Home
The biggest problem with the new house was that the stairs moved.
“Are they supposed to do that?” Aubrey had asked the realtor when they toured the property.
“We can have that looked at,” she was told curtly.
It was a spacious home, but at least 20 years behind in upkeep. Joel struck an optimistic tone—“the paint is a bit chipped.” Aubrey, always the snide realist, was dourer—“there are paint flakes stuck to the outside of our house.” The electrical went in and out and when they first walked up the staircase, it wobbled. Joel didn’t know how a staircase could wobble, but theirs did.
“Must be something with the framing,” Joel said with no particular expertise—“part of the inside has rotted away. That must be why the stairs move. They pull out from the wall a good inch if we shift our weight the right way.” Then, after a moment: “Or, I should say, the wrong way.” Yes, the framing was rotten—he had no basis for saying this, but it seemed like the sort of thing that would happen in an old house.
“Maybe we could go in the basement and look up into the stairs,” Aubrey said, imagining herself as a small child lifting up her mother’s skirts and looking up.
The framing—yes, that’s inside the house. To examine a house from the inside, one would go below into the basement and look up, wouldn’t they?
Fixing the house would be a labor of love, but then, they had the time. Sylvie was hardly a year old. She would be raised in this house; this would be her home. Aubrey officially began her new faculty role a week from Monday and Joel worked remotely now. Everything was in order. Finally, there was space: nearly 12 acres of land. They’d always talked of animals and a little homestead. They had toured the property before buying it: there was a small stream at the eastern edge. Dry brush shot out from the ground and hung ragged over the edge of the gravel road that ran the length of their property and connected their driveway to Route 141. It had been clear that day, the sky a pale but glowing blue. The scant clouds hit an airburst and seemed to lift along the mountains like water droplets following the curve of a glass bead. Just to the east, Uncompahgre National Forest in all its vastness. They started picking up debris from behind the house the first morning after moving in. Joel stepped out into the chill, late summer air to see the crests of hills lit up in the morning sun. He was electric.
“Think of all the hiking!” he said excitedly.
“Think of all the yardwork!” Aubrey said, handing him a contractor bag and turning on her heels.
The house, despite its opportunities for enhanced upkeep, was vast as well. Sylvie would have her own room. Joel would have a home office. Aubrey would have the small library and reading room that she had always wanted. That left one room free and there was cautious, not-quite-muffled talk of perhaps another baby when they were settled fully. And a dining room! Aubrey was particularly excited about this.
“We had a dining room in Irvine,” Joel said, but wished instantly words could be reeled back like a lure on a fishing line.
Of course, she shot him a glance that could have pierced a balloon.
“If your dining room exists inside your kitchen, it isn’t a dining room. If you get up from dinner, walk three feet to stir a pot and then sit back down to your meal, it isn’t a dining room,” Aubrey said.
Her retort was well rehearsed and Joel conceded the point as they both stood in their new dining room. She coveted the idea of a dining room table and chairs, a china cabinet and some small paintings—an actual dining rom. Maybe a teacart with a vase. The possibilities!
“There might be an Ikea coming to Grand Junction,” Joel said, but Aubrey was thinking of something different.
What she really wanted was space between the kitchen functions and the eating functions—a separation from the processes and the actual living of life. This is why they had left Orange County. The crowding, the cost, the traffic: everything amounted to a kind of grinding pressure. To keep from being trampled, you had to adopt a pace of life that just wasn’t living. Most days, something simple like finding a parking spot could be a battle. They had regularly to park a quarter mile from their condo.
“There’s a garage,” Joel said, pointing behind the house.
“It’s a shed,” Aubrey corrected, though it sounded to Joel more like a question.
“It’s a shed at the end of our driveway we can park a car in,” Joel said, kissing her forehead.
They bought their large house and acres of adjacent land for about half of what their old condo was worth. The rest they would use to rebuild the house in their image. Joel was elated with everything. Aubrey seemed quietly satisfied, but had reservations. It was such a strange and unexpected shift in the events of her life.
“You’re moving where?” Megan had asked. Her parents thought the Four Corners was a neighborhood in Los Angeles. However, it all came together in so many curious ways. The very week they agreed to consider leaving Southern California with seriousness, she attended a conference and met a department chair in Anthropology at Colorado State, Yamileth. She’d never heard of Yamileth, but they were recruiting for an associate position and Aubrey would have considered Timbuktu if it meant tenure.
“That was an excellent paper. It didn’t make publication?”
“It’s not that,” Aubrey said, taken aback slightly, “I’m still working on it. I haven’t submitted my final query letters yet. I might expand it to a book project. I’m not sure. I mean, this field’s wide open. I feel like there is a lot there,” Aubrey said.
“I agree. Your approach is brilliant. We need more young minds like yours,” she said, touching Aubrey’s arm.
Aubrey liked to hear things like this. It reassured her. She liked on occasion to pull her diploma from the closet, open the flap embossed with the logo of her graduate program and read “Doctor of Philosophy.” She enjoyed telling people she was a college professor. She seldom had to clarify her current role was as an adjunct, without benefits and likely intractably so.
“I loved your book! Sutures of the Self: Theories of Sexual-Social Development in Contemporary Multilingual Micro-Group Diasporas. It was wonderful! Let’s get a glass of wine!” the department chair told her after her talk.
Aubrey was surprised this woman had been aware of her dissertation, but nonetheless enjoyed hearing it referred to as a book. She imagined she were being praised by a book club. It felt good and in any case, she wasn’t one to turn down an open bar.
“I think your approach is really fascinating,” she continued, “I don’t think the kinds of questions you’re asking get enough attention. You know, the state system in Colorado is growing. In fact, at Yamileth, we’re one of the few departments in the region that are growing. With the cost of living these days, a lot of people are leaving the population centers. Schools like ours used to be outposts, but today we’re growing year after year. There’s a lot of opportunity out our way. You should consider it. We need young scholars with your vision.”
Yes, Aubrey thought, keep that praise coming.
“We have a tenure-track faculty opening in my department. You should apply,” the department chair stroked her arm and made it clear Aubrey would be a candidate of interest—“call me Diana.”
“Ha!” Joel said later, “That’s funny—I was just thinking Colorado.”
They had talked of Utah or Arizona—the clear, dry desert. Or perhaps Santa Fe with its eclectic mix of gothic architecture, adobo and sheer color.
“Colorado, interesting—yeah,” he had to find Yamileth on his phone, “Ok, southwest Colorado, Four Corners area. Beautiful out there…”
Sylvie was nearly one. Aubrey wanted to spare her the crunch-life, the life of mandatory body-image upkeep and social jostling—an unaffordable life in a paradise too good to be true. This was her first conference since returning to teaching duties. Sylvie was born and she and Joel were advancing into the future, whatever it may hold. Then the fires came. There was a glow in the evening spread out across the Silverado hilltops along the sky at dusk. It seemed the night itself was beating a retreat. Friends, neighbors, strangers were gathered in the street. Cars pulled over and bewildered onlookers mulled, chitchatting. Selfies were taken against the backdrop followed by hurried footsteps to the car.
