GUD Magazine Issue 3 :: Autumn 2008

by GUD Magazine Authors

  "Oh,” Kate said.

  "Yeah, Old Cook was his name, though, the counselor, but not his real name."

  "That must have been really unbelievable,” she said.

  "Yeah, pretty scary."

  You heard hissing. You looked up at glowing heads of spitting lizards stuck on stakes. Probably stuck there by Bud, you thought; Bud, now curled up in a ball in the closet, giggling. That son of a bitch.

  "No,” Kate said. “I mean it must have been incredible to be out in the wilderness like that, in open space, surrounded by mountains. I've never been any place like that."

  You looked up again. The lizards became streetlamps. The tracers started fading. Sparks stopped shooting out of Kate's hair. It started to snow. You walked slowly with her, your hands in your pockets. She asked you a hundred questions about hiking and traveling and the world outside the five boroughs. You were out for a long walk around the city with Kate, talking, buzzing a few doors, checking a few bars, asking for Bud. Nobody had seen him. Nobody but you.

  A few months later Kate and Bud broke up; soon after, she headed out west. She drifted through seasonal food-service jobs in the national parks, then settled in Phoenix. She worked for a chiropractor, rented a small house on a mesa, and spent her free time exploring the wilderness. She fell in with a group of people who taught her things, she said in occasional letters to you, but it was never clear to you what they taught her; it all seemed very complex.

  * * * *

  Your legs carry you perfectly, deliberately, up the ramp from the airplane to the Phoenix airport terminal. Kate's waiting for you at the gate. She sparkles like she always did, but she's changed. She's tanned and relaxed, and she stands differently, more comfortably. She's in cut-off shorts and hiking boots, an untucked floral shirt, a blue-beaded leather necklace, and red-beaded earrings. She startles you. She gives you a strong, assertive hug. She smells like cocoa.

  "I can't believe it!” she says. “You're finally here!"

  You hug her back, stiffly. You don't want to give her the wrong impression. But now you're fortified. Now you're steady as a rock. Both planes were on time. The four-beer-layover plan became a six-beer plan. It all worked out.

  You step outside the terminal. The air is hot and dry. You walk to an older-model Subaru wagon with a cracked windshield. You put your small suitcase, stuffed with casual workwear for the conference, and your backpack, filled with camping gear and the boots you pulled from the box in your closet, into the back of the car. After several efforts, you get the trunk to latch.

  Kate drives you through a labyrinth of curving streets between one-story cottages with red roofs and little rock gardens. You speak in short bursts about the flight, airplane food, the cab ride, how cool each little rock garden is. Kate listens, laughs, agrees, and says ‘wow’ repeatedly.

  Her cottage is tiny, set back behind twisted brush on a hillside. In the kitchen there's a table with two mismatched chairs. Taped to the refrigerator there's a picture of Kate with another woman and two long-haired, tanned young men, all in parkas, standing in a snowfield at some unthinkable altitude. An ornate Native-American hanging covers the wall.

  She offers you a beer; there are two in the refrigerator. You drink both. She has herbal tea. You sit and pack your backpacks and list everything you'll need for the hike: she has a stove, fuel, food, water bottles, filter, and tent—although she usually sleeps with her head outside the tent in the desert, she points out.

  "What about, you know, snakes?” you ask.

  "They're more likely to climb into your sleeping bag with you for heat than to bite you,” she says. “Thing is, not to get them upset."

  "Oh. Scorpions?"

  "It's best to avoid them."

  * * * *

  You go out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. At dinner you drink another four beers. You bring up Bud, just to connect the dots; you haven't been in touch with him since his dad got him a job on the stock-market floor and he moved to Connecticut. She hasn't heard from him since she left the East Coast.

  "Bud,” she says, smiling and shaking her head.

  "Yeah,” you say, shaking yours. “Probably making a million dollars."

