Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

  So what?

  November would be good, I told myself. It had to be. Otherwise, I was going to self-combust.

  Over the last few weeks, the leaves of Temperance had changed from yellow and red to the deep brown of late autumn. Throughout the day, the wind would strip them from the trees, one by one, and float them through the air until they gathered at the foot of our porch steps, spread them across the expanse of the high school parking lot, or line them up along the windowsills of houses. Leaves got caught beneath windshield wipers, and whenever rain came and I turned the wipers on, the leaves would fly up and away after being released, to drift through the air like paratroopers.

  Wherever I looked, it was a golden-brown landscape I moved through.

  Winter was coming down the line, though. I knew it when my dad and Toby took a day off work to go hunting and came back with a young buck, which they hung from the basketball hoop on the front of our garage to drain its blood, staining the gravel beneath the hoop a sticky black for weeks to come. And I knew it when my mom started to decorate the house for the coming holidays.

  Jarrod and I spent the first half of November trying to figure each other out. Since he understood what we were doing together better than I did, I let him take the lead. And because of what my mom had done—cut me off from parts of myself—I felt like I was speaking a foreign language. You, me, this thing between us. I didn’t always know what to do or how to do it, but I moved toward this feeling Jarrod created in me just by being near him. I touched his chest. Looked into his eyes. He stared back, and his lips were rough against mine.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, though, was it?

  Nothing, nothing I’d been told—by my family and teachers, by books and TV—none of it meant much to me any longer.

  And I had to figure out a way to live with my mom without hating her for messing with my head and lying to me, even though she said it was for my own protection. What a parent thing to say. That excuse, like everything else, didn’t mean much to me.

  “Let’s take it slow,” I told Jarrod, even though I wanted to pack a bag and hit the road, ride to some other place where I could kiss him on a street corner. Go someplace where we could figure each other out without worrying that anyone was looking at us, staring. Places like that existed. Temperance just wasn’t one of them. It was hard to ignore how different life here was from what we saw on TV and the Internet. Guys and girls were the norm here. If there was anything other than that, I’d never seen it. It was hard not to think that the right life for us was probably elsewhere.

  “Don’t worry,” Jarrod said, stroking my arm, raising goose bumps. He took my hand, looked at me through the locks of hair falling across his eyes, and said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  But how could I know that for sure? Hadn’t he gone away before? And hadn’t my mom made me forget important things? It seemed to me that nothing could be certain, that people couldn’t be trusted, not even your own family. Life could change your circumstances and whisk you away, or else someone could do something horrible to you, maybe without you even realizing it. And when you did realize it, they’d say, It was for your own good.

  “It’s just that I don’t know how to be myself,” I said. I was holding on to his hand like if I didn’t, I might float up through the air, into the clouds and into outer space, and then I’d keep on floating until I reached a planet with a gravity strong enough to hold me. This world, this town, my family, it all felt like I could put my hands right through it. Like there was nothing here but smoke and mirrors.

  “You don’t have to know how to be yourself,” Jarrod said, running his thumb across my knuckles. “You just are yourself. You don’t think it. You just feel it.”

  “But everything I feel,” I said, “none of those feelings can be real if I’ve been lied to. That’s what she’s done to me. She’s made my whole life into a lie.”

  “She messed up,” Jarrod said, shrugging. “All of our parents do. They think they’re doing good things for us, and sometimes they are. But other times, they’re doing things that are just convenient. I’m sure my mom used to think one more sip of whiskey would calm her nerves so she could take better care of me. I’m sure my dad thought by kicking me out, he’d kick the queer right out of me. People fuck up, Aidan. Your mom’s no different just because she’s—I don’t know. What the hell is she? Did she explain that to you, at least?”

  “You mean, what the hell are we,” I said. “Her and me both.” I wanted him to remember that I was as strange as she was so he didn’t blind himself to that and then later change his mind about me. “And no.” I shook my head. “She didn’t explain any of it. Said she doesn’t know what we are, just that we’re like anyone. Said she thinks most people can do what we do, if they would only let themselves.”

  Jarrod made a face like what I was saying was pure garbage.

  “Yeah,” I said. “She’s still lying. I know she knows more, she just won’t tell me.”

  “Maybe it really is for the best, then,” Jarrod said, sitting up against his headboard and stretching out his arms. He’d been lying beside me for the past hour, working me through tangled feelings, probably hoping we could do something far more interesting. But he listened to me; he asked questions.

  “How can it be for the best?” I asked. “You’re starting to sound like her now.”

  “I don’t know, Aidan.” He got out of bed, running his fingers through his hair. “It’s just that whatever’s happening here, it’s big. Maybe it’s best not to know everything. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but you’re already freaking out about what you do know. Finding out more might be enough to crack you.” He came to stand near where I sat on the edge of his bed, bent down on one knee, then put his hand in my hair to ruffle it a little. “And I don’t want to see you break,” he said. “Not after just getting you back again.”

