by Keith Rosson
Stay with us.
Stay.
It had not gotten easier to leave the trees as their time at the farm passed. The lights, the voices, they lulled him, promised a great number of things that no one could actually promise: safety, redemption, a relief from grief and guilt. He wanted to believe, felt he was sometimes on the cusp of belief. Of giving himself over entirely.
But away from the woods—working in his notebook or pedaling his bicycle to the villages along Road Seven, trying to interview the stoic, tight-lipped people that lived there, fording his messy way through the world of the living—the voices seemed tangential, crafted from smoke and falsehoods. It was maddening then, and yes, a little frightening. And yet they called like sirens; he could still hear them faintly, no matter where he was on the island.
They sang in his dreams, this song that thrummed inside him like some blood-mad tuning fork:
Stay with us!
Stay!
Even through the worry, the fear that he had become enrapt by something false, it was beautiful.
He was finally wanted.
•
He’d heard Karla’s confession—horse shit and glitter. Brian had been right. They’d all been right. There was nothing there. He’d stood up from the couch, his shirt cut away, Shane rearing back with the needle and thread still in his hands.
Stepping down the porch steps into the lashing rain, the voices called out and he walked to the edge of the trees as if an automaton. He could have done it in his sleep, the pathway to the lights seemed so familiar.
The voices rose.
Branches dug into his arms, snarled among his ankles. The wind blew rain into his eyes. The pain in his shoulder was distant. Shane had worked quickly, shot him with a local and fed him pain pills. But the blade had been lodged in the bone and the pain, he knew, promised a dark return. He was still bleeding.
The pills made the voices distant, watery, and he recognized their irritation at this in the way the lights hummed and worried his head like bees. The voices howled with admonishment and demand.
Stay with us!
Stay!
“I’m sorry,” he said, wicking rainwater from his face, leaning against a tree with his uninjured arm. “I can’t.”
The lights battered against him like moths. Furious, seeking entrance.
He looked for faces in them, could find none.
•
A kind of freedom tore through him. Freedom like a body flung out of a window. A freedom like leaping, like the final frank acknowledgment of the pavement screaming up toward you. He had become untethered, and even this provided its own sort of choice.
The simplest equation: if the horse shit was fake, the video was fake, too.
Stay with us.
Stay.
Through the traceries of limbs above him, constellations of stars hung in the sky like thrown salt. He was angry at the voices, at their animal insistence. He’d staked everything—career, reputation, freedom—on this one gambit, this fingernail of possibility, and lost. And lost, too, in a way that was shameful. He’d staked everything—everything—on a child’s prank.
A unicorn walks into a bar, he thought, and cackled.
Fear was churlish, gnawing, pushing its way to the front. Fear was the guest that took ownership of the home.
He’d heard Brian’s sister. The man had died. He’d killed the man.
He touched the phone in his jacket pocket. The phone he’d kept upon himself all these days, through all of this. A useless phone he’d still kept charged. A phone he’d maintained with the attention to detail that bordered on mania, the way he kept all of his equipment charged, checked, and cleared.
He had noted all throughout their time in Hvíldarland as icons appeared on the screen, each bringing with them their own stirring of dread:
New Voicemail
New Voicemail
New Voicemail
•
Stay with us.
Stay.
“Leave me alone,” Sandoval said as he stood among the trees, and the voices damped to a petulant mutter. The lights flitted away, keeping their distance.
•
He heard his name called from the house. Could see someone—Brian, it had to be—standing on the porch, hands shoved in his pockets.
“Mark, you out here?”
The lights winked out like someone had flipped a switch.
Rain ran down his collar.
•
He took his phone from his pocket, shielded it from the rain with his jacket. The battery showed a full charge.
The screen was snarled with a crack. Pixels blurred, errant blues and pinks.
He listened to his messages.
(Were the lights making this possible? There was no reception out here.)
Stay with us.
Stay.
Tad Hemphill, speaking with an officiousness that Sandoval had never heard before, and also sounding old and weary: “Mr. Sandoval, this is your attorney. Events have transpired recently which we need to address as quickly as possible. You have my number and I urge you”—and here, some vestige of humanity returned to his voice—“to call me when you get this.”
His editor: “Mark, you’ve got to give me some kind of progress report, otherwise they’re asking for blood. Legal’s drawing up the papers if we don’t hear from you by tomorrow. Throw me a friggin’ bone here.”
Lastly: “Mr. Sandoval, this is Detective Sotamayor with the Portland Police Department. I was hoping to establish contact with you, just had a few questions about a somewhat urgent matter. Why don’t you go ahead and give me a call at this number.”
•
He was stoned and thankful to be stoned. After these weeks of abstinence his blood was crying out for some alteration. The world filled now with a grand sense of drift. Shane had given him the good stuff.
