Among the Dead and Dreaming

by Samuel Ligon

  But in my dreams the miracles unfolded. I’d levitate over my old house near the Connecticut river and then farther and farther out, sometimes gone from my dying body for days, levitating across plains and mountains to Portland, Oregon, Michael joining me sometimes now, no sign on him of the agent orange poison that killed him, but both of us like we were in 1970, so young and fearless and in love, floating out over the country to save our baby.

  Nikki

  Alina vomited all night, reminding me of my bus trip to Austin after I’d stolen money from a sweet drug dealer in Providence and felt like I finally had a chance in this world. I got sick on that bus, my eighteenth birthday, and threw up over and over, but I’d never felt so free—my mother and Providence gone behind, and no idea of Cash or Alina up ahead, Cash’s baby, too, though his contribution was merely sperm and he was dead before I knew she was stitching herself together inside me.

  It never occurred to me to try to save him. I didn’t even know he was dying that night, and he did nothing to save himself. I drank for hours at the Top Hat, watching Daryl and his band and my cousin Melanie up front adoring him. I felt so sick for having slept with Daryl, knowing Melanie loved him, and sicker still for not being over him. He had a wandering eye, Melanie told me, and wouldn’t commit to anyone, though everyone wanted him anyway, something I knew all about. I tried to drink my guilt away, but my gaze kept falling on Melanie adoring Daryl. She was the one I was close to, not him. She was the one who moved with me from Duval Street after Cash wouldn’t leave me alone. I’d lock my door at night and he’d climb through my window, into my bed, until Melanie and I moved and he didn’t know where to find me.

  And then he was gone—I thought for good—and it was like I could breathe again after all those months of disintegration. Cash had been so happy when we met, a few days after I stepped off that bus in Austin, but as time passed and we got closer, he wanted more and more of me, pushing me away with his interrogation. Where had I been? Where was I going? “You don’t know what love is,” he kept telling me, and I started saying, “Find someone who does.” I watched what he called his love for me turn him mean and ugly and small. That’s what really killed him, all that hatred, all his clutching meanness. I remember crying on Melanie’s bed, wondering what had become of us, when we’d both been so happy when we met, but he just kept coming, breaking into my room, until I felt nothing but revulsion. I slept with a baseball bat, and he kept coming. I threatened to call the cops, and he kept coming. Then Melanie got us a place and we moved when he was gone to Waco, and I found myself settling into a peaceful existence, which I ruined by getting tangled up with Daryl and betraying Melanie.

  I stood watching her sway by the stage, so pretty and in love, but Daryl wouldn’t look at her. He’d told her he didn’t want a girlfriend. I knew what he wanted. Everyone knew what he wanted. And everyone gave it to him, something so magnetic in his voice or smile. I didn’t want to be the person I was becoming, didn’t want to love Daryl, who didn’t deserve my love. I should have just been grateful to be safe with Melanie. I hadn’t thought of Cash in days, so stupid to believe I’d shaken myself free, as though he’d let me walk away.

  I saw him come into the Top Hat as Daryl was screaming the first line to “Blood Poisoning,” my favorite song he sang, Cash crossing Daryl through the lights and smoke and filling me with so much anger and revulsion—because I hadn’t seen him in weeks and thought maybe he was gone for good, back in Waco or in jail, even after all his threats. It was just so awful to see him when I was watching Daryl, thinking about Daryl, still wanting Daryl, even though I had no right to Daryl. I pounded my beer and ran, drunk and lovesick. I thought I was at least careful enough not to be followed. I went straight to bed, and when I woke, still drunk, he was inside me, and I wasn’t aware anymore of hating myself, because I was just moving and moving, trying to get away. He punched me hard at the corner of my eye, over my cheek bone, the sting and then the throbbing in my face settling me into this quiet rage, this animal I was becoming as I reached for my jeans, pretending I was into the sex. I moved with him, pulling the knife from my pocket. I opened it and lifted it and brought it down and then it was just sound—all that rage in my throat—and white light as he ran, hobbling away.

