Once More Into the Abyss (3 page)

Here and now. You can't beat it.

I look out across the desert landscape of west Texas and think about death. I know the eighty-year morbidity statistic isn't like a law or anything. I don't
have
to die then. Or I could die sooner. I could die right now.

So what else is new? Death and I have met. He doesn't scare me anymore. In fact, I often ask myself,
If I were to die right now, how would that be?
It's made me a better and happier man. Seconds are precious.

Ollie's asleep, which is what I should be doing—we're due to reach the abyss at dawn—but I can't sleep—not usually a problem for me this time of night. The dogs and I typically rise early and doze off early. We've crossed a time zone, but the dawn's chasing us. Pretty soon the dogs and I will need to stretch our legs. They're slow these days but seem to enjoy their long, snuffling walks. They haven't lost their sense of smell.

As a kid, one of my first realizations of how weird and unusual my parents were was their attitude toward pets. If we brought it home, and it didn't belong to somebody else and wasn't dangerous—no scorpions or poisonous serpents—we could keep it and take care of it, get to know it. But not too many of any one kind. A new species was a shoo-in. Mom ended up doing a lot of the caretaking, of course, but what we weren't allowed to do was neglect them. If you weren't willing to hang out with a pet once in a while, maybe they might have something better to do with their lives than live it in a cage.

We had a fair number of dogs and cats, but never more than two of each, except for the occasional litter we fostered. Mom was crazy for kittens. Same with turtles, lizards, gerbils, rats. There were fish tanks until Mom rebelled on that one. I can't blame her. How many ecosystems can you watch collapse, leaving a sea of fetid corpses? I'm guessing there weren't fish on Mom's home planet. She couldn't connect with fish, though she certainly tried.

With every other pet, however, Mom and Dad were full of information about what they were thinking, feeling, hoping for. To them, all species were sentient creatures. Not like Disney animals but weird and goofy and fun. Complicated.

Because of the cats, we never did birds—though Mom always chatted up crows wherever they turned up. The one brief exception was a terrified cage-bound parakeet named Luigi who Mom soon drove down to somewhere in Florida to release when she saw how miserable he was.

He was grateful
, Mom reported when she returned,
delighted to be outside
.
Outside doesn't amount to much if you're always on the inside looking out at it, but once you're there? It's everything! Remember that, boys
, she added, another nugget from Mom. Ollie doesn't even remember it, but it stuck with me. Dad and Ollie used to wound each other, but Ollie mostly ignored Mom, which wounded her, perhaps, most of all. I adored my mom and dad, and then they just left when I'd barely gotten to know them.

If what Simon says is true, I may soon see them again after almost two billion seconds, most of my life, in other words. If that doesn't make you lose sleep, I suppose nothing will.

*   *   *

There's a fence around the perimeter of the abyss, quite a substantial fence, cameras, the whole rigmarole. Yet Simon Deetermeyer climbed over it. Fortunately for me and the dogs, we don't have to. We're housed on the abyss side of the fence. On the other is miles and miles of National Forest. Everything's forest either side of the fence, except for the anomaly, the star of the show, the very deep, very strange hole in the middle of everything. It's our first morning walk in our new neighborhood on the lip of an enigma, the dogs and I. We're all a bit nervous, darting our eyes, twitching our noses, leery of shadows.

You don't just stumble upon the abyss. You have to navigate a maze of forest roads, each one shittier than the last and certainly bouncier. And even then it seems to come out of nowhere, this emptiness—the abyss.

Just inside the fence sits a recently constructed three-bedroom house, nothing fancy but sound, the archeologist's family residence, one of the perks of Katyana's new job. We are the archeologist's family, her most cherished artifacts. It's completely furnished. Everything is beige or worse. We'll have to make our mark by shedding prodigiously and hanging shit all over the walls. There's a big eat-in kitchen. We'll like this place just fine.

On this first morning in our new home, I slipped out of bed quietly and the dogs followed. Horatio started whining, so I decided to take him with us and let my aged brother sleep. He claims never to get any, but he practically hibernated all the way here, prompting Dylan to ask if Uncle Oliver was all right. He's eighty-four, I explained. How he manages to walk Horatio, I can't imagine.

