In the darkness familiar directions become untrustworthy dreams. New street signs appear providing a fresh supply of obstacles. Shadows spread and ignore their loyalties. He sticks his head out the driver’s side window and attempts to find his way by smell. In the past he has been good at smelling despair and hunger and the locations of those waiting long hours to receive a delivery.
When the light dims at the end of the day it always seems a sudden event, even though the sun may have been sinking or the clouds rolling in for hours. But beyond his consideration the day is suddenly grey or amber, depending upon the time of the year, and he feels a strain in his eyes as they attempt to see all the details they are used to seeing. He feels dangerous driving a vehicle at such times, and is surprised at the end of the day to find that he has failed to run over any of the shadows.
The deepening night is like black snowfall, a mass of dark flakes carved from the giant ball waiting at the end of the day, the flakes gathering first in the corners and hiding places of the world, finally filling up the very air he breathes. Every morning he has breathed it out again, but a sooty residue of the previous night always remains inside him, in his heart and blood, in his thoughts and the words he uses.
He does not believe anyone would mind his peeking inside the package. He cannot believe anyone would deny him his right to know the final message. But he must hurry, he thinks, and decide what he must do, for the address scrawled on the bright red envelope might suddenly appear at any time.
But at the end of the day time passes slowly. Each block is longer and the intervals between lights stretch out lazily. He remembers all the dead ones, the ones who were former lovers, family members, even the dead strangers named by the newspapers. He can almost see them fleeing the headlights. At the end of the day he speculates about what their lives have become. At the end of the day he can feel the shadow of their fatigue in his hands clutching the steering wheel.
At the end of the day the lines of the streets disappear and he follows the final sparks of head-and tail-lights into the night. Static fills all positions on his radio. He drives through a landscape of black birds, thousands of birds gathered under his wheels, no light to reflect their colors or everyday shapes, wings overlapping until they are one solid, mobile mass rocking his van with their movements. He drives through a landscape of broken trees, their ragged ends scratching at the night. He drives through a landscape of window frames and door frames, their buildings transparent and filled with black.
At the end of the day he imagines that somewhere else, beyond the limited vision his windshield provides, events of terrible beauty are taking place. Faces are melting and hair is burning. Somewhere beyond his vision his children’s lives are turning to smoke. In his undelivered package he believes there must be revelations about the causes of such events. In his unopened message there may be instructions concerning what to do at the end of the day. At the end of the day he will have no one to tell him stories, no one to make requests, no one to speak the orders.
Sam opens a window to feel the dark air and his fingers come away raw and blistered at the end of the day so that he can barely grasp the steering wheel.
And yet there is still this one more delivery to make, one more service to perform. As his route stretches out into darkness the lights in the houses dim to amber, then fade to black. Body heat escapes through open windows and chimneys, causing the neon signs to burn noticeably brighter. At the end of the day the city burns its citizens for the fuel that keeps the buildings tall, the concrete rigid, that prevents the asphalt melting into a viscous sea. Sometimes there are power failures. Sometimes the tires on his van adhere to the road, making this final delivery more difficult at the end of the day.
At the end of the day all the customers have forgotten their orders. At the end of the day there is no one left to receive his package. His message is written in a forgotten language. There are no more tongues wrapped around difficult communications. In the empty streets there are no more tongues. The windows of the stores are grimed. Abandoned cars join together into metallic reefs to block his passage. At the end of the day all the vessels lie empty. At the end of the day torn scraps of paper, discarded messages, litter the plazas and lawns. At the end of the day everything sleeps. There is nothing else to do at the end of the day.
In the dark faraway he hears his wife and children calling him. His shift should be over by now, they tell him. He should be coming home. But at the end of the day there are very few roads fit for travel. At the end of the day he has lost his name. At the end of the day he cannot find his way home.
But at least he knows he still has his unopened package. At least at the end of the day he can imagine its contents. He can recite the poetry of its unopened message. Because it is urgent. Because it is essential. And because it is all that he has.
Fogwell
He’d never felt like one of them, not even for a moment.
Willis watched them at night, from his bedroom window. His parents didn’t understand why he was always going to bed early. He said it was because he wanted to read, or because he was tired. But he really just wanted to be in his bedroom with the lights out, in protected dark, so he could watch them, see what they were up to.
Not that he could ever really tell. They stayed in the shadows, and whispered a lot. But at least he’d be able to see if they ever decided to climb the wall to the porch roof, and his window. If they ever decided to come after him.
If they ever came after him he could always cry and scream, create what Grandma would call a ruckus, and Mom and Dad would come in to save him from them.
He knew that last part wasn’t true. They’d come in, all right, but they’d come in to see what the hell was going on. They’d come in to see what was wrong with Willis this time. Why he was such a baby. Why he couldn’t sleep through the night like other boys.
Sometimes Willis thought that Mom and Dad didn’t understand because they had lived here so long. Mom and Dad had both been born in the Bay and had lived here all of their lives.
