Some people from the area instituted an all-night patrol a while back, attempting to be more vigilant than the heavens themselves, but it didn’t last. Too few folks participated. The patrollers got exhausted and started falling asleep on people’s porch swings and in cars that were left open.
Someone else, a retired high school physics teacher, calculated a radius beyond which no one would be chosen. But then someone was. It happened barely outside the range he’d defined, as if to teach him a lesson. It was the furniture shop owner that time — his cottage found roofless and purified, not even his walking stick left behind. Some people said the physics teacher was responsible, that whatever was happening to the furniture shop owner, good or bad, in some unfathomable dimension, was the physics teacher’s doing. Maybe the furniture shop owner was being tortured. Then again maybe his limp was healed and he was drinking something cool in the shade. That’s why the TV channels lost interest, my father says — because they couldn’t prove anyone was suffering. He says when you get to the front of the traffic jam you want to be rewarded with stretchers and ambulances.
The furniture shop is still here, on the edge of our area, looking like a museum exhibit, the furniture inside growing antique.
The county police call it an ongoing situation, rather than a case. If not versed in the impossible, they’re at least practiced in the unsolved. Even folks who hold cops in the lowest regard agree that they’ve been graceful. The first couple times they swooped out in a fleet of lit cruisers and dusted every surface and put samples in zipper bags and stood around with coffee all day, keeping the reporters behind an orange ribbon. But they’ve wised up. Now they send a single deputy to do whatever paperwork is unavoidable. Sometimes the cops wait until the next night to sneak someone over — in part, I imagine, because they have comprehensible problems to battle, and in part because they don’t want to be asked if they’ve made any progress.
I walk out of the corner store where they sell used books and homemade ice cream, and a man sitting on a bench speaks to me. I don’t recognize him at first because he’s wearing khaki clothes and a floppy hat. It’s the investigator, the one sent by the rich Protestants. He asks me about fishing, about where to get gear and bait and a permit, and I tell him we don’t believe in permits around here.
“Have you decided anything?” I ask him.
He removes his hat. Now he looks exactly like himself.
“In fact, I have. I’ve decided nothing noteworthy is afoot, nothing worthy of further investigation. I think I’ll report insufficient findings. I’m going to recommend this area be left the hell alone. Close this baby up, as we say.”
I don’t know whether to be glad about his answer. There’s a part of me that feels slighted. The investigator looks deeply unconcerned.
“So you’re going back to Canada and you’re going to lie,” I venture.
His face doesn’t change but I can tell he likes me. Old people always like me. “I’m going to fib all right, but I’m not going back up there. I’m staying. The natives are going to be even more outnumbered than they are now.”
“You’re going to live here, just like that?”
“Well, I’m retiring. When people retire, they head south.”
“Yeah, but there are places more south than this,” I say. “Places that don’t have… what we have going on.”
“Exactly,” he says.
We’re under a few massive old pecan trees, birds flitting branch to branch above us. It’s the middle of the day but it’s dim here in the shade.
“Isn’t it against all religions to lie?” I say.
“First of all, there’s a lot of gray area in my line of work, religion or no. Second of all, yes, it is.”
“If you were Catholic, you could lie and then go to confession and admit it and it’s like it never happened.”
The investigator shifts on the bench. He’s not going to stand anytime soon. He’s probably not going fishing. He’s going to be one of us.
“I’m a native,” I tell him.
I watch him nod appreciatively. “I know it. And natives like you speak well of a place.”
“I think confessing sounds fun,” I admit. “You go in that wooden booth and nobody knows it’s you.”
“Somebody always knows it’s you,” says the investigator. “Someone’s always totting your omissions.”
That night my parents head over to one of the towns to see a movie, an old-fashioned date sort of thing. I practice juggling for about an hour in my room, a skill I’ve been trying to pick up. Then I listen to music in the parlor for a while, a subdued jazz record my father is partial to, but I can’t get sleepy. I go to the kitchen for a glass of milk, but instead I find myself rummaging in the drawers for the spare key to my father’s studio.
It’s a flimsy key, not full size, like a key for a file cabinet or something. I find it in a junk drawer underneath a calculator and a tape measure, and then I slip out the back and walk across our shadowy little yard and fit the key into the doorknob. There’s a palm tree growing right in front of the studio, leaning down over the entrance. When I open the door it shushes against the hanging fronds, and there’s the shush again when I close it behind me.
I’ve been in my father’s studio many times, but not lately. I know there’s a pull cord for the light, and I grope around above me until I find it. With the place lit up, I can see that everything is the same as I remember. The walls are bare white. There’s a case of mineral water under the drafting table, pencil shavings scattered around on the concrete floor. The air smells like things heated, things overused — hot glass and leather and stale coffee.
On the table is the book of all my father’s sketches. There must be a thousand of them, in clear plastic sheets. On the page that’s showing there’s a three-dimensional drawing of a clock tower. One wall of the tower is filled in — with irregular, soft-looking bricks — but the others seem like they’re transparent, so you can see that inside the tower, on the floor, is a pile of heavy chain. I look closer and there are cuffs attached to the chain, like to hold a person prisoner in a fairy tale. The clock has numerals but no hands. I turn to the next sketch and it’s the same drawing. There are small alterations — the size of the clock face, the shape of the bricks. Next page, the same thing again, but now the tower is stouter and instead of a pile of chain there’s only the cuffs, moored directly to the wall.
The studio is shaped like an L. I still my breathing and listen for a car out on the road. When I hear nothing, I go down around the corner, and what I see, arranged on a pallet of plywood, are a dozen identical metal eggs. They’re about two feet tall. They’re not eggs, though — they’re shaped more like tears, or a moon that’s begun to melt. They’re fashioned of a dull-colored metal. I step closer and see that they all have little holes punched into them, companies of tiny sharp punctures gathered around the tops. The moons, or the tears or whatever, are hollow. I put my hand on one and it moves easily, so I pick it up to assess it in my palms.
There’s a candle underneath. Now I see. There’s a candle under each one. I put the one I’m holding back where it was and look around for matches, which I find handy on an otherwise empty shelf. Big camping matches.
I get the candles burning, one and then the next and then the next. I pull the cord for the light, and when I come back around the corner I see, there on a screen my father has tacked to the ceiling, a host of wide-open eyes staring down at me, incurious and knowing at once.