The Grimscribe's Puppets

by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  The Group was a collection of three small offices tucked away in the corner of a three story brick building in some town Zane had never been to before. The carpeting was green, like pool table felt.

  Doctor Colton requested Zane take off his baseball hat while in her office. She smiled properly when she said it was her only rule. Zane tried to smile back, but he just sort of shrugged his shoulders instead.

  He held the hat in his lap. At one point during the meeting, the three adults in the room nodded their heads at Zane as they watched his fingers tapping and manipulating the baseball pins tacked to the brim, as if they’d discovered proof of who he was, who he was going to be.

  The doctor’s initial questions made him more uncomfortable because she asked if he thought he needed help with school. He didn’t think he did, and when he said that, his parents’ silence became another, wholly distinct and physical presence in the room.

  After the first round of questions, Doctor Colton took out a rainbow-colored brain made of foam. The colors correlated to the brain’s anatomy and she explained to Zane which parts controlled what functions. She said that it was very likely that parts of his brain were simply wired differently than everyone else’s.

  He liked that she talked directly to him, but he found her direct gaze too intense to meet. He kept his head mostly down and stared at the green carpet.

  There was talk of executive function skills, initiation, sustain, working memory, and impulse control. Doctor Colton asked him about his interests before sending him out into the waiting area so she could talk to his parents.

  While sitting in the waiting area, Zane imagined he was shrinking in his chair, disappearing down into his shoes. They wouldn’t know where he was when they came out to get him and maybe they’d just take the empty shoes home.

  The entire consult took an hour. It ended with handshakes, smiles, and reassurances. Of course, there would be tests to come; tests that would require multiple dismissals from school and trips back to the town Zane had never been to before.

  Zane and his father drove back home by themselves. Mom, having come straight from work, had her own car and she planned to stop at the pharmacy on the way home. His father let Zane sit in the front seat. He patted Zane’s leg and tousled his hair. The combination was his go-to form of affection now that Zane was older.

  His father said, “You were great in there. Really great.”

  Zane shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “I think it’s a good thing your brain is different than everyone else’s.”

  Zane showed a quick curl of a smile, and hid it under the brim of his baseball hat.

  “So, buddy, what do you think? The doctor was nice, right? Think she can help?”

  Zane said “Yeah” again, although he wasn’t sure how she could help, or what exactly needed help. And, what he really thought was too big, scary, and messy to describe. Zane looked out the car window and absently tugged at his seatbelt.

  “I’m proud of you, you know that right?”

  “Yeah.” If his father didn’t stop talking, he was going to start crying. He didn’t know exactly why he would cry. He only knew that he would.

  Likely sensing an emotional storm from Zane was building, his father stopped asking questions. He patted Zane’s leg again and let him pick songs to listen to from his iPod. Zane picked the loudest and heaviest songs.

  They didn’t speak to each other again until they were almost home. It was dark out by the time they turned onto their street.

  “Dad, put the high beams on.” Zane sat up and scooted to the edge of the seat. Both hands went on the dash and the seatbelt pulled tight across his chest.

  That a car had high beams was a recent discovery, and Zane asking for his father to turn them on whenever they were on their street had become an obsession. He imagined all that extra light filled the dark spaces in his head. And, for no reason he could explain, he loved the little blue high-beam symbol in the dashboard.

  His father complied, but said, “You make me crazy with the high beams.”

  Instead of spotlighting the section of woods across the street from their sleepy little house, the light reflected countless white dots floating in the air. His father had once said you couldn’t really use the high beams in a snowstorm, that the extra light didn’t help you see any better because the snow got in the way. But it wasn’t snowing now.

  “Man, look at all those moths,” his father said, and he slowed the car down, creeping alongside the curve of their front yard.

  “Wow. Why are there so many?” Zane had his right cheek pressed against the window, trying see how high up they went. The air was thick with thousands of white moths, each the size of a nickel. They were fluttering pieces of paper, bits of stuff leaking out of a teddy bear.

  “It’s too warm out. This is supposed to be December in New England, right? And it’s what,” his father tapped the digital temperature display on the car, “fifty-five degrees? That’s just ridiculous.”

  Zane hadn’t minded that it wasn’t cold out today. But now, listening to his father, to how agitated he was becoming, he wasn’t so sure. Even at age ten, Zane was still sure his Dad was the smartest guy in the world. If he said the warm weather was wrong then it was wrong.

  “So, because it’s warm out when it shouldn’t be, these moths were fooled into hatching or de-hibernating, or whatever it is they were doing. I mean, they shouldn’t be out, flying around like this.”

  They pulled into their driveway and his father shifted into park but didn’t shut the engine off. They sat in the idling car.

  The high beams were on and the extra light trapped the swirling mass of moths like a tractor beam from some science fiction movie. Zane would’ve preferred the sci-fi explanation over what his father was telling him: there was something wrong with the weather, there was something wrong out there.

  Zane suddenly felt like he was sinking again, this time into the car seat instead of his sneakers. He said, “So what’s going to happen to all the moths?”

  ~*~

  In the mad dash to keep up with his increasingly erratic father, Zane leaves his cell phone behind. He only has time to jump into jeans and sneakers, and then grab his black hooded sweatshirt before sprinting out the front door.

