Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  Vale went to bite his thumbnail and instead tucked his hands in his armpits. “Why are you telling me this?” His leg was going a million miles an hour beneath the table.

  Dave snuck into his sleeve again and looked down at the paperwork in front of him. “Because I’m trying to give you a break, Mike. I’m trying to believe you when you say you’re in the clear.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Dave held up his hand and ticked off each item on a stubby finger as he went. “You’ve got a shoebox full of thousands of dollars in cash in your van. You spent the night in Men’s Central, what, three nights ago? Assault charges that got lifted? And no disrespect, Mike, but you look like you’re sick. I mean really sick. As in not healthy.”

  “Are you a cop or a life coach?”

  Dave laughed. “That’s a good one.”

  “Thank you.”

  He held up another finger. “And Marvin? Mr. Dietz? You know he’s wanted by the police in Portland, Oregon for psychiatric pickup?”

  “I did not know that, no. But personally, it’s irrelevant.”

  Dave opened another folder, frowned. “Something about Joan of Arc? He knows her? He thinks he was her? Something like that. But they were supposed to pick him up if they found him.”

  Vale shrugged. Still with the knee jittering relentlessly under the table. He thought of Marvin, sighing as he said Here it comes. You’re looking for me. As if he hadn’t been surprised in the least. “And that’s weird to you?”

  Dave looked up from his paperwork. “Is what weird to me?”

  “That he thought he was Joan of Arc, or he knew her, or Albert Einstein, or any other famous dead person. Or that this Smith guy gets off his meds and joins a cult and eventually loses it. Whatever. I mean, there are ghosts walking around within a hundred yards of this room. Fucking straight-up ghosts. Right? The whole concept of what’s sane or reasonable seems like it should be pretty seriously reconsidered at this point. The old rules don’t apply, you know?” Vale swiped a hand across his forehead.

  “Why were you in Los Angeles again, Mr. Vale?”

  “Oh, I’m Mr. Vale now?”

  “Why were you in Los Angeles, Mike?”

  “My ex-wife’s funeral.”

  “And what about Mr. Deitz?”

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  Dave folded his arms across the table and sighed. He frowned, as if he was just so sad to see Vale digging his own hole. “Cooperation really will go a long way here. Okay? We’re just trying to understand the situation.”

  Vale said, “That’s the situation, Dave. It makes no sense. The dude just walked up to us right off of a busy street. Hanging out like he’d been waiting in that alley for someone to come by. Looked at the three of us like he was eenie-meenie-minie-moeing it, and he picked Marvin and boom. Now, am I under arrest? Because I’ve got my lawyer’s number ready to go. I apologize if I’m coming across as uncooperative, Dave, but I find that being held unjustifiably by the police? While my friend’s in the hospital, dying or already dead? It’s a little fucking irritating.”

  Dave slowly closed his folder and put his elbows on the table. Steepled his knuckles beneath his chin and stared at Vale with those hound-dog eyes above his red, chapped hands.

  He sighed, hooked a thumb at the door over his shoulder. “He’s not dead yet. Thanks for talking to us.”

  • • •

  Vale stared at an issue of Wired that was two years old. He was wrecked on bitter cafeteria coffee and cigarettes inhaled practically three at a time outside the emergency room doors. His eyes felt like ossified shit pellets rolling around in his sockets. Sleep? What’s that? He and Casper had been camped out in the waiting room for hours, Marvin still in surgery. They sat beneath a television showing women’s tennis. There were no windows in the waiting room; they’d have to go down the hall, the elevators, out the doors for that.

  “Screw this,” Casper said, swiping his hands down his face. “Let’s go have a dip.”

  They wended their way through the hospital. It was morning. A haze of smog already colored the sky. Casper thumped his chew can against his leg and leaned against the wall. They’d gone out to partake in their particular vices so often that they already had their usual spots.

  Blood had dried to the color of rust in the creases of Casper’s t-shirt from when he’d cradled Marvin. He looked terrible in the morning light, pale and haunted and tired, and Vale figured he looked about the same. He felt a wave of dizziness come over him and leaned against the wall, rolling the back of his skull along it. A wedge of the rising sun reflected itself in the hospital’s windows, made him squint.

