Thirteen Specimens (31 page)

     I didn’t slow my pace until I had crossed the street, then the larger parking lot, and come to the mouth of the freshly paved access road.

     I paused. A metal sign was posted there, stabbed into the earth. It leaned a little to the side, as if it had been there a long time, but I had never noticed it before. It read:
Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.

     Maybe I had had no cause, up until lately, to take note of that sign. But I didn’t think so. I thought it had just recently, very recently, been planted there. Furthermore, it didn’t strike me as being a warning to the general populace. I had seen no children riding their bikes down this road, no people venturing this far to walk their dogs. The sign was plainly speaking to me, alone.

     “Fuck you,” I spoke back to it in a whisper, smiling tremulously, as I pushed the stroller onward. Despite my bravado, however, the warning had strummed a vibration through the harp-strings of my nervous system that continued to resonant faintly.

     On my right I passed those four headless tractor trailer freight cars. Idly I wondered what, if anything, might be inside them. Mildewed mattresses that teen lovers had soiled? Porn magazines? Candle stubs? Spent hypodermic syringes? Pentagrams painted in the blood of sacrifices to this or that evil force?

     On my left, on a rise built from earth and gravel, the train tracks...and behind those, a string of deserted Odyllic buildings tapered off, the attenuated end of the main, central complex. Their windows, some broken black, observed me with cold detachment, without alarm, like a man watching a caterpillar inch its way along his sleeve.

     Deserted buildings,
maybe
. How could I know what machines might still be running in the corners of huge rooms cast in utter darkness, no loud sounds or even lighted buttons giving away their hulking presence to people at a distance – robot machines that didn’t even require an illegal immigrant paid minimum wage to operate them? How did I know whether men sat at desks placed in the center of these otherwise stripped, cavernous rooms, their computer monitors the only illumination, like campfires they warmed their hands over as if they were homeless squatters in three-piece suits?

     I heard the rumble of an approaching train. This inspired a pang of anxiety; would its crew, if they spotted me, phone and report my presence as a trespasser? I reassured myself that this train must originate from a place out of Odyllic’s orbit, that there was nothing to worry about. And here came the train now. There was no light blazing on the engine’s face; I realized that its green-painted caboose was leading the way, as if it pulled the rest. Freight cars resembling those trailers I had gone by thundered past in a long necklace. At last, the engine rocketed by and I turned to watch it recede in the direction of the main complex of Odyllic, and the town beyond that. I had seen commuter trains with an engine at either end, but it didn’t seem safe to me to have this train barreling along at such speeds in reverse. How could the engine’s operator tell if a car was stalled at a railroad crossing, a child was playing on the rails, a suicidal man was standing with his arms out-thrust directly in his path?

     The rumble of the train faded and vanished, leaving only the chitter of birds. I continued on.

     Despite my nervousness at being on this now clearly forbidden property, I had fallen into a kind of reverie as I pressed on. But the caw of a crow off ahead of me somewhere sharpened my senses.

     As if through some instinct, my eyes lifted to that sagging telephone wire where I had seen something green and glassy the last time I’d been down here. It had reminded me of a telephone pole transformer, despite being situated on the wire itself. I was certain that this was the stretch of wire I had seen it on, these the two poles that had supported that wire. I stopped, contemplating it. My gaze dropped below, to the grass growing through the gravel that trickled down from the train bed. A glimmer of sunlight on something shiny, and green. I wanted to investigate but I didn’t want to leave Grover behind, and pushing Logan’s stroller over the bare earth would be too awkward, so I unbuckled Grover and carried him against my chest in one arm. I stepped off the paved road, crunching across the oily dirt, tall weeds stroking my legs like the hands of ghosts.

     This had to have been the object I had seen perched on the wire, but it was shattered now. Had someone thrown a rock at it, as I had thrown rocks at glass telephone transformers as a boy, or had the wind dislodged it? I now stood directly over the fragments, and squatted down to prod them with one finger. The object had struck the gravel and been obliterated, but there was one large chunk that I ultimately picked up and turned this way and that. I raised it high enough to see the sun glowing green through its transparent surface. It was plastic, not glass. And the chunk I held was finely detailed. Feathers. It was the wing of a plastic bird.

     I rose. Dropped the wing to the gravel. It broke into three pieces. Grover and I turned back toward our abandoned stroller, into which I tucked him again, rearranging his blanket and red cap. We had to keep moving forward. We mustn’t be distracted from our goal, whatever that might be, at the end of the access road.

     If we’d passed the spot where the frog had been pressed
into the asphalt, I had missed it. And there was no longer any sign of that squashed turtle. Now I could see the rusty fence with the indecipherable old sign. This time, this time I would step through its open gate.

     I did not look toward the forest bordering the road on the right. I ignored the vines I knew were laced throughout the trees. I disregarded the swampy stench of the stream under its layer of green algae. I would not be distracted.

     At last, the rusted gate, opened fully on its hinges. The access road turned sharply to the right. In its overgrown lot stood the white tank labeled METHANE, that little shack-structure affixed to the tank’s side like a smaller, conjoined twin. I stepped through the gate. I continued to follow the road, now pointing me toward that huge block-like factory building I had never suspected lurked this far back on the Odyllic property.

     The road seemed to gird it like a moat, and so I began to circle the building. Broken windows gaped at me. Unmarked metal doors indistinguishable from each other were set into the flanks of the plant or warehouse or whatever it had been. At its rear, in shadow, there was a single picnic table that workers had once lunched at, badly worn by exposure to the weather. I approached it, scanned its surface for cryptic messages carved in the wood, but found none. I continued on, reaching the far side of the structure. I could glimpse little inside it through those shattered windows; darkness, or else sunlight shining through onto empty walls.

