Forget the Sleepless Shores

by Sonya Taaffe

  **

  He brought flowers and waited outside the stage door, an armful of chrysanthemums and his jacket collar turned up against the light rain sifting out of the sky, cool and fresh with ozone and burgeoning spring. In the mercury-vapor lights of the theater’s garage, the tightly packed petals looked less crushed-velvet red than some species of black, and Blake thought about throwing one under Niko’s feet when he came out. Some of the orchestra had already emerged, and most of the children’s chorus with sequins in their hair and proud parents in tow; a few figures gathered under the overhang of the gutter outside the security office, musicians or tech crew, clouds of smoke marking their conversation. Blake’s hair had grown out enough to get into his eyes with the rain, still straight and wintry brown, and he was wiping it back from his forehead when he heard her lighter click.

  The tip of her cigarette flared and condensed to a hot anemone eye, lowered from her lips in a gesture that was the ruin of honest detectives. Pulled back loosely with a metal clip, her hair had the luster of burnished bronze; the scratched lines of her face had filled out, so that mostly the familiar lean of her shoulders against rain-streaked concrete gave her away, and her unblinking gaze. She breathed out smoke carelessly, as though it were everyday air. Under the navy peacoat, she wore a black T-shirt with some paler logo that Blake could not read scribbled across its front. Her wrists were unscarred.

  If he had thought it would make any difference, clear or change his vision, Blake would have taken off his glasses; rain freckled their lenses and he did not move, transfixed while singers and musicians moved around him and a small child ran past him into the wet night, chasing another who had stolen its cartoon-blue umbrella. The chrysanthemums were a forgotten weight in the crook of his arm. When her eyes lifted to him, finally, their color would sear his sight: a memory of flames he had never felt crawled over his skin, insubstantial immolation, and he shuddered convulsively as Niko said, “At last, I have a groupie! A groupie with pneumonia. What are you standing around in the rain for? Next time, come backstage; it’s dryer and far more gratifying. Well, at least for my vanity.”

  Smudged still with glittering paint, remnants of his trickster’s mask caught at his hairline and brows, under his cheekbones and one earlobe that Blake contemplated licking clean, his face held some of the weight of whatever other world he had drawn onstage: where fire was metamorphosis and dull lead melted to gold. But under the makeup was Niko Sofianos, in worn black jeans and a windbreaker, and his scars were not memories.

  “I’m imitating William Henry Harrison,” Blake said. “Only with flowers. Here.”

  “And they’re not even lilies.” Hands full of chrysanthemums and Blake’s hands, Niko marveled until Blake smacked him, lightly, with one of the flowers. The rain was thickening, and even most of the smokers had gone; streetlight fractured white in the puddles at their feet. “Are we waiting for anyone?”

  Over Niko’s shoulder, the stranger with fiery hair and clean-skinned hands ground out her cigarette against the wall.

  “No,” Blake said, and took hold of Niko’s sleeve. Under sweat and makeup and the gel that still spiked Niko’s hair with glitter, he could smell the faint flavors of cedarwood and steeped tea: familiar smokescreen, smolder that disguised. No answers in the ashes, even of their fire. “I’m not.”

  ON THE BLINDSIDE

  The alley was full of late afternoon shadows, and the bricks were scattered with frost.

  Stooping for a closer look, fingers hesitant over the cracked wall, she knelt among dead leaves and splintered plywood, the remains of fruit crates that late October rains and chills had gnawed on; stripped branches overhung the wall, out of reach and so brittle to the eye that they might snap under even the weight of the pale sunlight, the sky wind-polished to a fervent blue. Her eyes were beginning to cross, from staring. Newspaper rustled like the black-and-white ghosts of the leaves, and she felt colder inside than the dying wind.

