Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  “It’s fine,” Richard said. It wasn’t, and both of them knew it, but it was done and they had come this far.

  “I’ll be going,” he said. “Thank you again.”

  “I was thinking I could give you directions to the grave. If you wanted.”

  “I already went,” Vale said.

  “You did?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Okay then,” Richard said. He pushed himself from the door-frame, his jaw working.

  • • •

  They stepped outside and the brightness of the day was searing, seemed almost artificial. Vale squinted as the two of them shook hands and Richard gave a little wave as he pulled away in his car. Vale went and sat in the van across the street. He felt no sense of resolution, only that exhaustion that he couldn’t shake. The neighborhood was quiet; he could hear the blat of a lawnmower somewhere nearby.

  He counted the money in the shoebox and then just sat there with the ignition off and his hands resting on the steering wheel. Stared at the constellation of dead bugs on the windshield. He took out his wallet and there in a compartment was Marvin’s card. Sounds Good, with a phone number for the shop, as well as a cell.

  It was a curious moment, and one he would remember: how the notion arrived fully formed—that salvation was possible, or at least worth trying to attain. Maybe nothing as dramatic as salvation. But the feeling that bridges burnt could be built again over time. That apologies meant something, carried some kind of weight, and so did not doing the same endless shit over and over again. He’d come to this conclusion before, but somehow after speaking with Richard, it felt different this time.

  It occurred to him that he could drink tomorrow. If he could knuckle through today without succumbing to whatever was happening to him, his tremors and sickness, his terror, then tomorrow he could bathe in alcohol if he wanted to. Swim in it. Save it for tomorrow: it was nothing he hadn’t heard before by the self-helpers and the AA people, nothing he hadn’t thought himself countless times before, but somehow at that moment with the ghostly growl of the lawnmower outside, it fit inside him like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

  With Marvin’s card in his hand, he looked up at the street, buoyed. Hopeful. He resolved to find a pay phone somewhere, to call Marvin and Casper. To help them, somehow, because really, what else was left for him? He had nothing else. This was it.

  And across the street, on the grass, there was Candice. Candice—her shape wavering like smoke in the brutal light of day—stood in front of her home, her house, turning and turning.

  • • •

  Vale stepped from the van and everything remained the way it was, bright and still, a bird twittering in a branch somewhere. The lawnmower stopped, started up again. It was undeniably her. She wore jeans and a collared blouse and her hair was longer than it had been that day in the restaurant three months before, and pinned above her neck. He didn’t know what any of that meant—if they were the clothes she had died in or what forces decided such things. But she stood in her yard and took one step this way and back, as lost as any of them were, stepping from grass to gravel and back again.

  He stood in the gravel of their rock garden and said, “Hey, Candice. It’s me.” His voice so timid, cracking on the last word.

  She pivoted on one foot and turned, but away from him. Roved her head around like she was somewhere else entirely, some great and depthless expanse of darkness. He stepped closer and touched her—her arm half-translucent, the color of old newspaper—and it seemed to do nothing; she seemed not to feel it. Neither did he.

  “Can you hear me? It’s Mike. Candy?”

  It was exactly as he had imagined: she had come home to the place that rooted her to the earth. Her home with Richard. This was where she had chosen to return. And he was right about the rest, too: his touch did nothing. She did not recognize him.

  “Okay,” he said. His voice cracked again. “Okay. I’m gonna get going now.” He swallowed, thumbed tears away with his good hand. “I am really sorry I fucked everything up, Dee. I mean, even before any of this. Our lives together. Your life. I am so sorry.”

  Candice turned toward him and he thought that she may have finally heard him, but no—she put her arms out in front of her as if she was navigating through a dark room. Her mouth moved and with a flat crack of heartbreak he realized she was speaking and he could not hear her.

  Again he said, “I am so sorry. I hope you find what you need. I don’t . . . I don’t know what else to do, Candice.” The look on her face was not of terror—he didn’t know if he could have withstood that—but one of vast confusion, of worry, so different from how he remembered her in life.

