Where They Wait

by Scott Carson

Some circuits stay lit.

We pretend that love of Ashley bonds us. Grief. We pretend we’re moving on in her honor. But we each know better. I’m watching him, he’s watching me. Yoked together. Keep your enemies closer and all that.

Hometowns, he had said, are complicated places.

“Because he was a broke man with dreams and Bryce was a rich man with patience,” she said simply. “That’s how it works with benefactors, right?

Silence is one of a reporter’s best tools. The typical person either likes to fill silence or feels a need to do so. You learn a lot when someone talks more than they’d intended.

“Sorry. Old journalist’s instincts. We’re used to avoiding cooperation with sources, and we’re damn sure not used to making money.”

The anger was building in me now, the avalanche beginning, scattered pebbles sweeping downhill, driving rocks of rage ahead of them.

Horror story or not, I wanted to be the one who told it.

I felt like the mouse in a maze, loaded up with some new cocktail of mind-altering drugs, pursuing a path I didn’t understand beneath the watchful eye of a man who didn’t care whether I lived or died.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve read the phrase his eyes twinkled and—embarrassingly—how many times I’ve written it when too lazy to find an original phrase. I’d never seen it happen, though. In real life, it doesn’t happen, right?

“Affordable, portable, incredible. Almost omnipotent power. You can’t unleash it, though. Unless…” He smiled at me again. “You see how this ends, right?” “Unless you can deploy a defense for it.” “Precisely. A vaccine, so to speak. If I could say, ‘Here is the weapon, and here is the shield’… well, then. Well. We would really have something.”

The last man standing. It’s a phrase that usually signifies victory, a triumph against the odds.

I felt as if gravity had tripled in strength, no longer tethering me to the earth but threatening to pull me down into it.

A language study from Germany was particularly fascinating to her. They had a group of students who were learning Dutch. The researchers played Dutch words while the students slept, and retention improved. Their memories were clearly enhanced from merely hearing the words while they slept. Then the researchers put a twist on it—they played the same words and added a single, one-pitch tone immediately after. A beep, basically.” “And?” “The tone blocked the formation of memories. It was astonishing: the students in that control group didn’t simply fail to improve; they regressed. Their memories weakened.”

If you spend enough time on black ice, does an illusion of control return?

It was a long, slow kiss, the kind that can make the rest of the world fade away, at least for a moment.

No man among us must die No man among us must die If you want to see home I ask you to rise Tell you now to rise Now, now you must rise For no man among us must die

There are some things it’s healthier not to believe in, maybe. Until the time comes when your experience forces your mind to expand, at least. Then belief takes care of itself, and doubt detonates.

Purgatory, fine. Purgatorium is Latin, though—it’s not the kind of word that just comes to the tip of the tongue.” “Does it mean the same thing? Being trapped between worlds, awaiting a fate?” “Yes,” she said.

Giant rolling breakers, the kind that sounded peaceful and pleasant from a distance but would pummel and pull you down. Drown you.

Do not fear, oh, do not fear For no man among us must die No man among us must die If you want to see home I ask you to rise Tell you to rise Now, now you must rise For no man among us must die

We both laughed then. The laughter felt good. Better than good: it felt necessary, like a lifeline tossed from the shores of sanity.

She was pushing too hard for humor now, but I understood it, of course. She’d been terrified. She still was. The world had gone mad around her. You either laugh or you cry, right?

When I was reporting in combat zones, I’d trained myself to remember a single phrase by echoing it, usually unspoken but always moving my lips, the physical sensation designed to anchor it in the brain.

“Always huntin’. Like he was hungry for something and wouldn’t say what.”

A natural storyteller. The problem was most natural storytellers are bullshitters. What I needed was the truth.

Evangeline was Longfellow’s poem about the genocide of the Acadians. That one was popular when it came out, about a century after the crime was done.

Truth became fiction. Fiction became truth.”

Already, the sun seemed too high, though. The newborn day was aging fast.

When power is wielded without grace and compassion, we behold a dark world, indeed.

“What might I have done?” is, I suspect, the final earthly thought of many men.

“Il navigue avec moi maintenant.” The translation records as: “He sails with me now.”

The only assurance is that we exit into a mystery.

Birds hear in a totally different way than we do, man. Not just frequencies and distances; they hear everything but with a totally different purpose. It’s how they mate, migrate, everything.

Something conceived with the best intentions could go bad in a hurry when you played with power you didn’t fully understand.

“Every family has a legacy.”

The who, what, where, and why of the living did not matter so much. Not when squared off against the will of the dead.

Loons are expert divers, capable of pushing fast and deep when necessary. When they dive, they are not prey; they’re predators.

Human touch seems to matter.”

Even the blanket couldn’t hide the reality, though; it draped in unnatural dips and valleys while other areas rose like a volcanic mountain range.

She was dying but not dead. Very close, though. Her gorgeous green eyes told me that. She knew she was close, and she wanted help. Wanted peace. I dropped the pistol and went to Renee. Touched her face as gently as possible. Cleared my head and my heart, and began to sing. “Far, far down we go…”

She died in the night, but I sat with her until dawn. I didn’t want to leave her there alone after sunset.

I am a dreamer now, as I think any singer must be. The two are interwoven, inseparable.

The singer, I believe, must be gifted with vivid dreams and visceral memories. With clear eyes ahead and the breath of the past against the ear.

You don’t choose these gifts; they choose you. All we control is what we do with them.

A perfect sunset view. People love a sunset view, she assured me. People will pay for that.

Grackles are disliked by many people, often viewed as a nuisance, and yet they are extraordinary creatures, gifted, capable of uncanny navigation.

The grackle is one of a very few North American birds that can navigate through an extraordinary sense of the earth’s geomagnetic field. Some research suggests that humans might carry the same ability on a subconscious level. Others dispute this.

I also learned something new about the loons of Maine that first winter after I left Rosewater. When the lakes and ponds freeze and force them from their freshwater homes, they don’t migrate far. They head for the coast, for open stretches of salt water, and overwinter at sea. In the spring, they return inland and prepare for the eternal battles—birth, life, death. Finding a home. Feeding a family. Protecting those sacred, hard-won things.

Some circuits, as my father used to say, stay lit.