Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  “Not with the men I get involved with…not a chance! I wouldn’t let any of them take care of my plants.”

  “So you got a few war stories, do you?”

  She puts up a hand, palm outward, as to if to hold a door closed. “You can’t imagine!”

  “I’ve got a few myself.”

  “You’re a guy,” she says. “What would you know?”

  Telling him her stories, she’s sarcastic, self-effacing, almost vivacious, as if by sharing these incidents of male duplicity, laughing at her own naiveté, she is proving an unassailable store of good cheer and resilience. But when she tells of a man who pursued her for an entire year, sending candy and flowers, cards, until finally she decided that he must really love her and spent the night with him, a good night after which he chose to ignore her completely…when she tells him this, Bobby sees past her blithe veneer into a place of abject bewilderment. He wonders how she’d look without the makeup. Softer, probably. The makeup is a painting of attitude that she daily recreates. A mask of prettified defeat and coldness to hide her fundamental confusion. Nothing has ever been as she hoped it would be—yet while she has forsworn hope, she has not banished it, and thus she is confused. He’s simplifying her, he realizes. Desultory upbringing in some Midwestern oasis—he hears a flattened A redolent of Detroit or Chicago. Second-rate education leading to a second-rate career. The wreckage of mornings after. This much is plain. But the truth underlying her stories, the light she bore into the world, how it has transmuted her experience…that remains hidden. There’s no point in going deeper, though, and probably no time.

  The Blue Lady fills with the late crowd. Among them a couple in their sixties who hold hands and kiss across their table; three young guys in Knicks gear; two black men attired gangsta-style accompanying an overweight blonde in a dyed fur wrap and a sequined cocktail dress (Roman damns them with a glare and makes them wait for service). Pineo and Mazurek are silently, soddenly drunk, isolated from their surround, but the life of the bar seems to glide around Bobby and Alicia, the juke box rocks with old Santana, Kinks, and Springsteen. Alicia’s more relaxed than Bobby’s ever seen her. She’s kicked off her right shoe again, shed her jacket, and though she nurses her drink, she seems to become increasingly intoxicated, as if disclosing her past were having the effect of a three-martini buzz.

  “I don’t think all men are assholes,” she says. “But New York men…maybe.”

  “You’ve dated them all, huh?” he asks.

  “Most of the acceptable ones, I have.”

  “What qualifies as acceptable in your eyes?”

  Perhaps he stresses “in your eyes” a bit much, makes the question too personal, because her smile fades and she gives him a startled look. After the last strains of “Glory Days” fade, during the comparative quiet between songs, she lays a hand on his cheek, studies him, and says, less a question than a self-assurance, “You wouldn’t treat me like that, would you?” And then, before Bobby can think how he should respond, taken aback by what appears an invitation to step things up, she adds, “It’s too bad,” and withdraws her hand.

  “Why?” he asks. “I mean I kinda figured we weren’t going to hook up, and I’m not arguing. I’m just curious why you felt that way.”

  “I don’t know. Last night I wanted to. I guess I didn’t want to enough.”

  “It’s pretty unrealistic.” He grins. “Given the difference in our ages.”

  “Bastard!” She throws a mock punch. “Actually, I found the idea of a younger man intriguing.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m not all that.”

  “Nobody’s ‘all that,’ not until they’re with somebody who thinks they are.” She pretends to check him out. “You might clean up pretty nice.”

  “Excuse me,” says a voice behind them. “Can I solicit an opinion?”

  A good-looking guy in his thirties wearing a suit and a loosened tie, his face an exotic sharp-cheekboned mixture of African and Asian heritage. He’s very drunk, weaving a little.

  “My girlfriend…okay?” He glances back and forth between them. “I was supposed to meet her down…”

  “No offense, but we’re having a conversation here,” Bobby says.

  The guy holds his hands up as if to show he means no harm and offers apology, but then launches into a convoluted story about how he and his girlfriend missed connections and then had an argument over the phone and he started drinking and now he’s broke, fucked up, puzzled by everything. It sounds like the prelude to a hustle, especially when the guy asks for a cigarette, but when they tell him they don’t smoke, he does not—as might be expected—ask for money, but looks at Bobby and says, “The way they treat us, man! What are we? Chopped liver?”

  “Maybe so,” says Bobby.

