Shifters

by Lee, Edward

  The malefactor left. He did not leave through the door. He did not leave as a bat. He left instead as a desire, an…edict. He left as a longing, or as the passion behind the saddest tear.

  I am forever. I am oblivion.

  He fell adrift, into the sea of night. Drifting.

  I…am…Sciftan…

  FIVE

  The Arrival of the Dead

  (i)

  Locke walked down Sunnyside Avenue. An odd ambiance struck him—it always did. It was night, obviously there was, at present, no sunny side…as with the neighboring Meridian Avenue, which certainly wasn’t the nexus of anything that Locke could determine. It seemed to show him something. Poets were weird.

  Am I weird? he pondered. He knew he saw things differently, but he felt that, as a poet, he was supposed to. Walking at night was more than that to him. It was walking through imagery, through a panorama of visual abstraction which solicited creative assessment.

  The night’s chill air enfolded him. Down the street to his left, bright light hung in a still explosion about the Open Book: “A Poem Emporium,” enshrouded by crisp darkness. It had been a few months since Locke had done a reading there; he liked the place, they sold nothing but volumes of poetry and little literary journals, and thus were always on the verge of bankruptcy, but the little shop was true, no contradictions in its Quixotic purpose. He passed the church, the small office buildings where up-and-coming law firms shared floors with down-and-out telephone boiler rooms, some small shops. Renovated rowhouses which all seemed to tilt at odd angles descended down dark streets. Old streetlamps cast umbrae of spoiled light at each corner. Yes, Locke liked walking at night. There was a time, in his positivity, that he regarded walking as a symbolic act: each step forward became an acknowledgment, or—yes!—a celebration. Every single step he took through life felt like a celebration of his love.

  Clare appeared in his mind. Not anymore, he realized. Now, walking seemed little more than a celebration of ambulatory capability. His positivity turned black.

  Still, he liked to walk. Locke didn’t own a car, he didn’t need one. His world was here; he needn’t own a car to reach his muse. The bookstore and the high school were walking distance. When he’d been dating Clare, his friend Lehrling often loaned him his second car, an old gold Dodge Colt with a dent in the side. Lehrling’s first car was an Austin Martin Volante, which got a nice eight miles per gallon and cost a hundred grand. Lehrling was Locke’s best friend; he was a good guy. He was also a heinously materialistic, pompous schmuck. At least he picked up Locke’s bar tabs, so he couldn’t be all that bad. Poets needed someone to pay for their alcohol. It seemed proper that the rich support the creative poor.

  Oh, where is she now, and what are her dreams, he recited a part of the poem that was to be his marriage proposal. But he remembers how the moonlight gleams, a resplendent angel in fine light dressed, and the poet thinks: Yes, I am blessed.

  Blessed, he thought. He couldn’t get the darkness out of his heart. Cheer up! He tried to make a joke out of it. In all that we were meant to be, thanks a lot for dumping me. But it never worked. Never. Some joke.

  The street felt as dark as his soul. Suddenly red and white throbs appeared around the silent corner. It was an ambulance—lights flashing, but no siren. It seemed to rove, driving slowly. Locke understood that when they did that, it meant that the victim had died on the way, so why hurry? The throbbing vehicle passed in a wake of eerie, lit silence; Locke watched it turn down 45th heading to the Swedish/Ballard Hospital some miles south. It seemed like an arrival of some kind. Or a message? he considered. But why should he think that? Why must he apply symbols to everything? It often aggravated him. Carrying the dead, he thought nonetheless. The arrival of the dead.

  The moon peeked at him over rooftops, like a face trying to hide. Was someone shouting? He heard no other bar commotion. Clare drove a blue Sentra; Locke, as always, scanned the lot for it. Not here. But what would he do if it was here? Would he go in? Would he run away? He frequently asked himself this. He hadn’t seen her now for over two months. What would happen when their paths crossed again?

  Where does she go now? What does she do?

  The questions were a tumult, an avalanche.

  Who sleeps with her now?

  That was the killer, the dread of any jilted lover. An unbidden image lit in his head: Clare in bed with someone else, whispering her passion into another man’s ear, wrapping her legs around another man’s back…

  Locke stopped, dizzy. Did he hear arguing? He had to lean against a fence post to steady himself. His love seemed like a cheap trick, an intricacy through which he’d become abandoned by truth.

  He let the moment pass and moved on.

  Locke generally entered Concannon’s by the back way—more symbology. The thief in the night. The fugitive. He pushed through the back gate, remembering all the times he’d come here with Clare, arm in arm, in love. His throat felt thick as warm pitch.

  Locke was right; he had heard arguing. Two figures bickered by the back door—a nondescript guy in a white shirt, and a tall beautiful brunette who looked like a model. Locke froze in gridded shadow. Neither figure noticed him.

  “What are you doing now that’s so much better than me?” the guy in the white shirt hotly inquired. “You’re more fulfilled now? You’re happier now?”

  “Well… yeah,” the girl replied.

  “Bullshit! You’ve never had a better relationship in your life!”

