JRZDVLZ

by Lee Klein

  “How well do you know him?”

  “They know me better than I know them. They treat me like a cousin with whom familial propriety doesn’t always apply.”

  “If you have a child, then you have a husband?”

  “Had a husband, but long ago, he went missing ... It was on a hunt across the river. His friends claim to have encountered the Leeds Devil.”

  “The same that infested the city this past week?”

  “It is not so simple,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “Rampant fakery, of course. Plus, I’ve overheard and intercepted so many words and glances, exaggerated surprise about the appearances and overacted worry for everyone’s safety, each of them either mocking the general sentiment or congratulating themselves for playing some role in it. So often they forget their servers are sober.”

  “Might you ever sell your knowledge?”

  “Drink loosens lips but what so often emerges is spew.”

  I might have to repay her hospitality with a visit from Braddock and Vermeule or one of their friends. “Did you know Wharton?”

  “I served him once or twice, but he stopped coming once we harbored enemies.”

  “So you know his plans?”

  “I should ask: whose side are you on?”

  “My own,” I said.

  “The same,” she said.

  I tried to steer the conversation more personally and ask about her parents, her child (son), her sister, her hopes, dreams, desires. No matter how well she responded to my interest I would have to reciprocate when she felt obligated to learn more about me. I would need to either respond with truth or fiction, and then I would need to arrange the fiction as it arose, wary of inconsistencies and suspicious of her suspecting me again. Expecting the inevitability of difficulty, I rolled on my side and said, “There is something you should know.”

  “Yes?” She mirrored my posture, head propped on hand.

  “The Leeds Devil did not kill your husband. He has not killed anyone—not for many years, at least—though recently he came very close to ending Stearns’s life.”

  “How can you know this? Or even that it exists?”

  “I know he flew over the city and some may have seen him but he was only investigating the costumed beasts meant to devalue his home.”

  “And you know all this how?”

  “Because I am him, of course.”

  “The Leeds Devil?”

  “The one and only.”

  She would ignore my shape in favor of heart and soul. I would protect her sister and son and live the rest of my time as a man.

  I had anticipated neither the volume nor the duration of her laugh. It was a joke, she thought, a commonplace play for her affections, like every interaction at the tavern. I felt not quite gutted. Conflicted perhaps? My words entered her body and transformed her into someone momentarily possessed with good cheer. She reflected my attraction for her and gave me a playful little slap to the head, as though to say you devil you!

  I was the Leeds Devil, none other, and yet ... I tunneled through passages in the hills of the future, weaving my way, rooting out her reactions and my reactions to those reactions, but then I forgot to attend to the fact of belief.

  “I have questioned my own existence, as well,” I said. “Whether I am only a legend as some have said, whether any of this exists—”

  “At most you’re a fugitive from a home for the deranged.”

  “You really must understand that—”

  What a strange sensation when someone covers your soft human mouth with their soft human mouth and sucks at your lips, opening them, probing tongue to tongue, exchanging breath, holding you closer. My eyes were open and my body stiffened as though the spell would break and I would come to my senses if I moved, still asleep at the tavern, dreaming of a first kiss between Eve and her Adam. I looked forward to the future of man: shorter wings and thicker legs, no tail or not much of one, face much flatter than mine, but the same eyes, the same heart.

  Solid Face

  LET HER HELP ME remove the dress. Her face rivaled the first I had ever seen. It took a lot not to end her horror. She beat me with a broom as I failed to clothe myself in the dress and jacket and shoes. Her sister and son entered and looked on as I burst outside, every brick wishing me harm.

  I stored the dress and whatever clothes I might need, and tried to stay away from humanity. Livestock became less common over the years. But pets flourished. Mistakes were made. I wished them no harm, especially kittens and puppies, each so difficult to work up the gusto to devour, despite their scrumptious, tender flesh. Yet often enough when I encountered a lost pet in the woods ... I am not proud of myself.

  The dreams of Wharton or Stearns were never realized. Maybe December had dissuaded her husband at every turn. For a time, I spied on her as she strolled with her children along the grounds, but she no longer seemed like the same person I had watched so often when young. Most of her life, she stayed on that estate. She did not, as far as I know, hang herself by the wrists or in any other way prematurely end her life. She had said she was the Leeds Devil. Such a statement may have freed her from her family’s curse. When she touched my fingertip, whatever life I had lived with her ended then.

  Water works along the Schuylkill River established in 1815, deemed at first a wonder of the world, faltered and were overhauled and improved a hundred years later. Fresh resources flowed through the city. Society progressed at a slow and natural pace. More forces were at work than Stearns and Wharton’s. Those who Stearns had wanted to relocate to the pines fought for the country overseas, returned victorious, and lived wherever they wanted. Even Stearns yielded to the ambitions of the world to conclude dispute in bloodbath and ruin. All those arguments and strategies and power plays ... and then most of the pines were sold to the state to preserve as a national forest while the federal government acquired the north end for the military base, Fort Dix.

