by Sonya Taaffe
Anything but the anger or tricks or flight she had braced herself against, she watched his face open into something disbelieving, half-impressed, more like long-exploding exasperation than mortal threat. “Binding,” she heard him echo, and there was the rest of his voice, before she could say anything else, a sudden tight-wired tenor boom: “Damn you, give me that back—”
He was faster than she had thought, not flailing at all. Her weight thrown backward, she nearly fell against the window, a white-painted straight-edge of molding not inches from her shoulder; she clipped a bookcase instead and hissed out loud with the pain, twisting to get her body between the oar and Evelyn’s graceless hands, diving for their prize as if he fought dirty every day. Any slower, he might have grasped wood; quicker, she could have given him her sleeve or an elbow in the ribs; their hands closed and she knew with absolute stupid certainty that the man she touched was not alive, not for a long time now, and afraid of her, as he should have been.
**
The last, feverish summer before she left the no-man’s-land of her mother’s house for Berkeley and all the degrees that she never would use, a codemaker from Brixton sat every night at the end of Delia’s bed and said nothing as streetlight and the setting moon made silver coins of his glasses, cloud-wrack of his schoolboy-fair hair. Sometimes he had a manila folder in his hands, a coat folded over his lap; he was dappled with his death-marks like a breaking wave, the night raid and the incendiaries that had left as little of the cheap-curtained, top-floor room on Camberwell as of its lodger, a Christmas gift from the Luftwaffe whose engine-drone she could hear on the nights she slept under his gaze, the flames in white-lit billows like an old newsreel, and she woke alone, in a sweat as cold as burning, clawing the bedclothes off like ashes and bricks. Some nights he seemed able to see her, turning from the window with a sweet, conspiratorial smile. Some nights he only stared ahead of him with a hopeless, set-mouthed apprehensiveness, and she wondered if he was hearing the bangs and whistles far overhead of falling bombs, the glare and jerry-rigged bedsits of the shelter he should have been in the night he died. He made no sense in a house built half a century before Moby-Dick, its high ceilings cracking in the wind off Narragansett Bay; he should have been haunting Baker Street or the Victoria line, not Delia’s faux-Tiffany lamp or the stuffed-animal leopard she still squeezed for comfort in her sleep, despite patchy fur and the stiff, matte-black spots where she had nearly lost it to a newly tarred road in 1985. Once, near dawn, in a light as sticky and exhausted as the codeine and coffee that had done nothing to keep his dead man’s dreams out of her head, he tried to touch her: worried, gallant. Her left hand ached like chain-link in winter for days. She would have found a vengeful spirit easier.
She was stuck with him, while downstairs her mother railed at the telephone as if it were God’s ear and her father came and went with no more to add than a pause of footsteps on the landing and the glass-jangling slam of doors. When she poured a double line of salt against her doorway, he was already on ts other side; when she left bowls of water on her windowsill, his face wavered in them like a forlorn moon. The blue of his eyes between serge and columbine, off-cast with pewter behind the glint of his wire-rims, the fine lines compressed around his mouth like stage makeup of the old bones he might have made—she could pinpoint the night she realized nothing about him was strange to her anymore and it was worse than knowing the taste of her own burnt teeth. His death was older than the home fronts her grandparents had fought on. Shucked of his cardigan vest and the neat touch of grease in his hair, he could have passed for any one of her mother’s second-year students, jockeying with mezzotints and monotypes for studio space on Union Street. She watched him wipe his glasses clean with a smudgy, instructional handkerchief, turn over sheets of handwritten paper as if he were still at a desk somewhere, working out plaintexts and keys; at his quietest, the small, sticking wrongness of a chipped incisor or a sore throat, the dust-scratch across the eye that dragged a blink into a match-white blinding flare. Go away, she had whispered until it became meaningless, more noise in a house full of words that did nothing. The only rattled tables and flying plates at the south end of Ann Street belonged to the living.
