SYMMETRY

  Chapter XX

  THE GODS OF GHOST RIVER

  “…we became the stories, we became the places.

  We were the lights, the deserts, the faraway worlds.”

  - M83, Intro

  Sick, my gut heavy with guilt and nausea, I pick at the grooves of the oak wood of his dining table, eyeing the silhouette of O’chohca through the half-open blinds, aflame in the sunrise. A pile of photocopied papers takes up a corner, crowned by Nana’s leather-bound notebook, souvenirs of my visit with Charley. The pungent odor of sheets soaked in sweat stain hits my nostrils. Laden with dirty linens, Bobbi hobbles to the double-stacked washer and dryer. Saving face, I pretend not to notice, putting my focus on studying my room-temperature cup of coffee that I’ve allowed to cool to the point of losing all appeal. The bean water’s acidity would likely bring me to vomit, so I swirl it in the cup and watch the brown spiral, a vortice much like my state of mind. How will I tell him? I killed Nico with such brutality… Or is it just one of many things I’ve seen over these many months, none of which I can be sure is real or just my fucked up trauma brain. Or worse still, that I lied to him, threw away the card with my lifeline to getting the help I hunger for. Shame eating me from my core, I struggle with how to verbalize so many things left unspoken. He takes his usual seat at the table, picture of calm, with that quiet, weighted depth that is his natural state.

  “I owe you an explanation,” tripping over my words, I try to catch his gaze.

  Those dark eyes rise from a single slice of toast he left for after his morning chore, the heaviness of his expression eating into my soul.

  “Bobbi,” I shy away from being pulled in by his visage, hoping he isn’t reading me like the pages of a book bent open against a worn spine, “I fucked up… I’m pretty sure I’ve lost my mind…. And… instead of doing the responsible thing like you’d of done… I threw away the card to the psychiatrist I got at the clinic. I don’t know if I didn’t believe I was losing it or if I was too scared to pull on the thread and watch myself unravel…”

  His contemplative stare unbroken, he observes me calmly without judgment, only intentionality, it rattles me more than any amount of anger I braced myself for.

  I wait for him to say something, only to be met with the gravitational pull of those umber orbs. My memories, as though separated from my conscious mind, I recount with every detail: Dizzy’s death on that fateful night that brought me here, Navan’yu, my mother’s forced pact with the Mistwalker, the fissure that pulled me through the fabric of the universe, the two gods, my place in it all, Prairie Mother’s warning, and the revelation that I, may have bashed Nico’s head in. Aware of Bobbi’s familiarity with fragments of the story, I’m sure to lay it all out on the table. Spent, I slump back into my wooden seat, confounded by my forthrightness, I’d rehearsed it in my head so differently, to slowly explain my situation, not throw it all in his face.

  Bobbi contemplates my words, his brow subtly furrowing, “Remember what I said to you all those months ago?”

  “No, what?” I shift uncomfortably.

  “That you’d tell me it all at some point,” a flicker of a smile flashes across his face, “It seems that moment is now.”

  “I don’t get how you’re so chill about this!”

  “Oh, I’m not,” Bobbi sets down his piece of toast with a single bite in it, “Here’s the thing, you’re my friend, and I’ll support you through this. But before you turn yourself in and start ranting to anyone who’ll listen about ‘bat gods’ and ‘the cosmos disintegrating’, do me a little favor.”

  “Sure, what is it?”

  “We got one more delivery run today, before we turn it over to the new folks,” he laments, standing from his chair, pacing.

  Losing Morninghawk for these last few months, the stress at the Nautilus slowly gnawed away at my old friend and I, until it reached an untenable point. I linger on the strength it takes to know when to call it quits. The price, turning over our responsibilities at the clinic to someone new.

  “Why don’t we make this a thing, it’s all Northside anyways, and after, we’ll retrace your steps. Starting with Packer’s Gate, to the most recent place you saw Navan’yu. It will help me understand and I dunno, maybe it’ll jog your memory. We’ll have a better idea of what’s going on, and… well if you do get locked up, at least we’ll have some quality bro time, before… you know.”

  Trying to suppress a tear, it rolls wet and fat into my cup of coffee. The dam broken, I lose control of my feelings, guttural, I gasp between breaths and pitching cries, “It’s too much, it’s all too fucking much!”

  “Hey,” Bobbi’s hand grips my shoulder, “You’re my brother, maybe not by blood but still, you didn’t ask for any of this, let me bear this burden with you. We’re not meant to go it alone. The weight of it all gets better when you let your people carry some of it.”

  I blot the wet from my face with a long sleeve, pushing down a sniffle, and nod in agreement.

