The Curious Absence of Divinity
Story by Joshua Myer
The lake was placid beneath a carpet of vibrantly fading orange-brown leaves of late autumn’s avalanche of discarded foliage; still, its smooth tense surface reflected every inch of blue sky peaking through the Adirondacks. Such was nature’s way of rejecting the artists’ conceptions of beauty. As a whole, it was glorious and Eve had been right: the leftover roast beef proved to make a most delicious sandwich.
Laurel stood by the frost etched glass pane of her younger sister’s small wooden cabin soaking in nature’s majesty, enjoying her newfound emancipation from aspirin, a sense of freedom that comes from feeling loved. She recognized the feeling and called it clarity.
Once every few minutes, a draft blew a shiver down her spine grabbing the elbows and sleeves of her light fleece pullover tighter. Soon, she returned to the jigsaw puzzle by the warm granite hearth. On the way, she glanced at the thermometer on the wall; it was forty-six degrees inside. It had been a very cold October even for the seasoned New Yorker. The wind raked the little house, injecting a harsh aching numbness into her fingers and toes. Without a clock, it was difficult to gauge the time more precisely than an approximation. It was a cold afternoon.
But the alcohol was out of her system and she thanked God for that. Pieces would fall into place, as would the green chenille afghan wrapping its arms around her as she leaned back into the big suede sofa. In the end, it was the fireplace that sang her to sleep …
When she awoke her toes were chilled, stiff against her clammy maroon slippers. She checked the thermometer only to find the temperature had dropped another ten degrees. Bravely, she forced herself to stand up, still clutching the sacred afghan. The fire needed poking; she crossed the coffee table made of some exotic wood, cherry or oak, perhaps mahogany. What was it? Eve would know, what with being a minor deity of interior design and all that jazz. She always was the smart one.
In contrast to her ultra-modernist snob-fest-of-a-home, Eve had furnished the cabin as homage to transcendental-minimalism, to be her own personal temple built right into the mountain, to worship nature and fashionable living, with simple designs and soft, warm colors – everything in woods (teak, walnut, and “hadn’t you been paying attention?”) but the slate fireplace, a few solid-color earth-tone rugs and tapestries, and the muted marble countertops. To be fair, Eve had stocked her aesthetic masterpiece with practical working appliances, good comfy furniture and tasty foods, but perhaps only to offset the ethereal ethos filling the strikingly plain angular rooms with little to no decor. She had even remembered to equip the cabin with an old flashlight, perhaps in case of a moonless night. Then again, the dishes were clay – oh, the internal banter of thoughts amused Laurel as she stoked the fire until it purred sympathetically. It was a simple but gratifying task, one that she was surprised to discover just how much she enjoyed it.
“I hope you don’t mind but it was cold so I let myself in” a gentle voice behind her explained. When she turned around she saw a stranger, a man wearing snowflake-lapels on his thick wool jacket, a faded plaid that spoke its years. Laurel judged he was in his late forties or early fifties – he grew a little stubble with a few grey hairs, and he carried in one hand a chipped yet sharp axe head. In the other, he held a broken haft. With his face, he held onto the passage of time.
“There’s a storm coming.” He paused to stare at the ground apologetically. “Axe broke.”
Laurel was surprised to see anyone, and it goes without saying that her first thought was to sketch a few scenarios: in her mind he could be the seemingly-innocuous axe-wielding misanthrope-drifter so she would be the secluded and subsequently vulnerable female desperately recovering from years of self-inflicted abuse … then again, in this neck of the woods, he was more likely the ruggedly-handsome and independent-minded outdoorsman, which would make her the foxy young divorcee craving … stability. Somewhere in her memory she remembered what might have been a joke or a metaphor – he was the bottle and she was the bottle opener or was it the other way around? The axe was broken, wasn’t it? Broken things demand acknowledgement.
She forced the images from her mind. “I didn’t realize I’d left the door unlocked,” she postured.
The stranger made the back of her mind scream and down glass after glass of secrets. There was the time that she got married, the time she enjoyed with a sculptor named Henry who had since changed his name several times, the time she missed, and the time she had left, and oh-so-many others. She had been sober exactly two months, a fact she patiently reminded herself of plenty on her own. She needed a cigarette, which she didn’t have and didn’t want. He shuffled sideways like a crab waiting for an answer from a pelican.
Where was Eve? Laurel knew: only God could help her now, but damn! Eve promised her that she would be miles away from the world, unfathomable distances away from the things that cause concerns, far, far away from credit card bills and the smell of vomit and fashion magazines, from the greasy stares of lawyers and thunderclaps of judgment. And here were the strange man’s eyes, lavender with hints of sea foam and burnt sienna; they were kind eyes. Damn it.
And then she remembered the storm, “this storm – it’s a big one?” That’s what she wanted to know most of all and to this he nodded. “How’d you know?” she asked.
He tossed a gaze at her evenly, trying to remember words. “Long-wave radio confirmed a hunch,” he chopped, “can’t you feel it though? You’re going to need some substantial firewood before it hits.” The thought of the stranger gnawed at Laurel’s lower lip, and she glanced back at the thermometer then her hearth and then the window; the sky was graying ripe with flurries. Flakes had already begun clothing the landscape in hushed silence and the rapid midday drop in temperature only confirmed his story. No longer could the sky peak through the leaves that shielded the lake from the sun.
“I really am sorry to force you to make a decision,” he said, and she could see he really was sorry, quite aware of the weight such choices about strangers carry, and he continued to stare at the ground as if to apologize for his offensive appearance into an otherwise straightforward existence. Many moments would have to pass before she made her decision, but moments are ephemeral things that have little to no baring on the outcome of stories. As soon as she thought it, she knew entirely what she had to do: this man was here for a reason. She was here for a reason. The axe was here for a reason. Her sister had leant her this cabin for a reason. The storm was part of that reason.
