Here? – Chris Morgan

February 7, 2025

The snow fell thinly but steadily, accumulating so as to drape the earth like furniture in a deserted house. My frostbitten feet left a spectral trail of my winding path back to warmth. The night was still, as if to be airless and unpeopled, making my way though disused baseball fields, silent schools, and the one house that forgot to switch off its blinking pink heart. Winter is paradoxical in its way, I thought, withholding comfort; not cruelly but without compromise, something you can’t go back from. A tranquil, enveloping nothingness. The respite from the worst that is finally behind you. Death from the dead’s perspective. I told Steve this much, maybe not in those words. I told him that I appreciated what he went through, but that I didn’t envy it and that it is not the dark that conspires against you or feels some special hunger. I let the words seep into his directionless gaze, even if he was then, and maybe always was, in no fit state to hear them.

***

“Kevin’s place has a mouse problem,” Steve said over my search for what little contentment could be found on Sunday’s Jets game. “He knows he should kill them, but he doesn’t want to trap them so he—”
        “Huh?” I said hazily.
        “… he just kind of steps on them.”
        I sat up and faced him. “How does that work?”
        “I don’t know exactly. Maybe it’s more personal for him? Then he names them and buries them in this kind of graveyard out in the woods. They’re marked by old action figures and have ‘HELLO My name is..’ stickers over them. The most recent one is named Ozzy.” 
        I sank back into the couch as the Jets threw another interception. “I thought Kevin was in some kind of assisted living thing.”
        “It’s not ideal,” Steve said as he retrieved another beer from the refrigerator. “So Rachael knows this social worker at her school. I asked if she could ask them about it.”
        “About Kevin?”
        Steve returned to the couch and snapped the can open. “Yeah, just to see what his options are. See if there’s something with more independence.” He took a swig of his beer and tried to catch up with the process of the game. “The problem is that Rachael thinks that the social worker doesn’t like her. She hasn’t given a reason.”
        “Rachael thought that I didn’t like her.”
        “I don’t think that’s true. I think she didn’t like you.”
        “Oh yeah,” I deadpanned.
        “I think she’s warmed to you though.”
        The opposing team scored another touchdown. “To indifference?”
        Steve chuckled and regarded his beer. “Oh shit, do you want one?”
        Most of what I’d known about Kevin Ritter was recently being filtered through Steve’s experience of him. It was as if Steve was his biographer, even as his encounters with Kevin had a far-fetched quality. Not that they seemed fantastical or implausible, but that these accounts were gleaned from what I thought were their brief encounters amid Steve’s daily commute, when he’d come into McDonald’s for his coffee. Kevin worked the day shift where he’d largely sweep around the tables and refill the cups, straws, and napkins. It did not occur to me that Steve had the time or the capacity to mentor anyone in between his job in waste management, his relationship with Rachael then stretching to its fifth year, and Sunday game night where these anecdotes would be recounted. Yet there Kevin’s number was in Steve’s contacts, as “Little Brother,” despite being a good decade our senior.
        “What do you guys talk about?” I asked him.
        “I tell him that I hadn’t been swallowed.”
        “What?”
        “He thinks the dark is this giant mouth that swallows everything. Especially the winter dark. So I call him after dinner to tell him that I’m still here, and that helps him.”
        I said nothing.
        “I set boundaries,” he said as if to echo across from another conversation. “Kevin knows boundaries.”

***

My knowledge of Kevin Ritter used to be closer to the surface level of everyone else. He bore a distinct presence in town as far back as my early teens. He was over six feet tall and with a barrel-shaped figure belying his penchant for walking everywhere. He always wore the same block-like sneakers, alternating between white and black, above which were any number of unfashionable combinations, though often ill-fitting jeans that either sagged down or rode up and a t-shirt baring some chipper graphic like a cartoon animal or “Life is good” to prove his positive outlook to the world. That was helpful as a contrast to his acne-scarred and ineptly shaven face that was dim of every available emotion. 
        He’d been shuffled around several local businesses but with a limited regimen of menial responsibilities; paid, no doubt, at the lowest allowable minimum while his employers reaped economic and moral incentives for doing so. 
        Kevin was often seen even as steps were taken not to notice him. Less out of outright disgust than to get out from under the effort to display compassion—to wave at him or smile at him or ask him how his day was while not expecting or hoping for anything in return. That Kevin could have a bad day was not a matter of serious consideration. A conception of good and bad never registered to someone of Kevin’s condition—though no one could say to any certainty what his condition was—as it did a regular person. So when a customer lost patience with him or his employers were gruff with him or the latest crop of teenagers tossed garbage at him from their cars, there was no need to intervene because it was all the same to Kevin.

