Beside me the blond boy swore. He grabbed the matches from me and lit one, turned to hold it cupped before my face. I brought the cigarette close and breathed in, watched the fingertip flare of crimson then blue as the match went out.
But the cigarette was lit. I took a drag, passed it to the boy. He smoked in silence, after a minute handed it back to me. The acrid smoke couldn’t mask his oily smell, sweat and shit and urine; but also a faint odor of green hay and sunlight. When he turned his face to me I saw that he was older than I had first thought, his skin dark-seamed by sun and exposure.
“Here,” he said. His voice was harsh and difficult to understand. He held his hand out. I opened mine expectantly, but as he spread his fingers only a stream of sand fell onto my palm, gritty and stinking of piss. I drew back, cursing. As I did he leaned forward and spat in my face.
“Poseur.”
“You fuck,” I yelled. I tried to get up but he was already on his feet. His hand was tearing at his neck; an instant later something lashed across my face, slicing upwards from cheek to brow. I shouted in pain and fell back, clutching my cheek. There was a red veil between me and the world; I blinked and for an instant saw through it. I glimpsed the young man running down the steps, his hoarse laughter echoing through the stairwell; heard the clang of the fire door swinging open then crashing shut; then silence.
“Shit,” I groaned, and sank back to the floor. I tried to staunch the blood with my hand. My other hand rested on the floor. Something warm brushed against my fingers: I grabbed it and held it before me: a filthy bandana, twisted tight as a noose, one whip-end black and wet with blood.
I saw him one more time. It was high summer by then, the school year over. Marcy and Bunny were gone till the fall, Marcy to Europe with her parents, Bunny to a private hospital in Kentucky. David would be leaving soon, to return to his family in Philadelphia. I had found another job in the city, a real job, a GS-l position with the Smithsonian; the lowest-level job one could have in the government but it was a paycheck. I worked three twelve-hour shifts in a row, three days a week, and wore a mustard-yellow polyester uniform with a photo ID that opened doors to all the museums on the Mall. Nights I sweated away with David at the bars or the Atlantis; days I spent at the newly-opened East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, its vast open white-marble space an air-conditioned vivarium where I wandered stoned, struck senseless by huge moving shapes like sharks spun of metal and canvas: Calder’s great mobile, Miro’s tapestry, a line of somber Rothkos darkly shimmering waterfalls in an upstairs gallery. Breakfast was a Black Beauty and a Snickers bar, dinner whatever I could find to drink.
We were at the Lost and Found, late night early August. David as usual had gone off on his own. I was, for once, relatively sober: I was in the middle of my three-day work week, normally I wouldn’t have gone out but David was leaving the next morning. I was on the club’s upper level, an area like the deck of an ocean liner where you could lean on the rails and look down onto the dance floor below. The club was crowded, the music deafening. I was watching the men dance with each other, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, strobelit beneath mirrorballs and shifting layers of blue and gray smoke that would ignite suddenly with white blades of laser-light, strafing the writhing forms below so they let out a sudden single-voiced shriek, punching the air with their fists and blasting at whistles. I rested my arms on the rounded metal rail and smoked, thinking how beautiful it all was, how strange, how alive. It was like watching the sea.
And as I gazed slowly it changed, slowly something changed. One song bled into another, arms waved like tendrils; a shadow moved through the air above them. I looked up, startled, glanced aside and saw the blond young man standing there a few feet from me. His fingers grasped the railing; he stared at the dance floor with an expression at once hungry and disdainful and disbelieving. After a moment he slowly lifted his head, turned and stared at me.
I said nothing. I touched my hand to my throat, where his bandana was knotted there, loosely. It was stiff as rope beneath my fingers: I hadn’t washed it. I stared back at him, his green-blue eyes hard and somehow dull; not stupid, but with the obdurate matte gleam of unpolished agate. I wanted to say something but I was afraid of him; and before I could speak he turned his head to stare hack down at the floor below us.
“Cela s’est passé,” he said, and shook his head.
