“Why didn’t you bring your guitar this trip?” she asks.
“Haven’t played in a while.”
“You miss it?”
“There’s always something to miss.” Liam flicks the puck past her again. “That’s game.” He brushes her wrist with two fingers, so quickly she might have wondered afterward if it even happened — except for the goose bumps. “I’ll miss you. When summer’s over.”
“Yeah,” she says, suppressing a smile.
“Yeah.”
They sit and look at each other without another word until Liam spots Gwen scoffing mints over by the hostess stand. “So,” he says, “let’s go get a glow on — as Papa Bear used to say when he thought I wasn’t listening — and I’ll fill you in on my research.”
Everything that is yours, bella.
What is mine, exactly? May wonders, watching Liam walk back from the bar with two foam-topped glasses and a look of triumph on his face. He’s close enough to legal back home to get annoyed when they card him, but far enough away, still, to feel proud when they don’t. Here nobody seems to care how old — or young — you are. Everyone drinks wine with their kids and thinks nothing of it.
Stashing her phone back in her jacket pocket, May accepts the frosty glass.
“So like I promised, I’ve been on Google this week.” He settles across from her. “There’s some interesting stuff out there.”
“Like what?”
He raises his glass but sets it down again, laying his hands flat on the round tabletop as if to balance himself. They’re nice hands, May thinks — for not the first time lately, though she’s too distracted and jumpy to consider what that might mean. They’re nothing like Marco’s hands, but oddly enough, a lot about Liam does seem to remind her of Marco. Is she seeing what she wants to see, perhaps, in what’s possible?
Liam stretches his long legs under the table and regards the platform stage with an over-satisfied, almost stoned expression. “Well, I was hunting around online and there’s this phenomenon called timeslip or retrocognition.”
There are no dives in Florence, not like the ones back home, but the café is below street level and dimly lit, with everything, including the stage, painted a dull-black matte. It reeks of beer and would be more at home in Chicago — where Liam and Gwen live now — than Italy, and that must be what he’s after.
May lets her gaze drift with his to where the band is starting to set up. It’s been nearly an hour, and Liam hasn’t looked at his phone once. In fact, it’s May who keeps pulling hers out, peering into the glow. There was a text from her mom this morning, and then, at intervals, another and another. Look, what else can I say? I’ve failed you. I’ve failed us, and I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
“And?”
“Some sources describe it as a mass haunting, where you hallucinate places and buildings from the past, sometimes with the associated people. There’s a famous case where these two English ladies at the turn of the twentieth century, teachers or a teacher and a principal or something, said they saw Versailles the way it looked in the time of Marie Antoinette.”
The drummer is smiling to himself as if he’s having an especially nice daydream. He looks high and happy, like he doesn’t care much, a bit like Liam tonight. The drummer has a fuzzy goatee and wears a blazer over a clean white T. May looks at him intently, because she can’t look that way at Liam, shouldn’t look that way at Liam, especially since looking at Liam that way oddly makes her wonder about Marco, what he’s doing in his moment in time, in his dank workshop among the dead and dying of another Florence. Would he be like Liam if his life had been easier?
“They wrote a book about it. They were visiting the palace, which is on these vast grounds, and got lost looking for the Petit Trianon. They’re wandering around when they start to feel all shitty, like something’s oppressing their spirits. Two men in long gray-green coats and triangle hats show up and point them toward the Petit —”
“I’ll ask you later what the Petit Whatever is —” May steals a look at this guy she knows better than anyone, who suddenly feels like a stranger. Her lips feel fat and chapped. She drinks more beer, a lot more beer, and taps her foot along with the sporadic drum warm-up.
The drummer finally leads the band into their first tune, something twangy and moony and hypnotic, and Liam lowers his voice and says, “They come to this isolated cottage where a woman and a girl are standing in funny old clothes, bodicy dresses and whatnot, and the girl’s reaching up for a jug the woman’s offering.”
“A jug?”
“Shh. Listen. So everything goes freeze-frame, like in a movie, and they walk on to a pavilion with something weird and depressing about it — it all sounded pretty glum — and there is this dude sitting outside, his face all messed up from smallpox, wearing a straw hat.
“The man in the hat pays no attention to them, so they walk on quietly and reach a small country house with shuttered windows and terraces on either side. There’s a lady on the lawn with her back to the house holding a large board with paper on it, working on a drawing or considering one. She has on a big white hat over her blond hair.”
May can almost see them, and the twangy, trancy music in the background makes for a weird sound track. The man at the table beside them is smoking another cigarette, a mushroom blooming above his head in the stage light.
“A short, poofy dress. A green shawl or kerchief over her shoulders.”
“You’re not on the witness stand, you know.”
Li shushes her, pausing for a long sip, wiping the foam from his mouth. “At the end of the terraces,” he goes on, “they see a third house. When they reach it, a door flies open and slams shut again. A young servant comes out, and they file in behind him, nervous all of a sudden that they’ve trespassed on private property. They follow him back toward the —” He pauses, all expectation.
“Yeah,” she obliges. “The Petit Whatever.”
