by André Babyn
I threw out my coffee and darted outside.
“Hi,” I said. Probably a bit too eagerly.
“Jesus Christ!” she said, jumping back from me and nearly stepping into the street. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“I was getting a coffee,” I explained, gesturing lamely to the deli behind me.
“Don’t fucking do that,” she said, catching her breath.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay. But I was going to work. I don’t have time to talk.”
“Can I walk you there?” I asked.
“Sure, okay. But it’s just down the street.”
“I know,” I said.
We walked in silence until we reached the real estate office, where Sarah turned and said goodbye. I don’t know why I was so eager to say hello to her, especially given the events of the day before. I felt like I was testing my limits. Like I could become someone else and it was just a matter of training or association.
But I didn’t know who I wanted to become, who I was trying to be.
I walked alone for a while, then crossed the street and headed back to the florist across from the deli. I wasn’t sure what to get — I knew that lilies were often at funerals but I never liked the way they looked when they were closed. They always seemed unpleasantly fleshy to me, like weird pustules. And open they just reminded me of what they looked like closed. So instead I bought a dozen red roses. Then I walked back to the hotel and got in my car and drove to the cemetery and found Adler’s grave. With the plot number it wasn’t very hard. Only after I laid the flowers down did I notice there was a poem affixed to the stone.
Letter to the Occupant
Please, turn your
lights off, I
can’t breathe, it’s like
an airplane, forever
rising. I fear
death, white of
electricity, height.
Please, please
you don’t understand
my letters
the station master
whimpers
as we watch
lit house after lit house
recede into
the white
and only hope
keeps me at my desk
writing, please
writing.
I bent close to the poem. Lights? I thought. The paper was damp and it looked like it had been freshly pasted. I didn’t recognize it and it was otherwise unsigned. I stood up and looked around, but the cemetery was empty.
Lights? I thought again, as I crouched down to the stone.
I felt like I was going to faint.
Who had done this? Where had they gone?
I considered pulling the paper down, but instead I ran my hands over the headstone, where it read: “Kent Adler/April 23, 1952–August 21, 1976.”
The rest was blank.
* * *
I’d planned on reading aloud a poem from Alert, “Evie of the Deepthorn,” a poem about a warrior making her way through the woods on her horse. And about the death that comes with or precedes venture. Or at least that’s what I thought it was about. But for some reason seeing that someone had beaten me to him made that gesture seem redundant. As if my words were just echoes of another. As if I were just an echo of Adler. Insubstantial and incomplete. Whereas I was sure that the poem on the stone was original, perhaps even that it was addressed to me. As crazy as that seemed. I walked back to the hotel, leaving my car baking in front of the cemetery.
A few weeks before I’d left for Durham I’d received an email from Jeff, something about how I was disrespecting him by not returning his calls. That’s all I could see from the preview in my inbox. I knew it would move into a discussion of how rarefied our relationship had been and how much I had meant to him. I deleted it immediately and was proud of myself for doing that, like I’d responded successfully to a challenge from God. But I knew that it would stay in my deleted files for thirty days before being completely eliminated from my account. It had occasionally been a source of temptation. As I was walking back to the hotel I thought about the email again and wished that I had read it, regretting that I hadn’t brought my laptop or phone with me so that I could open up Gmail and pull it out. At least to start the clock again.
And then I was grateful because I didn’t have to be tested.
In the weeks and months immediately following our breakup he sent me hundreds of texts, accusing me of everything from using him to being interested in women or of cheating on him. “I don’t see how you could leave us unless there was someone else.” It was insane. He was practically the only other person in my life, him and Adler, no one else. “Now you finally have the chance to fuck a girl,” he wrote. I didn’t think I wanted to fuck a girl. Finally I stopped responding and the texts petered out or at least slowed down. Then I blocked his number. It was a relief to not have to anticipate him, to not have my breath catch in my throat whenever I heard the familiar ping of my phone.
Though of course it still did.
I told myself I wasn’t running from him, as if it mattered what I told myself about that. I am not running from him, I thought. It has been months since I have seen him and I am not running. And that was true. I was carrying him inside me. He went wherever I went. I still heard his voice telling me what he thought I was — too much, or nothing.
It would be a long time before I got his voice out of my head, a long time even after I left Durham. When I mounted the stairs to my hotel room I passed the ghosts of former occupants, owners, patients, doctors, photographs lining the stairs, men and women in their turn-of-the-century finery, standing in faded relief to a background foggy from time.
Time or silver.
Silver or aluminum. I don’t know much about old photographs.
I thought I was going to kill myself.
4
I felt like I was being honest with myself for the first time in a long while.
I called the number on the business card again, over and over, with a kind of anger. There was no answer. I thought there was a good chance no one would ever pick up. It was getting harder and harder to care about what had happened to my car — that wasn’t the reason I was calling.
