Meet Me in the Strange

by Leander Watts

all live within.

  And if you doubt,

  they disappear.

  Anna Z was real. I never once doubted that. Still, it also felt like she was something I’d called up from somewhere deep inside myself. Even more bizarre, I thought: could both be true? Real and warm, a naked girl’s body just as I’d imagined it. And also a beautiful white-gold specter that might’ve been just a dream of bright lunacy. She told me about the word later, how in the old days, the Frankenstein time, everyone thought that the moon made people crazy.

  Luna, the moon. Lunar and lunacy.

  I thought about moving closer, of course. How could I not think that? I pictured running my hand over her body, just as they did in the films, pulling her nearer. If I was honest with myself, I’d have to admit I’d been thinking about this since the moment I’d seen her at the Maxima. That night on the rooftop, that feeling I had lying beside her was perfect. It was also fragile. I knew that one little wrong move would wreck it all. Staying in our balance of close and far, together and separate, was what really made that time so powerful. So I lay there with Anna Z until a calmness filled me and sleep took us both.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  When I awoke, the stars were still out, but the moon had disappeared. A quake of panic surged through me. The blanket was folded over me, and Anna Z was no longer there. I sat up, dizzy and confused. I called for her. I got up, yanking the blanket around me like a toga. Quietly, she said my name and told me everything was okay. I peered into the early morning darkness. There she was, dressed again, sitting by a low stone wall. I found my clothes, and now I was embarrassed, going to the far side of the rooftop to put them on.

  From there, I could see in all four directions. It took me a moment, turning slowly, to find the east. No dawn light was rising yet, but it wouldn’t be long. Had Maria-Claire already come to the suite below to say it was time to leave? Were the Guardia swarming the Angelus? Or worse—had her brother gotten into the hotel and found a trail to our hiding place? I had no idea and neither did Anna Z. We had no choice but to go back the way we’d come: down the ladder, which seemed more wobbly now, across the lower rooftop, along the ledge, and back through the balcony.

  The door was still locked, and there was no note from Maria-Claire. I said we should get going, right then. The bakers and some of the maids would be coming on duty soon. Other than them, the only people we’d likely pass were those staggering home from parties, and they’d be in no shape to recognize me, let alone give us any trouble.

  However, we weren’t quite ready yet. It seemed that we both had something to say. Neither one of us could do it, though.

  I unlocked the door but didn’t open it. Anna Z asked if I had my roll of cash. I showed her mine, and she showed me hers. I said again we should leave and she agreed. Maybe it was just simple fear that held us back. We both knew her brother might be waiting anywhere along the route to the train station. This could be our last moment, just the two of us together. And maybe we hung back because we were afraid of losing it. I wanted to tell her how perfect it had been, up on the roof with her, open to the sky and safe, open to each other and doubly safe. Even that, I couldn’t get out now. Fear and doubt ate at my thoughts. Adrenaline buzzed in my veins, my stomach, my brain. I said a third time we should leave and turned the doorknob.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  The corridor was empty. We rode a slow, shaking elevator and went down a hallway with lights that hummed louder as we passed beneath each fixture. A maid who I’d never seen before bowed her head as we went by, as though we were the royalty of the manor. An old man in evening clothes sat in a huge overstuffed chair, singing a nursery rhyme quietly to himself. He put his hand to his head, as if tipping an invisible hat. We took a back passageway around the lobby, down to the east kitchen.

  There was Maria-Claire, setting up her cart with someone’s early morning breakfast, fiddling with the flowers. She saw me and came over to give me a hug. “I was just on my way up to get you,” she whispered and took us into a big pantry. “As far as I can tell, the way out is clear. I haven’t seen any sign of the Guardia. I heard that Carlos is going to be all right. Hermann hasn’t brought any extra detectives on duty.” I described Lukas to her, and she shook her head. “No. I haven’t seen him.”

