A Meeting

       “Oh, I’m sorry. Are you in a rush to be somewhere?” Eloc says hotly, looking down at his pants pocket. No one answers. “That’s what I thought. We’re going this way.”

           Eloc walks along a desecrated road that delineates the western edge of the town. Cracks cover its surface like dried capillaries. There are potholes here and there. In some places, the road is missing altogether and blends into the nonexistence of the earth. Eloc sometimes amuses himself by imagining an unlucky traveler forced to slow to a crawl along the ugly avenue, the bumps and dips exaggerated by any acceleration. Of course, these are always just imaginings. He has never seen a single car come through this town. Never seen anyone.

           He bounds along the route and does not glance up as he passes the various businesses. He does not have to. He knows every building by heart. He goes by Johnny B’s, whose large, bulging letters are supposed to be yellow and red. The sun’s relentless beating and a thick coating of filth has colored them brown. The wooden posts surrounding the outdoor dining patio wear flourishing colonies of dark mold and moss. Most of the windows are shattered, and most of their splintered shards have been swept away with wind, rain, and time. The park-bench-like tables, bolted into the ground, remain. Eloc often thinks about eating here. How he might have enjoyed it.

           He continues. He passes Julie’s Sew Shop, Mac’s Fresh Market, E-Z Mart, First Financial Bank, and Kate’s Ceramics. All are in similar condition to Johnny B’s: disrepair. Eloc tries to maintain the interior of E-Z Mart because he frequents it often enough to care. He finds little motivation to do the same for the others.

           “Because I’m restless,” Eloc exclaims. Again, he looks at his pocket. Again, no one answers. He reaches the point of the road where it veers to the right, wrapping around the corner and shooting off to the east. Rather than follow the twist, he plunges straight ahead. He steps off the crumbling road into the surrounding foliage. Anyone watching him tramp through the growth would think, “Surely, he will get lost.” But he never did. And no one was ever watching.

           Pushing aside knee-height grass and dodging tortuous branches, Eloc sweeps into the forest. He glides through the greenery like a panther: soundless and powerful. After twenty minutes, the trees begin to thin. The shrubbery lightens. Thick undergrowth gives way to barren soil. And then it appears. The pond. His pond. He approaches the bank of the small pool but is careful to not look into the still, murky water. Not yet.

           “See, Neville? Record time. The sun’s hardly moved. All that complaining for nothing.” Eloc reaches into his pocket and pulls out a gray stone. It fits snugly in the indent of his palm. Its surface is smooth. It is simple and unimpressive. Its only distinctive feature is one which Eloc himself created. Using a permanent marker he snagged from E-Z Mart, he has dabbed two small circles near the edge of the stone and drawn a swooping line on the other. With those tattoos sketched on its cold skin, the stone smiles up at Eloc.

           “Ready?”

Eloc lifts Neville above his shoulder and beside his face, its smile looking outwards. He draws in a breath and holds it tightly in his chest the way a child waiting to be let into their birthday party might do. With an anxious but happy grin, he leans forward. He locks eyes with the reflection on the brown, glossy surface and releases his breath. It escapes all at once. Then his lungs are still. His eyes are enraptured on the dirtier, glistening version of himself staring back. Its eyes blink when he blinks. Its mouth stands ajar as his own does. Yet, Eloc does not see an exact reflection. This version of himself does not feel authentic enough to be identical. No, Eloc has seen himself in mirrors. While it was jarring to see his haggard and dirtied face, he had known it was indeed an exact copy behind the glass. Had felt on a visceral level that it could not be a lie. The surface of the mirror: it was too perfect. It held only truth. But when he looked into the pond, it was different. This copy was blurred. This copy was imperfect. This copy was skewed enough that it might not be Eloc after all. This muddy water was capable of untruth. And in that, it held hope. 

