Everything You Need: Short Stories (18 page)

‘”Unreliable narrator”? What the hell is that?’

‘It’s a literary term. Not sure how I know it, given that I used to be a cop, but...’

The guy looked nervous. ‘You’re a
cop
?’

‘No.
Ex
-cop. That way he could short-hand me as a tough guy with certain skill sets and a troubled past, without having to do much actual research, or getting stuck with writing a police procedural.’

‘That’s a relief. My character’s not a very nice guy, I don’t think. There’s a pervading sense of guilt throughout, though it’s never clear what for.’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’m not going to arrest you, even if I still could. Come on. Let’s go.’

I stood, and waited for him to follow suit.

‘I just don’t think I can, dude,’ he muttered, looking wretched. ‘I look out that window and all I see is two-dimensional.’

We turned and looked together. The light outside was beginning to fade. ‘Barely even that,’ he said. ‘It’s just two sentences, to me. “It was cold and grey and flat outside”. And “A couple of leaves zigzagged slowly down from the tree along the sidewalk, falling brown and gold and dead”. That’s it.’

‘Look,’ I said, pointing. Two leaves were doing just what he’d said, and it
did
look cold out there, and the light was grey and flat.

‘Every day,’ he said. ‘Every day they do that.’

‘So evidently what happens out there
is
your domain, at least to a degree. You could—’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t do it. I’m sorry.’

I felt bad for him, and realized how lucky I was. ‘I’ll come back,’ I said. ‘I have to keep looking, but I will come back.’

‘Really?’

‘Sure. I know where you live, right? And you’re in this new story now, too. That’s something, at least. You branched out. You’re recurring.’

‘Yeah, I guess. Though I’m still stuck in the same place.’

‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’

‘Okay,’ he said, shyly. ‘That... that would be cool.’

We shook hands. ‘The name’s John.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘So’s mine.’

I laughed. ‘Guess we were never supposed to wind up on the same pages. Never mind. We’ll cope. I’m going to find the guy, and when I do, we’ll talk.’

‘Good luck,’ he smiled.

I felt jealous. I’d never been allowed to do that. I have to
say
things, or
ask
them. Shout them, once in a while. I can’t ‘smile’ them. There’s tougher editing on the novels than with the short stories, I guess, or a more restrictive house style. Though... right now I was
in
a short, wasn’t I?

‘Thanks,’ I smiled, and took off my coat. ‘Here.’

‘Don’t you need it?’

‘I’ve got an apartment. There are closets. I’ve never looked inside, but there must be something. Worst case I can put on a sweater or another shirt.’

‘Thanks, man.’

When I got to the door I heard him wish me luck again. I turned back and winked.

‘Thanks. And keep the faith, my friend.’

W
hen I stepped
outside onto the sidewalk, however, everything changed. I knew right away that a decision had been made. It’s happened to me before. I stroll aimlessly through a chapter, with lots of thinking and not much doing, and then suddenly there’s a blank line break and the next event arrives.

I noticed a man on the other side of the street. He was wandering along, slowly, aimlessly, smoking a cigarette. He glanced across at the Starbucks I’d just left and I could see him wondering if he could face yet another coffee. There wasn’t so much traffic, but what there was, was moving fast enough that he’d have to go back to the corner to cross. It was enough to make him decide it wasn’t worth it.

I’d never seen the man before, but I knew who he was. I knew I’d found him.

I thought it again, for emphasis.

I knew
.

He looked a little like me and also a little like the guy I’d just left in the Starbucks, the other John. A bit shorter, and a little older, with a touch of grey in the temples. Less distinctive overall. He looked tired, too. Jet-lagged, was my guess. Come over from London for a meeting with his publisher and some research, doggedly using his first day in the city to walk the streets. Not for him, I knew, the hours of reading or scanning the Internet or using Google Streetview™. He liked to do his research with his feet, wanted to get to know the city through the miles he moved through it.

Suddenly I realized what this could mean.

The writer
could
merely be reminding himself of these streets for the sake of it, because that’s what he always did and it was better than lurking in his hotel room. Or it could merely wind up as background in another short story.

But... it
could
also be that there was a sequel in the works. A sequel to my book.

He could be
considering
doing it, at least. He didn’t normally. He usually came up with a new bunch of characters for each book, which was why we ended up in such fixed and limited worlds, without a future. But maybe he was clueing in to the fact that many readers don’t
want
to sit through the wheel being reinvented each time, but would prefer to settle back into a recurring set of characters like a comfortable old chair.

