by Laird Barron
Of course, this was nothing, which I blamed on the fact that I sat in my car the entire time, listening to the rain bang on the roof. It did not stop me from repeating the experiment with subsequent storms. Soon, I was starting the car, switching on the headlights, flipping on the wipers, and pulling out of the driveway in search of revelation.
For the next sixteen years, it eluded me. About the closest I came was during a storm that came over while I was driving back from a trip up into the Catskills with my then-fiancée. All afternoon, tall heaps of cloud had loomed over the mountains, dimming the sky, then moving east. When the air thickened, however, humidity pressing on us like a great, damp hand, a storm seemed in the offing, and we agreed it would be best if we beat it back to our apartment. Just the other side of Woodstock, a handful of fat drops of rain burst on the windshield, and then the world outside was swept away by a wall of water. Afraid to brake into a hydroplane, I downshifted as quickly as I could, stabbing the button for the hazards. Engine whining, the car slowed to a crawl, but even on fast, the wipers did little more than push the water screening the windshield back and forth. Lightning flashed, turning the rain into white neon, and the thunder that followed one-Mississippi two-Mississippi shook the car. I was already steering for the shoulder when the lightning repeated, the thunder answering one-Mississippi faster. Prin was telling me to pull over, the command a litany: “Pull over pull over pull over pull over pull over.”
“I’m trying,” I said, as lightning and thunder split the air together. Although I couldn’t help my flinch, I wasn’t worried as much about being electrocuted as I was about someone racing up behind and slamming into us. I knew the road wasn’t that wide, the shoulder not that far away, but hours seemed to pass as the car eased to the right, lightning flaring like the flash of an overeager photographer, thunder overlapping, crashing into itself and forming an avalanche of sound that rumbled and roared over us. When I judged we had crossed onto the shoulder, I put the clutch in, shifted into neutral, and opened my door. I hadn’t unbuckled my seatbelt, so I couldn’t lean that far out of the car, and Prin didn’t have to reach that far to grab my arm and haul me back inside. “Are you insane?” she screamed. “Close the door!”
I did.
“What were you thinking?” she continued, her eyes wide with terror. “There’s a goddamn hurricane out there!”
“I was checking to make sure we were on the shoulder,” I said, which was true: I was looking for the white strip that delineated the edge of the road. But once I’d pushed the door open and the immensity of the storm had rushed over me, I was swept by a feeling of such exaltation that the hand Prin had caught was stealing toward the release for my seatbelt. At her expression of utter fright, however, my exhilaration curdled to embarrassment. I took her hands and said, “It’s okay.”
“Asshole.” She tugged her hands from mine.
“Yes, but I’m your asshole.”
That brought a smile to her face, which disappeared as lightning stabbed the trees to our right, thunder cracking so loud it deafened us. Prin pressed herself into her seat as if it could conceal her, her hand groping for mine. Sheets of rain layered the windows; I switched the wipers off. “It can’t last much longer,” I said, speaking too-loudly because of the ringing in my ears. “These summer storms blow themselves out pretty quickly.”
Prin didn’t answer. I stared out the windshield, trying to distinguish the road through the water. For a moment, the rain lessened, and the world in front of us swam into view. Maybe fifty yards ahead, the road rose in a slight incline, more an extended bump than a hill. On the other side of that rise, something was crossing the road from left to right. It was an animal, easily as big as an elephant. For a moment, I thought it was an elephant, had visions of an accident involving a convoy of circus animals. But the silhouette was wrong: the back was longer, the dip to the hips less pronounced, the head shorter, blunter, crowned by a pair of heavy horns as wide as my car was long. With each step it took, the animal’s head swung from one side to the other with a slowness that was almost casual, as if it were out for a stroll in a light mist, not a raging storm. My hand was back on the door handle, and then the rain picked up again, hiding the enormous profile behind a curtain of water. I opened my mouth; to say what, I didn’t know. I was waiting for the rain to ebb once more, allow another glance at whatever that had been. When it did not, I turned to Prin and said, “Did you see that?”
