The City Beautiful

by Aden Polydoros

  I slapped his arm to get him to be quiet and stowed the book under my mattress for safekeeping. It felt like a stick of dynamite. The title would be easy to suss out for any Yiddish speaker with a half-decent grasp of the Latin alphabet. Later, I’d have to find a better hiding place.

  My hands began to tremble the moment I had nothing to hold on to. Looking down at them, I had the unsettling impression they belonged to someone else. I flexed my fingers just to reassure myself that they were still my own.

  “I don’t think I have until tomorrow,” I said quietly to avoid waking Haskel. “There has to be something we could do.”

  “An exorcism,” Frankie said blandly.

  “No. Not that.” I rubbed my face. Think. Think. “If Yakov can’t tell me who killed him, maybe he can show me. Remember how I went into the bathtub? In that vision, I saw him being dumped into the water. If I can re-create his death, maybe I can go back even further.”

  “No, that’s not going to happen,” Frankie said, raking a hand through his hair. “It’s too risky. The last time you tried that, you nearly drowned.”

  “It’s the only lead we have left. And we’re running out of time.”

  “Alter, you don’t know what effect triggering these visions will have on your body. Just look at what happened back there. This isn’t right. This isn’t safe. For all you know, it might just give him the means to take over!”

  I looked Frankie in the eye. “Do you trust me?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “This is my choice.” I took a deep breath, preparing myself for what I was going to say next. “We need to go back to the Fair and do it exactly as it happened. I need you to choke me.”

  His eyes flared in disbelief. “What? Are you mad!”

  Haskel grumbled, stirring on his cot. Frankie glanced his way before turning back to me. I rose to my feet and followed him from the room to give us some privacy.

  “I’m not going to choke you,” he hissed, once we were alone at the top of the stairwell. “If I hurt you—”

  I squeezed his hand. “You won’t.”

  He hesitated, searching my eyes. “Alter, if I make a mistake, you could die.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why risk it?” Frankie demanded. “Why go to such lengths for a boy who’s already dead?”

  “His murderer will kill other boys if I don’t stop—”

  “Just tell me the damned truth.”

  “I think... I really cared for him.” My voice dropped to a whisper.

  “Just call it what it is, Alter,” Frankie said, looking at me with such sympathy, my sinuses burned. “We both know. There’s no reason to hide it anymore.”

  “Love.” As I said it, something seemed to give way inside me. For so long, I had kept up my barriers. I felt them crash down one by one. “I loved Yakov, and I never told him. I couldn’t tell him. It’s too late for that now. I know I can never bring him back, but I want to do right by him. I need to see this through to the end.”

  Frankie sighed. “If it’s for love, I suppose I have no choice. But I’ll only agree if we do it on my own terms. We need to take precautions. I’m not doing it while you’re standing up, since you might fall, and I won’t use a rope or cord, even if that was how Yakov was killed. And the moment your eyes close, I’ll stop. Fair?”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Now, let’s go back to the White City and get this over with once and for all.”

  41

  Frankie wanted to hail a hansom cab, but instead, I forced the two of us to walk to the nearest tram stop, the way Yakov would have done. Tram stop to tram stop, we sat at separate ends of the car, not talking. Even when we reached the train station, all he did was slip a silver dollar into my hand on his way out the door.

  His careless generosity left my face prickling with heat. As I followed Frankie up to the elevated platform, I promised myself that I would pay him back someday. Somehow. For everything.

  Sitting by myself on the train, I tried to imagine that I was Yakov.

  “I’m meeting someone from home,” I whispered aloud, leaning back in my seat. I wished I had a cigarette. Pretending to be him, I took my vesta case from my pocket, clunky and unfashionable compared to the slim brass one Yakov had worn suspended from his watch chain. I flipped the match safe’s lid up and down, but stopped once the nearby passengers began glancing suspiciously in my direction.

  The Fair’s concourse was packed with tourists dressed in their Sunday best, bright satin and chiffon and silk. I lost sight of Frankie in the crowd, but I didn’t pause to look for him. We would find each other.

