SYMMETRY
Chapter XX
THE GODS OF GHOST RIVER
“…we became the stories, we became the places.
We were the lights, the deserts, the faraway worlds.”
- M83, Intro
Sick, my gut heavy with guilt and nausea, I pick at the grooves of the oak wood of his dining table, eyeing the silhouette of O’chohca through the half-open blinds, aflame in the sunrise. A pile of photocopied papers takes up a corner, crowned by Nana’s leather-bound notebook, souvenirs of my visit with Charley. The pungent odor of sheets soaked in sweat stain hits my nostrils. Laden with dirty linens, Bobbi hobbles to the double-stacked washer and dryer. Saving face, I pretend not to notice, putting my focus on studying my room-temperature cup of coffee that I’ve allowed to cool to the point of losing all appeal. The bean water’s acidity would likely bring me to vomit, so I swirl it in the cup and watch the brown spiral, a vortice much like my state of mind. How will I tell him? I killed Nico with such brutality… Or is it just one of many things I’ve seen over these many months, none of which I can be sure is real or just my fucked up trauma brain. Or worse still, that I lied to him, threw away the card with my lifeline to getting the help I hunger for. Shame eating me from my core, I struggle with how to verbalize so many things left unspoken. He takes his usual seat at the table, picture of calm, with that quiet, weighted depth that is his natural state.
“I owe you an explanation,” tripping over my words, I try to catch his gaze.
Those dark eyes rise from a single slice of toast he left for after his morning chore, the heaviness of his expression eating into my soul.
“Bobbi,” I shy away from being pulled in by his visage, hoping he isn’t reading me like the pages of a book bent open against a worn spine, “I fucked up… I’m pretty sure I’ve lost my mind…. And… instead of doing the responsible thing like you’d of done… I threw away the card to the psychiatrist I got at the clinic. I don’t know if I didn’t believe I was losing it or if I was too scared to pull on the thread and watch myself unravel…”
His contemplative stare unbroken, he observes me calmly without judgment, only intentionality, it rattles me more than any amount of anger I braced myself for.
I wait for him to say something, only to be met with the gravitational pull of those umber orbs. My memories, as though separated from my conscious mind, I recount with every detail: Dizzy’s death on that fateful night that brought me here, Navan’yu, my mother’s forced pact with the Mistwalker, the fissure that pulled me through the fabric of the universe, the two gods, my place in it all, Prairie Mother’s warning, and the revelation that I, may have bashed Nico’s head in. Aware of Bobbi’s familiarity with fragments of the story, I’m sure to lay it all out on the table. Spent, I slump back into my wooden seat, confounded by my forthrightness, I’d rehearsed it in my head so differently, to slowly explain my situation, not throw it all in his face.
Bobbi contemplates my words, his brow subtly furrowing, “Remember what I said to you all those months ago?”
“No, what?” I shift uncomfortably.
“That you’d tell me it all at some point,” a flicker of a smile flashes across his face, “It seems that moment is now.”
“I don’t get how you’re so chill about this!”
“Oh, I’m not,” Bobbi sets down his piece of toast with a single bite in it, “Here’s the thing, you’re my friend, and I’ll support you through this. But before you turn yourself in and start ranting to anyone who’ll listen about ‘bat gods’ and ‘the cosmos disintegrating’, do me a little favor.”
“Sure, what is it?”
“We got one more delivery run today, before we turn it over to the new folks,” he laments, standing from his chair, pacing.
Losing Red Feather for these last few months, the stress at the Nautilus slowly gnawed away at my old friend and I, until it reached an untenable point. I linger on the strength it takes to know when to call it quits. The price, turning over our responsibilities at the clinic to someone new.
“Why don’t we make this a thing, it’s all Northside anyways, and after, we’ll retrace your steps. Starting with Packer’s Gate, to the most recent place you saw Navan’yu. It will help me understand and I dunno, maybe it’ll jog your memory. We’ll have a better idea of what’s going on, and… well if you do get locked up, at least we’ll have some quality bro time, before… you know.”
Trying to suppress a tear, it rolls wet and fat into my cup of coffee. The dam broken, I lose control of my feelings, guttural, I gasp between breaths and pitching cries, “It’s too much, it’s all too fucking much!”
