New Tales of the Yellow Sign, page 3
“We have to find help,” you tell her.
Forest stretches all around you. You can hear and smell the nearby lake but can’t see it. Assuming that the direction you were already headed in was purposefully chosen is more than the legacy of gap upon gap, you start to carry the girl. She wriggles from your arms and takes you by the hand.
Wisping chimney smoke rises from behind a wall of pines. You head toward it.
“The people there will help us,” you tell her.
“How come you never call me by my name?” she asks.
You hurt. Your hands are behind your back. You try to move them; they’re bound with something hard and unyielding: plastic or metal maybe. Liquid trickles from your nostrils. You taste it: blood. Your face throbs. So do your ribs. Red spatters cover your shirt, your pants, your shoes.
You’re in the back seat of the Pontiac. You wriggle up beside the window. Slowly you crane your head up. The car sits on the edge of a clearing. Under a twilight sky Amy delivers the girl to a trio of men. One is slight, older, dressed in a leather jacket, wears a flat golf-style cap. The other two flank him, in down coats and toques. They’re tall, wide, young. Based on not much, you decide they’re Eastern European. On the arms of the down coats appear small patches, identical, bearing a yellow design. They’re too far away to make out but you presume it’s the Sign.
The girl clings to Amy’s legs. The thuggish men peel her away and pick her up. She hits one of them with a flurry of kid punches. The one who isn’t carrying her pulls what looks to be a knife. He holds it to her throat. The kid stops fighting.
The older man hands Amy an alligator-skin valise. They nod at each other. Amy steps away. The man calls her back. He nods to one of his guys. The guy passes her a pistol. She cocks her head in that argumentative way that feels characteristic of her. Then she takes it. She stalks toward the car, finger wrapped around the trigger.
Finally, you think, deliverance.
***
You’re digging with your fingers into cold, loose earth.
You reel back, to take stock. The light says early morning. You’re in the same clearing—no, a different, smaller one. There’s more blood on you. A crude, filthy bandage stretches across your palm. You peer underneath—it’s gashed deep. You’re wearing a down jacket, like the thugs had on. A quick check of the patch shows that it is, like you’d guessed, sort of a Yellow Sign, though stylized like Cyrillic lettering.
A hard object presses into the small of your back. You reach back for it: the pistol.
Impulse tells you to keep digging. You do until you uncover the girl’s dead face. They’ve tattooed it, with marks like out of an exorcism movie. One of the many signs matches the jacket patch. You picture them doing it. Fortunately it’s imagination, not a genuine memory flash, but still. They’d have had to sedate her. So that would be a mercy, right?
You can’t look at her. You push the dirt over her. Sobs choke you. You double over. You push your face into the dirt.
You stick the gun barrel between your teeth, pressing its tip against your palate. You can’t make yourself do it. Smacking yourself in the face with the gun butt is the best you can manage.
You weave up to your feet. If only you had a camera. You do your best to memorize this stupid, anonymous clearing. No landmarks of any kind.
There’s the Pontiac. You stagger toward it. Each movement shoots fresh agony through your limbs. It’s like there isn’t an inch of you that isn’t cut or contused.
Amy lies on the other side of the car, alongside one of the possibly Eastern European goons. She’s got a bullet hole between her eyes. The guy’s fatal wounds are in his neck. He’s not wearing a coat. The driver’s side door is fully open. Keys dangle from the ignition.
You reach into Amy’s pocket for her phone. It’s an old piece of junk she was too cheap to replace: no camera. But that’s not what you’re thinking anyhow. If a phone is on, and in range of a cell tower, the service provider can locate it. So if you leave it on and get back to civilization, you can give the cops what they need to locate the bodies.
But there are no bars.
You try the same with the guy’s phone. It’s broken, the glass front shattered. There’s a chance the battery is only dead. You compare the battery in his phone to Amy’s, thinking there’s an outside chance they might be swappable. To your lack of surprise they’re not.
Sliding behind the wheel of the car, you find the alligator valise at your feet. It’s full of worn American dollars, bundled together with new paper bands. There’s maybe twenty grand here.
