by Nisi Shawl
Jim handed Logan the rolled-up dollar bill. “Oughta keep you up for a while.”
Logan pushed open the door to the bar. Voices, music, bad lighting, nodding heads, smiling faces all came together, fused like the tiny continents of bone that make up a skull—a fugue waiting to be composed, one that would take in even the wispy fleeting shapes the smoke wove itself into. He couldn’t have been as almighty as he felt though, because Jim Lee’s arms made his look skinny and smooth, were a wake-up call, a hey-hello—wasn’t only his arms that needed work.
Friday night in southeastern Kansas. No hills to speak of, no lakes thereabouts, just strip-mine pits filled up by rain, the ocean a long haul as it happened, and Chicago a good nine hours’ drive. Things showed up newer on the broad boulevards of the city, phrases like freshly-minted coins, the shine already gone by the time they reached the callused hands of awkward farm boys, talked about while beer labels worked on by nails chewed to nubs came away in sticky little balls dropped into ashtrays crowded with cigarette butts.
Jim Lee dragged on his gnarled cigar, adding to the smoke softening the pinball machine’s yellow flashes, a kid across the room leaning into the flippers as if the shiny ball were tracing out his fate in its pinging odyssey.
Why not see how high the smoke went? Snort it, shoot it, pop it, climb a mountain, add a few stories to that skyscraper, aim a hollow arrow through a tube of gravity, send a dog, a monkey, a man to penetrate the starry mysteries that only come out at night, when it’s dark enough to see what’s melted in the white-hot glow, what’s trapped in a miraculous net of bone and sinew. They were a bunch of cast-outs, wing-broke and unhaloed, trying to return to some forever-breaking dawn. Same as the moth willing to die for its immortal moment immolated. Combustible wings. Fluttering against the skull’s dome webbed with cracks, calcified, its skylight sealed-up, lacquered with consciousness like an oyster shell smoothed with nacre. Everything in it turned to ash in the short-circuit where old lumber and vulnerable bone had collided.
“You know, this two-door town parked in the middle a nowhere had its heyday once.” Jim Lee’s eyes turned to slits above his smoldering cigar. “Used to get men of ill repute from Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, once in a great while even a black-sedan-turned-gray by the dust of half the Midwest, but you could still see the New York plates when it pulled up in front of our very own pool hall.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Right across the street. Stobart’s. Boarded up now, but Sto’s used t’hop, back then—a bit before I was a regular.”
Look close enough at Jim Lee’s eyes alight with the bygone, awash with beer, you might see in the dark irises tiny twins of Stobart’s Pool Hall just as he remembered it.
“Used to come from all over…” Jimmy Lee’s hand circled over the bar like a bird about to set down. “Right here.” His finger whitened at the tip where he pressed on the bar.
Jim Lee, a freckled kid on the black-and-white streets of yesteryears, a cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth, a pack rolled in a T-sleeve. Then at 17 leaning on his cue stick, freckles about gone, a white guinea-tee showing a weightlifter’s arms, not too arrogant to smile. A Lone Star in the other hand, fingers pressing a smoldering butt to the cold-sweating can.
Theme and variation. How many other teenagers looked just like him? Even went to Joplin and got tattooed. Smoked the same brand of cigarettes and drank the same beer in Stobart’s.
“Those days I was so cool when I stepped outside, temperature dropped.” His cigar a cold cinder, he looked at what was left as if he were missing something. “Left home sweet home to become one of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children—Yoo, Ess, Em, Cee. Fer the free scuba lessons. Damn near broke an eardrum.” He tipped his bottle all the way up. “A dive as outta this world as a moonwalk. You can go down in the same spot two, three days in a row an’ it’s new an’ unfamiliar every day.” Jim Lee aimed an index finger at Logan’s chest. “You’da never come up.”
