Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  “Right,” says the analyst.

  “Right,” says the woman.

  Rain sprays hard against the glass, blurring everything. She presses her hand against it. Cooling already, the water washing away the heat.

  “I’d like to visit this place,” the woman says.

  “When?” one of them asks.

  She has both hands against the glass now. Water spraying just an inch away. She says, “As soon as we possibly can.”

  The disconnected parking lots, some linked by short roads leading from one store to a gas station, but others blocked off for no apparent reason. A patchwork of asphalt and squares of grass, a stray tree, a crew of men putting mulch out, it’s not clear why. The three shrubs and two trees are barely alive. But some property owner many hundreds of miles away has checked a box, doing something he thinks is right, We landscape that parking lot we’ve always owned.

  To walk from one parking lot to another has become almost impossible, even though the distance isn’t far. Hopping curbs, passing through broken fences. Places where walking was never considered.

  There is trash at every step, foam cups and plastic bags, and there’s a syringe and a beer can, and there’s a bottle of an undetermined brand or purpose, the sun or rain or wind having stripped it of all its markings.

  The remnants of stray people who once wandered through here, a place no one was ever meant to go.

  The atrium above them dims just slightly.

  Cleaning people have started working in the bar near the lobby.

  But still they talk.

  He wants very much to kiss her.

  He’s not sure what she thinks. But he knows this is what he wants.

  She has blue eyes, he realizes. Something he’d never realized.

  Clear and bright and blue. He can’t stop thinking about her eyes.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Stranger

  Symphonies gone bankrupt.

  Museums unable to meet even their much-diminished payrolls.

  Colleges combining: each a hundred years old, they now merge their small enrollments, one last effort to stay open another year.

  Alone in his room, her younger son would use a steak knife to slowly cut a line along the inside of his thigh. It started not long after his older brother’s first trip into rehab.

  The parents hid the knives, and so he found the razors, snapping them from their plastic handles. The parents hid the razors, and so he found his dad’s tools, selecting putty knives with hard corners and box cutters still sharp. The parents hid the tools, and so he took a wire hanger, unwinding it to expose the rough steel tip, pressing it back and forth on the brick patio, slowly sharpening it before taking it to his room.

  The infection, the madness, it ran full force throughout the house. Mother and father in stages of denial for months, or was it years? Always so many steps behind. Identifying drinking, when the problem was already drugs. Identifying violence, when the problem was already self-abuse.

  The order of events, even now, she can’t quite recreate it in her mind. With her husband, probably, they could piece together the moments in a linear timeline.

  But what’s the point in that?

  Tell yourself you’d do it better. Tell yourself you’d be on top of it. Tell yourself it’d be bad, but not as bad for you.

  Then take your days and weeks and years and turn them inside out. Waking in the lobby of a mental health facility as the sun begins to set outside, your husband, brightly bruised around the face and neck, sleeping nearby on the hard floor. Your younger son, kicked out of school while you are with the older at a rehab facility in a distant state, day after day of painful, cold, and pointless therapy with and without your child. Your older son, who’s back home, and, as you focus on putting a tracking device on his car, he’s in his room now shooting heroin.

  No one trains you for this, a therapist finally said. No one tells you how to parent. Not even how to parent the best of children.

  He is the best of children, she responded.

  Her husband turned to her.

  No, the therapist said. He’s not. Not anymore. But maybe, somehow, we can work to get him back.

  “The demons won,” her husband says now. On the porch.

  How long has he been out here?

  The demons were his metaphor.

  But it’s not one she ever bought.

  Still, he used that phrase all the time. We’re not at war with our son. We’re at war with the demons who’ve overtaken him.

  “There is no such thing as demons,” she says now.

  She looks at him. He’s drunk. She can see it in his eyes. Watery, and his face seems bloated. When she sees him, if she looks close, she can see the face of her son.

  He shakes his head. Crying now.

  Everyone’s always crying.

  “Don’t,” he says.

  She remembers that he’s been out here for an hour. More. They’d been talking. About their older son. But she can’t remember anything that they’ve said.

  She drinks. Swallows. “You can sink into your notions of demons taking over that boy,” she is saying now. “But that is not what happened. It was chemicals. In his brain. There since he was born. Predetermined, predestined. This was DNA.”

  He shakes his head. “Please don’t.”

  Only in his face, her husband’s, can she clearly see her son before he died.

  “Maybe for once we could talk about our other son,” she says, exhaling, the vapor of gin, it crosses her eyes as she now blinks. “And how the fuck we’re going to find him.”

  He stands, slowly.

  “Time to go,” she says. “Right? Time to take one of your fucking walks. No time, though, to talk about him. You had two children, you know. Not one.”

  They have hired a private detective, of course. A few of them. In the years since their youngest son ran away. There have been rumors. Claims that he’s been sighted. But nothing more.

  Her husband leaves the porch, walking down the steps, hand on the rail. Drunk. Once more disappearing into darkness.

