The Universe in Miniature in Miniature Read online

“Run,” I said.

  He was staring at the ground, at one of the two men.

  “Run, moron.”

  He shook his head no, his eyes wide. He opened his mouth while his head was still shaking, and for some reason I thought that I couldn’t bear to hear him speak, I didn’t want to hear anything about his interpretation of what had just happened, because it would not be properly grown up and subtle. I didn’t want to hear a sound from him. I didn’t want anything about him to be there, as he had seen what I’d done, and what I’d felt nothing about.

  Inside the station I found some empty gas cans and brought them out and filled them up. There was just enough room to fit them into the back, but I had to arrange a few things. Then I went back in again, just to see what else there was that we could fit. I thought for a second about having Sara drive one of their trucks and filling the whole thing up. But that would take too long. It would also make us like them.

  We had to leave. There was no one else here, but there probably would be, soon. The lights attracted us, like we were moths. It was obvious now what had happened to all the owners of the other cars I’d seen parked in the side lot, and I had no interest in happening upon their graves.

  It was just as I was going out the door that I saw the meth on the countertop, beside the cash register.

  There were six or seven miniature baggies, all lined up in a row, and inside each of them a good, solid diamond-chunk.

  I recognized it from the one time I had done it in Grayson, when I’d first come back to the Midwest. I’d met an old friend and we’d gone to the playground at the same elementary school we’d attended twenty years before. He had gotten into ATV sales or something. I’d spent a lot of time having fourth-grade memories come into my head, not really knowing whether they were real or whether I was making them up—they’d been too pleasant, in a way, and didn’t fit into my haunted, dark-enchanted-forest sense of childhood. The kind where the trees eat little boys. He’d asked me why I came back, and I said, “It was so lonely out there,” which had felt basically true, and then we’d smoked the meth.

  I stuffed all of the baggies into my pockets. It was just something else that we probably needed.

  “Please tell me something,” Sara said in a tiny, meek, almost inaudible voice after I’d started up the car again and we were on our way. “Tell me that boy—I mean I know what those men probably tried to do, I understand that—but Joe? But that boy? Please tell me that he ran away from you, but straight back, directly away from the truck. That’s why I didn’t see him. Right?”

  “Right,” I said. “I told him to run and he ran.”

  “Who did you shoot twice, then?” she asked.

  “The fat one,” I said.

  It took us another two hours to get up into the mountains. For a half-hour I played with the radio, and high on the AM band I found somebody broadcasting, just a lone tinny voice talking about everything that he’d heard. He apologized for not having any music to play, but he figured that information was more important. He was in Indiana, he said. He said that as far as he knew, everyone in the southern half of Africa was dead. He said that in Indiana, there were tornadoes, larger than he’d ever seen, except that it was snowing, too, so ice crystals were flying through the air like shrapnel, moving so fast they were breaking through the walls of houses. Then he started talking about why he thought it was happening. Basically: God decided to be done with us. He had all these explanations.

  “Turn it off, please,” Sara said. “I don’t want to hear his theories.”

  I thought of bringing up my optimistic thoughts about it starting again. Instead I reached for the radio and clicked it off. I think we both understood that it was probably now going to be a long winter, perhaps a forever winter, and that it would be dark, and that there was no reason to think that it would ever get light again. What had the preacher said? That it didn’t matter. “It ain’t like it matters much, one way or the other.”

  To me, either way, it still felt like it mattered.

  Three weeks later I was outside chopping wood in the middle of a blizzard. Around me the landscape was starlight white and icy; I had worked hard every day to keep a hole open outside of the door, so I could crawl out through the tunnel and find wood. Then Sara insisted that we do the same for the windows of the cabin, and we spent a week digging our way through. “For the air,” she told me. “The circulation.” Then I spent two weeks wondering what would happen if the forest itself ended up underneath the snow, and so I chopped wood intently, piling it in the basement, filling the upstairs bedroom and loft, burning it often to keep us warm and lit, and to keep the snow from our walls. Of course I thought of the boy and what I had done. It was a shame, because it probably mattered.

