Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  He would look, before the light failed, for a café to buoy him up, a place with attractive people with attractive lives, and conversation to match, a place that was somewhere close by so he could easily walk home should the snow pile up to the sky and barricade the streets and make a glacier of the park and its pathways. As it was, snow was mounting the park, topping the black iron railings with crumbly white lines; sparrows fell from the trees and buried themselves in the white; Jason, the hawk, swooped down from the Christodora building on the park side of Avenue B and snatched a snow-coated rat feasting from a spilled-over trash can. A shivering old woman wrapped in newspapers slept on a park bench, the snow fast blanketing her with a soft coat to warm her dying.

  Maybe a woman at the café would glean that he was a good sort, lonely but not desperate, maybe she would see from his eyes that he was on the sincere side, that he was vulnerable, intelligent, courteous, kind, brave even. Maybe she would see that he had a feel for style but was not driven by it, that he understood style’s place in the discourse of everyday life, that one could be rightly or wrongly measured by it, to be seen to have or have not made an effort to brighten the lackluster day and to give life a little push toward the sun.

  Maybe there would be a woman there who could don the comic mask when needed, a face to keep up her spirits—and of those in her circle—and profess the charm of life, the ever-lively fun of it, so that neither she nor those whose company she graced ever saw in her a troubled, brooding, crushed moment. Never would anyone see her wear her true, tragic mask, and her need to seek comfort in the East River, in its depths, all the way to the bottom, among discarded rubber tires, strangled babies and murdered cats, all the way down to its soulless muck.

  “You play like a revelation, like the first buds of spring, like the death rattle that sounds the end and the beginning. You play like everything that can’t be said in words. Play us another,” Marie asked, when Louie had struck his last note and rose, pale, from the piano.

  Pale, as if he had learned of the suicide of a woman he loved. As if the woman he loved had walked out his door to spread open her thighs to another man in his thousand-ply Egyptian cotton sheets in the tonier reaches of Park Avenue, with twenty-four-hour doormen and a private spot in the basement garage. And maybe even with a fully equipped gym and a lap pool on the roof, en plus. As if he had just been told his blood was swimming with cancer, which was tirelessly doing laps in his bloodstream. Cancer drunk on blood, and taking little bites here and there, a nibble of liver, a snippet of pancreas, a morsel of kidney, never stopping, multiplying like fucking rabbits, like fucking drunk amoebas.

  “I’ve reached my limit for now,” Louie said, “but I may revive presently, depending on the disposition of the weather, depending on the developing cut of the company, depending on whether I can wipe clean the memory slate and leave fixed there nothing but void. Depending on the next drink, which I hope will be as exhilarating as the last.”

  Twilight finally let go and tumbled into black night. Snow shrouded the windows, turning the bar into a dim cave without shadows.

  “Marie, we need more light in here,” Harry said. “I can’t see beyond my nose in this two-bit obscurity. We need brighter bulbs, bulbs whose light stretches to the limits of the room and pours out the window and pools into the street. Light that cheers the heart and plucks it from ruminations on the inequity of unrequited love and other such disquieting pensées.”

  “Quite elegantly put, Harry,” Marie said. “I need a stroll. My heart’s pounding with Louie’s music. Pounding in a ravishing way, that is, Louie. Tu vois?”

  “I’ll go with you,” Harry said. “Let’s go down to the river and watch it congeal and freeze itself into ice.”

  “The weather may be an impediment to your excursion, Mr. Harry, but why don’t we all take a peep outside, to be sure,” the centaur said.

  “Good idea,” Harry said.

  “Why not?” Louie said.

  “What are we waiting for?” Marie said.

  The four huddled together, shivering on the sidewalk. They searched the impenetrable sky for a sign of its clearing, and could not bring themselves to move even as the snow climbed their bare heads.

  “I can’t see my hand,” Marie said.

  “I can’t see my shoe,” Louie said.

  “I can’t see your face, Marie. Come closer!” Harry said.

  A sudden opening in the sky cleared a way to the stars while the snow continued to fall.

