He remembered the earthquake and how it flung them across the lobby and into each other’s arms. He remembered her wine-dark beret, the flamenco curls from temple to jaw, the citrus smell of shampoo, and how she trembled in his arms as the building shook, breeze in a hurricane. She remembered the earthquake as well, how it darkened the morning like a headache, how they stood, foolishly, in the center of the room, easy targets for falling objects, but the trembling she most remembered was not her own but that of the hotel mirrors in the entryway and how margins of light and shadow appeared, disappeared, and reappeared, never having been reflected there before. And her sudden vulnerability, faced with these crazed objects, their seemingly manic delight in what the world was doing to them, was making them do, dancing from their hooks, shuffling to the edge of pedestals, crowding into a space suddenly made too small. There was chaos at the black market, a gnashing of teeth at the Seven Sisters’ Aquarium, and in the journalists’ bars on Jeronimo Street, a sudden rediscovery of the desire to live. That morning how many times did lovers tell one another wait here I’ll be right back. She had calculated and lost interest, her observation numbly re-tuned to the world when it had aged one hundred hours. The next day someone would find King Pedro’s head in their driveway, the bronze horse and the royal torso across the street in the pigeon-empty park. A sea of red cloth and the blue sky placidly peeping through. Cars screeched like monkeys racing up and out of the tunnels, glad to be in one piece, glad not to have made it onto the now-vanished bridge. They slept in his office that night, comforted by the distant sound of the elevator, the sirens far down below, the helicopters landing and taking off from the roof of the building next door. But first they got one another drunk and then he stripped her, and made love to her on his folded raincoat, among the packing boxes, riding in a sweat of pure guilt, pure relief.
And why now this relentless scouring of the past? As if a life might give up its secrets when caught in the oblique light of memory’s recessive tunnel. To take as guide the painter’s careworn symbols, dotting the jasper foreground, hung just so in the rod of the high slit window (Rapunzel’s lonely tower, or Jerome’s comfy cave). Not clues so much as ammunition for the mind-caressing argument. To bully observe and regard into the violence-prompting spotlight. To see how what stands at center stage, erect and armored and inscrutable, was bolstered by marginal nudity, crouched between the nettles’ overhang and the signature’s upthrust, the same gray eyes slanting through visor or matted bangs. Memory needed a robe to dress up as memorial, clutching down words from painted heaven. The act itself, revealed in the faces of the slowly turning messengers, must have felt like murder. Duty signed the register, tipped the quill on thumb as if to prick up a pearl of blood, and all good nods and sickened leers were hidden in the transcript, safe from the dodgy bull who looked and saw, spelled joy with a mouth made round as frolic. The gallery had nothing new to offer him. Beside the Titians, which seemed to change before his eyes, although the change was seasonal, was his own and nothing more. Hung so as to complement the brilliance of the one, the lesser disturbance of the other, like sisters fallen out and made to sit alone together in a locked room. Vain hope that either would break the silence, or show him what he wished to know. All signs point east he heard a drunk girl giggle as he passed by, the museum bar packed with Christmas shoppers and dead Spartans from the expo two floors up. And standing at the top of the snowgray steps, the wind rattling banners and thinly gonging metal hoops, a madly underdressed Jeremiah called up to him with a messiah-monger’s bleat: Have you heard the Word? The Word is Love. Ah yes. Love. With her festivals and opportunities, toylike hooks for fishlike mouths. She can walk on water and skate on ice. Every time Her steed snorts another man wrecks himself on the poleaxing plain. The morning snowplows had scooped a giant horseshoe in the street below, already filling back up at this hour. (Arch of Constantine, Senlis prison yard.) He tilted his head architecturally as the whitebeard ascended, tin cup or shaving mug pitiful in his fingerless gloves. He watched the fire go out of the old man’s eyes as he leaned in close with the Word: Keep your demons to yourself. There’s no one here can help you. His own gloves had fingers and he used them now, fussy with his coat collar, a summons to the ghosts of Christmas present. Love, as Rossetti saw her. Or Leighton, oranging her in flame, delighting with a brushstroke the fork where flesh became shadow. He remembered her in a cotton dress, caught in the terrace breeze, wind filling her sleeves, billowing at the bosom, till she turned back, laughing, and the dress emptied itself, resettling blue and white on her perfect body. Excellent, she said, and her meaning umbrellaed over room and balcony and drop-off garden, and her laughter defined that day.