The fires were more frequent and intense with every passing year, but they had been a distant experience—brush burning at the edge of the desert, in the valleys, the forests up north. Or maybe the Redwoods? Joel and Aubrey couldn’t keep track and had little need to. They were dots on the map one saw scrolling through a newsfeed. There were ominous pictures of dark, choking skies over Sacramento, over San Rafael, over Santa Cruz. But the damage was distant—blackened trees in rows along scorched hills. There were mobile homes incinerated to a charcoal skeleton; a couch half burned sat in the middle of the street besides a row of eucalyptus trees in flames as an old man in a gas mask walked his dog.
There was no shortage of apocalyptic images and there seemed to be no unified effort or response. The headlines were in equal parts dire and sensational. One headline the previous year read “No Wine for San Franciscans as the Napa Fires Advance.” They couldn’t tell if the headline was serious or a joke. By late summer, the scent of wood smoke was in the air over the LA freeways. It smelled like the world was burning before them, yet all Aubrey could think of was the scent of wood charring on a fire at summer camp growing up. Amidst the fire-apocalypse, she felt a curious desire for s’mores. They co-experienced an odd pairing of terror and quaint nostalgia, like an ecological crisis with a warm, fuzzy afterglow of youthful memory.
“The coasts are safe,” Joel had said.
The next night, neighbors and strangers congregated outside to watch as the green hills of Silverado were overtaken by a menacing glow. The following morning, it became apparent that by some cosmic (or comic) miscalculation, the distant flames were headed to the residential neighborhoods of Orange County. Evacuation orders were executed and Aubrey, along with her husband and Sylvie, went to stay with her parents in Carlsbad. The movement and jostling were too much. That night, Aubrey dreamed of tectonic plates and eruptions, two sticks rubbing together resulting in a wood fire. She woke up in a start in her parents’ guestroom.
“Babe, hey,” said Joel, restless as he touched her arm.
Aubrey looked at her daughter in the travel crib at the foot of the bed.
“We should leave this place,” she said, and that was the proverbial that.
Within a week, they were unofficially house hunting. They scrolled through page after page of real estate search results.
“Look at this one,” Aubrey would say. “Four bedrooms, $228,000. That’s a storage unit out here!”
They wanted a piece of land. Aubrey visited Point Reyes every summer growing up. Each house seemed to have its own little homestead: a good-sized yard with a handful of chickens and a well-tempered goat you could take for a walk through the town square in the evening. Not the sort of farm you make your living from, or even devote a lot of time to, but something outside the normal run of life’s activities. How she yearned for Saturday mornings in the grass behind the house: a stiff jacket and Carhartt beanie, seeing her breath in the morning air as she mended a fence. Or something like that. She liked the idea of having a goat or a pot-bellied pig. Perhaps a chicken coop would yield fresh eggs. It seemed a more authentic way to live than to get a specialized dog breed from San Clemente. She wanted to feel connected to the circle of life, connected to the Earth.
Her candidacy at CSU Yamileth was uneventful as far as academic hiring tracks go. Aubrey submitted her CV and teaching evaluations alongside application for employment, sample syllabi, and research prospectus. She was screened by the hiring administrators and department chairs. Diana spoke more in their interview than she did. They flew her in to deliver a talk to a department panel. On the flight, Aubrey imagined giving dueling presentations in the faculty hall with other candidates in front of a committee like some reality gameshow, but she arrived to find no such spectacle. In fact, as far as she could tell, she was the only candidate that had been invited to speak. In the current academic job market, that struck her as extraordinary. She gave the same talk she had given at the conference a few weeks earlier, but Diana sat almost comically enraptured, as though she had never heard it before. Aubrey gave a Q&A, publication highlights and a statement of teaching philosophy; the panel gave her a campus tour and free lunch at the student café. The department chair sat with her through the meal and gave her the history of the university.
“You know, one of our missions is to local people of southwest Colorado. We serve the local community—a lot of our students are indigenous, Mexican—people of color,” Diana said and paused.
Aubrey couldn’t tell if she was soliciting a response or gathering her thoughts. She wore a white wool sweater over a gray pantsuit; a combed swoop of silver hair drifted off to the edge of her forehead and dangled there in free space at edge of her hairline. Diana had the tendency to jerk her head slightly at end the end of statements, as if to demonstrate their definitude. However, the effect rendered was that her bob of hair bounced comically in every direction as she talked. Aubrey struggled to focus and found herself having to suppress laughter on several occasions. She once triumphed by transmuting a near-laugh into a broad smile at just the moment Diana struck upon what was evidently one of her favorite points.
“Oh, yes, that’s wonderful,” Aubrey said, her smile stretching to the edges of her face, tears welling in the corners of her eyes.
The department chair was elated.
“Yes, and I don’t know if you know this, but 45% of our female students are the first women in their families to go to college. In fact, we’re a female-majority student body: nearly 58%, actually. These young girls have a fierce hunger to learn. Anthropology has been a male-dominated subject since it started. Most departments are still majority male. Still obsessed with these frankly neo-colonialist fantasies of travelling around the world and living with some long-lost tribe. Gosh! Some boys never grow up. But there is so much work to be done here, analyzing our own society.”
Aubrey listened and smiled. She felt genuinely empowered by the idea that her teaching would matter. She liked the idea of making an impact. She didn’t know what ‘making an impact’ would entail exactly, but she liked the idea of it nonetheless. The server brought two plates with cake and forks to the table, setting them in front of the two women. Aubrey looked up and saw a poster on the far wall. The writing said, “Faculty-Student Outreach: A Yamileth Mission.” Beneath the writing, a young, well dressed white woman sat at a table with three younger women of darker complexion who were sitting seemingly enraptured.
“We’re a mission and values-oriented school, Dr. Van Orten,” said the department chair, picking up her plate of cake. She lifted it and leaned over it, pressing into the cake with her fork. Her loose bob of hair scraped along the top of the cake. Diana did not seem to notice. Aubrey was still staring at the poster and liked what she saw. She thought of her students in Orange County, so white and, often, so blonde. They spoke in a manner that was dripping with privilege, as though a satisfying career and heaps of money were a guarantee simply for their trouble having gone to school. Her female students came into class boisterously, hanging off the necks of their boyfriends. A collage of pierced navels, wrist tattoos and low-cut shirts were the serious scholars now, the inheritors of the Earth. She thought of Rosa, the way she crossed her legs and faced askance away from the class. Her careless manner and the way she licked her lips and said “um” before answering a question. The most expressive she had seen Rosa was the way she rolled her eyes after Aubrey asked her to stay after class.
“I’m concerned about your participation,” Aubrey said to her.
Rosa said nothing. There was a silence. Rosa looked at her phone. She wore a white sheer t-shirt and hip huggers. A thin line of fabric came up from under her jeans and ran along her hip. A small tattoo of a heart was partially concealed on her lower stomach. Aubrey traced its outline against the soft flesh of her bare midriff, smooth and tanned softly. She placed her hand against her own stomach. She wore a jacket of tweed and an off-white blouse she had bought from the thrift store. She realized Rosa’s eyes were on her. She was sweating profusely.
