by Robert Levy
She walked back inside, the snap of the screen door absorbed into the wall of noise. He watched her through the window as she gave her husband’s arm the very same squeeze, and Donald shuffled off to the kitchen, his hands and the crooks of his arms heavy with beer bottles and stacked glasses. Maureen joined some of her friends in the front room, where they swallowed her into their orbiting circle.
Blue retrieved his drink from the porch railing. The sangria had gone lukewarm; it tasted a bit like blood. He kept at it anyway, the alcohol going to his head, the surface of his skin. He rested his elbows against the railing and listened to the cry of the fiddle. This was followed by applause, then a hush from the house, as if the party was a radio play that had been abruptly muted. The wind whistled through the trees, knotted boughs discernible in the moonlight before a cloud lumbered over the cove. He closed his eyes.
A powerful sense of being watched shocked him to attention. Had he caught a strand of movement in the woods? Probably his imagination, but gooseflesh prickled his arms nevertheless. He kicked back a slug of wine, wiped his mouth, and lit another cigarette.
A light flickered in the trees. A lightning bug? Something alive and in motion, whatever it was, though now it was still, glowing like an ember. Blue stepped off the porch and walked a crooked line to the edge of the lawn a dozen yards from the house, and as he did the light appeared to approach in kind. The densely packed pines rustled, their limbs swaying overhead like water swept by an oar. He squinted into the night, as if he could glean meaning from the forest simply by staring hard enough into its dark and mysterious heart.
The light was gone, but he could hear—no, feel—a presence within the woods, accompanied by a wet earthy scent, powerful and fecund. He covered his nose, the cigarette paper a bright stain between his fingers, and the spark of light appeared again like a beacon. The source of the smell was extremely close, within arm’s length, perhaps; its proximity left him simultaneously repulsed and intoxicated. He could feel something reaching out to take his hand, stroke it like a lover would. Blue’s eyes narrowed, and his trembling fingers spidered forward, as if upon silken strings.
He could see himself. Right there, standing a little way into the woods, the dark surface of the forest freshly and impossibly reflective. There was his own startled face, backlit by the house and the candlelit glow from the windows. The light in the woods, it was the burning tip of the cigarette in his white hand, fingers extended in communion. Was he staring into a mirror?
He stepped forward, and now he could see right through this other self. On the other side of his reflection was the ghost image of a balsam fir, its needled branches held back by a hand. The hand that held back the branches, though, that was not his own—indeed, it was like no hand he had ever seen, the fingers bone-thin, and long, and deathly gray.
In a nauseating flash, it came to him: he wasn’t seeing his reflection, nor was it some estranged identical twin. Rather, he was seeing himself through someone else’s eyes. He was at once inside his body and outside of it, watching from beyond the sheltering trees. He saw himself as he was.
His sight refracted, the branches in his periphery a kaleidoscope of shadow and moonlight. A split-apart image of the forest floor and he listed, then steadied, his vision a mirror fragmented into shards. He pressed his eyes shut but the fractalled images didn’t yield, only multiplied into differing angles. He thought of the compound eyes of the praying mantis sculpture he’d glimpsed inside the house as he saw himself from deep in the woods, as well as closer by; a splinter of his chin captured from ground level down the hill; a sliver of the back of his neck viewed from the treetops. He saw himself through a multitude of eyes, all watching from the woods.
His curiosity swelled, then turned to fear, then excitement, rapid pulsations that bled together until one emotion was indistinguishable from the next. His very being cried out in surrender, and he hungered to be disassembled into nothingness, his heart pounding so hard he thought his chest would burst. And all the while the whine and burring of insects, the call of predatory night birds, and the screech of the fiddle in one long and discordant stroke, the final note of a song that refused to end.
A hand grasped his shoulder, and quickly withdrew. “Hey,” Gabe said. How did he get so close? “Are you okay?”
“What?” He shook his head. “Oh yeah. I was just . . . Nothing.” Blue glanced back over his shoulder at the trees. Nothingness, he thought. Surrender. Communion. “Admiring the scenery.”
“Nice.” Gabe nodded sagely. “Maureen smoked you up, didn’t she?”
“What? No.”
