"Heart of Hearts" by Bob Kopfensteiner
'Pronek was the only one looking into the "Pennsylvania 1760" room, so he was the only one to see a minikin figure, with long white hair, and an impish mini-grin, running across the miniature room. Pronek could hear the tapping, the barely audible, evanescent, echoes of the creature's tiny steps, which then disappeared into the garden.
Doubtless, a hallucination'
-Aleksandar Hemon, "Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls"
Doubtless, a hallucination'
-Aleksandar Hemon, "Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls"
Rachel’s feet touched the ground as she stepped out of her father’s station wagon. Standing beside the car, she shook the key ring, and the lone tape-marked key rattled in little circles before she snatched it up and clicked one of its buttons.
She started to walk the length of the parking lot. She passed a few cars, which were empty with steamy windows, their hoods dew stained in the thickly cool air. Tiny bits of gravel scraped against the pavement and stuck to the bottoms of Rachel’s shoes as she walked in a diagonal towards the front doors.
Inside, a woman behind a glass screen glanced up before leafing through the stack of papers her fingers were dividing. Rachel stood for a moment in the small lobby. To her right were the only chairs in the room, two of them, sitting close beside one another against the wall.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked, still leafing through her papers.
“I received a call this morning…” Rachel said. She pointed up with a half open hand before letting it drop back down.
“Name?” asked the woman.
“Rachel, McGowan,” she said.
“One moment.” The woman got up and walked out of her glass cubicle, down the hall, and out of sight.
Rachel turned away, leaning on the bit of desk that stuck out beyond the glass. A low table covered in magazines sat in front of the two chairs. On the seats of the chairs were marks. One of them had a sticky stain and the other was worn away, but from a distance they looked the same.
“Miss McGowan,” the woman said, back in her booth. “Come with me”.
Together they walked down the tiled hallway.
The woman reached for a door handle and let Rachel in first. The walls of the room were metal, and a metal stand and a metal table sat to one side. The woman walked over to the table with Rachel following close behind. The table had wheels.
The woman grabbed a corner of the white cloth that draped the table and asked, “Is this your father?”
This was, to be sure, Freddie McGowan. And deep down inside, tucked away in her heart of hearts, she knew.
When Rachel stepped outside, the early morning mist had yet to creep away. She walked in tiny zig zags across the parking lot to her car, ignoring the white sheets of fog that hung clipped to clotheslines in the sky.
This is not something a sane person should ignore.
With a flurry of loud, furious clicks, she had sealed herself in her car. Breathing deeply, she fumbled for something in her purse, which knocked against the wood paneling of the driver side door. Bits of this paneling had pulled away from the factory injected plastic that formed the interior, and some of them hung down in spirals like pulpy little worms.
Rachel started the car, pushing the knob for the air control so she could feel the car breathe. Looking out of the window, she could see the trees pass in and out of the rising mist like giant naked fingers wiggling away. She shuddered, gripping the purse straps that still choked her shoulder. The fingers stood in alternating lines, bony joints protruding at every angle. Through the still air they arched over her and that place somewhere behind, searching for what they didn’t have.
She drove then along the only road winding around through the woods. When she finished wiping her eyes, the road was leading her through town. She passed the rows of little shops with their little metal doors.
She really should have called her mother by now.
Rachel pulled into the first empty spot she saw. Some of the people walking along the sidewalk stopped to look, and one of them even took out his flip phone to take a picture. She hurried onto the sidewalk in front of the café and walked into the stream of people that had stopped to stare at the poor parker. They were taller than she was. And they were all around her.
She continued forward and pushed her way inside the café. Seeing no one near the empty metal podium—it was actually shiny wood—she hurried along the aisles stuffed with people and slid into the only empty booth along the wall.
She settled into the cushy plastic foam, which squished unpleasantly between her legs. She reached over and picked at the corner of the laminated menu with her thumbnail, waiting for something to happen.
I think we were both curious as to what this something was.
She turned around to look outside. The man with the flip phone camera was squatting behind her car with his camera out like an artist. When she turned back to her booth, she looked under her arm but could not find her purse.
Across from her, a large family, nearly sixteen in all, was squeezed uncomfortably into the U-shaped booth. Their plates all touched one another, a giant porcelain frown.
Over the sixteen-headed human wall, the waiting staff had momentarily gathered in front of the greasy kitchen doors. They nodded amongst themselves eagerly until finally a woman with braces (she had nodded with a smile) came over to Rachel’s table. Her feet were dripping something black and shiny, but they were only stilettos. She pulled out her little pad of paper with freckled fingers, which tapped nervously.
“Hi there, welcome to Fill’m Up, can I start you off with a beverage?” she asked, pen poised over paper.
“Water is fine,” Rachel said.
The woman, having already written this down the moment it left Rachel’s mouth, remained standing, staring. After a few moments the woman walked away and rejoined her comrades, who received her with a new burst of excitement.
Rachel continued to read the menu when the woman returned. She set the glass down on a giant white coaster, placing the straw parallel to the drink and the table edge.
Rachel had opened her mouth to speak when the woman said, “Are you Rachel McGowan?” She raised her eyebrows in asking to show she cared deeply.
This caused Rachel to direct her attention away from the menu. The woman smiled a metal smile.
“It is you, isn’t it? Gosh, I knew it must be. I’m so sorry about your father, you poor thing. I am going to get you some of our best cherry pie. It will set things right.” With that she turned and ran off.
Rachel found herself staring into the human wall. In turn, each head knocked into its neighbors as they turned to whisper to one another. Even with half their heads turned in secrecy, it did not stop the remaining eyeballs from scrutinizing every part of her.
What a freakish gaze.
A plate clattered to the table. Under the mound of white foam, bits of red pooled around a crusty bottom.
She looked up to see the woman leaning over her.
“Will that be all?” she asked, moving closer in a manner suggesting maternal instincts.
“I thought this was free?” Rachel asked, to which the woman mmhmph’d and walked off.
