My Stuff Out in Tucson
by Lake Markham
Witness report #1: Collin M.
R_________ Cty Police Department
[Time/date withheld]
It was only twenty minutes ago, twenty-five at the most, but I felt like I was already awake when I heard it go off. At first I thought that maybe somebody had broken into the room, but when I turned the light on, I saw that it was just me in there. I went outside, and I didn’t see anything out of place there, either, so I thought for a second that maybe I’d dreamt up the whole thing.
But right as I was going back inside, the man from next door came out, and that was when I realized that something had really happened. And to be honest, I still have a hard time believing that any of it was real.
★
Whatever it was, whatever it had been, the truth about that night was something that had grown very remote from Collin: everywhere in the darkness, which is where it seemed to have its eyes, he could feel it boring into his conscience like the prick of a pin. What had happened was a secret of a kind, a detail so fine that, in its omission, it suddenly became everything.
Collin replayed the story in his head one more time, hoping that another glance might bring the details into clearer focus—but except for how it ended, there had been nothing at all that was remarkable about that night, which was beginning to make Collin doubt his very own memory. He thought again of the police reports—the alibis, the corroborating witnesses, the accounts which lent physical form to his rather indistinct sense of time—and accepted that, at the very least, some part of what he remembered must have something in common with what had really happened.
Here was how it went: several hours earlier in the night, before any of this had gotten started, Collin had walked out of a Gulf gas station to sit on the hood of his car, where he peered into the sandy plains below as though from an outpost at the top of a High Sierra mountain. Collin wouldn’t make it out to California, not this time—he was headed north on I-20 for Wichita Falls, Texas instead, and for no particular reason at all—but the bodied memory of having ascended one or two of the mountains there had never quite left him, even all these years later. Collin peeled the lid from the tin of sardines he’d just bought inside the shop, beginning to tear away at the flaky white flesh now with a plastic fork, losing himself again down among the yawning gaze of the valley. It was all so beautiful from high above: there were still a few rolling hills to be seen if you made it out this far, but even they were growing sparer with each westward mile—it was the part of the country that told you only that you hadn’t made it yet, the part that was right between the east and the west, right between the here and the there.
Right between the night and the day, actually—it was beginning to get dark. Suddenly, as though in protest of this fact, the streetlight dangling above Collin began to warm to life, followed by clusters of them down in the valley below, the contours of entire cities awakening in rapid succession as their power grids slowly came online. But Collin paid no attention to any of that, instead peering only at the one suspended above him, where it hung in the same desert sky which it rendered starless. That was the one that was his. And far from denying him this secret of the night, the lamp had seemed rather to reciprocate the bond—in only an instant it had already put him in touch with all the people in all those towns, each of them taking part in this same shared ritual, the cumbersome task of turning day into night. To an outsider, it would appear as nothing more than the flip of an operator switch, buried somewhere deep within the desert machinery, triggered each night by a finely-tuned nuclear timer—but as it often went, there was so much more to all of this than that.
Collin had been a young man when he’d first made it out this way. He’d wanted to see what he could find on this side of things, the unlived side, past the edges of his comfortable life back east. He would seek it out, his object which was no object, and he would do his best to leave no trace beyond the footsteps and the photographs—as far as Collin was concerned, it was enough just to know something was out there.
“I’m going out west,” he’d told his boss one day out of exactly nowhere, an impulse he’d plucked from thin air. At his desk, Collin’s boss had taken off his headphones, and then he’d looked up at Collin where he was suddenly towering over him.
“What did you say?” was all he had to say.
“I’m going out west,” Collin told him a second time, “to the desert.”
What was a person supposed to say about that?
“Are you quitting?” his boss asked now, and Collin let him know that, as a matter of fact, yes he was.
“I guess I have to,” was how it came out.
That day, Collin left his job, broke the lease on his apartment, and then—without another word to anyone—packed what things he could fit inside his car, carrying them with him out of town. The whole thing had been just as easy as that.
At least it had seemed that way: eventually Collin would run out of money, which was the very moment he realized how much further he had left to go. So he started again, finding something for a couple of weeks at a time. Any short-term deal would do: harvest season work on a tobacco farm, or prep cook work in the kitchen of a restaurant, it was all the same to him—and when at last he had saved just enough to get started again, he would pick up where he left off, continuing along on his way.
