Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  The policeman thumbed the light off. He had a skull full of gray stubble and a cleft chin. “Do you live in the neighborhood, sir?”

  “What?” he said.

  “You can’t sleep in your vehicle, sir. I need to see your license and registration.”

  “Officer,” Vale said, and couldn’t finish. He looked down at his hands.

  “How much have you had to drink tonight, sir?”

  Vale shook his head, still looking at his lap.

  “Sir,” the cop said, “I need you to step out of the vehicle.”

  Vale nodded and started to roll his window up—this seemed like the right thing to do—and with surprising gentleness the cop put his fingers on the edge of the glass and said, “Stop.” He put his other hand on his holster, and Vale pressed his palms against his eyes.

  You fling your wreckage in an ever-increasing arc, he thought. Don’t you? You fling your shit like an animal.

  In the darkness, someone called out, “Excuse me, officer.” The cop turned, and they saw Richard crossing the street in a robe.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir,” the policeman said. “We’re fine here. You can go back inside.” Vale began weeping unceremoniously. Still the smell of burnt plastic and old piss hung in the air, and it was his own terrible scent, coming out of his pores or something. Richard just needs a sleeping cap, Vale thought. He just needs a lantern, and if Norman Rockwell ever needed to paint a millionaire entertainment lawyer he’d know exactly where to go. Val’s hands would not stop shaking and he made them into fists and jammed them into his armpits and still he cried, cried, cried.

  “Officer, I know him,” Richard said.

  Vale saw variants of his future, the summation of his choices. They’d run the plates on the van and it would be stolen. He’d be found guilty of menacing Richard, of transporting hate literature, something. He’d had any number of opportunities to do the right thing. He’d had endless opportunities. Prison would not be kind to him. Richard and Brophy would high five and do bumps of coke off the ass-cleavage of hookers. Casper would become famous and revile his name on cable television and Marvin would do . . . whatever the hell Marvin had come here to do. Meet his friend. And Candice would still be dead, still and forever be in the ground. This is me saying hi. Call me when you discover fire and the wheel. He put his hands over his face, a distant part of him amazed at the ungodly sounds he was making.

  “I know him,” Richard said again.

  No one said anything for a moment. He heard the cop sigh. “We can’t have him sleeping in his vehicle, sir. We’ve received complaints. You want to take him inside?”

  SATURDAY

  1

  Vale woke as if he was being pulled from some sea: wakefulness came incremental, borne slowly from darkness to light. He saw swaths of sunlight in unfamiliar patterns in an unfamiliar room and in a strange way that confusion itself was a feeling like coming home.

  He recognized, after a time, the bedroom the police had originally arrested him in. The signs of violence had been removed. The broken vase had not been replaced. He was in Richard’s house. Candice’s house. Outside would be the pool he’d been thrown into.

  There was a photo on the dresser he hadn’t noticed before, Candice lithe and angular in a white tank top, a bottle of beer held in one hand, leaning against a paint-chipped picnic table. Sexy in that offhanded, casual way she had; a mocking sneer on her face. A canopy of trees stretched green and vibrant behind her.

  He realized—the thought arrived as distinct as a snapping branch—that this place was the culmination of her life. She had loved him once, but by the time she had died, their life together had been little more than a back chapter in an older, sadder book. This was her home.

  Did I ever know you at all? Did I ever let you know me?

  If I didn’t know you, how it is that I’m losing you so ferociously now? So fiercely?

  He rubbed his face and his hand came away with flakes of dried blood. Rusty pool of red on the cream pillowcase. His broken fingers ached. He took the pillowcase off, scrubbed his face with it. It was already ruined. Blood had soaked through the pillow itself and Vale felt an unnameable twist of shame at that.

  He drank beer, for shit’s sake; he’d hardly ever even touched liquor anymore. What was happening to him?

  He opened the window and felt the breeze against him. Saw the backyard, the pool. He had little memory of coming into this room, only a vague recollection of the cop at the van window, Richard propping him up, the smoke-infused nightmare, burnt plastic.

