by Josh Weil
“If you’re coming,” she said. She looked to the east and watched the top of the ridge where the new mirrors slid into view, the whole sky creeping at the speed of their orbit. He watched it too. “Away from that,” she said.
“North or south?”
“Is that you asking?”
He reached up and caught her hand at his neck and pulled her to him and said, “You fucking bet.”
They wound up in the exact same spot on the same patch of floor staring up at the same ceiling and none of it had been similar at all. The cigarette was still behind his ear. She took it and they both looked at it as if there was no way of accounting for the fact, as if she held between her fingers evidence of God’s approval, and he lit it and they smoked it down while the light thrown by the mirrors probed the kitchen around them and they promised their one rule to each other. Then she reached over with the cigarette and ground it out on his chest. He shouted and leapt up and stood there swearing.
“You know you like it,” she said.
Outside, the dog stood on its roof, barking at them, or at the mirrors sweeping the sky above, or just at a world it had been pinned to and left in and given no way of understanding what for or even ever learning why.
They drove during the long dusk, which was what people used to call night but could not be called that now, and they kept to back roads, wending their way northwards along the spine of the Appalachians, up past Winchester and Stroudsburg and into Pennsylvania. The land bellied out and the horizons flattened and the barns changed to stone and the houses, too. The sky stayed the same. The mirrors filled it and moved on and it was filled by more. They were aimed by signal to throw their reflective beams down on cities as they passed, or prison yards, or factories, or forests where men worked cutting timber through all hours, or construction sites where buildings went up without pause for dark, or ballparks with their floodlights defunct, and anywhere where costs could be cut and productivity doubled by the simple continuation of light. Driving, they could see the bright patches of near daylight where the beams landed and they avoided them if they could. Elsewhere it was just the peripheral glow, a cold luminescence like the landscape under a full moon with its brightness cranked up to double. The mirrors floated where the stars used to be, winking as they shifted to meet a need, larger than stars, and smaller than moons, and like nothing the sky had seen before. The moon, when it was out, hung dully in the hidden darkness beyond them, the breathfog of a moonshape, resigned.
“Alright,” she said out of nowhere, “let’s talk about the future then.”
“Alright,” he said.
“What are you gonna do up there?”
“Try to get across the border.”
“I mean after.”
“How are we gonna get across it?”
“I want to talk about the future future,” she said.
“In the future I’m gonna ask you again how we’re gonna get across the border.”
She picked up something on the seat next to her and threw it at him. It hit the window like it would have done more than just hurt.
“Jesus,” he said. He felt at the chip in the glass and said, “Jesus you’re a bitch.” She was smiling sweetly at him and he forgave her so fast he forgot if he had ever held it against her. “What are you gonna do?” he said.
That was when she told him she had never seen the night. Not the real night, the way it was when he was a growing up. She had seen a planetarium. She spoke of it as if it was almost the real thing and he decided not to tell her how far from real it was. She drove and daydreamed aloud on how the real night must be and all her ideas were wrong in small ways—he thought on how sounds crystallized in dark and how the moon broke the black horizon in a different place each night and sometimes it was orange and squashed by the sky it was trying to rise through as if the stars had amassed their weight against it and meant to push it back—and in the middle of it he told her that planetariums weren’t anything like the real thing at all.
“You’ve really never seen it?” he said, and in her silence tried to count back to the years when the mirrors first began to fill the sky. “How young are you anyway?”
“How old are you?” she said. And then: “Old enough to have done something bad.”
“You or me?”
“Both.”
“Why do you think I’ve done something bad?” he asked her.
“Why do you think I have?”
“Because you told me. You said I wasn’t to ask what you’d done to run from, which implies there was something you did that warranted the running. Besides, a woman like you doesn’t get past puberty without doing something to make her parents cry and moan and gnash their teeth.”
“That’s what you like about me,” she said.
“I don’t mean sexual.”
“I don’t either.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It probably is.”
“It’s what I like about you,” she said.
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you won’t let me ask you about anything, which if you think my one thing is something not to ask about, what does that say about your life full?”
“It doesn’t say I’ve done anything bad. Could be something bad was done to me. Could be there was just a general badness in the world and I’ve lived through it.”
“Could be,” she said. “But it’s not.”
“Well you don’t know, or will,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I like in you.”
“Not knowing me?”
“Knowing there’s something to know and not knowing it and knowing you won’t let me know it.”
“You’re how old?” he said.
“Twenty,” she said.
He sat there listening to the bad music and watching the hotspots in the distance glowing bright where the mirrors were focusing their beams.
“What?” she said.
“That’s older than I’d thought.”
It was nearly true dawn when they pulled onto an old farm road and by the time it dead-ended in a thickness of woods, the sunrise was slicing between the eastwards trees. Westwards a blinding doppelganger glinted: the last of the mirrors setting. They got out and stood watching the truck change color. It had been red with a white camper shell when she had brought it to him, and under the mirrors the spray had turned it the color of bruised cherries topped by the yellow of coffee-stained teeth and now in the full sun it was all deep brown. They had driven it wet and bugs and grit had stuck in it as it dried. With his fingers he peeled away some insect’s wing, held it up into the sunlight, watched it darken to black.