“Yes, um…”
She fumbled with her papers. Rosa’s questioning look shifted to a devious smile and she narrowed her eyes. Aubrey met them. Naughty girl. The words came into Aubrey’s mind.
“So, like, did you want to talk about something or stare at me?” Aubrey heard, “am I good to go?”
“Yeah, um, of course. You can go, Rosa,” Aubrey said.
Rosa let out a protracted huff. She got up from her desk and left the classroom, stretching her shirt down over her abdomen as she passed.
“I was a fucking paid babysitter,” Aubrey said contemptuously.
Diana nodded slowly, as though in recognition of the unfortunate but common. She reached her hand across the table and took Aubrey’s, smiling in a way that seemed to say: this will be different. There is a mission, here. This is a place you can make a difference. Your work will mean something. There is purpose here.
“So, what do you think?” asked the department chair.
“I love it. I’m in love with this school and its mission,” Aubrey said immediately, almost before the department chair finished speaking. Aubrey worried for a moment that might have been a faux pas, but the department chair seized on it. This immediacy of response seemed to her to reflect a genuine enthusiasm.
“That’s wonderful,” she said, lowering her plate to the table. “I’m glad we share this mission. It’s near and dear to my heart.” She got up and moved her chair next to Aubrey: “I’m touched by your commitment to diversity in education. I think you’re just what we’re looking for.”
Aubrey smiled back. She felt a deep sense of accomplishment in that moment. But then, suddenly, her eyes narrowed. Blue. A streak of blue. The department chair, still smiling, leaned back in her chair oblivious that the hair framing her head was caked in blue icing. She paid the check. Aubrey said nothing.
“I’ll confer with the committee, but we’re very excited to have you,” she said and left the café.
Aubrey flew back to California that evening. The evacuation order lifted, they had returned to their apartment. She carried her bag in through the front door and put it down on one of the kitchen chairs.
“I’m home,” she said over her shoulder, but there was no response.
She walked into the bedroom. Joel was there in the corner at his desk, his headphones covering his ears. Colored bars shot up and down on his screen as numbers and calculations scrawled across the bottom. She tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up and lowered his headphones.
“Hey, honey. How was the flight?”
She sat down at the edge of the bed without saying a word. Joel got up from his chair and sat beside her.
“How did it go, hon?” he asked, but she said nothing.
She slowly leaned her head sideways against his shoulders. Her face suddenly bunched up and she began to shake. There were tears running and collecting at the edge of her chin, but she was silent.
“Hey, honey, hey…hey…” Joel said, rubbing her back. “Honey, what’s wrong? Did it go alright?”
She said nothing, but sobbed in silence for some moments before regaining herself. They sat there in the dark, the two of them, until they heard a whimper from the crib in the hallway. Neither moved for a moment, but then Joel straightened up.
“Gotta get Sylvie,” he said with some awkwardness and kissed the top of her head.
He stood and walked into the hallway. The following week, a formal offer letter from Colorado State, Yamileth arrived in the mail.
Yellow dirt, sand baked shell-hard by the sun. Mile after mile of Nevada seemed like a highway through a dry lakebed dotted with brush. They dropped off 70 in Utah and went south through the red hills and rock arches, and then east into Colorado. It took them three days by car, pulling over into rest stations every three hours to use the bathroom and feed Sylvie. When they finally pulled up beside the house, the movers had been waiting nearly half a day, but everyone seemed in good spirits.
“The couch there. Actually, could you go back a foot. That’s perfect. Thanks, guys,” Aubrey took lead in directing the movers and Joel carried Sylvie around for the grand tour.
“This will be your room,” he said as she sucked on her pacifier, “and this will be daddy’s office. This is where daddy will be working. And here is a nook with glass doors. We’re going to make this mommy’s library, just like she’s always wanted.”
By evening, the furniture was set in place. Aubrey had dreaded the unpacking, having to make final choices about where everything belonged. It somehow seemed like the end of something rather than the beginning. Looking around, it came into her mind how little there was to unpack. Their entire lives translated into stuff was not enough to make this old house seem full. Was there truly so little to them?
“I guess that’s the thing with moving into a big house from a little apartment: you realize how little you own,” Joel said.
Aubrey walked into the dining room. They didn’t own a dining room table, so that’s where the movers put the kitchen table. It was an expansive room, and their four-foot table seemed comically out of place. Aubrey insisted they move it back into the kitchen. The dining room would stay empty until a proper table could be procured. It was a trifle embarrassing, but Joel seemed amused. She walked into the corner of the room. There were two boxes stacked there, one on top of the other. They contained everything she and her husband owned that pertained to dining. Aubrey turned and sat on them.
“Careful, hon,” Joel said, “those might be dishes.”
Aubrey didn’t move, but sat for a moment looking at her feet.
“Was this a mistake?” she asked, looking up at him.
He walked toward her. He stopped and kneeled in front of her. He put his hand on his cheek.
“This was either worst or the best decision we ever made. But I think, for once, it’s up to us to decide which one it is.”
She closed her eyes and let her cheek feel the palm of his hand. Things were under control. Joel had everything under control. They drove into town looking for takeout.
“Hey, the town library,” Joel said, taking a second look.
“I don’t think that’s a library, honey,” she said flatly.
“Yeah, I guess you’d think the library would be downtown,” Joel said, genuinely quizzical.
Aubrey crossed her arms, “I don’t think the town library advertises itself with a neon sign.” Then, after a moment, she added, “And I’m pretty sure the town library doesn’t have nude girls either.”
“I know where I’ll be doing my studying,” he said with a wicked grin.
Aubrey sat in stony silence as they pulled onto the main drag.
“Let’s see, we have Dominoes, hot wings, O’Brien’s Mexican Cuisine…oh, neat—there’s a superette on the corner.”
Aubrey let out painful sigh.
“Well, it’s a college town,” Joel said. Aubrey was silent. “Hey, we’ll find something; this isn’t so bad,” Joel said, “Hey, look at that, a Starbucks. Oh, and this house. Look at that!”
Aubrey looked up—the building was indeed unique. It was purple house with a green roof set amidst the wall of storefronts. It had what looked like a large plaster flowerpot at the front edge. There was painted metal statue in the shape of a flower jutting out of the flowerpot and hanging out past the building’s edge over the sidewalk. Across the street, there was a construction site surrounded by a chain link fence and a sign that read: “Coming Soon: Whole Foods Market.” Aubrey felt herself at ease.
They doubled back and found a small Italian restaurant on a side street between a liquor store and a laundromat. It was charming and nearly empty. A single candle on a red and white checkered tablecloth lit their booth. Joel wondered if they had lost power, but he saw lights in the kitchen as the wait staff went in and out. No, this was pure ambiance. Aubrey smiled and he took her hand across the table.
“This was right,” he said.
She more than heard him: she felt his words resonate within her. It was a deeply felt confidence in what lay ahead of them.
