Once More Into the Abyss

 

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I just changed, aged, got older, however you want to put it. Isn't that how every story should begin? Even if the sucker's in present tense, it got written and revised
after
what really happened—or was
imagined
to happen—hopelessly entangled—actually happened. Our present past is a reinvention, a reimagining of the facts. That's not just old age. The boundary's always been more than a little slippery. Still. The story you're about to hear changed your narrator. Isn't that the very definition of getting older—change? Of a story, for that matter. We change until we die and become other people's memories, and of course they change too. Might as well get over yourself now. Once you're dead, other people get to decide who you are. Why let them get started on that now?

Getting older doesn't just glide along, however, smooth and easy at a steady pace. It's like a clogged-up little creek for many years, quiet and tranquil, same old trickle downstream, but when the hard rains come, then watch out, because then everything changes all at once, and washes your little world away.

Don't mean to sound grim. It's just the way it is. I'm the happiest, luckiest, happy-go-luckiest guy I know. Everything is perfect. Everything, as it always does, is happening now:

*   *   *

Katyana and I are sleeping in, or trying to. We're both early risers and would rather be up and out enjoying what looks to be, through the window, a beautiful day. We can hear Dylan in the kitchen laboring furiously to make us breakfast in bed before we have the bad taste to get out of it, so naturally we stay, trade nostalgic memories about him, about us. It's our anniversary. What started out as a marriage of convenience, I believe it's called, has turned out to be quite wonderful for all three of us. Dylan's twelve. I'm seventy-nine. That's coming up on 2.5 billion seconds. Time flies when you're having a good time. Katyana's lived a mere 1.4 billion seconds or so, but she's wise beyond her moments. We're holding hands. We do that a lot. Mine are leathery and old, a rainbow of liver spots arcing from pinkie to thumb, hers tattooed and still graceful looking like a beautiful tropical bird.

We squeeze and release when we hear Dylan trudging up the stairs, freeing our hands to make a fuss. He totters in with a huge tray heaped with food. Anticipating this, Katyana and I have cleared a space for a landing on top of the dresser, usually covered in random crap and piles of change. We're not the tidiest couple, but we're happy. He sets down the heavy tray with a cringe-making clatter, and we shriek with delight for the feast our wonderful son lays before us, applaud his presentation, the aromas, his thoughtfulness.

He serves us a spicy tofu scramble with lime-cilantro-mango salsa and fresh tortillas, zucchini muffins, grapefruit slices, and lots of hot coffee—this is
my
kid we're talking about. He's the best cook in the house, twelve-year-old earnest. The food radiates love. We dig in. I'm snuffly—from the salsa, or from the moment, I can't say—but
everything
is perfect.

When people say
I love God
, this is how they feel.

Then Katyana's phone bleats, and she says she has to take it, leaps out of bed and takes the call in the master bath.

Dylan's as surprised as I am. What's so important to interrupt our good time? We're a spoiled pair. She likes to spoil us—that's our story anyway. We listen intently. The bathroom amplifies everything but muddies it up too. It's her excited voice, but restrained a little. She's speaking up even though she's standing in the bathroom staring into the shower. A lot's riding on this call. We can tell that much. Dylan and I trade a look. Neither of us has a clue. You can't make out enough of the words to get the sense. Then out of nowhere, an unmistakable eruption of joy, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” It's positively orgasmic. It's overwhelming to hear it. Her joy is the world to me.

She bursts into the bedroom, her phone clutched to her breast like it's responsible for her good fortune. “I got a job! They must've had hundreds of applicants. Thousands! It's a real dig—I'll be an archeologist again! There's even a place for all of us to live!”

“What about the dogs?” Dylan asks. If he hadn't, I would've. The dogs are ancient. Avatar's fifteen and Myrna sixteen. Though she's a little more with it than he is, the best they can manage some mornings is to stumble around the neighborhood without bumping into anything, sleeping and farting together in whatever sunlit patch of rug they can find. I'm not sure how well they'll travel.

“The dogs will love it!” Katyana declares. “It's beautiful. You said so yourself when you drove us all the way out there and back.” Her eyes meet mine, and she lets that last part sink in a bit.

Holy shit. “We're talking about the
abyss
?”

