I stand up abruptly.
I never glance at the press box. If anybody is left up there, it’s nobody I want to see. I walk back to the tunnel, back to the chain-link fence. It’s still open; nothing has changed. Just sand, sand, and more sand. The sky seems closer, though, almost as if it’s ready to open up and consume me.
I walk off into the orange gloom for no reason whatsoever.
Chapter 22:At the Doors
Walking through this limbo, this purgatory of confusion, seems to go on both forever and in no time at all, although I’ve not gotten hungry or tired. Nothing in the distance ever gets any closer (the stadium has been gone at my back for the better part of--?) but that doesn’t stop me trudging on. There’s plenty of space to think here, plenty of room to chase whatever preconceptions may arise. That one thing is almost tangible here. The time to consider things done, things left undone. Just like Grandma always warned me. And with this space, this endlessness, my mind wanders, leaving me to chase along behind like some errant kid on the coattails of a hurried parent.
The ghostly spectacle of the past is, regardless, no less real. With every dusty footstep I creep ever deeper into the crevices from which fevered whispers issue. I try not to listen but I know I have to.
Just not right now…please…not right now.
But the faces in the stadium return. The wild cluster of familiars. I know how my life ended (though what my fate remains to be I am completely ignorant), but I have no clue as to the presentation I was given. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of people there, cuing on every move I made, and I never saw a single face in the crowd that didn’t strike me as at least vaguely familiar. No magic trick could have been more thorough.
More pervasive.
***
I can just now make out a darker brown smudge in the distance. A rushing wind drives against me, throwing a faint, jittering contrast of shape and shadow where before there was only a mere blankness. A few more steps and a definite outline emerges: a set of doors stuck into the desert as if standing sentry against some awesome secret. Just as out of place as a stadium curving out of a desert, replaying memories forever lost to the living.
Because at this moment I know. I’m just as dead as dead gets, as breathless as Grandma had been covered up nicely in her bedroom, as motionless as John with the dust powdering his face like a bad make-up job from some cheap production.
I am dead. Finished.
It’s just unnerving to discover I still have to remain on guard.
***
I walk up to the doors through the swirling wind and they do not fade; I find they’re solid wood. It is also at this moment I hear the heavy breathing. A very odd sound above the drilling rush of wind, but it is there, unmistakable. And with this another memory surfaces: a mat of hair fanning out in an ice chest, the bloated nude body beneath the fouled water. The woman’s killer sleeping peacefully in the house, secure enough to forget to prime the alarm.
I take a step closer and step on some shifting something. The heavy growl of snoring ceases as the body (because that is what it is) shifts beneath my weight. I quickly jump away and look down. The wind slacks off, and as the dust settles I see exactly what it is moving in the sand.
A man stirs there. With his first few feeble movements it is impossible to know at first, but the snoring associates form to gender. Therefore it is not surprising when a hairy, long-fingered hand breaks the orange surface. A ragged shock of black hair follows it. The figure sits up stiffly, a look of disinterest relaxing the face into a loose mask.
He turns my way and I’m still not sure—not positive. But when his face cracks in a smile I am, even though I‘ve never seen him do so. He pulls his other hand free of the sand and I watch the cigarette pinioned between his fingers trail a straight line of smoke into the quiet air. The wind has now given up completely.
He brings the cigarette to his lips and pulls deeply. When he exhales I catch the reek of tombs. Then he shakes his legs free of the sand and stands up. His slacks are ripped and bloody from the knee down. What is left of his shirt also hangs in bloody rags from his shoulders. His body bears red, semi-healed wounds that (even though they appear horrible) seem to have little affect. It looks like he’s been dragged behind a car; I can see pieces of gravel embedded here and there in the red mess of his flesh.
He smiles at me again and flips the cigarette away.
“Strangers, strangers everywhere, but some not so much as others,” he says. Then he laughs.
