The Dark Country

by Dennis Etchison

  "So," he said hurriedly, "why don't we wrap this up, so I can leave you two to enjoy your evening? All I need are the answers to a couple of quick questions, and I'll be on my way."

  Morrison slumped back into place, expelling a rush of air from his bean-bag chair, and thumbed the remote channel selector to a blank station. A pointillist pattern of salt-and-pepper interference swarmed the 12-inch screen. He pushed up the volume in anticipation, so as not to miss a word of The Uncle Jerry Show when the time came to switch channels again, eyed a clock on the wall over the Sony—there was a clock, after all, if only one knew where to look amid the glowing clutter—and half-turned to his visitor. The clock read ten minutes to six.

  "What are you waiting to hear?" asked Morrison.

  "Yes," said his wife, "why don't you tell us?"

  The young man lowered his eyes to his clipboard, seeking the briefest possible explanation, but saw only the luminescence of white shag carpeting through his transparent vinyl chair—another collector's item. He felt uneasy circulation twitching his weary legs, and could not help but notice the way the inflated chair seemed to be throbbing with each pulse.

  "Well," trying one more time, noting that it was coming up on nine minutes to six and still counting, "your names were picked by AmiDex demographics. Purely at random. You represent twelve thousand other viewers in this area. What you watch at any given hour determines the rating points for each network."

  There, that was simple enough, wasn't it? No need to go into the per-minute price of sponsor ad time buys based on the overnight share, sweeps week, the competing services each selling its own brand of accuracy. Eight-and-a-half minutes to -go-

  "The system isn't perfect, but it's the best way we have so far of—"

  "You want to know why we watch what we watch, don't you?"

  "Oh no, of course not! That's really no business of ours. We don't care. But we do need to tabulate viewing records, and when yours wasn't returned—"

  "Let's talk to him," said the woman. "He might be able to help."

  "He's too young, can't you see that, Jenny?"

  "I beg your pardon?" said the young man.

  "It's been such a long time," said the woman, rising with a

  whoosh from her chair and stepping in front of her husband. "We can try."

  The man got slowly to his feet, his arms and torso long and phosphorescent in the peculiar mix of ultraviolet and television light. He towered there, considering. Then he took a step closer.

  The young man was aware of his own clothing unsticking from the inflated vinyl, crackling slightly, a quick seam of blue static shimmering away across the back of the chair; of the snow pattern churning on the untuned screen, the color tube shifting hues under the black light, turning to gray, then brightening in the darkness, locking on an electric blue, and holding.

  Morrison seemed to undergo a subtle transformation as details previously masked by shadow now came into focus. It was more than his voice, his words. It was the full size of him, no longer young but still strong, on his feet and braced in an unexpectedly powerful stance. It was the configuration of his head in silhouette, the haunted pallor of the skin, stretched taut, the large, luminous whites of the eyes, burning like radium. It was all these things and more. It was the reality of him, no longer a statistic but a man, clear and unavoidable at last.

  The young man faced Morrison and his wife. The palms of his hsuids were sweating coldly. He put aside the questionnaire.

  Six minutes to six.

  "I'll put down that you—you declined to participate. How's that? No questions asked." He made ready to leave.

  "It's been such a long time," said Mrs. Morrison again.

  Mr. Morrison laughed shortly, a descending scale ending in a bitter, metallic echo that cut through the hissing. "I'll bet it's all crazy to you, isn't it? This stuff.'"

  "No, not at all. Some of these pieces are priceless. I recognized that right away."

  "Are they?"

  "Sure," said the young man. "If you don't mind my saying so, it reminds me of my brother Jack's room. He threw out most of his underground newspapers, posters, that sort of thing when he got drafted. It was back in the sixties—I can barely

  remember it. If only he'd realized. Nobody saved anything. That's why it's all so valuable now."

  "We did," said Mrs. Morrison.

  "So I see."

  They seemed to want to talk, after all—lonely, perhaps—so he found himself ignoring the static and actually making an effort to prolong his exit. A couple of minutes more wouldn't hurt. They're not so bad, the Morrisons, he thought. I can see that now.