  There is more, and I could explain it. Once, I thought I saw a bear and ran toward it, through the snow, instead of away from it, like I should have done had it been a bear. But it was a stump. Another time, Sara and I played cards for three hours, and I argued with her about the rules of gin rummy. I was mad and she said, “The world ended,” and I said, “That’s not the point.” To cool down I went for a walk and I hiked the road, to the highway, just to see what I could see, and to get away. I was worried we were both going crazy—the real kind. It was barren, too, and my flashlight showed me only a long whitish strip of ice both ways. I still had the meth in my pocket. I hadn’t smoked any. After a long time of breathing the ice air I threw it all away, into the ditch, and went back home.

  Here we are.

  The only other story worth telling is when I crawled through the front tunnel after a few hours of shoveling and chopping and opened the door and found Sara upstairs in the corner of the loft with the broom, sweeping up broken glass. She had brought the lantern up with her.

  “What happened?” I asked her. I saw then that there was a hole in the window. I could feel the wind.

  “No,” she said, seeing my stare. “It’s okay. I thought we could just fill it with insulation.”

  “Did you do it?” I asked.

  She shook her head no.

  “What?”

  She set the broom down and went to the corner. She knelt and picked up a shoebox that was there. She came back to me and set it in my hands, and as I held it, she lifted off the top.

  “It just came in like a missile,” she said. “I put it in the box. Like a bed.”

  There was a bird inside. It was a bright red cardinal. She lifted it out and held it cradled in her two palms. It was curled up and almost spherical, its beak tucked far down into its chest. It looked like a heart.

  “Is it dead?” I asked, and just as I did, it opened one yellow eye and flapped its wing.

  Vaara in the Woods

  It’s night. Alexis and I are in the bedroom, putting the new bed together.

  She’s wearing a white T-shirt that makes the pregnant curve of her belly obvious.

  “It seems substantial,” she says, looking at the bed.

  “We’ll definitely be supported,” I say. “This will be…very comfortable.” Eyebrows up.

  I can think of the monster while lying in the dark, as both of us are drifting off, and I can dream it, too, and see the white pines and the groups of men huddled around a fire. How many years can such things last? That’s an important question. And why does it feel so important to imagine apocalypse?

  My family tells me this happened in Forest County, Wisconsin, far from Chicago, and I would like to say that it isn’t or wasn’t true, because I am a modern person who uses computers, not a lumberjack. This was eighteen-something or nineteen-something, somewhere close to there, and the most important thing to know is that people who spent time in lumber camps suffered tremendously. The lumberjacks and the bosses lived in their killing zones for months at a time, used oxen to drag logs through the woods after they’d been felled, and often these oxen died of exhaustion, just crumpled first to their knees and onto their sides with a wail or a moan, and to hear that dying moan was like you had die
d as well. Sometimes they were just beaten to death by whips or shot for being not strong enough. When the jacks burned the dead oxen at night, it was said among the camps that the smoke collected up in the trees and came together, and later, not far away, it coalesced and drifted down to the earth, and it became the monster.

  The pain. That’s what drove the magic. It came alive again in the shape of something that looked like an ox but an ox made in a cave of hell, standing low to the ground with razor teeth, the horns on its head twisted around one another, its eyes burning red, a fire-liquid dripping from its rotten lips. The night after it was created, the monster would return and pull men from the camps.

