by Brian Hodge
But some of it defied explanation. Because it was a meeting room, there were a lot of metal folding chairs. One of the people appeared to have fallen through the seat, while sitting, except with no sign that the seat had actually broken.
I saw bodies embedded into walls. Bodies embedded in the floor. Bodies embedded into each other. A body that appeared to be clawing its way out of the door of a refrigerator. Strangest of all were the heaps of dust and ash in which some identifiable part was visible.
Nearly as strange, just less noticeable in context, was what appeared to be a massive old worktable. With leather straps. Only they were so far apart I couldn’t imagine what they were supposed to restrain. It would be, if not enormous all over, certainly long.
I looked at my brother, who appeared to be trying to remember the basics. How to tie his shoes.
“Cameron?” I said. “Who are these people? Did you know them?”
“They were just…looking for something to believe in. They weren’t much into thinking for themselves. So I did their thinking for them.” He looked from body to body as if trying to figure out who was who. “But they didn’t deserve this.”
“What happened here?”
“It…” He shrugged with a fatalistic, you’re-not-going-to-believe-this laugh. “It must’ve thrown a little tantrum. Because I left.”
Astrobiology, he’d referred to. Something between life here and life elsewhere. Until this moment, I hadn’t genuinely believed he had much of anything. Just some oddity that he and a following of gullible people thought might be significant. Say, a strangely shaped skull that would have a disappointingly mundane explanation.
From overhead came the plod and scrape of something large and heavy shifting across the floor. Unaccountably, the air began to tingle, electromagnetic ripples that caused Cameron’s hair to stir, then his clothes, and the skin along one side of his face twitched as if from a jumpy nerve. I backed away from him—okay, now would be the time to run—and our eyes met, stark with the understanding that something terrible was about to happen. He reached out to me, the way anyone does at the end, and I showed him how strong the instinct for self-preservation can be.
What a thing to send him off with.
He shot straight into the air, a complete overturning of physics, and landed flush with the twelve-foot ceiling, as hard as if he’d fallen the distance instead. When he reached down in desperation, some foolhardy surge of bravery shot through me, and I made a running leap for his outstretched hand. But the building was old, and the ceiling too high, and our fingertips weren’t even close. Before I could drag one of the chairs over to try again, scraps and fibers of his clothing began to slough off and drift about him like swirls of snow caught in an updraft. Cameron sounded less frightened than confused at first, then frustrated, then this quickly graduated to pain, severe convulsing pain.
It wasn’t just wordless screaming. He was arguing. “Don’t…but I brought…” he cried, although I couldn’t make out the rest.
Did I even need to? He’d brought me.
Wood cracked, or maybe it was bone, or both, or maybe it was the sound of the laws of the universe being broken, and Cameron started to meld into the ceiling, then through it, as if it were digesting him. One shoulder went first, and its arm, then his head, and then the rest of his upper body started to follow.
Whatever was up there, it pulled, and pulled some more, and on the second floor, it might look as if he were being born. I could still hear him screaming, muffled now, his head in another room at best, at worst another dimension, or some other place I couldn’t even conceive of.
How was this even happening? Maybe some kind of conscious control of when atoms were particles and when they were waves. Like those oddities that come out of the aftermath of hurricanes: a piece of straw, for instance, imbedded into a tree. I once read a physicist’s theory that an anomaly like that has nothing to do with wind speed and the perfect angle turning the flimsy straw into a bullet. Rather, under the stresses of the storm, and other rare conditions, atoms of both the straw and the tree become, for a nanosecond, at their point of contact, unstable enough to meld.
Cameron was gone past the waist now, then another leg entirely, and still the fight wasn’t out of him yet, until all that was left to see was the last of his leg, from mid-shin down, jutting from a patch of ceiling that had gone a few shades darker, and glistened with a sheen of moisture. His foot kicked a few last feeble times, then merely twitched, and fell still.
And I remembered everything there was to know about running.
Only when I was beside the car did I look back. The old myths always warn you not to, but I did anyway. Because they were just stories about impossible things.
Three arched windows ran along the second floor here in the back, as well, but now the center window was no longer empty. I was being watched, and with another paralyzing shock realized that Cameron had had a much better reason than scoffing to not bring me a picture. He would have known that I’d be certain to recognize the only person we’d ever really had in common in this world.
Even if she’d finally grown as vast and monstrous on the outside as I had always regarded her as being on the inside.
* * *
It felt like a valid question:
Is a problem self-contained if it has no reason to leave?
I knew I had to do something about what I’d discovered, but the more I turned it over in my head, the less I was able to think of any course of action that didn’t seem as if it would be grossly irresponsible.
The kneejerk option was to report it. As a concerned citizen, that’s what you do—you report things. You get out of the way of a situation and let the professionals handle it. Except sending in a group of local first responders would get them killed. What could I tell them, or anyone? Nobody would believe anything close to the truth; no lie plausible enough to urge caution would prepare anyone for what they would actually find.
