The Tower of Marsh Creek

 In the last summer before the heat became permanent, before the hills dried to bone and the birds forgot their songs, I returned to the intersection at the edge of Marsh Creek. The sun was setting, stuck like a rusty blade in the west. The traffic lights blinked their futile orders into the emptiness. Red. Green. Yellow. No one obeyed. The wind shifted but the air remained heavy, as if it remembered something terrible.

I had been driving for hours through the golden hills of Northern California, following an old journal that had once belonged to my grandfather, who said he was following the writings of someone else, a man named Marcos who wrote about a house with a tower, a doctor who married a ghost, and Miwok bones buried under the floorboards. The directions were scrawled in pencil. When I reached the light at Deer Valley Road, I stopped, not because it was red, but because something inside me recoiled, like a horse smelling blood.

To my right, beyond the bleached grass and the oaks hunched like conspirators, was the house. The house.

It stood behind a barricade of false history and state plaques, half-hidden by shadows and bureaucracy. Marsh’s house, they called it, as if it still belonged to him. A Gothic mansion with a collapsed tower and a history as translucent as a ghost’s skin. John Marsh, the first white settler in the county. Physician. Opportunist. A man who spoke Latin to Miwok children and dosed them with herbs he barely understood. He’d been murdered by his own men. Some say it was rustlers. Others say it was the land itself.

I parked near the edge of the road and got out. The wind kicked dust into my eyes. I wiped them clear and the sun dipped further, like a curse completing its arc. No one else was there. The road behind me had gone silent.

***

As I crossed the dry grass toward the ruin, I thought of what Vollmann wrote: “all history is a failed attempt at love.” Each empire is a desperate caress yearning for completion. Each war is a misunderstanding between hungry ghosts, fought by machines and drenched in innocent blood. I thought of Marsh’s tower and why he had built it so high: not just to watch for rustlers, but to see who was coming to get him, what divine vengeance was running towards him from the past.

The closer I got, the more the ground seemed to shift underfoot, as if something were moving beneath the soil. This was not just a site. It was a vessel. The trees whispered in a tongue I could almost understand.

The foundation of the house was cracked and lopsided, stones the color of dead teeth; a plaque informed me that renovations were underway, though I saw no workers, only scaffolding wrapped like a noose around the broken tower stump. A second sign claimed the Miwok had helped build the first adobe house here, that Marsh had treated them kindly. Free medicine, it said. I laughed. A dry, involuntary sound.

Inside, the house was empty. The rooms smelled of wood, dirt, and an older sense of decay. The walls were covered with old wallpaper, some floral, some geometric, all rotting. Dust hung in the air like ash from an invisible fire. I thought I heard something upstairs, the sound of a feet dragging. I went up.

***

There were three floors, though the third had partially collapsed. The second was worse: half-burned rafters, a mattress with black mold blooming across it like ink stains. A bookshelf, empty except for a single volume whose title had been worn away. I opened it and found a pressed leaf. Underneath it was a note: “Do not look at the tower at night.”

Of course, I looked.

Through the hole where the tower used to be, through that vertical scar, I could see the hills behind the house, rolling golden like the bones of old gods. There were figures out there. At first, I thought they were deer, but they moved wrong. Upright. Stiff. The kind of motion that implies rehearsal. Or ritual. I closed the book and went back downstairs, but the house seemed rearranged. I could not find the front door. I wandered, and time began to unfurl itself like a snake.

***

Night fell. It didn’t just descend, it bled from above. The sky turned purple, then black, and the stars looked down at me with the indifference of ancient survivors. I found myself in the kitchen. The sink was full of something viscous and red. Wine, I thought. Then I saw the tooth. I stepped back.

There was a mirror by the back door. In it I saw my reflection, though something was wrong. My face was smudged, like it had been painted in oil then smeared by a careless finger. My eyes were holes. Behind me, I saw the reflection of someone else. I turned around quickly but I saw no one.

The mirror was cracked down the center. A hairline fracture that spread with a sound like ice breaking.

***

Later, I woke up on the porch. I don’t remember lying down. The hills were glowing faintly in the starlight, and the oaks stood motionless. A voice came to me from the distance, not loud but persistent. A woman’s voice, speaking in Spanish or a language that had faded into Spanish centuries ago. I followed it.

