Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  Colognes and hand soap from the washroom nearly completed the guise we needed to take: that of wealthy boys indulging in the sin of the rich who make a game of poverty. The sin that lets debutantes play at being whores, knowing they can cast off that life while the disowned girls of port cities can’t. That lets students make a hobby of addiction and the Japanese tea-ceremony of melting smack and shooting up, knowing they can take cures in Lucerne clinics, their track marks closing near the platinum bands of watches custom-made in Geneva. The sin that lets boys whose nascent beards are shaved in bed by servants frolic in the shit-holes in which boys like Allen and me toiled, that makes a sport of what we do to survive . . . that lets these lads boast while being seen by the right people lunching with the right heiresses in the right clubs.

  To perform such a masque—that of boys who masqued themselves as what Allen and I really were—we’d have to scrape off the mange-whiskers we’d grown, the beards frayed by starvation and worry, that marked us as two who could be easily killed and forgotten. We’d packed no razors, why should we? Cooking oil and dish soap made our lather . . . warm water from the pot took a rust tinge from our flayed palms as we wet our faces. As I’d seen done by vagabonds who rode freight rails from city to city, I smashed a bottle that had held a sugar drink and tested the keen of the longest, sturdiest shard. With hands that felt gloved within their new scars, I raised the shard to my throat. When the ugly scrape of the first stroke fell quiet and even the crack of the fire was mute, Allen grinned and asked me, the universe, and maybe even God, should He have bothered to look down, “Did you know that we’re cool?”

  A prop dagger, sharpened, can stab a man through the heart, then be put in its scrap-leather sheath and be a prop again. Allen and I were costumed, wearing what had been sweaters of spun glass that hadn’t rotted over the years they’d been left draped over chairs. We packed wet cooking salt on our boots, so they’d be stained as if by road salt, making us look like we’d walked streets populated enough to have been ploughed and salted, and not the roads of the decaying outlands. Our “make up” of freshly shaved skin howled in the brittle air as we walked the path we’d cut through the bramble that smelled of citric extract and the tannic vinegar used to clean head wounds. We were keened props, things of reality pretending to be false. We felt sheltered by our deception, as if we held a lock of the Elf-Queen’s hair that would turn a sniper’s bullets to frost. Like Orfeo or Lot, we knew not to glance back at the place we’d quit.

  The we that Allen and I had become let our thoughts be non-verbal, let us speak in near-grunts as we hiked to the checkpoint that would grant us passage into the city. Our approach was a dumb-show, done for groundlings whose displeasure would leave exit wounds. As we reached the wall of ill-shod soldiers milling in front of what had been a tollbooth, Allen muttered to himself, and the mutterings we’d shared and understood became gibberish to me. I was suddenly afraid to be so alone in my own mind, unable to be aware of the third being I’d felt trail us. I realized that I’d welcome awareness of that spectre . . . who else but the dead could bear witness to my death?

  Some of the soldiers, as they weighed life and death under a forest of smoke columns swaying in the east, couldn’t be bothered to close their phones while they listened to the Evangelical plays broadcast at that hour. Allen, I realized, wasn’t muttering, but praying. He, a Catholic, walked beside a Jew along a corridor of wrecks towards death as if in some Romantic Era parable, whisper-praying as did the Hasidim who’d taken me in after the first Center to which I’d been sent was burned down. I wished to pray, but couldn’t while walking that frozen path, while the river that had been the lifeblood of my home became that of Babylon. I felt overwhelmed by Allen’s faith, a converso for the span of those heartbeats as the storm of my soul was billowed under by the storm of his soul . . .

  . . . and which I knew was too strong to be his alone.

  Amid the noise in my mind, like the memory of the plague-mad revelers’ music, I felt a wish to kill the soldier who walked up to question us in the filthy air. Behind him, commandeered backhoes widened the pit in which he’d gladly burn us. I hoped the wish was a goblin-thought. Something nurtured by the memories of the music made by rioters maddened as if by Hearn’s horn. Maybe it was Allen’s blasphemy that put me in such a Godless mindset, because as we’d entered the checkpoint I’d heard Allen tell the God to whom he muttered to hush, as if he spoke to a noisy pup he trained.

