by Jay Hosking
The troubles come on slowly. I find myself shifting in my seat, taking momentary breaks to rub my biceps. My body is not used to this repetitive activity. I consciously switch between using my arms and using my torso to pull the boat forward in the water, but all of me is becoming sore. And just as Officer 2510 promised, I can feel the pads of my hands puffing up where they rub against the grips of the paddle. I let the blisters fill up with lymph and that takes some of the discomfort away. Then one bubble bursts and leaves an open wound in the meat between my right thumb and forefinger. I take off my T-shirt and wrap it around my right hand. A short time later I put my other hand in a sock.
The shore meanders, always more of the same. It’s not clear how far I’ve travelled, what I should be looking for, or how to know when I’ve arrived. I keep paddling.
Every time my mouth feels full of paste I rest the paddle along the edge of the boat and sip water from my cupped hands. At first this is fine, in fact the water is cold and tastes incredible, but as my hands worsen, every dip into the lake stings my palms. I carefully towel my hands dry with my other sock and paddle again.
When I’m sure the sun has started to descend from its highest point in the sky, I allow myself a long break. The boat bobs about two hundred metres from the land and in clear view is the long slow curve of Lake Ontario’s northern shore. The clothing I’ve tied around my hands is damp and making my skin pale and puckered. I free my hands and face them palm up in the sun to dry. Some of the wetness on them is from broken skin and the fluid it releases. There are only small traces of blood in the first burst blister.
I lean back in the boat and try not to use any of the muscles in my upper body. And though I avoided it for a while, sleepiness is starting to creep between all my aches. I knew nothing about the other side, this journey, but still I curse myself for failing to get a good night’s rest first. I consider slowing down and conserving my energy, parking the boat onshore and sleeping underneath it, finishing the trip tomorrow. And then something catches my eye.
Far, far off in the direction I came from is a black speck that rides along the water. It is so distant that its shape cannot be made out, but it follows the path I took along the lake and it is exactly the same colour as my boat. It moves in a straight line and with purpose.
The hunter is catching up with me.
My break is over. My clothes have dried so I wrap them around my hands again. I paddle harder and I push myself further than before. My body reminds me that it’s in pain, then says nothing at all. There is only the rhythm of my actions and the colours of the sky, from blue to pink to orange. I push my body until I cannot straighten my arms and until my legs are asleep and until my lungs feel full of liquid. When the wraps around my blisters become damp again, I remove them entirely. I paddle until there’s a noticeable shift in the light and, just for a moment, I turn to watch the sun kiss the lake behind me. The hunter’s black speck on the water has grown. I paddle again.
The horizon turns purple and the rest of the sky soon follows. It becomes difficult to differentiate the water from the land with my eyes. Twice my little boat wanders too close to the shore and my paddle crashes off the rocks underneath. I dig out the flashlight and hold it in my mouth but it gives me only a few weak shimmers on the water immediately in front of me.
I’m about to pull the boat to shore and continue on foot when I notice the light. It’s in the woods and still far ahead, but it’s clearly a fire. My whole body protests but I paddle ahead as hard and fast as I can until I reach it. The glow of the fire bathes the forest floor and casts long shadows from the tree trunks out toward the beach, toward me. I can see the flicker of flames about a hundred metres along a manmade path into the woods.
At first my body will not do anything. The boat rests on the rocks of the shore, leaning to one side, and I sit and lean with it. Finally I force myself up and out. The temperature feels like it’s dropped sharply, now that I’m not paddling. My hands are almost useless and singing with pain, so it takes a long time to put on my clothes.
I lurch along the path, my arms folded up and my back arched and leaning too much weight into each step.
Flames are billowing out of a messy pile of wood. There’s a log for sitting next to the fire. No John, no Grace, but someone must have lit this fire. I close my eyes for just a moment, a tiny rest. It’s bright and warm and it feels amazing to be upright and stretching my legs and gently swaying in the forest air.
I’m not sure how long I stand with the world bright behind my eyelids, listening to the crackle of the wood, but without warning someone grabs my shoulder and twists me in a circle. I open my eyes and see John pulling his other arm back, a large angled rock in his hand, about to strike me. I am too tired to stop him or move out of the way. He has absolutely no concern on his face, no doubts about cracking open another human’s skull.
“John,” I say feebly.
His face softens immediately. He looks at me as if his mind is busy and confused. And then he hugs me hard and laughs. The stone in his hand presses against my lower back when he squeezes me. My arms are still bent and I can’t hug him back. I breathe deeply.
—
He sits on the log, while I choose to stand and face him. He looks no worse than the last time I saw him, although his hair has grown long and there are wispy patches on his jaw and chin.
“God, it’s good to see you,” he says. “But I don’t understand. You know who I am?”
I nod.
“How does that make sense?” He sits very still and seems to be concentrating. Finally he looks up at me. “When did you last see me?”
“About a year ago,” I tell him. “It’s December, 2008. Or it was, before I got here.”
