Letters to Lovecraft

by Jesse Bullington

  My head buzzes, and swims, gets thicker. Maybe I’m becoming the hypochondriac Shells always accuses me of being; I open and close my jaw, pop my ears, and shake my head, and nothing feels like it works right. My neck muscles are tight and stiff, the ligaments turning to bamboo.

  Olivia comes running out of the water and into the open towel that the woman holds out for her. Olivia doesn’t hesitate. The woman kisses the top of Olivia’s head, and then rubs the towel all over, drying her off. She says, “Go see your father. He’ll help you get dressed.” She wraps Olivia up tight in the towel, brushes the wet hair out of her face, and tucks loose strands behind Olivia’s ears. The woman points at me sitting in my chair, and that’s all I’m doing, sitting, watching. Olivia stumbles up the beach, wrapped in a towel cocoon. She’s shivering when she reaches me. Her teeth click together.

  I say, “You okay, Liv? Your teeth weren’t made to smash into each other like that, you know.”

  “I’m cold.” She worms an arm out of the towel and scratches behind one of her ears. Her hair falls in front of her face. She won’t look at me. I don’t blame her.

  “Let’s get you dressed. We’ll get lunch at home. Okay?”

  I hold up the towel around her as she peels out of her two piece and struggles into underwear, shorts, and a tee shirt. She’s still wet.

  The woman is down at the shore, and no one stands within ten feet of her. She’s like a human crop circle, which would be a funny joke to tell her if it wasn’t true. I suddenly want to take Olivia up into my arms and just run. Fuck the car and fuck this town and just run and never stop running until I’m somewhere else, nobody knows where, and only then will I maybe call Shells and tell her that I’m sorry for the rest of my life.

  Michael comes out of the water, and the woman gives him a coy little wave. He smirks at her, that look that says he sees you, doesn’t want to talk to you, not in front of anyone else, but he’s still glad you’re there. The woman sneaks up beside him and, in one motion, drapes the towel over his thickening shoulders and sneaks in a quick hug around his neck. He’s already almost as tall as she is. He says, “Stop it,” but smiles and gives an embarrassed little laugh. He rubs a spot on the side of his neck absently. He’s always been a distracted, twitchy little kid, and now’s a charmingly distracted, twitchy big kid, just like Shells. It’s amazing how much he looks and acts like her. Michael lifts the towel off his shoulders and drapes it over his head. The woman walks next to him, and bumps her hips into his. From under his towel-hood, he laughs, and says, “Stop,” again.

  I turn my back to them; I can’t watch anymore and can’t think anymore. I hurriedly fold up the watermelon blanket, doing it all wrong, and it ends up as misshapen as an asteroid. I stuff it and the rest of the kids’ stuff into the green beach bag. If I grab Olivia now and run, would Michael know enough to follow me? The left side of my face feels swollen, like I’ve been punched, and slack too, and Christ, am I having a stroke?

  Michael’s shadow falls over me. His is the only shadow there. He’s alone, I think. If she’s there she’s not saying anything. I’m not going to look for her. When did this (this being whatever it was I thought I was doing, I don’t know, I don’t know) become such a horror show? Has it always been a horror show?

  I tell the kids we’re going home. I don’t give them the option of not going home. Olivia and Michael walk around in front of me but don’t say anything, and they don’t look back at me. My eyes fill with tears, and my chest is tight with panic, everything in my head spinning so fast it can only fly off its track and smash into a million pieces.

  Michael doesn’t bother changing into his dry shorts and tee shirt. He’ll sit in the car on his wet towel. Even though Olivia changed into her clothes, her wet towel hangs loosely over her shoulders: a limp, sagging cape.

  “Come on,” I tell them. I’m impatient. It’s how I lie to them: Yes, Dad has done something recklessly stupid, but he can fix it when we leave here, when we get home. “Come on, now! Walk. Move. Let’s get home, okay?” I don’t ask them to help me carry anything, so my arms are full of all the stuff. We stagger up the small, sandy hill, and then through the fence to the parking lot.

