Cory Johnston
The Far Lights
It came from outer space, of course.
Through my bedroom window, I would watch for signs. I did not know what I was looking for precisely, but I felt certain that the arrival of the creature destined to murder me would announce itself in an appropriately dramatic manner. Across my mind’s eye flickered images of some cosmic flare that punctured the gray-blue evening sky amidst screeching vibrations of sound, or maybe the wild cackle of electricity as the high-tension power lines in the empty field beside our house braced to receive the impact of its terrible arrival. For a grieving twelve-year-old boy raised on sci-fi and B-horror, this seemed as obvious and unavoidable as the blinking of the red traffic light across from my window.
I may not have known what cues would signal its arrival on Earth, but of the monster itself I had a clear and specific image, so fixed in my imagination that still, twenty years later, from the dark and the quiet, it endures. The monster that was fated to kill me took the form of a prop mummy from the silent-movie era. A long and emaciated human effigy, it was draped from head to toe in white bandages that hung in tatters below the elbows of its outstretched arms, frayed edges splattered with yellow like pus from an open wound. Only its eyes were not covered by eldritch wrappings: red and evil, they stared through the black nothingness of space and fixed like magnets upon a point on Planet Earth, a beige two-story home beside green suburban sprawl and the great titans of high-tension towers. Through the dusty glass of my bedroom window, the eyes fell upon me as I lay tucked beneath my pinstriped New York Yankees bedcovers.
I knew only two things about this creature: the first was that it only approached when I closed my eyes. When I slept, or rested, or even just blinked, it would creep forward, nearer and nearer, closing the distance between us. If only I could keep my eyes open, it would freeze in place, stuck like a fly in a spider’s web.
The second thing I knew was that when it finally reached me, it would rip the dusty glass from the window’s pane, crawl its way into my bedroom, and kill me sure as a bullet. That was it. That was its only purpose. It was bound only for me.
Each night, I’d keep the light on for as long as I could, telling myself that maybe I’d read a book. But it was a losing battle, and soon I would click off the bedside lamp and let the darkness begin its ceaseless pull upon my eyes, burdening them with sleep. Darkness defeated my resolve to stay vigilant and ward off the death that zoomed toward me from the depths of space. I slept. Did the monster, then, creep ever closer?
In the morning, the southwestern horizon outside my window shone blue and tall, the fluffy white clouds obscuring the far light of the stars.
In daylight, the house was chaos. My father was dead and all the people who loved my family filled the downstairs rooms from morning until night to offer support. Their cars flooded the dead-end street and flattened the knee-high grass in the adjacent field. Trays of food sprawled across the dining room table: platters of sandwiches, steam trays of roasted red potatoes and pulled pork, bowls of mixed greens beside gallons of ranch dressing. No one actually knows how best to comfort a grieving family because no one actually knows how to grieve. We tell ourselves that the way we do it is right, but how could it be? There is no prescription against the stubborn truth that we share our world with this force, this thing, whose only purpose is to unmake us; there is no balm for the sudden shocking realization that on any day we might awaken to find it has crept into our home and carried someone off while we slept, nor for the cold certainty that soon enough it will be back for more. So instead we visit. We idle. We take turkey and cheddar cheese, and mayonnaise tossed with some lemon juice and dried basil, wrap them up in a flour tortilla, cut it into thirds, and arrange the pieces on circular black platters. We display the platters on disposable paper tablecloths. Afterward, the tablecloths are crumpled up and stuffed into an opaque, high-volume trash bag, so that we are not bothered with frivolous incidentals like laundry. We perform this ritual in silence, perhaps pausing to admire how neat and tidy, how perfectly free of crumbs, the tabletop has remained.
I took full advantage of the sandwiches, but I avoided the people as best I could. It wasn’t because I wished they would leave, but because their presence each day was demonstrating a fact I was only then coming to know: that conversations between people who love each other, when one is trying to comfort the other, are almost universally worthless. It all felt so contrived. We were soap opera understudies rehearsing tepid dialogue. They called me champ or sport. Low voices murmured with serious intonation, except for when someone, usually Mom’s brother, my Uncle Dennis, said something goofy to lighten the mood, and everyone laughed, and the laughter too was low and serious, and it either ended too abruptly or lingered just a bit too long.
At twelve years old, I felt this only as a background-radiation level of awkwardness. I can see now the deeper truth: that during those days the house was swaddled in a kind of soft panic, not at the loss of my father but at how his death brought into such clear relief the frightful limitations of our power. Overhead, the monster careened through space, and the tools we used to ward off the perpetual grasping of its shadow, all the champs and sports, revealed only how unfit they were for the task.
