Simulacrum

Duff Fink sits in his ice blue Dodge coupe on the side of a dark, rural road he’s traveled thousands of times in his life, a road that isn’t so rural really because it isn’t so far from the rumble and congestion of I-45 and its miles of suburban Houston sprawl. But tonight the road looks strange. Or not so much the road itself, which is gray-black and scarred, like most roads he’s traveled, but everything other than the road. The knee-high grasses, the blue-black thicket of scraggly trees, even the scratched moon: they recall stage props from a play he saw as a boy. Couldn’t have been in a theater—his dad wasn’t the theatergoing type and there’d been no one else to take him—so it must have been a play within a television show. The play: a spoof of a western, the props not intended to be realistic. The performers mounted wooden cutouts of horses and made jerking motions with their torsos while a pumpkin-hued desert scrolled behind them.

None of this is why Duff pulled off onto the side of the road, though. He stopped because he thought he saw the big-headed shape of an owl.

The last time he thought he saw an owl, which was also the first time he thought he saw an owl, he didn’t stop. That maybe-owl had sat atop the roof of a barn. Below: massive, round hay bales, like cigarette stubs tossed by a giant. A voice inside Duff had said, whoa! But after a long day cleaning kennels at the animal shelter, he had wanted a shower. He had wanted to sit in front of the television and eat the leftover chicken and rice his dad had cooked the night before. He had wanted to do his Duolingo, so he wouldn’t get demoted from the Obsidian League. There’d been traffic, there was always traffic, and he would have had to make a U-turn and circle back around to the maybe-owl. His hands on the steering wheel, his foot on the gas pedal—they had not submitted to the whoa.

Truth was Duff might not have given that first maybe-owl any thought at all afterward if a neighbor, Paul, a man who, like many men Duff knew, wore a tight-lipped expression that made Duff think of shrink wrap, hadn’t banged on his dad’s door later that evening, frantic, asking where was his wife, did Duff or his dad know anything, see anything?

That was just before Christmas, and the answer had been that Duff knew nothing.

Paul’s wife, Shirley, used to watch Duff after school when he was a boy. He’d walked directly to her house when the school bus spit him out. Sometimes she’d let him paint the flat, manageable panels of miniature refrigerators, ovens, dressers, and wardrobes, while she’d painted tiny carrot tops and the honeycomb bodies of pineapples. She’d told him strange stories she said were true but that sounded made up. He remembered tales of an albino alligator Shirley had said was her mother reincarnated; a rabbit-shaped cloud Shirley insisted was the same cloud she’s seen dozens of times before, as though the cloud had mysteriously overcome its transitory nature.

Those days of helping Shirley paint dollhouse furniture had been quite some time ago, though. The last time Duff had spoken to Shirley was not all that long after his dad told him he was old enough to stay home alone and gave him the house key he’d pinned inside his sneaker. Shirley had been outside on a ladder, hoisting up an ugly brown windsock. Had he ever seen Shirley outside before or after that? He’d walked over that afternoon not for supervision but because the ladder was tall, and he’d feared she’d crack open her skull. After that, months then years layered over those afternoons with Shirley, burying them deep. When Paul knocked on the door, asking about her, it was like that time Duff helped an uncle peel off layer after layer of wallpaper in a hundred-year-old house: four layers in, they reached a rich burgundy that gave off an odor so strong of cigars that Duff had felt light-headed even with the windows open.

Being reminded of Shirley’s existence by Paul’s visit, and again, now, by this second maybe-owl, Duff has the peculiar feeling of having woken from a vivid dream, the way the residue of a dream can cling like wet toilet paper.

He doesn’t particularly care about owls, not in general, but he wants to see this owl. Or rather: if what he saw was indeed an owl, then he’d like confirmation that it was an owl. If it wasn’t, he’d like confirmation of that. What Duff wants is certainty.

But now that he’s stopped to get a better look, he can’t locate what he thought had been an owl.

Instead, he sees a car coming slowly down the unlit road. The car is on fire. No visible flames, but the smoke rising from the hood means fire, he knows, because about fifteen years ago, his dad was driving him to school after Duff had missed the school bus and smoke rose from his dad’s car like that. His dad kept saying, “I can’t be late to work.” At the school, his dad parked the car, shooed Duff away to the gates, then lifted the hood and damn near burned off his face. This was followed by a scream from the teacher on drop-off duty, then, on the playground, the synchronized snapping of his classmates’ heads.

When the car is close, Duff waves. The approaching car slows to a stop. The driver, a teenage girl a few years younger than Duff, lowers her window barely three inches. “I have pepper spray,” she says.