  The woman calls out to us from behind. We stop. She stands next to a boulder that demarcates one section of the parking lot. We’re five cars away from our car. She holds up surrender hands. Her smile stretches out across the rest of the lazy summer afternoon, yes, but there’s something sad in her smile too. It’s an all-good-things-must-come-to-an-end look. I know that look, I do.

  She says, “Hey, guys, forgetting something? You really going to make me jog back home?”

  We wait and she catches up to us. She says, “You guys are so mean to Mommy.” She pats my butt, reaches into my bathing suit pocket and grabs the car keys. “I’ll drive.”

  We fall in step behind her. She opens the trunk, and I dump the chair and everything else inside. The kids dutifully climb into the back seat. They don’t argue about who gets to go into the car first and who sits on what side like they normally do.

  Earlier, when I parked, I forgot to leave the windows open a crack. The car is a sauna. I sit heavily in the passenger seat and sweat instantly pours off my face. I catch a glimpse of my left cheek in the side-view mirror: there’s a puffy mass as red as a boiled lobster. My right eye is closing up.

  There’s an ant on my thigh. I try to pinch it between my fingers, but I keep missing it. I brush it off my leg to the floor of the car. We’ve already pulled out of the lot and onto the street. I hadn’t noticed we were moving.

  The windows are down. The woman is driving. I look at her. She’s been crying, or maybe still is crying, because she wipes tears off of her face. She looks an awful lot like Shelley does when she cries but pretends not to.

  She says, “So, um, how were the swimming lessons, kids?” Her voice is bright and cheery.

  They don’t say anything. I turn around and look at Michael. He’s sitting ramrod straight in his seat, eyes open as wide as an ocean, and they are fixed on the woman in the driver’s seat. His neck is patchy red, like he’s breaking out in hives, and he shivers despite the heat. His bathing suit goes dark in the crotch as piss trickles down off the car seat and onto the floorboards.

  I yell, “Jesus, Michael! Are you okay? I think he just had — had an accident?” My own voice sounds like it’s coming from so far away. I look over at Olivia, and she’s just like her brother. They twitch and convulse together like partners in a dance. Her shorts —

  There’s a sharp sting on my neck. Everything goes darker and fuzzier at the edges. I settle back in my seat. The woman’s hand hesitantly returns to the steering wheel, and maybe I see something protruding from the pad of her thumb before she vines that hand around the steering wheel.

  She says, “Don’t worry, they’re all right. They’ll be fine.” Her voice wavers and is at the edge of breaking. She covers her mouth and blinks back tears.

  I shake and shiver, and it hurts in my bones, like I’m shaking hard enough that I might fall apart on my own.

  She takes a deep breath, composing herself, and says brightly, “They probably just need something to drink, something to eat. Is anyone else hungry? I don’t know about you guys, but I’m starving.”

  Allochthon

  Livia Llewellyn

  “[T]aking definite form toward the middle of the century, comes the revival of romantic feeling — the era of new joy in Nature, and in the radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the poets, whose utterances take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering.”

  On this planet, in this universe, geology is geology — the land simply is, and it is nothing else. Mountain ranges and forests and “Nature” in its entirety are not sentient, they have no wisdom or knowledge to impart upon the world, and whatever emotional expectations each individual traveler draws from their journeys into the wild is of our making alone — the landscape “speaks�
�� to us, but it’s only we who are doing the talking. Or so we say we believe — I myself am not quite as certain, and I suspect many of us feel the same. Lovecraft certainly didn’t believe this to be the truth of our world. “[T]here was a…cosmic beauty in the hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically,” Lovecraft wrote in “The Whisperer in the Darkness,” “and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited and for which I had always been vainly searching.” Time and time again, he wrote of the land around us as alive in ways we barely comprehend, watching us, calling out to us, drawing us in. How, then, can we really know for certain that the conversation is so one-sided, that those resplendent and horrifying feelings of mysterium tremendum et fascinans that the supernal wilderness of the world draws from us aren’t the cosmic answers to questions we instinctively ask? Living as we do today, in cities and suburbs subtly crafted as if to seem once removed from unstoppable Nature, we forget that we came from the land; we are wet mortal ghost-slivers of the geologic forces out of which every living thing evolved. The land is always with us, because it is us. And when, in ways wondrous and strange, we are called home, we have no choice but to go.

