The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “You’re distracted,” said Nestor.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I don’t know.” Easy to forget myself here, with him, to forget that this world was like a dream, but learning the names of Mursult’s killers had been a touch of horror. I wondered if Marian was already dead in terra firma or if I had an opportunity to save her—I wouldn’t know until I stepped back into the rushing river of time. Life was perfect here in its way, perfect with Nestor, out here in Buckhannon. I found myself trying to memorize Nestor, every detail, knowing I’d leave him someday.

  “Let’s head back,” I said.

  We walked in silence for a time, finishing our walk through his uneven side yard, a half acre overgrown with wildflowers. Nestor helped pick foxglove and aster, Buick running ahead of us to the level grass. Darker here, Nestor’s house occluding the front-porch light and the light from the neighbor’s barn. I was remembering nights as a child out in the country like this, the stars so numerous that sometimes I could see the hazy band of the Milky Way.

  “I can’t stay the night,” I said. “I’m taking a trip with a friend of mine, for a memorial service. She’s picking me up in the morning—”

  Nestor kissed my forehead. He held me, breathed in the scent of my hair. “I’ll miss you.”

  “Just a few days.”

  The sky was clear, and as night fell, I saw stars, but not the ineffable brilliance I remembered from childhood. The horizon glowed, always faintly glowed—light pollution from somewhere, light interfering with light.

  —

  Nicole picked me up in her Fit, our first time seeing each other since the other night. She’d slipped away that morning while I still slept, left a handwritten apology and a thank-you for the spare sweater. A further act of contrition that she’d brought me a coffee and a croissant for breakfast, something for the road.

  “You look nice,” she said. “I’ve never seen you dressed up.”

  I’d found a carnation-pink day dress at Avalon. It had a tailored fit, nice lines, with a black belt to cinch the waist. “You look good, too,” I said, Nicole effortlessly graceful in her navy-blue pea coat and white linen dress. “I thought you only owned scrubs.”

  We left Washington south to West Virginia, to Nicole’s mother-in-law’s home on an orchard outside Mount Zion. Country roads, a stop at a gas station, the only restroom housed in a cinder-block hut. I wondered what Nicole remembered from the other night, if she regretted having told me so much. She was quieter than usual, I thought—or maybe I was reading too much into her not being such a morning person. She put on music to fill the silence, fiddling with the dial until she slid in a CD. I watched birds gliding on outspread wings, riding gusts.

  “You all right?” asked Nicole. “You turned pale.”

  “I’m . . . yeah, I guess so,” I said. “Will any of the people who—”

  “Let’s not talk about that,” said Nicole. “Just forget it, right?”

  Wondering what faces I would see—other sailors than Mursult assumed lost but were here, living, as if returned from the dead. And Nicole was in the center of these men, somehow. She sang softly to the music, the color of her true love’s hair, a resonant voice. Difficult to measure her against her past, a past I didn’t fully understand. A murmuration of starlings stippled the sky: they turned together, changed direction like a sentient cloud.

  “You won’t be at the memorial,” said Nicole. “That will just be family. I don’t know who will come back to the house after, but some might.”

  We turned from the main road onto a private drive and passed through rows of fruit trees, some sickly or dead, most erupting in glorious white blossoms, petals on the grass like a spring snow. The house was at the top of a shallow rise. It had a gabled roof, twin stone chimneys. A barn was set on the far side of the rise, a gable roof echoing the house, a saltbox shed attached. Neither the house nor the barn was painted, both just the grayed color of plank wood, the lawn dried brown. Nicole parked near the barn.

  “This is beautiful, Cole,” I said. “How often do you make it out here? It’s peaceful.”

  “Never,” said Nicole. “Almost never.”

  The house had spacious rooms, hardwood floors. The windowsills were decorated with antique bottles of colored glass that cast rainbows across the walls. A memorial display had been arranged on the coffee table, I noticed, a small selection of items: a photo album, an American flag in a triangle display case, a pocket watch on a strip of velvet. An old long rifle hung above the fireplace mantel, from the 1800s or maybe earlier, a bag of powder dangling from the muzzle. I wondered what Nestor would have made of it. The smell of simmering chili filled the house, bread baking.