  There was a rawness in the soldier’s voice. It filled me with a dread like that of falling in a dream. Because although he wielded deadly force, he himself was not deadly—he was far worse. I’ve known deadly men. They’ve never frightened me the way this man did. True deadliness is patient, like a predator waiting in reeds by a stream. It’s a decision to be lethal that’s never impulsive and that can be countered like a chess move, by the recognition of that willingness to kill. Men who aren’t deadly are wielded by the power they think they wield. And they’re jealous of that power . . . knowing it can abandon them like the wives they beat into fidelity. Anger shakes in the eyes of a man who’s not deadly while he holds a gun, palpable as the misogyny in the eyes of those who first “become men” as clients of whores.

  I’ve since learned that to look at an enemy is to look at yourself. But then, as a boy, I didn’t know why I looked to see if the soldier had the scars that would tell me if he’d had the kitchen table surgery that would have torn the corners of his mouth while a butcher-priest cut the wisdom teeth out of his jaw amid prayers shouted in ecstatic tongues. I wondered, as he looked at Allen and me, if he’d had the other surgeries that would have removed his appendix, tailbone, and one rib to rewrite his body in accordance with Scripture, erasing the lies that Satan had written into his flesh the same way the Deceiver had hidden fossils under the skin of the Earth.

  I know now that I looked at him so because I was aware in a deep, wordless way that if he knew I was a Jew, he’d search my brow for traces of horns.

  The man’s hand shook as he questioned us in his lazy-tongued dialect, under a bank of meat hooks hung on the chain link fence like wash drying, by rusted barrels of thickened fuel that with their patches of red, waxy polymer looked like an art installation made of junkyard salvage. The Church Militia patch on his shoulder, stitched over the flag there as if to cover something shameful, told me he was used to the spirit of God working and flowing through him the same way as did lethal power, moving him to do things for which he’d have to take no personal responsibility—from dervish-running in circles at revivals to proselytizing strangers to shooting a man. I didn’t shake. Because that would loosen the mask I wore of the spectre he’d been raised to fear: that of the shape-shifting Jew who passed for “normal.”

  I stood before him, to his eye with the complexion of a saint and the condition of a devil. I was the fiend that boys such as he had been told would carry him off in a sack if they were bad. I addressed him as if he were a recalcitrant Gabbo, acting impatient and weary and invigorated beside my friend as if we were on our way home from a day of shovel-board and bear baiting, speaking to him as if he didn’t grip a weapon, but loitered expecting an undeserved tip. We were each other’s monster. To me, he was the villain, descendant of the shiftless villein of old dramas. I feared him because what I’d seen of his kind stranded at docks and rail yards, who cursed the Sodom in which they were marooned and that I called “home” . . . when the Sodom they endured was what they brought in their hearts along with their scar-widened grins, as they awaited passage to the countries that let them pursue the Hammite slave trade they claimed as their lost heritage. I know now that by looking for traces of crude stitch-work at the corners of his mouth, I wished to put a mask on him out of anger for the mask I’d been coerced to put on . . . that made me the embodiment of the mask-wearing fiend he dreaded.

  The living mind can stand only so close to death and remember its face. Death is eternal, an infinity of mirrors with no object of focus. It’s
indifferent to time, and while we breathe, we can’t grasp an unchanging end. That’s why drowning men spin into a pit of memory as they die, awaiting the heaviness of the sea in their lungs. That’s why sailors, knowing such a crush of memory might await them, always carry the horizon’s span in their eyes, even when inland. Death smothered my memory of passing that checkpoint. Yet in that darkness, I know I felt the being to whom Allen had prayed and knew him not to be God, even though he touched me as would God, granting me some small peace in my terror. It was a peace I felt he granted Allen out of a kind of love I’ll never know.

  I slumped like an old man as we walked away from the barbed wire gate bordering the converted tollbooth, our masque (our farce?) ending as we crossed into the Commonwealth of Boston, out of the jurisdiction of the soldiers. Allen looked about to fall in the snow like a drunk whom the cold would either sober up, or numb to sleep and let him freeze to death. We became the starved and desperate boys we were, home in our dying city as smoke stained skies the color of bile, too tired to flinch as shots rang out from the checkpoint; the people behind us on the road must have been worse actors than we. They’d burn in the failure of their performances, executed by men enraptured by phone plays about their promised Rapture while they sent strangers to the Heaven they’d have to earn, and not be lifted to.

