by Rio Youers
“Dad does,” Edith replied. “Classic rock, usually. Boring.”
Calm smiled. The willow leaf danced between her fingers. “And did you ever notice how, on longer journeys, the reception fades? Or maybe another station comes in on top, so you get two lots of music?”
“Dad hates when that happens,” Edith said. “Especially when one of his favorite songs is playing. The crossover, he calls it.”
“That’s where people like me and you are, Edith. On the crossover. We’re constantly picking up two receptions, and sometimes the voices are very loud. We can’t exactly flip the switch—not unless we want to unplug our brains. So we have to mute the sound. We have to build a shelter.”
“Up here?” Edith’s turn to tap her temple.
“Yes.”
“How?”
Calm stopped spinning the leaf. She placed it on her palm and held it out for Edith to take. Edith did. She first inhaled its green, oily fragrance it, then she twirled it.
“That’s one leaf,” Calm said. “One leaf on a tree of thousands—of tens of thousands. In a garden full of trees. In a neighborhood, a town, full of trees. And yet that was the only leaf you could see. Really, the only leaf in the whole world. Why? Because I drew your attention to it. You focused on it.”
“Sure, but…” Edith shrugged. “So what?”
“When I was younger, we used to say ‘far out’ when we thought something was outrageously cool. What do you say now?”
“I don’t know. Insane, maybe?”
“Okay.” Calm winked and made a ball out of her hands, as if she were holding a spider or small bird. “Then this is insane.”
Edith looked from Calm’s eyes to her hands. “What are you doing?”
“I’m opening a window.”
“I don’t see—” Edith’s words fractured. She covered her mouth and watched as Calm slowly drew her hands apart. There was a crackling sound, a smell like summer rain on hot asphalt. Threads of light snapped from Calm’s fingers. She eased her palms wider and the space between them began to shimmer, then separate. It was like a torn flag rippling, until the tear expanded and everything on the other side became clear.
“Whoa,” Edith said.
“I call it the Jungle,” Calm said.
Edith wiped her eyes and looked through the window Calm had created. She saw plants with broad leaves and burning flowers, a tree with purple branches, distant mountains capped with snow. A stream trickled in the foreground. As she watched, an unusual creature—part bird, part porcupine—loped into view and dipped its beak in. It took a long drink before fluttering away on quilled wings.
“It’s beautiful,” Edith said. She reached, then drew her hand back. “How are you doing that?”
“The same way you jump inside Shirley’s mind.” Calm’s hands trembled but her voice was strong and even. “I use the electricity in my brain to power a connection. Then I project.”
“Onto what?”
“Onto the place between.” Calm smiled. “The crossover.”
“But can anyone see it? My parents, my sister … if they were to look?”
“No. Only those who live on the crossover—those who can see the thin places.”
Another odd creature appeared in the window, a cross between a small dog and a raccoon. It sprawled in the grass and stretched, its tail swishing happily.
“That’s a billy-bumbler,” Calm said. “Cute little fellow. I have to admit, though, I stole him from a book.”
The broad leaves swayed and the trees creaked as a breeze blew through Calm’s jungle. The billy-bumbler leaped to his feet and shuffled away, and that was the last Edith saw before Calm closed the window. She brought her hands together with a snap. Edith caught a whiff of something vaguely electric, like a popped fuse.
“That’s my place, my refuge.” Calm’s powerful eyes shone. “I go there when the voices get too loud. I smell the flowers, climb the trees, sleep in the grass. That stream leads to a warm lake filled with beautiful fish. I’ll swim there for hours sometimes, then lay on the rocks and let the sun dry my body.”
“I like it better than the well,” Edith said. Tears pricked her eyes once again.
“It’s taken a long time to build,” Calm said. “I add to it every time I visit. A flower here. A rock there. And it all started with just one leaf.”
She pointed at the willow leaf still clutched between Edith’s fingers. Edith twirled it again, watching it glimmer.
