Purchase

by Christopher K. Doyle

  I would not bow to his anger then, nor shy away from him in the least. But I just kept my head level and watched him, taking it all in, all the vitriol he had in him to expend. Before I seen his anger finally flush out a bit with his hate, with his exhaustion in waiting on word of his wife, and so I used my lower, calmer voice to counteract all his spite. I just think Runnymede is scared of us is all. I mean, that’s why he didn’t say our names that night, right?

  Jesus! What are you talking about now?

  Our names. The night of the performance in Bristol. When Ms. Clara May first appeared again. Parmenides, I said and moved closer to him, my coffee cup rattling on its saucer. You remember, don’t you? In the library at the Peabody. The first time you charged him with his falseness, when he said this whole Earth was changing in every moment and you said it wasn’t. Sure, you stood right there beneath him in your street rags and offal and told him no as no other had probably ever done, and he marked you for it; I swear. He marked you for sure in his mind, and maybe that was why he come to me then, to tell me.

  Come to you? In a bar. To tell you what? He was scouring his reflection and reached out to touch it now as if to trace some indecipherable pattern, some riddle in his long oval face, something that he wanted to get at below the surface—an instinct perhaps, a source.

  To tell me about how close we are.

  Close to what?

  Than we’ve ever been before. Since we first started. Closer to beating him out, is what I think. Goddamnit, you know it’s almost been three years since I first seen you. Three years and we’ve only gotten better. We’ve only gotten better and can’t stop now. We can’t stop for nothing.

  Not even for my child? he said and stopped touching the glass and slumped so that his wide forehead touched the clean surface. I could see the heat smudges of his flesh all spreading in a little mist cloud around him as he looked out, scouring the street.

  Maybe that was why I seen him? I said after a long spell of watching him. Maybe that was why he come to me and took a name from me. Because of your child. Because he thinks we’re finished. Maybe that was why?

  He took a name from you? He’d straightened up at mention of this and wiped the sweat that still clung there to his brow with the glazier’s fire below burning brighter and brighter (for we hadn’t even heard him come in at all with the commotion building in the street).

  He took a goddamn name from me, I said. The same one I showed you. And maybe he wants to take all the names. So we can’t get them no more. So we can’t beat him out and take what he wants. That celebrity. That fame and success. And all that truth. I held up my empty red-rimmed hand to show him and even I could hear I must have sounded like a madman, that I’d gone beyond the pale, as they say. Though, at least, I was steadfast in my urgency, and didn’t waver my hand none and could have walked a straight line with my eyes closed if he’d asked me. Though when he finally did turn to glance at it, to scour my fingers and arm, before giving my overall appearance a general once over, I could hear a loud sigh escape his lips as he rubbed his chin considering everything I’d said. Sure, I was a mess, there was no escaping it, and I’d seen a vision perhaps, and maybe it was my own self that had dropped that paper slip into the candle flame anyhow in my drunkenness. But maybe, just maybe, I hadn’t; and anyway, how could he say? How could he know anything about it? As he turned to the window again, shaking his head back and forth, a siren wailed outside and the flashing red and blue lights paused on his face as I watched him narrow his eyes.

  Jesus Christ, he said, is this the day, speaking to the windowpane, not moving a breath, not turning an inch. Is this the goddamn day the whole world’s gone mad? Out in the street there was shouting that echoed up through the whole building, and as I stepped closer to A.D. to watch, standing beside him, I seen it all but couldn’t believe it for my life. Not an ounce of it. A crowd of men had thrown down their hats and were trying to force their way bodily into the Mercantile. Even as a line of police held clubs and batons and beat them back as that one solemn bank official in his black suit and monocle pointed at a few that must have done something awful to raise the ire in his cheeks, for they were flush and blotchy and he was shaking his head he looked so forlorn to inform upon them. But he continued anyway, shouting even as one man stood at some remove from the scrum, and seemed raised into his own invisible buffer of space and time. He was raising his arm slowly at the monocled man and in the late morning sunlight A.D. and I could just make out the tinny glinting pistol and seen the puffs of white smoke before the shots—CRACK CRACK—reached our ears and the pandemonium truly set in.

