Evie of the Deepthorn

by André Babyn

  “But who knows,” I said.

  “Are you talking about your mother?”

  There was silence.

  “What do you mean? How did you know that?” I asked.

  “Know what?”

  I just stared at her.

  “About my mother.”

  She gave me a look like I was crazy.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I don’t know anything except that you used to write poetry.”

  “I’ve never posted anything on my wall about my mother.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  I ignored her.

  We finished our beers. Then we walked to the gas station, and the creek, where she showed me the bicycle she’d been riding when she broke her arm. It was half-buried in the silt and there was no way she had ever even touched it.

  “I don’t believe you,” I told her.

  She just shrugged.

  “Believe whatever you want,” she said.

  Then to the park, lit intermittently, where we sat on one of the benches in the baseball diamond, just at the edge of a halo of light, until we realized that there was a man seated in the darkness of the opposite bleachers, staring at us, not moving.

  “You give me the goddamn creeps,” Sarah whispered to him, as we were leaving.

  From there we walked over to Castillo’s Pizza, which was of course closed, but we could see a light on in the back and we waited, hoping that someone might come out eventually and give us whatever was left over. Sarah said that had happened once, when she was a teenager, although she also said it was probably just because the kid who was working that night had a crush on her friend.

  We walked along the tracks for a bit and went into the old train station, just a heated room with benches, because the train only picks up passengers every three days, and then only at weird times, which is probably why the station door was unlocked. It was creepy in there, so we went back outside and sat on a railing and I asked her what she thought about being in Durham again.

  “I don’t know, I can’t really say. I’m going through a lot, I guess. The only thing I’ve really noticed is that I think people come out here because they feel entitled to something, and that the wide-open spaces reassure them about their lives.”

  “That’s interesting, but not what I asked.”

  “Oh. What did you ask? What I feel about being up here, like, personally? I feel like a complete fuck-up, I guess.”

  “But you’re leaving soon,” I said.

  “It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like everything’s coming apart at the seams. I almost can’t remember ever leaving.”

  “There’s no reason you should feel bad.”

  “I feel corrupted even being from here. I completely understand why you can’t write.”

  “That’s not why I can’t write,” I said.

  “But even so, I understand it. I can’t write, either.”

  “You write?”

  It was a long time before she turned her head toward me.

  “No,” she said. “All I said was, ‘I can’t write, either.’”

  “Why does it matter if you don’t write?”

  “I’d like to write, is what I mean. But I can’t as long as I have this stain on my conscience.”

  “This town? A stain? What are you talking about?”

  “Well, what else would it be? There’s nothing good about this place or the people who come from here.”

  “What about you? What about me?”

  “That’s what I mean!” She got up and started walking in the other direction. I watched her for a while, but decided not to follow her. I felt strange, like I was watching a movie. “You’re crazy,” I said, but it was clear she couldn’t hear me. I wished vaguely I had a cigarette, but I didn’t have any on me. For Mom. Because of Mom. On my way home I thought it over. Sarah was basically right, but there was nothing about Durham that should have provoked such a passionate response. Durham is the opposite of passion. It’s where you go when you don’t want to feel anything more in your life, when you want to numb yourself and your pain. Durham is a figment of the imagination, more so than any other place I’ve ever been. It is an illusion and there’s nothing real about it or the people who live here. But the same is true of anywhere.

  That’s what I had to realize in order to become a poet.

  11

  If I was honest with myself, I realized that I didn’t want anything more to do with Tom. Things hadn’t been great between us for a while. It was while sitting on the couch with an open notebook on my lap, trying to draft a list of things to say to him in a response to all of the emails, when I realized that was true.

  I mean. It made a lot of sense. Given my recent behaviour.

  I was going back the next day. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to stay in Durham, but I didn’t want to go back. I’d only just realized that. I thought about my mom and how obviously unhappy she had seemed married to my dad. I didn’t want to be like her, needlessly pushing forward through something that only made both parties more miserable. I guess that was my dad’s fault, too.

  I had thought that getting a place with Tom would make things better somehow. That our relationship would deepen. That we would understand each other more. And it was true that some things had developed: I was now intimately familiar with his morning stretches, his meditation routine. The way he smacked his lips at the breakfast table. His shudder every night before falling asleep. I knew what he looked like peeing in the toilet. And how often he remembered to put the seat down again. But those things were all superficial. And in lots of other ways I felt totally exhausted by the idea of spending any more time with him, of seeing what else was waiting to be discovered.

  Was I attracted to Kent? To his availability, or unavailability, or whatever it was? It wouldn’t be the first time that I jumped out of one ill-conceived thing just to begin another.

  But — Jesus! What did I even need anyone for?

  One thing was clear. I didn’t want to go back to Toronto. But I didn’t want to stay in my mother’s house either, or anywhere else in Durham, or in the country, or on the planet. I wanted to slip through a crack in the world and come out the other side.

