“Stay out of the boat, Tom!”
But Tom was already easing himself into it, untying the rope. “I just want to say hello. I just want to be neighborly.”
“Stay out of the boat, Tom!” the Baxter thing screamed and screamed, but did not move from where it was sitting, did not even lay down the fishing pole. Tom thought perhaps the Baxter thing could not move from his assigned spot. So who’s stuck now?
Tom gently pushed away from the dock and picked up the oars.
“Your phone! Better pick it up! Come back and pick up your phone, Tom! Tom!”
I’ve picked up the oars so I can’t very well pick up the phone, Tom thought. The boat moved as if on its own accord towards the center of the dark lake—Tom hardly had to pull the oars at all. He gazed at the far side of the lake, now brilliant with explosive white light. Behind him someone was calling his name, but the sound was so unfamiliar he couldn’t quite grasp its significance. When he got back from the party he’d have to investigate.
It suddenly occurred to him he may have forgotten something, but he could not remember what it was. He and Janet were always forgetting things when they went off to parties.
A stench of burned flesh in the air. A constant ringing in his ears. Someone really ought to pick up that phone.
He turned around in the boat to look for it, and saw three people waving to him from the shore. But where was Baxter? He’d probably just caught his limit and returned to his cabin to sleep it off. The man was a lush—Tom had known it the first time they met him. Janet had been more charitable. “He lives up here alone. His wife died a few years ago, I’m told. He doesn’t have much to hold onto anymore, poor man.”
Poor man. Poor Tom. He has no wife and he has no cat. No cabin, no phone, a borrowed boat, and all his children grown up and gone. All of them ghosts with much more substance than he.
The music from the far side rose and fell like waves on an ocean. So much activity for such a small lake, he thought.
A change in the light made him look up. Somehow the trees along the lakeshore had grown taller, bent over at their tops to dome the water. He stared at the water and saw their reflections: layered trees above and layered trees below. And no light anywhere except for the glow of the distant party, the burn of their laughter, the fire of their full lives.
A desperate ringing in his ears.
He could hear the splash of other boats and other swimmers. He heard their voices, calling for the people on the far shore to wait for them, to keep the party going until they got there, but he saw no boats, no swimmers. And then all was still again.
The boat turned and raced. It made no difference if he used the oars or not. Sometimes the boat swung around so that he could see the dock he’d departed from: the figures waving frantically, the confused cries, the rring rring rring begging his attention. But then the boat would turn again before he could even think of acting.
He thought of preparing himself for the party to come. What did he have to say? A lot of pleased-to-meet-yous and isn’t-that-interesting and we’ll-all-have-to-get-together-again-real-soon. Janet would have coached him well about what he could or could not say. And his children.
And his children. They couldn’t know what went on inside his head. No one could look inside another person’s head. Yet they still loved him. How had they managed that?
They could not see the dying inside him struggling to chew its way out—the young had no true appreciation of the dying—and yet they still called him Dad, still sought his company, as sorry as it must be at times.
They managed to do so much, his sweet children.
The wind picked up sharply, blowing hard enough to pull his scalp right off his skull. Tender thoughts for his children ripped through the skull plate, tangling briefly in his too-long hair (measurable in feet it seemed, since beginning this boat ride), before spinning off into the impenetrable cloud cover. He held on to his rippling shirt, then held on to his face, feeling the skin pull into a rictus grin.
He was close enough now to the far side of the lake, that he could see the rows of faces gathered along the shore. Faces resolving themselves out of the showy paper lanterns dangling from the trees, faces expressed in broken cabin windows and dead tree trunks erected in the shallows, faces floating out of the fires that raged unchecked through the campground.
Faces everywhere, and nowhere.
It had always seemed to Tom that everywhere you went there were faces and eyes to look at you, and yet most people were seldom seen. How could this be?
Rring rring rring. A tall figure on the shore, ringing the largest handbell Tom had ever seen. That person, wrapped in sheets and dust webs and flame, had to be someone of enormous power. A bell the size of a school bell, for every wayward student of the world. If only he could show his children such a sight.
If only his children. It’s not right, Daddy. Of course not, but sometimes, maybe most of the time, we had to live with what was not right. He had tried hard to get that across to them, even though he hadn’t really wanted them to know.
You live alone and you die alone, and that isn’t right. You know no one and no one knows you, and that isn’t right.
In fact, it is a horror. But it is a horror you share.
Rring rring rring. He’d have to answer. His children were waiting for his answer. As the boat swung back around he could feel the burning gaze of the dead on the far side of the lake, against his back, on his head. He could feel the rage in their hunger and the hunger in their rage.
But his children waited for him on the opposite shore. As the skies cleared, and he pulled the oars slowly through these waters shadowed with time, and memory, and all that he could not understand, he could see first one, then the others, wave him home.