Jim Lee down there in the water-dark, sinking and lost, following the beam of his flashlight, eyes peeled just in case those rumors about a sunken civilization were true. His undersea excavations maybe after a way to be that buoyant all the time, that wonderstruck, that close to the sound of his own breathing, to the ocean’s breath sweeping things along, making kelp forests wave like the hair of Old Man Ocean long forgotten, topside temples gone to ruin, a pagan god half-buried face-down in the sand now, too at ease ever to move again, a natural formation on the bottom giving off a little greenish smolder in the sea night, a smidgen of glow maybe what caught Jim Lee’s eye as he wove through those kelp strands—why’d he come back to Frontenac? The only waves here were in the lapping woodgrain patterns on the bar.
Yes, a kind of motion, as if the wood were breathing.
“Hey buddy, what’re you starin’ at so hard?”
The woodgrain pattern shifting, trembling under Logan’s fingertips, the vibrato of mothwings.
“You don’t wanna know.” Jim Lee squeezed his eyes closed, massaged his wrinkled brow.
Somebody tugged on Jim Lee’s suspenders on his way out.
“Awright, awright, g’bye.” Jim Lee adjusted his suspenders with a thumb under each. “Can’t unnerstand why they gotta mess with a man’s apparel.”
A little later, Jim Lee’s head bowed, his back slumped like he was feeling the weight of those oversized volumes he read, or maybe it was his gone-from-the-earth mother, a slow leaving, cancer of some kind, maybe that’s what made him look old and worn, defeated, all three.
“I drink …” Jim Lee lifted his bottle. “…therefore I am.”
Was that all he’d managed to distill from his dusty stacks of books, an old joke? Was that all that’d come of sitting up late amidst the holy clutter of his collectibles, pouring out whiskey meditations on William Blake, wrestling with the sometimes insufferable, often impenetrable verses of the Bible by candlelight and cigar glow till sleep slipped up behind him, left him face-down on the table beside a hardened puddle of wax?
“They toll me philosophy’d help me pass the L-SAT, the logic an’ all, but I don’t hardly remember none of it.”
“Logic leads t’Aristotle, not t’God.” Jim Lee finished off what was in his bottle. “Plato wiped his ass with it.”
Don waved a hand. “Heard he was a fag.”
Jimmy grinned. “You couldn’t be a waiter in Aristotle’s Diner.”
“Shit.” Don shook his head. “Philosophy about as good as forchin tellin’….”
Who to look for in the insect buzz around a streetlamp? In the smoke-swirl conversations around them? Descartes? Or a higher-up?
“You ever been to one a those prayer meetings?” Don pointed at Logan with his bottle. “One with snakes? Those hillbillies pick up handfuls a the poisonous suckers at a time, never get bit. Straighten ‘em out like a fistful a arrows, stand ‘em up like shocked hair.”
Jim Lee shrugged. “Whaddya expect a farmers who drink their corn?”
“They thank thay’re saints from the Babble. Reincar-nayted or somethin’.”
Not reincarnated, Logan thought, something different, the soul a song composed of a certain number of elements already there in the ancient Sumerians and their drumbeat songs, reshuffled over the centuries till you got a Kansas farmboy blowing his harmonica blues. Old as the hills in Oklahoma. No one ever really comes back, it’s all odds, theme and variation, some things that look like others are bound to show up.
“You and Jim Lee read too many bucks, I can’t hardly keep up with you.”
Did Logan say that out loud? Or was Don reading minds?
“The Lord works in mysterious ways all right.” Billy nodded confidently. “The night old Stobart died of a heart attack I dreamed he was drowning and was callin’ out for help.”
Why had there been no owl screech, no ominous dream, no fire alarm, no fire-colored moon in the sky the night his father had died? Logan had gone on sleeping, the mellow rhythm of his breathing unbroken while his
father crossed that yawning gulf alone.
The death of his father should have been like the lowering of another world. He should have sensed that the sky had been swallowed, should have felt that second world settling like another night. Its magnetic poles should have pricked up the hairs on the back of his neck, made them stiff as cactus needles. The added gravity should have squeezed the breath out of him, pressed against his dreaming as though sinking into mud, tracking itself, leaving scarred terrain as proof of the casual forces loose in the world—which had collided at an intersection where two trucks had mangled themselves as if one of them had expected to win. Their shiny grills like sets of teeth caught, the two trucks had stopped dead trying to take a hunk out of one another. No witnesses, both drivers killed, both drunk, police had never ruled on who’d run the signal.
