Seethe

spooky. toothy. YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY

I hate this town. 

Little nothing mountain town on the long path up Christ Holy Mountain called Toothless. One of those towns named ironically or something, like Needles. Half tweakers, half  empty or condemned vacation homes. In the 50s Toothless was a true vacation town. When Alterra leased the land ten miles up and built the Christ Holy ski resort, Toothless fell on economic hardship. Now, here it sits. A fucking dump. 

 I sit on the patio of my king bed hotel room and watch nothing pass by the main drag. A couple closed realty businesses, a 24 hour Mexican joint with a burnt out sign for truckers and low-life’s, totally empty save for a single bartender and server, flirting in the pink and green neon tint. Behind it all is forest. Trees for an eternity. No people really. 

I take a sip from the bottle I’m nursing, knowing there’s nowhere within an hour where I could get a refill. I think I should fall asleep. I can’t though. I’ve been watching CSPAN for eight hours straight, as is my ritual whenever I’m trapped in a hotel room for work. 

Journalists are supposed to explore, but at night, there’s nothing but your own mind and the empty room you’re trapped within. 

Recently people down the hill from Toothless have been getting sick. Spiritual sicknesses, psychosis, schizophrenia, manic depression. It wasn’t until diarrhea and vomiting symptoms kicked in that public officials suspected it might be something in the water. The hypothesis is that some corporation somewhere is dumping toxic materials into the river that runs down the top of Christ Holy into the valley. Not a new story by any stretch of the imagination, it wouldn’t make me a million bucks. But it would pay the rent. 

Tomorrow I am meant to go out and hunt for information, get a taste of local life and pry into any potential secrets. But frankly I’d rather write a hit piece on a D lister than be here. 

I check on the bartender and server and they’re gone. I can only imagine what they might be up to. But I’m lonely and a little starved for human contact so I know what I suspect. At least that's what I hope for their sakes. 

It’s quiet now though. I haven’t seen a car in a few sips. Town’s gone full supernatural. 

CSPAN drones on in the background. A reading of something I can’t really hear, and a little Q&A. It just sounds like a crackly Peanuts adult. Wah wah wah wah wah. 

It’s quiet out here. 

Just past the forest is the river and a little docking area for kayakers and floaters. It’s the only place a truck could unload toxic material so far as I can tell. If I’m lucky I’ll hear a diesel rumble by. But it’s silent out here. 

The darkness is like the ache before the flu. Just out of touch, weaving in and out of the lit streaks of trees that I can see from where I stand. I don’t dislike being alone, but maybe I’m not used to it. I’ve been here before on the way to report on this or that happening at Christ Holy but I’ve never seen it this still. 

The whole place looks like a model home. 

Lights are off in the Mexican joint now. 24 hours my ass. Now there’s no one. And only my car in the motel parking lot. 

No, not a model home, everything looks like a picture. 

I take a sip and light a cigarette on my patio. Fucking Toothless. Maybe it’s the buzz, but I have to reach out and tap the air to make sure someone hasn’t Truman Show’ed me with a backdrop or something. Nope. Still the air. So I lean over the patio and crane my neck to see either end of the street. Both just tumble off the gradient into black like even the streetlights are eaten by blackness. 

Now I’m part of the still. 

The silence is like pressure in my head. I admit I’m a city boy but I don’t mind forest silence. But forest silence isn’t silence. It’s wind in the leaves, its rustling of critters, it’s the swash of the river. The river has nothing to say, the trees are mute. And I have not seen a critter since sunset. 

Another sip.

Time to go to bed. 

You see ghosts at this hour. Hear them too if you’re unlucky. The booze doesn’t help. But I know I won’t sleep, so now I’m just nursing this bottle and hobbling back to the king bed across from the fireplace. I sit at the edge and take another sip. It’s getting to be mostly backwash, just foamy spit at the bottom, regurgitated from the depths of my guts with each burning swig.

I think I’m getting sick. 

Morning comes as sobriety hits me. CSPAN is playing golf now as the sun cracks through the trees. I turn to the window, head full of cement, and body throbbing with somatic aches. Now I can see the river through the trees, just a gentle shimmer of sparkle on the water. Light hits my corneas in staccato bursts. For a moment I am reading morse. A strange tingle of dread flutters in my chest. I am sleepless, and I know the danger of this. Like truck drivers seeing the mountains writhe in their periphery, finding faces in far off brake lights. I’m on salary, and I’ll at least need to produce something today.

So I push myself off the bed and head to the kitchenette to prepare one of those crappy compost bag cups on the little micro coffee machine the motel provided. Hot water from the sink gurgles and spits as it warms up. And I realize, almost too late, that I really shouldn’t drink from the tap. I have to throw out the pot I’ve made. I’m not sure if I should get a coffee from one of the local shops, so I decide I’ll just hit a gas station and get a canned coffee. 

