Lucien turned off the radio. It seemed the one-horse open sleigh song was going to follow them all the way across Oklahoma. One could track the reach of Wall-mart for the next thirty miles since every other yard displayed the same Christmas decorations. It was a homogenous patch of real estate; and the sameness not so much underscored cultural resignation as what had always been in place: edge-of-oblivion resourcefulness. It was like a tribe of cavemen whose tools were all made using the same regional flint stone.
If wishes were fishes, we’d all be eating at Long John Silver read one Assembly of God church marquee; these words was quickly committed to embers of the campfire. Daylight decomposed around Amarillo, where the travelers stopped for dinner at Bingo Burgers. The ground under the Lumina harbored an arrière-pensée, as red clay was already salting the sunset.
Because Death required no sustenance, he wandered the twilit parking lot, preoccupied with his unattended-to dossiers; the diner kept losing sight of him from the window seat. The deity set off no motion detectors, and it was feared he might slip away under some fine print stipulation.
Near the end the speedy meal, a curious couple came into the eating establishment. At first Lucien judged them to be father and daughter, but the pregnant teenager was underdressed for the season, and did not move with the self-consciousness of her age. Though pretty in a deciduously infantile way, her skin lacked appropriate transparency. It had seen much sun, and (likely from her condition) too many hands.
Speculation turned to her companion, who was perhaps a juvenile officer, although the man kept looking furtively at empty tables with a mind to stack them up in a battlement against prying eyes. The mismatched pair left shortly, and Lucien followed them outside to ring his mother on his flip phone.
There was always a nervous beat or two, where he imagined Blythe fussing with her walker, or with the large folds of her housecoat in pursuit of a cell phone. Though the flashing baby monitor kept tabs on her utterances and breathing, he could not easily relate the diode to the fact of her. Had the tiny struggling light been the sound of her clacking walker on carpeted hallway, it would have been more a shepherd to him than any flickering star.
“Hello?” she answered with a rasp.
Only a thin sparking wire was needed as a suture. “Just checking in, Momma.”
“I worry about you when you are on the road,” she fretted. “I love this new broach you got me. Did you find it among my old church earrings in the jewelry box?”
(She referred to the microphone clip for the monitor.)
“You must keep it on you until I return. I love you, Momma. I’m going to bed soon.”
“Love you too, baby.”
The son dropped the phone in his pocket and rounded the lot to find Enoch.
The deity stared westward to where curried sky bled into a mile of encroaching road. He proclaimed, with restraint and melancholy, “Plato said true philosophers make dying their profession, and in being denied my profession I am forced to become a philosopher.”
The travelers resigned the world to darkness, and the road atlas to the car console. A motel lay conveniently across four lanes of interstate, although the intended guest puzzled exceedingly at a sign posted over his room door. In bold san serif print, it read: Doors pressurizes at midnight to guard against bears. All doors depressurize at six a.m.
The low door frame grazed Lucien’s scalp. He bungled in dimness until his shin met a cast iron bed rail. A lamp chain clapped against the glass bulb on a table lamp, which tossed the barest serviceable light over crown molding and a row of evenly spaced rivets: Walls and ceiling were joined in the manner of a ship’s bulkhead. The facing wall was covered in reproductions of pastel seascape paintings, replete with lighthouses, trawlers, and glinted seagulls. (This was odd décor for a landlocked panhandle.)
The television was turned on to establish a sense of normalcy, although channel surfing provided only a paltry selection of stations.
“Isn’t it late to watch TV?” questioned the companion.
“I am looking for news,” answered Lucien, “to see if anyone has died since we started this trip. If I see a headline that reads ‘Death takes no holiday,’ then I will know you have tricked me.”
Enoch settled into the room’s only chair; his posture might be described as a grimace.
The television was soon turned off, revealing the outline of an argument on the other side of the motel wall. Its timbre possessed the quarrelsome character one associates with compromised privacy in close quarters.
Lucien was parlous tired, so yanked the light chain and dropped to the bed without removing his shoes. The bickerers in the next room were well matched. Strings of words did not make it to the end of sentences before falling like objects from low ledges.
“Someone will need to win this argument if I am to sleep,” the motel guest complained of his neighbors.