“It’s all about focus,” Calm continued. She leaned closer to Edith, her face dappled with the soft light edging through the willow’s branches. “One leaf. The only leaf in the world. I studied its color, its structure, its smell. When it was set in my mind, I moved on to the next thing: the branch. I gave it character and shape. I imagined the way it would move in a breeze. Then I added more leaves. Within weeks I was sitting beneath my first tree. Then flowers started to spring up around the tree. Before I knew it, I had a garden. Then it was a forest. And from there…”
Calm opened her hands, indicating her wild and colorful jungle, although the window had closed, leaving nothing but a vague smudge in the air.
“Insane,” Edith said, and grinned. “Can you teach me?”
“That’s why I’m here. But you have everything you need to get started.” Calm pointed at the leaf in Edith’s hand. “The only leaf in the world, remember?”
Edith stopped twirling the leaf and looked at it intensely—at the thin veins running through its flesh, the curl of its stem, its pale underside.
“The beauty of a powerful mind,” Calm said. She reached across and clasped Edith’s wrist. Her gaze was hard and serious. “But it can be dangerous, too. Our power is real, Edith. It’s quicksand. As your secret place—your garden—grows, you may be tempted to spend more and more time there. You don’t want to go so deep that you can’t find your way home.”
“I won’t,” Edith said.
Calm let go of her wrist and sat back, her face flushed with kindness once again. Edith glanced away as the recurring nightmare brushed across her mind: the dead foal spilling limply from the well, and her sister with splintered goat’s horns—I’m coming for your sooooooooul—pursuing her through the forest. These terrible images were muted by the promise of a new place: a garden—her own place of power—full of light and wonder. Just thinking about it made everything inside so much calmer.
No more bad things, she thought.
Calm nodded and started to get to her feet. Edith took her hand to help her up, but that wasn’t enough.
“Thank you,” she said. Tears flashed down her face and she wiped them away, then pulled the old lady into her arms and hugged her.
* * *
Calm stayed with the Lovegroves for four days. Martin and Laura offered their bed, but Calm wouldn’t hear of it; she crashed in the basement with the enthusiasm of a boy scout—built herself a den stocked with pillows and comforters. Martin checked it out once, when the girls—Calm included—were out shopping for groceries. He meant to lie down to test its comfort, that was all, but woke up two hours later to find Calm poking him with a hockey stick. “Get out of there,” she said. “That’s my damn nest.”
It was like having a favorite aunt visit. She helped with the cooking and cleaning, and in the evening the screens went dark and they all sat around the kitchen table playing board games. It was the kind of family time that Martin thirsted for.
“You can stay for as long as you want,” he said to her.
“That’s sweet, but I’ve got dogs in Roanoke,” she replied. “They’re yappin’ for me.”
Most importantly, Calm spent those four days helping Edith. They often went somewhere quiet together—usually beneath the willow in the backyard, sometimes the basement—where Calm taught Edith how to meditate. “Breathe slowly. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Allow all exterior influences to fade away.” Once there, Edith focused on the leaf. She detailed it in her mind with loving and patient care. By the ti
me Martin drove Calm to the airport, Edith had the beginnings of a branch, mostly bare but intact, that she could look at whenever she wanted.
* * *
Edith kept up her end of the deal; she read twenty (usually more) pages a day and practiced on her guitar. She went from slowly plucking the notes on a major scale to strumming intermediate chord progressions, and all the time the garden in her mind expanded. It quickly became spacious enough for her to inhabit. She squeezed in and sat beneath her first tree. It was small but strong, with shimmering leaves and a smooth bark that smelled like flint. Before long, brilliant flowers bloomed in the grass around the tree, and a tall plant with elaborate orange leaves that always swayed. Edith walked from one side of her garden to the other. Seventeen steps. Next time she tried, it was nineteen. There were more flowers.
It soon felt very real to her, and very powerful.
My garden, she thought. All mine.
Edith started to believe that she’d never be scared again—that she’d always have shelter from the bad things—and then she saw her mother die.
9
Nolan Thorne was waiting for her at the RTC in Syracuse. She’d emailed her arrival time from the Rutherford Public Library, and here he was, as reliable as ever. He sat on the hood of his pickup (as their executor on the mainland, Nolan was afforded such luxuries as trucks and email), periscoping his head from left to right, looking for her amid the passengers leaving the station. Valerie was almost on top of him before he recognized her.
