Halcyon

by Rio Youers

  She’d paid the cabdriver at just after 10 a.m., according to a wristwatch hanging from the rearview. The White Lantern opened for lunch at 11:30. Beyond the windows, empty tables and chairs sat in darkness. The front door was open, though, to let in staff.

  Valerie went inside.

  * * *

  She used to enjoy Chinese cuisine. Not anymore. The smell of food being prepared in the kitchen—hot sesame oils and fresh fish, coconut milk, fried rice, and aniseed—placed a knot in her throat that was tough to swallow. She peeled a napkin from a nearby table and dabbed her brow. Her heart was faster now.

  The White Lantern hadn’t changed much inside, either. There was a large Buddha ornament surrounded by pots of half burned incense. Beyond the entrance, a Fu dog spouted water into a pond where koi as fat as Valerie’s leg swam slowly. The pictures on the walls were of lotus blossoms, mauve sunsets, junks on peaceable waters. Rear doors opened on riverfront seating.

  “Oh. You’re here.”

  Valerie jumped and turned around. The owner, Sasha, stood in the shadow of a bamboo screen. Sasha was Chinese but born and raised in Wales. She had acquired the restaurant from her mother, who in turn inherited it from her brother—Sasha’s uncle, the original proprietor—after he’d died of a justly deserved brain cancer in 2000.

  “Yes, I’m here,” Valerie said. “As agreed.”

  “Sorry, it’s been so busy. I lost track of the days.”

  Sasha had a delicious Welsh accent that seemed unlikely on her eastern lips. Her skin was ivory-smooth and her eyelashes were as long as daisy stems. In another life, Valerie might have tied strings to those eyelashes, flashed them open and closed while having her sing Chinese folk songs in her little Welsh accent.

  “Is the room ready?”

  “Yes,” Sasha said. She ducked away to fetch the key, giving Valerie a moment to compose herself. Or try. Her heart mirrored the sounds from the kitchen. Chopping. Clanging. Sizzling. She always felt like this when she met with the Society. A terrible, wonderful anticipation.

  Sasha returned with the key. Valerie took it with a weak smile and clutched it too tightly. The teeth impressed on her palm, hard enough to break the skin.

  “I’ll have company soon,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Send them right up.”

  “I will.”

  Valerie nodded and stepped away from Sasha, wending between the tables toward the restaurant’s eastern wall. Here she passed a huge painting of a rising sun, a dizzying circle of fiery brushstrokes. There was a stork in the foreground, and this, again, made her think of Pace, with his long legs and elegant body.

  You’re set apart, he’d said to her once, rocking her in his arms as if she were no larger than a cat. A gem. An outrageous wonder. Most of all, I see faith in your eyes.

  Valerie walked down a narrow hallway, past the washrooms, to a subtly crooked staircase painted red.

  * * *

  The bamboo wind chimes on the upstairs landing had been there for as long as Valerie could remember, positioned so that you had to step sideways to keep from brushing against them. Valerie had lost count of how many times she’d heard their hollow music. On the other side were three doors. The one to the right opened on an office. It was closed now, but it had stood ajar enough times for her to see inside. The one to the left … she wasn’t sure. Storage? Cleaning sundries? Boxes of fortune cookies? Valerie wondered if this was where the Society prepared themselves—where they pulled their masks on.

  The door straight ahead opened on a room that had been intended for private functions. Valerie unlocked it and stepped inside. A conference table with nine chairs around it dominated the space. This was a recent addition, having replaced a number of threadbare sofas that smelled heavily of nicotine. Two modest windows offered views of the Meadowlands and the Manhattan skyline beyond—a vista that Valerie sometimes saw in her dreams. The pictures were the same: hanging scrolls and lotus blossoms and junks with their dragon sails flying. And the lantern, of course, a moon-white oval floating over the table.

  Valerie looked at it for a moment with sweat trickling down her spine. She moistened her lips and sighed.

  So hungry.

  She took a seat at the table and waited.