“What?” she said. Her brown was level, her mouth straight, her cheeks pale. She was angry, I realized; she had witnessed what I had, and the experience had made her furious.
“I—”
“Do you think you can drive out of here?”
I wanted to ask if she was serious, remind her that this was a car, not a submarine, but what I said was, “Yeah.”
Wipers whipping back and forth, defogger blowing, hazards blinking, I put the car into gear and turned toward the road. I was certain that I was going to drive into whatever had been crossing it. After five minutes passed with no collision, though, my hands began to relax their hold on the steering wheel, and once the dashboard clock had counted another five minutes, I knew that, even crawling forward as we were, we had passed beyond the place the great animal had been. I felt, not relieved so much as full, as if what I had seen were inside me, straining against the walls of my chest. I couldn’t seem to draw enough breath. The sensation persisted all the long drive back to our apartment in Wiltwyck, where Prin led me directly to the bedroom, tugged down her shorts and mine, and pulled me onto the bed. We made quick, vigorous love, and once we were done, did so a second, and a third time.
When, aching, sore, we finally pulled apart from one another, we stood from the bed and stumbled into the kitchen and out the back door, onto the apartment’s nominal back deck. Night had descended, bringing with it a fresh round of storms. Naked, we stood in the darkness, letting the rain pound down onto us. The pressure in my chest had eased, though it was not gone. It was more as if whatever was inside me had folded its legs and settled into sleep.
If I say that the babies—twins—who resulted from that afternoon occupied my attention for the next dozen years, there’s enough truth to the words for them not to feel like too much of an evasion. What they are is incomplete. After all, there were a good four weeks between Prin’s and my lovemaking and the baby-blue “+” appearing in the window of the home pregnancy test, during which time three more storms thundered through the area. I could have ventured out into any of them, could have tried to return to the spot outside Woodstock where my long-term intuition had seemed to flower into reality. For that matter, once Prin’s pregnancy was confirmed, our hasty marriage accomplished, there were a handful of instances before the twins arrived when I could have resumed my investigation, as there were scattered throughout the years that followed. The most I did, however, was a cursory search of the web, which revealed that the place where Prin and I had seen whatever we’d seen was proximate to Dutchman’s Creek, which had a vaguely sinister reputation; why, exactly, I couldn’t discover. On a couple of occasions, I broached the topic of that day with Prin, but she met my question of what she thought we’d seen crossing the road with one of her own: “What? What is it you think we saw?” Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a denial of our experience, but it was as if shutters dropped over her eyes, sealing off what might have been happening behind them. It stymied me into silence, which appeared to be the desired effect, since Prin did not continue the conversation.
It was as if the part of me that responded to storms so profoundly had become stuck, the memory of that huge form a gouge in the vinyl, stuttering my emotions. I would sit on the living room couch, Nina cradled in my right arm, Eddie in my left, as the rain washed the picture window, and the curiously hollow ring of water striking glass would absorb my attention, leaving it too saturated for any further response to the tumult outside. I would half-lie on Eddie’s bed, my head and shoulders propped a
gainst his headboard, his face pressed into my chest, his arms wrapped around me with all his five year old’s strength, as the air lit white and cracked, and I would stroke his hair, rub his back through his Spider-Man pajamas, telling him as I did that it was just the weather, keeping my voice calm, level, the steady rise and fall of my words, the slow circles my hand traced on his cotton top, smoothing away any emotions of my own that might have been threatening to bunch up. I would sit on the living room couch beside Nina as the CBS affiliate out of Albany interrupted our sitcom to discuss the severe weather rampaging across the area, and after leaving my seat to point out to her where Ulster County was on the regional map, I would explain why I didn’t think we had to worry about a tornado striking us; although there was one that knocked down the wall of a school south of us, in Newburgh, some years ago—which led to us abandoning the TV to search online for accounts of that old catastrophe, channeling any impulses that had been stirred by the wind’s shriek into research. The agitation, the exhilaration I had felt wasn’t gone—it wasn’t that far away, at all. It was . . . contained, dormant.
