Moonlight and Vines

by Charles de Lint

  I suspect she’s waiting for someone since all she’s been doing is sitting there, looking out the window. Hasn’t ordered anything yet. Or maybe it’s because Jonathan’s too caught up with the most recent issue of the Utne Reader to notice her.

  I look away from her when I realize that Ted hasn’t answered. I find him giving me a strange look.

  “So what’ve you got in that cup besides coffee?” he asks.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He laughs. “I’m not sure. All I know is I don’t see anyone sitting at this counter, male or female. I see you and me and Jonathan.”

  I’m sure he’s putting me on. “No, seriously. Who is she?”

  And he, I realize, thinks I’m putting him on. He makes an exaggerated show of having a look, taking off non-existent glasses, cleaning them, putting them back on, looks some more, but his attention isn’t even on the right stool.

  “Okay,” he says. “I see her now. I think . . . yes, she’s a princess. Lost a shoe, or a half-dozen feet of hair, or a bag of beans or something. Or maybe turned the wrong key in the wrong lock and got turned out of her bearded husband’s apartment and now she’s here killing time between periods of sleep just like the rest of us.”

  “Enough,” I tell him. “I get the picture.”

  He doesn’t see her. And it’s beginning to be obvious to me that Jonathan doesn’t see her or he’d have taken her order by now. The group at the table behind us, all black jeans and intense conversation, they probably don’t either.

  “So what’s this all about?” Ted asks.

  He looks half amused, half intrigued, still unsure if it’s a joke or something more intriguing, a piece of normal that’s slid off to one side. He has a nose for that sort of thing, from Elvis sightings to nuns impregnated by aliens, and I can almost see it twitching. He doesn’t read the tabloids in line at the supermarket, he buys them. Need I say more?

  So when he asks me what it’s all about, he seems the perfect candidate for me to tell because it’s very confusing and way out of my line of experience. I’ve never been prone to hallucinations before and besides, I always thought they’d be more . . . well, surreal, I suppose. Dadaistic. Over the top. This is so ordinary. Just a woman, sitting in a coffee bar, that no one seems to be able to see. Except for me.

  “Hello, Andrew,” Ted says, holding the first syllable of my name and drawing it out. “You still with us?”

  I nod and give him a smile.

  “So are you going to fill me in or what?”

  “It’s nothing,” I say. “I was just seeing if you were paying attention.”

  “Um-hmm.”

  He doesn’t believe me for a moment. All I’ve managed to do is pique his curiosity more.

  “No, really,” I tell him.

  The woman stands up from the counter, distracting me. I wonder why she came in here in the first place since she can’t seem to place an order, but then I think maybe even invisible people need to get out, enjoy a little nightlife, if only vicariously.

  Or maybe she’s a ghost.

  “Did anybody ever die in here?” I ask Ted.

  Ted gives me yet another strange look. He leans across the table.

  “You’re getting seriously weird on me,” he says. “What do you want to know that for?”

  The woman’s on her way to the door now. Portishead is playing on the café’s sound system. “Sour Times.” Lalo Schifrin and Smokey Brooks samples on a bed of scratchy vinyl sounds and a smoldering, low-key Eurobeat. Beth Gibbons singing about how nobody loves her. At one time we both worked at Gypsy Records and we’re still serious music junkies. It’s one of the reasons we like The Half Kaffe so much; Jonathan has impeccable taste.

  I pull a ten from my pocket and drop it on the table.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I say as I get up from my stool.

  “Andrew,” Ted says. “You can’t just leave me hanging like this.”

  “Later.”

  She’s out the door, turning left. Through the café’s window, I watch her do a little shuffle to one side as a couple almost walk right into her. They can’t see her either. “Sour Times” dissolves into an instrumental, mostly keyboards and a lonesome electric guitar. Ted calls after me. He’s starting to get up, too, but I wave him back. Then I’m out the door, jogging after the woman. “Excuse me!” I call after her. “Excuse me, miss!”

