Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  A few Orient natives burrowed through the vegetable bins, feeling no need to step aside for the over-the-causeway customers. Karen Norgen, her skin as gray-green as algae, her hair still whipped into silver curls from the funeral, was midway through a rant aimed at August’s ears. “I’ve been picking blackberries from those bushes ever since I was a child. I always used the Tabor lawn to access the beach. My parents used that lawn. And this woman who calls herself an art advisor—god knows what that means—moves in last year, shows up one time all season, and now she tells me I’m trespassing! On a lawn my parents have been crossing since they were children. Art advisor. You can make money saying shit is gold, and I can’t walk across a lawn. . . .”

  A German shepherd and a scrawny collie mix sniffed the car grilles for bird carcasses. Mills watched the German shepherd mount the smaller dog, humping her as he glanced dully around. After a few too many nervous giggles from shoppers, August clapped his hands. “Spark, get off her.” He hurled an apple, hitting the dog on its side. The shepherd climbed off its mate, his purple tongue lolling, but when he tried to trot away, the collie was pulled behind him. They were still joined, hind to hind, the shepherd’s penis stuck in the collie’s opening.

  “She was eating a canapé,” Karen wailed. “On a Tuesday afternoon. By herself! While she was telling me I was no longer allowed to pick blackberries!”

  Paul asked for a dozen oysters from one of the Igloo ice coolers.

  “Have you ever tried an oyster?” he asked Mills. “It’s like eating the sneeze of the sea. I mean that in a good way.”

  Mills couldn’t take his eyes off the dogs. They were scampering around the cars, stuck together, trying to run in opposite directions like conjoined twins desperate to separate. They looked embarrassed, as if confused by an instinct that had betrayed them.

  “I think they’re in pain,” Mills said.

  “Just came out of the bay this morning,” August told Paul as he scooped twelve oysters into a plastic bag and double-knotted the end.

  “Do you think that blackberry bush will be there next spring? I don’t. That woman is building a Japanese rock garden.” Karen shook her head in bewilderment. “I don’t know what we’re in for with these new people,” she huffed. “I was thinking I’d throw in my name to fill Magdalena’s seat on the board. Just to help out where I can. August, Paul, what do you think?” Karen only glanced at Mills when she thought he wasn’t looking.

  Paul smiled at Karen and nodded. He quickly turned to Mills. “I’ve got to find my steel shucking gloves. Have you seen those gloves in the kitchen? They look like Michael Jackson gloves. Opens them right up.”

  The dogs whined as they ran diagonally, trying to break apart, and whined viciously when they couldn’t. They spun in circles, slamming against the fender of a Jeep, then running back to back in a yanking sidestep toward Main Road. The shepherd’s eyes were white with fear, his penis bent painfully back, causing a twinge of sympathy in Mills’s groin. The collie swiveled around to bite her mate. She yelped and tried to roll on the ground to dislodge him. The shepherd dug his paws in the gravel and dragged her up. He sniffed the thrown apple, as if a second of distraction would clear up the crisis.

  “They’re getting too close to the road,” Mills said to August Floyd.

  “They’re animals. They know what they’re doing.” But August noticed his dogs were indeed a few feet from the whipping traffic. “It’s forty total,” he told Paul, then jogged over to the dogs. August kicked them back with his boot and kept kicking until they drifted over the gravel, not as two dogs but as a single flinching, double-headed organism. They disappeared into the thick marsh grasses, growling and snapping but still fused end to end. The grass shook as shoppers continued their excavation of the vegetable bins. When Mills looked up, Karen was studying him, her mouth forming a reluctant smile. August counted his money.

  Paul and Mills returned to the Mercedes, loading six pumpkins onto the backseat.

  “I wish we could make sure those dogs got free okay,” Mills said as he climbed into the car. He watched the grass, hoping to see one of the dogs lope out alone.

  “I’m sure they’ll work it out.” Paul pressed his foot on the clutch and let out a moan. He rubbed his knee. “It flares up when it rains,” he said through his teeth, as if tasting sour meat.