  She’d gone into her savings and gotten more money for me. At first, I refused to accept any more. But she insisted. “Take it, Davi. You’re going to need all you can get.” Handing the folded wad of bank notes over, sadness seemed to well up inside her. “Where exactly are you going?” she wanted to know. I didn’t say. “When will you be back?” I had no answer for that either. So she kissed me on the forehead, a motherly goodbye kiss, and said I should write when things had settled down.

  Following the path out that she’d already checked, we left the Angelus, going from the closed-in darkness of a tunnel to the huge open darkness of the sky. A canal flowed inky black before us, carrying the starlight out to the sea. We were free, gone, escaped. The train station was only ten blocks away.

  But it took a lot longer to get there than on any other normal day. Lukas knew where I lived, and he’d claimed he’d seen Anna Z leaving the Angelus that first night. If he was as wild to get her back as she said, he could be lurking somewhere nearby.

  So every block we traveled was like crossing the dead zone between two armies. Maybe no threat waited for us, or maybe Lukas would come raging out of the shadows, exploding like a bomb. We went down some alleys tangled with sagging laundry lines. We cut through somebody’s workshop, strewn with scrap metal and broken tools. We had to tiptoe by an old lady who slept on the pavement. One of her eyes, swollen and gummy, opened as we passed. “Never, never, never,” she muttered, and laughed like a hissing cobra.

  “This way,” Anna Z said, taking my hand. “The station’s over there.” She was right. The building was huge and gray, smudged to a blur by the smoke of ten thousand trains. We found a side entrance and headed for the lobby.

  Neither one of us had ever traveled far by train before. I’d seen movies, though; I’d read books, and I knew about schedules and tickets. It took a little while to figure out the huge board in the main lobby. Between us, we did it and soon were sitting on a cold wooden bench in the farthest, darkest corner of a side waiting room. Three hours had to pass before we could board the train. Then came a hundred miles of track, speed and rocking rhythm, every second taking us closer to Django. Anna Z put her arm around me, leaned her head close to mine, and whispered in my ear that she’d never been happier in her whole life.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  “When I was little, I used to imagine running away, far away, and it looked exactly like this. A train station with people coming and going. Like the couple over there. See them? Saying goodbye, so romantic, so sad, their last kiss. Or the girl that just came in. The one with the long, dowdy coat. Did you even notice her? I’d imagine that I could sneak away—like her—and no one would pay any attention to me. That’s a big part of it, just being left alone. And when we get there, Davi, absolutely nobody will know us. That’s what I wanted when I was little. To be left alone. And when I got older, I wanted it even more.

  “The first time I left, I only went a couple of blocks away from home. I kept asking myself why not go, go, go? Put a thousand miles behind me. Farther—as far as I could. Why not put as much distance between me and my brother as I could? Maybe go all the way to the New World. But of course, I didn’t. And I ended up back home with Lukas breathing down my neck worse than ever. More rules, more control and suspicion. The second time was better, more hidden. Still, I was right here in the city. And people knew me. Lukas had seen me talking to Jules before I left. There was no way it would work out.

  “I get it now, Davi, why I didn’t go to the end of the continent those other times. Or around the globe. I understand now. You’re it. You’re the reason. I think I knew deep inside that I needed somebody else to run away with. Somebody exactly right. And you’re it. You’re the reason I stay
ed and the reason I’m going away.

  “There was a game we played when I was little. It wasn’t a game that anybody lost or won, like chess or the Tombola, but there were rules and a way of playing it right or wrong. We called it ‘doing an experiment.’ Lukas was always in charge, saying what I should do and when. Like a lot of kids, we started out playing doctor. With our parents gone, it was easy. But then it got different, more and more like the book and the movie. Lukas was Doctor Frankenstein, and I was the creature. His creature. In a way, it was like he was inventing me, making me up out of his mind. Out of his thoughts and his feelings too.

  “I liked doing the experiments, at least at first. He had a special room he called his lab on the top floor of our house. He had it all set up just for the experiments. I’d lie on the table, and Lukas would cover me up with a big white cloth. I had to be quiet, perfectly silent, lying there under the cloth. Like I was dead. Then he’d shine a bright light. He’d pull back the cloth and tell me how beautiful I was. And that was the best thing I ever had, Davi. Feeling like there was nothing and nobody in the whole world as beautiful and perfect as me.

