The Absence of Sparrows

by Kurt Kirchmeier

  “Is that really a good idea?” asked Mom. “I mean, do we even want to know?”

  “I think we have to know,” Dad replied. “Whether we want to or not.”

  “Turn it up,” said Pete.

  Five minutes went by, then ten, and finally twenty, but there was still no word from the hypnotist. People began to wonder if something had gone wrong during the session. They suggested that the police should go in to check.

  I chewed my fingernails to the quick—a nervous habit of mine—but it didn’t help. My whole body thrummed with anticipation. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, exactly, but I figured it would have to be big.

  The hypnotist we were waiting for was apparently a famous one who traveled all over the world using hypnotism to help people get over their fears. I didn’t recognize his name at all (Dr. Norman Whitcombe), but from the picture they showed of him, his face seemed sort of familiar. He had a small chin and wore wire-rimmed spectacles, and when he finally came out of the high-rise building where he had done the regression, he was immediately swarmed by the media, who all started shouting different questions at the same time.

  Dr. Whitcombe just stood there for a moment, blinking his beady eyes and waiting for the noise to settle, which it eventually did, but not before one final question rang out above all the rest: “Did he say anything?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Whitcombe replied, “he spoke.”

  There was another eruption of noise and a fresh new volley of questions. They all wanted to know what he’d said.

  “He said a number of things,” the doctor began. “But I think it’s important for us to understand that there may have been hallucinations or dreams, and that some of the things he said may not be—and probably aren’t, for that matter—rooted in reality.”

  The reporters were growing impatient. They wanted answers, not preamble. “Just tell us!” one of them yelled.

  “Well,” the doctor said uncertainly, adjusting his spectacles, “he appears to have memories of some other existence. A rather grim existence. He whispered of rivers of tar and of trees that leak blood like sap.”

  A stunned silence fell over the crowd.

  Dr. Whitcombe cleared his throat and continued. “As I was trying to say, this imagery may have been influenced by dreams or hallucinations. At this point, it’s impossible for me to say with any degree of certainty. Now, if you’ll raise your hands, I’ll try to get to as many questions as I can.”

  Every hand went up. Dr. Whitcombe pointed to a pretty reporter in a bright red blouse. “Yes?”

  “Do you think it’s possible that he may have actually been somewhere else? This grim place you mentioned?”

  “It’s possible,” Dr. Whitcombe replied. “Or part of him, at least. His consciousness maybe, or his soul. Please keep in mind that this is pure speculation, based on answers that were largely unintelligible.” He pointed to a different reporter and said, “You.”

  “What do you mean by unintelligible?” the man asked.

  “Just that,” the doctor replied. “The patient wavered between moments of brief lucidity and total recalcitrance. Much of what he said was gibberish. However, there were a few revealing sentences—fragmentary, mind you, but revealing. It’s also clear to me that the patient has suffered a severe trauma. He was very confused.”

  “Confused about what?” another reporter asked without being called on.

  “Everything,” the doctor replied. “He moved his tongue around in his mouth as if he were no longer accustomed to having one, and at one point he failed to recognize his own hands. When I asked him what seemed unfamiliar about them, he blurted out ‘small’ and ‘fleshy.’ He then very clearly asked me what had become of all his scales.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the closest reporter, looking bewildered, “but did you say scales? Like on a snake, or…?”

  “That’s correct,” Dr. Whitcombe replied. “Unfortunately, the patient would elucidate no further.”

  Pete and I shared a look, then simultaneously turned our gazes on Mom, who had lost all color in her face.

  “He must be lying,” she said.

  Dr. Norman Whitcombe looked genuine to me, though, and more than that, he seemed genuinely troubled at having to be the one to share the unsettling news. Nevertheless, many of the reporters appeared to agree with Mom. They started asking about Dr. Whitcombe’s methods instead of his results. Some of them even went so far as to suggest that this whole endeavor must be a hoax, a publicity stunt of the very worst kind.

  “I assure you it’s not,” Dr. Whitcombe tried to tell them, but now that the idea had been planted, it seemed to take root.

  “I bet the regression didn’t even work!” said one of them.

  “How dare you!” said another.

  Sensing a dangerous shift, Norman Whitcombe began to back away. I think he was just about to turn and run when someone who apparently did believe him asked: “How is the patient now?”

  “The same as before the regression,” the doctor replied. “Unreachable.”

  It was the last thing he would say on the matter.

  Unreachable. The word stuck with me. It seemed to imply that something had either been lost or left behind, perhaps permanently.

  Pete was stuck on a different word, though.

  “Scales,” he said, with a mixture of wonder and fear. He looked down at his own hands then, as if trying to imagine what that would look like.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Mom. “How could that be?”

  Dad just shook his head, as if he was past the point of trying to make sense of anything.

  I didn’t know what to think, but my mind kept going back to that Polaroid photo, to that eerie human-shaped figure, fuzzy as if seen through a fog, or perhaps through the curtain separating this reality from a different one.

