by Andrew Pyper
She shakes her head at the memory as if a trick had been played on her, one she had to admire for its cleverness.
“I’m going to find her,” I manage, the room spinning. “I’m going to stop her from hurting anyone else.”
“Stop her?”
“That’s why I’m here. To put an end to it.”
“But this is the end.”
I try to think of something to say but none of the candidates is anything that would mean anything here.
I’m sorry.
There was nothing you could have done.
She lost her soul the same day she was born.
“You better get on your way,” she says before I can try any of them. “The days are bad. But the nights . . . you don’t want to be out there at night.”
I find a brush on the counter and use it to untangle her hair. Lay a dry towel over her legs. Bend down and kiss the side of her face. She surprises me when she turns her head to kiss me, too.
“Good-bye, Mom.”
“I’d rather not say the same to you, if it’s all right,” she says. “The thought you might come back is something I’m going to try to hold on to.”
She turns away from me to look out the small rectangle of the bathroom window, where she can see only pillows of fog pushed along by a whistling wind but never clearing.
“Happy birthday, Danny,” she says.
35
* * *
I have to go no farther than the sidewalk to see that my mother was right. The After has different levels.
You need only look both ways along Farnum to know this place is farther down the slide than where I was when Ash brought me here. Less sun, less order, less hope. The formerly well-tended gardens and lawns now high with thistles, thick vines crawling up walls to join fingers with others as though pulling the homes into their graves. The pavement cracked, huge slabs heaved upward like an ice-jammed river.
All of it seen through the fog-that’s-not-a-fog. Selectively obscuring, veiling, disappearing. Making distances difficult to judge. Casting gray doubt over everything you think you see.
More disturbing are the screams. Every couple minutes a new howl of agony or protest, some sounding a half mile off, others no more than a block or two. No sirens. No reply of gunshots.
Which way to go?
To wherever she is.
The places Ash knew, the emotional landmarks, the ones with meaning. Where the very worst thing happened to her. For most, a short list of such places would immediately come to mind. But for a girl who didn’t feel as others do, it could be anywhere or nowhere.
I’m not here.
I start by looking for something that might be useful. Transportation, above all. Figuring my old Raleigh might come in handy, I hop the backyard fence where my bike and Ash’s used to be kept. The shed, too. Nothing with wheels is still here. The same with the neighbors’ yards and garages. The few parked cars—in the middle of the street, on what used to be front lawns—gutted long ago, sitting on corroded rims, the hoods ripped off. The Motor City has no motors.
I start west. My watch says it’s noon. It has said that since I got here. Winding it, tapping it, knocking it against brick doesn’t bring it back to life.
When I get to Main I cross and carry on the couple blocks to the high school. The same walk of my teenaged years, made with the same dread. Ash never let me make the trip with her. Instead, she walked ahead or accepted the ride from one of the older boys who rolled next to her in their cars though the school was less than a quarter mile away. Sometimes I’d spot her in the hallway over the course of the day and turn the other way, pretending I’d forgotten something in my locker, if only not to see how she didn’t see me. Talking to her friends or laughing at the report of a practical joke by one of the basketball guys, Ash always at the center of the pack no matter its composition, and she would pass me without any sign.
Later, once we were home, she would find me.
“I saw you today,” she’d say, as if my being visible was another instance of poor judgment on my part.
Maybe this is why I climb over the rubble where the main doors to the school once stood and enter the building’s dust-choked insides. Maybe she’s already here, having walked on ahead of me.
I stop at the office, noting how the counter where the secretary in the nightshirt had stood on Pajama Day has been hacked apart. Try all the light switches at the main board but nothing comes on. The result, as I start deeper into the school, is hallways bathed in near darkness, the smashed windows offering light that reaches only a few feet inside before fading to chalky grey.
The classrooms are destroyed. The desks overturned, burned. Ceiling tiles ripped away to expose the spidery wires and ducts above. A wall of presidential portraits amended to create a pornographic mural of self-pleasuring. In the library, the books have been pulled from the shelves and spread over the floor. The pages soaked and dried so many times they have puffed up soft, an orange shag carpet.
I open the door to the theater. Because there are no windows in here the only available light enters from behind me. The rows of seats, the panels depicting scenes of Detroit’s industrial and cultural ascendance, the stage, all in total darkness until a moment ago. And though it’s still dark, the weak glow is enough to reveal two things.
The first is that the South Pacific set used for the production Ash was in remains onstage. The palm trees that used hockey sticks wrapped in brown construction paper for their trunks, the painted background of a distant island. All of it just the same as when Ash stood before us to accept a standing ovation for her winning “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.”
The second is that someone sits in the audience.
Only the back of a head is visible but the hair is long. A woman staring stageward in the middle of the rows, not turning around even as the dim light is cast over her.
“Hello?”
There is no reply beyond a distracted flap of her hand, as though asking me to keep my voice down and not interrupt an ongoing performance.