They ate what seemed like the best meal they had had in very long time and shared a bottle of Chianti while Sylvie, miraculously, never even stirred. They drove home along the soft dusk of night and put Sylvie down in her own room for the first time. Taking a walk through the house, they began to see it with new eyes. Aubrey took Joel by the hand and led him up the stairs. Near the top, the framework shifted. Their feet moved beneath them. Joel grabbed Aubrey as they tumbled down on the landing at the top of the stairs. They lay there tangled in each other’s arms and each looked at the other in the momentary jolt of disbelief. Aubrey’s hair was slung down over her face and Joel’s glasses had slid down and sat crooked over his nose. There was an electric levity in that moment of shock.
“You look stupid,” Joel said, pointing at his wife’ disheveled appearance.
“No, you look stupid,” she retorted.
“No, you,” and on they went until the edifice of mock-seriousness collapsed into hysterical laughter. It felt like a wall coming down.
Joel held Aubrey and she kissed him. And again and again. He put his hands through her hair and there they remained in the darkness of the hallway.
Joel arose early the next morning. He dressed, put on his boots and a pair of work gloves and went out into the early morning. The sun cutting across the horizon had a softening effect. The hills that had seemed so jagged and menacing at dusk seemed now tired and moss worn. He breathed in. The cold air bit his throat. He held it, absorbing the feeling, acclimatizing to this new rugged environment. He exhaled steam and marveled for a moment at his powers of transformation. He undid the latch and swung open the great garage door. “I think I put it…over here,” he said to himself. And then, after a moment of searching, “Ah, here it is!” He took hold of a large wooden sign. It was hunk of old tree dragged down from Palomar Mountain and shaped by a local artist in Lake Forest. Joel had procured it just before they left California: one quick good luck gift to himself. Sanded smooth, it looked both old and new at the same time. Burned into it were the words: “Van Orten Dr.”
He took a hammer and, marching down the driveway to the dirt road, followed it the quarter mile to where it met the main road. He found a smooth piece of ground next to their mailbox and began to hammer it in. After several strikes, he leaned back to look. He squinted and cocked his head. “That’s not straight,” he muttered, tilting the sign back the other way and continuing to hammer in the stake. He stepped back and he wiped sweat from his brow. Surveying his craftsmanship, he was dismayed to see the sign lilting at a slight angle. “Must be weak soil,” he said to himself. He was going to straighten it, but stopped and thought better of it. “More rustic this way, actually,” he said. He tilted his head again to view it straight. “No, that’ll do,” he said, flipping the hammer in his hand and catching the handle after it spun in mid-air, “that’ll do.”
In the house, Aubrey was already awake and there was breakfast on the table.
“Hon?” he heard as he closed the door, “I’m in the kitchen.”
The words came from the other side of the house. Joel took off his jacket and reveled in the fact of owning a house that required shouting to communicate across it. As he walked into the kitchen, his wife was nowhere to be found. As he seated himself at the table, Aubrey fluttered into the room. She was dressed smartly and putting on makeup. She walked into the kitchen while fastening an earring.
“Where’d you go?” she asked him.
“Hammering the sign in,” he said, his self-satisfaction evident.
“Oh,” she said simply and headed back out of the room.
“I didn’t know you were going in today. I thought class starts next week,” Joel said.
“Staff orientation’s today, syllabus prep and I think some other stuff,” she said casually. It sounded to Joel like she was putting on lipstick as she said it.
“Got breakfast made,” she said. Joel thought she began to say something else, but it trailed off.
“Mmm,” he said simply.
She came into the kitchen, kissed him and was gone a moment later. He finished his breakfast and went into his office. He sat down to his first day of work in the new house. He logged into his computer and connected to the company network. He accessed his cache; his project had already been uploaded for him. It had been fortuitous. He had wrapped up his previous project just as they were wrapping up their lives in California, and now, here in Colorado, a fresh start and a fresh new project. The last one had taken him months. Nearly 800 hours of ground-scan vibrations recordings. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with, here,” said to himself, accessing the metadata. “This is a supplemental,” he muttered, reading through with curiosity, though not without a touch of disappointment: “‘anomalies found—please process for additional analysis.’ There I was thinking I was getting a fresh project. Ok, let’s see what we got. Geolocation at A-316223-D. About 86 hours. Oh boy…”
He opened the first audio file and put on his earphones to begin the long process of listening. The sound mapping registered as a deep swooshing sound, like a giant fan blade moving slowly. The sound repeated at short intervals. Everything seemed normal enough. He ran diagnostics as he listened, measuring for pitch and duration. At every hour, he would lift the data and record it into spreadsheet. He would tabulate his findings and generate the debrief report at the end of the day. However, at 10:30, he paused the audio and took off his headphones. “Let’s take a break,” he said to himself and went into the kitchen to make coffee. He put the kettle on the burner and spooned brown crystals into his mug. There was something exhausting about such passive work. It could be complex, highly technical labor, and yet most days he felt as though a clever high school student could do his job. It could be enjoyable and there was occasionally some engaging problem solving, but for most of the six years he’d been in the role, the work unfolded slowly. With all the changes in their lives, he thought perhaps the work would take on a new resonance in his mind: as though the transformation of his workspace might also transform the work. He understood now that same old sense of stasis would remain. Hour after hour of that sound became a unique strain, a vacant tedium that both bored him and made him fear that _______ Corp would eventually figure out how simple his task really was and then evaluate whether or not his role was truly necessary. Or perhaps that was his secret hope.
He got through his days by inventing mental games. For the first few years, he’d listened to the sound and likened it to giant turbine blades cutting in the darkness. He visualized them and spent hours sketching them in his notebook. He made bets with himself on whether the sound density would increase or decrease. “Ok, we go down in hertz and I do 10 pushups. We go up and I crack a beer this evening while I do laundry.” But now he imagined heavy mechanical breathing—robot’s breath, perhaps. His work brought him into contact with the subterranean world. As he liked to tell Aubrey’s friends at get-togethers, we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the bottom of the ocean. “And yet, what do we know about the world beneath our feet?” What he wanted to say was this: “I talk to robots underground. Do you want to know what they say?”
The kettle began to hiss, bringing Joel out of his reverie. He poured hot water into his cup and watched the crystals dissolve. His momentary fascination was disrupted by a mild sense of disappointment. “Gotta get some real coffee,” he said, nodding to himself as if in affirmation of a well-devised plan. He looked at the clock: 10:37, too early for lunch. He’d work another hour or so and make a run into town. He sat back down at his desk and put on his headphones. He hit play on the recording and listened. Diagnostic readings scrawled across the bottom of his screen as that familiar swooshing sound cut across his apprehension, like an object coming in and out of focus. The sounds became longer and thinner, as if they were being stretched. There was a tinny echo as the sound of each swoosh receded. “Wow. Found a big, empty space. Must be a cavern or underground cave system or something,” Joel though. “Judging by that echo, it’s big.”
