The central image from her dream stayed with her long enough to code onto an index card.
Church : silent worshippers : pens scratching notebooks :
rat’s music : it’s always night inside : dome, far away & up
above, starstudded : the painted sky = mid-range blue (over
white base, a milky feeling) : painted stars = a child’s gold foil
… ::: … they’re afraid to leave, afraid to go outside, they’ve
come to believe the painted dome’s the real thing.
Mary slipped the card into the first book that came to hand, not glancing at the title, only a glimpse of maroon with yellow letters. From off the top of the pile of dirty clothes lying in the middle of the floor she selected a washed-out beige shirt to go with the sketch-brief white panties and socks she’d slept in (left sock black, right sock green).
In the kitchen she put the kettle to boil and picked through the wire basket where she kept the teabags. She picked a rose-packaged single (for fragrance, for lightness) and a Golpe-brand black pekoe to balance out the perfume and mildness. There was a rhyme in her head that would turn into a song in a while. Day into day and night into night don’t let the little ones out of your sight. It meant something for it to stick around but it wasn’t her job to caliper the threads into a pattern for either the dummies or the brainiacs and besides, no one listened to lyrics when their ears were busy trickling blood.
She felt the shadow before she saw it and in the corner of her eye Cecilia had appeared, the windscreen singing lightly under his weight, the flower box groaning as the screws stripped and held.
-Where’ve you been? Mary asked.
The cat’s pupils were slits in the sunlight, the green of the iris pale as weak tea. A breeze tufted the back of its head into a momentary orange ducktail.
-I could have used you earlier, she said.
Cecilia wasn’t listening, settling into the flower box for his worry-the-squirrels shift. When the tea was ready Mary set the cup on top of her amp and poured a smaller tea cup’s worth of vodka. She’d slept right through her hangover and the long silence of the dream church had made her forget what she might have done the night before, where she’d been and come back from, whom, if anyone, she’d been with, talked to, pissed off, made peace with. A whirl of adze-edged details the puzzling out of which would be sheer luck. The alcohol seemed to give heft and warmth to her bones, and she coughed with a sudden muscular urgency that made her dizziness that of a cherry spun on a kingsized globe. She’d finish this cup, pour another, and with two or three cigarettes she’d drive the hunger pains away for long enough to get some work done. And what would work consist of, with no rehearsal planned today, with no particular drama needing her molecule-splitting, star-studding virtues and vices?
A nostalgic dive through the guitar solos of her girlhood. She wanted to hear them in full context of their respective songs, to get the full impact of memory, to caress the sound in all its splendid rippling riverlike sprawl, to taste the dark roe of twenty years like a fine coating at the back of her throat, to let her eyelashes bat against the light, as though to keep something out or keep something that was inside from escaping.
The bittersweet lure of the music of those ancient days and the more ambiguous pressure to lose herself in the coded dream image offered her two opposing beacons. Provided the alcohol held out (a quick run round the corner to Sunny’s? a dip into the emergency reserves?) and she could steer her drunken boat back and forth all afternoon and into sunset and beyond, into the choice of serenity or trouble. She was getting ahead of herself, tea not yet dark enough, half a cup of vodka in her hand. Cecilia decided for her, entering through the screen door (clever boy, that rare cat talent to hook and release, never getting trapped by his own claws, never needing to sit and plead for release only to repeat the error until the game ceased to amuse). The tomcat’s size was a promise of disaster, of spillage and breakage, of biped nerves shot to hell and culprit kitty long gone. But being a cat of high and unpedigreed intelligence, of vast experience in a number of worlds (flatland, five-dimensional, gravity-free), Cecilia’s twenty pounds were an orange masterpiece of majestic grace. Which he displayed for her now, leaping between the pillars of upright Stratocaster and twelve-string Alvarez to alight without sound and the barest tremble of bounce among the coins, keys, pens, breath mints, condoms, batteries, pliers, switchblade, and black rubber brassiere littering the far end of the sofa. Mary sat down on the floor with her back to the cat, letting her gaze drift blandly along the sideways titles of the record albums. Cecilia was not yet ready to be ignored and feigning innocence, began to wash his lifted right paw. Relying on the myth of caudal independence, the tip of his tail switched the air between his mistress’s shoulder blades before rising and curling to tap her cheek, tickle her ear, remove and repeat, insinuate its blunt slide underneath her hair, fluttering the back of her neck till she shivered and spoke:
-Yes, your Majesty?
He knew that tone and liked it, it was the sound of irritation crushed low by affection, of guilt at focusing on non-feline things when time was tight and life was fleet, his nine still less than her undisciplined one.
Cecilia floats around Mary’s moods like a pearl-perfect moon around a great black sun.
He’d been in his hunter’s blind beneath the mulberry bush when she came home last night. She’d come up the driveway, walking very fast, with her arms lifted from her sides like a big mad bird. The perfume of her body told him many things. It had been a long time since he’d scented this gaiety of spirit, especially when she was as drunk as he could smell her to be. Fear was an animal. And so was patience. He wondered at it, none too deeply. He’d seen her start a brawl and then scoot free and invisible just moments before hamfists knuckled into hamflesh. Perhaps she’d been at it again. She walked right past his bush and past himself and nearly fell over at the bottom of the metal stairs, but caught herself with a laugh and a bad word (he loved them both) and went up at a near run. Kitchen light on. Radio on loud and then off. Kitchen light off. Silence. Sleep. Cecilia turned his attention to the afterblur of destroyed spider webs ghosting the driveway to the street. He counted the strands inside an hour’s egg. He let a lizard zigzag the moonlit shadow of the big pecan tree. Then up the stairs, dewbeaded metal cold on his pads, balancing the delicate railing, the jump to the air conditioner and through the rot-wobbly wood, his whiskertips spare on either side by the space of a squirrel’s fat incisor. Before dropping through the baggy wallpaper to the cushions below, Cecilia let death pass through him. Not his own but that of the possum he’d ambushed and gutted two lives ago. He saw its greedy eyes, saw its broad bald white face, saw its murderous claws too slow for once, saw the smoky gurgle of its blood, oozing out its belly where he’d uniformly perfed it with his razzle dazzle rippers.
Mary interrupted him by suddenly tilting her head back and turning him into a pillow.
-Hey you, she said.
-would you like to listen to Jorma and the Airplane? You might like it. I promise it’s better than the shit I’ve been inflicting on you lately. Are you game, baby boo?
She bounced her head softly against his body and squeezed from him an involuntary mew of assent. She scrambled into a doglike position, her fingers slipping over the albums, searching, her voice a rise and fall of explanation.
-He plays this solo on ‘Wild Tyme’. Actually, he plays it twice. It’s almost like he drives up and then circles the block and comes back to see if you’re ready to go for a ride. The first solo I ever learned note for note. Here we go.
Cecilia hopes her happiness will last as long as the upcoming solo, in which he takes no real interest, playing dumb and unimpressed but watching rather the lunatic flight of her left hand, fingers curling into and recoiling from her palm as she recreates that transcendent moment of education from her faraway thirteenth year.