Trader

by Charles de Lint

  “This is true. After what he put me through this morning, I don’t ever want to see him again.”

  “Except to collect your money.”

  Tanya shook her head. “I don’t even care about that.”

  Zeffy put her hands behind her head and looked up at the ceiling. She wore a look of satisfaction that was positively beatific.

  “Well, I’m going to make sure he pays up,” she said. “And I’ll enjoy collecting every cent of what he owes you—right down to the last errant penny.”

  15 MAX

  The super’s apartment is easy enough to find. It’s on the first floor, at the very back of Devlin’s building. Under the buzzer someone’s taped a small rectangle of paper that reads, TED PINKNEY, SUPERINTENDANT. I thumb the buzzer and wait. I’m expecting someone like the super in my old building in Foxville, an overweight balding man in worn chinos and a sleeveless T-shirt who answers every question and complaint with the same unfriendly glower. Pinkney’s not even close.

  The man who comes to the door is a tall, cadaverous individual possessing a full head of slicked-back hair. He’s wearing a spotless white T-shirt, dark blue mechanic’s overalls with sharp creases in each leg and leather workboots, polished to a bright shine. He answers the door with a cheerful smile that lasts only until he recognizes me—or at least until he recognizes Devlin, which, all things considered, is pretty much the same thing.

  “Don’t start,” he says before I can speak. “I warned you and warned you and all you ever did was laugh it off.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Pinkney shakes his head. “Playing innocent’s not going to help either. We carried you for almost three months.”

  “But—”

  “You got the notice, so why the surprise?”

  “So he’s—” I catch myself. “So I’ve been evicted. That’s why the locks have been changed.”

  Pinkney nods his head. “Weller was by with an officer a couple of hours ago to wrap things up. You weren’t there, so we figured you’d just cut out.”

  Weller, I assume, would be Devlin’s landlord.

  “And my things?”

  “They’ve been impounded. If there’s anything left over after the sale, Weller will issue you a check. Do you have a forwarding address?”

  “Jesus, what do you think?”

  Pinkney gives me a sympathetic look. “Don’t get mad at me. They told me to ask.”

  “So all I get to walk out with is the clothes on my back,” I say.

  “It’s not like you didn’t get a chance to pack a bag or anything, Johnny. I gave you the final notice myself on Friday. I thought for sure you’d work something out over the weekend. If you couldn’t come up with the money, you could at least have taken a few things with you. I’ll tell you, I was surprised to see everything still there. You should have at least taken your stereo and TV. Now you’ve got nothing.”

  But why should Devlin have bothered? I think. Why take anything? The eviction isn’t his problem because he’s found another way out.

  “Look,” Pinkney says. “If you need a couple of bucks...”

  I shake my head. I won’t accept charity—not in Devlin’s name.

  “I appreciate it,” I say, “but no thanks.”

  “What’re you going to do now?” Pinkney says.

  “Get my life back,” I tell him.

  Pinkney gives me a confused look.

  “I wouldn’t know how to begin to explain,” I say. I put out my hand. “You seem like a decent person. I hope Devlin didn’t screw you the way he seems to have screwed everybody else he knew.”

  Pinkney automatically takes my hand and shakes, but I can see his confusion deepening as I speak.

  “You know,” I go on, “the more I get to know this guy, the less I like him, and I didn’t much care for him right from the first.”

  “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” Pinkney asks, a hint of uneasiness in his voice.

  I know exactly what he’s thinking: Devlin’s lost it—not taking money when it’s offered to him, acting differently, talking about himself in the third person. Pinkney doesn’t get it, but I’m not about to explain.

  “Maybe we’ll run into each other again under more pleasant circumstances,” I tell the super. “See you around.”

  “Sure,” Pinkney says dubiously. “See you.”

  I walk away, feeling the weight of the man’s gaze on my back for the entire length of the hallway. By the time I reach the front door of the building, I still haven’t heard Pinkney’s door close. I step outside and set off down the street.