I step another foot back. The thick smell of rot wafts off him in steady waves. He offers his hand to me but I only look at it. The image of the woman floating in the ice chest refuses to subside.
He cocks his head in the direction from which I’d come and whistles sharply between his teeth. “Been to the stadium I see,” he acknowledges without the slightest hint of question. Again, I say nothing. “Out and out picture show, isn’t it?” He clears his throat and looks back at me. His eyes are still achingly alive though his body seems to forbid it. “I watched them bounce me up and down that goddamn road until I couldn’t take it anymore, I tell ya. And that’s the plain truth,” he says, nodding. “Looks like you didn’t exactly die in your sleep either.” He grins again.
I look down at my chest, amazed at the bloody holes I find there making a tatter of my shirt. I reach around back and find the exit wounds; when I bring my hands around they’re covered in blood. I let them hang limply at my side.
“Where the hell are we?” I ask.
The familiar stranger only laughs again and sits down Indian-style. He claps his hands together, once, hard, before looking me directly in the eyes. A mesmerist is there in his depths. I wonder how many women he’s killed. “Well, you’re about half-right buddy. Myself, I never believed in any of that shit anyway. But now…” he shakes his head and spits into the sand.
“But the Waiting Room gives you plenty of time to think things through. Plenty of time to wait.” He runs his hands through the sand and holds it up, letting it sift through his fingers. “This is all that’s left of the ones who couldn’t make a choice, boy. It may seem like Time doesn’t go by here, but it does.”
I look out on the miles and miles of endless stretches of sand and hold my breath against the horror of his implication.
He taps a finger to his lips. “I’m sure I know you,” he says and squints, trying to sharpen me into revelation. It doesn’t seem to work; almost though, but not quite. “You didn’t happen to be at the stadium…?” he asks.
I shake my head no, remembering the night I’d gone through the woman’s purse in this man’s bathroom. Her name escapes me and that’s a bad thing because I remember his clearly enough.
“No…hmmm…well, I can’t rightly remember right now but it’ll come. Everything does eventually around here. And since Time is no object,” he smiles here, stretching his arms out extravagantly beneath the gun-metal sky, “what’s the bother of worrying when?” He nods again as if agreeing to something I’d said and scratches his left hand in the sand at his knee. As I look on he extracts a lit cigarette from the furrow and fixes it to his lips. The smoke which then trails from his mouth etches a lighter-gray contrast between it and the sky spreading out beyond the crown of his head.
“You’re Ryster,” I say then, quietly.
His hand jerks at the name, a grimace almost escaping his close watch. He looks at me very closely. “And you?”
“Jesse Avery,” I say. “I broke into your house and stole the kayak. I found the girl floating in your ice chest.”
For just a scant second the lively, reptilian eyes glaze over and the muscles in his skinned and bloody neck tighten. He rubs the cigarette-less hand over the stubble close-cropping his chin. The nails there are cracked and caked with dried blood. He forces a coughing, bark of laughter as his eyes come back to life. “So…as I said…everything come back to its Maker.”
I decide to change directions; stroking the self-pity of t
his creature is too sickening a notion to entertain for another moment. “What did you mean before about choices?” I ask.
He grunts, looking down, playing in the sand with his bloody toes like a child. “That’s about all you get here,” he finally says and spits again.
“Here?” I look around, now holding my hands out. “What is this place?”
He smiles again, always the smiling fool, and flicks ash from the cigarette. “I’ve already told you that…Jesse…the Waiting Room. Always has been; always will be. Nothing ever changes outside these doors.”
The comment piques my curiosity. I momentarily put aside the image of the dead murderer fiddling with the sand with his broken, bloody toes and turn to look. The doors could easily belong in any upper-scale family home in the South. Heavy oak, it looks like, breaking the monotony of the desert and sky with their very solidity. One is white, the other black. Identical gold handles stand out near the jambs. I walk to the side of one and look around behind but find nothing. Just more sand. In fact, the only difference is there’s no paint on the backsides, only dull, unfinished wood strangely mocking the colors of the sky above and the sand below.
