Because that was the Duke alright, and I’d never heard anything like it before nor since. For as he went on, and as the faces I thought I knew beside me began to dissolve into something else, as the liquor and music continued to work their magic, I felt the whole world revolve and slow down as he slowed down, or gather up speed again, as he sped up, and it seemed like he was the true arbiter of each movement, of all the living and dying that could happen in the world. His music was so much more than life and death, so much bigger and truer. How else can you say something that’s unsayable? How can you know something that’s unknowable? You approach it through music, I guess, and magic, which are one and the same to me, and to think on it I had to laugh as he played. So that maybe after another fifteen minutes or so, I shook my head just to rise from the beautiful sadness the Duke had cast upon me and everyone else in that room.
As I did, I scanned the smoky tables and a large white face rounded into focus. And if I hadn’t been sufficiently drunk before, well the sight of that face took me even deeper into all the excitement and confusion liquor can bring to a man—for not ten feet away, set against a brick wall, amidst the darkly swirling smoke, sat the spitting image of Runnymede McCall. Singer extraordinaire. Lately of the Piedmont Pipers. And he was smiling! He was smiling his Cheshire cat grin as he slipped another cigarette into his lips and snapped his silver lighter shut just as John Hill Carter had done at the Peabody. Before I could even stand and steady myself to see if it was really him or not, to tell him he was nothing compared to us, nothing for what he must a thought a nigger janitor and white trash vagrant like A.D. could be—he was gone. A side door swung open and I staggered out in my wobbly boots, even as the Duke poured on into the night, touching the soul of the world just to keep it spinning.
AIN’T NOBODY NEVER LEFT WHEN THE DUKE IS ON. And he’s on tonight.
I know, I know, I said. My friend from before had somehow found me even though I swore I’d come out the back of the club. But in a moment, he had me turned in another direction because he was sensitive to the gravity that must have brought me out from the sounds that he’d heard and listened to as intently as anyone else inside. For he’d said then to the world and to anyone who cared to listen how it was the Duke’s saddest number ever, and that it had been sad before this for sure, but tonight was something else entire. Tonight was of a magnitude that could touch all the way to your marrow and then some went so deep and hot and true, that when he turned to me, a low frown creased his face, and I agreed with him even though I was already looking past him to the street.
I looked and the smooth white face of Runnymede was there at the edge of my vision, floating as if smeared with greasepaint, as if delivered from the night itself. I didn’t know if it was real or not, nor how it hovered there as if detached from any physical form—as maybe even Ezra Lee’s face still rose in my mind—but it kept rising through the murk and soot of the city, and I gasped deep in my chest to see it. The face was the only thing in the world then that moved me. It had moved me even beyond the reach of the Duke’s sad sound, for I could hear his piano fading now as that drum and bass and trumpet started slowly blending their voices in the undertow of what the Duke had spread out for them. For I suppose he wanted us to rise up again now too. He must have even signaled it to the other musicians somehow, with a subtle nod or rise of his shoulder, because they’d started up again, and the sound rose brighter and sharper, building in intensity and tempo, Until it might as well shouted Rise up! to anyone who could hear it, and then I knew it was my cue to move on. That white face implored me. Hell, it demanded me to move. Demanded some action or deed on my part, something that I could not guess nor know, and yet, even as I hesitated to succumb to it, to go, it only seemed to shine that much brighter beneath a lamppost on the other end of the street. I breathed once and blinked watching it, and it shined there as if goading me on to the end of the city, to some other world entire.
Runnymede, I whispered and my friend put his hand out to touch me, to bring me back in to the Duke and his band, but I’d already stepped past him and was off. I was following the face of a man that had vexed me before, and that had reappeared now as if through the very firmament to bring me on into whatever spectral vision or landscape that tortured me. Something I knew not, but that only I could ever be wounded by and forced to visit. For Hackett? I said to the street. Is this for Hackett? For that sonabitch I killed for touching my wife?
