Path of Smoke

by Bailey Cunningham

  There seemed to be no other choice. He opened the door and found the salamander on the step, asleep.

  “Ah. Excuse me.”

  The lizard opened a single eye. Then it yawned a puff of smoke and looked at him.

  “Would you mind coming inside, for a moment?”

  It rose and followed him into the house, as if it had been waiting for an invitation. He closed the door behind it. He half expected Mardian to recoil from the salamander, but then he remembered that none of them could see it.

  “All right—” He gestured to a spot on the floor, feeling a bit foolish, like a child introducing his imaginary friend. “It’s sitting right here.”

  “Go ahead,” Pendelia said. “Ask what your name is.”

  “This lizard really knows my name?”

  “You won’t know until you ask.”

  He knelt down beside the salamander. “Can you tell me—” He swallowed. “Do you know what my name is?”

  The salamander gave him a long look. The hourglasses turned. Then it flashed forward and bit his hand. Its teeth left half-moon imprints, which quickly welled up with blood. He snatched his hand away. At first, there was just a sting. Then it started to burn. Fire moved along the length of his hand. He cried out and ran across the room. He plunged his burning hand into the bowl of water, but the pain didn’t stop. His blood was on fire. It sang through his veins until it reached his heart.

  Aleo.

  He saw a polished wooden stave with a jade pommel, winking death beneath the sun. A black tunic with scarlet swans, whose outline reminded him of settling blood. A basalt tower that cut the horizon, where all manner of creatures gathered and fought among the steps: wizened-looking children with long claws, drowned beings with hair of seaweed and smashed shells, giant spotted salamanders who clustered like moths near the light. And at the top of the tower, a cloud of eyes that filled him with unspeakable dread.

  He gripped the table, still trembling slightly. The salamander, now satisfied, curled up beneath the nearest lantern and went back to sleep.

  “Well?” Pendelia asked. “What did you see?”

  Aleo stared at the mark on his hand. He might have been imagining it, but there seemed to be flecks of gold within the blood.

  “I think I know who I am,” he said, “but not what I am.”

  “An oculus,” Felix said. “You can see lares. It allows you to communicate with them on an instinctual level, through dreams and visions. There are others—called auditors—who can hear the spirits, but can’t see them.”

  “Was I an auditor, once?”

  “Yes.”

  “But this is different.”

  He glanced at the sleeping salamander. “Very much so.”

  Aleo looked around the room. “Why am I here?”

  Pendelia leaned forward. “That depends. How would you feel about fomenting a little revolution?”

  2

  WHEN HE WOKE UP, his hand was still on fire. He flexed it experimentally. His knuckles felt as if they’d been dragged across broken glass, although the flesh was unmarked. He walked to the bathroom and stood with his hand under cold water. It made little difference. The burn was on the inside, and no ice pack was going to help. Still, the action made him feel better. He looked for some cream to put on it, but all he could find was Vaseline with aloe. He absently rubbed his knuckles, staring at the water-flecked mirror. The bathroom was a misstep from the seventies, with a looking glass framed in wicker and two pendulous lamps hanging from a chain. The odd lamps reminded him of something, but he couldn’t quite say what. They tended to sway when a truck passed too close to the house.

  When you were just a little thing, his father had told him, you used to scream every time the train passed by. The house is evaporating! You meant to say “vibrating,” but I couldn’t bear to correct you.

  He pressed Brew on the coffeemaker. Lights flashed, and for a moment, he thought it might blast off. But then it started to burble, as usual. He ate a banana, waiting for the travel mug to fill up. He tried to remember his name. It took a moment, as if the world’s software were slowly coming to life around him. The drive whirred. He stood astride a synaptic gap. Myelin spread like frost, and when he touched it, some silver clung to his hands. He waited for a spark. Waited for the light to change. Then the machine beeped, and he remembered.

