Short Story: “The Abomination of Desolation”

Note: “Standalone” tag notwithstanding, this is part of a broader story cycle, but the other stories in it are not going to be made available for quite some time.

“What’s this we’re listening to, Bella?” Sydney Alter asked his granddaughter on the winding two-lane blacktop between two banks of wooded hills. It was a surly afternoon in early July and the summer sun above the Catskills was never quite there and never quite gone. Bella was twenty years old, taking a break from college because of the pandemic, and living with Sydney and his second wife Gloria as a safer alternative to making her way out to Colorado where her parents and sisters were hunkering down.

            “It’s Taylor Swift,” Bella said. “One of the albums she released last year.”

            “Very relaxing,” Sydney said. “Not the pop trash I’d have expected.”

            “Expected from Taylor Swift of from me, Grandpa?” Bella asked. Sydney was worried for a moment that he had offended her, but then she grinned at him in a way that he recognized as a peace offering and as an invitation to be in on the joke, and he was put at ease. She did not look as if she genuinely expected an answer to the question she had asked, but he decided he would give her an answer anyway—and a true and honest answer, to boot.

            “Not from you, Bella,” he said. “You play clarinet, wasn’t it, or something like that?” Bella nodded and steered the car past a waterfall that plunged down to the right-hand side of the roadway. “So you’ve got taste. I just hear most of the names of these newer artists and it makes me expect some kind of song that won’t agree with me. Your parents are probably getting to an age where they’ll start to understand this. I’m sure you will too, some day after I’m long gone.”

            “Hopefully,” said Bella. “Hopefully I’ll get to that age someday, I mean.”

            “Morbid way to put it, wouldn’t you say?” her grandfather said to her.

            “Lots of morbidity going around these days,” Bella said. She turned the car onto another state highway. The weather was getting finer. The leaves, green on the trees that overhung the road, shined with pearlescent golden light that reminded Sydney intensely of his long-ago honeymoon, which had taken place over a span of similar summer days.

            Sydney and Bella were visiting the site of Glickman’s Mountain Resort, which had limped along until 1988 and whose ruins apparently still stood overlooking the little lake in which he had gone skinny dipping after dark with the girl he had lost his virginity to, the better part of a lifetime ago. He had had his first job at Glickman’s as well and his first beer, furnished by his older cousin Alan when Sydney had been sixteen. Bella was doing her thesis about some of those old resorts in the Judaic studies department at a certain university upstate; since Sydney wasn’t driving any longer on account of his bad eyes, she had offered to ferry him out here so that he could regard his past and she could write her future.

            Bella was not necessarily Sydney’s favorite of his five grandchildren. That was probably Rachel, Bella’s first cousin, the middle child of Sydney’s firstborn Alan. Alan was named after Sydney’s cousin, Rachel and Bella after two of Alan’s sisters. Most of these people lived in the Midwest these days; Bella with her upstate university was the only grandkid who was currently in or around New York. She was therefore also the closest to Sydney’s deceased mother’s family up in New England. Bella’s sister Nessa lived with a gang of roommates in a small city in, Sydney believed, Wisconsin; he heard from that part of his family about two or three times a week most weeks and they seemed not to see calling him as too much of a chore.

            Sydney had flown out to visit that side of the family twice, in 2002 and in 2014. In 2002 they had just moved to the Midwest; Alan II had gotten a job at the Port of Cleveland and the family had been able to find a fairly nice place to park themselves that did not suffer from all the recent problems that people were getting liable to think when they thought Ohio. Bella had been barely a year old at this point and Nessa would not be born for another six months. Sydney’s memory for things like this was not what it once had been, but he seemed to recall that it had been during this stay with them, and not before or after, that Alan’s wife Cynthia had found out she was pregnant for the second time. They had all been overjoyed and, maybe unusually for parents of second daughters (Sydney wouldn’t know), Alan and Cynthia had stayed overjoyed throughout Nessa’s life so far. She would have just turned eighteen now, which made it a little weird in this day and age that she was already living with these roommates; Sydney had never really understood the specifics. It was also not entirely clear to Sydney whether or not Nessa was in college or even expected to be college-bound eventually, and Bella also did not have the world’s clearest answer for him when he would ask her, which by the time of this ride through the Catskills together he had done, by his count, three times. Bella claimed to know her little sister well, but not, she said, that well, given that she had not been able to go home for any of this summer.

            “Do any of these roads look familiar to you, Grandpa?” Bella asked him as the gizmo that was telling her where to drive them chirped and purred.

