Chloride

by: Regan Lauber

I took a trip last year to a dying town.

Don’t ask me why. I’m sick of everyone asking why. The thing is, I wouldn’t have much of a problem with the question if everyone that I talked to about it didn’t sound so shocked. Why are you leaving? Don’t you think you should stay here? We can help you. It wasn't your fault, you know.

I couldn’t stand listening to them. I just had to get away. The days started to blur together, and all that I could focus on was the stack of bills piling up on the table and the front door remaining closed. And the smell. The god-awful smell of our rotting apartment became an empty shell with its only survivor hunched inside like an animal in a cage. Me.

It just became too much, so I left.

But you.

I can tell you why. You’re not like them.

You see, I have a fascination with dying things. Things that are disappearing, turning to dust, slowly becoming forgotten. Things that gravitate towards extinction instead of flourishment. These are the things that I chase.

Let me give you some examples: ghost towns, abandoned amusement parks, childhood toys, old people—they all have auras to them that I find mesmerizing. Auras that act in waves, radiating in small pulses, that you can only see when you look up-close. And when you do have the opportunity of seeing the auras up-close, they’ll speak to you, if you let them. They’ll unfold themselves, sharing their stories, one by one, until they fulfill the rest of their journey.

I’ve been lucky enough to see these auras up close. To hear a couple of stories on my quest to hear dying things speak. Some stories are short, some are long; others don’t have much to them at all. In a way, it’s all about how you pay the dying things in order to hear them—with your time and attention.

But who has the time for that? To explore every abandoned place they come across and listen to its story? Incarceration is another factor—some dying stories aren’t available to everyone because of trespassing. No one wants to risk that.

But me? I’ve got all the time in the world. And I don’t care what happens to me.

Once, I found an entire school bus on the side of the road, swallowed by the desert and the aging sun. Shrubs and cacti sprouted around the wheels and up through the escape hatch in the roof, the cracked leather seats lathered in pieces of chewed-up gum and fading sharpie marker from lovesick teenagers declaring themselves to one another.

The bus told its story to me the minute I climbed the steps and took the time in getting to know who it was. While I ran my fingers along the dusty windows, the bus told me about everyone it once carried. The driver was a close friend, a middle-aged man who whistled nursery rhymes and reeked of egg sandwiches. One student with braces bounced around so much that vomit permanently dried in one of the aisles. Towards the back, a rattlesnake made a home out of dead grass and mice skeletons.

To me, there’s beauty in seeking these auras. To let these insignificant, dying things have the chance to tell you their story before they fade away and disappear forever.

You understand, though, right?

I knew you would. No one else does.

Last year’s visit was just some random town I found on a map in Dad’s dusty, termite-infested office. (That’s another thing I’m interested in—maps. The process of unfolding them, pressing down on the creases, and gazing at all the tiny symbols marked on the legend fuels my need for what’s left of the past. Maps are dead, too, if you already didn’t know.)

I mistook the random town for a splotch of coffee.

It wasn’t a coffee stain—rather, it was a small dot of a town that’s considered to be one of the oldest inhabited silver mining camps in the state.

Chloride, Arizona. Founded in 1860, population of 400—maybe less—and deserted after WWII, resting at the bottom of the Cerbat Mountain Range. On the internet, Reddit users described it to be “the living spirit of Arizona’s first breath of air.”

That’s all it took. I grabbed the map, my mustard-colored backpack stuffed with a handful of cash, clothes, a pack of cigarettes, and your old bracelet, and hopped in the family minivan, a rusting 70’s striped wagon filled with broken seatbelts and empty Hostess wrappers.

I left nothing behind. Why would I? No one that I cared about was around. And the one person I did need wanted nothing to do with me anymore.

No. It was best to leave with no note. No trace of me whatsoever for anyone to find. I’d be a figment of the past; my own form of an aura for others to search for.

It was around noon when I ditched what was left of the suffocating carcass of our family’s hoarded apartment. Vegas trailed behind me in a blur of blinding casinos, cacti, palm trees, and magician billboards—mostly because of the huge cracks in the windshield that made it hard to see through. An hour and thirty minutes had passed by the time I arrived—time didn’t faze me in the slightest. It never really did anymore.