  O the police reached then for their guns and fired on the man who stood out in the middle of the street and just kinda fell over as if he were doing nothing more than laying down to take a nap. The monocaled man had already slumped back against the front window of the Mercantile and was waving his face with his hand for he seemed to be inundated with a terrible heat. He clawed so at his suit and tie as a number of police stood above him and touched their hats, raising them to their foreheads, as one by one they spoke to themselves but could do nothing for the few minutes it seemed the monocaled man steeped and boiled and then ceased to be as a wide wet puddle spread beneath him. That was when the police chief himself, I think, arrived and draped a white sheet from the trunk of his cruiser over the slumped man’s head, resting there now for all eternity on the sidewalk with his soul.

  Jesus, A.D. muttered, Jesus Christ Almighty, and he watched the same as I as that crowd raged on in their ceaseless fury, before finally disbanding as more police arrived and a fire truck sprayed across the whole lot of them and then an ambulance and even a few reporters scoured the scene with photographers. The streets were filling now with folks gawking and running back and forth and waving their hands as a red police line was strung up and wooden sawhorse barriers cordoned off the sidewalks. But still more folks wanted to get into the Mercantile to continue with whatever business they were so keen to keep at even after all this madness had just occurred.

  Here, I said and I handed him his guitar because it was the only thing I could think of to get our lives back from the edge of that window, to get us back into any semblance of reason. With our success over the years, A.D. had since bought a few nice Martin guitars that he kept in his bedroom, and as I strummed across the open strings of one, to hear the true tuning of it, and the sound rang up to reverberate and fill the whole apartment with that angelic sound, it took him another minute to realize he held his own guitar for he was still watching the street. I strummed again, and started a line of notes that I’d been tinkering with for a while, and that got him finally to turn to see me as maybe he’d never seen me before. As someone at the end of the chaos. As someone to raise him up out of the madness. Someone to confide in. Someone to keep. You’re right, he said. You’re goddamn right. That bastard never did say our names that night.

  He never did. My voice was flat and listless, without any emotion, for I suppose most of it had already been drained away in seeing those two shootings, the ones I shall never forget. But the music helped. The music always helped. O it raised us up above everything else, and bandied about inside us then almost as a mysterious presence or cerecloth of intervention. Something to spell and steal away and bleed the hours and take us bodily through a series of upward moving steps into some ethereal delight. Something that only we were ever meant to enter. How else can I say it with words that are not adequate? We were lost then amongst ourselves. Lost amongst our own harmonious divinations and reveries. Lost until the lone echoing footsteps of someone approaching seemed the very metronome of our making.

  The streets had since been cleared and as we shook our hands out from playing away the hours and looked at the darkness below, dotted now with the yellow haze of streetlights and the empty storefronts snaking in an undulating line along State Street, a single figure cloaked in some otherworldly blankets and lightness stepped out beneath the window and started up towards us. She was
at the door before we could even turn around.

  A.D.? A.D.? It was Ms. Clara May. Jesus, but she was strong. She was smiling as she stepped inside the doorway. Her rosy cheeks were clear and shining as she nodded to the wrapped and perfect blankets slumping off her as she came forth. Nodding to the burnished center of her, as the brightest, most astonishing face you’d ever seen stared up at A.D. The little one yawned and made a soft gurgling sound as A.D. fell to one knee to breathe in the sweet warm milk scent of her—his child, his girl—as for moments and moments he touched her soft downy head as he knelt speechless and mute in his happiness. It’s your daughter, Ms. Clara May said and smiled as the room refracted into a prism of light and broken geometries for the tears bathed her eyes and lips and chin as surely they bathed mine and even our A.D.’s, for he looked on her and breathed in short quick breaths to hear the news again from her own strong lips. It’s your daughter Jolie.

