found_drama

We’re headed out into the country on a drive; the idea is to find this obscure camping site.  We have directions but they are vague and the roads do not match up with them and many of the landmarks are missing and many of the street signs are covered with mud.  David Sedaris is at the wheel, I ride shotgun; in the back is a couple, the woman is hugely pregnant.  The roads are bumpy and muddy and they wind around and up and down rolling hills.  Sometimes we pass a farm.  The woman complains of pains; D.S. drives on, certain that we are nearing the turn-off.  We pass what might be the road but drive past it, afraid to turn down.  The road is extremely narrow — scarcely wide enough for our one car — and very muddy.  As it pulls away from the main road, it appears the the narrow ride rises up, meaning a fall not only puts us in the ditch but could plummet us down twenty feet or more.  In the back seat, the woman gives birth.  The child is still in the caul and D.S. says he knows what to do as he backs the car up and turns down the muddy road ascending into the forest.

We spend far too long at the store.  Between the research and the trying out different items and then finally filling in all the paperwork for the service agreements and all of that.  Since when did A. become obsessed with HDMI?  And why?  She has even gone so far as to say that this whole purchase is to improve the music at the house.  I suppose that could be the case…  But then why the large flat-panel television?  She mentions the musical news like in Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music but I’m not buying it.  Someone has gotten to her.  And as soon as we leave the store with this cart full of electronic apparatuses, the curb gives way to a waterfall.  The water seems to start just under the box store and runs down, falling at least a hundred feet.  Something suspicious down there.  The cart is gone and A. and I are strapping ourselves into climbing harnesses handed over from unseen hands.  We need to climb down and inspect the caves behind the falls.  It will be a delicate and difficult climb down.  Flashes of memory, of some crime committed; a series of ambiguous and increasingly bizarre crimes.  We slip over the side and begin down.

I suppose it’s played like a game though the urgency suggests that the threats are real.  But how can a half-dozen people locked in a 15′×30′ room really qualify as a civilization?  No matter.  When we detect the interlopers down the hall, we get the door slammed and barred before they can see us.  But they know that we’re in here and they’ll try anything to get in.  Just as we are prepared to make any sacrifice to keep them out.  We grab rocks, bricks, blocks of wood — any kind of shim we can find in the closet and jam them under the door, anything to seal it up.  Out in the hall we can hear them trying to work their way in.  They’re trying to lower the floor.  We hover near the door, holding our bodies up against it like that will make some difference.  The room is filling with water?  The water rises.  We dive down to ensure that the shims are still lodged under the door crack.  A hand comes through from the other side, we grab it and go at it with a bow saw.  Cries of pain, the arm recoils.  The water recedes some but there is damage and one of us has drowned.  We wait for cries or even shuffling from the other side but it seems they have retreated.  We are loathe to re-open the door.

To get there on time we need to leave on time.  But how can we leave into that dark cold winter night without being properly equipped.  Everyone else rushed to the door, cavalierly donning whatever barely warm-enough coats they could find.  I took my time, plowing through the closet to find my warmest coat.  The one with the orange liner.  Everyone is telling me to hurry up.  Even having found the coat, I still struggle to find the hood; it has become detached somehow and is missing.  I continue to dig through the closet despite their protests.  ”Let’s just go OK!”  But what foolishness is that?  Finally, I find the hood but it’s too small, like it’s shrunk in the wash.

We walk onward into the night.  There is a party where we’re expected.  We walk through campus greens.  When we arrive, I follow one of my mates into the house and right into the bedroom of our host.  I do not know any of these people.  They are all lying on the floor watching football on television.  Our host (however) reclines on his bed which is somehow too large for the campus environment.  After a moment or two, I recognize his face.  J.S.?  He acknowledges me with a tone hinting at disdain, asks if I’m a sinner.

I leave the party almost immediately, realizing that I am late for … class?  The building goes on forever.  A monstrosity.  Many buildings have fused into one, connected by hallways, gangways, breezeways, cloisters, terrariums…  After enough turned corners, I find myself so deep into the super-structure that there are no more windows.  The only light is the buzzing of the fluorescents.  I do not arrive at any classroom on time.  The professors all seems to expect it.  ”No one finds it right on the first day.”  The stairs wind up in squared-off coils, too many steps between floors, or else too few.  Or else they’re too steep or terminate abruptly.  Many hallways are too narrow.  They have jammed in residences where there might only have been room enough for service closets.  There isn’t a single map anywhere.

