The Weird

by Ann

  An alley near the docks. That smell of tar and creosote. Turbid water. Invisible keelboats rock in their moorings. Black figures on a sidewalk. Indistinct. Something lies in the haze of erubescing smoke that billows tinny music through the transom of an open doorway.

  Too small to be a drunk sleeping it off on the cobbled walk amid foaming puddles and slivers of bottle-glass, far larger than a child, covered with red fur in the bar-light, it opened its jowls as I drew nearer – a pink tongue livering between fangs and drooling mutton chops – listlessly raising its head. The head of a dog, or an anaconda that had swallowed a dog in one gulp. Its breath came in shallow mists tinted the color of blood. Its muzzle drooped to its paws, ears lowering. It took a last look around through half-lidded, glistening eyes, attuned to the new odor, listening, almost as a matter of form, for the least echo before its eyes closed again. I had to step over it, passing under the sign of an uncoiling snake.

  Threads of undulating cigar smoke interlaced with what I could imagine as the aroma of peanut shells, spilt beer and liquor, all rubbed into the masonite bartop, saturating its cushioned stools, its wide mirror broken into panels by gilt marbling, hidden between shelves of bottles and their reflections, drained by the reddish light from green and amber into hues of black and tangerine or, like the chess pieces on one of the little tables against the opposite wall – hardly visible behind the bottles and the venous streaks – into the same shade of pink. There, in reflection, by the curtained windows – the panes were painted black to mask a dingy passageway, a wall of crumbling bricks that led to what must have been one of the piers – two men, wasting away under their thread-bare jackets, were having a game, staring not at the board between their identically folded hands, nor at each other, but off into space. The beer foam left traces of weblike film in their drained glasses.

  All but the last of the bar stools were free. An old man sat hunched over his empty shot glass, the bill of a wickerwork cap slouched over his eyes, oblivious to the mounting rhythms of La Valse. The music was reaching its lyrical peak. The speaker buzzed above the bar mirror. A vague tremor passed through its clutter of bottles as the old man began to make frantic signals to the bartender, who had his eyes closed and was swaying back and forth on his chair by the register, beating time with pudgy, hairless arms. The bass was so deep that, at the point where every instrument was playing, the dynamics of the orchestra having reached its utmost pitch, I felt the floor tremble under me, sending a rattle up in spiraling orbits around my head.

  Sudden silence. An oboe or an English horn. Footsteps as the music quieted. A clack of heels on linoleum through the back passage. Odd patches of cement filling in rough gaps under the stools where the old floor had worn away. The tables sat on poles that flared into the sawdust in wide, cast-iron bases. Following the perspective of this dimly lit motif, I came to the young barmaid at the end of the line of tables. A tall, red-haired girl, dressed in a halter and tight, faded jeans speckled with flecks of dried paint, biting a hangnail on the little finger of her left hand, a serving tray under her arm.

  – Whiskey! cried the old man with a toothless grin, grabbing the girl by the seat of her pants as she lumbered by, pulling her to him, nearly falling off his stool in the process. He whispered something in her ear. The barman snapped out of his musical revery.

  – Goddamnit, where the hell d’you think you are, Cappie!

  – Aw, shit, I’s justh tellin’ Joodie somrthin’. A sthecret.

  – Go on, get the hell out of here! You got your snootfull.

  – Gone, get on yerselth. Yer jus’ jealousth ’cause I goosthed-up lil’ Joojie ’stead o’ you. Right, Jood? Go ’head in back the bar, Alf wantsa goosth ya. C’mon, Alf, don’ be sh(uk!) shy.

  But Alf, having spoken his piece, was drifting back through the ebb and flow of cigar smoke into his lost dream of a Viennese ballroom – perfumed crinolines of satin, rustling watered silk, dappled by crystal tears of chandelier-light which glittered off the buttons and epaulettes of blazing military tunics. The chess players cocked an ear in his direction, without tearing their eyes from a fixity on dead space, until the barman came to himself again. By then, the old drunk had disappeared.