Rachel looked around the establishment. The table in front of her had four, bowl scraping soup suckers. With each dip of the spoon, the four bowls screamed in unison. Behind her, the crunching of bone and gristle was matched only by the seesaw cutting of overly cooked steak.
She picked up her fork and stuck it in the froth. She started to peel off the upper layer, amassing a pile of melting cream on one side of the plate. Beneath the white layer, she revealed a little center of red. Inside was a little mass, a wrinkled and tired globe.
What she was digging for, we cannot fathom.
Looking around, she quickly piled the whipped cream back on top over the hole before getting up to go.
As she stumbled out of the booth in the direction of the door, her waitress’s head snapped to attention. Their eyes met and Rachel walked faster. Eyebrows raised, the waitress kept pace, her eyes bobbing over the low wall of the booths in time to the clack of her too-tall stilettos. They came together in front of the door and Rachel ducked out of reach before the twisted-up face and pale empty arms could fold around her.
Outside, the man with the camera phone bumped into her and rudely asked who she thought she was. She continued walking, looking for her car. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her keys, but there was only one key and it had tape on it. She stuffed them back into her pocket and looked up to see a man holding a storefront door open for her.
This is not the kind of help we would seek.
Rachel matched his big welcoming smile and walked inside. On the walls around her were racks of shiny specs, whole panels of eyewear suited for the visually inept (her eyes worked just fine). The man behind her placed his hand on her shoulder and gestured towards one of the sections.
“We have a special on sunglasses today. If you’d like to try on a pair, let me know so I can help you,” he said, smiling as wide as he could with the facial capacity he had to work with. “It feels so good to help you.”
Rachel paused. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.
The man must have said no, because his eyebrows crawled close together and looked like a great white worm dancing on his head. He pushed the glasses up his nose and scrutinized her.
“Ok,” Rachel said. She pretended to walk towards the eyeglass display, but instead perused her way out the door.
Back on the sidewalk, she took a deep breath. Two women across the street peered inside the store “We Are Watches," both of them pointing at different things. Rachel looked over and saw her father’s car.
She began walking in that direction. She put her hand out as she walked and felt the brick and the glass and occasionally some metal. Up ahead, a new street crossed the one she had been walking along. She followed the storefront walls around the corner without letting go of them, which disappointed the people doing their best to window shop.
The new street terminated shortly after it began. The wall she was following made a loop and came back to begin again along the first street. There were no storefronts in the loop, and the wall was simply brick. Two off-colored bricks set at an odd length from one another gazed at her. The sidewalk she stood on gave way to grass and the space in front of her had been converted into a small park. Situated in the middle of the nook was a plastic bench. The bench welcomed her like an old friend, its arms open wide.
Let’s not get carried away.
She took a seat on the bench, slumping to fit the groove of the seatback. She reached into her pocket to look for her keys, but couldn’t find anything. At that moment, an elderly gentleman walked through her field of vision. He was wearing sac clothes, baggy and hand stitched with thick thread. On the side of his face that she could see, he had a large scar that split his head in two, running from the very top of his fuzzy scalp down below his eye and across his lips. He was walking along the sidewalk and whistling a strange tune, and for a moment it sounded as if it was accompanied by all the instruments expected of such a tune. And then he crossed the gap and disappeared behind the brick wall that would turn into storefront again had she been able to see it.
Rachel’s foot pressed the air below it in a steady pumping motion.
“Miss?”
Rachel looked up to see a man with a Hawaiian tee shirt and a purple stroller. His face was rapidly shrinking like a dough ball someone forgot to keep rolling. Behind him, a woman talked into her cell phone and nodded vigorously.
“Miss, do you think you could scooch over?” the man asked.
Rachel slid over, and the man took a seat. He rolled the stroller in front of him and began to push it back and forth with his feet.
“Thanks, I just needed to give my legs a break,” he said, rocking the stroller.
Rachel watched him as he continued rocking and rolling, twiddling his thumbs. The woman with him (they were both wearing rings) was still nodding, but it was her turn to listen, staring wide-eyed in rapt attention. The man waved at her, and pointed to the thing in the stroller, and the woman waved back at him with little fingers that told him he was cute.
Rachel shifted in her seat and the man took notice.
“This place is great, isn’t it?” he asked, leaning forward to assure her of his veracity.
Rachel ignored his question. “Do you know me?” she asked.
The man looked startled. “I certainly do not,” he said. He continued to stare, and Rachel got up to go.
Around the safety of the corner, Rachel walked towards the loud buzzing noise that quickly filled the air. A large bay door took over the wall, its bulging glass paneling pouring out as thin metal strips dissected their soft pulp. The same, off-colored brick pattern was here as well above the door, and so the door was a giant mouth now, a lolling concrete tongue waiting for someone to step on it. It was looking at her.
It most certainly was not looking in this direction. That’s for sure.
Inside, men in frayed jumpsuits hopped from one car to the next (there were only two), and a man with a large, random orbital sander was grinding away at the metal on one of the cars. He spit something out as black as the oil on his pants, and the residue of it flooded his lips like an over-embalmed corpse. Noticing her stare, one of the mechanics jumped off the upraised vehicle he was working on. The car had no windshield and the bumper was gone.
“Hey,” he said, smiling the small smile that wants to be a big smile. “Can I help you with something?” He was still holding a hammer, or a screwdriver, and he polished it on the lapel of his shirt until the metal gleamed. He paused, standing a few feet from the massive door hanging above them both.
“Are you okay?” he asked, bending forward at just the right angle.
One of the cars behind him roared to life, and a whiny clinking began that sounded like death.
It must be that engine belt.
“Hey, Frank, needs a new engine belt!” the man inside yelled, looking at the mechanic between the car and Rachel. Frank turned around, but before going looked at Rachel and said shyly, “We just fixed the seatbelts.” He waved goodbye.
