by Unknown
He looks at me abashedly, as if scolding someone who loves him, whom he does not love back. This would never change, no matter how many years passed. I pause, then continue: “I mean, wouldn’t you like to give a recital, in the world?”
“But I …”
“You are quite talented. I could make arrangements for a suitable venue.”
A look of calm understanding comes over Sky Spider’s face, but then he shakes his head.
“You understand, don’t you? We are …”
“Mais non,” I interrupt him. And now I understand what has been gnawing at me.
Things that were here to begin with may not be taken away.
Why had Cerdan told me this?
To stay, or to go, it is up to me, he had said. If that is the case, it makes no difference if I return to the world, or if I disappear. But if that is so, why had he gone to the trouble of explaining the rules to me?
It must be there is something he does not wish to be taken away.
What might that be?
No, it couldn’t be. There is just one possibility I cannot get out of my mind.
She was my best student.
And on the forced march of a concert tour, she had suffered a miscarriage.
Only afterward did I realize what was strange.
The young woman flitting about.
Caught between the near shore and the far shore, the passing of years is lonely.
“Everyone else is just as they were when Neveu died. Only you are different.”
This can only mean one thing.
“You … are alive!”
For a long spell, Sky Spider remains silent. He is in agony. Realizing, though, that he cannot hold back, he slowly opens his mouth. In broken bursts he tells this most unlikely story.
Sky Spider was born in September 1981.
His mother, who had wandered unwittingly onto the Ghost Ship, went into an early labor and gave birth prematurely. She had not wanted children. Realizing there would be no evidence, she left the newborn in this place, and returned to the world alone.
The child had been raised by everyone on the plane, and Neveu had taught him to play the violin.
The ghosts on the plane were the only family he had ever known.
He was aware of the outside world. But all he had ever seen was the world within the fuselage of the plane. He only knew how to do one thing, and that was to play the violin.
“These people are my family. And on top of that, I don’t think I could survive on the outside.”
“You yourself …” I say, choosing my words carefully.
Pushing too hard might work against me here. I know that, but I can’t help myself.
“You’re the one who told me this, aren’t you? Torn from the world, growing old is lonely. You actually realize that you are L’Etranger. And it may be as you say, that the outside world is L’Enfer. Or it may be that we are in Purgatoire.”
“I know, all of this. If I exit the plane, I will have to go through immigration. And then customs. As a practical matter, one cannot just enter a country bringing along an extra person with no ID, with no records.”
“And also …” he starts to say. “This is where I was born. It is my fate that I cannot get out of here.”
“That’s not so,” I say. “Things brought here from somewhere else may be taken away. I believe that that is your fate. Think back! I play the cello!”
I would remove the cello from its case, and put Sky Spider inside.
At the Immigration Desk, there would be no hand luggage inspection, and I would pass right though. Then, Sky Spider would get out of the case, and walk through customs on his own two feet. The customs officer would not ask to check his visa or travel history. He would just show the cover of his passport, and breeze through.
“Hang on a sec!”
Sky Spider is visibly shaken by this absurd plan.
“I don’t even have a passport.”
I grin, and hand him a French passport.
“Remember, there was something in the breast pocket of the clothing that man left behind. I had to check it out.”
We are in a secret place. It was there for whatever reason, just because it might be useful at some point. I hear a sound outside. One of the ghosts is eavesdropping.
“The jig is up,” I mutter.
I had been utterly focused on convincing Sky Spider. This was foreseeable.
“We’ve been spotted.”
4.
It is like air pressure. The unanswered thoughts of the ghosts press against us, then penetrate. My own reflexive fear threatens to paralyze me, sap me of all my strength. Finally I would be made to see. Or perhaps there is a fate worse than death. Now it is too late. There must be seven or eight of them. Including Cerdan.
“That’s too bad,” he says, standing in the doorway, glaring at me.
“You, sir, may leave. But you may not take the young man.”
“You’re wrong!” I respond, in desperation, near collapse. “Don’t you think we should ask him what he wants?”
No.
Respecting Sky Spider’s wishes—that in itself would be fine. For an instant, though, I pause in my thoughts. If he stays behind, he might be able to work his way through this situation. I begin to cover my trepidation in a florid cloak, one that the boy might still see through. He’ll see my hesitation, and in that moment, be crushed.
These words will get us out of here. It is the only way, if I am to save the young man.
“Well …” Cerdan starts to say. “We are a family, are we not?”
“I …”
Sky Spider is clearly at a loss. The pressure of the dead is rising, as if to penetrate the crevices of his heart. And in that moment, a piercing C# is heard. For an instant, the ghosts turn their attention in that direction. On the far side of the aisle, Neveu has drawn the bow across the strings of the violin, and then she puts it down quietly.
“Follow your heart!” she says, in a voice that carries well. “The sound of those who waver is worth no more than fingernails!”
Her words pierce my heart.
A person who has lost their own music. A former cellist, unable to let go of his own regrets for nearly half a century. I may be able to get off this plane, but surely I would lose my music once again. Of what value is such a man?
A man who cannot play the cello. How would the young man see me then?