“You could go this same distance every day,” Collin had written in a journal then, back in the early days when he’d still tried to keep them, “and even then you might never get where you were going.” But eventually, of course, even the journals couldn’t keep up. When Collin looked back on them now, he found only the same questions that he still had, and wherever a new one had reared its head in the meantime, it was only because it was the answer to an old one, a mystifying hydra of drifter’s wonder.
It was when he wasn’t looking for answers that Collin was sometimes able to find something there.
Collin would open one of the little black notebooks to the middle—on that night, for instance, he opened this one in particular, which was labeled Aristotle, Faust, the Texan. Inside, like a toy in a cereal box, he might find the description of a sunset that had comforted him once (“If you could liberate every gradation of a sunset, setting each ray of light free of all its chains, would it come to life with a will all its own, or drift back instead into the sunset on a breeze?”) Or else he could stumble upon a passage he’d read once and liked the sound of, words which he’d thought to copy down into the notebook for a moment exactly like this one: (“Whereas the true statement is in no way the cause of the actual thing’s existence, the actual thing does seem in some way the cause of the statement’s being true.”) But no matter what it was he found, if it resonated with him deeply, its meaning holding up for him the same way after all these years, it meant to Collin only that it couldn’t have ever been that important—how could it be, if it could be identified in two places at the same time: the here and the there, the then and the now?
“There is nothing new under the sun,” Collin would sigh to himself, wishing for a moment for a blank notebook full of clean, white pages.
For sleep most nights, Collin left his car in a church parking lot—it was safer there than at a Wal-Mart—where he would collapse the rear seats into the trunk, lying on his back and peering into bunches of stars through the sunroof, bunches that seemed to mimic the streetlights he’d seen outlining each of those little towns along the way. Whatever else it was, all of it seemed to be so momentous at the very least—yet it was and it wasn’t. The stars had already been hiding there silently all day long, after all, had outlasted Collin’s own tiny life in the span of twenty-four hours—even the ones that were lightyears away, the ones that didn’t even exist
anymore.
That was when Collin would usually surrender to sleep for the night, trusting his body to awaken him in the morning before it allowed him to be spotted. But on that night in particular, the night in which this story took place, things were going to happen a little bit differently for Collin. With a little extra cash in his pocket, where it was busy burning a hole, he would find himself a motel room among the ghostly patchworks of light down in the valley. And once he was there, each of those bulbs would take on a life all its own, emerging for him slowly into focus, becoming distinctive shapes with dimension, character, substance. Some would even reveal themselves to be signs, imprinting a name of some kind onto the night itself—before, in the morning, the sun would finally rise.
Once he’d finished his sardines, Collin lobbed the case of beer he’d bought with them into the loaded trunk of his car. Collin turned over the key in his ignition and directed the front wheels of his car down into the valley that awaited him. In that moment, everything was still so possible, the night that lay out before him so rich in its many contents. To Collin, that was beautiful—he had been there at the moment of a small birth. And what was even more than that, Collin knew, was that on that night in particular—once he’d checked himself in safely to the secure walls of a motel—Collin had decided he was going to get drunk.
★
Witness report #2: [Name redacted]
R_________ Cty Police Department
[Time/date withheld]
It was right before _:__, because it was right before ___ _ _____ was over, they was just fixing to roll the credits. Suddenly the TV went——well, there was static for about a split second, you know, and then there was the blast, but after that it went right back to normal. I looked out the window, but it sounded like whatever it was come from pretty far off.
Right around then was when I first called you, and then I went out into the courtyard to see if anybody else was awake. The first two fellas was standing outside smoking cigarettes in front of their rooms. I told them that you was on your way, that they should just sit tight. The older fella said he wasn’t gonna do that, but I was able to talk some sense into him. When ___________ come out of his room, I went over and said the same thing to him. I could tell we was all a little shook up, to be honest with you. With everything going on lately, there wasn’t no telling what it was liable to be.
