Forget the Sleepless Shores

by Sonya Taaffe

  “So? Maybe I do.” He rested one arm across his knee, looked over at her. With his eyes narrowed against the light, all the fine lines in his face were creased as deep as cuts. Then he said, as though she had spoken in the brief, considering silence, “I’ll sound like a real asshole if I ask, won’t I?”

  “Ask what?”

  “If this is because I don’t have tits.”

  Sunlight shifted on the carpet like a kaleidoscope; the wind-crooked branches, laden salmon and white with late blossom, drew and re-drew shadows on the dust-flecked panes. Maddy’s voice was somewhere unmanageable, her stomach or her knuckles, and she retrieved it in more pieces than she had meant. “Yeah,” and she sipped more tea-flavored water, so she could finish the sentence. “Yeah. You really will.”

  Charles sat back on his heels, the battered paperback still in one hand. Flakes of acid-browned paper had crumbled onto the knee of his cargo pants: pockets always empty, shirt always tucked in. “Does that mean it isn’t true?”

  Two and a half years, if she counted from September. The sun made highlights in his hair, flyaway and disordered as ever. His eyes were green enough to slice: and burn in the wound.

  “Fuck you, Charles,” she said, finally. The words might have been I love you, for all the difference they made.

  Arms full of Spider Robinson and Goethe, Schiller and Le Guin, all the philosophies and speculations she would never read, he paused once in the doorway to brace the heavy white cardboard box against one narrow hip and reach for keys that were not there. Sweat darkened the collar of his T-shirt, the patch where it had stuck to his spine as he knelt in slow, restless sunlight. “I don’t really care, you know,” and she heard her own words inverted back at her, a mirror with a flaw. “If you want to fuck men, women, Shetland sheepdogs, more power to you. But don’t—” He shook his head, dazed with the intricacies of explanation, with early waking and all the broken places between them; she had forgotten that he, too, might hurt from this. “You could at least have told me.”

  There might have been humor in his words, however unwieldy, but she felt only the barbed-wire snarl that every spoken exchange had become: the rips and scratches of common courtesy, until the only unambiguous language lay between their bodies; and not even that now.

  “I don’t want to fuck Brace Williams,” Maddy said. As true as false and the other way round, and her voice shook only a little; she laid the words down between them and did not look away. “Okay?”

  “Okay.” The door had almost swung shut; Charles propped it open with his foot, his unbeautiful, intimate, foreigner’s face blocked between the doorframe and metal painted brown as old wood. “But,” he said, like a riddle, like the last line of a theorem, “you say her name in your sleep,” and the lock clicked home behind him.

  **

  Cried raw, she fell asleep with the afternoon sunlight on her mouth, her arms wrapped around the feather pillow from the couch. The powder-blue pillowcase smelled like Charles’ hair, and the CD in the system under her desk was a mix she had made for him, that he had never taken home: why bother, with every other night spent in her bed, in her arms? Tom Waits’ voice heaved itself up like rusty anchor chains, pitched back down the other side of the verse, a red rose, red rose blooming on another man’s vine, and the tears seeped between her eyelashes to mark the other, foam pillow beneath her cheek. “Damn you,” Maddy whispered, to both of them, to either, but she was asleep before the next track started up. Somewhere in the dark that smells as cool and mineral-pored as a cavern where no sun ever reached, Johnette Napolitano’s sweet hoarse voice tears open over itself, ache and anger like stone and soil, and Charles pulls another page from the book he holds open on his knee. Light diffuses up over his face, spectral as foxfire, the photophore glow of abyssal fish. On the torn paper, luminous ink in snailshell characters slowly blackens to illegibility—silver to tarnish, the scattershot shorthand of dream, and she cannot take the book from his hands.

  **

  Sky and skyline had reversed themselves, so that she looked out onto a nightscape inverted. Beyond the opened window, the geometric dazzle of signs and lit windows marked shops and apartment blocks like stars pinned to earth, butterfly-collected; only coal-dust darkness above. After the day’s broil and simmer, the breeze that threaded in from the street might almost have felt cool. Salt still lay on her skin like a residue of tears. “Did you ever think,” Maddy said, softly, “your moon would come back?”

