“It’s just stupid,” she said. “I fell asleep while I was reading and then I had this weird dream where everybody I knew treated me the same way Johnny did this morning—you, Jilly, Geordie, my mother. It was like nobody knew me anymore and when I woke up, I felt all creeped out. I mean, I knew it was just a dream, but I still had to come in here and see if you, I don’t know...”
Her voice trailed off and she gave an embarrassed little laugh.
“To see if I’d recognize you?” Zeffy asked softly.
Tanya nodded. “Dumb, right?”
“No. Everybody gets dreams like that where what happens in them feels so real that can’t believe it didn’t actually happen when they wake up. I mean, think of Sophie.”
“But she really believes...”
Zeffy smiled. “Or something. The thing is, you shouldn’t be embarrassed about feeling the way you did. I know you’re not really over Johnny, so what he did this morning must’ve really hurt you.”
“Oh, I’m over him now,” Tanya said. “After what he did today, he’s history. I even threw away my cigarettes.”
“This is a good sign,” Zeffy told her.
Tanya sighed. “I suppose. But now I can’t get rid of the feeling that the only reason I’m all interested in Geordie is because, well, you know me. I don’t like to be between boyfriends.”
“I can’t help you there,” Zeffy said.
“But what would you do?”
Zeffy didn’t even have to think about it. “I’d take it slow.”
“But don’t you worry that if you take it too slow, then maybe he’ll think you’re not interested in him?”
“If a guy’s seriously interested in you, you can take it as slow as you need to. I don’t mean you ignore him, Tanya. You just don’t jump right in bed with him or declare your undying love on the first or second date.”
Tanya frowned. “I don’t—”
“I didn’t mean you in particular,” Zeffy assured her. “I meant you as in plural. People in general.”
“Don’t commit until they do. Jeez, guys get all the breaks, don’t they.” Zeffy laughed. “What? You don’t think guys have anxiety attacks about this kind of thing themselves?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Can I get that in writing?”
Tanya shook her head. “No, but you should write a song about it,” she said, getting up. “You could set it up like an advice column, part of the verse being the question, the other part the answer.”
“I think John Prine already did.”
Tanya paused by the door. “Then you should write a song about my dream.”
Zeffy thought about that dream. Nobody knowing you. Taken to the extreme the way Tanya had in her dream, it really was a metaphor for how people felt lots of times, wasn’t it? Not that nobody might physically recognize them, but that nobody understood the person they really were.
“Maybe I will,” she said.
But Tanya had already left the room.
19 NIA
By the end of the day, Nia was spent. Her feet and calves hurt from walking around all day and it had gotten to the point where all she wanted to do was get her own piece of cardboard and lie down on it the way some of the panhandlers she passed were doing. Instead, she continued on down Williamson Street until she got to Gypsy Records, where she claimed for herself a portion of the wrought-iron bench that stood outside the store, only just beating a punky-looking guy to the seat. He said something snarky to her, but the words didn’t register. She merely smiled at him and stretched her legs out in front of her. The luxury of being off her feet felt glorious. The punk reacted like a cat, sauntering off down the street as if that had been his intention all along.
Nia watched him go, then listlessly turned her attention to the traffic going by on Williamson Street. It was coming up on rush hour and the four-lane street had grown progressively more congested as commuters jostled for position on the northbound lanes with cabs and buses. Every so often the pavement would shake as a subway went by under the sidewalk, but the rumble of its passage barely registered above the street noise. They were playing an old Lee Konitz album inside the store. The sound of his sax spilled out of the speakers hanging above the entrance of the store, but she soon gave up trying to pick it out.
After a while she found herself staring at a weed growing up beside one of the planters the city had placed at the edge of the sidewalk as part of its efforts to green the city. She had no idea what sort of a plant it was, but its tenaciousness won her sympathy far more than the geraniums and petunias trying to survive amidst the trash that littered the planter and the clouds of exhaust. She didn’t quite know why she identified with it. Maybe it was because they were both outsiders. Neither of them fit in.
As she watched, a pair of women approached the planter and sat down on its edge to wait for their bus. The running shoes they both wore seemed out of place with their office clothes: nylons, tight short skirts, blouses with padded shoulders. Both carried briefcases. One of the women put her foot on the weed, flattening it under the sole of her sneaker, and Nia looked away, sighing. So much for its chances for survival.
She let her gaze wander the street, looking for a face she now doubted she’d ever find. Within fifteen minutes of deciding to track down the stranger she’d spied in the hallway of her building, it had dawned on her exactly what an impossible task she’d set herself. Some could claim to be able to find a needle in a haystack, but then some people also thought that angels danced on the head of a pin.
No, she soon realized that she was never going to find him, but since she couldn’t go back home anyway—not with Max, or whoever it was that looked like Max, still there—she’d stuck to her search for hours, wandering all over the Market, then widening the circle of her search to the downtown area. She began to feel that she’d have a better chance of winning a lottery, even if she never bought tickets, or getting hit by a comet.
