In Springdale Town Read online

  This empty room was odd though–someone, at least the teacher, should have arrived by now. He rose and walked into the closet-like office, then to the couch, where he sat reading a brochure for a weekend seminar with a visiting yogi. A few minutes later, he slipped his socks and shoes on and left. Across the parking lot, in the food co-op, he bought an avocado, some lemons, and a bag of organic potato chips. Aside from the young woman at the cash register and a man putting out produce, the store was empty.

  He deposited the groceries in the trunk of his car and walked toward Main Street; while crossing the street in front of The Cook’s House (a store selling upscale kitchen items), he decided to go to the Springdale Library.

  The library occupied an attractive 1920s-era brick building with wood floors and high ceilings. Several afternoons a week, Shelling would come here to sit in the magazine section and look through various newspapers. On this visit, he paused in the foyer to look at a poster advertising the performance of three short Samuel Beckett plays at the college. He had never read or performed any Beckett. Off to his left stood a table of new books; straight through led to the fiction, he knew that...but where was the drama section? He thought to ask if the library had the featured Beckett plays.

  Besides programs at the college, there were a few theater groups in town. Funny, his discontent with television had colored his entire view of drama. But why not enter the theatrical life here? Though he was hesitant to reveal his past, or rely on his background to secure parts in local productions, it was ridiculous to turn away from acting altogether. Perhaps instead of acting, here in Springdale he would direct plays, explore a more artistic vision, divorced from the business that had involved him for so long.

  Finding no one at the front desk, he rummaged through the new books, picking up one with a painting of a sailing ship on its cover. He flipped through the pages, then stopped. The text was not English. It so closely resembled English that at first he thought his eyes had blurred, mixing the words into random configurations. He picked up another book, and it was the same, words in a sort of near-English gibberish: “Leth free, tor mousled, ol shan vetchy,” read the line at the top of one page, opposite a strange drawing of young women and people-sized cats wearing clothes.

  Shelling looked around for another library patron or employee, but found no one. At the circulation desk, he called out: “Is anyone here?” The ceiling, distant and white, mocked him. He found he couldn’t breathe, could not force air in through the knotted thing his windpipe had become. A sudden wave of heat engulfed him, a magnified exhalation, as though he had entered the exhaust vent of an immense furnace.

  4

  I had just entered my room with the daisy-print wallpaper and started travel ritual number one{note 5} when someone banged on my door. Not wanting to talk to anyone, I ignored the knock. If the hotel needed me, they could shove a note under the door. The knocking changed to pounding, a rhythmic thud, like some overworked drum circle reject. My irritation magnified with each drum beat. “Okay, I’m coming,” I said. I turned the knob, preparing an irate statement, but smiled when I saw Michael.

  “Took you long enough,” he said, pushing past me, followed by two men and a woman, all of whom I thought I recognized from around town. “Train ride okay? Should’ve let me know what time so I could meet you.”

  “I figured you would be pretty busy with the wedding.”

  “Well, we’re out to have some fun. Not exactly a bachelor party. Drinks with some guys. And not even all guys.” He pointed to the woman.

  “I’m Sherrie–you handled my divorce,” she said.

  I nodded, although I didn’t remember her. “I have to phone my office,” I said, lying. “Then go over some notes on a case. I’ll meet you later.”

  “Too much work,” Michael said. “That’s not the Patrick Travis I remember.” They left. I waited half an hour, then went out to eat mall food, one of those stupid chain restaurants that make you feel as if you haven’t traveled. Springdale has excellent dining, but that was enough reunions for the day. I drifted around the shopping mall till closing. The anonymity of the place comforted me.

  5

  Swells of oceanographic angst buffeted Shelling. A profusion of discolored velvety fur–pelts of beaver or raccoon–lined the street, softened his fall. Shelling had a beaver dam on his property, and he liked to sit near it, under the trees, losing himself in the sounds of his land. He planned to move a picnic table out there, though he worried it might disturb the animals. But why was he lying in the grass outside the library? Shelling jumped to his feet, and hurried down Main Street.

