In Pursuit of the Horse-Headed Man

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. During the summers, we used to sometimes wait until Mom and Terry were asleep, or pretended to be. Then we’d creep up the fire-escape, mindful of its deeply held desire to betray our escapades with tattle-tale screeching tuned to the exact frequency that would rouse Madame Deveroux, or worse, her husband, from their Gallic dreams, to send the sash flying up, demanding answers in broken English, whilst shouting insults about our upbringing to each other in French. They never looked up at the wonder above.

But we did, Anna and Lila, the little twins, and me and my twin Lucas up on the tar paper roof, still sticky from the heat of summer heat. I can feel the beady scratchiness of it on my bare legs and smell the petroleum fumes that seeped up from under our heads. I couldn’t say whether or not that hydrocarbon tang aided in our games, but those were heady hours we spent watching the cloudbursts above as tendrils of mist fought melees in the air, forming into creatures both fantastic and mundane, like the dreams of some god broadcast on the sky. We’d quiz each-other, testing our powers of imagination. Do you see the rabbit?

Yes, do you see the dragon? The girls would often whisper to each other in the unique, secret language shared by every set of twins, then squeal with laughter, but always refused to divulge what they thought was so funny, even if the Deverouxs started pounding on their ceiling with a broom, as they did when we were too loud. That just made them laugh harder. I’d spend my time trying to predict what shape would form next. Would that knight extend and distort into an alligator or scrunch up into an angry, fanged face?

Lucas always stayed quiet during these sessions. As the oldest of the bunch by seven minutes, I often made excuses for my younger siblings and defended them when necessary. From my earliest memories, I put Lucas’s reticence down to natural shyness, though it was always on display, even among family. As a baby, he was known to cover his face with a blanket at every opportunity. At school, his file got passed along year after year, and the regular teachers knew to not ever call on him unless he raised his hand, which he never did, but substitutes were rarely privy to these instructions and more than once I saw his face turn sunset-red and then bloom heirloom-tomato purple when some motivated replacement teacher would, unknowingly, single him out.

One bastard, presumably some Singleton on loan from a gulag, jumped at the chance to further embarrass him with a peppering barrage of questions about cats and tongues and the color of beets. With the exception of Lucas’s regular cadre of bullies, who behaved themselves when I was around, the episode made the whole class squirm in their seats with the uncomfortableness of it all. I finally stood up and said something. I don’t remember what, but Terry used to curse a blue streak and later Lucas said I sounded like Terry. That earned me a trip to the principal’s office, but it was worth it.

That was the day Lucas asked me how I could stand it all and I asked How can I stand what? That was when I found out Lucas doesn’t see the world the way regular folks do. When he looks at something or someone he doesn’t just see things as they are, but as they will be. Worst of all, until that day, he thought the rest of us were just better at handling seeing a wasteland world of death and decay everywhere we look. It turns out he was always quiet on the roof, because he didn’t just see purple clouds racing through the pink sky, he also saw a cold dead universe where all of everything is frozen motionless and the iron stars no longer shine.

The disciplinarians at school generally went easy on us on account of our father, who was still highly respected when we were born, though afterwards I think they just felt bad for us. By and large, I was the only one to regularly get in trouble, but I used these encounters to learn how to lean on peoples’ sympathies, or at least I thought I did. Maybe they really were sympathetic.

I don’t have many memories of our father, but I can vividly recall sitting on his lap with a map spread out on the desk in his office at the university. It was an old thing, hand-drawn on dusky parchment, and the edges looked like they’d been chewed by mice. I couldn’t tell you what ancient city or temple complex it depicted, but the bitter coffee-smell of his breath and the way his stubbly cheek scratched my head as he leaned over me, tracing the roads with his finger and explaining the daily movements of the people who had lived there, stay with me to this day. That was shortly before he left.

Mom never had a nice word to say about our father, but Terry, who had been one of his students, would defend him, saying Dad might still make a discovery that would change our understanding of the world. Even when I was little, I could tell Terry didn’t believe that so much as he wanted to believe it, and used to wonder how that was different than lying. Mom wouldn’t get mad, though, she’d just laugh and acknowledge that maybe finding Atlantis was worth giving up your family for, if it could change our understanding of the world, which she’d say in a sing-song, taunting way, before laughing. It helped to have a sense of humor about the whole affair.

The Deverauxes died within a week of each-other and their children flew in from France to pack up their things in boxes. Three sets of twins muttered foreign profanities as they carried load after load down the stairs. They argued a lot and smoked cigarettes in the hallway, which irritated Mom enough to send us all up to help empty the place more quickly. At the time, I didn’t understand why our father would have left his journals with the unfriendly couple, but I took them without asking.