“You can borrow the axe so long as you promise to return it promptly and in one piece,” she offered, gesturing to a leather-hooded woodchopper’s tool-of-choice hanging faithfully from a peg by the doorway (thank goodness for Eve and her boy scout of a husband). The woodsman nodded his thanks gruffly, and turned to retrieve it. This triggered her stomach to change settings mid-load to tumble dry hot. So she yelled, “wait” a little too loudly and there was an awkwardness. So he stopped and turned his head to face hers, curious, his hands still, frozen in place by the handle and strap. Laurel had not planned this far ahead and didn’t want to make things any more awkward than they were already for the poor fellow. Dousing her fears with a bucket of anonymous calm she found a more appropriate question to ask instead. “Do you think I have enough fuel?”
He dropped his hands and then lifted one level with his hip, as he let the other fall slack with all the finesse of a practiced gunslinger. He asked “is that all,” pointing out the last two logs on a wrought iron stand across from the poker, shovel and tongs. She nodded, anxiously, to which the stranger responded, “I’ll go get some more then. It’s no fun being snowed-in without fire.” With that he turned and was out the door swiftly, leaving his broken axe as collateral, squinting into the glaring bright landscape as the temperature descended down below numbness. Laurel settled back to the couch feeling nothing, until, from inside her cocoon of green afghan, she got up, drew a glass of very cold water from the sink and drank it slowly, before returning to the couch and staring at the puzzle wondering where the strange and unexpected man had come from and, more importantly, why he had carried his broken his axe …
Twenty minutes passed during which the fire crackled and the little house creaked, and the stranger returned, a sizeable bundle of white capped logs cradled in his arms, the axe secured to his belt with its nylon strap. But first she heard the door, then she felt the frigid wind, and then she saw the strange man. There was nearly an inch of wet slush caked on his boots that tracked smudges of cold, wet dirt across the floor, to Laurel’s refreshed supply of firewood; the stranger wordlessly turned to the open door.
“Wait,” said Laurel disturbed and disoriented by the smooth efficiency of the transaction, and on some level completely unwilling to admit kindness to a stranger. Who was he? When you live in the city for as long as Laurel had, you get tough; you also get a little desperate when it comes to understanding anything beyond the mechanisms of society. Laurel needed to know he was real, that he had feelings, so she asked the first question that she could grasp, “how far is your cabin?”
He shook his head unreassuringly, “two, three hours in this weather – I should be on my way as soon as possible.” He continued to move, step by step towards the pronounced chill that steadily crept in through the still open portal.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Laurel wondered aloud in protest. He only shrugged, unwilling or perhaps unable to acknowledge such a fruitless prospect as danger. She took note of this. It was a romantic sort of expression of independence, pride and strength; it was a solitary, primal grunt with roots in an ancient kind of magic. It was the kind of thing Henry would have beaten into bronze until it wailed tears as old as mountains. She was no longer frightened by the strange man, but pitied him for his ignorant lack of worldliness. She grinned surreptitiously, asking, “what’s your name, anyway? I’ll need to know who to hunt down if I don’t get that axe back.” After all, she assumed he wasn’t going to chop the wood here and carry the axe back in the eminent blizzard.
When he didn’t answer except to stare back pleadingly, she turned to the window, seeming to survey the landscape, “I’m no expert but my gut tells me that if you leave now you won’t make it back before nightfall.” He looked at her with cold, hard calculation. Outside nature was howling like a hungry wolf, the wind crying out in anguished isolation as it spread through the leafless trees. The woodcutter replied with a more direct question, “you’re suggesting I stay?”
Laurel was a little surprised at her remarkable audacity reflected in his plain words, but she hid her fears, smiled and nodded, gesturing to an empty spot beside her, “you can sleep on the couch by the fire.”
He shook his head as he marched to shut the door, leaving the axe hanging from the peg where it belonged after wiping it dry on the inside of his coat. “You’re going to want the couch – it’ll be warmer.” Laurel was lost. He read her absent look, sparking what for him would be an epiphany – “you’ve never been caught in a blizzard before have you?”
Laurel shook her head. She grew up on the beaches of South Georgia; snowstorms were seldom seen except in news stories, whispered about by her parents. They were like pillars of alabaster in houses made of glass. And then they moved to the city … snow was no serious obstacle to the bold New Yorker with that can-do attitude, and hopefully plenty of resources or at least a credit score … but out here, there was no one for miles. Only garments, wooden walls and a stone fireplace fought back against the coldness.
He barely smiled and with a hint of non-condescending authority ordered, “you can take the couch”, and before she could protest he interrupted with a more pressing issue, “are you sure I can stay here? It could be a while, especially if we get snowed in.”
But she held up a hand and dismissed the thought of spending weeks with a complete stranger as well as any thanks he might have expressed towards her generosity, to which he nodded and, after a pause to recollect stray thoughts, and said, “my name is Burt.”
***
It was white both in color and intensity – so white you could not see or judge depth beyond the numbness of extremities; Laurel’s eyes were wide with irises clenched in wonder. It had no depth. She was spellbound. She knew no eyes would ever penetrate the brightness of the void beyond her cabin window. She could have stared for hours at that majestic, overpowering colorlessness.
“So,” started Burt after shedding a few layers of protection and mopping up as best he could the mess he’d dribbled all over the floors, “you should figure out how to pass the time – after all, cabin fever’s no fun for anyone.”
Laurel pointed back behind her to the coffee table without averting her gaze from the window. “I like jigsaw puzzles … we’ve got a whole bunch of them. Feel free to work on the one on the table.”
He sauntered over to the scattering of pieces on the broad table. There were several thousand of them on the coffee table, partially arranged by color and pattern. Burt could see most of the border had been completed, but with such small pieces in places it would be impossible to predict the finished picture until more progress was made. It held his attention for about ten full seconds during which Laurel interrupted his reverie.
