A Spectral Hue

by Craig Laurance Gidney

  Mona finally deigned to take a seat at the white round table. “Black Gnosis is a heathen cult. They worship African gods alongside Christian ones. Who’s that goddess you worship who wears pink?”

  “We only worship the one true God, and his son, Yeshua. Black Gnosis is a Christian group. The goddess in pink, as you call her, is the mother of Yeshua. She is the feminine divine, the black avatar of the Gnostic Sophia, Christian goddess of wisdom and secret knowledge.”

  Mom looked like she was going to have a fit. “That’s blasphemy,” she said, through gritted teeth.

  “Technically, it’s heresy,” Earline replied. “But, it’s not even that…”

  The two sisters began to argue in earnest. Earline was easy-going, and didn’t take it seriously. This drove her mother crazy. Mona was a daddy’s girl, through and through. Earline probably took after Ethel, the grandmother Iris had never met. Iris stopped paying attention to the minutiae of the sisterly spat, picking out things that sounded interesting. Iris was in the midst of a passion for anything pink. All of her favorite shirts, and hair accessories and socks and scarves, were some shade of that color. She was intrigued by the idea of a goddess that wore pink things.

  Meanwhile, the halo-lights of the two women began flashing like strobe lights. Moody blue, muddy red. It began to bother her, so Iris left the women to their quarrelling. She snuck upstairs, and paused by Pop-Pop’s room. It smelled of sickness: astringent medicines masking sweet rot. Pop-Pop was asleep, his eyes moving rapidly beneath their closed lids. His breathing was shallow and rough and there was a sheen of sweat on his brow. But that wasn’t all that Iris saw. A translucent, wispy shawl of black, lightly spangled with red, hovered over his body.

  Instinctually, Iris knew what the black shawl meant, as it translucently hovered over her grandfather. It meant imminent death. She resisted the urge to lift up the edge of the comforter that hid his amputated foot. It was too macabre. The medical term for the rotting flesh was gangrene. (For the longest time, Iris thought her mother was saying Gang Green. She imagined a microscopic army of sickly green cells, eating away at Pop-Pop’s foot.)

  The shawl encased his body like a filmy web. He looked like a mummy. Iris was in the room before she knew what she was doing. She began waving the black shawl away. It dispersed briefly, into shreds and tatters, before it coalesced back together. Iris snatched at it again. It was a pointless exercise. Death would not leave its web. She wished she had scissors, to rend the veil into a thousand tiny pieces.

  She snatched up a bunch of the black stuff. It was a cloud, wet and vaporous. It also stung, like wires or nettles. It squirmed between her fingers, flowed through them. It was an ugly color. Not a rich, luminous black, like the hair on her head or the space between the stars. No. It was grey-black, faded and unhealthy looking. Why couldn’t the shawl that covered her grandfather be a better color, something more vibrant. More alive. Not this half-color that leached the life out of him. Something bright. Something pink, like the wisdom goddess that Earline spoke about.

  It didn’t happen immediately. It was insidious, slow, but the grey threads of transparent shawl began to change. Grey into pearl. Pearl into peach, like the inside of a shell. The threads were few and far between, yet they were brighter than the formless mass of the death-shawl.

  “Rissy! What are you doing in here!”

  She dropped the piece of cloud at the harsh sound of her mother’s voice.

  “Take a chill pill, Mona,” said Aunt Earline.

  “I expressly told you not to disturb Pop-Pop. He needs his rest.” By this time, Mom had her French-tipped nails on her shoulders, piercing through the thin fabric of her blouse.

  “Leave the child alone,” said Earline. “She’s hardly in the damned room. I see you’re an old school style parent.”

  Mom let her go, and faced Earline. “How dare you. How dare you judge me. You have no idea what it’s like to raise children.”

  “Actually, I do.” Earline was calm, cucumber-cool. “Black Gnosis ran several day care programs in Oakland and Detroit. I’ve worked with children of all ages. And I know that spare-the-rod crap doesn’t work.”

  Mom was speechless. Her mouth hung open. Iris could feel the tension in the air. The pressure dropped. And Mom’s blank expression hid the roiling anger within her. Iris wished she could warn her brand-new aunt about the tongue-lashing she was about to receive.