  “You had to ask. God. I don’t know,” Brace answered, her smile an implication at the edges of her mouth, and reached for the bottle of soda on the windowsill. With no beer in the refrigerator, she had fished out a raspberry lime rickey from behind the water filter, sugar-sour and transparently red as stage blood; Salome or Snow White. As softly, she said back, “Charles?”

  This time last week, Maddy had been transcribing tapes while Charles read Wilde’s De Profundis and played all the Enigma CDs they owned between them, Gregorian chant and backbeat every time she slipped off the headphones and neither of them spoke. Brace on the same couch, a book of Annie Dillard essays in her lap, might have been swapped in from some alternate universe: or some sea-depth of Charles’ subconscious, cream-braided anima as decorated with silver as a talisman. The thought tweaked her mouth up a little, so that she could answer; only a little. “I don’t know. I should miss him more. Or maybe if I never saw him again, the sky could stay dark for all I cared.”

  “It’s dark of the moon.” Brace shifted, zazen on canvas-colored cushions. “You could get your wish.”

  “Oh, yeah. For one night.”

  Brace said mildly, “Sometimes that’s enough.”

  “For what.” She stopped herself before the words became a question. “It doesn’t matter. Like you said,” so tightly that the words were cords jerked in her throat, “Charles is no moon. And I never—he thought—” Maddy’s fingernails were picking at the back of the couch like a cat’s impatient claws, hard enough to snap threads; head bent away from Brace, so that she saw only couch, carpet, books, and between them the partition of her own dying-leaf hair. Brace’s gaze was as palpable on her flesh as the faint stir of air through the screen, less heated, as patient. She looked up at last in frustration: no lunar phase or fairy tale sufficient to this ache shoved hot through her heart. “There isn’t anything enough for what I want.”

  “Should I ask what you want?”

  Sweat on Brace’s skin looked more like oil, thumb-stroked over the submerged line of her collarbone, the channel of her throat; or she was a fair-haired woman in black combats and a sleeveless grey shirt, broad-shouldered, clear-voiced, recognizable. No strings of moonlight and desire vanished upward from her elbows and knees into a sky as darkly restless as the sea beneath. Her face held no honey, no craters. Maddy twisted her fingers in the torn threads of couch; dry-mouthed, salt on her lips. Adrenaline stitched her chest like a scar.

  “No,” Maddy said. The sound was little more than the shape of her lips, a shake of her head. “You shouldn’t.” But she was moving as she spoke, had knelt up on the couch and her hand closed clumsily on the cloth at Brace’s shoulder, as though she clung a moment for balance before her fingers opened, slid up to the alien smoothness that was Brace’s unstubbled cheek. Strands of pale hair slipped over her knuckles, loosened from Brace’s customary braid; the shaded lamplight made fire-specks of the piercings in her ears, a gilded wink at her lip. Her skin was soft with sweat, and she held very still under Maddy’s touch. So low her voice might have been a stranger’s, she said, “You don’t want me.”

  Each breath was transformation: possibilities breaking down into potentials, into present. This close, Brace’s eyes were the next shade of brown up from black. Electricity barbed the underside of Maddy’s skin. For answer, for argument, she dipped her head to meet Brace’s mouth, and her lips were sweeter than soda, warm as afternoon.

  Neither midnight nor silver: and the same mute cold spilled through Maddy so quickly, desir
e stripped from her bones and ice laid there instead, that she pulled back even before Brace could say, with no grace at all, “I told you.”

  Her face was feverish and her gut churned cold; she had known the minute their skins touched. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought—”

  “I’m not the moon!” In that moment Brace looked more mortal than ever, caught wrong-footed for conversation. She wiped the back of one wrist over her forehead where sweat shone, damp-dark streaks in her hair where she had pushed it back; a split of anger in her voice that was always even as the wheel and rising of stars. “You thought I was the moon.” Only flesh and blood, transformed and still vulnerable. The anger shook out of her voice, left it boneless and her face as stark as a tinsnip circle of light. “I’m not even the next best thing.”

  For this, Charles. For this, dreams. Like a dead echo, clean white and cold burn and ashes in her outstretched hand, Maddy whispered, “I didn’t think.”