You toss the valise onto the thug’s body. It bounces and lands on Amy’s hand. The gun goes, too.
The car chugs easily to life. You tell yourself that you are not going to gap until you reach a recognizable sign, which you will then write down. In the glove compartment you find a Chinese takeout brochure from a town you have never heard of. This will itself be a clue, but you’ll write more precise details on it when you find them.
***
You stand in front of a soothingly rectangular building faced in cheerful red brick. A row of blue letters announces it as a detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police. One of those nagging near-memories informs you that you’re in a place called Bracebridge. In your hand, you clutch the takeout menu. Pencil scrawls can still be seen under a layer of blood smears.
You head for its concrete steps, low and beckoning.
***
You wake up, not in a cell, but in your own bed, back in the city. You’re naked. Dirt and blood smudge your white sheets. You leap from the mattress and into the living room. The down jacket hangs over a chair. If you’d turned yourself in, they’d have taken it as evidence. You must have chickened out at the last minute. But it’s not too late. You thrust your hand into the pocket, searching for the menu. It’s not there. You search the apartment for it, upending all the garbage cans, sorting through the basket of Amy’s paper shredder. Nothing.
An Internet search turns up the latest news on the missing girl, which is that she is still missing. Her name is Madison Drejer and they give her age as five years old. News footage shows her pleading mother and father breaking down at a press conference.
Although you can’t provide directions, you can tell the police what you do know. You pick up the phone to call them.
***
You’re at work, slicing tomatoes against the scarred plastic board. A customer comes in to order a roast beef and cheddar panini. It’s possible to name him even: Mr. Baalham, who works next door at the credit union.
As always the mordant truth of the phrase “no-brainer job” strikes home. Turns out that at a sandwich shop a lack of contiguous memory is not the handicap a person might think. It’s all routine. One might go so far as to say that the memory losses aid with the monotony. Besides, you don’t gap out at work as much as you do at other times. It seems as if the more important an event is, the greater the odds of its collapsing into the darkness on you.
You hum an old Motown tune as you slap the focaccia on the sandwich press. The TV over your head is perma-tuned to the local news. A report marks the one-month anniversary of Madison Drejer’s disappearance.
Mr. Baalham clucks at the screen. “Horrible shame,” he says.
You agree.
If the you that lives in the gaps can never manage to follow through on contacting the cops, there must be a reason behind that.
***
You’re in the green Pontiac, pointing its broad nose at the gates of a small-town dump. Amy’s stuff fills the trunk and back seat. There’s surprisingly little of it. She moved around a lot before you met and wasn’t into accumulation.
She was estranged from her folks, to the point of never telling you who they were. So there’s no parents to come around asking why she’s fallen out of touch. You told your few friends that you came home from work one day and her shit was cleared out. That it had been tense between you for a while but you weren’t prepared for her to up and vanish. That on a fundamental level, looking back, you never truly understood her.
Or rather you infer that what you told them was along those lines.
***
Life has settled into dull humdrum. You aren’t having so many gaps any more. The irony: little of it is worth remembering.
Some nights you wake up terrified, thinking the cops will one day pull you over on a routine stop, run the plates, link you back to the men who killed the girl, and uncover all of it.
Or that the man with the alligator valise will show up on your doorstep with some of his boys, looking to tie up loose ends.
Some nights you wake up terrified that they won’t.
***
You’ve kept the Pontiac. You hardly need it for city driving but occasionally you go north to compare the features of lonely, wooded highways.
***
You’re walking along Bloor Street West, headed toward the Christie Pits. It’s been so long since you last had a gap that the sensation dizzies you. You lean against the side of a flower shop and wait until you’ve steadied yourself. Like anybody, you cross south so that there’s a street beside you and the park.
High prefab traffic walls still surround it. Now you can hear backhoes moving behind them, the beep beep beep of their backing up. They’re finally getting around to clearing out the mass graves from the trouble last summer.
You stop at a Korean place for takeout and head home down Euclid. Your apartment is a second floor walk-up accessible by a separate set of exterior stairs. As you near the door the vertigo comes back on you.