But he didn’t turn. He never turned nor answered as we went. So I just followed him through street after street, past corners and tenement buildings that rose so high I could not see the air above them nor know if I was still above the ground or had become a thing in some subterranean ward. A grotto of disgust or loss swept down into the dirt. A diminishment was what it was. The ceiling of the city had put its infernal stamp upon me as insignificant, as unwanted, and the feeling immersed me in my pursuit as the slow hard slog of my feet kept me moving. Moving toward water, for I could feel some light turn in the air the farther I went. Some wave of moisture, or humidity, closed in on my face as I blinked and that other face—Runnymede’s—disappeared and I had to surge past an overturned barrel set aflame by some vagrants just to keep pace.
I was panting and covered in the amber beads of my whisky-soaked sweat. I licked my lips and looked past a line of taxicabs at the edge of some terminus or port of call. Sails, I said, and sloshed my boots through soot-colored puddles as the sails of ships and creaking beams rose and far off voices echoed over water, rising up as close as my own hideous thoughts just then. For I wanted to wound Runnymede, it’s true; I wanted to hurt him for the elusive nature of his spirit and the apparent delight he must have taken in my confusion at his appearance. I could feel him rise up above me like the wind as great precise lungs of wire hummed and pinged, stuttering with a soft susurrus through its web as Runnymede’s voice implored me to walk out with him, to walk to the edge of the world.
A bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge and its long span shook beneath me. As I clambered out, the vague shape of people drifted across that stretch of space and time, blurring as they came toward me but were then as quickly gone, sucked into blackness as only the white shining face of Runnymede remained. For he was singing—I could hear—and as I stepped closer, I knew the song, each note. But I also knew it was forbidden to sing this song, forbidden for all time, for it was Yancey Jakes’ song, the one from the ridge that A.D. and I would not repeat nor ever play. The one too true to bring to the world of Man and masquerade as our own, for it was the last song was what it was. The last of its kind. Untouched. Unblemished. Forever. Amen. But here Runnymede was singing its first verse as his white glowing head swayed on the platform, and his voice called out in agony, as if to reach something more divine in the air above us. And as I grabbed the back of his shining white head as if to strike him, or throw him forever into the depths—for I knew not what path my rage might take—Runnymede turned to me and his white mask slipped from his sick grin into Ezra Lee’s crooked gaze. Before smearing once again, as another gust of wind wavered past, into A.D.’s tortured smile. I choked back a sob and peered into the truth of A.D.’s vast, stunning sadness.
XXI
In the mist ~ Manhattan’s myriad blur ~ A magnet inside us ~ The lights ~ The prophecy and story of the red doors ~ Three bodies ~ His tale of woe and wonder ~ Tracing a soft circle on his forehead ~ Just a conduit ~ A channel ~ An oiled and floating clock ~ Some other judgment ~ A child ~ A blessing ~ The wind in the wires
A.D. WAS SUFFERING AN ENCHANTMENT and I had to touch his face to wipe the demented expression that seemed so eternal, so infernal, as to be cast in bronze upon his lips. O it glimmered and wove its way there and would not leave the more I touched and wiped, I had to shiver to see him like that—so confused and frenzied in his reverie. But I had to persist in bringing him down from this mania that would have me see both Runnymede in the city, and that devil Ezra Lee in turn, reflected in his face. It’s the lights, he said finally
, the lights, and he took my shoulders in his hands and pressed so hard I could feel the thin narrow bones in his fingers. It’s the lights, is what it is, he said, the lights. Just look at them like what he said, like what he knew.
Like who knew?
He was pointing with his anxious finger and at the end of it, in the soft reddening dawn, I seen Manhattan’s myriad lights blur and diffuse and shine as if refracted through a thousand tiny dewdrops. The sight was so revelatory and absorbing I could feel A.D.’s heartbeat thrumming in his chest. He cast his gaze about and recognized something so true, something so revealing that surging out of his person was an energy and force I’d not seen nor felt in any other. I had to count the heartbeats racing away in his bones then and in my own just to know it was true, the reason for my wandering through the city to find him.