  The girl seemed wearied. “When will you understand? I don’t want a relationship.”

  “What do you want then? You want to spend the rest of your life shaking your ass on some dance floor? Giving your fucking phone number to every guy who wears the right clothes, has the right haircut? Getting laid by a bunch of anonymous cockhounds and dance club scumbags? Jesus Christ!”

  The girl just shook her head, keeping her cool. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Why can’t you just accept it that things didn’t work out for us?”

  “Things?” White Shirt laughed. “Work out? You used to love me, remember? There’s a lot more to love than ‘things,’ for Christ’s sake!”

  The girl’s eyes looked huge in the moonlight. They looked flat, disimpassioned. “But I don’t love you anymore,” she said.

  Locke watched with his mouth hanging open. Familiar words. Clare had said those exact same words to him, in the exact same way. The same blank expression. The same flat, disimpassioned eyes.

  White Shirt seemed to stand in his own ire, minutely shaking.

  “I have to go,” the girl said.

  “But I still love you,” White Shirt croaked.

  “So what’s that supposed to mean?” she objected. Yes, she was beautiful—tall, elegant, even in faded jeans. It was her beauty that gave her the calm, cruel power. “Just because you love me doesn’t mean I have to love you. I don’t. Why can’t you get that through your thick skull? I’m with someone else now, and, yes, I am happier, I am more fulfilled—”

  “You only think you are,” White Shirt denied.

  But again the girl only shook her head. She began to walk away.

  White Shirt’s face looked corrugated. He pointed his finger like a gun. “Let me tell you something, baby! One day somebody’s gonna do to you what you did to me, and you’re not gonna like it! One day you’re gonna give your heart to someone, and they’re gonna spit it right back in your face! It’s gonna happen! My God, I hope it happens, I can’t wait! Then you’re gonna know how it feels!”

  The girl shrugged and moved on. She passed Locke in the shadows without noticing him. The back gate slammed closed.

  Familiar story, Locke thought. White Shirt went back into the bar. Locke mulled over the bitter scene, abstractly as always. Strange ideas drifted up. He remembered the ambulance, lights on but no siren. He thought of Clare. He thought of walking in the night, each step a celebration of his broken dreams.

  The words meshed, not just Clare’s
, not just the pretty brunette’s, but the same words spoken in the voices of a thousand ghosts:

  I don’t love you anymore.

  Locke gritted his teeth.

  The night was something more than a night. The moon was a stoic overseer. The cold air was the last kiss of every shattered love affair in the world. The night was an arrival.

  Locke went down the steps into the bar.

  (ii)

  Lehrling glanced up from a bottle of EKU Edelbock; he smiled, waved Locke over to the next stool. Carl the barkeep was making time with three girls at the other end of the bar who giggled, fawning over him.

  “The poet extraordinaire!” Lehrling greeted. “Have a seat, let me buy you a beer.”

  “Why don’t you buy me ten beers?” Locke returned the greeting.

  “Uh-oh. The self-reflection of the stalwart artist. Hey, Carl! Get this man ten beers!”

  Locke sat down. His thoughts winded him. Lehrling slapped him on the back, a bit hard for Locke’s liking. “So what’s up, buddy? How are things in the poet’s domain?”

  Locke sighed. He looked around. Not much of a crowd, it was still early. But at the midbar pillar, he noticed White Shirt slamming back a pint glass of Red Hook, a cigarette lit.

  “I need to talk to you, Lehrling,” Locke bid. Best friends, yes, but they addressed each other by their last names, since their first names were the same.

  “No, no, no, please. Don’t tell me you’re still in the pits because of Clare. Please don’t tell me that.”

  All right, I won’t.

  “Ten beers?” Carl came over and asked. Carl was good-looking enough to disgust most men. “Oh, no wonder—Locke’s here. Should I bring the whole keg over?” He put a pint down in front of Locke, which he drank from at once. In several gulps, it was gone. Lehrling and Carl raised brows at one another.

  “So how’s the writing?” Lehrling asked, serious now.

  “Sucks gorilla peckers,” Locke eloquented. “I haven’t been able to write anything good in months. I’m in a block and I can’t get out.”

  Lehrling frowned over his stout. “That’s an excuse. You’re either a writer, or you’re not. You either get the job done, or you don’t. ‘Writer’s block’ is the refuge of the candy-assed dilettante. You write or you don’t, it’s just that simple.”

  The job, Locke thought. That was the difference between them. Lehrling was a novelist; to him, writing was a job. It was something he did for money. Locke’s view, though, was that writing for money was a perversion of creativity. To be real, it must never be a job. It must be a passion. Money subverted the passion to lust. It seemed evil in some psychical way. Locke hadn’t read a novel since college; he’d never even read any of Lehrling’s books. Theirs was a strange relationship: they were best friends yet they constantly condemned each other’s creative motivations. Lehrling’s “speculative” novels had earned him close to a million dollars; he wasn’t famous, really, he was just rich. But to Locke, fiction was a lie. The only truth in the written word as an art form came through verse, not prose.