I turn back to the creature in the sand. “What happens if you open em?” I ask.
Ryster blows out a plume of smoke and picks a bit of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. He examines it like a prize from an archeological dig before flicking it away and turning those lively, jittering eyes upon me again. The smile torturing his face would make children cry. “Now that’s a whole different story,” he admits, drawing another long pull. Even so I notice the cigarette hasn’t gotten any shorter. It’s the same; like the sky, like the sand.
“What the hell is this?” I ask again, menacingly this time.
He laughs. Spits. “It has a lot of names but none of em matter much. I call it the Here and Now because no matter how you cut it, that’s what you get.”
“And through there?” I ask, pointing.
“Somewhere else,” he answers, smirking.
I turn away from the riddler in disgust, my hand already on the closest doorknob when he speaks again. I only pause because the voice has lost its edge of sarcasm. “Careful what you do,” he warns.
I stop, listening to the swish of sand against sand as Ryster gets back to his feet. “Little something you should know…”
I turn to face him again, hoping this’ll be the last time.
“Didn’t finish telling you about the choices…”
“I’m listening.”
He nods his head towards the doors. “May look the same but they’re not.” I let go of the doorknob. “You a…religious man?” he asks. I shrug my shoulders and he laughs again. “Not always easy to tell, is it? Least not here it isn’t.”
“You’re talking about Heaven and Hell?”
“Call it what you like. I’m just telling you what I know. You see, there was somebody waiting on me here too. And notice she ain’t around anymore. Gave me the Key to the Kingdom, though,” he says proudly and points past my left hand. “That door’s the one I was gonna choose; I‘ve just been waiting around to get freed up, but in the meantime I‘ve changed my mind. ‘S only right you should know the alternative too.”
“Alternative? What makes you think I’d trust you?”
“Hey man, I don’t give a shit. You‘re my ticket back, s‘all. You’ll have a chance too when the right sonofabitch comes along, but right now lucky for me you‘re here. Not that it matters much to me, but there are people I need to drop in on and Time keeps on trotting along on the other side.”
“Our lives, you mean?”
He smiles wickedly. “You pick that door,” he says pointing to the one I’d almost opened, “you can go back. You pick the other one I don’t know where the fuck you end up.”
“Back where?”
“Where we come from.”
“And the purpose of that?”
Whatever Ryster has become wrings its hands. “Unfinished business,” the creature says. And it is with this that I picture his vengeful ghost tracking an endless trail of revenge and grimace. He must see it on my face because the smile vanishes.
“I’m done with that,” I say. “I’m all paid up.”
“Suit yourself.”
I turn back to the doors, on a whim reaching out to grasp the knob of the door I’d been about to try. I’m not about to trust the creature smoking cigarettes in the tattered and bloody Italian suit.
Locked.
At least that much is welcome.
I move two steps to the right, looking back at the pathetic creature before turning this knob. “Thought maybe you were gonna change your mind,” it says as the wind begins to pick up again.
I shake my head, pull back on the doorknob, finding it unlocked, and go through without even looking back.
Chapter 23: Continuum
Several steps past the threshold and the door no longer exists. When I look over my shoulder it has simply vanished into the desert sand, and in the dry monotony this ‘other side’ seems really no different than the previous one. There is, however, one positive, Ryster’s gone. The endless sky stretches overhead, unmindful, silent. The wind has dwindled to nothing as soon as the door swung to; I feel sand between my toes and suddenly doubt everything I think I’ve heard.
Nonetheless, I turn back to my own precious direction. I have no real hope of walking a straight line (not that I even know I should) in the disorienting field of orange and gray, but there is nothing else to be done. So that’s what I do.
And it is as I walk that the transformation begins.
