Michael had seen him for the first time when he was ten years old. They were driving cross-country and they had stopped at a gas station along the highway somewhere out in Alberta. A hot day, car windows down, nothing but blank space and blue horizon and this shanty filling station, some old guy pumping gas, and in the shade of the plankboard souvenir store, obscure amidst all this clutter and dust: the Gray Man. The Gray Man peered out from under a gray slouch hat with a fixed, attentive look Michael remembered, too vividly, from his dreams.
Terrified, Michael looked to his mother, but his mother had seen the Gray Man at the same time and she was terrified, too. He could tell by the way she was breathing, tight little gulps of air. Dad was paying the pump jockey, attention focused on his credit card as it ratcheted through the stamper in the old man’s hand, worlds away. Michael opened his mouth to speak but his mother laid a warning hand on his arm. Like a message: Your father won’t understand. And it was true. He knew it without thinking about it. This was something he shared with his mother, and only with his mother. This fear. This mystery.
The Gray Man didn’t move. He just watched. His face was calm. His eyes radiated a profound and scary patience. He watched as Michael’s father started the car, watched as they accelerated down the highway. I’ll wait, the eyes promised. I’ll be back. And Michael returned the stare, kneeling on the rear seat, until the Gray Man and the gas station both had vanished in the sun haze.
The horizon made him feel safe again. The Gray Man lost in an ocean of space: it was like waking up.
He knew better than to ask about it. What bothered him most was seeing his mother so scared. Her fear persisted all that day; she was not reassured by distance. And so he was carefully silent. He didn’t want to make things worse. “You’re awfully quiet today, kiddo,” his father said. “Sure you’re feeling all right?”
“Yes.”
No.
He was confused. How did he feel? Frightened, obviously.
But there was something else: he recalled it all these years later, here in the power company meadow. He felt it again.
Curiosity? But that was too mild a word. More like—
“Fascination.”
The word hovered in the cool September air like some dark bird.
Startled, Michael turned.
Briefly, the world seemed to go in and out of focus.
He thought, I should have been safe here. This was home turf, his own territory. It was certainly not a place for the Gray Man, who was a lurker, an alley person, a shadow person. But here was the Gray Man only yards away, slouch hat pulled down against the sunlight, the same man Michael had seen at the gas station in Alberta five years ago, not appreciably older but maybe—it was a sour joke—maybe a little grayer.
Michael took a shocked step backward and felt the fence press into his spine.
The Gray Man spoke. “You don’t have to be afraid.” His voice was rough, old, but deep and calming. He smiled, and the smile made his angular face seem less scary. His eyes, small in their battlements of brow and cheekbone, remained fixed. A thin line of scar tissue ran from brow to ear and up into the shadow of the hat. “I only want to talk.”
Michael suppressed an urge to run. With animals, they said, you should never show your fear. Did the same rule apply to nightmares?
“Going home?” the Gray Man asked. “Home to your mother?”
Michael hesitated.
“Your mother,” the Gray Man said, “doesn’t talk much, does she?”
Michael reached out and wrapped his fingers in the links of the fence, steadying himself. He felt weak, bewildered. His legs felt tremulous and distant.
The Gray Man stood beside him. The Gray Man was tall and calm. The Gray Man put a hand on his shoulder.
“Walk with me,” the Gray Man said.
Michael’s attention was tied up now in the Gray Man’s voice, the sweep and cadence of it; he wasn’t conscious of the route they were following, the places they passed. By the time he thought to look around they had left the power company meadow far behind.
“You feel different,” the Gray Man said. “You’re not like other people.” His hand on Michael’s shoulder was firm, fatherly.
The words brought back a flicker of fear. “Because of you,” Michael said accusingly. “You—”
“Not because of me. But we can start there. What is it you call me?”
“The Gray Man.” It was silly. It was a childish thing to say out loud in the cool September air. But the Gray Man’s laugh was indulgent, amused.
“I have a name. Well, I have lots of names. Sometimes—” His voice lowered a notch. “Sometimes I’m called Walker.”
“ Walker,” Michael repeated.
“ Walker. Tracker. Finder. Keeper.”
Like a song, Michael thought absently.
“What matters is that I know things about you. The things your mother won’t talk about.”
Michael asked in spite of himself, “What things?”
“Oh, all kinds of things. How lonely you feel. How different you feel. How you wake up sometimes… you wake up sometimes in the night, and you’ve been dreaming, and you’re afraid because it would be so easy to wake up inside a dream. As if dreams were real, a place you could go, maybe a place you visited once.”
And Michael nodded, strangely unsurprised that the Gray Man knew this about him. It was as if he had passed beyond fear and surprise into an altogether stranger realm. Sleepwalk territory, Michael thought.
They walked past darkened houses and brittle, silent trees. There was no wind. He didn’t recognize the neighborhood; he wondered fleetingly how far they had come. Nowhere near home, anyway. There was no neighborhood like this near home.
“We don’t go to the obvious places,” the Gray Man said, and Michael felt included in that we: a brotherhood, a special few. “We don’t walk where other people walk. You know that already. Deep inside yourself… you know that.”
He had never spoken about it. Seldom even thought about it.
But yes, it was true.
“You could walk out of the world if you wanted to.” The Gray Man stopped and bent at the waist and looked into Michael’s eyes. “The world has angles other people don’t see. Corners and doors and directions. You could step sideways and never be seen again. Like this.”
And the Gray Man moved in a direction Michael could only just perceive. Not away, exactly, but somehow… beyond.
And Michael took a tentative step after. “This,” the Gray Man said, smiling now. “This. This.”
A step and another step.
Michael felt an electricity flowing in him, a tingling sense of power. He was dizzy with it. Angles, he thought. Angles and corners and doors. A door in the air.
He could see the place the Gray Man was standing now, a cobbled hilly street, a horizon of hard blue sky and old industrial smokestacks, a faint smell of fish and salt in the air. He could not hear the Gray Man’s voice but saw him beckoning, a subtle but unmistakable motion of his pale hand. This way. This way. Only a step, Michael thought. This quiet miracle. It was only a step away …
“Michael!”
The sound came from far away. But his attention wavered.
“Michael!”
Closer now. Reluctantly, with a sense of opportunities lost, faltering, he turned away from the Gray Man, the cobbled street, the cold blue sky.
The sky he faced now was dark. A few stars blinked above the blue nimbus in the west. He did recognize this neighborhood: old houses and a slatboard grocery store on the corner, a mile or more from home and school.