Along the Tether

Since my mother’s fall, nearly every day she’s asking me to take her to the sound bath again. She holds her injured arm up for me to see. This bruising down her side needs to be mitigated. There is numbness to her second knuckles, and her toes. In fact, she blames her lack of improvement on not having gone in so long.

So, nearly every day, I walk her request back in from the gas station side mart, where she now stays, to our rest stop’s main building, to the group of men who call themselves The Council. Today I find them steeping coffee grounds together from one cup to another by the condiment dispensers.

Is that a walk that she could make anymore? they ask.

Even clipped and following the tether?

They shake their heads at these questions that they’ve posed. Not a one of them will venture outside to evaluate and see her for themselves, however; they’d prefer to know as little as they can about the invalids. There is no help they can actually offer, after all.

Though I am dismissed, the one who calls himself the foreman stands from their group and pulls me aside to ask if I could help him with something. In the maintenance corridor is a set of mirrors that he’s attached to 2x4’s and would like to have polished as signal arms meant for the roof.

He says that learning how to flash out codes by catching sunlight in the mirrors will double our communications distance. Triple it, even.

These are the sorts of inconsequential jobs we’ve started inventing for one another in an attempt to keep busy. He begins an as-the-crow-flies conversation about how long I think it’d take to get to the next rest stops and about accounting for the curvature of the earth but instead of engaging with him any further I wander out the door, out around and to the front parking lot. The foreman doesn’t shout after me. Although I do not accept it, this was his way of apologizing: offering an activity. Putting my mind to something else. And it’s why I make sure to never promise my mother anything.

Outside, a little crowd has gathered atop the picnic benches that line the rest stop’s front bank facing the highway. They’re staring across at a spot where a piece of the barrier wall has crumbled apart, revealing a high knot of beech roots over a dark opening.

What happened? I ask. Did someone cross the highway?

I get a look from each of them. Of course not.

It was just like that this morning, Marlin says, hardly turning towards me.

We all gasp when, not five minutes later, a tiny man emerges from the opening, crawls up onto a beech root, and stares at us.

There are a few glints from what looks like a spyglass, sweeping back and forth. He takes something out from a breast pocket. A little book? This man is taking notes.

In all my life, someone says, I never would have imagined.

It’s a little goblin man.

A fae man, someone else corrects.

He must have knocked the hole in the wall.

I guess so. Are they strong enough to do that?

Under our mounting attention the tiny man suddenly stuffs his things away and disappears.

We argue over whether he had truly vanished or simply jumped down out of sight.

Everyone seems afraid to breathe too loudly.

It’s more than I can bear. I take an unattended asphalt rake and no one turns around; they are content to stand on the picnic benches for some time, staring, but I am not.

There are no set working hours and I do not stay on top of things, but I will preen the cracks from the semi-circle of parking lots surrounding our rest stop and collect any desiccated car parts into my little bag, in case they’re worth displaying on the window sills. Though most of the good stuff has been claimed or traded away by now. The cars themselves by this point are barely more than brown insectile shells.

Around dusk a messenger arrives from the south, from Rest Stop 1202, along the tether. His bag is full and the others crowd around him; it is some time before I can confirm that it is Placard, the only of the 1202 folks that I know. He takes his eye mask off and we embrace.

By the guidelines he is not allowed to unclip until within the main building’s vestibule, having to follow the tether through where it’s been carefully tensioned between our several trees and then fed through a small hole at the bottom of the door. Too many people have been lost to the open landscape; the tether runs about a hundred miles up and down what’s left of the highway, they say, connecting a dozen rest stops.

He says that not a single walking convoy has ventured over their suspension bridge in months, before sifting through the cardboard box of sugar rations on top of the trash can, taking a cocoa bomb, and biting into it like a nectarine.

And that bridge is in great shape, he says. Relatively.

I take him into the food court so that we can sit with our legs touching in my booth beneath the windows.

Have you heard about our little fae man? I ask.

Yes, they were all saying you had a visitor.

It was as if he’d been birthed fully formed from the wilderness, two feet tall, like I could have sat him on my knee.

What’s beyond the wall, anyway?

Acadia, New Jersey.

Is there anything left of it?

We’ve never given anyone permission to go unclipped and check.

I lean against him while he cleans the chocolate from his hands and face with my station rag, even though it smells like blue cleaner. We touch at the seams of one another’s coveralls.

After about 25 minutes he leaves me, vibrating, to go and accept a slab of cinnamon dough from Lex at the kiosk and eat it while playing with her hair.

He needs to make his rounds; I get it.

