You reach the edge of town. It is evening, the sun already down. The road has been slowly rising in elevation. You are one of a long column of people and are nearing the place where you are to spend the night. People at the head of the column begin turning off to go into the place, but as you near it, neither you nor the three people ahead of you—a stout Black woman, a thin Jewish man, and an otherwise nondescript girl with dark hair—can see where it is. There are no buildings, only a broken desert of scrub and large granite rocks and prickly pear. The people ahead of the woman seem to have vanished as they turned off to go into what were to have been their lodgings. The woman and the man and the girl and you stop. Ahead of you, the rising low desert terrain appears to come to what must be an overlook, as you can hear what sounds like freeway traffic beyond it. The other three are worried and want to go back. It is twilight now and there are no buildings around. The woman and the man go back. You tell the girl you’re going to go on, you want to see what’s below the overlook. You study the jumble of rocks and scrub and prickly pear and say, I’m going to find a path. You’re confident you can do that even though it is getting dark. You go on, saying again, I’m going to find a path.
You find yourself in a university library. You stay there overnight, and for the next day and the several following days and nights. In the mornings you sit naked in a carrel while your clothes dry. Every morning it is like this. You take your clothes off the night before and fold them on the study table and lie down to sleep under it, and in the morning your clothes are wet. You wonder if there is a leak in the ceiling above the table. You sit in the carrel. Students pass by. Many of them are young women. You barely glance at them. You don’t want them to notice you. What might they think if they saw you sitting there naked? It would be worse than a scandal. Likely there would be a scene and the police would be called. You know it would make no difference to explain that you were waiting for your clothes to dry. You’re in a university library and that’s not an appropriate place to be naked. Your final morning there, a young man sits in the carrel next to yours. He sees that you are naked. He cautions you in a friendly manner, warning you of things you already know. You explain that this morning your clothes were sopping wet. He suggests you wring them out and put them on. He hands you a towel. Young women are passing by. You drape the towel across your lap.
There was to be an apartment for you, but it wasn’t ready. You had almost all your stuff packed up and loaded in your car. Your parents loved you but were happy to see you go. We won’t miss your music, they said, you play it all the time. You were in their living room and could hear one of your records playing. You told them you were sorry, you couldn’t leave yet, your new apartment wasn’t ready. You went out to smoke a cigarette. You didn’t usually smoke anymore and were surprised to discover that the cigarette was menthol. You smoked it anyway. It burned down quickly. You crossed the street to a house where you knew the family had lots of girls. They had never been close to you. You thought they might let you stay the night, or even a few days and nights. You could sleep on the sofa and really wouldn’t be a problem. But there were a lot of cars parked in front of their house and you figured they had company, family in from all over. You changed your mind about asking them and finished your cigarette. One of your cats, the black mama cat, was in the yard and you picked her up and held her close to your chest. You sang the song, You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone. The cat purred but wanted to be let down, so you put her down. A girl walked by.
You found more girls—women, really—and one of them was your wife and another was her sister. You went as a group in several cars to a hotel in the mountains in the desert. You found lodgings and stayed the night. You all stayed in the same room together. In the early morning, you all got ready to eat and then to leave. There would be breakfast in a large cafeteria, baked pastries topped with whipped cream. You got dressed and walked out to the parking lot. The sky was lightening with early twilight but it was still dark enough to see the stars. You saw your favorite constellations—Orion and Taurus—but you weren’t sure where Cancer or the Pleiades were. The mountains may have blocked them. Your wife’s sister walked by and you told her of the stars, how much you loved to see them and how, where you lived now, the skies were hardly ever dark enough to see any of them. She didn’t seem to want to talk about it, as if you were boring her or she had something else on her mind—breakfast, likely. You saw Scorpio low along the horizon, a brighter and more star-studded Scorpio than you had seen before. You told your wife’s sister, but you got its name wrong and called it Sagittarius. She still didn’t seem interested, and walked away, toward the cafeteria. You went there, too. Everybody else you were traveling with was already there and seated at long tables, eating the pastries topped with whipped cream. You ordered the same from the waitress, but you got the order wrong and your pastry had no whipped cream. You ate some of the whipped cream from off the other pastries, reaching to your right and left, there were so many, there was no way all of you could eat all of them.
At the university you were taking a chemistry lab. There was one other student, a woman, and two teaching assistants, one of whom was also a woman. The other was a man. The four of you sat at desks in a classroom. It was early in the semester and the teaching assistants were reviewing the syllabus and talking to each other. They wore white lab coats. You had just arrived from work and carried the case file for a murder investigation the police were not too interested in, but you were. The teaching assistants were done talking among themselves and the man told you the woman preferred to have the other woman as her student. You said that was fine. You had been tempted to tell the woman teaching assistant or the woman student about the murder investigation and show them what was in your case file, but you knew you would only be doing that to impress them and have a chance to fuck them. But your wife would be picking you up after class and you couldn’t do that, fuck them, or even allow yourself to want to do that. The two women went into the classroom next door. Your teaching assistant began walking you through the opening parts of the textbook. Hydrogen and oxygen were terribly important. A noise like a drill came from the classroom next door and he stopped and called out loudly to ask what was going on. A woman’s voice responded that there was a problem with an experiment. He apologized and said he had to attend to this. He said you could come along. The two of you went to the classroom next door and the woman teaching assistant and her student, and now a third woman, were working with some lab apparatus. One tool was a large drill press. You stood back and watched as they did various things with it. A bell rang and class was over, it was time to go.
In the parking lot was a car you recognized as belonging to the suspected murderer. A sample of blue paint in your file matched some splotches of blue paint on the car’s bumper. Two maintenance men wearing yellow reflective vests were in the lot near the car and were curious. You showed them how the paint matched. The suspect had left his keys dangling from the trunk latch and you opened it. There was a translucent plastic bag filled with clothes, and there were tire-changing tools. You closed the trunk. You looked back at the building and were certain the suspect was inside. It was late in the day and the sun was low. Your wife should have been there already to pick you up. You thought to call her or text her but you couldn’t find your phone. The maintenance men had already left, their workday done. You knew there was a coffee shop up the road, near the edge of town. Maybe there would be a phone there you could use. The road slowly rose in elevation as you walked along. The sun went down. In the evening dusk you saw, ahead of you on the road, a stout Black woman, a thin Jewish man, and an otherwise nondescript girl with dark hair. You called out to them, but they didn’t seem to hear.
Tetman Callis was born in the Northeast and raised in the Southwest, his father a soldier and his mother a homemaker. He holds a degree in philosophy from the University of Texas at El Paso. His work has been published in various magazines, including Propagule, and most recently including BULL, Book of Matches, and Tahoma Literary Review. He is the author of two published books, the memoir High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner's New Mexico (2012, Outpost 19), and the children's novel Franny & Toby (2015, Silky Oak Press). He can be found online at https://www.tetmancallis.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/tetman.callis, and lives in Chicago with his wife and her cat.
Read Tetman's story in Propagule 2 here.