Afterimage

by Roderick Geiger

  Ishue cracked open her cellphone and began canvassing directory assistance services, finding only one Deverson, a Michelle in San Francisco. She called the number and got a machine, did not leave a message. A deputy at the Yolo County Sheriff’s office in Woodland told her they were not allowed to give out any personal information about their officers, retired or not. Of course! That made sense.

  Now her attention turned to her only lead, the old Deverson farm. She located it on a satellite map according to where Dr. Yeoh had said she’d find the place. It was still there as of the date of the image so she drove on out. It was as Yeoh had warned: huge tractors and bulldozers pushing and pulling, recompacting and remaking the earth, causing several detours, road-widening projects. Then she passed an old, unmarked concrete bridge, and a quarter-mile further on, an overgrown driveway. She stopped before a pair of enormous gates made from the steel wheels of some giant, ancient farm machine, securely chained and locked together. Beyond, a house, barely visible behind unmanicured hedges. Ishue was suddenly compelled to honk the horn. Three blasts. She waited. Several minutes passed, during which time the sun moved behind some distant ridgeline and the sky faded to gray.

  Then a short, barrel-chested man appeared, leathery dark skin, jet black hair in a ponytail, a fancy straw cowboy hat with a turquoise hatband, red and black plaid wool shirt buttoned up to his neck. Moving with a pronounced limp, he methodically unlocked the gate, opened it and stepped aside. It was as if she’d been expected. She started the engine and drove through, the man continuing to stare at her, expressionless, intense. As night quickly came on, as shadow and light mixed indistinguishably toward darkness, she felt for an instant as she had in Claire’s house.

  She shook it off and parked beside the modest house, paint badly faded, overgrown with creepers and brush. No lights from within. The man, who had come up close to her window, gave her a start, his fingertips pressing against the glass.

  She had the fleeting thought that at no time in her life would she have ever opened the window in the near darkness, in a strange place with a strange man leaning against the glass…until now. She did.

  “You’re with the police,” the man half asked, half said.

  “I’m a reporter. Ilene Ishue, Manzanita Enterprise.” She showed him her press pass.

  “Another reporter, from so far away?” He pulled back his hunching shoulders a little and said: “You are too late. They all left.” He said this with a conclusive wave of his hand, but stepped back just enough to let her door swing open.

  She got out. Another reporter’s on to this? “Who all left?”

  “Everyone. Mrs. Adel and her friend, the other man, the two men in the truck, the police, the other reporter from Sacramento. Only Roberto is left. Come in and see for yourself.”

  Ishue felt herself being drawn in, as if into a maze, and she had a fleeting compulsion to leave a trail of breadcrumbs. The porch boards squeaked loudly underfoot. He turned a dim lamp on just inside the door and she stepped in. “And you are Roberto, the caretaker here?” she asked.

  He extended a hand, like black leather. He was noticeably shorter than she, barely over five feet tall. In the light she could now see he was very old, deep furrows in the otherwise smooth skin of his face, but she could not tell how old. Ancient.

  He shook his head while moving to another lamp, switched it on. They were in a small foyer, a parlor on the right, a hallway straight ahead. Roberto gestured for her to follow into the parlor. He turned on another lamp, dim, with a thick, maroon, heavily brocaded shade. A mishmash of musty old furniture styles, the smell of dust too fine to be seen.

  “Did anyone say when they might be back?”

  “I cannot say exactly. Please sit.”

  She obliged, taking a large, wingback chair in the bay window, clutching her reporter’s notebook in her lap. “What happened here today, Roberto?”

  Roberto sat across from her. “Many things. A very busy day in a place where very little ever happens. Mrs. Adel came, with her friend, just like she said she would. Then the man from the government in the white car came, then a van came and took all the Professor’s papers, then the police and the reporter came and said Mrs. Adel escaped from the sanitarium. Now you. Many visitors.”

  Ishue produced the picture of Sara. “Is this Mrs. Deverson’s friend.” Roberto nodded matter-of-factly, and Ishue did too. “Where did they go?”

  Roberto wrung his hands. “I don’t know where.”

