by Rich Horton
Ray worried that if he wasn’t in the house when she arrived, Janice might panic. It made perfect sense to him that she would arrive back in this world in a state of some confusion. He couldn’t let her go through that alone.
He didn’t bother to call work. It certainly didn’t surprise him that they didn’t call him. He imagined going to work as usual, then disappearing out of his cubicle leaving a half-eaten sandwich behind. How long would it take them to realize something was amiss?
But it seemed less funny after four weeks with no one calling. The automatic deposit of his paychecks continued uninterrupted.
Each day he spent an hour or so sitting in different chairs in different rooms. He saw things he had never noticed before: a small truck in the background of a painting, a birthmark on the ear of an anonymous relative in one of the photographs in the living room, a paperback book he’d thought lost under one side of the couch. He developed a new appreciation for the pleasant home he and Janice had created together.
After that first month he considered whether he should come up with a story to explain her absence to the curious. For the first time he realized how suspicious the circumstances of her disappearance might look to the police. He thought it fortunate that Janice had quit her job. She had no living relatives that he was aware of, and no friends out of her past (had there even been any?) ever bothered to call. Wouldn’t the neighbors be a bit curious, wouldn’t they notice that now he lived alone? Of course not.
Molly had to be told eventually. The next time she called he would offer some sort of explanation. He owed her that. But what if she never called? Should he track her down, introduce this sad twist of physics into the life of the one human being he still held dear?
Ray could not bear the idea that his daughter might never look into his face again, making him feel, at last, recognized. But it seemed as inevitable as his wife’s fade from the world.
* * * *
Four years later Ray was walking past a church a few blocks from home. It had become his habit each night to walk the nearby neighborhoods, not returning home until sometime after midnight. Each house window was like a dimly-lit television, the people inside moving about with unexplained purpose behind partially drawn shades and curtains. The noises could just as easily be sobs or laughter, and he had no responsibility for knowing which was which.
Sometimes he attended nighttime lectures at this church, sitting near the back to observe. The lectures were usually nonreligious or at least nondenominational. Usually on a social issue “Of Concern To Us All,” or a recounting of some overseas trip or expedition. Never anything he hadn’t heard a hundred times before.
“Spontaneous Human Invisibility,” it said on the church activities sign. “8 P.M. Wednesday.” It was five after the hour. The lights inside appeared dim, and he thought for a moment the lecture must have been cancelled. A woman his age, graying hair pulled back, a pale brown, unflattering knee length dress, appeared suddenly out of the shadows and turned into the church, disappearing through the doors. Without thinking he hurried after her.
“In every case the person was physically present, but according to reliable witnesses of good reputation and standing in the community, the person could not be seen or heard.”
The man at the podium wore a stiff white shirt, striped tie, black pants. Black shoes that gleamed with a high-gloss, plastic-like finish. He reminded Ray of a Jehovah’s Witness who had once come to his door, except the fellow at the altar wasn’t smiling.
Perhaps eight or nine people sat in the front rows and an equal number on the sides. He could see movement in the unlit overflow seating sections off to either side behind rows of pillars: a fluttering as of birds trapped in shadow, a jerky nod, a gleam of cuff link or teeth. It seemed odd that people would sit in the dark, unless they were embarrassed or didn’t want their attendance noted.
Then there was the lady he’d followed in here, sitting a few rows ahead of him. Particularly noticeable in that she was the only person in the room smiling.
“Besides these third-party witnesses, we have limited testimony from the victims themselves, limited apparently because of embarrassment, or because they could not believe anyone would listen to their stories.”
Ray felt movement nearby, saw three men sitting a few feet away, listening intently. They must have arrived after him, but he hadn’t seen them come in.
“We have the story of Martha, who stopped going into grocery stores because not once in six years had a clerk answered any of her questions.”
A nodding to Ray’s immediate left. More late arrivals, but he hadn’t felt or heard them sit down.
