Tribulations

by Richard Thomas

  I pick at the meal, pushing the food around the plate, and she is nothing but laughter and white teeth. But the mask she wears is one I’ve seen before, and buried in that sharp, emerald gaze is a glimmer of recognition, a spark of an old lie that she holds close to her chest. I remember passing a man on the sidewalk who was adjusting his tie, a damp negligee at the bottom of our hamper, her workout clothes folded in her gym bag while her body still glistened with sweat. Electricity jumped across my flesh as she darted into the shower and locked the door behind her.

  ****

  Can you die from a lack of sleep? It turns out you can, and sooner than starvation. It might be a photo finish for me. A lack of sleep can result in many things, so I scan down the list that Google has showed me. Huddled in the dark, sitting at my computer, I peck away at the dirty keys. Sleep is elusive and Candace needs her rest. Irritability: check. Blurred vision: check. Slurred speech: check. Memory lapses: check. Overall confusion: check, check. Hallucinations...

  I get on the wrong train today in a fog, my thoughts focused on hang-ups, parking stubs and grocery receipts for filet mignon I’m sure I never ate. These are not my people, the usual mix of suits and skirts. The elderly Polish woman sits upright, her hands clenched together, eyes out the window, and her husband—is he already in the ground? An expanse of warehouse juts out to the horizon, concrete bunkers side by side. The boy with the curly dark hair nods to the music, headphones on tight, bass resonating all around him, hidden behind dark sunglasses—is he heading out or coming home? Wires stretch taut bisecting the grey sky, as black birds hunch together—harbingers of doom. Doors opening, cars starting, why is this belief in love so easy for others and impossible for me?

  Somehow I end up on the wrong METRA rail and wind up in Fox Lake. The first five stops seemed a bit off, not quite the right direction. The names were all a bit foreign to me but I attributed it to a lack of sleep. Drifting off between blurry bungalows and strips of warehouses I wake up north of it all. I’m almost in Wisconsin, for Christ’s sake. This day is ruined, I’ve finally lost it, so I call into work, sick. My voice trembles, gravel in my throat. They tell me to take it easy.

  The next train heading south isn’t for an hour and a tiny diner across the tracks is the only thing open. Wandering over, I soon find myself neck deep in a platter of eggs—bacon grease smeared across my lips and a pot of coffee by my side. The waitress is a stone wall—massive breasts tucked behind a tattered white apron that is splattered with food, her arms spotted with freckles and moles, square jaw tight and unmoving. She shakes her head, clucking into her apron. She’s seen my kind before in the dead eyes of her beaten down husband, the daily grind reducing him to pulp. Perhaps her son left home for some tattooed hussy in tight jeans. She’s been a witness to things falling apart. Her eyes are on me the entire time I’m there, arms crossed in defiance—waiting for me to reveal myself.

  “More coffee?” she asks, her shadow engulfing me.

  “I can’t control my wife.”

  She fills up my cup and purses her lips. “And you should? Like a dog maybe, telling her to sit, to stay?”

  “No. I just want her to stop fucking other men.”

  Her eyes go dark, two bits of ore, squinting. “She’s missing something, no doubt. What is it you aren’t giving her?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  She walks away as dissatisfied as I am. There have been shadows at the periphery today, Candace’s ghost tracking me from stop to stop. When I left she was asleep but in that moment before the door clicked shut, while I stood there turning the key, I heard too many things. The sheets were pulled back, the shower turned on, a rumbling in the pipes that shook the whole building and a distant ringing in my head coming from our apartment. She didn’t fool me one bit.

  I sip at the coffee, and the waitress appears, placing a Danish in front of me. “I didn’t order this.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “You remind me a lot of my mother,” I say, “And I mean that as a compliment.”

  “I get that a lot,” she says. “I guess waiting on you, bringing you something that you didn’t ask for, that’s enough for you?” she smiles.

  “Today, that’s all I needed. A bit of kindness.” She nods her head once. “Thank you,” I say. She shrugs and walks away.

