I felt the physical manifestation of despair in my bones and in my viscera. Joy is no less pathetic than the worst grief.
I let myself type. Do not sleep until it’s through. Make the nightmare go away. You won’t have to look at it every time you close your eyes. You won’t have to hear their cries echo in the room when you open them.
I don’t remember all I typed, but when I was done I hit
Save
, not
Send
. I made it to the bathroom and flicked on the light. I heard the little voice go,
Poor Dad.
I draped my arm over the toilet, my head in the bowl. Heave … Heave … Heave.
I
get in the Spider and drive. The skies are dark over the Sangre de Cristo. Heavy clouds are rolling in from the west, moving in with me.
Who put my name on the wall? What does it matter who, now? The problem isn’t the hunter. The problem is the trap. There is something about the house that makes me go to the dark. I keep going back. I blame myself. Nobody is doing this to me. Nobody but my own ghosts.
I drive into Mora and stop at the Mustang.
I scavenge $1.79 from the cracks of the seats and find myself a mini of the cheapest stuff: schnapps. It rings up $1.99, and I pick the last two dimes from a dish next to the register with a hand-lettered sign that reads:
If you need a penny, take it. If you need more, get a job.
I say thanks and the Mustang attendant says nothing. I can tell from her expression that I must look like a madman.
I get back in the car and catch the weather forecast on the radio:
A weak upper-level disturbance will slide east across New Mexico today bringing rain showers along and west of the central mountain chain. Only light precipitation is expected with this first system above 7,500 feet. A more powerful storm system will move in quickly behind the first system with drenching rains at high elevations.
I look up and see charcoal sheets of rain on the Sangre de Cristo.
I pull off into an arroyo behind a willow tree on Aplanado, breaking the branch of an evergreen to conceal the chrome bumper from the road.
I have ceased to be concerned about trespassing. I come to the house this time like a natural son.
I step onto the portal. Again I feel the pressure drop, even in the cold, clammy air, even as I swoon from the pain in my chest, from the headache of insomnia, from the burden of a world collapsing on my shoulders. It is like the house draws you in to make you sleepy so that it may whisper its story in your ear.
I look at the walls. There are drugs in those walls. It’s the east wall where my articles are hanging, the wall that contains the remains, the one that stands in the shadows.
I walk inside and the birds start peeping.
You still here? Your mother is stuck somewhere away from home, or else really dead. Maybe she’s been dead since the day I first came back.
The padlocked hinge I pried off is still there on the floor. I stand before the wall with my articles tacked all over it, the pages fluttering.
There are bones in these walls.
The air smells beautifully of rain. How the hell did it get so cold all of a sudden?
It is time to get started. It will not be difficult to take the pages off the wall. Only Scotch tape sticks them to the hard plaster. I could tear them down in a fury, or hold a lighter beneath the bottom row of sheets and set the wallpaper ablaze.
I remove them one by one, remembering every subject through each headline, my name at the top of every page.
When I am done I have a neat pile of pages from
Surge
to take with me.
Now it’s over. You can drive away. Catch that plane.
I stand back and look at the wall. I look at the dingy paint.
This is crazy. You’ve taken the pages down. You can drive away, stop this stupidity, break the chain
.
I get the tire iron from the trunk and dig a little at a cracked spot in the plaster.
The rain comes on quickly, tricking me into thinking it might be a brief shower.
It is too early for the monsoon-type rains of midsummer in these mountains. I have no change of clothes, the heater in the Spider doesn’t work, and it is cold, so I decide to wait it out.
I keep digging.
Before I’ve chipped very far, I put down the tire iron to step out on the portal. The shower has become a steady downpour. I will have to wait for it to clear.
I pace around to keep myself warm. Soon the rain is coming down so hard that I know I will get soaked just stepping onto the portal. It is pounding on the roof, loud, annoying like a dinner guest who gets suddenly, rudely drunk.
It is getting on night.
