* * * *
Transfiguration
Richard Christian Matheson
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON is a film and television writer, producer and director. He has worked with Bryan Singer, Steven Spielberg and Roger Corman, among others; he has also written and/or produced three mini-series, eight feature films and thirty pilots, plus hundreds of comedic/dramatic television series episodes for HBO, TNT, NBC, CBS, ABC, Showtime Networks, Fox Network and Syfy.
He has also published two short story collections and a novel. Matheson is a studio musician who studied with Ginger Baker of Cream and has played drums with the Smithereens and Rock Bottom Remainders. He has worked as a paranormal investigator for UCLA and is considered an expert in parapsychology. He runs his own production company in Los Angeles and The Matheson Company with his father, famed fantasy writer Richard Matheson.
Describing the original story that follows, the author is typically succinct: “The North Slope of Alaska is an oblivion. To those who risk passage, death is always near, and I wanted to somehow capture its anonymity and haunted lure. Which lead me to the road that slashes it; a two-lane, in arctic void, where ugly secrets and desolation dwell. A man could go mad.”
IT IS EASY TO BECOME disoriented here. Snow is everywhere and the corners of the world soften and vanish. Sometimes when I dream, I watch myself drilling the thick, blue ice. I bore a large opening and stand over it, then slip through. I slide into the ancient sea beneath and, as currents gently sweep me away, my pained thoughts ease. I look up, through the ice, to see a place I never belonged, that never wanted me. Then, I close my eyes and fall asleep. I am finally home.
~ * ~
Angels come out at night, restless and far from Heaven.
We like to move about when the sun dies and we can more easily pass for human. The night hides our secret and our tasks. It is not known where we dwell—whether in the air, the void or the planets, as some have noted, but whether by thrones or dominions, we were created to convey His will to men. We like cold places and are not subject to death, or any form of extinction, extradition or censure. As divine soldiers, we keep order in an impure, Godless world, and I do what I must to serve Him. No matter the cost.
I am seventy miles north of Fairbanks, where pavement dead-ends and the Alaskan Highway turns into Dalton Highway; a hypnotic, gravel throat that stretches 414 miles across vast, plains of snow, all the way to Deadhorse, on the remote North Slope oil fields, at Prudhoe Bay. Bluish ice and dry snow surround the two-lane I’m on, as if infinite square miles of suffocated flesh and, on indefinable horizon, it collides with white-capped peaks that rise up from the bleakness like paralyzed waves.
Dalton is the “haul road” for eighteen-wheelers like mine and when it isn’t trying to kill you, the road takes you straight to where North America, for good or bad, finally runs out of land and surrenders to frigid sea. Along the way, I pass “Coldfoot” and “Beaver Slide” and, at mile 75, “Roller Coaster,” where the icy, two-lane goes down steep, fast, then up steeper, making big rigs like mine slip and lose their grip. They’ll tumble sideways, over and over, crushing the cab and driver, and when you come upon the mangle it makes you sick. People should die for a better reason.
These plains are violent and primitive and it’s a killing field when winter hits. I’ve seen bad ones at Avalanche Alley, near mid-point; a man-eating gust of winter flipped a married couple’s rig and shoved them through the windshield onto hard ice. Wolves finished them off. The weather’s usually out to get you, so freezing to death is the easy way out. You can feel it. Arctic skies stare down at you, on the two-lane, where spruces huddle and the frozen Yukon River is still as sculpted glass. When I drive beside it, I imagine fish, posed motionlessly in the frozen river like you see them sometimes in modern paintings. There is an incompleteness to this place that makes your mind fill things in. A gloom and need. But that isn’t why I come.
To get to Deadhorse, I tank up a grand of diesel, two big thermoses of black coffee and some candy bars. Sugar and caffeine wind me just right. I always have my notebook, too. I like to keep track. Dates; descriptions. My ride is a thirteen-speed, dual-stack, diesel Kenworth. Whole shebang grosses out at 88,000 pounds fully packed. 475 horsepower, eighteen aluminum wheels, tandem axles, Ultra-Shift, Air-Suspension. Sleeper, too. Only home I ever had and a hell of lot better than what I was born into. But even when a man dies inside, it’s only the beginning. Hebrews 12:22-23 says that when we get to Heaven we will be met by a myriad of angels, and spirits of righteous men will be made perfect. Myths of hopelessness are just that and do no one good.