  “Look up now,” the centaur said. “There’s Orion and his diamond belt, and there’s the big and little dipper—signifying nothing but direction for mariners and desert nomads. But here, in that cluster of stars north of Venus, much is said.”

  “Do they say my tug will leave the slip with Marie as my first and only mate?” Harry asked.

  “Do they say that the soul is immortal?” Louie asked.

  “Do they say that a woman may be won by the unexpected? By the surprise of a man’s smile as he turns when you call his name? Does it say when my Red will return?” Marie asked.

  “The stars do not answer inquiries or predict outcomes,” the centaur said. “They forewarn of disasters weather-wise and otherwise, and sometimes they tell character.”

  Snow walled the deserted streets and buried the cars. Snow shrouded the park and its trees, filling in even the empty spaces between the branches. Snow converted the benches into white catafalques and the park into a silhouette of trees and statues, obliterating entirely the iron railings. Snow trucks rumbled their engines in the distance, from maybe as far away as Avenue D, where they had massed to attack the mounting whiteness but remained idling, unable to move a foot. Tugs, locked fast in the crushing ice of the East River, shrieked like foxes in the hunter’s trap. Ships and boats large and small struggled to make their escape, their propellers futilely grinding the ice that healed itself in place.

  The four began their retreat to the bar but the snow had climbed so high that they had to burrow through in single file, the centaur at the lead, plowing ahead with his broad chest. When they finally got inside, they stood mute, blue in the face, their teeth chattering, even the centaur’s, until Harry said, “Marie, haul out the good stuff. This is the time for it if ever there was.”

  “White noise, white nights, white heat, white marriage, white lies, white coffee, white waters, white whales, white flags, whiteout,” Louie said, trying to unlock his frozen jaw.

  “I once,” Marie said, “peered into a highland cave in Peru. It was pure blackness, absent of sound and vacant of light. I saw then what extinction was made of, the final oblivion of the self. Except, I thought, what if after my death I were to become an atom, an atom with memory and consciousness speeding through eternity and unable to speak, to communicate, unable to love. So, whiteness comforts me—I sleep on a white bed with white pillows and wool blankets whiter than white.”

  Marie said this as she drew a bottle from under the bar, a bottle that glowed with the fire of an ancient Mediterranean sun, sending its warm, golden rays throughout the room.

  “The horses left me this bottle,” Marie said, “left it to me as their memento, and with the wish that I treat this bar with tenderness for the lost and the sad.”

  “It should be packed then,” Louie said, “packed day and night.”

  “It’s a mystery how only a few find this place, though it is clearly visible, and how few enter only a few steps beyond the doorway before they turn about,” Marie said. “And, as for the young who swarm this neighborhood, the young who have eyes only for the young, they pass by, not seeing what’s through the window, but seeing only reflections of themselves.”

  “Let’s drink to the snow that keeps us here. Let’s drink,” Harry said, “to the expectations of love that keep hope alive.”

  They drank and soon their faces returned to the various shades natural to each. The snow melted away from them, pooling silver puddles at their feet. They looked about and up and down and sideways
and wondered at life. “Life, life, life,” Louie intoned.

  “Is there anything more grand?” Harry asked the corrugated-tin ceiling from 1903, when horses had first made the bar theirs.

  “Nothing,” the centaur said, raising a hoof, his left one.

  “I’ll bet my life on life, anytime,” Marie said, hoisting the glass of glowing amber she swirled into a baby whirlpool.

  “I feel,” the centaur said, “that we are the last persons alive, that the world has perished in the snow.”

  “Yes,” Louie said. “Perished in the snow and all the memory of the world with it.”

  “Let’s drink to the vanished world,” Marie said.

  “To us,” Louie said.

  “To insatiable dreams and fair winds,” Harry said.

  “To this bar and all breathing in it,” Marie said.

