Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  MD: Like I said, Mark, not entirely comfortable.

  SFH: It’s nothing to be ashamed of.

  MD: Still. Let’s move on.

  SFH: Well, how about this, then—maybe your own brush with death has enamored you to the ghosts? Maybe, if you’ll pardon the pun, they sense a kindred spirit?

  MD: It’s possible. I’m certainly empathetic. I mean, I know what it’s like to be lost, you know? Don’t we all?

  SFH: The first season finale shows a smoke—

  MD: Mark, I really hate that term.

  SFH: Okay, sure. Sorry. The first season shows a specter in dirty rags and this huge dark beard. And he drops before you, weeping and muttering in Latin. Right there on Rodeo Drive! He seemed desperately tired. Just lost.

  MD: Yeah. I think he was.

  SFH: And then you placed your hands on his shoulders, and you spoke to him too quietly for the cameras to pick up entirely but (interviewer turns to camera) it was in Latin, people, and he looked at you and then just disappeared. Just vanished. With what looked like profound gratitude. Where do you think he went? Where do they go after they talk to you?

  MD: I don’t know the answer to that, Mark. I really wish I did. I hope they’re finding rest, finding peace. But who knows.

  SFH: But what do you say to them, Marvin? What did you say to that man?

  MD: Sorry, Mark. (Laughter.) We just got renewed for a second season. I can’t go giving all of our secrets away.

  • • •

  “You’re sure that you’re up for this?”

  “Come on, Casper. It’s a cold. It’s not like I’m dead.”

  First Thursday in the Pearl District, rain or shine: a madhouse. The first Thursday of each month all the galleries in that part of town unveiled their new shows, and tonight was no exception. Fuel was standing room only. More than a few reporters and critics had flown into Portland for the opening.

  We stood for a moment in front of the windows. Hundreds of people were gathered inside with hardly room to move, and honestly, few of them seemed to be looking at the art. There was a tended bar, and a four piece orchestra played quietly in a corner. Jacob Burfine had spared no expense. And why should he? There was a lot at stake. The buzz had been immense.

  Vale had been the subject of recent feature articles in the New Yorker, the New York Times. Word was that Warner Herzog was vying for a documentary. Reporters from Time and Rolling Stone lurked somewhere inside. Early writings were tinged with the tone of redemption, the sounds of a comeback, while Art & Artists— almost singularly—had been vocal in their doubts about Vale’s ability to recoup any of his previous momentum from earlier years.

  This was something he’d gleefully informed Casper and me over cups of coffee at our weekly “business meetings.” Regardless, there was no stopping him. He was on fire with it. The man had paint on his hands every single time I saw him. He told us he painted every day. “I love it,” he’d tell us. “I love painting, guys. Goddamn. I forgot how much I missed it.”

  And they were good paintings, I’ll admit it. This was coming from someone who still doesn’t even care for art all that much.

  The lettering in the window:

  SMOKE CITY

  New Paintings by Michael Vale

  The title had actually been one of Art & Artists’s supposed signals that Vale had lost it. The show itself had been top-secret before tonight’s reception; the gallery windows had been covered in butcher paper while the show was hung. Assistants and handlers had signed nondisclosure agreements. Press materials had been sent out in the form of painting details, rather than entire paintings themselves. Still, it had been enough for Art & Artists to preemptively call the show “genteel, pandering to the past, full of a yammering, cliché-heavy teen angst, not exactly graceful for a man well enmeshed in middle age.”

  Vale had brought a copy of the magazine to the coffee shop the day before. He’d been ecstatic. “Now that I’m not blacking out and bleeding into my underwear, the paintings are ‘cliché-heavy.’ I love it,” he’d grinned.

  • • •

  Our lives are filled with these brief intersections, these unknowable trajectories that never travel in straight lines. Did I ever think I’d be here? No.

  I found myself thinking about Donald Jarvis Smith often. The man who shot me. God will judge, he’d said, and I’d known. I found myself pitying him. His entire life lived, all those years full of hurts and joys and regrets and loves, all leading up to that point.