I sloppily hike my way downstairs and to my car and feel my forehead. I’m not sure if it’s a fever or a hangover, but I’m hot, and can tell that my body is in the preemptive stages of unhealth. No, it’s gotta be the flu. Shit.

I drive down the boulevard with a frown. A couple cars drive by, but they’re all driving throughwards not towards. No one stopping to unload chemicals into the river. No one even stopping for a coffee. 

There’s one coffee shop that I pass as I make my way to the gas station at the outskirts. Alpine Joe. Windows are boarded, big red condemnation signs posted to the door.

More things I didn’t notice driving up last night: a boat abandoned on its keel on the side of the road, a house with a yard full of rusted cars in pieces and the weeds climbing high around them, A dead coyote, unseamed by a car tire and dragged off to the shoulder.

I have been to Toothless a thousand times. I don’t remember it being this desolate. But  lot of California towns are going the way of the dinosaur these days. Makes me think of Desert Center, a little town designed in the 20s to serve travelers moving from CA to AZ. Some solar company moved in, promising jobs for locals, and ended up fucking them all out of their housing. I’ve considered doing a piece on abandoned places in California, but again, I am thinking of Toothless all wrong. Toothless is not a ghost town, it’s just a shithole.

I pull up to the gas station and make my mark at pump 8. My card works fine on the machine, but I am interested in the man smoking a cigarette at the counter inside. I hold my wallet tight and make my way through the door which opens with a groan and a muted ding from the rusty bell overhead. The man greets me with a nod. A beautiful harbinger for any horror tale, I think, and the more I am here in Toothless, the more I suspect I have walked into a horror tale.

“Can I put $40 on pump 8?” I say. 

He taps some numbers into his computer and hands me the little card reader. It does not have a tap function, so I slide it.

“You open 24 hours?” I ask.

“Yep,” he says.

“See any big trucks rolling through late?”

The man takes a drag, I am silently jealous, but the room smells like a firepit and the walls are coated in a subtle dripping yellow from ages of nicotine stains.

“Sysco comes up once a week. Propane truck, hazard waste disposal. All getting to Christ Holy,” he says then clears his throat. “What are you asking?”

He wants straight forward. And while most locals of any town aren’t interested in airing their dirty laundry to a stranger, he doesn’t strike me as particularly resistant, despite his demeanor and clipped tone.

“I heard rumors about someone dumping hazardous materials into your river.”

He nods and shifts in his seat.

“Oh yeah, that,” he says. “I’m not worried. Been drinking this water for a long time and I’m okay.”

“Right,” I say. Then silence. “Well, what do you think is causing people to get sick?”

The man chuckles, his mouth is a hole, very free teeth left. I watch him without a word. Then he speaks after a long pause.

“Nothing likes to die,” he says. “Things get a little snippy at the end.”

“How do you mean?”

“Toothless is losing teeth,” he says. “But the teeth its got left are sharp.”

“You mean the people here might be fighting back against the town dying?” I ask.

He shrugs.

“Not exactly.”

“Help me understand.”

The man locks eyes with me now for a long time.

“You spiritual?” he asks.

“Agnostic.” Atheist really, but I think this answer works better for what I’m about to hear.

He grunts.

“Places develop a soul after a while. You ever live in a city?”

“I’m in West Hollywood now,” I say.

“Then you know what I mean,” the man says. “A city is like a body. It has rhythms.Wakes up at one time, sleeps at another. White blood cells, cells that kill cancers and such.”

“You mean a sort of ecosystem,” I say.

“I think that’s putting it lightly,” he says and leans forward. “I mean that’s where living things come from, right? Little cells make a big you.”

I open my eyes in surprise, not on purpose. I just don’t think I was expecting that.

“You mean the town is literally alive.”

“You think West Hollywood isn’t?”

And I have to sit with that for a moment. I don’t think I have a lead here, but maybe it’s the sleep depravity driving me to continue the conversations. I have to send in some sort of treatment this afternoon. This is going to be a waste of time. I pull myself back and look towards the cooler, where a single Starbucks Frappucino bottle stares at me from mostly empty shelves.

“I’m gonna get this as well,” I say as I grab the bottle.

He charges me.

“That all for you?”

“I think so,” I say. “Thanks for talking with me.”

I turn to leave but the man speaks again. I stop to look at him. 

“Go to the river at night. Late. You can hear it breathe,” he says with a nod. He’s not trying to scare me. But I feel like he is. I cannot find a drip of insincerity in his old eyes.

“She’ll tell you,” he says.

I thank him once more and return to the car, wondering how much of that interaction was real and how much of it was just sleepless wakeful dreaming. But I suspect that it was all real. Odd places attract odd folk, and in time they create more oddities. What’s more, I could not tell the man’s tone. It was possible he relished the sickness hitting the bottom of the hill, but it was just as possible it was somber reflection. But it felt neutral, like a scientific observation.

