LOW FREQUENCIES by Bridget Apfeld

I was twenty-eight, at a point in my life where more people had begun to call me Mrs. than Miss, teaching thirteen-year-olds English and World History in a one-story middle school at the junction of a county road and a state park reaching up into the Smoky Mountains. I had not intended to end up where I was, side-stepping into a permanent position after a few months subbing for a teacher five years my junior who decided to make her maternity leave permanent.
I had never been a particularly good teacher and was not enthusiastic about my job, but I liked the room in which I taught, as it was warm and clean and smelled of crayons and nylon. The posters on the wall were brightly-colored admonitions to Reach for the Stars and Just Keep Swimming, crowded by tacked‑up book reports and timelines of the kings and queens of France. I knew many of my students could not point to France on a map, and had only a basic idea of what Europe entailed. Sometimes I tried to tell them about my childhood home in Minnesota, the way the prairies made the same sound as the rain on the birch trees here in North Carolina, and they stared blankly at me or asked, politely, whether we had many hollers on the prairie. I could not tell if they did not understand me, or simply thought what I said so uninteresting that it did not merit a response.
I lived in a cabin with Alan, my boyfriend. He did not work, though many men in the mountain valley did not work, so when this troubled me I reminded myself he was simply in the same situation as his peers. Instead Alan was studying radio frequencies. That is, he was researching the huge cell towers that strung the mountains together. They were defunct, a government-subsidized company having long ago decamped in the midst of construction for more profitable urban centers. But the structures remained on the peaks, mostly overgrown but still visible as spindly points rising from the mountain smoke. It felt a little muddled when Alan explained it, but there were always copious amounts of notes and scrap paper floating around his desk, books spread over the kitchen table, so I just served us dinner on the couch and listened to his daily account.
Sometimes Alan spoke of needing a change. The light in the cabin, he said, encouraged too much introspection. The schematics, the blueprint of the valley, was thwarting his research.
(Once, many years before, he’d published several poems in a fairly good journal, and it caught up to him on occasion.)
“Maybe law school?” I’d suggest.
He shooed that idea away. “Law is dead,” he’d say. “There’s no ethical foundation anymore. It’s all corporate.”
“Tech writing? Television? I know you hated doing search engine copy but that’s always a backup.”
But in the end the project always called him back, and within a day or two of these funks I’d find him perched on the roof, chain smoking, an open notebook at his side and a laptop balanced on his knees, looking out at the mountain ridges.
And in fact, as I now pulled carefully up the short, steep gravel drive to the cabin, I could make out his form on the roof. It was dark, the autumn sun already behind the mountain ridge and the valley cast in long twilight, and I almost missed him, a studious gargoyle at his task. More recently Alan had begun to spend a lot of his time on the roof, sometimes heading up with only a pad of paper and pen, other times lugging various camcorders – to map the area, he said. Perhaps it had something to do with the red and blue pins he’d already dotted across a topographical map unfurled over the living room wall.
I parked and got out of the car. “Losing the light, aren’t you?” I called up. Alan popped his head over the eaves.
“I don’t need it anymore,” he said. He grinned, shaggy hair haloed around his ears. Leaves, caught in the gutters, trembled from his shifting weight.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
But he just shook his head, still smiling. I could see there were several small twigs caught in his hair; he must have been lying on the roof. I wondered how long he had been there.
We ate dinner on the couch. I was quiet, perhaps prompting Alan to ask, sooner than he normally would, how my day had been.
I sighed. “It’s that horrible shit, Lyle Evan Miller.”
Alan gave me a sympathetic frown. “Again?”
Lyle Evan, nearly fifteen, had been passed down with the rest of my predecessor’s teaching supplies and manila folders, an afterthought with a stack of failing test scores and a hulking frame he scrunched into a chair at the very back of the room. He was very like the other students, quiet and bored, and in the beginning I had studiously ignored his records and poor, childlike penmanship in an effort at professionalism. I needed to be unbiased. I had no illusions of changing anyone’s life here, but I could at least ignore unnecessary history.
“He’s just . . .” I thought of how to phrase it. “He’s hanging around too much.”
“After class?”
“And other times. During recess. I look up and he’s just there.”
In the mornings, too, such as today: I’d pulled into the lot in front of the school building and had slammed on the brakes when my beams swung across him, sitting on the fence that edged the parking lot. I’d sat in the car for a moment, my hands shaking, while Lyle Evan remained where he was, placidly waiting. It was an eerie scene, and I told myself that was why I was so startled; with the early-morning mountain smoke blowing down the ridges, Lyle Evan looked like a gothic figure or graveyard statue, wreathed in fog. For a moment I was wracked by a kind of joyous thrill, my whole body infused with the strangeness of the tableau, yet even the edges of this excitement were frayed with apprehension, with the jolting feeling of having missed a step and falling, continuously, forward into space.
When I got out of the car I attempted a scolding tone. “Lyle Evan,” I said, “I could have hit you.” My heartbeat was still uncomfortably fast.
He stared at me. When he spoke it seemed deliberate, his voice soft. “But you’re a good driver, Missus. You wouldn’t even have touched me, would you?”
I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d done next – whether I’d said something to him or gone into the school without responding – but I had been jittery all day. It was beginning to make me nervous, Lyle Evan’s soft voice, but I could not say why.
“Probably has a crush,” Alan said. “I know I would.” He scratched his head; a stray leaf stuck in his hair crinkled against his fingers.
I nodded. “It’s no big deal,” I said, watching the leaf work its way from Alan’s collar to the couch cushion. “It’s fine.”
Alan reached over and stroked my cheek. “Don’t worry about it, Laurie,” he said. “Kids are weird.” And so then I listened as Alan told me about the latest modifications to his project, something about a projector field between the mountains, frequencies needing amplification between the various peaks and bowls, but as I nodded and asked interested questions I thought about how Lyle Evan had wraithed up out of the mountain smoke. I could not say precisely what had frightened me so much about the encounter. Yet how the scene had happened – as it should be, then enter, a figure – had been like bending over a deep well and seeing someone else’s reflection looking up at you. Or peering down at the water and, on the surface, seeing nothing looking back at all.