There were no professionals for something like this, not that I was aware of. In the shadowy branches of the military and national security agencies, there may have been, but these were beyond my reach. Even then, how effective might they be? What I’d encountered could manipulate matter. For all I knew, anyone who would show up in an official capacity might be strong on theory, but have no more practical experience dealing with something like this than I did.
Yet to ignore it, pretend I’d never been there, would be to condemn someone else to stumbling upon a disaster.
The least objectionable option was keep this to myself a few more days, while sorting out a more informed decision. After all, whatever had been created, using our mother as raw material—in Cameron’s framework, a lesser god—it had not left the building in his absence. Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from godhood, he’d said, and if this entity was in any way intelligent, it had to know what an aberration it was, and likely to stay safer while remaining hidden.
This, alone, may have been enough to buy a little time.
Laid out, these were the things I knew:
My brother was or had been part of a deeply strange organization called the Starry Road, which our mother had introduced him to.
Like it or not, they more than anyone were likely to understand what he had, what she had become.
My brother had lost control of a situation and come to me instead of them, whether out of fear, rift, embarrassment, or, based on his last words, to deliver me to it for some reason. Possibly a combination of these.
If there’d been a schism, they may have had no idea where he’d ended up.
If they did know, they might soon reclaim the site and everything else would be a moot point.
Whatever the status between them, Cameron was likely to have left some trail of communications wherever he lived.
Except I didn’t know where he lived, and anything that may have pointed there, like a wallet or phone, would’ve been lost with him, and going back to find it was ou
t of the question.
Assuming I could put enough pieces together to establish contact with the Starry Road, I couldn’t just point them in the right direction before I’d gotten a better idea of their agenda, one that was more concrete than Internet rumor and innuendo.
Finding out where Cameron lived was likely to be the easy part, a simple matter of paying an investigator a couple hundred dollars.
Or, on second thought, maybe he’d left it as close as downstairs, telling Lara or leaving her with some way of getting in touch with him again. She was fun. Except when I bounced down to ask, I could tell it was the worst possible thing to bring up.
“Has he gone?” she wanted to know.
“Yes.”
“Good. I…I know now why you never mentioned him before. I can see why you wouldn’t want to.” Her lips barely moved, her voice scarcely above a whisper. “If he comes back here, you have to tell me first, I don’t want to…I can’t…”
For the two years I’d known her, Lara had kept her part of the house spotless, nothing ever out of place. That was why it was so easy to spot two days of clutter and dirty dishes left around with half-eaten food. With anyone else, it would’ve meant nothing. Hey, I got busy. With Lara, it seemed catastrophic.
“He won’t be back. Ever,” I said. “I promise.”
Wholesome—that was the word to describe her that had always eluded me before. I’d known few it would fit; fewer still who would even want it to. But Lara it fit. And now here she was, looking like a young woman who’d seen the devil.
“Did he hurt you?” It hurt just to ask.
She took a deep, uncertain breath as if she didn’t know where to begin, or how to possibly make me understand. “He didn’t leave marks, if that’s what you mean. There’s just…this coldness in him. At the core. Underneath what he pretends to show. This freezing, empty core. I saw it. I felt it.”
I took a half step forward to offer a hug, and she met me the rest of the way, so I held her a long time, maybe longer and closer than what anyone else might have thought necessary. But it was. No one who’d seen her eyes could argue otherwise.
Besides, I wasn’t completely there, stuck obsessing over what I was going to have to do next. I could only make informed decisions by gaining a better insight into my mother’s past, which really came down to just one option.
I couldn’t imagine a trip I less wanted to take.
* * *
I’ve always hated leaving the place where I live, putting mile after mile between us. It’s always made me afraid I wouldn’t be coming back. We’d done this so much when I was a kid. I’d already had enough rootlessness to last me a lifetime.
It was nice that Ashleigh insisted on coming, and welcome, and we would get there faster with two drivers rather than one, but while it made the long, southerly haul less lonely, I still didn’t feel any less alone.
She knew nothing of this situation, only that I needed perspective on Cameron and his troubles. Because how do you tell someone about what sounds impossible and make it credible, even someone who’s inclined to believe you, and worse, when it’s something your own family has set in motion? Shame can go too deep for the truth to set you free. So the secrets remained mine alone, and the responsibility for them, along with the gut-gnawing feeling that I was trying to win a race against an assortment of disasters before they could catch up with us.
Driving through Portland again, just two days later, was the worst, peering from I-5 toward the west, imagining I could see the building from my car and forgetting to breathe. Because what if I’d made the wrong choice and it all went worst-case scenario right when we passed by, and something as distinctive as a mushroom cloud rose in the distance.
Selfishly, personal Armageddon loomed large, as well. Citing unspecified family troubles would win me only so much slack with my professors and project supervisor. And how could I reintegrate back in as if nothing had happened? I could see everything I’d worked for slipping away in an ebb tide of failures, no-shows, and incompletes, and nobody could even know why. They would see the familiar sight they’d seen too many times before: one more grad school washout who couldn’t handle the pressure in this last stage before the real world.
