Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  A minute later, a man-made construction looms up among an avenue of cleared forest, a concrete overpass at least twice as tall as me and supported by arches, flanked by treetops, stretching in both directions farther than I can see (north and south, I tell myself). As I near it, I realize that it’s an elevated train track, conceivably the same track on which we arrived, or one of its neighbors, stretching lifelessly through the forest, cutting from end to end. The landscape filters deferentially around it, has sculpted itself to this imposition over time.

  I stand beside it, my hand touching cool, reassuring brick, looking up. If one made it up to the track—railed off on either side—it would be possible to traverse the land from above, to search on a broad scale. I wonder how long it’s been since these tracks were laid, where the nearest station is. It occurs to me that I’m standing at the conduit, or a point on the path that leads to the conduit, the beginning and possibly the end.

  And then, just inside the shadow of the brick archway below the trees, on the forest floor, my eyes adjust and I see it, another foreign item.

  A shoe, lying on its side.

  Your shoe.

  Or, more accurately: the last shoe I remember you wearing. A sneaker—white with blue trim and a swoop, impressively generic—from a first-floor closet in Vivian’s mansion, one of the pair you’d said fit “better than a greased fist.” The shoe lies at the center of a nearly circular sweep of dirt, a spin and a fall, maybe. My chest swells with a feeling of victory and, in equal measure, perverse hopelessness, knowing ultimately that the shoe is nothing if I can’t attach it to anything, if I don’t find its partner.

  I pick it up and hold the opening over my nose, inhaling deeply, prickling with the sensation that I’m being observed from just out of sight, that I am trespassing on a private moment. It’s slightly damp, and the sweat scent is there, still harsh, faintly like yogurt. It feels as though I’m picking up the final traces before these molecules join the air around me and are subsumed into the environment, like I’m interfering with some natural process by putting them into me. The sole is dirty but not caked with mud, as if the bulk of the rainstorm had been waited out elsewhere. It can’t have been long since you were here, or since whatever or whoever had your shoe was here.

  I call your name into the forest, the shoe. It would never be that easy.

  I search the area for other signs, for more unsettled earth or broken branches, a rune carved into a tree, but there’s nothing glaring or obvious enough for me to notice. I backtrack to look for evidence that someone else has been here, of a struggle or a chase, a body being dragged, just movement beyond myself, but the forest floor is random, devoid of even my footprints, and I understand with a kind of resigned reassurance that this is all I’m going to get—short of finding a sleeping bag or a makeshift hovel my tracking skills are nonexistent—and I feel certain that I’ve been left some kind of gift, a sign. I consider the placement of the shoe—beneath the arch, heel angled toward me, toe pointed east. I proceed in that direction, the direction I’ve been headed, because it’s easiest to draw that conclusion. I take the shoe with me, assuming it’s charged with magical power and because, wherever you are now, you’re missing one. In my head, I turn over and over something you said about possession.

  A short distance later, a single-lane paved road appears in the forest. I skitter across as if afraid someone will see me, ignoring both directions, thinking only, Forward, forward.

  *

  The afternoon passes, with this as my mantra.

  At first, I register the smell and then forget it. It’s filtered through my senses and disappears, like the last of your sweat, assumes the identity of the forest around it: the bark, the leaves, the dirt. Above it all, the sun is lustrous. It’s a day for optimism.

  I only notice when the insides of my nostrils start to burn, one sense reminding me of the betrayal of another. I press my nose to the tongue of the sneaker, holding it like a gas mask. Suddenly I’m squinting back tears, the trees above whispering all the same thing—the remnants of smoke. Something has burned here.

  I blink away the clouds from my eyes and feel my contacts shift. As I walk on, the smell remains the only indication that something is different. Looking up through the branches at the sun has the same effect on my eyes, and again, I’m able to deny what I sense. Again, I register it, and then forget. I walk blindly on.

  I emerge into a clearing.

  The first thing I take in, beyond the unexpected openness, is the roundness of the space, a platform there in the forest. I look skyward—at an utterly empty patch of blue—before I look anywhere else, before I look directly ahead and see the blackened, scorched hulk in front of me, smoking quietly into the sky.

