Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

“How they treatin’ you today, sweet girl?” Papa Sky asked.

  “Okay,” she replied, and both the question and the answer soothed her, although she couldn’t have said who she thought “they” were.

  “Well, you just hang in there. You got friends in high places. What you wanna hear today?”

  She shrugged, which was a request in itself. Dealer’s choice…and when the dealer was this good, it was all flow.

  Papa Sky put the shaved Leblanc reed of the 1922 Selmer alto sax (this instrument that was almost, but not quite, as old as he was) to his wetted lips, and it was an incantation and supplication in one.

  The glorious sounds poured out, smooth perfection, throaty and soaring and exultant.

  The Girl recognized the tune. The last time he’d played it, the old blind black man (the half cubano as he called himself) had told her it was called “Night and Day.”

  She closed her eyes and let the melody fill her, began to move to it. And this was no longer just going through the motions, nor feigning interest in the arabesque and pas de deux that had once been her universe.

  Night and day, you are the one….

  She gave herself over to the river of harmony, let its cool voice fill every pore, engulf eye socket and fingertip, ankle and neck, liberated into expression and movement.

  The way it had been before, when Luz Herrera had taken the photo (so exactly like the one atop her night table now) of her as Giselle at the March recital in mid-jete, enraptured, effortless.

  Freed from the pull of earth, and its cares.

  Weightless.

  Before weightlessness had become a curse and a shaming, and a constant source of danger…

  But that pang of memory was not for now; if that waking-dream existence lingered in her it was pushed far down and away, like a sliver imbedded and grown over with flesh, like venom lurking in a vein.

  Let it go….

  There was only this moment, this gift, here and real and fine if she just held on to it….

  As she twirled and swayed, inseparable from the tumble of exquisite notes one on another, the image came to her of Nijinsky as the Faun and the Rose, posed with that excruciating, incredible mix of delicacy and power that only he could attain, so expressive and perfect that these weren’t still images to her-she saw him in the glory and magnificence of motion.

  The clear, undeniable message, the siren song that had drawn her so long and with such constancy…You are your real self when you are removed from self, when you give yourself over to what the cosmos calls you to be, and that thing might be called Destiny. Or simply Truth.

  To see that truth, to not be blind to it…

  And yet Nijinsky thought he saw it, heard what he took to be its call. He followed it, and that false god led him to his destruction.

  She knew that god, too, now, had been snared by it.

  But not in this moment, this sanctuary, blessed and released…

  The song ended, the notes held, then drifting away, to unknown, unreachable places.

  The Girl settled to stillness, exhaled a slow breath. She opened her eyes.

  Inigo was there, watching her. As she knew he’d be.

  Hanging back in the shadows against the cold stone wall of an office building, gazing at her through Gargoyle sunglasses. Though she could not see his eyes behind them, she knew from past encounters that they were white as pearl, with only the faintest vertical slash of gray for the pupil.

  White like the old jazzman’s eyes, like Papa Sky’s. But not blind; Inigo could see as well as she could; better, particularly at night.

  He was her age, but shorter-smart like her, though-bundled up not against the cold, because there was no cold, but against the light. The dark navy hood was pulled low over his broad forehead, the sides of it drawn tight against his bony face, that pale skin that was blue-gray and spoke of sickness but also, paradoxically, of strength.

  The Girl couldn’t say why he looked this way. But then, she couldn’t say why she looked the way she did, wasn’t sure she wanted to know, to hear the insistent thrumming deep in her bones. It was quiet now. Sometimes it seemed aching to scream.

  Is it real or Memorex?

  Let it go….

  “Hey,” Inigo said to her.

  “Hey yourself.”

  Papa Sky smiled his smoky smile. “Now we got enough to really make an audience.”

  “Nearly didn’t get through,” Inigo said. “The Bridge-”

  He stopped himself, shot a worried glance at Papa Sky, whose face had darkened, a silent caution.

  The Girl knew he hadn’t meant the Brooklyn or Verrazano Narrows or any of the others familiar to her and to Manhattan. There were things that could be said here and things that couldn’t, and the rules were always unspoken.

  She remembered her friend Margie Daws once confiding about her own family, as the two of them had loitered after phys ed beside the volleyball net at St. Augustine’s, “The best stories are the ones we never talk about.” (And she wondered just now how she could so clearly recall Margie Daws, but not the owner of that other room in her apartment-the one who slept in that perpetually rumpled bed.)

  The Girl was full of questions for her street-corner companions, but she invariably found herself faced with a silence that proclaimed, You can’t get there from here.

  Still, she was grateful to be here in this brief respite with two who were undeniably not mirages or puppets of the mist but actual people, regardless of what prohibitions they might have forced upon them.

  There were other acquaintances she recalled, less as if she had met them on the way to her own daytime obligations and more as if they were characters in a story she had been told. Still, she could visualize them…almost: a Russian hot-dog vendor, she recalled dimly, and an impetuous, powerful young woman, and a wild-eyed homeless man. There was a veil there. Was it real or was it…?

  In some way she could not quite summon, she knew they were real; had become a good deal more than that in later times.

  But none of them were here now, that was for sure.

