by Joe Clifford
He stopped logging my statement, standing there, dumbfounded, while I rambled on, still doing my best to connect myriad loose threads.
A car? Yes, it was a car. Was it closer to where I found Francis? Or the highway? One of those answers verified causality. The other was wasting their time. And I struggled to give an accurate, infallible answer.
“I…um…”
“You say you heard a scream?” the officer said.
“Yes, I heard a scream. I saw…a shadow.”
“A…shadow?”
My answers left me talking in circles. A car sped onto the highway. Francis had a head wound. Cause and effect? Two separate scenes, separated by space?
“Someone attacked the guy,” I said pointing at Francis, who sat sullen, goose egg knotted on his head.
The way the officer looked at me after that left me unnerved. And, yeah, I got it. There was only one person with Francis when the police arrived: me. I wanted to scream, Well, it wasn’t me! Of course it wasn’t me. Francis knew that—that was the one thing he’d verified before lockjawing his Winston. I knew I hadn’t hit the guy. But between those two absolutes was a bridge too wide to span. I realized what the officer was thinking: something perverted. An old man and a guy my age, late night, roadside motel? What was more likely: an aborted abduction? Or a lovers’ spat? I wanted to clear up that misperception.
“He’s a family friend,” I said, desperate to get his mind out of the gutter, adding, “I thought he might be in danger.” Of course, that only added to the confusion.
I’d painted myself into a corner. I couldn’t launch into crazy theories of lizard people secretly running the government or any of the other conspiratorial crap Francis and Jacob’s stupid zine spelled out. I maybe could mention my latest theory about the jewelry, how if Jacob stole gems someone might be out for revenge. The pawn shop. That drug house. A private, connected importer. What did I really know? Not much. Plus, I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. What if Francis was connected to this jewelry business? I didn’t have any proof of a heist in the first place, and I didn’t want to make a bad situation worse with opined conjecture.
The officer stuck Francis and I to cool in the back of the cruiser but didn’t shut the door—we weren’t under arrest, mild consolation. He went to scope out the motel, skipping our room in favor of the neighboring truck stop and gas stations, the scene a circus, absurd. Mom, Dad, Junior, and Baby Sis huddled by their doors, arms wrapped around one another, parental lectures about never finding yourself in a mess like those two down there. The fried waitresses and haggard truckers, the stoned cashiers, clerks, and other assorted weirdoes you find after midnight at a roadside rest stop in the middle of nowhere. They gathered and peered, peeped and whispered.
Soon, the officer was joined by another man, whom I assumed was the proprietor of the complex by the way he carried himself, the brazen swagger of franchise responsibility, and then they were both gesticulating, at the motel, the road, the muddy field, offering speculative versions of reality.
“You give him your ID?” Francis said. His voice surprised me. He’d been quiet for so long.
“No. Just my first name.”
He peered around me, at the cop, a good fifty off in the distance.
“You have the keys?”
“To the Buick. Yes. Why?” I knew why. We hadn’t had to supply our driver’s licenses at the motel. Late at night, no one asked for the plate number or model of the car we’d be parking overnight. If we left now, we were never here.
Francis patted the bulge of cash in his pocket. We had everything we needed. “Let’s go,” he said.
I wish I could say saner parts of my brain took over, the reasonable, prudent components Brandon Cossey comprised, the characteristics of a guy who didn’t jaywalk, who played by the rules. We hadn’t done anything wrong—we’d been the victims. But I didn’t want to stick around and take chances others would see it the same way. More questions, deeper examinations, which would require last names and photographic verification, information that might then be fed into more efficient computers with broader databases, where my name could pop up as being a person of interest back in Cortland.
So I didn’t say a word. Just hopped up, followed Francis, didn’t look back. Through the dark lot, around the side of the motel, and into the car. I was surprised by how calm I remained, how few nerves protested, and how little anyone seemed to notice.
