Nowhereville

When I climbed off the bus at the station in S. (I have my own reasons for not divulging the full name of the town), I had no idea how hard it would be to fulfill my duties there. You see, my grandmother, a woman I knew nothing about, had deceased, a few weeks ago, at the respectable age of 87 years old. I had never met her in my life. That is, if you count out the funeral, where I was able to catch a glimpse of her right before they closed the casket. In that one fleeting glance, I had been able to tell she had the same large, crooked nose that both my dad and I had unfortunately had inherited.

I come from a broken family, you see. The most distant relative I know is my uncle – my dad’s brother, that is – he has lived next door to us since I’ve known myself, in the same dirty, plain Chicago suburb. My mom left when I was two, so I don’t remember her much. She did try to contact me when I was about 15, but my dad tore up the letter she sent me and threw it in the bin, cussing so loudly that Uncle Mervin came over, asking what was wrong. My dad and Uncle Mervin were twins (I often liked to say I had two dads) and they were, in many ways, alike. They had been born in one of those good old-fashioned families; they had another two brothers and two sisters. Dad has never told me anything about his family; he is rather touchy about the subject. However, from what I could gather from Uncle Mervin, they had been the “bad sheep” of the Morris family. That is why they ended up exiled in the Chicago suburb that they had inhabited for over thirty years. However, my uncle never did mention any of his other brothers or sisters – where they lived or how come they didn’t stay in touch.

Their mother was however, a subject that was never brought up. When I was young, I tried to ask them about her, but a dismal look would appear on their faces each time I would pronounce the word, ‘grandmother’. I grew up knowing better than too bring up the subject. I didn’t bother much with family problems; I grew up loathing my dad and our small house with dirty windows that sun never quite penetrated. I hated the beer stains on the ragged armchairs in our tiny living room and the unkempt lawn in the front yard. I hated looking into my father’s eyes and seeing that particular look of quiet defeat.

That’s why I fought; I fought hard so that I would never, ever, end up like that. I studied relentlessly at school, ignoring the bad names the other kids called me. I knew that if I stooped down to their level, stopped learning just so I could be “cool” and gain their acceptance, I would end up some washed-up football star, the kind that contemplates nostalgically his high school trophies, beats his wife, and drinks the nights away with cheap alcohol. High school wasn’t my time, and I obstinately refused to let it turn me into the person I thought I’d never be. College, however, was going to be my time to shine, my time to prove them all wrong and beat the odds of your average nobody rising above it.

It was no surprise to me when I received my acceptance letter to Berkeley and a bunch of other Ivy League schools, because I had worked for it and I had earned it. There was no one to thank – not God, not my parents, not my teachers, not my friends (not that I had many) – except for myself. I chose Berkeley in the hope that California sun would erase the image of the bleak, grey Chicago suburb that was tattooed on my retina. I had just finished my freshman year and was enjoying my first summer in California, when I got a call from my dad, soon after the funeral of the woman who had supposedly been my grandmother.

I was used to my dad making me do stuff that he didn’t feel up to. He didn’t ask me to do it, he demanded that I do it. He said he’d send me some money in the next few days. He told me to get on a bus and go to Arizona, so that I would tend to the affairs of the late grandmother that I had never met.

So here I was, only a couple of days after the funeral, squinting in the blinding red light of the setting Arizona sun. I was starting to become aware of the fact that if there was ever a place that deserved to be referred to as the middle of nowhere, that was it. I looked around me and all that I could see was bleak, bare land. The road was winding in the distance and about two miles away I could see a clump of houses, dark against the line of the horizon. The driver of the bus – which had been completely empty apart from me – told me that I had a fair bit of walking until the town.

The bleakness of the landscape gave me a vague feeling of uneasiness, it made me feel anxious and sort of small, insignificant. I started walking. Although the sun was setting and the day was reaching its end, it was stifling hot. I loosened my collar as I was walking, and frequently had to wipe sweat off my forehead. There was no wind, not even the slightest trace of a breeze.

The distance was longer that I had expected. Darkness was now falling rapidly and I could barely make out the outlines of the houses against the darkening firmament. I hurried along. It was a while before I could distinctly see the fences of the first houses.
It wasn’t dark yet, the sky had turned a dark, inky shade of blue. I hated the particular ambiguity typical for this time of day – neither day nor night, neither light nor dark.
I advanced slowly now that I was nearing the first house on the road. It looked black against the backdrop of the indigo sky. None of its windows were lit up, and as far as I could see, there were no streetlamps. Realizing that in a matter of a few minutes I would be standing in complete darkness in a town that I was not familiar with, I sped up again.

I took my time, however, to observe each house that I passed. All of them were big, old houses, built in a strange fashion. They resembled the ones you sometimes saw in old westerns, made out of wooden boards and with large front porches. They were all utterly dark, no light was flickering from inside their black windows. This gave me a queasy feeling, which was increased when I started noticing the unkempt fences and porches, and occasionally, broken or boarded up windows or front doors that were standing ajar.

There was a thick coat of dust on the sidewalk, as if no one had walked it for years, as if the wind never blew there.

For some reason, I kept imagining that the whole town seemed as though it was suspended in expectation for something. It was as though all the clocks had been stopped. And then, with an unexpected fear tugging at my heart, I thought, slowly, that I was the only living thing with a soul in an area of God knew how many miles. This whole town was dead.

There was nobody here.
This sudden realization made me stop abruptly. My first instinct was to turn around on the spot and bolt in the opposite direction as fast as my legs would take me. And then I heard a voice ringing loud and clear down the deserted street.

“I think it’s a bit too late for you to turn around now, don’t you?,” the voice said.