When Shadows Get Loud

Three separate cold fronts coalesced above the heartland that November, with the heaviest axis running from the eastern Ozarks to central Illinois. The first one swept down as a high-pressure Canadian air mass; the other two exchanged brief and chilly text messages to solidify a plan to drive from St. Louis to Kansas City the following morning, leaving at dawn in order to dodge the worst of the weather.

The drive had to be made, and on that day too—there was no getting around it. Marina had made the appointment in September, and November 17 was the earliest day that Dr. Agrawal had open. The procedure itself was not necessarily difficult—an in-patient, half-an-hour ordeal, but it required considerable precision and experience. And since a fuck-up could render you permanently blind in one eye, Marina had opted to trust the surgeon recommended by every St. Louis eye doctor she’d consulted, even though it meant waiting for more than a month for an appointment and driving more than two hundred miles to his clinic.

Her condition made road navigating impossible, so the plan had been for her sister Pia to handle the driving end of the four-hour trip. Marina’s surgery was scheduled for two-thirty in the afternoon on Friday; after that they would stay overnight at the pricey but sumptuous Hotel Indigo on West 111^th and return to St. Louis on Saturday. Despite the rather gruesome half-time show (in which Dr. Agrawal would inject a gas bubble into Marina’s left eye and seal the retina with a laser) both sisters had been looking forward to spending the down-time hours together.

Then Covid reared its microscopic head; Pia’s Antigen Rapid test came back positive. Marina took the call around noon on Thursday and said, after an almost formal silence, “Well, fucking aye, honey—that sucks proverbial tailpipe... for you, of course—you dodged that bullet for years. But for me too.”

“Right? I know. I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry for a catching a virus? Don’t be silly. It’s an act of a very cynical God. Take care of yourself.”

“No doubt. I’m quarantining upstairs so Jon doesn’t catch it too. But obviously, tomorrow is out for me. Not sure if you can reschedule? Or have any other option to get to your appointment?”

“I really don’t; this comes from pretty far out in left field.”

“I know. So here’s the thing, Mari. I know what you’re going to say, but I have to say it anyway: Jon has the next few days free and he says he’s happy to drive you.”

“God, no. Four hours in the car with Jon? Times two with coming back? That’s my definition of over-the-top. And what are we supposed to do tomorrow night, share our suite at the Indigo?”

“They have other rooms available; we already checked. We’ll book one. Or worse comes to worse, you could come back that same night and sleep on the way, in the car.”

“I’m not supposed to travel the same day, remember? That was going to be the fuel for our bonding mission in K.C. Or re-bonding, like they’re gonna do to my left fucking retina.”

“I know. I know it, honey—voilà, we could have been kids again, where troubles float like lemon drops. Fate had a wrench.”

“Fate had a middle finger, that’s for sure.”

“And anyway, this thing with Jon has gone totally sophomoric. If you want us to re-bond, you’ll have to get over it. He was your best friend for how many years?”

“Since we were sophomores, actually. But fuck that noise, darlin’. He un-BFFed me when he effed you over.”

“Oh, God, this approaches the compulsive, Marina. Talk about ‘f’ words? If I can forgive him for an office discretion, so can you. So should you. It’s endlessly awkward and any shitstorm between Jon and me belongs to our world exclusively. It’s my life and you don’t get to be so self-centered about it.”

“Except that I’m more than a casual onlooker, Pia; I’m the catalyst who introduced you two.”

“So this is ambient guilt? Well guess what? We both remain grateful to you for that introduction. We have achieved equilibrium after all this time and in your hour of need, he’s offering you a pretty humble olive branch. I really don’t know the whole kit and kaboodle of what happened between you two, but...”

“Kit and kaboodle?” Marina snorted. “Sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon with a psychotic cat and a passive-aggressive mouse. Honest to fucking God, Pia, sometimes I think you have the self-esteem of a Roomba. Tell you what. Let me check the olive forest near me and if I can find a branch with less baggage hanging from it, that’s the way I’m gonna go.”

“Well, let us know if you need a chainsaw, honey. Jon can probably help with that too.”

And that’s where they left it. Marina had already packed an overnight bag—phone charger, change of clothes, gummies for sleep, a small flashlight, loungewear jammies—and now she began the anxiety-puttering that made up her afternoons—playing piano without notation, a slow circuit-walk around the block with a cane so she didn’t fall, easy cooking with Ray Charles and Kenny Rankins on the Echo Studio. Did the eye drop regimen: Four kinds, one a steroid that gave her nightmares of falling and familiar faces turning into monsters. There was no trip to the olive grove because there was no olive grove and at three o’clock, she sent a terse, open-ended text to Jon, her first direct communication with him since the previous summer:

‘You probably guessed that I’d rather Uber to Kansas City that take up your offer.’

Terse for terse, Jon came back with: ‘But you can, Mari. Uber to Lambert, fly to KC and Uber to your doctor. Lather, rinse, repeat in reverse until the Uber is back in your driveway.”

‘Smart ass. I probably should do that, but it’s too much shit where something goes wrong piled on top of the stress of getting a gas bubble injected into my eyeball.’

‘So I’m driving you?’ Jon wrote.

‘Pia said it’s awkward for her, but she has no idea, does she? You may be able to compartmentalize your way out of the thing at the barbecue, but not me.’

‘I’ll be embarrassed about the barbecue thing until the day someone trips over my life support cord.’

‘If I’m around, maybe I’ll do the tripping. Be sure to delete this message thread, too, and be glad I never mentioned the barbecue thing to Pia. I doubt she’d be so keen to put us together in a hotel.’

‘It was drunken, classless, stupid play.’

‘Booze is a shitbag’s excuse. What’s next; your wife doesn’t understand you? Your clichés are usually better than that. Also your moves. I’m what, another score from your work?’

‘I have nothing but an apology for that night, Mari. Beyond that I’m dry.’

Twenty minutes later she wrote, ‘Pia may not understand you, but I do. It’s some fundamental flaw, you know? Pathological vanity or something. I should have seen it before I installed you inside my clan. But I need to make this fucking appointment, so thank you and fuck you concurrently. My conditions are this: Round-trip Bose headphones and we take my car.’

It was accepting an olive branch with fireplace tongs, but in the end, they didn’t take her car, they took his. The lower atmosphere compromised while the upper atmosphere rebelled. The winter storm moved in much more rapidly than predicted—residual Indian summer air collided hard with the Canadian cold front and what threatened one or two inches of snow became five or six in the panicky voices of weathercasters who live for weather but sound terrified of weather.

Still, a storm of that magnitude was unheard of in November and Marina’s lightweight Benz 35 AMG would be a cork on a mid-Missouri heavy-wind ocean. Jon’s Subaru Crosstrek was made of sterner stuff. Marina agreed to the change of plans in a somewhat icy cascade of whatevers and on went the headphones.

The first soft flakes began to thread down as a bruise in the east became a proximity of daylight; the storm picked up steam as it sculled southward. By the time they hit Warrenton, meteorologists were setting the stage for a 1-in-70 year snow event with nonsense neologisms like ‘snowpocalypse.’ The hoary flatlands and weedy stubble fields took on milky contours as far as you could see, which, in degrees, became less and less far—half a mile, then a quarter mile.

But her early wake-up, noise-cancelling Stevie Wonder on the Bose phones and a single cannabis gummy had left Marina deliciously asleep, miles removed from miles of white, and she did not wake up until they had crossed the Missouri River.