I looked to where he was gazing. I saw that the dance floor was endless, eternal: the cinderblock warehouse walls had disappeared. Instead the moving waves of bodies extended for miles and miles until they melted into the horizon. They were no longer bodies but flames, countless flickering lights like the candles I had seen in my apartment, flames like men dancing; and then they were not even flames but bodies consumed by flame, flesh and cloth burned away until only the bones remained and then not even bone but only the memory of motion, a shimmer of wind on the water then the water gone and only a vast and empty room, littered with refuse: glass vials, broken plastic whistles, plastic cups, dog collars, ash.
I blinked. A siren wailed. I began to scream, standing in the middle of my room, alone, clutching at a bandana tied loosely around my neck. On the mattress on the floor David turned, groaning, and stared up at me with one bright blue eye.
“It’s just the firehouse,” he said, and reached to pull me back beside him. It was five a.m. He was still wearing the clothes he’d worn to the Lost and Found. So was I; I touched the bandana at my throat and thought of the young man at the railing beside me. “C’mon, you’ve hardly slept yet,” urged David. “You have to get a little sleep.”
He left the next day. I never saw him again.
A few weeks later my mother came, ostensibly to visit her cousin in Chevy Chase but really to check on me. She found me spreadeagled on my bare mattress, screenless windows open to let the summer’s furnace heat pour like molten iron into the room. Around me were the posters I’d shredded and torn from the walls; on the walls were meaningless phrases, crushed remains of cockroaches and waterbugs, countless rust-colored handprints, bullet-shaped gouges where I’d dug my fingernails into the drywall.
“I think you should come home,” my mother said gently. She stared at my hands, fingertips netted with dried blood, my knuckles raw and seeping red. “I don’t think you really want to stay here. Do you? I think you should come home.”
I was too exhausted to argue. I threw what remained of my belongings into a few cardboard boxes, gave notice at the Smithsonian, and went home.
It’s thought that Rimbaud completed his entire body of work before his nineteenth birthday; the last prose poems, Illuminations, indicate he may have been profoundly affected by the time he spent in London in 1874. After that came journey and exile, years spent as an arms trader in Abyssinia until he came home to France to die, slowly and painfully, losing his right leg to syphilis, electrodes fastened to his nerveless arm in an attempt to regenerate life and motion. He died on the morning of November 10, 1891, at ten o’clock. In his delirium he believed that he was back in Abyssinia, readying himself to depart upon a ship called “Aphinar.” He was thirty-seven years old.
I didn’t live at home for long—about ten months. I got a job at a bookstore; my mother drove me there each day on her way to work and picked me up on her way home. Evenings I ate dinner with her and my two younger sisters. Weekends I went out with friends I’d gone to high school with. I picked up the threads of a few relationships begun and abandoned years earlier. I drank too much but not as much as before. I quit smoking.
I was nineteen. When Rimbaud was my age, he had already finished his life work. I hadn’t even started yet. He had changed the world; I could barely change my socks. He had walked through the wall, but I had only smashed my head against it, fruitlessly, in anguish and despair. It had defeated me, and I hadn’t even left a mark.
Eventually I returned to D.C. I got my old job back at the Smithsonian, squatted for a while with friends in Northeast, got an apartment, a boyfriend, a promotio
n. By the time I returned to the city David had graduated from the Divine. We spoke on the phone a few times: he had a steady boyfriend now, an older man, a businessman from France. David was going to Paris with him to live. Marcy married well and moved to Aspen. Bunny got out of the hospital and was doing much better; over the next few decades, she would be my only real contact with that other life, the only one of us who kept in touch with everyone.
Slowly, slowly, I began to see things differently. Slowly I began to see that there were other ways to bring down a wall: that you could dismantle it, brick by brick, stone by stone, over years and years and years. The wall would always be there—at least for me it is—but sometimes I can see where I’ve made a mark in it, a chink where I can put my eye and look through to the other side. Only for a moment; but I know better now than to expect more than that.