By the time he’s ready to go back home it’s gotten dark and his pack is belted shut, overflowing with metal trinkets, frosting tubs, toilet cleaner, and unimportant messages for old friends written out on cardboard tubes. He kisses me on the mouth, though I’m not the only one, before slipping on his eye mask. There are two keychains of pen-lights, one on either hip, that he uses to find his feet on his way along the tether, a clatter of little beams as he walks. He let me look at them all, once. Faded, scratched out brand-names of companies I barely remember. Promotional things. I kept a green one. Half a bank’s name. It never did work.

In the side mart at the gas station they have found a cigarette again; they are passing it to one another like an injured baby bird.

I kneel beside my mother and check the cables of her arm sling, tug her shirt sleeve into place, shake a breath of talcum powder down her collar, wipe her brow, stir her a cup of rehydrated eggs, and hold the approaching cigarette against her lips before sending it along.

Have you asked about the sound bath? she asks. My joints could use the resonance. I could stand to get lost in other thoughts.

And I tell her that, no, unfortunately her request was declined.

We take a long look out the glass door together towards the main building and I pretend to join her in trying to parse the reasoning of the men we’ve put in charge but really I’m simply exhausted. Staring at nothing at all.

Dorian has passed, she says eventually, gesturing to a sitting spot by an old ice cream case now taken by a man with steel wires wrapped around his legs, whose name escapes me.

I know, I say. It was announced before rounds this morning.

He was carried to the mulch?

She means where the swings used to be; there have been no children around for a very long time and it was the only ground soft enough for the tools that we have.

I say, He was.

And she gives a great pained sigh in turning to push up off the wall enough to fall against me.

We hug.

By the time the nearly-spent cigarette makes its way back around to us I am recounting our fae encounter for her benefit: his easy way of floating up the tree roots, the shimmer of the metal clasps across his chest. The others lean in, interested.

An elderly woman across the room who’s been propped upright with shelving brackets says that she once was vigiled over by such creatures, as a child. Brownies, peopling her room between her dolls. Between her feet. Muted eyes, drawn by her heavy fever. They tugged her earlobes and evened out the drawstrings of her windowblinds, but her parents would never believe what she said. The doctor would laugh and slide the dimmer on her ceiling light.

The woman abruptly stops talking to adjust herself and the folds of padding-cloth beneath her arms. She does not continue. The rhyme of her circumstances, immobilized in the face of the fantastic, five or more decades removed, has unsettled us all.

There’s a mechanical squeal from the small bathroom behind the empty snack displays; the nearly-broken toilet judders.

Ask them again tomorrow, my mother says, hoarse. Will you?

I always do.

She pinches at the little fray on my shirt sleeve and turns it several times, rubs it with dissatisfaction.

Four days later, our little fae man pays us a closer visit.

I am in the main building’s storeroom when it happens, prying corroded batteries from smoke alarms and motion sensors before Marlin runs past with some others and pulls me to my feet.

From the front windows we watch the creature step onto the highway. He entirely crosses the median with a second step, floats all the way to the edge of our grass with a third.

The Council presses a few of us to go and greet him.

So I stand outside the doorway with my arms slightly open, trying to seem welcoming. Hyacinth, a woman who I chat with sometimes, appears at my side with her hands anxiously cupped across her mouth.

She says, simply, Here he comes.

With a flourish and another leap he is before us, metal clasps gleaming across his small chest, a grey poncho-type garment hanging behind his knees and trailing long tatters in the dust. He is aquiline but too long-necked, proportionally, knobbled joints akimbo.

Uh, welcome, the foreman says, approaching from behind me, before being kissed on the nose by the creature, who has suddenly ascended to sit atop his shoulder.

We all share in an incredibly alarmed variation of delight.

Inside the main building we find portion cups of hazelnut creamer to offer the fae man and he drinks them deliberately, peeling the lids off and folding them gently onto the table while looking around at the exposed rafters. There’s a bird.

I’ve been sent to assess what the problem is here, he says, his voice pinched and nasal.

The problem?

Can I take some of these home with me?

He shakes an emptied creamer cup and Hyacinth sets a few more down onto the table.

Yes, he says, the problem with humanfolk. You all. There’s no more of you. The little ones.

He turns to look us each in the eye, craning his neck, making a show of the effort it takes.

Children, he means. Apparently the number of human children has decreased so substantially over the past several years that there are hardly any for the fae to take.

Take? Hyacinth says.

And return, he says. Eventually. But it’s getting pretty bad on our end. We need those kids.

What exactly do you do with them? the foreman asks

And I’ve always wondered, too, at the classical story, but the fae man brushes the question aside.

Our industry is depressed—this is all that he’ll say. Their paraphysical economy has stalled, greatly.

We convene in the center of the food court and after several minutes come to the conclusion that he must think we’ve always lived here, that he doesn’t know about the bombs or the sootstorms or the mile markers, headstones now, small cairns at the base of nearly every one, precisely measured records of our long diminished march.

The Council suggests that the foreman take the fae man on a tour of the rest stop grounds, in order to showcase our circumstances.

