by Shane Jones
“I’ll finish up here. Be over at five,” she says into my ear, giving me a hug. I don’t have the chance or the guts to tell her that’s also a bad idea.
At home I record a video of Alice, and on the replay see a wavering oval of air, a portal-shaped glistening suspended over the couch. I try and show her and she runs into the bedroom. Outside it’s starting to rain so the men in the neighborhood are looking up at the sky.
One thing I’ve brought from the office, previously instructed to keep from the home after my gate opened, is the training manual and Dorian’s research paper. I read from them in my professional voice, following Alice into the bedroom as her limbs flicker from cigarette ash to the gray of storm clouds.
She runs back past me, down the hall, past where we were once Leg Wobble Man together, and into the front room again. She has nowhere to go. I tell her again she isn’t real. I tell her again this will not last. I go back through the rules as quickly as possible. I start to cry when she resembles fog settling against the door.
One of the men outside is setting-off fireworks in the rain. Through the windows an umbrella of gold sparks is coming down over the street. That’s the only legislation I know the Leaders have ever passed – making fireworks legal again. Their retirement package is sickening. They only need ten years to retire, so all across America ex-Leaders are just relaxing, drinking Arnold Palmers, driving golf carts, signing checks on granite countertops.
Alice is still able to stand, even in her current form, and runs to the kitchen. She leaves behind a damp trail. I break more rules. Destroying her, I have this song stuck in my head. The lyrics were written on orange construction paper, stuck on my bedroom wall, each corner with layers of masking tape:
All together now
Raise your voices to the sky
Magic will happen here somehow
If we’re all together now
Mom loved this song. She hummed it during naps. After she woke and moved to the couch I’d make her bed. I can still smell those sheets, see her socks balled-up at the end of the bed. But there’s no reason why this song should be in my head now besides that there’s no reason to the world. Stuff just enters your head and you have no control over it. I can’t find Alice.
She appears in the backyard rubbing her arms. In the wind she turns off and on. I’m waiting for something to happen, her final disappearance, a dramatic puddle of Alice into the soil. She walks to the backdoor. I hear it open as I prepare myself to break more rules. But she doesn’t come up the back stairs, she goes down.
The basement is one long and wide room, the entire size of my first floor apartment. There isn’t much in here. Dangling light-bulbs, cobwebs between the wooden beams, and a dirt floor with a washer and dryer topped in purple lint. The landlord uses the space to store paint cans, random tools, and bargain priced items from Home Depot. I’m forced to walk hunchback-style because of the low ceilings, looking for Alice.
“Hello?”
I wanted to be a good person. I wanted a simple life. Don’t blame me for how life worked out, blame time, blame time, blame time. See? A year is just a lap around the sun. The moon has moves but the stars can’t tell you anything.
I slowly walk forward, calling for Alice. The landlord’s work bench contains many saws and I run my finger through a clump of sawdust.
Alice, or at least a shape resembling a person, runs into the further dark, toward the far back corners of the basement.
I break apart Alice, speaking into the dark how she isn’t real, telling her she’s an illusion who can’t survive, controlling the space, controlling my life, taking more pictures (I glance down, all black), threatening to leave her down here forever, killing her.
I hear her whimpering as I approach her, walking past unwrapped plumbing parts the landlord has stored against the wall.
I dip under a rusty metal beam. At the end of the basement Alice is kneeling in the corner, becoming smaller against the concrete and dirt.
One final time I work my way through the list.
All together now…
Alice becomes an oval shaped portal.
Fog.
White smoke translucent with stars.
A constellation of a woman suspended in the sky.
Mist withdrawing into a black hole.
A distant voice.
Now gone.
I move my hand through the air in front of me and it’s a coincidence I make the shape of a cross. I look down. My fingertips are wet. On the dirt floor there’s a dampness, a sweet smell, one strand of hair.
Upstairs, someone is knocking. Where I am in the basement, Alice is directly above.
This is my life. A seamless transition from one Alice to another as I open the door. Alice is coming into the apartment for the first time since leaving the apartment. Maybe being alive isn’t so cruel. Maybe everyone comes back to you.
JULY 4
Thousands tilt their heads backwards at the first firework. America is always in celebration mode. Even in the bleakest of times we’ll fly our flags and light up the sky. Wearing shorts in the colors of the flag while getting drunk doesn’t have to be mocked, maybe it just feels right.
