After James (8 page)

That night when Shoad undressed he found burn marks on his legs, red lines in curls and flares, like ancient letters painted with a thick brush. The heat had burned through his canvas work pants and left the pants unmarked. Only in the cool of the bedroom did he feel the burns alive.

The last thing Stefan had said to him, “To remake the house, Clayton, build it simply. All things toward God.”

“I can't tell you more,” he said. She understood him to mean he wasn't up to it. He seemed depleted, his shoulders rounded in resignation.

He left the house to check the sky and the water level in the ravine. Ali sat in the cool room and the remainder of story. Her memory wasn't of hearing it, but of having been present at the events, there by the fire with Shoad and Stefan, there with Shoad that night in his room. On her shins she felt
a phantom heat. She could picture the burn marks on his legs that read to her as math and science symbols. One was shaped like
psi
, phase difference. Another was
theta
, time constant.
Eta
, hysteresis. And
alpha
, the false positive rate or fine structure constant or a constellation's brightest star. Alph produced the alphabet and fitted the characters into her thoughts.

She picked up the two empty cups and took them to the kitchen, rinsed them in the sink. The stream died in her hands—she'd forgotten there was no power, no pump—and something about the water on the base of her thumb looked wrong. Or it looked as it should but felt wrong, given where the hand was wet. As if her nerves were reading sensation through a new, fast-evolving system. What would it be like to lose this, to be on the other side, after weeks of this feeling, to be blunted back into common, unremarkable days? You might choose to pitch yourself off a bridge.

She looked for Shoad through the window. The weather vane on the barn had almost stopped spinning and now she could see it was in the shape of a soldier, a man with a rifle. He wore a cap or helmet of some kind. Or maybe not soldier but hunter. Only now she noticed the top of a smokestack above the roofline.

The rest of the story, the part Shoad couldn't bring himself to tell, wasn't hard to put together. She had Denise's version and the evidence of this place, the sculptures, the new barn, the scorched wood, and Shoad himself. Denise had omitted from her telling all contradicting details. Her Shoad was not a keeper of animals, not an artist, no one with a use for a forge. She would have driven into the yard, imagined a
communication from her imaginary friend, and somehow spilled fire into the barn. Aurelius had died in the fire, the barn had burned to nothing, had had to be rebuilt. Stefan, if he came at all, would have witnessed the aftermath. And whatever the time between then and now, the Dahls were not in West Africa. Denise was likely a new patient in some long-term care facility, and Stefan would be living near her, looking daily for signs she'd return to herself.

A few hours more and the pill would wear off. Would she retain this comprehension and what was she blind to? She felt herself lagging behind some important understanding, something right in front of her that she couldn't see. A need for revelation connected her to Stefan. Like Shoad they were part of the pattern. Both needed to step away from their fears to sort the false from the real, the consoling illusions from what was unsettling or unendurable. She felt the quick in her molecular and genetic levels, the decouplings, the triggered gene expressions. Of course she couldn't really, but she did.

As in fourteen percent of the subjects, a headache announced the onset of the peak effect. Next might come more intense visual disturbances, scintillations, cuneiform patterns overlaid on points of focus.

A flashlight stood lens down on the counter. When had he collected it? He was thinking ahead, thinking better than she was. Other things were out of place. A slotted box of cutlery on a stool, a canvas ball cap propped with a plate in a dish rack. Sitting on top of a covered wicker basket with a decorative floral inlay was a yellow plastic pill dispenser.

Across the room, a door ajar. She saw a glimmer on a blue wall. She walked over and opened the door.

The room held a small table, a window onto the yard. Against the blue wall opposite the window was a stepladder and an old cardboard suitcase with a faded Fragile sticker on the side. On the wall itself were a few photographs, tacked polaroids connected by angled lines that as she came closer resolved into writing, the minuscule jitterscript she recognized from the note he'd left for her. The polaroids were placed it seemed randomly on the wall. She recognized the barn and weather vane in one shot, a view of the house from the yard entrance in another. Two photos were unreadable, extreme close-ups of surface textures, maybe wood grain, maybe fur. Above the others was a picture of a smokestack streaming greyblack. Where the photo ended, the written lines took up the path of the smoke and drifted toward the ceiling. She took in the words at eye level. They began on the margins of the house shot and extended in three parallel lines to the barn.

