by André Babyn
“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging.
“Okay. But why does that mean your life isn’t tragic? Do you think tragedy is something inherent to a person or to their experiences? And what’s so great about it, anyway? If he was really so inaccessible to you do you think you’d like his poems at all?”
“No,” I said. “That’s not what I mean.”
“Tragedy is just a device,” she said. “It’s not real. No one’s life is actually tragic.”
I thought that was wrong or that she was being pedantic, but I decided I didn’t want to say anything. It felt like she’d made up her mind about that a long time ago.
“I think he was a coward,” she said. “I think he was afraid. That’s tragic. But I don’t think his life was tragic. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“What do you know about it?” I said.
She didn’t answer me.
“God,” she said, after a while. “I’m sorry.”
I shrugged.
“You don’t have to apologize,” I said.
By now we were back in town.
“I’m not like this all the time,” she said.
I wanted to be friendly to her. It felt better having someone to talk to.
“I’m staying at the hotel just over there,” I said.
* * *
“Why aren’t you at work?” I asked her, when we were in my room. She was sitting in the chair by the window and I was sitting on the bed. She said she’d never been in the hotel before, but that when she was a kid she used to think it was an asylum for the criminally insane. Because of some movie she had watched with her mom. She used to fantasize that the guests she saw coming and going were patients given only temporary leaves. “I mean, I knew it was really a hotel,” she had said. “Someone told me that. Maybe even right after I’d seen the movie.”
“On the weekend I only go into the office for a couple hours,” she explained. “Just Saturdays. I get Monday off, too. Penny is usually showing houses on the weekend and she doesn’t work on Mondays if she can help it. On Saturdays I just check the messages and set up appointments, that sort of thing.”
I nodded. “Sounds good.”
“It’s a good job,” she said. “What do you do?”
“I’m a bookkeeper,” I said.
“What kind of books?”
“You know, like accounts. Small businesses, mostly. Some estates. It’s pretty basic. I work for a small firm.”
“Do you like it?”
“Sure. I guess,” I said. “It’s pretty rote, but I don’t have to think very hard.”
“How come you’re so interested in poetry?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just am. I studied it in school.”
“What about movies? Or fishing? Or NASCAR?”
“I don’t like any of those things,” I said.
“Good. Neither do I.”
“Okay,” I said. What did it matter to her? I wanted to change the subject. “What were you doing in the forest?”
“Oh,” she said. And shrugged. “Nothing, really. I like to go out there sometimes. No special reason. To be alone. It reminds me of someone I used to know.”
“Who?”
“Just a friend,” she said, standing up and looking out the window. “A very good friend.”
“Someone you dated or something?”
“No,” she said, turning to me. “Nothing like that.”
The way she looked at me then made me nervous.
“You know, this place is supposed to be haunted,” I said, to keep the conversation moving.
“Really?” she said. “By what, a ghost?”
“What? What else?”
“I’m haunted,” she said.
“Huh?”
“You seem haunted, too.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I can tell you’re running from something.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
After a long while.
“Because you won’t look me in the eye,” she said. “It’s like you’re afraid of your reflection.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“What did you do?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I didn’t do anything.”
“I was running when I came out here, too,” she said. “But it doesn’t make you feel any better. Running, I mean. Being up here. It seems like it will be easier, but it isn’t. Sometimes I think coming here was the worst decision I ever made in my life.”
She was leaning against the wall, her eyes closed.
“So leave,” I said.
“But I don’t think that for any practical reason,” she said, sitting down next to me on the bed. “I just don’t know what to do.” I stood up and hovered uncomfortably by the door.
“Oh,” I said.
“So leaving wouldn’t make any difference,” she explained. “I mean, I hate it here, but that’s not why. Not because I’m stuck. I hate it for what it’s taught me about myself. I hate it because it won’t let me leave. Because I haven’t learned anything.”
“What were you hoping to learn?”
“The same thing you were,” she said.
I hadn’t told her anything about that.
“What?” I said.
“That place you were talking about earlier. I wanted it to exist. I wanted it to mean something. I wanted to escape there.”
“You mean — when I was talking about poetry?”
“No one cares, Rissa. I don’t even care.”
“What?”
“There’s … nothing there.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” I said. “And it’s Reza.”
She laughed. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I mean, it does. I’m sorry.”
I just looked at her.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I should go,” she said.
“That would be great,” I said, reaching for the door.
5
I was angry after Sarah left, but I wasn’t sure why. I slammed the door behind her without meaning to, making me jump after I had turned away.
I felt like there was a lot she wasn’t telling me, like she had been following me around and keeping tabs on me without my knowledge. I wondered, vaguely, if she knew Jeff somehow, if they were friends and if they had talked, but I realized how crazy that was, too. There was no way they had even heard of each other. And it wouldn’t have mattered even if they had. There was a better chance she knew Jeff Adler, even though he’d died long before she was born. She was hiding something else.
