Penpal

  ________________

  by

  Dathan Auerbach

  1000VULTURES FIRST EDITION

  Copyright © 2012 by Dathan Auerbach

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by 1000Vultures.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.1000Vultures.com

  www.facebook.com/1000Vultures

  [email protected]

  Title fonts by Chris Au (www.chrisau-design.co.uk)

  Interior layout design & typography by Jocelyn Michaud

  (www.chezjocelyn.com ; [email protected])

  Cover design by D. R. Tuzzeo ([email protected])

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you, D. R. Tuzzeo ([email protected]), for letting me take advantage of your talent and generosity. The quality of the cover of this book, and virtually every visual component of this entire project, is the result of your hard work. I am indebted to you.

  Jamie Stephens, you are a beautiful person. Thank you for listening to my ideas and helping me with every step.

  Thank you, Carolyn Nowak, for providing your talents as an illustrator for the promotional cards for this project. You do amazing work. (www.carolyncnowak.com)

  Brian Gowin, you saw what I could not see. Thank you for lending me your sharp eye and catching my mistakes.

  Thank you, Mercedes Krimme, for your feedback and help.

  Lee Wasdin, thank you for your contribution to this project and to my life; both are better off for it.

  Jocelyn Michaud, thank you for your limitless patience and exceptional skill in working with me to format the interior of this book.

  To the “NoSleep” community of reddit.com – you pushed me to where I otherwise might not have gone. Were it not for your endless support, encouragement, questions, and praise, I feel confident in saying that this book would not exist. I thank each of you from the bottom of my heart.

  SPECIAL THANKS TO MY KICKSTARTER.COM SUPPORTERS

  Were it not for your assistance,

  this project would have buried me.

  AwesomeJamie

  Philip Foord

  Cody T. Smith

  Panji “Gooner” Wisesa

  Conrad Pankoff

  Meghan Spector

  Barbara Boyd

  Garrett B. Donleycott

  Adam “Gaunten” Nilsson

  Mark Thomas McLaughlin

  Thomas Polakovics

  Colin Arnoldus

  Scott Christopher Morris

  Mat Jenkins

  Janet Amemiya

  Adam Rains

  Courtney Lee Mollison

  Brian Ellis

  This book is dedicated to my mother

  Penpal

  Memories

  When I was younger, I took a job at a deli that had what the owner called an “ice cream buffet.” On Thursdays, children would get a free ice cream cone with their meals, and they could pick any one of the fifteen flavors we had. There were many times when a child had some understandable degree of difficulty selecting their preferred scoop, but eventually each kid would happily make their choice when the mom or dad urged them along – except, that is, for one little girl.

  She couldn’t have been more than six, and when her father picked her up so that she could see through the glass, her face lit up as her eyes moved over all the different kinds of ice cream that were on display. When her dad asked her which flavor she wanted, she must have ignored the fact that he was not speaking about a plurality of scoops, and she excitedly named some and pointed to others. Gradually, the realization began to set in that she could only choose one kind of ice cream, and as I watched her try to pick just one flavor, I could see how anxious she was becoming. It wasn’t greed that beset her; it was the result of wanting many things equally but not having the emotional resources to settle arbitrarily on just one.

  As the anxiety consumed her, she began to cry. There was no tantrum. She didn’t yell or pout. She simply could not choose. As her father was comforting her, I caught his eye and made a gesture. He nodded, and after a few seconds I leaned over the counter and called to her as I extended my hand. The little girl looked up to see me holding a cone towering with five different scoops of ice cream. Her mood was transformed instantly, and I can say with all sincerity that I have never seen another human being in such a state of pure jubilation. The father thanked me and saw to it that the girl did as well. They left, and we all moved on with our lives.

  That was years ago, though my mind returns to that day for different reasons now and again. Most of the time I just think about how happy she was; but sometimes I think about how, despite her seemingly limitless joy that day, in all likelihood she probably doesn’t remember me or the ice cream. This doesn’t bother me. As children we have terrific and terrible times – events that, as we experience them, seem to be the most important things that have ever happened to us – but more often than not we forget them. Truth to tell, at any point in our lives we’ve forgotten more than we know about our own history. The world moves on, and so do we, and what was once important fades away.

  But that’s just the nature of memory. The events of our lives unfold linearly, but in the mental reel of these past experiences, most of the frames that haven’t been completely stolen by time are left distorted and blurred by it. When you try to reconstruct the series, you find that it isn’t complete, but maybe this never really bothers you, because you can’t miss what you don’t remember.

  We all have voids in our narratives – lost time that we attempt to reclaim with best guesses. Most people have whole parts of their stories that they don’t realize are patchworks of guesswork, and those who do realize it aren’t likely to care. We want so badly to be happy – to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live – that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were.

  Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time. So we keep them in our memories. And when we regret that we don’t have more memories of them, maybe our minds give us more gifts; gradually we find ourselves remembering them being with us in times and places that they couldn’t have been, and gradually we stop correcting ourselves because, well, we want them to have been there.

  Some memories slip away through the cracks of our minds, but leave fibers behind so that we know there’s something missing. But this isn’t all bad. In fact, if we remembered every detail of every day, we might find ourselves so fixated on the past that most of our memories would be of us just sitting in a dark room thinking about all of our yesterdays – too focused on what was to care at all about what will be. And what of bad things? What of those things that we would wish had never happened if we could remember them? Sometimes forgetting is the gift that we give ourselves, and when we do, it’s back to the void, and it’s time for more guesses toward a better life.

  But sometimes you realize that the memories were always there – you just needed to be reminded. When this happens, it offers a previously lacked context for memories that, while never missing, were never understood. This is a special kind of gift. Our lives are so short that it seems a crime to squander any of it by forgetting. Memories extend our lives backward through time, making them feel longer. And that’s what we want. So we try to remember. But sometimes, when we do, we wish that we could just forget again.

  But I remember.

  The story that I’m about to tell you is the product of my own mental archaeology. Of course, like all great digs, how the artifacts fit together in a timeline is about as immed
iately clear as which things are important and which are not. Some parts of this story I have always remembered. Others were buried deeply, and some I simply never knew about and have only recently discovered. As is often the case, remembering one thing helps you remember another, and as you learn new things about your old life, memories that you thought were insignificant (or at the very least irrelevant) parts of your overall story are suddenly its foundation.

  I began reconstructing and transcribing parts of this story on my own, and when I eventually and inevitably had questions, I turned to the only other person who could claim any amount of expertise concerning my history: my mother. Over the course of several weeks, my mother and I had a series of increasingly strained conversations, and it was through these talks that the importance of some forgotten, ignored, or never-known childhood events became clear. Looking back, these events all seem to fit so squarely that I can hardly believe they required reassembly at all. But what we notice in our lives, particularly as children, is so extraordinarily selective and contextualized that something ostensibly benign or self-contained can be transformed, by a single detail, into something terrible and pervasive. You just have to know what you’re looking for, and when you do, suddenly it’s all you can see.

  Here, I’ve tried to preserve both my thoughts and experiences of my early life, as well as the gradual influx of new information, so that you might learn of these events as I experienced them. Parts of this story were written before I knew what I now know, all of which you will know by the end of this story, but I’ve kept the chapters as they were originally written. To the best of my ability, I have avoided contaminating my old memories with new revelations, and I’ve tried to be as faithful to the past as was possible when extrapolating from my earliest memories. What I offer you here is a combination of what I remember, what I’ve learned about my past from my mother, and what seems most likely; though my guesswork was restricted to gaps that are ultimately unimportant. If I was successful in all of this, then you will understand now as I understood then, and the pieces of my history will fall into place for you in very much the same way that they have only recently done for me.

  Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.

  – Harlan Ellison

  Footsteps

  In a quiet room, if you press your ear against a pillow, you can hear your heartbeat. As a six-year-old boy, the muffled, rhythmic beats sounded like soft footsteps on a carpeted floor, and so as a kid, almost every night – just as I was about to drift off to sleep – I would hear these footsteps, and I would be ripped back to consciousness, terrified.

  For my entire childhood, I lived with my mother in a fairly nice, and extremely rural, neighborhood that was in a transitional phase; people of lower economic means were gradually moving in. My mother and I were two of these people.

  Those that spend any amount of time driving on interstate highways will see half-houses traveling alongside them. It’s an odd sight if you let yourself think about it; two halves of a house built somewhere miles away from where it becomes a home. Everything about those structures has a feeling of impermanence: the wood that forms them is cut where it isn’t used and assembled where it doesn’t stay; the most permanent things about those houses are the concrete support columns that they rest on, but even those seem transitory in a way. My mother and I lived in one of these houses, but she took good care of it. As a kid, I always thought our house was quite nice.

  As I sit here and think about my old home and all the things in it, an amusing and pleasant conflict builds in my mind; I know now that we were poor, but had you asked me then, I would have had no idea what could have prompted that question. My mother must have had so little money to spend, but I never remember her saying the words that tend to become the mantra of some parents when they try to subdue their children’s eager shopping: “we can’t afford it.”

  I don’t remember wanting for much; I even had a bunk bed despite being an only child. I’m sure that this is the case for many children in low-income homes, but as a boy, despite the incongruity, I thought my home was as close to a palace as one could hope for. To me, the support columns under the house didn’t represent what the house actually was – an imported structure on a makeshift foundation – but what it could be. I remember asking my mother if we could make the columns taller so our house would tower over all the others.