I decide to leave. I will run to the car. I will get wet. I will start the car and shiver all the way back down that road. I can be down to the Mustang in twenty minutes, and there is still some loose change in the car. A hot chocolate with Lord Calvert will stop my teeth chattering. Maybe there will be a cheap, dry T-shirt:
Mora, NM. Leave here and never come back.
I make a break for it.
I splash up the drive, jumping clumsily between potholes filled with water, getting soaked within seconds. When I arrive at the car the arroyo is running. The water in the ditch has come up above the tires.
I open the door and the floor of the car is choked with mud.
I try starting it even though I know it is stupid—not a cough, not even a click. I splash back to the house, remembering something from the Discovery Channel: once you get wet, you’ve lost half the battle. My shirt is cotton. What do they call it? The death fabric. The rain keeps pounding.
I stand shivering under the portal and look back at the valley, but there is nothing to see, no lights on the other side. Everything is in cloud.
You will have to spend the night in the house.
The wind blows the rain slantingly onto the portal. I turn and go back inside. The birds will not let up squeaking now, loudly, incessantly, as if some understanding in their miniscule brains makes them declare full alert. I wish there were some way I could tell them:
It’s okay, your mother will be back soon.
I think about their mother.
Hell, when this rain lets up, I’ll bring you some food.
I decide to build a fire in the middle of the floor. The absentee owner will be angry when he next comes around and discovers the damage. I don’t care. I have my lighter. There is dry wood inside. Wet, cold, stranded, I have to burn it. I am taking heroic measures.
I gather what scrap wood I can find from around the floors: an old chair leg, splintered floorboards, planking I cracked off the padlocked door with my tire iron. I don’t have very good ventilation. A little smoke never killed anybody, I tell myself. Yes, it does—so does a little lead paint.
The pages of
Surge
are too glossy and won’t get the wood going. There is only the Bible for kindling. I take my lighter out of the Altoids tin and light the onionskin pages.
I mumble a lapsed-Catholic apology in my head. It’s only the heat I’m after.
I tear out a good chunk of pages and stoke the flames. A black arc sweeps across the stack, shrinking and leaving behind a pile of ash.
I start to feel better when the fire burns up a little, but I have to be right near the flame to feel warm. I am still wet, and the second I back off from the fire I get cold.
I take off my clothes, spreading them out on the planks to try to dry them.
I stand exposed in the firelight, shivering in damp underwear. I want a blanket. A sleeping bag would be better, something to wrap around myself.
I pace the floors. I have to keep moving.
Where is my marijuana? I might have thrown it in the fire. It happens all the time, people burn something of value to them by mistake.
I am growing tired. It rains.
Now it is full-on night. I pass between the bird nest and the fire. The baby birds peep weakly. A mother won’t return to her nest when a person has messed with it. It’s I who am keeping her away.
I fill a bottle cap with some water and hold it to the mouth of the nest. Do I feel them pecking at it? I can’t tell. My hands are shaking.
Keep moving.
The chair legs burn to cinders. I use the tire iron to break up the crude table that held the Bible. I have to add paper to keep the fire going, so I throw in the glossy
Surge
articles.
I am getting better at managing this fire. How long has it been pouring? Four hours? Even if it is the monsoons, no one storm could last much longer. A warm, dry front always pushes through a cold storm system.
I collect all the trash I can find on the floor and burn that. I cast around for more wood. I take the tire iron and pry up the floorboards at the edge of the room. I burn them.
There is no noise coming from the mud nest hanging from the viga. Nothing. I should have helped them while I could still do something. Is it my fault their mother hasn’t come back? I’ll get them some food as soon as this rain lets up, go out in the mud and dig up some worms.
I find a rusty soup can and let water stream straight into it from the holes in the roof.
I have to piss, but I don’t bother getting up and going onto the portal. I go in the corner.
I see something burning at the edge of the fire. It might be my marijuana. Or it could be the business cards from my wallet. It is impossible to tell, but I keep on looking at it in fascination. A neat trapezoid of ash has folded upon itself like an ancient and decaying silk shirt: a sleeve, a cuff, a collar. It is beautiful, and it soothes me to see it.
I feel damp, but not cold.