An arrow-pointing sign of the town—Welcome to Chloride!—lunged out at me in bright orange letters. The heat from the sun melted a forgotten HoHo that Dad had left behind on the dash. How long it was there, who knows. Chocolate oozed over the dashboard and sunk into the air conditioning vents, the sickly-sweet smell of tobacco, dust, and chemical-induced sugar circulated throughout the entire van.

“Fuck,” I muttered, reaching to stop the river of chocolate, but it was too late, as goo had smeared all over the map, the small dot of Chloride fading into a dark, brown blob. I put out my cigarette on the dash and frantically searched for a napkin in the glovebox, ending up wiping the map with a Gretchen Wilson CD cover that somehow got ripped out of its plastic holder.

Poor Gretchen. Her face looks like dogshit on the bottom of a shoe.

As soon as I looked up, the shape of something short and bent over materialized right in the middle of the road.

A person.

Immediately, I swerved to dodge them, diving off the shoulder and going straight through a fence, taking out with it a garbage can, cacti, and the weirdest thing I had ever seen—a dummy made out of metal.

I came to a halt, my white-knuckled, chocolate covered fingers convulsing against the steering wheel, too afraid to let go, and I sat in silence for what felt like minutes.

I didn’t hit them, did I? I was positive I hadn’t. Still, all that I could tell was that I was seeing flashes, the kind of flashes that you can only compare to television static. The kind that wouldn’t go away no matter how many times you blinked. The kind that left you dizzy and breathless, seeing the world in an array of colorful floating orbs instead of geometrical harsh shapes. I tried to steady my breathing, but my gentle gasps turned into something heavy and threatening. I couldn’t control the intakes even though my brain was screaming at me to calm down.

It couldn’t have been longer than three seconds, though, because I heard a voice.

No, it wasn’t just a voice, it was a voice yelling. At me.

Fists were banging on my driver-side window—which, thankfully, hadn’t shattered from the crash. In fact, I don’t think anything from this rusty piece of shit was damaged at all. Figures.

The sound of the yelling was muffled from the inside of the car. I turned to the window to face whoever it was, and I must have been hallucinating for a second, because there was no one there to match the voice on the other side. Just a backdrop of desert, sand, and wobbled mountains standing against the lightest wash of blue-denim sky you’ve ever seen.

But then, the car door opened, and stood at the lip of the footboard was a kid, open-mouthed and staring up at me in a mix of awe and fear. A lopsided band-aid was strewn across his nose, two front teeth were missing from the rest, and a pair of crooked, circular blue glasses were sitting on his face, already magnifying the intensity of his bug eyes.

The yelling I thought I heard coming from an angry homeowner turned out to be coming from this child.

“You ran over Dennis!” He yelled.

“Dennis?” I choked, horrified. A trickle of something wet dripped into my left eye. I touched my temple and winced when I looked back at my fingers—blood. I must have hit my head on the wheel.

“Our cowboy. He’s been standing there for years. Well, I guess, not anymore…”

A breath of relief escaped my lungs knowing it was the metal dummy I hit and not a real person. I grabbed my backpack from the passenger seat and stumbled out of the van, landing on a chunk of rock and twisting my ankle. “Ow, fuck. Are—are you hurt? I didn’t hit you, did I?”

I did a quick scan of him for injuries. His tanned, brown skin was clear of any cuts or bruises, aside from a layer of redness from the sun. His baggy white tee, jean shorts, and tiny cowboy boots with horse stickers on them were free of any blood, and the mop of his short, black curly hair was filled with sand, but thankfully, nothing else.

“No. I told you, you hit Dennis,” Bugeyes said as he swayed from side to side. Then, he pointed at the yard. “And the fence. And the trash can. And your head. Actually, you hit a lot of things.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” I said, scanning the trailer house in front of us. “What were you doing in the road? Are you lost? Where are your parents?”

