by Andra Brynn
He’s dressed in a suit with a fine tan trench coat flying around him as he pulls up. His breath comes fast, and I watch it curl in the frosty air with fascination. “Hey,” I say. “What are you doing here?”
He raises a brow at me. “Well, let’s see, there’s a Catholic church on campus, where my adviser and mentor holds Mass, and I still have this crazy notion that I might want to be a priest some day. What do you think I’m doing here?”
I shake my head. “You have no idea how to take a good opening for a joke,” I tell him.
He frowns. “Like what?”
“You could say, ‘I’m here to try out for the cheerleading squad,’ or ‘I was meeting a secret lover,’ or something like that. Anything. Anything but telling me you were at church.” I can’t keep the scowl off my face when I say it, and immediately I see his eyes soften.
“Hey,” he says. “It’s okay. I keep forgetting how bad your experience has been. I need to remember not to mention it.” He purses his lips as though trying to figure out how to do this.
I shake my head again. “No, forget it. I just have to get over it. It’s a part of you.”
“I suppose it is,” he says. But the troubled look on his face doesn’t go away. Then he shakes himself. “So what are you doing out here? Coming back from lunch?”
“I haven’t even had breakfast yet.”
“Bianca!” he says, his voice reproving. “It’s almost two in the afternoon.”
“So?”
“You need to take better care of yourself.”
“That’s what Tanya says.”
“She’s right.”
I roll my eyes. “Well, if you want to come back to the dorm and make me something to eat from the peanut butter, salami, and left-over Indian food I have to my name, you are welcome to do so. I can’t be bothered. Eating is a chore.”
“I will,” he says. “But what are you doing out here? Did you just get up?”
We turn toward Marchand, and I try to think of how to reply to him. Should I tell him the truth?
...I should. For some reason I don’t want to lie to Daniel any more than I already do. He’s too good for that.
“Well, I was supposed to go over to a guy’s room that I kind of know, get drunk and sleep with him, but I decided not to,” I say.
He’s quiet. “Oh?” he says after a moment.
I look at him from the corner of my eye. “Yup,” I say.
“Any particular reason you decided not to do it?” he asks.
I give him a sharp look, but he’s all innocence and I shrug. “I decided I wanted to spend the day at home with people who actually like me instead of with people who want to use me.”
“That’s a pretty good decision.”
“I’m really bad at making good decisions,” I say. “Watch. I made this decision, and now the house will burn down. I bring disaster and destruction wherever I go.” Though, to be fair, most of it is entirely internal, but I don’t say that out loud.
“Perhaps I should hang out and make sure that doesn’t happen,” he says.
“Are you inviting yourself over?” I can’t quite hide my smile.
“Yes,” he replies. “I want to make sure you’re okay.” I narrow my eyes at him, and he looks taken aback. “What?”
I sigh. “You’re kind,” I tell him. “Someone is going to hurt you really badly some day.”
He’s quiet. We pass the music hall, one of the prettier buildings on campus. It looks almost like a cathedral. Inside, someone is playing piano, and the music floats out onto the quad, beautiful, haunting, and the leaves swirl in time with the cascading notes.
“You’ve made me think about ghost stories a lot,” he says suddenly.
I look at him in surprise. “Really? Usually I try to keep them to myself. People think I’m weird when I share them.”
“That piano sounds like it could be played by a ghost. The campus is so deserted right now it seems like we should be the only two people here.”
“I do know a ghost story about pianos,” I say.
“Tell me.”
“This one is an unfinished business story. The story goes that there was this man who worked a shitty dead end job and he hated it more than anything in the world, but he could play the piano by ear. His kid loved to listen to him play, and he’d sit down at that piano after dinner or whenever he had a day off, or even late at night when he was supposed to be sleeping and just play for hours. Finally one day he decided he wanted to start recording his magnum opus, which was in his head, but which he’d never written down because he couldn’t read music, he could only play it, and he wants his kid to be able to listen to it, you know, when he’s gone, or once the kid goes off to college or something. So he buys a bunch of recording equipment and starts recording himself playing the piano.
