Show Me the Way to Go Home

Dark water sucked and slapped at the hull of the small skift, setting the boat to a constant sleepy roll. The younger man's head craned over the boat's edge. He squinted hard into the fathoms where a strange phosphorus luminance pulsed in slow, measured beats. "What do you think it is?"

He thought the older man must have not heard him, so his lips parted to ask again; but at length his companion spoke, each word trudging out with a deliberate and curious apprehension, as if the wrong one might snip some invisible trigger wire. "I don't know. But let's not worry about it just yet, Ace."

Ace's eyes rolled towards him. The older man was still fixed on the light, his wide apish mouth slightly agape. Then he shook himself as if from a drowse and gave his attention back to the tackle situated on the center thwart that separated them. Clanking and jingling as the older man's thick blunted fingers rifled around. The lid was hinged back towards Ace so he couldn't see the contents stored within the weathered metal box.

"Do you think it's some sort of fish?" Ace asked. Then with a chuckle that was almost desperate, "Hey I didn't think there were any fish that glowed like that in lakes?"

The other man mumbled something unintelligible, hands still working unseen. A clean moon laid its sterile white track over the boat and in its cold light the older man's eyes appeared to glimmer with some mad purpose. A wispy rag of gray cloud hung against the otherwise clear starry vista. The air was crisp, a not unpleasant sting scouring Ace's nostrils. The coolness quieted the lake's usual gamy reek of algae and rotting fish and the immediate surroundings were so absolute in their darkness outside the fluttering gash of moonlight that his senses were mostly isolated to sound alone. Whippoorwills cried in the distant stands of oak and beechwood that hemmed the lake in.

The older man's leg jerked spasmodic as he continued his search, coarse peppered eyebrows furrowed in concentration below the fringe of his frayed watchman's cap.

Something broached the lake's surface behind Ace. His torso twisted and he made to look when the man across from him looked up suddenly and belted, "Do not." His stare was hard and made harder still by the jouncy play of moonlight and shadow over his stony features.

"Ok," Ace said, both hands palm-up, "ok, what gives?"

The older man returned to the tackle. Minutes like hours passed. The only sounds were that of the whippoorwills and the restless toiling of the man's hands. Ace leaned and peeped over the boat's edge again. The light was both bigger and brighter now in the depths. He saw the stark outline of his head reflected in the steady obsidian mirror of the lake's surface, the features there shapeless. He reached up and felt his cheeks, his eyes and mouth to placate a childish bone-dread of sudden erasure.

"What--" Ace began, but then the older man made a triumphant hiss, the clatter stopping with such abruptness Ace thought he felt his ears pop. The tackle lid closed with a loud clack of finality and the older man straightened the slump of his broad shoulders, balanced with an odd delicacy in both hands what appeared to be a plate composed of battered tin.

"Now," the older man breathed, "do you remember?" The plate reflected the moon dully and lent a dead gray sheen to the man's cragged face.

Ace looked from the plate to the man's inquisitive stare. He shrugged. "I don't know what you're asking me. I don't know what any of this means." Ace looked around the boat and for the first time was aware that there were no fishing poles; no bucket to keep the bounty. A coldness seized inside his chest. "Where's our gear?"

"What," the man snapped and then, registering the question, jerked his head side to side in a gesture of impatience and proffered the plate again. "Don't worry about that," he said, "it doesn't matter. Focus on this. Now--what is my name."

"Your--"

"Who am I."

Ace scoffed, a stiff uneasy smile stuck in place. "What the hell do you mean, you're--" Thoughts rushed and broke against a dam raised somewhere in his brain. "You're..." But then with some reluctance slowly shook his head and swallowed hard and, just above a whisper, said "What is this?"

The man nodded. "First right thing you've said."

Another splash in the dark. This time louder, closer. The boat raised and dipped with gentle force. No birdsong from a shore whose existence he now questioned; he could see nothing beyond where the moon reposed like a bloated dead face in the lake. His mind had assumed certainties; a lake needs a bank, a road a destination. What road brought him here? What bank saw him push off?

He reached up and once more confirmed his features with a tremulous hand. "Are you the Devil?"

The older man leaned forward and reached the plate to Ace, the boat pitching with his weight. "I don’t know what I am, but I think it’s safe enough to say I’m not that.”

Ace looked down and regarded the plate. The edges were crudely crimped and the flat well was scuffed and smudged with dust or soot all over. Yet he could see his face clearly in its center. Everything he saw looked older than he felt, a disparity so great he sensed the offense of his soul. Crow's feet; sunken eyes; parenthetical grooves running from nose to mouth.

The older man leaned his head over the edge of the boat. "We don't have much time. Be quick."