He held up a sparkly purple rock with black spots on it. “I was looking for rocks.”

God, this kid.

Purple was----is----your favorite color. You’d probably like him. You’d probably shake his hand, hold it, and ask to be his friend. His innocence reminded me of you. His lisp reminded me of you. Any kid, no matter what age, reminded me of you.

Aside from the mess I created, the yard in front of me was already littered with junk. A bike with broken peg legs leaned up against the porch, a dried and cracked yellow plastic slide resided in a pile of weeds, and a kiddy pool with floating toy horses burned in the fever that was Arizona, the remaining water drying up by the second.

It reminded me of the depressing excuse of our apartment. It reminded me that we weren’t the only ones to live a life of clutter, a life of chaos, a life of ripped screen doors and dead house plants. A life of empty 99 cent McChicken wrappers sitting on the counter instead of 5 dollar on-the-go salads, because healthy food never belonged to people like us. A life resorted to collecting random things over the years because there was a chance of never having something like that again.

I knew, even with the cash I had in my backpack and the coins saved in a small tin can in my room, that I would never have enough to pay for the fence. Still, I ruined their home. And I knew that when things like this happened to people like them, to people like us, you fixed what you ruined. I took out the cash, stepped past the collage of broken rock and broken Dennis parts, and headed to the trailer.

But before I could reach the steps, the kid grabbed my hand and dragged me away, leaving Dennis, the chocolate van, and the hundreds of dollars in damage behind.

He led us towards the town. Towards Chloride.

We passed nearby trailers and houses decorated with tacky western nostalgia that you’d find in an empty antique mall. We passed porch swings and empty rocking chairs and skinny dogs slurping up grainy barrel water. We passed carriage wheels sitting without their carriages, and horses eating hay in the shade of stables. A church with broken shutters fluttered in what little breeze there was, and a sheriff’s office with chipped black paint looked straight out of a black and white Hollywood film. And we passed saddles----so many saddles. They hung everywhere---over horses, bikes, run-down cars, and over the rail of every building until rock turned into gravel, shrub turned into sand, desert turned into society.

The heat made it feel like ages to get there, even though the town laid itself in front of us like a rug. The sun pelted us, sweltering and cunning as it targeted the ground for victims, draining any last ounce of water out of my body. My skin sagged in the weight of its own sweat, the kid and I’s conjoined hands slipping past each other’s in a slick, soggy dance, and I reached in my backpack to pull out a cigarette when the sun licked both of our sweat up so fast, it left us bone dry.

Bugeyes stopped us at an old Pepsi machine on the side of a bank with boarded-up windows to get us some sodas.

“Hey, kid. You’re taking me to your parents, right?” I asked, wiping dried blood and sweat off my forehead.

He nodded and slipped a quarter into the coin slot, jamming his thumb on the button.

As we waited for our sodas, I faced the buildings that were lined in front of one another like cowboys armed with guns. They read: SALOON, GENERAL STORE, JAIL, BLACKSMITH, BATH HOUSE, POST OFFICE, and CAFÉ in strict, vintage letters. Rotting wood made up their skeletons, clinging to the ground that held them, and the idea of age wasn’t something you could just compare to any old western town—the amount of time this place had seen must have spanned over the course of centuries. The buildings had their own personalities, and their own auras, too, I could tell—tall or short, pointed or square, barn roofs or dulled stone. Some even had two stories with balconies to gaze out at spectators. And other than us, not a single soul was in sight.

It was completely dead.

Bugeyes gave me my Pepsi and I pressed the cold drink onto my neck, scanning the windows for any sources of life. He led me into a building with a hanging sign that pushed back and forth from the wind that read: THE IRIS.

It was a crystal shop. But it took the form of an old bar, the wall behind the counter replacing what used to be of liquor and spirits with crystals of every kind. Rock lamps, technicolor quartz, tarot cards, and herbs decorated the shop, hanging wind chimes and crystal glass prisms bouncing colors in every corner. Flute music whistled a calming tune while sage incense burned somewhere, the strong piney scent tickling my nostrils and making my head fog up.

