Bards and Sages Quarterly (April 2019)

Passage-4

I’M STILL SCREAMING when a hand yanks fiercely at the cargo loop on my jeans. I feel the pants slip lower on my hips and automatically pull them up as the brownstones across the street ripple into view under the street light.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” The voice belongs to Carissa. I’m standing on her front stoop. Eric is seated on my right, Carissa on my left. She stubs out a cigarette and flings it onto the sidewalk.

“It’s the bump on the head,” Eric says. “I told him he should see a doctor.”

Carissa gets up, wipes her hands on her army fatigues, and lumbers down the steps in her motorcycle boots. From the back she looks twenty years younger. From the front she looks like she’s trying too hard. She turns and screws her face at me. “You need help. And I don’t mean just because you hit your head. Listen to Eric.” Then she enters the door to her basement apartment.

I glance at Eric, who’s being careful not to meet my eyes. My nose feels full, encrusted inside, and I’m not getting much air. I touch the bridge and experience a deep throb at the gentle probe. Then I glance at my watch, which used to be my father’s and now spends every moment of every day in my pants pocket. It’s 8 p.m.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“What day is it?”

Eric’s gaze slants at me sideways. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“You really don’t know?”

I shake my head but the vague pain in it stops me.

“Crap.” Eric whistles through his teeth. “It’s Monday. Tell me you’re shitting me.”

My breath comes quickly. “No, I’m not. I don’t know how I got here.” My voice rises. “I don’t remember getting here.”

“Easy.” Eric grabs my arm, letting go when I fling it aside and get up. “Where you going?”

“Home,” I say. I’m shaking inside.

He follows me down the steps. “I’ll walk you.”

“No!” I move away. “No. You need to get going to that thing you’re going to. Whatever it is.”

“But you remember that?”

I think. I remember something but don’t know what.

Eric’s serious brown eyes examine me as I turn away. “Carissa’s right, you know.”

“She should mind her own business.”

“When was the last time you looked for work? Or showered, for God’s sake? You talk about your old girlfriend like she dumped you last week. And now— now, since your father—”

I wave him off and start walking. He’s still watching a moment later.

The uneven pavement and the jangle of traffic on the avenue are less real than the sweet dry smell of soil and the prickle of goldenrod. Only minutes ago, my dog was killed for the second time. Adopting him saved my sanity after Jenny walked out. I hunch into my jacket and try to keep my eyes down. The few people I pass stare at me as if I carry a terrible aura. In the window of a small electronics store the sidewalk camera and TV monitor show my bruised face. I stop and look, wondering where I’ve been the past couple of days, afraid even to ask the question.

A block from home I see a young kid in the middle of the sidewalk, picking papers up off the ground and trying vainly to keep them in his arms. It’s my next-door neighbor.

“Ravi, what’s wrong?” I bend down and help him.

“Someone stole my knapsack.” He hitches with suppressed sobs.

“You mean—just now?”

Ravi nods, swiping at his face under the glasses. “He went into the park.”

“You okay?”

He nods again. “Took my money.” His voice thins so I can barely hear it. “And my father’s war medal. I took it to school to show everybody.” Ravi finishes in a whisper and breaks into tears. “My mother doesn’t know. She’s going to kill me. I don’t know how to tell her.”

I take a deep breath and glare into the park. Inside me something black and acrid wells quickly. “These guys usually just want your money. They go through your bag and drop everything else right there in the park. I bet we can find it.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s happened to me.” I regard his fine-boned face, the puny frame inside the too-large jacket. “But you’re not coming with me. Go home and I’ll bring it to you.”

“I can’t go home without it,” he wails.

“Then wait on your front steps.”

“I’m coming with you.”

I think of Arlen at my side. “No.”

He mumbles, “What if you don’t come back?”

“Then get your mom to call the cops.” I run across the avenue to the park, crazy, horrified at my brazen pursuit in a place where target practice is sometimes heard just after dusk and muggers are rumored to drop from low-hanging branches onto dog-walkers at night. When I was robbed, a passing cop car drove me through to maybe find who did it. I found my emptied wallet. My heart beats wildly, the adrenalin of anger more vicious than that of fear. I’m astounded at the fury that eclipses my good sense.

The park is hilly. I go up the flattest trail past the agitated silhouettes of gnarled old trees. Before long, I see the backpack, dirty plaid unzipped, papers and pens dumped on the grass. I check inside; the medal is gone. I comb the surrounding area without much hope. The night sits heavy and silent in all directions. I gather the backpack and its belongings. My nose has started to bleed. I head down the path toward home, blood smeared across my face.

It’s when I realize the backpack is no longer in my hands that I also realize I’m no longer in the park, that I’m running along a shoreline drawn against inky water under a strangely luminous cloud cover that acts like moonlight. I slow down, then stop and bend over as tears squeeze out in spasms of fury, confusion, fear, loss. They stop quickly, but I’m left shaken in the dark, sinking to my knees as a voice nearby says, “All who arrive here are lost and have a loved one dead or dying. I can take you to your animal.”

The voice startles me only for a second. The old woman no longer scares me. My eyes have adjusted, and I see a black shape where her voice is. “Is he dead?”

“I couldn’t offer you passage if he weren’t.”

“But he was with me the last time you did. Was he dead then too? Why was he with me then and not now?”

She mutters something to herself. I imagine her mouth moving against her gums, adjusting for loose or non-existent teeth as she considers a reply. “He’s moved on,” she says.

