Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  “So, uh, no einhyrningsins then,” Brian said.

  “Eh?” said Olafsson.

  “So no unicorns here in Hvíldarland then.”

  Again, Olafsonn leaned and spat on the ground. “No nothing in Hvíldarland. But surely not any unicorns. Shit.”

  “Got moss,” said yet another man, wiping his hands on a rag. “Got rocks. Sheep shit. Horses. Fish out there, sometimes, if you can handle the sea. Got wind, always. You see any unicorns? Look around you.”

  •

  A week after their arrival in Hvíldarland, Brian woke to another morning awash in meager gray light. He’d taken his last pain pill the night before and the vestiges of his usual troubled sleep still haunted him. He had some dim memory of a man with the head of a unicorn stretching on a yoga mat in an arid desertscape, the dusty valley before him filling with a tide of dark blood. Remembered in another dream a pale hand bursting from the bone-cave of his own skull like a zombie writhing free of a grave, and how he’d suddenly felt light, free of some weight. Brian was relieved to be done with the pills. His face was slowly healing. The stitches, those weird, stiff interlopers, still bristled from his lip for a few more days.

  He got out of his tent. Always the morning fog hanging in tatters on the ground, obscuring the mountains, turning the greenhouses vaporous and strange. Road Seven was nearly invisible. The occasional hum of a passing car was relayed to him in odd, muted tones. Gunnar and Liza ran along the length of the porch, jackets and boots on over their pajamas. Clomp clomp clomp, Liza whipping at Gunnar’s legs with a woven belt as she squealed and laughed, her tangled morning-hair fanning out behind her.

  Sandoval strolled out the front door with a pair of ceramic mugs. He walked down the steps, dodging the children as they made another circuit around the porch, and handed Brian a cup of coffee. It was as idyllic as something from a movie. He’d just gotten to the point where he could drink coffee again, and he took the mug with something approaching rapture.

  A rhythm, a schedule. Most mornings, Sandoval would review the previous night’s inevitably disappointing footage, then walk to the waypoints where they’d set up the camera and motion detectors, and move them to the next established position. Given the nature of the video Karla had sent him, Sandoval said he wanted to focus on the tree line. They were still waiting for their shipment of new gear to come in via General Delivery to the Kjálkabein post office; Sandoval didn’t trust the mail carrier not to tamper with the stuff. The less people involved, he said, the better. Brian had thought for a moment of arguing, but then conceded he might actually have some kind of a point.

  Brian’s part of their morning routine: he looked for clues, such as they were. He looked for tracks in the earth, bite marks or horn rubbings along the trees, scat on the ground, any sign of visitation. He tried to keep his own doubts at bay, treat the place with the sanctity of any traditional site. But short of a flashing neon arrow that said This here’s proof of a unicorn, buddy, he had no concrete idea what the hell he was looking for. Not a clue. That morning, he walked a few feet into the woods and pissed against a pine tree.

  He heard Gunnar and Liza thunk down the porch steps, their laughter both closer and quieter amid the fog. Ghostly.

  They were good questions, the ones Sandoval had asked him in Whitmer’s office: Do you believe in this stuff? Flat out. No lie.

  Brian zipped up, leaned a forearm against the tree in front of him, gazed deeper into those impenetrable woods. People with acne were once thought to be carriers of the bubonic plague; it was believed the sick could simply gaze upon the living and infect them that way. Through the eyes. But ignorance hadn’t made the dead, stacked and tiered like cordwood, any less real.

  Do you believe in this? In these things?

  The forest was just a forest. The tree he’d run into had been just a tree. Nothing had conspired against him that night. Nothing chased them. Nothing had spoken in his ear. The only interlopers were the darkly dividing cells in his own brain, and the fear that went with that.

  A bird called out, hidden among the tree’s upper limbs. The soil beneath his feet was burnished with moss, flakes of dead bark. Sticks and loam. The building blocks of life and death down there in the churned earth.

