Everything We Don't Know Read online

  That night nothing felt right. What chain hotels we found along I-5 were largely empty. Gas station parking lots were either too small, too vacant or too exposed to truckers, travelers and highway patrol. The forest roads we found outside small towns had gates on them, preventing access to the secluded spots deep in the woods. Sleeping on the shoulder wasn’t an option. Two summers before, Michael Jordan’s father had been shot to death while he napped in his car at an Interstate rest area. We kept driving.

  The serrated points of evergreens loomed on the roadside. The tops of firs, cedars and spruce were black silhouetted against black. My eyes itched from fatigue and my calves ached. Dean drank Diet Coke to stay awake. I slumped in the passenger seat.

  I hadn’t stayed up all night since I was a kid, and even then it was only to consume countless sodas and watch horror movies until my middle school friends and I passed out on the living room sofas at dawn. This was different. Here we moved in a hushed, eerie realm of limited-visibility populated by truckers, druggies, coyotes, and those damned to the graveyard shift. Who else walked the earth at this hour? In European folklore, this was the witching hour, the period after midnight when supernatural creatures were thought to be at their most powerful. Tearing down the highway as the rest of Skagit and Snohomish counties slept, I felt like an undercover operative, someone with a mission and an accumulation of secrets. I savored the feeling.

  I needed to feel this. Already my routine was: eat, sleep, watch TV, go to school, drink on weekends, week after week. I could see the writing on the wall: two more years of college and it was off to the work force. A nine-to-five job. A cubicle. Florescent bulbs hanging from the office ceiling. Then what: marriage? Mortgages? Kids? Then cancer treatments, bladder control issues, erectile dysfunction?

  There had to be more to life. We weren’t tadpoles, we were humans. Yet even something as atypical as a roadtrip got mired in the mundane: find food, get sleep, pump gas, brush your teeth. I wasn’t sure what I expected, only that I expected more.

  Thin clouds formed a sheet over the highway, blocking the stars. Dean said, “I bet there are tons of bats out tonight.”

  With all the farms in those fertile volcanic lowlands, I said he was probably right. What else was out there? I stared into the darkness. A semi’s headlights passed. A large tractor sat dormant in a field. I said, “You ever wish there were goblins and griffins and all those mythical beasts?”

  Dean looked over smirking, scrunching his brow. “Are you high?” he said. Tarantulas, hawks, Gila monsters—was a horde of natural wonders enough to satisfy him? I turned to the window and rubbed my red eyes. “I just think the world must have been a whole lot more magical in ancient times.”

  In Medieval Europe, common people suffered the black plague, Inquisition and poor sanitation. But they also believed in elves, luminous fairies and nymphs. I’d explored caves, soaked in springs, slipped inside the dank cavities of hollow trees, and I had never seen any of these creatures.

  I imagined forest hovels, warlocks tending wood fires, concocting potions, casting spells. Roots, herbs, and berries. A broth filled with charms. Bats flapped overhead on the night of the full moon while knotted hands stirred iron caldrons.

  Round about the cauldron go;

  In the poison’d entrails throw.

  I thought of the witches of Macbeth:

  Double, double toil and trouble.

  Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

  I unrolled the window and hung my hand outside. Chilly wind battered my palm, sweeping the sweat aside. At seventy miles per hour, momentum resembled time speeding forward, hurtling us toward the smothering repetition of home. My dry eyes searched the sky for the moon but couldn’t find it.

  Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,

  Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,

  For a charm of powerful trouble,

  Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

  I set my head on the window sill and let the wind ruffle my hair. It seemed the world’s magic lessened with each year we aged. Childhood had been filled with it.

