Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

by Michael Marshall Smith

  But she was walking along a residential street, lined with trees. It seemed familiar, but she had never seen it this way before. There were no cars. The leaves on the trees were grey. There were houses, or things that should be houses but were just oblongs with roofs. There were no windows or doors. They were the idea of shelter, nothing more. These houses were designed to keep you out. To make it clear that you were alone.

  The street finished in a dead end. Beyond was a grassy area. The trees here were bigger. Pines, some eucalyptus, and a redwood or two. A few picnic tables, empty, old, forgotten. It looked like it had been a long time since anyone had tied a birthday-party balloon to any of them.

  On the right there was an open patch, with a path leading across it. She walked this to the end, where the ground abruptly shaded away, and realized how high up she was. Then she saw the view, and realized …

  This was Ocean View Park.

  She blinked, looked back. Yes, she knew this place, of course she did. It was a park on the other side of Santa Cruz from where they lived now. They used to come here when she was younger and they lived on the east side, back when everything was good and all she knew was a rolling cycle of warmth and food and play and sleep – with occasional TV.

  She took a few steps towards the edge, realizing something else was wrong. She should be able to see the boardwalk from this high vantage. The ocean too, of course, hence the name of the park, and the wide mouth of the San Lorenzo River, crossed by the old wooden hulk of the decommissioned railway bridge, but especially the boardwalk and the Giant Dipper, and …

  None of it was there. It was just cloud.

  She turned and hurried back up the path, calling for her grandfather, fighting to stay calm. She couldn’t remember when he’d started not being with her any more. He wasn’t here now, though. She could tell that. Nobody was here.

  The place felt dead. Wholly, utterly dead.

  Past the tall trees and the picnic tables was the first set of swings, the ones for little kids. Beyond that, down a shallow slope, the bigger swings. She could still remember the day when she’d graduated to these, when she’d judged she no longer needed to be held fast by the bucket shapes of the toddler swings but could perch on these stirringly adult contraptions instead, keeping herself in place by gripping the metal chains and allowing herself to be held by momentum.

  Her father had been dubious at first, but she’d proved herself capable. ‘Wow. Look at you,’ he’d said. He seemed both happy and sad. ‘Look at you all grown up.’

  She remembered running across the grass afterwards to where her mother sat, and her mother folding her in her arms and telling her how big she was now. It was the moment when Hannah had progressed from toddler to a child, the first time she’d left part of her life behind.

  The swings hung limply in the still air.

  Hannah walked past to the park’s banner attraction: the two long slides. They went down a full thirty feet, dropping from the park’s upper section to a lower one with a climbing frame that she’d never had much to do with (it seemed to her to be a boy thing). The slides were made of metal, burnished by the passage of countless small backsides, often aided by small, scavenged squares of cardboard (which meant your bottom didn’t get as hot, and you went twice as fast).

  She stood at the top and looked down. She couldn’t see the end of the slides. She didn’t want to go down. She didn’t want to be here at all. She turned, deciding to walk back out of the park the way she’d come, to do it now, and to do it fast.

  She saw that one of the swings was in motion. Someone was sitting on it. Too large to be a kid. Someone with brown hair like her own, but wavier. And …

  Hannah took tentative steps towards the swings. The figure didn’t look up. She, or he, or it, kept swinging slowly back and forth … And Hannah suddenly realized that there was something deeply familiar about it.

  ‘Mom?’

  The figure jumped off the swing and ran.

  It ran like a bundle of shadows, through the trees. It was making a noise like someone crying – though again, the sound seemed confused, broken up by other noises, like a swing door opening and the chink of wine glasses.

  Hannah ran after it, ran as fast as she could, but the figure was moving at adult speed – the speed of someone who, like Hannah’s mom, diligently did at least a 5K run three days a week, come rain, come shine. Hannah followed it along the path to the drop, towards the big cloud where you should be able to see the boardwalk, running until her breath was tearing in her chest, managing to keep the figure in sight.

  It ran right to the end, where the bluff dropped away, not slowing, getting faster and faster.

  And then it jumped – hurling itself into the cloud.

  Hannah was scared to jump, but scared not to. The figure had been the only thing here. Now she was alone. She tripped but kept on running, trying to screw up her courage to follow, to jump into nothingness.

  But then something grabbed her arm, and Hannah screamed.

  It was Granddad.

  ‘Don’t go closer to the edge,’ he said.

  ‘Was that Mom?’

  ‘No. Come on. Follow me.’

  He tried to drag her away but Hannah didn’t want to leave. She dug her heels in, eyes still on the cloud.

  Behind them, she could hear the rusty sound of the swing still going back and forth. Swinging, swinging.

  Why was it making that noise again? What was making it swing? Was the figure back there now? Was everything repeating?

  ‘It’s not there,’ her grandfather said. ‘What you’re seeing and hearing isn’t really there.’

  ‘But how come, if you see it too?’