  The clearing isn’t natural. Around me, across a diameter of maybe a hundred feet, the smaller trees have been imperfectly downed, and the tops of those surrounding are missing at erratic, choppy angles, as if wildly scissored away by a giant, spinning blade. As the thing resting at the center of the clearing has one long remaining strut projecting from its top like a single finger pointing at its own wake. It’s a downed helicopter.

  Apart from the blade, the rest of the machine has burned and warped torturously together into a single, twisted mass of charred matter. The shape of it still reads “helicopter,” its general structure intact, but the body has burst, and the entrances on its sides, the windows at either end are stuffed with its half-ejected human contents, as though the helicopter had been packed as full as possible and then, interrupted mid-flight, just barely touched down when it exploded from the inside, propelling its passengers out through any available space. Through the rear window, facing me, someone’s back half has been forced mostly out, while someone else’s arm reaches pitifully into the air, pinned by the bulge of the other body into the corner of the window, like a strand of clay extruded through a press. From the cockpit window, half of a masked body outfitted in uniform black lies on the nose among the glass of the shattered windshield. Between the front and tail ends, the insides of the helicopter’s cabin spill en masse onto the forest floor like garbage, at least a dozen bodies, a wreck of tangled limbs in a pile as if awaiting mass burial, a mix of uniforms and silk suits and dresses, summer clothes burned away. Shreds of fabric waft in the breeze in clouded colors. Scattered further into the clearing, around the mangled helicopter and its dead passengers, overturned suitcases lie among the wreck of the forest, burst open, like a luxury cruise washed deep inland. The fallen branches, splintered trees are arrayed around them in vibrant destruction, revealing their orange and yellow insides, the charred bark like reptile skin. The ground goes alternately gray, black, brown, and green. The smell—of smoke, for one, and of bodies rotting in the sun for days—blankets everything without warning.

  I vomit just shy of my shoes—I make a point to avoid them, I careen away at an awkward angle. My body seems to make a concerted effort to bring up the last thing I consumed, and so it’s the acidic sweetness of the pasta sauce that fills my mouth, somehow undigested pasta that I spit onto the forest floor, held onto for days out of spite, refusing breakdown into anything useful. I stay on my knees for a long while, because the smell is actually better down there, closer to the ground, and because, I realize, I can hear birds again. Crouched here, there’s nothing forcing me in any direction; I can stay in one spot as long as I like, just breathing. I wonder if you’d come across this wreck, if the shoe had been some kind of indication as to what lay ahead, the swooping pattern in the dirt a cipher I’d failed to decode.

  Eventually I push myself up, joints cracking, brushing ash from my knees. I pinch my nose with your sneaker, inhaling your scent, your fear maybe, and make my way cautiously forward, stepping over branches, discarded clothing, and debris. At the base of the slopped pile of bodies, one of the black-uniformed figures lies face-down, as if he’d been standing on the edge of the aircraft when it exploded. Even the hands, spread to either side in permanent don’t-shoot, are gloved in bl
ack. A zipper runs down the back of the head. I use one shoe to lift the body at the shoulder, but it hardly moves, the legs pinned down by others. I try again, harder. I kick and drag my foot—a motion I repeat with increasing viciousness and pressure—until the body turns over; when it does, those behind it shift and topple. The sound, like potatoes falling to the ground, cuts through the clearing and then quits, infinitely still. I vomit again, my body empties another refuse chamber, followed by a hacking round of coughing.

  I turn back to the uniformed body, now face-up, pointed toward the sky. The mask only leaves space for the eyes, intact and glassy, ringed with dirt. There’s a bulletproof vest and zippered pockets across the front and sides. The chest is strapped with sleek black canisters, tear gas or grenades; I’m surprised they didn’t explode on impact. A combat knife, too, is sheathed on the leg. I’m looking for insignia, for a distinctive label of some kind, corporate or government branding, but there isn’t any. The belt is hung with ammunition, an empty holster at the waist. My heart skips a beat at the sight of the missing weapon, and I step back and pan the forest floor before me. My stomach drops out again: materializing all around me, pistols and machine guns, weapons of all kind shimmer into view out of nowhere, gleaming in the grass, hidden in the suitcases, transmuting out of branches and black shadows, everywhere, outnumbering everything.

