Lost Places, page 4
“And then, one day, the boy realized he had nothing at all. He was his brother’s giant shadow. He was a forward echo, a void. Nothing was his. All he could do was watch the world try to catch up with him, but he was always looking backward at it. All he could do—”
“No,” said Denny.
Stella had forgotten the kids were there, even though they were on camera the entire time. Denny had stood and walked over to where Uncle Bob was telling the story. With Uncle Bob sitting, Denny was tall enough to look him in the eye.
For the first time, Uncle Bob turned away from the camera. He assessed Denny with an unsettling smile.
“No,” Denny said again.
Now Uncle Bob glanced around as if he was no longer amused, as if someone needed to pull this child off his set. It wasn’t a tantrum, though. Denny wasn’t misbehaving, unless interrupting a story violated the rules.
Uncle Bob turned back to him. “How would you tell it?”
Denny looked less sure now.
“I didn’t think so,” said the host. “But maybe that’s enough of that story. Unless you want to tell me how you think it ends?”
Denny shook his head.
“But you know?”
Denny didn’t move.
“Maybe that’s enough. We’ll see. In any case, I have other stories to tell. We haven’t checked in on my hill today.”
Uncle Bob began to catch his audience up on the continuing adventure of the boy who’d been dug out of the hillside. The other children kept playing, and Denny? Denny looked straight into the camera, then walked off the set. He never came back. Stella didn’t have any proof, but she was pretty sure this must have been the last episode Denny took part in. He looked like a kid who was done. His expression was remarkably similar to the one she’d just seen on Marco’s face.
And what was that story? Unlike Dan Heller’s driving story, unlike the one she’d started thinking of as her own, this one wasn’t close to true. Sure, Denny had been a big kid, but neither he nor Marco played basketball. He never protected Marco from bullies. “Nothing was his” hardly fit the man whose house she’d cleaned.
Except that night, falling asleep, Stella couldn’t help but think that when she compared what she knew of Denny with that story, it seemed like Denny had set out to prove the story untrue. What would a person do if told as a child that nothing was his? Collect all the things. Leave his little brother to fend for himself. Fight it on every level possible.
Was it a freak occurrence that Denny happened to be listening when Uncle Bob told that story? Why was she assuming the story was about him at all? Maybe it was coincidence. There was nothing connecting the children to the stories except her own sense that they were connected, and Denny’s reaction on the day he quit.
She hadn’t heard hers when Uncle Bob told it, but she’d internalized it nonetheless. How much was true? She wasn’t a cuckoo bird. Her reinventions had never hurt anyone.
Marco called that night to ask if she wanted to grab one more meal before she left town, but she said she had too much to do before her flight. That was true, as was the fact that she didn’t want to see him again. Didn’t want to ask him if he’d watched the March 13 show. Didn’t want to tell him his brother had consciously refused him protection.
She should have gone straight to the airport in the morning, but the fan mail address she’d written down was in the same direction, if she took the back way instead of the highway. Why a show like that might get fan mail was a question for another time. This was strictly a trip to satisfy her curiosity. She drove through town, then a couple of miles past, into the network of county roads.
The mailbox stood full, overflowing, a mat of moldering envelopes around its cement base. A weather-worn “For Sale” sign had sunk into the soft ground closer to the drainage ditch. Stella turned onto the long driveway, and only after she’d almost reached the house did it occur to her that if she’d looked at the mail, she might have found his surname.
The fields on either side of the lane were tangled with weeds that didn’t look like they cared what season it was. The house, a tiny stone cottage, was equally weed-choked, but strangely familiar. If she owned this house, she’d never let it get like this, but it didn’t look like it belonged to anyone anymore. She tried a story on for size: “While I was visiting my parents, I went for a drive in the country, and I found the most darling cottage. My parents are getting older, and I had the thought that I should move closer to them. The place needed a little work, so I got it for a song.”
She liked that one.
Nobody answered when she knocked. The door was locked, and the windows were too dirty to see through, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that if she looked through he’d be sitting there, staring straight at her, waiting.
She walked around back and found the hill.
It was a funny little hill, not entirely natural looking, but what did she know? The land behind the house sloped gently upward, then steeper, hard beneath the grass but not rocky. From the slope, the cottage looked even smaller, the fields wilder, tangled, like something from a fairy tale. The view, too, felt strangely familiar.
She knew nothing more about the man who called himself Uncle Bob, but as she walked into the grass she realized this must be the hill from his stories, the stories he told when he wasn’t telling stories about the children. How did they go? She thought back to that first episode she’d watched in Denny’s basement.
Once upon a time, there was a boy whose family planted him in a hillside, so that he took over the entire hillside, like a weed. They dug me out of the hillside on my thirteenth birthday. It’s good to divide rhizomes to give them room to grow.
