Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  “You just threatened my life and you’re having me sign, like, a corporate NDA.”

  “Just sign it.”

  “Why did you bring me here if you didn’t want me to see anything?”

  “For all that is good and holy, Brian, sign the fucking form.”

  I said, “We found that arm in the mud and then a few hours later we left Sandoval’s arm there. I can’t stop thinking about that.”

  Keller put his hands in his armpits, pushed back in his chair. The chair legs slowly screeched along the floor. Then he said, “Where are you, Brian?”

  I said, “Hvíldarland.”

  “You’re not thinking. Where are you?”

  “Camp Carroll.”

  “Where?”

  “Downstairs.”

  Keller lowered his head. “And what’s downstairs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He touched his nose and then pointed at me. “Go ahead and sign that for me.”

  I signed it. What else was there to do?

  Keller scooped up the papers and motioned for his pen back. “Thank you. Now I need you to understand that this is me reaching down benevolently and placing the kiss of God upon your soiled, woefully stupid forehead. This is my blessing to you.”

  I looked out the window at the wall of smoked glass out there. “You had my sister fly out here.”

  “I did. She obviously loves you very much.”

  “She’s your insurance policy, right?”

  “No. She’s your insurance policy.”

  Quietly, I said, “So you’re not going to kill us?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “This is the deal,” he said. “I want you gone, Brian. I want you gone and I want you quiet. I’m sending you and your sister home. Mark Sandoval is going to be seen in a few different places around the globe, spotted here and there. It’s a big, bad world, and he’s working on a book, after all. So someone will post something about seeing him in Myanmar, or Berlin, or somewhere in the Outback, and then it’ll go quiet for a bit, and then he’ll pop up somewhere in, I don’t know, Zimbabwe. And eventually people will stop giving a shit. From what I can tell, he’s a man who has not inspired much loyalty in others.”

  “I think you’re miscalculating people’s interest.”

  “You could be right. But thanks to you, this is the shitstorm we’re working with. I’m coming in with my broom and dustpan, Brian. You can go ahead and mouth off to the New York Times, to the Post, to fuckin’ Fangoria if you want. A juicy exposé about Mark Sandoval and how he died, how he pulled off one of the biggest hoaxes in modern history. You can talk about the secret military base in a little island country off the coast of Iceland. You can even tell people about what you’re about to see, and how you could have stopped it if you’d just left when you’d been told.” He held up the folder. “But remember: we have your DNA, my man. We have your fingerprints. We have your signed confession to a number of crimes. And we can be vastly creative with all that material, believe me.”

  I’d grown cold all over. Hands numb as stones. “I get it.”

  “We’ve already gathered up your stuff from Karla’s place. Mark Sandoval’s already caught a flight to Reykjavík, according to any records that anyone’s gonna find.”

  “Okay.”

  “If your brain tumor doesn’t eventually kill you, and you breathe a word of this, I will roll tanks through your life. I’ll delegitimize you. I’ll send detailed lists of child porn sites you frequent to your employer, to your family. You know the kind of pariahs that dudes in the sex registry are? Good luck with your PhD after that, Brian.”

  “What is it that you do here, Vaughn?”

  “The IRS will audit you with a pair of tweezers. We’ll get you on that no-fly list. Allahu akbar and all that. You’ll never catch a flight again without being sweated in a room by a couple of roided-up TSA dudes with onion breath. You’ll make a phone call to an ex-girlfriend or a buddy, hear a bunch of strange clicks. See the same guy in a different car parked outside of your house every day. Oh wait—you’ll be on the registry, so count yourself lucky if you’re still sleeping indoors by then. That’ll be your life.”

  “I get it.”