What raised it was my children; specifically, their decision to venture out into the woods behind our house on the brink of a storm. I saw the heavy clouds piling overhead; I had read the weather report, which put the entire region under a Severe Thunderstorm Watch; I could already hear the distant thunder, like big trucks bumping over a road. Nonetheless, when Eddie said that he and Nina were going outside to try his new two-way radios, I didn’t object. “Don’t go too far,” I called after him, “it’s supposed to rain,” but my only answer was the screen door to the porch slapping its frame.
The thunder arrived first, a series of deep growls that rolled over the low hill behind the house. For long moments, the air was crowded with sound, and then it was full of rain, the lightning that flickered almost an afterthought. I sat on the living room couch, the book I had been reading lowered, and listened for the clump of my children’s sneakers on the porch steps, their inevitable giggles at having run home through the downpour. Lightning flashed; the thunder’s growl rose to a roar. I left my book open on the couch and hurried to the back door.
Rain hammered the porch. I opened the screen door, and the wind caught it and flung it wide. Leaning out into the storm, I cupped my hands around my mouth and called Nina and Eddie’s names. There was no answer. I could picture the two of them crouched beside a tree, grinning like maniacs as they listened to me shouting, an image sufficiently annoying for me to consider leaving them to their sodden fate—an impulse that vanished a moment later, when a bolt of lightning speared the top of the back hill. Thunder boomed, shuddering the house; the rain redoubled. Before I fully knew what I was doing, I was down the porch stairs and running across the yard toward the woods, my bare feet kicking up sprays of cold water. By the time I reached the tree line, I was soaked, my hair and clothes plastered to me, my eyes full of rain. Bellowing my children’s names, I plunged amongst the trees. Lightning whited the air; thunder shook the tree trunks. Every warning about what to do in a thunderstorm, especially the keeping-away-from-trees part, ran through my head. “Nina!” I shouted. “Eddie!” I dragged my forearm across my eyes, trying to wipe away water with water. Deep in my gut, dread coiled, while higher in my chest, a sensation of being absolutely overwhelmed threatened to force its way out of me in one long scream.
Strange as it sounds, only after Nina and Eddie had caught my arms and were guiding me toward the house did I realize that the tree I had been standing near had been struck by lightning. When the storm had burst, the twins had sought shelter in the garage, where they’d remained until they’d heard me calling for them. They’d emerged in time to watch me rush into the woods. After a brief deliberation, they’d set off after me. Fifty feet into the trees, they stopped, unable to tell which direction I’d gone. Nina was for splitting up and going left and right; Eddie favored staying together and moving forward. Their debate meant that they saw the lightning plunge into the trees somewhere in front of them out of the corners of their eyes. The attendant burst of thunder doubled them over, their hands clapped to their heads. Ears stunned, they stumbled to the spot where a moderately-sized tree had been detonated by the lightning bolt. Chunks of wood, some steaming, a few on fire, fanned out from the trunk’s jagged remains. In the midst of the wreckage, the twins found me, standing with my eyes wide. Later, Eddie would tell me that he was afraid to touch me, because he was afraid that I might be electrified. No such worry disturbed his sister, who strode up to me, took my right arm, and turned me toward the house.
The worst effects of my experience—the almost-total blanching of my vision, the loss of my hearing—ebbed more quickly than I would have predicted. By the time Prin had returned from shopping and was driving me to the hospital, my vision had largely cleared, though colors still appeared washed-out, and while my hearing was little more than a high-pitched ringing, I was aware of my family’s voices as disturbances in that noise. The E.R. doctor pronounced a cautious diagnosis that I was substantially unharmed, which my regular MD would second when I saw her the following day, and which she would amend to mild hearing loss when I checked in with her two weeks after that. I wasn’t aware of any diminishment in my hearing as much as I was in my vision, specifically, my color vision, which remained less vibrant than it had been, as if I were viewing colors through a film. My ongoing complaints led to an appointment with my optometrist, who found nothing obviously wrong with my eyes and referred me to an ophthalmologist, a retinal specialist who spent a long time shining painfully bright lights into my dilated pupils, only to arrive at the same verdict. The specialist offered to send me on to a sub-specialist he knew up in Albany, but I demurred. By that time, I was starting to understand what had happened to me.