She wanted no words but those a six year old might choose. My syndrome she called it, prior to that childlike reversion. He ordered her up an illustrated fantasy, plunked her down amid the shimmering wires and the haut suspended trees. He’d fete her, drown her with attention, beat her donkey into a startled perfect syntax. Her diplomatic passport greened his inside pocket, he’d pore it by gaslight while she diddled bubbles in the hotel’s generous tub. He folded his guilt into a powder blue towel and mused upon the distractions that kept him so dutifully one step behind. Grim commendations separated him from her previous beaus, flea-bitten and regretful even as they thanked their lucky and their shooting stars. Finders keepers and a monogrammed envelope stealthing underneath the bathroom door. The slippered foot promised more than nudge and tickle. All will be revealed, each mystery broken on the wheel. If anyone asked, he intended to make known his plan of attack. Begin with a new set of measurements, marking where the first angels fell and proceeding by the nuance of material to a settlement acceptable to those most intimately cited, those most willing to risk an afternoon of shame for midnight glory. From the temple door a twelve foot span, a further interval pinned somewhere near the shadow’s heart and sidling on, a double archway, leading by illumination (left) and darkness (right) to the same source still further back within the circle of curtains and soapstone elephants. A nook for pausing in mid-flight, cluttered with what had once been plunder and was now the prop of cultural heritage. An Alexandrian trunk, curvaceous lid warped more erotic, the dangle of a lock beaten ell-shaped in the fury of that long-ago curfew. Maps, tubed together with Bethlehem loops, the smooth hide facing out and still oily to the careful touch. A blunderbuss in pieces, ployed like severed limbs among cocked hats and colanders fashioned from the ribs of extinct cats, spiders tactical and on the move. Thus cornered by obsession he mistook the sacristy for tomb, the tomb for chapel. He retraced his steps and emerged, flushed and wet with panic, into the perpetual sunshine of her nudity among that morning’s shopping bags, newly delivered and hot with delight. They were neither of them more than halfway there and her sun, her smile, her breasts were more than a match for his alphabet of blunt desire. A bull on fire, as golden as though lit from within.
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A morning bright as any winter cliché, crisp as year’s end: a perfect morning for death to fall, missiles spattering the innocents at play upon the blue fields. He had fallen out of bed in a creep sweat of terror. A pee, a gargle, a splash of cold water moved terror from its thudding throne to the footstool where anxiety habitually perched. Fear returned like a bruciore di stomaco and his mind took the battle reins, telling him all was not lost. Setbacks, yes, and disaster close enough to foul the air with its metallic breath, but a panic-suicide, an honor-suicide even, these he could stall. And now, waiting on his lunch, how far away and long ago the morning looked. Had his fear been nothing but illusion to begin with? He couldn’t yet tell himself so, it had held and shaken him in its real-enough grip, but appetite and a strolling mind could certainly be taken as presentiments of a better world arrived at. He took a sip and then another and obliged his glass of water with a squirt of lime, almost imagining he could see the dissolve of clear through clear. He did one memory exercise and then another. Simple ones: who had been sitting where in the lounge that morning, and at the meeting afterwards, and the order in which they had gathered up their files and gone. Till he was alone with the Director and could deliver the bad news without distraction, letting the full weight fatten each rehearsed word. The Director had pressed him only on the solitary anticipated point and he, in turn, paused just shy of cruelty and indicated his need to consult his notes, harry the new redhead for some finer clarification before he dared venture the requested, desired absolute. But there was no clarification needed, he had smiled at the redhead but walked on without speaking, nor would he be getting back to the Director, not now, now that the weakness of his enemies’ position had been so completely anatomized and revealed. The waiter came and went, a new gauntness around his mouth. A hint of a limp as well, a brave front to cover some malady where things fell away by decimals. The sliced potatoes shone in cheerful humility, shingled to a mound, neat burn marks promising a crisp beginning. He sliced a crescent from the curve of the empanada and turned his fork in the air, gathering the filling within its own tassels of cheese.