The voice led me down a dry creek bed where the frogs had all turned to stone, where the dancing leaves were whispers. At the bottom, I found what I thought was a well. It wasn’t. It was the old adobe foundation, older than Marsh’s house. Stones laid by Miwok hands. The voice stopped. I looked down into the pit and saw a figure sitting cross-legged in the dark. It looked up. It had my face.

***

I don’t remember driving back, but I must have. I woke up at the intersection. The traffic light was green.

A white car passed, headlights blinking like insect eyes. The buildings on the corner, a bank, a restaurant, glowed faintly from inside, though they must have been empty at this hour. I saw my own reflection in the window. This time, the reflection smiled at me. I did not smile back.

***

Weeks went by. I told no one what had happened. What would I say? That I had met myself in the ruins of a house built by a man who feared the land he claimed to own? That the hills had whispered secrets into my mouth and now I couldn’t sleep without tasting iron?

I began to write things down. I drew symbols I had never seen. One night, I woke up standing in the yard of my house, barefoot, with a cold wind speaking through my teeth. I had painted something on my chest. Rancho Los Méganos. The Sand Dunes.

***

I read about Marsh’s tower. How it fell in the 1868 quake. How he rebuilt it in wood and it fell again in 1906. A structure fated to collapse. He built it too tall, they said. Too proud. But maybe he built it for someone else. Maybe he was waiting.

I returned to the house. The renovations had ceased. No one was there. I climbed through a window. The air was thick and soft. I found the old tower shaft and descended. There were stairs, though they should not have been there.

At the bottom I found a room. In it, I saw a stone table, a ring of dirt, and a single candle, unlit. I heard chanting. I saw shadows. I do not remember the rest.

***

They say Marsh was murdered by the men he trusted, that they dragged his body to the creek and left it for the animals to feed on. They say that the Miwok grieved him, that others rejoiced, that his wife died before she ever saw the house finished.

They say the tower was cursed, that the hill rejects permanence, that the land was never his to begin with.

They say a man lives in the house now, quiet, thin, always watching. No one sees him come or go. They say he speaks in riddles, in half remembered dreams. They say that if you knock, he will answer with your own voice. They say the hills remember everything. And they do.

 

Momentary Sacrifice

 

For several days now I had been conducting a quiet, obscure war. A small war, private, untelevised… not unlike the wars of the mendicants or flagellants; those hungry saints who beat themselves with cords to feel closer to the unnameable.

My battlefield was a chamber of weeds, a sanctuary grown wild with disuse and perhaps mercy. It may once have been a storage shed or the bones of a forgotten greenhouse. But I had made it sacred by the act of tearing.

Each morning: one bill. Always a ten. Jackson's face torn in quadrants, one piece dropped east, one west, one to the wind, one underfoot. The rite was methodical. The sacrilege was exact.

I did it to destroy the root, to disrupt the wormhole in my chest that had twined itself around the desire for accumulation. A fetish, not of worship but of yearning, of obsession, of the silent panic that can wakes me in the night, panting for what I do not yet have.

On the second day, as I stood on the weeds, I looked down at the scrap in my hand, this worn, fibrous rectangle of power, and saw it finally as it was: a piece of paper. An object without essence. A body whose soul I had invented.

I saw then how much of my life I had given to these revenants of value. How many hours I'd sold to preserve the illusion of worth.

And then… everything became transparent: the bill, the chamber, my intentions, my body, even the leaf that fluttered past my shoulder as I stooped to place the second quadrant into the soil.

I began to cry, but not for the money. Not for myself either. It was the kind of weeping that comes when a person understands, for one suspended moment, that everything around them is dying, and they too are dying, and there is no villain in it, only motion.

I thought of the people I loved. How little I had said. How foolishly I had traded time for control and business, affections for assurances, letters for ledgers.

At the third mark, I halted. I made a circle with my finger in the dust. A magic circle but not for summoning. Rather for banishing. To tell the spirit of money, or the echo of my longing for it: Go.

There were no candles, no altar, no knife. Only the final shard of the ten-dollar bill, held like a relic between two trembling fingers, and my voice, raw, trembling, untheatrical:
“I release you.
You are nothing.
You are what I made you
because I forgot the deeper thing.”

And in that moment, not redemption, not transformation, but clarity.
Clarity in the form of weeds.
Clarity in rusted nails.
Clarity in wind and tears and paper,
scattered like autumn prayers across a forgotten chamber where I, a fool of the world, had come to offer what I no longer needed.

The Book of Instructions

 

I.

