Everything Solid has a Shadow

by Michael Antman

  But that was okay; by the time I’d gotten out of there, I felt like a tiny bit of the pressure that had built up in my “pipe” (I refused, out of what remained of my pride, to call it a sewage pipe) had been alleviated.

  When I hit Monroe Street I remembered that Diane worked nearby on LaSalle Street, so on impulse, I called her cell. I was actually astonished when she answered.

  “Diane, can I meet you at Starbucks again?”

  “I would love to! But I’m working.”

  “I know, I know. I mean a Starbucks downtown or something. There must be one right by your office, right? Just fifteen minutes? Please?”

  “Charlie, you don’t sound great.”

  “Just came out of a deposition. You know, lawyers.”

  She laughed. “Hah! Lawyers! We’re the worst! Okay, you remember my office building, right? There’s a big old-fashioned Greek coffee shop in the lobby. I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes for fifteen minutes, but that’s all I have. Maybe twenty. But only for you, Charlie!”

  I was so relieved and happy to see Diane that I could hardly speak. We got a booth in the back of the coffee shop, and I ordered a Greek salad to pay the “rent” for the space, and Diane ordered a cup of tea. I told her a little bit about the deposition and about Gilbert’s parting words.

  “Ah,” she said, “those are the words of a loser. Go on with your life and forget him.”

  “I have, I have.”

  She balled up her fists in a comical way and spoke out of the corner of her mouth like a movie tough guy. She sounded more like Cyndi Lauper. “Gives you any trouble, I’ll take care of him, that’s what I do for my daily bread!”

  “I sometimes forget what a tough broad you are!”

  “Still playing music?”

  “Nah, not really. I’m just too distracted. And Nemerov’s going to help me with this dream stuff. And I keep on thinking about what you said at dinner, about how everything shifts, and I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Well, in general, my dreams are exactly like what you were talking about, where nothing is ever the same. But MariAngela? When I have one of my dreams about her, she looks exactly like she does in the real world. What do you think that means, Diane?”

  “You know, I once had a dream where I was looking at tulips, and I noticed that they didn’t cast any shadows on the sidewalk, and then some voice said to me, ‘That’s how you know this is a dream, because the flowers have no shadows.’ That creeped me out for some reason when I woke up, but I guess I would have been totally freaked if the flowers did have shadows. Then I would have felt like, you know, if the real world was invading my dream world, then the dream world could invade my real world, too. So maybe, is that how you’re feeling? Like when you’re seeing MariAngela, you know, exactly like in real life, that it’s really her inside of you?”

  “I don’t know, I was hoping you’d answer that question.”

  “It’s really her, Charlie. I haven’t met her and I’m not inside your head, but I think it’s really her. And you know why?”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  “Well, if everything shifts in your dreams because you fear death, maybe you no longer fear her death, or at least you’ve come to accept it. She’s fixed in your mind in a certain way. There’s a whole other aspect to dreams that I didn’t even talk about at the steak house with you guys, anyway. Not only are things always changing, like I said, but you almost never see anything clearly and directly, like the flowers that don’t have shadows. You sort of have a suggestion that you’re talking to a certain person, ’cause you know who they are and you’ve seen them before, but you can’t really see their features, it’s like when you play with your peripheral vision”—and here Diane rolled her eyeballs all the way to the right side—“and you can barely see some things, and then there’s a spot right after that that’s kind of ragged where you can’t really see anything at all, but you can sense it. Right?” I rolled my eyeballs the same way she did, and saw the counter and, beyond it, as she’d said, the fuzzy suggestion of something else that was solid. I turned my head in that direction and saw that it was a gleaming silver coffee urn. “So the interesting thing is not only that you’re seeing the actual MariAngela, but that you’re seeing her straight on, and not peripherally. That’s why I think she’s real.”

  “Diane, I know my fifteen minutes are ticking away, but I have to use the facilities. I’ll be back in just a second.”

  I walked into the bathroom, used the urinal, and then, as I was washing my hands, I looked at myself in the mirror. I stared and stared until the sight of me looked strange, and then I turned my head away from the mirror and turned my eyes back in the mirror’s direction. I could just barely sense that someone was there, in the mirror, and then I had to swivel my head really quickly to confirm that it was me, and for the split second it’d taken me to do that, I’d felt terrified, as if my own face might have changed.

  When I got back, I saw Diane thumbing her iPhone.

  “I’m really sorry, I know you’re busy. It’s just I think I might be cracking up.”

  “Charlie, you don’t have to worry. You’re too strong for that. And besides, the kind of people who crack up for real are the ones who it never even occurs to them that they’re cracking up.”

  “Well, I definitely don’t want to. I just want to be normal, just like I was when Alisa and I first met you and Frank. Or maybe I was never normal, I don’t know, and it’s all just coming out now. But I want to have a happy life, I really do. I am the one I have been given to live my life with, and it’s a shitty deal, but I’m all I’ve got. So I have no choice except to live it with the tools I have at hand.”

  “Do you wish you were someone else?”