My twin, thirty-foot trailers get filled with groceries, medicine, cars; anything you can’t get where it drops to fifty below. Deadhorse trucks in everything life in a lifeless place needs, maybe some it doesn’t. Truckers are a transfusion for the isolated workers of the Conoco Philips North Slope facility, every one of them trapped like cubes in an ice tray. As for the road, the Dalton has strict rules:
1) ALWAYS DRIVE WITH HEADLIGHTS ON.
2) WATCH THE ROAD AHEAD AND BEHIND FOR PLUMES OF DUST OR SNOW SIGNALING ANOTHER VEHICLE.
3) BEFORE PASSING, MAKE SURE OPERATORS OF OTHER VEHICLES KNOW YOU’RE THERE.
4) DO NOT STOP ON THE ROAD. IF YOU CAN’T GET OFF THE ROAD, PULL FAR TO THE RIGHT AND ACTIVATE YOUR HAZARD LIGHTS.
5) RESPECT THE SPEED LIMIT BECAUSE IF A RIG GOES TOO FAST, ITS WEIGHT WILL CREATE WAVES UNDER THE ICE THAT WILL MAKE THE ROAD BUCKLE AND COLLAPSE.
Now and then, overweight rigs driving over the limit drop through the cracking road, where it thins, and disappear like they were never there; I’ve seen huge carriers devoured by a big, jagged mouth in the road, the sloshing, polar sea beneath. Sometimes God needs a sacrifice. Sometimes the road is complicit. No life is sacrosanct.
Visibility is always an issue out here and when reflector posts vanish in white-outs, we chain our rigs together and ride it out, sitting in our cabs, listening to starved winds trying to get in. Snow can fill up the air intakes and choke you to death, so I keep my engine running even though the truck heater doesn’t keep me warm. In bone-deep cold, blood slows and you can hear it throb in your ears like a dying heart.
Out here, no one knows you, no one cares, no one takes an interest. We come, we go. There’s no cameras, no checkpoints. I could be anybody. Do anything. God’s work requires the clandestine and though angels may have flesh which resembles polished metal or faces like lightning, I wander free of such telling detail.
During the ‘74 oil crisis, the Dalton got carved in six months, borne of lies and avarice. It was clawed from denuded nowhere and runs alongside the massive veins of the 800-mile Trans Alaska Pipeline that runs from Deadhorse to the port at Valdez. Long-haulers do the four hundred miles, but they all know it’s a bad road, a bad bet. Some don’t make it. The oil company doesn’t care. There’s always vultures. Ask me, people like that don’t deserve to live. Add them to the fucking list.
Driving the ice-road seems to go on forever; like being lost at sea. You can’t get a cell phone to work past mile 28, but there’s no one I want to talk to. People waste my time. Exploit my best intentions. I prefer being alone, in my rig, not having to talk or listen. I’ve heard it all. Lies disguised as prayers, lust masqueraded as faith. We live in dire times and I am sanctioned by our Father to do something about it. All things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. For He shall give His angels charge over earth.
Those who forget that cannot die enough times.
Going down a slope, my dual stacks belch scarves of exhaust and when weather’s decent, I get lost in the locomotive hum of my tires on gravel. It puts me in a trance and lets me forget bad things; at least try. The worst nights, you come across accidents. Agonized faces, pinned under steel, begging for relief. Jack-knifes, rear-enders, head-ons. I kneel and calm them as life seeps from their scared eyes.
At the three-quarter mark, my rig strains through Atigun Pass, at 4,752 feet. Air gets thin and birds and animals don’t come out much. The tundra is a sheet of uncrumpled, white paper as I stare at amber halogens, drink my fourth cup of black. Long-haul truckers are ants who never looked up, escorting cargo through frozen wasteland, and they don’t realize that angels can take on the appearance of men when the occasion demands and so they are imprisoned. It is said a book must be “the ax for the frozen sea within us” referring certainly to the Scriptures. Half-frozen seas surround any life, threatening to wash people away. Life is a condemned promise and someone must pay.
They say drivers see things out here.
Apparitions or ghosts or the lingering energy of those who have died or whatever word you can live with. Once, on a brutal run, when I hadn’t slept in almost forty hours, I saw my dead father standing bloodied in the middle of the road, grinning in that hateful way he did the day he was taken from this world. But he was one of those people who never totally die because they leave a terrible dent inside you and your mind can’t let go.
The aboriginal people up here say the dead seek salvation, but it is not because they are spirits that they might be angels; they become angels when they are chosen. And only the chosen are raised up. The rest burn; their debased souls punished, their flesh disemboweled.