That night, poring over the volumes, I was disappointed to see that our father had not written them in English, but in the incomprehensible hieroglyphics he always claimed were Atlantean. The iconographic writing featured depictions of the sun, waves, trees, several types of animals, including fish and birds, what appeared to be various animal horns and antlers, and the oft-repeated image of a man with a horse’s head. Only the dates and names of people, mostly family members, were rendered in our alphabet and legible to me. I brought what I had found to Lucas, whom I found with his rock collection, which seemed to be the only thing that brought him comfort and joy. He brushed me off, saying I was just going to burn them anyway.

Lucas rarely spoke, because it embarrassed him to know everything. When he did offer an observation about the future, he was never wrong, but, for years, I couldn’t see how he could possibly be right about this, as I treasured Dad’s journals and never once considered destroying them. It wasn’t uncommon for me to fall asleep with one, the inky scent of the pages and leather pungency of the cover filtering into my dreams.

Mom never wanted to talk about her ex-husband, and Lucas just didn’t want to talk. At first I tried to interest the younger sets of twins in the books, but then it was revealed to me that they were all Terry’s kids. Mom asked me to not bother them with what she called, “Your father’s nonsense.” I tried to ask Terry about them, and he earnestly seemed interested, but said he’d made a promise to “not encourage” me. I carried the books with me everywhere, using my free time to stare at them the way Lucas stared at his rocks.

In addition to hundreds of pages of Atlantean hieroglyphics, our father’s journals contained dozens of drawings of ancient structures, as well as various aspects of our home. Our names featured at the heads of incomprehensible lists and I pored over the pages of diagrams and runic inscriptions endlessly. Of particular interest to me were four drawings of a mosaic festooned with gemstones depicting some myth, featuring a creator goddess conjoined at the back with her twin, who consumed everything She breathed into existence. This was one of the few places our father had included color. Both goddesses had bright blue eyes, and the rest of the scene was rendered in all shades of the spectrum. It wasn’t until my final year of school that I began a serious attempt at cracking his code. By spring break I was confident that the horse-headed man was the character for “I” or “Me.”

The night of graduation, there was a party at a big house outside the city that belonged to the parents of two boys on the lacrosse team. The sky blushed and purple clouds swirled overhead as I drank red-plastic cups of bitter beer, one after another. I remember us dancing by a bonfire in a big field on the estate like we were some tribe celebrating victory in battle or a successful harvest. I had gone alone, as Lucas had withdrawn so much by then that I hadn’t even bothered asking him to come, knowing he’d be miserable in the crowd. He also wasn’t much for drinking or making out, both of which I was looking forward to.

Many of those present had brought their backpacks, full of handouts and reports from the last months of school. A great purge occurred, as we cast the detritus of our academic careers into the fire that night. Maybe I’d had too much beer or maybe the nihilism was contagious, or maybe I was full of my own fire because I’d run into that girl from art class who was nearly as shy as Lucas. She was holding one of her paintings. They all featured fantastic animals in alien landscapes, produced with a talent that outpaced her age.

“Are you going to burn that?” I asked, slightly slurring my words. It embarrassed me to appear out of control in front of her, whose steady hand I had seen paint whiskers on a crabbit or rime a zebracorn’s horn with practiced ease on many occasions.

“Are you mad? I’m going to go hang it in the house,” she said, a look of shocked pity appearing on her face. I suddenly wanted to die or disappear, knowing what her imagination was capable of, and how silly and stupid she must think me now. Then something changed in the air between us and she added, “Some things should burn, though,” and kissed me sweetly before walking off into the night.

I’d never kissed a girl before and my head swam. The skunky taste of beer in my mouth was tinged with her sweet, strawberry lip gloss. I ran my tongue across the waxy residue on my lips and thought about the possibilities. Maybe I was mad, or too young, or ignorant to see things clearly and maybe I always would be. I suddenly grew afraid that I’d never be able to appreciate what I had and that the temptation to throw it all away in pursuit of some long-drowned continent that probably never existed would blind me, until I trotted off down the well-worn footprints of disappointment left by those who came before.

I turned to look for the girl, but she was gone. The starting lineup of the lacrosse team had taken off their shirts and painted each-others bodies with ash from the fire like warriors from the past. They drank and hooted and danced barefoot in front of the flames, hoisting their sticks over their heads like spears. Most of them would never again play competitively, but that didn’t seem to register, or maybe they didn’t care.

I was thinking about how their toned bodies would soften and sag as they sat behind their desks over the coming years and wondering if they realized how good they had it at this very moment. Lucas could have told me that the one hooting the loudest would remain young in our minds forever, cut down in the line of duty on his first day in uniform by friendly fire.

