Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  “I’m very, very sorry to hear that.”

  “Something’s wrong with him. With his little baby bones.”

  These moments. You want to rend worlds apart in moments like these.

  I said, “Well, I want you to know we have very good doctors here.”

  “His bones have holes in them. Our whole church is praying for him.”

  Osteosarcoma? Rhabdomyosarcoma? The patois of the dead sang in my skull. And yet what thing named is ever robbed of its power simply by the naming?

  “Why are part of your glasses black?”

  “I can’t see out of this eye very well,” I said, pointing. “So the doctor put a black lens in. I can only see out of my good eye.”

  “Is it icky?”

  “My eye?”

  She nodded, pointing at the lens. “Is it icky in there?”

  I nodded, grimacing. “It is pretty icky.”

  She was poised, I knew, to ask to see it—the idea of an icky eyeball all too tempting—when her mother finished her business with Velma.

  “Come on, Mellie,” her mother said, and Mellie took her mother’s hand and gave me a small wave as they walked away. Her mother smiled at me and nodded and didn’t see me at all. I was vapor, a mirage. The totality of her world was held in her hand and in a room down the hall. Her heart was a vessel, I knew by experience, but one incapable of being filled. The heart’s capacity for grief seemed boundless. Mellie’s boots clacked down the hall and I thought of her brother, a little boy inculpable of sin beyond the most original and banal—that of being born. And yet still dying for it, his devastation piecemealed out.

  But me? Amidst all the blood I’ve spilled through the centuries? Me, you can’t get rid of. I’ve visited horror upon horror on the world and what happens? A violent death, yes, sure.

  But then a rebirth, my memory intact.

  The oncology ward is one of the few places I feel anything, the only time I can muster up anything beyond a profound indifference. My palette consists of lethargy and rage, and when I am here in these rooms I hold that rage next to my heart like a gift.

  7

  “So what are you gonna do, then?” Raph asked.

  Vale looked around at the dark red walls of the Ace High, heard the crack and clack of pool balls kissing each other behind him.

  “First I’m going to finish this beer,” he said. “And then I’m going to get another one.”

  “Shit,” Raph said, shaking his head above his crossed forearms. “Dumb, man. Really dumb. You know how much I had to kiss Mario’s ass to get you that job? Larissa’s little brother, man, and there I am practically blowing him to get you that job.”

  They sat next to each other at the bar, their faces in the mirror dented and distorted. Vale waved a hand. “Yeah, so I could dress up in a paper hat and sell hot dogs to shitbags? Forget it.”

  Raph leaned back, both hands wrapped around his glass. “There’s some gratitude for you.”

  “I do appreciate it, man. Seriously. I’m just saying there’s plenty of shit jobs out there.”

  “Listen. I don’t want to disagree with you. I’ve worked plenty of shit jobs in my life, you know? But shit jobs for a dude like you? No disrespect. Forty-whatever years old? Tattoos on his hands? A record? I don’t know.”

  The bartender, Nate, wore matching sleeves of blurred tattoos and a t-shirt mounded tight around his gut. Nate had always despised him, for no particular reason Vale could discern. The man would be jovial and yelling over the jukebox to other patrons, his eyes shining, and when it came Vale’s turn at the bar he would wind down like a clock. Vale couldn’t quite remember if it had been Nate who’d kicked him out the night before.

  Vale made a V with his fingers. “Two more IPAs, Jeeves.”

  “Hey. Big spender,” Raph said. “Thanks, man.”

  Nate poured, set the glasses down. Vale, knowing he would regret it, gave him a five dollar tip just to see what would happen. Nate took it without comment, face like a stone idol. “You’re welcome,” Vale called out bitterly. And yet in spite of it, he felt the stirrings of a Moment.