* * *

       All week long Alan was on the roof. He was coming close to the second stage of his project, he said; his papers on the kitchen table had been rearranged into different stacks, and where before he had been patient, methodical about his research, it was now not uncommon, when I returned from the school, to see him move restlessly from one pile to the next, intermittently jotting down notes. He was working late at night, clicking for hours through the internet, browsers open on multiple screens so that, if I came downstairs looking for him, the whole first floor felt like the surface of the moon, colored in grayscale and lit with reflection.
Alan’s sudden burst of energy had not gone unnoticed in town, either.
On Tuesday, during my lunch break, the school principal popped her head around the door, brown paper bag in hand.
“It’s not good to eat alone,” she said. “Bad for your digestion.”
“I’ve never heard that,” I said, clearing space on my desk for her to set out her ham salad and tiny cup of cherry tomatoes.
“Something you have to think about it, now you’re getting older,” she said. “Being alone.”
I nodded. The principal, an attractive, made‑up woman in her fifties, struck me as someone who had an elliptical in her garage, the kind of woman who joked about never letting her husband see her sweat.
We both picked at our food.
“You’re still up in that cabin off Bryer’s Peak?” she asked.
I nodded.
She dug a nail into one of her cherry tomatoes, speaking to it calmly. “Carol Northbird’s husband was up that way the other evening. Said he saw your boyfriend walking around the woods. Tramping around, I think she said.”
I looked at the framed photo of Alan and me, propped on my desk. The picture had been taken a few months after we’d met, both in our first year of graduate school. I’d wanted to live in a place where the land had shape, texture, as had he – someplace inland, a quiet university town three hours’ drive from the nearest airport. He’d kept his hair short then. His degree was supposed to be in semiotics.
“So?”
The principal shrugged. “Nothing. Josh just said he thought it was odd. Said your boyfriend didn’t want to talk to him.”
“I don’t think Alan knows Josh Northbird,” I said.
The principal’s nail was nearly halfway through the tomato. “What does Alan do these days?” she asked.
“Copywriting,” I said. “From home. For a company.”
“Had he started that before or after his episode?”
“Excuse me?”
She began peeling the skin off the tomato. I wondered that she didn’t mind the pulpy juice on her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, glancing at me. “I won’t mention it again. I imagine it’s good for him to be working, keeping himself busy.”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s very busy.”
“But not too busy for a hike in the woods now and then,” she said.
I stared.
The bell rang. She stood. “Remember, don’t eat alone!” She gave me a bright smile and left the room. The desiccated cherry tomato lay wetly on the desk. I imagined her smiling as she bounced away on the elliptical. If her husband interrupted she’d playfully throw up an arm to hide her face. Not while I’m perspiring!
I looked up. Lyle Evan stood by the whiteboard, idly doodling with a marker.
“You’re early,” I said, even though I could hear the cheerful murmur of other students in the hallway, on their way in from recess.
“The bell rang,” he said. I couldn’t disagree.
Lyle Evan sketched lightly on the board. He was handsome, for a fourteen-year-old. Honey-colored hair, clear skin. I tried to think if I knew what his father looked like, if there were any model for what features he might grow into.
“That your tomato?” he asked.
“What?”
“On the desk,” he said, pointing.
“Yes,” I said. I was aware I was being more curt than I needed to so I amended, “It was from lunch.” I looked at him again. Though faint, you could see the changes of age already underway in his face: a darker shading along his jaw; shoulders broadening beneath his windbreaker.
“You know what they say?” Lyle Evan said. “About tomatoes?”
I shook my head, watching him doodle. He kept his eyes on the whiteboard, nodding slightly.
“The wet part’s the sweetest,” he said. “Not the skin.” He turned to me then and looked me in the eye. There was a feeling as though my head were levitating while the rest of my body sank through the floor. Lyle Evan held my gaze.
“You okay, Missus?” he asked, gentle.
Then the rest of his classmates came tangled through the door.

