by Ursula Pflug
Then, slowly, I begin to remember. I don’t remember what it is I have forgotten, just a nagging sensation in the thighs. I stare at a man in the phone booth, his hand cupped around the receiver. Is it you? But the question is meaningless, because I have forgotten who you are supposed to be, what it is you do, only (and until recently I didn’t know even this) that once you existed; now you do again. The blond man has moved on, but yet another stranger, this time with short dark hair, comes in and piles his knapsack on the floor under my table. He goes to the bathroom and I get up to do his laundry; in the pockets of his jeans I find maps, maps and names.
For the first time in three years I leave the diner. I call a number I found in the stranger’s pocket, on the same page as a map of a bridge. A woman answers, her voice breezy and sincere. Suddenly I know where she lives; it is a house I once stayed in with you. She didn’t live there then. There were others; we didn’t know them well. We’d sit around the kitchen table reading science fiction books (everyone in that house read science fiction), comparing plots and styles of writing, bitching about the price of cigarettes, the price of time. Whenever I was with you, it was always someone else’s kitchen. In this memory which is not a real one but one invented by the telephone wires, one which cannot exist independently of them, you are going away somewhere, and I am sad. Through the smoke of the cooking, the cigarettes, the people, you smile the smile of a brother and I am comforted.
“I’ll be back,” you say.
But you weren’t. In that life you never came back. Or I waited for you in the wrong place, on the wrong bridge. When I hang up the phone I am released from the invented life, the life that never happened except in the electronic part of memory that exists because of telephones and computers, but I am still left with the nagging suspicion that you are real, that somewhere I will find a real memory of you. So I go to the bridge. It snows; I wait for you. I do not know if this is the right bridge, but it is the only bridge I know.
sss
You died in the fire. But that was in another city, and you and me both had different names then. Maybe in this city I have moved to, this emerald green city below the border, you will have a new name, one that doesn’t burn so easily. Maybe in this city we will meet on the bridge. They do not know, those artists, that this freedom I have is not mine. They do not know I have it only because of you.
sss
I remember how I used to visit you in the hospital and you would tell me you wished for drugs and shock treatments, how it would make you better, because then you could no longer think and see and feel. “But that would mean being stupid,” I said, and you said it would be better. “But that would mean happiness was only possible if you were stupid,” and again you said it would be better.
Sometimes it is as though all of love died with you in that fire. I couldn’t bear it, so I tried to escape, hoping even the memory of you could disappear in this fog. And now it begins to be not you I mourn, but someone else whose name I can never place, someone whose loss I mourn more than all the others, someone whom my human lovers can only approximate, be representations of.
Castoroides
1) IN MY VILLAGE the swollen creek lapped at the edge of the sidewalk. Your young friend and I squatted there, dipping our fingers in. It wasn’t just plain water, lapping over the edge of the sidewalk; it contained secrets. The secret of where you were. The secret of why we missed you. Your friend and I dipped our fingers in and sucked off the secrets one at a time. Then I put my fingers in your friend’s mouth and he put his in mine, and we sucked each other’s secrets. Both my secrets and his secrets were about you. The secret of who you are. The secret of how to get you back. When we were done doing that I told him to go inside and iron your lace collars.
2) What with no ironing to do I swept the stairs from top to bottom and bottom to top. I went back into the bathroom and looked at the untouched stack of wrinkled white collars, at the iron, at the tiles on which you had painted animals. You and your friend and I used to keep busy painting broken dishes with birds and flowers, creating not fake antiquities but relics from a time not yet. “I’m not a good person,” I remember telling you, “I’m a bad person with healing powers.”