  I passed through the gate, paid my way. I retraced the path I had taken several days before. The gilded Statue of the Republic rose before me, set alight by the setting sun until it glowed as brightly as the angel Dumah’s flaming sword.

  I hated this place. I hated all that it had taken from me. I hated myself for believing that I ever belonged here.

  I rested against the railing overlooking the basin and waited until I spotted Frankie before continuing on my way. As I walked, I counted the people I passed, clearing my head of everything else.

  At first, I felt hopelessly alone. Yet as I headed deeper into the White City, I detected the faintest trace of burnt gunpowder on the breeze. Pressure cinched around my throat when I swallowed. I was getting closer, if not to where Yakov had been killed, then where they had found him.

  Soon, I found myself at a secluded area north of the Court of Honor, a wooded island carved from the lakeside, lush with gardens, dense foliage, and manmade streams. Fairy lamps and paper lanterns were strung along the pathways. This was no wilderness, but manicured groves of red-fringed switchgrass, buckthorn, elm, and black cherry, carefully tended to give the illusion of a wild space.

  I strayed from the path and retreated into the shadow of the wooded canopy, as I sensed Yakov had done. I knew it in my heart—he had been pursuing someone. A residue of his anticipation coiled in my gut.

  I stepped up to the brink where the solid ground plummeted to the water, bent down, and ran my fingers through the exposed dirt. Chunks of turf were dug up as though by frantic hands.

  It had happened here, in this shadowy grove. Away from the eyes of fairgoers. I circled my fingers around my own throat; my palm felt cold and coarse, not living skin anymore, but braided leather.

  I lifted my gaze to the sky. Blossoms of red and blue fire spread silently through the low clouds, marbled gold and pink by the setting sun. Fireworks.

  A twig snapped behind me. I turned around, as Yakov had done—I knew it, I felt it—but Frankie was the only person to emerge from the underbrush. Of course.

  “What were you looking at?” Frankie asked, coming up to me.

  “The fireworks.”

  He glanced up with a frown. “Alter, there’s nothing there.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling rather dizzy. The stench of gunpowder mingled with other stranger odors. Wet dirt, filled chamber pots, birch tar used to treat expensive Russian leather, scorched hair, sea brine.

  Two souls cannot coexist within the same body, Meir had told me, and maybe he was right. I wasn’t sure anymore where Yakov’s memories began and mine ended. Time was running out.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” I whispered.

  Frankie nodded gravely. “Lie down.”

  I settled onto the damp grass. The thicket hid us from curious eyes. In the mounting twilight, it was unlikely we would be spotted from the pathway, unless someone were to approach.

  Staring at the maroon sky, I tried to summon the memory of the flooded field from my vision at the slaughterhouse, or rather, those brief sensations that I had glimpsed there—the stench of soiled sawdust and manure, the distant voices and laughter, the shuddering of oilcloth in the wind like the flapping of vast memb
ranous wings.

  This wooded bower was where Yakov had died, but not where his night had begun. He had followed someone here.

  Frankie climbed on top of me. He swung his leg over my side, his calves firmly straddling my hips. His closeness would have been thrilling, if not for the fear that wreaked havoc on my nerves and twisted my stomach into knots.

  Frankie rested his hands upon my throat. Like someone searching in the dark, he gently guided his fingers down my skin. He set his fingertip upon my thrumming pulse, and I knew he must feel the same blood that roared in my ears.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He curled his hands around my throat. “Now, you’re going to struggle.”

  “I know. Don’t stop when I do.”

  “It’s going to hurt.”

  I smiled faintly. “It needs to.”

  No sooner had the words left my mouth than his fingers cinched tight, severing my breath.

  42

  I had resolved myself to go under without resistance, but my body moved on its own. I writhed beneath Frankie in a blind panic, trying to pry his hands from around my neck. He rode out my struggles with ease, the pressure of his thighs grounding me.

