by Matt Cardin
The pressure in my forehead was beautiful. The tingling warmth in my abdomen was delicious.
I shut the doors behind me and walked boldly back through the menagerie of artifacts, no longer fearing that I might defile them. With uncharacteristic courage, I stopped and caressed them one by one, feeling a new exultation well up within me at the feel of their textures.
The elevator door was open and waiting for me. I rode it back down in complete inner and outer silence without holding onto the rail. The hanging light fixture was motionless and silent as the car came to a halt and I stepped back onto my accustomed ninetieth floor. The hallways were dark. Everyone had gone home for the evening, and I walked in total solitude to my office, where I found the door still open and the lights still on.
It was not until I sat down at my desk and swiveled the chair to face the window that I discovered the true nature of the gift Mr. Brand had given me.
Outside, there were only stars. Instead of looking down upon the hopeless squalor of the old city, my window-wall now sat at the glowing hot center of a spiral galaxy. Delicate arms of silver and white fire unfurled away from me like flaming roads to paradise, like star-dusted snowbanks, and the spaces between them shimmered with a golden glow like the light of a sunrise.
Nothing stood between us now, the stars and me, no obstruction at all. Even this cold pane was utterly insubstantial. If I tipped forward I might pass through the window as through a sheet of water, and on the other side fall forever into a vast well of endless beauty. The city below had turned invisible in the cosmic light of this sacred gallery, and I wept with joy as I realized that I no longer had to wonder why I was here instead of somewhere else, or worry about whether I should be doing this instead of that. Enjoyment of the ultimate mystery might be reserved for another, but I no longer felt any sense of loss. All my questions had vanished, leaving only this dazzling cold beauty outside my window and inside my heart. Most miraculous and wonderful of all, I knew that it would all continue to shine on without me forever, and imparted meaning to the meaningless. It was shining without me even now, immediately outside my window in that inconceivably beautiful swirl of fiery night.
Mr. Brand saw it all as well, and understood the vision in its entirety from the protection of his shadowy sanctum perched high in the eye of the needle: Mr. Brand, who alone possessed the secret of joy, whose tower pierced through the heart of heaven like a spear; Mr. Brand, who banished all fear and desperation with his touch, because he alone knew what was ultimately needed.
For no reason at all, I work for Viggo Brand.
Desert Places
Men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars.
—H. P. Lovecraft
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
—Robert Frost
1
When Dr. Pryor told me that my friend Paul had been involved in a terrible accident, I was sitting in the heart of the Utah desert fifteen miles outside Vernal, brushing away flecks of dirt from the leg bone of an as-yet unidentified fossil. We only knew that it was some sort of dinosaur, right from the heart of the Jurassic period. Only a small portion had been exposed by our efforts. The bulk of it was still buried under the dry Utah soil. It would take many more days of painstaking effort to excavate the piece with all of its secrets still intact.
The light of the early evening sun spilled over my shoulder like a flow of warm liquid, bathing the earth before me with a ruddy glow. That moment, with my eyes fixed on the long-buried bone of an extinct reptile and my brain reeling from the news I’d just heard, burned itself instantly, irrevocably, into my soul. The sense of being deeply and painfully marked was almost physical.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Pryor said. “The woman on the phone said I should tell you exactly what was going on. She said you’d listen better that way.” His unreadable little eyes were even more opaque than usual behind his thick eyeglasses. He shuffled his right foot through the heavy carpet of desert dust, and his work boot kicked up a dry brown cloud that lingered in the motionless air between us.
I didn’t have to be told who had made the call. No one else would have had the astounding boldness—or tactlessness—to pass the message through a stranger, nor would anyone else have had such a bitingly accurate insight into my state of mind from across a distance of a thousand miles.
“Did she say how it happened?” I asked.
“Not exactly. Some sort of injury to the head. I guess it’s quite serious.” He shuffled his foot again.
I knew I should felt bad for my paleontologist employer. He was obviously discomfited by Lisa’s awful judgment in giving the news directly to him instead of doing the sane thing and asking him to hand me the phone. But I couldn’t feel anything besides a hollow dullness that seemed to breathe into me from the desert.
“I guess you’ll be leaving.” His words were both a statement and a question.
“Yes.” I took a final glance at the great leg bone, as thick as the trunk of a small tree back in my home state of Missouri, and willed the moment to stay with me. Something about its pain, its vividness, seemed crucial. Something about the mystery of the buried bone seemed vital to my continued health and sanity. I wanted the pain of that mark on my soul, and the mystery of the dead monster, to stay with me forever, to remind me of the fact that I was indeed capable of feeling such a pure and profound emotion.
Then I took a breath and rose to my feet. Dr. Pryor stood looking at me doubtfully. I knew I was abandoning him right when he needed me the most. But then, I had only been working with him for a short time, whereas my roots with Paul and Lisa were old and deep.
“Sorry,” I said. It was all I could manage.
He shrugged faintly. “You have to do what you have to do. I’m sorry about your friend.”
