I followed them. I stayed way back, and Marissa didn’t even know I had a car, much less what kind of car, and when they turned off on this little winding road called Barker, I slowed down, pulled over at a farm gate, and sat there for a while. I knew where they were going. They would park beside the old barbed-wire fence, carefully insinuate themselves through its rusty strands, pay no attention to the No Trespassing signs, run across the meadow, and enter the forest. This was Old Man Turnip’s land, and he was still alive then, and sometimes he would chase kids off his land with unintelligible shouts, firing his shotgun in the air and generally filling a folktale niche in the history of any country-born boy.
I waited for about twenty minutes, and then I continued on up Barker and passed Harley’s Jeep about where I expected to find it. And that was all the tailing I did that day. Overzealousness is, I suspect, often a stalker’s undoing.
The next day was a school day, so I cut class. I wasn’t worried about my folks getting a call from school. I was a model student, never missed a day, so everyone would assume I had a good reason for not showing up.
I figured Marissa would be at school, and I wanted to see what I could find in the forest without accidentally running into her or Harley James.
I guess.
I didn’t have a plan. I desperately needed a plan, but I didn’t have one. I just wanted to be doing something. I wanted to save Marissa from the malign influence of Harley James, whose interest in her was not—I was sure of this—remotely intellectual.
I followed their trail, which was marked according to Harley’s ingenious system that utilized nature’s variety to encode a series of instructions far more precise and less destructive than anything achieved by stripping tree trunks of their bark. I was one of the three people who knew these codes, and as their language came back to me, I felt sadly abandoned.
I had brought a sleeping bag and other supplies in case I would have to spend the night. Harley was an intrepid explorer, and, to my credit I think, I was willing to endure some hardship myself. I might not have had a plan, but I was prepared to suffer for the sake of love. That’s what redeems teenagers. Passion trumps stupidity.
It was getting dark, and I told myself I needed to stop and establish camp, but I pushed on, ignoring my good advice. I spied an arrangement of rocks that was not random and approached it, reaching for the flashlight on my belt. Before I could decipher the rocks’ message, my feet leapt out from under me and I found myself upside down, a human pendulum describing ever shorter arcs.
We learn in school that the eye, that marvelous machine, presents an upside-down image that our brain is required to flip upright and does, reflexively and effortlessly. This is always presented as a wondrous accomplishment, but I would be more impressed if this same brain could refrain from that flipping when we find ourselves upside down, since, at such a time, the upside-down image would be just the ticket.
In any event, I recognized the sneakers right away, and then there was a light blinding me, and a voice: “Jerry!”
Harley leaned his face in, illuminating his features by holding the flashlight under his chin. “It’s just me,” he said. “Sorry.”
He got me out of the trap quickly. I waited while he reset the trap, and then we headed back to his campsite.
“No offense, but that was a disappointment,” he said. “Like stringing a line for catfish and getting a snapping turtle.”
I didn’t much like being compared to a snapping turtle (an ugly and belligerent species), but I was feeling too sheepish for a rebuttal, and that’s when Marissa popped her head out of Harley’s tent and smiled shamelessly.
“Excuse me,” Harley said, and he went into the tent with Marissa. I assumed they were discussing me, so I just sat there steaming. In truth, there had been no betrayal. I had never kissed Marissa, never said I loved her.
They took me to see the store that night. “It’s not far … if you’re up for it,” Harley said.
“Sure.”
I didn’t really want to see whatever it was that had them so enraptured. I should have turned and walked away. That was my first impulse, and I should have obeyed it.
* * *
Now Marissa and I stood on her front porch. It’s hard to contemplate millions of years and imagine anything that feels like the truth, but contemplating twenty years isn’t that easy either. It wasn’t that anything much had happened. I’d gone to college, grad school, had a couple of really bad jobs. The jobs frightened me, and I went back to the university, acquired more credits, and contemplated the academic life; then I wound up back at my parents’ after an unfortunate affair with a lap dancer named Dawn—anyone can make a mistake, especially the sexually sheltered—and while I was home my parents said I should apply at Enderson Labs, and, to appease them, I did and was shocked when they hired me.