  When I was nine, I woke up every Saturday morning to watch the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Based loosely on the role-playing game—which, at the time, had a harmful, occult reputation among parents—the cartoon series aired on a local TV station from 1983 to 1985. The premise was fascinating. During a casual day at the fair, a group of young friends got pulled from their rollercoaster ride into an alternate dimension: the “Realm of Dungeons and Dragons.” Without reason or warning, the rollercoaster broke free from its track, disintegrated, and hurled the kids into an alien land where a longhaired elfin man named the Dungeon Master assigned them each weapons suited to their talents and temperament. One was a Ranger who shot magic arrows; one a teen wizard who pulled items from a hat; the eight-year old barbarian had a club that produced shockwaves when it hit the ground. Like most kids, all they wanted to do was return home. As they searched for a way back, they stumbled from adventure to adventure, rescuing the unfortunate and battling the dimension’s many evil forces: swine-faced soldiers named Orcs, skeleton warriors, and a demon named Vengar. The show had true bottom-of-the-barrel geek appeal, and I ate it up, because beneath the mundane setting of these ordinary kids’ lives lurked an exciting ulterior world, a world where they had superpowers, a purpose, a chance to be heroes and no clue about any of it until a portal spirited them away.

  In Episode 11, “The Box,” the mythological Greek character Pandora appeared in the altered form of Zandora. In Greek mythology, Pandora’s box—originally a jar—wasn’t a force of liberation, it was the source of the world’s troubles. Zeus gave Pandora the jar and instructed her to keep it shut. Since she had also been given the gift of curiosity, she inevitably opened it, and out rushed ills the world had not previously known: various evils, disease, burdensome labor. The story goes that Pandora hadn’t acted out of malice, only curiosity, and when she saw what she’d unleashed, she quickly closed it. Hope, apparently, also laid at the bottom of the jar. I felt the same way at age twenty while out in the woods. And watching Episode 11 as a kid, I knew that, had I found a box in a canyon, I would have opened it, too.

  “Let’s not go back,” I told Dean. We could ditch everything, live in the van, get crappy jobs, sleep in National Forests, travel city to city, park to park, and be free.

  “I agree,” he said. “I could do this forever.”

  He steered the van between the straight yellow lines. I looked at my watch. We were well past the witching hour.

  By the time we reached the town of Everett, the dark eastern sky was turning light blue. We wanted to see Possession Sound, that narrow stretch of water between the mainland and Whidbey Island. Instead, we watched the sun rise behind the Cascades from a window seat at McDonald’s.

  Pink. Lilac. Shades of ghostly lupine.

  Four sausage and egg breakfast sandwiches.

  As enchanting a sight as sunrise was, I wanted nothing more than to find a place to curl up in the passenger seat. Dean assured me we would sleep soon, and drove us to a nearby convenience store. We looked disheveled. Mud splattered Dean’s hiking boots and socks, and the hole in the bottom of my black Converse All-Stars kept letting in tiny pebbles. Blearily, we pulled caffeinated sodas from the store cooler as a frantic woman in her mid-twenties begged the clerk to use his phone. “Please,” she said. “I don’t have any money.” The clerk refused.

  When we found the women by the gas pumps, pacing in the yellow dawn, Dean asked if she needed help. She said she was trying to get home, then tailed us to our van and climbed into the passenger seat. “Hurry,” she said, “they’re following me.”

  Her long brown hair twirled as she scanned the perimeter. I didn’t see anybody. A single car sat in the lot. It was probably the clerk’s.

  Dean took the seat behind her and unfolded his pocket knife, in case she tried something.

  She directed me down the street. “Go left.” I steered the van down a two-lane r
oad. Her long nails dug into the arm rest, and I wondered how we’d ended up entangled in a stranger’s drama.

  “Turn there,” she said. We veered into a residential neighborhood. White, manicured houses lined the green, narrow streets.

  I studied our passenger sidelong. Trim waist, small nose, pink lips—had Dean and I seen her in a bar, we would have both wanted to talk to her. But in this frenzied state, she could have just robbed a store, fled the scene of an accident or had a pistol in her shirt.

  Eyes bulging, she said, “They’re right behind us!”

  I glanced in the rearview. There weren’t any headlights. Was she hallucinating?

  Dean’s aunt was schizophrenic. She refused assistance, quit taking her medication, and lived on the Phoenix streets in and out of homeless shelters.

  My stomach knotted from adrenaline.

  “Hurry,” the woman said. “They’re right down that street.”

  I looked out. The street was empty. Just rows of unlit houses, rose bushes and parked cars.

