A two-piece short I wrote (and never finished) for a college class centered around developing character. This is a character that seems to pop in and out of my writing. I'm sure I haven't seen the last of her.
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It was always quiet in Clarksville, New Hampshire inside that shallow pocket of time between fall and winter, where the novelty of windswept colors and foliage wore off, even for the tourists, and the heavy hand of isolation seemed to come down on all their shoulders. It was as if they depended on that crude reminder the promise of winter brought them each and every year – that series of days where the alpine tumors of rock and forest were drained of their color, and mutated into a sort of film-noir barricade between them and some fleeting idea of a life everlasting.
It was in the span of these few weeks, as the few remaining visitors were hollowed out of the spaces between the tiring mountains, that a pervasive silence fell over the ridges as they cast off that spirited autumn coat, one depthless layer at a time. And with the well-mannered voices of the horde finally muted and put to rest, the residents of Clarksville – and the surrounding towns – fell back into a pleasant lull of their own, content in their isolation, and with the familiarity in the stillness.
But there was no way that they knew of to ignore the cold, which seemed to move slow and deliberate over the hills, and falling like quick-sand onto the ones who could not bring themselves to leave. Maybe it was the frigid air that kept them there – paralyzed and unwilling to fight their way out. Or possibly it was the crumbling bones of older generations, murmuring as they turned to dust below their feet. But those adults who had stayed in or nearby Clarksville all of their lives had no interest in brooding about why they were there – and even those in the throws of youth, who were mad at the world anyway, seemed to be more invested in negotiating with hormones than trying to plan an escape. But they were all, collectively, a community of fairly friendly and level-headed people. For the most part everyone sort of kept to themselves – there were no booze-empowered racists parading clumsily around the word of God, nor weekly meetings for occults, nor any of those other problems you sometimes hear about in smaller towns. No, these were as normal a crowd as there ever was – and as much as they might rather avoid the coming of a cold you just can’t get used to, most of the residents of Clarksville were relieved to hear that quiet begin to fall upon them.
A steady stream of light issuing through the blinds of Marlene Lampert’s single-windowed motel room kept her from immediately opening her eyes, but a throbbing ache from within her head made her all too aware that she was awake. She groaned, urging her head towards the opposite direction of the window, and a wave of unwashed, amber hair fell across her face. Even in those very first moments after waking, there was a sort of determined coarseness prescribed in her face – something that suggested she knew everything she needed to know about the world, and none of it in her forty-nine years of life impressed her much. There were layers to her, to be sure – but it was clear that no one would ever reach them. From her place in the makeshift shelter from the sun, her expression seemed only to harden as her eyes started to open.
Marlene stared at a wall, listening to the disgruntled breathing of the man sleeping beside her, resenting him – as she usually did when the sun came up. But it was not his snores, nor the intruding sunrise that had woken her, though both were certainly irritating her. She noticed the odor of whiskey, clutching to her body in a stale sweat that told her she had drank far too much of it – but she was no stranger to hangovers, and knew it would take more than a grungy discomfort to wake her. But as she began to adjust to the muted booming in her head, she became aware of the total silence that seemed to envelope the room – the motel – the town – the entire world.
It was a quiet far removed from the simplicity of noise, or any of the physical senses: it was a permeating stillness – a calm that burrowed deeply into things. And in that moment, it felt as if it would never go away. It was not in of itself a force that made her happy, but rather a dynamic with such a deliberate momentum, she could not help but trust it. A part of her was fearful of it – she had long since been convinced that there were no surprises left in this world, and yet here she was, facing the unknown. But every year, as the winter months inched closer towards her town in the mountains, Marlene woke to feeling just as she did now. And something about the quiet that fell made her want to be a part of it. It felt secure to her – it was only ever in these moments that she craved being able to put absolute faith in something other than herself. Only in these moments did she feel herself soften – it felt liberating to finally let something from the outside world, in. She wanted nothing more than for this feeling to last – but no matter how persuasive and substantial this intensity seemed to be, it faded again from the world when the snow began to melt and the ice began to thaw. A violent cough from beside her rent the calm to pieces, and Marlene instantly returned to her place on the edge of a motel mattress – her resentment restored and in full effect.
