The Ancient Hours

by Michael Bible

  One day she invited me to listen to a Lou Reed record at her house. Her bedroom was full of candles. A Courtney Love poster on the wall and a fish tank with no water in it. Wax pooled on the floor in a figure eight.

  She told me she was feeling a strange, yet familiar, feeling.

  It’s something between a continuous longing and a sudden dread, she said. Like a rainy afternoon when the sun is shining or the mysterious hum of an empty street at night.

  The Constant, she called it.

  Sounds terrifying, I said.

  Are you scared, she asked.

  She touched my knee.

  My mom’s at work, she said. Dad’s at physical therapy.

  I nodded.

  Why are you touching my knee, I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  Then she told me a long, rambling story about how one time she’d run away from home and met a stranger at a Chinese buffet who wanted to pay her fifty bucks to touch her feet.

  What did you do, I asked.

  I took off my shoes, she said. While he kissed my feet I stole his wallet. He only had twenty-five dollars in there anyway.

  Really, I asked.

  Cleo changed the record from Lou Reed to Bach. Some of his sad cello stuff.

  You know I’m not exclusive, she said. And I don’t like games.

  OK, I said.

  She was taking off her clothes, quite slowly, almost imperceptibly.

  You have a crush on me, she said. Everyone knows it.

  Maybe, I said.

  That’s not what I heard, she said. I heard it was a big, bad serious crush.

  When I took her panties off I could see tiny marks where she had cut her inner thighs. I knew better than to ask. I figured it had something to do with The Constant.

  We spent the next two years skipping school to seek weird adventures. Mostly we drove around in my old beat-up VW and got high on bad weed. It never felt like a high school romance. It was savage, cosmic, and strange. I was beginning my long slide into a dark place that only got darker. Cleo was mostly what kept me away from the edges. Sex was a weapon we used against The Constant. A barricade against everlasting fear.

  I felt The Constant, too. I knew things would never get better. Adults always told us we were too young to understand. They said we should be happy. I never understood happiness. The whole concept seemed obscene. Nobody in Harmony was even close. All they did was work and go to church. I used to stay up late at night praying for nuclear war. Then I realized no one would ever drop a bomb on Harmony.

  Nothing ever happened. Nothing ever changed.

  What I thought was trouble back then was simply life. It was neither good nor bad. It just was. I’d give anything for one more night with Cleo. One more memory of her. I’ve exhausted all the ones I have now. Like the time we saw an Amish man stealing a microwave. Or the time we stayed up all night drinking wine coolers and came face-to-face with a zebra. I always felt that with Cleo somehow the things that were supposed to be dreams were actually real and real life was some kind of nightmare.

  Captain Tom brought lunch today, but I didn’t eat. Stayed in bed most of the afternoon. He came back in during supper and asked if I wanted to see a priest on Sunday and that my lawyer wanted to talk to me and that they had about fifty media requests. I told him I didn’t want to see anyone.

  He nodded his head and looked at his shoes. I always liked old Tom and I’ll miss him, I really will, I just wish he wouldn’t be such a sad sack of shit around me. It was hard to respect a man so down in the mouth.

  Any thoughts about what we talked about this morning, he asked.

  I reckon a pulled-pork sandwich might be nice, I said. And a Dr Pepper in a bottle.

  You got it, he said.

  Things changed with me and Cleo the summer after junior year. When I got a job on a landscaping crew. That’s when I met Paul. It was the beginning of one thing. The end of something else.

  As I fell asleep I started to dream about the last dogwood blossoms falling outside my window and I became them. They became multitudinous and filled the rivers and they filled the oceans and covered every inch of the world.

  3

  BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS I’ll be free of the earth. What does it matter if I’ve told you the truth? I’ll admit that perhaps I’ve been less than honest. Anyway you wouldn’t believe me if I told you the truth. The truth is funny like that. Nothing’s ever as real as The Constant circling in the depths. For me, darkness begets darkness and love only got me into trouble.

