Alice Isn't Dead

by Joseph Fink

  26

  Jerry Morrisette had been a medic in Vietnam, an alcoholic, a monk. He was hired by Caltrans to run a maintenance crew at the Crystal Springs Rest Area in 1990. He parked a decommissioned ambulance behind the bathroom and lived in it. At the time, the rest area, convenient to San Francisco, but also conveniently rural, was a popular site for drug trade and gang conflict.

  Jerry tended the grounds like they were his own garden, because that’s what they became. The bathrooms were always impeccable, with vases full of flowers on the sinks. Eventually he moved out of the ambulance into a Caltrans maintenance shed. To help keep crime away, he painted some of the parking spots with “Reserved for California Highway Patrol” and it worked. The drug trade and the gangs moved. Jerry went on living, unknown to the State of California, in a rest area he sometimes referred to as his monastery.

  A few years later, the state found out and tried to evict him. But the people of the Bay Area fought for him, and Jerry was made official. The state put up a trailer for him and he moved in, with two dogs, Butch and Spike. And the bathrooms were clean. And there were flowers in the vases.

  Keisha smelled the garlic from ten miles out. Gilroy, California, is where the nation’s garlic is grown, and the smell permeates the whole area. From Gilroy, Keisha followed the 101 through the town of Coyote and up toward San Francisco. About a half hour out she had to pee and laughed at the thought of trying to stop a truck in the city and find a toilet. As though an answer to that specific prayer, she saw a sign for the Crystal Springs Rest Area and flipped on her blinker.

  Even though the lot was full, the bathroom was empty. There was a glass vase full of fresh flowers on the sink. Keisha chose the stall in the back corner. She had read once that the first stall, most visible to the rest of the bathroom, is also always the cleanest because people choose it less. She didn’t know where she had read that, had no way of knowing if it was true, but had spent the rest of her life believing it.

  “What have you seen?” a voice asked from the stall next to her. The stall had definitely been empty when she had walked by it moments before. It wasn’t empty anymore. The voice sounded like an MP3 from the early 2000s. Flat and faint. “Two of you, like now,” the voice said, “but two of you. Later. Soon. Or already. I can’t tell.” The feet in the stall next to hers shifted. The person was sideways, facing the divider.

  “I’m sorry, I think you have me mixed up with, uh . . .” Keisha didn’t know how to finish that sentence, then realized she didn’t have to and so left the stall and headed for the sink. The stall next to hers was open, and empty. She stared at it. Someone had been in that empty stall. And as she thought that, the stall stopped being empty. A person in a hoodie, the hood pulled over their face.

  The person was slumped, looking at their feet, whispering to themselves. Then they were standing. Not that they stood, but that they were sitting and the next moment were standing. Then they were at the sink, running their hand over the flowers in the vase, still whispering. And then they were looking at Keisha. Their hands tearing at the petals. They murmured louder. Keisha sprinted for daylight like it was her next heartbeat, and as she did she was able to pick out one word from the whispers.

  “Praxis.”

  It started with the death of a dog. Spike died, and Jerry Morrisette started drinking again. His work suffered. He phoned a Caltrans supervisor who he believed had poisoned his dog and threatened him. Police came, his trailer was searched, three guns were found. Why did Jerry Morrisette have three guns? Well, he did live in a parking lot that once was frequented by drug trade and gangs. Or maybe it was because he lived in America, and so for better or worse, or worse, or worse, he could.

  The state began eviction proceedings. Insult of all insults, they didn’t let him clean his bathrooms anymore, brought in another worker to do it. The state even cast doubt on the most fundamental aspects of his story. Maybe there hadn’t been so much crime at the rest area before. Maybe Jerry Morrisette hadn’t done much more than be real good at cleaning. His single-handed transformation of a troubled place into a peaceful garden might have merely been good PR.