  Half a block from the library, he stopped, unable to recall the source of his agitation. That’s what happens when you miss your yoga class, he thought. He would have appreciated an explanation for the cancellation. With his unstructured life, disruptions like this left him dangling. If not for the discipline of yoga, his transition to life in this small town would have been difficult; the practice relaxed and invigorated him, opened him to new experiences. Living in the Los Angeles area for so long, he had grown contemptuous of other places in the country, of small towns, of any place lacking big-city sophistication.

  As he walked, he glanced into the windows of several stores, seeing a clerk behind the counter in some, and in others, no one. Not just the yoga center then; the town appeared to be shorn of people, residents and visitors alike.

  He entered Frisell’s Coffee Roasters, pausing in the doorway, as had become his habit, to allow the fertile aroma of the roast to permeate his lungs. Two young women sat on stools behind the counter. They were laughing; as he drew near, he heard the one at the cash register mention elephants, or maybe cellophane. The other laughed harder, gasping, sucking air through the laughs. She hunched forward, cupping her reddening face with both hands. Silver rings decorated most of her fingers. Shelling recognized one with a raised zigzag design on a dark background, from the jewelry store across the street. He had spent parts of two afternoons there, trying on rings, assisted once by a bland-faced woman and the other time by a well-manicured bald man, neither of whom gave any indication of interest in talking to Shelling beyond the requirements of their job.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked. Neither woman responded. The young woman at the cash register asked the other to start a pot of decaf. Shelling ordered a cappuccino and waited while the ring woman prepared it. The cash register woman held out a hand for money. A tattoo of a dark bird, wings outstretched, decorated the underside of her wrist. Shelling wanted to join their discussion, but saw no way to breach the wall. He opened his mouth, preparing to tell the young woman that he admired her tattoo; instead, he carried his mug to a table and looked out the window at the empty sidewalk. The two women continued their conversation as though Shelling didn’t exist.

  “There’s an archival method, Albania or someplace,” one of them said. “They use numbered index cards to keep track of the tides.”

  “Are they suspended by fishing line, like in Greece?”

  ~

  This emptiness, it haunted him: empty cafes, empty theaters, stores. No cars passed through. Shelling drove around town, searching, up Main Street and into the neighborhoods, but saw no one other than the waiters, waitresses, ticket sellers, fishmongers, and shopkeepers at their respective stations.

  He pulled his car into the parking lot of The Crow Bar, a brew-pub occupying an old mill on the north edge of town that could easily absorb the ski season crowds and the summertime hikers. This evening, neither were in evidence, though he did find the bartender and two others, a man and woman.

  Shelling felt a smile growing but shut it down. It would not do to appear too eager. He would order a drink, wait for conversation to happen. The dark ale reminded him of winters spent in the mountains, in lodges surrounded by friends and strangers, all laughing and talking. Where were these people now?

  The man at the bar spoke to the woman. Shelling couldn’t place the extended syllables of his accent. “A m
an dressed all in black enters a white room. The only sound is the air conditioner, blowing through a vent in the ceiling.” The man stopped and drank the last third of his pint. He motioned to the bartender for another. His hands were wide, with sausage-like fingers.

  “How large is the vent?” The woman’s voice sounded husky, as though from smoking, but Shelling saw no ashtrays near the couple. Her accent didn’t match the man’s.

  “Doesn’t matter. Just a vent blowing air.” The bartender set a full glass down on a coaster; the man wrapped his thick fingers around it and lifted it to his lips to drink before continuing his story: “So, here’s this man, dressed all in black in a white room. The room is rectangular, maybe four times deeper than it is wide. It’s cold. The blowing air pushes against his hair. He takes out a black knit cap, the kind that covers his whole head except for the eyes and mouth. But he doesn’t put it on. He’s waiting for something, or someone.”