I talked to David only a few times over the years, and finally not at all. When we last spoke, maybe fifteen years ago, he told me that he was HIV positive. A few years after that Bunny told me that the virus had gone into full-blown AIDS, and that he had gone home to live with his father in Pennsylvania. Then a few years after that she told me no, he was living in France again, she had heard from him and he seemed to be better.
Cela s’est passé, the young man had told me as we watched the men dancing in the L&F twenty-six years ago. That is over.
Yesterday I was at Waterloo Station, hurrying to catch the train to Basingstoke. I walked past the Eurostar terminal, the sleek Paris-bound bullet trains like marine animals waiting to churn their way back through the Chunnel to the sea. Curved glass walls separated me from them; armed security patrols and British soldiers strode along the platform, checking passenger IDs and waving people towards the trains.
I was just turning towards the old station when I saw them. They were standing in front of a glass wall like an aquarium’s: a middle-aged man in an expensive-looking dark blue overcoat, his black hair still thick though graying at the temples, his hand resting on the shoulder of his companion. A slightly younger man, very thin, his face gaunt and ravaged, burned the color of new brick by the sun, his fair hair gone to gray. He was leaning on a cane; when the older man gestured he turned and began to walk, slowly, painstakingly down the platform. I stopped and watched: I wanted to call out, to see if they would turn and answer, but the blue-washed glass barrier would have muted any sound I made.
I turned, blinking in the light of midday, touched the bandana at my throat and the notebook in my pocket; and hurried on. They would not have seen me anyway. They were already boarding the train. They were on their way to Paris.
He waited in silence, afraid to speak, afraid to give voice to his questions,
afraid that they would be answered . . .
Between the Cold Moon and the Earth
Peter Atkins
They only brushed his cheek for a second or two, but her lips were fucking freezing.
“Christ, Carol,” he said. “Do you want my coat?”
She laughed. “What for?” she asked.
“Because it’s one in the morning,” he said. “And you’re cold.”
“It’s summer,” she pointed out, which was undeniably true but wasn’t really the issue. “Are you going to walk me home, then?”
Michael had left the others about forty minutes earlier. Kirk had apparently copped off with the girl from Woolworth’s that they’d met inside the pub so Michael and Terry had tactfully peeled away before the bus stop and started walking the long way home around Sefton Park. He could’ve split a taxi-fare with Terry but, given that they were still in the middle of their ongoing argument about the relative merits of T.Rex and Pink Floyd and that it was still a good six months before they’d find Roxy Music to agree on, they’d parted by unspoken consent and Michael had opted to cut across the park alone.
Carol had been standing on the path beside the huge park’s large boating lake. He’d shit himself for a moment when he first saw the shadowed figure there, assuming the worst—a midnight skinhead parked on watch ready to whistle his mates out of hiding to give this handy glam-rock faggot a good kicking—but Carol had been doing nothing more threatening than staring out at the center of the lake and the motionless full moon reflected there.
“Alright, Michael,” she’d said, before he’d quite recognized her in the moonlight, and had kissed his cheek lightly in further greeting before he’d spoken her name. Now, he fell into step beside her and they began to walk the long slow curve around the lake.
“God, Carol. Where’ve you been?” he asked. “Nobody’s seen you for months.”
It was true. Her mum had re-married just before last Christmas and they’d moved. Not far away, still in the same city, but far enough for sixteen-year-olds to lose touch.
“I went to America,” Carol said.
Michael turned his head to see if she was kidding. “You went to America?” he said. “What d’you mean, you went to America? When? Who with?”
Her eyes narrowed for a moment as if she were re-checking her facts or her memory. “I think it was America,” she said.
“You think it was America?”
“It might have been an imaginary America,” she said, her voice a little impatient. “Do you want to hear the fucking story or not?”
