Divisadero: Part 1 of 3
divisadero
noun
1. a division
2. to gaze from a distance
... When I return,
The colours won't be so brilliant,
The Jhelum’s waters so clean,
So ultramarine. My love
So overexposed.
And my memory will be a little
Out of focus, in it
A giant negative, black
And white, still undeveloped.
-Agha Shahid Ali, ‘Postcard from Kashmir’
Prologue
Talking wasn’t usually their thing, but once, when they were sitting on the hood of the Impala, the starless black sky stretching endlessly over their heads, he’d asked a question that he remembered from a book: ‘If you could choose to live in any historical period, which would you pick?’
There was a pause, during which he wondered what the answer would be, several potential answers coming up in his mind: an endless stream of possibilities that ran through the shared terrain of their lives.
The answer had been: ‘Right here, Sammy. Right now.’
Sam laughed, and leaned back against the Impala’s windshield. ‘Oh ye of little imagination,’ he said. Dean punched his shoulder and called him a geek.
Even now, sometimes it seems that those possibilities are still alive. Even though he’s someone else now, he remembers eyes the color of rain-washed grass, remembers partings and reunions. Remembers taking himself away from that landscape, finding his way back there, having it all taken away again. Remembers who he’d been when his name was Sam Winchester, because memories are all he has until he gets his brother back.
Part One: Sam
‘Maybe I’ll marry a centaur,’ Sam says, looking up from his book. He’s in the driver’s seat of the Impala, parked in front of Bobby’s house, his book propped up on the steering wheel. Dad and Bobby are away on a hunt. Sometimes, on afternoons when they’re left alone, Dean goes out, returns late in the evening smelling of booze and cigarettes and sex. Sometimes, he chooses to hang out with his sixteen-year-old brother, and Sam hasn’t figured out why.
‘A boy centaur or a girl centaur?’ Dean asks from the back seat. He’s on his back, feet sticking out the window, a bottle of beer balanced on his chest, creating rings of condensation on his gray t-shirt.
Sam shrugs. ‘Whichever can ride the fastest.’
He doesn’t say ‘whichever can get me out of here the fastest’, but that’s what it sounds like.
The cold glass of Dean’s beer bottle touches the bare skin on the back of his neck. Sam squeals and flails, the palm of his hand hitting the horn. ‘You jerk!’
‘Whatever, bitch,’ Dean smirks, swallowing the last of his drink. ‘Go get me another beer.’
Sam can easily get lost in books. Bobby’s library is the closest thing he knows to paradise, with its aging volumes and their musty, comforting smells. There aren’t many books that aren’t about the things they hunt, but tucked between an ancient book about runes and a rare edition of the Quran, he finds a book about the Gold Rush. He spends hours in the book, reading it thrice from cover to cover, imagining himself in that time, going off to make his fortune, wearing an Indiana Jones hat and riding a chestnut horse.
In the book, there’s a brief record of an incident: On this riverbank, says a small inscription below an illustration of a winding river, two brothers killed each other arguing about which direction to travel.
Sam looks up from the book. It’s Dean’s turn to fix sandwiches for their lunch, and the sharp silver of his knife glints as he chops away at lettuce and tomatoes. Sensing Sam’s gaze, Dean tosses him an apple. ‘Here, chew on this for a while.’
Sam catches the apple and bites into it with a scrunch. Juice trickles down his chin, and he wipes at it absently with his sleeve, already back in his book.
Somewhere in Bobby’s house is a small collection of photographs he takes of the boys as they’re growing up. There aren’t very many photographs; they often go for long stretches without seeing Bobby-once for as long as a year-and even when they do meet, there’s usually some Big Bad that’s got their attention.
The year Bobby gets his Asahi Pentax is also the year in which Dad leaves them at the junkyard for the entire summer. Dean’s eyes light up when he sees the camera for the first time, and for the rest of the summer, he and the Pentax are practically inseparable. Sam is his unwilling subject, made to pose for hours while Bobby goes off on hunts, leaving Dean his camera and some rolls of film to keep the boys amused and out of trouble.
There’s a little store-room next to the first-floor landing that Bobby’s converted into a dark room. Dean’s learnt to develop the film himself, and sometimes he lets Sam help, lets him hand Dean stuff or look over his shoulder at the wet paper in the orange tray, transfixed at the sight of an image slowly coming to life under the fixer.
