Forget the Sleepless Shores

by Sonya Taaffe

  With the same abstracted candor, she had remarked on her six months in the Danish Merchant Navy, how she had backpacked across Ireland for free, and broken her ankle climbing down Mount Fuji in the dark: as randomly and reliably far-fetched as an ancient geographer. You don’t believe me, she had said to Maddy over afternoon coffee a week or two ago—small, cliché small world, when Maddy realized that the pale music-store clerk lived three floors up from her own apartment; she had bought Le Tigre and Electrelane from her the day before— unoffended, amused. I don’t blame you. But I don’t lie. Not a tall woman, and not more than thirty; her brows were almost as light as her hair, her skin as faintly flawed as a plate glazed to crack. The lip piercing was fresh, still flushed, and she had tongued it exploratorily between sentences. The moon was a new story.

  Whether she would tell the truth now, or a fantasy, or neither, Maddy did not care. If she could fill her head with strangers’ loves, perhaps Charles would not stick so insistently in her thoughts, a fishbone that scraped as she swallowed. Or maybe she could come home tonight and find him still awake, waiting up for her as he had done in their early days, a care that had charmed her all the more because he never thought he was doing anything special, so that she could tell him he was more to her than any mythical one-night stand. Perhaps. Maybe. The words tasted like the smoke unraveling downwind, gunpowder and dissolution. Still she said, “So tell me about your moon. Do you mind? I’d like to hear what you dream.”

  “You’re better off with Charles.” Brace laughed softly; opened one eye, dolphin-dark. A spray of firecrackers a few roofs away sounded like incendiary bubble wrap. “It’s easy to fall in love with the moon. It’s afterward that’s hard. But—” a slight shift of her shoulder, a horizontal shrug “—there’s nothing unique in that.”

  **

  The coffee grinder had broken the day after the Fourth of July, in a coughing whine and stutter of black-brown grounds that they mopped off the countertop with damp paper towels, so she put two mugs of water in the microwave to nuke for tea. Charles was reading on her bed, a wasteland of dark-blue sheets and three or four pillows in a crazy-quilt mismatch of pillowcases; framed posters for Kill Bill and City of Lost Children on the walls, the Decemberists on the stereo, and if she walked into the other room she would see the dogwood tree outside her window still flowering like May. On the floor, where she had sat down to file some scattered manga, Maddy listened to the hum of the big fan in the window and did not reach to pick up Angel Sanctuary. Their silence congealed in her stomach, cold and unmoving.

  Charles turned another page of Novalis, mid-afternoon sun in his hair like molasses. He never wore T-shirts with images or logos; this one was blue-black, a size too small, a muscle shirt if he had had muscle worth showing off. No beauty, for all that she could watch him for hours on end: creases and angles as awkward as a stepped-on rake, his face constructed from fine components and no symmetry, like a blind collage. He always looked sleepy when reading. No, she don’t know why she got all dolled up for a suicide…. Faintly through Colin Meloy and the fan’s white noise, Maddy heard the microwave beep.

  She still had one hand on the mattress when Charles closed Novalis, the nearest corner of the sheet like a bookmark between night-hymns, and said as conversationally as a glance at his watch or her name, “Abwärts wend ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht.”

  His head was still bent toward his book, the nearest pillow with an ink-brush print of a sleeping cat wrinkled over fawn-colored cloth. On their second date, he had recited Jacques Brel in French until the nearest tables at the little noodle shop were all looking at them, and she had only heard David Bowie’s version before. “And for those of us who don’t speak German?”

  “Oh, like I could call a cab in Berlin….” Translation unfocused him, as though he were winnowing words out of the spaces between the air: molecule by molecule, from somewhere he could never see, only feel. “‘Down I turn to the night, holy, unutterable, full of secrets.’”

  The cold in Maddy’s stomach touched her throat, so that her voice was very soft. “What brought that to mind?”

  Sunlight fingered a dozen kinds of green from Charles’ eyes, bright and momentary as an edge of bottle glass, as he turned his face toward her for as long as it took him to say, “I just liked it. Is that a problem?”

