"I"m not being cold... Look, do you want to drive for however much longer we have to drive with a decaying corpse in the back? Maybe we can come back for her or something. I hate leaving her here every bit as much as you do."
"But she was just your employer. This is my mother."
"I don"t see that we have much of a choice. Remember, all this stuff is just here to sidetrack us. We have to think about the journey. We can"t get waylaid by all this stuff. If we do then we"ll never make it."
We laid the corpse of my mother down on the baking ground and went back to the van to retrieve the next corpse. This time it was my grandfather. He no longer looked like the skinny Ernest Hemingway I remembered. His beard was gone and he had some sort of black tribal tattoo on his face but I knew it was him.
"This is my grandfather!" I said, now indignant toward whatever cruel fate had played this trick on me.
"I"m sorry to hear that," Wrench said.
"How can you be so blase about all this?"
"How else can I be? Like I said, we can either stop here and you can be overcome by grief over people you knew were dead anyway, or we can continue onwards and maybe do something about it. For all we know, the Nefarions will have the power to resurrect people."
"That doesn"t sound very likely." We dropped the corpse of my grandfather next to my mother. "Where did you guys pick these corpses up, anyway?"
"I told you, I have no idea. Your imposter sent me into just about every store we pa.s.sed for beer. I didn"t even notice the corpses until you pointed them out."
We pulled out the next corpse.
"Dad!" I said.
"I"m afraid you"re wrong about that one," Wrench said.
At first, I didn"t know what he meant. I studied the corpse. It looked like Dad. No. It didn"t look like Dad. It looked like Gary Wrench. Strange, I had come to think of him as my father.
"This is you," I said.
"This is my imposter," he said.
"So, you were my father"s imposter and you had your own imposter?"
"Oh, everyone has an imposter."
"A doppelganger."
"No. A doppelganger would be someone who resembles you on a natural level. A doppelganger is usually the cause of meeting people for the first time and having that person think they"ve met you somewhere before. An imposter is one who intentionally tries to look like someone else in order to fool or trick people. I don"t really know why anyone would want to pose as me but I guess a lot of questions just don"t make sense anymore."
We put the corpse down next to my grandfather.
"Funny," Wrench said. "I hadn"t seen him in a while. I didn"t know he was dead, though."
"Are you sad?"
"Well, it has often been said that imitation is the highest form of flattery. Now I don"t have anyone out there imitating me."
We went back to the van and I wondered who we would pull out next. This was the final corpse. We slid him out and, after studying the face, I was relieved to discover that I had no idea who it was.
"Do you know who this is?" I asked.
"No," Wrench said. "I feel kind of relieved, don"t you?"
"Yeah."
We hurried over to the dumping spot and laid this one down.
"That was exhausting work," Wrench said, wiping his hands on his shirt. "I think we might just have to take a nap in the van."
"I could definitely go for a nap."
We entered the van and reclined our seats.
"Do you ever get the feeling you"re napping your life away?" Wrench asked.
"If you ask me," I said. "There are few things in life as perfect as a nap. Sleep is such an overlooked part of modern society. Most people fit their sleep around their hectic schedules and I, for one, think it should be the other way around. We should go to sleep when we get tired and wake up when all the sleeping is done. I think that would make for a much healthier society."
But Wrench was already asleep, his snores filling the cab of the van. A few minutes later, I joined him.
Twenty-one.
When I came to the van was moving. Wrench had apparently woken up before me. We were on some kind of super highway. Eight rows of traffic, all moving very fast. Given our spa.r.s.e, almost apocalyptically empty travels thus far, this was kind of surprising.
"Where the h.e.l.l are we?" I asked.
"Have no idea."
"Did you look at the map?"
"I tried but it was blank."
"Yeah, the last time I looked at it it was just a picture of a dog."
"I think someone is messing with us."
"I"ve kind of thought that for a while."
"It"s most probably the Nefarions. They are the source of much confusion and bewilderment."
"Bewilderment."
"Yes. By the way, I think we need to talk."
"Okay." I pulled myself up in the seat and silently braced myself for what Wrench was about to say. Whenever he said we needed to talk it was usually pretty cataclysmic.
"About those corpses back there..."
"Yeah. What about them?"
"It was all a farce. Or, well, here"s what I think... I think they were all imposters."
"I"ve been thinking... If everyone has an imposter then do the imposters have real lives? Do the imposters have imposters? I mean, they can never be a.s.similated into the lives of the people they are imitating so..."
"I"m not really sure about that."
"But you"re an imposter."
"Actually, that"s what I wanted to talk to you about."
"You"re not an imposter?"
"No. I"m your real father."
I buried my head in my hands. What the h.e.l.l was going on?
"Then why tell me you"re an imposter? If you"re my real father then why did you wear a costume for the past twenty years?"
"You might as well sit back."
I again leaned back in my seat, looking out the window of the van at all the other traffic. Part of me wished I was in one of those other cars, full of people doing mundane things like going to work or maybe just going on vacation or headed home or going out to meet some friends. But, I realized, I was glad I was not one of them. I had tried that, albeit briefly, and it had failed miserably. Wrench began speaking and I heard what I was supposed to believe was the true story of the last twenty years or so.