  It was weird to find myself in this position. Especially with my family. Not because I was secretly having a relationship with Jarrod while everyone assumed we were just friends, but because of the secret I kept for my mom. “Don’t bring up any of the things I’ve shared with you to your dad or brother” was what she’d said after I’d ridden home on the back of a white stag, when she’d finally talked openly about the things I was starting to see and hear that autumn.

  “But don’t they already know?” I’d asked.

  “Toby doesn’t,” she’d said, shaking her head vigorously. “He never had the sight you have, not to that degree, so it’s best to just leave him be. Your father once knew about all of this, yes.” She’d looked down at her hands, where her fingers slowly twisted together in her lap, fidgeting.

  “What do you mean, once knew?”

  And she had looked up with her lips pursed, unable to meet my eyes, and said, “I helped him forget some things. The same way I did with you.”

  “Mom,” I’d said.

  But she’d hushed me. “It’s better this way,” she said. “Our lives are much better separated from the things I hid from you and your father. Please, Aidan. Help me keep it this way. I just want us all to be happy.”

  Grudgingly, I’d agreed. What else could I have done, really? Run and told my brother I’d seen our great-grandfather in the war that killed him? Run and told my dad that my mom had somehow made him forget things, that she’d done something to make him remember his life differently from the way it had actually occurred? They would have looked at me like I was crazy.

  So the days passed as if they were normal, and then Thanksgiving came around just in time for my family to really get some good practice at being ordinary. We spent that day in the usual way—watching the parade on television, eating turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing—like any average American family, even though my mom and I sat across the table from each other withholding a secret from my dad and brother while we ate slices of pumpkin pie. Our eyes met every so often, but my mom was always the first to look away, which made me realize just how muc
h she required my silence.

  It was only a couple of weeks later, when everyone had just gotten used to the idea of December, that the house phone rang in the middle of the night. Across the hall, I heard my dad’s voice, thick with sleep, say, “Snow? Really? That much? This early?” And his voice kept going up and up as he spoke, drifting across the space between us, slipping beneath my doorway, like the voice of the Living Death Tree seemed to manifest right there in my room sometimes, a disembodied presence.

  Snow usually didn’t fall this early in December, and never that much when it did. But when I got up and went to the window, sure enough, it was falling fast and thick over the fields and the back pasture. It must have been falling like that for hours, too, because the ground was covered and my car had become this amorphous whiteness sitting in front of the garage. I looked down at my phone: it was five in the morning and the town was already buried in nearly a foot, according to my local weather app.

  When I heard my dad buckling his belt and zipping up his coat, I left the window to go downstairs, arriving just in time to see him close the front door behind him. Snow still floated in the entryway where he’d been standing. The flakes hung in midair for one long moment, almost suspended in time, before they drifted to the floor and turned into drops of pearled water.

  My mom, too, was awake already. I found her in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a glass of water, her hair draped over her shoulders in uncombed strands. When I first came in and saw her under the fluorescent glare of the kitchen light, the fine lines that crowded the corners of her eyes seemed to cut deeper than usual. A bit of makeup usually hid the age that had crept up on my mom over the past few years, but without that polish she looked more worn down than I was used to seeing her.

  “You should go back to bed,” she said, putting her glass down when she saw me in the doorway. “They’re going to cancel school soon anyway.”

  She was right. The house phone rang again not twenty minutes later. My mom took the call, listening to the recorded message from the principal, even though she already knew what was coming.

  Before she’d even had a chance to shout the news to me from the kitchen, the weatherman on the news station I’d put on in the living room predicted that the snow would keep coming for the next few days. And after hearing that, in true Midwestern mother fashion, my mom decided we’d better stock up on necessities before things got worse, and she drove off ten minutes later, headed for the grocery store, where I was sure a mass of Temperance’s parents were already gathering.

  The first night of any string of winter days my dad was gone because of work was almost always a magical experience, at least initially, because his absence let the rest of us do whatever we wanted. Toby would watch TV without having to fight with my dad over the remote. My mom would open a bottle of wine and lie in bed reading a mystery novel, sipping from her glass until the bottle was empty. Me, I’d wander down into the basement, a space we usually avoided because my dad kept his woodworking machines and taxidermy tools down there and he didn’t want us messing around with them. These were hobbies he indulged in whenever he had free time. I liked to go down there when he wasn’t around to examine the things he made below the floors where we lived out our daily lives. Running my fingers along the leg of a stool still clamped on the lathe, stroking the back of my hand against the fur of a deer’s preserved muzzle, both made me feel like I was somehow trespassing, but also like I was able to understand something about my dad, who was quiet and didn’t share his thoughts with anyone too readily, unless he was angry, and then everything he thought, good or bad, came spilling out of him. The things he made in the basement were like hieroglyphs found in an Egyptian tomb, and I ran my fingers over them, hoping to somehow know him better.