“She said she was going to bring by some sticky stuff, so I just figured. Hey, how long have you been out here? We haven’t seen you for hours.”
“Hours?” Blue looked down. Between his fingers he held a charred cigarette butt, the stub burned down to the filter. He flicked it into the trees, and instantly regretted the trespass. “Has it been that long?”
“It’s four in the morning. Elisa’s complaining about her feet. She sent me to find you.”
“Okay. Let’s go.” He mussed Gabe’s hair somewhere between rough and tender, a bid for normalcy if nothing else, and Gabe ducked away from him. See? Everything is fine.
They walked across the lawn. Elisa, heels in hand, put an arm around Blue and the other around Gabe. The three schlemiel-schlimazeled to Jason, who stood with his arms crossed, shaking his head in mock disapproval. Elisa slapped him hard on the ass, and Jason howled as he threw his own arm around Blue. The four returned in a slanting box step to the house on the hill.
Once Jason and Gabe shambled upstairs to bed, Blue and Elisa retreated outside for one last gasp of night air, and for Blue one more glass of wine. “Man, am I beat,” he said as they planted themselves on the porch swing. He glanced down the hill, toward the trees at the border of the lawn. “I thought I saw . . . Jesus, I don’t know what. It was like I could see outside my body. Like I was watching myself through the woods, but from a hundred different eyes. Something.” He rubbed his face and waited, but no response was forthcoming. “Fuck. Maybe I was having a flashback.”
He thought he heard her laugh under her breath, but once he leaned in he could make out the sound of anguish as she choked back tears. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, are you okay?” She didn’t answer, only rested her chin against the heels of her wrists. “What’s the matter?”
After a while she said, “Do you ever think you’ve made the wrong choices in life?”
“All the time. Why?”
“I don’t know.” Elisa’s face was cast in darkness, only a slight suggestion of her features visible in the moonlight. “Never mind. I’m fine, really. Just ignore me, okay?”
“If you say so.”
He listened to the wind rustle the leaves, to the solitary warble of an unknown bird darting across the tree canopy. Awesome Elisa. More than a decade gone since they met as teenagers in front of the Limelight, where they split a tab of E and danced the night away on a catwalk, looking down at the world below. He saw inside Elisa that night, right to her soul. Not by the yellow glow from the moon but beneath a scorching spotlight, its gels rotating red, green, red. The throb of music from the speakers, clean sweat, the chemical smell of dry ice: he had never wanted that blurry carnival of wasted youth to end. Then he awoke from its poppy-petaled spell, only to find himself cold and alone on the dirty bathroom floor of his midtwenties, wondering how he’d managed to land up there. When he wasn’t looking, the lost boys and girls had all grown up.
Beyond the cove, a thin zipper of dawn opened on the horizon over Kelly’s Mountain. “Look,” he said. “Here comes the sun.”
“Please don’t sing,” she said, and he busted out laughing. Elisa could always do that, penetrate to his core and alleviate the sense of alienation he’d harbored as long as he could remember. What could he say? She still got him. It didn’t help that she was as beautiful as ever; that would never change, not to him. He would always love her, if only in regret.
Except for that one night in May, right after he’d gotten the call about his grandmother and her house, when he and Elisa found their lips thrust together in need of both consuming and being consumed. Hands fumbling in the dark to remove each other’s clothing, the heat of her warm flesh on his, skin on skin. That night regret was a stranger.
Blue slid his hand along the rough wood of the porch swing and interlaced his fingers with hers. Across the cove the distant light strengthened until it sparkled above the water like a disco ball, like glitter thrown from a rafter high above a cavernous and smoke-filled dance floor.
“Glittering,” she said softly, as if she’d plucked the word from his mind.
“What’s that?” he asked, but she didn’t respond, only squeezed his hand before loosening her grip. It was a word he’d long kept close to his heart, one that described a place that didn’t exist. A land of belonging he had once searched for across the skin of lovers, at the bottom of liquor bottles, in clouds of pot smoke and granulated powders and pills. His magical home, always just out of reach. She was the only thing left of that world, and already she was fading.
“Elisa,” he said, her very name in his voice its own charge of urgency. “If there’s something going on, you know you can tell me, right?”