I drink my frappuccino and check my head again. I’m burning up. My fault. Altitude, insomnia and a general disposition for being unwell and unacclimated to direct nature is not serving me. When I pass the 24 hour Mexican joint, I can finally see the name of the place. Zapata’s, with a painted mural on the wall of Emilliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, heroes of the Mexican revolution. It’s still not open. Mr. Bartender and Mrs. Server are nowhere to be found. 

Behind Zapata’s I can see the river, still sparkling in Morse.

I spend the day studying traffic, seeing who stops and where. No one stops here. So I hunt down locals in the afternoon. One man tells me the story of the beach community he grew up in, where he and other unsavories such as Darby Crash and Kevin Spacey used to steal cars in their youth. I don’t believe the stories, but I want to. I am a quiet lover of forbidden and forgotten Hollywood, before they were Hollywood. The man also tells me the story of how Stanley Kubrick was groomed from a young age to become the filmmaker and member of the illuminati. The strange man uses the phrase, “A tiger doesn’t know its stripes” as a defense. States that Kubrick didn’t know he was Kubrick, but was always trying to escape the chains of his identity through his art, only becoming more himself as a result. The man can talk, but not about the questions I’m asking. So, I slip away from the conversation and find someone else. I spend early evening talking to three other people, the only three I can find. I buy another bottle at the local liquor mart and talk to the cashier. She has lived in Toothless her whole life. She tells me about how it started as a logging town, midway up the mountain, how Toothless supplied most of the original lumber for San Bernardino County. I don’t consider this factual, considering it was more likely that San Berdu got their lumber from Big Bear Mountain, nevertheless, I find it usefully mythic. There was a time when the people here took pride in their town. She says she doesn’t know anything about the poisonings in Flatland below. She offers me a cup of tap water before I leave, I politely decline and go elsewhere to purchase a bottle.

My Google alerts go off while I’m driving and I pull over to read them. More sicknesses below according to local news. Two deaths from dysentery. An Oregon trail disease where you shit yourself to death. No known cause still, but they expect bacterial. By the time the sky is indigo I have nothing of merit in my word processor. I can make up a bit about how the remaining townsfolk are getting revenge for the world forgetting them for the ski resort at Christ Holy, but I’ve grown fond of the oddities residing in this tucked away little nowheresville.

I have nothing. 

From my hotel room, I watch as the glitter on the river dims and fades to the same haunted blackness as the night before. So, I decide on a drink. And another, and another. I email my pitch, carelessly. Realistically, they should send me down the hill to talk to the Sheriffs working the case. I would hate that, but not more than I hate being sleepless up here. Worst case scenario, they’ll bring me back home. Fuck if I care, really. 

The night grows later and the darkness grows blacker.

As I sit on my patio and smoke cigarettes, I can’t stop staring at the spaces between trees. Zapata’s never opened today. The streetlights are dim and mercury green. The place is sickly in color, like a dying man. It is a dying man. For a moment, I am sorrowful. I hate Toothless. I don’t want it to die. You can’t really hate a ghost, and maybe I enjoy hating this freak town. 

And as the witching hour approaches, I am reminded of the gas station attendant.

I fix myself a drink into a hotel-supplied cardboard cup and decide to make my way down to the water.

The night is icy cold and I’ve had just about enough of it by the time I cross the street. But I’m not going to stop myself. If I weren’t curious, I would need another job. I cross over the parking lot and vault a small barrier separating Zapata’s from the forest. Then through the trees I go. The air is crisp here, a distant incense of pine sap brushes my nose. I turn around to make sure I haven’t gotten myself lost. The green streetlamp haze through the trees is eerie, almost radioactive. I like it, despite the fact that something in me tells me that should be a warning.

I keep walking. My head is throbbing. I am officially ill, it seems. But the strong drink is keeping the moaning and groaning at bay for now.

When I reach the river’s edge, I sit, illuminated only by moonlight, and I drink from my cup. The world isn’t hazy or wobbly yet, but I can tell I’m getting there. The virtue of a drink is it allows me to focus. It is becoming more and more likely in my mind that the citizens of Toothless are revolting against their plight. Like the Desert Center citizens who rebelled against the solar company that took their land with spray paint and property damage. But I entertain the possibility that the town is somehow alive. It wouldn’t necessarily know it was alive, just a thing motivated by the inner processes and inner workings of its people. Kind of like people. “A tiger doesn’t know its stripes” and all that.

A breeze sussurates through the pines and tells me a secret, but I do not speak the language of the trees. It falls on deaf ears.

I take another drink. A smaller one to gauge myself.

I’m fine.