  An article from 2014 said he moved to a trailer in South San Francisco. As of that article, he had been given six months to live. Cancer, of course. Always cancer. There is no more sign of Jerry Morrisette on the internet after that. Presumably he died, but this story does not contain that certainty. These are the only facts that this story contains: there was a man who had gone to war and come back, and gone to religion and come back, and who turned a rest area into a place of worship for a few years, and then his dog died and it all ended. There’s no moral to this story, but there is a real human life.

  Keisha’s first instinct was to drive until the tank was empty. Instead she climbed a trail from the rest stop up the hill behind it. At the end of the trail was a statue of a man, bulbous and ill-formed, pointing at the highway like he was scolding the passing cars. The plaque said it was Father Junípero Serra. He was lumpy and squat with a drooping face, the shape of a human, but not put together right, and stuffed into skin that wasn’t the correct size. It was, she realized, a statue of a Thistle Man, pointing at all his potential victims in the passing cars. She descended the trail and, without letting herself hesitate, went back toward the bathroom.

  A family of laughing women from three different generations went in right before her. At least she wouldn’t be alone in there. But the bathroom was empty. The air felt different from the air outside. Much cooler. A smell like a slow river, somewhere between clear water and algae. There was a vase with flowers on the sink. She examined each stall. Empty. Movement behind her, and she turned to see a man with a long graying beard, wearing an orange safety vest, carefully arranging the flowers in the vase. “Excuse me,” he said, the details of his form lost in the dimness. He nodded slightly and left.

  She looked back at the stalls. The person in the hoodie was sitting in the middle stall, folded over at the waist, and whispering at the floor tiles.

  “Hello?” Keisha said.

  The whispering got faster, more urgent.

  “Hello?” she tried again.

  “You again,” said a voice to her left. The person in the hoodie was sitting on the sink, legs dangling. They were barefoot and their feet were filthy. “Or is this the first time?”

  “Who are you? What do you know about me?”

  “I am an oracle. In hidden places on the highways, in the bathrooms at gas stations, behind the painted scenery of roadside attractions, in vans parked far out in the grassland. There are oracles on these roads.”

  “You can see the future.”

  “You misunderstand me.”

  “You said you were an oracle. What did I misunderstand?”

  “You misunderstand me. You don’t understand what I am.”

  “Why don’t you help me understand?”

  “I want to help you,” they said. They were back in the stall, flopped backward against the tile like a person unconscious. “You are in danger.”

  Keisha snorted. “Some prediction.”

  “You don’t understand the danger,” they said.

  “There’s a war.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m caught between the sides.”

  “Yes.”

  “So that much I understand.”

  “You don’t even understand the most basic shape of it,” they said.

  Keisha asked the question that seemed to be the heart of all of it.

  “What is Praxis?”

  The person in the hoodie rose, hanging limply from their upstretched arms as though held on invisible hooks. “Many dead at the hands of Thistle.”

  “Yeah, they’re serial murderers.”

  “Killers without direction. Without purpose. Or so they’d like you to believe.”

  They came toward her, bare toes dragging on the pristine floor. When they were close, she could smell, unmistakable and overpowering, heather.

  “On
e of their murders holds a secret.”

  “Which murder?”

  “I can’t tell you,” they said.

  “Why can’t you tell me?”

  “Because,” the oracle said. “I didn’t. Because in this moment I don’t tell you. I am always here, and I am always not telling you. I’m sorry.” They put their hands on Keisha’s shoulders. “The pipes burst in the library in Oklahoma, but all is not lost. It wasn’t lost.”

  A library in Oklahoma. Burst pipes. There had been a mention of that in Officer Campbell’s emails. Keisha couldn’t remember the details.

  The oracle leaned close and Keisha saw for a moment, within the hood, two human eyes, and the wet-reflected light of tears falling from them.

