by Miles Klee
A girl pulls on my jeans pocket, holding out a pellet of charred bark.
“Want to buy part of the miracle tree? I cut it off at night when the guard wasn’t looking.”
Oh boy. I push past the girl, who makes a haggard face that I guess is supposed to be mine and goes on to hock her artifact elsewhere, the pellet turning to ash in her palm. At last people create a channel leading to the center ring of the circus. Anastasio turns around and sees me, appears relieved.
“Morning, Aidan.”
The riled-up pair in Anastasio’s corner might be his sons. Looked older from a distance. And as much as their father may have urged them to walk away, I catch a flash of pride around the firmly set mouth: his boys do not take this lightly.
“Who can I thank for the renovation?” I hold up the rock.
One of the young men Anastasio is holding in check points at my frazzled neighbor, whose name I’d long ago forgotten.
“He was throwing this,” the maybe-son says.
“This your place, yeah?” my neighbor asks. I shrug. “It’s my fault, I’ll pay for the window. But you gotta do something about these nuts.”
The boys tense up again, but Anastasio holds his ground. They could easily get past him—respect for the outstretched arm does more than muscle could.
“I don’t need an Armageddon Woodstock next door,” bathrobe guy says. “I could get you all arrested.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I hear myself say.
My neighbor takes a last look at Anastasio’s family and the larger throng, considering the offer.
“You better.”
He turns to leave and gets a few steps before adding, “Sorry about the window.”
One of the boys says something in Spanish, and a few in the surrounding swarm chuckle. Anastasio just shakes his head.
“You can’t catch joy like you catch sadness.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I should be off the hook at last. Instead, the dread snowballs.
“Please, Aidan, we are the ones who should be. You must not apologize.”
“Because now I have to call the police.”
A murmur snakes its way through the onlookers, translated, re-pitched with grief, repeated slowly, as if never finishing phrase might postpone its reality. Anastasio alone stares earthward, silent, knowing I’m right. Over his head I see the souvenir-selling kid peeling more bark off the ruined tree and stuffing her pockets while everyone’s distracted.
This whole affair was self-cannibalizing. Nothing could sustain it. Not Henri’s generosity, not Anastasio’s faith, not my apathy. But what Anastasio says next surprises me. Neither a flat denial nor a rallying cry. The words simply hang there.
“Then we must make our case to them.”
I shuffle back up the steps and inside. Infuriating. That Anastasio will convince his congregation to stand out there to the bitter last is sick. The broken screen door flaps glumly behind me as a wind picks up and whistles through the punctured window. These people stay any longer, the house’ll end up condemned.
I find my cell on the kitchen counter and dial 911. It rings once, but I hang up. Should give them time to move, let only the diehard few lag behind. Less trouble that way. I dial again, reminding myself that it’ll take cops just to get the exodus going. It rings for a healthy while before a staticky voice says:
“Officer Larry Moody speaking. What is your emergency?”
“Hi, yes, my name is Aidan Kilham, and I wanted to report a … mm, a disturbance on Meadowbook Lane.”
“You mean Estronale Avenue?”
“Sure I do.”
Hank hums the specifics as he taps them in.
“Oops, I’m supposed to ask,” he says. “What is the nature of the disturbance?”
“Cult.”
“What?”
“Just … there are a bunch of people on my lawn who won’t go away. Can you do something about it?”
“All our officers are out on calls right now, but later today we can send someone by.” Click. Good enough. I sneak back up to the front window to get another look at the yard. Virgin Mary merchandise, figurines, T-shirts coming out of duffle bags and off the back of pickups. Navigating the crowd in a daze is the woman Henri was convinced was our old bus driver. I’m guessing she doesn’t know we live here.
Henri yells from upstairs. Forgot all about that. Have to break the news without sounding too excited. I get up to the second floor, but before I can open the door to Henri’s old room, he yells again.
“Up here.”
I take the next flight of stairs and stop on the next-to-last one. The narrow doorframe is weirdly scarred, lines like claw marks etched in the jamb. He’s lying face-up on the wooden floor, near an open window that looks down on the front yard. Nearly catatonic. A sunburst of marble journals strewn out around him, pages peacock-fanning in the breeze.
