Whatever happened next, I must have been dreaming. That’s about all I can figure out. I was lying on the floor of the attic, thinking about my future, like it was being projected on the screen: a long, empty highway scrolling endlessly, twisting and turning and with no one else on it, moving at a hundred miles an hour. The picture getting smaller and smaller, like I was rushing into something. Smaller and smaller, like my spirit was being compressed. But never so small that I couldn’t see what was happening, making out the highway and the cracks in the road and the loose gravel spilling out into the ditch. I don’t know how to explain it, but I knew the feeling was doom. A kind of pure doom that was crashing like a wave over and over again in my head. I knew with certainty that whatever was waiting for me at the end of the road would be bad, even if there was nothing there at all, even if the road never ended.
Then I heard a sound from the other side of the attic, loud and definite, like a block of wood falling from a great distance, and I looked up, expecting it to be Carl. Wanting it to be, so I could pull him closer to me and forget everything I was feeling. So I could bury my face in his fur. But Carl never went up into the attic, even though he often tried. Sometimes he sat at the bottom and meowed urgently as if he had been left on his own at the end of the earth. The ladder was too steep for him. When I remembered that my heart seized up with fear.
“Carl?” I said. “Carl? Carl?”
I was unsteady and my head started swimming when I propped myself up on my elbows to look into the corner.
“Who’s there?” I asked, catching myself, fighting the urge to throw up.
It was dark far down the attic, where the boxes were stacked high and the light from the single light bulb had difficulty reaching. But I thought I saw someone standing back there — a silhouette staring back at me from behind some junk.
“I know you’re there,” I said, my eyes watering. Unable to take them off the corner.
The figure — I could see now it was a man — had long hair, stretching down to its shoulders. It moved slightly, bending into itself. An acknowledgement, like it was bowing at court. When it moved its body shimmered, as if its teeth were caught in the moonlight. But it didn’t have any teeth.
I wanted it to go away.
I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. It was still there, still watching me.
“Dad?” I asked.
It wasn’t my dad, but I worried that it was.
“Who are you?”
I couldn’t see its eyes, but I knew it was looking at me, or into me, like it was looking for an entrance. It didn’t move, but it was moving, like an animal standing stock-still in the forest, or like a tree slowly shifting in the breeze. It felt alien, and alert, an intelligence that I couldn’t understand. I knew it wasn’t my dad, but it looked like my dad, or not like my dad, but familiar, in a way that I couldn’t place.
I had always known it or it was related to me.
Or it came from me or was coming for me.
The silhouette stepped out from where it was standing, unfolding and folding its long limbs as it moved.
“What do you want?” I asked. It took me a long time to get that out. I was so scared I was pushing the sound out of my mouth one breathy syllable at a time. My whole body was quaking. I didn’t know where the thing had come from, but it felt like I had invited it up there into the attic with me and I wasn’t sure why or how. It was looking at me like it wanted to find a way in. Or like it knew the way in and it was just waiting for the right moment.
The silhouette didn’t move. We both held still. Each holding our breath. Or I was holding my breath.
I don’t know what the silhouette was doing, if it could breathe, or think, or have any intentions at all.
Then I noticed with horror that it was getting longer, that it was rising, inch by inch, rising and inclining its head toward me. I felt caught in the movement, a mouse watching a cobra rear up and slowly shake its head. And I knew it was exactly like that — that if I kept watching, it would get taller and taller and closer and closer, and then something would happen and whatever that was it wouldn’t be good.
And I was almost ready for that.
I closed my eyes and felt it coming closer. I thought, It won’t be long now. I thought, Just a little bit farther.
But something stirred in me that I didn’t expect.
I forced myself to get up off the floor, though I tripped forward and caught myself roughly with my knees and the palms of my hands. I would find bruises there the next morning. I wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol or the adrenalin or the fear that caused me to trip just at the moment of rearing up. But I got up again and launched myself at the creature, shouting at the top of my lungs.
Then it disappeared, pulling into itself like a puff of smoke. Scattering into the corner or down the trap door. Leaving me pitching forward, unsteady, violent, without a target. Momentum threw me through the gaping hole in the attic floor, where I glanced off the ladder and landed with a disturbing crunch on my arm.
* * *
Over the following week, I wondered whether I had chased the shadow away or made myself vulnerable to it. Where it had gone — if it was in me now or somewhere far away.
But then I thought, no, there hadn’t been anything there, I was just wasted and half-asleep and deeply, deeply stupid.
This was after I threw up on the carpet. This was after I dragged myself to the railing and used my other hand to pull myself up. This was after I somehow hobbled downstairs and called for an ambulance. This was after waiting patiently outside for the paramedics with one arm clutching my shoulder, after struggling to stand up and sheepishly greeting them when they arrived. This was after they took me to the hospital and set my bones and put a cast on my arm.
