Strange Tales of Secret Lives Read online

  For, he could hear, above the sounds of the people moving around him, a low growling whimper. It came from somewhere far, far down the alleyway. It didn’t sound human. It didn’t sound friendly. For some reason, until he heard that sound, and a wave of the lime smell washed over him again, Rajan had not realized that the paths he saw might be populated . . .

  No, although he began to sense more and more of them—felt, at times, as if the world were riddled with them like wormholes—it wasn’t until college that Rajan first placed his feet upon a “ghost path” as he began to call them (because no one else could see them because there was something mournful about even the brightest of them because it was better to think of them as ghosts of paths than as portals).

  In his second year at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsyvania, on a cold winter’s night at the end of a drunken party to celebrate a friend’s birthday, Rajan was sitting on a couch, wide awake, with other students sleeping or dazed all around him, when a path appeared to him in the white wall directly in front of him. It was a canopy road: oak trees with deep green leaves hanging over red clay. It was like a cocoon in greens, reds, and the solid brown-gray of the oak tree trunks. A wind came roiling up across the road, bringing a haze of red dust up into the room; Rajan could taste it. He could smell the red clay, thick and oddly comforting. He could hear the rhythmic retort of a woodpecker. He could feel the thick, wrinkled roughness of the oak bark . . . and then he realized he was on the path, that he had gotten up off the couch and was standing on the path, and when he looked back he could kind of see the apartment and the couch and his sleeping friends, but they were the mirage now, and the path was the reality, and somehow he wasn’t frightened, not frightened at all, and drunk but alert, he started to walk down the path.

  For a long time, he walked alone on that path, content to let the mottled sunlight through the tree branches massage his shoulders with warmth and the cooling wind push gently against his clothes. Off to the sides lay deep, sprawling forests of oak and fir trees. Sometimes, he could hear the distant complaint of a blue jay, or the very personal bustling sound of a squirrel in the underbrush, searching for acorns. Sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the apartment he’d left behind—an exit, a slice of his world, reassuring him that, when he wanted to, he could return home.

  After minutes or hours or seconds of walking—his watch had stopped as soon as he had set foot on the path—Rajan noticed a two-humped dark shape crouched to the side of the road about a hundred feet ahead. At first, he could not tell if it was human or animal, and then, when he had come within fifty feet, he realized it was both an animal and a human: an old woman holding a leash attached to the collar of some sort of boar or wild pig. They sat by the side of the road in silence.

  For a moment a prickle of unease slowed Rajan. He stood there, looked back the way he had come, and wondered if he should try to return to the apartment. Again, the thought of populated paths filled him with a numbing dread.

  But when he turned back, the woman and the boar had stood up and were staring at him. The woman was smiling; her eyes were white with just a hint of pupil. The boar was huge—bigger than the woman. It had the coarse black bristle-pad hair common in its breed, as well as sharp, yellowing upturned tusks. A faint musky smell wafted up from the boar. In its barrel-chested, broad-backed swagger, it reminded Rajan of the actor Oliver Reed.

  Rajan smiled back, his natural politeness kicking in. He walked toward them. After all, it was just an old woman with her pet pig. On a road that had appeared out of an apartment wall.

  “Hello,” Rajan said as he approached, addressing the woman. “You are the first person I have seen since I started walking this road.”

  The woman smiled and burbled something.

  Pulling on the leash with one foot so the woman had to hunch over, the boar said, “She doesn’t talk. She doesn’t talk. She’s just how I get onto this path.”

  Gooseflesh broke in a wave over Rajan. He tried to control a sudden visible shaking. The voice of the boar was the same pitch and timbre of the thing that had whimpered in the alley when he was sixteen.

  “I’m sorry,” Rajan murmured. “I meant no offense.” It had all started to become distinctly too real.

  The boar grunted, ignored his apology, and asked, “Are you here because of them? Are you one of the others?”

  “I don’t think so,” Rajan said. “I’m not sure who you’re talking about.”

  The boar huffed and snorted. “You must be new. New scent. New human.”