  "Well, I envy you. I went through a Marvel Comics phase when I was a kid. Those are worth a bundle now, too. My mother burned them all when I went away to college, of course. It's the same principle. But if I could go back in a time machine . . ." He shook his head and allowed an unforced smile to show through.

  "These were our son's things," said Mrs. Morrison.

  "Oh?" Could be I remind them of their son. I guess I should be honored.

  "Our son David," said Mr. Morrison.

  "I see." There was an awkward pause. The young man felt vaguely embarrassed. "It's nice of him to let you hold his collection. You've got quite an investment here."

  The minute hand of the clock on the wall ground through its cycle, pressing forward in the rush of white noise from the speakers.

  "David Morrison." Her voice sounded hopeful. "You've heard the name?"

  David Morrison, David Morrison. Curious. Yes, he could almost remember something, a magazine cover or . . .

  "It was a long time ago. He—our son—was the last American boy to be killed in Vietnam."

  It was four minutes to six and he didn't know what to say.

  "When it happened, we didn't know what to think," said Mrs. Morrison. "We talked to people like us. Mostly they wanted to pretend it never happened."

  "They didn't understand, either," said Mr. Morrison.

  "So we read everything. The magazines, books. We listened to the news commentators. It was terribly confusing. We finally decided even they didn't know any more than we did about what went on over there, or why."

  "What was it to them? Another story for The Six O'Clock News, right, Jenny?"

  Mrs. Morrison drew a deep, pained breath. Her eyes fluttered as she spoke, the television screen at her back lost in a grainy storm of deep blue snow.

  "Finally the day came for me to clear David's room. ..."

  "Please," said the young man, "you don't have to explain."

  But she went ahead with it, a story she had gone over so many times she might have been recalling another life. Her eyes opened. They were dry and startlingly clear.

  It was three minutes to six.

  "I started packing David's belongings. Then it occurred to us that he might have known the reason. So we went through his papers and so forth, even his record albums, searching. So much of it seemed strange, in another language, practically from another planet. But we trusted that the answer would be revealed to us in time."

  "We're still living with it," said Morrison. "It's with us when we get up in the morning, when we give up at night. Sometimes I think I see a clue there, the way he would have seen it, but then I lose the thread and we're back where we started.

  "We tried watching the old reruns, hoping they had something to tell. But they were empty. It was like nothing important was going on in this country back then."

  "Tell him about the tracks, Bob."

  "I'm getting to it. . . . Anyway, we waited. I let my job go, and we were living off our savings. It wasn't much. It's almost used up by now. But we had to have the answer. Why? Nothing was worth a damn, otherwise. . . .

  "Then, a few months ago, there was this article in TV GUIDE. About the television programs, the way they make them. They take the tracks—the audience reactions, follow?— and use them over and over. Did you know that?"

  "I—I had heard ..."
r />   "Well, it's true. They take pieces of old soundtracks, mix them in, a big laugh here, some talk there—it's all taped inside a machine, an audience machine. The tapes go all the way back. I've broken 'em down and compared. Half the time you

  can hear the same folks laughing from twenty, twenty-five years ago. And from the sixties. That's the part that got to me. So I rigged a way to filter out everything—dialogue, music— except for the audience, the track."

  "Why, he probably knows all about that. Don't you, young man?"

  "A lot of them, the audience, are gone now. It doesn't matter. They're on tape. It's recycled, 'canned' they call it. It's all the same to TV. Point is, this is the only way left for us to get through, or them to us. To make contact. To listen, eavesdrop, you might say, on what folks were doing and thinking and commenting on and laughing over back then.

  "I can't call 'em up on the phone, or take a poll, or stop people on the street, 'cause they'd only act like nothing happened. Today, it's all passed on. Don't ask me how, but it has.

  "They're passed on now, too, so many of 'em."

  "Like the boys," said Mrs. Morrison softly, so that her voice was all but lost in the hiss of the swirling blue vortex. "So many beautiful boys, the ones who would talk now, if only they could."