  I lean back into the booth, the windows filling up with steam. Outside it could be anything, anywhere—a campus, a hospital, Armageddon.

  All day, apparitions have followed me around, an outline of Candace floating in the gray. She is stepping out the front door as my bus heads south. Hopping into a yellow taxi as I descend the steps to the el train below. Skirt lifted, she dashes onto the platform next to mine as my train eases out of the station. There is no answer at home today—no matter what time I call. She is not to be found. Years ago I offered Candace a cell phone and she quickly refused—she wouldn’t be tracked like a wild animal.

  My cell phone chirps and the ID is blank, unknown caller it says. I pick it up and she’s whispering in my ear. She wants to know where I am.

  “Work,” I say, and she laughs out loud.

  “David, I called the office. They said you were sick. And I’m beginning to agree,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your behavior.”

  “My behavior?” I shout into the phone. I glance around the diner, the waitress pausing with a plate full of bacon and eggs.

  “David, perception is reality.”

  The phone goes quiet and I chew on her words. It doesn’t matter what the truth is, that’s what she’s trying to tell me. If I make it the truth, then whatever I imagine—whatever she believes, it becomes a reality. I’m poisoning the well that we drink from every night. Suddenly, I need to get home.

  ****

  Candace is waiting for me when I get to the apartment. She is sitting in the living room, a bottle of red wine open on the long, slender table, a glass half full with lipstick dotting the rim. The room is dim behind the floor-to-ceiling drapes, shadows filling every corner.

  “We need to talk,” she says.

  I hang up my coat and sit down.

  “I’m not cheating on you, David. I need you to know that.”

  “What about…”

  “David,” she says, “look at me, look me in the eyes.”

  I lean forward and her eyes are rimmed with red, tears held back by mascara and determination, her hands placed gently on my knees.

  “I’m not cheating on you,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say. “I hear you. I trust you.”

  “No, David, you don’t,” she says, picking up the wine and taking a sip. “And I deserve that. We never talked about what happened…”

  “Before.”

  “Before we were married, yes,” she says. “And I don’t want to dwell on that now. But things aren’t right. So I’m giving you three choices, and you have to make one right now.”

  “Choices, what are you talking about?”

  “This is my solution, David.”

  I pick up her glass of wine, drink it, and fill it again. Candace glances at her watch.

  “The phone is going to ring in a couple of minutes. It’s the wife of the man I slept with two years ago.”

  “What the hell, Candace?”

  “Just shut up and listen or there’s the door.” She points.

  “Go on,” I say.

  “This woman is calling me because I left her a message on her cell phone. I’ve known them both for years now. It’s my friend, Melissa.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I can tell her one of three things, and I’m going to leave it up to you, because we either end this game right now and get a divorce, or we find a way to salvage our marriage.”

  The sunlight is fading, a dull orange glow from the street outside leaking in, but soon we’ll be in total darkness.

  “I can tell Melissa the truth—that her husband and I had an affair. I can tell her it’s still goi
ng on. It will end their marriage and she’ll put him in the street tonight. I know her. She’ll make a pile of his suits out on the sidewalk and set the whole thing on fire.”

  I laugh, a slow grin easing over my face. The first option has great appeal.

  “Two, I can tell Melissa that you and I are in an open relationship and that I’d like for the two of you to have sex.”

  My mouth opens and I picture Melissa and her hearty laugh, her athletic body tan and fit, my wife’s sporty twin—a woman I’ve quietly lusted after for years. I look at my feet, a heat rushing up the back of my neck.

  “She’ll do it. I know she’s been looking around, unhappy. It’d be our secret—she thinks she can trust me. And she’s always liked you.”

  “Okay, that’s an interesting option.”

  “But, David?”

  “Yes?”

  “It might be the end of our marriage.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Fair or unfair, I don’t know if I can handle that. I’m just telling you that now. But at least we’d be even.”