  “We can go home,” Mills said. “We don’t need to go to the tip today.”

  Paul waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll be fine.”

  Yesterday, Mills had found an old sign in one of the back rooms, tucked between a carton of empty bicentennial 7-Up cans and a bundle of synthetic neckties. At first he’d mistaken it for a flag, covered in twenty years of velvet dust. As his fingers wiped the dirt from the surface, red letters appeared: TERPO. He rubbed until OYSTERPONDS INN ran across the wooden board. He carried it into the dining room, and Paul held it up admiringly as if it were a family photograph.

  The sign had belonged to Paul’s mother. It had hung on the porch of the inn her family had owned for three generations. Paul decided he would pick Mills up after Magdalena’s funeral and they could drive to the inn to deliver it as a gift to the young couple who’d recently bought the place. “Beth told me they were artists. They can put it in their kitchen,” Paul said, “or maybe hang it right on the porch if the hooks are still there. People like that, a touch of history.” Mills decided not to destroy the neighborly fantasy by voicing his own opinion: People don’t like that. People don’t enjoy former owners showing up at their houses, inviting themselves in, and turning their rooms into photo albums in which their own faces do not appear. But, behind the gesture, Mills sensed a secret motivation at work. Paul was curious to see what the new residents had done to his mother’s farmhouse. Scrubbed and de-splintered, the sign was now lying in Paul’s backseat with the pumpkins.

  As they drove east, Paul shook his sore leg to improve his circulation.

  “How did you hurt it?” Mills asked. He knew the answer, but he decided not to mention the car accident Tommy had told him about. Paul had made it clear how much he abhorred Orient gossip, and Mills understood why: it seemed like every house in Orient had an electric fan of gossip blowing the curtains in their windows. Paul preferred the stagnant air of his own separate world.

  “I had an accident last June. Wasn’t watching the road as I was coming in from the causeway and hit a tree.” He pulled at his tie with two fingers. “No big deal. But every so often my knee shoots with needles. My doctor says I need physical therapy, but do I really want to pay someone to watch me bend my leg for an hour? It’s getting better, little by little.” He patted his left knee through his black wool pants.

  At least Mills wasn’t also wearing a black suit. His jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt would prevent them from being mistaken for a pair of father-son Christian missionaries when they showed up at the old inn. Mills stared at the water-flecked fields they passed, remembering the scenery from his drive with Beth to Jeff Trader’s house. He almost asked Paul if they could check on the cats and sheep, but that would have been another admission of sticking his nose in places it didn’t belong. How could Mills explain rummaging around the home of a dead man?

  Every so often, pictures of the Plum monster appeared on passing lawns—PROTECT YOUR HOME FROM CONTAGIONS. PROTECT YOUR FUTURE WITH THE STATE-OF-THE-ART. CALL PRUITT SECURITIES—mixed in among the PEARL FARMS DREAM HOME for-sale signs. It wasn’t much of a leap to make a connection between the monster’s decaying shape and the real estate markers in close proximity, linking them together by cause and effect. “Adam’s signs aren’t doing wonders for property values, I’ll tell you that much,” Paul said.

  Mills pitied the creature. Even if it was a mutant, designed in a lab in some twisted experiment to merge the ugliest features of the animal kingdom, it had still been alive at one point, and somewhere in its brain pan had possessed the desire to live. Mills imagined it escaping from its cage in the night, clawing its way through barbed wire, its paws
touching earth for the first time in the short history of its species, and diving into the water, thinking it could swim. It must have enjoyed that minute before drowning, snorting the clean night air, contemplating the comfort of heat and blood and the rough tug of jimsonweed on its skin.

  “If it were cute it wouldn’t look like such a threat,” Mills said.

  “A panda crossed with a Yorkshire terrier and the slightest dose of sloth?”

  Mills had relied on adorability for much of his childhood. He fixed his eyes on the clouds that stretched skeletally over the bay.

  “Well, even if it started out under a microscope, it should have some rights, shouldn’t it?”