The whine of the car sounded louder, and whatever Frank said after he waved was lost in the screaming metal that rattled the bubbles of glass above and sent Rachel running out of sight.
We both knew it was too soon.
The next street sign was unfamiliar, and Rachel looked back and forth for the street where she had first parked and left her father’s car. Out of one of the many shops that surrounded her like a cubicle, the old man (elderly gentleman) stepped out and began walking away from her. He was dressed differently, with a sweater vest and a pair of chinos. A security guard stepped out shortly after he left, watching the man with intense interest. The elderly man didn’t look back, but after putting enough distance between him and the burly guard, jumped and hooted.
She started to walk in the direction of the man, making her way past the guard who remained loyal to his post. She stopped near a long row of TV’s. One of the screens flashed news updates, a thin red band snaking under a blank white screen. It read “Dow down three points @ 10am. Town hall bake sale @ noon. Local hero saves life, vanishes @ 2pm. Donations for failing middle school @ 5pm…”
Rachel found herself at a payphone wall. She looked around for the man, and stumped, put her hands in her pockets. She felt her keys in one of the pockets, and remembered her car. She turned and walked over to one of the phones. She picked it up and put to her ear, listening to the dial tone.
“Hello?” a voice said on the other line.
“Mom?” Rachel asked.
“Hi dear,” she said.
“I’ve been meaning to call you,” she said.
“Oh, we both know that, dear.”
“I want to come home but I can’t find my car,” she said.
“Then you can’t come home just yet, but I’ll be here, dear.”
“But I need to,” she said, sniffling.
“You need to find your car first though, silly. And then we can talk about what’s been going on. We’ll make it alright.”
“This is a hard day,” she said.
“I know, I know. I feel the same way. But once you come back, everything will be better, I promise. Now get going.”
“Mom, it’s not that easy,” she said.
“I love you very much.”
“I love you too, Mom,” she said.
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
Rachel listened as the line on the other end cut out. She still held the phone to her cheek, not wanting to move. Some of the tears running down her face slid into the small holes of the receiver and disappeared. She wiped the rest away with her hand, but couldn’t keep herself from tasting the salt.
A man on a nearby bench was watching her. She smeared more of the tears across her face. He frowned, and dug into the pockets of his jacket, then his jeans. Finally he walked over to her. She looked up as he stuck his hand out.
“Here, take this," he said. "Good luck to you."
He held out a few quarters for her to take.
“I don’t need those, I already made my call, thank you though."
He frowned and apologized, dropping his head to signal his extreme embarrassment.
She attempted a smile as he slowly walked away. Rachel realized that she, too, had overstayed her welcome, and hung up the phone.
She began to walk away from the payphones when she saw the elderly man again. This time he was wearing a powder blue suit coat and a copper patterned tie. His salmon pink pants had a hole in the knee, and the fraying threads stuck out like an alien growth. He walked with a bit of a limp, and shuffled forward with one leg dragging slightly behind the other.
He ignored the sidewalk, and made his way across the road, which luckily had very little traffic. Before he was too far away, Rachel saw that the scar across his face was pink and fresh, as if his head had only recently been sewn back together after splitting like a melon.
She began to follow him.
It seems Rachel thinks this man is important.
Rachel crossed the street after him, careful to avoid stepping into one of the many large potholes that covered the asphalt like plague. Hardly anyone paid them any attention.
The old man walked out of town, away from the storefronts, and followed the sidewalk until it turned to grass and kept walking when the grass turned to dirt. He still followed the road, though, walking beside it as if without it, he would be lost.
The few people he passed looked on politely at his fine clothing choices, but before long he left them and the road behind. His new path dipped down a shallow embankment, leading into the forest and out of sight of the small town.
Rachel remained a good distance behind him. At first out of accident, she began walking in his footsteps. His feet were larger than hers, and it was easy to place herself within them. The only difficulty was the dragging foot, and in order to follow it in it, she would have had to adopt a similar hitch. As a consequence, the footprints were tri-legged. The left foot was a double-print, with a smaller, nearly identical shape nestled within a much larger version of itself. The right foot was split. One part was a dragging, hindering thing, while her neat cross-cross print always stamped into the mud slightly above it.
The old man made his way through the woods and came to a clearing. Resting against one of the larger trees was a lean-to, made from scraps of cardboard and tree limbs bound together with swatches of fabric. As soon as he was close to the door he whipped around.
Rachel ducked behind a tree.
“Who’s there?” he shouted. “I know someone’s there. I told you to stay away and I’m not sayin’ again!”
She squeezed the tree tight and some of the bark stuck to her hands before she stepped out into the clearing.
The old man put his hand over his eyes as if saluting her.
“Who is that? Come on down here.”
Rachel approached, looking around through the trees as she walked. Nothing else moved in the woods except for the slow falling and swirling of the leaves in the autumn air.
As she came closer, the man put his hand down and immediately wrung his hands out of an intense anxiety.
Rachel tried to catch his eye but he only held hers for a moment, instead looking down at his gummy shoes.
“I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “I thought you were someone else. I wouldn’t do ya any harm, honest.”
Standing face to face, the man was old, but different. A thin crooked nose separated the small, free-wheeling marble eyes resting close together at the top of his head. His brow was furrowed, but he didn’t squint or frown at her. The lines there seemed more like a carving, for his skin didn’t move when he spoke. A thin layer of white stubble blanketed his head, falling down around his ears and over the valley of his entire face, at last settling on his mound of a chin. The scar was gone.
He scratched his head, and then as if remembering he had a hand, held his out in a greeting of equals. Rachel shook it, and his hand scraped hers as he pulled away.
“Please,” he said, “step inside.” He made a grand sweep with his arm, which pointed towards the wall leaning against a tree.
“Oh, I think I’m just gonna go,” Rachel said, starting to turn.
“Insist,” he said, sweeping his arm all over again.
Then she walked out of his footprints and under his roof.