That story made her remember the notebook she’d taken from Denny’s house, and she rummaged for it in her purse. The notebook was alphabetical, printed in a nearly microscopic hand other than the page headings, dense. She found one for Dan Heller. She couldn’t decipher the whole story, but the first line was obviously Once upon a time, there was a little boy who wanted to go fast. She knew the rest. In blue pen, it said what she had said to Jeff the archivist: motorcycle wreck, alongside the date. That one was easy since she knew enough to fill in the parts she struggled to read. The others were trickier. There was no page for Marco, but Denny had made one for himself. It had Uncle Bob’s shadow-brother story but no update at the bottom. Nothing at all for the years between.
Who else had been on the show? Lee Pool had a page. So did Addie Chapel, who as far as Stella knew had followed in her mother’s footsteps and become a doctor. Chris Bethel, and beside him, Tina Bevins, the other dinosaur lover. If she spent enough time staring, maybe Denny’s handwriting would decipher itself.
She was afraid to turn to her own page. She knew it had to be there, on the page before Dan Heller, but she couldn’t bring herself to look, until she did. She expected this one, like Dan’s, like Denny’s own, to be easier to decipher because she knew how it would go.
October 30, 1982. Once upon a time, there was a little girl who didn’t know who she was. Many children don’t know who they will be, and that’s not unusual, but what was unusual in this case was that the girl was willing to trade who she was for who she could be, so she began to do just that. Little by little, she replaced herself with parts of other people she liked better. Parts of stories she wanted to live. Nobody lied like this girl. She believed her own stories so completely, she forgot which ones were true and which were false.
If you’ve ever heard of a cuckoo bird, they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, so those birds are forced to raise them for their own. This girl was her own cuckoo, laying stories in her own head, and the heads of those around her, until even she couldn’t remember which ones were true, or if there was anything left of her.
There was more. Another episode, maybe? She had no idea how many she’d been on, and her research had been shoddy. Maybe every story was serialized like the boy in the hill. It took her a while to make out the next bit.
November 20, 1982. Our cuckoo girl left the nest one day to spread her wings. When she returned, she didn’t notice that nobody had missed her. She named a place where she had been, and they accepted it as truth. She made herself up, as she had always done, convincing even herself in the process. Everything was true, or true enough.
Below that, in blue pen, a strange assortment of updates from her life, as observed by Denny. Marco’s eleventh birthday party, when she’d given him juggling balls. Graduation from middle school. The summer they’d both worked at the pool, and Marco’d gotten heatstroke and thrown up all the Kool-Aid they tried to put in him, Kool-Aid red, straight into the pool like a shark attack. The time she and Marco had tried making out on his bed, only he had started giggling, and she had gotten offended, and when she stood she tripped over a juggling ball and broke her toe. All the games their friends had played in Marco’s basement: I’ve Never, even though they all knew what everyone else had done; Two Truths and a Lie, though they had all grown up together and knew everything about one another; Truth or Dare, though everyone was tired of truth, truth was terrifying, everyone chose dare, always. The Batman premiere. The prom amoeba, the friends who went together, all of whom she’d lost touch with. High school graduation. Concrete memories, things she knew were as real as anything that had ever happened in her life. Denny shouldn’t have known about some of these things, but now she pictured him there, somewhere, holding this notebook, watching them, taking notes, always looking like he had something to say but he couldn’t say it.
Below those stories he’d written: Once there was a girl who got lost and when she found her way home she realized she’d arrived back without herself, and her parents didn’t even notice the difference. Which couldn’t be her story at all; she hadn’t been on the episodes he’d been on.
After graduation, he had no more updates on her. She paged forward, looking at the blue ink. Everyone had updates within the last year, everyone except for Denny, everyone who was still alive; the ones who weren’t had death dates. Everyone except her. She tried to imagine what from her adult life she would have added, given the chance, or what an internet search on her name would provide, or what her parents would tell someone who asked what she was doing. Surely there was something. Parents were supposed to be your built-in hype machines.
She pulled out her phone to call Marco, but the battery was dead. Just as well, since she was suddenly afraid to try talking to anyone at all. She returned to the notebook and flipped toward the back. U for Uncle Bob.
Once upon a time, there was a boy whose family planted him in a hillside, so that he took over the entire hillside, like a weed. They dug me out of the hillside on my thirteenth birthday. It’s good to divide rhizomes to give them room to grow.
This story was long, eight full pages in tiny script, with episode dates interspersed. At the end, in red ink, this address. She pictured Denny driving out here, exploring the cottage, looking up at the hill. If she ever talked to Marco again, she’d tell him that what he’d found in Denny’s closet wasn’t a shrine; it was Denny’s attempt to conjure answers to something unanswerable.
She put the notebook back in her purse and kept walking. Three quarters of the way up the hill she came to a large patch where the grass had been churned up. She put her hand in the soil and it felt like the soil grasped her hand back.
Her parents said she didn’t visit often enough, but now she couldn’t remember ever having visited them before, or them visiting her. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever left this town at all. She lived in Chicago, or did she? She’d told Marco as much, told him other things she knew not to be true, but what was true, then? What did she do for a living? If she left this hill and went to the airport, would she even have a reservation? If she caught her plane, would she find she had anything or anyone there at all? Where was there? She pulled her hand free and put it to her mouth: The soil tasted familiar.
