Another Like Me

by Albert Norton, Jr.

  We delude ourselves if we think that time ticks off at steady, evenly-spaced intervals. Perhaps it does for the sun and the stars and the seasons of earth and the cycle of life on the earth’s surface. But it doesn’t in the subjective experience of man. For most of a week, Jack had lain idle, but the moment he lived in now was fuller than a thousand such weeks. There was death, and there was life, and it was not for Jack to choose between them.

  But there was more, even, to this sliver of an instant than mere death and life. Those eyes! A consciousness that wasn’t his own. A consciousness that beheld him! Jack was suddenly confronted with a shift in his means of self-awareness. An awareness of himself as he perceived himself through the eyes of another. Another like me, he thought. He was stunned, not only because of the danger but because, in that instant, his consciousness of self had been set askew. He was frozen, his mind like a malfunctioning video feed.

  The theme of Jack’s life over the course of the last three years had been the slow demise of this usual way of seeing himself. Before his aloneness, Jack’s inner life had been illuminated from without—by others’ perception of him—rather than from above, by God. And so lately, without that lateral illumination, his interior life had grown ever darker. He had been receding into it, as into the darkness of the Knoxville library.

  So Jack was as transfixed by this conflict as he was by animal fear. He stood, agape, even after the moment of initial shock. The almond eyes never wavered, nor did the cannon inches from his face.

  At last, Jack moved of necessity, for air. He gasped, aware of his own need for breath. His hearing seemed to return to him. His weight shifted backward, away from the abyss of the shotgun’s bore. It moved with him. He stepped backward. It continued to move with him, and he stepped back again, at an angle out from the door, tripping backward over a little brick step that lined the sidewalk approach. He registered surprise as he toppled backward—he hadn’t seen the brickwork when he had loped toward the front door oh so long ago. The shotgun followed him down, followed by the eyes, followed by the girl, slim, confident, jet-black hair swept back inside a russet scarf. He considered her lithe movement forward despite the heavy gun, even as he sprawled unceremoniously onto his back, his eyes locked to hers all the way down. He whumped into the soft snow and stayed there. His hands were at his shoulders, palms up.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said—or tried to say. His words came out like the yawp of one awakening from a bad dream. His first spoken-aloud words in months. It made his throat feel strained as if he’d just shouted an hour-long speech.

  The girl had stepped over the threshold, following his movement unerringly with the gun, but now she remained motionless. She didn’t respond to his words. Her expression was unreadable. Perhaps she would stand over him with this weapon forever. Jack wondered if she understood. Perhaps she only spoke Spanish? Despite her dark features, she didn’t look Mexican.

  “Lo siento,” he tried again. He tried to sound unthreatening, despite the high-capacity rifle and the semi-automatic at his side. He’d let the rifle fall well away from him as he had fallen back. His position on the ground would have made retrieving the pistol at his waist awkward and slow.

  After what seemed an eternity, she lowered the muzzle so that it was again inches from his face while she bent down and deftly relieved him of the pistol. It disappeared somewhere in one of the layers of clothing under her winter coat. She stepped to the side to get the rifle, and Jack noted that the mouth of the gun did not move at all, other than to rotate ninety degrees. She seemed to have all her attention on Jack and simultaneously on ejecting the magazine from the Sig. She was so calm. Jack entertained no notion of attempting to overpower her during this operation.

  “Get up,” she finally said. No accent. No anger. Businesslike.

  Jack complied. He moved slowly and took his time brushing off the snow. The fear was past though the adrenaline surge remained. In place of the fear was awe. A living, breathing person. What does she think of me? Jack’s mind was benumbed by the transition. One moment, his inner life was a dying ember, only faintly illuminating a cobwebbed, drearily-furnished mind into which his awareness of self had been rapidly receding. An increasingly dark place unfed by interaction with others. Jack was no longer aware even of this—that he was well on the road to an affectless solipsism, wherein other people, if there were any, would be just facts of the exterior world, like cold, heat, darkness, and danger.