It’s a party?  Since when did B.S. have a house by a … lake?  It’s like Robert Downey Jr.’s house from Iron Man but crossed with a rustic cabin.  There’s about a dozen people here.  Everyone seems to be waking up, slightly hung over.  It is too early for this group of alcoholics to be waking up.  And who is this practically elfin woman that clings to B.S.’s arm and keeps telling me to do things.  Her voice isn’t shrill so much as it’s just high-pitched.  The pre-dawn grey comes into the windows and though everyone starts in whispers, they get louder as the morning progresses.  The sun gets brighter but never gets orange or pink or even yellow.

B.S. leads us all down to the docks out back behind his house.  A flamboyant park ranger is loading everyone up into canoes.  He gestures broadly across the expanse of water, suggesting that through the fog lies an island, that we’ll be paddling out to there and setting up camp.  Six to a canoe, he explains.  Matched pairs all around.  Except for me.  But I’m fumbling with my pack.  Loading and unloading and reloading the bag.  No one else is bringing a bag, they’re all just jumping into their assigned boats.  B.S. high-pitched elfin girlfriend (if she is, in fact, his girlfriend) tells me to stop screwing around.  ”Just bring it all.”  By “all” she of course means the bag filled with camera equipment — a few thousand dollars worth of lenses and accessories.  I had packed a small point-and-shoot into a waterproof case for the paddle across the lake but here I’m being told to bring everything.

At her insistence, I load the bag into the canoe and get in as well.  We start to paddle across but not 50 meters out from the dock behind B.S.’s house and something over turns the boat.  A monsoon on a lake?  Some kind of cryptozoological creature?  The bag floats but it’s not waterproof.  Neither are my lungs.

I sneak in to grab a few things from my room.  I am not due back here for another week or so and do not want to arouse suspicion.  No one recognizes me anyway.  I turn the corner and a few folks look up but say nothing.  There is perhaps a faint glimmer of recognition but no greetings, no definite acknowledgments.  I enter my room to find it empty.  Everything that they had assigned to me is gone; only my own things remain — a stack of books and a few trinkets.  My things are lined up along the wall as if still contained on their bookshelf.  I grab a few items up into my arms (none of which I had originally come for) and try to leave the way I came.

We arrive at the shelter with the night coming quickly, close on our heels and ready to consume us.  I do not know what we were expecting.  A log cabin?  A English Tudor house?  No matter.  The shelter is octagonal and in many ways little more than a screened-in gazebo.  Considering what we have just been through, where we’ve come from, this should provide sufficient coverage for the night.  We set out things down and go about our quick-as-we-can business of securing the sight.  We check the screens for tears.  We bolt and lock the door.  We inspect the floorboards to make sure that none are loose.  Feeling safe enough, we unroll our sleeping bags.  But it isn’t long before we hear the low groans and know that they have found us.  Within minutes, we can hear their shuffling in the leaves and branches of the dark forest night around us.  We hear a thud on the roof.  We turn and see them start to climb up the screens: the zombie cats with their patchy fur and drooling hissing.  Fear overwhelms us.

The house knows your secrets.  It keeps memories from you, it forms opinions about you, casts judgment on you.  The rooms change shape when you enter, they reconfigure; the house wants you to feel at home but this is no place you’ve ever called by that name.  But you recognize it in tiny fragments.  The hinge on a cabinet door.  The grain of the wood paneling.  The carpet worn too thin along a certain path.  This isn’t the place you know but you know this place.  The house tells you that it’s okay, you can do whatever you want here, you are safe here.  But it’s trying to trick you.  You know that it will just use these thoughts, these deeds against you.

We have a pet orangutan; she wanders the house and speaks to us in Sign.  One evening, the orangutan tells us that she is pregnant and she dives into the swimming pool.  We watch her for a bit, waiting for something to happen.  The whole thing makes us very nervous.  After a while, the orangutan gets back out of the water and sits down, panting heavily.  After a few moments, she delivers the brain; then the baby orangutan.  She feeds the brain through the baby’s ear and then proceeds to nurse.

The mission, the secret has been compromised.  Our own expedition was a success in as much as our craft — a lightweight, one-man, helium-propelled bicycle of an aircraft — returned to base.  What none of us had banked on was that we would be pursued by a friend.  (M.F., was that you?)  His craft however, was not so provident.  Our intelligence reports tell us that he chased after us, that he out-performed us in the air, that he then went off the radar and never came back.  As the pilot, I am angered and shamed; as his friend I am saddened and confused.  Intelligence tells us that he had been coerced by Communists.  So many plausible explanations, so little time to find him.  We spring immediately to action.  Our evidence leads us to an elementary school.  We question the teachers, the students, we study the equations scribbled on the math class’ chalkboard.  Where could he have gone?