Presage
Deborah had been unable to keep track of the rain, and it worried her. She’d fallen asleep with the rain and awakened again with the steady, numbing beat of it, and there seemed no change in its rhythm, no change in the clouds of mist which covered the ground and lowered the sky and filled her mouth when she tried to speak of her fear. The rain continued, day after day after day. She tuned into the weather forecasts on both the television and radio and, although they spoke of the rain and how no clear days were yet anticipated, no one remarked on the awful persistence of the rain. No one verified Deborah’s belief that the rain had continued without slackening, without even the pause of a few seconds, without even the vaguest alteration in its pace.
The numerous fogged windows had left the house encased in grey. At night the moon melted into milk which was quickly soaked up by the dark clouds. Her footsteps seemed to disappear into the floor, as if she were walking on liquid the color and texture of wood. The voices of her husband and children had faded into soft, damp echoes.
The grey of the rain became the grey of walls, floor, and ceiling. The grey became her own thoughts, the steady beat of rain the rhythm of her heart and lungs. When she breathed, she breathed the house, her entire life, into her lungs. Her mind grew damp, then heavy with waterlogged furniture and decor. It was during the fourth week of such rain that Deborah began seeing the new people living in her house.
A young woman walked through the rooms much as Deborah always had, anxious and afraid, checking on children who were not Deborah’s children.
An older man read late at night in a chair she did not recognize, in a study that had been her sewing-room.
A small boy she had never seen before painted picture after picture of a woman with grey hair, brown eyes made too big and of different sizes, a dark red smear for a mouth. Deborah thought the woman strangely resembled herself.
Out in her back yard, under a steady stream of grey that descended from a still greyer sky, a young couple embraced beneath a huge maple where once a sapling had grown.
Strangers moved in and out of her home as if underwater, as if in slow motion, as if waltzing through a vagueness of time. When Deborah’s daughter walked into the room—and wh
at was she doing out of bed? She should have been in bed hours ago!—Deborah stretched out her hand through the frigid air and brushed the ice from her daughter’s hair. Her daughter looked up into Deborah’s face and smiled with an empty mouth. Then her daughter reached up to embrace her mother, their empty grey mouths met, and Deborah’s daughter filled her with cold.
Deborah walked out into the grey rain and down the streets of her neighborhood. Here was the church where her daughter was married. Here was the house where her daughter raised her own children, lived and died. Here was the grey grave of her husband. Here were the graves of everyone she had ever known. Here was her own damp grave.
Deborah stared at these houses all around her. She went from house to house as if floating, as if her feet would not, could not touch the ground. She went to the windows and stared at the strangers inside: people she had never known, eating, sleeping, watching the clock. She shouted at them through the grey glass but they paid her no attention. She beat on the glass but they would not turn and look at her.
“Don’t you know?” she shouted as if underwater. “These?” And she looked around her at a world at once familiar and yet obscured by the greyness of strangers. “These are the houses of the dead!”
Derelicts
They always seemed to find him. The derelicts. They always seemed to know just where to look. He’d go into a store to buy cigarettes or beer, and when he came out there’d be several of them gathered around, waiting for him. Washed out eyes and dark stubble, frayed collars and cuffs. Hand always outstretched, that look of hunger in the face. They seemed convinced he would give them something; they were sure of him. They’d pass by far more likely prospects to hit on him. It was as if they had a network, passing the word around that he, the red-haired one, was the one to ask.
And yet he never gave them anything. He was polite enough about it, never rude, but still he never went into his pockets for them, never gave them money or offered to buy them food. He would walk past them, self-consciously holding his head erect. He would not be intimidated by them; they had no right to intimidate him. And yet they continued to approach him: individually, in couples, even small groups.
He lived in an old part of Denver, his neighborhood an odd mixture of housing developments, antique houses, abandoned buildings, and vacant lots. The shopping malls nearby were among the oldest in the city, every other store boarded up or rented out for warehouse space. Shops seemed to come and go, few lasting more than a couple of months. “Coming Soon to This Location” signs were much in evidence, and were removed frequently, often before the neighborhood had even been told the nature of the new business.
Tatters of poster overlaying poster made ragged murals on nearly half the buildings. Stripped away with only partial success, each succeeding layer blended and weathered until they made Rorschach arrangements of color. He had never seen so many posters and handbills anywhere and he wondered where they all came from. He had never seen anyone actually putting them up. Circus posters and campaign posters, handbills promoting the Socialist Workers’ Party, advertising community meetings, block parties, year-old garage sales. Always asking you to join, to belong to something. They suggested extensive activity, but he knew there had been little such activity in some time.
Abandoned stores, boarded-up houses, overgrown lots (wasn’t there some sort of ordinance?), structures crumbling dangerously into streets, trash-filled alleys … if he really thought about it the sense of desolation was nearly overwhelming. Like a city in wartime, or a bad dream about the world after a nuclear attack. So few people out in the streets, especially this time of year. It was too unpleasant.
And where did all the trash come from, or the wind-blown grit that stung your eyes? Sometimes he had the fantasy it was manufactured outside the city, brought in on trucks or dropped from planes.
The number of derelicts in the area increased, even as the apparent wealth declined. He couldn’t understand it—who had any money to give them? He theorized enough: perhaps the police had driven them out of other areas, perhaps they were local hotel dwellers with Social Security money—not wanting handouts so much as to make contact. Perhaps they were a club. He watched closely for hidden handshakes and meaningful looks. They seemed so well organized; he couldn’t believe it had happened by accident.