  I walk aimlessly, the blocks disappearing under my feet. I’m oblivious of my surroundings. I think of the super, standing in the doorway of his apartment, watching me leave. Scratching his head, maybe. Definitely thinking Devlin’s gone off the deep end. For all I know, he’s still standing there, will be standing there for hours to come. I don’t much care.

  I walk until I find myself deep in Fitzhenry Park. I blink in surprise at the tall trees that rise up on either side of the path in this part of the park. Beech. Some magnificent white pine. A stand of hemlock. The woods are deep here—untouched, some say, from the days when the first settlers came.

  I take a deep breath, savoring the pungent smell of the pines and hemlock, the sap and the dead needles that carpet the ground; then I step off the path and walk in under the trees. Moments later, the woods swallow me from sight and it’s like I was never there.

  16 NIA FISHER

  Nia lay in bed long after her mother had left, trying to hold back her own tears. The aftermath of the argument they’d just had lay like a heavy weight on her chest and she found it hard to breathe. Though her mother had tried to hide it, Nia knew she’d left the house crying. Nia had wanted to go after her, to say “I’m sorry, Mom, I love you, too,” but the words stuck in her throat, choking her. Tears blurred her sight. She hated the constant antagonism that lay between them but couldn’t seem to stop herself from saying the horrible things she did.

  If only their relationship could go back to the way it had been. They’d been friends before, confidantes as much as parent and child. But the turnabout in how they related to each other had settled deeply into its new pattern and reversing it at this point no longer seemed possible.

  It was weird how much things could change in a year. They used to get along so well. They used to feel so lucky. But her mother had become progressively more unhappy and bitter over the last few months—with her job, with her love life, with the world in general—and Nia was left to bear the brunt of that discontent. Nia knew she was no angel, but everything she did now was criticized. They never talked anymore, only bickered. At one time her mother had been so proud of the free spirit in her daughter; now that free-spiritedness was the source of much of their contention.

  She understood that her mother was making an effort to keep her problems to herself, to deal with them on her own and not worry Nia about them, but that was a large part of what was going wrong with their relationship. Her mother had always been there for Nia. Now it seemed to Nia it was her turn to be encouraging, her turn to be the one to offer comfort and support. Instead her mother was shutting her out, hiding not only her problems from Nia, but the other details of her life that they’d once shared.

  That was one of the reasons she spent so much time downstairs with Max: she was lonely, plain and simple. Max helped fill the hole in her life put there by the growing alienation between her mother and herself. Having been her mother’s best friend for so many years, she’d never really been able to connect with her own peers because their concerns all seemed so juvenile. She hadn’t needed another best friend when she’d had her mother. Losing that friendship had been devastating because she had nothing to replace it— nothing until Max moved in downstairs and proved both interesting to be around and amicable to her daily visits.

  Sometimes she thought she drove him a little crazy—yammering on about anything that happened to pop in her h
ead—but he never asked her to leave. And they could share companionable silences, too, the way she and her mother used to be able to before those silences all seemed strained. She supposed she filled the role of surrogate daughter for Max, since he didn’t have any kids of his own. Though she didn’t see him as a father figure. He was just her friend.

  It was funny that her mother thought she was seeing too much of him. Max was the one who, when Nia complained about the latest thing her mother had said or done, would always try to get her to see things from her mother’s side.

  “Doesn’t sound to me like you’re opening up to her either,” he’d say. “How’s she supposed to know how you’re feeling if you don’t tell her?”

  “You don’t understand. I used to be able to do that, but I can’t anymore. Whatever I tell her now just gets thrown back in my face the next time she’s mad at me. I don’t want to give her any more ammunition.”

  Max would smile. “So why don’t you tell her that as well?”

