I should have felt fear, I know, in the face of the still, dark house. The front door had been removed altogether and the entryway was a gaping hole.
It was pitch-black inside with all the windows boarded up. But when I stepped across the threshold I felt an instant, soporific comfort. There was a sudden drop of pressure in my chest accompanied by a great fatigue. I couldn’t say what about the place made me feel as though my system was suddenly going to sleep, made me wish there was a chair to sit in.
I fired the flash into the other rooms. The first was actually an attached log cabin that hadn’t been chinked in decades, gaps between the logs big enough to stick your hand through. Of the six adobe rooms, five connected end-to-end with no doors on the passages between them. But at the entrance to the last room, a heavy wooden door was deadbolted.
I wondered about the people who had lived here. These houses, these old adobes, were originally oneroom dwellings. People ate and washed, slept, fucked, shat in the pot, gave birth, and died all between the same four walls.
It was only when the oldest son grew up that they converted a window on one end into a door or broke through a wall shotgun-style and added three more. The young man and his new wife moved into the next room, which they in turn filled with children, and the cycle began again.
In warmer months, the cooking and washing took place outside and naturally so did most of the work: farming, herding, and gathering the next winter’s wood, a chore that began early in spring, as soon as the snow had melted from the last winter.
At eight thousand feet, winters lasted half the year—long, monotonous battles of resistance against the snow, the cold, the wind, the dark. The women melted snow in iron pots and cooked dried meat, chiles, beans, hominy. For six frigid months the families slept long hours, played tired games, told stories, and never let the fire go out.
I walked back out on the portal, heard Oppie rustling in the dark trees, and whistled low. “C’mere, boy.”
He came out of the hedge dragging a plastic bag around his neck.
“Oppie, what the fuck did you get into?”
It was a large shopping bag, not quickie-mart sized but the kind you’d get at a department store.
“Drop!” He did not drop. “Drop, Oppie!” He could not drop. He had somehow gotten his pointy head through both handles, and now the bag was slung around his neck.
I bent over Oppie and he had a bizarre look in his eyes. I took the bag off his neck and felt that it was heavy. Oppie scrambled away.
I opened the bag and held the camera inside. The lighted display shone on an intricate pattern. I felt the lining of my throat thicken. Inside the bag were bones—not from a chicken or pig, but large bones, a tangle of eight or more.
I threw the bag back into the weeds and peered around the overgrown yard. The sagebrush and ragweed glowed dimly in the starlight. A cricket chirped loudly near my feet.
“Come on, Oppie, let’s get back to the campground.”
We walked back the way we had come.
When we got to the campground Kitty was still asleep. Oppie followed me into the tent and curled up at her feet. I slid quietly into my sleeping bag and lay awake a long time.
I played the scene over and over in my head: Oppie dragging a bag of bones out of the thicket. Had there been someone out there? Oppie hadn’t growled. Could he have sniffed around in the brush, found the bag, and looped his head through the handles while trying to get at the contents? What kind of bones were they? Cow? Elk?
Toward dawn, with the crickets giving way to the birds, the insomnia yielded to a throbbing headache. I think of that dark hour waiting for sunrise—tossing in the sleeping bag, irritated by Oppie’s farts, and wincing against the migraine—as a kind of haven, a last quiet before I came to understand the nightmare I had stumbled into.
Friday, July 5
Soon it was morning and kids were waking up at campsites all around us, laughing, screaming, jumping in the lake. It was a workday, but we were in no hurry. I had used a personal day to make my birthday a four-day weekend. Great expectations.
“This place is a dump,” I told Kitty after taking Oppie for his walk. “Let’s go home.”
“You drag me way the fuck out here in the sticks and now you want to leave already?”
“There’s no coffee and I have a headache.”
“You and your goddamn headaches.”
We packed out what we packed in and rattled back out of Morphy Lake State Park over that abysmal road, Kitty and I stewing in silence while Oppie stewed noisily.