“Sure,” she said. “Of course.”
“If things with Jason aren’t—”
Her breath caught in her throat. “Don’t,” she said, and moved her hand from his. “I can’t. Forget it. I’m sorry.”
She stood and went inside the house, Blue left on the jangling porch swing, alone.
Chapter Two
* * *
He sees himself again, this time in his dreams. His unconscious, normally a dark pool, is now aglow with moonlight, and the mirror of the night forest appears to him once more. He faces his refractive self-image, and hears his call to himself: a choir of different selves in different voices, but all him. Struck by the same sense of longing he felt outside the ceilidh, he steeps in the fecund scent of his kindred, close by, so close.
They call him Blue, his adopted name; they call him Michael, his given name; and they call him by another, older name, something altogether different, but also familiar. A dream name. Or a christening at last?
His lips move, as if to repeat the word. But only a buzzing sound emerges, a hive of listless bees awakening to life, to be reborn.
Blue opened his eyes to the tartan room’s plaid bedding and matching walls. The name was gone. All that remained was a dull thud of sensation: that of being smothered and emerging, an escape from being buried alive, which was how he felt after most of his nightmares. More gloomy thoughts born of Saturn.
He’d neglected to draw the curtains, the square of light from the window next to the bed diffuse but still painfully bright. He slumped back down, a momentary shuddering of trees across his vision before he sat up again, determined to meet the incipient challenges of wakefulness.
Beyond the foot of the brass bed, someone stood in the doorway: Gabe, in a rumpled T-shirt and jeans that hung low over his narrow hips. They both started.
“Oh—sorry,” Gabe said. He went to shut the door, appeared to collect himself, and peered back inside. “I was just—sorry. I heard you cry out.”
“I was having a nightmare. Don’t sweat it. Really.” He didn’t want any strangeness between them; he had enough to deal with already. “I hurt,” Blue said, and rolled over. “What time is it?”
“Noonish. A bit later maybe.”
“I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”
“I know what you mean.” Gabe shut the door and leaned against it. “A little too much schnapps, I guess.”
The two had been in a holding pattern for a few weeks, since they’d drunkenly fallen into Blue’s bed together, an odd repetition of what transpired with Elisa a couple of months prior. It was the same night he had shown Gabe his old photographs, and nostalgia once again turned into abandon. Blue had done most of the work, Gabe largely passive, almost dutifully so, a ritual display of surrender as Blue hauled him from the bed and into his lap. Blue’s hands slid up Gabe’s spine, only to rest on a fibrous landscape of raised scar tissue along Gabe’s back in beaded threads. Another disturbing indication, along with the mottled scarring on his hand, that Gabe had suffered greatly in his youth.
“What . . .” Blue said that night, but, “Don’t,” Gabe had replied, and moved Blue’s hands down to his waist. Gabe hadn’t wanted him to see, and so he wouldn’t look. The landscape of Gabe’s back remained fixed in his mind, however, an image of vestigial limbs or perhaps wings, shorn clean from muscle and bone.
After they’d finished, Gabe had put his shirt back on and turned to Blue, traced his finger over the smidge of hair on Blue’s chest as if reading something there. Blue drifted off to sleep, and awoke the next morning to find him in the same position, inches away with his ice-blue eyes trained upon him, as if Gabe had remained awake all night doing just that. Searching, Blue had thought at the time. But for what, exactly?
“Hey, you know who’s great?” Blue said now to break the silence. He had to do right by Gabe, which was why—against better judgment—Blue invited him on the trip in the first place. “Maureen. She’s spectacular, isn’t she?”
“Absolutely,” Gabe replied, eager to agree, as was often the case. “We talked for a while last night. She’s kind of like the best mom ever.”
“It’s true. Though she is a little out there.” He took a cautious glance out of the tartan room’s bright window, which faced a stand of mighty firs that stretched around the back of the house. “She told me she thought I glowed.”
“Well, you sort of do.” Gabe hid a sideways smile and stared down at the floor. “She told me something else, though.”
“What?”
“That Elisa is knocked up.”
Blue’s stomach contracted, and he swallowed hard. “That she’s what?”
“She said Elisa had the glow.” Gabe laughed. “I don’t know what that means about you.”