“And what are we to make of Lisa, a gorgeous woman from all accounts, who hasn’t been asked out on a date since she was sixteen?”
A stirring in seats all around him, as if the air was charging with emotion.
“These are active, living people, who through no fault of their own have found themselves sadly, spontaneously invisible, often at the very moment they needed to be seen the most. Missed by their children, ignored by their spouses, underappreciated in the arenas of commerce, I contend these are members of the most persecuted of minorities, in part because it is a minority whose existence has gone for the most part unperceived.”
These remarks were greeted with thunderous applause. Ray glanced around: every pew, every seat was filled. He stared at some of the faces and saw nothing remarkable about any of them. Nondescript. Forgettable. The lady who’d led him here got up and headed briskly toward the door. He scrambled to follow her.
He passed close to one of the dark overflow areas. The faces staring out at him were gray, with even grayer eyes. They filled every inch of space, a wallpaper of monotone swatches.
When Ray got outside he discovered to his dismay that the woman was already more than a block ahead of him. Her shadow hinged like a stick insect as she made the corner.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey!” And ran after her.
He followed her for several blocks, never making much progress. He shouted and screamed until his lungs were on fire, at first thinking the local residents would be disturbed. Infuriated, they would call the police.
No, he thought. No, they won’t.
And so he shouted and screamed some more. He yelled at the top of his lungs. There were no words in what he was screaming, only fragmented syllables his anguished mouth abused.
At the end of the street the sky had lightened, yellow rays spreading through lines of perspective, stringing the distant houses together with trails of fire. He could see the woman had stopped: a charred spot in his retina, the edges of his vision in flames.
He arrived breathless and on the verge of fainting, awed by the observation that the sun had arrived with him. All around him the world lightened, then bleached, became day, and then became something beyond. White and borderless and a pain in his heart. He was amazed to find she was looking directly into his face.
“You see me,” he whispered. Then, “But am I still alone?”
It seemed as if he’d never seen pity until he’d seen it in her face. Looking at him, looking at him, she nodded sadly for him and everyone else waking up in solitary beds at the edge of nonexistence.
And the world was silver. Then pewter as it cooled. He waited, and waited, then, finding enough shadow to make a road, he followed it to his house and the rest of his days there. Alone.
And to any eyes that might pry on that place, occasionally, and only occasionally, visible.
BY THE LIGHT OF TOMORROW’S SUN, by Holly Phillips
I arrived by boat, because End Harbor is an outport and that’s the only way to get there. Jacques Devries came to pick me up at Kiet’s Inlet in his dad’s old diesel-powered troller. He looked so much like his old man, with his black hair tucked under a greasy John Deere cap and deep grooves already around his mouth, it shocked me when his young man’s bawl rang out across the wharf. “Daaaaan-yuuuuuuul!” He slapped my shoulder and called me a ci
ty slick, and carried my duffel bag down the gangway to the float as if he didn’t trust me not to fall in the drink. But the subtle shifting of the boards was intensely familiar to me, like the slap of the oily water under my feet, the creak of boatlines, the stink of fish, diesel exhaust, and the sea. So terribly familiar I didn’t know if it was love or panic that filled my chest. I sat in the wheelhouse with Jacques and we talked, of all things, hockey.
When we arrived I could see the End was the same as it always had been. And yet, that’s a lie. Though I’d lived there all my life until I away, there were things about the place I hadn’t known. Or rather, I knew them only at the roots of me, in my cells, not in my mind.
But I had no trouble recognizing the village’s unpainted frame houses strung together by floats and boardwalks and stairs. The old cannery still leaned on its pilings across the inlet, its steel roof a sagging tent of rust, and the crescent of beach was still tucked at the far end like the web of flesh between a finger and a thumb. And the trees still hung above it all, giant firs black with shadow, feathers on a raven’s wing that reached to snag the fog.