When we got down from Ledoux, I made a left onto 518, pulled into the Mustang in Mora, and got some awful coffee. We crossed the mountains through Carson National Forest, blowing by Tres Ritos and Sipapu. I made a left onto 75 in Vadito, taking the winding state highway through Peñasco and Dixon.
Today is 7/5, you’re going seventy-five on 75, and you just turned forty years old.
I made a left onto 68 in Embudo and we snaked through the canyon. We climbed out at Velarde and motored across the hot valley of Alcalde, then got onto 30 in Española and made our way through Santa Clara and San Ildefonso. We climbed 502 back up the Hill, all the way home Kitty’s silent treatment accusing me: Why didn’t we stay in a hotel? We don’t have to be camping. We have money.
I am a reporter, among the best in the in-house publishing industry. I could be doing interviews for Vogue or Vanity Fair, but after the last wave of layoffs I decided to weather the recession on the richest hill in America, Los Alamos, writing profiles for Surge, the Lab’s employee magazine. How many places in the world can a writer take frequent afternoons off and they still pay him enough to keep a restored Spider on the road?
I had the contract, the health plan, cost-of-living increases, grade-level adjustments, pay raises, bonuses, and the 401(k), on top of which I had already saved six figures.
When we got home, Kitty took Oppie for a walk on Pajarito Road.
I had agreed to a dog on the condition that it be a Basenji. I read somewhere that purebred Basenjis don’t bark. Oppie didn’t have to. Even though his low growl was barely audible over the hum of the refrigerator, he skittered around crazily on the linoleum whenever anyone came to the door, and that was enough watchdog for Los Alamos, where a lot of people don’t even bother to lock their doors.
From the day we brought Oppie home, he had been surprisingly well mannered—except for the containment issue. But with the invisible fence he was adapting.
I took my statins and checked the cut on my hand. It was sore, but on the surface it didn’t look so bad. I discarded the duct-taped tissue and dressed the wound with a sterile gauze pad.
I caught the weekend highlights on Golf Network while Kitty chopped Oppie some sirloin and popped a frozen pizza in the oven for us. I sat on the couch and she took the easy chair. More silent treatment while we watched a rerun of Sex in the City.
Remember when we used to watch TV together and cuddle on the couch and she would stroke my forearm, how I actually used to feel that? Now I don’t feel anything at all. It’s like it all happens in a movie, detached, without sensation. Why is that?
We polished off a bottle of good Shiraz with a couple of thin slices of pizza apiece. I scraped the cheese off mine. I had to watch the HDLs and the LDLs. We want to see the one go up and the other go down, said Dr. Hank, just like the scales of justice. I gave the crusts to Oppie. Back when Kitty and I used to speak to each other, we would call these pizza bones.
At bedtime Kitty went upstairs, popped an Ambien, and climbed under the covers, Oppie curling up at her feet.
I programmed Mr. Coffee and went upstairs to lie beside Kitty for a minute. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, the Ambien would make her pliant, but tonight she was all elbows.
When I got the job in Los Alamos, the real-estate agent had left Kitty and me alone in this bedroom to share our images of the future together. Kitty tickled my ribs. Can we really afford it? Of course not, but that never stops anyone. This was 2007, and
as long as you kept your credit somewhat clean, a broker could get you a loan based on stated income.
In better days we had lain side-by-side in the showroom on the king-size, springless, formaldehyde-free mattress, giggling and selecting our own Sleep Numbers. We bought king-size for luxury, but now when I tried getting close to her, all that size felt like we were in two beds, separated by a red zone in the middle that neither of us crossed with even a stray hand or foot.
I didn’t like feeling sorry for myself, but I couldn’t really blame Kitty. It wasn’t that I hated her, even though I couldn’t vouchsafe the opposite. He never gave you a child—her mother’s indictment. Kitty never told her about the complicated miscarriage and how that pretty much cut off any possibility. Now Oppie offered all the worries and joys of parenthood—nursing, potty training, private schooling, grooming—compressed into a 15 percent lifespan.
Dropping off to sleep, I was thinking about the abandoned house. It had been strange about the bones around Oppie’s neck, but this was nothing compared to the shock I would get when I checked out the photo I had taken of myself on the portal, the loser shot.
