The Midnight Country

Chapter 10

It’s a curious thing, watching your own hand disappear, especially when you lean forward to view what should be a stump and see only your skin infinitely regressing, extending into a kind of invisible fog, vanishing into mist and memory. It’s even more curious to walk forward and find yourself in a different place altogether; a place as warm and humid as any sauna and dense with foliage, and not just any foliage but the kind you might expect to find in Hawaii or South America or the jungles of Vietnam—hothouse foliage, tropical foliage, primordial foliage—not far away but right there, by the Mohawk River, in northern California. In 1978.

It’s also curious to find yourself talking to someone you can no longer see, but whom you know is right there—only a few feet away. At least I hoped he was still there.

“Dillon? You there, man?”

Nothing. Not so much as a peep.

Until, finally, “I’m right here. Right on the other side of, whatever this is. You can’t see me, either?”

I looked at where he should be, where the sycamore and cottonwood trees should be, the white alder, the Mohawk River, and saw only cycads, only ferns, only a hazy volcano in a red-orange sky.

“Nope.” I glanced around, looking for dinosaurs, looking for dragonflies the size of eagles. There was nothing. “But it’s all right, really. You can come on through.”

“I don’t know, man ...”

I reached forward without thinking and snatched him by the coat collar, yanked him through.

“Hey ...!” he protested, then stiffened, looking around.

“Holy mother of ...” He trailed off as something caught his attention deeper in the jungle, something which verily gleamed as I followed his gaze; something I’d completely missed when I’d first scanned my surroundings—a mammoth rib cage, just laying amidst the trees. Baking in the sun.

“Oh, man. Is that what I think it is?”

I didn’t need to look at him to tell how frightened he was. And yet I moved forward anyway, as young boys often do, not really caring how he felt, pushing through the warm, moist fronds—where a gaggle of dragonflies erupted into flight and made a beeline straight for Dillon, I don’t know why. And then he was yelping, yelping and hollering diminishingly (for he was running away), and he must have stumbled through the portal—for there was no sign of him left anywhere—and I was standing alone.

Alone with the remains of Ghost’s family (which I knew in a way I cannot explain—not then, and not now), orphaned amidst a village of bones; which gleamed in the sun like a shattered puzzle, curved symmetrically, too perfect to be natural, like the standing, ivory birdcage in the corner of Grandma Grace’s living room. Or the burned out fuselage of a 747—half-buried, perhaps, on a misty island beach—somewhere between LAX and Hawaii.

And then I was following Dillon, through the fronds and back across the transom, where I stopped to take the fish out of my bag and unwrapped it with trembling hands, before placing it halfway into the portal so that only its tail could be seen.

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