I go down the aisle and slide in to sit two seats away from her. See that it’s someone I know. Knew. Michelle Wynn, one of the three girls who went down Woodward Avenue with Ash on her birthday. Though this Michelle is one I have never seen before: midthirties, ample-cheeked, her girth spilled over the handrests. The state of things when she took her own life.
“Michelle? It’s Danny Orchard.”
She turns. Her mind catching up to my words. “Danny?”
“Remember me?”
“Sure, I remember you. I think about you all the time.”
“You do?”
“I think about everything all the time.”
“The old days.”
“No, not because of that. Because you never know what will end up being part of the answer.”
“The answer to what?”
She smiles a don’t-be-stupid smile.
Of the three girls who pedaled along behind Ash, Michelle was the one hardest to see being there at all. There was the pedaling itself, which she would have found difficult, trailing farthest behind, the heaviest and least athletic of the girls. Then there was her neither-here-nor-there place in the Dondero universe. She was distinguished primarily by her transparent need to get along with everyone, which in high school marks you as guaranteed to be rejected by all.
And she was big.
“It’s my glands!” Michelle would protest whenever teased for her weight. It turned out to be a misguided defense. Boys would only stuff half a hamburger in their mouths as she walked by in the cafeteria and shout through bun-blowing mouths, “Ooh! These glands are so delicious!”
“What are you doing here, Michelle?”
“I’m waiting for her to come on,” she says, jutting her chin toward the stage.
“You’ve seen her here before?”
“Many times! Starting with opening night. May 14, 1989. And the six shows after that. She was amazing.”
“You came every night?”
“This was my seat. I’d sit here, trying to figure out how she could do that. Become someone else, have everyone believe in whatever you were doing, moment to moment.”
“What about here? The theater on this side,” I say. “Has Ash come back here?”
“She hasn’t spoken. And it’s too dark to see her. But I’ve sensed her standing up there, looking at me. I could feel what she was thinking.”
“What was that?”
“The same thing I felt her think whenever she looked at me then: ‘Why do you even bother?’ ” Her Ash voice is impeccable. An impersonation so good it makes me look around to make sure it’s not actually her. “ ‘Look at you! Why live when you have no reason to?’ ”
“I don’t understand why you’d be here for her when she wasn’t there for you.”
“Because I loved her! When she talked to me, made me feel like a friend, let me in on some secret—I’d never felt that way before. I never felt anything like it again.”
Michelle shifts in her seat, or tries to.
“It’s why,” she says, “when she told me to take a razor blade and—I did it. I did it. For once, I had all of her attention. And I never felt anything like it.”
One of her hands briefly rises, fighting against the seatback in front of her, and I see she wears a wedding ring. Whoever she left behind, the children she may have had, none of them equal to a girl whose lesson was that life wasn’t worth living unless you could live it like her.
“Do you remember the day Ash died, Michelle? When you followed her on your bike on her birthday?”
“I remember.”
“Did she say anything about meeting someone?”
“Someone?”
“A date she had, maybe. A secret she wanted you to keep.”
Her face sours.
“Like Dean Malvo?” I ask. “The teacher? Did she ever mention him?”
“Nice seeing you, Danny.”
“Wait. Don’t—”
But she’s gone. Her gaze returned to the center of the stage as if a spotlight has been turned on. The folds of her body tensed in anticipation of the first strains of music.
I make my way back up the aisle. She doesn’t look back. When I leave, I close the doors behind me, leaving Michelle in perfect darkness once more.
36
* * *
There are people out on Main Street.
Not many, maybe a dozen scattered over the three blocks of Royal Oak’s downtown strip, including some I even vaguely recognize. Gus of Gus the Barber’s, standing on the corner in his white barbor coat with scissors poking out of the chest pocket but wearing no pants, staring skyward as if gauging the chance of rain. One of my dad’s friends from the office, chewing on an unlit cigar as he stares down through a sewer grate on hands and knees. A cashier from the Holiday Market, dragging a stroller stacked with fallen birds.
As I pass them they give me the same look of distaste, one that shifts to a hostility I can feel growing with every moment they hold their attention on me. It’s my freedom of movement. The way I walk around them and keep walking, heading south. I haven’t found my place yet. My ability to decide on a direction and pursue it at will—to roam, as my mother said of Ash—is what fills them with rage.
A couple of them start to follow me, murmuring to themselves, before giving up when I quicken my pace. None venture beyond the rail tracks. All of them loyal to the Royal.
By the time I make it to where Main meets Woodward, the light has begun to fade. The gray mist rippling like an aluminum curtain. Above it, the clouds remain a solid mass, their underside untextured as a bedsheet. Somewhere behind them, the sun has started its decline, though it does so according to a pace of its own choosing. Whether in two hours or five or fifteen—whatever shape “hours” take in this place—night is coming.
