An earlier version of this story was originally published by JAKE Magazine on June 20, 2022.
Witness report #1: Collin M.
R_________ Cty Sheriff’s Dept
[Time/date withheld]
It was only twenty minutes ago, maybe twenty-five, but I felt like I was already awake when it happened. At first I thought that someone had broken into the room—but when I turned on the light, I saw that I was all alone. I went outside to see if anything was out of place, but nothing at all had changed out there, either, and I thought for a second that maybe I’d dreamed the whole thing.But right as I was turning to go back in, the man from next door came out of his room, and that was when I realized that something must have happened.
★
Whatever it was, whatever it had been, the truth about that night was something that had grown very remote from Collin—everywhere in the darkness, which was where it seemed to have its eyes, he could feel it boring into his conscience like the prick of a pin if ever he got too close. What had really happened was now a secret of a kind, a detail so fine that, in its omission, it had suddenly become everything.
Collin ran through the story in his head one more time. He hoped that another pass at it might bring those last few details into clearer focus, until at last they were discernible, took on the characteristics of something he could see, feel, identify. But except for how it ended, there had been nothing at all remarkable about that night, which was beginning to make him doubt even his own memory. Again Collin thought of the police reports—the alibis, the corroborating witnesses, the written accounts which lent physical form to his rather indistinct sense of time—and finally began to accept that, at the very least, some part of what he remembered must have actually happened there.
Collin’s story went like this: several hours earlier in the night, long before this part of it had gotten started, Collin walked out of a Gulf gas station to sit on the hood of his car, which was where he peered into the sandy plains below as though from an outpost at the top of the High Sierra mountains. Collin wouldn’t make it out to California this time, he knew—he was headed due north on I-20 instead, a direct line to Wichita Falls, Texas, where he was bound for no particular reason at all—but the bodied memory of having ascended one or two of the mountains in the Golden State had never quite left him, not even after all these years had gone by. Collin peeled the lid from the tin of sardines he’d just bought inside the shop, beginning to tear away at the flaky white flesh now with a plastic fork, and then again lost sight of himself down among the yawning gaze of the open valley. It was all so beautiful from high above—there were still a few of the east’s knobby hills to be seen surviving here if you made it this far out, but even they were growing sparer with each sprawling westward mile: it was the part of the country that told you only that you hadn’t made it yet, the part that was right between the east and the west, the part that was right between the here and the there.
The part that was right between the day and the night, in fact—all around Collin now it was beginning to get dark. Suddenly, as though in protest of the changing cadence, the streetlight above Collin began to warm to life, followed by clusters of them down in the valley below, the contours of entire cities awakening in succession as each of their power grids slowly came online. But Collin paid none of those any attention, peering only at the one suspended high above him, where it hung in the very same desert sky that it appeared to render starless: that was the one that was his. And rather than to deny him the rules of its secret language, the lamp had instead seemed to reciprocate his bond—in only an instant, it had already put him in touch with all the people in all those towns, each of them taking part in this same shared ritual, the cumbersome task of turning day into night. To someone on the outside, it would appear as little more than the flip of an operator switch, buried somewhere deep within the machinery of the desert, rigged to and triggered each night by a pristinely-tuned nuclear clock—but as it often went, there was so much more to this than met the eye.
Collin had been a young man when he’d first come out this way. He’d wanted to find what he could find past the edges of things, on the unlived side, past the lines of his comfortable life back home. He would seek it out, his object that was no object, leaving no trace except for the footsteps and the photographs. As far as Collin was concerned, it was enough just to know there was still life out there.
“I’m going out west,” he’d told his boss Roger one day out of exactly nowhere, an impulse he seemed to have plucked from thin air.
At his desk, Roger had taken off his headphones, and then he’d looked up at where Collin was standing over him. “What did you say?” was all Roger asked.
“I’m going out west,” Collin told him a second time, “to the desert.” And what was a person supposed to say about that?
“Are you quitting?” Roger asked him now, and then Collin told him that, as a matter of fact, yes he was.
“I guess I have to,” was how that part came out.
That day, Collin left his job, broke the lease on his apartment, and then—without another word to anyone—packed what things he could fit inside his car, carrying them with him out of town once and for all. The whole thing was just as easy as that.