Her eyes took a while to adjust; she surveyed snow drifting across highway and beyond, tattered trees scattered among prairies and furrows of winter wheat suddenly anonymous beneath a shroud. She could barely see to the end of the Crosstrek hood.

“What the fuck?” she cried.

“Well, to break our cone of silence, the weather reports are pretty bleak. Thirty miles per hour is as fast as we can handle right now. And it’s getting worse.”

“We accounted for that, though. Right? In our timing?” She tried her phone and there was no signal. She shook the phone as if that might help. “What the further fuck?”

Jon shook his head: “I drive this route a lot and there’s always a signal. Ice might be building up on cell tower antennae. Maybe the wind misaligned them.”

“But we’ll still make it to Kansas City by two-thirty, right?”

“We should. Unless the cops close the freeway.”

And then, at the Moorcroft exit, the cops closed the freeway. Cars—and there were not many—were routed up a slalom run posing as an offramp. Most of these opted to turn left, turn around and take the ramp leading back to St. Louis.

At the crest, a blue-lipped state trooper with a rimed yellow moustache stood blocking the westbound interstate entrance. Jon asked him where they could find a working wi-fi and the cop shrugged, dislodging an inch of white powder. He crooked a gloved finger to their right, past an abandoned Phillips 66 station with a chained and padlocked door. “Moorcroft, maybe. Early Bird café has a hook-up if they’re open. Downtown, across from the hotel, about a mile. No sense in heading west—it’s a whiteout. ”

“What are the chances the Early Bird is open?”

 “Fifty-fifty.”

“We have to try,” cried Marina. “I have to get in touch with somebody at Agrawal’s office. I’m sure I won’t be the only one who got jammed up by the weather and maybe they have a Plan B.”

So they took the snowy road that led toward a faded, hermetic town of six thousand built around a salt lick before the Civil War.

When the town boomed—and it had—tons of crystallized salt from the nearby springs were shipped to St. Louis via keelboat. Now, Moorcroft flotsam hung sadly over the river with snow drifting against boarded-up storefronts along Main Street. Downtown still had bars, a tattoo parlor called ‘The Golden Needle,’ a tiny ‘rail museum’ and several second hand stores—one of which billed itself as ‘America’s Oldest Television Repair Shop.’ All were shuttered against the storm. But there was a small neon ‘open’ sign at the Early Bird Café.

They wedged into a snow bank on the opposite side of the street beneath a squarish prosperity-relic, a two-story revivalist building. Above wooden double doors, over the lintel, was a segmented pediment with an insignia set into a crest inscribed ‘Hotel Augustus.’

Inside the café, it was filmy with forced-air heat. A small, gnarled person in an insulated winter vest sat at the counter bobbing rhythmically although there was no music. He had the unsettling, off-kilter features of Down syndrome. Only one of the café’s six tables was occupied; a youngish man in a denim sport coat and a Hemingway-style turtleneck and a woman with pale skin and large dark eyes in a Kangol cap and a zippered sweatshirt. The man inclined his head to acknowledge them; the woman glanced up briefly from her cell phone.

“Whoa. Do you have a signal?” Marina asked her.

“No problem,” the woman answered without making eye contact and returned to her text. Marina found a corner by an assortment of children’s wooden-bead toys and began to check messages.

The man said to Jon, “Worse or better out there?”

“The interstate? Westbound is totally closed. East still open.”

“That works. We’re heading east.”

“Lucky you.”

From her toy corner, Marina listened to an overly complex recording from her doctor’s office, and while she replayed it, she noted that Jon’s voice had adopted its usual unguardedness—a genial dealing-with-strangers tone. It seemed to have gotten louder since they were in school. He was still good-looking, but his face was thinner and harder than it had been in those days, although intact was his innate charm, which people still fell for.

He was shortly chatting with the man as if they were cut-buddies from boyhood, and she returned her attention to the message, then made a second call to Pia.

A woman now came in from the kitchen. Her short-sleeved polyester shirt showed big, loping letters tattooed along her left arm: ‘Create Yourself.’

“I’m closing in twenty, friends. Grill’s off, but I do have two fritters left, which is sort of weird. They’re usually the first to go.”

“They’re really good,” the turtlenecked man said.

“Coffee?”

“To the bitter end,” the tattooed woman nodded.

Jon took a pair of coffees back to the table nearest to the couple. He said, “We were just routed off 70 and came in search of a working wi-fi so we could change our plans. State troopers are acting like it’s a horde of Cossacks descending from Canada. If you’re heading back toward St. Louis, you should think about making tracks before they close that ramp too.”

“Yeah, we’re on our way. Hey, we just abandoned the only room at the inn if you need a place to stay tonight. Hotel Augustus, across the street. We were going to stay a bit longer, but Michelle took a dislike to it overnight.”

“Must be serious dislike to make you jump ship in this weather.”

“I heard a fucking gunshot, Anthony,” Michelle said. “Right next to the bed.”

Jon understood that he’d plopped down in the middle of an ongoing bicker. Anthony answered, “It’s not like I said you didn’t hear something, Michelle. The building is a hundred years old. It creaks and moans—there are sledge hammers in the radiators. But a gunshot? In the room? You’d think I’d hear that too. Anyway, I loved the place.

“Bricks and mortar are why we booked. It’s the room—there’s something wrong with it. I could smell it the moment I walked inside.”

“Michelle smells things like that,” Anthony said, his voice bemused. “I don’t. Tremors from her dream shell.”

“Why not just switch rooms?”

“We tried, but it turned out to be only room they had free.”

“Well, now it’s free again,” Michelle replied tersely.

Anthony said, “We’ve been thinking of a finding a tired old town like this to put in stakes.”

“But not this one,” answered Michelle.

“We’d need two rooms, though. Marina and I are in weird sort of entwinement this weekend.”

“Got it. But in the event you don’t want to drive twenty miles to a Motel 6, you may need to repair the weird, at least for the night.”

“She’s my sister-in-law.”

“That’s a tough call, bro,” Anthony said with a slight upturn of the lips. “Best of luck with that one. Anyway, we better make tracks before it gets worse out there and all four of us have to bunk up in that room.”

He added, “If you’re ever on Cherokee Street, look us up. We do ceramics classes—pottery; hand-building and wheel-throwing classes, that kind of thing.”

“What’s her name again?” Michelle asked, glancing at Marina, then looking at Jon oddly.

“Marina. You might know her—she loves crafty arts districts.”

“It’s not her, it’s her name. Marina. But never mind. If I were you, I’d drive the 20 miles. You really don’t want that room, especially if she’s sensitive to morbid stuff.”

Jon answered, “So do me a favor and don’t mention anything to her, just in case we get stuck here. She’s always had a low threshold when it comes to the heebie-jeebies. Maybe we’ll get lucky and somebody else checks out.”

“Ask the maître d’—he’s right there,” Michelle answered, pointing to the bobbing counter man with Down syndrome; the couple threw on fleece and wool and headed out into whipping winds.

A minute later, Marina sat down opposite Jon and cupped the coffee mug. “Whew, it’s a fucking hotbox in here. Who were those people?”

“Artists from Cherokee Street, just passing through. They were staying at the hotel across the street.”

“That big old pile? Fucking horseshoe crabs, places like that—living relics from the past. Surprised they drum up enough trade in this town to keep the lights on.”

“Somebody thinks otherwise. They said they checked out of the only available room. Anyway, what did you find out?”

“About my appointment? I’m waiting for a callback. The message at Agrawal’s office said they were rescheduling for tomorrow depending on the weather. Maybe I can still get in the morning. I have to wait to hear from them.”

“You want to head back to St. Louis?”

