By Jared Hanson
Featured Art: No End To The Desert by John Sabraw
The lobby of the midtown hotel, packed with disheveled travelers asleep on loose rows of waiting room chairs, or fidgeting next to their rolling suitcases in line for the electronic kiosks, resembled nothing less than a Greyhound bus station. Otto cut briskly over the unmopped floors, spinning out into the livelier air over the sidewalk on Seventh Avenue, jogging across the standing traffic and merging with the crowd onto the escalator that carried him down into Penn Station to catch the 3:13 Amtrak Keystone to 30th Street Station. Leaving his conference early, buoyed by the prospect of improved surroundings, carefully weighing his snack and magazine options, he was warily eyeing a copse of NYPD officers and their German Shepherd on a leash, when he heard the pattering of the first shots.
If you’ve ever stood in the ocean when the tide was coming in, two hours before a storm, the water receding rapidly, the sand pulling away from around your feet, the sensation that you are being pulled forward, but really you aren’t sure if you are moving until you see the wave coming, larger and taller than the ones before—you know it will break violently, your idea of where it is and how fast it is coming is meaningless, and the threat of it is hypnotizing: you forget that it is your responsibility to react, to turn and run, to run and get away from it before it overcomes you, pulls you under, into the brine—that was the motion of the crowd in which Otto found himself in the train station corridor: the crowd moving smoothly, unblinkingly under the first shots, lurching forward into a sharp standstill before turning against Otto in a surging retreat, breaking over him as he dumbly locked eyes with the dog, which sat, unflustered, patiently licking its running nose. Then he ran. They all ran, jockeying for inches, only friction and a few thin layers of synthetic blends separating one panicked human being from another as they forced each other up the escalators and out onto the avenue. Otto rose with the force of the crowd back out into the afternoon, gasping for breath, running faster as the running crowd thinned, running until it was clear that the only dangers still surrounding him were the normal, everyday ones. He caught his breath by 23rd Street, walking west towards New Jersey until he hustled up an iron stairwell and strolled back uptown among the trees and native flora and self-seeded grass along with the mostly Danish tourists, the sole of his right shoe broken and flapping over the old railroad tracks, until he was back over the yards, scanning the tops of the commuter trains for signs of the attack before catching a double-decker bus to Philadelphia, his face pressed up against the glass hanging over the New Jersey Turnpike.
The attack didn’t show up on his news feed for a full forty-two minutes, sandwiched between a celebrity Twitter feud and a longform story about farmers converting rice paddies to shrimp ponds in response to rising sea levels. When they passed through Mt. Laurel, it was still unclear how many people had died, how many shooters there were, or if any of them were dead or arrested. Lisa wasn’t picking up her phone. By the time he caught the R3 to New Sweden out of Suburban Station, at least three people were listed in critical condition at Mount Sinai West; someone had been detained but it was unclear if he was a shooter. When Otto turned into their subdivision just behind Lisa’s minivan—he would have, after all, been able to pick Bradley up from tennis—his phone had died, but Otto felt an undeniable joy flooding over him, as if he had been the girl pulled from the rubble days after the earthquake, living on concrete dust and trickles of rainwater, or the man, swept out to sea by the tsunami, clinging to an uprooted tree for weeks under the tropical sun in the placid mouthwash-colored currents of the Indian Ocean.
“I’m OK,” he gasped out, running to the passenger side of the minivan as it slid open. “I’m alright!”
Bradley, his son, unathletic, consistently 35th percentile on the growth charts, slipped by him wordlessly.
“He was waiting over half-an-hour,” Lisa called across the top of the minivan. “I can’t do this shit anymore. Tell me when you’re running late.”
“I had the conference,” Otto called back. “In New York.”
