Deeply Odd(38)
I didn’t mind being soaked to the skin and chilled, because the rain washed from me the feeling that I was unclean where the Other had touched me. With relief but also with some apprehension that the blinding dark might again depose the daylight, I recovered the dropped pistol, crossed the roof to the shed, and opened the door.
The interior of the shed was not as clean and featureless as it had been when I first ascended to it in that other realm. Enough storm light found its way inside to reveal abandoned spiderworks tattering in the corners of the ceiling, a generous layer of dust on the shelves, and a litter of paper scraps and broken glass across the floor. On the shelves stood a few oddly shaped cans so old and rusted that their labels could not be read.
The air was redolent of wood rot and a lacquerlike smell that came from something that for weeks or months had been oozing from one of the rusty containers. I realized that in the other-world version of this building, there had been no odors, either foul or sweet, just as there had been no sounds except those that I made.
When I opened the creaking door at the head of the single flight of narrow stairs, I smelled mold and dust. The shaft was dark except for watery light below, where the lower door hung open and askew on two of three hinges.
In the third-floor hallway, I discovered the source of that vague illumination: three skylights. The hollow rataplan of rain on the slanted panes unnerved me because it masked other sounds that I might need to hear, and I hurried to the west stairwell.
By the time that I made my way down to the garage on the ground floor of this crumbling structure, I reached the conclusion that the other version of the building, the one without dust or odors or fine details, was not a part of the black wasteland with the distant lakes of fire. It possessed a character different from both this world and that one, as though it must be in some kind of borderland between realities, a sort of way station.
The garage contained no vehicle. The white van once stored there had been driven away earlier by the would-be burner of children or perhaps by his hard-faced stocky friend in the black-leather jacket. The fancy ProStar+ was secreted in the other garage, the one in the borderland building, to be retrieved when its owner had need of it.
Evidently, the rhinestone cowboy not only knew of these way stations but also seemed able, unlike me, to come and go from them at will.
I tucked the pistol in my waistband, under my sodden sweatshirt, glanced at the high latticed windows to be sure that the lightless wasteland had not again closed around the building, and left by the man-size door.
I stepped into the storms, the one that is merely weather, and the other that is the story of humanity.
Fourteen
THE SLIGHTLY CONCAVE PAVEMENT IN THE ALLEYWAY channeled a rush of rainwater that carried with it crisp golden ficus leaves like fairy boats, stiff-legged dead beetles, cigarette butts, an empty foil condom packet, tiny purple petals that the wind might have shaken down from the limbs of early-blooming jacarandas, and all manner of flotsam, every scrap of it familiar yet somehow ominous.
I felt a little bit as if I were debris, too, swept along by the cataracts of falling rain. When at the end of the alleyway I turned right on the sidewalk, the run-off swelled deeper in the gutter, and among the trash borne on that tide was the hollow rubber head of a Kewpie doll. Although I hurried, the head kept pace with me, and though it bobbled back and forth in the current, its painted blue eyes seemed always to fix upon me.
As I approached the street drain capped by the iron grate with the stylized lightning bolt, the flow in the gutter quickened, and the doll’s head swept away from me. The cascading water washed the myriad bits of refuse between the bars of the grating—except for the severed pate of the doll, which was too wide to pass and which came to rest upright, its ragged neck in one of the gaps between the lightning bolt and the ring that encircled it, its stare still turned on me.
I halted. Stood there. Waiting, watching.
The rain silvered the day, and for a moment it seemed that the only color was the blue of the doll’s eyes.
Not everything that happens during the day is an omen portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth. The breadth of Creation makes it impossible for us to step back far enough to see the story that the tapestry tells; the intricacy of it, from the macro to the micro to the subatomic, makes it impossible for us to comprehend the megatrillions of connections between the threads in just one small fragment of the whole.
Yet there are uncanny moments when each of us recognizes that the surface of events is just what the word denotes, a surface under which lie layers beyond counting, that what’s really happening is always more than what appears to be happening, that the apparent meaning of an event is only the smallest part of its fullest meaning. In such moments, most people—wise or foolish, simple or smart—truly feel the wonder of the world and perceive poignantly but briefly that at the heart of our existence lie mysteries so supremely grand in character that we cannot comprehend them in this life. The tendency then is to treat this revelation as an aberration, to react with fear or pride, or both, and to attribute the experience to mere confusion, stress, one glass of wine too many, one glass of wine too few, or any of innumerable unlikely causes.