Blue remembered what Maureen had said last night: that they both glowed, but Elisa’s was familiar, or common or something . . .
“I wouldn’t exactly take her word for it,” Gabe said, picking up on Blue’s conspicuous unease. “It’s probably nothing.”
Blue wanted to say he didn’t buy it, but the problem was that he instantly and utterly did. This was based on his worldview, having long accepted the truism that if a certain possibility was deeply discomfiting, that meant it was accurate. Not that the kid could be his: despite his inebriated state that night, he had total recall of Elisa reassuring him she was on the pill. But why shouldn’t he want Elisa and Jason to be pregnant? It would help cement their relationship, and in doing so abate the shame Blue felt over sleeping with her. He didn’t want to be a shitty person. Not to Jason, not to anybody. And he certainly didn’t want to fuck up Elisa’s life. She should have the future she wants, he thought. And if that involves kids, well, good for her. Maybe I dodged a bullet.
After Gabe shuffled back to the yellow room, Blue dressed and put the conversation out of his mind; if Elisa was in fact pregnant, she would tell him soon enough.
Downstairs, Elisa was washing last night’s dishes, while Jason read in the Adirondack chair out on the porch. And there—past the back of Jason’s safari-hatted head, beyond the edge of the porch and down the rolling lawn that humpbacked Maureen and Donald’s property—was the shining daylight splendor of Starling Cove. They had arrived under fog, so he wasn’t expecting the expansive vista or the magnificence of the open sky, clear and blue, traversed by a lone eagle high over the shimmering water. No wonder so many who wandered up here in decades past had ended up staying. Was this really the place his mother had fled, dragging him along with her?
“So,” Blue said. “Are we going to stay here forever or what?”
“You, maybe,” Elisa said, drying her hands on a dishrag. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. There’s only so much c
eilidhing a girl can take.” She pressed the rag to his chest, casual with the intimacy of the gesture; they were, he supposed, cool again. “And thank God you’re awake. I’m starving.” She gestured to a pink ceramic mug, no doubt one of Maureen’s creations, filled to the brim with coffee. “Light and sweet, just like you. Ha. Jason went to the general store and bought out the place—eggs, bread, cheese. Whatever vegetables they had, which wasn’t a lot. Our work here is done. Wow us, please.”
“Lower your expectations. I’ll see what I can do.”
Setting his sights on the pantry, he started by excavating the dusty canned goods and nonperishables left by untold past renters. Gherkins, baby corn, dried beans . . . Pastry flour! Mini-quiches were his first thought, but when he unearthed a package of almond slivers and a jar of cinnamon, he shifted to sweet breakfast buns. Their caramelized, starchy smell soon wafted into the living room, and Elisa begged him to take them out of the oven.
He’d been cooking for more than twenty years, since the days of making hotchpotch casserole dinners for his cuisine-challenged mother, seven-year-old Michael balanced precariously on a stool set against the stove. He loved feeding people, loved the entire process of conception through delivery. Part of his pleasure was the ease with which it came to him. His first béchamel at culinary school (the sauce taught early in the first semester to scare off the dilettantes) had the velvety and complex nature of a master chef’s. While the other students scurried back and forth from their notebooks to the stove, he whistled quietly over his saucepan, stirring the bubbling milk around a melting roux. His classmates at the institute initially resented him, then began to scrutinize his work for hints and tips, as instructors and visiting chefs gravitated to his cooking station. He was, in short, a natural.
After graduation, he sous-chefed at a few places before opening Cyan, a storefront dumpling spot in Brooklyn with a couple of tables that soon fostered a brisk delivery business. There were write-ups in New York magazine and Time Out, and a mention in the Dining Out section of the Times. With enough traffic, he had hoped to move into a larger space, maybe by next year. But that was before he started borrowing money from men like Vincente Castro, an independent entrepreneur who loaned money to naive and/or desperate business owners throughout the outer boroughs. It was only later that Blue came to terms with the fact that the man’s nom de guerre was Vinnie the Shark, and that Vinnie’s friends had witty and hilarious nicknames as well, names like Jerry Rasputin and Sawed-Off Sal. The only way he was going to dig himself out now was by signing off on the house sale.