3) This story connects to all the other stories. Am I ready to finish it now? You had already been gone for a long time before I painted the stars. I could have told a different story. I could have picked a different staircase to follow down from the freshly painted stars. Out of this story. I could have sat at the sewing machine today and sewn words. I am making a yellow quilt. It is hard work and time consuming. If only I could type on my sewing machine. The sun faded the curtains in streaks. I take them down and cut them into squares. The soft white stripes, irregularly shaped, were made by the sun. I lay these stripes crosswise to one another. I affix things to the squares. My mother’s face. Transparent silk. Coyotes. Pine trees. The great grey owls. Your face.
4) We are the moment that we need. This time it’s easier to repaint the stairs than to try and clean them yet again. Today I even abandoned my quilt and went outside to remind your friend he promised he’d help with your ironing but he was already gone, his big flat tail thwacking the water loudly to announce his submergence. Just before he dove I saw he wore one of your white lace collars. Underwater it wouldn’t matter whether they were ironed or not.
One Day I’m Gonna Give Up the Blues for Good
LITTLE DAVIS IS DEAD, his body dragged out of the river this dawn. He was murdered, his light snapped out by some jalloo who couldn’t let him live for not giving it all. Jalloo. It’s a word that means client, in our game. Benji made it up one night when she was drunk and high, and it stuck.
Me and Little worked together, down in the Clinic on River Street. The Clinic. To cure what ails you. Whatever it may be. Cure the blues with The Blues, I say. Clinic is the only place you can get the stuff. Little only started working here after he got his habit. Most people, it’s where we got ours. But not poor Little. He had me to fuck him up.
Royally.
I come in to work tonight, even though Frankie tells me to stay home. I come in to sit in this chair, soft and grey and comfortable. I come in to look out this window, out onto the street, where I keep hoping I’ll see Little dance around the corner, swing into the big glass doors to start shift. But I know he won’t.
Because he’s dead.
Outside, the blue CLINIC sign blinks off and on, its reflection flashing in the puddles below. The Clinic.
Everything begins here. Here is where it all ends.
At home his ghost sits on the stool under the factory windows, watching the ships on the river, looking for my face in the night crowds below.
But he won’t find it.
Because I’m here. And because ghosts never find each other.
I am a ghost now, and The Blues have all of me, when nothing, and no one should ever have all.
All the time you think it’s you that wants the drugs, when really it’s the drugs that want you.
They got me now.
sss
Benji comes in, on break from her case. She dances with herself, in front of the mirror. She sings. “Who do you love?”
“Little Davis,” I say, even though I know it’s just a song she likes. Outside, the streetlight winks red.
Tells me he’s dead.
Benji goes to the fridge, takes out two beers, brings me one. I suck on it, set it down next to the other, stare at the window.
She brings me her kimono, drapes it around my shoulders. “You’ll catch your death,” she says, and I think, no, I can’t, I already caught someone else’s. The kimono is turquoise, with dragons embroidered in silver and gold. Benji is beautiful: half black and half Italian. She wears her hair in long dreads; they dance around her thin face like dragons. Her dancing hair makes the room go quiet, all still like before the thunderclap. The stillness wraps around me, a se
cond kimono. In my head I thank her for it.
Out loud I say: “Me and Little was gonna quit this year, give up The Blues for good. I don’t know what to give up now.”
Benji comes over, opens my mouth ever so gently, rests a cigarette between my lips.
I smoke it, thinking it doesn’t matter if you die of cancer when you can’t feel. “I used to be able to feel,” I say to Benji.
“How could you tell?” she asks, dancing.
I remember the last time, but I can’t talk about it to Benji. I couldn’t even talk about it to Little. So I tell her about the time before that. “When Marianne left it felt like I was torn open and my guts pulled out and spread all over the floor and stepped on.”
Benji laughs, and I can’t really blame her.
Marianne is the first lover I ever lived with, and the only one, besides Little. I would say she was my first lover but she wasn’t. She was the first one that counted. “My hands shook all the time. The skin under my eyes went grainy, like a photograph that’s been blown up too much. Like those.”
Wet rings on them now, from my beer bottles. Prints of the body they dragged out of the river. But blown up too much. The eyes look bad.
