Over There by Benjamin X. Wretlind Part 2
The wagon wheels creaked as they traveled the desert floor. The sun was high and the heat had returned. Harrow saw another white puff of cloud in the distance, a collection of whatever moisture could be pulled out of the arid world around them. In other places, that cloud would likely grow into a storm. Here, it would eventually go away, replaced by yet more blue sky and more heat.
Wendel stirred. He stretched out on the brown wool blankets in the back of the wagon. Harrow heard him and turned to look.
“Where are we?” Wendel asked.
“Told you it had a kick.”
“You weren’t wrong about that, mister. How long have I been asleep?”
“A night and a morning. Any good dreams?”
Wendel took a drink of water out of a tin cup and poured the rest over his head. He mussed up his hair and wiped his face dry with his hands before taking the seat next to Harrow on the jockey bench.
“Think I went back in time,” Wendel said. He looked around before continuing. “Damn desert looks the same as it did yesterday.”
“That’s an illusion. The horizon is always just over there, but the mountains to the left and right have grown larger.”
“Plants ain’t much to look at.”
“No, they ain’t. So tell me. What was this dream you had? I’m always interested in what my customers experience. Makes for good advertising.”
“Just so…odd. There was a little boy, about four or five. Think he was me, but I don’t know. He was playing with some little toy soldiers.”
Harrow reached into a shirt pocket and held out the toy he had taken as payment for the pill. “Like this?”
“Yeah, that’s it. In fact, that’s the same toy the boy in the dream….” Wendel trailed off. Harrow glanced his direction and saw the man’s eyes drift backward into memory, fixed on a moment rather than any object in the present.
“Go on.”
“That’s just it. I don’t think I can. The boy was playing with the toys and there was a stove. I can’t recall what happened. It felt like a memory, though, but some piece of it is missing. What’s in that pill, anyway?”
“A few odds and ends. Magic. Whatever you want to call it.”
The wagon rolled forward for a quiet minute. Clomp, clomp, clomp.
Finally, Wendel spoke up. “You said dreams help heal whatever the past has thrown at you. What did you mean by that?”
“Dreams are many things. They can be memories, the brain working out problems, or just random thoughts laid out in random ways. Things in the past can seem lost sometimes, but they’re nothing but memories we haven’t processed, load-bearing walls in the construct of our house. I think sometimes dreams help us repair that wall if it’s causing us to behave certain ways later in life.”
“If this was a memory, you’d think I’d remember more.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Always thought dreams meant nothing.”
“No.” Harrow chuckled. “They’re something so much more.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it this way. If I gave you a book with a thousand words, you could make up a thousand stories, right?”
“I suppose.”
“But you can’t make up stories that included words that were not in that book. In that way, you’re limited to what you have.”
“I’m not following.”
“Your memories are those words. Your brain won’t make up what it doesn’t know, so there are holes. Those random images are not random, are they? They are the words in that book being shuffled around until they make up a new story. What if we could put those words back in the order they first appeared? What if we could patch the holes by using the words of another man’s book? Another boy’s book?”
“Guess I don’t get it.” Wendel sighed as his leg rhythmically bounced. “Wish I could go back and figure it out.”
Harrow pocketed the little toy and smiled slyly. “You can. For a price, of course.”
###
“I’ll take a shoelace.” Harrow pointed to Wendel’s shoes as the two sat apart from each other around another nightly campfire. “You ain’t got nothing else I need.”
Wendel obliged, removing first a shoe, then pulling its lace through the holes. He passed the lace to Harrow in exchange for another pill.
“We’ll be at Avernus tomorrow, so make this one count.”
Wendel nodded and choked down the pill.
###
There is the boy again and the wooden container with the toys inside on the stove in the living room. The old people are still talking and laughing at whatever it is old people talk and laugh about. They have their backs to the boy and do not see the first signs of pending trouble, do not see the first flame ignite a piece of wood on the side of the bowl, a piece that drops from the bowl onto the floor.
The boy’s eyes are wide as he tries to cover up what he’s done by throwing a nearby cloth over the flaming piece of wood. In his haste, the wooden bowl tips over, spills the contents of the melted toys onto the floor.
The fire spreads. The old people turn to see what the boy has done. Some of them are yelling. All of them are on their feet. One of them pulls the boy back from the stove while another tries to put the fire out by batting it down with a blanket. Rather than go out, the fire grows. A spark catches a curtain. Another catches a throw rug. In seconds, the living room explodes into a firestorm and the boy is pulled farther away by the old person, farther away from the fire, farther away from the experiment that was supposed to end in a rainbow crayon with which he could paint the world. It is gone, like the bowl, the stove, the curtains, replaced by flames, by screams, by shouts of direction and the words of unintelligible panic, by the heat and movement and a dozen different smells vying for attention in the boy’s nose.