Someone’s smeared red stuff on your door. It stands out against the white paint. The densest smears are a little more than three feet from the bottom of the door. They’re thickest around the handle.
***
You’re walking home. You head up the steps to your apartment door.
***
You’re sitting on your couch, perched in a strangely alert position on the edge of the cushions, hands clamped tight around your knee caps, skin clammy and pale. The coffee table has been knocked askew. A toppled glass rolls at your feet, orange juice pooling around it. You mop it up with a paper towel. You think back to your last memory before the gap. You were heading to your door.
It’s ajar, key still in the lock, key ring dangling from it. Cold air drifts in. You drop the wadded up paper towel, soaked with juice.
A chaos of scratch marks mars the door’s lower half. You wipe it down with bleach. The scratches penetrate the paint, exposing splintered wood beneath. If he sees this, the landlord will shit himself. You finish cleaning up the spill. Then you head off for the hardware store.
You return hefting a bag full of purchases: a can of white paint, a couple of brushes, sandpaper, and a hand sander. You sand down the scrapes and paint them over.
That night you wake up to a clawing noise. Raccoons is your first thought. Or pigeons on the roof. You go back to sleep.
Next morning, the scratches are back, deeper and redder.
During the time you would normally give yourself to eat breakfast, you clean, sand, and repaint.
You’re sitting in your couch in the same locked position you gapped into yesterday.
The girl stands before you, grimy and dead. She’s pushed the coffee table out of position. Her arms hang at her side. Her toes point inward. She stares straight at you. She’s as she was when you last saw her, buried in that shallow grave. The horrible tattoos darken her face. A deep gash runs through her throat. Through it you see dangling threads of rotting flesh and possibly exposed vertebrae.
***
Never have you gapped in and out in such a rapid cycle as you do now, with the girl coming to visit you. She talks to you but always in the gaps. But when you gap in, an impression remains of her having spoken. You retain a gist, if not a recollection of sounds, or an ability to recreate exact words. Conversely, you can remember snippets of what you say to her. It is a conversation conducted across chasms of suppressed memory.
“I’m sorry,” you tell her.
***
You get the feeling she knows that.
“Why did it take so long for you to come to get me?”
Because she had to find the others first.
“So you started with the guiltiest, and now I’m last on your list.”
***
She didn’t want to hurt them. What they did to her was real bad. But she didn’t want to do that to them. It upset her all over again, having to do it.
You are glad you can’t exactly remember what it looks like, when the dead girl cries.
***
“Don’t be sad to do what you have to,” you say. “I understand.”
***
She tells you you’ve got it wrong. That’s not why she’s here. You tried to help her. It wasn’t your fault. She doesn’t have to punish you, like she had to with the others. She gets to choose. And that’s not what she chooses.
“But won’t that mean you’re stuck here, if you don’t finish up?”
She’s stuck here no matter what. Because of what happened to her.
“So what do you want? How can I help you? Whatever you ask, if I can do it, I will.”
What she wants is she’s lonely.
She can’t go home. She tried that and it went real bad.
Madison wants somewhere to go.
***
The gaps regularize. When you’re out of the apartment, you remember everything. Every minute of work. Movies in their entirety. Time whiled away at pubs and restaurants. All the moments around them, dull or momentous.
Your time at home fragments. When Madison’s here, the gaps close in. Sometimes she’s some other place. She doesn’t tell you where, and you don’t ask.
With your memory under control, you can get a more demanding, better-paying job. You go into management. The extra money you spend on her. You buy a large screen TV, a premium cable subscription, a Blu-Ray player and an exhaustive selection of kid’s movies. You get dolls and toys and coloring books. A tablet, consoles, handheld game devices. She likes when you play against her.
Her tastes don’t change. She doesn’t age or mature. She’s easy to please. You don’t have to prepare food for her. (Though occasionally you worry that feeding happens, when she’s out of the apartment.)
You’re constantly buying clothes. She bleeds through them, so they’re ruined after a couple of wears. You rotate stores so the sales clerks don’t catch on to the weirdness.
TV remotes require constant replacing, too. The blood gets into them, sticks the keys, and eventually shorts them out.
