I closed my eyes, sucked in a dry breath, and stalked out of the building like a specter.
5.
On Tuesday night, I sat in one of the hard plastic chairs in the A/V suite off the library's microfilm reading room.
A deep ache had settled into the muscles of my back from the hours I had spent hunched up at the terminal. I wanted to go home and hide away in my bedroom and read my borrowed Chuck Palahniuk from cover to cover. But the project was so close to being finished that I didn't want to put it off any longer. I wanted it to be done.
The final seven minutes of the film had proven trickier than I'd anticipated. I'd spent twelve hours on the last scene, because the ending alluded to my own metamodern twist on the story: that Cyrano and Cristian were, in fact, two aspects of the same person. A bifurcated man, Charlie had called him, and that sounded right. But I left it to the viewer to decide which character was actually real.
And then, at ten minutes past eight on a stale Tuesday evening, I dragged the 28-second closing credits clip to the bottom of the screen and dropped it into the video bar. I scrolled to the beginning of the file and watched the film in its entirety, uninterrupted, for the first time. Twenty-three minutes later, I sat forward, smiled, unfolded my arms.
Cyrano was finished. It really was.
I dug a blank video-CD out of my bookbag, slid it into the computer, and saved the file to the disc. Then I made a second copy of the project before saving a third copy just to be safe. I slid each disc into a protective sleeve and tucked them into the front pocket of my bookbag.
I collected my script notes and my storyboards and the pages of my screenplay and stuffed them all back into the main compartment of my bookbag. I pushed myself out of the hard plastic chair, slinging my bag over my shoulder as I crossed the room and stepped out into the library.
I glanced toward the half-circle bay window looking out over the courtyard, spotted the crown of the Scots Pine against the slate-black sky beyond the student parking lot. Phil had planted the tree on the last Saturday in March.
He had gotten permission on the day we learned that Ethan was gone, and put the twelve-foot-tall evergreen in the brick island at the center of the concourse between the staircases. The newspaper staff had split up the cost. Ben had a chunk of soapstone engraved with Ethan's name and dates, and set it in the mulch at the base of the conifer.
Now I watched the crown of that Scots Pine. The slate-black sky behind it threatened to rupture again and empty another foot of snow across the world.
Graphite whispered dryly on looseleaf, and I passed a lanky sophomore girl with acne. She glanced up at me with clear coffee eyes, and I was certain that she would be a striking beauty in ten years. Then she looked back down to her notebook and resumed her writing, and I headed across the room. I spotted Rob McCall alone at another table beside the bay window, hunched over a massive book with a slimmer volume open above the first.
I angled toward the doors, and saw the librarian read a well-worn copy of Mrs. Dalloway behind the circulation desk. I glanced back to McCall one last time for no real reason at all, and that's when the exterior floodlights snapped on, bathing the courtyard in a harsh white halo.
I watched out the window, saw a streak of white arc upward. The stripe snagged the uppermost branches of the Scots Pine before tumbling down out of view, leaving a pallid fluttering streamer over the crown of the tree.
I paused at the center of the library, waited a couple of seconds, and then crossed the carpet to the wide transom. A floor below, a lurking figure scurried across the concrete around the tree, and I memorized the ribbed slate-black turtleneck he wore. He would have been nearly invisible in the darkness before the spotlights had snapped on.
In another second, the figure reached a splotch of white on the ground at the end of that white line arching over the Scots Pine. He stooped quickly, picked up the tousled roll of toilet paper. His right arm reared back again for another pitch as he decided where to place his next brushstroke.
Hot fury erupted out of the back of throat, tasting like brimstone and cordite. "HEY!!!" I bellowed, pounding a fist once against the glass. The figure stood, spun, found me. I stabbed a finger against the window, mashing my fingerprint into the pane: "yeah, YOU!!!"
The figure stared up at me for one long moment. I felt my heartbeat quicken in my throat as my breath splashed across the window. I glared at the kid, saw his hair stand at jagged spikes and angles, and realized that there was nothing I could do. The kid knew it as well. The white gleam of his malicious grin flashed in the spotlight as he jabbed his middle-finger skyward. Then he spun and hurried up the stone steps toward the parking lot.