It had been, anyway: eventually Collin ran out of money, which was the moment he realized how much further there was to go. Collin would have to start again, finding something here or there for a couple of weeks at a time: any short-term outfit would do—harvest season work on a tobacco farm, prep work in the kitchen of a roadside restaurant, it didn’t matter to him—and when at last he had saved enough to pick up his trail, he would get back on the road, continuing along on his way.
You could go this same distance every day, Collin had written in a journal once, back in those early days when he still tried to keep them, and even then you may never get where you were going. Eventually, of course, even the journals couldn’t keep up—there had been no record now for a long time, no indicator of life except that there had once been one. When Collin looked back on the journals now, he found only that he still had the very same questions, and wherever a new one had reared its head in the meantime, it was only because it was the answer to an old one, a mystifying hydra of traveler’s wonder.
But sometimes, when he wasn’t looking for answers, Collin was able to find something there. Those were the times when Collin would open one of the little black notebooks right to the middle—on that night, for instance, he opened this one in particular—and tucked inside its pages, just like a toy in a cereal box, he would perhaps find the description of a sunset that had comforted him once:
If you could liberate every gradation, setting each ray of light free of all its chains, would it come to life with a will all its own, or drift instead back to the sunset on a breeze?
Or else he might stumble upon a passage he’d read once and liked the sound of, words which he’d thought to take down into the notebook for a moment exactly like this:
If there is a man, the statement whereby we say that there is a man is true, and reciprocally—since if the statement whereby we say that there is a man is true, there is a man.
But no matter what it was that Collin found, if it resonated with him deeply enough, it meant to him only that it could never have been that important—how could it be, if the same thought could be had at any moment at all? How could anything of consequence exist in two places at once?
“Nothing new under the sun,” Collin would sigh to himself, for a moment wishing only that the notebook in his hands was full of blank, white pages.
Once he’d finished his sardines, Collin lobbed the case of beer he’d bought with them into the trunk of his loaded car. Collin turned over the key in his ignition and oriented himself down toward the valley that awaited him. In that moment, everything was still so possible, the night spread out before him still so rich in its varied contents. To Collin, all of that was beautiful—he had been there at the moment of a small birth. And even better was that fact that, on that night in particular—once he’d checked himself securely into the safety of a motel—Collin knew that he was going to get drunk.
★
Witness report #2: [Name redacted]
R_________ Cty Sheriff’s Dept
[Time/date withheld]It was right before _:__, because it was right before ___ _ _____ was over, they was just fixing to roll the credits. Suddenly the TV went——well, there was static for about a split second, you know, and then there was the blast, but after that it went right back to normal. I looked out the window, but it sounded like whatever it was come from pretty far off.
Right around then was when I first called you, and then I went out into the courtyard to see if anybody else was awake. The first two fellas was standing outside smoking cigarettes in front of their rooms. I told them that you was on your way, that they should just sit tight. The older fella said he wasn’t gonna do that, but I was able to talk some sense into him. When ___________ come out of his room, I went over and said the same thing to him. I could tell we was all a little shook up, to be honest with you. With everything going on lately, there wasn’t no telling what it was liable to be.
★
“Hello, caller,” the radio host was saying now, replicating himself over the AM airwaves, part of the same ritual that renewed itself into perpetuity every night in the desert. And every night in the desert, those very same words would eventually tear themselves apart, reforming on the back of an altogether different frequency only once Collin found himself within its range. Whenever the signal would invariably vanish, Collin would skim the radio diligently until at last he was able to recover it, hard at work drawing out a spirit, scanning the inside for something that desperately wanted out. It could grow nearer to him, or else it could grow farther away—there were certain patterns, recognizable tendencies, that Collin had grown accustomed to looking for over the years, and he came to adjust the dial preemptively as a way of satisfying the signal’s demands. The sound of the host’s voice would return to focus momentarily, sharpening as perhaps Collin ascended a hill, and that was how he knew to nudge the dial, ever so slightly, just a little bit more to the right. Otherwise, the clarity might fall away completely—if he plunged into the bowels of the land, for instance, coming down on the other side of the same steep hill—and the noise would fragment into something like a rudimentary morse code, unmasking the energy that occupied most of the atmosphere surrounding his body. Whenever that happened, Collin would frantically try to relocate the host’s voice, searching for an anchor to the world from his own position on this side of the void.