Then he heard it: a piercing blast of sound followed by silence. It was almost like a growl, but quick. It shot out with the tension of stretched elastic and suddenly went slack. Joel nearly jumped out of his seat. “What the hell was that?” he said aloud. He’d never heard anything even remotely like it. The diagnostics at the bottom of his screen stopped. There was blank space for a moment and then the numbers resumed. “Whatever you are, the computer doesn’t have a good reading,” he said, tapping the mouse pad on the laptop. For some moments there was silence overlaid with static, nothing more. Joel found himself fidgeting. He rolled his chair in and out and realized he had hardly been breathing. He took a breath, swallowing a mouthful of air in a gulp. It was as though he had forgotten how to breathe. Something thrust in him by that jagged blast of sound was lingering. It must have startled him, he thought—really startled him.
He realized all of a sudden that there was no swooshing sound at all. How could that be? “This has to be a recording error,” he said to himself. The diagnostics had flat lined. A faucet-drip of data and nothing more. “Even if the system detects nothing, it should be recording that—but this is just emptiness, like the sound pulses had been pulled into a vacuum. It’s like something is intercepting the signal,” he thought. He was about to stop the recording when his ears perked. It was soft and muffled, like voices across a room. A quick muttering wub wubwub wubwub back and forth. Joel was astonished. He’d never heard sound patterns like this before. They came at irregular intervals, like some sort of call and response. Joel’s next thought chilled him: it almost resembled speech. This pattern alternated between two poles for some moments like a tennis ball being struck back and forth across a court. Joel got control of his frame of mind with a sip of coffee. “Relax,” he told himself, “you’re not listening to a subterranean conversation.” No sooner had this thought occurred to him then the sound pattern stopped with such abruptness, Joel found himself leaning forward, as if the screen might reveal something to him. Again, there was static. There was something strange about the way the sound had cut out. It was as if two spies talking suddenly realized they were being overheard.
Then it started again, faster and more intense. The sound patterns overlaid each other, no longer in seeming response to one another, but in a shared function. Wubwub wub came forward aggressively and reeled back into a sort of clicking chatter. The sound bars spiked and dropped. It sounded like taunting schoolchildren bullying with a cruel joke and stepping back to snicker. Joel realized he was gripping the edge of his desk. His fingers were white. Something about this sound was digging into him, etching itself inside mind. He had no idea what he was hearing, but it seemed impossible. There was something menacing about it, something destructively mocking. The sound dissolved into a series of clicks—clicks seeming to come in from every direction, like evening crickets. Yet not like crickets at all—the clicks had something sharp and penetrating about them, more like crab pincers. Joel couldn’t account for it; he felt surrounded, enveloped in this web of clicking. He tried to breathe, but felt stiff. He realized his legs were numb. He tried to move his toes. He loosened himself slightly and got a breath in. Then it came: a sound like the first one, but the deep growl had been set loose as a fanged roar. His body shook. He felt something icy piercing its way up the back of his spine into his head. It held him for a moment and, like a clawed beast releasing a lamb to run just a bit longer, it withdrew into a web of clicks that held for a moment before fading piecemeal like fireflies in the morning light.
Joel felt free a moment later. Oxygen poured into his lungs with his first deep breath in minutes. His muscles loosened. He was in control of his own body again. He took off his headphones and threw them across the desk. He knocked over his chair getting up and nearly ran out of the office.
Joel sat in the kitchen breathing in and out. He tried to revisit the event, but struggled to recall just what had happened. Some curious wall of fear led his mind in circles, around and around, the before and the after. The event itself remained a concealed tender spot in his memory. He swallowed water by the mouthful. Swallowing eased the tension in his throat. As the minutes went by, he felt closer and closer to normal. He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face. He looked in the mirror, smoothing the skin of his cheeks. Something caught his eye. He turned the light on and leaned close to the mirror. He saw not two eyes, but one eye and one little red orb staring back. His left eye was completely bloodshot. He put his glasses on and walked out to the garage. He stood for a moment in the sunlight, letting the mid-morning glow and cool air sober his nerves.
He drove into town shaking his head. “What was that?” he kept repeating to himself. Up the street from the superette, Joel was caught at a red light. He looked at face in the rearview mirror. His eye was an unseemly red. He rubbed his face and blinked a few times. From the corner of his eye, he could discern a form. A tall, disheveled man was standing just outside his passenger side window. A trash bag was slung over his shoulders. His figure stuck out against the gray background of the street. He was standing in front of the flower house, the metal flower statue hung in the air just over his head. His arm was extended forward, his palm flat against the glass storefront. His jumbled mass of long, fraying hair was pushed back, held in place by a pair of sunglasses set atop his head like a tiara. He was an odd figure, seemingly cut from a different setting altogether: he seemed to belong in an encampment beneath an LA underpass. It was a strangely comforting thought: something reassuring, something familiar. He tried to recall the previous evening, its levity and the sense of a bright, open future in their new home. A few minutes ago, he was animated by the impulse to get out of it and back into the safety of the world at large—tried to reconcile these polarized emotional reactions in his mind. He stared again at the large man standing under the hanging flower statue and was reminded of the chaos of the world. He could feel safe escaping into it.
Honk!
Joel shook his head, remembering where he was. He looked up. The light was green and he could see a man in the car behind him waving his arms from the rear view mirror. Joel put the car in gear and drove the remainder of the block. As he signaled and pulled into the superette, the car behind him sped past with a loud, prolonged honk. Joel rolled down the driver’s side window from the superette parking lot and extended his arm with his middle finger arched upright—“Yeah, well…fuck you!” he yelled but the other car had driven two blocks and turned off the main road by the time he’d expressed his sentiment. He turned the engine off and sat shaking in the car. He felt a heavy sense of passivity. “Yes. The world. Escape”—these words tumbled through his mind. As he was collecting himself, the disheveled man from the flower house walked into the parking lot from the sidewalk. He was tall, very tall, with broad shoulders. Joel had had enough uncomfortable encounters with homeless people that weren’t all there. The man’s presence was enough to galvanize him out of his ennui. He got out of the car and started walking toward the entrance, hoping to get inside before the other man overtook him, in case an encounter was imminent. He could hear the shuffling of a bouncing trash bag behind him. Joel heard the quickening of heavy footsteps. His nerves were already strained beyond their limit: he wasn’t looking for any trouble with the local yokelry.
“Hey!” he heard. “Hey, you, buddy! Hey guy!”
Joel heard the words and propriety made him halt. “Breathe,” he told himself. He was well practiced in this scenario. “I’m sorry, I don’t have any cash. Can I buy you a sandwich?”—that was his standard response. Joel turned. The man was indeed tall—at least six-foot-eight. He had long hair, once blonde but now transitioning to gray with a bandana around his forehead and considerable beard. He looked both older and younger than he had originally thought watching him in front of the flower house. He wore a leather jacket over a Hawaiian shirt and what looked like swim trunks and sandals. This was no local. Where was he from? The man looked at Joel silently, twisting his head as if observing something he didn’t know what to make of. Joel smiled politely, turned and started walking toward the store. He was afraid he’d hear footsteps behind him again. He didn’t want to have to make a mad dash for the store entrance in broad daylight.
“Hey!” he heard from behind him. “Hey, you, guy, hey!” Joel stopped and turned again. The man dropped his trash bag and advanced to meet him. “Hey, guy—sorry. I’m not knowing your face.” He spoke with an accent. What was it—Russian?