  He got dressed. All of his shirts were primary colors. He chose the cleanest one. The bedroom resembled a garage sale. There were books and clothes everywhere, along with a broken set of speakers, a plastic tote filled with dusty miscellany, and scattered DVDs. He shouldered the knapsack with the broken zipper, his holy relic, which had been with him since undergrad. Threads of anxiety and desire and slender hope were woven into it. The interior pocket was always sticky, but he couldn’t remember what he’d spilled there, or when.

  His phone chimed. It was a text from Shelby.

  Are you coming to school?

  He started to reply, then closed the phone. It was a simple question, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to answer. Carl would soon text him, and then Shelby again. For the past several months, they’d been treating him with kid gloves. All the kind smiles and hapless questions about what he got up to all day, how he was doing. It had seemed so odd. For a long time, he’d felt the loop closing. They cared about him, but they’d also changed the locks. And it hadn’t made sense, until now.

  Some people valued honesty. This was something that they announced upon meeting you, as if to properly calibrate the conversation. And then they proceeded to tenderize you with their honesty, leaving you slightly concussed. He didn’t value honesty, but he was a terrible liar. Whenever he tried to dissimulate, his tongue stopped working. He couldn’t keep the dark detours of the story straight. It all came unraveled in the end. So, in a way, he was slightly impressed by what they’d done. He never would have been able to fuel a piece of deception for so long. But they had committed to the lie. They’d made it into something durable, something that you could lean against without falling down. It had brought them together.

  It was an Anglo-Saxon riddle. It could have been a butter churn, or sex, or some inscrutable act whose significance had faded with the parchment. The truth was in the margins, but it didn’t make sense. Just a smooth surface of gold leaf, trapped under egg yolk that a monk had applied centuries ago. If he tapped it with a fingernail, it would remain inviolate. Unlike an e-book, a scroll didn’t run out of energy, or require a software update. It persisted, curiously, painfully, long after its world had vanished. Someday this brilliant, harried age would pass into shadow as well, and someone like him would survey its ruins, comparing them to giant’s work.

  He waited for the bus to come. The sky was uncomfortably blue, and traffic roared down Albert Street. The wastebasket next to him was overflowing with plastic cups, a feast for the wasps that droned in circles around it. Light cut through the glass of the bus shelter. People glanced at him as they walked by. All he needed was an artist’s statement, with an audio recording to go along with it. Feed me. Ask me my name. Flash photography is encouraged.

  The wrong bus drove by, then the next wrong bus. The #4 was a miracle of inconsistency. It rattled along like entropy on wheels, only appearing when your back was turned. Plains University had recently purchased advertising space on buses, vans, electronic billboards, and any other conceivable surface. This is your [insert season]. It starts with you. They should have included the price of tuition in the advertisement.

  A woman with a cane walked by him. “Beautiful day,” she observed.

  “It is.”

  He tried to smile convincingly. She smiled back. Success. If he ever saw the woman with the cane again, he could resurrect that hazy, well-meaning smile, which signaled that, yes, the day was beautiful. She kept walking. A student’s face drove by, smiling hugely. It looked almost painful. He wasn’t sure tha
t he could display that kind of enthusiasm, not even for metronomes, book-binding glue, or yoghs. It was exhausting to react to things, all day long. People claimed that frowning required more effort than smiling. But wasn’t it easier to take the path of least resistance, and avoid reacting at all?

  For most of his childhood, it had felt as if people were speaking a foreign language. Their drives were a mystery. What they cared about, what they fought for, remained a blurry watercolor whose flecks of color might have been anything, or nothing. When a boy would say, Look at my new truck, he would reply: Bats communicate through echolocation. When someone pushed him into the sand, he would stare at the hand in puzzlement. What had he missed? Why was there grit and cat smell in his hair? There was a mysterious choreography at work, but nobody had given him the notes. He tried to hear it. He listened so hard. But all he could hear was microwave background radiation, the white noise of everything settling into heavy matter.