***

“Please state your name for the record,” the detective said in his self-announcing bullet-pointed tone.
        “Sean Joyce.”
        “And what is your relation to the deceased, Steven Aiken?”
        “Friend.”
        “How long had you known Mr. Aiken?”
        “Since, I think,” I fell silent under the weight of having to consider the timespan in which I’d taken my indissoluble connection to Steve for granted, and then to add up to the time since it had dissolved, but then resolved on something simpler, “since fifth grade.”
        “That’s,” the detective paused to do the harder mental math, “15 years?”
        “More like 16.”
        “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said with a fade of afterthought.
        I nodded and shifted in the hard seating provided in the interrogation room.
        “Just to make clear,” the detective began more casually, “you’re not in any trouble. There are still some questions that need answering. And I know this is difficult, but any light you can shed on his state of mind lately could be helpful.”
        “Sure.”
        “When was your last contact with Mr. Aiken?”
        “Before Christmas. So two months ago.”
        “And was there anything you noticed about him that was out of character to you?”
        “Stress at work, I guess.”
        The detective jotted down a note that glided with predetermined ease.
        “Could you elaborate on that?” he fairly asked.
        “Just that, I guess, he didn’t feel satisfied at work. Like it wasn’t noble or something. And I just told him that sanitation was a noble job.”
        “Right.”
        “Just maybe not a classy one.”
        “What about his love life?”
        “It seemed satisfactory,” I said with a shrug. “You’d have to ask Rachael Manson for more about that.”
        “Ms. Manson is in no fit state to answer questions at this time,” the detective said in a revelatory frustration. As I was leaving the station I’d overhear a patrol officer mentioning how “the dead guy’s ex” was found tossing her clothes, a TV, a laptop, and other belongings out on her lawn, as if it was a bedtime fairy tale.
        “Did Mr. Aiken mention anything about Crescent Meadows?”
        “The development?”
        “Was he doing any kind of work there?” He paused. “Did he have any money in it?”
        “I couldn’t say,” I said with an evasive chuckle. 
        The space between the detective’s well-worn brow narrowed instantly. I looked down at the folder the detective brought in but did not consult, the corner of a photograph stuck out from under it that I strained to ignore.
        “It’s mostly wood frames over there. But there’s one section that was finished and carpeted. Seemed to be spending a lot of time there.”
        “Like living there?”
        “Maybe not living there, but we found a sleeping bag, some beer cans, Hostess cake wrappers, and a camping lantern. It looked like he was seeking some kind of refuge. Was there anything he was trying to hide from?”
        By this point I had no non-negations to offer. I’d reached a state where consolation was needed, which only meant to my conversant that my usefulness had lapsed, at least momentarily.
        “I’ll be in touch for follow-ups.” He got up to lead me out of the station. “I’m sorry again.”

***

“So … what, did you name the squirrel,” I asked Allison over video conference, which we had daily as remote employees of a public relations firm.
        “No,” she said with a laugh, “why?”
        “Since you’ve made a new friend it seems.”
        “Because it crawled up my leg?”
        “Seems like a sociable thing to do,” I said. “A yearning for connection.”
        “Or, you know, just being invasive,” Allison said slyly.
        “Maybe it thought you were concealing acorns from it.”
        “How, I wonder, would I do that?”
        “I could only guess.”
        We both laughed and I became suddenly pensive.
        “What?” Allison said with slight but unassuming concern.
        “Nothing really …”
        “C’mon.”
        “Oh, it just reminded me of something weird a friend told me last night about someone he knows.”
        “Do tell!”
        I hesitated before finding my resolve. “This guy has, I guess this mouse infestation …”
        “Ew …”
        “Yeah … he has this mouse infestation, but instead of trapping them or, like calling an exterminator he exterminates them …” I paused briefly for no clear reason “… with his foot.”
        “What?”
        “Yeah.”
        “That’s … either hardcore or kinky or evil. I don’t know which.”
        “It’s odd, like I said.”
        “He could just get a cat!”
        “He’s afflicted.”
        “Afflicted?”
        I paused again, in struggle for the correct word and, having lost the struggle, said that Kevin was “kind of slow.”
        “Ah ha,” Allison drawled.
        “Don’t you need to get a tetanus shot or something?” I hastily appended.
        Allison’s posture became upright and rigid through her webcam. “Can you get those proofs back by end-of-day so that the press releases can be distributed first thing tomorrow?”
        “I got those done before lunch,” I said in between clicks and key strokes. “And they’re in your inbox now.”
        “Great,” she said averting her gazes before her screen cut to black. 