  “I know. I know. Nobody ever….” and when Brace shoved herself up from the couch, strong forearms and her swimmer’s shoulders, feet bare on the iron-rust carpet and fewer books to step over than before, she was already as insubstantial as the distance of sunlight.

  Still she knelt by the door, as wordless as her own reflected ghost, lacing her black and steel-toed work boots as blindly as though she were crying. Dry-eyed, dark-eyed, she looked finally back at Maddy. “And you wouldn’t want me anyway. The light moon and the dark are the same.” Speaking, she almost sounded as easily unhurried as ever, but silence hitched and caught between every word. “It’s what she gave me. He. And you will always think I’m what I’m not.”

  Someone had broken all the bones of her chest; Maddy breathed in against the matchstrike rasp of tears and said helplessly, “Brace. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Lying, Brace sounded even less like anyone Maddy had ever known. To the carpet beneath her knee and her hand on the doorframe, she said, “Be glad I’m not the moon,” and rose to let herself out.

  **

  Silver smells like oysters and lit magnesium, as chill and incendiary as Sirius distantly alight in the depths of time. Silver feathers her skin like the moment when flakes of snow, falling, distinguish themselves from the whalebone sky, and silver pulls beneath her flesh like hunger and loss, tendons and ligaments of immaculate light. If she parts her lips, silver will drown her, moonstruck, moon-drunken, and cast her in its image from the inside out. Flesh shelled around metamorphosis; a husk of story to peel from a dream. She will never hold it all.

  “Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt,” says the man who was Brace, the woman whom Brace will become, or both in the same braid of light and dark, “Gießt Nachts der Mond in Wogen nieder.” As recitative as Charles, bard of libraries and Romantic pages, “‘The wine that one drinks with one’s eyes, the moon pours down in waves at night.’ But I drank down that white, white wine, and he waxed and waned. And me along with her. Kainis was Kaineus until they hammered him into the earth.” Very little in the broad, solemn bones of her face has changed, the strength in his shoulders and the casual precision of her voice, but he has unbound his wealth of moonlit hair and it trails away into the dark and silver until Maddy cannot tell where Brace stops, where the moon’s curve begins. They hang like iris and pupil, the night’s unblinking regard; the celestial, inconstant lover and the androgyne who fucked the moon. “But I keep coming around,” and there are centuries in Brace’s wry smile.

  To answer, she must open her mouth, inhale night that she will shape into language, and silver frosts on her tongue like alcohol’s gaslight flame. Of course I love you and of course it’s what inside that matters…. With moonlight splintered between her teeth, molten in her throat, Maddy starts to ask, “Is it too late?” but Brace’s finger presses silence to her lips, angel of the world before preserving secrets into the world to come, and his eyes are the only reminder of earth in all this star-skinned night.

  “It’s always too late.”

  Her scarred hands—as though he caressed fire, once, or bitter cold—comb through Maddy’s hair that is the color of leftover autumn, gently touch her face as though to read freckles like Braille. The full moon gleams in her left ear, the new moon in his right; a crescent on her lips and he carries the moon’s orbit at his wrist, like a thin-skinned planet. The anemone bloom of her hair rays as palely on the dark as the moon’s puppetry, drifts close around them as Maddy cups his cheekbone in her palm, this memory more real than all the rest and it feels even more like a dream. This time, she will hold him no matter which face of the moon turns to her, no matter that she does not hold the moon. This time, no matter how many late nights, how many uneasy silences and conversations that could hurt, she will not let go.

  “From the moment you look up,” Brace tells her, unalterably, not unkindly, “it’s too late.”

  Silver is streaming like acid through her, in her nails and capillaries, her lashes and her ribs, revelation and obliteration in the same phase. Fireworks that fade. Maddy answers, “I know,” and what she knows, she will forget when she opens her eyes. But this moment, she twines her fingers deep in Brace’s cream-colored hair and pulls her mouth, his mouth, close to her own, so that she can murmur, “This is not for the moon,” before she kisses Brace as the moon never did, and its light is eclipsed between their mouths.