  She knew he was right, but things had progressed to a point where it was too late for that kind of dialogue. She was gun-shy, having been cut down too many times already. And while she could understand how maybe her mother felt the same way, it didn’t make it any easier for her to open up. She couldn’t even say she was sorry anymore. The pain in her heart created a bottleneck in her throat that only allowed the hurtful words to come out, not the ones she really wanted to say.

  Nia sighed and rolled over to look at her clock. The way she was feeling now, the last thing she wanted to do was get out of bed, but she knew she should get up and face the day. It wasn’t like tomorrow would be any better.

  I should move out, she thought as she slid her legs out from under the bedclothes and put them on the floor.

  The idea scared her as much as it thrilled her. Where would she go? What would she do?

  Rummaging around on the night table in front of her cassette machine, she dug through her cassettes until she found one by Thelonious Monk. The cool sound of his piano slid through her thoughts, washing away their immediacy. She loved the sound of jazz, from big band and bebop to fusion and the more ambient stuff that was now often filed under New Age in the record stores. It was music rich with heart and soul, but still technically brilliant. Sometimes she thought it was its very dichotomy that appealed the most to her.

  She slipped on a pair of black jeans and went into the bathroom to wash up. The music followed her through the ritual of combing out her hair, then down the hall to the kitchen, where she brewed herself a strong cup of coffee from an espresso blend. She wasn’t hungry, but she nibbled on a piece of dry toast so that she wouldn’t have to lie about skipping breakfast if her mother should rag her about it when she got home.

  The Monk cassette ended while she was still eating, but she didn’t feel like putting on more music. There were times when she liked to have just one sound in her head and let it settle there throughout the day, a kind of balm against the inferior music she was subjected to when she left the apartment and had to put up with traffic noise, the Muzak in stores, or whatever crap somebody was blasting from their boom box. She did the same thing with poetry sometimes, or chapters from novels, the text gathering power in her mind the longer she held on to it, the selected lines untouched by other, less meaningful words.

  After a while, she got up to check the mail. She paused just outside her door when she heard voices on the landing below hers, not quite ready yet to face anybody else today, not even Max. She didn’t mean to eavesdrop, and was about to go back inside the apartment, but curiosity got the better of her, and then the very oddness of the conversation made her creep over to the railing and listen more closely still.

  It was Max, speaking to a stranger, but Max might as well be a stranger himself from the weird things he was saying and the way he was saying them. She shook her head as she finally started to get the gist of the conversation. What they were talking about was impossible.

  She jumped when the door suddenly slammed shut below her, heartbeat accelerating. The stranger who claimed to be Max hammered on Max’s door. She began to retreat from the railing, holding still when she heard the door open once more. The ensuing conversation—mostly from Max’s side, this time—only muddied the waters further.

  The door closed again but this time the stranger didn’t try to regain Max’s attention. Nia heard him move on the landing, the creak of his weight on a stair, then nothing. Pulse drumming, she returned to the railing and leaned over to see the stranger sitting on the steps coming up to her landing. His back was toward her, his face was in profile. He was no one she’d ever seen before. Strikingly handsome, a little disheveled. And a complete stranger.

  When he bowed his head, his anguish so plain, her heart went out to him. She certainly didn’t know him. He might well be crazy. But she couldn’t help feeling for him, empathizing with the bleak despair that seemed to grip him. Maybe it was because it mirrored her own feelings this morning, only increased a hundredfold.

  She leaned there on the railing watching him until he finally stirred. Afraid that he might look up and see her, she slipped back across the landing to her own apartment, bare feet silent on the wooden floor. She closed the door with a barely audible click, then hurried to the bay window in the living room. From there she could look down at the street in front of her building. She held the white sheers open just a crack with her finger so that she could peer down without being seen.

  The stranger appeared after a few moments. She started to let the sheers fall back in place when he looked up, but then realized that he was studying Max’s windows not her own. She’d couldn’t read the play of expressions that moved across his features. It was like trying to hold the wind, they shifted so quickly one into the other. The turmoil of his emotions again seemed to echo her own earlier confusion and again her heart went out to him.