But an organism isn’t compelled only by its inner workings. It’s a feedback machine. It demands context. Cancer emerges naturally, yes. But sometimes it’s cigarettes and smog. Or booze.

I drink to that.

Another whisper, but this one comes from the trickle of water itself.

It translates for me.

Seethe is the word.

Seeeeeeeethe. One long drawn out exhalation from the toothless grin of Toothless’s river. Seethe, again.

I listen, knowing this is some form of auditory pareidolia.

“Why?” I ask.

Neither trees nor river respond. It’s also a dumb question for a living town. A living town wants to live.

In the corner of my eye, something shuffles. I turn towards it. A figure moves towards the water, the figure of a human man. I stand and consider calling out to it, but watch in silence instead. He reaches down and splashes his face with water. He does this three times. Then he stands with his back to the water and falls into it.

“Hey!” I shout. 

I dart towards him without thinking. I’m stupid for not bringing a flashlight. Even with moonlights helping hand, it’s impossible to see clearly. Branches scratch my cheeks as I flail in darkness towards the man, now, just a bobbing black shape on the water, moving downstream.

“Hey!” I yell again, but the man is not responding. I chase him further, but the river runs faster than me.

Seethe, she tells me. Seethe.

The river slows, my lungs are on fire and my legs are turning to mush.

The man’s body stops at a small natural dam and beats up against it, pulled under then launched back up. I don’t know if he’s drowned or not already, but by some secondary instinct, I throw my cup into the water and dive in.

I am swing my arms towards him, fighting the tide until I too am up tight against the little wall. The dam is soft, not made of lumber or stone. It’s soft like skin. I claw towards the drowning man by odd fleshy limbs that wriggle with the current. 

I know something now that I cannot admit.

I know something unspeakable about the dam.

Whether by intuition or some other feature of consciousness.

I know something.

It’s seething inside me.

I reach the man with a gasp of breath and grab him. Water splashes into my mouth, into my lungs and I hack it out onto the dam. The water is sour. When I can see more than the blotted, white stars in my periphery, I use the last of my waning strength to grab the man’s arm and pull him over my shoulder. With a howl of last-strength, I drag him back to shore and collapse onto dry land beside where I have dropped the body. Breath is hard and hot, my head throbs from the sick and the agony of energy spent to the furthest extremes.

Finally, I can roll over and see who I have collected. The man is hacking I think. No, he’s laughing. And with the moonlight’s scythes on his cheeks, I can make out the contours of a familiar face, the gas station attendant. He opens his eyes and stares at the dark.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I bark through gasps.

He shakes his head and does not answer, but instead raises a hand and points. I follow the line of his finger to the object of his intention. The dam. And I can see clearly now its composition. Bodies. Bodies on bodies on bodies all clumped together in a writhing line. The damned.

My heart is a jackhammer in my temples. With each rapid beat, my vision blears red.

I turn back to the old man and shake him. It’s an impulse, it doesn’t make sense. He’s alive, and he couldn’t have singlehandedly delivered all these bodies to the water. I want to shout something at him but I don’t know what.

Seethe.

He opens his eyes, gray with age and smiles. Only three or four teeth are left in his hole mouth. Inside, nothing but the deepest black, like the night through the trees. 

“Did you hear her?” he asks.

“Why?” I cry, not responding to his question. Not responding to anything but the fact tht nothing is making sense right now. Maybe I’m drunk. Maybe I’m delusional. Maybe this is all a mistake and nothing has happened. I’ve been asleep, dreaming like a baby in that ancient king sized bed.

“A body doesn’t die,” says the man. He is laughing again. “It changes.”

“What are you talking about?”

The man closes his mouth. Smile gone. Laugh gone. Teeth gone.

“A body doesn’t die,” he says. Overhead the trees are trilling their song. Seethe, seethe, seethe. “It becomes a weapon.”

With a burst of strength, he shoves past me and dives into the river. I start to chase after him, but he does not emerge. He’s trapped somewhere beneath the dam of corpses. And I can’t stop staring. Flesh waves off of bones like tattered battle flags in the breeze. 

The sour water still tangs on my tongue.

A body doesn’t die. It becomes a weapon.

I stumble back into a tree.

I can see the river now, hear her clearly. At first I think they are making biohazards of themselves, but that’s not it. Treatment plants would deal with that. There is the river hovering above the river like a ripple of noxious gas from a line and within that finger of distortion I see faces carved into wavering matter. Faces on faces on faces. Those who sacrificed themselves to grant agency to their ghost town. To exact revenge. 

The river moves now twice, superimposed over itself. Faces glimmer with as much joy as agony, they sparkle in moonlight, tapping Morse code directly into my synapses. Only now I know the language. I know the word. Maybe the word that God spoke into the universe to bring it to being, maybe the true final words of Christ himself as he died to grant agency to animal humanity. A holy word. 

Seethe.