Willis had been born in Chicago, when Mom and Dad were on vacation. Dad had always kidded about that: “Your mama just couldn’t wait, I guess.” And then he’d laugh, but Willis didn’t think it was a real laugh. Willis thought it was one of those laughs people made when they were trying to hide something.
Willis heard a lot of laughs like that in the Bay.
Once he had come home early from the library and heard his mom and dad in their bedroom, talking about it. “If he’d been born here in the Bay like we’d planned he wouldn’t be this way,” his dad had said.
“You’ve no right to blame me. You were the one who wanted to go so far away, you know, even with me pregnant.”
“I didn’t know you were going to pull a stunt like that. I didn’t know if I was even going to get you out of Chicago.”
“It was a better hospital, and …”
“It was Chicago! You didn’t want to leave after he was born. Or are you trying to tell me you don’t remember that? You wanted to stay in Chicago, and not tell any of the people back here where we were!”
“I was scared, John. I was a lot younger then, and I was scared.”
Willis couldn’t quite figure out what they were talking about, but he sneaked out of the house after that last part. He was suddenly afraid about them finding him there, home early from the library and everything. So he went off into the woods and stayed awhile, until it was the time he’d told them he’d be home.
Willis liked the woods around the Bay. There wasn’t the noise (he couldn’t understand how people could live in the city) and there weren’t all the faces—pale and staring. There were trees so tall he couldn’t see their tops. There was ground that hid stone and pockets of stone, and bold animals.
Sometimes Willis wondered what the animals thought about the people of Greystone Bay. If they wanted to have anything to do with people other than him. The noise people made would bother them, he thought, so he tr
ied to be as quiet as he could.
The animals who lived in the woods outside the Bay surprised him some. The animals he saw in books and on TV had lots of teeth and were wild, and wild meant you couldn’t keep them as pets because they’d act nervous and try to get away and maybe even go crazy and try to bite you. Willis knew that wild animals were nothing like the stuffed animals his mom used to make him.
The animals Willis met in the woods didn’t show their teeth, although he figured they must have them. The animals Willis met in the woods had pale fur and white eyes and were thinner than what he would have expected wild animals to be. They looked as if most of their guts had been taken out.
But they moved okay, and they didn’t act sick.
There was a rabbit in the woods that moved around on its hind feet and stood taller than he would have expected a rabbit to.
There was a cat-thing (he couldn’t tell what kind) that made a sound like a whisper and you couldn’t always see it move.
There was a deer that leaped in slow motion, and when it landed it shook all over for a few minutes, before leaping again.
Willis was sure that all these things had teeth, but none of them showed their teeth.
Sometimes when he’d run off into the woods these and other animals would come close to him, only a few feet away, and they’d stay with him, watch him, until it was time for him to go home again.
At school he usually didn’t have any friends, but sometimes on the playground a few kids would come close to him, only a few feet away, and watch him until it was time to come in from recess.
They didn’t show their teeth either, but he knew they had them.
Sometimes at night, when they thought he was asleep, Willis’s mom and dad came into his room and stood at the foot of his bed and watched him.
Willis spent most of his time by himself. That part didn’t always bother him, at least not so bad. He had other things to fill his time.
He could imagine things. He could imagine things better than the things he saw in the Bay. He could imagine city halls bigger than the town’s City Hall. He could imagine hotels far more elegant than the Ocean Arms. He could imagine houses far older, far more ornate. Even though he’d never seen these bigger and better things—he’d never been outside the Bay since he was a few weeks old—he could still imagine them. He had a real talent for imagining but only his sister Elaine and two boys at school—Johnny Williams and Roger Plummer—knew he was so good at imagining. He could see this thing in his head, and he could see that thing in his head, things far more wonderful and strange than what could be found in the “real” world.
Until they showed him the fogwell, and he saw what it could do.
He didn’t know if he could call Johnny and Roger his friends, exactly. If they were his friends they were the only ones he had. Not that that bothered him too much—he had the imagining, after all—but maybe it bothered him a little. Sometimes maybe it bothered him a lot.
But Johnny and Roger were best friends, and had been ever since Willis could remember. Willis was the third friend, the friend of Johnny and Roger. Second best. And somehow he knew that’s the way it would always be. Whoever he met, he’d be the third one. He’d never be anybody’s best friend.
But you couldn’t say that. You couldn’t complain about it, really. Then you might end up with no friends at all, like he’d been, most of the time, most of what he could remember.
Willis couldn’t figure why that was, unless it was something in him that made it be that way. That’s the only thing he could figure. Something in him that made him imagine so well, and something in him that made him nobody’s best friend. It had to be something like that.
Roger was the short friend, the friend with the dark hair, but with eyes so pale you didn’t always notice they even had pupils. Willis had first noticed this future friend standing on the corner near their house—it had seemed he’d stood out there for days, because every time Willis had looked out his bedroom window Roger was there.