Marissa had moved away for a few years, but when her mother died of cancer she moved back to look after her father, who had always been a sad man in an ill-fitting suit. He called me “Harry” and seemed to get most of life’s details wrong, maybe lacking the stamina for recalling names and faces and facts. He had inherited a good deal of money, and, too apathetic to spend it, he was still rich on the day he died. He killed himself with an automatic pistol he’d bought at a gun show. He shot himself in the stomach, in the leg (probably an accident, the coroner noted), and finally through the heart. I wasn’t in town for the funeral, but I was surprised when I moved back in with my folks to find that Marissa had bought a small farmhouse out on Griffith Lane.
* * *
Here we were.
“Maybe we should leave it alone,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
I thought that was obvious. “To avoid being killed,” I said. “That’s what comes to mind first.”
Marissa glared at me, and I thought I saw Harley’s disdain in her eyes. “I thought you were a scientist. Isn’t curiosity sacred? Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“We’ll never know what happened.” I think I raised my voice; I was exasperated, but that’s no excuse. Marissa seemed to think that the world was a tidy place. She’d missed quantum physics or something. Hell, she’d missed television and the Internet. “Even your boy genius Harley was stumped.”
“He would never have stopped seeking the truth!” Marissa said. “Oh!” I was getting really worked up—I supposed guilt had something to do with that—and knew I would say something hurtful. “What good is the truth if you’re dead? If you fling yourself into the abyss you won’t come back whole. Would you seek the truth if you knew your mind couldn’t contain it; if you knew it would shatter all the convenient objects of your reality as though they were china; if you knew knowing would bring madness?”
I realized in that instant that Harley understood this—that I
was
one of his disciples. It was another one of his symbiosis-inspired rants. Like all his rants, it came out of nowhere, a long
non sequitur
(because Harley’s conversation was almost entirely internal—and divisive). He’d been speaking of ants he called amazon ants (I can’t remember the genus, but they weren’t uncommon; there were species in Europe, in America).
Harley said, “So these ants enslave other ants, in this case ants of the genus
Formica
. The amazon ants go into the nests of the
Formica
, kill any ant that opposes them, and steal the cocoon-encased pupae. The amazon ants are great warriors with large mandibles. But these warrior ants have no other castes. The amazon ant is essentially helpless without its slaves; it can hardly feed itself, much less attend to the complex needs of the colony. All it can do is enslave other ants, but what does that anthropomorphic verb ‘enslave’ mean to the ants it captures? Nothing. Business as usual. You now have a
Formica
colony that nurtures some ants with long, killing mandibles. That’s it. And the
Formica
will seek out other colonies of
Formica
and lead the amazon ants to that nest. So are these
Formica
evil collaborators? Of course not. This is all just ant-life in the ant-world. Where did these amazon ants come from in the first place, these helpless warrior ants? You’ve got me.”
Harley hesitated. It was a rare thing to see him confused, but there it was. “It’s as though nature, whatever you want to call it, cannot avoid going down these paths; it doesn’t, in fact, resolve into simplicity. Nature
perseverates
. It’s neurotic, insane really …”
He didn’t finish the sentence. It was the first time I can remember Harley being at a loss for words, and (I confess) I was pleased.
* * *
I had no idea how or what I felt as we drove up Barker. I was worn out and resigned to whatever bad thing happened. An apathy born of defeat: the closest I’ve ever come to a Zen state. Small talk was in order: “Does this property still belong to the Turnips?”
“It never belonged to the Turnips,” Marissa said. “That was kidspeak. It belonged to the Turners, and as far as I know it still belongs to them. They are probably sitting on it until the rich real-estate developers come along, which is a ways off.”
“Way beyond the horizon,” I agreed.
