Little traffic was met heading toward Winslow. Meteor Crater lay thirty-seven miles east of Flagstaff. Nothing of the landmark could be seen for the rising Colorado Plateau.
An impression of the crater dated from school days, where dramatic aerial photographs of the impact site were recalled like the gaping Mouth of Hell. Yet in climbing onto the rim with his companion, the scale of the circling canyon was diminished by the clarity in viewing it. A diorama spoke of The Washington Monument fitting into the crater with room to spare, but this thought terrified Lucien since he could not picture the obelisk in so seemingly shallow a bowl. It was no wonder astronauts used the location for training in the Apollo program, because little of its treachery and steepness was obvious at first glance. The contemplator was reminded of one moon mission where an astronaut, looking over rocks near an incline, had no idea of his danger because he could not gauge the distance down due to the effect of lunar parallax, which made the bottom as crystal clear as the terra firma under his boots. The drop may have looked shallow, like a hop down into beach sand, but it was more like The Grand Canyon that beckoned. This effect robbed the panorama of its sense of depth, distance, and terrible awe.
Until that moment, the acrophobic visitor had not realized how he underwent a similar decompression (or call it enchantment) on the Blue Mesa in The Painted Desert. He crawled over a magical gorge with surprising freedom. It was only in staring back up at caped Death from the lowest point that he understood the perilous danger he undertook.
The travelers were close enough to see Mount Humphreys’ snow-white cap, and several lesser examples of The San Francisco Peaks, besides. Shades of azurite and malachite covered the windshield, leaving the car mired in thickening resin like a beetle scaling a tree of which it could not see the top.
Death remained disarming, diverting, but duplicitous. The world through which he led his charge was dissolving; and with it, Lucien’s gated sense of self. They were short of climbing eight thousand feet above sea level, and nine hundred miles lay between Flagstaff and Los Angeles.
The motel they chose for their second night, Cactus Dahlia Lodge, had a wood porch framed with wagon wheels. A saddle greeted the visitors at the door, yet apart from an odd smell (such as one might imagine a wren’s nest in a saguaro cactus to possess), little here suggested a western frontier.
The second floor smelled of ambergris and leaking refrigerant. Wallpaper drooped along its principal corridor and resembled the parched lining of a whale’s stomach.
Gaining his room, the motel guest unlatched his suitcase and plumbed its sparseness. A toothbrush was fished out of from under a wrinkled shirt, leaving him to enter the bathroom in pursuit of splashing resolve. The small hand towel was secured to the towel bar by a mere eighteen inches of heavy gauge cable looped through a metal grommet. As he patted his cheeks, perturbed by the proprietor’s paranoia over thieving guests, he felt himself lured too compliantly into a trap.
The angel offered no commentary while watching these castings, though once Lucien set the baby monitor on the night table, he urged his fellow traveler, “Tomorrow we have a big push to cover remaining ground.”
Flecks were spotted on the bed pillow: It was tethered to the headboard by yet another cable and reinforced grommet. Lucien swiped at the particles like anesthetized flies, and believed them dandruff from a previous occupant.
The phone in his pocket rang; his mother’s felicitous voice righted him. “I’m getting ready to go to bed,” she said, “and wanted to call you before you woke me.”
“Yes, Momma,“ he answered. “I was just about to call.”
“Sweet dreams, baby,” she told him.
With similar words, he shut the lid on the flip phone. The LED on the baby monitor had not intensified during his mother’s conversation. It was possible the microphone clip had slipped down her lapel, yet was still close to her breathing.
Lucien sank into his pillow, remiss he had told her nothing of his adventures that day. Blythe vicariously enjoyed descriptions of travel where she had seen little in her life. When the son thought of pleasing his mother, he was not so different from any other son in wanting to rise in her esteem, but he had failed her in so many counts, and his coming to his love for her was the realization and regret of an autistic with an improving (if not curable) condition.
Death retired to the bathroom. His fellow traveler was out shortly and entered a grave-like sleep. He pictured the peaks of Humphreys and Elden in the north. Linked towers on their slopes were traceable from Arkansas; these flanked their darkening aspects of aspen.
Two ravens from the badlands had been kachina (as Enoch suspected). They had tracked the travelers westward, and became eagle dancers in the center of the small room. They swept their feather-cloaked arms over the low-pile carpet before pointing their outstretched wings at the ceiling. Lucien’s physical body could not pass into the unclouded firmament, for in seeing the cornice circling these spirits, his mother’s living room was recognized. The eagle dancers pointed at a star, or the moon beyond it. The dreamer awoke abruptly, overly warm and restless. Angelic light seeping from the bathroom door doubtless influenced his dream imagery.
