Conference Grounds in Shambles
Arp explores the ruins and finds a new home
All around Berkshire, Arp passes remnants of a conference that was held without him. A conference to which, he considers, perhaps he was summoned back here to attend. He pulls reams of wet paper from the side pockets of his denim jacket and tries to make out what’s written upon them, the speech he was perhaps expected to give, but no more than a few words come clear at a time. He can’t decide whether to feel anger at having received no clearer instruction, or relief at having dodged a potentially exhausting duty.
He passes food and drink stands and pavilions and info booths strewn in haphazard clusters, as if rented in bulk from another conference and only partially unloaded. Or perhaps these items were mis-delivered; perhaps the trucks carrying them broke down when they stopped here for coffee and gas and the drivers, fearing retribution, fled into the countryside. Or perhaps, Arp thinks, the entire thing folded when I failed to arrive. He pictures rows of attendees in suitcase-wrinkled blazers sitting on folding chairs, their eyes rolling shut as the stage behind the microphone remains empty.
All that’s left is blown-down flyers and leaflets and speakers’ notes redacted with heavy felt pen. “At the very last moment, for reasons none involved would later claim to have seen coming, the Peace Talks fell apart completely.” A TV in a puddle of beer barks this as Arp walks past. He knows better than to make eye contact with the anchor, but this knowledge doesn’t keep him from doing so.
As soon as he does, the anchor looks at him expectantly, her rouged eyes wide and dark. He falls deep into one of Spine’s memories, wired at four in the morning, staring down his suite’s shared TV set while snores and sex sounds issue from the neighboring bedrooms. The anchor and Arp walk side by side through a destroyed TV-movie version of Berkshire, a cheesy late-nite Alien Invasion or Nuclear Winter scenario, clearly modeled—it seems to Spine, there in that dorm room night more than a decade ago—on the 90s video game Myst, in which a disembodied presence wanders around a lush, vacant island, piecing together clues about something that… happened.
Arp and the anchor help themselves to beer from the many abandoned refreshment stands, sipping and spilling it on the ground with loopy, careless gestures, discussing something that Spine, all the way back in college, can’t hear no matter how high he cranks the volume.
***
Spine & Arp waver inside and outside of this scenario, struggling to locate themselves within or beyond it, to end up on this side or that side: anywhere but on the cusp, their skin melting into the glass of the screen. They struggle to move forward as themselves. Because if they can’t, if they get stuck here and become immobile, a new Spine and a new Arp will materialize, one watching and one being watched, filling both vacuums as nature demands, and then the story of the trashed conference will proceed as if there had been no interruption.
***
Arp shudders and tries to kick the TV away, but more beer wells up from the sewer system to send it sparking and bobbing along beside him, the anchor yawning as if she’s seen this all before and has no problem letting her companion work himself up if that’s what he needs to do.
“The old joke about how the conference-goers got lost in the Bretton Woods,” she continues, “how they went in there and never came back, well, it’s—”
A body falls from the roof of the Faculty Club, crushing the TV. Two aerials shoot up in self-defense, but they too are crushed, protruding from the body like spare limbs. This leaves Arp on his own again, vested this time with the presence of mind to avoid looking down and recognizing the body’s face. As long as I don’t see it, I won’t know it’s me, he thinks. This permits him to hurry onward, at a trot and then a run, though he knows, as he picks up speed, that the only destination he’ll succeed in reaching, as the old joke prefigured, is the lush but chilly wastes of the Bretton Woods.
***
As soon as he enters the woods, he passes the first of many identical houses, all occupied, according to the plaques out front, by Mr. Derekis, Berk’s long-time A/V supply man, and his new families. “After the Peace Talks collapsed, it became a point of common knowledge that Mr. Derekis, onetime purveyor of audio jacks and lens covers to undergraduate film students, started an immense number of families and positioned them all throughout these woods, known to some, half-jokingly, as the Bretton Woods, and to others as—”
A shrieking overwhelms the quiet woodland scene before Arp can read further. He turns to see a train whoosh by, close enough that the air in its wake sends him flying. He lands on his back in Mr. Derekis’ yard and lies there until the train’s many, many cars pass out of sight. When he sits up, he sees a leaflet has landed in his lap.
Opening to the first page, he reads, “The numerous dictators who agreed to meet at the Berkshire Conference never arrived. They remained forever on their respective trains, revising and re-revising the treaties they would never sign. Some say they are there still, chugging and chugging through the woods along tracks laid for them by the Conference Committee, a volunteer organization of former Berk students and faculty, all hoping for a workable resolution to the War which—”
The train flies past again, closer this time, crushing the fence an inch beyond where Arp lies. It forces him up and across the lawn, stumbling on his heels until his back crashes against the door and then he’s inside Mr. Derekis’ front room, where he turns to face a woman and four children whose expressions make clear how long they’ve been waiting.
“Turn that thing off,” he says, in a voice that’s not quite his own. “I can’t eat with the news blaring.” He walks over to the wood and glass TV set and cranks the chrome knob all the way to the left, snuffing out the anchor in her puddle of beer, though not before she regards him with weary disappointment, as if he’s about to indulge a perversion she thought he’d outgrown.
Then, in the hissing silence, he places the leaflet on a shelf crammed with older copies and turns back toward the table to take his seat before a plate of steamed broccoli and pineapple-glazed pork, eating quickly in the knowledge that soon, if its spiraling trajectory stays on course, the train will plow through the house.