We chatted as we had always chatted, and I enjoyed this strange displacement in time. The mood changed when Marissa parked the car—not, it seemed to me, where we used to park it. We got our gear and crossed over the dying meadow and into a forest guarded by evergreens that opened into the first scatterings of fall color: yellows and browns and reds, curled leaves that crackled under our feet.
By the time we got to the store, it was dark, and I sensed it before I saw it, and I was afraid and assaulted by images from twenty years ago and time hadn’t improved the vibe.
“We’ll go in,” Marissa whispered in my ear, and the words hummed as though read in a ritual.
“Yes,” I said.
Although it looked like wood, it was cold and hard as stone, silver-blue and luminous. The door was halfway open (as always: it could not be opened or closed, it couldn’t be budged), and we slipped inside to where the blue light was brighter and the weirdness weirder. I could hear Harley’s whispered voice: “Everything has been replaced: some exotic substances, although common quartz seems to predominate.”
I stood in the center and turned slowly in a circle, as I had the first time I came here, as anyone would. Everything had leapt up and pressed itself into the walls: an old oil stove, counter-tops, signs advertising soap and elixirs for health, cans of beans and carrots, a bag of potatoes that had burst open and set its contents free so they now resembled the backs of great bloated beetles burrowing into the plaster, a tall, ornate cash register from which coins tumbled, each stuck to another. Whatever had pasted everything to the walls had also robbed everything of color—the jelly beans were either white, black, or gray—and it was this absence of color that had made the man stuck to the wall seem—surely—a manikin. But where the flesh flared raggedly on the left side of his jaw, the teeth and dusty-black tongue were difficult to explain, as was the single skeletal foot (the other encased in an elaborately decorated boot). “He was,” Harley had whispered, “no doubt the proprietor until … well, perhaps he still is. Maybe he’s old man
ELDERS
like it says on the sign outside. Retired. Under new management.”
“Same as ever,” I said, wishing to sound at ease but discovering a voice that was thin and lacking in conviction.
Marissa must have heard it. “Let’s get on with it,” she said.
I hastened to follow her as she crossed the room and slipped through another half-opened door. We walked down a flight of wooden steps (
real
wooden steps) and entered what was an underground storeroom that had succumbed to the usual laws of entropy. This room existed in a sort of eternal twilight, and I could never ascertain where this light came from, but, surrounded by bigger mysteries, I was content to let that one lie. This is where I first encountered what Harley called recon rats. “I think their masters send these out to look around. But these masters don’t have much love for their servants. They are ill-used. When they come under any light, you’ll notice they are red. Their little metabolisms have been pushed to the max, and they are sweating blood.”
Across the room, Marissa opened another door. I raced after her, descended stone steps, and encountered, as though for the first time, the hall of the warlords.
That is what Harley called the place; he found it, he gets to name it.
But naming it doesn’t describe it. I don’t know how these giant, grisly murals and carvings were created, although I think they might have been created in some malleable material and later subjected to the process that turned the store to stone.
* * *
I have never traveled the miles of this underground labyrinth, and I don’t intend to, and not because the undertaking would be too physically arduous. No, what I fear is eventually
understanding
this catalogue of what must be eons of war. There isn’t any single artist, or any single species. It’s nondiscriminatory interspecies carnage.
As a teenager, seeing all the images, feeling the outrage that younger generations bestow upon the previous generation, I despised the very impulse that generated life. What I saw—and what I was still seeing twenty years later—was one generation of monsters recounting its triumphs only to be overwritten—no, defiantly written
beside—
the next race of extraterrestrial barbarians. This was the universe’s graffiti wall where the boasts and venom of cosmic gangs could share a moment of art.
Every kind of monster, every atrocity, every dark, festering need is depicted on these walls. To see it is to despair.
* * *
Marissa called my name, and I saw her further down the hall. I started walking toward her and hesitated when I thought I saw a shadow behind her.
“Jerry,” she said. “He came back.”
It was, in fact, Harley, or the image of him. He seemed immediately at her side.
“My old friend, Jerry,” he said.
“What are you?” I asked.