There was a little chair inside, and Rachel sat down. Around her in a ring were various things lying in the mud. A radio with a thick brown cord leading nowhere; a torn up license plate, curling at the edges; a large cardboard box of clothes, paper and ceramic plates, a few books with their covers faded away to a tan blank. A large screwdriver was stuck into the tree.
She looked to the man, who stood a distance away from her wringing the end of his sky blue jacket. He must have sensed her stare, because he moved closer, his shoe squelching as it carved through the mud.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” he said, his eyes shooting from her to the mud to lend a stronger emphasis to his statement.
She sat very still. His eyes kept jumping, down then up, down then up, to her and his feet, to her and the ground, to her and his junk pile.
She raised her arm to point when the man threw himself on his knees, arms out as if to embrace her.
“Please,” he said, “I just found it, I swear!” He waved his arms frantically to accentuate his point.
He started twisting his hips in little circles, using his already upright elbows to give him the momentum he needed to move forward. By the time he got close his pink pant legs were covered in mud and leaves. He reached down over his radio and grabbed the license plate.
Still gibbering, he grunted and tugged at the metal with both hands, slowly bending the hunk back into a flatter shape. With a final heave the peripheral eyelets were stored to the same plane as the rest of the plate.
“Here,” he said, “take it.” He held it out to her with wobbly hands.
She accepted.
“I took it after, after I found you. I promise,” he said, keeping his arms out wide in the way all honest men do. “I didn’t think you’d come looking for it.”
The plate was sharp, the way she imagined all metal to be sharp.
“I didn’t come here for the license plate,” she said.
His arms dropped to his sides and he said nothing. He stood and hunched himself before her, and she looked down on him from her chair.
“Did you want to thank me, like the others?” he asked at last.
She felt for her keys, but found only one, her father’s, and gripped it until her red palm ached.
“No, I came for something else.”
The man looked at her but didn’t. He looked past her, and as she turned her head she saw through a hole so small she wasn’t sure if it was a window or an accident.
The man started walking in his way, and limped around his home to where he had been looking. His shoulders were sagging, but the padding in the ill-fitting suit gave him two sets of shoulders, and from an angle they become one shoulder and he became a hunchback.
She got up to follow him. She walked with him a ways before he stopped, suddenly, and stood grimly to the side.
Next to him was another large tree, larger than the one they had left. Its great branches reached high, bent at unexpected angles. Their leaves had fallen away to reveal the skeleton that had always existed behind them. The branches were a testament to its power, which claimed the sky as wholly as its roots claimed the earth as they rippled in and out of the forest floor. The bark had been stripped away in big panels, the smooth wooden flesh naked to their eyes.
The old man was looking from the tree to her, and so she stepped forward.
Small holes had been punched into the tree with something sharp. Protruding from these holes were bits of scrap metal, twisted into shiny hooks, and from them hung rings. Platinum blue topaz, plastic zirconium, silver diamond, and all manner of gold bands and glistening stones were looped through metal wire and bits of wood. They glittered under the fragments of the midday sun that had broken through the white shroud above.
The man, wordlessly, walked to the tree. He picked one of the gold metal bands hanging from the tip of a wooden dowel. He presented this to Rachel.
She plucked it from his hand, fumbling with it for a moment in her palm. She slipped it over her ring finger, but it wobbled back off into her palm.
“Thank you,” she said, and he made a shaky little bow.
As she walked back up the slope, she made sure to put the ring in her pocket. The sun had broken through by the time she reached town. Large groups of people were walking down the street, carrying wrapped dishes of gelatin cutouts and plates stacked with chocolate chip cookies. She walked with them for a time, but eventually cut across a more deserted street.
When she found the shop, the mechanics were still monkeying with the two cars. Frank caught her eye and began walking closer. As he waved in greeting, she pushed the scrap of license plate into his hands.
“What is-” he started, looking at the sheared metal.
He glanced at her. “We were gonna put a new one on there for ya," he said.
She looked past him, at the bumper-less car the men were fiddling with. One of them took a bite from his apple.
“Check it out,” he said between chews, sliding into the car. He turned the sound system up, and a slow hum drifted out of the open door.
“Toldya it’d work, man,” he said.
Rachel left Frank holding the missing piece of her car before he could say anything.
She walked back along the shops. Rounding a corner, she saw her father’s car, parked in front of the Fill’m Up Diner where she'd left it. As she made her way towards it, she saw more people moving in the crowd down the street. A man in a purple Hawaiian shirt pushed a stroller while his wife carried a tray of something in one hand and a phone in the other. Two women walked in sync wearing identical watches and matching legwarmers. The waitress from the diner had stepped outside to stare, and as Rachel passed by she flashed a big smile.
Before Rachel could unlock her car, a big yell sounded from the crowd. She saw that many of the people had stopped in the street, crowding around something of interest. Through the sea of faces she saw one with wild eyes, a flash of pink moving through the crowd. The people cheered him, offering a candied apple or a no-bake easy-made peanut butter cookie. He caught Rachel’s eye and gave a big wink and a wave before the crowd hoisted him up and continued on their march.
Rachel drove along the long winding road, through the trees that twisted overhead like a net.
She stepped out of her father’s station wagon, the slam of the door echoing across the nearly empty parking lot. A cool breeze rustled the dry leaves that had fallen on the pavement, and they skipped across its surface like stones across dark water. The white, cloud-filtered sunshine coated the stone building before her, the speckled surface glistening. She opened the glass paneled door and walked inside.
The rust colored lobby was empty. She took a few feeble steps and realized she had left mud prints on the cream colored carpeting. Behind the glass window of the receptionist’s desk was an empty chair.
Rachel approached regardless, leaning on the counter. A little electronic buzzer sat in front of her but she didn’t press it. Instead she removed her father’s wedding ring and set it on the counter. She poked at it, pushing it around with her finger.
The waiting area had a small wooden table covered in magazines and two chairs. They were positioned on either side of the table facing one another.