Roused, he crept up to the keyhole, and though he was advised (warned) to knock before entering, he did not intend to intrude. Initially his excavating eye saw nothing but effulgent light: It resembled a blinding white avalanche of snow, which had buried the imprint of something fallen through a chute: The archangel had reverted to its celestial state and hid under the translucent shower curtain. The pearlescent plastic blunted its full magnitude, yet while the seeker lingered over the scene, he was drawn willingly into an illusion—
Daphne La Trisse’s prepossessing figure left nothing to complete. Her uncovered skin was lactescent and silver where she stood in profile, squared to the narrow shower stall.
Lucien drew back and collapsed.
To say he beheld a vision of beauty was only true, but what he took away from the room, more than adoration, was the spectacle of his own inadequacy. Stuffing the baby monitor in his pocket, he returned downstairs to the lobby. The motel guest could not explain his reaction, other than a need to escape a house of collapsing cards.
A newspaper was found in the seat cushion of a sofa chair, where he searched for obituaries or other evidence that minions had been employed in Death’s absence; nothing of this nature was found.
He was presently aware of security cameras in the vicinity—so many that their redundancy looked more like hoarding than a reasonable installation of a security system. Some were aimed at the ceiling, or at potted plants; two cameras were pointlessly pointed at each other. It took a Coke tumbling down inside a nearby drink machine for Lucien to notice the lobby’s only other occupant.
The teenager dabbed her neck with the cold aluminum can, and rolled it along the strap of her sunflower dress. “You’ve been following me,” she accused him, before throwing out a smile one associates with critical cinematic scenes, or with bad decisions generally.
Up close, she did not look harsh. The dropped ceiling lights at Bingo Burgers had given her a rubicund complexion that she did not possess. Perhaps her beguile carried her true age better than her face, though the surrounding glow of western-fringe lampshades softened more than her simple symmetrical features.
Vanessa (as she called herself) was late in term, and where she stepped ahead to lead the way, the child she carried could be blocked from any weak man’s mind. She wore flip-flops with tassels, so was in no rush to get to the other side of the little-trafficked road. Her lagging companion expected to see a deceptive network of trestles under her vacuum-sealed Spandex, but there was nothing in her presentation but stratum corneum, and a buoyant pound of gristle from miles of strenuous walking along desolate highways.
The moon had passed into its gibbous phase, and greater visibility made the lagger watchful for snakes once they crossed into rough, unpaved ground.
Vanessa wanted to share something with him.
Her destination was gained within two minutes of walking in unmodulated darkness.
It was a pit, perhaps from mining, but enormous. Like Meteor Crater, it was impossible to conceive its size from the vantage. Moonlight allowed for detection of its rim, which was almost surgical where no earth or rock was turned up to scuff its edge. The same light could find no bottom to the hole; and should there have been no moon at all, a precipitous and tragic end would befall anyone happening by here.
Vanessa said nothing of the danger, but stood motionless along the ledge. It was clear she saw no more than he, yet listened for sound from the depth. He kept his distance behind her, and pondered what she expected to hear: an unfortunate coyote with a broken leg? The steepness of the side was undeterminable, but it was doubtful anything fallen in the pit would crawl out under its own power.
Lucien heard something after an interlude: small rocks tumbling down the face.
He ventured closer, keeping an arm’s length between his position and his mysterious guide. Something grayish was spotted. Something two legged and moving below. It was like a sidewinder snake seeking a rising crevasse—or was it a crouching man probing for a foothold?
Whoever (or whatever) this was, it did not call out in pain or for help. Perhaps it was someone looking for fossils or petrified wood illegally, yet nothing in this fumbling suggested organization. Indeed, this figure struggled with reflexes, as one might imagine a zombie would struggle where it had instinct in a dilemma, but not problem-solving intellect.
Abruptly, a second figure shuffled further down the hole—much further down. This person did not endeavor to climb but swayed, as in misery and resignation. Lucien determined that he only discerned these dim figures because of their uniformity of tint: each man was nude.
There were perhaps more individuals down there besides, but the nubile contemplator of this torment not so much conjured images of souls trapped in Michelangelo’s Damnation as mutants emerging from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Were these the other male companions he saw earlier in his travel? Had Vanessa led them here and hurled them into their premature graves?
Her delicate profile was too malleable in the dark; and what surprisingly few tweaks would be required to erect Daphne’s face in its place. A knife was yet to cut on it, to perfect it, and so the admirer compared its virginal state to be the fault in the Amish quilt.
Was this how it was to end? Was this young girl Daphne? Had she not been eaten by a bear along a wilderness trail in California? Had she simply, in a reversal of snippets, returned to her pre-plastic surgery body?
Somehow she was transformed into a teenage sorceress, or perhaps into one of the minions Lucien imagined Death to dispatch as proxies. Still, the doomed gentlemen below were not dead, though perhaps longed for death to end their agony.