He stares until he feels he can drink in no more, then slowly raises himself upright. His lungs expand again. They pump steady and hard to compensate for the lost time. He looks at Neville as if to check that it shares the same wonderment as he. Eloc searches its blank expression. It is unyielding. Yet, Eloc swears he sees a sense of amazement resting just below the drab, stony surface. He is sure of it, and wide grin stretches across his lips.

“I knew you’d agree,” Eloc sighs. He sounds relieved. “What would you do if you saw another person, huh? What do you think?” Neville did not respond, but Eloc heard its answer in his mind. Was sure it was Neville speaking to him.

I don’t know. Say hello, I guess.

“That’s it? Say hello?” Eloc laughs. He cannot recount how many hours he had preoccupied himself imagining what it would be like to see another person. He thinks it would feel like glimpsing The Man in the pond, but it would be different. It would be amplified. It would be an insurmountable explosion of bewilderment and astonishment, something astronomical that he could not even begin to comprehend. Yet, in all his ponderings, he had never considered simply saying hello. “You’re funny, Neville.”

What would you do?

“I’d smile, and I’d show ‘em all around town. I’d take ‘em to the E-Z Mart, treat ‘em to dinner, and then take ‘em to the library.”

You love that library.

“Well, yeah. It’s the only thing here that’s normal. Stories, I mean. Stories are normal.” Eloc’s face grows sad. The lines carved in intaglio to the sides of his lips and between his eyebrows seem to deepen. Darken. “Reminds me of back then.”

Eloc looks over at Neville, smile towards the sky and unmoving. “Other people did exist, you know.”

Yes, I know.

“Did you know that I used to live with other people?”

You tell me all the time. Your mom and dad and brother.

“Yeah. I was eleven when it all happened.”

How old are you now?

“I didn’t think to keep count. I have no idea how old I am now.”

Neither do I.

A gentle chuckle tickles the back of Eloc’s throat. His tightened lips loosen a little in a faint smile. “What would I do without you, Neville?” He pauses. “What if I just tossed you, huh? You know, just threw you into the trees. You’d be all alone. And scared, I bet.”

Eloc laughs, but the sound is heavy. Laughs are not meant to be this way. They should be loud or full or boisterous. But they are not meant to be heavy. He hears the sound vibrating through the leaves, touching their flesh and shaking them. He feels as if every one of them might break off. A kind of unnatural, induced abscission. But they do not. The dense laugh continues to reverberate off the trunks and through the grass, and Eloc wonders what it is that weighs it down. What pollution sifts through the undulating waves of that sound, dirtying and toxifying it? Why does it resemble a scream more than a laugh? He shutters. The lines deepen. They age his face, one far too young and fresh to appear so old.  

They are out there.

“I appreciate the positivity, Neville. But they aren’t.”

You don’t know that.

“I do.”

How would you feel if you saw someone?

Eloc stares out at the pond, less than thirty feet across at its widest point. He grows pensive. He braces himself and looks down at the water once more. He pours into the brown eyes stained by wet dirt and detritus. His chest tightens and he dives into the feeling. He swims through the tension, through the strain, through the swelling pressure.

“This. I’d feel like this,” Eloc says.

What is this?

“Wonderful. I think.” His voice quivers as he says this, and it comes out more as a cracking whisper. When he hears it, he pictures the town grass that grows in the alleys between buildings: tall and quivering. He pushes the image out and tries to think of the bole of one of the oak trees instead: thick and solid. He succeeds for a moment and quite admires the painting he has created. Then the tree is falling over: weak and dying. Eloc shuts his eyes, hoping the onslaught of darkness will push his thoughts away. It works.

Are you sure?

“Yeah. I’d love to see someone else.” Eloc feels as he speaks that he can feel another unspoken conversation trailing behind his words, or perhaps on top of them. A parallel but silent dialogue. He wonders what those words are, then wishes he had not wondered. A random crackle from the forest snaps the silence. Eloc is grateful.

