2020-08-30 - Transient Guests Are We (No Longer)

All bus stations everywhere tend to look the same; rest rooms, one or two vending machines, benches, cigarette butts on the floor. Furniture that hails back to the 1960s or 1970s unless for some reason the local town council has decided to spruce up the place sometime in the 1990s and it’s all glass and steel. The most interesting thing to look at while you wait is the departure table – which is why travellers inevitably sit with their noses in their cell phones, playing Candy Crush or whatever their game of choice might be, reading news, or getting up to speed on their social media feeds. All obeying the one rule of commuters everywhere: Don’t make eye contact.

Ravn Abildgaard is not getting on the bus. He has not packed his few belongings – or his new cat – and decided to wander on, away from Gray Harbor. He’s just thinking about it as he walks by the bus station on his way to the laundromat, carrying a bag of – you guessed it – clothes in need of laundry in one hand. He just pauses a moment outside and looks wistfully at the sign that says Portland.

I was supposed to be in Portland three weeks ago. The street kitchens of Portland are said to be absolutely fantastic.

Ravn will not make it to Portland until the end of the tourist season at least. And if he has to be honest with himself – something he doesn’t always succeed at – he’s probably not going to go there in winter, either. Gray Harbor has its claws in him, deep.

Will the Two if By Sea need him when the tourist season ends? Probably not. Ravn doubts that there is a lot of patrons looking for a beach bar in the chilly winter of the Pacific North-West. The climate is entirely too much like his native Danish weather – except the water is colder, courtesy of the glaciers – and the beach bars back home definitely don’t stay open all year round. Come September 1st, the tourists are all gone – even the Germans who flock to the Danish coasts like flies to manure because beaches is something Germany doesn’t have a whole lot of.

Finding work elsewhere will not be difficult. Ravn is qualified to teach at university levels; the school or high school might need a substitute history teacher. More likely, though, he may end up tutoring a handful of rich kids whose parents want to be able to boast that their little prodigies play a classical instrument. He did that for some months in Florence, before wandering on. The kids didn’t enjoy it much and neither did he, but work is work. It’s funny how things pan out. How it feels, sometimes, like Gray Harbor itself will go out of its way to solve a few of life’s little problems, to get him to stay.

Hotel California. You can check in, but indeed, leaving does seem to be the problematic part.

Ravn starts walking again before some friendly local decides to wander up and ask if he’s lost. The Suds’n’Duds laundromat looks like any other laundromat he’s visited on his wanderings too. A few people sit around on the plastic chairs, waiting for their laundry to be done. None of them talk to each other. One is reading a magazine, the others are on their cell phones. Do not make eye contact.

He wonders what it would be like to be normal here. To live in small-town America where nothing ever really happens and if the ratio of dead bodies turning up at random is a bit higher than average – a shrug of a shoulder, think of the murder ratio in New York or Los Angeles, blame the political party you don’t vote for. Work a nine to five job, a house on Spruce, a wife, a kid or two. Watch a game on the TV with a few buddies, barbecue in the yard in summer, live the good, American suburban life.

Terrifying thought, really.

‘Normals’, he heard someone call them, these other people – the vast majority of townspeople who do not posses the shine, the gift, the song, the sparkle, the light, whatever epithet people like him prefer to use. To Ravn, it is an awareness, a pull, almost like magnetism, towards those other people, the ones who – like himself – don’t entirely subscribe to the laws of physics. He wonders how many of the shine, gift, song, sparkle, light, awareness people secretly wish they were normals. Had blinders on. Saw no evil, heard no evil, probably didn’t speak a lot of evil besides the occasional gossip.

Most of them. Because life here is pretty gruesome when you think about it.

Ravn stuffs socks and boxers and shirts into the empty laundry machine. Every single piece is black. It’s a lot easier that way. Nothing goes with black like more black. Black is easy. Ravn likes his sartorial choices being easy. He knows that he is prone to overthinking, and this at least gives him one less thing to obsess about. Ravn dedicates a fair bit of time to removing excuses to overthink from his life. He’s bad enough about overthinking things as is.

The machine starts to rumble. His cell phone is in his blazer pocket but he doesn’t feel like firing up Wordfeud. He’s still playing with a few friends back home after all this time, but they’re asleep at this hour – it’s 2 am in Copenhagen – and he’s not in the mood. The Dane stares at the wall instead, pretending to read the various advertisements and calling cards on the bulletin board.

For three years he has lived by one simple rule: Do not get attached. Not to things. Not to places. Not to people. And yet, here he is. Kitty Pryde could travel with him, in a carrier or on a leash, wearing one of those little cat harnesses. Ravn is quite firm in his belief that as long as her supply of tuna remains stable, the black stray that’s declared her ownership of him wouldn’t really care where they go. The reason he isn’t going anywhere is that in three short weeks he has already put down roots. And that, he reflects, is another terrifying thought.

That’s the true horror of Gray Harbor. It knows what you need. What you really want, deep down where no one else gets to look. Where you keep all your deepest and darkest secrets. It looks into the most secret corners of your soul and sees what’s missing, and it dangles it in front of you like bait.

Somehow, the horror at the heart of this little town, reaches out across oceans and landmasses and pulls people here from all around the planet. Collects them. Spends them. And, if the stories of people disappearing or dying regularly are true, discards them once it’s done with them.

I should be terrified. And the fact that I’m not means I probably need to find out if this town has a therapist who knows about the shine, gift, song, sparkle, light, awareness.