  I found myself, through all of this, wondering not in the existence of God—how could I after all this? That had long since been resolved.

  But what of God’s intentions? God’s leanings?

  What about God’s willingness to forgive?

  I thought about that a lot. In so many ways, it was still the only question I couldn’t answer.

  • • •

  Casper peered in the window, nervously working a wad of chew around his bottom lip. “Lot of people in there,” he said.

  I pulled out my handkerchief and coughed into it. It was my first bad cold since things had changed, since Joan had come to me in the hospital. Since she’d told me what I needed to do. I was fifty-eight years old and sometimes the fear of it all, the knowledge that this time it was for good, that this was it, seized me with immobility. This was my life.

  We’d arrived back in Portland all those months ago to find my store shuttered, the door padlocked. The records were all gone, the room empty. Randy had done exactly what he’d said he’d do: the building was razed, and blocky, pastel-colored condos were thrown up within months. They looked like toys left behind by gigantic, disinterested children. I’d had a hard time caring by then. Music itself had become too full of ghosts, all those records too heavy with memories.

  There was no way to fully escape our past. We were all shaped by it, formed by it, but there was such a thing as dead weight, and Bill Creswell’s records had become dead weight by the time I got home from LA. Music and memories. Both felt like stones in my pockets, weighing me down, and I had to get rid of at least one of them before I drowned.

  I lived in a small two-bedroom house in St. Johns, and Casper and I worked on the show and visited with Vale. The three of us frequently went back to Los Angeles for business meetings, and of course to shoot the show. That was the totality of my life; that, and the ghosts, and most of the time I was content enough with it.

  I tried to stay in the moment.

  Randy, so said the Oregonian last month, had been arrested on charges of racketeering: the bluster about Boston and mob connections had apparently rung at least somewhat true. Litigation loomed. Again, I had a hard time mustering up much emotion about it. I still dragged the past around like an anvil. I don’t think you could live for as long—or as fruitlessly—as I had and just magically slough off regret. I was getting better a bit at a time.

  We stepped inside the gallery. It was twenty degrees warmer, humid. Casper headed directly to the food platters set out next to the wine, people pausing to speak to him on his way; we made sure that he and I got equal airtime on the show and were both frequently stopped when we went out, especially if we were together.

  I held my coat over my arm and scanned the room for Vale. I saw Adam first, and waved. He wedged his way through the crowd. His cheeks were red and he looked uncomfortable in his suit. Mostly he looked shockingly, achingly young, and I was glad things had happened with the store the way they had.

  “This show is amazing, Marvin.”

  I smiled. “I know it. He’s good, right?”

  Vale’s paintings were bright and detailed, like living things snared on the white walls. “It’s not even eight o’clock,” Adam said. “It looks like almost every one of these is sold. It’s crazy.”

  Adam and I didn’t talk about his mother. I thought about Julia a lot, but I was okay not knowing. We lived in the same city, but I was content with her being another ghost in my life. I was learning to navigate among them with at le
ast a minor amount of grace. She had helped me when I needed it so much.

  I saw men in tuxedos, in suits, in sleeveless t-shirts with their arms wreathed in tattoos. Women in cocktail dresses, women in paint-splattered smocks. I saw a woman with a shaved head and implants under the skin of her skull to make it look as if she had horns. I laughed at myself as a stutter of envy ran through me, looking around at all the young people here, loose-limbed, happy, talking, their lives yawning ahead of them. And yet, here I was. This was what I’d wanted. I was here.

  “How’s your show going?” Adam asked. He lifted his glass of wine, more than a little drunk, still ceaselessly earnest. Casper had taken a liking to him and wanted Adam to start interning for the show’s production team after he graduated. “Let’s put that philosophy degree to use,” he said.

  “The show is good,” I said. “The show is blowing up like Vale is blowing up.”

  Finally, I saw him—Vale—across the crowded room.

  “There he is,” I said, lifting my chin. “You want to talk to him?”

  Adam blanched, nervous.