There’s always fog on that stretch of coast. Sometimes, like it was that day, it’s a thin veil that glitters in the trees when the sun eases through the clouds. Other times it submerges the world under a breathable ocean of gray. Days like that the only clarity is at the still surface of the ocean, where a seal coming up to gasp for air sounds like a message from another world. And that was the surprise I felt, the new recognition of the old, old truth: End Harbor looks like nothing but what it is. The meeting place of worlds.
Jacques slowed the boat, killing our wake before it could rock the floats, and glanced my way. “Hey, Dan. Glad to be back?”
I couldn’t say it, but I was. I was.
God, how I loathed myself for that.
* * * *
The house I grew up in was on the ocean side of Tempest Point, a twenty minute walk from the village through the trees. The warm mushroom smell of decaying fir needles filled my lungs, an earthy undertone to the rank green of the wet salal and thimbleberry that lined our way. Black mud oozed under my boots, long stretches of the trail so smooth I could see that only deer had been that way since the last big rain.
It being the coast in springtime, the last big rain could have been that morning, but Harold Peach said apologetically, “It’s been a while since anyone’s been out there. Your granddad made it plenty clear he didn’t need no visitors, and Dick Turnbull took out a box of groceries last Sunday, so—”
“You know the old man,” Jacques added. “Grumpy as a sea lion in rut.”
Jacques and Harold Peach had volunteered to walk out with me. As much to make sure I actually went, I thought, as to offer me support. They knew I would never have come back if Margaret Peach, Harold’s wife, hadn’t tracked me down and told me to. The old man was failing, she had said, and the house was falling into the brine. My mouth was full of cold saliva, a result of the nausea of fear. I wanted to push my way off the path and lie down under the ancient trees, to disappear under the blanket of moss. Why had I come? But even as my mind flailed, my bones knew. Fate gripped the back of my neck and marched me to the end of the trail.
Falling into the brine. It was no exaggeration. The house hung at the edge of a cliff, the stumps of its foundation posts buried in earth that was being eaten by the waves. Like an organic glacier, the thick black forest duff, that was centuries of dead needles, dead animals, dead trees, poured off the mountainside and into the sea. Underneath, frangible basalt cracked and crumbled away, bedrock less certain than water. The house had been twenty feet back from the edge and twenty feet above high tide when it was built. This winter past, according to Harold Peach, storm waves had washed the back porch, warping the wood and worrying the foundations.
“You can see the lean in her,” he said, and he was right. I could. Small weathered house, its roof of cedar shakes green with moss and infant trees. I felt a visceral dismay that the whole thing hadn’t been washed away. As a blank space at the edge of the world, it would have been beautiful.
“Gotta take a leak,” Jacques said, heading around the side of the house to the cliff edge.
Coward, I thought at him, who’d once been my best friend.
Harold Peach climbed the stairs to the front porch and stamped his feet to clean the mud off his boots, better than knocking. “Matwa? It’s Harold Peach.” From within, silence. “Hey, Matwa! Come see who’s home!” He turned to slip me an uneasy wink. The only sound was of the waves beating the shore below. I stood stupidly on the bottom stair. Even the hand of fate couldn’t drag me any further. Again, I thought, why am I here?
Then Jacques shouted, a wordless yell of horror.
A cold sheet of sweat washed my skin. A tide of sick relief.
“That’s why.” The words escaped my mouth. Harold Peach gave me a strange look as he ran past me down the stairs.
* * * *
But of course it wasn’t what I hoped. The old man had fallen, yes, but he was still alive.
* * * *
The cliff below the house wasn’t a clean knife cut. Nibbled by storms, it fell by stages into the waves, a rough slope of earth and roots above, and then steep crannied stone down to the water. Slow waves sloshed against the shore. It was low tide and the tumbled lumps of black rock at the base of the cliff were clad in white barnacles, purple mussels, green and russet weeds. Spring kelp was visible beneath the surface just beyond the intertidal zone, and then, beyond that, the smooth blue swells of the ocean. The clouds were breaking up, letting sunlight through to dazzle on the water. I squinted, some relic of a habit making me search the horizon for strange ships. Usually they appeared after storms, or on the still gray days when they got lost in the fog, but we always looked when we were kids, wanting to be the first ones to wave them into the harbor. The visitors, the strangers, like Matwa my grandfather once had been.