I stared out the window until I was sure she was gone, watching cars pass through the trees and vines that blocked my view. I wanted to open the window and scream “Fuck you!” at the passing cars. But I didn’t, of course.
I walked back to my car and drove through town, past the downtown, past the hotel, past the gas stations on the highway. I turned toward Toronto and gunned it, just a brown slut in a white car barrelling south at full speed. For a minute I thought about driving all the way back home and spending the night in my apartment, of leaving my clothes and bags and my copy of Alert behind in the hotel room and never coming back. Instead I turned off at the first interchange I saw and ate dinner at a fast-food place.
The place where I turned off was kind of like Durham, but much bigger, with more strip malls and chain stores. After eating I wandered absently through parking lots, watching awkward families unpack themselves from minivans and slowly saunter through the automatic doors of the nearest big-box retailer. It reminded me of growing up, of making that walk with my parents, feeling exposed and vulnerable and needy even in the hundred or so metres it took to get to the store. It never seemed to matter what I had been doing that day, I always felt a little bit worse when I was out with them, with their idiosyncrasies, their accents and bad clothes that matched my own.
The sun set as I drove back to Durham, and the light seemed to disappear
faster than it did in the city, slipping behind a hill near the horizon and shrouding the countryside in an inky purple darkness that my headlights struggled to cut through. I regretted leaving my driving glasses in the hotel room as I watched the red and yellow lights from other cars smear and distort over my windshield. The sky was overcast and when I got out of the car I noticed that it was significantly cooler outside than when I had left. There was a breeze running through the trees, rustling the leaves above me in huge gusts of wind. A distracted spray of raindrops hit me from above as I walked back across the parking lot. I looked into the sky and thought I saw funnels reaching out of the clouds, black funnels straining to touch the earth, but it was too dark to make out the details.
That night I dreamed I was in the forest again.
Jeff was in the barrel. Just standing there. I wasn’t sure if he could see me. First one and then the other boy climbed out from underneath him, like spiders pulling their long legs out of a pipe. Then I was in the barrel and I could hear the two boys, writhing somewhere in the grass. Their panting and exclamations. I was hard because I knew what they were doing, but it felt wrong to be aroused and I wanted to get away. But when I looked it wasn’t the two boys at all — it was Sarah and Kent Adler.
“Hey, stop,” I shouted. “Don’t you know who that is?”
One of Sarah’s hands was pressed against Adler’s side, where he had a huge, gaping red wound. Not pressed up against: pushing inside. They moaned together as her hand gradually disappeared, digging deep into his flesh.
The next morning I discovered, to my embarrassment, that I had come in my underwear.
* * *
It had rained hard in the night, I heard it beating steadily against my window, and it was still overcast outside though the sky was considerably less threatening than it had been when I’d returned. There was now a giant puddle in front of the hotel, a swampy, dark mass that slanted across from an oak tree in the middle of the lawn and completely engulfed the walk. The hotel staff had laid down wooden skids from the hotel entrance to the sidewalk, and they had a desk clerk standing outside with extra umbrellas, directing patrons to the alternate route. I had to admit that I was impressed with the effort, or at least surprised that they had mustered it up so quickly, although the clerk looked like he was still in high school, pimply and awkward, and I didn’t want to bother him for an umbrella because he was busy helping an old man cross the uneven skids, holding him by one arm.
On the main street there were little rivers running along both sides of the road, hugging the sidewalk and causing cars to drive slowly down the middle. Occasionally they would veer to the side unexpectedly to avoid a collision, sending impossible sprays up into their carriages and over unsuspecting pedestrians. I overheard someone saying that it hadn’t rained that hard in Durham in over thirty years, and I believed it.
My dream had disturbed me, and I wanted to talk about it with Sarah. Not to tell her any details, of course, but to ask her what she knew, really knew, about Adler. I had woken up with the same feeling I’d had when she’d left, that she had been lying to me, that she knew exactly who I was talking about and was intimately familiar with his work. That perhaps she was even a relative, a niece, or a distant cousin, who was protecting Adler through misdirection and evasion, like she was a knight or a nun guarding the location of the Holy Grail. I don’t know how I knew that, or why it seemed like it was true. Or what she had to gain.
In any case it was obvious to me that she had been the one who had locked the cemetery two days earlier, her or the real estate agent that she worked for. But likely her. The more I thought about it the more I realized I was right. It couldn’t have just been a coincidence.
I walked to the real estate office with the intention of saying some or all of that to her. But of course when I got there I realized it was Sunday and it was closed. I didn’t know where else to find her, so I began walking out of town, back to the forest, across the gravelly mud on the highway’s shoulder.
Overnight the little creek that flowed through the ditch had become a torrent of churning brown water, capped with swirling white eddies that rippled up against the sides of the ditch wall. I couldn’t believe how quickly it had been transformed, and nervously I looked up at the sky, now darker than I remembered, regretting not having borrowed an umbrella from the kid in front of the hotel. I was a long way from town, a long way from shelter, and it looked like the clouds might erupt at any moment.
