Shadow Man: A Novel

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “I hit a slice backhand to slow the pace. It kicks up funny on the grass. Jimmy mis-hits. The ball comes to me soft and high. I step in and drill it down the alley. Jimmy races to it but barely gets his racquet on it. I hear him grunt. The ball floats toward me high and at the net. I step in, not a thought in my brain, and put it away and see Jimmy racing for it, but it’s beyond him and out of sight and Jimmy looks at me from across the net and then he drops his head and walks toward me. The crowd is going crazy, but Jimmy and I lean in and touch foreheads and find a piece of silence.

  “When the prince or earl or whoever hands me the trophy cup, I’m struck by how light it is. It seemed so heavy when I had watched on TV as other champions lifted it. I take a shower. The blisters are raw and pink, the muscles are balled and tight, and the soreness settles in. But I stand there with the water rushing over me, feeling, I think, how God must want each of us to feel at least once on this earth.”

  A plate clattered at another table.

  “I can see you running toward the ball, Kurt, your racquet back and waiting,” said Vera.

  Kurt lifted his soda.

  “That daydream will get me through three or four cans of gray.”

  Vera leaned forward.

  “You know what my daydream is, boys? To sleep one solid night without worrying that the man is getting closer. Just to breathe calmly and sleep, cool air running over my shoulders, like when I was a kid with the winter blanket falling away and me reaching for it, but still asleep, not waking.”

  “What’s your daydream, Jim?”

  I sat back.

  Mine was of Mom, and lately, of Alice, but I didn’t tell them. I must have blushed, though; Kurt and Vera pointed and laughed and I felt heat bleed across my face. I wanted Mom back. I wanted her to be waiting in our house after this adventure, but I knew she wouldn’t be there and all the rooms would be empty. In my daydream I whispered dictionary words to her, odd antecedents and unusual origins. She laughed at their sounds and meanings and said I was a smart boy of syllables and mischief; she told me this at the kitchen table when the late-afternoon autumn light was beyond the sink, retreating, leaving the kitchen dark, the white light of the rising moon far away down the street, when the neighborhood lingered in that in-between silence of dinners cooking and afternoon movies and men coming home and steam clinging to windows.

  I looked at the busboy. He was a table away; dirty plates slipped through his hands like playing cards. He sweated through his hairnet and kept his head down; the world could have crumpled around him and he wouldn’t have known. He had a faint mustache and sparse, coiled whiskers on his chin and jawline. His white busboy’s shirt was stained with condiments and grease, the sleeves too long for his arms; his pants were black, his face pale. He seemed like candle wax come to life. A girl, a young woman actually, wearing cutoffs, a tank top, and flip-flops and carrying a baby on her hip walked in and kissed him on the cheek and stood in front of him. He didn’t look at her for long. He reached into his pocket and handed her a few bills and she left, the baby waving its tiny, fleshy fingers at him. Kurt dropped a few extra quarters on the table and we slid out of our booth and back onto the boardwalk. We walked for an hour, not saying much, strolling to where the boardwalk ended at the dunes and the only lights were from ships in the black, black distance. Vera caught a chill and she walked back to the hotel between Kurt and me, each of us with an arm around her to warm her.

  Room 503, my room, was full of flowers. I saw them when I creaked the door as Kurt and Vera passed to 501. I pushed the door open and light from the hall spilled into a room covered in daisies, roses, carnations, black-eyed Suzies, long-stemmed irises, and others I couldn’t name in splashes of purples, reds, and yellows. They were thrown about as if tossed by wind and their scents held back the salt air of the beach. I stepped in, closed the door, and breathed them in. I turned on the TV and the flowers turned to silhouettes in the blue glow. I sat and smiled and watched the weatherman move the sun up the coast; farther north, Nova Scotia was lost in rain and fog and the weatherman noted that the Atlantic cold-water cod were running; it all tied in with Arctic air masses and deep, frigid currents. A guy with a lunatic’s face and a cowboy hat popped up selling used cars and I turned the channel and saw a note on the mirror.

  “Daddy ordered waaaaaay to many flowers from the Farm Fresh. Aren’t they pretty?”