  **

  Over in the west, across the roofs as blackened in silhouette as something charred, the sun had fallen and the sky flamed up all the colors of firelight and tangerine peel. And it lies in blood, but she had no lovers to ask where they were and the eastern sky was still clear, ash-streak clouds and no moon. Distinct as pencil scratches on the warm-water air, a canted aerial and an empty clothesline stood like the remnants of an older decade. Even moonlight was eight minutes in the past.

  Slate under the heel of one hand and concrete under the other, Maddy had her eyes closed against the honey-thickened light; memories skinned too close to the surface, but she would have been deaf before she missed the metallic scrape of the stairwell door pushed open, the scuffed and striding footsteps, and shadow dropped sideways across her feet like a greeting.

  “I never,” Brace said, each word like a weight dropped down, lead for the seafloor, sounding depth, “thought the moon would come back.”

  When Maddy twisted her head up to look at her, sunset burned across her vision and she blinked through a Rorschach smear of afterimages to find Brace with her hands in the pockets of her jeans, her black T-shirt for a band Maddy had never heard. She had cut her hair, thick as a sheaf of barley and styled back from her face; there was a stitch of silver across her right eyebrow, and the earrings were plain studs. Straight-faced, “I felt like a change,” and for a moment Maddy would not even have sworn that her voice was the same. But Brace crouched down beside her, monochrome figurehead if residential roofs were clipper ships, washed to amber by the declining sun, and finished, “Never.”

  Trading in used CDs for store credit over the weekend, Maddy had looked for Brace among the racks of alternative and blues, showtunes along the wall and operas on their own shelf behind the counter, and seen no one familiarly straight-backed and braided. She had not even drawn breath to answer, now, as though some incautious movement might startle Brace back into her own moon-haunted dimension; but she would have bet that Brace was not the one dreaming of deep skies and silver, night after night. Her addiction was aftermath. Thirdhand sunlight; and some reflections never faded.

  When she looked over at Brace, the woman’s earth-dark gaze was fixed on the horizon: where the clouds caught fire, not where they cooled. Were the lines of her face less delicate, cut to a harder scale? She had never been voluptuous. Or had she never been what Maddy saw all along? The question would mean as little as the answer: they had lain all night beneath summer haze and landing lights, drunk on folklore and fantasias, wasted on the moon, and Brace in dream or daylight had not been wrong. Like a proverb up-ended, the beloved of my lover is mine. But n
o one made love to Brace and felt the moon like an echo in her flesh. You don’t want me. It’s always too late.

  Maddy had nothing less mundane to say; still she offered the words. “At least you had her once. That’s more than most people.”

  “Wax and wane,” said Brace. Her smile was as sly and reminiscent as the last crescent of light on the old moon, the first sliver of dark for the new. Once she must have looked only human. Her piercings glittered like tears. “Wait and see.”

  Their shadows slipped east, and the skyline was putting out the sun.

  EXORCISMS

  This is the inside of a woman’s head. This is looking out through her eyes that are like the eyes of a mask, bone frames and curtains of skin; she blinks and inside her head, seeded close behind her eyes, the spirit curls like the unborn she once was. The woman sips coffee, and the spirit tastes on their shared tongue the rich, burnt bitterness of a drink she never knew when alive. They drank tea, where she lived: in glasses, and you could hold sugar on your tongue while you sipped.

  The spirit shifts, finds a roomier resting place in the crannies of thought between how to hold a pencil and first fumbled words, observes the woman’s hand penciling letters across a page: quick sharp downstrokes, absurd jaunty tails on “g” and “y” dashed away back-pointing to the left where the letters incline; a backwards progression, to her eyes. Left to right, the wrong way across the page. But she has grown accustomed to the idea, this spirit that tucks herself around a memory of kisses in spring rain; she reads now, through others’ eyes, the languages of more lands than she ever saw in her life. Then she saw one country, and one town of it, and the uneasy circling of the world outside: the bells that rang the orthodox hours, you could hear them when the wind blew crosswise Sunday mornings. Soft smoke of prayer and incense, frightened she could smell it drifting in the dusty streets; her own day of rest flavored with the scents of fresh bread broken and wax slipping down the side of a burning candle, its dip and flicker the light that dances from the bride’s bright raiment when she enters at sunset and you greet her with song: she still knows all the words. If she sang them with this woman’s mouth, who would hear her?