After James (7 page)

“He wouldn't come in. He held still for food. I tied him. Maybe the barn. We'll look in there.”

Ali was still catching up. Crooner had been here but wasn't. Had Shoad made the stag and how and why was it absent from Denise's account? Where had the day landed her? Where was the forge?

Shoad was in the rearview, walking to the barn. Something shivered in the side window and there it was again, a wire of lightning in the black distance.

She had a memory of crossing the yard, trailing Shoad, but no sense she'd actually done it. She'd been sitting in the truck,
looking at the collar, and the next second she was standing before the barn. It stood in a rock-salt light. A concrete floor extended past the walls. The wood looked reclaimed, old, mismatched, only partly painted, with fresh gleaming galvanized nailheads. The planed timber boards joined truly. A pile of ash and scorched wood sat beyond the far end.

The swinging door was ajar. Shoad pulled it open and hit the lights and they stepped into the space. The barn was not a barn. There were no animals—Crooner wasn't here either—or stalls, no hayloft, no sawdust and straw on the floor. They stood in a workshop that gave way to a sort of gallery. The sculptures were wood and bone, copper, clay, forged metal. There must have been thirty or forty. The figures were human or nearly so, emerging from some chaos or returning to it, in agony. Their faces contorted in sole notes of pain. Air ducts led to a far wall and a huge fan high up that turned slowly and strobed the figures in light and shadow so that they seemed in motion. They were mismatched in size and height, the larger, standing ones maybe seven feet, others only three or four. Some were on their hands and knees, some lying on their sides. In many the bones were half-exposed, partial skulls, rib cages made from wood or curving antlers.

“Who are they?”

“I don't know. I dream them.”

There were men and women, two children she could see. He said they weren't separate pieces. He called the whole thing Descendant.

She said something she herself didn't hear, could not recover. Then another question.

“What's happening to them?”

“I don't know. The same thing happens to all. Has happened or will happen soon.”

The words led her to one clear thought. There was something monstrous about Shoad—Denise was right—but in showing her these creations, he wanted Ali to know it. What else she needed to know, to find a way of knowing, was if the monstrous was
of
him, of his nature, or only
in
him, as it might be in anyone under the common burden of those awake to certain truths. There was some receding shadow upon the edge of the distinction. He wanted her to see that truly monstrous things are real, even when they're not.

“They began after the accident,” he said. “A road in the Black Forest. I hit a deer. Then came reconstruction. My face. I learned to speak again.”

He said that before the accident he was a sculptor of abstract forms, “a sculptor of ideas,” but that after the weeks in the hospital, with each successive surgery, each anaesthetized dropping-off, he became ever more crazed with the forms of living things. The life survived into the sculptures. She'd never seen anything like them.

“You have these lives in you,” he said. “These people. You know them.”

“I've never dreamt about these people.”

“They're strangers you recognize.”

He presumed to know her forgotten dreams or unadmitted fears. She recognized the pieces, not as sculptures but as living-dying things. Moment to moment she was getting no more used to looking at them. They seemed about to turn
their eyes to her. The standing and crawling ones stirred in perpetual advance. Here was a problem to record, that if the drug expanded an imagination already apprehensive, it could, in so many words, disturb you to death. But the record didn't matter now. The record was well past mattering.

She needed out and said so. For a second it seemed he might touch her, take her by the arm, but then he presented his back and he was leading her into the yard. She saw her footprints in approach as they returned the way they had come, to the truck and past it, over new ground, onward to the house.

H
e came and went, making tea on a woodstove.

They were in a large central room with a stone fireplace full of embers. She was sunk into an armchair. The handle of the knife on her belt pressed on the ball of her hip.

He put two cups on a coffee table and sat opposite her.

All day, little rounded stories had simply come to her, alive, dragonflies lit on the hand, each with its colour and engine. Now she heard Shoad's. He said he'd been living in France and Spain for a summer, looking at prehistoric cave art. There'd been the deer through the windshield in Germany, a return home, here, a place he'd moved to years ago to be alone with his work.

From the end of the couch he angled himself at her across the shared table, regarding her from just above his high knees, one of which he'd grab to pull himself forward whenever he took a sip from his cup. She found herself refining her sense of his manner of speech. The words and their sounds came
slanting across the gaps of dysarthria or aphasia, the sentences neurotraumatically clipped. Their compression had force. She had never understood before the thinness of conjunctions.

The sky was beginning to clear. He studied the trapezoid of sunlight that had narrowed and hardened around them. The set of his eyes, the indentations half-rhymed, rhymed again with the slight asymmetry of features not fully repaired. His face and his interest in cave art made her think of a photo on the wall of her father's study, a shot of the earliest known artwork, a once-headless human statue carved from a mammoth tusk thirty-some thousand years ago. It was discovered at the onset of World War II in a cave in southern Germany. After the war, other pieces were found, fitted together, completing the head. It turned out to be that of a lion. The earliest artwork was a hybrid, a kind of monster. The repair lines were there in the picture, somehow both ancient and new.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

She answered the usual way, as if he'd asked a different question. She said she was a researcher at a pharmaceutical company. Her training was in genetic science, her thing now was the brain. She used the word
hiatus
with a vague but present sense of its inaccuracy. He sat there across from her, point-blank. The hiatus had brought her here. She found herself mentioning her father.