***

“Normally I could do this on my own,” Steve assured while he rifled through the backseat of his jeep, parked by a wooded area at the edge of Crescent Meadows. “But with you here I can cover more ground quickly.” He came from his car holding a handled flashlight in one hand an a camper’s lantern in the other, handing me the latter. “The side gate should be open.”
        This was the outcome of Steve breaking a succession of unanswered texts over the course of weeks with “hi im outside,” and not explaining further until I was his passenger in transit. 
        “I called him as I usually do,” Steve said waving his flashlight on the ground. His words chattered telegraphically from the December cold.
        “Kevin?”
        “Yeah. I called a few times. No answer. I went to his place and it was dark. Went to McDonald’s—nothing.”
        “So?” I said in thoughtless aggravation.
        Steve stopped dead, turned to me and shined the flashlight in my face. “So?” he said, his throat corroded with indignation. “So.”
        The side gate turned out to be stubbornly padlocked. We resolved to climb the freezing chainlink fence. Steve landed on the other side with a feline’s sure-footedness as I struggled not to tear my pants or cut myself. Our light sources could barely make out the skeletal husks of the unfinished condominium complex. Yet Steve’s steps had a fluidity to them over half-paved, half-gravel streets and beds of hardened mud and fertilizer while his light ray points were quick and precise. His “normally” echoed back in my thoughts. I wielded my lantern like a pulp fiction hero in a cave even as its brightness extended barely beyond my person.
        “What am I doing?” I whispered harshly.
        “Finding signs of life. He likes to come here.”
        “Here?”
        “He thinks it’s safe here from getting swallowed.”
        That? I thought to myself.
        “Because I guess to him there’s nothing here worth swallowing.”
        Steve was reaching, I thought. Not simply because he couldn’t know Kevin’s mind as well as he was saying but because he seemed to be telling something contrary to reality. Nothing unseemly, to my knowledge, had happened at Crescent Meadows other than some financial collapse on some unfortunate investor’s part. It carried no special aura, no wound of human tragedy. But it was lifeless as planets hostile to humanity are lifeless. Its dark had a bleeding ink consistency that our lights were penetrating like pins. Once I’d adjusted to the cold I meandered around the grounds as if in black water, looking for nothing because the monstrosity was engulfing me.
        “Normally.”

***

“Did you ever tell me how this came about?” I asked him as we smoked on the back porch in the post-game twilight. 
        “About Kevin?”
        “Yeah.”
        He took a long drag and thought for a moment. “Just sort of happened. The same way other friendships happen.”
        “But it’s … different, right?”
        “Different how?” he said with a scrutinizing glare.
        “Like different from you and me.”
        “I don’t see it that way.” He put his cigarette out into an empty plant pot as if to leave the matter settled.
        “Oh,” I said flicking my spent cigarette over the fence. “You at Rachael’s for Thanksgiving?”
        “Nah, Rachael had it out with her stepmom. She’s gonna see her dad in Florida.”
        “You’re welcome here.”
        Steve was silent without giving an indication of thought. 
        “Here?”

***

What surprised me about seeing Kevin Ritter up close was how little space he took up. This in some logical defiance to his lumbering frame within the strict confines of his workplace, where I took the opportunity to go one afternoon having depleted my coffee supply at home. This seemed on account of an automatic way of movement, programmed rather than natural. He swept the floor at a rhythmic pace and worked around the tables in a determined way, along the periphery and moving inward. At the same time he was courteous to dodge all customers, who returned the precaution as if all had mutually repelling forcefields. So to get closer to him, just to see how he really was, took the shape of a dot-based video game. I, the intruder, ricocheted from edge to edge within his fortress. But this could not go on. Not with the cashier’s glare of substantiated suspicion, and not against the reality that close encounters happen only when fate deems them worthy of happening. Such as when I went to throw the stirrer into the garbage.
        Behind me Kevin stood like a sculpted tree trunk, waiting patiently with garbage bag in-hand. In that instance the wide-open space had constricted like a trapped worm. I jolted back. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I yelped.
        “Okay,” Kevin said. His voice, unheard before that point, was soft with a residue of deference almost certainly instilled as early as he could learn it. It bore a strange contrast not just to his arbor-like body but to his mask-like face, the expression of which was less of vacancy than of fading out. I had only seen it once before, on a girl at a college house party, who’d spent the entire night seated in a recliner. She had been left there in a glassy serenity that slowly drained out, as with her bodily fluids. Her Oxycontin habit had taken the typical course.
        I stood to the side as Kevin slowly but smoothly exchanged the full garbage bag for the fresh one, and christened it with my mostly full coffee cup.
        “Good day,” Kevin said as I was halfway to the door.

