Soul Standard

by Richard Thomas

  Manny looks up.

  “Dormant, it doesn’t do anything. You can pick it up and carry it around. I mean, I wouldn’t put it in your mouth or anything. But if you hit it, like I did with my hand, or with something harder, like a sledgehammer, it emits this yellow-green phosphorous. Ground up into a powder it has healing powers, like the horn of a rhino. It’s an aphrodisiac, they tell me. Melted down into a liquid, it can be forged into the strongest metal known to man. And…”

  “There’s more?”

  “One more thing. The meteorites out at the house?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve counted a couple dozen, but they keep coming. I don’t know why.”

  Manny sits back, rubbing his chin.

  “Nice opening. I’m impressed. What else?”

  “Could I have some water, you think?”

  Manny leans into a small box on the desk. “Bridgette, water please?” He leans back and studies my face. “I’m not sure I want to see the other item.”

  “You do,” I say.

  A tall blonde walks in the door at the back of the room, but I can hardly even register her presence. She sets down the silver tray and pours two glasses of water, turns around and heads back out. I take a deep pull at one of the glasses and continue.

  I walk over to the wagon and take out the last item I have.

  It may be my saving grace. Can’t be for sure.

  I slowly unwrap the dusty, grimy rags from around the bottle, set it down on the desk with a dull thud and step away. Manny stares at the bottle of thick black but doesn’t say a word. I sit down and cough into my handkerchief, nothing but sticky black residue now. I hold up the cloth to him, and his eyebrows raise.

  “Jesus. You weren’t kidding.”

  “I need to wrap this up,” I say. “Your Juice man is a fraud.”

  “What? He’s the smartest man I know. He’s an epic scientist, a chemist. The man is a genius! And you fucked his wife, that’s why we’re here. You will not besmirch his reputation.”

  “Do you have any vodka here, in a clear bottle?”

  “Sure, to your left. There’s an entire cabinet full of liquor,” he says. “You going blind?”

  “I am.” I wander over and grab the closest bottle and bring it back to the desk. “You’ve no doubt seen the Juice before,” I say. “Ever imbibed?”

  “Mayhaps. Once or twice.”

  “What color is Juice, Manny?”

  “It’s a rich purple, the color of an eggplant. Any fool knows that.”

  I reach into my jacket. “Easy, Manny, relax,” I say, pulling out an eyedropper. I hold it up to him and show him what it is. I pull the cork out of the bottle, lower the eyedropper into the neck of the bottle, and fill it up. I turn to the bottle of vodka and twist off the cap and squeeze the eyedropper until a few drops falls into the clear liquid. The rich purple weaves its way slowly down toward the bottom of the bottle, branching out like the veins of a leaf, a thick stem down the middle, spreading out farther and farther until the tendrils hit the side of the bottle and like a flash of light the entire bottle is purple.

  “Damn,” Manny says. “This is legit?”

  “For sure.”

  “Where does this come from, this black tar?”

  “Me.”

  Manny and I slip into the dance club, two old men staring at the young talent. We stand in the dark room, lights spinning, stunned and tired. He waves one of the waitresses over and whispers in her ear. She’s off like a shot toward the front of the club and Rebecca is standing next to us in seconds.

  “Dad, what are you doing here? You know Mr. Montenegra?” she yells over the music. She glances from him to me and back. My heart fills my chest with rapid-fire beats. I knew she was in the business still, knew she couldn’t get out, but this close, right next door. Fate is a fickle bitch, yeah?

  “We go way back,” Manny shouts. “Turns out we’ve known each other for years, my dear. Small world, eh?”

  “It is,” she says. She turns to me. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, Rebecca, I am. But I’m going to go away for a bit.” I turn to Manny and his eyes sparkle. “Cancer.”

  “Oh my God,” she says. “What can I do?”

  “I’ll be fine. Manny knows some people. They’re going to help me get rid of this poison I’ve got in me. Radical new treatment. Blood spinning, or something like that. It’s hard to explain.”