  Hours later—after I went looking for Daryl, and came home again, where I just wanted to be dead—I tracked Cash to the house on Duval, empty bottles of Percocet and Jack on the floor beside him. I knew he was hurt, but I thought it was the whiskey and downers that accounted for his lethargy. I chopped his finger at the top knuckle, the way I’d learned to cut chicken at Stubb’s. I bandaged him, figuring we were even, and when Melanie called a few hours later to tell me he was dead, I was like, But I let him live, so arrogant and stupid, Alina’s cells already working to bring her to life inside me. My only emotion was fear I’d go to prison, when I should have just gone to the cops. But I wasn’t calling it rape even to myself then, and I knew the cops wouldn’t call it rape either. Besides, I’d gone there to kill him and had killed him. I hated him more for dying than for the rape even, and once I learned I was pregnant, I hated him for that, praying all those months in Portland she was Daryl’s.

  But once I had her, it didn’t matter where she came from, and it still doesn’t matter and never will. Her flight back to Michigan was at nine this morning, though she didn’t know that, and there’s no way I can put her on a plane so sick and wrung out. She sleeps and sleeps, and I wander the house—stalled, waiting, weakening—the clock ticking down as Alina sleeps. If Cash hadn’t come to me like he did, I wouldn’t have her, I know that much, but that doesn’t mean I go looking for pain and hurt and injustice to see where love might bloom. It doesn’t mean I have forgiveness for him, either. It just means you can’t know where love might come from or how it might rise in you, and how strange it is that it can bloom from a bed of hatred and meanness and fear, nearly erasing the bad that bred it. But it was easier for me, with him dead and gone from the world. If he were still alive, breathing my air and feeding my fear and weakness . . . which is why Burke has no right to anything.

  Mark

  I hadn’t been doing well, hadn’t been sleeping. Or maybe I’d only been sleeping. I drove to Cynthia’s building, which had been a spice warehouse for a hundred years before its conversion to illegal lofts. The air was infused with these lingering smells, cloves and cinnamon and spices you couldn’t name. Cynthia’s answering machine flashed “12,” eight new messages since I’d last been there. I wandered her place, opening drawers and handling knickknacks, smelling everything. When I found a bottle of prenatal vitamins on her kitchen counter, I couldn’t recognize what I was holding at first, couldn’t understand the implications, even as evidence bloomed around me, pregnancy books and baby catalogs and a car seat by the door. Had her breasts seemed bigger the last time I’d seen her, before her trip to Lake George? I looked at the vitamins with her name on the bottle. Would she have told me if the baby were mine? Would she have known? Maybe there was a way she could tell, or just a wish, the final glue for her and Kyle.

  I opened the window in the living room that led to the fire escape and gathered the baby books, the car seat, the prenatal vitamins. I crawled outside and dumped everything, piece by piece, to the alley below. I stood on the grated platform, looking down at the mess I’d made, feeling myself coming undone, like she’d come undone at the end of our last year in Providence. She’d had an abortion that fall, which made us sweet for a while, but we returned to our old routine soon enough, cheating and breaking up and getting back together. Maybe three weeks after our last breakup, I was at a party with another woman, Maya, and Cynthia walked in and saw us together. A shadow fell over her as she stood winding up. Maya must have seen the craziness in her eyes. “Go,” I said to her, “I’ll catch up with you later,” and she headed for the back door as Cynthia came at me, scratching, punching, kicking, grabbing my hair in fistfuls. I picked her up and squeezed the
breath out of her, and when she finally let go of my hair, I dropped her to the floor. The whole thing was over in thirty seconds, but the party had stopped around us, people looking on, horrified. Who could blame them? This kind of thing didn’t happen to people like us. Would we kill each other?