  At this the guy takes a step back and bugs his eyes. “You got any rye?” he says. “I could use some rye.”

  “Seriously,” Bobby says to him, gesturing at Alicia. “We need to finish our talk.”

  “Hey,” the guy says. “Thanks for listening.”

  Alone again, the thread of the conversation broken, they sit for a long moment without saying anything, then start to speak at the same time.

  “You first,” says Bobby.

  “I was just thinking…” She trails off. “Never mind. It’s not that important.”

  He knows she was on the verge of suggesting that they should get together, but that once again the urge did not rise to the level of immediacy. Or maybe there’s something else, an indefinable barrier separating them, something neither one of them has tumbled to. He thinks this must be the case, because given her history, and his own, it’s apparent neither of them has been discriminating in the past. But she’s right, he decides—whatever’s happening between them is simply not that important, and thus it’s not that important to understand.

  She smiles, an emblem of apology, and stares down into her drink. “Free Falling” by Tom Petty is playing on the box, and some people behind them begin wailing along with it, nearly drowning out the vocals.

  “I brought something for you,” Bobby says.

  An uneasy look. “From your work?”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t the same…”

  “I told you I didn’t want to see that kind of thing.”

  “They’re not just souvenirs,” he says. “If I seem messed up to you…and I’m sure I do. I feel messed up, anyway. But if I seem messed up, the things I take from the pit, they’re kind of an explanation for…” He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated by his inability to speak what’s on his mind. “I don’t know why I want you to see this. I guess I’m hoping it’ll help you understand something.”

  “About what?” she says, leery.

  “About me…or where I work. Or something. I haven’t been able to nail that down, y’know. But I do want you to see it.”

  Alicia’s eyes slide away from him; she fits her gaze to the mirror behind the bar, its too-perfect reflection of romance, sorrow, and drunken fun. “If that’s what you want.”

  Bobby touches the half shoe in his jacket pocket. The silk is cool to his fingers. He imagines that he can feel its blueness. “It’s not a great thing to look at. I’m not trying to freak you out, though. I think…”

  She snaps at him. “Just show it to me!”

  He sets the shoe beside her glass and for a second or two it’s like she doesn’t notice it. Then she makes a sound in her throat. A single note, the human equivalent of an ice cube plinking in a glass, bright and clear, and puts a hand out as if to touch it. But she doesn’t touch it, not at first, just leaves her hand hovering above the shoe. He can’t read her face, except for the fact that she’s fixated on the thing. Her fingers trail along the scorched margin of the silk, tracing the ragged line. “Oh, my god!” she says, all but the glottal sound is buried beneath a sudden surge in the music. Her hand closes around the shoe, her head droops. It looks as if she’s in a trance, channeling a feeling or some trace of memory. Her eyes glisten, and she
’s so still, Bobby wonders if what he’s done has injured her, if she was unstable and now he’s pushed her over the edge. A minute passes, and she hasn’t moved. The juke box falls silent, the chatter and laughter of the other patrons rise around them.

  “Alicia?”

  She shakes her head, signaling either that she’s been robbed of the power to speak, or is not interested in communicating.

  “Are you Okay?” he asks.

  She says something he can’t hear, but he’s able to read her lips and knows the word “god” was again involved. A tear escapes the corner of her eye, runs down her cheek, and clings to her upper lip. It may be that the half shoe impressed her, as it has him, as being the perfect symbol, the absolute explanation of what they have lost and what has survived, and this, its graphic potency, is what has distressed her.