  Part of my love for the house stemmed from my general love for the area surrounding it. The neighborhood itself was relatively large in proportion to the town itself. Small towns lack many of the luxuries of larger towns or cities; what few stores there are close down early, traveling events don’t stop there because they probably missed your small dot on the map, and there aren’t many police or hospitals at your disposal. But, to a kid, these things don’t matter because small towns often provide a luxury that can’t be found in larger, more convenient or populated places: freedom.

  Of course, I had rules to follow – I had a lot of them, in fact. But I didn’t notice any of them restricting me because I was allowed to do the one thing a kid in a relatively remote area likes to do – explore. Just a short walk from my back porch was a dense and untamed wilderness that I spent some part of nearly every day surveying. These woods and waterways surrounding the neighborhood were my playground during the day. But at night – as things often do in the mind of child – they would take on a more sinister feeling.

  The apparent change in the very nature of the trees and the lake, I think, was mostly my fault. One of my mother’s rules was that I could explore the woods on the condition that I would be home before dark. To motivate my speedy return, I would play games in my mind when leaving the woods at dusk; my feet moved more quickly when I imagined that they were carrying me away from ghouls and beasts. When I would dream, the footsteps would belong to these pursuers.

  Sometimes I’d pretend that a hideous and ravenous wolf was charging through the woods just behind me; I’d imagine what would happen if I stumbled or fell and it caught up with me, but when I concentrated too hard on keeping my balance, it would always seem to ensure that I lost it. Other times I’d convince myself that there was an enormous clutter of spiders descending from the trees above and blanketing the earth behind, and that I was always inches away from being ensnared in a collective web or simply overwhelmed by their numbers and tackled by the sheer weight of their individually weightless bodies.

  The thing I imagined the most, I think, was that if I didn’t make it home before the sun went down, my mother would be gone – that everyone would be gone, and that I’d be all alone. I always made it back home the quickest when I played that game.

  It didn’t take long for these games to become a reflex, and the fear would appear without any effort at all. Some nights I would spill into the house so frantically that it would startle my mother, but this was the winter of the first grade of elementary school, so I tried to compose myself and pretend that I was merely worried about getting home too late.

  The things I imagined in the woods just before nightfall created a feeling of general uneasiness in me when the sun retired. My home offered refuge from these terrors, but the architecture of my house came to sabotage my feelings of security. The concrete stilts that raised my house above the earth left a void just below the entirety of the floor of my home. Gradually, my mind came to fill this crawlspace with imaginary monsters and inescapable scenarios, and they would consume my thoughts whenever I was awoken by the footsteps.

  I told my mom about the footsteps, and she said that I was just imagining things. This seemed an appropriate accusation given my tactics for making curfew, but I persisted enough that she blasted my ears with water from a turkey baster once just to placate me, since I insisted that it would help. Of course, it didn’t. The footsteps continued that night, but I tried my best to ignore them, just like always.

  Despite the general eeriness that the games and footsteps would cast over the nightt
ime neighborhood, my life was a quiet one. I had adventures by myself, or, more often, with my best friend Josh, but I suppose every kid has their adventures. The only odd or noteworthy events that I can remember happening were the occasions when I would wake up on the bottom bunk despite having gone to sleep on the top. This would only happen every now and again, but it wasn’t really that strange since I’d sometimes get up to use the bathroom or get something to drink and could remember just going back to sleep on the bottom bunk. This would happen frequently enough to remember but infrequently enough to dismiss. In itself, waking up on the bottom bunk never really bothered me.

  But one night, toward the end of winter in first grade, I didn’t wake up on the bottom bunk.

  I had heard the footsteps, but was too far gone to be woken up by them. When I awoke, it wasn’t from the sound of footsteps, but the feeling of biting cold and violent shivering. As I opened my eyes, the clashing of what I expected to see – what I had nearly always seen when I woke up in a place other than the top bunk – and what I actually saw, frustrated my senses as my mind tried to reconcile my expectations with actuality.

  I saw, or rather my mind showed me, the red, cylindrical bars that supported the mattress of the top bunk, but beyond those, I saw stars. Gradually, the bars melted away and faded from my vision, and I was left with only those floating points of light and the jagged, crossing limbs of the tall trees that arched across them high up in the sky.

  I was in the woods.

  I shouldn’t be here, I thought. The coupling of the woods with darkness was something I had trained myself to avoid.

  I sat up immediately and tried to make sense of where I was. I thought I was dreaming, but that didn’t seem right, though neither did me being in the woods. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the limited light, and gradually the trunks of trees and the shapes of overgrown bushes began to take form. I scanned over the foliage without really focusing on any of it as I searched for something I might recognize – something that might give me some indication of where I was.