She climbed into the truck bed and he tossed the wing and climbed in after her. Inside there was a pileup of suitcases in the corner by one of the wheel humps, all of a rolling set, and all unzipped upon wild spillages of female wear, and wedged in beside the other wheel hump was a plastic fishing tackle box unlatched and the plastic trays risen out of it and all the colors of all her makeup strewn and jumbled as if someone had shaken the box like a die, and behind the suitcases and the makeup sat a large plywood trunk, fit flush from bedwall to bedwall along the back of the cab, unpainted and lidded and locked. On it someone had wood burned the word HOWELL. Before it was another word that had been scratched and gouged till it was unreadable now. She was flapping out a wool army blanket and as she let it settle he saw it again, stenciled in black: HOWELL. And again the antecedent word defaced.
She shut the gate and pulled the rear windshield shut above it. The windows were all black and it would have been true dark if the light hadn’t come pouring in behind them from the windshield of the truck cab. She swore at it, wanted to block it out, hang the blanket over the window to the cab, but he told her he was too beat to do anything but sleep and she lay down next to him and they lay there.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” he said. Then he put two fingers of his other hand to the back of her head and puffed an explosion
with his lips against her ear. He got up and slid open the rear window, reached into the cab and popped the glove box and brought back the .45. She took it from him and he gave her the cartridge box and watched her slip the clip out of the handle, load it full, slap it back in. She checked the chamber and cocked the hammer and locked the safety and the whole time he watched her trigger finger and it didn’t once touch the guard. He had seen on the barrel, engraved on its steel, the same word written and before Howell was James.
“What you did,” he said. “Is it bad enough they’ll come after you now that we’re out of Virginia?”
“They’ll hunt me till I get across the border,” she said.
“I figured.”
She turned and looked at his face so close she could feel his breath on her eyes. The orange sun came through the window from the cab and lit his beard like a torch blazing around his cheeks, his cheekbones like hot stones, his eyelashes like sparks escaped. The weight of his head lay on her arm and numbed it and she felt the feeling drain out of it and loved to feel it go. His head, heavy as a boulder. His ear, jutting out from beneath the blanket, dark and folded in such mysterious patterns of flesh. She had spent her life so far in moments a whole lot less peaceful than this.
She said into the scent of his neck, “What’s it like? The real thing. At night.”
“It’s limitless,” he told her. “That’s the difference. They try to re-create it but there’s only so much they can create and you feel that, but the real thing you don’t, you feel the opposite.” He was at the edge of sleep and his eyes were closed and she could feel his beard brush her face as he talked. “And it’s always different,” he said. “You can’t know it. You can’t even know all that’s in it, and even if you could, you can’t know what is going to cover it one day, maybe there’s some clouds, or maybe there’s just some light nearby, or maybe there’s dust in the air, or anything, it all changes it, and you can’t ever know exactly how it’s going to be, or even what it really is.”
Outside the birds were sending their birdsounds through the trees.
“I thought they mapped it,” she said.
“Sure,” he said. “They mapped what they can know, but there’s stuff out there too far for them to even guess at.”
“I thought they had theories.”
“Theories are just guesses,” he said. “And there are some things way beyond what even they have theories for.”
They were quiet for a while.
“It’s not like that in a planetarium,” she said.
“No,” he said.
Then he was asleep. She nestled tighter to him and felt his heat warm her almost till she couldn’t stand it and she held herself there and tried to sleep, too. A while later she heard him say, “The mystery of it you feel it’s dark you feel so dark you’re …” But that was all he said and when she lifted her head and looked at him his breath was even and heavy and his eyes were tremoring beneath their lids. He had an Adam’s apple like a knuckle in his throat. She reached to it, so lightly, and with her fingertip rode his swallow. He slept on. When she let her hands hover over the place his heart would be, palms down, she could feel his chest hair rise to meet her lifelines, draw away again. He had a sunken chest, like someone had taken a hammer and chisel to it and banged along his breastbone. The hair on it was gray as an old man’s, and beneath it there were the strange tattoos buried, self-done and lumpy with scars. She tried to make them out. They were as inscrutable as wormwood grown over with moss.
Outside, the birds that had once been night birds and the ones that had once been day birds filled the forest with their confused cacophony. Below it, other animals made noises in the leaves. She knew they were small, probably, but they sounded large. She knew too that there were still some of the larger ones left in places like this, small patches of woods that no one went in anymore. A few last stragglers hanging on. They were the worst. It seemed impossible to drive them out or kill them off. They seemed to already have in them what the change had required, as if it had been hulking there in their genes all along.
