The Cabin at the End of the World(67)

I tell you, Andrew and Eric, I now wish my only role was to be a passive witness of the end. I took my time and I was careful not to walk too fast so I could see and mark everything, and maybe thirty minutes in, there was a fifteen-foot-tall, cube-shaped boulder of dam just off the road and squatting in the brush like a sunning tortoise. Its sand-colored, crumbly concrete was striated, and from the road it looked like a section of a staircase for a giant. Like I said, I didn’t know it was a piece of the St. Francis Dam until I got home, so I didn’t know what it was other than a man-made ruin, a leftover, a gravestone for a doomed past. I kept walking and following the road, and maybe another thirty minutes later I stopped. I was made to stop. I now think I was in the spot where the dam had been built and spanned across the valley. I left the road and hiked over to an area covered with rubble, a mix of stones and small bits of porous cement. I stood in the lowest point of the valley and it was as quiet as the bottom of the sea. I expected, I don’t know, to see someone or something (I still can’t bring myself to say God, or a god) come over the hilltops and—this sounds crazy, I know—grab me, pick me up because I felt doll-sized, and I didn’t think I was alone anymore, and it wasn’t a good feeling. Then everything went black.

I tell you, Andrew and Eric, I know Adriane said she saw The Goonies rock and the tsunami before we saw it all on TV. I never saw that. I won’t lie to you. That’s a promise I can keep. I’d marched the path of a great flood without knowing it and I didn’t see anything other than darkness. It wasn’t like I’d lost time or something and it had become night in the valley. It wasn’t night-dark; I couldn’t see anything. There was nothing. I was nothing. But then I heard groans and high-pitched sounds of stress and I could only imagine one of the hills was going to burst or break above me. There was a thunderous crack and a low vibrato whoosh sounding like the earth itself giving a defeated sigh, and then an ocean of water cascading and rushing over me, past me, and into the landscape I could no longer see. There was the percussive snapping of trees and crunch of collapsing houses and buildings. There were people, so many people, screaming and screaming, and the worst part was the screams went unfinished; the screams cut out and left me to fill in how they were supposed to continue. In the valley I listened to an apocalypse that already happened and I was listening to the end of everything else, and that end would never cease. The callous rush of water didn’t stop and continued long past the final echoes of destruction and death. It went on forever. I went along with it, neither cold nor warm, or anything really, another piece of detritus floating away. Part of me is still there now. At some point I was extracted out of that endless time, and I wasn’t in the dark, and I was back at my car and it was almost noon. I don’t remember walking back to the car. Trust the process, right?

I tell you, Andrew and Eric, there are other gaps in my memory. Gaps I don’t care to fill in. I already told you how I tried not to come to New Hampshire and how I just sort of came back to myself, from wherever I was, and I was sitting in a cab on the way to LAX.

Just let me tell you this, Andrew and Eric: I wasn’t me, or I wasn’t all there when the three of us killed Redmond. It was like a trance, I guess, though I’ve never been in a trance so how would I know? I think a part of me, the best part, the important part, got sent back to the nothingness, floating along in the never-ending end in the valley, but enough of me was left behind here to see Redmond grinning through his masked face and to feel the wooden handle vibrate in my hands as I smashed his head and to hear the sound it made. I wasn’t there for all of it. I can’t tell you how many times I swung and hit him. I can’t tell you which one of us landed the final, killing blow. I tell you, Andrew, I already cannot recall specifics about our struggle at your SUV. It’s like trying to remember something from early childhood. There’s only the barest and broadest traces of this happened and I was there.

Eric asks me if I’ve seen anyone else here or there (he doesn’t specify where there is) and he mumbles something about a figure and light. Andrew talks over him, nearly shouting, telling Eric to stop talking to me and he asks Eric if he’s ready to go yet. Eric doesn’t look at Andrew. He only looks at me. I try not to stare at his daughter, wrapped in a sheet and on his lap. It only occurs to me now that I’m being a terrible nurse for not insisting I look under the sheet at Wen, to make sure she’s beyond saving.

I tell you, Eric, I’ve never seen a figure like you described, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one here.

Eric says that right before Redmond was killed, he sensed a presence in the room with us. It was sort of like when you drop an egg into a pot of water and the water rises, is displaced. He says it was like that.

I don’t like what he is saying and I like how he looks even less. He has a lights-are-on-but-no-one’s-home glaze. I wonder if I looked like that when I was talking about my experiences and I already can’t remember how much or how little I actually said out loud to them or just thought.

Eric says he could feel the space in the room being displaced. He says he saw something appear, join the circle around Redmond before we started pummeling him. He says he tried to pass it off as a flash of light from the deck or a concussion-and stress-induced hallucination or migraine, one that looked at him, one that regarded him. Eric enunciates “regarded.” He says he hasn’t seen the figure again, but he’s felt it hanging around. It was here somewhere after Adriane and Wen died, and Eric says he shut the cabin’s front door to keep it outside.