The traveler was destined to cross paths again with the agitated rental Santa after leaving the cafe.
“That man!” the bell ringer exclaimed. “Did you see that man who came by?”
The addressee gestured evasively.
“That man is the Devil himself!” yelled Santa.
The pedestrian could not ignore the remark. “That man is a fellow disciple.”
Saint Nick snorted. “Of course he’s talking up God! What else is left him? How can he corrupt when all is corrupted? He has to build God up just to highlight a contrast!”
The artist strolled insouciantly away, along a row of plate glass windows illuminating the dusky street. He slowed on the declivity, where a stand of fir hurried the last quarter-hour of sunlight to its end.
Approaching clouds did not darken accordingly. Their lighter tone indicated snow, and wind was soon pushing the heavy downfall up the slopes of mountains. The blunting effect of whiteness made everything poetically unfamiliar.
The traveler returned to the broadway. A hirsute monstrosity escaped from the Krampus parade dashed by him. This figure could not be positively identified as the same one passing the cafe window. His stare was similarly arresting, though his gait was thought unnatural. When distance allowed, a peek over a shoulder revealed the fellow at the end of the block. He was fully out of his costume, which he left at his hooves on a white-dusted sidewalk.
Across the block, another impostor sprinted in the same direction; and no sooner was he acknowledged than a third chimera, clanging like a Christmas bell, was spotted. In each case they were behind the spectator before they disrobed, though the manner of the transformation was recherché under veils of snow. The men were white as bone when the traveler stopped to face the sloughing gale.
These fleers had rushed out of reach of lamplight, where darkness devoured their unchained bodies before an exact process could be deciphered. Undulating outlines became ash, which in turn became indistinguishable from crystalline flakes of snow. The spectator’s eyelashes iced and drooped into his line of sight. He could not honestly declare what he saw.
He ducked into a doorway to clear his eyes, but by then everything beyond the sidewalk was behind a white curtain. The scene was recast as a picturesque Christmas postcard.
Returned to the motel room, a note awaited him pinned to the drape: Meet me at the chapel at seven.
It was a lucky guess on the hypnotist’s part to deduce his subject’s disposition, but he was wrong about intent: The traveler was not a pilgrim, but an absconder. The suit jacket hung over the shower rod. Its navy blue shade was made more nightfall by the shadow of a mountain penetrating the bathroom window. The theatre ticket was placed face down on the bed table. An unhurried hand had penned a note to the reverse side: It is the pride of youth to prefer tragedy to an imperfect happiness.
The chapel’s steeple was seen among spears of sharpened pine in the distance; a lamppost illuminated a marquee halfway to it.
The ticket holder found no one at the booth to tear his ticket. That evening’s performance was presumably underway. He crossed into the unlit lobby, where eerily no sound of an audience or speaker issued from two sets of double doors. A peek inside the auditorium revealed a full house. Everyone stared raptly at the hypnotist, who stood beside an empty chair on the spotlighted stage. The performer gazed imploringly over the heads of those assembled, and appeared to wait on a volunteer.
The equivocating late arrival held up in the doorway, thinking whatever business preceded him would play out, but hypnotist and audience were comfortable with the prolonged interlude. A second spotlight dangled like a silver chain from the rafters. It appeared trapped in an eddy where it circled between pedestals and border drapes. Nodular, tar-like shadows were displaced and threatened to escape should the door be left open, so the latecomer fled the scene before he was overtaken.
The elderly justice of the peace and his organ-playing wife were archetypes from another age, when rash comedy hastened the Hand of Providence and its unquestioned consequences. Glancing at his bride-to-be, the groom was nearly convinced that he had begun his journey with a different woman. “I was held up by a pagan parade,” he explained in a specious defense of his lateness. “Unseemly characters…”
A platter of crust-trimmed wedges of sandwich bread, filled with something cheese-like and spreadable, sat across from the loquacious grouping on a bureau; it was stale on sight. Polite inquiry was made after a bathroom, and he strayed into a less stuffy hallway. He worried about its inky corners, where skulking witnesses seemed already assembled.
Icier snowflakes scraped an alcove window; the cap of a drawstring danced on its sill. Curtains were exposed to the elements through a raised sash, and beyond them branches whirled in a caldron of mumbling voices.
The seeker peered through the pinkish cuticle of a lampshade with sudden, unshakable fatigue. A second curtain moved in his peripheral vision, and swung like a detached retina in lockstep with a sweep of his head. He fussed at the bathroom tap in hope of flinging one of these ghosts into the open, and succeeded.
The size of the retreating bear was hard to gauge through the series of grey panes of window glass, and required the pursuer to slip into an adjacent kitchen for a better view. There he found only a screen door shielding the back of the unlit property. The same cold breeze penetrating the compromised hall window pushed through its wire mesh. It emboldened the scent of a white sheet cake cooling on a table.
The groom nudged the yielding door; only one of its three hinges remained attached to a frame. Neglect (and perhaps not the furry marauder) explained the disrepair. A second look at the cake forced him to reconsider this assumption: a slice of it was missing. The cut was a careful one, without a crumb to light on either the cake tray or tablecloth. The knife used for the removal was also clean, with no smudge of icing on the blade. No bear, he reasoned, would be so punctilious in its opportunism.
The sleuth was backing away from the curious scene when he noticed that the end of the table opposite the dessert was minus a leg. Immediately he understood the situation: The three-tier wedding cake was being used as a counterbalance—and how many slices could be removed from it before the table should topple?
This, as it turns out, was one of several discomfiting details in the kitchen, which presented a child’s puzzle book of challenges in listing strategically placed incongruities: One of the wall mounts for a paper towel dispenser was missing, leaving the paper roll sitting upright on a counter. The toaster oven next to it had no handle on its glass door. (A pair of locking pliers served this capacity.) Three of four cabinets under the counter were unburdened of their doors, and this predicament was shared with the dishwasher.
No porch or stoop abutted the screened door. The explorer stepped easily into pine needles where the low slicing wind had yet to apply snow. The loose bedding moved him up the vertical terrain like an escalator, in spite of his inadequate shoewear. His inquisitiveness made him venture further than was wise, out of his own memory and into another along the rising timberline of the mountain. The snow was last to find this wind-scourged ground, and with tardiness the tracker realized he had failed to note whether the bear left any tracks as such to follow.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.