  There's a dance somewhere in the restaurant. There are swirling bright lights and people laughing and live mariachi music and applause spilling in from another room. You start telling your stories about your city life. They feel like they fit together seamlessly. You move from the complicated balancing act you feel you perform at your job to the remarkable, sensitive way you manage tensions and altercations on the streets and the subways to your unflinching grasp of the aesthetics and symmetry of the urban landscape. As the evening goes on, your stories become more ornate and elaborate. They seem reasonable and funny and honest and interesting as you say the words, less so as they sit on the table between you and Kate. Kate has spoken very little; she's followed your stories, laughed when you were hoping she'd laugh, opened her eyes wide at other parts. She says ‘wow’ at least thirty times.

  "Anyhow,” you say, “it's all been closing in on me recently, in so many ways. I really think I need to start changing some things."

  The waitress brings the check and you realize you've been doing all of the talking.

  "Anyhow,” you say, “I've been doing all the talking."

  Kate looks down at the label of the beer bottle she's been peeling all night. She understands needing to change things. Sometimes people close in on her too. Her friends are great; they are teaching her so many things, about herself, her powers and energies. But it's hard. You ask her what she means and she shrugs. “Someday,” she says. “Someday I'll try to explain it."

  You drive back to her house. She turns in; you need to get an early start. You roll your sleeping bag out on her couch and stare at the ceiling. The air in the apartment is cool—mountain air, desert air.

  You remember the restaurant. You remember talking too much. Your body flinches impulsively. What were you talking about? Why do you talk so much?

  Then you look across the room in the dim light at the photographs on the refrigerator. Who are these other people? Boyfriends? Road dudes? You always wanted to be a road dude. Every day at your desk, for a couple of years, you daydreamed about being a road dude. As the seasons passed, the daydreams faded. You became another guy at a desk, on a subway, on a bar stool. You became another guy going home alone with a six pack and a takeout burrito. You live in a city filled with guys like you.

  The couch rises and swirls, gently tonight, not spinning wildly like your own bed last night. Your first dream floats back into the restaurant, to the music. You're the road dude in the picture; you've been together all this time. You're holding Kate in your arms and dancing slowly, the lights spinning away from you. Everything smells like cocoa.

  * * * *

  Suddenly you're awake; it's the first hint of daylight. Your first thoughts are filled with confusion, embarrassment—'What did I say last night? I'm such an asshole.’ Kate smiles at you from the kitchen. She's made a pot of coffee for you and a cup of tea for herself. She pours your coffee into a thermos while you roll up your sleeping bag. In seconds, you're back in the car and driving up a highway. The city peels away and you're in the suburbs, then the desert. You stare out the cracked windshield at a landscape that's totally new to you—wild desert with huge cactus and tumbleweeds, cracked red mountain ranges shimmering on the horizon.

  After a few hours, Kate turns onto a one-lane dirt road. She pulls over under a cluster of twisted pine trees. She climbs out, sits on the back of the car, and ties on her hiking boots. You follow her to the back of the car. You pull your own boots out. You haven't worn them in many years, but when you lace them up, they feel familiar and sturdy. When you pull your pack onto your back you feel ready to go.

  "It's really good to get away,” she says.

  "Yeah,” you say. But then you remember your dream and a wave of embarrassment passes through you. You try not to look at her. Kate walks to a ledge
where the sky disappears. You follow her to the rim. A thousand shades of red and orange glare up from below.

  "All the way down there?” you ask.

  "That's the plan."

  "Are you sure we brought enough water?"

  "There's water down there."

  "What about food? What if we get stuck down there?"

  "We've got food for an extra day. Come on."

  Kate pulls her pack out of the back of the car and deftly swings it up onto her shoulders. You try to resettle yours, struggling with your straps. Your legs wobble when it's back in place.

  She steps over the rim, onto a trail clinging to the canyon's wall. You focus on her backpack and follow. Bobbing down the incline in front of you, Kate looks so strong—brown and lean from six years in the desert. She's a different person now. You remember her six years ago, in the neat gridlines of the city, the brief girlfriend of Bud the dealer. She was so unsure of herself. Out here, she's all business.