“Does it ever get tempting to just turn in a different direction and keep on driving?” Ashleigh asked somewhere south of Eugene.
“Sure.” Agreeing was easier even when it was a lie, but inside something was screaming mayday, mayday. This is how it starts, how the hooks get sunk in and pull you off course a little at a time, until you’re no place you remotely planned on being.
“I can work anywhere. It’s just temporary anyway, until I get some things figured out,” she said. “And you could find something.”
Right. Ashleigh, with the more artistic hand, could make me a sign: WILL POINT OUT CONSTELLATIONS FOR FOOD.
The horrible thing was, I could see it happening. I could look at Ashleigh slumped comfortably in the passenger seat with her shoes and socks off, her feet with their plum-colored toenails propped onto the dashboard, looking as free as the best day of summer, and I could see it happening. Swerve east and aim 3000 miles ahead. I could really see it happening, and wanted to steer into the next bridge abutment to stop it before it could, because I could see myself enjoying it: It’s not what I planned for, but it’s not so bad, either.
Remembering, too, Cameron’s assessment of what I was really doing here:
You like the bad girls, he’d said. Are you really that blind to yourself? …Poor guy, you’re still trying so hard to fill that void, aren’t you? You’re still looking to bring home a girl just like Mom.
I could prove the prick wrong, though.
This morning, on Ashleigh’s refrigerator, her latest Reason of the Day. It was about a man in India, not much older than we were, who, when he was only four, had gotten separated from his big brother on a train ride. He’d ended up hundreds of miles from home, too young to explain where he’d come from. He’d grown up, in essence, an orphan, a refugee. He’d had an entirely different life. And now, circumstances had led him back to his village and reunited them all. He’d never forgotten them. They had never given up hope. He had his family back, and the love had endured.
Ashleigh really must have gone digging to find a story like that for this morning. She’d done it for me. So whatever parallels Cameron may have thought he’d seen, they were superficial at best.
My mother would never have done anything like that.
My mother would never have thought of doing anything like that.
* * *
The last I’d seen my father in person predates my memory of anything at all. He’d left when I was two years old, give or take—the account varied, my mother either shaky on her recollection or she just wasn’t concerned with accuracy, and would say what sounded right at the time.
He’d made an attempt to keep in touch, and once I was old enough to understand the concept of mail, every few months an envelope would arrive for me, with a skimpy single-page letter scrawled in his sloppy hand, and maybe a picture. He claimed to care, to miss me, to wish that I could accompany him on his adventures on the road. The envelopes displayed a lot of different postmarks, and I suppose I found the notion of joining him exciting, infinitely more appealing than the lopsided situation at home. He made it sound fun, even exhilarating, but eventually I began to see past the charade to the truth: that he was just a drifter who couldn’t hold a job for long, and always needed someplace new to land.
I’ll give him credit for this much, though: While he often claimed to miss me, and may have been sincere about wishing I could join him, he never actually promised to make it happen. Not once. He didn’t promise something he was incapable of delivering.
In the end, it was never anything more than letters and photos. He was a two-dimensional father who’d never managed to break through into the 3D world.
The letters got fewer and farther between, and in the pictures he looked more and more haggard
. Eventually they just stopped, but this was around the time I was thirteen, not long into a new life under a different roof, and wanting nothing to do with any part of the old one. It just terminated between us. Maybe he’d run out of ways to spin the truth and decided to stop. Maybe he knew I saw through him. Or maybe his last letter got lost in transit. Whatever had dammed the flow, I never wrote back to see if there would ever be another.
Then again, it could have been that he stopped writing because his wandering days were over. He’d landed for good, finally. It was years before I considered the notion that he didn’t write because he thought I needed the idea of a father, but instead, he’d written because he needed the idea of his son to keep him going. Once he’d gotten someplace he could call home for the long-term, my purpose was served.
For those last eight months of letters, the postmark had stayed the same: Niland, California. His home was now a co-opted wasteland called Slab City, the remnants of a Marine base shut down after World War Two. The buildings had been dismantled, leaving only the concrete foundations they’d stood on. Its desert locale was so undesirable that nobody could find another use for it once it had served its purpose of training soldiers to blow things up with artillery shells. Eventually the place became a magnet for drifters, malcontents, peaceable anarchists, leftover hippies of the original vintage and their modern counterparts, retiree snowbirds who wanted to winter on the cheap, and every other kind of exile, eccentric, and oddball ready to live off the grid in a badlands frying pan 120 feet below sea level.
After eleven years, it had taken just a few phone calls and an e-mail to ascertain that my father was still there.
And so after two days and over 1300 miles, Ashleigh and I came to the end of our coffee-fueled descent through the Pacific Northwest and the length of California. We’d traded one corner of the country for another, the landscapes of fall growing dryer and browner the farther south we got, until I’d reached another post-apocalyptic world entirely. Slab City was an accumulated village of trailers and RVs, tents and shacks, full of unkillable desert scrub and devoid of the things that most everyone in the civilized world took for granted. Services like water, sewage, electricity.