There was a small padlock on the door.
He looked back.
The other man was still standing at the far end of the bridge, looking at the canopy of leaves above. It wasn’t clear what he’d be looking at, but it didn’t seem like he was waiting for the right moment to rush over, bang the other guy on the head, and steal his wallet. If he’d wanted to do that he could have done it back up at the house. There was no sign of anyone else around — this boy he’d mentioned, for example – and he looked like he was waiting patiently for the conclusion of whatever needed to happen for him to have earned his dollar.
Miller turned back and fitted the key in the lock. It was stiff, but it turned. He opened the door. Inside was total dark. He hesitated, looked back across the bridge, but the man had gone.
He opened the door further, and stepped inside.
The interior of the cabin was cooler than it had been outside, but also stuffy. There was a faint smell. Not a bad smell, particularly. It was like old, damp leaves. It was like the back of a closet where you store things you do not need. It was like a corner of the attic of a house not much loved, in the night, after rain.
The only light was that which managed to get past him from the door behind. The cabin had no windows, or if it had, they had been covered over. The door he’d entered by was right at one end of the building, which meant the rest of the interior led ahead. It could only have been ten, twelve feet. It seemed longer, because it was so dark. The man stood there, not sure what happened next.
The door slowly swung closed behind him, not all the way, but leaving a gap of a couple of inches. No-one came and shut it on him or turned the lock or started hollering about he’d have to pay a thousand bucks to get back out again. The man waited.
In a while, there was a quiet sound.
It was a rustling. Not quite a shuffling. A sense of something moving a little at the far end, turning away from the wall, perhaps. Just after the sound, there was a low waft of a new odor, as if the movement had caused something to change its relationship to the environment, as if a body long held curled or crouched in a particular shape or position had realigned enough for hidden sweat to be released into the unmoving air.
Miller froze.
In all his life, he’d never felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. You read about it, hear about it. You knew they were supposed to do it, but he’d never felt it, not his own hairs, on his own neck. They did it then, though, and the peculiar thing was that he was not afraid, or not only that.
He was in there with something, that was for certain. It was not a known thing, either. It was... he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. He just knew that there was something over there in the darkness. Something about the size of a man, he thought, maybe a little smaller.
He wasn’t sure it was male, though. Something said to him it was female. He couldn’t imagine where this impression might be coming from, as he couldn’t see it and he couldn’t hear anything, either — after the initial movement, it had been still. There was just something in the air that told him things about it, that said underneath the shadows it wrapped around itself like a pair of dark angel’s wings, it knew despair, bitter madness and melancholy better even than he did. He knew that beneath those shadows it was naked, and not male.
He knew also that it was this, and not fear, that was making his breathing come ragged and forced.
He stayed in there with it for half an hour, doing nothing, just listening, staring into the darkness but not seeing anything. That’s how long it seemed like it had been, anyway, when he eventually emerged back into the forest. It was hard to tell.
He closed the cabin door behind him but he did not lock it, because he saw that the man was back, standing once more at the far end of the bridge. Miller clasped the key firmly in his fist and walked over toward him.
‘How much,’ he said.
‘For what? You already paid.’
‘No,’ Miller said. ‘I want to buy it.’
It was eight by the time Miller got back to his house. He didn’t know how that could be unless he’d spent longer in the cabin than he realised. It didn’t matter a whole lot, and in fact there were good things about it. The light had begun to fade. In twenty minutes it would be gone entirely. He spent those minutes sitting in the front seat of the car, waiting for darkness, his mind as close to a comfortable blank as it had been in a long time.
When it was finally dark he got out the car and went over to the house. He dealt with the security system, opened the front door and left it hanging open.
He walked back to the vehicle and went around to the trunk. He rested his hand on the metal there for a moment, and it felt cold. He unlocked the back and turned away, not fast but naturally, and walked toward the wooden steps which led to the smaller of the two raised decks. He walked up them and stood there for a few minutes, looking out into the dark stand of trees, and then turned and headed back down the steps toward the car.
The trunk was empty now, and so he shut it, and walked slowly toward the open door of his house, and went inside, and shut and locked that door behind him too.
It was night, and it was dark, and they were both inside and that felt right.
He poured a small scotch into a large glass. He took it out through the sliding glass doors to the chair on the main deck where he’d spent the morning, and sat cradling the drink, taking a sip once in a while. He found himself remembering, as he often did at this time of day, the first time he’d met his wife. He’d been living down on East Cliff then, in a house which was much smaller than this one but only a couple of minutes’ walk from the beach. Late one Saturday afternoon, bored and restless, he’d taken a walk to the Crow’s Nest, the big restaurant that was the only place to eat or drink along that stretch. He’d bought a similar scotch at the upstairs bar and taken it out onto the balcony to watch the sun go down over the harbor. After a while he noticed that amongst the family groups of sunburned tourists and knots of tattooed locals there was a woman at a table by herself. She had a tall glass of beer and seemed to be doing the same thing he was, and he wondered why. Not why she was doing it, but why he was — why they both were. He did not know then, and he did not know now, why people sit and look out into the distance by themselves, or what they hope to see.