  ♦

  North Bonneville, 1934

  Ruth sits in the kitchen of her company-built house, slowly turning the pages of her scrapbook. The clock on the bookcase chimes ten. In the next room, the only other room, she hears her husband getting dressed. He’s deliberately slow on Sundays, but he’s earned the right. Something about work, he’s saying from behind the door. Something about the men. Ruth can’t be bothered to listen. She stares at the torn magazine clipping taped to a page. It’s a photo of an East Coast socialite vacationing somewhere in the southern tropics: a pretty young woman in immaculate white linens, lounging on a bench that encircles the impossibly thick trunk of a palm tree. All around the woman and the tree, a soft manicured lawn flows like a velvet sea, and the skies above are clear and dry. Ruth runs her free hand across the back of her neck, imagining the heat in the photo, the lovely bite and sear of an unfiltered sun. Her gaze wanders up to the ceiling. Not even a year old, and already rain and mold have seeped through the shingled roof, staining the cream surface with hideous blossoms. It’s supposed to be summer, yet always the overcast skies in this part of the country, always the clouds and the rain. She turns the page. More photos and ephemera, all the things that over the years have caught her eye. But all she sees is the massive palm, lush and hard and tall, the woman’s back curved into it like a drowsy lover, the empty space around them, above and below, as if they are the only objects that have ever existed in the history of time.

  Henry walks into the room and grabs his coat, motioning for her to do the same. Ruth clenches her jaw and closes the scrapbook. Once again, she’s made a promise she doesn’t want to keep. But she doesn’t care enough to speak her mind, and, anyway, it’s time to go.

  Their next-door neighbor steers his rusting car down the dirt road, past the edges of the town and onto the makeshift highway. His car is one of many, a caravan of beat-up trucks and buggies and jalopies. Ruth sits in the back seat with a basket of rolls on her lap, next to the other wife. It started earlier in the week as an informal suggestion over a session of grocery shopping and gossip by some of the women, and now almost forty people are going. A weekend escape from the routine of their dreary lives to a small park further down the Columbia River. The park is far from the massive lock and dam construction site, the largest in the world, which within the decade will throttle the river’s power into useful submission. The wives will set up the picnic, a potluck of whatever they can afford to offer, while they gossip and look after the children. The men will eat and drink, complain about their women and their jobs and the general rotten state of affairs across the land, and then they’ll climb a trail over eight-hundred-feet high, to the top of an ancient volcanic core known as Beacon Rock.

  The company wife speaks in an endless paragraph, animate and excited. Billie or Betty or Becky, some childish, interchangeable name. She’s four months pregnant and endlessly, vocally grateful that her husband found work on a WPA project when so many in the country are doing without. Something about the Depression. Something about the town. Something about schools. Ruth can’t be bothered. She bares her teeth, nods her head, makes those ridiculous clucking sounds like the other wives would, all those bitches with airs. Two hours of this passes, the unnatural rattle and groan of the engines, the monotonous roll of pine-covered hills. The image of the palm tree has fled her mind. It’s only her on the lawn, alone, under the unhinged jaw of the sky. Something about dresses. Something about the picnic. Something about a cave —

  Ruth snaps to attention. There is a map in her hands, a crude drawing of what looks like a jagged-topped egg covered in zigzagging lines. This is the trail the men are going to take, the wife is explaining. Over fifty switchbacks. A labyrinth, a maze. The caravan has stopped. Ruth rubs her eyes. She’s used to this, these hitches of lost time. Monotonous life, gloriously washed away in the backwater tides of her waking dreams. She stumbles out of the car, swaying as she clutches the door. The world has been reduced to an iron grey bowl of silence and vertigo, contained yet infinite. Mountains and space and sky, all around, with the river diminished to a soft mosquito’s whine. Nausea swells at the back of her throat, and a faint, pain-tinged ringing floods her ears. She feels drunk, unmoored. Somewhere, Henry is telling her to turn, to look. There it is, he’s saying, as he tugs her sleeve like a child. Ruth spirals around, her tearing eyes searching, searching the horizon, until finally she —

  Something about —

  ♦

  — the rock.