“Yeah, well, I don’t know yours either,” Joel said, catching his breath.
“You just move here, eh?” the large man said.
“Yes,” Joel said, “just moved here.”
“What’s matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost?” he said.
“Maybe I have,” Joel said, looking down and wondering.
“Hey, maybe you have, eh?” the man repeated.
He looked at Joel, his eyes narrowed in seriousness.
“I want to ask you about something. Something peculiar about you. There are patterns in the world. We make patterns as we live and move through it, like a bird leaving ripples on the surface of water. You know what I mean?”
Joel looked at him—he was not at all clear what this man was trying to communicate, but he nodded anyway: “Yeah, yeah I get you.”
“The world is not what we think. It is filled with sacred places. There are sacred musics and sacred sounds, sacred grounds and dances: free-floating or connected with the Earth, or both,” he said.
Joel nodded. This man seemed increasingly unhinged with each passing statement.
“What I’m leading to is this: there are unseen things in this world. You must know them and fear them.”
Joel looked up, as astonished as he was quizzical.
“I…I don’t have any cash.”
The man stepped back, aghast, as though wrongly accused of a crime he would never have even contemplated committing. He looked intently at Joel’s face. Joel realized he was staring at his bloodshot eye. He covered it for a moment with his fingers, rubbing it as though it itched.
“Hey, buddy, you got me wrong. I sense a sudden hunger in you to know, my friend. Something is burned into your eye. It is a sign. Things unseen need to be seen, or perhaps the other way,” he said with kind of distant solemnity.
Joel said nothing. His experience earlier had jarred him. There was something unnatural about it, at least according to his understanding of nature. Certainly, it was a new experience for him. This strange man, fortuitously approaching him with this quasi-mysticism: it was uncanny. He’d never believed in the unseen, in any sort of anomalous phenomena, but in his current state he felt himself vulnerable to alternative explanations.
“What can you tell me?” he asked cautiously.
“It’s more about what I can show you, eh?” He reached into his jacket pocket and looked over his shoulder. “Come closer. I show you something.”
He retrieved a small zip lock bag filled with what looked like half a dozen small crinkly mushrooms.
“This, my friend, your doorway to the unseen,” he said gravely.
Joel spun on his heels.
“Hey, guy, where you go, eh?” he heard behind him, but he did not stop.
He got into the store and leaned his back against the door as he closed it. Slowly but surely, he began to laugh. An immense feeling of relief washed over him. “Thank God,” he said to himself, “thank God that guy was full of shit. Not what I needed today. It’s been weird enough already. Good ol’ LA underpasses.”
Joel picked up a basket from a stack beside the door and began to make his way through the store. It was difficult to recall what he had gone there to buy. “What was it, again?” he said to himself—“Eggs? No. Oatmeal?” He wandered around the store in a daze, feeling an eerie sensation he couldn’t quite place: it was a sense of being dislodged, or disconnected from the group. He thought of scenes from a nature documentary they had watched. Wolves separated a caribou calf from the herd. Singled out and pushed away from the comfort of the group, the calf seized up. As the wolves closed in, swiftness became its only path to salvation, and yet, at such a critical moment, the calf’s movements became unsteady. The rhythm of its stride was uneven and clunky. The more the wolves closed in, the more panic set in and the slower the calf moved. As if anticipating fate, the calf tripped in a small hole and fell to the ground at the wolves’ feet. The chase ended without the wolves needing to bring their quarry to the ground. They simply walked up to it licking their chops. In the final shot, the calf raised its head and called out toward the empty sky.
“Shit!” A bag of sugar slipped from Joel’s fingers and crashed to the ground, splitting open and sending white crystals in every direction. He didn’t remember having grabbed sugar. He walked away.
“Sorry!” he said toward the back room, not knowing if anyone was there or not.
He grabbed at a bottle of barbeque sauce. It slipped out of his fingers, but fell into the basket. He walked into another aisle. He straightened his arm and slid three packets of ramen noodles into his basket. This, he determined in that moment, would complete his shopping trip. He couldn’t focus anymore. He walked to the front and stood in the checkout line.
“Sir?” a young man at the checkout station said to Joel over the magazine rack, “Rufus will actually take you on checkout #2. He’ll be there in a moment.”
Joel stepped out from the back of the line and walked to the conveyor belt at checkout #2. He started taking the barbeque sauce out of the basket, but his fingers wouldn’t close. His hand was paralyzed as though he had slept on it. He shook his hand and his fingers came alive.
“Having some trouble there, eh?”
Joel looked up. It was the large man from earlier. He was standing behind the cash register wearing a red apron with a nametag that read: “Hello: my name is RUFUS.” Joel blinked slowly. He lifted his basket, dumped the items onto the belt, and dropped the basket back on the ground. He slid it out of the walkway with his foot. Rufus looked at him for a long moment, but said nothing. He scanned the ramen and the barbecue sauce. “That’s $5.13 for you, buddy,” he said without looking up. Joel fumbled with his wallet, managed to retrieve ten dollars and held it out to the man. His arm hung extended for a several seconds before Rufus looked up with a sudden intensity. His arm shot out from behind the counter and grabbed Joel by the forearm. His hands were powerful. His fingers were dark and blotchy, as if he’s crawled his way out of the dirt. He pulled Joel so that he was leaning over the conveyor belt. His gaze was crystalline and unwavering. Joel felt as though he were being scanned through, as though beneath the mechanical eye of an X-ray machine searching for some dark tumor. All of a sudden, Rufus released his grip and opened the register.
“Buddy, you should relax more, eh?” he said simply.
Joel bagged his items and left the store in a hurry. He drove home and left the car outside the garage, fumbling with the keys outside the front door. He looked up at the sky and took a deep breath. “Get ahold of yourself. What’s going on?” He thought of the yoga classes he used to take in the office on Friday afternoons. He learned to breathe from the belly and center himself. He did this for a moment. “Just focus on the breath,” he said to himself. He breathed in and out slowly. “Visualize,” he said to himself. There was a pinprick of light in the center of his vision. “Allow it to expand, envelope,” he recalled his mindfulness exercises. He was there again in conference room C. His purple yoga mat beneath him, t-shirt and basketball shorts. He was the only male in the office that took the “Fun Fridays” yoga class.
“You can always use this,” the instructor said.
Long, deep breaths followed.
“Deep breathing through the nose, breath is the life of the Earth. Pull the breath down; breathe deep into your belly. This will center you. You can always use this,” she said.
