by Sarah Bruni
He was staring at the bottom of the jukebox across the bar when he saw something slink in through the door. Out of the corner of his eye, whatever it was passed for a dog, but it was a strange-looking dog. This was confirmed by two men playing pool across the bar.
“Will you goddamn look what we’ve got here,” one said to the other.
His partner straightened up from his shot at the table and leaned into his cue.
Then everyone was looking. The animal seemed to shy from the extra attention, and settled quietly near a cooler at the front of the bar, looked the other way, as if mesmerized by all the different colored bottles of beer.
The animal looked perfectly harmless. One woman cooed, “Hey, pup pup puppy,” and announced she was going to pet it. But the man she was with grabbed her wrist and said it was actually time to get going.
“Settle down,” the bartender chided. She clapped her hands above her head. The bartender announced that yes, there was a coyote in the bar, and that Animal Control had been called. Everyone was free to take off or stick around. “If you’re leaving,” she advised, “don’t forget to close your tab.” A few people walked away from half-full beers with an exaggerated tiptoe by the animal. But most picked up their conversations after a few minutes of taking pictures of the animal with their cell phones. The coyote didn’t even look up. It had curled into a ball in front of the cooler and closed its eyes. Peter wondered if this was such a strange occurrence really. Stranger things, it seemed—more absurd and unthinkable things—happened all the time. The bartender turned the televisions up as a means of distraction. It was the people on the island again, organizing their ranks before the attack everyone knew would come at the end of the hour.
Peter ordered another scotch.
He drank it slowly to balance the pace in his brain. Peter was sitting in an unknown bar on an unknown street in a city he had no business being in. He had come here to save a stranger for no good reason. But now, none of it mattered. The whole natural world felt skewed, its order difficult to anticipate, to penetrate in a way that made any sense to him now. Coyotes walked into bars. Sharks attacked on schedules set by television executives. Sheila was gone. He dreamed her disappeared, floating or trapped, and in doing so, he had put her in danger, and now she was lost. He was irresponsible. He was afraid. He was alone again.
A woman with long dark hair sat on the stool beside him watching the televisions, but she was muttering something about the animal. “Third one found alive in the city this month alone,” she said. “It’s not a good sign.”
“What do you mean?” Peter said.
“Look around!” the woman grumbled. “The whole world’s fucked. Starting with the food chain and working its way on up the line.”
“Keep it down,” the bartender said. “You’re freaking everyone out.”
But the woman would not stop talking. “You know what they say about coyotes,” she said, laughing. “Wily? Pranksters? Right?” the woman said.
Some of the people at the bar nodded their heads.
“Well,” the woman said, “that’s all bullshit. They’re messengers. They move between the living and the dead and they carry messages.”
“Keep it down over there!” The bartender was becoming more insistent.
Peter felt his body slide off his stool. He lifted his eyeglasses from his face, propped them on his head, and crouched to the ground to get a better look. He remembered Iva saying how the animals ran along the lake in packs. Peter looked at the coyote, and the coyote opened its eye closest to Peter. He didn’t know what he was thinking, but he was thinking the animal had information.
The coyote looked away from Peter, at the bottles of beer in the cooler. But it knew. The woman was right; animals don’t walk into bars for no reason at all. They carry messages.
“Get away from the animal,” the bartender advised. “You’ve got about three seconds to move.”
Peter moved a step closer to the coyote and leaned into it, his body asking the animal to confirm or deny it carried information. His body asking the animal if Sheila was living or dead.
The coyote turned to Peter. Its ears were sharp and, when it looked up, its eyes, translucent yellow. Four uniformed men appeared in the bar then, with instruments in their hands—a metal glove, prod and a lasso, and tranquilizer darts just in case. The coyote showed its teeth but—messenger or not—the animal was little match for four men with a strategy and the tools to implement it.
Messengers take on all different sorts of forms, so sometimes it’s difficult to predict their arrivals. When Peter walked back into the apartment, he found Iva was there again, sitting at the kitchen table with Petra and Lenka, drinking tea. The cards had been put away. Iva stood when Peter entered the room and pushed an envelope in his hand. “It was beneath my door,” she said. “But it is for you.” She indicated the name scrawled on the front of the envelope: Peter. He reached for the envelope and took a step back from the kitchen table. All three women watched as he read.
Peter, I found him. Where are you? I found him. Near the scrap yard, like you dreamed. I came home for you but you aren’t here and I don’t want to leave him alone again and you know why! But there is nothing to worry about because we’re both safe and I am looking after him until you get here. So I guess the plan is working, just like you said it would and we’re doing fine love. I mean it. His address is 1534 W. Walton. Get over here fast, I need you and so does he.
Love,
Gwen
P.S. Also stay away from our apartment—it isn’t safe.
“From Sheila?” Iva said. “Yes?”
“Yes,” Peter said. He breathed out and then in again. “It’s her,” he said.
Iva nodded. “I knew it must be,” she said. “You will make up with her?”