The sculpture must not stop. To see past plane and volum. The time around the moment. A stranger in town with blue sleeve. She handed me Samuel three 19. “and the Lord was with him and did let none of his word fall to the ground.” So who is it with me.

From the barn to the wood grain the lines angled downward again.

In a crow we know what to look at dimension perspectiv. The tree near the window. The crow in the tree is and is not bigger than the barn. He would paint the crow if he painted who is with him. The sculpture is a prison. The life inside is long-tailed. Like zoo animal. Like wartime animals starve. The skul is a prison.

The handwriting would be part of a therapy to address his lexical agraphia. Of course he would make of it a locally open book. You could know him by his spaces, his workshop, his living room, this study, places Denise had never set foot in.

She read into the crowded margins of the photos and saw that the lines crossed into the pictures in places. In the slatted walls and tire-rutted foreground she looked for references to family, friends, a deep past, but the cobalt lines floated in a shallows of personal time. The depth was only in his need for words, the need was ancient human, there in the early brain. Language began a hundred thousand years ago, writing eight. Again she thought of the earliest art. Representational cave drawing, adornments made of bone and antler, an awareness beyond sensation, into reflexive consciousness, a kind of early selfhood.

Her father had taken her caving once.

Lined into taut, parallel strings of words, Shoad's fragments assumed a disciplined force, not the obsessive massings of hypergraphia. She'd seen such tiny writing before, in galleries, cramped into notebooks, in the reproduced pages of
famous men. Dostoevsky, Van Gogh. Lewis Carroll and his ninety-eight thousand letters, a number she remembered from her own childhood obsession with Carroll and his Alice, whom she used to like to think she was named after.

Above the smokestack, the top corner of the wall was barely marked. She mounted the ladder, followed the smoke plume where it broke into skeins trailing into clear space, and read what seemed the most recent entries.

The sun hit the ice. Meltwater rush in the stream. Smell of first things. Thawing things thawed on the

bank. Digging at the source.

The source a humanform. He found a hand, the arm, the head he backed off the shape. The smell brought him backed off again. His own sound sounded strange.

The light shot into him falling

So the day's thaw had revived him in the light of creation. He'd described it all in the third person, as if trying to get outside himself. The word “humanform” seemed to refer to his sculpture, Descendant. She noted a few more dropped letters. The more energy in the writing, the more urgent, the more mistakes he made.

The vertigo arrived with a half-formed memory that wouldn't come clear. She hung on to the ladder, then step-floated down as if onto the moon and said a simple “ouch.”
She had never been prone to bad headaches. It didn't help that she could picture the brewing storm in her brain, a storm aware of itself just got more agitated. She sat on the hard chair and felt Crooner's collar in her back pocket. She withdrew it and with no regard for the mess she was making rubbed the dried mud from the leather only to reveal strange dark discolourations.

When she closed her eyes she was falling so she opened them and tried to focus on what was before her, the shard of pain in her head. She was already passing through the living room before she realized she was walking, looking for medicine, and then she was back in the kitchen holding his plastic med dispenser shaped like a multistorey building sheared in half. The pathways inside formed a maze. Each compartment was marked with an hour. The pills were of every description. She worked at the casing, unroofed it.

Only one compartment was empty—he'd missed at least two doses, which made sense, somehow, on this clockless day. Whites, blues, yellows. Rounds and oblongs, precisely machined edges. She recognized the Gilshey brands and their knockoffs but saw nothing for her head. He must have been in near-constant pain. Meds for sleep, digestion aids. Meds for joint inflammation, depression, and others she didn't know what. She wondered if a small dose of Alph would be of use to him in finishing out the kinks in his speech. More likely, on a calm day, a day not like today, it would help the depression with the elating wonder of simply seeing more, creating more. Maybe all the pills could be cleared away if he took a hit of Alph with his breakfast. The
hell would be the headaches and the coming off. He'd recover speech and end himself.

She had a moment of panic, then remembered that the stash of Alph was in her suitcase. The sudden adrenaline should have dulled her pain but it worsened.

She put the dispenser back on top of the basket, took it off again and set it on the counter. She tried to think precisely about what she was looking at.
Wicker
,
weave
, the words seemed to cluster in little near-likenesses and the word
cluster
took her back to the headache. She lifted the lid off the basket.