As Rachel waited, she looked down the long hall. She could see everything through the glass, even herself, and the more she looked the more she saw herself standing there in the hallway. When she looked back, she didn’t recognize herself. Her father was suddenly in front of her on the countertop, the white cover draped over his midriff. As she looked on, her reflection did too, and she picked up the ring and slid it back on his finger.
Her hand hovered over the buzzer, but she didn’t press it. And while she waited, we both wondered what she would do.
She started to walk the length of the parking lot. She passed a few cars, which were empty with steamy windows, their hoods dew stained in the thickly cool air. Tiny bits of gravel scraped against the pavement and stuck to the bottoms of Rachel’s shoes as she walked in a diagonal towards the front doors.
Inside, a woman behind a glass screen glanced up before leafing through the stack of papers her fingers were dividing. Rachel stood for a moment in the small lobby. To her right were the only chairs in the room, two of them, sitting close beside one another against the wall.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked, still leafing through her papers.
“I received a call this morning…” Rachel said. She pointed up with a half open hand before letting it drop back down.
“Name?” asked the woman.
“Rachel, McGowan,” she said.
“One moment.” The woman got up and walked out of her glass cubicle, down the hall, and out of sight.
Rachel turned away, leaning on the bit of desk that stuck out beyond the glass. A low table covered in magazines sat in front of the two chairs. On the seats of the chairs were marks. One of them had a sticky stain and the other was worn away, but from a distance they looked the same.
“Miss McGowan,” the woman said, back in her booth. “Come with me”.
Together they walked down the tiled hallway.
The woman reached for a door handle and let Rachel in first. The walls of the room were metal, and a metal stand and a metal table sat to one side. The woman walked over to the table with Rachel following close behind. The table had wheels.
The woman grabbed a corner of the white cloth that draped the table and asked, “Is this your father?”
This was, to be sure, Freddie McGowan. And deep down inside, tucked away in her heart of hearts, she knew.
When Rachel stepped outside, the early morning mist had yet to creep away. She walked in tiny zig zags across the parking lot to her car, ignoring the white sheets of fog that hung clipped to clotheslines in the sky.
This is not something a sane person should ignore.
With a flurry of loud, furious clicks, she had sealed herself in her car. Breathing deeply, she fumbled for something in her purse, which knocked against the wood paneling of the driver side door. Bits of this paneling had pulled away from the factory injected plastic that formed the interior, and some of them hung down in spirals like pulpy little worms.
Rachel started the car, pushing the knob for the air control so she could feel the car breathe. Looking out of the window, she could see the trees pass in and out of the rising mist like giant naked fingers wiggling away. She shuddered, gripping the purse straps that still choked her shoulder. The fingers stood in alternating lines, bony joints protruding at every angle. Through the still air they arched over her and that place somewhere behind, searching for what they didn’t have.
She drove then along the only road winding around through the woods. When she finished wiping her eyes, the road was leading her through town. She passed the rows of little shops with their little metal doors.
She really should have called her mother by now.
Rachel pulled into the first empty spot she saw. Some of the people walking along the sidewalk stopped to look, and one of them even took out his flip phone to take a picture. She hurried onto the sidewalk in front of the café and walked into the stream of people that had stopped to stare at the poor parker. They were taller than she was. And they were all around her.
She continued forward and pushed her way inside the café. Seeing no one near the empty metal podium—it was actually shiny wood—she hurried along the aisles stuffed with people and slid into the only empty booth along the wall.
She settled into the cushy plastic foam, which squished unpleasantly between her legs. She reached over and picked at the corner of the laminated menu with her thumbnail, waiting for something to happen.
I think we were both curious as to what this something was.
She turned around to look outside. The man with the flip phone camera was squatting behind her car with his camera out like an artist. When she turned back to her booth, she looked under her arm but could not find her purse.
Across from her, a large family, nearly sixteen in all, was squeezed uncomfortably into the U-shaped booth. Their plates all touched one another, a giant porcelain frown.
Over the sixteen-headed human wall, the waiting staff had momentarily gathered in front of the greasy kitchen doors. They nodded amongst themselves eagerly until finally a woman with braces (she had nodded with a smile) came over to Rachel’s table. Her feet were dripping something black and shiny, but they were only stilettos. She pulled out her little pad of paper with freckled fingers, which tapped nervously.
“Hi there, welcome to Fill’m Up, can I start you off with a beverage?” she asked, pen poised over paper.
“Water is fine,” Rachel said.
The woman, having already written this down the moment it left Rachel’s mouth, remained standing, staring. After a few moments the woman walked away and rejoined her comrades, who received her with a new burst of excitement.
Rachel continued to read the menu when the woman returned. She set the glass down on a giant white coaster, placing the straw parallel to the drink and the table edge.
Rachel had opened her mouth to speak when the woman said, “Are you Rachel McGowan?” She raised her eyebrows in asking to show she cared deeply.
This caused Rachel to direct her attention away from the menu. The woman smiled a metal smile.
“It is you, isn’t it? Gosh, I knew it must be. I’m so sorry about your father, you poor thing. I am going to get you some of our best cherry pie. It will set things right.” With that she turned and ran off.
Rachel found herself staring into the human wall. In turn, each head knocked into its neighbors as they turned to whisper to one another. Even with half their heads turned in secrecy, it did not stop the remaining eyeballs from scrutinizing every part of her.
What a freakish gaze.
A plate clattered to the table. Under the mound of white foam, bits of red pooled around a crusty bottom.
She looked up to see the woman leaning over her.
“Will that be all?” she asked, moving closer in a manner suggesting maternal instincts.
“I thought this was free?” Rachel asked, to which the woman mmhmph’d and walked off.
Rachel looked around the establishment. The table in front of her had four, bowl scraping soup suckers. With each dip of the spoon, the four bowls screamed in unison. Behind her, the crunching of bone and gristle was matched only by the seesaw cutting of overly cooked steak.