And what if? What if, if he were to leave the airplane, Sky Spider were to lose his own talent? There could be no guarantee. Turning to him, I see fear in the young man’s face. Surely I have overinflated my own expectations.
The ghosts step nearer.
Toward where I stand. And even more so, into my heart. Violent emotion swells within me. This is not something out of this world. It is something commonplace, pure happenstance. And that makes it all the more difficult to resist. For example, fear. For example, the relief of submission. The seduction of leaving the world behind, to live with music. Amid all of this mixed together, I listen. A high, eardrum-piercing pitch. The brakes of the car that had stolen my gift.
That’s right.
What had happened to me in that accident? I had moved to protect my instrument, and I had injured my arm, right? (Wouldn’t you like to try for yourself?)
Wrong.
This ship is not for testing people. It is for revealing their true nature.
I lift my head, and look around me at the ghosts. My voice is so relaxed it surprises even me.
“The moment may be imperfect, but music has value, don’t you think?”
I wait for Sky Spider to respond.
In a small voice, he says, “I would like to play a recital outside …”
A voice so minute it was on the verge of disappearing. But it had conveyed a clear
decision, and it brimmed with spirit. Cerdan stares at Sky Spider, but finally he nods in assent. “I understand,” he says.
Waves of something like sadness wash over me. Two or three particularly persistent ghosts reach out. But Cerdan quickly interposes himself. It is over in an instant. A left hook flashes, and before you know it, the ghosts are down on the carpet, moaning.
“Old man, you are very lucky,” Cerdan says caustically to me in my befuddlement. “Marcel Cerdan was middleweight champion, with a record of 119 wins and four losses. Just see what he can do!”
He adds, self-mockingly, “He died in 1949, in an Air France accident. As long as he remains here, though, times are good!” Cerdan’s support encourages me.
Damn straight.
Who cares if I cannot play the cello? That is simply an inescapable fact. If Sky Spider forgets how to play the violin, I can always teach him again. The living should live in reality.
I take the young man’s hand, and walk the path that Cerdan opens for me.
He has long, soft fingers. Surely that is how he earned the name Sky Spider.
The remaining passengers fall silent, respecting our wish. Sky Spider removes the clothes he received from the ghosts, puts on a coat of mine, and climbs into the cello case.
Neveu begins to play a song of parting.
I give Sky Spider an awkward hug, tell him I will see him again soon, and close the case. The future is unknown. We may not even be able to get past immigration. But there will be no turning back.
I am decided, and I take the first step.
The Ship of Dreams, where flows the music of a future that never comes.
Or, the superhuman daydream of a moment when music itself became visible.
You can get anything you want in Little Toke. Steve insisted that his cousin’s best friend fucked a sex robot in one of those capsule hotels at his bachelor party, said it was like fucking in space. I’ve never seen a sex robot or slept in a capsule hotel; Steve and I mostly stick to a handful of drugs, the electro-green drinks at Decker’s and the flesh-live geishas with purple hair and schoolgirl uniforms and nude mesh panties. And sushi. Best goddamn sushi I ever put my mouth on. Last time we were at Bento Friday, I swore the eel I had was still alive when I dunked it in soy sauce and crammed it into my face.
The handful of narrow streets that make up Little Tokyo grew up just off Washington Square Park, back when Anime Crash and Tower Records were destination shopping for otaku boys and nerd girls in Hello Kitty T-shirts to paw through basement racks of LaserDiscs and clamshell VHS cases. When both of those shut down, a conveyor sushi joint went in, then a bubble tea house, a Jas-Mart and a new comic shop, and then the whole rest of the mess. Someone put in a pachinko parlor, I shit you not. The three-block radius is a neon hellscape if you’re sober, but luckily, that wasn’t ever a problem for me and Steve.
We started with sake bombs at the Tokyo Tavern, where they were five for twenty bucks. It was an NYU freshman bar for sure; they never checked IDs and all the girls wore bad hair extensions and tube dresses that stuck tight in all the wrong places. They might blow you in the alley, sure, but it would be a sloppy, faux-porno job and they’d either start crying or throw up before they finished. No, for the girls we went to Decker’s.
Decker’s was packed like it always was on Friday nights. The DJ was blasting BabyMetal from the LED-lined plexi walls of his booth and our shot girl, a sweet little thing in a pink blazer with epaulets and microscopic shorts, bent over to flick on the green light of our table before sliding us two electro-shots. Steve put a fifty on the table and she smiled that practiced schoolgirl smile, pulled a small vial from inside her jacket and dropped two small tablets into our drinks. Steve grinned at me, lifted his glass, and we drank.
We left around midnight with sushi on our minds; Bento Friday was 24 hours and late night was half-price. “If we’re not eating pussy, sushi’s the next best thing,” Steve said. I was too drunk to do anything but smile like an idiot. The tablets, whatever they were, made me euphoric and stupid. It was a perfect state for a Friday night; the only way to truly experience Little Toke.
