I was running through the woods at top speed, my hiking stick held in both hands as if it were a machine gun, my feet making soft thuds on the moist dirt of the deer path I was following. Overhead, white clouds hung in the azure sky like Christmas ornaments, the sun the star at the top of the tree. The trees blurred by as I juked and weaved around them and popped over fallen branches and small gatherings of dry leaves. I was making almost no sound except for my breathing, which was quick and measured. The Monster was out here, somewhere. I could sense him. Feel him.
I paused beside a fallen pine tree and held my breath. My pulse beat loudly in my head and the wind curling around the trees whispered white noise that blocked out everything but the most persistent bird calls. I took in a long, shallow breath and let it out slowly, trying to bring my adrenaline in check.
From where I was standing I could see the tunnels, two fifteen-foot high cement tubes shoved through a hill so the stream could run undisturbed beneath the railroad line laid above it. On some days, kids from the neighborhood would be hanging out in the pool the two tubes emptied into, a pool we called "the pocket," but today there was only me in the woods. And the Monster.
It was out here somewhere, although whether it knew I was hunting him, I didn't know. Sometimes he was smart, sometimes dumb, but he was always out here. I clenched my fingers around my hiking stick and began picking my way through the underbrush toward the tunnels, avoiding the path that led the easiest way. If he was out here, that's where he'd be waiting, behind some tree that was never wide enough to hide his body, but somehow always did. I jumped off a steep bank and down onto a catwalk of shale that bordered the stream from here all the way to the lake, a mile-and-a-half further downstream.
From where I stood on the bank, the water was thirty yards across and averaged four feet deep. Hovering on the bottom were suckers, bottom-feeding carp that rarely bit on a lure and were no fun to reel in. During spawning season, the salmon teemed in desperation and tried to jump the three feet from the pool into either of the tunnels so that they could continue their journey upstream. I rarely fished anymore.
The water gurgled and bubbled, swirling in small vortexes midstream and stagnating in pockets near the shore. Across from me, a blazing red cardinal jumped from a tree branch and turned hard right downstream, its wings beating furiously against the air. I stared up into the electric blue sky and listened. Then I heard it.
I snapped my head level and looked across the stream. Crunching small sheets of shale with each stride was the Monster, its arms swinging in huge arcs. It wasn't the least surprised to see me standing on the opposite shore fingering my walking stick. It growled slightly, as if in a hurry for some other appointment, and began running. I took off after it on my side, keeping it in my peripheral vision as I stared at the few feet of ground bordering my side of the stream. Every step had to be chosen within a millisecond of lifting my foot, a misstep would tumble me into the stream. The Monster's bank was the better of the two. The woods met the stream with a thin strip of dirt and clay that created the bank, only occasionally turning into the shale that
"C'mon, Nick, turn off the damn alarm," Sarah said into Nick's ear as she jostled his shoulder. "I can still sleep more."
Nick's eyes snapped open and he shook his head. The clock radio was pouring out NPR's Morning Edition into the bedroom. Nick sat up on the edge of the bed and hit the alarm's "off" button. Sarah rolled away from him and draped her right arm over her eyes. Nick's heart was pounding. He gulped in some air and stood up off the bed, visions of the dream stream overlapping with the chest of drawers. He looked at himself in the mirror and shook his head to clear his mind.
"Whoa," he said softly as he walked out of the bedroom toward the bathroom.
After steaming himself clean in the shower, he dressed and headed for the local police precinct to read through the reports. It was a typical morning with traffic dribbling away from the curbs and small, early-morning clusters of people standing near the bus stop signs, many insulated beneath personal-stereo headphones. Nick did not envy them, the people who made up the bulk of the work force, producing actual products or servicing people's needs, hidden from the world in cubicles or in plain view behind cash registers. These were the people who only saw the world as it was presented on television: oversexed and crime-ridden, or solved with humor within thirty minutes and four commercial breaks, ready for another no-consequences episode the next week. Real life, as Nick experienced it, was far more complex and banal. It was strung together by a fabric too few people saw and even fewer examined. Most were content to let one day fall into the next and speed along toward the next vacation or holiday.
Nick stopped in at the coffee shop on the corner and bought a large coffee with a shot of espresso in it. He pulled the copy of the Morning News from the rack and sat down at a table. He quickly scanned the pages, something he normally didn't do until after he'd filed any of his own stories, and sat back in the chair, letting the steam from the coffee rise up over his chin as he held it near his chest.
He didn't feel like going to work today; the night had seemed to pass without sleep, although he knew he certainly had closed his eyes and slipped from the conscious world. This was too many times in too few weeks for a dream he had left behind long ago. The Monster. His job was secure. His relationship solid. His friends certain. There seemed to be no reason for the return of the stalking creature. He took a sip of coffee and stared through the large picture window as a half-dozen people filed onto a public bus and waved their passes at the driver. It couldn't be turning 30 and not being married, only living with his girlfriend. That kind of angst wasn't the haunting kind, it was the stuff of humorous office conversations and late night beers with friends. It was the stuff of romantic comedies.