I remember looking up at the clouds churning across the blushing sky, octopus arms of mist forming inchoate chaotic anti-patterns too fleeting to register as anything, moving too fast to predict. Do you see my emotions? I would have asked, but Lucas wasn’t there, no one was. I barely remember grabbing my backpack from where it sat in the grass. I do remember throwing it, how it arced above the flames, and how I realized the journals were still in it at the last moment. It landed in the center of the fire but didn’t immediately ignite. I must have stepped towards it, because my foot was on one of the stones demarcating the fire pit when one of the lacrosse boys grabbed me by the wrist.

“Woah, woah, woah, watch your step,” he’d said. It was the one who’d die young, but I didn’t know that then. Streaks of ash crossed his chest and cheeks, making him look like a barbarian with a neat haircut. That made me laugh and I kissed him. He kissed me back, and I didn’t turn around until everything was ash and all my possible epiphanies had gone up in smoke.

Years later, Lucas and I were still living in the apartment, which technically belonged to the university. Dad had held the lease, followed by Terry, who by then had absconded with Mom to that beach town they loved so much to comb the sands and drink hot tea out of canteens each sunrise. I became the third in line, entitled to housing per my position as a bottom-rung professor of meteorology. The large apartment was officially designated for upper-tier members of the staff, but considering our long tenancy, we were allowed to stay.

After everyone went off to education or adventure, Lucas and I had remained. He was working for the government by then. His talents had been detected and he received a healthy stipend for filling out a form about impending events each morning and by agreeing to remain available to soberly answer their calls at any hour of the day or night. He almost never spoke anymore, but he’d told me that he sometimes lied to them, not to further some agenda, or to keep up the idea that he wasn’t always 100% accurate, but just because that’s what he does. He said he wasn’t afraid they’d kill him for it, because he knew they didn’t. I appreciated Lucas’s reticence, because talking to him could make my head hurt.

I didn’t want to believe him, of course. No one wants to think that what they do doesn’t matter, that there’s no way to change the billiard balls once they’re set in motion, even if the first shot broke off at The Big Bang. Plus, maybe Lucas wasn’t always right, or maybe he lied to me, too. It seems like if it were that easy, we’d be better at predicting the weather by now. He’d told me once that he “couldn’t see” our father, but I don’t know if that was a lie or if he chose not to see, but he could have at least tried, instead of always just staring into some damn piece of lapis lazuli or a star opal. He certainly never mentioned that Dad’s journals would show up again one day, even though he was fully aware of the grief I carried with me for years after the night of the bonfire.

A medium-sized package with a return address in France, inscribed with our family name, wrapped with brown butcher’s paper, showed up in the post one day. I considered rousing Lucas from his rock collection, but the thought of him standing there, zombie-eyed, denied by The Fates any possibility of hope, or even the dopamine-fire of excitement and anticipation that drives the engines of human endeavor was too much. Whatever was inside, I didn’t need him ruining the moment by sucking all of the energy out of the room.

Reproducinctions of twenty-one volumes of our father’s journals lay within. Each featured a photocopied page of his original entries, in Atlantean hieroglyphics, juxtaposed with what appeared to be a full translation of the text in French. My burned backpack had contained only fourteen volumes, so this represented a significant increase in the size of my personal, incomprehensible scripture. Flipping through my father’s gospels, I was shocked to see that the dates of the most recent entries were from long after he had left the family.

A broad-spectrum anger bloomed in my heart. I hated him for leaving, and the Deverouxes for keeping his secrets, and Mom and Terry for not being more forthcoming, even though I could tell that talking about Dad twisted each of their hearts in different ways. I was even mad at Lucas, for all the good that did.

My work suffered while I translated the text from French. It should have gone faster, but no computerized character recognition system could decipher Madame Deveroux’s spidery script. Numerous words resisted translation, though I began to understand each as it appeared in context again and again. The first seven volumes presented an earnest belief that evidence of a lost, ancient, advanced civilization existed, not just in the historical record, but more so in the gaps of history. He planned on presenting his thesis in the Atlantean language to demonstrate that it was capable of conveying and digesting complex concepts, perhaps even better than any modern tongue.

The work drew a lot of parallels between present-day life and the way he believed the people of Atlantis conducted themselves. He posited that the difference between us and them is that they were compelled, once in their life, to undertake a heroic journey to learn new things and spread their understanding of the world. He said that it was this impulse, whether societal or instinctual, that allowed them to sow evidence of their existence around the world so long ago.

Each time our father indicated himself in the original text he used the horse-headed man and that’s how I began to see him in my mind. The man in the photographs that I found stacked in the closet had always looked like an almost-stranger to me. “That’s your father,”someone could have said to me, though no one ever did. They could have also said, “That’s your grandfather’s accountant,” and I wouldn’t have known the difference. By the time I hit volume fifteen, the first one he wrote away from home, the only way I could picture him was with the head of a horse.