I emptied my pockets and found the receipt from my coffee that morning. I was about to throw it out before I remembered the note that I had scrawled on it: “early morning … bad sleep … dreams of ghosts … fragrant night.” I didn’t know what the words meant but they made a kind of sense to me. I thought of them as a kind of mantra. Or not a mantra, exactly, but a sort of oblique prayer. Maybe if I said it enough it would open into a kind of sense.
Anyway, I put it back in my pocket.
Bad sleep … dreams of ghosts … fragrant night, I thought.
Downstairs I asked if they had any recommendations for lunch. They directed me to a place nearby, a restaurant built into a grand old mansion, a dead and half-empty place with beige curtains and pastel-green seat cushions and light rose tablecloths. Fragrant night, I thought. The staff was attentive, but in a way that made me feel like I didn’t belong — like they were making a point of accepting me. It was clear to me that I didn’t belong, and I wished that I was anywhere else. Dreams of ghosts. I ate a boring meal of salmon and rice with asparagus on the side. Following the meal they served me a cup of flowery Earl Grey. It was fine, but afterward I felt like I had to cleanse myself. Like the muck had to be scraped from my body. Like I hadn’t eaten food, but its opposite.
Early morning … bad sleep.
After my meal I started walking down the highway, but instead of turning down a side street I kept going in the direction I had come from: past town, beyond where the sidewalk ended, and where I had to walk on the shoulder next to cars that were going ninety kilometres an hour. There was a creek that ran alongside the highway, in a kind of ditch. Then it turned away from the road and into a small stand of trees. A forest, I guess. In the distance, far from town, at a
major intersection, were two gas stations. Each seemed like they had materialized out of thin air. Like condensation had gathered into their orange-red neon and bright white fluorescence.
The creek wasn’t deep and I forded it without difficulty. There was a thin, brown path, marred with roots and holes, that ascended steeply into the bush. I took it without hesitation, only beginning to worry about where it led as I proceeded deeper and deeper into the forest.
* * *
The path continued for at least a kilometre, the forest tight and here and there, strewn with bits of trash blown in from the highway, before terminating in a clearing about thirty metres wide. It looked like it had been cleared a while ago, maybe for a house that had never been built, maybe by a hermit who had nothing better to do.
A rusted oil barrel stood in the far corner of the clearing, with a few tufts of heavier weeds growing at its base.
The clearing was calm and open, but the barrel felt almost menacing, a symbol of human industry in stark relief to the surrounding forest. It felt like stumbling on the ruins of a long-dead civilization, its iron heavy with ancient ghosts.
I knew that I would have to look inside the barrel, but for a long time I resisted, walking the edge of the clearing, peering up through the trees.
It was like it was staring back at me.
I knew what would be inside: branches, metal, perhaps garbage from the road. Ashes, if what I suspected was true and the barrel had been used to burn trash. Innocuous, but somehow the mere prospect of looking inside was terrifying.
I wanted to leave, to turn around and walk back down the path. Instead I moved to the edge of the barrel and craned my head over the lip, catching my breath at what I saw. It was something from outside this world. A severed head or a piece of rotten human flesh dripping from a branch propped up against the inside.
I took a couple of quick steps away, dizzy, my stomach heaving, trying to come to terms with what I had seen. Slowly I resolved to look again. It couldn’t be real.
It wasn’t.
Not flesh. Just a rubber mask. I pulled it out and held it in front of me: Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan was underneath and below that there was surgical tubing and what looked to be a hacksaw.
“What the fuck,” I said, picking up the hacksaw and feeling its heft.
It was just like my dream, or not my dream, but the hallucination or premonition I had experienced when I was watching the movie.
I was walking backward through my own life.
Then I heard two voices coming from the trail: loud, threatening. “Little piggy, little piggy,” they called. My heart stopped. Without thinking I dropped everything back into the barrel and darted into the woods.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Everything told me to run, but instead I found a place to hide and watched from behind a tree as two young men reached the clearing and burst out laughing when they saw that it was empty. It was the two kids from the car wash, the ones who had given me the business card.
“We really creeped that fucker out, didn’t we?” said the first one, who was reaching into the barrel and pulling out the masks. He put on the Carter mask and handed the other one to his friend. Reagan took out the plastic tubing and handed it to Carter. Then he pulled out the hacksaw.
“En garde!” said Reagan, to Carter, who held up the tubing in mock defence.
They quickly lost interest in that game.
“I bet that brown guy shit his pants,” said Carter.
“Yeah,” said Reagan, putting the hacksaw back into the barrel. Then he reached out for the tubing. “Give it to me,” he said.
“No,” said Carter.
“Jesus, hand it over.”
“Fuck you.”
Reagan sighed. “Fine. Whatever. Just don’t fucking break it. We need it.”
“What?” said Carter. “How fragile do you think this stuff is?”