  The centaur rose on his hind legs, staying aloft for some moments, before returning to land, where, once again firmly planted, he said, “Let’s drink to my ancestors who walked among sex-drunk satyrs in lush mountain glades, where baby grapes bulged with longing for the sun, my ancestors who swam among river gods and river nymphs, who sang to them. Let’s drink to my ancestors who were philosophers before philosophy and, being beast and human, had the wisdom of both.”

  “That’s a sweet toast,” Harry said. “But what’s philosophy compared to love that needs no philosophy?”

  “We’ve come a long way from those golden times you speak of, centaur, if, indeed, those times ever existed,” Louie said. “We imagine the past as always better than the present. But it was never better except in our wishes, in our soothing tales of make-believe. My earliest ancestors lived in freezing caves and dreaded every uncertain moment of the day. They feared the moonless black night even more—feared that some beast or fellow man might steal into their icy den and gut them in their sleep. For them, moon or no, it was always night! The sun was only on loan. They clubbed and ate each other for food and power, but they also painted scenes of animals on their cave walls and in that elevated effort to make art we see in our brutish ancestors common and highest humanity.”

  “We lived, but we made no record. All of our records were drawn by others, the mythmakers. And now there are three of us remaining and soon we shall be none,” the centaur said.

  “How sad,” Marie said. “But you are with us now, centaur.”

  “I have a distant cousin who lives in Queens but she’s a misanthrope and a shut-in and is tired of life anyway. And there’s another cousin who lives in hiding in Greece, fearful of being hunted down and exhibited in a cage.”

  “Bring him here to live with us,” Marie said.

  “I don’t think so. He lives in the high mountains and loves cold streams and swaying pines. In any case,” the centaur continued, “I forgot to mention that the stars have sent us greetings. They suggested we stay safely in the bar because the blizzard will worsen and dark hazards await us out there in the drifts.”

  “Let’s take a chance anyway, Marie, and go down to the river,” Harry said. “Let’s go down to the river and see the ice floes and hold hands like kids in love. Let’s you and me walk the ice down to the Narrows to the open sea and to the vast beyond.”

  “I’ve sailed many rivers,” Louie said. “I’ve rafted on the Ganges and seen on its banks the dead burn away on skimpy funeral pyres, seen the ashes strewn in the river’s moody flow and I understood that finally we were only in transit to ashes, and that after death nothing in the beyond waited for us. All our memories too, gone up in smoke and scattered in the ashes, just some crumbs of ash to show for what was a life. What an affront! Needless to say, I do not love the Ganges.”

  “What a Gloomy Gus you are,” Harry said.

  “I have lived on a houseboat on the Seine,” Louie continued, “the Louvre at my back, Notre-Dame in my window, swans pecking at my hull for attention; known the river’s swanky rhythm, its swells and splash, and felt its claims to historical stature. Yet, I do not love the Seine. Or the Tiber, the Amazon, or the Rhine or the Thames, or the Hudson or the silted stream they call the mighty Mississippi.”

  “Yes,” Harry said. “But the East River! The stark East River that flows without decoration or embellishments, without froufrou, without anything but boats and ships and tankers and tugs, or an occasional sail or skiff on a lark, that’s my kind of river. Let’s go down there, Marie, and let’s burn the ice on a sweet green bench.”

  “Has anyone seen a red cat around here? I hope he did not get stuck in the park with all this snow,” Marie said, looking up and down and all around.

  “That’s an elegant way to die,” the centaur said. “Peaceful, I’m told. Many of my horse ancestors died that way on the retreat from Moscow, where Napoleon’s cavalry froze en masse in the snow, horse and rider still standing and stuck fast in the ice that encased them. Ice statues on an ice plinth, they were. A noble death for both horse and rider, I would say.”

  Snow divided the window, half snow, half sky—or the glacier the sky had become, a glacier pressing against the window and in love with the life behind it.

  “Is there more of this elixir?” Louie asked, laying a twenty on the bar, and Marie answered, not sharply but with a significant edge, “Yes, but not for money. Certainly not for money.”

  “For love then,” Louie said.

  “There’s a dream,” Marie said.