  “And then we’ll send someone to your sister’s bar, right? Some guy that’ll start following her to her car, okay? Knocking on her door, calling her, sending her emails. And worse. I mean, there’s always room for worse, Brian. We haven’t even talked about your mom yet, or your dad and his sweet thing. You think you’re living some black helicopter shit right now, but you have no idea. You will, but right now, you think you’ve seen it all.” He coughed. “The world is a fragile place, balanced on a great number of fragile beams, and you and Sandoval have just upended a lot of them. So now I have to clean up your mess.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  “People don’t really believe in ghosts. Monsters under the bed, all that. They just like the idea of them, as long as they’re safe. People just want to be protected, you know? ‘I’m in here, the bad things are out there.’ And that’s what we do here, Brian. We protect people.”

  Another knock, and the same guy in the lab coat peered his head around the door. “We’re on schedule.”

  Keller pushed his chair back with another squeal and bounced to his feet. “Excellent. Let’s go.” He’d grown jolly with fury, bristled with it.

  My sister was in a room down here. She’d come to get me.

  Keller led me back out into the cavernous, high-ceilinged room, his hand around my bicep. My head pulsed immediately and I almost buckled to the floor.

  “Hurts, right?” Keller leered. He moved his warm hand to the back of my neck, squeezed. “You’re gonna want to get some specialists for that tumor when you get home. I guarantee your stay here has exacerbated your situation. It messes with some people more than others, but some of my guys can’t even be down here with a hangover. I need you to just hang in a little bit longer. You bought tickets to a show, after all. Hell, you wrote the show!” Next to us, the guy in the lab coat murmured something into his earpiece.

  A siren blared once. It filled the room—a knife-zipping lighting along the cleft of my brain—and then trailed off.

  Like supplicants, we all turned to the glass. I shut my eyes, afraid of what I would see.

  The smoked-glass wall in front of us—Keller smacked the back of my head, told me to open my eyes—grew transparent.

  This unknowable thing writhed behind the glass, lashed against it. Sinuous, wet, plated. A single eye passed across me and I felt something reach toward me, invite me.

  “It’s got a tug to it, right?” Keller grinned. “You feel that?”

  “We’re clear,” the man murmured into his earpiece. “Send in subject one.”

  A panel slid open in the room behind the glass and there stood a small, trembling, pale horse. A pony, really. Eyes widened to show the whites, an animal so like the ones we saw in the fields along Road Seven, like the one I had spied in my night vision goggles. It might have even been the same one that Shane slapped a fake horn on, that had started this whole thing.

  It immediately began bucking in terror at the indefinable thing that reached for it.

  In my ear, Keller said, “You wanted to fucking see it, right? Right, Brian? You came here looking for a monster? Here you go.”

  I watched what happened to the horse. What was done to it. I struggled to comprehend what was happening, the way things were moving behind the glass, the jets of blood that doused the inside of the glass and ran down in rivulets.

  Keller said, “This is on you. This is your show. Remember how fragile the world is, Brian.”

  The man in the lab coat cast a glance at Keller. Keller nodded.

  Into his earpiece, the man said, “Subjects two and three are go.”

 
; The door behind the glass slid open again, and there were two nude figures standing there. I opened my mouth to scream—I thought it was Brooke, Shane—but Vaughn clapped his hand over my mouth and let out a throaty little chuckle. Into my ear, he whispered, “Believe me, you don’t want to be making a lot of noise right now, Brian.”

  Constables Jónsdóttir and Leiffson, sent on some charade after finding the arm in the mud. Sent to some trap. Keller orchestrating it all. Naked and crouched there.

  And so we watched. Keller’s hand gripped the back of my neck. We watched as the thing behind the glass got to work on them as well. I wept.

  “Open your eyes,” Keller said.

  “Open them,” he said.

  Jónsdóttir and Leiffson, paying for my sins.

  7

  quiet enough, and then loud enough

  “And now, years later, here I am. Scar-heavy, gun-shy, but accepting of what’s become of me. We aren’t privy to all of the answers. We don’t get to know. There are vast swaths of time where we’re just riddled with uncertainty, with a lack of understanding. And I’m okay with it. After all, I’m here. I made it. I took the long way home, but I made it.”

