A steel cooler-shaped box thrummed, the sound of a strained motor on a drill. Two glass insulators grew out of its lid, like antennae from a black and white Frankenstein movie.
Next, she heard the sound of an old steam engine.
“This is the pumping heart of my workshop,” he yelled over the noise. “We must incinerate and suck out all impurities before the noble gas is injected.”
High current passed through the tube. Illumination was instant, but anemic, pale. Gradually, color seeped in, its cool glow warming to red in stages.
“Neon is a dying art, Kristine. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be creating words and images. But each time I prepare to pack up and leave, a job or two trickles in.”
He turned the pumping off, and in the sudden void of that rhythmic pulse, the radio station swept back through the air with the moaning of a tortured sea. Violins surged, their tempo that of blinding strikes of lightning.
Kris felt his hot breath on the back of her neck. She peeled off her cardigan, which had dark sweat stains on the underarms, and wondered if he could see the beads she felt forming on her back, above the dip of her tank top.
“Let’s take a break,” he said, “and cool off. The swimming hole is nearby. It will be refreshing, no?”
“I—I don’t have a suit.”
“Darkness will cover you.” He opened the screen to see outside. Fog swathed Vegas Vic and smothered the reach of his light, actually swallowed and internalized the light, as if the fog were a lead apron. “Clouds have rolled in. Our night is perfectly starless.”
In the abandon of darkness, Kris had no sense of the cliff’s edge, until there was no more earth under her feet. For a sliver of time, they hung suspended, midair. Then, her outside arm flapped in tiny circles, her stomach dipped, and, hands still interlaced, they dropped through thirty feet of nothing. A prolonged yell, part exuberant, part terrified, escaped her and rang out to the treetops. Then a cold, hard splash. There was barely time to close her mouth before the water engulfed her, then curbed the freefall, like a net below a tightrope. They paddled up and bobbed. Kris pushed the clinging hair back from her face and unleashed a whoop, long and piercing, which curved into a kind of throaty grunt, the kind a javelin thrower releases as she takes her delivery step and transfers her momentum into the spear, her body a whip from toe to arm.
Veins of lightning throbbed above them, followed by a crack like a splitting tree. She clasped his neck, and entwining their ghostly, weightless legs, she grazed his jaw with shivering lips. The smell of him was masked by the film of water cellophaning his skin.
Holding their shoes and exhaling the last tendrils of adrenaline, they dressed and walked to his van, an arm slung casually around the other’s waist. Ahead of them, a man was walking. For a sinking moment Kris wondered if it was possible, somehow, that Wit had followed her.
Don’t be ridiculous, she thought, and shook her head. Farfetched, even for me.
A fat rain drop stung her shoulder, then another, until they heard plunks smashing to the ground in all directions, slow at first, and gaining speed, as does a train pulling of its station.
In the shadows of the little shop, by the red light of the bar signs and flames of orange and blue, they faced each other, dripping puddles at their feet. Kris stripped his sopping shirt from him, tearing it at the collar. Neither one blinked, not even when she kissed him, or when she pushed him back onto the loveseat and straddled him, unbuckling his jeans with one hand, and skimming her free fingers over and inside his mouth. They stayed that way for two nights and a day, she waking him whenever the hunger washed over her again, until the rains gushing onto the roof finally relented to a steady drum track, looping and isolated.
When Kris stopped at the gas station on her way home, her head was swimming with a long-forgotten sensation, of discovering herself in another, of going all-in, the idea that if she stepped into the void, an answer in a form she never expected would be waiting for her.
The convenience store was empty aside from a toothless cashier, who spat a squirt of tobacco into his spittoon, fashioned from a Styrofoam cup, ragged and stained, and lined with leaves from days-old chew. Squirt-plunk, went the brown sludge.
“Good Lord willin’, the worst is over. Best we can hope for, now.”
Kris sprinted from the driveway, into the house. Wit wasn’t in there. No surprise. He was probably back in the barn, she thought. But when she squinted out the window, past a fresh burst of rain, she saw the barn was gone.
In the end, the river rose a record eleven feet. There was flash flooding everywhere. As the sky dumped an endless stream, floodwaters were strong enough to derail a freight train, lift cars and force animals into trees. People paddled in boats on streets underwater. On the sixth morning they awoke to find the sun illuminating the Neches River, and dozens of caskets drifting downstream. The dead had been disturbed, disinterred from their plots, coffins gently bumping each other—a jumble of corpses, coasting with the steady pull of nature, the formaldehyde used in the embalming process leaching into the soil, into the river, a bright greenish oil forming a skin on the river’s surface, a potion of formaldehyde and melted flesh. As temperatures rose, the odor entwined with the sulfur.
Dozens of volunteers showed up to sort the bodies, with Kris among them. They were given cloth respiratory masks as they waded out into the slime, to heave coffins onto shore. It wasn’t until mid-morning that a child-sized body came floating at them, facedown, about fifty feet up-stream from where Kris was positioned. Those around her stopped what they were doing. They held their breath.
The child’s Medusa hair snaked out, and, in the contaminated water, each strand had the green and purple hue of a snakelocks anemone, its tentacles tapering, flexuous, and rippling gracefully in the current. Following that one, there was another, and another, until a tangled sea of girls, soiled, lifeless, wooden, all of them the same size and shape, appeared, lashed together with fabric and debris, and conjoined at the limbs like a mass of defective births, in one, long raft, bobbing languidly, high to low, and up again, from around the river’s bend toward the frozen onlookers, and joining the coffins in their lurid parade, a drifting canvas of gray earth tones, blacks and browns, a dark vision welling up, unchecked, blotting out the light and spilling its ink out into the poisoned waters.
From the peculiar vessel’s center rose an obtuse pyramid built from dismembered parts, a contortion of limbs, torsos, mouths and eyes, its capstone a half-sitting girl, straining upward in salvific longing and desperation, a shredded blouse sleeve flapping from her outstretched arm, like a flag hoisted in truce on its mast.
The dolls’ faces were vacant, emotionless, their sideways eyes neither tormented nor satiated, painted lips pressed against navels and buttocks and necks, their unclothed places teetering between nudity and the innocent nakedness of children.
As it neared, the raft seemed to extend outward, into Kris, drawing and engaging her as a participant in the wooden contraption that seemed on the verge of fracturing apart.
She stood shuddering. A figure—a man with a charred-looking face— rested along the rear of this deranged pageant boat, pulled along by his head and shoulders, floating carefree as a monarch whose kingdom has been threatened, or an ant colony’s queen in a flood, her majesty kept safe by her larval ant brood.
At first, the man looked like a massive, polyurethane balloon character. His inflated thighs and bloated arms trailed in the water, bulging with unnatural strength. His blackened head twisted, confronting Kris, beckoning her with his open, putrefied palm, his stretched arm exposing a triangular gaping wound beneath his ribs, the blood-tinged froth about his nose and mouth taunting her, his eyeballs protruding in their sockets, between his teeth, the heel of a headless doll.