The more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. I’d always felt that there were elements in my story that hadn’t been tied up as satisfyingly as they could have. I’d been left on a cautiously upbeat note, but there was a lot more to be said.

Maybe he was going to do it.

Maybe there was going to be more.

I felt myself smiling. Meanwhile the writer ground to a halt, looking up and down the street. I saw his eyes lighting on this and that — store fronts, fire escapes, passers by — absorbing everything without noticing, passing it down to the part of his mind that stored these snippets of local color for later use.

I turned away, not wanting him to see my face. When I’d left the apartment that morning, a meeting had been exactly what I wanted. Now I didn’t. I didn’t want to run the risk of derailing him. I wanted whatever was going through his head to run its course, just in case there was a chance that I was right.

I heard a noise behind me.

I turned to see the guy from the Starbucks, the other John. He was standing in the doorway of the coffee shop, and the sound he’d made was a grunt of disbelief.

He’d done it. He’d tried the door, and opened it.

He stepped cautiously out onto the sidewalk. ‘Holy crap, John,’ he said, seeing me. ‘Look!’

‘You
did
it, man.’

The joy I felt was partly for him, but mainly for myself. He’d come out because of me, after all. I’d met him and I’d
changed
things. If that much was possible, then maybe everything else was too. Perhaps the writer was considering a sequel precisely because I’d started to prove myself capable of independent movement, worthy of further development.

Maybe I was even going to be a series
.

The other John was staring around in wonder. He took a couple of steps up the sidewalk. He turned and looked back the other way. Another pair of leaves came zigzagging gently down from the tree, falling brown and golden.

He reached out and grabbed one, crumpling it in his hands. ‘I did that,’ he shouted. ‘I
did
that!’

‘Way to go,’ I said.

He waved his hands in the air triumphantly, still shouting. He was making a lot of noise now. Enough that it reached across the street, evidently...

... because at that moment, the writer looked up.

He saw John, of course. John was the guy making all the noise, dancing around on the sidewalk, brandishing a crushed leaf in his hand.

The writer frowned, cigarette halfway to his mouth, as though something about John struck him, but he wasn’t sure what. It could be that he was merely wondering if he could use the guy in something, not realizing that he already had.

But then his eyes skated past John, and landed on me. And he froze.

He knew who I was.

He was bound to, I guess. I’d recognized
him
immediately, after all, and he’d spent nearly a year with me inside his head, every day, every working hour. Could be that he’d already been thinking about me, too, moments before, if he genuinely was considering pulling me out of the backlist for another turn in the light, as I hoped.

He kept on looking at me. He blinked.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You’re Michael, right?’

He started to back away up the street.

I was confused — this was the last thing I’d expected — but then I realized. He was scared. I’d assumed he’d understand how things work, but maybe not. I guess these guys just put down the words and chase their deadlines, not realizing what comes to life between the sentences that come out of their heads in torrents or fits and starts.

He thought he was losing his mind.

‘No, it’s okay,’ I said, hurrying up my side of the street, trying to catch up with him. There were too many people and so I darted across the road instead.

‘Go away,’ he said, between clenched teeth, hurrying backwards as I got closer. His eyes were wide. ‘Go
away
.’

‘It’s
okay
,’ I said, trying to sound soothing. ‘I got no problem with you. Not any more. I... I think I know why you’re here. And that’s cool. It’s
great
, in fact. I don’t want to freak you out. I just wanted to say ‘hi’, and, you know, wish you good luck.’

‘You are
not
real,’ he hissed, and kept backing away — but he realized he was right up against a crossroads, and had to stop. ‘I am
very
tired, that’s all.’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘That’s all it is. And I just happen to look a little like a guy you wrote. Look, we’ll go our separate ways. It’s the way it should be. But let’s at least shake hands, okay? No hard feelings. And, you know, obviously I love your work.’

I raised my right hand. His eyes got wider still.

I realized my hand felt cold and heavy, and when I glanced down at it I remembered that actually, I
had
found my gun before I left the apartment. It seemed like he was prepared to go down the unreliable narrator route after all. I tried to throw it away, to prove I was harmless, but it wouldn’t leave my hand.

