The Ancient Hours

by Michael Bible

  Farber joined them.

  Ms. Trudy, Farber said. Karen said we have to call the police.

  Nonsense, Trudy said. The little girl is around here, I’m sure. Children like to play hide-and-seek.

  Then they heard crying. It was coming from the children’s section. The bathtub. The three of them ran toward it and found Carolina curled up, crying to herself. She got out and instead of running to Cleo, she ran to Trudy. Her eyes full of tears.

  4

  A FEW MONTHS LATER, Farber was eating breakfast at a Waffle House and an older man in a suit was shouting at his phone at the table beside him. The phone was broken. Faber asked if he was OK. The man said something about an important meeting. It took Farber all of twenty seconds to fix it. The man bought him breakfast and by the end of it Farber had a job in New Mexico. He quit the library and drove out a few weeks later. People were different in New Mexico. Not like Harmony. He met a girl named Beck online. She was a nurse, sweet and funny, with kind eyes as blue as an angel.

  He lived in a large one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of town and for the first time in his life, Farber didn’t worry about where the rent was coming from. He worked as the man’s personal computer guy and then was hired as the IT director of his company. The employees gave him access to their personal lives without even thinking. On dates he would tell Beck about some embarrassing detail he discovered on their computers.

  This one guy is a furry, he said.

  A what, she asked.

  When he told her what it was she laughed for ten straight minutes. It was a big, joyous laugh. He could recognize it across a crowded room. Life was better in New Mexico, but he never forgot Harmony. As the weather turned cold he started to miss his hometown more and more, a place he never thought he would care about. That day at the library kept calling him. For a long time he couldn’t even understand why that day had been so important. He couldn’t describe it exactly. It was as if he could see inside these strangers’ hearts. They had experienced something together. They’d found a lost girl, even if she wasn’t far. The way they all stood out in front of the library as if they’d known each other forever. The light fell golden and warm around them and the air was charged with sweetness. Nothing terrible happened to them that day. He and the young mother, she told him her name was Cleo, stood together, the child still clinging to Trudy. They were all survivors of different storms washed up on the same shore.

  After a date to the movies, Beck asked if she could come back to Farber’s place. They made love. She didn’t tell him it was her first time, and he didn’t ask. He told her of his childhood surgery and she kissed his scar.

  Does it hurt, she asked.

  Not when you kiss me like that, he said.

  She was the only person he allowed to know him fully, the only one who knew his secret pain. But there was more he wanted to say to her. He wanted to tell her about the library and the missing child that day and how they stood together as the sun died over the hills and it felt like they were a family, even if it was just for five minutes. The child had fallen asleep in Trudy’s arms and she finally handed her back to Cleo. Love and pain weren’t all that different, Farber thought. He realized he was capable of great sacrifice.

  He tried to tell Beck all of this but it came out wrong.

  There was a mother and a child and this other woman, he said.

  He went on and on and finally gave up trying to tell the truth of it.

  Beck kissed him. It was a long, slow kiss of new love.

  Can we talk about it in the morning, she asked. I want to go again.

  OK, he said.

  She turned the lamp off. The room went dark.

  CLOUD

  2019

  1

  IF IT WASN’T FOR THE VIETNAM WAR, she wouldn’t have been born. Her father was a US Army captain. Her mother wore a wild rose in her hair, a waitress in a Hanoi cafe. They married and moved to America, settled in a little southern college town and named their only daughter Alabama. She looked like her mother and he talked with her father’s southern drawl.

  I’m Alabama, she said. Al for short.

  I’m Joe McCloud, I said. Everybody calls me Cloud.

  I met her when I was in college studying the poetry of John Milton. Al was a local, her father ran the law school. The town was the birthplace of a famous architect named Mary Hutton Hart, a genius of early modernism who despised her southern roots but the city fathers made her birthplace a museum anyway and the drugstore sold postcards of her face and every year a parade in her honor made its way through the square passing the clock tower that she designed. It stood silent after its bell broke decades before. They’d never raised enough money to make it toll the hour again like it did on old distant afternoons in the terrible years after the war. I saw Al for the first time one late autumn night drinking beer at the bowling alley, the only culture for miles. I couldn’t resist her. Her movie-star eyes, biker boots, and ripped blue jeans. After a few hours, she asked me if I wanted to go skinny dipping at the motel pool at midnight and I said yes. We did bumps of cocaine off her car keys behind a dumpster and she touched my hips with her hands and pulled me close. We partied all night with her townie friends in an abandoned barn and later we made out in the bedroom of some rich man’s house she knew was away on business. We ate sleeping pills so strong we slept through a storm. I was convinced the whole thing was a secret dream. The storm and the pills and motel pool and the barn and the rich man’s house. All of it a dangerous fantasy.

  Or maybe the storm wasn’t the night we met. Maybe that night was dark and strange like so many other deep southern nights. We simply sat talking and drinking flat beer and the world was unexciting everywhere and the sky was calm over the broken clock tower whose bell didn’t ring.