  I left the party and walked to Fox Point where I sat for hours, and when I finally got home, I heard Cynthia in my bedroom, crying. I opened the door and she was on the floor, surrounded by—I couldn’t tell what. Rags, it looked like. I saw scissors beside her. She must have seen me see then, because she looked at them and shook her head. I realized she was surrounded by clothes she’d cut up and paper from books she’d torn apart and pieces of records and tapes she’d smashed, nearly everything in my room destroyed. But all the rage was gone. She looked wasted, drawn out, full of—I didn’t know what. Grief, I guess.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as I took in the damage, “I really am.”

  I saw how worn out she was.

  “I know this is wrong,” she said. She shook her head in the mess she’d made, staring at the floor.

  I went and sat with her, knowing it was over between us for good. We both knew. She said she was sorry again and I said I was, too, and we sat together in the mess of my room for a long time. She started to clean up, but I told her I’d take care of it later. That was the weird part—how tender we were once we realized there was nothing left between us. But she got help and worked to make herself better and didn’t blame me for her cracked ribs—though I blamed myself—and she got better. And we were apart all those years and probably should have just left it alone and never gotten back together in the first place, but she kept getting better and we did get back together and it was good for a while—until Kyle showed up and we started our old cycle.

  I stood on her fire escape in the heat, looking down at the baby stuff I’d dropped to the alley, feeling myself slipping, the way she’d slipped that night in Providence so many years ago—but she’d come back. She’d gotten better. Her insanity was only temporary. And I’d played my role, like she was playing her role now, wherever she was. I went back inside, her cool, dark apartment sort of foggy or misty, and so quiet and still, except for the answering machine flashing on the kitchen counter. I walked to it and hit play, activating the voices from the past trapped there, a message from Beth, a message from her mother, a message from Planned Parenthood, twisting my guts, but all Planned Parenthood wanted was money. There was no planning, no pending parenthood, no mention of a recent pregnancy test or abortion.

  I had this crazy feeling that the baby’s voice was going to be on the answering machine with some kind of message for me. Or that I’d be able to track it down somehow on the internet, so I could determine its lineage—if it even existed, which, if it did, it really didn’t, since it would have died with Cynthia.

  The fourth message was at 5:50 on the night of her death, and I couldn’t quite recognize his voice at first or make sense of it. He was supposed to be dead. And everything was so foggy.

  “Hey, baby,” he said. “It’s me.”

  It took me a second, but then I knew.

  I punched the stop button on the machine.

  Baby?

  When I’d found his pants in Cynthia’s clothes, I was nearly sure, but not quite certain, and his voice was already on the machine, less than twenty-four hours old, waiting for me. But I hadn’t listened.

  I turned on the machine—“Hey, baby,” he said—and turned it off.

  They both seemed so far from dead, animated completely by my rising hatred and embarrassment and shame.

  “Hey, baby,” I said.

  I started the machine.

  Kyle said, “Hey, baby—”

  Stopped it.

  “What the fuck, Cynthia?”

  Started it again.

  “Hey, baby,” Kyle said, “it’s me. I was thinking about what you said, and I think I know a better place.”

  I had to stop myself from stopping it.

  “Anyway, if you’re free tonight, and you feel like it, we’ll go for a ride and I’ll show you. Nobody’s ever down there, so it’s like... Oh, and we’ll bring binoculars. And I’ll bring a blanket this time, to keep the sand out of our asses.”

  I was walking circles in her living room, listening to his voice. I lifted a potted plant by its wrist-fat stem and swung it until the plastic pot flew off, then slammed the root ball against a wall, knocking a shitty framed photo of Billie Holiday to the floor. I kept banging until there was dirt all over the place.

  Another message came on the machine and for a minute I couldn’t tell if it was me or the caller breathing so hard, and then I knew it was him again—his ragged, raspy breathing—maybe dead now, somehow calling from deathland. But as I made my way to the kitchen, I heard myself saying her name on the machine, my electronic voice so muted and small, as if a pallet of bricks was sitting on my chest.