Otto watched them thread their way through the old sports equipment and stacked bulk foods in the garage, the garage door descending behind them, panel by panel, leaving him alone to watch the glorious sunset over the steep hills of New Sweden, the strands of dying light gilding the leaves and invasive blooms of the purple loosestrife and Japanese knotweed garnishing the slope down to the creek bed. For many years they had lived in a tight collection of rowhomes tucked under a nearby Blue Route overpass; it felt like an inscrutable stroke of fortune when the township had approved the variance allowing construction, despite the steep slope overlay ordinance, after Lisa had seen this lot lying fallow—imagined it really: any other passing dreamer might have only seen the neighbor’s weedy side yard next to the cement culvert draining the storm overflow from the entire cul-de-sac across a few yards of riprap into the creek whose banks, at the time, were invisible behind an overgrowth of box elder. It was a feat, the resounding achievement of his family life; he congratulated himself on the equity he had been able to extract from the townhouse, but the image, the concept, was all Lisa’s: it was she who convinced the township to build the necessary retaining wall, it was she who corralled and marshalled the general contractor and the subcontractors and the landscaper, their regiments of backhoes and concrete drums and endless dump trucks emptying backfill into the moonscape of their new kingdom, scouting out local quarries and stone supply outlets, picking through the gneiss and river rocks until she hit upon the matching exterior stone—not to mention the roof tiles and the complimentary colors of the siding—so that in the end their new house blended seamlessly into the small development of older, slightly smaller homes.
Otto entered the kitchen from the sliding door on the back deck. A burrito in cellophane spun in the microwave. In the family room, he could hear yelling, the mechanical drone of machine gun fire, like the chain slipping off a child’s bicycle, and then, after someone was hit, a clipped, disappointed groan.
“I need to watch the news, Izzy,” Otto said. “I was in a terrorist attack.”
Isabella, his first born, wedged into the right angle of the sectional, her high school GPA hovering between 3.3 and 3.6, toggled away on a smudged controller, biting her lip at the rapid wash of changing pixels on the flat screen perched above the ashless fireplace.
“I can’t just log off,” she yelled. “It’s rude.”
The secret to parenting, Otto had learned, was lowered expectations. To the right of the fireplace, a small ziggurat of stacked electronic devices hung by a tangle of wires from the screen. He picked up the nearest remote control, testing the buttons in a process of elimination—he was ordered, methodical, surprised at his own tranquility: he had often felt the images in her games were too realistic, but now it was the cartoonish residue he questioned. There was a certain privilege, he thought, in actual experiences, no matter how harrowing they might have been. By the sixth button on the second remote control, the screen turned blue and silent. The microwave beeped cheerfully, but the blue glow of his small success faded as he failed to summon a single cable news channel.
“You fuck everything up with my friends!” Isabella protested. “And then you always complain that I’m antisocial.”
“How do I get the news?” he yelled after her.
The doorbell rang and standing under the arch on the veranda was a young Asian woman Otto had never seen before. A pickup truck honked and drove away behind her; Otto waved reflexively.
“I’m Emma,” she said. After some time, after she backed away slowly from the threshold, he realized that he hadn’t responded, and then he realized that he was staring at her and, in an effort to make her less uncomfortable, he looked away at the receding pickup, looking back into her eyes only when he felt he had looked away for too long and she had stepped off the veranda onto the path that led away from the house, an unused path leading nowhere, ending abruptly in a curb under the shade of a Japanese maple. He didn’t want to look away again, so he let his gaze wander over the curve of her left eyebrow, over the pink nub of the tear duct at the proximal corner of her left eye, down her nose and her tender left nostril, following the nasolabial groove to her lips—she was really quite young, too old to be meeting Izzy, but too young for any work Lisa might have needed around the house—seeing her there at that age reminded him somehow of his own unemployed summers before college when he would languish outside in the stifling city heat, waiting for life to start, falling in love for a moment with any girl that walked by.
“I’m the tutor,” she said. “Or babysitter, whatever. Someone named Lisa set up an appointment online.”
“Oh,” he said, hoping it had an apologetic lilt. “There was a shooting.”
She backed away quickly, still looking at him, and reached her arm behind her hip, withdrawing a small pistol—or for a moment he was certain that was what it was: a gun, nothing automatic certainly, but he knew some people carried them for self-defense (and wouldn’t he, the thought zipped through him, want Izzy to carry one when she was of an age to visit, unchaperoned, the strange quarters of neighboring townships—Springfield, especially, might warrant that kind of precaution) and he crouched defensively in response to the threat—but no, it was only a cell phone from her back pocket, which she managed to operate without looking away from him, fumbling once or twice he could tell, because her perseverance enhanced the wild look in her eyes which he had begun to appreciate in a way that embarrassed him.