I broke from the window, sprinting across the room as the librarian protested. I darted through the security sensors, pushed out the wooden door, barreled into the second-floor stairwell. Even as I pounded down those ceaseless stairs, I knew that the kid would be gone before I ever reached the courtyard. I'd never catch him.
But I pushed faster, taking the steps at a clip that threatened to snap my ankle. I poured out into the main lobby, rushed down the length of the cafeteria, slammed open the doors that emptied into the floodlit courtyard. Four paces out onto the concrete, I stumbled to a stop. The sweltering scarlet veil of my own rage churned around me, the stitch in my side screaming. I doubled forward, hands on my knees, my breath spilling into the night air.
I stood alone on the cement, that vandalistic bastard long gone. Monolithic fury beat its pulse inside my skull, and I wheeled, kicking a trashcan. It did two cartwheels and a backflip before coming to rest on the stone steps.
I twisted, ready to kick something else. I found nothing nearby, and I felt that sweltering veil burst into scarlet dust around me as I stood in the artificial light of a March night without my jacket. I gasped in sharp, jagged breaths, and wished that I could go on hating for the rest of my life.
I caught my breath, and crossed the concrete. The Scots Pine stood with quiet dignity despite the ribbons clinging to it. A bitter breeze sliced across the open grounds. I climbed onto a picnic table and snatched the nearest streak of paper. For twenty minutes, I stripped away every shred of damage with unwavering relentlessness.
Ethan had been gone for nine days.
6.
Phil drove his rickety Chrysler Newport in silence. Ben and I said nothing, because there were no words.
It was April first, the Day of Fools. We were running late, because Ben had waited until we arrived at his house at six-thirty to insist that he needed to take a shower. He had spent the next twenty minutes in his bathroom. Phil and I had sat in the kitchen while Ben's father had watched Heartbreak Ridge and nursed a Yards Brawler in the living room. We considered leaving Ben to find his own ride at one point, but talked ourselves out of the idea.
Now at quarter-after-seven, I sat in the passenger's seat of Phil's rickety Chrysler Newport, listening to Joe Perry's lonely guitar chords underscore Steven Tyler's coarse vocals. I stared out the window as the storefronts of downtown Prophecy Creek, such as it were, slid by through the darkness beyond the glass. Tyler spoke of mirrors and the lines in his face, and as we rolled past the Serenity Tavern, he declared that the past was gone.
I held back the laughter, and held back the tears. It was a strain. Because the three of us knew better. We knew that in the end, all of Ethan's yesterdays had conspired against him to light his way to dusty death. And we were the fools once again. Because whatever spectacular joke Ethan had been planning to spring on us this year, he had taken it with him across that Mythic Brink.
Maybe the real joke had always been that there had been no joke at all. Only the unbearable anticipation of a punchline never meant to be delivered. I saw the four of us sitting in a window booth at the Creekside Diner – saw it so clearly that it might as well have happened – talking about religion, and politics, and yesterday's season-opener between the Phillies and the Mets. Philadelphia had lost the 14-inning marathon one to nothing.
Midnight would come and go. No one would mourn its passing. And when we looked away from the clock ten seconds into the new day, we would find Ethan wearing a trickster's grin of infinite amusement. Gotcha, he'd say, or maybe you missed it. Maybe he wouldn't say anything at all. Maybe he'd let us figure it out for ourselves.
But now we'd never know. And as Phil pulled his rickety Newport into a sharply lit parking lot, I laughed, and felt one rogue tear squirt down my nose to my lip. Because I was sure that Ethan would have enjoyed our ignorance immensely. It was the perfect joke.
We emptied out of the car. Phil had parked along the side of the Wenro County Credit Union, and we took turns pulling cash from the ATM at the front of the building.