  Something happened out there, he thought.

  Nothing happened out there.

  He stepped from the trees just as Gunnar motioned to him from around the corner of one of the greenhouses.

  “Hey, Brian! Brian, come look!”

  Liza was squatting down, staring at something on the ground. Gunnar waved his hand in a Come see gesture. “Hurry!”

  Brian turned, started walking toward them. Sandoval, a small figure out near the edge of the road, heard the commotion and started toward them as well. No one in any hurry.

  “Poop!” Gunnar yelled. “Brian, look at this, we found poop!”

  •

  “This is a load of shit,” Brian said, and drily laughed at his own joke. He and Sandoval and the children stood between a pair of greenhouses, the house obscured. The sun had begun to throw wicked little shards through the cotton batting of the clouds overhead, the fog just beginning to burn off. Sandoval was filming.

  Liza giggled at Brian’s bad word and scratched at a bug bite on her ankle with a stick she’s picked up somewhere. Gunnar stood before the pile of shit with his arms folded, so jazzed and proud he was practically hopping up and down. Brian saw new Sharpie bracelets drawn on his wrists.

  “You said shit,” Liza informed him.

  “I did. Sorry.”

  “Don’t let doubt make you blind,” Sandoval said, squinting into the camera’s eyepiece as he roved around the poop, treating it with all the sudden piousness of someone rolling up on the Kennewick Man dig. “Remember, Brian? You remember when I said that? This is what I’m talking about. This is what we’ve been waiting for. This.” He lifted his face from the camera. He looked crazed, his eyes huge. “Seriously, you remember when I said that?”

  “Sure, but this—”

  “Well, this is something that’s right in front of you.” The back of his shirt rucked up as he crouched. The three of them saw the raised linework of his scars over the jutting knobs of his spine.

  Brian gently tested the stitches on his lip with the pad of his thumb. “Poop,” he said, mindful of the children. “Poop is what’s in front of me, Mark. That’s all it is. This is a joke or something.”

  “It’s magical!” cried Liza, holding her stick aloft.

  “It’s not magical,” said Brian.

  Sandoval continued wheeling around the pile of shit, speaking into the camera’s microphone. Gunnar and Liza were thus privy to such thoughtful missives as, “Note that amongst the potential unnatural or supernatural elements of the feces, there are also a number of more ordinary grass seeds and stringed, pale weeds—be sure to check for consistency in regard to standards of local flora.”

  “Those aren’t supernatural elements, Mark.”

  “Shush. And also note the quality of dryness to the fecal matter—that’ll need to be quantified as well. When did the subject stop here? How old was the fecal matter by time of discovery? Also note that if this particular section of the farm was under surveillance last night—admittedly unlikely, given our meager materials at the moment—why was the subject not visible? Explore possibilities of other camouflaging agents at work here.”

  “It’s magical poop,” cried Liza, waving her stick in the air again, and then blessing Brian with it, once on each shoulder, as if knighting him.

  “Gunnar,” Sandoval said, leaning in close with the camera, “can you move your feet, honey? Just a little bit.”

  It had to be a trick. Obviously. Someone was screwing with them again.

  “Brian, go and get a dig shovel and some sampling sets from my kit. It’s in my tent. No, it’s in the dining room. The big bag.”

&n
bsp; Brian started walking. Behind him he heard Sandoval call out, “This is what they didn’t want us to find. This is what they tried to steer us away from.”

  He grabbed the stuff and came back, finding Sandoval still crouched and wheeling with the camera, Gunnar beside him. The boy pointed and quietly said something, and Sandoval laughed loudly.

  Brian set the dig blade at Sandoval’s feet.

  “Look at it,” Sandoval purred.

  “Oh, I’m looking at it,” Brian said.

  The four of them stood before a pile of glitter-dusted horse shit. Horse shit positively frosted, in fact, in a gleaming coruscation of granulated glitter that went from gold to topaz to a rich purple. It was a pile of glitter-coated horse turds that also happened to be studded with what looked to be a half-dozen jewels as big as Brian’s thumbnail.