This limitation was the true object of that panic, and with it the understanding—still nascent and unarticulated, just the soft dulling of the horizon as dusk marches westward—that life contained another force that the adults were trying to hide from me, indeed often tried to hide from themselves, which was so utterly unlike the thrilling drama of television, where the good guys lived and the bad guys died, where Mulder and Scully solved the mystery and took down the scary monster within the confines of a weekly forty-four-minute story arc. But my dad had just been golfing when his heart gave out. It had been a normal Sunday morning. In the real world, it seemed, death stalked with calculated indifference, and my mind failed to process and express a meaningful response. To fill that void was little of substance. Champ, sport, turkey sandwich. So instead of confronting what had happened head-on, I allowed everything to be put through a filter of unreality: these were just people in a place, experiencing some events. A couple of nights at the funeral parlor in town. An afternoon in a green field surrounded by weird stones. Never enough detail to bring the images clearly into focus.
But the passage of time complicates matters. I remember only what my biological systems allow me to remember. And so this strange time in my life may remain forever mysterious to me. I don’t know which details are real, or which I’ve invented. I can’t take stock of those I’ve forgotten. A new panic has replaced the old one: that I failed to notice the right things, failed to commit to memory the most important details, failed to realize that in the long run, it is a devil’s bargain to choose the soft edges of unreality.
Back in my room, turkey sandwich in hand, I opened the windows and let gusts of May air rattle the framed posters that hung on my wall: Jeter, Tino, Brosius. Sitting cross-legged on my bed, I’d try to anticipate the wind, which whispered through the screen in its own subtle language. There seemed to be a logic to the wind, a glimmer of something extraordinarily vast. I imagined that in its soft rushing I could hear, too, the endless crash of tides against the shoreline, the relentless grinding of earth that lifted mountains. If I listened, the signs of an approaching gust began to materialize. Down the street somewhere, a screen door slammed against its hinges; on the corner of Brooklake and Main, across the empty field, the blinking red traffic light groaned as it swayed from its suspension. A high-pitched whistling cut through the air, filled my room, and sang like strange music. Between sloppy bites of my cold and damp sandwich, I tried to predict the wind.
Sometimes, a random thought about my dad would break through this daydream. I would catch a glimpse of his old baseball glove and suddenly realize that we’d never again visit Yankee Stadium, eat greasy hot dogs, talk shop about off-speed pitches in hitter’s counts, that my Little League team suddenly had no coach. As these realizations crept into view, I would feel some thing or other swelling inside my chest. It moved from my gut to my lungs, up the back of my throat and into my nose, my eyes, the bit of brain behind my forehead. I didn’t know where this thing came from, or what to call it, or what to do with it. Sometimes it escaped my mouth in a horrible wracking sob, the volcanic eruption come at last to relieve all that pent-up pressure. It didn’t last long, just a hiccup, but it was so strong it stole my breath. I tried as best I could to match it to the rhythms of the wind, which would maybe suck it up into the swirling May air and carry it off to wherever the wind goes.
Whenever I try to access the Penrose staircase that is my memory of that time, a strange kind of vertigo ensues. Dozens of moments whisper and warble to me, but I can’t set them in order. They refuse to cohere. The logical part of my brain knows these are experiences that occurred over the span of weeks or even months, yet when recalled, they stack upon a single day-night cycle. I remember Uncle Dennis taking me to the three-in-one shop in town for scratch-off lottery tickets. We put down twenty dollars into $1 and $2 tickets and then reinvested our winnings into more of the same, on and on, until, as is the design, we went bust and ended up with nothing. But it took all afternoon and he bought me Runts and Gobstoppers, the kind of candy that takes hours to finish because it shatters your teeth if you bite down too quickly. I remember scrubbing my purple tongue with a toothbrush after eating all the candy in one sitting.
I remember standing outside the funeral parlor during the wake, and a girl I was kind of dating, in that way middle schoolers kind of do, told me that I wasn’t sad enough. My behavior was all wrong. Shouldn’t I be crying? I remember sitting in the kitchen of our house while the priest who would deliver the eulogy talked to me about God, then asked me what kind of things I wanted to hear during the ceremony. I don’t remember what I told him, or anything at all about his eulogy, though I do have a clear image of the pamphlet that the church distributed, the resplendent depiction on the front flap of an open field and idyllic long grass beneath the words, “And he will dwell in the house of THE LORD forever.” I do not remember finding any solace in this. What I do remember—with so much clarity it has become a kind of nightmare, a parasite that eats up my brain’s neural networking like a moth at old cotton—is standing in the dining room and surveying a full platter of sandwiches when I heard the slam of a car door outside and turned my head to see my aunt walking across the lawn, carrying another platter of sandwiches. I remember how, when she brought it inside and pulled the plastic wrap off, it glittered with tiny bubbles of condensation, which dribbled onto the tablecloth and soaked through to the wood.