  “Miss Ashleigh?” Nicole called out.

  A woman answered, “Cole, oh—I’ll be right with you!”

  The woman was stout, with white hair in ropy braids, her broad cheeks and thick neck marshmallow soft. “Here you are,” she said, and although she used a cane, she enveloped Nicole in a crushing hug, “You’ll slip through my arms, Cole. You’re scrawny, you’re too scrawny.” And when Nicole introduced me, Miss Ashleigh shook my hand and said, “Courtney, we’re well met. Look here, we’re each missing something.” She lifted her hem and showed off her prosthetic foot.

  “Diabetes?” I asked.

  “That’s right. Had neuropathy,” said Miss Ashleigh. “Type 2, all of a sudden. Lost my vision also, but had a doctor prescribe me those nanobot gelcaps, cured me up. You don’t mind a cot in the den, do you?”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “Thanks for having me.”

  “Pish,” she said. “A friend of Cole’s, you know. Shauna and Cobb have their stuff in the spare bedroom. Some of the others got a hotel closer to Spencer.”

  Cobb. In the same house with him, the SEAL.

  I brought my suitcase to the den, an addition to the main house—brown carpeting, a breakfront with American Bicentennial plates, a cherrywood eight-gun display case that was empty. I had a view of the wide lawn and the distant orchard. A woman sat on a stool in the side yard, out near an antique horse-drawn plow that was left as decoration, a burlap sack and a bucket at her feet, shucking corn. Her hair fell in copper waves, a bottle color. This must be Shauna, I thought. I watched her with the corn, breaking off the husk and peeling leaves, picking off strands of silk. She wore camouflage pants and a long-sleeved thermal shirt that hugged her chest. Athletic, but out of her element with the corn. The kind of girl that might buy a pink shotgun.

  Nicole knocked at the door. “Will this be all right?” she asked. “Comfortable?”

  “Yeah,” I told her, looking around at the room, the foldout cot. “This will be perfect.”

  “I’ll have to leave you alone for a little while,” she said. “Miss Ashleigh and I are going to meet some of the family. We’ll be back for dinner. Cobb’s driving us.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Will you be all right?”

  She was thinking it was a mistake to have brought me, I could tell. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Listen, about all that stuff from the other night. I don’t know what I was saying. I don’t remember, but I’m sure I was—”

  “Cole, I understand,” I said, “and I was drinking, too. I don’t even remember.”

  “These people, they’re my family,” she said. “I’ll be fine. They’re good people.”

  We had coffee at the kitchen table while she waited for Miss Ashleigh to get ready. Heavy footsteps clambered down the stairs. The man who entered the kitchen was gargantuan, a full foot taller than me at least, and broad, the sleeves and back of his suit coat tight against him. Muscled, the bearing of a wrestler gone bulkier as he aged. Scandinavian, by way of the Midwest—corn-fed, in his fifties at least, if not older, his white-blond hair a tight crew cut that fuzzed the pinkish folds of his neck. His eyes were close set and uneven, one slightly higher than the other—dumb eyes, some people might have thought, but to me his eyes looked like something gone feral.

  “Who’s this?�
� he asked when he noticed me.

  “Courtney Gimm,” I said, and we shook hands—my hand in his like a petal wrapped in meat.

  “A friend of mine,” said Nicole.

  “Gimm,” he said. “All right. I’m Cobb.”

  “Cobb,” I said, and he seemed to like that, hearing his own name repeated. He smiled, a sort of squint-eyed smirk. I imagined him killing Mursult, I imagined him killing a girl. I imagined him killing a girl with his bare hands, strangling the life from her, breaking her neck.

  “We’ll be back soon,” said Nicole.