The swirling myriad of orange and gray begins to merge, pulsing eventually into a thick fog that surrounds me. My sight fades with the colors and I move blind, forward, I think. Or perhaps only into an eternity of this mind-fog. The terror of having opened the wrong door into this phantasmagoria shrieks madly in my mind. The next available thing amid the desolation is so minute (though so coordinated) that I take no notice until it is unmistakable. Mist tendrils thickly around me, bloated like some reptilian killer squatting, rising up from the warm sand. A hum begins deep in the base of my spine, followed by an abrupt flash of pain and light and the next thing I know are solid walls stretching away from me at both shoulders. The sand has smoothed to a dirty, concrete alleyway. Having a look up, the jut of the identical and opposite eaves cut a particular shape I have no trouble remembering.
I’m somehow back at my former haunt, coming in through the back alley. Again, the rumbling terror that only uneasily keeps itself down shakes at the chains I’ve bound it with. The killer’s spiel rushes back; his talk of the doors. His talk of going back, and the consequences I’ve pictured him facing once there. But he is nowhere to be seen.
It’s just me who’s back.
I recognize the opening directly ahead. Straight through there and I’ll be in the courtyard that fronts the old couple’s apartment. Frightened of the possibilities awaiting me in my own loft I break right, skirting through the last few feet of arched brickwork like a fugitive.
Because, after all, isn’t that what I am? A fugitive of the dead.
And I am not wrong; everything is exactly as I remember. The row against the back wall where the garbage cans stand like sentinels to some silent murder; the cracked ceramic fountain surrounded by sweating Mexican tile; the profusion of airplane plants and ferns twisting lightly in the wind that spills in from the street. A blue light dances against the curtains in the old couple’s living room. The blinds are drawn. For some unknown reason the walkway lights are out on that side.
I walk farther into the walled enclosure; stop momentarily to test my senses. As far as sight goes, everything is perfect. Touch follows hand-in-hand too (the tiles are solid enough below my feet), but there is no smell. And whatever rocks the ferns hanging below the second story walkway seems something other than wind.
I glance up in the direction of my former apartment. (There is no doubt in this knowledge; I am far past
the realm of these memories, and yet to find out why they are being visited on me now becomes imperative.) Closed up tight and black—like a tomb. Nothing moves, nothing stirs. In fact, it is not much different really from the solitude of the orange-painted desert, though thankfully I am not being pestered by some killer formulating plans of revenge and escape.
Now it’s I who have to digest the idea of passing back somehow to the land of the living. First impressions have been deceiving; I am no more home here than a wandering ghost passing through the places it has once known—
a disembodied ghost, surely not much different from the fate I’d assumed for Ryster.
And as this malevolent inspiration washes over me I very clearly hear the dry rasp of a lock giving way. A sound that very clearly comes from the direction of the old couple’s apartment. I turn and am struck dumb.
My mother stands in the couple’s doorway, her hand resting gently on the knob. And, incredibly, the first thing I recognize is the lack of what I’ve remembered up until now. She has on a simple print dress and coy smile, almost teen-age in its innocence. And the sense of desperation (that palpable object that hangs upon her memory like the weight of the albatross around the ancient mariner’s neck, that thing that gives the only color to the photographic still-shots left to take up room in my brain) is gone. She simply stands, smiling, in the doorway, the familiar shades of expression of my Grand’ma giving definition to features that spring newly-remembered to my mind.
I cry out and collapse to my knees on the Mexican tile. Her smell drifts toward me, unleashing another torrent of suppressed emotion I had no idea I still possessed. The shock of memory and remembrance reduce me to a wet, sobbing mess before the fountain.
Only her touch on my shoulder is finally enough to bring me back to whatever world it is I now inhabit.
When I look up into her precious eyes, only now am I able to gain some semblance of control. She says nothing, pressing a forefinger to her lips. I grab onto the warmth of her hand and try to be still.
“Quiet,” she says. “You’ve come a long way,” and she pulls me effortlessly to my feet. “Come inside,” she says. I go through the open door without a word.