  Harder every time, to force her vision through: worse than staring a 3-D design into focus, Sam thought, and refused to blink. More like finding the trick to an optical illusion; pinning down the blind spot in her sight. Which eye do you see me with? Chion had asked her that, in his boy’s dauntless voice more than twenty years gone: thin, ragged as autumn, a glancing quick-copper ease in his movements as he circled her; and she, who knew the fairy tale, held still in sick terror of the needle stabs, blind darkness, blood. Behind him, a pair of slender figures put hands up to identical mouths and giggled as Sam whispered, shaking, Both…. Within a week, she would not fear them, Mimiko-Remembrance and Mimiko-Regret, their white-peach faces like two halves of the same moon, angular bodies that interlocked like jigsaw when one leaned on the other or wrapped an arm around a skinny waist. Then, she had closed her eyes against their merciless laughter and only opened them—fear suddenly dissolved like honey in tea, alchemized comfort—when she heard that Chion had also begun, much more startled and much more wryly, to laugh.

  A dull ache pulsed at the inside of her temples, and she exhaled hard between her teeth. Black grains were crawling across her vision now, as though brick and cinderblock and cold autumnal air were shivering apart, a cloudy breakdown of atoms, molecular bands snapping one by one to reveal the vibrating emptiness between. Under her palm, the wall did not give: more solid to the touch than the eye. How had she ever found this easy? Frustration swelled in her throat like tears, dryer and more nauseous; she was scratching across the wall with both hands now, unable to see anything more than the constant headache fraying of her sight, feeling nothing more than the crystallized damp that her nails skidded through, over these rough blocks laid down in a year of industry and reason.

  The blank plane of brick and pecked-out mortar shivered. A tic of flesh, skin twitching off a fly, an unwanted touch; and Sam leaned in harder, turning sideways, twisting, until the bricks like dusty, cinnamon meat yielded to her body’s weight and parted. A last icewater wash of wind skimmed over her shoulders before the wall slid grainily around her, clay and soft fruit, a smell of rotting iris and chrysanthemums sagging in a forgotten vase. Her head pounded like the god of wine’s own hangover. In the smeared and sparking darkness inside the wall, between states and certainties, Sam realized she was smiling.

  Heat struck her like a slap across the face. Beneath her sweater and turtleneck, jeans worn milk-white at the knees and work boots with laces double-knotted, she was instantly rinsed with sweat; some inverse summer here, or they always kept the heat turned up. The light was gas-lamps and fluttering candles, not the sun declining toward winter. The air smelled of freshly-baked bread and, the wall’s aftertaste, decaying flowers. Stumbling from the momentum she never felt herself pick up, awkward from lack of practice, she almost ran into the broad granite workbench before she could stop herself. Across the room, a light, sliding voice said, “So the wanderer alights at last.”

  Even through three years’ unfamiliarity, she could hear the surprise. Straightening, Samantha Fine wiped sweat-tangled hair away from her face and laughed, a little breathless still, a little bitter and as always dazzled.

  The room was as crowded as she remembered, with the same tatty velvet and tawdry antiques that had so entranced her as a child and even a young woman. Even the broken-down gramophone, that no one had ever wound up, still stood among dried sheaves of grain and a wooden doll whose neck had broken and tilted over to one side. Unlike her memories, it was empty but for herself and Chion in the corner, one leg hooked up over the overstuffed arm of his chair and one booted foot swinging, the skirts of his vast, mole-mottled coat spread out over the stained blue upholstery like shed skins. He had acquired a walking stick since the last time she had seen him, hand-polished blackthorn and a cat’s-eye slug winking in the head, that she saw when he moved his long, tea-stain fingers. All too easily, she could picture the myriad uses he would find for it.

  Over his shoulders, his hair scattered like an explosion of fallen leaves, shaggy and all the colors bet
ween gold and crimson and tannin-brown. She could not read his narrow face, grooved with all manner of sidelong expressions. His eyes were lazy and metallic, warm buttons of brass.

  “Is this a social visit?” If Chion had mislaid his composure, he had it back before Sam had all her breath; gaslight and candlelight sieved his eyes for brightness, dipped up reflections and dropped them as he blinked, owl-slow. “Some people write before they drop by,” and she saw finally the smallest twist of a smile at one corner of his mouth, for the thought of a letter slipped through a slot in the derelict brick, the wall at Sam’s back where threadbare tapestry made over into curtains hung down across faces of stone still harsh from the quarries. Briefly, she wondered what kind of postcards Mimiko would write, what images would appear on the stamps. Milk poured over corn; constellations like the night sky turned inside out and over itself; urban skylines as looped and jagged as handwriting. She could not imagine Chion in a post office.