* * *

       “Do you think maybe you just don’t like him?”
I was on the phone with one of my girlfriends from college. The cabin was empty, but I had retreated into the tiny spare bedroom on the attic level and shut the door behind me. I sat in the window that faced downmountain, though not without unease about the other window, facing up the peak, at my back.
“I’ve disliked students before,” I said. “I’ve had problem students before. I know how to deal with them and keep myself objective. I’m not prejudiced.”
“Of course not,” Sarah said. “The system failed him, not you. What is it, ADHD? Family problems?”
“I think it’s just old-fashioned flunking,” I said. “This is his second round of eighth grade.”
“Well there you go,” she said triumphantly. “Raging hormones, nothing sinister.” I could picture her curled into a plush couch in the Raleigh townhome she shared with several fellow nurses. No papers or maps scattered on her tables; decorative candles and festive, seasonally-appropriate knickknacks.
I pressed my face to the window. I would see Alan coming if he used the road. But what if he was in the woods?
“Maybe I should be talking to the principal about this,” I said. “But there’s so much politics with that. And I was hoping I wouldn’t have to get parents involved.”
“Do you really think that’s necessary? It sounds like this kid is just lonely and probably weird.”
“But it’s not that!” I took a breath but felt it getting away from me. “He’s – he’s aggressive.”
“Laurie,” Sarah said. She was silent for a moment. Then: “What are you afraid of?”
I moved to the window that faced up the mountain. If I stood in the dark, looking out, I wouldn’t be able to see anything – but nothing looking in could see me either.
“Laurie,” Sarah said again. “I’m sure it’ll be okay.”
Though I was not touching the window I could tell the glass was cold. Alan’s coat was hanging downstairs by the door. Neither were his boots gone, nor his hat.
“Hey? You there?”
I thought of the tomato on my desk. I’d left it there all day and then, when my students had gone, I lifted it with my finger and tasted the lukewarm pulp. Sweet.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s okay.” The phone crackled with a blip of audio feedback and I was discomfited to hear my voice a second time. It’s okay.
“Good,” Sarah said, sounding relieved that we’d moved on. “How’s Alan doing these days?”
“He’s fine,” I said, hurriedly. “Hey, listen, I have to go. But I’ll call you soon.” I mumbled a goodbye and hung up.
My breath fogged the window lightly, bringing it back into existence. There was the outside and the inside: different things. My heart was beating fast.
“Laurie?”
I spun around. Alan stood in the door holding a large lumpy paper bag in his arms. He lifted it toward me.
“I thought we could do pasta tonight,” he said. “Spinach?” His long hair was combed and braided, his clothes clean. A scarf looped neatly around his neck – one I’d knit for him shortly after we first met. He’d taken it home with him when he had to leave school, sent me photos of him wearing it while he sat in his parent’s damp Rhode Island alleyway and let all the symbols and scribbles and notes and papers drain away, all his research tumbling away like the autumn leaves hurrying down the Providence streets. It took until winter for his thoughts to clear; until spring for language to return. His prognosis, his parents told me, was excellent. He had a little pill container, took them every day without complaint.
He wrote a few poems then, none very good. I’d peeked at them in the small folder he brought back with him to the mountains. Mostly about the ocean, and time.
It wasn’t his fault. And he wasn’t dangerous, no matter what the students had said. We knew they lied all the time.
“Let’s make dinner,” I said.
Sarah was right. Nothing to worry about.