He looked down at the welcome mat, spreading his arms wide, his palms open. “I’m sorry!” he said.
“Can you stay on the phone with me?” the girl said to her phone.
The air-conditioning billowed out into the evening. Otto shivered violently and felt a sense of relief. The strange girl stood in the middle of the street; behind her the Rosenblatts’ lawn spread, flush with nitrogen and glyphosate, up the incline, as unstoppable as rising surface water, the green having caramelized in the twilight to a mossy dark chocolate, so that she looked to Otto, as she retreated into the encroaching night, as if she were sinking below him into a deep oceanic trench. Higher, in the shadows towards the hilltop, the Rosenblatts, an older, childless couple, bent over a low wheelbarrow, weeding their lawn by hand. They had bought the first lot in the subdivision and they would die there, but Otto appreciated the effort they put into maintaining their home, perched as it was above his own front windows, unlike the owners of the lot directly west, who had lost a lot of value in the crash and were waiting for property values to recover before they would sell; until then, the lights in their living room clicked on and off every night from room to room in a slow, compact fluorescent symphony while they beached themselves all summer at the Shore. Next to them were the Mormons who homeschooled, then two reclusive attorneys who had married late in life, the Indian doctor on the hill, and the divorced pharmaceutical rep who gardened in her bikini with her teenaged sons—Otto never spoke to these people, he waved and they waved; even the developer himself, who lived next door, would only laugh when he saw Otto and Otto would laugh right back, which was fine, he figured: in a few years they would sell this one too for an impressive return and move to Radnor while the old developer would still be floating on an inflatable pillow in his inground pool, spilling his margarita into the chlorine.
Otto shut the door behind him. Lisa descended the stairs in a tight pantsuit, and Otto was overcome with an urge to devour her.
“Are you ready?” she asked. “You look a bit disheveled.”
She corrected his collar, pulling the cuffs of his dress shirt out from under his jacket sleeves, licking her thumb and wiping his hair back down to his scalp, tucking his shirt tails under his belt, her hands down the front of his pants exciting him enormously: he pulled her by the hips against him and she let out a pleasant sigh.
“It’s designed to be worn untucked,” he said.
“The tutor should’ve been here,” she said. “I’ve been looking for ages. Online, they’re all early twenties, getting their GED, living in Chester with their grandmother, ‘I babysit my cousins all the time,’ you know. Then I saw her profile: an absolute gem! Perfect SAT scores, but a lot of diversity: ACT, achievement tests, 4.0s in all the APs.”
She ran her hands through the hair over her temples, squeezing her fingers into fists. “Don’t look at me like that! I’m only thinking of our children.”
“All that and she just goes to strangers’ houses?” he said. “You can’t trust someone like that. Izzy can handle Brad.”
“I know, but that’s my point: what have I been thinking? We shouldn’t repeat our mistakes. We can’t let time go by like that, with them together, doing nothing.”
Bradley came stumbling down the stairs, nodding at his father in a distant, masculine way.
“Hey, buddy,” Otto said. “Daddy needs to talk to you. Something bad happened, but Daddy’s OK now and you’re OK, and Mommy and Izzy, too. Everything’s going to be OK.”
“I don’t think so.” Bradley cross-stroked over the carpet gracefully on carpet skates strapped over his tube socks. “They’re going to put computer chips in our brains, Dad.”
“Where? At aftercare? In coding camp?” Bradley could design algorithms at a third-grade level.
“No, not me. The stupid kids. The computer chips will make them smarter.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“But then there won’t be any difference between people. How will you tell people apart? We’ll all be the same, the world will be so boring.”
“We’re leaving,” Lisa announced. “Remember under no circumstance are you to open the door, or answer the phone unless it’s a number you recognize.”