  A pile of glittery turds rife with half-embedded emeralds and diamonds and rubies, turds that were by far the brightest thing out there in that gloomy morning.

  As if something magical—oh, like a unicorn, maybe—had paused in its nightly ministrations and decided, then and there, to take a shit.

  3

  just perhaps maybe the slightest monkey

  “I began to wonder if I was the lost one.”

  -Mark Sandoval, See Me

  1

  A week before he and the kid flew in a juddering twin-engine plane over the worn checkerboard tarmac of the Kjálkabein airport, Mark Sandoval had dinner with a blind date at the White Bird. It was a French-fusion place tucked below the Morrison Bridge, between a CPA’s office with yellowed posters in the windows and a new bar that broadcast the grand assholishness of its clientele by the fact that its name, Drill, had actually been drilled into its brushed-steel facade. The White Bird was gloomy, housed in a room roughly the size and dimensions of a rail car, lit only by the candles on each table and a single hanging chandelier. Waiters in white coats and facial piercings prowled the narrow lanes between tables, speaking as low and intimately as physicians delivering grave news. The place had been a city staple for years and so was outrageously, notoriously overpriced; it was due only to Sandoval’s fame, however diminished it might have been, that he was he able to get them a table without a reservation. The White Bird was not his first choice—it wouldn’t have been his second choice, or third—but his date, having heard “absolutely innnncredible things about it,” had insisted on the place with a buoyant ferocity that did not bode well for a subsequent date. Still, he agreed to meet her there. He was lonely.

  The date had been set up as a favor through Sandoval’s lawyer and his lawyer’s wife. His date, Viv, was blonde, fit, and brutally tanned, which seemed at odds with the fact that she was a dermatologist. Once they were seated, she’d scanned the menu like an MMA fighter looking for an opponent’s weak spot. She had a wonderful freckled expanse of cleavage that fairly sang with erotic promise in the dim light of the chandelier. Sandoval had met her in the restaurant’s tiny waiting area—he’d had trouble finding a parking spot for the Jag and was a few minutes late—and she’d risen from the little bench she’d been sitting at, still wrapped in her coat at that point, and offered her hand. “You must be Mark.” Was it insouciance? Flirtation? They’d been seated at a window table while lust and loneliness flitted around Sandoval like warring devils on his shoulders.

  Their emaciated, tattooed waiter took their wine order—Viv, with no apparent compunction regarding propriety, ordered a hundred-dollar bottle of 2010 pinot from a Willamette Valley winery Sandoval had heard good things about—and then departed quietly in his white coat, a ghost banished. Sandoval was surprised, both at the fact that she’d done so without consulting him and that he hadn’t really minded.

  “Guy looks about one bad shift away from giving plasma,” he said.

  “I think he’s cute,” said Viv. She took a sip of her water, her eyes roving about the room before settling on him. She was probably ten years his junior. Old enough, he knew, to own her own practice. His lawyer Tad, and Tad’s wife Heidi, had both insisted it would be a good fit. “You’ll just love her, Mark,” Heidi had said. “She vacations in Mumbai every year over the winter and offers free medical advice there to the people, a Doctors Without Borders type thing. Beautiful, smart. You’ll get such a kick out of her.”

  “And she’s got a thing for the weird ones,” Tad had offered.

  The waiter came with the wine—he offered the sample taste to Viv as Sandoval looked on, smiling and bemused. The waiter went to pour him a sample and Sandoval held up a hand.

  “Wonderful, thank you,” Viv said, and the waiter set the bottle down and left just as vaporously, murmuring that he’d be back in a few minutes to take their order.