“You haven’t seen me since 2007? Not in the following spring? You seemed to remember me the longest, even when the others had forgotten.” He shakes his head. “You remembered until things became really different. I don’t get it.”
“I think I might.” To me this pattern is familiar, a changing world, others’ fading memories. It’s a mirror to my own experience. “Somewhere in November of 2007, or maybe December, you started using the dirt from your dead end inside the box you’d built.”
He opens his mouth as if he wants to say something but nothing comes out. My mind is still making the connections as I talk.
“You knew it was a bad idea, that anything from the dead end was out of your control, but you were so desperate to make the box work that you used the dirt anyway. You got Buddy through the box right around the time you had your little celebration at Shifty’s. A week later, you wrote your goodbye note to me, your backup plan in case you didn’t succeed, and then you crawled inside the box for the first time. You weren’t in there long before something scared you back out. So far, so good?”
He nods slowly. My mouth is only one step behind my thoughts. I continue.
“You had figured it would be as easy as building the entrance and going through it. It wasn’t. So you rethink your plan, but you notice something is happening: your reality starts coming apart. People begin to forget about Grace, or about the shit you pulled at your lab. Other things vanish, objects, physical things. Eventually people don’t recognize you, look at you like a stranger.”
“How—”
“Let me finish.” It’s strange to be talking with John and have all the knowledge and power in the conversation. “So you became increasingly isolated, your world unreal, and finally you came to the realization: the thing that was blocking your way through the box was yourself. One way or another, you learned to let go of those doubts.”
“Overpower them, actually,” he says.
“So into the box you went again. And this time, you found yourself here.”
“It took quite a number of tries, as a matter of fact,” he says.
“Like learning how to meditate.”
“Yes, exactly. For a time I thought I was losing my mind again. But in the end I took control and crossed ov
er.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong.” I’m working on straightening my arms, massaging my biceps and triceps with my knuckles. My hands look like raw chicken. There’s an ugly implication to what I’m saying. I turn back to John. “You crossed over in December, 2007. You didn’t come back to our side after that.”
And that means neither did I. The reality of what I’m suggesting hits me in the guts. I’ve been stuck in the box since August, 2008. The last few months of my life weren’t my life. I shiver and step closer to the fire. “Officer 2510 made it clear that there are a lot of spaces or times or whatever we could call the ‘present.’ ”
“Officer 2510?” he asks. “What does she have to do with this?”
So he hasn’t seen her here. It’s likely he hasn’t met any of her people. No trespassing.
“Never mind her for now.” I’m pacing around the fire to keep up with my thoughts. “She made it clear your box is amateur compared to entrances like the dead end, how I don’t know. But I think the first time you got out of the box, it left you drifting across all the possible presents. Like a needle that lost its groove on the record.”
He shakes his head. “I think I get what you’re saying. But the grooves of a record would be different times. It’s more like a needle that moves to a very similar groove on a very similar record, over and over again, until I don’t recognize the record at all.”
“Fuck, John. Give it a rest. It’s just a metaphor.”
The fire lights half his face and conceals the other half in darkness. He looks boyish and small. “How could you possibly know all of this?”
“I can’t know, not for certain. I’m just working with the pieces that I have.” The lake is audible from the fire, just barely. It sounds as though the water has picked up and waves are sloshing onto the rocks. “One thing I do know for certain is that we don’t have a lot of time. We need to get Grace, get on the boat, and get back to where the city is on our side. Where is she?”
His face changes. He’d been in wonder or maybe even a little impressed, but at the sound of my sister’s name he goes rigid. He stands.
“She’s in there,” he says and points deeper into the woods. “Where my parents’ old house would be, if we were on our side.”
Something about his tone lingers after he’s finished.
“But?” I ask.
“But things are complicated with Grace.”
“No shit. Let’s go.” I start to walk north, away from the shore.
“No.” His voice is firm enough that I turn to face him. He hasn’t moved from the fire. “You won’t like what you find in there. It’s better to let her come to us. She visits regularly, in one form or another.”
“There isn’t time for that.” I can feel a breeze coming off the lake now that I’m standing away from the fire. I pull my coat closed.
“Really,” he says, “time is the one thing we have plenty of here.”
His words are starting to sound like excuses, rationalizations. There’s a nervous edge to his voice.
“John. Why haven’t you just gone in there, gotten her, and brought her back?”
And then there is a horrible, endless screech of pain coming from the direction of the shore. I have heard this sound once before, in John and Grace’s apartment. It is the sound of a scared rat. The hunter is here.
“Jesus Christ,” I say. “It’s hurting Buddy. It’s here.”
A flash of recognition passes across John’s face. “You were followed here. Through the box.”
I nod. My ears are waiting for the sound of shuffled leaves and twigs, a thing walking through the forest.
“You need to go,” John says. “Right now.”
“All right, let’s go.”
“No.” He pinches his face, frustrated. “Look. I can’t. I can’t get through. For some reason, the entrances don’t work for me. I know the dead end is out there but I can’t use it. Nothing works for me. I’m stuck. I’ve been stuck here for so long.”