 “I don’t think that makes any sense, do you?”

“No. But I’m asking.”

“They’re say four or five inches, but it’s supposed to end by evening and then the weather warms up a lot. I also talked to Pia, Your wife, in case you give a fuck. She’s feeling better.”

“Of course I give a fuck. I’ll call her when you figure out what you want to do.”

“Well, I mean, I have to wait to hear from the doctor. You said there’s rooms at the hotel across the street?”

“A room. As in ‘one’.”

“Well, that doesn’t work for us, obviously.”

“Hang on,” said Jon and rose to approach the man at the counter, touching his shoulder lightly. The bobbing stopped and the man went rigid.

“Sorry. Do you work over at the hotel?” Jon asked.

The tattooed woman returned from the rear. “That’s Billy. He manages the Augustus front desk—he’s the grandson of the owners. People scare him, so it’s an odd occupation. A mercy job, really. It was a grand enough place in our halcyon days; it’s mostly a residential hotel for old people now. But they usually have some rooms free—that particular demographic doesn’t stick around indefinitely, if you catch my meaning. Diminishment.”

“Yes, I work there,” said Billy suddenly. It was a high-pitched warble, at odds with the brutish contours of his face.

“We need two rooms for tonight.”

“Only one room is open.”

“Do you have a restaurant or a bar or anything?”

“No,” said Billy.

The tattooed woman said, “There’s a kitchen and a dining room at the Augustus, of course, but it’s mostly ‘Today is Friday, The Weather is Cloudy’ type food for the residents. We used to have a couple decent restaurants in town, but like most of us, they got caught in economic crossfire. Amazing that I hang on, frankly. At any rate, much as I’d love to see you folks again tomorrow morning, I really need to lock up now. I have a dog who needs to make yellow snow and hellion kids on early release. If you don’t mind the drive, there’s a Motel 6 in Steubenton, but they’re probably booked up too. People are hunkering down right now. I’d be happy to bag the leftover fritters for you, no charge.”

“Okay,” said Jon as he settled up.

He explained the situation to Marina who said, “Well, that’s another tailpipe. But I’m done with blizzarding and I won’t risk losing my phone signal again. Let’s take the fucking room. You can be a gentleman and insist on sleeping on the sofa.”

Ten minutes later they were stomping off snow and brushing off their coats in the stale chill of the hotel’s wood-paneled atrium. Despite gauzy light from old chandeliers and a frenzy of plaster flurries, the appointments in the entryway were high-quality—a brass and mahogany dreadnought with thirty mail slots and a country hutch that, if it wasn’t Chippendale, made a good approximation. It seemed to be pet-friendly digs, too: There were cats milling about. A skeletal, well-dressed man on a settee held an orange one in his lap. The cat was kneading him while his own feet were digging into a mottled patch of carpet.

Marina said, “Welcome to the lobby in Limbo."

“Pretty noir.” Jon shrugged. “But there was a time when this place must have been the town’s exclamation point.”

“A sleeping monstrosity stuck inside a hell loop.”

With twinges of melancholy, Marina recalled that as WashU undergrads, these were the sort of counterpoint sentences she and Jon had composed together when confronted with any form of novel environment or unique scenario: For kids on the event-horizon of adulthood, such a mind-meld is invaluable; humor is a lifeline from the inevitable undertow, like when their mutual friend Julian committed suicide by sticking fentanyl patches all over his body. Unison in unison; at the funeral, they’d been able to laugh and cry at the same time. She did not blame herself for this evaporation of emotional intimacy; she blamed Jon’s outsized need for physical intimacy, one that that had become more pronounced in his thirties and now into the first years of his forties.

“Survival by absorption,” Jon said, crooking a thumb at a pair of muttering, puttering forms in the shadows; people shuffling along as if their trains were derailed and their wheels no longer had contact with earth.

A high-pitched voice said, “This is a prior place.”

Behind the opulent cherry-wood reception desk, Billy now clutched a carabiner of pass-keys. He’d made it back while they were fetching their overnight bags. His gaze was fixed and intense, devoid of emotion.

“That’s an astute comment, young man,” Marina said.

“What is?” Billy answered.

“Never mind. What we really need is two separate room, two rooms separated by a long hallway and preferably, a stairwell.”

A vein in Billy’s neck was quivering and so was his lower lip. His forehead bossed out like his lower jaw; his teeth did not fit together. Marina guessed that something more than Down syndrome was going on in the genes; a neural tube defect.

Billy said, “Only open room for now is Room 9, upstairs, end of the hall.”

“That’s what I was afraid you’d say,” Marina replied, laying down her Visa card. She’d already insisted on covering the cost of room as her share of Jon’s olive branch. Plus, it gave her better dibs on the mattress.

“You’ll call us if another room opens up?”

Now the brutal face cracked into an approximation of a grin: “If you don’t mind the drive, there’s a Motel 6 in Steubenton, but they’re probably booked up too. People are hunkering down right now.”

They took their bags up a grand flight of stairs into a hallway so broad that furniture fit in the middle, including a massive armoire and a seven-foot formal dining table with a carved apron and lion-claw feet. The walls were lined with photographs of various Moorcroft gems—grand houses on hilltops, bearded men in handsome garb, women in dresses with high necklines and fitted waists and cemetery monuments showing where most of these people had ended up.

Interspersed were Ozarkian crafts—framed, crib-sized quilts. It was hard to imagine the sort of babies they were for, though: the tattered panels on one showed bugs and spiders and on another, in what passes in the critical world as naïve art, were portraits of baby heads that made them look cephalic, like they had whatever Front-Desk Billy had.

The Agrawal call came as Jon was unlocking the heavy door to Room 9. She turned back into the hallway to take it in private:

“There’s my destiny on line one, Jon. Go on in and set up camp in some faraway corner while I deal with them.”

Inside the room, Jon discovered the unpleasant scent the café woman had mentioned, but it wasn’t strong—likely nothing more than a taint of dry rot, the smell that old furniture gets when it is closed up for a long time. And maybe, faintly, there was the residue of old-school oil soap someone had used for cleaning. How long ago the café couple had checked out had not been clear, but in the meantime, the room had been done over—the flat, uninspiring bed was made, a triangular corner sink wiped down and an old dresser, which had circular holes on the surface where an upper-half mirror had once been, was dust-free.

He set Marina’s bag on the bed and his own on a spindly rocking chair that blocked the inner-room doorway that is often found in old hotels; a door leading to an adjoining room. It was a feature that allowed families to stay together with privacy, but with the ability to maintain easy access to one another.

The only other piece of furniture was an armchair with faded tuft upholstery. There was no sofa, so sleeping for Jon would be upright or on the floor, neither of which struck him as overtly dreadful considering the circumstances.

The walls were hung with more patchwork quilts and he paused before the faded yellow-and-maroon one hanging above the dresser where the mirror had been.

Briefly, he was thunderstruck at the coincidence. The name. He understood what Michelle from the café had been talking about and stepped briefly back into the hallway; Marina was embroiled in a conversation ten feet away. Her voice had taken on the shrilling iron streak she used when she wanted something urgently.

Back inside the room, he removed the framed quilt from its hook and slid it behind the dresser. No need for further dramatics. On the piece, in stitched, scissored calico letters against the cloth ground, it read ‘Marina.’

She entered a moment later. “And?” he said quickly.

“And I can get in at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. The receptionist will probably need her own specialist after the arm-twisting I did. So, as long as providence melts all this bullshit by morning, it’s all systems go.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Of course I’m hungry, Jon. I’m fucking famished—I didn’t eat last night either so as not to choke on my own puke during surgery. Now I have to follow their advice again for a second chance. And yeah, a shot at visual redemption is worth it.”