“He's coming to visit,” she said. The transparency of the lie seemed of no concern to him. “He'll arrive tonight. I left him a note letting him know I might be here.”

In the pause he took in her deception. It was as if he could take hold of her lies and pull her closer with them.

“You don't know the Dahls,” he said. “You came after they left.”

“We spoke by phone. Quite a bit, actually. How well do you know them?”

She tried not to seem to be gauging him. He no longer looked away from her. The muddled expressions of his speech and face could retract, she saw, leaving a plain, unsettling regard.

“Stefan is a friend. He came here to help. After the accident.”

The wind sounded, beating the house. Beyond a skylight a fleet of dime-edged clouds shot by, and a sensation formed as if her brain were growing down her neck, through her shoulders and arms. The effect was of extending the feeling of normal thought, its housing in the skull, into new territories. Was she thinking faster, better? Shoad's few words opened in all directions.

“His wife is sick,” he said. “She sees demons.”

Stefan had been checking in on Shoad's house while he was in Europe. After his return he visited every second day, in duty, a good Christian neighbour. Shoad was still physically weak and Stefan helped around the yard. Stefan had bought a donkey from a rescue service and sponsored its boarding at a stables, and he suggested it might make dependable company. He knew that Shoad's prescribed therapy included writing in a journal and speaking aloud, and reasoned that it would give him a set of ears to talk to. Together they built a
stall in the barn and closed it off from the workshop, repaired an old fence that marked the overgrown pasture, arranged for feed deliveries. Stefan collected Aurelius, a large-headed thing with huge black eyes in a face like a furred instrument case. Together they groomed and dewormed the animal, which took to following Shoad around the pasture and watching him from the fenceline, braying in joy or aggrievement. After sunset Shoad would eat his supper in the barn with Aurelius, telling him about his life, things no one knew, and about sculpture and the human arts. He understood that the animal was lonely, and he would either have to get another donkey or return Aurelius to the stables.

Stefan came by with materials for Shoad's work. He had begun the stag sculpture, made of antlers and false antlers he constructed from wood, clay, and epoxy. If Shoad was still at work when he arrived Stefan would visit Aurelius or occupy himself with work in the yard. He never left without speaking. Shoad came to realize that Stefan needed someone to talk to about Denise, someone he could trust. She had started into a delusional phase and seemed to be off her meds, though she wouldn't admit to not taking them. Shoad suggested he bring her to visit Aurelius. Shoad had been to their place three or four times since moving here, though not since the accident, and Denise had asked about his life, his sculptures. Though he kept to himself and didn't mind being thought of as the local outsider, the Dahls had no investment in feeling apart from him, and now it was hard to reconcile his memory of Denise with the woman Stefan was describing.

The next day they arrived. He watched them from the picture window. She wore a long denim shirt, untucked, over a billowing, rose-patterned skirt with a crooked, scissored hem. She looked around the yard and seemed to fix on the weather vane. Shoad met them at the door and stepped back for them to enter but Denise would not come forward. She said nothing at the sight of him, said nothing to Stefan when he asked her what was wrong. Shoad offered her something to drink. She went back to the car and wouldn't get out.

A few days later the stories began, relayed by Stefan, of a Russian bride named Irina.

Stefan now devoted his time to Denise, and Shoad was left with Aurelius and an isolation he was used to, had sought most of his life. As if to produce company, his dreams became peopled with figures he recognized as those who'd come to him in the drugged sleeps around his surgeries. He had half-forgotten them but now they returned and asked to be given material form. He began to sketch them, even as he worked on the stag. Rather than visit, Stefan called the house. He said less and less until the only things between them became unspoken. In time the calls stopped.

Shoad had built the stag on a base that sat atop skids. He hauled it with his tractor to the front of the yard. He couldn't say why he'd made it or why he'd positioned it there but it somehow displaced the turbulence he felt at the memory of the accident and its aftermath. He and the animal had happened to each other, a chance intersection of two beings that only one had survived. Their coming together had changed him wholly, not just his ways of saying but of seeing too. His
work was filling with animal forms, simple enough, and with something inside them not otherwise seen. There was no way to say this even before the accident, and the way of saying it now was through the pieces themselves. His old works had been stillborn.

“The new ones are alive. They carry death inside them.”

So he said, or seemed to say. His words were too simple for their volume of meaning. He barely spoke and yet the story came to her whole. In the variable speeds of the mind, her perception outran time. Had he said all this, and so willingly, or had he sketched a story that Alph had remade in great detail? She tried to stop listening. As Shoad sat before her, speaking, memories glinted and disappeared. A neighbour's mean boxer tied to a sapling. Pigeons wheeling over rooftops of some foreign city. She could see them there against the wall. Her father, young, watching TV in a motel room chair.