  I was tired of working, tired of money, tired of never having enough and always wanting more and feeling exhausted by everyone and everything. I wasn’t even sure I wanted success, either, some deluded future of sitting in a corner office and checking on my meagre retirement every half-hour, coming home to a living room backlit with the acid glare from a constantly blaring television, bedroom as sterile as nuclear war.

  I saw all of this from where I was perched on the couch, notebook and pencil tossed to the floor, looking out through the drawn curtains at the radium-blue neighbourhood. I saw my father, too, reflected in the attic window of the across-the-street neighbour’s, hunched at his desk and trying desperately to recapture what was already fading away from him. What he thought he’d lost, but always had.

  If only he had told me.

  If I didn’t do something — though what that would end up being I didn’t know — I’d end up just like him. Like my mother, too.

  I had to act.

  But I couldn’t think of anything to do.

  Something slowly dawned on me.

  I dropped my notebook and grabbed a flashlight and my coat and ran outside. I kept running until I reached the park, where I bent over and caught my breath, my broken arm throbbing with my quickened pulse. Then I stood up and surveyed the darkness of the empty field.

  * * *

  I’d never been alone in the forest at night. It wasn’t a big place, and it’s not like I was worried there were wolves, or bears, or killers, or whatever, since it was so quiet. But it was cramped and close and strange, and I could hear things moving — just squirrels, I told myself, or rabbits or raccoons hopping through the dry leaves.

  I don’t know what I was trying to prove. Or what I was looking for. But something
told me I was on the right track.

  I stayed close to the path, kept my eyes focused on the beam of the flashlight, and tried, most of all, not to imagine anything waiting for me. To regard my surroundings with a clear and cold objectivity. Maybe that’s why I was so disturbed by what happened next.

  As I was making the final ascent to the clearing, a deep, low sound stopped me dead. Not at all like a tree or the wind. After a moment of absolute terror I collected myself and calmly hunted for the sound with my flashlight. Telling myself it was nothing. A spooked animal, maybe. It sounded like something or someone was in trouble, but there was also a menace in its strangeness. In its pain. Like the moan of someone being eaten alive.

  For a moment I imagined that the silhouette had lured me out into the forest and was only moments away from striking.

  I decided that if I was going to die, I was going to die, but I wasn’t going to run. I stayed put, surprised at myself.

  Eventually I realized the sound was coming from inside the clearing. Every zombie movie I’d ever seen flashed before my eyes. I knew it was a bad idea to go inside. I didn’t really want to see what was happening, but I also had no choice but to look.

  I took a few breaths and breached the trees, and my eyes struggled to make out a solitary figure writhing in the darkness. I could hear that, too: the dirt — or maybe the air — being pushed around, somehow I could hear that now that I was inside, louder even than the moaning. “Hello?” I said. There was no response. Silence, for what must have only been a few seconds, but felt like days or hours, the moaning and the writhing and my own breathing.

  My nerves tensed up, the flashlight halted just to the left of the body, in the dirt, the body now still and quiet. Moving only slightly. But I could see it now. If I’d been capable of making noise, I would have screamed.

  It was Evie.

  What was she doing here? I couldn’t believe my eyes. Why had she come back? Was she angry that I’d killed her? Had she haunted the clearing every night since the day I had burned her up?

  Was it Evie I had met in the attic?

  I slowed my breathing down and closed my eyes. Evie didn’t exist. I didn’t even really know what she looked like, though I could picture her in my mind. When I opened my eyes again the light was pointing at someone whose long hair lay tangled and dirty, his arms raised tentatively, delicately in the air. His eyes wincing in the beam.

  It was Kent.

  “Jesus Christ! What the hell are you doing here?”

  He didn’t say anything. I dropped the flashlight and ran to him.

  “Are you okay?”

  His shirt was wet, soaking wet, torn in several places, and my worst fears were realized when I brought the flashlight over and discovered he was covered in blood. His eyes were half-closed, cheeks pale and slick with sweat. His eyeballs twitched behind their lids in the halo of light, lashes fluttering, throat gulping down breath anxiously. Then I lifted the shirt where it was ragged and discovered a gaping red wound, dark and suppurating. I heaved and turned away.

  I could taste acid at the back of my throat but nothing came out.

  “Jesus, Kent — what happened?”

  He didn’t respond.

  I didn’t know what else to do — I put one hand over the shirt, right where the wound was, but that didn’t seem to stop the bleeding and might have actually made things worse, because Kent moaned louder. But it encouraged me that he was still alive, I mean that he had enough breath and strength in him to complain.

  “You asshole …” I said.

  I thought it was obvious that whatever had happened to him he had done it to himself.

  I took off my coat and laid it over his stomach. Even though he’d cried out when I put my hand on him I thought it might be better if there was some pressure on his wound, anyway, since I’d be gone for so long, so I found a stick to lay over the coat, enough weight I hoped to staunch the bleeding at least until help arrived, but not enough to hurt him. Not that I could really tell one way or the other. He moaned but without as much intensity as before.

  I slapped him. He cried out and his eyelids flickered.

  “You bastard — stay awake! I’m coming back for you.”