  The definition of a Moment: those periods—always drunk, always brief—when Vale was awarded a savage, tumbling happiness. A smoothing out of the world’s sharp edges. The goal of drinking—beyond the drunkenness itself—was the culmination, if he could manage it, of a Moment. He’d lived so long with hangovers by now, was intimate with shaking hands, night tremors. Occasional lacings of blood in his shit. Loose teeth, insomnia. All rote by now. But there were also the Moments, those times in which he was purely joyous, and the sacrifices and ravages to his body seemed a fair trade for these. If there was one thing Vale knew, it was that nothing was free. Ever.

  And as if just by thinking of it, he realized it had arrived. As if he’d conjured it. That perfect balance of intoxication that he would for the rest of the night attempt to maintain. It took an alchemist’s precision. At stake: the shimmering way the light haloed itself over the hanging lamps above the pool tables. How the girls half his age were so achingly beautiful, how free they seemed, how the pure quicksilver joy of life leapt inside them. It was like lust but more—what? Clean? Distanced? In the Moment, yes. And also how the young men surrounded each other, their rough laughter and small kindnesses to each other, pool chalk passed wordlessly from one to the other, commiserations on missed shots even amid a kind of offhanded cruelty.

  He loved even more the Ace High itself: the cement walls painted a crimson red, the Christmas lights strung up in the windows, the threadbare carpet laced inexplicably here and there in duct tape. If only his life was like the floor of this fucking bar! Something so grievously used but—look!—still functional! With purpose! Music from the jukebox rattled his heart like a stone in a glass.

  “How I feel right now?” Vale said, rolling his head on his shoulders. “This good feeling I have in me? Painting used to make me feel like this.”

  He bought another round. He looked into Nate’s eyes as he handed him exact change this time, and Nate looked right through him.

  And the evening wound around them. Two vultures curled on their stools as the bar wailed electric around them. They were of a different world than the other patrons—full-blown barflies, the two of them—and as such were hardly visible. He was an awkward piece of furniture that brayed laughter at odd times, got sloppy, fell off his stool. And the shame of this? The knowledge of what he was? It was all lessened when he was in the Moment.

  They watched the television hanging above the bar. Tanks trundling down a smoking, cratered highway in the Middle East. Someone was shot outside a convenience store in Gresham. Then grainy footage of yet another smoke sighting in Southern California. Somewhere in Orange County, according to the closed captioning. This one showed a smoke standing in some mini-mall parking lot, wringing its hands, looking down at the pavement. It was bearded, in suspenders, looking for all the world like some woeful, shit-luck lumberjack. Yellowed as an old photograph. They never interacted with the living. Just stood there, locked in their own repetition, their own little worlds. And then, of course, the newscast cut to the familiar footage of the Bride there on her golf course, her hands buried in the fabric of her dress as she ran one way on the putting green and then the other.

  The sightings had begun appearing at the beginning of summer. Footage of the Bride, as she came to be called, aired first. She went viral in a day, and then news crews began getting others on film. Things escalated, flared. Chain of authority ran up and down the pipeline until the CDC, of all organizations, was tasked with leading the investigation.

  Various committees were appointed at the federal, state, county and local level. The economy had nearly collapsed and was now ballooning with a kind of joyous panic. There was Congressional talk of a curfew throughout heavily populated areas like LA, San Diego, something the President denied would happen. So far the spirits had only appeared in Southern California and Northern Mexico—everything else had proven to be hoaxes.
No one, of course, could explain any of it. Some people were saying it was somehow a Russian hoax, that they were—somehow—satellite-controlled holograms. Others were saying it was End Times. That Western decadence would soon be laid to waste. Some people were rapturous when they said it. Curbside prophets sang and threatened and prophesied, would thrust crazed, disjointed pamphlets into your hand as you passed. You couldn’t walk a block without getting accosted. Suicide cults had bloomed.

  Two weeks previous, a Southwest Airlines pilot died of a heart attack after a smoke, a little ghost boy, appeared in the cockpit, thirty thousand feet in the air. The plane had almost crashed into downtown Pasadena; the FAA had imposed a flight ban throughout Washington, Oregon, and California that was still in effect. Some people were moving away from the west coast entirely, while hot spots like Los Angeles and Tijuana exploded with visitors. In the space of a few months, and despite the constraints on the airlines, the smokes had become a multimillion dollar industry. California was packed, in spite of the supposed exodus. Everyone wanted to see for themselves.

