Having finished the book, I wanted to see Tamara. The sooner the better. But she was nowhere to be found. I called her a few times, but all I got was the answering machine. I figured she was busy, but where was Gunther? Maybe on vacation. No idea why he’d go, because the weather was fine on the island. I figured if he was off in a business trip, I at least should enjoy the sunny days.
I did whatever popped into my head. Nothing else I could do. So I took walks, cooked, watched TV, wrote in my journal. Late at night, I lay awake, too tired to watch TV.
One night I sat up in bed and wrote in my journal. “I feel empty. Maybe I’m always empty, and just don’t notice because I’m busy. Or maybe I’m really, seriously empty, in a way that nobody else is. When I sleep, I am filled with things, and all day I use them up until evening, when I feel like a car that’s running out of gas, or a kid who can’t reach the gas pedal, or the brake pedal. I just putter on, running on fumes until I go empty. And then I just sit there, on a dark road, headlights beaming straight ahead at the road before me.”
Gunther called me on a Tuesday. For August, it was cool, and I had taken off strolling in the foothills. I was just getting back to the trailhead when my phone went off. I leaned against a wooden fence and answered. After a brief exchange, my hand fell to my side and I slipped the phone in my bag.
No explanation of where he’d been. Just a quick hello and a casual invite to dinner.
By now I was used to this mode of communication. I said I’d be there.
When the time came, I walked. I knew the route by now, so why not?
Gunther greeted me at the doorway. I noticed a new row of hedges kept it out of view from the road.
“Did you notice anyone following you,” he asked me in a low voice.
“No, but I wasn’t looking. Is there—?”
“Things are escalating.” Before I could respond, he ushered me inside.
Tamara sat in the den. She’d seen some sun. I sat down across from her and placed my hands in my lap to mirror her.
“Hi. Thanks for coming.” She smiled reluctantly.
“I’d like to know what going on,” I said.
“Did you like the book?”
I thought about it. “No. I didn’t like it.”
“Any reason?” She seemed uneasy.
“Yes. It was a bit scattered.”
“Any idea why somebody would take it out of print?” She looked me in the eye.
“I would say… lack of demand. Nothing controversial in there, nothing to censor, if that’s what you were thinking.”
“And yet someone paid good money to bribe a well-known editor, to pressure the publisher, to take it out of print.”
Now it was my turn. “Was it ever actually printed?”
“What?” Tamara tilted her head to one side.
“This copy is just a mock-up.” I showered her the artless cover.
Tamara shook her head. “It was the only copy we could find.”
“Then maybe the book was never printed. And maybe someone paid for that to happen.”
Tamara nodded again.
“Now what?”
“Well, I saw the author.”
“You found her?”
“Gunther did. And I met with her. But her living situation. it was impossible for me to see her openly.”
Gunther slipped out quietly and shut the door behind him.
“The woman I spoke to was Carolyn Shoemaker. I came to her home in New York. All her roommates were asleep, so we sat in the dark and talked for about three hours, but it seemed much faster. When she told me about her husband, she spoke quickly and quietly, so I had to listen very closely just to understand what she was saying.”
As Tamara spoke, I became aware of the moon rising over the windowsill and vanishing behind the curtain. She talked over the drafts of night air, and the shrill nightbirds.
“Just before she met Gene, Carolyn was 20 and living in Los Angeles. The West Coast had just seen a big rainstorm, and the rain only lasted for two hours over LA, but the amount of rain was enough to cause mass flooding because the landscape there is incredibly flat. In some areas of California outside LA, the subterranean water is so close to the surface that the rainwater has nowhere to drain. The ground is already saturated. In other areas, the desert ground is so compacted that rainwater just flows along the topsoil because it can’t sink into the ground. So all that water collects and flows downhill, away from the mountains, and into the city, because it has nowhere else to go.
“‘I caught a connector from Detroit to Deboise,’ she told me. ‘There was a moment during the storm when, in a swirling mass of clouds, I saw lightning shoot up into the sky until it was lost in the darkness, and in the sudden radiant light, I saw the rain, and it was falling upwards.
“Before I could interject she went on: ‘I have a distinct sense of what I’m supposed to see, and what I’m not. It’s a kind of intuition that I’ve had since I was a kid. These days it applies mostly to work. If I hear a conversation going on in the background, I can tell without fail if it’s a private conversation. I see a document, and I know if it’s confidential, even if it’s unmarked. My intuition is finely attuned to that specific distinction, but when I saw that rain, it triggered my intuition. I felt as if the rain were part of a confidential document, or a private conversation between two strangers. If you really want to know, I felt as if I had walked in on two strangers making out and turned the light on.
