by Tim Wirkus
“Wow,” I said. “So where do you think she took him?”
“Who knows?” said Harriet.
The waitress, dishes in hand, approached and said, “Huckleberry milkshake and BLT?”
“That’s me,” I said.
She set down the plate and the glass, and I dug in, reflecting on what Harriet had just told me.
“How long has it been since you got back?” I asked Harriet between mouthfuls of sandwich.
“Five, six hours,” said Harriet.
My annoyance with Sérgio started to give way to real concern. In that amount of time, anything could have happened.
“So,” I said. “How much time, do you think, before we start to worry?”
“I started about an hour ago,” she said, turning her glasses over in her hands.
I thought of Sérgio alone somewhere in the snowy mountains to the north.
“What do we do?” I said.
Harriet set down her glasses.
“Well, let’s not get carried away just yet,” she said. “He’s probably fine.”
Outside, the sun was sinking low in the sky and the temperature was likely plummeting.
“I hope so,” I said.
“Can I try your shake?” said Harriet, keeping her voice calm with obvious effort.
“Yeah,” I said.
She flicked a straw from the dispenser to her left and I scooted the cup in front of her. While she took a drink, I looked at the birdsong-every-hour clock hanging above the diner’s cash register. It was already past four. Soon it would be dark.
“That’s good,” she said halfheartedly, eyeing the birdsong clock.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to imagine what could be keeping Sérgio this long. “Do you think we should call the police?”
She looked at the clock again and then at her watch.
Behind us, the little bells attached to the top of the door jingled as someone came into the diner.
“There you are,” said a familiar voice.
We both turned around. It was Sérgio, his face shining with a strange intensity.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Where did she take you?” said Harriet.
Sérgio took a deep breath.
“I’m very hungry,” he said. “Let’s find a table and I’ll tell you everything.”
XVI
I’m still trying to make sense of what happened,” Sérgio began once we’d settled in and the waitress had brought him a bacon cheeseburger and a basket of fries. “I’ve preoccupied myself for so many years with the work of Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie and then to find out . . .” He popped a fry into his mouth. “To discover . . .” He shook his head. “I just don’t know how to put it into words.” He took a bite of his cheeseburger, chewing reflectively. Whatever Sérgio had experienced had catalyzed in him a palpable transformation. His gloom had dissipated entirely, replaced not with his former chatty enthusiasm but with a wide-eyed awe, a baffled reverence. He swallowed and looked to us in consternation. “I encountered Salgado-MacKenzie,” he said, “but to articulate that experience is to give it narrative form, which—I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Take your time,” said Harriet. “But if you’d like a suggestion, you might start your story where I left you. I’ve filled Daniel in up to that point.”
“Yes,” said Sérgio. “Very good. Give me just a moment.”
As he thought this through, he polished off the rest of his cheeseburger with great alacrity. Each bite he took seemed to incrementally restore his vigor, but even as the burger rejuvenated his body, that strange, awestruck intensity lingered in his face.
• • •
So (said Sérgio after finishing off half the basket of fries as a chaser to his burger). We parted ways, Harriet, at the Fordis residence, and as you—I assume—drove back to Fremont Creek, Anne Fordis drove me to the base of a mountain maybe ten miles from her house, where we diverted from the state road onto an unplowed mountain path. The snow on this path was not deep, but our ascent was dramatic and Mrs. Fordis, though she obviously knew the road well, drove the old pickup at barely a crawl. She watched the road ahead of us so intently, in fact, that I didn’t dare break her concentration with questions. As you might imagine, I had many: How did she know Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie? Why had she decided to trust me? Where were we going? I remained silent, though, reminding myself that in all likelihood this would be another dead end—that, as Harriet had suggested, Mrs. Fordis was merely an attention-hungry eccentric. I hoped she was a benign one.
Higher and higher we drove, climbing the mountainside with a steady determination. As our strange, silent journey wore on, I began to fixate, in spite of myself, on the other possibility Harriet had raised, that Anne Fordis might be dangerous. At what point, I wondered, should I become concerned? The farther we drove from civilization, the more vulnerable I became to this stranger’s enigmatic whims. I grew quite nervous, I have to say, and to distract myself from these troubling thoughts I focused on the view from the pickup truck. Whenever a gap appeared in the trees I could catch a glimpse down into Lodgepole’s famous caldera below us. Truly stunning, the view from where we were: rugged hillsides, lofty evergreens, meandering streams. Everything was covered in a thin layer of snow.
After some time, the road leveled out and turned inward, toward the mountain, where we came to a broad, flat stretch of ground with an even higher mountain towering above it. To my great relief, a few houses lay ahead of us. We drove just beyond them then down a long private path at the end of which lay a cottage. Maybe that’s not the right word. A rustic house, not small but not big either. Next to the house was a large garage with its door open and darkness within. Anne Fordis stopped the car. Barring the appearance of weaponry, I no longer feared for my safety. I was in running distance of human habitation, if things came to that.
Mrs. Fordis said, “Here we are,” and got out of the truck.
