Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  DJ MelMel: Girl, naw. Syrine become part of that creek over to the other park where they seen the goat boy. They say she was drowned, but what it was, was liquefaction.

  Daddy Chrome: Liquefaction is the fate of rotting things, MelMel. It’s what corpses do, not girls. What happened to Syrine, it happened down at Bernheim Forest. She become a bear, they said. Or someone like her.

  T. Tommy: Then I expect I must become definitive. I must learn you in the laws of physics, which permit no transformation into bear or creek or mulberry. Here is what took place, and it took place like this because I knowed her. I knowed her family.

  Syrine Landon was the source of American dreaming. Grew up in hard country, Jesus-haunted, playing by the rules most of all. Lived down Seventh Street. She was sallow and silent five days of the week, housekeeper and caretaker for her younger sisters Amber Jade and Jade Amber. Only on Saturdays and Sundays and Wednesday nights was Syrine allowed to shine, children. And she shone in the Damascene Holiness Church, where the ecstasy carried good folks unto poison and snakes.

  They wasn’t a snake that touched Syrine Landon, children. It was as though for a place and time they was a vaporous charm about her, a fog of good intentions, and the boys in the shanties and even the boys at church—well, they seen it and esteemed it for what it was. Because Syrine could of lain on her back with her knees up on her chest and she could of given it up to them, could of settled for the life that such behavior would bring her.

  But she didn’t, for Syrine had dreams of expanses. Refused them boys, her eyes on school and a decent marriage. She went to Jesus with prayers for rescue, spoke in tongues with the Holy Spirit.

  Brischords: Ha ta bo ho si ko lo. Bo ho la ta. Shondala.

  T. Tommy: She spoke to me about it as well. About resistance and self-denial, how a body behaves for the eyes of God rather than for others, rather than answering the promptings of the inner self. Why she refused them boys.

  Why she refused me.

  So it was that Wednesday night, the day not yet cooled but the snakes restrained and suppressed, back in their cages and the long, plaintive Pentecostal wail dying off at Damascene, that Syrine started home, through rows of houses or pine and maple, the night close around her and the summer boding. In the humid shadows she loosened her blouse, let the air in over her rapture-glistening skin there in the dark where nobody could see…

  And the devil seen her, to hear the church and family tell, and what he said…

  Brischords: What he said was…

  T. Tommy: We don’t know what he said, children, because if we did, this would be an easy tale.

  But he rose from the brambles, or from an alley or even an open brownfield, goatish and large, swollen with night and yearning. And what passed between them was as silent and driven as the deafening pulse of blood alone at the edge of dreaming, and she knew enough to run, poor frightened thing, and did not look back though she knew he was following, and the night slowed, and with it, her rush toward the distant lit windows of her shed of a house.

  The brambles pulled at her, or something did, her sisters said. They seen her intermittent in the light, as though she danced with the wind. She called out to them, her hands splayed against the screen door, then yanked away from the door as she embraced the shadows or dark arms and was lost to sight. Then back, her dress loosened and tattered by heat, her white breasts scarred.

  Amber Jade and Jade Amber cried out, but they was only twelve, what could they do? And the blackness swallowed Syrine Landon once again, and the silence swallowed what might of been her screams.

  Then out of the derelict shadows come the song of the flute, this song, and they said it was owls, the girls did, and they were too afraid to go to her.

  But the morning reassured them, because there is this buoyancy in morning. The sunlight reassembles things, children, and mends them, and all things are open and possible. They went out to look for Syrine Landon, passed through a copse or across a desolate parking lot, where they would find scraps of familiar gingham, a stickiness that snapped and splintered underfoot.

  So what good was all that denial, children? Whether it happened a century past or a dozen years ago, it still slips away from understanding—this holding back, this refusal to embrace while you can embrace before the night comes. And the legend has it that, as a form of remorse, the devil made an owl-flute of her finger bones, seven pipes or nine, depending on who tells the legend. And when it plays, you hear it or don’t hear it before you are compelled to follow: whether it’s inside you or outside you, I’m not the one to say.