  Laughter. One of the women from the family was coming out of a stall. The other two were at the sink. They were laughing about the brother of the woman in the stall, who had insisted on buying a number of paper maps rather than using his phone but then couldn’t even read the maps correctly. Keisha stood shivering against the sink. One of the other women side-eyed her but didn’t ask if she was ok. The three left the bathroom. There was no vase on the sink, no flowers. The floor was muddy and trod on, hadn’t been cleaned in a while. She stayed there a long time, trying to put some version of herself back together again, and then shaky, but her, she stepped out into the light.

  27

  Keisha had to pee again and there were no towns in this part of Death Valley. But there were also no cars. The dark clouds lingered. She pulled her truck onto the muddy shoulder. It was strange, squatting by this highway, and looking for miles into the distance, and seeing no one. She enjoyed the absolute silence of distance. She was alone here.

  It was in this area that Cynthia O’Brien’s body was found. It wasn’t where she lived, but she was murdered on vacation, while staying at one of the hotels in the national park. Later her papers would be moved to a library near Tulsa, where they were destroyed by a burst pipe, and then asked after by Officer Campbell. Keisha had no idea if this was the murder that the oracle had meant, and if the place where the murder had happened held any significance at all, but still she had come. Here she was, trying to approach the mystery.

  Not far away, Officer Floor watched. She had been following Keisha since the Salton Sea. Here there were no towns, no watchers to watch her watching. Pull a little off the road, cut the lights, and a person becomes invisible. To take a few uncertain years from someone’s life, is that so much of a crime? What are those years worth, and would Keisha have even gotten them anyway? Isn’t it better to die in a purposeful, clear way than to stagger on until a superfluous organ starts making its cells wrong?

  Of course, the officer might choose to not even provide the generosity of a graceful death. How humiliating, for instance, to die peeing in the dirt. But instead she lay back on the hood of her car, enjoying its warmth, and looking up at a sky promising rain, a sky as gray and blank as slate. A sky about to break into violence.

  The officer closed her eyes and waited.

  If she had a name, her name was Thistle. But she had no name. There was no separating her from Thistle. She and it were born in the same instant. Even she could not explain her history. Her first memory was of clawing out of mud after a long rain, but perhaps that was not her first birth. There may have been earlier births in simpler forms that she does not remember. Back then she didn’t need to look human and so she didn’t. She took all sorts of forms: a bird of prey with long white feathers, a burrowing creature with long white teeth, a plant with thorns that broke off and putrefied in the flesh. Her name and form did not interest her. What interested her was the effect she could have on the world.

  Once humans came, she mimicked them, seeing in them a unique opportunity to cause new pain. It is difficult to track her history once she blended in with people. Which were acts of isolated human cruelty, and which were influenced by her whispering?

  In 1873, a traveling doctor and salesman of cure-all medicine arrived in the town of Okmulgee, Oklahoma. The sign on his wagon said thistle modern miracles of health! He spoke and sold in town for a few days and moved on. His assistant, a small woman who introduced herself variously as Miss Wheel and Miss Night, took the coins and offered in exchange vials of a dark blue and bitter medicine. Three weeks later, everyone who had tried the medicine died of a lingering and painful condition that manifested first as a red bulging in the skin and then incurably infected the brain. The town doctor died himself before he could give an educated opinion of the plague, having disbelieved in the medicine but having sampled it for his own edification, and by the time another doctor was allowed to see the bodies, they had disintegrated into a marshy sponge that smelled peppery and sour.

  The inconsistently named officer, who in this moment called herself Officer Arm, continued after Keisha. Past the larger towns were the mining towns, a few houses and a school attached to a quarry, and a processing plant. It was dusk and the plants were still churning. Busy workers, for now, until their jobs went too. Everyone’s jobs are expendable, except the officer’s. That kind of violent hunger is always in demand. She could sleep a thousand years and wake up to a world that needed her.

  A man stopped his car to take a picture. The expanse was majestic. The officer stopped too. She put him into the bushes and left him there. Then she got in his car and pulled it back on the road. Always a good idea to switch vehicles.