"What am I supposed to--"

"I can't tell you that, Ace. No one can." The man hadn't taken his gaze from the water. His eyes lost some of their hardness and instead appeared rueful, longing. "Just you, see. It's always been just you." And with that the man slipped over the gunnel and vanished without a sound.

Ace jumped up on reflex, the plate clattering against the aluminum floorboard. The skiff listed precariously. He steeled his body but it was too late. The boat turned turtle before he could draw even half a breath for the plunge.

A brilliant light swam up and filled his vision. The next thing he knew he was gasping and flailing on the floor of a large grassy clearing. He heard a close chirp. He looked up from where he sprawled and saw a small nacre bird perched on a stump, its head cocked at a curious angle. The bird chirped and hopped and paced the stump with little jaunty steps. Ace righted himself, leaning back on his elbows. The bird flexed its wings twice and dipped its head in a bow-like gesture.

He expected the bird to talk or transfigure or for something momentous to occur. A world had tempered him to accept, almost without thinking, that a led to b and b to c; but nothing so far had resolved to be in congruence with that world and so he waited for the bird to talk. Instead it paced once more and spread its wings and flew up past the clustered spruces and elms and into the white glare of a noon sun.

Ace watched it until it was out of sight. He looked at his clothes and touched them and ran his fingers through his unkempt hair. Everything was dry. Only the inside of his head felt waterlogged. He noticed a narrow deer path running just beyond the stump, almost entirely hidden beneath shocks of alfalfa. He walked it with a listless abandon; no answer seemed right and what seemed right was certain to unspool into error. What road brought you here? Which path would take you home?

Coming around a bend he heard a loud crack from somewhere above. He looked up and was gobsmacked to see the boat perched in the crook of a giant old-growth elm. There was another loud crack and then the boat pitched forward with violent momentum. Ace braced himself for its inevitable fall, eyes closing in reflex, but then it jammed against another thick bough and trembled before it finally settled again. There was a long, low grating sound and then something spiraled down through the air, landing ten feet away from him into a big briar bush that shook from the impact.

Thorns pricked his hands and wrists as he lifted the tackle box up and out. He found a deadfall nearby and sat down, the metal warm in his lap. He unclasped the hinged locks and opened it up.

Empty.

Ace let it fall from his lap onto the ground, rested his chin on his clasped hands. No plate, no road, no meaning.

"Something wrong?"

Ace looked up. A young boy with a slight frame stood looking at him as the bird had looked at him, his small head cocked to one side. His face was streaked with dirt, the too-short jeans he wore drabbled with drying mud at the shins.

Ace gave a weary sigh and let his head drop. “Kid, honestly, I don't remember enough to know just how wrong or right anything is.” He looked back up, cast his eyes to the blue filigree of sky showing through the tree tops. “I think I dreamed I was alive. Or something like it. I don't know. Whatever purpose I might've had once was a sham I guess.”

Ace shifted uneasily. Here he was hanging the weight of his man-crisis on the shoulders of a boy who couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen. He started to apologize, but then the boy said, “Maybe your purpose is to have no purpose. That wouldn't be so bad, would it?"

Ace gave a derisive snort and shook his head.

The boy straightened back up and then swiveled his head around to look in the distance before turning back. An impish grin split his pale round face. "Hey. Hey, you wanna see something pretty cool?"

****

They climbed through a gully and up the other side, weaving through clusters of briar bushes and trailing vines that hung limp from trees like the petrified tentacles of long dead sea cryptids.

The boy kept a spry pace. He moved with the prescient stride of something that had committed to memory each and every jutting obstacle in the undergrowth. Ace thought he'd lost him once but then the boy peeped around a scrub pine and motioned him on. "Not far now," he chimed.

They came to the brink of a deep ravine. Looking down Ace saw what he first assumed to be a natural if somewhat anomalous mutation of rock and tree; but focusing his attention he saw it was a house. Set with its back against the far rise, it harbored a regality that was both audacious and somehow reckless. A hodgepodge of cyclopean stone and rough-hewn timber, it looked like something which had started as a simple necessity and then on a vain whim decided it wanted something more for itself.

"Who lives there?"

"I don't know," the boy said. "I just saw it today."

Ace looked at him. "Who are you?"

"You mean today?”

"What."

"I like to change it sometimes. Nothing looks at me any different whether I'm Jack or Jude. Animals don't worry about names. Do you think a squirrel knows it's called a squirrel?

"You're not an animal."

"I’m not? I do everything they do. I think they see me coming and just think, Watch out, there it is again.

"Where are your parents?"

"You'd have better luck asking who, and I don't really know that either. I remember a smiling woman and a man with a frown. I guess they must've canceled each other out. It doesn't bother me. You can call me Pete if you want."