  I tried to think up ways to get rid of her. Yet another part of me feared she might really need our help. Her behavior, as strange as it was unsettling, mixed with the adrenaline and sleep-deprivation, awoke something in me that all the weed and shrooms could not.

  Dean tried to extract information, but the woman only screamed, “They’re catching up.”

  No one knew Dean’s aunt’s exact location day-to-day. Sometimes she called the family house to berate Dean’s mother, claiming she’d hired people to kill her. Other times she called to rant about demons who were pursuing her. Demons—that was a recurring obsession. As we sped through Everett, Dean’s aunt was somewhere lost in Phoenix.

  I repeated Dean’s question. “Who’s following you?”

  “Some people,” the woman said in a loud, labored voice. “They’re jealous. They always are.” She looked around but wouldn’t make eye-contact. “Keep going straight.”

  Dean caught my eye in the rear view. The dull two-inch blade hung by his knee.

  I floored it, as much to calm her as myself. Was this a lesson the spirits were trying to teach Dean and I? Keep doing drugs and you could end up losing your mind. If there were spirits, maybe this was a warning, their way of asking if I was prepared for the answers that I sought. Could I handle the truth? I’d never previously considered it. Maybe I would fall apart and want my ignorance back—too much fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Or maybe I would melt like the Germans in Raiders of the Lost Ark when they laid eyes on the contents of the Ark of the Covenant. Then again, maybe I had it backwards: couldn’t Dean and I be winning karmic points by helping a troubled stranger?

  I steered our crowded van. Wasn’t I doing the same dumb thing that I always did: looking for meaning where there wasn’t any? Why did my mind always go for these outlandish supernatural explanations, rather than the most reasonable? Maybe I had tripped one too many times. One day I might take a trip and never come back, go over the deep end, like her. But it wasn’t just me; it was a generalized problem with the human mind, the downside of cognition: the need to find order in disorder, to make sense out of the inexplicable, even if we imagined it.

  As my mind buzzed with debate, the woman motioned with one hand. “Right here.”

  I parked in front of a large home set back on a verdant yard, expecting her to dart from the car and run to safety. Instead, she hung her right leg out the car door and paused. “Okay thanks,” she said. “We should hang out sometime.” She scribbled her number on a scrap of paper that she fished from our ashtray. “Call me.”

  Dean climbed into the passenger seat as she sauntered up the front steps. He pocketed his knife. “My God,” I muttered. “What a trip.” I began mulling over theories as to what we’d just experienced: was she running from a rapist? An abusive boyfriend who threatened her? Was she suffering from amphetamine psychosis?

  “You know there was nobody following us,” Dean said, “right?” I nodded then admitted I wasn’t entirely sure. He snickered at my naiveté. “She’s totally schizophrenic.”

  I trusted he was right, but I didn’t want him to be. While the empirical side of me favored scientific thinking, the whimsical side resisted the idea that medical science could classify and explain away the complex and sometimes troubling nature of human behavior. I thought I’d read somewhere that certain scholars believed many of the great Biblical prophets’ visions resulted from seizures. What modern doctors would diagnose as epilepsy was, back then, perceived as the frightening ability to channel divine messages. When prophets spoke, ancient people listened. Now prophets and believers got tranquilizing prescriptions.

  We debated calling the number to see if the woman was alright, then we stored the paper in the ashtray and headed out of town.

  I steered us down the winding roads and onto the interstate, merging with the stream of morning commuters. The sun rose over the Cascades, blinding my tired eyes. Dean sipped his soda.

  “I can’t believe you thought she was serious,” he said further down the road.

  “Hey, what do I know?” I shrugged and put on my sunglasses. “She was scared. I mean, anything’s possible.”

  Dean shook his head, sucking on his straw.

  We slept in a south Seattle motel that morning: checked in during rush hour, checked out at 6:30 p.m. For the next two days we drove through Washington and Oregon into Northern California. As exhaustion set in not long after sunset, we agreed to sleep in the next town we hit. Twenty-nine miles northwest of the town of Weed, and several hours before bedtime, we arrived in Yreka.