Two days before my appointment with the ophthalmologist, I dreamed I was back in the woods, searching for the twins in the midst of the storm. I stumbled into the small clearing where the twins had found me. Evergreens, interrupted by the occasional birch, stationed its border. I screamed my children’s names, and as I did, a finger of lightning touched one of the trees across the clearing. For a dream-moment, the lightning hung in place, a blazing seam in the air, a brilliant snarl of glass through which I glimpsed a shape. It was a tree—but such a tree as I’d never seen. Leaves as green as an emerald, as one of those tropical snakes you see in nature documentaries, gathered into a globe atop a slender trunk whose bark shone like polished bronze. Simultaneously, this was a child’s approximation of a tree, and the original tree, the Platonic ideal from which all others emanated. When the lightning was done plunging into the evergreen, the window it had burned into the air closed, a feeling of loss—of grief—as profound as what I’d felt at the death of my father made me suck in my breath as if I’d been kicked. Gasping, I struggled up to consciousness, to Prin asleep in the bed beside me.
For the next week, the image of that tree burned in my mind with such intensity that, had you placed a sample of my neurons under the microscope, you would have seen it lighting the center of each nucleus. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw those leaves thick with green, that corrugated bark. I didn’t know if what I’d dreamed was an actual memory, retrieved from the trauma surrounding it, or a symbol, a way for my imagination to represent another, indescribable experience to me. I didn’t care, because as the vision of that tree glowed in my brain, it illuminated the emotion that had accompanied the lightning strike, a terror that was exultation that was exaltation. It was the feeling that had stirred in me a dozen years before, more, while the wipers metronomed across the windshield, the rain jumped on the road ahead. It was the sensation of standing beside a fundamental openness, a Grand Canyon from whose space might emerge anything: an enormous beast, ambling over the blacktop, a tree glimpsed through a flash of lightning. As the huge shape that Prin and I had seen those years ago had seemed to take up residence inside me, tangling itself in this emotion and thus inhibiting it, so the sight of t
he tree roused the animal, set its nostrils flaring, its tail switching. Pulling my emotion along with it, the thing began to pace the confines of my chest, lowering its blunt head to test the thickness of the wall here, the padlock on the gate there.
Not at once, but over the course of weeks, months, the next couple of years, my actions, my behavior, shifted, became more impulsive, erratic. I noticed it first at work, where I was less-inclined to suffer the idiocy of either my co-workers or our customers. At home, the twins entering their teens provided both a prompt and an excuse for me to adopt a more authoritarian style of parenting. In my marriage, I became more vocal about my unhappiness with the long hours Prin put in at her job. And when a storm blew in, I was much more likely to grab the keys to the truck and announce to whoever was listening that I was going out. If one of the kids, or, more likely, if my wife asked why, I was ready with an excuse about us needing milk; although, on a couple of occasions, I declared that I felt like taking a ride, and since that provoked no further questions, it became my default response.
In nothing I did did I go too far, say words that could not be forgotten, commit acts that could not be forgiven. But in various ways, in all facets of my life, as time passed I drew ever-closer to a border to cross over which would bring disaster. At work, my responses to my district manager’s suggestions for improving the store verged on outright mockery, while I had given a few dissatisfied customers such a run-around that one of them had been in tears. Within the house, I became adept, not at criticizing the twins, but in remaining silent to the little they offered me, treating their adolescently-awkward gestures at communication with a bemused condescension. Within my marriage, I had stopped complaining to Prin; instead, through the miracle of social media, I had located the woman I had been involved with before Prin, and had started e-mailing, then calling her, late at night, when everyone else was asleep. Whenever lightning strobed the yard, thunder ground against the house, I reached for the keys. Sometimes, I would pull the truck into a lay-by and step out into the storm, let the rain needle me, the lightning arc overhead, the thunder shake me. No outsized animals emerged onto the road beside me, no lightning bolts opened views of other places, but I didn’t care. Fear so pure it was joy made my blood sing in my ears, made my skin electric, made the animal confined in my chest toss its head and kick its hoofs.