“Hey. Daniel. We could maybe use your help here.”
Harold Peach was crouched at the edge of soft dirt staring up at me. God knows what he thought, me gazing out to sea with the old man stranded down below. One of Matwa’s canes was there by the house’s corner foundation post, its rubber foot clotted with mud. I picked it up and propped it against the wall. Harold Peach was easing himself down to the ledge where Jacques perched by the old man’s side.
“He must of fallen last night,” Jacques said looking up at us. “He’s good and wet. I can’t believe he’s alive.”
The old man was an ungainly huddle against the dirt. He’d drawn his crippled legs as close as he could for warmth, and he had his right arm hooked around an exposed root. The trees that might have stabilized the cliff edge had been cut down to build the house and expose the view, but their huge root boles had remained under the ground until now. Dead and buried, keeping him alive. Saliva filled my mouth. Jacques was wiping mud off the old man’s face, that was dark and heavy with bone, strong even when it was slackly unconscious. There was no sign of the other cane. I turned against the wind and spat.
Harold Peach was digging rough steps in the earth with his boot heel. He said without looking up, “Dan, find a couple blankets and a rope. We’ll wrap him tight and pull him up.”
“If he busted something when he fell—” Jacques said.
Harold Peach shook his head. “Looks to me more like he climbed down and got himself stuck.” He was still kicking at the dirt, and starting to pant. “Come on, Daniel, get to it.”
Eels in my gut, my feet clumsy as anchor stones, I climbed through the side rail to the back porch—the steps hung out over pure air—and went inside.
Everything that was End Harbor was in that house. The wholly prosaic: homemade cedar table and chairs, iron stove, kerosene lanterns, braided rugs. And the wholly wonderful: the silk cushion embroidered with four-legged birds, the harpoon of shining golden stuff that wasn’t gold, the hide of the sea-beast with the long scaly neck and black flippers like wings. Mementos f
rom the sailors who found themselves in the End, hopelessly lost, but still willing to trade. There were glass net floats on the windowsills, too, frozen bubbles of pale green and blue, but those had mostly washed ashore from Japan. I pushed into the old man’s bedroom, trying not to look at anything while I pulled a couple of wool blankets off the sour tangle on the bed, but on my way to the front porch for a length of nylon line my eyes fell on the trunk by the door. Dark wood bound in brass, carved with letters only one man on this earth could read. There was still a gleam of old polish under the dust. When I’d taken the coiled line from the hook in the porch roof I went around the house instead of cutting back through the inside.
Harold Peach had finished his stairway and was teetering at the old man’s feet, telling Jacques what to do. I passed down the blankets and line, and then stood there feeling sick and useless while they wrapped the old man in his cocoon. He moaned once, his eyelids flickering to reveal yellowish whites, but he didn’t come to. Harold Peach and I hauled on the line from above while Jacques pushed from below. Jacques’s footing on the unstable ledge wasn’t good, and the strain was visible in his face. Right past his head I could see the water, bright green now in the sun.
We got the old man onto level ground and then Jacques, clumsy probably with relief, slipped. He wasn’t in much danger, but he threw himself in a belly flop against the slope, scrabbling with his hands.
“Shit,” he gasped. “Shit!”
I left the old man to Harold Peach and ran to grab Jacques’s wrist. He grunted, but he didn’t look at me, or even try to pull himself up.
“Come on, man.” I gave his wrist a yank.
“Hang on.” He twisted his wrist out of my grasp. He was still scrabbling at the dirt, but not for purchase. “Jesus,” he said. “I don’t believe this.” His voice was blank, almost mild. Beyond shock.