Northern Lights

by Raymond Strom

  “To infinity,” J would say, quoting some movie I hadn’t seen, “and beyond.”

  It is difficult to pull specific events out of the fog of this first weeklong drug binge and those that came after. There are, of course, those common to all: the grinding teeth, the shifting shadows, the marathon masturbation sessions when I found myself alone for the night. More than once I walked the streets until the sun rose, the streetlamps guiding me with their yellow cones of light in the darkness. But in my memory it all folds back into a single thread, one long night punctuated by bursts of sunlight. At some point, I brought over a couple of notebooks and we each took to them with pencils. J drew and I wrote but neither of us were very good at what we did. My poetry narrated our lazy days in the sun, the waves washing over us, and J drew abstract designs that grew more and more complicated as he worked, until the page was a solid block of inky darkness, a monument to the energy bound up inside both of us.

  At home late at night, the men and women on the wall stopped working and turned their attention to each other. Ancient rhythms of the heart and body. Every angle the neck can twist to take a kiss while holding the sacred contact. Every possibility of the shuffling of limbs. Yet no matter my efforts, I was trapped in the rocking. Pulling and groaning to no climax. Until sunrise. Then up with my pants and off to work with no rest.

  * * *

  I was working a dinner shift, awake for the fifth day in a row, when my last hit of speed wore off and the waves receded. That was when my fear returned, when my dreams crept into my waking life. Customers peeked around corners to give me dirty looks. The waitress walked up to me and looked down at the crook of my arm. “You disgust me,” she said. “Wash the silverware and bring it out to the dining room.”

  I did as she asked.

  “He’s got tracks,” someone said in the break room. I ran to the doorway but no one was there.

  I worked with my head down. Dirty dishes were brought to me in tubs. I took the plates and bowls and stacked them on the counter, dumped the liquid from the glasses and put them in the slots overhead. The silverware was tossed into soapy water to soak. I loaded the plates onto racks and pushed them into the dish machine. Ninety seconds later they came out the other end. Thick clouds of almost invisible insects swarmed. I swatted them away from every white surface. I worked and worked and soon there was no more work to do. All the dishes were washed and stacked and brought to the line, and the bathrooms were stocked with paper towels, hand soap, and air fresheners.

  “Hey, dishrat,” the cook yelled. “Bring me a pork chop.”

  I went to the cooler to find one and came back.

  “What are you doing with that?”

  “I brought it for you.”

  “Is it my birthday?”

  “You called for a chop.”

  “You need to lay off the drugs, dishrat, you’re losing it.”

  The cook turned back to his work. On my way to the dish room I heard him mumbling so I peeked back around the corner. His features had disappeared, his face was flat and barren like the pad of a thumb.

  “What the fuck are you looking at?”

  I ran back through the dish room and into the break room. I put the chop back in the cooler, then sat down and lit a cigarette. The cook’s voice floated through the doorway, a whisper, but I knew he was talking about me.

  “Knives,” the waitress said.

  I jumped up and ran to the doorway.

  “Act cool,” the cook told the waitress. “I think he heard us.”

  I snuffed out my cigarette, then snuck up to the cook’s line where the cook and the waitress stood, bored, as if they hadn’t been talking about me. A chef’s knife and a serrated sat on the cutting board.

  “Do you need anything?”

  “No.”

  “Your knives could use a quick wash.”

  I took them to the dish room and set them in the sink. From the drawer where we kept the kitchen utensils I took the other knives and the sharpening steel. I wrapped it all up in a white towel, brought the bundle to the walk-in, and hid it in a box of lettuce. I walked out of the cooler calmly, as if I weren’t being threatened, and when I saw that no one had seen me go in or come out, I took off my apron, threw it in the linen hamper, and ran out the back door.

  Minutes later I was knocking on J’s doorjamb, the bedsheet flapping out around me on the breeze.

  “Who is it?”

  I answered.