  The summer after junior year was the low point. Every night I snorted painkillers and listened to the music of the night. Freight trains leaving the brick factory. Police cars headed down to Yellow Hill. I bought Vicodin and Xanax from a guy named Memphis down on Park Drive. I crushed them into a fine white powder and rolled it into a cigarette and puffed it out the window. The good life I’d been promised seemed to diminish each evening with the setting sun. The possibilities became smaller and smaller. Tragedy went from a probability, to a likelihood, to an inevitably.

  I applied to work with the landscaping crew the day after school let out for the summer. I wanted Cleo to try to get a job there too, but she said she wanted to stay with her dad. He wasn’t doing so well. She was taking a film class at the community college all summer. We watched movies at my place. A few Alfred Hitchcock films and Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, stuff like that. But also 8½ and Stalker and The Seventh Seal and a bunch by this Japanese guy named Ozu. I liked his late movies best. They felt like being inside an old man’s dream. Whole days early that summer were spent mowing grass and sitting alone in a Hardee’s parking lot dreaming of Japan.

  The day when Paul first came to work on the crew, it was raining and we all sat in Hardee’s. The rest of the guys said he was bad luck for bringing the weather, but I told him not to worry about what they said. He was eighteen, a year older than me. Tan and tall. Tired eyes. He’d just moved to town, his father was the new minister at First Baptist.

  We ended up talking about Russia. Not sure why, it was something I’d been reading about the day before at the library and brought it up to him apropos of nothing. He asked if I’d ever heard of the Bolshoi. I mentioned Degas’s paintings and he perked up at that. Who were we but two country boys talking about ballet in a fast-food restaurant on a rainy day?

  I want to be a choreographer, he whispered.

  He said it like it was some kind of dirty idea.

  So what, I said.

  My father, he said.

  Let me guess, I said. He wants you to be an NFL quarterback who flies jets on the weekends.

  Something like that, he said.

  Paul looked at me for a long time. He was different, like Cleo, but more cosmopolitan. He wore a red bandanna around his neck like a Frenchman and he drank brandy from a sliver canteen. Always reading these thick European history books I’d never heard of and biographies of famous dancers. I saw him walking to work in the morning with his big straw hat and tote bag.

  We were always working side by side and spending our lunch breaks together. Those long desperate afternoons at rich people’s houses trimming hedges. Planting rose bushes. Paul made the days go by. I used to look inside at those houses and picture myself there, feet up on the coffee table, cold beer in my hand.

  Bob was the bossman, a dude not much older than I was. His dad owned the company. He sat in the truck listening to sports radio. Sometimes he’d lean on the hood dipping Skoal with his wraparound sunglasses, whistling at ladies. The rest of the crew was mostly Central and South American guys. There was Eddy and Angel and Luis. They were all much older than I was and liked to play pranks. Angel was the oldest. Probably in his fifties. He was always putting hot sauce in Eddy’s water or locking Luis in the Hardee’s bathroom with a plastic knife. Bob hated them and called them all kinds of racis
t names when he was around me and Paul. Like we were supposed to agree with him cause we were white. I never said anything but Paul always told him off. I was too scared to lose my job. Paul didn’t give a shit.

  The summer went on pretty uneventful. The days of lawnmowers and flowers turned into nights of sad foreign films with Cleo. Then one weekend I called her and she couldn’t come over so I called Paul instead. He said his parents were out of town on a church retreat and their lake house was empty.

  It was one of those blue fantastic afternoons. Paul drove over in his father’s yellow Mustang. We went ninety miles an hour down to the lake through the countryside listening to Howlin’ Wolf. Paul was wearing an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt and his straw hat. I wore overalls with no shirt and a pair of aviator sunglasses. We stopped on the side of the road to watch a horse nuzzle his newborn. Sipped brandy under a hundred-year-old oak tree and snorted painkillers in a Wendy’s drive-through. Shared a Frosty as we waited for a long train to pass. We were so high we bought five watermelons at a farmers market. It was almost dark by the time we got to his lake house. A huge place with tons of rooms and an outdoor shower. We drank some expensive wine and smoked a joint out on the porch.