  I do not remember the color of her eyes, nor do I know whether that Wednesday night ended with her consent or tortured resistance. Nor can I tell you when this happened, nor how the girl’s voice sounded in the church or the glade or the side street.

  I do know, however, the sound of the owl, and that its rise and falling away is a mask and a deception. For the song has not ceased since that Wednesday, and it will continue, dark or day. And once it is gone, the night will be quiet at last.

  19 Episode: Reconciliations

  Hands in pockets, seated in the row above George Castille, Stephen allowed it had been a disappointing evening.

  They had sent Vincent and Aron down to clear away a quartet of vagrants who had been singing by the amphitheatre stage, seated in the orchestra. One of them, a shiny fat man, had stood ground almost defiantly, but then three others joined the boys—young men he assumed were their classmates—and the band of drifters had trailed away into the dusk.

  Now George Castille lit a cigarette and stared down into the shimmering geometry of the mirrored stage scenery, the smoke crowning his head and coiling in the still air.

  The two older men were reckoning the damage in solitude, having left Maia on the court in the company of Galatea and the spouting cherubs.

  “It’s odd,” George observed, “to see young actors running on technique alone. It’s supposed to be geezers like us who go through the motions but this bunch is just reading lines. If you ask me, it’s time for early and radical changes. We need a translation that sounds like human language rather than this literary nonsense. We may even need to shuffle the roles around a little.”

  Stephen reached over and cadged one of George’s cigarettes. “Shuffle the roles?”

  George nodded. “Regard, if thou wilt, young Vincent. Gorgeous and sporting a golden spiral of hair. You know he looks more godlike. Maybe Aron is better as Pentheus, after all. And honestly, Stephen, before you spend too much time and energy in production, you might even consider another play. Antigone is easier to follow. It’s Sophocles, for god’s sake, and makes some sense. And there are a million translations. They read it in high school all the time, so the language has to be on a fourth-grade reading level. Which works for around here, you know.”

  Stephen shook his head. “Antigone has a huge cast.”

  “That’s an excuse, Stephen. You can double roles, and you know I can get you the walk-ons from the college. Those kids are itching to pad a resume.”

  Stephen took a deep drag from the cigarette. “Excuse or no, I’m standing ground on The Bacchae and on this translation.”

  George shrugged. “How about the casting?”

  “Well. If you can get Aron and Vincent to switch roles, I’m all behind it. Vincent certainly is more handsome and…and poised than Aron. But for some reason, Aron is clinging to the god role.”

  “Oh, he wants to be a star. Don’t we all?”

  “No, George. This is enthusiasm. Sometimes enthusiasm is enough.”

  George nodded. “The Greeks called it entheus, how the god spoke through the actor. The tragic mask is a symbol of that. The god occupying receptive shape, seeing through its eyes and breathing and speaking through its mouth. An actor—even a young one like Aron or Vincent—has moments in which the words usher forth Dionysus, or Apollo, or whatever god is present.”

  Stephen laughed. “No professorial lectures, old friend. Espe
cially those that miss the mark like a bad arrow. Because the words themselves are masks. Lest you forget it, words are not the voice of the god any more than the mask is his face. The actor and director bring them to life. No conjury in words, as far as I can tell.

  “Now, the stage, on the other hand, has some possibilities. Especially this stage. We might be lucky that the mirrors from your old Hamlet are still up. We could use them to confront the audience, to let them see the side of things that stage illusion usually hides. How might it work if you could sit in the crowd and see, by reflection, an actor remove one mask and put on another?”

  George shook his head. “Why on earth would you want to do that?”

  “I want masks, George. Like the original.”

  “Then what difference would it make that Vincent is prettier than Aron?”

  A call from the court interrupted them. The streetlamps were just coming on, and Maia approached them, a taller woman walking beside her.

  It took Stephen a moment to recognize Dolores Starr. “Oh, not her!” he muttered.

  George rolled his eyes. “Don’t borrow trouble, Stephen. You think there’ll be a confrontation because you can’t imagine a part of the world that has nothing much to do with you. You’ve imagined the grudge for ages, rehearsed it in your mind until you’ve cast her as some kind of Medea. Was she that bad when you saw her at the high school? She’s just checking on her son.”