  Maybe the change in the sky signaled a sort of convergence, an overlapping of worlds that left us vulnerable. What if Dr. Whitcombe was right when he said that it might have been his patient’s soul that had traveled somewhere else? I’d always thought that our souls couldn’t leave our bodies unless we died, but maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe we just needed to be put in a state that was like death. Maybe then our souls would come unglued. Maybe then they could be taken.

  I imagined the blurry photograph figure as a stealer of souls, a scale-covered demon exploiting some cosmic loophole that Satan had somehow stumbled upon and was now taking advantage of. Maybe the world converging with ours was hell itself.

  I shuddered at the thought, then told myself I was being stupid, and that my imagination was just running away on me (as it often did). The idea sort of made sense, though. As much as anything else did.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Two more days passed, making it four since Uncle Dean had come down from the roof. Constable Sheery conducted a census throughout town and, according to him, thirty-six people turned to glass at the same time as Uncle Dean. Twenty-five of them were still solid and whole, but the rest had all since shattered. None had come back to their bodies.

  Constable Sheery said that the youngest of them was only seventeen. This was one year older than the youngest person known to have turned to glass so far. Apparently kids were safe from it; however, nobody really knew why. Pete said that the guy on the radio believed it was because young people were still too innocent and pure, that they hadn’t yet been weakened by “accumulated sin,” which I guess just meant that they hadn’t done enough bad things yet, although most of the adults I knew weren’t bad either. Maybe small sins counted, too, things like little white lies and occasional moments of selfishness and greed. Maybe it all added up to something bigger.

  I wasn’t sure what to believe. I thought of the Messam twins and wondered if maybe they were vulnerable, too, in spite of their age. I hoped so, otherwise the whole planet might end up becoming like that island in Lord of the Flies, with guys like Lars and Lester ruling the roost. I didn’t like my odds in a world like that. Conch shell or no conch s
hell, I doubted anyone would have much use for the opinion of an eleven-year-old birder.

  “Pastor Nolan is holding a special service this Sunday,” Dad told us. “He’s going to be remembering everyone who has shattered in Griever’s Mill.”

  “Like a funeral?” I asked him.

  “Sort of,” said Dad.

  “Is he gonna talk about Uncle Dean?”

  Dad nodded. The bags under his eyes were getting darker, and I knew that he hadn’t been sleeping much, because I hadn’t heard him snoring. His back was bugging him, too, probably from all the wood-chopping he’d been doing. I thought Pete had gotten carried away with the ax a few days before, but that was nothing compared to Dad. Twice now he’d been out there for hours at a time, splitting logs as if his life depended on it, the neighborhood echoing with every impact of metal on wood. Mom was worried about him, that he was going to give himself a heart attack.

  “We’ll probably be the only ones there,” said Pete. At church, he meant.

  Lots of people in town had begun to leave, some with trucks and trailers crammed to capacity, and others with only their cars and whatever they could fit inside them and on their roofs, precarious towers of overstuffed luggage and hastily packed boxes, tied down with so many bungee cords and bright orange ratchet straps.

  “Where are they going?” I had asked Dad.

  “To be with friends and family,” Dad had replied. “While they still have the gas to get to them.”

  Pete had another theory, though. “They think they’ll be safer away from town, for when things get worse.”

  “Worse how?” I asked him.

  “Food shortages,” he said. “It’s already happening in some places. It’s gonna be every man for himself.”

  “No it isn’t,” said Dad with a scowl of disapproval.

  Pete shrugged as if to say that he knew differently, which maybe he did. He’d been listening to his radio pretty much nonstop and was probably sleeping even less than Dad was.

  “It doesn’t matter who will or won’t be there,” Dad continued. “We’re going to put on our Sunday best and give thanks to the Lord just like always.”

  “Thanks for what?” Pete asked.

  Pete had never been fond of church and had never made much effort in hiding it either. I felt the same a lot of the time—especially on sunny mornings when I could be watching birds or riding my bike instead—but I knew that it was important to Dad, so I tried not to complain.

  “For accepting your uncle Dean into heaven,” said Mom as she walked into the room.

  That shut Pete up pretty much instantly.

  “I miss him,” I said into the silence that followed. I kept remembering how he was always adjusting his ball cap and how the smell of the garage clung to him no matter where he went, an oddly comforting mixture of metal and grease.

  “We all do, Ben,” Dad told me. “We all do.” He smiled a sad sort of smile, then swallowed hard and blinked his eyes a few times, fighting off tears. He cleared his throat. “I’m going to go over to his garage and grab a few things,” he said. “I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

  It was usually a given that when Dad went anywhere, Pete would ask if he could go with him, but not today. Pete didn’t say anything at all. I think he just wanted to get back to his radio. I offered to go, but Dad shook his head.

  “I think I’ll just go on my own this time, okay, champ?”

  “Okay,” I replied. It occurred to me then that maybe Dad needed some time on his own to deal with his pain, to let it out where no one could see him. I think Mom realized that, too, because she let him go without an argument, after which she returned to her regular spot at the kitchen window, where it seemed she could stand indefinitely without moving or speaking. I wanted to believe that she was just watching birds, but I suspected that she wasn’t really watching anything at all. She was just staring, at everything and nothing all at once.

