Path of Smoke (27 page)

After that, he'd run into Paul, who was on his way to Canadian Tire. Ingrid had totaled their car.
She was off-roading through the park, or something,
he'd said.
I don't get it. The car was just sitting at the foot of the legislature, and it looked like some monster had stepped on it.

That was in the morning. He waited all day to hear more about this disaster, but there were no texts, no e-mails. He ran into Shelby at school, but when he asked her about Ingrid, she seemed confused. It was as if she'd forgotten that they knew each other. No mention of the crash. Surely, Ingrid would have said something. Even someone as distracted as he was could tell that the two of them were getting closer. That left 2.5 possibilities. (1) Shelby didn't want him to worry. (2) Shelby didn't want him to know about the accident. (2.5) The accident wasn't at all what it seemed. The fractional possibility was what made up his mind.

The next day, he followed her to the hospital. He stood behind the curtain on the other side of the room, where there was an empty bed and a radio playing. The conversation wasn't particularly illuminating, but he lived in the margins. If there was anyone who knew how to furnish a radical interpretation of the text, it was a grad student who studied Anglo-Saxon fragments that were literally crumbling. He listened. And what he heard was a different lie, something that Shelby was fashioning on the spot. It had something to do with Dr. Marsden, Ingrid's car, and the park. He had the feeling—however terrible it might be—that Trish Marsden was admitted to the hospital soon after Ingrid's car was destroyed.
It looked like some monster had stepped on it.
Perhaps the car had struck something. A big something. But what could that mean?

When they all met at the club, it felt as if they might have reached the fifth act. Someone was finally going to tell him something. Shelby and Carl seemed visibly relieved to see him there, and everyone was having such a good time. Carl's poem was both a challenge and an apology. For a moment, he thought that they might simply dance their way to some kind of truth. But then Paul was driving him home, and he could feel the vibrations of the lie, struggling to cover a surface that was now impossibly vast.

Sometimes,
Paul said, staring straight ahead as they drove down Broad Street,
I think that she's keeping something from me. But I can never tell. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

His knuckles were white as he gripped the wheel. He knew, then, that Ingrid was managing Paul in exactly the same way. Paul was too busy, or perhaps too good-natured, to tease out the threads of the lie. Paul would relieve the babysitter, put Neil to bed, and then fall asleep before his DVD had even loaded.

Ungelich is us.
It's different with us.

That was the refrain of
Wulf and Eadwacer
, one of his favorite poems. Wulf brings a bundle to the woods, for no purpose that we can fathom. What's wrapped in cloth? The word
hwelp
could mean “child” or “pup.” The narrator is a shadow with no name, but whatever Wulf bears to the woods belongs to her. It is their
giedd
, their riddle.
None can sunder what was never whole.
The cloth conceals a poem itself, a fragment of vellum and bone. The refrain—
it's different with us
—has been torn from all context. What could it mean? To him, it had always referred not only to those enigmatic characters, but to future readers.
It's different with us, the kind of people who find themselves in a
wyndleas
grove, or reading a poem with no beginning or end. It will always be different with us.

Because he had one foot in the grove already, it was different. There was no trampoline leap into dreamless space. No comfort of sleep. All he could do was retrace his steps, walking back down Broad Street, toward the club. He would unwrap the riddle. Now there was a loose thread, and if he pulled—

But he didn't know what would fall out. A
hwelp
? A shadow? A word-hoard? Monsters came in all shapes and sizes. They didn't just step on your car. They could be small enough to hold to your chest as you carried them deeper into the woods. He feared that he might be the pup, wrapped in a bag and left to the elements.

Then he saw the librarian, standing in the lamplight behind the club.

And everything shifted sideways.

A memory dangled in front of him. Fire and bloody paws.

I'm Oliver.

I think I know you.

Yes. You do.

The thread was there. It had practically snagged on his thumbnail. But it was Oliver who tugged on it, pulling him out of the light and back to the park.

