The Everborn Read online

  And who had dressed me in clothes such as these, in a manner which suggested that my wife herself had done it?

  Standing there, gazing downwards in consternation towards a carpet so disturbingly shampooed that its normal ruby tone seemed almost orange, I realized I was still holding my wallet. That was when I decided to experiment.

  It was intuition which made me first submit to the authenticity of the upstairs letter, but the cowardice I faced by the mere notion of challenging its message made me hesitate. Something within me whispered that I was wasting precious time; that I should have been out the door by now.

  I stepped into the kitchen. I made up my mind. I opened my wallet and reached for the wall phone.

  Outside, the wind rapped steadily against the glass of the curtained kitchen window, and for the first time since I awoke I caught the gentle clamor of the pipe chimes swaying and suspended beneath the patio awning. Before the first number was dialed, it was their wispy serenade which tenderly hinted that perhaps the source of my calm had risen from the reassuring efforts of my home itself.

  And my home did not want me to leave.

  3.

  A Boulevard of Doors

  A strange, restless urgency to abandon everything without further thought or delay would not let me be. It was like being hounded for loose change by the vagrants at the corner store while trying to use the payphone. Aside from this annoyance, there was not a doubt in my traumatized mind that one or two inquiring phone calls would bring me closer to my rational perceptive self. I could not comply with the letter’s invitation until I was satisfied by this simple task. The Master Magician, whoever he may be, could wait an extra ten minutes.

  On the other hand, what about Melony?

  My speculation was cut short as was the dial tone of my cordless, and I moved for a seat at the dining room table nearby. I spread my wallet and its selected contents before me as the mannerly effeminate voice of my bank’s twenty-four-hour customer service representative put me on hold. After a minute or two with an earful of an instrumental rendition of Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home,” the matter of my conventional obligations was put to rest. Somehow, my monthly banking needs had been tended to, as was everything else, as though I had never been gone at all.

  This amounted to two reasonable explanations: either I hadn’t been gone at all but instead suffered four months’ worth of amnesia, which meant this whole letter thing was a joke...

  ...or my wife had been living here without me all along.

  Needless to say, this discovery put me at ease all the more and I found no desire to continue with the experiment. I withdrew from the table and replaced the phone into the wall cradle. I fought against any further urge to speculate or delay and the growing temptations to place additional calls to friends or associates might prove futile and even dangerous.

  I made my way back up the stairs and returned to my office. Standing beside my wife’s desk one final time, I noticed the Land of the Lost calendar my wife had apparently placed upon the wall. It bared the month of January ‘95 and it made me feel distant and alertly out of place.

  I snatched the letter and gave it a quick re-read, then proceeded to my own desk to retrieve an organizer notebook and micro-cassette recorder. As it was with everything, I located them in the places they normally would be. I checked the tape in the recorder and removed extra ones from a sealed package inside the middle desk drawer, then reverted for the entire package. These necessities now gathered, I shut off the lights and returned to the stairway, hurried across the living room, and exited out the front door.

  At last.

  Not far out on the walkway, I shifted to return to the upstairs office only once more, grumbling, as I recalled the letter’s mention of the humming of Melony’s typewriter, and of my neglecting to turn it off.

  ***

  It was quiet in Malibu that night as I departed, driving south down Pacific Coast Highway and scaling the oceanside. Gazing alternately upon the stretch of road before me and then at the coast to my right, I felt as though I was embarking on a secret mission to smuggle forty-six years of reason into the heartland of unreasonable chaos. The coast was like an endless welcome mat of uneven wasteland molded into the roadside like adhesive siding, its colossal door open wide to a swollen, black terrain.

  As my pale-brown Mustang climbed upon the freeway onramp and proceeded eastward, I found myself facing the emergence of traffic and engulfing city lights. I was too much aware of myself and my impending destiny and drove with all the careful attention of a driver in combat with his own drunkenness. Life was active and bustling around me and I felt unique to a secret, which concerned every aspect of it. I felt profoundly chosen.