She picked up her fork and stuck it in the froth. She started to peel off the upper layer, amassing a pile of melting cream on one side of the plate. Beneath the white layer, she revealed a little center of red. Inside was a little mass, a wrinkled and tired globe.
What she was digging for, we cannot fathom.
Looking around, she quickly piled the whipped cream back on top over the hole before getting up to go.
As she stumbled out of the booth in the direction of the door, her waitress’s head snapped to attention. Their eyes met and Rachel walked faster. Eyebrows raised, the waitress kept pace, her eyes bobbing over the low wall of the booths in time to the clack of her too-tall stilettos. They came together in front of the door and Rachel ducked out of reach before the twisted-up face and pale empty arms could fold around her.
Outside, the man with the camera phone bumped into her and rudely asked who she thought she was. She continued walking, looking for her car. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her keys, but there was only one key and it had tape on it. She stuffed them back into her pocket and looked up to see a man holding a storefront door open for her.
This is not the kind of help we would seek.
Rachel matched his big welcoming smile and walked inside. On the walls around her were racks of shiny specs, whole panels of eyewear suited for the visually inept (her eyes worked just fine). The man behind her placed his hand on her shoulder and gestured towards one of the sections.
“We have a special on sunglasses today. If you’d like to try on a pair, let me know so I can help you,” he said, smiling as wide as he could with the facial capacity he had to work with. “It feels so good to help you.”
Rachel paused. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.
The man must have said no, because his eyebrows crawled close together and looked like a great white worm dancing on his head. He pushed the glasses up his nose and scrutinized her.
“Ok,” Rachel said. She pretended to walk towards the eyeglass display, but instead perused her way out the door.
Back on the sidewalk, she took a deep breath. Two women across the street peered inside the store “We Are Watches," both of them pointing at different things. Rachel looked over and saw her father’s car.
She began walking in that direction. She put her hand out as she walked and felt the brick and the glass and occasionally some metal. Up ahead, a new street crossed the one she had been walking along. She followed the storefront walls around the corner without letting go of them, which disappointed the people doing their best to window shop.
The new street terminated shortly after it began. The wall she was following made a loop and came back to begin again along the first street. There were no storefronts in the loop, and the wall was simply brick. Two off-colored bricks set at an odd length from one another gazed at her. The sidewalk she stood on gave way to grass and the space in front of her had been converted into a small park. Situated in the middle of the nook was a plastic bench. The bench welcomed her like an old friend, its arms open wide.
Let’s not get carried away.
She took a seat on the bench, slumping to fit the groove of the seatback. She reached into her pocket to look for her keys, but couldn’t find anything. At that moment, an elderly gentleman walked through her field of vision. He was wearing sac clothes, baggy and hand stitched with thick thread. On the side of his face that she could see, he had a large scar that split his head in two, running from the very top of his fuzzy scalp down below his eye and across his lips. He was walking along the sidewalk and whistling a strange tune, and for a moment it sounded as if it was accompanied by all the instruments expected of such a tune. And then he crossed the gap and disappeared behind the brick wall that would turn into storefront again had she been able to see it.
Rachel’s foot pressed the air below it in a steady pumping motion.
“Miss?”
Rachel looked up to see a man with a Hawaiian tee shirt and a purple stroller. His face was rapidly shrinking like a dough ball someone forgot to keep rolling. Behind him, a woman talked into her cell phone and nodded vigorously.
“Miss, do you think you could scooch over?” the man asked.
Rachel slid over, and the man took a seat. He rolled the stroller in front of him and began to push it back and forth with his feet.
“Thanks, I just needed to give my legs a break,” he said, rocking the stroller.
Rachel watched him as he continued rocking and rolling, twiddling his thumbs. The woman with him (they were both wearing rings) was still nodding, but it was her turn to listen, staring wide-eyed in rapt attention. The man waved at her, and pointed to the thing in the stroller, and the woman waved back at him with little fingers that told him he was cute.
Rachel shifted in her seat and the man took notice.
“This place is great, isn’t it?” he asked, leaning forward to assure her of his veracity.
Rachel ignored his question. “Do you know me?” she asked.
The man looked startled. “I certainly do not,” he said. He continued to stare, and Rachel got up to go.
Around the safety of the corner, Rachel walked towards the loud buzzing noise that quickly filled the air. A large bay door took over the wall, its bulging glass paneling pouring out as thin metal strips dissected their soft pulp. The same, off-colored brick pattern was here as well above the door, and so the door was a giant mouth now, a lolling concrete tongue waiting for someone to step on it. It was looking at her.
It most certainly was not looking in this direction. That’s for sure.
Inside, men in frayed jumpsuits hopped from one car to the next (there were only two), and a man with a large, random orbital sander was grinding away at the metal on one of the cars. He spit something out as black as the oil on his pants, and the residue of it flooded his lips like an over-embalmed corpse. Noticing her stare, one of the mechanics jumped off the upraised vehicle he was working on. The car had no windshield and the bumper was gone.
“Hey,” he said, smiling the small smile that wants to be a big smile. “Can I help you with something?” He was still holding a hammer, or a screwdriver, and he polished it on the lapel of his shirt until the metal gleamed. He paused, standing a few feet from the massive door hanging above them both.
“Are you okay?” he asked, bending forward at just the right angle.
One of the cars behind him roared to life, and a whiny clinking began that sounded like death.
It must be that engine belt.
“Hey, Frank, needs a new engine belt!” the man inside yelled, looking at the mechanic between the car and Rachel. Frank turned around, but before going looked at Rachel and said shyly, “We just fixed the seatbelts.” He waved goodbye.
The whine of the car sounded louder, and whatever Frank said after he waved was lost in the screaming metal that rattled the bubbles of glass above and sent Rachel running out of sight.
We both knew it was too soon.
The next street sign was unfamiliar, and Rachel looked back and forth for the street where she had first parked and left her father’s car. Out of one of the many shops that surrounded her like a cubicle, the old man (elderly gentleman) stepped out and began walking away from her. He was dressed differently, with a sweater vest and a pair of chinos. A security guard stepped out shortly after he left, watching the man with intense interest. The elderly man didn’t look back, but after putting enough distance between him and the burly guard, jumped and hooted.
