Lullaby for the Rain Girl

by Christopher Conlon

  He dropped slowly to the sofa. After a while he wept.

  # # #

  Weeks later, he heard from Jane Hooper one last time when his phone chirruped at three o’clock in the morning.

  He turned over toward it, disengaging himself from the girl next to him.

  “What is it?” she murmured.

  “Just my phone,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

  He fumbled with it. “What?”

  “Mitchell?” It was a female voice that sounded very far away. There was a cold hissing on the line that almost drowned the voice.

  “Yes? What?”

  “It’s Jane.”

  It took him a moment. Then he was wide awake.

  “Jane? I…I can hardly hear you. Where are you?”

  “I…I’m not sure. I found the place, though. The one I was looking for.”

  “Where?”

  “I…I can’t explain, I…”

  The hissing was so loud that the girl in the bed muttered, “What are you doing?”

  He ignored her, trying to hear the other end of the line. “Jane?”

  She might have been crying; he could not be sure.

  “I knew there was a place,” she said. “It’s weird. Dark. But there are…people here. I think. I’m not alone. I think I…”

  “Jane, what?”

  “I think I—I even know some of them. I’m where—where I’m supposed to be, Mitchell. Where people that aren't liked go. I—I just wish I knew…knew why. I—I—”

  “I can hardly hear you, Jane.”

  “I…Oh—I…I have to go, Mitchell….”

  “Jane, where are you? Tell me where you are.”

  “I have to go now….” Amid the hissing he now heard another sound: voices. But they did not sound like any voices he had ever heard. Low-pitched, grunting, they did not sound like human voices.

  “Jane?”

  “Mitchell—”

  Her voice was nearly inaudible, breaking up with hiss and static.

  “Mitch—m…un…p…want…”

  The sound broke up completely then. The connection clicked off to silence.

  But not before Mitchell had mentally filled in what she had said, or what he thought she had said: what he prayed he had misheard, that she had not said.

  Mitchell, my uncle Pete wants me.

  He felt his breath grow short.

  “Honey?” the figure next to him said, looking over her shoulder at him curiously. “What is it?”

  He placed the phone down slowly, methodically.

  “Just a—” His voice was hollow. He cleared his throat. “Just a girl.”

  “Oh?” She looked back at him, mock-offended. She was a bartender he had met downtown, a fun girl, pretty. He noticed the crow’s-feet around her eyes, the streaks of gray that shot through her dark hair. “Do you like her?” she asked.

  He thought about it for a long time.

  “No,” he said at last.

  She smiled. “I’m glad.”

  She settled in again. He got out of the bed after a few minutes, stepped into the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face and drank some from his cupped palms. Then he came back and crawled in beside her, wrapped his arms around her, pressed his body close to hers. He realized suddenly that he was trembling.

  “Hey,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Tell me your name,” he said, burying his face in her hair. “Please. I want to know your name.”

  7

  It was dawn when I finished “The Girl That Nobody Liked”—eight thousand words in a single nonstop night. My head throbbed, my hand ached, and goddamn but I wanted a cigarette. Still, it was done—the first sustained work I’d accomplished in more years than I wanted to count (the years, specifically, since Leprechauns Can Be Murder seemed to have killed all my desire to write anything at all). Yet I experienced none of the exhilaration I would normally have felt at the conclusion of such a massive writing session, one that yielded a story I immediately knew was better than anything I’d done in many, many moons.

  Instead, that quiet pool of the past—that pool that had begun thrashing blackly within me over the past few days—seemed even more active, ever more dangerous. This new story had taken me back some distance—Mitchell Noone was me, after all, me as I’d once been, synthesized, crystallized, in a time so long ago that it seemed to belong to another life. But there was further to go. I somehow sensed this, though I didn’t know how.

  But, even with my confused and bewildered mood and my lack of sleep, I resolved to get to work that day. I half-expected to find her waiting for me in the main room or kitchen, but the Rain Girl was nowhere in evidence.