The road they’re on is one few people travel by day, much less by night. It doesn’t go anywhere except to a few houses scattered here and there haphazardly like debris. One of those houses is Duff’s house, or rather, his dad’s house, which Duff still lives in. Another is Shirley’s, or was. Still another of those houses is where this girl, her name is Laura Lippit, lives. Not that Duff knows that. Her family’s house is a mile and a half past his, and not since he was a boy out roaming on his bicycle has Duff had a good reason to venture out toward that dead end.

“I have a fire extinguisher,” Duff says. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to pull down the road, so you’re not so close to my car. Then you’re going to turn off the engine.”

Laura looks back and forth between Duff and her car’s smoking hood.

When she puts her foot to the gas, Duff thinks she’s leaving, but she parks the car on the edge of the road just as he instructed.

After Laura turns off the engine and steps out of the car, she stands there staring uncertainly at all that smoke rising like it’s in some hurry to get the hell away from there.

“I guess I should pop the hood?” she says as he approaches. She starts to reach back into the car.

“No!” he yells. Then he explains about combustion, about how oxygen feeds fire.

She says, “You scared me.”

“You scared me,” Duff says back.

The metal canister of the fire extinguisher is cold because the evening is cold, despite that the day had been unseasonably warm for late January.

A fact Duff knows is that dew is most likely to form on cool nights that cap off warm days. He doesn’t remember why well enough to explain when people ask, “Why’s that?” as they sometimes do when he shares this fact, but he does know that dew forms on grass and not, say, concrete or bare soil, because grass shoots up from the earth. In a building, heat rises; outdoors, on a dewy night like this one, heat rises, too, but even so, grass is cooler than dirt.

Days like this make Duff feel funny, as though Earth’s rotation is an unsatisfactory explanation for the shift that happens as night falls. He feels he’s in a different place than where he’d been. The sensation is heightened by the maybe-owl and the car on fire. He feels not quite himself, like he’s Kilogar, the half-orc ranger he’s been playing in D&D since he was thirteen. Slayer of countless beasts. Fearless wanderer stalking the edges of civilization for beastly foes, on some quest to free captives or recover stolen goods.

Laura says, “How are you going to put the fire out if I don’t pop the hood?”

“You are going to pop the hood,” he says. “But you’re going to wait until I’m ready. Also, you’re going to get away from the car after you pop it.”

He’s slow to ready himself. He fumbles with the canister in the dark.

Laura says to Siri, “Turn on flashlight, please?” When the light turns on, she says, “Thank you.”

She hurries over to shine the light on the fire extinguisher. After Duff plucks out the pin and readies the nozzle, she hurries back to the car.

When the hood pops open, flames leap out like they do when Duff’s dad cooks meat on the grill. Duff sprays until there’s nothing but gray.

Laura joins him in front of the smoking engine. She takes a lip balm from the pocket of her white bomber jacket, which is furry like a rabbit, and coats her lips. She says nonchalantly, “I knew this car was trouble. Twelve hundred dollars my mom paid for it. I thought it would break down, though. I didn’t expect fire.”

Duff laughs.

“What’s funny?” she says.

“You and everybody else.”

It confounds him that people don’t prepare for fire when, truly, fire is one of the easiest things for which to prepare.

He says, “You owe me a fire extinguisher.”

“You mean my mom owes you a fire extinguisher,” Laura says. “You want to know what she was worried about when she bought me this car? Creep men. If I get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, I shouldn’t let some so-called Good Samaritan pull over and help me. I need to know how to change my tire myself because Good Samaritans are sometimes rapists and murderers in disguise. Cops, too. If a cop turns on his flashing lights to pull me over in the middle of nowhere, I should keep driving until I reach civilization because that cop might not really be a cop. Or maybe he is a cop, but he’s a creep cop. There are plenty of creep cops, my mom says. Apparently, she didn’t have a plan for the engine catching fire in the middle of nowhere, though. I’ve got pepper spray, a rape whistle, a Texas road map, a flashlight. No fire extinguisher.”

Duff says, “How do you know we’re in the middle?” He looks around them at the inky sky, the dark, huddled shrubs that seem to him in this darkness like humanoid creatures cowering to appear as shrubs.

“The middle of what?”

“Nowhere.”

She squints at him. “You’re not a creep posing as a Good Samaritan, are you?”

“I don’t really know what a Samaritan is, good or bad,” Duff says. “Your mom’s right, though. The world is full of creeps.”