* * *

       I woke in the night. Alan was not beside me. I sensed there were deer in the woods, just beyond the brush closest to the cabin. The bucks liked to rake their antlers on the tree trunks to remove the velvet skin that covered the new-grown nubs. You could find the fleshy remains in the morning, hanging in ribbons from the bark.
I crept down the stairs. The cabin was dead quiet, and I was struck by an electricity in it: the strange, body-churning feeling you get when too close to an electrical tower, like the air is thickened with staticky particles.
“Alan?” I whispered. The shape of things jumped at me: round bowls, the flat plane lintel above the fireplace. Nothing felt like it was mine, but I could have moved through the cabin with my eyes closed.
I found Alan in the kitchen near the sink, naked. His dark hair gleamed, as did the cigarette cherry he now drew away from his lips, held in his right hand; I did not see his smoky exhale but could smell it. He had his left forearm stretched out, the pale flesh – curtailed by a shadow – like a disembodied glove.
“What are you doing?” I could tell he was looking at his arm, though his face was in shadow.
Slowly he turned his forearm back and forth, flexing his fingers. “Do you ever wonder why in movies and tv shows, science fiction shit, they always put the microchip in your arm?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t. It’s late. Come up to bed.”
He ignored me. “It’s because the skin is so thin there. There’s almost nothing stopping them from getting inside. They’d do it so quick, too, you wouldn’t even know.”
“Who?” I said, trying to affect impatience, a brisk attitude.
He gestured elaborately. “Them,” he said. “All of them. The government. The people in the towers.”
I thought I might vomit. “There’s no one in the towers, Alan,” I said. “You know that.”
“I was going to wait to tell you,” he said, his voice shaky, “but maybe – it’s my research, I’ve made a huge breakthrough, this is going to change everything.” He flicked his cigarette into the sink. “They’ve been trying to hide it but I finally picked up the right frequency to hear them.”
I was beginning to be seriously frightened.
“Alan – ” I reached out and brushed his shoulder with my fingertips, and though the touch was brief I could feel his skin was unbelievably hot, even with the cabin near freezing, unheated as we kept it at night.
Alan looked at his shoulder where I’d touched him, then at me.
“Oh, Laurie,” he said, and dropped his arm. “I’m sorry, babe.” He smiled hesitantly. “I sound ridiculous, don’t I?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I tried to laugh. “You just had a bad dream, right? A nightmare?”
“I’m just getting carried away,” he said. “It’s okay.”
Back in the bedroom, I pulled the quilts back over us. “You make me worry,” I said. I snuggled up to him, his burning skin heating my belly and thighs.
“Laurie,” he whispered. “Don’t worry. They wouldn’t do it to you.”
I froze. I could feel my spine melting, a strange fuzzing in my ears.
He yawned, drew me closer. “And if they did, well,” his grip tightened on me, “I’d take care of it for you.”