  “I was sure you were the cops, knocking like that,” he said, weathering paranoia similar to mine. He sat in his chair smoking a cigarette while a single candle burned in the window. The room was dark and I thought I saw someone sitting in the corner but when I turned and looked I could see that no one was there.

  “Man,” I said. I didn’t know what to say. I looked again to the dark side of the room, then I sat down on J’s bed. “So, where’s Mary?”

  “She went home. I thought she said something but she didn’t. I don’t know.”

  “I hear you,” I said. “I can’t tell what’s real anymore. That’s from the drugs, right? Withdrawal?”

  I was so desperate for him to tell me this—my fear had drawn all of my muscles tense, ready for battle or, more likely, flight—that when he nodded I could feel my body expanding into its natural form, the relief was so great.

  “I don’t have any of the pure shit left,” he said, “only a couple folds of the vitamin mix. You should try to get some sleep. That’s the best way to send the shadows back where they came from.” He held out a small plastic bottle with squared-off corners, shook it so it rattled, handed it to me. SLEEP AID, it said on the label. “Six of those will put you out no matter what.”

  Afraid that I’d fall asleep on my way home, I didn’t take the handful of pills until I made it back to the Arlington, tossing them in my mouth as I creaked up the stairs and taking water straight from the faucet in my room to wash them down.

  I had felt much better after talking to J but it wouldn’t last, because my visions again turned on me when I looked into the shadows on the wall. Instead of industrious men and women working or pairs of lovers straining to please each other, small pops and explosions gave way to words of smoke that floated out into the room. FAGGOT, BITCH, LOSER. The words dissipated into clouds of bugs that spiraled into vapor, coming together again to make the next explosion of abuse. LAZY, STUPID, LONGHAIR. I stood and turned on the lights to find that the words had etched themselves into the walls. Standing in the center of the room I was suddenly unsure where I was. Perhaps I had wandered into the room, in the same position as mine on another floor. These looked like my windows but I couldn’t remember decorating my walls with spray-painted insults. None of the stuff in this room looked like anything I owned. The rumpled clothes on the floor could have belonged to anyone.

  I collapsed before I could figure out where I was, whose apartment I had wandered into, having forgotten that I had taken pills to do exactly that, but my mind had been racing so quickly that it couldn’t be subdued. I lay there for a long time, a prisoner in my own body, listening to the red light over the intersection click on and off to the beat of my heart and my shallow breathing, watching Plasticine melt in my mind’s eye like the images in a kaleidoscope until I fell into the darkness.

  Six

  I was out behind the More-4-You admiring the new piece by HOPE, this one a complex twisting of letters linked in impossible ways, when Russell showed up with the usual bulge in his waistband, this time a pocket flask he had stolen from his father. He opened it up and took a drink, then passed it to me.

  “It’s not even noon yet,” I said. “And I have to work tonight if my boss doesn’t fire me.”

  “It’s noon somewhere,” he said, “and you’ll be fine by five. Smoke some weed or something and it’ll give you the energy to get through it.”

  I took a small sip but held the flask up with my tongue sealing the hole to make my drink seem bigger than it was. When I handed it back to him, he turned
south and waved for me to follow. We crossed Center on the tracks and continued along them. The water tower fell away, then the government center, and the last business in town, the A&W, and we were in the country. Looking straight ahead the tracks went on forever, disappearing as they converged on the horizon, a long arrow pointing to where I was headed: Minneapolis. The farther we got, the lighter I felt, and not only from the whiskey. I was surprised, after a long silence, to hear that Russell felt the same way.

  “Sometimes I think about hitching the train out of here, I’d just take off and never look back,” Russell said, each of us walking the rails as if they were tightropes, a long stick between us so we could use each other for balance. “I’d jump on and ride it south as far as I could take it—I bet this shit goes all the way to Texas.”

  “Don’t you think it would stop in the Twin Cities first?”