  * * *

  His name was Pace—short for Pacifico, which meant peace-loving, and this was one of the first things he’d said to her. He found her huddled in a wet box beneath an overpass in East Rutherford. She was bruised, shivering, and very thin. He wiped the hair from her eyes, told her that he was going to look after her, and swept her into his arms. She looked at his face. Penny-brown eyes. Blond hair that curled beneath his jaw. Darker facial hair. Her hand rested on his chest and it felt as good as anything she’d ever known.

  “I’m damaged,” she warned. “Throughout.”

  That was when he told her his name and what it meant.

  He took her to his home and to a bed—but not his bed—where he nursed her over a dreamlike course of weeks. He fed her soups, proteins, plenty of water and antioxidants. He took her to the bathroom, washed and dressed her. Whenever she woke from a nightmare—which was often—he was there, perched on the side of the bed, usually wiping her brow with a cool cloth. “Hey,” he’d say gently. “It’s okay, sugargirl. It’s all good now.” Once she woke to find him playing an acoustic guitar on a chair in the corner. The sunlight streaming through a gap in the drapes made his golden hair burn like a halo.

  There was a mirror in the room and she watched herself grow stronger by the day. The color returned to her face. Her hair regained its fullness and shine. Even her scars appeared less conspicuous. She eventually felt strong enough to venture downstairs, following the sound of voices, music, and laughter. She pushed through a bead curtain into a spacious room with copious light. A girl with glistening Jheri curls sprawled across a beanbag smoking. Another girl, blond, dressed in cutoff shorts and a Madonna T-shirt, sat cross-legged on the floor sorting through a selection of vinyl LPs. Pace lounged on a taupe leather sofa with a third girl—maybe seventeen and pixie-faced—sitting on his knee.

  “Hey, sugargirl,” Pace said, and smiled. “You get one question before I ask you to sit down and take it easy.”

  Valerie frowned. She looked from one face to the next, then through the wide balcony doors at a vast, swaying meadow. Her heart lunged; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen so much open space. She wanted to run through it until she spilled from the edge. Instead, she shuffled her feet and asked her question.

  “What year is it?”

  The other girls looked at her. Their faces were quite different, but each wore identical expressions of curiosity.

  “I’ve been down a long time,” Valerie added.

  “The year is about as important as the time of day, which is to say: not at all.” Pace smiled and regarded her with his sharp brown eyes. “But for the record, it’s 1986. August, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Time’s an inhibitive concept,” the girl on his knee said. “The hands of a clock are more like prison bars. Once you embrace that, you grow wings. And once you have wings…”

  “Sky’s the limit,” the girl with the Jheri curls finished.

  “You’re not down anymore,” Pace assured her.

  But she had been down. Four years of pain and degradation. Four years of her precious life removed, as if an enormous hand had reached from the darkness and swatted them away. Valerie looked at the swaying meadow again, recalling her urge to run. She still wanted to, but after so long crawling across the floor, she thought wings might be nice, too.

  “My turn to ask a question,” Pace said, sliding the pixie-faced girl off his knee, getting to his feet. “What’s your name?”

  “Sugargirl, I guess.”

  “Cute.”

  Valerie wore a too-big bathrobe that she drew tighter as Pace stepped toward her. He ran the back of one hand across her cheek, which was clearer and pinker than when he�
��d found her in East Rutherford.

  “It’s Valerie,” she said, pulling away from him. “It’s a terrible name, I know. A goddamn fat housewife’s name.”

  “Not at all.”

  “It’s a powerful name,” the girl with the Jheri curls said. She blew a mast of cigarette smoke into the air and zigzagged one finger through it. “Valerie means valiant and strong-willed. It’s a survivor’s name.”

  Valerie’s nostrils flared and tears pricked at her eyes. She fought them back; it wouldn’t do to be called strong-willed, only to start crying. But something about it touched her deeply, because she was strong-willed, she was a survivor. It felt like recognition.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I’m Iris, by the way.” Iris stubbed out her cigarette and sat up on the beanbag. “It means rainbow. And I’m very pleased to meet you, Valerie.”

