Days Between Stations

by Steve Erickson

  So she told him about the cats. In the dawn she pulled him naked from the bed and they sat in the window and waited. At the first gleam of the sun on the far building of the street, there emerged one cat and then another. They were only seen for a moment, before they disappeared around another corner, down another narrow canyon between two more buildings. She told him how when she was young she could call them in the fields, and they would respond in herds, struck and spellbound. Michel said, You ought to call them again. But that, Lauren answered, was when I was young, long long ago.

  He stayed with her the entire time, bringing her groceries and cleaning her apartment. He did everything but answer the telephone when it rang in the mornings. Then, when she sank into each conversation with Jason like a reverie, Michel stepped quietly out of the apartment and stood in the hall staring at the banister that ran alongside the steps. He stood waiting, trying not to think, until after a while the door opened behind him and there she was, finished. She looked at him with his hands in his pockets and he looked much younger without the patch, but for the eyes that always looked old. He didn’t look at her but glanced over her shoulder at the phone returned to its cradle, and then staring at the ground stepped once more into her world.

  A white haunted lull filled the following days. They watched it pass beyond the window, from her bed where they lay together saying nothing. The sand stopped awhile, the city scraped raw by the recent storms—white blotches on the buildings of Pauline Boulevard where the paint and plaster had been torn away. All the windows were scratched, long intricate webs across the glass. It was quiet. There wasn’t the sound of traffic but for a few buses and the bulldozers moving the sand where it had piled high. The moonbridges which Michel had seen when he first returned to the States were now smooth white mounds with only an occasional railing still visible. People went out, life in general went on, but it wasn’t clear whether this calm was courage or concession. The sky was white all the time. The wind moved the sand slowly across the horizon in large masses like clouds. Electricity went off and on all the time now. People didn’t buy anything they had to keep in their refrigerators. They wore wrist-watches because clocks couldn’t be trusted. The owners of the Blue Isosceles now closed the club four nights a week. On his way to and from the club Michel saw the streets strewn with stranded cars. Televisions blinked erratically in the dark. Jason was in Europe; he did not call again.

  Michel would come home from the club to find her still awake, a lamp beside her bed if the current was running, a candle burning if it was not. In bed she touched him dangerously. She ran her hands up his legs and across his chest and his stomach, and then dropped her fingers to feel him, to run one finger up and down him. He had been celibate since that morning in Paris. He didn’t know if he had made love before that morning. He didn’t know if there’d been women in Paris, or Los Angeles—actresses or bohemians or lunatics in bookshops. Where the other instincts had returned to him even as he woke selfless in Paris, the instinct to take a woman was something he only rationally understood. He hadn’t been touched by it directly, the way he’d been touched by hunger or fatigue. He never stripped naked before any woman since that day; it was the vulnerability he couldn’t accept. He couldn’t accept the notion of risking that much. In other words he entertained the possibility that he had never had a woman. In other words, in terms of who he was now, he might as well have never had a woman. But now she touched him this way in a fashion that surprised even her, and not only did he respond to the touch, but he felt his heart release a dark dangerous ink in his soul, as though each ventricle was the arm of a squid. When it flooded him, he knew he was capable of just about anything.

  A black seeping dark filled those days, then: a craziness he was compelled to contain even as it threatened to gush first from him, then from their bed, then swell within the room lapping at the corners and pushing against the window. As he tried to turn from her, for her sake more than his own, she pursued the craze; she tormented him with her hands and pressed herself against him, pushing her breasts up against his shoulders and stroking him until his knuckles were white from gripping the springs beneath him. It occurred to her that this was her revenge against Jason; and then she thought of the voice stuttering in her uterus, and it occurred to her that this was her revenge against Jules. Before she fell asleep, as the lull outside ended and the first of the new storms was arriving from the east, it occurred to her that for a reason she didn’t know, rooted in an incident she could not recall, this was her revenge against Michel himself.

