“I can’t go near that thing,” Carol had said. “I won’t go in there, Reed. It’s just too much.” So she’d left the trash pile and returned to camp, and didn’t go to any of the sites after that, just stayed in their tent and read. That’s what finally got to Carol. The layers. Death upon death. To dig beneath someone’s house and find the skull of someone who had lived there before. To find the ghost of someone else’s last meal mixed in with your own garbage. To find the central artifacts of someone else’s dead life drifting up through the ground into your living room. She’d talked about those things at the time, and Reed had thought she shared his obsession with it. Later he realized she only shared his occasional fear of it.
Carol didn’t like looking down, or digging into the layers. And she didn’t like that part of Reed that found such excavating to be of central importance. It made her profoundly uncomfortable.
If Reed had known more, if he had dug a little deeper, he would be even more frightened than she. He had hints of it even back then.
The Anasazi abandoned the Mesa Verde area during the great drought of A.D. 1276 to 1299, never to return. But there had been droughts before, and they’d remained. There is evidence of various nomadic tribes raiding them; perhaps that’s why they moved off the top of the mesa into the cliffs in the first place. No one knows. Reed liked to think they were haunted by the history, the overwhelming sense of a past here. As he was, though he didn’t know it then. The “spirit of the place” had finally gotten to them. They left their homes to the spreading vegetation, and the drifting earth.
For a time he’d convinced himself that the phone call from his parents was a dream, part of his dream of the flood. But as he went over that night again and again, he knew it could not have been a dream. It was simply too vivid, and he could remember being awake—he knew he had been awake. Some sort of prank, then, although he knew no one who could have pulled it off so convincingly. He had to know, but he was afraid to know.
He broke off studies for a day and played several hours of racquetball with Terry, a slightly overweight, redheaded classmate whose physical presence never seemed to change no matter how much he exercised. Terry referred to Reed as his “fit friend,” but he was neither. They just played racquetball together, and occasionally drank afterward. Reed’s own body had always felt strange to him, as if he weren’t really at home there. He was generally thin, and extremely pale, a pasty white that made his black hair and pink lips and nostrils almost a shock. It made him look slightly ill most of the time, actually. That used to bother him, to think of other people seeing him that way, but it didn’t anymore. After all, he didn’t really feel ill. He just had to take special care on the digs, always wearing a wide-brimmed hat and thin, long-sleeved khaki shirts.
Although his shoulders and legs were strong, showing some muscle, his arms were long and thin, and never seemed to change no matter how many weights he lifted. He knew some people thought of him as hyperactive, and he did have this agitated, can’t-sit-down presence much of the time, but he felt calmer in his mind than he looked. It was the body that was agitated.
He put on a lot of weight after he was married, which seemed to round off some of those slightly sharp, agitated angles in his physique, though he was still aware of them underneath the roundness—he sometimes imagined he saw the shadows of them in his mirror. But marriage had made him healthier—more color in the cheeks, and the almost continual colds that had given the nostrils their pinkness were gone now. Only his eyes seemed the same—a slightly feverish, wet look that he knew others took for intensity.
He’d begun losing weight steadily the past few months, and his nose was feeling vaguely sore again. As the layers of fat were stripped away, the nervous angles came back; his hidden body took over completely, changing his gestures, stance, expressions, everything. Friends from his early married days no longer recognized him on the street.
The red ball came at him fast; he felt his shoulders creaking as he slammed it back at the wall. Terry maneuvered slowly to intercept its return—Reed moving restlessly, his face feeling uncomfortably warm, aware of his mouth extending slightly as his facial muscles tensed—and slammed it back at the wall. Reed returned it awkwardly, his legs crossed, his body hesitating, then overcompensating in response to his commands.
The physical activity—the slamming of the red or blue or green ball against a stark white wall—seemed to help him focus, made him feel a little more in touch. The last few years he’d found it necessary to focus self-consciously like that at least once each day. Sometimes it consisted merely of lying in the grass and observing what was there, how the grass felt, what the insects were doing, what it looked like up close.
Reed felt suddenly in a hurry after the games, but Terry wanted a drink. They dropped into a dim bar downtown with faded-looking moose heads, stuffed squirrels, and mounted birds decorating the walls and the shelves behind the bar.
“You’re looking tired, Reed. Working hard on that Mesa Verde thing?” Terry downed his drink quickly, coughed, almost choking.
Reed glanced away and spoke into his drink. “I think I’m going to quit for a while, Terry. I think I am.”
“No shit? What brought this on?” He drank again, jerking the glass up so quickly Reed found it distracting. “You having a hard time… troubles with your wife and kids?” He looked embarrassed. “Adoption… that’s a real hard thing. I don’t think I could handle that, and school both…” He shrugged helplessly.
Reed looked at him wearily. He decided to let the stupid remark on the nature of adoption pass. “I don’t know… I’m tired, I suppose.” Reed sipped slowly at the beer, wiping the foam from his lip awkwardly, with the back of his hand. “Do you have a hometown, Terry?”
“Sure… doesn’t everybody? Minneapolis.”
“Ever visit?”
“Oh, last time was a year and a half ago to see my folks. We had sort of a reunion with the rest of the family. Funny to see where you came from… all those old folks, I mean. They’d bring out their albums with the pictures of the houses and cars, and the clippings from the old country. Once in a while that’s kinda nice to see.”
“Well, I think I’m going to be going home for a while. I haven’t been home in ten years.”
“No shit! A reunion?”
“Yes… yes, I think so.”
The rest of the day he read, or rather tasted, books. It had become an obsessive activity with him; he’d read long into the night in a darkened house, the only illumination a floor lamp tilted over the worn green chair, pizza and a quart of beer sitting on the footstool pulled up between his legs.
He rarely finished a book. They were stacked two feet deep around the green chair, sometimes spread-eagled on the floor to mark a halt, but usually with one bookmark or several to note the places where he had stopped, unable to continue with the thing.
The reasons he could not continue with a book were usually the same: he would reach a particularly vivid image or a passage that threatened to pull him into another reality, and it frightened him, sometimes even into terror.
Something that had to be done…
He’d changed the light bulbs over much of the house tonight and redirected lamps so that the floors and wainscoting were almost entirely in darkness. He even went to the trouble of locking several rooms.
He had obscured the bottom layers of the house, the strata of the child. He couldn’t bear to think about them—Alicia and Michael. Unaccountably, he felt as if he would never see them again. A child leaves a strong presence in a place—he would have had to scrub the floors down to bare wood, replacing planks and borders showing the obvious scuffing of small shoes and roller skates and the impact of thrown toys, to cover the walls and replace furniture, and still there’d be the occasional piece of a toy he’d overlooked, the green soldier dropped down a radiator grating or the marble rolling suddenly out of a closet.