“Hello, caller,” was what that anchor sounded like.
Every night it was the same story—and it was no different on that night, the night that this story was just beginning to be about, only a couple of hours to go now before everything started to happen. For a moment, Collin lost the voice just the same as he had before, and it wasn’t until he discovered it on another channel—until it returned to him abreast of yet another airwave—that finally, there it was, the answer to his questions.
“You didn’t disconnect me before, did you?” a man began at the sound of the host’s address. The man had a brittle voice, one that made him sound as if he’d been splintered slowly, over the long course of time, into the composite of five-year old children that constituted his life.
“What,” was all the host asked him, “earlier tonight?” The host had one of those voices—you could recognize it anywhere.
Lighting a cigarette, Collin plunged his left hand out the window into the pocket of night that engulfed the car, and under the sudden force of the wind, his arm snapped back completely at the elbow with a jerk.
“Toward the end of the last hour,” the caller went on, “you said, ‘West of the Rockies, you’re on the air.’ And then you were replaced immediately by an operator, who said, ‘Your party has not connected—’”
“—well, as you can tell, I don’t screen my calls—”
“—right—”
“—so what happened is I answered the phone right when they’d let you ring as long as they were gonna let you ring—”
“—yeah?—”
“—and sometimes that happens, I’ll go to a line and it’s dead, there’ll be nobody there, and that’s what happened tonight—”
“—yeah—”
“—you were right on the cusp—”
But at that very moment, Collin was plunging his car from the highway into an exit ramp. When he arrived inside the town, he crept along down the narrow strip of a street called Main, parking finally in the lot of a roadside motel, the brightly-lit vacancy sign there having lured him into its orbit like a beacon in the night. As Collin snapped off his ignition, he trapped the voices back inside the airwaves that contained them, so that whatever it was that they had left to say, whatever the two of them were busy straightening out at long last, it was being done quietly, somewhere on the other side of the wall.
Through the darkness that had begun to collect in the courtyard of the motel, Collin could see a man in the office doting over an old television of some kind, which he pounded on suddenly to bring the picture into view, sitting in a rolling chair behind the window that was stamped like a thumbprint into the building. When he approached, Collin saw that it was made of bulletproof glass.
“How many,” was all the man inside said. The man scratched his leg as he averted his gaze from the television, rolling forward in his chair as though the whole thing had just become a chore for him.
“Just one,” Collin told him, pressing his ID against the glass.
“Slide it under,” the attendant ordered, gesturing after the license with a pinching motion. The nametag on his shirt read LOU. “You want smoking or non?”
“Whatever’s cheapest,” was all Collin said, but Lou looked at him through the bulletproof glass.
“They’re the same,” was what he said to Collin. “You want to smoke inside your room or not?”
The motel had been cash only, but there was an ATM near the lobby with a $7 service charge. Once he’d paid the dues that granted him access to room 113, Collin emptied his bag of clothes out onto the bed, and then he did the same with the case of beer, shaking each bottle loose from the cardboard box, the contents of each container folding into the other until finally becoming a single set of things. Collin lifted one of the beers and twisted off the cap, beginning to sort the clothes into the darks and the lights, rattling some loose change in his pocket, producing a small baggie of quarters from his backpack. Out the room’s only window, the silhouette of a man drifted by, and Collin waited patiently as the shadow passed over the closed blinds, a suspension that found resolution only when the door to the next room slammed shut.
Once the shadow had at last come and gone, leaving Collin all alone now inside the little room, he began to carry the armful of clothes to the motel’s laundry station, which he’d found by following another brightly-lit sign.
The sign buzzed overhead as Collin walked under it.
Collin counted the quarters back in his hand like he was sifting through grains of sand—he was looking for something imperceptibly smaller, it seemed, something that could be picked up by no instrument—before inserting the coins, one after the next, into the washing machine where they seemed to disappear. But even there they continued on life, falling upon the heap of change accumulating within, the sound they made like galvanized droplets of water rejecting the hard puddle to which they’d finally returned. Tomorrow, with his clean clothes, Collin would get a fresh start.