  "Like the ones on the tracks," said Mr. Morrison.

  "Like the ones who never came home," said his wife. "Dead now, all dead, and never coming back."

  One minute to six.

  "Not yet," he said aloud, frightened by his own voice.

  As Mr. Morrison cranked up the gain and turned back to his set, the young man hurried out. As Mrs. Morrison opened her ears and closed her eyes to all but the laughtrack that rang out around her, he tried in vain to think of a way to reduce it all to a few simple marks in a now pointless language on sheets of printed paper. And as the Morrisons listened for the approving bursts of laughter and murmuring and applause, separated out of an otherwise meaningless echo from the past, he closed the door behind him, leaving them as he had found them. He began to walk fast, faster, and finally to run.

  The questionnaire crumpled and dropped from his hand.

  Jack, I loved you, did you know that? You were my brother. I didn't understand, either. No one did. There was no time. But I told you, didn't I? Didn't I?

  He passed other isolated houses on the block, ghostly living rooms turning to flickering beacons of cobalt blue against the

  night. The voices from within were television voices, muffled and anonymous and impossible to decipher unless one were to listen too closely, more closely than life itself would seem to want to permit, to the exclusion of all else, as to the falling of a single blade of grass or the unseen whisper of an approaching scythe. And it rang out around him then, too, through the trees and into the sky and the cold stars, the sound of the muttering and the laughter, the restless chorus of the dead, spreading rapidly away from him across the city and the world.

  THE DARK COUNTRY

  Martin sat by the pool, the wind drying his hair.

  A fleshy, airborne spider appeared on the edge of the book which he had been reading there. From this angle it cast a long, pointed needle across the yellowing page. The sun was hot and clean; it went straight for his nose. Overweight American children practiced their volleyball on the bird-of-paradise plants. Weathered rattan furniture gathered dust beyond the peeling diving board.

  Traffic passed on the road. Trucks, campers, bikes.

  The pool that would not be scraped till summer. The wooden chairs that had been ordered up from the States. Banana leaves. Olive trees. A tennis court that might be done next year. A single color TV antenna above the palms. By the slanted cement patio heliotrope daisies, speckled climbing vines. The morning a net of light on the water. Boats fishing in Todos Santos Bay.

  A smell like shrimps Veracruz blowing off the silvered waves.

  And a strangely familiar island, like a hazy floating giant, where the humpback whales play. Yesterday in Ensenada, the car horns talking and a crab taco in his hand, he had wanted to buy a pair of huaraches and a Mexican shirt. The best tequila in the world for three-and-a-half a liter. Noche Buena beer, foil

  labels that always peel before you can read them. Delicados con Filtros cigarettes.

  Bottles of agua mineral. Tehuacan con gas. No rewritable.

  He smiled as he thought of churros at the Blow Hole, the maid who even washed his dishes, the Tivoli Night Club with Reno cocktail napkins, mescal flavored with worm, eggs fresh from the nest, chorizo grease in the pan, bar girls with rhine-stone-studded Aztec headbands, psychoactive liqueurs, seagulls like the tops of valentines, grilled corvina with lemon, the endless plumes of surf. . . .

  It was time for a beer run to the bottling factory in town.

  "Buenos diasl"

  Martin looked up, startled. He was blinded by the light. He fumbled his dark glasses down and moved his head. A man and a woman stood over his chair. The sun was at their backs.

  "Americano?"

  "Yes," said Martin. He shielded his forehead and tried to see their faces. Their features were blacked in by the glare that spilled around their heads.

  "I told you he was an American," said the woman. "Are you studying?"

  "What?"

  Martin closed the book self-consciously. It was a paperback edition of The Penal Colony, the only book he had been able to borrow from any of the neighboring cabins. Possibly it was the only book in Quintas Papagayo. For some reason the thought depressed him profoundly, but he had brought it poolside anyway. It seemed the right thing to do. He could not escape the feeling that he ought to be doing something more than nursing a tan. And the magazines from town were all in Spanish.