  The spread of the human virus across the surface of the earth was not in danger of being slowed by anything other than an impulse to self-destruct. As the century proceeded and human beings flirted with extinction at their own hands, I imitated Christ and Socrates, practiced humility, did what I could to fulfill Franklin’s thirteenth commandment. By which I mean I did nothing at all. Any footprint or hoof print or claw or tooth mark would be unbecoming of the entity I wished to become. An angel? Something almost nonexistent, but earthly, breathing, with the blood in my wrists and desire in my loins restrained.

  Humans underwent cataclysms of energy come adolescence. Perhaps I was on a longer timescale than usual, only recently entering an awkward hormonal era? I liked that thought: in Leeds Devil years, I was only thirteen, the equivalent of more than two hundred rotations of the earth around the sun. If I lived to be seventy in Leeds Devil years, my life would not end until roughly 2800 or later—let’s say 3000—long enough for anyone. There would be time enough to breed. Plus who knew how humans would mutate or customize themselves to adapt to environmental change? It was possible that breeding would no longer involve a sexual act by the time I was twenty five in Leeds Devil years. It would be more like shopping, based on best possible genetic union. In which case, if sex were only atavistic urge and intimate pleasure, I might be in luck if ever I encountered a woman who didn’t mind if I forever wore a white wedding dress to bed.

  Other worries arose during my weird extended adolescence: the air felt different. It seemed less capable of sustaining my flight, as though changes had occurred at the molecular level. The ultrasensitive undersides of my wings noticed minute fluctuations that neither eased my flight nor encouraged the gulping of streaming air as I glided. Areas northeast of the pines released the foulest muck imaginable—perhaps this caused what I had sensed. I could neither say for sure nor share my perception with others. I never discussed the matter with vultures who had also noticed a change.

  In most parts of the pines, it was the same inane bird chatter and inse
ctile chirps, the same fluctuation of sunlight and susurration of wind, the same projection of clouds across the earth in the form of shadows. Newborns arrived as cute and cuddly as ever, seedlings transformed into mischievous saplings that solidified into elms and oaks before they lost their leaves and fell, along the way experiencing every pleasure, every stress. Life hadn’t changed too much because work now required a computer instead of a shovel. For the most part, day after night and day again, year after year, was marked by an inability to understand the nature of humility, the foremost human virtue, according to the country’s most creative founder. What would Jesus do? Socrates? Franklin would have rendered in memorable language what he ought to do and then commit to the opposite: he achieved humility by discerning how far he had fallen from approaching an imitation of those he admired. To always try as hard as you can and always fall short, what better goal can there be? I tried to be human, I entered the fray, I fell short of immersion and realized it wasn’t for me, yet neither was isolation nor a ricocheting position between extremes.

  If I could find a nice blind girl whose hands had no sense of touch, who heard my voice and loved its tones and the eloquent flow of my speech and the significance of cooing words relayed, perhaps we would do well together? A blind girl with no family or friends might never discover my commitment to a certain gown. The first thing we’d do when a child emerged would be to put it in a cage so preternatural aggression did not cost mother and obstetrician their lives. Home schooling would follow, and then what? How would we explain when our child saw others playing ball or doing anything normal kids might do? We would need to take care that inherent belligerence did not emerge—or channel it into athletics. We’d work with the kid on the books. Committed parents we’d be. Everything that comes with raising such a child. Or maybe my oddities might soften thanks to the traditional shape of another.

  At mid-century, I had heard a call to engage with the world but how could I submit to regimentation, and how explain the dress to a drill sergeant? I could have acted as my own secret weapon. Had things gone otherwise and Axis outposts were established in North America, I would have undermined their efforts. But I only knew obliquely at the time what had been at stake, sensing it along my underbelly and beneath the wings, some trouble, some disturbance that agitated the stream of cognition. On still days, when not wearing the dress, I had been like a radio receiver, tuning into hundreds of thousands of broadcast thoughts. It was something I’d become better able to do—something that was easier as people seemed to have more time for thinking, time in their cars, thoughts streaming perhaps from their radio antennae, the cars themselves conveying thought into the air where it mixed with radar, television, and then cellular waves. Endless streams of unseen chatter actively transmitted by those ever-clever humans.

  Through the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, even the ’50s and early 1960s, I imagined visiting far-flung cities and wildernesses but never roamed far from home. In the late 1970s, when the weather was warm, I sometimes considered spending days in the dress rollerskating around Washington Square in New York City’s Greenwich Village, around the fountain, through the arch there, skating in circles, slapping hands with happy strangers, moving in perfect rhythmic sync with everyone else. It would be like the best days in the pines when the oscillation of birds, weasels, insects, and the elements seemed to elevate into a well-tempered music. Washington Square would seem conducted, a music to which my movements would be sensitive, the beast in me most definitely soothed. I wondered what it would be like to become a downtown fixture, a man in a wedding dress and sparkly blue roller boots, dancing and twirling and grinning to whatever music I heard. Tourists would photograph me, journalists would interview me (I’d never give a straight answer, if only for my own amusement, though once I’d tell the truth, knowing of course the journalist would think I’m nuts), but mostly I’d celebrate what had taken me so long to achieve. But it could never last forever, of course. Whenever something essential seems grasped, you wake the next morning to empty hands. And, hence, humility.