It didn’t take more than thirty, forty seconds to be in the Buick. No one called after us. No police gave pursuit. We hit the freeway, heading west, the whole surreal episode fading fast in the rearview. I checked the mirrors, anticipating their being filled with lights from the advancing fleet. Nothing. Five, ten, twenty minutes. After half an hour, I stopped worrying.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I had a lot of questions for the old man. At the same time, I relished the silence.
It must’ve been after we crossed state lines before I said a word.
“Who were those guys?” As soon as I asked the question, I understood why I’d waited so long.
I didn’t want to hear Francis’s answer.
Nothing he said would satisfy, satiate concerns, or make me feel any safer. Like whenever Francis spoke, I’d have to sift through the wreckage of language and decipher: What was fantasy? Outright fabrication? Pure insanity? Which would leave me searching for that nugget, the cornerstone of fractured logic I could begin constructing a fragment of truth from. This process of extraction and reconstruction was exhausting.
Francis slid out another cigarette, scanning ahead, as if looking for an exit. We were headed to Minnesota, which meant I-90—which we were already on—all the way. What did I know? About Francis? Tonight? His plans? Any of this?
“Francis, who were those men?”
“Who do you think?”
“If you say the Shadow People, I swear to God I’m jumping out of this car.”
“Call them whatever you want. They don’t want us finding out what happened to Jacob.”
“I’m not stupid,” I said. “If Jacob’s body was found with expensive jewelry, he probably stole it.”
“My grandson wasn’t a thief.”
What was I supposed to do with that? Problem was, I couldn’t outright call him a liar. I’d seen the men. I witnessed the blood, dealt with the police. Unless I were willing to postulate Francis staged this too. Preposterous. But any more so than the rest of this madness or his ludicrous theories? I had no choice but to take his words at face value. At least the part about people wanting to protect secrets. I wasn’t sure which scenario was more terrifying: Francis being wrong or Francis being right.
As little as two hours ago, I’d managed to convince myself I’d invented a non-existent danger, a little boy playing overdramatic, inserting himself into a world of fabricated intrigue in order to make himself feel important. Who was I? Brandon Cossey, college student slash orphan, twenty-three, a nobody. And that was the best-case scenario. I felt better believing I was invisible, innocuous, unworthy of being hunted. The alternative meant threats had stepped out of the shadows, entering a world of certainty and retribution.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Francis said.
The question caught me off guard. My response, the obvious one, given Francis’s physical proximity: “What are you talking about? I’ve been driving with you for two days. Of course I remember you.”
“No,” he said, drawing on his Winston. “Before.”
A disturbing presence sank in its claws, like someone—something—was at the doorstep of my deep subconscious, about to knock—an old acquaintance I might not be anxious to see again.
I glanced over, hit by a wave of déjà vu, remembering the way that cherry tip glowed hot, vivid in the dim light of the cab, trips taken when I was small…
Still, that better part of me, the one so desperate to stay tethered to the tangible and real, rebelled and fought back. “When you cam
e to my apartment last week?” I said, my voice on the precipice of breaking. “Man, what are you talking about? Of course I rem—”
“When you were little. When Lori brought you home from the hospital.”
“What hospital? I was never in any hospital.” That part was true. I’d never broken a bone, never had an appendix out, no tonsillectomy. Not even a trip to the ER with a spiking fever. I was a bastion of good health. One of my superpowers: a remarkable immune system.
“Shady Acres.”
“What about it?” I’d been to the mental hospital often. Visiting Jacob. When I pictured Jacob in there now, however, he was younger than when I recalled visiting him. In these new memories he was five, six. In reality, Jacob wasn’t hospitalized until at least a decade later. Was I conflating memories of my mother, a woman I never visited in a psych ward, projecting family legend? Was my brain cracking under the pressure, unable to tell the difference between fact and fantasy? I’d never been to the Utica Insane Asylum.
The long, dark highway was deserted with the witching hour. I didn’t know what town or state we were even in, and I didn’t care.
“Pull over,” I said. “That’s it. I’m getting out. I’ll hitch a ride. I’m sick of this shit. I’m serious! Pull over!”