This was it, whatever it was. I wondered if, in this snowy house in the mountains, I would finally discover what I’d spent decades searching for. As I stepped down from the cab of the truck, I asked Mrs. Fordis where we were, but she ignored my question, looking past me instead into the darkness of the open garage. I followed her gaze. At the edge of the darkness, just inside the garage door, a man in blue coveralls stood at a long workbench, completely engrossed in some small mechanical task. Just behind him, a squat space heater glowed orange.
I shut the door of the truck and the man finally turned to look at us. His hair was completely white, his skin wrinkled and loose, but there was no mistaking the sad-faced figure I’d met at the party some twenty-five years earlier. I took a step forward, and then back. I must have looked as discombobulated as I felt, because as the man watched me, his face assumed an expression of concern, and he looked to Anne Fordis as if for reassurance.
She came around from behind the truck and gave him a nod, which seemed to put the man at ease. He wiped his hands on an oily towel and took a few cautious steps out of the cavernous garage. If he recognized me, his face didn’t show it.
I’d rehearsed this moment so often in my mind that the adrenaline now coursing through my veins granted my actions an added surety and my consciousness an almost hyperreal clarity. I introduced myself and held out my hand. Instead of taking it, though, he turned his own grease-covered hand palm upward and said, “I’ll have to wash up first.”
I lowered my hand. A minor deviation from the scene I’d imagined, but by no means an insurmountable obstacle.
The man tucked the oily rag into the back pocket of his coveralls and said, “What is this about?”
Back on script, I said, “You may not recognize me, but we’ve met before, Mr. Salgado-MacKenzie.”
He cocked his egg-shaped head and said, “What did you call me?”
Another unexpected deviation.
>
“You’re Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie,” I said. “Are you not?”
This elicited a sound somewhere between a snort and a chuckle from the man.
“Name’s Cooper,” he said. “Rex Cooper.”
“Mr. Cooper, then,” I said. “We met at a party in São Paulo about twenty-five years ago, and you introduced yourself as Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie—your pseudonym, perhaps?”
“What did you say your name was?”
I said, “Sérgio Antunes, but please, call me Sérgio.”
“All right, Sérgio,” he said. “You’re looking for Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie? I can tell you for a fact that Salgado-MacKenzie doesn’t exist.”
I had no idea where to start. I’d prepared a painstaking apology for this occasion, as well as a carefully curated list of questions, but I had not anticipated that Salgado-MacKenzie would deny his own existence.
“You’ve heard of Salgado-MacKenzie, though,” I said.
He said, “Like I told you, the man doesn’t exist.”
Behind me, the pickup truck’s engine ticked softly as it cooled down. Anne Fordis leaned against the cab, watching our exchange with folded arms. I decided to try a new approach.
I said, “But you’ve been to Brazil?”
“Sure,” he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “I lived there off and on for a lot of years.”
Now we were getting somewhere.
“The party where we met,” I said. “It was at the old Capital Hotel, during the Great Lusophone Exposition of Science Fiction—do you remember it?”
He wiped the back of his hand on the leg of his coveralls.
He said, “That’s not a time in my life I like to think about.”
Recognizing that this was not an explicit denial of having attended the convention, I decided to proceed.
I said, “I’d like to apologize for that night. I was very happy to meet you, but we had something of a misunderstanding.”
He said, “Is that right?”
“Yes,” I said and then described the encounter in some detail. He listened with an expression of increasing discomfort, as if an unseen presence were slowly driving a thin metal blade beneath one of his fingernails. When I finished my story, he shrugged, his pained expression softening into a look of minor annoyance.
He said, “What do you want from me?”
“Mr. Salgado-MacKenzie,” I began.
“It’s Cooper,” he said.
I exhaled heavily, my breath forming a cloud in the chilly air.
“It’s a strange thing,” I said. “I’ve spent so much time thinking about the story you told at that party that I can’t tell—within my own mind—what’s invention and what’s reality anymore. What I mean is, do I remember that night I shut the door in your face, or am I just remembering your account of it, made vivid by my thinking of it over and over and over again? I don’t know anymore. What I do know is that I want to apologize. I’m sorry for my reaction when you confronted me at the party, and I’m sorry for any pain I caused you before that.”
He took this in for a moment, thumbs hooked in the pockets of his coveralls. A bird landed on the branch of a tree behind him, knocking the narrow pile of snow that had accumulated there to the ground with a soft puff. Cooper turned to look, and the bird flew away. He looked back at me and said, “You seem pretty upset about all this, but I have to say, whatever did or didn’t happen between us, it’s over. Like I said before, that was a very unhappy time in my life that I’ve worked hard to forget, and it’s over now. It’s all in the past.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t you see that? It just doesn’t matter.”
I said, “It matters to me.”
“Well,” he said, “there’s nothing I can do about that.”
Anne Fordis shifted her weight against the truck, which responded with a faint creak.
I said to Mr. Cooper, “I need you to know that I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” he said. “Message received. Anything else I can do for you?”
He angled his body back toward the garage, ready to walk away.
I was not going to allow this to be the end of our conversation, so I said, “Yes, there is. I’ve admired your writing my whole life, ever since—”
“Stop,” he said, looking away from me. “I told you. I’m not Salgado-MacKenzie.”
