Universal Harvester(41)

“You mean they’re all dead.”

“Maybe. I guess. I don’t really know. They’re people who were here once. I’m their witness. I keep their memory alive.”

“I don’t get it,” said Sarah Jane.

“Sure you do,” said Lisa. “Everybody does.”

“Everybody what?”

Lisa rose to her feet, took a deep breath, and shook her hair. It was late and the moon was so bright you could see it through the drawn blinds.

“Everybody leaves a little something behind,” she said, heading up the stairs. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

*

She lay awake later, thinking: Keep their memory alive. People you once knew who’ve gone somewhere: those memories everyone can understand. They are hothouse flowers. You tend to them because the world will be diminished by their loss. But the memories to which Shed #4 and Farrowing Crate bore witness—whose were those? They were nothing, they went nowhere. No names, half-seen faces, no locatable beginnings or ends.

But there was the one scene, though, that did feel like an end, the last one on the tape labeled State Road. That woman running down the driveway, her hair seen free for the first time. Someone following. The sound of cold gravel underfoot, the cold readily established by clouds of steam emerging from a panting mouth at lens-height behind the camera, fogging the screen as we pursue our quarry out toward the road. Sarah Jane couldn’t fix the outline definitively, couldn’t say why this felt like the one scene after which no other could be envisioned. But in the hidden recesses of her heart, at the bottom of a diagram she’d never looked at under good light, that’s what it was: the concluding moment, the nearest thing to a climax these dozens of tapes had to offer. The opening out onto the blacktop. The last blurred burst of information before the transmissions stopped coming forever.





3

Sometime after dinner that evening, as the washing machine in the garage chugged cheerfully away, cleaning the blood out of Jeremy’s clothes, Steve dug his journal out from the back of the drawer where it had lain unattended for years. He turned to the point where he’d left off; that final entry before the long break ventured so far out into the depths: it had felt like a purging, and it was. He’d seldom thought of the journal at all after writing it. It had taken him over a year, back then, to get to the place where he could open himself up to say It feels dark a lot of the time. This new entry took the shortcut.

Linda I think Jeremy’s hurt or in trouble and I don’t know what to do, it says. I can’t lost Jeremy. Help me Linda I don’t know what to do.

Ken Wahl never saw this entry, and neither did anybody else. After writing it, not stopping to correct lost for lose, Steve tucked it back underneath the dress socks he never wore. Then he went out to the kitchen to clean up. They’d had chicken alfredo with noodles. By now he could make it without having to read the instructions on the jar. He turned to chicken alfredo when he wanted to feel secure.

*

Jeremy was awake and restless by midnight. Turning in early had thrown him off. Shifting and turning in bed, he tried unsuccessfully to calm his mind. After a while he gave up.

“Hey, it’s Jeremy,” he said quietly into the mouthpiece, standing in the living room at the wall phone in the dark, wearing the same basketball shorts and undershirt he’d used as pajamas since high school.

“It’s twelve thirty,” Stephanie said. She’d been sleeping.

“Oh,” he said. For him it was still yesterday, all that blood and sun and glass: for her it was only the middle of the night. “Sorry.”

“It’s OK. What is it?”

“I—” Where was he going to start? “You were right about Collins.”

“Collins?”

“The house.” Nothing. “The one from the movies.”

In some places night gets louder in the summertime. Cicadas were buzzing outside, choral, alien. He looked out at the backyard from where he stood, hearing their sound but seeing no motion, just hearing the drone. They attached themselves to trees and sang all summer. When it got cold they’d be gone.

“No, listen,” she said after a long silence, stirring finally free from sleep. “I decided you were right. You know? You were right.”

“I was right?”

“It’s none of our business.”

“I didn’t say that,” he said.

“You said, ‘I don’t want to know.’”

“That’s right,” he said. “I didn’t want to know, but I had to go out to Collins to talk to Sarah Jane, and I—”

“Sarah Jane lives here,” said Stephanie. “She’s right down the street.”

“Well, but no, she doesn’t. She drives in from Collins most days now, when she comes in at all.”

Stephanie laughed. “This is new,” she said.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” said Jeremy. “She seems kind of worried when she comes in.”

Stephanie was now sitting upright in bed. The San Francisco job was beginning to look like a dead end. She still wasn’t sure how much longer she could really stand Nevada, but when Jeremy’d refused to go adventuring down the county roads, she’d taken it to heart: she wanted adventure, but she didn’t want it to get messy. But it seemed like now it was messy already, and Jeremy was less than a mile away.