★
“Hello, caller,” the host was saying now, replicating himself over the AM airwaves, part of the same ritual that renewed itself perpetually every night that Collin spent out there. And every night that he spent out there, those very same words would eventually break themselves apart, reforming on the back of an altogether different frequency once Collin had found himself within its range. When inevitably the signal would vanish, Collin would skim the radio diligently until at last he was able to recover it, hard at work drawing out a spirit, scanning the inside for something that desperately wanted out. The signal could grow nearer to him, or else it could grow further away—there were certain patterns, recognizable tendencies, that Collin had grown accustomed to over the years, and he came to adjust the dial preemptively as a way of satisfying the signal’s demands. The host’s voice would come into focus momentarily, sharpening as Collin ascended a hill, and that was how he knew to nudge the dial, ever so slightly, just a little bit further to the right. Otherwise, the clarity might just fall away completely—perhaps he had plunged down into the bowels of the land on the other side of the same steep hill—and the noise would fragment into something like a morse code, unmasking the dark energy that occupied most of the atmosphere around his body, and frantically Collin would try to relocate the host’s voice from his own position on the inside of this void.
“Hello, caller,” was the sound the world made when it returned to him.
Every night it was the same story, and it was no different on that night, the one this story was beginning to be about, with only a couple of hours now before everything was going to happen. For a moment that night, Collin lost the voice just as he had so many times before, and it wasn’t until he was able to discover it on yet another channel, until it came back to him abreast of yet another organized wave, that finally there it was, the answer to his questions: “Hello, caller.”
“You didn’t disconnect me before, did you?” a voice began, a man’s voice. It was a brittle voice, the person on the other end having splintered himself slowly, over the course of his life, into the composite of five year-old children that constituted him.
“What,” the host asked, “earlier tonight?”
The host had one of those voices—you could recognize it anywhere. Lighting a cigarette, Collin plunged his left hand out the window into the pocket of night engulfing the car, and under the sudden force of the triumphant wind, his arm bent back completely at the elbow with a jerk.
“Towards the end of the last hour,” the caller was going on. “You said, ‘West of the Rockies, you’re on the air,’ and then you were replaced immediately by an operator, saying, ‘Your party has not connected—’”
“—well, as you can tell, I don’t screen my calls—”
“—right—”
“—so what happened is I answered the phone at the very moment they’d let you ring as long as they were gonna let you ring—”
“—yeah?—”
“—and that happens, sometimes I go to a line and it’s dead, there’s nobody there, and so that’s what happened—”
“—yeah—”
“—you were right on the cusp.”
Collin slowly pulled his car from the highway onto an exit ramp, then down another Main Street into the parking lot of a roadside motel, its brightly-lit vacancy sign having lured him in like a moth. That was when he turned the radio down—whatever they had left to say, whatever it was that they were going to sort out, it was going to have to go on without Collin. Through the darkness that had begun to collect in the courtyard of the old motel, Collin could see a man doting over an old television of some kind, sitting in a rolling chair inside the fluorescent check-in office, the window of which was stamped like a thumbprint into the side of the building.
When he approached it, Collin saw that it was made from bulletproof glass.
“How many,” was all the man in there said. He rolled forward in his chair reluctantly, like the whole thing had just become an errand for him.
“Just one,” Collin said, pressing his ID against the glass.
“Slide it under,” the attendant ordered—LOU, his nametag read—gesturing after the license with a pinching motion. “You want smoking or non?”
“Whatever’s cheapest,” Collin told him.
Lou just looked at Collin through the glass. “They’re the same. You want to smoke inside or not?”
The motel had been cash only, but there was an ATM near the lobby with a $7 service charge. Once he’d paid the dues that granted him access to room 113, Collin emptied the clothes from his bag onto the bed, and then he did the same with the bottles of beer, shaking them loose from their cardboard case, the contents of each container folding into one another to gradually become a single set of things. Collin lifted one of the beers and twisted the cap off, beginning to sort the clothes into the darks and the lights, rattling some loose change in his pocket before producing a small baggie of quarters from his backpack. Out the room’s only window, the silhouette of a man drifted by, and Collin waited patiently as the shadow passed over the closed blinds, finding its resolution only in the slamming door the next room over.