The place smells permanently of bleach, from all the spot cleaning. You bought her plastic furniture but she sometimes forgets to sit in it.
Your bedclothes, too. You buy sheets and blankets cheap, store them up. Periodically you take the Pontiac to a deserted spot and burn them.
She sleeps on top of the blankets. Well, sleeps isn’t probably the right term. But at night when you are half-awake, you feel her curled tight against your calves and feet. It’s not warmth—she’s room temperature—but it is pressure, the pressure of a touch.
The Blood on the Wall in the Fortress
The artillery shell struck the ruined keep, turning to powder its remaining crenelations. From their vantage atop their own commandeered tower on the Rhine’s western side, the men of the ninth fire detachment, second artillery battery, Loyalist infantry, watched black smoke billow into the Alsatian air, near the town of B__________. Standing in a castle built in the 12th century, they observed the effect of their big gun on its 11th century counterpart. Through the smoke, they beheld a burning figure. The wretch ran helpless circles. The tower roof gave way, constraining them to a tighter orbit. The men could only presume his faraway screams.
Venon averted his gaze. The rest of the men swayed, transfixed, as their flame-wreathed enemy leapt from the tower, ablaze.
Girinec asked the lieutenant: “Another go, sir?”
The lieutenant held up his gloved hand, gold braid swaying. Until resupply came, the ammunition required cautious husbanding.
Venon and Jaquillard readied a shell for loading. Venon trembled. When the war first started, six months ago in the spring of 1947, he assumed that he would, over time, inure himself to its shocks. Experience turned this hope on its ear. Each time proved worse than the last. The unit’s first engagement had been a thundering abstraction, its victims hidden on the other side of a ridge line. The second shook him some, but only afterwards, when he saw its victims hauled away on trucks. In the firefight before this one, he for the first time fired his rifle and saw targets fall. He’d concealed his weakness and kept his head. He joined Jaquillard and Nurschinger in laughing about it. Like blasting grouse, Nurschinger said. Only weeks later did the dead creep into Venon’s dreams. Their white faces resembled masks.
The wind sped and dampened, presaging a storm. It cleared away the smoke. The crew’s castle stood higher above the valley than their target, allowing them to look down on its shattered roof. Two bodies sprawled beside a high-velocity, wheel-mounted gun. It lay on its side, knocked over by the blast.
The lieutenant gestured for his field glasses. Girinec had them ready. The lieutenant peered through them. He chewed at his lower lip. The lieutenant feared errors, his own most of all. Unlike his predecessor—who was promoted after the action at Strasbourg—he allowed himself to think aloud. “It is likely disabled. But better not to chance it. Nurschinger, can you hit it?”
“Yessir,” Nurschinger nodded.
Girinec hauled out the smoking, spent shell. Venon checked the breech. Jaquillard loaded the new shell. Nurschinger cranked the targeting lever. He squinted through the scope. He measured the trajectory. He returned to the scope and signaled for Girinec to haul on the firing mechanism. The gun boomed. Its round whistled across the Rhine. It hit the tower. The top of the tower blew off. The enemy gun became shrapnel. The bodies disappeared.
The lieutenant called for a stand-down. Venon filled two empty shells. The gun, balky since Strasbourg, would require a full check, but not until it cooled. Jaquillard rubbed his ample belly and proposed a forage. The lieutenant shook his head. Girinec tried to tease Jaquillard over his habit of miming his every emotion and state of mind, like a cheap Guignol actor. Like all of Girinec’s attempts at humor, it registered as mere complaint. The lieutenant seemed tempted to intervene in the carping and badinage of his men. Instead he gestured to the boîte-noire. Girinec opened its leather outer casing, revealing its black plastic shielding. He pulled out the antenna and positioned it until the transmitter button lit. He slid out the keyboard. The lieutenant sat cross-legged to hunt and peck his incident report into the machine. When he was finished, he snapped his fingers for Girinec to complete the transmission. Girinec fiddled with it. He had to drag it outside to finally establish a full connection. The castle walls created interference, he muttered. He cursed them out. He tried to make a routine of it. No one laughed.