  As we parted, Allen had the expression of a diver looking at water from a height he’d never attempted before. The “we” that we’d been was dying. Through that death, I knew whatever pained and frightened him waited for him at home. Years later, with my lover Cynthia in her studio redolent with paints, clays and exotic yarns, I felt pain behind my eyes and heart the moment she set down her brushes after doing my portrait, when she severed the connection we’d shared while I sat in active stillness and as she pressed her will onto a blank canvas. Looking away from her was like tearing stitches in my mind. That pain echoed the pain of leaving Allen, as our famine-sharing of our selves rended. Torn from him, I could see, but not understand, the grief that waited for him, the grief that made me hate myself for hating this boy who in his desperation had clung to my mind the way a drowning man would cling to driftwood.

  There was another sadness standing at that corner with us, besides that which nearly bent Allen double. The being that had walked with us faded from our senses as its sadness grew. It billowed to nothing the same way our breaths did, lifted by the cold air. And for the first time in my life I knew that I’d stood beside a ghost of someone newly dead, who’d just recently let go his last breath and his soul with it. Allen looked to the plumed sky, and I knew the colors of that twilight would be the colors he’d wear in mourning.

  I didn’t see that sunset.

  Pulling the sled, I came to Aunt Louise’s home. Crispin was the only one to greet me, leaving the blood-jeweled snow on the porch where he crunched mouse bones to wrap himself around my legs. A note from Justine and Janice, written in the shorthand of the wards, told me that everyone in our household had gone to gather fuel from the abandoned lawns near the fallen overpasses, where no snipers or home-defenders would be. I fell into my bed still in my coat, and knew from the stray hairs on and the scent embedded in the pillow that Justine had slept there while I was gone.

  I woke to the smell of smoke, pure smoke from a wood fire, not poisoned by fumes of human blood, hair and fat. The bills that had been in my pocket were gone, and I felt panic at what I might have done while Justine or Janice pulled the money from my coat as I slept gripping my gun beneath my pillow.

  A plate on my nightstand dusted with soda cracker crumbs told me I’d woken and eaten. I had no memory of it. I touched a dim awareness I’d had . . . of being comforted by the sounds of sniper fire, that in my half-dreaming mind sounded like the fall of smiths’ hammers in a stable.

  The silence told me I was alone (without even Crispin for company, since he’d have cried from the hallway at my stirring). I stripped and walked to where the fire I smelled burned in the yard. The insulated gloves and tongs I used to lift flagstones from the coals and drop them hissing into our cedar tub were stained from the times we’d used them for cooking shanks in the pits we’d dug in the summer. While the stones warmed the water, I scrubbed with snow, burnishing myself with the flush of a healthy man; the snow was clean . . . too close to the factories that were now crematoria to be stained by human soot, the way a man standing right under a fountain might not be hit by the spray. I washed in heat and cold until I felt faint, dried myself with a towel warmed by the fire.

  Duck eggs, bought from a vendor or stolen from the nest, waited for me in the kitchen . . . along with a loaf of Justine’s bread, oven-warm in the center, and mare’s milk poured through pine branches and left by the stove to set. I’d slept long enough for the food to be bought on the black market the morning after my return, long enough for someone in this house to brave snipers near the center of town and return with food and fuel for the tub and stove, long enough for Justine’s bread to rise and be baked and for the milk to turn to a rich qvark.

  No longer feral for being washed and fed, I wondered if Justine could still love me even as I heard her tread behind me, and felt the placing of her cool hand on the still bath-warm skin at the base of my neck. She took me in her arms as I rose, and as I crossed the threshold of her gaze into the one home I’ve ever known, I knew that she knew that I’d wounded my soul. And that she forgave me for marring something she loved.

  I didn’t cry with her as we lay in bed. Crying is a flowing outward. I folded inward. Justine let me fall . . . and so pulled me from my hurt. Scarred, but healed. I knew I could come home, because the best part of me had never left. Justine and I rebuilt the quiet inner spaces that Allen and I had razed while we starved.