And late in heat-lightning August, when the haze over the interstate burned like a refinery with taillights and sodium reflections and the window fan sounded too much like a bomber’s whine and roar, Delia lay on sweat-crumpled sheets and tried to close out everything but Robbie O’Connell and the Clancy Brothers—five-string banjo and Bobby’s voice soft as a letter frayed with folding, Paddy’s harmonica like a soldier’s wistful whistling in the dark—when she realized the codemaker was listening. A sleep I shall have, a rest I shall have, yet death will be but a pause…. She had not thought it was one of the nights he could see her, stretched flat and restless in a pair of worn plaid boy shorts and the knots of her unbraided hair, but the moonblanks of his glasses tipped and slid suddenly as he took them off with sharper movements than she had ever seen him make, and when she rolled over to turn off the Walkman and stare frankly back at him, she would have sworn she saw something like a blush fading among his silver nitrate shadows before he looked away. Her noonday demon after dark, whom nothing of this earth had ever drawn out enough to make him leave it. He was fiddling with his glasses, turning them over with foxfire-splashed fingers as if he were still alive and nerving himself up to ask a girl to the cinema or a man out for a drink. Yours and yours and yours…. It was easy, after all, as easy as anything that hurt. This time when she reached out in the half-light, he was the one who flinched.
She held on, though his sleeve felt like the rough coat of February, the scarring cold of the empty flesh beneath, and her breath jerked and hiccupped as if there were live wires in the stone-sharp turn of his wrists; though the night-sketched clutter around them was beginning to warp and flare like will-o’-the-wisps or melting film, until the codemaker’s hand tightened around hers like frostbite and white phosphorus and still she held on. Down the turn of the stairs, someone was whispering so fiercely, it hurt more to hear than a shout, but she could not tell if it was her mother on long-distance or her father leaving for the dozenth time or the rescue workers who had pulled out of the snow-hissing rubble nothing a poem-code could have put back together, cardboard earth burying little more than a name. The air she gasped for was hot as her dreams, choking with coal gas and plaster and the lime-kiln acridity of blasted brick; he frightened her and he hurt to be near and she gave him all the songs she could remember that might lead him back from the loose ends of the twentieth century to the Blitz that was over before her mother was born, from his death down into the dark.
She would never recall them all afterward, any more than the dead who might have sung them when they were new: white cliffs and little city flowers, wry-faced soldiers and their Windmill girls, the ghosts of tube posters blowing round deserted stations, bright grey snapshots of his shadow on a splinter-swept street. Nothing she could make as real as saccharine-stiff tea gone cold as the dawn-fogged windows with an all-nighter indecipherable, but she dredged mock-reveille from mornings in her grandmother’s kitchen and music hall from footnotes in her father’s fake books, an old iron plate, an old iron grate your mother used to fry on as the sky turned milky as old glass, and imagined that she could tell which helped, which hindered, which made no difference at all. Over and over again, like a signal-lantern lifted into the blackness that lay out before them like fast, deep water or night on a broad road, until the words were a foreign language and her voice ground down to the cinders of a chanteuse’s sensuous smoke, my Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marlene. She did not know if there was anyone waiting for him, by its light or elsewhere. She could feel neither of their fingers anymore. His glasses, cat-eyed, shining like a wound, were the last thing she saw before one of them disappeared.
She woke past noon in the sweat-warm weight of summer, filling the room like an overdrawn bath; she had dreamed of the pale gills of wrists and
the wet-edged angle of a razor, drying in a curl of crimson like a question mark. Her palm came away shining when she wiped her face, peeled the seaweedy, split ended snarl of her hair from around her throat. In the aimless, flooding light, it looked no different than before a dead man had gripped it, except for the bone-bruise beat of her heart to her fingertips, her muscles aching as if she had thrown herself all night against some unyielding wall. There was the chimney-stack, its cooler bricks painted with sixth-grade robins and sea-green leaves, Delia’s unwieldy signature in acrylic blue where the carpet missed the floorboards by an inch. There was A High Wind in Jamaica where she had left it halfway through Chapter Three, the deck of the Clorinda bookmarked with the nine of spades. No broken spills of plaster, no scattered code-cards. She could not look at calendar, mirror, or closet and see where he had gone. And she knew, nearly better than anything in seventeen years of her life, better than the dry nausea in her mouth or the shrapnel scars of history in her thoughts, there would be ghosts with her always—the boy from Miyakojima, still clutching his torn net with mulberry leaves in his tsunami-black hair, the rag-shod girl who had died at Riga with a pistol in her hand—the ones she could see already and the ones that had yet to find her, drawn wakerife from wherever the codemaker had strayed or stayed—the painter with her laudanum cough and a room on Malaya Bronnaya, the Boston bootlegger with the flick-knife lift of his brows—and the one that would never leave her, no matter what she said or sang, any more than she could walk away from her shadow.