Even as a kid, though, the Monster had never paid so many visits within such a short period of time. The dreams always stretched out over months and years. It was only the recollection of their similarity that made them worthwhile. It was only the fact that they had been consistent throughout early life that he even bothered to remember them. But why a monster that never caught him? Why a monster he sought out in his dreams? Why a monster he could only ever refer to as The Monster, as if it were the universal incarnation of what monsters were?
He took a sip of coffee and lolled his head against the chair back. There was obviously something to these bad dreams. Something working its way through subroutines in his subconscious, waiting to work its way to the main area of his brain where he could laugh at the simplicity of the problem. Maybe a diamond ring would solve it. He finished his coffee and headed for the precinct house.
Behind the desk, Officer Claypool was talking steadily into the phone, his face loose with the look of exasperation. He paused for a second and nodded silently at what the other person was saying and rolled his eyes. Nick gave him a small wave good-morning and pulled the clipboard from the wall, sat down and began leafing through it.
"You used to be like clockwork, Nick, now you're coming in whenever. Problems with the woman keeping you up?" Claypool said after he put the phone down.
Nick looked up out of the corner of his eyes and drew his lips straight. "Nah, nothing like that. I think I fell off my sleep cycle the other week. Or something like that. Must be because it's getting lighter earlier and staying light longer."
The phone on the desk buzzed and Claypool snapped it up. Nick returned to the reports and flipped through them quickly, looking for rapes, murders, bizarre deaths, and art thefts. Nothing. Just a normal morning. So maybe life on his end of the lens wasn't always as exciting as he liked to think.
He met Cap in the gym for their workout after leaving the office and was none too interested in lifting heavy metal plates. Some days were like that, the feeling that the time lost in the gym really didn't serve any purpose other than vanity. Not, he thought as he looked in the mirror, that he was gaining any type of curvature on his body worth a narcissistic thought. It was also a lame excuse for justifying
his lifestyle of barstools, movie seats and remote controlling the television. Sarah might like her station as an acolyte of the aerobicized, but Nick's efforts in the gym were nothing more than a reaction to her intense desire to remain firm, lean and desirable in the eyes of men.
"You know, Cap, I don't think humans were ever meant to be hulking muscle heads," Nick said as he pulled a pair of dumbbells off a rack and sat on a bench. "I don't think we were supposed to develop legs and arms and stomachs. All this working out, I don't know."
Cap huffed out a couple of repetitions with his own dumbbells, dropped them to the floor and looked over at him. "What?"
"I'm just guessing that the only real muscles we are supposed to have are the ones that would develop from hunting wild animals, fighting off rival tribes, and stuffing our gullets until our bellies had a nice anti-starvation layer surrounding them," Nick said.
"Yeah, well, not anymore," Cap said. "You're certainly not getting massive forearms from typing all day, are you?"
Nick shrugged.
"Besides, the kind of guys who still rely on hunting to get in shape are the same guys with beer bellies who have heart attacks dragging their deer out of the woods every year," Cap said as he bent over and picked up the weights at his feet. "That kind of body is easy to get."
They worked out in silence for a while longer before Cap turned to Nick and asked about the pain he had gotten in his side the last time they had been in the gym.
"I don't know what it is. I've had it a few times. Actually, a lot of times. It lasts a little bit and goes away," Nick said.
"Maybe you should get it checked out," Cap said.
"Why?"
"You might have a hernia or something. I wouldn't want to fuck with it for too long if it keeps coming back."
"Maybe I'll just take a week off from lifting and see what happens."
"Maybe you're coming down with something," Cap said, exhaling steadily as he moved the dumbbells. "Maybe it's gallstones or something."
Nick looked at Cap's reflection in the mirror. "Gallstones?"
"Yeah, I think that's where you get the pain. In your side somewhere. I'd get it looked at if I were you."
Nick nodded and sighed. "I don't think I have gallstones. I think I just strained something."
"Yeah, well you could always take a week or so off from here. It wouldn't make a difference on you," Cap said and smiled.
After dinner, Nick sat on the couch drinking beers and watching television while Sarah worked on the computer in the corner of the living room. Nick wanted to make sure he fell asleep quickly, without the dreams that played in the theater of his mind. He wanted to skip the entire show and fall straight into the void of unconsciousness and come out on the other side when the alarm went off in the morning. Sarah had been oblivious to what he was doing until he pulled his sixth beer from the fridge and popped it open. She turned over her shoulder and watched as he leaned against the sink and took a long swallow from the can.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"What do you mean?"
"You've been sitting on the couch drinking beer and watching the History Channel all night. Is something wrong?"
Sarah got up from her chair at the computer desk and walked over to the couch, slipped a cigarette from the pack on the table, and lit it.
"You might as well get me a beer while your standing there," she said as she exhaled a plume of smoke into the room. "I don't want to have to notice your beer breath all night long. Besides, I don't think I can stare at this screen any longer. I think I'm starting to see individual pixels."
Nick smiled and returned to the living room with a beer for her.
"Why are you drinking so much tonight?" Sarah asked as she popped open her can.
Nick shrugged. "I've been having a lot of weird dreams the last couple of weeks and I keep waking up in the morning feeling like I haven't had any sleep. I just want to have enough to drink so I can sort of pass out and skip the dreaming."
