Prologue
The detour sign came upon him abruptly, just over the rise of the hill, vibrant orange in the headlights and unapologetically square. Bold black blocks of letters sunk into the florescence, insistent arrow diverting him from the road home. Behind all that, strobes of yellow and silhouettes of lumbering behemoths gnawed at the road ahead of him.
He slowed the car, stopped it, and the sign filled his windshield. The radio played on, and he only realized his complacency within the nostalgia of the tune as it ended, stillness of the car adding volume to some advertiser’s insistence. He pushed the volume knob and silence replaced the announcer’s pitch, overtaken by the rumble of destruction.
He stared at the arrow, turned his head where it directed him, and studied the country road that went straight into the obliteration of evening. I just want to go home, he thought, and that seemed so pathetic he decided to say it out loud.
“I just want to go home—” Flaccid. “Damn it.”
The car idled. Still, he did not move.
He had woken that morning to the tender strokes of his wife, made love to her before the sun had introduced itself to the day, wonderful musk of morning breath across his cheek as she whispered, “Happy birthday” just as he lost himself inside her. He had bathed in October sunrise hues with steaming coffee on the sun porch as his seven-year-old son bounded onto his lap and handed him a colored construction paper card—“Happy Birthday Dad” cut from yellow and orange dancing across the page.
Later that day at work, it was slaps on his back from boss and team members after the launch and fruition of a seven-month-long project. In his head rang the echo of his team’s celebratory banter after work at the downtown bar while the golden glow of satisfaction spread down and through his insides.
A day like that shouldn’t end this way—obstructed by a detour while construction churned his road home to rubble. Of this he was certain, no matter how petty the thought.
Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the birthday, maybe it was the culmination of so many little things, but it seemed like the world had its arm around his shoulder.
The arrow on the detour sign seemed to stretch and flex as it pointed right.
Fine, he thought, but don’t think you’re going to ruin this day. You can’t. I’m untouchable.
He looked in the direction where he spun the wheel and turned onto the detour, down and down the sloping side road.
#
Too long. He’d been driving too long. There should have been a sign directing him left, back east. There was none.
To either side of him, empty fields running to the horizon under the star-speckled expanse of sky. The dash display read 8:07 P.M. He should have been home by now, thought about calling Jen to let her know he’d been rerouted. Irrational logic insisted he had no reason to—he would be home soon. He kept his eyes fixed to the achingly straight southbound road.
Cresting another hill, he saw nothing but more road undeterred. He pulled over to the narrow, gravel shoulder and spoke his address into the GPS. After suspenseful moments of calculation, the unsympathetic voice told him to make a U-turn when possible and take the very road the detour now forbade him to travel. Global positioning didn’t even identify him as being on a road. To the all-knowing satellites above, he was exactly nowhere in the outskirts of Fortune Falls, Wisconsin.
Impulse pushed him out of the car. It seemed like the only way to confirm this nowhere place witnessed through the comfort and safety of the Lexus was actually real. The damp chill of the air tightened his face, widened his eyes, and made him want to stretch out his arms and pump his legs. Suddenly, the location and the moment seemed significant, vital, in a way that observing through a windshield could never be. Beyond the ravine beside the road, far across the field, he caught a glimmer, like a fleck of daylight winking in the distance. It pulsed and captivated.
He scooted around the car and stepped down the steep ravine into the long brown grass, climbed up the other side to a barbed wire fence. Hunching down, he pushed the top wire up, lifted a leg over the bottom strand and went through.
His thoughts became independent of his actions. His consciousness was a passenger, perception a face pressed against the window of a dream. In some vague sense, he realized that, had his day been different, had he met adversity and struggle and disappointment, maybe he would have turned away from that glimmer, remained snug in his car and found the road home. With a day like today, a glimmer only beckoned and promised. The alcohol tingling his blood encouraged, the tangy chill of autumn air enticed, and every step forward into the field thrilled.
Jen would have told him to come back, don’t be an idiot, and she would have been right. But something made tonight different. Something insisted upon climbing through barbed wire into the unknown.
His shoes were clumped with mud and slick with dew. The glimmer was gone, nothing but fields fading to the fuzzy black horizon. He kept moving forward, a tall black shape giving him the only certainty that he headed toward anything other than more fields.
Behind him, the car could hardly be discerned—glossy black against nighttime dark. Ahead, the shape stood at his full height, a small obelisk in a muddy field. Far off, the moaning moos of cows unseen.
He hummed the song from the radio and remembered being seventeen with the summer night brushing back his hair and streetlights scrolling by as that music played. The hum stuck in his throat as he stopped before the object.
A slot machine. It was some kind of slot machine in the middle of a dirt field off some county road.
The chill air began to seep and burn like frost.
Antique. Old enough to be ageless. Dark wood braced and bracketed with cast iron corner pieces and cabriole legs at the base sinking into the mud. A blaze of inlaid veneers on the front forming a multi-pointed starburst, like a compass. A smaller, central burst of silver. Cast iron laced the corners. He looked downward where a front panel angled like a podium top, three slits side-by-side-by-side showing only white. On its side, a metal crank.
And all around, nothing but the four corners of night.
He was scared, but it was an exhilarating fear. He coughed a chuckle of disbelief.
His hand reached for the crank arm. The handle wasn’t cold. He had expected it to be cold.
Tension at first as he wound the handle clockwise, felt the drag against gears, whir of machinations in motion, then the crank went slack. He let it go, the machine clicking and tacking and whirring. The three window slits blurred with gray, the spin of cylinders beneath the framing of a silver faceplate.
The first one slowing, the blur more defined, black shapes coalescing. The clunk of a catch, the cylinder locked, the slit showing words…
YOU ARE
The second slit, slowing, fragments of black shapes, letters, stopping with a chunk…
GOING TO
Every part of him now existing within the spring blur of the third slit, slowing, ticking clicking slowing, clack of the catch, and the last word glaring…
DIE
Breath like liquid, lungs needing to force each sloosh of air from him like a cough—much like forty years ago, to the very second of the clock, when Jason Lahey had been born into the world.
