Nick

by Michael Farris Smith

  Nick picked up his helmet and set it on his head. Tilted it low across his eyes.

  “I said you got a girl?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t neither. And I’m glad about it.”

  “Go ahead and tell me why.”

  “Not with your attitude.”

  “Go ahead. I know you can’t keep from it.”

  “I’m going back over there.”

  Nick nodded and eased his helmet down farther.

  “I thought you had to talk about something,” Nick said.

  “I want to. But it takes two to talk.”

  “It takes one to talk.”

  “You ain’t never been alone much. Have you?”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because if you’d spent as many days as I have out in the middle of goddamn nowhere trying to make a living off land that sometimes wanted to cooperate and sometimes didn’t then you wouldn’t mind having a conversation. No matter what it was about.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “What?”

  “Before you said you were lonely. Now you’re saying you were alone. It’s not the same thing.”

  The man huffed. Stuck his helmet on his head. “You’re kind of a smart guy. Aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “I bet you got a lot of school in you. And you probably read lots of words.”

  “What else would I read besides words?”

  “See what I mean? You’re a smart one. At least you think it.”

  “I don’t think anything.”

  “Then you’re just a son of a bitch then.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I say to you.”

  “Then don’t say nothing.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

  “Son of a bitch. I’ll leave you in your little kingdom.”

  The man crawled out of the hole and across the ground and he slid back down into his own hole. Moments later a big glob of mud sailed across from one hole to another and smacked Nick on top of the helmet. A pause and then another smacked on his shoulder and splattered his face.

  Nick threw off his helmet and came up out of the hole like a madman. He went for the man with the buzz cut, diving down on him and punching and clawing at his face and the man yelled and punched and kicked but Nick was on him. The man’s helmet came off and Nick shoved the back of his head into the mud and the man yelled he’s killing me he’s killing me. A handful of soldiers peeked up out of the surrounding holes and crawled over and down into the hole and tried to pull Nick off the man with the buzz cut and their movement and yelling triggered a smattering of machine gun fire from the dark recesses of the woods that made them all forget what they were doing and they dropped to their stomachs and squeezed close to the earth.

  9

  In solitary moments he tried to remember the things or people that had meant something to him. It began as a practice of reassurance. You have another life out there and these are the good things about it. But the habit eventually turned into a collage of memories that irritated him.

  The train horn that echoed across his small town in the late night as the cargo passed from east to west and how on nights when he had trouble sleeping he would lie there and wait for it, its arrival a comfort and its horn like a single, simple lullaby. The straight and smooth sidewalks of his childhood and riding bikes in the summer with a baseball mitt hanging over the handlebars and half a dozen others trailing behind as they rode to the elementary school playground and started up a game that began with the goodnatured charm of boyhood but always ended in an argument.

  The echoing halls of New Haven where professors lectured with authority and certainty and how he had taken some of their most heartfelt ideologies and passed them off as his own in what he saw now as juvenile editorials in the campus newspaper. The wide walkway separating the dorm and the library that was lined by lampposts where he walked in the night and his shadow splintered in random directions and as he moved he saw the varying degrees of shadow as varying degrees of himself and he wondered how many were truly inside.

  The box of cowboys and Indians and horses under the bed in his room that he took out and played with by the moonlight once his mother and father were asleep. His hesitancy to let the cowboys always be good and the Indians always be bad and the way that he allowed everyone on the Western frontier of his mind to be a survivor.

  A date he took to a football game and her thick and wavy blond hair that fell over the collar of her fur coat and her eyes that shined like polished dimes. When she spoke he could not decide if he was entranced or appalled as she only spoke of her family name and her family homes and the family she was planning after she graduated and no matter that there was no man involved at the moment because there would be one whenever she decided which one fit the way she and her family expected him to fit. Her shrill when a touchdown was scored and her condescending stare toward those less beautiful than her.

  His mother licking her hand and flattening his cowlick before they walked into church and his father squeezing his shoulder as they moved down the aisle toward their usual Sunday morning pew and how their seat had never once been occupied by an unfamiliar face.

  The books he read sitting on a concrete bench as he chewed on a sandwich and waited for his next class. Notes from Underground and A Simple Heart and Fathers and Sons. Stories that he thought he had understood then but he understood better now with the grime under his fingernails. The redhead from Philadelphia who sat next to him in American History and told him he didn’t need to waste his time reading fiction as long as there were books published on politics and war but who later became one of the biggest liars Nick knew as they both rowed on the crew team and in the locker room the redhead bragged of sexual escapades that they all knew he had neither the looks nor courage nor grasp of the English language to pull off.

  Nick sat with his memories in the way that others sat with photographs of wives or children, holding the worn edges and staring at the faces as if staring into an unanswerable question. Others read the same letters over and over again. Not reading, Nick thought. But reciting. The words engrained and beating like a heartbeat and giving nourishment. Some kept rings or pocketknives or lucky rocks tucked in the inside pockets of their coats and took them out and rested the trinkets in the palms of their hands as if feeling the need to touch something that would not fire or explode.