  They woke at morning to a black sky. In the course of the day the sky went from black to gray at noon and then deepened to brown to black again by sunset. The first storm lasted thirty-six hours; it blew high above the ground, leaving only a hiss on the rooftops along with the distant sound of the wind. This storm subsided and the afternoon was still; by night the second sandstorm arrived. It was closer to the ground, and while it wasn’t as long as the first it bombarded everything violently; the next morning, in its aftermath, the streets were ranges of sand, sloped against doorways and all but burying the first levels of the buildings. Michel gazed out the bedroom window. “I have to go to the club,” he said.

  “Nobody will be at the club tonight,” said Lauren.

  “I have to go at any rate,” he said, “and make sure.” At the steps that led down from Pauline Boulevard they came upon a sandy incline too steep to descend, so they were forced to take the long way, following one of the other streets that went winding down the hill. At the club, the band Michel had scheduled for that evening was waiting in back of the building by the stage door. Michel told them he was thinking about closing. The singer, a girl with short blond hair and leather bands around her wrists, protested that the gig was too valuable to lose and asked if Michel would at least wait and see what kind of crowd they drew. Michel reluctantly agreed that if a reasonable crowd arrived, he would let the group go on. By sunset, when the sand on the boulevard was glistening a rosy light and there was a break of blue out over the ocean, neither Michel’s cook nor bartender had shown up. Up in his office back behind the stage Michel could see from the window an ominous black cloud in the east, above the desert that lay just before Nevada. Again Michel considered closing the club; by now he was certain no one would show. One ticket seller wandered in. Lauren sat in a corner, resting from the twinges of pain, her eyes wandering out past the office window like they did so often in her bedroom. She would turn the dial on the radio sometimes; sometimes she would get something. We’ll be out of here by ten, said Michel, unless the weather worsens, in which case we’ll stay the night.

  But by seven-thirty Michel realized he was wrong. People were starting to appear on the walk outside, waiting for the doors to open. By eight-thirty, there were so many Michel had to open the doors and instruct the ticket seller to begin business. The people poured in and by nine the club was mobbed, packed to the walls, and they kept coming, filling the dance floor and pushing aside the tables in back of the room, until the club couldn’t accommodate them all. Michel couldn’t imagine where they were coming from. This crowd was even stranger than usual; at times they looked altogether different from anyone who’d come to the club before. It wasn’t the hard leather-and-steel regalia but the subterranean contortion of their faces, as though they had unearthed themselves, waiting in the sand for the hour when they could converge here, climbing molelike from underground between storms. Since there was no bartender they began helping themselves to the beer in the coolers, passing them down the line into the crowd. The free beer didn’t placate them long; it was warm from the power having gone out so often. It was clear to Michel these people held any generosity of shelter or sustenance in contempt.

  Now he wished he hadn’t opened the doors at all, because the atmosphere was explosive and he knew no way of short-circuiting the charge, least of all with music. It was possible that the music would leave the crowd spent and satisfied, it was also possible it would leave them i
n a frenzy; but if the band didn’t go on he knew there’d be havoc. Michel decided to start the show, but now even the band, which was used to tough crowds, was wary of this one; hesitantly they marched out on stage through the glass, bottle-ends crunching under their feet. A roar met them but it was insistent and threatening, not friendly.

  The band began playing and the songs blinked on and off like lights, power surging through the club and then sporadically stopped, speakers and instruments and backstage strobes cutting out and then returning in sync. For a while the audience seemed amused by this, dancing frantically off the walls and freezing like statues in the blasts of dark and silence. But then they became impatient with it, and in the same dark and silence there was the crash of more glass, and ultimatums voiced from the tables upstairs. With each return of light and sound the singer appeared more visibly anxious, glancing around at her fellow musicians as though waiting for a signal to bolt. The wind outside could now be heard scraping against the walls. It set the crowd on edge even more. When the power failed for what must have been the tenth time, there was the sound of even more glass and bottles rocketing across the room; and then Michel heard one long cry in the dark that withered to a moan. Voices rose from the floor, random shouts, and when the lights came back the band’s singer was covered with blood and on the her knees, hunched over, the ends of her blond hair dragging in the pale pink human tissue on the stage before her.

