An Angular Discipline
an excerpt

By six in the morning, Conrad’s just following street signs as he finds them – mostly on the highway, for whatever reason, and Scissor Jack must be taking him some place very far away, but Scissor Jack was always farther away than this, so a few miles in whatever direction is hardly anything, really.
When Conrad sees dead animals on the road, he has to stop and stare at them and wonder if they’re a sign or not. Scissor Jack was never cruel, and it seems cruel to kill an animal this way and leave it dying out on the street and not understanding why – but Conrad identifies with them, too, because of this, so some of them end up being signposts and some of them don’t.
When the sun rises, Conrad knows he’s close – the light of the sky fades from the bright orange of his god’s hair to the sharp blue of his eyes to sleepy clouds like steam in a too-hot bathtub. He could not possibly be wrong.
He ends up turning off the highway and going into dusty back streets without names, surrounded by high yellow grass with a few thin trees scattered around it. His air conditioner seems about to fail, so he opens his windows and nearly chokes for a moment on grass – grass that’s almost familiar, for its height and shade, but tastes too much like this world and not anything like the Neither his mind remembers so impossibly.
The sun towers in the sky like a god in its own right by the time Conrad gets to where he knows he’s supposed to be, and he gets out of the car and sees a small house, and it’s too small to be Scissor Jack’s, but this person might lead him to Scissor Jack instead, and he knows it’s the right place when he bursts inside – there is no lock – and sees an old photograph on the wall of two boys.
And one of them has the bright hair and thin smile of his god, and he knows this is the person he’s supposed to find, so he runs down the hall, confident that he’ll be recognized, but as he throws open doors and falls through doorways, he realizes – there is no one here.
He feels himself start to panic, so he checks all the rooms again – he opens his mouth to call for someone, but he doesn’t know a name to ask for, and what if they don’t even know Scissor Jack’s name? Scissor Jack used so many names after all.
It’s worth a try. “Scissor Jack?” he says quietly, almost afraid for some reason, and he wants to try another name but can’t remember a single one. If he’d been that Neither child he would have known, he’s sure of it, but he isn’t that child anymore and so he only knows a single name for his god, which he says again and again into this empty house in the middle of nowhere.
“Scissor Jack?”
He looks in the bedroom again, and there is no one.
“Scissor Jack?”
The kitchen again, and inside closets and pantries although it doesn’t really make sense for him to.
“Scissor Jack?”
As he stands in the bathroom, practically running around in frantic little circles, he realizes in the middle of saying his god’s name that there is a shed outside.
It must have a clue. It must be able to tell him something.
Conrad runs out the back door to the shed, and the door has a lock on it this time, but it’s an old one, so he shakes and pulls at it, still saying, “Scissor Jack?” and sounding like he’s getting hysterical now, but this person’s got to be inside, and they’ve got to tell him what to do, to find his god, to be useful to his god again, his god who needs him and has always needed him, and the lock breaks in a rusty little burst and the wooden doors fly open and for a moment, Conrad sees nothing but a cloud of splinters and dust in his eyes.
As it clears and he steps inside and his eyes adjust to the light, he sees a shape and says, “Hello?” but it’s just a sheet thrown over something, and there’s no one inside.
Conrad stands in silence and listens. The whole area has the light quiet of a place deserted. There was someone here recently, and he knows it (by the feeling of fear still vibrating through the little building he’s in, but his adult self doesn’t quite realize this), but now they’re gone, and he was too late and too slow with following the signs.
There’s nobody here. There’s nobody here. He can’t think it enough times – there’s nobody here.
He stumbles all the way back to his car and falls into the driver’s seat and thinks to himself that he isn’t sure he’ll know the way home and begins to cry.