  He slipped his sketchbook on top of Kafka and opened it awkwardly.

  "I'm supposed to be working," he said. "On my drawings. You know how it is." They didn't, probably, but he went on. "It's difficult to get anything done down here."

  "He's an artist!" said the woman.

  "My wife thought you were an American student on vacation," said the man.

  "Our son is a student, you see," said the woman. Martin didn't, but nodded sympathetically. She stepped aside to sit on the arm of another deck chair under the corrugated green fi-

  berglass siding. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse and thigh-length shorts. "He was studying for his Master's Degree in Political Science at UCLA, but now he's decided not to finish. I tried to tell him he should at least get his teaching credential, but—"

  "Our name's Winslow," said the man, extending a muscular hand. "Mr. and Mrs. Winslow." "Jack Martin."

  "It was the books," said Mr. Winslow. "Our boy always has books with him, even on visits." He chuckled and shook his head.

  Martin nodded.

  "You should see his apartment," said Mrs. Winslow. "So many.'' She gestured with her hands as if describing the symptoms of a hopeless affliction.

  There was an embarrassing lull. Martin looked to his feet. He flexed his toes. The right ones were stiff. For something further to do, he uncapped a Pilot Fineliner pen and touched it idly to the paper. Without realizing it, he smiled. This trip must be doing me more good than I'd hoped, he thought. I haven't been near a college classroom in fifteen years.

  A wave rushed toward the rocks at the other side of the cabins.

  "Staying long?" asked the man, glancing around nervously. He was wearing Bermuda shorts over legs so white they were almost phosphorescent.

  "I'm not sure," said Martin.

  "May I take a peek at your artwork?" asked the woman. He shrugged and smiled.

  She lifted the sketchbook from his lap with infinite delicacy, as the man began talking again.

  He explained that they owned their own motor home, which was now parked on the Point, at the end of the rock beach, above the breakwater. Weekend auto insurance cost them $13.70 in Tijuana. They came down whenever they got the chance. They were both retired, but there were other things to consider—just what,
he did not say. But it was not the same as it used to be. He frowned at the moss growing in the bottom of the pool, at the baby weeds poking up through the sand in the canister ash trays, at the separating layers of the sawed-off diving board.

  Martin could see more questions about to surface behind the man's tired eyes. He cleared his throat and squirmed in his chair, feeling the sweat from his arms soaking into the unsealed wood. Mr. Winslow was right, of course. Things were not now as they once were. But he did not relish being reminded of it, not now, not here.

  A small figure in white darted into his field of vision, near the edge of the first cabin. It was walking quickly, perhaps in this direction.

  "There's my maid," he said, leaning forward. "She must be finished now." He unstuck his legs from the chaise longue.

  "She has keys?" said the man.

  "I suppose so. Yes, I'm sure she does. Well—"

  "Does she always remember to lock up?"

  He studied the man's face, but a lifetime of apprehensions were recorded there, too many for Martin to isolate one and read it accurately.

  "I'll remind her," he said, rising.

  He picked up his shirt, took a step toward Mrs. Winslow and stood shifting his weight.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the maid put a hand to the side of her face. .

  Mrs. Winslow closed the pad, smoothed the cover and handed it back. "Thank you," she said oddly.

  Martin took it and offered his hand. He realized at once that his skin had become uncomfortably moist, but Mr. Winslow gripped it firmly and held it. He confronted Martin soberly, as if about to impart a bit of fatherly advice.

  "They say he comes down out of the hills," said Winslow, his eyes unblinking. Martin half-turned to the low, tan range that lay beyond the other side of the highway. When he turned back, the man's eyes were waiting. "He's been doing it for years. It's something of a legend around here. They can't seem to catch him. We never took it seriously, until now."

  "Is that right?"

  "Why, last night, while we were asleep, he stole an envelope of traveler's checks and a whole carton of cigarettes from behind our heads. Can you beat that? Right inside the camper! Of course we never bothered to lock up. Why should we? Everyone's very decent around here. We've never had any trouble ourselves. Until this trip. It's hard to believe."