“But he keeps messing up because now that it’s being recorded he’s nervous. He starts drinking so he can relax, but he doesn’t know it interacts really badly with some medication he’s taking, and one day he drinks just a bit too much and he goes loopy from it combined with the medicine. He kind of blacks out, leaves the house, gets in his car and drives away.
“Of course he’s totally fucked up at that point and drives his car off a bridge into a river. His wife and kid are devastated. He didn’t finish recording his magnum opus, and now they’re poor because he’s gone.
“And then one night, his kid wakes up and hears the piano playing out in the living room. And the kid recognizes the song. It’s the magnum opus that was never finished. So the kid jumps out of bed and gets all the recording equipment together and presses record, and the piano’s just going and going and going, and the kid finally hears the whole magnum opus through, from start to finish, and it’s the most beautiful piece of music in the world. But when the recording is played back, it’s just static. The man came back to play for his kid and no one else. And that’s the story of the haunted piano that I know.”
We are almost to Marchand now. “Your stories are so sad,” Daniel says. “Ships that pass in the night. Waiting that’s never rewarded. Goodbyes from beyond the grave.”
“Better than no goodbye at all,” I say, and we are at the house. I let us in the back door.
I have a moment of déjà vu, and then it passes, quietly.
“Whoah!” Daniel says. “It’s freezing in here!”
“Oh yeah,” I say. “I forgot. The heating must have gone out. That’s why I left in the first place.” I turn and wink at him. “Getting laid warms you up, you know. Oh wait, you probably don’t.”
He glares and I laugh, and then we weave through the halls to the foyer. Tanya is still sitting in the living room and she looks up to see us enter.
“Hey guys,” she says, then narrows her eyes at me. “I thought you were going to go get laid or something.” She shifts her narrowed gaze to Daniel. I don’t even have to look at him to know he’s blushing.
“I decided not to, and I ran into Daniel on his way back from Mass.”
“What are you guys doing here?”
“I have to get something to eat,” I say. “Come on, Daniel.”
I lead him into the kitchen. In the refrigerator are the leftovers from my Friday night dinner—lamb shahi korma. The best of all worlds. I heat it up in the microwave while Daniel leans against the counter.
As my bits of dead sheep pirouette around and around getting bombarded by radiation, I turn to Daniel. “So what’s going on?” I say.
He looks at me in surprise. “Why do you think something is going on?”
I shrug. “You’re here. No offense, but we haven’t exactly done any hanging out in a general context. It’s been studying and sticking our noses where we probably shouldn’t.”
He thinks about this. “You’re right,” he says. “Why don’t we think about hanging out next weekend?”
I chew my lip and study him. “Why not today?” The sheepish look on his face is enough for me to divine his intentions and I laugh. �
�If you want to go exploring you just have to ask.”
“I know,” he says. “I want to go visit one of the old houses. I’m really getting back into photography again. It’s sucking me in.”
The microwave beeps and I pull my food out. I don’t want to bother putting it on a plate, so I just grab one of my forks—only two left after freshman year—and start stuffing my face. My stomach growls as I do so and I realize that Daniel was probably right—I do need to take better care of myself. Not that I’ll ever admit that his paternalistic bullshit might be on-target.
“Did you stop when you entered seminary?” I ask him as I start to shove food in my mouth. If we’re going to go somewhere we need to go now instead of later. And Daniel’s still in a suit.
“Pretty much,” he says. “But it was just a coincidence. I just didn’t feel like I had time for it.”
“So which house are we going to? We’re heading to Nompton, right?”
“Yeah. There’s one house that was abandoned in the late nineties and it’s pretty big. I wouldn’t say mansion, but it’s really nice and probably not rotting all the way through so we can go upstairs and everything.”