When at last the shadow had come and gone, leaving Collin all alone in the little room, he carried the armful of clothes to the motel’s laundry station, the location of which he’d been alerted to by a sign that was noisily buzzing overhead. Collin counted the quarters back in his hand like he was sifting through grains of sand for something imperceptibly smaller, ultimately inserting them one after another to disappear deep within the washing machine. As they landed face-up on the heap of change accumulating inside, they sounded of droplets of water that had been galvanized, rejecting the hard puddle to which they finally returned.
Tomorrow, with his clean clothes, Collin would get another fresh start.
★
Witness report #3: Collin M.
R_________ Cty Police Department
[Time/date withheld]
I came out of my room a few minutes later than everyone else, maybe around _:__. I’m just staying here tonight, on my way to _______. It’s my _____ __________ tomorrow.
Anyway, the other other guys were already standing around talking, and the owner just came over to say that you were on your way. He said that he didn’t know what it was, so I checked my phone, but of course there wasn’t anything out about it yet. I would’ve believed that it happened here every night, the way they stood there and kept smoking.
★
Three more beers had come and gone, and Collin was lying on the bed inside his motel room, watching C-Span on the television as he quietly folded up his laundry. Onscreen, a senator was standing in the middle of the chamber floor, occupying time with only the presence of his body, stalling the motion presented before everyone with the stillness of a filibuster.
During a commercial break, Collin stood up to step outside for a cigarette. He opened the door to reveal the same old man from before, just as he was emerging mid-stride into his step, otherwise passing by exactly the same as he had the last time. The old man was wearing flip-flops the color of ancient coral reefs, and tropical surf shorts that disappeared under his belly, which was only mostly covered by the Margaritaville T-shirt he’d stretched over it. Cajun music played beneath the low hum of Collin’s television, lilting from the open windows of a
black El Camino sitting just beyond the door, which Collin assumed must have belonged to the old man—besides his own, there were no other cars parked anywhere in the lot.
When he saw the door open, the old man stopped in his tracks, peering at Collin through thick, wire-framed glasses.
“Hey,” Collin said to the man accidentally, embarrassed at having caught him like this.
“Hey,” the man grumbled back, then vanished again into the next room with a slam of the door.
At last Collin was able to get his cigarette lit, and as he inhaled, he looked down its
length, watching as the distance between its end and himself slowly grew shorter in the length of the night.
Suddenly, a man in a navy suit appeared, stepping away from the check-in window. He walked briskly across the courtyard toward Collin, pulling a rolling suitcase along on the pockmarked asphalt he left behind him. The man slowed to a stop to study the key in his hand, scanning the long row of doors for the one it would unlock, and then got started again once he’d decided on the correct trajectory for his approach. As Collin took one last drag from the cigarette, the man glanced over at him for a moment, taking a deep breath where the clean air became infected. The man’s eyes darted toward the cigarette, and then they looked back at Collin, the disparate irritation of a former smoker.
“Hey,” was all the man said of the exchange, as though the word were currency manufactured to be palmed off between strangers. Collin nodded a greeting before stepping back inside his room, where he began to return his folded laundry to his American Tourister.
★
Witness report #4: Collin M.
R_________ Cty Police Department
[Time/date withheld]
Oh, it must have been about 4:30 or 5, I reckon. I had to be up soon anyway, I’m going out to ______ today. I’ve got to go get a bunch of my stuff.
Well, it come out of nowhere, it was this sound like nothing you ever heard. It like to have scared us all half to death. I must’ve fell asleep with the TV on, cause that’s the only way I could see the door, and when I went outside the kid from the other room was just standing out there smoking a cigarette. The manager come out and told us to hold still, that you was gonna be down here soon to get statements from everybody. And so, well I told him, I gotta be out of here early, I got to go get my stuff. I’m going out to ______ first thing in the morning. But he said it wouldn’t take that long. I said I got better things to do than stand around and tell some cop my thoughts. No offense. Just could’ve done without this, that’s for sure.
★
At around 4:30 in the morning was when it finally happened: a sudden sound like an explosion, without warning, from somewhere completely outside of time itself. Collin flicked on the lamp beside him and darted bolt upright in bed. He looked around the room frantically. Nothing had changed—whatever it was, it couldn’t have come from in here—and slowly, cautiously he opened the door, emerging through its frame and out onto the sidewalk. Collin placed a cigarette inside his mouth like a single tooth and got it lit, and then he started to look at the world outside.