  XXVI

  Miss Tuesday Staunton ~ From the far edge of the world ~ A burnished pearl ~ The loss and faith of the thing ~ A pantomime or reiteration ~ How it wove its curse upon them ~ That miracle electric ~ Drifting like snowflakes ~ The flames of circumstance and hazard ~ A little more returned

  BLACK TUESDAY WAS WHAT THEY CALLED IT, and I would joke later with A.D. that was what they should’ve named their daughter, Miss Tuesday Staunton, because Ms. Clara May certainly didn’t want to use his last name (though if he ever mentioned it to her, I cannot rightly say). But everything pretty much bottomed out after that, considering our funds and the investments Benjamin Marks had been letting glide along easy-as-pie for months had been taken down with almost everything else financial and monetary in the country.

  It was a shame and a disservice for certain, cause when he didn’t appear that night nor the next, nor the next after that—even after Ms. Clara May and A.D. seemed like they might have turned some blind corner with Jolie, that they might be a tried and true married couple for once—the news of Benjamin’s absence was of a trifling matter to them. As of something sad and dispassionate washed ashore from the far edge of the world.

  Benjamin went to see his cousin, Ms. Clara May said almost off-handedly, when I finally got around to ask. Not because I worried for our monies and accounts and such (which I never did have any understanding of anyways), but because I’d seen the man when he’d let me out of the car that morning, when he’d needed something—anything—to hold onto and to show his love to and to have his love returned to him. Since I’d also read of the many suicides in New York City after this whole mess started, I felt responsible in a way for Benjamin. Hell, I needed to know if he was alright, if only for my own conscience. But I’m sure you already heard how it went. What with all those financiers and stockbrokers and bank managers plummeting from the tops of skyscrapers and clock towers and bridges for days and days to come, so that you would a thought a perpetual rain of bodies had lined the streets and oak trees of that darkly nefarious metropolis. It got so that when I looked out the window from Ms. Clara May’s, I thought the Bristol streets would have been lined like that, too, with the broken and rotting shapes of the desperately depressed. But of course, my eyes only ever focused on that one spot, where that man had been shot down in the street. My eyes centered on it always, for I still seen the blood stained concrete and had to shake myself free every time from thinking on it in those days, just to move on in my own sad way.

  Cousin? I said, trying to parse together her words.

  In Harrisburg, she said, he was his investor. But it was no use after that. She had Jolie in her arms, and was swaying side to side and singing in that magic voice of hers. When I heard it and thought on my own baby girl in Annie’s arms all those years ago, after the toil of work had been done for the day, with the sun setting low over the Blue Ridge Mountains, dropping like a burnished pearl to flare out with its great dripping colors and ripples of clouds, I had to remember the fair picture of family life. I had to remember how it could fill your whole soul, making you complete, as if nothing else mattered, and left them right then and there and didn’t once look back to tempt my A.D. into anything new anymore, into anything at all really. Hell, it was easy. In light of Jolie’s sweet and simple face, I’d just decided to quit that plan for good now, to quit it all and to change somehow. To do something else, something free and clear, anything but dragging him back up into the ridge.

  I mean, how could I? I murmured as I stepped into the dusky light. It was November already. The town was still on the edge of all that anxiety and need, almost as if it had condensed in the ether like another skin we couldn’t get out from under, it was so thick and waxy. That in looking around, you’d have thought nearly everyone had been ground down to dust to know their life savings and earnings were nothing more than empty deposits in a land washed clean of any foundation. It was a phantom world was what it was. Dry husks of people stumbled past. Some dragging behind them shredded bank statements and savings receipts, while others just trailed nothing more than the frayed end of a rope from some pawned wagon or goat. And some didn’t even stumble at all, but just sat right there in the street where the news had met them. When they’d realized all was lost, that all was wiped free of any property. That the institutions and implements of success that had seemed as insurmountable and staunch to them as allies in a high-off fortress had left them as impoverished and alone as a severed stump set out to wither in the wind.

