Secret Lives (10 page)

The field gives way to forest, and the path is pine needles and the wind is fresh and clean, but it’s no comfort to Rajan, because he can hear the sough of the boy’s breathing, and can feel how the boy’s body relaxes and stiffens, as if preparing for some transformation. And his own strength is giving way to fatigue, his arms heavy, his legs churning, the sweat enveloping him.

It’s the boy who saves them—saves his own life and saves Rajan, because Rajan is in danger of becoming lost; the thoughts going through his head are unthinkable, but still there. That the boy might fade away, on the ghost path. That he might have brought the boy to his death through the simply human hubris of thinking he had a way, that he could be a hero, that he
had control
over something he still didn’t totally understand.

But it’s the boy who save them both, who raises his hand long enough to point, as if to say, “I see it,” as if he knew all along what Rajan was looking for, was willing them toward, and Rajan turns and he sees it—the tear in the world along the left side of the path, and through it the neon of emergency room lights, and without hesitation, without even breaking stride, he changed direction and lunged for it—for this change of attention, this way to another path—and with the sudden and inexplicable taste of lime in his mouth, and a slowly growing joy and relief, he was crying as they
passed through
and he brought the boy to safety.

Afterwards, everything was different for Rajan, although he didn’t know why. Suddenly, exploring seemed important again. It took up much of his time, and for many long years he walked the paths cataloguing their every detail. What made one seem cheerful and another somber. What made one seem still and another busy, although no one walked upon either. There was no detail so small that he could not take interest and joy in it, from the latticework of veins running across the back of a leaf to the absurd drunken scuttling of a stink bug up and down a stalk of sedgeweed. The feel of crumbling brick from the wall of a ruin that might once have been a watch tower. The smell of cedar and of larch. The sound of . . . well, every sound captivated him, and in each sound some part of him listened, flinching, for that same odd and lonely sound of metal flying through air.

And, over time it seemed only natural to show Libette the paths, to explain that he had not been talking in metaphor, about something that could be or should be, but something that was . . . and to his delight, she accepted both it and him, after her initial shock, as if nothing had changed. Because, in a way, nothing had.

Once, during his explorations, Rajan came upon the canopy path again. He was gray in the temples by then. He walked with a cane. He was not with his wife, for his wife did not always come with him.

The trees encircled and cocooned him, and for some reason it made him think of the boy whose life he had saved, and he was in a sweet, good mood for many miles.

After a time, he saw ahead a shape by the side of the road that became two shapes. As he came closer, he saw that one was a great boar, ancient beyond measure, his eyes, with each blink, reflecting a sliver of a different ghost path. The other was an old woman, her hair like gray bristle pad, sparse and coarse and close against her scalp, her eyes blue and watery.

“Hello,” he said to the boar.

The boar stared at him curiously with its strange eyes.

“There is no point speaking to him,” the old woman whispered to him in a throaty murmur. “He can’t speak. He hasn’t for many years.”

“Oh? Have you been waiting here long?” Rajan asked.

The old woman smiled. “We’ve been on a great journey.”

“I know,” Rajan said, and they both laughed, although the laugh was tinged with a bittersweet quality familiar to the aged, and then Rajan walked past them both, down the ghost path, down the corridor of trees, the clay firm yet soft beneath his feet.

CONSTANTINE MARKOPOULOS

It comes lumbering out of the ocean onto the North Carolina shore: at dusk: like a boulder-sized behemoth, water spraying out from its massive, deep-green shoulders. Across its chest lies a trail of encrusted barnacles, closed tight. What form it has for legs is cowled by seaweed, in the strands of which the pale shapes of caught fish, caught shells, glisten. The eyes lie so deep within the unknowable kern and curl of its face that they flicker and flare only when the creature blinks, the movement catching on the hint of moon above. A myriad of smells rise from the thing as it approaches the beach, some of the sea and some not of the sea. Brine and riddled, rotted wood, passionflower and sage; a glimpse of mint. The thick musk of dead fish is a distant aftertaste. There is in the curled, coiling scents such a sadness of forgotten memory as to be unbearable.

