by Keith Rosson
His father’s voice is a little shaky. “The thing I wanted to tell you, Brian. I, uh— I’m pretty nervous.” He laughs. “I’m a little afraid, to tell you the truth. I just wanted to let you know that.”
“About dinner?”
“Yeah.”
“Trust me, Dad. Brooke’s as scared as you are.”
“Oh, Jesus.” His father laughs again, sniffs. “Your sister’s never been afraid a day in her life.”
“It’s just dinner. An hour or two, and then she’ll go home.”
“And there’s wine,” he said, and lets out another honking laugh.
“And there’s wine,” Brian agrees. “It’ll be over before you know it.”
“Okay, bud,” his father says, and Brian hears him blow his nose into the phone. He sniffles a few times and says, “Love you, bud.”
“Love you, too, Dad,” Brian says, feeling the grind in it, the difficulty, and feeling also the possibility that one day those words might not seem such a heavy stone to lift.
He makes it through the lobby and heads to the lower level of the school. Glossy floors, that lovely wonder of circulated air, only a few students roaming the halls given that the semester has wound down. Between the classrooms are banks of lockers, scuffed and dented, painted an industrial tan. Brian steps to one, looks at his phone to check the time, and then spins a combination.
Inside are a sheaf of printouts and a single notebook.
The notebook is much like Sandoval’s had been—a thin black cardstock cover, bound in spiraled wire.
He has an hour before class starts. He takes the notebook and printouts and heads to the college’s library.
The pair of students manning the front desk are strangers, but he loves the familiarity of the library. Loves coming to the school. Teaching now is different; there’s an ease to it that had been missing. The weight was gone—that sense that every day doing this was a wasted day. Every day now has, after all, the potential to be his final day, doesn’t it? Every day since Hvíldarland has been a gift.
Now, after Sandoval and Jónsdóttir and Leifsson and what he saw behind the glass, he is laden with both a purpose and a grand debt. He is armored with it.
The tumor is still nestled there in the dark of his skull, growing. That peach pit of rot within him. It still clamors and throbs. Today is Tuesday, and Thursday is the operation.
His phone rings again, and with a grimace of apology to the librarians, he walks out into the hallway.
Brooke says, “This is bullshit.”
“It’s dinner,” he says. “That’s all it is.”
“I’ll piss in his meatloaf.”
“We’re having soy chicken and kale, actually.”
“God, if the tumor doesn’t kill you . . .”
“Come on, Brooke. Dad’s bringing wine.”
She sighs. “The nutritionist is gonna be there?”
(This is progress. This is better than anything she’s called Traci up to this point.)
“They’re together, Brooke. It’s a package deal.”
“Ugh. I’ll piss in her meatloaf too.”
“We’re having soy—”
He can hear her smiling when she says, “Shut up, Brian. God.”
“See you at seven,” he says.
“If Mom tells me not to go, I’m not gonna go.”
“Mom is stoked that he’s eased off on the lawsuits, Brooke. This is a good thing. We’re doing better.”
“Maybe,” she says.
“Seven o’clock.”
“Seven,” she says. And then, quickly, she blurts, “I love you” and hangs up before he can say it back to her.
They haven’t talked about Camp Carroll. About Sandoval. He prays—if that’s what you want you call it—that she has no idea about the thing behind the glass. She said she’d bummed Shane’s cigarettes in that room, and then they were taken back upstairs, and that was it. Like his father, Brooke had been furious at his reluctance to have the operation immediately. But she had afforded him a grudging respect when he said that he would get it taken care of, but he needed to get his affairs in order first. Brian, putting his foot down? It had bridged some gap between them, his quiet, steadfast insistence.
He walks back into the library, picks a table near the back of the fiction section.
He takes a pen from his bag, checks the time again.
His opens the notebook with the black cover.
And he starts writing.
It’s free writing, really, something he has his Writing 65 students do for ten minutes at the beginning of every class. Occasionally he refers to a printout and crosses something out in his notebook and writes beneath it.
Something in him rejoices in this simple race against time. Against biology. Against his own limitations.
Against Keller and what he did.