  Excruciating pain radiated through my throat. Within seconds, the sunlight blurred, filling my vision with a throbbing crimson glow. The ground suddenly dissolved beneath me. I plummeted past clumps of dirt and torn grass, through the soil, into the light, the—

  —sunlight spilled through high windows, filling the room with a warm glow. White porcelain tiles beneath my palms and knees. The walls of the long room were painted a rosy peach. White accordioned curtains. White wrought-iron beds.

  Heavily disoriented, I staggered to my feet, grasping onto a bedpost to keep from falling. The room spun in dizzying circles around me. Through the open windows came trilling birdsong and the silvery laughter of children at play.

  The room was as silent as a tomb; it took in the outdoor noises and sealed them inside itself. Most of the beds were shielded off by curtains. As I stepped deeper into the room, unpleasant smells flooded the air. Stale vomit, lye soap, ammonia, herbal ointments. The stench of a ship’s sick bay.

  “Yakov?” I called out.

  I moved from one bed to the next, peeking through the gaps between the curtains. Human forms swaddled in burial shrouds rather than bandages, dirt dusting their skin, their eyes and mouths covered with chunks of shattered pottery.

  Just like the sunflower field, this was not a genuine memory but the distortion of one. The shrouded corpses and the pulley system stretching across the ceiling were my own contributions.

  I reached the opposite end of the room where linen curtains diffused sunlight around the final bed. I stepped past the partition.

  Instead of a cot, there was an elevated wooden table. The sort used for washing corpses. A young boy lay on his stomach, the sheet drawn up to his waist, so that he appeared to be cut in two. Bandages cocooned his torso.

  The boy was a stranger to me, but something about his dark hair and the shape of his features tugged at my memory. Even before he opened his eyes, a name formed on my tongue.

  “Yakov.”

  As I reached his side, he stirred and looked at me. His eyes were as dull and gray as cinders, burnt out. He didn’t try to sit up. Just lifting his head must have been excruciatingly painful.

  “You know me, don’t you?” I rested my hand over his. His hand felt so small and fragile, as though it was blown from glass. I feared the lightest touch might shatter him.

  “He’s coming,” the boy whispered.

  “Who, Yakov? Who’s coming?” Still holding his hand, I twisted toward the door. I couldn’t see much beyond the partition, only a sliver of peach-pink wall and white porcelain.

  “Tugarin.”

  “Tugarin? Was Tugarin the one who killed—”

  My voice died in my throat as a noise came from the other side of the partition. The heavy flapping of the curtains being whipped in the wind, or perhaps the rustling of many wings.

  Slowly, I let go of his hand. As the flapping grew louder, the sun’s golden glow tarnished into the frail sheen of moonlight. The room darkened until all I could make out of Yakov’s face was the terrified gleam of his eyes.

  Holding my breath, I stepped past the curtain. A ravaged dirt lot confronted me, encircled on all sides by electrical arc lamps as bright as full moons. The acrid stench of scorched flesh overpowered everything else.

  I swiveled around, but Yakov was gone. The hospital ward had dissipated like smoke into that desolate stretch of earth, surrounded by shadowed structures. The darkness disguised the rising structures’ true form, but I could tell they were slotted and made of wood. Not walls. Stairways perhaps or the scaffolding of gallows. Another fragment from Yakov’s memories.

  As I turned ahead, a massive form emerged from the darkness, intruding into the electrical lights’ harsh gleam. Grasping limbs. Bared jaws, gnashing teeth. Haunches made from burnt arms and offal, a serpentine tail ridged with human vertebrae. Not any single person, but a multitude of them, some charred to the bone, some with faces I thought I recognized. Crawling over each other, fused—melted—to each other in the shape of a beast. Upon the creature’s back were wings made from soiled white tarpaulin or hospital curtains, melted onto the flesh and veined with throbbing arteries.

  I staggered back in terror, only to strike a hard, unmoving body. I sensed Yakov standing behind me, but I couldn’t turn. His palms pressed against the sides of my head, keeping me looking forward, confronting the monstrosity. In the corner of my eye, I could only see a hint of him—eyes as incandescently blue as the heart of fire, a briar of dark hair dewed with lagoon water.