  The impending fight, though, was defused.

  “Mona?” came Pop-Pop’s dry voice. Iris heard cracked earth in those tones. His voice was shriveled, like a raisin.

  “Daddy,” she said. Iris knew from experience that the fight was far from over. It was just delayed. Mom could hold grudges. “How are you doing? Do you need any water? Are you too warm?”

  Pop-Pop grunted, waving away her questions. “Who’s that in the doorway?”

  “It’s me, Daddy,” Aunt Earline said. Her voice was suddenly timid. Iris noted that Earline didn’t move away from the door frame. “I’ve come home.”

  Pop-Pop weakly motioned both Iris and her mother to move aside. His hands trembled. “Earline?” he said. It was a choked whisper.

  “Yes,” Earline replied.

  Then Pop-Pop did the strangest thing, as strange, in its own way, as the shawl-aura things Iris saw.

  He began to cry. His wrinkled face became even more wrinkled. Large tears leaked from behind his glasses, the streaks getting caught in the folds of flesh. His lips quivered. Iris was stunned into silence. Pop-Pop never cried, not even when he lost his foot. She didn’t even think he had the ability to cry.

  Mom said, “See what you’ve done? You went and upset him.”

  “Oh, Mona. Hush,” Earline said as she moved into the room. She went to Pop-Pop’s bedside, and embraced him. He looked so small and frail in her giant arms. The translucent shawl draped itself over her arms, enfolding her grandfather. The black halo around him changed color, to a light, spring-like green. The green of pistachios, mint, and new leaves. Pop-Pop trembled like a baby in Earline’s arms.

  ***

  It was nice to have someone else in the house. She had been used to living alone for so long that she had forgotten how nice it was to see someone in the morning and the evening. Xavier mostly kept to himself, bouncing between his room and the museum, but they shared breakfast and dinner together. The past few years, Iris had become a hermit. Her mother and her aunt had passed just before Tamar left. She’d spent hours going through dead women’s things, and dealing with probate courts in Pennsylvania. Mama’s stuff had been easy to get rid of; it was mostly clothing her mother hadn’t updated since the ’80s and ’90s, an endless supply of garish colors and shoulder pads. And church hats. Mama’s hats were architectural wonders, with sombrero-wide brims and gardens of fake flowers. The only thing she kept of Mama’s were the photo albums. Aunt Earline was used to living frugally, so there wasn’t much to get. Iris ended up with her collection of masks and sculptures. They now hung in her bedroom. These stylized wooden faces were sometimes her only company for days on end. She still had a bunch of Tamar’s things, stuff that Tamar had left in Shimmer.

  Xavier left for the museum every day at 9:45am. It was a brisk fifteen-minute walk there and the weather was cooperating so far. She’d been tempted to drive him there the first time, just to get his bearings in the small town.

  Then, she thought about the pink translucence she’d seen. She hadn’t seen any caspers for quite a while, and it was strange that it showed up in broad daylight. She knew that she should be used to them by now. But, the thing had followed her. Waited for her.

  The sound of a phone ringing broke into her reverie. The ringtone sounded like cricket chirps, and it came from Xavier’s room. Iris knew that he had left for the day, so he’d probably left the phone by mistake. She entered his room, and found the small phone still plugged in, with a “Mom called” message on the screen before it faded away.

  She sighed. The right thing to do would be to tak
e the phone and charger to him.

  ***

  “Is Xavier Wentworth here?” Iris asked the man behind the information desk. He towered over her. If she hazarded a guess, he was maybe six-foot-five and rail-thin. He wore a grey coverall with the name LINCOLN sewn in a white oval. Lincoln hunched his shoulders as if he were ashamed of his height.

  “Yes, he’s in the back. Shall I get him?” Lincoln avoided eye contact, as if he were distracted.

  “He left his phone at my house,” Iris said, “and I’d like to hand it back to him.”

  The tall man nodded and left. Iris stared at the desk, with its computer monitor, its metal form curved in a U shape and topped with a glass ledge.

  Don’t look at the walls. Don’t look at the walls.

  The information desk was stacked with brochures. Brochures that had reproductions of the art on high gloss paper.