‘Michael,’ I said, trying to sound reassuring. ‘It’s okay. You know me — I’m not a killer. I’m basically a good person. More sinned against than sinning, like all your protagonists. Just ignore the gun, okay?’

But he’d started to back away again, so scared now that he’d forgotten where he was standing, and he stepped back into the road and lost his balance and a cab came around the corner and smacked straight into him.

I
haven’t been back
to the Starbucks in Soho. I said I would, and I will, but I haven’t yet. I don’t know what to say to John. I don’t know how to explain what happened. I don’t want to have to describe how it felt to look down at the writer’s head on the street, with all the blood leaking out of it, or to watch his eyes as they went from clear to glassy to frosted. I don’t want to admit to the fact that I was the author of that event.

I also don’t want to see John yet because afterwards I tracked down one of the writer’s story collections. I found it in the discount section in a Borders. Borders may be history in the real world — more’s the pity — but my novel was set back in 2006, so for me they’re still around. I found the short story John’s in, and I read it. It’s pretty good, but it’s kind of spooky and heads toward a dark, bad conclusion. I don’t want to have to explain to John that he dies in the end after all, or why that may be better than being me.

Because... I do not.

I do not die. I walk these streets and these pages forever, and there will never be a sequel now.

I should have just stuck to my arc, to my own story, been satisfied with what I had. Now I’m trapped in this dead end.

Down at the bottom of this chunk of words.

It doesn’t even end properly.

It fades to white.

It just stops.

A
imless
. A short, simple word. It means ‘without aim’, where ‘aim’ derives from the notion of calculation with a view to action. Lacking purpose or direction, therefore, without a considered goal. People mainly use the word in a blunt, softened fashion. They walk ‘aimlessly’ down the street, unsure whether to have a coffee or check out the new magazines in the bookstore or maybe sit on that bench and watch the world go by. It’s not a big deal, this form of aimlessness. It’s a temporary state and often comes with a side order of ease. An hour without something hanging over you, time spent with no great duty to do or achieve anything in particular? In this world of busy lives and do-this and do-that, that sounds pretty good.

But being wholly without purpose, with no direction home? That’s not such a good deal. Being truly aimless is like being dead. It may even be the same thing, or worse. It is the aimless who find the wrong roads, and drive down them, simply because they have nowhere else to go.

M
iller usually found
himself driving on Saturday afternoons. He could make the morning go away by staying in bed an extra half hour, tidying away stray emails, spending time on the deck, looking out over the forest with a magazine or the iPad and a succession of coffees. He made the coffees in a machine that sat on the kitchen counter and cost nearly eight hundred dollars. It made a very good cup of coffee. It should. It had cost nearly eight hundred dollars.

By noon a combination of caffeine and other factors would mean he wasn’t very hungry. He would go back indoors nonetheless, and put together a plate from the fridge. The ingredients would be things he’d gathered from delis up in San Francisco during the week or else from the New Leaf markets in Santa Cruz or Felton as he returned home on Friday afternoon. The idea was this would constitute a treat, and remind him of the good things in life. That was the idea. He would also pour some juice into one of the only two glasses in the cabinet that got any use. The other was his scotch glass, the one with the faded white logo on it, but this only came out in the evenings. He was very firm about that.

He would bring the plate and glass back out and eat at the table which stood further along the deck from the chair in which he’d spent most of the morning. By then the sun would have moved around, and the table got shade, which he preferred when he was eating. The change in position was also supposed to make it feel like he was doing something different to what he’d done all morning, though it did not, especially. He was still a man sitting in silence on a raised deck, within view of many trees, eating expensive foods that tasted like cardboard.

Afterward he took the plate back indoors and washed it in the sink. He had a dishwasher, naturally. Dishwashers are there to save time. He washed the plate and silverware by hand, watching the water swirl away and then drying everything and putting it to one side. He was down a wife, and a child, now living three hundred miles away. He was short on women and children, therefore, but in their place, from the hollows they had left behind, he had time. Time crawled in an endless parade of minutes from between those cracks, arriving like an army of little black ants, crawling up over his skin, up his face, and into his mouth, ears, and eyes.

So why not wash the plate. And the knife, and the fork, and the glass. Hold back the ants, for a few minutes at least.

H
e never left
the house with a goal. On those afternoons he was, truly, aimless. From where the house stood, high in the Santa Cruz mountains, he could have reached a number of diverting places within an hour or two. San Jose. Saratoga. Los Gatos. Santa Cruz itself, then south to Monterey, Carmel and Big Sur. Even way down to Los Angeles, if he felt like making a weekend of it.

