Do you remember Windfall Lake?
“Well, you’re always talking about how you want to get back into camping,” Shane says, leaning in to better see the enigmatic words of the targeted ad on the laptop screen.
The text appears to float over a dim canopy of treetops. The view is from below, the shot mostly sky. Presumably the sky is blue, but the image is so dark it’s impossible to tell. The shabby state of the trees, their unleaved crooks like the elbows of tangled corpses. . . just as likely the sky is gray.
Shane’s arms appear from behind me, crossing my chest. The slope of my neck becomes warm with him. “You know you need this.”
I tell myself that forgiving him for missing the point is easy.
♦ ♦ ♦
Do you remember Windfall Lake?
There was a time, not long ago, that I would’ve simply scrolled by. Back then, targeted ads were far from perfect. You expected the misfires—clothes you wouldn’t wear, not even in a nightmare, books you’d never read—accepting them as another of life’s small spasms of weirdness. Back then, companies hadn’t yet learned how to collate their information—so many lifetimes of interaction, entire human psyches, an endless library of secrets—with advances in neuroscience. The Internet still had a sheen of innocence, the last of it, unrecognized without the vantage point of retrospection.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore an ad now.
♦ ♦ ♦
Do you remember Windfall Lake?
Well, do I?
“Where is it?” Shane asks.
“According to Google, Alaska.”
“We don’t have the money for Alaska.”
“No. Of course not.”
The picturesque pines of Windfall Lake look nothing like the gnarled trees behind the text, but I don’t mention this to Shane. There is no need to explain that Windfall Lake is a recreational cabin for rent in Tongass National Forest, no point in drawing his attention to the fact that the “advertisement” strangely lacks essential information, no phone number, website, or even a link to make reservations.
I try not to glance at the space between the TV and the window, which is suddenly no longer empty.
“Alaska would be incredible, but maybe you could settle for something a bit closer.”
I force myself to meet Shane’s smile. Somehow, I manage my own, focusing on the ever-rich blue of his eyes. The sharp etchings of light on the wall behind him are notably absent of the contours of the figure in the corner, a sure sign that it is a figment of my imagination. . . unless, of course, the angle is wrong. I make a thinking face and hold it for what feels like an appropriate length of time.
“There’s Sunshine Lake. I went there a lot in high school and college. It’s where I used to clear my head. Re-center.”
“Well, don’t you think you could use that now?”
When I look at Shane again, I realize all at once how much older we have gotten.
♦ ♦ ♦
I don’t look, but I hear the whispering in the darkness over my shoulder. I want my headphones, but they are behind me, on the bookshelf. I catch myself thinking that I could navigate the room backwards if I kept my hand on the wall, but the headphones wouldn’t do much for a sound that exists in my head. . .
The whisper continues, repetitive, quiet, almost nothing but a faint hiss, t’shhhh, t’shhhh, t’shhhh. . . It is easier to pretend it belongs to the distant cycle of a dryer, or that it’s the noise of insects outside.
I can’t sleep, so I try to imagine Sunshine Lake. I wonder how much it’s changed, whether the bike trail still goes all the way through the woods and into the next town. I try to remember the paths, the way the trees formed a half canopy on one side with the water on the other. I remember the heat of biking in the half-shade, the way snakes crept onto the concrete from the brush, lured by the warmth and too lethargic to return to safety in the sudden cool of the evening so that I often had to carefully avoid them on the way back. . .
Behind me, there was no movement, not even the sound of breath between the whispered syllables that seemed to grow louder, as if drawing closer.
♦ ♦ ♦
For a long time, I fantasized about an extended medical leave. At one time, we even made half-serious plans of a New England road trip, beginning with New Orleans and turning north, guiding the Jeep all the way up the coast, camping the whole way, no fancy hotels, although Shane would’ve preferred to remain indoors whenever possible. There was no concern for the medical aspect, not in these little daydreams.
Now that my wish has come true, I spend my time off waiting in the house for Shane to come home. There are days I don’t bother with the lights. I sit in the gray that gathers around my desk, pretending to read, waiting for Shane to order dinner, waiting to watch him drift further into himself over the quiet sounds of eating, becoming another shade among shadows.
Waiting for the sound of crushing metal to empty itself into the hours I’ve gathered, hoping it will ultimately come to prefer these wider spaces. I don’t tell Shane that there is more of the sound than I thought, so much that it doesn’t finish pouring.
You need to see someone, he’d say.
There are other things I keep to myself: the way the ad changes now, if it can be said to be an ad at all; the way I’ve begun writing down the words appearing on them, the way they have taken on a hollow, childlike voice, a singsong lilt thinned by oceans of static. . .
♦ ♦ ♦
It’s Shane’s idea. I agree, but only to please him. Resistance wells up within me, but I fight, hoping that by the third drink I will have found my way outside of myself and can finally breathe.
We order wings and stare out into a darkness somehow intensified by the artificial light surrounding us. A country band plays clumsy renditions of George Strait on a small raised stage. A wide square of bare floor has been cleared for dancing, but it is mostly empty. In a different time, I would’ve let Shane take me out there, feigning indifference to the disapproving glares from certain corners.
I wait while his eyes travel the blackness. It takes him a long time and most of a beer to build the courage to speak.
“So when are you going back?”
I wait before answering. Laughter rushes into the pause from somewhere out in the dark.
“When I feel better. When there’s less anxiety.”
Shane nods slowly, his deep blue eyes rimmed in red.
“You haven’t been getting out at all.”
“. . . No.”