I said, “Then who—”
“He needs to meet Madge,” said Anne, speaking up for the first time since we’d gotten out of the truck. She pushed off against the truck and stepped forward to stand between me and Rex Cooper.
I said, “Who’s Madge?”
Rex shook his head.
Anne said, “She’s our sister.”
I said, “And where would I find her?”
“Right here,” said Anne, pointing to the snow-covered house next to the garage. She looked at Rex. “Let’s go inside.”
• • •
As if overcome by these recollections, Sérgio put a thick hand to his chest.
“Heartburn?” I said.
“I’m fine,” he said.
He took two deep breaths and a long swallow of off-brand diet cola from one of the diner’s white Styrofoam cups.
• • •
Since we’d arrived, the sun had come out from behind the clouds (continued Sérgio), and as we approached the blue-gabled house I had to squint against the white light reflecting off the snow. It was still so bright, though, that my eyes stung. I approached the house then, eyes watering, wondering what revelations might await me inside. By that point in my visit, I truly had no idea what to expect, the day so far having been such a convulsive series of excitements and frustrations. I’d already abandoned my imagined script, the product of so many years of careful speculation, giving myself over to whatever this house held in store for me.
We ascended the wooden steps of the front porch and I followed Anne through the front door, Rex trailing behind me. Inside the house, that overpowering snow sheen diminished only slightly, thanks to a vast picture window through which light flooded the room. The illumination overwhelmed me, and I felt as disoriented as if the room had been pitch dark. As I adjusted to my surroundings, I heard music and, looking for its source, saw a rail-thin, white-haired woman sitting on a simple wooden stool strumming an old Spanish guitar.
Without missing a note, she looked up and in a husky voice said, “Who’s this you’ve brought me?”
I introduced myself. She played through a few more arpeggios and then set her guitar on the floor, leaning it gingerly against the wall. With none of the stiffness I might expect, given her age, she stood from her seat. She was a tall woman, dressed smartly in trim black slacks, Chelsea boots, and an oversized tailored dress shirt. A cloth headband held her white hair back from her face, which regarded me with preemptive amusement.
“Madge Cooper,” she said, shaking my hand. “You’re Brazilian?”
I said, “Yes, ma’am. Paulistano.”
“A great pleasure to meet you,” she said, switching to Portuguese.
“Likewise,” I said.
“Sit,” she said. “Please.”
So I sat down and Madge asked what brought me all the way to Idaho.
I said, “I’m looking for a writer named Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie.”
“Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie?” said Madge, and gave a short, barking laugh. “Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in quite some time.”
She looked at Anne and Rex, who sat at a long wooden bench that ran beneath the picture window. With the light behind them, I had a hard time making out the expressions on their faces.
Madge said to her siblings, “What does he already know?”
Rex said, “I told him Salgado-MacKenzie doesn’t exist.”
Madge arched an eyebrow at her brother. “That’s not quite true,
though, is it, Rex?”
Without looking at me, Rex jerked a thumb in my direction and said, “It’s true as far as he’s concerned.” He folded his arms. “Far as I’m concerned too.”
Anne leaned conspiratorially toward Madge. As if I wasn’t there, she said, “You know, he claims to have read all the stories.”
“He does?” said Madge, recoiling in mild horror.
I had the uncanny feeling that if I didn’t reassert my presence to these three ancient siblings, I might literally disappear.
I said, “I have read the stories, and they mean a lot to me.”
Madge wheeled around to face me, a look of concerned wonder on her wrinkled face.
She said, “You’ve read them all?”
“All the ones I could find,” I said.
“Who would have thought?” Madge said to her backlit siblings, and then to me: “You say they’ve meant a lot to you?”
“That’s right,” I said.
She cringed and looked again at her siblings. Anne shook her head with apparent pity, and Rex rested his face in one broad, upturned palm.
“I’m afraid you’ve made a terrible mistake,” Madge said to me. “The stories, they’re just larks. They’re not meant to be taken seriously.”
“In any event,” I said, undeterred, “they’ve meant a lot to me.”
She sat there for a moment, regarding me with her wide dark eyes.
“Clearly,” she said. “After all, here you are.”
“If this is an intrusion,” I said.
“No,” said Madge. “It’s not. The truth is, Mr. Antunes, that Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie is a hoax. We invented him—Anne, Rex, and I did—back when we were children, as part of a little time-killing game during one of our parents’ interminable parties in the countryside of São Paulo.”
Rex and Anne both opened their mouths, presumably in protest, but Madge lifted a silencing finger before they could speak.
“This is a story I want to tell,” she said to them.
• • •
The particular party that birthed Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie (Madge said to me) began as a Festa Junina, our parents’ normally cosmopolitan guests arriving by the carload on Friday night dressed in their ridiculous straw hats and painted-on freckles. That first evening they stuffed themselves with pamonha, quaffed gingery quentão, and danced a lively quadrilha by the light of a bonfire. From there, though, the proceedings shucked off their holiday trappings and sprawled forth into a long, disorganized weekend of decadent revelries, a devolution not atypical for parties hosted by my parents.