Last month, snow flurries were hammering me from all directions, and I swore I saw my brother beside the road in the white mayhem, screaming and running from something that terrified him, his long legs getting stuck in the deep drifts as he looked over at me with pleading eyes. He mouthed my name though I couldn’t hear it with my windows up. But the way he died all came back. Another day I’d like to forget. But those are the days you can’t.
Out here, wait long enough, everything comes back.
I’ve seen other people, too, in the hungry, falling snow, even though I know they’re long gone. They stare at me, helplessly, as they dart in front of my headlights and the grille smashes their flesh and bones and they’re swept under the truck. I know they were just mirages.
The Big Blank.
That’s what long-haulers call it up here. It’s when the outside world and your thoughts merge, a perilous weave that undermines sanity. Sometimes the soft powder takes on human shape. Milky silhouettes, without detail, who somehow want something. Fatigue breeds dark thoughts; every big-rigger and long-hauler knows it. The mind is a complicated thing and a childhood like mine is no help. Even angels suffer. God sees to that for his own reasons.
Things do bother me.
When I’ve been awake for too long, my mind loosens and sometimes I imagine skidding off the road and dying in the crush of my overturning rig. I quietly bleed in the cold, and the snowy shapes circle me until I can’t breathe. I fight them, but it is always too late. Angels can’t die yet I imagine it.
A psychiatrist at that place once told me it was a projection. Like with movies. Light passes through the film and it gets bigger on the screen. I guess he was saying thought and faith have that kind of power. But he had no fucking idea who he was dealing with.
I reach the Ice-Cut grade, a steep climb with sheer drops on both sides, and grip the wheel tightly. When I’m going fast, my tires hiss on the frosted flatness, like a monster’s sled, and the tire tracks disappear as ice instantly re-seals. I rumble across the road, bite into a Butterfinger and watch the speedometer. I stay ahead of schedule so I can stop if I need to. Lick chocolate off my fingers and watch for approaching headlights in my rear-views and ahead. Scan for plumes of white, jutting and hovering over roadway, see none and finally know I’m alone.
I slowly pull over in the solitude.
There is something sad out here. Sometimes I hear wolves, mourning in the desolation. If I’m very quiet and still, I feel sleepless tides roaming under the ice. Mostly, I hear nothing until the winds anger, shoving my eighteen-wheeler like it’s in their way. I glance at my watch and know I must move quickly. I pull on leather gloves, parka and goggles, leave the engine idling and get out.
The air freezes my face, as winds howl and tangle and my amber halogens leave orange-peel streaks on falling flakes. Diesel ghosts from the chrome stacks as I lean down, unlock the storage space under my driver’s door, and withdraw my rechargeable ice-fishing drill. I remove it from its case, quickly find a patch of thinner ice beside my rig and trudge toward it. Fifteen miles behind me, headlights flare on a far rise; another rig will be here in ten minutes.
I re-check my watch, grip the drill with both gloved hands, press the five-foot-long bit onto the frozen ground. The high torque and fast rotation allow me to work quickly before the other rig shows. The bladed teeth bite into the hard ice and, as winds rake, I begin to drill a fifteen-inch diameter opening. The grind of the motor makes my arms shake and curlicues of ice cover my waterproof boots. The whirling bit finally reaches the sea, five feet below, and I reverse the drill, pull it out, check the opening. Replace the drill in its case and toss it back in the storage compartment. Then, I grab the cinched canvas bag beside it.
I open it and begin to empty its contents into the hole.
I am at home out here. Angels have authority over the natural world, even when people don’t realize their time has come. Hell is a self-inflicted state of mind and people get what they goddamned deserve whether they like it or not.
As I work, I like it best when the snow falls audibly; a hushed downpour. Sometimes, what I drop in goes easily, sliding into the water beneath the ice road. Sometimes, I have to use a knife to cut it to size. Once the bag is empty, I fill the opening back up with snow, kicking it in, and pack it down with my heavy soles. It disappears fast in the cascading white, as if miraculously healed, and I get back in my idling rig.
I watch stars fight for their moment in overcast sky. Thank the Holy Father. In Genesis 18, Abraham welcomed angelic guests who appeared to be nothing more than common travelers. Truth disguises itself when necessary.
I flip on the overhead fog lights and they cast sick glow as the other truck finally passes with a high-beam nod and I lower my visor to block the glare. But I never look at myself in the hinge-down mirror. Prayer cannot repair flesh so ravaged. I have learned to accept shame and rage. There have always been sightings of angels who appear to be a man with unusual features. But I hate God for allowing this to fucking happen to me.
