Shadowplays

by W. D. Gagliani

  “Okay,” she said, imitation patience oozing from her tone even though she tried to hide it, “we all have these ‘death’ nightmares. You know that, don’t you? It’s stress. The paranoia of modern society. Computer withdrawal or computer overdose. Overexposure to phone radiation, microwaves, radio waves, and high voltage wires. Maybe even TV.” She smiled, uncertainly, letting me know I seemed to be slipping off the proverbial rocker. Her dark eyes flicked sideways, unconsciously checking to see if anyone in the room could hear us.

  “You sit in your dark place and stare at that computer of yours, making yourself miserable with your downer Incubus music.” She shook her head. “It’s no wonder you have nightmares. You barely get any sleep. See, it’s a cycle. You don’t sleep enough, so when you do sleep it’s not good sleep, and so you have nightmares, which in turn scare you away from wanting to sleep.”

  I nodded. From her point of view, this made sense. But she had no idea that my mind actually erased people from the world. She couldn’t see the pain I felt at the thought of losing her, and yet the willingness I showed in risking her very being for some elusive and temporary comfort. She could not know that I was weak, and that she would suffer for my weakness.

  “Spend less time on your computer,” she was saying. “Tell those leeches at HyperMusic that you need more time. Take a vacation, a week off or something, and catch up on your sleep.”

  I had not gotten through. No matter how delicately I wanted to tell her about my problem, or how bluntly, she would never believe.

  “I know about all that,” I said. “But two or three of these nightmares a night? I can hardly close my eyes without finding myself lost in a dream. And it’s not just the dream itself, Jackie, it’s that the people I touch within the dream - anyone I touch in the dream -” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  The people I touch within my dreams have a habit of fading away, okay? totally out of the fucking picture. The more I touch them, the faster they fade, until one day they aren’t there at all. And I don’t know where they go …

  I just couldn’t say it - couldn’t be expected to take her response in stride. “It’s a little like -” I cast about for an example “-like having three different bodies: one asleep, one interacting with people in the dream, and one somewhere between the other two, watching and stalking and somehow hurting them. Without affecting me, the sleeping one.”

  I left out some things - my improved health, vigor, strength. Youth. Eternal youth, I was beginning to believe. She couldn’t possibly be ready for those.

  “It sounds horrible,” she whispered, but I could see that she wasn’t tracking.

  “Jackie, do you hear me talking to you? I haven’t had more than an hour or two of sleep a night for the past two months. This is why I had to beg for the contract extension. Why I haven’t called you or seen you in so long. I’m afraid to fall asleep -” I clenched my scarred hand under the table now, twisting some pain from the tiny points “- and I’m afraid to find out what will happen to you if I do.”

  There, it was out. I stopped. She was looking at me strangely.

  “I still think sleeping pills should help,” she said. I admired her stubbornness, in a crazy way. “Maybe you’re working too hard. Or drinking too much.” She nodded at my empty glass, already thrice filled and thrice drained, symbol of my new-found alcoholism. “Or maybe both.”

  A few more minutes of the same useless advice and I’d given up, agreeing to order a late dinner. We barely talked over greasy burgers. Mine caught in my throat - a lump of dead matter, lukewarm and tasteless. I felt each bite come back up to tease my efforts.

  “I hope you won’t mind, Paul,” she whispered later, as we were gathering our jackets, “but it might be best if we didn’t spend the night together.”

  “If that’s what you’d prefer,” I said carefully, hoping my relief wouldn’t show. As much as I loved her, being with her would almost surely lead me down the path to dreams, and if she appeared in my dreams -

  If only there were some solution.

  If only it were as simple as drinking blood - at least then I could choose my victims.

  I sensed a sudden coolness in her manner, and I really couldn’t blame her because I was changing into a ghoul before her big brown eyes. There was no understanding, only the pretense. The evening had deteriorated to a simple “Good night,” and then she was alone with her ritual and I with mine.