  But Nick did not have any of these things. He felt the tinge of jealousy in the early days at not being the owner of such keepsakes but as the days and weeks and months had gone by he had lost the desire for anything physical that could be lost. He let himself be comforted or frustrated or broken or sustained by the thoughts and memories that he knew he could change if he wanted to and in his darkest moments he began to separate himself from the images, as if they belonged to someone else and he had overheard the stories. Overheard the descriptions of home or of faces and voices and it hurt less to remember the good and he laughed at the absurd and if he was certain that none of the others were in earshot, he described his own memories to himself aloud as if he had stepped out of his body and sat next to himself in the dirt and was educating this visitor about who he was and how he had come to be there.

  10

  Nick and the others who survived the forest were rewarded with leave and there was no doubt where he was going. On the train to Paris he imagined seeing her from a distance. Watching her for a while before sitting down next to her or calling her name and hiding behind a tree. He imagined the frames in the new colors or the blends of colors that she had created and he heard their footsteps as they climbed the dark stairway into the attic and he saw the sun in the open windows and a shadow across the curve of her bare back. He moved his fingers and imagined them in her short and soft hair and he heard her telling him that he didn’t have to go back and we can go somewhere and this time he wasn’t certain how he would answer.

  He arrived in Paris at the Saint-Lazare train s
tation in the middle of an afternoon of sun and marched directly to the last place he had seen her, the café at the end of rue de Clichy. It was not a long walk and his pulse quickened as he moved with stretching strides. The doors and windows of the café were open and people sat at the outside tables and smoked and he walked in and out three times as if he were certain she was there and maybe hiding as part of some game. Back out on the sidewalk he stood with his hands on his hips and was nearly taken out by a bicycle. The small waiter recognized Nick and scolded the bicycle for riding on the sidewalk and then he took Nick’s arm. He led him to a barstool and sat him down and welcomed him with quick chatter that bounced off the preoccupied soldier. Nick drank an espresso and then nodded to the man and walked out. He thought to go to the attic but he didn’t believe she would be there in the light of such a clear day.

  He hurried to Parc Monceau. Crawling with children and their busy shadows. The song of the carousel never ending. He walked the pathways and looked for her and the cart but saw neither. He ate a sandwich while leaning on the iron gates of the front entrance of the park and then he wiped the crumbs from his mouth and walked on. Up through the hills and high steps. Back down and across the Tuileries and then along the river. His eyes in and out of the cafés and scanning the park benches but no sign of her as the afternoon trailed away. He stood at Pont Neuf and scratched his head and then his chin and then reminded himself that the quickest route from A to B is a direct line. Go to the attic.

  He moved north again toward Pigalle and sometimes he walked and sometimes he quickened to a run. He crossed streets without waiting and ignored the honks and shouts. He imagined the attic at the forgotten Théâtre du Rêve and the racks of costumes and he could see her sitting in the windowsill as if she knew he were coming. He reached Pigalle and moved in and out of side streets, trying to remember the theater and the door of the abandoned building that she had led him into and he felt stupid for not having written it down. His forehead sweating and smacking his lips nervously as he searched and then he recognized the building. Scraps of wood and piles of plaster right where he remembered them as he opened the door and walked through and into the alley. In the alley the cats scattered and he opened the door that took him into the black staircase. He started carefully but after the first flight he hustled, taking two steps at a time and then up above he saw the light from the space underneath the door and he tried to gain an extra step and he tripped and fell, smacking his shin and slamming his fist but not stopping. Shaking it off and making it to the top of the stairs. Standing at the door to the attic. Catching his breath and smoothing his hair and wiping the moisture from his top lip.

  He opened the door and the light fell into the staircase. He stepped inside and moved between the costumes and he called her. There was no answer but a sour smell grabbed him and he saw a buzzing of flies. He called her again and she answered with an exasperated exhale and he pushed through the costumes and she was there. Lying on her side and sweating and her knees brought up to her stomach. Her arms wrapped around her knees and rocking a little and not the eyes he had known but replaced by the vacant stare of the sick.

  The attic floor was splattered with vomit. Some there for days and some for hours. Nubs of candles stuck in bottle necks and her clothes and stockings and boots scattered as she lay in only her underwear with a silver evening dress underneath her folded body. Nick knelt and felt her forehead and she was hot and sweating. Her face pale and cheeks drawn and her color drained. A nearly empty bottle of whiskey sat on the floor next to the chair and wadded up next to the bottle was a costume shirt dotted with blood.

  “Ella,” he said.

  She did not lift her head. She lay and rocked and squeezed her legs. Her lips were dry and cracked and she whispered I did not want to.

  “What is it? You need a doctor. Let me take you.”

  “No,” she said. “I cannot move.”

  “What can I do?”

  She only shook her head and touched her dry tongue to her dry lips.