I awoke in the night to full alertness, stirred by a distant, persistent dog barking. My injured hand was throbbing. Kitty lay slack in Ambien’s embrace and I needed to take a piss. The crickets were still going strong, so I knew it was sometime in the middle of the night. I felt for the bedside clock and squinted at the red numbers in the dark.
2:47—shit.
3:47 I could have handled, 4:47 might have been fine, and 5:47 would have been perfect, but after that sleepless night on the hard ground beside Morphy Lake, 2:47 meant a miserable day ahead.
I went downstairs without a shirt on. Oppie followed and I let him out the dining room slider. The house was quiet.
I lumbered into the bathroom and sat on the toilet. The statins gave me nocturnal erections, so I had to sit to piss if I didn’t want to spray all over the place. I flipped on the light, plink. The little voice inside my head said, Poor Dad.
My father would wake up for work in the middle of the night and walk down the hallway to the bathroom. There was that second before he shut the door when he would flip the switch, flooding the hallway with light and making me squeeze my eyes shut. The worst part was that sound, echoing off tile every day except Sunday while he started his workday in the dark—plink!
I used to feel sorry for him for his sadness, for being already unhappy as long as I could remember, for his constant struggle to make ends meet. And I resented him for not being around more, for never taking me to a ball game, for always being drunk on Sunday and most nights after work.
Now that I was married I pitied my father for having stuck around. Why had he worked so hard when my mom had never shown any love for him? She hadn’t even been nice to him.
What made him wake up at an hour when most dads, even those with happy families, were asleep, and what made him get out of bed, walk past mean, crazy, sleeping Mom, come over to my bed, and, while I pretended to sleep, lay a hand on my head … then go into the bathroom, throw the switch, and give himself a shave in the middle of the night?
What made him get going on the first in a haul of chores through a workday that he couldn’t have enjoyed, that nobody could, through long, monotonous days of commute, back-breaking work, and slow, halting, drunken returns?
And then came Fair Oaks, the institution. The one time I had asked him about it, he said it was because he had begun having terrible nightmares and that after a while, even on the brightest days, he couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Dad’s psychiatrist had been an Italian American, the brother of a famous character actor in the movies. Now every time I see that actor in a modern mafia movie, I think of the doctor, placid behind wire-rimmed glasses, prescribing mountains of lithium, four hospitalizations, thirteen bipolar shock treatments. This was before researchers discovered that unipolar ECT was just as effective and fried memory a lot less permanently. But don’t resent the doctor for his orders. He was just trying to jolt Dad out of those nightmares.
Finally, my father’s funeral—devastating, but also a relief. When I had gone past the casket and made the sign of the cross, I heard that noise of the bathroom light switch: plink. Now every time I hear it, it’s like the sound of a little coffin shutting. Poor Dad.
I went into the living room and turned on the TV, muted it. The Golf Network was cycling the same highlights show as when I had gone to bed. My hand throbbed. The couch was hard. The upholstery was cold.
I turned off the TV, went into the dining room, and flipped on the back flood lamps. I pushed aside the curtain and caught Oppie squatting on my practice putting green. I rolled up a copy of Surge and threw open the slider, smacking Oppie’s haunches as the final squirt dribbled onto the grass.
That’s when I remembered the photo.
I went to the garage and got the camera from the glove compartment of the Spider. I connected it, woke up the laptop, and opened iPhoto. I had not emptied the memory card in a while. You have 112 new photos. Download now? Yes.
I went to the cabinet to pour myself a glass of scotch. Then I opened the desk drawer and took out my stash and papers and rolled myself a joint. While the photos downloaded I smoked. First there were a bunch of pictures of the workers digging the trench on our property line for the invisible fence, then a bunch more shots that Kitty took of Oppie playing on the front lawn. Then the download got to the picture I took at the house, the loser shot.
In the photo—holy shit!—a spike of red light seemed to shoot out of my chest.
Oo-ee-oo.