  One minute his face, like a wrinkled prune, was grimacing bare gums above the bar. Suddenly, it vanished. My eyes became accustomed to the reddish light. I had walked from the door to the table at the back, its votive flame guttering behind red glass embossed with pimples clustered in the shape of diamonds. A black wick, half submerged in the tallow, was rooted to a bed of gleaming yellow wax. A quivering, blue-edged leaf. If I were to blow it out, the charred wick-tip would burn off its glowing coal under a gray, sulfurous ribbon. I saw the old man again. His cap had fallen off and he was rolling in the sawdust, trying to get clear of the stool base and the brass bar which entangled his feet. I just wanted to sit. He began to crawl for the door where the ventilation fan wafted clouds of pink smoke through the transom into the mist of the alley. To let the flame go out. The last traces of reddish light that still escaped the Anaconda Bar found him clambering over the dog. One heard a brief whine and some heavy panting. Clouds of vapor. And he was gone.

  Hidden lamps through a veil of shifting tints, blending one into another, cast their iridescences on nickel honeycombed with pits of black-mottled faille. A festive glow threw the rest of the barroom into shadow. Violet to blue into green, from green into yellow, orange and red into violet. Cold, spectral metamorphoses, each so smooth that no one color gained a hold on the eye before another took it over. An illusion. There were no unadulterated colors. The ambient light was pitching into black. Chromescences, already tinged by a fading redness in the air, took on additional saturation from the hues out of which they had just emerged. Subtle, delicate gradations from one color to the next as in a mist passing through some strange chemical evolution. Green left whatever followed it with a greater susceptibility to red. From ultra-marine to chrome yellow, a traceable ‘tea-rose’ glow would overlap which, in turn, colored the orange that followed in the wake of yellow, bringing it dangerously close to ‘red’ long before red was due to come up again; by then, the images would have absorbed so many previous superimpositions of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ casts that the whole passage from indigo, across the spectrum, to violet would have masked its original chromatic properties. Theoretically, were the process to be accelerated, one might postulate with mathematical precision a third, a fourth, even so much as a fifth layering of afterimages, taking all the variables into account. Coordinates of each successive stage, mapped out on a hypothetical ‘chart of degrees of discoloration’, marking the length and breadth of this closed infinity until the retina becomes overloaded. Then the jukebox, along with the barroom, wiped out by a livid clot, loses form altogether. Disappears.

  A click. The waltz had subsided. When I peered down through the glass dome the light was deep yellow with blue vermiculation. The record slid with a whirr from the vertical turntable into its niche among the rank and file of other disks.

  – Took out all the crap. Kids used to come in wanting to dance. Disturbing the customers. Real pain in the ass. So I figured, what the hell, I’ll put in my own: Beethoven Schubert, Berlioz, Fauré, Czerny.

  The barman, the one the old sot had called Alf, was waddling toward me, his thick cigar butt smoking, held daintily aloft between thumb and forefinger.

  – Like opera? Don’t have to pay. Fixed it up special myself. All you do is push the right combination of buttons.

  The bar-light, gone from red to purple, touched his stray hair-ends as a nimbus. He lodged what remained of the butt in the gap between his middle teeth and bent toward the console. The rainbow suffused his open shirtfront, casting highlights under his nose and chin, tinting the smoke of his bobbing cigar as he leaned the full bulk of his weight on his arms, staring into silver depths.

  – I never get tired of this.

  His finger brushed lightly over the double row of ivory-colored keys, depressin
g one for the ‘letter,’ another for the ‘number’ of Selections from The Barber of Bagdad by Cornelius, all in one fluid motion. One of the chess players seemed about to make his move. That gnarled hand, brown splotches, veins neutralized by the tincturing light, hovered above a crenellated tower. The hum of metal, faint, as the turntable glided slowly past the file of records and came to a stop, dipping into the rack with its copper bracket-ring, drawing out an old ten-inch disk. The tone arm came forward to meet it. I could see his face, a gourd-shaped distortion in the darker reaches of the background, floating half-transparently behind the record rims.

  – Want a drink?

  I just came in to get my bearings.

  Then nothing. The disk was turning. The lights were still on. The phonograph needle was a hair short of making contact with the dusty groove. Alf bit hard into the butt between his clenched teeth (the ash dropped off), spit out what was left and muttered a vague obscenity, hitting the console repeatedly with the flat of his hand from top to bottom, his ear cocked to its every tremor as though listening for the faintest noise outside the door of a locked room at midnight.