“Hey,” Bobbi’s hand grips my shoulder, “You’re my brother, maybe not by blood but still, you didn’t ask for any of this, let me bear this burden with you. We’re not meant to go it alone. The weight of it all gets better when you let your people carry some of it.”
I blot the wet from my face with a long sleeve, pushing down a sniffle, and nod in agreement.
“Grab your coat,” Bobbi shuffles to the door, “It’s cold out there.”
•••
Packer’s Gate stands eerie, casting elongated shadows in the late autumn midday light, the buttes’ rusty edifice standing as a testament to time and violence. The scrubland less leafy than in summer, all the green that remains belongs to the junipers. Parking at the summit of the stone towers, Carl pulls up to a spot that could have easily once housed Nico’s neon idiot machine. Tire tracks long gone from all those months ago, we disembark from Bobbi’s silver sedan, intent on scouring the site for anything that could’ve been left behind from that summer. I rotate the marble badger in the palm of my hand housed deep in the pocket of my long charcoal-grey coat. The only thing I’ve yet to explain by just chocking it up to hallucinations from my disturbed mind. Bobbi pulls a flashlight from the car, shining it in the spaces obscured by the shade of the great rocks.
“Damn boy, talk about trying to find a grain of sand in the desert,” Bobbi calls to me, “Do you remember where you were standing when things went down?”
“I know I smoked a cig against one of the walls of ‘the gate’, but it was dark, so I’m not quite sure where,” the taste of clove returning to my mind’s eye from a memory locked deep within me, “You can look, but I had an old metal pillbox I’d put the spent butts in.”
“Yay for conscientiousness, but man, talk about bad timing,” my old friend complains, “You aren’t making this easier.”
“Sorry, dude.”
Kicking up the dirt of the makeshift parking area, I look for a sign, anything that gives me a clue. I try to picture Dizzy on the ground bleeding out, a crimson pool forming around him. Repositioning myself, in relation to Carl, I consider where he would’ve been in space. The toe of my boot penetrates the soft ground to find, nothing. Fucking hopeless, I’m just unhinged and it’s all in my head. In a huff, I head towards Bobbi, kicking up more desert earth. Sediment tinged with a dull red ocher stain crumbles around my heel. Curious, I crouch down and remove more of the topsoil with my bare hands. It cleaves against a solidified crusty layer, deep purple, a continuous blot soaked into the sand. Peeling back more, it cuts deep under my feet in a radial pattern.
“What’d you find there?” Bobbi stumbles up to me, “Oh, shit!”
Dried bloodstain, leached into the soil, presumably buried, blooms out from the desert floor. My fingertips ice, I pull back from my dirty task, swallowing down my stress.
“Fuck, I only half believed what you said, but here it is, it’s real,” Bobbi looks in shock, his mouth hanging open.
Staving off the building anxiety, I press my hand into the side of my head.
“We have two options, this could be left by me, if I killed Nico… or this could be from Dizzy,” I let out a labored breath and pause.
“Nico being Nico, if he did this, he’d of fucked up somehow, left stuff behind. Look for casings,” Bobbi suggests.
“On it!” I take on one side of the stain, while Bobbi works his way around the other.
Using the edges of the sole of my boot, I slice through the sun-baked earth, searching for the resistance of metal.
“Found something!” my old friend, juniper twig in hand, scratches at the sandy soil.
Striding over to him, enshrined in the shadow of the southern butte of Packer’s Gate, just below the surface, three spent cartridges. Dizzy died here, his car disposed of, his body removed. Of course fucking Nico took all the big things and left casings on site… damn shithead.
“Any sign of my metal water bottle?” I ask Bobbi.
“Nada,” he probes the evidence with the stick.
“Should we take these with us?”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“No, but we should take some pics and prolly bury them again. Never know, might be important later,” Bobbi instructs.
“The bloodstain too,” I nod in agreement, rolling the stone badger in my pocket nervously, “Keep looking for my water bottle, but if my first version of events is right… maybe there’s tire-tracks where he came at me in that dumb box of a car.”
“I can look for more casings too,” Bobbi’s expression brightens as he takes a few photos with his flip phone and waves his flashlight as a gesture of excitement.
Hoping my recollection’s accurate, I head northbound from Packer’s Gate into the wild scrubland, the best friend anyone could ask for at my heels. We take care to step on patches of slickrock to avoid the towers of blackening biocrust. Microbes that give the desert ground nutrients, keeping life itself alight in the harshest places. The undisturbed colonies coat the baked earth, dark, popcorn-like, at times stacking themselves into crunchy organic towers.
