by Brian Short
Tunker, the owner, the man behind the bar, recognized me straight off, he stepped back like he’d been stung and held up his hands and he said, “Whoa there, Sheriff, we don’t want any trouble now, I don’t know, there’s been a complaint or something, has maybe somebody complained, about what, about the noise or something, I don’t know, but we aren’t looking for any trouble, you see…” But I walked straight past him and went to the telephone, the small payphone box, the booth, near the bathrooms, there in the back, past the crowds of people all at their tables, at the booths, at the bar, as it was a crowded night, this being what, a Friday night, I don’t remember, but it was a pretty good crowd in there, and I pushed to the back where the payphone was, and sure enough, the phone was off the hook. And there was the skeleton, holding the phone.
I pried the hook, the headpiece, out of the skeleton’s hand and I listened: silence, except for the little hiss of the live line – I could hear that. “WAIT!” I said into the telephone. “WAIT!” and set the headpiece down onto the counter. I couldn’t figure out again how the skeleton had been holding it, so I just let it rest there.
On my way out, I held up a finger at Tunker, as if to say WAIT, and he looked back at me, eyes wide, something not right, definitely not right, but I was out again on the street and moving. Inside Lorelei’s, in all that light, I couldn’t see Amanda, there were only a few customers this late. She must’ve been in back. I ran up the hill, under the bright-bright, shimmery stars, back up to the station, the door to which I found I’d inadvertently left open by a crack, and through the crack a crack of light spilled out over the parking lot, crack over the bumps of the gravel, just a little, but it shone and stood out in contrast against the deep dark of the night.
Inside, the phone still waited on its side. I picked it up and listened. It was hard to hear anything but my own ragged breath, though in time I could make out the sounds of voices, though these were not voices talking, not to me – these were voices talking, talking to each other, these conversations, the sorts, being had, background sounds, sounds in the background, the sounds of laughter, glasses set heavily down to thump the wooden surface of Tunker’s bar, and footsteps, and the other sounds, but nothing held the receiver, no skeleton, nothing, and no one spoke to me. And I said, “WAIT! Okay? Just… just WAIT!” and I was out the door again, this time careful to shut it, and I looked up at the stars.
And they blinked. And they shimmer-shimmered. Everything so close, like I could touch it, like I could reach up and brush the stars away with my sleeve like so much dust.
I took off running down the hill, through the winding bends of the narrow road, down the hill, into town, onto Main Street, the dark of town, most of it sleeping, and again past Lorelei’s – I didn’t even look – and again into the Tooth Or Claw, darkness on darkness, interior red or purple neon sign-light. Tunker saw me, stepped back, raised up his hands, palm open, at chest level, hey, whatever, as if to say, and I scooted past through everyone toward the back, and noticed how the crowd in here seemed thinner than I’d seen it last: thinner, tables left open, partial beers still waiting at empty seats, the persons whom I knew, whom I’d once known, and someone, who is it? she looks up… she looked up at me with recognition in her eyes, in the eyes of her lined face, a warmth, a shock, a sudden recognition, and then she’s gone, the face is just gone, and so is the person. A bottle falls to the floor, it breaks. Beer foam spreads over. Over the. It spreads over the
I picked up the phone from where I’d left it, the line above it still alive, the line still live, and to my ear, though I was breathing hard, I could hear just what? the faint buzz of the live room, my office, police station, the other end of the line in the police station, and I said, into the headpiece, the handpiece, the mouthpiece, “What? What is it?” between gasps.
On the other end I heard a crackle, like something, like the line itself, clearing its throat of static electric gunk, then a voice, just faint, my voice, yes it was definitely my voice, saying, “The skies, where I grew up, these same skies, they were all so full of… of fine, small, dark things… of little fine dark things… and they… they all knew me. They knew something about me. I think they did. I think they all knew my name…”
NINETEEN
The World
[Winter Solstice, 2005]
Harleys by the dozens lined parked along the highway, taking every space formerly left open over the downtown strip of Main Street, their kickstands deployed, frames leaning, chrome bits gleaming, rubber in dark black rings twinned, thick or thin, back ends back and fronts forward, extended, long and thin; all in militaristic formation, perfect, precise. This was how the Ceres clan did things: like they knew what. Several of the bikes, most in fact, had rear seats and sissy bars outfitted with custom-made child-carrying devices. Some even had sidecars with special hampers installed. And now that the air had stopped thrumming, and every loose thing settled from shaking, in the dim confines of the Ignatius! coffee! Co! it was First Wife or perhaps first widow Shulamit who said, “What this town lacks is a doughnut shop.”