"Did you have another dream about the Monster last night?" Sarah asked.
Nick nodded and pulled a cigarette from the pack. He lit it and told her about the dream.
"That doesn't sound too scary to me."
"Some of them are like that, where I've got all this courage to chase him down but never get to confront him. They never really make any sense, I guess, it's just weird that they keep coming back."
"Maybe you've got some unresolved problem that your brain is trying to work out in your sleep."
"I don't know what. I mean, I don't hate my parents, I like my job, I love you. What could it be?"
Sarah looked up at him and cracked a smile. "I dunno, maybe it's because you haven't married me but we're living together."
Nick rolled his eyes.
"What, it could be that."
"I don't think so."
"Why?" Sarah took a quick pull on her beer. "You're the one who said you thought you'd be married by your mid-twenties and have a kid or two by the time you were thirty. Maybe your subconscious is remembering that."
Nick shook his head. "Yeah, sure, but that was a long time ago before I knew anything. I feel comfortable."
Sarah dragged on her cigarette. "Maybe that's the problem, you're comfortable but not really happy."
"No, I am happy." Nick said defensively, his words coming out quick and accentuating the 'am'. "You're not saying that because we're not married are you?"
"No, I don't care about that. I mean, I do care, it just doesn't really matter right now."
"Well, you're the one who keeps bringing it up," Nick said as he flicked ashes from his cigarette into the ashtray on the coffee table. "I mean, would that suddenly make some sort of difference?"
Sarah shook her head and tucked her hair behind her ears. "Yes. No. Maybe. It would make some kind of difference, but what kind I don't know. We've been living together for almost two years and dating almost three. I don’t know that being married would make a difference in how I feel about us or anything like that, and I don’t feel some urgent need to have a diamond ring or to be planning a wedding. But, at some point, I want to be married and everything that entails."
Nick took a drag on his cigarette and blurted the smoke into the room along with his words. "Well, I don't know what to say. I just don't feel like it's the right time. I don't know why. I can't explain it. I don't know what to say about it. It's just something inside me that feels that way."
"Well, if you're waiting for a sign from God or something, you're going to wait a long time," Sarah said, crushing out her cigarette and setting her half-finished beer on table. "I think I'm going to go to bed, now."
She got up and walked to the bathroom. Nick sat on the couch and listened as she brushed her teeth, gargled, and went to the bathroom. During all this he quickly finished his beer and switched it with the one Sarah had left behind, lit another cigarette and stared at the World War Two documentary playing on the television. German tanks were speeding across tall grass on a Russian plain, stopping occasionally to belch fire from their muzzles while the narrator described the proficiency of the Nazi tank crews in comparison to their Soviet counterparts. Sarah walked through the living room without looking at Nick and padded quickly down the hall to their bedroom. Nick shook his head and stared at the tip of his cigarette.
Early talks of marriage had always been in that wistful half-hope of a future together, where either of them would say that they could never imagine being without the other. At one point just a few months after they started living together, he had thought they should just go ahead and do it, but before he had brought the subject up he changed his mind and said nothing. On some level, he knew that part of his hesitation was bound in the knowledge that none of his friends were married, and if he married Sarah, things would be different. Two of his friends from college were in the same situation as he: living with their girlfriends. A couple of tangential friends had girlfriends, but his best friend, Cap, wasn’t even dating at the mom
ent, having given up on it almost a year earlier after his girlfriend dumped him. He just wasn’t sure he wanted to be the first one to go to the next level, and obtain a wife. He wanted feedback, a test case, information from someone who knew what being married meant, and co-workers didn’t count.
Nick shook his head and breathed deep on the end of the cigarette, hoping that the smoke would somehow clear his mind and give him an answer. It didn't. He drained his beer and headed to the bathroom and duplicated Sarah's routine. When he walked into the bedroom he saw Sarah rolled up on the edge of her side of the bed, facing away from center. He stripped down to his boxers, turned off the lights and crawled into bed. He rolled onto his side, facing away from her, and mumbled "good-night." Sarah said nothing.
He awoke staring up at Sarah, her blond hair pulled back behind her head and her bathrobe drawn tight around her waist. The angle was wrong and he squinted as if that would change the perspective. It didn't. He rolled his head to the side and saw the coffee table behind her legs. He looked down and saw a blanket covering his legs and the television standing in the entertainment center against the wall. He looked back up at Sarah.
"What are you doing out here?" she asked, her face full of concern.
"I don't know."
He was in the living room, on the couch, sleeping beneath one of the blankets from the hall linen closet and with a pillow from the bed beneath his head.
"Didn't you come to bed last night?"
Nick sat up and put his feet on the floor. "Yeah. I went to bed in the bed last night." He scratched his head and pushed his hair out of his eyes. "What the hell am I doing out here?"
"Are you sure you didn't go to sleep out here?" Sarah asked again and sat down on the edge of the coffee table.
Nick nodded. "Yeah, I'm sure. I know I went to bed in the bedroom. I don't know how I got out here."
Sarah raised her eyebrows and reset them. Nick looked into her eyes and shook his head slowly.
"This is really weird," he said.
SEVEN