“Back home in England, one of our ladies stumbles across this portrait of the queen drawn by some famous artist, and yes, it’s the same sketching woman they noticed near —”
“The Petit Trianon —”
“Wearing the same clothes.”
It’s a good story, May thinks, but it feels like a story. Nothing like Cristofana and Marco or plague sores or a convent full of orphans. She isn’t sure how much if any of these particulars Liam is ready to hear. Swirling her beer, May’s not sure how willing she is to share them yet. “So what did they do?”
“One of them went back to Versailles in 1902 but couldn’t retrace their steps. The grounds looked different. But she also found out that on October fifth, 1789, Marie Antoinette was sitting at the Petit Trianon when word came that a mob from Paris was marching toward the palace.”
“OK,” May says, closing her eyes to listen. “So what happened?”
“Nothing. I mean, I guess they decided this moment was so emotional and terrible for Marie Antoinette that it just got imprinted there and hung on through the years, and somehow the English ladies stumbled into it. That maybe impressions like this linger, and sensitive people can pick them up. I guess now paranormal investigators call these scenes afterimages.
“A lot of the people who had these timeslips felt like they were in some altered state of consciousness; the air was still and the place seemed mostly silent and abandoned. There’s this one thing going on, yeah, but like a loop, over and over, and it’s all eerie and depressing.”
Eerie and depressing. Again her mind rifles back through all the reading she’s been doing, pausing at an image that lodged in her brain that afternoon, an artist’s rendering of a plague physician in medieval Europe. Even if you were lucky enough to be seen by a doctor in, say, Florence — most urban docs fled to the countryside or contracted the disease and died — they tended to show up in surreal waxed robes and wide-brimmed hats, big gloves, and this leather mask with glass lenses and a long, scary beak stuffed with vi
negar-soaked cloth and spice to distract from your mortal stink.
Cristofana had pointed out one of these nightmare figures on the street once, and May thought she would rather die alone than have that be the last thing she saw. The preferred method of “curing” patients at the time was to bleed them — a slit wrist leaking into a bowl — though doctors might also try a poultice of human excrement or a tonic of diced snake or ground emeralds if you were rich.
It was a bad business, in other words, scary beyond imagining, and May can’t grasp the fear and heartbreak Marco and Cristofana must be living with daily. She’s seen glimmers of it with her own eyes, but it’s not the same. As Cristofana loves to remind her, there’s nothing at stake for May. She’s a traveler without footprints, a passing phantom.
“Just a little eerie.” May looks up. “Yeah.”
The band’s playing something a little more upbeat, thank God, though still on the maudlin side. Li swears by what he calls Americana and what everyone else calls country. How did these guys end up in Florence?
And why can’t she focus on what Li’s saying instead of just his mouth?
“Well, anyway,” he goes on, a little self-consciously, picking up on her mood, which he’s always done, which used to drive her crazy. “To make a long story short, they’re like a loop of film or a videotape, these images, of past stuff linked to some trauma or big event or emotion. You have a lot of battlefield and murder-scene afterimages, of course. Some locations are more conducive than others. Just like some people — ahem, sensitive types — are more likely to pick up on them.”
“How’s that different from a ghost? In ghost stories, people are always stuck there from another time in old clothes, hanging around for way too long, trying to figure out or avenge or explain something. But they never seem to say much, ghosts, and believe me, Cristofana talks — a lot, all the time — and she does affect things, even if I don’t. Really, I’m the ghost when I’m . . . there.”
“Pretty much rules that theory out, then.” Li sips his beer, and May smiles at the drummer, who now has a shit-eating grin on his face and seems to be lazily watching their table, though he may just be blinded by a spotlight slicing the room. He took off his jacket between songs, and his freckled arms gleam with sweat.
She turns to Liam, who’s looking at her in this drowsy way, and looks away. It’s humid in here. No air-conditioning to speak of. Just the one fan, high on the wall, overlooking the swinging kitchen doors.
“There’s actual time travel, of course, but that’s been disproved by physics and pretty much anyone who hasn’t watched too much Doctor Who. . . .”
“Like you, for example.”
He laughs.
“OK. Why?” she asks as calmly as she can. The more she reads about the Black Death, trying to make sense of what Cristofana’s up against — what she’ll be up against, if Cristofana follows through on her veiled threats — the more agitated May feels.
“Most physicists argue against time travel because it screws with cause and effect.” He sips his beer, and, when she raises her eyebrows, adds, “It’s a paradox problem. A traveler could go back and kill his grandpa, in which case he’d never be born in the first place. Didn’t your parents ever make you watch Back to the Future?” Liam always was a sci-fi geek, but as a future physics major, this assignment’s right up his alley.
“Right. But what if when the traveler gets there,” May persists, treading closer to the truth to test his reaction, “she’s just a shadow, not flesh and blood? What if she can only watch . . . and can’t change anything?”
“Is, um — she — there at all, then?” Liam leans close across the table, his mouth twitching back a smile. “Is that what happens to you?”
A guy at a nearby table blows smoke in their direction, and May wrinkles her nose, trying to ignore the fact that Liam, for all his words to the contrary, is humoring her. This is a pity mission. Maybe he thinks it will score him brownie points. Maybe he thinks it’s foreplay.