  My grandfather’s grandfather, a man named James Somerville, worked those camps, and he worked them so long and so hard, so mercilessly, that he became a boss as a young man. He drove the jacks in the camps harder than anyone, and they hated him even more because he wouldn’t eat with them at night; instead he ate in his shanty with his pregnant wife and his baby boy. It was uncommon for there to be any women in a camp, but James had demanded she come along through the summer. There had been what he once called “indiscretions” having to do with the pregnancy, and he wanted her by his side where he could watch her. She came. Her name was Martha. And when the story plays in my mind, for some reason I am one of the young loggers in that camp watching this happen, I am seventeen and outside of it and I see her through the open doorway some evenings as we come back to the camp, sitting in a chair with that baby in her lap, rocking it, her black hair loose around her shoulders, and I sometimes hear her singing to the child, and I realize why other men would be so quick to love her: She doesn’t fit here.

  Then it’s that terrible June day and James, out in the woods, has been watching a Finn named Vaara. Sometime around lunch, sitting on my log, slapping at the black flies on my sweating neck, I see James walk by and spit at Vaara’s feet. Either Vaara has been with her or James believes he has, and it doesn’t make a difference which version is true.

  Vaara takes a long look at the wad of spit by his feet and considers it and James keeps walking past him, to the oxen, and among them he finds one of the healthiest we have and he pulls it into the middle of our lunch gathering and he begins to beat it with his short whip.

  It takes him fifteen minutes to kill it. No man says a word. The ox cries out at every strike. I shut my eyes.

  Once it has gone to its knees, a bloody mess, James takes the pistol from his holster and shoots the ox through the head.

  He looks at Vaara for a long time, breathing hard, and says, “Help me drag it back to camp.”

  Vaara, pale now, looks at the dead ox and says, “Would be impossible,” in his thick Finn accent.

  James says, “Come with me, then. I’d like to speak to you.”

  Vaara puts his sandwich down. Together the two men walk out into the woods. Not long after that we hear the shot.

  James tromps back and says, “Far more to do before the day is done, boys.”

  I am part of the group left behind to burn the beast in a pyre, and we shrug and think two birds with one and don’t think about the pain and we go find Vaara in the woods and put him in the pyre as well.

  We burn them both up and go back to camp, but as I eat I think back to the smoke I saw coming up from the pyre and think of how it seemed different and think of the stories of the monsters but let that go from my mind quickly, as I’m not the type to believe it. Near dusk, as I’m washing up, I see James come out of his shanty and go out into the woods. Twenty minutes later he’s back and he walks straight to me and says, “Where is Vaara?” “We burned him,” I say, and he says, “Where?” And I say, “With the ox you killed.” James’s eyes go wide and he stares at me for the longest time. “The same fire?” he says, and I say, “Yes.” “You goddamned fool,” he says, and his neck snaps around and he looks out into the woods.

  It’s night. It’s right then we hear it, this low moan but with a force behind it, like it’s coming from far away but loud enough to get to us. James begins to run toward his shanty and that’s when the monster comes into camp. It’s not even like the stories say it should be; it is shaped like a man, but terrible, awful I tell you, enormous, burning and moaning its way into our clearing, its long, blackmuscled arms nearly dragging on the earth, and eyes red and its teeth gleaming. Vaara and that ox have fused together. James is already in the shanty to protect his wife and the monster throws one of those long arms out into the side wall, wood explodes, and that’s when I feel myself running toward them, which is opposite, because every other man in the camp is screaming and running away.

  The shanty is burning by the time I get to the door and when I pull it open I can see that James is already in the arms of Vaara, amid a fire, that the monster’s torn through the wall, and that the woman, Martha, is crouched near the bed, and she sees me and my eyes are wide and she holds the baby out toward me, and I scream, “Run outta there!” and see in the corner of my eye James smashed up into the ceiling of his shanty by the monster, and he is on fire, he is a rag doll, his neck’s already broken, but she only thrusts the baby into my arms and backs farther into the smoke and chaos of that place coming apart, and a piece of the porch collapses beneath me with this baby in my arms and then I am only running, not looking back and not hearing the sounds of her screams as I plunge into the woods.