Twelve years later Logan hadn’t let go. Fingers bent with gripping, cramped and tangled in horsehair, holding on to the bristling mane of night. Veins rippled across taut skin. Mane of the constellation Horse. Bright pain as the windows of the skull fog with frost.
It had been a car accident. Cal was a mechanic. But…how?
The amount of motion in the universe constant, only direction changes, is affected by will, acted on by the soul’s desire. Is that how he did it? By wishing for it? By deep-felt belief?
And what is that whisper running along the bone like a breathy prayer rounding the dome of St. Pauls? His father’s voice? Prodding his conscience?
Jim Lee looking around the room, sifting the haze of voices and exhausted cigarettes as if waiting in some dust-infested corner were the very thing he’d been scouring the sky for with his tripodded magnifying glass. Sitting there as though it might sidle up next to him, take a seat on one of Larry’s stools (electrical tape covering a split in the leather), maybe he was waiting for a vision to visit. Weren’t they all? A moment different from any other that would make sense of every other? That would make this long night of disappointment breathable, bearable? Why else look over at the door every time it opened? Jim Lee, who’d seen the submerged bottom of the world, stared forlornly at the unplugged jukebox.
Caught in the night’s undertow, his flashlight lost, something of the cool shadows cast among tombstones in his eyes, Jim Lee—Logan would’ve bet—wanted to ask something of the dead, possessed of oracular knowledge as they were rumored to be, having circumnavigated this side and that, seen the darkest of places, what he wanted to know—his ass half hanging off the stool—was why he could blow things up two or three times lifesize but not see any clearer. Was how to keep night after night from etching unwanted tattoos on memory’s skin. How it could be he was looking out on things and still wondering about the order to put them in: does death really come before dishonor (the price of those free scuba lessons)? And if forced to choose, would it be another line of poetry or a line of coke? A little sky scanning or another gander from his stool outpost at the sweaty faces and smoky voices? Where exactly was he supposed to be standing (or sitting) in relation to everything else? Deep-sea diver into the early morning hours, what was all that down there on the unlit end of the ocean floor? And what have we got here on the gritty floorboards we’ve never noticed by day? Light chases the mystery outta things, though pure darkness makes the exact whereabouts a your hand in front of your face fairly enigmatic. A Beethoven symphony or the insects in the fields with their endless nightchant? The Epic of Gilgamesh or another excursion to one of Frontenac’s titty bars? A little more living or a peek at the secrets of the dead?
That is the question.
Each Star a Sun to Invisible Planets
Tenea D. Johnson
For the moment, William had forgotten, and in forgetting an ephemeral, disjointed peace alighted upon him. He allowed himself to savor it. The sun warmed his upturned face as he lay on a secluded hillside, surrounded by purplish-pink flowers. He didn’t see another person. So he could not ask anyone where, exactly, he found himself. It felt like midday, and the sun’s position overhead confirmed this. William left it at that: he was out in the afternoon. Behind the curiosity, he sensed relief in the space knowing had left behind. It was enough that it was beautiful outside and he, alone. A gentle wind blew up the length and across the girth of him, pausing as it traveled to collect its breath to finish the journey. He stretched his long limbs, savoring the sensation of the great columns of muscle reaching their limits. Through the thin fabric of his pocket, he felt a small, hard rectangle slide across his thigh. Yawning, William shoved a calloused hand into his pocket to pull out the surprise.
He recalled that he enjoyed this game of discovering himself from the things he carried.
When he wrenched his hand free and opened his palm, he found an ancient datacorder resting in the expanse between his faint life and love lines. He recognized it immediately and cleared his throat. William’s rich bass activated its sensor. With a click, it, and he, came to life.
He spoke. “This is the fourth, no, the fifth datacorder I’ve had. The others are…full, also hidden.” William took a long pause, searching his mind for more. What else should he say? He stared at the thing in his palm and concentrated.