And then what?

Instead he simply drove.

There are only so many major routes you can take through the area’s mountains and redwood forests. Highways 17 and 9, or the road out over to Bonny Doon, Route 1 north or south. Of these, 17 is the one of any real size. In between the main thoroughfares, however, there are other options. Roads that don’t do much except connect one minor two–lane highway to another. Roads that used to count for something before modern alternatives came along to supplant or supersede or negate them.

Side roads, old roads, forgotten roads.

Usually there wasn’t much to see down them. Stretches of forest, maybe a stream, eventually a house, well back from the road. Rural, mountainous backwoods where the tree and poison oak reigned supreme. Chains across tracks which led down or up into the woods, some gentle inclines, others pretty steep, meandering off toward some house which stood even further from the through-lines, back in a twenty- or fifty-acre lot. Every now and then you’d pass one of the area’s few tourist traps, like the Mystery Spot, an old-fashioned affair which claimed to honor a site of Unfathomable Weirdness but in fact paid cheerful homage to geometry, and to man’s willingness to be deceived.

He’d seen all of these long ago. The local attractions with his wife and child, the shadowed roads and tracks on his own solitary excursions over the last few months. At least, you might have thought he would have seen them all. Every Saturday he drove, however, and every time he found a road he had never seen before.

T
oday the road
was off Branciforte Drive, the long, old highway which heads off through largely uncolonized regions of the mountains and forests to the southeast of Scott’s Valley. As he drove north along it, mind elsewhere and nowhere, he noticed a turning. A glance in the rear-view mirror showed no-one behind and so he slowed to peer along the turn.

A two-lane road, overhung with tall trees, including some redwoods. It gave no indication of leading anywhere at all. Fine by him.

He made the turn and drove on. The trees were tall and thick, cutting off much of the light from above. The road passed smoothly up and down, riding the natural contours, curving abruptly once in a while to avoid the trunk of an especially big tree or to skirt a small canyon carved out over millennia by some small and bloody-minded stream. There were no houses or other signs of habitation. Could be public land, he was beginning to think, though he didn’t recall there being any around here and hadn’t seen any indication of a park boundary, and then he saw a sign by the road up ahead.

STOP.

That’s all it said. Despite himself, he found he was doing just that, pulling over toward it. When the car was stationary, he looked at the sign curiously. It had been hand-lettered, some time ago, in black marker felt on a panel cut from a cardboard box and nailed to a tree.

He looked back the way he’d come, then up the road once more. He saw no traffic in either direction, and also no indication of why the sign would be here. Sure, the road curved again about forty yards ahead, but no more markedly than it had ten or fifteen times since he’d left Branciforte Drive. There had been no warning signs on those bends. If you simply wanted to people to observe the speed limit then you’d be more likely to advise them to SLOW, and anyway it didn’t look like an official sign.

Then he realized that, further on, there was in fact a turning off the road.

He took his foot off the brake and let the car roll forward down the slope, crunching over twigs and gravel. A driveway, it seemed, though a long one, bending off into the trees. Single lane, roughly made up. Maybe five yards down it was another sign, evidently the work of the same craftsman as the previous one.

TOURISTS WELCOME

He grunted, in something like a laugh. If you had yourself some kind of attraction, then of course tourists were welcome. What would be the point otherwise? It was a strange way of putting it.

An odd way of advertising it, too. No indication of what was in store or why a busy family should turn off what was already a pretty minor road and head off into the woods. No lure except those two words.

They were working on him, though, he had to admit. He eased his foot gently back on the gas and carefully directed the car along the track, between the trees.

A
fter about a quarter
of a mile he saw a building ahead. A couple of them, in fact, arranged in a loose compound. One a ramshackle two-storey farmhouse, the other a disused barn. There was also something that was or had been a garage, with a broken-down truck/tractor parked diagonally in front of it. It was parked insofar as it was not moving, at least, not in the sense that whoever had last driven the thing had made any effort, when abandoning it, to align its form with anything. The surfaces of the vehicle were dusty and rusted and liberally covered in old leaves and specks of bark. A wooden crate, about four feet square, stood rotting in the back. The near front tire was flat.