  Hand to hand, deft and absent, he was tossing the walking stick like a decision still unmade. She wanted to pull off her sweater, cable-knit wool gathering heat against her skin like a private greenhouse effect; not under his glinting scrutiny. Too much time between their last meeting, too much change, even as her muscles remembered an easiness in his presence, her skin their contrasted shades. For a moment as sharp as a needle, she wished for Dalmaty or even dark, bristling Vistres, anyone else in the room to break not the silence collecting between them, but all the unspoken things of three, or ten, or twenty years. Next time, I’ll remember, she had almost said; had not. Her first words, here, now, were crucial.

  Gravely, Chion said, “You’re looking well.”

  Unless she wanted to shout at him, she had nothing to say to that. Of the books strewn across this side of the workbench, red and green and royal blue covers water-stained and battered at the corners, Sam picked up a random volume, opened it and stared at the neat, close-printed diagonal slants of lettering across the rough paper, the color of brown rice. Her laughter was gone, the migraine aftermath of transition back; she turned pages that she could not read and felt sweat bleeding through her shirt where it stuck to her shoulderblades, a prickling ache diffused down her bones. Children were meant to hurtle through the spaces between here and elsewhere, the fearless and innocent heroes of daydreams and nightmares, not married women returning to university in the fall for degrees in medieval history. Once she had wanted to catalogue the dynasties and protectorates that Dalmaty could recite like the alphabet, riddled with coups and illegitimate cousins and the occasional occupation, and prophecies that were neither believed nor discounted; had written down what she could remember, thirteen or moody fourteen in her mother’s never-unpacked apartment, and a classmate had read the pages and promptly wanted her to join a club for students who wrote science fiction. Probably she was not staring at a history book, right now. Poetry, or omen texts; with her luck, a romance novel.

  She put it down on top of a volume whose crimson binding had washed out to pressed rose, staining the pages, and looked finally back at Chion. He had caught the walking stick on its last pass and not lowered his hand; he looked like a magician who had forgotten, halfway through, how the trick ended.

  “Ah.” She could not tell what the sound meant: understanding, resignation, or simply a syllable to stall the conversation until he figured out what came next. His mouth ridged on one side in another smile, not unkind and not reassuring. “So, then. What do you want?”

  She had no other first words: she gave them to him as calmly as she could. “Look at me.”

  Thinner than the last time he had seen her? Did he know where all the new lines had come from? Three years ago, Sam had worn her hair in a long, fair, unraveling plait; short and unexpectedly spiky for another year, it had grown out now to an uneven shock too short to pin up off her neck, too long simply to run her fingers through in the morning. Changes she did not care if Chion noticed, and she waited until his gaze moved across her face and stopped, double-checked, and he stared back into her eyes whose irises were the acid, translucent pale-green of limes: not the rind, but the tart broken flesh.

  “Two years ago,” Sam said, “they were brown.”

  Chion swung his leg down from the chair’s arm, dropped both hands onto the walking stick and set its tip against the timbered floor; he might have been sitting for a portrait, regarding her. “It’s a good look for you. Myself, I prefer something a little more prismatic, but the world would die of boredom if we all looked the same.”

  She had not expected much of anything else. Still it astonished her, the immediate hurt and all the retorts that leaped up behind her teeth; she kept her mouth closed until she was sure none of them—The world would die of boredom if it had to listen to you talk!—would startle out. “Myself,” she said tightly, “I prefer how I looked.” Anger made her absurdly confident; she skinned the sweater over her head, left it lying over the tattered books and strode around the workbench until only a glaze-green vase half full of dry sticks stood between her and Chion. “Like myself. Not like this.”

  Close enough now, she put up one hand and pushed back a forward-falling hank of hair, still fair and shot through with early grey, like all her father’s side of the family. But these strands were not silver from age, or even yellowed to ash, but hard and gleaming as wires. She had never dared cut one, to find out if it broke differently. If she would need tinsnips. Sometimes, when she turned over at night, one scratched.

  When Chion’s eyes widened, their pupils dilated in slots. “That’s different.”