  It had been a dream, of course—obviously I’d slept a little before I started writing. As I poured myself some orange juice and toasted a bagel I considered it. No doubt all that emotional talking with her at Dugan’s the day before had done it, opened something within me, burst some inner floodgate. I would have to thank my young friend, even if she wouldn’t fully understand what I was thanking her for.

  Resolving to make a respectable appearance that day, I shaved, showered, and dressed, being careful to choose items that were actually clean and in possession of all necessary buttons and zippers.

  The hours moved slowly, but there were no run-ins with Mr. Geiger, no particularly troublesome situations in class; Daisy ran over Myrtle in last period and we discussed what it all meant. “I was right!” Dion proclaimed. “That bitch is crazy!” (I let the profanity slide, not wishing to dampen the young man’s enthusiastic participation. He was reading it, anyway.) I reminded them they needed to finish the book by tomorrow since Winter Holiday was almost upon us—as if they needed reminding!—and when the bell rang they scurried out happily enough.

  I was exhausted, and of course I had a headache. I leaned forward, dropping my head into my folded arms atop the desk, determined to let my eyes rest for a few minutes before I headed home.

  I woke up two hours later, jolted to consciousness after a dream of rain, shouting voices, a tall white building with a clock on its face.

  The building was empty but for the janitorial crew.

  I walked home in the winter darkness.

  # # #

  I sat staring at the ceiling. The TV was on, without sound. It didn’t matter. I watched the colors reflected from the screen play on the walls: blue, green, yellow, sudden fades and flashes. I was on my third Camel Filter, warm smoke rolling down my throat and into my lungs and giving me some sense of peace amidst the feelings of disaster that were overcoming me. I pictured a blown-apart world, buildings crumbled, stores looted, roving bands of maniacs shooting and raping and torturing. The world. The world soon. The end of the year would come and with it the end of civilization. The computers were all going to fail, we were going to be driven back to a new Dark Age. Terror would rule the land. I knew it couldn’t happen, yet I knew that it would. The hours were stumbling past and yet no one tried to stop the inevitable coming collapse. It was all over, I knew. Everything I’d lived would soon not even be memories. Just nothing at all. Every moment in the classroom, every girl who’d served time in my bed, every argument with Dad about the goddamn this and that, everything I’d ever written, every laugh, every sigh, all, all gone, gone soon, gone forever.

  I knew what was causing these apocalyptic thoughts, but I also knew that I didn’t want to face it. It: her. Yet the memories were pouring over me, fragmented, inchoate, a sour black syrup in my mind. It was a place—she was—that I never visited.

  Rachel Lynn Blackburn.

  Even the name itself was difficult for me to conjure up in my mind. As for her, she was gone—more than fifteen years gone. And yet she wasn’t. But there was nothing I could do with those memories, there was no place for them to go. There hadn’t been for over a decade and a half.

  Shaking myself out of my torpor, I ground out my cigarette, feeling both a mild nicotine high and a sick sense of guilt at having fallen off the
wagon yet again. Still, I was through now and wouldn’t need any more for a while. Maybe.

  I spent the evening typing up the scribbled pages of “The Girl That Nobody Liked” and went to bed early.

  # # #

  Thursday was the last school day before Winter Break, so naturally it was rather zoo-like. Knowing this would be the case, I ran a lot of quasi-educational videos, whose soporific qualities were most welcome. But in last period at least we did kill off poor Jay Gatsby once and for all. Dion remained convinced that Daisy Buchanan was crazy. Annie remained convinced that Dion was crazy. A merry time was had by all, except of course for Gatsby.

  And me. Like the day before, I seemed to float through the hours without really being a part of them. Within my mind voices, touches, whispers impinged on me, insinuating, insistent. At times my heart beat strangely hard and strangely fast. Work kept me from thinking too much about things, but then work ended and it was time to go home.

