The Meaning of Isolated Objects

by Billie Hinton

  After dinner they sat by the pool outside the motel. The water was too cold for swimming so it was empty of guests. Nice with the light coming up from underwater.

  They’d spent enough time together to talk about what had happened. “You need to fill me in,” was how he broached it to her.

  She twisted a piece of her hair around her finger until it formed a tight coil. “His name was Tag. He was at the campground in Texas. I went there with Grayson.” She stopped. “That’s too long a story, the whole Grayson thing, but anyway, I left with Tag and we went to Roswell. When we stopped for gas I overheard his friend say something about me looking exactly like he’d described. And he asked if I could do what you did.”

  Scott inhaled and then let the breath out slowly.

  “I had a dream about Tag. More like a vision. He knew what it was. It was like he’d been there. Almost like he caused me to have the dream so I’d go with him to White Sands. He had your sketches, from 1977. He knew all about you. He said they want me, that I can do what you did.”

  “Did you do anything other than the hospital room?”

  “I drew missiles. New technology. I have them in the room.”

  “They might come after those.”

  The air was chilly and he noticed she was shivering. He took off his jacket and handed it over to her.

  The light from the pool hit her eyes when she leaned over to take the jacket.

  “We’ll keep moving. See how this plays out.” He leaned forward. “You’re okay, though. Nothing more than what you just told me.”

  “I never even met any of the other people. It was personal, with Tag. Not really related to the remote viewing. Well, it sort of was related. In a way.”

  He knew what she meant. The way he’d gotten inside her dream. That feeling of connection. It was hard to shake. “It might continue.” He didn’t want her to be surprised. If Tag kept it up, she’d feel it.

  “It already is. I can feel him thinking about me. I can feel his body around mine. The outline of his body. His energy. Does that even make sense? It’s hard to describe.”

  He knew exactly. “I get it. I felt it.” He paused. Maybe this wasn’t the right time. He didn’t know. “I feel you sometimes. Calling me home.”

  He hoped she wouldn’t start crying.

  “I know, Daddy. I feel you too.”

  She paused and then continued. “The thing in the hospital room? The worst part was how sad you were.”

  He shifted in the chair and looked away.

  “You have to let that go, all that sadness.”

  “I’m working on it, Wendell.”

  That was as much as he could say.

  The landscape shifted north out of Santa Fe. To the left stood a strangely isolated object, not a mountain, not stone the way she was used to seeing it in Virginia. It looked like clay on a potter’s wheel that had been left in a hurry and forgotten.

  The distant mountains were pink dotted with green. Like the flesh-colored crayon in the big box that had the sharpener on the back.

  They stopped at Bandelier for lunch. The picnic tables were scattered by a stream, and on the other side, what remained of an ancient Pueblo village. They ate beneath the watchful eyes of tassel-eared squirrels, then walked a path bordered by cottonwoods, shielded their faces as they looked ahead to the flat, vertical canyon walls, punched with holes, black against the pale orange stone.

  Ladders climbed high to the cave dwellings, which were carved into the sides of the hills, smooth-walled, with the original fire pits and petroglyphs. Spirals and birds, which made her smile. Labyrinthine flight, among other things.

  She was particularly intrigued with the kivas, underground chambers used for ceremonies and councils. She crouched for a moment and closed her eyes. Filled in the bones of the place inside her head. For the first time her father did it too. It reminded her of their swims together, matching strokes. His images mixed with hers, men and women descending steps that led to the sacred spaces, the fire, the smell of some herb burning, the sounds of their chanting. Her eyes watered from the fragrant smoke, the image was so real. The vibrations of voices, a chorus of hums and shrieks.

  She watched for a moment from her father’s eyes. Her skin tingled. It was much like it had been with Tag, on the mountain. The sensation of being in one skin.

  It shifted then, and she saw her mother, but young, Wendell’s own age. She turned and whirled away, then looked back. She was flirting with her husband. Wendell felt the response, the desire. She was still seeing through her father’s eyes.

  He was standing right behind her, close enough that she could ask. “What things did she love to do?”

  “Gardening. Knitting was a close second. She made everything radiate. She cast a far-flung glow.”

  Wendell felt it, finally. Understood some of what her mother had been to him. The song that contained his broken heart.

  In Los Alamos they searched together through the shelves of a used bookstore. The books were dusty and some smelled of mildew.

  He held up an oversized volume, black and white photographs of stone formations just like the one they’d seen driving. Hoodoos, natural rock piles of fantastical shape, formed over millions of years, constantly changing.

  “I remember these,” she said. “In the blue box.”

  “What blue box?”

  “The ones from my mom. Aunt Jessie has them, up in her closet. We used to look through them all the time. The blue box had all the letters and cards from you.”

  “I didn’t know she kept those.”

  “Well, she did. And one of the postcards had these hoodoo things on it. You sent it to my mom and she wrote something on the back. Something about the hoodoos being where magic happened.”

  She paged through the book. “Listen to these captions. A tenuously perched hoodoo. A strangely isolated hoodoo. A very mature hoodoo that is ready to collapse. A fallen hoodoo.”