  The man tipped his glass and drank, finishing the beer in one deep swallow. He nodded to the woman, who picked up her purse and stood.

  “What’s he waiting for?” Shelling asked, but they left without answering.

  Shelling sat for a while, drinking his beer in small, brief sips and idly taking pretzel sticks from a bowl. The bartender moved off to shelve a rack of clean glasses.

  When he first stopped here, on his cross-country drive, the streets had been crowded with cars, pedestrians. Or had they? It was as though he carried competing memories–a town alive with human contact, and this, the emptiness.

  6

  In the morning I dressed and drove to town for the wedding. Michael and Dee had decided to hold it in a mansion owned by one of her relatives. The place was a wreck–hadn’t been lived in for years–wallpaper peeling, dank corridors leading off into uninhabitable wings, but it had this amazing ballroom, gilt molding, parquet floor, and a ceiling painted all in cherubs and naked nymphs. I stood in the back, apart from everyone. What a fucking waste, all this. Within a couple of years, either Michael or Dee–didn’t matter which–would do something stupid, some fling with a co-worker or whatever, and that would be the end. People are predictable. Everybody starts out with the same well-meaning platitudes.

  The woman who had stopped by my room last night with Michael and the others sat beside me. “Sorry you didn’t make it out to the bar,” she said. “It was a good time. Some of Michael’s former students–I think they had all just turned twenty-one recently and were feeling way proud of it–showed up, and we had them going with stories about Michael’s wild days in the merchant marines.” She waved to some people standing near the door. They came over and sat in the remaining three seats of the row. The woman introduced them to me, but then the music started, freeing me from conversational obligations.

  Dee and Michael appeared from opposite ends of the room, all smiley, and their smiles shamed me. I tried to feel better, or at least to hide my cynicism with an outward shine. Hard enough for them without all my negativity coming at them. And they looked great. Dee had bought some vintage wedding dress and shortened it to just below the knees. Michael was wearing a pink ruffled shirt and dark pants.

  After the wedding, a civil ceremony with cosmic overtones, we relocated outside for the reception. The garden was mostly overgrown brambly things, but they had cleared enough space for tables and chairs. I went through the hand-shaking line, then sat alone beside a ragged shrub with purple flowers. Late May here was always perfect. I had forgotten. Michael owned a canoe, and after his classes were over, we would take it out on the river. I had always assumed that after putting away enough money from my law practice I would buy a canoe and a riverfront house. Okay, I could still do it, just not here, not in the way I had pictured things back then.

  At least Caroline wasn’t at the wedding. Turned out she and Dr. Wonderful had gone to Spain for a month. From my spot by the shrub, I saw a familiar-looking woman talking to Caroline’s best friend, that romance writer Skippy Brisbane. I definitely wanted to avoid Brisbane. That other woman smiled a lot when she talked, which looked odd next to Brisbane’s sour face. Smiley woman was wearing a flowered tank dress that showed a lot of leg. Maybe I had met her once. Maybe she hadn’t been wearing glasses then, or her hair had been long.

  Several guys I used to play softball with came over, blocking my view of smiley woman. We exchanged small talk; I told them about lawyering and stuff in the city.

  Then this man showed up, waving his hands in the air and screaming something about broken hearts. He said if the wedding wasn’t stopped, he would “do something.” He never said what he would do, just kept repeating the line. A woman standing near him said the wedding had already happened, and he grabbed her shoulders and shook her. That’s when that fat cop I had nicknamed Scooter intervened. He pulled the man away and escorted him from the party.

  Now I was feeling guilty for all that negativity I had radiated earlier, thinking I had somehow caused this. One of the softball guys said the screaming man had been Dee’s boyfriend before she met Michael. Someone else said they had been engaged. I had wanted to hide, alone, by my flowering shrub, but for some reason more people joined the group around me. When I saw Brisbane and smiley woman moving my way, I slipped out.