  He turned and headed back to the van, across the rock garden and the grass, and all the while, the impossibility of the day’s brightness bore down on him, the clear delineation of shadow cast from the roof of the van to the pavement. He practically ran back to the van, because his heart, really, just couldn’t take anymore.

  A big red Cadillac turned onto the street, roving like a blood clot on four wheels. The driver saw Candice in front of the house and Vale watched as it slowed, then stopped. The smoky windows rolled down. Both the driver and passenger took out their phones and began filming.

  Vale thought, She’s lost. Poor Candice is alone and lost and this is what we’re doing? This is what we do to them when we see them? Gaze at them and film them?

  The car was stopped in the middle of the street. Vale walked up and stood in front of the passenger window, blocking their view. The man and the woman were both gray-haired, older. The man had a big gold watch on, a straw hat that touched the ceiling of the car. Leather-everything inside the Cadillac.

  “What the heck,” the man said, trying to aim his phone around Vale.

  “Move,” the woman said, frowning. “What in the world is the matter with you?” She looked back to the driver for help. “Morris.”

  “Don’t,” Vale said, his voice thick. “It’s not right.”

  “They can’t even tell,” the woman said, casting a doubtful eye at Vale’s face, his cast. “Morris, tell him to move.”

  “We’re not asking you again, son,” the man said, and Vale took the passenger side mirror in his good hand and broke it off and threw it down the street, sunlight throwing a single knife of light into his eyes before it landed in someone’s lawn.

  “Get out of here,” he said, and they did.

  When he looked back she was gone. Maybe she went inside somehow, he thought, maybe she was safe, looking at her paintings and waiting for Richard to come home. He got back in the van and leaned his head against the wheel and wept as that terrible sunlight fell in his lap and across his hands.

  4

  Spectral Sightings Continue to Plague the West Coast

  —Newsweek

  Congress Convenes for Emergency Session Regarding Enforced Curfew in High-Impact Spectral Areas

  —Los Angeles Times

  Homeland Security and Department of Transportation Consider Freeway Reroutes Due to Increased Apparition Presence

  —LA Weekly

  Governor under Pressure to Claim California a Disaster Area, President Threatens to Send in National Guard under Executive Order

  —Time

  • • •

  So in spite of my big revelation, Casper and I were still out of ideas. We had the rental car, we had the home base, and the desire to act. That was about it. I had the panicky, dry-mouth feeling that my death would be coming at any minute; it was making me skittish as hell. And that was it, our sum total. We drove around aimlessly, eventually passing an ornate sign that said Welcome to Brentwood—it seemed like a nice part of town, certainly nicer than where we were staying—and we talked very little.

  When my phone rang, I didn’t recognize the number. Casper eyed me, waiting to see what I’d do.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey. It’s me.”

  My eyes widened. “Hey, Mike.”

  Casper faked his death,
splayed out in the seat next to me.

  “What’s up?”

  “Listen,” Vale said. I could hear traffic noises behind him. “Listen, Marvin, I’m at, like, the last pay phone in America here, man. I just wanted to apologize to you. To you and Casper.”

  “You want to apologize,” I said, more for Casper’s benefit.

  “I do,” Vale said. “You guys deserve that. I was wrong, and an ass. I screwed up. I’d like to help you guys if I can.” He gave a jagged little laugh. “I mean, I don’t know how—but I don’t really have much else going on. I’m kind of at a loss here.”

  I pulled into the parking lot of a fast food restaurant and turned the car off. “Hold on a sec,” I said, and put my hand over the phone.

  “He wants to apologize. He wants to help.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Casper said. “Tell him to go throw someone else’s shit into the road.”

  “I’m not going to tell him that.”

  “Is he sober?”

  I put the phone to my ear. “Mike, have you been drinking?”

  He seemed prepared for it. “Not today. No.”