  After the first day of snow, he’d usually come home and the roads would be clear and everyone’s lives would go back to normal. We’d eat dinner and he’d fight with Toby over the TV, and my mom would only have one glass of wine at dinner.

  This snowstorm, though, was different. The first night passed in that magical absent-dad way, but in the morning, when he hadn’t come home to pick up Toby, my mom called the roads department, worried. No one was there to answer her call, though. The answering service came on instead, telling her to leave her name and number, saying that someone would be in touch as soon as possible. They were working as fast as they could.

  She called my dad’s cell phone afterward, and luckily he answered. “The snow won’t quit,” he said. “Me and the other guys have our work cut out. Stay home. Tell Toby not to answer his phone if a supervisor calls. Or else you answer and tell them he’s sick. I don’t want him on these roads.”

  When another day passed without my dad coming home, my mom began to stop in the middle of doing things. She’d look out a window suddenly, as if she’d just heard my dad’s truck pulling into the driveway, but who knows what she saw out there. Phantoms, maybe. It was never my dad. The driveway was always empty.

  Toby got the tractor started on the third day and drove it fifteen miles to the roads department, ignoring my mom’s pleas for him to do as his father said and stay home. A few hours later he returned, covered in a layer of frost that had formed on him as he drove out in the open air. Looking like a snowman as he stood before us in the kitchen, he said, “All the crews have been called in and are overnighting it. There are a bunch of trees down, and the roads are almost impassible in some places. Dad said he’d be back as soon as he’s able.”

  Which made my mom sigh, relieved to know that he was okay.

  When he didn’t come that night, though, when my mom had to later pack his dinner away in the refrigerator, her forehead started to crease with concern again. I began to worry too. Jarrod had texted several times over the course of that day to say, “Hey, your dad just drove past my place with his plow,” letting us know that he was out there in the world, safe, doing his job. But now those occasional notifications were cold comfort.

  On the fourth day, my dad called near midnight to tell my mom that the storm seemed like it was never-ending, and that was when she and I stayed up together, avoiding the stare of my suicidal grandfather, watching the hands of my grandma Bennie’s old cuckoo clock slowly sweep across the hours.

  “This isn’t natural,” my mother said to finally break our silence. She looked out the front window at the rolling hills of snow, at the buried bushes, at the trees sheathed in cases of glinting ice. Everything glinted under the cold glare of a full moon. We were like those small figures of people in snow globes, I thought, trapped in a tiny town under glass.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  “I mean, someone’s done this,” she said. “Someone’s wished this into being.”

  “What?” I asked again. It was the first time she’d talked openly—without any coded references—since she’d made me promise not to tell anyone about the things I’d been hearing and seeing since October. I was hoping I could find out more now, while an emergency distracted her from keeping her secrets.

  “There’s a wish behind all of this,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she were my physics teacher talking about gravity. “A wish that comes from sorrow and anger. Can you see the tears behind the flakes as they fall?” She pulled back the curtain a little more, to show me, and I pressed my face closer to the window.

  I couldn’t see anything like tears falling behind snowflakes, but I knew they were there if my mother said she saw them. “Wishes made in sorrow or in pain are powerful creations,” she said, dropping the curtain again. “Sometimes they come from people who are too caught up in their feelings to realize what they’ve even done.”

  “A wish,” I said, “can actually be made?”

  My mother nodded, her lips pursed in thought, as if she didn’t like the idea of wishes but had to acknowledge their existence. “Curses, too,” she said. “If a person knows how to bring them into being.”

  “How?” I asked.

  She shook her he
ad, eyes heavily lidded. “It’s too much to explain right now. I’ve got to deal with this blizzard.”

  “How?”

  She turned back to the window then, and I noticed her fingertips rubbing against the palm of her hand nervously. “I have to go into the world’s shadow to change this,” she said. “And I’ll need you to look after me. Here, at home. I might be gone for a while. And if I’m not back in a few hours, I’ll need you to wake me.”

  “You can do that?” I asked, thinking of how, not long ago, I’d been unexpectedly swept away to a battlefield in France during World War II. “You can go there when you want to? Like, on purpose?”

  She nodded, eyes closed, like she was ashamed of all the things she still hadn’t taught me. “You can,” she said, opening her eyes again. “But you shouldn’t do it unless you absolutely have to.”

  “Why won’t you tell me about these things?” I asked, throwing my hands in the air, shaking them with each word that I said, the same way my dad did whenever he got angry. “Why don’t you trust me?”

  “Aidan,” she said, “it’s not you I distrust. And I don’t have time for this right now. I have to change things. This blizzard has been caused by someone, and I think your father may be in danger because of it. Will you or won’t you wake me if I don’t get up on my own in a few hours?”