The printouts are sacred things, imbued with sanctity. (Given his education, he is accustomed to sanctifying objects; it’s second nature to him.) He cross-references timelines, expands upon the biographical and geographical facts he remembers from reading Sandoval’s own notebook. He writes about the specific placement of the stairwells in Camp Carroll, draws maps, wracks his memory for the way that Keller’s hand had moved on the doorway keypads, the patterns there. He writes down as many names of as many soldiers as he remembers during his brief stay in Hvíldarland. He writes about the bar they went to, about the distant, wistful tone that Karla took when suggesting they go there. He lists Gunnar’s favorite bands. He writes about Constable Jónsdóttir, and how she had a husband, and how she and Constable Leifsson got a call after coming to the farm, a call undoubtedly orchestrated by Keller. He writes about the bending trees of the álagablettur, about Road Seven, about Orvar and Viktor, about the dizzying way the plane hung over the little island before they descended.
But mostly he writes about Vaughn Keller.
After class tonight, or tomorrow morning—he tries to keep it sporadic, without structure—he’ll go to a FedEx office or a copy shop and use their internet. He’ll pay for his time with cash. He’ll visit websites and leave with a half-dozen printed pages, sometimes less. His sheaf of printouts will grow. The article he saw today reinforces the notion that he should be careful. It could even be a warning—knock it off.
Of course, it’s all terribly flimsy, these paltry defenses, this insistence on grade school–level subterfuge. But Brian is banking on the chance that Keller has other things to worry about. The man has to get Sandoval away from Hvíldarland, has to continue to lay those breadcrumbs away from Camp Carroll and the thing behind the glass. Two dead cops? Brian saw the newspaper article in which Sandoval had been officially charged in the hit and run case, so Keller also has to keep the Multnomah County District Attorney off the trail. He’s got to balance that with whatever he’s done to appease or threaten the Hauksdóttirs, the Jónsdóttir and Leiffson families. The Kjálkabein police. Brian wonders if he already has enough information to make things happen. Before people do begin to forget about Mark Sandoval.
But for now, Brian, small and tumor-fat, is a little mouse. Quiet and not bothersome at all.
He hopes to still be alive on Friday.
He hopes the rot is removed from him.
He hopes.
So he’s researching. He’s building the foundation of his story. He’s anchoring facts to footnotes. It’s an old muscle, research is. Don Whitmer’s three-armed embrace: theory, investigation, and review. It’s a familiar, beloved, well-developed muscle that he’s using now, even if the subject matter is a little out of his wheelhouse.
You can go ahead and mouth off to the New York Times, to the Post, to fuckin Fangoria if you want. You think you’re living some black helicopter shit right now, Brian, but you have no idea.
He writes. He builds the foundation, solidifies the narrative. He names names. And me
anwhile, time does what it does. Time is relentless. Time is a beast. He wishes he still had Sandoval’s notebook, even his original, ruined version of Monsters Americana. Something. His phone chirps—the alarm going off. He has a class to teach. But hopefully not his last—he’s found that he loves it. It’s a good fit after all. He writes another paragraph, reluctant to stop, but then rises and shuts his notebook, gathers his pages. He walks out of the library and puts his materials in his otherwise empty locker. It’s all thin, wire-thin, the whole process. The gamble.
It’s all so goddamn fragile, but he’s trying.
He hopes.
He’s found a few things about Vaughn Keller that he believes will lend credence to his story. He has the names of a few people who might be willing to talk about a small and mostly forgotten military base on a remote island near Iceland.
His classroom is on an upper floor in another building, and he smiles when he steps outside—the evening here is kissed with the scent of warmed cement and cut grass. The sky is a deep strident purple and, oh, it’s glorious. It really is.
They are waiting for him, his students, with laptops or notebooks open on their desks. A few of them chat quietly with each other. He nods, smiles, walks up to his own desk and puts his bag down by his chair. A few minutes later, his classroom is full.
Who will he tell? Who will believe him?
When he’s ready to talk, who will help him?
For now, it’s enough to simply do the work.
It’s enough to be quiet while preparing to be loud.
“Okay,” he says, and smiles. Their expectant faces gaze up at him, waiting. “We made it. Is everybody ready to do this one last time?”
About the Author
Keith Rosson is the award-winning author of the novels The Mercy of the Tide and Smoke City. His short fiction has appeared in Cream City Review, PANK, Outlook Springs, Phantom Drift, December, and more. An advocate of both public libraries and non-ironic adulation of the cassette tape, he lives in Portland, Oregon. More info can be found at keithrosson.com.