  “Where am I? What path is this?” Rajan asked. He did not want to answer the question implied by the boar’s statements.

  “If you don’t know,” the boar said, staring up at Rajan with its black marble eyes, “then my telling you won’t help. It wouldn’t mean anything, would it? Until you’ve experienced it.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Rajan said. The boar was huge. Just the size of it scared him. Besides, he was still drunk.

  The boar sat back on its haunches. The old woman sat down beside it, smiling inanely. Around them: the swirling wind, the red dust, the slightest echo of a catbird’s call.

  “It’s fine, you know,” the boar said in a kindly, almost grandfatherly fashion, “not to know. We’re all travelers here. I hope your journey is a good one.”

  Rajan stood there in silence for a moment. The woman stared up at him, and he could have sworn the white of her eyes had changed and now a miniature of the canopy road swirled there.

  Then he realized he had been dismissed. The boar had dismissed him. Their conversation was over. Somehow, through his relief, he felt disappointment.

  “Well, then,” Rajan said, “It was nice to meet you.”

  When he was long past the boar, the boar shouted out, “Be careful! You never know who you might meet on these paths!” And laughed—a deep, rough roar of a laugh.

  Rajan did not look back. He met no one else on the canopy road, and, after a time, catching yet another glimpse of the apartment, off to his left, he plunged toward it, and in no time at all, he was standing at the front door, in the snow, shivering because, of course, his jacket was inside the apartment, where he’d left it.

  Now the paths came fast and furious. Somehow the encounter with the talking boar had emboldened him, as had his ability to get back so easily. He went from path to path, exploring, experimenting, figuring out how to get from here to there, and back again. What, after all, were one’s college years for, if not experimenting? So he traveled over paths covered with pine needles and broken through by roots like veins. Paths of fine sand that smelled of brine. Paths of mud, deep and treacherous. Paths of pebbles, curling down the sides of cliffs. Paths of sawdust and paths of cedar chips. Paths of asphalt and of concrete. Paths of wood. Paths that lay below ground. Paths that lay above ground in the form of bridges and causeways. Paths weaving upwards through the branches of trees. Paths over which a light rain of spores poured down. Paths in darkness and in light. Paths of granite and of shale. Paths of marble. Paths that were like nothing he’d ever seen on TV or in photographs, that could not be of the Earth he knew, so that he stood

  . . . in a field of wheat, through which the ghost path ran over flattened stalks, while at the horizon huge twinned minotaurs battled in front of a blood-red sun, the stink of their sweat infiltrating the wheat, the musk of bull, tornadoes swirling up in the wake of their passage . . .

  . . . on a gravel path near a brook that panted and burbled and trickled down into a pond full of carp, while a woman who looked like his mother played a violin . . .

  . . . on a dirt trail outside of a vast city beside a river, looking up at two green towers rising from the water, between which the sky looked different and strange birds flew . . .

  . . . in the middle of a desert, the path the faintest indentation of sand, ahead of him ruins overrun by weeds and decay, while beside him little metal-and-flesh scorpions clattered and clacked and leathery lizards pumped
up their red throats . . .

  . . . on a cobblestone street, watching an old man sweep a courtyard clean under the glare from a purpling sun, while down the way a woman put clothes on a clothes line and dogs yapped at her feet . . .

  . . . at the center of a labyrinth of mine shafts, staring down at an abyss, hearing the plop of pebble he’d sent tumbling down, but only after several minutes . . .

  . . . and in all ways he familiarized himself with this gift for finding what lay side by side and simultaneous with the reality of his every-day life, until it was no longer a matter of searching for a path, but of seeming to create it.