  “Iris is our resident name expert,” Pace said. “Knows all the origins and meanings. She’s also a damn fine painter and a published poet.”

  “Agnes,” the pixie-faced girl said, raising her hand. “It means virginal, apparently. I think I need a new name.”

  “Yes, you do,” Pace agreed with a pearly grin. He gestured at the girl sorting records. “That’s Amy. Means beloved. She doesn’t say much but she can sing like heaven. Had a recording contract with Tom Dowd at Atlantic. She broke those corporate chains to be here with us. How do those wings feel, Amy?”

  Amy held up a copy of Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and smiled.

  “Then there’s me.” Pace touched her cheek again and this time she didn’t move away. “You remember my name?”

  “Pacifico,” Valerie replied. “It means peace-loving.”

  “Right on. Call me Pace.” He trailed his fingers down to her throat, then drew his hand back slowly. “Strong memory. What else do you remember?”

  “Too much.”

  “Not all of it good, I’m guessing.”

  “None of it.”

  “Well, it can be sweetness and light from here out—if you want it, of course. Consider this your home now. Stay for as long as you like, but the doors are right there anytime you want to leave.” Pace threw his arms wide, mimicking the balcony doors and everything beyond them. “That meadow sure looks pretty, but trust me … it’s all darkness on the other side. It’s all tick and tock.”

  Pace was never exclusive to her, but Valerie couldn’t help but think he favored her. Maybe the other girls believed they were favorites, too, but it didn’t escape Valerie how often he left their beds to get into hers. Not that he hurried. Many weeks passed before they became intimate. He gave her space and healing, until one night he came into her room and asked, “Are you ready?” and Valerie responded by throwing the sheets off her scarred body. There was a gift in the way he touched her, a brilliant confidence, as if she presented no mystery to him. It was nothing so clichéd as knowing where and when to touch; he wore her, almost, and moved her body in ways that unnerved and enthralled her.

  They went, just the two of them, for long walks in the North Jersey Skylands. They swam in lakes and beneath waterfalls. Often they went into the meadow behind his house, where the flowers were waist-high and sweetly perfumed. Sometimes he played his guitar with the bees and butterflies droning around him. Other times he sat rock-like while Valerie sketched him in pencils. Without fail, their clothes ended up strewn and they made love. He traveled her body.

  “I know how pain feels,” she said to him once, stroking his narrow abdomen. “I’ve been down and broken. If this isn’t real, Pace … if you’re not real, I think I’m going to break all over again.”

  “You don’t have to worry.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “But maybe you do.”

  They watched the sun rise and the moon fade, surrounded by bird and coyote song. They debated art and fulfillment and how they’d change the world. Pace sermonized about essence and decay, and of course he talked about Glam Moon.

  “Don’t think of it as heaven,” he said—almost snarled, such was his passion. “Don’t cheapen it like that. It’s closer to what Guatama found under the Bodhi tree: a transcendent experience.”

  “You mean spiritual enlightenment?”

  “That would suggest a heightened awareness. A state of mind. The Glam is more than that. It’s a living world formed of the purest energy, where you can breathe the air, drink the water.”

  Glam Moon was very much a house affair. It drummed throughout every conversation, every act of love, often directly, other times like a distal pulse. Pace said his dream was to find a secluded spot and establish a self-sustaining community—men and women from all walks of life, who’d cast aside their clocks and chains to find a deeper meaning.

  “We’ll call it Halcyon,” he said.

  “Named after a bird—a type of kingfisher,” Iris said. “In Greek mythology, the halcyon is a seabird that can calm the waves. As an adjective, it means a time of great tranquility and happiness.”

  “Hence the phrase: halcyon days,” Amy said.

  “We’ll love, we’ll meditate,” Pace continued. “We’ll find what we’re looking for, no matter how long it takes.”

  “Like a cult?” Valerie asked.

  “Cult is such an ugly word,” Pace said. “It creates negative energy. I prefer to think of it as living in harmony.”

