If Absence Took a Spiral Shape
by John D. Gorman
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
He could go a full day without talking to anyone. He learned he did not have to thank the grocery bagger for bagging his groceries, nor the barista for making his coffee, and could get away with pointing to an item on the menu in a restaurant. It annoyed the workers, but he was able to keep his silence. It gave a mechanical feel to life; each movement another turn of the gears.
He wondered on the days he did not speak whether this was what it was like to be old, to have lived through all your days in such a manner that each one was indistinguishable from the last. It did not help that his assignments involved him going down to the freight yards and taking pictures of trains coming in and out for a piece on the importance of logistics in the inner-city economy.
“Get some shots of all the lines full of boxcars,” the editor said. He might as well have said, “Take the pictures to get your mind off things.”
His newspaper was one of the few print papers still in circulation, and it was subsidized purely by donations. It afforded creative liberty at the cost of exploiting and exploring the strange and the novel. He’d wandered into sewers in the morning, ate lunch in abandoned trap houses, then spent his afternoons at the mayor’s granddaughter’s birthday where she bawled and brawled with Custer the Clown.
The problem with taking pictures is that it happens in an instant. The light is captured in an image that could last eternity. In that instant, he can forget the mechanization of his life. He can forget the concrete pillars plated with glass that seem to grow taller each year, blocking out the sky overhead, reducing it to a single, neat square of blue.
She had wanted to leave when she learned she was pregnant. The city is no place to raise a kid, she had said. He had agreed. He had been in the process of finding a job somewhere else in the country when she was killed. “You are very lucky to be alive,” they told him. The doctors in white coats and the nurses in blue scrubs healed his bones and repaired his flesh, all so that his spirit could be crushed with the knowledge that he was the one who had killed his wife.
He’d fallen asleep while driving. “You are very lucky to be alive,” and “I’m sorry about the accident” were said in the same breath many times. The first time a nurse told him that, he almost said, “If I wasn’t alive right now, then neither of us would have to be sorry.” Instead, he took up a silence that soon became more comfortable than talking. Talking inevitably led back to the guilt. He could detach in his silence as easily as slipping under water.
Out of the hospital bed and back into the workplace, he found if he didn’t communicate with his co-workers there would be problems. It was necessary to exchange a half-dozen words during meetings. It was during one meeting where he was assigned the task of photographing trains, and during another one a month later where he was offered a new assignment: take photos of the northwestern pine forest and the surrounding fields and conduct interviews with the locals.
There were legends surrounding the forest. The photos would go with an article on the dangers agribusinesses posed to the local farming community. The first words on his lips were “No thanks”, but something stopped them from coming out. She had wanted to leave when she learned she was pregnant, and she never got the chance to. Instead of saying no, he said he would think about it.
He decided to go over a bowl of ramen. He liked eating at ethnic restaurants because if you pointed, the server assumed you didn’t know how to pronounce the dish. He felt an obligation to stay in city; being enclosed in a concrete tomb was penance. Had he not felt the obligation, he would have left the day he was discharged from the hospital. But he was the one who had killed her; therefore, he should suffer. He reasoned he could continue to suffer in a pine forest and a soybean field just as well as a concrete and glass crypt. There it would be easier to keep his silence.
“Is the farming job still available?” he asked the next morning.
The editor gave him a plane ticket and a phone number to call once he landed. He called the number from outside the terminal. It was overcast and smelled like damp cigarette butts.
“Hello?” There was a lot of static on the other end, but the voice was much younger than he had expected.
“Hi, I’m the photographer.”
“Ah good, you made the trip. What’s your terminal?”
He told the person on the other end. He waited for almost an hour before a long-bed truck pulled to a stop in front of him. It began to rain, and the smell of cigarettes become more pungent once he climbed into the truck.
The youngest brother had been put in charge of the farmhouse by his siblings. They had inherited the land and the house from their grandparents. They decided to sell the farmland but keep the house on the top of the hill. From what he could gather, the youngest brother had no real occupation other than to ensure the house was maintained and ready to rent out on a moment’s notice.
Flat farmland punctuated with shelterbelts stretched out far to the north and east. He could see how the rain fell in sheets from gray storm clouds, watering fields miles away. To the west lay rolling hills dotted with pines. The dirt road to the cabin wound up and through those hills. The youngest brother helped him with his bags and gave him the keys to the house.
“Don’t mind the machines and workers,” he said, “they won’t bug ya none.”
“I won’t.”
“There’s a car around the back. Keys are hanging up just inside. It should have enough gas to get to the station, but not to town.”