“Oh!” he said, surprised. And again, but with a different emphasis: “Oh.”
Her hair was pulled back, cinched with a rubber band. She was stooped, walked with a limp. Yes, she looked ten years older than when she’d left.
“You’re thin,” he said.
“I’m ravaged,” she replied.
They drove to Fisherman’s Point in silence. Valerie sat in the passenger seat but angled her body away from Nolan. She looked out the window the entire way. Not that there was anything to see. Housing tracts and swampland and dull green markers signaling every tenth of a mile. If there was an opposite to Glam Moon, NY 481 might be it. They crossed the river south of Oswego and drove northwest to Fisherman’s Point. This small town on the edge of Lake Ontario featured a trailer park, a marina, and a lively bar called The Hull. They zipped through in all of fifteen seconds, taking Salmon Road west, and then Ridge Lane—an unmarked chicken scratch that cut through an acre of dense forest toward the water. There was a derelict summerhouse where the road ended. Weeds and crawlers burst through its broken windows and dirty siding. Its front porch was covered with raccoon shit. Nolan parked in the driveway, helped Valerie out of the truck, carried her bag as they made their way to the lake. At one point he tried taking her hand and she slapped it away.
The boathouse—in decidedly better shape than the property it accompanied—was home to a twenty-three-foot center console, designed as a fishing boat but used mainly to ferry goods and people to and from the island. The boathouse also stored some of their winter supplies: gloves and hats, lightbulbs, medicines, diesel, canned food. Lake Ontario hadn’t completely frozen over since 1934. There was often a thin ice sheet latched to the shoreline but that wasn’t a problem. It was the snow; lake-effect accumulation frequently made Ridge Lane impassable, even in Nolan’s four-wheel-drive. It was smart practice to stock up by mid-November and journey to the mainland only when absolutely necessary.
Valerie regarded the barrels and boxes with a sneer. “It’s May. Do we really need all this shit here?” It was the first thing she’d said since Nolan had picked her up.
“It’s a head start,” Nolan replied. “Twenty-six of us on the island. That number will go down by winter, but even so, we’ll need a lot of supplies.”
“Twenty-seven,” Valerie corrected confidently.
“Twenty-six,” Nolan insisted. “Garrett’s gone, remember?”
Her nostrils flared. She inhaled the weedy aroma of the lake, along with faint notes of hemlock, old rain, and diesel. The waves stroked the boat’s hull.
“To the Glam,” Nolan added. There was no question in his voice. Sometimes his loyalty broke her heart a little bit.
He helped her onto the boat and this time she let him take her hand. He untied the mooring line, started the engine, and rumbled out of the slip. Valerie sat ahead of the cockpit, hoping the windblast would invigorate her. Twenty-six, she thought, and Garrett Riley floated into her mind, with his big eyes and shapeable heart. Yes, she’d almost forgotten about him. The most hated man in America, maybe, but only a smidge to her—a tool, like a screwdriver or a pencil, and she couldn’t be expected to remember every pencil. Besides, she was mind-weary. Bone-weary, too.
She looked at the lake, broad and deep blue. On clear days she could see the forty miles to Canada. Not today, though; the horizon was blurred with haze. Impossible to tell where the lake ended and the sky began. Even the island was obscured, eleven miles north by northwest, a gray-green knuckle shimmering in the blue.
Home.
Halcyon.
* * *
The wind picked up and the chop was rough. Nolan eased up on the throttle and Valerie joined him at the cockpit. Her face was wet with spray. She pulled a towel from one of the bait lockers and used it to dab herself dry.
“How close are you now?” Nolan asked. Valerie heard his voice trembling, even above the engine.
“Extremely close,” Valerie replied, “I sometimes think I could take a step and be there again, among my flowers, breathing the honeyed air.”
Nolan covered his face and started to cry. “Beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful, beautiful.” Then he lowered his hand and looked at her, boy-like and cracked. “I can’t wait to see it.”
“It won’t be long.”