“Look, there!” Bobbi points to a path of damaged bio soil, two thick rungs cut through, leaving divots of sand yet to be reclaimed by slow growing cyanobacteria.
Possible tire marks, the tread within them long gone from the wind and rain. We traverse the land cautiously along the ruts. Following the channel, one foot in front of the other, we scour our new path for things left behind. A divot, its hue rust-orange with exposed sand, contrasts the charcoal tone of the soil crust, the shape within resembling a shoe print. Curiosity gets the better of me, I place my tread into the empty space, my blood runs cold, it matches the outline of my boot… well, shit.
“Check this out!” Bobbi points off trail at the glint of a bullet casing.
The threads of that night weaving together into some kind of fucked up tapestry, the growing pit in my gut signals an emerging fear of what we’ll find at the end of this Nico-made road. What will I have to reckon with at the end of this dreaded path? The acceptance of dark gods and a chaotic universe decaying into oblivion hits worse than the most rational explanation, that I’m a monster, a killer.
Bobbi’s flashlight beam glints off a shiny thing imbedded in the flakey bark of a juniper trunk. We traverse the exposed sandstone, taking a closer look at the divot in the small tree. A bullet lodged deep into the wood, the depth reflecting the trajectory of a high velocity round.
“Nico, Nico, why were you firing at trees?” Bobbi rolls his eyes.
“Shit-for-brains aim,” I grin, surprised to find my sense of humor to be alive and well.
“You know what they say about guys with shit aim?” Bobbi jokes.
“Tiny fingers!” I crack up.
“HEY-O!” Bobbi doubles over with laughter.
He snorts, pulling strands of espresso brown hair from his face, regaining his composure, “You wanna keep going? It’s a lot to take on.”
“Yeah, I got to see this through,” I shoot him a knowing look, “I’ve avoided facing this for too long.”
Bobbi nods, “I’m with you.”
We proceed up the machine-made tracks sliced into the desert, walking in contemplative silence. Cold sweat saturating my fingertips as we traverse the uneven terrain, my breath quickening, the boulders growing to towering heights around us. The grooves come to a stop when the stones reach a state of impassability by vehicle, with only a few steps left as spectral outlines in the biocrust. On that night I took the hard way, scrambling over solid rocks in hopes I could outfox Nico. Below me, the ledge, haunting my waking dreams, hangs over Ghost River, the rapids beneath gurgle with the same timbre of Nico’s death throws, the horrendous sound lodged in my brain. A dull stain, etched into the ground, soaked into the sandstone, sits visible from where we stand.
BURNING. Leaking… Am I dying?
I wretch, my whole body shaking…
Bobbi rushes to stabilize me, looking for a place to set me down on the slickrock, “I got you! I got you!”
Regaining my composure, I push past Bobbi’s steadying grasp, walking through my nightmare. The deep maroon splatter and pooling discoloration, etched deep between the grains. Trembling, control lost from my limbs, I stare at the evidence of my carnage… my blood.
“Dude… that’s a lot of blood loss,” Bobbi scrutinizes the mark, “How’d you survive that?”
“I…” I stammer, “I don’t think I did…”
•••
“I’m not sure we’ll make it to Split Canyon Road before nightfall, if we stop at the Ghost River overlook trail,” Bobbi cautions, turning the steering wheel, “It’s up to you dude, if you wanna keep this up.”
“I need to understand, I need to face this,” I shrug, trying to disguise my exhaustion, “Let’s do the overlook. We can skip Split Canyon Road and return anytime since it’s so close.”
“You da boss,” Bobbi turns up the radio, in an attempt to soothe the mood.
The sounds of the road and the music blur into white noise as we turn off the highway onto a poorly paved road. In the north, a blonde wall of stone rises as a sentinel over the valley, reflecting the harsh late-season light from the south. I consider allowing the rhythm of the sedan to rock me to sleep, but with each passing minute, the rugged beauty of the high desert pulls me to wakefulness. It occurs to me, this is our first real adventure together since childhood. Bobbi and I work day in and out, we’ve never made time for ourselves. Better late than never, I shy away from considering the wasted moments of our lives, given everything, it’s too much to bear thinking about.