“Shady Acres was the mental hospital where you and Jacob met.” His eyes on the road, hands on the wheel, burning butt between his fingers, white hair slicked back, so cavalier, so calm. “When you were a patient.”
The human mind is a funny thing. They say you only use ten percent of your brain. We’ve all heard it. Having studied biology and the human nervous system, I also knew it was a myth. We use way more than ten percent. How much more? I didn’t have an exact number. It wasn’t a full one hundred, I knew that. There were empty pockets, dead zones, areas cut off, inaccessible. We have these rooms in our minds, like the locked-up ones at secretive houses with the plastic draped over furniture so no one can sit down. What’s behind that door? What’s in the attic? Where’s that noise coming from? We don’t have access. No map. No key. No clue. But sometimes we don’t need any direction or passcode to get in. A word, phrase, or sentence will unlock the door.
I’d never been a mental patient. I had zero recollection of having been hospitalized. Psychiatric treatment? For what? I was, and had always been, rock solid, a testament to normalcy. I worked. I studied. I paid my taxes and didn’t break rules or laws. Whatever successes I enjoyed were the result of embracing convention, not flouting it. Only now I couldn’t escape the institutional green walls. I saw the orderlies, doctors, and nurses, the little pills in tiny medicine cups. I heard the unhinged shrieks of the unwell, clanging spoons off the bars, rebelling against their jailers. I felt the creepy-crawly on my skin when I couldn’t sleep late at night. I stopped envisioning Jacob in hospital gowns, catching my own reflection in toaster ovens and rain-slicked windows. I was the young patient. Five years old sounded right. Around the time my mother left.
“You’re lying,” I said, my voice hollow and insecure.
“How do you think you came to live with the Balfours?”
“We lived in the same neighborhood.”
“And what? Lori invited you for dinner one day and you never went home?”
“How would you know—?”
“I was living there.”
“Bullshit. Lori hates you.”
“I was living there. After my son…” Francis flicked his spent butt out the window. “Don’t worry about my place in all this, boy. Ask yourself: how would Lori gain custody of a child that wasn’t hers? Your parents gave you away to a stranger?”
“My parents were a mess,” I said. “My mother…left. She had problems. Alcohol, drugs, pills. Lori—Mrs. Balfour took me in.” Cold air filled the cab. “My father wasn’t a bad man. He tried to save her. I remember driving around with him, going down to the rough parts of town, and there she’d be, on a street corner, selling herself for ten bucks. It was awful to watch what it did to him.”
“And you’re sure that’s the way it happened?”
“That’s the dumbest question. Of course that’s the way it happened! I was there!”
The roadside zipped by. No stars, no spotlight on the signposts up ahead. I was having a hard time swallowing.
“I was around in those days,” he said. “Whether or not you want to believe it. You were a patient, boy. At Shady Acres.” He paused. “You ever look for your parents? White pages?”
“It’s not 1950 anymore. No one uses a phonebook.”
“Online. The interwebs. You try to get in touch?”
“No. Why should I? They didn’t want me. I didn’t want them. Mrs. Balfour took good care of me. The Balfours were my family—are my family. They love me.” I wanted to break his old man heart.
“Your parents are dead.”
“No shit.”
“They died when you were little. Your father killed your mother, before he turned the gun on himself.”
I looked at Francis. Nothing had changed in his visage.
“Maybe it’s hard to find the story,” he said. “I don’t know how this stuff gets archived. But I remember when it happened. It was big local news.”
Like I’d never put my parents’ names in a search engine. Over the years, I’d scoured the internet for them plenty. I didn’t remember much of my first few years, but I knew my own parents’ names—Buck and Lisa—and I sure as hell knew mine too—and it was my real name; I had all the documentation. I knew the town I was born and lived in. I knew the year they let me go. The internet has all this. Databases and newspaper articles, and I’d found nothing. Growing irate, I was about to tell Francis to go to hell.