  I wondered what secrets were carried by the cities and buildings and vehicles around me, by the lives behind them all. The more I wondered about them, the more I wanted to know them and this was how I came across my own secret to begin with.

  It was as though I hadn’t enough to wonder about already.

  That night, the whole world seemed unknown to me. It was like starting all over again, back to the basics with Discovery 101. Continuing down the freeway and merging onto the Corona Expressway, everything I passed was to me an everlasting and boundless boulevard of doors, each door containing secret upon secret awaiting revelation. That was the way my life had been. That was the way all life around me seemed now. I imagined this was the way one felt while journeying through that infamous tunnel of light on the verge of meeting his maker.

  I was now entering Carbon Canyon.

  Stretching northward from the Carbon Canyon Reservoir and up through Chino Hills State Park, this was the home of manifold mysteries, each shrouded subtly amidst the innocence and solitude of rural ranch house turf. Stories have trickled downwards from beyond its lofty hills and grasslands like melted snow upon the ears of neighboring communities. To most, these were nothing more than rumors of supernatural mayhem, whimsical accounts of witchcraft and occult rituals in the hours of late night obscurity, of strange greenish mists emitted from alleged government bases, of floating balls of light and vanishing yokels.

  Nothing but the finest in Backwoods Town, U.S.A., superstition.

  These tales would thrive as long as humanity maintained its imagination. I, however, would just as soon be interested in most of them as I would be exploring the underbellies of rocks in my backyard. It never used to be that way, and fifteen or so years ago one would easily find me in hot pursuit of these less-than-credible countryside flights of fancy. Yet here I was now, in the middle of it all, adding to this trivial folklore the very ingredients necessary to change the course of civilized man.

  And goddamn, was I ever hungry.

  Under normal conditions, one would not expect this to be the proper time to think about food. I did not wish to be hungry, but I was overcome with the desire to eat as instantly as I had glanced upon the letter’s final instruction.

  Keep going until you get hungry.

  Besides, it was apparently true that I hadn’t eaten in more than four months. And these certainly were not normal conditions. However inappropriate it seemed in my mind, I was already digging into my pocket for that half-empty M&Ms wrapper.

  ***

  Carbon Canyon Road, at this time of night, turned out to be a treacherously abysmal obstacle course, a twisting and turning labyrinth of formless black wilderness. Every so often, I would spy a lonely street light or two illuminating a cluster of quieted homes or stables. I assumed the canyon had fallen victim to a power outage until I noticed there were no street lights anyway.

  Towering dark formations in the distance before me soon became walls of rock revealed by my Mustang’s high beams. A mountainous borderland lay ahead, floating upon the distending vista like a deluge of lofty apparitions, rising with every moment of my approach from the depths of a thick, Stygian pool of nightfall. It was a disclosure both menacing and beautiful, surrounding me fully much sooner than I’d expected. With
in the next moment, the road diverted abruptly to the right, my lights pivoting in rapid secession from the sloping hillside walls. Steering viciously to retain my course, I navigated the bend only to be pitted against an ambush of bright light.

  An onrush of three or four vehicles swept into the opposing lane, passing me and plunging into the darkness from which I came, a welcoming committee of sorts to the challenging thruway I had just entered. Nearly every sharp curve promised a showdown of more oncoming headlights, splashing into my view without notice, my eyes dripping with blindness as they billowed past. Their sporadic stampede and the narrowness of the road together gave me the illusion they were racing directly into me. The urge to swerve off in panic was a deadly instinct held into check by my frozen grip upon the wheel.

  I wondered if the hands of fate ever did drugs. As I endured this portion of my journey, I began to draw the conclusion that the fate folks upstairs were wide and flying and flicking cigarette butts at a television screen displaying my feverish image. They had only to depress the button which would make my illusion real, thwarting my newfound realities into a speeding semi and tomorrow’s six o’clock news.