  I am a baby bat, he told his father. But my echolocation is broken.

  He slid into the blue vinyl seat of the bus. Two men across from him were speaking in Farsi, while a woman yelled into her earpiece. Most of the students were manipulating their screens, tapping or stretching or thumbing from one picture to the next. They chatted without making eye contact, nodding absently, spinning empty morphemes while they texted. The bus turned a corner sharply, and he watched them slide across their seats, still typing. He was the only person looking out the window. He felt suddenly self-conscious and tried to load a social media site on his phone, but the screen froze. A blue wheel turned and turned, refusing to deliver the page. He stared at the wheel, and his stomach did a roller-coaster flip. He remembered the shrieking clepsydra, the amethyst ring that Felix wore, the salamander’s kiss. Fortuna had struck his life in the sweet spot, and now he was whirling through space.

  Felix needed him. They all did. And he couldn’t remember the last time that someone had asked for his help. It didn’t count that Shelby needed him to update her antivirus software, or that Carl sometimes faltered while preparing his taxes and couldn’t remember how to declare his education credit. This was different. He’d longed for it while sitting in the sawdust at the foot of the Adventure Playground—the name that his school gave to a dangerous play structure full of splinters and sharp edges. Diving between crooked trees, watching for dragons in the vegetable patch, drawing runes while everyone else was crumpling paper for spitballs. All of it, surely, had led to this moment. The longing that had seemed unbearable, the days spent on the roof, listening for stardust, had actually meant something.

  But what was he supposed to do now? What could he do with this spark in his pocket, this hungry secret, that the people he trusted had kept from him? Carl distracting him, leading him on false adventures meant to conceal the true ones, like Virgil in reverse. Shelby managing him, while something frayed beneath her kindness. Ingrid refilling his coffee, telling him not to worry, even as she waited for him to leave the room. Sam was the only one who’d hesitated. She didn’t quite understand their rhythms, and he could see it in her eyes. A blip of something that might have been pity, there and gone. But he’d caught it, once or twice.

  The shadow died. Felix adjusting his mask. You. The shadow.

  What was his name? Who had he been? He touched his chest lightly, as if he could feel some ruined heart, silent alongside the other. A shadow sinus rhythm. But only a flutter of ashes remained. How did you mourn for something without a name?

  He tried to remember, but the bus turned again, knocking his mind off track. A pebble came through the open window, landing on his knee. If he stayed absolutely still, it might remain on his knee. Some scrap of augury that would lead him to somewhere. But he shifted, and it fell beneath the seat.

  He thought of the wanderer, who had buried his gold-friend, now remembering the warmth of the hall. How he had held and kissed his lord, his head an insensible pebble on the man’s knee. Life, the medieval poets said, was a sparrow’s flight through a well-lit hall. Outside was darkness and the promise of winter. Aeschere’s head waited at the foot of the mere; dragons would poison you before giving up their hoard. The flight was short and erring, but what more could we do? Fate moves as it must.

  The bus pulled up to the Innovation Centre. People stood beneath the shadows of the young trees, rooting through backpacks, collating, applying sticky tabs like bandages. Music was thumping from the campus green. Midterms were still a distant threat. A few choice parking spots remained, and it was still possible to drop a class without having Withdrawn marked on your record in burning script. Life was good.

  His phone buzzed. It was Carl, as he’d predicted. They were tracking him like a stray neutrino, but the downside of closing ranks was that they no longer knew his routine. The lie was actually a beautiful thing. Like a constellation of Tinkertoys. It must have been difficult to maintain. The ridiculous idea that Carl had been playing hockey. Shelby’s late-night study sessions. Even the game that Carl had invented. So close to the fire. But they were growing frustrated. They couldn’t avoid the topic every time he wandered into a room, as if they were trapped in a Restoration comedy. So they’d found ways to let off steam, to let fall a crumb of knowledge here and there.