  Ishue’s reporter instinct told her he was holding back. “They said she escaped from a sanitarium?”

  “Yes. Her daughters put her there because she talks to the Professor. She comes here once a month, sometimes less, whenever one of her daughters finds the time to bring her, and she sits in that very chair and talks to him.” Ishue fidgeted in the chair, felt herself fighting the sensation of sinking down into it. “I would have brought Mrs. Adel here as often as she wished, except her daughters forbade me going out there…to the sanitarium.”

  “Wait. Are we talking about Professor Deverson, her deceased husband?” Ishue asked.

  Roberto looked around nervously, tightening up. She was losing him. Time for some tactical quid pro quo. “Look, Roberto, I’ve got a personal stake in this. I’ve been seeing things and hearing things ever since that Manzanita Hospital fire…things that shouldn’t be.”

  “Then you understand,” he said, visibly relieved. “What have you seen?”

  “Before we get into that, I need you to clarify…Adel talks to her deceased husband?”

  Roberto shook his head. “I am not so sure, deceased. He disappeared from this place, a fire in the building out there.” He gestured with his head toward the rear of the house, smiling. White teeth with one eye tooth missing. “More than just a fire. Mrs. Adel was there too, blinded, wandering in the yard, her clothes burned off.”

  “Nine years ago?”

  He thought a moment. “Ten, more like. Last week her daughter, Michelle brought Mrs. Adel here. She was very excited. She said it had finally happened again and now the Professor would be able to continue his work.”

  Ishue felt anxious and strange, her vision blurring at the edges and she caught herself blinking to correct it. This was not right; it was not safe here. She felt herself rising from the chair, sidestepping toward the foyer. This was going nowhere…time to get back on the road.

  “Please, do not be afraid,” he pleaded. “What you are feeling is to be expected. Because there are powerful spirits here. I believe they are good spirits so you need not fear them.”

  Oh, in that case. She sat back down uncomfortably.

  “I have something I want to show you. It is in my trailer out back. Come with me… or follow me in your car if you wish.”

  She checked to make sure the huge gates were still open, thought for a moment about bolting out. But she was intrigued, so she drove behind Roberto’s tired old golf cart as it crept slowly past the house, on through the property. It gave her a chance to look around. It was fully dark now but sporadic light poles cast dim, misty bells of light. There was the steel lab building, and over there, the remains of an old barn, shattered wall, roof caved in.

  Roberto led her across 500 feet of open field to a small grove of trees, live oak and sycamore, winter-bare, a skeletal canopy over a mobile home, a skinny metal box, old, oxidized bare aluminum, a round porthole in the door, with a faded brand-name above the front windows: ‘Thunderbird.’

  Beyond: distant twinkling lights, amber-orange, a thin line across the horizon. The street lights of new tracts, strip malls, raw encroaching civilization.

  The inside of the ‘Thunderbird’ was tidy, clean, heavily varnished wood veneer paneling, a cozy smell to the place, with a wood stove improvised into the corner of the little living room. A small sofa, a chair facing the sofa, a lamp with a purple velvet shade. No TV. And everywhere, religious icons, Christian and Orthodox crosses, writings in Arabic, hieroglyphics, cuneiform; sculptures, paintings, mosa
ics. She counted seven renditions of Christ on the cross and winced at the heavy feel of it, the immersion in icons.

  With the chill of evening upon them, Roberto set about lighting a fire. He put a kettle on the wood stove and hung a perforated metal tea-ball inside. Ishue sat on the sofa, checked her pocket to make sure her recorder was running.

  “Do you live here alone?” she asked after a time.

  “Yes.” He sat on the chair.

  “How long?”

  “Twenty-five years I’ve worked for the Deversons, 25 years I’ve lived right here.”

  “Do you have any family?”

  “No,” he answered quietly. “No one.”

  “Were you here when…it…happened?”

  Roberto nodded. “Here in this very room.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Professor Deverson many times before did these experiments, but never like this one. Father Corinto said he was doing the Devil’s work out here and when the last one happened I was afraid. I stayed here in my trailer. I did not know Mrs. Adel was hurt and needed help.” He lowered his head shamefully.