  “That’s the obvious.” He did not ask; she did not offer. As he looked up at her, she could have reached down and sunk her fingers into his heavy, tatterdemalion hair; touched the pale scar that furrowed up one cheekbone, healed and new since she had last seen him. There was no place for desire now, even without the cold in her bones and throat as she spoke. “But even this, how long until people start to notice? Until somebody checks the color of my eyes—I have photographs, I have a driver’s license, damn it. And,” the words spilling over, no gentle way she had ever envisioned to say this fact, unwieldy, imperative, “I’m married. And we want to have children. And I can’t. Not like this. I can’t.”

  One of the gas-lights sputtered in its brass fixture, sank into blue petals and died. Chion’s laugh was softer than the slight, extinguishing sound. “I shouldn’t have expected an invitation to the wedding, I suppose. When?”

  “Eight months ago. Lucas. He’s an engineer.”

  “Sounds very steady.”

  Sam said helplessly, “He sings opera in the shower. Badly. He wants to put speakers the size of California into my car, the Bonneville, it’s the color of cherry cough syrup and he wants to make it sleek; that’s the sort of thing he obsesses about. He doesn’t know I—” Lunatic, schizophrenic, lost in fantasies; nothing Lucas would ever say, and the phrase conjured up nothing else. “See things. I don’t want to talk about him. I want—”

  “To stop seeing things?” The way Chion moved, he could have broken her neck before she had time to draw breath for a scream; he ducked out of the chair, slipping past her reach and around the workbench, with little more eff ort than if he had leaned back into his lazing, contemplative pose again. Had he thought Sam would hurt him? The thought was as inconceivable as crushing quicksilver.

  Even with the crowded span of granite between them, glass flasks and retorts clustered at his end, some still crusted with colored crystals from their long-dried contents, he hardly looked at ease. Puzzled, aching, Sam said, “I can’t keep looking in rivers and seeing a different season’s trees reflected behind me. Passing strangers on the street and noticing their shadows have colors. Windows look like doorways. Stairways stop in thin air. When I want to see, it’s like shoving mountains aside with my eyes. It gets worse every year. Something you grow out of, maybe…. But all the little details, the distractions, they’re getting worse too. And this.” She did not have to widen her eyes, or indicate he
r streaked, glimmering hair. “What am I going to turn into? Lucas thinks my eyes have always been green.”

  Chion picked up a small graduated cylinder, shook it until an azure glitter of dust roused up from the glass. His voice was dry as the last of autumn’s leaves. “Some husband, if he’d leave you for the color of your eyes.”

  She must have been able to talk to him once: now, she could not think how. “That’s not what I mean. That’s not the point,” Sam started, and lost her temper and the rest of the sentence in a sudden shout, “Stop talking about Lucas! It’s not what I am! It’s not what I want my child to be!”

  The cylinder shattered on the floor in a puff of shards and powder-blue. Chion yelled back, “And what am I to do about that?”

  The savagery in his face, that had always looked made for wry smiles and harmless, biting commentary, frightened her more than the question: energized her. Like a card reversed, she stared at him across granite, books, desultory alchemical pastimes: slight and fiery as a tree unleaving, tense against the backdrop of white-flaked stone and raveling, knotwork hunting-scenes. He looked furious, stretched thin with something like terror that she had never seen in him, and for once not fast enough to evade her. Caught in her grip, his wrist was skinnier than she remembered, but the same odd hinge of bone slid under the skin as he twisted to free himself.

  Hold me fast and fear me not, for I’m the father of—once, maybe. Not anymore. She wanted Lucas.

  “Chion.” For a moment he stilled, eyes blind rings of bronze. “It’s your world. No one in mine has any idea. If you walked out of a wall in my Bede class, my God, the whole class would need therapy for years. That’s why—if I’d seen the way I do from birth, I’d never have made it to adolescence. I can’t pass that on to a child. It has to be here, or nowhere. I thought staying away would be enough. It’s not. Your world bleeds into mine and I don’t know how to stop it. I never see mine showing through yours,” and as she finished, “It’s a one-way mirror. I’ll show you from my side,” her vision pulled apart into haze and grains of black.