The man could have passed her a dozen times without her recognizing him. All it would take was a slight change in his appearance. A hat, or a pair of sunglasses. He could have just gone home—if he had a home—or left the city. She’d gotten to the point now where she wasn’t even all that sure what he looked like anymore. She’d only ever seen him in a darkened hallway up close, and then from a distance on the street below her window.
A bus pulled up to the curb in front of her and the two women sitting on the planter got up to join the crowd boarding it. The crushed weed lay flat against the pavement. Nia felt like going over to it and trying to coax it upright once more, but what was the point? Someone else would just step on it again. What was more amazing was that it had managed to survive as long as it had.
She continued to sit there, not even bothering to search the faces of the passersby, until the traffic started to die down. She could hear the music coming from Gypsy Records’ speakers more clearly now. The lead instrument was still a sax, but it was more contemporary than the disc they’d been playing earlier. Everette Harp, she decided, recognizing his style from a special she’d heard on Zoe B.’s radio show, Nightnoise, her favorite late-night listening. He had a nice smooth sound, but she wasn’t sure she liked the somewhat schmaltzy chorus of background voices.
Halfway through the next cut, the music was abruptly shut off. She started, feeling as though her ears had suddenly popped, then realized it was closing time. The staff would be leaving now. They’d walk, maybe take the sub or a bus home, sit down to dinner...She felt jealous of the normality of their lives, which was weird, because she’d never in her life had the slightest yearning to be normal before this moment. But she’d never been in her present situation before, either.
She was tired and hungry, and if the truth had to be told, a little scared. Well, she couldn’t go home, not with the chance that the stranger pretending to be Max might still be there, but she could at least have something to eat.
She hadn’t had a thing since that bit of toast this morning a
nd a large cappuccino she’d bought from a street vendor in the middle of the afternoon.
She checked her finances to see what she could afford, then got up and walked down the block to a coffee bar with the unassuming name of Susie’s, where she had a couple of cups of coffee—the beans freshly roasted on the premises—and a cheese and tomato sandwich on light rye. The coffee was better than the sandwich, but she was so hungry she ate the whole thing, stale bread, processed cheese and all. Splurging on a couple of chocolate-chip cookies, which were good, she settled back into her seat.
The coffee bar was filled with yuppies and wanna-be alternative types— the kinds of trendy people that she normally couldn’t stand to be around— but she still stayed there, nursing her second coffee for an hour before finally getting up to leave. Once she was back out on the pavement, she didn’t know what to do. It was still too early to go home.
Returning to the bench in front of the record store, she killed another hour before this seedy-looking guy started to hit on her. He made her skin crawl with his slicked-back hair and this black leather jacket that looked so cheap it had to be made of vinyl. But his mouth was the worst of all—lips so thin they were almost nonexistent and every time he smiled, all she could see were the gaps where he was missing teeth.
It took going into a bar to lose him. She got kicked out almost immediately for being underage, but at least her admirer was gone by the time she was escorted out by a surprisingly apologetic bouncer. She checked her watch—not even nine—and decided to walk around some more, just to kill time until her mother would get home, but what she thought was merely aimless wandering brought her within sight of her home before she even realized where she was going.
She paused in the shadow of an old brick house and looked at her building. The lights were off in her apartment and Max’s shop, but it seemed like every light in Max’s apartment was on. Her anxiety returned. She didn’t have the nerve to try and creep by his door, couldn’t even stand to be this close to him, so she turned and retraced her steps through the narrow twisting streets of the Market until she got to the corner of Lee Street where her mother would arrive. She’d either come by bus, or—if her date had a car—this was where she’d have him let her off.
She stood there for a while shifting her weight from one foot to the other, until she realized that this was really dumb. Her mother might still be hours, probably would be hours, considering how long it had been since she’d last been out on a date.
Only why did it have to be tonight? A horrible thought occurred to Nia. God, what if she really hit it off with this guy and stayed overnight? Except she’d call home, if that was the case, and discover that Nia wasn’t home either. Which would bring her back, all worried, and Nia knew she’d really be in for it then.
Sighing, she looked around for a more comfortable spot to wait. Spotting some wooden benches farther down the block, she went and slouched in one of them, willing time to hurry up and pass.
Naturally, it wouldn’t. As the minutes crept by, each slower than the last, she grew more and more irritated with her mother for staying out so late on a night like this. It made no difference that her mother knew nothing of the day’s odd occurrence and so couldn’t really be blamed. Nia just felt like she had to take it out on somebody and, out of habit more than anything else, her mother was an easy target.
It was unfair, and she knew it, but everything was unfair, wasn’t it? That weed getting crushed in front of Gypsy’s. What had happened to Max. Life in general.
Going on like this was stupid, she thought, feeling guilty and depressed, all at the same time. She forced herself to think of something else to pass the time. The last poem she’d read, she decided. Lew Welch’s “The Image, as in a Hexagram.” She loved the idea of the hermit in his cabin, locked away against the blizzard and winter, emerging in the spring with a book and only one set of clothes. It was so weird how Welch had gone off with a rifle into the mountains near Gary Snyder’s house and just never came back. Disappeared like Ambrose Bierce in Mexico. Though maybe they didn’t disappear so much as become invisible to those around them.