Then one day, while Willis was passing by this strange boy on his way to school, Roger had handed him a frog. Just handed it to him, put it right into Willis’s hand. Willis had been so surprised he’d taken the frog, accepted it just like it was a natural, everyday thing for somebody to be handing you a frog. The frog had been an albino, all pale and shiny, so pale and bloodless, in fact, that Willis would have sworn it was a dead thing, all the blood drained out of it. But its eyes had moved, round and round inside the bulging sockets, and then its feet had started rubbing back and forth across Willis’s forearm, as if it were dreaming of water, swimming along Willis’s arm.
Willis had been afraid, at the time, that it might open its mouth all of a sudden, and Willis would have to scream. But the frog didn’t, and Willis didn’t.
The next day Roger had met Willis out on the playground, and brought his friend Johnny to meet him. Johnny was taller than anyone else in the class, and had very thin blond hair. His hair was so thin and so light that it almost disappeared on real sunny days, so that Johnny looked old, bald and tall and stooped.
Johnny didn’t say much, just seemed to always be looking down at you, breathing all the air somewhere over your head. Johnny made little gasping noises when he breathed. It was kind of creepy. Like a fish out of water.
“Hey, Willis! Let’s go in the woods! Tell us what you see. Tell us some stories about the woods.”
That was Roger. He was always trying to get Willis to go into the woods with them. He was always trying to get Willis to tell new stories about the woods. That would make Willis feel all funny inside. Kind of good, that Roger would invite him, that Roger would want him there. And kind of proud, that they’d see that he had that imagination, and that they’d want to hear some more of his stories. But kind of scared, too, and unsure, because Willis liked to be in the woods by himself. It was his place. He didn’t want to share it with anybody else.
“C’mon, Willis! We can camp out! You can tell us all about the woods!”
Until there was that one day that Willis finally gave in. Roger and Johnny had been gone most of the summer—Willis never knew where—and he’d had nobody to play with the whole time.
Summers were the worst. You couldn’t pretend you had too much schoolwork to do to play with the other kids. You couldn’t pretend you didn’t need to play with the other kids. And he’d wanted to play with somebody so bad.
So Roger and Johnny finally dropped by the house a couple of days before school was supposed to start that year. Willis had wanted to play so bad, and Roger and Johnny were already walking towards the woods.
Before he knew it Willis was running after them. He had an awful time catching up.
“What do you see, Willis?” That was Johnny, and he always breathed even funnier when he asked questions like that.
Willis just kind of grunted, like it was a joke. They weren’t even near the woods yet.
“What do you see, what do you see,” Roger chanted, and the two boys raced ahead of him. Willis ran as hard as he could, but they were too far ahead of him. Before he could catch up they had disappeared into the woods.
Willis didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all. The woods were his place, and now his sometimes friends were in there by themselves. Finding his secret sitting places and his secret lying-down places. Looking at his secret animals.
He stumbled as he ran after them, falling hard on his face. He began to cry. He got up and ran towards the woods, that suddenly seemed too far away, just a dim grey fence of a thing over the hill.
Willis tried to imagine being there, being with his animals, curled up in the dark places, so dark you couldn’t see the spiders and lizards and other things he didn’t like so much. Just the animals, his animals, because they kind of glowed inside and didn’t show their teeth.
Then he was there, standing right inside the woods, the trees suddenly taller than anything he had ever imagined, hurting his head with their tallness, crowding out the sky with
their tallness.
And everything was so quiet, quieter even than his whole life.
The trees were like the ones in the Snow White story, or Snow-drop, when she was taken into the woods to be killed on order of the wicked queen, the wicked mother. Or like the trees in “the Sleeping Beauty of the Woods”, that grew so tall and wide, interlaced with brambles and thorns. He could see grey running shadows in the distance, weaving their way through the narrow spaces between the trees. He stopped and breathed deeply of the dark air to calm himself. Then he followed.
As Willis hiked deeper and deeper into the woods, disappointment began to seize him, and the dark air tasted sour on his tongue. They’d gone in so quickly, without hesitating, it appeared as if Johnny and Roger knew their way around here. And all this time, Willis had thought of these woods as his own.
The trees had grown taller to protect Sleeping Beauty, but here they seemed an ever-growing screen to keep Willis out.
Suddenly the sound of Johnny’s and Roger’s progress through the woods became audible again, and Willis chilled—the sounds seemed so close by.
The luminous deer leaped the spaces between trees. The pale cat-thing rolled in the branches overhead. The tall rabbit remained invisible except for its eyes, which danced and floated in the dark.
Willis closed his eyes, wishing them gone. If he had to share them he’d rather not have them at all. But even with his eyes closed he could feel the patterns they made in the air.
Something tall and silver-grey moved from tree to tree. For a moment, Willis couldn’t remember if he had opened his eyes or not. He thought it might be Johnny, playing hide-and-seek with him. He shut his eyes and opened them again—or was it the other way around? Either way, what he saw was the same. Something tall, something silver-grey, moved from tree to tree.
He hated hide-and-seek. Of all the games they played, this one was the worst. Kids you thought might be, might become, your friends suddenly went away, hid somewhere laughing at you while you were looking for them, so afraid that they were gone. They were off playing and having a good time and here you were all by yourself.
Absent Company Page 26