The Detroit Zoo is just ahead, on the far side of Woodward’s multiple, buckled lanes. I’m climbing over the iron spokes of its fallen water tower when I spot the magician.
Running between the ticket booths at the entrance, his top hat wobbling but somehow clinging to his head. The same man who was the entertainment at my one and only childhood birthday party. The man in the cloak and gloves I cycled past when I was here with Ash and he pulled a dead dove out of thin air.
The magician climbs over the water tower’s remains. Noting me but without slowing. His eyes darting in different directions.
The roar stops us both. Something like a lion, but not. Coming from inside the zoo’s grounds.
Next to me, the magician releases an involuntary squeak of terror. Lurches on.
A zebra next. Squeezing through the gap where the turnstiles used to stand, whinnying. When it’s out it can’t decide which way to go, so ends up standing next to an overturned cotton candy cart, white froth dripping from its mouth.
Another roar.
Followed by others, coming from other sources. Some distant, some very close.
A tiger jumps onto the roof of one of the ticket booths and looks down at the three of us as if taking roll call. Zebra, magician, man. All here.
There’s enough time to see that it’s not really a tiger. It has the same stripes, the lashing tail, the whiskered chops. But its orange parts are too orange, its black too black, as though painted and lacquered. And it’s twice the size of any tiger in the living world. Its teeth and nails bigger still.
It comes to a decision.
Locks eyes on the zebra. Leaps from the roof—an effortless airborne crossing of the thirty feet between them—and falls upon its back.
The zebra emits a catlike yowl, then nothing more. Black-and-white-striped legs falling to the ground, still kicking. Claws parting head from neck with an audible pop.
The magician sees what’s coming next before I do. Starts to run.
Which reminds me I should, too.
And I’m about to when something new comes over the ticket booths.
A second tiger. And another. The third one bigger than the others by half. Muscled and smooth as though its fur has been greased. This and its eyes mark it as the creatures’ leader. The irises glowing red, dazzling even now in waning daylight. The same red I’d seen in Violet and Sylvie’s father’s eyes as he stood at the top of the stairs. The red of Dr. Noland, my mother’s delivery room doctor.
It ignores the other two tigers and makes the jump onto the top of the felled water tower tank. Taking in the view to the south, over the twelve miles of blasted flatlands to the black pillars of the Renaissance Center. Seeing it all as its own.
I run past the multilevel parking lot, pounding the sidewalk south. My heart may be just as defective in the After—it certainly struggles to make my legs do anything more than a thigh-burning jog after the first couple hundred yards—but the fear of a death-in-death isn’t as sharp as the fear of the shiny tigers, and I carry on until I can’t anymore. The corner of LeRoy and Woodward where the gray slab of the Ferndale First United Methodist Church stands. Where I see the magician again.
We notice each other at the same time. He sits leaning against a tree in the grass median. When he sees me, he stands. His waxy face betrays a look of disbelief at this—In a thousand acres of wasteland you had to leave a trail to where I’m sitting?—before he turns to new considerations.
He looks up his tree but it’s too low, too exposed to bother climbing. To the south, Woodward continues on, wide and open. He swings his head, choosing between the streets on either side, when he stops.
I follow his line of sight and see the biggest of the three tigers coming down the middle of the southbound lanes, a half dozen blocks off. Its red eyes locked on us.
The magician runs into the church and I follow him.
The sudden dark holds me in the entranceway a moment. Even when I make my way down the aisle of the nave, there’s no sign of the magician.
Red Eyes had to have seen us come in here.
The pipe organ next to the altar
has been smashed, all but a few of the keys removed so that what’s left looks like a boxer’s gumline. But most of the pipes are still there. The gaps between showing a shadowed space behind them. Maybe big enough for a man to fit into.
Climbing onto the pile of the organ’s ruins I’m able to pull myself up to the platform holding the pipes. That’s the easy part. Getting to my feet without falling is harder.
The tiger enters the church just as I squeeze against the wall and slip behind the pipes. It pads along the aisle, its head lowering to sniff the floor. When it looks up again it gazes at where I stand.
There’s a full moment of the two of us held like this. Measuring, listening. Then it starts forward again.
I’m sorry, Eddie.
The monster stops directly below me, where the organist would have sat. My feet a couple ladder rungs above the top of its head.
I wish I could have gone farther. But I tried. I did.
With a movement so sudden there isn’t the time to gasp, the tiger leaps backward onto the altar. Its roar shaking islands of plaster off the ceiling.
Almost instantly, the magician jumps out of the darkened vestibule where he’d been concealed. He attempts to pitch himself past the creature and run for the door. As if in anticipation of this very action, the tiger raises one of its great paws and plows it into the man’s side, knocking him into the pews below. The top hat tumbling to the floor.
The magician cries as the monster takes its time pulling him apart. A human wailing not for himself but for something left behind, the last of what he remembers of being alive.
And when its teeth find me, it will be my turn to do the same.
37
* * *