  “They called it an accident.” His breath brushed against the side of my neck, tickling my skin. “A fallen candle perhaps, or a spark from the eternal flame. It was Shabbos. There were twenty of us in the shul at the time. No one around to warn us until it was too late. And once it was over, no one would believe the words of an injured child, that Tugarin Zmeyevich had burned down the shul. It took me so long to remember what really happened. I buried my memories down deep, like the dead... But like the dead, they cling to you, Alter. They cling, and they always come back.”

  “Tell me who he is,” I said frantically. “Show me what he looks like. Show me so I can find him.”

  “Alter, you’ve already seen his face.”

  The beast lumbered toward us, panting and snarling, fiery sparks seething from its many mouths. Its arms reached out for me, smoke flowing from beneath its skin. I turned to run and made it two steps before its—

  —lips crushed against my mouth, blowing smoke into my body. I flung my hands out in a panic. I didn’t recognize the form looming over me until my palms slammed into Frankie’s chest. He tumbled back and planted his rear in the dirt.

  “Baruch HaShem, you’re awake,” he said breathlessly, one of the few times I had heard him ever thank God. His warm complexion had blanched to an ashy pallor, beads of sweat gleaming on his brow and cheeks. “I thought... I thought I killed you. You stopped breathing.”

  My mouth trembled too violently for me to speak. I couldn’t escape from the image of the monster. It had felt so real. A part of me feared that the beast had followed me into the waking world and was lurking somewhere nearby, under the water or in the twisted branches, watching with eyes like liquid fire and sparks seething from its soot-blackened teeth. I looked around to make sure we were alone.

  Frankie studied me intensely. “Alter, are you all right?”

  I nodded mutely.

  He retrieved a silver flask from his pocket. After taking two deep gulps, he passed it over. “Here. This will help.”

  The flask was filled with syrupy bourbon that scalded my throat on the way down and warmed me from the inside out. The metal rim chatt
ered against my lower teeth. I spilled droplets on my sleeve and my lap, and only managed to get down a mouthful. Each time I swallowed, it felt like someone was crushing my windpipe. I took several sips before the shuddering in my limbs subsided.

  “Better?” A small smile touched Frankie’s lips as I handed the flask to him.

  “Tugarin.” My voice came out in a shuddery croak.

  He furrowed his brow. “What did you say?”

  “Yakov told me the name of the man who killed him. It’s Tugarin Zmeyevich.”

  Frankie sighed, looking tired and baffled. “I can’t believe it...”

  Excitement sparked inside me. “Do you recognize it?”

  His jaw worked silently. He looked down at his hands, then shook his head in disgust and rose to his feet. “Alter, that isn’t a human name.”

  “What do you mean?” I was taken aback by the frustration in his voice.

  “I mean that your friend wants us to chase fairy tales!” Pacing between the bushes, Frankie took another swig from his flask. Then in a sudden flare of anger, he hurled the container to the ground, spilling bourbon everywhere. “This was all useless. I almost killed you, and what did he give you? The name of a dragon in a damned folktale! We’re getting nowhere, and that’s what he wants, isn’t it? He’s wasting our time until he weakens you enough to take control, and you’re just going to let him, because for some reason you think he ever gave a damn about you!”

  “You’re wrong, Frankie.” I stood, grasping onto a tree until the vertigo passed. “It isn’t like that at all.”

  “It isn’t?” His features burned with anger, but his eyes were filled with unshed tears. It dawned on me just how badly I had scared him. “Then tell me, why is your face so white? Why are you trembling?”

  “That’s—”

  “And the worst part is, you’re not even fighting it. You’re just letting him consume you, and you’re forcing me to be witness to it.”

  “I never asked you to get involved!” I snapped, his anger spurring me into irritation of my own. All my nerves felt raw now, as though the dream had flayed me. “You’re the one who told me I have a dybbuk inside me. You’re the one who brought me to Meir. I didn’t ask for any of this.”