Passing the comic shop, I noticed a small enamel necklace of a rabbit. My roommate, Luce, was covered in tattoos of rabbits; she kept them covered with pencil skirts and long-sleeved silk blouses when she taught French at an Upper East Side private school, but she mapped them all out for me once, standing in our living room in her Siouxsie and the Banshees tank top and leopard-print boy shorts.
I was just drunk enough to be in love with her, convinced that this little token would woo her to strip down and go to bed with me. I slapped a fiver down on the counter, got the little beastie wrapped up and shoved it in my pocket.
“She’s never going to fuck you,” said Steve, firing up an unfiltered cigarette that smelled like a bum’s asshole. “She’s got no reason to. It’s her apartment, she doesn’t owe you shit.”
Luce hated Steve. He came over to get me one time and I don’t know what he said to her, but the next morning she offered to pay the cable bill herself if I promised never to bring him around again. But one night, he came to the apartment in the middle of the night, piss-drunk and repeating himself, convinced the cops were following him for a crime he wouldn’t tell me about. I let him sleep on our couch, and two days later I found a dead rat in my cereal box. Luce doesn’t fuck around. I like that about her.
“You should get a fucking tattoo,” said Steve, pointing upward to a limp banner with a dragon and a tiger wrapped around thick block letters spelling out tattoos. “Luce loves that shit, she’d probably fuck you then.”
In a better state, I would have told him to fuck off, but the second round of tablets the shot girl geisha pulled from the oversized sleeve of her microscopic kimono had made me suggestible and delirious. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, a tattoo. Fuck yeah!”
The place was empty except for an old gyno table and a wall of flash: block letters spelling “No Regrets” and “Only God Can Judge Me,” the Twin Towers with various combinations of eagles and flags and “never forget,” naked girls with too-skinny legs and pinpricks for eyes.
“How about this one?” Steve said, pointing to a purple girl with two swollen eyes and “Told Her Twice” on a banner scroll underneath. Fucked up as I was, I still didn’t find it funny.
The owner didn’t even seem to notice we were there. He was a squat old Japanese man covered in fading soldier ink, with a wispy mustache and short fingers like a grade-school clay project. He was smoking from a twisted metal pipe, porno magazine spread open on the counter, belt undone.
I pointed to a kanji labeled Dragon. “How much for that one?” I asked. We were in Little Tokyo, after all, might as well get something to commemorate the night.
“Fifty,” he grunted in an accent that suggested English wasn’t his second, third or even his fifth language.
I didn’t see a MasterCard logo anywhere and I wasn’t sure I had $50 in my wallet. But Steve did, and he slapped it down on the counter. “You can get the sushi,” he said. “I’m fucking starving; this is a bargain compared to what you’ll spend.”
“Luce!” I called, slamming the door. “Luce! I got something for you!”
She came out of her bedroom, in the romper she made from an oversized Gamera T-shirt that she’d giddily drunk-purchased off a street vendor when she and I first went to Little Toke. My dick got hard and sweat broke out on my forehead. “Jesus Christ, Vance,” she said. “It’s four in the fucking morning, what is your damage?”
I hoisted up my arm, stumbling backwards from the effort of movement. “Got my first tat!” I announced.
Her fingers felt like fresh spikes on my still-raw flesh. “A fucking kanji,” she said, shoving my arm away. “How original. Rough night in Little Toke?”
“Awesome night,” I insisted. The air in the apartment was too heavy. All the euphoria, the needle-gu
n high, the shots and the pills were all starting to dissipate into fragile atoms. I leaned against the doorframe for support and swore it buckled under my weight.
“Steve get one too?” Luce snorted, her voice sounding like it was a million miles away.
“Who knows what the fuck Steve did?” Last time I saw Steve he was leaving Bento Friday with a chunky blonde armed with an optic headmount and panties with a credit-card slot built right into the upper thigh.
“You two are such brosephs,” Luce snorted. “I figured you would have gotten matching tats on your dicks.”
I tried to flop onto the couch dramatically and instead landed flat on the floor. “And what about you, Manic Pixie Dream Girl?” I spat, hauling myself up against the coffee table. “Would you be more impressed if it said lapin?”
She laughed, hard and loud and mean. “You are really fucking drunk,” she said. “Aller se coucher, Pierre.”
“Va te faire foutre.” I tried to stand and storm out, but my bedroom was miles away, the whole apartment twisted and slanted like a funhouse. My arm throbbed; the skin around my tattoo crawling. I don’t know how the hell she sat still long enough to get inked up like she did. I would have chewed off my arm to escape that bugged-out ache.
I woke up on the couch, still drunk, at 6:43 a.m., took a piss and fell into my own bed. Around nine I heard Luce leave, and when I woke up again at 9:27 she had brought me a large bodega cup of black coffee, a glass of water and two Alka-Seltzers. My left arm hurt so fucking much I couldn’t even move it to tear open the packet.
“You should get that checked out,” she said, clicking off the news report about a dead girl found in Prospect Park when I staggered out into the living room. “It shouldn’t be that red.”
“It’s fine,” I muttered. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Yeah, well, I shouldn’t have been such a twat last night,” she said. “You were pretty fucked up. What the hell were you on and why the hell were you speaking French?”