  A girl’s penmanship was a loopy thing of wonder. I read the note, put it back on the mirror, took it down and read it again, searching between words and letters for things not spelled out. I cried. I don’t know why. It just came. Not long and sloppy, just real quiet; I held it deep in me and let it out a little bit at a time, the way you let the pressure hiss from a radiator.

  I Dream of Jeannie came on. I propped a pillow and leaned back, covering myself in flowers. In the silences between the dialogue of Jeannie and Master, I heard the ocean. Jeannie crossed her arms and boinked — the sound like springs — and disappeared in a curl of smoke into her bottle. My face was tight from dried tears. I sat up and flowers fell and I went to the bathroom and put my face in a sink full of water. I dried and waited for Alice, peeking my head out the door every now and then to see if the elevator numbers were moving. I put my ear to the wall with 501, but I heard nothing, maybe a rustle, but their room was still.

  I opened my dictionary, closed it. I went to the balcony and crossed the border from pollen to sea, the change dramatic; the flowers in the room turned to scentless beauty, as if under glass in a museum. I stepped back into the room and the flowers’ scents filled me again, and the sea fell away as if it were not there. A knock. The slender rap of a girl’s knuckles. I opened the door.

  “You get my flowers?”

  I laughed quietly and Alice stepped in. I closed the door. Alice knelt on the bed, flowers in her hair, counting petals in the dark. They floated like pieces of night.

  “You’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “Early.”

  “All the nice boys leave.”

  “How many?”

  “A few, but no one got flowers. Only you. Kiss me once and lie down and let me sleep on your chest. We can’t do more. If you were staying, maybe. I can’t give my whole self to a boy who will be gone. But we can wake in the morning with a room full of flowers, and that’ll be something you’ll never forget.”

  We kissed. We kissed twice, even though she said only once. She gathered alongside me, her head was light. She traced my face with a finger.

  “I’ll draw you on paper later.”

  I closed my eyes. Lying there with Alice was good enough; I was curious about those places I had never been, but mostly I was happy just to feel her breathing in my arms on our private sea of flowers. She felt like a part of me, her skin mine, and I held her tight, not too tight to wake her but tight enough to claim her for the hours we had left. I played songs in my head and wondered about God looking down into all the rooms on earth, and what it’d be like when I was older lying in a different room with another girl, remembering Alice in the darkness of a new place. I watched the blowing curtain. The curtain in my room back in Philly rarely felt the breeze, the streets and alleys were so tight and narrow that the wind couldn’t find our house; it blew past us to wider spaces beyond. The sounds, Alice’s breathing, the waves, all went quiet, as if they were moving away from me and into the distance. I slept.

  I don’t know if I dreamed. I woke and Alice was still there on my chest; the dawn hadn’t come, but the night was turning to gray dust and I could see blues, whites, yellows, and pinks flaming around me. I shut my eyes. A door in the hall slammed and the wall with 501 shook. I heard Vera, it seemed to be Vera, screaming not words but tangled indecipherable gasps. I jumped up from Alice and ran into the hall and saw Kurt standing at the door of 501 with a bucket of ice; cubes speckled the hallway as if he had run from the vending machines back to the room. He must have heard her scream, too. He saw me and rolled his eyes. Vera’s screeches came through the door. K
urt reached for the knob and slowly opened 501. I heard a pop and saw Kurt’s ice skip out of the bucket and fly around him like tiny, clear planets. Kurt’s body jolted back and he looked down and dropped the bucket and then stepped wobbly across the threshold. I heard another pop and glass break. I ran and saw Kurt lying on the carpet, two paintbrush strokes of blood widening from him, one near his chest and the other at his thigh.

  Vera was standing on the bed in underpants and no shirt, the silver gun heavy and smoking near her breasts. She was crying and shaking and screaming, “The man! The man!” The room smelled like the scene of a toy cap-gun fight; the scent of gunpowder, but deep in it a musky, sweet tang. Vera’s lipstick mirror map was shattered and the TV screen was static with the color of salt and pepper. I got down next to Kurt. His blood warmed my knees. All his muscles were still. His eyes were open as if examining the fallen galaxy of ice around him. I lay beside him and held him and asked him not to go.