Shoad took a sip and continued.

Stefan drove into the yard. He stepped from his car absent of the usual forced good cheer through which he tried to convince himself he occupied some world different from the one he stood in. Even in his posture he seemed troubled. Months ago, when he'd first visited after the accident, Stefan had neither reacted to Shoad's appearance nor pretended not to notice it. It was as if Shoad's face was of no matter to him, as if he'd seen real monstrosity and this wasn't it. Now some distance, Denise, had formed between that Stefan and this one.

They walked to the pasture and said hello to Aurelius. Stefan looked confused, as if unsure of why he'd come. His movements were muted. He declined an invitation to the house. Shoad described his renovation plans. He referenced the walls Stefan would know, walls Shoad intended to knock out. He described the ironwood posts he'd procured to buttress the beams, the position of the fireplace he'd build. Shoad led him around the property, pointing out the work he'd done. A newly mounted yard light, a new well cover. He walked him to a stand of sumac, the deadwood cleaned out and piled in the open, in need of burning. Together they heaped the wood into a pyre. They gathered hoes and blankets from the barn and gasoline from the machine shed and poured it onto the pile. Shoad lit a match and tossed it. The wood fired in a great convulsion and they stood before it and Stefan began to talk. He said fire was where it all began, the troubles Shoad had no doubt suspected. He had always known his wife was holy but she was prone to visions that were not, or so he believed. It was natural for him to reject the visions. They isolated her from him. He felt they stood against him, so his position was determined. Stefan didn't tell Denise's story so much as confess the ways in which it confounded him in a series of unconnected pronouncements about fire and visions and the pitch and length of strange Russian vowels. Shoad couldn't follow him but felt he shouldn't interrupt. It was as if Stefan were speaking neither to him nor to himself but to a third party unknown between them.

Because of her illness, Stefan said, they had backed out of a planned African mission in the winter.

“I can't reason with her about her Russian friend,” said Stefan. From his pants pocket he produced a necklace with a locket. “She said her friend gave her this. I've never seen it before. Denise doesn't wear jewellery.” He handed it over. “You see those words there, on the clasp?” Shoad could see there were faded characters or numbers barely impressed on the cheap metal but couldn't make them out. “I guess you don't read Russian.”

“Never made a study.”

“I looked at the words under a magnifying glass. They look maybe Russian.” There were no words on the locket itself. It was empty. “When we bought the place there were all sorts of things that would just turn up. One time in the walls I found insulation cinched around a water pipe with an old wristwatch. Maybe this is something like that. Maybe she found it in the walls.”

Though Shoad felt the heat on his face and through his clothes, Stefan put the blanket over his shoulders and cut a figure in the light, holding his hoe like a staff.

“My wife has visions, Clayton. She's unstable but she has the greater faith. I wait for revelation but it doesn't come to me, maybe because I fear it. And so I sift through fallen things looking for evidence. I try to fill my heart with goodness but I don't know how to be open to revelation. I believe in it, I think I do, but it doesn't choose me.” He seemed to be working toward a question he couldn't find words for. Shoad imagined the question concerned the impossibility of absolute trust in a God never present to the senses. “How can we know if the presence we feel is of God or the Enemy?”
Stefan said he felt the Lord only when in a state of prayer, but his wife had had even this beautiful gift poisoned by disease. For years they prayed aloud together every night, prayed in their shared language and in tongues. “The gift of tongues sounds different in different people,” Stefan said. “I know the sound of her gift like I know the voice that comes to me in my thoughts. But one night her tongues changed, another voice came. And I knew what it was, this language. She was speaking Russian. The spirit of her friend, her dead friend, real or not, lives inside her.”

With the new spirit in her came no easing of the willfulness Stefan had never been equal to. In different hours she could be one or the other, almost herself or almost another, truly foreign woman called Irina who enraged the Denise he knew for her fate and her acceptance of it. Surely Irina was just a picture on the internet, and yet Stefan too was divided against himself, wanting his proof, something that would after this dark interval finally again bring their beliefs together, even though to want evidence was to want a confirmation of a suffering outside of his wife, a suffering and murder and the revelation that Shoad was not who he seemed to be.

“I confess to wondering,” said Stefan. “I come here to your place and I know the truth, but at home I see her suffering and I want another truth.”

But even if he could find proof that Irina had been real, there'd be something more terrible. He would be forced to confront something else he couldn't accept, that his wife now carried the souls of two tormented women. Shoad understood that Stefan wanted to find evidence of Irina and to have
come to believe in her. But to find it or not, neither result would release him.

“I can almost see her, Irina. Sometimes the way Denise looks at me, her eyes, they're shaped wrong, flatter to the brow, and she holds them on me for just a second. Then she turns away and she's gone.”

After Stefan left, Shoad walked the perimeter of the fire, looking for stray embers. Now and then he found one and stabbed it out with the hoe. He tried to imagine what might be done for this man who would confide in no one else. He thought of the word
mission.
His own mission was to help Stefan and Denise, but he had no idea how to reach them.