Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  I dream of Cauchon nearly as often as I dream of Joan.

  But Joan. Every avenue circles back. Everything returns to the mysterious and martyred Joan of Orléans. The young peasant girl who for a brief heartbeat of time was believed to have felt God’s lips pressed to her ear.

  What of Joan of Arc?

  For all of my grief and heartache and guilt, the truth is I only met her once, and that was the day I burned her alive.

  • • •

  “I turn fifty-seven next Monday,” I said. “One week. Which means I’ll be dead in six days or less. Or so history dictates.”

  Julia crossed her legs, cleared her throat. She said, “I know, Marvin. Would you like to talk about it?”

  I smiled, pleased with myself, my hands laced across my chest. My sessions with Julia were generally the high point of my week. “Well, to tell you the truth? The fact that I’ve survived this long surprises me.”

  Within the periphery of my good eye, I could see Julia set her pen and yellow legal pad on her desk. She uncrossed her legs and smoothed her skirt—her version, I knew, of an exasperated sigh.

  “Because you don’t always,” she said.

  “Live this long? God, no. Hardly ever, in fact. I’ve died anywhere from a few weeks old to my mid-fifties. But this long? A week before my birthday? Nope, this is a record.”

  Julia waited for me to keep talking. When I didn’t, she said, “And what do you think that means?”

  I had thrown any amount of incendiary, outlandish trivia Julia’s way in our sessions, and she always managed the same impassive, impenetrable veneer. That wonderful amalgam of detachment and polite, professional interest.

  My relationship with my therapist, distilled: I confessed my sins and she tried, through dogged perseverance dense with silences, to convince me my truth was fiction. I bemused her; I confounded her. I was her high-functioning, erringly pleasant pet lunatic. I was her act of charity. I impressed her with the depth and seamlessness of my delusion. I paid her in jazz records.

  Julia’s office was in a strip mall on Eighty-second Avenue, amid a string of used car dealerships, apartment complexes with parking lots of buckled concrete, and fast food outlets with typos on their marquees. Eighty-second stretched for miles, a stitched scar running north to south, the city’s class-dividing Cesarean. The traffic was ceaseless and deafening, and on a hot summer day like today, the stench of exhaust and melting blacktop was like a fist to the nose. Julia’s office was couched between a tanning salon called Life’s A Beach and an oft-darkened dry cleaners that I was convinced was some kind of front.

  During our first session, I’d gone into her office and been surprised when she actually wanted me to lie on a couch, like in the movies.

  “Is this really necessary?” I’d asked.

  “It relaxes me,” she’d said.

  “It relaxes you?”

  But now I couldn’t imagine telling Julia the things I told her while sitting upright, hands planted on my knees in some office chair. In Julia’s office, the couch—a lumbering leather beast the width of a twin mattress—sat flanked against one wall. She rarely sat at her desk; it seemed like something she kept around to throw her notepad on. A potted fern stood quietly dying in the corner. On the wall, Julia’s diplomas and licenses hung amid a drawing her son Adam had done when he was either a toddler or very, very drunk. It was about what you’d expect of a therapist’s office whose neighbor was a tanning salon with a dead starfish in the window display. And yet my profound disinterest in living—my outright contempt of it, actually—seemed to dissipate during the fifty minutes I sank into those vast, dark cushions. Seriously, I loved that fucking couch.

  Finally, I shrugged—the couch gave a little squeak of protest—and said, “I don’t know what it means. I don’t think it means anything.”

  “Really? It seems like it might be an improvement.”

  Another pause. “Well, it’s not,” I said. “It’s the same old shit, Julia, believe me.”

  Julia picked up her pad and wrote something on it and asked if I was still volunteering.

  I nodded. “I have another shift later today.”

  “Do you have any different feelings about it?”

  I smiled. “Besides a black and ceaseless disdain for any kind of supposed ‘guiding force’ in the world?”

  A smile, humoring me. “I suppose, yes.”

  “No,” I said. “No different feelings about it. I’m grateful for the opportunity to help there, and at the same time it makes me feel so powerless that I want to hit something until that something breaks. I want to rail against God.”