Through the maze of switchbacks carved into the canyon walls, we rise higher and higher, the sky clear light-ultramarine and devoid of clouds. My fingertips drag along the grooves of my marble badger, the texture calming, a reminder of who I really am. That dark silhouette against the gibbous moon, mercury eyes of pandemonium staring back at me all those months ago… with the evidence of my ordeal tangible, the many appearances of Navan’yu hold greater consequence, a possibility that the cosmos speaks to me. So many unanswered questions, my mind spins, will I ever get closure?
Bobbi bobs his head, humming to the music, holding it together, disguising his stress. What must he be thinking? Maybe reflecting on the tangle of strangeness that has been my last six months. No, I can’t think about it, take it one step at a time, let things unfold as they should. Redirecting my attention, in the great outdoors beyond the tempered glass, the stones tower, borne of striations. Telling a story about a desert far more ancient than our own, a time of lands covered in swirling sand dunes, swallowed by new worlds of sediment, only to be resurrected by the upheaval of mountains to the east. Could Navan’yu have witness such a thing, the ever-shifting planet, forming and reforming, unending, unbound by the constraints living things are governed by? Everything changes… maybe, everything will be alright in the end. Nico’s just another scumbag taken by the wilderness, yeah, I could have a life out here. Help finish what Nana started, recording the history of my people… let alone getting to hang with Charley and Bobbi. My mind drifts into a state between slumber, the world growing fuzzy and comforting.
Through the open driver’s side door, a shrill cry of a scrub jay jolts me from my rest. Pocketing the stone trinket in my charcoal grey coat, I see Bobbi’s form in his seat, hunched, his feet planted on the dirty ground, his head buried in his hands, the day taking its pound of flesh from him, as well as I.
Pulling myself up, I attempt to comfort my old friend, “We’ll get through this.”
He turns to me, his cavernous eyes glazed and wet, “I don’t know how to explain how you’re even here… it scares the shit out of me… And… I don’t know what I’d of done with myself if you’d died.”
“I was gone from your life for so many years though.”
“Yeah, but I could’ve lived with the idea that you were somewhere else living your life,” he shakes his head, “What a fucked up way to go…”
“All we can do now is push forward, learn what we learn, and accept where it takes us,” I speak with an unexpected air of resignation.
“You’re right,” he sniffs deeply, clearing his sinuses, “Here’s to finding the fuck out!”
“Damn straight!” I give him a fist bump.
Lifting myself from the seat, I stretch, feeling the sinews in my back loosen from their tight coil, extending into a drawn out yawn. Following Bobbi to the trailhead, I crack my neck to stave my disquiet. The wind sings through the brush, rushing with a unique flavor of chaos.
“How far are up the track did you say you found the Mistwalker?” he asks me.
“About a half a mile to the overlook and prolly a few miles off trail along the canyon edge,” I shiver, recollecting my ears breaking against her brassy shriek, piercing pain, the world spinning.
“Cool, let’s get as far as we can, but turn back before we lose the light,” Bobbi suggests.
Diligently, I follow my old friend up the path, Bobbi my armor. Warmth gathers in the depths of my chest, percolating through the membranes of tissue, the knowledge that I won’t go it alone again soothes my weary soul. We walk in near silence except for Bobbi’s occasional wheezing breaths, a sign he’s been neglecting to hike regularly. Losing the supply runs might be a blessing, giving us more time to spend doing things important to us. Our pace brisk, we reach the overlook, wrought iron bars adorning the edges, the gorge plunging to the depths of Ghost River, a sight I’m all too acquainted with.
Something tickles the protruding bone on the base of my neck, a warning of the impending presence of something past my sight. Fatigue takes me… my eyes growing heavy, my body slouches… Bobbi’s distant screams of panic… echoing somewhere beyond my mind…
••••
“RILEY? FUCK, MAN! YOU OKAY? PLEASE BE OKAY!”
Eyes refocusing to the late afternoon sun, the overlook glinting with warm rays, exactly where I was when I fell into a state of sleep. My limbs jerk about beyond my control, my line of sight strange, lower, as though hunched.
What’s wrong with him… a seizure maybe? The fuck is my phone?
“Go get help, I should go get help,” words unfamiliar to me spill from my mouth… Bobbi’s words.