  “Can I come with you, help you?”

  “No, darling, you stay here, work hard—be a good girl. I’ll be back.”

  “He’ll be back, Rebecca,” Manny says. “You have my word. Good as new.”

  And I stare at my daughter, no longer a little girl, a woman now, and I realize there is nothing I can do for her. She will choose her own path. I cannot save her, just like she cannot save me. The chasm between us has widened, but for a moment, we are so close, her skin flushed, her lips trembling, and I can see she understands, can see her let it all go with a delicate sigh.

  “Okay, Daddy.” She smiles. “When you’re clean, you come back here, okay? I’ll be here. We’ll get a drink, we’ll talk.”

  I nod my head and swallow. “That would be nice.”

  She steps forward and wraps her thin arms around my shaking shoulders, and leans into me, resting her head on my thin chest. The rest of the world fades away, and a hummingbird of hope flutters in my chest as she squeezes me tight, and I hold my daughter, and remember why I’m still alive.

  IV.

  GHOST TOWN

  SUMMER

  Jamais Vu

  Light spears through holes in the rotted blinds. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. It comes away soaked. I stagger out of bed and toward the window. In the corner, the television set spits out warbled words, dishes out ugliness on loop like a scratched record. I lift up the blinds, open the window. Late morning and down below, hooded dealers peddle diluted junk to skeletal crackheads. Vials of Juice switch hands for coins or promises of future services rendered. In other parts of the City, dealers have to always be on edge, paranoid gazelles primed to jet as police cars stroll by like predators in tall grass. Not here. Last time the force showed up for a routine pat-down, an army of berserk youths emerged from their derelict skyscrapers and killed two officers. The top hats figured they had a burgeoning riot on their hands, sent a small team in the dead of night to retrieve the mutilated corpses, then gave up on trying to secure the area, the same way they had given up on justice and fairness decades before.

  Hundreds of pictures, notes, and newspaper clippings cover every inch of my walls. The lost boys and girls of the City await. Some of them smile in school or family photos, relics of a better past. Others exist as incomplete stories—words, scribbles, pins on a map. There was a single pin, once. Multicolored strings stretch across streets, buildings, and waterways. The lines they trace ignore topography and geographical boundaries, weave twisted lattices of loss that offer no answer. I’ve been stuck on the losing end of this staring contest for three years. I light up a cigarette and shut my eyes. I wait for dark clouds to gather, for the next swing of the scythe.

  The phone rings.

  “Jules?”

  “Morning, Detective.”

  “Jules. We have a new lead. They found more children.”

  I wait at the usual dive, a damp little coffee shop slash diner slash bar owned by a couple of anarchists. The place is small with boarded-up windows and stinks of unwashed hair and patchouli. Some of my pictures hang on the walls. They were Favors. Traded them to the owners in exchange for cheap coffee and the occasional bagel. A group of teenage kids in a booth pass around a plump joint and I have the urge to join them, ask them to let me have a hit, don’t Bogart that shit. But I am ancient and fat and the name wouldn’t mean anything to them anyhow.

  They found more children. The echo vibrates through my bones. This wasn’t the first promising phone call, the first solid lead. There had been dozens of them. But each light at the end of the tunne
l had been a mirage. By the time it faded, I was back to square one with another chunk of my heart missing.

  Elza comes around, long red hair down to the small of her back. She places a cup of coffee on the table without a word. She has seen me weep too often. Tattoos of flaming skulls cover both of her arms, the easiest way for me to identify her. I know the technical details of her face, the words and adjectives I hard-linked to her being: late twenties, gorgeous, brown eyes, lips painted black. But rediscovering her features, actually seeing them, is always a pleasure. The small yang to my condition’s yin: forgetting means the ability to appreciate beauty all over again, unspoiled by the dullness of routine.