Joel liked the idea of having a mental tool at his disposal. Her voice filled him. A tool, yes—like the utility belts in his favorite comic books. His eyes were closed. A curtain of black hung around his field of vision. The pinprick expanded. There he was, another solitary afternoon in the bedroom he grew up in, the quiet of the house kept at bay by the afternoon sun. He would only notice the silence in the dark. These were his father’s comics. Heroes wore masks. They were strong and resourceful. There was always something in their utility belts that they could use no matter the situation. Joel liked this idea. He always thought in terms of toolboxes and skill sets. “Breath-work. This is a tool: an object I can access for my benefit whenever I like. When I tense up, I can use this,” he said, returning to himself in the present. He breathed, accessing his tool. Every remaining subsequent Friday, he dutifully came and his instructor’s voice filled him. Her name was Helga, and every week she contorted herself in front of the class and taught the importance of deep breathing. She lunged one sleek leg forward, reaching back and pulling her other foot toward her lower back. Trim in tight black, her form stretched gracefully, arching the small of her back forward. Her head lifted back, eyes closed in a kind of euphoria, dreadlocks tucked neatly at the back of her head. Joel copied, but opened his eyes. He couldn’t keep them shut, try as he might. He saw the silver of her naval ring, tattoos running from wrist to shoulder. After his last class, he spoke with her. She smiled at first, dabbing her forehead with a towel. He shook her hand. He told her that her voice filled him each week. “It makes me very excited,” he said trying to express his gratitude, but not sure what he was saying. There was the rush of her presence and a silence he couldn’t account for. He looked up at her face. A gold ring through her septum rested just above the tender of her upper lip. Freckles on her cheek—gentle and faint, you could only see them up close. This gave her a tinge of soft yearning. She seemed in that moment a lost farm girl gone wayward in the wicked city. Her face was blank. It was a curious and demure expression. She leaned her head back and said nothing. There was a hint in her expression that she was vulnerable and in need of protection, as though she were about to call for help. At first, Joel had felt himself to be a sturdy presence. Her soft vulnerability had stirred something within him: something chivalrous. It was a quirky feeling; the impulse manifested to defend Helga in some heroic way. He strangely desired an immediately dangerous situation, some filmic cataclysm or terrorist attack so that she might in some feminine way bear witness to his intelligent resourcefulness. However, in the flash of a moment, he realized how far toward her head his own had been leaning. He could feel his own breath coming off her face and back onto his. An icy realization took hold: he was the source of, not protection from, her discomfiture. He felt a shriveling sensation and wanted to slink back like an inchworm. He bowed his head in quick obeisance—“Thank you!”—and quickly walked away.
He shuffled out of the room in a desultory fashion and spent the remainder of his day packing his desk. He was supposed to go for a sendoff pint with Mehta, but he uncharacteristically was not in. He sat in the car recalling the interaction with Helga. Twice during class, he looked at her feet and drew his eyes upward over the length of her body. The line of contact between her waist and the topmost line of her leggings. Black, glossy material, they hugged tightly against her, but her waist was so trim it made only the slightest impression. His eyes lingered on her bust contained in a black sports bra. One wouldn’t have thought to find such considerable softness on so firm and petite a body. Then he met her distant face and dimly realized the self-conscious expression it bore. How had he done that and not been able to recall it? He shook his head. His mind had buried it. He recalled the sensation of moving his head up and down, scanning her body and she had caught him doing it—twice! It was nearly mechanical, so little agency was involved and he couldn’t immediately remember those moments. Perhaps he had sunk so deeply into his mental exercises that he had allowed his own fear of being caught fall away. He then cornered her in conversation afterwards, nearly pressing his own face to hers. What must she have felt? He was mortified, his growing delirium quickly revealing itself as a guilt pang. He contemplated sending her an apology e-mail, but his mind recognized this for what it was: an attempt to keep contact with her. He also recognized this would push the encounter over into stalker territory. His wife’s face crept into his mind. On the drive home, he became of aware of listening to the radio—“Hey girls! Do you have a creepy guy-story? We wanna hear! Call in!” He started laughing at this. He thought of the last time he saw his father. There was the image of chewing gum wrappers pressed up into little balls on the floor of his room. He wouldn’t be that man. Something renewed in his mind at that moment. “I’m not a scumbag,” he said to himself and was immediately surprised at having thought it.
He hugged Aubrey unsteadily when he got home, but she didn’t notice. The movers would be by the next day. Everything was set. That night, he spoke continuously over dinner. He explained every technical aspect of anything he could imagine. Aubrey observed him with suspicious wonder. She cleared the plates as he continued.
“Then there’s geo-depth telemetrics,” he went on.
Aubrey took a break.
“Ok, that’s…Joel, thank you, that’s enough. Can we just watch TV now?”
He was being so unreasonable, but he felt a piercing sensation when she said that. His mind in some strangely transmuted form of redemption wouldn’t allow itself to rest, but that effort at self-distraction had been derailed. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt for a moment a sense of total effacement, like he had simply been erased or he didn’t matter.
“Don’t cluck at me,” he shot back.
She glared at him.
“What’d you say to me?” she said challengingly.
He said nothing.
“Don’t talk to me that way,” she said and left the room.
The next morning, the packing and loading was a solemn affair. The movers had their entire lives packed and loaded in a trailer in under three hours. It seemed depressing, seeing all their possessions fit into less than 12 feet of trailer space. She nudged against his arm in conciliation late in the afternoon. He was warmly obliging.
“We’re both nervous,” she said.
“Everyone’s leaving California,” he said, still hurt and unsure of why he just said what he said.
She said nothing.
“I love you,” he said and then, “I’m sorry.”
She took his hand from her shoulder and kissed the top of it. All was renewed. He felt like himself again, his limbs and thoughts once more under his full control. He fingers fumbled the keys on his keyring, but he managed to isolate the key to the front door. Joel relaxed and unlocked it. His breath was normal, but there was a thunderous pounding in his chest. The yoga instructor’s name was Helga. Her face was quite lovely. She had pale skin and green eyes. There was a tattoo of a small flower above her left breast. These things should be forgotten. He allowed himself one quick recollection of her form and then brought himself to reality. Upon opening the front door, he smiled to himself and took off his jacket, closing the door behind him. He was home, he reminded himself: this was home.
Then he saw it. It was very curious: a puddle of water the size of a dinner plate had gathered over the floorboards near the foot of the stairs. Joel looked at it. “Great, looks like we got a leak somewhere,” he said at first with consternation and then with excitement. Nothing like a small homeowner’s crisis to get his mind focused on the normal. He walked to the edge of it and looked down. “But from where?” He scratched his chin. The walls were dry. He pressed his fingers along the baseboard by the stairs. There didn’t seem to be any evidence of rot. He couldn’t find any soft spots. He looked up. The ceiling looked dry. He took the stepladder out of the coat closet and set it up next to the puddle. He touched plaster of the ceiling. It was dry and he could see no water stains. He unscrewed the light fixture, felt around inside it and put it back. He put the ladder back and kneeled down next to the puddle. He stood over it, seeing his reflection in the dark water. The water was still, yet his reflection was distorted. “So strange,” he thought, “where did this water come from?”
He took the shopping bag into the kitchen and returned with several sheets of paper towel. He dropped it onto the puddle. He watched as a dark circle grew in the center of the white sheet. Joel pressed down and wiped the floor dry. He returned to the kitchen and unpacked his bag. “Time for coffee,” he thought. He froze in sudden recollection of the one item he had wanted from store and laughed to himself: “More instant coffee. Works for me. At least I have lunch covered.” He put on the kettle and doled out coffee crystals into his mug. He felt a sense of levity. The events earlier: this must have been a panic attack. Joel had never had a panic attack before, but that was what they must be like. He felt silly for a moment and then a wave of relief washed over him.