  I sat for a long time on my sofa, smoking and listening to the quiet. Distantly I could hear the elevator chuffing up and down. My refrigerator hummed. I stared out at the gray evening.

  Finally I stood and made my way to the bedroom, opened the closet door, and reached far back on the top shelf to a box I knew was there.

  I brought it out—an old blue Nike shoe box, with tape sealing it all over. In spots the tape had yellowed and hardened and begun to pull away from the box. It had been stuck there over fifteen years ago.

  I blew the dust off the box and brought it into the main room. I placed it on the inverted crate that played the role of my coffee table. Then I went to the kitchen, microwaved myself a mug of tea, came back and sat on the sofa before the box.

  It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about it. I knew, every second of my life, that the box was there, waiting for me. There had been moments, especially when I’d moved from one apartment to another, that I’d held it in my hands and considered tossing it into the trash. How much simpler my life would be, I’d thought, if I could just do that. But no. I didn’t. Couldn’t. Yet in all those years I’d never opened it, either.

  The gray light slowly failed outside, leaving only the darkness to watch over me. The box always seemed smaller than it should be—than it could be. Yet there it was.

  After another cigarette I tore the tape away from the box and lifted the lid.

  What did I expect to find?

  I don’t know. Maybe I’d thought Pandora’s demons would come rushing forth to engulf my soul. But my breath came fast as I looked down and saw what, after all, I knew was there: a pile of old junk, that’s all. A tattered black spiral notebook with most of its pages missing. A couple of old university literary journals, their covers stolid and respectable. Some little yellow Post-It Notes, creased and crumpled and stuck haphazardly together. A few dull silver bits of jewelry—tiny hoops, studs. A photo or two. None of it surprised me. At the same time I didn’t feel the need to start studying all this material, analyzing it. It was dead, after all. A collection of relics.

  But then I found something at the bottom of the box I didn’t recall: a videocassette. There was no slipcase, no label—just an old unmarked tape. I tried to think of what it might contain, but my mind drew a complete blank.

  I smoked another cigarette while I thought about it. No: nothing, nothing at all came to mind. Odd. The idea of playing it unnerved me and I felt my breath coming fast. Yet this, this one thing, was a mystery. The old papers and journals didn’t surprise me at all, but this did. Why would I have put a videocassette into this box all those years ago?

  I didn’t want to try playing it, but this was too unexpected, too strange to ignore. The years had caused my mind to completely vanquish all memory of whatever this was.

  I stood, turned on my TV and VCR, and plugged in the tape.

  I waited.

  Blackness. Static scramble. Then the picture came up, and it was as if someone had sucked the oxygen from my lungs. I fell back onto the sofa, a cold sweat suddenly covering me.

  “Oh my God,” I said aloud, to no one.

  She was smaller than I remembered, and younger: good God, how young she looked! Hardly more than a child. She must have been nineteen, I quickly calculated, when we made this video. Maybe twenty. She was completely naked, lying on sheets I immediately recognized. The bed itself was familiar, too. She was looking sleepily toward the camera, her arms raised over her head. Her raven-black hair was askew, as if she’d not been out of bed in a long time. Her underarms had dark, downy hair. Her breasts were tiny and hard-looking, like little apples. I could see traces of ribs under her skin; her belly was pale and flat. Her pubic bush was dark, longer and silkier than I remembered. Her legs were splayed casually open, her thighs muscular and firm. As she bent one leg I could make out a tattoo on the top of her foot—a rose with a thorny green stem dripping red blood.

  The picture held on the long view, which took her in as well as most of the bed, and then the young man who’d been operating the camera stepped in. For a moment it seemed impossible to believe that this nude, long-haired stranger was me; the body seemed alien to anything I recalled, shockingly pale and skinny. So skinny! I must have been at least fifty pounds lighter. The skin on my face was tighter too, the jaw line sharply defined. My hair—so much of it!—reached nearly to my shoulders. My ass was narrow, deeply hollowed on both sides, small and firm. In any other context, and without seeing the face, I would never have connected this boy’s body to anything that had ever had the slightest connection to me.