Volume seven ends with the epiphany that, to better think like an Atlantean, he must act like an Atlantean. The next seven are filled with building confidence and courage as he begins to understand that he must make a journey. There are several passages that acknowledge the sacrifices one must make to quest in such a way. He recognizes that his income is paltry compared to the royalties our mother receives from her books about the study of Twinning, and implies that he won’t be too terribly missed. He shows faith that Terry will take over his position at the university and “do right for the family,” whatever that means. Only three times does he allude to a return, and the only apology among the thousands of pages reads “If any of my children ever read this, I am sorry: I had to.”

Summer break had just begun, and the supervisory committee at the university let me know that whatever had been distracting me for the past two semesters had put my job at risk, and I had better return with a renewed sense of vigor if I was still interested in a tenured position.The process of fully translating the texts took months, and with only one remaining to work on and in need of company, I decided to finish the task at the beach. Plus, it would be good to see Mom and Terry.

Stepping out onto the quad after the conversation about the future of my career, the world seemed over-saturated with color and the sun burned supernova-bright overhead. I thought I saw the horse-headed man, standing under a tree across the expanse of lime-green grass, just beyond a circle of students kicking a hacky-sack around, but I blinked and he was gone. I called Mom that night and asked if there was room for me to come stay a little while. She sounded happy when she said yes, like I knew she would

When I said goodbye to Lucas he hugged me harder and longer than I ever remember. When I turned to leave, he handed me the lapis-lazuli orb that was almost never out of his hand and told me to take it “For good luck,” but I didn’t think too much about this until later. I was too concerned with volume 21, which I was desperately hoping would provide a keystone for my father’s story.

By the 15th journal it was clear to him that his theories were wrong, that Atlantis is no more than a legend existing in the hearts of humanity. There are many passages in which he scolds and critiques himself, followed by a span of nearly a year without an entry. After that, any interest in serious archaeology is abandoned, and the text takes on a more philosophical and personal tone. “Atlantis is a continent of the mind,” appears frequently in the text like an epiphanic mantra.

For my first three days at the beach I didn’t even look at the journals. Accompanied by my own notes on the project, the voluminous affair required its own suitcase, which I shoved under the bed in the guest room as soon as I arrived, in an attempt to assuage some of the gravitational pull it endlessly exerted on me. The charming little house Mom and Terry had retired to was right on the water, and as I sat, sipping a beer in a cobalt-blue Adirondack chair that first night, watching seals play in the breakers as the wind kicked sand along the high-tide line, I imagined I could taste strawberry lip gloss, but memory is funny that way.

Mom and Terry watched the sunset from the porch every evening and as the blazing orb settled beneath the edge of the water and the blushing sky settled the night over us like a blanket, they’d clap like they were at a show, which they were. My third night there, Mom and I stayed up late after Terry went to bed. She said she wanted to say something about my father, and it would be better if I grabbed us another couple of bottles and listened for a moment.

She said she knew I’d had my head in the clouds for a long time, which is a joke a lot of people make about meteorologists, but I knew exactly what she meant. Mom reminded me what the world had been like before the night sky blushed and people started Twinning, how war, strife, and greed drove people to do unspeakable things as a matter of course. She had dedicated her life to the study of what had happened two centuries ago to change the atmosphere as well as the basic biology of humans. She said that predicting the weather and untangling the past were like opposite sides of the same coin.

Something happened with twins in the womb, she explained. The presence of another consciousness, from the first genesis of nascent perception, fosters a level of empathy that generations of the past never had access to. Even in the tragic event that one twin was stillborn, those few months together was enough to cultivate compassion in the survivor. Our father was a Singleton, she’d said.

It was something I had known, or at least suspected. Mom and Terry were both close with their brothers, and we saw them often, but I had never heard anyone make reference to any of Dad’s siblings. He was an only child, and like a puzzle with a missing piece he’d never be complete. Mom said that’s how she had made peace with the whole affair, that if someone couldn’t share in our lives and be content, that they probably couldn’t be content anywhere, and that was on them.

She said that, before the sky blushed, almost everyone was like our father and that’s why it was important to understand what happened, so that if things ever returned to the way they were before, they might be able to get the world back on track. She also said that there were more people out there like Lucas, but that was for someone else to study and she just hoped whomever did so was kind. Then she kissed me on the head and went to bed. I watched the purple clouds in flight against the blushing sky, and for a moment I thought I saw a horse-headed man in the water, but as it dipped back beneath the waves with a flip of its tail, I saw that it was just a seal.