by Joseph Fink
Keisha felt all this strongly, but most of all she felt defeat and shame. She didn’t get out of bed except to shop for frozen meals. After her time away, she didn’t feel capable of getting her hands into the correct gestures and timing for cooking, but the microwave still worked as expected and didn’t require more from her than she was able to give. Mostly she spent her time looking at her bedroom ceiling as though it were a landscape, which in a way it was, a landscape of texture that changed with the position of the sun. Shadows made their way from this corner to that, and she followed their journey for hours.
The truck lurched and then stalled. Keisha had never even driven manual before and now she was trying to learn an eighteen-gear rig, having to deal with the idea of a clutch, and an H pattern shifter with a splitter, and timing it all with RPM, a dial that had always been on her dashboard but that she had never for a moment in her life thought about.
“You’re trying to shift her, not stop her,” her instructor said between wheezing laughs that smelled like every cigarette he had ever smoked.
“I’m fucking trying,” she muttered and that made him laugh even more.
He was an old-school trucker, had been doing it since the ’70s up until two years earlier when he had retired and opened a driving school. While women driving trucks was not as uncommon as it used to be, he found the idea amusing and took every mistake she made as proof that he was right about everything he had ever thought about the world.
But as obnoxious as it was, for her the only way out was through. Her way into the life she had decided to have was on the other side of this driving school. And while she grappled always with anxiety, and certainly having this old white man laughing at her from the passenger seat was not helping her anxiety one bit, she also contained a great capacity for stubbornness. This entire endeavor was born out of that. Why else would she choose to take on such a hopeless mission, crossing and recrossing the country searching for someone who most likely didn’t want to be found? In any case, she set herself to learning how to drive this stupid machine and she would not stop to take any kind of break until she had gotten her clumsy hands to do what was asked of them.
“Yeah, now you’re getting it. That was right on it,” her instructor said. He had gradually shown more respect as he saw how absolute her insistence on learning was, how little interest she had in what others thought of her.
“You don’t have to tell me I’m getting it. Old man, I know I’m getting it.”
This is what it was, then, to have a single driving mission and then lose it. Bay and Creek continued to try to get in touch with Keisha. Obviously, she no longer had the job, but they did need the truck back. She had ditched the trailer a few hundred miles from Victorville, far enough that she hoped no one would make the connection, and then she had parked the cab on her back lawn, where she hoped it wouldn’t be visible from the street. She didn’t want any remnant of her life before to taint whatever it was her life would become next.
Gradually she found her feet, getting out of bed and moving around. Taking walks through the neighborhood, as people from their yards squinted at her with the feeling that they must know her from somewhere but couldn’t quite put their finger on where. She started buying groceries that were ingredients, food that other food could be made from, some of it not frozen. Her hands regained the gestures and timing of cooking. Days passed. Then two weeks. She felt like maybe she could do this forever. That it would never be ok, but that she could make a list of activities each day, and then go through that list, and when the list was over the day would be over and she could sleep fitfully before starting again.
A life does not need to be satisfying or triumphant. A life does not need to mean anything or lead anywhere. A life does not need a direction or a goal. Ultimately, a life merely needs to be lived until there is no more living left to do.
The house had a deck upstairs, off the master bedroom, that faced an identical deck on the neighbor’s house. A thoughtless bit of subdivision design, mirroring houses so that the entire neighborhood would not look so uniform but ending up with this accidental bit of intimacy. Keisha had never known much about her neighbors’ lives, but they had often ended up a few feet apart on summer nights, eating dinner outside, smelling each other’s food, half in and out of each other’s conversations.
So she was unsurprised when she sat out in the warming weather and one of the neighbors, Sheila, appeared.
“Keisha! I saw lights on in the house but I didn’t know if it was . . . how are you?”
Keisha nodded, as though saying yes to a different question that wasn’t asked.
“It’s good to see you again, Sheila. It really is.” She gave her best smile, her most carefree wave. “You have a nice day now.”
Often at night she found herself looking out her front window. There was no reason for this, only a lingering instinct to be aware of her surroundings. She got to know the people in her neighborhood better than she had in her years of living there. The people who took runs in the dark or walked their dogs after coming home late from their jobs. Once or twice she saw a person in a hoodie, based on their size probably a teenager. A bored teenager hanging out in a boring neighborhood. Then, a few nights in, she noticed the car. An old Mustang, with a hood that was a different color from the rest of the body, and scratches and dents all down the sides. One of the tires looked low, flabbing out onto the asphalt. It was not the kind of car seen often in her neighborhood, and she watched it intently, night after night, but no one ever came for it, no one else ever looked at it. Sometimes she thought she could see movement through its darkened windshield. As though there was always someone sitting inside, night after night, staring right back at her.
16
Once she had decided to live the rest of her life, Keisha started looking for a job. The kind of job she had held down before everything about her old life had ended. No one knew what to do with her résumé. Middle-tier white-collar work and then this long stretch as a truck driver and now back to searching for office jobs.