  Michel was standing next to Lauren who had watched from the balcony behind the stage. He pushed her back down the upstairs hall toward the office. Get in the back room and lock the door, he said. She stood there, staring past him, out toward the stage. Go on! he said, and her head seemed to jerk at the sound of his voice; she stepped back three, four steps. The band deserted the stage and their singer, leaving her where she knelt as the circle of blood around her widened. She did not move at all. Michel turned on the houselights; the crowd, at this point, was in the throes of glee, dancing and whooping before the motionless girl and her face lying at her knees. Bottles were flying everywhere and people were getting hit; and on the landing above, the railing gave completely, several bodies tumbling over the side. The crowd seemed prepared to dismantle the club from the floor up and the ceiling down, meeting somewhere in the middle. In the midst of it all, the blonde onstage never moved; and where at first the crowd appeared like it might descend on her and leave nothing, now they seemed to just move around her, as though having offered her as a sacrifice they understood she was no longer theirs.

  When the final blackout came and the revelry did not stop but rather raised in pitch, heated by the dark, Michel began backing out, up the stairs of the stage; at the top he turned for the hall and decided to get Lauren and get out. The sound of the wind rose in the tumult; he wasn’t certain whether the wind or the mob would raze the club first. In the hall he saw the window before him crackling around the edges, slivering in a crystalline pattern, and he could imagine all of them suddenly obliterated by glass; he wondered what moment he’d be shredded in an explosion of sand. Even in the night the sand could be seen hanging in the sky like an ashen hail, the blizzard cutting across the roof and the grit rattling within the building’s innards. He got to the office door to find it unlocked, and stepped through as the window exploded and the glass sprayed through the club; he looked over his shoulder to see it stop in midair and then float down like silver confetti. He fell to the floor waiting for the office window to shatter too. He called out to her to drop. He called again.

  She was not in the office.

  He sat awhile, under the desk, trying to think. He was waiting for the wind to die; he couldn’t hear himself at all, and he didn’t see the point of calling for her. His great fear was that she’d gone back out into the club, and he felt worse about this possibility when he remembered the way she looked at the girl on the stage—as though, like the girl, and perhaps at the same moment, she had been stunned into oblivion. But now he sat there afraid of going back out into the club and what he might find, the wounded and the glass; and he didn’t imagine she’d have gone back out there anyway. Rather he supposed she was in a closet somewhere, like the closets into which she had followed cats in labor.

  When he did move he had to dig the sand away from the desk in order to get out; that was when he realized the office window had been open. In his mind he constructed this scenario: that perhaps she had even considered leaving the building, through the window, but seeing how serious the storm had become, and how far a drop it was to the ground below, she changed her mind and went to another room in the club. It didn’t occur to him that she might have actually gone out the window.

  Michel trudged through the sand in the room and slowly moved the door open, pushing away the sand that had mounted against it. In the hall there was more sand. It was pitch black so he couldn’t really see clearly, and he could only discern the forms lying on the ground. He could smell the blood; but what froze the flow of his own veins was that there wasn’t a sound at all from the club: not a murmur or a groan or a cry. It was absolutely still: not a stirring or a footstep. Lauren, he said. No one answered. He turned in the doorway and in the moonlight saw the sand fall from the ledges above the corners.

  He went to the window. The moon was rising over the dunes and they looked like the waves of the Atlantic, as he had seen them before he returned from France.

  He realized then that the sand had piled high against the building so that it wasn’t drop at all from the window. If there had been footprints, they were buried by now.

  Disgusted, he turned from the window, went back into the hall and called again. Again there was no answer. The entire building seemed to be shifting, and a door broke open and swayed. Part of the ceiling gave and the sand fell through; he saw the dark sky beyond the torn ceiling; the wind was dead and the night was clearing.