From their musty dais the members of the panel had one by one asked him to explain himself. How even now, called on the carpet, his eyes foraged for detail, some curve or color to remind him of something else. Analogy spread its curse like a picnic blanket, entertained itself with puzzles only a cheat could solve, invited like and unlike to tussle ever closer till they were canceled whole from the blue flat field. And everywhere the ancient world peeked through, a nipple under lace. Nomads fattening on imperial supply lines. A counsel of division bloating the chapel. A blind girl manning the booth between vanities, selling kisses to the boys with the copper tokens, kissing briskly till led away for closer questioning. Béarnaise made sense but what about Burgundy? And why a rhyme where leather slapped the ear, the wolf-beguiling Jesuits sprouting horns and disappearing into the mission-swallowing jungle? Explain all this and prove them wrong, convince them while time staked out its tent on neutral ground.
I saw green velvet under heavy glass, caught in the revolvings of a courthouse door. Russet hair, tightly curled and clipped with an ebony bow that was the standard fashion when Aurora Leigh was electric and alive, escaping from one suffocating love to the next. I peg the details of such faint echoes, draw pleasure from the garblings, dressed and uncertain as they cannot help but be. Lights on a rainy road, four in the afternoon and thoroughly wintry, the sky a wet wool ceiling a reasonable ladder might punch through to let the night drop in. The green doll stays in my tired mind, a clavinet I cannot hear ensouls her like a magnet corking a saucerful of rain. Would it trouble me to learn that scene after scene was staged for some offworld prospectus, some demonstration of skills acquired, assumptions renewed, a simple wager between gods bored with debauch and debate? Not having access to this behind-the-mirrors truth, how could I be troubled? Neither my behavior, nor yours, would likely alter, nor would any vain diligence outlast a week of best intentions. I am a fossil. Only in dreams do I bark and growl. No insult burns me here. No betrayal can wound me. The green dress flung over the back of a chair, the cries and demands in the other room, the deep-throated affirmation close on the spurs of surrender.
A thought rekindles and the interrupted snowfall resumes.
After his lunch he had taken the leisurely way back the Arcades. Anxiety seemed to be at a surplus during the long weekend immediately preceding the holidays. And he noticed it while consciously striving to discount its unusual resurgence, finding it in the background music piped overhead, finding it in the blocks-long chilly interior boulevard marked at intervals by fake fountains and plastic evergreens, the walkway itself flanked on either side by rows of overheated shops, bright and crammed till the cramp of constant proximity to every element in the periodic table gave him a whiff of nineteenth century vertigo which he quickly attributed to loneliness and distraction. The music he noted foremost as it was mobby and on the high end of cheer, animal emotion forced through a metal mate straw. He was tired of begging forgiveness for his social ineptitude, tired of being agreed with that yes, solitude was healthy and nothing to apologize for, agreed with by people, some of whom he cared rather deeply for, who represented in themselves the constant slight disappointment in his slow or non-existent progress, as though they held ambassadorial rank in the Ministry of the Anti-Solitary. Modesty will win out, he whispered to the nipple-less and double-jointed mannequinette straddling a glass coffin at the border between the food court and the luxury stalls of luggage and lingerie. If he held his hand in the air before the next never-was-and-never-will-be display case, he might see the particles of light float in and out of his skin, skirting the tangle of veins and efficient bones like bubbles round a tooth-picked olive.