“So you don’t mind if I eat both these café fritters?”

“God, you are insufferable. What I’d really like? To have some down-time for myself, then take a handful of gummies and sleep through the rest of this shitty set-up.”

“Cannabis residue no problem for your surgery?”

“Who knows? —that much I didn’t ask since it’s non-negotiable. Food? That’s expendable.”

“Well, not for me. So here’s what I’ll do. I’ll take my laptop and head downstairs to give you your space.”

“Knock yourself out. Take the key. I can’t remember if you snore, but if you do, don’t you friggin dare wake me up during the night.”

Back in the atrium, Billy remain stoically, sullenly at his post. Jon remembered reading that most people have Neanderthal DNA swimming around in their pool and concluded that this poor dude had more than his share. Still, he was the only lifeline to information and Jon asked him where the kitchen was.

“That’s for residents, not guests,” Billy answered firmly.

“So what do guests do for basic sustenance, like dinner?”

“Bring their own food or go out.”

“Yes, but if you noticed, everything in town is fucking closed.”

The comment struck Billy as funny. His face broke open wide again, showing the malocclusion. “That’s because it’s really snowing hard!”

The man in the elegant dark-green suit was still working the carpet beneath the settee with his shoes, but the cat was gone. Jon figure he might have more luck here and sat down beside him. There was something pure and almost transparent about the old man’s demeanor; a fragility that ran through his cheekbones and up into the papery skin of his skull.

“How are you?” Jon asked.

“Pretty good. Nothing extra. Migraines here and there, but not right now.”

He seemed lucid enough, so Jon went on. “A lot of snow today, huh? In November, too. Weather people saying four to five inches, but mostly melted by tomorrow.”

The man had clear blues eyes; he turned them slightly toward Jon. “I’m not sure I see the link between you, me and the weather.”

“Well, there’s none. Except that’s why we stopped here. Marina and me. Can’t drive any farther on 1-70; it’s closed. So here we are, all together on this snowbound Friday. But I happen to have a couple apple fritters from the café across the street. Would you like one?”

“I’d be obliged.”

Jon handed over a fritter from the white sack and then extended an open palm. “Jon Grasso,” he said.

“Is there someone behind me?” the man answered.

The question was so unexpected that it was a moment before Jon could answer: “Nope. It’s just us.”

“Sometimes someone lurks back there and strokes my head. I can’t see them.”

“Ah. Well, just like your migraines—not now. You’re sitting against a paneled wall.”

The fritter lay untouched in the man’s lap, occupying the space where the cat had been. Jon ate his. A moment later, through a tunnel of sadness, the old man said, “I have a wife here but I can’t remember which one she is.”

Such an odd phenomenon, Jon thought, and not altogether awful. To be dropping down a bottomless, self-contained well, shrinking into a sum of symptoms, your slate wiped clean and the past reduced to a strange fog that rolls away in waves. It was a perception that, in days gone by, he’d have shared with Marina.

This thing with her, though: She’d been the closest thing to a soulful, cerebral friendship that he’d ever experienced with a woman. Of course, back then, there were other, more vital imperatives encouraging the grand leap into bottomless wells, and despite their brief closeness, he’d left many surface things unsaid. The tickings of life got in the way; trifling boyfriends, silly girlfriends, and then, an introduction to Marina’s sister Pia, who was far more eager for the well-leap than Marina was.

So the things that remained unsaid back then—despite the one shit-faced night at a house party thrown by the brother Raffy—remained unsaid today.

He finished his fritter and the old man nodded as if he had forgotten about forgetting and the sadness thawed: “This hotel was built in 1905. Did you know that?”

An odder phenomenon, perhaps—to forget the consequential and remember the irrelevant. Jon said, “I guessed it must be from around that era.”

“Yes, thanks to Daniel Boone’s sons. Back then, there was big trade in river salt here. Bigger than timber, bigger than agriculture. This town was once very important—they made it so. The boys were not frontiersmen, they were entrepreneurs.”

“Well, see? That’s an interesting tidbit of information.”

“There was a double murder here too, back in the ‘30s.”

“Gangster stuff?”

“Oh, no. A love triangle. The cuckold husband shot them both in bed, then turned himself in. Hung the next year. We used to do that more often in Missouri. And sooner rather than later.”

“Did it happen in Room 9?” Jon asked suddenly.

“Why, I don’t know,” the man said. “It would have been upstairs, though. He climbed up a fire escape because a pump-action shotgun would have been hard to conceal in the atrium.”

Shortly, the fritter began to lay hard in Jon’s gut and he forgot about looking for a kitchen. Instead, he excused himself and found a lounge annexed to the lobby. Within, the floor was a ceramic checkerboard set diagonally, like a scene from Vermeer. And, as in these paintings, diffused lighting created adamant absences in the shadows. Briefly, in the low light, it was a stunning visual.

Billy had called it a prior place and it certainly was; the lounge was empty but for an old upright piano beneath a massive pair of elk antlers—there were no bottles behind the bar and the counter itself was covered with a film of dust.

He moved a Chinese checkers set from a table and unfolded his computer. Marina was right; he should call Pia and tell her about the change of plans. But he didn’t. The dropdown showed that the hotel’s wi-fi was unlocked, and although it took a few search engine tricks, he found an article from the Kansas City Star archives:

HOTEL HORROR IN MOORCROFT’S ‘AUGUSTUS’

Moorcroft, January 17, 1938. (AP): Police have identified the bodies of Jouett L. Cunningham, 25 and Mrs. Ellen Rossman, 20, both of Columbia, Missouri, who were murdered Friday night at the Hotel Augustus in downtown Moorcroft. Police say that the slain pair were involved in an illicit love affair and were shot to death by the woman’s husband, George L. Rossman, 43, who had followed them to their hotel tryst. Immediately after the killing, Rossman called the police from the hotel’s atrium and admitted to his deeds. He was arrested within fifteen minutes of firing the fatal shots.

The hotel manager said that the slain pair had checked into separate but adjoining rooms on the evening prior to the murders, identifying themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Richard E. James of Kansas City. He said it was not the first time the couple had checked into the Augustus under these assumed names.

Police say that the hotel room was a scene of unprecedented carnage. Both barrels of the shotgun had been fired into Mrs. Rossman’s chest at such close range that they left two separate holes, blowing away part of her ribcage before travelling up through her lungs and breaking her shoulder blades. The force of the blast that killed Cunningham was so violent that he ended up lying partly face-down on the floor with blood soaking into the floorboards. Police did not speculate on which of the deceased had been killed first, but guests in nearby rooms said that the shots were fired in close proximity to one another.

Mr. Rossman, a grain salesman, has been arraigned in the Saline County courthouse and will remain in jail while awaiting trial.

Time passed; the wintering light failed, the room darkened and shadows intruded. In this span, Jon experienced the entirely modern phenomenon of instant-access—going from knowing nothing at all about a random topic to knowing everything available on it. He followed the story of the crime through Star archives, and then an account in MurderMania.com, and then he found a ghostwritten piece in a 1940 ‘True Detective’ called ‘Murder in Moorcroft,’ purportedly submitted by Moorcroft chief of police Dan Bondehagen.

It began: “Something horrible has happened at the Hotel Augustus!” These were the words that greeted me when I answered the call at the station in the wee hours of January 16, 1938. “A terrible crime has been committed by myself, George Rossman! I just shot my wife and her lover dead!”