  Papa Sky had come first, appearing on this street corner or one much like it days and days before (hard to tell how long precisely, with each day so similar). Inigo had arrived some time later, suddenly standing there as he stood now, seemingly drawn by the music, transfixed by it.

  There was a familiar quality to him, although the Girl knew she hadn’t met him before, not this specific individual. But in the murkiness of memory she knew that she had encountered ones very like him, vague names in the cloudy waters coalescing into…Freddy? and…Hank?

  The Girl had lingered on that day when Inigo made his debut, had drawn him aside into a shrouded alley curtained from prying eyes.

  “Where are you from?” she demanded of him.

  “Here,” he said simply, and she knew from how he said it that he didn’t mean these streets like her street, but really here, where this truly was, or at least what lay beyond her island home, the outside that was excluded from her.

  Since then, she and Inigo had stolen moments away when there was a lull in her imposed schedule, blank spots to fill in. They went to the Guggenheim sometimes (the art was always different) or to Sbarro’s at Times Square (where she always had just enough money).

  They had both been shy of each other at first, and wary, too. But longing for company, in time they had opened themselves in a slow dance of growing companionability.

  She assembled his past from the tiny fragmented pieces he revealed to her, like a jigsaw with more missing than revealed.

  He was alone, his mother and father gone.

  (As was she…)

  The father had disappeared first, under mysterious circumstances. There was a curious irony to that, because Inigo had been named by his mother after a character in The Princess Bride, one whose raison d’etre was to avenge the death of his father.

  Then his mother had exited, too. Not departed into death like Tina’s own mother, but on a voyage of some
sort, a searching. Inigo had been left in the care of some woman…a friend of his mother’s? At a place his father had worked?

  The details were musty, uncertain. The Girl couldn’t be sure of any it….

  Or that on a day back in summer, this friend of Inigo’s mother had vanished, too, removed in some appalling, different way, had left Inigo derelict and stranded here, abandoned yet somehow shielded….

  Had that friend’s name been Agnes Wu, or was the Girl merely confused again, mixing up what she saw and felt and remembered? It was all jumbled and scrambled together, smudged and blurring in her mind as she tried to hold on to it, elusive as steam hissing off a subway grate.

  She knew this, though: On that specific summer day, at a certain very precise time in the morning, Inigo had begun to change.

  The same day and time as when the Girl herself-

  As if her thoughts had somehow prompted it, a dark rumbling swept through the sky like a giant clearing his throat, the ground trembling in sympathetic vibration.

  The Girl and Inigo both shrunk away from it, and there was even a ripple of concern across the old jazzman’s face.

  But then Papa Sky began to play, and all grew calm.

  The Girl knew this one, too, from her mother’s record collection, the collection the dimly, almost-recalled other had brought along with the books and bookcase so long ago.

  “Stormy Weather.”

  The Girl closed her eyes and danced and was free again.

  But had she looked to see, she would have spied Inigo watching her from his place in the shadows, and would have known he needed nothing more to worship.

  The music faded again and the Girl returned.

  “Time you best be movin’ on,” Papa Sky advised. “Wouldn’t want you late for lessons.” She knew somehow that he wasn’t referring to the mockery of the classes that were the same, but instead cautioning her not to light here too long, to draw a scrutiny she would not want to incur.

  “Later,” she said, already starting away.

  “Bye, Tina,” Inigo said.

  The Girl paused and turned back. “Call me Christina,” she said. A more formal name, but it suited this different time, this different place.

  She headed off down the street to walk among the mists and shadows and echoes that were the same every day….

  Every Mobius-strip day.

  “This part always creeps me out,” Inigo said to Papa Sky.

  New York was shutting down. Or at least this section of it, now that Christina was gone.

  Growing dim, the people and buildings subsiding around them, losing detail, like clay sculptures submerged in water and drawn out again. Or Adam and Eve in reverse motion, God in an act of un Creation, returning them to the mud again.

  The darkness encroached, not at all like a sunset with night coming on, but instead like the cessation of consciousness as death drew near.

  The Place to Be turning into the Non-Place.

  Inigo stowed the Gargoyle shades in his jacket pocket and threw back the hood, letting his blanched skin feel the caress of the thinning air.

  “Quittin’ time…” Papa Sky crooned. To one who knew the blind man less well than the boy did, there might be the assumption that he was unruffled by the darkness because darkness was his constant state.

  But Inigo knew this was not the case-Papa Sky was just cool, in the way that eight decades of hard road and iron discipline had lent him a calm and strength that were rarely shaken by anything.

  The old man bent his long, lean frame to the open case that rested on the pavement, set the gleaming sax gently within it as though it were an infant, wadded with cotton to hold it safe.

  He snapped the case shut and stood with it, felt blindly with his free hand for where his fiberglass cane lay against the edge of the nearby building. His fingers closed around it with deft assurance.

  Time for them each to make his own way home. Or what they called home now. Sure as hell not here.

  To go while they still could.

  Inigo fished in his pocket. His fingers found the coin that was always there, always newly born.

  He pulled out the buffalo nickel, not knowing the source of it, at least not precisely. Dr. Sanrio, he supposed. That would be his sick idea of a joke.