He has led me to you, I whispered. He has. For as sure as I’m standing here, the very idea of Runnymede has been set like a magnet inside us to draw us on toward some desperate conclusion. But then I was hushed at the sight of A.D. and those lights cascading to the water, so that it looked as if the heavens themselves had been ripped aslant from their great milky swathes to touch upon the river and stretch out in it their twinkling, glittering stairway. When I seen it, it made me think of the Blue Ridge in the first dawning shine, or sad aching twilight, when its long smooth shadow, exaggerated and dusky, stretched itself out like that as a creed or truth or something monumental. As if it was something too chaste and pure to be reconciled with or informed of any other idea. For in those moments, I would see the ridge not as it was, but bigger, and all-encompassing, as if it were drawn out then beyond creation itself, becoming something singular and grand to behold in its endless coalescing. And that was how the waters looked to me then, with all the stars scribbled across their depths in an infinite procession of lines and shapes and moods, so that I had to breathe just to know I was living.
Do you see it? A.D. said, for I think he heard my own sucked in cheeks and startled chest. Touching me gently on the shoulder, he whispered, He said it would be like this. Now his voice was as measured and steady as time itself, as if seeing this vision of life had set him in order again, just by the grand structure of it all, in the underlying framework. He said it would be like this at the end of me for sure and now I see it and believe it. The lights, Isaiah, the lights. He’d turned again to the rail and seemed airy a sudden, as a great gust wove up through the rusty girders, before whipping through the wires and walkway, rifling the ends of his brown ropey hair and greasy wool jacket. As the cold air pierced through him and me, touching every part of our eyes and limbs, I had to shiver and twist to warm myself by the lone fire A.D. had become.
O something quivered like electric eels beneath his skin. As I grabbed him, I could not move him from the rail nor know how he might survive the sight of the lights that so beckoned from below, for I felt him inching closer with his body and soul to the void that stretched out then across the depth of that water. It’s okay, I said. It’s okay to come back to me, to the world again. It is.
No, he said and shook his head furious at me. He said it would be like this for me at the end, and now I believe him and can see it the more I look upon it as on the world itself. But as he spoke the rising wind took his words away from me a moment, before I could hear him continuing as he mentioned what I knew had been hidden in him all along, weighing on him heavily. Because the red doors in his house would never have wanted it any other way. Not for me.
The red doors? I said and knew then the force that had returned somehow to haunt him. Or maybe that had haunted him ever since he’d stepped behind them in the first place. For surely some prophecy had occurred there in that house of the dead for A.D. to be so lost now inside it. To still be so scared and yet elated to know it and to see it come true to life, and I shivered to ask further, to understand the meaning that now turned him into someone else entire. Into someone who would jump as sure as stand there to see the truth revealed and made known to him in the lights of that city, to see it fulfilled somehow, whatever path he had been led to believe was his. So then tell me, I said. Tell me about it.
There is nothing to tell. There is only the end now for me. Like he said.
Like who said? Ezra? About the lights? What did he say?
That they were markers for me. That they were my own special fire as later he saw the fire in Clara May, as it lingered there along her neck. In everyone there is the same visible spark and fire, waiting, patient. He pointed to the lights reflected on the waves and whispered. In time the fire catches up with everything and everyone.
Waiting for what?
For even you, he said, and A.D. turned his cold blue eyes on me and I had to shake my head to see the intensity of his belief in this prophecy.
And he showed you this? I said, struggling to shield myself from the furnace blast of his faith in this lunacy.
He did. But it was already there before I even arrived. It’s always been there. It’s been waiting all this time. I just needed someone to tell me.
To tell you what?
Why my destiny, of course, he said. The true path. The one I’ll take to death for sure, to end all this, and he waved his arms and smiled to feel the wind and coldness against his cheeks, his eyes, gazing all upon it in his wildness, in what he thought was the end for him, the end of all time. We stood above the coffins inside the red doors, Isaiah, and he was singing even before I entered, even before I saw him and knew that he sung for me. That he’d been waiting and singing all that time just for me.