  I can’t believe I’m doing this. I have no idea what I’ll say to her if she stops. But she doesn’t turn. Gives no indication she’s heard me. I catch up to her and touch her lightly on the elbow. I know a moment of surprise when I can feel the fabric of her sleeve instead of some cool mist. I half expected my fingers to go right through her.

  “Excuse me,” I say again.

  She stops then and looks at me. Up close, her face, those sad eyes . . . they make my pulse quicken until my heartbeat sounds like a deep bass drum playing a march at double-time in my chest.

  “Yes?”

  “I . . .”

  There’s no surprise in her features. She doesn’t ask how come I can see her and nobody else can. What I do see is a hint of fear in her eyes which shouldn’t surprise me. A woman alone on the streets always has to be on her guard. I take a step back to ease the fear, feeling guilty and depressed for having put it there.

  “I . . .”

  There are a hundred things I want to ask her. About how she did what she did in The Half Kaffe. How come I can see her when other people can’t. Why she’s not surprised that I can see her. I’d even ask her out for a drink if I had the nerve. But nothing seems appropriate to the moment. Nothing makes sense.

  I clear my throat and settle on: “Can you tell me how to get to Battersfield Road?”

  The fear recedes in her eyes, but a wariness remains.

  “Take a left at the next light,” she tells me, “and just go straight. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks.”

  I watch her continue on her way. Two women approach her from the other direction, moving aside to give her room when she comes abreast. So does what appears to be a businessman, suit and tie, briefcase in hand, working late, hurrying home. But the couple behind him don’t see her at all; she has to dart to one side, press up against a store window so that they don’t collide.

  She’s invisible again.

  I follow her progress all the way to the end of the block as she weaves in and out of near collisions with the other pedestrians. Then she’s at the crosswalk, a tall, slouching figure waiting for the light to change. She takes a right where she told me to take a left, and a storefront cuts her from my view.

  I almost return to The Half Kaffe, but I don’t feel up to being grilled by Ted. I almost go home, but what am I going to do at home on a Friday night? Instead, I run to the corner where she turned, cross against the light and almost get hit by a cab. The driver salutes me with one stiff finger and shouts something unintelligible at me, but I’m already past him, on the far curb now. I see her ahead of me, almost at the end of the block, and I do something I’ve never done before in my life. I follow a woman I don’t know home.

  3

  The building she finally enters is one of those Crowsea brownstones that hasn’t been renovated into condos yet—five stories, arches of tapered bricks over the windows, multi-gabled roof. There’d be at least twenty apartments in the place, crammed up against the other, shoulder to shoulder like commuters jostling in the subway. She could be living in any one of them. She could just be visiting a friend. She uses a key on the front door, but it could belong to anybody.

  I know this. Just as I know she’s not about to come walking out again. As I know she’d be able to see me if her window’s facing this way and she looks out. But I can’t help myself. I stand there on the street, looking at the face of the building as if it’s the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen.

  “She’ll never tell you,” a voice says from behind me, a kid’s voice.

  Here’s what it�
��s like, living in the city. The kid can’t be more than twelve or thirteen. He’s half my size, a scruffy little fellow in baggy jeans, hooded sweatshirt, air-pumped basketball shoes that have seen way better days. His hair is black, short and greasy, face looks as if it hasn’t been washed in weeks, half-moons of dark shadow under darker eyes. I look at him and what do I do? Make sure he’s alone. Try to figure out if he’s carrying a gun or a knife. He’s just a kid, and I’m checking out what possible threat he could pose.

  I decide he’s harmless, or at least means me no harm. He looks amused at the way I’ve been eyeing him, cocks his head. I look a little closer. There’s something familiar about him, but I can’t place it. Just the features, not the dirty hair, the grubby skin, the raggedy clothes.

  “Who won’t tell me what?” I finally ask.