  I stagger backward and trip over a fallen branch. My elbow lands on the barrel of a rifle. My breath feels trapped inside of me. I scrabble at the ground, pine needles and ash, I push myself to my feet, furious that I have to work so hard just to keep standing, to move past anything. I snatch your shoe from the ground. I trip again at the edge of the clearing, the trees ludicrously tall.

  I don’t stop running until my legs give out. Behind me, the killing machines bloom like flowers at my feet.

  Before I know it, the forest ends, as cleanly as it started, and the next thing I smell is the ocean.

  *

  The sea breeze breaks against me and doubles me over, drives a chill through my body and the outfit now completely saturated with sweat and dirt, stiffening it like a shell. The ocean is maybe a quarter mile away, sprawling before me in both directions, as limitless as the overpass was before it. The sky is a deep, majestic blue, like a painting, something you pay for. I stand there rigid, wind channeling around me. From the edge of the forest, thinning grass slopes into a bulky rock fringe, and beyond it and below, a narrow strip of beach glows in the moonlight. The sleeves of the ocean pull forward and back; I imagine the land beneath, coding and re-coding as it’s alternately revealed and hidden. To the south, my right, stoops the foreboding outline of a rambling coastal estate, dark enough to nearly pass itself off as part of the landscape, to disguise the threat. As I stand above it, deep in the black, in some miniscule fixture many levels below me, I recognize a pinprick of light. The moment I step forward, it’s gone. I step backward again, retracing my steps; I tilt my line of sight left, then right, but the light doesn’t return from any angle. The mansion crouches in its creeping darkness like a family who’s snuffed out the final candle as the troops arrive.

  I pick my way forward down the hill, away from the forest and toward the rocks, parallel to the mansion. I clutch your shoe in my right fist like a talisman (my fingers wrap almost all the way around it, the size is just too perfect). The dirt changes to sand. My feet sink into it and I trudge forward, a physical experience many years dormant. The sound of the waves is borne up to me like television static. I fill my vision with the ocean and try to move into it, toward the water and nothing else. I divide the world into two halves: the sky clouded and phantasmal with stars, and the water below it, offering a smoky hint of reflection. I feel myself going deeper. My right shoulder knocks against wrought iron in the dark, and I’m awakened as if by a bad dream. The collision cascades outward along the fence; the sound is swallowed by the ocean but the vibration continues, an insidious undercurrent. I step back and feel out the bar with my hand, ceasing the resonation. Faintly, against the night, I can pick out the spires of the fence, ending about six feet above me. Just inside, the property is bordered with hedges of the same height, obscuring the grounds. I angle away from it, now that I know the approximate perimeter, and continue on at a diagonal toward the sea, the wind, the roar now coming from all sides (when I’m near the bars, it’s filtered through them, ringing slightly). I paddle out into the air.

