by R. A. Nelson
“Come on!”
I can’t make the turn here; there’s a median, but I can’t see it. It would be too easy to drive off the road. A little farther I find a break in the grass defined by the flow of water rushing through the gap. There must be six inches of rain pouring across the road in this place. I swing Wilkie around like a boat. “There!”
I’ve made a 180; the green car is not very far in front of us.
I can see Mr. Mann’s brake lights, that’s all: two receding red eyes. No other car is visible. It’s only possible to move at about ten miles an hour, especially in the low spots. The road is filling with water. I can’t see the wake we’re making, but I hear it rubbing aggressively at the bottom of the doors. I’ve never driven in water like this.
“What are you going to do?” Schuyler says.
“Follow him.”
“But it’s a flash flood! Don’t you see that water? Come on, Nine. Enough! Let it go for tonight. Pull over onto some high ground.”
“No. I’ve got to see.”
“See what?”
“Where’s he going! My house? Sunlake?”
“What does it matter? I don’t like this. Please leave him alone. It only matters if he’s bringing the cops, and nobody else was with him.”
“It matters.”
Schuyler settles back into the seat, resigned to whatever I’m going to do. “You’re obsessed,” he says quietly. With the rain, I don’t hear him; he has to repeat the words.
“Yeah, I guess I am,” I say.
“You even admit it!”
“Sure, I do. Except you’re wrong. I’m focused. There’s a difference. That’s what I do, Schuyler. I focus. I don’t know any other way to do it. There!”
This is a very weird chase. It’s majestic. Slow. We’re close now, a couple of car lengths behind. Enough for my headlights to wash over his trunk. But I’m only aware of a metallic green rectangle and the silver line of bumper floating away from me.
We’re coming to a place with large blocks of watery, cube-shaped lights. An intersection. It must be. But where?
I can see the stoplight now. It’s hanging at a forty-five-degree angle in the wind. Mr. Mann and I move so slowly, the light changes from green to red to green again by the time we get there. I’m in danger of losing him if he makes it through the light first.
“He’s turning,” Schuyler says.
“Where?”
“I can’t see. But his blinker’s on. Turning left.”
One of the bright cubes of light is shaping itself into a Texaco station.
“Sunlake! This must be Zeirdt Road.”
“So he’s going home.”
“Yeah!”
I put my blinker on ridiculously and sidle over to where I think the turn lane might be. It’s impossible to tell, there’s so much water.
“So you know where’s he’s going,” Schuyler says. “Maybe it’s okay. Let’s go home.”
“No.”
The turn is stately and harrowing—the intersection is a double trough crossing four lanes of traffic. In the troughs the rushing water must be more than a foot deep.
“Don’t!” Schuyler says.
Wilkie shudders and balks, splattering the windows with spray. Mr. Mann is out of the deep place first and gains some distance. The other part of the road must be higher, up in the dry. I’m back to following the red eyes, but at least I can tell where the road is again.
“If I can trust him,” I say.
“What?”
But I can’t speak.
Something white is blooming on either side of Mr. Mann’s car. From here it’s impossible to tell what the blooming things are. They blossom and fall away, blossom and fall away again, like white smoke from the NASA test stands when they fire the shuttle engines. There’s something frightening about them.
Just as suddenly, the white things stop, fall away one last time. I don’t see them anymore. Mr. Mann is pulling away again, the red eyes getting smaller. I put on a spurt of speed.
“Wait. No,” Schuyler says. “Stop.”
I see what he must have seen. The red eyes are swinging in a smeary arc; they disappear after a quarter turn, are replaced by twin white eyes.
He’s turning around.
“Stop!” Schuyler says. “Turn around, now!”
“He’s coming!” Coming straight at us
The whole landscape is jiggling and dark. I have no street-lights here to gauge the boundaries of the road. I can only assume he’s staying on his side. I steer away from the center for what I think is the width of one car.
“Stop!”
“I won’t hit him, Schuyler. Besides, we’re going so slow, it wouldn’t be much of a crash. Want to play chicken?”
“Not the car, the—there!”
He’s terrified. Not warning me about Mr. Mann; he’s warning me about the white things. I intuit the word before he can actually speak it:
Water.
That’s what the white things were. Water so deep it was raging over Mr. Mann’s door panels. We must be coming alongside the swamp. The swamp behind Sunlake. The swamp that winds between the cypress trees. This part of the road is completely flooded. How deep, I don’t know.
We hit the flooded part with a smashing roar.
Water fountains around us like foam hitting the prow of a ship. The water is jetting so high, I can only see white out the windshield.
Schuyler makes a noise; I don’t know what to do. Some knowledge surfaces inside me. My father’s half-remembered words, something about the points getting wet in the engine. You can’t stop or you might never start again. You’ll be trapped in the flood. I plow ahead.
All my attention is on getting us through the water. I lose sight of Mr. Mann’s headlights. I’m forcing the car forward on pure telepathy now.
“Nine!”
I see the headlights again. Moving inexorably, suddenly much closer. I fight the wheel hard to the right and there’s a feeling of leaving the earth, a craft flying with no night instruments.