  Then Paul showed me down into the basement where his dad kept his guns. There was a safe with all sorts of weapons and porn. He handed me an assault rifle and some ammo. We set up the watermelons on the dock and shot them through the scope. It felt good to have the gun in my hand. The pure power scared me and I loved it. We spent the rest of the daylight drinking and laughing and shooting random things in the trees. Paul made steaks on the grill and we ate them overlooking the water. I was pretty fucked up and I could tell Paul was getting there too. Then he asked if I wanted to take the boat out.

  We changed clothes and went out on the water. He took me to a secluded beach and we jumped in. We spread out towels on the sandbar and warmed ourselves under the young moon.

  You have a girlfriend, he said.

  You mean Cleo, I asked.

  He nodded and moved over closer to me.

  Can I ask you something, he said.

  What, I asked.

  He looked out over the water.

  Never mind, he said and laid back.

  We sat there for a long time not saying anything. Wind filled the trees and stopped. My heart was pounding. Paul’s eyes were closed. I inched closer to him, not sure what I wanted to happen. He stood up and started to walk toward the boat. I grabbed his hand and pulled him close to me.

  Ask me what you were going to ask me, I said.

  He kissed me instead. It was slow and easy with Paul. He was patient with me. We spent the night at the lake house making love. The next morning we rode back to town and went to work on Monday. I couldn’t look at him the same.

  When I get to this part of the story, people always ask me if Cleo was jealous of Paul or if Paul was jealous of Cleo. I never understood that, though. All three of us had something in common. We’d been told that we weren’t like the rest of the world. That something inside us was missing. We became each other’s medicine against the weariness.

  We all three made plans to meet at Paul’s lake house one Saturday afternoon. The week was long and hot and I couldn’t wait for it to end. On Friday, we were working in Mayor Presley’s yard. Angel was up on the hillside Weed-Eating. Bob was sitting in the truck talking on the phone. I was trimming a hedge when I looked up at Angel and he was on his back. I turned to Paul.

  Look at Angel, I said. He fell.

  The other guys started laughing. Thought it was one of his pranks. I laughed too and went back to work. Then I looked back up again and saw Angel hadn’t moved.

  I don’t think he’s joking, I said to Paul.

  Paul went up the hill and stood over him. He yelled down for help. Everyone dropped their tools and ran toward him. Bob poked his head out of the truck.

  Hey, he said. What are you doing?

  Angel fell, I said.

  I don’t care, he said. Get back to work.

  Paul ran into Mayor Presley’s house and called an ambulance. I ran to Angel, started giving him CPR. I didn’t really know how to do it. The whole time Bob was telling everyone to get back to work. When the EMTs got there, Angel was already gone. They loaded him up and drove away. There was no big fanfare. Nobody wailing and moaning. He just died alone on a hill.

  It was the first time I really saw a dead person up close like that. One minute you were here and the next you weren’t. I tried to find out where the funeral was going to be but Luis said they were going to ship his ashes back to Honduras and that was that.

  The next day I picked Paul and Cleo up to go to Paul’s lake house. On the drive down Cleo and Paul didn’t say a word to each other.

  We pulled up to the house.

  Pretty nice, Cleo said. Your dad in the mob or something?

  He’s a minister, I said.

  Same thing, Cleo said.

  We went out on the boat. Cleo rolled us cigarettes all afternoon. Paul made bourbon and ginger ales. Then we went back into that little cove and watched a rainbow arrive over the sandbar. Cleo took pictures with her Polaroid camera. A late summer dream.

  As we pulled up to the dock, Paul’s parents were there waiting. His dad was wearing a FISHERMAN FOR JESUS hat and a big metal watch, his mom was in yoga pants. They were pissed cause Paul told them he was at my house spending the night. They’d planned a romantic getaway and thought someone had broken in and stolen their boat.

  Someone got into the gun safe, Paul’s dad said. Was that you, too?

  He decided to search us for drugs, which he found. Then he searched Cleo’s bag and found pictures of me and Paul kissing. I think about that day often. How if maybe we’d taken another lap around the lake something would’ve been different. Or if we’d never gone to the lake that day in the first place.