  D# Minor

  When I close my eyes sometimes I still see Terri, though her features are less and less distinct each time. She was pretty in an angular, boyish, blond-haired way, with flat breasts (but with big, prominent nipples) and narrow hips. But her light-blue eyes were entrancing. And she flirted with me shamelessly, enjoying the consternation this caused in a thirteen-year-old who couldn’t touch but wanted to.

  She was my best friend’s girlfriend, on and off, and his down-the-street neighbor. We spent a lot of time together, Tim and I, like brothers. And then like a little Yoko she came along and turned from the snotty little neighborhood girl into the sexy girlfriend and we became three in everything except the kissing, and the jealousy started. Those two took every opportunity to rub lips and wrestle tongues in my presence, enjoying my discomfort and - to my shame - my obvious interest.

  “You like to watch us kiss?” She’d laugh and her eyes would sparkle. And then they’d both laugh as I indicated that, no, I didn’t and yet I’d still watch as they French-kissed and barely came up for air, their chins slick with each other’s drool. “I think your friend likes me,” she liked to say to Tim as their faces collided once again for another dose of youthful lust, smearing her lip gloss provocatively.

  I knew her malicious streak wasn’t deep. She was nice to me, on the whole. I can almost see her image still on thick-bordered snapshots taken in someone’s backyard, and even though nothing remains of her except a faded outline, it’s always the three of us, like twisted Musketeers, adventuring in some childish scenario. Never mind that Tim always got the girl. After all, that was his role. He was the star, while I played sidekick. I didn’t have to look good, then, just as comfortingly Sancho Panza-ish as I could. At nearly two hundred pounds and below average in height, I guess I was tailor-made for the role.

  The day I snuck a snapshot of the three of us from his kitchen table I knew what I would do. I hadn’t planned it, but a scenario of my own had taken hold of my imagination. That night I trimmed the picture around Terri’s image, around the curly blond hair framing her delicate eyebrows and thick eyelashes. Around the dimpled cheeks and thin but perfectly-shaped, brightly-colored lips. Around the slight swell of her breast. Around the sides of her hip-huggers. Then I taped the cut-out where I could see it clearly, off the edge of the nightstand. I had to crane my neck on the pillow, but the angle kept the cut-out out of view of the door, so my mother couldn’t see it if she looked in on me.

  I fell asleep trying to keep Terri’s likeness locked in my mind.

  For weeks, I found Tim in my dreams more often than Terri. But I could afford to wait, since the two of us would never touch in those dreams. It was just a matter of time. No, I wasn’t at all upset at him. In his place, I’d have kissed her all day too. Then, one night, Terri and I held hands in a dream the sweetness of which still overwhelms me on occasion. A few nights later, we indulged in my wildest teenage fantasies. I touched Terri in my sleep as I could never touch her in real life.

  Then the dam burst, and all the fantasies and hopeful side glances and the pretending not to watch and the lust as they indulged themselves in my presence as if I didn’t matter came tumbling down the valley of my mind. The dam was gone, and I dreamed about her every night. In color. In detail. I touched her - oh, how I touched her.

  And within weeks Terri was gone.

  After searching all the local culverts and parks for a shallow grave, her parents’ efforts faded at the same rate as the image of her near my bed.

  Two years later, they sold their house and move
d away, broken people.

  With the hardened heart of youth, Tim eventually got a new girlfriend, one I didn’t like.

  Occasionally, on gazing at Terri’s blue clapboard house while we played street football, I felt a stab of guilt. But it always went away.

  Bb Minor7

  I knew that I couldn’t let myself sleep, even now, after the rowing, because the shakes I’d had in the car guaranteed a dream.

  The sweat had dried on my skin, and I felt sleep slowly creeping over me. The rowing should have exhausted me to the point of dreamless sleep. I had rowed continuously for two hours, hoping sleep would take me then and leave me alone.