  “He’s just a guy,” I said. “He’s a dick half the time anyway. Come on.”

  Vale was surrounded by a ring of what I could only assume were collectors, buyers. He’d often insisted to Casper and I that collectors liked to collect artists as much as they liked to collect the art. He sounded good-naturedly bitter about it, playfully put out. Burfine was at his side, hair gelled, in a dark gray suit shot through with silver threads. Bullshitting, elbowing Vale playfully, smoothly transferring the work of the actual sales to his assistants.

  Vale hugged me. It was hard to reconcile him with who he was when I’d met him on that sun-blasted stretch of highway a year and a half before. That bloody bandage wrapped around his head. I felt his warmth as he put his arm around me, the scratchiness of his beard against my cheek. He’d lost weight, his face grown thin and hawklike since he’d stopped drinking. He’d become a kind of resolute pit bull in his sobriety, tenacious and unwavering and fierce. His sense of humor had not improved.

  “Glad you could make it, good sir,” he barked into my ear, and clapped me hard on the back. This lead to another coughing fit, which I tried to cover with my handkerchief. The collectors soured and Vale excused us, steered me away. Adam followed sheepishly.

  Vale frowned at me. “Well, at the very least, thanks for getting me out of that, Marvin. But you sound like shit.”

  “It’s just a cold.”

  He nodded, searching my face for a moment. “I’ve mentioned that the eye patch is dashing as hell, haven’t I?”

  “You have,” I said.

  “Where’s the Poltergeist Whisperer? Where’s Captain Ectoplasm?” Vale’s game with Casper, always a new name.

  “He bee-lined for the food when we came in.”

  “I don’t blame him. Who’s this?”

  I turned. “Mike, this is Adam. He’s a friend of mine. Casper wants him to start interning for the show.”

  “These paintings are amazing,” Adam said.

  Vale, among other things, seemed to have learned at least a modicum of graciousness. “Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate that. I’m happy with them.”

  He and Adam talked as I looked at the paintings. Vale’s work had always been so couched in allegory, but these were all about Candice in some way. I mean, it was about Los Angeles, and our trip, and the things that had happened there, but they were mostly about Candice.

  The entire series had been done in grayscale, with one vibrant fist of color blooming somewhere on the canvas. Here, a side-cut of a grave with a skeleton interred in the ground, roots entwining the bones; where they broke the soil, burst forth into a bouquet of orange flowers.

  And here, a wolf stood crouched and snarling inside a dilapidated house as water poured from a faucet and flooded over the sink, pouring onto the floor. A swatch of blue dress and bare arm was just visible in the window behind, a snaking drift of curling red hair. Vale seemed to be haunting and freeing himself at the same time.

  “They’re apologies,” he’d told us over coffee. “That’s what the magazines and collectors and shit aren’t ever going to get. This is me saying I’m sorry.”

  “To who?” Casper said.

  Vale had scowled at him, cracked his knuckles. “Who do you think, Casper?”

  He had told me about seeing Candice that day in front of Richard’s house. We went back whenever we were in town, Casper and I, hoping to see her. I would have been happy to listen to her, to free her like that. We’d always park across the street, not wanting to bother Richard. We usually waited an hour or two, those awkward blips of time between meetings.

  “They’re all about the fact that I can’t save her,” he’d said to us, “after she saved me a hundred times over. I can’t find her, when she always found me.” And he’d tapped the Art & Artists article with a finger. “So I paint instead. I try to say I’m sorry.”

  “I bet she forgives you,” Casper said.

  Vale snorted. “It’s unforgiveable, man. I treated her like shit. There’s no forgiveness. There’s just the act of trying.”

  “There you guys are,” Casper said now. He was holding a glass of wine in one hand, a fistful of crackers in the other. Crumbs scattered on the lapels of his suit jacket, a t-shirt beneath it. He and Vale hugged.

  Casper cocked his head to one side, chewing. Snaring Vale with that look of his. So Casper-like. I knew what was coming before he said it. “You sad that Jared couldn’t come, Mike?”

