Three Miles Past (21 page)

You feed Thomas from the produce section of the health food store, walk hand in hand to the car.

In the slot next to yours is a woman leaned into the passenger seat, arranging groceries. Nobody in the whole wide world watching her. You stand there, appraising her, and finally realize this is a test. That everything’s orchestrated, synchronized. That she’s waiting to see if you’re the same anymore. If you’re still you.

Not a test, an invitation.

Come back. Remember us?

Yes.

But walk away.

Buckle Thomas into his seat, pull your door closed and ease out, take random streets through the more and more familiar buildings until dusk settles down over the city, and, there like you knew—you’ve been waiting as well, haven’t you?—there’s the park. The only park. The right park.

Stay at the curb for ten minutes, for twenty minutes, your hands curled over the steering wheel, like if you let the steering wheel go this image will fade, this memory will get sucked back into the past.

But it’s real.

You lead Thomas out into it, the seed pods crackling under his feet in a way that makes him lift his feet high, smile.

Hold his hand. Remember.

Look across, through the equipment, for a woman sitting on a bench, oblivious.

She’s not there.

Just, standing by the tree, her shoulders shaking, a younger woman, her boyfriend or husband trying to console her, each of them with hair the color of straw, with faces washed even lighter.

Distraught, that’s the word.

Two people come back to the playground at night, the same way ghouls traipse out into a cemetery under the moonlight?

Wait, see.

Thomas slips away from your hand, rushes out to the jungle gym, the swings, the slide, and the woman looks up to him like she’s waking from a dream. And then she looks across the playground, for this boy’s watcher.

Only—it’s your instincts.

Of course you’ve stood such that the wide tree trunk is directly behind you. Of course you’ve stood such that you fade, that she doesn’t see you. Such that this perfect little boy, he’s running out of nowhere, and from no one.

Her hands stabs down, takes her boyfriend’s, her husband’s. She makes him look.

At Thomas.

He’s climbing the slide, the one with the plastic hood at the top.

Look ahead of him, to the jacket in the crow’s nest, whipping in the light wind.

Smile, bite your lower lip in.

An instant later, your chest hollowing out with fear, Thomas ducks into the red plastic hood, that brief and forever tunnel, and when he slides out, the metal beneath him polished by a hundred thousand years of human existence, the hood amplifies his scream of delight.

His voice.

The woman rushes out to him, collects him from the woodchips and holds him close, like a package she’s stealing, her left hand cradling the back of his head, and then she looks around one more time, for you, but you’re in the shadows now, your head moving back and forth in something like a dry heave, something like joy, enough that you have to cover your mouth to keep it in, and like that you let Thomas go, let him have the life he deserves, the life you always wanted for him, and whether you go back to your old ways or just keep fading, it doesn’t matter.

Things are already in motion. Like they always have been.

Thank you. From all of us.