  The jukebox kicks in again, an old Stan Getz tune, and Bobby hears Pineo’s voice bleating in argument, cursing bitterly; but he doesn’t look to see what’s wrong. He’s captivated by Alicia’s face. Whatever pain or loss she’s feeling, it has concentrated her meager portion of beauty and suffering, she’s shining, the female hound of Wall Street thing she does with her cosmetics radiated out of existence by a porcelain Song of Bernadette saintliness, the clean lines of her neck and jaw suddenly pure and Periclean. It’s such a startling transformation, he’s not sure it’s really happening. Drink’s to blame, or there’s some other problem with his eyes. Life, according to his experience, doesn’t provide this type of quintessential change. Thin, half-grown cats do not of an instant gleam and grow sleek in their exotic simplicity like tiny gray tigers. Small, tidy Cape Cod cottages do not because of any shift in weather, no matter how glorious the light, glow resplendent and ornate like minor Asiatic temples. Yet Alicia’s golden change is manifest. She’s beautiful. Even the red membranous corners of her eyes, irritated by tears and city grit, seem decorative, part of a subtle design, and when she turns to him, the entire new delicacy of her features flowing toward him with the uncanny force of a visage materializing from a beam of light, he feels imperiled by her nearness, uncertain of her purpose. What can she now want of him? As she pulls his face close to hers, lips parting, eyelids half lowering, he is afraid a kiss may kill him, either overpower him, a wave washing away a tiny scuttler on the sand, or that the taste of her, a fraction of warm saliva resembling a speck of crystal with a flavor of sweet acid, will react with his own common spittle to synthesize a compound microweight of poison, a perfect solution to the predicament of his mortality. But then another transformation, one almost as drastic, and as her mouth finds his, he sees the young woman, vulnerable and soft, giving and wanting, the childlike need and openness of her.

  The kiss lasts not long, but long enough to have a history, a progression from contact to immersion, exploration to a mingling of tongues and gushing breath, yet once their intimacy is completely achieved, the temperature dialed high, she breaks from it and puts her mouth to his ear and whispers fiercely, tremulously, “Thank you…Thank you so much!” Then she’s standing, gathering her purse, her briefcase, a regretful smile, and says, “I have to go.”

  “Wait!” He catches at her, but she fends him off.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “But I have to…right now. I’m sorry.”

  And she goes, walking smartly toward the door, leaving him with no certainty of conclusion, with his half-grown erection and his instantly catalogued memory of the kiss surfacing to be examined and weighed, its tenderness and fragility to be considered, its sexual intensity to be marked upon a scale, its meaning surmised, and by the time he’s made these judgments, waking to the truth that she has truly, unequivocally gone and deciding to run after her, she’s out the door. By the time he reaches the door, shouldering it open, she’s twenty-five, thirty feet down the sidewalk, stepping quickly between the parked cars and the storefronts, passing a shadowed doorway, and he’s about to call out her name when she moves into the light spilling from a coffee shop window and he notices that her shoes are blue. Pale blue with a silky sheen, and of a shape that appears identical to that of the half shoe left on the bar. If, indeed, it was left there. He can’t remember now. Did she take it? The question has a strange, frightful value, born of a frightful suspicion that he cannot quite reject, and for a moment he’s torn between the impulse to go after her and a desire to turn back into the bar and look for the shoe. That, in the end, is what’s important. To discover if she took the shoe, and if she did, then to fathom the act, to decipher it. Was it done because she thought it a gift, or because she wanted it so badly, maybe to satisfy some freaky neurotic demand, that she felt she had to more or less steal it, get him confused with a kiss and bolt before he realized it was missing? Or—and this is the notion that’s threatening to possess him—was the shoe hers to begin with? Feeling foolish, yet not persuaded he’s a fool, he watches her step off the curb at the next corner and cross the street, dwindling and dwindling, becoming indistinct from other pedestrians. A stream of traffic blocks off his view. Still toying with the idea of chasing after her, he stands there for half a minute or so, wondering if he has misinterpreted everything about her. A cold wind coils like a scarf about his neck, and the wet pavement begins soaking into his sock through the hole in his right boot. He squints at the poorly defined distance beyond the cross-street, denies a last twinge of impulse, then yanks open the door of the Blue Lady. A gust of talk and music seems to whirl past him from within, like the ghost of a party leaving the scene, and he goes on inside, even though he knows in his heart that the shoe is gone.

  • • •

  Bobby’s immunity to the pit has worn off. In the morning he’s sick as last week’s salmon plate. A fever that turns his bones to glass and rots his sinuses, a cough that sinks deep into his chest and hollows him with chills. His sweat smells sour and yellow, his spit is thick as curds. For the next forty-eight hours he can think of only two things, medicine and Alicia. She’s threaded through his fever, braided around every thought like a strand of RNA, but he can’t even begin to make sense of what he thinks and feels. A couple of nights later the fever breaks. He brings blankets, a pillow, and orange juice into the living room and takes up residence on the sofa. “Feeling better, huh?” says the roommate, and Bobby says, “Yeah, little bit.” After a pause the roommate hands him the remote and seeks refuge in his room, where he spends the day playing video games. Quake, mostly. The roars of demons and chattering chain guns issue from behind his closed door.