Oh. Michael didn’t smile or attempt to kiss her, but he felt like doing both. Telling stories—real, imagined, or some happy collision of the two—had been one of the bonds between them, one of the things he’d loved about her. Not the only thing of course. It’s not like he hadn’t shared Kirk and Terry’s enthusiastic affection for her astonishingly perfect breasts and for the teasingly challenging way she had about her that managed to suggest two things simultaneously: That, were circumstances to somehow become magically right, she might . . . you know . . . actually do it with you; and that you were probably and permanently incapable of ever conjuring such circumstance. But her stories, and her delight in telling them, were what he’d loved most and what, he now realized, he’d most missed. So yes, he said, he wanted to hear the story.
There was some quick confusion about whether she’d got there by plane or by ship—Carol had never been a big fan of preamble—but apparently what mattered was that, after a few days, she found herself in a roadside diner with a bunch of people she hardly knew.
They were on a road trip and had stopped for lunch in this back-of-beyond and unpretentious diner—a place which, while perfectly clean and respectable, looked like it hadn’t been painted or refurbished since about 1952. They were in a booth, eating pie and drinking coffee. Her companions were about her age—but could, you know, drive and everything. Turned out boys in America could be just as fucking rude as in Liverpool. One of them—Tommy, she thought his name was—was giving shit to the waitress. Hoisting his empty coffee mug, he was leaning out of the booth and looking pointedly down the length of the room.
“Yo! Still need a refill here!” he shouted to the counter.
Carol stood up and, announcing she was going to the ladies’ room, slid her way out of the booth. Halfway down the room, she crossed paths with the waitress, who was hurrying toward their booth with a coffee pot. The woman’s name-tag said Cindi, a spelling Carol had never seen before and hoped could possibly be short for Cinderella because that’d be, you know, great. Carol spoke softly to her, nodding back towards Tommy, who was impatiently shaking his empty coffee mug in the air.
“Don’t mind him, love,” Carol said. “He’s a bit of a prick, but I’ll make sure he leaves a nice tip.”
Cindi, who looked to be at least thirty and harried-looking, gave her a quick smile of gratitude. “Little girls’ room’s out back, sweetheart,” she said.
Carol exited the main building of the diner and saw that a separate structure, little more than a shack really, housed the bathrooms. She started across the graveled parking lot, surrounded by scrub-grass that was discolored and overgrown, looking down the all-but-deserted country road—the type of road, she’d been in
formed by her new friends, which was known as a two-lane blacktop. The diner and its shithouse annex were the only buildings for as far as her eye could see, apart from a hulking grain silo a hundred yards or so down the road. As Carol looked in that desolate direction, a cloud drifted over the sun, dimming the summer daylight and shifting the atmosphere into a kind of pre-storm dreariness. Carol shivered and wondered, not without a certain pleasure in the mystery, just where the hell she was.
Done peeing and alone in the bathroom, Carol washed her hands and splashed her face at the pretty crappy single sink that was all the place had to offer. The sound of the ancient cistern laboriously and noisily refilling after her flush played in the background. Carol turned off the tap and looked for a moment at her reflection in the pitted and stained mirror above the sink. As the cistern finally creaked and whistled to a halt, the mirror suddenly cracked noisily across its width as if it was just too tired to keep trying.
“Fuckin’ ’ell!” said Carol, because it had made her jump and because she didn’t like the newly mismatched halves of her reflected face. She turned around, ready to walk out of the bathroom, and discovered she was no longer alone.
A little girl—what, six, seven years old?—was standing, silent and perfectly still, outside one of the stall doors, looking up at her. Oddly, the little girl was holding the palm of one hand over her right eye.
“Oh shit,” said Carol, remembering that she’d just said fucking hell in front of a kid. “I didn’t know you were . . . ” She paused, smiled, started over. “Hello, pet. D’you live around here?”
The little girl just kept looking at her.
“What’s your name?” Carol asked her, still smiling but still getting no response. Registering the hand-over-the-eye thing, she tried a new tack. “Oh,” she said, “are we playing a game and nobody told me the rules? All right then, here we go.”
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 28