They came quietly, the way ghosts or debts come—by mail. Cream-colored envelopes, sometimes pale blue, often typed, sometimes handwritten in a strange elegant cursive that curled like a vine around my name. They came every few weeks, regular but never predictable. Each one with a task. Not a demand, not

a favor. A suggestion that arrived like a soft imperative.

    "Take 12 photographs of birds—any kind, any place."
    "Write 6 poems about someone you love."
    "Make 10 notes about old memories, even if they're false."

The return address was always the same—an artist in another city, a name I’d once seen footnoted in some underground catalog of collective performance pieces. We had met once briefly, I think, in a train station or at an opening for someone else’s work, her hair coiled like wire, her smile something quick and

technical. But now, we spoke only through these one-sided correspondences, and I did as I was told. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to. Because something in the ritual thrilled me.

I took the photos of birds—crows outside the hospital, a heron knee-deep in garbage water, pigeons under a freeway underpass glowing in dawnlight. I wrote the poems, some real, some fabricated to fill the quota. I peeled the scabs of memory open and scribbled whatever I found inside. I did it all, every absurd,

holy, useless instruction. I placed them in my trapper keeper, labeled with my name and the number she had assigned me: PARTICIPANT #74.

And then, nothing.

II.

Weeks passed. Then months. Silence.

At first I thought I’d simply missed the final instruction. That maybe I was supposed to wait in stillness, a test of patience or trust. But more time passed, and the silence stopped feeling profound and began to rot inside me like old bread.

So I went looking for her.

Her address was a crumbling apartment building at the edge of an industrial district—now half-razed, soon to be developed into offices for green tech startups. The buzzer didn’t work, so I went around back, climbed the rusted fire escape, and found the door unlocked. Inside, the apartment was abandoned, but

not empty. It had been left like a shrine.

III.

The walls were covered with charts, diagrams, piles of folders. Index cards with names. Dozens of binders, colored and labeled like grade-school relics. It smelled of glue, dust, and burnt coffee. Her mail had stacked in slow sediment near the door. Her mattress was rolled up and tied with string. But what struck

me most—what dropped my heart into my feet—was that my trapper keeper was there, placed neatly among the others.

I recognized it instantly. Purple with neon lightning bolts. I opened it and flipped through my photographs of birds, the poems I had written (some of them still made me blush), the ten memories written on yellow lined paper in my unsure hand. It was all there, unchanged. But it wasn’t mine anymore. Or perhaps it

had never been.

IV.

That’s when she arrived—the other woman. She barged in with angry eyes, a nervous energy in her jaw.

"You too?" she said.

I nodded.

"She told me I was part of a grand piece. She told me I was helping her construct a web of meaning. I did everything she said. I sent my binder. Never heard from her again."

She looked at me, trembling. Not with rage, not exactly. More like betrayal shaped as fury.

I went to the wall. Her binder was there. I took it down, handed it to her like a ceremony.

"Here," I said. "Don’t be afraid. I found yours. And mine. And many others. And now I understand something."

She watched me. Her rage was cooling, morphing into something else—reluctant wonder, maybe.

"These pieces—we made them, yes. But we didn’t author them. She did. She’s the artist. The true creator. We were her hands, her instruments. Vessels."

She blinked.

"And that’s not a betrayal. That’s a gift. We were invited to participate in something larger than ourselves. Something without edges. And I can’t imagine a better kind of grace."

V.

We sat in the quiet hum of the abandoned apartment, flipping through pages. Notes, drawings, artifacts of invisible rituals. How many others had received her instructions? How many had obeyed? How vast was this project? Hundreds? Thousands?

There were folders labeled in Polish, Arabic, Nahuatl. Some had been mailed from jungle villages, some from Manhattan lofts. One was bound in goatskin. One was nothing but a USB stick taped to a piece of cardboard.

The deeper we looked, the more impossible it became to grasp the scope. She had built a world inside this modest apartment. A museum of participatory obedience. A cathedral of small gestures. A silent archive of human willingness.

I stood by the window and watched the sky turning orange with industrial dusk.

"This is art," I said. "Not because it is beautiful or even complete. But because it changed me. It turned my life into a sequence of rituals. It made me pay attention."

She nodded, quietly now.

And somewhere behind that orange sky, I imagined the artist herself—maybe sitting in a new apartment in another city, watching someone else obey. Watching the net grow larger.

I left the binder on the floor like an offering. Then I walked out. I didn’t lock the door.