  “Grab your coat,” Bobbi shuffles to the door, “It’s cold out there.”

  ???

  Packer’s Gate stands eerie, casting elongated shadows in the late autumn midday light, the buttes’ rusty edifice standing as a testament to time and violence. The scrubland less leafy than in summer, all the green that remains belongs to the junipers. Parking at the summit of the stone towers, Carl pulls up to a spot that could have easily once housed Nico’s neon idiot machine. Tire tracks long gone from all those months ago, we disembark from Bobbi’s silver sedan, intent on scouring the site for anything that could’ve been left behind from that summer. I rotate the marble badger in the palm of my hand housed deep in the pocket of my long charcoal-grey coat. The only thing I’ve yet to explain by just chocking it up to hallucinations from my disturbed mind. Bobbi pulls a flashlight from the car, shining it in the spaces obscured by the shade of the great rocks.

  “Damn boy, talk about trying to find a grain of sand in the desert,” Bobbi calls to me, “Do you remember where you were standing when things went down?”

  “I know I smoked a cig against one of the walls of ‘the gate’, but it was dark, so I’m not quite sure where,” the taste of clove returning to my mind’s eye from a memory locked deep within me, “You can look, but I had an old metal pillbox I’d put the spent butts in.”

  “Yay for conscientiousness, but man, talk about bad timing,” my old friend complains, “You aren’t making this easier.”

  “Sorry, dude.”

  Kicking up the dirt of the makeshift parking area, I look for a sign, anything that gives me a clue. I try to picture Dizzy on the ground bleeding out, a crimson pool forming around him. Repositioning myself, in relation to Carl, I consider where he would’ve been in space. The toe of my boot penetrates the soft ground to find, nothing. Fucking hopeless, I’m just unhinged and it’s all in my head. In a huff, I head towards Bobbi, kicking up more desert earth. Sediment tinged with a dull red ocher stain crumbles around my heel. Curious, I crouch down and remove more of the topsoil with my bare hands. It cleaves against a solidified crusty layer, deep purple, a continuous blot soaked into the sand. Peeling back more, it cuts deep under my feet in a radial pattern.

  “What’d you find there?” Bobbi stumbles up to me, “Oh, shit!”

  Dried bloodstain, leached into the soil, presumably buried, blooms out from the desert floor. My fingertips ice, I pull back from my dirty task, swallowing down my stress.

  “Fuck, I only half believed what you said, but here it is, it’s real,” Bobbi looks in shock, his mouth hanging open.

  Staving off the building anxiety, I press my hand into the side of my head.

  “We have two options, this could be left by me, if I killed Nico… or this could be from Dizzy,” I let out a labored breath and pause.

  “Nico being Nico, if he did this, he’d of fucked up somehow, left stuff behind. Look for casings,” Bobbi suggests.

  “On it!” I take on one side of the stain, while Bobbi works his way around the other.

  Using the edges of the sole of my boot, I slice through the sun-baked earth, searching for the resistance of metal.

  “Found something!” my old friend, juniper twig in hand, scratches at the sandy soil.

  Striding over to him, enshrined in the shadow of the southern butte of Packer’s Gate, just below the surface, three spent cartridges. Dizzy died here, his car disposed of, his body removed. Of course fucking Nico took all the big things and left casings on site… damn shithead.

  “Any sign of my metal water bottle?” I ask Bobbi.

  “Nada,” he probes the evidence with the stick.

  “Should we take these with us?”

  “No, but we should take some pics and prolly bury them again. Never know, might be important later,” Bobbi instructs.

  “The bloodstain too,” I nod in agreement, rolling the stone badger in my pocket nervously, “Keep looking for my water bottle, but if my first version of events is right… maybe there’s tire-tracks where he came at me in that dumb box of a car.”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “I can look for more casings too,” Bobbi’s expression brightens as he takes a few photos with his flip phone and waves his flashlight as a gesture of excitement.

  Hoping my recollection’s accurate, I head northbound from Packer’s Gate into the wild scrubland, the best friend anyone could ask for at my heels. We take care to step on patches of slickrock to avoid the towers of blackening biocrust. Microbes that give the desert ground nutrients, keeping life itself alight in the harshest places. The undisturbed colonies coat the baked earth, dark, popcorn-like, at times stacking themselves into crunchy organic towers.

  “Look, there!” Bobbi points to a path of damaged bio soil, two thick rungs cut through, leaving divots of sand yet to be reclaimed by slow growing cyanobacteria.