But he called you usurper, a dilettante. He said you were stealing his songs. That was only after I saw he had my Clara May down in the wheel of fire.
Don’t you see? That was only after I saw he was watching and prophesying her fire, too. Then I had to act. I had to save her and spoke Catullus to release her, to release his spell, shocking him out of his power, for he did not think anyone else would know it nor use the power of it against him, those words. But still I believe his prophecy. I still believe him from before.
From before what? But he had turned again, had retreated inside himself, wandering the maze of his mind for the red doors in the house of the dead. I could see him remembering and blinking, and as he turned slightly from the rail, I thought I had the first part of him saved. Though I needed the whole part, the other part, the part of his mind and memory that was giving in ever so slightly to the words I kept using, asking, imploring him to remember, to come back to me, to come down from his delusional heights. All I needed to hear now were the words of the red doors that Ezra had spoken to him as if a curse, to make it complete, so that his destiny might be dispelled. So I could help him shake it forever by tearing it apart bit by bit, even if he seemed so set upon believing and making it true. So I waited. And that was how I finally heard the story of the red doors. With all the nefarious reach and influence they had on him, with what he seen that night, and surely, what he could never un-see again to save his soul.
THREE BODIES LAY BEFORE ME IN THEIR COFFINS, A.D. began. The red doors creaked behind me as I touched them—an old cripple with only one leg left and an aged grandmother with a worn down face. I was drawn to that house from the very beginning, after walking clear across town and into the woods toward the rising madness of the voices and dancing faces ringed ’round me ebbing and flowing into their ecstasy, but then dissolving as I stepped inside. It was as if I saw straight away the path parting for me. The people stepped aside as I made my way beyond the bar to where his voice was wafting as of a lullaby. The lullaby of mankind. O something soft and sweet from my past called in its reminiscence, as what a child might hear in the offing of a ship. Or in the sunny inlet of a bay. With what mystery yet to come enchanting me on into the darkness of his rhyme.
He was rhyming?
Very much so, with a voice lilting and true, as if risen across water, you might say. Or half-remembered from a dream. The sound of it was like a dream to me, in all its many paths. Like
one you could never forget.
The sputtering smokestack of a steamer trudged beneath us as he paused and blinked. The gray mist had parted so that as we leaned over to look down we could see the fire inside the belly of the engine and the blue-black sparks crackling up like inverse lightning bolts striking against the great cement towers of the bridge. As they did, the wheel of fire from Ezra’s house returned and burned its image ever brighter on the veil of my eyelids, even as A.D. himself seemed to push beyond its obvious parallel. For he skittered and flinched a moment, but somehow recomposed himself as that ship passed through. I thought he might dissolve entire into the frightening images and acts the story recaptured, but it only seemed to spur him on that much more as he spoke and wove his tale of wonder and dismay.
Then the third body caught my attention, for it was the one he was administering to with the utmost delicacy. It was a young woman, just a girl really, and the lifelessness of her and the world she left behind moved me. Frightened me. Even now. For she was blue, and her body stiff and naked as Ezra held her thin smooth arms up while he worked. Then he looked at me and touched his lips to her skin, emitting a small sound as he sucked something from her—her soul, her dreams, maybe? Her death? I couldn’t say. But I could see the fiery intensity in his sparkling blue eyes as they narrowed the more he set his thin red lips against other parts of her, as he licked and kissed and then sucked her flesh. Her death was the story he wanted, he said, as it is all our stories. For death is a release of fire and sparks, of the inevitable dreaming that spins out into the soil and sky and that was where his intersection was, he said. His house. His work. He thought he was positioned there to catch it all as it moved away from the world and up into the ether or down into the dirt, whichever way it went—after he touched and felt it completely. At least that was what he hoped, he said, and then he held her cold naked body and pressed his ear to her lips listening for the story of her death, his greedy hands cupping and pinching her small hard breasts.
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