  – Happens all the time. It’s an old machine. The antiques dealer offered me quite a pile for it. Joodie, get me the screwdriver, under the sink with the openers! But I wouldn’t part with it for anything. Practically had to fight the old bastard off. Said he wanted it as a gift for someone he admired. My ass! Christ knows what he really wanted it for. Who would buy an old heap like this? Hasn’t been ’round for a long time, though. No, goddamnit! The other screwdriver! Can’t you see this one’s too big? What the hell’s the matter with you? And get me a flashlight! So, how about it? You must be stifling. How do you manage to find your way around? Have one on the house, just name it. We’ve got soda, if you want it. Cigarettes, perhaps? A glass of water?

  Joodie was coming back with the flashlight and a small screwdriver in her hands. Out of the red smoke. From the doorway, over the head of the sleeping dog, I followed the noise of a distant fog-horn through the streets and alleyways. An old tub was putting out to sea. I thought I might be able to find the inner harbor. To follow the tracks from there. A negative of the jukebox lights still hovered before my eyes like a second mist, gradually dwindling to a translucent dot at the center of my field of vision. The clatter of something metal, hollowed into the shape of a drum, broke the silence and seemed to roll in my direction from around the corner. Footsteps. Laughter.

  I flattened myself against the bricks. Slowly, taking great pains to make no sound, I peered around the quoin. An old man was lying under a mound of garbage. Three men in shirtsleeves, their clothes askew, were trying to help him up. The one in the odd, yellow-plumed cap kept falling down.

  No. They were beating him up. I could see it clearly now. The three of them. Rolling him for his money. Their fists were busy everywhere, poking, prying, jabbing, trying to bring the old drunk out of his torpor by scooping up handfuls of rubbish and hurling them in his wilted face. It was the one they called Cappie, the tippler from the Anaconda Bar, lying there like a dishrag, or a puppet, allowing himself to be hoisted into a standing position by two of the laughing men while the third, the one sporting the panache, set the garbage bin aright with a distinct chuckle. Yes, it was the old sot. He could easily have come this far on his hands and knees before blacking out. The prankster stood by, cap in hand, waving the yellow ostrich feather under the old man’s nose as the cohorts tipped him, head first, into the can.

  What could I do? One man against three. Dog tired. As it was, I could hardly stand up myself. All from the walking. My mind clouded. I could barely see to maneuver my way about. The goggles, not to mention the narrow eyeholes which could be knocked awry, put me at a tremendous disadvantage. There was another garbage can next to the one where Cappie’s legs stuck up like a V. His feet turned out at right angles. Motionless. I thought it best to wait.

  The three morning revelers began to circle the metal bin, kicking it in with the tips of their shoes. A loud battering noise. They shivered with the damp, rubbing their shirtsleeves to keep warm, blowing on their hands. They bellowed like a tribe of Indians on the rampage. I can’t remember how long the uproar lasted. They were very near. A scarce five feet away. I stood with my back to the wall. I heard their war cries. From time to time, the whistle of a garbage scow cut through the heavy air. The harbor, from the sound of boats in choppy waters, seemed no more than a stone’s throw from the barrier of hazy lights. Keelboats rocked gently against the pier planks before breaking free of their moorings. I kept my eyes open.

  Not long after. They were running past me, sliding on their heels, tumbling over the wet street bricks. I crept up to the garbage cans and, almost at once, realized my mistake. Black trousers with a satin stripe down the outer seams. Too well-dressed. It wasn’t Cappie. The one with the yellow panache, or one of his cohorts, had removed the shoes and socks from their unsuspecting victim.

  I searched my pockets.

  Still a few certificates that I hadn’t put in my lost bag. I took one out. Signed my name to it. The time of morning (an approximation). And tied it to the big toe of his right foot, where the police were sure to see it.

  The bricks laid out an uneven zigzag, sloping away from the middle of the street as rainwater flowed in rivulets toward the sunken gutters. Near the end of the block, two sets of worn-down tracks merged in a curving gantlet. It was coming back to me…I could not be far from the roundhouse.