  I could hardly recognize this behavior as my own, so horribly intimate, so weak and tiny, after the fuck-lord’s message. But it was me—calling Cynthia’s machine when she was less than twenty-four hours dead—breathing and rasping and saying her name on the night I’d called to study her voice.

  “Cynthia,” I said on the machine, and again: “Cynthia.” I kept calling. And breathing, as if I’d just run fifteen miles, chased by killers.

  Or maybe it was me from the future, somehow calling from deathland.

  It was my living breathing though, and my damaged voice, but all I managed in the last message was, “I,” through all that breathing, and again, “I,” and one more try: “I,” before the machine clicked off.

  16

  Burke

  I nearly have a heart attack when I see her Monday afternoon, sitting on her stoop on Wyoming Avenue. I look enough like Cash that it’s possible she’d recognize me, even if I am twenty years older than him when he died, but I never could have dreamed she’d look exactly the same as in the photos, though women have all kinds of surgeries today, and I only get a quick look before I push the rental car past. I park up the block and walk down the opposite sidewalk, wondering if it could possibly be her, so young and beautiful and horrible. The oxycontin I took for my back’s made my head fuzzy, but walking south on the opposite sidewalk, I clock her again, positive it’s her, reading a big book in the sun like she don’t have a care in the world—like I’m not out in the world looking for her. Like I’m harmless. I pull my Mets cap lower, the bill practically resting on my sunglasses. Even though it’s a hundred degrees, long white sleeves hide my tats. I shaved this morning, too, and now I’m not worth a glance from her, Miss high and mighty, Miss bitch heartbreaker. I can’t remember a time I’ve felt so alive, my heart in my ears.

  I walk down Wyoming to Ocean View, then up Wisconsin to Park and back down Wyoming. I left my mother’s .38 at the Royalty, but I must outweigh her by a hundred pounds. It would be nothing to kill her with my hands. This is the smartest part of my plan—to make her think she won’t see me till Friday, giving me all this time to figure out my surprise, directed by the guiding hand of fate.

  She’s still there on my next loop, even looks up from her book and sees me across the street. I wave. She waves back. She has no idea who I am. But I know exactly who she is. And the feeling is like when you’re with a woman and know something good’s gonna happen, maybe not right away, maybe not in five minutes, but soon, because she’s already made the decision in your favor. And all you’re doing is riding it home, Cash’s killer laid out like a birthday present waiting to be opened.

  Alina

  The western sun hits our little porch where I sit with The Odyssey—my stupid book for Freshman English—pretending to read, pretending I’ll go back. I’ve been home three nights and haven’t called Jen or Ashley, haven’t even walked the beach. I overheard my mother this morning, rescheduling my flight when she thought I was asleep,
after throwing up so much on that stupid boat yesterday. Wednesday’s the day Kyle would’ve come to Interlochen, but she doesn’t know that, because that’s between Kyle and me.

  Some creepy guy in a Mets cap waves from across the street. I wave back, feeling Kyle all around, protecting me.

  He had a cabin booked through the Stone Center right on campus, and planned on staying at least two nights and maybe longer. It was why I finally agreed to go to Interlochen, his secret promise to visit, but now I feel tricked because I’m still looking forward to it, even knowing he won’t be there and I won’t be there, but my mind stuck on that cottage, maybe the two of us drinking wine and kissing in front of the fire, all the other girls so stunned to see me with an almost famous painter, so handsome and funny and never talking down to me. There’s no reason whatsoever to go back now. I know I was just a kid to him, his girlfriend’s daughter, but my mind keeps landing in that cottage and the wine and kissing on the floor in front of the fireplace, which might seem kind of creepy or sick, given our age difference and the fact that him and my mom were together and everything, but it’s really just a thought my mind doesn’t mean to have. Just a place I find myself returning to.

  “What are you doing out here?” my mother says, startling me.

  I crane my neck to look at her standing behind the screen door.

  “Come in, baby,” she says. “You’ll burn.”

  “I’m not going back,” I say.

  “Alina,” she says, stepping through the door. “I know how you feel.”