  Stepping into the hall, he heard the sizzle and clatter of pans in the kitchen. He smelled bacon and coffee. Nausea rolled in his guts like someone throwing dice.

  He veered into a bathroom on the way to the kitchen, pissed. Spat up a few dark wads of something and quickly flushed without looking too closely. Shame curled on itself, wrenched itself into a tangle of fear inside him in this jangling, searing arc. He ran his hands under hot water, scrubbed his face. He was afraid to see Richard, afraid to look him in the eye.

  The kitchen was bedecked in black marble and chrome, a wooden island the size of a king-sized bed in the center of the room. A constellation of copper pots and pans hung from hooks above, the counters done in the same pale wood as the island. Magazine-quality shit.

  Richard stood at the stove wearing a bathrobe and slippers, his jaw dusted with shadow.

  “Mike,” he said without turning, gave a little wave with a spatula.

  “Hi,” Vale said, his voice ravaged. Ravaged and timid; unsure.

  Two days ago Vale had walked soundly over Richard’s grief with his own agendas, his own resentments and furies. What would you have done, he thought, if the positions were reversed? Richard turned the bacon, scattered a handful of onion into another skillet, stirred that. The two of them stood there silently like satellites. Orbiting each other’s grief, the one commonality of their lives.

  Finally, Vale cleared his throat and said, “I want to say thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Richard said. “There’s coffee if you want some.”

  “Really, though. How I’ve acted . . .” he started, and couldn’t finish.

  Richard turned and pointed the spatula behind Vale. “There should be some bread behind you. Christ knows there’s everything else. People brought so much food, you know? Can you slice some of that up?”

  Vale turned and saw the counter behind him was indeed piled high with food. Pies in plastic wheels, pies in tins. Salad bowls topped with foil. Stacks of cold cuts, plates full of gourmet cheeses, crackers, garnishes he couldn’t name, half a dozen bottles of wine. Who in Christ’s name would bring a bottle of wine to a wake? The bottles gleamed dark and bullet-like, an armory of sleek shells.

  He found a loaf of olive bread dusted with flour amid the stacks and took down a knife from the magnetic rack on the wall. He began sawing the bread into slices. Candice’s name was shockingly vibrant on his pale hands, the black marble counter.

  Richard chopped, drizzled olive oil, stirred, pushed things around with his spatula. He threw what looked like a handful of pink salt into the skillet, his eyes on his work. Vale’s nausea slowly dissipated, the smell of the food unlocking something inside him.

  He dropped the bread into a toaster. A sliding glass door led to the patio and Vale saw how the sky and the bottom of the pool were almost the exact same unreal hue. An eye-watering blue. For a moment he wanted to paint that, to find that color and bathe in it, cover his body with it. Fill his mouth, his insides. Live inside it.

  “I was furious at you all day yesterday. Last night even, with that cop.” Richard said. “God, I was so pissed.” He was motionless, only the hem of his robe wavering as he stirred.

  “I can understand that,” Vale said.

  Richard turned and looked at him, then wagged his spatula over his shoulder. “No, Mike. Nope. Here’s the thing. You don’t get to understand. You don’t get to know what it’s like. Sorry, but that smack
s of sanctimony.”

  Vale stared at the glowing coils in the toaster. “Okay.”

  Shallots, garlic. Richard walked to the refrigerator and removed a crate of eggs. Broke a half dozen of them into a bowl. Whipped them. He was the type of guy that could break eggs one-handed.

  “I apologize for what I said to you the other day. I feel like, for the last week or whatever, I’ve just been holding on,” he said. “Like I’ve just been hanging onto the skin of the world. I’m just waiting to fall off.” He poured the eggs in the skillet. “But I realized last night,” and here he spoke brightly, as if he were telling a joke, a story, “like literally right before I looked out and saw that cop outside your van: I realized that I’d eventually need to do more than that. That just breathing and hanging on wasn’t going to be enough. For now, sure.

  “But Candice, we—one of our things was to never let each other rest on our laurels. Right? To never sit still. She challenged me so much, man. We never got in each other’s faces, it wasn’t like that, but she had high expectations. For both of us. That’s how we did it. ‘What’s the bare minimum you’ll accept,’ Candice would say. ‘And what about after that? What comes beyond that?’ We pushed each other.”

