldn’t. The Lawrence Darby who had walked out of this forest more than three decades ago could not accept into himself this quivering, lost waif. I have to leave the boy, he thought.

  Leave the boy. It’s what they had whispered to him. Leave the boy, let us have him and you, the real you, can go.

  Three days alone. No food, freezing at night, terrified. The search parties never even came close. But he heard the whispering inside his mind, saw the weird shadows—the whispering devils. They had tricked him, somehow, always leading him away from the trail, away from rescue, drawing him in deeper and deeper. A child could not have survived. He had to bargain with them or he would have died. Died of hunger, or exposure. Or loneliness.

  Leave the boy, leave him for us and go, be strong, be free . . .

  “I’m sorry,” Darby said again, standing, looking into the eyes of his own divided soul. Hating himself as he knew others hated him but unable to allow the weakness back in.