  ‘I’m seeing it because you do. Until a few seconds ago I was somewhere else. I was beside an apple tree in a garden I knew long, long ago. Waiting for someone who never turned up. I’m only here now because your mind is young and very strong.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Hannah said. ‘That … that was Mom. I have to go to her.’

  Granddad gripped her arm even more tightly and swung her round to face him. He looked strange and old. ‘Turn away,’ he said. ‘Forget it. Leave her be.’

  Hannah didn’t want to. Once his gaze held her, however, she didn’t seem able to free herself. She couldn’t move. His hands gripped her arms tighter and tighter, like giant claws.

  She heard the thing on the swing – her mother, she still believed it must be her – make a noise.

  Then there was a clanking, chinking sound as the chains on the swing rattled, as the thing sitting on it climbed off, slowly this time, and started towards her.

  ‘Hannah,’ Granddad said very urgently. ‘Look away.’

  She closed her eyes.

  She opened them a moment later to find that she was standing again on the pathway in the place with the short grasses and the bushes. Ocean View Park had disappeared. The Devil was standing to one side.

  The imp, Vaneclaw, was close to him. Its face looked pinched and tense. ‘Boss? This doesn’t feel right. At all.’

  ‘It does not,’ the Devil agreed. ‘We should go.’

  He set off up the path. Up, or perhaps down. Hannah and her grandfather followed. After a few minutes she was enormously relieved to see the iron gate in the distance. She sensed that she was not the only one to feel that way, as they all started to walk a little faster.

  She was the last to pass through, and as she stepped over the threshold she turned, thinking she heard someone call her name.

  ‘No,’ her grandfather said. ‘Don’t look back. Never ever.’

  When she was the other side the Devil closed the gate and slipped his hand into its lock. This time when he turned it, she felt the way you do when you’re walking down a flight of steps and don’t realize there’s one fewer than you thought.

  But hollow, too, and very sad.

  After they’d clambered back out of the canyon, the Devil spent a few minutes in conference with Soulfang. At the end the imp no
dded, looking somewhat dejected, and trudged back to stand guard once more at a crack in the earth in the back of beyond.

  Then they started the long walk back to the car.

  For hour after hour, the Devil drove through the dark emptiness. Granddad insisted Hannah ride in the front, to be closer to the heater. The heater wasn’t very efficient and barely produced any warmth at all, but she loved him for the thought.

  For a long time nobody spoke. Finally, as they came out of the second endless chunk of forest, and Hannah felt that they were far enough away that it might be safe to speak of what had taken place, she asked a question.

  ‘What happened in there?’

  ‘You got lost behind,’ Granddad said.

  ‘Left behind?’

  ‘No. Lost. In the Behind.’

  She turned in her seat to look at him. ‘Did you find out what’s wrong with the machine?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. All I learned is that it’s worse than we thought.’

  The Devil’s eyes were on the road ahead, or what little of it could be seen in the light of headlamps fighting against the thick darkness. Hannah didn’t think she’d ever seen someone look so serious in her entire life.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked him.

  He took a very long time to respond, and when he did she could see that the answer pained him a great deal. ‘I don’t know.’

  They got back to the city just before dawn, the same time they’d left the day before, which made Hannah hope she might be able to pretend the whole episode had never happened, that she’d merely dreamed it, lost a day somehow through forgivable carelessness, and that life could go on as before.

  As they were walking across the hotel lobby towards the elevator, Granddad’s phone rang. He answered it, and listened, and then walked a distance away to listen some more, his eyes on Hannah all the time.

  When he ended the call he stood motionless for a moment, looking lost. Then he walked back over to her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We need to be calm,’ he said.

  Hannah immediately felt very un-calm. ‘Why? Has something happened to Mom?’

  ‘No. That was Zoë. Your father has disappeared.’

  Chapter 18

  In the beginning was the word. So what do you do when the words won’t come? When you don’t know what happens next?

  You just keep typing.

  Steve knew this all too well. You keep doing things. It’s how life works, the engine of time itself. Breath follows breath. Day follows night. Homework has to be supervised and school lunches have to be made. Groceries need to be bought. Cars require to be filled with gas before you can do any of this, and those cars have to be paid for and your dad or mom or some steel-nerved stranger will have had to teach you to drive.

  This follows that. That follows this.

  It takes you a long time to grasp the fact that neither ‘this’ nor ‘that’ make a lot of difference, and in fact it’s all the following that takes up your time. Whatever you do, whatever you say, will lead to another thing, and another – and before you know it you’ll be riding some brave sentence out into the great unknown, driving it like a road into a future you create for yourself word by word.

  Unless … the words stop coming.

  She was beautiful. Beautiful and wild deep inside. Beautiful and bold and occasionally rash and yet always so practical, and fundamentally – Steve believed, and had always believed – several large strides out of his league. He had tried selling himself the idea that perhaps their leagues lay side by side, like different breeds. If it’s true that every dog still has a touch of the wolf in it, then Steve’s was heavily domesticated, glimpsed only in an occasional twitch in the feet as he dozed and dreamed by the hearth after a long day working the farm. Kristen’s inner wolf had her pacing up and down along the fence every evening, sniffing at the cold winds coming down from the mountains, eager to run and explore. To be Out There.