“‘When I saw the rain falling upwards, I thought that the plane might be falling. It would have to be falling very rapidly for the rain to fall upwards from our perspective. But that couldn’t be. Surely I would feel it if the plane were losing altitude that fast. I got up.
“‘The flight attendant appeared in my path. “Go back to your seat!” she said. “Go back to your seat and put your seatbelt on.”
“‘I’m going to throw up,’ I said.
“‘She let me pass, and I shuffled through the hallway, past people’s knees and the lumpy shapes of carry-on bags.
“‘On my way to the front of the plane, I stole a glance out the window, past the silhouettes of men and women sitting in their seats, clutching their things, drinks shaking in their hands. There was lightning again, and the rain lifted, same as before. I got to the dark empty space between the attendant’s little desk and the lavatory, and I knocked on the cabin door. A flight attendant opened it and gawked at me. Light was dim in the cabin. The pilot sat behind the control panel. The copilot faced the side wall, riffling through a small metal box.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“‘You can’t be here.’ The flight attendant made a shewing motion. I could barely hear her over the rain.
“‘Where’s the bathroom?’ I had to yell. She waved toward the laboratory door and tried to shut the door.
“‘I squinted into the cockpit. She shifted her weight to lean in front of me. Making eye contact, she motioned with two fingers. ‘It’s right there.’ Then she gripped the door with both hands and pulled it shut.
“‘The plain lurched again and I feigned a fall, grabbing the door. The flight attendant lost her grip and stumbled backwards. I had a clear view of the control panel. I saw what I needed to see, before I was pushed back and the door shut in my face. The flight attendant was outside with me now.
“‘’Seatbelt light’s on for a reason!’
“‘She pushed me into the lavatory and shut the door behind me. I was alone again, and I sat down hard on the closed toilet seat. Inside the captain's cabin I had caught a glimpse of the dials. Searching my memory of the image I found what I was looking for. I was not an expert on planes, but I recognized the units and the general range of numbers I should look for. We were something around thirty-five thousand feet in the air, but more importantly the number has remained steady. We weren’t falling.’
‘A few months later I happened to be speaking with a friend of mine who was in the hospital. He told me about something he saw while he was staying in the fire-watch tower—which seemingly you know about. His friend had called him up there to see the storm. They were above the clouds, and they saw rain start to fall upwards. That was on January 26, 1948. The same date as my friend’s plane-flight. I couldn’t believe it was a coincidence anymore so I called up my old friend at the fire watch but I couldn’t get in touch. Come to find out he went missing, years ago. But when I went looking for him, all I found was an address in Amador. When I went there, the whole house was gone. Just a mailbox and an excavator sitting near the foundation, and a pile of old lumber. But at the drugstore, when I stopped to pump gas, I met Gene. He was leaning on the hood of his car, wearing some faded jeans, and smoking a cigar. He was on his way to an impact crater in Death Valley.”
Tamara paused. She had relayed the story well, and I had filled in the blanks with what I got from that book. The whole time, I had been able to picture the old author in her armchair, telling Tamara these things, their voices just above a whisper. “I did a bit of research. That man’s house got washed away by the flood.”
I remained silent, and Tamara set her tea on the porch railing. “She wouldn’t say much more after that. So I went to see about her friend. Carolyn couldn’t find him, but I did.”
Tamara seemed to notice I was silent. A dull shock had silenced me, silenced even my mind. I had no words and no thoughts, just a numbing buzz. Tamara’s intensity scared me. I assumed it was wind that took the rain upwards. It was the only explanation, but in the dark outside Tamara’s house, in the open air by the sea, with her cigarette smoke swirling about her face. The embers cast a dim red light across her eyes and her wrinkled face.
“He was in prison. When I finally got in a room with him, he told me he gave a 5-year-old child to one of the mossmen during an acid trip on the mountain—he figured he was tripping already when he was the rain, but it wasn’t until later that he remembered the rain happened before he took any acid, because he only took the acid when his friend arrived and gave it him, and when he watched the rain it has just been him and the 5-year-old kid he was supposed to get rid of.
“The moss men. Who are they?”
Tamara shot a glance in my direction. “The what?”
“You just said he gave the kid to one of the moss men? Who are the moss men?”
“Shit, Liza. I don’t know what I said. But that’s not a bad name for them. He said he’d been about to throw him off a cliff into the lake when something came out of the lake. Storm clouds were already rolling in. Little things like small, wet men, skin the color of charcoal began to crawl up the cliff, as if they weighed nothing. Their legs floated behind them, and they climbed with their hands. As he retold the story, it reminded him of a video he had seen of astronauts on the international space station, clinging to the runs of a ladder while their bodies lifted behind them, held down only by their spines and muscular contractions, and not by any natural force of gravity. When he got back to the watchtower, there was one waiting inside for him. Tall, slender, naked, but in the light of the flashlight, his skin was not black, but dark green, like moss. This man asked for the boy. He never took his hand off the ceiling, and he was flexing as if to keep himself from floating up to the ceiling. But the fire-watch man couldn’t believe he was weightless. The ceiling tiles flexed under its hand, as if its enormous bulk were pressed against the ceiling by gravity just as hard as our feet are pressed into the earth. If it had hair, the hair would have fallen upwards.”