That thought brought back her depression, so she concentrated on the Monk album she’d been listening to this morning. She’d read somewhere that his son was planning to rerecord all of Monk’s music the way it was really supposed to sound, because apparently the albums that existed had originally all been recorded in just one or two takes, not allowing Monk the time he said he needed for his arrangements. His producer described him as being somewhere between difficult and impossible, but Nia guessed that sort of thing came with genius.
She was looking forward to his son’s recordings and envied his having been able to hear the music firsthand and up close the way he had. Monk had kept a piano at the foot of his bed and the first thing he’d do in the morning was get up and play. He played music all day and Nia couldn’t begin to imagine how wonderful it would be to grow up in that kind of environment, although she did think it was funny that the son had taken up the drums when he started to play music himself. Still, she liked his group and meant to buy a tape or CD by them the next time she had some spare money.
She guessed her mother was right. She should get a job. Then she wouldn’t always have to be mooching money for this and that and the next thing. She’d have her own. She wouldn’t have to explain why she was broke, or what she’d spent her money on. As it was, she still got an allowance, which was so juvenile, except she couldn’t not accept it, because then she’d have no money at all.
She checked her watch for what felt like the hundredth time since she’d sat down. Almost eleven now. Maybe her mother wasn’t coming home. Maybe she was having so much fun she hadn’t bothered to call home first, she was just going home with this guy. Maybe she was remembering the fight they’d had this morning and didn’t want to come home. She could be putting it off for as long as she could.
Nia wouldn’t blame her, considering the way she’d treated her mother this morning. But where did it leave her? She didn’t know what to do. There was no one she could stay with, and she sure wasn’t going home by herself.
She could feel the beginning of a panic attack when she saw a car pull over to the curb a little farther up from where she was sitting. It stopped under a streetlight and the tightness eased in Nia’s chest when she recognized her mother stepping out of the passenger’s side. She got up from the bench, pausing a little uncertainly when the driver’s side of the car opened as well and a woman stepped out.
What happened to her date? Nia wondered.
But then the woman came around the front of the car and embraced her mother. Nia stared, stunned, as they began to kiss. It wasn’t a friendly goodnight kiss between two friends, but a long lingering kiss, hands roving up and down each other’s shoulder blades and backs.
Nia shook her head.
No, she thought. This isn’t real. That’s not my...
The horror of what was happening came to her before she could finish the thought: it wasn’t just Max who’d been taken over by some stranger’s mind, but her mother, too.
No, she wanted to cry. It can’t be, I won’t let it be true. But she knew it was. That wasn’t her mother. Whatever alien had swallowed Max had stolen her mother as well.
Tears welled up in her eyes, blurring her vision until she could no longer see the two women, the streetlight casting their shadow across the sidewalk in one long, entwined shape. But the image was burned in her memory.
Sobbing, Nia turned and fled into the night.
20 MAX
I’m dreaming of Janossy again when I wake. Suddenly, in a fright. I stare wildly up into a night sky thick with stars, the hard stone under me. I’m just as disoriented as I was this morning. My back’s stiff and sore. It’s dark and I’m cold and there’s something warm and hairy pushed up against me. I start to panic, but then it all comes back to me. Not the dream—this time I can’t remember it, only that Janossy was there. What I remember is what shoul
d be a dream.
I sit up, moving slowly so that I don’t startle the stray. He starts to quiver under my hand, but I calm him down before he can bolt.
“Easy there, easy, boy,” I tell him, stroking his matted fur. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Everything’s going to be okay.”
I’m talking as much to convince myself as him. I’m talking to hear a voice and right now even my own will do.
I guess I thought everything would go away while I was sleeping. That I’d wake in my own bed again instead of on a stone headland in Fitzhenry Park. That I’d be in my own body instead of trapped in one of some loser that nobody likes, myself included. That I’d get my life back...
I can see well enough in the dark to know the dog’s gone big-eyed, looking at me, worried. I sense a rapport with him, as though we’ve been buddies for years, and find I like the feeling. We never had dogs, growing up in the city, even before my mother died, but Janossy did, Pitter and Hoo, a couple of mutts that were already ancient when I moved out to the farm. Pitter died the first year I was living there, Hoo outlived Janossy by a couple of months.
“The best animal friends,” Janossy told me once, “aren’t the ones you choose, but the ones that choose you. The ones that just move in on you.”
“What about the ones at the animal shelter?” I asked him. If you think I’m into details now, you should have known me back then. I couldn’t take anything at face value, always had to ask what if and why not. “Don’t you think they deserve a chance at a good life? It’s not like they can wander around, looking for the right person to move in with.”
Janossy smiled. “Just because a dog’s in jail, doesn’t mean he can’t make decisions anymore.”
To hear him tell it, the dogs in lockup could will somebody to come in and take them home. And maybe it’s true. It was true for Janossy, at any rate. Half the time he didn’t so much ask questions as make pronouncements.
I always meant to get myself down to the pound to see if one of the dogs there wanted to make a decision about me, but somehow I never did get around to it. Janossy would say I was simply waiting for this old stray lying beside me now only I never knew it.
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