The swamp.
We’ve left the road.
The twin fans of illumination from the headlights rear up, then land on a broad, swirling surface. The weight of what is happening, the horror of it, settles on me in an instant with the intensity of a dream.
In the middle of the air, in the microsecond of the car’s crashing, I again see the truth: There is no control. It’s a myth. Whatever happens, happens.
Wilkie’s hood enters the flood first. Water explodes over our bouncing roof, drowns the world. Wilkie rebounds for a moment, lights jerking crazily. I see the shiny wet branches of trees. Our heads hit the ceiling with a sound of tearing fabric.
We’re falling now.
There is no sense of a bottom, only a bouncing motion, then a settling.
How deep is the water here?
Moments.
I’ve had them before like this.
Falling from a tree and catching myself. Losing traction on a hill and finding a root to hold. Sliding down a roof until my toes catch in the rain gutters.
None of those moments ever lasted as long as this. Time is broken into slices so small, they are tiny beyond measure. I have plenty of time to understand that the Last Bad Thing has come; my life is over. But a decision confronts me:
Give myself over completely or fight?
But fighting is silly, stupid, impossible. We’re still moving forward. There’s a great shuddering slam of metal against something immovable. My forehead smacks Wilkie’s steering column. My eyes flash with lights. I don’t know what’s happening to Schuyler. One of us screams in pain. Maybe both.
We’ve struck something. One of the trees?
I feel blood oozing down my forehead. Everything is as dark as anything can ever be. Wilkie’s lights are gone; we’re sliding down the base of the tree into deep water.
neural meat
Where am I?
Floating here.
All these things in my mind
I can’t turn off. There’s a time coming that’s very close, a time when my head shuts off for good. But in the meantime I still know a few things.
I know the average human brain weighs three pounds.
It takes up 2 percent of the body’s weight but uses 20 percent of the blood and 20 percent of the oxygen.
It’s made up of 100 billion neurons. It has 111,000 miles of myelinated nerve fibers, enough to get you nearly halfway to the moon.
But none of this is any good to me now.
I’m winking out.
Operating on my ancient reptilian brain stem.
Wood.
Dark.
Wet.
Cold.
Die.
the language of leaving
Light.
I can see again. I can’t see anything, but I can see.
Something has shivered my mind awake. I sit up and shout at Schuyler, but I’m not speaking English. I’m not even speaking Indo-European. This language is even older, much more primitive. It’s a language spoken on the slopes of erupting volcanoes or while sliding into a black crevasse on a glacier. Everyone understands it, or will.
Schuyler doesn’t reply.
The car. We’re still in the car. I have a sense of Wilkie listing, a buoyancy that is false and won’t last. In the dark I work at the driver’s side door and get it open. Freezing water floods in.
My own language comes back to me. I’m yelling at Schuyler to come and kicking away from the car. The darkness is pitted with smears of light, squarish shapes, windows of the apartments around the lake.
Now I’m swimming in reedy water, my legs banging submerged objects. I can’t tell how deep the water is. It’s pushing too hard against my legs to let them touch bottom. Suddenly I’m floating in a cone of light; I see the tree where Wilkie is lodged.
The current shoves me against it. I angle my body, grapple with my arms. My legs swing free in the current. I see a dark figure inside Wilkie through the spattered windshield. It isn’t moving.
“Schuyler! Schuyler!”
Anything else I could scream never makes it to my mouth.
“Schuyler!”
I scream his name over and over as Wilkie’s hood takes on water. I try to bring my hand around to grab the metal grill, but the current is too strong. Every time I start to pull loose and grab the hood, the floodwater threatens to rip me away from my hold on the tree and carry me somewhere deeper. The car sinks. I get my feet braced against the roots and push.
Still Schuyler isn’t moving. I can’t tell how high the water is in Wilkie’s front seat. It’s too hard to see with the contrast between the darkness of the water and the brightness of the car lights shining on us.
Car lights.
Someone else is here.
It’s the other car, still on the road, its lights barely above the flood, but it isn’t sinking. It’s angled, pointing at me.
“Help us!” I scream.
I’ve got to make an effort, even if it means getting swept away in the torrent pouring into the lake.
I get my fingers into Wilkie’s grill and pull hard, letting go of the tree. I’m snapped straight out, but my fingers hold, even as the skin begins to tear.
The slanting hood is underwater. I have two hands on it now, can feel the grill.
It’s all I can do to hold on. I can’t pull myself closer to Schuyler. The car continues to sink. I realize it’s not sinking in water, but mud.
I scream at Schuyler to come out. The dark shape doesn’t move. Maybe the crash did something to his head. Maybe he’s— don’t say it. Don’t even think it.
The water is freezing. I find the roots again with my sneakers and push hard, propelling myself against the current. My right hand cups the front quarter panel near the tire. I pull; my strength fails me. Pull again, pushing with my feet, and get both hands on the jagged edge of the wheel well underwater.
I scissor my arms and try to stand; my body snaps out horizontally again. I fight to get my shoes back on the roots. Wilkie is lower; the water is covering his hood all the way to the windshield now. Still the shape inside hasn’t moved.