I came to the place where the path branched off from the highway, where I had forded the creek easily just the day before. Here the water was backed up higher than down the creek, like it had come to a dead end, though I could see that there was still a current running along the bottom, pulling dead leaves and silt through a gap in whatever was clogging its path ahead, as it cut through a hill before twisting deeper through the forest.
It made sense to turn around, to give up looking for Sarah, and head back to the hotel. Maybe spend my last day in the coffee shop in the centre of town, maybe go back to the cemetery for a final goodbye, maybe even pack up all of my things and check out early. I knew I wasn’t going to find Sarah on the other side of the creek, especially not the way it looked then. But I jumped it, anyway, sloshing through the final two feet of water and soaking my shoes, slipping forward and scrambling up the path, tearing thick chunks out of the soil and getting mud all over my pants. After I stood up and got my bearings, I realized that if I’d thought about it for even a second I would have looked for signs of Sarah’s footprints from the other side. But I kept going anyway, nursing a slim hope that I would find something that would clarify my experience and begin to make sense of myself.
The oil barrel had eighteen inches of stagnant water sitting at the bottom. That was it: stagnant water, plastic bags, rotten sticks. The tubing, the masks, and the hacksaw were gone. It gave me a sick feeling, like I had imagined everything that had happened the day before. I searched the clearing, wondering if I had missed them somehow. I looked back in the barrel, and almost jumped when I saw my reflection in the dark water, thinking it was either Reagan or Carter sneaking up on me from behind. I reached in and broke the surface with one hand, searching for signs, disturbing my reflection.
But I wasn’t surprised when I came away with nothing, just ripples in the water. It was obvious that they were gone.
* * *
I got caught in the rain five minutes from the hotel. It came down so fast and heavy that for a minute I just stood there, letting it wash over me. It was warm, or I imagined it was warm. Probably it wasn’t. But in any case it changed quickly, mixing with hail that forced me to duck for cover underneath an awning, shivering and watching little specks of ice collect and melt on the ground. A car stopped a few feet away, its hazards flashing and windshield wipers furiously pumping. The cabin light was on and I could see the driver waiting out the storm.
When I got back to the hotel I stripped off my clothes and threw them into the bathtub with me to get out the mud. Then I ran a shower, as hot as I could make it. I hung up my clothes after I was done, rinsing them and wringing them out and draping them over the curtain rod. I grabbed the comforter from the bed and pulled it around my shoulders as I looked outside, watching the rain ripple the surface of the pool of water in front of the door. I felt protected in that moment, calm and clean and warm.
There was a knock on the door.
“Just a minute,” I called, as I scrambled to put on dry clothes.
But there was no one there by the time I got it open. Instead, there was an envelope on the floor, slipped neatly under the crack. It was addressed with the letter R and inside there was a handwritten letter.
Sorry, I don’t know how to spell your name and I didn’t want to risk embarrassing myself again. This is Sarah.
I’m writing this letter to you because I want to apologize for yesterday. And for the day before. I’m not sure if you even noticed. Thanks for putting up with me. I must admit that I took advantage o
f the fact that you’re so passive. I do that sometimes without even realizing. It’s a character flaw. The fact that you don’t live in Durham just makes things worse.
Calling you passive isn’t very nice, either, even though it’s true.
Sorry.
It’s exciting when I meet someone from out of town because I can say whatever I want to them, knowing that I probably won’t ever see them again. When I was younger I wanted to talk about poetry with them, and art, and other things that I’ve mostly forgotten about now — things no one here cares much about. Now I seem to want to take something out on them, a kind of aggressiveness instead of fellowship. Compensation, I guess.
Again, I’m sorry.
It’s possible you’ve guessed the truth, that I know who Kent Adler is and I’ve read his poems. Maybe not. I don’t know why I decided to keep that a secret from you. In fact, you probably won’t believe me when I tell you the extent of our relationship — it’s difficult for me to understand, too. I knew Kent. We were friends. Or, actually, I’m not sure how he felt about me. I met him a few years ago, when I was like you, afraid and running. Maybe I was worried that you would find him, too, though I don’t understand how that would work or why that would bother me.
I don’t know how else to explain it, really.
I’ve liked his poetry for a long time. Sometimes I imagine that I went to school with him, that we grew up together, that I watched him die in a forest near my parents’ house.
Other times I know that happened.
I used to visit him every day in the hospital, until the doctors explained that I couldn’t come to see him anymore. My dad died in the same building, although I was just a teenager and I wasn’t allowed in to wherever they were keeping him, even after he died.
I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me. I’m not telling you this because it’s easy. In fact, it’s quite hard. You’re the first person I’ve met since moving here who knows about Kent at all and I feel like I have a duty to tell you.
He really shouldn’t have killed himself.
It’s not good for me to see you right now. I’m writing a novel. I need to focus on that. It’s about a young girl and her horse. She’s lost a lot in her life, but she’s still going. In some ways it’s the only thing that feels real to me.