“Maybe your version isn’t that far off,” he said. “Maybe your old man did catch your mom messin’ around. I don’t know anything about that. But you got the ending wrong. No one is handing a five-year-old to a neighbor lady. Lori worked at the hospital. She got to know you. She felt sorry for you, developed a fondness. You were going to be released to social services, foster care. She took you in.”
“And nobody ever told me this?” The balls on this guy.
“Maybe they did. Maybe they tried. Maybe, boy,” and here he paused, bitingly, “maybe you aren’t as sane as you think you are. Maybe you are as crazy as the rest of us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Francis was out of his skull. Of course I’d searched my history. There was nothing there. I started beating myself up for not looking harder. But this was how my brain turned on me, warped by the Francis Factor, which is what I’d started calling the effect of conversing with the old man. You’d start out regular and certain, and by the time you were done talking to him, you were wondering when the color blue was invented.
When Francis said that bit about the hospital, my head began leaking, like a thin layer of ice had been cracked, exposing what lurked beneath; and now these brackish waters burbled up from the fissures, spreading across the gray of a frozen lake. The human brain is like that. Super susceptible to the power of suggestion. We reconstruct fractured timelines, slot in events to fill in cohesion and order. We need linear chains.
For as long as I could remember, the story went like this: I met Jacob at Farewell Commons. My mother left. My father drank. I went to live with the Balfours. That was the order, the causality, the triggering event and eventual outcome. Only, as we sped along the freeway and conversation turned dry, that sequence got muddled, mixed up; and I had to admit how ludicrous that scenario, my scenario, sounded. Francis was right about one thing: kids don’t just go live with a neighbor. Children aren’t thrift store garments plucked from bargain bins. There’s a process to gain custody. Mrs. Balfour must’ve filed paperwork, talked to a state agency. When did my parents sign over rights? Transfer of parental rights, custody, emancipation—these things take time.
I struggled to find the indignation to argue. I was livid. I wanted to fight with the old man, take these frust
rations out on him. But no spark existed. The energy source I needed to fuel the rage, injustice, wasn’t there. You can’t fake self-righteousness.
Highway, late at night, tumultuous experience, I felt my brain powering down, going into saver mode. This wasn’t the time. Conserve strength, Brandon, I heard a voice say. I’d always possessed a great ability to shut out distractions. Another superpower. Tunnel vision. If I didn’t want to think about it, I didn’t think about it. Out of sight, out of mind, and out the window it went. Redirect and focus on the task at hand. Screw the Francis Factor and his nuttiness. Take your meds, old man.
Then a more alarming thought struck back: whose voice is this I’m hearing?
Because it sure as hell wasn’t mine.
Not long afterward, Francis said we were stopping for the night. Another pit stop at another roadside chain—we still hadn’t slept. The most surprising part about Francis: for a man so unhinged—he’d admitting going off his medications, meaning he had the schizophrenia present, unencumbered—he wasn’t totally reckless. He adhered to an order, routine, as if somewhere along the way, he’d made peace with his beast—he had no problem implementing and sticking to a plan. He was in charge. It was as though, in exchange for letting it, the Beast, live, Francis demanded a hierarchy. The Beast could stay. The Beast would play a role. But like any well-functioning organization, a chain of command must be followed. Francis was the boss. If Francis and the Beast were to coexist, the latter had to know its place.
I didn’t know how long we’d been driving, but if I had to guess, judging by the color of night, the particular hue of bruised, I’d say midnight, a couple hours after the incident at the Flying J Truck Stop. A reasonable time to pull over.
I was shocked when we checked into the hotel and saw the time in the lobby. Three a.m. Meaning five hours had passed. I didn’t remember being in the car that long. Hour, two tops. What had I been doing all that time?
When we got to the room, I told Francis I was taking a walk. He shrugged, unconcerned by the time of night or where I might be going. Wasn’t long ago I was done with this adventure. I didn’t know what happened in that windswept motel field, and Francis hadn’t instilled confidence one way or the other, but I couldn’t leave. A greater power commanded me to stay. Or maybe it was lack of faith in my own abilities. A dirty trick by Francis, implanting memories, instilling self-doubt.