The Forgotten

 

I woke up sweating in a hotel room that smelt like gas and wet cement, with the ceiling fan making more noise than wind. My friend was snoring softly in the other bed, bare-chested, a machete tucked under his pillow like a joke nobody would laugh at twice. We were in El Salvador, again. Or still. You never really leave, especially when you’re trying to forget something.

--

She was a freelance reporter. Sarah or something like that. Gringa. Young, blonde, and probably used to lattes and Netflix recommendations. She had come down with a padded notebook and a press pass printed at home. “Investigative,” she’d said. “Immersive.”

We were drinking cheap local whisky out of water bottles and eating potato chips from a plastic bag. The conversation had turned into a slow spiral of abstractions—poverty, memory, global conscience. She said, with this blank conviction that only people who had never been afraid for their lives can manage:

“There are no forgotten people anymore. Not in the modern world. Everything’s documented now.”

I laughed once, loudly, and then stood up. My laugh startled my friend, who had been half asleep in his chair, like an old jaguar that never stops listening.

“You stupid bitch,” I said, “Of course there are forgotten people. Most of the world is made up of them. You don’t see them because people like you are the ones who did the forgetting.”

I was shaking now, and she blinked. My friend was on me before I got any louder, pulling me out of the room with a force that felt like compassion, or at least strategy. As the door closed, I saw her shaking her head, like she was disappointed but determined. She was going to prove her thesis. That was the story. That we were all accounted for.

--

We were dropped off somewhere east of Cojutepeque, or maybe it was further. No signs. No signal. No clear instructions. We were supposed to find a woman—his aunt, allegedly—who might help us with something undefined. Food. Shelter. The story.

The sun was vertical and overwhelming, and the road was all dust and dog piss. Within five minutes, we saw them—three young men standing beneath a tangle of barbed wires and dying yellow flowers. Tattoos up to their throats. One of them had a glass eye that didn’t track with the rest of his face.

 “Buenas,” I said, with the forced casualness of someone pretending not to smell death in the air. “We’re looking for my friend’s aunt. Maybe you’ve seen her?”

My friend tensed like a wire pulled too tight. He said:

“Tía? I don’t have a tía here, vos. You must be confused.”

 

They left us alone. But as they walked away, my friend leaned in, whispering to me:

“You don’t ask people things like that around here. If they think you’re looking for someone, they’ll want to know who, and why. Then they’ll go find her before you do. Not to help her. To find out what she knows. You get me?”

I got him. We were walking blind, in a game rigged by ghosts. Every question was a clue in a crime we hadn’t committed yet.

--

Later, I started thinking about her again—Sarah, or whoever. I imagined her stumbling across the cracked tile of some comedor, asking old women with cataracts where the child soldiers had gone. I imagined her recording quotes that sounded profound in English but were just tired fragments of survival. She’d be somewhere not far, I thought, lost too, only in a prettier way.

She would write about hope and resilience. She’d quote a man who used to be in a gang but now makes jewelry out of shell casings. She’d miss the man sleeping on cardboard behind the cantina who used to be the mayor’s brother.

Eventually, I thought, we’d run into her again. Maybe in the town square. Maybe on the edge of a dry riverbed where bones are buried. And I’d ask her if she still thought everyone was remembered. And I’d point.

To the old woman with no teeth who once taught algebra and now sells candy from a tray. To the child drawing cartoons in the dust with a nail, whose mother was disappeared, whose father was dismembered, whose name no one says. To the man with the glass eye who used to be called Alejandro but now answers to no name.

I’d tell her:

“This is where the census ends. This is where maps curl at the edges. This is where God forgets to answer the radio.”

And maybe then she’d understand. Or maybe she’d write a grant proposal. Or maybe she’d shake her head again, because some truths can’t be carried back on an airplane.

--

That night, my friend and I slept in an abandoned house. Rats scratched under the broken sink. The roof leaked even though there was no rain. I had a dream I was a boy again, looking through a keyhole into a room full of people who had forgotten my name.

When I woke up, I wasn’t sure where we were anymore. I looked at my friend, who was staring at nothing, his face lit by the slow, blue dawn.

“Do you think she’ll make it out?” I asked.

“Probably,” he said. “They like her type.”

Then we got up. We kept walking. Looking for a woman who may or may not exist, in a village with no name, to prove to someone who didn’t believe in the forgotten that they were still here.

Still waiting. Still hiding. Still real.