After a couple more drinks he went over and introduced himself. Her name was Catherine and she worked at the university. They got married eighteen months later and though by then — his business having taken off in the meantime — he could have afforded anywhere in town, they hired out the Crow’s Nest and had the wedding party there. A year after that their daughter was born and they called her Matilde, after Catherine’s mother, who was French. Business was still good and they moved out of his place on East Cliff and into the big house he had built in the mountains and for seven years all was good, and then, for some reason, it was no longer good any more. He didn’t think it had been his fault, though it could have been. He didn’t think it was her fault either, though that too was possible. It had simply stopped working. They’d been two people, and then one, but then two again, facing different ways. There had been a view to share together, then there was not, and if you look with only one eye then there is no depth of field. There had been no infidelity. In some ways that might have been easier. It would have been something to react to, to blame, to hide behind. Far worse, in fact, to sit on opposite sides of the breakfast table and wonder who the other person was, and why they were there, and when they would go.
Six months later, she did. Matilde went with her, of course. He didn’t think there was much more that could be said or understood on the subject. When first he’d sat out on this deck alone, trying to work it all through in his head, the recounting could take hours. As time went on, the story seemed to get shorter and shorter. As they said around these parts, it is what it is.
Or it was what it was.
Time passed and then it was late. The scotch was long gone but he didn’t feel the desire for more. He took
the glass indoors and washed at the sink, putting it on the draining board next to the plate and the knife and the fork from lunch. No lights were on. He hadn’t bothered to flick any switches when he came in, and — having sat for so long out on the deck — his eyes were accustomed, and he felt no need to turn any on now.
He dried his hands on a cloth and walked around the house, aimlessly at first. He had done this many times in the last few months, hearing echoes. When he got to the area which had been Catherine’s study, he stopped. There was nothing left in the space now, bar the empty desk and the empty bookshelves. He could tell that the chair had been moved, however. He didn’t recall precisely how it had been, or when he’d last listlessly walked this way, but he knew that it had been moved, somehow.
He went back to walking, and eventually fetched up outside the room that had been Matilde’s. The door was slightly ajar. The space beyond was dark.
He could feel a warmth coming out of it, though, and heard a sound in there, something quiet, and he turned and walked slowly away.
He took a shower in the dark. Afterward he padded back to the kitchen in his bare feet and a gown and picked his scotch glass up from the draining board. Even after many, many trips through the dishwasher you could see the ghost of the restaurant logo that had once been stamped on it, the remains of a mast and a crow’s nest. Catherine had slipped it into her purse one long-ago night, without him knowing about it, and then given the glass to him as an anniversary present. How did a person who would do that change into the person now living half the state away? He didn’t know, any more than he knew why he had so little to say on the phone to his daughter, or why people sat and looked at views, or why they drove to nowhere on Saturday afternoons. Our heads turn and point at things. Light comes into our eyes. Words come out of our mouths.
And then? And so?
Carefully, he brought the edge of the glass down upon the edge of the counter. It broke pretty much as he’d hoped it would, the base remaining in one piece, the sides shattering into several jagged points.
He padded back through into the bedroom, put the glass on the night stand, took off the robe, and lay back on the bed. That’s how they’d always done it, when they’d wanted to signal that tonight didn’t have to just be about going to sleep. Under the covers with a book, then probably not tonight, Josephine.
Naked and on top, on the other hand...
A shorthand. A shared language. There is little sadder than a tongue for which only one speaker remains. He closed his eyes, and after a while, for the first time since he’d stood stunned in the driveway and watched his family drive away, he cried.
Afterward he lay and waited.
She came in the night.
Three days later, in the late afternoon, a battered truck pulled down into the driveway and parked alongside the car that was there. It was the first time the truck had been on the road in nearly two years, and the driver left the engine running when he got out because he wasn’t sure it would start up again. The patched front tire was holding up, though, for now.
He went around the back and opened up the wooden crate, propping the flap with a stick. Then he walked over to the big front door and rang on the bell. Waited a while, and did it again. No answer. Of course.
He rubbed his face in his hands, wearily, took a step back. The door looked solid. No way a kick would get it open. He looked around and saw the steps up to the side deck.
When he got to the back of the house he picked up the chair that sat by itself, hefted it to judge the weight, and threw it through the big glass door. When he’d satisfied himself that the hole in the smashed glass was big enough, he walked back along the deck and around the front and then up the driveway to stand on the road for a while, out of view of the house.
He smoked a cigarette, and then another to be sure, and when he came back down the driveway he was relived to see that the flap on the crate on the back of his truck was now closed.
He climbed into the cab and sat a moment, looking at the big house. Then he put the truck into reverse, got back up to the highway, and drove slowly home.
When he made the turn into his own drive later, he saw the STOP sign was still there. Didn’t matter how many times he told the boy, the sign was still there.
He drove along the track to the house, parked the truck. He opened the crate without looking at it, and went inside.