Once, when Dean’s out, Sam goes into the dark room by himself, feeling strangely guilty. Freshly-developed photographs are clipped up to dry, shining wetly in the red light from the overhead bulb. There are images of him that he expects to see, candid shots of him: caught in mid-shout as he tries to prevent Dean from photographing him when he’s just out of the shower, trying to hold on to the towel around his waist, reaching for the camera with his other hand, his hair sticking to his forehead in wet strands; standing in the middle of the kitchen, covered in flour after a failed attempt at baking, the image a little blurred because Dean had been laughing so hard; looking up in the middle of writing an essay, his hair mussed from running his fingers through it with frustration, the end of his pencil caught between his teeth.
Sam’s breath catches when he sees the last two images. There’s one of him sitting on the couch with an open book on his knees, his face turned toward the window as he watches the rain. Dean must have taken that a couple of days ago; Sam had thought he’d been out at the time. And another, probably taken that morning, since that’s the t-shirt he’d been wearing last night: his face squished into the pillow, only half-visible, the toes of one foot peeking out from under the blankets.
Their time at Bobby’s place is like an in-between time: no significant holidays or birthdays, just random weekends and summer breaks that consist of unidentified days and nights.
To commemorate the time, label it so it won’t get lost in the desert of his memories, Sam creates his own anniversaries. 20 July: he’d just turned twelve and Dad had finally, finally allowed him to hunt. A couple of years before then, Dad had given Dean hell for telling Sam that monsters were real. Sam hadn’t heard the entire conversation, but Dad’s voice had gone low and growly as it did when he was really, really angry, and later, when it was over, Dean had come into their room, looking white and shell-shocked. Sam had tried to go to him, but Dean had pushed him away and thrown himself facedown on his bed, his shoulders shaking.
The last photograph of Sam and Dean together is when Sam is sixteen. He’s leaning against the hood of the Impala, his elbows too warm against the sun-drenched metal. Dean’s sitting on the hood, an arm slung carelessly over Sam’s shoulders. Later, Sam comes to see that photograph as a dividing line between what they were and what they would become: going from inseparable to two individuals who diverged from each other with geometrical precision.
12 August 1999: the first time Sam gets badly hurt during a hunt. They’re close to Sioux Falls, on a case with Bobby and a tall, ginger-haired Irish hunter called Harriet, when Sam gets thrown into a wall by a particularly vindictive poltergeist. Dean’s nowhere in sight, and Sam’s world is reduced to a haze of pain and confusion, and the slick warmth of blood leaking from beneath his hairline.
‘Dean?’ Harriet says, kneeling beside Sam and trying to help him sit up. They were introduced to her less than an hour ago as ‘Sam and Dean’, and she’s gotten them mixed up.
‘Dean,’ Harriet says again, lifting Sam’s head. ‘Bloody hell, you okay?’
Dean appears in the doorway then, and Sam’s vision clears enough to see how Dean’s eyes are fixed on him.
Later that night, he lies on Bobby’s couch as the adults drink whiskey and make plans for the next day’s hunt. Dean’s on the chair next to the couch, his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. He doesn’t talk much as he sips his beer, but he occasionally tilts his face down to Sam to ask him if he’s doing okay, reaches over to gently check the shallow wound at Sam’s hairline. He falls asleep with Dean’s hand resting on top of his head.
There’s a tall, rickety water tower behind Bobby’s house. If he squints, Sam can make himself believe, Don Quixote-like, that it’s a monster on six spindly legs. No one but him is stupid enough to climb the flimsy structure, so when he really needs to get away, it’s where he goes.
There’s a little door at the top, big enough for a grown man to get through. Even in bright sunlight-or maybe especially in it-the water is too black, less a colour and more a huge nothing, a space to lose himself in.
He’d been thirteen the first time he’d jumped into the water. He’d panicked when he’d tried to get out, realizing with a sickening feeling that the water level was too low for him to reach the trapdoor above. He’d almost screamed for Dean before his scrabbling fingers had brushed against the ladder attached to the wall of the tank, invisible in the darkness. Then he’d begun to swim, ducking beneath the surface to give himself the illusion of drowning, but there was no danger any more from the water in the tank.
By the time he’s sixteen, the water tower is no longer used. Sam goes there late one afternoon, lies on his back facing the closed trapdoor, wonders if he’ll run out of air if he stays there long enough. It’s dark inside, the bottom of the tank still faintly damp with the memory of water.
When the door is opened from above, he cries out at the suddenness of it, at the almost-painful stabs of light in his eyes. Dean says nothing, dropping lightly to the floor without bothering with the ladder. They sit in silence for a while, no movement in the small space except for Dean’s hand occasionally bringing his cigarette to his lips, a slow stream of smoke curling up to the ceiling and disappearing into the air outside.
‘Dean,’ Sam says eventually, watching Dean half-dozing across the floor from him.
