BY M. KOLBET
Copyright is held by the author.
IN MY fatuity, I find it easier to believe in God when I’m not in church, where everything seems too much like a recital, the last steps before an execution. Outside though, the trees, the passing smile of a woman, even traffic can make me believe in a heaven that’s all half days and dogs with wagging tails.
I’d left work before two because a migraine that had been battling me all day became a massacre. I felt like I was dying. Though I’d had more headaches in the months since my father died, skirting poverty with an almost cheerful indifference, this one was the worst. My thoughts were scattered, removed, and, when they dared muster again, beaten into submission. My boss, worried more over mistakes than deadlines, let me go. We weren’t exactly robbing orphanages or re-purposing monasteries without a thought to the cells, but extra scrutiny could create more trouble.
And my hurried departure should have been an exercise in frank innocence, the afternoon stretching before me. Time to lie down with the lights off, praying for palliation or at least sleep.
But when I reached the street where I parked five days a week, my car was gone.
A quick series of phone calls ensued. The vehicle had been towed. A mistake? Possibly.
Dispatch wasn’t saying. They said the information hadn’t been processed fully, a sentiment I didn’t dare believe. Words were merely bureaucratic merriment. I’d learned long ago not to trust speech until I was certain about what action would follow.
My upbringing was led by parents whose hard words and harder slaps had done little to encourage better behaviour. And school, which ought to have been some kind of intellectual haven, taught me that questions — at least those that didn’t fit anodyne rituals — were usually wrong. Year after year, teachers tried to kill the spirit to save the child. They never said it so honestly, hiding instead behind colourful posters that read: Something Challenging Pushes Me or Hard Days Mean a Growing Brain or simply, Grit it Out.
I had little choice now. The tow yard was too far to walk, but the person on the other end of the line assured me it was on the bus route. I planned to find an Uber, but my phone, like my mind, ground to a halt. Evidently I’d forgotten to charge it the night before.
With little ceremony, I began walking, tripping over the sidewalk like an errant bellboy.
The streets were mid-afternoon empty. People were either stuck at work, ensconced at home, or leery of downtown, which after years of protests and counter-protests, of unpredictable violence, seemed to exist only so the ghosts who rode buses had somewhere to haunt.
Besides, it might rain.
Any needs for real estate, furniture, appliances, or sporting goods could wait. I found a bus shelter and was surprised it still had a bench. So many modern civic decisions focused on making the city inhospitable to anyone who couldn’t pay to sit down: the price of a cup of coffee, which could vary wildly, was the minimum. The glass and steel enclosure had a kind of brutal beauty. Reading the weathered schedule, I saw that I’d just missed the number five, which would take me within in a mile of the tow yard. The next set of city wheels wouldn’t arrive for nearly half an hour.
I considered merely sitting, but a stray dog, sniffing the ground, approached and commenced growling. A massive animal, it looked like a mix between an Airedale Terrier and a German Shepherd. I didn’t have the medical training or the curious inclination to find out if the beast had rabies. Something cold skated up my back. The feeling of torment and eternity in this uncommonly abhorrent hound frightened me. Perhaps I’d seen too many movies, bought in the notion of compassionate, even altruistic dogs. I couldn’t see them as scourges. But dogs, like other kindred spirits, could be used to whip the world back into shape. To become a plague, a curse, or some other reminder of human frailty.
I shuffled briskly to one side of the glass shelter. When the dog was distracted by an invisible smell, I walked in the other direction, worried that if I started to run the animal would immediately give chase.
I wasn’t far wrong. I’d gone half a block when the barbaric critter noticed my absence and broke into a frantic run. Before fear could paralyze me, I ducked into the nearest business, which turned out to be a fortune teller’s, though the sign made it clear Madame Ilyas was also gifted at palmistry, Tarot, and dream interpretation. Enough to astonish any guests. Her myriad gifts were like the wisdom of a book written by a dozen authors. Whatever Madame Ilyas performed, I’m sure it felt authentic. Me, I just wanted a solid door between me and the outside world.
Peering back through the glass, I saw that it was raining, though the spitting precipitation seemed too light to drive a determined dog away. It had scented something more than trash. The smell of death hadn’t reached high enough for vultures to begin circling, though I had no doubt that something in the world was rising.
“I can make you feel lighter than you’ve ever been,” said a voice behind me. I turned to see the proprietor.
This was no wizened old woman, a shock of white hair and gnarled hands speaking to the wisdom of experience. It wasn’t even a middle-aged woman with dark flashing eyes and raven hair. No, it was a blonde woman, younger than me, smiling broadly as if ready to invite me to tea. Her expression would have been suspicious if it hadn’t been so encouraging.