Lenka asked something in Czech, and Iva pointed to Peter, smiling, and answered.
“I say to her that now you found your love again,” Iva explained. “And Lenka says this is good.”
Petra was smiling now too. “Dávej si pozor,” she said. She clucked her tongue like a grandmother giving counsel.
“Yes,” Iva agreed. “Also to be careful.”
Peter nodded in assent to all of it. He would be careful; he would find her again; he would set everything right. He would find the man and the dreams would stop and he would get them all out of the city. Sheila had done her part, and now he was needed; he had a function, a purpose, a power, just as he’d been promised. He felt he had to move quickly and he felt he could barely move. He kissed Iva on the cheek, mumbling his gratitude for the message, and started to make his way to the door. Then, he turned back and kissed Petra and then Lenka, before running into the street to find a taxi that would take him to the address in his hand.
HIS CAPTOR, THE KIDNAP victim, the messenger, the angel, the girl with the gun, the girl with the name of Spider-Man’s first love, Gwen Stacy, sitting across the table from him, her hand in his.
He had heard it said that when human beings screw things up beyond repair, make a complete mess of what they’ve been given, sometimes there is need for intervention from elsewhere, help from the next world, but really, who would believe such outrageous claims, but the weakest, the most desperate and dependent. But perhaps he was one of these. What else could explain it? And what sort of next world could it be that would send an angel down looking like this? With a handgun tucked in the waistband of her jeans, with interrogation tactics and the stray dog as her sidekick. To imagine an angel wearing no bra and a shirt so thin you could see everything. And now she was leaning into the table across from him; she was trying to get his attention.
“Your brother,” she said.
She had made him macaroni and cheese for dinner, and they were eating it together when she started again with the things that she knew, the past he was always already working to forget, and Novak put down his fork to listen, to hear her better and accept the news she had clearly come to deliver.
“Your br
other,” the angel-kidnapper repeated.
For all his stubbornness, it could take so little to shift the will. For months he could think only of his errors, his oversights, his solitary work and meals and bed and bathroom. But at the sound of the girl’s voice acknowledging that he had a past, Novak found he wanted to be in the place where he was, to be in his kitchen, at his table, to be a man with his past and his slowly shifting present that was now, he could see, starting to become something different already.
“He’s in Chicago,” the girl said.
He felt his heart shift in his chest to conjure it: Seth, as a boy of six, with his dark, sly smile and nine-thirty bedtime.
“He’s come here to find you.”
Novak closed his eyes. He held the girl’s hand inside his own. To imagine that decades after disappearing, so long after a clumsy exit from his prior life, his brother would seek him out. Novak raised the girl’s hand to his face and pressed the thin bones of her knuckles across his mouth. There was no way to compare the feeling of being forgiven to anything else in this world.
Novak knew what it was to disappear, and he knew what it was to be on the opposite side of it, the receiving end of the act, to be the one at home, sitting on his hands, waiting for word. His father disappeared when he was eleven. This meant that for eleven years, Novak had felt like he had a normal life, before he had nothing but an overworked mother and a baby brother who he had to look after. His father had been in the Marines for many years, even before Novak was born. He knew how to sail, and all the different parts of a ship. He knew how to read a compass. He had given Novak a compass of his on an old gold chain. As long as the arrow points north, he explained, you can never get lost. Exact coordinates could always be determined. It was tricky, because this sort of thing could allow you to feel safe, at home in the world. When his father was away, in some unimaginable sea that was impossible to conjure up from his Iowa bedroom, it helped to think these spaces existed somewhere—there were numbers, degrees of longitude and latitude that corresponded to the places his father went. But even within the most precise coordinates on earth, it’s possible to lose one’s way: say, at night, say, in a storm, tropical winds cutting across the south Pacific all that summer with little regard for even the most able and well-equipped vessels, to say nothing of the men inside; it is possible to exist in a space that can be found on a map, but to eventually breathe in water and sink to the ocean floor.
It was only a few months after his father didn’t return that his mother started to show, low in the belly, but she was eight weeks away from delivery before she would sit Novak down and explain to him that he would soon have a brother. From then on, his mother threw herself into the business of preparing for this baby, and when the baby came, no one talked about the father. Novak knew for a fact that his mother never told Seth anything of his father, for Seth had come to assume that his father was different than Novak’s. Novak never told his brother differently, because he had never been completely sure. Also, there was the fact that it was easier not to think about him. This skill he had learned from his mother. The more time went by without speaking of his father, the easier it became to live without him. If the fact of Seth’s birth was a reminder of the man who had brought him into being, then it was better to imagine that he had come into this world by alternative means, through the act of another man, a stranger, or without any father at all. The only thing that suggested that Seth had come from any common origin was his name; when he was born, the baby was given the name of Novak’s father, the man whose return, not six months before, he and his mother had given up on.