A seascape hung on the noisy wall, and resembled barges of glowing jellyfish. The magician, glancing at this dark picture framed beside him, expanded on the opportune chalkboard. “It is fashionable to dismiss symmetry as the fairy tale of a Perfect Creator. For the Universe to exist (we are told), this required a distribution of oddly numbered particles of matter and antimatter, where mutual annihilation was not complete. Yet is this idea any more palpable to the circle-closing mind than the allusion of A Kindly Grandfather who puts his children to bed under stars too far away to be heard as howling furnaces? All the slumbering child hears, remembers, and prizes is silence.” The Great Roldofo swept his cloak over the watery picture, transforming its titanium streaks of light into solid points. No further noises arose beneath its stilled waves in the wall. “Creatio ex nihilo,” he proclaimed.
“My mind tends to distraction where it meets with silence,” confessed Lucien.
The appointed guardian inquired, “What do you expect to discover when you wander into silence?”
There was a pause. “The fact of my own inadequacy.”
Enoch pondered the bleak remark. He cast no shadow, but became one himself where he resembled a psychoanalyst in the chair. Readjusting his cape, a gesture was made toward the bathroom. “I will retire for the evening in there,” he announced. “I advise you, if you value your sanity, to knock before entering this room.”
The seraph disappeared behind the door and closed it. A light, unconnected to any wall switch, presently appeared around the jamb and through the keyhole.
A dossier was left in the abandoned chair; Lucien used the provided nightlight to examine it.
Surprisingly (or not surprisingly) these were notes about Daphne, but not the usual sort of curriculum vitae. This was more like a medical history, but not a comprehensive record or even a death certificate. This list included plastic surgeries and other cosmetic procedures, and was of such an extensive nature that Lucien doubted the account’s authenticity. Had the documents been magically whipped up out of a toilet sheets covers? And to what purpose? To disillusion the pilgrim so early in his pilgrimage?
The homesick man plopped back onto his pillow. He watched luminous jellyfish drift like clouds over him, where the baby monitor blinked from a shore like a distant lighthouse beacon.
Lucien had a dream of unusual vividness for an early bedtime. He walked searchingly through a graveyard, where cawing crows swarmed and massed in preparation of dusk. Closer by, he heard, and then glimpsed, a squirrel darting out of view and clambering up bark on the far side of an acorn tree. The pale yellow light was that of November or December, which provided the startled witness with dark but attenuated shadows.
Among the headstones, an outline—not of a squirrel but a child—was spied; or so the dreamer anticipated a child in having walked past a narrow strip of field containing the graves of children seconds before. And yet, the proportions of this tree-climbing figure indicated nothing of an uncoordinated child or a dwarf but—surely—the aspect of a normal man scaled in miniature… a homunculus…
Lucien awoke with a shiver, but if he thought himself on the cusp of daybreak, he was still in moonless dark. The angel was no longer a light bulb in the bathroom; a peek inside produced no corporeal body.
The motel guest groped along the wall, where fingertips grazed air bubbles trapped in the wallpaper. These resided below the sea-themed paintings, and resembled skin on dried porridge. High water presumably crested here at a prior time, and the nautical pictures served to misdirect away from this damage by their strategic placement.
The searcher forced open the room door with surprising ease and stepped outside. He found the gravel lot as featureless as his windowless room. Beyond it, the evolving western landscape was less capable of concealment. He conjectured a river (if not a substantial one) lay in the vicinity since the area conformed generally to a plain. Flooding, short of Biblical proportions, would not produce the water damage found in his motel room.
Perhaps he had not noticed the structure in the hubbub of bedding down for the evening, but an unusually long row of lights lay on his side of I-40. These were not runway lights of a small airfield, but windows in a one-story building. The size of the complex compelled Lucien to hazard thoughts of rattlesnakes and irrigation canals to reach it.
No silhouetted smokestacks, power lines, or satellite dishes broke against the clean line of this well-lit building. Similarly, no parking lot filled with cars skirted its perimeter. Nearing an entrance, glass pneumatic doors opened to reveal a polished corridor of boggling length.
Lucien stood in the entryway, expecting to hear a forklift or other vehicle ferrying a pallet of durables across acres of cement floor; but nothing of this nature was detected beyond the hum of circulating fans. He scanned the walls for signage or a site map, yet found instead a brochure case such as one finds in visitor centers. These announcements for touristy attractions in the region were nothing of recent printing. They were yellowed and of considerable age, and where a few provided roadmaps, these predated completion of the federal interstate highway system: before I-40 assumed much of Route 66’s west-bound trek.