“Try to remember …” his mouth moves weakly. “It’s me.”
“Henri. I’m calling a doctor.”
“No.” Sudden strength in his voice. I take the last step up. “Don’t worry!” he cries, gripping his head. “It’s worse when you’re worried. Please. I’ve seen a doctor, I know what to do.”
“Well do it already, you look awful.”
In reply he points vaguely at my feet. I see an envelope on the floor with a name that defies all sense.
“Take it to him. Harvey House.”
“Grady?”
“Get out now, please. This isn’t your problem.”
“How can I ignore it?”
“I can’t be so close to you.”
And Henri forces his muddy eyes open, mustering a control that, like Anastasio’s over the worshippers, cannot be maintained much longer. His hands move off his face and clench next to his hips, hopelessly clutching at whatever it is that will escape someday, grip tightening in anticipation of release. Grasp the piece of ice that melts, these hands say; embed its shape in palm, its architecture in skin. Condescend to save an imprint. A ghostly hollow in the matter. One force shifting loose another.
I think for one grave moment that Henri is crying, but it’s a light drizzle slanting through the window that illuminates his face. Seems to bring him some relief.
“Tell me,” I say.
The urge to not hear it tears me in half—how can we continue without our absences, and the answers smothering hope? But Henri must see that my resolve is weak or cracked, that I’m not to be trusted, because he turns his face to the window, and his eyelids flutter against invading flecks of rain.
“I promise,” he says. “Now close the door.”
DH /// IVYLAND, NEW JERSEY ///
TWO YEARS AGO
A 757 ascending from Newark International screamed low overhead. Among those woken in Ivyland’s low-rent district was DH, to whom the jet was obviously a choir of robot angels. Here at the tail end of an epic binge, with uncomfortable morning wood, DH scoured his cartwheeling mind for a fitting song title.
This concern was eclipsed by the realization that he was curled up atop a streetlight. He cast frayed eyes down to Garden Avenue, almost falling right away. The pole was a smooth twenty feet, the spindly arc that connected his perch to it worse than unfriendly. He pulled himself out of a fetal bunch and straddled a domed surface that held sturdy glass in place, marveling less at the height he’d scaled than at how he’d stayed on the thing while sleeping.
Hadn’t climbed one of these since high school—someone must’ve dared him, really gotten under his skin about it, doubting he still could. And before he’d finished rounding out the scenario, DH was convinced of two things: 1) that a psychological prank like this bore Lev’s splattered-bug signature, and 2) that Lev had long since tumbled into the sleep of phony insomniacs in a stranger’s bathtub, wildly unconcerned with consequences.
DH began to fret over how he might pee. Away from home three days, he calculated to distract himself, the last evening there one of spaghetti, barely thawed peas, and burnt bacon, for
ced upon him by Hecuba, who said she’d be damned if her son would starve. She’d planted him in the same old kitchen chair. The TV was chattering excitedly about a second space age even while reporting that next year’s moon visit would suffer further delays. The news didn’t agree with Hecuba; she tossed pots and pans back into their cupboards with a recklessness that bordered on real violence, got the whole kitchen clanging.
“Any tomato sauce maybe?”
Hecuba reached into the fridge and threw a ketchup bottle at him. He mumbled gratitude but set it aside, went to work on the bacon.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t eat all of one food and then move onto the next. It’s psychotic.”
“How?”
“Because,” she blurted into the garbage disposal, “the polite thing to do is to try a little of everything, going around the plate. It’s polite to the cook.”
“Why are you crying? Food’s not bad. Look, I like it. Mmm.” He choked down a few icy peas. Then he chewed on the tines of the fork, tasting cheap metal, and as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t stop, the sound of imitation silver on enamel nicely deafening within his skull. Hecuba shot him a bleary glare.
“S’matter? Menopause or something?” DH asked.
“Wish.”