There are days when I struggle to remember the details of my father’s face. The length and color of his moustache, how he parted his thinning hair. I can’t remember being able to remember the sound of his voice.
It is so obviously a poor trade: eyes, smile, moustache, voice, in exchange for ancient evil wrappings splattered with blood and pus. A temporary reprieve from the process of grieving in exchange for the annihilation of memory.
I didn’t expect that, years later, I would want to think about everything that happened during that time, that in rejecting the details of my own grief, so too did I cast aside those of its source: my dad, his life, the person that he had been. I couldn’t understand—what twelve-year-old would?—that true death occurs not when the body fails but when the dead’s presence can no longer be called to mind by those for whom its impact was strongest. I did not lose my father on a Sunday morning in May, but slowly over time, as all the specificity and peculiarity of his life dissipated like morning fog.
Maybe that is the true madness of grief: the lunatic belief that it really is the person that we keep in our mind’s eye, and not our own pathetic scribbles and tracings. Maybe this is where all of our monsters come from.
Not far from where we lived, there was a stream that ran alongside the middle school baseball field. It banked into the woods near third base before passing beneath a planked footbridge that separated my dead-end neighborhood, which had only one outlet to Main Street half a mile to the south, from the more expansive side of town. Between the bridge and the school was Snake Hill, a series of ravines and ditches and dirt trails that the older kids had turned into a BMX-style biking spot, with some wooden ramps complementing the natural inclines of the landscape.
On the day before the funeral, I approached from the dead-end side, so my view was blocked by a row of trees and undergrowth that rising spring temperatures had spurred to rapid growth in recent weeks. Although I could hear murmurs and the rattle of metal bike frames, I was happy to remain unnoticed. I didn’t like Snake Hill. I owned a bike, but had not learned to ride it until the previous summer, when I was eleven years old, so I had a perennial shame of how terribly I maneuvered the thing, never daring to adventure beyond the smoothly paved streets of our immediate neighborhood. Instead, I came to this spot in order to sit on the concrete embankment underneath the bridge and watch as the water passed.
There was a vertical drop on the other side of the bridge, maybe three feet straight down, and the sound of the waterfall—a silly word to use here, but in a kid’s imagination, this modest spilling of creek water was almost supernatural in its wonder—was like a steady chanting. Sometimes, when I was elsewhere around town, in school or at baseball practice, or lying awake in my bed with eyes fixed on the sky, I would think of that little drop and feel a kind of awe wash over me in the realization that, at that moment, in that place, water was still tumbling down and rushing on toward where the stream emptied into the Passaic River. Even though I wasn’t there to see, it was still going. I could almost hear it babbling on.
I went to the waterfall that day because Mom told me I couldn’t just stay in my room all the time, that she was worried. I think she wanted me to be around all the people in our house and talk with them. But I had instead lugged out my bike and rode down to the stream. The gently flowing water, with its contours shifting in a dynamic cycle of surge and trough, was an easy choice.
Twenty years later, my mind has gathered all the decisions I made during those weeks and reduced them down to one: the river, not the people. But that day’s crisis fed continuously into those of the days that followed, which turned into months and years. There is no hard boundary between the person I am now and the kid who bent his head low over the running water to feel the soft mist of its endless exhalation. I still hold him within the eye of memory, and so he still informs my sense of the world and how to respond to it. Sometimes he pulls my strings, makes me dance, fills my head with a manic desire to make myself blank, to detach entirely from a world that he tells me is nonsense. Even now, I sometimes find myself receding in his wake. My behavior toward others can be cold or unfeeling. I may willingly go an entire day without speaking to anyone. I am pathologically and humiliatingly incapable of offering comfort to the people I love. I freeze up, almost literally, just staring straight ahead until I can find something on the corner of my mouth that demands to be poked at by my tongue. I have a weird, emotional preoccupation with sandwiches.
The irony is that in rejecting this confrontation with mortality, I unknowingly conferred upon it a romanticized kind of power. Set against a house filled with empty words that did nothing to help me grasp the change that had come to my life, the raw and inarguable power that death commands over life had become clear. And so I have as an adult become somewhat obsessed with its power, with the dead and the dying, with this force, this monster, this thing, which hunts us by mysterious means and follows its own unknowable logic. It is a Pandora’s Box that I keep on my desk and on my nightstand. I wrap it in cheesecloth to pack alongside the mummified entrails of bread and mustard and potato chips. I cannot take my eyes off its loathsome figure, that merciless dead stare, the gaunt and sunken cheeks. The image is a dangerous one, equal parts wonder and fear. The infinite vastness of the cosmos and the singular, relentless pursuit of the monster.
