Chapter 7

  More driving, more nothing. I had no idea how long I'd been on this road for. It seemed endless. I checked the time. 7:40 P.M. That made sense; the sky was a dark blue, not quite the pitch darkness of night but without the powerful rays of the sun. Still, I wasn’t sure where those in-between hours went. I glanced over at Isobel: she gazed into the surrounding trees and the now more common buildings that passed us by, not looking particularly interested in anything, but having her eyes open nonetheless. She turned to look forward. For a second I wondered if she was bothered by the lack of a sun visor; I had to take that out some years ago when it began to constantly drop from its resting point and make a terrible creaking noise as it swung dangling downwards from its old hinges (which still remain there as a reminder). But this was obviously not the case, since there were no bright lights to block out.

  “So, what are we gonna do?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, what are we gonna do when we get to his house? Because so far, all you've talked about was beating him up, and I don't even know where I'm supposed to begin. None of it makes any sense. We don't have anything.”

  “We can try to think about that as we get there.”

  “Lewis, we've been on the road for at least 6 hours, and all we've done is drive a little bit, get out, and get back in. Nothing is happening! This is a loop we are in! How do we get past?!”

  I thought for a moment. I thought about the fact that I really hadn’t thought about any of this. I tried to think of a plan, but the truth is I am not a very assertive person, and dealing with conflict is something I almost always explicitly avoid.

  “I think we can, um. Break in, and deal with him, somehow.”

  “I know this. We’ve known this. How are we going to do that? Neither of us are skilled in combat or anything like that, so I want to know how you think we’re going to do that.”

  “Listen, he’s old, right? He’s probably dying already.”

  “But he isn't dead. I know things about him that you seem somehow unaware of. I want to know… who do you think he is?”

  “Listen, all I know is that he's a criminal, and that he’s out there in the world taking things. I have good reason to believe he has stolen what is rightfully mine. This morning, there was no milk in my fridge. I have never forgotten to buy milk, not once in my life. He had to have stolen it.”

  “Okay. He stole your milk. I will not even consider deliberating on whether or not this is possible. It doesn't matter. He has done more than this. Much more. I hate to talk about these things, but I don't see how else to get my point across.”

  Isobel sighed and put her face in one of her hands. This continued for a few seconds, maybe half a minute, before she suddenly clasped her hands together and proceeded to roll down the window. She took out another cigarette and lit it with a lighter adorned with several Lisa Frank stickers.

  “Okay. Okay. I don't know where to begin with this story. I don't tell it very often. It's long and confusing and unpleasant. I guess it can begin when I left my parents’ home the day after my 18th birthday. I decided I was through with everything I had seen in my hometown, so I just got in my car and went as far as I could possibly go. I only packed a single backpack, since I didn’t particularly care for many of my physical possessions. I took as many clothes as I could fit, all the money I had saved at my shitty job, and my phone. To be honest, I didn't really expect my plan to work, but I guess it did. By midnight, I was too tired to drive, and so I just pulled into some parking lot and slept in my car. For a few days I did this, just driving and getting gas when I needed to. Eventually, I ended up in a little town in Wisconsin where I liked the look of things enough to stay for a while. It was so much colder than it was back in Arizona, so I ended up having to buy a lot of new clothes. The thrift store employees knew me well, haha.”

  She paused, then took a long drag of her cigarette.

  “It was nice. I worked in a library and I was able to rent a little cabin in the trees. The smallest kind of life you could imagine. But something began soon after. I had a particularly troubling dream about a year later. I remember there was a man I did not know inside of my house. I recognized his face; he had appeared in several of my dreams before. This was the first time he spoke. He said to me, ‘Be careful around those with the wrong blood. There are people you cannot trust.’ I woke up immediately. I began to view my surroundings in an entirely new context. I started noticing these green stains everywhere I went, which almost looked deliberately placed. To put it lightly, I started to freak out. I began to isolate myself more and more until one night, I just left. Got in my car and started driving again. The whole world felt hostile to me and I wanted to escape. But there was nowhere for me to go. I had the worst hallucinations of my life. Everything was blood, green, horrible. My memories aren’t as clear here, but I know that I never really stayed in one place. Virginia, Delaware, California, Washington, even Ontario at one point. Life was fleeting, and I was running through all that I had. Slowly but surely, I disconnected from the outside world. This is where he entered. The internet was his medium. Nowhere was a safe place. It felt like he extended a terrible hand out from cyberspace to strangle me. Sometimes it still feels that way, but I’ve been gaining confidence. I have a solid place to live now, and things that I care about. His grip on me is loosening. But we still need to do this. For the good of everything. That’s all I’ll say for now.”

  My grip on the steering wheel had enough force to kill something. How could something like this happen? How could a person have the capability to act this way?