  As if someone had flipped a switch, a ghost appeared in the parking lot between two cars. The smoke-form took shape as a young girl in a dress. She spun in circles. Lost. Ceaselessly turning.

  “Jesus,” Vale said. “It’s just a kid. Hey!” he called out, hands cupped to his mouth.

  She kept turning, precise only in her confusion.

  “We can’t do anything. They don’t hear us, man. Smokes, remember? They hear Marvin, but not us. We’re just white noise.” Casper watched for a moment then and leaned over and spit, tucked his arms over his chest.

  They watched the ghost for a time. Vale was looking at it when he said, “I saw her.”

  “Who?”

  “Candice. Dee.”

  “Your wife?”

  Vale dropped his cigarette, ground it out. “She was just like that,” he said, and nodded toward the girl in the parking lot.

  “Wait, you mean you saw her?”

  He pointed at the parking lot. “When she was like that. I tried to talk to her. She didn’t see me. Like she was looking past me.”

  What else needed to be said?

  He put a hand over his heart. Poom poom poom beneath the fabric. “I think I need to go back inside,” Vale said. “I think I need to sit down.”

  “Mike?”

  He pushed himself off the wall and then all feeling stopped at the legs, ceased somehow. So strange, the ground rising up to him. The pavement sounded loud as a pistol crack against his jaw. The taste of metal shavings in his mouth and Casper’s face peering down at him from miles above. Darkness like tendrils of cotton at the edges of the world. The roaring of some sea in his head.

  3

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  In the city of Svalöv, in a country called Skåne. Part of Sweden now. Maybe a hundred and fifty years after Geoffroy died, a hundred and fifty years of pretty ferocious living. It had been a busy time, a terrible time of testing the parameters of the Curse, slowly piecing together the Rules. Finally, this time, I was born into circumstances that allowed me some respite. A calm after so long in a rough and bitter sea.

  I was born Martin Gormsen, a noblemen birthed into a family of both measurable prestige and wealth. My disfigurement in that particular lifetime, a small and stunted left arm, the fingers smartly curled into the palm, was one I was born with.

  When I was twenty years old I met Lise; we were introduced at a banquet held by Tycho Brahe, the famed financier and astronomer. Tycho, deservedly, has gone down in history as a glorious madman. The man was wonderfully nuts, downright brilliant. He was friends with my father and was one of the richest men in Europe at the time. (He’d also had the bridge of his nose sliced off in a duel with his third cousin some years before and wore a gold prosthetic at dinner parties and would on occasion bring a moose to dinner events and feed it liquor.)

  Our families had done business together for many years, and perhaps sensing something strange about me, Tycho had taken a liking. I was admittedly an odd young man; a hundred and fifty years of the other shoe dropping—in the most horrific of ways—will do that to you.

  To be honest, Lise had been no traditional beauty, but Jesus, neither was I. In all my lives, gender had hardly been an issue, as hard as that is to believe. I bounced between male and female throughout the years, there was a fluidity t
here. And really, physical relations before Lise had been rare anyway; I felt (and frequently acted) a monster, regardless if I’d been born man or woman. But with Lise we fell into it, into each other.

  Oh, she was beautiful to me. Beyond our physicality, she nourished me with her kindness. She soothed me with her expanses of easy silences. She was someone I could sit next to without being reminded of the weight of my own horrors, my ravages wrought upon the world. She blessed me with the easy cadence of her love. My heart calmed when it neared her.

  Her father dealt in shipping, and while well off, he was more than happy to marry his daughter into the Gormsen bloodline. We were married a year after meeting and Brahe, as a wedding gift, commissioned our portrait.

  The day of the ceremony the priest intoned rites and prayers before us, and we stood on the opposite sides that tradition dictated so that my whole arm and hand should be able to hold hers. I allowed myself a sliver of hope, a glimmer of it. My mother wept to see us standing there; my father, in a rare show of emotion, put his arm around her.