  Yet somehow they’d come together. Come together and started weaving a life, sharing the same page. In your twenties you unquestioningly believe you’re writing in pencil, a striking first draft. You do things with such confidence. You know you’re so strong, so individual, wholly unique: that you have power over heaven and earth, and that the future and its wonders are either already in your hands or will be after you do the next thing, or the thing that follows naturally after that.

  And so you bravely pick up the existential pencil and sketch a few opening sentences, the speculative first paragraph. You encourage the woman or man you love to write alongside you, relishing the co-authoring of this huge improvisational adventure, this big and beautiful game. You write and write and write and it all seems so very easy, and before you know it you’re already on Chapter Sixteen and that’s great because just look how much you’ve done, and how very good it is … or will be, definitely, when you’ve had a chance to give it an edit.

  Until the lunch in Los Gatos when you realize there will be no second draft, that your wife doesn’t love you any more, and you’ve been writing with indelible ink all along.

  Before all that happens you get married, rather early. You have a child. You work. You buy a house. You prioritize one set of friends over another. You move to a bigger house. You tend towards one brand of instant coffee. You buy a mountain bike and feel guilty about never using it. You fall into the habit of visiting Big Sur, and hang your dreams upon its crags.

  You do all these things, telling each other how serious they are, so mutually proud of how grown-up you’re becoming – look at me, Mom! Hey, Dad, see how well I’ve done! – though in reality it still feels like a game, endless dress-up. And gradually you realize a lot of these haven’t been actual choices, but words following words in the sequence that makes sense at the time. Or maybe just … happens.

  Because sometimes, you come to fear, doing what made sense, word by word, has trapped you into sentences that don’t in fact go where you expected (or wanted) to be led. But that’s OK, because you’re still in charge, right? Life is the ultimate creative act, as all the photo memes and Twitter quotes and the racks of bestsellers in the bookstores endlessly remind you. You’re the artist at work. And so you take stock, judiciously, glad to be older and wiser now, and you pick up the Eraser of Maturity and bend over your story, ready to make the few minor adjustments required to get it back on glorious track.

  But it won’t rub out.

  All those words and sentences, those previous chapters … turns out they’re there for good. You rub and rub at them, and maybe you’ll get some of the most recent words to smear, but the meaning remains in place, irrevocable. There is no future in them, no present, only the endlessly structuring past. You live in this house in particular, and are father to that specific child, and have a certain job, and you have become all the things you have done and thought, and now can’t undo or unthink.

  You push the paper aside, discomfited. Ignore the situation for a while, continue to add the everyday acts of brushing your teeth and working and listening to your wife talk about a big contract she’s considering taking in London and how good it would be for her career, and thus for the two of you, never realizing that by now she is thinking mainly of herself and her intangible needs – to a degree that even she is unaware of.

  But then a few months later, when you return to the task, having convinced yourself in the meantime that it must be possible, you find that someone else has been covertly trying to change the story while you weren’t paying attention, rubbing out your joint past far harder than you ever had courage to.

  The words are all still there, still visible. But she’s rubbed so very hard at them that the paper itself has started to tear right across the middle.

  And in your heart of hearts, you don’t blame her.

  You’ve grasped by now that the situation is in danger of becoming desperate, that your story is going off the rails. The problem is that by the time you accept this, the world has already jumped tracks.<
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  But it must be recoverable, right? There must be something you can say or do, some form of words, some astonishing paragraph that will fix everything and bring life back under control. You try and try, but the words won’t come. If stories are like cats, then words are the most scaredy of kittens. The harder you chase, the deeper they hide, until the morning when the woman you love hands you back the piece of paper you’ve huddled over together for many years, and tells you that – apart from a few choice sentences, like the child you both love – it’s your story and yours alone now.

  And the next chapter is your sole responsibility.

  So WTF happens next?

  You realize then, far too late, that you were mainly good at the describing parts, the adjectives – and it was she who came up with the plot, the verbs, the doing words. You realize that your wife may even have a point, that you have become ossified and disengaged and becalmed (though doesn’t her impulsiveness miss the target far more often these days, now she’s stopped using you to ground her feet and steady her aim?). You come to fear that while some are good at writing their stories, you have a tendency to let your story write you instead.

  Words will vanish under these circumstances, and this messed-up, anger-torn, and tear-stained piece of paper becomes all that remains of a life that not so long ago you were so proud of that you’d have hung it on the wall. Now it looks like something found screwed up in a drawer of an old person’s house.

  But it’s all you’ve got. So you scribble. You type. You hack at it. Nothing makes a mark. You start to fear it never will, that all you can do is cross some of these once-loved words out. Until one night it occurs to you that maybe there’s a more vigorous editing style left to try, a way of bailing from a story in which you don’t even seem to have a speaking part.

  That perhaps you have to be your own deus ex machina.

  That you could take your piece of paper somewhere private. By yourself.

  And set fire to it.