Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “You asked about my children,” Carter says one morning to the stranger. “Well, I left them behind. Abandoned my wife, and them.”

  “That’s all in the past now,” the stranger replies. “You’re on this train, now.”

  “I couldn’t support them; I kept losing jobs. I was never a very good father, or husband.”

  “Look out the window,” the stranger says.

  In the valley below them a swiftly moving river has improbably left its banks and is pushing houses, cars, livestock, all rapidly down its path. Carter can see the smooth fish-shapes of human bodies tumbling in the flood. The train, of course, is safe, on a bridge high above the valley.

  “We can’t do anything,” Carter says.

  “Correct. You have no responsibility. That is another life. You have escaped.” The stranger grins so fiercely Carter is surprised the man is able to get the words out.

  “It was best that I leave.”

  “Of course.” The stranger thumbs through a week’s accumulation of newspapers. Carter can make out only pieces of the headlines: HUNDREDS DIE … MAN JUMPS … 23 INJURED WHEN … CHILD ABUSE ON … CANCER UNDER … FIGHTING CONTINUES … WAR DECLARED BETWEEN … ESCAPEE FOUND …

  “Anyway, I was never very good in emergencies.”

  “Of course—few of us are,” the grinning stranger says. “Few of us are responsible. But you’re on the train, now. Its speed is beyond anything you’ve ever known before. It splits time and space. Its destinations lie in the future, another dimension entirely. Those other people, the ones outside the train, are merely lost messages coded into the winds, and the dry dust which disintegrates as the train pushes through their world. They cannot reach you. They cannot hold you responsible.”

  “But a witness? Doesn’t a witness have some responsibilities?”

  “This is the modern era. An era of media, media faster than any train. We are all witnesses. We are born into witnessing.”

  Carter continues his escape on the train. Rails click and cars rock, his wife and children tap and kiss the window, but he will not look at them. He will not feel guilty. And every day, unthinkably, people die outside his window, towns burn, children starve, planes plough nose-first into the ground alongside the tracks, and all the pleading voices are readily accessible to him. All he has to do is press his ear against the glass. Day rolls over into night and the seemingly endless night turns slowly into day.

  Outside his train window he sees his wife and children caught out in an open field, a tornado like a man’s anger ripping up the ground around them. Stones are picked up by the fierce winds and hurled like bullets at his family. Branches become spears. Odd bits of debris become flying shrapnel. He watches as his wife covers their children with her own body. He watches as the blouse across her back begins to tear into bloody strips. He watches as his children’s clothes are plastered to their bodies by drenching rains. He moves closer to the glass, and he watches.

  And as the impossible scene with his family continues, as his unlikely family is tortured and dies, he waits for the stranger to come and sit across from him. He’s eager to hear whatever the stranger has to say.

  The Far Side of the Lake

  If you live long enough, everyone you know becomes a ghost. Tom didn’t know who said that. Maybe he was the one. If you live long enough, you become the most obvious ghost of them all.

  He might have said it in a dream. These days, he spoke much more in dreams than he did in day-to-day life. The problem was, the people in his dreams were never as they were now, but as they might have been, or as they would one day become, or as he remembered them when they were still alive. Where was the comfort in that?

  It was a cold November morning in the city, but Tom deferred turning on the heat, took off the heavy socks he’d slept in, and walked the wooden floors barefoot. Tom, who’d always hated the cold, who’d engaged his late wife in a decades-long silent battle using locked windows and raised thermostats, now craved the palpable intimation of cold against bare flesh. To remind him of her, and to remind him that he might still feel.

  Half-remembered voices issued sleepily from between the floorboards as he padded towards the front door.

  A heavy white light had settled into the windows. It felt like a snowy day, and when Tom walked out for the paper he found the grass crispy with frost. But there was no snow, and the sky was not only empty of cloud, but of warmth as well. There was no traffic on his street today, but a distant murmur of moving vehicles beyond the houses to the east, the prattle of an invisible stream. He’d always thought of this neighborhood as noisy, too close to the Interstate. Even Janet had complained that the noise wasn’t good for the kids. Something must have happened. Something big enough to leach that surplus of sound from the air. A large grey bird flapped slowly away from the tall elm by the street, its wings heavy and silent.