He poured his coffee and began taking it upstairs to his office. Halfway up the stairs, they shifted slightly under his feet. He gripped the rail and managed not to spill coffee on himself, but it startled him. “Gotta get the contractor out here. Maybe they can look at the pipes while they’re at it,” he thought. He went into his office and sat on the futon. He looked at his desk. The monitor had gone dark. Papers were scattered; his headphones lay in the chaotic state he had left them. “Yeah,” he thought, “a panic attack. How strange.” He thought about the unnerving sounds he had heard and the uncanny resemblance they bore to the cadence of speech. He had been afraid to rehear those sounds in his memory, but now felt settled enough to look at it all rationally. Of course, it makes sense: there had been much stress in these past few months. They had moved nearly halfway across the country, selling one home and buying another. This life in Colorado was fresh and new, but so far, it had proven itself a challenge. There could be no doubt about that.
Joel began to drink his coffee. “Still,” he said to himself, “still, something seems off.” Something about those sounds had spooked him terrifically. He had never heard anything like it. Perhaps it was some sort of interference: some kind of nearby industrial machinery or seismic activity. He would need some kind of explanation. It was extraordinary how human beings could apprehend normal formations in the natural world as manifestations of intelligence. Perfectly ordinary sounds could seem transformed in all sorts of sinister ways by moving them through different mediums: the sound of a human voice as it passes through water, for instance. Could these sounds have caused a panic attack, or whatever it was that he experienced? He thought about this. Yes, perhaps the wavelengths of these anomalies triggered an intense reaction in the lower chambers of his animal brain. It was possible. His maintained a pet theory about the Dyatlov pass incident. He believed the formation of the nearby mountains were shaped in such a way that sound passing between them generated a low-frequency hum at such a wavelength that it triggered an intense fear reaction in the brains of those young hikers. That would explain the apparent hysterical reaction that arose without a seeming cause. “Pure fear with no object,” he thought, “total a-causal dread, free floating.” He returned to his desk. He switched audio files and tagged the one he began earlier. “I’ll go back to that one,” he said to himself, “let’s start fresh.” He slipped his earphones halfway over his ears and started the next file. His screen returned to its normal flow of jumping sound bars and scrawling numbers. In his mouth, he turned over the taste of bitter crystals.
“Honey!” Joel heard, “Honey!”
Joel took his earphones off. It was almost 5:30. He left his office and started heading downstairs. Aubrey was at the bottom of the stairs with Sylvie.
“Shit!” Joel said as the stairs shifted beneath him.
“Yeah, we gotta call someone,” she said.
He kissed her as she took off her coat.
“Well,” he said, “how was it?”
“Huh? Oh. Yeah, no, it was great,” she said closing the door to the coat closet. “Hey, what’s this water here? Do we have a leak?”
Joel looked down. There it was again: a small puddle of water in the exact place as before.
“That’s odd,” he said, “there was a puddle in that exact spot this morning. I couldn’t figure out where it came from. I cleaned it up, but now it’s back.”
“Maybe we’ll get the contractor to take a look,” she said, handing him Sylvie.
“I looked, there was no water on the ceiling or the walls or anything. There’s no water damage. I can’t figure out how a puddle would get there,” he said, following her into the kitchen. She slung the strap of her purse over the back of chair and turned. She looked at his face and stopped.
“What happened to you?” she said. He said nothing, but looked down and took his glasses off, touching the skin beneath his swollen eye. “I mean,” she started, “honey what happened to your eye? Oh my gosh.”
“It’s nothing,” he said with hesitation.
She put her hand on his face.
“It looks like a burst blood vessel. You were concentrating too hard…”
“That must’ve been it,” he said.
She took Sylvie from him.
“C’mon, help me with dinner.”
“Yeah, just let me go log off,” he said.
“Don’t break your neck on those stairs,” she said from the pantry.
“Still can’t figure out why they’re moving,” he said, his voice feeble.
“It’s fine. We’ll get a professional to take a look,” she said.
“Yeah, and they can fix the puddle while they’re at it,” he said.
He heard her cooing over Sylvie as he left the room—“Who’s my silly girl? That’s right! Who’s my silly girl?”
He walked into the foyer and kneeled next to the puddle. “How odd,” he thought for a moment and then stood, lingering over it. He walked back up the stairs gripping the handrail, but they remained steady beneath his feet. As he got into his office, he felt a vibration in his pocket. Joel took out his phone and looked down at the screen: UNKNOWN CALLER. He stared for a moment, swiped the green button and put the phone to his ear. A piercing tone came through. He pulled the phone from his ear. The sharp, cutting sound dulled itself into a hiss and then a low growl. Joel felt something inside himself tighten. After a moment of silence, there was a voice. It was scattered and then came together through the static. He returned the phone to his ear. It was as if what was on the other end was modulating itself, moving up and down the spectrum of possible sound outputs. Then the background receded and a voice came through.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” Joel answered, relieved to hear a human on the other end.
“Hello,” the voice repeated.
It was stiff and tinny, almost like a recording.
“Yes, hello,” Joel repeated.
“Hello, could you please,” the voice stopped.
“Hi, who am I speaking with?” Joel asked.
It was some moments before a voice responded.
“Could you please….in?” Joel couldn’t make all of it out. It sounded like some garbled computerized sales call.
“Yes, how can I help you?” Joel asked again.
“Please, if you please, in? Yes?” the voice said.
“Hi, this is Joel Van Orten. Who am I speaking with?”
“Please, yes? Please,” the voice said.
Joel stopped responding. No dialogue would be established with the voice on the other end. Maybe it was a recording after all, or a poorly managed telemarketing call from overseas. The voice, increasingly mechanical, droned on. This was some sort of prank, the local yokels putting one over on him again.
“Please….yes, please…yes?”
Joel hung up the phone. He’d had his fill of the strange over the last two days. He put his phone down on the desk and put his hand on his laptop’s mousepad. As the screen flashed, awake with color, he heard faint voice. He looked down at his phone; a call was connected. He narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t answer the call,” he said aloud without realizing it, “Did it just answer itself?” He could hear a string of verbalizations coming through like broken pieces. The voice droned into the air in short bursts, seeming to invite a response. The voice would continue to speak until it was heard. The idea this was a prank left his mind. That was as far as his thoughts could take him.
“Who is this?” Joel said in a near-whisper, his throat and chest frozen.
“You hang up?” the voice said sharply.
“Who is this?” Joel insisted.
“Please?” the voice said, “Yes?”
“Who the hell is this?” his voice grew stronger in his frustration.
He felt a powerful need to challenge the voice, to stand his ground, but it continued on in its stream of broken language.
“Please?...Yes? Please…please…”
Joel threw his phone down to the floor. He sat in his chair staring forward, listening. The voice continued in its fragmented language. The phone had slid nearly to the doorway and from across the room, he could sense there was a sharpness to the words: accusatory and belittling, like the authorities issuing a sentence. Even from a distance, each word stuck him, again and again.
“Yes?...Yes?...Please?”