  Maia approached, and with a sweet, perfunctory greeting, left them to join the young people milling on the shadowy stage. Dolores seated herself on the bench beside George, and held out her hand. He dropped a pack of Winstons into it, and she drew one out, lit it, and French-rolled the smoke from mouth to nose in an ecstasy of nicotine.

  “I understand,” she exhaled, “that my son is to be the god of the vine.”

  George and Stephen exchanged glances. Stephen caught the whiff of wine in the smoke, smelled it on her skin.

  She was rising to Aron’s role, he figured.

  “We read through the play this afternoon, dear,” George replied at last.

  Dolores smiled. “Good. Very good. Oh, George, do you remember the trouble with arranging those mirrors?”

  George nodded. “Oh, Stephen, the task of it all. We wanted the set to seem like it revealed backstage, like you were saying before. But only the backstage we wanted to reveal.”

  “The illusion of transparency,” Stephen said.

  “Or the transparency of illusion, either way. At any rate, Dolores and I spent hours tilting each mirror so it caught only so much reflection from the others. For a while we entertained the idea, Stephen, of positioning me between two mirrors that directly faced each other, so that there would be Hamlets regressing boundlessly. And of course I would stand between them when I said, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space,

  were it not that I have bad dreams.

  “Clever,” Stephen remarked vaguely.

  George stirred the smoky air with a wave of his hand. “Oh, far from it, honey. Just too obvious, like that production of Coriolanus where we thought about making him a motorcycle gang leader. It could have worked, you know…”

  “Just not so…”

  George nodded. “Apparent. Just not so apparent, Stephen. Not that it made any difference to that hideous old queen Wade Abner.”

  “I remember, George. If it’s any consolation, Abner’s still the drama critic for the paper only because he has a knack of knowing whose bottom to kiss. How else would you survive two changes of ownership and a corporate takeover?”

  “Well, my bottom was never kissable, apparently. What was it he said? Histrionic, from its arm-waving Danish Prince down to the funhouse mirrors in which he seemed to have lost himself and his dignity?”

  Dolores and Stephen exchanged glances and laughed. “I’m sorry, George,” Dolores said at last. “But it’s rather a funny line.”

  “It is an insult,” George said, lifting his chin and squaring his shoulders, “from which I am still recovering. I lost the way and ended up in musical comedies.”

  The three of them sat silent, watching the young people roughhouse and dance across the disheveled stage.

  Somewhere at the edge of the park, near the bus stop by Fourth and Fellini, a chorus of voices was singing “Love Me Tender.”

  20 Episode: Bathophobia

  On center stage, five boys sat Indian-style, like points of a star.

  Billy and Apache passed a cigarette back and forth like a doob. Vincent and Aron huddled with Jack Rausch.

  Aron was going on about the Hamlet of George Castille.

  Hamlet couldn’t make up his mind, Aron insisted. That was his problem. It was what they said at the beginning of Olivier’s Hamlet, after all. And we all know that was the best version.

  Vincent nodded absently, his eyes settling and fixing on Jack Rausch, accepting the half-smoked cigarette from Billy Shepard. The smoldering glow of the tobacco lit the boy’s dusky skin, the dark eyes with a hint of his mother’s epicanthic fold. The other boys’ heads turned toward him, seeking news from a faraway country.

  “My mother designed these sets,” Aron said. “Feel like I’m in a fuckin’ funhouse.”

  “Wasn’t that what the reviewer said, Aron?” Vincent muttered. All the boys except Jack Rausch laughed wickedly.

  “The reviewer said ‘fuck?’” Apache Downs asked, which set them all laughing again. The laughter faded as Stephen approached.

  “Next Tuesday,” Stephen said, “we’ll read again,” You could see him taking in the faces of the unfamiliar boys, nodding howdies to the new ones, his gaze finally settling on Jack Rausch.