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Stepping through the beadscreen onto the dirty sidewalk he felt the city release its cloudy bit of tang, a day half done, minds beginning to gravitate to the wind-down, the various exits raising their call. He was concentrating on avoiding any immediate regret, focusing on the shallow relief of having nowhere to go or be. He stood outside the half-hidden entrance and looked without watching. He began to notice the division among the people around him, the differing strains of movement across the street. He distrusted what was set out for him to see, finding it unlikely that it should be so easy to discern the natives from the refugees. Even when the sun had been set for a couple of hours he had been told there would be stragglers still with every intention of getting to the other, the official side. They should be avoided if he wished to stay, to maintain whatever trust he was lucky enough to have built up those first and early nights. A coffee-cart stopped near him and the half dozen evangelists from two awnings down rose from behind their ancient typewriters, made a show of flexing their shoulders, rotating their wrists, cracking their knuckles. It was rare that anybody came to them in the afternoons, and when they did they were already in such desperate straits that the cost of a letter would probably be as well spent on three holy candles and the poor box. The evangelists sat at their posts nevertheless, smoking their pipes and nursing their paper cups till the metal grills began to grate down, whinnying and scraping at the tailor’s, the pawnshop, the sheet music store. Either the neighborhood was filled with a race of invisibles, or nothing but sore thumbs. And either of these was acceptable to him, with his talents at a slant, his many errors of judgment like clues no one had read correctly till now. Act as though the Bridge is only open on Tuesdays and Fridays between the hours of ten a.m. and 2 p.m. Cross over once, maybe two times a month, never more. Buy a pair of shoelaces, a couple of pork dumplings, a celeb fanzine, as you please. Let yourself be seen but be so dull, so unremarkable that even the four-decade, second generation snitches and the hard-eyed stoolies discount you as you stroll past. As the man in the toll booth said: Scratch my back and one day I’ll forget your face and lose your address for good. Promise? Promise.
He had allowed small things to anger him and had fooled himself with the illusion that each abandoned day would content itself with vanishing unremarked. He had not anticipated revenge, nor left himself the resources needed when his flank was turned, the injuries sustained by others meaning nothing to him, meaning less than nothing as evidenced by his dumb recoil, the silence of his surprise. Time enough was the grove he passed by, some other trail conspiring at his self-seduction, articulate sobbings that decoyed him to blindness. All was stripped away, the axeman’s budget allowed neither splutter nor flow, the scaffold was a brisk and wordless place. The code was run for a donor match, blink once and it would be done. He’d glimpsed a portable secretary plugging in, he’d glimpsed some certainty he’d return to in the luxury of imagined time but the passing cloud showed there was no sun in hiding, the parting crowd revealing a waking nightmare which reason had not the resources to explain away, to swallow, to drain of its poison. The tentacles of a beast come onto shore where telephone cables should be laid, the great shaved dome of the rescue-pod spastic to the crowd’s admiring touch, the cyclops-eye that rolled and steadied, unaccustomed to the light. The thing he feared the most, the corrosive daydream and the moment like a hinge, like Pandora’s option. He wanted to believe that what was holding it back was not malevolent, was not even conscious, but simply particles in overlap, a random drift that had colluded with his glance to resemble something indestructible and colloid but which, should he look again, would prove to be the famous other, the sister of nothing. Mere light, an offset of cataract and temporary dizziness, passing already. At the next shelter on the pilgrimage he would consult the local oracle as to the symptoms of nervous exhaustion, and he would be honest, and painfully so, when they asked him what he was doing here, what he thought he was doing here, ransacking the dreams of those around him in order to fabricate an exquisite corpse, something to take home with him, to stand in a corner and play at being in love with, or to bury in the back yard, among the sleepless others.