  There are patterns and shapes hard-wired in the brain. When you see these patterns out in the world, you recognize them, and are filled with awe. He hadn’t said that, maybe no one had. Something he’d read, or dreamed. When he used to argue with Janet, he might say he “read it somewhere”. When she tried to pin him down, he could not always identify his sources. So maybe he had dreamed it—he just couldn’t always tell the difference.

  “So, how are things at your house this morning?”

  He looked around for the source of the question, and saw no one. Details were muted; he squinted at his neighbors’ porches for faces. Flowerpots with dying plants, shadows under the eaves, worn patches in painted walls, discolored windows: faces everywhere, and nowhere. Nothing but old houses layered in memory. Lonely middle-aged wives, retired types, widowers. Janet used to say they should research each house someday, see what they might uncover—all that history, it was a shame not to know. But they never got around to it.

  “Hey, Tom, did you hear? I said how are things?” The face was there, set above a withered hedge as if speared on a sharpened branch. His neighbor, rough shadows travelling the face as he tilted his head. He didn’t appear to have shaved in a while. Tom couldn’t resist touching his own face, the stubble like abraded skin.

  “Hello, Jack. Didn’t see you.” When was the last time he’d spoken to the man? Years? “We’re … I’m fine. Everything at my house is fine.” Had to use singular pronouns now—had to remember that. Didn’t want to embarrass people. Suddenly everything had become so damned personal. Manners an impenetrable code. Minefields everywhere. When had the small things become so painful?

  “Well, that’s good, good to hear. Listen, I was sorry to hear about Janet. Good woman.” Black-mittened hands floated above the hedge now like crow wings, looking for a place to land, finding none. Jack grimaced his sympathy. So it had been at least three years. Janet had been dead three years.

  “Thanks, Jack. Thanks.” He spoke the words a little too loudly, but it had been a while since he had talked to anyone on their street, this street, his street. He didn’t have complete control over his voice.

  Jack’s head looked down at the hands, as if in wonder at their sudden appearance. Hands flapped and struggled, disappeared. “You know I lost my wife four years back. I guess I know how it feels.”

  Was this an overture? An invitation? Tom had no idea—he wished he could call one of his daughters, they were so much better about people things, thank God, but even if he could call them he could never ask such a thing. Four years? He had had no idea. It felt like ten. Had they sent their condolences at the time? Surely Janet would have taken care of that. But maybe this was Jack’s way of gently criticizing him for having said nothing. “I’m … I’m sorry, Jack.” Which part was he sorry for? Jack’s wife’s death—what had been her name?—or his own awkwardness and neglect? In fact, he was sorry for damn near everything. He could hear the fear in his own voice. Could Jack? “Well, see you soon.”

  “See you, Tom.” The voice behind him, so loud and strong in the cold air. But he’d already headed back into the house as quickly
as possible, trying not to slip on the frost-slick grass, because if he fell, then what? What could he say to Jack? He could feel faces appearing at his neighbors’ windows, heard a whispering like distant traffic, but he didn’t look. Not with their eyes fixed on him like that. If he turned around, what would he see? Nothing, nothing at all. Nothing and everything.

  He was acutely aware of the sucking sound made by the soft rubber weather stripping as the front door closed onto the still house. He could not remember having noticed the sound before. It might have been the remarkable quiet, something about the cold, typical for this time of year, or a change in his own hearing because of age, or—more likely—emotion. The idea that sad people might hear sounds denied to others made an odd kind of sense to him. He opened the door again, closed it. A sound like a kiss, something sealed in, or something sealed out. A finality, in any case. Whom would he kiss, if given the chance?

  He went into the family room, the entertainment room—they’d called this space various names over the years and now none of them seemed to fit. No family at home, and he could not remember the last time he had been entertained. He pulled the heavy curtains across the windows, greying down the light. He sensed layers of dust floating past him. When they landed everything felt dirty and uncleanable. Julie, especially, was always alarmed to find the room this way. “Dad! It’s like a mausoleum in here.”