  “No, not exactly. I’m okay with being me, but I sometimes want to be other people at the same time. To me, you know what’s the biggest mystery of existence? Of all? It’s not what everyone else says, where do we come from and where do we go, and why are we born and why do we die, and what happens when we die. No, to me the biggest mystery is that there are billions of us, but every one of us, without exception, can always and forever only be the one person we were born as and never anyone else. It seems so incredibly, I don’t know, limited.”

  Diane thought about this. “Charlie, every ghost in history that I know of has come of its own accord. Except for yours. It’s like you want to be haunted. Maybe it’s because you’re lonely, maybe it’s because of Alisa, or maybe like you said you want to be someone else too. I don’t know. But now with MariAngela, I think you’ve got what you wanted, and she’s going to be living inside of you now.”

  4

  When I got back to my house, I went up to the dormer room and laid down with my head facing the dollhouse and my feet sticking out, just as the one-armed man had done in the video. I played a bit with the shutters, opening and shutting them, and then I peered through the little hole in the wall at the street. From my angle, I could see a fragment of concrete stoop, a metal handrail, a piece of lumpy tree root, and, fleetingly, a girl’s foot shod in some sort of black shoe or boot. I knew the house; the family that lived there had five children, all girls. I waited for the boot to reappear, but it never did; the little girl had moved on. One isolated spot on my cheek was icy from the winter wind, and the rest of me was getting chilled, so I wriggled out of the dormer room and went downstairs to watch television.

  But there was an idea forming in my head, less tangible even than a dream, but there nonetheless, that had come to me while I’d peered through those tiny shutters. I could feel it forming on the horizon like wisps of clouds coalescing into something I could not name.

  The next day, I went to see MariAngela in the morning, a couple of hours earlier than my usual lunchtime visits. I was true to my word and brought her a big chocolate malt, whi
ch she sipped at decorously throughout the visit. Decorously? It was pleasant to use this term, with its implications of femininity and politesse, but the truth, as I well knew, was that her swallowing problems had just begun, and taking too large a sip, or, worse, swallowing a big lump of ice cream, could have resulted in a team of nurses rushing to her room. I found myself wishing she would just use a goddamn straw.

  She tilted the cup toward me. “Want some?”

  I looked at the sloping milkshake and I felt awful—there actually were little lumps inside, and I wasn’t sure they were ice cream. It looked disgusting; I couldn’t believe I’d bought it for her.

  “No, thanks. Are you sure you’re okay with those lumps of ice cream or whatever in it?”

  She looked puzzled. “There aren’t any lumps. It’s really good.”

  We talked for a few moments of this and that, and then I said, “MariAngela, I know you’re the one who’s dealing with a terrible situation, but I need your help with something.”

  She smiled in an uncomplicated way. “Sure.”

  “I really need to understand for my own mental health if the dreams I’ve had about you are actually psychic.”

  “I have no way of knowing, do I? And if you don’t mind my saying it, that’s not even what you really want to know.”

  “Really? You know what I want to know?”

  “Yes, Charlie, I do. You want me to tell you if you’re going crazy or not. I don’t think you are, but you’re under tremendous strain, obviously.”

  She placed the milkshake cup on the table next to her chair, but she had trouble placing the bottom squarely on the table’s surface—the cup reeled a bit on its cardboard circumference, a little bit like the way she herself had reeled when she had walked into the room.

  She smiled. “Remember that night we drank Mississippi Mudslides?”

  “The malted makes you think of that?”

  “Yeah. That was fun, wasn’t it?”

  “It was.”

  “So tell me about it, Charlie.”

  “You don’t remember? I’d stayed late one night at Berto’s after my set two summers ago, drinking with the old manager, Jack, and with you and a couple of the other waitresses. By 1:00 a.m., this waitress named Erika, I think her name was, the one with the big hair, had whipped up some Mississippi Mudslides with Baileys, Kahlua, well vodka, and I think it was a carton of whipping cream. The air conditioning had been turned off, so the cool drinks had been a real treat, remember? By 1:45, we’d finished the drinks and placed the glasses at our feet, and everyone but you and I had gone home. By, I don’t know, maybe 2:15, you and I stepped out into the alley to clear our heads just as it started to rain. It rained really hard for a while. But instead of heading back inside, we stayed under the eaves enjoying the cool air, and it really felt good, remember, the way the wind would whip little splashes of rain in our faces.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Are you having trouble remembering things?”

  “No, Charlie, you are.”

  “Like what?”

  “I said something about how it’s a ‘palatial downpour,’ and you laughed and said, ‘No, it’s torrential, not palatial.’ ”

  “I don’t remember that, but it sounds like something you would have said.”

  “Still would say,” she said, and laughed. “And then you kissed me.”

  “Wait, what? I did?”

  “You did. It was really nice.”

  “Must’ve been because with Alisa, it was always her making fun of my word choices.”

  She smiled. “I was a change of pace, wasn’t I? And then when we were talking about how I get words wrong, I told you I have reverse dyslexia, remember?”

  “No, what’s that?”