“Don’t look at those, Ruby. That’s asking for it.”
The cops brought them in for identification purposes. I could identify them, all right. No, officer, that’s not my sweetheart. My sweetie was beautiful, and what you got there is a piece of meat, all swelled up and ugly. Cops got no sense of humour.
Benji fishes around in her stuff piled up in the corner beside the mirror. She makes her piles of stuff wherever she goes, says it makes her feel at home. I wish I could do that. Feel at home. “You got an itch to look at pictures, you look at this one.”
She kneels on the floor beside me, showing me the postcard. I look down at it. It’s a photograph of a lot full of gravel, raked around a pile of rocks.
“So,” I say.
“It’s a garden. Chuckie sent it to me. It’d called Ryonji and it’s in Japan. That’s where he went.”
“It’s a dead quiet kind of place, Benji.”
“Quiet, maybe, but no more dead than you right now.”
“I wish it was me and not him. You know we were going to Japan? Right after we gave up The Blues. His buddy in Kyoto had a place for us to stay. The one who sends him oranges. You know Little was part Japanese.”
“Yeah,” says Benji, dancing. “I know.” She turns around, dances to me now instead of the mirror. “Too bad it wasn’t the right part.”
“Yeah. Too bad.”
I know she is dancing for me. To make me still, like Chuckie’s garden. I wonder whether Benji can still feel, or whether all of her has learned this stillness.
I stare out the window.
sss
It was last Christmas. He was dancing on a table, juggling oranges. He wasn’t wearing anything, and he was covered head to toe in silver body paint. He looked maybe seventeen. Later I learned he was twenty, but it was too late; by then he’d already made me feel old.
It was afternoon, the Ocean Club. I’d gone there to try and shake off this case that had left me more spooked than I’d been in years. Since Marianne. It’s an arty bar—people who go there have weird hair and no money; they sit around a lot, waiting for life to turn dangerous on them. Because I never had that choice, the Ocean is a kind of vacation for me, and last Christmas it was as far away a place as I could think of from where I’d just been, the chamber of horrors that was my jalloo’s mind.
Little ended his song by tossing his oranges into the crowd. There were six of them and the last one he kept for me. When I caught it he smiled. There are smiles, and then there are smiles. Little had the second kind. I got up and followed him into the dressing room. Eyes followed me all the way there, but I didn’t mind; I liked the feel of them, tickling my neck.
He was sitting on a stool at the makeup mirror, just lighting up a joint. I closed the door behind me, sat down on the other one, peeled the orange. It’s a trick I use on my jalloos; nonchalance gives me the upper hand.
“Mandarins,” he said, passing me the number. “From Japan. I got a buddy there sends them to me every Christmas.”
So we both knew the same game. I laughed. It was a beginning.
We smoked, ate mandarins. I wanted to sit there all afternoon, basking in his beauty. He was so beautiful: thin, slight even, his body still a boy’s, legs dangling from the stool, graceful and bony. His black hair was cropped close to the skull, showing off his Asian cheekbones. The Ocean is a dive. Its dressing rooms are tatty: torn leopard upholstery with the foam bulging out. At River Street even the walls are broadloomed. It gets stifling. I liked the peeling paint, the bare bulb; they set him off, made me want him more. Made me want his startling blue eyes. More.
His smile made me happy to be alive; after this case, a scarce feeling, hopelessly precious. I wanted so bad to make him feel the same way. I wanted so bad for him to like me, but I didn’t think he could, ever, like someone like me.
So I reached for the only way I knew would work for sure. Unzipped the pouch on my belt, took the little packet out. Poured blue powder out in a little heap onto the shelf under the mirror.
