The Last Answer, Part 4
Several weeks passed before I managed to visit Karl, driven mainly by the hope that doing so might restore my ability to sleep. Each night since returning from the portal, I went to bed expecting to return to it the following day. Yet, in the ensuing hours, under the weight of interminable thoughts, my resolve would erode until, with the sun’s return, hopelessness consumed me.
Eventually, I couldn’t discern whether my apprehension to return stemmed from the power contained within the portal or from my guilt over withholding my experience from Karl. Only much later did I realize that I had manufactured this guilt to facilitate my confession.
Karl’s house was a fifteen-minute walk from me, near the edge of town. At first glance, it looked uninhabited, but the few who knew him understood this was by design.
I walked the faintly worn path through his yard, passing items like a dining room set, a few children’s bikes, and a well-rusted 1978 Plymouth cop car, all now familiar to me. Somewhere, among these treasures, seemed to live a memory kept alive by their proximity. I recalled my fear the day he’d caught me and Midge poking around, thinking it was abandoned — the first time I suspected the world wasn’t mine, a feeling that was now constant.
I heard him moving behind the fence obscuring one side of the house. Pushing open the gate, heavy, unwieldy, and only loosely associated with its hinges, I found him bent over one of the few dozen buckets scattered about, digging at its contents with a piece of rebar.
“Hey Karl,” I said, shoving my hands into my pockets.
He continued his investigation without acknowledgment. I stood where I was, watching him blankly, starting to think my visit was ill-timed. Finally, I sat down on a wire chair, knowing it would leave a crisscrossed pattern of rust on the seat of my pants. From here, I watched his long grey hair dangle just above the bucket’s opening.
“Where’s Midge?” he said at last, still poking the depths inquisitively.
“Midge? Oh, she’s helping mom with something.” In truth, I had no idea, and, as soon as I’d said it, I was certain he knew this.
He straightened to a wiry six-foot-something, exposing a white tee adorned with various grease and coffee stains. “What’s goin’ on, Mr. Eli?” he asked, stroking his long, black and white-streaked beard, as if contemplating the answer to a question I had yet to ask.
“What if I just wanted to see how you were doing?” I said, squinting through the rays of sunlight passing over his shoulder.
“Uh-huh,” he grunted incredulously. “Ok, then. Come in.” Somehow, he seemed to know why I had come.
I stood and hurried to catch the rebounding screen door in his wake, hoping the paint chips concealed no splinters. Once inside, my eyes struggled to adjust as dust danced in the light passing the outline of my body.
“Want some water?” his voice emanated from the darkness of the kitchen.
Before I had time to answer, he appeared with two plastic cups: one red with a cartoon chicken on it, and another white with a four-leafed clover and the words ‘Century Bank’ in green. Silently, he handed the red one to me and maintained his trajectory into the living room.
“Thanks,” I said, suddenly wishing Midge were there. I now realized I’d never been here without her. I moved across the thick wool carpet, which was once a vibrant red to match the sofa atop it.
Karl sat backward on a wooden dining chair. It looked uncomfortable, but I’d seen him sit like this for hours. He took a sip of water and placed the cup on a three-foot stack of magazines he had no intention of reading.
“I gotta talk to you about something, Karl,” I said, hardly waiting for the sofa’s springs to quiet.
His reply was a single emphatic nod.
“I found something in the desert, a ways from here, between a couple of rocks.” I looked up at him, as though seeking the confidence to overcome my doubt in my own story.
His expression, largely concealed by a beard claiming territory to the north and an unkempt hairline on a southward campaign, was almost always unreadable.
I began to fidget in my seat. “I’m not sure how to explain it.”
Karl took another drink. Then, folding his arms atop the back of the chair, said, “Go on.”
“Well,” I continued, twisting the cup in my hands. “When I stand between these two rocks, something happens.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I see stuff. There’s a woman there, or at least her voice. She talks to me.” To my mortification, the vivid depictions ever-present in my mind, whether sleeping or awake, had dried up. My efforts to describe them were now akin to grasping at smoke.
“Uh-huh. What does she say?” He remained as still as a statue, as though nothing I said disturbed him.
“Amazing things. Important things,” I replied, wincing at the confluence of his interest and my forgetfulness. “I don’t know. Everything. She knows everything. She’s shown me more about life than anyone in this town has ever dreamed of.” We sat in silence for several moments before I realized the implication of my words. “Not you, of course,” I added, extraneously.
His lips curled into a smile. “Well, that sounds great, Eli. Then what are you doing here? Sounds like a place I’d be hanging out at all the time if I were you.”
I eyed him warily, wanting to question his indifference to my fantastic tale but lacking the confidence to do so. “It’s not all good,” I heard myself say.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Eli.” I saw nothing in his sharp eyes but recognition. I knew he would have sat there forever if needed.
Gradually, the tattered fragments of my memories began to reemerge until I, like a record interrogated by a needle, began to tell him all I could remember from the day I discovered the portal’s existence.