She started to walk in the direction of the man, making her way past the guard who remained loyal to his post. She stopped near a long row of TV’s. One of the screens flashed news updates, a thin red band snaking under a blank white screen. It read “Dow down three points @ 10am. Town hall bake sale @ noon. Local hero saves life, vanishes @ 2pm. Donations for failing middle school @ 5pm…”
Rachel found herself at a payphone wall. She looked around for the man, and stumped, put her hands in her pockets. She felt her keys in one of the pockets, and remembered her car. She turned and walked over to one of the phones. She picked it up and put to her ear, listening to the dial tone.
“Hello?” a voice said on the other line.
“Mom?” Rachel asked.
“Hi dear,” she said.
“I’ve been meaning to call you,” she said.
“Oh, we both know that, dear.”
“I want to come home but I can’t find my car,” she said.
“Then you can’t come home just yet, but I’ll be here, dear.”
“But I need to,” she said, sniffling.
“You need to find your car first though, silly. And then we can talk about what’s been going on. We’ll make it alright.”
“This is a hard day,” she said.
“I know, I know. I feel the same way. But once you come back, everything will be better, I promise. Now get going.”
“Mom, it’s not that easy,” she said.
“I love you very much.”
“I love you too, Mom,” she said.
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
Rachel listened as the line on the other end cut out. She still held the phone to her cheek, not wanting to move. Some of the tears running down her face slid into the small holes of the receiver and disappeared. She wiped the rest away with her hand, but couldn’t keep herself from tasting the salt.
A man on a nearby bench was watching her. She smeared more of the tears across her face. He frowned, and dug into the pockets of his jacket, then his jeans. Finally he walked over to her. She looked up as he stuck his hand out.
“Here, take this," he said. "Good luck to you."
He held out a few quarters for her to take.
“I don’t need those, I already made my call, thank you though."
He frowned and apologized, dropping his head to signal his extreme embarrassment.
She attempted a smile as he slowly walked away. Rachel realized that she, too, had overstayed her welcome, and hung up the phone.
She began to walk away from the payphones when she saw the elderly man again. This time he was wearing a powder blue suit coat and a copper patterned tie. His salmon pink pants had a hole in the knee, and the fraying threads stuck out like an alien growth. He walked with a bit of a limp, and shuffled forward with one leg dragging slightly behind the other.
He ignored the sidewalk, and made his way across the road, which luckily had very little traffic. Before he was too far away, Rachel saw that the scar across his face was pink and fresh, as if his head had only recently been sewn back together after splitting like a melon.
She began to follow him.
It seems Rachel thinks this man is important.
Rachel crossed the street after him, careful to avoid stepping into one of the many large potholes that covered the asphalt like plague. Hardly anyone paid them any attention.
The old man walked out of town, away from the storefronts, and followed the sidewalk until it turned to grass and kept walking when the grass turned to dirt. He still followed the road, though, walking beside it as if without it, he would be lost.
The few people he passed looked on politely at his fine clothing choices, but before long he left them and the road behind. His new path dipped down a shallow embankment, leading into the forest and out of sight of the small town.
Rachel remained a good distance behind him. At first out of accident, she began walking in his footsteps. His feet were larger than hers, and it was easy to place herself within them. The only difficulty was the dragging foot, and in order to follow it in it, she would have had to adopt a similar hitch. As a consequence, the footprints were tri-legged. The left foot was a double-print, with a smaller, nearly identical shape nestled within a much larger version of itself. The right foot was split. One part was a dragging, hindering thing, while her neat cross-cross print always stamped into the mud slightly above it.
The old man made his way through the woods and came to a clearing. Resting against one of the larger trees was a lean-to, made from scraps of cardboard and tree limbs bound together with swatches of fabric. As soon as he was close to the door he whipped around.
Rachel ducked behind a tree.
“Who’s there?” he shouted. “I know someone’s there. I told you to stay away and I’m not sayin’ again!”
She squeezed the tree tight and some of the bark stuck to her hands before she stepped out into the clearing.
The old man put his hand over his eyes as if saluting her.
“Who is that? Come on down here.”
Rachel approached, looking around through the trees as she walked. Nothing else moved in the woods except for the slow falling and swirling of the leaves in the autumn air.
As she came closer, the man put his hand down and immediately wrung his hands out of an intense anxiety.
Rachel tried to catch his eye but he only held hers for a moment, instead looking down at his gummy shoes.
“I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “I thought you were someone else. I wouldn’t do ya any harm, honest.”
Standing face to face, the man was old, but different. A thin crooked nose separated the small, free-wheeling marble eyes resting close together at the top of his head. His brow was furrowed, but he didn’t squint or frown at her. The lines there seemed more like a carving, for his skin didn’t move when he spoke. A thin layer of white stubble blanketed his head, falling down around his ears and over the valley of his entire face, at last settling on his mound of a chin. The scar was gone.
He scratched his head, and then as if remembering he had a hand, held his out in a greeting of equals. Rachel shook it, and his hand scraped hers as he pulled away.
“Please,” he said, “step inside.” He made a grand sweep with his arm, which pointed towards the wall leaning against a tree.
“Oh, I think I’m just gonna go,” Rachel said, starting to turn.
“Insist,” he said, sweeping his arm all over again.
Then she walked out of his footprints and under his roof.
There was a little chair inside, and Rachel sat down. Around her in a ring were various things lying in the mud. A radio with a thick brown cord leading nowhere; a torn up license plate, curling at the edges; a large cardboard box of clothes, paper and ceramic plates, a few books with their covers faded away to a tan blank. A large screwdriver was stuck into the tree.
She looked to the man, who stood a distance away from her wringing the end of his sky blue jacket. He must have sensed her stare, because he moved closer, his shoe squelching as it carved through the mud.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” he said, his eyes shooting from her to the mud to lend a stronger emphasis to his statement.