  It was all gone now. All of it. Just waste and chaff like the powdery smoke a magician might blow from the flat edge of his palm. The more I stopped and looked on them, the more I could see their sad faces hollowed out by the knowledge of it all, by the loss and faith and the end of the thing, of what they’d trusted. This commerce, I said and stood outside the bar that Runnymede had appeared in that night and remembered the cold, calculated way his white teeth had chomped down together annunciating that word, and for some reason I wanted to see him again. I needed to see him again, to hear what he thought of all this.

  It gave me a chill to remember him, and to think of his delicious confidence in the elegance of the system, and the change he professed in the things to come. But just the same I slid into the corner table where I’d looked dumbstruck and not a little bit envious upon the smooth pudding of his face. Sitting there, I drained my whiskey scouring the walls and anonymous depths for the man to reappear. I looked at my hand and held it over the same flickering candle flame, but there was no name with me now to burn up into anything. There was no name at all in my mind, as I drank more and thought on the crackling quick shots I’d heard, and then the clean white puffs of smoke when that man had fallen down into a trance of death and sadness where his life had taken him. The empty turn he’d chosen. And I eyed the people behind me and the ones who’d just stumbled in to see how the world was turning, if violence and emptiness was to fill up the remainder of it. If the black iron hull of the world was any indication of the barrenness stretched before us. Much like the barrenness of the smudged window I watched, as each vague shape formed in its murky edge as of a pantomime or reiteration of destruction. Waiting. Waiting all the while for Runnymede to rise up again like the ghost of death itself. The ghost of something long past and yet to come. But there was nothing. No dramatic entrance. No sulfurous odor. No insidious speech.

  Music was all I heard.

  Turning my ear to the end of the bar, the green radio dial glowed supernatural and queer and from its wooden depths a voice was rising. Fiddles. Guitar. A bass line and some drums combined softly, and then more gradually grew into a much greater marching dirge. Something martial and bright was rising to its heady wave before the first clear lyrics sung out as if writ from a page of the wind itself, and it was Runnymede, I tell you—my Runnymede—singing to me even here, singing for all he was worth. His voice had found me even as dozens of the gathered drunks had started to chime in, following each verse as it wove its curse upon them, as if branding them anew to the pale fire of the world, to the fire yet to come, everlastin
g, in its commerce of waves and sadness and regret. Amen.

  ISAIAH?

  I turned to the sound, but there was nothing. Just the mirror’s glazed shimmer above the mantle reflected my confusion as I looked upon it. My face. Haggard. Ashy and drawn. The creases of my mouth glinted with the whiskey accumulated from drinking in that sour place, with my gray hair stringy and clumped and spotted with bits of white dust and soot that had fallen down from the rafters as more sad revelers piled in. As more voices called out. As I’d felt the sound and scent and feel of life collapsing upon me to know that Runnymede could be anywhere there was a radio now, anywhere there was a signal or conduit of that miracle electric to beam his devilish charm across the world. That he was connected, attached to some darker current, terrible and true, and that was why I’d had to run straight out of there during the middle of that thing—that song—and waver home.

  There was something so wrong in its utterance, something so constrained and vainglorious in the self-pleasing depths of it. That even as I’d wanted to spy Runnymede himself, to stand and confront him about his vaunted commerce and all that it had done for us, I couldn’t bear to hear it no more. To hear the crowd in that bar singing along as the swell grew louder, and his voice grew stronger, for even I’d heard this one before. Runnymede had just put out another album and was touring and touting the strength of it and so great long articles were appearing in publications and smart glossy magazines. Even with the country floundering into the hole of its own demise, music and the power of the radio were busting up at the seams to tame the sadness and despair and make a nice tidy profit in the process. Music, I said, and alcohol, and muttered the words, before hefting another log onto the fire. They’re the only constants. After all this.