I peered at the photo and tried to make sense of how it happened: had it been digital noise, or maybe the flash reflecting off the zipper of my jacket? It’s not unusual for photos taken in low light to develop artifacts, but this was a straight red spike, and it was right there over my heart, a real you gotta put dat up on your Facebook shot.
I needed to show this to someone for a reality check, but if I showed it to Kitty I would have to explain my late-night hike at the campground. I decided I would wait and show Hank Farmer for a second opinion.
I closed the laptop and went upstairs to lie next to Kitty. When I heard a scratch on the dining room slider, I remembered Oppie and went back downstairs to let him in.
I lay back down beside Kitty with my statin erection and thought about the blood tech. When would I go back into the clinic for the next draw? I could probably squeeze one in before the end of the month. What would the blood tech tell me? Sorry, my car broke down … ? Would she even remember? Was this something she did to guys regularly, or was she fucking with me specifically?
Except for the goth stuff, she seemed like a typical employee of the valley, another one of those Hispanas who take all the menial jobs at the Lab. They were the new migrant workers, people who race up the mesa every day from forty or sixty miles away because there aren’t any houses for less than a mil on the Hill.
She was one of those women that northern New Mexico is built upon, paraprofessionals, whatever that means, working long days while their boyfriends stay home drunk or go out for irregular day labor and complain about how they can never get a break. It was possible she had pegged me as a potential sugar daddy but then one of those guys whose name was tattooed on her arm discovered the scheme from one of her girlfriends and beat it right out of her.
The throbbing hand kept me up most of the night. Only when the first light of dawn began glowing against the curtains did I finally begin feeling drowsy. I lay there a long time and thought about the house.
Maybe this was one point where it might have been possible to let it go. The house had given me a strange feeling, but it could have remained a quirky accident. The photo could have stayed there on the memory card, unlooked at for months, years, and the bones around Oppie’s neck remained something unexplained, barely remembered, just another paranormal holiday in New Mexico. But I was hooked. Something was already growing inside of me.
Saturday, July 6
I was jolted awake by the keening of a Weedwacker. I got up to look out the window. My neighbor Ned was edging his lawn in gloves, goggles, ear protection. I looked at the clock—6:20 a.m. This is insane. What kind of asshole weed-whacks at 6:20 in the morning?
I remembered getting up in the night, remembered the photo, and decided to catch a round down at Buffalo Thunder before rolling up on Dr. Hank at brunch for Bloody Marys.
I showered and got dressed. Then I went down to the kitchen and poured a cup from Mr. Coffee, took one scorching sip, and left the mug in the sink. I packed the laptop in my briefcase, loaded my clubs in the trunk of the Spider, and backed out of the garage into the Los Alamos sun.
I was at the light on the corner of Third and Main listening to the idle of the Spider. The opposing pedestrian countdown told me there were only seconds left on my red when an old man stepped off the curb wearing something he’d tailored from a burlap bag, the collar and sleeves scissored out of the bottom and sides, the hem of the sack riding above his bony knees like a tattered miniskirt.
I said to myself, Great, the sackcloth-and-ashes people are back.
He was a perfect specimen: stringy hair, wild eyes, crazy beard. The old man intercepted a woman jogging on the crosswalk. “There’s blood on your shoes!” he yelled at her, shaking a bag that discharged a little cloud of ashes over her New Balances.
The jogger dodged and the old man swung his fishy eye on me. “There’s blood on your car!” He pitched toward the Spider and I had to look away. The skinny legs reminded me unpleasantly of my dad in a towel coming out of the shower.
The light turned green and I leaned on the horn. For such a small car, it had a solid old Italian air horn, and the old man jumped out of the way.
Here was one of the little disturbing nuisances of life on the Hill that you had to learn to push into the periphery this time of year. What was Pax Kyrie doing back so soon? There were still ten days until the anniversary of the first nuclear detonation at the Trinity site. Sackcloth-and-ashes season usually began around July 16, the birthday of the Bomb, and wound down three weeks later on Hiroshima Day, but it seemed like every year the freaks from Pax Kyrie were coming to town a little earlier.
Curse the Names Page 2