  “Well, honestly, that seems like a pretty normal response, Marvin. I mean we’re all powerless in the face of death, aren’t we? And they’re children. It’s got to be hard.”

  I turned and looked at her. Julia was a pretty woman, maybe ten years younger than me, with a glossy wing of auburn hair that covered one eye as she wrote and that particular softness that some people get when they reach the point where exercise becomes a luxury and not a lifestyle. It worked very well for her. A lovely scattering of freckles beneath her eyes. She wore dark hose and a brown skirt, a black blouse. I felt a surprising tenderness for her when I saw a chafe mark on her ankle, the cost of some ill-fitting sandal.

  “You think I’m just afraid of dying. Is that it?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Julia, come on. It would be clichéd to say I’ve died a hundred times, but it wouldn’t be that far from the truth. Dying is nothing new.”

  Chimes sounded in her desk drawer. The alarm going off, like some ethereal angel breaking wind. Our time was up.

  I could see her dilemma. She was torn between calling me out on what she undoubtedly believed was my bullshit—the guilt over my made-up stories about Joan of Arc and Pierre Cauchon and all the rest were clearly, she felt, masking some other very real guilt. And yet she struggled with her education, her profession’s standards and base practices, perhaps even her own beliefs and value system, all which staunchly noted that change must come from within.

  I appreciated her for that, for that struggle. Because if she ever had actually called me out in the year I’d been seeing her, I’d have beat feet. Going and gone. I’d have promptly left her office and never spoken to her again. Our relationship was contingent on that structure: I confessed and she listened, no matter how ludicrous my tales. She could doubt but she could not refute. I needed to tell someone.

  I extricated myself from the arms of the couch. A thinning, pot-bellied old man with a pair of prescription glasses, one lens transparent and the other ink-black. I felt relaxed. My Post-Confession High, I called it. I leaned over and handed Julia a paper bag that had been leaning against the couch.

  She opened it and gently, picking it up from the edges the way I had showed her, extracted the record and laid it on her desk. A sealed copy, a 1959 original of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps LP.

  “Adam should be able to get at least a few hundred dollars for that,” I said. “At least. Tell him to try the jazz auction sites first, then Discogs, and eBay as a last resort.” She sat looking down at the record as if it were some kind of rune, some glyph to figure out. Coltrane’s long fingers loomed on the cover, ratcheted around his sax. When she looked up at me there was a flatness to her expression, a blankness that surprised me.

  “Are you in danger of hurting yourself, Marvin? I really need to know that.”

  I looked at Adam’s childhood drawing on the wall—Jesus, was it a man surfing? A dog attack? I couldn’t tell. “This is just how it is, Julia. I live and then I die and then I live again.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “No. I’m not a danger to myself.”

  “Well, Marvin,” she said, “I’d like to schedule one more appointment with you before you die.” I laughed. Julia didn’t. She thumbed through her planner, frowning. “Considering the fact that you believe you’ll be dead by next Monday and reincarnated
as . . . How does it go again?”

  “As penance for my past transgressions. For what I did to Joan.”

  Julia nodded, still with the frown. “That’s right. For your sins against Joan of Arc.”

  “Julia, you’re being glib.”

  “I’m really not, Marvin. How does tomorrow at three sound? Can you fit that in? I know it’s short notice.”

  “Is sarcasm a popular method in psychiatry today?”

  Julia looked up from her planner. She raised her eyebrows and smiled, but there was a coldness to it—I realized that I’d hurt her, that she’d allowed herself to finally be frustrated; she was taking it personally, the steadfastness of my delusion. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Marvin, remember? I’m a psychologist. A therapist. If I was a psychiatrist, we’d be having a very different conversation right now, believe me.”

  “Why is that?” I said. Knowing what was coming.

  “Because I think you would greatly benefit from medication, Marvin. Because I’m worried about your safety.”

  I gently rapped on the doorframe with two knuckles. “There’s nothing to worry about,” I said. Meaning, of course, that some bad things happen whether we worry about them or not. “I’ll see you at three tomorrow.”

  Outside, the world was the same as I’d left it. Hot, the sun winking off the chrome of passing cars, that stink of melting blacktop.