The sound echoes again. Eloc looks towards the noise, knowing a deer or some other animal will soon emerge from the barricade of trees and bushes. And after fifteen seconds, one does.

The air from Eloc’s breath sticks to the sides of his throat. His heart accelerates, thudding against the hard surface of his ribs and threatening to splinter them. He thinks he might scream, but nothing comes of it. He remains silent. His chest starts expanding, throbbing up and down with the struggle not unlike that of a dying animal. His eyes are large and wet and feel like they are expanding incessantly. The lines around his mouth deepen. He feels others forming. He expected a reaction such as this to seize him. He also knew he could never have prepared for it. Standing across the pond is the culprit responsible for the noise. Dead leaves crunch beneath her hide-wrapped feet until she comes to a staggering halt. She catches sight of him. Their eyes lock onto each other like magnets, become inseparable. All the weight of twenty empty years is held in the net of that stare. Eloc feels words flying around his skull. He tries to grab ahold of them, fails, and tries again. This time he manages to hold onto and solidify them so that he can hear them rattling in his adrenaline-flooded brain: a person.

What would you do?

The two stand as frozen as the time surrounding them. Eloc wants to take her in, scour every inch of her until he has a perfect recreation of her tucked neatly in the crevices of his mind. But he does not. Cannot. His eyes never leave the snare of her own. He sees that she is dark, but not in the way that he is. The freckles dancing across her nose and all around her eyes seem to say that her skin is not meant to be this tan. She sees that his eyes are a golden brown, much different from the jade green of her own. She thought she might never see a different color again. Hot tears spring onto her lower lid. She holds them back. She is not sure why, for no one has taught her to do so.

How would you feel?

Eloc does not look down at Neville and he does not speak to it but hopes it can hear his thoughts.

I was right. This is amazing.

But that’s not all you feel, is it?

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

But he does know. He feels it surging through his veins and gurgling just beneath the surface of his skin. It swirls with pulsating quickness and with each passing moment, it threatens to consume him. The more he tries to push it away, the quicker is slips into his bloodstream. It trickles into all of him. He feels himself becoming less human.

What does it mean to be human?

He recedes. Devolves. Becomes atavistic. This is all part of that parallel dialogue, the one unspoken but somehow more present than the words that were. He realizes what has been fueling this silent conversation, wishes it were less powerful. He begs the amazement, the wonder, the awe to control him instead. It tries. But it cannot overthrow it. The fear is too immense.

She’s going to move, Eloc.

He watches. Just as Neville said, she takes a shaky step forward.

No, no, no, no, NO! Don’t do that! I want to like you but you can’t scare me! You’ll ruin everything!

She takes another, her eyes still suctioned onto his own. This time, he replicates the movement in the opposite direction. She notices this and stops her progression, tries to undo what she has done. It is too late. Eloc stumbles backwards, nearly tripping over nothing as his heel kicks into the dark soil. Eloc thinks his fear has swelled into an ugly, stinking cloud. With each movement, the aroma grows thicker. She must smell it too, for she begins to track backwards as well. She does fall, sprawling onto to the pile of rotting vegetation. Her back touches the ground for only a moment before she springs back up. This time, she is facing away from Eloc. She is sprinting.

Eloc wants to scream at her, beg her to come back. He wants her to run towards him and extinguish the dread stinging his insides. He wants her to hold him and hold her back, to know what it feels like to feel another person’s skin pressed against his own. He wants to show her around the town and read her books and ask her where she has been all this time. He wants to watch her open cans and eat chips and try soda for the first time. He wants to speak to her and learn to love her, learn what love is in the first place. He just wants her to be there. He wants to scream and beg her to come back.

But instead, he runs in the opposite direction, back towards the town and away from her. Tears stream down his face and soak into his skin. He runs, never turning back, never seeing her again. He leaves Neville. It smiles up at the sky as his footsteps grow fainter and fainter.

That’s not all you feel, is it?