“That’s what he saw?”
“Yeah.”
“Then we have no idea what actually happened. If his trip was that bad, he could have seen anything. Did nobody look for the kid?”
Tamara looked at her hands. “Just me.”
----------------------------------------
Gunther took me home. He was silent for the car ride. The radio played a local college station softly. The moon was hid behind clouds, but in places the stars peaked through, and I watched them through the windows, where they mingled with the colorful reflections of Gunther’s stereo system, and the lit-up dials on the dashboard.
When he let me out, it was chilly. Fall was well on its way to winter, and I clutched my jacket around me. The temperature couldn’t be below seventy, but there was humidity in the air, and the wind off the pacific ocean blew a chill over the island. Even here in the shelter of the apartment building. Overhead, a train was just arriving. It slowed, the lines of blurring light grew shorter, separated into individual bulbs. The doors opened. No one got off. When they closed the train howled, let off steam, and accelerated away from the apartment building and away from the island. I ought to take the train sometime, I thought. I could visit Benji in LA without much trouble. Or I could visit the shops. I’ve got a nice bit saved up by now, it would be perfectly alright to spend some. And this case has me on edge. It would be nice to get away for awhile. Maybe Benji could put me up for a few days, or hell I could fly to New York for a week. I make my own schedule. Why did I insist on working day after day? Habit, I guessed—and it had served me well, so I shouldn’t be harsh with myself, but it isn’t good to work all the time. The mind needs rest in order to perform its best, just like the body.
With these thoughts I went inside and prepared a late dinner. When I finished chopping everything for a stir fry, I set it on the oven and walked to the balcony for a moment. I opened the door and fresh air flowed into the apartment. I needed that air. Stepping outside I yawned and stretched my arms up high. For a moment, I leaned on the railing and put my head in my hands.
When I got up, the door had shut quietly behind me. The eleven PM train passed overhead like rolling thunder, and all became quiet. Somewhere above the moon should be visible soon, I thought as I reached for the doorknob. Then hesitating, I turned toward my neighbor’s window. Sure enough the blinds were closed, but a light seeped out from behind them, and movement. Shadows blocking parts of the light, visible at the cracks. “I shouldn’t watch her like this. If I ever do meet her, she’d think I was a creep. It is creepy to watch like this anyway, no matter if she knows or what she thinks. And even if I learn something, that will only ruin my own experience of getting to know her. I’d have to pretend I’m surprised when I learn certain things. I couldn’t do that. Maybe I’ll see her on the train one day, getting on or coming off. I ought to spend more time there. It’s a good way to meet people. People are curious about the island anyway, so even if I don’t see her, I might meet other interesting people. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so lonely then. Then another thought flashed through her mind. “I must look like a creep watching from here.”
I reached for the doorknob when a deep voice came out of the courtyard behind, echoed on the brick walls. “Wait.”
I froze, and he went on. “It’s a deadend. You won’t find him.”
“What are you talking about?” My voice shook.
He was on a balcony, standing close to the wall. There were no lights on him.
“Who are you?”
“I have a message for you.”
I fumbled for the doorknob.
“In the course of your clumsy and unconcealed research, you have got on the trail of an interesting… issue. You and I are looking into the same peephole.”
“What does that mean?”
“I am a snake in the tall grass at night, feeling the heat of a tiger. You have yet to see either of us clearly. If you alert him to your curiosity, he will not hesitate to kill you. The tiger is alone in our world, and frightened, but very strong. And he is more dangerous than you realize. I will let you live if you walk away now, because that would be quieter. But make a fuss, try and wake the tiger? You know what’ll happen.”
“You are threatening me.” I was angry now. My hand closed on the doorknob. “What research?”
“I am drawing a line in the sand,” he said in a measured tone.
I tore the door open and burst inside, diving to the floor, I rolled to the side. No gunshot rang. Heavy silence filled the room. I was breathing hard. The lights were on, but I could feel the fear of night.
He could see me if he tried. I dove for the lightswitch. Clicked. Now the dark was absolute. I ducked. Still no gunshot, so I crept toward the door. It hung open, creaking in the night breeze. My eyes were adjusting. I could see the glint of starlight on the brass doorknob. The gas-stove glowed nearby, and I caught the reek of burnt onion. I reached for the knob. I could feel each nerve in my arm. If he shot me now—? I yanked the door shut.