It mentioned the room number—28—so they were off the hook for any blood-stained floorboards. The rest was period drek; over-the-top sensationalism. The female victim had been a piano teacher enamored with one of her adult students and the affair had been going on for six months. Because her husband frequently traveled for his job, steamy nights at the Augustus were regular occurrences. On the last one, a suspicious George Rossman followed them to the hotel and waited outside until he saw his wife at one of the upstairs windows, then climbed the fire escape and settled his beef with a shotgun.

The piece had a detailed account of George Rossman’s final hours, playing whist with the death house guards while drinking orangeade. The piece finished: “A few seconds later the steel trap was sprung and George L. Rossman cancelled his debt to society.”

And hours later, gorged on this backstory, Jon knew all the irrelevant consequentials about the Hotel Augustus murder while, in his way, he forgot about his own wife.

When he finally got up he felt ashamed and vaguely ill. He found the atrium deserted and the reception desk empty. He peeked outside. Snow was still clumping down; an arctic landscape spread in all directions with ice-blue canopies heaped against storefronts and cars parked at awkward angles—his own was now beneath a white shroud—and nobody in sight; everyone cowering, everyone baffled.

He went upstairs. In the center of the wide blue hallway an old woman now sat at the formal table. Perhaps it was the wife of the atrium man, perhaps not: Her hair hung in filaments, her lips were slightly parted to show prominent dentures. She was still as a statue except for a fidgety gaze which darted about the semi-darkness but never locked on Jon; they jitterbugged like the nighttime eyes of someone who is dreaming.

Jon passed her by without a word; he unlocked the room and inside, Marina was beneath bleached sheets, asleep, gummy-blossoming in apparent bliss. He saw that she had folded the bedspread and set it on the armchair. He paused at the bedside and watched Marina’s eyes move the same way the old woman’s had—fireflies darting behind a screen.

He knelt down and snatched some of her small, sour breath. Were she to awaken suddenly, he was so near her face that this time, she’d know that booze was not to blame. This time, there would either be a kiss or the equivalent to a double shotgun blast to the sternum.

But she didn’t wake up. She remained isolated in her dream place while behind him, the spindly rocking chair made a small noise.

He thought he might have nudged it with his foot, but it broke the turn of the moment. He stood up and the chair flinched again. This time he saw the movement of the rockers; his foot was nowhere near them. And then he heard a crude sound behind the inner door—a guttural croon:

“Let me out.”

 He put his ear against the wood and the voice sifted through the wall again. He assumed it was a senior in the room next door, maybe someone addled with dementia; maybe they locked this type in at night. Perhaps it was the man in the green suit who’d forgotten his wife; the request sounded pathetic, as if the voice was bored through with worms:

“Let me out.”

“Out of your room?” Jon whispered back.

“Out of the penetralia.”

A strange, sad, unsettling response. He glanced down at Marina, who slept on undisturbed. The woman from the café told them that they didn’t want this room, the only one available—she’d said it emphatically and more than once. This was why? Raspy syllables seeping in from the room next door? It was ineffably disturbing, and how did you even complain? Loud music was one thing, but people in their own space are probably allowed to whisper. But he was glad that Marina was missing it.

 “Are you in some kind of trouble?” Jon asked in a slightly louder voice. “Do you need help?”

At this, the brass door knob began to turn and some pressure was exerted from the far side—an effort to push it open. Instantly, he grabbed the knob himself to hold the door closed but found that it was locked. In a moment, the faint rattle of cast steel stopped. He crooked his head and listened and there was nothing more to hear beyond the tickings of ancient innards—hotel hisses, pipes and boilers, and then, the pulsing wash of his inner ear.

He released the knob and sat down on the armchair. Within her nest, he heard Marina’s clean and patterned breathing. From time to time, her body gently readjusted itself. She made a murmur through a fissure in her sleep and he recalled an intimate smell, a brief plume from a half-hearted campus protest against the Iraq War they’d attended together—it must have been January, 2002, because they were back at school after the winter break. It was freezing outside and he’d clutched her body and felt her clutch him back and her scent was salty and tinged with crowd-fear and cold raw earth and the exhales of wool that has been perspired into.

 He pulled the heavy bedspread around himself and faced the inner door like a sentry would. He sat upright for a long time but his chin slowly dropped and he had nearly nodded off before there was a reassertion; a different voice this time, one without a rasp, but as formless and soft as wind across a field:

“The imposition of awareness on the non-living is the mother of all suffering. No last words. We see it all; you know that, right?”

“You see what?” he said despite himself.

“Everything. See you approach her with fawning caution when she is still, transcending the risk of dying in a way that is all too intimately understood.”

It came from the next room—the far side of the door, he’d swear to that much, but perhaps it originated within his own head, mental debris washed in on the tide of blood.

“What does that mean?” he said aloud.

“It’s how spiders copulate.”

The doorknob twisted on its spindle; it rattled again: “Let me out, Jon.”

Other than the troglodyte at the front desk, no one but the man in the atrium knew his name, and these abstractions seemed too highbrow for Billy. So it must be the man in the green suit. But the source was not obvious; it resonated in his bones, like he was hearing it through the tissues in his head.

He spoke aloud: “Where are you?”

“Right here, fertilizing the shadows.”

“Where?”

“In the prior place, where everything is as it should have been.”

These were Billy’s words—‘a prior place.’ But it didn’t sound like Billy’s voice.

His Nonna had bellowed the word ‘basta’ when she’d had enough. He didn’t bellow it; he stepped into the hallway and there was Billy, three feet in front of the doorway, stock-still but for his snuffily breathing.

“What are you doing here?” Jon said, startling backward. “What do you want?”

The knurl on Billy’s forehead was so pronounced that it shaded his eyes. He licked his upper lip where a fuzz of hair grew.

“I have to count everyone. To make sure we’re all still here.”

“Bullshit. You can’t count people through a door. I heard you whispering. Weird stuff, too. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Billy blenched back and winced, and as Jon took a step forward he noticed that the door to the adjacent room—Room 8—was ajar about a foot, making what must have just happened suddenly obvious: Billy had been in that room, muttering, trying the inside doorknob, a secret voyeur who spied on his few pretty guests while they slept. Michelle from the café must have heard his whispers too.

Jon nudged the door open further and was hit by a furling stench from within; the same dry rot from his own room, only amped up to a level where it caught in your throat. He flicked at the light switch and nothing happened.

“Nobody is in that room,” Billy mewed. “The lights don’t even work.”

“You told me that our room was the only one available.”

Billy made a shrug of helplessness: “Not that room. It’s not available. Once you exist, you leave a trace.”

“That’s more weird shit, dude. Get the fuck out of here and don’t come back tonight or I’ll call the cops.”

Jon looked up the hallway. The woman no longer was sitting at the formal table that stood between them and the staircase. He made a violent lunge and Billy skittered away to add himself to the darkness.

It still didn’t sit entirely right. Jon propped open the door to Room 8 so that some parched light from a wall sconce got in. From what he could make out, it was a mirror image of their own room, with the beds against the dividing wall and the interior door to the left of fronted by an identical rocking chair. He stepped inside where the hall light wove through the blackness like wicker. He wanted to make sure that the inner door was locked, and as he put his hand on the knob, from behind it—from his own room, apparently—he listened as a low hum formed itself into a voice:

“I’m not in a dirt trough, Jon. I’m right here, carving up the nothing. But at least I no longer have to watch the sun and the moon from below.”

He twisted the knob and it was unlocked; he yanked open the door and confronted a solid brick wall that had been built between the two rooms. And then he heard an explosion on the far side that was so loud he was sure it was a shotgun blast.

