Raveling (48 page)

She looked around. This was where they found me, she realized, alone and raving, incoherent, psychotic, on this path near
the highway. This must have been where I had hidden the evidence, too. Katherine closed her eyes and tried to imagine what
I had been feeling that day. I believed, at that point, that Eric was out to kill me. I was clutching a plastic Wonderbread
bag with a red sneaker and a knife inside it. I felt that the woods had swallowed me. I was aware that my mother had cancer
forming around her optical nerve. All my life I had believed my sister was taken out here somewhere and killed by my own brother.

Where would someone in that state of mind hide something? Katherine asked herself.

Then, far up ahead, she saw it, the tunnel. It must be in there, she thought. I must have hidden the evidence somewhere inside
the tunnel. There was a trickle of water coming out. In the spring, she told herself, it must fill halfway up with the thaw.
Katherine had to step on some carefully placed rocks to cross the deep puddle forming at its base. She poked her head around
the corner and saw that it was just large enough for a normal person to stand inside. Anyone over six feet would have had
to duck.

She stepped in. There seemed to be something blocking the other end, because the light was dim, darker than it should have
been at this time of day.

“Hey,” a voice shouted.

Katherine squinted. Was someone down there?

“Hey,” the voice said again.

“Hello?” Katherine said.

“Get… the… flying… fuck…”

“I’m just looking around,” said Katherine. “Nothing to worry about.”

“… out… of… my…”

“I don’t mean any harm.”

“… tunnel.” There was a man, she could see now, standing in the middle of the long tube. He had emerged, like the billy goat
gruff, from an enclosure of cardboard and plastic.

“My name is Katherine DeQuincey-Joy,” she said to the silhouette. “I’m a psychologist.”

“Katherine DeQuincey-Joy,” the man said, “you are a major pain in my ass.” It was the voice of a forty-year-old man.

“Can I ask who you are?”

He came forward, sloshing through the liquid grime.

Katherine took a step back. How fast could she move through the woods, she asked herself, and get to the highway?

“I am no one,” he said. “No-fucking-body.”

She could see him clearly now. He was homeless, evidently, or, more accurately, this was his home, and he wore the usual overgrown
thicket of black and gray facial hair, the heavy coat, the orange wool hat. “Of course you’re somebody,” Katherine said, thinking,
he must know everything that’s around here. Perhaps he saw something. Perhaps he had seen me that day, she thought. “I was
just wondering if you could help me.”

“Help you?” His tone was derisive.

“Yes,” she said. “Help me.”

It was a good ten degrees colder in here. She shivered.

“Why would I?”

“To be nice?”

He laughed. “I am the man who lives in the tunnel and frightens children. I am not nice.” There was a halo of light forming
behind him. The homeless always made Katherine think of biblical figures. It was their hair, she thought. “I am the direct
opposite of nice.”

“I just have a couple of questions.”

He rolled his eyes, and she could see his whites in the gray light of the tunnel. “Hit me,” he said. “Lay it on me.”

“There was a, a man found out here, right around here, anyway, I think,” Katherine said. “His name is Pilot. He was, he was
sick, you know, seeing things and—”

“I know Pilot,” the Tunnel Man said. “I know him.”

“You do?”

“What do you want?” he laughed now. “His stuff?”

Katherine couldn’t believe it. “Do you have it?”

“No… I do not have it. But perhaps… perhaps I know where it can be found,” he said teasingly.

“Where?” She stepped forward, his face coming into clearer focus in the dark. She could see that he was actually handsome,
with delicate features beneath all that hair.

He threw a hand in the air, startling her. “I cannot tell you my name and I will not tell you my name,” the Tunnel Man began,
“but I will tell you that I know the Pilot of whom you speak, I know the secrets and the daylight particles that fall through
the cracks in hospital floors, and that I knew, know, will forever be advised, of where he left things, where things are hidden
and placed accordingly, each along their lines, by their kind, color coded.” He smiled at Katherine, yellow toothed. This
was an act, she knew. He had been far more lucid just a moment ago. He was pretending to be insane. This was schtick.