  “It was the best and the worst. Because more and more it made me feel awful too, especially when Lukas got inside me and knew all my thoughts and how I felt. Just Lukas and me, alone together. We got older and the game changed. It got stranger. I remember the big, bright light and how it felt like the rays were going right through me. And it started to go on longer too, Lukas and me and all that silence in the lab like a tomb. That was a big part of the game. I could never say a word the whole time we were playing, never make a sound.

  “But what we’re doing, Davi, is the opposite, and that’s why I know it’s right and good for me to run away this time and this way. No more silence. I can say whatever I want now. I can tell the truth, the whole truth, at least to you. When we get there, all the old games will be over. When we get there, we can do anything. We can change our names. We can be whoever we want. One night with Django and the wild mutation, and then who knows what we’ll turn into? Last night the moon was just about full. That means tonight is the night—total lunar spectral glow. It’s going to be amazing, Davi. We’re going to be amazing. I can feel it already. The light from last night is still in me, and it’s in you too. We’ll be at the show and we’ll be the show.”

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  She kept going on like that for a long time. And even though I loved to hear it, all those words—repeated and twisted around on themselves, rising from a whisper to a kind of woozy singsong—started to scare me a little. She wasn’t going crazy or telling herself lies so strong that she started to believe them. She wasn’t losing her mind as she kept on talk-talk-talking. It was more like she was making her mind, right there with me, making herself out of words. Beginning, middle, and end: like a movie. The theme music, the opening shot of the film, the credits, and now the big escape scene. She was creating herself, like a movie creating pictures and voices in the darkness of the theater. From nothing to the biggest, wildest something I’d ever known.

  Suddenly, she was quiet. She pulled me close and put her lips to mine. We kissed, hard and long. Her breath went into me and mine went into her. The whole world fell away like the dissolve shot, where the camera focuses on one thing and rest of the scene goes blurry and disappears. No words anymore. No sounds at all. It was just me and Anna Z. Then she pulled away a little bit, and we sat there, forehead to forehead, as though her thoughts could go straight from her brain into mine. I let it happen, or maybe I just pretended. Either way, it felt the same. I could see what was inside her mind. I could hear the words without her saying them out loud.

  If before she made me feel dizzy and weird—now I was totally drunk. Over the years, I’d seen hundreds of people at the Angelus who’d had too much wine and spirits. They staggered and giggled, talked too loud or whispered like lunatics. They danced real close and slow in the great ballroom. Very romantic. Once, a man in his evening clothes opened the window, climbed out on the ledge, and stood there all night yelling at the sky about some girl he loved and lost. Hermann’s men got him back in eventually. I’d seen the whole thing from my window, and it was sad when his yelling stopped. His voice had been so free, so overflowing with what he felt. That’s how I was with Anna Z at the station. Drunk, though I’d never even tasted wine.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  The train came and we got on. It went and we went with it. We sat together, holding hands, as the train gathered speed in the tunnel and then broke out into daylight. The city flashed by. I saw a few buildings I knew, though from the backs they seemed very different. We crossed the Great Canal. Then we were beyond, out in the countryside.

  We saw very little of it, though, sitting together like two refugees on the last train out of Doomsville. Knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder, we huddled in the last seat of the last car. We made three stops, and still a hundred miles didn’t take very long. The train started the journey in a dark tunnel and ended in one too. With a blast of steam and squealing brakes, a long lurch and a sudden jolt, we were there.

  The crowds in the station flowed upward, and we flowed with them. Stairs and passageways, long corridors with low ceilings, then emerging into a great lobby where the chandelier hung like a glittering spaceship coming down for a landing. Only then did I really feel the truth. We’d made it. We were there. And in only a few hours, we’d be at the Prinz Lorenz arena to see Django. We’d talked about getting a hotel room first. But both of us were too hyped up for that. So we asked directions and went straight to the arena.