  On another occasion—the women preparing dinner and discussing Glam Moon—Agnes mentioned a drug that could take you there: direct and rapid access, no meditation required.

  “It’s a synthetic hallucinogen,” she said. “Like LSD. But there are no trippy side effects. Everything you see and feel is beautiful.”

  “It simulates the Glam,” Amy clarified, adding sliced cucumber to the salad. “You’re not really there.”

  “But if you think you’re there—”

  “It’s called Rhapsody,” Pace said, entering the room. “I’ve also heard it called Jesus, Bliss, and Route One. And Amy is right, it’s a simulation. We can do better. We can find the White Skyway.”

  “What’s that?” Valerie asked.

  “It’s between here and there,” Agnes said.

  “Between up and down,” Iris added.

  “Compare it to an Einstein-Rosen bridge,” Pace explained. “A throat, or tunnel, connecting two points in space and time.”

  “A gateway between dimensions,” Amy said.

  “Right,” Pace said. “In essence, a wormhole, but with an exotic matter added, making it stable … traversable.”

  “And where do we find this wormhole?” Valerie asked.

  Pace looked at her, and she saw something in his eyes she didn’t like. It was cold and hollow—the closest thing to an answer she got for many years.

  They lived simply and happily, farming their own produce, making just enough money through art and music to pay for the things they couldn’t do without: a home, electricity, clean water, sanitary towels, birth control. There were no clocks, no concerns, only a raw, unbridled love for one another. Sometimes that love was made as a group—the five of them tangled across the living room like wires. Other times it was one on one. Valerie recalled the first time she woke to find Iris’s slick curls tickling her inner thighs—Iris’s tongue rolling over her anus.

  “I can stop, if you like,” Iris said a moment later.

  “Don’t you dare.”

  The nightmares never went away, but Valerie learned that she didn’t have to be afraid. Her new family made her feel whole and beautiful, and she adored them completely. She would kill them all in time—cut their fucking throats like pigs—but in those early days she felt immeasurable love.

  Then there was Pace and the moments they shared, where she felt both womanly enough to tower, and small enough to sleep in his palm. And yes, she was his favorite. She knew this with every crumb in her soul. He even said as much.

  “You’re set apart.” He cradled her as a winter sun shone almost blue through the icy windows. Her body was rigid with cold bu
t warm inside. “A gem. An outrageous wonder. Most of all, I see faith in your eyes.”

  She pressed herself against his chest. She purred.

  “The others … they believe me, or they want to believe.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I sometimes feel they’re just along for the ride. But with you there’s never a moment of doubt.”

  “Never.”

  “Is it because I saved you?”

  “No.” She slipped from his arms and into his lap, gathered there like a part of him. “It’s because I’ve been there. I’ve seen Glam Moon.”

  * * *

  The lantern swayed in an updraft—heat rising from the kitchen below. The restaurant had opened for lunch and Valerie heard the buzz of clientele, the clatter of cookware. She’d been in this upstairs room two hours, by her rough estimation, and still no sign of the Society.

  She got to her feet and walked to the rightmost window, pressed her face against the glass. From this ungainly angle, Valerie had a partial view of the parking lot. Three cars occupied spaces facing the river. They looked too old—not grand enough—to belong to Society members. They would drive Audis or Mercedes-Benzes. Maybe the one with young hands—the snake—drove a Porsche. She waited to see if another car pulled in but none did. Valerie paced the room, floorboards creaking. Her nerves had settled but her hunger raged.

  They could be downstairs, of course, gorging on Sichuan chicken and crispy fucking noodles. Or maybe they’d been lured to some new catastrophe—a super typhoon in the Philippines, perhaps, or the recent mass-shooting in San Diego. They’d gorge on that, too, those fucking animals—circle-jerking as the body count soared.

  Pleasure out of pain. It was what they did.

  And why she needed them.

  Valerie groaned, suddenly lightheaded. She collapsed to her knees and raked her fingernails across the floor. She wasn’t just hungry. She was jonesing.

  The lantern floated on its redolent updraft. Valerie looked at it. Her eyes were dark green pits.