  “Not today,” I said to Casper.

  “I just want to talk to you guys,” he said. “I have some money. Maybe I can help. You know?”

  Casper looked at me and shrugged, palms up. Up to you.

  Look for portents and signs.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’re at a fast food place. What are the cross streets? Casper, can you see where we are?”

  Casper got out and trotted to the corner. He came back and gave me the cross streets, which I gave to Vale. “It’s in Brentwood,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll be in the restaurant getting something to eat,” Casper said. I repeated it.

  “What’s the restaurant?” Vale said.

  I told him and he laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” I said.

  “Never mind. It’s a long story. I’ll see you guys soon.”

  “Okay, Mike.” I couldn’t keep the doubt out of my voice. And always time running away from me, time dwindling down. This place could be my last meal for all I knew. Jesus.

  “Thank you, Marvin. I’m heading your way now. I appreciate it.”

  I folded my phone.

  “Well,” Casper said, “this should be interesting.”

  5

  Vale drove, thinking of the Ace High. The vast hours he’d murdered there.

  He’d attempted a few times to tally the actual number of hours he’d killed in that bar and those like it; the number eventually became staggering enough that he’d get close to a rough figure and try to stop thinking about—which usually meant going to drink at the Ace High or a place like it. It was just unfathomable. It hurt his heart, that number. Sitting on a barstool, bellowing nonsense in Raph’s ear, night after night after night.

  He did it for years and years.

  The same forty songs played on the jukebox every night, the same ghostly film coating the inside of the pint glasses. Everyone armored with indifference. The bartenders who knew his name and could rarely be stirred to address him by it. The bathrooms dense with misspelled graffiti, the reek of piss. After enough drinks, the women in the bar grew or shrank to become little more than the recipients of his contempt and sadness and—by their proximity, the simple fact of being there—the cause of it. Fucking ridiculous.

  Vale hunched like a golem on his barstool. Watching a female bartender somewhere bending over to retrieve a tallboy from the cooler. Her very shape causing an ache inside him, this jumping electric desire flaring inside him like a current, causing him to leer like a fucking teenager. And then he would buy another beer and would be moved into actually tipping her that time, would be shamed into it. Not for the looking; he was paying for the want itself.

  Years and years like that.

  The bluster of pop music from a dead age, those same songs again and again as Vale chased the Moment throughout the room, up and down an emptying glass. What could he have done with those hours had he not spent them in the Ace High and places like it? Who would he be now?

  Years he’d squandered. Among spitting neon and felt-worn pool tables, bathroom floors grown slick with vomit, men like him gazing silently up at televisions mounted on the walls. His own ghost continually bounding inside him like a loosed animal. His failure like a coat of ironwork that grew heavier as the night wore on. Years doing this.

  And for years he’d blamed Brophy. A face to pin his failings upon. He lifted glass after glass, bottle after bottle, always with the burning hope that Brophy’s ruination would somehow rest in the bottom of one of them. Years spent with blame as a useless currency while he let whatever meager talent had been afforded him seep out and grow soft with rot. And beneath the blame lay a constant, heated loathing, a self-hatred like topsoil laid across the poorly tilled fields of his heart.

  He’d grown old in there, in that place. Places like it.

  All the dead hours. The years cataloged by jobs quit or fired from, by eviction warnings, fights, arrests, by blood spatters in the morning sink. Hands studded in scrapes, knees blown out of his pants from falls on the way home. By the teeth grown loose and bloody in his mouth.

  He made it to Brentwood, found the place with little trouble and parked on the street, gazing up at the winged burrito rising from the roof of the building. He crossed at the crosswalk and stepped into the busiest Bean There, Bun That he had ever seen.

  It was a massive building, easily three times larger than the one in Portland. Populated by a half dozen cashiers. Potted ferns and faux-marble counters. The staff wore white long-sleeved shirts and dark vests and crimson visors. Where were the paper hats? The suffocating sadness? Where were the old men in trench coats with their newspapers and cups of water, rationing out their little boats of Chili King Fries?