  In Chicago, in the night, I look out the window at the bare trees in the wind and the yellow lamp lighting my street corner, and of course the I is not the right I, that baby was my great-grandfather, directly above me, or so the story goes. I am not lying to you when I imagine the real ending to be Vaara trundling down Winchester Avenue in Ravenswood. Up into our building. He finds us in our new bed, Alexis and me, and takes us with him as well.

  I cross the room and go down the hall to the bedroom door, and through the crack I can see her asleep in the bed.

  I go back out to the window.

  Once the baby comes, it will pass. I believe. We’re safe.

  Even so I hear myself whisper, then, still watching the clicking trees. I tell the night, “Vaara, I’m sorry, I’m sorry but it wasn’t me.”

  Easy Love

  Seven or eight years ago I saw Alex, the Iraqi man who used to own my corner store, chase a neighborhood boy out onto the sidewalk and throw a can of Diet Dr. Pepper at his head. I had just two days before I sent off my applications for medical school, and I remember feeling lighter as I walked, relieved I was through (for the time being, anyway) with the paperwork, the staplers, the lost files on my computer, the carefully-crafted emails to old professors, pleading with them to send my letters of recommendation. Relieved that I could get on to more important things, like reading the veins of leaves and rescuing farm animals from barn fires.

  Almost everything was changing; my mother had died of MS over the summer and I had gotten engaged to a girl I’d met only a month before. Her name was Corinne Jones, and we’d met at a bar called Saxony. By December Corinne was married to someone else, but at this moment it was all roses, not a bad feeling in the mix. When Alex threw the Dr. Pepper she was away in France for six more days, there for some kind of international conference, presenting a paper regarding something maybe having to do with recycled paper. I knew little about her. I couldn’t tell you details of what she was doing there, or if she was passionate, or even what kind of work she liked to do, but I hadn’t slept, thinking of her return, and her hair piled up neatly beside me on her pillow in the night. I loved that girl.

  By then I had known Alex for two years. I was intrigued by his corner store—Windy City Liquors, it was called, with a square blue sign bordered by bright, globular light bulbs, not unlike what you might see on Broadway, New York City. The floors were sticky. It was understocked, served homeless alcoholics as much as anyone else, and often contained, instead of customers, three or four members of Alex’s family sitting behind the counter, watching a small Zenith television, smoking cigarettes and drinking exotic-look
ing shots of charcoal-black coffee. Transactions there had a ceremonial air to them involving greetings, nods, and thank yous from both sides, from many different people, consecutively. To buy a box of saltine crackers could make you feel like you were ratifying a constitution.

  I knew the family was Iraqi because Alex had once told me proudly that the picture on the wall beside the condoms, the one of the clean-shaven young American soldier who stared straight into the camera, was his son. I asked Alex what country the family had come from.

  “Originally, I mean,” I said.

  “Iraq,” he said, staring at the picture. “Joseph is there fighting Saddam now.”

  This day Alex was the only one at the store. Maybe he was nervous, and when he saw that a kid was stealing from him, he didn’t have his family there to hold him back. I could see, from where I was on the sidewalk, the candy bars spilling out of the kid’s pocket as he ran out of the door. He had made it to his bike and had stood up on his pedals to begin his escape just before the barrel-chested Alex emerged, wound up, and released, and the Diet Dr. P hit him square in the temple, and he sort of accelerated and veered into a metal garbage can at the same time. The front tire hit it with a metal crump, and the bike stopped moving, and he kept going—through the air above his handlebars, then went down onto the pavement, where he remained, facedown, not moving, for quite some time.

  “You don’t do that!” Alex yelled at the boy’s body.

  After no response, Alex yelled, “This is a business!”

  Still no response, and Alex looked over at me. I could see he was surprised by the violence.

  “Is he dead?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” Alex said then, laughing very nervously. He shook his head, then went and knelt down beside the kid. “I am sorry, boy. Hello?”

  He shook the kid’s shoulder, then looked back at me. He smiled, and his mustache curved up below his nose.