He walked past the frozen clock in Campus West (it had never struck him as being a “westerly” building, and none of the other wings of campus were described using the compass rose). For the first time, he realized that the clock wasn't completely dead. The second hand was mortally wounded but still struggling to move. Time shivered but couldn't bring itself to go forward. Decaying posters surrounded the clock, layer upon layer that had been stapled over each other, announcing fossilized events. The bookstore was advertising a sale on maple fudge. Students rushed by him as he stared at the clock. He could fix it. He could be a Time Lord. But it seemed best not to meddle with cosmic forces, and so he kept walking.

The department was quiet. The oversized posters of theorists watched him like Gothic paintings as he made his way down the hall. Foucault was blurry and purple. Kenneth Burke looked devilish, wearing just one glove. The faculty offices were compact, with frosted glass windows. Various articles, conference fliers, and comic strips were taped to each door.

The shared TA office was bare. He opened the door, and the smell of coffee flew out, along with a patina of stale cigarettes. He watered the ficus and turned on the computer, waiting for its sleepy parts to wake up. He wasn't even sure what he was looking for. It was just reflex. The computer yawned and struggled to pull itself together. He stared out the window. A colony of spiders was having some kind of meeting on the balcony. Students were sunning themselves below. In the office next door, he could hear strains of hip-hop.

When the computer had sufficiently roused itself, he logged onto the EBSCO database and tried a few search terms.
Wascana Park. Coyotes. Disappearances.
He had a faint memory of going through the same motions before, as if he were following his own research tracks. He read. He poured himself a coffee from the communal machine. He read some more and refilled his cup.

When he was done, he printed off a few more articles. The general office was empty, and the whine of the printer split the silence. He retrieved the warm stack of paper from the tray, then turned out the lights and locked the door behind him. If he went back to the shared TA space, someone would find him. Grad students were always dropping in and out of that snug closet as they feverishly graded exams or worked on conference papers.

Instead, he went to a classroom across the hall. It had fallen into disuse, but he had a special affection for it. Decades ago, the room had been designed for experiments involving LSD. The walls were covered in beige carpet, which reminded him of a pelt. There were no angles—the room had a peculiar ovoid shape, which he found strangely comforting.

There was a chalkboard on the far wall. Many of the other classrooms had been outfitted with space-age whiteboards that you could draw on with laser pens, transferring your ideas to a larger screen. But he liked the older technology of chalk. It broke, and you reached for another. The dust settled over everything, leaving its trace. The smudges on his sleeves reminded him that something had happened. The tutorial hadn't been written in light.

He began writing notes on the board. Like his tutorial notes, they were curlicued and mostly illegible, a mess of arrows and words that ran into each other. The result was a single stem with fantastic roots, the type of word that linguists called
agglutinative
, because it was really a small core with modifiers glued onto each end. The notes unscrolled in all directions. They became an array that made no sense.

“Coyotes can't destroy a car,” he murmured.

“Clearly, you haven't watched enough Road Runner cartoons.”

He looked up. Carl was standing in the doorway.

“How did you find me?”

“I heard the blizzard of chalk.” Carl stepped into the room. “Plus, you always talk to yourself when you're making notes. I just had to listen for the disembodied conversation.”

“I guess you know me pretty well.” He returned his attention to the board. “Maybe you can clear something up. What was Ingrid's car doing in front of the legislature?”

Carl closed the door softly. Then he walked down the aisle of desks. He took a piece of chalk and drew a crude picture of a box, which he labeled
TNT
.

“There's your answer,” he said.

“Stop joking.”

“Andrew—”

“No. Just stop. Late-night study sessions? Hockey practice? An RPG set in ancient Rome?”

Carl took a deep breath. “Okay. I can see that you're pissed. But let's stop this merry-go-round of blame for a second, and just slow down. The situation is—unstable.”