“You didn’t plan to come here,” she said, sagely but still cheerily.
“No, I uh — ”
“But your head is feeling better.” I looked at her, wondering how much of it was a guess, merely reading my face, dissecting the circumstances of a businessman stumbling in on a Tuesday afternoon. She was right, though. My migraine had dulled to almost nothing. “And the dog, he’ll go away soon. For a while. There are other monsters now.”
“Listen,” I said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your day.” I was thinking this might be a favour. After all, if a passerby saw a customer going in — a rare occurrence, I imagined — they might abandon their qualms and check out Madame Ilyas’ predictions in their own time.
“No interruption,” she said. I considered that maybe she was the receptionist, a bright face to lure people in, a kind of Circe charm, but she quickly disabused me of that notion. “I wasn’t working with anyone else.”
God, I thought. At least she hadn’t said she was expecting me. Her guileless nature made me self-conscious.
“I just need to — ”
“Don’t tell me,” she said hurriedly, holding up a hand, taking a step back into the room, as if the openness was more conducive to whatever vibrations guided her . Her eyes drooped. “Most customers have enough doubts already.”
“I’m not here for anything,” I confessed. My fortune had been written that morning by an oncoming migraine. Time’s acoustics did the rest. Except the pain in my head was gone. I felt fine now. In fact, I was thinking more clearly than I had in weeks.
“Your car won’t be retrievable just yet.”
Fair enough. She’d probably seen me at the bus stop, staring at and dismissing the sign, the wealth of anxiety in a stranded man. It wasn’t much of a leap from that to someone missing their personal vehicle. But then, she spoke as if the lines had been scripted for her. There was no hesitation or awkward pausing, stammering to find the truth. She seemed to have a map already — the rest was merely reading.
I chuckled, enough to cover my discomfort.
“OK. That’s a neat trick —”
“No trick.” Her smile, which had vanished for a trice, returned, though now it was an exercise in discipline, nothing full. “Do people say your work is a trick?” She went on to specify details about my job, which still might have been a calculated guess, though the particulars shifted me closer to belief. I considered how often clients had accused me of lying, reneging on the essence of a contract if not the actual language.
I’d been standing near the entrance, but now attended to how the room fanned out. There were two curtained sections, though one was open and I could see a table with six chairs around it. Perhaps Madame Ilyas had a partner, or used different spaces to conduct her telepathic oscillation. Maybe she assumed a new name sometimes, donning a different disguise to please her audience. Though my host said nothing, I stepped toward the table, knowing it was what I wanted, but also feeling that somehow I’d been cheated.
I felt a strange moment of hope, the kind men will kill for.
It was cold in the room. As we made our way to the table, I could see the fortune teller’s breath, a white-blue cloud in the air that might make guests believe more readily in spirits. Maybe the chill didn’t bother one of God’s confidantes, someone who could tap into that well of infinite promises. In time, I was sure I could find a place to nestle inside these rooms. Perhaps it was just the expectation wrought by the curtains, though it seemed more than that, the portents of reckless hopes and unrehearsed words.
We sat down at the same time, instigating some ritual. I guessed now that this fortune teller succeeded, in part anyways, because she knew how to read the moment. She could make something, even coming to a table, more than what it was.
Madame Ilyas hadn’t locked the door, but perhaps she knew she wouldn’t be interrupted. I still imagined business was slow most days. I’d be the only person she saw all week. Yet rent had to be paid, somehow.
When we sat, she took each of my hands in hers. It was a reassuring gesture, though I’d expected it and had my hands laid out in front of me already. Probably it made me feel better because it was something I could make sense of. There was no extravagance in the touch. Then that smile again, predatory and soothing at the same time, the one spiders use in open parlors.
“It isn’t today that worries you,” she said, holding my eyes with hers. “You’re thinking like a movie, that before sundown you need to leave town or change your name. It’s all very dramatic.”
“But do I need to leave?” An excremental memory hummed in my temples. The past, mercifully delayed, was catching up with me, prepared to topple me, head first. I was thinking of a drive I’d taken the week before. I’d had a migraine at the time, knew I needed to pull over. But the road was narrow. At dusk it appeared to shrink even more. And when the wind picked up everything nearby went bump. So my particular bump seemed unimportant. A fallen tree limb. A stray opossum. The evening hadn’t been a monster tale, not in the traditional sense. The rain, which any cinematic endeavor would have turned into a storm, had been falling lightly, more like cotton than the big fat drops of storms.