* * *

       The next morning I was determined to put a stop to Lyle Evan. Things had gone far enough; I could see now that I had been too concerned with objectivity, with being unbiased. It was time to talk to Lyle Evan’s mother.
During lunchtime I composed the note. Brevity, I thought, would do for now – no need to get into details. I considered the wording. Nothing to worry about, but . . . I hated the modifier. Its presence was questionable, fluid. How might the students diagram that sentence, the invisible parts of it that weren’t there yet?
My phone buzzed; it was Sarah.
“I’m taking action,” I said. “I’m going to meet with the mom.”
There was a delicate silence.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s one way to handle it, I guess.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” she said hastily, “just . . .”
I checked the door. No lurking Lyle Evan. “Just what, Sarah?” I hissed.
“Does this have anything to do with Alan?”
Now I was quiet. “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry, but I had to ask. I mean, I can understand why you’d be overreacting to a student who was, I don’t know, acting out a bit. Anybody would be stressed in your situation,” she said, the sympathy heavy over the line. “All you went through. It was so ugly.”
“That was a misunderstanding,” I said. “He didn’t do anything.”
“Of course he didn’t,” she said, soothing.
On the wall opposite my desk, there was a poster with several hound dog puppies in a basket, under text that read There’s Room for One More. It hung crookedly; I wondered when the sticky tack had gone bad and let it slip from the cinderblock wall. I blinked, looked closer. The hound dogs were babies, the text There’s Womb for One More. I blinked again. Dogs.
“The bell just rang,” I said. “I have to go.” A moment later the bell rang. Psych! the kids would have said.
The hallway was just beginning to fill with noise and bodies, the children crowding at their lockers as they struggled out of their coats. It only took a few moments to locate my charge in the crowd, taller than the rest as he was.
“Lyle Evan.” I handed him the finished note. “Please have it signed tomorrow morning so I know your mother saw it, okay?”
He nodded, though he did not open the folded paper. I wondered whether that meant he was simply not curious, or that he knew what it must contain.
“Do you understand?” I said, a little sharply.
He looked up at me, silent. He was handsome, I could see that. Though this was one of those things I shouldn’t see. “Well,” I said, “I guess it’s time for reading circle.”
That afternoon when I returned home the cabin was empty, which was itself not unusual – particularly as Alan’s research had taken him outside more frequently these days – but I stopped dead when I saw the kitchen table. Instead of its typical clutter and tangle of cables and computer monitors, it was swept bare, gleaming as though it had even been polished. I stepped closer, sniffed. Pine-Sol.
“It was time.” I whirled around. Alan stood with a few apple slices in hand. He offered one to me; I declined, gesturing to the table.
“You’re not giving up, are you?”
“Of course not.” He crunched a slice for a moment, then continued. “I’m thinking I need more room, to really let the data spread out. I’ve got to have space to see the connections between things.”
“Oh.” I felt my disappointment mutely. “More space.”
“Yup,” he said, chewing. He swallowed. I imagined the lump traveling down his throat. He smiled at me. “How were the kids today?”
“Good,” I said, “great.”
He nodded, pleased. “See, that Lyle Evan thing blew over like I knew it would. Nothing to worry about.”
“Exactly,” I said. He retreated into the kitchen; I went to the couch, brushing crumbs from the indentations that showed our usual spots, and took out my phone.
My mother’s voice was surprised when she picked up. “It’s been a few weeks,” she said. “We were starting to wonder.”
“Just been a little busy,” I said. I paused, unsure of what to say next. My mother waited. I imagined her sitting in our living room, south-facing to gather the most light from the short Midwestern autumn. She liked to read in the afternoons; I’d probably interrupted her with a book in hand.
“Actually, Mom – hold on for a second – ” I saw Alan in the corner of my eye as he was passing through the room, and I flagged him down.
“Where is all your stuff?” I asked. “From the table – where did you put it, your computers and everything?”
He shrugged. “On the roof.”
I stared. He looked at the phone, clutched to my chest, and nodded to it. “Your mother?” he mouthed. I kept staring; finally he shrugged again and continued out of the room.
I became aware of a noise at my midsection. My mother’s voice buzzed from the phone.
I picked it up again. “I’m here. Sorry.”
“Was that Alan?” she asked. “How’s he doing?”
“Oh, you know Alan,” I said.
My mother chuckled. “He always was eccentric, wasn’t he?”
“Mom,” I said, suddenly seized by an idea, “do you remember when I was little and got lost on the prairie one winter?” I wanted to ask her what it had felt like when she realized I wasn’t there. I wanted to know if, buried in her panic, there had been anything else.
“Well, I do, Laurie, but . . .” Her voice was curious. “It wasn’t you that got lost. It was Arne.” My cousin Arne, the same age as me, lived down the street. We’d been close as children, though lost touch when I moved away.
“I remember it,” she continued, “of course I do, it was terrifying. But it wasn’t you – it was Arne. Your aunt was distracted and while she was busy your cousin went and took himself outside and got lost. It took hours to find him.”
“But I remember it,” I said. “It was December. Dad found me. You made me sit in front of a fire all night to warm up.”
“Your dad found Arne,” my mother said. “Just over the hill out back. He’d made it all the way over to our house in the dark.”
We were quiet.
“You both spent so much time together,” my mother said softly. “Maybe you pretended, as a game, after it happened.”
“That’s probably it,” I said.
“Why did you want to talk about it?” she asked.
“Oh,” I said. “Just wondering.”
After a few more minutes of talking about nothing in particular, we ended the conversation. I remained on the couch, my heart beating very quickly. I thought of that winter in Minnesota, the buildup of snow. The snowplowed banks were twice my height. I could feel it now, how cold I’d been. The exact texture of the snow first clumping and then freezing onto my knit mittens before soaking through, and then the wet, clammy feeling of my skin before the total numbness. The sky was black, and a light snowfall swirled down.
It was perfectly clear in my memory: I’d put on my snowsuit, let myself out the back door, and walked into the field. And after playing for a while, I’d grown tired and hungry and turned to go inside, and the house wasn’t there. I was alone on the prairie, the light falling, lost. But it wasn’t me.