  It’s dark now and I can hardly see her face. But it’s better that way.

  “What’s the third option?” I ask.

  “We let it ring. We don’t answer it. And you let it all go. No more games, no more accusations from you, no more teasing from me. Enough. We go upstairs and make love and find a way to honor each other. For the first time in a long time, maybe.”

  I take a breath and rub my temples, my eyes—searching for the ability to let her back in. The phone rings.

  The Offering on the Hill

  I’d been following the train tracks north for three days when I came across the skeletons—a pile of bones in a ring around a cairn of skulls, a bullet hole in the center of each one. The sun beat down on me, one wave of pulsing sunshine after another, my skin like worn leather—my eyes two tiny black dots. One boot followed the other as I pushed onward, faded jeans pasted to my sweaty body like a second layer of skin, a revolver on each hip, leather holsters filled with glistening metal, their weight a comforting presence. I’m too old for this, but the uneasy quiet that has slipped over the land—it is not a death knell—only a beginning. The world has moved on, but my greatest fear is that the dead will never stop laughing.

  As hot as it is now, it will be deathly cold tonight, a wave of freezing air washing across the desert as sure as the sickly glowing ball will rise tomorrow. I have to find shelter, or start building a fire, soon. In the distance there are mountains, but I can’t get there tonight. I don’t like the look of the ring, either—the skulls make me uneasy. So it will be baptism by fire—one dried scrub brush on top of its brother; whatever dead or dying cactus I can find, the rotting boards from an old sign—Death Valley it says, an arrow pointing off in one direction, surely a joke.

  When the skulls are covered in debris so that I can’t see their gaping mouths any longer, I spark a flame from a wooden match with my thumbnail, and toss it onto the wood. It catches quickly and sends flickering tongues of fire up into the sky as the darkness settles across the land. I raise my head and glance north again, and in the hazy distance the ghost of a train whistle blows sorrow. I walk to the tracks and set my hand upon them—a tiny vibration running through my gnarled fingers, certainly heading away. I’ve never seen the train going south. No reason to head back that way—nothing but abandoned buildings, rotting car husks, and the stench of the human race gone sour.

  So long had I been out in the desert, up in the hills, prospecting and tracking deviant flesh, runaways and bounties hunted with great patience, that there was nothing left for me when I came down—no people, no messages, no television, and no radio—just an endless silence that stretched out into eternity. I’d seen no explosions, nothing nuclear, and the cattle, it could have been anything—starvation, sickness, even poachers—but I gave them a wide berth, anyway.

  The only clue I’d found was the word north. Everywhere I went, whispered by the lips of the dead, scratched into pads of paper, and painted on walls—the word north. I found an entire town, Crystal Lake, dry as a bone, the irony not lost on me, with hundreds of cars on the highway pointed in this direction—empty.

  None of it made any sense.

  But it’s where my wife and child may have gone, if they are still alive. The shadows at night creep in and whisper horrible things, violent imagery of my daughter hung up on a cross, wearing a thorny crown, vast pits filled with the walking dead, pillars of fire shooting high into the night.

  And then the cold pushes in on me, so I move closer to my pyre. I will slowly rotate as the night goes on, walking around the licking flames, as the freezing wind nips at me, a thin sheet of ice coating my emaciated frame. If I stop moving I will die—the weather shifting to both extremes, blazing hot in the daytime and freezing cold in the night. In the wake of the new world order things had changed. I’ve been having this dance with the devil for weeks now, and in the morning, when it warms up, I will collapse. For now, it is the gleam in the eyes of my daughter Allie that pushes me on, reminds me why I even bother.

  The day I left, her long brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, as a teapot on the stove steamed and whistled—the clocks whirring behind my princess as tears streamed rivulets of dirt down her face. Her mother, Cecilia, God bless her, holding Allie back as her own dark hair fell over her eyes, her face, hiding behind it, unwilling to look at me. I walked out the door, securing our future—and possibly their death.