Bugeyes took me to the bar and knocked on the carved wooden counter, taking a seat on a barstool. After a minute, someone walked through hanging door beads from the back, and Bugeyes got up to greet them.

A woman, with braids, beads, and an embroidered skirt. As beautiful as she was, she couldn’t have been his parent; she was too old. A grandparent, maybe.

I watched as they embraced each other. I watched as the woman lifted him off the ground, her thin arms squeezing the youth out of his small frame, cradling him to her chest. I watched as she pressed her forehead to his, mumbled a set of intelligible words into his ear, and set him down gently, her colorful arrangement of bracelets clanging against one another.

I used to hug you like that. I used to hold you until you couldn’t breathe. I used to cradle you and sing you lullabies until you fell asleep in my arms, until I had to carry you from the piss-stained sofa onto the mattress on the floor, laying the only comforter we owned on your tiny body. I used to be your parent because we were too broke and young and unfortunate to have a responsible one of our own.

Bugeyes whispered something in her ear, and the woman’s dark brown eyes met mine. I could tell by the lines on her temples, cheeks, neck, jaw, and lips that she had a history of her own. A story. An aura that flowed out of her like the smoke rising from the incense, like the energy pouring out from the crystals behind the bar.

“You saved him,” the Grandma said, her eyes sparkling. “My boy. You saved him.”

I didn’t know what to say. How to start. Her words felt like a punch to my gut. I didn’t save him, not really. I opened up my mouth to say something, something that resembled a nicer version of I could have killed him in one single breath, but I couldn’t get a word out.

I pulled out the wad of cash in my pocket and held it out, waiting for her to take it from me, even though our bodies were on separate ends of the store. I stuttered out what I thought to be a sentence but turned out to be a combination of consonants and vowels swirled together, my tongue tied in a tightly knotted mound of guilt. Guilt of what I did. To their yard, to Dennis, to the van. What I could’ve done to Bugeyes.

I kept trying to hand the Grandma the money, but she wouldn’t take it. Instead, she sat us in a triangle on the floor and circled the sage around my head, the smoke filling my lungs. God, it smelled good. Like burning leaves and ash and fire. I needed a cigarette. She set down the sage and gathered a deck of tarot cards, shuffling them in her hands. The entire time, all I could think about was that I didn’t deserve to be there. I didn’t deserve to accept the kindness they were offering me.

I could have killed him.

My eyes flitted over to Bugeyes where he was sitting crisscrossed, his hands in his lap, blissfully listening to the music and smiling like he wouldn't want to be anywhere else. He was happy to be here. With his Grandma. With me.

I wanted to throw up. I wanted to go out on the porch and finish an entire pack in one go. Maybe both. Instead, I distracted myself by asking about the town. I asked about the history, the buildings, and why the lack of people outside made the place look like it was the remnants of a toxic spill evac. Bugeyes said it was the heat, that everyone usually buckled up and sat in front of their fans whenever the temperature climbed over 100. But it just made me that more curious to meet them all.

Grandma asked me to cut the deck, then she drew three cards. She set them down in front of me—past, present, and future. As she flipped them over, one by one, I watched as the first depicted the drawing of a skeleton. I’ve never had a tarot reading done to me before, but I wasn’t an idiot. I knew what it was.

Death.

The grandma studied me closely as she explained the meaning to me, but again, I zoned out. Out of all the cards in the deck, I got death. Of course I did. I should’ve never come here. I meant to leave the apartment to get out of the black hole I tried so hard to climb out of, not dig deeper into it. The sinking feeling was coming back, sucking the life out of me until I could feel nothing other than the hollow bones resting inside my tissue and flesh.

And then it all came back to me. The van. The crash. The screams.

Because you’re gone, is the thing. As much as I hate to admit it, you are. As much as I like to talk to you like you’re still alive, you’re not. And as much as I tell myself it wasn’t my fault, it was.

It was my fault we went out driving that night. It was my fault I dragged you along to get more food. It was my fault we both had empty stomachs and it was my fault Dad left us and it was my fault that I didn’t see that damn truck.