  “Kurt, please stay.” I kept saying please like I did when I was a child trying to get something from him he didn’t want to give. I gripped his hand and looked into his face, sideways and scrunched on the carpet. He squeezed my hand and tried to say something, but the word stopped, half formed in his mouth. His eyes closed like they did when he’d stand on our stoop after work and drink his beer before dinner. I didn’t want to take my face off the carpet.

  I wanted to stay staring at him, holding him; I wanted to go where he was going and to wait for that frozen word to be released from his mouth. He was about to tell me something, something I needed to know.

  Alice and Slim stood in the doorway. Vera stayed on the bed and dropped the gun to her side, her head tilted down, eyes looking through ragged hair, her body trembling.

  “He was here. He was here. When Kurt went to get ice he snuck in and slammed the door and when Kurt came back he disappeared out the door just as I fired. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to end it. But, oh, Jim, I shot Kurt. He got away, down the hall and across the beach. I’m sure. I told you he was here, so close, always so close. I wanted to kill him, but look what I’ve done, Jim. Look what he’s made me do.”

  She stepped off the bed and fell to her knees and slid the gun toward the bathroom. She crawled to Kurt and me. She lay with us. She stroked Kurt’s hair and whispered to him; whispering and whispering, filling Kurt’s ear with words but no stories. Her sounds were brittle, breaking in the air around her. I wanted to push her away but I didn’t want to let go of Kurt. She was no longer that girl we met in the Philly diner. Curled and half naked and streaked with Kurt’s blood, Vera was a strange finger painting, a refugee from a faraway place. She stopped whispering. She sobbed in long silent shakes along Kurt’s body. She kissed his forehead. I couldn’t look at her. I closed my eyes. I kept my hand in Kurt’s and felt his calluses and saw him playing tennis, not with Jimmy Connors but with me, the two of us hitting in one of those rich suburbs outside Philly. I pressed closer to him, my nose touching his nose like I did when I was little and snuck into his and Mom’s room and lay between them and listened to their breathing.

  I waited to feel his breath, but nothing came, and from far off I heard squawking radios and men talking. They moved closer and I opened my eyes and saw shoes appearing around me, black shoes so shiny I could see my reflection next to Kurt. I closed my eyes again and held Kurt, trying to get us back to that tennis court, where I chased one of his down-the-line shots, lunging for it and finding the racquet’s sweet spot, my return flying back at such an angle that all Kurt could do was watch the ball speed past him, and then look across the net to me as if I had done something miraculous.

  The black shoes closed in and I felt hands pull me away from Kurt. I didn’t let go but one of the men pried my fingers from Kurt’s, and the men lifted me and it seemed I was floating. When they put me on the ground, I dove back and held Kurt again. Tighter. The men peeled me away and I cursed them. They sat Vera in a chair and draped her in a blanket, and she almost disappeared; a cop drew chalk marks on the carpet and another one slid the gun into a plastic bag the way I had seen them do in the movies. It all moved slowly as if everything was beating with half a heart, and scrapes and clicks and noises warbled in my ears like trapped birds. Alice hugged me and stepped away. The men held my arms and led me down the hallway. I squirmed to get back to Kurt but they were too strong. I heard the elevator ping and felt melting ice beneath my feet as I turned into Room 503. It was full of morning light and flowers left too long without water.

  seventeen

  “That’s where it ends, James. You in that room full of flowers.”

  “Do you know what happened next?”

  “Yes. Your life happened, James. From that day till now. Thirty-nine years of life.”

  “Kurt died.”

  “Yes.”

  “Vera?”

  “I don’t want to speak of her.”

  “Where is Kurt buried?”

  “You’ve been there. In Philly near your mother, not far from the shipyards.”

  “I loved him.”

  “Yes.”

  I am sitting in a chair looking out a window in a room that feels like a hotel. It’s night. I see the white foam of a wave in the distance and a man’s reflection in the window. His head moves when mine does; his hands, too. He is sitting next to another reflection. A lady with a slender neck peers through the window to the sea, a wineglass at her lips. It seems the two reflections are characters in a pantomime or movie, their lives playing in a window illuminated in the sand. The lady’s hand moves. She puts the wineglass down, stands, takes a step, and sits on the man’s lap, on my lap. The man in the window is gone, covered by the lady, like a blanket or a shawl.

  “I’m thinking of taking a trip to Poland, James. To visit where I came from. See old faces.”