She signed her student housing papers right-handed, the dead burning in her bones like time.
**
She would not lie to either of them and say that she did not remember what she had done to the ghost that called itself Evelyn Burney, not when he had drawn her blood in his panic and she had left worse marks on him. In ninth grade, lunch-break reading under the blocky shadows of Brutalist concrete and the pecking commentary of the latest inescapable boy in baseball caps and sweatshirts who called her a dyke and a Satanist and asked her in stage whispers to show them how she got herself off —come on, you’ve got to be so good at it by now, a guy’s dick just fucking vanishes when he looks at you—she had breathed in the cold, dry-edged air of the last week before Thanksgiving and dropped Fitzgerald’s Odyssey, stood up and windmilled the kid so hard in the face, he went over sideways with a surprised snort of blood from the nose she thought she must have broken, before he coughed and spat and she realized it was only his bitten tongue. More than the way her fingers had twinged stiffly until Christmas, the guidance counselor’s questions or her parents’ chilly back-and-forthing of blame, she remembered how she had felt, seeing that holly-bright spatter among the chewing-gum smears at her feet: not shame, or satisfaction, or even the draining after-cold of adrenaline as she retrieved her books and the boy shouted thick-tongued threats he never would carry out, but the simple recognition of damage: her hands, another’s hurt. With her boots in salt-welling mud and tall grasses rattling like scabbards about her waist, she had watched Evelyn with the sunset flare behind him shaking with rage and fright and felt the same distant sense of restraint slip from her, as she imagined most people spoke of losing their tempers; he was a dead man afraid of the dead, his oar gone clattering across the floor when they grappled and fell against bookshelves and old plaster that crunched under her weight like a mask’s papier-mâché, color film in graphite-black canisters rolling underneath the desk, and Delia could not remember the last time anyone had run from her. She could not catch him in the salt marsh he knew better than any afterlife, all the long years or centuries hiding out from whatever he should have gone on to. His face was a knot of shadows, the red-sailed sky in his glasses like blood. For just a moment, she wondered if he knew what she meant to do; she saw his mouth moving, but she did not think it was prayer.
In the spring of the year, she sang him this ay night, until she could feel the way down rising to meet her, the dark river that was a white road opening step by step beneath their feet, as it lay underneath every sea and stone, the journey no one could avoid taking and few ever retrace. Candle-glim and gorse-thorn, she made herself look at him when he folded to his knees in the burnt-gold-rippling tide and the first hesitations of silver began to streak the air; by Brig o’ Dread, the air was full of half-seen foxfire in the twilight and he would have given her his fingernails if that would have sent off whatever lovers or creditors he recognized in those desolate lanterns, but they were no longer coming to her voice, only his, bargaining, begging, his hands driven through his hair like rosaries, Kirke’s shades come up for their honey and their barley and their blood. She could not see him, the next time she looked through the dimming reeds. And Christ receive thy soul.