  He always smiled when she said that, although he never told her why. It was silly, really—he just found himself inordinately proud to have a daughter who might use such a large and unusual word.

  Whenever she’d find the room this way she’d busy herself pulling back curtains, opening windows, dusting the most obvious places, collecting plates crusted with unidentifiable food. “You’re going to get mice, Dad. And bugs, for sure.”

  He hadn’t seen any bugs, except for moths trapped in his lamp shapes, beating and beating until he ran to free them, unable to stand the sound of them. Sometimes they got caught behind the window shades, tumbling together in a pantomime of struggle. He could not bear to watch. But he’d never noticed insects on an everyday basis. Insects were background, like the soft and steady cascade of thought, or the whisper of distant conversation.

  But as he’d grown older, the backgrounds of his life had expanded, grown increasingly detailed, until finally they became the foreground, leaving nothing in background, nothing unnoticed, nothing unheard. He was only sixty, but felt much older. Then again, he couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t felt much older.

  Mice had always been a problem for Janet; their presence made her feel like a bad housekeeper. Their cat Max had done a good job of keeping the mice at bay, but Angela took the cat when her mother died. This had created friction between the girls—Julie thought he needed the cat’s company. To make peace he assured her this wasn’t the case. Angela retrieved Max the evening of the funeral, and though she’d said nothing about it, Tom was convinced she’d been afraid he was incapable of taking care of the cat.

  Oddly, he hadn’t seen a mouse in the house since then. Perhaps the rodents saw no point without the drama of the cat. Sometimes at night he’d lie in bed listening for their scurryings, his breath catching when branches scraped the window. But no sign. The house was empty. The thought would make him oddly hungry, and he’d climb out of bed and go down one set of stairs and down another—the house had always been too big, even when they all lived here—and stare into the refrigerator for long periods of time—Tom, you’ll burn out the bulb!—feeling cold mist travel his face, but saw nothing there to satisfy him. Then he’d hear this scratching, this scurrying, this racing, and he’d turn and turn, looking for the mice. Then realize it wasn’t mice at all, but the blood racing through his skull, scratching at his temples, gnawing at the flowers of his memory.

  The room—this would be the TV room now, he was thinking, this was where he watched TV—was adorned with family photographs. Periodically Julie would take care in dusting them. He looked at them often, but he was afraid he didn’t really see them anymore. The girls didn’t look like themselves in these pictures, and his son Will looked too much like a younger version of Tom, so that in some pictures he couldn’t tell if it was Will with his mother, or a portrait of Tom and Janet. And there were always more and more people he didn’t recognize. Who were all these dead folk?

  Janet would have been able to tell him. Only Janet had stayed pretty much the same, showing her age in only subtle changes to her hair and skin. She was in most of the photographs—even as part of the background her features were sharply defined. Janet relaxing. Janet in some unrecognizable landscape. Janet surrounded by pale strangers. Sometimes one of those strangers would be him, but not often. He’d taken most of the photographs, even the ones of people he no longer recognized. Now and again Janet or one of the kids would ask him to pose, to hand over the camera just for a second, but he usually declined, made some lame excuse. The kids often complained he didn’t trust them with his precious camera equipment. But that wasn’t it. He’d just never liked having his picture taken. He wasn’t sure why.

  One thing was he didn’t particularly like seeing himself, the way he’d changed over the years, the way he got older. Was that really him? He’d been afraid to tell his family he didn’t always recognize himself in old photos. It would sound impossible—it sounded impossible to him now—but looking around at the easel-backed frames propped up like some variegated army on crutches, he couldn’t always tell which photos he was in, except for the rare close-up. If there were ghosts in any of these photos, they weren’t the images of the ones who’d passed on, but of Tom himself, absent or unrecognized, a sad specter.