Laurel, still staring into the bright, white light, asked, “how long will it snow like this?”
“Two or three days according to the forecast,” replied Burt, “We might have to melt open the door or dig a tunnel out. Unless you know help is on the way.” This caught her attention plying her eyes away from the depths. Burt just shrugged casually, saying, “we could be stuck here for about a week.” The fire crackled, throwing wave after wave of hot air into the well-furnished room as the temperature outside continued to drop and the wind whispered insane gibberish into every notch in the walls of the wooden cabin.
Laurel combed her mind for what she knew about Burt. He was definitely a stoic and good with an axe … she couldn’t really say if she trusted she knew anything else about the fidgety mystery man. So she plopped down on the couch next to him to begin questioning. “So are you telling me,” she began, “that I’m to spend an entire week freezing to death with some axe-wielding stranger?” The thought of being a stranger made his fingers twitch but he did not react in any way to her accusation of axe-wielding, perhaps because he did, in fact, chop the wood that heated the room.
She surveyed the landscape of fractured scenery, searching for a piece with a flat grey edge and tan highlights pretending not to see Burt try to smile reassuringly, “stranger, we won’t freeze to death unless the fire burns out. We’ll survive this.”
But Laurel bit her lip. This was all superficial, excluding the bit about the fire, which was just plain terrifying. She decided to change her strategy. “I know nothing about you,” she protested, pining for something to make the headache subside as she forced herself onward with the conversation.
Burt paused and a shadow flashed across his face, momentarily obscuring his appearance, corroding the calm, cool exterior grown out of years of chopping wood, laying snares and living off the land, doing whatever was necessary to survive. It was only a moment. “I’m sorry,” he began, “There are some things about myself that you won’t know, Laurel.”
It was so vague that it was clear even to him that she did not understand, so he clarified, choosing his words carefully like a flower arranger new to their job, constantly considering alternative arrangements, “I’m not used to being around people.” He stared down regretfully at his thick wool socks, shuffling in place, as if to explain his presence as a matter of gravity pulling him towards the Earth no matter which leg he stood on.
Laurel nodded, mostly to reassure him, and returned to the cross-legged arranging of pieces of the puzzle.
Burt fingered the soft edge of his deer-hide belt, a belt from a hide he’d stripped, scraped, measured, cut, tanned and hardened alone, nearly twelve years ago. There was something Burt found incredibly satisfying in that process, realizing thousands of years of refinement, resulting in a simple useful tool. Having had nothing metallic to spare meant there wasn’t a buckle to potentially freeze against wet skin; a sturdy cloth lanyard wound through a set of notches along the head kept it from slipping. He’d worn that belt for years …
“I see the stove runs on gas,” he said suddenly standing up, alert and rested. “Is there a tub in the bathroom?”
The young woman wasn’t entirely sure where he was going with the inquiry, but she nodded meekly. Burt nodded back, “the pipes may burst and we need water,” he stated in a matter-of-fact tone. She showed no sign of worry, though the thought was horrific. Who was this man?
Laurel pointed to the doorway leading to the bedroom and returned to the puzzle, “master bath’s on the right.” He was gone in the blink of an eye, the word “master” striking him a bit quaint, during which she located another border piece finishing an edge. That meant she only needed to find four more pieces to finish the border. Running water sounded from the recesses of the house, somewhere behind the living area’s back wall, behind a simple decorative tapestry of raw silk and wool.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” she asked upon hearing him reenter the room. At least he couldn’t sneak up on her, so long as she stayed awake. Three left.
He replied simply, without emotion, “yes,” but then he thought about what she might have meant and explained, “a gas stove means that we can boil the water to purify it. I hear some people use electric stoves but power lines don’t stand up in this kind of weather and they usually get repaired only after search teams comb the area.” Her eyes continued to trace paths over the chaos on the coffee table. Two left. One. “I’ve seen a lot of storms …”
“You must do a lot of jigsaw puzzles,” he remarked, unattached to the comment even as it left his mouth. She put the last piece in the border. “Yep,” she replied, “this one is easy too.”
He nodded, continued to watch as she began to fit piece after piece into the frame, observed “you never use the box. How many pieces are there?”
She looked up and chided playfully his novel wonder, “three thousand and it’s not a challenge if you know what it’s supposed to look like before,” before returning her spiderlike fingers to the task of rearranging the fragments of color into a coherent image. “What do you usually do for fun?” she asked, peripherally aware that he had yet to even glance at the tabletop.
It took him a few moments to respond. “I read a lot. Survival guides mostly but sometimes western philosophy. Lately, I’ve been carving a new chess set,” Burt spoke with the emotional range of a granite block. “Lost the old one last year to fire. Shouldn’t have left that candle by the board lit.” His eyes seemed to look through her and out into the merciless hale of solid snow, through the dance of shadows cast from the fireplace. “Don’t you remember what they look like?”
Thank God for that fireplace. It took her forever to figure out what he meant by that. “I order them from a special catalogue – no pictures. Just piece counts and a general topic description. Of course,” she added, “you can always return it if it’s not to your liking.”
“So what’s the topic for this one?” Burt inquired.
“My favorite,” she grinned, “grab bag.” The way Laurel saw things, he’d figure out how to keep busy one way or another. Maybe he’d even learn to relax a little. Or not. Probably not.
Burt left to check the tub. The simplicity of jigsaw puzzles appealed to Laurel who continued the task, but, before long, her mind meandered across the surface of the table to the doorway leading to her bedroom. In her mind, she followed the sound of running water.