  —Mark Sandoval, The Long Way Home

  1

  It’s stiflingly hot in his little one-bedroom place in Kenton. The fan pushes fetid air around in the kitchen while a fly buzzes in unhurried, bumbling constellations against the window screen. Lawnmowers and the shrieks of children come drifting through the mesh, the lulling sound of some neighbor’s radio.

  Brian’s entering grades into his laptop and sweating in his boxers when he hears the ding of an incoming email. He tabs open his mail program, sees the tagline, and goes cold. Easy as that. A deep cold, a bone-chilling cold like some ghost is settling down on top of his heart. Like some ghost-Brian is drifting into his same shape in the chair where he sits.

  It’s an email about a monster hunter.

  Mark Sandoval spotted in Jamaica—and he’s LOOKING for DUPPIES? CLICK HERE!

  He clicks on the link, viruses be damned, and is taken to a fringe website he’s never heard of before. Bigfoot, alien sightings, sidebar ads for hair-growth creams and investment programs urging viewers to transfer their assets into gold before the oncoming and inevitable economic collapse. The article shows a blurry picture of a white man in sunglasses and a button-up shirt loose at the throat. The man crosses the street at a busy intersection. Are those the telltale scars on his neck? It’s hard to tell. The article itself is a three-paragraph travesty about Sandoval being spotted in Kingston while potentially researching duppies—a term originating from the Caribbean, meaning the restless spirits of loved ones. Brian reads it. There is, of course, no mention of him, of Hvíldarland, Camp Carroll, or of anything remotely factual, as far as he can tell. He closes the laptop with a hand that doesn’t even feel like his own. He takes a shower to obliterate the chilled sweat that’s suddenly covered his body.

  Summer is winding down, persistent and cloying. He dresses, steps outside into the heat shimmer of the afternoon, heads to his MAX stop. On the way, he’s met with the almost pleasant miasmic stink of blacktop and gutter-piss and cut grass. Since returning home, he’s taught a single semester at the nearby community college, three classes: Anthro 101, Intro to Sciences, and Writing 65. Today he teaches his last class. He’s just boarded the train, his bag snug over his shoulder, sweat already making the maddening journey down the crack of his ass again, when he realizes the email could’ve been sent specifically for him. That it’s very likely. He realizes that Keller could’ve as easily as not planted some kind of bug or malware on his computer now, that the website might have been built expressly for this purpose. Tracking him, his searches and page visits. Remember how fragile the world is.

  If your head feels like it is growing or is hot, the article had read, you may be in the presence of a duppy. You can shame a duppy by using bad language or exposing your genitals. He could picture it, Keller okaying the copy, grinning and scratching his nose. Grimly mirthful and mocking to the very end.

  The MAX clacks and rolls beneath his feet. People sit, people stand with their hands laced around the poles, the overhanging straps; they all sway with the ululating rhythm of the train’s movement. Everyone is sweating. Sunlight refracts off the angles of the outside world, dim knives of light behind the tinted windows.

  His phone rings and he stares at it for a moment before accepting the call.

  “What’s up?” he says.

  “Hey, I’m wondering, have you had these Soy You Later things? It’s like they want to convince you it’s chicken, when it’s clearly not.”

  His father’s voice is loud, brash; Brian’s certain the people around him can hear the entire conversation. This would’ve mortified the pre-Hvíldarland Brian as he skulked his way through the world. This Brian couldn’t care less.

  “Yeah, those are good,” he says.

  “Okay. So we’ve got fake-ass chicken, kale—Traci, you said kale, right?—green beans, salad, wine. Can you still drink wine?”

  “Yeah, just until twenty-four hours before the surgery.”

  “So tonight’s the last night you can drink,” his father says.

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  A pause. “Okay.” He clears his throat. “So, that’s dinner for tonight. That work for you?”

  “Works great, Dad.”