“Merry Christmas,” I said.
sss
A jalloo like my father. Like him, a child molester. Like the leftover bits, the ones I couldn’t kill. The bits of memory I couldn’t wipe, no matter how long I worked Clinic, how long I lived The Blues. There’s not many of them left, those daughter fuckers, thanks in part to us, to the Clinics. But the ones that don’t get to us before they go bad, get sent to us after. Except this one just walked in off the street. He headed straight for me, like he was special ordered. They fit me like a glove, all his fuckups.
And so we worked it out.
Like my dad, he’d woken up one day, one eye at least. Taken a look around and realized it was not too cool, what he’d once been up too. Thought he could fix it, and in the worst way. He even found the creep who’d sell him the gun. But on his way home, this wiseacre passes the Clinic, like he does every day of his life. Only this time, something twigs and he comes walking in, straight into my waiting arms. Just lucky, I guess. I was probably the only one in the world who could fix him, aside from his daughter, and you can count her out.
Only to be of any help to him, I had to unlock all my boxes, and they were glued mighty shut. Yanking all those rusty nails out cost me more than it did him. It cost him too, but by the end of the week he’d gained some. He didn’t even hate his mother anymore. Saw that where her handiwork left off, his had picked up. That surprised him. It always does.
It’s like kindergarten, really; making animals out of clay. Just for the hell of it, you think you’ll make a monster. Then when clay class is over, you’re stuck with it, saying, “Where did this monster come from?” Like you hadn’t made it all by your lonesome. But by the end of the week, he’d finally understood. That if you got the itch to make something, there are other things besides monsters. It’s not like it’s written in the rule book somewhere, that a monster is what you have to make. Only a lot of people see it that way. Some make big monsters, some make little ones. By the end of clay class, you’ve got one hell of a collection. And all those monsters, boy, do they have some party.
He told me about his daughter. Miranda. His stories of her felt like me. That’s how come I could get at him; I knew her so well. After he left I had to call, explain things. It’s policy. Dumbfuck policy, but you know how policy gets. It’s stick to it or your job. It was just my luck she answered the phone.
“Hi,” she said, all breathless, like I was her girlfriend or someone she’d been expecting.
I sat there in that grey-walled room, the telephone in one hand, his gun in the other. I’d made him leave it, but now I was wishing I hadn’t. I was thinking I would shoot myself instead of talk
to her. Not for her, you understand.
For me it would be easier. But I did. Tell her. I told her her daddy wasn’t coming home anymore. Told her why, what it was he’d planned. Told her things he’d said, things no one in the world but her could’ve known. Things that made her breathing go funny over the telephone.
I hoped she wasn’t crying. I wondered what it looked like, the room she was sitting in. Not grey. Please, for her sake, let it not be grey.
“I hate him,” she said, when she could say something.
“I know, honey. I know. He won’t hurt you now.”
Now, if he hurts anyone, it’ll be himself. But I didn’t say that part, didn’t tell her I couldn’t get rid of the monster, could only turn it inside out.
“I only know your word that what you said he was gonna do is true. I know you said you made it so he’s never coming back. I know I loved my daddy. I love him. Even right now I do.”
His gun lay stupid in my lap, stupid and silent. I couldn’t use it now. I never could have used it. On me. On anyone. I’m just not made that way. She’d led me to the spot, the one we come to, all of us, sooner or later. The spot that was my job. Take people there, take them out of it again. If you can. Everyone but me. For me the spot was made of memory, the feeling of a little girl I’d been, all crumpled up and thrown away. Was still. So I told her. I couldn’t do anything else, just tell her and tell her, how it had been with me and him.
She listened to me, like the little trouper she was.
She was just a kid, like I’d been. Only for me there hadn’t been anyone to explain. Why I survived, when my testimony sent my daddy away for good. That I loved him too, always would, no matter how much I hated him. That neither love nor hate would make me free.
That it was him who was bad, and not me.
And after I’d said goodbye to her his monster was still with me, sticky like glue. I felt like it was mine now, and not his. Even after four years, you sometimes forget how to let it go. His murderous heart was circling me, in orbit around my soul like a darkened moon.