  “Even Murderopolis would be better than this shithole.”

  “I hope so.”

  Russell was pretty scrawny for a Holmer, which is to say we were the same size. So when I stumbled off my rail, pulling with me the stick between us, he fell off his and came crashing my way. We collided and he put his hand on my shoulder to steady himself but he didn’t make another move like he had on the bridge. Though I was too embarrassed to talk about what had happened, I had to know if that night had been a fluke—whether it was me that he was after or if he would have rolled on top of anyone who pulled him out of that hole. As we made our way toward wherever he was taking me, I tried a couple more moves to land me in his arms, but it didn’t happen. It was like he was two different people—he even started talking about girls.

  “I fucked this girl,” Russell said, climbing back onto his rail. “She was damn hot.” He made gestures near his butt and chest to show me how hot she was.

  “Yeah? What’s her name?”

  “Didn’t even tell me,” he said. “I met her at the fair after you ditched me. Took her over to the stables. Horses can really turn a girl on, probably from looking at their huge cocks.”

  This was supposed to be a joke but I didn’t laugh. Was he trying to make me jealous? The stick twitched between us—Russell stumbled but regained his balance.

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve never kissed a girl.”

  “But you want to?”

  I was quiet for a moment, thinking maybe he hoped I would say it was him I was after. I wanted to tell him this but the words wouldn’t come. In the end I told him about Jenny, about the day at the More-4-You and our camping trip. It was true, after all, that I was drawn to both of them, similar as they were. Describing her as beautiful, smart, thin, and blond, it came to me then that the only differences between them were demeanor and gender. As I was finishing my story I turned to Russell and saw he was holding his free hand to his mouth to contain his laughter.

  “You’re here two weeks and you fall in love with the craziest girl in town?” he said. “That’s classic.”

  I pushed out on the stick, sending Russell sprawling onto the rocks next to the tracks.

  “Fuck, man, it’s not my fault she’s crazy,” he said, standing up, brushing dirt from his pants. He got back up on the rail and took his end of the stick.

  “Are you gonna tell me the story or not?” I asked.

  “Not much of a story,” he said. “I don’t know the details beyond she got caught stealing when she used to live over that way.”

  He pointed off to his left, the wrong side of the tracks.

  “It wasn’t only shoplifting, I’m pretty sure I heard she stole a car or two as well. Like she’s a kleptomaniac and she has been since she was a kid. She didn’t look then like she does now, more a stick figure with a boy haircut and glasses, I mean real glasses—thick frames with lenses that gave her cow eyes. She looked like the most innocent girl in the world until one day the police came into the school and arrested her and she wasn’t in class for the rest of the year. Weird thing is that when she came back, they moved her up a grade into my class. We’ll be seniors next year. Someone told me she’s a genius. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never talked to her. Still looked all cow-eyed until a year or two ago. She’s hot now, sure, but watch out.”

  I tried to imagine a younger Jenny in glasses on a shoplifting spree. It wasn’t too difficult.

  “I should go rob a gas station, maybe they’ll put me in college.”

  “I don’t think anyone will mistake you for a genius,” I said. He laughed but we both knew it was true.

  We walked on in silence, abandoning the stick and instead crunching the rocks alongside the tracks for a while before we heard the whistles behind us. Russell veered off the tracks to the right and I followed, stepping past him into the long grass at the edge of the trainway, but Russell stood a few feet from the rails, turning toward me to yell over the sounds of the train’s approach.

  “I’m gonna hitch it!”