***
It was a month ago she saw God. She may have been drunk, but she wasn’t crazy — it wasn’t something she talked about, not even with Eve, not even during detox, when the pains were at their worst and she began to rant, pouring out her soul to skeptical nurses who seemed to leave her room in a hurry forever after that. It didn’t bother her; Laurel simply saw God. It was that image of divinity that convinced her to go cold-turkey in the first place, as well as the reason she started to keep a dream journal as well as a reason to begin painting again. It was strange having people who loved you think that you are crazy.
She saw a light in the bar that day, wearing the music by the jukebox at a quarter ‘til eight. It was blindingly bright, yet she could not have averted her eyes if she had wanted to. It was beautiful. It contained the entire room and held the world together. It was beautiful.
God gave her strength she never had imagined she possessed, even in her wildest (absurdly mild) daydreams or her most decadent moments of creative bliss. She finished the drink and called Eve to tell her the good news, omitting the crazy parts. She was drunk, not crazy. She wasn’t about to tell Eve she saw God. That would be crazy.
“I’m goin sober.” She had slurred it a dozen times already, always meaning it with all the sincerity she could muster, wondering if she still had that sculpture in her foyer (the one of wrought iron that looked like a mash up between Picasso and Rodan. Eve could tell she must have been real bad-drunk again. This was not, by any means, the first time she had heard those words.
“I want to help you beat this,” a but was coming, “but you need to get in-patient treatment,” she stated firmly, a nervous flutter in the back of her throat. She had helped Laurel through some rough times. A lot had changed since the playground days of Chestertown. But Eve was faithful to a tee, even when dumb ol’ Laurelie married the fucking conman who conveniently disappeared halfway through the honeymoon, even when she pawned all her paints and brushes one by one until all she had for it was a rum and coke, even after mom cut her off at the dreaded Christmas party of ’95, officially excommunicating the black sheep from the family once and for all … those were the many times Eve never gave up on her older, crazier sister.
Somewhere, on the other end of the phone far away from the streets of Queens, Eve’s husband shouted, “dinner’s ready!” She’d get sober again if only, “I need to get a cab – can’t drive,” Laurel was trying to hail a cab on the tilting street, and Eve promised to – the rest was black. Actually, the whole damn thing felt like a memory reconstructed from conversations. It all seemed very far away to Laurel.
The first thing after that which Laurel remembered was falling in and out of sleep in a hospital gown, in a clean room, with a bad headache and the most bizarrely beautiful image of divinity imprinted in her mind. The lights were off and the curtains drawn but daylight was creeping in through the edges of the clear portal. The leaves of august drifted in on wet waves of fire scorching her brain, where questions were starting to form: how would she pay for this? How did she get here? Where were her clothes? Eve …
She woke up. It was hot as hell and she was sweating liters into a plastic-mesh-mattress. She was in a familiar clean room from before, this time with Eve who was waiting by the window, wistfully patient.
“I told mom, but she’s … still pretending I’m an only child,” little quivering globules formed in the corners of her eyes. “Before, I could hang up she asked me why it is that I believe you this time,” she spat out the last few words and they stung. She wiped her eyes before she could cry.
“My car –“
“Parked it in a private lot. I found you a few blocks from that dive on 48th.”
Eve’s train of thought took a sharp turn too fast and jumped the track. Her eyebrows loosened and she took a deep breath. She had practiced this before. Better stick to the script. She bit her lower lip.
Laurel started sobbing. What she asked next was a question she would have never asked if she hadn’t seen the bright, white light so clearly ephemeral, floating from that jukebox. She remembered everything, each contour of radiant forms the time on the clock, the beautiful song that was playing – Elvis, “Love Me Tender” – the look of sadness on the bartender’s face when it chose her and said that’s enough, it’s voice so sensual, such a smooth and youthful falsetto…
“So why do you believe me this time?” She asked quietly, level headed and calm. She needed to know, no matter how badly it hurt.
Eve swallowed. She didn’t know why, but she wasn’t sure quite what to say. She couldn’t tell her that she didn’t know anymore. Instead, she stared at her mess of a sister. Then, she prayed to God for one of them to break the silence.
“I’m burning up” was all Laurel could say. The force of the hospital’s air conditioner made her shiver despite the heat. She felt like a simmering kettle that would soon erupt. The headache’s pain was everywhere all at once.
“You’ve got to get through this,” Eve said firmly.
Laurel felt the strength again, and she knew she needed to keep warm despite the sweat. She quickly scooted to the edge of her bed, stood up, turned and took three cautious dizzy steps to the door-less alcove housing several white blankets. She reached out and touched the dry, solid air; the colors all blended into a bright pulsing blur to match the frigid ache in her skull and surge of hellfire from within as she fell into herself.
***
“Another two minutes,” said Burt confidently, atop his perch on the armrest, “then I’ll turn it off.” She could hear the tub in the master bath filling up with warm water, a chattering chorus of tiny bells.
Laurel gathered her thoughts, taking a break from the puzzle to reacquaint herself with reality. She was going to find out more about Burt no matter how awkward he made it. “You know a lot about survival,” she danced around the subject gingerly.
“What else is there?” he asked as if to him life was really that simple.
“You can’t – well.” Laurel protested in search of words. “Ethics. Art. Culture.” She gestured broadly at her surroundings, the universe as her evidence.
Burt chuckled, as if she were an old friend and offered half a sentence, an incomplete answer. There was a long silence. “Yes there’s that, but in the meantime,” an incomplete question he left for her to complete.
Laurel shrugged, but smiled back. This was progress. “Survival I suppose.”
Burt grinned. It had been quite a while since he’d made a joke. “You’re done with the border” he pointed. Apparently, this was supposed to make her happy. This was progress.
“So puzzles aren’t really your thing,” Laurel posited.
Burt nodded, “I like simple. That’s why I live out here.” He stopped abruptly. “Wind’s really howling …” his eyes found their way to the window and so many falling snowflakes it seemed like a wall of snow. He knew full-well that his love of simplicity wasn’t the only reason he lived so far from people. But it was simpler this way.