“What does that mean?” I rise to my feet.

“What matters is I can take you to him now.” She pulls out a small violet orb the size of a marble but multifaceted like a crystal, glowing with its own light. “Hold this to your eye.”

I hesitate, then take it from her and squint into it as if I were viewing the world reflected in the cut of a gemstone. I see Arlen sitting and looking straight at me, his nose almost in mine, tail whisking. His face bobs even closer and for some reason calls up the memory of my father tugging playfully at the scruffy runt squiggling in my arms. As a puppy fresh from the shelter, Arlen was so small and scrawny that my father joked he didn’t have enough genetic material to form a full dog.

An additional stab of grief rips through me at the thought of my father’s death. “I want my dog out of here.”

She says nothing.

“Did you hear me?” The air is sharp on my tongue, though there’s no scent of smoke.

“I heard.”

“What can you do for me?” I ask quietly.

“I can let you see him one more time. I can take you there and bring you out again.”

I think of the lion-creatures and she immediately says, “No one will bother you if I’m with you.”

“He’s coming out with me.”

“That’s not allowed.” She clears her throat and spits next to my feet. “If that’s what you want, I can’t help you. And if you go in alone, you’ll die. As simple as that.”

I consider a moment. “What about my father? Is he here too? Can you take me to him?”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps he’s here or perhaps you can take me to him?”

“Your animal just passed. Not so your father. We’ll see.”

“My father’s been gone just three months,” I say.

“The day before yesterday it’s not.”

“Tell me where I am.”

“A sac.” She casts the word from her mouth like a curse. “A pouch in the universe, where the unfortunate sometimes fall.” Her rough, knotted hands open and close at her sides.

An unusual cold calm has settled over me. “If you take me in, what do you get for your trouble?”

I hear her breathing. She says, “I get to live,” snatches the orb from my hand, and starts walking.

I wait for a beat, then follow a few feet behind, making sure I don’t lose her in the dark. I’d rather be near her than the lion-creatures, though I also think maybe I should just turn around and run. I might find myself on the street again with Eric or Ravi or in my apartment rooting through the refrigerator for a late dinner. Again, I picture Arlen.

“How far?” I say to the old woman.

“Close.” She’s out of breath and trails a pungent odor behind her. I avert my face, wondering if I can manage to steal my dog back from this world.

A growl from the old woman catches my attention. A form shrinks away into the shadows near us. “Don’t dawdle,” she says. “They’re close by.”

She walks through an opening in a nearby stone wall—and we are in the park at night, winding our way up the path I took to find Ravi’s backpack.

I catch up to her. “Why are we here? What’s going on?”

She holds her hand up as if she’s heard something else, just as a weight drops from the branches of the nearest tree, landing inches from me with little sound. The old woman hisses before I can see what it is. I spin around and catch a lion-creature scowling as it recoils through the gloom. She hisses again as another one jumps onto me and throws me to the ground. My shoulder hits the dirt and something like a dull claw slashes the jacket on my back. She swipes at him with one hand. He lets go of me and slinks away.

“Where are we?” I grab at the rags around her throat. “Why are we in the park?”

“We are not in your park.” She clutches my arm with surprising strength and pulls away. “This is simply how it looks to you. You want to see your animal?”

The topography of her face is loathsome even in the murk of night.

I turn away.

“Do what you want,” she says, and bustles farther up the slope, moving not like an old woman now but like a young woman in an old one’s body, someone who hasn’t settled into her aches and restraints. I look around and feel my vulnerability, and I follow her.

Ahead is a copse of trees, conifers standing guard over the expanse of dead boughs that twist and stoop all around. A brush of light with no apparent origin illuminates the desiccated tangle. We’re no longer near anything that resembles the park I know.

She stops. “He’s in there.”

“Those woods?”

“I’ll take you in.” Old and blind, she resumes her progress in the dark over the uneven grass as if she’s guided by a psychic sense.

My breath is visible in the air. I shove my hands deeper into my pockets and keep my eyes on her back. She leads me toward the looming conifers and stops just in front.

“I go in first.” Her voice is almost shaking. “Stay close but don’t call to him unless I say you can.”

“What—?”

She shushes me, holding her hand up as if feeling the sky. Through the bower of living trees, the dead ones look hideous, almost obscene, as if they’ve brought about their own destruction. A few steps into their midst, the twigs snag my clothes, the deformed trunks and branches droop into simian crouches. Beneath my sneakers the rotting mat of earth and leaves crunch like delicate bones.

She stops at a splintered two-foot trunk, clutches the edge with a hand to lean against it, and says, “You may call him now. He’s over there.” She indicates left with her chin.

“Arlen! Here, boy!” I cluck and whistle, peering into the snarl of shriveled trees, listening intently for a yip or excited whine or the sound of feet flying through the underbrush. “Come on, Arlen!”

I look back at the old woman. The smile on her face is gruesome. Without taking her hand off the tree stump she points behind me with the other one. A surge of fear flushes through me, but there’s nothing at my back. When I turn to her again, she’s gone, the violet orb rolling on the ground until it nestles against an exposed root.

I stand without breathing for a long moment, all my will tamping the panic that’s begun to boil. At last I pick up the orb and squint into its facets. I see nothing but a reflection of the dead woods around me. Even before searching, I know she has simply vanished. I’ve found no Arlen, no father, no one, nothing.

* * *