  Later, the boys stood in front of Dolores’ Starr’s array of mirrors. Each one could see himself and himself and himself, diminishing to a vanishing point. But as each boy stood there and looked, the others saw nothing. The mirrors were inverted, turned on each other and to the interiors of the viewer.

  But time and a rainy fall, vagrants and crackheads and a hard freeze in November had dislodged some of the glass. Now the upstage center mirror—the one Dolores Starr had designed to show the back of Hamlet, or rather George Castille—had fallen on its side. Now, as if by accident, it faced the mirror upstage right.

  And it was between these glasses that Aron Starr and Jack Rausch found themselves, alone and together for the first time.

  “‘Sup,” one said, more statement and challenge than question.

  The other looked up, and they recognized each other in the smeared image.

  Jack saw something startled and furtive about Aron. Met his gaze until Aron lowered his eyes finally—something Jack encountered, wherever he went, and took as the way to greet and be greeted.

  Aron saw Jack as larger, more indistinct, as though the glass rippled across his features, blurring and obscuring them. Once the face seemed to gather definition, and Jack met Aron’s gaze and widened his eyes. Aron dismissed it later, set aside the thought that Jack’s pupils expanded until they engulfed the iris, then the scleras. But at the time Aron had looked away, baffled by the strange swimmer’s terror of riding a current over a shadowy underwater crevasse.

  Bathophobia. He had looked it up. Had endured the taunts of Apache and Billy, who claimed it meant fear of bathing.

  So he moved the conversation to safer, shallow waters, and spoke to Jack of mirrors and reflections, sparring with words. How you couldn’t see the vampire in a mirror, though you could in Nosferatu, in Anne Rice, and the horrible new glittering incarnations of Twilight for which both boys expressed hot hatred. Was it antipathy to silver? one of them asked. Transparency? An absence of souls that the mirror could contain?

  Then one recalled other reflected boys, the ones of older stories: Hylas and Hermaphroditos tugged under by nymphs as they admired themselves in still waters, and Narcissus pining away in love of the likeness that met his eyes. Aron knew the stories, was surprised at how familiar they seemed. It was as though Jack evoked them
through whisper and reflections, brought them alive until Aron was uncertain whether he was learning the tales, discovering or remembering them, or somehow making them up himself.

  They stood before the mirror young and beautiful, susceptible to its drowning pools: Jack and Aron looking at Jack and Aron in an infinity of crouching speculation, in all cases Jack’s hand placed tentatively on the larger boy’s shoulder. For a moment the surface of the glass troubled, and both boys squinted to look into supposed distances, catching a glimpse of something glittering down a corridor of corridors, into amphibolous night.

  21 Episode: First Reviews

  “He’s perfect,” Stephen admitted.

  George Castille refilled the wine glasses. “Beautiful and guileless, yes. But the fundies have netted Jack Rausch. Yes, he acts, but in productions of Our Town and The Fantasticks. And those innumerable bad Christian dramas that Antioch serves up.”

  Stephen looked over the lip of his glass into the red pool of Lachyrma Christi. Broke the surface tension of the wine with a touch. “He’s perfect, nonetheless. And if not an actor, I understand from Vinnie, who should know, that the boy plays a wicked bass. It’s The Bacchae, damn it, and we need music—original music—for a play about Dionysus. I want him in the play.”

  It was deep night on the Crescent Hill porch where the two men sat, smoking and drinking and speculating on the future of the play. The days had vanished into each other in front of them, and it looked as though long, hard rehearsals might end up with nothing to show but an amateurish performance.

  “For God’s sake, George,” Stephen lamented. “I can’t even cast the damn thing! You know we’ll end up as the two old men, you and I, and Maia is woefully young to play her own mother, which is what she is if we’re to believe Vincent is her son. I’m sorry…no amount of makeup… Then there is Aron. He’s workmanlike enough, but short on the charisma, like somehow the die is cast against him. You saw him shrink away from the Rausch boy, cede the stage to him, for crying out loud, and I could use that, could hinge the play on it. What wouldn’t I give for a production in which my Pentheus is naturally afraid of the invading god? I’d love to have Jack Rausch in this play.”