Secret Lives (8 page)

It would be wearisome to relate how Tidwell came to acquire the duck—the money he had to save, the journeys he had to make to various European countries, the bribes given to this curator to look up records from centuries past and that old grandmother who claimed to remember seeing it in her youth, or even to convey the sheer ferocity of desire it took for Tidwell to continue on his course. Suffice it to say that in due course, he did acquire the duck, even though he committed more than one crime to do so. All seemed forgivable if only the duck came into his possession.

One rainy spring day, Tidwell came back from his final journey, holding a box. He wearily opened the door to his home, threw the box on the couch, and went to fix himself a drink. It had taken over five years to find the duck, and several times he was certain he would fail in his quest, dead end leading to dead end. But, finally, a wizened old man in a beret, sitting in a cafe in the wine country outside of Marseilles, had given him the lead that had led to the clue that had resulted in a box containing Vaucanson’s duck.

Tidwell wondered idly if his family and friends would ever forgive him for his obsession. Probably not, but the damage was already done. He could not undo it. Nor, he thought as he drank down his whisky, did he think he would have wanted to. He was not the same person he had been before. He had picked up a dozen new skills in his journeys, discovered in dangerous situations that he responded firmly and well. The world had, no matter what came next, opened up for him in a different way than it had opened up for him in his previous life.

Thus far he had glimpsed the duck only briefly—winced at its crumbled condition, one wing inoperable, the beak chipped, one foot half sawed-through, the feathers that had once coated its metal surface weathered or gone, so that Vaucanson’s duck looked as though it were half-plucked. A smell had risen from it, too. The smell of rotting oil, of metal parts corroding.

Could it ever be restored? Tidwell didn’t know. But he lovingly took it from its box and set it out on the kitchen table. At some point, one of the duck’s many owners had tried to restore the duck to its former glory, with mixed results. Now one eye appeared to consist of faux emeralds, while the neck had a pattern engraved on it more common to paper doilies. The one intact leg had a similar design inflicted upon it. The duck should have been self-winding, but even the emergency wind-up mechanism, twisted and torn, couldn’t get the duck to work. Vaucanson’s creation had survived the centuries, but only as a corpse.

Something wistful welled up in Tidwell as he sat at the table with his whisky and the mechanical bird. Something sorrowful.

He remembered the words of the man who had started him on this path to either ruin or Enlightenment. He wondered now why he had taken them so to heart, why it had seemed at the time like a directive or a plea he could not ignore.

Well, it was too late now for regrets. He sighed and went to get a screwdriver and some other tools. Almost from the start, he had decided to perform an autopsy on the duck should he ever get his hands on it. Between the homeless man’s comments and the remarks of the people he had encountered on his quest—including the descendents of Vaucanson—it had increasingly struck him that there might be something
inside
the duck even more important than its worth as an automaton.

It took some effort to pry the matching halves apart and he was breathing heavily by the time he had finished. A flicker of deep excitement energized him, though, and it was with triumph rather than exhaustion that he finally peered into the mysteries of the duck’s innards.

At first, he saw nothing of interest. Just gears and levers and rusted chains, the remains of a rubber tube that had served as the duck’s intestinal tract. But when he looked closer, he found, nestled deep in the bird, a compartment in which sat a round, grooved black globe the size of a human eye, and a corresponding empty space beside it.

All the tension draining out of Tidwell, he sat back in his chair, arms behind his head, and began to laugh. This,
this
is what the homeless man had led him to. His journey had just begun. Caught. Afraid. Curious.

After awhile, he began to weep, and then to reach out with a trembling hand for the black globe buried in the guts of Vaucanson’s duck, and then to pull back, as if from a flame. Reach out, pull back, reach out.

For all I know, Tidwell is sitting there still.

RAJAN KHANNA

Rajan Khanna currently works as a data manager for Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, in the New York-New Jersey area. Rajan writes short stories and novels in his spare time. His wife, Libbette Mahady, is from Queensland, Australia.

Rajan is not religious, although, if pressed, he would say that his inclination runs more toward Eastern schools of thought, like Taoism or Zen Buddhism. Perhaps this inclination provides some evidence of a proclivity for seeing what is truly there.