  Then I grabbed the flashlight and ran out of the forest the same way I’d come, faster than I’ve ever run before. Not once pausing for breath. I kept running until I reached the first house with lights on inside, and I banged the door until a woman answered.

  “Who is it?” she asked. “What could be so urgent?”

  Her hallway smelled of meat roasting in the oven. An old man with a stiff pot-belly stepped into the hallway just as I was reaching the kitchen phone. “What’s going on?” he asked, looking from me to his wife. I could hear the television in the background.

  I dialed 911.

  * * *

  In one corner of the attic, underneath a little desk that I’d never seen before, was a box marked SARAH in my father’s handwriting. I found it when I was drunk. Before I saw the shadow, before I fell out the trap door. Inside were a bunch of ratty old blankets and a couple princess dresses I must have worn at those Ren fairs at least twenty years earlier. At the bottom of the box was a journal. It was my dad’s. He started it the year I was born. My father was twenty-three, my mom nineteen. Most of the entries were pretty mundane, an only slightly more intimate version of his journals at work. The entries came less and less frequently, until they stopped altogether. The last third or so was completely blank.

  He seemed to be struggling with the idea of talking about his feelings, like he had started the journal for that reason but wasn’t having much success. In the beginning of the journal he was dating my mom, and apparently that was the source of a lot of his frustration. Mom was my dad’s first relationship and he took a lot of responsibility for the issues they were having. I read about twenty pages, skimming through them idly, before I found this:

  Some days I feel like Lindsay is only with me because she wants a father for her child. That if she didn’t have Sarah she wouldn’t have looked twice in my direction. I know that we’re mismatched. I know that. But even so, I also know that I’m lucky that Ted left her. I know that I will be able to prove myself in time. That she will one day love me with the same strength that I love her, that I love Sarah with, too.

  When I first read that I was angry, and I’m still angry.

  But now I also think, “Dad, Dad, Dad.”

  * * *

  By the time the paramedics made it up to the clearing, Kent was barely moving, but still alive. I’d led them through the woods, beam of light tracing wildly, racing ahead of them as fast as I could go, while they struggled through the underbrush, wrestling with the stretcher.

  While they worked on him I stood off to the side and pointed the flashlight at his body. Far off, but maybe not as far off as I imagined, I could hear coyotes howling somewhere. I tried to tell myself that there couldn’t be any in the forest around us, that we were too close to civilization. But I imagined them circling the clearing, smelling blood, waiting for Kent to die. I started shivering. It wasn’t the cold, since the jacket I’d borrowed from the older couple was much warmer than any I’d ever owned.

  12

  At the hospital the doctor explained that Kent had been shot. The bullet had passed right through him and luckily hadn’t done any serious damage. But he’d lost a lot of blood. His body, they told me, was in shock. An officer sat me down in a quiet corner of the waiting room. I told him that I thought Kent had done it himself. He agreed. We both wondered where the gun was.

  When the officer let me go he went back to Kent’s room to speak with the nurse on duty. A few minutes later he stepped back out into the hallway and finished his notes. Then he radioed his partner, who arrived with a tray of coffee for the cops and nurses in the ward.

  Everyone stepped out of the room when I went in to see Kent. They all thought I was dating him.

  I guess I had kind of told them that. Not explicitly, but I
liked the misunderstanding.

  It was more dramatic.

  I went to the window first and looked out at the parking lot and the traffic roaring down 89. I could hear Kent breathing behind me. I turned and sat down next to him. His body was pale and dry. His lips chapped.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  Then laughed, because there was something wrong with me.

  Maybe because there was nothing else moving, except his chest, and then only slightly, like he was an actor playing dead in the movies, the hair in his nostrils seemed to have an exaggerated animation as they quivered with his breath. I unconsciously addressed those little blond hairs, as if they were the only part of him alive.

  “Why would you do that? You have a lot of promise, you know.”

  I touched his hand. It was much colder than mine.

  “Get better, okay?”

  It seemed like something was stirring in him. Something quiet, something not visible or that I could feel with my hand. Whatever it was, it was in the air, building, a release.

  A release from what? I didn’t know.

  I stayed with him, though, until much later when the nurse came in and politely asked me to leave.

  Three

  Reza’s Part

  Someone was whispering far away in the fields. Purple and pink lights fell like flowers from the trees. I approached the little wall around the well. At the very bottom I could see the water reflecting me — the image I saw was strange. I felt afraid: the fear that children and dogs feel before a mirror.

  — Silvina Ocampo, “The Imposter”

  1

  The night before I left for Durham I watched part of a movie on television. I came in about halfway through. It was about a desperate couple on a motorcycle being chased up and down forested roads by two obsequious cops. The cops seemed to be from another movie altogether. They kept deferring to each other with polite turns of phrase, travelling steadily, but in no real hurry — the lights were flashing on the cruiser, but they didn’t appear to be speeding, their siren could only be heard in exterior shots, they even paused to allow animals and children walking with their parents to cross the road. But the man and the woman on the motorcycle raced away from the police officers at incomprehensible speeds, looking wild and afraid that they’d be overtaken at any moment.