He pulled in at the first gas station he saw. He stopped at the pumps, turned off the car, and clambered out, only then realizing the shop was abandoned and empty, the pumps covered with grime, the rubber hoses old and cracked. He got back into the car and started it again, then drove through the streets of the town looking for another station. But there didn’t seem to be one.
What had he seen in the storm cellar? He still wasn’t quite sure. He unlocked it and went down, his father standing with his arms crossed up top. It smelled of dust inside, and of something else—something that made him taste metal in his mouth when he breathed the air. It made his throat hurt.
He went down the rickety wooden steps until he came to a packed-earth floor. There was just enough room to stand upright. Even with the door open, it took a while for his eyes to adjust, and once they had adjusted, he didn’t see much. The floor was stained in places, darker in some places than others—unless that was some natural property of the earth itself. He didn’t think it was. There was, in the back, deeper in the hole, a series of racks, and there was something hanging on them. He hesitated and from up above heard his father say, “Go on,” his voice cold and hard. He groped his way forward, but because of the way his own body blocked the light, it wasn’t until he was a foot or two away that he realized that what he was seeing were strips of drying meat. Hundred of them, sliced thin and sometimes twisted up on themselves, with nothing really to tell him what sort of animal they had come from. Though it was a large animal, he was sure of that.
His mouth grew dry and he found himself staring, his eyes flicking from one strip to the next and back again. He almost called out to his father to ask him where the dried meat had come from, but something stopped him. In his head, he imagined his father answering the question by simply reaching down and swinging the door shut and leaving him in darkness. The feeling was so palpable that for a moment he wondered if he wasn’t in darkness after all, if he wasn’t simply imagining what he thought he was seeing.
He forced himself to turn around very slowly, as if nothing was wrong, and climb up the stairs. His father watched him come but made no move to reach out and help him as Bernt scrambled out of the shelter.
“You seen it?” asked his father.
He hesitated a moment, wondering what exactly his father had meant for him to see—whether it was the strips of meat or perhaps something else, something behind the racks, even deeper in. But almost immediately he decided it was safer to simply agree.
“I saw it,” he said.
His father nodded. “Good,” he said. “Then you understand why you have to stay.”
Bernt made a noncommittal gesture his father took as a yes. His father clapped him on the shoulder and then began walking.
Why his father felt he understood that, what his father thought he’d seen, what he’d thought the storm cellar had done to him, Bernt couldn’t exactly say. Indeed, he would never be sure, and ultimately he felt it might be better not to know. He went after his father back to the house and retreated to his room. From there, it was a simple matter to wait until dark and then pack a few things, climb out the window, and leave for good. He had never been back.
After a while he gave up looking for a gas station. The gas gauge read between a quarter and a half full still; probably he had enough to make it into Elko.
He parked in front of a diner on Main Street and went in. It was crowded inside, all tables full. He sat at the counter. Even then, it took a while for the waitress to get around to him. When she finally did, he asked her about a gas station, felt it was par for the trip when she told him there wasn’t one. Used to be one, she said, but gas here cost too much. Nobody used it, not with Elko nearby. No, the nearest one was up the road at Elko.
“How far away is that?” he asked.
The question seemed to puzzle her somehow. “Not far,” she said.
He asked what she suggested, and she recommended the soup of the day, which he ordered without thinking to ask what it was exactly. When it came it was surprisingly good, a rich, orange broth scented with saffron and with strings of meat spread all through it. Pork, probably. It made his mouth water to eat it. It seemed a sign to him that his trip was finally becoming less strange, or at least strange in a way that was good rather than bad. When he finished, he used the edge of his thumb to scour the sides of the bowl clean.
He sat there, far from eager to get back on the road. The waitress brought him a cup of coffee with cream at the end without his asking for it, and before he could tell her he didn’t drink coffee she was gone again, off to another customer. He let it sit there for a while and then, for lack of anything better to do, took a sip. It was rich and mellow, different from coffee as he remembered it, and before he knew it he had finished the whole cup.
It’s okay, he told himself, and found he more or less believed it. The strange part of the trip is over. Everything will be all right from here on out.
He had written twice to his father from California. The first time was maybe a year after he’d arrived. He’d wanted for his father to know that he was all right, that he’d landed on his feet. He’d also wanted to gloat a little. Perhaps too he had still been curious. What exactly was it that you thought showing me the storm cellar would do? What was it in there that you thought would keep me?
For a month, maybe two, he had waited for a reply. But his father had never answered the letter. The only way he knew for certain his father had received it was because when his father died, his aunt had written to let him know, saying they’d finally gotten his address off a letter he’d written his father.
The second letter, years later, had been more measured, calmer. It was, as much as he could bring it to be, an attempt at reconciliation. It had come back to him unopened, “Return to Sender” written across it in his father’s careful block writing.
Everything will be all right, he was still telling himself when he got up from the stool and made his way to the bathroom. He peed and flushed, then stretched. While he was washing his hands, he noticed the mirror.