  Obviously, there’s no way his father should be driving. After their standoff in his parent’s bedroom and after his father told Zane to get ready because they had to go, Zane said he would go with him, but only if he was driving. Of course, there his father is, in the car by himself, already behind the wheel, honking the horn.

  Twenty minutes later, they’re on the interstate, stuck in traffic even though it’s not rush hour. On both the northbound and southbound sides, the lanes are full, including the breakdown lanes.

  There must be an accident up ahead. Zane tries the radio and gets only static. He leaves the radio on, hoping to elicit some sort of reaction from his father. The constant hiss is maddening.

  Zane taps the dashboard nervously and wishes he had a steaming cup of coffee to fill his hands. He didn’t tell his parents that he is self-medicating with caffeine now; they thought he is relying solely on study techniques and the college’s academic support.

  Zane says, “Dad, you have to answer me. Where are we going?”

  “It’ll be all right.” The spaces between his words elongate. The radio’s hiss bunches up in those gaps, gumming up his sentences like misplaced punctuation marks. “You’ll see when you get there.”

  “Dad!”

  “It’s important. Okay? It’s like this. It’s like something. Something we all have to do….” He trails off into mumbles again. His bits of nonsensical phrases and shards of broken words act as a simulacrum of speech; something his father might’ve said to him a long time ago.

  He wonders why it’s so hard to intervene, to just tell his father that he’s not well, demand that he pull over and let him take him home or to the hospital. He wonders why he can’t simply tell his father that he�
�s wrong.

  The all too familiar feelings of disorientation and shame return because of his indecision. It’s only being exacerbated by everything in the periphery not making sense: the blacked out TV, the fuzzed out radio, the endless traffic jam.

  There’s also this part of Zane, that kernel of him that was formed long ago, that wants to believe his father, wants to believe in his father, wants now to be like all those times they used to drive around together, just the two of them, with his father telling Zane the why and how of everything even when he didn’t want to hear it.

  “Hey, where’s Mom? What about Mom?”

  His father says, “She’ll be—” There’s a great and terrible pause. The radio is still on, and it sounds louder as if one of them had turned it up. Neither of them has made a move toward the volume button.

  Zane finishes the sentence. “Fine? How do you know she’ll be fine?”

  “No!” His father slams a fist down on the steering wheel. He sighs. The sighs become grunts and the grunts become words. “She’ll be there. She’ll be there already.”

  “There?” Zane is yelling now, overwhelmed, and on the verge of losing control emotionally.

  “There!” His father turns toward Zane. He’s wild-eyed and smiling; it’s a look of manic relief. “There. It’s—you understand, don’t you? You have to.”

  “No, I don’t understand. Just tell me, Dad. Where is there, Dad? Where are we going? Where’s everyone going?”

  Zane looks away, out his window, at the other cars and their drivers. Many of them are alone. They stare straight ahead through their windshields. Some talk to themselves, mouths moving and their words forever trapped behind glass.

  ~*~

  The moths. There were so many, fluttering into and over each other. They flew like they were panicking, like they knew the warm weather was some kind of dirty trick.

  His father said, “Can they re-hibernate? Probably not, right? It’s supposed to get cold again, tomorrow. Or, you know, back to normal.”

  Then he said something else, which was so obvious, but horrible in its obviousness; a secret knowledge that was never a real secret.

  What his father said, it sent Zane exploding out of the car and sprinting across the gravel driveway. The stones crunched under his feet.

  He tried to run fast enough so that none of the moths would touch his skin. There were too many. Not touching them was an impossibility. Their slight bodies crashed into his head, brushed against his skin and lips, and got caught in the weave of his jacket.

  Zane knew that this wasn’t right, none of this was right, and he was sure the moths, in their alien intelligence, knew it too. Zane could not articulate these feelings just as he could not tell his parents or Doctor Colton how he’d felt earlier.

  He stood under the single-bulb lamp above his front door. The moths swarmed the fixture. They landed on the door and stuck to the glass panes that had collected condensation in the unusually warm and humid weather.

  Zane tried to brush the moths off the glass. They were too frail and crumbled to pieces at his clumsy touch.

  Standing there under the lamp, in cloud of moths, Zane imagined the collective beating of their thin wings formed a primitive song with a repetitive rhythm and a simple melody, one that was sweet, oddly familiar, yet made to be easily forgotten.

  Later that night, after a pizza dinner, Zane sat on the couch next to his mother, ate popcorn, and they watched a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos. She didn’t press him with questions. They stayed up late together, with the two of them in his bed, under the covers. Using a small book light, they read comics about a boy and a tiger, and they talked quietly until he fell asleep.

  Zane didn’t tell her about his father in the car saying that it was good his brain was different than everyone else’s. Zane didn’t tell her about the moths or what his father had said in the car, about how most of the moths would be dead in a few hours. How they’d all be dead by morning.

  ~*~

  The traffic slows to a stop that doesn’t start again. They abandon their car just like everyone else.

  They walk on the highway with hundreds and thousands of others. Zane tries to get his father to stop, to explain, to refute, to reject, to turn around. He doesn’t.