★
Witness report #3: [Name redacted]
R_________ Cty Sheriff’s Dept
[Time/date withheld]I came out of my room a few minutes later than everyone else, maybe around _:__. I’m just staying here tonight, on my way to _______. It’s my _____ __________ tomorrow.
The other guys were already standing around talking, and the owner just came over to say that you were on your way. He said that he didn’t know what it was, so I checked my phone, but of course there wasn’t anything out about it yet. I would’ve believed that it happened here every night, the way they stood there and kept smoking.
★
Three beers had come and gone in the night, and Collin was lying on the bed inside of his motel room, watching C-Span on the little television as he quietly folded his laundry. Onscreen, a senator stood in the middle of the chamber floor, occupying time with nothing more than the presence of his body, stalling a motion underway with the absolute stillness of a filibuster.
During a commercial break, Collin got up from the bed to step outside for a cigarette. He opened the door to reveal the figure from earlier, this time stopping short now that his body was in clear view, but otherwise passing by just as he had done three beers before. Slightly embarrassed, the man peered at Collin through his thick, wire-framed glasses—he had on flip-flops the color of an ancient coral reef, and tropical shorts that disappeared somewhere under his belly, which was only mostly covered by the Margaritaville T-shirt he’d stretched over it. Beneath the low hum of the C-Span, Cajun music lilted from the open windows of an El Camino sitting just beyond the door, which Collin assumed must have belonged to the old man he saw. Besides his own, there were no other cars parked on the empty lot.
“Hey,” Collin said accidentally, unsettled by having caught the man like this.
“Hey,” the man grunted back indifferently, then vanished into the next room with another slam of the door.
At last Collin was able to get his cigarette lit, and as he inhaled it, he looked down its length, watching as the distance between himself and the end grew shorter in the long span of time that carried them. As the cigarette did the very thing it was made for, it seemed, gradually there would be less of it, until at last it disappeared altogether.
Suddenly, a man in a navy suit appeared in the courtyard, having just stepped away from the counter of the check-in window. He walked briskly toward Collin, pulling a rolling suitcase along the pockmarked asphalt behind him, slowing to a stop to examine the key in his hand. For a moment, the man scanned the long row of doors to find the unitary one that the key would unlock, and once he’d decided on his approach got started again, this time with a resolve that seemed to have been affected in some way.
As Collin took one last drag from the cigarette, the man glanced over at him, taking a deep breath of the air that had suddenly become infected. His eyes darted toward the cigarette, and then flashed back at Collin, the disparate irritation of a smoker from a past life.
“Hey,” was all the man said, as though the word itself were currency manufactured to be palmed between strangers.
“Hey,” Collin told the man in turn, then stubbed out his cigarette and stepped back into his room, which was where he started to put his laundry in his American Tourister.
★
Witness report #4: [Name redacted]
R_________ Cty Sheriff’s Dept
[Time/date withheld]Oh, it must have been about 4:30 or 5, I reckon. I had to be up soon anyway, I’m going out to ______ today. I’ve got to go get a bunch of my stuff.
Well, it come out of nowhere, it was this sound like nothing you ever heard. It like to have scared us all half to death. I must’ve fell asleep with the TV on, cause that’s the only way I could see the door, and when I went outside the kid from the other room was just standing out there smoking a cigarette. The manager come out and told us to hold still, that you was gonna be down here soon to get statements from everybody. And so, well I told him, I gotta be out of here early, I got to go get my stuff. I’m going out to ______ first thing in the morning. But he said it wouldn’t take that long. I said I got better things to do than stand around and tell some cop my thoughts. No offense. Just could’ve done without this, that’s for sure.
★
Around 4:30 in the morning was when it finally happened—a sound like a sudden explosion, without warning, extended to the world from somewhere completely outside of time itself.
Collin flipped on the lamp beside him and darted bolt upright in his bed. Under the diffuse glow of the light that peeked out past the shade, he searched the room frantically, but found only that nothing had changed—whatever it was, it couldn’t have come from in here. Slowly, cautiously, Collin looked through the blinds and out the window, then opened the door quietly and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Collin placed a cigarette inside his mouth like a single tooth and got it lit, looking into the night at the world that had gone on moving all around him.
What could it have been? For a moment it had seemed so real, so violent, so disquieting—but maybe it had only come from the inside after all, the real inside, emerging into this world from its life inside a dream.