I can’t hide my smile at the thought. “I’m in,” I say. “Are you going to change or something?”
He looks down at his suit. “Oh, right, I should probably do that.”
I shake my head. “I can’t believe you forgot you were wearing a suit. I hate dressing up. I can never wait to take them off again and put on pajamas.”
Daniel smiles. “You may have many sins, but I believe the sin of pride is not among them.”
“I bet everything we do could be considered a sin. It’s impossible to go five minutes without sinning in your heart,” I tell him. That was big in the tongue-speaking church. Sinning in the heart. It was a good way to keep people terrified of themselves. You didn’t even have to do anything to anyone else. If you felt a negative emotion? That was a sin.
Frowning, I swallow the last chunk of lamb, then tip the container and let the sauce run into my mouth. All emotions must be sins by that logic, I think, because anything can be spun negatively. Love? Well, why aren’t you loving the Lord more? Fear? You don’t trust the Lord. Anger? Your pride blinds you to the Lord’s plans. Lust? Earthly pleasures keep you from fulfilling the Lord’s plan for you.
No thinking. No feeling. No fucking.
The last of the sauce drips down my throat and I sigh. It’ll be a while before I can afford that again. I cross over to the trash can and throw it in before turning to Daniel.
He’s looking at me incredulously. “You just drank the sauce?” he says.
I put my hands on my hips. “Why not? I paid for it. It tastes good. I’m not going to let it go to waste. That’s... I’m sure that’s some kind of sin.
“Yeah, but drinking it was gluttony.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Wrath,” I say. “I’m feeling wrath right now.”
He grins. “Pride.”
“Sloth.”
He raises his eyebrow. “Sloth?”
“I had the impulse to slap you silly, but I was too lazy to do it.”
He runs a hand over his chin. “You’d slap this sweet face?” he asks.
“You really are full of pride.”
He drops his hand. “So they tell me,” he says. Pushing away from the counter, he stuffs his hands in his pockets and brings out his keys. “Are we going or not? We have to stop by my apartment first, but then we’ll have the rest of the afternoon.”
I nod, and suddenly I am so glad I decided to come home. I’d rather spend the day with Daniel, suicidally crawling through condemned buildings than drinking bad rum, then letting some guy fuck me just so I can pretend I’m loved. I could get used to this kind of routine.
“Let’s go,” I say.
He nods, and I lead the way out of the house. The back door is closer to the quad than the front, so we weave through the lower halls, and when I push against the door, it opens easily.
We are already talking about what we will find in our next undiscovered country when I hear the door slam shut behind us, the sound cracking through the cold air like a gunshot.
I have the strangest notion that I have just heard the door of the past closing, and our lives are about to change, suddenly and forever.
Then Daniel makes a joke and I laugh, and the feeling is gone.
.0.
They say that God never closes a door without opening a window.
I hate that saying. Closing a door is an asshole move, and opening a window just means you can look at, but not take part in, whatever is on the other side. Or maybe the window is there so you can throw yourself out of it. Either way, it’s a shitty deal, and why wouldn’t you just kick the door back open? That must be how ghosts get back into the world. They won’t accept such a bullshit compromise. They rebel. They come back.
Except I’ve never seen a ghost. I’ve never heard a ghost. I’ve never witnessed any evidence that they exist at all. So it must be something more than a door that separates us from then and now.
Chasms, perhaps. Pits. Meandering rivers that can only be forded one way. Across our lives, cracks appear, separating us from the past forever. Some of them are small, hardly noticeable, but others are an earthquake, a sinkhole, a bloody, jagged void a thousand miles wide, and it marks the line between when I was young, and now I am this.
.15.
When we pull up outside Daniel’s apartment he turns off the car and sits there for a moment, frowning at his dashboard.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
He purses his lips. “It’s too cold for you to stay outside,” he says.
I blink. “Yeah,” I say. “So? Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
He takes a deep breath. “I haven’t invited a woman into my home, alone, since my undergrad days.”