  I remember a beach trip my parents and I took up to Connecticut to visit my grandparents, at least a decade ago. Over the course of the morning we dug an enormous hole in the sand, my dad and I, deep enough that I could stand inside of it, up to my eleven- or twelve-year-old shoulders. Afterward, my dad went out into the water and dragged a neon-orange bucket back and forth until he scooped up a wayward jellyfish. He wandered back to the beach, the bucket overflowing, I clambered out, and we dumped the jellyfish into the hole. I shoveled sand on top of it while he went back to the shore to find another. The process repeated: we kept layering them like this until the hole was entirely filled in. The thrill of it lay in the pacification of the jellyfish at my hands, that isolated in this mass grave the jellies were no longer dangerous to me, the natural aquatic environment where they acted as predators to carefree swimmers switched out for another that they weren’t suited for (where they couldn’t even move!), and I was enamored of my role in this, in their relocation and burial, in making these fearsome, nebulous creatures harmless. (The thought didn’t occur to me at the time—or to my dad, apparently—that someone else might later dig in this same spot and be stung by the buried jellyfish, that their poison lingered, their tentacles wound through the sand.) Around the hole, under the span of two umbrellas, our beach chairs are arranged in a lazy half-circle: one with my mom, reading (her chair partially in the sunlight out of self-sacrifice); my dad’s empty chair; my grandfather, looking at a magazine; my grandmother, likewise, while unwrapping a sandwich covered in foil; and two more empty chairs, one of them mine. It must have been longer than ten years ago, I think, because my dad’s father was still alive; it must have been twelve or thirteen years, when I was nine or ten. There came a period a few summers later—a dark period, sometime around sixth and seventh grade—that I can’t remember with any specificity, that afterward my parents avoided referring to explicitly. Following this, after thirteen or so, everything comes into sharper detail, and from then on I can approximately trace my development, my sentience as a human. But this day on the beach, it must be a moment before then, before the silent period in my memory—even years before, because there were visits when my grandfather wasn’t mobile at all, when he wouldn’t go to the beach and we were further inland—a rare, clarified scene. Across the hole from me, also digging and filling, reacting to everything in the same ways I do, there’s a face I don’t otherwise specifically remember: blonder, longer hair, brown eyes, but built the same way I am, a little thinner. He climbs out of the hole as my dad walks up the beach, the bucket sloshing over the sides, and then he takes one of the empty chairs, kicking his feet, to watch my dad empty it. The memory smacks of conspiracy. I find myself looking at this boy more than I should, slightly uncomprehending, as if my present self has gone back to inhabit the memory, overlaying its current perception on the child I was, pausing a moment to examine the reality around him, to reflect on this distant, strangely familial face. I had a brother like you.

  The next moment I’m standing at the arched front gates of the coastal mansion, completely perpendicular to where I last remember walking, without clear recollection of how I changed direction. The ocean is at my back. The sound of the waves hiccups behind me, cutting out and returning, doubling over itself to fill the missing space. The gates here are closed, but they’re unlocked, and so I push the right half inward as if on command, moving forward as the external world catches up, readjusts to my new position. I enter the grounds. I leave the gate open behind me, a habit now more than anything.

  The courtyard between me and the house
is decorated with fountains and pools in elaborately planned formations, all shut off, the water stagnant and evaporating. There’s no direct path to the front door—the meandering pathways are meant to be contemplative. Weeds have started to sprout among the zen-garden flowerbeds and through the cracks in the flagstones underfoot. I walk over a once-charming varnished teak bridge above an artificial pond—below it, in the dark, I discern the shiny, whitish shapes of enormous dead koi that once populated the pond, now floating on the surface. In the moonlight, their scaled bellies, barely drifting, look like giant maggots. At other displays, thematically and historically at odds, mythological nudes and Hindu gods stand with stark resolve in emptying stone basins stained and striated green with algae. The lack of arcing water, of at least a common movement to unite them, if nothing else, makes each tableau look especially empty of meaning, especially forgotten. Bordering the courtyard, the towering hedges create a pocket of isolation around the property, locking out the breeze, the tangential ocean. When the estate was at its highest level of operativity, I imagine the people entering these grounds through the front gates would be greeted by the sound of trickling water through treated silence, the coast a separate aesthetic to be viewed from afar.

  The handle on the front door—in this case, a metal ring on a little knob, a bit of stronghold about it, the door perhaps an antique shipped in from another country, another century—is pitched low, below my waist. I pull. These doors open out, but this is the only difference.

  In opposition to the imperial-dilettante exterior, the inside is old-money stately, sized in different proportions. Rather than tile, everything is carpet over wood, every surface is patterned or paneled where it’s not covered in somber oil portraits of the family ancestors locked in thick oval frames, the forebears of this region. A monstrous coatrack greets me just inside the door, beside a chair and a wooden endtable, used for sitting and anticipating visitors, correspondence sorting. When I take a step forward, the entire entryway creaks, and I freeze, a bolt of fear paralyzing me. The sound crackles through the carpet and up the walls, past the sconces and browning bulbs shaped like candle flames until it disappears into the far reaches of the house. There’s a different character in the house’s pre-modernity, in knowing this mansion could have been built on the upwards of a hundred years ago, that it keeps its own mysterious ways of carrying messages from end to end. I listen raptly for sound from elsewhere, as though, if I’d been hiding in this mansion, I would have come running at the slightest noise rather than burying myself even deeper, as if I’ve forgotten my entire purpose for being here, the warped sneaker in my hand: to find other life.