  They sat with their wine for a moment while the restaurant breathed around them. A corona of half-decipherable talk and clinking silverware. The diffusion of neon in a nearby window turned all the raindrops dotting the glass a marvelous red. They made small talk for a few minutes—the difficulty in scheduling at her office, how they’d met Tad and Heidi, the weather. Sandoval helped himself to the wine. It really was very good.

  “So, Mumbai,” he said. He willed himself not to look at her chest.

  Viv, midsip, nodded and set her glass down. “Right! Yes. Heidi must have told you.”

  “She did, yeah. Said you do great things there.”

  “Heidi’s wonderful, isn’t she?”

  Sandoval, who did not much care about Heidi Hemphill one way or the other, especially since he was generally in her vicinity only when he and Tad were having a meeting or lunch that could be written off as tax-deductible, said, “Oh, she’s a hoot. She’s great.”

  “Did you know she macramés?”

  “No,” Sandoval said. “I didn’t know anyone macramés anymore.”

  “Oh, they’re hideous,” said Viv. “But darling, really. She works so hard on them!”

  “So you head there for the winter? Mumbai?”

  “Yep, I have a few friends who run a clinic there. I go and help out.”

  “Indians?” said Sandoval.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Are they actually from India, or, you know, Americans? Your friends, I mean.” He tapped at his forehead where a bindi would be.

  He watched Viv hold her glass and decide whether or not she should be offended. It was a calculable thing. “Well, one of the doctors on staff is British,” she said stiffly, “and they have local interns. The couple I know are from Virginia.”

  “Got it.”

  She tilted her head, appraised him; the smile had turned brittle. He saw that she’d decided to be offended. “Does that lessen the impact of the work, do you think? The importance of it?”

  Sandoval poured more wine. He felt heat on his face, blood creeping up his cheeks. His scars, when he got tense or angry, itched terribly, and he resisted the urge to rub his back against his chair like a bear against a tree trunk. Ten minutes in and he’d already pissed her off. Christ. She filled out the dress though, and his loneliness sang out alongside his idiocy, a single note in harmony. He said, “Not importance, no. But it does come across a bit as the great white saviors coming in to help the wretched brown people, doesn’t it?” He couldn’t help himself.

  They were saved by the waiter, who came to take their order and remained dutifully oblivious to Sandoval’s flushed face and Viv’s obvious anger. She ordered the salmon and tomato salad, oozing a deadly cheer as she did, refusing to look at Sandoval. He ordered the duck breast—now there was the power of suggestion, good lord—with gorgonzola and artichoke. He momentarily quelled the urge to order another bottle of wine and then decided fuck it and went ahead. The waiter left and Viv attacked a piece of bread that lay in the basket between them.

  “Listen, I’m sorry,” Sandoval said. “That was shitty of me. It’s shitty to knock someone’s altruism like that.”

&nbs
p; “Oh, it’s fine,” Viv said, buttering her bread with short, precise strokes. “It’s nothing new.”

  “No, please. It’s not like I’m out there doing anything charitable, abroad or otherwise. It’s guilt, is what it is. Guilt and nervousness are the leading causes of men talking out of their asses more than anything, I guarantee it.”

  Viv relaxed a bit. “Well, I don’t know if that’s true.”

  “For this guy it is. Tell me more about it, please.”

  And she did. She talked about the clinic, the ceaseless tide of children there that needed help, the poverty and malnourishment, the anguished parents, the orphans who weren’t lucky enough to have parents. The sense of hopelessness she often felt in spite of the good work the clinic did. “So much of it is like putting a finger in a dam and watching two more leaks sprout right next to it.”

  Finger, leak, sprout. Sandoval nodded, asked questions, distracted. Still trying not to look at Viv’s freckled chest. She was pouring her soul out here, or at least talking real with him. Honestly, openness. When was the last time that had happened? And what was he doing? The wine came, another pinot, along with their plates.

  “And what about you?” Viv asked, wineglass held by its bulb between her tented fingers. The wine seemed to be doing good things for her as well. A bumpy beginning, but they seemed on better footing.