  But now, in this next moment, the ember glowed orange. He had a vague but growing awareness of her presence as more than just a variable to contend with in his world. Their relationship, such as it was, was something apart from their interior worlds. There was a society if only a society of two in mutual guardedness. That little society by itself already began to motivate in Jack the beginnings of a sense of responsibility and purpose outside of self-preservation. This was new to Jack, or rather dimly half-remembered from a distant world.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. It seemed like the right thing to say.

  “Turn around,” she answered. He did, but he was just facing the untrammeled blanket of snow in the little yard and the street beyond that. There wasn’t much to see in that direction. Surely she wouldn’t just shoot him in the back?

  “I didn’t know if you were a threat,” he said to one side but without turning all the way back to her. His own voice still sounded strange, as if he were listening to someone else speak, perhaps someone on the radio, back when there were radio broadcasts. The sound-absorbing snow made his voice even stranger. Jack took notice of how the sound reverberated even inside his own head. He was long out of the habit of speaking. He’d have spoken more now just for the rare sensation, but for the still-worrisome circumstances. And this new Other.

  “If you run, I’ll shoot you,” she said.

  Jack thought about what to say next to allay her concerns about him. If she had any inkling what he’d been through these many months, she would see his conduct as reasonable. But what about her? What had she been through? Was she also by herself? Were there others? Was she struggling, as he was, with this mutual discovery?

  “Walk. Slow.”

  “Are you alone?” he asked over his shoulder.

  No answer.

  Well of course not, he thought. Why would she feel compelled to tell him anything? Maybe she would just shoot him still. Jack glanced back behind him. She looked at him, a little less intently than when she was looking down the barrel. Her head was covered in the scarf, which he now saw was a heavier fabric, more like a thin blanket. Her dark hair framed her eyes at the front of the shawl-like covering. In that glance, Jack perceived a quickness of mind. Wisdom beyond her years. She looked at most fourteen. Willowy of frame, especially behind that massive shotgun.

  “Go left.”

  Jack stepped across the shallow ditch into the road, trying not to slip backward in the snow. He was less sure of his footing in the faltering light. The road itself was at more of an incline as one headed further north, away from the highway. They trudged north for a bit. There were no more houses close to the road, but there were little side roads here and there. Private drives, no doubt, to ranches reaching up into the hills.

  Jack was also quite conscious of being unarmed. He felt more vulnerable from that fact than from the presence of the girl behind him. The well-armed girl. A shotgun and his .45, at least. Maybe he could retrieve the Sig back at the house later. Already, he was thinking of the girl as being no real threat to him, even as she kept the shotgun at the ready, pointed at his back. From her perspective, he’d hunted her down, armed to the teeth. He smiled at his own blundering paranoia. No doubt there were better ways to have handled the whole thing than the one he had chosen. But he came from a lonely world.

  It was nearly fully dark now, but the snow preserved the little light that there was. They walked in deep phthalo shadow. The road was becoming steeper at almost every step. Ahead, it curved past some cypress trees and out of sight, but
Jack could see that it likely ended somewhere in the canyons to the north, now becoming indistinct against the massive wave of mountain north of Luna. To his left, however, he could make out a straight edge against the snowy backdrop, the corner of a structure of some sort. Maybe a house. They’d left the main road and were on a side drive, perceptible only as a blue-white path through the increasingly thick vegetation. As they rounded a corner of scrubby brush and bushy pines, the side of the structure—a barn—came into view, and Jack could see a glow of orange from under the eaves, bright against the gloom. It was lighted inside.

  “Go toward the barn,” the voice behind him ordered. She had been marching a few yards behind him, quiet but for the occasional scrunch of compressed snow when she stepped forward on the incline of the road. He was aware of her presence, though. Well aware. Aware of little else, actually, other than the fade to snow-illuminated blue shadow, all around. Hers was the human consciousness in which he now saw himself. He watched himself exist as on a stage in her mind.