  And all the while, that global murmur: This Is Quite Likely the End of the World, People. Capitals for emphasis.

  Vale didn’t know. He couldn’t get his head around it. He believed in ghosts the way he believed in space travel; he didn’t understand the mechanics of it, but why not? He lifted his glass to light; he was drunk now, expansive, worldly. Benevolent now that he was in the Moment. Let the ghosts have Los Angeles! They could have California, who gave a shit? Raph got more Catholic the more he drank and insisted the whole thing was a sham. “Because otherwise,” he said, “it’s the Reckoning, man.” He pointed at the television, his eyes wide with sincerity. “It means those are souls trapped on earth and who wants to think that, you know? Because why? What would that mean? Heaven is full or something?”

  The two of them went out to smoke and when they came back had missed last call. Nate turned the lights on. “What the fuck,” Raph hissed, and everyone in the bar shrank down into themselves like vampires, murmuring.

  “Pick ’em up, boys and girls,” Nate yelled. “You can go anywhere you want but you can’t stay here.”

  Outside, the night was cloudless. Vale nearly rolled his ankle walking down the steps and Raph grabbed the back of his shirt before he could do a face-plant on the pavement. Just like that, the Moment faded into tatters.

  “I’ll see you later, man,” Raph said, grinning, standing with his bicycle between his legs, his eyes half-lidded.

  Staggering in place on the sidewalk, Vale snarled, “You won’t see me later,” but they both knew this was meaningless, just Vale sad and drunk and leaning against the walls of the world.

  “Fuckin’ Nate,” he said, gazing at the bar.

  “Forget about it. See you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Vale staggered toward his apartment, raging with inner proclamations, promises to himself. When he got home, he would do a hundred push-ups, drink a dozen glasses of water until he was sober. He would wait and sober up through the dawn until the sunrise colored the wall behind him. He would sleep for days and when he rose he would be cleansed. He would be calm. He would listen to talk radio for the sound of people’s voices. He would drink tea and read history books. He would find a job that didn’t seem to kill him an inch at a time, something he liked. He would get a library card! Yes, a library card. He’d meet a nice woman who worked in a coffee shop and she would learn his name and his order by heart because he came in so often. He would come in one day and she would ask him what he was reading, because he had gotten a book at the library and brought it with him, and that’s how it would start between them. She would realize that he was a nice man, a man who had been haunted at one time but had managed to move beyond it, and he was calm now, and good. He had been one person and now he was someone else, someone better.

  He fell into someone’s rose bushes and cursed as the thorns snared themselves in his shirt, as they cut traceries in his arms, across his face. It didn’t hurt. He’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and pulled himself up from the bushes and crossed the street. He found himself with his hands laced around the cool metal bars of a fence. He saw the gray shapes a few feet away and realized they were gravestones, that he was looking into a cemetery, the entire thing surrounded by a two-foot concrete retaining wall and, above that, the black iron-wrought bars he gripped in his hands.

  Vale’s arms were beaded with blood and there was no breeze, none. A litany of regrets flared white-hot in his heart, and he held a bar of the fence in each fist and shook them as hard as he could. He tried to pull the fence apart. Odd guttural keenings loosed themselves from his throat.

  Vale sank to his knees, his hands still locked around the bars. He began running his forehead along the lip of the cement wall, back and forth, back and forth, growling. There was no bravery in him anywhere. Only a great nameless ache. Nearly fifty and feeling like this. Busted. Hurt. Like some young kid who’d let the world take a bite out of him. There would be no sobering up, there would be no calming life. There would be, Jesus Christ, no woman in a coffee shop.

  There would be only him and his own trappings, forever: this man lost, his hands laced around the bars of a graveyard fence. This man growling and weeping, grinding the curve of his skull against the edge of a concrete wall over and over again, the name of his ex-wife tattooed on his knuckles.