  He looked thoughtful but remained quiet. She wondered if the driving and the circumstances would elicit more images from his life. The part she knew nothing about. The reason they had been driven to this journey alone together, what the hoodoos had to say to them. Which walls would fall first.

  “We have to go to Bisti.” She imagined the shapes of the hoodoos, not exactly like those in the book, because they had eroded further, and changed.

  “It’s a good place to spend some time. There’s nothing out there. We’ll be off the grid for awhile.”

  He reminded her that they needed to call Aunt Jessie before they got out of cell signal range. She answered on the third ring.

  “Wendell? God, it is so good to hear your voice. And Scott’s with you? Oh honey, that’s perfect. Finally. You get him all to yourself again. Some quality time.”

  Her father shook his head no when she held the phone out to him. “I love you, Aunt Jessie. We’ll call when we get back to civilization.”

  The directions led them two miles down a gravel road. To a rustic parking lot circled with stones and a small sign. Bisti Wilderness Area.

  The landscape was not ghostlike as in the book. The hoodoos themselves were gray and white, the ground black crumbling rock interspersed with dark pink-orange soil. Chunks of amber-colored fossilized wood.

  They walked side by side. Wendell had pulled her hair back beneath her hat and marched ahead.

  Except for the slight crunch of their hiking boots and the whistling of the wind, they walked in silence. The sun wasn’t yet full strength.

  The hoodoos were regal and eerie.

  “They have spirits, Daddy,” Wendell whispered.

  They continued walking for several hours. Made their own captions: twin hoodoos, cone hoodoo, slanted hoodoo, ridged hoodoo, hoodoo arch, beak-like hoodoo, hoodoo with a helmet.

  When midday hit, they stopped to make shade with a tent and piece of silver tarp. Several pale orange lizards scurried out of the way. A spider-like black beetle toddled along the cracked ground.

  F
rom the tent’s front there was a hoodoo view, and off to the side, scrubby low bushes. They sat in the shade of the tarp. A lone tumbleweed blew by, small but potent monument to wind and solitude. Forward motion.

  Wendell was intrigued by the cow prints and patties, random markers so dry and well preserved they could have been there for decades. There was no way to know.

  He told how he had gone home from the hospital with her a baby in his arms and rocked her in the chair Lynnie had bought in an antique store, one she had tested and tried and considered for weeks before deciding it was the right one.

  That Wendell had cried but stopped when he sang. That he’d dropped three bottles of formula on the kitchen floor and broke them. He had to call Jess to come hold her while he fixed more. Jess had offered to stay the night but he’d refused, determined to take care of things himself.

  He didn’t think it necessary to tell Wendell how he had cursed and stomped and acted like a fool on the back porch when she finally let him put her down in the crib. He had only lost it that first night. Then promised himself never to do it again.

  It would have been dangerous to indulge bad behavior and he hadn’t. Not that particular one, anyway.

  They talked for a long time and drank water to stay hydrated. Wendell passed him the bag of trail mix. He took a handful and gave it back.

  After awhile she told the story of her earliest memory. Him leaving. She wanted to know where he had gone.

  He remembered, but did not want to tell her. He had been in a darkened room, remote viewing for the government, spending every other moment in some strange dream space with his dead wife, who he had not been able to give up. The years he spent working the field in Afghanistan he had done his job and tried his best to lose Lynnie. Attempted to bury her, but nothing had really worked.

  One daughter he had hidden away and forgotten, the other he gave to his sister-in-law and pretended that connecting through the ethers was enough.

  He didn’t want to think of her tears. He was ashamed to think it but when he had been home, he’d been glad to go away again, relieved to be off duty to the little girl he loved but barely trusted himself to care for.

  That he’d rather have been shot at than stay with her seemed sick now, and shameful. He didn’t say that either. Maybe he should have. But surely there were some things better left unspoken.

  She hadn’t known he’d felt so guilty about leaving.

  Across from her, he looked into the distance. In the shifting light all the lines in his face showed. The way his shoulders sagged made her want to rub the strength back into those tired muscles. She thought she saw something, a darkness in front of his face, like a shadow, but it couldn’t be, not in that sun. Perhaps a preview of what would be in fifteen or twenty years. The older man he would become.

  They waited out the heat while evening fell around them like a cloak. The hoodoos sang, a low and bewitching hum. In some other incarnation she could have transcribed their music. As it was, all she did was listen, let it slip into her.

  He listened too.

  “Hear them?” she whispered. He nodded.

  He was drinking again, although not as much since whatever he drank he’d had to pack out to the camp. He seemed to require the fortification of whiskey.

  “There’s something else I need to say.” His voice was halting and unsure. He waited a moment before continuing. “I had another daughter. She was born a few months after you. She lived in Afghanistan. I saw her twice, when she was born and again when she was four. I went back a third time recently but she was no longer there. I was told she was killed in a skirmish.”

  She didn’t know what to say, and walked off from the campsite to be alone. She didn’t go far, but enough that she didn’t have to look at him, or feel him looking at her. She felt a mixture of things. Betrayal and anger, confusion and jealousy. But mostly she felt reluctance at hearing more. It was like opening a wound and having things leak out. When it got dark she sighed and went back to the tent.