  No sooner had I begun to pray for relief when the gorge yawned into open terrain once again. Even better, I saw that I had emerged into a more populated area. Intersections branched outwards, both to my left and right, leading through scattered residences bathed in yellow lamplight. Somehow, I felt overwhelmingly redeemed.

  Until, within the next few minutes, I felt lost.

  Where was I to go? I was still hungry, of course, but was I expected to simply follow my empty stomach? Follow it like that damn animated toucan follows his nose to the flavors of fruit in that cereal commercial?

  If I was, it wouldn’t surprise me.

  I had a good mind to pull over and park at the roadside, and wait for the unknown to come to me. With my luck, what actually would come to me would be a cop. And what would I say to him?

  I dug into my pocket for more M&Ms.

  There were only three left.

  And they were already melting in my hands.

  ***

  The countryside view I had wished for only lasted a mile and a half, and my precious street lights decreased in number with the concluding remnants of community farmland. The road curved at an incline as my headlights reflected back from steel guardrails perched upon fat wooden pegs rising from the embankment, directing me around a sloping grassy hillside.

  I slowed to a crawl. I clicked down my high beams finally, preparing in advance for a second stampede of heavy traffic, my nerves preparing for another envelopment of rocky walls.

  I didn’t prepare for what came instead, as the foothills parted and the road gave way to the approaching vision to my right.

  Peacefully anchored along the shoreline of a gravel sea was a solitary diner. It was average in size and structure, and nameless but for the pale blue neon of a generic diner sign mounted above a level rooftop and between two rotating air vents. Its interior was brightly lit, a beacon in the midst of consuming shadow, disclosing a view of the scattered occupants within.

  So enticingly welcome was this sight that I made it a necessary destination at once. My appetite had swollen in painful succession to each moment of anxious starvation as I neared. It occurred to me that the letter’s mention of hunger was a riddle to be understood only at a specific point in time.

  This point in time.

  It made complete sense to me then that hunger was a predetermined reference to this diner, a reference both puzzling and vague to any who should happen across the letter’s contents unintended. Contrarily, I thought it to be outright silly that I should meet an entity responsible for timeless universal mystery over a cup of coffee and a bagel. Surely I was not drawn here for vain disappointment, bewitched by some hi-tech subliminal publicity stunt pushing midnight meal specials to superstitious nitwits.

  I veered onto a driveway of broken asphalt which tapered into the diner’s parking lot, its gravel crackling beneath my Mustang’s tires like crispy toasted rice in milk. The fact that mine was the only vehicle in the lot alerted me to a sudden self-consciousness. An imaginary vigil of countless hidden spectators gazed upon me in simultaneous fixation, their heads extended like a herd of gazelle startled from my mind’s whimsical waterhole. I felt like a first-time courier of drugs for the mob. I wondered what might be watching me. I wondered if this was a mistake.

  I crawled into a halt a few yards from the entrance. I silenced my car’s engine and pocketed the keys, and killed my headlights. I regarded a wooden sign suspended into view beyond my windshield, held by chains descending from a looming archway:

  “We’re never close.”

  Behind this, in the window, was a poster board declaring midnight meal specials.

  Tonight’s was Malibu chicken.

  I snatched the notorious letter from my side, along with the organizer notebook and micro recorder and gathered the blank cassettes which slid between the seats during the drive. Without further delay, I abandoned the familiar comforts of my Mustang to the rush of bitter canyon air. My emergence from the vehicle was like a bold step into a foreign world. I felt myself an adventurer suddenly, a discoverer, an astronaut, a visitor to a place which should not ordinarily exist and which perhaps would vanish like a dream into the earliest morning light.