  When next I shaved, I used the shard I kept wrapped in my pocket as a talisman, so I’d never forget what I’d survived. I barely nicked myself; more blood flowed from me because of the new toothbrush I found in the bathroom, which scrubbed red yolk from my gums in a way that made me look like a dying man spitting the milk of his ulcer. No razor has touched my face since.

  My face smooth and resting on Justine’s breast, I asked her what had been the colors of the sunset the night I’d returned. She stroked my hair in rhythm with her speech.

  “Burgundy . . . and a kind of ivory. There was green, too. The kind you see in marble, sometimes.”

  I love her deeply for never asking me why I needed to know.

  A mirror of steel is oddly silent. . . .

  Yet what of a mirror that’s fallen mute? What’s the nature of that quiet, that shocks you to deafness? Is it the void of a retreating echo? The quiet after a gunshot? Is the silence odd because it’s really your twin who’s now dumb, the self that you can’t hear, yet with whom you speak in the language that’s too fragile to bear the weight of uttered words?

  I never spoke to Allen again. After what we’d shared, I couldn’t, any more than nerves can speak to a severed limb. I waited to know what happened to Allen, and to me, while we roamed in exile. Spring came, as did barges heavy with crops from upriver and seafaring ships that didn’t bring new plague strains along with cargoes of fruit and grain. The Charles spoke as its frozen sheets cracked and icebreakers made paths for flatboats that brought livestock to the Magazine Beach slaughterhouses. Among the stalls of the open-air Cambridgeport book-market, I saw a boy whom I knew to be Allen’s cousin, who wore colors of mourning that were burgundy and ivory . . . and the kind of green that hides in marble, sometimes. I led him away from the beehive hum of writers and poets reciting their works to potential readers to a spot by the shore, where the most distracting sound was the blows of rivermen cutting blocks of the Charles to cart to icehouses in midtown and to fish markets by the harbour. Under the buds of a willow tree, he told me that I’d had by proxy a brother whom I’d never meet, even though I knew his face, and his spirit, with an intimacy I’d shared with very few.

  I’ve played in comedies about twins as separated as
two drops in the ocean who seek each other, and who are reunited. I’ve made burlesque of mistaken identity and farce of confusion. I know now that it’s a great loss that there are no tragedies or mourning plays about twins. No farce can speak of the language that is rejoined when two who’ve shared a womb meet again. The language of twins is urgent as the language of your heart-beat. Words are the lies we place between a thing and what it is, like when we say that lightning is flashing, even though we know lightning can’t exist without a flash . . . any more than you can exist without that which is reflected in burnished metal. Maybe this realization, not a sword, killed the Gorgon.

  Allen had been cut from himself, as cruelly as language cuts lightning from its flash. I was scarred the moment that he was cut, burdened with a wyrd that was as inescapable as the birthmark of a seer. Allen’s twin brother had been born simple, choked into that state by the birth-cord of his brother. He could speak with Allen as he could with no one else, his speech as limited as that of the street kids who lurked on the peripheries of the wards who’d cut themselves to be let in and treated, the kids who were raised feral, who didn’t fall to that state, but were stunted to it, cut off from human voices and human touch . . . so much so, it was rumoured that some had been raised by dogs.

  Allen and his brother shared language the same way they’d shared womb’s blood, and so had bled into each other. I, sharing a crucible far crueler, had bled into Allen. His brother . . . frightened . . . dying of fever, and maybe not knowing what dying truly was, reached out to Allen, through whom I’d felt Death as it took Allen’s brother, my twin, whose name I’ll never speak, because I’d “heard” his name through the language that is felt, not spoken. Through the silent language of steel mirrors. By touching that dying boy I’d felt the soul of one who was becoming a ghost, the presence of a shade-not-yet-dead who’d followed Allen and me into the dead lands we walked so the ones we loved could live. The boy had died in delirium, between two worlds, between dreams and waking. From there, he’d called to his brother and summoned me into a dusk the mere sight of which changed my sight, the way that vision of our world as seen through a birth caul changes the sight of a child born with one draped on his face.