Valerie wondered if Nolan had ever really been a boy—if he’d ever been allowed to cry. The fifth son of a US marine, he could gut and skin a deer before he was eight years old, could strip a small-block V8 before he was ten. He followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the Marine Corps in 1988. Three years later—aged twenty-one—he was shipped to the Persian Gulf with the 2nd Marine Division. He traded bullets for 100mm shells when Saddam’s 3rd Armored Division, riding in Soviet tanks, opened fire on his unit on the outskirts of Khafji. During a four-month deployment, Nolan saw and did things that he only ever revealed to Valerie. He returned stateside with a slate of physical and psychological woes: if he wasn’t laid out with fatigue or a crippling headache, he was screaming at the walls or barreling toward suicide. He applied for disability after being diagnosed with PTSD, but the VA denied his claim, attributing his mental health concerns to a “detrimental” upbringing. So, absolutely nothing to do with the nerve-agent pretreatments he’d ingested, then, or the Iraqi Scud—likely armed with sarin—he’d watched explode over the city of Jubail.
He lost everything: family, friends, love. Valerie found him long-haired and pole-thin, defecating between two garbage cans on a sketchy street in Brooklyn. She extended her hand and saved him, just as Pacifico had saved her fourteen years before.
“It won’t be long,” Valerie said again. She wiped spray from her throat and regarded Nolan with what she hoped was an honest expression. “Don’t worry, Nolan, your faith will be rewarded.”
He nodded stiffly. “Do you still need the drug?”
“You know I do.” Her shoulders swayed as the boat tackled the chop. “Rhapsody is a simulation, but it’s also a kind of meditation—a mental development. I’m strengthening my mind to see something that nobody else can.”
“The White Skyway.”
“That’s what this has all been for.” Some of Valerie’s hair had come loose and swirled madly around her skull. “As soon as I find the Skyway, we can all go to Glam Moon. We can leave this dirty world and stay there for as long as we please.”
Nolan nodded again and smeared the tears from his cheeks.
“Only then will I not need the drug anymore. Or the Soci
ety.” She clasped Nolan’s arm to steady herself as the boat rocked. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be free.”
“We’ll all be free.”
“Exactly.” Valerie took a deep breath and looked across the water. “Which is why I need another hit. And soon.”
Nolan turned to her, frowning. “Buffalo wasn’t that long ago, and you need to regain your strength.”
“I’ll be fine. And Glenn is nearly ready.”
Nolan didn’t respond for a while. He studied the water through the cockpit’s windshield, then said, “He missed you. He’s been howling like a dog.”
“Good.”
They approached the island, now close enough to see the shadows embedded in the granite outcrops, the sedges and wild grasses swishing in the wind. The signs were impossible to miss: PRIVATE LAND and NO TRESPASSING, both hand-painted, aggressive red uppercase on yellow backgrounds. There were similar signs posted around the 270-acre chunk of land—a crude oval, seen from above. Gulls signaled their arrival by swooping, making noise. There was a man-shape on the dock, indiscernible in the sun’s glare, but Valerie knew it was Jake Door, posted there to keep unwanted boats from docking.
Nolan slowed down and worked the wheel to approach port-side. Valerie threw him the towel.
“Dry your eyes,” she said.
* * *
The rooster had said the same thing, handing her a handkerchief with a blue R embroidered into one corner. The Society was so seldom given to kindness that she regarded the handkerchief suspiciously, as if he’d laced it with chloroform. But she used it, dabbing her cheeks gently.
“Did you bring it?” she asked.
“The pig has it.”
“I went beyond. You must’ve been … satisfied.”
The rooster held out his hand. Valerie gave him the handkerchief and he lifted it to his beak and inhaled—trying to smell the salt in her tears, no doubt, although he likely only got a whiff of latex and his own extravagant cologne. He folded the handkerchief, returned it to the pocket of his suit jacket. The ring on his right forefinger flashed in the light. They all wore them—a gold band, heavy as a nugget, set with a green eye and inscribed with a legend borrowed from Joyce: DEREVAUN SERAUN, which scholars believed translated to: The end of pleasure is pain.