Izzy made a snoring sound from the kitchen, and when he and Lisa pulled out of the driveway, Otto scanned the darkness for the girl or the pickup, content that his own children were well-ensconced and provisioned. Otto and Lisa had actively worked to prune social events out of their schedules; episodes like these—a business dinner with two partners from a biotech startup in Illinois which Lisa hoped would become a major client for her boutique firm—had become the last and obligatory holdouts of what Otto remembers as the endless march of dinner parties, bars, and contrived public gatherings of his late youth; before he was married, these had seemed inadequate to stave off the staleness of time spent alone, but now, especially after the children were born, he was exhausted after even a brief chance conversation: a parent from Izzy’s school in line at Starbucks, for example, or the woman who ran the dry cleaners (Otto had run into her twice in the chips aisle at Acme), and the deliberate engineering of a social event for the limited purpose of simply seeing someone’s offline face seemed to him completely unprofitable.
“I’m sure they’re dreading it just as much as we are,” Lisa said. “Greg should really be doing this. The Midwestern guys always want to go to strip clubs.”
Greg was the other senior accounts manager. Extroverted, well-networked, good-looking in a Flyers-season-pass way, Greg had been the protagonist of most office hijinks that Lisa might narrate to Otto over frozen chicken tikka masala—spilled drinks at office parties, reciprocal slander among the female junior accounts staff—Otto had never had suspicions about his own marriage until, comparing pivot tables one Thursday afternoon, Greg handed Lisa a save-the-date card for his wedding to John, and Lisa quickly developed a deep passion for marriage equality: yellow equal signs appeared on their bumpers and fridge door and as a filter over profile pictures—“Aren’t you a little late?” he asked, “I mean, it’s done, right?”—but the long nights at work started then; he felt her growing absence as he piled mileage on his Acura, shuttling from tennis to dance to band to drama to swimming—he had never known Izzy was learning to ride a horse, or that people still learned to ride horses—until Lisa’s late nights stretched into early mornings and sometimes he only heard her voice once every twenty-four hours, between 6:45 and 7:30 in the morning, always apologetically, always the same words in the same dead affect—“I have so much on my plate right now”—so Otto, at the Thanksgiving table, between a third serving of mashed potatoes and the first slice of pumpkin pie, installed an app on her phone that showed him everywhere her phone went and, following the pulsing red dot to a horrifying little motel on Baltimore Pike advertising color TV and HBO, he called her from the outdoor staircase, her voice rich with mucus and stumbling over familiar words until he pounded on the door, ready to fracture his scapula on the composite wood, in which he noticed a few stray bullet-width holes patched over with wood putty—you’ll never be the first at anything, he reminded himself, you’ll never be truly disruptive—there she was, groggy in her work clothes, her laptop and tablet and piles of paper neatly stacked in a halfmoon around the imprint of her ass on the still-made bed. There would be layoffs, she told him. “And you’re all just so needy.”
It wasn’t a matter of therapy, he reasoned, but of prioritization, of time management. They negotiated, auctioning off the scarce hours of their remaining lifespans, time-blocking quiet moments and transportation logistics and team-building exercises for the four of them. He had fallen in love with her ambition, her competence and determination, but that night he felt he had never really appreciated her beauty, the physicality of her body pushing air around a space; the pure sensuality of the scene, the lonely woman in an empty room, was the first snowmelt in what tonight, after the trauma, felt like an inundation of lust threatening to stain his middle age. Her breathing presence in the passenger seat was the only thing that kept him from imagining himself as the waving man in the pickup truck, the Asian girl sitting next to him, their stomachs heaving from his driving too fast on the small hills of a quiet country road.
The small-time execs, Ian and Wasim, were already seated at a table for three, standing suddenly in a stiff and chivalrous gesture towards Lisa, licking her with their eyes, even buttoning their sports jackets in her direction, asking Otto for the wine list. They were discussing geography. “I was telling Ian,” Wasim said, “once you cross over to the red part of the state, it’s a different world: red barns, silos, these big spirals of hay they roll out for the cows like giant Cinnabons, the kind of thing you think doesn’t exist anymore—I mean, the way people talk, you would think the corporate guys would have eaten these people raw by now, they should all be sucking Fentanyl lollipops and stocking shelves at Walmart.”