  In Brentwood, a basket of Total Taters cost eleven dollars.

  He found Marvin and Casper seated in the back, glumly picking at their food. Neither of their faces changed all that much when they saw him, maybe a cloud of guardedness coming over Casper. He reminded himself that he was the one that owed them; it wasn’t the other way around.

  He sat down across from Casper. Casper was eating a Fishwich Dee-Lish and stared at him impassively as Vale put his hands on the table in front of him. He looked down at the tattoos on his fingers—those four letters, C-A-N-D, the other hand covered in a dirty cast—and when he raised his eyes to meet Casper’s gaze he felt suddenly tethered. He felt like he knew, for the first time in Christ knew how long, which way was up. Knew what he needed to do, at least in that moment, that second.

  “I’m sorry for leaving you guys like that. It was wrong.”

  Casper chewed, looked over at Marvin. Finally, he saw whatever he needed to see in Vale’s face and he put his sandwich down. “Don’t worry about it. Are you really sober right now?”

  “Yeah.”

  Casper frowned at Vale. “How do you feel?”

  He felt more awake than he had in years. More present. “I feel good, actually. Tired. But good.”

  Casper sucked at his teeth and moved a finger back and forth between Vale’s eyes. “Well, that’s kinda weird then.”

  “What?”

  “Your pupils are two different sizes.”

  6

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  When I was Bill Creswell—in my pre-Marvin life—I died one sweltering August night by injecting what felt like seventeen tons of heroin between the webbing of my toes. This was New York, 1961. It was all Ginsberg and uppers and jazz jazz jazz. Beat shit was blooming. This was less than a year after my trip to Moineau, which I’d never really shrugged off. The ensuing disconnect. That sense of being adrift.

  I was in my apartment on Avenue B when I did it. It was scorching hot inside, and it could be considered a suicide in the sense that I had grown willfully careless. You just reach that point where you hit a wall. My will had been drawn up for months,
all of those stupid records arranged to be shipped to Portland, Oregon after my death.

  I fell out of my chair and onto the gritty, filthy floor, the spike still dangling between my toes. I didn’t feel it at all. Something like a pale white roar all through me, this heavy drift, this wall coming down. My head hit the floor, felt like concrete wrapped in lace. Mingus’s “Flamingo” started in on the stereo, and that was the last song Bill Creswell ever heard.

  • • •

  Vale, it could be said, was on fire.

  In the parking lot of the Bean There, Bun That, the three of us took up our usual spots inside Vale’s van and talked. We didn’t tell him everything—Casper and I had agreed to as much—but we told him enough to get the immediacy across. The three focal points being: Lyla, To the Point, and we’re running out of time.

  And just like that, he was on it.

  He seemed shaky and looked pale and ill-used, but he also looked inspired. I don’t know how else to explain it. Like a sick man who’d found religion, maybe.

  We followed the van in the rental car, and I counted no less than three specters as we drove, the first one just starting to gather a crowd and the other two with the police blocking streets with their huge tanklike vehicles, cordoning the areas off. Soon enough, we’d have cops out in there in riot gear. And then, the National Guard, a curfew. Guns on the street, checkpoints.

  It all seemed inevitable and sad—you live long enough and you’ll see it plenty of times, even in one life. The curtailing of simple, civil things. The quashing of it. I wouldn’t have believed it a week ago, but the ghosts were almost becoming commonplace. Even if I suspected they all had a story as heartbreaking as Suyin’s, we were acclimating. It was the military presence that was becoming more unnerving.

  We followed Vale out of Brentwood, went to another copy shop, where we did possibly the most archaic, old-man thing possible and rented a computer for an hour. Vale scowled and stood over our shoulders, watching the video with Casper and I as we sat hunched in front of the screen. “This is who you have to find?”