Vine: An Urban Legend

by Michael Williams

  55 Stasimon: Strophe: T. Tommy and the Brischords

  T. Tommy: Brothers on bicycles. Sign of the wound and the revel. Pedaling aimlessly through the city, economically shaken out and dropped on purpose. I know the numbers: life expectancy and child mortality, diseases communicable and chronic, hypertension and small-arms fire.

  Two blocks from here are drawing rooms that match old times for opulence. There are three floors of housing for a childless couple, riding mowers for city lots. There is stained glass in windows—original to the buildings, they tell the photographers—and that glass minded more carefully than you mind me, my Brischords, or than this city minds its generation of cyclists.

  They was a time in everybody’s childhood when a body might sacrifice dove or goat or holocaust of beeves. For which the gods would lay down treasures. We still see such deals cut among Mafia dons and Evangelical Prosperity Gospel, where you jimmy the old causal machinery, so that every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven.

  They claim that they’s a pattern of things you might see from a helicopter high above this intersection, where these brothers on bicycles hint at a larger design, something you might catch hold of from a single engine plane, or maybe as far as a weather satellite might get you. But that, too, is a momentary stay against confusion, a truce with the world. Because the world, children, is alive with a nonexistent god, a place where last week’s storm took away our young guitarist in mid-shred. A world that reconfigured after that sadness like the streets return to normal when a cyclist falls in a hidden alley. Somewhere a tenant got evicted or a Wal-Mart clerk laid off, or on one of them occasions of balance and design, a more useless denizen was lifted into spectacular and unforeseen light.

  Out of what seems to be disorder, order and structure fake an emergence. That is, if you squint your eyes right and you catch them in perfect light. There are no identical snowflakes, but they all have six sides, like the hexagonal papers of the Starr boy’s game map, like our own ground, darlings, where the vine bleeds and grows.

  56 Stasimon: Antistrophe: Polymnia, Muses, Maia, Beverly Nguyen

  Polymnia: Our numbers swell now, sisters. So let this stage be a bloodstained mountain in Boeotia, where many creatures have fallen to the hunter. Let it be the mountain at high mid-day, the sun contracts the shadow, and you would think that all the world is lit, apparent.

  Melpomene: There the hunter Actaeon tells his friends to call it a day, their spears and nets dripping. When the dawn comes, they will resume, he tells them, but for now the air is hot and still. Finish your task, he says. Call in the dogs, piss on the fire, and seek the shade.

  Polymnia: Nearby is a valley sacred to the goddess. There, in the depths, lies a wooded cave, where nature has made an arch out of pumice and limestone, mixing fire and water in a kind of narcotic artifice. Here the goddess Artemis bathes in a shadowy pool. While attendants loosen her hair, she looks into the water, where the moonlight slants against the surface. She sees her serene, Platonic face shaped by an image beneath it, an abstract violence giving it form and structure, the terrible innocence of a child warrior. As her servants help her out of her tunic, she imagines faces behind the face in the water, the face in the framing moon. Perplexities of light resolve to face upon face, an infinite regression, a sign of the immortal in her.

  Melpomene: While she bathes there, Actaeon strays through the wood, never noticing the stillness. As soon as he reaches the cave mouth, it yawns to permit his entry, the entry of light. Now the attendants of the goddess, seeing a man’s face, beat at their breasts and fill the whole wood with their sudden outcry. They crowd round Artemis to hide her with their bodies. But the goddess stands head and shoulders above all the others, her face the color of sun-stained clouds. She catches a handful of the water, and throws it over Actaeon’s head…

  Polymnia: And he begins to change. The stag horns sprout painfully, the hands transforming, cleaving, Actaeon’s skin dappling as he falls to all fours and begins to run. The forest alters: the once-distant birds now open and clamorous, the light a transparency of leaf and shadow. Now the masted and rooted ground rolls beneath his swift feet and for a moment he feels exuberance, almost joy. Until his dogs catch sight of him, and he knows.