He recalls Shirley’s husband, Paul, scanning their living room from the doorway, as though he suspected Duff and his dad of hiding Shirley in one of the drawers of the TV console or behind a couch cushion. The man’s sulky, betrayed expression. Duff never did like Paul. When he used to go to Shirley’s house after school, he’d watched the clock so that he’d get out of there before Paul came home from work. When he failed in this endeavor, and Paul walked into the house, catching Duff off guard, Paul looked displeased, as though Duff were a sink of dirty dishes Shirley hadn’t bothered to clean up. At the time, Duff hadn’t given the man much more thought than that, but now he wonders if Paul was mean to her, if Paul was why Shirley left. He hopes “left” is the correct end to that sentence. He wonders what took her so long. He thinks of his Aunt Barbara, who married a man who then molested their two sons, spent time in prison, and is now a registered sex offender. He thinks of a girl he’d gone to school with, Kammy Tremblay, who used to come to school with bruises on her arms, her face, and whose brother later shot their father in the head.

Laura gives Duff a wary look, but the way she tilts her head to the side and sticks her chest out a little, he wonders if she’s trying to maximize her attractiveness. Or maybe her body is operating separately from her mind. That is a legit possibility, he thinks. Bodies do that all the time.

“What were you doing out here?” She glances toward his car.

“I thought I saw an owl.”

Shirley is into omens and signs and stuff like that, or was when Duff knew her. She’d said she was “a wee bit swamp witch,” via her Cajun mother. She once told him a story about driving along the highway late at night. She said she saw a teddy bear scurry across the road. This had been at like two in the morning. She hadn’t been able to see anything except what her headlights briefly illuminated. And she’d been deliriously tired, chugging cherry cola to stay awake. Whatever the creature truly had been didn’t matter to Shirley. That it had looked to her like a teddy bear was what was important. That teddy bear had been a sign that she would be okay, everything would be okay.

Duff thinks of himself as a practical person. Hence the extensive first aid kit, the PPE, the tourniquet, and the fire extinguisher in his trunk. He likes to watch first aid videos—partly to brush up on his skills, partly because the videos calm him, the fearlessness with which the zealous, sometimes callous, instructors handle the most gruesome things that can happen to a body. A chunk of metal lodged in an eye: here’s how to secure that eye with a cup and gauze. A severed finger: here’s how to clean the finger and pack it in ice. No time for tenderness or niceties. They’re a no-nonsense breed, first aid instructors.

Still, when Paul said Shirley was gone, Duff thought of the maybe-owl he didn’t stop to get a better look at. He wondered what an owl sighting would mean to Shirley. He wondered what his thinking he’d seen an owl, whether he did or not, would mean to her.

Laura says, “Did you see an owl?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

He watches the smoke rise from her car’s engine. If he hadn’t stopped to look for this second maybe-owl, he wouldn’t have been here to put this fire out. Duff wonders if Shirley would say fate made him stop, fate made him see something that compelled him to stop. He could imagine her saying that the fire extinguisher he’s been carrying around all this time was destined all along to put out this particular fire.

He says, “Do you need to get anything out of your car before we go?”

Laura looks surprised. “Where are we going?”

“You tell me,” he says. “Where were you going?”

“How do I know it’s safe to get into a car with you?” she says.

Flirtatiously, it seems to him, like a girl in a horror movie.

Some guys, upon finding a girl alone at night, would believe that girl was a gift bestowed upon them by the universe. He considers his friend Evan Dippman, who stays out until closing time, scanning bars for a Corduroy, a girl who, like the buttonless bear in the children’s story, is desperate for someone to take her home with them.

Duff says flatly, “You don’t know it’s safe to get into my car.” He tells Laura that another nice thing about fire is it makes itself obvious. “You never have to wonder: might I be unknowingly burning right now? Unless you have leprosy. Most dangers aren’t so obvious.”

Laura’s smile crinkles.

If he were like Evan, a guy with an agenda and with the skills to carry it out, she would probably feel more at ease. Girls, teachers, grandmothers, restaurant diners: they all happily comply to Evan’s manipulation. Duff and Evan got jobs waiting tables at the same Mexican seafood restaurant after graduation, and five years later, Evan is managing that restaurant. Duff, in contrast, didn’t last three months. His name always scraped the bottom of the list ranking the waitstaff according to how much they upsold customers. Evan not only convinced diners to order appetizers and alcohol and desserts and specials, but diners then thanked him for this manipulation via big tips. When Duff tried to upsell, what he got was “No, not tonight.” He got grumbles of annoyance. He’d considered that it was luck of the draw. He got assigned to the diners who weren’t interested in all the excess food and drink their manager wanted them to push. But then when he was busy with a particularly large table one night, Evan managed to upsell one of Duff’s other tables on both dessert and after-dinner drinks when, previously, they’d told Duff they weren’t interested. Duff had to concede that his inability to sell wasn’t a matter of luck, but something no less mysterious. After that, he bounced around a bit—worked the counter at a taco shop, dried off cars at a car wash, tried substitute teaching. All these jobs, despite his initial impressions, involved selling of one sort or another. Eventually, he got his current gig cleaning up after the homeless cats and dogs at the animal shelter. Nothing to sell whatsoever. In fact, he can go all day sometimes without speaking to another human.