  In a heated and frightened fury, he returned to the window and stood: then he went through. Everything was still: the branches of the trees against the moon were bare but for white clumps of sand that occasionally shook loose; and standing knee-deep he saw nothing move. He watched the sandtrees for some minutes until one shuddered from something unknown, a breeze he didn’t feel or the weight of the sand on a high branch. It was only then, from far away, he heard it; as he listened he realized it was bells in the night. Churches and homes are ringing their bells now that the storm is over, he said to himself; but in fact, in the black lightless city it sounded at first like the voices of children. The landscape shuddered again, the stripped white forms of the sandtrees drooling over the curbs in the moonlight.

  That was when he felt it at his feet, soft and fine. He looked down and he saw the seaweed, there on the sand. He stared at it in the light as it glistened yellow-brown on the dune beneath the window. He wanted to go back at that moment, though he never believed in signs or visions. He stood watching it several minutes, and finally bent to touch it. He pulled gently at it; and when it didn’t come up, he saw it was rooted, stretching a foot, two feet. He felt stupid, realizing it wasn’t seaweed at all, but human hair.

  Beneath the sand, she had been listening to him.

  It was like in the hospital, when she had listened to her womb talk to her, only now it seemed a bit the other way around, that she was the one enveloped. She was in some kind of pocket; she could breathe, she could see, she felt like she had room, as though she could have gotten up and put on her clothes there under the sand. She had no idea what happened to her clothes; she felt the sand drift beneath her belly, between her breasts, down her legs. The sand was warm, to her surprise. Everything seemed calm. Because she remembered in the back of her mind she wasn’t allowed to make love, and because she felt so nakedly suspended here, she had the sense of being absolutely virginal, free from any sort of gravity, unbound by any sort of temporal concerns. The wind that buried her here was gone, she could hear it, through the earth, miles away by now, nearing the ocean; she too could hear the bells though they sounded like nothing but
a high tone struck off the rim of a glass in space.

  She listened to him somewhere above her, and felt him pull at her hair. She knew it was him. In this state of hers, his touch was like a violation and it thrilled her. She thought of him standing over her in the sand, and in her mind pictured him against the the jagged blue edges of the window. The only thing she couldn’t quite see were his eyes, because she hadn’t gotten used to the missing patch; when she saw his face his eyes were replaced by dark patches of the sky, so it wasn’t possible to tell what he was thinking or feeling, since the rest of his features were so impassive. She knew he was going to take her. She knew that from the way his shoulders sloped and the predatory way his fingers curled. She still couldn’t see him but that didn’t matter; it wasn’t necessary that she actually see him. He stood in the sand and she knew when he pulled apart the buttons of his pants and dropped his shirt to his side, and poised himself naked above her.

  She felt the sand shift around her, and the displacement from his knees dropping to the ground on each side of her; when he dug away the sand around her she felt his fingers inside her legs, and the sand slip down between her. Finally he had cleared away all the sand from her waist to her thighs, and once again she felt him pull her hair, until he had wrestled free her face from the dune. The breeze that lifted and died across the landscape was very slight; bits of bark blew by, and before her the moon pulled from the trees and drifted higher. He touched her around her legs and the small of her back. He held her hair with one hand and felt her face with the other, running his fingers across her brow. She remembered she wasn’t supposed to do this, the doctors had said; but she understood that he wouldn’t be stopped. She was pinned to the sand and she was thinking of one black cat in particular, and she was remembering the way she brushed its fur in a field on just such a night as this one, when each star was visible and the moon was a white cold hole throbbing above her: she was thinking of this when she felt him place his finger just inside her and then follow with the rest of him. This was when she realized just how hungry both of them were. It was a movement so driven and unhesitant that she responded with a spasm. The sort of bliss in which she’d rested felt aborted. She attempted to pull away, she tried to twist around to face him; but his presence that far up inside her left her caught and wriggling.