The Voices in Our Heads (3 page)

When she’d finished and pulled everything back together, she looked for a pile of leaves to hide the tissue under. Too dark. She got out her cell phone, aimed it at the forest floor, and hit the red button. The pale wash of light exposed dirt channeled and sloughed by past rains, twigs, patches of short weeds. She turned twice and spread her view, but saw nothing but a grainy flash of bare ground and foliation, and then it went dark. She hit it again and moved a bit south away from the path behind her, then a bit west, then a tad east; stands of intertwining elm, tufts of ragweed, snarls of thorn. There was a waist-high stone wall over run with hard vine and thistle, and the light went off once again.

Hell with this. She dropped the damp tissue there on the ground and turned back the way she had come. She was glancing up in the general direction she thought would yield the glow of their fire up on the hill, but the afterimage kept her in a pale, temporary blindness.

She bumped into something. Hard.

“Ow!” she said, and her voice deadened in the stillness around her. She felt at her forehead, already knotting with the bruise, and hit the button on her cell phone.

She had bumped into a birch tree, pressing close to its twin.

“No way,” she whispered, turning the opposite direction, trying not to run in the mild state of panic that was rising in her. The light went off, and she hit it back on, and before her was the upper end of the creek and an old walking bridge. Ashley let out a short scream and ran in the opposite direction, her thoughts a collection of confused jolts and starts that came together in bright red to remind her that the order and chronology and logistics were wrong, that according to the story she’d just heard, dead opposite the leaning birches was the floor of pine needles, then the lower part of the creek with the dark polished stones and the path beyond that led out of the forest. She was climbing and moaning, and gaining footholds in nettles of roots, and she was lucky her cell phone didn’t go tumbling off in the darkness.

She gained a crest of sorts, and she pressed on the light.

Before her was a flat square covered with briar and milkweed, and the petrified remains of a hitching post. The northwest corner of the carriage house had eroded and crumbled down to the height of about four feet, and the well still had ancient trails of bloodstains ghosted and shadowed down through the crevices.

Ashley about-faced immediately and tore down the path as fast as she was able. She slowed when the light cut off, and she hit it back on again, chest heaving.

She was back at the well, two feet from it now. She was crying, moaning, and she looked at the phone so she could call her mother, and there was a red bar across the old-fashioned rotary graphic claiming, “No Service.”

There was a sound, hollow and echoed, coming from deep inside the well. Ashley backed off a step, and the cell light cut off, and the sound before her grew there from within the bowels of the earth, and it was surfacing, and it was the furious sound of beating wings, and she hit the light button, and the stone structure erupted with a flood of barn swallows and sparrows, vomiting up into the air like hornets, and she fell back and struck her head upon the ground. Her last vision was one of inverted vertigo, the shapes above her fitting into the spaces between the branches and blotting out the night sky.

When she woke, she wondered how much of it was a dream, an illusion put upon her at the brink of consciousness. She blinked. She was lying down on what still felt like outdoor terrain; dirt was in her hair, but above her was a perfect sort of darkness, like velvet. Her breathing was in her ears, and she wondered if there were actually enough barn swallows and sparrows to fill every nook and cranny of the forest canopy, and she pawed along the ground and found a small stone. She sat up slowly and then underhanded the projectile as hard as she could. It hit something up there and plunked back down beside her.

She understood when the great eyes opened, straight above her, devil’s blood orange, coal furnaces slanted like oil drops, and then there was movement to the east and the west, and at the furthest periphery of her vision she saw stars cut off by the gradated edge of a wingspan that measured fifty feet at the least on both sides. The wings lifted, made gargantuan tent-shapes at the carpel joints, and then thrust down with a massive whooping sound as the Falcon of Penn Wood knifed in toward its prey.

May

J.F.K. is dead. Judy Garland, Osama bin Laden, King James, Chaucer, Hitler, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Nostradamus, all dead, like a trillion others. So am I, but don’t ask if I’ve seen your long-lost great uncle or anything. It’s not like that. There’s just foliage out here; vague images and dark outlines in the passing windows, a lot of roadway.