The next morning I limped out of the hospital under my own power. It could have been much worse. I could have landed on my head, or twisted my neck, or broken a leg and had to crawl down the stairs or have the paramedics break down the front door. Carl was waiting for me by the front door when I came home, hungry and chirping in confused but relieved bursts.
I also discovered that there were three missed calls from Tom on my phone. He’d finally called me back, I think when I was lying in a heap underneath the ladder or outside waiting for the paramedics to arrive. He hadn’t left any messages on my voicemail, but he’d sent me a few texts: “just calling to say hi,” “baby are u there,” “i wonder what you are up to tonight.” I just stared at them, trying to decide how long I should wait to send him a response. I thought about telling him about my arm, or trying to talk to him about what I was feeling, maybe talking to him about my dad, but something made me think that he wouldn’t understand.
I sat down on the couch and thought, vaguely, about crying. Probably I had every right to. But instead I realized how lucky I was, that I had lived through something so incredibly dumb. I felt a weird sense of calm. Something awful had happened to me and I was more or less fine. Things were a little worse, but it wasn’t the end of the world.
It seemed impossible.
Then I looked around the living room, at the new furniture and the new floors and the new TV and the photographs from Mom and Dan’s vacations on the mantel and I thought, fuck that, why do I feel calm, I shouldn’t feel calm, my life is hard and there’s no end in sight and I have nothing and I have been robbed. I lay back down on the couch with my broken arm tight against my chest and that feeling flashing in my head like hot lightning.
To take my mind off things I reached for my computer on the coffee table and drafted an email.
Mom. Hope you are having a good time in Cuba. I know about Dad. (I don’t mean Dan, of course.) (I mean the man who lived in your house before him and paid for all of your new stuff.) (Stephen, you remember.)
How come you never told me?
But it didn’t seem likely that my email would accomplish what I wanted it to, so I sent the following instead:
Mom. Hope you are having a good time in Cuba. Carl is fine. I (Sarah) am fine. The house is fine.
The latter email was pretty much in keeping with the tone of our recent correspondence.
Then I took a picture of my cast and bruises, intending, maybe, to send it to Tom. But I didn’t. I was suddenly sick of myself. Instead, I put down the phone and put on my puffy green jacket and went outside. My right arm hanging on the inside of my coat, in a way that made me feel important, like a veteran of the American Civil War.
Heading to the forest meant passing by Upper Canada Secondary, so I found myself repeating my old walk to school. The neighbourhood that way was older, with taller trees, each of which had turned with the fall. I thought of a scene I’d written long ago, when Evie looks out over a cliff and sees a city burning from very far away.
Despite the horror that she sees, she is unable to look away, transfixed by its beauty.
The path through the forest was a bit rougher than I remembered, and I got turned around more than once. It was only when I pushed aside some brush to make space for myself entering the clearing that I realized there was someone else there with me, already inside the circle. He was tall, too thin, with hair to his shoulders, and crooked glasses. For a minute I thought it was the silhouette from the attic, waiting for me, but the longer I looked at him the more I realized it was a real person, just another human being, not a ghost or a dream.
He looked startled when he saw me, standing up and brushing dirt from his faded jeans, bowing his head under the branches overhead. I dimly recognized him, I realized, from Upper Canada, though if so he’d changed a lot.
He looked sad, in a quiet way. Like he no longer expected much from anything. He gestured to my cast, to the bruises on my neck.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I said.
That was apparently enough of an introduction. He sat down against a fir and I sat down next to him. Gingerly, though, using his shoulder as a support.
“Sorry,” I said.
He shrugged.
“I thought I was the only one who knew about this place,” he said, after a while.
“That’s funny. Me, too,” I said.
“But I never thought I’d come back here.”
“You’re not the only one,” I said. Wincing. Or smiling. I was trying to do the latter, but it came out closer to the former.
He picked up a piece of rusty wire, twisted into a spiral, and held it up in front of him.
“What do you suppose this is? There’s a bunch of them over there.”
I shrugged. “I have no idea,” I said.
He played with it for a bit in his hands and eventually threw it away.
“Didn’t you go to UC?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “A long time ago.”
“When?”
“I graduated in 2006,” he said.
“Really? Me, too!”
His eyes narrowed. “Why don’t I know you?”
“Did you know everyone?”
“No,” he said. “Definitely not.”
It wasn’t a big school, but it was big enough.
It was weird sitting with someone else in the place I’d always gone to be alone. There was a silence that kept descending, unheeded, but almost inherent to the place. It’s not like me to be so calm when I’m meeting someone for the first time.
“Hey,” I finally said, after I’d gotten a good look at him. “Are you sick or something?”
“What? Why would you ask that question?”
“Were you sick?”
“No. I was never sick.”
“You seem like you were sick.”
“I was never sick.”