  Possible tire marks, the tread within them long gone from the wind and rain. We traverse the land cautiously along the ruts. Following the channel, one foot in front of the other, we scour our new path for things left behind. A divot, its hue rust-orange with exposed sand, contrasts the charcoal tone of the soil crust, the shape within resembling a shoe print. Curiosity gets the better of me, I place my tread into the empty space, my blood runs cold, it matches the outline of my boot… well, shit.

  “Check this out!” Bobbi points off trail at the glint of a bullet casing.

  The threads of that night weaving together into some kind of fucked up tapestry, the growing pit in my gut signals an emerging fear of what we’ll find at the end of this Nico-made road. What will I have to reckon with at the end of this dreaded path? The acceptance of dark gods and a chaotic universe decaying into oblivion hits worse than the most rational explanation, that I’m a monster, a killer.

  Bobbi’s flashlight beam glints off a shiny thing imbedded in the flakey bark of a juniper trunk. We traverse the exposed sandstone, taking a closer look at the divot in the small tree. A bullet lodged deep into the wood, the depth reflecting the trajectory of a high velocity round.

  “Nico, Nico, why were you firing at trees?” Bobbi rolls his eyes.

  “Shit-for-brains aim,” I grin, surprised to find my sense of humor to be alive and well.

  “You know what they say about guys with shit aim?” Bobbi jokes.

  “Tiny fingers!” I crack up.

  “HEY-O!” Bobbi doubles over with laughter.

  He snorts, pulling strands of espresso brown hair from his face, regaining his composure, “You wanna keep going? It’s a lot to take on.”

  “Yeah, I got to see this through,” I shoot him a knowing look, “I’ve avoided facing this for too long.”

  Bobbi nods, “I’m with you.”

  We proceed up the machine-made tracks sliced into the desert, walking in contemplative silence. Cold sweat saturating my fingertips as we traverse the uneven terrain, my breath quickening, the boulders growing to towering heights around us. The grooves come to a stop when the stones reach a state of impassability by vehicle, with only a few steps left as spectral outlines in the biocrust. On that night I took the hard way, scrambling over solid rocks in hopes I could outfox Nico. Below me, the ledge, haunting my waking dreams, hangs over Ghost River, the rapids beneath gurgle with the same timbre of Nico’s death throws, the horrendous sound lodged in my brain. A dull stain, etched into the ground, soaked into the sandstone, sits visible from where we stand.

  BURNING. Leaking… Am I dying?

  I wretch, my whole body shaking…

  Bobbi rushes to stabilize me, looking for a place to set me down on the slickrock, “I got you! I got you!”

  Regaining my composure, I push past Bobbi’s steadying grasp, walking through my nightmare. The deep maroon splatter and pooling discoloration, etched deep between the grains. Trembling, control lost from my limbs, I stare at the evidence of my carnage… my blood.

  “Dude… that’s a lot of blood loss,” Bobbi scrutinizes the mark, “How’d you survive that?”

  “I…” I stammer, “I don’t think I did…”

  ???

  “I’m not sure we’ll make it to Split Canyon Road before nightfall, if we stop at the Ghost River overlook trail,” Bobbi cautions, the steering wheel turning slightly in his work worn hands, “It’s up to you dude, if you wanna keep this up.”

  “I need to face this… I need to understand,” I shrug off my exhaustion, “Let’s do the overlook. We can skip Split Canyon Road and return anytime since it’s pretty much in Vermillion.”

  “You da boss,” Bobbi turns up the radio, attempting to soothe the mood.

  Turning off the highway onto a poorly paved road, the sound of the pavement and the music in my ears blurs to white noise. A blonde wall of stone rises in the north as a sentinel over the valley, the southern sun blazing the ancient rock in butter gold. The sway of the silver sedan tempts me to sleep, yet rugged beauty of the high desert pulls me to wakefulness. My first real adventure with Bobbi since those distant memories of childhood, working day in and out, time slipped away from us, time we can never reclaim. A waste, I can’t stomach how much of our lives we’ve lost, how many experiences abandoned by the march of time. It’s almost too much to bear thinking about.

  Through the maze of switchbacks carved into the canyon walls, we rise into the clear light ultramarine of a November sky, devoid of clouds. My fingertips drag along the grooves of my marble badger, the texture strangely soothing… a reminder of who I am… who I could’ve been… Had Navan’yu never laid claim to my being…those mercury eyes of pandemonium… that dark silhouette against the gibbous moon… my ordeal evidenced in the saved software of my little silver flip phone, born witness to by graces of technology and my old friend. The weight of it all rests at the tip of my tongue… the possibility… that the cosmos speaks me.