  Life gets mixed up for me. Twisted and turned. My surest summer memories lose their leaves and the green yards of my recollections become white with fresh snow. What I do remember is one night we talked about the town and how we both wanted to move up north someday as she drove me in her Dad’s muscle car down to the dry riverbed, her hot hand on my thigh, listening to Thin Lizzy.

  You take these curves pretty fast, I said as we raced back to town along the country highway.

  It’s the only way I know how, she said.

  We parked outside the last drive-in for a hundred miles and watched a soundless movie, Julia Roberts’s huge face floating over the pines.

  We should keep on driving and never come back, she said.

  Where would we go, I asked.

  To Mississippi, she said, New Orleans maybe or the good parts of Texas.

  Then what, I asked.

  She sat quiet as stone.

  It was as if we were playing out some kind of lost teenage rebellion where pure freedom was only a matter of constant motion.

  OK, I said. Take me somewhere. None of the old places. Somewhere fresh.

  We drove over the border into Tennessee, maybe that was the night of the storm, and got a cheap hotel room and sat up drinking bedtime tea and smoking joints of shitty weed, exhaling through the bathroom fan. The TV in the room down the hall played Mexican talk shows all night full blast and we never said a word to each other. We made love, ordered a pizza, watched black-and-white westerns on mute and fell asleep to the rhythm of the rain. There was a simple dazzling honesty to the moment. What can I say about pleasure except that it is rare in this world without pain.

  On the way back home, she told me she had to leave and go back to college in Virginia, she’d only taken the semester off to get her head straight. She said she wanted to keep in touch. She would be back for spring break. Maybe we could hang again.

  Why didn’t you tell me before all this, I asked.

  Again she sat quiet as stone.

  Or maybe she did say something, had some explanation, but I’ve already forgotten it along
with a million other things that used to fill me with confidence. With a reality I used to know. Now sometimes it feels like I drift away each night into a warm fog and wake to find myself on a remote island.

  After that I put Al out of my mind. Wrote my thesis on Paradise Lost. Spent the years after graduation working at the movie theater, writing bad poems about love gone rotten. I started dating Vicky, the projectionist, and after a year we moved in together. Sometimes those years come back to me like a sudden afternoon rain. Vicky was thin and tender with pink hair and a robot tattoo. She wanted something more than what the world had given her. Looking back, if I’m honest, I can’t recall the feeling of a single day with her but instead remember her as a distinct sensation I can summon at will like the smell of sunflowers or the sounds of a county fair.

  It’d been years since I’d even thought of Al when the bell began to ring on the clock tower. Vicky had gone to her parents’ house in Biloxi for Christmas, we’d been fighting all week. I wasn’t sure if she was coming back or if she did that we would last the month. I was working a late shift at the theater and walked out to my car on the square. In the distance I heard someone calling my name.

  Al was running through the streets with a top hat on and a glass of champagne. She’d been at the wedding of the mayor’s daughter.

  The bell is ringing, she yelled. It’s ringing again.

  She was a vision from some alternate past. She spoke as though no time had come between us. As though we’d been in the middle of a conversation only minutes before.

  Can you believe it, she said. They finally got it working.

  I was so taken by the sight of her I hadn’t noticed that the bell was, in fact, ringing. The shock of it brought people out of the bars and restaurants into the cold. Everyone enraptured by this ordinary, extraordinary sound.

  Take me somewhere, Al said. We need to celebrate.

  I unlocked my car.

  You’re drunk, I said. I’m going home.

  Come on, she said. Don’t do this to me. To Mary Hutton Hart’s house. We must honor her.

  Al got in the passenger’s side.

  No, I said. I can’t do this.

  Do what, she asked downing the rest of the champagne, throwing the empty glass in the backseat.

  Whatever we’re about to do, I said. We can’t do it.

  She took her top hat off and rolled down the window.

  What are we about to do, she asked.

  I don’t know, I said. You tell me.

  She produced a cigarette from behind her ear even though I’d never known her to smoke and she lit it with a wooden match like a general in an old war movie about to fight an unwinnable battle.

  I’m tired, I said. How bout we get lunch tomorrow and catch up.

  A van of partygoers rounded the square. Girls in expensive dresses, men in tuxedos with tails. They yelled for Al to join them. To get out of the car. The bell was ringing, they said. They were going to the river. Al shook her head and they drove away.

  Can you forgive me, she said.

  For what, I asked.

  For leaving, she said.

  I started the car.

  The van was coming back around the square a second time.

  Can we at least get out of here, she said. I want to be alone with you.

  We drove toward Mary Hutton Hart’s house and the sound of the bell faded a little. I parked away from the road and we got out and shared a cigarette on the hood of my car. It was an old British convertible I’d found in a junkyard and rebuilt. I never repainted it and loved its fading majesty.

  She kissed me and I pushed her away.

  Sorry, I said. I can’t.