  And then one fine day in my natural form, obeying the command of instinct, I left the pines for a paradise of graceful boredoms, somewhere I might live in peace, make some friends, get to know some people, blend in among the populace, and like Christ and Socrates, release myself into legend.

  A wondrous invention appeared around this time. Velcro let me evenly strap down the dress so I could wear light khaki pants and a button-down shirt and not seem out of place among shoppers at the grocery store where I worked. Bagging groceries was my first job. It was an excellent if admittedly inauspicious start, with room to grow.

  Thanks to steady employment, I saved money, worked well with a positive attitude, and achieved inconspicuousness. The trouble I faced was how to meet people, make friends, and do more than absorb music, movies, books. Every day, stabilized by work, seemed mature, purposeful. Each bag was a puzzle of shape and weight, adjusted for perceived customer strength. In place of Larner or Wharton, an old man named Buxton paid me in cash at the end of every week, and otherwise left me alone if I gave him no reason to know anything more about me than my name.

  I am not sure what accounted for it, whether it was nature or nurture, but something within me started to change around this time. Triggered by daily industriousness or some insidious stirring in the environment, I was afflicted in such a way that, whenever I removed the dress beneath my grocery clerk getup, I seemed to have noticeably aged. Out for an evening soar, remaining airborne seemed more difficult, as though my natural buoyancy suffered from some idiopathic weakness. I could not visit a physician and explain the problem, or consult a friendly veterinarian I’d gotten to know in the checkout aisle, or complain when talking with friends over a beer: yeah, I hear you about getting older—by the way, a weird thing, but lately I’ve had some difficulty flying—ever get that? Flying used to be easier than walking, but now every takeoff feels like it could be my last.

  If ever I were to divulge this newfound ability to age, my friend Riv would be the most sympathetic and intense listener, never questioning my sanity as I revealed the particular peculiarities of my life. His eyes would brighten as he slapped the table and said I knew it, I knew it, I knew it all along! Such was Riv’s way. Short for Rivkin. We referred to our friends by their surnames, like professional athletes or Army grunts. My surname they sometimes shortened to Merry, though they never called me Adam, which I went by at the supermarket.

  Not very long ago I obtained a cheap digital camera and began one of those photograph experiments every precocious student undertakes at one point, taking a selfie every morning for a year. I wanted to create an online slideshow and send the link to the Environmental Protection Agency. If I were a rare American beast, I needed to be declared an endangered species. The photos would provide undeniable evidence of an accelerating aging rate.

  My friend Kirsch might be able to connect me with someone who knew someone who knew someone with influence at the EPA. He seemed to know everyone. His online profiles were linked to thousands. He’d lived everywhere, or almost everywhere, my source of insight about what it might be like in California, Texas, Chicago, Boston, even places that rarely crossed my mind like Austin, Missoula, Louisville, Oxford (Mississippi). He was like a journeyman infielder, playing forever at the university level, more apt to take another assistant professorship or a one-year contract on an emergency basis at a new school than settle down for long-time security. There would be time for long-term security. He taught composition classes, rhetoric classes, basic college-level literacy classes. The light infantry of the university system, he took on work no one really wanted. Recently, Kirsch returned to his hometown, having had enough of travels, and also to help ease his parents into old age.

  People say that towns like ours are perfect for raising children. There’s room to grow, excellent schools, peace and quiet, long-established summer recreation leagues, a well-educated citizenry thanks to the university, and it’s less than an
hour to New York and Philadelphia, and not much longer to beaches. But safety comes first. Young parents move from cities to communities like this one if they can afford it, or they scrimp to purchase stability and security. And yet, a certain percentage of a community anywhere, no matter how small, will be naturally cruel, and if they are a charismatic percentage of an elementary or junior high population, that number can double as they sway less willful members to attend to their business.

  The day I met my friend Moss, a member of this cruel few had lured him to the woods with an invitation to smoke. Once letting him have more than his share of a joint, nefarious elements of the local youth population emerged. From behind thick bushes and the stray boulder from a long-retreated glacier, some played out-of-tune violins and others beat drums. It was an improvised funeral dirge, impassioned and slow, and to young David Moss’s ears, it was terrifying once it became clear that he was the focal point.

  In the last twenty or so years of the 20th century, particularly in that area of New Jersey, the concept of woods meant more than it had fifty years before or now with all land accounted for, either developed or set aside as park or nature preserve. But for a while every wooded area seemed a perishable conduit to the past. Moss, much later on, told me about how he had grown up playing in a thin strip of woods between his housing development and a cornfield that became what’s now a well-established housing development of semi-expensive homes. At the time, Moss said, you could feel the housing development coming, like it was stirring alive, the ruins of some great society that needed to be excavated and restored. Everywhere you looked it was like this extraordinary archeological dig in central New Jersey. Instead of digging up and restoring a lost civilization, when the heavy machinery arrived, they excavated the future.