Fake jewels! Glitter! His life upended by materials in a kid’s pencil box, in a mother’s closet!
He wondered where Marnie was right then, and poor Viv. Viv with her altruism, her inherent faith in the good that people can wreak on each other. Poor Don Whitmer. All these people in the shattered periphery of his world, people he’d burned to the ground. He thought of the man he’d left like a bundle of rags behind his car half a world away. Remembered the clerk at the Greyhound station all those long years ago, giving him aspirin and Band-Aids.
Stay with us.
Had it ever even occurred to him to ask the roving lights, ask these poor dead men, Why me? Why have you chosen me? Why not Brian? Why anyone?
Had he ever thought to ask them, Who are you? Are you who I think you are?
Or are you something else entirely?
•
He sank to his knees, pressed his back against a knotted, moss-furred tree trunk. The house stood white and strong through the fractures of the black woods. Brian was gone from the porch.
“Are you helping me?” he said, and the voices returned, the lights swarming him, jubilant.
Stay with us.
He started to cry, but even through the anesthetic his shoulder began to throb and he stopped. He was just a walking collection of injuries now, wasn’t he? Neither he nor Brian had escaped unscathed. Everyone’s lives all stacked and snared within each other. Some ornate, terrible puzzle of half-truths and obfuscations.
He began dialing Marnie’s number, and even with the broken screen, the phone operated as it should have. Five bars of reception.
“Are you helping me?” he asked again, and the lights boiled around him.
The phone number arose as muscle-memory even though he hadn’t dialed it in years. Crazy the things enmeshed in us. What time was it there? Hvíldarland was seven hours ahead of the States. Her “hello” was marred through some distant undercurrent of static. She said it again. She
sounded tougher than he remembered. All gristle and sand, her shyness long worn away. His fault.
“Hey, Marnie,” he rasped, the words strange in his mouth. It had been so long.
There was another pause. Part of it was the lag in the signal, but mostly he imagined it was simply the sound of his voice. How confused she must be! “Mark?”
“Yeah, Marn. It’s me.”
“What . . . What’s going on?” Another pause. “I mean, why are you calling me?”
“Uh,” he managed. The forest around him hissing with falling rain. “I just got a wild idea, you know?” He pictured her in some bedroom, the blankets mussed. Her hair short and boyish, her body lean and small. A swath of sun falling across her legs. A cat on the bed.
Oh Christ, who knew where she was.
“Mark. Listen, I’ve got to get to class. I’m not really able to talk right now.” Her voice carried the rushed cadence of someone unhappily caught by surprise.
“Oh,” he said brightly, “you’re going back to school. That’s great. That’s great, Marnie.” He was just so tired.
“No,” she said, “I’m teaching.”
“Oh, shit. Sorry. That’s even better. Wow, congratulations.”
“Listen, Mark.” In that moment before she spoke, any number of things could have happened to them. Any number of words could have left her mouth. If he could stay in that moment, anything would be possible.
But that wasn’t how things worked. You act and the rest of the world’s inhabitants react in turn. On and on, relentlessly.
“I don’t want you to call me again,” she said. Her words were level and slow and even. “Ever. I want no part in your life. I don’t want to hear your voice.”
“Okay,” he said. “Sure.” Thinking of the apartment, remembering her hippie candles. Her red knees. The way she’d curled the sleeves of her sweater over her hands, as if protecting herself from life’s sharp edges. How he would sit down on the couch while she was reading and she would get up, not even closing her book, still reading it, and walk into the other room without a word. Their short, wretched stretch of a marriage. The life they’d shared was something he’d ruined, something he’d leveled like a drunk, grandly sweeping glasses off a tabletop so he could dance on top of it.
“I’m serious,” she said. “I’ve been sober for fourteen years, Mark. You are the very definition of toxic to me, okay?” God, she sounded tough. It was glorious. Joy ripped through him.
“Okay,” he said. “I understand.” Marnie didn’t even say goodbye, just hung up. He felt cleansed by it, beautifully hollowed out.
Stay with us.
Stay.
He dialed the other number, this one coming just as easily, he’d always been good with inane shit like this, and she picked up right away. “Hello?”
He tried to inject some joy into his voice. “Dani, hey. What’s up, lady?”
Another pause. Ah, he was racking them up. “Mark?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” His voice was tinny in his ears. “How’s things?”
“You sound weird. Are you okay?”
“I’m good,” he said. “Totally, sure. You got the check okay? I know I sent it on a different day.”
She snorted. “Yeah, I got the check, Mark. What is going on? You’re breaking your own rule here, dude.”
“I know.”
Her voice became deep and mocking, a caricature of his own. “I think we need to get some distance until our shared history becomes a little less obvious, Danielle. Just to be safe. Let’s try to keep contact to a minimum.”
“I know.”
“Those are your words, not mine.”
“I know, Dani.”