  I watched them leave, Cobb’s truck kicking up a plume of dust down the long dirt drive. The floorboards whined as I walked through the house alone. The light fixture at the top of the stairs was pink glass. I found the bedroom Nicole was staying in, wondered if this was the room where Jared Bietak had grown up. If it was, all traces of him were gone. White walls, a whiter rectangle where a picture once hung. I went back downstairs, opened the cover of the photo album that was part of the memorial display: A Mother’s Love Never Ends. Photos of Jared Bietak from elementary school, high school. He looked like a tough kid, I thought, but Miss Ashleigh had saved every report card, a straight-A student. There was a graduation picture, then grad school. A Ph.D. in chemistry, Penn State. I turned the page and saw a picture of four men: Cobb, shirtless, muscular, his arm around Jared Bietak. Patrick Mursult was in the picture, smoking a cigar, but I didn’t recognize the fourth man. About as tall as Cobb but leaner, a corona of reddish gold hair. The man’s head was like a death’s-head, sunken cheeks and bony cheekbones, his lips parted, his teeth visible. Shadows covered his eyes.

  “You shouldn’t be looking at that.”

  Startled, I closed the album. “I didn’t mean to,” I said, turned to see Shauna standing in the doorway. “I was curious, I’m sorry—”

  “I’m not mad at you,” said Shauna, “but they wouldn’t want you looking through their stuff. Miss Ashleigh shouldn’t have left this out.”

  She was my age, about, or a few years younger, somewhere in her thirties. When she pulled her hair back, a sensation of déjà vu washed over me, like I had seen her pull her hair back before. I noticed a tattoo in the cleft of her left hand, a black circle with crooked spokes.

  “I just wanted to see what Jared looked like,” I said.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” said Shauna. “I’ll show you the orchard.”

  There were paths through the fruit trees that led to the road. The trees bloom but get blitzed by late frosts each year, so some of the petals had browned, fallen. Apple and pear trees mostly, nothing ready to pick yet, but Shauna spoke fondly of walking here in summer, gathering fruit for pies. My mind wandered as we walked, thinking of Njoku, of his ship, Cancer. Cancer had sailed Deep Time, and I wondered if the same had been true of Libra. I wondered how Libra had returned, seemingly without anyone noticing, or if it had ever launched.

  “So you’re close friends with Nicole but you never met Jared?” Shauna was saying.

  “I only know what Nicole’s told me about him,” I said.

  “He passed a few years before I was with Cobb,” said Shauna. “They were close. Cobb talks about Jared all the time, their time in the Navy.”

  “How’d you and Cobb hook up?” I asked her.

  “I used to go to this roadhouse, this biker bar out in the sticks,” said Shauna. “They did all the MMA pay-per-views out there, and he started chatting me up. He introduced me around to everybody, all the river rats.”

  We walked the far side of a strawberry bush, past an old outhouse made picturesque by falling into disrepair. We saw Cobb’s truck pull through the orchard, returning toward the house.

  “We should get back,” said Shauna. “We should be there to meet them.”

  “What is that you mentioned?” I asked her. “You said the river rats?”

  “They were in the Navy together. Jared and Cobb and the others,” she said. “Hyldekrugger.”

  “Is that what they call themselves?” I asked. “Are they a gang or something?”

  “They called themselves that in Vietnam,” said Shauna. “River rats. They patrolled the rivers over there, talk about it all the time, all the shit they’ve survived. Hyldekrugger always says they’re the survivors, that lambs are sacrificed but rats survive.”

  We walked alongside the old barn, spotting wildflowers. There was a hayloft still piled with bales, but Miss Ashleigh used the barn as a garage. An old Winnebago was parked inside, coated with dust. We rounded toward the house.

  Jared Bietak. Charles Cobb. And the others, Shauna had said. The crew of Libra were the survivors, she’d said. River rats. They aren’t the lamb. It’s often quipped that the most important personnel in the Naval Space Command are the two dozen psychiatrists who work with sailors home from Deep Waters. Deep Space and Deep Time are irreality—and beliefs built on irreality are beliefs built on quicksand. NSC sailors who have witnessed Deep Time are often haunted, reacting to events that haven’t yet occurred, may never occur. And many sailors who have seen Deep Space return hollowed, overwhelmed by the immensity of the cosmos. The totality of human endeavor is nothing when set against the stars.

  We ate dinner together in strained silence, the five of us seated around the kitchen table, the quiet punctuated only by the clink of silverware against china, the sound of our chewing. Chili, the corn Shauna had shucked, bread. Nicole hadn’t spoken since the three of them had returned—more sorrowful than I’d seen her, and I wondered just how deep her mourning for Jared ran, if it was coming back to her or if something might have happened while she was away. I tried to compliment the food, and Miss Ashleigh and Shauna responded with smiles, but Cobb ate quickly, staring into the screen of his phone, and left the table in a temper.