  For awhile, then, it could be said that Rajan Khanna took his secret talent for granted. He used it frivolously—as a shortcut to arrive early to work, or to make sure he wasn’t late for a date with his wife. It did not occur to him that this was frivolous because he had become so used to finding secret paths through the world. For a time, that mysterious otherworldliness he carried about him like a cloak became merely the jetlag of the weary world traveler, except that the world he traveled was like no other in his experience. Sights he came upon—the very ground erupting into hilly golems; a turtle the size of a large island, dotted with trees; a huge metal sculpture in the shape of an Egyptian pharoah in the middle of an infinite desert—no longer moved him to awe or tears. Instead, it was almost as if these images wore on him, burdened him, lessened him. When he saw the face of a tiger carved into the side of a mountain, eroded and smoothed down by the years, it seemed to him that this was his face.

  Once, he had known a salesman who had described a life of months on end living out of hotel rooms and walking through airports, until the delightful frisson and discovery of travel had become the daily plodding toward an end point that whispered only of room service, nights spent in his underwear, alone, on a bed with a view of a parking lot and luminous skyline, watching television. “It could’ve been Rio,” the salesman whispered to Rajan as he left. “It could’ve been Monte Carlo, and it would have been the same as some small town in Alabama with nothing to do.”

  And so, after awhile, Rajan stopped using the paths that often. If they were so common, why bother? He could, most days, get where he was going without recourse to them. Why, although it was rare that he saw someone on the ghost paths, he had once been passed by a jogger of all things—someone jogging on a secret path. Using what had once seemed mysterious and sacred as an exercise route! Stuck in the backwash of sweat and a mumbled greeting from the man, who had his headphones on, Rajan had stopped walking and left that particular path at once.

  When he finally told his wife Libbette about the ghost paths, she thought he was talking figuratively, kissed him on the cheek, listened intently, and then shared her own views on religion and spirituality. He did not mind this overmuch. It was better that than that she think him crazy.

  Then, one winter evening, everything changed again. Imagine: Rajan, walking through lower Manhattan, on his way to meet his wife. (Although, later, thinking back, he couldn’t be sure he was in his Manhattan at the time, and not some shadowy other Manhattan, that he hadn’t accidentally walked onto a ghost path.)

  It’s just after dusk and there’s still a glow in the sky to remember the day by. There’s the glow of streetlights to presage the full night. And the constant steady stream of headlights, the cars and cabs now rushing by, now stopped and holding, waiting, waited upon.

  The cold has Rajan hidden under shirt, sweater, and overcoat, along with a hat and gloves. A sprinkling of snow lies across the ground, looking as if scattered there by the beating of great wings. Breath comes out painfully, seems to cramp the side, make sore the ribs. Yet it’s an exultation to Rajan, a kind of holiness—the chill, and the winter night, with him hurrying to meet his wife at a restaurant they love. He is completely self-absorbed. He is without self. And he has no need for secret paths—the real ones will do fine.

  But then he is brought up short by a sound like the end of the world played out in the rip and screech of metal against metal. Then there’s the odd and lonely sound of metal in the air, turning over and over, and the awkward thud and crash of a car overturned, crumpled between two other cars, half on and half off the sidewalk at Rajan’s back, the impact, the momentum, a kind of drawing in of the world’s breath, so that he cannot move, can feel his heart beating and feel the blood pumping through him, and is sure that the next sound will be of metal wiping him from the sidewalk as surely as he had never existed . . . only for a few seconds of silence to be followed by beeping car horns and the unmistakable shift from accident to aftermath. There’s the smell of oil and the smell of burning, although, as he turns to face the scene, nothing seems to be on fire. The car is overturned, and its driver is groping to open the driver’s side door, and someone is helping him, and behind several other cars and SUVs have clearly collided with one another in the confusion, so that there’s an infernal traffic jam. Some people rush up to the driver, others to the cars, while others stand still, staring. A woman in a pink jacket and stretch pants is wailing to someone else over her cell phone.

  That’s when Rajan notices the boy off to the side, thrown clear, probably a pedestrian, and the way he sits under a newly planted tree, as if broken in on himself, a blotch of blood spreading across his side, and at first all Rajan can focus on is the spray of blood across the scattered snow, and the way the red, under the lights, doesn’t deepen but diffuses as it widens, until it’s pink and crystallized in the cold, and then just a shade deeper than the white.

