Errantry: Strange Stories (39 page)

TYRANNOSAURUS REX

PROPHETS SEERS AND SAGES

THE ANGELS OF THE AGES

“Is that T. Rex?”

He grinned. “I always,
always
wanted this album. I could never find it.”

“You could probably find it now on eBay.”

“I never wanted it that much.” He laughed. “Actually, I totally forgot I wanted it, till now.”

I took the cardboard sleeve. It was damp and smelled of mildew; black mold covered Marc Bolan’s face and cape. When I tried to look inside, the soft cardboard tore.

I handed it back to Angus. “Is it worth anything?”

“Not anymore.” He glanced at it then shrugged. “Nah, it’s toast. It doesn’t even have the record inside.”

“I bet it’s been rereleased. You should get it, it might give you and Tommy some ideas for Estelle.”

Angus grimaced. “Trust me, Tommy doesn’t need any more ideas about goddamn Estelle.”

The song cycle had been my idea. “You’re like a troubadour, Tommy,” I had told him back when his obsession with the broker had spun completely out of control. “Their whole thing revolved around idealized unrequited love. You would have fit right in.”

“Did their whole thing revolve around stalking women at Best Buy?” I remember Angus asked.

“That was an accident,” said Tommy. “A total coincidence, she even admitted it.”

“Did the troubadors ever get laid?” said Angus. “Because that would clinch the deal for me.”

“I think you should channel all this into something constructive,” I suggested. “Music, you guys haven’t written anything together for a while.”

The first songs Tommy wrote all used the woman’s real name.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Tommy,” I’d said when he played me the CD he’d burned from his computer. “Considering the restraining order and all.”

“But I love her name.” He had appeared genuinely distressed. “It’s part of her, it’s an extension of her, of everything she is—”

“You don’t have a clue as to who she fucking is!” Angus grabbed the CD. “You went out with her once before she dumped you. It was like you dated a blow-up doll.”

“She didn’t dump me!”

“You’re right—you were never involved enough to
be
dumped. You were downsized, Tommy. Admit it and get over it. Lot of fish in the sea, Tom.”

Tommy got over it, sort of. In the song, he changed the woman’s name to Estelle, at any rate.

It remained a sore point with Angus. He turned and skimmed the album cover towards the lake. I walked to join Tommy on the cabin’s front steps.

I asked, “What’re you doing?

“Mail tampering.”

A stoved-in mailbox dangled beside the door. I watched as Tommy prised it open, fished around inside and withdrew a wad of moldering letters, junk mail, mostly. He peeled oversized envelopes away from sales flyers, releasing a fetid smell, finally held up an envelope with the familiar ConEd logo.

“It’s a cut-off notice,” he said in triumph. Angus had wandered back and looked at him dubiously. “It’s got his name on it. Orson Shemeltoss.”

“Orson Shemeltoss? What the hell kind of name is that?”

Tommy ignored him. The wind sent the screen door swinging; he pushed it away, then knocked loudly on the front door. “Mr. Shemeltoss? Hello? Mr. Shemeltoss?”

Silence. Angus looked at me. We both started to laugh.

“Hey, shut up,” said Tommy.

Angus pushed him aside, cracked the door open and yelled.

“Yo, Orson! Tommy’s here.”

Tommy swore, but Angus had already stepped inside.

“It’s okay.” I patted Tommy’s shoulder. “You’re sure this is his place, right? So he’s expecting you.”

“I guess,” said Tommy.

He pushed the door open and went after Angus. I followed, almost immediately drew up short. “Holy shit.”

The room—and what was it, anyway? Living room? hallway? foyer?—I couldn’t tell, but it was so crammed with junk that walking was nearly impossible. It was like wading across a sandbar at high tide, through stacks of newspaper and magazines and books that once had towered above my head but had now collapsed to form a waist-high reef of paper. Things shifted underfoot as I moved, and when I tried to clamber on top of a stack it wobbled then flew apart in a storm of white and gray.