Ignatius nodded his sad agreement. “There’s taffy at the confectioner’s up the road a bit,” he offered helpfully, though his pride may’ve been wounded a bit by this failure. “Granted,” he said, “it’s not the same.”
“Taffy,” Shulamit expressed, “schmaffy. Who comes to a town like this looking for taffy?”
“You’ve got me there. But since you are in town – and the whole, eh, family as well – should the need arise, well, such as it is, the thing is available.”
She looked around the abysmally dark room and reconsidered. “You may have a point.”
Ceres children of various sizes and indefinite number bounced loudly about, most of them with a bright mess of blond on top, though a fierce and nearly feral-looking two or three (Proteus couldn’t count – they moved too fast and never stopped for long) with red ragged brushy mops were mixed in among the others, and all ran, weaving patterns throughout, wearing off the colored stain and fixative sheen from the concrete floors. They ducked beneath tables, they popped back out, they hid behind chairs or shoved past them, and occasionally threw small objects into the air. Wherever they were or whatever they did, they were shouting. One girl, barely yet old enough to stand and say her name, hovered just outside the front door. She stared enrapt into the eyes of the ownerless golden retriever who, tongue bouncing with each quick breath it took, stared back at her in existential detente.
“Still, this is no doughnut,” said Shulamit.
“No. No doughnut. It is true.”
I… that is, Proteus… damn it… worked behind the espresso machine, arms swinging in double time, trying to keep up with a mountain of orders, failing miserably, though I’d (he’d) not yet pulled (and wouldn’t) a single shot of coffee. All was milk, foamed, and lots of it, with a squirt of chocolate sauce – make that several squirts; the Ceres clan liked it sweet – stirred vigorously and made into hot cocoa. Rosettes of whipped cream were piped atop, which in short while deranged themselves to mere blobs, melted, bled, the mass of chocolate sprinkles liberally applied left to float on the mottled surface.
Teenage sons Nephi and Laman, in unusual dress (considering how the rest of the family appeared), wore simple, clean suits – dark jackets and trousers both, white shirts, little ties – and had grouped to flank the Professor, who, between them, with his arms folded over his chest, sat stiffly chair-bound, his legs stretched forward and spread slightly, his feet wagging side to side as if keeping their separate time, and whose beaming, toothy smile and head, in a constant slow nodding, may have indicated deep consideration and interest in what these two were saying. Or not.
“Our father has prepared a home for us in the Celestial Kingdom! We know this!” said Nephi, getting a little short of breath. “We saw him ascend into Heaven… and that… is where… he waits…?”
“He’s been appointed his own planet to rule over,” added Laman, somewhat less excitedly, “a
nd now it’s only a matter of time until we all get to join him. And a matter of keeping the Covenant, of course.”
“Yes,” nodded the Professor, who beamed magnificently, his head nodding up and down. “Yes…”
“Have you heard about the Covenant?”
“And the… the structure of the Godhead?”
The Professor, saying nothing more, only continued to nod and smile, white teeth reflecting more light than there was in the room.
“Hey, wait,” said Nephi. “Does that make father our Heavenly Father? Since he’s our father in heaven?”