His reaction was instantaneous—obviously—but back in Room 9, nothing seemed to be disturbed. Marina was still asleep beneath her stiff white sheets, her air pulsing and lapping behind the whirrs and ticks of building functions.

So he doubted himself, as someone would—work stress, personal turmoil, driving for hours into a blizzard and most probably, the power of suggestion—the graphic articles, the strange café couple, both random and ineffably germane since one of them had heard a gunshot while the other had not.

No doubt it was a catalyzed combo of all the above, but Billy had absolutely been in the room next door—that wasn’t a hallucination. The door had been open and he’d been standing just outside it. His usual sound must have been muffled by the brick wall and his words were nothing more than the mindless upchuck of things he’d heard other residents say.

And so he returned to his upholstered chair and sat vigil—no nodding off this time—and ten minutes later it came like a soft finger in his ear, a weightless whisper:

“Turns out that the verdict is not irreversible—a little bit of color lives on.”

So Billy must be back, and this time, Jon wanted to catch him in the act. He rose quietly and slithered out into the corridor again. He could not remember if he had shut the door to Room 8, but it was ajar. He threw it open and in the treacly trickle of the sconce light, he shortly had to own that the room was empty

...but for the crusting tickle against his eardrum: The murmur rose again as he looked under the bed and behind the shower curtain:

“There’s a thing you hold in your head but not in your hands, Jon. When you grasp at it, it dissolves. It moves ahead of you at the same speed you travel, a pace at which it will never be reached—it is eye gel and a side-window moon.”

He checked the base of the brick wall, thinking there must be a gap in the floorboards through which sounds could rise. But it was solid—in fact, extra plates had been installed on the subfloor to bear the weight of the concrete.

 Still, as he crouched down, the smell—Michelle’s smell—was so strong that he nearly retched. Rot he could have identified; a dead rat in the bowels of the architecture would have been the source. But this was a distillate of imprints left by wet dust and moldy ductwork and filth that generation after generation of housekeepers had missed.

And when he closed the door to Room 8, the whisper followed him into the hallway:

“In the old house, Nonna’s form is ungainly but graceful in thickness. Remember how she puts a plate in front of your grandfather who acknowledges neither her nor his grandson and grunts at the food? The house is so relentlessly grey, Jon—brittle petals and flat spice. This is not a place you want to be, but it is the place you are and so it is the most important place that ever was.”

Back in their room, with the door locked behind him, the sound continued with no noticeable change in volume; the voice he was hearing was not incarnate—he was forced to concede that much.

“Places like Bischoff cannot be held because they are only a swelter of connections. A home is not made of beams and mortar or of flesh and fluid. It is cosmology that contains only gyres.”

 Marina’s shriek was incarnate though; very much from a familiar dimension. She lurched up suddenly on the bed, eyes wide, and cried, “What the fuck was that?”

Jon said nothing as he watched her carefully. Marina screamed, “Didn’t you just hear that? It sounded like a fucking gun went off next to my head.”

He weighed how much to tell her, then spoke: “There’s something going on here and I’m not sure what it is.”

“People are shooting guns?”

“I don’t know, Marina. I’ve been awake and I didn’t hear a gunshot. But I heard something half an hour ago and you didn’t. Something else is happening.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I heard people talking in the room next door.”

“Well, okay. The freaky dude at the front desk said all the other rooms are occupied.”

“Not that one. I checked. It’s empty. I saw Billy from downstairs in the hallway. I thought it was him sneaking around, trying to punk us,. Maybe he’s the resident Peeping Tom. But I went in twice, and there’s no one in there.”

Marina remembered the mystery door next to the bed. “What’s that? —maybe it’s like a closet or something.”

“It’s supposed to lead to the next room.”

“You need to check to see what’s behind it.”

“It’s locked.”

“Maybe our room key fits.”

That hadn’t occurred to him, but it made sense, so he moved the rocking chair out of the way and tried the pass key. The steel guts easily yielded; the door opened to another façade of brick and mortar.

“It’s a wall, like on the other side,” Jon said. “A different door.”

“A door that leads to a wall? That’s too goddamn creepy. Jon. Who does that shit? You know we have to leave, right? Get the fuck out of here. Like, now?”

He closed the brick-wall door and locked it. “I’m not sure we can; I checked the roads before I came up—the Crosstrek is under a foot of snow. I can dig us out, but the interstate is probably closed in both directions. I can see if Motel 6 has rooms left.”

“You should try that at least,” she said, and he did, but his phone had lost reception. He said, “I got a strong enough signal downstairs—it might be insulation or the brick wall. Should I go down and see?”

“You remember how I am, right? What a fucking baby I am about this kind of silly crap? I’m really scared, Jon. I’ll spazz out if you leave now. And I sure won’t go down there.”

Their eyes met; Jon saw the panic. “What do you want to do then?” he asked. “Ride out the night?”

“What I really want might be undoable, even though you look like you’re freezing.”

“This quilt is heavy-duty”

“What do you want, Jon?”

To tell her, of course: Not the story about the true-crime fugue he’d unearthed; not the stitched name behind the dresser or the sound he’d carried from room to room, the gnawing throat growls that knew the notches in his brain. Implausible that it might be external—they were made of himself, because only he knew about the grey house with the dead petals and the dried herb smells. He wanted to tell her the story about Pia. But he didn’t.

“Well, I’ll say it, then,” Marina said. “I want you to come into the bed. Choose a side. I’m fucking terrified. Remember how we did it that night at the Icon on South Grand? After we stormed through Bellefontaine at midnight looking for William Burrough’s grave?”

“I remember you couldn’t stop shaking.”

“Until I did. Chaste shit that was, Jon. Holy, maybe. You made me sleep easy that night. Very beautiful that you were able to respect the boundary and hold me anyway.”

“I wasn’t drunk.”

“You aren’t drunk now. And I’m shaking again, or I wouldn’t ask.”

“And then there’s your sister.”

“Right? Her name is Pia. I haven’t forgotten what I said in the car. And even if I told her, she knows me well enough to trust that my motives aren’t hormonal—they’re pure, pre-puberty chickenshittedness. But I wouldn’t tell her. Fuck it all, Jon—you must have figured out by now that the best thing about you and me was that it wasn’t about sex.”

It was her perspective and he knew that she believed it to her core; he’d known this much all along. At his own core, the subject was the same today as it was back then—an inscrutable drive in a clockwork universe and the more you weigh it up, the stranger it got. At some point, as you age, breeding moved up a few rungs in the priorities. And even then, something doesn’t change; biology doesn’t permit you to discount the feral end—the insidious interference.

At least he moved from the chair to a sitting place at the edge of the bed.

“This isn’t hypocrisy either,” she said as she made a space beside her. “It’s circumstances. I heard a gunshot and it wasn’t a dream—it jerked me out of a dream. And you heard something too. Maybe it’s that caveman maître-fucking-d’ tomcatting around like you said, maybe somebody is shooting guns in the alley.”

“That could be it, I guess.”

“That has to be it; I refuse to allow my mind to go anywhere else. But I need sleep to face this surgery and fuck me, but I can’t sleep now unless somebody is next to me. Raffy would do it in a heartbeat if he was here. Hansel and Gretel, lost in the void; big brother shit. You wanted to help me in my hour of need? The hour is now. Please, Jon. At least until I nod off again.”

So Jon accommodated her. He lay down in the indentation she’d left beside her, still warm from her. She mouthed ‘thank you’ and the exhale that followed was filled with her. But she was right—no hypocrisy; she immediately curled herself in a protective crunch and shut her eyes. He was the Black Forest big brother.