* * *

       It was Friday, half-past four. The day was over and the buses long gone, but I was waiting for Lyle Evan and his mother to arrive.
“Missus.”
I looked up; Lyle Evan and his mother stood in the door, identically silent and waiting.
“It’s Ms.,” I said. “Ms. Callahan,” I said, standing at my desk. They remained in the doorway until I gestured to a pair of chairs I’d drawn up beforehand; after a cautious look around the room they approached and sat down.
I gathered myself.
“Lyle Evan says there’s a problem,” his mother said. She had her hands folded neatly in her lap, her legs crossed at the knee, entirely contained and steady. She was like most of the women I saw in the valley: dressed in jeans and a barn coat, hair pulled back simply. Lyle Evan’s mother had an apple embroidered on the breast pocket of her coat – the Millers owned an orchard, I thought I recalled. But apart from that I knew little of his family than what I could surmise. And I was supposed to be in the business of being objective.
“Mrs. Miller,” I said. “June?” She nodded. “June. I wouldn’t say a problem, per se, at least not yet.”
“Lyle Evan tells me you’ve written him up.” She looked at me impassively.
“Well, that is true,” I said. “School policy requires a record for these sorts of things, but I thought at this stage we could settle this in person.” I waited for her to respond but she merely raised an eyebrow. Lyle Evan sat at an odd angle in his chair, legs straight out and torso twisted toward his mother, and when I looked at him, hoping to catch his eye, he shifted more pointedly away from me.
“June,” I said, “I’ve asked you here because I think we need to have a discussion with Lyle Evan about personal boundaries.
Now there was a flicker behind her face.
“Is that right.” She glanced at Lyle Evan, then back at me. “Personal boundaries.”
I hesitated. I sensed she was quickly making a great many calculations.
“Yes,” I said. I modulated my voice carefully. “There have been several incidents in which I believe Lyle Evan has been acting inappropriately toward me, and a verbal reprimand after class has not been enough to deter him.”
“Not enough to deter him,” June Miller said. Again she stared at me impassively.
“Perhaps I’m not being clear,” I said. “Lyle Evan has made several – sexually aggressive comments to me.”
Lyle Evan seemed to twitch in his seat.
“Lyle Evan’s been talking to you about sex,” his mother said.
“No,” I corrected her.
“But you said he’s been saying things about that.”
I tried again. “Lyle Evan’s behavior has been suggestive.”
“Suggestive of what?” June seemed to be staring at a corner of my desk; I looked: it was the framed photo of Alan and me. I reached over and calmly lowered the picture face-down. I felt the conversation slipping away from me and wanted to refocus our attention.
“Let me explain,” I said. “It’s a combination of Lyle Evan’s behavior and his . . . general attitude.”
“He ever ask you about your personal life?”
“No,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes. “He asking about your family?”
Again I told her no.
“He ask you about that boyfriend you have?”
I bridled. “It’s about what he doesn’t say.”
Mrs. Miller shook her head. “But you said he was saying things,” she said. “What did he say in particular?”
Lyle Evan’s leg slipped; his sneaker skidded with a chalky squeak across the floor. I suddenly saw what to do.
“Lyle Evan,” I said quietly. He looked up at me. “Please tell your mother what you said to me last week.” I thought I might have to jog his memory. “It was a Tuesday, I believe.”
He blinked, turned to his mother. She nodded at him. When he spoke, he looked only at her. “I said, Missus, how sticky do you make your jam?”
His mother stared at him for a moment. I wondered what silent communication passed between them, if anything. Then she turned to me.
“And that’s sexually suggestive?”
I felt myself reddening. “Those are the words Lyle Evan used, yes. But it’s about more than that. It’s about – other things.”
“He’s said other things?”
Now Lyle Evan spoke again, unprompted. “Sometimes I ask Mrs. Callahan about her cooking. She likes to talk to us about that stuff.”
I wanted to throttle him. “Lyle Evan is referring to my habit of using metaphor in class to describe our lessons. But that is beside the point. He doesn’t ask about my cooking, he . . .” I looked at them both. “I – I can’t explain it.”
June Miller uncrossed and re-crossed her knees with a surprisingly graceful leisure. “So you wrote him up for making conversation about your cooking.”
“I guess I did.”
“And you talk about cooking in class sometimes?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“And Lyle Evan never said anything to you about sex things?”
I swallowed. “No, he has not.”
June Miller stood. “Seems like it’s time for us to go on home,” she said. “You’ll let me know if he’s asking about your cooking again.” There was no mistaking the edge in her voice. She gathered her purse and looked around.
“This room wants dusting,” she said. “In case you hadn’t noticed.”
I stood at my desk and watched them leave; just before they exited the room, Lyle Evan paused and leaned back through the door. He waved, a short little salute, and as he did I thought I saw on his face, in the last dregs of sunshine peeling through the windows, a sudden smile.