  The boy is gasping—drawing in breaths in great gulps and swallowing severely, and looking off into a place that doesn’t exist.

  Rajan walks up to the boy. He can see a hint of blood near the boy’s mouth, the way the teeth grind, lower against upper. There’s a tiny man crouched near the boy, dressed all in black, and Rajan actually shouts—a nonsense word, a nothingness—when he sees the man, because he was invisible until Rajan was so close that he could have touched him. The man’s face is dark. The boy’s face is impossibly pale, untouched even by the blossom around the cheek usually brought out by the cold. A sour smell comes from either the boy or the man, Rajan can’t tell which; he ‘s still trying to absorb what he’s seeing.

  The man turns from his crouch, sees Rajan, and says, “He needs help. He needs it now. I’m a doctor. He’s going to die if he doesn’t get help immediately.”

  Rajan straightens up, looks down the street, first one way and then the other. The traffic jam is total now, due to the accident, and it’s going to take an ambulance some time to get to them.

  “He’s going to die,” says the little man who claims to be a doctor.

  Rajan doesn’t doubt it. The boy is becoming paler by the instant, if that is possible. The boy’s hands are clenched tight, one around the little man’s fist.

  “What’s he doing here all alone?” Rajan says in a hushed whisper, as if it matters whether the boy hears him or not.

  “I think he’s from one of the cars,” the man says. “I think he was thrown clear. And they’re all gone. They’re all gone. We need to get the boy to a doctor.”

  It’s an impulse, but it’s all Rajan has to help with. He leans down, into the boy, can smell the sweet of his breath against his cheek, faint and sugary, and gently scoops his arms under the boy, bends his knees, and lifts up—and the boy is so light he comes away from the ground like a leaf, like something already departed into the darkness. This lightness, this ethereal lack of weight, surprises Rajan, and he almost falls over backwards.

  But he rights himself, and with one last look at the doctor, he turns to his right, and walks through the wall of a convenience store, onto a ghost path.

  Until he did it, he had no idea that it would work—never even thought about the possibility that he would make it onto the ghost path but leave the boy behind, that through some quirk of how his gift worked, that he might kill the boy by bringing him onto the path.

  But it does work, and they are b
oth on the path, and suddenly the boy is heavier than he was an instant ago, and blood is steadily collecting on Rajan’s shirt.

  The path: It’s summer here, and the path is yellowing grass, cut short, running through a field of wildflowers, flanked on one side by the crease of a barely discernable stream, the sound of running water a salve to Rajan in that moment, and on the left a copse of oak trees. There’s the smell of the flowers and the constant sleepy sound of the bees collecting pollen, and a red-shouldered hawk wheeling through the sky overhead, searching for mice and rabbits. Rajan’s encumbered, stumbling, already sweating.

  Quickly, he lowers the boy, who looks up at him with a unwavering but almost unseeing stare, sheds his coat, his hat, his gloves, his sweater, and then gathers the boy up again, holds him close, whispers in his ear, “I’ll have you to a hospital right away. In an instant. As if no time had passed at all.”

  At least, he hopes, for as he half-walks, half-runs across that field of flowers, in the soft summer light, he realizes it might not work, he might not find the path. It’s been a long time since he had to find a path, a long time since he had to focus, a long time since he even took in all the details that make one path unique from another.

  So he run-walks along, searching for that hint of a different light, a sliver of another seeming, at the corners of his vision, that would bring him to another place.

  After five minutes, Rajan’s nearly frantic. After ten minutes, he’s in despair. He can’t see it. He can’t find it. And even though he knows time works differently on the ghost paths, he begins to think that if he’d just left the boy where he found him, he might be in a hospital by now.

  The field gives way to forest, and the path is pine needles and the wind is fresh and clean, but it’s no comfort to Rajan, because he can hear the sough of the boy’s breathing, and can feel how the boy’s body relaxes and stiffens, as if preparing for some transformation. And his own strength is giving way to fatigue, his arms heavy, his legs churning, the sweat enveloping him.