The emboldened explorer pressed ahead and entered the intimidating corridor, where the first in a series of widely separated doors was presented. He crossed its threshold and found not a room but a vast diabolical space. The doors, like the brochures, were dummies to mask a repurposed airplane hanger. Rows of metal cabinets traversed the unpartitioned space, with each overburdened with antiquated consoles of electronics. Cooking transistors and copper wire protruded from these housings, and only Atlantic Telephone and Telegraph—old Ma Belle—was grasped as a comparison. In concert, these components may have served as a routing station straddling The Continental Divide in an earlier tele-communicative era, but what conceivable function did they serve now? So much overheated technology must require a staff of diligent technicians to maintain it, yet no one was seen about.
Bundles of electrical cords impeded the trespasser’s path, yet he ably reached a set of headphones lying across a desk. These were slipped on with the hope he might hear a recorded docent explain the bizarre display.
A pleasant sounding woman was in the middle of saying something, as it turned out, but silences punctuated her sentences, which the listener judged to be places where unheard replies were being supplied. The character of these quiet bits possessed no analog dimension, which indicated that not only was the headset of an advanced, noise canceling design, but the voice relayed in the ear cups was digital, and likely synthetic. The subject of this conversation was indecipherable, yet these listening stations numbered in the many dozens. It was reasonable to suppose that each landline engaged a different caller.
The aforementioned circulating fans hung from steel struts on the high ceiling, although these were better described as propeller engines formerly attached to fixed wing aircraft. Collectively they created a cooling downdraft of such immense force that any candy bar wrapper or post-it note would be pushed to the front of the building and plastered to its wall like a bulletin board.
Lucien used the racket to cover his tracks, and continued down these rows of inscrutability, stopping periodically where an intersection created a walkthrough and a view of a far exterior wall. He reckoned he might see a fire extinguisher bolted here, or lockers, or something suggestive of human activity.
Eventually an object of interest sprouted in one of these interstices: a dark place not in keeping with the bright airiness of building.
It was like approaching a burned-out house at the end of a spooky block, but he knew this was an iron bar cage from its shadows of crossbeams. Soiled, compacted straw lined the bottom of this enclosure, and the unpleasant smell in the vicinity was consistent with a zoo exhibit.
Necessarily the unlatched cage door was of immediate concern.
Pages of magazine photographs—all of attractive women—were Scotch-taped to the inside the cell bars, so to humanize the confinement. These were not pornographic images but, instead, sunny models advertising shampoo and other cosmetic products. Their selection indicated nothing of a sorted, prurient nature, but Lucien was not convinced that whatever dwelled here held any regard for them.
A plastic dish tub was filled with scummy water—and what manner of inhabitant required this amount of hydration? Whoever (or whatever) occupied this sturdy cage, in any case, roamed the facility at will, and perhaps was tasked with dispatching unwelcome visitors after business hours.
Were this a predatory animal, Lucien reasoned, the strong draft should make it difficult to pinpoint the location of prey, so this temporary advantage was seized and the trespasser walked back the way he came. He stopped at each row of cabinets to check for a horror he dare not envision, knowing, in his excess of caution, that his scent was being rushed through the building like a piece of telecommunication—this could only alert the sentry to his presence.
Coming to the next bastion, another section of exterior wall was seen—a creeping shadow leapt across it. The observer’s earlier nightmare, which roused him from his sleep, came to mind. And having tapped into this frightful recollection, the shadow began to writhe, as with devious but inaudible laughter. This determination was judged premature—surely this was the lifeless carcass of a large animal being excavated by blowfly maggots?
The trespasser broke into a wobbly trot that became an earnest sprint. None of the doors along the wall through which he passed were genuine. Gaining his original door, and the corridor, his heels sounded like strings of firecrackers on the high-buffed linoleum. He was on the gravel lot outside before he was aware he had flown through the pneumatic doors.
A glance behind him was spared—
As by osmosis, the blackish phantom materialized at the far end of the shiny hallway. There was, again, jarring movement about its body, as though arms of incredible length fetched and groped in front of it like a fly-catching spider. And yet, the fleer would not describe the figure as charging after him. Its face was grotesque in the blurry way of one’s peripheral vision, where the brain, deprived of precise details, invents them clumsily and nightmarishly.
Lucien did not tarry to sort this budget of curiosities, and he met with no obstacle in the field. He practically propelled himself like a hovercraft over coarse, uneven ground, and was soon safely behind his motel door.
In an effort to calm himself, he remembered the baby monitor in his jacket pocket. His mother’s slower heart rate was compared to his own, and gradually the two synced while dawn broke in the East.
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