* * *

       They’d asked Alan to leave because he told a student that she was going to die.
It was a misunderstanding: a freshman seeking advice about a paper she’d failed; office hours in a shared room with greenish lights and half a dozen cubicles. Alan was tired. He’d been awake for days. Her paper was poorly written but, he told me, the real problem was her understanding of space-time ontology. Even in birth we are all rushing toward death, etc.
But she went home and told her roommates, who mentioned she ought to be frightened of him, and on their advice had called her parents, who’d driven down from Nashville to find out why a “wild-eyed Marxist” – their quote in the local paper – was threatening to kill their daughter.
I could understand that perhaps he’d gotten carried away. He could be very intense about his teaching. He had trouble, sometimes, with tone.
Still. She could have been more understanding. And Alan couldn’t remember what he’d said – a side effect, his doctors said later, of the mania – how could she repeat it word for word?
Uncomfortable. They’d quoted her police report. Uncomfortable with the door closed. Her name was Brynlee. Which is not a name at all. For months I had dreams of confronting her, demanding she recant her statement and admit to lying.
Before he left, Alan asked me to stay. He liked it in the mountains, he said. Would I still be there if he returned?
Yes.

* * *

       It was possible in the mountains to be so alone that you forgot that state of separation occasionally. Everyone was alone in that place.
I drove a winding road home. Back in Minnesota, my mother would be winterizing the house, exchanging door screens for glass panes and raking out the gutters. Out in the prairies on a clear day, with the air at its thinnest, you could see fifteen miles if you stood on a fencepost. The hawks could see nearly three times that distance.
It was growing dark; I switched on the high beams. Swaths of kudzu still hung thick and green across stretches where the road cut into bare rock, and in the curving light they shimmered like many eyes. I drove quickly, too fast, but I knew the turns and trusted myself. It was not very far anyway and I liked the feeling of swinging around the bends and hearing the engine rise and drop from gear to gear, adjusting for the tension of elevation and gravity, being so aware of gravity within yourself: each organ shifting against your bones in response to the elevation, higher, deeper into the mountains.
And as I came around the last turn before the cabin, I saw that there was a man in the road. It was Alan.
He stood with his arms raised, stretched wide like he would absorb the car, or let it move right through him. I screamed and slammed on the brakes. The car juttered to a stop. Alan didn’t move at all, just dropped his arms slowly and nodded once, twice. The beams cut across his torso and left his shoulders and head in darkness. I was quite sure that I’d wet my pants, though when I shifted in my seat all I felt was a sheen of sweat that had instantly broken out over my whole body.
I got out of the car. It occurred to me that I was now, too, in the road, the car idling behind me on a blind turn facing upmountain, where anybody might do exactly as I’d just done, but nothing seemed real at the moment. It was nighttime in the mountains. Alan was in the road.
I stared at him, unsure what to say first.
He spoke. “I found you.” He sounded satisfied, but reproachful, as though I’d been the one in the road.
I knew what to say then. “What the fuck, Alan,” I said.
He held up a hand. “We don’t have much time. They’re here.”
“Who?”
But he was moving, down off the road and scrambling into the brush. He paused to look back up at me.
“Laurie,” he said, plainly impatient. “Come on.” The voice he’d often used back when he graded student compositions, both of us on the couch, feet tangled, laughing at their poor logic and rudimentary essaying skills. I’d loved him so much, from the very beginning.
We plunged down the mountain in the dark. I slipped after him, ducking and twisting around the low branches and scrub, ignoring the thought of how easy it would be to lose my footing. I wondered where he was taking us – we weren’t on a trail or deer path; was this where Alan had been going on his walks?