She sat very still. His eyes kept jumping, down then up, down then up, to her and his feet, to her and the ground, to her and his junk pile.
She raised her arm to point when the man threw himself on his knees, arms out as if to embrace her.
“Please,” he said, “I just found it, I swear!” He waved his arms frantically to accentuate his point.
He started twisting his hips in little circles, using his already upright elbows to give him the momentum he needed to move forward. By the time he got close his pink pant legs were covered in mud and leaves. He reached down over his radio and grabbed the license plate.
Still gibbering, he grunted and tugged at the metal with both hands, slowly bending the hunk back into a flatter shape. With a final heave the peripheral eyelets were stored to the same plane as the rest of the plate.
“Here,” he said, “take it.” He held it out to her with wobbly hands.
She accepted.
“I took it after, after I found you. I promise,” he said, keeping his arms out wide in the way all honest men do. “I didn’t think you’d come looking for it.”
The plate was sharp, the way she imagined all metal to be sharp.
“I didn’t come here for the license plate,” she said.
His arms dropped to his sides and he said nothing. He stood and hunched himself before her, and she looked down on him from her chair.
“Did you want to thank me, like the others?” he asked at last.
She felt for her keys, but found only one, her father’s, and gripped it until her red palm ached.
“No, I came for something else.”
The man looked at her but didn’t. He looked past her, and as she turned her head she saw through a hole so small she wasn’t sure if it was a window or an accident.
The man started walking in his way, and limped around his home to where he had been looking. His shoulders were sagging, but the padding in the ill-fitting suit gave him two sets of shoulders, and from an angle they become one shoulder and he became a hunchback.
She got up to follow him. She walked with him a ways before he stopped, suddenly, and stood grimly to the side.
Next to him was another large tree, larger than the one they had left. Its great branches reached high, bent at unexpected angles. Their leaves had fallen away to reveal the skeleton that had always existed behind them. The branches were a testament to its power, which claimed the sky as wholly as its roots claimed the earth as they rippled in and out of the forest floor. The bark had been stripped away in big panels, the smooth wooden flesh naked to their eyes.
The old man was looking from the tree to her, and so she stepped forward.
Small holes had been punched into the tree with something sharp. Protruding from these holes were bits of scrap metal, twisted into shiny hooks, and from them hung rings. Platinum blue topaz, plastic zirconium, silver diamond, and all manner of gold bands and glistening stones were looped through metal wire and bits of wood. They glittered under the fragments of the midday sun that had broken through the white shroud above.
The man, wordlessly, walked to the tree. He picked one of the gold metal bands hanging from the tip of a wooden dowel. He presented this to Rachel.
She plucked it from his hand, fumbling with it for a moment in her palm. She slipped it over her ring finger, but it wobbled back off into her palm.
“Thank you,” she said, and he made a shaky little bow.
As she walked back up the slope, she made sure to put the ring in her pocket. The sun had broken through by the time she reached town. Large groups of people were walking down the street, carrying wrapped dishes of gelatin cutouts and plates stacked with chocolate chip cookies. She walked with them for a time, but eventually cut across a more deserted street.
When she found the shop, the mechanics were still monkeying with the two cars. Frank caught her eye and began walking closer. As he waved in greeting, she pushed the scrap of license plate into his hands.
“What is-” he started, looking at the sheared metal.
He glanced at her. “We were gonna put a new one on there for ya," he said.
She looked past him, at the bumper-less car the men were fiddling with. One of them took a bite from his apple.
“Check it out,” he said between chews, sliding into the car. He turned the sound system up, and a slow hum drifted out of the open door.
“Toldya it’d work, man,” he said.
Rachel left Frank holding the missing piece of her car before he could say anything.
She walked back along the shops. Rounding a corner, she saw her father’s car, parked in front of the Fill’m Up Diner where she'd left it. As she made her way towards it, she saw more people moving in the crowd down the street. A man in a purple Hawaiian shirt pushed a stroller while his wife carried a tray of something in one hand and a phone in the other. Two women walked in sync wearing identical watches and matching legwarmers. The waitress from the diner had stepped outside to stare, and as Rachel passed by she flashed a big smile.
Before Rachel could unlock her car, a big yell sounded from the crowd. She saw that many of the people had stopped in the street, crowding around something of interest. Through the sea of faces she saw one with wild eyes, a flash of pink moving through the crowd. The people cheered him, offering a candied apple or a no-bake easy-made peanut butter cookie. He caught Rachel’s eye and gave a big wink and a wave before the crowd hoisted him up and continued on their march.
Rachel drove along the long winding road, through the trees that twisted overhead like a net.
She stepped out of her father’s station wagon, the slam of the door echoing across the nearly empty parking lot. A cool breeze rustled the dry leaves that had fallen on the pavement, and they skipped across its surface like stones across dark water. The white, cloud-filtered sunshine coated the stone building before her, the speckled surface glistening. She opened the glass paneled door and walked inside.
The rust colored lobby was empty. She took a few feeble steps and realized she had left mud prints on the cream colored carpeting. Behind the glass window of the receptionist’s desk was an empty chair.
Rachel approached regardless, leaning on the counter. A little electronic buzzer sat in front of her but she didn’t press it. Instead she removed her father’s wedding ring and set it on the counter. She poked at it, pushing it around with her finger.
The waiting area had a small wooden table covered in magazines and two chairs. They were positioned on either side of the table facing one another.
As Rachel waited, she looked down the long hall. She could see everything through the glass, even herself, and the more she looked the more she saw herself standing there in the hallway. When she looked back, she didn’t recognize herself. Her father was suddenly in front of her on the countertop, the white cover draped over his midriff. As she looked on, her reflection did too, and she picked up the ring and slid it back on his finger.
Her hand hovered over the buzzer, but she didn’t press it. And while she waited, we both wondered what she would do.