  He turned and looked at Vale then and his eyes were red-rimmed and haunted in a way that Vale had seen in his own mirror hundreds of times over the years. A look steeped in sadness, regret. “She still loved you, in her way. Never stopped. In spite of herself, maybe.”

  The toast rose. Vale stood there locked onto Richard’s terrible gaze.

  Richard said, “She defended you to her last fucking day, man. To me. To everybody. She always believed in you. She always thought you’d get your shit straight at some point.” He stared at Vale almost defiantly, as if daring to contradict him. “So I decided I needed to do more than the bare minimum here. For her. Do you understand me?”

  “Okay, Richard,” Vale said.

  The two of them. Christ. Graceless with pain; Vale’s voice clotted, Richard wiping at his bloodshot eyes, holding a spatula.

  “I’m sorry about Brophy,” Richard said. “About bringing him here. He does a lot of work with my studio. And I’m trying to, I don’t know . . . forgive people their trespasses. But it was stupid of me. I shouldn’t have had him here. Candice hated that guy because of what he did to you.”

  “I talked to him,” Vale said.

  Richard turned back to the stove. “You did?”

  “Yeah.” Vale gave a weak little laugh, sheepish. Stacked more bread in the toaster. “I followed him. Got in his car. It was a pretty anticlimactic showdown.”

  A pause. “Did he tell you he has cancer?”

  “I figured it was something like that.”

  Richard nodded.

  “Pancreas at first,” Richard said. “Now it’s starting to spread. Doctors gave him a year, year and a half. His agency represents a lot of people we work with. We’ve had a drink or two together. I’m trying to give people second chances. But still.”

  “Thirds, for some of us.”

  Richard turned and looked at him. A ghost of a smile there. “For you? Shit. You’ve had more chances than a cat gets lives, Mike.”

  Vale looked at the countertop. “I know it.”

  They ate standing up. Richard poured Vale a cup of coffee and Vale held it until he was able to will his hands still. They ate in silence, their allegiance to Candice the fragile salve between them. Vale looked at that blue sky outside and swore to himself that he would never drink again, and immediately recognized it both for its familiarity and its unlikeliness.

  2

  Excerpt from National Public Radio’s All Things Considered program:

  And it’s not as if we’re talking A-list celebrities here, Robert. Nobody is witnessing Elvis, or John Lennon. In almost every account, these are regular people, from all walks of life and a host of different periods throughout history.

  So no one’s claiming to see Davey Crockett. Benjamin Franklin. Jesus.

  Exactly, Robert. There was the one alleged case of Abraham Lincoln on the San Francisco pier, but so many of these are impossible to verify. But they seem—these apparitions—to run the gamut of ethnicities, social strata, gender, time periods. They’re all over the map. It’s very democratic, actually. You’ll have a pioneer-era soldier in Beverly Hills and a, say, Depression-era housewife in Compton.

  But all attempts at contact have so far failed, isn’t that right?

  Correct, all attempts at contact have failed so far. We’re still trying. But there’s just a disconnect going on.

  Doctor, let me just . . . So, you’re a Professor of Bioethics at Stanford University. There’ve been a host of federally sanctioned committees formed since these apparitions appeared a few months ago. The Centers for Disease Control is coordinating the investigations. A multitude of research has been done by a variety of scientists, hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent, the global economy has taken a hit, and we still have virtually no concrete, factual information as to what these things are. So let me just come right out and say it: Are these ghosts? And why are they here? Why now?

  Well, that’s where the continued attempts at contact and study are so important, Robert. Because if I had to answer that right now, I’d have to say I don’t know. But if they are ghosts, think of what that says. For the world, for humanity. For our notions of God, and spirituality, and all that entails.

  But what do they want, Doctor?

  Like I said, we don’t know. We’re trying. But what do most ghosts want? In all the stories we listened to as kids? They want to go home, they want justice. They want to be heard. They want to be allowed to move on.