  Melpomene: Now he runs across the country where he has often hunted, this time flying from his own hounds. He longs to shout ‘I am Actaeon! Know your own master!’ but he only groans, and the air echoes to the baying. Now they surround him on every side, sinking their jaws into his flesh, tearing their master to pieces in the deceptive shape of the deer. The whole pack gathers, and they shred and rend till there is no place left to wound him. Actaeon cries out, a painful, half-bestial cry, and wishes he could shake this burden from himself—this knowing, this invention of death more painful and frightful than the jaws of his hounds, against which all devices of faith and art are torn asunder.

  But who is this now before us? Who stands before us in disarray, hair tangled with darkness and hands interwoven? Who looks out and up to us, reflections pooled in a shambles of mirror?

  Maia: Oh, the role no longer matters, Jack. One boy, one girl in different guises for the lot of you.

  Beverly: We hold hands across generations, across fractured light and being and unbeing. This pretty girl, Jack, who dreamed you into light. Who shared with you the qeej around your neck and its story—my story to you, Jack, of broken reeds made whole and lyric in the prince’s hands. But now my body breaks reeds along the riverbank, slowly moving like the goddess bathing or like Hamlet’s crazy girl. A fisherman my Actaeon, discovering me downstream, washed against the pylon of the Matthew Walsh Bridge, my body liquescent and transformed. And all talk of foul play swept with me by what is about to happen, passing toward shadow and the Mississippi, scattered in the wake of the approaching night, the approaching god. Now I am indifferent, afloat on a current that has erased my breath, then memory and awareness, then identity as I dissolve into the undertow.

  Maia: I would have been something splendid in your eyes, because you awakened me, Jack. It was like I was lying on a slab of stone somewhere, all shadowy in full sunlight. Or like a painted figure, recumbent on an ancient clay vessel. Then your voice lifted me out of sleep, and I know now where I am headed. And no, do not smile at me that lovely smile, because you will get no traction from it, not now. I am headed out to the crossroads to twist snakes in my hair—isn’t that from the chorus you want me to lead, Mr. Thorne? Yes, I am headed out, because I saw the summons that night from my brother’s van, when we brought Elvis to the corner and the light seemed to spread across all that sadness and desertion. There is a place for us—for me—out there, and I will not be alone.

  So go along, sweet Jack. We’ll meet soon. This will end in bliss and you know it.

  57 Episode: Peripateia

  The next morning Stephen received a panic-stricken call from Aron.

  Dolores had not come home. When Aron had come in a little after midnight to find the apartment empty, he assumed she was out late planning for the play, would be in when he awoke the next morning. Out of suspicion he had tossed the mail onto her bed, and was alarmed to find it there, in the same spot, when he awoke at noon.

  Stephen was at a loss. Her cell phone went straight to its message, and the people who might know her whereabouts—the college where she taught a summer class, the occupant of the next door apartment, her best friend at the high school—all had no word of her since yesterday morning.

  George Castille was no help, either. “Oh, honey, she’s on a drunk somewhere and I can already feel the flop sweat,” he wailed into the phone, hysterical despite Stephen’s attempts to soothe him.

  “Surely she is all right,” Stephen said, more to himself than to George. But it felt as though all disaster was converging on the park, on the theatre, on his unsteady designs, and he was at the end of his resources.

  The police could be of no help, he told himself, still believing that the twenty-four-hour waiting period applied to
all missing persons. As a long shot—one that failed—he tried contacting Maia De Chevre to fill in for the dress performance, but as the hours moved up through the afternoon he tried Dolores again.

  This time she answered sleepily. Would not tell Stephen where she had been, but assured him she was well, would be present and accounted for that night. An odd way of saying it, but everything about her sounded odd, disengaged, and he wrote it off as long carousal, made her promise to set an alarm for five so she could be at the theatre by sunset.

  Aron arrived an hour early to rehearse lines with Jack. There is the scene between Dionysus and Pentheus, charged with intense dialogue, where the adolescent prince, self-righteous and egocentric, tries and fails to face down the god. Aron did not want to rehearse it. There was something too explosive and intimate about it.