“You didn’t want to ‘arouse suspicion.’”
He shut his eyes. “I was thinking maybe it was time we reconsidered that.”
There was a moment of silence, and then she exploded in laughter. It was mocking, joyless. “What, now? Just out of the blue?”
“Well, I mean, when I get back into the States—”
“Mark,” she said, “are you kidding? You’ve kept me on a leash for fucking decades. You send me a check once a month to keep my mouth shut and to stay away from you, so that people won’t put two and two together. I mean, it’s fine, I agreed to it, but now out of the blue you want to, what—rekindle some flame? It’s a joke. What’s the matter? Dick getting soft these days? You’re that hard up?”
He couldn’t help it—he laughed. Dani was the only one who could talk to him like this, could so easily revive some ghost of their old banter. But then she told him to fuck off and he realized—too late—that she really was hurt, furious. All this fury held inside her for years.
That day she’d picked him up outside the church with those bags of soup! With those two pairs of sweatpants! He remembered it all with a photographic clarity. Your plans got you wearing someone else’s pants outside of a church in Dog Dick, Montana, holding a sack of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup. You can’t even ride the Greyhound without fucking up. Don’t tell me your plans, Mark.
“I miss you,” he said, and the voices coveting him howled in outrage. “I was wrong.”
Dani’s voice was soft. “I’m sorry, hon,” she said. “But you’re years too late with that. There was a time when I’d have done anything for you, but you missed that window by a long shot. Whatever you’re going through right now? It’s your burden, not mine.”
•
He rose, grunting and gasping, from his perch at the foot of the tree.
What was left? The only tangible thing to stack upon the nothingness of this endeavor was the new book.
The notebook.
He’d stumbled upon some kind of mystery after all. More importantly, he’d told the truth as best he could. Was telling the truth. There was still more to write. Still more chapters being written. He would pen the rest of this tale in prison. He would come out redemptive. The book would be a confession. He would scourge his lies clean.
He would tell the truth. For once.
Stay with us.
Stay.
“I have to go home.”
The voices rose, a buzz almost insectile. A hive stirred, awakened.
Stay with us!
Stay!
How had this happened to him? What was the catalyst? What single thing had brought him here?
He’d tossed so many lives like kindling into a fire.
He walked out of the woods, the mud squelching at his boots, the windows of the house shining bright.
“I have to leave,” he said, and again the voices clamored for him, called to him. Hot with jealousy and anger.
Stay with us!
Stay!
“I can’t stay,” he said. Imploring them to understand. “I can’t. I have to go home. I’ve done so many . . . so many things wrong.”
The voices settled, stirred and feathered against him, seeking purchase, and the lights wended about him. Cold comfort now.
“I’m leaving,” he said. “I’m sorry that this happened to you all.”
Say goodbye to us then, the voices said quietly, slyly. If you won’t stay, say goodbye to us.
He was so tired.
“Goodbye,” he said to them as he walked toward the house, and he thought, I need to get Brian home. At that moment the voices—which he realized in a heartbeat, an eye blink, were only one voice—it changed, flexed, the voice became something mirthful and ancient, its throat clotted with darkness, its writhing mask pulled back. As understanding flooded through him, he had time to think, It’s not lost at all, it wants to be here, and he took another step through the darkened yard and felt something like a stone beneath his foot. And then the earth coughed beneath him, so strange, this dark rose of soil blooming in his vision. Curiously lifted, he heard glass breaking, heard what sounded like some
one throwing a handful of stones against the side of the house.
His eyes were cast to the stars, then to the lights weaving among the trees, the lights of the singular and terrible thing that trod this place.
And then the death-lights and the night stars merged, became one.
Sandoval tumbled skyward.
6
monsters americana
“Greed, gluttony, temptation, selfishness, pride, anger. If there was a devil, I was paving my own road toward a showdown.”
—Mark Sandoval, Devil in the Blood
1
I put on my jacket to go find Sandoval. In the past hour he’d been attacked, had a hatchet pulled out of his arm and had his sole motivation for being here yanked out from under him.
“Tell me what you think you’re doing,” Brooke said.
“It can’t be that hard to figure out, Brooke.”
“We need to talk,” she said.
Shane took his cue and walked upstairs.
We stood there in the kitchen, the two of us, my sister flown halfway around the world to find me.
“I want to talk about your tumor,” she said. That shorn scalp; even right then, some minute part of me wished I had a hat for her. She looked so tough and small.
“Yeah,” I said, “and I want to talk about how you got my private and confidential CT scan emailed to you, but I don’t think I’m going to like your answers.”
“Brian—”
“There are a lot of things at play right now, Brooke. A lot of stuff is happening.”
And then she said softly, “Tell me,” in a voice so surprisingly kind it was simultaneously a balm and a shock. “Tell me what’s going on. Please.”