Right to the bitter end, he’s keeping things from me. I say, “At least hide from that thing.”
“He isn’t interested in me. Only you.”
I hop from one foot to the other, trying to warm up my legs.
“How do you know?”
“Because I used to have one following me.” He sets his jaw. “If you’re going to find Grace, now is the time. I’ll stall him, misdirect him.”
There’s another screech, this one closer. “Get Buddy to safety if you can. And be ready to leave when I get back.”
John points into the woods. “Run!”
It takes only a few seconds before I’m out of the fire’s glow. The woods are so dark that I’m reminded of the sensation in the box. The flashlight illuminates the ten feet of dirt in front of me and no more.
I run down the path as fast as I can. My legs are the last part of my body in half-decent condition. I work them hard. After five or ten minutes my hairs stand on end and I can feel eyes in the trees. Then whispers.
Hi, little brother.
This part is so tedious.
I’ve been waiting for you.
“Grace?” I shine the light into the woods and see only trees.
Keep going. I’ll see you there.
“Grace, quit fucking around. It’s time to go.”
Get in there, you worthless little shit.
I stumble forward. The path curves a little and abruptly ends. I’m not sure what to do so I keep moving forward, weaving between the trees. My head swims with physical exhaustion and lack of sleep. My eyelids close and open slowly and it feels as if they leave a coat of slime behind. I take a few more steps.
The world comes alive with artificial light. I didn’t see the transition but now the trees in front of me are sparse and short, and behind me what had been forest is now just dirt and mud. Before me is a street light, the back of a diamond-shaped sign, the paved dead end of a road. I take a few more steps.
And after two long years I see Grace, standing casually and chatting with another woman whose back is turned to me. Grace is in profile, her mess of hair tied back and her clothes dirty. She shares a quiet laugh with the woman.
“Grace,” I say.
Both women turn to me. Both are unmistakably my sister.
I look carefully into the suburbs. There is a sea of people around the houses, sitting, standing, talking, resting, watching me. Every person I can see is Grace. All of them.
“Oh Jesus,” I say. I feel sick.
The two women in front of me turn to each other.
“Oh,” one says. “I guess it’s my turn. You’ve done it already?”
“Obviously.” The other nods. “Go easy on him.”
The first Grace walks up to me as if nothing at all were the matter. I am concentrating on standing. She smiles and punches me on the arm.
“Took you long enough,” she says.
—
We walk down the suburban street. We pass small clusters of my sister talking among themselves. Occasionally they look up from their conversation and smile but none are surprised at the sight of me. Nor are they surprised by my awkward walk or the peeled skin on my hands. Grace leads me to the porch of one house and motions for me to sit. The glow of the electric light is eerie, and the neighbourhood doesn’t look quite as it did the time I was here previously. It is an overcast night.
When she sits next to me, I ask, “What is this place? Did we—are we back on the other side?”
She shakes her head. “Think of it like standing in a doorway. A little stretch of time that connects one side to the other, repeating over and over. A loop. We’re not exactly inside or outside.”
“And when are you from?” I ask. “When was the last time you were on our side?”
“Shouldn’t you know that?” She stares into space for a moment, working through her thoughts, and it comes to her. “So I go back after this. I’ve crossed multiple times. How many?”
“At least three,”
I say. “First, after family dinner in November, 2006. Then in the middle of the night, early December, 2006. Then again a week or two later.”
I don’t tell her about seeing her the last time, just after Christmas. Something about that last time nags at me.
“November was a trial run,” she says. “An accident, really. I didn’t get all the way through the entrance, just looped for a while and that was amazing enough. Came right back out at the exact same time I’d entered. This time, I crossed all the way through, explored a bit of the forest and shore. No sign of the locals yet.”
I don’t tell her about seeing Officer 2510, about the so-called facilities on Toronto Island, about the fact that they’re not local at all.
“Then I stumbled on this place. It’s the same geography as where I crossed, but a different time. A totally different entrance, I suppose. When was it that you crossed through the dead end?”
“I didn’t,” I tell her. “I used the box.”
She looks utterly perplexed.
“Haven’t you run into John yet?” I ask. When her eyes go even wider, I say, “He’s here, too, by the lake. You’ll see him eventually. He built an artificial entrance to find you.”
Two of my sister pass by in quiet conversation. They don’t even turn to us.
“How many of you are there?” I ask.
“Just one. Think of it as a closed loop.”
Some of the Grace population wander closer to the dead end, like an audience.
“So all of these are versions of the same you,” I tell her. “You’ve been them all before.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” she says. “I haven’t been some of them yet.”
“But you’ve seen this, what’s happening right now between us, before.”
“Of course. I’ve watched you visit so many times, from so many angles, that I hardly notice each time you get here.” She scratches at her head. “When I arrived, it seemed like there were already thousands of myself here, but that’s because this is a finite amount of time that keeps repeating. I was the youngest, subjectively speaking. With every cycle, I find myself a little older, occupying the space that used to be some future version of me. And when I’m the oldest, the ultimate, I’ll leave the dead end with you.”