  Bobbing his head, humming to the music, holding it together, Bobbi disguises his stress, as if he could hide it from me… me, who knows most of his tells. What must be swimming behind those cavernous eyes, in that mind of his? Maybe, he contemplates the tangle of outlandish events since the moment he took me in this summer… I can’t let it eat at me… He’d find comfort in letting things unfold as they should… as I also must. Beyond the tempered glass, towers of stone borne of striations leer at us, as primordial as the Great Spirit herself. Bearing account of an ancient desert within its incalculable grains of sediment, lands covered in swirling sand dunes, swallowed by time, only to be resurrected by the upheaval of the mountains to the East. Could Navan’yu have beared witness to their tribulation? An ever-shifting planet, forming and reforming, unending, unburdened by the frailness that afflicts all living things. All things change…in time, maybe everything will be alright… even me. Nico nothing more than dust or memory… just another scumbag taken by the wilderness… I could rebuild my life… here. A chosen family... a friend, Bobbi, by my side… or maybe even Charley… if she’d have me. Finding my purpose, maybe finish the work Nana started… she’d be so proud of that. My mind drifts into a state somewhere between slumber and wakefulness, the world growing fuzzy… comforting me in the radiant heat of the sun through the passenger window.

  A shrill cry of a scrub jay jolts me from my rest… Pocketing the stone trinket in my charcoal-grey wool coat, I make out the outline of Bobbi’s form, hunched in his seat. Pulling myself up, the muscles in my neck ache… my old friend sits in a state of anguished quiet, his feet planted on the dirty ground, his head buried in his hands…

  I reach out to comfort him, “We’ll get through this.”

  Bobbi turns to me, his abyssal gaze heavy and damp, “I don’t know how to explain how you’re even here… it scares the shit out of me… And… I don’t know what I’d of done if you’d been found dead, or worse, just disappeared.”

  “I was gone from your life for so many years though.”

  “Yeah, but I could’ve lived with the idea that you were somewhere else living your life,” he shakes his head, “What a fucked up way to go…”

  “I think… all we can do is push forward, learn what we learn, and accept where it takes us,” I speak with an unexpected air of resignation.

  “Sure… You’re right,” my old friend sniffs deeply, clearing his sinuses, “Here’s to finding the fuck out!”

  “Damn straight!” I give him a fist bump.

  Lifting myself from the seat, I stretch, feeling the sinews in my back loosen from their tight coil, extending into a drawn out yawn. We retreat from Carl, leaving the silver sedan in the dust. Striding to the trailhead, I crack my neck noisily to stave my disquiet. The wind sings through the brush, rushing with that unmistakable flavor of chaos unique to the canyon-lands of Ghost River.

  “You said the Mistwalker called you to this place?” he asks me, “How far up the track?”

  “About a half a mile to the overlook and prolly a few miles off trail along the canyon edge,” I shiver, recollecting my ears breaking against her brassy shriek, piercing pain, the world spinning.

  “Cool, let’s get as far as we can, but turn back before we lose the light,” Bobbi suggests.

  Warmth gathers in the depths of my chest, percolating through the membranes of my tissue, as I diligently follow my old friend up the path, Bobbi, armor for my spirit. We walk in near silence except for my friend’s occasional wheezing breaths… a sign he’s been neglecting to hike regularly. The thing we crave… those little instances where time slows so the universe burns a fraction brighter within the lull. Our pace is brisk, yet every moment digested with clarity, something lost to us in the busy day-to-day at the Nautilus. We reach the overlook, wrought iron bars adorning the edges, the gorge plunging to the depths of Ghost River. A sight I’m all too acquainted with, I fight the urge to pull away… to run… I swallow my fear.

  A tickle against the protruding bone at the base of my neck… a warning… an impending presence of something beyond my sight. Fatigue… takes me… my lids grow weighted by a burden I cannot see, my body slouches… Bobbi’s distant screams of panic… echoing somewhere beyond the spreading emptiness of my mind…

  ????

  “RILEY? RILEY? RILEY! FUCK, MAN! YOU OKAY? BE OKAY, DAMN IT!”

  Eyes refocusing to the late dazzling glare of the afternoon sun, the overlook, and the far off painted canyon walls. All familiar, the place where I succumbed to… sleep? My line of sight strange, lower, as though hunched, I try to press hand to my temple to orient myself. Yet the palm swivels away from me, as though beyond my control.

  Oh no, a seizure maybe? What the hell’s wrong with him? The fuck is my phone?

  “Go get help, I need to get help,” words unfamiliar, mumbling softly to me from my mouth… Bobbi’s words.