  The buffalo had been the first to be affected, out beyond the mountains in the federal lands, and the Indian lands, too…and Inigo’s father had been the second.

  They had left him here, his father and then his mother, and Agnes Wu, too, when the hard rain had come down.

  Fortunately for Inigo, he had turned into something that could stand that hard rain, something that was pretty damn hard itself, little and wiry and tough. And although he had not been wanted by what remained to perceive him, It had not-fortunately, again-regarded him as sufficient of a threat to bother to dislodge him.

  (And perhaps, too, some residual affection Agnes held for him-or whatever of Agnes was still left-had lent him some sort of asylum, reprieve.)

  Which hadn’t made the loneliness any easier…

  Until, that was, the new arrivals made it onto the scene, these two good souls, these friends…and the additional interloper who was anything but Inigo’s friend.

  Inigo slid the coin into the breast pocket of Papa Sky’s suit, just behind the white handkerchief that was always immaculately folded. He said the words he always said at this point, the ritual. It was what his father had said whenever he’d given Inigo his allowance, before Dad headed out on his rounds at the facility, or set off into the Badlands.

  “Something for the ferryman.”

  Papa Sky nodded. “Always got to pay your own way…”

  Inigo started off, but Papa Sky beckoned him back. He leaned down and whispered into the boy’s ear, the ear that was so delicately pointed, tufted with fine, white hair.

  “I had a word with the Leather Man,” Papa Sky said. “He told me it’s time.”

  Inigo drew in a tight breath of thin, chill air.

  It wasn’t a surprise, not really. He knew this day would come. But still, he felt far from ready.

  Not that any of that mattered, though.

  Yoda could be a little green dude, or he could be an old blind black man, or something with scales and wings.

  There is no try, there is only do.

  Inigo was the messenger.

  Christina returned home as the sun was dipping below the spires of the city, the sky streaked and fiery.

  Her body ached from the hours of practice at the School of the American Ballet, obeying the commands of the shade that looked and sounded like the essence of the retired prima ballerina she had so idolized and emulated in recent years, years that seemed more a dream than the dream that had awakened her this morning.

  Wearily, she climbed the four flights to her flat, her book bag feeling as if weighted with stones. She fished out her key as she drew near the door-then saw that it stood half-open (and she knew she had locked it on leaving that morning).

  With a choked cry, she dropped her bag and the key, dashing inside, the hope surging in her like a drowning man swimming for the surface that at last he had found her-the one she could almost, not quite, remember-that he had come as he had promised her, back in the place she could not summon, but that her mind told her was named Boone’s Gap.

  But the figure sitting in the one good chair, silhouetted against the dying embers of the day that slanted in through the window, was not the one she waited for.

  From the outline of him, she knew he was wearing his manshape again. He drew on his cigarette in the darkness, and the red tip of it was a malevolent eye.

  What monstrosities would walk the world were men’s faces as unfinished as their minds….

  “What a day I’ve had,” he muttered.

  She settled into the rocker that her lost mother had sung lullabies and held her in; that her lost father had torn the runners off in a fit of rage, before she was born.

  Soon you’ll be past the pain, her vi
sitor had told her long ago, on a rooftop over a thousand miles away.

  She wondered when that would be.

  He had never touched her in violence, never physically harmed her in any way. But he had committed horrors, and she had been the unwilling witness to much of it. Like the inhuman being in the Harrison Ford movie that was older than she was, the one who in the end found a dreadful and curious compassion.

  I have done questionable things….

  She said nothing as he unburdened himself through the night, opening his dragon heart to her once more.

  FOUR

  GATEWAY

  It took Cal and his companions nearly two hours to search out a shelter, one big enough to hold thirty road-weary travelers. In a different terrain (one with such novel variations as valleys and mountains and hillsides, not just an endless expanse of grassland), Cal would have been content securing some cave in a cliff face-ideally one with no bears, wolverines or other irritable residents, not to mention tunnels full of grunters or portals that could suddenly open onto different states.

  But as Cal had learned in many a quick improvisation on this journey, you worked with what you had.

  “I think this’ll do,” Cal said as they drew up rein and surveyed the square structure sitting smack-dab in the middle of all that grass that stretched from the horizon on the left to the horizon on the right (not to mention the horizons ahead and behind).

  Goldie dismounted and strolled up to the entrance. The glass door that said IN was shattered and hanging off its hinges, while the door that said OUT was intact, if almost black with grime. Of course, no one paid the least attention to those rules anymore, not that anyone particularly ever had.

  Seen from here, the interior appeared utterly dark and quiet. Goldie turned back to the others. “The king seems to be gone from his palace.”

  “Palace?” Colleen asked.

  “The Palace of Material Goods, the central image and shrine of all we once held dear. Or at least, you guys did-I myself took a path I prefer to think of as more stripped-down and Zen.”

  Cal thought of the vast mountain of scavenged goods Goldie had assembled in his underground home in the tunnels beneath New York, the place Goldie had led him that first night after the Change, where Cal had found his sword. You seemed pretty damn materialistic back then, he reflected, but said nothing; he was just glad Goldie was talking again.