  I stood and felt the tightness in my sore muscles. Had I really been in a rowboat, I mused, I could have rowed clear across the English Channel. But would I sleep? I staggered to the bed in the curtained alcove and collapsed onto the wrinkled, sweat-soiled sheets. I desperately wanted to slam my hand onto the tack mounted on the headboard, but both my palms were throbbing and there was a weariness settling in on me that I could barely begin fighting off. Brief catnaps weren’t enough to satisfy the body’s hunger for sleep, the brain’s hunger for food. For that is what Jackie was, what all the others had been. But catnaps were all I’d allowed myself for weeks, hoping to reduce the length of REM-sleep. It was like falling into a web, once I was asleep. A web that allowed me motion and yet trapped me and my prey into a death ritual no one could stop.

  I lay on the bed naked, waiting to be engulfed by the darkness and the fear.

  You can’t hurt the people you love. I wanted to believe it, but I wasn’t even sure I loved her, was I? And if she loved me, wouldn’t she have believed me? Did she deserve my protection, when she wouldn’t take my word that she was in danger?

  Silken hands reached out to me and I went with them.

  F Minor sus9

  She was enclosed in a massive hourglass-shaped crystal container. Its neck was wide, at least two feet, wide enough for her to stand inside. But she was on her knees, buttocks resting on her heels. Her breasts swung free, nipples stiff, and then she leaned forward and pushed up against the glass. The hourglass moved, and eventually I became aware that its flat surface rested on one pan of a huge brass balance. The air was hazy, but the background dark, so that I couldn’t see if there was anything on the other, opposing pan.

  It didn’t matter because I stared at her seductive smile and I responded, and then - in the twisted logic of dreams - we were both in the hourglass and making love, our slick bodies moving against each other and sliding on the cool crystal as we exploited our unusual position to the fullest. I touched her soft skin and caressed her hair and held her tightly, my fingers prodding and probing her very being, her lips locked with mine until release took us and then we collapsed giggling into each other’s embrace.

  The other balance pan came into focus slowly and I saw a man - a young man - with scarred hands watching us, smiling. I looked down at Jackie who lay in my arms, but she was not there. She wasn’t in the hourglass at all. I stared at the young man on the other side of the balance, and when we locked gazes I was looking into a mirror.

  C Minor°13sus4

  I screamed.

  Jackie.

  My hand found the tack and the rapid, sensual pleasure of the first strike turned to agony, yet I continued until my palm was a wet, gory mess and the sleep-haze was gone. I pulled my crippled hand from the metal point, felt the slippery metal wriggle free of each layer of skin, and my shaking fingers clutched at the telephone. Blood-slick. The receiver slipped from my grip and landed somewhere under the bed, its dial tone accusing, unforgiving.

  Daylight poured into my window, met the fluorescents and became a soft-focus photograph. No comb, no toothbrush, no soap could relieve how I felt and must have looked. The dream images throbbed into my skull as I slipped sweatpants over my bareness, feeling still the wetness there, and half-buttoned a wrinkled shirt over my shoulders.

  Moments later, with no real memory of any action or occurrence in-between one reality and another, I was standing on Jackie’s lawn. The key she’d given me (“I don’t hand one of these to just anybody, I’ll have you know, Mr. Successful Musician!”) sticky with dried blood from the countless tiny punctures that crisscrossed my palm, I negotiated her porch. Any second she would open the door, startled, then laugh at the sight of me disheveled and so early in the morning, and invite me in for hot chocolate or tea. Maybe she’d wink and offer me a dash of rum for the cocoa, “to jump-start the day.” Or maybe she’d frown and hustle me inside with a gentle spank and admonish me for making another spectacle in full view of her neighbors. “Even from artists, they can only take so much,” she’d say.

  The house was still. She was probably asleep, curled into a ball under her snowy white down comforter. I opened the bedroom door, the throb that hammered at my temples increasing its intensity, but she wasn’t there. The bed was slept in, though, the comforter puffed and creased. I checked the bath, but there was no residual heat or steam. The guest bedroom was empty. In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed quietly and the microwave LED blinked out the time. On the counter, a huge mug sat next to a half-eaten cookie. It was too early on a Sunday for her to have gone anywhere.

  My head felt as though it would buckle under the pounding.

  In the living room I sat on the couch and consciously slowed my breathing so I wouldn’t hyperventilate. Then I cradled my head with both sticky hands and tears came.

  I had to look, then, knowing what I would find.