I started to say thanks, but then I just nodded and walked away to where we had parked our vehicles. The cloud I kicked up as I drove back to the road swirled around my old Ford van like a rusty ghost. When some of it sucked in through the grill and coughed out of the dashboard vents, it tasted hot and coppery, like a splash of blood on my tongue.
2
The drive should have taken seventeen hours, but I made it last nearly thirty. This was due partly to the practical fact that my battered old van with its badly unbalanced wheels shook like a minor earthquake when I exceeded fifty miles per hour. But the real reason for my slow pace was my sharp reluctance to reach my destination. I was heading back into territory that I thought I had left behind, and every mile I traveled felt like fighting against a river current. I drove most of the way at a speed of around forty, stopping by the roadside several times to catch my breath and stare up at the sky—dappled with silvery stars by night, then cloudless and harsh with heat during the day—while I struggled to divine my own motives. Did I really want to do this? Did I really want to go back and face the remains of my old life again?
When I finally arrived at the hospital in Farrenton, Missouri, it was eleven-thirty at night and I felt like a walking dead man. My eyes throbbed with a pulsing ache and my back wanted to split in two.
True to form, Lisa displayed her talent for mind reading by greeting me in the lobby. There was no way she could have known when I would arrive, or even whether I would show up. But there she sat, waiting on a mahogany-colored sectional sofa with a crisp copy of the Farrenton Beacon spread open in her lap. When she saw me, she dropped the newspaper and ran to me as if I were a long-lost friend or lover. Which, of course, I was. Only she was obviously more at ease with our troubled past than I could ever be. The dark midnight mood of the lobby, with its sleek contemporary décor and black-tinted windows, reminded me of a movie set as she closed the distance between
us.
“Oh, Stephen!” she cried, and buried her face in the breast of my tee shirt. As she heaved against me, I reflexively put my arm around her and then stood inhaling the scent of her perfume and looking down at the glossy black sweep of her hair. She watered my dusty shirt with her tears for a moment before stepping back.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her cheeks and attempting a smile. “It’s good to see you. I’ve missed you.”
I mumbled something in reply and tried not to notice that she looked delectable in a crimson turtleneck and auburn leather jacket. Her pants and boots were dark leather as well. Outside her sweater she wore a gold weave necklace that rose and fell with the curves of her breasts.
“I’m . . . sorry,” she said again, and the falter in her voice caused me to notice for the first time how out-of-sorts she seemed. A sliver of pain was etched between her eyes, which still glowed an emerald cat’s green, just as brightly as they ever had. The corners of her lovely mouth were taut with worry and her shoulders were drawn tightly inward. The social skills I had lost during three years of drifting through rain forests and deserts started to come back, and I took her by the arm and led her to the sofa, where I kept my hand on her until she was seated. Then I sat beside her and waited for her to make the next move.
“It’s bad,” she said. I knew immediately that she was referring to Paul. I had been gripped by a raging curiosity about his accident all during the long drive east, and more to the point, there was nothing else for us to talk about.
“He’s not going to get any better,” she said. “The doctor says he’s brain-dead. He’s just a vegetable.” This brought on another bout of sobs, during which I again put my hand on her arm and noticed that I could feel the heat of her flesh all the way through the double layer of leather and cotton.
“Lisa,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken her name in three years. She looked up at me with glassy eyes, and I knew that a part of me, a despised part that I would have given anything to be able to excise from my soul, still loved her. The question I then asked—“What the hell happened?”—referred to Paul’s accident, but the vehemence with which I asked it arose from the fact that it may as well have referred to Lisa’s and my sorry history.
The tale she related to me was absurd. That was the thought that lingered with me after she had explained everything and we were rising from the sofa. It lingered as she led me farther into the hospital, toward the elevators, toward the seventh floor, toward the sterile white room where my best friend and spiritual mentor, the wisest and kindest man I had ever known, lay attached to a respirator with a dent in his head from a wayward terra cotta planter that had fallen from a high metal shelf at a home supply store. He and Lisa had gone browsing there with idle thoughts of building a house together. Almost as an afterthought, they had wandered through the outdoor section, where a strong wind, a veritable mini-cyclone, had blown in from nowhere and toppled the fifty-pound planter off its perch and directly onto the back of his skull. He had never regained consciousness.
We rode the elevator in silence. Lisa’s body glowed with warmth as she stood next to me in her red turtleneck. When the door opened, she led me in silence down a hallway, past a nurse’s station, toward a room I dreaded to enter.
Paul lay under the sheets with a bandage wrapped around his head and various plastic tubes attached to his body like the limbs of a giant insect. The rasping of the respirator was dry and chilling. Several fresh flowers in plastic vases adorned the table next to the bed, along with a scattering of sympathy cards. I stepped closer and looked down into his face. Even as he lay there unconscious, his dark eyebrows still endowed him with a placid, mysterious demeanor, halfway between brooding and peaceful. If it had not been for the tubes distorting his features, his expression would have been identical to the one I had seen a thousand times before, when we had sat beside each other in meditation.