“You will try to come back,” Madame Ilyas intoned, not clarifying how she expected me to vanish first, what my ultimate destination was. She had the look of an honest lunatic and suddenly it felt as though she was speaking to someone else. “It’s too dangerous. And time is bursting.”
“So what do I do?”
She released my hands, rubbed her own together, and extended an open palm. Payment was due. Ten dollars. If it had been more I told myself I would have objected, but the truth was that I’d begun to grow nervous. My fingers itched. My feet ached. I needed to get going.
The bus was idling near the shelter and this time I caught it. I offered a quick prayer of thanks. The words were more genuine than the prayers I jokingly shared with my boss when a deal went through. Those were entreaties about legalities and signatures, the haze of ethics. I hadn’t really prayed sincerely since my father died, in collusion with his financial and mental depression. He’d fooled me all through my adolescence with his timid smile, seeming like an imbecile happy to be duped, but pinning me down with his toilsome brand of torment, the fata morgana of treacherous words and brisk cuffs. So when our roles were reversed I’d bled his bank account, a little at a time, happy with my nameless thoughts. He never seemed to notice, but stayed in the same chair, greeted me with the same half-hearted hello when I visited the home I’d grown up in, the one he’d have to sell before long. The financial erasures were just the cost of age, which was a business unto itself. I might have gone on in exploiting his second childhood longer, but his death precipitated an escape. The will sent the remaining money to charity, including any gains in selling the house. I decided not to quibble with the lawyers but gave a eulogy praising my father as a fond fool, who could pass on with a bouquet of dry lilies.
There were only a handful of other riders on the bus, all who exited before we headed beyond the furthest limits of the city, where imperious red shadows gave way to grey outbuildings, abandoned factories, and eventually, the tow yard.
I marched the required mile and read the sign, bolted to a chain-link fence, with an audible sigh. They were open until six. This, I guessed, was a compromise, probably the result of protracted negotiations about what hours city employees could work and the needs of indigent citizens. It gave me some time to locate my car in the vast acreage of loss and regret, for I suspected the yard was less organized than even Madame Ilyas’ parlor and more prone to soft nightmares.
Yet here I was blessedly deceived. The fallacy of simple location did not thwart me. There was only one entrance, and though it was commanded by a middle-aged woman who appeared deep in the wells of ennui, someone who probably read her karma every day in the gravel drive, when I approached she asked how she could help. Her tone did not shift, and I suspected the words were part of a civic mandate as well.
“I wonder if I could look for — ”
“We’re not a junkyard,” she said curtly. “If you want parts, a spare tire, a new mirror, the lot for that is further on.” She pointed vaguely into the distance, somewhere that fit any definition of further on. I looked at her name tag and tried a more friendly approach.
“Midge, I’m looking for a specific car. My friend’s car.” Using my own name felt like telling too much. The woman may have had less formal training than Madame Ilyas, but she eyed me skeptically. “It came in today. The city towed it by mistake. It was in a paid spot, but my friend can’t get off work.”
“Cars are parked by date and time of entry. Newest cars near the front. In order to retrieve the vehicle you’ll need proof of ownership. Your friend,” she added, calling out my smug ignorance, “will have to provide proof of ownership.”
I nodded, and when she said nothing else, my doom laid out, walked into the yard.
Whatever the opposite of a mirage is, the yard was it. It was solid and dirty and undeniable. I spotted my car straightaway, and was surprised that three others pinned it in, blocking its exit. I marveled at the mathematical precision of the place. They must have adjusted their inventory hourly, shifting the cars in faux viatic fashion, for they moved only a few feet each time. Business was both steady and lucrative. The default position held.
I wandered slowly toward my car, not wishing to appear too eager, and even pretended to consult my phone as if to confirm what the car looked like. I was buying time to think. I could offer proof of ownership, but considered how to frame the narrative around it, that I’d stopped by my friend’s office to retrieve it. Still, I was sure I’d have to produce identification, a driver’s license. Something written down. And that worried me. For my bump in that night had also given a yelp.
“Hope it’s not that one,” Midge said, startling me. My heart jumped, and I’m not convinced my feet didn’t too.
I feigned looking past my car, at others lined up behind it, as if studying terra-cotta warriors and waiting for them to spring to life.
“This one? No, I don’t think so.” I checked my phone again, a locked screen picture of my cat.
“Cops told me not to let it out.”
“The police?”