  He scanned the room. The vomit and the shirt spotted with blood. Cigarette butts and only an ounce left in the whiskey bottle. The smell of rot and the sound he now realized of flies. He stood and opened the windows. He picked up an old newspaper from the floor and waved it to move the putrid air. He moved back to her. On his knees and wanting to touch her but not knowing where. Wanting to help her but not knowing how.

  “How long have you been like this?”

  “You came back,” she whispered. “You should not.”

  “I told you I was. Now what can I do?”

  It was a different room. No more mystique and no more sanctuary and no more enchantment. He touched her bare shoulder. Touched her back. Felt her breathing and then he looked around the room again and tried to figure out on his own what had happened. And then he thought about the pebbles he had kept in his pocket and how many there were when he was given leave and he had been gone for more than two months. He thought about what they had done together in this space during their seven days and then he moved his hand to her damp forehead.

  “Ella,” he said as it occurred to him. “Are you?”

  She took several heavy breaths. Let go of her knees and gingerly moved her legs down. She folded her hands underneath the side of her head and closed her eyes.

  “No more,” she said.

  Nick moved his hand from her back. Sat back on the floor. Across the room he noticed a brown bottle lying on its side. The cap off and the bottle empty.

  The air left him. He sat with his mouth open and stared at the pill bottle. Moved his eyes to the bloodstained shirt and to the bluewhite sky outside and then back to her. She was so thin and white and he wanted to scream or stand and kick at the walls or rage at something. He wanted to throw blame at fate or the workings of time or luck or bad luck or himself or her. He wanted to do something other than hold it all in but she began to cry and he held it all in. Because the thing had already been done.

  11

  He sat with her day and night and wiped her face with a damp rag. She sipped from a bottle of laudanum when there was too much pain and then she slept for hours at a time. A deadened, motionless sleep. Sometimes she spoke out from dreams but it was always in French and Nick could not decipher what she was saying or who she might be talking to. He only hoped that it was a vision of them together behind her eyes and that the words she spoke were not of bitterness or guilt. Her voice was monotone and in fragments and he thought once he heard his name but later as he walked along the street below and smoked he knew she hadn’t said Nick.

  While she slept he cleaned up the attic. Scraped away the vomit and got rid of whatever she had used to wipe her mouth or wipe the blood. He kept the windows open and bought fresh flowers to help with the smell. He sat in the windowsill with a cigarette and blew the smoke back into the attic to fight the sourness and he had taken a bucket of rainwater and some rags and wiped down everything. The windowsills and chair and lamp. The floor and her brush and some books. He folded her clothes and stacked them neatly in her suitcase. He went down into the alley and gathered wood scraps from the carpenter’s pile and stacked the scraps next to the unopened bottle of glue and paint cans. Across the tops of the cans he set the brushes and he fixed a wobbly wheel on the cart.

  He had bought bread and bananas and slices of ham. Bottles of water and wine and the chocolate bars he knew she liked. During the first two days she took little but the laudanum and sips of water and wine but after two days he had gotten her to eat some. Sit up straight. Stand for a minute or two. When she was awake she said little and answered his questions with head nods or shakes and she did not look at Nick when she talked but instead out of the window. He was able to put together that she had gotten the pills to get rid of it from a girl at one of the Pigalle dance halls and that she had been alone and sick in the attic for a week. Maybe more. He did not ask her anything else about it and on the third day she sat up in a chair and they shared a glass of wine fro
m glasses he had found in a prop box. Several times she returned a polite and serene smile and looked more like the woman he had known before.

  At night he lit the candles and he pulled the chair over to the mattress. He had bought a couple of newspapers and a comic and he tried to read to her in his best French accent. He had no rhythm and mispronounced badly but she did not correct him. Only lay there and listened to him trying and she would turn on her side and rest her hand on his foot. Each time she touched him he paused. Looked around the side of whatever he was trying to read as if to make sure it was her hand and not something in the dark that he wasn’t ready for. The candles burned and the sky became a navy blanket and even after she nodded off he kept reading and as he sat next to her he realized that he had been here before. With his mother, reading at her side. Dark outside. Dark inside. Past midnight and with Ella sleeping he folded the paper and set it on the floor next to the chair and he said to the attic the world repeats itself. He said it with certainty as if it was something he had always known but just now found the courage to admit. I have been here before and I will be here again. I wonder what war I will fight in next and will it be worse and who will be the enemy. What hand will I try to hold somewhere in my future that will remind me of this hand I am trying to hold now. This hand that I want to hold on to as if it were something priceless and precious and I think that it is. This sick hand but it will not be sick forever and I will make sure of that. I will try as hard as I can try no matter that I know I am at the mercy of whatever circles us around. We are here now but we will be here again and next time with the child but will it be with different faces and different sounds but the same desperate feeling? The same slipping grip on what we have made?

  She was fast asleep. Her hand across the toe of his boot. He reached down and moved her hand to below her chin. She breathed in and out with a barely audible wheeze.