  Vale looked away for a moment. Squinted at a painting. Nodded. “I am. Definitely.” He stared at the floor, scuffed a spot there with his shoe. Nodded again.

  Brophy had died two months before. He and Vale had managed to resuscitate a kind of strained friendship once Vale began painting again. Brophy had actually gone ahead and nullified the contract himself; the few originals he still owned all these years later, he had shipped back to Vale. Vale said he had flown out to Los Angeles a half dozen times in the past year and sat with Brophy after his chemo sessions. They sat for hours and, when Brophy was capable of it, talked about art, women, Hollywood. Vale navigating the choppy waters of gracefulness and forgiveness. If it wasn’t friendship there at the end, it was something close to it.

  Brophy had insisted his new paintings were his best work, the critics could go fuck themselves. He’d also promised to never buy another goddamned Mike Vale painting as long as he lived, which made them both laugh. Vale had gone to his funeral; he’d been buried in the same cemetery as Candice.

  For a moment we stood there, this cluster of us. This group. My friends and I. It was a small moment, but I’d come to appreciate them. Then Burfine came back over with a trio of collectors, and Vale squeezed my arm in passing. “We’ll talk tonight,” he said.

  When I am able to stay in the moment, I’m profoundly grateful. I have no inkling of what awaits me beyond this life, what terrors or joys. What promise of ceaselessness. I don’t pretend to know a thing about it. A vast nothingness seems likely. But each moment, I’ve discovered, is my own now—and in my best moments, I am indebted to my history but not moored by it. There is a lot of good to be done.

  There are also times—I don’t sleep well anymore, thinking that I only have a limited number of nights allowed me now—when I am afraid of death. Absolutely terrified of it, really. When I am kept awake by the failings of my lives before this one, the terrible things I’ve done. The great debt I will always owe those I’ve wronged.

  And yet, I am able to take small comfort in the grasp and attentions and love of these people, my friends. We are doing the best we can. If we are hurtling toward oblivion, we are doing it arm in arm.

  And Joan, you ask? What of her?

  I don’t know what to tell you.

  When you see them, help them, she had whispered to me after blessing me with her forgiveness. That scar on her arm, the bleach spot on her shirt. The pendant with the sigil of my father’s coat. My co
at. After she had given me, truly, my life back. After she’d said, They’ll need you.

  They’ll need someone to forgive them. They’ll need someone to listen to them.

  So what of Joan, you ask?

  I only met her once, but I dream of her often. All the time. Her ghost walks the long hallways of my heart. It’s not quite as restless a place these days, but I don’t think she’ll ever go away. And I don’t think she should; she’s more than earned her residency there.

  What of her? Well. I was the dark and terrible mechanism of her undoing. I work now, these last unknown days, to earn her forgiveness.

  Acknowledgments

  It’s been a long road to publication for this novel. I’m grateful to the following people for their support during the process:

  Josie Corby, as well as Matt and Sherris Corby—your continued encouragement came at a much-needed time during the writing of this book. Thanks so much.

  Sheila Ashdown provided invaluable early feedback on the manuscript.

  While researching this novel, Chloe Massarello answered my great number of dumb questions about the general state of affairs of fifteenth century France with measured and painstaking detail, as well as offering some crucial pieces of information about Joan, the ways in which she was viewed at that time, and the brutal lives and societal expectations of medieval executioners. There are undoubtedly errors and inaccuracies regarding this aspect of the book—please be sure to assign them to me, the author.

  My agent, Christopher Schelling of Selectric Artists. I mean, I wrote a novel about an alcoholic painter and the reincarnation of Joan of Arc’s executioner road-tripping through a ghost-heavy LA and he was like, “Okay, I’m in.”

  Tricia Reeks and the folks at Meerkat Press for their continued belief in the value of my work. I’m beyond appreciative; with these past few books, you’ve taken a gamble when few would, and have undoubtedly changed my life. Thank you.

  Lastly, to Robin Corbo. For all of it. You’re my person.