  Next to a pasture beyond the glow of lights, we emptied the capsules onto a CD case and cut the PCP into lines with a credit card. Unsure of the proper dosage, we did it all, snorting it through a rolled dollar bill until our eyes teared up and noses stung. I wanted to sneeze but feared expelling the precious powder.

  We sat in the van wiping our eyes. I cut the engine and rolled down the windows. The smell of dry grass mixed with the glue-like odor caking my nostrils. Crickets chirped in the field. Our arms rested on the warm metal frame.

  “This stuff sucks,” I said. Knowing we’d be too many hundreds of miles away to complain, our Canadian hosts had probably cut the drug with something to keep the bulk for themselves.

  “Maybe it takes a while,” Dean said. We decided to drive around.

  Searching for a safe place, still hoping to lose our minds without attracting police, we headed west. Like the rollercoaster in D&D, the narrow country road buckled, lifting free of the golden valley and hurling us into the mountains. Thin pines crowded around, deepening the already deep night. On a curve in the road, I eased the van into a dirt pullout tucked against a hillside. We stepped outside. A fine patina of stars dusted the heavens. I looked up and my head spun so fast I thought I was going to puke. Dean said he felt the same. I looked down, hoping to dull the motion sickness, but the dizziness remained. Squinting didn’t help, or drawing breath.

  One of us said, “I need to lie down.” For some reason we chose the middle of the road.

  Stepping from the shoulder, we laid on our backs on the warm blacktop. Feet to the east, heads to the west, Dean sprawled on one side of the lane line, I on the other. We folded our hands across our chests like mummies and set our shoulders a foot apart.

  The chirping crickets grew louder and warmth rose through the back of my shirt. Following teenage drinking protocol, I focused my eyes on something fixed: the stars. They glowed between the dark treetops but were not staying still. They seemed to be slowly rolling over, the night sky’s entire surface slewing to the right. I watched the celestial film drift southward as if atop a body of water, pulling me with it as it spilled over the trees. I pinched my eyes shut, trying to halt the world, but it revolved within the darkness under my eyelids.

  “I’m getting sick standing still,” I said. Dean too. We were in the foothills of the Klamath Mountains, in one of the West Coast’s most Eden-like and least populated areas, an
d we couldn’t do anything but close our eyes.

  The hills were quiet enough that we assumed we would hear a car approaching. Or, with our eyes open, at least see the headlights reflected on the pines. We wouldn’t be able to test this theory until a car drove up from either direction, and it didn’t matter. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. My chest pounded and pulse thumped in my neck. Pressing my fingers to my temples, I awaited the pang of expiration.

  I had long wished I shared Dean’s quiet acceptance of death. Heaven sounded wonderful, reincarnation better. I wanted to imagine that, upon dying, our spirits were ferried into another dimension where our minds lived on—our conscious selves, with all our memories, personality, and sense of humor intact—so that, even if reincarnated as a Skagit Valley farm cat or a Snoqualmie Pass huckleberry bush, we would forever remain ourselves. Aaron, always Aaron. I just kept thinking of what my dad believed. “When you die,” he’d said on numerous occasions, “you die. That’s it.” He’d been raised Baptist but later forsook it as “Fear of fire and brimstone.” Many people, some in our own family, spent their whole lives preparing for the afterlife—penance, church services, no drinking, no dancing, frequently giving alms. But what if, as I feared, their conception was wrong and my father’s was right? That we were doomed to lie in the dirt until we became indistinguishable from it? Lying on that mountain road, I thought we were resting in our graves, that if a car didn’t kill us the PCP would, leaving us for the animals to pick apart. Foxes would emerge from the forest to tug at our flesh. Coyotes would drag an arm in one direction, a rib in another.

  During my elementary school, a recurring sensation often washed over me. For that brief moment right before sleep, I drifted through space in a universe without planets. Nothing in the distance, nothing in every direction. For one overwhelming second my primate brain grasped the elusive notion of death as a long, black, empty forever. That’s what awaits us, I’d think: eternal nothing, infinite blackness. The sensation never lasted more than two seconds. Then my eyes jolted open, and I pressed my face into the pillow to silence my sobs.