  If I could not tell Lise of my past, I thought at the time, this dark and calamitous secret I held, could I still not be happy? At least a little? At least this time? It seemed possible. Perhaps, I dared to think, I even deserved it. Time stretched before us: I was only twenty-one! Even with the Curse at work, we would have decades together.

  I might as well have been smote right there, daring to think I deserved anything.

  Lise birthed us a son within a year. Robair was born without complications, a rarity then even for families of great wealth. I can still remember Lise’s howls of pain as handmaidens and midwives gathered around her. My dear Lise, my little mouse. Where Joan had held her head high, imploring mercy from God and piety from man, Lise had held out our tiny, bloodied, bundled child to me with no less power or grace. I can still see the two of them there: Lise’s smile, her hair damp, Robair’s little bleat, his spasming fists.

  I have survived for years on that image. Nourished myself from that. I have trod through unspeakable events, been buoyed by it, sustained by it.

  And then came the inevitable, of course.

  Every gift given with the Curse is done only so it might be taken away.

  Robair, at five months old, died of influenza. Nothing creative: a rattling cough that took root in the little engine of his lungs. He had been real, I sometimes have to remind myself. This tiny boy.

  Lise became wraithlike after Robair’s death. A pale, grim-socketed shadow of herself. It was understandable. It was summer when he died and golden light seemed to spill from every window and fall in swaths on the parapets. It was macabre, that sunlight, a mockery. Our home hung heavy with silence.

  One morning I stepped into our chambers where Lise lay amid her quilts, moored in the canopy of our bed. Blue veins swam up her throat, the backs of her hands. I stood over her.

  “You must eat,” I said. Plaintive. Begging.

  The Curse, I had come to realize by then, was brilliant in its precision: I would live and live again, would feel life’s pains—or growing numbness—at every turn. But Lise, my love, had just one life, and this was what she had chosen with it. Me. Robair.

  A disfigured husband and a dead child.

  “We can try again,” I said, and she made a sound like an animal with a bone in its throat. She turned her face from me, covered her eyes with that blue-veined hand.

  I lay next to her on the bed and laid my whole arm across her. She beneath the covers, me above.

  The physician would pronounce her barren shortly hereafter. There would be no more children for us, and she would be dead anyway in less than the time it would have taken to bring another child into the world. Pneumonia.

  The day after her funeral I went into a tavern in Malmö and taunted a drunken bondsman until he beat me to death.

  • • •

  After some indefinable time, the darkness retreated to a thin wash of pale light. I was in a bed in a room and if there was a window anywhere I couldn’t see it. The room was full of hidden machinery, though; I could hear it all chirring away, and the light, the light had to come from somewhere.

  The room seemed formless save for the bed, the chair beside it. But I also saw my hand on the sheet, even the hair on my arm silvered in pinpricks of light. This was a hospital, surely. Surely.

  I thought of little Mellie in the children’s ward, and her brother. How she had told me something was wrong with his little bones. Would that boy wander Smoke City someday? Was he even now trundling around the alleyways here, a little boy crafted from smoke and sorrow? Lost, looking eternally for his mother?

  I turned my head to see Joan sitting in the chair next to me. Her hands were folded in her lap, her hair was shaggy and poorly cut and darkly beautiful, the color of coffee. She wore jeans and a faded red Esprit t-shirt, a brand I hadn’t heard of in years. There was even an odd pink shape on the sleeve, a bleach stain. And a white scar on her forearm shaped like an L. Such details! I tried to rise from the bed but couldn’t. She blinked her eyes in tandem with the beeping machines.

  “Joan?” My voice sounded like a needle running across a record.

  She smiled. Marvin.

  I trembled; the breadth of my regret left me speechless. It flooded me. I gaped and she smiled and touched me on the arm. There was a moment then where I smelled flowers, lilacs, and that detail among all of them seemed the most unlikely.

  Marvin? she said. Or Geoffroy? Do you have a preference?

  “I don’t care. I . . . There’s so much I’ve wanted to say to you.” I mewled it, tears tumbling down my whiskered cheeks from my good eye, the other socket loose and sunken, tearless. My glasses were gone.