Laurel gripped the afghan a little tighter and nodded emphatically. “Does it always sound like this?”
“Sometimes.”
The bleakness of the answer made her shiver, and she returned to the puzzle filling in one piece and then another and before she knew it she had a fair size chunk completed. And the water was off and Burt, her new friend (she decided he was in fact quite friendly in his own injured way), was there, sitting beside her, watching her eyes as they flicked between the puzzle and his own.
“It goes there, by the odd looking edge,” he said pointing to a spot near the border, without even looking to see where he was pointing. It fit.
“Thanks,” Laurel said, unsure of the stranger’s intentions or abilities. “I think I’ll start warming up some dinner soon” she mused, surveying the remaining pieces for bits of bright blue highlights. After that she moved onto a shadowy section, perhaps a patch of a thicket in an un-kept garden or some wild vines scaling trees in an ancient forest. She reckoned it was an artistic depiction of lush foliage. Tiny brush strokes marked pieces of leaves, accented in orange and yellow, betraying a hidden light source beneath the surface of the grey-green landscape. The brown must be the trunks or the earth or a chocolate-colored grizzly bear, or massive heaps of dog-shit, but the picture had to be a forest no matter which direction she turned it in her head.
“I noticed the canvas, in the bedroom,” Burt feigned nonchalance. He was out of his league. She didn’t have the heart to tell him.
“Did you now?” Laurel replied mockingly, smiling to herself. He was certainly charming.
“Yes.” He replied with utter sincerity. “Merry Christmas – from Eve with love.”
“My sister,” she smiled and finished a small section of sky along the border, after which she dropped her hands to her knees. She had forgotten Christmas. Then again, she was sober now enough to realize and that made up for it. “I think it’s time for me to heat up some dinner.” Laurel stood up.
“I always thought artists were really picky about their supplies” said Burt.
The comment demanded a response. It hung in the air like a cloud of buzzards waiting to descend and tear the flesh from off their bones, so that the next person to enter the cabin would find the two skeletons bleached white and bare naked, before the birds escaped through the open door. The idea was petrifying, but something had to be said.
“Sometimes.”
***
ring, ring!
“Dalworth residence, who’s calling?”
“I need to ask again: are you sure it’s not a problem?”
“Don’t be silly. I promised to help you any way I could and here’s a way I can help and besides, it’s not like I’m using it.”
“So I’ll just…”
“Call me when you’re ready and I’ll have Maria drive you – she cleans on Thursdays you know.”
“I’ll need warm clothing, lots of jigsaw puzzles, ooh and meat .Am I going to have a bed?”
“Just as long as necessary, ‘cause then I’ll want it back for me and my chubby hubby!”
“Ugh … hey Eve?”
“What’s up?”
“I love you”
“I love you too, and for God’s sake, call me if you need anything”
“Count on it. I’m checking in regularly from now on. Once a week. At least.”
“And there should be a few surprises waiting when you get there”
“Surprises?”
“Not telling.”
“I really love you – don’t worry about me”
“Love you too, Lor”
click. pause. click.
***
“The average human can survive about a month without any food,” Burt said gesturing with a fork-full of roast beef, “but without water,” he paused dramatically with the meat in the air before totally ruining his setup with a matter-of-fact conclusion, “most people last about four days.”
Neither light nor wind entered through the blank, cold window. All light came from the flickering hearth as they ate a meal of beef and Brussels sprouts together on the couch.
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” he chewed. He glanced at her, sideways, as if noting a wisp of green caught between her teeth yet, being too polite to mention it directly, decided to discuss the weather, alternatively. But, to Burt, it didn’t mean a thing. “You wouldn’t last a week without food.”
“Why’s that?” Laurel asked, taken aback.
“Low fat reserves” he gave her a weak smile. It wasn’t even a smile as much as an acknowledgement of her existence, a brief moment of attentiveness in his otherwise full mind.
“Oh,” she said, as the fire rebounded waves of heat from its stonework cage. If it was a lion it would have roared, tossed its mane and gnashed its teeth. But it was a fire. It crackled lightly in the background.
“So, can I ask,” Burt queried in between bites, “what sorts of things you paint?”
She paused from eating. “People, the things they do to each other and to themselves to feel alive,” to which he responded by barely wrinkling his nose. Anyone else wouldn’t have seen it. Perhaps she had imagined it, but she decided it was enough to ask: “You don’t like people?”
“People are complicated.” This was not an answer, not to the question she asked. He knew that. She knew he knew that. He was pretending to be interested in his plate.
She popped a Brussels sprout into her mouth. “What about me?”
Burt shrugged; then, seeing her face dim, instantly regretted his words. He rushed an apology, “You forget things in nature, how to talk to other people.” Disappointment adorned their mutual expressions. Maybe they both knew it was a lie, but what isn’t these days? He wore that disappointment everywhere like a badge of shame but he continued on with the conversation to keep from dwelling on it. “It’s like this roast beef. I forgot how good beef tastes.” They both gnawed at the silence, until Burt asked, “does that make sense?”
Laurel splashed some boiled bath water around her mouth before she swallowed, thinking it could taste a lot worse. She nodded “Yeah, it does.”
“I mean, thank you. I’d have … had … what you did.” He fumbled for the right words.
Well, someone had to stop him from embarrassing himself. “I think you’re a good Burt — a regular sport,” she said with an encouraging smile.
“Thanks …” he returned the smile automatically, but soon would be miles away, trudging through the cold. “You should try adding a pinch of salt to the water if it tastes too stale” he replied unfeeling, his eyes surveying the thermometer. His mind wandered to places Laurel would never know, because they were places where no one ever recognized him, places he blended in with the scenery and became part of the world. He could have been a tree in a park or a cloud or a rock. People would walk right by.