  That was all it took.

  She stood in the marsh. It both was and was not the Shimmer Marsh. From horizon to horizon, islets full of reeds stretched. There was no tree-line. Only water, in shades of blue and streaked with chalcedony-green blooms of algae. The marsh floor was fawn and chocolate, dusted with traces of white and grey silt, strewn with broken shells and fish bones. The colors were super-saturated, like a painting. The color here wavered, echoed and sang. They were more than just strands of light, filtered through a prismatic lens. Iris felt each color as an emotion. Mournful blue, resilient green, cheerful yellow. Marsh-bells dotted each clump of grass, vibrating delirious euphoria like a note just beyond hearing range. For a moment, she let it wash over her.

  I’ve missed this.

  It was glorious, this feeling of belonging and joy.

  A marsh-bell sphere expanded next to her, the blossoms fusing together like glass. The stem sank, and the muddy ground grew. The blossoms came together, became a fabric satiny in its sheen. In the whirlwind of bright purple, arms and legs grew. The veil parted, revealing a face. Or, something like a face. Eyes were the beads of stamens, the mouth was the trumpet of a blossom.

  Iris, it said.

  With Tamar’s voice.

  “Iris?”

  The dream marsh burned away, replaced by sealed concrete, cinderblocks, fluorescent lights and the face of Xavier in front of her. His face was wrinkled with concern.

  She felt a moment’s embarrassment at her spaciness, followed by anger, at herself, for coming here in the first place.

  “You left your phone,” she said, when she got her voice back. She fumbled in her purse, pulling out the phone and the charger.

  “You okay?” He took them from her hands.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” Iris said. “Just fluorescent lights give me headaches.” She shaded her eyes, as if to demonstrate.

  That seemed to quell his concern. “Thanks so much,” he said.

  It took all of her resolve not to dash to the museum entrance.

  4: Lincoln

  The Bayside Motel was the type of place that was probably rundown even when it was new. It was a motor-court style establishment, with a moat of cracked black pavement and parking pylons. In the middle of the sea of black, there was a raised concrete platform that fenced in a kidney-shaped pool that was currently empty and clogged with dead leaves and cigarette butts. The roadside neon sign was remarkably intact. Only the ‘O’ in motel was burned out. The sign was animated with three pink starfish and an aqua blue seahorse.

  Lincoln had stayed in worse flophouses. There were not a lot of cars parked in front of the rooms, and the Vacancy sign flared hot red.

  The motel was a two-story rectangle of white stucco and drab green doors. The office/lobby was on the left side, nearest the roadside sign. The inside of the office was drab, with vinyl furniture, cracked tiles and dusty plastic plants. The property manager was a middle-aged woman in a fabulous orange and silver-threaded sari that brightened up the lobby. She sat behind bulletproof glass, her eyes glued on a tiny television. Lincoln heard the sound of a Bollywood musical through the glass, orchestral pizzicato arabesques. Taped up behind the woman was a handwritten list of rates and rules. (Rooms could be had by the hour, and for a week.)

  He rang the buzzer, and fully expected to be treated like shit. He was, after all, a drifter, and he looked the part. The clothes he had on his back hadn’t been washed in a week, and the duffel bag he carried emanated a funky odor. His hands were wrinkled and scarred; they were dishwasher’s hands. His nails were bitten to the quick. He hadn’t shaved when he took the bus from Ocean City to Shimmer.

  The woman behind the glass, however, smiled warmly at him. Even beamed at him. What hair peeked beneath her flame-and-silver veil was black, with a streak of white. Her face was smooth and clear brown.

  “Welcome to the Bayside Motel,” she said, “and thank you for choosing us!” The speech was boilerplate, but she sold it.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be needing a room for a couple of weeks. Until I find a permanent place.”

  “I see,” she replied. “Cash or credit?”

  “Cash,” he said, and handed her a clump of twenty-dollar bills, which would cover a few days.

  She made a great production of counting the bills, straightening them, holding them against the light of a lamp, and, finally, marking the bills with a counterfeit-detector pen. Linc was surprised that she didn’t smell or taste the money. She placed a magnetic key in the lazy susan cut into the glass display. #28 was handwritten on the key sleeve.