  Bobby channel surfs, settles on CNN, which is alternating between an overhead view of Ground Zero and a studio shot of an attractive brunette sitting at an anchor desk, talking to various men and women about 9/11, the war, the recovery. After listening for almost half an hour, he concludes that if this is all people hear, this gossipy, maudlin chitchat about life and death and healing, they must know nothing. The pit looks like a dingy hole with some yellow machines moving debris—there’s no sense transmitted of its profundity, of how—when you’re down in it—it seems deep and everlasting, like an ancient broken well. He goes surfing again, finds an old Jack the Ripper movie starring Michael Caine, and turns the sound low, watches detectives in long dark coats hurrying through the dimly lit streets, paperboys shouting news of the latest atrocity. He begins to put together the things Alicia told him. All of them. From “I’ve just been to a funeral,” to “Everybody’s ready to go on with their lives, but I’m not ready,” to “That’s why I come here…to figure out what’s missing,” to “I have to go.” Her transformation…did he really see it? The memory is so unreal, but then all memories are unreal, and at the moment it happened, he knew to his bones who and what she was, and that when she took the shoe, the object that let her understand what had been done to her, she was only reclaiming her property. Of course everything can be explained in other ways, and it’s tempting to accept those other explanations, to believe she was just an uptight careerwoman taking a break from corporate sanity, and once she recognized where she wa
s, what she was doing, who she was doing it with, she grabbed a souvenir and beat it back to the email-messaging, network-building, clickety-click world of spread sheets and wheat futures and martinis with some cute guy from advertising who would eventually fuck her brains out and afterward tell the-bitch-was-begging-for-it stories about her at his gym. That’s who she was, after all, whatever her condition. An unhappy woman committed to her unhappy path, wanting more yet unable to perceive how she had boxed herself in. But the things that came out of her on their last night at the Blue Lady, the self-revelatory character of her transformation…the temptation of the ordinary is incapable of denying those memories.

  It’s a full week before Bobby returns to work. He comes in late, after darkness has fallen and the lights have been switched on, halfway inclined to tell his supervisor that he’s quitting. He shows his ID and goes down into the pit, looking for Pineo and Mazurek. The great yellow earth movers are still, men are standing around in groups, and from this Bobby recognizes that a body has been recently found, a ceremony just concluded, and they’re having a break before getting on with the job. He’s hesitant to join the others, and pauses next to a wall made of huge concrete slabs, shattered and resting at angles atop one another, holding pockets of shadow and worse in their depths.

  He’s been standing there about a minute when he feels her behind him. It’s not like in a horror story. No terrible cold or prickling hairs or windy voices. It’s like being with her in the bar. Her warmth, her perfumey scent, her nervous poise. But frailer, weaker, a delicate presence barely in the world. He’s afraid if he turns to look at her, it will break their tenuous connection. She’s probably not visible, anyway. No Stephen King commercial, no sight of her hovering a few inches off the ground, bearing the horrid wounds that killed her. She’s a willed fraction of herself, less tangible than a wisp of smoke, less certain than a whisper. “Alicia,” he says, and her effect intensifies. Her scent grows stronger, her warmth more insistent, and he knows why she’s here. “I realize you had to go,” he says, and then it’s like when she embraced him, all her warmth employed to draw him close. He can almost touch her firm waist, the tiered ribs, the softness of a breast, and he wishes they could go out. Just once. Not so they could sweat and make sleepy promises and lose control and then regain control and bitterly go off in opposite directions, but because at most times people are only partly there for one another—which was how he and Alicia were in the Blue Lady, knowing only the superficial about each other, a few basic lines and a hint of detail, like two sketches in the midst of an oil painting, their minds directed elsewhere, not caring enough to know all there was to know—and the way it is between them at this moment, they would try to know everything. They would try to find the things that did not exist like smoke behind their eyes. The ancient grammars of the spirit, the truths behind their old yet newly demolished truths. In the disembodiment of desire, an absolute focus born. They would call to one another, they would forget the cities and the wars…Then it’s not her mouth he feels, but the feeling he had when they were kissing, a curious mixture of bewilderment and carnality, accented this time by a quieter emotion. Satisfaction, he thinks. At having helped her understand. At himself understanding his collection of relics and why he approached her. Fate or coincidence, it’s all the same, all clear to him now.