I pulled my balance, then slipped my card back into the machine and withdrew the maximum on a whim, mostly because I had never held that much cash in my hand at once. I folded the wad of twenties in half and stuffed them into my pocket. Then I crossed the street behind Phil and Ben to a brick building with a narrow recessed doorway beside a broad plate-glass window. A hand-painted sign above the doorway read TETRAPLEX.
A banner hung across the front window announcing the store's GRAND OPENING. A flyer in the window of the door announced a POETRY READING at 8:00pm.
We stepped into a warm buffer of air that smelled of paper and coffee grounds. It was a heartening smell.
I paused, breathed, scanned the interior of the building. The place was narrow, and deceptively deep. A counter and a register stood against the left wall inside the door. Another counter mirrored it against the opposite wall, scattered with the paraphernalia of a coffeehouse.
A sign on the counter read Free Coffee Tonight (Only!), and a blank blackboard hung above the station. A dozen paces from the door, three shelves stretched away from the street to create four aisles down the length of the building. A narrow lectern stood in front of the shelf to the far right, facing a section of seating at the front of the store.
More than a dozen teenagers milled among the tables in front of the coffee counter, and one of them yelled at us: "Phil!" Helen sat at a table with Bellona Meyers and a kid I didn't know him. Gale was there, and Dawn and Rose, and Caroline Davis and Lucas Archer. Charlie Carmichael and Donovan Blake sat at a table with a couple of girls I didn't know: one with black hair in a bob to her chin, the other with sandy blonde hair in a bun that revealed an arc of nine stars tattooed up the left side of her neck.
Phil lead, Ben followed, and I crossed with them to the tables. Amber sat at the table nearest the coffee counter, talking with Winnie and McCall and sipping from a brown cardboard cup. Phil broke off to join Charlie's table, and Ben dropped into a seat across from Dawn. I crossed to Amber's table, and even as I caught a sidelong glimpse of Gale watching me, I leaned in to press a kiss to Amber's cheek, catching the corner of her pastel lips.
"Congratulations," I told her, sitting across from her.
She flashed that beauteous smile, and it quickly spread into a euphoric grin. "I know!" Winnie laughed as Amber leaned forward onto the table. "My admissions advisor called this morning, said I'll be getting my letter this week but he wanted to tell me right away! I got in!"
Her enthusiasm was infectious, and I smiled. I couldn't help myself. "I heard you blew them away." I glanced over Amber's shoulder, spotted Gale still watching me. We regarded each other for a few seconds, and I was sure that Amber would turn to look behind her, but she didn't.
Then Gale turned back to Dawn, forgetting about me.
"I must have," Amber said with soft disbelief. I had to laugh at that. At the way that her own talents still seemed to fascinate her, as if she were still discovering the amazing aspects of herself. I laughed, because I understood her amazement, because her talents still fascinated me.
"The first Creeker to get into Curtis," Winnie said. She sounded a little starstruck. McCall grinned, and Winnie told Amber. "They'll probably give you a plaque."
"God, I hope not," Amber laughed, shaking her head, closing the topic. She stood with her empty cardboard cup and looked to me. "You want a coffee? It's free."
"Tonight only," I said, standing, rounding the table.
Amber crossed toward the coffee counter. "This is going to be Erin's job starting tomorrow," she called out, "but I taught her everything she knows. You mind?"
The dark-haired girl turned in her seat, and I saw her shockingly green eyes from across the room. "Go ahead," she answered, laughing. "You're the damn expert."
Amber stuck out her tongue, then turned back to me, flashed that beauteous smile. "What can I get you?"
I looked up at the blank blackboard. "Whataya got?"
"Anything you like, any way you like it," she said. "Espresso, cortado, cappuccino, frappé, Americano, cà phê sữa đá, macchiato, frappuccino, affogato —"
I blinked twice, then again. Amber trailed off.
"One thing I've learned," she started over, glancing to Erin, "is that you can tell everything worth knowing about a person just from the way they take their coffee."
"I have no idea how I take my coffee," I said.
The answer seemed to delight her. "Telling."