  “If you say so,” Paul said, nodding. He steered the car around the deeper puddles, his knee stronger. “We have rights too, if you say so. That’s all rights are—just values that enough people agree that they share.”

  “I am saying so,” Mills replied. He wasn’t in the mood for one of Paul’s fatherly lessons on relativism. Fine, he thought, bring it into existence, stick needles into it, and exterminate it as soon as it gets out of hand. Welcome to the life cycle of the twenty-first century. The dogs at the farm stand combined in his mind with the creature on Adam Pruitt’s ads until it all felt slightly sickening, like the earth itself was a giant petri dish for the growth of horrible organisms. He tried to picture the creature in its cage in a basement laboratory at Plum, prodded and tortured by white-suited needle-wielders with sharp, lucid eyes. Often, Mills found himself despising the human species, praying for its inevitable extinction, even as he was enjoying a slice of pizza or taking the bus. He had come to view hating human beings abstractly as the most convenient way of living with a conscience in the world.

  Paul glanced over at him, gauging his agitation, and dropped his smile. “I’m not trying to argue with you,” he said. “I think this whole mutant thing is a bunch of bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit,” Mills snapped. “If it’s the future, it’s something to consider.”

  Paul rubbed his mustache, his eyes shifting from amused to meditative. The tires of approaching cars created small tidal bores that crashed against the side of the Mercedes.

  “Here’s what I think,” Paul said after a minute. “Pruitt’s signs don’t mean protect your future. They mean protect yourself from it. Why is it that when everyone thinks of the future these days they’re always bringing up visions of the apocalypse? It’s a fear that anything new must signal the end of days. I find it pretty sad that a whole generation has become terrified of what’s to come. When I was a kid, we were so optimistic. We were cheering for more men on the moon.”

  “You can’t be that old,” he replied. For Mills, dreams of traveling to the moon appeared in the same grainy, black-and-white footage as the first televised landing—a program that had already been canceled before he had been born. The dream could barely withstand the advancement of color. “And you don’t even own a television set.”

  Paul straightened his glasses.

  “I’m afraid I am old now.” He laughed, as if his birth year were a punch line that kept getting funnier every time he remembered it. “How long before kids look at me the way I once looked at people born in the nineteenth century?”

  Mills rested his temple against the window. He couldn’t imagine anyone born in the nineteenth century.

  “Do you think one day those kinds of mutant creatures will be normal?” he asked. The car slowed, waiting for a clear turn onto a dirt road. “Like a regular feature in zoos?”

  Paul thought about it. “Probably.” He rotated the wheel. “Can you think of one scientific breakthrough that was ever stopped? It all becomes a reality eventually. Best not to waste your strength trying to fight the future. It’s like trying to punch the Internet. But if you’re asking about that Plum monster, I doubt it was real.”

  Oak branches tangled above them, a canopy of wicker. Whatever Paul had imagined by way of renovations to his mother’s farmhouse inn did not prepare him for what he found crowning the bluff a mile north of Main Road. As the car approached the house, air leaked from his lips. “At least it’s the same shape,” he rasped.

  The main floor of the house was grand, almost as large as the Benchley mansion, with a smaller second story stacked like a captain’s cabin at its peak, an elevated roost to watch storms rolling on the sea. They pulled into the driveway, parking behind a black sports coupe. Even from this distance, the house had a blurry patina, an out-of-focus sea mirage that gleamed with leathery plastic. Mills couldn’t blink it clear. Twenty feet to the side, a backhoe leaned its yellow claw into the dirt. Mud mounds made a maze on the lawn. Paul lugged the wooden sign from the backseat, staring piteously at the mud trenches.

  “Can’t fight the future, right?” Mills couldn’t resist saying as he unfastened his seat belt. Paul winced, forcing the kind of smile that came over those who had been justly punched. They followed a trail of white paving stones up to what must have once been the porch. A U of grassless dirt indicated its former site. If they drove to a landfill fifty miles away, Paul could have surely found the rotting beams and hung his sign on its original pegs. Instead, he pretended to set it swinging in midair.