And the salt improved the flavor considerably. Long after the dinner eaten they continued to sit at the table. “So when do usually go to bed?” Laurel asked, breaking the silence.
“You want to continue working on the puzzle after dinner,” he said, anticipating her motives.
“I usually go to sleep around eleven, eleven-thirty” she replied.
“And I can wait, and move the table afterwards, or else fall asleep in the bedroom.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, with genuine concern.
He nodded, certain, then smiled grimly and said, “it won’t really get cold until tomorrow anyway when the snow becomes ice.”
After dinner, Burt carefully scrubbed the clay dishes and wooden cutlery with a plastic sponge, rinsed them and set them on a towel to dry. He wrapped the leftover meat and Brussels sprouts in separate tin foil packages, and scrubbed the skillet and the cooking utensils clean. Finally, he set the dishes and utensils by the hearth to dry. Then he too sat by fire, enjoying mankind’s earliest “invention”.
The thermometer in the little cabin drifted below freezing. Somewhere, far away and deep below, the pipes burst silently as the ground around them froze in place.
They stayed close to the fire. Burt watched Laurel place piece after piece into the frame, her eyes probing for pieces, her fingers finding them.
In this way, the hours passed (an hour passed between wakefulness and dreams, depositing another foot of snow that drifted into the side of the cabin, and another hour passed and they were both dreaming and the snow continued to fall and neither one could say how long it had been).
***
She spoke through the spinning darkness to the form before her: “Who are you?”
The golden creature laughed in untamed jest without derision: “I am.”
The girl, herself, spellbound: “You’re beautiful”
Solemn: “I am.”
“Beautiful”
***
Laurel awoke to the chill and a strange darkness, the only light coming from the fire slinking back into the core of the fresh cut logs. The whole room smelled delicious, a termite’s dream but her reality she joked to herself. When her eyes adjusted, she rose to coax the remnants of flame to brave the air beyond their warm wooden cocoon. A little fire still burned, but not enough to throw substantial heat. It needed some new fuel.
Her eyes jumped to the figures of shadows dancing just beyond her grasp. Her mind conjured symmetries, faces, and bizarre contorted forms to fill the darkness. But still the shadows flooded into her field of vision from places beyond the periphery.
She couldn’t bring herself to think what would have happened if the fire had died entirely … She shuddered at the thought. The storm outside had gone eerily silent.
As her eyes adjusted to the absence of light, for the first time she saw the puzzle she had completed before sleep. It was a painting of a nature scene, an abstract expressionist’s depiction of wandering in some lush tropical fantasy of a forest , before looking up to try to find the sun in preparation for some preliminary sketch. Instead, the artist saw only one small patch of bright blue sky that shined through a lone gap in the trees along the edge of the unframed puzzle. It was beautiful, the natural focus of a landscape painted orange-red, yet dominated by dull descriptive blends of browns, grays, and greens. It was beautiful.
It was cold, the kind of cold that burns. Laurel shivered and wrapped the afghan tighter around her torso and tiptoed over to the hearth. Burt probably fell asleep in the bedroom, she discerned, but a veil of shadows made it difficult to be sure of anything beyond a few feet. She threw a fresh log into the mix, and poked air holes into the charred coals with an iron prod, until the conflagration began to swell breath heat back into the room, the new log burning bright.
The flashes of heat from the reborn gold-red flames awoke faint recollections of the dream, and then the angel, the bar … she needed her journal, quickly as she remembered her dream. Grabbing an adjustable lantern and setting it as dim as it would go, she turned to penetrate the utter darkness surrounding her sphere of visibility extending a shallow two meters beyond the fireplace. The mirrors in the heavy flashlight cast a dimly white rectangular beam that swept across the walls and floor, until settling on the half-open door to the bedroom. Burt was motionless, fast asleep. Gathering her courage and stepping as lightly as she could, Laurel plunged into a world of shadows to retrieve something dear to her.
***
“How did you sleep?” he asked, somehow able to sense the moment she woke up, in what could have been the morning, without turning his back to the fire. He must have done something perched there in front of it like he was, because the flames were low, but the thermometer read thirty-two degrees. He turned to face her; light from the fire fringed his outline with a brilliant golden border that danced around him like a chain of infinitesimally small links. “I hope you don’t mind: I made myself eggs for breakfast and I used a bit of the onion for flavor.”
“I don’t mind … is there coffee?” Laurel blinked and rubbed her dry eyelids.
“I’ve got some tea already made.” Burt asked, handing her the heavy lantern.
“Yeah. That will work.”
“Pot’s on the stove. Should be warm unless the gas ran out,” he pointed as he returned to tinker with the fire. He had mentioned last night something about fires, about building heat sinks and reflectors, maximizing air circulation while minimizing exposure. He said the trick to keeping warm was keeping the biggest logs’ core temperature’s just hot enough to continue to burn slow. She hadn’t really paid attention. It sounded pretty technical.
The wind or some ancient feral beast was howling again. The window’s showed no sign of daylight outside, and under the flashlight’s beam revealed walls of snow. But first things first.
The tea was still warm and tasted more like a sour and fruitless cider than what Laurel thought of as tea. It was vaguely spicy, thick amber, unctuous and zesty, completely unlike any brew she had tasted before. “What kind of tea is this?”
“Dried Bayberries, lemongrass … mostly sassafras, some nettle, let’s see … ginger, hickory salt, handful of green pine needles” Burt continued to list ingredients.
“You made this?”
“Yeah. I always carry some during the winter, in case of an accidental injury. Even without warm water it’ll stave off shock if you suck on it – my own blend.” Burt might have been proud, but mostly seemed curious.