  The room was clean, surprisingly so. The teal and orange color scheme was stuck in the early ’90s, but the pillows were fluffy, the carpet threadbare but unstained, and the television set was a flat screen. The WiFi password was written on his key sleeve. Best of all, he could see the shimmering marsh from the picture window.

  ***

  Lincoln awoke to the sound of waves, and the bleat of gulls. For a moment, he thought he was back in Ocean City. He’d been there for the summer, drifting from job to job. He’d only had to sleep beneath the boardwalk for a week before he found a room to rent. Frankly, sleeping in the cool sand was preferable to the room he’d rented. The couple that lived down the hall fought constantly, screaming swear words to each other in Czech. Magdalena was also violent. He’d hear slaps and punches, and in the mornings, Lukas would come downstairs with new bruises. Freddie, the man who lived directly beneath him, played old-time gospel music morning, noon and night. Once, Lincoln had gone into his room after he’d left for the day because Mahalia blared from the old boombox Freddie used. Lincoln quickly stepped into the dark room and switched the music off. As he left the room, he stepped over piles—mountains—of porn magazines with names like Jugs and Twerking Cum Sluts.

  It had been surprisingly comfortable in the sand. There was a wooden sky above him, and the tarp he used as a bed kept the scuttling sand crabs at bay. The sea sounds, clanging buoys, rolling waves, screeching gulls made falling asleep easy. And there were other perks, too. Lincoln found that the boardwalk after hours was a cruising ground for men on the Down Low. They were mostly white men, and probably ‘straight’ at home, with wives and kids. The sex was hummingbird-quick. And brutal. Only one guy had kissed him.

  The jobs he held were also meaningless, and ephemeral. Two weeks as a cashier at a local supermarket. Night security at a beachfront hotel for the month of June. Dishwasher at a variety of greasy spoons, scraping scrapple and other crud off chipped dishes. Those jobs never lasted long. The Blue Plate Diner’s boss had been openly racist, referring to African-American customers as ‘Canadians,’ as in ‘those Canadians don’t know how to tip,’ or ‘those Canadians are too noisy.’ The Mermaid Cafe was staffed by meth-heads, from the tatted-up owner to the waitresses and the clientele. No one ever really ate at the cafe. They just sipped bottomless cups of bad brew. He’d ended up at a pancake house, the kind that had pictures of the various dishes on the plastic menu and full of groups of screaming children.

  There was a point when he had been one of those kids, attached
to a touristy family. Lincoln’s own family might have even visited that very pancake house, and shared a Dutch Baby or two: a crispy soufflé-like jumbo pancake filled with cooked apples, dusted with powdered sugar. Now, he was a nobody, a shadow-dwelling weirdo who lived beneath boardwalks, and rode smelly buses, floating from dead-end job to even deader-end job.

  He never imagined this kind of life. He was from a middle-class family, solidly in Huxtable territory. Dad was an epidemiologist, and Mom was a paralegal. His older sister Elaine had gotten into an Ivy League college. They lived in a big house in the Rock Creek Park section of DC, where he saw daily traffic jams and herds of deer. He fully expected to go to college, get a good government job, and have a family. But that all came crashing down when he met Gash.

  Garland Ashton was from Southeast, the ‘bad’ part of the city. He wore jeans that sagged low and showed his underwear riding high and conforming to his shapely buttocks. He listened to Trap music with slurred vocals, minimalist clattering sound effects, and deliberately misspelled words. (Example: all plural nouns had z’s instead of s’s: words became wordz, cats became catz, etc.) He had a couple of indecipherable tattoos on his forearm, word(z) in ornate script (probably L’il Wayne lyrics) that were olive green against his black skin. Both his parents hated Gash within minutes of meeting him. He could see their frowns of disapproval when Gash refused to take out his earbud while they ate dinner. And Mom threw daggers from her eyes when he took a cellphone call at the table and cussed up a storm.

  “Where did you say you met him?” his mother asked after he left the house.

  “At Estelle’s birthday party,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Estelle has lots of different friends. Theater kids, math nerds…”

  “Hood rats,” his father said.

  Mom said, “Kenneth!”