“Jesus Christ, Ray,” Marlene growled, reaching down with one hand towards a pile of her clothes on the floor, using the other to hold the blanket to her chest. She was squirming away from him, like she always did the morning after. If she hated herself for anything more than regularly ending up with in a motel room with Ray Byrd – it was the way she squirmed away from him, like some panicking animal caught in a hunting-trap who, wounded, finally manages to escape. Ray grumbled something inaudible as he rubbed his bloodshot eyes, groaning in a whine at the light flooding in the cracks in the blinds. After untangling her shirt from the rest of her clothes, Marlene sat bolt upright, and twisted herself into it – lighting up a cigarette before squeezing into a pair of jeans about two sizes big on her. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him launch into a fit of coughing, struggling to sit up.
Ray was the screw-up son of one of the wealthier couples from Clarksville – according to Ray, at one time or another the Byrds had owned everything in town and then some. At some point, they realized there was a pretty penny to be made off the annual procession of foliage-hungry tourists to Clarksville and started using some of that land they had been sitting on. They built a hotel, a handful of Moose-themed restaurants, and a bar – but somewhere down the line, most of those tourists realized there were plenty of towns a lot further south than Clarksville who also had trees. Ray had never shown any promise, other than a few high school football games – and he didn’t show any signs of starting. So Mr. and Mrs. Byrd cut their losses – sold the restaurants and the hotel – and left Ray to manage the bar so that he wouldn’t follow them to Boca Raton. So, there he was: thirty-six, lacking facial hair, – married to some girl who is either too dumb to notice the motel charges on his credit card, or smart enough not to stop him – and managing a bar in the middle of nowhere.
What irritated Marlene the most was the fact that she worked for Ray on occasion. She handled most of the accounting and bookkeeping for the bar – but only when she needed the money. Her dad had left her the cabin free and clear before he went and drowned in Lake Frances – so she didn’t have to work all that much. And when she did, she worked mostly from that run-down cabin of hers because she generally couldn’t stand people – especially Ray. Marlene stomped around the room trying not to look at him, snatching at as many of her belongings as she could before heading straight for the door.
“Where ya going, ‘Lene? I’m ready to go again,” Ray laughed through a wheeze, his baby-face contorted into something Picasso-esque as he suspended his scrawny arms above him in a stretch.
“Go fuck yourself, Ray,” Marlene muttered out of habit, reaching for the doorknob and yanking it open. A solid wall of cold hit her before she had even stepped over the threshold of the door – and if Ray responded with some tawdry jab he had likely rehearsed in the bathroom mirror, Marlene never heard it. She was once more overcome by a momentous quiet that was suspended all across the mountain air. All at once, the world seemed to be a little less disappointing. And as if she was seeing the world for the very first time, she decided that there might be a few more surprises left, after all.
Her rugged 1986 Buick trembled through the heavy cold that still clutched the uneven skin of the mountain town. The lurid reminder left by night, as morning reared up from a place beyond darkness, was not entirely unpleasant – a once lurid coat of red, long since hushed by years of salty gravel and rust, lamented silently beneath a stubborn layer of frost. It was that stretch of morning before daybreak where time shrugged its shoulders, and stirring light glowed with uncertainty – if it weren’t for the determined hands of Marlene’s tarnished wristwatch, clicking convincingly in chronic currency of seconds, she thought the approaching light of day could have just as easily been shrinking back towards the solitary grip of evening. The impatient grumbling from the motor droned in a bizarre, clashing harmony with the silence of the world outside the car, somehow amplifying it. Marlene could not shake that feeling of suspension that sometimes accompanies two extraordinary opposites that inexplicably blend together to form something distinctly unlike either element. It was not an entirely uncomfortable sensation – it seemed to displace her, if only temporarily, from a perspective of the world that was normally quite definite to her. Her ideas about the world were certainly not very optimistic – but she took comfort in convincing herself that she was quite sure about the way she saw things. And yet, if she were to be completely honest with herself, she had to admit that she was sort of fascinated by these marked moments of uncertainty when she entertained the idea that maybe – just maybe – she was wrong about things.