All the strangeness began on that day the elephant wind came to take my grandfather away. Of course, when that happened, my father was well aware of the Nefarions because, ever since my grandfather had stolen Brilliance from them, our family had been cursed. In fact, the whole world had been cursed. Bringing a piece of them into our world opened the door between our world and theirs. Their main goal seemed to be to break down our reality. Hence the imposters and strange towns that do not live under any law. Whereas my grandfather knew he could simply return the flame and end it all, he refused to do this. Part of him wanted to make the academic world and, really, the whole world, pay for ignoring him. He wanted to prove his point on a grand scale. Another reason was Grandfather felt the presence of the Nefarions actually enhanced the world. It kept the boredom factor down and introduced an element of the unexpected into people"s lives. He knew he was taking a risk but he still refused to return the flame.
My father did not feel the same way at all. He only wanted things to go back to normal. He had a family to raise and he wanted to do that in the most traditional manner possible. Like my grandfather, he had dabbled in anthropology but, seeing that his name was sullied before he even began, he dropped out of school, started a family, and went to work in a hot air balloon basket factory. The work was not rewarding but the normalcy it provided was. Then, when my grandfather came to live with him, he knew the normalcy was over. My grandfather was anything but normal and, even more than that, was the unrelenting cause of the family curse. At first, my father refused to let him in the house if he insisted on bringing the flame, thinking maybe this would inspire him to return it. Instead, my grandfather just slept out in the yard for an entire summer, the flame tucked securely under his arm. Once it became cold, my father couldn"t bear the thought of him sleeping out in the frost and let him enter the house, flame and all. His plan was to wait until the old man separated himself from the flame and then set it outside, knowing it would probably be gone by morning. But my grandfather never did that. He kept himself shackled to the flame, pulling it behind him like a pet until deciding to hide it. After a few years, no one really thought anything of it.
And then the elephant wind had come to take Grandfather away and everything changed again. My father went looking for him, taking the flame, much like we were doing now. The factory, however, had only given him two weeks off and, once the two weeks were over and he still hadn"t found my grandfather, he returned to the old farmhouse, stored the flame up in the attic and waited. He couldn"t just leave Brilliance out for the Nefarions to come and reclaim. He needed it as a bartering tool. He needed it if he ever wanted to see my grandfather again.
My father had apparently always struggled with his weight, as though it were something that appeared daily and challenged him to a fight. While he was on his journey, he met a group of people who subjected him to twenty-four rigorous hours of diet and exercise and, when the day was over, he had found that he had lost an incredible seventy-five pounds. The sight of his return so shocked my mother and the children (neither of us recognized him) that she insisted he wear the costume. They had one specially made and he discovered he liked it. Part of this was too avoid all the gawking when he went back to work. At the factory, you couldn"t do anything different without everyone not only noticing it but pointing it out to you. So like if he got a haircut he would have a hundred people a day say, "Haircut?" and he would have to either say the obvious, "Yes," or just lie and say no. The only other alternative was to get a haircut every week so it looked as if his hair never grew. Until he had the costume made. Then no one ever asked any questions. Then he looked the same every day. There was also a creepy s.e.xual roleplaying undertone that Mom derived from the costume. Like being married to one man but having s.e.x with another, since he had to take it off to do that. But I tried not to think about that too much.
So they settled into the routine. He in his costume, Mom doing whatever it was she did, the kids doing whatever it was we did. For years and years.
And then the Nefarions had stolen Mother. That was pretty much where our story began. They had stolen Mother and Dad didn"t know how he would tell me so he planted the mother doll on the floor, faked a funeral and told me she was dead. But she wasn"t dead, only missing, ha ha. And then, because I had walked in and caught him without the costume on, he had told me that he was an imposter and tried to escape because he didn"t want to bring me into it and planned on doing it alone.
So, Gary Wrench, the swinging bachelor b.e.s.t.i.a.list, no longer existed. I found I kind of missed him given he had become more a father to me over the past couple of days than my real father ever had been. But now I discovered he was my real father. Only it had been my real father playing the role of someone who was not my father but had only pretended to be for the past twenty years. All very confusing. I had to fight the urge to take a nap. I should have known it was my real father by the napping. An inherited quality, no doubt.
"So," he said when he finished the story. "What do you think?"
"What do I think? I"m kind of trying not to think because I"m pretty sure whatever I think will be wrong."
"Fair enough," he said and savagely cut the van across five lanes of traffic, barreling down the exit ramp.
"Where are we going?"
"I just had to get off that highway. The traffic was killing me."
I had been so engrossed in his story I hadn"t even noticed the traffic.
Twenty-two.
Dad took the exit with ferocity, swerving all over. I hadn"t noticed it so much on the highway but he seemed to have trouble controlling the vehicle.
"Jesus, Dad, are you drunk?"
"A little, I guess."
"Maybe you shouldn"t be driving."
"I figured you were too lazy."
"Okay," I took a deep breath. "Just because I know you"re really my dad now doesn"t mean you have to start acting like it. Just act like you"re still Gary Wrench."
"A guy who f.u.c.ks a monkey when he leaves his fake family in the evenings?"
"Yeah, it has all the makings of a really good life, don"t you think?"
"Why are you so strange?"
"You want to talk about strange?"
"I"m too drunk to talk about anything very coherently right now."
"Maybe that imposter slipped you something. You were fine just a minute ago."
"Feeling a little woozy now, though."
He stopped at a stop sign-actually, well past the stop sign, leaned his head out of the van and vomited.
"There you go," I said. "Get it all out."
He pulled away from the stop sign, his head still hanging from the window, and let loose again.
"You"ll feel better tomorrow."
He pulled his head into the van and wiped his mustache with the back of his hand.
"I think we"d better stop the first place we come to."