  More puzzlement than edge in his voice, this time: easy enough to sharpen if she let herself reply. Those words he might have declaimed to the darkness as it blossomed in fireworks, their moment slid past in days that simmered like sun-sticky blacktop, nights that clung like melted velvet to the skin, and now she could not listen.

  “Fine. Jesus,” and he reached for the paperback, place lost as he pulled it free of the sheets. As snappish as though she had slapped him with it, “I thought you’d like the imagery. Your sort of thing, isn’t it?” The microwave was plaintive in the kitchen and she left the room before he could open the book again; before she regretted how she would answer him, this temptation of another night. He leaned over and punched off the music as she passed. Is it too late to tell you—

  **

  Under the hood, the engine snarls and buzzes like a ripsaw, until Charles pulls the slate-blue Civic over in the breakdown lane. The night sky smolders with stars like sea-salt flares, cold sapphire rages in the pure dark, each the size of Maddy’s palm that she raises to measure the unfamiliar constellations; the hills and trees rimmed in silver, all this back-country desolation where the road coils like dropped ribbon, though she sees no moon. Her shadow on the gravel and scrabbly weeds is faint with starlight, even her freckled skin turned pale as skimmed milk.

  Behind her, Charles curses and she hears him drop the wrench back into the canvas bag of tools he keeps in the trunk, though she can change a tire far easier than he—his fingers are for turning pages and taking notes, spider-scrambling over his laptop’s keys, and the one time he tried to fix her toilet they had to call a plumber for the entire floor. “Sweet,” he says. “I knew it was running too sweet,” and when she leans to see beneath the raised hood, the engine is all one mass of hornets’ nest, head gaskets and valves mummified in sugar-brown paper and seething with yellow jackets. Honey drips through the transmission and pools like amber-clear oil on the asphalt. His fingers are smeared with it, reddened with stings, and he sucks on them absently as he closes the hood. “Luna de miel,” the way he loves to scatter other languages like largesse into their conversations. “The moon will have to fix it.”

  “What moon?” Maddy starts to argue, before she sees the silver bubbling up through the trees, sliding in rivulets over the hills, as the blacktop turns to poured and precious metal. If the stars are fists, the moon is seven clasped hands, and it does not rise so much as it burns through the darkness like a coal through cheap cloth. Its highlands are white as new paper. All its seas shine wet as inkstone, calligraphy in the language of meteoric time. But the letters write themselves together, word on word like the features of a face, as Maddy blinks in the alien blaze and Charles turns away from his wasp-ridden car and the revelation of the moon together, and she recognizes its parchment smile in the second before Charles reaches to cover her eyes.

  She was blinking away silver, her lips parted on a word she could not remember if she had spoken, awake or in dreams. In the darkness where no stars burned and the fan only stirred the heat back and forth, she lay against Charles’ sweat-warm back and watched the pages of her Bosch calendar flutter palely on the wall, hells of music and heavens of sex, until she felt him stir against her woken stillness. Half into the pillow, he mumbled her name. “Go back to sleep,” she murmured. One hand over his tousled hair like a magician’s pass, “I’m all right,” and she repeated the words as strongly as a charm, for both of them, no matter whether it was true.

  **

  A sultry wind was rising as she closed the stairwell door, and far out on the horizon thunder grumbled. The city spread out around them in lights and tumbl
ed architecture, the crisscross canyons of streets and avenues: as though traffic wore down through brick and concrete like a river through sedimentary years, chiseling out skyscrapers from tenements and street-stalls, erosion into metropolis. Car horns and conversation drifted up, blew away on the hot night air. Sweat was already starting down the back of Maddy’s neck, and she waited for lightning in the star-faded sky.

  Drink down the moon, Brace had said, and so she was looking for all the candles and crystals of new-age ritual, ley lines and wine in a silver cup, not Brace in a black tank-top and loose jeans, perched peregrine-careless where the roof steepened into old slates and a dust-crazed skylight that looked down into someone’s forgotten attic, arms folded over her drawn-up knees and a carton of Canadian beers beside her. White light fanned out from the fixture over the stairwell door, paper-cut her shadow across the concrete flags, so that she turned to Maddy a face momentarily without shadows: an unmarked moon. Only the heavy braid of her hair held darkness in its plait.

