Thomas Marshall

Conversations with Charlie

Excerpt

One: A Cabin in the Mountains

I came up to a cabin in the mountains to end my life.

I left everything I had and knew behind me as I attempted to escape to some final feeling of completion somewhere I thought would complete me. I quit my job, terminated my lease, dumped or donated most of my possessions, and packed everything I had left into the back of my car to take on a long drive to some final destination. 

I couldn’t sleep the last night I spent in town before I left. I spent it walking through my soon-to-be-former apartment complex, past windows illuminated by televisions burning blue into the cool mist of the early midnight. It’s odd seeing into someone else’s life through a drawn blind or open door. You think your own personal placement of objects is the only way your apartment could be set up, given the space, yet every single place you pass is different and unique, populating the same floor plan in a myriad of matchless ways. 

I watched a spider move through invisible air, with long legs outstretched into the unknown.

Between the life I left and the cabin was about a day’s drive; I woke up groggy and escaped the last patches of populace and before long found myself among the trees. I looked to my left out the window at the blur of green and brown, picking out individual trees in the near distance and following them individually to make the forest stand still for instants at a time, like the calm in the eye of some great whirling storm around me. My seatbelt rested uncomfortably on my torso and the thought to unbuckle it intruded into my psyche. The individual steps came to mind; unbuckle your seatbelt, drift to the right, relax your shoulders, relax completely, sail through the windshield, break your skull against a sturdy tree trunk, over. I let the feeling pass as I refocused on the streaming lines on either side of me, vibrating as I drove between them, holding me in place. I had already paid for the cabin, I thought, what a waste it would be to cut my plans of cutting my plans short even shorter. Plus, I could always fuck up even something like this, wind up paralyzed, vegetative, or simply wounded, not even dead. I let these thoughts pass from my mind with the same resigned apathy with which they entered. 

I guess I imagined that at some point I’d break free of the trees on the last leg of this drive, but they only got thicker, deeper, and when I finally took an exit farther still into the trees, the forest seemed to swallow me entirely. Night was already beginning to fall, but I felt as though it would have been just as dark in daylight, subsumed by centuries of arboreal growth. When the dirt road ended, I continued without my car, and I took my pack with me, a great burden upon my back, and as I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where there was a cabin, in a small clearing of the trees. The modest cabin, a post-and-beam, timber-frame wood hovel, could be politely described as rustic. There was a small lean-to overhang on one side of the cabin and a small pile of firewood sheltered underneath it. The cabin itself was encircled by a thorny thicket of old and dead rose bushes, the earth around strewn with centuries of seasons of dry, brown pine needles layered over layers of those decomposing underneath. A forest floor carpeted with the worst shag imaginable crunched underfoot as I approached the lockless door. And into the rose garden I went. 

The cabin was dark, but had a few small fixed-picture windows draped in muslin curtains. Though the blue-white light of the moon lit them up like an incandescent gas mantle,the cabin was still dimly lit, dark. There was a shelf, though, across from me, and on it there was a kerosene lamp and an old tin of paint thinner beside it, dented and dust-covered, and another storm lantern hanging from a beam above me in the center of the cabin. I gave both a jostle and both were dry and empty, so, fumbling with the small screw-in stopper at the metal base of the smaller lamp, I poured in some of the kerosene paint thinner and replaced the stopper. I removed the glass globe chimney and lit the flat wink, already damp with the flammable liquid it sopped up from its base. Upon lighting it, it glowed bright and diffused the rest of its light as it flickered under the glass globe I replaced upon it. I looked around again in the dim light, black and wispy smoke seeping up from the small flame, and decided to fill and light the mixed-air storm lantern hanging from the rafters too. More light, and more smoke still. 

In the cupboard above the wood-burning AGA next to the sink were an old coffee tin and two metal enamelware mugs. Most of my life, no matter where I go, even if I have nothing, I still have too many goddamn mugs. At the bottom of the cupboard, hanging from one of the old wooden shelves, was a bunch of red roses tied together, dried and hung upside down. On the shelf next to the tin of coffee was another of Crisco and an old stovetop percolator. A blackened, old, cast-iron skillet rested by the hot plate burner of the long-dormant AGA. I went out again to gather some felled branches, twigs, and dry pine needles and with a little of the kerosene paint thinner lit the furnace of the AGA and shut the hatch, the warmth already radiating from the stove. And in that warm, flickering glow and the light of the lanterns, I surveyed my surroundings.

Inside the cabin, at the very top ridge of the sloped, vaulted ceiling, there is a single, long, large wooden beam that runs across the length of the main room, and juts through a wall into the bedroom. It supports other smaller beams running perpendicular, which in turn support the shiplap panels running perpendicular to those beams that make up the roof. This intricate puzzle of support and strength left a running gap in-between the largest beam and the shiplap roof above it, and this gap beckoned to me. That largest beam could easily support my weight swinging from it without issue, and the gap was more than enough to secure a rope through. I hadn’t arrived here with any plans in particular, just the singular plan, which I guess is a better sign, psychologically speaking, but this beam gave me a means to this end. I was drawn to it, preoccupied, and I knew that I would look at it each morning that I got up, each day I wandered around in this cabin alone, and each night before returning to bed once again. I noticed it more than I noticed the view of the trees and the undulating mountains of green outside the window, more than anything else, it jutted from the roof and into my mind like an insidious, intrusive thought. Maybe this was just a temporary escape to begin with, maybe I just needed to get away under the immediate guise of suicide, but that beam made this place into a destination.

I didn’t stand a ghost of a chance here, not for long.

About the Author

Thomas Marshall is a novelist from Southern California pursuing the MFA in Fiction at Columbia University. He writes young adult and contemporary fiction; his first novel, No More Dead Kids, was published in 2019. He is currently working on its sequel along with other novels.