I drive a ’95 Nissan Sentra, and it’s an absolute shitbox. Members of my family tease me about it; the pitted back bumper, the broken driver’s side door handle that makes you lower the window and claw out to flip up the exterior release, the lack of a floor mat on the passenger side, the worn felt seat cushions marbled like old dough.

Oh, and don’t fret over the fact that I refer to my wife and kids in the present tense. I engage in this practice only because I think I am trapped in a moment that keeps being played out as if in live time, and my family is no more concerned about me than they were in terms of their “yesterday” or the day before that. And though I cannot be utterly sure in terms of hard proof, I am fairly certain that I am indeed deceased because I don’t get hungry anymore. Moreover, I can only recall universalities. I know that killing is wrong, that getting a girl pregnant before you marry her can put a real dent in your plans, that The Who were always better than the Beatles, if not in terms of cultural impact, then by a standard of showmanship and instrumentation, but I don’t remember what I had for dinner last night (if there is such a thing as an “evening” for me any longer). As I alluded to before, I know I have kids, but can’t recall how many. I know my wife is a pale brunette, but I can’t recollect her laugh. I know she has sun freckles dusted across her cleavage, a nondescript suburban ass, and Mediterranean cheekbones she accents with lavender blush, but I can’t remember her maiden name. My whole life, or past life if you will, has been reduced to wallet-sized black and whites, faded and out of order.

Thing is, I don’t miss it. My life. Because even though it seems I am stuck for eternity in this shitty charcoal gray Nissan, there is also a feeling about me (or in me) that I am in transit to a destination. Now, please don’t interpret that as something spiritual, as if I am on some cosmic pilgrimage to meet the Almighty. I mean that the feeling about me (or maybe imposed on me) is one like I am on my way to work, or the Crate and Barrel, or the driving range for a quick bucket, or the Lord & Taylor because I forgot to get Mother’s Day garbage, and it doesn’t feel anything like eternity. The window is open with my elbow up on the rim, I’m squinting slightly, and the sky is that pale broad canopy of the lightest blue that fills us all with hope and longing: leisure images of sailboats inching along sun spangled waters, traveling carnivals, picnics, barbecues, graduations, promises.

Here’s the thing. I can’t exit the vehicle without dire consequences.

The first time it happened was quite by accident, pardon the pun, when I rear-ended a big dude in a black Dodge Ram, silver diamond grid contractor boxes bolted to both sides of the back bed. I’d been cruising along and had just passed an area where the roadside sound barriers flanked the near spread of woodland like the walls of some majestic fortress, and I had sort of realized in the back of my mind that I hadn’t seen a road sign in awhile. It was the first inkling I’d had that something was odd about this journey, and the first hint that maybe I’d been on this road for longer than what I might have considered “normal.” But just as I started to focus on the fact that I’d been driving without noticing the passage of time, a green sign flashed by, bolted to an overpass, and I realized I’d missed another one, and then traffic before me had come to one of those sudden standstills, and I hit the brakes and screeched the tires.

I skidded, swerved a bit left, and plinked his back bumper. An insignificant little nudge, a Boston kiss.

“Fucking moron,” I heard. Couldn’t see him. The back window was tinted jet black, but I saw his arm from out the driver’s side window, flannel cut on an angle high up at the shoulder in a makeshift short sleeve, bicep hair, beef-bull forearm. The arm went straight up, and then his index finger curved. He jabbed the affair toward the area up and over the roof, toward the breakdown lane. It was an order and he wasn’t kidding. The car in front of him moved forward a bit, and he pulled over, tires making chock ’n’ gravel sounds. I followed, stopped, put it in park, kept it running. My heart was thudding a bit and my face was ashen, or at least it felt that way. And I couldn’t find my information in the glove compartment. It was a mess of papers, envelopes, expired insurance cards, parking passes, old directions printed off Mapquest, dashboard flyers to identify me as a parent for summer camp pickup, and I couldn’t even remember what I was supposed to be searching for in the first place. Did he need my owner’s card? My license? My Social Security number?