Duff says, “Of course, you can stay here if you want.” He looks at his watch. He starts walking back to his Dodge.

Laura runs to catch up with him.

When she opens the passenger door, she shines her flashlight around the interior.

“No dead bodies,” she says. She laughs, hesitates a beat before getting inside.

He drives in the direction Laura had been headed. As they pass her still-smoking car, he says, “You live down here?”

Laura reapplies her lip balm. She says, “I wasn’t so much going somewhere as leaving somewhere?”

He looks at her. He nods. “Where were you leaving?”

“It’s stupid,” she says. She rolls the tube of lip balm between her palms. Then she says, “I left my friend Lizbeth at a dance club. Thing is she’s always hooking up with some random guy. Everywhere Lizbeth goes, every guy is into her. If she were here right now, you’d be into her. See? I told you it’s stupid. I sound jealous and petty. But here’s the thing: I accept that guys are more into her than they are me. I mean, she’s gorgeous. And I love Lizbeth. She’s my best friend. But I hate it when she picks up some guy and, suddenly, it’s like I don’t exist. If I meet someone, too, then fine, but if I don’t, then it’s just me dancing alone, you know? So, tonight I just left her there. I mean, to be fair, I did try to tell her I was leaving, but she wasn’t paying any attention.”

When Duff had asked Shirley all those years ago why she was putting up that ugly windsock, she’d said, “So I know which way the wind is blowing.”

Laura says, “I guess I feel a little guilty leaving Lizbeth like that. She took some molly, so she’s not totally in her right mind. If something happened to her, I’d feel awful. God, what if that guy turns out to be a creep?”

She glances quickly at Duff.

She says, “How is she going to get home? What if she lost her phone? Lizbeth is always losing her phone. You think that’s why my piece-of-shit car caught on fire? Because I abandoned my friend?”

Duff slows the car to a stop. He says, “No, I don’t. Cars just catch fire sometimes.” He says, “You want to go get your friend? Where’s this club?”

“Seriously? You don’t mind? It’s in Houston. Like thirty minutes?” She gives him the address.

Duff turns the car around. He punches the gas.

When they approach Laura’s car the second time, it’s still smoking, of course, but the smoke looks less in a hurry to escape now. Or maybe it’s just the speed at which Duff’s traveling that makes the smoke look sluggish.

When they reach the highway, there’s nothing but strip malls and electric lights as far as the eye can see.

He tolerates Laura scrolling through radio stations even though he prefers silence.

After settling on a hip-hop station, she says, “So do you always look for owls when you’re driving at night?”

“I don’t look for owls.”

“Well, do you always stop the car if you think you see an owl?”

“No,” he says.

Laura nods her head to the beat of the music, taps her fingers on the window frame. When they drive past an empty pickup truck parked in the breakdown lane alongside the highway, she turns to look at it as they pass, then says, “A girl my mom went to school with disappeared one night, and her truck was found parked in the breakdown lane just like that, her purse on the passenger seat. The theory was that she pulled over willingly, that she knew the guy. Her body wasn’t found for like five years. They never did figure out who killed her. Girls are always disappearing around here, their remains not being found for years and years. My mom’s paranoia is annoying, but she has good reason.”

“What do you mean ‘always’ disappearing?”

“Are you kidding? Haven’t you heard of the Texas Killing Fields?”

Duff has not.

“Huh,” Laura says. She points out the window. “Somewhere right around here. Decades’ worth of victims. A lot of the murders are still unsolved.”

There isn’t much in the way of fields of any sort as far as Duff can tell. Strip malls and chain restaurants and gas stations light the highway, the buildings every bit as scrubby, he thinks, as the ugly thickets that lead out to his dad’s house. Other than the ocean, which, well, isn’t exactly beautiful either, brown and foamy most days, there’s really nothing nice about the place he’s lived his whole life. He wonders if ugly places breed ugly behavior, ugly personalities, if that’s why so many of the men around here wear tight, shrink-wrapped expressions, like this place has smothered all the softness they might have once had, all the kindness.