  “The invisible. She won’t be able to tell you how it works. Half of them don’t even know they go invisible. They just figure people treat them that way because that’s all they’re worth. Seriously low self-esteem.”

  I shake my head and can’t stop the smile that comes. “So what are you? A psychiatrist?”

  He looks back at me with a steadiness and maturity far belying his years and his appearance. There’s a bead of liquid glistening under one nostril. He’s a slight, almost frail figure, swamped in clothes that make him seem even smaller. But he carries himself with an assurance that makes me feel inadequate.

  “No,” he says. “Just someone who’s learned to stay visible.”

  I’d laugh, but there’s nothing to laugh about. I saw the woman in the café. I followed her home. If there’s a conspiracy at work here, the number of people involved has to be immense and that doesn’t make sense. No one would go through so much trouble over me—what would be the point? It’s easier to believe she was invisible.

  “So how come I could see her?” I ask.

  The boy shrugs. “Maybe you’re closer to her than you think.”

  I don’t have to ask him what he means. Self-esteem’s never been one of my strong suits.

  “Or maybe it’s because you believe,” he adds.

  “Believe in what?”

  “Magic.”

  He says the word and I can see three small tobacco tins, the children burying them in the dirt under their porches. But I shake my head.

  “Maybe I did once,” I say. “But I grew out of it. There’s nothing magic here. There’s simply a . . . a phenomenon that hasn’t been explained.”

  The boy grins and I lose all sense of his age. It’s as if I’ve strayed into folklore, a fairy tale, tapped an innocent on the shoulder and come face to face with fanged nightmare. I feel I should turn my coat inside out or I’ll never find my way back to familiar ground.

  “Then explain this,” the boy says around that feral grin.

  He doesn’t turn invisible. That’d be too easy, I guess. Instead it’s like a sudden wind comes up, a dust devil, spinning the debris up from the street, candy wrappers, newspapers, things I can’t identify. That vague sense of familiarity that’s been nagging at me vanishes. There’s nothing familiar about this. He’s silhouetted against the swirling litter, then his shape loses definition. For one moment I see his dark eyes and that grin in the middle of a shape that vaguely resembles his, then the dust devil moves, comes part, and all that’s left is a trail of debris leading up the sidewalk, away from me.

  I stare down at the litter, my gaze slowly drifting toward the invisible woman’s building. Explain this?

  “I can’t,” I say aloud, but there’s no one there to hear me.

  4

  I return to my studio, but I’m too restless to sleep, can’t concentrate enough to work. I stand in front of the painting on my easel and try to make sense out of what I’m seeing. I can’t make sense of the image it once depicted. The colors and values don’t seem to relate to each other any more, the hard edges have all gone soft, there’s no definition between the background and the foreground.

  I work in watercolor, a highly detailed and realistic style that has me laboring on the same piece for weeks before I’m done. This painting started the same as they always do for me, with a buzz, a wild hum in my head that flares down my arms into my fingertips. My first washes go down fast, the bones of light and color building from abstract glazes until the forms appear and, as Sickert said, the painting begins to “talk back” to me. Everything slows down on me then because the orchestration of value and detail I demand of my medium takes time.

  This one was almost completed, a cityscape, a south view of the Kickaha River as seen from the Kelly Street Bridge, derelict warehouses running down to the water on one side, the lawns of Butler U. on the other. Tonight I can’t differentiate between the river and the lawn, the edge of the bridge’s railing and the warehouses beyond it. The image that’s supposed to be on the paper is like the woman I followed earlier. It’s taken on a kind of invisibility of its own. I stare at it for a long time, know that if I stay here in front of it, I’ll try to fix it. Know as well that tonight that’s the last thing I should be doing.

  So I close the door on it, walk down the stairs from my studio to the street. It’s only a few blocks to The Half Kaffe and still early for a Friday night, but when I get there, Ted’s already gone home. Jonathan’s behind the counter, but then Jonathan is always behind the counter. The servers he has working for him come and go, changing their shifts, changing their jobs, but Jonathan’s always in his place, viewing the world by what he can see from his limited vantage point and through an endless supply of magazines.