At first, the creature struggles under the weight of displaced water; it must raise its shoulders, push out its chest, pull each leg from the sand with a muscle-damaging effort. But, closer to the shore, the kelp and other debris drains flat against its barrellous body. The water trickles away to nothing. Suddenly, a sinnuous quality displays itself; a litheness at odds with the thick directness of its form . . .

There’s always rain on those nights when the creature crunches a path up the beach toward the high tide mark. A mist that obscures the dark green fir trees beyond the sand. As it walks, it raises its head to feel the rain more fully, and a sigh seems to fall out of the general area of its face, enters the world as a fresh, clean sound.

From the directness of its path—the way in which it forces its ungainly body to adhere to a quick and certain destination, with no diversions—an observer might think the creature planned to enter the forest, to lose itself amongst the dark, damp, cool camouflage of the firs. Yet ever it is the same: the creature stops at the high tide mark. Beyond this point, the creature will not venture.

In its solid quiet, its fealty to the idea of motionless, the creature quickly becomes no more animate than the trees, the gathered shells and rocks that form a necklace for the high tide. And yet, in the intensity of that stillness, lies hidden some tension, some coiled event or contact. Every muscle in the creature’s body seems poised for action, and still no action comes.

Until, from amongst the trees, treading carefully, a man appears and walks up to the creature. He is as hidden in shadow as the creature. There is no difference now, under full nightfall, in the color of their skin.

The man stops in front of the creature. The creature makes a sound like a thousand branches heavy with rain. The man bows his head. The man puts his hand upon the creature’s shoulder. The creature bows its head. Now the man makes the sound of a thousand branches heavy with rain. Now the man bows his head and the creature puts its hand upon the man’s shoulder.

After a moment, they drift away from one another. One slowly walks into the ocean. The other walks in amongst the trees.

One of them is Constantine Markopoulos, a comic book artist and certified hypnotist with a degree in computer science and cognitive psychology. One of them is unknown. Which is which has not yet been determined, nor is it clear that making this distinction would lead to any greater revelation. What this secret life means, or what in entails, cannot be understood simply by waiting from a safe place with binoculars held at the ready.

Some secret lives remain inscrutable under even the closest observation.

SHANE HAMILL

Here is everything that I know about the strange events that happened in and around the area of our bookstore, starting eighteen months ago. This is also everything I know about Shane Hamill. We never liked him. I want that on the record, first and foremost. We never liked him, and I’m fairly sure he never liked us. There may have been some good reasons for this situation, and some bad reasons, too, but I doubt any of it is important now.

Shane once made out with a girl in a graveyard. I don’t know if he met the girl there or if they came there together. I mention it because Shane told us about it so often, or referred to it. For my part, I found this fact kind of creepy, not cool. Others, more attuned to the Goth scene, I believe made Shane into a sort of hero over it, behind his back. Although, as I’ve stated, we didn’t like him. He was a good worker, and some even said he was a good supervisor, I’ll admit that—but no better than the rest of us. We’re all good workers.

Sometimes, even early on in his employment with our bookstore, Shane had a far-off stare, which was strictly against bookstore policy. I cannot stress that enough: Shane often said or did things that were against corporate policy. Not explicitly against policy—not the formal policies—but still things no one else said or did.

For example, once, during a slow day, we were both standing around the cash register, Shane staring out the window, when he said to me, “I’ll bet it’s not snowing in Sarajevo.” Now, the weirdest thing about what he said is that it wasn’t snowing here. So I don’t know
why
he would say that. It didn’t make sense. Besides, who’s to say it
wasn’t
snowing in Sarajevo at that moment? It might very well have been snowing in Sarajevo. Thee might have been a blizzard for all Shane knew. That bothered me for a long time, to tell the truth.

Another time, Shane actually paid for a book for a customer, and it wasn’t even because he liked her, if you know what I mean. He felt sorry for her! Which also doesn’t make sense. When someone can’t afford groceries, that’s a tragedy. When they can’t afford a book, that’s just a shame. Maybe she told him it wasn’t snowing in Sarajevo. I have no idea.