Briefly, he studied her—the back of her head; the pale glow of her contours, the delicate curves and rises of her structure, the airy hair wisps at her temple, hoping she didn’t suddenly open her eyes again.

But a minute later, she did open them. There was a quick shudder in the atmosphere; an invisible loosening and then the scuffling voice rippled:

“Tell her now, Jon.”

Quietly, he asked, “Did you hear that?”

Marina clutched the sheets closer to her body. “I heard something. Like someone muttering under their breath in the room next door. But there’s a brick wall between us, right? We shouldn’t hear that.”

“No, we shouldn’t. And the room is empty.”

“Then what the fuck is going on?

“I’m trying to work it out,” Jon said. “I thought I was imagining it. I thought it was in my head.”

“Then it’s in my head too,” Marina whispered. “It said your name.”

Ethereal persistence and a spidery growl: “It can also say your name, Marina.”

Marina began to hyperventilate softly, like a dog pants. “How do you know our names?”

The sound became clearer: “Because you are transparent fragments in the present while I am static in the permanent past. Jon knows this already. I see him. I see you. You don’t see him and you don’t see you. Tell her about Pia, Jon.”

“Tell me what about Pia?” Marina whimpered.

“I don’t know. This is primal bullshit—a hallucination or some bizarre trick.”

Marina was incandescent with fear, too paralyzed to rise up. But Jon’s mind moved in mechanical ways; he shuffled through scenarios—the sound was being pumped into the room, and maybe there was a camera hidden in a fixture.

He lit on a sudden, outrageous proposition—it was the pottery couple from the café, Michelle and Anthony. They’d already been in this room and they’d set this up as a bizarre mindfuck; maybe it was a film verité project. This much made sense: Jon had told them who they were and they could easily have overheard Marina talking to Pia on the phone and picked up the name, a personal tidbit. Could he have imagined that the wall-hanging said ‘Marina’? In a certain mind-frame, people invented these sorts of connections; pareidolia—faces in the clouds.

But there were also the details about Nonna and his grandfather and the old grey house on Bischoff. Nobody knew about these things but him. And his wife? Even Pia didn’t know about his plans yet.

“Jon, what’s going on?”

Now he wasn’t at all sure. The café encounter was too random to have been pre-arranged. But a tick-tock mind will cling to what is rational: “This has to be orchestrated somehow. It can’t be real.”

“It sure feels real,” whispered Marina.

The gossamer growl: “Doesn’t it? Marina has a big day tomorrow, Jon. Tell her about Pia now.”

“What about Pia, Jon?”

“Nothing about Pia,” Jon answered.

“For fuck’s sake, tell me. Is she sick? Like, she hasn’t figured out how to break it to me yet? Jon, you have to tell me.”

The growl became suddenly toxic, loud as a shotgun blast. At least, Jon heard it like this—he realized that that Marina did not since her wounded pout of pain and confusion did not change.

“Let me out!”

So Jon let it out. “I’m going to leave her, that’s what.”

“Leave Pia? When?”

“I don’t know, Marina. That’s for us to work out. After the first of the year probably. After the holidays.”

“I just talked to her and she said everything was fine between you two. ‘Equilibrium’ was the word she used.”

“She doesn’t know yet.”

“Oh my fucking Christ. When did you decide this?”

“After I sobered up from Raffy’s barbecue.”

“That was last summer. Why now all the sudden, Jon?”

“It’s not all of the sudden. Talking about it is.”

“Because of that stupid barbecue? Fuck that—I won’t carry this load. I don’t have skin in your game and forgive the fucking pun. Tell me the real reason why.”

She heard fingers of sound as sharp as cracking glaze: “But you already know the real reason why, Marina.”

“Do I?” she whispered.

“You see better than you think you do. Look right now.”

In fact, on the rocking chair wedged in the corner with the rusted porcelain sink, she saw something peculiar; a glasslike pixilation, a coalescence like a breath exerting tiny pressures in the air.

“Jon, look. Can you see that too?”

Jon looked and saw an odd dichotomy—a sullen luster, a sparkling grey shivering in the dust, a singularity in the shadows. There had been two voices but they folded into each other like layers in the feathers of a bird.

“Yeah, I can see it,” he answered.

The mandate came again from within the fused intonation: “Say it out loud, Marina. Why is Jon leaving Pia?”

Gently and uncharacteristically, Marina began to cry. Because she did know.

“Say it!”

Choking softly, she said, “Because she’s not me.”

“To one another other mute. Why do we interact, Marina? Why not just exist within each other? Why do we collide? Why do we prevent one another from entering our realm? Why do we wait inside the absence until we’re forced into unity in the end, when all abstraction ends...”

“I don’t know,” Marina whimpered.

“Why do we wait for the black of a common grave?”

“Who are you?” Jon said loudly.

“You know who I am.”

“How did you know about our house on Bischoff? How my grandfather ate dinner?”

“Because your story floats above you.”

Marina wailed, “Jon, do you know who this is?”

Jon shook his head and scanned the room again for devices hidden in the desk lamp, in the electrical outlets, the heat vents, the jambs on the doorway above the bathroom.

“Why does it keep saying that you do?” she said.

Jon said, “This is what I know, Marina. When I was downstairs, I found a history of the Augustus Hotel online. Two people were murdered here in the 1930s, a man and a woman. By a jealous husband. In Room 28. We’re in 9.”

“But don’t they usually put floor numbers in front of room numbers in hotels? If they did that, 28 would have been next door. Right?”

Jon’s rational mind was thrashing; the phenomenon refused reconciliation: “I suppose so,” he said.

“Do you remember the names of the people that were killed?”

“I could look it up again but there’s no reception. There’s a signal in the lobby.”

“You can’t leave. Hold me, Jon. Please.”

He did; almost imperceptibly, her thin-bone tremble lessened. He said: “The girl was Ellen, I think. Ellen Rosswell. The man I don’t remember. One of those backwater hillbilly names, from the Bible or something. With a ‘J.’”

There were strange pressures behind the filigree of light that perched on the rocking chair; it was the glimmer of a stream turned back on its course—it whispered and echoed: “Let me out.”

Jon said, “Jouett. His name was Jouett.”

Marina flexed in closer, wiping her face, clutching the girding arm, pressing her skull against the bed’s headboard. She remembered Ouija sessions with Pia when they were kids; late nights, candles on the back porch or worse, in the basement. They made contact with the insanity of their adolescent selves and there was protocol.

 “Are you Ellen and Jouett?” she whispered.

There were shudders in the silvers of the air stain; it’s fabric became more tenable and it pieced together the drizzle of a seated figure. An expressionless face; it was inosculation, when two trees graft themselves together to share trunks and roots. The face held elsewhere eyes—the delicate weight of nothing. No Milton-Bradley board could do this.

“I am remnants,” it said.

“Remnants of what?”

“Shape-shifting hearts. An erasure that failed and became untouchable.”

Marina succumbed. So mostly to convince himself, Jon declared: “Mutating space is not metaphysical—it’s bedrock relativity.”

“Space is no longer an interference,” came the response. “There is no periphery.”

Jon said, “You’re made of matter or we couldn’t see you.”

“I am made of a transfiguration ambushed at the threshold.”

“What does that mean?” Jon asked.

“Stress is sustenance. Tension fed through a tube. Anger and non-resolution. You don’t wake up thinking you’re dead, but aren’t you remnants too?”

“How does this work?”