  She could taste bitter on the tip of her tongue and she tried to hold it there. Tried to make the bitter taste linger. There was a coyote up ahead. The coyote was waiting for the officer’s approaching car, standing in the middle of the road, calm. The officer slowed her car and held the animal’s brown eyes with her own, and they understood each other. Low creatures, taking blood where they could, as natural as the salt flats, as natural as a rock face. They kept quiet eye contact for several minutes. When people saw her, they tended to look away. They recognized that she was not something they wanted to know. But the animal met her gaze blankly. The officer winked and told the coyote that she needed to get back to her own prey, as she was sure the coyote needed to get back to hers. As she drove away, the coyote watched, unmoving.

  1901. Chicago. Thirteen missing children over one summer. Disappearances traced to a new shop. Thistle Goods and Butchering. Staff and owners disappeared before questioning but were described by neighbors as a crew of oddly shaped men acting under the orders of a small, frail woman who called herself Madam Tile. The evidence found in the shop required the complete demolition of the structure, as the horrors there made it beyond rehabilitation.

  1955. Missoula. The only synagogue in town burned down by a group of men with faces that no one would admit they recognized as their friends and neighbors. A federal investigation of the crime was cursory, and most of the witnesses were deemed unreliable due to their repeated insistence that a woman was seen walking through the flames in the building, passing through the heat and singing. The case was closed with little investigation. Most of the Jewish community moved away. People didn’t talk about the burning much, and soon even the witnesses wouldn’t say that they had been there. Many saw the woman from the fire again and again, drinking in local bars, talking in low tones with groups of local men.

  Most of the buildings in Death Valley Junction are still in ruins. A former dormitory for employees at the borax mines. Then in 1967, a ballet dancer named Marta Becket broke down in the town and stumbled on a small abandoned theater that the employees once used as a community room. She moved from New York City to this town, where she and her husband were most of the population, and she began ballet shows in the desert three times a week. Many performances, no one would show up, and so over the years she painted an audience on the inside of the theater, so that there would always be someone watching. She died in 2017, but there is still a ballet dancer who does a weekly show to guests at the attached hotel.

  Cynthia O’Brien’s body was found five miles from town, on a highway leading to the nea
rest casino. Keisha drove out to the spot, or as near as she could figure it. It looked like any other spot on the road. Miles away, a cloud cast a shadow directly down onto a low round hill, and to Keisha it looked perfect, like a landscape painting. She wasn’t used to being able to see this far in the distance. She stood in the place where Cynthia was found, or where she thought Cynthia was found, and then she drove away, not knowing more than she had known before.

  Keisha stayed at the hotel by Marta’s theater, with its musty carpet and Marta’s paintings on the wall. There was a café that was only open a couple days a week but was surprisingly good. She didn’t know how they made money with a restaurant open only two days a week in the middle of nowhere. But she felt grateful for people who come to places like this and do things like this: dance, and make food for strangers. Good people deserve good things.

  The officer curled up inside one of the ruins of the town. She enjoyed how cold it got at night. It was time for her to switch cars again, so when a tourist couple pulled into the unlit lot, she helped herself to them and then to their vehicle. She felt grateful for people who come to places like this.

  A hundred years ago, and fifty years ago, and ten years ago. “Perhaps we can help each other,” said the woman with many names, to the government official who frowned. He didn’t ask how she could help him. He knew. There were always troublemakers. People who didn’t go with the program. Communists. Civil rights agitators. Even plain old liberals. A government can only do so much directly against these degenerates without risking the title of democracy. But a band of serial killers with this woman at the heart of them? They could cause all sorts of useful chaos. “Perhaps we can help each other,” said the woman with many names, and the government official felt his skin crawl, but he nodded. “Yes, I think we can.” She smiled. She had this conversation with many government officials, over many years, and they always said yes. No one could resist the terrible freedom she offered.