  The ground was flat on the long side of the barn. The entrance would face south, he could see, at an angle from the road they’d traveled up, and he would round the corner to get to it. All of Jack’s senses were attuned to the evidence of human presence in this orange-lit barn. His instincts were to run and to circle around, to sneak up on the barn as he had the terminus of the girl’s footprints. But that was unthinkable. The armed voice was right behind him in the blue shadows. He could feel her presence. He tried to move slower, but without drawing a warning from the girl. His breath became shallower. He wanted to crouch down, to silently find an obscure vantage point to peer in—maybe a hole or a space between siding slats. But the girl knew what the barn contained, evidently, and she was in control. He felt even more vulnerable, approaching the entrance on tenterhooks.

  At the front corner of the barn, he could see that orange light promiscuously spilling out the wide front door onto the white snow. It was firelight. Jack was a city-slicker, but he knew that fires don’t belong in barns. But what of it, he thought. Let it burn down. The tiniest remnant of humanity now owned all the barns in the world. He stepped forward gingerly, from the corner toward the entrance, and stole a look back at the girl. She made the slightest nod toward the entrance to the barn. Jack stepped forward, feeling intensely his lack of control, disgusted at his own helplessness after those many months of self-reliant survival. He dreaded what he might find inside. If the girl had made the fire herself, earlier, it would not continue to burn so robustly now.

  Jack breathed deeply and rounded the corner. There was a fire, all right, contained inside a metal barrel-end in the middle of a well-swept dirt floor. And just beyond, well-lit by the fire, was a man. He had been seated facing the fire and the door to the barn, but upon seeing Jack, jumped to his feet with alacrity. A boy, more like. But older than the girl. Right behind Jack, the girl also stepped into the light of the fire in the doorway. Jack watched the young man’s eyes sweep to her, questioningly.

  “Robin?” he inquired, his palms up in an interrogative gesture.

  Jack watched his eyes follow her and then snap back to him as she stepped wide to the other side of Jack, and then past the fire, the shotgun held laterally but no longer pointed right at Jack. She made a face as if to say “it’s a long story.” She moved forward to hand him the shotgun.

  This was a moment of opportunity, Jack realized. The two of them were inside the barn, on the other side of the fire. Jack was still standing just a few feet inside the wide entrance. He could be out the door in a flash. Out of the angle of the firelight, he’d be in darkness, especially to one with eyes used to the light. He traced a route in his mind that would get him to the dense vegetation a few yards from the side of the barn. They would have to fire blindly after him if they were bent on shooting at all. He’d have to scramble fast, himself blinded in the darkness at first. His odds were good, not because he’d be likely to get far before being shot, but because he sensed they wouldn’t shoot at all, now that the two youths were together and he was less of a threat to the girl alone. But where would he go, ultimately, with knowledge of these Others in the world? The cold outside, or the warm fire here?

  These thoughts ran through his mind in all of an instant. He stood fast. He lived in a different world now than he had just a few hours before. He was in the company of other people. On the wrong end of a gun, to be sure, but he retained his rationality despite the mind-altering events of the afternoon. The person who had left the footprints on “his” road, probably the girl, had not sought him out. He had pursued her. And if she had approached him the way he had approached her, what would he have thought? He realized that he was lucky to be alive.

  The girl and the young man quietly but warily murmured back and forth, obviously discussing Jack, standing so that they had a constant eye on him. They had an easy familiarity with one another, but not like lovers, and anyway, whatever the age difference, they were on either side of a divide. He was an adult, if barely, and she was still a child. Jack tried to maintain a patient and non-threatening countenance. Easier to do because he felt like he owed it to them. The young man was perhaps eighteen, twenty. He was a good bit taller than the girl, strongly built but with the leanness of youth. Jack noticed that they bore something of a resemblance to one another as they stood side by side in whispered consultation. Siblings? But the girl was dark—she could have been Arabic or Indian. Perhaps American Indian, it occurred to Jack. They were all standing in territory that for many hundreds of years was Apache, and, a little further north, Navajo. The boy looked like he was a little more gringo, with sandy hair and lighter skin. The “man,” Jack began training himself to say. The man tended to greater expressiveness than the girl, who was nearly as reticent with the young man as she had been with Jack, yet she clearly deferred to him and was comfortable in his company.

