The Brightwell Podcast presents...
Lazarus.
Episode 1.
They told me it would get easier with time, but...
If that's true, apparently five years isn't enough time.
It's every day, every hour, really, that I still think about you.
I can function like a normal person, but it's like my whole brain is on autopilot.
Sure, I'm there physically, but mentally I'm miles away.
It's the only way to cope.
Five years ago, we were sitting on the porch, on an early brisk morning in May.
It was right before you had to head out for work.
In the warmer months, we like to sit out on our front stoop and look out to the world,
watch it go by, idly chatting about whatever we felt like.
It was my favorite time of day.
Me drinking coffee with too much cream and sugar because coffee tastes like diesel fuel,
and you drinking iced tea because you were smart enough to just give the whole coffee
thing a miss.
You told me you'd come home early that day because someone was closing for you, and I
said I'd be in the basement lab pretending I'm working on an experiment about proving
an Italian scientist's hypothesis that ants, if given opposable thumbs, could ride see-doos,
when in actuality I'd be trying to see what metal shavings made the coolest firework.
It's iron, by the way.
We kissed and said our goodbyes, and I watched you pull out of the driveway.
I was at the hospital an hour and a half later.
The car's left side was completely crushed in.
The other driver left the scene of the accident, completely unscathed, apparently.
I was bitter about that for a while, but in the end I figured it didn't matter much.
You were on the ventilator for two weeks when they told me that you were essentially brain
dead, and if you ever did come out of it, you wouldn't be the same person.
A husk of your former self, and that's no way to live.
We gathered around your bedside one last time to say goodbye, and I stayed until the heart
monitor stopped beeping, and then I stayed a little bit longer.
Ever since then there's been this gnawing, aching feeling in my stomach, like being eaten
alive from the inside out by a creature without teeth.
It's constant.
I can't shake it, and I don't even know if I want to.
Two years after the accident, your friend Jacob asked if maybe I shouldn't get out there
and try to find somebody new.
Try to move on.
And I've never had to try so hard to not kick a man in the larynx.
Like I know he was only trying to help, but, you know, fuck you and your larynx.
He wasn't the only one either.
People tell me I have to get out more, and self care, and shave, get a haircut, shower
occasionally, and it's like, what's the point, you know?
There's nothing there.
There's nothing out here worth getting ready for.
So I stayed in.
I stayed in and I read books.
I tried to make them educational and scientific, or at the very least science adjacent, but
there's only so much quantum physics you can read before you realize you're just never
going to be Niles Bohr, Werner Herzog, or Leonard Hofstadter from the Big Bang Theory.
Eventually you hit a saturation point where you just can't learn anything else.
So I started to expand my horizons a bit.
I started reading travel diaries, and biographies, and the occult.
Now I'm a man of science.
I have faith, but that faith needs to be backed up by evidence eventually.
And I've seen people hope and pray for miracles that just don't ever happen, but it's fun
to dream every so often, isn't it?
Fun to pretend and wonder about these certain things and if they could ever actually work.
Ridiculous, of course, all of it, but what if it wasn't?
You know?
What if just this once these things could come true?
So while I was reading and researching different things, I come to find this place, a town
completely out of the way in what seemed to be Nowheresville, Canada, where things...strange,
off-kilter, wild, and insane things seem to happen at the drop of a hat.
A town called Brightwall.
It sounded ridiculous, utterly and completely insane, the stories that would come out of
this place.
Giant creatures made of mud, random disappearances, cults, houses with evil demonic entities living
underneath them, sirens that can walk on land, driving unsuspecting men and women to their
doom.
It made for decent fiction, but everything I read seemed to be just that.
However, all of these stories seem to be in reputable journals.
People looked at this tripe and thought, yeah, that'll go in our peer-reviewed textbook.
The future scholars will look upon this and praise us.
It's like if we took the film Night of the Living Dead and called it a documentary.
And film, not a real thing.
But then I saw...
Then I saw a video.