It was full of old pill bottles and packets. She searched through the drugs, in vials and small boxes. Over-the-counter cold reliefs, topical ointments, allergy pills. Expired, most of them, now that she checked. Lemon cough drops. Letters she couldn't read became “Lozenges” when flipped. There was nothing to touch what was happening to her head. And then there, at the bottom, a broken silver packet of capsules. She turned it over and saw the word “КОДЕИН.”

She stared into the mystery of it. She ran her finger along the date crimped into the edge. Whatever they did to you, these Russian ones, they could do it yet.

She needed to move but she stood there.

And whatever the effect of the drug КОДЕИН, it was nothing compared to that of the word itself. It named one thing, enacted another. The row of strange characters gave her certainty. Certain knowledge in a half-familiar word. Then the six Cyrillic letters drove the sense into questions that wouldn't stand still.

She had suffered common ailments. Irina.

There was something growing here, growing near. She was failing to react self-defensively. She knew this and yet she just stood.

She wanted to swallow the foreign word. Or Alph wanted it. She had always believed there was a genius at work in the chemicals themselves to combine and play toward a final balance. A compound of well-being. Imagine a state in which one might know about the way of things, of cruelties and neglect, and still feel well, feel joy, even happiness. Fear could always come over the top, but there were glints of evidence in the research and in her of something like calm amazement. She had thought that the final word, the name for this shared solid state, for our dreamed-of one lasting knowledge and belief, would be
peace.
But maybe the word itself was a compound, some mix of native and foreign characters and the histories trailing them. Line up the letters in just the right way. Train the palate to say it. Repeat.

She turned from the counter and looked into the living room where they'd shared tea, an empty room, a sense of contained design, trying to locate herself. What did she know for certain? Her father lived in California. She'd come here from Vancouver, where she was born. But where had she arrived? She pictured the map of it fading even as she saw herself heading east, ducking down into the Dakotas, through Chicago, Michigan. Then, as she followed herself along, the forests and fields ran to a kind of empty, unnamed space. She was forgetting the present. As in a dream, she didn't even know what country she was in.

Days ago, crossing the continent. She could see herself from some elevation. She held both views in mind, looking out from her skull here in Shoad's house and looking down at herself as if through a transparent ceiling. A part of her was in a tree, maybe a redtail hawk on a limb. Then the hawk flew off and she was almost where she was.

Look how alive, these walls at the end of the world. Even at the end we imagine some other ending.

This house. She really had to get out of here.

She thought of Crooner's collar. Now she understood. The discolourations were burn marks.

A presence was moving behind her. It cast its tall shape on the wall.

She couldn't turn to face it but then did. There in the window, standing up inside itself, was a silhouette against the low sun. From behind the barn the column of smoke rose higher than she could see. He rounded the corner in stride. He was coming across the yard for her.

S
he's lying in a room and she's running. There's a TV playing in the corner. She's cold and wet, her feet stabbing along the streambank. The light in the ravine, in the room, is dim. The stream is more than a stream, she's running against it. The screen, at an angle, plays old footage, some black-and-white interior. The sense of someone else in the room, watching the screen, the sense of the top of a head above a chair back.

The oncoming water bends before her. Her feet are numb, she's sliding stride to stride. The waterrush covers the sound of her breath but she feels it leaving her in explosions in the air, the need to cry out and the need not to. As she runs she remembers lying in a room, a TV, a memory so sharp it's semi-actual, lying there remembering running here in the ravine, but she can't remember what happens next.

A man on TV standing on a stage in black and white with curtains behind him and she hears now distant laughter, entertained-audience laughter. He disappears or becomes a
war scene slanted away from her in green spotted colour and she feels greatly fatigued. A man with a rifle crouches on-screen. The head moves in the chair.

She's having to scramble more than run. The water has claimed the flats and shelves and forced her up the bank so that she's crossing slopes of mud in a continual fall and climb, and when she's highest above the water she sees its strength, the rapids formed along the rising verges. All is pure duration. She allows no full thoughts, no language for thought. The run west has slowed to nothing. She needs to make it higher, to the narrow strip of woods, but she can't get enough purchase. How far has she really come? The bank draws her back down and she hooks her elbow around a young tree and wedges herself there, resting.