“We’re working on it,” Ian guffawed. And then Lisa guffawed back, with Otto and Wasim guffawing sympathetically in response. Lisa claimed to know these men very little, mostly clipped email exchanges, a few chirpy sales calls, capped by a long morning meeting in the conference room at her office overlooking the artificial duck pond, in which they politely sat through dueling and hastily assembled PowerPoint presentations. Otto imagined them there, leaning back in ergonomic rolling chairs, drinking cold spring water from travel-sized bottles, their minds wandering to the night ahead at the strip club, wandering back to his wife swaying in front of them, her hand caressing the histograms and bar charts projected beside her, the faintest outline of moisture visible over her exposed armpit. But it was more than that: while Ian looked earnestly toward him every time he forced a laugh, Otto felt that Wasim was avoiding him, either out of unconscious discomfort or an intentional attempt to exclude Otto from the conversation. He wouldn’t look Otto in the eyes and, the longer it went on, the more Otto felt his suspicions confirmed, until he realized that he had seen Wasim before, although Otto had no reason to believe that Wasim would remember him. In his first year of business school, several months after 9/11, before he met Lisa, he and several classmates were at the school’s small food court when they spotted Wasim and another foreign student. They wondered, naturally, what they were doing at a school like this. It was a regional institution, with very little pedigree, and almost all the students were local residents looking forward to local job placement; graduates couldn’t rely on brand recognition in the national job market and certainly not internationally—it simply wasn’t plausible that these men had come from so far away for legitimate career purposes. Enrolling in American schools was an easy way to get a visa, and graduate school would provide exactly the kind of long cover sleeper cell operatives might need. So they confronted the men, not in an antagonistic way, but just to give them a heads-up, to let them know they would not be ignored or inconspicuous. His old friend Steve (who, after years of growing his father’s auto parts chain, now represented Upper Darby in the state house) did most of the talking. Insults were exchanged.
“You’re on notice,” Steve shouted after the men as they walked away from them towards the salad bar.
“Yeah,” Otto had said.
It was an ugly time. Otto resented being reminded of it. But here this man was, forking his kung pao lobster and chatting up his innocent wife. He told her about his children, about the troubles they had at school because of their talents and their shy, awkward gestures: he defended standardized tests but blamed the parents and social media, and she—scuttling her sea bass and haricots verts from the center of her plate to the periphery, limiting herself to three initial bites—sympathized with him, favoring him with her attention and a few, well-spaced minimal encouragers, an oh and a yes and an ah, paraphrasing the main thrust of his oration before beginning her own self-disclosure, a diatribe about the public education system and in particular the PTG in their local school district.
“Those stay-at-home bitches,” she began, but just then a cow mooed loudly beside her. Ian choked on his Riesling in surprise, coughing a mouthful out onto the table. It was a custom ringtone assigned to, and chosen by, their daughter; it surprised them too, as it was rarely heard, given her preference for texting and evasion. Lisa became a quiet island in the rising swells of conversation in the bistro.
“There are police at the house,” she announced. “Stay on the phone with me.”
It made sense to Otto: they would come looking for him, every witness needed to be interviewed, he had downplayed his own presence at the massacre but the authorities would be thorough, it would be handled by federal investigators and the survivors who lived this far away would be few enough that local agents might have a very short list and come for him early in the process. But the call dropped. Izzy’s voice had been a whisper, Lisa said, as she and Bradley sheltered in place in the closet of the guest room, and Lisa agonized over whether to call back: whatever kind of danger they were in, would the ringing of her phone reveal their location?
And so they left the strange, exuberant men at the elegantly set table, their mouths hanging slack or full of saliva over the unchipped plates of dead sea animals, retracing their route back to New Sweden: over the same roads, past the same towns, faster now, with barely a pause at the stop signs and red lights, their stomachs heaving as he sped over the gradual hills, Lisa leaning against him through the sharp right turns, the violence of the maneuvers and the screaming of the tires on the pavement reminding him of the terror in the train station, only here alone with her in the car, it was a shared experience, not something that bound them together but something that revealed the bonds between them, fossils buried by years of sediment and pressure, now glowing like bones just as the flesh was ripped off.