“Was this, uh, about finding yourself?” the interviewers at job agencies would ask about her work history.
“It was about finding someone, sure.”
“Mm. Ah. Well, we’ll call you.”
Keisha also tried gingerly to reach back out to friends. Margaret answered the door with a look somewhere between happiness and loss.
“Keisha, dear, I thought I had . . . ,” and then she took Keisha into a hug that crushed Keisha’s nose into Margaret’s collarbone. It had been so long since Keisha had had a friend like this, and she had trouble finding the center of gravity in the conversation. Margaret asked gentle, probing questions about the missing time, and Keisha deflected them with questions about Margaret’s life.
“My life is the same as it ever was,” Margaret said. “If you knew me then, you know me now.” She cocked her head. “I suspect the same can’t be said of you.”
“I suppose not,” said Keisha but would not elaborate. Finally she made an awkward good-bye and they made plans to hang out again. Keisha desperately wanted to but found herself delaying reaching out again.
Now that she was home, she started going through Alice’s things in a more organized fashion. She separated every item she found into two categories: unrelated and possible evidence. The possible evidence pile got bigger and bigger. Eventually everything went into it. How could she know what misplaced grocery list was actually a coded message? It had to be kept, in case she found its concealed meaning someday.
There were the words she remembered from her first time through. Bay and Creek. Vector H. Vector H was referred to in heavy, malignant terms, with words like fatality incident and handled. None of what she found connected in a way that made sense to her. And so she returned to that beating heart at the center of each person’s life. She started going through Alice’s laptop.
Every day, at 3:15 p.m., a police cruiser drove by the house. Keisha tried to believe this was a coinc
idence, but no one has much control over what they believe.
She was asleep when she heard the thump and the gurgle. It sounded like a drainage problem, or a person trying to breathe with a collapsing lung. The sound came first in her dream. She dreamed she was in an immense room, like the ballroom in an old-fashioned estate. The walls were lavish but distant, every decorative detail dwarfed by the scope of the architecture. And scattered all over the space were rolling cots and curtains, all of them unused. A field hospital for a war that hadn’t started yet. There was a huge basin of clean water in the center of the room, and she understood that soon the water would be full of blood and pus from all the wounds yet to be inflicted. She bent over the basin, and the water bubbled up at her with a thump and gurgle. She stumbled backward, understanding that something terrible was crawling up from the water. Another thump, another gurgle. A hand with badly burnt skin, peeling and charred, splashed up out of the basin. She started awake.
She sat up in bed, warily eyeing the dark corners of the room. With her blurry, half-awake vision the darkness seemed to heave and pulse. That sound had been so distinct and real and she felt certain it had entered her dream from the real world. She listened for the sound again. After half a minute, there it was, a thump and a gurgle, from somewhere in the house. She didn’t know what to do. Or she knew what to do and could not bring herself to do it. She waited and heard the sound a couple more times, and then nothing. She went and checked the bedroom door. Still locked. She never used to keep it locked, but now she always did. She sat up in bed for hours, waiting for the sound to come again, but it never did and she drifted back to sleep as the sun began to rise.
Back out on the deck that afternoon, and Sheila came out with her partner, David.
“Oh!” said David. “Sheila mentioned you were back, but still such a nice surprise.”
“It’s nice to see you too,” said Keisha over the book her sleep-deprived mind had been grappling with for the past half hour.
“Well, don’t let us bother you,” said Sheila, and the two of them lay out on their deck chairs, not talking to her or each other. Keisha gave up on the book and returned to Alice’s laptop. But there was nothing. Alice’s laptop was as blank and inexplicable as her disappearance. It gave up none of her secrets.
Keisha decided she would keep trying, day after day, letting the television play her old sitcom episodes while she methodically went through each folder in the laptop until it dead-ended in a worthless batch of system files, and then she would back out and try again. After two days of this, she found what was labeled as a temp directory full of folders that were named with randomly generated series of letters and numbers. Within one of these, she found a subfolder that contained ten subfolders and one of them contained a hidden folder disguised as a system folder, and that one contained years of pay statements.
Keisha went through the statements one after another, but it only took a few to understand what she was looking at. They were payments, to Alice, from Bay and Creek, going back years. Alice had been working for Bay and Creek since around the time she and Keisha had moved into this house.
She closed the laptop and tossed it next to her on the couch. She had found what she had been looking for and felt not even a little bit better.
Before going to bed, she went back to her deck, half hoping that Sheila or David would be there so that she could have some sort of human contact to recenter herself, stop her mind from going through the years of her life that she had so completely misunderstood. But neither of them were out. The sliding door into their bedroom was open, which was odd. The contractors had put no screen on the doors to the decks, and so no one left their sliding doors open in the buggy seasons, which were most seasons. Keisha tried to look through the door without looking through it, since staring into their bedroom seemed creepy. But there was something wrong about what she was seeing, and she was trying to isolate what it was. Then she noticed a white tube near the bottom of the door. What the hell was that? It was a leg. It was Sheila’s leg, sticking out of the doorway and onto the deck.