They stood in silence.

"Ok, Pete. I'm going down there to take a look."

The boy’s face darkened, the easy smile diminishing. "Go ahead then, I guess. I don't think I can stop you.”

****

Ace sidled down the sheer drop, checking his speed by catching hold of several scrub trees that twisted out of the earth at diseased angles. The further he descended the more he noticed just how leached everything looked. The flat at the bottom of the draw was hardpack and what few sprigs of vegetation existed looked almost depleted by a tireless, hard-won effort. Every color was a half-measure, greens and browns and ochres all dominated by a foundational pale.

He approached an overlarge plank door battened with thick rusted iron along the top and bottom. He knocked. Nothing. Using both hands to grip the vertical pull he labored it open, the bottom of the door screeching a tuneless agony against the threshold.

A thick, hermetic mustiness accosted him when he entered. Cobwebs hung in big swooping catenaries throughout the open plan and he wondered if their role was now maybe essential in preventing the place from becoming nothing more than a smoking pile of rubble. Dirty light fell in oblongs through chinks here and there. Picture frames without subjects were tacked all over the walls and in the center of the biggest frame set above a cold hearth, in print so small as to be almost illegible, was scrawled LIFE. The only furniture was a massive banquet table positioned on the far side of the room. Tapers lined its considerable length, wax frozen in long gothic dreads.

Someone was seated at the table’s center. The head, bowed in eternal rigor, was topped with a paper-mache crown wrinkled and foxed with mildew and mold all over. Ace approached with caution, the boards beneath his feet creaking with each measured step. His heart throbbed in his ribs. Cobwebs clung to the seated figure. Ace got close enough to see the plate of battered tin resting on the table before the bowed head, the old man’s face reflected dully in its center. Ace, feeling inspired, wondered whether he’d starved himself on an image he no longer had the guts to metabolize.

The man’s head tilted up. Ace was startled to a halt. The cobwebs attached to him spasmed with the sudden motion and to Ace it almost looked like he’d been ventriloquized to life from above. The crown toppled to the floor without a sound, revealing beneath it an old frayed watchman’s cap. The man’s eyes roved in their sunken sockets. His wide apish mouth trembled.

“What,” he croaked, but then spiraled into a coughing fit. When it abated he looked at Ace for a long moment and said, no more than a whisper, “Who are you?”

Ace felt something in his chest come loose. He shook his head. “I don’t think it matters.”

The man bowed his head again and seemed to be regarding his own face in the plate once more. “Would you get me a drink? Something cool?”

Ace looked around but found nothing. Only stores of dust that gave unto more dust. “We’ll have to leave, there’s nothing here.”

The old man looked at him as if deliberating. Then he smiled, nodding.

****

The boy was skipping flat hunks of shale when he saw the two figures emerge downstream along the creekbed. An old man and the younger man he’d encountered earlier. The younger man was helping the old man to his knees. The latter then crawled on all fours towards the molten gold run of the sunlit trace and cupped his hands into the flow, bringing the water to his puckered mouth.

The boy sauntered up alongside them. “Who’s he?”

Ace didn’t turn. “I don’t know. Neither does he. I don’t think we care.”

Both the boy and Ace helped the old man to his feet again. The three of them set off through the woods. For hours they talked. They talked so much and for so long they eventually lost their path, but none of them knew it and so it didn’t matter. The boy told stories without beginnings and the old man told some without endings. Ace was happy enough to just listen.

The wild things in the woods noted their boisterous approach. They could not discern where one voice ended and the other began, all three voices unified into a single siren that simply shouted life.

****

Somewhere along the way he lost them. Ace had his head drooped for what seemed no more than a few minutes when day shifted into night with an abruptness like wind. He turned about in the pitch and shouted them out, turning in circles, but even in the vastness of the wide-open woods only his own voice returned to him, as though the space of this world itself was nothing more than a ploy, the trees and undergrowth and the scampering creatures just synthetic props arranged on a stage of unparalleled authenticity.

He stopped mid-turn and looked up past the tree breaks. A pale gold star pulsed in the sky. Without wanting or meaning to he felt himself rising towards it, buoyed up and up into an aether that started to feel both viscous and, somehow, alive. Ace shouted that he didn’t want to, he didn’t care to know. His voice grew petulant in its protests. He tried to will himself back down but both mind and body were gripped in a hopeless deadlock.

As the light of the star got closer he heard all the answers he ever wanted and some he never cared to know, not ever. The light filled his vision with clear and terrible purpose. He wept tears he had no choice but to swallow, the unbridled force of his ascension conceding nothing to the boy he was, the man he is, the great human-shaped shadow he was inevitably to become.