  “You’re a schmuck, Locke,” Lehrling offered. “And I’m saying that as your friend.”

  “Some friend.”

  “Look, you want the truth, right? Isn’t that what all poets think they want? The truth?”

  “Sure.”

  “The truth is, a real writer uses every emotion in his life to make himself a better writer. You’re not doing that. You’re letting this Clare thing make you a worse writer.”

  Locke gave this some thought. Had Lehrling hit it on the head? And if so, so what? What could Locke do?

  “But that’s not really what you want to talk about, is it?”

  No, Locke thought.

  “How long’s it been since the two of you broke up? Month and a half, two months?”

  “Almost three.”

  “And you’re still not over it,” Lehrling observed. It was no question. “You want my advice?”

  “No, I came here to look at your pretty face,” Locke said.

  “You’re not gonna like it.”

  “What’s the advice?” Locke nearly moaned and rubbed his temples.

  “Cut bait.”

  Locke winced. “What?”

  “Cut bait. You don’t need the headache.”

  “I can’t cut bait, Lehrling!” Locke shouted. “I still love her!”

  Silence.

  Locke glanced to and fro, head down. I just shouted in the bar, he realized to himself. Lehrling was looking at him. Carl was looking at him. The three girls at the end, and even White Shirt, were looking at him.

  “You need to get a grip on yourself,” Lehrling suggested after giving the outburst some time to pass. “You need to calm down.”

  “I know.”

  Lehrling ordered them two more. “So what happened? You never seemed to want to talk about it before.”

  But what had happened? Even Locke didn’t know that. “It wasn’t anything ugly. One day she just looked at me and told me she didn’t love me anymore.”

  Lehrling nodded. He poured more of the amber bock slowly into the pilsner glass. “But who knows what love is, really? Are you sure she ever loved you at all?”

  Yes! he wanted to scream. He knew she had. He was certain of it. That’s what love was, perhaps—not something you could define but something you simply knew. “I know she loved me,” Locke said, very quietly now. “Same way I know the sun comes up in the morning. I know.”

  Lehrling, a cynic, left it at that. “Then you gotta ride it out.”

  “Ride what out?”

  “The despair.” Lehrling’s eyes sought Locke out. “I know all about despair.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Shit, Locke, you’re not the first chump in the world to have a relationship go bust. If you let it mess up your life—in your case, your poetry—then you fail as a human being. So you ride it out. You tighten up the bootstraps and you move on.”

  Lehrling didn’t understand anything. It was male pride, Locke knew, that induced these ideas. Locke felt above that, he felt superior to such a falsehood. But if he felt above it, why did he feel so low now? He finished his second draft and let the buzz kick in.

  “But you’re lucky,” Lehrling continued. “You’re one up on the average guy in the same situation.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re a writer.”

  “I know. Catharsis. Aesthetic reversion. It’s all a load of shit.”

  “No it’s not. It’s true. And believe me, it’s the only thing that’s going to save you. Everybody deals with life in different ways. Writers deal with life by writing. We’re the most fucked up people in the world—that’s why we’re writers. If we didn’t have our writing, we’d all be in psych wards. Writing is the way we’re able to exist normally in society. I write speculative novels—”

  “You write pulp novels,” Locke corrected.

  “And you write candyass poetry, but that’s beside the point. My novels exist in a duality. On the outside they’re just novels, invented characters within an invented plot. But on the inside, somewhere in between the lines, they’re my displacement. In between the lines, Locke, my novels are me. All my perceptions, all my feelings, all my joys, sorrows, hopes, and dreams. It’s more than catharsis, Locke. Writing is exorcism.”

  Locke signaled Carl for another beer. Exorcism, he thought. Displacement. Maybe Lehrling was smarter than he thought. Or maybe he’s just full of crap. Because Locke still didn’t know how to use what Lehrling had just said.

  The novelist went on. “I’ve been shit on by women more times than pigeons have shit on the White House. I’ve never had a relationship that’s worked. I’ve loved girls, sure. Lots of girls. And when it falls apart, it hurts, it seems like the worst thing in the world. But I get out of it every time. I save myself—every time—with my work.”

  Locke was looking down, running his finger through water rings on the bar. His beer seemed to taste like regr
et. All of his visions, then, reverted to a whorl of memory, plummeting. He felt ruined, even after three months. And now here was Lehrling, the know-it-all rich novelist, claiming to have all the answers. Locke didn’t even know what the questions were.

  “You take it out of your heart,” Lehrling continued to postulate, “and you put it somewhere else. You put it on that piece of paper that sticks out of your typewriter. There’s no other way to get away from it, Locke. You’re a visionary, a dreamer—all poets are. Everything you feel, you’ve got to write about it. That’s the only way you’ll ever get over Clare. That’s the only way you’ll ever be free.”

  Free… But Locke didn’t want to be free, he didn’t want to get over it, not if freedom meant that his love abandon him forever. He wanted Clare back—the way it was—that’s what he wanted…

  White Shirt inexplicably pounded his fist on the bar. “Never,” he exclaimed. He was drunk and then some. “Never, never…”