The cloudy sky starts to lighten a little but still the rain is not letting up. I go back into the other room and keep chipping at the wall.
I am tired. I go back into the main room and crawl onto the mattress to lie down. The springs groan, comforting my aching spine. I do not mind the foul odor.
I swoon with fatigue and listen for the sound of the rain, convinced that it has stopped and what I heard in my ears was just a ringing in the head of a man gone mad. Then I feel the floor lurch a quarter-turn, the room spin into place, and the sound come on louder than before: rain, more rain, on the roof, in the corners, puddles, pools outside, filling higher, deeper.
Trying to remember: why did I come here? Don’t I have a job, a house, a wife? I just need to leave. Walk away. All I have to do is get up and walk away.
You tried that. You tried that last time you left. But your name was on the wall, so you came back.
When I go into the other rooms to pry up more splintered chunks of wood, my teeth begin chattering. I would be relieved if someone showed up and caught me trespassing, rescued me, arrested me, called an ambulance—ended the ordeal—but this wish is just a diversion from the real problem: I have to keep coming back here.
Execrate. My life has been execrated, dead on paper, dead credit, medically dead. All dead. Abandon them to ashes.
Streams of water from the ceiling are leaking all over the room and the fire has died down. My teeth are chattering uncontrollably. That’s a sign of hypothermia. So I run out into the rain in my underwear and slog through the mud to the car. I dig in the glove compartment for something to use for kindling and find the Los Alamos telephone directory. Back inside the house I light my lighter and tear out the yellow pages to make a torch. While they briefly blaze, I search around the room and find some trash to burn. I sit on the mattress close to the fire.
I don’t want to let sleep come again, but I am desperately tired. The storm clouds are low and it is a dark day, but I am unclear whether it is dawn or dusk.
Still raining. No dogs barking, no coyotes. Everything is in its den.
Something on the floor catches a glimmer of firelight: a rusted paperclip. I unbend it and hold the tip over the fire, heating it until the sliver of steel is orange. I touch it to my skin, to the back of my left hand and wrist, shooting pain through myself to stay awake.
My adrenaline begins to dry up and I torture myself at the edge of consciousness. I spit on a piece of wood at the rim of the fire. The water burns off leaving an archipelago of mucus in the shape of a backward J. The moldy stuffing warms me, rocks me to sleep.
I see a town of ten thousand people reduced to ashes. I see people coming out of their homes in agony. Smoke blots out the sun, fills the sky. A noise beating down on the earth makes the dying clasp hands desperately over their heads.
How horrible to foresee death so clearly.
S
omeone does come, a man in a Western hat and a long oil coat that reaches to his cowboy boots, the rain dripping from his brim and cascading off his back. I cower like a wet animal while he shines a flashlight around the room to take in the squalor.
What must this look like? My pathetic fire smolders amidst the splintered boards. My clothes in the corner make a wet, filthy knot. I am worse than the sackcloth-and-ashes people. At least they don’t move into your living room in their filthy rags and use your furniture for kindling.
The man says, “I seen your car stuck in the mud, figured you could use some help.”
This strikes me, after many hours of animalistic toil, as so human, so sympathetic, that I convulse into a great sob.
There are neighbors and people around who call this valley home, and I came here to this abandoned house and turned it into a demon obsession. I have made my mark on this forsaken place, but I know that I have been bitterly defeated. It all seems preposterous, now that help has arrived. The pages with my name are ashes, but the superficial scars I have left behind are nothing to the house, just scratches in the plaster. The bite it has taken out of me will fester for a long time, maybe kill me.
There is no blanket to put over my shoulders, and the man’s coat is dripping wet. He waits while I let it out. When finally I have calmed down to the point I can breathe, I say, “It’s a mistake.”
The stranger nods. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
He walks past the fire and I briefly glimpse his face: it is the red, deeply lined face of a tough old man cultivating a relaxed rage. He bends over me and takes out a pack of cigarettes, a brand I buy now and then when I can’t sleep. I nod and the stranger fishes out two, lights them both, and hands one down to me.