     I had completed my circle. The building was as anonymous an industrial structure as could be imagined, its only real feature being the shipping/receiving dock up front, and the attendant dumpster stuffed with stripped insulation and other debris. I turned my attention back to the white methane tank. Then, found myself drifting toward it.

     Could there still be gas trapped inside it, despite the peeling paint and long streams of rust?

     This time, I decided, I would chance the risk of ticks, and plow through the tangled weeds swallowing the base of the thing, mount the metal stairs and have a look through the shack’s broken windows.

     Again, I left the stroller empty behind me, cradling Grover in one arm. I held him high against my shoulder as I tramped through the underbrush, not wanting ticks to latch onto his blue fur. I reached the short flight of grille-like metal stairs, much corroded, and they rang with hollow clangs as I ascended to the metal platform upon which the little wooden shack stood. Its white paint and staring windows made it look like an immense skull one could climb inside.

     I leaned close to one of these socket-like windows, to peep inside. It was murky in there...but I did see something. Something on the wall...

     I faced the door to the shack, wondering if it were unlocked, and that was when I noticed for the first time the letters stenciled upon it in faded and chipped black paint. DOOR 5.

     The knob turned. I pulled the door toward me, and the weeds poking up through the slots of the grilled floor feebly tried to hold it back but were crushed. I crossed the threshold into the stuffy, humid gloom, too drawn by the obscure thing I had glimpsed on the wall to be concerned about a possible face-full of spider webs.

     Sunlight entered through the open door, and glimmered on emerald-hued plastic as clear and hard as glass, and I heard myself gasp dramatically. I wanted to take flight, just spin on my heel and run, but at the same time I was mesmerized. Dust motes swam calmly, glinting also, in the
shaft of admitted light. It was an hypnotic, suspended moment.

     There was a human figure affixed to one wall of the shack. It was lashed there with rusty metal wires, which randomly crisscrossed the room in lieu of spider webs, their ends moored to eye screws in the floor, walls, ceiling. Wires around the figure’s arms, which were outspread in crucifixion. A wire around the neck, the other end of it wrapped around a light fixture in the ceiling. Wires around the ankles. Wires – anchored to eye screws that had been screwed directly into the green plastic – appeared to hold open the dissected flaps of the effigy’s body. For this manikin of translucent plastic had been molded in a posture of vivisection. The incision in its front extended from the throat to the pubic bone. There was no penis. Despite the shortness of the figure’s wonderfully detailed hair, it was obviously a woman. Her small breasts were spread to either side of the wide, appalling wound. Inside the wound glistened an array of green plastic organs as clear as ice. Some of them had been sculpted in such a way that they looked as if they could slip out of their cavities and splat (or in this case, shatter) on the floor at any second. One loop of intestine was already hanging down, almost obscuring her genitals.

     I studied her hands, the gnarled fingers, the creases in her palms. Then, her face. Her mouth was open a little, so that I could see some of her pellucid teeth and a bit of green tongue. Her eyes were closed in death. But, though the figure was meant to represent a partially dissected corpse, there was a lingering tightness in the features, as if the woman had died only moments ago and her facial muscles hadn’t fully relaxed yet. Her final scream still echoing in this small, too small room.

     I might not have realized that the figure was Marsha,
had a second figure not been lashed to the ceiling. It wasn’t as exposed to the sun as Marsha was, but I could tell that it was a green model of her little scruffy dog. It was more wrapped up in the snaring metal wires than Marsha was, as if it were in the process of being cocooned. I could touch it if I reached my arm up and stood on my toes, but I had no desire to touch either form.

     They had murdered her, I thought. For talking too much, maybe to other people besides myself. For trying to sue them, to fight them. Then they had made a cast of her tortured body (I could see a deep, almost severing wound through one thigh that was not simply a break in the plastic), and from that cast had molded this replica.

     Or
was
this just a casting? Only a manikin, a model? What else might they have done to Marsha and her dog?

     Finally I was able to break the spell, back away, into the sunlight again. I closed DOOR 5 gently, as if I had intruded into Marsha’s house and didn’t want to wake her and the dog from their nap.

     I anticipated turning around and seeing that white security truck bearing down the road toward me. Seeing someone crunch out of the bushes, pointing a handgun with a silencer. But the grounds were as deserted as ever. I hopped down the grate-like steps, jogged back to the stroller, and buckled Grover in. I had seen enough. I had seen too much. It was time to get home before I was seen, in turn.

     The walk seemed longer than it had before, as though the access road had mysteriously doubled in length. The suffocating heat inside the shack had started a headache to brewing. When at last I arrived at the start of the access road, the headache had already increased to a dizzying level. I reached up a hand to touch the lump, around which the pain was centered.

     I felt a wetness there, and jerked my hand away, expecting to see blood on my fingers. It was a clear, watery fluid, but I was certain it had come from a little sore I had touched in the center of that knob-like swelling.

      I arrived at my little house on Mill Street and locked my door behind me, but without any sense of relief. I rushed into my bathroom to have a look at my reflection. There was, unquestionably, a fluid seeping out of a ruptured little wound in the growth on my forehead.

     In the kitchen, I snatched up my phone and dialed my doctor’s office.

     Over the receiver, there came only an oddly distant moaning or howling sound. It took me several moments to understand what I was hearing. It was the sound the wind made when it blew across the top of that cell phone tower down the street.