What if it had been a gas main?
Collin exhaled deeply: if it had been a gas main, he realized, he would have already been dead. Collin put his lighter in his pocket.
At that very moment—steadily, quietly—the man from next door spilled out of his room in the flip flops, the surf shorts, the T-shirt.
“What was that all about?” was all he said to Collin.
“I don’t know,” Collin told him, then said, “I thought maybe I’d dreamed it.”
Collin couldn’t tell if he was kidding about that part or not. He took a long, deep huff from the cigarette before allowing the smoke to leave his body, looking into the darkness that extended way out beyond the courtyard, a vanishing point somewhere in a field on the other side of the road. Whatever it was, whatever it had been, it was somewhere out there. Out in the next life.
“Hey,” the man asked him, “you got one of those things you could spare?”
“Sure,” Collin remarked, realizing the old man was talking about the cigarette, and handed one to him so that the two of them stood there together, smoking in silence. “It’ll be the one that saves my life,” was what Collin said about it.
The old man laughed at the joke, which served as a calling card for the right sort of person, representing a shared language through all the appearances that cluttered the surface. There was an impermanence of a kind that held this ceremony together, the sense that if you ever did want to see one another again, you probably never would—and that, if ever you did, by then they would already be someone else.
“I’m from Birmingham,” the man from next door told Collin. “Gotta leave out of here early. Could’ve done without this mess, that’s for sure.” The man took a short breath before shoving the cigarette back inside his mouth.
“Where are you headed?” Collin asked him. Collin had repeated his own story to himself so many times now that his memory no longer held any space for it. All it could do was grab on to something else for a little while.
“Tucson,” was what the man grunted. After that, there was a lull in the air.
Suddenly a door slammed shut on the other side of the courtyard, and out of it stepped Lou, walking toward them now until they could both see the expression on his face, which said only that he didn’t know what it was, either. Lou was hanging onto a clipboard in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
“Y’all hear it?” was all he said. From the corners of his mouth, smoke unfurled like crumpled paper, as though he might have been an angry toy.
“It woke me up,” Collin told him. “Do you have any idea what it was?”
Lou just shook his head. “No, sir. Sheriff’s department’ll be here soon, though. They hadn’t heard anything about it, either.” Lou blew a cloud of smoke into the night and spoke again. “They’ll probably want statements.”
“Well I had to go to bed before,” the man from next door grumbled, “but now I really gotta go to bed.”
“Hang on, now,” Lou just said, “it ain’t gonna take that long.” Lou drew from his cigarette fiercely, a sure sign of his mental state, and then threw it down onto the ground once and for all. “We’ll make sure they do you first,” he told the man, and then, off into the distance, Lou shouted, “Hey!”
When Collin turned in the direction Lou had been shouting, he saw the man who had been wearing the suit standing silently there in the night. He had appeared in his doorway with a look of confusion, and Lou trotted toward him to repeat the few details.
The click of Lou’s lighter reverberated throughout the courtyard as he began to walk away.
“Well I gotta be out of here early,” the man from next door resumed. The man from next door was a broken record. “I gotta get out to Tucson to get my stuff. I got a truck out there. A motorcycle. A couple of boats. I gotta get out there and get it all.”
“Yeah?” was all Collin had to say about that. “Say,” he said, “I think I’m going to open a beer while we wait. You want one?”
“Sure,” was what the man from next door told him. “Only one, though. It’s gonna be daylight before long.” The old man grew silent for a moment, and then he said, “Last time I tried, my old man got me put in jail. Just for coming down there to get my own stuff.” He inhaled one last time through the cigarette before crushing it out against the cinderblock exterior wall of the motel. The old man heaved a deep sigh, and then he whispered quietly, as though to himself, “But I gotta go get my stuff, and then I gotta get this leg looked at.”
But already inside of his motel room, Collin could no longer hear the man. Collin twisted the caps from two beers, and then he closed the door to the mini fridge, almost as quietly as a secret. The sheriff’s department would be here soon, and they were going to be needing statements.
Lake Markham is a writer and musician in Nashville, TN. With a background rooted in the intersection of art and philosophy, his creative work focuses on the relationship of the artist with their art, postmodern alienation, and the hermeneutic continuity of existence.