  He’s flipping through the glossy pages of a British pop magazine when I come in. Miles Davis is on the sound system, a cut from his classic Kind of Blue, Evans’s piano sounding almost Debussian, Davis’s trumpet and Coltrane’s tenor contrasting sharply with each other. I order an espresso from Jonathan and take it to the counter by the front window. The night goes about its business on the other side of the pane. I study the passers-by, wondering if any of them are invisibles, people only I can see, wonder if there are men and women walking by that I don’t, that are invisible to me.

  5

  I find Ted at Bruno’s Diner the next morning, having his usual breakfast of late. Granola with two-percent milk and freshly-squeezed orange juice. All around him are people digging into plates of eggs and bacon, eggs and sausages, western omelets, home fries on the side, toast slathered with butter. But he’s happy. There’s no esoteric music playing at Bruno’s, just a golden oldies station issuing tinnily from a small portable radio behind the counter. The smell of toast and bacon makes my stomach rumble.

  “So what happened to you last night?” Ted asks when I slide into his booth.

  “Do you believe in magic?” I ask.

  Ted pauses with a spoonful of granola halfway to his mouth. “What, like Houdini?” He puts down the spoon and smiles. “Man, I loved that stuff when I was a kid. I wanted to be a magician when I grew up more than just about anything.”

  He manages to distract me. Of all the things I can imagine Ted doing, stage magic isn’t one of them.

  “So what happened?” I ask.

  “I found out how hard it is. And besides, you need dexterity and you know me, I’m the world’s biggest klutz.”

  “But that stuff’s all fake,” I say. Time to get back on track. “I’m talking about real magic.”

  “Who says it’s not real?”

  “Come on. Everybody knows it’s done with mirrors and smoke. They’re illusions.”

  Ted’s not ready to agree. “But that’s a kind of magic on its own, wouldn’t you say?”

  I shake my head. “I’m talking about the real stuff.”

  “Give me a for instance.”

  I don’t want to lose my momentum again—it’s hard enough for me to talk about this in the first place. I just want an answer to the question.

  “I know you read all those tabloids,” I say, “and you always let on like you believe the things they print. I want to know if yo
u really do. Believe in them.”

  “Maybe we should backtrack a bit here,” he says.

  So I explain. I don’t know which is weirder—the story I tell him, or the fact that he takes me seriously when I tell it.

  “Okay,” he says. “To start with, all that stuff about Elvis and bigfoot and the like—it’s not what I’d call magic. It’s entertainment. It might be true and it might not. I don’t know. It doesn’t even matter. But magic . . .”

  His voice trails off and he gets a kind of dreamy look on his face.

  “There’s a true sense of mystery with magic,” he says. “Like you’re having a meaningful dialogue with something bigger than you—bigger than anything you can imagine. The tabloids are more like gossip. Something like what’s happened to you—that’s the real thing. It reaches into what we’ve all agreed are the workings of the world and stirs them around a little, makes a person sit up and pay attention. Not simply to the experience itself, but to everything around them. That’s why the great stage illusions—I don’t care if it’s a floating woman or someone walking through the Great Wall of China—when they’re done properly, you come away questioning everything. Your eyes are opened to all sorts of possibilities.”

  He smiles then. “Of course, usually it doesn’t last. Most people go right back to the reality we’ve all agreed on. Me, I think it’s kind of sad. I like the idea that there’s more to the world than I can see or understand and I don’t want to ever forget it.”

  What he’s saying reminds me of the feeling I got after I first started to do art. Up until then I’d been the perennial computer nerd, spending all my time in front of a screen because that way I didn’t have to take part in any more than the minimum amount of social interaction to get by. Then one day, in my second year at Butler, I was short one course and for no reason that’s made sense before or since, decided to take life drawing, realized I had an aptitude for it, realized I loved it more than anything I’d ever tried before.