He only now fretted over that reply. The intensity of his grip on the slick roost, his hand making sweatprints on the silver … silvery thoughtforms and the promise of something new … each idea followed its parent in such relentless procession, sparked a flash and crumbled into darkling holes, forgotten. He let go of the sequence and stared at the brick wall of the MexiLickin’SurfHog where Hairy Duane from around the block had been shot on his graveyard shift, watching layers of graffiti surface and sink. In front was the dirty unused payphone Leo had used to call in terrorist plots to school, enough to garner a Bomb Threats spread in the yearbook: stills of kids pouring out into black-and-white, pre-bust Ivyland, some seizing the chance to sneak off, others growing bored with spurious threats on their lives, maybe starting to crave the real thing.
The stuff, he concluded, hadn’t left him yet. New Forest Adderade cocktail was no-shit good. The dripper they bought from—one of Lev’s med school colleagues—said the filtration was swimming with recombined premium Endless shit designed to boost all the right neurotransmitters in harmonious waves, showed DH the cheap basement lab while expressing a profound need for smaller E-flasks, then pitched his idea for smart TVs: couples would watch different shows on the same screen, each half of the sound and image confined to a sliver of private angles. “What do you think?,” the guy asked, like his survey was what mattered.
This drip made one feel, DH and Lev agreed, in possession of Satan’s powers. There was the edge, they’d shrieked giddily, like badass snakes swimming off your body. You craved a tribal drumbeat to explain it all and even then you’d just dance till clarity dissolved, till nothing was left but the charge of synapses firing joyously, axons overloading. They’d sat on Lev’s porch and watched the night’s drunk drivers careening by with sirens in tow, flattened people stumbling home, stopping to lean on their shadows for support, sneakers that swung from sagging power lines in the pre-dawn breeze. One guy went up to a house across the way and knocked, but DH said: “No way this guy’s getting in.” Lev said, “He will, there’s a light. TV’s on.” DH said, “Trust me.” The TV glow quit. Guy stepped back to scan the house for life, waited a beat, and walked away, drawing an awed gasp from Lev.
Except DH cried: if he was right about such things, then the world was broken, had something unnameably awful at its core. “Did you know that would happen,” Lev asked, “or did you make it happen?” Satan’s powers. DH instantly wished a hex on Lenny to protect himself, and especially Mom, in case he had the devil’s touch after all.
*
There’s a spot along a river in South Jersey’s pine barrens, between the shore and garbage dunes, where the water isn’t the common tea-brown, not even greenish, but dazzling, icy azure on top, crushing whale-blue below: a well without end for all we know, stashed away in an igloo of rock. Kurt, DH’s father, had taken him there, shown him how you could weight a hook and always run out of line before you hit bottom. DH would complain that the grotto offered no fish for the catching.
“But look,” Kurt would say. “Something strips the hook.”
Something always had.
“Then we’re just wasting bait,” DH finally countered one day.
“Somebody’s making use of it. What if a water nymph lived down there? Like your Greek myths book.”
“Yeah, right. Prolly just gets caught on the rocks.”
“You dive deep enough, she’ll hold on and suffocate you with a kiss.”
“You’re making this up.”
Kurt grinned like: so what? As if yanked by wires, a honeycomb of bubbles broke the surface. This, DH had to admit, was more difficult to explain away.
They emerged from the limestone cave onto thick Jersey jungle yawning mist in summer, miasma of leafy shadowplay and strange humid rot. DH’s eyes imagined movement, suspecting the elsewhere-eye no doubt focused on them, judging the pair and rimmed with wonder. Sudden tang of rancid flesh. Out of stillness came a rising, nauseous buzz. Trying to move forward, Kurt’s body stalled, lapsed into private wilderness.
“What?” DH asked.
“You’ve got to live like no one can see you,” he said. “That’s the only way to win.”
From early on, New Jersey had foiled DH’s attempt at invisibility: the Johnstons’ God-fearing foster home, its curdled smell and no-shoes-inside rule untranslatable idioms, where he was the kid who didn’t get piano lessons. A beer-soaked high school with one or two unbroken teachers, where he’d been held back again and again until one day he was at prom with children. Convenience stores at 3 a.m., cake frosting colors and Mr. Clean’s biceps bursting forth to console him. Cold train-station bathrooms, where he’d calmly hallucinated green worms that swarmed over his skin, tunneling in and out of pores. Cars parked up in the Reservation’s murder-ready set-pieces with girls who knew he was holding enhanced goods. Prone alongside dusked highways, too weak to fend off mosquitoes, the seep of his vomit filling rumble strips. Newark homeless shelters where he’d been dumped by Good Samaritans. Lev’s place of disarray, with décor to stimulate the overstimulated, and a futon that had caved in the shape of DH’s body.