  In the distance I hear wood cracking, splintering, and crashing to the ground—shattering. The thin branches and hollow trunks can’t sustain the weight of the ice, and they topple over, ripping up roots, fracturing—turning to shards, fragments, and sparkling dust. Every night I long to walk out into the freezing cold and let the elements take me. But something is calling me north.

  ****

  In the morning I come to lying in the ash around the fire, not burned, but not frozen to death either. A large black bird sits on my feet, tapping its beak on the faded sole of my left boot, yellow sparkling eyes like two marbles rolling around in its feathered, bobbing skull. The beast turns its head to the south, and then leaps into the sky with a rush of foul air, wings spread wide, pushing up into the gray tapestry above us, heading north with a sense of sudden urgency.

  The fire pit is just as I had originally found it, a ring of bones around the pile of skulls, no evidence of the fire, no proof that my labor had even happened. I need water soon, so I have to move on.

  Three hours later I come to the edge of a forest that squats at the base of an expansive mountain range, sweat running down my neck, my back—dirt and grime slipping down my spine. I can hear the water gurgling, but can’t see it yet. My lips crack and bleed, the goatskin at my waist squeezed dry the day before, my eyes on the clouds above, as it grows dark, lightning flashing over the horizon—but the rain, it will never come, not now that I need it. Crashing through the bushes and low-hanging branches, a thin path reveals itself, my feet tripping over roots and buried stones, the sparkle of water glinting through the greenery. I stumble to the pool of water as spider webs stretch across my face, my outstretched hands waving them off, filament in my mouth, a wash of panic mixing with a knot in my gut, the water suddenly my world.

  As I kneel at the edge of the creek, by the pool, I cup the cold water and drink, the liquid spilling down my chest. The knees of my jeans soak through with mud, and as I sit up to breathe, gasping, the row of crosses reveals itself to me, on the other side of the oasis. Six, seven of them, all in a row, all shapes and sizes, skeletons strung out and bound with vines, crucified, the nails run through, another row behind them, with nothing but skulls on pikes. Tied around each bit of rotting wood is a single piece of ribbon, each of them a faded pink, moss growing beneath the sacrifices, low white blossoms running off into the woods. I lower the canteen into the cold water, and fill it up, my stomach clenched in knots, my eyes on the whispering leaves—my heart thudding drumbeats in
my chest.

  It’s time to move on.

  ****

  I won’t be able to make it up the mountain tonight—wouldn’t make any sense to get caught out in the open like that, wind and ice spraying certain death. Out of the woods a path deposits me at a tiny shack, a lantern glowing in the window as the sun falls out of the sky. A skeletal dog is tied to the house with an old withered rope, whining and pissing into the dirt as I approach the humble dwelling, the skittish beast eager to say hello.

  “It’s okay,” I say, showing the skinny wreck my open palms. She squats, her tail wagging like a metronome turned all the way up, her eyes glazed over with white, a black lab mix of some sort. She licks my hands, her black muzzle dotted with grey hair, the poor thing dying out here, begging for attention. She must go inside at night, I think to myself, or she’d be frozen to the ground, dead long ago. I run my hands over her ribcage, each bone like a slat of wood, wasting away to nothing. I root around in my gear and bring out a tough stick of jerky, and kneeling in the dry earth I give it to her, and she falls into chewing and licking with a devout worship that makes me a tad bit uneasy.

  “Good girl,” I say, standing back up.

  The door to the structure opens and a grizzled old man peers out, long gray beard hanging down, his eyes the same glossy white as the mutt. In overalls, boots, and a dirty long-sleeved shirt, the man sways in the doorway, a grin slipping over his face.

  “That’s awfully kind of you, stranger,” he says. “Food’s hard to come by out this way, and in my condition, our condition, it’s difficult to head into town.”

  I nod my head, realizing he can’t see me, and step forward.

  “My name’s John Ford, and I’m heading north. You seen anyone come by, any sign of life, of late?”