  It had none of the Maxima’s ancient majesty, looking more like a vast concrete fortress than a place where great music happened. The streets around it were more crowded, dirtier, and louder. The Guardia there were called Polizei. They wore coal black uniforms with Northland runic emblems. Some had riot helmets and shock batons. Lined up in squads, glaring at the swelling mob, they looked like soldiers about to attack.

  Above the arena was a huge billboard advertising the show. “Last Time Ever!” the crimson letters shouted. “Django Conn’s final show!” Below that was a massive picture of Django, grand as the Emperor of Dimension X. They’d even given him a scepter and a crown. Last time? Final show?

  “Do you think it’s true?” I asked Anna Z. “Or just hype? Is it really the final show?”

  She shrugged, looking confused and maybe even a little afraid. She didn’t know any more than me. It was all foreign here: the look of the people, their accents, the cold stone architecture, the rules and laws, the way the Polizei shoved the crowd and shouted orders. There was even a squad on horseback, like cavalry brought in to herd the peasants this way and that. We got into the line, and it was a very good thing we’d skipped going to the hotel, as it took three hours to get our tickets.

  SEVENTY-NINE

  The feel that day was different than at the Maxima. Everyone seemed on edge, ready to go crazy, seething with excitement. Plenty of kids were glammed-up, dressed in full moonglow glister. Hair was dyed every color of the spectrum, and a few I’d never seen. Even though the Polizei were out in full force, fashion ruled. Boys with platform heels, skintight jumpsuits, heavy necklaces of turquoise and amber. Girls in feathers and furs, silver capes, golden robes. It was all there hours before the doors opened.

  The rhythm of the voices, a rougher feel to the way people talked, made me feel like a foreigner. I listened in to the kids around us. Just a hundred miles away, and even the slang here was different. The band was “sprooly” and the new record “razz.” I heard one kid said he was ready to “drill and spill,” whatever that meant. A couple of ticket scalpers had already been beaten up and robbed of their precious goods. Everybody was hyped for Django, of course, fanatics like me and Anna Z. But the stakes seemed higher here than at the Maxima. Maybe this really was Django’s last show. Maybe it would be a party and a funeral blast, a wild celebration for his last goodbye.

  I asked a kid with a blue and orange comet pai
nted on his face if this was the final show of the tour, or forever. He laughed, screwed up his eyes, and yelled over the crowd’s din, “Luigi!”

  “What?” I yelled back.

  He made two fists and beat them in the air. “Luigi!” Then I realized who it was—the weird kid I’d seen the day before at the record store.

  “Hey, you came all the way here too!” he said. “This is going to be madness. You listening? Absolute madness. You ready for that?” Getting only a shrug from me, he looked at Anna Z and said, “You ready? This is the end. The end of the end of the end. Everything and anything can happen.” He grabbed her, pulled her close, trying to kiss her. She squirmed away, and he laughed it off. “See you on the astral plane!” he yelled and went shoving his way toward the front of the crowd.

  The doors opened an hour before Django was supposed to hit the stage. The crowd at the Maxima had been wild and excited. Here, it was totally out of control. Already there were fights, high-fashion girls getting mauled by gangs of bruiser-boys, kids hitting the white gong too hard, too soon. The Polizei didn’t even try to keep order now, drawing back, giving up. With a roar and a shrilling wail, ten thousand kids surged into the arena. I grabbed for Anna Z, like we were in a whirlpool in a black-storm ocean. I got her shoulder, then yanked myself nearer and took hold of her hand. The whirlpool poured into a gaping entrance, and we went with it like little bits of driftwood.

  EIGHTY

  The Prinz Lorenz arena was much bigger than the Maxima. The ceiling was a vast dome, supported by iron arches. There were bleacher seats on three sides, facing the stage. And some kids were heading that way. We went with the real fans, down to the main floor. Slowly, still hand in hand, we wormed our way closer to the stage. Everyone on the floor wanted to be up front too, of course. Some worked their way toward the middle of the stage, where Django would appear. Others pushed toward the stacks of speakers, which stood like huge black monoliths on the right and left.