The boy is sitting in the grass now. It is wet. He is scared and does not yet know what he has done, what he has wrought upon his mother, his brother, his father, the old people still in the house. He hears glass break and sees flames erupt from a window. The night sky, so often full of stars, is now fading, turning a reddish gray, covered by smoke rising from the house and lit from the fire. The boy fears he is not far enough away. He can feel the heat. He is not far enough from the fire in the house, from the angry old people, the glances in his direction, the people running from the trough in the barn with buckets. He wonders why they don’t use the water from the well, the well Daddy said to never go near, the well his brother said was home to a troll, the well in which he once saw Mommy toss a coin.
His brother. The boy looks around. He cannot see his brother, cannot hear his brother. He does not know if one of the old people grabbed him and pulled him out. He had left the living room to go into the kitchen. Is he still inside? Is he safe? Or did the fire reach him, wrap its devilish fingers of flame around his body, and drag him to the place Mommy said bad people go?
Wendel now recognizes himself. He is standing in the grass off to the side, his uncle’s house engulfed in fire to his right, the boy in front of him. He watches the boy, the boy who is backing up, the boy who does not see how close to the well he is.
The boy who was his brother.
As rapid as the fire had taken over the house, a surge of regret and guilt—pent-up emotion trapped behind bricks built of self-doubt and denial, of projection and displaced anger—bursts through and floods the tangles of Wendel’s mind. He feels his throat constrict even as his eyes grow wider with the realization that it was he who egged his brother on, he who pushed him to place a wooden bowl on a hot stove to make a New Thing, he who was responsible for the fire…he who forgot his brother had died in that well on that night so long ago.
Wendel takes a step toward the boy still backing toward the well. He wants to warn him, to say something to the boy who was his brother, who would still be his brother if things had turned out differently.
He wants to, but he does not.
There is something in the grass the boy left behind, something that blends in with the green but stands out because it wants to stand out, because it needs to be a beacon of light in the flood of emotion that threatens to drown Wendel, a buoy on which to cling.
He reaches down and picks up a toy soldier, the kind that is kneeling, the kind that is aiming a rifle. He tells himself he will hold on to it, that he will cherish it, that he will always remember what he did until the day he dies.
He will make the New Thing for his brother. Maybe then they can forgive him.
Wendel blinks. He is in another field, another time. He is no longer a boy, no longer welcome anywhere. In front of him, there is a house on fire, just like his uncle’s. A woman screams. People frantically try to douse the flames. A woman writhes on the ground. The scent of burning flesh stings his nose, waters his eyes. He grips the toy soldier in his hand, the rifle digging into his palm as he watches the fire create a New Thing in front of him.
Once more he closes his eyes. The screams fade, the smell dissipates. When he opens his eyes again he sees another house, another attempt at creation. But he is too close. The world fades in and out, black and then orange, black and yellow, black and red. He is dizzy. The smoke in his lungs robs him of consciousness.
When he comes to, heat from another fire rushes over him, and he opens his eyes to see.
A larger building in a city. Fire wagons surrounding an inferno, people throwing buckets of water on the flame. He stands across the street and watches, entranced by the flames, comforted by the heat, satisfied with the way the wood pops and crackles and steam trapped inside heats up and bursts. He knows this fire will deconstruct the building, just as it did those crayons, those toys, the other houses, the world. He knows he can finally make the New Thing for his brother. He knows he can paint the sky with magical rainbows, yellows and oranges and reds all rising among the black and brown of smoke.
In his hand, he grips the toy soldier tighter until the rifle snaps off..
###
Harrow backed the wagon up to a precipice. Far below, the rotting bodies of men and women and children clambered over each other, stretched out to find purchase on the vertical sides, to find a way to climb out of the pit. They moaned and cried and wailed and screamed. There was room for a million more and then some. No doubt, as Harrow completed his delivery of this man, he would return to the desert and find another and another. Perhaps they will recall why they were chasing the horizon in the first place, why they wandered in the desert with no destination in mind. Perhaps they won’t need a pill to remember.
It’s a nice thought, but they all need a pill. True sins can leave voids in the brain, empty spaces where memory should be. The pill helps fill in past transgressions with facts from someone else’s point of view.
As the horses pulled the wagon forward and the still sleeping body of Wendel tumbled out of the bed and into the pit, Harrow reached into his pocket and took out the little toy soldier. He regarded it for a moment, turned it in his fingers, then tossed it to land among the detritus of a million other payments made for a chance to learn the truth, a million other reminders of the wages of sin, the price of guilt.
The End