  For a second, Maddy half expected honey to drip, like strands of clotted sun, from the hand Brace raised in greeting. But she said only, “Hey. The show’s just getting started,” and moved over to make room.

  In the shadows of their bodies, the beer was the color of Brace’s eyes and tasted dark as earth on Maddy’s tongue: less like a fermentation of grain than leaves. Condensation beaded between her fingers like sweat, dripped down the heel of her hand. Even halfway through her second beer, she still flinched a little at Brace’s question. “No,” she answered, and pressed the bottle against her forehead: no real chill left in the opaque brown glass. “Charles said to thank you for the invitation, because he’s like that, but he’s probably asleep by now. He’s the one in classes and he gets more sleep than I do,” but she could not even put her mouth into a smile, and she tilted her beer back so quickly her teeth clinked on the bottle’s rim.

  One foot propped on a strip of copper sheathing that rain and corrosion had flaked milky green, Brace took a handful of her shirt and twisted the cap off another beer: her third, or fourth, or Maddy had stopped counting. If anything, she spoke a little more carefully, placing her words as steadily as stones. “If you want—”

  “No.” The word was a drystone clack; she shook her head. “I really don’t. I just….” The blink of stars descending on as straight a line as a theater’s god-from-the-machine was a plane coming in to the airport. A cat’s-claw darkness past full, the moon looked only like itself: an ash-white coin Maddy could cover with her thumb. “It’s just stupid. With him. I can remember what we did, but I can’t remember what the fuck I was thinking.”

  “I didn’t even think.” Briefly flicked over to her, Brace’s look was not unkind. “I wanted. I couldn’t think. I dreamed of her all night, every night. I wasn’t sleeping—lying there, looking up at the sky. Imagining how it would feel, all that clean white, that cold burn. Like she was in me already, and it was over, and all I had left was the memory.” Her mouth pulled an expression too sardonic for a smile, too soft for a sneer. “I knew the stories. Afterward. Tithonos, Endymion—who wants that kind of immortality? I would have walked away. But she put her hand on my wrist, like that,” as Brace laid her fingers against the slates, dryly grey as a sea-cliff, “and she said, Those aren’t the only gifts we give. And I laughed at her. Christ, I laughed and I said what was she going to give me, then? An all-expenses paid trip to Florida? I’d been to Rome….”

  Maddy swallowed another mouthful of beer, that might have been water for all she noticed. The story was a thin wash of tinsel on her thoughts, sense less important than sound; only that Brace keep speaking, telling the moon as they drank it down. “What did she give you?”

  Brace’s smile came and went like an eclipse. The backs of her eyes were luminous, moonstruck: or their sheen might have been tears. “The usual,” she said, and lifted her bottle, drank without taking her eyes from the sky. “Change.”

  She set before the moon did, subsiding from story to silence: half-curled on her side, her cheek against the slates like a tired child. Passionless and certain as a catechism, she had recited, But if I look at the moon herself and remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move among divine people, and things that have shaken off our mortality, the tower of ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted woods, the white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with his shining cup full of dream, so the same mouth could hold poetry-philosophy and lip piercings. No doubt Charles had a copy in Maddy’s apartment or his, the pages all unbent at the corners and marked on the diagonal with his small, ink-slashed hand, neat as a script font. She did not wonder for how much longer; she listened to Brace, her murmured lyrics and confidences and lunacies, until there was no more to hear.

  “Brace….” But she was asleep, without any of the little stirs and twitches of dream Maddy had been expecting, pale hair braided like fishbones down her back, the relaxed curve of her spine and all her skin turned to Italian marble in the late moonlight. Where her tank-top cut away from her shoulders, as grave with muscle as a swimmer’s, the vertebrae showed fossil-fragile at the nape of her neck. A loose thread of hair had blown over her parted lips, and stirred faintly with her breath. Beneath her lids whose lashes were fairer than her hair, only her eyes flickered, and Maddy did not shake her awake after all.