  I shut the car door and surveyed the property and I was reminded of my view of the starlit coastline from the Malibu highway before. I breathed in deeply the frosty air, enraptured for the moment by its relaxing freshness until my skin grew numb against its chill. I cast a curious gaze into the dining room windows and spied an elderly man stabbing salad greens with a fork at a corner booth. Before he could catch notice of my scrutiny, I proceeded across the gravel towards the entranceway’s glass double doors.

  The glass door to my right hung invitingly open as I arrived beside it, extending its patient courtesy to not only myself but to the coldness I now sought to escape. In passing I thought to shut this door, and I shuffled the belongings I held for a free hand. I reached for its handle, the horizontal bar kind common to emergency exit doors, and I shot a quick glance to the empty vestibule and vacant counter for a self-conscious acknowledgement of approval. I was actually somewhat relieved to find no one there and I cringed to myself as I realized I might not yet be fully prepared to face what I had come here for. As much as I longed for my wife, I feared her confrontation as well. Up until now I had been alone in this and in a matter of minutes the impending company would make real what still to me remained dreamlike.

  I drew myself toward the door until my breath became an explosion of white misty cloud upon the surface of the glass. It was as though I’d exhaled any hidden complacencies into a breath-frost which dissolved like water beads heated upon a kettle into ripples of steam. I grappled with my confidence until I willed it to rise. I stared for a moment through the glass at the wispy torrents of life as I knew it, and in my blurred reflection I beheld the fossilizing remnants of a Max Polito that once was. Silent and sentimental, I bade it a final farewell.

  I hadn’t expected anything short of a casual entry after this. I gripped the door’s handle, but several futile tugs revealed it was somehow locked into place. Feeling a bit foolish, I would have abandoned my efforts as I had not come all this way to contend with an unruly door. But as soon as I released my grip the door creaked disastrously ajar, christening my entry with a confounding loss of balance; I found myself slipping impossibly backwards, my frozen ass plummeting to a painful collision with the hard entranceway flooring. In striving to retain my grip upon the door’s handle I clumsily lurched forward, further complicating the embarrassing episode as my armful of journalistic accessories slipped from their brown-and-beige-sweatered hammock, splashing across my feet and the encircling tile floor in a bedlam of clamorous grief. Inadvertently, as if to polish off the performance, my restored grip upon the handle issued a faceful of glass which could have shattered had I not
at least some small degree of luck and the door locked firmly in place, pitting my nose no more than an inch away from a blue and white endorsement for Diner’s Club.

  Time appeared to stop amidst the following silence, and I dared not turn to the presence I felt behind me. I leaned over to retrieve the clutter about me, fighting against the weight of attention which tried to paralyze me, ashamed and distressed of the notion that the unknown itself could come running to my aid at any given moment.

  It was not supposed to happen this way.

  My organizer notebook lay unscathed amidst a dispersion of microcassettes. My microrecorder had fallen face-down, and I cursed as I raised its rectangular body to find the plastic window severely cracked. Then two AA batteries spilled out from their ruptured compartment.

  I failed to notice, at first, the reflected image of the woman before me in the closed entry door’s glass.

  I was distracted by the movement of light from her flickering image....I shot my gaze to the glass pane, my full attention seized but for the awareness of my quickening heartbeat.

  The woman was approaching me in determined but politely cautious strides, disproportioned into a seemingly impossible distance behind me, beyond me and dwarfish enough to present the illusion of being perched upon my reflected shoulder like a voluptuous human parrot. I spied the front register counter following up in stunted visage upon the view’s horizon. The counter truly could not have been more than several yards away from my crouching back, which logically placed the woman’s actual position a mere few feet from me.

  I feared a hand upon my shoulder at any given moment. I could almost feel her breath there. I could almost catch the drifting fragrance of Channel mingled with the sweet scent of familiar hair spray. I could see the shroud of lampblack luster limply draped and shoulder-length, hair framed about flawless Venezuelan features, caressing waves sweeping against tan brown skin and the shoulder straps of an azure autumn house dress.