            “A little but it’s just been so long, you understand,” he said. He felt apologetic, like he was imposing on Bela even though the idea to come out here in the first place on a summer’s day like this had been one that she had suggested to him, not the other way around. She spun the steering wheel cautiously.

            “Glickman’s, Grossinger’s, Concord, Katz…” said Bella. “Fantastic names. Fascinating places.”

            “Fantastic like great,” Sydney asked her, “or fantastic like something out of a story?”

            “Both, for someone as young as me,” Bella said, which was the answer that Sydney had been afraid she would give. “It’s—I don’t know if this is the kind of thing that I can explain, really, or even that I ought to explain. You went hiking a lot when you were younger, didn’t you, Grandpa? Dad has told me that you did.” And Sydney indeed had, and Sydney nodded. He almost saw what Bella meant without Bella having to say it outright. Once back in 1974 or so Sydney and his then-fiançée, Bella’s late grandmother, had climbed Mount Washington together as part of a road trip to somewhere in the far north of Maine to visit a college friend of Rita’s who had married someone there. It had been mid-fall and the mountain was already bitterly cold and speckled with unprepossessing hoar above the blazing maple-red treeline. Yet from that chilly peak a vision had unfolded around Sydney and Rita that might as well have been a vision of hundreds of years ago or of hundreds of years from now. Woods beyond woods, New England burning bright in the still flames of its October. It might be that Bella then expected a similar eternity from the stillness and emptiness of this post-Glickman’s Catskill July, a July that Sydney still wished were full of life and motion once again. Of life maybe at least it was indeed still full; the woods that fell away from the road were after all very green, and Sydney could just make out a family of white-tailed deer grazing companionably together in the fields below some reservoir. Bella seemed impressed, even, already, by this quiet and cicada-sedate summer beauty.

            They drove on and on and reached the place where Glickman’s once had been, a country road stretching between rows of unpleasantly new-looking houses. Sydney could see bits of the resort’s overgrown golf course, which his father, a brash hater of that so-called gentlemanly game, had never let anybody in Sydney’s family use back in those days. The lake could not be seen from the road so Sydney figured they would have to get out and walk. Bella said that she had batching suit packed somewhere in her car and Sydney was happy to get into the lake in his street clothes if that was what it took for old times’ sake.

            “‘Old times’ sake’ seems to mean an awful lot to you, Grandpa,” Bella observed.

            “Well yes, it does; of course it does. Live a while; you’ll see why,” Sydney said, not quite intending for Bella to hear it as a warning. “Living for your memories is something almost everyone ends up having to do and finds themselves doing sooner or later. Actually it took it a lot longer to kick in for me than for most, if you can believe that, Bella.”

            “I can believe it, Grandpa,” Bella reassured him as she drove the car past an increasingly ominous-looking chicken wire fence.

            “Stop the car,” Sydney said urgently.

            “What? Now?”

            “Yes. Now. As soon as there’s a halfway decent pull-off.”

            “Why?”

            “Don’t argue,” said Sydney, surprising himself, worrying himself a little. “I know where we are now and you do not. I know what it ought to look like and you do not. I want you to stop the car now, Bella.” Sydney himself was affrighted by how stressed and aggrieved his sounded.

            Bella brought the Subaru to a stop that was a little bit more abrupt, maybe, than Sydney would have preferred it if he had been thinking clearly at the moment. “Okay,” she said, rattled; he could hear her breath coming in more-than-usually labored puffs. “The car is stopped. Take it easy, Grandpa. Grandpa, what’s going on?”

            “There’s a fence—a fence,” Sydney said.

            “Yes.”

            “With the name of a developer.” Sydney pointed at a sign posted on the fence. “Some casino developer. Bryce Entertainment. See?”

            “Yes. I see.”

            Sydney was more and more agitated, struggling without much success to explain to his granddaughter what made this such an enormity in his eyes. He seemed to remember that Bella considered herself an anti-capitalist, but this was not about capitalism; it was about something else, something more original yet more obscene. “Disgusting,” he said. “Abominable. A desecration. A pig in the Temple. A desecration.”

            “Of what, Grandpa?” Bella asked, eyes wide, looking and sounding downright desperate to understand. “A desecration of what? Please; I want to understand. I want to know if I can help.”

            “A desecration” was all Sydney would say. “A desecration” was all he could say. The summer sun beat down impassively on the casino developer’s construction site.