  “Isobel, I… That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Really, it’s okay. I’m fine. More than fine. Great, actually. Better than ever. Perfect. A-oh-fucking-kay. Stop the car.”

  I pulled over pretty much immediately into a convenient clearing on the side of the road. I looked over at Isobel; she was trembling badly.

  “I t-thought I was okay. I thought I could be b-brave. Guess not… I hate this.”

  Instinctively, I reached out to Isobel, to hold her hand, to hug her, something like that, but she drew back in a way that made me feel even worse. She got out of her side of the car, and beckoned me to follow her.

  “Sorry, I… I just can’t handle the closeness like that, right now. Please don’t take it in an insulting way. Please. I like you.”

  “It’s okay, Isobel! I don’t hate you, or anything like that! I understand!”

  “You don’t, but that’s okay. I’m going to go get something. Stay here.”

  She walked towards the trees, face to the ground. I wanted to follow her, but I didn’t want to make her any more upset than she already was. I just kind of looked around at the clearing. I had no idea why it was here until I saw the 4 large rectangular imprints, indicating a building was once here. It reminded me of what happened to my childhood home. Until I was about 15 years old, me and my mom lived in this quaint little house on a street lined by what had to be dozens of houses of an identical make. Every wall in our house was filled from floor to ceiling with trinkets and memorabilia that my mother loved to collect. From the outside it would seem like hoarding, but from what I knew, every last object had a meaning to her. It was beautiful. Our house was nice; maybe it was a bit small, but we didn't really need more. One day, I woke up to discover a huge pile of boxes in the living room. I saw, for the first time in my life, that the walls were completely empty. My mom told me that she had landed a new job in an accounting firm, but we would have to move for her to work there. I was something close to devastated, but at the same time, I was proud that my mother was advancing in the world, so I didn't complain a single bit to her. Still, my mom, with her magical insight, knew that I was deeply upset, and reassured me that everything would be okay, that "Everything is going to be the exact same as it was." She definitely tried to make this true. The wall decorations were entirely there within a week of us making the move, and more steadily trickled in to fill the more spacious walls of our new house. But of course, with me turning 16 in this wholly new location, then 17, and then 18, she couldn't have been further from the truth. Still, life continued, as it tends to do. Fast forward to my 21st birthday. I am in community college, and my roommate insists on me having a beer they had saved exactly for this occasion. Begrudgingly, I obliged, and took part in the strange societal pastime of making oneself stupid. And so I was newly dumb. After a couple hours of dicking around in the parking lot, my roommate and I decided to take a walk to my childhood home, something which I had been meaning to do for quite a while. It was only about an hour on foot, so we began our trek, cooler of more alcohol held by my roommate's drunken hand. As we passed more landmarks, the old ice cream parlor, the playground where I scraped both my knees after falling from the slide, the library where I grew rapt in dozens upon dozens of books, I grew more and more anxious, more and more eager to see for the first time in years the place I knew as my origin. My legs were just beginning to almost give out when we started to reach the street occupied by my home and its many twins. I got so excited that I started running, yearning to burst through the door and find those lovely rooms the exact same way they used to be. However, this could not happen. At some point between us moving and now, every single house on that street had been demolished. There was nothing there, not even trees, not even grass. It was just dirt. My childhood was dirt.

  “Hey, Lewis.”

  I looked up. Isobel stood in front of me with a huge stick, probably about half her height in length. She wielded it like a baseball bat.

  “Go get some rocks.”

  “What? What are we doing? Why do you have a stick?”

  “I’ll teach you about this. But first, you have to go get some rocks.”

  I was completely bewildered as to the purpose of this endeavor, but I had no reason not to oblige. Looking downwards, a few were at my feet, but I was hesitant to classify them as “rocks;” on my personal mineral sizing scale, from pebble to rock to stone, they were somewhere in-between pebble and rock, but too close to pebble for me to comfortably present them to Isobel. So, I walked towards the trees in search of minerals closer to rock, but not too close to stone. After a small amount of searching, I came across 4 rocks, sufficiently above pebble size and below stone, and took 3 of them, leaving the largest one out of fear it may be just a smidgen too close to stone. It was a bit awkward to bring them to Isobel, as they were quite hefty and unwieldy, but I managed not to drop any.

  “Great. Those will serve you well.”

  “Can I put these down? They're heavy.”

  “Yes, yes, go ahead, put them down next to you. I’ll tell you what this is about. Back when I was in Virginia, during a brief period of lucidity and relative cognitive normalcy, I met someone interesting. He was an older man, probably in his late sixties or early seventies, and he worked at a car dealership. He didn’t sell cars though, he was just a janitor or something. Anyways, somehow, him and I grew kind of close and we started having tea at his place in the evenings. His house wasn’t very big, but his backyard was huge. We would often go out there and do this thing where we’d have someone hold a stick and the other throw rocks. The stick-haver has to try and hit the rocks back toward the rock-thrower with the stick. If the stick breaks, the rock-thrower wins, but if all the rocks make it back to the rock-thrower, the stick-haver wins. He called this game of ours “lithomancy,” but I’m not entirely sure what that word means.”

