“That’s weird.”
“It’s not weird, is the thing,” said James. “I mean I know it sounds weird, but it didn’t feel weird. We just sat there and had a Beast, right, and then he started to cheer up, talking about how his son Jeremy kicks ass at his job, how he got this job back when things looked kind of sketchy but it all turned out great and now they don’t even think about how sketchy it was for a little while, because now it’s all just great, you know? And my eyes kept drifting over to that picture of their whole family up there, and I thought, I’m not gonna push this guy, everything needs to be just great for him.”
Abby thought about going back down into the basement for more tapes, to see who else might have been compelled to identify themselves by name; and about then locating those people, trying to ask them what they remembered about something strange they’d done or been asked to do ten or more years ago; and about where they might go from there, what other roads might lie open. She remembered her own mother’s face by the screenlight, that look of worry; Mom loved everyone’s children, her heart was like the sun.
“I don’t want to abandon all those people,” she said after a moment’s consideration.
“Abs,” James said gently. “I’ve been thinking about this all day. I went out and met the guy’s father. Don’t take this the wrong way, OK?”
Abby scowled and folded her arms; James was a very arrogant brother sometimes.
“Those people don’t even know you exist,” he said, and though she felt like she ought to have been offended, she knew he was right.
6
You don’t see a lot of grain silos in New Mexico. They’re there, of course; silos are the great hidden constant of the industrialized world. But you only ever notice them if you happen to reach the saturation point: if you live across the street from one, say, or if, on your way to work each day, you drive past so many outcroppings of them that you lose count. In the West or down South, you have to go off the main highways to see them. Out here you’re bound to see a few.
James remained in the upstairs room after Abby had gone; the glare of the old monitor made his eyes burn, so he scooted the rolling chair over to the window to rest for a minute. He looked out: near the boundary line, diagonally opposite the abandoned cars, stood the remains of an animal enclosure, pigs probably. Its rough wooden beams sagged but held their intended shape; you could picture the whole of it thriving with life some spring morning, spry and noisy, bright and needful. Just over its distal beams, right before the fallow Pratt field gave way to the neatly tilled furrows of the neighboring property, was a pile of discarded wood with bits of rusting wire jutting out from it: something roughly dismantled either by hand or by hatchet, left to warp and splinter in the sun and rain.
To one side of this modest ruin, just before where the grass grew high and wild, was a squat silo, dull silver, with a cap like an inverted funnel. There couldn’t be anything in it, could there? James sat and thought. If this house had been empty for some time before Mom and Dad arrived, then any grain left in the silo would be rotten by now, perhaps wholly decomposed. He imagined fermented slurry seeping out into the soil, the ground gradually absorbing it over the course of several frozen winters and thawing springs, no trace left of the process.
At first he didn’t like the idea, but as he sat staring through the window, he grew fonder of it: a small place, unmarkably emptied of something that had been there once but found its own way out, mindlessly, without intention, by allowing time and air and its own internal moisture to do the work. A relic of no demonstrable presence. He wondered.
By the time he reached the silo on foot, about ten minutes later—getting there was slower going than he’d envisioned; grass was thick on the ground, and the dirt from which it grew was lumpy and uneven, not the gentle rumpled blanket it appeared to be from the upstairs window—he had a clear picture in his mind of what he’d see there, and it wasn’t far off from what he actually found: an empty space enclosed by corrugated tin.