  The two youths seemed satisfied that Jack had stood patiently while they talked. This, more than the substance of what they had to say to each other, caused them to proceed with less of a sense of alarm. The girl flopped down on a heap of blankets, beginning to draw one up and around herself. In exasperation, she paused and sat up, and reaching inside of her clothes, drew out Jack’s .45, rolling her eyes at the young man and tossing the gun atop a blanket between the two. Jack noticed a dog, for the first time, as it lowered its nose to the gun and then settled down again between the man and the girl.

  The young man kept Jack’s gaze, intently, while resuming his seat. He purposely paused a moment and then gestured over to his left, Jack’s right, at a five-gallon plastic bucket lying on its side.

  “Would you mind having a seat,” he said, arranging the shotgun across his lap. The stock was to his right, the barrel toward Jack, but not pointed right at him.

  Jack leaned over the bucket and turned it bottom-side up without straightening up himself. He moved it a little closer to the fire and then stood, stepped over the bucket, and settled onto it. He looked back at the young man, intentionally waiting to let him speak first. But the young man just sat there looking back at Jack, expectantly, as did the girl. In this way, the baton was passed to Jack. Instinctively, Jack understood that it was not so that he could ask questions. Instead, Jack began to tell his story.

  Chapter 6

  The first thing Jack saw the next morning was the shadowed and conifered mountains in the distance, across the valley. Orange light like a cool fire had just graced the utmost reaches, in sharp contrast to the spruce-blue range below. The orange light would descend the mountainscape, like a curtain being lowered at an imperceptibly slow pace. The sky behind, to the southwest, was blue and clear.

  The second thing Jack noticed was in the immediate foreground—a thin column of smoke ascending from what had been the fireplace of the previous night. It rose in an undisturbed stream just so high, and then began to eddy and loop in the course of its climb, and finally to dissipate. Jack followed it up with his eyes, for the first time wondering where it
would go and why the inside fire hadn’t made the barn uninhabitable with smoke. Above, a large area on the western slope of the roof was open to the sky. There was just a grid left, formed of support beams and a few remaining cross-pieces.

  The third thing Jack noticed was the dog, suddenly and noisily appearing at the opening to the barn. At this, Jack was wide awake, fumbling for his .45 before remembering that it would be unnecessary, and anyway, he no longer had the gun. It was the dog that had remained parked between the two strangers for the better part of two hours the night before. It didn’t have that feral look he’d come to recognize, and anyway, right behind it was a now-familiar voice, calling “Dewey.” Dewey paused before obeying, straining his nose forward at Jack as if to sniff him out from a distance, and on the other side of the smoking fire pit. The pause was momentary, though. Dewey snorted and turned back in the direction of the voice outside the barn. His tail wagged. He scooted out of Jack’s sight past the edge of the doorway again, and then reappeared, now at the feet of Robin.

  Jack experienced the shock of discovery all over again. The night before could have been a weird dream, despite the confirmation of waking in the barn. He’d slept fitfully, off-and-on dreaming of the soft snow-cloud cover slowly thinning, and the stars re-emerging. Stars in the cold heavens, reasserting his aloneness. A second abandonment, crueler than the first. And then he wondered if it had been a dream at all. The stars were visible overhead after all, even from inside the barn. And the horror of being alone again had returned on waking—his emotions were unquestionably real. But now all that dissipated like the rising smoke as Robin stepped into the barn. Dewey loped over confidently to sniff his hand. Robin took a seat on the upturned bucket that had been Jack’s perch the night before.