by Ann
Through a small crack in the blinds – nothing. Flat gray up from where the street lights were diffused without contour. Lost haloes in a soundless fog. Not even a muted echo. Something had moved inside. Everything became absorbed in that one brief movement. It might have been on the floor below or in an outside corridor, or on one of the landings. A footfall. The latch-click of a closing door. Who knew what it was or where it came from? It brought me back to her breathing. The old man had finished his monologue. He may have taken a step forward. It may have been him. I couldn’t tell. It was too dark.
– What now?
Pardon?
– I mean what are we supposed to do with her?
The police will take care of everything.
– Are you hot?
Why?
– Nothing, I just wondered.
Let the women put some clothes on her. And if you can find a driver’s license or any sort of identity card, poke a hole through it and tie it around her neck with a piece of string. Don’t use a rubber band or anything elastic that might affect her breathing.
– That’s no good…you see her just as I found her…without a stitch.
Maybe there’s something in her room. In one of the drawers. You could ask your wife.
–?
Or, here. Take this and fill it out later. I’ve already signed it. If you want, you can turn the light back on. I have to be going.
– What is it, a prescription?
No, it’s for the police. Give it to them when they come for the girl. And don’t forget to fill it out. I’ll go on ahead to make the necessary arrangements. Don’t try to move her. Get her dressed as best you can. They’ll take her to the roundhouse.
– The roundhouse? You mean the old railroad museum? That hasn’t been open for years.
Somehow he managed to get to the door without knocking against the furniture. An amber light filtered in from the corridor, framing his bent silhouette with a dull nimbus. He took off his glasses.
– I’d like to get rid of these…can’t see a thing with them any more…try them on…see how they fit.
I have to go. When you find my penlight, you can send it to me care of the roundhouse. The address is at the top of the certificate. Or you can always get me at the office. You have my number.
The old man scratched his eyebrows and, shrugging his shoulders, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. He breathed on the lenses, smiling.
– I’d save myself a lot of breath just by sticking them out the window.
He called down after me.
– Be careful. One of the steps has a loose mat.
I came down slowly, out of the amber light, squeak by squeak on the stairs. That odor. I could smell it later on my hands. I heard the tenants shutting their doors before me. All the way to the bottom. Into the mist.
Into the night. Night into dawn. The sun comes up the other side of what remains unseen: a cloud at the bottom of shadowy buildings, fuzzy lights along a lost itinerary of upper rooms, the map he carries in his head. Gunmetal haloes, one pole to another, a double row up the hill in moveless smoke. Less and less distinct. You can never get too close or keep too far away from this mesh of blind spaces; they coalesce at the top of the street, whittling the map down to a cold stretch of pavement two or three yards across the one remaining hollow. Each step is a push against the fog, but never enough, even though you take it step by step, to give a proper clue to the mask. The middle distance vanishes behind neutral gray, and if a muted noise were to find its way back to the father – killing time beyond reach of the lampposts, he looks down out of his open window on nothing – it would only come to linger, an invisible blot he might almost feel the weight of on his eyes, crossing what he knows to be the street somewhere below, a subtle rumor of dislocation hovering in the doctor’s wake: the doctor who has left him, who has left them all (wife/sister, brother-in-law/husband, sister-in-law/sister, and the daughter/the niece/the unknown) to their darkness and the ticking of the clock. The doctor is in footsteps, sounding dulled claps of heel and sole off a sidewalk that tilts upward out of its center of gravity.
If roofs are up above, birds are asleep on the roofs. But those who walk the streets have felt the tilt of everything that is lost in the fog. A pair of cat’s eyes comes floating, paw by paw, before its black head becomes visible. Dense air, close to the asphalt of the street, a blind alley, a dead-end room without walls, where noxious odors drift. Within this compass of a few cubic yards the scavenger picks its way through a heap of empty liquor bottles, old newspapers stained with grease and coffee grounds, tatters of oilcloth wrapped around moth-eaten books, foxed page-ends curling in the damp.