  “Well, they have the right, after what they paid,” Paul said with a sigh, his eyes squinting under his glasses. “The door is still here, so they didn’t scrap everything.” He pointed to the slab of ocher wood with a brass eyehole staring from between two pillars. The door was there, but the walls around it weren’t. The entire house was wrapped in plastic tarps, like a contamination site; Mills expected men in Hazmat suits to emerge, warning them to keep away. The wind jittered the plastic seams, revealing flashes of the interior: glimpses of sharp, minimalist furniture, a fur coat slung over an ivory end table, a Persian carpet that swept under a liquor cabinet stocked with vast bleached bottles. Mills pushed his face between the tarp edges and noticed a roll of twenties lying within reach, amid a pile of keys and matchbooks. Everything inside the house winked with an odorless prosperity, a headachy shine engineered to reflect the current owners.

  “These poor people,” Paul said, “having to live in a construction site.”

  “These rich people, you mean,” Mills whispered.

  Paul tapped softly on the front door, as if he feared he might knock it over. “They have to be rich,” he said. “This house and its forty acres cost well over six million. It was quite a controversy to see an old house like this go so far beyond the asking price.” Paul waited patiently at the door, but no wealthy artist opened it to greet him.

  “No one’s home,” Mills said. “Who did you say these artists were?” Paul stepped back to take in the upper floor, searching for signs of life.

  “They’re from the city. Beth said the man’s name is Nathan. And his wife is Liz or Luz or something like that.” Mills turned from the tarps and stared at him. The sports car in the driveway belonged to the black woman who had visited Paul’s house on the day Magdalena died.

  “She came around to see you,” Mills told him. “But you were out. She said she wanted to paint your portrait.”

  “Paint me?” Paul’s lips tightened in confusion. “Why would she want to do that? I’ve never met either of them. But they should have told me they were doing this kind of construction. I could have dug up the floor plans and saved them on the contractor bill.”

  Mills walked to the front door and tried the handle. Paul grabbed his arm.

  “We can’t just walk in.”

  “She invited herself into your house. So we get to do the same.” The handle didn’t budge. Mills could have easily stepped through a gap in the tarps and unlocked the door from the inside, but that seemed a more sinister form of intrusion, as if even invisible walls were not allowed to be breached. For a minute they both stood awkwardly in front of the only obstacle that prevented Paul from his trip through memory’s bed-and-breakfast.

  “Oh, well,” Paul said in resignation, as if to bluff the house into opening its
door to him. “I can at least show you the grounds.” He pointed toward the Sound, then followed his own finger, a divining rod to locate the past. The blue water curved around giant, jagged rocks, pushed against the coastline in the last Ice Age. Any farther push would have saved them the burden of the trip. Gulls skimmed the water like descending planes. The black-and-white thimble of a lighthouse rose from an island of stones. “Coffeepot,” Paul told him. “There used to be lounge chairs just on the edge of this cliff. And over there a gazebo that slid onto the beach during the hurricane of ’71.” They hiked across the lawn, Mills snaking his arms around his stomach to keep warm. Seven half-dug rectangles were engraved in the grass, as if the backhoe had furiously attacked the earth and now stood shamefully on the perimeter, deflecting blame. Paul shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck, agitated the way any previous homeowner is who disapproves of their successor’s renovations. Mills could see that all of the construction work rattled him, like a memory being ripped apart. He let Paul walk a few feet across the lawn by himself.

  “Why all of the digging?” Mills asked.

  Paul spun around and attempted a weak smile. “I think they’re trying to build a pool. Or several pools. Or maybe they keep changing their mind about where they want to put it.” He pushed his heel into the frozen dirt. “They should have asked a local for advice first. This land used to be a salt farm before my mother’s family took it over. It was flooded with water from the Sound and baked by the sun into salt crystals. My family had to build up the cliff and harden the ground with clay to keep it stable. It’s too risky and expensive to dig a pool here. The previous residents knew that.” Paul finally threw his hand up, releasing himself of blame. “Well, it’s not my problem. Anyway, they’ll have to wait for spring now to continue. The ground’s frozen.”