  That’s when she told me the story of how her parents met. How if it wasn’t for some absurd war that killed hundreds of thousands, she wouldn’t have been born. Every day she lived because someone else didn’t. She was a product of misguided history and somehow all those decisions, big and little, had led us here to that freezing night. For many years I’d struggled to become a poet in that little town. Wringing out my misery in lines. I wanted to be known for something, singled out. It was strange but in that moment with Al telling me about her parents I decided I didn’t want to become famous anymore. I wanted to fade into the nothingness of time, become a statistic and a stranger to the ages hence.

  I’m freezing, I said.

  Same, she said. But I don’t want to go home.

  We drove to the motel where we first went skinny-dipping all those years before and we got a room and undressed each other and took a long warm bath. I’m not sure what happened next. If we made love or drank beer or watched TV. Though I do remember that Al revealed to me her sins and I revealed mine but for the life of me I can’t remember what they were. Instead, all my memory will allow is another mysterious night we shared together. I can’t place it in time. My mind won’t tell me if it was before all this or after but the image is striking. We were driving in the mountains late at night and the car broke down. It was 4:00 a.m. and we were lost and had no phone service. We decided to walk up the mountain to the nearest gas station ten miles away. After an hour or so a truck came by and an old couple was driving.

  Need a lift, they asked.

  We climbed in.

  Why are you out so late, I asked.

  There’s a meteor shower, the wife said.

  They took us down a dark country road to a sandstone outcrop overlooking the Blue Ridge. We lay on the rock. This old couple, Al, and me.

  The wife said, Don’t try to chase the shooting stars, instead find one fixed point in the heavens and let them come to you.

  Soon the meteors burned through the sky. After a long pause, her husband spoke.

  Like the blossoms of the falling cherry tree, he said.

  This memory, the wife and her country zen husband, gets mixed up with that night the bell began to ring again. I’m not sure why or what it means if it means anything at all but I think it has something to do with the way things come to an end. Soon after all this I got a call from Vicky. She was coming home. Then months went by and she was pregnant and then more months went by and she lost the child on a hot summer day. We made a little wooden cross on a hill overlooking the town and I never went back to that place.

  The last time I saw Al was almost two years later. I’d moved to New Orleans. Got a job in an office making other people rich. One day on my lunch break I tried a new restaurant and Al was there waiting tables. She looked different. Her head shaved, fresh tattoos. When her shift was over we caught up. She smoked a cigarette out back while I sat on a milk crate. She told me she lived out west for a few years and her boyfriend had died in a car crash and she moved to the city. She was full of politics. Talked about joining black bloc soldiers fighting fascists in the streets. She was thinner than I remembered, but stronger, too. Her mystery had returned.

  Revolution is a means of survival, she said. Money is like a living death.

  I nodded because I didn’t know what to say.

  For Al, the intervening years had become heavy with the old tragedies of the world and some new ones, too. She smoked one cigarette after another. The afternoon was turning into evening, she was already drinking wine. Light haloed her head and I noticed she was missing a few back teeth. It was strange to see this person I had thought about so many lonely nights changed into a street mystic in black orthopedic shoes, ranting about guerrilla warfare and lovers dead on the Dakota blacktop.

  That day at the restaurant reminded me of the second closest I ever came to dying. I was living at home with my aunt and uncle after college. Deeply depressed, I went out driving aimlessly with the intention of killing myself. In a fit of despair I intentionally ran a red light and almost hit a woman head on, but swerved at the last minute. I pulled over and turned the car off and watched the wind blowing through the trees like lungs inhalin
g and exhaling. It was like being banished from paradise into the world of life and death.

  It was the first time in many years that I had thought of my mother. Memories of her are rare these days. I can recall even less about my father. Only what others have told me. I was four when they died. What I do remember are sensations. My mother’s cold hands on my forehead, checking for a temperature. My father’s crisp work coats hanging in his closet. I thought about the day the chaplain came and told me they were going to finally execute Iggy. I was away at church camp. He told me after chapel near a big magnolia tree.

  We got word his appeals failed, he said. Tonight at midnight, he’ll be dead.

  I sat up all night checking the clock listening to my roommate snore. I almost fell asleep a few times but kept myself awake. I wanted to see the clock strike midnight. I wanted to know when he was dead. I watched the minutes tick by. Finally when the hour struck midnight, an enormous relief came over me. It was as if I had been carrying a great weight for a long distance without knowing it. I thought of my mother. The sound of her voice calling me in for supper. The way she would laugh on the phone for hours to my aunt.

  As I fell asleep that night I thought about living in Mississippi with my aunt and uncle. They raised me in the hill country after the fire. One night, I must’ve been about fifteen, they were up drinking, watching TV. Out of nowhere a violent storm began outside. We went to the porch and everything was raging and black. The heavens opened and it began to hail. My aunt grabbed me and took me inside. We huddled in a closet. The lights went out. It sounded like a freight train outside. Then, as quick as it came, the storm was gone. My uncle got out the flashlights and we went outside. The ground was covered in ice. White globes the size of tennis balls covered the yard. The night was clear and a full blue moon reflected in them as if a million tiny moons had landed in the grass.

  We started to hear footsteps crunching in the ice. In the distance was a young woman walking down the street. Blood was streaming down her face. She was out of a horror movie with the light from my uncle’s flashlight in her face.