The steps, paw by noiseless paw, driving the hollow back a little, as in a footloose vignette, toward a crash of shattering glass. Muffled bursts of laughter come in waves, now louder, now softer, as the bricks glide by, covered with graffiti: carved initials that almost seem to have been burned in between the lumpy strips of mortar, stick figures in colored chalk, telephone numbers, obscene witticisms, marmalade men on a span of crossing ladders, the outline of a hand, eyes the shape of fish, a rudimentary phallus-on-wheels pointing the way. Nothing but this wall of bricks and the sidewalk. A horizon lost in the gray blur a few feet beyond a manhole cover. Tarred cracks in the pavement squares. Curbs half eaten away, with drainage holes tunneling into their sides. A labyrinth of pipes runs beneath the city in old blueprints – if you stop to listen, a faint gurgle of metalized water comes to you from below the street, no matter where you may have happened to wander. Black paws creep gingerly over flattened wads of chewing gum, brown cigarette butts crushed in a smear of ashes, ticket stubs bleached white by rain, odd bits of rubbish, wire coils twisted by chance into numberless abstract shapes that will skitter across the cement if a breeze comes up, old rubber bands blackened with filth. Spittle and piss have corroded the lamppost bases: pod-like disks at the bottom of fluted columns, a coat of green paint pitted with rust. Each pole rises into a hazy cataract of light. Before it comes to the next street lamp, the cat passes the remains of a sawed-off tree trunk lost in a circle of weeds behind some wrought-iron palings.
It stops at the very end of the graffiti maze, where bricks become a brownstone wall, paws on the cold grating above a cellar window. Eyes, black lozenges dilating almost to the corners of their lid-slits, discern the form of a vise clamped to the edge of a workbench near a heap of planks. Traces of movement in the murk below. The mice are out of their holes, sniffing for breadcrumbs or a pellet of cheese amid the wood shavings. Elsewhere, a distant clatter of furniture rumbling down, shaking the inner walls of the old townhouse from top to bottom. A tremoring echo falls through the empty stairwell and throws a shudder into the mice that sends them scurrying off to the four corners of their pitch-dark cellar.
Past the door and its stucco pediment to where the light dies gradually away. The first window, less sooted than the one beneath the street, gives on a corridor lit by green pools to the foot of the stairs. Someone glides into the darkness on tiptoe, a fat man with plaid suspenders hanging in a double loop from his belt. He has waddled out of his room, where one of the green lamps glows above the door in a leafy sconce of brass, to put his foot on the bottom step and give an ear to the stairwell laughter – a hollow echoing beside him, where the steps go down to blackness under their rubber mats. Yet the source is higher, beyond the reddish haze of a second corridor much like the first but with no man, fat or lean, to do the listening. Here you can almost see the tops of the radiator pipes glint on the landing under the curtained window. In the third corridor a deep blue light catches eyes through the taut chain of a half-open doorway. Bleak fluorescences, cast in flickers on a wall behind the silhouettes, indicate someone must have turned the sound quite low. They wait, between the door and the jamb, in rapt silence as another laugh filters down amid what seems to be the clamor of a wild stampede. Two men in shirtsleeves, ties askew, are tumbling arm in arm out of the upper reaches, a b
lur of somersaulting legs and heads head-over-heels, thundering into the corridor. The metalodious squawk of an irate pheasant announces from on high the descent of a third reveler by way of slippage down the mahogany bannister – a prankster appears, more disheveled than the rest, nose and lips hidden behind an outrageous chrome-yellow panache held by a bronze clasp the shape of butterfly wings encrusted with costume jewelry to a button at the apex of a mauve skullcap which reposes, albeit somewhat precariously, upon his occipital peak. He comes bellytobogganing down, a blind swimmer flailing his arms with the hickory squawker in his mouth, blowing sqwahnk! sqwahnk! to disperse a sudden traffic in the corridor which, at present, assumes the collective form of his two associates lying crosswise in eclipse, bloodshot eyes turned to the ceiling, gasping for air as he lands pfoomph! on their cushioned paunches, bouncing off to make the rounds of the bare walls, blowing his quacker while they struggle to reinflate their lungs.