  Pushing my mental fortitude, I attempt to lift my leg… praying I can slam it into the ground, the pain shooting through my shin, a sign of my command over this body… to no avail… passenger… forced to be an unwilling passenger within someone else… Bobbi’s passenger. Dread coiled in every chemical within him, his stare pivots to a lone figure… still yet slumped, a waterfall of raven hair covering the being’s face against a chillingly slack, lolling head… a dusky grey coat… me… Grotesque is my outer-self, limp, the appearance of being switched off… my mind removed from its shell. Disturbing to the fibers of my psyche, my empty body sways with a subtle, unnatural movement. My old friend’s respiration strains against his tightening lungs, as he rummages through the baggy pockets of his black and royal blue parka, seeking his cheap flip phone.

  No service! Damn! Keep it together Bobbi. Try and move him… yeah, get him sitting, get him settled in case he starts flailing. If he falls, we’re both fucked!

  Paralyzed, yet I feel his muscles take action, he grapples with my frame, attempting to lean my hollow self against the ground. Resistance, Bobbi braces himself for another try, calling upon strength I was unaware he had, to combat the rigidity of my form. No avail, I’m immovable as though solidified to the dead oxidized earth, my skin shudders against his grip. The horror dawns upon my old friend, taking a purposeful step back, the alarm rises within the fibers of his spine.

  Fuck! What do I do? What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to protect him… he depends on me… damn it, I am fucking useless… Keep your shit together, Bobbi… Can’t let him down…

  His blood turns to ice, that creeping sensation of being watched burrows through the grey matter of his thoughts, infecting my consciousness. Deeper than empathy… I know this feeling… I’ve experienced it. The emergence of something obscure and terrible… the heart of divinity.

  Primal fear… there’s something there… Don’t move… It’s not real if I don’t look.

  Unable to resist the pull of morbid curiosity, Bobbi turns to face the frightening thing that haunts the darkness within all of us. A dense cloud of ebony smoke hovers… ink in water… a tendril of shadow. Navan’yu disembodied, curls over the canyon edge, worming its way towards our shared vessel, a brassy grumble emanating from within. My old friend’s mind lies blank, broken by the sight of something unexplainable, his ligaments frozen in place. Slowly it approaches, no longer the “she” I’ve known, now devolved into something truly unfathomable. The entity halts within inches of his nose, awaiting his engagement… thirsting for connection. Numb, he stares into the gloom, as mesmerizing as it is petrifying. Violence so inherent to the Mistwalker’s being, it consumes his face in ebony particles, invading his mind, his cognition stretching… drawing him out somewhere beyond thought…

  ????

  … Amber, dense clouds, rumbling on the horizon, the shared psyche of my old friend and I soar above distant ground. Unbound from pain, weariness, or fear, within an immense body, constructed of petals of luminous tissue, exuding a great heaviness… the burden of the universe. It floats with indescribable beauty… Bobbi… yet not… something removed from what he once was… a being of boundless, blazing light enshrouding a sphere of pure void… the other… the second half… the creator…

  A memory… a recollection from a time long past, the tortured cries of animals below, victims of the cycle of renewal, their flesh to be remade into soil and ash. A pang of regret, lives destroyed, yet a necessity for the continuance of all things, a fixed moment. What of the experiences to be lost to the pyroclastic wave? What of the value of the consciousness of life? The explosive timbre of the great mountain to the southeast bellows, laden with molten debris from the deep within… The Shadow that Envelopes Light, circles. Its inky form dances, threads of matter swirling, in the gloom… together, we, the one of the whole and the whole of the one, in infinite symmetry…

  ????

  … Navan’yu releases her vise on Bobbi’s mind… the Dark God, returned to a state of towering meat and beast… Her leaden gaze tearing me from his consciousness…

  Electricity ignites my extremities, pitching me backwards, my psyche propelled from Bobbi back into my limp body. Heaving, I gulp for air, filling lungs that are again my own. My vision sharpens… yards from me, Bobbi stands in the shadow of the Great Spirit, his expression betraying a state of euphoria… incomprehensible serenity taking his features. Enthralled by the presence, his fingers coil around strands of her feral, shaggy, midnight mane.

  “BOBBI…” I plead, reaching out for him… the words unable to take form.

  A vicious caniform grin curls on her black lips as the Mistwalker regards me, her orbs narrowing with malicious satisfaction. She takes wing, dragging my friend into the dimming sky… astride her back, the pair vanish into the deep blue expanse… two… the whole… the dyad… united… a thought crawls in the back of brain. I’m over… forever alone… I’m just a ghost… a stranger in my own story…