"What do you recommend?" I asked.
She watched my eyes for a moment, her lips wrinkling into a mercurial smirk. She considered the matter of my coffee for longer than coffee ought to be considered, and then she made her decision. "You strike me as a caramel flat white kind of guy." I stared at her mouth, saw her tongue dart into the corner of her pastel lips. She had annunciated all three syllables: CAH-ruh-mell.
I shook my head, feeling drunk. "Why's that?"
She winked as she poured the espresso, tapped the side of her nose: "trick of the trade." She pulled up with a third of the cup full, setting the carafe back on its warmer. "It'll mean more when you discover the why for yourself."
"Doesn't it always?" I said.
She turned to the counter against the wall, returned with two smaller urns, decanted the first. Steamed milk rolled into the darkness of the coffee in abstract helixes until the cup was nearly filled. Then she tilted the second urn, angling a thin flow of smooth caramel, and I heard all three of those delicious syllables again in my head.
"Tell me when to stop," she said, watching the cup. She knew I staring at her. Of course she did. She was enjoying it. And I enjoyed knowing that she liked being watched.
"Never," I said, staring into her caramel eyes.
Amber tried to bite back a laugh at that and failed. She tipped up that third urn and returned it to the counter, leaving the caramel, milk and coffee to mix and mingle. Steam drifted off the cup and made for higher ground, and that smell flooded me like a thrilling aphrodisiac.
I picked up the cup, sipped at it gingerly, scalded my lip and tongue. I cringed as the liquid burned a trail down my throat and held the cup down, looking up. "Hot."
Amber grinned at me. "You get used to that."
I nodded, sipped again, scorched my throat. Amber stepped out from behind the counter and we crossed back to her table. "You can wait for it to cool, you know."
"I could," I agreed. "But where's the fun in that?"
She laughed and turned back to Winnie. I glanced across the room at the assembled teenagers, at kids I had known for years, and kids I had never met. I didn't know any of them, not really, any more than I knew anything at all about myself, and I felt entirely comfortable with them. They were extended family, not of blood, but of ink. They were in-laws and outlaws, fourth and fifth cousins three times removed by the turn of a page. We were descended from Whitman, and Ginsber
g, and one or two from Poe, and we all spoke the same gibberish language.
Even if none of us understood it.
7.
By the time the poetry reading began, the crowd had swelled by another dozen.
Erin stepped to the lectern at a few minutes past eight, peering out over the group. "Nice looking crowd."
The buzz of murmured conversation dulled and died. Erin looked down at a page on the podium, then looked up. She flashed a smile that reminded me Amber's and said, "Thanks everybody for coming out for the opening of the Tetraplex." That earned a sprinkling of applause, and I watched the girl's shockingly green eyes. "I'm Erin."
A handful of people responded: "Hi Erin."
"Oh, thanks. No," she said, laughing, "those meetings are held at Transcendence Unitarian Universalist Church down on Worthing every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday." She grinned. "Not that I know about that sort of thing." This received a knowing sort of laugh, and Erin laughed. "I'll be your resident barista here on nights and weekends. I'll also be opening tonight's reading with a piece that was recently published in Strophe."
She looked down to the page on the lectern, paused. Then she recited a rambling free-verse elegy that she had written in a sitting area of the Prophecy General Hospital while she waited for her great-grandmother to die. It was a poem of relief and release, of eternal rest well-earned, of a life sentence served in a prison of the human body. Her great-grandmother had lived to the age of 109.
Erin's delivery earned her an energetic applause. A bald man wearing frameless glasses and an unobtrusive silver stud in his left earlobe snapped his fingers with both hands. She thanked the audience, then glanced down at a second page and asked for Geoffrey Hume.
The bald man with the silver stud stood, stepped to the lectern, introduced himself. He received a chorus of "Hi Geoffrey," which was followed by a round of laughter. It became routine for the evening, each new poet standing before the audience was greeted as an addict in recovery. And that was fitting, because, in a sense, we all were.
The Danger of Being Me Page 18