“Thanks.”
The youngest brother peeked at him from over his sunglasses. “Now, I don’t suppose they told you the rules before you came here.”
“Clean up after yourself,” he recited.
“They told you the least important,” he said. “Clean up after yourself, and don’t go into the woods. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“Clean up after yourself, and don’t go into the woods.”
“That’s to you, not me.” The youngest brother smiled. “I’ll swing by later to check on you.”
He watched the youngest brother leave by the same road, then went to sit on the porch. For a long while, he soaked in the scenery before him. It was so open he felt naked, exposed to the elements and eyes alike even though he was alone on the hill. Clean, cool air filled his lungs. He squinted against the shining sun and down into the fields. The machines whirred and sprayed the three plots at the bottom of the hill. Workers dressed in yellow plastic suits stood around with pens and clipboards. At last, he turned his gaze to the pine trees, lining the eastern plot as silent sentinels. A deep-seated resentment tugged at a space in between his ribs.
It wasn’t easy knowing where the anger came from, at how the tree roots pushed into the soil or how their limbs stretched skyward, tickling the clouds. The soybeans that would grow in the now-empty fields were owned by board members and their machines.
He got as close to the fields as the overseers would allow him. They stood around the perimeter in their yellow suits like overgrown lemons. He tried to ask the lemons a few questions, but they were as responsive as the citrus they resembled. He walked around for a couple of hours, taking pictures of metal monsters crawling across the earth, sowing modified seeds, and spraying poison into the ground.
The longer he watched, the more he wished something would come out of the woods and render the hulks unusable. The anger peaked as a machine rumbled by him; he smelled exhaust fumes and oil. He supposed it was better to be angry at the machines than the trees. Even in the breeze, they remained still.
The youngest brother came in the late afternoon. The editor wanted a general history of the area. The youngest brother’s account was to be recorded. He did not ask the youngest brother for clarification until the end.
Through the 160 years of the area’s recorded history, the woods had been the town’s sun around which deaths, disappearances, and tall tales revolved like planets. In 1850, the farmers had tried to chop down the trees. A journal from a survivor detailed the first and only day. Axe handles broke with each swing. Saw teeth dulled or snapped altogether. As night fell and the conversation turned to using fire to burn the woods, the shadows reached out and took three men. The others fled.
They returned the next morning to find a heart at the wood’s edge. They tried again after the war. They were harder men, unafraid of what was now believed to be folklore. They marched into the woods with axes, saws, and dynamite. A few carried Californian bear rifles. The wives made supper, then dinner, but both went cold. No man came out of those woods that day, or any day that followed.
One wife went looking out of mourning and found an axe head cleaved neatly in two. Nearly a century later, three children went missing while their mother took an afternoon nap. They had been playing with a ball by the eastern field. The wind caught it and carried it into the boughs of the pines just beyond the woods’ edge. When the mother went looking for them, she found the ball in the shadow of the pines. A decade ago, there was a homeless man thought to have been connected with a string of murders in the town over. The police tracked him to the edge of the woods. They found his shoes tied around a trunk.
“Me and my siblings, we used to camp out at the wood’s edge,” he said. “Drove our parents half-mad with worry, but we wanted to see it for ourselves.”
“See what?” he asked when the youngest brother did not continue.
“The monster. Couple of kids at the school said they’d gone in the woods and seen a monster. Don’t think much of it now though; no one ever comes out of the woods. Anyone who says so much that they did is lying.”
“Did you ever see anything?”
The youngest brother’s finger drew a circle on the table while he thought. It went around and around the same point for what seemed like two minutes, then three. “No. No, never did.”
The youngest brother excused himself, saying he had to get home for dinner. “You’re more than welcome to join us. Our table’d appreciate the company with the kids at school.”
“Thank you for the offer.”
The youngest brother nodded, understanding.
A question popped into his head. He stopped the youngest brother in the doorway. “Is there anyone in town who’s claimed to have seen the monster?”
“There’s a couple. Most are in the slammer. One gal’s in town though. I can leave her number for you, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up for an interview. Her man’s meaner than a wasp nest kicked downhill.”
“I’ll take the number. Thank you.”
“Alright, mind yourself now. And whatever you hear from her, stay out of those woods.” The youngest brother looked out over the fields, at the machines rumbling and the lemons running around them. “I still wonder if there wasn’t a better way. Doesn’t seem right, letting programs do what G-ma and Gramps did each day of their lives.”
The youngest brother paused, then said to himself, “I’m not better than the rubber suits, though.”
Copyright © 2022 by John D. Gorman