Its taste was unusual, but Laurel was surprised at how even the flavor seemed to help her wake up. “It’s surprisingly tasty,” she decided, feeling a pleasant buzz as she plopped down on the couch.
“Almost no caffeine but it get’s the blood flowing” he said with his Burt inflection. “I would have made some breakfast for you too but you were still asleep.”
“I usually skip breakfast, but thanks.”
This got Burt’s attention. “It’s the most important meal of the day.” Then he changed the topic instantly, “I spent the morning inventorying the kitchen and I noticed flour, eggs, sugar, milk, butter” he explained.
Laurel laughed and shook her head. “It’s my sister’s cabin – her husband works as a chef for some fancy hotel,” she said, “a real nice-guy.” She looked at him strangely as if to impart meaning to his life, as if she wanted him to do something. “You remind me a lot of him actually.”
Burt’s thoughts drifted back to his origins briefly. This was not difficult for him, he had spent a dozen or more winters, some blizzards much worse than this one, without the luxuries of flour, dairy products and processed sugar, a bathtub to fill with running water or a gas burning stove. She could see something troubling him, but it was cloaked beneath his woodman’s façade of fierce independence. He was actually quite lost, at the moment thinking of how, if he were back at his campsite, he would have made a batch of dry acorn-flour pancakes and eaten them with the last half-jar of tangy strawberry preserves he had managed to salvage. He could almost smell the thumbnail’s worth of deer fat sizzling in the pan above the stove that cooked his food and warmed his bare-bones cabin. But that was a long way from here, many miles. Also, there would be about two inches of ice, and at least four feet of snow to crawl through. But in this fantasy he would walk home on snowshoes he made with his own two hands. He read how to make them. He’d made them before, from soft young willow branches and dear hide. And no one would need him, and he would need no one.
She smiled and rolled her eyes patiently waiting for him to realize that it was meant to be a simple compliment. She asked him how they would know when the storm was done. “When the winds die down, then the temperature starts to rise again.”
She continued to sip the warm bitter brew.
“Will anyone dig us out?” He asked.
Laurel swallowed hard. “Eve will have us out of here as soon as it’s safe. She watches the weather channel. It’s sort of her thing … one of them anyway.”
Burt passed up the chance to discuss her younger more successful sister, clapped his hands together and began the conversation again, “Are you going to paint today or do we need another puzzle?”
“You know, I think I may just paint,” she said. “Perhaps you can help me set up the easel.” With a thought she noted, “I’ll need to use the lamp to get a clear sense of colors.”
Without so much as a single ray of sunlight able to pierce the snow that piled up the side of the cabin, it would have been impossible to tell how many days they spent inside the cabin, Laurel painting by mechanical lanterns, Burt watching from the couch. He tried to find meaning in each stroke, as did she but nothing could break the deafening silence full of sad truths so familiar to the lives of outcasts like them. Finally, an image emerged from the blur of abstraction and colors: a golden-winged man standing or floating by a jukebox that had been abandoned in the middle of a dense expressive jungle.
The jukebox itself was barely visible beneath the vines, but it wasn’t the background that stood out – the angel seemed injured, a wild animal but at the same time hardened by years; an unapologetic beard cupped his square jaw gracefully while curt locks of dark brown hair played across his face.
His eyes were sharp teal but with soft undertones. They seemed to follow you no matter the angle you viewed the painting from, even though the canvas never moved – his mouth never smiling or frowning. He was a regular Mona Lisa. And odd as the scene was, the way it was painted, it felt natural, almost real … however if you looked closely at the angelic form you could not tell how far away it was or whether it stood on the ground, as golden light flowed from somewhere deep behind the tangle of vines, framing the angel in holy light. The task of having rendered a scene so surrealistically as to seem natural was a credit to her artistic genius, a trait never recognized by anyone except Eve and a few faithful patrons who were far more concerned with how a piece of art looked on a wall than with the art itself.
So when, she finished painting, they were both exhausted from the intense drain of trying to give meaning to the multitude of barely-visible brush strokes that comprised the beautifully surreal scene. It could have been days, or years, but there was no way anyone could tell how long she had been painting that angel.
“You’ve been to the Amazon?” Burt asked, finally breaking the silence.
“No,” she answered. “Have you?”
“Nope.”
“I think I’ve seen you before, Burt. It’s just a feeling I get.” Laurel turned calmly to face him. She shouldn’t be saying this because she’s sober, and she hadn’t seen him before. She knew she hadn’t seen him before. The angel in the jungle listened patiently without judging.
The painting was done. She laid a hand on Burt’s shoulder gingerly.
“I doubt you’d remember me,” he spoke into her eyes. “Before today, the last time anyone saw me was years ago.” For a long time they sat together, saying nothing, feeling everything. “It’s … my way.” He explained as they continued to watch each other growing old in the room with the low, trembling fire.
Eventually, the batteries in the lantern gave out with a final flicker, and then only the fire kept them from total darkness. They bundled up in blankets and clothed their faces shut to the harsh frozen air; together they sunk into the shadowy crevices of the couch, into the comfort of each others’ warm bodies.
They slept.
But even then, the snow was never far from their minds. It entered their dreams flooding their minds in silence, chasing them always as they ran.
***
Laurel woke up on the floor, by the fire, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets and fell back asleep. A few minutes later she began to absorb a rush of details: a crack of light peering through the top of the window, the hunger knots of her stomach, a decisively masculine scent lingering on her shoulder, the back of the canvas showing little in this light, the lantern dead, it’s batteries spent.
She sat up: the puzzle on the table, the patch of blue, the fire recently stoked. Everywhere she turned she looked for him, but he was not there. She replayed the past few days in her mind, and determined it could not have been a dream. It was far too cold to be a dream. He could not have gotten far with all that snow outside.