“Theory is that this vehicle was used in a crime. Paint transfer gave them something, so they could track make and model. And they spotted it on the street. Had us pick her up.”
Things that get bumped off the road didn’t get picked up, I thought, not unless somebody was hungry. They didn’t rise on their own either.
Midge didn’t notice my distraction.
“They’re coming to get it this afternoon, thank goodness. I don’t like having a car in here that killed someone.”
“Killed?” I felt like a ventriloquist dummy with a prehistory of head injury. She looked at me strangely, full of the belief that people who get caught are always guilty.
“Yeah, killed. Some dying lady.”
I resisted the urge to repeat the word dying. Midge rewarded my silence with something better than a boxing glove. Maybe she got lonely most days, wanting more than tracks etched in the dirt. More than other people’s pain.
“Evidently the woman had some condition. An illness that, among other things, made her sleepwalk. She was dying faster than most, but her body didn’t know it. It kept moving, even when her brain was asleep.”
“She wouldn’t have known where she was,” I said carefully. Midge shrugged. We could only guess at someone else’s thoughts, and the process became doubly hard when they were ill, their mind obscured by meandering shadows.
When my car had hit the woman walking in the night, I’d told myself it was a coyote and almost believed it. Both of us were disappearing into another life. She’d already gone; I was running behind.
With mumbled thanks, I said I’d tell my friend I hadn’t found his car. Midge offered to look at my phone, to see if she remembered the vehicle, but I demurred. Thanked her again before I strode away, my eyes nearly jumping from my head.
I practically ran back to the bus stop, though my haste only meant more time to wait, half vagabond. The other part of tarried at the gallows. When the police arrived at the tow yard they would have no trouble with records, matching the car to its owner, to me.
As I rode the bus back into the city, I tried to think like a criminal, like a librarian or cartographer instead of an accounts manager. Like anything besides an animal. There was still time to get to my apartment. To pack a bag. Concerning destinations, nothing was certain. My thoughts, even those that saw me cross borders, felt hunted. Someone would be tracking my credit cards, monitoring my bank account. Withdrawing the daily limit today would be a sign of guilt, but also the only means of surviving through tomorrow. Without a car, I’d be sleeping rough or burning through cash at tawdry hotels, places where they didn’t bother with names.
The trip back to the city, a torment of linked impressions, seemed twice as long as the one out. The calendar meant the sun was setting earlier and earlier and it took me a moment to recollect where the bus had deposited me. On any other day my car would be parked a few blocks away. I passed a minute in foolish gazing.
It was the dog that set me straight. The beast came bounding up the street, barking and growling, a mini-Cerberus that had lost its way loafing among drugstores and cafes. It snapped at the air, at death flies I couldn’t see.
Immediately, I could tell the brute recognized me, or scented out my nervous smell, wine and undercooked meat. My tendency to cultivate deceit. The dog grew aggressive. This charge would not be one of a lolling afternoon, but something savagely haptic. Seeing the dog’s gaze, I broke into a dead sprint, yelling now, looking for trees to climb, buildings to scale, though I doubted those would be enough, faced as I was with a pitiless cur. The lindens didn’t stretch to heaven. The skyscrapers stood shy of the deprecating clouds.
Once more the only building with an open door belonged to Madame Ilyas. I tugged at the handle and was soon inside, closing the stiff glass behind me, barely noticing how the sign outside had been changed.
I breathed a sigh of relief as I shut the door behind me. I might even have giggled if the proprietor greeted me and told me fate had commanded me to return. But that young oracle, a diaphanous prophet, was nowhere to be seen. Instead I faced two police officers, one young and one old, the veteran paired with the rookie in script-like fashion. The older one looked like my father. The younger seemed an avenging angel.
Presumably Madame Ilyas had called them. At least she wasn’t there, waiting in a cop’s uniform as well, secretly laughing at me. I wondered how many cases she’d helped solve, officially or not, with delicate spells and hints. I still searched for a developed theme to escort me, a sunrise tone, a lavender taste.
But the room was transformed; only funeral flowers are real.
There were no longer any curtains or tables, no suggestion of crystal balls, divining cards, ethereal mists or a peek into the afterlife. Instead, there was a desk for a receptionist — presently abandoned, though I could envision Madame Ilyas cheerfully behind it, answering to the name Jenny or Barbara or Vivian — and a small scattering of cubicles. It was as though she’d never really been there. Like the God I wanted to believe in again, she’d perfected a withering resilience, an envoi I’d forgotten how to read.
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***

M. Kolbet teaches and writes in Oregon.