‘What?’ It’s not a bad ‘what’, really. Dean’s head is in a patch of sun, his hair golden in the light. He looks warm and comfortable.
‘I.’ Sam crawls across the floor until he’s next to Dean, their shoulders almost touching. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
‘You out of money again?’ Dean asks, without opening his eyes. ‘There’s a couple hundred in my wallet.’ He gestures vaguely toward his discarded jacket, lying rumpled on the floor beside them.
Sam shifts a little closer. Typical Dean. Always looking to provide, always making sure Sam’s got enough. Enough money, enough clothes, enough food, enough books. And now Sam’s got to tell him it isn’t enough.
He imagines Dean turning his head and seeing the look on Sam’s face, how the magic and comfort and warmth will drain instantly out of the small space around them. Sam’s fingertips itch as if he could hold on to all those things, gather them in his arms and shower Dean with them.
‘Sam?’
‘No, I’m good.’
‘Then what?’ Dean shifts away, turning so they’re face to face. ‘C’mon, Samwise. Spill.’
Sam smiles. ‘Why can’t I ever be Frodo?’
‘Because Frodo’s the brave hero and Sam’s the sidekick. And the sex slave.’
Sam’s heart thuds painfully at that, and he doesn’t let himself think of the implications of what Dean’s just said. ‘Dude, Frodo’s a hobbit. He’s tiny. And has hairy feet.’
‘So’s Sam.’ Dean’s hand reaches to tug lightly at Sam’s earlobe, his thumb brushing against the soft skin behind Sam’s ear. ‘Stop trying to change the subject. Talk, Sammy.’
‘Please say something,’ Sam says. He’s followed Dean into the kitchen, trailing him after he left the water-tower without a word.
Dean doesn’t answer, his back to Sam, his head bent forward as he leans against the counter, his knuckles taut against the edge.
‘I won’t go,’ Sam says. ‘If you ask me to. I won’t go.’
Dean half-glances at him, his body still turned away from Sam. ‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Dean, no. I-I’ll listen.’
‘Okay, then. Don’t go.’ Dean turns around, his lips twisting into a wry smile that gets nowhere close to his eyes. ‘Stay. Stay with dad and me. Keep hunting and killing. Don’t even think of another life for yourself. That’s what I want for you.’
‘Dean, what-’
‘Obviously that’s what I’d want for you, right? To give up the chance to go to college, so you can stay and fight?’
‘Dean, I didn’t say-’
‘Then what did you say, Sammy?’
‘Don’t,’ Sam says, taking a step closer to Dean. ‘Please. Dean. I don’t want to fight.’
Dean steps forward too, meets Sam halfway. He puts a hand on top of Sam’s head, fingers scrunching up his hair. ‘Me either. I’m saying go, you little idiot.’
Sam looks up at him. ‘And you’re okay with that?’
‘I’m not okay with you leaving, Sammy. But getting you out of the life? Yeah, I’m cool with that. And if it means you have to leave, then you have to leave.’
‘Come with me.’ Sam’s fingertips press into Dean’s forearm. ‘Come with me, Dean.’
Dean’s hand brushes Sam’s face, a thumb briefly caressing his cheekbone. ‘Dad needs me, Sam. You know he does.’
I need you more. If Sam were to say the words out loud, he’d want to say them with his face pressed into Dean’s neck, with his hands grasping Dean’s hips.
He doesn’t say anything, lets Dean walk to the fridge and get them a couple of beers, the conversation already a memory.
Dean’s black t-shirt is too large for Sam, but it’s warm and smells like Dean. Sam pulls the soft cloth down over his knees as he draws them up to his chest, his heels against the edge of the wooden chair, a thread from the fraying hem of his jeans tickling between his toes. He winds it around a finger and tugs it free, the tiny sound of snapping thread audible in the silent kitchen.
‘Sammy?’ Dean says from the doorway, his voice rough with sleep. Sam hears the rustle of fabric before Dean throws a blanket around him, his hands smoothing the soft wool over Sam’s shoulders. ‘It’s freaking cold. What’re you doing?’
‘Nothing,’ Sam says quickly. ‘M’okay.’
‘Like hell,’ Dean mutters, sliding into the chair next to Sam’s.
Sam shrugs. ‘Couldn’t sleep.’
Dean yawns, dropping a hand on top of Sam’s head, ruffling his hair briefly. ‘You wanna work on the model some more?’ he asks.