“It’s exciting, isn’t it?” he said.
It was as if she didn’t hear him. She stared relentlessly at her phone, eventually having the presence of mind to call their local police station. There were unconfirmed reports of a shooting in their subdivision, the shooter still at large, casualties unknown; they were told to stay away for their own safety, officers had been dispatched and the area would be inaccessible until it had been secured. The coincidence of this did not seem so bizarre to Otto. So soon after the first shooting that afternoon, this second incident felt ordinary and private in comparison. He did not have the same rush of adrenaline he’d had the first time; instead, he had a growing awareness of a deep muscular soreness in his lower body, an intense ache in his calves and quadriceps radiating up to his lower back and abdominals. If it continued like this, he contemplated, a shooting or two a day, he would only become more and more fatigued by it, any excitement would only be replaced by malaise.
Beside him, Lisa’s eyes stared ahead with a wildness so familiar to him that he wondered where he had seen it before, until he remembered the Asian girl at the door, and it embarrassed him again how entranced he had been by her, though it reassured him that it was his own wife who enthralled him now. Lisa’s right hand gripped the grab handle above the window while her left hand clutched at the seatbelt where it crossed her neck, her thighs tense, pressing her feet against the floor mats, her whole body so tense that when he made a premature left, clipping the rear of a Kia Sorento that had crossed ahead of him, she let out a long moan and Otto was certain she had reached some sort of sexual climax. He thought of all the bodies pressed up against each other in the train station and the bodies they left behind, lying on top of each other in the concourse.
“We should keep a gun at home,” he said. “Nothing automatic, a pistol, a hunting rifle, something to protect ourselves. If Izzy had something, you wouldn’t be so worried now.”
There were no sirens as they approached their subdivision, but they could see the red and blue lights dancing over the Rosenblatts’ lawn and the fronts of the neighboring houses. One darkened police car was parked perpendicularly across the entrance to the cul-de-sac, which was marked off by regularly spaced red flares, giving a celebratory feel to the landscape while the red and blue lights lent the exterior façade of their house a good-natured, jaunty look, as if they had taken their Halloween or Christmas decorations too far; the handful of policemen ambling in the yard, sweeping tactical flashlights over the lawn and down the slope towards the creek, only added to the impression of festivity. Otherwise, their house was as they left it: the upper story of the house dark, their children cuddled in safety somewhere in that darkness, while on the lower level, the white light from the family room and the kitchen windows peaked out amongst the blues and reds. Otto put the car in park just below the crest of the hillside approaching their cul-de-sac; he had never had a sustained view of his house from this vantage point. It was handsome, but from here the old cabinet doors above the kitchen sink looked shabby and the granite countertops of the kitchen island struck him as outdated.
“When this is over,” he said to Lisa, “we should remodel the kitchen. The countertops would look better in quartz, or some kind of engineered stone.”
“What?”
“I just want . . .” he began, but she had unbuckled and fled, racing down the incline in bare feet towards the home they had built together, screaming and running faster the farther she ran down the hill, the police running towards her, merging into some sort of defensive formation. There were more than he had realized. They approached with their hands resting on their weapons, and one, a skinny young officer, had drawn his gun. She was screaming unintelligibly; Otto could make out words like ‘help’ and ‘my children,’ but it occurred to him that she may have lost her mind, that frantically shouting gibberish would only endanger her. He wanted to tell her everything that had become clear to him, how much there was to be grateful for, how little time they had left. Our souls, our minds, our personalities, were only illusions, the emergent properties of an infinitely complex biological system.
No, that wasn’t it. It was the distance between them, the false perception of difference, separation, that we are somehow individuals, self-absorbed monads floating through some relative space-time, bumping into each other like the spinning numbered ping pong balls in the Pick 5 nightly drawing after the news, when really we are all connected—no, more than that: unified, singular, undifferentiated points in a matrix.
That didn’t sound right either. Otto killed the engine and exited the car, lightly jogging towards his wife as the officers closed in on her. Death was always knocking; he no more owned his life than he did this house and the matching bedroom sets with their deep, glossy finish. He didn’t want to die, but he didn’t want to fear death in silence, alone.