Now I understand video can be changed and edited and mixed around just as much as a
story can, so this is hardly irrefutable evidence, but there was something about this image.
It was a young girl and she had a goldfish in her hand.
And it wasn't moving and it wasn't thrashing.
It was dead.
It had to be.
It was like, you know, you're trying to get that chill out of water.
But the girl kneeled down at this statue-looking thing, a giant stone sculpture.
We could only really see the base of, and the top was cut off by the frame.
This girl, no more than five, on her knees with a fish.
And she waited, completely calm and completely still.
I don't even know if she could breathe.
And then after a couple of seconds, a light emanated from her hands.
The video distorted and then cleared itself up again.
The girl stood up, happy as ever, and the little fish in her hands began to flop around.
That placed it back into the bowl and the family walked off into the sunset and the
video cut off.
Ridiculous.
Unbelievable.
It's nonsense.
It's a marketing campaign for a new kind of fish food or a hidden viral trailer for a
new Cloverfield movie.
They weren't even trying that hard to hide it.
No, there was more gravy than grave about this video.
And yet, I'm kind of ashamed to admit it that...
I guess the only word that makes sense is I became obsessed with it.
I watched it over and over again, picking apart the places where the footage could have
been doctored or faked or CGI'd, stunt double fish, I don't know.
Like, fifty times, sixty, a hundred.
I watched it on a loop for days.
I barely ate, I barely slept, it was on when I went to sleep, and usually it was on when
I woke up.
Eventually your dad came by to ask how I was doing, and I could tell by his reaction that
the answer was apparently not so great.
I was wearing the same clothes for a week.
They were moth bit, stained and stale.
He asked me what I had been doing.
How do you even answer that question at the time?
I guess, honestly, is what I did.
I told him about the video and the miracles it showed, and he looked at me in a way that
I had never seen before.
But in a way that I was growing used to from people.
He looked at me with pity.
A look of absolute, dejected pity.
I was rambling, talking about this video and how often I had seen it, talking about all
my theories and ideas.
I didn't even see him ask me to sit and calm down.
I was in overdrive, I was manic.
When I finally calmed down, he asked me what my plan was, and I didn't understand what
he meant.
He asked what I was going to do with my life now that five years had passed, and that I
hadn't thought about.
Planning for anything seemed pointless.
What's the point of making plans to continue a life when you're not there, you know?
Yeah, it had been five years already, but like, what is that, really?
Especially when I found a place that could fix everything.
I mean, it can't, obviously.
Nothing can, but maybe it can?
I hadn't realized this, but I was shaking a little bit as I talked through everything.
I'd established a tremor of sorts in the ensuing years.
My doctor says it's an anxiety response.
It happens when I get too excited and the adrenaline flows too quickly.
It can make basic tasks difficult sometimes, especially when I forget about it.
Cooking, driving, eating, they can all become an issue when the brain stops thinking and
your adrenaline takes over.
Your dad told me I was dodging his question, and he was right.
I said I didn't know.
I said I know I should know, I should have a plan on how to continue on, but nothing
made sense.
He looked around the room at all the notes that I was taking, all about the videos and
the blogs I had printed out, the books I had read on the subject.
He took a deep breath and asked if I was going to actually try and go.
To where?
Brightwall?
I asked.
Yes, he said.
It seems to be where your mind is at right now.
And even if there's nothing there for you, at least you'll know.
At least you can stop all this waiting and thinking.
It's always better to know, right?
It's always better to know.
That was genius.
Completely genius.
I had to go.
I think I always knew that this is what it was coming to, but this was almost like permission.
Somebody kicked me out of my rut and my wheels had spun into.
What was my plan?
I was going to go to Brightwall, and I was going to do the impossible.
I was going to bring you back.
Your dad cautioned me not to get my hopes up, but I knew this was going to be it.
I couldn't be stopped.
Everything made sense.
See all the stuff on my desk and on my floor?
All the blogs and all the books and the travelogues and stuff?