Sam nods, gratitude welling up inside him. Dean makes coffee and they stay up until dawn, sitting across the kitchen table from each other, working silently on the half-finished craft model of the World War I Sopwith Camel that Dean got him for Christmas. He’d given Sam his present a week early. Sam still has Dean’s gift buried at the bottom of his backpack: a small, cheap, throwaway camera he bought at a gas station, for after they leave Bobby’s and Dean can’t play with the Pentax anymore.
The sun’s up in the sky when Bobby appears in the doorway, his long rifle propped on one shoulder like a woodsman’s ax. ‘You boys been up all night?’
‘Princess here couldn’t sleep,’ Dean grins, getting up and ruffling Sam’s hair again.
‘Dean?’ Sam says a few nights later, looking across to the other bed. The threadbare motel carpet between the beds is lit with silver from the moonlight spilling in from the window.
‘Mm,’ Dean says, half-asleep.
‘Look. It’s snowing.’
Dean makes a contented sound into his pillow, and Sam smiles to himself. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You wanna get a tree?’
‘No fucking way.’ Dean grumbles, the words slurred with impending sleep.
Sam laughs. ‘Why d’you always have to be such a Grinch, huh?’
‘Fine, okay, we’ll get a freakin’ tree in the morning. Now can I sleep?’
They get a tiny plastic tree in the morning. Sam secretly prefers the artificial ones, never having liked the idea of cutting down a real tree. This one has a shiny silver star at the top, and Sam winds silver and red tinsel over its little branches.
Later, he straddles Dean’s shoulders to hang a set of colorful Buddhist flags from the ceiling. There are five flags on the streamer: yellow for earth, green for water, red for fire, white for clouds, and blue for sky. Sam’s had it since he was fourteen and Dean almost always makes a face when he brings it out, but the previous year, when Sam had forgotten to pull it down, Dean had been the one to fold it up carefully and slip it into Sam’s backpack.
He’s almost as tall as Dean now, but skinny enough to still fit easily on Dean’s shoulders. He fastens the flags to the ceiling with a strip of tape, letting the free end of the streamer swirl in the air.
He slides down Dean’s back and wraps his arms around Dean’s chest from behind, pressing close against him. ‘Thanks, Dean,’ he says, his mouth against Dean’s shoulder, and Dean allows it, his body still and warm and solid against Sam’s.
It happens unexpectedly, like a rainstorm that arrives after a sultry day: the thing that drives them apart.
They’re deep in a wood, separated from Dad, being tailed by a wendigo. It’s a couple of weeks after Dean’s twentieth birthday, and while the biting harshness of winter has somewhat subsided, it’s still cold enough that Sam keenly feels the absence of their warm motel room.
They’re almost weaponless; there was no time to grab all their gear when they’d awakened side-by-side to gunshots and Dad’s yell of ‘After it, boys!’
Dean had grabbed Sam by the front of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. While Dad fought the first wendigo, they’d chased after the second almost blindly, picking each other up when one of them stumbled, their movements uncoordinated, their limbs still heavy from sleep. Dean had his rifle with the homemade incendiary bullets. For a while it had seemed as though they would win, that they would torch the creature and triumphantly make their way back to camp, but then it had rounded on them, picking Sam up and throwing him bodily into a tree. Dean had managed to fire off a couple of rounds, and the creature had abandoned them, letting out a pained howl and disappearing into the trees.
‘Sam,’ Dean had said, dropping to his knees, terror in his voice.
I’m okay, Sam wanted to say, but his chest hurt and he couldn’t breathe, and his left leg was twisted brokenly. The last thing he’d remembered was Dean scooping him up into his arms, the wetness of his own involuntary tears against Dean’s neck as he was carried to safety.
They’ve taken shelter in a cave. Sam’s leg is set, bound by strips of Dean’s undershirt. The pain is a little more manageable now, but not so much that he can contemplate standing.
They’re arguing, Sam trying to convince Dean to go get help, and Dean refusing to leave him alone while the wendigos are still out there.
‘It’s not like my leg’s going to heal itself anytime soon,’ Sam points out, teeth gritted, shivering with the cold and the pain.
‘I know.’ Dean crouches beside him and wraps his own jacket around Sam’s shoulders for additional warmth. He puts an arm around Sam, and for a moment Sam expects to be pulled closer, but Dean’s only reaching around to get his hand into his jacket pocket. He withdraws it, clutching a packet of colored powder; they’d used it the previous night to draw the Anasazi sigils around the campsite.
Sam watches as Dean draws the runes on the ground just inside the mouth of the cave. He finishes and comes back to Sam, drawing a protective circle of red around him, and then smearing the last of the powder over Sam’s forehead, his fingers pushing Sam’s hair out of the way and tracing a symbol there. Then he presses the rifle into Sam’s hands.