  “It’s just something I made up, but I can read writing upside down just as easily as right side up, like if I’m sitting across from someone at a desk, it’s like my own personal WikiLeaks, and I’ve always been incredibly fast at unscrambling, whaddya call them, those backwards words…?”

  “Please don’t say pachyderm. Palindrome.”

  “Yeah, palindromes. And I have a touch of synesthesia, too—remember how when I got back from Australia I told you all of the accents were colored blue?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And so anyway, you’d kissed me, and like I said it was nice, but I said something like ‘Don’t you find it weird that I mix up words so easily but I can unscramble them like this?’ ” And then MariAngela attempted to snap her fingers, but missed, and there was the faint, disconcerting sound of flesh and bone damply flapping against flesh and bone. She flushed. “And then I said to you, and I remember this as clear as day, I said to you, ‘Yeah, I guess I have a weird brain.’ ”

  She looked at me, hard.

  “So you said you had a weird brain.”

  “And has this occurred to you, Charlie, that this was the reason I ‘came’ to you in your dream less than a year later and said that there was something wrong with my brain?”

  “And you’re telling me that your coming to me the very night of the day you were diagnosed with a brain disease was just a coincidence?”

  “That’s not the point, Charlie.”

  “Quit saying my name, it sounds like my mother when she was mad at me.”

  “The point is that…”

  “What about your parents?”

  “Huh?”

  “Do they know about your illness?”

  “Yeah, I told them. My father. My mother hasn’t spoken to me in years.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t try to change the subject, Charlie. I’ll give my parents this, they bought me great health insurance. And my dad and brothers and sisters are deeply upset, and as far as I know my mother is too, at least from what my dad tells me. But let me get back to my point. The point is that, there in the alley, drinking those Mississippi Mudslides, we stayed up until, I don’t know, it was probably close to dawn, and then we went to Golden Nugget and had eggs over easy with hash browns and a huge plate of greasy corned beef hash, remember? It was delicious.”

  “Yeah, I remember that.”

  “And that whole night, it was like we shared some kind of intimacy, I told you all kinds of things about myself, but now in retrospect it was like talking to Colonel Data—”

  “Commander Data.”

  “For all the effect it had on you. It was humiliating. A couple of nights later when you came in for your gig it was like nothing had even passed between us, do you remember? Except of course you went back to your usual half-assed flirting. I’d rather it’d been just sex and you not calling me, instead of what we had, and what happened afterward.”

  “I remember the night, yeah, but I don’t remember acting unusually the next few days.”

  “Well, that’s the point. You didn’t act unusually the next few days. You acted like nothing had happened, I sent you some texts and you didn’t even respond.”

  “Look, MariAngela, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were holding this over me. I guess I should’ve responded.”

  “You don’t even understand my point.”

  “Do I get to have a point? I mean, do I? Because I know you’re facing something far, far worse than I am, but I’m falling apart here, MariAngela. I even went to a psychiatrist and he told me—”

  “I don’t care what your psychiatrist told you.”

  “But this part of it is about me, because it’s happening inside my head, not yours.”

  “It’s not about you.”

  “What, you’re gonna tell me it’s about you, when you’ve been denying all along that you’re doing or thinking anything to make yourself appear inside of my head?”

  She appeared to think about this for a minute. “I guess what I’m sayin
g is it’s about us. Look, I mentioned my mother. She’s a very brittle personality. Borderline personality is the technical term. She not only isn’t speaking to me, she went for a long time not speaking to a few of my sisters, and some of my brothers, and my dad, and my dad’s sister, and I guess this has given me this tremendous sensitivity to being ignored. And the more sensitive I am about it, the more it seems to happen to me. It’s one thing for me to have sex with a guy or a girl and then I don’t get a call afterward, I’ll admit that’s happened to me a few times, and it crushed me. My own fault, I should’ve known better. But you were worse.”

  “Because kissing is somehow more a commitment than fucking?”

  “That shows just how totally you don’t understand. You and your songwriter sensitivity, you faked me out. I thought we’d shared something. I thought that that kiss was a lot deeper than any sex I’d ever had. But it’s just so fucking par for the course.”

  She stopped for a moment, as if she were out of breath. “I mean, in a sick way, I feel like I’m lucky, incredibly lucky, even to be having this argument with you right now, instead of being brushed off in a text message…”

  “That’s what Willa said.”

  “Refresh my memory. Who is this Willa?”

  “Oh, this girl I met in Hawaii, after I broke up, well sort of during while I was breaking up with Alisa. It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Or worse, being brushed off without even a text message, the person just never responds at all. No one fucking notices me because they think all I am is a waitress so I don’t matter, and that’s why I didn’t want to go to Hawaii with you, because after Alisa said no, I was a fucking afterthought.”

  “You were my very first thought after Alisa said no. That’s not so bad, is it?”

  “What, that Hawaii is a consolation prize to me for dying? That you, here, now, us, having this discussion finally, for the first time when we should have had it a long time ago, is also my consolation prize for dying, because you fucking know damn well that if I wasn’t dying we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all?”