  Devil’s work? How quaint. “There was nothing you could have done for her.” She said this with such absolute certainty that it surprised even her. “But please,” she continued, “could you describe…it? What you heard and saw?”

  He nodded ever so slightly. “I remember it like yesterday. The whining sound, building, louder…louder, then the flash of light, the sky going black for a moment, and the - how can one describe it - like an explosion without noise. It went right through me, through my soul, and I believed the professor had opened the gates of hell, just as Father Corinto said, and I prayed for all our salvation.”

  His teakettle began to whistle so he pushed himself up from the chair and limped toward the stove. Ishue’s eyes fixed on a small bookcase. With aluminum foil, gaudy plastic brocade and dozens of candles it had been converted into a kind of shrine. Two unframed pictures formed the visual centerpiece of the shrine. She rose and crossed the narrow room, feeling herself drawn to the images. Reverently, she withdrew the first picture from it’s enshrinement, a colored-pencil drawing, child-like in it’s perspective and dimension, but painstakingly drawn, with amazing patience and attention to detail. An unusual composition, Roberto had devoted more than half of the drawing to the nighttime sky, stars grouped together into somewhat recognizable constellations. Dead center, a flaming, oversized orb dominated the sky. Beneath this, the obligatory Jesus on the cross, drooping, looking dead, and at the base of the cross, another Jesus, perfectly alive, arms outstretched to a group of townspeople wailing and praying to him even as their clothes seemed to be burning off their backs.

  “It is a vision. I have seen this vision many, many times,” Roberto said, handing Ishue a cup of tea.

  “It’s very good…the drawing I mean. I mean the tea too. They’re both very good.” She laughed awkwardly. “Is this…are both of these…Jesus?”

  He nodded solemnly. “Yes. And Zoroaster, Ra, Mohammed. He is known by many names. All religions claim him.”

  “But there’s two of him.”

  Roberto nodded slowly. “It is the way it happened…the resurrection.”

  “That’s not the way I learned it in Sunday School.”

  “The scriptures are wrong,” he announced with conviction. “Scripture is not the word of God; it is man trying to explain the word of God. Many things are mixed up. Stories told by father to son, holy men changing the stories to suit themselves…for many thousands of years, telling and retelling, over and over. This is the source of those stories.” He paused to study his drawing. “For years I have been working on this. I leave a tablet next to my bed so I can draw in the morning when I awake, when the dream is still clear.” He took a thoughtful sip of his tea. “Are you religious, Miss Ishue?”

  “I was raised Lutheran,” she offered, and for a moment she saw her father’s toothy grin on that fateful Sunday morning 30 years ago when she had asked him if he was a Lutheran too. “I was brought up Shinto,” he’d answered, “but now I am nothing. Just like you, who is being raised Lutheran, but when you grow up you will be nothing.” The thought of being nothing had frightened her. She’d told her mommy and her parents had gotten into a terrible fight about it.

  “When I grew up,” she said pensively, “I hope you won’t take offense at this – but when I grew up I guess I just grew out of it.” Ishue didn’t mind occasionally talking about herself during interviews. It was a way of de-formalizing the process, a personalization device to defrost interview subjects. But only for a moment. Now it was time for her to retake control: “What about you?”

  “I was raised Catholic, and as a young man, I too lost my faith. Why or how is not important. What is important is how I got it back, twelve years ago, when the visions started.”

  “Twelve years ago,” Ishue said. “Did this have something to do with…”

  “The Professor’s experiment,” Roberto answered, anticipating the full sentence. “I was inside the barn when the machine exploded and the roof collapsed on the Professor’s arm.”

  “And these visions started…” she asked, pointing at his drawing.

  “That very night.”

  Ishue sat forward, energized by the news. A clear, cause-effect relationship? “Then Dr. Deverson’s experiments caused the visions, is that right?”