The labyrinth ended here: paralysis in a crow’s nest. The last direction left had been straight up, and after making minor progress along that axis he was stuck. Didn’t trust himself to get down safely, not when he was so out of practice. Just a few Belltruvin would’ve killed those nerves. Wind was picking up. DH carefully stretched cramped limbs one by one and focused his ears on a pair of competing car alarms in the distance, two pitches of horn grating against each other in staggered blasts, eventually alternating. The increments of empty space shrank again till the horns were aligned in rhythm, only to un-synch once more. DH heard it as the synching and un-synching of an adjusted universe. Midday, the sun backlit a gray canvas, giving it a luminosity he thought gray hadn’t earned. It annoyed him how a red-tailed hawk did effortless surveillance in druggy loops above.
A period of actual thumb-twiddling came and went, temperatures dropping, worrisome throat-clearings of thunder a few towns over. People started noticing him, especially the ragged high-schoolers cutting class. He couldn’t hear them, just saw them pointing. People pointed at him a lot these days. On the bench directly below, a pinstripe-suited man was shaking a two-liter Atlas Adderade bottle, opening it slowly to relieve the carbonation’s pressure, then taking hideous gulps. DH watched as the man repeated the process four times, its loop first irritating, then torturous, accusing. He wished, as a flock of teenage poppers passed underneath, one flashing an unmarked orange bottle to the others, that he was addicted to the right stuff. That he would never again watch Hecuba standing over the sink, distracting hers
elf with dirty dishes while Lenny called him the last of the hippies and the future of junkies.
People had plenty of warning before the storm really started in—by the time a pulverizing rain developed, DH had the town to himself. Lightning split the air like crooked heaven as a pair of headlights came to life a few intersections away, then began to weave unnaturally in the downpour. Of course: it had to be Wednesday by now. And his mom drove Wednesdays. And she drove poorly.
To the west, gobs of smoke bubbling up near the lot where Viking Putt sat. When he was young, and industry booming, Ivyland’s outskirts gave off plumes of such unexplained smog at regular intervals, and he was given to asking adults whether it was a fire raging a few miles off. “It’s nothing,” was the automatic reply, no mystery dispelled. Of course it wasn’t nothing, you’d have to be living inside-out not to see it was something, and this non-answer one day confirmed an ultimate childhood dread: that no one, not even grown-ups, knew what made black wraiths ascend only to break against clouds of concrete.
*
“Dad, what’s your job?” DH had asked Kurt as they trekked the muddy trail from fishing spot to parking lot.
“It’s not important,” Kurt said.
“Leo Clafter says you shovel shit from the smell of it.”
“Language. Tell Leo I work in South Woodbane, a town where a lot of chemicals are processed in big important factories, and if he knew anything he’d know that factories smell bad. The more important the factory, the worse the smell. So people who smell bad are the most important ones around.”
“Even if they’re homeless?”
“Especially if they’re homeless,” Kurt clarified.
“Am I ever going to be homeless?” DH asked. “Maybe, right?”
“Maybe.”
*
DH tried to watch the approaching bus, but the rain began to sting his eyes. This water had an element of grease to it, which he assumed was a Jersey thing. He sat up, put his back to the wind and looked out over the muddy knoll where a house once stood and a checkerboard of parking lots at his back, a small cemetery among them, which was hard not to think of as a parking lot for dead people, and to South Woodbane’s grid of electricity hubs and warehouses, the stubby cylinders of chemical plants and sewage treatment centers, a tissue sky with shafts of paradise angling through clouds, and he even saw the smell. The city should’ve been an open book to DH, transparent. Instead it brimmed with lacks and surprised him: They tore that place down? When had the pawn shop moved to the corner opposite? Had New York always looked that close? Might Dad have paused to lean on this streetlight? As though Ivyland were a Buddhist conundrum that would blink into nothing if he stopped asking.