  “Okay,” his father says, and there is an awkward pause where he clearly wants to say something more but doesn’t. There are these vast swaths of unexplored topography between them; so far neither Brian nor his father has been quite willing to ford them. “Well, I had something I was gonna say, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was. We’ll be back in a few hours. I’m taking Traci to a movie, get out of the heat.”

  “Cool. I’ll be home after class. You’ve got the key.”

  His father hangs up. Brian smiles at the evening’s menu; Traci has been insistent on shopping for him before his surgery, and everything is antioxidant-rich, organic, vegan. This is the strange trajectory of his world now; his father, after learning of the tumor, has sold his condo in the nudist colony, and he and his twenty-four year-old girlfriend (twenty-five now! Time passes!) have returned to Portland to caretake for him after his operation. Assuming, of course, that the operation is successful and he lives, which his neuro team has solemnly informed him is not a given.

  “Don’t talk bullshit like that, Bri,” his father had barked after Brian had mentioned to him of the odds of recovery. He’d been shocked to hear of Brian’s reluctance to do the surgery immediately, and even more shocked when Brian had insisted on teaching an entire semester of classes while he decided what do. So much history sat wasted between them, so many stony, silent years. Traci and his father had gotten a room in a seedy hotel on Lombard to be close to Brian’s house once he is allowed to come home. An air mattress sits on the living room floor; they will take shifts caring for him. It all seems excessive to Brian, but his father has reached for it like a man grasping for a life preserver.

  The train slaloms gently around a curve. A cement wall faces one side of the tracks, a wall festooned in graffiti and hasty tags. It goes by in a blur.

  Somehow, inexplicably, the article about Sandoval calms him—at least he knows where he stands. It affords him a type of clarity. It’s clear that Keller means every word he said, and undoubtedly can do everything he’s said he can do.

  For Brian, it is simply a question of being quiet enough, and then being loud enough. This is a thought that comes to him often, as close to a mantra as he has.

  Hvíldarland has taken on the blurry inconsistency of a mirage, something like a heat shimmer, until shards of it suddenly stick like slivers of glass in his heart. This usually happens in the half-lit world between waking and dreaming. He wonders what Shane is doing now, the children. Poor Shane, man. Poor Karla;
he thinks he knows them well enough to know that both will blame themselves for the chasm between them, the chasm that Sandoval’s arrival built and his death cemented. All based off of an attempt to salvage love. Everything birthed from this one tiny untruth and all the things that spiraled from it.

  But maybe Brian’s wrong. Maybe the family will be able to come together, to entwine their lives again.

  Then again, maybe Shane is dead. Maybe Shane, too, was put behind the glass.

  (How he’s had to reframe his entire world around what happened behind the glass. Jónsdóttir and Leiffson and what he owes them. Even Sandoval. How the dead stack up in his mind, how he constantly calculates his indebtedness.)

  The doors open to let someone off the train, and there above the chiaroscuro of buildings is the beginning of a sunset, drawn in strident bars of oranges and pinks, that practically cracks his heart to see, even as he can feel the heat roiling off the pavement, the diesel stink of evening traffic. He is nearly driven to his knees with entirely average shit like this now: the simple beauty of a sunset, or a drawing of a heart poorly scribbled in a bathroom stall, or a man anguished and gesturing to himself at the right angle of two brick walls. Every day, something threatens to undo him.

  Writing 65 is held twice a week, evening classes, ninety minutes at a stretch. A mix of kids out of high school taking it for college minimums, older immigrants, and blue-collar folks who work during the day. He is proud of all of his students, the work they’ve done in the short time he’s known them. It hadn’t paid shit, this semester of teaching, but he made some extra cash freelance editing, got some pieces published here and there, and the shack in Kenton—labeled a “cottage” by the friend of Robert’s who hooked him up with the place—sits in the shadow of a larger house and costs less than his old room.

  The MAX stops at the college and Brian gets out. His phone buzzes. It’s his father again.

  “Hey, Dad. Everything okay?”