For me, walking with dogs early in the morning is one of the great pleasures of human life. Horatio is challenging that notion. I want to walk through these magnificent woods and see the sun rise over the abyss. He wants to go berserk in the Forest! He's never experienced one before. Gone is the Zen dog in the car window. He smells deer and dead things and who knows what all as he races this way and that. We proceed in fits and starts as I stop to reel him back in.

Avatar puts up with his puppy antics for a few of these episodes, until finally he lets out a fearsome snarl worthy of a satanically possessed werewolf and shows some snaggletooth fang, and damn if huge Horatio doesn't sink into the dirt and the pine needles in a puddle of submission, while Myrna looks on like that beauty who watched George slay the dragon—if she were a half-daffy collie in her last days.
We haven't got time for this nonsense
, she seems to say. Myrna, even now, always acts like she's got someplace to go, and the herd better stick with her.

Avatar, as usual, falls in behind her, and Horatio stumbles behind him. Now that Myrna's lead dog, I can relax. Her navigation skills are still far superior to mine. Around the house the woods are sparse, but they soon grow deep and dark.

It goes without saying that the dogs believe in the presence of aliens. All dogs do. One sniff, and they know. I've never seen it fail. Has your dog ever veered off from his walk, quite out of character, to meet some oncoming stranger in a wagging frenzy? Alien.

I counted four cameras in the trees aimed at the house, one for each side. Who knows how many are inside? Who knows what might show up out of the abyss?

When we got here, Katyana and I did a quick dash through the visitor's center with a tiny museum of the site. There was one car in the parking lot, one guy inside who said he was a volunteer. He volunteered his ignorance of the site, so we wouldn't make the mistake of asking him any questions. Prominent among the displays was a case full of artifacts from the abyss with the caption
Do you know what any of these objects are? What they might have been used for?
Damn near anything by the looks of them, as intricate as the complex doodles I draw when I'm on hold listening to oldies, trying to maintain my serenity.

The artifacts look like things that used to show up in Mom's weird paintings and mosaics. I asked one time what something was in one of her paintings. She was going through a still life phase. She'd put something like a pile of fruit, a jug of laundry detergent, and a claw hammer on the kitchen table and spend the day painting it, only the jug didn't look like a jug, and the hammer didn't look like a hammer, and the fruit looked like fruit from another planet. She was letting me watch. I asked her what the hammer thing was, and she told me it was a thraxle.

“You bend time with it,” she said, “so you can see what's around the corner.”

“You can't bend time,” I said.

“Not without a thraxle,” she said.

I've always wanted a thraxle, but as Mom used to say, getting what you want is seriously overrated. She sounded like she spoke from firsthand experience, so I always wondered what had disappointed her, what did she regret? Did she want me and Ollie? I believe she did. What she didn't want anymore was to leave us and go home. So maybe she will come to see us like Simon said if only just to say good-bye.

And suddenly the dogs and I are out of the woods, standing at the lip of the abyss, a circular berm that for all the world looks like a pucker. All attempts to measure the depths of the abyss have failed, but the various instruments sent down to plumb it are hauled up encrusted with the artifacts Katyana has come to investigate and understand. What's not to understand? They're alien. Inscrutable.
Everything is scrutable
, Katyana corrects me,
even if you don't know what the fuck it means.

It's hard to look dead on at the abyss. There's no point of reference. You've never seen anything like it before. The emptiness seems to draw you in, summon you perhaps, into its inky depths. It's hard not to feel like no matter what you do, you will fall in.

But we don't look into it, the dogs and I, lined up in a row as the sun breaks through the massive pines and warms our faces with delicious light. Even Horatio closes his eyes and tilts back his drooling snout and lets the sun wash over him. We're only here a few glorious moments in the sun's embrace. To get here, Myrna led us through deep woods where the sun rarely reaches the forest floor, as if time itself is hiding under the litter of needles and cones. To bring us to dawn.

Now Myrna unerringly leads us back. There's not much of a trail to speak of, and everything looks different the other way about. Smells the same, apparently. Myrna never skips a beat. It's chill and damp, but I can still feel the warmth on my cheeks, note the spring in even Avatar's step as Myrna takes us home. Horatio ambles behind almost gracefully, as if the years the two old dogs seem to have shed have been gifted to him. A walk to remember.