Later, sitting on his porch in the darkness, he listened to the sound of the wind moving through the tops of the trees. He drank a warm beer, and then another. He looked at the grime on his hands. He wondered what it was that made some people catch sight of the sign, what it was in their eyes, what it was in the way they looked, that made them see. He wondered how the man in the big house had done it, and hoped he had not suffered much. He wondered why he had never attempted the same thing. He wondered why it was only on nights like these that he was able to remember that his boy had been dead twenty years.
Finally he went indoors and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He did this every night, even though there was never anything there to see: nothing unless it is that sad, dark thing that eventually takes us in its arms and makes us sleep.
The Seventeenth Kind
Hi. I’m James Richard. No, not ‘Richards’, but ‘Richard’. Dumb name, I think you’ll agree. No, it’s okay. Really. Enjoy yourself. I’ve had many years to savour the name, to laboriously spell it out over the phone and find parcels arriving at my door marked for Richard James anyhow. I didn’t even make it up. It’s not a stage name. My parents gave it to me when I was born, bless them — along with a very straight nose, nice wavy brown hair, and next to no talent at all.
‘Why,’ I asked my father one time, back when I was young in years and full of hope, ‘Why in the name of sweet Jesus did you call me James Richard?’
He stared down at me, confused, and I belatedly realised he was in the same predicament. His name was David. David Richard. Maybe when he was young his peers also snarled ‘Hey, shithead — why have you got two first names?’ For a moment I felt a strange and poingnant affinity with my dad, as if we were holding hands down the years, two small boys a generation apart who’d shouldered a similar burden.
Then I kicked him in the shin.
Anyway. This isn’t about my name. This is about what I do, and what I do is I’m a presenter on a shopping channel. No, go ahead. Laugh all you like. Just the stupidest job in the whole damned universe, right? Well, you know, screw you. If I hear one more person say a chimp could do my job then I’m going to take some innovative and durable kitchen implement — retailing in stores for $19.99 but available for this hour only at the low-low price of $11.99 plus postage and packing — and shove it up their ass.
This is a skill. It really is.
And it saved my life.
I wound up in home shopping via a circuitous route. Everyone does. Nobody wakes up one morning thinking ‘Hey, I want to be on live cable selling people shit they don’t need.’ Or perhaps they do, in which case they genuinely are stupid. Maybe they think it counts as television, and is therefore glamorous. It’s not. The point of being on the tube is first, to earn big bucks; second, to be recognised in the street. Anyone who tells you different is a moron. What — they instead want the unsociable hours, the threat of being sacked at any moment, the ever-present danger of exposure and embarrassment — not to mention the joy of standing under hot lights while hairy-backed yahoos point cameras at you and swop impenetrable jokes behind your back? The money in cable really isn’t that great, and the people you actually want to recognise you are pretty young things of the opposite sex. Or of the same sex, whatever. You work a shopping channel then these are not the people who are going to being recognising you. They’re going to be... well, I’ll come to that.
I was an actor originally. I was profoundly average, and there’s only so many times you can emote your heart out to scraggly-bearded directors to then be told you’re insufficiently tall or Turkish-looking or fem
ale or frankly even any good. So I switched to stand-up as a kind of holding pattern. Easier to get gigs, but the money stinks like fish and I couldn’t write my own material so I was going nowhere fast. Finally there was a spell on a local radio news station for which cattle made up the main demographic. That was really grim. It was while I was there, reading out the weather and listening to the neurons in my brain popping one by one, that I saw a trade ad for a presenter on a cable channel. I combed the straw out of my hair, jumped on a plane and went and did my thing. I dug deep, gave it everything I had. I was desperate.
I got the gig.
Now. If you don’t do any home shopping then I’m going to have to explain the deal to you. (If you do, then just skip-read or have a sandwich or something. I’ll be back in a minute). How it works is this. The channels basically have a pile of goods which they want to sell. Pots and pans. Jewelry. Gardening implements. Technical gizmos for the home. Limited Edition Star Trek™ bathmats. The buy-me inducements they offer are severalfold. First, the goods are cheap. No store overheads, plus the advantages of buying in bulk. Two, you just pick up the phone and give a credit card number (hell, just your name, if you’re a returning customer) and the thing will be with you in a couple days — without you even having to get up off your couch. I assume when it drops through your mailbox you have to get up and go fetch it, or maybe these people have someone who does that for them too.
The third inducement is people like me. The presenters. Your friend on the screen.
As the audience, this is what you see. A live picture of the object in question with a panel at one side telling you the cost and the product code and just how beguilingly cheap it is compared to normal in-store prices. You listen to a voice-over, with cutaways to the presenter’s face and upper body as he or she tells you how much the thing costs (in case you can’t read), how many are left to buy (‘Only three quarters of our stock left now – this one’s moving incredibly quickly everybody, so hurry hurry, pick up your phone and make that call, operators are standing by...’) and also explains to the hard-of-thinking why they should want the damn thing in the first place. If it’s a ring, for example, my job would be to remind you that you could put it on your finger and wear it for cosmetic purposes, in order to enhance your attractiveness and/or perceived status. You think I’m kidding. I’m really not.
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