And then, the dreamlike feeling of suspension slipped away from her. And though her callous expression remained cold and unmoving, Marlene returned to her place of tangibility between the mountains with a slight spasm of regret knotted somewhere within her chest – not unlike the moments following a dream, where one tries in vain to remember what it was. She was, once more, conscious of the timeworn Buick and its gargled attempt to cling to life.
A sudden volley of potholes in the road cemented her place back in the physical world, the alarming sound of mechanical failure threatened to overtake the sputtering engine, and a sharp crunching sound cruelly nourished the continued ache in her head.
“Shit,” she barked, instinctively grabbing the weathered leather steering wheel with her second hand. The car coughed dangerously for a few seconds, losing momentum and faintly weakening, before reluctantly mellowing back into its usual, wheezing growl. Marlene squinted, glancing into the rearview mirror just in time to see the rough patch of gravel fading out of view as it melted into the curvature of the road. Silently cursing nothing and no one in particular, her focus returned to the road in front of her. Should have seen that coming, she thought, darkly. And just as quickly as it drifted to sleep, her comfortable contempt for the world – potholes and all – jolted back to life.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, a fragmented memory was urgently trying to work itself to the surface. Many of the roads in Clarksville had been around longer than Marlene had, and the back-roads like this one – rambling confusedly through the few shallow tufts of mountain – had no chance at all of every being replaced. Marlene was again reminded of that feeling following a dream, as it withers away and back to whatever immaterial place it came from. But she knew very well it was not a dream that was floundering dully in the back of her head begging to be noticed – it was something less fragile than that. She was reminded of the countless drives along this road as a little girl – and how that very same bumpy patch of road had meant something very different to her then, as things often do for children. She could remember, in vivid detail, rounding that very same turn with her father, back when the road had meant weekend trips to get ice cream in town during the summer, when the towering mountains briefly let down their obstructing guard long enough to remind the town what it was like to perspire. She remembered how those bends in the road felt with the windows rolled down as far as they would go – sunny blankets of summer’s breath gently whipping her hair about, kindly offering up a seductive aroma of the sugary sweat of maple trees, the welcoming chill of the lake from its place behind the hills, and the lingering medley of aftershave and burnt coffee that always hung on her clothes for hours after her father released her from one of those great, big grizzly bear hugs. That must have been a year or two before her sister, Shannon, was born: before there was ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ and any other way to feel besides a pure, unadulterated thirst for life – a feeling that only survived for Marlene through a few precious memories like this one, which she rarely allowed the chance to reappear.
Marlene’s expression, impassive and illegible until now, suddenly gave the sort of twitch that suggests a person is being gnawed at from the inside by something corrosive and viral. Not the sort of virus that can be transmitted through the air, or the sort that will thrive and culture on a sponge, or a kitchen counter, unnoticed upon such stark faces of routine – but the sort of virus that starts as an idea, and grows with a person over time, like an extra limb or unnecessary body hair. It was not in her nature to recall and contemplate memories of those days, and especially not the ones that were saturated in any one emotion – even if that emotion was a positive one. For Marlene, the only result of mulling over memories was an overwhelming outbreak of context, which she would inevitably be unable to persuade back into dormancy for days, perhaps longer. To consider this or any memory was like being forced to stand facing either side of a window: on one side, an inviting living room, where a cordial warmth radiates cheerfully from the hearth – and on the other, the outside world being bleakly hounded by a wall of heavy rain, opaque and hostile. Recalling the happier moments in her life left her stranded in figurative squall of comparison to her life in the present – while thinking back on those memories that were not very bright at all kept her dry, but leering at the storm that raged eternally on the other side. It was best to stay away from the window entirely, and to retire in a different room within the house, entirely – perhaps the attic, where the door would lock with a satisfying ‘click’, and where there weren’t any windows at all.