One floor above, it is completely dark. The corridor, littered with confetti and streamers, comes little by little under the weakening beam of a flashlight. Someone says Shit! and feels the crunch of broken picture-glass beneath his heel, sundering the calm of what had begun, inauspiciously, as an unhurried inventory of the debris. He quickly sees his mistake. The xix-century sporting print continues its suspension from the wall, unmolested, beside the thermostat (reset to 9ºF). In truth, the querent has put his foot through glass and silvering. A gulf opens. Behind his fractured silhouette – fragments of a body viewed from the ground up, swaying in the depths of the oval mirror – a second ceiling comes to light in pieces, below the floor. A soundless image, faint if he aims his flashlight directly into it, much brighter if he tilts it to the ceiling above, toward a noise of scuffing heels that grows at the landing, a left turn up the last flight of stairs under the ruins: shards of a flowerpot upended in its mound of dirt, a twisted vine with fuzzy purple leaves, streamers of pleated crêpe speckled with confetti. The last passage. From here you need a ladder to get to the roof. The birds are asleep.
Now, almost in silence, they listen for the sound of sleeping birds. Where have they gone? The men loosen their ties beneath a pale oval in the wallpaper. The women are bending forward in front of them, their heads out the window, still in a daze. It’s useless. They can only hear the revelers coming out onto the street below. Normally an amber light would cast dwindling shadows across the walk from the bottom of the stoop. But the fog leaves everything to a confusion of half-smothered rumors, blunting the dickory sqwahnk! sqwahnk! with an echo of cowbells as the prankster and his cohorts roll out onto the pavement over the jagged slivers of a champagne glass tossed from one of the high windows. The stem alone is intact, a thick helix of smoked crystal with a tinge of blue. The remains glitter like stardust against the flinty texture of the concrete.
Silence. Then all three of them begin to howl like dogs.
The crowd is thinning out in the hallway. Under the pale oval, an old gent with graying hair wets his moustache in a last swig of bourbon. Frosted cubes tinkle at the sides of the glass through which faceless people, no bigger than pins, kaleidoscope behind the melting ice.
– Disgusting.
The only woman left at the window turns as if to answer him, eyes glazed from drink, buttocks propped on the sill to keep her balance. But the gray-haired gent has his back to her now, one patent-leather shoe poised over the apartment’s threshold, then another, before the door closes and all the noises of the party – voices in the smoke, clinking bottles and glasses – are swallowed up.
A chuckle drifts up to the window. The ‘dogs’ are gone. A cat who says meow and pussypussypussy in falsetto has chased them off. She staggers from the sill to the wall and, with an eye to where the wall goes pale, her fingernail traces the fringe of an endless floral motif. The paper is rough and dry, with minute ridges numbing the tip of her finger. Near the top of the oval a rusty nail casts a sidewise shadow over the wall, contrasting with the catalogue of pits and scars, microscopic eruptions, pimples that make tiny dents in the skin and only seem to give a little when you press your finger to them. She notices spots. As she looks up, the specks float upward in their transparent film, just an instant behind the movement of her look. Whether from drink or because her eyes can fix on the gliding specks, she finds herself able to ‘track’ her gaze smoothly along the wainscot and the radiator pipes, from one wall to the other. Then it was the radiator, not the sill (the sill sits too high), that she leaned her weight on when the gray-haired man had spoken. She returns to the window, trying to picture the cat. Its color. Its form, crouched like a sphinx under the fog.
– Meowrreoww?
Her skirtfront pressed to the embossed pipes, she looks down, the mist cooling her face. Mouth open, licking her bottom lip, she waits for the cat to answer her invitation, purring a whisper only she can hear behind clenched teeth. A hiss flutters at the back of her tongue.
Silence. An almost grayless gray in the coming down. Without sensation of movement or plummeting weight until, close to touching bottom, having left black, blue, red and green windows behind, a dark form emerges crouched against the pavement backdrop. A headless shirt with no visible legs. One bare arm reaches slowly for the glass stem. Suddenly the hand draws back, as though a spark had passed from the smoky helix through the tip of one of its fingers. He turns a huge grin toward the lost window. White cheshire teeth come almost halfway up before the murk closes over, plunging them down with the rest of the night’s debris.
He scampers off on his hands and feet like a mad gorilla, the yellow ostrich plume trailing gracefully in his wake. The other two are chasing after him with echoing cries to stop. To wait. They’ve left their coats upstairs. It will be a chilly morning. She hears them. Running footsteps. Swallowed in fog.