  There were no beers left, but their taste was still in her mouth, like rained-on earth. Only a few hours until the sun rose, and the moon still thumbtacked over the western sky; she settled down on one elbow to watch Brace in the haze of streetlight and reflection while the night gathered and faded toward the dawn, while Brace dreamed of her lover.

  **

  Far beneath their feet, the ocean booms like distant fireworks and mortar fire, but the cliff pushes back against her leaning palm rough and wet with spray. Shells coil within the stone, ammonites, trilobites, frozen in their silting seafloor that the earth has heaved up high and dry, that she fingers like a rosary as Brace tightens the cord, snaps one finger against the veins in the soft crook of Maddy’s arm: a drum, or a watermelon that might be ripe. “She draws,” Brace tells her. All enamel and filigree, her hair unfurled like phosphorescence by the salt-damp wind, “She pulls. The sea knows, you see. Our blood’s no different.”

  Down through the darkness, silver slides and buckles on restive water, striations where the ocean floods one way and tide drags another. This moon has knotted itself into the sky, a netsuke puzzle of coral and bones; like black and disturbed mercury, the night bulges around its weight. All the filaments of its light are anchored in the waves, the cliff face, Brace’s shoulders and hair and her hands now reaching for the syringe, all marionettes for the moon. The strings stretch and slant, and never slacken. When Maddy reaches for one, it breaks over her fingers as insubstantially as plain moonlight, fine as a laser’s beam. “But it never hurts,” Brace confesses, and folds Maddy’s hand closed, holds it safe in her own as she sets the needle to Maddy’s unmarred skin. “It only hurts when you pull the other way,” and the moon flows into her like a spider line of light, hooking her up, plugging her in, brimful.

  Her vision is turning to platinum and the slideshow blur of waking, the moment when dream becomes memory, but all she can feel now is the burn of silver in her veins and Brace’s hand clenched on her own as the light hardens, as the strands form, and through them she drinks down the moon.

  **

  Charles came for his books in the morning, his knock at her door so unfamiliar that she almost forgot, listening for the clink and ratchet of keys, the doorknob thumped against the nearest shelf, to let him in.

  Awake before noon, he looked as blurry as a bad photograph, stunned even by the bits and breaks of light slanted through the dogwood branches, speckled like dust motes over her rust-orange carpet, the stacks and slopes of books, the birch-framed couch still half a bed with a pillow at one end and a bundle of hospital-white sheets stuffed against the arm of the other. Night sharpen
ed him, as though late hours were strong coffee, so that he wrote all his articles before sunrise; so that at four in the morning, as she had turned away from him under sweat-rumpled covers, from his flesh that pressed too close to hers, he could be articulately unkind. Don’t bother. You don’t even want me in your bed anymore, do you, and he had risen and pulled one pillow out from under her shoulder before she could answer. Through the fan’s whine and whir and the hard beat of blood in her own ears, she had listened to Charles rummaging through the plastic bins of her dresser and known that kindness or unkindness came to all the same end; after all the silence and the shouting, she would have said yes either way. Now he said, flatly as teletype, “You said this was a good time,” but she had to ask him twice before he would come in.

  Heat filled the apartment, drowned their movements slow as undersea in summer. On his knees to gather up paperbacks, split-backed science fiction and Norton Critical Editions, he was too familiar not to touch and Maddy picked up last night’s tea mug and filled it at the kitchen tap instead. Running water so she would not hear him, cool and sun-shot spill over her fingers when she held the mug under the faucet too long; when she drank, it tasted like the dregs of rose hips, metallic, a hangover ghost of homeopathy. Blue-glazed earthenware was impenetrable to the teeth, only a little harder than language as she walked back in to watch him.

  “Charles.” He did not raise his head at his name, though she saw it register in his shoulders, his back, the way his hand closed on a well-thumbed reprint of Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X. Today’s T-shirt was graphite-grey and so oversized that it hung off his shoulders as though still on the bargain rack, loose sleeves down past his elbows like a tunic. A scarecrow child, sticks and sanctuary. He had never looked his age. “You don’t have to take everything. I really don’t care.”