She nods excitedly. “It's an incredible opportunity! The first serious archeological exploration of the site!”

Oh joy, the incredibly weird and scary site. “That's wonderful!” I declare and hop out of bed, wrapping my arms around her. She beckons to Dylan, and he pops inside our circle and smiles up at us with perfect love and trust in his eyes.
You
poor kid, your parents are alien looneys
, I want to say but don't. He already knows. His mother and I try to practice total honesty with the kid, a perilous policy if there ever was one, but so far it's worked out spectacularly. Someday, before I die, I aspire to be as together as my kid. “We're going to New Mexico!” I tell him. “It will be a wonderful adventure!”

Katyana used to be a working archeologist with the highway department, then the recession hit, road building ground to a halt, and any archeological digging would have to be done the old-fashioned way. Funding was scarce to nonexistent. Thousands of archeologists chased a handful of jobs. For the last twelve years she's worked at mostly shitty, lifeless jobs. To see her like this fills my heart with joy. I'll follow her anywhere. And I wasn't lying to Dylan. This
will
be an adventure. Filled with wonder. Alien portal, geological oddity, or archeological treasure trove of enigmatic artifacts—take your pick—
any
journey to the abyss is an adventure, though in my two previous visits, I never managed to make it all the way. Third time's the charm, they say.

*   *   *

The sun hasn't even set on this news, and the three of us are gathered around a battered road atlas on the coffee table to show Dylan where we're going. It's the atlas Katyana and I took before he was born to call on Dylan's biological father who lived just shy of the abyss, who didn't care to get involved in Dylan's pending birth or his life thereafter.

So when he arrived, I took on that good fortune, much to my continued delight, relishing each second—his and mine. We're telling him our version of this epic journey, and he's enthralled, though he's heard it all before, when Katyana's phone rings again. She sighs when she sees the source, but this time doesn't leave the room, and we can all hear the tinny voice on the other end.
Is she the daughter of Simon Deetermeyer?
she's asked, and she confesses, bows her head, wondering what trouble her wacky old man's gotten himself into this time, only to learn he's dead in New Mexico, an apparent suicide. By this time, she's sobbing so hard I take the phone away from her. “This is Katyana's husband. She's devastated. May I ask how did this happen?”

He tells me in a deadpan cop voice from a thousand miles away: “We have him on security cameras breaching the perimeter of an archeological site known as the abyss, and at exactly noon our time, he jumped.”

“Has the body been recovered?”

Is that a
chuckle
? “You can't recover nobody from the abyss. Too deep. Too dangerous. I'm terribly sorry for your loss. Would you have your wife call us when she feels ready?”

You bet, Chuckles. “I'll pass that along.” I take her in my arms and hold her. After a while, I put her into bed, continue to hold her, and she cries herself into a fitful sleep. Every once in a while she wakes up and cries some more, clinging to me. Dylan, who never knew his grandfather, takes care of us with tea and snacks. I read, look out the window, watch the beautiful day's progress, reminisce. The day I was told my folks had disappeared into the abyss, I wanted someone to hold me, but there wasn't anyone. There's nowhere I would rather be than holding her. Dylan pops in to check on us, and I tell him to go to bed. It's been a long day.

“Was it a good anniversary?” he asks.

“The best,” I say.

He glances nervously at his sleeping mother. “What was he like?” he asks me. “Was he…”

“Crazy? Good question. I wish I knew. Crazy or not, I think he was right about some crazy things, like aliens.” Dylan's familiar with my weird notions and remains undecided about them, but Simon Deetermeyer was way weirder than me. He was on a mission. Some would call it obsession.
Like John the Baptist
, he said once in a story Katyana narrated to me: the night her father shared his theories with the assembled family for the first and only time—that aliens had come to Earth and taken on human form, then fled en masse leaving behind a network of adult children of alien beings struggling to understand their enigmatic identities. It was his mission and purpose in life to set them free, so that they might return to their home planet.

You don't get any more wackadoodle than that. Unless you become one of his followers. Like me.

“He was incredible,” Katyana said. “He was on fire!” That night her mother packed the three kids in the car and left him. Katyana's the youngest, the only one who ever had anything to do with him after that night. He was crazy. Whether it was John the Baptist crazy or not, you can decide for yourself.