“Unstable?” Andrew put down the chalk and really looked at him—not at the safe point above Carl's shoulder but straight into his eyes. The connection jolted him. The intimacy was sharp and unexpected, but he didn't look away. “I'm a terrible liar. We both know that. What I didn't know, until this moment, is that you're an even worse one. Nothing that comes out of your mouth contains an ounce of plausibility or sense.”

Carl stepped forward. “That's not completely fair. Like I said—”

“It's complicated? Life isn't a status update. Life is brutal and full of exceptions. I just never thought you would be one of them.”

He looked stung. “Andrew, please. You have to give me a chance to explain.”

“No need. I get it now.” He returned his attention to the notes. “It doesn't make any sense, but I get it.”

“There's a lot that you don't understand.”

“I used to know all of this. I was part of the equation. Then—” Andrew wiped the notes clean with an eraser. “This happened. Whose fault was that, exactly?”

Carl took the eraser from his hand. “It was the park. There are rules.”

“You used your emergency student loan to buy new pants. You're telling me that you couldn't bend the rules? Not even a little?”

“It's not that simple. If we'd told you anything—if we'd let something slip—”

“You made a choice.”

Carl blinked in confusion. Then he leaned closer. Andrew felt the proximity run through him in currents of silver. He could smell Carl's deodorant and the faded dryer sheet that he must have fished out of someone else's machine. There was a daub of soy sauce on his jeans, like a lost island. He wanted to step back, to reestablish his personal Fortress of Solitude, but the room was beginning to shrink. He couldn't remember which direction was safest, which point on the compass promised escape.

“No,” Carl said. “It was never a choice. I wanted to tell you. So many times, I nearly broke down and told you everything. But the magic doesn't work that way.”

“You don't know how it works. Oliver says—”

Carl's expression hardened. “Oliver is playing with you. He's playing with all of us. I never trusted him. But Ingrid couldn't see it, and of course, nobody listens to me.”

“That night at the club—” Andrew managed to take a step back, although now his shoulder was awkwardly pressed against the board. “I was going to ask you. We were dancing, and I could see that you wanted to tell me something. I went to grab us drinks, but then I saw Ingrid talking to Paul. She told him that the babysitter had to leave early.”

“She was trying to protect him.”

“Why did you need to get rid of us?”

He looked uncomfortable. Andrew could see that he was weighing his options. “We met with Narses,” he said finally. “Do you remember him?”

“No.”

“He's a spado. Like Mardian, but with a conscience.”

“Mardian.” He felt his chest tighten. “It was my fault.”

Carl touched his shoulder. “It wasn't. You were scared and confused. You couldn't control the salamander. It lashed out.”

“I knew what I was doing. The fire and blood. It felt right.”

“Andrew, you were out of your mind.”

He pushed Carl away. “Do you know how many times I've wondered if I was crazy? How many times I've nearly asked for a prescription that would just make it all go away? It turns out they don't make a cocktail for that. I get to feel this every day. But you and Shelby—even Ingrid—you were the only ones who didn't make me feel broken. When I was with you, I wasn't out of my mind. I was home. I was safe. And then you started fiddling with the dial, until I couldn't tell what was real anymore.”

Carl took his hand. “You're still home. Still safe. Nothing's going to happen to you. And now that you understand—now that you remember—”

“Everything can be like it was?” Andrew shook his head. “What's done is done. That person—that shadow—whatever it was, it's gone. I didn't find my way back, Carl. I came through the side door. And the view is entirely different. I'm different.”

“You're still Roldan.” Carl's voice broke slightly as he said the name. “Some little part of him survived.”

“It's just a word. It doesn't mean anything to me.”

“That's not how it's supposed to work! You must remember something—” Carl's hand was like ice. “The foxes? The frayed tapestry? You told me that we were breathing stolen air, and that was when I realized how much every day mattered.”

Andrew took his hand away. “I don't know what you're talking about.”