“Pilot told you where he hid his things?”

“He hid himself, didn’t he?” the Tunnel Man said. “Pilot
of the golden light, dreamer of the weary dark, trembler under blankets, didn’t he? He hid himself well.”

Katherine heard the reason beneath the Tunnel Man’s strange locution. From here she could smell him, as well, the alcohol
stench. “I’m Pilot’s friend, too,” she said. “A good friend.”

“Friends are found in the places of transport,” he said, “at an hour when only the criminals are expected to depart.”

“Pilot was your friend?”

“… of a friend of a friend of a friend…”

Katherine smiled at him. “I’m wondering if you might help me find where Pilot hid his things. It’s very important, and he
asked me to help him. Can you help me help our friend Pilot?”

The Tunnel Man walked back and forth quickly within the confines of the small tunnel, his feet splashing in the water. Katherine
wondered why he hadn’t died of exposure by now. “Thinking, thinking, thinking,” he was saying. “How do I know about you? What
are your credentials?”

“Well,” Katherine started to say. “I’m—”

But he cut her off. “How do I know that Pilot is living and that a simulacrum has not been placed in his place and that you
are not party to the council of time, when all lost—”

Katherine held out her hand. She reached into her purse and extracted a twenty-dollar bill, extending it toward him. “He wanted
me to give you this,” she said. “He said you could use it.”

The Tunnel Man looked at the money, his eyes narrowing comically, a smile forming beneath his beard.

“He wanted to offer his help to you,” she said.

The Tunnel Man moved forward, toward Katherine, shuffling, sloshing. “He thought,” he said. “Pilot—he’s a thinker.”

“Pilot is very thoughtful,” Katherine said, “yes.”

Close enough to reach, he snatched the bill, brought it to his nose, and sniffed. More schtick, Katherine realized.

“Will you help Pilot now?” she said. “Will you?”

The twenty disappeared somewhere inside the Tunnel Man’s layers of clothing, and now his arms made little circles in the air.
“Helpfulness is next to cleanliness,” he was saying, “cleanliness is connected to the funny bone, the funny bone’s connected
to the brain stem, and the brain stem leads down, down, down in the ground, the underneath of things thinking, always thinking.”

“Where did Pilot hide his things?” Katherine asked hopefully.

The Tunnel Man looked incredulous. “I just told you,” he said. “Didn’t I?”

“I didn’t understand.” Was it lost somewhere in his word salad? Katherine wondered.

“Understanding the moon landing.”

“Where?” Katherine asked.

The Tunnel Man shook his head.

“Will you show me?” she pled.

“I knew Pilot,” the Tunnel Man said, his face held up. “He came and talked to me until the winds and trees made him afraid
and my tunnel turned to him, curling, a wave over him, unsmiling, and so I went out and said hello to the highway, and they
came for him.”

“You went for help?”

“Pilot is all right?”

“He’s fine,” Katherine said. “He’s with his father.”

The Tunnel Man smiled. “Fathers are feathers.”

“Show me,” Katherine said. “Show me where he hid his things. Please.”

He looked left and he looked right. He touched his fingers methodically, one by one, each dirty fingertip touching the
next. “Can you return?” he said. “On the day after the day after the—”

“Can I—”

“I’ll have to find you the things,” he said lucidly, “all the evidence, the naughty evidence, and if you come back in three
days”—he held three blackened fingers up—“I’ll have everything ready for you.”

“You can’t show me now?”

“Three days,” the Tunnel Man said. “A blink.”

Katherine wondered if it would even be worth it to come back here in three days. Was this homeless man even remotely competent?
Was he lying? Did he really know me? Was he only hoping for more money? Katherine smiled as warmly as she could. This man,
the Tunnel Man, either didn’t know or he was simply unwilling to tell her now. “Three days,” Katherine said. “And then I’ll
be back.”