It takes me a moment to understand what he’s saying, and then I have to giggle. “Oh, really, Daniel. I promise I won’t accidentally hump you. You’re studying to be a priest. There’s nothing inappropriate about this.”
He doesn’t answer me, and I see his Adam’s apple bob beneath his stubbled skin. “Right,” he says. “Come on.” He pops the door open and gets out, and I follow.
The car’s heating had been working so the sharp sting of frost in the air makes me gasp as I stand up. I try to keep my head down in the wind as I follow Daniel up two flights of stairs to the third floor. He unlocks his apartment quickly, then stands aside and lets me enter first, just like a gentleman of the old school or whatever. I take the gesture. It’s fucking cold outside.
It’s not much better in Daniel’s apartment, but it’s something. Like all grad students I have to assume he’s barely making ends meet by eating rice and beans and wrapping himself in blankets and sweatshirts while keeping the heat turned down.
The inside of his apartment is austere. In the kitchen and living room area there is a television, a beat-up loveseat, a desk where the dining room should be, and then a door leading off to the bedroom. The decorations on the walls are minimal, containing only a degree and a crucifix on the wall above the loveseat facing the TV, as if Christ can’t stand to miss an episode of Real Housewives.
Daniel shifts from foot to foot as I look around, and I notice he’s wringing his hands, massaging them as though attempting to relax them. “Feel free to sit down and flip through the channels,” he says. “I’m just going to go... you know, throw on something better for crawling through rubble.
I smile. “Take your time,” I say, grabbing the remote and turning on the TV. From the corner of my eye I see him nod, then make a beeline for the bedroom.
For some reason, Tanya’s comments on how hot he is come back to me. The suit has not helped that impression, and I am having difficulties suppressing my Pavlovian reaction to being in the apartment or dorm room of the opposite sex.
Blech, I think to myself. He’s a priest. Gross. He’s totally safe. My inner thoughts are not convincing
. But being attracted and doing something about it are two different things, though, and with a huff of impatience I push the thoughts away. It feels incredibly rude to even have thoughts like that in Daniel’s sanctuary. Sleeping around with any man that I can pretend loves me is a habit I should probably get around to breaking, and I can practice doing that with the easiest one: the guy who’s not supposed to sleep with me at all.
I grab the remote and flip through channels until Daniel emerges from his room, wrapped in sweatshirts and jeans and boots. He still looks cold, and he crosses to the little door that leads out onto the balcony, peering through the blinds. “You don’t think it’s going to snow, do you?” he asks.
“It’s still October,” I say. “It’ll just feel all cold and then we’ll get hit with sleet or something.”
“Better bring some umbrellas, I guess,” he says. He disappears back into his room and comes out with two small travel umbrellas.
“What do you have those for?” I ask. I don’t even own one umbrella.
He smiles. “When you’re really poor and you want to try taking some pictures with professional light, you can sometimes rig a regular old umbrella to do all the reflecting and directional stuff. Not that I’ve tried it. It all kind of got pushed by the wayside, if you know what I mean.”
I nod. “I used to knit,” I say. “Before I came to college.”
“You knitted?” He looks surprised.
“Yes. What’s so shocking about that?”
“It seems...” He searches for the right word. “So domestic.”
I roll my eyes. “I’ll have you know that knitting was a man’s past time for a long time. I’m still manly. Don’t worry.”
“You’re anything but manly,” Daniel says.
I don’t know what to say to that, and he seems embarrassed to have said it, because he clears his throat and tosses one of the umbrellas to me. I barely have the presence of mind to snatch it out of the air.
“Ready to go?” Daniel asks.
I nod and get up. He locks the apartment and we get back in his car and start heading north.
I watch the landscape slide by. It’s starting to become familiar to me now, though I have to wonder what it looks like in spring or summer. All it seems to me now is a dead place, a cold-blasted land stripped of growth and warmth. A ghost land, after the bombs go off.