  He—I—stood facing her beside the bed. She sat up, folding her legs under her, and took my erection gently in her small hand, stroking it. She smiled, looked up at the boy standing before her. Her lips moved, but whatever she’d said was inaudible on the ancient videotape.

  I thought: No. We were never this way, never so young, these were never our bodies, never our lives. They couldn’t have been. Certainly not.

  Yet eventually my younger self climbed onto the bed with her. She reclined onto her back. Her thighs opened. Her arms went around my, his, waist.

  Oh my God.

  I watched—horrified, embarrassed, saddened, moved—as my long-dead self made love to this long-dead girl.

  As I stared at the screen I had an odd sense that there was someone in the room with me.

  Glancing quickly over my shoulder, I saw the Rain Girl just behind me there in the semi-darkness, the light of the TV flickering on her face. In the instant before I reacted I saw that her expression was wide-eyed: not in shock or disgust, not in titillation.

  In hunger. In need.

  It was the same look you sometimes see on the faces of starving people in news stories about Third World famines. The eye sockets appear to grow larger, the eyeballs virtually popping out from the face. The cheekbones sink in, corpse-like. The mouth gapes. Yet the entire face seems nothing but eyes, eyes gazing, envisioning something that we, the comfortable, the well-fed, can never see.

  That was her expression now.

  “Kiddo—” I started to say, then gathered my wits and grabbed the remote, shut off the VCR.

  We sat in silence for a moment. My heart was pounding, pounding. She was kneeling behind the sofa, her eyes still on the TV screen, as if there remained something to see there. I watched her.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked, her voice breathless.

  “It’s not—honey, you can’t watch—things like that…”

  “Turn it on again.”

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  “No.”

  Finally she looked at me. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

  I sat forward, buried my face in my hands, tried to breathe. I heard her step around, felt her drop down on the sofa next to me.

  “It was,” she repeated, “wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the girl—the woman—that was…was Rachel, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. It was.”

  We sat silently in the
darkness.

  I asked finally, “How did you get in here?”

  “Your door isn’t locked.”

  “It locks automatically.”

  “Not this time it didn’t. Go see.”

  Looking at her, I stood. I was glad it was dark: my face felt flushed with emotion. I was sweating. I moved to the door, which was indeed slightly ajar. I pushed it shut.

  “You always have an explanation,” I sighed, “for everything.”

  “Tell me about Rachel, Ben.”

  “You need to go home now.”

  “Oh, come on, Ben.” She scowled and stood. “You should know by now that I don’t have a ‘home.’”

  “Where do you go, then?”

  She shrugged, stepped near me. She wore the same drab brown coat I’d always seen her in.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  Our eyes met in the darkness.

  “You know who I am, Ben,” she said finally.

  I shook my head. “I don’t.”

  “If you think about it, you’ll know.”

  I heard myself groan. I dropped down to a chair at my little dining room table. “I have thought about it,” I said. “I don’t have any answers.”

  She brought my forgotten tea mug to the table and placed in before me, then sat at the other chair.

  “Can I watch the video?” she asked, “Please?”

  I took a sip of the lukewarm brew. “It’s a porn video, kiddo. A homemade porn video. I can’t let you see that.”

  “I don’t think it’s porn. It’s not porn if it wasn’t made for other people to see. It’s not porn if the people in it are in love.”

  I looked at her, sighed shakily. “What do you know about it?”

  “I just know.”

  I shook my head. “There’s plenty of porn on the Internet, if that’s what you want to see.”

  “That’s not what I want to see.” She paused and looked closely at me. “I want to see my mother.”

  The room grew darker. “What?”

  “My mother. I want to see my mother.”

  “Rachel was not your mother.”

  “Yes, she was.”

  “Rachel never had children.”