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Like a tick fat with blood, he felt swollen to bursting with the interception of the collective signal. Voices bounced from howl to murmur between his temples. ‘Deliciae populi’ was the label on the disc. Each time he spoke into the microphone, each time he drew a thick line with his marker diagonally across an index card he imagined a vein pricked open. He did not believe in an afterlife and here it was before him. Over coffee he discussed the matter with his comrades, some of whom felt the same as he, while others saw it merely as a job, a worthy task doubtless, but no more than that. The weather was pleasant, if overcast, and so they chose to take their breaks on the wide verandah of the Institute, with the unseen valley stretching away to the west (visibility low and worsening). A windstorm the night before had swept the tables with twigs and a plague of terrestrial isopod crustaceans (suborder oniscoidea), small as capers and black as tar. The tall dialectician, Vanushka from the Urals, explained the regional significance of the various names for the small frightened bugs. Roly-polys, doodlebugs, pillbugs. All were equally descriptive and none stuck out as a slur. The memories housed in the Institute’s archives had grown oppressive in the last weeks, as if sensing the endgame implicit in their compilation. Barbarians might choose to forget or even actively destroy, ensuring that nothing remained of the past except what named them in praise and fear. An insecure victory, defining the universe as the distance a man could ride before death overtook him. For this, their compilers’ role against the tense simplicity of the destroyer, Vanushka was armed, as ever, with the visual calmative of diagrams on napkins. It no longer seemed enough however, and, what was worse, there was the feeling it never had been. What we all need is a good cheap vacation, Simmelweiss said, smiling his equine smile, chief of cheerful thorns in the side of the dour ones. Gabby tossed her curls and sparkled Yes! Enough of this talk of universes! And Fatty Archambault, incising the crusty fold of a custard empanada, This is my universe chomp chomp. For a minute or so the summit of NX13 was visible, blue with snowcaps, a thin column of sun drilling its head. Then mist and a swirl of gray rain hid it from view again. That, he said, pointing, is one battle the humans won’t win. And then the party broke up. And for the rest of the day he plunged more drastically than ever into other people’s images, the better to forget what he’d said, and why.
He’d heard of a strange case of a couple, married close to twenty years, who’d divorced over political differences. Hearing just enough details so as to feel entitled to an opinion, he said that he found it absurd. Sexual differences, economic opposites, even an aesthetic dispute seemed to him more understandable, more defensible. When he said this to his informant she answered simply and without smiling You’ve lived a very sheltered life here, haven’t you? And had he? Did he have any real notion what she meant? He left the office into a seasonal brief shower, had a drink at one of the students’ cafes before the last leg to the train station, sat waiting with his unread evening newspaper and unlit cigarette, watching the shine of sunlight on the distant rails give way to the overhead neon and still he couldn’t arrive at a satisfying paragraph break. Should he ask, the next morning, for further details? Or should he drop it? The couple in question was, after all, unknown to him and he’d had little enough in the way of experience in sorting out the lives of his own friends. None, he corrected himself, he’d had no experience whatsoever, although he did feel some competence (decreasing, as he sat) in the naming of those who might require sorting out. On the train he found himself taking more notice than usual of the other passengers. A pair of mixed race little girls, silent between silent parents. All this on assumption. They were tired after a long day’s outing. Or perhaps they were lost, riding round a city whose language they didn’t understand. Or which had disappointed them, nothing like the practice cassettes, or the movies with their smiling detectives and pretty girls, each with three words apiece. He closed his eyes and willed the carriage empty. The next stop added to his dilemma when a drunk and his embarrassed teenage daughter got on. The man insisted on hanging on to one of the ceiling straps, even though there were plenty of seats and he could barely stand to begin with. Watching the two, he fiddled with his newspaper, folding it and refolding it, a casual gesture which ran the risk of drawing the drunk’s attention if he did not stop. He looked out the window and let his speculations run wild through the blue parkland gliding by. A widower, now disabled in a work accident. Bitter, regretful, his daughter the primary breadwinner, heading without choice or genuine comprehension to shortly dropping out of school. How much of her small pay packet was handed over to the old man? All of it? Stop it, he told himself.
Oh pet, she said, are men born blind as kittens? It’s all there to see, no higher degree required. That forward slump whenever the victims’ names are mentioned, the perpetual whip of hair clumped inside the collar, and look at the size of her hands. Small as a child’s and raw-red from wringing. What do I make of her defense? Classic and sans surprise. Her lead attorney knows his stuff although the Queen Christina gestures may need to go. The press crowded like cattle to a lick, framed her every word, joining in her mockery of experts they already privately despised, those owners of words whose feathery tails contradicted the wounding tip. And she, the wretched mouse, snowflaked with accusation, sat silent in the great room. That he was free to leave was not the thing which most disturbed him. It was the growing compulsion to remain a moment longer, to remain one moment longer. This failure of nerve in the face of temptation had all the earmarks of desire and the symptoms alone would further glaze the jaded eye in any Court of Love. Pretend, in one of those childish moments, that enlightenment was an unknown, lay the glass plate of fatalism on the sensual map. And had he almost missed it, just then? That half-turn, made slow and thereby heightened by her cumbersome jacket? Her eyes were clearer than expected, the hand that gripped the arm of the chair not one to be so idly slapped away. The fingernails (and this he imagined, not being near enough to tell for sure) were filed and neat, just enough of a half moon on each to disparagingly tap, impatiently click. She had the vacant look of someone counting words, calculating delay, closing some distance. Later, the lights in the hallway would dim for him alone, would yearn towards him their clean electric fall. Oh pet, she told him, her voice a low echo in the emptied garage, I can see it in your eyes. Beauty trumps justice, as blind as a kitten.