  My cell is ice-cold as I write this. I’m getting tired thinking about the past. I wish I had more to say. Something profound to leave you with but there’s only the cold creeping in. Captain Tom brought me my dinner.

  On Saturday we move you to a small holding cell, he said. It’s procedure.

  Do you think I’ll still be able to see the dogwood tree from my window, I asked.

  He looked at me for a second and shook his head.

  No window, he said.

  4

  I SUPPOSE YOU WANT to know about Johnny Nightshade. The first time I met him he beat me up with his saxophone. I was in the parking lot of the library, weeping. It was hot. Almost the Fourth of July. Johnny Nightshade wasn’t his real name, of course, but that’s what everyone called him. He was a local musician that played street-corner jazz every night downtown. In his fifties, he was the town’s only busker. Leftover from a bohemian world that never really reached Harmony. A resident alien from a different time and place, soul patch and cabbie hat in a town full of football jerseys and mullets. He was beloved in a way because of a curious loophole in evangelicalism whereby you had to be friends with anyone who played music at church regardless if they looked stupid or not. And Johnny could undeniably play the shit out of that saxophone. The very saxophone he beat me up with.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. After the incident at the lake, Paul’s father sent him away to rehab camp and there things only got worse. He fell in with people that exposed him to harder stuff than we were doing. I was unemployed at the time. Bob fired everybody after Angel’s death. I dropped out of school and was spending most of my days in the computer room drinking gin and orange juice cause it was all that I could keep down. I was watching videos until all hours. Random stuff at first, but soon it became darker. Plane crashes, police shootings, suicides, beheadings. The Constant made manifest. Maybe I was so numb I wanted to feel something, even if it was other people’s pain.

  Paul used to send me these rambling letters from rehab about how he
would go on long swims in the lake and think about moving to Europe. He thought America was too far gone and that we were basically living at the end of civilization. He was reading more about revolutionary anarchists. Cleo was still in school. We met at the Starlight Diner one morning for blueberry pancakes. She talked about wanting to make a documentary about the invisible things that control our world. She’d dyed her hair blonde and pierced her nose. We sat in a booth by the window.

  Do you ever feel like doing something, I asked her.

  Like what, she said.

  I don’t know, I said. Burning everything to the ground.

  She rolled her eyes.

  You’re such a rebel, she said.

  I’m serious, I said.

  OK, she said. But are you going to finish your pancakes first?

  I slid her my plate.

  Some weekends we’d drive up in the mountains and trail-ride horses when we could scrape together the cash. We’d camp by the Bluebird River and make love beside a longleaf pine. But the days had become too much for me. The tedium unbearable. I found myself joyless at breakfast still drunk after a night in front of the computer. Then, I guess it was after a fight with my mom, I started to look up ways to kill myself. I found this forum where people were talking about it. At first it was almost a joke. See what these idiots were on about, but then I began to understand them. They all wanted to die but they didn’t want to die in vain. There didn’t seem to be any glory left in the world. A sickness had infected everything.

  I got a letter from Paul one day. He was coming back to Harmony. Wanted to party. I suggested we meet at the old water tower at midnight. Cleo picked me up after her class and we drove out there under big stars. The moon hung above us, just a thumbnail. We smoked cigarettes and listened to a Dostoevsky audiobook. Made bets about if Paul would really show. Finally he did arrive in a van with a few other people from his rehab. It didn’t take long to realize they had escaped. We spent three days under the rusted old water tower listening to Neil Young, eating homemade tacos, and shooting heroin. It was my first time and wasn’t what I expected. Like God ran his finger down my spine, that’s what it was. All my pain transmogrified into a star. I could’ve lived like that for years but after three days our luck ran out. Paul’s father found him and called the cops. They arrested him and when they put him into the car, somehow I knew. I knew it was the last time I’d see him. I remember him standing there handcuffed. Just standing there, waiting. There’s always waiting with cops. They can’t do anything in a timely manner. Paul shot me a glance.