  You nurse a bottle of water; you have two more in your pack. You wrap a bandanna around your head, and in seconds it's soaked. Sweat pours off your nose. You wring out the bandanna, then struggle to keep pace with Kate, who moves with steady determination down the trail. You realize you have nothing to drink, other than water, for the next two nights; you try to remember the last time you went through a night without a drink and realize it's been years. What if you freak out? What if you can't take it? Better not to think about it. So you try not to think about anything.

  Hours pass. The sun shifts in the sky. Shadows pour down from the high cliffs into deep black pools. The trail plunges in jagged switchbacks to the floor of the canyon. You look up at the cliffs now soaring above you; the same cliffs you will eventually have to climb back up. The alcohol has evaporated from your body, and your first clear thought comes with a new wave of terror, deeper than the rest. What if you can't get back up? What if you die down here? People die in the desert all the time. What if there is no water?

  You stumble forward, following Kate down into a narrow passage. As if on cue, water cascades from mossy walls, over broken rocks, and under your feet. You stop to plunge your head in the creek. You refill your water bottles. A new thought enters your mind. What about that speech you have to make in three days? Why didn't you bring it with you? You could have practiced it on the hike. Then you look around you, at the bubbling moss, the rock formations like cathedral apses, the rock faces like carved saints. Water seeps out everywhere, here at the bottom of a canyon in the desert. You decide that all of it—the speech, your job, your airplane ride home, whether you left the stove on in your apartment—can't matter right now. All that matters is that you keep following Kate. You rise and make out her silhouette down the sand bar, turning a corner. You follow her deeper into the labyrinth.

  A fine line of sunlight brushes against the uppermost rim. The sky fades to deep blue and the first stars appear. Kate moves ahead in the shadows and disappears around another corner.

  Suddenly, the corridor opens up. A foaming brown river surges toward you. On a beach, you find Kate sitting by a large ring of stones, detaching her tent.

  "Are we the only people down here?” you ask.

  "I don't see anybody else. Come on, give me a hand."

  * * * *

  The moon rises full over the rim of the canyon, bathing the walls blue. You eat dinner in silence. You stare out at the river. It bubbles like chocolate milk. You've sweated pounds of fluids out of your body, replaced them with gallons of creek water. You feel different now. Somehow, for the moment, you feel clear headed. You feel good.

  After dinner, Kate walks up the beach. She disappears behind a rock. She comes back a minute later, her tangled hair glittering wet in the dim light. You both pull your sleeping bags out so your heads are outside the tent. You watch the moon inch higher in the sky. A tiny silver blip with blinking red lights glides effortlessly between the stars; the moonlight illuminates its fine vapor trail. Flying is so gentle, so beautiful, you think. How could anyone be afraid to fly?

  "Do you ever think of just breaking out altogether?” Kate asks.

  "Breaking out?"

  "Yeah, just taking off? Leaving everything behind? Just the great big nothing up ahead?"

  "This isn't the big nothing?"

  "No, I mean, not like a little vacation. I mean heading up-country. Alberta. The Yukon. Alaska. Just keep going. See where it all goes."

  You freeze. What should you say? What's the right thing to say?

  Finally you come up with, “I've always wanted to go to Alaska."

  You lie in silence for a long time. You want to say something more. You try to form the words. But when the jumble of sounds falls into place, when you finally have the courage to say something, her eyes are closed. Her eyes are closed and she's sleeping and you've said nothing and you know you never will, so long as she's awake.

  But for now she's sleeping, and so it's safe for you to whisper, “Let's go, let's go, let's go."

  Splitting the Atom by Tania Hershman

  It's three single-malts past midnight and my thoughts turn to splitting the atom. I pour myself another and go down to the basement for my power saw.

  Back in the kitchen, I decide to start with an apple and work down. I plug in the saw. The apple splits easily, a nice division, pips sliced neatly in half. Done. I look around for something smaller and spot the salt cellar Julie bought at Camden Market, a stupid wooden ball whose holes are too bloody small to let the grains out.

  Positioning the saw's a bit trickier this time. The salt cellar's only the size of a golf ball, and it keeps sliding away. I polish off the whisky to steady my hands and wedge it between the wheatgrass juicer—another useless Julie purchase—and the Magimix.