“Vivian, over here!”

I pushed myself up, coughing as I breathed in paper dust and mold. A dog barked, close enough that I looked around anxiously.

But I saw no sign of a dog, or Tommy; only Angus standing a few feet away, surrounded by overflowing bookshelves.

“It’s better over here.” He reached across a mound of magazines to grab my hand, and pulled me towards him. “C’mon, thatta girl—”

“It’s like the print shop exploded,” I said, still coughing. The smell of mold was so strong it burned my nostrils.

“It’s a lot worse than that.” Angus stared in disbelief. “This guy has some issues about letting go.”

Everywhere around us was—stuff. Junk mail and books and magazines, mostly, also a lot of photos—snapshots, old Polaroids—but other things, too. Board games, Bratz dolls, stuffed animals; oddments of clothing, stiletto heels and lingerie and studded collars; eight-track tapes and a battered saxophone, all protruding from the morass of paper like the detritus left by a receding flood. Vinyl record albums filled a wall of buckled metal shelving. Here and there I could discern bits of furniture—the uppermost rungs of a ladderback chair, a headboard.

And, scattered everywhere, the eerie paper figures that were the Folding Man’s handiwork. I dropped Angus’s hand and picked up one of them, a horned creature made of aluminum foil. Inexplicably, and despite the pervasive smell of mildew, my mouth began to water. It was only after I unfolded the little form that I saw the Arby’s logo printed on it.

“Where’s Tommy?” I asked.

“I dunno.”

Angus turned and began to push his way to the far side of the room. I tossed the bit of foil and grabbed another figure—there were hundreds of them, thousands maybe, so many it was impossible not to think of them as somehow alive, burrowing up through those countless layers of junk.

I wondered if it was like an archeological dig, or geological strata: was there a Golden Age buried under there, before
People
magazine ruled the earth? If I reached the very bottom, would I find Little Nemo and the Katzenjammer Kids?

I doubted it. I could see nothing but junk. All the magazines seemed to be well-worn, and many were torn or missing their covers. The other stuff seemed to be ruined as well, toys cracked or broken or missing parts, clothes soiled or unraveling. The photos were ripped or water damaged, and a lot appeared to be charred or otherwise damaged by smoke or fire.

It was like the town dump, only worse—you could scavenge things from the dump. But it was difficult to imagine there was anything here worth saving, except for the thousands of origami-like figures. I picked one up. It was larger than most, big enough to cover my palm, plain white paper. It resembled a bird of some sort, a heron maybe, with tiny six-fingered hands instead of wings and a broad flattened bill like a shovel. Its eyes were wide and staring: an owl’s eyes, not a heron’s. I unfolded it and smoothed it out atop a heap of
National Geographics.
A missing flyer, the kind you see in post offices or police stations, with a black-and-white image of a teenage girl’s face photocopied from a high school portrait. Dark curly hair, freckles, dark eyes. Last seen May 14, 1982, Osceola, Wisconsin.

“Oh,” said Angus in a low voice.

I glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was leaning against a small bare patch of wall, turning the pages of a small red-bound book.

I picked my way carefully to his side. “What is it?”

“I used to read this to Corey when he was little.” He didn’t look up, just continued to turn the pages, stopping to pull them gently apart where they were stuck together. “Every night, it was the only thing he ever wanted to hear. He knew it by heart. I never knew what happened to it.”

I stood beside him and stared at a picture of a rabbit in a rocking chair, cats playing on a rug, a wall of bookshelves.

“It’s even missing the same page,” Angus said softly. His face twisted. He turned from me, reaching for his pocket. Tommy’s alarmed voice came from somwhere across the room.

“I wouldn’t light up in here!”

Angus frowned, then reluctantly nodded. “Yeah, right. Bad idea.”

I said nothing, and after a moment began to make my way unsteadily towards where Tommy’s voice had come from. A few times I almost fell, and tried to catch myself by instinctively grabbing at whatever was closest to me—handfuls of newspapers, an oversized Sears family photo in a shattered frame, the tip of an artificial Christmas tree.