Fear and trembling had moved on beyond the cottage phase. It was oxygen, it was a stake in the vineyard, it was grown mythic and priceless as Ionian gold. As though the browns of autumn were come to stay year round. In churches the flocks closed their eyes for a glimpse of heaven, the omnipresent fear like a bored hand sweeping the tips of the candles, making the shadows dance on the back wall. The pews rehearsed the gathered tremblings, the bat of a tectonic eyelash. A broken, overly familiar God tapped the footlights shamelessly, the high-kicking chorus line crowded him forward, pretty girls with a crazed shine on their faces. He said he needed no warrant, implying they should stand back, walk away, leave him be. He turned over the books in the Lost and Found, spine and cover and next. I Am The Happy Blind Girl by Pia Sorensen. His memories of Pia were only partially marred by concussion. Her ease in the courtroom, her impressive recovery from a complicated joke that fell flat. She was not blind, nor was he surprised by this. Her happiness or lack of it he could not judge. The sidewalk outside the courthouse had been crowded with the vigil of subdued fans, an amazement of inexpression, like suicide risks on a painkiller drip. Eh, what’s that, kiddo? the sarcastic prosecutor asked, cupping his ear as he waded through the miasma of flowers and stuffed animals. Back in the Lost and Found he stacked the books, studied each one for a hard second and moved on. Your Ass Is Mine by Sgt. Denny Hale, a thick-necked throwback in full grimace on the back jacket. Smiling, he tapped his lighter on Hale’s plastic forehead, estimating he could take him with a nightstick and a foul mood. Cronos, Our God by a white-haired, soft-faced Druid with a made up name. Captain Warthog strung out on Spanish fly. If he could bottle stupidity he’d be king of the fucking world. What was an aching jaw a symptom of? Formless desire, the fog sprites pulling up anchor at the mouth of the river. Time to separate the goats from the men, the sheep from the boys, to hurl ‘slut’ at every woman and narrow it down to the ones that looked offended. His was the strong arm of virtue. It would bloody the heads of the wicked. He must remember to reserve a dung-heap at the gates of the city. His reputation preceded him. Was this the beginning of another round or maybe, just maybe, the way out? Show me your gods, he felt like shouting, tell me their names, I’ll pray to every one of them if that’s what it takes. Hope, amnesia, despair. Look for a red door to knock on humbly, to barge through, to put one’s ear against like a good man when the law had let him down, or a bad man when the clock was running and the villains were in caravan to the oasis. Come Isis, come Krishna, come Huitzilopochtli. Release me from this land of shadows.
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What apparently happened was that he had set down the phone, made a camel-face and a noise like straw in a blender and walked out, leaving the troubled girl and her overactive younger sister to their own devices. All that was behind him. Without a body though, without a mouth to sync the pre-recorded words, the meeting dribbled from strategy to the back-and-forth of leisurely, professional conversation. Just before his departure she had written abuse event?? on a note card and turned it round on the table so he could read it from where he was sitting. He looked up from her words with a blank expression filled, he suspected she felt, with much emotion and meaning. Someone else might have shaken their head or bugged their eyes at her but not him. For a long time the myth of human nature had sustained her, had allowed her to seize a breathing space and gather strength where only weakness was apparent. Was this now a plateau or the warning bell of burnout? How long could she continue before someone noticed, called attention to it, made a date with her at the corner bar for that special chat? Something tragic will save us and we’ll travel lightly under trauma’s umbrella, safe from here to the last falling latch. Old friends and habits shook off the dust of dreamtime and returned to take up residence with her. The cats pretended not to notice, twitching their ears back to the mouse on the mantel. At night her mouth filled with the red and black centipede, and when she turned her head the pillow smelled like grapes and ashes and sleep grew up around her as though she were sinking through powder.