“But you’re so thin now.” I didn’t remember him being anywhere near so thin, though I didn’t remember him well.
He didn’t say anything.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked. “I mean, assuming you left.”
“I left.”
“So what gives?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“What? You’re sick?”
“Do I look sick?”
He shrugged and looked me over. “Not really. Beat-up, maybe, but not sick.”
“I just came back from the war. Afghanistan.”
“Seriously?”
“No. Come on.” I knew I didn’t look like I’d been in any war.
“So — what happened? If it’s okay to ask.”
“It’s okay.”
“So …?”
“Traffic accident.”
“What? Really?”
“Kind of.”
“What happened?”
“Bicycle, car.” I mimed the car hitting my broken arm. I don’t know why I lied. It made more sense, I guess.
“Wow. Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes. Are you?”
“I’m not sick,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. Instead I raised my eyebrows and looked off into the forest.
He sighed.
“Okay. I was kind of sick.”
I turned to him, so fast that a muscle pinched in my back.
I winced. “Really?”
He looked me in the eyes and tapped his fingers slowly against his temple.
I rolled my eyes.
“Oh, jeez, are you kidding? Everyone has that.”
“Not like I did.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sarah. And yours is Kent, right?”
“That’s right. How did you know?”
I just shrugged.
We didn’t say anything for a long time afterward. A cloud passed overhead.
“Okay. I do remember you now,” he said.
“Really? From where?”
He thought for a minute. “I don’t know.”
* * *
When I got back home there was a voicemail waiting on my phone. It was Tom.
“Hey — are you okay? Listen, I’m sorry about the other day. I mean, I could tell that something was up and I should have gotten back to you sooner … I got distracted. I’m sorry. But I really don’t think it’s fair for you to be punishing me like this for not being able to help you, even if you’re hurting. Anyway … call me back.”
Now was the time to send him the photo of my cast:
As you can see, Im really hurtin, tom
Then I went upstairs and lay down in the bathroom’s empty bathtub, with all of my clothes on. My phone started ringing. It was Tom, of course.
“Jesus, what happened to you? Are you okay?”
“What the hell are you taking responsibility for?”
“I just thought —”
“What the hell! Tom! Punishing you? What are you even talking about?”
He tried to respond, but I got up and turned the water on, holding the phone in front of the roaring faucet.
“I can’t hear you,” I shouted. “I’m taking a bath! Well, talk to you later!”
I threw the phone across the room, where it split into two pieces.
“I didn’t mean to do that!” I shouted.
I turned the water off. All of my clothes were soaked.
“Now I’m all wet!”
Carl was standing just outside the room, one eye hidden behind the door frame.
“Who am I even talking to?” I asked. “Is it you?”
Carl didn’t say anything.
* * *
At least I’d had the presence of mind to keep my cast elevated and out of the water. The phone was wrecked.
I am really dumb, I thought.
I toweled off and went to bed. In a fit of regret the next morning, I spent about thirty minutes trying to piece my cell together by re-attaching the wires at the hinge and holding everything in place with tape. My greatest success was about two seconds of the Rogers logo circling together before lapsing into distortion, black screen, and an ear-piercing whine. I jumped and dropped the phone, and that was the end of that.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I went out again, back to the place in the forest where I’d met Kent, half hoping he would be there again. He wasn’t. So I sat in the centre of the firs, unable to completely relax, thinking that I might see him at any moment. I wasn’t sure what I had to say to him, but I had the feeling that I needed to say something, not to him in particular, but to anyone, and he seemed the most apt to listen.
But maybe I didn’t have to say anything. I had the idea I could write him a letter, seal it in a Ziploc bag, put the bag in a jar, and bury it with a flag sticking up out of the ground in the centre of the clearing. Once Kent opened it — and if he’d unearthed those binding spirals, it seemed likely that he would — he could write me a response, leaving it where he’d found my letter.
I went home and drafted the first of these letters.
* * *
Hey Kent. It’s Sarah. It was nice meeting you yesterday. So nice that I decided to write you a letter. Hopefully you find it! Isn’t it weird that we came from the same town but never met before? I feel like I know you, I don’t know why. Although I guess it’s obvious why. Two people who go to the same school, at the same time, live in the same town, probably within blocks of each other (of course I don’t actually know where you live), go to the same place to be alone, but never meet, until a chance encounter, eight years out of high school, in a town neither of them lives in anymore? That’s got to mean something, right? That’s the kind of coincidence they write novels about. I mean, maybe our friendship — am I getting ahead of myself? — could be really important, and if that were true then that importance might be reflected in the improbability of our beginning …
I don’t know. I folded the paper up as small as I could and jammed it in my pocket. I felt stupid for assuming so much about Kent, for thinking that anything I wrote could resonate on an emotional level with another person. As penance I cleaned out Carl’s litter box, while he stood off to the side and made sure I did an okay job.