  She stepped back from his view when his gaze rose up to her window, letting the sheers close. She waited a beat before returning to stand by the glass. He was no longer looking up at her window. He strode off down the narrow cobblestoned street and she watched until he was lost from view. Letting the sheers close once more, she slowly sat down on the sofa and tried to figure out exactly what it was that she’d stumbled onto. Something very strange, that was for sure.

  The conversation between the two men had been surreal and she was convinced that she shouldn’t take it at face value—after all, what they’d been talking about was impossible. So it had been some sort of...what? Code? Metaphor? It didn’t make any sense at all. Then she thought of the fact that Max was still in his apartment. Normally he was in his shop by eight, already working for an hour or so before he opened for business.

  She went back into her bedroom and checked the time. Just after ten. That late! She chewed at her lower lip, trying to decide what to do. After a moment, she came to a decision and finished getting dressed.

  She got rid of the T-shirt she’d been sleeping in and put on a clean black one, tucking it into the waist of her jeans. Over that she put on a vest that had been a black jean jacket until she’d torn the sleeves off, much to her mother’s dismay—“Nia, I just paid fifty dollars for that jacket!” Sitting on the edge of the bed, she tugged on her dark purple combat boots, laced them tightly, and finally stood up. She looked at herself in the mirror. Without makeup, her face looked like it belonged to a ghost.

  “I feel like a ghost,” she said softly.

  In their kinder moments, her schoolmates referred to her as “that death chick,” the rare times she did attend classes. She supposed it was preferable to “fuckhead” and “that creepy bitch,” which she got more often, though really, she didn’t much care what they called her. Who had the time to pay attention to cretins that didn’t even know the difference between a Beat and a Goth? Her predominantly black wardrobe wasn’t an embracing of the funereal look the way the Goths dressed. She had no great preoccupation with death at all, except for how it had stolen so many of th
e greats before their time, stolen them when they still had so much to share. Kerouac. Wes Montgomery. Lenny Bruce. Robert Johnson. The list was far too long and depressing.

  But she was interested in ghosts, especially in the idea that people could become ghosts in their own lives and simply fade away because, after a while, no one could see them at all. That was the truth behind so many of the mysterious disappearances that had people so baffled, she was sure. The man on his way to the corner store. The woman who never made it home from work. It wasn’t that they’d gone AWOL from their lives, or even something more sinister. They simply lost contact with who they were, with the people around them. With nothing left to anchor them, they became invisible, ghosts. And eventually just faded away completely...

  She turned away from the mirror and picked up her knapsack from where it lay by the foot of her bed. Slinging it over her shoulder by one strap, she left the apartment again. She went all the way downstairs, ostensibly to check the mail. There was none. Turning from the mailboxes, she crossed the foyer to the door of Max’s shop, but the closed sign was still taped to the glass, the shop dark except for what light came through the front window.

  Maybe he’s sick, she thought, peering into the dark room as though she’d find the answer in there among the various tools and instruments, some half-finished, some only in for repair. The mandolin from that friendly bluegrass player who’d been in last week was lying on the worktable, surrounded by sketches of Max’s plans for its inlay pattern. Otherwise everything was in its place.

  Nia sighed and turned away from the door. So now she’d be the good neighbor and check up on him to see how he was doing, she supposed. Nothing to worry about. He was her friend, right?

  Her uneasiness grew with each step she took up to his landing. She knew she had nothing to be afraid of—this was Max, after all—but she couldn’t shake the creepy feeling that had settled inside her ever since she’d overheard the conversation between him and that sad stranger. It had been such weird business, so crazy. She felt a little crazy herself, thinking about it, half-convinced that she hadn’t really heard them properly. Maybe it was like one of those black-and-white Cary Grant comedies that her mother liked so much, the ones where somebody would be talking about one thing, but because of mixed signals or whatever, everybody would think he was talking about something else. The conversation worked either way you heard it.