He thought he knew that the moment had come. Far less homework was involved than he would admit but the need to keep the façade of busy-as-a-bee, savvy in the foxlight and nimble in chiaroscuro kept him deadpan and dishonest. The identity of the women was tied up with the clipboard’s balance sheet. Anyone could see that, provided the psychology was a shadowbox and the scope of intent came with its own glossary. The hangar was large, one had to squint to see if it was raining out on the gray field. The rain alone wasn’t much of an omen, some wildlife was called for. Something to offset the tiny coffins and the rags that draped them, smuggled in under sweaters and overalls, the sneaky turret otherwise occupied. He had to force himself not to glance at the ticket but pretending it wasn’t there, damp and three-folded in his pocket, was an exercise that left him scatterbrained, jumpy as a first-time saboteur. Something bundled by in the rain. Too big for a rabbit, too small for a dog. The loudspeaker started up and someone adjusted the volume till it sizzled intimate, a tap on the shoulder to await further instructions. He looked down at the ground as the women began to file past. Several of them tried to get his attention, to hand him their papers, but he waved them on without looking up. earlier, when they’d all been outside waiting on the sleepy guards to open up, the little one-eyed grandmother had tried to engage him, to lure him onto the thin ice of thought. He’d managed a few phrases, taking care to round his ‘r’s’ with a mountainous semitic muffle, to let them know he was no native, it was not incumbent on him to notice or observe the local morality. The cause might well require one more corpse but he didn’t see why it should be his. Another twenty minutes and the site would be cleared, the main event shuttling down the ramp on its short trip to the incinerator. And then he could safely leave, eyes narrowing as the scooter groaned through the dust of the swerving road, dahlias on one side, barbed wire on the other.
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All morning rain fell out of a cloudless sky and a voice at the bottom of the public well cried for everyone to stay calm. His mythologies were failing him on every side, from the elephant god to the queen of windy sleeves. I know something that will make you feel better said the off-duty security guard. And she was right, and it did, but only until they were dressed again and bussed aboard the boulevard-hurtling tramcar, rump to hip and shoulder to metal, entering the long turn through the purple hothouse where trouble lay dozing. He peered down upon her smart blue cap, smelled himself on her hair and thought our loss is surely someone’s gain. They parted ways at the platform, she to take the wide stone stair rising to the north, towards a patch of colorless sky, patient between storm clouds. And he to cross the street and go west through the mosaic’d and fountained square, fish and fairies and dolphins, shining in the water and treacherous to the step. Straight on to the office buildings beyond, wading through a surf of schoolchildren on an outing of hot dogs and propaganda. As he moved among the children the spray of their dithering petted his heart to a prudence better suited to his tie than his age. One face reflected vanilla, another mint, and the token of a third, blank and perfect oval, with a moth’s baffling symmetry. White on white, like lace curtains concealing sunlight on snow. Were he to begin the return of what he had stolen, he would still die a thief. Life appeared to be reaching for its sag-line as he grew aware of other voices nearing, as he grew alert. The obituary that snared an old friend, snaring him with its smirking list, caught him looking. Looking and not knowing he’d bowled along across the line, into the ranks of the any day now school of aging. He asked the purple curtain sash whether there was still time to change. He chose to read indifference as hope. Last night he had watched his suffering made explicit, staged between the curb and a snow bank washed in blue light. The stylish wreckage of a confidante, nursing her tantrum by the evening star, the red beacon, the on-off of Last Call. The gore of a flung orange dripped down an advertisement for the finest of fine English art, one of Turner’s tear-lensed bridges single file with ants in pilgrimage, passing back rumors of a citrus trail.