  7

  Perhaps the emptiness had been forced on Shelling to balance his past. In his previous life on television, solitude had never been a factor. Even when a network cancelled a show, he found more work quickly; when a relationship ended, another started soon after. All of that seemed so far away now, relics. He wondered what some of those people he had known were doing. Though he owned a television, he hadn’t turned it on since receiving his belongings from California.

  Saturday morning passed without the situation changing. Shelling sat with his tape recorder as usual, though he thought he spoke with more determination and insight. “In the continuum of solitude, all beings are supreme,” he said, then talked for a while about the consequences and benefits of geographic relocation. The recorder had a voice-activation feature; he clipped the unit to the waistband of his pants and moved out into the yard, where, with an unthinking determination, he dug out a broad swath of turf and turned the soil in preparation for sowing. He forgot to talk into the recorder until he had finished digging, then spoke of the seeds he planned to buy, the vegetables he would plant. And with his garden in mind, he drove into town.

  Downtown Springdale consisted of Highway 7 (which, as it cut through the town, became Main Street) and the intersecting blocks between Hill Street and the turnoff where Highway 7 veered right to merge with Highway 23 and cross the river. Hill and Knight Streets ran perpendicular to Main. Various stores, offices, and restaurants lined Springdale’s streets. Shelling had visited them all. The used bookstore and the Japanese restaurant were on Knight. One of the two movie houses was on Hill, occupying a former vaudeville theater. A new complex, built in a space behind the buildings on the west side of Main Street, housed the other theater. Though new, it had been designed in scale and style to blend with the surrounding buildings.

  Shelling left his car near the newer movie house. On reaching the used book store, he allowed himself to be sidetracked from his goal of the garden shop. Entering, he had an odd twist in his stomach, apprehension, he thought, though of what? He laughed–nothing in a book store could hurt him.

  The woman who ran the shop came out from the back, passing him without a greeting. Shelling roamed the store, flipping pages and looking at pictures in a few cookbooks, but none drew him. In the fiction section, a book protruded from a shelf; he reached for it, Dead Language, stories by Samantha Hidalgo. He had heard the name somewhere. The dust jacket photo showed a woman with short dark hair and squarish glasses. “A linguistic and phantasmagoric tour-de-force,” the blurb said. He opened the book at random and read the beginning of a story.{note 6}

  Shelling paid for the book and left the store. Back at his car, he opened the passenger-side door and dropped the book on the seat. There he lingere
d, not ready to return to his empty house. Across the parking lot, the movie marquee beckoned. Shelling didn’t like going to movies alone, feeling exposed and self conscious, judged for his inability to find a companion, but Springdale gave him little choice.

  The ticket booth was on the inside, to the left of the entrance. Shelling found it untenanted. A film called The Painting of Kathleen Alice May would be starting soon.

  The theater smelled of corn syrup and stale popcorn.{note 7} Shelling walked toward the back, passing where the ticket-taker commonly stood. Ahead, the hallway stretched. No one came to challenge him. Continuing, he found the air began to thicken, first around his toes and rising, assuming the consistency of a thin oatmeal porridge, and it resisted his forward progress, pushing on his thighs and sucking at the soles of his shoes. Thick air oozed and flexed to hinder his entry. Perhaps a security measure initiated because of the lack of present employees?

  As the air thickened, it also darkened. Shelling looked over his shoulder at the line of fluorescent light fixtures, bright where he entered, fading here. A glow framed a doorway to his right, from behind which came the sounds of a movie playing, but in the dark of the hall, Shelling couldn’t read the sign showing the name of the film.

  He traveled on, immersing himself in the shape of the hallway, more a shadow of a hall than an actual one, a shadow that clung to him, and he found himself embracing it, willing it closer, wearing it as a cloak. Even as the last, scattered elements of light skittered away, across the blackened carpet, still he continued. His eyes adjusted to the dark, seeing it as a blackness that shaped the world into figures, into objects of startling unfamiliarity, and in them he found comfort.