Blood comes into my eyes mixing with the rain. I can barely see. Slowly I draw myself to the wheel well and edge my way toward the door.
It’s no good.
I’m not strong enough. Schuyler’s going to die here. In this swamp. Choking on mud.
And it’s my fault.
come back for me
“Hey.”
That’s all he says.
I’m not sure it’s a voice until his hand is on my arm.
The voice is connected to a strength that pulls me forward until I can grasp the edge of the open car door.
Mr. Mann.
“Help! Help us!”
His hair is plastered against his face and across the bridge of his nose. He has a nylon rope knotted around his waist that leads back to his car, where the headlights are shining over the racing water.
We work together to pull Schuyler out. Mr. Mann’s arm is around my waist. This means nothing as I slide into Wilkie and tug at Schuyler’s belt. Nothing but life, safety, the future. I can’t tell if Schuyler’s breathing; he’s cold, heavy, and logy. I can barely move him in the frigid water, but he comes slowly to us.
I’m cupping his jaw with my hand, keeping it above the flood. The closer I get him to the door, the more I can see. His temple is gashed and blood is flowing into his ear, blood that looks black in the reflection from the headlights.
I get him to the door, dragging him under his arms. Mr. Mann has hold of him now, letting me go and wrapping an arm around Schuyler’s waist. He hauls against the force of the water with one hand on the rope, dragging Schuyler along.
“I’ll come back for you,” Mr. Mann says.
He does.
remember
I don’t remember how we wrestled Schuyler onto the backseat of Mr. Mann’s car. Maybe we pulled him through the window. I don’t remember the ride to the hospital.
I remember this: Mr. Mann’s arm around me. Our bodies joined against the surging flood, holding each other, the cord around us tightening and loosening until we are back on solid ground again.
mountains of time
The Door.
To keep from thinking about it, I focus on seven words:
“Don’t worry, he’s going to be fine.”
Those are the words I have to hear.
One word for each day they say it took to create the earth.
Though I know it really took billions of years and swirling dark matter and hydrogen snow.
But we are waiting God days in the emergency room of this hospital. God hours and God minutes. Whole epochs pass.
Think of anything but Schuyler back there behind the Door.
Focus. Observe.
The people shift and change like Geologic Events.
Here’s a man, head slumping. His chin slouches into his chest like a tired mountain range. A woman lying on her side is covered in fault lines. Someone she loves dearly is behind the Door. She’s a continent trying to keep itself from tearing itself apart. A couple of kids run back and forth like rivers.
Where is Mr. Mann?
I know he came in with me. We sat side by side at the desk, getting Schuyler registered. I remember him leaning against the wall. Surely he hasn’t left me. Again.
My raw fingers ache. The TV high in the corner makes me need to vomit. No sound, just a series of jeering, flashing heads. I sit with my back to it. If this is going to last an Age, I want to feel it.
My forehead is bandaged, but not many people are bleeding tonight. I don’t know what’s wrong with them as they come in. These are sleepy emergencies.
Seven words.
“Don’t worry, he’s going to be fine.”
I’m wrapped in a blanket. The Door never opens out. People go in but never come back again. The woman at the counter is so drowsy, her face is three inches from the computer monitor.
T
he Door keeps inhaling people.
I was born in this room, on these plastic chairs. I’ve lived here all my life. This is my school, my neighborhood, my street. Outside, I see cars flowing by. They are not lodged in this iceberg of time.
I haven’t prayed since the sixth grade. I’m praying hard now. Praying for myself as much as Schuyler.
But how do you talk to God? Sometimes I can’t think of him as anything but a Size.
How can I pray? Especially when I’ve done something like this? It’s too much to ask. Please just be good to Schuyler or the whole world is over. I’ve been stupid and pissed everything away.
The Door opens.
The doctor is pinching his eyes as he crosses the room. Triangular patches of bare scalp range deep into his hair. How does he know to come to me? Oh no.
He unscrews his face and exhales a long time, arms crossed.
“Are you Carolina?”
“Yes, please, is he okay, please tell me, is Schuyler okay?”
“Don’t worry, he’s going to be fine.”
Seven words.
I lose focus in all the crying and the relief and the wave of injured love that comes over me.
I grab the doctor—he’s shorter than me—and squeeze the life out of him. When I let him go, he tells me things I can barely stand to hear.
Concussion, broken wrist, ten stitches on the side of Schuyler’s sweet head. He’s staying overnight. The hospital has contacted his parents in Destin.
I can imagine them furiously stuffing clothes in bags, trip cut short, hair exploded by sleep, trying to find a place with gas in the middle of lower Alabama on the drive back. I can imagine what they’re saying about me. What they think.
I haven’t called Mom and Dad. I don’t think I will. They go to bed so early these days. They’re sleeping. Let them sleep through it. Let them have one more night of relative peace before they see just how changed I’ve become.
Is it possible to be driven home, crawl into my sheets, just wake up tomorrow? When will they notice Wilkie is gone? My bandaged fingers? The butterfly tape on my forehead? The doctor is about to leave.
“Can I see him?”
arm crazy
Inside.