  Roberto shook his head and squinted. “Not caused. Opened. Just as the accident in the hospital opened you to see the visions.” He paused here, hoping she might talk about her experience. She did not. “But there was another accident, long ago.” He gestured to the drawing. “It will take time to understand,” he soothed, rising and moving stiltedly toward the kitchen, separated from where Ishue sat by a short bar and a pair of slightly unraveled bamboo barstools. He began chopping something just out of her view. By the smell, onions - perhaps shallots.

  “I first showed the Professor that drawing a year before he disappeared. He was interested in the detail of the sky. He gave me the name of an Astronomy professor who identified three constellations and many stars in my drawing, and said it was not the sky of today. He said it was the sky of 10,000 years ago.”

  “How did he know that?” Ishue asked, unsure where this was leading.

  “The distance between the stars,” Roberto answered. “He said only an astronomer would know how to draw this sky of 10,000 years ago. He also said that my description of the star falling straight down was what he called a ‘direct strike,’ very rare because meteors fall at long angles across the sky, something to do with earth rotation, but if they do fall straight down, a meteor, even a small one, can make a tremendous explosion.”

  “Ummm,” Ishue nodded.

  “I believe this is the true Guiding Star.” Roberto continued, scooping up a dollop of something white, dropping it sizzling into the frying pan. “Professor Deverson said there may have been a prior event like the ones he made in his laboratory. An event caused by a meteor crashing to earth. He said perhaps my Star of Bethlehem might really have been such a thing, which resurrected this man, pulled him back among the living. I believe it is so. I believe it is God’s work. He chose this man. He sent the meteor and opened a doorway between earth and heaven.”

  “For that matter, it may have happened many times,” Ishue said uncomfortably.

  Roberto’s eyes grew suddenly wide. “Accidents, perhaps. But God’s doorway, only once. For 10,000 years, only He. Until the professor, only one.”

  “That’s a lot to accept on faith.”

  “Not on faith. On His word.”

  This left Ishue more or less speechless, so she quietly watched Roberto scrape the contents of his cutting board into the frying pan, releasing the dark aromas of chili pepper and pork fat.

  It was like a stew of Christian images, she thought. Christmas, Easter, Jesus and Barabas, the star of Bethelem, all simmering together in a pot. She could smell the clean fragrance of boiled rice.

>   “Are you hungry?”

  She was. She replaced the first picture in the shrine and withdrew the second. Again the highly detailed, childlike art. A drawing of an MRI, sparks pouring out the ends, with a baby, halo and all, emerging from the machine’s throat.

  “Born not of woman, but of God, immaculately conceived,” Roberto quoted. “This too is in the vision. The other is the past; this is the future. God’s reopening of the doorway.”

  He had prepared a humble vegetarian chili, served with rice. Perfectly seasoned. They ate quietly for a time, then Roberto dabbed his napkin to his lips and said: “They think I am a crazy old man, even my friends, my fellow parishioners, they do not believe any of it. So I learn to keep to myself, not to talk to people about what I have seen, what I know. It is very lonely.” He gave a long sigh.

  Ishue was inclined to agree with Roberto’s friends. “What about Mrs. Deverson? Did you ever talk to her about the vision?”

  Roberto cast down his eyes. “Oh yes. They - she and Professor - cannot see some things. They are blinded by science…as if it were the word of God. The professor is the instrument of God, and yet he does not believe. Now he looked up. “You’ve had visions too. What is in your visions?”

  “I’m not sure.” And she wasn’t sure…about anything that had happened in Claire’s house. It seemed so long ago, the memories foggy, tattered with age. “It wasn’t so much a vision as a feeling. And I was very frightened.” She left out the part about the man dressed in animal skins.

  Roberto nodded insightfully. “Yes, feelings. You were nearby when the old woman died… in the machine, yes?”

  “No. I was on the scene 20…maybe 30 minutes after she died.”

  He knit his brow. “Then I cannot say whether you will see more visions…or whether they will not come again.”

  Ishue did not want to pursue this. No more references to dead people in the present tense. No more quotes from the Bible. She was feeling restless now, her thoughts turning to Eugene. It was time to go. “You asked me here to show me something. What did you want to show me, Roberto?”