  My birthday was in a week, but I’d be dead before then. Some terrible death in the next seven days. And then on to the next life. So it had been, so it would be.

  Honestly? It was hard to get excited about much.

  3

  Oh, there were so many reasons to clock the guy.

  As Vale leapt from the countertop, as he watched the man’s mouth move and curl but heard nothing besides the howl of his own blood in his ears, he ran through them. The list came fluidly and easily to mind:

  1) Blood had by then hardened to a dark crust inside his sock.

  2) His last two cigarettes had busted in half after he ran into the telephone pole.

  3) The blood spatter from his nosebleed on his last clean work shirt.

  4) Having to borrow one of Mario’s extra work shirts, the humiliation being compounded when said shirt was so small on him it felt like Vale was wearing a fucking wet suit.

  5) A hazy memory of the bartender at the Ace High laughingly cutting him off last night, and Vale realizing he may have literally cried in his beer before the bartender had taken his empty glass away.

  6) Throwing up in the employee bathroom as soon as he got to work, his retching undoubtedly loud enough for both customers and coworkers to hear.

  7) The fact that the other employees at Bean There, Bun That—loud, gum-chewing teenagers and solemn, tight-lipped Latinos, all of them twenty years his junior—perpetually avoided him, as if, every day, he’d just strolled into work after his early morning shift of gleefully fellating irradiated warthogs outside the Fukushima reactor.

  He was airborne, weightless. The overhead lights gleamed on the shaved dome of the guy’s skull. Also:

  8) The fact that Candice already had a new book out. He’d seen it in line at the grocery store the other day. Another Janey Delancy thriller. What was this, her twelfth novel? Thirteenth? The woman wrote like a goddamned metronome.

  9) His hangover was brutal, but that was hardly an excuse anymore. That was like blaming nearsightedness, or being bucktoothed, or circumcised.

  But mostly?

  10) A sudden and terrible clarity: none of it meant anything. None of it meant shit. He was nearly fifty years old and had his ex-wife’s name tattooed on his hands and seventeen dollars in his wallet. He was wearing a paper hat shaped like a hot dog and was pretty sure that he’d splashed a fair amount of vomit on his pants during his little bathroom visit. Nothing mattered.

  So when the bald guy in the muumuu-like jersey had stepped through the doors with his phone pressed to his ear, practically shoulder-checking an old, curmudgeonly, wobbly-kneed regular that Vale actually kind of liked, that was it. Then when Purple Jersey Guy didn’t even apologize on top of that, it was a done deal. Vale might as well have turned his lettuce leaf–shaped apron in right there.

  “Oh,” the guy practically bellowed into the phone once he got to the counter, “she was a total bitch, dude,” drawing out the word total as if it were a piece of taffy. “I mean, she had that look already, but then she started talking, you know?”

  Vale tightened his hands on the sides of the register and steeled himself for a new chapter of his life. “And what can I get for you, sir?” he said brightly.

  The guy held up a finger as he looked above Vale’s head, nodding. He laughed—no, Vale thought, he chortled—and said, “That’s what I told her, dude. I said, ‘Dinner and a movie? Well, I’m gonna be straight with you. If I’m paying for dinner and a movie, I expect some reciprocation.’”

  Out on the floor, bleary-eyed mothers sat at tables festooned with howling children, flying hot dogs into their mouths like plummeting airplanes, begging them to eat. Clusters of old men read day-old newspapers, men who remembered war rationing and could stoically nurse a bean and cheese burrito and a cup of ice for three hours.

  “Grass, gas or ass, bro, that’s right,” the guy said. “That’s exactly what I told her. Yeah.” A pause, another chortle. “What do you think? We came to an agreement.” The guy’s eyes flitted over Vale’s for just a moment. The sum total of the man’s decorum seemed to be summed up by the fact that he minutely turned away from Vale before he said, “Oh hell yeah, I blew my nut. Hell yeah. Alright, lates.” And then he hung up.