Story Notes
         

[“
Interstate Love Affair
”]
I distinctly remember pulling over to the side of the road out by Shallowater, Texas one day and getting most of the way in the ditch so I could write down the first sentence or two of this story. Like it had just drifted in through the side glass. And then, after scratching down those few words, about a hundred yards down the road there was this big old mangy dog running in the ditch. So I stopped, went out into the cotton fields, chased him down, cornered him some lucky how, carried him back to the cab of my truck and closed the door gently, so as not to spook him. Then I got in behind the wheel, to take us on what I was sure was going to be the first of our many adventures. Except he kept coming across the bench seat and biting me on the arm and the side and the shoulder. So, after about four miles of that I had to pull over again, dive out my side so that dog could explode out past me, go on with whatever his plans had been for that day, before I delivered him far off course. Then, hunting a month or so later with one of my cousins, who’s into medicine, I kept asking him all these oblique, kind of sidelong questions about, you know, like, what if somebody had rabies, say, and they didn’t want to have it anymore, like, what would
this hypothetical person
this
character
I was writing maybe do about that whole situation? And, that walk through the trees when I was just completely camouflaging my real intentions, this snowstorm was blowing in hard and blinding, and we weren’t dressed even close for it, but we were Blackfeet, on Blackfeet land, so we weren’t so nervous. Just step, squint, lean into the wind; wash rinse repeat, until some kind of blue light just fizzed into existence right over our heads, enough to cast our shadows in the wrong directions, bright enough that we ducked, didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know what
could
be happening. And then a few steps later we kind of felt something, and looked back into Glacier Park, to one of those big rock faces that reach into the sky higher than Tolkien ever dreamed, and this snowy face of it that must have been the size of Rhode Island, it just calved off, fell in slow motion, so far away. And that’s related to this, for me. That massiveness. Our smallness in comparison. That combination of mystery and fear that adds up to awe, if you can just not look away. But, that Deridder-lift that gets things going: I’d recently studied that from every angle I had access to, and still couldn’t decide if it was some animal not on the books or if it was just hype. The way my heart was pounding, though, it was real real real. I wanted to go there, lick the asphalt where that animal had been found. So, William, for me, he was how I charted the distance between ‘cryptid’ and ‘Pomeranian.’ Also involved, I guess, was I’d had to bail one of my dogs out from the pound in Lubbock not long before. The tech walked me back to this one black dog they had that didn’t really fit the description I’d given, but what the heck, and sure enough it was her, and her intestines had all fallen out, were hanging down in the newly-loose skin of her left leg, and her front paw was just a skeleton hand she was holding up because it wouldn’t take weight anymore, and she was mostly burn and blood and starvation, and the tech kind of eeked his mouth out, said Why hadn’t the driver just put her down already? I kind of wondered that too. She should have died in the road. Except she had to come home. We were her people. And, because there was nowhere to hold her that didn’t make her cry out, she had to drag herself out to the truck, get up into it herself. And it was a tall truck. And she made it through those next few weeks, her whole body white with gauze, then she limped through the next eight years, and finally only died up here in Colorado, after many more injuries (she cut her neck way too open once, she had some teeth knocked out with a bat, she got chewed by other dogs, but still, I’d trade any ten dogs just to have her again. any ten dogs and most people). So this story, it’s about dogs, yeah. I think most of my stories are, really. Dog and trucks, and fathers, all in some narrative petri dish, just add antifreeze and radiation, let cook overnight. But, the more macro why of this story: I’d told somebody once, and said it like I knew what I was talking about, that we should all, at least once, write the thing we’re most scared of. For me, that’s always been a person with a dog head. My single biggest fear is walking around some corner and into the chest of some solid dude, then looking up, and up, and seeing this Anubis kind of head just starting to tilt down, apprehend this disturbance. It still terrifies me. I thought I could exorcise it with this story, but, man this story just made it so much worse. I wrote it in like three days, I think, and loved it, thought it was perfect, but it wouldn’t let go of me the way most stories will, or know to do. So then I wrote forty or fifty thousand more words of it, turned it into this big violent novel, hoping to get rid of that image. It was an effort that cost me nearly twenty pounds, too. Every time I sat down to write it, to back my way into this particularly dark space, that dog-head guy would stand up just behind me and I couldn’t turn around, couldn’t even think how to, so I’d gag, not be able to eat for that whole day. But I couldn’t let go of the keyboard, either, knew that the only way out was by writing. That’s always the only real way out. So I tried, and I tried, and it completely didn’t work, if what chasing that novel down was supposed to do was make me not scared of dog-headed people. Really, it just gave them names, and trucks. But, anyway, this piece that’s here, it’s the front of that novel. And very much involved with it is how much I always hated getting ticks and ringworms and lice in elementary school. Well, not the lice so much, who cares about lice, but I always hated having a tick on me, latched deep, and always felt like my revulsion was a very specific kind, that I was feeling it deeper than anybody else who was having a tick on them. And, yeah, the title’s completely an STP-steal; that’s one of my favorite of all songs. And, as for why Tomball, it’s that the whole Houston area’s always freaked me out. It’s so hot and humid and muggy, and there’s so many people, and they’re all doing all these things I can’t even guess at, and for reasons I’ll never know. But I can’t write about the city, I never really understand cities, so I wrote about out where one of my good friends lives, because the pastures out that direction, I kind of recognize them. They feel real to me in a way that I can do them on the page. And, I-10 there: I’ve driven ruts in that road, I think, going back and forth from Texas to Florida. You get a lot of ideas, late at night. And sometimes they turn into stories, and you think you can vomit them up through your fingertips, be done with it, have it gone for good. But there’s always more.