I’m one of the few walking from the celebration. I don’t really care about fireworks, but Mom and Dad did, we never missed a Fourth, and nearing forty years old, I haven’t missed one either.
Last night Alice and I had dinner together and it was amazing. I had nothing prepared so I made grilled cheese sandwiches. Again? Again. I thought about making eggs but didn’t want to mess them up.
Watching her move around the apartment I thought she would disappear or ask where Alice was. But she seemed calm, back in the apartment, after so long. She talked about how lonely she was in Chicago, how I would like it there so much more than A-ville.
“Chicago is basically a much bigger and better version,” she said.
“But in Illinois.”
I flipped a sandwich and Alice smiled. “Right,” she agreed, “but in Illinois.”
Just outside where the plaza ends, a man with a shaved head, dressed in red and black is handing out little wooden crosses, and I want to avoid him, I tell myself to avoid him, but for some reason I take the cross and thank him. I don’t have time for this. I have to get home. I have a life to live. Alice is with the refugees now, but I’m going to see her later.
“Let me ask you something,” says The Cross Man. “My brother, are you happy?”
“It’s not part of the deal,” I say flippantly, “but I’m good today.”
“Belief in God will lead you to wonderful places,” says The Cross Man, leaping forward to give a couple on their way to the plaza two crosses. They are so innocent, the wooden crosses, that everyone who is handed one, takes one.
“Not interested in heaven?” He has a spider web tattoo covering his elbow. On his wrist ORION with no surrounding stars. “How can you not be interested in the next level?”
“The constellation,” I say, pointing to his wrist.
“Not exactly,” he replies.
Last night I asked if she would ever move back to A-ville and she gave me a look, that Alice look, ugh, crushes me. When she flipped the question, would I ever move to Chicago, you know what the first thing I thought was? My retirement. Twenty more years isn’t that long if you fracture it, year by year, month by month. Twenty Christmas days. Twenty laps around the sun. I told all this to Alice and she stared at her lap. I said she should consider moving to A-ville, but she didn’t respond. I still think I can convince her.
The fireworks give an increased light to the sky, but then it’s dark again. And because the fireworks are sounding off on the plaza, the echoing off the agency buildings is deafening. Parents with infants are running from the blasts. Walls of white light flash on the marble facades. If you didn’t know it was a fireworks display you would assume something was wrong. But nothing is wrong. Everything feels hopeful. Alice just needs to decide to be with me.
“You w
on’t be reunited with anyone you love,” continues The Cross Man. “My brother, join our path,” he pleads, his voice soft and comforting. He hands me a pamphlet with an iron cross on the cover. He laughs when I refuse to take it.
Something else about last night: I couldn’t stop thinking about PER Alice. I knew she was gone, but part of me felt like she was still down there, in the basement, breathing. Breaking the rules, she talked about our trip to the castle, saying she wanted to go back, telling me to stop, until she stopped. But that breathing. I swear I could hear it rising through the floorboards while sitting on the couch with Alice.
The Cross Man yells about heaven and salvation, shielding babies from Satan, the time is now to be saved. There’s a carnival approach to what he’s saying to no one in particular, but it feels like his yelling is directed at me, not those running around me. The faster I walk away the louder he becomes.
In last night’s dream I was escaping. I don’t know what exactly, but I was in the Pontiac and Elderly was driving. Police sirens were flashing behind us. That wasn’t what we were escaping from, something else was lurking its way toward us.
Elderly had this big lunatic grin on his face, hunched over the wheel, pedal to the floor. The road was desert but smooth as pavement. I was in the back seat with some version of Alice, but it looked like we were in bed, how we slept together wrapped around each other in the twilight-dark. It must have been blistering hot because we wore strips of clothing. All the windows were down. Alice whispered something in my ear that made me sit up. Through the windshield the sky was a screen with a waterfall pouring out of it and Dorian was beneath it, waving. And as we sped away from the sirens and at that sky Rudy in the passenger seat put his head out the window, blood-tongue hanging loose like it was meant to. Alice squeezed my hand as we drove into outstretched arms.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you Giancarlo DiTrapano, Rebekah Bergman,
Adam Robinson, and Sarah Bowlin.
Shane Jones is the author of three previous novels: Light Boxes, Daniel Fights a Hurricane, and Crystal Eaters. He lives in Troy, NY.