Then again, what if it had been a gas main? No—Collin heaved a sigh of disturbed relief before clutching his lighter deep inside the pocket of his sweatpants. If that’s what this had been, he would already be dead.
Collin heard a quiet creaking sound, prompting him to turn around and watch the man from next door spill out of his room in those flip-flops, the shorts, the T-shirt.
“What was that all about?” was all he said to Collin.
“I don’t know,” Collin told him, and then said, “I thought maybe I’d dreamed it.” Collin couldn’t tell if he was kidding about that part or not. He took a long, deep huff from the cigarette before allowing the smoke to exit his body, looking into the darkness of the night that extended way out beyond the courtyard, its vanishing point somewhere in the field on the other side of the road. Whatever it was, whatever it had been, it was somewhere out there—out in the next life.
“Hey,” the man asked Collin now, “you got one of those things you can spare?
“Sure,” Collin remarked, realizing that the old man was talking about a cigarette, and handed him one so that the two of them stood together, smoking there in silence. “It’ll be the one that saves my life,” was what Collin said about it.
At this, the old man laughed. To the right person, a joke was a calling card, representing a shared sense of experience beneath the clutter of appearances. It served as a magnetism of impermanence that could bind two people together for a moment, the gravity of knowing that if you ever wanted to see the other again, you probably never would—and that even if you did, by then they would already have become someone completely different.
“I’m from Birmingham,” the man from next door told Collin. “Gotta leave out of here early. Could’ve done without this mess, that’s for sure.” The man took a short breath of fresh air before shoving the cigarette back inside his mouth.
“Where are you headed?” Collin asked him. Collin had told himself his own story, had repeated it so many times now, that his memory was no longer able to hold any space for it. All he could do was latch onto something else for a little while.
“Tucson,” the man grunted. After that, there was a stillness in the air.
Suddenly, a door slammed shut on the other side of the courtyard, and out of it came Lou, walking toward them until they could both see the expression on his face, telling them only that he didn’t know, either. Lou was hanging onto a clipboard in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
“Y’all hear it?” was all he had to say. From the corners of his mouth, smoke unfurled angrily, like Lou might have been an angry toy.
“It woke me up,” Collin told him. “Do you have any idea what it was?”
But Lou just shook his head. “No, sir. Sheriff’s department’ll be here soon, though. They hadn’t heard anything, either.” Lou blew a cloud of smoke into the night and spoke again. “They’ll probably want statements.”
“Well I had to go back to bed before,” the man from next door grumbled, “but now I really gotta go back to bed.”
“Hang on, now,” Lou just told him, “it ain’t gonna take that long.” Lou sucked from his cigarette brutally, a sure sign of his mental state, and then threw it down onto the ground once and for all. “We’ll make sure they do you first,” he said, and then, off into the distance, shouted, “Hey!”
When Collin turned to see what Lou was yelling at, he saw the man from before, who had been in the navy suit. The man had appeared in his doorway with a look of confusion, and Lou trotted toward him to repeat the cursory details. As he began to walk away, the click of his lighter reverberated around the courtyard.
“Well I gotta be outta here early,” the man from next door resumed. The man from next door was a broken record. “I gotta get out to Tucson to get my stuff. I got a truck out there. A motorcycle. A couple of boats. I gotta get out there and get it all.”
“Yeah?” was all Collin had to say about that. “Say,” he said, “I think I’m going to open a beer while we wait. You want one?”
“Sure,” the man from next door grinned. “Only one, though. It’s gonna be daylight here before too long.” The old man grew silent for a moment, and then he said, “Last time I tried, my old man got me put in jail. Just for coming down there to get my own stuff.” The old man inhaled one last time through the cigarette, then crushed it out against the cinderblock wall of the motel’s exterior. He heaved a deep sigh, and then he whispered quietly, as though he were reminding himself, “I gotta go get my stuff, and then I gotta get this leg looked at.”
But already inside the motel room, Collin could no longer hear him. Collin twisted the caps from two beers, and then he closed the door to the mini-fridge, the airlocked seal producing a sound almost as quiet as a whisper. The sheriff’s department would get here soon, Collin knew, and when they did, they were going to be needing statements.