  Watson enters. His hunched-back posture, as if gravity were too much to handle, gives him away. He is wearing a long black duffel coat to hide his frail frame. The coat hangs open, the holster strapped to his chest in full display. He stinks of bacon and badge. The goth kid holding the joint in the next booth places it under the table. Watson cringes, shakes his head. He gives the kid the thumbs up and approaches my table. He stares at me with apprehension, unblinking.

  “I recognize you,” I say. “Sit down already.”

  “Good.”

  “I was looking at my pictures.”

  Watson snorts. “Narcissist.”

  “Actually, I was thinking I don’t have a single shot of you.”

  Watson points at his face. He hasn’t shaved in weeks and the bags under his eyes are big enough to pop. He still doesn’t look as old as I do. “You keep forgetting,” he says, “I’m not very photogenic.”

  “I’ll get you, eventually.”

  Elza passes by and pours Watson his coffee. He blows her the usual flirtatious kiss, contemplates her curves as she walks away. Watson and I trade smoke rings in silence for too long, neither of us equipped to tackle the elephant in the room. Still, I try.

  “Is she alive?”

  Watson sighs, eyeballs his coffee. “I don’t know.”

  “Who are the children?”

  He crushes his cigarette, scratches his beard. “Feds busted another human trafficking ring in the Western parts. Found seven dead boys stashed away beneath a farmhouse in the Outskirts. A few girls were alive.”

  “How is this related to my daughter?”

  Watson slips a hand inside his coat, removes a single photograph, slides it across.

  “Amir Velar. A.k.a. 8-ball. Don’t get me started on the street name.”

  Tribal tattoo under his right eye. A nose that’s been broken more than once. Meth teeth. I memorize the technical details and am glad I will forget his ugliness once I look away.

  “Amir was one of their snatchers,” says Watson. “A squad followed him to the farmhouse, grabbed him, busted the place up. Amir talked, but I doubt he told the whole story. Said most of the kids he took were between ages five and twelve. We connected the dots. He hit schools and playgrounds around the city at least a dozen times over a period of five years. Elpis Elementary was one of them.”

  “My girl’s school.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “I’ve arranged a meeting.”

  “Three years. Do you think he’ll remember if—” I want to say her name, but the words stay stuck in my throat.

  “Jules,” he says, offering a grim grin. “Come on.”

  “When do we meet him?”

  “Tonight. Financial District’s fourth precinct. Eleven. Meet you in front, by the fountain. Boys in black will let us in.”

  Watson slides his pack of cigarettes next to my coffee, stands up to leave. I want to thank him, ask him how he is doing. Instead I ask, “The girls they found, how are they?” The real question hiding behind it: Is there a chance my daughter could be one of them?

  He bites his lip, chews on skin. “Better than they were yesterday, I wager. We ran DNA tests. She’s not one of them. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Not yet. See you tonight. And bring a picture of Amelie.”

  He leaves the coffee shop as the floodgates open under the pressure of her name and the blank face that appears when I think of her.

  Prosopagnosia. The word sits in the mouth as comfortably as an ice pack, stupefies the tongue. I was diagnosed at sixteen. My father assumed I suffered from autism. Every night he prayed to his God for a cure and he may as well have been twiddling his thumbs. My mother had assumed nothing, had known nothing except for the joy of her new family away from the City. Teachers told my father I had issues socializing. They were wrong. I socialized fine, picking my way past the rubble of generic jock lookalikes and copy-pasted wannabe prom queens. I ignored the clones and focused on what my brain could cling to: the punks with uniquely shaped mohawks, bearded metal-heads and goths with easily identifiable piercings, the overweight and the too-skinny, the kids who didn’t shower or sported the same pair of ruined shoes month after month. The ugly and the weird beamed like lighthouses, steering me to safe shoals through the relentless smog of my memory.

  With my brain as my Judas, I realized early on that I needed a way to bottle reality. Photography saved me. I learned to never leave home without a camera. Pictures gave me the ability to even out the playing field. I captured faces more than anything. They became a reference guide to the world around me. Eventually, pictures allowed me to make a living. I ventured out into the City and mapped its serrated landscape and hidden alleys with my lens, then sold them online. Can’t work most jobs when you don’t recognize your co-workers or your clients.