‘You need it more than I do,’ Sam says, trying to push it back, but Dean shakes his head.
‘I’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘You see the son of a bitch, you don’t think, you fire. You got that, Sammy?’
Sam nods. ‘Don’t be too long,’ he says lightly, as if Dean’s only going out for a supply run.
‘Back before you know it,’ Dean promises, starting to get to his feet.
I might never see you again. Sam grabs the cord around Dean’s neck and pulls him down, his mouth finding Dean’s in the semi-darkness of the cave, his body shaking against Dean’s. Still half-kneeling, Dean braces himself with his hands on Sam’s shoulders and lets Sam kiss him. He doesn’t kiss back.
Sam pulls back, his hand still clutching the amulet, terrified of Dean’s reaction. Dean’s expression is unreadable for a moment, and then he releases Sam’s shoulders after giving them a quick squeeze. ‘Stay awake, okay?’ Dean says, gently prying himself away from Sam’s grip.
Sam nods, clutching Dean’s flashlight tightly as he watches his brother leave.
It’s three hours later when it finally dawns on Sam that Dean isn’t coming back.
He startles awake as the rifle slips from his hands and clatters to the floor. The sun must be high in the sky outside, but inside the cave it’s still half-light. There’s a swishing sound from outside, and Sam doesn’t know if it’s the wind in the trees, or the wendigo coming back for him.
The realization falls into the pit of his stomach like a stone. The cave can’t be more than thirty minutes from the campsite, meaning that either Dean has lost his way-and he wouldn’t-or something has prevented him from coming back with help.
His bruised chest hurts almost more than his leg now, every breath a pained effort, any movement almost impossible. He dozes intermittently, dreaming of Dean coming back, of Dean strung up below the ground as food for the wendigos. Don’t be dead, he thinks when he wakes. Please don’t be dead.
The hours pass by. When the gathering darkness outside begins to spill into the cave, he puts on the flashlight. The last of his strength is slowly seeping out of him, dying with the batteries. It wasn’t your fault, he thinks as he watches the weak flickers of the dying torch. Please never think it was your fault.
He wakes two days later in a county hospital. There are tubes in his mouth and nose and he can’t speak, can’t ask for Dean. Then Dad’s hand is on his forehead, calming him down.
‘You’re okay,’ Dad says. ‘Dean’s okay. You’re both gonna be fine.’ There are tears of relief in his eyes, and he looks like he hasn’t slept in days. Sam squeezes his hand in apology, and lets himself fall back into sleep.
Dean stays unconscious for another day; it turns out that being thrown into a tree and going through exposure for over twenty hours isn’t as bad as being grabbed by a wendigo and taken to its lair.
Later, lying in a motel room with his leg in a splint, Sam thinks of their last photograph, the easy familiarity of it, and knows that there’s a border between them now, that they’ll ensure they’re never mistaken for each other again, knows that the coming years will only make things worse.
And so it happens, the thing that Sam hadn’t even known he’d been dreading until it was too late to stop it: separation from Dean in a way that he isn’t ready for, could never have been ready for. The thing that drives a wedge so deep between him and Dean that it seems they’d never had anything but distance between them. Dean doesn’t meet his eyes when they’re alone; indeed, he ensures there are very few occasions when they’re alone with each other. The few times Sam manages to corner him, Dean’s guilt spills over into the space between them like blood. He doesn’t say I left you and no one knew where you were and you could have died and I’ll never forgive myself, even if you’ve forgiven me, but Sam can hear his thoughts as clearly as if Dean were screaming them out loud.
Sometimes, in the years that follow, years in which the kiss he’d dared to give Dean fades to a memory, Sam lies awake in the darkness and feels the absence of what they could have had, the unwritten story of what they’d left behind in those woods. He feels it staring at him when he looks into a mirror. It sits in an empty chair across the cafeteria table from him at Stanford, makes itself felt in the digits on the screen of his phone as he takes his thumb off the call button and presses cancel instead.
Dean is older than Sam’s memories, his past reaching beyond Sam’s into a space that Sam can’t share. He’s always known that. But he’s still the person Sam doesn’t have to explain his contexts to, the one who knows the chronology of Sam’s life without having to be told. The one who erased places on the shared map of their lives as though they’d never existed.
After Dick Roman, Sam kills every Leviathan he can get his hands on. He’s lost Dean many times before, and Dean has lost him, but never like this, never when Sam didn’t know where Dean was, didn’t have a clue where to start looking. He lies awake and hears himself ask, If you could live in any historical period, which would you pick? He turns his head on the pillow, and there’s no answer from the empty space beside him that isn’t Dean, that was never Dean.
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