  Vale could sometimes feel Mario, his boss, on the line behind him, doing bun counts in the kitchen and checking employee shirt tucks and whatever the fuck else a tight-assed twenty-year-old kid had to do to become a Senior Manager, while Vale took countless orders for flash-frozen burritos and hot dogs as wrinkled as a toddler’s fingers in a bathtub. This was one of those times. Mario and his laser focus.

  “Yeah,” the guy finally rumbled, looking up at the menu now with his jaw hinged open. “Give me two TacoBurger specials with Chili King Fries. Extra jalapeño cheese. Two chocolate Devil Dogs. And a large Coke.”

  Vale gently set his hot dog hat on the counter. The guy was still in thrall to the Great Menu Above, so slack-jawed Vale could see his fillings. Mario suddenly appeared at Vale’s side, his headset perched in his ear like some cyborg grasshopper. “Everything okay here, Mike?” he chirped nervously. Mario was good like that, some managerial spider-sense that warned him of impending fuckups. Vale ignored him.

  Instead, he leaned over the counter and pressed a finger into the guy’s chest. He said, “You fucking suck, man.” It was all he could come up with. The inside of his head was a red cloud.

  The guy looked down slowly, from the menu to Vale’s finger and then up to his face. “What? What did you say to me?”

  Vale said, “You suck, man. You totally suck. You’re seriously a worthless human being. Flat-out.” He slapped his hand on the counter. Heads turned. “Grass, gas or ass? I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you’ve never said ‘Grass, gas or ass’ to a woman in your entire life. And if you have, I guaran-fucking-tee they recognized you for the petrified, misogynist dumbfuck that you are and ran the other way.” His voice had risen. He was yelling, and it felt evangelical, redemptive. It felt good to yell at someone. “I call bullshit on you, you purple-shirted, rap-rock-loving, tribal tattoo-and-goatee, TacoBurger-eating motherfucker.”

  It was the guy’s turn to point a stubby finger at Vale. Looking at Mario, he said, “So this is the guy you want, like, manning your register? This is the face of your business? This asshole?”

  Mario had his hands out in front of him. “I am very sorry, sir. Really.” He turned to Vale, grinning and terrified. “Mike, why don’t you go work on the Tater-Totaler for a bit, and Brittany can relieve you here at the register. Sound good, Mike?”

  Mario put a hand on his shoulder. Vale shrugg
ed it off and suddenly leaned across the counter and seized the man’s nipples in each hand. He twisted, hard. “I expect some reciprocation,” he snarled.

  “Ow,” the man said. The two of them stayed that way for a moment, Vale’s hands on the man’s breasts, and then the man’s lips pulled back and he was slapping at Vale’s hands, trying to grab them, and Mario said something like, “Pardon me, folks, hey guys, I’m the manager,” trying to get between them, and things were finally, finally moving.

  Vale hiked his leg up on the counter and he had already begun crafting the list of reasons why he was going to hit this man, it took no time at all, and it was only when he was mid-leap, when he was actually in the air, that Vale realized he was smiling for the first time in days.

  4

  Excerpt from Sound on Sound: An Oral History of Jazz, 1978:

  Alan Coates, Columbia Studios session engineer: “Who, Bill Creswell? Yeah, I remember him. We used to call him Dollar Bill. A regular at the Blue Door, the Hi Hat, all those places. Tall, gangly white dude, real shy. Always wore long sleeve shirts ’cause you could see he had burn scars all up and down his arms. He was a jazzman for sure. Ate it up, man. Loved it. One time John [Coltrane] and some others was over at his loft—he had this place on Avenue B—and the motherfucker just had stacks of records, man, just stacks of them. I mean, like, ten copies of this album, twenty of that one. ’Round About Midnight had just come out, and John said Dollar Bill had about fifty copies of that son of a bitch just sitting there untouched. Just right there in a box. So after that, he was Dollar Bill from then on. I don’t know what he ever did with all those records, but they go for some money now, you know.”

  • • •

  I was dumping inventory in the computer while Adam walked around the store stocking records. Even with his glasses on, Adam had to hold the album covers close up to his face. We were listening to the Dead Boys and dust motes hung motionless in the window’s sunlight. “Listen,” I said. “Hypothetical question. If you had a choice, would you rather own ten amazing records, or a hundred mediocre ones?”