  In truth, he talks about their younger son all the time. She knows this. His sadness about the boy leaving is no less than hers. She knows that too.

  Behind her, a house on the hillside a half a mile away burns brightly in the night. A huge house—as it burns, she thinks it looks like a fort that’s been attacked. The stars in the sky are washed away in the light of the growing fire.

  There’s a misery to the repetition. How mental illness cycles endlessly. A force, a weight that pushes down, clouding everything it can touch.

  The boys became strangers to their mother. To their father. Finally, they weren’t even ghosts. Instead they became people their parents didn’t recognize. Or had ever known.

  Of course, the woman is a stranger too now. A stranger even to herself.

  Libraries funded below a minimal level. Books sold at weekend sales in the library parking lot. Or discarded to save space. The tables on the first floor host the homeless who manage to behave, or young children waiting for their parents to pick them up after the library closes at seven.

  Each spring has gotten worse. After six years of drought, subdivisions like this one have seen fires spread across the hillsides. The hills, it seems, are magnets for the flames. Lightning is the worst of it. Hitting dry landscapes of dying brush.

  On the news, they say tinderbox.

  The insurance companies, most of them, found exceptions in their policies to deny homeowners the coverage they thought they’d bought. Governments stepped in, with ten cents on the dollar.

  Other insurance companies, the very small ones, simply bankrupted themselves in the face of all the claims.

  And so, there’s very little incentive for anyone to move.

  Except, of course, the fires.

  It would take an unprecedented wind to push the fire this way. A wind they’ve never had.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks him.

  He’s w
alked by her, nodding some, turning to go upstairs.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks again.

  He stops on the bottom step.

  “What?” she asks.

  He turns to her. “I’m not sure how to answer,” he says.

  She shakes her head, just slightly. “Why?”

  In a moment, he lets himself sit down on the steps, looking toward the big living room. “The last time we spoke,” he says. “I mean.” He pauses. Staring down. “It was very hard.”

  She nods. Nods again. Says in a moment, “Yes, it’s very hard.”

  He turns his head toward her.

  She’s nodding. Nodding hard now. Lips tight. “Harder on you, of course,” she says.

  He stares at her.

  “Always,” she says. “Always this is harder on you.”

  He says, quietly, “I meant what you said to me. On the porch. It was hard to tolerate.”

  “On the porch?” she says, voice rising. “What I said on the porch? Oh. That’s what you’re upset about? You got your feelings hurt? I was hard to tolerate?” She shakes her head. Her arms are crossed, tightly. “Let me apologize. For your feelings and how they hurt. And my role. My essential responsibility for how bad and awful you always feel.”

  He stares.

  “Why is it that I get all the blame and no support?” she says, arms crossed tighter. “Why is it that I can’t feel safe here anymore? Why is it that every misstep of mine is thrown back into my face?”

  He stares.

  “And you have nothing to say,” she says. “Always. Nothing to say. Nothing to do. No help to offer me. No love. No care. Just nothing.”

  He stares.

  “Could you say something nice to me?” she asks, nearly yelling. She’s turned red, eyes wet. “Could you say something kind?”

  When she’s this way, her husband can see pure shadows of what she once looked like. The shadows are so beautiful.

  He starts to speak, pauses. Looks away. Looks back at her. “I would like to support you,” he says. “I would like to love you. But you’re impossible to reach.”

  She shakes her head. “And again, that’s clearly my fault.”

  His head falls slowly, staring down now. At his feet.

  “Always,” she says, “it is my fault.”

  He starts to speak, says something maybe, but she cannot hear it. Or maybe his words simply have no force or sound behind them. So that now he looks only like a man sitting on the steps, head in his hands, whispering silently to himself.

  Grand elementary schools built with aspirations of educating a new generation of young children. Now half empty, or is it two thirds, roofs leaking, gyms unusable, cafeterias infested as if there were no solution to the matter.

  Neighbors flee. Parents run. Only the poorest stay behind. Without the voice or means or wherewithal to make any sort of change.

  The fire is near their house now. The neighbor’s home is totally ablaze. The neighbor who’d had the generator and the baby. She watched them leave a week ago. A moving van. And both their cars.

  The caravan of abandonment. Repeated so many times by people here.

  The wind has finally shifted. A turn deemed impossible by the experts. On hearing of this development, scientists speculate that the fire itself changed the course of the wind and, with it, the wall of flames.

  The house next door burns bright. Like a castle that’s been stormed and plundered, now left to burn like all the other conquered homes before it.

  “We need to go,” her husband says.

  Over the last few days, he’s emptied their home of anything of value. Financial or sentimental. Photos. Books. A painting they bought together in a delta city many years ago.

  She tried to find something to keep from each of her boys’ rooms. A stuffed animal. A blanket. A pop-up children’s book high up on a forgotten shelf.

  She couldn’t.

  But her husband swept through the boys’ rooms, putting a last few items in a cardboard box.