  • • •

  Casper sat in the passenger seat, his arms folded. He’d taken his hat off a few times, ran his fingers along its filthy band, bent the bill into a crease. Hadn’t said a word the entire time. We hadn’t seen a car enter the lot, either. No movement, just me telling my story that at times sounded ludicrous even to me. Maybe it was the circumstances—I was a long, long way away from Julia’s couch—or the simple fact that the entire thing was ludicrous. The Curse, defined.

  “And that’s it,” I said. “I’ve got until Monday to find her. I’ll probably be killed any time between then and now.” My laugh sounded strangled, silly. “Any second now. Who knows? And even if I do find her, I don’t know what any of it means.”

  Casper ran his tongue over his teeth and nodded once. “Well. I guess we better find her then. Soon.”

  “Just like that, huh?”

  Casper shrugged, pulled his shirt down over his belly. “Listen, Marvin. You and I, and the whole world, man—we’ve seen, like, ghosts literally wandering around. Literal spirits. I saw you talk to one in the bathroom of a shitty motel.” He shrugged again. “So what do you do when the whole world pretty much jumps the shark?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Me neither. But I know this: the shit that I’ve seen since we got here goes a long way toward making me believe you. I mean, I was already inclined, but still. So, yeah. I don’t know if I fully get all of it, but I’m a long way toward getting there, dude.”

  And it was ridiculous, how that made me feel. The gratitude I felt. This weight lifted off me. Like netting being pulled from around my lungs. I could breathe again. I thought of the priest who had me drowned in the Tisza. Of Julia’s humoring smiles.

  It was a ludicrous story, yes. All of it.

  But we lived, finally and irrevocably, in ludicrous times.

  3

  He was in the spare bedroom gathering up his things. In the mirror, his forehead was still marred with quarter-sized scabs, the flesh surrounding it shiny and pink. Here, he realized, was the culmination of a lifetime of choices. Right here, Christ, in front of this sun-shot window in a bedroom in Candice’s—Richard’s—house. The end result of every supposedly good idea he’d ever had had brought him here.

  “Hey, Mike?” Richard knocked quietly on
the door. Vale opened it and they stood there awkwardly in the doorway, Candice’s inevitable thereness filling in the room. This man in front of him the one she had chosen to spend her life with. Not him. Not Vale. Vale had squandered it all.

  Richard’s eyes found the pillow and bloody pillowcase on the bed. “Shit,” he said.

  “It was from last night. Sorry. I didn’t get any on the bed.”

  Richard sighed, frowning. Vale’s mortification was complete. “Listen,” Richard said, bouncing his car keys in his hand. He wore a sport jacket and a white shirt with the collar open, faded jeans. The tan, chiseled looks of some retired athlete. Even headlong in his grief he looked more presentable than Vale had been in years, had ever been, maybe. “I was thinking I’d go to the office for a bit,” he said. “Just to get out of the house.”

  “Of course, sure. I’ve got my stuff here, just packing it up.”

  “No, no. You’re welcome to stay. I thought I’d give you the alarm code in case you wanted to leave the house before I got back. But you’re welcome to stay.”

  He was speechless for a second. He wouldn’t trust himself in this house alone. But then again, that was one of the differences between them: Richard was a man capable of being uncompromising with himself: his wife had loved Vale at one point, Richard reasoned, and thusly he would treat Vale with kindness. In spite of Vale’s missteps. And even though he was, by Richard’s own admission, a drunk and derelict. This was the weight of Candice’s beliefs, right here, and it showed in the buoyancy of Richard’s love for her. Here was Richard in the tangible act of honoring her memory.

  “No,” Vale stammered, unable to meet his eyes. “I should get going.”

  Richard bounced the keys in his hand again. “It’s up to you,” he said softly.

  “Thanks for everything.”

  “Of course.”

  “And again,” Vale said as he ran a shaky hand through his hair, “I’m sorry about everything. The funeral, Jesus. I can never make that up to you.” He let out a little chuckle as he burned a hole in the floor with his stare. “Ruined a perfectly nice pillow.”