  He sat in slanted moonlight, one half of him swathed in a pale white glow, the other in shadow. She began to comb through her hair with tentative fingers, over and over again until she got up the nerve to ask.

  “Why couldn’t you track her the way you did me?”

  “I don’t know. I never got images the way I do with you. It was like the channel was blocked with her.”

  He turned away for a while and kept drinking. The air seemed frozen and her fingers continued combing through her hair, which had gotten knotted by the wind. It was as though her arm had been wound up and operated on its own.

  She felt dizzy, but the vertigo was inside her head, not physical. She glanced at her father. The way she saw him had changed, like she was seeing him from some other perspective. She saw him suddenly as a man, not a father.

  When he turned back, his look was different.

  His forearm, tight with muscle, rested on one knee. The grind of his teeth, jaw set so hard, but then he opened his mouth and it stopped.

  She didn’t know if he even realized how he was looking at her.

  Years back they had found the abandoned house while hiking the mountains of Tennessee, on an old logging road that curved up and around to the top of a ridge. She saw it first and ran ahead to claim it. The front door was half obscured with vines but unlocked.

  In the front room a single chair was draped in a dusty sheet. Boxes were piled in one corner, decaying, spilling over with wrinkled clothing and crumbling books.

  The kitchen must have gotten the morning sun, but in the afternoon, when they had stumbled onto it, there was only enough light to make the old white porcelain sink luminous in the shadows. The cabinet doors beneath stood open, drawers pulled out, as if someone had been looking for something and forgot to close them back.

  On the sink’s edge a single spoon and coffee cup were the only inhabitants in the room.

  She wanted to know who lived there, Even at that young age she had wanted to preserve every tableau, use them as pieces to puzzle out the hidden story. The secrets of a forgotten place.

  That night, inside the abandoned house, she woke to find her father’s sleeping bag empty. She kicked her way out of her own bag, grabbed the flashlight, slipped on sandals and followed the circle of light down the narrow hallway, toward the flicker at the end, a candle, she thought. She had expected to find him there reading.

  Her mouth formed the shape of the word she was about to say. Daddy. But she stopped when she saw him, naked in candlelight, dappled with shadow and the yellow flicker of flame.

  “Lynnie.” His voice, husky and full, a throaty timbre that pushed her back.

  He was on top of something, silky white fabric, a dress, it looked like. From where she stood his body was elongated, buttocks taut with muscle as he moved his hips.

  What he was doing was both unthinkable and fascinating. She knew she should go back to the sleeping bags. She shouldn’t have watched such a private moment. The way he’d moved was beautiful and scary.

  “Lynnie, be still. Don’t go.” He pushed harder against the fabric, spread the dress beneath his hands as though he held her there.

  “Come back, Lynnie. Goddamn it, come back and stay.”

  Suddenly she had seen her too. Lynnie, her mother, the ghost woman he had conjured. Her face, familiar and yet distorted, eyes beneath his, burning as hot as the flame of the candle.

  There was nothing she could have offered him back then, little girl that she was, nothing to match the spirit sex her mother gave. Now Wendell was a woman, full of her own powers to haunt and possess. It seemed she had arrived finally, to a destination. Like she was completing a circle.

  She slipped back and forth beneath her Wendell self and the energy she knew was her mother’s. It was her mother who took off the clothing, revealing breasts and length of naked body, the long hair. The full portrait, nothing hidden.

  When she shifted back to Wendell in her mind, she reached for the clothing and the
n stopped. She had always wanted a bond with her father that could never be broken, some concrete thing she could do to prevent his leaving and give her some of what she needed, solace for the leave-takings, his and her own.

  He went to his duffel, looked back at her while one hand searched the bag. Her arms stippled, gooseflesh, curiosity and fear sliding over her like a shiver. What he might pull from that dark cavity.

  It was white, diaphanous, for a moment she thought he had conjured an apparition, the pale shimmer that linked his hand with the bag.

  It cascaded from his hands as he walked toward her. She took a step back.

  It was the gown.

  She considered the act, putting flesh to a ghost, the absent father, anchoring him deep inside her body. Her mother’s body.

  Her mother’s gown, such a light fabric, nearly weightless, and soft. Wendell slipped her arms through the sleeves, it flowed around her like the breath of a lover. He was wide-eyed in the moonlight, and stepped sideways, back to shadow.

  “Lynnie.”

  His voice pierced the space between them, thick with something, syrup, some tincture both deadly and sweet. They were diving too deep.

  She was Lynnie again, not the mother but the wife, not like being possessed, but intentional, a role she chose to take, an offering.

  What he needed to let her go.

  The moon cast a bewitching light. Lynnie stood before him with shining eyes, wearing the white gown, standing on dusty earth. She had come to him as her younger self, before she had been pregnant with Wendell. She seemed like Wendell, somehow. Then he thought it was Wendell.

  His mind reeled, but he remained motionless. Unable to look away. Nor could he speak. The words hovered – stop this, no – but remained wispy and elusive, smoke in the air around him.

  She stepped closer and he saw the fine hairs at the top of her left thigh glisten in the moonlight.