The Buick continued on in a slow but determined current, noisily carving through the hulking mountains like a bullet through flesh. Marlene’s grip on the wheel had tightened, but she had slowed the rumbling vehicle down quite a bit without realizing it. At some point during her accidental recollection of those summer drives, Marlene had become overly sensitive to the overpowering depth of the road, and of the wilderness on all sides of it. She knew that she was getting very close to leveling the mental barriers she had methodically built over the years , and panic began to ripple out from the center of her stomach. She tried vaguely to remind herself of the window, and of her favored place within the secure, visibly delineated confines of the attic. But there was something changing about the world around her on level that felt ghostly, as if her hand would pass right through it, even if she were able to figure out what it was. Maybe it was something changing within her – maybe some sequence of code unraveling and caving in upon itself, still undetectable to man even in the age of stem cells and atomic energy. Or maybe something in the world was physically different – Marlene’s eyes darted back and forth over the road, lost in this consideration of the two possibilities, faintly worried that either could occur without her knowing for sure which it was.
As she overtook another expanse of the never-ending road, Marlene’s entire body tensed in fear as she felt familiarity clenching its awful fist once more. There was a procession of trees bizarrely marching up one side of a sloping hill that ran parallel to the road. The trees jutted out, one by one; six in total. They posed in a vertical parody of gravity, surely delighted that they successfully upset the intentional asymmetry of nature. To the casual passerby, it was not a sight that would immediately stand out – but for Marlene, it revived another memory from when she was much younger. She was older than she was in those blissful summer days, for the outings to town – and she was with her father, and a little girl of about five years old. Marlene, in the present, slowed as she passed this hill with the funny little formation of trees – and as she drove past she relived each and every one of the memories that contained the moments in which she began to feel real emotions – feelings far more complex and significant for a person than the primitive simplicity of a child. In a single second, Marlene remembered the first time the seed of resentment gave a lively little shudder within her – as Shannon climbed that same little hill, holding her father’s hand, and Marlene watched from her place at the bottom, thought at the time she felt much farther away. She remembered how she met Fear in the woods behind their cottage, when she realized she was lost and alone. She recalled the first time she had met Grief, standing over her mother’s hospital bed in college – still too young to really understand the finality of death, but old enough to know that she would be seeing it again. But she did not expect to as soon as she did – less than two years later, at the edge of Lake Francis as her father was pulled up from beneath the billowing darkness that tends to follow water that cold all the way to the surface.
For Marlene, this memory was the most vivid – it was the day she became acquainted with Hate, and the day it had showed her how to use him as a safeguard from all the other ways there were to feel that were somehow more painful than watching them coax her daddy’s body out of the lake with a fishing net. They never told her whether or not it was an accident – but Marlene had Hate as her confidant, and Animosity as a weapon, and she did not need a police report to tell her that he had walked out on that ice with no intention at all of ever walking back. It was Shannon that killed him – not the icy chute of lake that he greeted below the lake, through the same mouth that had finally, a day before, given up mouthing Shannon’s name. That was exactly ten years ago – today, Marlene remembered. It was her tenth anniversary with Hate, and they were still going strong.
Marlene knew that was something about the air that day that had left her vulnerable to the way time can sometimes bend and stand still when the past comes back to remind you its still there – reliving those memories made it seem like the aged gravel of that road was placing recurring pieces of itself faster than she could travel over it. But after what seemed like days rather than minutes, the tired Buick and its anxious passenger began to approach that final bend in the road. Relieved at last, she eased her grip on the steering wheel and allowed familiarity to settle over her, quelling the troubled throb of unease in her bones that she had conceived, delivered, and eventually stifled yet again, all within that span of minutes along the road. As the darkly looming figure of Lake Francis slowly reared into view, Marlene pulled over to an unassuming place beside the lake, and looked out across the surface. She thought she heard a voice, barely peaking out through the cold silence that still blanketed Clarksville – and would continue to until the start of spring. Marlene, convinced she could hear something – possibly coming from the lake itself – got out of her old Buick, and stepped towards the lip of the great lake, sorely tempted to step onto the pale layer of ice already working its way across to whatever was there on the other side.