Dead
Chapter 1
My name is Ward Hopkins, and some of this happened to me. I was present, and the events moved the air in front of my face like a flock of birds taking chaotic flight. Had I done differently, things might have turned out otherwise. Better. Worse. I don't know. I choose to believe in free will — at least, I think this is a choice that I make — but also that the loci of our movements are constrained: that we have pre-ordained arcs within the chaos of life's endless flight, and that invisible forces are manifest in our paths. We all run, we all hide, we lie awake in the night, flustered and confused, made small by the shadows in our lives.
Time is a lake, getting deeper year by year, drop by drop. Surface tension, the electric presence of our staccato acts, keeps us scuttling like water bugs on its surface, unmindful of the depths we traverse. We're safe, afloat in the now, until we stop moving and begin to sink into the past. Only then do we realize how important all those yesterdays were, how they hold each present moment to the sun; and how many people we leave behind, stricken in time like ambered insects. We think that it matters in the meantime, which route we take across the surface. We trace our complex patterns, and watch those of people who walk close by, seldom raising our eyes above the horizon or squatting to examine the path. But trees which overhang the edges of the lake will sometimes drop leaves into the water, causing ripples which we experience without understanding. Rain falls, too, from the future, sometimes heavily.
Time really does pass. Once in a great while, however, something will stir deep down beneath the surface of the lake, a thing that is long gone in time and yet still alive. This creates a deep, roiling wave, a cold current which affects everyone who lives on the surface, pushing some of us together, others further apart. Most ride the wave; some are engulfed; few realize that anything has happened at all. The creatures that live below us are rarely sensed, trapped deep in the occluded past.
Sometimes they do not merely stir, however, but rocket upwards to break the surface. They disturb us in the night like the shrieking whistle of a runaway train: a train bound across dark hills for somewhere you will never see, though the whole world may hear the crash of it reaching its destination.
Some of this happened to me, but not all of it.
I'll tell you what we know.
===OO=OOO=OO===
The first email had come a few days before summer ended. Nina and I had spent the afternoon in Sheffer, the nearest shopping opportunity to where we were living. A very small town in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, Sheffer has a main drag of wood-fronted buildings divided by five cross streets which fade into fir trees without much ceremony or regret. The town has a market and a cafe that serves good food, as well as selling second-hand books and CDs and curios of no value whatsoever. There is a pharmacy, a sundries-and-liquor store and a place for ladies to get their hair cut the way they did when Jimmy Carter was president. The town is home to a couple of upmarket bed and breakfasts and three bars, with a motel conveniently just up the road in case you lose track of the time or drink a little too much to drive home. In our case, both had been known. There is a small railroad museum, a police station run by a good man, and that's pretty much it. It's a decent place, and some nice people live there, but it's little more than a wide spot in the road.
Our temporary residence was smaller still, a log cabin that had once been part of an old-fashioned resort down on the Oregon coast. At the end of the 1990s a retired couple from Portland bought three of these cabins, moved them up on the backs of trucks, and installed them on a forty-acre lot at the end of a failed subdivision in the forest thirty minutes north-east of Sheffer. The husband had died soon after but Patrice was still going
Chapter 1
My name is Ward Hopkins, and some of this happened to me. I was present, and the events moved the air in front of my face like a flock of birds taking chaotic flight. Had I done differently, things might have turned out otherwise. Better. Worse. I don't know. I choose to believe in free will — at least, I think this is a choice that I make — but also that the loci of our movements are constrained: that we have pre-ordained arcs within the chaos of life's endless flight, and that invisible forces are manifest in our paths. We all run, we all hide, we lie awake in the night, flustered and confused, made small by the shadows in our lives.
Time is a lake, getting deeper year by year, drop by drop. Surface tension, the electric presence of our staccato acts, keeps us scuttling like water bugs on its surface, unmindful of the depths we traverse. We're safe, afloat in the now, until we stop moving and begin to sink into the past. Only then do we realize how important all those yesterdays were, how they hold each present moment to the sun; and how many people we leave behind, stricken in time like ambered insects. We think that it matters in the meantime, which route we take across the surface. We trace our complex patterns, and watch those of people who walk close by, seldom raising our eyes above the horizon or squatting to examine the path. But trees which overhang the edges of the lake will sometimes drop leaves into the water, causing ripples which we experience without understanding. Rain falls, too, from the future, sometimes heavily.
Time really does pass. Once in a great while, however, something will stir deep down beneath the surface of the lake, a thing that is long gone in time and yet still alive. This creates a deep, roiling wave, a cold current which affects everyone who lives on the surface, pushing some of us together, others further apart. Most ride the wave; some are engulfed; few realize that anything has happened at all. The creatures that live below us are rarely sensed, trapped deep in the occluded past.
Sometimes they do not merely stir, however, but rocket upwards to break the surface. They disturb us in the night like the shrieking whistle of a runaway train: a train bound across dark hills for somewhere you will never see, though the whole world may hear the crash of it reaching its destination.
Some of this happened to me, but not all of it.
I'll tell you what we know.
===OO=OOO=OO===
The first email had come a few days before summer ended. Nina and I had spent the afternoon in Sheffer, the nearest shopping opportunity to where we were living. A very small town in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, Sheffer has a main drag of wood-fronted buildings divided by five cross streets which fade into fir trees without much ceremony or regret. The town has a market and a cafe that serves good food, as well as selling second-hand books and CDs and curios of no value whatsoever. There is a pharmacy, a sundries-and-liquor store and a place for ladies to get their hair cut the way they did when Jimmy Carter was president. The town is home to a couple of upmarket bed and breakfasts and three bars, with a motel conveniently just up the road in case you lose track of the time or drink a little too much to drive home. In our case, both had been known. There is a small railroad museum, a police station run by a good man, and that's pretty much it. It's a decent place, and some nice people live there, but it's little more than a wide spot in the road.
Our temporary residence was smaller still, a log cabin that had once been part of an old-fashioned resort down on the Oregon coast. At the end of the 1990s a retired couple from Portland bought three of these cabins, moved them up on the backs of trucks, and installed them on a forty-acre lot at the end of a failed subdivision in the forest thirty minutes north-east of Sheffer. The husband had died soon after but Patrice was still going
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