  She kisses me on the forehead. She is light, warm. Her hair smells of sea and herbs.

  “Do you remember your first time at the National Museum in Warsaw, James?”

  I don’t remember anything.

  “It was, maybe, 1990, sometime shortly after the Wall fell. We went to the ground-floor exhibit of Christian iconography. Remember? You were struck by the suffering. There were Christs in marble, carved in wood, painted; images of a twisted, agonized Savior through the centuries. Crowns of thorns and tears of blood collected by angels with goblets. It was, you said, like a still-life horror movie. Image after image, everywhere you turned. You didn’t get it, though. I told you that nobody suffers for their faith like the Poles. The torment of that broken Christ is our national metaphor. We endured through history and then we took His suffering and made it ours. Our strength …”

  The lady’s words are soft in my ears. Her voice is cracked with a husk, like a radio voice. It is lulling. I feel the hairs on my arm rise as she whispers.

  “We left the museum and went walking through downtown Warsaw. We came upon the granite soldiers, so big and blocky. They stood on the corner. Stone monsters, you said. But they were not. The memorial flame lit them in the night. And don’t you remember the snow falling around us, and we kissed among the big stone men and their helmets and guns? You said right then that you loved me and we kissed and drank wine in a café until they kicked us out and we walked to our hotel through a deep snow.”

  The lady stands.

  “You said you loved me, James. For the first time, in the snow all those years ago.”

  She pours wine. She sits in the empty chair; there are two reflections in the window. Snow is the last word I hear. The image she gave me is gone. Starting at the center and crumbling toward the edges, like when Kurt and I watched Bonanza and the flame seared through the middle of the Cartwright map and raced to the corners, that’s how my mind loses things — in burning, black, widening holes. I try to concentrate, but neither picture nor memory survives. Only Kurt and Vera. Who is this lady? Should I run into the night toward the curl of the wave? No, I will sit. It is pleasant. The chair is comfortable. The lady’s voice is
pretty; there’s a movie in the window.

  “How many stories have you written, James?”

  She asked this before. I can’t say for sure, but it seems so. I must be a writer.

  “A journalist,” she corrects.

  She keeps talking. She is a tour guide. She knows stories from all over the world, and in each of them I have a place, I think, but I can’t hold the stories for long, and I see in her face that she is trying to will something, to convince me into belief, and I’d like to help her, because she is nice and has a pretty voice, actually all of her is pretty, but I cannot, and I can see in her eyes that I am disappointing her, but her eyes are tender, so very blue and tender. She pours more wine.

  “What kind of child would we have had, James? I often think of this. What would have happened that night under that bright moon in Tunisia if I hadn’t bled in that taxi and lost it? I felt it leave me, James, like a spirit from a room. I wonder what he or she would have become, raised by two nomads like us.”

  The lady stops talking. It’s quiet. I look in the window, but in the illumination there are no tears like the ones I see when I turn toward the lady. That’s how movies are. Kurt said movies seemed like real life but were really only tricks of light. Wind rattles the window; the reflections shimmy like pictures on water.

  The lady turns toward me. She holds my hand. She rubs it with both her hands, pressing my palms and sliding down my fingers.

  She says I used to have carpal tunnel from typing so much and at the end of workdays we’d sit in our apartment in New York and look over the river and she’d massage my hands and wrists as we watched lights harden in the dusk. Then we’d go out for dinner. She says we ate mostly Chinese and Italian, but that our favorite place was an Ethiopian restaurant hidden on a cross street up by Columbia University. We went to jazz clubs and sometimes, with friends, out to Long Island in autumn to see the leaves change and houses reel in their awnings and board up their windows for winter. She said life was good. Clever conversations and faces around tables chattering about everything from Bratislava to Khartoum, and on Sunday afternoons a long walk along the river and holding hands watching a black-and-white movie in a small cinema, where the popcorn man ran the projector and scents of dampness and perfume lingered in thick red seats. Those cinemas were her favorite places in New York; the old world lived in them, stories and tales of great European directors composed in shades of gray, full of meaning, but disappearing like ash when we walked home in the afternoon drizzle. This life sounds good — the parts of it, anyway, that don’t evaporate as soon as she recites them.