I couldn’t get used to it. Empty streets. It felt like rain. Once a thick mist has settled in, not even a morning downpour can drive it away. Blind men are wandering or keep to their houses, moving from room to room. Without light. Others can see at least the foreground. You almost had to feel your way. Familiar landmarks which never appeared, or loomed up suddenly. Less than a yard off. Vast truncated bases. Without background. Too huge to be taken in whole by the eye. Routes you thought you knew like the back of your hand. Unrecognizable. Your hand in front of your face. Nothing more. The ideal space in fragments. This narrow stretch from gray to gray. Deserted streets I carry in memory.
Distances fell in upon themselves early on, until no distances were left. Impossible to go more than five paces without having to call forth all the minute details of what had passed under my shoes. Pieces that give the illusion of continuance. For now the streets were more of the head than at any previous time. Fragments. Without form. They were there, always. Just ahead, beyond my grasp. Or behind me, half remembered. Brick. Marble. Cement. Glass. Granite. Steel. And never enough to provide an assurance that I might come to the old roundhouse. Through my goggles the dim city came and went in macroscopic vignettes. One faded, giving way to another which passed to vapor in its turn. A city brought up close. All that went unseen became mammoth behind the cold, gray silence. Those of us who walked its streets. Floating islands. Without shadow. I was lost.
Hoping to find the railroad tracks I had reached the top of the hill, turning left down one of the gravel alleyways beside a garage whose ramshackle doors were too far in to be visible. Loose pebbles sloped away from the walk. My heels crunched with each step down, sliding as the weight shifted to my ankles. The sun must have come up by then. What remained of its light spread thinner than the silver haze of the lampposts. I touched bottom. Grass began to appear in the gravel, thickening into clumps of weeds where the yellow garage doors should have been. A sun lost to the gray density. Sudden tunneling effects. Recessions in depth lasting no more than a few seconds. Hazel trees flattened in the middle distance beyond a footbridge whose planks crossed a gully hidden by an undergrowth of nettles and sand-colored weeds. Some older trees tipped toward one anot
her from opposite banks. A vault of leaves. Motionless. Gnarled trunks in a tangle of shaggy molds the mist cloaked long before I had a chance to take my bearings. Pointing myself in what I thought to be the general direction of the bridge – there seemed no way for me to gauge the distance I had to cross before the first planks would come into view, if I moved too quickly I might miss them altogether and be swept into the gully – I took a few tentative steps forward, always with an eye to my mud-spattered shoes. The rim of the copper lining-ring cut into my neck. My goggles steamed. I stopped, breathing faintly, while a clear spot opened, blotting up the layer of condensation. And I began again.
No tunnelings then. Pebbles gave way to grass, and grass to mud. Bridge planks came under my heels with a creaking and what would have been an odor of old wet wood. Mist, almost white in the gully. Tumbling rivers of smoke rolled in under the faint outline of a tree. What looked to be a tree, slanting in the haze, heavy with damp. If a stream trickled below over sand and rocks, the fog or the mask had blunted its noise. It was too far down to hear. Even from the middle of the footbridge. If the riverbed ran dry. I dropped a coin over the side and, waiting for its ping to break the silence, began yet again.
Weak-kneed from having crouched so long near the edge. Silence. Staring down into the billowing white set diaphanous wing-flutters pulsing at the corners of my eyes. I stood up. No railing. My legs were wobbling. On either side the bridge planks extended less than three feet into blank space. Without top or bottom. I could put out my hand and still see fingers clearly spread against the neutral backdrop. Center depth. The footbridge seemed more and more to be hanging without supports over an unsoundable gulf. The grassy fringes of the pebble path had long since disappeared behind me, pushed back with the streets and the city buildings far into the dense atmosphere. From where I stood when the fog had opened up, the bridge looked to be little more than a few paces in length. Now I went on tiptoe, in fear that the rotted planks would drop out from under me. The slightest loss of balance might easily carry me over the edge. Faster. A sudden unevenness in the planks threw my rhythm off. As the other bank came into view between the end of the footbridge and the muddy fringe of grass, something like a fallen log rolled under me. Pitched me forward. Breathless. Hands thrust out. Grasping at air. Useless against the pull of gravity. Wet grass tilting up. Into black. Whatever was left of the ground-below-ground eddied back. Widening hollows of noiseless space drifted out into darkness. Something had caught my ankles. The sickness. The paralysis of the fall drew me even farther down.