The first time Rajan came across a secret path, in Livingston, New Jersey, he was only eight, and did not recognize the significance of the event. He had drifted past the swings, jungle gym, slide, and sandbox, off toward the wooded area where he and his friends often incorporated a large concrete tube into their imaginary explorations of strange lands.

On this particular day, Rajan was by himself, reluctant to return from a recess just ending, but reconciled to it. When he heard the teacher call to him and other stragglers, he started to walk back toward the school. Half-way there, he stumbled, moved a little to his right on his knees, arms out for balance, and then looked left because of unexpected
light
. He saw, in a moment that didn’t seem real, a slice of sun through the otherwise overcast sky, a hint of a breeze where none had existed, and, stretching out before him, a path of dried golden-brown leaves. The path wound its way up the lee of a slice of hill that had not been there before, and out of sight, always touched by the sliver of sunlight that seemed from some other place.

Rajan inhaled with an audible gasp, mouth open, heart beating faster, and grasped the thick grass of the hill with both hands, as if to anchor himself.

He blinked once.

The path was still there. It seemed both tranquil and dangerous. The leaves upon its surface spun and whirled, but never blew away. The light upon the leaves had an unreal, hypnotic quality.

He wrenched his gaze from the sight. He blinked again.

The path, the light, the leaves, had disappeared in that instant of blindness. There was a ringing in Rajan’s head. No, not in his head. The teacher calling to him once again, in a shrill voice.

Reluctantly, Rajan released the grass and ran up the hill through the cut grass smell, back into the safety of the school. The mangled stalks of grass in the fists of his hands felt much more real than what he had just seen.

Soon, the memory of that glimpse into . . . into what? he did not know . . . receded into the morass of other childhood memories. It became more and more unreal, until it became a daydream, a vision, utter fantasy.

But Rajan did not entirely forget, either. It was hard to forget an event like that, even if dismissed as mere epiphany. It became a kind of
submerged
memory. It came back to Rajan in moments of triumph, of ecstasy: the column of remembered sunlight like a manifestation of his personal happiness. And yet, a disturbing memory, so that in photographs of Rajan happy, experiencing happiness, there is a hint of a puzzled expression on his face, a hint of looking through the camera into some dilemma, some mystery.

And that might have been the extent of the secret life of Rajan Khanna: a curious expression in family photographs, a sense in those who met him that at times he wrestled with some unanswerable question. It might have ended there, and simply lent him that attractive otherworldliness his wife secretly adored in him. But, for whatever reason, Rajan Khanna proved to have a talent for finding paths and roads, streets and bridges, overpasses and tunnels, that either no longer existed or had never been there.

The second time it happened—or, at least, the next time it happened and he could not ignore it or explain it away—Rajan was sixteen and walking with his friends in Manhattan, down a street clogged with pedestrian traffic. In the middle of a block, a sudden compulsion came over him, accompanied by an odd yet pleasant scent, as of fresh lime, to stop, step out of the bustle of people, and look to his left, at the solid brick wall of a bank . . . only, it wasn’t solid brick. Now, in the middle of a building he had passed dozens of time, a mews, or narrow alley, cut right through the wall and traveled off into the distance, buttressed by the dark suspicion of alcoves at irregular intervals to either side. There was a wavery quality to the edges of the brick where it met the open air of the sudden corridor. A suggestion of mirage, as when heat rises beneath from a manhole cover.

Rajan frowned, tried to control the sudden acceleration of his breath, his heartbeat. That couldn’t be right. It just . . .
couldn’t
. The mews went right through the building, cut offices in half, created a sliver of blue sky in the middle of windows, and he could see people walking from one side of an office to another, disappearing as they passed through the area now occupied by the sky above the mews, and reappearing unharmed on the other side.

“Rajan—c’mon. What’re you looking at?” one of his friends asked.

“Just a second,” Rajan said, still staring.

Rajan realized then that sometimes he existed in two worlds at once. He stood there and stared down the alley into that expanse of impossible blue sky and knew that if he chose to, he could walk
through
the building, that there would be no brick to stop him.

But on that particular day, at the age of sixteen, Rajan chose not to follow the path, in part because he was with his friends. It wasn’t that he wasn’t curious. He was. But on that day, too, Rajan began to realize that he didn’t yet understand this “gift,” and that while it might seem wondrous, it could also be dangerous.

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.