  As expected, Pete returned to our room and his whispering speaker, leaving me alone on the living room floor, in front of a muted TV that I was starting to hate.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was closer to two hours before Dad got back. His eyes were red and his shoulders slumped, and he looked like a man defeated.

  Among the things he’d brought back with him were a big toolbox and a crate full of Uncle Dean’s personal things, clothes and knickknacks and whatnot. He’d also hauled over all the wood from behind the garage, where Uncle Dean had a firepit and two long benches that he and Dad and some of their friends used to sit on while drinking beer and talking about sports and fishing and who knows what else (probably women). Pete and I weren’t allowed there. The firepit area had always been an adult-only zone.

  “There are work gloves on the backseat,” Dad told Pete and me. “You can help me unload this.”

  Mom stood in the driveway with her arms crossed. “I think we have enough wood already, don’t we?”

  “Not if we end up having to burn it all winter,” Dad replied.

  “But it’s still summer.”

  “And I might not be here come fall,” Dad said bluntly.

  “Don’t say that!” Mom scolded him, as if bringing it up was to tempt fate.

  “It’s just the truth, Jane.”

  It was also true that Mom might be gone by then, too.

  “I don’t care if it’s the truth,” said Mom. “I don’t want you talking like that.”

  Dad looked at her for a second but didn’t say anything. He lowered a particularly large chunk of wood down to Pete. “Careful with this one,” he said. “It’s heavy.”

  “I got it,” Pete assured him. He wavered a bit once the weight was fully in his arms, but then readjusted his grip and seemed okay.

  “Smaller piece, please,” I said. I knew I wasn’t strong and saw little point in trying to prove otherwise.

  “Here,” said Dad. “And don’t bother piling them neatly. I’m going to chop them all right away.”

  “You haven’t even had lunch yet,” said Mom. It was just after one.

  “I had a beer and some jerky at the garage,” said Dad.

  Uncle Dean had loved beef jerky and always kept some of it around. I think the only thing he loved more was homemade shepherd’s pie. He came over whenever Mom made it and would sometimes park himself at the table an hour or more in advance, as if supper were a concert that he had to wait in line to get tickets for. I remembered coming home from school one day to find him sitting there with a fork in one hand and a knife in the other, and the food not even in the oven yet. Being there early was just his way of showing his appreciation. That’s the kind of man Uncle Dean had been.

  Mom looked like she might say something else, but instead just turned and went back in the house. Dad watched her go, a weird tension left hanging in the air. Pete and I stayed to help finish unloading, and then we went inside as well. A few minutes later, Dad had the ax in his hand and a log on the chopping block. He stood there for a moment just staring at it, as if he was no longer sure he had the strength to bother. His shoulders rose as he took a deep breath, then lowered as he let it out slow. He did this a couple more times, and then he began.

  He went easy to start with, but it wasn’t long before he was moving at a frenzied pace, and even then he kept trying to go faster and swing even harder, as if there were some sort of threshold he needed to cross, a way of erasing the past and fixing the future through sheer exhaustion. He looked possessed.

  Mom stood in the doorway, looking out at him and shaking her head as if to say, Here we go again.

  It was different this time, though. He wasn’t just getting it all out like a boxer at a body bag, channeling his stress through the head of an ax instead of his fists; he seemed desperate now. Panicked, almost.

  I think we all sensed this change and that’s why we all kept watching, from the first log until the last, which Dad placed on the block before pausing and looking around in sudden confusion, realizing only then that there wasn’t any
wood left for him to annihilate.

  He roared in frustration as he brought the ax down one last time, then dropped to his knees and started sobbing, his whole body shaking from the force of it.

  “Dad!” I yelled, pressing my hand to the glass of the window.

  Mom rushed out to him, calling his name. She dropped down beside him and pulled him close to her, telling him, “It’s okay. Just let it all out.”

  Pete looked utterly devastated, like he’d just watched Superman himself plummet out of the sky and into the earth like a mortal man. As much as they were always getting under each other’s skin, there was no one in the world who Pete revered more than Dad.

  That moment was a turning point for Pete. Afterward, he would no longer disagree just to be disagreeable, but rather because he no longer had the faith in Dad that he once had, and because he now felt a quiet resentment for having seen something that he felt like no son should ever have to see in his father: weakness.

  It didn’t matter that the moment would last only minutes, and that Dad would stand up just as tall and straight as he’d ever stood before. The bricks had already been set in my brother’s psyche. There was no going back.

  Pete left the window and went upstairs.

  “Look what you did to your hands,” said Mom.

  Dad blinked like a man fresh from a trance. His palms were bloody where he’d torn open calluses. The pain seemed to hit him belatedly. He winced and clenched both hands to fists.

  Mom told him to come inside and clean himself up. He kept his boots on and went straight to the kitchen sink, his whole body tensing as hot water entered the cuts. He gritted his teeth, and probably bit his tongue to keep from swearing.

  “Honestly,” Mom said, shaking her head in admonishment.

  By the time Dad toweled his hands off, he seemed wholly himself again, as if the inner storm that had been raging for days had finally blown itself out. All it took was a moment of pure surrender. He regarded me where I was sitting.