“You killed us all off. The road won’t get finished,” I said.
“The work doesn’t matter,” he said, but his tone was odd, like he was smiling when he said it.
“Was this better than being awake for her?” I was angry. You can’t stay scared forever. For a while I was petrified. He killed up and down the line. I saw death administered hundreds of ways, then, after the uppers incident, I got numb, like death was anything else that happened. It was no different than going to the bowling alley. But now I was mad.
“Of course.”
“She’s dead.”
“That’s true,” he said.
“So how’s that better?” I dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow. Her arms flopped across her chest. He pushed his burnt leather face up to mine, but I didn’t back up. We locked eyes, his watery blue ones with my muddy browns.
“Before, she was always going to die. Here, she had a chance.” His breath washed on my chest. I thought about jumping him—he didn’t carry a weapon today—but I had seen him attacked before, two times. They both died horribly, slowly, in a great deal of pain.
“What chance!” I yelled. It was so stupid. He would kill me, and that would be that.
“The same chance you had, which was better than what you use to have over there in your waking life.”
“What?”
He sat down on a boulder the size of an office desk and crossed his legs under him.
“What do you think life’s about?” he said to me, suddenly angry. “Have you thought for a second what you do anything for?”
I tried to think, but I was too mad. I couldn’t figure what he was getting at, and I wanted to kill him. I’d never have another chance. What did I have to lose? I bunched my fist and slammed it into his throat.
It was like hitting polished marble, like punching a statue. He waited until I quit grimacing. My knuckles should have all been broken, but they weren’t. The skin wasn’t even bruised.
“Don’t you get it?” he said. “I can’t die, and that’s why she’s lucky and so are you.”
I must have looked stupid. “Huh?” I said.
“Nobody used to live,” he said. “You know, it was inevitable. Everybody died. One-hundred percent. But it’s different now. Things have changed here.”
I looked around. Behind him the gray desert hills mounded one on another. Behind me, the incomplete road reached into the swamp like a dock. “Where’s here?” I said.
He shrugged. “All places are the same place. Heaven, I guess, if you want a word. But you’re in it all the time, sleeping or awake.” He put his hand on his leg, fingers wrapped around something. “Only now, not everyone will die. We get to choose a survivor.”
Maybe it was his calmness about our conversation. Maybe I just didn’t have any anger left, but all of the sudden I just felt empty. Everybody in the dream but me was dead. I said, “Before, no matter what I did, I was going to die anyway.” It was more a statement than a question.
“In the end.”
“And now I’m not going to, ever?”
He opened his hand and held it out to me. It was, naturally, the black bordered patch with the gray background. In the middle, in black, 1/1,000.
“No, never.”
He walked away, into the desert, and from the other direction I heard feet marching, a thousand sets of feet. I pinned the patch to my shoulder and waited for the troops.
ROCK HOUSE
From the highway where I parked my car, to the door of Rick’s house, my school-years friend, I climbed a mile of twisting, scrub oak-lined, tree-shrouded path that looked more and more to my satisfaction like an animal track the farther from the highway I traveled. Every foot into the late spring woods was a foot farther from everything else. When the sound of the last diesel truck faded in the leafy rustle, it was as if I had stepped back in time. Tree bark grew rougher, with gaps wide enough to slide my hand into. Roots crossed the trail like great, vegetable veins, and when I stopped the third time to recheck his instructions in the letter I’d received the week earlier, something large and ponderous crushed through the underbrush just out of sight. I stood, my heart paralyzed, his letter fluttering in my fingers, until the heavy snap of branches vanished in the distance and an unafraid mountain jay lighted on a rock near the trail to look me over.
Despite everything, I almost turned around then, but I’d lugged my suitcase so far already.
Rick’s eccentricities drove him to excess when he was young. He’d been a bookish, pale shadow in college. So had his sister, Lynn, but I’d been a reader too, and we’d found camaraderie in our novels, swapping books, discussing imaginary lives between classes. They were trust fund kids, unbound by finances, and their worries were not the world’s worries. By my junior year, I’d fallen in love a little bit with them both, but we didn’t have any classes together my senior year. Lynn grew increasingly quiet and absent in the way pale girls can, and Rick started haunting used bookstores for rare editions, expensive leather-bound volumes with cut edges and sewn in bookmarks. I remember the second to last time we talked. He put an old book with an indecipherable title on the table beside him, which, in idleness, I picked up. He snatched it from my hands, his cheeks suddenly red, like blood under the snow, and I saw in his eyes a rage that frightened me. The next day, he tried to apologize, but all I saw was the rage. His skin became a furnace with it, baking me. We never spoke again, but I passed him or Lynn on the quad every once in a while, and I mourned the darkness in their eyes, the burnished silk of their hair. Few people know books. Few like to talk about them.
So we drifted fifteen years apart, until his letter importuning me to visit, to see the “strange edifice of my rock house home,” as he put it, to “salve his maladies and afflictions.” As misfortune would have it then, time lay heavy on my hands, and my office found me useless. Three weeks vacation and “more if you need it” became my prescription. A week in the mountains with my old friend, Rick, seemed like the best of the bad options. If there was a way to arrange it, I wouldn’t go back. Nothing in the world seemed worth the effort.
Two turns more up the tree-shrouded track, then I came to a small clearing in the woods, thigh-high with alpine grass and spring flowers. After the aged forest’s overhanging gloom, the sudden space should have lightened my spirits, but instead I felt a twinge of agoraphobia, as if the overwhelming branches held me to the Earth, and their disappearance marked the opening of a gate between me and a gray abyss. My stomach rose. I staggered a step before shaking the impression away. His letter said the clearing was his front porch, but it seemed like any other undisturbed forest space. Certainly nothing manmade marked the scene at first. I looked for a minute to find it. The mountain’s shoulder swelled at the clearing’s other side into a black limestone cliff shot through with bright mineral lines. At its base, cut into the stone, stood an entrance, tall and pointed like a medieval cathedral’s, and when I drew close, the grass tips brushing against my fingertips, I saw that the door was stone too with a stone knocker in the center. Grotesque carvings lined the recessed archway, hideous heads no bigger than my fist, all caught in mid grimace, tiny mouths filled with cat teeth and sharp tongues. Human faces, just barely. I smiled at the sight. Rick lived on a better Earth, a literary one, and where I’d failed in my bookish dreams, he’d clearly pressed on.
I used the knocker, the sound no louder than a pebble tapped against a boulder, but a few seconds later, the door drew back.