“Slow down!” I called, but he kept going. I was panting, cold and overheating at the same time. A branch whipped into my face, a quick stinging brand down my cheek. I remembered the car in the road: would it even be there if we came back for it? (I’d used the word so naturally, if. Conditional, untethered from time.)
Suddenly I thudded into Alan, who’d stopped. Feeling his way to the base of a tree, he crouched down, appearing to dig around the trunk. He drew his hand away and approached me. In the moonlight I could see there was something luminous on his fingers, liquid.
“Taste it,” he said. He licked his finger. “It’s sweet.”
“What?” I asked. There was an aqueous sound in my ears, panic turning my tongue metal. “What did you just say?”
But he’d moved on. Downward, scrambling. We pushed into the shadows. Ferns and tanglewood crept at our backs and pulled on our clothing. Witching hour, they called it here. Smoke fingers trailing over the mountains. Those blue ridges wreathed in something alive, something less than alive. Every morning in the little cabin I watched the smoke sea wrap around the clapboard siding and slide down, as we did, to the valley below, before the sun burned it off.
“Here,” Alan said from the darkness in front of me, and I saw his form, now stopped, beckoning me. I approached and saw we had reached an open, level area where the trees thinned out.
Alan drew me next to him. His arm was quite tight around me, almost painfully so. “Look over there on the ridge,” he hissed. “Look!”
“What am I supposed to see?” I followed where he pointed but there was nothing except the adjacent mountain ridge. Shapes contained in the darkness: I was less able to see a mountain than I knew one was there.
Alan shook me, sudden and hard enough to startle me. “Jesus, I’m looking,” I said. He squeezed my arm, less roughly.
“It’s on,” he hissed at me. “The tower. I can see it!”
Did I see a red blinking light in the dark? I couldn’t tell. I took a step closer to the edge of the plateau, straining to see.
“You see it, right?”
When they’d asked him to leave school, we decided it was stress. Just stress. He’d been in the wrong field anyway. Better to wipe the slate clean, start again.
“At first I thought my radio was picking up something from over in Asheville but it wasn’t the right type of sound, so I started tracing it closer, and then – then I knew that I’d found them!”
“Who?”
“The government,” he said, exasperated, “it’s this whole experimental thing. I don’t have time to get into it now. But my research totally holds up.”
I tried again to see anything in the mountains, but whatever Alan saw eluded me.
“Now listen – ” he put his arm on my shoulder, guiding me to the very edge of where we stood, “and you’ll be able to hear it.
I listened. I heard nothing. There was the wind, the sound of the mountains at night, and no more.
“Laurie, please. You can hear it, can’t you?” I glanced at him, then looked away quickly. I didn’t want to see what I knew was there.
I tried once more. I closed my eyes and stepped away from Alan, feeling my way into an open space where I could feel the cold breeze all around my body, untethering myself from what I knew was around me and finding my way into a sound, low, thrumming, and distant, as though the mountain valley was full of water, the peaks merely islands in a vast sea.
“Laurie?” Alan pleaded again. It took so little to get lost in the in‑between. The mountains made it that way. He’d not meant to hurt anybody, really. There was nothing wrong.
I took another step, eyes shut. Blackness, silence. And then, unfurling from it – my neck prickled. If I listened hard enough, I thought a sound was just there. Something in the crackling dark like a voice. I tried to hear the sound again, but it was lost in the space between the peaks. I strained, blood rushing in my ears. If I held still enough, perhaps the voice would emerge from the air, clear above the static and kudzu whispers. It had to be there. A few seconds longer and maybe I’d hear the words.

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Bridget Apfeld’s stories have appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Newfound, Dappled Things, and The Fem.