  “I think I read about that once. I believe it was some medieval religious practice. Nothing like what you’re describing, though.”

  “Huh. That’s odd. He was always kind of an esoteric guy. His living room basically doubled as a library with all the bookshelves he had. He was a wise old man. He died unexpectedly one day, from a heart attack or something like that, and of course that set me back into mental collapse. But now, looking back at it, it's just sad.”

  She looked down at her stick, seemingly examining its structure. It was almost perfectly straight, and it had 2 small twigs extruding from it, one near the top and one closer to the middle.

  “Well, I've explained enough. Go ahead and pick up your first rock.”

  I looked down at my trio of rocks. I decided to start with the smallest, most pebble-like rock, as I didn't really have any sort of competitive spirit in me at the moment. I just wanted to go along with what Isobel was doing so she would feel better. I threw it firmly towards the stick, in what was probably my first display of athleticism since the 8th grade. Isobel reacted quickly, and the stick stood strong against the rock, knocking it back to my feet. I put it away from the other rocks in order to differentiate them.

  “Nice. One point for me.”

  “Wait, there's points?”

  “No, that was more, like, a figurative thing to say. Lithomancy doesn't have points.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  A few seconds passed, and Isobel kind of vaguely gestured towards my 2 rocks to continue, so I picked up another and threw it in the same way towards her stick. I won't lie and say it isn't embarrassing to admit that despite how spent I was by throwing a measly 2 rocks, the stick showed no sign of snapping and again returned the rock to its starting point.

  “I seem to be winning.”

  “Heh, I'm not too surprised. Physical recreation was never really my thing.”

  “Eh, I'm not sure this game is entirely physical strength. A lot of it moreso relies on the durability of the stick you choose or the heft of the rocks you choose. It's in Gaia's hands.”

  “I guess you're right. Maybe this last one will do the trick.”

  I picked up my last rock and threw it just a little harder than the last two, using most of my remaining arm strength. This time, the outcome was different; the rock resisted the force of the stick, and the stick snapped in two, leaving the rock and half of the stick and Isobel’s feet.

  “See. You can never tell how these things are gonna go. I feel a lot better now, even having lost. It's a way to get energies out of your system, especially bad energies.”

  “Yeah, I get that. I'm glad you feel better now, Isobel.”

  “Thank you, Lewis. Really, truly, thank you. You've done nothing but show me unwavering friendship this entire day, and it makes me happier than you could ever imagine. I'm so, so, so glad that you're my friend. We can hug now, if you want.”

  We did as she said, and, with an unspoken yet fully understood level of compassion and warmth, embraced right there on the side of the road. I don't think I've ever felt so immediately close to a person in my life. Isobel was different; I felt she and I were actually similar, something which I almost never observe. I felt so lucky to have a friend as true as her. It felt as though this moment lasted forever, and I wished it could, but eventually, Isobel gently drew away from me with one arm still around me and began to speak.

  “Well, we should probably get going now. So we can absolutely fucking decimate this guy. I think I've devised a simple plan that can get us through this. I, knowing much more about him, somehow, will keep in contact with you via your phone while you're in his house, and tip you off on where to go and what to do. Does that sound good?”

  “Yes, that sounds fine, though I'm a bit nervous about going in there alone. I understand though. I wouldn't want to face him either. But something's still gnawing at me. Why do you keep implying some kind of connection between me and him? What does that mean? You're being strangely coy about it, and I kind of just want you to tell me.”

  “Lewis. You're sure you want me to tell you? Like, absolutely, 100% sure? Right now?”

  “Yes, please, tell me now! The more you act like it's some horrible truth, the more I want to know! Come on, it can't be that bad!”

  Isobel sighed deeply and made a face that I can only describe as anguished.

  “Lewis… I don't know how to tell you this without just saying it. Leopold is your dad.”

  “Leopold? Who's Leopold?

  “Leopold… the guy we've both been talking about this whole time?”

  “Oh, yeah, Leopold. Sorry, forgot. And he's my…”

  “Your dad. Sorry.”

  I kind of just stood there, not knowing how the world could possibly go on. I felt like everything was just going to stop here and fall apart. Every cell that made up my body wanted to separate. Every atom that made up those cells wanted to fission. Every quark that made up those atoms wanted to split. Everything was a stupid, stupid joke, and I was a stupid punchline waiting to get used up and dissolved into the echoes of nothingness. Fuck this. Fuck everything. Fuck me. If it's the last thing I do, I will burn that old fuck to the ground.