  The conductor sounded the whistle for a long beat as he passed and Russell held his ground. I didn’t think he was going to do it but then he started jogging alongside the train until he caught its pace, reached out for the nearest car ladder, and pulled himself up. He hung off the side, looking back, and waved in a way that told me to come along. I stepped back onto the rocks and ran toward the train, pacing the nearest ladder but something went wrong. Instead of taking a rung and holding it for a few steps, I tried to jump and the momentum tossed me sideways, spinning me for a half circle before I landed on my back on the rocks, my head on a railroad tie. Looking up at the bottom of the train, I felt my hair being pulled as the wheels of a car passed by, a few strands that had landed across the rail. I rolled back toward the grass and looked up to see Russell running toward me but I stood, brushed myself off, and hitched the next ladder before he got back. Feet firmly planted on the bottom rung, I looked back to see Russell catch the rear ladder of the same boxcar and between us was one of the biggest HOPEs I had seen yet, blue and white, in bubble letters drawn so full they seemed about to explode.

  The train picked up speed as we came out next to the highway, quickly catching and passing the southbound cars before we swerved off between two cornfields. We rode for a while, the train going so fast that I was afraid to jump off, but a few miles out it slowed again so I waved at Russell, then made my way down the ladder to dismount before it sped up. Hanging off the ladder, I saw why the train was slowing and swung my feet back onto the bottom rung as my train car eased onto the trestle. Twenty feet below, a river. The Spirit.

  The trestle was two train cars in length and soon we were on the other side. We hung from the ladder and dropped into a run, slowing to a stop as the train passed. I stepped down the riverbank and dipped my hands in the water, splashed my face. Russell followed. When the train was gone I heard birdsong, insects buzzing like power tools in the trees. The river trickled by and a family of ducks, a mother and four fuzzy yellow ducklings, passed without a look in our direction. This quiet part of the forest was very peaceful so I sat down on an overturned tree, swinging my feet and watching the summer day unfold.

  Although I had lived in the middle of nowhere all my life, I hadn’t spent much time out in real nature. The closest I had gotten was a ravine that ran alongside our house in Grand Marais, a short valley with no wildlife, a rusted-out Volkswagen that must have taken a severe turn off the road, a number of old mattresses, and three sealed steel drums with no labels. All this in a stagnant pool that rose and fell with the rain. Even then I had enjoyed the privacy that nature allowed, and in that gorge with a long stick for a sword, I was the king while my mother and father determined the fate of my kingdom back at the house.

  Russell was not new to the natural world and he soon stripped down to his boxer shorts and waded out into the river. After dropping underwater, he turned toward me and swung his arms like pinwheels, playful, splashing at me but not getting me wet.

  “Are you coming?”

  * * *

  My boss called me into his office when I arri
ved for my shift at the Aurora. I had known this talk would come upon waking in my room and realizing that most of my confusion had been voices and shadows in my head. Delusions. Running out of drugs can be as bewildering and disorienting as having them.

  I hadn’t had too many words with Leon since he hired me. He had shown me how to use the dish machine and told me to do anything that anyone asked me to do and since then I had, until my last shift, of course. Aside from that, I knew he chewed short-cut tobacco from the lumps in his mouth and the paper cup that he carried with him around the restaurant, and he wore a dark curly mullet that he kept tied into a ponytail. On my walks around town I had seen him riding his motorcycle up and down Old Main, hair flying behind him as he passed.

  The office was a dirty box of a room, an afterthought thrown together with plywood in the back corner of the restaurant, a low counter with two chairs, a couple of calculators, and the safe, protected by a flimsy door with a hefty lock. A small frosted window set high in the wall let filtered light into the room.

  “So that other shithead told me you hid all the knives in the cooler and left him to clean up after himself.”

  I grunted, trying to hide my guilt.

  “He said you’re a drug addict and a fucking idiot.”

  I put my hand on the crook of my elbow and looked down at the table—neat stacks of bills and coins. He had been counting money for the cash register.

  “I told him that he can’t call my employees idiots and then I fired him.”

  Leon motioned for me to sit and he took the chair near the money. He pulled the band from his ponytail and ran his finger through his hair a few times. It was far longer than mine.

  “You’re having a rough patch here,” he said, “I can see that. But I believe in you and I want to help you.”