But this only made it more difficult to move, as the stacks invariably tottered and fell, so that I found myself half-buried in the Folding Man’s junk. I thought of the advice given to hikers trapped in an avalanche—to surf through the snow or, if buried, to swim upwards, to the surface—and pushed back an unpleasant image of what else might be under these layers of mildewed paper and chewed-up toys.

The dog barked again, closer this time.

“Tommy? You see a dog somewhere?” I yelled, but got no reply.

I straightened and looked back. Angus had slumped to sit precariously on a sagging mound of papers, head bowed as he turned the pages of the little book back and forth, back and forth. I shut my eyes and ran my hand across piles of paper till I felt a paper figure, picked it up and opened my eyes. The squarish head of an animal, catlike, with a small snout and large eyes that, as I unfolded it and flattened it, faded into a ripped piece of paper with dark washes of green and brown and blue and red words beneath.

GOOD NIGHT BEARS

GOOD NIGHT CHAIRS

I dropped it and took a few painstaking steps in the direction of a door. I could hear faint scrabbling, and then Tommy exclaiming softly. I wondered if he’d found the dog. I stopped, listening.

I heard nothing. I glanced down and saw a white cylinder poking up between a copy of
Oui
magazine and what looked like the keyboard from an old typewriter. I pushed aside the typewriter, grabbed the cylinder and pulled it free: not a folded figure but a small poster rolled into a tube.

The edges were stuck together, and tore as I unrolled it. The once-glossy paper had been nibbled at by insects or mice, and was dusted with dull green spores that powdered the air when I held it up.

But towards the center the image was still clearly visible, vibrant even; and as recognizable to me as my own face.

It was a print of Uccello’s “The Hunt in the Forest.” The original hung in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. I had never seen it, but when I was nine I’d come across the picture in a children’s book about King Arthur and the Middle Ages. The painting actually dated to the Renaissance—the late 1460s—and it had nothing to do with Arthur, or England.

But for me it was inextricably tied up with everything I had ever dreamed or imagined about that world. A sense of immanence and urgency, of simple things—horses, dogs, people, grass—charged with an expectant, slightly sinister meaning I couldn’t grasp but still felt, even as a kid. The hunters in their crimson tunics astride their mounts and the horses rearing from turf whorled with white flowers, pale arabesques in a green carpet; the greyhounds springing joyously, heads thrown back and paws upraised as though partaking in some wild dance; the beaters—boys in tunics colored like Easter eggs, creamy yellow and pink and periwinkle blue—chased after the dogs. To the left of the painting, a single black-clad man—knight? lord? cleric?—rode a horse richly caparisoned as the rest. Dogs and horses and men and boys all ran in the same direction, towards the center of the painting where a half-dozen stags leapt, poised and improbable as the flattened targets in a shooting range.

And above everything, mysterious, columnar trees that opened into leafy parasols, like the carven pillars in a vast and endless cathedral, trees and hunters and animals finally receding into darkness as black and undifferentiated as the inside of a lacquered box.

I had not seen the image, or thought of it, in years. But it all came back to me now in a confused, almost fretful rush, like the memory of the sort of dream you have when sick.

“Vivian.” I started at the sound of Tommy’s voice, calling from inside the next room. “Viv—”

I dropped the poster and pushed my way to the open door. A narrow path led into the room, wide enough that I could pass without knocking anything over.

“Tommy?” I strained to see him over a mound of old clothes. “You okay?”

It must have been a bedroom once, though I saw no furniture, nothing but old clothes and shoes, wads of rolled-up belts like nested snakes.

But I could see the wall, close enough that I could almost touch it, with a closet door that hung loosely where one of its hinges had twisted from the sheetrock. Tommy was crouched beside the door. One hand was extended towards something on the floor inside the closet; the other was pressed against his cheek as he shook his head and murmured wordlessly.