Laura tells him about a girl in her class who ran away in September. “For a while there, we thought she might be out in the Killing Fields, but then she turned up on the internet in these S&M-looking photos of torture that are supposedly protesting experimentation on animals in the cosmetic industry or something like that.”

“Why’d she run away?” he says.

“How should I know?” Laura says. “I didn’t really know her. We were lab partners once or twice maybe, but she was kind of a loner, you know?”

Without asking, Laura opens his glove compartment. She pulls out the little red wooden refrigerator. “What’s this?”

Duff’s first instinct is to tell her to put it back, to shut the compartment, but he restrains that impulse. He says, “A refrigerator.”

“I know that, but why is it in your glove compartment? Is this dollhouse furniture?” She pulls out the red oven as well.

“Simulacrum,” Duff says, surprising himself. He’s not used or heard the word since English class, senior year of high school.

Duff hadn’t exactly known Shirley well, either. How could he have? He’d been just a boy. She’d filled their hours with tall tales, stories meant to entertain and fascinate.

“What’s a simulacrum?” Laura says.

“An imitation of something real, like Disney World, androids, Civil War reenactments, the Gingerbread Man.” Then he adds, “Like you saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to a computer.”

Laura says, “I don’t like how people order Siri around. It’s rude.”

She opens the freezer drawer of the refrigerator. She pulls out a tiny brown parcel. Inside the refrigerator compartment, there’s a wooden bottle of juice, a ham, a head of broccoli, and a tiny egg carton filled with tiny eggs. In the oven, a glistening brown turkey.

He’d long ago stolen these pieces from Shirley, one at a time, even though he knew she would have given him the pieces if he’d just asked. He believed at the time that she didn’t know, but now he thinks she must have known, and it shames him.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Laura says. “Why are they in your glove box?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

He put the miniatures in the glove compartment after Paul’s visit, after first excavating them from a box inside his bedroom closet. He couldn’t say why. Since he’d put them in there, though, the dark glove compartment has seemed to him like a little house. A windowless house, like the Happy Meal boxes from when he was a kid. Every Friday night, his dad used to bring home McDonald’s. Happy Meal nights Duff watched horror movies. He liked the franchises best. Maybe it was the comfort of the familiar. Duff’s dad never paid any attention to what Duff watched on television. He was either in his bedroom, watching the other, smaller television, or he was out in the garage, lifting weights or smoking or doing things Duff couldn’t imagine. Duff would get so focused on the movie, he’d forget about his food, and his dad would come in from wherever he’d been and say, “Eat your food, kid. Don’t let it get cold.” But the burger was always cold to begin with. Only the fries were sometimes still hot when Duff first opened the roof of the box. Duff pretended the fries were the people who lived inside the box, and he was a monster reaching in and devouring everyone inside. Why he would want to pretend he was eating people, he didn’t know. With Shirley’s furniture inside it, the glove compartment is like that, only more like an underground bunker. Safe. Not a house a monster could get into, not with Duff around to keep watch.

“Please put all that back where you found it,” he says.

Laura looks at him curiously, but she obeys.

When they exit the highway, they drive past a couple of restaurants, then the street becomes brick townhomes. Arched windows stretch across the second and third floors of one building. The building is bordered by a wall, and inside that wall, each door opens out onto its own small yard, where some of the occupants have set up patio furniture—umbrellas, bistro tables, love seats. Stringed lights crisscross one of the yards. Globe lanterns hang from a tree in another yard.

For no good reason that Duff can think of, he pictures Shirley in the desert. He pictures a bleached, piss-colored stucco building devoid of shade. Everything withered and weary from the heat. Even the few cactuses on the property, plants that are supposedly adapted to the desert, emaciated and a sickly, pale purple color.

He feels depressed by this vision. Then he feels guilty, as though his imagining this fate might cause it to happen.

So, he puts Shirley into a much nicer scene—a lush forest, a cozy log cabin. He imagines her self-sufficient—gathering and hunting, making. A dog for company and protection. He pictures a Saint Bernard—big, fluffy, and warm. He never has seen a Saint Bernard in the shelter. Who would abandon a dog like that?

“Hey, an owl!” Laura says then.

Duff looks.

The owl in question sits motionless on the north end of the wall encircling the building. It’s a decoy. Plastic probably. Hollow. Lighter than a real owl, he thinks, then catches himself. Bird bones are full of air sacs. And beneath the fluff of all those feathers, probably there isn’t much meat on an owl at all.

Duff brakes the car and studies the sharp, reproachful eyes. Not really reproachful, of course. Alert is more accurate, wary, like the eyes of every instructor in every first aid video he’s ever seen.