The first sharp report. A dull cracking bores through the sound of the current. Then it comes in twos and threes in tight succession, and too late she looks upstream to see the wall of water high above her, breaking off the young trees on the slopes of the ravine, snapping them with the force that meets and covers her and no wonder she can't remember.

Past the way she came, past floating wooden swing seats and mailboxes, the column of smoke shunting into view and away, passing swallowing whirlpools in themselves swallowed, the highest reaches of treetops at eye level, a skunk belly-up and half cut in half by a snare loop, past the barriers to nonsense, a rumble as in train sounds, she tumbles under the surface and up again, catching discontinued scenes that
seem clipped from a reel, reeling past crows hopping in branches in stark alarm, a coyote going under, its tail blooming on the surface and the cold meltwater pinching out all feeling and order. Under and up again, stunned too cold to draw breath, and her leg catches on some submerged trunk or footbridge, garbage floating past, a wind chime of seashells draped on a dead cat, tent flap, paper yard lamp, ornamental dice. The river lifts her onward again and bends her with it, sweeps the low sun into her eyes and she thinks there must be a falls ahead. The surface is not constant, it moves at varied speeds. The cold has kept at bay a knowledge now rallying to her consciousness that she's struck or been struck by something. She's bleeding from her shoulder or neck and when briefly the water runs deeper and flattens she sees or imagines the narrow furl of blood in the mud-brown current, loses it again when the surface folds, and the blood brings the feel of the wound, and the wound some body sense, space and volume, breath, at last, and the motions she's been making all this time, buoying her past impossible matter, a power cord coiled on a limb, hollow plastic buddha bobbing upright in the roil, unbroken window or hothouse pane shimmed into a trunk like a serving tray, a slope-roofed birdhouse drifting by, a beak popping out of the hole. Her limbs move without her. She can see her hands but not feel them but the seeing is clouded now and for a time it seems she's not carried at all but watching the land move around her as if out the car windows in an old flick hurtling into plot, into story, end of a story, so that now the cold is blinding and each solarized moment is beaded in her eyes, and she
closes them and sees here at the end a dead man in a glass ball turning and the skull is a prison.

The through-force had released her.

She'd washed up in the low crotch of a maple on the edge of a field. Grey muck covered her, the plugged diamond bark.

Below on the hillside the brown water eddied against the higher trees, their trunks and limbs mudslick and heavy, a tired platoon from the trenches. The light was clean, of morning, the shadows solid on the moving surface reaching tree to tree, branches in dark connection like newly dead thoughts. She saw things in their relation and in relation to what wasn't or once was or would come to be.

A door rafted by, kicked off a treetop, and spun back into the current.

A huge bird lifted above the ridgeline and turned, progressing in slow loops. As it grew closer she saw the black-and-white underside as it seemed to stop midair in the apex and became a serried portal to a world of clear, dark sense. Without the strength to form the words, she opened her mouth to call the clarity down to her but couldn't sound the appeal.

She thought again of the creatures unknown to her. Did one of them feel her existence? She listened to distinguish water from wind. Somewhere underneath them both was her breathing and thinking of it made all the sounds seem doubtful.

The mud on her clothes was stiffening now. The sun was low but warm.

She shifted her weight, touched her neck. The wound was clotted or caked. There was pain in her legs and forearms, in her hands, but they worked. She bent her knees and swivelled to face the drier ground above her, and slid and landed on all fours. She crawled higher and saw two fingers out of joint. After a time she was drying on dry ground and she sensed a breathing presence over her but couldn't even gesture at escape and didn't know if she wanted to. She curled and slept there.

She dreams she is slumped sideways in an armchair, one leg dangling to the floor. She feels heat from a woodstove. Crooner lies against her leg, his fur, his weight heavy on her naked foot. It's daytime. There's something in her lap that she wants to see but she can't make her eyes look downward. Instead she is looking across the room at an opposite wall covered in empty black picture frames, all askew. Crooner is panting in his sleep. He is running in his dreams, running or in some nightmare. Her eyes feel freer now, she looks a little lower, sees her knee, the pages in her lap, and the panting grows louder and louder and she wakes.