I knew this town back to front already.
A place I had never been felt like home.
Because my brain, my consciousness, had lived there for so long.
The post office was exactly 230 steps from the coffee shop.
The coffee shop was 1,499 steps from the park, depending on what side of the coffee shop
you left.
The Brightwall radio station was 60,123 steps from the playground, but only on Tuesday.
I thanked your dad for giving me the initiative I needed to finally get up and go.
He looked at me again with a new expression.
Not pity like the last one.
Not fear.
Not confusion.
But almost a sadness.
A bittersweet look of recognition came across his face, like he knew something I didn't.
I wanted to ask him what the issue was, but I didn't.
I don't know why.
I thought about it really hard, and it was my every intention to, but I just didn't.
I remember it like you remember a hyper-realistic dream, where you're not sure that the conversation
actually happened in real life or not.
It was so long ago now, but I still remember the look, and I still remember the feeling.
That night I couldn't sleep.
Something that was beginning to be a constant in my life.
But this time it was an excited longing, like a kid on Christmas.
I'd figured it out.
I figured it all out, you know?
Like I didn't know how, and I didn't know why this power existed, but I was gonna put
an end to the worst five years of my life, and I was gonna bring you back.
I am a genius.
I needed to focus.
I'd been lost too long, and the drive and ambition to accomplish something finally being
back was sending me into a tailspin.
But if this is true, this is going to be the biggest discovery since fire, since the wheel,
since oxygen.
I took a couple of deep breaths to get a hold of myself.
I was an adult man.
I am a scientist.
I wasn't a child on his way to Disney World.
I was ready to make the biggest discovery this universe had ever seen.
My heart rate slowed, my shaking lessened, and I began to relax.
For the first time in a long time, I let myself relax.
Next morning I was out the door like a shot.
Change was packed, had food and water just in case.
I made my way down to the train station like it was 1945 or something and people still
used trains.
I thought about taking a flight, but not a single airline flew out that way.
Not even within driving distance.
I called the airline to see what the deal was, but they just told me, and this is the
god's honest truth, they told me, you can't get there from here.
I thought about that line for 45 goddamn minutes.
They seemed to know how to get there.
That'll be the last time I try to fly southwest, thank you very much.
I went up to the ticket booth and asked for a ticket to Brightwall.
The gentleman stared at me for a second and excused himself to go get his manager.
Weird.
Maybe he's new.
The manager, who I'm fairly certain was either his twin brother or the same man but now in
a hat, gave me a ticket out of his pocket.
Didn't have to print it, didn't have to type anything in.
He just already had it on him.
Bill charged me 300 bucks for it, though.
I found an empty cabin to set all my stuff in.
Because while I was excited to get there, I didn't much care to share my excitement
with everybody else.
I could trust your dad with my plan.
I knew him.
I knew that he, if not understood it completely, would at the very least humor me and my ideas.
But these other people?
I didn't trust them even a little bit.
As the train finally started to move, I leaned my head on the window and watched the world
go by.
I remembered our 10th anniversary.
We took a murder on the Orient Express-style train ride across the country.
We got to see the country in a brand new way.
Meet different people and solve a murder.
All at the same time.
It was one of my favorite memories to reminisce over.
The nostalgia ate at my insides like a hungry parasite gnawing its way through my stomach
lining.
I hated this feeling, but I couldn't stop it.
I didn't want to stop it, to be honest.
Because stopping that feeling meant stopping the memory, which meant stopping seeing you
again.
So I dealt with it.
I always dealt with it.
It was worth it.
I must have drifted off to sleep with that memory playing in my head because when I came
to it was nighttime outside.
I didn't remember falling asleep.
It was like a blink-and-you're-gone kind of feeling.
I felt ethereal.
I swear as we stopped the train melted away into the ground.
Into nothingness.
I don't even remember anybody else getting off at the same time than I did.
It didn't matter, though.
I didn't need to see anyone else.
I was finally here.
I was finally ready.