“No,” answered Laman. “Heavenly Father is different. Our father in heaven is just our father. In heaven. Like. I think…”
In a back corner farthest from the door, Amanda was deep in conversation with a Ceres wife whose red hair – she was, no doubt, mother to the mismatched non-blond children in the room – and whose deep-lined, leathery skin seemed to Proteus, even in this unnatural, dim light and from this distance, especially familiar. He imagined – no, he remembered – that she’d once stood beside a raging bonfire, under stars, the full, heavy canopy of the night sky – or was that the red hair that made him think that? She’d had something… she’d had something for him. Or no: she’d had something of his. Wasn’t that what she’d said? That was different. It seemed so long ago. And just as he realized he’d been staring at these two, they in turn abruptly stopped talking and turned to look directly at him, their expressions each firm and severe. He quickly looked away and returned to what he’d been doing, to pouring yet more foamed milk into the row of small paper cups he’d lined up along the counter, one after another. But he could feel it, how they watched him now. He knew they’d not resumed their conversation, but still studied him. He doubted they’d ever had a “conversation” at all, such as it was – yet he couldn’t even explain to himself what he meant by this. As if in sympathetic response, he felt an itch burning deep inside of his right thigh, an itch so fundamental he knew he could never reach far enough down into his own flesh to scratch it.
Outside, through the window, on the walk, tall Davis stood in place in the sun, long and willow-like, twisting his body from side to side at the hips, letting his arms flap limp and boneless, centrifugally. Windmilling. His form was reflected in the face of the machine; a shape in motion, vertical, smeared and bent, that hovered at the upper edge of Proteus’s eyesight. This annoyed him. Maybe it was the relentless repetition. Certainly, it was this. He tried to ignore it, though this was impossible.
“Here you go,” Proteus said, reaching across the machine to hand the first couple carry-trays of cocoa drinks to the women who waited. Halfway, he hesitated – the two wives stood as still as trees. They even looked a little bit like trees: similar, dark-haired, oval-faced, and youngish. Their arms could easily become branches, he thought, were they lifted up and draped, should they grow out just a little, should they change, by chance to fork, finger, and spread… and… and… their large eyes, the two pairs, glimmered, almond-shaped, the same, the same, earthy, unearthly.
“Uh…”
But these two girls themselves broke the spell they’d cast. They reached the rest of the distance across to accept what he half-held and half-withheld, as if they also shared a single thought.
“Thanks,” and, “Thanks,” they said at the same time, smiling politely.
Proteus twitched his lips back in what he hoped was a grin.
“We do not remember you,” the slightly smaller of the two said.
His grin tightened.
“But we wonder how you’ve come to this name, Proteus?” asked the slightly taller.
“This is not a normal sort of name,” commented the first.
“My name…” he hesitated, trying to remember when he’d told them his name, “is not Proteus.”
“No. Of course it isn’t.”
“Of course it isn’t. But why?”
“Why?” he echoed uncertainly. “I seem to have lost my name.” But he knew perfectly well this was not an explanation that made any sense. “I don’t know where, but any name I used to have is gone now. It’s just gone. This is the only one that’s left. Even though it’s not really mine, I have to use it as if it were. So does everyone else.”
“Yes, gone…”
“Not your own.”
“Everyone else.”
“Does that mean that you can’t remember your normal name? Is that why you need this new and special one?”
“Something like that, I think.” he explained. “It’s less that I don’t remember; more that it was taken from me.”
“Yes, that’s right. Your name was taken.”
“And so you have to use this other one you’ve got now instead.”
“Like a farmer’s forgotten hat, left abandoned on a fencepost.”
“That you found there, and put onto your head. So that it won’t get burned by the sun.”
“Yes,” said Proteus, “yes, exactly!” He began to work on another batch of small hot chocolates, an order that seemingly would never be finished. When he chanced to look up again, the two women remained, smiling at him. Again, his lips twitched and stretched back over his teeth, skull-like. He couldn’t help it.
“Our husband,” said the taller woman, “has gone into the sky. He went to heaven, you know.”
“I do,” said Proteus. “I was there. I saw it happen. But…”
“But we don’t remember you.”
“We were supposed to follow him,” said the second woman, “only we couldn’t.”
“We couldn’t.”
“So we’re here now instead. Still on Earth. On this mountain. Amidst the troubles and sorrow.”
“It isn’t like that in the Celestial Kingdom. Not at all.”
“Are you sure…?” began Proteus, glancing up from his work of foaming a large pitcher of milk, having to talk – that is, shout – over the machine’s terrible squeal of tightly focused, pressurized steam. “Are you sure that’s where he’s gone to?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Where else could he have gone?”