The fully clothed philosopher said nothing of the unfolding horror, but inched backwards. She dare not threaten him where their meeting was so publicly captured on videotape minutes earlier in the motel lobby. (This was perhaps a misplaced hope.)
Gradually the girl turned to smile, and nothing sinister was betrayed in her sweetness. She did not lunge at him, or seize his arm, but followed the same path back toward the road and its smattering of civilization.
The pair did not return to the motel but wandered in the unpromising direction of an apartment complex. The relative distance between them, established at the pit, was maintained. They ascended rod iron stairs barbed in the branches of a cottonwood tree; a scent of desert rain was imagined in the pencil line of clouds overhead. Vanessa’s cracked lips turned toward the hinting breeze like scarlet-spotted leaves anticipating moisture. If he thought of restoring them with a kiss, this thought was flattened in the broadside she gave a wide wooden door.
An elderly woman slumped on a couch past the dark entrance; a muted, flickering television stood in for a fire log. Blinds, tied off like a bundle of fire sticks against the ceiling, dangled over an exposed picture window, while a hissing, rumbling oxygen generator sat under its sill.
The guest did not like this setup, either logistically or as a moral hazard; but he had yet to utter a protest.
“Leave grandmother to her sleep,” Vanessa cautioned, creeping around her gatekeeper to enter a narrow, blank hall. She kicked off her scabby footwear and gestured him to follow.
The bedroom décor was a distraction, and a year or two behind its occupant’s social development. He would not guess her age, and kept peeking past high school pompoms taped to the back of the closet door.
The teenager grabbed the footboard of her single bed and gave it a good yank. Lucien was startled to see her, heavy with child, exert such force. He stepped up to help, yet with an impulse that was lodged somewhere between chivalry and chagrin—he need not have bothered. In seeing the loose headboard no longer touched the wall, the resident was satisfied.
The bed abruptly resembled an obstetrician’s examination table; and the light over it possessed a clinical tint of blue-white. “You can spend the night,” she announced matter-of-factly, “if you stay quiet.”
From where he stood, Vanessa was as cut and proportional as any catalog model, but she was no delicate waif he imagined bending to a will. Her strawberry-blonde bangs and shoulder length trim made her neck appear longer, and as he watched her remove her Lycra leggings, there was something oafish and fat-fingered about it. The girl was in the process of reinventing herself, with dyed hair and a bun in the oven. Perhaps she was on a second or third version, and the cheerleader guise taped to the closet door was a back-story. Her face was nevertheless striking, and maybe a year’s growth spurt would make her ravishing.
A carved white box with beveled edges sat on the pink dresser; it was filled with prophylactics and candy heart necklaces. His fatigue would have been evident to all but his young companion when he mumbled, halfheartedly, “I must leave.”
The undeterred ingénue strolled up to the bastion, which prompted him to push his hands into his pockets to minimize grappling surfaces that might entangle him in more details. She leaned in with an embrace, although her limbs were instant levers moving in contrary ways to his. A sun-freckled shoulder hovered below his chin, although with a ledge duller and less abrupt than the one faced at the pit.
He preferred thinking about young parishioners clad in pale, alluring tints of nylon; but his interest in Daphne, even when it was exigent, was never sexual. Still, the lover tried to picture the nymphet before him as a desirable partner under her boy band posters. Shame was not attached to this desire. Situational ethics would not be offered as justification for taking advantage of a promiscuous, possibly underage girl.
“Will you stay until I fall asleep?” she pressed.
The young woman pulled him along to the bedside, though more in the way of a daughter. She curled up on her eiderdown pillow without wile or calculation, and switched off the princess lamp on the night table. His head gestured toward the dimming lampshade; the sidewall of his eye daubed the mottled crimson patch where the bulb had been.
He sensed the inamorata’s skin receding spatially among these effects, with her top half still glowing as filament while her bottom half became gutted candle wax. Her smile was as opaque as it was freely given, and on sticking out her hand to take hold of his fingers, he accepted their ambiguity.
Enough room was for left Lucien to slip behind the girl and wait out an hour. The protector collapsed incrementally onto the mattress and hoped that the many points of interest in his predicament would deny him rest. He would not face her back since its shapely silhouette was her most compelling feature. The baby was temporarily buried in a shallow grave, and shoved like hard luck between her knees. From his perspective, the fulcrum it presented had rolled downstage to tumble into an orchestra pit, where it rocked unseen on the bow tips of building arpeggio strings.
What motivated his bedfellow was not nearly so diffuse, poetic, or self-doubting, as it did not animate from deliberation but mechanics. In letting Nature and youth tend to her subterfuges, calluses on the bottom of the teenager’s feet were left to experience. Hers was the fate of a drifting derelict ship, and one as quiet as any ossuary.