  And that was how he’d begun to suspect that he wasn’t crazy. That they really were keeping something from him. All the bullshit about last semester. The crazy fight in the library that they’d explained away. It was just a LARP that got out of hand. The fire was an effect. Those hospital drugs made it look real. The hours of therapy that he’d endured, sitting across from a man in slacks who made him practice acceptable eye contact.

  How would you characterize your relationships with others?

  Sketchy.

  How does it make you feel when a stranger looks at you?

  Like I just put my head in a bucket of scorpions.

  Did you leave the house yesterday?

  Yes.

  Where did you go?

  Lankhmar.

  I’m not familiar with that neighborhood.

  It’s in Nehwon, between the Great Salt Marsh and the River Hlal.

  That doesn’t sound real.

  You’ve obviously never been there.

  Going to made-up places doesn’t count.

  Why not?

  Because they aren’t real. You can’t experience meaningful interactions.

  My interactions there are quite meaningful.

  But they aren’t real.

  Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser would probably argue that fact.

  Those aren’t people.

  Tell that to the Lankhmarese authorities.

  Social interaction, apparently, did not include books. Which was news to him, because he’d been socially interacting with books for as long as he could remember. His discipline was based on the idea that books could change your life, that the people living inside them had a voice that you could hear. Their lives mattered, not simply because they might echo your own, but because they offered a thousand plateaus of joy and radical difference. He had followed Conan as he scaled the Tower of the Elephant. He had held his breath when Goodman Durnik presented the sorceress Polgara with a rose made of iron. He had wept bitter tears over the death of Atreyu’s horse, Artax, who could not resist the Swamps of Sadness. Weren’t they real? Didn’t their battles, their love-turns, their outrageous mistakes, leap off the page? The whole point of reading was to live in another form, to encounter a shadow that had been following you all along.

  His friends understood that. Carl and Shelby had their share of lives, reading furiously as the light changed and various essays came due. Reading as an emergency exit, reading to feel alive, reading themselves into corners, down alleys, through forests, across bridges that shuddered beneath them. They knew what it was all for. They would have been just as baffled by the psychiatrist, even if they managed to go through the motions a tad mo
re convincingly than he could.

  They knew what it meant, and what it could do. The serrated pleasure of an alliterative line, the shock of two words coming together, assuming the crash position, then suddenly flowering into a kenning that cut you deep. A riddle that would never give you up. They knew, and they made him believe that he was out of his mind.

  Systems decline. Patterns unravel. It’s how the universe works. A little heat escapes, and suddenly, the void isn’t friendly anymore. The constant is anything but. Heraclitus dipped his toe in the river and drew it back, shocked by the change. He knew that Carl was lying to him about hockey practice but couldn’t figure out why. Carl had never lied to him about anything before, save for his claim that he appreciated Babylon 5 (in fact, he’d only watched it because he had a weird thing for Bruce Boxleitner). The lie was new, and rather than pressing, he chose to let it grow roots in the dark. Then they visited that pretty little lie of a park, across from the Dodger, whose outlines had softened to dandelion felt. And he knew that Carl’s lie went deeper, because his hands were sweating and he couldn’t stop looking at the broken stones.

  After that, he’d run into Paul, who was on his way to Canadian Tire. Ingrid had totaled their car. She was off-roading through the park, or something, he’d said. I don’t get it. The car was just sitting at the foot of the legislature, and it looked like some monster had stepped on it.

  That was in the morning. He waited all day to hear more about this disaster, but there were no texts, no e-mails. He ran into Shelby at school, but when he asked her about Ingrid, she seemed confused. It was as if she’d forgotten that they knew each other. No mention of the crash. Surely, Ingrid would have said something. Even someone as distracted as he was could tell that the two of them were getting closer. That left 2.5 possibilities. (1) Shelby didn’t want him to worry. (2) Shelby didn’t want him to know about the accident. (2.5) The accident wasn’t at all what it seemed. The fractional possibility was what made up his mind.