“I walked down to the cottage that would be mine someday”—that felt nice, even if she wasn’t sure she believed it—“and then past the cottage, through the town, and into my parents’ house. They believed me when I said where I’d been. They fit me into their lives and only occasionally looked at me like they didn’t quite know how I’d gotten there.” That felt good. True. She sat in the dirt and leaned back on her hands, and felt the hill pressing back on them.
She could still leave: walk back to her rental car, drive to the airport, take the plane to the place where she surely had a career, a life, even if she couldn’t quite recall it. She thought that until she looked back at where the rental car should have been and realized it wasn’t there. She had no shoes on, and her feet were black with dirt, pebbled, scratched. She dug them into the soil, rooting with her toes.
How had Denny broken his story? He’d refused it. Whether his life was better or worse for it remained a different question. To break her story, she’d have to walk back down the hill and reconstruct herself the right way round. She thought of the cuckoo girl, the lost girl, the cuckoo girl, so many stories to keep straight.
The soil reached her forearms now, her calves. The top layer was sun-warmed, and underneath, a busy cool stillness made up of millions of insects, of the roots of the grass, of the rhizomes of the boy who had called this hillside home before she had. She’d walk back to town when she was ready, someday, maybe, but she was in no hurry. She’d heard worse stories than hers, and anyway, if she didn’t like it she’d make a new one, a better one, a true one.
That Our Flag Was Still There
It would’ve been a normal day if the Flag hadn’t up and died on us. Not even halfway through the shift, and she’d been up there on the platform, wide-eyed and smiling from the Stars and whispering to herself in the way Flags usually do, and then she got a funny look on her face. A moment later her vitals went all screwy.
“She’s tanking!” I said, trying to control the panic in my voice. I’d trained for this scenario, but never encountered it in the five years I’d worked at the National Flag Center.
“Breathe,” said Maggie Gregg, from the console beside me. “Can you get her under control?”
“I’m trying,” I said, though I couldn’t figure out the problem. I tried and failed to stabilize her chemically, then let Maggie deliver a series of jolts through the Flag’s screensuit. It didn’t work.
“We have to bring her down,” Maggie said.
I looked over, surprised. Maggie’s dark skin had gone pale. She’d been here twenty years. She had to know the protocol for a dead Flag. Even I knew it, though I’d never had to use it before, and she must have been through this at least once or twice. The Flag can’t come down until sunset, or the visitors on the Mall would freak out, so we have to leave the dead one up there and trust the visitors can’t tell a quiet living Flag from a dead one, and loop footage from earlier in the day, with the sky color-corrected to the current weather. I didn’t respond, and she didn’t say anything more.
We brought the Flag in at sunset, like always. It was harder than if she could’ve assisted in the transfer, but not too much harder, since most are pretty glassy after a day up on the platform. Removing the ink from someone whose liquids are pooling instead of pumping turned out to be tricky too, but we couldn’t hand a body back to a family in that condition, with the skin settling red, white, and blue. I hope that doesn’t come across as unpatriotic or disrespectful of the dead. I set the Colors draining the same as I would’ve on anyone.
I have two jobs: one, administer the Colors (under which falls monitoring and retiring the Colors, as well); two, administer and monitor the Stars. When the dead Flag came off the flagpole, I had the easy part. I felt worse for Maggie, who had to call the family. I did my part and watched Maggie do hers, and afterward offered to buy her a drink. To my surprise, she said yes. The first time she’d said yes in five years working together.
It took a while for us to finish the paperwork and make arrangements with the team who’d take the body home. By the time we left the Flag Center, the National Mall was empty except for the policebot that chased us down to inform us the Mall was closed to visitors. It scanned our Center IDs, which were enough to appease it.
We didn’t pass any people before we hit Chinatown, where the sidewalks got busy again. We hadn’t discussed our destination, and I couldn’t tell if she was leading or I was, so things got progressively slower and more aimless until finally I had enough and pointed up 7th.
“That one okay?” I pointed to the Pewter Spoon. “It’s got a long happy hour.”
In all the times I’d gone out with the other techs from work, Maggie had always said she had to get home. I didn’t take it personally—she
lived far away, and she had grandkids living with her—but I’d assumed that meant she hadn’t spent time down here at all. I was surprised when she rejected my suggestion.
“Not that place. How about Forte?”
I’d never heard of Forte, but she was the one who’d had to call a family with bad news, so I agreed. She took me past the arena, under the bigscreen nightly Flag replay and the news tickers listing the day’s top patriots, past the Friendship Arch. We walked faster than before, which told me I’d been right about neither of us leading earlier. Two blocks farther, around a corner, to a side door.
The place we stepped into was dark, with a utilitarian wooden bar down the room’s length, and six tables against the opposite wall. Four customers sat along the bar: one talking to the bartender, two talking to each other, and one nursing a beer. No windows, no pictures. No screens anywhere. Nothing on the black walls at all, which is to say, the next thing I noticed was the absent Flag. Not over the bar, not on the back wall, nowhere.