Suddenly, the voice became his Nonna’s: “All’onda.”

It was a phrase she used frequently; it meant ‘the wave’ and she would say it when the confoundings of reality became too much to bear.

Spirits hovered in such biospheres; Marina believed this without question. In that instant, she realized that there was more protocol: You make a certain demand of apparitions—any rudimentary bullshit book on parapsychology will tell you so:

“What do you want?” she cried out.

“Gloria in excelsis.”

And then, to his manifest surprise—driven perhaps by indelible parochial years and the fierce doxology of the household championed by the gnarled voice he had just heard—Jon teetered into his own succumbence.

Acknowledgement at least: “It’s not promised to adulterers.”

 “You should know.” Was there astringent wit in the silvery tone?

“What do you want?” Marina repeated louder.

“What do you want?” And now the voice sounded like her own.

Her response came as a pule: “I want simple, okay? I don’t want complicated.”

But she held on to Jon so intimately and desperately, sucking in his urgent musk and blowing out primal panic, her tremors passing into him, inside him, that she created her own complicated.

And Jon said, “That’s not promised either, Mari—adulterer or saint. In fact, complicated is part of the guarantee.”

From the ménage of light and shadow: “She knows what you want, Jon. Have always wanted. Sight is a mortal disease. Vision becomes immortality. But an animated corpse can taste it.”

“How?” Jon said.

“Look through it, not at.”

Marina said, “Is this the barbecue shit again?”

“It wasn’t shit, Marina. It may have been Jack Daniels, but it wasn’t shit.”

“Tell her, Jon.”

“I just did.”

Marina said, “Tell me so I understand.”

But right now, in the middle of this? Where would he even start? With a shrug? “I always thought the worst thing about you and me was no sex.”

“Oh, that’s such bullshit. You had plenty of outlets. What was your girlfriend’s name when we first met? Deanna something? And the one after that, from Atlanta, the blousy chick with the ridiculous name. Lyric Chambers? You had your share; you didn’t need my permission and you sure didn’t need my submission.”

“Is that how you see it?”

No matter, though; is that how he saw it? Take it back to the hatchling stage, puberty surfacing and the classification system that forms subconsciously, long before it becomes overt. The elaborate rethink as friends become flesh, or worse, proximate targets. Sofi Roselli, two doors down on Bischoff, who went from icky to edible over the course of a single summer; his cousin Luisa whose precocious hunger exploded through the roof right after her deadbeat dad moved out.

When the playing field expands, the vast, potent, tumescent crusade keeps pace. When you are made of parts, the drive is to make more parts. There is repulsion or reciprocation in the biological formula, but rarely are the walls constructed so near the finish line.

He did his best to explain it so that she could understand.

“Dude, I set you up with my sister, who is not only younger than me but prettier.”

“Why assume that that’s the end game?”

Because it usually is. Jon could do a TED talk on the subject. But not always.

“Fuck it, right? I get it. I listen, even accidentally. She’s not me. You plan to blow up my sister’s life because she isn’t me and I’m supposed to be flattered?”

Except that in her sad, atrophied way, she was flattered and even though Jon answered, “You’re not supposed to be anything, Marina. All’onda,” she’d been close enough to him—was close enough to him—that she didn’t doubt he guessed as much.

The sound crackled in her ear; the shattering wind: “Tell him about Raffy’s party.”

“No need to; I was there,” Jon frowned.

“Not at this one.”

A sluice of snot and sobs; Marina choked, “Are my thoughts floating above me? Are they visible?”

“They’re vivid. There is nothing for me to discover. But for you, there is.”

“I never told anyone.”

“So let me out now.”

And she did, holding the enveloping arm, gagging into Jon’s musk and muscle. The summer she turned fourteen her parents took a second honeymoon to Santorini; Raffy, now eighteen and leaving for college in September, was left in charge. Two rock-hard weeks of teenage catharsis culminated in a party. Word got around and by ten o’clock, things had snowballed—rough crews, not people they knew. Bikers, beards, drug boys. She went to bed in a room without a lock. And he there loomed, magnified and ugly, pathetically hungry and primed to devour the spotlessness. An entire gold-star childhood gutted over five unforgivingly fetid minutes. Too big to fight, but couldn’t she try? Scream and pray to be heard over the headbang music downstairs? If she did, he might go find Pia, only twelve, and if spotlessness has gradients, she was more so.

For Marina it was not to be in a soft bed with an attentive new husband, but with a stranger in the room where she still had toys. And her wall was built at the starting gun, not the finish line.

There was no submission—that conviction was as unassailable to her as anything ever was. But maybe, from high overhead, it looked otherwise. No matter. When it was over, time spooled on. He was gone but the stink and stains remained. All her toys were broken. Not stepped on in the heat of the one-sided confiscation—they couldn’t have been since they were in the closet in snap-lid totes along with things that embarrassed her about yesterday but that she wanted to keep through tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. The next day she threw them all away; she sleepwalked them out to the curb.

Swirls of reverberation sounded in the low-pitched wind: “He machined me too.”

“Who did?”

“The grain salesman.”

“Who’s that?”

Jon was grateful to have something to say that would not be tainted with the horrific selfishness of misunderstanding:

“That article I read. About the murders that happened here. The man who shot the couple, the husband—he was a grain salesman.”

“What happened to him?”

“They hung him.”

Thoughts cannot float. But then again, wind can’t infold and it doesn’t speak. Shadows do not project. But there it was, graphic and animated, as tactile as the nightmares that a brain can construct effortlessly out of nothing. Nothing—not even out of thin air since by nature the mind is airless. Lucidity in a vacuum: Even Jon accepted that you can see things that are not material but still have substance; you experience this in a dark room when you close your eyes.

This night, with their eyes open, they saw a farmhouse and a hard bed with a non-attentive new husband. Acute, telescoping pain, hot blood on cold sheets and the total exodus of spotlessness. There were plenty of screams and this time, no death-metal blaring from Revel Salon speakers to drown them out, but no one who heard them cared.

“Are you seeing this?”

“Of course I am,” Jon said.

And when it ended, there was nothing more to see. Or fight about. It had been let out and the spindly chair in the corner was empty. No shimmery image remained; the rockers neither moved nor creaked. No wind rattled the shadows. Resolution is famine. But is there deliverance in starvation?

There followed a long, long spell of silence and neither Jon or Marina felt inclined to break it until harsh stains at the window’s edge made it clear that dawn was happening. Then Jon whispered, “Raffy’s party, the first one. This late in the game? Can I be incessantly sorry?”

“Why not? I really don’t know what else to say, Jon. Why the fuck not? You may.”

Morning sifted skyward; the sun was like a struck match. This was the day that Marina finally had her sight restored. After they got back, Jon felt impelled to track down the café couple. To compare notes: Two sources would be corroboration—journalism’s prime directive. But he trailed Cherokee and Lemp streets, slinking among the grit, and could not find the pottery shop. He asked inside a storefront where a woman with hooded eyes and a mass of short gray curls was curating a collection of pastel landscapes and overly-accessible seascapes. She nodded, but sniffed with condescension:

“I remember them—they did pop-up pottery classes at various studios. Unlikeable couple—he claimed to be her mentor, but I read him more as her tormentor.”

She liked her pun: “Haven’t seen them in ages. They were always talking about moving out to a small town. Maybe they did.”

Or maybe not. Jon was never able to track them down. So questions remained, but as it happens, the important ones had been answered. Even so, Marina smelled blood on the sheets and Jon felt rope burns on his neck for the rest of their lives—a lot of which they spent together.