  The hallway wall. Dozens of framed photographs hidden in shadow. Her photographs, snapshots raised to the level of art. I turned on the hall light. They were all photographs of me. At the keyboard, in my studio. A rare one, on stage. At Bradford Beach, outside her cottage in Eagle River, on the steps of Curtin Hall at the university, on a pontoon boat riding at anchor on Cranberry Lake, cross-country skiing on the paved bike trail. Others.

  But before most had been photographs of us, taken candid-style with her motorized timer.

  Where Jackie had been on each photograph was now a light, translucent spot. Background color peeked through thinly, as if to remind you that there had been something there, but that now it was gone. Black and white photographs were even more stark, her outline a white smudge that hid background like a hanging tapestry.

  I felt the glass cutting my hands and wrists as I shattered each frame by pummeling it against the others until there were blood splatters and skewed frames and spotted glass shards covering my lacerated feet. Then I slid to the floor and wept.

  Alone.

  * * *

  ONLY SPECTRES STILL HAVE PITY

  Published in THE GRIMOIRE and in SHADOWPLAYS (1st edition)

  I knelt next to the window as the last rays of sunlight filtered through the grimy glass, and watched the daytime groups of passersby slowly dissolve and disappear, one by one, until the grey street was nearly empty. Electric lights flickered; weak beacons guiding souls to their rest.

  I ignored the lights and embraced the coming darkness.

  That was my time.

  Not unlike most nights, civilian traffic would soon be replaced by rumbling Saracens, Land-Rovers, and roaming foot patrols, all with their blazing searchlights like Cyclopean monster-eyes defiling the purity of my night.

  My night.

  My night.

  I have always claimed the darkness.

  The patrols wandered empty streets without recognisable patterns, to better protect the barricaded innocents by confusing the nightly evildoers, paratrooper boots tapping out complex rhythms something like Morse, endless strings of which colour the contours of my nightmares still.

  Even now, here in the Maze, where pain and misery tread the stone halls without rest, and pity’s a currency we trade amongst ourselves.

  I was indeed an evildoer that night, and sober to know my silhouette could so easily fetch a hail of bullets if I were careless enough to be seen. But I would be neither careless n
or seen this night. I was good, and rightly proud. Oh, yes, proud. Not as a mere craftsman, not I, but as an artisan.

  A master.

  I sat with my back propped against the peeling wall, and the hard wooden flooring kept me awake and conscious of my mission.

  You can never be sure whether that’s good or not, and I wasn’t.

  It didn’t matter at all, I decided. Whether I was thankful or not. I thought of children and flowers and smiles, but black streaks ate into those images and obliterated them. Perhaps I was too far gone to allow mere images to disguise the truth.

  I chuckled and played the game I couldn’t win.

  Shortly after sunset I raised myself with care to a crouch again, my joints cracking in protest, and peered outside. Belfast seemed quiet tonight - much more so than it had recently been, since the newest escalation - and the sedate home lights made it almost peaceful to the eye. So peaceful that, for a moment, it was hard to believe anything else.

  Belfast was a huge pot, simmering and building up pressure, threatening to overflow but never quite dousing the flames beneath it. The papers described it that way and I, more than most, knew the truth of that description. I knew how close to boiling the pot was, and how hot the flame. And I knew how to fan that flame into an inferno.

  Why was I in that decrepit, old bombed-out building, inside an empty third-storey room with a view of a slowly-dying city?

  A volunteer, that’s what they called me to my face. But I couldn’t put a name to what it was that had made me step forward once again. Was it hatred, as old man Liam maintained whenever we discussed our respective causes? Or patriotism, what the boyos in the dank cellar pub spoke of in their hushed bloody whispers? Was it a convoluted mixture of those? Or something else, darker and much better left unspoken, unnamed in the face of the night?

  As I wondered idly about my own crumbling life within that crumbling monument of a city, there were three short knocks on the door. A pause, another knock. I hunched into my coat, relaxing slightly after having started up. Then the door swung inward and a man crawled inside, scraping along the floorboards. A slash of cold from outside accompanied him.