  I washed the dishes while Shauna dried, Miss Ashleigh at the kitchen table having late coffee as the light outside faded. I wasn’t sure where Nicole went, or Cobb. I joined Miss Ashleigh for a cup of coffee, then went outside. Gorgeous here, the house and barn stark against the deepening twilight. I walked around the far side of the house and caught sight of Nicole, leaning against the edge of the open barn door smoking a Parliament. Ghostly in her flowing white dress, her pea coat draped over her shoulders.

  “There you are,” she said, her voice velvety between breaths of smoke. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around. I should have been with you today.”

  “I’ve been finding my way all right,” I said. “Shauna’s nice, so is Miss Ashleigh. How are you holding up?”

  “We buried my husband again today,” said Nicole.

  I came up near her, wishing I was still a smoker, wanting to pass the cigarette between us and enjoy the night.

  “You don’t let on how much you miss him,” I said.

  “Sometimes I do,” said Nicole. “I’ll find myself thinking of Jared, and then I’ll realize all over again that he’s gone and think of everything that’s happened, and the pain hurts new, every time.”

  “After all these years,” I said.

  “Have you ever lost someone close?” she asked.

  “I have.”

  “You forget the bad, your memory tries to heal the past. Years don’t matter either,” said Nicole. “Time just burns. Time burns, and you think the wounds are cauterized, but they open up raw, again and again.”

  She looked away from me, into the outer darkness. In what must have been a reflection of the last stray light from the sinking sun, her eyes seemed to flare with an olive shine that gave her face a feline complexity. Her expression was expectant, terrified, as if she were keeping watch against unseen predators that might manifest from the night. The sunset was red tonight, the sky a lake of fire. She turned back to me, and the glow in her eyes was gone, a trick of the light that had passed.

  “How was the family? Were they a comfort?” I asked. “I know you don’t get along with some of them.”

  “Shake a damp rag and watch water run like diamonds.”


  “I don’t understand,” I said, but she pinned me with her glare. She took a drag on her cigarette. I breathed deeply the taste of her smoke, the sweetness.

  “You do understand,” she said. “I know now that you of all people would understand what I mean.”

  Water without gravity, I thought. Water wriggles away like iridescent worms—or like jellied diamonds. But how could she know? I thought over the afternoon, trying to remember if I had somehow slipped, if I had somehow betrayed myself, but no, she wouldn’t know, she couldn’t.

  “I’m growing so old,” said Nicole, “so fast. I sometimes think I can hear my body aging. I forgot how much I like it out here, how slow the orchard feels. I spend every day helping the elderly, and I see them die, and it seems like waves breaking against the shore, but out here everything is slow. It reminds me of home.”

  “Kenya?”

  She nodded. “Mombasa. They made the trees to look like emeralds. Everything was engineered, nothing grew naturally—all the irrigation, all the straight lines. You pick a fruit and the fruit grows right back, there was never any want. I was never hungry as a child. Seeing the perfect rows of fruit trees reminds me of home. I didn’t miss it until I realized I’d never see it again.”

  “You can go back,” I said. “If it’s home—”

  “No, my home is gone,” said Nicole. “My home never was. I went with her because my father met her at a reception in our village, a reception for the crew of Libra, and he made arrangements for me to leave with her.”

  Libra—the shock of the word. “Why are you saying this? Cole—”

  “No more time for lies,” she said, her eyes smoldering with what might have been hatred, or cunning. “You’re like a message in a bottle to me now. Sometimes the bottle breaks and sinks in the sea, but sometimes the bottle reaches the shore. I can’t control which.”

  Her name hadn’t appeared on the crew list, but Nicole knew Libra. She had been aboard Libra. I’d met her and thought she was a barfly, an addict. I’d thought the surface of her life was all there was, the Donnell House and May’rz Inn, years of drinking and pills and never-ending shifts tending to the elderly, but she had sailed on Libra, her life was luminous with memories of Deep Waters.