Now, standing at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes from the meal the girl had made, Novak tried to run over what he could still remember of Seth, but it was difficult. It had been so long that Novak found that in his memory, the image of his brother had conflated with a thousand images of home.
Doing pull-ups on the bar in the garage while Seth counted, his voice still like a girl’s, always speeding up the litany of numbers to try to get Novak to pull his chin onto the bar faster.
Beyond the garage was the field where the lake would freeze in the winter and Novak had taught Seth how to find the weak spots in the water, and how to find the tough spots that could resist the weight of them both, sliding in boots across the width of it, taking turns.
“You’re not scared of falling in?” he asked Seth.
Seth shook his head.
“Think there’s any fish down there still?”
“If I fall through and see any fish, I’ll bring them back up with me,” he said.
In his memory of home, he and Seth were always on their own. His mother was always at work, though it wasn’t her fault; she had to raise them. Novak understood that he was supposed to take care of Seth when his mother was at work; he was supposed to fill the areas where a father would have been. He tried. He told Seth stories at night to help him get to sleep. He passed on his comic books when he finished reading them. The spring he left home, the spring he tried to leave the world for good but then settled on Chicago as an alternative, he had felt he couldn’t keep up with all the ways he was expected to fill in for absences left in the lives of others. His mother thought it was selfishness that prompted him to swallow so many of her sleeping pills; she’d said as much at his bedside in the hospital where he woke up, and maybe she was right. But after playing father to Seth, after trying to be a confidant and support to his mother for too long, and then learning that he had also been standing in as a surrogate son and lover and—he couldn’t say what else—to Edith; he had come to understand, finally, that he wasn’t doing anyone any good as himself. It was around this time that the only thing that settled him was imagining the exact coordinates of this pitch-dark place in the pit of the sea. Chicago was supposed to be temporary, a neutral territory, a place to stay while he processed the shame of his failed attempt to abandon his family. But weeks passed, then months, and the longer he stayed away, the more the shame grew, the more difficult it became to imagine a way to return.
The night he left home, Novak had poked his head around the corner into Seth’s room. It was late and his brother was asleep, but for a second he saw Seth’s eyes flicker open, his head on his pillow, without moving. He waited for a moment longer, but Seth didn’t stir. His body still had been so tiny at six he barely filled half the twin bed. Though it seemed impossible, Seth would be nearly thirty now, ten years older than Novak had been when he left the boy alone with their mother.
He made the girl a bed on the sofa. She insisted this would be more comfortable than his bed, and Novak didn’t argue. He unrolled the sleeping bag that he had bought for camping but never used, and offered her his own pillow, the only one in the house. It was late, and they both needed sleep. The dog was already asleep in the corner under the kitchen table. She was accustomed to seeking shelter from the elements, burrowed inside or under whatever structure was available. He showed the girl where the switch for the overhead light was, and where she could place her glass of water so it wouldn’t spill if she got up in the night. The girl sat on the couch and began to unlace her shoes. “Thanks a lot,” she said.
Together, they had devised a plan. At first the girl had wanted to go to Seth right then, but it was the middle of the night, and that wasn’t the way Novak wanted to meet his brother after so long, waking him from a dead sleep. He convinced Gwen that they should get some sleep themselves; then, first thing tomorrow she would go to Seth and she would bring him to Novak, and there would be time to talk, time to start to explain. They had discussed exactly how it would happen. Novak smoothed the sleeping bag at the foot of the couch and began to walk back to his bedroom. Before he turned out the light, he looked back over his shoulder again at the girl, who now was removing her socks and fitting them neatly into each of her sneakers. He paused.
“Where did you come from?” he asked the girl.
“Iowa,” the girl said. “I told you already. Anyway, you didn’t need me t
o tell you. You said my face was all over television.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but what were you doing in Iowa?” He was embarrassed to admit that her presence conjured the supernatural, that he only could imagine otherworldly messengers barging in unannounced and bearing the type of news she carried around. But, clearly, this was just a girl; he could see it in the way she folded her socks and the way she ran her fingers through the knotted ends of her hair.
“Nothing really,” the girl said. “I went to high school. I was working in a gas station when I met your brother.”
The footage from the security camera flashed in his brain for a second. He remembered the unidentified man with the black hat, his posture, his shoulders. There must be some mistake. He felt he was losing the thread of all the facts he had accumulated; he was starting to feel confused again. He saw the footage weeks ago. It was possible the police had named their prime suspect by now.
“Just this little nothing gas station on the Coralville strip,” the girl said, and she smiled a little in the corner of her mouth, like her brain was stuck on the tail end of remembering something.
Novak said, “My brother kidnapped you, didn’t he? Is he the one the cops are looking for?”
The girl was stretched out on her back, staring up. The half smile disappeared from her mouth’s corner, and her voice went hushed. She said, “Your brother’s the one who rescued me. He’s the one who got me out of there.”
Novak added this new piece of information to the story. “You’re his girlfriend,” he asked. “Something like that?”
Gwen smiled.