***

Interest in the Super Bowl had waned at the Super Bowl party. To continue to monitor its progress constituted willful deviance against the prevailing social trend to disperse into smaller units of carousal; forming isolated conversational customs, but still sharing the dip. I drifted among the crowds like floating debris before colliding into a high school classmate whose name I didn’t remember and who in turn seemed to be calling me “Seth.”
        “Seattle is great, man,” he said as if this was known to me. “The best, actually.”
        “What do you do?” I managed to ask.
        “I sell men’s pills.”
        “Men’s pills?”
        “For … male-related issues. Real indie brand, very luxe,” he said with disconcerting grin. “Still here?”
        “Yeah,” I said looking past him. Rachael was making serpentine motions through the living room. I gave a wide-eyed signal of rescue but it seemed she was predetermined in my direction.
        “That’s cool, Seth. Lots of people do that. Not me, though. I need the fre—”
        “I’m borrowing him,” Rachael said with a tense smile as she led me away to the kitchen.
        Three of her girlfriends—a brunette, a blonde, and a slightly darker blonde—huddled over a bottle of vodka on the counter as if it was an extraterrestrial artifact. The brunette glared at my presence and they flanked into a mock tribunal behind Rachael.
        “Well?” Rachael asked, stern and cross-armed.
        “Well what?”
        “What is Steve doing?” she asked, though not very certainly. “Has he said anything? Told you anything?”
        “No more than usual,” I replied with no greater certainty.
        “Seriously? You’re his friend.”
        “Yeah but …”
        “Are you sure this is the right person, Rach?” the darker blonde asked.
        “Yeah,” the blonde said, “he doesn’t seem to know anything.”
        “I guess not.”
        “We broke up,” Racheal said with a jolt, as if it had only just occurred to her then, “in October.”
        I paused contemplating the correct rapid-response. “I’m sorry about that,” I muttered.
        “You didn’t know?”
        “Maybe not directly?”
        “Direct, my cock,” Rachael cried. 
        The brunette’s countenance grew concerned. “Rachael this isn’t going in a good direction.”
        Rachael’s indignation, pent up over the last five months, fell off like a melting ice sheet. The tribunal convened back to the vodka, finally opening and imbibing it, as Rachael struggled to develop a new line of inquiry. 
        “I have to take this,” I said holding up my phone. “Sorry again.”
        Two women made out drunkenly on the pool covering out back as I smoked a cigarette and read between the lines of Allison’s text of “u missed 3 typos be more careful plz” a day before.

***

“I think the waitress is going to burst into tears if we turn her away again,” I told Steve pushing the menu closer to him.
        “This is not the greatest coffee in the world,” Steve muttered.
        “You expected … what, exactly?”
        Steve’s eyes wandered about the place. It was near closing but still well-attended. Waitresses in Santa hats weaved through tables in the same barking revelry. Yet our waitress’s distress seemed to radiate through the pounding of “Sharp Dressed Man” and  “Addicted to Love” and into the other diners. A type of community forms around Hooters customers, one of a primordial type that can turn on the insincere or the stingy tipper.
        “Had a dream about this place,” he said.
        I heaved a breath and bid him to go on.
        “Kevin was working here. He was in his McDonald’s uniform but he was here doing what he always does. And there were moms at every table. Moms nursing their babies.” He took a wincing sip of his coffee. “It was so real.”
        “It’s weird when dreams feel like that.”
        Steve’s gaze hardened. “It didn’t feel real.”
        We ordered mild wings to go and left a $30 tip. Steve opened the to-go container on the hood of his jeep and held a wing close enough to my face to get buffalo sauce on the tip of my nose. 
        “Try one.”
        The remaining diners had filed out by this point. A man in a Giants sweatshirt and paint-streaked jeans broke from the crowd and walked toward our parking space. He stood before us silhouetted by the beam of the double-Os. 
        “Merry Christmas, fellas,” he said in a tone somewhere between jovial and chiding, depending upon your attitude. He receded back into the crowd and its laughter.
        “These aren’t bad, actually,” Steve said, whose sauce-smeared face had an aspect of clown in the flickering lights of a closing restaurant.