Or mirrors, rather. There were two of them, one suspended over the other, a larger one with a small one screwed in over it so that the larger one looked almost like a frame around it.
He looked at himself in it, his haggard face, but his eyes kept slipping to where one mirror ended and the other began. Was it meant to be that way? Some sort of design scheme? Was the center of the larger mirror cracked or foxed and the small mirror had been hung to cover that? Was there some kind of hole the second mirror was hiding?
He reached out and grabbed the edges of the top mirror. It was affixed in each of its four corners by a screw that went through the corner of the mirror and then through a thin block of wood and then through the mirror behind it. He could just get the tips of his finger in the space left between the mirrors. He tugged, but it was bolted firmly in place.
When he let go, the tips of his fingers were black with dust. He washed his hands again, more slowly this time. His face, when he looked up this time, looked just as haggard. He turned off the taps, dried his hands, and left the bathroom.
A moment later he was back in. He had the penlight on his keychain out and was shining it at the gap between the top mirror and the bottom one. He pressed his eye close, but no matter where he looked, no matter where he shone the light, the mirror behind it looked whole and complete.
III.
At first, he lied to his girlfriend, claiming he had gone to Utah and to his father’s ranch for the reading of the will, but had received nothing. But then, when the box came, he finally came clean. It was an old box, starting to collapse, and smelled dank. It was very heavy. The words “Bernt’s Pittance” were written on the side of it in his father’s careful hand.
He left the box sitting on the table for a day and a half. The evening of the second day, they were both sitting in bed, both reading, when she asked him when he was going to open it. He put the book down on his chest and began to talk. She let
him, interrupted only once, and when he was done she curled up beside him, one hand touching his shoulder softly, and said nothing. That surprised him—he’d thought she might be angry that he had lied to her. But if she was angry, she kept it to herself.
Of course, he told her, nothing was really going on, it was just my imagination. It was just an ordinary trip. I was just noticing the things that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t notice. But as he told the story, moved bit by bit across the landscape between Reno and the small town whose name he had never quite figured out, it was all he could do not to panic again. He didn’t believe it was a normal trip. He believed it was anything but. And he believed that somehow, his father was to blame.
The hardest part was explaining why seeing that, seeing the one mirror placed atop the other mirror, had been the thing that had turned him around and made him drive back to Reno, made him stop and rent a hotel room and drink himself nearly blind until he ran out of liquor and sobered up enough to realize enough time had elapsed to give his girlfriend the impression that he had gone to Utah. There hadn’t, he had to admit, been anything really wrong with the mirrors—but that, somehow, had been exactly what was wrong with them.
That was the one time she interrupted him. “Was it like what you saw in the storm cellar?” she asked.
But what had he seen in the storm cellar? He still didn’t know, and never would. Was that like the mirrors? No, that had been a hole in the ground containing curing strips of dried meat. How could twinned mirrors be like a hole in the ground and strips of meat? No, the only thing they had in common was that he felt as if he couldn’t quite understand what either one was telling him. That he felt he was missing something.
He’d left the café, climbed into the car, and driven. His intention at first, despite the way he was feeling, was to keep driving, to continue on to Utah, to see the trip through. But as he took a left out of the parking lot and headed down Main Street, he felt as if he was being stretched between the mirror and wherever he was going now. That a part of him was caught in the mirror, and the link between that and the rest of him was growing thinner and thinner.
And so instead of getting on the highway, he circled back to the café. He took the tire iron out of the kit nestled beside the spare tire and walked into the café and straight into the bathroom. He gave the top mirror a few careful taps with the tire iron and broke out each of the four corners, then lifted it down and set it flat on the floor. The mirror beneath was complete and whole. This mirror he simply broke to bits, just to make sure there wasn’t something behind it. There wasn’t. Only blank wall. So he broke the first mirror as well. And then he left just as quickly as he had come, the waitress staring at him open mouthed and the burly cook hustling out of the building and after him, cursing, just as he turned the key to his car and drove away.
Even then, he might have kept going, might have kept on to Utah, he told his girlfriend. But the trip—all of it, not just that last moment of finding himself doing something he’d never thought he’d do—seemed to him a warning. It was a mistake, he felt, to go on. So he turned around.
And indeed, almost before he knew it, he was back in Reno, the car all but out of gas. He found a gas station, then found a hotel and settled down for a few drunken days to wait. Both because he was ashamed he hadn’t gone all the way to Utah and because, to be frank, now that he was back in a place that seemed fully real to him, he was afraid to get in the car again.
But then at last, head aching from a hangover, he had climbed into the car and driven. A moment later he had crossed over the state line. He wound his way up into the mountains, went past Truckee, skirting Donner Lake, through Emigrant Gap, and then slowly down out of the mountains and into more and more populated areas, ever closer and closer to home. By the time he had pulled onto their street, it almost seemed as if he had made too much of it, that he had just wanted an excuse not to go to Utah after all.