Lisa showed uncommon good taste by standing back and letting me absorb the reality of the moment. When I had seen enough, I turned to look at her.
“Lisa, I’m so sorry.” And of course I really was. Despite the fact that she had chosen him over me, devastating me with such a desperate sense of grief and betrayal that I had been driven to the brink of madness, I could not feel anything but anguish at Paul’s fate. And I could not help feeling a momentary surge of protectiveness toward her, like the phantom sensation of a lost limb.
She stepped up beside me and we both looked down at him. “Do you recognize that expression?” she said. “He could almost be meditating.” A ripple of chills went down my spine at this latest display of her intuitive powers. I had never gotten used to that, not in all the years we had been lovers. She had always seemed connected to the universe in a way that I simply could not rival, no matter how hard I worked to develop my spirituality. The fact that Paul, too, had possessed his own special kind of connection to the absolute, and had been not only my best friend but also my informal guru, was more than just ironic. In light of what had followed, it was downright brutal.
“I keep hoping,” she said, “that he’s experiencing all kinds of things that he always wondered about. He always talked about death like it was a long-lost friend. He always expected it to tear away the last veil and bring him face to face with the great mystery.” She looked at me and smiled a sad smile. “I don’t have to tell you this. You knew him as well as I did.” She had painted her lips red to match her blouse. They looked sweet as strawberry candy.
Suddenly, I knew I had to leave the room. There was no visible reason for it. I only knew that I had to step out for air. The memories and emotions were swirling too thickly beside Paul’s bed, and something like a panic attack waited just beneath the surface to shatter me. I said something about needing to visit the restroom, and she offered to walk down the hallway with me.
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I just need a minute to wash the dust off. It was a long drive.”
“All the way from Utah,” she said. Her eyes were impenetrable when I dared to look into them.
“How did you know where I was?”
“I called your mother. She gave me your employer’s number.”
Of course. She had called my mother. How difficult should that have been to figure out? I had left Dr. Pryor’s cell number with my mother, who had always loved Lisa, even after the two of them, Lisa and Paul, had betrayed me. The thought of these two iconic women from my past chatting with each other like old friends behind my back sent another chill down my spine. I hid my uneasiness with a nod and made a hasty exit.
A sign directed me to a restroom at the end of the corridor. Most of the overhead lights in the main hallway were switched off for the evening, and the beige walls and floor tiles gave off a chalky glow in the dim illumination. A woman was perched at the nurse’s station on my left, reading a paperback novel by the light of a desk lamp. She glanced up at me, but I kept my gaze purposefully forward and sighed with relief when I encountered no one else.
In the restroom I spent a moment relieving my distended bladder and then another washing my face in the utility sink. Then I paused to consider my reflection in the mirror. My tee shirt looked as if a child had daubed it with clay. There were muddy streaks where Lisa’s tears had smudged the desert dust. My face and arms were tanned. I needed a shave. If I had not been the one living behind my own eyes, I might have done a double take, just to make sure that I was really the same clean-cut person who had set out from this town only a few years ago.
When I returned to Paul’s room, I found Lisa seated beside the bed in one of the guest chairs. Her eyes were closed and her lips were moving. She held Paul’s hand in her own, and I received the inescapable impression that she was uttering a prayer. Knowing something of her exotic spiritual proclivities, I didn’t presume to venture a guess about to whom or what she might be praying, or what she might be saying to them. In the silence, I looked around and noticed a small crucifix mounted on the wall above the bed. For a few s
econds I tried staring into Christ’s tiny face in an effort to find some kind of solace, but the sculpted look of agony only increased my uneasiness.
Presently, Lisa’s eyes opened, and when I glanced down at her it was like an icy fist suddenly seized my heart.
Something about her eyes was terribly wrong. It took me a moment to recognize it, but when I did there was no mistaking the source of the wrongness: her irises had darkened. From a bright emerald green they had turned a deep coal color while she had prayed, and even as I watched in shock, they appeared to be growing darker with each passing second. Her expression appeared unfocused, as if she were gazing not at the hospital room but at some other world that she discerned behind the surface veneer of plaster walls and vinyl floor tiles. The sliver of pain in her brow suddenly looked more cruel than wounded. Her entire demeanor exuded a kind of quiet menace that was somehow linked to her physical beauty, as if her loveliness were just a discrete facet of some other, wider reality whose overall character was awful.
Then the moment passed, and I realized she was looking at me. No trace of the sinister expression remained. She offered me a wan half-smile, and after wavering for a moment, I seated myself on the other side of Paul and tried to get a look at her eyes. They were bright green, like a cat’s. Without changing position, I folded back into myself mentally and filed away the bizarre incident for later reflection. I had not experienced such a strong hallucinatory episode for quite some time. That it could come on so unexpectedly, without any warning, and in the midst of such an unlikely setting, disturbed me deeply.