  Ruth lifts her head. She’s sitting at her kitchen table, a cup of lukewarm coffee at her hand. The scrapbook is before her, open, expectant, and her other hand has a page raised, halfway through the turn. On the right side of the book, the woman in the southern tropics reclines at her palm in the endless grass sea, waiting.

  Henry stands before her, hat on head, speaking. —Ruthie, quit yer dreamin’ and get your coat on. Time to go.

  —Go where.

  —Like we planned. To Beacon Rock.

  The clock on the bookcase chimes ten.

  Outside, a plane flies overhead, the sonorous engine drone rising and falling as it passes. Ruth rubs her eyes, concentrating. Every day in this colorless town at the edge of this colorless land is like the one before, indistinguishable and unchanging. She doesn’t remember waking up, getting dressed, making coffee. And there’s something outside, a presence, an all-consuming black static wave of sound, building up just beyond the wall of morning’s silence, behind the plane’s mournful song. She furrows her brow, straining to hear.

  Henry speaks, and the words sound like the low rumble of avalanching rock as they fall away from his face. It’s language, but Ruth doesn’t know what it means.

  —Gimme a moment, I’m gonna be sick, Ruth says to no one in particular as she pushes away from the table. She doesn’t bother to close the front door as she walks down the rickety steps into warm air and a hard grey sun. Ruth stumbles around the house to the back, where she stops, placing both hands against the wooden walls as she bends down, breathing hard, willing the vomit to stay down. Gradually, the thick, sticky feeling recedes, and the tiny spots of black that dance around the corners of her vision fade and disappear. She stands, and starts down the dusty alley between the rows of houses and shacks.

  Mountains, slung low against the far horizon of the earth, shimmering green and grey in the clear, quiet light. Ruth stops at the edge of the alley, licking her lips as she stands and stares. Her back aches. Beyond the wave and curve of land, there is… Ruth bends over again, then squats, cupping her head in her hands, elbows on knees. This day, this day already happened. She’s certain of it. They drove, they drove along the dirt highway, the woman beside her, mouth running like a hurricane. They hung to the edges of the wide river, and then they rounded the last curve and
stopped, and Ruth pooled out of the car like saliva around the heavy shaft of a cock, and she looked up, and, and, and.

  And now some company brat is asking her if she’s ok, hey lady are you sick or just taking a crap, giggling as he speaks. Ruth stands up, and slaps him, crisp and hard. The boy gasps, then disappears between the houses. Ruth clenches her jaw, trying not to cry as she heads back around the house. Henry stands beside the open car door, ruin and rage dancing over his face. Her coat and purse and the basket of rolls have been tossed in the back seat, next to the wife. She’s already talking up a storm, rubbing her belly while she stares at Ruth’s, her eyes and mouth all smug and smarmy in that oily sisterly way, as if she knows. As if she could know anything at all.

  The sky above is molten lead, bank after bank of roiling dark clouds vomiting out of celestial foundries. Ruth cranks the window lever, presses her nose against the crack. The air smells vast and earthen. The low mountains flow past in frozen antediluvian waves. Something about casseroles, the company bitch says. Something about gelatin and babies. Something about low tides. Ruth touches her forehead, frowns. There’s a hole in her memory, borderless and black, and she feels fragile and small. Not that she hates the feeling. Not entirely. Her hand rises up to the window’s edge, fingers splayed wide, as if clawing the land aside to reveal its piston-shaped core. The distant horizon undulates against the dull light, against her flesh, but fails to yield. It’s not its place to. She knows she’s already been to Beacon Rock. Lost deep inside, a trace remains. She got out of the car and she turned, and the mountains and the evergreens and, thrusting up from the middle, a geologic eruption, a disruption hard and wide and high and then: nothing. Something was there, some thing was there, she knows she saw it, but the sinkhole in her mind has swallowed all but the slippery edges.