  “The word ‘dream’ and the snow crushing against the window set me to thinking about a young man I knew of,” Louie said. “A German lad en route to an engineering career, but, on discovering he had tuberculosis, went to be cured in a clinic high in the Swiss Alps, where he remained for seven years. For pleasure, and to break from the daily routine of his cure, he, one late afternoon, hiked high above the snow line and found himself caught in a sudden blizzard. He took shelter in a kind of broken-down, doorless shed that left him exposed to the snow and the freezing cold. The blizzard was so thick that he could not see two feet beyond him, and he was unable to tell up from down and east from west or get any directional hint of how to find his way back to the clinic. He did not know if he had been in the shed for hours or for days or years or from the moment he was born. He drifted in a sweet delirium of timeless time.

  “He lay down and closed his eyes and grew drowsy, dreamy, increasingly sleepy as the afternoon grew into night but, knowing the deathly consequences, he fought sleep. But he also thought how easy and how pleasant it would be to surrender joyfully to Morpheus and let himself freeze to death in the sleepy god’s comforting embrace.

  “I too,” Louie continued, “had started out the afternoon seeking a place to distract me from myself, finding instead a place that has invited me to die in company in the night.”

  “Touch my forehead, Marie—careful, don’t scorch your fingers. I’m burning like a crazy furnace, burning for want of you,” Harry said.

  “I don’t ever remember having as much fun as this,” the centaur said. “Or ever meeting people like you. Or centaurs like me. May I say, Mr. Harry, that I wish one day to love as powerfully as you do this woman here.”

  “You may call me Marie, centaur.”

  Marie disappeared into the kitchen behind the bar and soon returned with a tray that she placed on the table directly under the snow-crowded window and set down, in this order: a plate of sliced onions, curled at the edges; a chipped plate of seven unsliced Polish pickles; a bowl of saltine crackers, some crumbled; a plate of yellowish cheese, rubbery in texture; a shot glass packed with toothpicks in see-through cellophane envelopes; a plate of twelve anemic sausages that had languished and were on the way to death in the fridge and were glad for the reprieve; and a four-inch hunk of liverwurst that had originally been earmarked, Marie said, for her cat, who seemed to have gone elsewhere to live and to be fed.

  From nowhere, she produced a bottle of greenish Polish vodka, Żubrówka, and with casual authority stuck it into a crystal bucket of crushed ice. And, from the same nowhere, she topped the tab
le with a single red rose in a Lalique vase and two hand-crafted beeswax candles in eighteenth-century English silver holders, their elegant gray patina untouched by time or man. Or maybe it was goose wax. Or maybe the holders were Regency and not Georgian. Maybe they were French even, and ransacked from the home of a guillotined aristocrat family.

  “À table, tout le monde. Let’s feast, let’s banquet, let’s chow down, let’s dig in, gents,” Marie said.

  “It is very difficult—indeed, physically impossible—for me to sit as you all do. Excuse me if I remain standing,” the centaur said. “And forgive me too, should I dampen your spirits, but I do not eat meat or other things that live on land or sea or range the skies.”

  “You, centaur, are a gentleman,” Harry said. “Your courtesy sets an example for me. I apologize to all for my earlier embarrassing amatory outbursts, however passionately and earnestly inspired.”

  “Merci, Monsieur Harry. Vous parlez du coeur. Vous avez toute ma sympathie. Et mon amité,” the centaur said, speaking in a language alien to him and that he had never before employed.

  Soon, they were all speaking in French. And gesturing in French with shoulder shrugs to indicate their indifference to fate and twisting their cheeks to show their pleasure with this or that morsel or sip. The translation follows:

  “This meal well pleases me,” Louie said.

  “I wish my mother had set the table and served her meals with such refinement,” Harry said. “It would have shown me the way to a higher life, one with delicacy of expression rather than what molded me into the coarse man you see here.”

  “I do not find you coarse, dear Harry. On the contrary,” Louie said, “your very concern that you might be woven of rough stuff proves otherwise, and reveals a sensitive nature beneath your guise of a rough old sea salt.”