Bobbi? Oh, is it happening again? I try to lift my leg to slam it into the ground… to no avail… passenger… again an unwilling passenger within someone else. His eyes swivel to a figure standing, still, yet slumped, a waterfall of raven hair covering the being’s face against a lolling head… long deep grey coat… it’s me. Grotesque is my outer-self, limp as though switched off, my body sways with a subtle, unnatural movement. My old friend’s breathing strains as he struggles to find his cheap flip phone in the baggy pockets of his black and royal blue coat.
No service! Damn it! Keep it together Bobbi. Try and move him… yeah, get him sitting, get him comfortable in case he starts flailing. If he falls, we’re both fucked!
Powerless, I feel his muscles take action, attempting to lean my frame against the ground. Meeting resistance, Bobbi uses strength I was unaware he had, to combat the rigidity of my form. To no avail, I’m immovable as though solidified to the dead oxidized earth, my flesh shuddering against his grip. In horror, my old friend takes a purposeful step back. The alarm rising deep within the fibers of his spine.
Fuck! I can’t lose you Riley, not again… Too many wasted years! What do I do? What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to protect him… he depends on me… damn it, I am fucking useless… Keep your shit together Bobbi… Can’t let him down…
His skin turns to ice, that familiar creeping sensation of being watched, it burrows through the grey matter of his thoughts into my consciousness. Deeper than empathy, I know this, I’ve experienced it, now we share the verge of the emergence of something terrible, the heart of divinity.
Primal fear, something’s there… Don’t move… It’s not real if I don’t look at it.
Unable to resist the pull of morbid curiosity, Bobbi turns to face the frightening thing that haunts the darkness within all of us. A dense cloud of ebony smoke hovers, ink in water, a tendril of shadow. Navan’yu disembodied, curls over the canyon edge, worming its way towards our shared vessel, a brassy grumble emanating from within. My old friend’s mind lies blank, broken by the sight of something unexplainable, his ligaments frozen in place. Slowly it approaches, no longer the “she” I’ve known, now devolved into something truly unfathomable. The entity stops within inches of his nose, as though waiting for him to engage, thirsting for connection. Paralyzed, he stares into the gloom, as mesmerizing as it is terrifying. Violence so inherent to the Mistwalker’s being, it consumes his face in ebony particles, invading his mind, his cognition stretching… drawing him out somewhere beyond thought…
••••
… Amber, dense clouds, rumbling in the distance, the shared psyche of my old friend and I soar above distant ground. Unbound from pain, weariness, or fear, within an immense body, fabricated into petals of luminous tissue, exuding the weight of the universe. It floats with indescribable beauty… Bobbi… yet not… something removed from what he once was… a being of boundless blazing light enshrouding a sphere of pure void… the other… the second half… a god…
A memory… a recollection from a moment long past, the tortured cries of animals below, victims of the cycle of renewal, their flesh to be remade into soil and ash. A pang of regret, lives destroyed, yet a necessity for the continuance of all things. What of the experiences soon to be lost to the pyroclastic wave? What of the value of the consciousness of life? The explosive timbre of the great mountain to the southeast bellows, laden with molten debris from the deep within… The Shadow that Envelopes Light, circles. Its inky form dances in the gloom… together, we, the one of the whole and the whole of the one, in infinite symmetry… bear witness to this crucial instant in time on this lonely little world…
••••
… Navan’yu releases her vise on Bobbi’s mind… the Dark God, returned to a state of meat and beast. Her leaden gaze ripping me from his consciousness…
Electricity returns to my stiff limbs, pitching me backwards, as though my psyche propelled itself from Bobbi back to into my own body. Heaving, I gulp for air, filling lungs that are once again my own. My eyes refocus… Bobbi stands yards from me, stationary, enthralled by the presence of the Great Spirit, a state of incomprehensible serenity taking his features. Reflexively, his fingers curl around strands of her shaggy midnight mane.
“BOBBI…” I plead, reaching out for him, unable to form the words.
The Mistwalker watches me, her orbs narrowing with satisfaction, akin to a predator reveling in a fresh kill. She takes wing, dragging my friend into the late afternoon sky. Astride her back, the pair vanish into the deep blue expanse… two… the whole… the dyad… united… a thought crawls in the back of brain. I’m over… never about me… forever alone… I’m just a ghost… a stranger in my own story…