The more he talked, the more he tried both to explain to his girlfriend how he felt and to dismiss it, to relegate it to the past, the more another part of him felt the event gather and harden in his mind, like a bolus or a tumor, both part of him and separate from him at once. He did not know if speaking made it better or made it worse.
When he was done, he lay there silent. Her girlfriend was beside him, and soon her breathing had changed, and he could tell she was asleep. He was, more or less, alone.
There was the box still to deal with, he knew. He knew too that he would not open it. He did not want whatever was inside it. In his head, he planned how to get rid of it. Just throwing it away did not seem like enough.
Careful not to wake her, he got up. He slipped into his jeans and found his car keys. He put on his socks and a shirt, and at the door he slipped on his shoes.
No, he needed to get it as far from him as he could. He would take it back to Utah, back to where it came from.
Or maybe not, he thought a few hours later, well into the drive and recognizing nothing as familiar, completely unsure where he was. Maybe not as far as Utah, but certainly somewhere past Reno. That would have to be far enough.
Any Corpse
I.
When she awoke, a shower of raw flesh had fallen in the field. She watched the furnishers sweep their way slowly toward her, moving awkwardly in their armatures, prodding the rended bits where they lay. What seemed fresh and unmaggoted and was large enough to grasp they gathered. They would smoke and preserve it, then try to sell it as provision. What was rotten they kicked dirt over, lifting their faces to the sky as they scraped the dirt along with their feet.
There was nothing for her here. No, nothing. The furnishers could not understand this. They could, in fact, understand very little, she had come to realize, and were it not for their armatures, they would not be able to make pretense of being human, the air pressing too heavily upon them. One of them, indistinguishable to her from the others, approached, bowing and scraping, and said in its gargly voice, “Query: shall person be furnished?”
“No,” she said. “What do you have, meat?” It gave the flinching gesture she had come to understand as assent. “I don’t need meat,” she said. “I need a body.”
“Body made of meat,” the furnisher said. “So too meat made of body. Let it be written and beads exchanged.”
“No,” she told him, “I need a whole body.”
“Whole,” it said. Unless it was “hole.”
“Complete. Someone recently slaughtered, one of the newly deceased,” she continued, trying now to ape the spirit of their own locutions, to make them understand. “One whose flexible organs would yet be capable of speech, not with lineaments already hardened in the sun.”
“Organs,” he said. “Yes. Lineaments, yes.” He barked something and the furnishers behind him began rooting through their bags.
“A complete body,” she insisted. “Who are you?” she asked. “Which one? Are you the one I spoke to last time? Do you have a name?”
“These are many queries,” he said, and hastily retreated.
The rest came at her bowing and presenting their bags to her, but she waved them away. Confused they turned in circles a moment and then bowed and presented again, but she had already turned and walked back into her cave, where she knew they would not follow her.
There were other fields, other caves. Everything told her there must be. Her tablature could be moved—she could probably hire the furnishers to do so. Or the slaughter would change, and bodies would again present whole, or nearly so if she were to wait a little. A few days maybe, or a few weeks. Was she willing to wait? Soon her provisions would dwindle and then she would be forced to go hungry or buy from the furnishers. Or leave.
She watched the furnishers from the darkness of her cave, crouched and aimless near its mouth. Why did they not enter? What were they afraid of?
Soon, she strode out to the mouth, standing still in its shadow where they would not approach. This time she had her stick with her, and as she spok
e she struck it against the rock of the mouth. They gave little shivers with each blow, but whether they were of pleasure or pain, she did not know. Once she had a corpse, she would ask it. Perhaps it would know.
“A corpse,” she said. “Bring me a corpse.”
They mumbled to one another and then one approached. Whether the same as before or different, she couldn’t tell.
“Person, excuse,” the envoy said. “Person will be furnished in meat.”
“Not meat,” she said. “I shall not buy meat from you. Never. But I shall buy a corpse.”
There was much confusion at this. “Query: person pay well?” the envoy asked.
“Yes,” she claimed. “Very well.”
“Person will have corpse,” it said, giving the flinch of assent.
She had just begun to turn away when the envoy continued. “Query,” it said. “What corpse?”
“What corpse?” she said. “It doesn’t matter what corpse. Any corpse. As long as it’s freshly dead.”
“Query: any corpse?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Freshly dead,” it said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Queries: person pay well?” it said. “Any corpse?”
“Correct,” she said.
For several hours they conversed, using that strange gargled speech so distant from her own language that she couldn’t even make out the parts of it, couldn’t really decide if they were speaking in discrete words or in something else entirely, a kind of warble of sound that couldn’t be parsed. She observed them from the shadow of the cave. Then again they fell silent, and one made its way to the cave’s mouth.
“Query,” it said. “Any corpse?”
“Are you the same one?” she asked. “I already answered that query,” she said. “Any corpse, as long as it’s freshly dead.”
It turned and mumbled something at the others. When they responded, it turned back to her.
“Person, please to proceed out of cave,” it said.
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