  When the saw's in position, I flick the switch, but my hands slip. I miss the wooden ball, the saw takes control, and, before I know it, I'm on my back on the lino, the saw buzzing in my hands and half a kitchen table on either side of me. I help myself up, pull the plug, and have a look. It takes me a few minutes to realise: the table's made of atoms, like everything. So, when I sliced through it, it makes sense that I split a load of atoms—at least a thousand, right? Well, that was easy.

  Very chuffed with myself, I go back to the living room and pour another. Okay, so the table's ruined—though a couple of new legs and you never know—but I proved my point. Pity Julie's never coming back—she'd be bloody impressed. Those scientists a hundred years ago, they didn't have the technology anybody's got in their garage today. Poor sods.

  Conquered by Sylvia Eastman

  Thunderburned she was by the velocity of his love, a Viking bobsledder cornering Greenland, mouth screaming plunder.

  In Every War by Jim Pascual Agustin

  morning will be the coldest metal tracing your temple.

  the children are aimed at the window, a sea of fireflies sweeping away their fears and senses.

  all through the night, parents lie unable to surrender to slumber, crossing bridges of sounds, listening for broken moments.

  morning is sure to come, tramping in heavy boots through bamboo, crushing even new shoots.

  Sa Bawat Digma by Jim Pascual Agustin

  malamig na malamig na bakal sa sentido ang umagang daratal.

  nakaumang sa bintana ang mga bata, tinatangay ng dagat ng alitaptap ang kanilang takot at malay.

  magdamag na nanunulay sa mga hibla ng bawat tunog, sa bawat lagutok ng sandali ang mga magulang na di makaidlip.

  papalapit na nga ang umaga, nakabotang humahakbang sa kawayanan maging bagong usbong tinatapak-tapakan.

  "Sa Bawat Digma” first appeared in 1992 in Jim's poetry collection Beneath an Angry Star, published in the Philippines by Anvil Publishing.

  a night without dreams by Rohith Sundararaman

  i was ten when dad tired of the two sparrows visiting us through a gap i had discovered over our verandah window.

  he got up on his chipped-leg stool, whistling as he shut the hole with nails
, wood, and hammer while i listened to the birds twitter like a stuck doorbell, their cry soon swallowed whole by ply.

  still whistling, dad sat with me till the sun leaked to a puddle, and he left after a ruffle of my hair, his tune a linger in the air, a song to help me understand the flight of desperation.

  Soon You Will Be Gone and Possibly Eaten by Nick Antosca

  Every so often, over the years, I'd be with Sabile in a bar—or at an art gallery, or a party—and a woman would walk into the room who was so beautiful that I not only ached for her but felt jealous because I knew Sabile must want her, too. Anyone gravitates to beauty like that; gender is meaningless. Orientation can fall away like snakeskin, like a robe you might loosen and step out of.

  Or maybe it would be a man who walked into the room, and not only did I resent him, a possessive hand drifting to Sabile's waist, but I felt drawn to him myself.

  That was what the aliens were like.

  * * * *

  Sabile was a beautiful woman. She had the eyes of a deer, black and hugely apprehending.

  * * * *

  The aliens came down in August of that year in great white obelisks, landing in the forest, somehow turning the nearby air a terrifying candy-green.

  We had left the city and were staying at an old house my parents owned in western New York state, outside a town called Welsh Falls. They mostly used the house as a rental property—each floor was a furnished apartment—but it was empty until November, and my dad had said we could take a vacation there.

  When they showed up, around midnight, I was watching TV in the upstairs den and Sabile was in the bath. Snow suddenly filled the screen and, from the corner of my eye, I saw that green light for the first time. I went to the window.

  Things that looked like giant white needles had begun falling slowly from the sky. Their whiteness reminded me of the inside of a geode, white stone crusted with crystals, and each one left a phosphorescent green trail. I could see ten or fifteen, some very far away, heading probably for the outskirts of Albany. The nearest one was falling about a mile off, above the forest.