[“
No Takebacks
”]
That elegance you’re always looking for with code? How some red-eyed night you might sneak up on a recursive statement that can make a page or two not matter anymore? How you can luck your way into a simple string_replace trick or a way of passing variables nobody’s thought of yet, but that everybody should have been thinking of all along? That’s exactly the same elegance you’re looking for with fiction. Or, that’s exactly the same elegance I’m always looking for, anyway. I’ll stay awake however long it takes to luck onto it. I’ll do the piece over and over, trying every which way, even ways I know are going to be broke, just on the chance that the right way’ll be shadowing me as I work. And that I can turn my head fast enough to see it. Problem is, I don’t have nearly enough elegance to try to program
and
write fiction, at least not anymore. Or maybe it’s a patience-thing, or maybe I’m just not smart enough to manage both. Or maybe I’ve just had too many concussions, finally. But I still remember that hazy joy of being awake for three days, peeling through pages of not-really-that-natural syntax, and how it can all be worth it with one magic
Return
. This story comes directly from that. I’d done it once before, with this story that turned up in
Asimov’s
, but this story took a dark turn just a whole lot faster. It completely surprised me, too. I went in thinking it was going to be a couple thousand words and done, go see a movie now, you earned that torn stub, but it kept scaring me more and more, and there kept being more layers under the one I thought had already been the last one. That last scene? It still terrifies me. Of everything I’ve written, it’s been the stickiest, at least for me. But I guess that’s just because, like Eli Roth says, the best horror, it’s personal. Which is to say, the horror that works best on me, the horror I can make the most real, it’s the horror that just bleeds up through my pores. That’s in my DNA deeper than I can ever get at with anything but story. So. That morning before the afternoon I wrote this story, my wife and I’d hit a garage sale, and she’d bought this huge ancient-old surely-haunted lamp, then put it in the back of our truck such that, every time I checked the rearview, there was that lampshade, sneaking up on me. It was spectacularly creepy. But—it was like this deer head I grew up with, that my granddad I never met had shot before I was born. That deer stalked my whole childhood. It got to where I couldn’t sleep if that deer wasn’t on the wall in my room, so I could watch it, keep it from stepping out of the wall. I dreamed about it so many nights, and then, one night, I woke from a nightmare of that deer and it was in bed with me, had fallen off the wall. That was a bad night. And now this lamp, it was my deer, just all at once, some kind of childhood-horror transference that I’d stupidly assumed I could be immune to. If I could see that lamp in the rearview, then that meant I knew where it was, at least. And that was far better than the alternative. So, as these things go, I came home, wrote this story after lunch, just all at once, like a backcountry amputation, and still had to sneak upstairs when I was done. And that sneaking-upstairs, it was way more complicated than usual that night, because light, that’s supposed to be what saves you, right? Except now it was lamps I was terrified of. And then, to make it all worse, for some reason we put that lamp in the landing outside our bedroom door, so, some nights I’ll still wake up, kind of look out there, and there’s that lamp, just standing there. Waiting. I hate that lamp. In the nighttime, at least. In daytime, it’s pretty all right. But so’s the deer. And, as for the dog stuffed with jewelry, I think that’s from a trip to the vet with a sick dog. She’d been eating rocks, and was looking pretty dead on her feet, and I got to talking to the vet about all the weird things she’s had to cut-and-forceps out of dogs. And there was some pretty insane stuff, and I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about it all. And about what if she only
thought
the dogs had been eating all that on their own. And, that scene early on, where they’re hanging in the kitchen and the dad comes in, for some reason that feels like one of the most real things I’ve ever written. I’m not good at just a whole lot of stuff, I don’t think, but I can do sixteen years old like nobody’s business. No clue why, really. Once Will Christopher Baer said to me that I really had this teen-angst thing all the way down, man. I left thinking yeah, he sees it, he knows, dude’s got an eye. Except then I got to thinking that maybe that wasn’t so much of a compliment. But I can still take it that way, if I squint right. And, as for the title, it’s just—we
don’t
get any takebacks, right? And I think that’s good. The world would be all messed up if we did. One of my favorite stories, RM Berry’s “Metempsychosis,” that first bit’s always haunted me: “Dougherty dreams of second chances. He doesn’t feel cheated so much as simply baffled by irreversibility. Things happen. They don’t happen again.” For all of my life, I’ve been right there with Dougherty. And many thanks to Laird Barron for picking this one up for the debut issue of
Phantasmagorium
. I like to think Laird’s one of the smarter people I know—and I know he’s one of the best writers writing—so, that he ran it, it means a lot.