As for his participation, Lucien’s external bones bore more resemblance to pectoral fins than to limbs, yet he was indentured to the idea of physical bodies.
The wall across from the bed rumbled with the cursing and accusation of a squabbling couple in the next apartment. It was easy for a hyper-vigilant mind to isolate these sounds, even in the dissolution of sleep. Lucien repelled from this prospect, and from, what appeared to be, the beginning of a bad dream. The headboard groped and cracked above his head where a darkly hewed figurehead fell away from a prow. The moon that shepherded shadows from the other side of the apartment building was here denied, although pulsating television light seeped in from the adjoining room and, too, the hum of the pressurizing oxygen generator.
He was next certain that the elderly woman from the front room pass the open bedroom doorway.
Conversation in the neighboring apartment continued. The couple had argued off and on for the past half hour. Their to-do was little more than a murmur until the female participant yelled loud enough to be clearly heard. “I have told you nothing you did not already know!”
Presently a door slammed in this quarrelsome wall, and the tremor set the creaking closet door in the bedroom on edge; Lucien watched it swing open. A full-length door mirror attached to its far side extended the reach of the TV’s bounding luminescence from the front room. Fewer clothes hung in here than one would have thought necessary for a teenager, yet what was markedly visible (discomfiting) was a pair of trousers pulled over a hanger. A pants leg was bumped—not from more reverberation in the thin-skinned wall but from where something disturbed it.
The protector inched higher on his pillow, seeing no one standing inside the closet. He listened for steps and heard none, yet detected motion again in the bedroom doorway.
The back of the old woman’s small gray head pulsed in the glare of the cathode-ray television tube. Her shoulders in a pale housedress labored feebly. Something moved in front of her: something raised and lowered with effort.
Lucien was self-conscious of his intrusion, and more so because he was in the bed of a pregnant teenage girl. An illicit presumption existed, and his lying stationary for some short minutes would not exonerate him. The matriarch must have seen him, judged him, or perhaps not. She was busy with the activity that preoccupied her, yet might turn soon enough to see the granddaughter’s indiscretion.
He was about to bolt and hide when, at last, the broom the matriarch wielded came into view. She swatted at something hanging from the ceiling. He leaned forward and glimpsed it beneath the bedroom door frame: a billowy cobweb.
The moment he identified this obstruction, his heart welled with pity on realizing that the infirm woman was incapable of ridding herself of the nuisance. He was divided in his mind about what to do because he wanted to assist, yet from his compromised position, it seemed wiser to continue playing the cad.
Muscular reflex was almost enough to catapult his conscience to its feet, but her final swing was like a toggle switch flipping: The broom swayed forward, a good six inches below the diaphanous veil. Housekeeper and her tool disappeared, as if passing through a door at the end of the hall. The web remained vaporous until it too evaporated like a ghost.
Lucien slunk off the springy bed and confronted his balled socks in the floor. In the process, he felt Vanessa’s body answer his like a counterweight, suggesting a different distribution of mass. Glancing at the mirror inside the closet, his unclothed body and whey-faced expression mugged him. He then remembered the jostled coat hanger, and saw a small red light lying below it. The baby monitor had slipped from the pocket of his closeted pants, and its slow, even flicker was the only thing in sync with the contractions of the pressuring air pump in the next room.
The man had believed the palm-sized device to be one of two paired particles entangled across a universe, yet here, in his distraction, his vigil was forgotten; and, moreover, the truth discovered:
The moaning compressor was only a masking lullaby, where sibilating oxygen spread from a tube, yet was blunted against nostrils that no longer required it.
Despair sent Lucien into the front room, and then sinking to his knees over the motionless figure on the sofa.
The mute television across the room inserted a codicil: The image of a helicopter circled Lake Havasu and a capsized boat of perished passengers. The caption read: Death takes no holiday.
He wanted to summon tears, like a legion of attending angels to cloak and sanctify his grief; but it was not Death who tempted him away from home, but the very Devil himself.
Lucien returned hurriedly to the bedroom. The closet door stood at a wider angle than he left it. Its mirror threw more illumination against the side of the bed where the soles of Vanessa’s feet were bathed in a glowing emollient. Pigment still clung to the lampshade on her night table, and when he leaned in to assess her sallow features, his eye penetrated the concave curve of her body between her abdomen and thigh—
No evidence of a baby was seen.
Scampering erupted from the blackest corner. Elbows, like pelting scabs of skins, bounded across the hardwood floor. The sinewy form of a toddler bumped the bracketed closet mirror and sent it dropping flush to the door stile—the guillotine blade cracked in two pieces. The top half came to rest as a bookend next to its bottom half. The two-legged giggler was fleetingly caught between the sheets of glass, and answered itself like a ricochet.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.