  She doesn’t notice what he grabs.

  She’s found herself concluding that it would be better for all of it to burn.

  The smell of smoke is strong.

  “We need to go,” he yells to her from outside.

  She makes her way out the front door. “Where are we going?” she asks, standing on the porch.

  He’s in the driveway. “I’m not sure,” he says. “Please, let’s get in the car.”

  She stands still. Looking toward the approaching line of fire.

  She can feel the heat. A different heat. Above the heat in the air and the heat from the sun. Something different than the constant heat they’ve had for these many years.

  “Amazing that you can feel the fire,” she says. “Even this far away.”

  She’s watching the flames begin to cross the dead and yellow grass.

  He’s standing near her. “We need to go.”

  She watches. “Where?” she asks again.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know. But we must leave.”

  She watches.

  “One of the detectives,” her husband says. “He called. He thinks he’s found our son.”

  She leans her head back. Seeing thick smoke across all the sky. It’s begun to block the sun. Mid-morning dusk.

  In a minute, she asks, “Where?”

  He tells her.

  She nods. “That’s a city far from here,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “A dying city.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is he doing there?” she finally asks.

  “It’s not clear.”

  She stares at her husband now. Maybe it’s the first time she’s truly looked at him in years. “It’s not clear? Or you won’t tell me?”

  “We have to go,” he says. “The road will be covered in fire.”

  “Tell me,” she says.

  “The fire is coming this way,” he says.

  “Drugs?” she asks. “Prostitution?”

  He’s looking past her shoulder, toward the neighbor’s home. Burning. The yard, the trees, all now burning too.

  “Tell me,” she says.

  He looks at her. “Yes.” He turns away. Back toward the front door. He walks up the steps. Pulls the door shut. “Yes,” he says. “That and more.”

  She leaves the porch. Walking toward the car. Getting in. In a moment, he sits down in the seat next to her. Engine starting. Flames a hundred feet away.

  “I have to go there,” she says.

  “I do too.”

  “I don’t want you to go with me,” she says. Which isn’t true. She knows this. But she needs for him to say, again, that he wants to go with her.

  “I am going also,” he says.

  He’s backing the car down the driveway, quickly. Turning the car now, using the wide circle in the driveway; they’re headed away from the house and the fire. Their home, it will burn soon, but she doesn’t care. She thinks he probably doesn’t either. Fire has been spreading through that house for years. Burning everything and everyone who once lived there.

  They just never saw the flames.

  A theater, nearly two hundred years old, is easily torn down. Rotted anyway. From the rainfall that poured for so many years through the gilded dome of a towering, decaying roof.

  The musicians who had played there, the actors and actresses who once performed, the speeches long ago delivered, poetry read aloud, movies played. Funds were raised. During the war the stage was lined with beds.

  Now gone.

  Memories offer no protection. They are only a series of moments that happened in the past.

  A small notebook falls from his pocket. She picks it up. Asks if she can read from it. He says yes. Instantly. Something he’s never said to anyone.

  She moves through the pages. Struggling to read his handwriting.

  Usually, he tells her, it’s just things I’ve seen. Ideas I might write about next week. Or many years from now.

&nb
sp; She turns pages. Smiling some when she glances at him.

  She wants very much to kiss him. But, for now, she just reads the notes aloud. He helps her where she hesitates, unable to read his writing.

  A man, she says as she reads, smiling now, looking at him, confusion, a question. A man. Living in a city. A city that’s been abandoned.

  PART 2

  A Stranger Even to Himself

  He rises early. But not by choice. It’s just that his mother always made him do so. Even before they crossed the border.

  Wake, she’d say in Spanish. It’s time to pray.

  He no longer prays. But waking is a habit now made physical. Unavoidable.

  Fifty now.

  A life of waste. Alone his entire life. Never a wife. Never anything like love.

  He stares at the ceiling of his single room.

  The residue of drugs. Gin. He feels them. Still running through his body.

  A nausea. Sickness. He shakes and cannot sleep. Cannot stand.

  There’s nothing to stop this but more time. Here. Alone in bed.

  He turns onto his side, pulls his knees up, slowly, as he tightly curls in upon himself.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Carousel Operator

  Cars line up, a quarter mile or more, waiting to turn into the massive parking lot surrounding the church.

  People watch, late at night, hoping for the preacher to call their names.

  Men and women in Sunday suit or dress, crossing through the brick path in the flower-lined median, waving to a friend before starting up the stone steps of the cathedral.

  The carousel circles around him, lit gold and red and green, the colors blurring together against the night sky he can see between the horses and unicorns and sleighs as they revolve. Where he stands at the control panel, the gears of the carousel clatter wildly with each rotation, the diesel engine loud, but a sound that only joins the uproar of the small roller coaster nearby and the coin-toss games fifty feet away and the loud music playing from the haunted house behind the carousel, all of it combining with the screaming voices of the children tugging desperately at their parents and siblings and friends.