  He found Jack in the topmost tier of the amphitheatre. The younger boy cocked his head and smiled, as though he had summoned Aron out of the air.

  “I figure by now,” Jack said, “we should be ready. If we don’t know the lines, the play’s pretty much fucked anyway, now isn’t it?”

  Surprised at Jack’s language and indifference, Aron sat down beside him nonetheless. He wanted to object, but caught himself before he disagreed with his own argument. After all, Mr. Castille had told him to use the discomfort he felt around Jack. To remember that Pentheus and Dionysus, though cousins, were no friends. He wished Jack would just go away until “places,” because hanging around him made Aron forget hostilities.

  “Then I’ll go on, Jack,” he said, perhaps a little abruptly. “Gotta roust Mom anyway. She sleeps through alarms.”

  “Oh, she’s awake,” Jack replied.

  “How would you…”

  “Saw her on the way over here. Passed by Fourth and Fellini, and she was there by the Rite Aid.”

  “Jack, that ain’t funny. That’s my mom.” Aron paused. “Why were you there anyway? Looking for Maia?”

  “It’s the last place anyone seen Vincent,” Jack replied. Then, smiling enigmatically, “…or maybe not. Right?”

  They were both silent for a moment, then Aron whispered, “God, Jack. What’s happening? Is everybody gonna fuckin’ vanish?”

  “Oh, your mom was very visible, Aron.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Means out in front of the Rite Aid. Hanging with some of the women there.” Jack laughed. “I actually saw one of my aunts. Ina, I think. They all look alike with sunglasses.”

  “How about Maia?” Aron asked. “Did you see her?”

  “She wants nothing to do with me, Aron. To be honest, I wasn’t even looking. But it isn’t pretty down there right now. Your mom and my aunts are there. Maybe Maia. I think they’ve had their fill of the men, and I can’t say as I blame them. They’ve picked up a couple of bottles of Sutter Home, are sitting on that brick wall next to the Family Dollar and the beauty supplies place. Trying on wigs and taunting the brothers. The police came by and dispersed them, but they gathered again. It’s like they all circle wildly but if you stood in the bell tower of the Methodist Church just north of them and you watched them circle, you’d see a pattern forming in it, a large design…”

  “We gotta get her out of there, Jack,” Aron insisted.

  But Jack shook his head. “Getting strange down there. Dunno how welcome a boy would be among ’em, Aron. Even a son.”

  Aron stood, made to leave. “Don’t be dumb, Jack. It’s my mom.”

  “And what did you say in the note, Aron? What’d you call her? What’d you accuse her of?”

  Aron sat back down. How Jack would know these things never crossed his mind. “We need her here. It’s only an hour till they start to gather for dress rehearsal. People will be here, Jack.”

  “Surely it’s not the play, is it, Aron?”

  The two of them regarded each other across a wide, inscrutable gulf.

  “You need to get her,” Jack said at last. “Not me. She’s your mom, after all. But come along. I’ll help you.”

  58 Episode: Processional

  So Jack prepared him for his journey, there backstage in the hour before rehearsals.

  Aron objected to the change of clothing. There would be time when he had returned with Dolores. There was no need to wear the tunic yet, certainly no need for the makeup. It made him feminine, took away his power.

  Jack told him the story of Herakles, who served Queen Omphale in purple robe and slippers as penance for family murders. Of Achilles, who was hidden from recruiters by his mother, dressed in the clothes of princesses to duck the drafting eye of Odysseus.

  But this is not the old days, Aron argued, as Jack slipped the tunic over his shoulders. We’re just playing this, and it’s Louisville in the 21st century, after all.

  Heracles and Achilles, Aron, was Jack’s only argument. Passing through couture and coming out heroes, what’s cooler than that? Hold still before I blind you with eyeliner.

  They’ll tear me apart over there, Aron objected, gesturing vaguely north toward the intersection where he was told he would find his mother, Jack’s aunts, even Maia.

  And now the Muses emerged from the castoff sets, rising from the fragments of mirrors swept into a disheveled heap backstage, the mirrors into which Vincent had fallen out of body. Clio whispered how Aron met the occasion, how frocked and bouffanted in the twilit park he could almost be lovely were he not destined for valor.