When she was nine her father stuck his handgun in his belt and took his shotgun in one hand and her hand in his other and led her out into the woods. It was the long dusk and the trees slivered the mirror light around them. Back then the sky was less full of them and in the patches of land between where the light was directed the night was dimmed down to almost dark. He made her stand there with him till the first one came through the underbrush. He gave her the handgun and told her, Shoot it. She got it in the gut and it came at them, scrabbling and falling and trying to stay on its feet, a trail of itself left steaming behind it, until it was just a few feet away and her father shot it in the skull. Then he said, Wait. It was not five minutes before the others came, slinking through the scrub and scampering over the dry leaves until they lunged upon the dead thing leaking its scent and turned on each other, a rolling churn of them amassed over the carcass, tearing apart anything close enough to tear, eating and fighting and howling in pain and more coming through the brush. See, her father told her. There’s no mystery to it. It’s just bad. He ran his thumbnail down the part of her pigtailed hair. That’s better isn’t it? To know? He was the kind of man who thought the mirrors beautiful.
There was a time in the hottest part of the day when he woke to the press and ease of her breasts against his back and lifted her arm and drew himself away from her and crouched quiet and bent under the low ceiling of the camper shell, his spine missing the feel of her breathing. She had pulled the blanket over her eyes and left the rest of her to breathe. He lifted it off and draped it, working slowly and silently, until it covered the rear window of the cab and it was dark but for the places on the side windows where she had missed. Then he opened the tailgate and climbed out. In the full blast of the sun he circled the truck, starting at one long window of the plastic shell and moving to the rear window and to the one on the other side. He was barefoot, in his underwear. In his hand a small stone glinted. Against the glass it made a rough scratching sound.
Inside the truckbed again, he shut the tailgate behind him, and on his knees turned to look. She lay still sleeping where he had left her, but the draped blanket had settled darkness over her and the hundreds of holes he’d scratched in the window coating let in the daylight. All around her a small new galaxy floated. He had meant to wake her and show her, but from the west the sun came through the holes—a hundred luminous threads all slanting—and found her skin and turned her naked body into a lake reflecting. He could not bring himself to stir it. And when he finally did crawl back beside her, he lay for a long time looking at a small dot of light that moved across her neck, slow and steady as the turning of the world they were on. When it got to her collarbone he placed his hand over it. There it was on him, now, there between the tendons behind his knuckles, and he could imagine it going right through like a bullet, marking them forever with two halves of the same wound.
She woke just before mirror-rise. He lay watching her as he had lain the last few hours. She took in what he’d done. Nothing of her moved but her eyes. All around them the camper shell was dark and the stars he’d made were white and they watched them burn down slowly to orange and red and almost gone. The long side windows grew more and more clear, the spray coating losing its opacity as the sunlight drained, and the mirrors came, until through them they could see the dark shapes of the trees and the pale orbs of the mirrors filling the space where the hot stars had been. Out there the sleepless birds sang their ceaseless songs.
“What’s your name, anyway?” she said.
“Minor,” he said. “Juhle.”
“Minor Juhle,” she said.
“Mitchel,” he added. “Minor Mitchel Juhle.” He had been calling himself that for such a long time he considered it true.
“You know what’s funny?” she said.
“What?”
“My name is Pearl. Well my middle name. My first name is Drema.”
�
�Drema Pearl.”
“Isn’t that funny? Pearl and Juhle?”
“Not particu—”
Her elbow caught him below the rib, hard, and he took a deep breath to ease the pain. “Drema Pearl Bitch,” he said.
“My last name’s Howell,” she said. “Not that you asked.”
“Drema Pearl Howell Bi—“
“Don’t say it.”
A little while later they were on the road driving north again with the windows down and the mirror-light blowing through them on a roaring wind.
“Mmmm Juhle,” she said.
“What?” he said.
She said it again, slower: “Mm-Mm Juhle. Can I call you that?”
“You can call me baby,” he said. Then he grinned at her and sang it. She joined him, but after the chorus neither of them knew the words so they just sat there howling into the wind a wordless semblance of the tune.
They drove on north through long miles of agri-industry, huge fields staggered in their planting, the ceaseless sunshine quickening their rush to yields so in these months farming was a constant race to meet the rolling harvest. They passed wide swaths of new soybeans, their small leaves glinting in the gloam, and stretches of paled plants ready for cutting, and vast strips already being cut, so many white workers’ hats flashing in the mirror-light, as if a flock of migratory birds had alighted to feed on swarms of something heavenly and rare, the way they used to before the mirrors changed the migrations. He had seen it long ago and he commented on it. She only knew of it from nature shows she’d seen in school. He was older than she’d thought. He asked if it mattered. She said it sure didn’t seem to did it. And it was midnight. They passed wide-built single-story factories with their clear glass roofs letting the light down onto floors full of figures working through the electricless post meridian hours and forklifts scuttling across mirror-lit lots and they passed through the lumberfarms of west New Jersey where forestfuls of lumberjacks worked the quick-grown giant pines and there was no sound but the rumbling of the truck engine and the constant sawing from all directions as if the woods had been infested by some horde of saw-jawed pests. And they saw New York City rising in the distance, the mirror-light glancing off the glass of all the roofs, and all around it the oceanfields of floating solar rafts gleaming with slabs of the reflected sun, and they drove on.