The fae man agrees, though insisting the foreman holds his hand the entire time. The rest of us remain standing in our group, watching as they disappear into the food court kitchens, emerge at the other end, lament the now derelict state of the arcade games that we would play so much in the earliest days, and then head out to the dumpsters.

By the time they circle back around to the front entrance the foreman has a declaration to make.

His name is Aedew, and as the… curtain to his world is drawn?

He looks to Aedew, who nods in confirmation.

As the curtain to his world is drawn, he will need to stay the night.

He is given the mass of blankets behind the coffee counter, one of our prime spots, which the longtime occupant, Eren, can decide to share or not. There’s a long stare between the two before Eren says he’d rather take an open food court bench for the night. He knows how to fix the plumbing in the bathrooms. It’s a lot of future leverage he’s just banked.

Even so, when Aedew is later handed a toilet paper roll packed with our good weed by the picnic benches Eren tsks his disapproval.

One streetlight still works, about a half a mile up the highway, only a hanging orb at this distance, but the night gets otherwise complete and it takes a few rotations before anyone has the nerve to break the silence.

Aedew, Tenerife says from beside me, what’s the fae world like?

And there’s a rustling from the darkness as everyone nods—that is the question.

Aedew, deliberate, begins: It is much like here but laid with strands of light, yes, the weaving of all things together. We pull the strands apart to cross. They’re strung between our roof thatch. We curl it into ladders and ascend it with knobbed shoes. Imagine a single endless fabric. To build a road as grand as your highway here would take several dozen of us, in fact, pulling in teams day and night, until the coils hold fast. But we would never. No, we prefer a lighter touch than all of that. Our world is a net of light that will dredge us up from the muck once we have finished our tumbling within it, and we treat it as such.

As such?

As an insight that will come to pass, he says, though not quite yet.

I pass Tenerife one of the napkins in my pocket; she’s begun to cry.

In the morning, she is gone.

The fae man’s gone too; a small crowd has gathered by the front windows to look out across the highway towards the hole in the barrier wall.

Angelo, who was with us last night, speaks with his nose against the glass.

I saw her go with the thing, he says. They crossed the highway at dawn.

And you didn’t say anything? the foreman says. You didn’t come get me?

Angelo gestures around, like, look at this place.

I wonder what they’re going to do with her, somebody asks. They can’t get children anymore, so they’ll settle for adults? I wonder if they’ll give her back when they’re done.

That night I spend some time in the vestibule, letting people bump into me as they pass. The Council has put together a search party to investigate across the highway, and I watch them sweeping through the rubble with their headlamps.

They return every hour or so with meager collections of found rubbish and to report their forward progress; beyond the trees there are more trees. New Jersey proper, eventually. One of them pulls a rusted muffler from a sack and sets it onto the ground. There are no portals in the rootwork, there are no sinkholes. There has been no magic left behind for us.

Which is about what I expected. It has been several years here and things fail more and more. The power sputters. The ventilation hood above the flat top grill fell down. Early on there were weekly convoys of people walking past on the road, sharing news, trading seed packets or magazines for lighters and aspirin, but no longer. When we appointed The Council it was because we imagined there would be endless logistical difficulties for them to resolve. Now they have fuck all to do.

After the search party comes in and dumps their final assortment of acorns and vole skulls and snaps of rebar onto the coffee counter, laughs together for around an hour, and then disbands to fall asleep, I leave.

The side mart smells like hot crayons. When I rouse my mother her hair is damp and she gets to her feet with minimal fuss.

Well, let’s go, is all I say until I get her outside.

If there are any remaining occasions for joy then we had better take them.

Imagine, I tell her, as we snap into file along the tether, imagine arriving at the sound bath right at dawn, or in the rain, or with the place all to ourselves?

Oh no, she says, it must be more popular than ever before.

She has made the miles-long trip three times since we originally arrived at the rest stop, and insists that the vibrations can penetrate deep tissue, organize the marrow, and induce hallucinations.

It is a large concrete pavilion in the field beyond Rest Stop 1204, through a chainlink fence, that holds an echo especially well. An initial group we’d sent had found rolled mats and singing bowls there. They’d found oil burners. Someone had volunteered to lead the sessions and we intuited the rest along the way.

Though it has been several months since our last visit. Who knows about its state of ruin.

But all that’s left are states of ruin anymore. What use would there be in classifying their magnitudes? I simply take her by the hand and we begin to walk.

Once we’re clear out of view from our rest stop there is only the crunch of loose highway stone, the soft zyooop zyooop of our carabiners timing with our steps along the tether, the occasional working amber streetlight by which I catch her face. Eye mask off. Seemingly contented. She declines a sip of water and we skirt a lump of roadkill. We continue on in this way for many hours, managing a gauntlet of dim obstacles with far more care than how they came to be set against us.