  From behind her mask, Melpomene replied, we shall see. We shall see where valor takes him.

  She already knew. It was just narration.

  Jack walked him a ways north, and it never occurred to Aron to ask for further company. Something about his bravery might appeal to Maia, he told himself. The air stirred with promise, and he caught the smell, commingled with smoke and diesel, as he reached Ormsby and looked into the light. There by the bus stop, dark silhouettes meshed with shadow. The world was slipping out of definition, but Jack laid his hand on Aron’s shoulder and suddenly fear was a narcotic, an enticement, not the truth of what lay behind this lonely impulse of curiosity and delight. I will show them all and be someone, Aron thought defiantly. But he heard Jack’s words commingling with his thoughts: he was already someone, just not who he thought he would be.

  Jack left him the north side of the street, at the doorstep of the old Puritan building and across from the former bank. Now Aron moved toward the corner, where the transactions were loud, the lights brilliant. To his left it seemed like two suns setting over a line of brownstones, and in the confusion of slanted sunlight and the rising glow of the streetlamps a glimmer caught Jack’s hair, which seemed to coil and harden and rise as though he were horned or helmeted. Nonetheless Aron wished Jack would stay with him, would accompany him forward into the blinding and clamorous intersection.

  Jack almost had to shout that he was leaving, was returning to the stage. When it registered with Aron above the din, a strange regret passed over and through him. He rushed back down the street toward Jack, shouted to him over the racket that all was forgiven, that he should be at peace and not worry.

  Jack cocked his head, his smile distracting. He seemed to say he understood, that there was nothing to forgive, a perplexing reply to a perplexing statement, all of it lost in the loud, exhaustive sigh of a city bus, and when Aron craned forward, asked him to repeat, Jack was gone, backing down the street with a warm, tidal wind lifting his jacket. He waved, turned, and paced back into the baffled darkness.

  And the noise surged around Aron, as harsh and driving as the shred of Vincent’s guitar. He lost his mother in the milling people, looking vainly toward the store fronts for signs of Dolores, of Maia, but the faces blended with one another as though he saw the world through smoke or water, and the women by the drug store turned, and one pointed at him and shouted something.

  Higher ground, Aron told himself. Jack said there was a vantage, and Tommy had said it before him: a point where you could watch the crowd and it made sense, or almost. He backed
across Fourth through a rush of traffic, horns and the shriek of brakes and the cursing of drivers, finding himself somehow on the southeast corner of the intersection, the stone gothic arches of the Louisville Church of Christ. He felt his back against stone, found purchase on a metal drain spout and began to climb, gripping the spokes of the huge rose window that was a relic of some older time nobody remembered. And there aloft the building, Aron Starr looked down on the crowd approaching, scanning it for faces that would guide him home.

  59 Episode: Sparagmos

  T. Tommy would remember it, in the aftermath of that night and in the years he would endure. The sacrifice at Fourth and Fellini rose to join other memories, jostled to life by the boy on the church cornice, by the crowd milling below him.

  Tommy stood in front of the Chinese take-out and looked on as the passing figures glided from actor to role, their shadows dilating and faltering against the streetlights as the old story rose out of their milling. It was like his dormant years—riding the snake, Morrison and acid spiraling down to Richards’ and park benches—had come due at this intersection, where identity moved so fluidly that things were what they are but also what they might be.

  Queen Agave, still smarting from Aron’s letter, was down among the women, over by the Rite Aid sign dispensing Sutter Home in paper cups lifted from the store. She and the other women were opening their fourth bottle when the boy arrived, like one of those deeply Protestant communions, everyone mantled over separate little vessels so that your mouths didn’t touch where theirs had.

  The boy Pentheus stood by the bus stop, made his way up past the bank to the intersection and called out for mama, but Dolores was too drunk to recognize and almost too drunk to heed, weaving on her feet and joining the chorus of the corner girls to observe how smooth the wine was, each bottle smoother than the one before.