The sliver of sunlight that slipped in through the window filled the whole room. The door was closed. The wind was whistling. The inside of the window was coated with a layer of ice and it glowed. A pot of tea was on the stove. The smell of Earl Gray mixed with moist cold air. A note was on the table: “From Eve with love.” Laurel closed her eyes and listened: the sound of scratching metal.
Her journal lay open and she began to read the page, but could not finish because there was a muted knock on the door. “Go ahead and come on in if you’re knocking” she called, rolling her eyes.
“No can do,” Burt called.“Door re-iced … I’m gonna need you to boil a pot of water, preferably within the next two hours so ASAP.” She was relieved to hear Burt’s voice. The last few days had left her quite disoriented. He sounded nervous, so she worked quickly.
“Will this pot of tea work? It’s almost full.” She called from the kitchen.
She heard him scraping at the door. “Yeah,” he replied, “that should do the trick.”
She turned up the gas on the stove. As it began to simmer, the bubbles rushed to the surface; together the sound of them popping en masse slowly rose from a whisper to hum. It sounded a bit like a song but Laurel couldn’t imagine what the song would be about. “How’d you get out there?”
“Steam, salt, elbow grease,” he stated as if the answer were obvious, “You’re a pretty heavy sleeper.”
She ignored the comment, as he no longer frightened her. “So the storm’s gone?”
“Not entirely, but I had enough extra calories to spend a few, and it’s a lot easier to get a start digging when the snow’s still soft enough to pack along the tunnel and reinforce the walls.” Burt explained with patience. “Unless, of course you know for certain someone’s going to be digging us out before we starve.”
“My sister, maybe … I thought you ran away – where should I put the kettle once it’s boiling?”
“Where would I run to? Just aim the steam around the doorknob and the lock, I think I got most of the ice off the hinges,” he called back, “I never told you how much I liked that painting.”
“How much did you like it?” She called through the door.
“A lot.”
Laurel positioned the tea kettle with the broken whistle and pressed down on the lever that capped the spigot to test her aim. “Almost got it,” she reassured him. Bracing her wrist, with her free hand, she released the remaining steam into the lock. “Done.”
“You’d better stand clear.” Ka-thunk! The door shook and Laurel scurried back to the stove. KA-THUNK! This time the wooden structure creaked from the force of the blow and the wall reverberated a tiny echo.
Then, with a crash, the door swung open and Burt rolled forward and inside, a small folding ice pick still in hand. A tiny avalanche of unpacked snow shook loose from the force of his battery poured over the threshold. The tunnel held solid. The lump of soggy clothing on the floor didn’t miss a beat, “you probably will want to close that door. It’s cold out,” he explained.
Laurel snapped into action, slamming it with a resounding bang. Burt picked himself up off the ground, breathing heavily, exhausted. He put the ice pick back in a pouch sewn into his faded wool over-coat and smiled. “That’s a lot easier with someone inside to help,” he panted out a sigh of relief.
“How would you have gotten back in?” she asked with genuine concern. In fact, the prospect of him stranded out there terrified her, though it also imparted many warm convictions about his work ethic.
He shrugged. “You try and get the metal warm as possible by rubbing it, then you pee in the lock and pray it doesn’t freeze before you get it open. Even if it fails to work, you’ll make the papers.” The look of horror on her face would have amused anyone else. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t have been out there for more than a few minutes at a time if I had been alone,” he sat down on a teak chair by kitchen table. “Also I would have dug straight up with a pole until I had a working chimney, then I’d carry some fire out there and let it do the work.”
Laurel joined him at the kitchen table. “I was thinking I might crack open a cookbook and bake something later today.”
“That’d be nice. I’m really hungry — it may not look like much but that tunnel took over two hours to make.” Laurel hadn’t seen the tunnel, but she knew it was there. “Your sister, Eve – she’s going to send help, right?” Burt asked his eyes almost as wide as Laurel’s.
“Definitely,” she repeated, “definitely.”
Burt nodded his head. “Good.” Having finally caught his breath he mused, “I must be getting old.”
“Join the club,” Laurel replied.
Burt cocked his head to one side, curious, but unsure whether he should ask what it meant. He was unfamiliar with the phrase just enough to face the joy that is confusion. The wind let out a gentle sigh. And then the snow kept falling like diamonds from the sky as they waited for Eve and the park rangers to dig them out.
From that day forth, Laurel would wonder what her life would be like if Burt disappeared suddenly. She continued to wonder what her life was like, in fact, long after his mysterious disappearance some years later. She never wondered about Burt though; that was his way.
***
Somewhere, behind the counter of a seedy bar in downtown New York, an angel silently dries his glasses clean. Well, not really an angel – more like a man and a wrinkly ol letch-of-a-geezer at that. Well, maybe he’s younger than he looks, but he smoked in his youth … anyway, one by one, he slides the glasses into overhead racks in preparation for tonight’s crowd. Any colder and the glasses would stick to his hands. It’s cold as a witch-tit.
Tucked in the corner, the jukebox takes no quarters. It only takes dollar bills. It’s one of those modern jukeboxes. The kind that’s all-business, and doesn’t let you see the disc flipping arm because it doesn’t have a disc flipping arm to show. At this particular moment, The King would be explaining the laws concerning blue-suede shoes, if the jukebox were on. Outside, the wind rattles the windows like some punk-ass youngster trying to wake up his goldfish.
The barkeep speaks to no one in particular. No one would ever tell his story to another human being over a beer or a cup of coffee, or at a dinner party of close friends, or in the spring when the snows melt, or in the summer when the sun is closer to the earth. It’s not much of a story. It doesn’t even have a proper ending and the beginning is all scrambled up like yesterday’s eggs.
Adopting the voice of some fictionalized grizzled pirate he muses, “hell of a storm, my darling,” and then decides to repeat the phrase, “hell of a storm,” before losing his train of thought somewhere in the frosty distance.