“I don’t… exactly know,” shouted Proteus, “but wouldn’t there be, maybe, other possibilities? Maybe?”
“You mean, like another place?”
“Like maybe somewhere else?”
“Right.”
“No…”
“No…”
The two looked at each other and shook their heads.
“No, we don’t think so.”
And reflected in the chrome face of the espresso machine, bent, tall Davis, twisting outside, presented his own face, knob-like and warped across its surface. His was a miniature face, framed by the front window and darkening somehow, gathering the darkness to himself, ruining the sky with it – what once had been hot and bright, not even five minutes before – twisting the month of December into, onto, and at once past this cusp of winter, so that the sun was lost, the color quickly drained away, and all the birds were shocked into silence, if only for a moment. Soon they, unnoticed, resumed their bird-screaming while meanwhile rain threatened, at first distant, and then not so distant, yet still not quite upon the mountain.
“I was there,” Proteus said again, finishing and stirring this last and latest batch of hot cocoa drinks, “I saw it happen. I saw your husband disappear.”
“As you said.”
“But we don’t remember you.”
“My point,” he continued, “is that so many people in this town have disappeared too, and in the same way.”
“While at the time, you weren’t here.”
“No, I mean, that’s right, I wasn’t here at the time, but I’ve heard stories. Lots of stories.”
“People love stories.”
“The people,” struggled Proteus, “who disappeared weren’t like your husband, Zedekiah. They weren’t holy men. O-or women.”
“Our husband was our prophet. He still is. He has been transformed and gon
e into the sky.”
“But these other people… they were just people. It was the sheriff who made them all go away, the same as he did to your husband. He was here, on the mountain, then he was there, down in the valley, where we met.”
“We don’t remember –”
He cut them off with a wave of the spoon, whipping a glob of milkfoam inadvertently into the air. “Something happened to him when he was up here, on the mountain. Now the people around him all vanish if they get too close. Or they would, but he’s gone now too. He’s vanished himself away, like… like so much mist. But do you understand what I am trying to tell you? That where Zedekiah went to might be the same place all these other people have gone also, and that might not be heaven.”
The two women looked to each other for a moment, then the smaller one said, “We don’t know about those other people. We only know about our husband, and it was he that went to the Celestial Kingdom and is there now. He’s preparing our home for when the rest of us are ready to spend eternity…”
Shulamit wedged her way in between that dark-haired pair of wives and the counter, pulling out her rag purse, shoving the women back a step. “Don’t worry yourself about these two,” she said to Proteus. “They’re very sweet, but hardly a lick of sense between them, heads all aflutter with sweet visions and words and the wind. What do we owe you?”
“Er, let’s see… thirty-two small hot cocoas, a dollar-fifty each, plus tax…”
While some few shorts steps over, at the table where those other twinned spirits Nephi and Laman had bookended themselves, standing to either side of the Professor – who in this case was the book – he, seated, pulled at his frayed collar, sat stiffly upright and began to expound, responding perhaps upon some finer point of theological speculation the boys had brought up: “The Higher and the Lower? Yes… This was always the story being told, so far as anybody knows, really, among any discourse whatever. As the two reach toward each other, in their intersections, in the ground between Earth and heaven, we hear their voices… That’s it, isn’t it? We’ve heard the voices and often wondered – we know that we have, though we’ve been unwilling to admit it, if even to ourselves alone – just what was being said? We listened… oh, yes, we listened very carefully, indeed. Every voice, a particular instrument; each, a perspective, each with its own phrasing. We remove value from the considering and find ourselves, first and only, just considering. We merely listen. We pay them the attention required, knowing it’s the price. Yet we’ve never understood just what was being said. We could never make that part out. It is what has driven us mad. Perhaps it was the absence of value, that value was the only meaning. We only knew that the voices were talking, that there should be meaning, and that this was the division between what was and that Platonic ideal of what was meant to have been. The High and the Low remain ever thus, separate, even when conjoined. Otherwise, wouldn’t it be the case, always, ever after, that we should understand the words, and we should have the knowledge, and follow these conversations of our holy guardian angels? And was this not the promise that we were given in the first half of life, so swiftly, so ruthlessly snatched from us in the second?”