My tires leave grimy waffle marks on the road and snow carpets the ground behind me like I was never there. Snow is like time. It covers whatever it touches with a new layer of meaning that replaces the previous one and the one before that. Out here, it paints over everything and this 414 mile, barren forever is a place of temporary fact, of evidence erased.
Except for more headlights that approach from miles ahead, the Big Blank is shiny and black now, drawing me to Prudhoe Bay. I stare at the wide beams, the rushing dotted line. Long-haulers call it the Zipper and swear if you look at it too long, it gets inside you; does bad things. As I near Deadhorse, it’s 3:36 a.m. and seventeen below. Tall, sodium-vapor lights spill on the road and there are no trees, only machines, mechanical shadows. There isn’t even a church. It tells you everything. Where there is no God, impulse and pain rule. I have seen it.
Steam blasts from industrial structures and workers are up, walking around in parkas; shifts that come and go twenty-four hours a day, an exhausted army of detached, clock-less zombies, deserted by friends and families who loathe them. Most are liars. None can love. Thousands come and go, less than twenty-five live here. It is a soulless, transient dungeon and if they knew who I was, they would fall to their knees, ask for forgiveness.
Let them die for sins they relish.
I drop my haul at the transportation yard, get paid, buy a hot meal at the diner, check into the Prudhoe Bay Hotel, a one-story outcropping that squats in this gulag.
The frozen Atlantic Ocean nearby is mostly slush without visible tide and the local hardware store operates out of a thrashed doublewide. It’s open 24/7, even during white-outs, and their policy is if they don’t have it, you don’t need it. I drop in to buy replacement gloves, hacksaw blades. Go back to my room.
Try to sleep.
Snowdrifts are up to the windows, and I drink scotch and watch the septic swirls of smoke from the refineries. Listen to arguments in the street spilling from bars. The laughter and alcohol madness. The frantic despair of the voices, their pathetic, greedy noise. They are all damned. They will get sick and become empty and agony will ravage them.
Poison seeks itself.
From my window, I stare at the anemic expanse that leads back to Fairbanks. I measure the numbing monotony with bloodshot eyes. The undetected things beneath. Terrified expressions, twisted limbs, torn flesh. The couples and the ones who were alone. I imagine them all under the vast ice, finally where they should be. Here, they will always look the same, forever preserved, unable to make bad decisions, demolish lives. I saved them. If they could, they would spiral from the countless openings I drilled, vaporous and sorrowful, wanting to be forgiven. But it’s too late. Salvation is not given to the irredeemable.
I can feel the scotch and my skin hurts where scars seam my scathed features.
~ * ~
Sometimes when I dream, I watch myself drilling the thick blue ice. I make a large opening and stand over it, then step into it and slip through. I slide through the narrow opening and into the ancient sea underneath and, as currents gently sweep me away, I finally relax. My bad thoughts and fears stop and I look up through the ice and see a world I never belonged in, that never wanted me.
~ * ~
People don’t care.
They do what they want. They ruin their life. They ruin yours. They take and take. Smother everything good, give nothing back. Like my family did. It’s the same everywhere I go. Every other truck route across this fucked-up country. I bring them here, where no one will find them. But none are missed. When I give them back to the sea, maybe there is some balance in this damaged, indifferent world.
I remember the one from last week. Refinery worker. Nervous. On his way to Deadhorse. Black oil under his fingernails, unslept eyes. We pulled out of Fairbanks as the weather got bad. The windshield iced over and my rig’s steel wipers ground at it. He glanced over at me, thanked me for the lift. I offered him coffee from my thermos and he said yes, in a polite voice. But I could tell he was a person who hurt others and derived pleasure when they begged. I could detect in his casual conversation that he cared only for himself and that anyone stupid enough to get close to him would suffer. As he sipped, he glanced at my pistol mounted on my door bracket. Looked back at me. We hit a rut, duct tape rolled from under the seat and the blizzard swallowed us whole.
That was that.
Just like the ones I met in San Diego. And down south. Back east. Tulsa. So many voices and faces. I get people talking while we drink coffee so I can write down the details later. Otherwise, I lose track. They’re all narcissists. Bullies. All 361 of them talked about themselves, only a handful ever asked me a question about myself or faith or where their soul might be bound. Vain, worthless assholes.