It’s my fault you’re gone.

Did you know that? Did you know that I killed you?

I never told you that before. But you have to know that—you have to. I can’t keep hearing your voice in my ear saying that you were the hungry one, that you were the thirsty one, with your small hand tugging on my sleeve and pulling the wheel over and over and over and over—

“You okay, there?”

Grandma and Bugeyes were staring at me. They were closer, I think. I could see that Grandma had a small piece of bone going straight through her septum. Bugeyes’ bugeyes were bigger than usual. I was scaring him.

Was that all I did to people?

“I’m—I’m sorry,” I said, quickly wiping my cheek. The money was still folded in my hand, but it was warmer with the weight of both Grandma and Bugeye’s hands clasped over it. I didn’t even realize they were there.

“Would you like some water?” Grandma asked me.

I didn’t tell her that I still had my Pepsi, which was sitting on the bar, condensation dripping down the sides and ruining the fine wood. I let her go to the back and bring me a fresh glass. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to deal with an explanation, or maybe it was because I was selfish and missed being cared for. Either way, the cool liquid felt good going down my cigarette burned throat.

She moved onto the second card. A person was sitting up in bed, head in their hands, with six swords behind them. She explained this one to me, saying my past was having a hold on the present. The third, my future, was a man reaching towards the sun.

It meant abundance, new beginnings.

I didn’t know if that could be true. Could I move past this? Could I get a new beginning after the crash? After you?

For the past year, I’ve been searching for dying things to hear their last stories; to reach for a beating heart of life in their souls that were slowly fading away. Stepping inside this store, this town, meeting this small, tiny family—it was the core of what I was searching for. And yet, I still felt like it wasn’t enough.

Maybe what I was searching for all along was something to heal inside of me. An aura inside myself that was dying and fading away, and I didn’t even know it. Maybe the only way to truly heal was to accept what happened. To accept what I did.

After, Grandma had us bow our heads in silence as she said some words that I wasn’t familiar with. We stood up, and Bugeyes gave me his rock before wrapping his arms around my waist, squeezing tight. I stood there, a wooden post bound to the dirt. Somehow, after seconds of taking deep breaths, I allowed my arms to hug him back.

"I don't know what's making you sad," Bugeyes said. "Maybe it was the cards. Or the fence. But it's gonna be okay, you'll see."

It's gonna be okay. I wanted to cry. It was the last sentence you ever said.

"Thanks, kid. Sorry about Dennis."

He shrugs. "I never liked him anyway. I always thought he was ugly."

We laughed and went outside, where everyone had come out from the buildings. Most of the people were as ancient as the town, some in rocking chairs, others holding canes to their sides as they came down the steps. They were all looking up.

Above, the sun disappeared, clouds hovering over the earth with full, gray bellies. The first drop of rain fell, and then another and another, until an entire rush of a monsoon enveloped the decaying land, drenching us whole.

I watched as the Grandma began to laugh in delight, holding her palms to the sky. Bugeyes ran out to the square, kicking and jumping in puddles, his horse-stickered cowboy boots caking with red mud.

I sat on the steps of THE IRIS, gazing at the mountains on the horizon. I didn’t know what the tarot reading meant for me. Did the cards hold true to their meaning? Did my past—did you—hold me back from my future? I didn’t know. In ways, you might not be here anymore, but I’m grateful that you were with me. To talk to, to care for, to be a part of my life. I hate what I did to you. I hate you for leaving me. I hate that I'll never fully be okay with what goes on inside my head.

But sitting here now, listening to the cheers of the town and seeing the tiniest spark of hope in even the smallest and deadest of places, I can see that looking for dying things isn’t always the way to live. It may help others move on, but it won’t help me move on. Hearing other's stories isn't an ending, and there isn't always just one----it leaves room for interpretation, for imagination. For more endings.

I clenched the purple rock in my hands, remembering a world when you were alive. And as the sun winked at me from behind the clouds, I imagined you sitting here next to me, creating a thousand different endings for the both of us.