Negative Space

picked up. Ritter forced himself to walk faster. Get that circulation going. The sky smeared with gray, like newsprint sealed over the town. He passed coffee shops, used bookshops, flower shops. Antiques. A diner.
The people don’t look at me. Submerged in their own world, they weren’t exactly of the charming, gregarious, small-town type. A town full of artists, maybe. Like those two impossibly young novelists who’d just debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, Martin Becker or John Smith, or—something like that. They were only half a decade out of high school, he’d read.
Everyone’s head seemed in the clouds. Ritter mused they were all the high-dreaming, funny runoff filtered over from San Fran, up from LA, down from Portland, and from God only who knew where else.
***
III
To their right sprawled dark hills and valleys, lonely in gloom though falling far short of the primordial blackness of the ocean to their left. The moon absent.
Under the van’s wan light, Karen leafed through loose papers found on the floor, reading the text, looking at the pictures but not really absorbing anything, not really, not with these things scratching at her mind. She had wanted out of her life back east, out of all of it, and she had done it. Clean break. She hadn’t belonged there.
Yet here, with Max, her life afloat in fragments, she belonged all too well and that frightened her just as much.
Max dozed in the passenger seat. He still didn’t know the full story behind Dwayne. Should he ever know? Why? Because it was inevitable. She had orchestrated this; they would only become more and more entwined, forcing such secrets into closer proximity, giving them progressively less room to hide.
Maybe he’s not who you think he is. Maybe he’s not your brother and you’re not deceiving him—
Karen looked at the papers in her hand, grainy photocopies of some kind of text accompanied by pictures of bizarre flora, some resembling mutated cornstalks, others with gaping mouths like Venus flytrap.
Dwayne kept one hand on the wheel, and, with the other, flipped stuttering through the radio stations, giving jockeys and singers mere seconds to prove their worth. Karen stared through the windshield at the several yards of lit road ahead of them, at the night melted over the land.
Dwayne clicked off the dial and the van’s guttural purr took over.
“What you got there?” he asked her in a lowered voice.
“What?” Karen said, still staring ahead.
“Those papers. That the Voynich manuscript?”
“Oh...I don’t know. I was just looking through whatever was here. I’m sorry if I messed anything up....”
“ This whole van needs a major cleanup. Don’t worry about it.”
“What are these?”
“Those are photocopies of the Voynich manuscript I got from a fellow I know at Harvard, someone who worked with one of the linguists involved in trying to crack the code. But so far no one’s gotten anything. Written in a totally incomprehensible language.”
“Strange.”
“You’re telling me.”
“What about all the plant drawings?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Hmm.”
“Yeah, actually, interesting we’re going to Twilight Falls,” Dwayne said. “Because it was a Native American tribe that supposedly lived around there that shed any kind of light on the subject. Code-breakers found distant similarities between characters in their language and those in the Voynich. Makes little sense to me, though, since the Voynich manuscript was written in the thirteenth century by a European named Roger Bacon.”
“What was the tribe?”
“The Agras.”
“Agras. I’ve never heard of them.” Karen snorted. “Didn’t help that I never paid attention in history, though.”
“Can’t imagine you would’ve. Heard of them, I mean. They’ve been overshadowed by the Agra Circle. Don’t know much about them but I know enough to stay away. They’re a cult, basically, based loosely on whatever they thought the Agras believed. In fact, some scholars are skeptical even of the real tribe’s existence, thinking maybe it was PR for the Circle.
“The original tribespeople, as I understand it,” Dwayne continued, “were supposedly Aztecan descendants who migrated north after the Spanish conquest. They settled somewhere up here. Weren’t that many of them. Their practices and spirituality and all that totally changed. Basic tenet of their culture was that the gods had stowed away inside them, to escape persecutors. The tribesmen were supposed to unleash them, re-birth their gods, generation by generation. Guess gestation and delivery time is long for a god.”
“Or maybe it’s the blink of an eye,” Karen said, “By God standards.”
“Hah, maybe.” Dwayne nodded. “My favorite thing is their paradigm for how things happen.”
“What do you mean? Happen how?”
“Anyway, anytime, anywhere. The four elements we know; air, fire, water, earth. But the Agras also had more intangible forces at work. There was a destroyer, a creator, a collector, and a teacher. The destroyer was the bookend of the process, destroying first so the creator could create, and the creator would create with the tools and the knowledge gathered by the collector. And the teacher would spread the seed of the creation. It was never such a linear process, but they believed everything happened with those four forces operating together, in whatever capacity necessary.”
“So not just one of each?”
“No, could be tons of them. There’s no one any of them, they’re all collective, I think, lots of creators, destroyers, collectors, teachers.”
“Interesting.”
“It works if you think about it. Think of how this country kicked off. Destroying native societies, creating new colonies, expeditions like Lewis and Clark collecting what they could, paving the way, and word of all this progress spreading and inspiring yet more of it, more destruction, for even more creation, more collection. Clanking on and on.”
In the front seat, Max stirred. Dwayne gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Good sleep, Maximo?”
“I guess. Just had a dream that I knew was a dream and was telling myself to remember when I woke up, but....”
“Gone?”
“Yep. Blinked away.”
“Hate when that happens.”
Max riffled through his pocket and brought out a Taco Shack packet. He bit it open and began sucking it like an infant on a pacifier.
***
The dark quiet of