  In the mirror, behind blue knickknack shelves, some of them are dancing. Others, off to one side, make do by the piano, rolling their eyes. Some stagger leeward through clouds, drawn as by a magnet toward the beading bucket of ice on a folding table piled with steadily diminishing cocktail napkins, tumblers, plastic cups and long-stemmed glasses, hidden, amid the glitter of clear and tinted bottles, in a confusion of labels from gin to seltzer. The last chords of music evaporate in perfume and smoke. The babble of voices, of liquid poured over ice, the crystalline clink of glass to bottle, build to a gradual roar, half suppressed when the pianist, lifting his foot from the legato pedal, crushes his cigarette in a pentagonal ashtray and, exhaling a blue haze over the butts, the uneven heaps of ashes laced with ribbons of cellophane and blackened match stubs, calmly walks out onto the landing, slamming the door behind him.

  Debris. Shards of a flowerpot upended in its mound of dirt on the stairs. The last flight rises under the remains of a wilting vine with fuzzy, purple-edged leaves and streamers of pleated crêpe flecked with sawdust. His hand grazes a balluster, with its hairs. He leans forward, peering into the dark of the well, down through the matrix of dizzying rectilinear spirals. Carpeted steps emerge from the blackness at different levels in pools of faintly colored light that skim the bannisters, touch the fringes of deep shadows and hang, unconnected, spanning the depths of a bottomless space. He can almost hear their slightest movements filtering up from the vestibule in irregular ticks that echo less and less of metal – that constant expansion and contraction in the heating ducts – as they approach the upper stories from the outside of the building. It’s cold. He has to take time to light another cigarette. After only a few quick puffs, he wants to let it drop. To watch the cinder fall away, tracing an orange spiral into the gloom. But afraid of starting a fire, he stubs it out on the mahogany railing. It burns a shallow crater into the polished wood. Still breathing smoke, the steam comes out of his nostrils. Evaporates. Gray wisps against the dark of the stairs. He turns and, passing the pale oval in the wallpaper with its nappy ruts from fingernail scrapings, walks to the window, aware of nothing more than that the ticks, after reaching their loudest pitch, have suddenly abated. A lull in the jabbering behind the door. The unexpected silence, cut by a few oddly stifled cries and the heavy tramp of feet on piano keys. A wild discord, shrieking, groaning, up and down the width of the sounding board.

  Horror. The prankster in his stocking feet, crouched with arms crossed like a mad Ukrainian dancer out of costume, struts across t
he ivories while his cohorts scramble in through the curtained window. Utilizing a free elbow to knock the prop out from under the piano lid – a thud followed by a resonant echo of overtones – he leaps off, touching down in the middle of the floor with time enough to make a hurried survey of the crowd he has driven back to three of the four walls. Even an amorous couple sprawled under the knickknack shelves, arms and legs askew on a crushed-velvet settee, has deemed it necessary to come up for air. The man snatches his sweaty palm from beneath the woman’s rucked-up skirt as she tugs mechanically at her garter, catching sight of the prankster in mid-flight, the yellow plume clenched between his uppers and lowers. He’s sailing toward her over an ocean of blurry faces. The button atop his scarlet beanie snags the tip of a streamer off the light fixture, plummeting a lime-green ribbon behind him. His arms stretch, casting a shadow over the rapidly vacated settee that sucks him into its hollowed cushions with a puff of dust and a rain of lacquered figurines. He manages a blind grab at the fleeing woman’s ankle, arresting her perpendicular momentum not long after she pitches forward into the canapés with a torsion sufficient to engender violent scatterings of cheese-dip flecks, a sudden but short-lived response to the centrifugal vortex of her imitation pearls. Taking full advantage of the lull – everyone frozen into position, glass in hand and glassy-eyed, wondering if they haven’t already passed beyond the limits of discreet alcoholic consumption – the prankster, shaking a porcelain panpipe from his ear, takes a sidereal bound off the cushions toward the crawling woman and giddyaps, legs astride her thrust-out hips, through a parting of skirts and trouser cuffs, into a nearby closet, slamming the door behind him.

  Consternation. The guests form a little group before the point of entry, leaving a semicircle of rug-space between their feet and the closet door which vibrates to a rumble of flailing arms and shoe-heels, tumbling boxes and desperate shrieks. The prankster, in a claustrophobic blackness of dust, mothballs and perfume, under a pummeling of bony fists, long fingernail scratches and platform heels, constructs a hasty barricade of umbrellas, galoshes and slippers, before lugging his recalcitrant partner behind hanging overcoats into the deepest recess of the closet, forgetting that the door opens outward.