He’d changed jobs twice the past year. Staying too long in one office had always made him uncomfortable. Both his employers had been surprised; they’d insisted he talk out any problems he might be having with them personally. They said he was a valuable man. They said they couldn’t get along without him. Their insistence made him anxious, and in both cases he cleaned out his desk immediately, cancelling his two weeks’ notice.
He hadn’t seen his wife and two kids in over three years. Last thing he’d heard they’d moved to Chicago. He felt sad about that, but not enough to write, not enough to make contact. He knew he should, but he just couldn’t force himself. His attitude nagged him; he was aware of how cold, how inhuman it must seem to others. But he didn’t have it in him to tie himself to a wife and children. It was somehow … wrong, for him. As if he were committing some moral wrong—he felt it that strongly.
He left the grocery store with bags in the crooks of both arms. Twice as much food as he needed, really, and he wasn’t sure why he’d been so extravagant, except sometimes since he’d left his family he’d had a crazy urge to buy, to consume, to let the food spoil and then throw it out when it smelled too bad to tolerate. It released something in him to do that; it was relaxing.
They were waiting for him, a group of five or six, outside the grocery store. He couldn’t get to his car without passing through them. They had no right.
They wouldn’t move. He strode closer and closer to their little group, and still they wouldn’t budge. The tallest one turned slightly as he approached, opened his mouth wide, and expelled a long, slow, and rancid breath into his face. A smell of ancient appetites, things dying in the cavern of the mouth. He veered away from them, and two old women raised ragged hands, grease staining them in streaks, or was it blood, and dirt caked over to seal their wounds? It was a slow, dirty dance as they moved ever so slightly with his own movements, seeming to follow him with their thoughts, their smells, their dirt, the sluggish cells of their bodies following in kind.
He couldn’t bear the thought of having those filthy, tattered clothes touch him, those torn and grimy fingers. And the eyes … he couldn’t see them. The eyelids so dark and greasy … the eyes seemed lost.
He walked past, and, incredibly, they didn’t touch him. They slipped by like oil. Dark and silent. If they touched him he’d never be able to wash them off.
They followed him to the car, two steps behind the whole way. He got in, pulled out, and would have run them over if they hadn’t suddenly slid aside like a dark and stained curtain.
Driving home he suddenly realized he’d been thinking about his parents. Their faces had crept into his daydreaming, merely as additional faces in the crowd, and then they had stepped forward. He couldn’t remember the last time he had thought about them.
For a moment he couldn’t remember what he had been thinking about them, and although that kind of lapse happened to him all the time he found it disconcerting. He knew it was something important. Then with a shock he realized he’d been trying to remember the day of their death, and the funeral that followed. What had he been doing? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t even remember their death—it did happen, he was sure it happened—but he suddenly couldn’t remember anything about it. Where it occurred, when it occurred … it was all a blank.
It was quite remarkable, really, the way the derelicts worked things. Each appeared to have been assigned a specific street corner, but was ready to move, to regroup if it seemed necessary. There were always a few of them everywhere he went in the neighborhood: outside a movie theatre, on the steps of the local branch library, sitting by the trees next to his bank, congregating in the parking lot of the in
surance company where he now worked. And it would always be a mixture of new and old faces. They must have squad leaders, he thought. He began noticing definite patterns. Many of the same faces showed up at his bank that also appeared at his grocery store, but none of those ever seemed to make an appearance at the library.
At the library they watched him return some long overdue books. At the grocery store they caught him overspending again, buying much more food than he needed. At the theatre he bought a ticket to an X-rated movie under their watchful gaze. At the laundromat he sorted shirts he’d let go much too long without washing, and they were there just past his left shoulder, on the other side of the window, lounging on the sidewalk.
He could have done all his shopping outside the neighborhood, but he didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t loyalty to local commerce so much as an interest in watching how things went in the neighborhood, how things occurred. Observing the life of the neighborhood had become a kind of hobby for him. He watched it go downhill; he studied its decay. He performed a kind of accounting on each building he saw, day after day. He observed whether there were more tiles missing, more chips in the paint, more splits in the wood. He knew where all the broken windows were, and when a new one appeared. He saw the merchandise leave the shelves and noted the failure to reorder. He watched the weeds grow around the buildings and in the vacant lots.
On a Saturday he drove around the lake. There seemed more of the derelicts than he had ever seen before, hundreds of them, mixed in thoroughly with the usual Saturday lake crowd. Lounging about, picnicking, even playing basketball. Almost a convention of them. There were more of them than he had imagined, and he wondered if perhaps more of them were migrating here, to his neighborhood, from other parts of the city, or if it were just that large numbers of his neighbors were going over—their lives decaying as the neighborhood decayed.
He thought he saw his parents in the crowd, sunning themselves in tattered and greasy clothes with the other derelicts, and he spent some time driving around in that area, but he couldn’t be sure, and he did not see them again.
Absent Company Page 16