But I asked him to do it, she thinks, to humor me. And because he’s obliging, she feels less alone, even if she also feels ridiculous. But I’m afraid, Li, she wants to say, though she feels better now, calmer. Better with him. I’m afraid.
How can he help her if she’s too embarrassed to tell him what’s really happening?
“This one guy talks about a kind of quantum theory where everything that can possibly happen, and I mean everything, is happening, all the time, in every direction. We think of time like moving water, right? Flowing along. But this guy describes reality more like still images that get linked the way a filmstrip makes a movie. Blink,” Liam commands.
She rolls her eyes.
“Seriously. Blink hard, fast, a bunch of times in a row. If every frame of reality is separate, a still —”
“Those stills are in some kind of order, Li. And to get from this point to that point takes time. Time and reality aren’t the same.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”
“If you buy in, ‘reality’ is really endless variations, all existing as a series of stills. We may only slot into one ‘movie’ at a time, but it isn’t the only possible one.”
“Because we have free will?”
Liam shrugs. “I guess. But it’s the time part — time as an absolute in itself — that the theory rejects. Even Einstein called it an illusion, more or less.”
May tries to wrap her mind around a slight variation on the scene at hand . . . on a still stacked beside theirs . . . with another on the other side . . . and so on in every direction. All with different outcomes. A heaped jumble like on the tables at a flea market. Some universe.
How many stills away was Cristofana? Worse, how many Cristofana “variations” were there? May has a sudden sharp memory of being small and wobble-ankled on skates, of her mother on one side and her dad on the other, leading her in a figure eight around a frozen pond near Grandma’s. “It’s the sign for infinity,” Dad had explained, and while May didn’t know what that meant at the time and didn’t feel like spoiling the moment by asking, inviting a lecture, she felt her skinny ankles learning their work, and the easy scrape of blade against ice; she felt her mittened hands in theirs, and the inside of her head spinning round and round, and her body moving forward and back, round and round, over and over, like music. Like forever.
But there is no forever.
Her parents have pointed that out.
As it turns out, time in all its bigness is something May can’t fathom. She does better with small. Microbes, which she’s been reading about all week, make more sense than the universe, maybe thanks to her brief career as a veterinary intern, maybe because she really just likes this stuff, medical weirdness, but either way, May has been reading and letting her mind dwell on plague, on the reality of it.
What she already knew is that the human body is a colony for microbes, single-celled bacteria so small they can’t be seen without a microscope, critters that get picked up in everything we breathe, drink, eat, and touch; they live in hair and mouths and intestines; they groom our eyelashes; and mostly they do it just so they can cop a ride and a little nourishment. All of which is gross, May thinks, but fascinating, too, and normal.
Parasitic microbes, on the other hand, just take, and sometimes kill. They also spread — fast — and can infect a lot of people at once. An epidemic. A really successful epidemic, one that finds its way around the world, is a pandemic. The Black Death was the beginning of the Second Pandemic. The first toppled the Roman Empire.
One of Gwen’s guidebooks explained how historians think bubonic plague hitched a ride with rats from Central Asia to Europe on fleas infected with Yersinia pestis, a parasitic microbe. If an infected flea jumped from a rat to a human and took a chomp, it left thousands of microscopic bacteria in the wound. These attacked the lymph nodes, swelling the person’s groin and armpits into the “buboes” Cristofana keeps talking about, and causing feve
r, diarrhea, respiratory distress, and blackened skin. All told, you were usually dead within three days (sooner if you managed to breathe Yersinia pestis into your lungs, which gave you hours).
“Then you have supersymmetry —” Liam’s saying, and May juts out her hand like an imperious crossing guard.
“Stop,” she demands, closing her eyes, “please, dude.” She rubs her temples against the image rising in her mind, a gaping absence, a wall of nothing, leading to a world of nightmares. “I think we nix the paranormal explanation, and while I’m not ruling out crazy physics, my head is going to explode if we don’t stop talking about it.”
Something in Liam’s humid eyes, in the way he looks in that blue stage light at just that moment, makes her suck in air way too fast and blurt out, “Dance with me.”
He looks around to see if anyone else is dancing, to see if there’s anywhere to dance. They aren’t, and there isn’t. “Seriously?”
She nods.
“Right. OK. I’m not much of a —”
May stands up before she can change her mind, and she holds out her hand.
He lets her pull him up, lead him to the shadowy edge of a bank of mostly empty tables just below the stage, and drape his right arm around her waist. Leaning forward, she rests her cheek on his shoulder, hands stuffed in the frayed back pockets of his jeans. The drummer is still smiling.
“Why?” Liam whispers into her hair, and she hates that he sounds bewildered.
“Why not?” she says quickly, breathing him in, lifting her face without meeting his eyes, for the first time in a long time thinking not of Marco — who feels remote just now, locked in another age — but of Liam, who smells good, like sweat and aftershave and beer. “You said we should try to have fun while we’re over here. Life is good, right?” She rests her lips in the damp curve of his neck, not quite kissing him.
Plague in the Mirror Page 11