  Zane follows his father, finally giving in. The clear and focused will of everyone else around him is too much to deny.

  There’s no buzz or drone of conversation. No one talks. There are only the collective sounds of footprints, expelled breaths, groans of exertion from those having trouble walking such a distance. They walk for hours.

  The sky is more purple than blue, more grey than purple. An inkblot sky, it’s the color of static. Zane has lost track of time. He thinks the sun should be higher than it is, which is presumably hidden somewhere behind a strip of clouds that rings the horizon they’ll never reach.

  Eventually, the crowd veers off the highway, heading east. They don’t use an exit ramp. Instead, they pour through the knocked down sound-proof barrier fencing, which has already been crushed and broken into pieces that will never be put back together again.

  The ravenous crowd tosses aside parked cars like the afterthoughts they’ve become. They march over and through swing sets, storage sheds, and amateur gardens. Only the biggest trees and structures serve as obstacles in the inexorable path eastward.

  This great migration cuts a swath through small woodlands, through suburban back and front yards, through industrial parks and strip mall lots. Manicured landscaping, fences, and other flimsy man-made delineators of land, property, and culture are destroyed, ground into the ground, rendered to be nothing more than the dead skin of history.

  Zane struggles to keep pace with his father. He stumbles a few times and grabs his father’s hand. His father doesn’t acknowledge that his son is still there. He mumbles and sways left and right to some secret rhythm.

  Zane is not tall and he cannot see above or beyond the people surrounding him without jumping up, without dowsing the increasingly infrequent gaps of space between swaying heads and bodies. The crowd continues to swell. Zane can’t see its end in any direction.

  There are very few landmarks with which to determine direction, position, or place. They could be anywhere. They could be nowhere.

  Eventually, the air changes. It’s no longer the stagnant air used and discarded by the thousands of pairs of indiscriminant lungs. This new air moves. An insistent wind blows in their faces and over their heads, out of the east. The wind brings the unmistakable smell and taste of salt and brine. The ocean is very close.

  The ground under Zane’s feet has gone soft, not that he can see his feet anymore while in the thick of the crowd. The people ahead of him are slowly making their way up a large hill. Sand dunes, perhaps.

  Zane reaches to his left, for his father, and grabs hold of his sleeve. Only, that sleeve belongs to someone else: a tall, thin woman with a sharp nose and wearing glasses and a black overcoat.

  He thinks of his mother and feels guilty for not having looked for her. He is heartbroken, and he quickly apologizes to the woman for grabbing her sleeve. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at him.

  Zane yells, “Dad!” and scans the crowd. There are too many people to focus upon any single one. Zane is weak-kneed with panic, even after he thinks he sees his father ahead and above him, near the top of the dune.

  Zane tries to pass and squeeze through the people ahead of him, but the sledding, as his father used to say, is tough. Walking uphill in the sand has become supremely difficult. The constant pushing and pressure from all sides challenges his equilibrium.

  Zane finally crests the dune, and while standing at the top, in its windy lofts, there’s an explosion of sounds. There are the crashing waves, yes, but there’s also the low and warbling thrum of the surrounding mass of humanity, of their moans and cries.

  And below that wall of sound, underneath it all, Zane faintly hears what sounds like the high-pitched, discordant
whine of microphone feedback. He tries to focus on it, and gets the sense there’s a pattern there, somewhere, but it’s elusive. He can’t track it.

  While on the top the dune for the briefest of moments, his vision isn’t blocked or obscured. The people directly in front of him are now all below him. And below him, there is no beach, no jetties, only people: people up and down the coastline, people thrashing about in the choppy and icy water like greedy parasites in blood.

  Zane has lost sight of his father again. There’s a massive push from behind. He lurches forward and is pinned against the back of the person ahead of him. He looses his breath in a rush; his chest constricting with each attempted breath.

  The pressure breaks when the person he’s pressed up against falls and is swallowed up by the advancing crowd. Zane quickly bends and reaches down in an attempt to help, and he sees a terrible glimpse of the beach that is not the beach. The soft he’s been walking upon is not in fact sand.

  Zane is caught in a competing tide and is again rushed forward. The great, cascading roar is just ahead of him: the pounding surf, last breaths, lost breaths, and a fragmented chant of there. There.

  Frigid water licks his ankles. He tries to lift his feet out of the water, but there’s nowhere else to put them. He screams for his father. Everyone pushes and converges from every direction.

  In water up past his knees, his feet go numb. The people ahead of him never turn around or away from the sea. There’s no mass desperate, lizard-brained attempt to keep from drowning.

  A large wave crashes through Zane’s section of the crowd. He manages to remain standing, others topple like bowling pins. Some get up. Some don’t. The woman in the black overcoat is gone.

  Zane scrambles around and presses his back into the remaining people in front of him for leverage. Now that he’s turned around, he’s face-to-face with the crowd. Their identical sets of unblinking eyes look through and beyond him.

  The undertow tugs at Zane’s legs and feet. He stumbles backward and comes precariously close to falling face-first into the water. There’s someone directly beneath him. He can’t see who it is.