It took her until full dark to come back inside, searching from his house to her car on its thin boardwalk of sand just in case he had run somewhere as mundane as inland. She saw a heron’s long-winged flap on the horizon, the half-moon floating in the sound like an oyster shell; the tide was high and turning nearly at his threshold, asking no more leave to come in. Evelyn was curled in the slate-colored armchair, his glasses off and dangling from his cattail-torn fingers, too drained even to hide. He looked as though he had fallen in the marshes, more than once; struggled to his feet and plunged on through whip-wire cordgrass and brackish mud with all of Hell’s flame and Purgatory fire behind him, running him to the only safe ground he knew. The oar was clasped to his chest like a childhood toy, the green-shaded lamp among the desk’s bric-a-brac of pens and papers a third-degree glare from the way his fingers folded over his eyes. As quietly as she tried to ease the storm door shut, at its small metallic slam he started nearly out of his chair with a jumbled suddenness that would have been silent comedy if Delia had not seen his face, as shapeless and sticky with tears as a small child’s, as indecently transparent as all the dead. Even then, he showed nothing of a ghost’s vagueness, the silvery marks of dying about their persons or their clothes that sometimes remembered what the long-lost flesh pretended it could forget. He looked maybe thirty-five, maybe forty-five, undignified and alive and unhappy. When she pulled the straight-backed chair over from the desk, so that he would not have to stare any more vulnerably upward, he blinked with damp-stuck lashes and tried to fumble his glasses into place; his hands were shaking badly and he lowered them again, resting the mud-streaked lenses on his knee as if he were sitting for a portrait. She did not think he would want to remember either of them like this.
Because she did not know what more harm she could do him, she said curiously, “You don’t really need those, do you?”
“A lot you know about what I need.” His voice was colorless again, distantly drypoint, as if she had never heard him crying out. In the slant light, she could see blood as well as mud in his stiff-spiked hair—he was spattered with it, chin to brow as if it had been flung in his face, and Delia could not tell if it was his own, or if not, if she really wanted to know where it had come from. Closed, his long-lidded eyes gave him a meditative look, except for the tears. “You came here knowing what you wanted so well….”
“This isn’t about what I wanted.” She had not called the dead out of season to have this argument over with him again; she could feel it starting anyway, coming around on the guitar. The old unceasing anger was there without her even needing to feel for it, her own easy descent, waiting underneath everything she did not say. “I said that at the start: I wouldn’t have come here if it was just me and unfinished business. It’s what someone I—someone who matters very much to me needs,” and Evelyn gave a wet, hopeless sound that might have been laughter, hung up on clogged sinuses and irony. One arm still hung around her chair-back, Delia was fishing a wad of Kleenex out of her pocket—crumpled but clean, padding out her jacket like the clementines she carried everywhere in winter or her rattling tins of ginger-flavored mints—before she realized how ordinary the gesture felt, and stopped.
He took the tissues from her anyway, without giving away an inch
of his guard-dog’s grip on the oar, and blew his nose so noisily and thoroughly that she wondered if he was putting it on, reassuring himself of all the quirks and faults and frailties of this body that was no such thing, even while his shadow lay soft and clean across the silt-tracked floor. There were ribbons of eelgrass snapped around his still-bare ankles, trailing wetly from his soaked cuffs; she had seen the splashes and trampled sedge when he ran. His footprints had led her back in, pitch-dark, through his door.
More gently this time, gesturing at the oar and not at the glasses he was fitting, painstakingly and clumsily, one-handed, back onto his face: “Are you bound to it?”
Evelyn stared at her with a handful of damp Kleenex and his glasses hooked over one ear, a bruise darkening on his cheekbone she had not seen before. “Oh, yes,” he said, wonderingly. “I can’t let it go. It….” His voice was very small, childlike as the back of one wrist rubbed against his mouth now that he had his lenses on straight, his shields and blinders back up. “It makes things safe for me.”
Delia nodded, slowly. What she had wanted was not to ask this question, to know its answer before she did: “And if I take the oar?”
What there was of his smile was pure mockery, twisting as a taste of brine. “I’ll go where you go.”
His eyes were as dark as the door of the earth, for once holding hers as steadily as she studied him: not the first person she had ever hurt so precisely, but perhaps the first she had ever stayed around to acknowledge afterward. Neither of them had collected the books knocked from their careful stacks, the magazines sliding in a fan of matinée faces under the jade plant’s kicked-over earth. Belatedly, she thought of cracking ice cubes out of a tray and offering them for his bloodied face, but she was not sure that she could leave him, or that she had the right not to. Either way, it was too late for pretending. She had made her choice the minute she opened her mouth, standing at the edge of a tidal creek with a dead man’s house behind her; all she could do was be honest with it.