I reached out through the open window, flipped up the handle, and got out of the car.

Everything changed. I wasn’t on 476 or 95 or the Northeast Extension anymore, and it wasn’t spring. It wasn’t daytime either. It was late fall, you could tell because there was that smokehouse tang in the air as if someone had been burning leaves, and the trees all around me were bare, crooked, and spidery, making criss-cross shapes before a low moon. We were on a dirt road cutting through the forest, and the pickup had its blinkers on, leaning slightly right because he’d pulled into a bit of a ditch.

There was a rather brisk wind on my face, and I had not brought out anything from my glove compartment. I walked forward, sure I was going to get a lecture, or maybe even a punch in the eye. I was sweeping apologies together in my head, trying for the right flavor, and couldn’t decide between the half-jest “Sorry about that,” or the sincere “Hey friend, my fault, what can I do?” kind of thing.

His door opened, and a leg thrust itself out, work boot clapping down to the dirt, jeans with cuff-frays coming behind the heel. He pushed out, gripping the upper door rim, and he had to duck to get out because he was that big, and he was muttering,

“. . . learn to drive in a fucking girl’s room . . .”

and he stood and he was turning toward me, and he pulled at his crotch to move the underwear a bit and he had a chain going from his wallet to his belt, and a chest like a grizzly, and he was shaking his head as if he was going to teach this little bastard a lesson, and then he looked up and he saw me and his mouth dropped open. He slumped a bit, shoulders curling in and withering, knees knocking in toward each other as if he’d just been whacked in the nuts.

“Uhh . . .” he said. He fumbled back for the open doorway and almost missed, still staring at me, measuring my approach, scrambling sort of sideways for the sanctuary of the truck.

Then I saw it, what scared him. It was only for a split second, and then it was gone, there in his back window, jet black and kicking up gleam from the moon, and I only saw it out of the corner of my eye because I was so focused on his odd retreat, and it was only a flicker because it changed when he broke eye contact. For that one second, it was a creature from some haunted lagoon or lake or swamp, dead, damp vegetation draped over its skull as if dragged up from the bottom of dark waters, fingers long and pointed, water-rotted skin hanging off the bones in tatters and shreds.

It was my silhouette in his back window, and I know it was me because it was mimicking my advance, I could see it at the periphery of my vision, both hands extended out like “what the heck” in response to his cowardly crawl back into the cab, and he broke eye-lock, and I looked at the black outline directly, and it was just me in there now, short hair, pudgy face, I could even see my glasses with the moon reflected in the bottom rim of each lens.

I somehow knew that the rotted figure in the glass had been an image he’d picked up from some TV special he saw when he was six, after he snagged his sister Melinda’s Ranch Doritos and tiptoed down the basement even though it was past his bedtime and if Daddy caught him he’d warm up his behind something good. I saw the original horrific images washing over his face in pale lines and shadows just as clearly as I saw the flash forward to his wetting the bed for a year, lying in his own sour dampness with the comforter pulled over his head, breathing all cut and shallow through the little porthole he’d made for his mouth.

The pickup pulled off in a roar, kicking up dirt and road-grit.

I blinked, and it was spring again. I was doing a lazy 63 miles per hour and the sky opened before me in that panorama of oceanic crystallized blue. There was sloping acreage to the right, wheat or rye moving with the pattern of the breeze, and on the left there was a long meadow with antenna towers in the background. There were cars around me, but the occupants were forms, vague outlines, shapes.

And no road signs. When I concentrated, focused, and bore down, the way my Dad used to tell me to do in Little League when I couldn’t find the strike zone, I’d see something ahead, that familiar rectangular green with the white outline and the white block letters, and then I’d get distracted at the last minute by a deer crossing sign, or a plane flying low overhead, or a truck passing too close.

After some indeterminable amount of time, I pulled into a Howard Johnson’s to get directions, to get a handle on this, to convince myself that what happened with the contractor was illusory, and that I wasn’t the creature from the black lagoon.