Keisha lost track of her breath and fell backward against a deck chair. And that was when she noticed a second shape, which had been standing the whole time in the darkest corner of her neighbor’s deck.
It was a Thistle Man, a skinny one with missing patches of hair and a head that was lolling around like he didn’t have control over his neck. His smile arced crookedly up around his yellow teeth. He stared at Keisha from the shadows.
“Shumf,” he murmured gently. “Woo.”
17
She had murdered her neighbors by just trying to come home, and there was no to-do list she could work her way through the next day that would make that something she could live with. She was used to not sleeping, one of the side effects of her constant anxiety, but she wasn’t used to not sleeping for a good reason.
At around four in the morning she heard haphazard, arrhythmic clapping. Adrenaline seized through her, but she stood and with shaking legs left her bedroom. She crept down the stairs. Slap slap came the sound. There was a flickering in her living room. Slap slap. The TV was on and muted, showing a local weatherwoman describing a hurricane that would never come anywhere near the area Keisha lived. Against this weather report, Keisha saw a blurred reflection. A strange bent shape, swinging loosely back and forth. Slap slap. She smelled tilled earth, and she smelled her own sweat, and she smelled cleaning chemicals and the sharp funk of a gas station bathroom.
“WOOP,” the shape said. “WOOOOOP.” Slap slap. Slap slap.
She leaned around the living room door with as little of herself visible as possible. A Thistle Man, not the one she had first met, and not the one she had followed to the town, and not the one from her neighbors’ deck, but another one still. He was bent horribly backward, like his spine was broken, and he was loosely swinging his arms back and forth in a circle so that they slapped his chest and back. Slap slap. Slap. He gurgled. “WOOOP!” he shouted. “WOOOOOOOOOP!”
She ran back to her bedroom, making no effort to be quiet, waiting any moment for a hand to encircle her ankle, but she made it up the stairs, slammed and locked the door, and then finally, after all the events of the last few days, she cried. The slapping had stopped. It was silent in her house. She waited for the door to break down, but nothing else happened, except, eventually, morning.
The truth was manifest to her. They would never let her escape. They would never let her disappear into a life, no matter how quiet. They had come for her. These weren’t warnings, the murder of her neighbors, the creature in her house. Because there was nothing left for them to warn her away from. She had given up, and here they still were. This was them playing with their food before they ate it.
They left her with no choice. If they wouldn’t stop coming after her, no matter how fully she had given up, then she could not give up. She instead would have to be the one to come after them. She was ready. Fuck the Thistle Men.
She would have to be patient. This was not an enemy to approach in haste. There would need to be a plan. The first step, obviously, would be to disappear again, return to the roads where they might have a more difficult time tracking her. She would do her best to switch cars regularly, not take any of the same routes twice, sleep mostly in her vehicle unless she couldn’t avoid it. Then she would need to turn the tables on them and watch them. There was that hill above their town. In her head she could see a lean-to, a camouflaged place to sit and watch them. She would take all the time she needed. They would not rush her to oblivion. She would sit on that hill peering into binoculars until her eyes were strained and her nose was pinched. There would have to be a weakness. And, if it took her the rest of her life, she would find it.
Once she had found their weakness, she would gather the forces needed. There must be like-minded individuals out there, like Sylvia, but with more power. More ability to put an end to this nightmare for good. Keisha would find these people, if it took her years, and it might
take her years, and she would show them the weakness she had found in her long solitude of surveillance, and they would help her make a plan that exploited that weakness ruthlessly, and then finally she would win, she would crush them, and maybe it would be decades later, but on that day she would come home and once more live in peace.
It was a long and difficult battle she was pledging herself to, but she saw the hard years before her and welcomed them as companions. Let them come. Let her age. Someday she would have her revenge.
She decided all this and it filled her with satisfaction and rage, and then she heard a slow knocking at her door. Like a wind-driven branch tapping inconsistently against a window. Looking out her upstairs window, she saw no one anywhere near the front door, but there was a note, nailed to the door.
Creeping downstairs, holding a heavy book as some token of a weapon, Keisha peered out the front window. No one in sight. She opened the door, tore the note off the nail, closed and locked the door again. The note was short and unequivocal and it made her throw out every plan she had made.
Instead that night she made several frantic phone calls and then, three days short of a month after coming home, she walked out into the darkness, got into her truck, and drove it out onto the street. She had spent no time preparing. She had taken nothing with her. She would only make one stop on the road ahead, to pick up a couple items that she wasn’t sure would be helpful. But she couldn’t second-guess herself. She was driving directly to Victorville, and she would face these monsters head-on. The note lay unfolded on her passenger seat, and each time she glanced at it, the spike of fear acted as fuel to keep her awake through the long night’s drive.