  TUESDAY

  1

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  I was born Geoffroy Thérage in a mud-hewn village called Moineau, only a few miles outside of Rouen, where Joan the Maid would be put to death all those decades later. The date of my birth is of some dispute, even to me, but the few theologians and historians interested in such things (and yes, there are a few) seem to generally agree on the year of 1381. This seems right: it would make me fifty years old when I lit Joan’s pyre, an old man for those times, and fifty-six when I died, which obviously fits the Curse’s parameters.

  Moineau was a cluster of maybe sixty scattered shops and homes, the whole thing ringed with fields and skirted with random huts and outbuildings (including our home; given my father’s occupation, we were considered unclean and not allowed to live within the village proper). The whole affair was laced through with the mudded ruts of roads, the comforting bleat of animals, leaning fences and the constant smell of shit.

  I was the oldest of four children. (There had been three before me, all of whom had died by the time I was a young boy—enough so that I hardly remembered them. There had been two sisters, twins felled by the plague within the same year, and a baby brother who lived for a week sickly and tiny and had hardly seemed to be there at all. A tiny breath on the surface of the world, a feather let loose in the wind.)

  So I was the oldest and had three younger sisters. I would find my mother looking at me sometimes, her jaw at work for just a moment, as if gauging when or where I would be taken. Death was like that, casual with its cruelty. We slept huddled together on mats stuffed with straw, our animals tethered against the open entrance of our home, to block the chill, to keep us safe from marauders and animals both. Rats were limned shapes on the hardpacked dirt floor, chattering like gossips in the night. Fleas, those envoys of death and plague, were constant. My sister Esme, a sweet blonde girl three years younger than me, had been born with a cleft palate. At night she loosed a high, pinched snore that I waited for; it was a comfort to me. It let me know that we were all safe. My father was gone on his rounds for weeks at a time and when he was home took heavily to the wine to quell his own visions, his own weighted demons. I had long realized I would need to be the one to protect them all, and Esme’s night sounds were my signal that I could sleep.

  Life was lived lean against the bone. We received little quarter from our neighbors. They traveled to our hut only when an animal needed butchering (my father) or, sometimes, when clothes needed mending (my mother). Given the nature of my father’s employment, we did not need to work the field
s. We weren’t allowed to. Doing so would have been to invite even more blight upon the crops. We kept our personal garden, our animals for milk and meat.

  The idea of a salary was ludicrous for an executioner; my father was paid by the killing. We lived on the land rent-free, and my father, when he remembered it, was allowed a portion of produce at the market. (Though he was not allowed to touch the produce, and instead used a long handled spoon the vendors kept nearby for such matters. Which probably played a large part in why he so often forgot to bring any home.)

  Honestly, we were better off than most in many ways. Still, even when things were going well, we were all at the mercy of another cold winter or damp spring.

  I was ten when the trajectory of my own damnation began. That evening we sat, the five of us, around our table. I remember the supper: rock-hard bread, heavy with the mealy taste of the acorns my mother had cut the flour with. Greens from the garden. A particular treat; my father had shot a hart with his bow the week before and we had deer meat, a luxury. I was a well-fed child compared to many. I remember Esme and Riva giggling across the table at each other, some invented game, when my father wiped the grease from his beard and said to me in that voice that brooked no argument, “Tomorrow, Geoffroy, you’ll come with me.”

  I felt it inside me. My life turning like a wheel.

  “Jean, no,” my mother said. My father raised his cup to candlelight and quieted her with a glance and my mother pressed her knuckles to her mouth, silenced. She must have known it was coming: what else was there for me? As the son of an executioner, there seemed no other avenue left, save crime or begging.

  “Death comes for us all,” my father said. He would never be mistaken for a kind man—he was too haunted for that, brutality being his trade—but it was the softest I had ever heard him speak. “I will not walk here forever. He’s needed.”

  “Jean.”

  “Don’t worry, woman,” he smirked. “God provides.” He drained his cup so high I could see the workings of his pale throat. He said, “Tomorrow, you’ll come with me,” and poured more wine in his cup.