And so it begins afresh, the crunch of metal, the impact as the red Toyota flies from the overpass and lands just ahead, in the right lane. Sheer luck that I was in the left.
“You need to get through this.”
The clatter of debris striking the Jeep strangely amplified in the shock.
“You have to function.”
The fine spray of fluid, amber, red—it’s true what they say, about time slowing down. The vehicle doesn’t bounce but flattens. Sparks and the immediate smell of burning rubber, gasoline. The driver’s side door bends, snaps off like it’s nothing, spins through the air, revealing in the sudden gap of the wreckage a face somehow further away than it should be, at the end of a tunnel formed by layers of what seems like rough, unfamiliar fabric. But it’s the eyes that loosen something inside me that begins to shake, eyes far too round, protruding just below an oddly smooth forehead the color of chalk stretching back to a severely receding tangle of wild hair.
Where have you been? my mind screams—one question, however insane in the light of what has happened.
Where have you been?
♦ ♦ ♦
I wait until Shane’s almost ready for work before unlooping the Ranger’s key from the hook by the door. A bewildered smile. “Hey, good for you.” A kiss, hurried, unshaven, still sweet. I tell him I’m off to shop for camping supplies and promise to keep it cheap. At the doorway he tells me he loves me again. I follow him out the neighborhood before we split at the main road. I stay on the expected route long enough to vanish from the rearview mirror, then detour into the older part of town.
My work’s in the other direction—toward the interstate, along with all the new restaurants and businesses—and it’s been some time since I’ve driven this route. Residential areas shift beneath a sheen of weariness I don’t remember. How long have I avoided the world of my childhood? The grass in the front yards is higher now, and the yards themselves seem to have shrunk, as if the neighborhoods here all yearn for an inanimate afterlife in the corners of a playroom.
The streets have changed as well—more potholes, garbage overrunning the bins and spreading onto the sidewalk. I drive slowly, but not out of fear. There’s a pleasure in the kind of sadness the old neighborhood fills me with, a rare one worth savoring.
I find the church easily enough. Its white cross still towers over the surrounding ruin. I pull in the parking lot and kill the ignition, listening. Do you remember Windfall Lake? The whisper tries to come from my own mouth, and I leave it unformed, the merest suggestion of air. I watch and wait, but I am not sure what I expect. A van pulls into a parking spot, and I watch a man in work clothes exit and vanish into the double doors with a toolbox. He is no one I recognize, and some time passes before I’m satisfied nothing else will happen.
Nothing is here that I haven’t brought with me.
♦ ♦ ♦
It isn’t a dream, since I’m awake when I relive it. I gather another load of laundry, feeling every inch of the new aches that flare along my back. When I stand, I am a child again, in a soggy room of the old church beneath a depiction of Noah’s Ark, animals entering the hull of a wooden ship below a mass of mold that has replaced the benign pastels of God’s clouds, His wrath a green, oleaginous mass crouched at the end of time.
“What is it?” I ask Ryan, who has been staring into an empty corner.
He doesn’t look at me. He has lost all his color and his fingers tremble. I ask him again, but he doesn’t seem to hear. For the first time, I wonder whether I should go for help, but he speaks at last, his voice suddenly babyish.
“Cry Bobby.”
Tears fill his eyes. I peer into the corner again, which remains empty. Nothing but mold.
Later, on the way home, I wonder whether he meant to say “cry baby.”
♦ ♦ ♦
I knew Ryan from Sunday school. Like me, he was quiet, the product of a restrictive environment. Once, I discovered him with a Walkman in the bathroom. Before long, when he decided he could trust me not to tell anyone, he’d let me listen to the songs he’d recorded from the radio in the brief interim between Sunday school and “Big Service.” Sharing his headphones, heads almost touching, I learned how to drink a certain endlessness in his blue eyes.
At the time, the Northside Baptist Church building vastly exceeded the needs of its congregation. Our pastor, who eventually became a car salesman following a scandalous romantic affair, had successfully extracted funding for a series of expansions. There was a recreation center that mostly stayed empty, state of the art classrooms in which the older congregants convened, even a lucratively updated daycare facility. Only the elementary and middle school grades remained upstairs in the old building among mildewed rooms with dulled murals, long hallways gone eerily silent, room after room filled with nothing but lurid blue carpet and the pained hum of fluorescent fixtures.
By the time Ryan and I began exploring, maintenance had long abandoned the upkeep of the hallways and water from the AC unit had begun staining the ceilings. We began skipping Sunday school, spending the hour huddled in empty rooms over the Walkman, scribbling obscenities on the whiteboards with the few near-dry markers left behind. Ryan began bringing comic books too, frequently the kind his parents didn’t know about, and soon we were skipping service as well, making sure to find our way back to the sanctuary in time to join our parents, pretending to have only just parted from our classmates. There was a doomed awareness that we’d eventually get caught, but the excitement won out, and we wound further and further into the uric lighting, terrorized by every structural groan, electrified by the formless swaths of mold beginning to colonize the deeper corridors.
It took some time to realize that Ryan felt we were never fully alone in the crumbling hallways. His unease around certain blind turns wasn’t a ruse to scare me, as I first imagined. His frequent backwards glances into emptiness, his panic whenever the lights began flickering, somehow it was real, attached to something beyond my understanding.
Did he want to ask me if I heard it? Did he stop himself?
How could he describe it? Like the hissing of a snake trying to form human words, t’shhaay, t’shhaay, t’shhaay. . . the breath of nameless seduction moments before the atmosphere electrifies, before the round eyes appear, two planets caught in the aura of a black hole.
♦ ♦ ♦
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