***

“Did he ghost you, too?” Rachael asked under a streetlight as I walked from the party, shivering under her impracticably thin cardigan.
        “I never thought of it like that.”
        “We ended badly. I couldn’t believe it. I hated him for months. I was ashamed to tell my parents. My friends never liked him. Now look at them. They don’t know what they like and what they don’t.” She paused abruptly. She refused the offer of a cigarette as I lit another. “He really withdrew. Like really. I swore he was talking to someone else. He just seemed so fixated on things that weren’t, like … that weren’t there.”
        I gave a quizzical look, though one of previously inexact data becoming more precise.
        “Not, like, invisible. Just things that didn’t have to do with us. I feel like that’s a fair thing to have a problem with.”
        “Sure.”
        “Everything makes more sense now. More sense than before. How is it that five years makes less sense than four months?”
        “I really don’t know,” I said as the cold seeped into my bones more deeply than into hers.
        “I thought I saw him at the dentist. When I approached him it was someone else. But for a moment it … I hope his teeth are okay.”
        It had begun to snow. Flakes drifted though the light building a wall between us.
        “I’m not really in the best shape,” Rachael admitted as if speaking though me.
        “I hope you feel better.”
        “They make it so easy to destroy things and not to know,” she said as she sank back into the darkness. “No one knows but the one being destroyed.”

***

“I called him a baby,” went the voice note. “I called him a giant baby and asked him, in a baby’s voice for some reason, if he needed his diaper changed. That’s the first thing that came into my head when he told me that he was afraid of the dark. He took me to dinner and said he had something to tell me. That’s what he told me; not totally in those words but that was the gist. I thought he made it up. I thought he was avoiding something. I just remember his face losing all of its color instantly. I just couldn’t. That’s literally the last time I saw him, Sean.”

***

“The world is full of Steve Aikens,” the detective said in a mildly weary tone as he took a seat at my kitchen table. “It’s not a pretty reality, and it’s easily overlooked when faced with an individual case, such as families usually are.” He took a tablet out and made rapid swerves over the surface with his finger. “I’d say two-thirds of the deaths we investigate are of that type.”
        “Two-thirds?” I said leaning rigidly against the counter.
        “In this county alone. Deaths that are self-answering, let’s say. Though the answer is hardly satisfactory.” He directed me to have a seat at the table. “But even these types of cases still have loose ends.”
        “Now,” he continued as he set the tablet against the napkin holder, “I have some things you’d be interested to see.” 
        A freeze-frame of a video was on the screen, showing an aisle at a grocery store. Already in view was a tall, slouching man holding an empty basket and staring fixedly at a single item on a shelf. When he pressed play, another figure approached with excess caution. The detective paused the video.
        “He’s not an animal, you know?”
        He played it again, the approaching man became more determined in his moves, so much so that the taller man, now clearly Kevin, jumped back. Nothing can be heard, but the man appeared to be repeating something at Kevin, who was frantically looking back and calling to someone else. A woman came into the frame and stood between the conversant and his target. My identity was confirmed in my retreat.
        “It’s never nice to accost people in public,” the detective said matter-of-factly. “When we followed up at Mr. Ritter’s residence, his caretaker said you’d mentioned a ‘Steve’ to him several times before she intervened. We asked if she knew what you meant and she did not.”
        “What did Kevin say?”
        “Kevin was watching a nature documentary at the time.” He returned his focus to the tablet and made another series of swipes. “But now that we’re on the subject, here is the second item.”
        The second video was black and white footage of Steve’s jeep on a snowy night.
        “It’s footage of a motion-activated wildlife camera that someone put at the edge of the of Crescent Meadow property. Take a hard look at what activated it.”
        Through the darkness and the snow I could glean a shape very similar, in fact identical, to the man in the grocery store. Though he had in that view a look barely discernible from a raccoon, raccoons don’t typically have the ability to lift large rocks and to petulantly hurl them at a parked car before receding back into the darkness.
        “Detective work is all about the details, Mr. Joyce. Nothing can be taken for granted. Though we didn’t think much of the scratch on the hood when the snow melted off of it,” he said with disciplined snideness. “The time stamp is the most interesting detail. 1:47 AM on February 13. A good 12 hours before Mr. Aiken was found and about the time he was in the process of dying.” He paused for a response that didn’t arrive. “This doesn’t really change anything. Honestly, we’re lucky to ever get a complete picture of the events. They come mostly in shards that never fit as much as the family of the dead hope or want or demand quite often. But you have a moral dilemma.”
        “What do you mean?”
        “You have to ask yourself what is worse: knowing more than you let on and denying closure from Mr. Aiken’s loved ones or spending your friend’s final moments on earth vandalizing his car?”
        I sank down in my chair as if a giant finger was pushing me.
        “But that’s just adulthood,” he said as he put the tablet away, “for the rest of us.”