On Nowhere Island the night came and the light dropped from the sky and there was no sign of my father. Walking down to the
beach every fifteen minutes, my hand over my brow in a salute to the descending sun, I squinted my eyes for any speck of darkness
in the corner of the sky that could be his little seaplane. There was nothing, though, only the cold creeping in through the
medium of a strengthening wind. Patricia had packed sweaters, at least. I kept my one eye on the treeline around the small
clearing where the tent was, waiting for it to move an inch, to creep forward a single millimeter. Would it strike out? Would
it grab me or Patricia? I couldn’t remember then if I had ever actually seen the woods strike out in my craziness or if I
had only been waiting for them to do it.

“There must be a storm coming,” Patricia said. She smiled reassuringly. “And he has to wait for it to pass, that’s all.”

“He’d fly in a storm.”

“No,” Patricia insisted. “No, because I ask him not to.”

I didn’t see the sense in disagreeing. He would fly in a storm, though. My father always drove above the speed limit without
his seat belt. He ran the lawn mower without the safety guard. He kept his handgun, the safety off, by his bed. He would fly
in a storm if it suited him. And, as it was, the sky was only wind and cloud. There wasn’t any rain yet. At least not out
here. “Maybe something’s wrong with the plane,” I said. “And that’s why he can’t come back.”

“That’s possible,” said Patricia. She kept eyeing me, looking for signs of schizophrenia, I suppose, waiting for the craziness
to start. I kept looking at the way she looked at me, trying to see if she was seeing a crazy person. The treeline remained
where it was, however, and the ocean became only choppier in the wind.

The sky stayed empty.

I paced the circumference of the island, walking around and around at least ten times. Patricia began grilling the steaks
we had brought for the evening. “If we wait too long,” she said, “the meat will spoil.”

It was nine at night, completely dark.

“Maybe he can’t come back until the morning,” I said again. I had said that a thousand times, I think.

Then, for the first time, there was an admission that something might possibly be wrong: “I hope he’s all right.” Patricia
smiled weakly.

“Of course he is,” I told her, probably too quickly. “He’s fine. My father?” I tried to laugh, but it came out weird.

We chewed our steaks in silence. It was a meal, we both knew, that my father would have enjoyed more.

“There’s wine,” Patricia said.

I only pointed to my head, indicating with a circle what could happen.

She laughed. “You feel all right?” she said. “Are you feeling—”

“Given the circumstances,” I told her, “I feel just fine.”

Patricia walked around the fire, knelt beside me, and put her arm around my shoulder. “He never warns me,” she said.

I looked at her questioningly.

She said, “He just takes off sometimes, sometimes quite literally, in his plane, you know. I’ll wake up in the morning and
he’s just, he’s just packing his things. I don’t know if he’s leaving me forever or if he’s coming back the next day.”

“He wouldn’t leave you,” I said. “He would never—”

“You don’t know that.”

I didn’t know. It was true. But I said, “I know him well enough to know he would never leave you.”

“He left your mother. And he tells me he’s going flying somewhere and I wait to see if he wants me to come and sometimes,
you know, sometimes he doesn’t.” Patricia smiled. “And so I wait. I wait for him like an idiot, like we’ve been doing here
all day. I mean, not doing anything but preparing things for when he gets home, making everything perfect, just for him. But
not, you know, not doing anything for myself. I mean, nothing. Because his life is the life I’m living, you know what I mean?
It’s his life, and I have to wait to see when and how I’ll be a part of it.”

“I’ve always wanted to ask you,” I said, “what it was like before, before he left my mother and came to live with you.”

“It was like this,” Patricia said. “It was a lot of pacing.”

“That couldn’t have been fun.”

“I always imagined your mother was doing the same thing in New York.”

“She had things to occupy her.”

“Yes, but—”

“She wanted him to leave as much as he wanted to leave.” This wasn’t true, but I said it trying to make Patricia feel better.