The longest recorded night in Prudhoe was fifty-four days. The shortest was twenty-six minutes. No matter where you are, it is a world of extremes. Each must make peace with that somehow, each in their own way. Heaven and Hell are not so different. Sometimes, in summer, when mosquitoes swarm, it gets warm here and the Aurora Borealis makes you swear you can see your whole life in its randomness. Time and places. Hurts. The faces of people who never cared. The strangers who did you wrong. The rape and torture.
The world is a diseased zoo.
As I listen to them laughing like banshees, on the icy street outside, I’m exhausted and sore. When generators die, and lights go out and my room turns black, I stumble hard against the small dresser and hear its mirror fall and shatter. I always turn mirrors around in my motel rooms, even tape blankets over them so I never have to see. But after a minute, the generator starts back up, the lights flicker and I glance down, without thinking, to avoid shards in my bare feet.
As the bulbs twitch, I see splinters of a terrible face I had forgotten. A scarred mosaic of every face in my family, the mouth an ugly slash like my father’s, the eyes filled with sick contempt and futility like my mother’s. The nose crammed and broad and common like my brother’s. I stare at myself, reflected in vicious jigsaw fragments, and weep.
And though I fight its truth, I understand, at that instant, that I am guilty and damned. I am not of Heaven but Earth. I take. Give nothing back. I am no better than anyone. Sadism and suffering is all I know; I was raised with it. I am one of them. My heart is an Inquisition, my thoughts are vile and filthy. God has abandoned me and I am forsaken.
I have been drinking sand.
When day breaks in Deadhorse, I am broken. Betrayed. I dress and shower and I tell the front-desk man I will pay for the mirror and he tells me it is seven years of bad luck. He smiles like a lizard and I want to put a bullet in his head. Outside, engines are freezing up and plans changing. Workers need to get across the Big Blank, some with no means. I walk to the diner for coffee and a young woman with willing eyes asks me for a lift to Fairbanks. I refuse and tell her I’m not going all the way through. She doesn’t know what I mean since the road ends where it ends and nowhere else.
Fuck her. Fuck everyone. Fuck God most of all. For his lies; for making me believe them.
I get in my rig and head toward Fairbanks, thinking about how the world is worthless and can never be saved. Like my family. Like me. The psychiatrist was right but I couldn’t understand. He came to my ward and led me out into the garden and tried to help me. I thought he was evil, trying to cure an angel. I cut out his tongue with shears, got out of that place and moved on. We all have regrets.
The falling snow starts to wall me in and I drive faster, ignoring the speed limit. I reach a stretch of the Dalton with thin ice and push the engine harder, speeding over the slick surface. My steering wheel shakes as the rig starts to create waves under the road that will make it buckle ahead, the undulations like a massive blanket slowly shaken in the wind.
As my tires wobble, I look over and see my brother on hillocks of white, with the sawed neck I gave him; a gory joker’s collar. Beside him is my murdering father and my sadistic mother. Both staring, unblinking, waiting for me because they know I am no better than they are and never will be, and that I belong in the icy water with them for what I did.
I feel the sea shuddering below the road as the waves roll thicker and begin to break the ice and the two-lane starts to crack under the weight of my truck. It suddenly ruptures like a pane of broken glass and my engine is a roaring, wounded creature as a wide crack races toward me. Then, another. Then, more, wider and faster, the erupting waves tearing the road open.
The tires spin and I downshift, and my rig abruptly stops and hitches into the dark slush. My seat belt holds me tight against the sudden lurch and my fog lights shine on the collapsing road as it cracks apart, the water churning beneath, leaking upward. The rig begins to make hideous, scraping noises and the huge front tires and grille nose into the shattered roadway as the massive engine slowly dies and sea sloshes up to my doors, wanting me. I watch it without reaction and know I deserve this.
I slowly open my windows.
The freezing water gushes in, lapping at me, and I gasp at the aching cold, drinking in icy saltiness that fills me. I watch my belongings move, in slow motion, in the inundated cab, the inked pages in my notebook running, details and names washed off the paper; my pious, repellent spree. The truck creaks and tilts, huge trailers wrenched and twisting, and I look up through the windshield as sea submerges us and we slowly descend into green-black Ocean.
My dreams were premonitions. But they were wrong.
As we drown, I see murky images, drifting closer.
I can just make them out and am afraid as they move toward me with gunshot faces, slashed throats, many without legs or arms, mouths duct-taped. Pale crowds of them emerge through kelp, mutilations fresh, bloody clothes billowing. Wanting to hurt me as I hurt them.
They tear at me and I look up to see a place I never belonged; that never wanted me.
The sea goes red and I am finally home.