“I traded for this one, on the way through…middle Tennessee…from a man…on a broken bridge contemplating a quick, wet end. He stood, staring at the water, at the end of a beautiful road. I discovered him because the pathway had pulled me in. Bright pumpkin, cherry red, a gold like tarnished quincentennial coins: those leaves. They framed the trail and it looked like I’d stepped inside a painting of the last bend before home on the prettiest day in autumn. I’d been walking eleven, maybe twelve years by then. I usually trekked in the dark. People took too much notice of my size otherwise. It made them want to talk to me, to ask questions. So my world was night, layers of dark, shadow, and pall. With the…bombings? Yesss, the bombings…and the round-ups, places like that path spread farther apart every day. Peaceful places are always precious, I guess.”
William let his gaze wander, begin to drift away. With an effort, he roused himself.
“Out in the country, when I saw people, they were usually huddled around lean-tos. They dotted the toxic sites and other abandoned places folks ran to when the gene corps came searching—” He paused, wondering what they were searching for. It eluded him.
“Because of the skull plate jutting out from his forehead and the dirty film on his camoed skin, I could tell the man on the bridge had gone AWOL from the corps. Like the rest of them, his adaptations were post-pubescent and work-specific, not genetic, therefore aching, foreign, and often fleeting. Not worth the pain, but the corporate reps didn’t tell recruits that when they signed up, and seeing as they were recruits mostly because they wanted to eat it wouldn’t have mattered. Still, back then, the gene corps had a high turnover rate. Often the heart rejected what the body did not.
“And so it must have been with him. He must have caught a case of conscience, and it had led him to that spot. He couldn’t continue in his duties, or perhaps at all, so his former employer had no use for him. They paid the gene corps not to care how many suffered or died in their quest for…for…manufactured…immortality. Yes, they were searching for a single set of DNA that had become legend. That they had been sent as a provocation.”
Flashes of queues and refugee camps overwhelmed William’s inner eye. He saw poor brown people rounded up for DNA tests: DNA tests for job applications, DNA tests for medical care, for food, for oxygen on days when smog obscured the sunrise. And when they wouldn’t submit willingly: hair ripped from scalps, skin from flesh, stomachs emptied of their meager contents with well-placed blows.
William rubbed his eyes and ran a hand over his bare skull. He continued, shaken.
“Legendarily stupid, perhaps, to have shown the media that biogenetic adaptations could produce such longevity. There must have been a better way to subvert the system. The sample didn’t give the downtrodden hope; it dimmed what little they possessed. The genetic corporations just created new rules
to root out the exceptional. Sending that self-degrading culture of DNA sharpened their tactics—and our culture kept degrading. Lesson learned. Long life does not confer wisdom.”
William stopped. His breathing slowed, and a sliver of melancholy worked itself into his chest. Oh. He licked his lips and began again. Now his story, this history bubbled up in a rush, but he let each word settle before he moved on to the next.
“Rosedale; Base Brush; Doubtful Sound: these are the disappearing places. First from the world, then my mind, and finally, gone. Once they were of my world, errant stars born to burn bright and fall forever. The world grows darker with their absence. Even their names are a secret only I seem to have kept.”
William’s head sunk to the side, his vision obscured by stalks.
“I’ve been to dozens of places that never officially existed. Those places were pillaged, plundered, and bulldozed into open patches of land. I still go back, checking for those hidden well enough to be saved. I’m not the only one. But just as quickly as gathering spots for the exceptional sprout, they’re harvested. The privileged value those people, or rather their components, too much for the gene corps to leave them be. As always, some remain tools, like the man who I traded a handful of open-pollinated seeds for this datacorder.
“Even now, an incredible proliferation of human genetic diversity thrives, just hidden from view. Back then, it was as wild as the seeds it’s illegal to keep. Mandatory gene registration didn’t exist, and no one had thought of variable DNA exchange rates on mortgages. We had more choices. In that, we were rich and unique in global genomic economics. We were free on a mitigated basis.
“But that’s just a memory now, and after 157 years, the gene corps keeps searching. They haven’t found me.”