“More like how dumb I think you are,” mumbled Reagan.
“Oh, fuck you,” said Carter, raising the tubing as if to strike Reagan, but evidently thinking better of it and dropping it absentmindedly instead.
There was a brief silence. I couldn’t tell if they were saying anything to each other. But I could see the tension rising as Reagan continued to stand by the barrel and Carter wandered over to the far side of the woods.
I was wondering what they could possibly need the tubing, hacksaws, and masks for. I imagined the boys finding me, tying me down, wrapping the tubing around one of my arms and patiently hacking it off. As they expressed surprise that someone had vandalized my car. But even as I thought that it seemed impossible — they seemed incapable of violence: just boys, tall and skinny and awkward and weak.
But they were planning something.
“Hey, come back here,” said Reagan, finally.
“What?” said Carter. “Why?”
“Just come here,” said Reagan. Something in Reagan’s tone seemed to pull Carter in, and he went, reluctantly.
“What,” he said again, when he was closer.
In a much softer voice. Almost trembling.
Reagan grabbed Carter around the waist with one hand and with the other pulled up Carter’s mask and put his mouth on his.
Carter resisted only momentarily.
I was starting to feel uncomfortable about spying on them, and I thought that if I tried to leave I would make it obvious that I was there. So instead I maintained my position, crouching behind a tree, watching them from a distance.
They began to thrust into each other as they kissed, grinding themselves up and down. After a while Reagan knelt down in front of Carter and undid his jeans. He pulled Carter’s penis out and gave it a few strokes as it extended to its full length. Then he put it in his mouth. By now both of their masks were off and Carter was running his hands through Reagan’s hair. From a distance the act was so small and fragile that it was difficult to understand how so much importance could ever be put upon it.
After Carter came, jerking his body forward, and Reagan spit out his come, letting it slowly drip from his mouth to the grass, Reagan stood up and they continued kissing. Carter began fumbling with the fly of Reagan’s jeans but they were interrupted by a noise coming from the path. I couldn’t tell what it was, but they both quickly did up their belts and ran into the forest, thankfully cutting in a different direction from the one I had gone. In a hurry they left the masks and tubing and hacksaw behind, lying on the ground.
I wasn’t going to stick around to find out what was coming next, and so I started to slowly work my way out of my hiding spot to try and skirt the clearing and get back to the road, where I figured I would be safe. It was as I was doing this that I heard a voice I knew. Then I looked to the path and saw Sarah emerge, singing softly to herself.
* * *
I asked her what she had been singing and she shrugged. “Nothing in particular,” she said. “Sometimes I make up songs when I’m alone.”
We were walking back along the highway.
“What was the name of that dead guy you wanted to see? The poet,” she asked.
“Kent Adler,” I said.
“I was thinking about it. I might have heard of him before.”
“Yeah?”
“I think so,” she said.
That was apparently all she had to say. I wondered if I should tell her about the kids and what they’d been doing. Ask her if she thought there was anything to worry about, regarding the contents of the barrel. But something told me not to. Maybe because I was afraid I would tell her what I saw and she would think I was perverted. Maybe because they seemed so small and scared and tentative and I couldn’t imagine them committing real violence. Maybe because I remembered being a teenager and feeling upset and helpless, and how I had kept my own barrel filled with violent instruments I was never going to use, though it was only ever in my head.
“What’s his poetry like?” she finally asked.
“That’s a hard question,” I said.
“I mean, how does it make you feel?”
I thought about it.
“I mean, I don’t know,” I said. “It makes me feel like there’s this space. And I’m the only person who exists there. But someone else was there before me. And when I read his poetry I feel like we’re there together. Even though I’m alone. And I feel alone when I’m reading it.”
She sort of nodded.
“I don’t know, it’s difficult to describe,” I said.
“No, I get it,” she said.
“And like … maybe my life isn’t tragic like his was. But I feel like when something bad happens to you, your life changes. And this thing opens up inside you that wasn’t there before. And for some reason his poetry reaches me there.”
“Hmm,” she said.
I thought about it some more.
“That’s the best I can do,” I said.
She seemed preoccupied. I waited a long time for her to respond, but she didn’t say anything.
“Do you read a lot of poetry?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I mean, sometimes. But I was thinking about what you said about your life not being tragic. Why would you say that?”
I thought that was a weird thing for her to ask, since she didn’t know me at all.
“Well,” I started, “his brother died when he was really young. He talked about how that changed him in interviews. Like he was suddenly aware of himself in a way that he wasn’t before. There was the person from before his brother drowned, whom he knew, but he didn’t understand. And then there was the person afterward. There’s a photo of him from when he was a kid. You can see the difference. I mean between that and later photos. His brother looks more like him than he does. In the eyes. His mom died pretty early, too.”
I could tell she was still skeptical. She didn’t say anything.