“We don’t need to be afraid of death!” he called out.
“Stop!” yelled one police officer, unholstering his weapon.
“Hands where I can see them!” cried the young one, aiming into the darkness.
“Stay right there!” shouted a third, calmer and undrawn, holding out his left hand flat into the air as if Otto was a waiter at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, insisting he take another serving.
The only real freedom is to rail against your shackles, anything else is acquiescence. Otto couldn’t stop running, his momentum was too great. Instead he veered right, sprinting past the flares and the empty police car, jumping the curb, stumbling around the unfenced perimeter of his yard before slaloming through the weeds down the steep slope to the creek bed, splashing into the cool water, his shoes filling with water for a few strides before he left them in the quick mud.
A gunshot whizzed by his head, a moment of pure awareness struck before he heard the sound, a crisp pop over his left shoulder—it must have been the younger officer, Otto thought, overcome with sympathy for the boy: so earnest, so worried about doing the right thing, reminding Otto of an entry-level version of himself, or the initial fumbling of his courtship with Lisa—maybe it hadn’t been a bullet: it was hard to hear over the sound of his own clattering through the water, choking on each breath as it wheezed through his trachea; he upset night animals on the riverbank and they launched themselves recklessly past him in response, the dry branches of fallen tree limbs cracking in brittle retorts under his bare foot.
Further down the creek he found a small boat covered in a gray tarp. He peeled back a corner of the tarp at the stern and lay down underneath the gunwales. The path of the creek had taken him behind an unfamiliar subdivision and the boat was moored behind a large Tudor-style house. All the windows were dark, but his movements activated a motion-detector-controlled floodlight, illuminating an elegant stone patio. Farther up the creek, he could hear splashing and the beep and gurgle of two-way radio. The boat looked rustic; as Otto untied the rope fastening it, he appreciated the woodwork.
If you’ve ever sat in a gondola in Venice, floating down the Grand Canal next to a woman you loved, the gondolier belting out arias under some majestic ponte, his baritone echoing over the wide piazzas, the cityscape eroding into the sea while you dream of crusades and trade monopolies, then you know the thrill Otto felt as his canoe jostled against the larger stones and tree roots before finding deeper water.
But no, that’s not right. It was not cultured or erudite. He was a man of action: crossing a frontier, launching his keelboats and pirogues into the headwaters of an unknown territory, heading west into danger and romantic encounters with native women: his small skiff, he knew, would flow into the Schuykill and then into the Delaware, washing him out into the salt water crashing over the Atlantic seaboard.
The creek widened out instead into a small reservoir, the boat stopping only after becoming ensnared in a thick nylon rope beaded with egg-shaped orange floats, which kept the boat from spilling, with the collected creek water, over a high stone wall. Past the wall, Otto could see the bright lights of what he knew to be the township’s sewage treatment plant. He had not come that far. Across the water, he could see a tastefully lit Colonial Revival home roosting on the brow of the hill overlooking the pond. It was large, at least six bedrooms. If you looked straight out from the large terrace, Otto could tell, you wouldn’t see the treatment plant, only the ripples in the water and the willows leaning over the opposite edge. It would be a fortress, a citadel, something he could defend. The water dripping off his pantlegs formed a small puddle at the bottom of the boat and that puddle slowly grew as Otto appreciated the firepit and outdoor kitchen on the lower level of the terrace. He had nothing to bail the water out with, plugging the first hole with his index finger until he realized a large swath of the hull was cracked and flaking off rust. There was nothing he could do to stop the seepage.
It had been a long time since he had gone swimming. He might, he thought, be able to dogpaddle to the terrace. But the current of the creek, which had seemed so slight and ambling earlier, sounded treacherous here as he listened to the edge of the pond overflow the stone wall. He had no choice, he felt, but to wait here as the boat descended the three or four feet to the bottom of the pond, coming to rest over a thick layer of last year’s unraked autumn leaves.
Jared Hanson lives in New York City. His fiction has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Pembroke Magazine, the Baltimore Review and Faultline.
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