*   *   *

When we step inside we find a household in chaos. In honor of our possible reunion with our folks, Ollie's decided to make a Big Breakfast Like Dad Used to Cook. Indeed. There are pancakes. There are potatoes. A mountain of scrambled eggs. There is what looks like a pound of bacon frying in the skillet. Katyana and I are both vegans. Whoever thoughtfully stocked the fridge obviously wasn't informed of this fact.

The dogs are dazed with passionate longing for whatever shit that is simmering in the pan. It's been some intense moments for Horatio—Car Window, Forest, Dawn, and now Bacon! But even Myrna isn't blasé about the aroma of fatty, salty bacon in the air. She's chattering like she used to do in her youth, and I have to smile. This is my brother. He's just like Dad. We both are.

“Tell your wife,” Ollie says, “that you will have some of this perfectly fried bacon in Dad's honor.” Ollie's been talking about Dad a lot, like he really might see him again, get a second chance to get things right. Maybe alien parents should stay dead like normal parents do. Ollie's spent decades getting over a few things about them and finally seems at peace with them. I'm afraid if they show up, they'll only piss him off again, and all that counseling will have been for naught. Horatio is about eye level with the pan. His drool streams to the kitchen floor. Ollie looks down at him. “Don't even think about it.”

“Might as well think about it, Horatio,” I say. “I'm not having any.”

“Stan, nobody lives forever.”

“How about longer? Is that okay with you? I'm not having any.”

“What about you?” he asks Katyana.

“I love you, Ollie, but no thanks, and please don't ever cook bacon in our shared kitchen again.”

He likes the “Ollie” from her, who wouldn't, the way she purrs it? But he's standing there with a platter of bacon fried to perfection just like Dad taught us, dying to
serve
it to somebody, but there's no one to serve.

Then for the thousandth time I discover that I do indeed have the perfect son. He steps up. “I'll have some, Uncle Oliver,” he says. “How about BLTs? I like the name, but I've never had one. Are they good?”

Uncle Oliver beams. “Dylan, allow me to show you how to make the perfect BLT.” Exactly what Dad would say. Me too. Dylan uses the make-a-perfect-whatever line with his friends, mostly girls who have a crush on him, often older by a year or two and nearly always taller.

Katyana and I retire to our room, leaving them to their uncle-nephew moment. Dylan's never eaten flesh since he met a friend's pet pig Sophia, and they hung out for the better part of the afternoon, wandering around the property together, a small Hanover farm, mostly wooded. Dylan was seven. “Sophia showed me around,” he said. After Sophia, he shuddered at the thought of meat, especially pork, but here he is, stepping up for his ancient Uncle Oliver.

This makes Katyana and me feel like such good parents we make love in our new bed, in our new room, in our new lives. That's how the day goes, one big happy family. Katyana goes to the lab—
her
lab—and returns with a dazzling slideshow of the first batch of artifacts she'll be studying, some of the oldest to have emerged from the abyss. We gather around her and eat dessert as she tells us about each one. She's where Dylan gets his earnest from, his big heart. Every single moment. Everything is perfect.

*   *   *

It's the middle of the night. The room is bathed in moonlight. I can't sleep. I listen to Katyana's breathing like the ocean waves coming in, going out. What a glorious sound! My life is impossible, and yet here it is. Not a dream come true. My dreams were never this good.

A shadow crosses the window—a bear or a ghost from the abyss or a trick of the moonlight. I slip out of bed, go to the window, and look out. It's the field the dogs and I traversed at dawn, and now it's bathed in moonlight. There's someone standing at the threshold of the woods, looking right at me.

It's Dad.

He turns and disappears into the woods with the slow, measured pace of someone very old but still strong, rather like I imagine myself. I scurry around, throwing on clothes, desperate not to wake anyone, and I almost get away with it. I'm trying to find my left shoe when a familiar snout gets in my face.
What are you up to?
Myrna wants to know.
Don't even think about finding your way through those woods without me.
She has my left shoe. Good thing animals don't think, or I'd suspect a plot.