Her kiss tasted like apples and peppermint and something else he couldn’t place. He wondered how long her confusion would last and what part scruples might play. Several times in the course of the tour she mentioned a fractured rib, but she spoke with a smile and painlessly and so he smiled back as in a secret code. The restaurant was closed by curfew but she was in possession of the keys and therefore access to the balcony and its celebrated panoramic view. He wouldn’t regret it, she promised, despite the hour. The lighted boats on the river, the tomb with its blue and green domelights, the people like ants on the silver bridges. The pockmarked snowball … what building was that? The planetarium, a favorite of school children and religious fanatics. Beyond that was the aviary, its design that of a headless woman in a hoop skirt, bosom to waist where the seabirds came to glide, back and forth, the endless scour of their yellowy eyes, at sunset their wings like lead. Nearer in, the pedestrian walkways that swayed above the kidney-shaped and manmade lake, chicken wire reflected in a puddle. She pressed him on some amnesiac point, her laughter drilled through his skull, bubbles bled off the switching tongue of a mechanical dragon, advertising adventure two stories up. When he didn’t answer she shied a pretty insult, her mouthful of brief words less damaging than her body language with its kilt-swirl, shoulder toss and outstretched little finger, limply dangling. She bluffed and he called, pinning her lightly against the glass, her hair in his mouth, his hands caressing the whereabouts of this injured rib. The implication of her body was that it was not his turn to hurt her. She offered her neck to his breath, her wrists fit neatly in his grip, the city outside the window glowed against the blackening sky. How quickly he had disappointed her, although he would receive residual credit for not speaking. And how quickly she had lowered her standards, although nothing had happened other than a loss of balance and the sort of recovery that put an end to conversation. The glass and steel and dead sun thrummed together a sympathetic drone, to bed the adagio’s final lie-down. There was no absence of things to look at as they descended. The magnet at the base of the escalator, all-seeing eye in its coach of stainless steel. The office cat, prancing prissy and quick from desk to credenza to cabinet, carefree tail above its feather-duster pantaloons. The revolving doors sucked and slid, the smell of rainstorm gathering in the darkened lobby. Anyone might wonder that they stood so close together, close as lovers who’d seen the end, the last lie told and the first blow struck. Or fresh from the deathbed of one mutually adored and realizing at last, post-death, that the thing they needed the most was no longer in the safe-keeping of the other. The fuse spluttered, there was a broken-backed heat to the challenge she had not yet formally withdrawn. On what new terms might he have his way with her? Her with him?
Ivy serpented the frosted pane, a stab of berries on the snowy sill and bird tracks fine as newsprint. Look up, catch the last hour as it waved goodnight. In the Whistler twilight of blue and bronze the shoppers could have been bears or beavers, furred, fat, nervous. He spied through them like a sniper on neutral, remembering a similar moment on another wrong street, desolation rising with each strange face, half glimpsed above suede or leather, maroon or black. He couldn’t stop himself then, what made him think he could step back now. A boozy wedding party netted him in their clumsy undertow and he walked backward five steps before it was safe to continue, quiet enough to think what he might do. Run, Marina! We’ll back your play! He glanced up and read the marquee, once for context, once for style and, hardhearted, gave it failing marks. Emotion blinded him as the street emptied out at either end, and the night crept darker along the wide open sky. But it wasn’t emotion, it was only a light rain, misting down to add the spice of danger to the rush of homeward commuters, and only visible if you looked up to the streetlights and caught the insect tracerfall. The newsstand at the corner of Fraser and Bolero seemed a suitable place to pause and count down a calming zoological ten. On the cover of Vogue, a young woman in a white bikini and a Soviet commissar’s fur hat, straddling the question: DO YOU KNOW WHO SHE IS? CHANCES ARE YOU DO. Details inside but he’d seen enough and Dante’s wolves were only one block over, scenting the wet air, gathering, ambling towards him under cover of December’s hanging gardens. He yearned for invisibility, to breeze among the columns and feed on grief. The moon looked closer than it had last night. From above, the rainy streets and softly sighing parks must appear exposed and vulnerable, dark grooves and valleys gouged by hidden animals, sheltering from the promise of punishment. Enough of hiding, enough of exile. He was gone into the open where no one dreamed of looking.