  My wife Mathilda, when I first met her in college, she didn’t understand. Prosopagnosia. Had to say it slow, lining up those syllables like bricks. The word’s Greek roots spoke to her as clearly as hieroglyphs. Face blindness, the common term, gave off the wrong vibe. She thought I couldn’t see properly. Or maybe I was amnesiac, or unable to retain new memories, didn’t know who I was. I know who I am. I know what I am. I warned her. I warned her. She knew and still she loved me.

  On our third date, as we held each other for warmth under the blankets, I asked her, “Who do you love most in this world?”

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “I know it’s not me, so just tell me.”

  “My brother,” she said.

  “Is there anything you wouldn’t do for him?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Now, picture his elbow.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Picture his elbow.”

  “I can’t.”

  “If your brother was here, you could see his elbow, yes?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m not blind.”

  “Now if I took a picture of his elbow, waited a week, placed it amongst pictures of fifty other similar elbows, could you recognize it then?”

  She chuckled, not understanding where I was going.

  “Now you know how I feel about faces.”

  When Amelie came into this world, I spent nights holding her, examining every inch of her skin.

  Before sleep, I would repeat to myself all the things that made her unique, same way one recites a prayer. Black hair, green eyes. The beauty spot on her right shoulder blade was the first anchor. At age four, she hurt her knee after a bad fall, and I smiled as I cleaned her wound and dried her tears, knowing the inevitable scar would further define her in my mind. I missed the point for too long.

  At age five, she disappeared. If you asked me now, three years later, to describe her, I’d simply say: she is my daughter. Everything about her is unique, no matter how much of it gets swallowed up by the black holes chomping away at my skull.

  Eleven p.m., Financial District. The place reeks of blood money, oozes with bad memories. Banks burgeon at the feet of billion-dollar skyscrapers and keep the edifices of men shackled to the ground. Most windows are still lit up despite the hour. Armies of corporate dead men work the graveyard shift. Lawyers, ad men, and analysts staring at endless strings of numbers, souls shrinking as the numbers grow.

>   I reach the precinct out of breath, my back drenched in sweat. A cab was out of the question. No cash or credit card to my name anymore. The police station reflects the neighborhood. Polished marble, pillars, blue floodlights, cameras, laser fences, a fountain, packs of policemen sporting crow-black outfits, gas masks, rifles, brute authority kicking back chaos with threats. I have learned to live without the physical presence of the law and being so close to one of its power seats sets my teeth to chatter. I sit by the fountain and know that cameras are scanning my face, sending my wrinkles and receding hairline to be traced into the great binary beyond. I light up a cigarette and wait for my chest to stop hurting, for life to unfuck itself.

  A car pulls up to the curb, slides to a screeching halt. Black Mercedes, paint scratched. A man emerges in a black duffel coat. He sets the car’s alarm and hurries in my direction. I stand up and wave. He frowns, keeps walking past. Laughter right behind me. It rings like a broken bell.

  Watson sits on the other side of the fountain.

  “Never not funny,” he says.

  He wears a trench coat I’ve never seen before. He’s probably been sitting here for far too long, watching, enjoying himself.

  “How clever,” I mumble.

  “Let’s go talk to our friend.”

  I can’t hate him for this prank. Mathilda did the same when we started dating. She would hide in plain sight, stand next to me in front of restaurants and theaters, wait for my brain to do something it’s incapable of doing. She’d dye her hair or wrap it in a bun, wear a hat, switch perfume. When she’d get bored, she’d move closer and nonchalantly ask, “Who are you waiting for?”

  “You,” I would reply with unwavering faith. “Always you.”

  Watson nods at the cops on duty, and they step out of our way, no questions asked. We enter the elevator. The doors shut.

  “Those cops,” I say. “They may as well have rolled over and exposed their bellies for you.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Why?”

  “You know exactly why. Too much dirt on the department.”