That day by the river, which in my mind is every day and all of those days by the river, it was my sister who came to fetch me and bring me back. Erin stashed her bike against a tree and sat down on the concrete embankment. It was late afternoon and sunlight splintered the gaps in the rustling canopy. Although only three years older than me, she looked mighty as I watched her from my spot down below. Her feet dangled off the edge and the soles of her shoes shuffled like sandpaper against the fine grain of the rock. She was on a mission, she said. An epic quest, the kind that only a big sister can handle. Mom had told her to find me, that it wasn’t good for me to be alone. I don’t know how she knew where I’d be, but then again, there were only so many places I ever went. Now that she was here, she said, that meant I wasn’t alone, and so there wasn’t any rush. Back home, everything was chaos. The people were still there. But in front of us, the stream’s rhythmic chanting continued on without end, just as it had before anyone died and it would when the two of us arrived back home an hour later with flushed cheeks and windswept hair, just as it does now and will continue to long after we are gone.
* * *
One night, which in my mind is every night and all of the nights from that time, I took the screen out of my bedroom window and climbed outside. My room was in the front of the house, directly above the entrance foyer, and beneath my window was a small shingled bit of roof that covered the front stoop. I sat there in the chilly night air and looked up to the southwestern sky. It was out there, I knew, the monster that would kill me once I had closed my eyes for long enough. It came from so far away, but all it had to do was wait. How long could a boy keep his eyes open for, anyway?
The red light across the field was blinking as always, and there was little noise save for the chatter of crickets. After I’d sat for some time, harsh sounds exploded from the open living room window downstairs. Mom was there, with my aunts and uncle. She was weeping like I had never heard before. I don’t think I knew that word at the time; crying is the word I would have said then, unsure how such a simple and clear word could fail so completely to capture what I was hearing.
Light fell upon the roof shingles beside me, and I turned to see Erin once again. It was a curious reversal of an old pattern between us: years earlier, when I was five or six and I couldn’t sleep, I would sneak into her bedroom and curl up on the foot of her bed. Erin radiated that peculiar magic of older siblings, a mystical power to annihilate any fear, to stand firm in the face of whatever the night’s dark threw at us.
But it was different this time. There was nothing mighty about her. No special mission to be completed. She looked every bit the child she was, peeking into my room with wide, terrified eyes.
I went back inside and joined her in the hallway at the top of the stairs. She clutched with pale fingers at her red pajama pants, which clashed against the plain white walls and gray carpet fuzz. We just sat there next to each other, not speaking, hands gripping the bannister, and listened to the noise from the living room, distorted and grotesque as it echoed off the walls and loped its way up the stairs like some murderous fiend.
After we listened for a bit, I went into the bathroom and took a roll of toilet paper in my hand. Crouching low, I spun the roll over and over until all the paper lay in a pile at the bottom of the wastebasket. I took the brown cardboard roll into my room and shut the door behind me. Lying down in my pinstriped bed, I brought the roll to my eye and gazed through it. There was no lens, no mirror, of course. It magnified nothing. But with my left eye shut, it seemed to pull the night a little closer. I looked at the treetops on the lawn, the graceful arcs of the high-tension towers, the blinking red traffic light. Then I pulled my gaze upward to the sky that lay beyond, and the far light of the stars.
In time, I would learn about starlight, how it bends around planets and refracts into rainbows, how the little pieces of stuff it’s made of have no mass, and how, because of this, they experience no passage of time. It makes a strange companion to memory, I suppose. Those weeks and months, as I recall them, are a single day and night, a weightless pattern of neurons that fire in concert. And yet it is in this form that days persist and maintain their own kind of existence. That twelve-year-old is still there, stuck in my mind’s eye, enduring so long as I hold him within the gaze of my memory. But like starlight that bends around some massive sun, memory can also twist and create illusions. When I ask it to bring me back to some time before those awful weeks, to perhaps locate the echoing strands of my father’s voice or the details of his face, it recalls instead the stained bandages and dead-eyed stare of an outer space monster and insists it has done what I’ve asked, that this is what I seek, that to expect to hear the timbre of speech and feel the rough shag of moustache is only to betray how little I have learned. Voice and face and mind and heart are all there, it whispers, there and only there, the place toward which it is our nature to be pulled.
On that night, on many nights, I looked through the kaleidoscope of a toilet paper roll and tried to see past the stars, to whatever it was that awaited me there, frozen in outer space, its gaze holding my own, waiting for me to blink, and knowing I always would.