  A look from Janet caught him. Feeling faint, he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he couldn’t find the particular picture of her. For an anxious moment he worried that someone had taken it, but that made no sense. Other eyes seemed to be looking up at him, no doubt an illusion created by their tilt. Some of the frames leaned dangerously, threatening to spill their occupants. Other pictures appeared to gesture to companion photos, attempts to signal, to draw conversation. He found himself leaning, dizzy.

  Tom reached out and found the arms of the oldest chair, now collapsing into the floor. Angela had bought him a new one, and he’d moved that into the living-room still wrapped in plastic. He sat in it once when she gave it to him, smiled and thanked her, told her he loved her. But he hadn’t sat in it since. There was a lamp beside the old chair because he used to read a great deal in this room. The bulb had burned out weeks ago. He hadn’t bothered to replace it because he read little these days. His eyes always wandered from the print, following some stray thought having nothing to do with what he was reading, and he’d find himself staring at this room and seeing nothing, feeling everything and seeing nothing, and yet unable to return to the page again. If he returned to the pages, the words had changed. He was in the middle of another story, another day, and there were too many words he’d never seen before.

  So now it was the TV room, and he used the remote to turn on the morning news, satisfied with the darkness of the room. “God, Dad,” Julie would say, “You can’t tell if it’s day or night in here.” But that was the point, although he wasn’t sure why that was the point. It was just easier somehow.

  The image on the screen flickered, and flickered, pulsing like a failing heart. He’d let his cable service lapse, and the reception on the local channels was poor on the old TV. The last time Will had visited, he’d offered to buy him a new one, but Tom had declined, telling his strangely grown-up boy that this would do, this would do fine. He did not tell his son all the things he was thinking at the time, how he didn’t know any of these people anyway, how a sharp picture might fool you into thinking you knew them, how it brought them right into the room with you, how sometimes the clarity of superior reception could be such a lie. Some thoughts you simply did not share, not even with a loved child. Most thoughts you did not share.

  He’d never really understood
what should be told, what should be kept to oneself. Somehow that was a key to intimacy between people, but he’d never known. Janet had been the expert, and had obviously struggled to hide her exasperation with him when he made terrible faux pas. Perhaps for more than anything else, he’d loved her for that. When he lost her, he lost the world’s patience.

  A buried rustle. Mouse in the room, but he had no cat. He had no wife and he had no cat.

  The lead story was about a famous young actor who had died the night before. The cause of death was unclear to Tom—he could not be sure what they were saying. It sounded as if they were saying the young actor died because he was a young actor. And that made a kind of sense to Tom. For a moment you might believe everything they said. But they were specters, flickering, beating desperately against the inside of the glass as their lights began to fade.

  Tom didn’t think he’d ever seen any of the movies the young actor had made, but he might have seen one of the commercials he’d been in as a young boy. For peanut butter, maybe. A boy’s smile of simple pleasure, repeated again and again, like a grainy home movie watched too often. Some people smiled much too much, continued to smile long after happiness had passed, and long after they themselves were dead.

  The sound, too, was grainy, allowing other conversations to creep in, but Tom could not trace the specific words, nor did he recognize any of the other voices.

  A phone rang, and it was far too clear to be a phone on TV. He looked around the room, momentarily forgetting where he’d put the phone. He had no idea where the wall jack might be, and besides with the long extension cords, not to mention those new cordless jobs—did he even own a cordless? Julie had talked and talked about buying him one, and he’d told her that was too much money for an old man’s birthday, and she’d been upset—Don’t talk about being old, Dad. You’re not that old!—so now he had no idea where the phone might be.

  The phone jangled persistently. It probably wasn’t for him anyway. Almost all the calls had always been for Janet; she’d had so many friends. A few had called since then, to see how he was doing, to ask for information only Janet might have had, and then those calls had ended abruptly, like a short circuit, a sudden surge of pity and then everything was dead. Now he got three or four wrong number calls a week. The other day some fellow just would not believe he wasn’t Jerome Bledsoe. You sound just like him! And the guy started making small talk, just didn’t want to hang up. And Tom found himself unable to end the call—they must have been on the phone together a good five minutes. And then the caller himself ended the call, and it surprised Tom how disappointed he was.