But all of this happened before the boat, and it was manageable, these little things he did that made him unlike the rest of us. (Although I think it’s all relevant. Even the kiss in the graveyard, which I may get back to later in this report; I was given no directions to follow in making this report, so I think it’s best if I just get it all down and let you guys in HQ worry about what should be in it and what shouldn’t be in it.)

The boat was just like . . . like a physical manifestation of his strangeness. He’d been borrowing books about boats secretly for awhile before he asked our manager if he could build one on a lot not far from our bookstore.

I still remember hearing our manager snort when Shane asked him. I was kneeling in the history section, facing copies of William Vollman’s latest, and they were in Politics, just one shelf over. He snorted and said something like, “What would you want to do that for?”

And Shane replied, “I’m going to build the boat and then I’m going to leave for the ocean.”

Our manager snorted again and said, “No, really. Is it some kind of hobby?”

Slowly, Shane said, “I guess you could call it that.”

And our manager was so amused—and bored, too, probably—that he told Shane that he could build a boat if he wanted to.

That was eighteen months ago. Now that the boat is built and Shane is gone, it doesn’t seem funny anymore, even to those of us who are still bored. At first, it didn’t seem like he was serious. A boat? Near the bookstore? How could one man build a boat, anyway? It turned out he could, but very slowly. He started out by buying lumber for scaffolding. Then he bought lumber for the hull. One weekend, his friends must have come out and helped him, because when I got there on Monday (I don’t work weekends; that’s what seniority and an assistant manager badge can get you) about two months after he’d started, the scaffolding was all in place, along with ten long curved beams for the hull. I remember looking at it and thinking it was some abstract sculpture, like the stuff in the more boring books in our Art section. It didn’t look like a boat back then. It looked like a mess. A few of us stood out back at lunch time and we laughed as we watched Shane work on it. He’d get no more done than bolting something in place to something else in an hour—I can’t pretend to know enough about boat-building to give you the technical terms. To us it was clear: Shane had gone mad. Something in his head had gotten loose and inside he was thinking “I’ll bet it’s not snowing in Sarajevo” over and over again. Or maybe he was thinking about the girl in the graveyard.

I should tell you that I looked through his knapsack once, while he was working on the boat. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t like Shane, but it fascinated me that he was doing something so insane. I wanted to know why. I wanted to have some clue. I found a little notebook inside and quickly took it to the photocopier, but could only run off a couple of pages before another employee came by, so I put the notebook back. But I’ve still got those two pages. I’ll transcribe them here for you, in case it’s useful:

Once, I made out with a girl in a graveyard. I didn’t realize it was a portent of the future. It was the kind of thing thousands of people have done before me, and if it had personal significance, if it symbolized a certain individual daring, a frisson of experience outside of the every day, well, then, I seem to have psycho-analyzed all the mystery out of it by now, haven’t I? The fact is, the world is generally indifferent to such acts. They do not reverberate or echo. No quiver or ripple comes unbidden to others because of it. But I still think of this event, if not often, then often enough; the softness of her lips, the intensity of her tongue, the feel of her against me, and, also, I can remember feeling the tombstones all around us, almost a dulling comfort against the burning. What am I to make of it? As much as “I’ll bet it isn’t snowing in Sarajevo”. Later, we sat there, gazing at the dead. Perhaps it was then that I decided I’d rather leave than stay.

There’s more, but it’s not particularly useful to relate it. Some things are too personal, and I do not feel I deserve the comments anyway.

So it wasn’t until month five or six that we really began to see the shape of the thing, and to realize the extent of Shane’s Folly, as some of us began to call it. It took the form of a Roman galley, or so Shane said. It had five slots on each side for oars and one main mast in the middle. Typical for him, when I asked him where he’d gotten the blueprints for it, he just smiled and flipped me a coin. I’m going to take a rubbing of it with a pencil and show it to you here, right in this report, so you can see just how disrespectful Shane was to those around him.