  Joan looked at me with her dark eyes. She leaned forward and put her warm hand over mine, and I felt something like a song walk up the ladder of my ribcage. A warm, wordless chorus inside me.

  She held my hand and I saw a golden chain around her neck, the pendant resting there between the shallow valley of her breasts. A small figurine there.

  Not a cross, or a crucifix. Not what I expected.

  It was a little man!

  It was a little man wearing a coat. A yellow coat.

  Joan tucked her chin down and held the talisman between her fingers, looked down at it. She turned it around and there it was—a little sword on the back of it.

  I said, “It’s my father’s coat.”

  Joan looked at me and a sadness fell across her features like a slow and inevitable storm. She let the pendant fall against her chest and shook her head.

  It’s not your father’s coat, Marvin.

  “It’s not?”

  You wore it as well. It’s yours.

  I took my hand away. Shame burned through me. “This is a dream, isn’t it?”

  It’s not a dream.

  “No?”

  No.

  She smiled sadly.

  Marvin. This is your reckoning.

  4

  Marvin’s surgeon was a tall, red-faced man named Dr. Torrance. He had a boyish, unkempt shock of gray hair and had been kind enough to drop by Vale’s room to fill them in on Marvin’s progress—Casper was pulling double duty after Vale’s seizure in the parking lot.

  “Dr. Torrance,” the doctor said—he said this every time he’d spoken to them—and everyone shook hands. Vale had an IV loaded with a saline solution for dehydration and they’d given him, according to the doctor, a round of Xanax and an anti-seizure medication. Vale would have been embarrassed about it all, or afraid, or something, but just couldn’t seem to drum much up by way of the negative. He felt better than he had in weeks. He felt awesome, actually.

  “He’s a little out of it, still,” the doctor said, smiling at Vale.

  “I am,” Vale agreed, grinning.

  And then he frowned. Dr. Torrance telegraphed everything with his face. You’d never need to worry about what Dr. Torrance thought about your health. “You know, alcohol withdrawal is a serious matter, Mr.
Vale.”

  “I just drink beer,” Vale said. “I don’t even get what the . . .” He gestured and then spent a few moments watching his own hands gesturing while the doctor and Casper waited. Finally they understood he wouldn’t be finishing his sentence and the doctor cleared his throat and examined his clipboard.

  “You’re both friends of Mr. Deitz.”

  Casper nodded. “We all came down here from Oregon together.”

  “We’ve done what we can for him in surgery. He’s stable at this point. It’s a question now of monitoring, of waiting and seeing.”

  “So you got the bullets out?” Casper asked.

  Dr. Torrance nodded vigorously. “We did. One entered his shoulder and shattered his clavicle. But that one exited, which is good. With the other wound, the prognosis really isn’t ideal, I’m afraid. As much as any gunshot can be, I mean. There’s a high risk of complications in a situation like this.”

  “Why’s that?” Vale managed to ask.

  Dr. Torrance shrugged. “Like I said, we got the bullet out. Issues of concern now are hemopnuemothorax and hemostatic shock. He’s suffering from peritonitis as well.”

  Casper said, “We don’t have a clue what that means.”

  Dr. Torrance held his pen up and traced the flight path of the bullet in front of his own chest. “The bullet entered in the left side of Mr. Deitz’s chest at an angle, okay? Like this. It missed the heart—amazingly—and glanced off the spine, where it also missed severing his spinal cord. In that regard, he’s incredibly lucky. But then the bullet traveled down and hit the left lung. That’s what hemopnuemothorax is: blood and air in the chest cavity from a pierced lung.”

  “Jesus,” Casper said.

  “Right. Hemostatic shock is, simply put, when there’s severe concussive force received by organs within the body as the bullet passes through. The body puts itself in a kind of lockdown.” He held a hand up in front of his chest and squeezed it into a fist. “The bullet ran down the length of the lung, opening it, hit the wall of the lower abdomen and ricocheted off of his left hipbone, which is where it exited. Peritonitis means that wall, the abdominal wall, has become inflamed.”