The track ended in a widened parking area, big enough for four or five cars. It was empty. There was no sign of life at all, in fact, but something — he wasn’t sure what — said this habitation was still a going concern, rather than collection of ruins that someone had walked away from at some point in the last few years.

Nailed to a tree in front of the main house, was another cardboard sign.

WELCOME.

He parked, turned off the engine, and got out. It was very quiet. It usually is in these mountains, when you’re away from the road. Sometimes you’ll hear the faint roar of an airplane, way up above, but apart from that it’s just the occasional tweet of some winged creature or an indistinct rustle as something small and furry or scaly makes its way through the bushes.

He stood a few minutes, flapping his hand to discourage a noisy fly which appeared from nowhere, bothered his face, and then zipped chaotically off.

Eventually he called out. ‘Hello?’

You’d think that — on what was evidently a very slow day for this attraction, whatever it was — the sound of an arriving vehicle would have someone bustling into sight, eager to make a few bucks, to pitch their wares. He stood a few minutes more, however, without seeing or hearing any sign of life. It figured. Aimless people find aimless things, and it didn’t seem like much was going to happen here. You find what you’re looking for, and he hadn’t been looking for anything at all.

He turned back toward the car, aware that he wasn’t even feeling disappointment. He hadn’t expected much, and that’s exactly what he’d got.

As he held up his hand to press the button to unlock the doors, however, he heard a creaking sound.

He turned back to see there was now a man on the tilting porch that ran along half of the front of the wooden house. He was dressed in canvas jeans and a vest that had probably once been white. The man had probably once been clean, too, though he looked now like he’d spent most of the morning trying to fix the underside of a car. Perhaps he had.

‘What you want?’

His voice was flat and unwelcoming. He looked to be in his mid-late fifties. Hair once black was now half grey, and also none too clean. He did not seem like he’d been either expecting or desirous of company.

‘What have you got?’

The man on the porch leant on the rail and kept looking at him, but said nothing.

‘It says “Tourists Welcome”,’ Miller said, when it became clear the local had nothing to offer. ‘I’m not feeling especially welcome, to be honest.’

The man on the porch looked weary. ‘Christ. The boy was supposed to take down those damned signs. They still up?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even the one out on the road, says “Stop”?’

‘Yes,’ Miller said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have stopped.’

The other man swore and shook his head. ‘Told the boy weeks ago. Told him I don’t know how many times.’

Miller frowned. ‘You don’t notice, when you drive in and out? That the signs are still there?’

‘Haven’t been to town in a while.’

‘Well, look. I turned down your road because it looked like there was something to see.’

‘Nope. Doesn’t say anything like that.’

‘It’s implied, though, wouldn’t you say?’

The man lifted his chin a little. ‘You a lawyer?’

‘No. I’m a businessman. With time on my hands. Is there something to see here, or not?’

After a moment the man on the porch straightened, and came walking down the steps.

‘One dollar,’ he said. ‘As you’re here.’

‘For what? The parking?’

The man stared at him as if he was crazy. ‘No. To see.’

‘One dollar?’ It seemed inconceivable that in this day and age there would be anything under the sun for a dollar, especially if it was trying to present as something worth experiencing. ‘Really?’

‘That’s cheap,’ the man said, misunderstanding.

‘It is what it is,’ Miller said, getting his wallet out and pulling a dollar bill from it.

The other man laughed, a short, sour sound. ‘You got that right.’

A
fter he’d taken
the dollar and stuffed it into one of the pockets of his jeans, the man walked away. Miller took this to mean that he should follow, and so he did. It looked for a moment as if they were headed toward the house, but then the path — such as it was — took an abrupt right onto a course that led them between the house and the tilting barn. The house was large and gabled and must have once been quite something. Lord knows what it was doing out here, lost by itself in a patch of forest that had never been near a major road or town or anyplace else that people with money might wish to be. Its glory days were long behind it, anyway. Looking up at it, you’d give it about another five years standing, unless someone got onto rebuilding or at least shoring it right away.

The man led the way through slender trunks into an area around the back of the barn. Though the land in front of the house and around the side had barely been what you’d think of as tamed, here the forest abruptly came into its own. Trees of significant size shot up all around, looking — as redwoods do — like they’d been there since the dawn of time. A sharp, rocky incline led down toward a stream about thirty yards away. The stream was perhaps eight feet across, with steep sides. A rickety bridge of old, grey wood lay across it. The man led him to the near side of this, and then stopped.