The Best of Lucius Shepard

by The Best of Lucius Shepard (v5. 5) (epub)

  She stirs her drink with a plastic stick whose handle duplicates the image of the neon dancer. In all her artfully composed face, a mask of foundation and blush and liner, her eyes are the only sign of vitality, of feminine potential.

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  She glances up sharply. “I’m too old for you.”

  “How old are you? I’m twenty-three.”

  “It doesn’t matter how old you are…how old I am. I’m much older than you in my head. Can’t you tell? Can’t you feel the difference? If I was twenty-three, I’d still be too old for you.”

  “I just want to know your name.”

  “Alicia.” She enunciates the name with a cool overstated precision that makes him think of a saleswoman revealing a price she knows her customer cannot afford.

  “Bobby,” he says. “I’m in grad school at Columbia. But I’m taking a year off.”

  “This is ridiculous!” she says angrily. “Unbelievably ridiculous…totally ridiculous! Why are you doing this?”

  “I want to understand what’s going on with you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, I just do. Whatever it is you come to understand. I want to understand it, too. Who knows. Maybe us talking is part of what you need to understand.”

  “Good Lord!” She casts her eyes to the ceiling. “You’re a romantic!”

  “You still think I’m trying to hustle you?”

  “If it was anyone else, I’d say yes. But you…I don’t believe you have a clue.”

  “And you do? Sitting here every night. Telling guys you just got back from a funeral. Grieving about something you can’t even say what it is.”

  She twitches her head away, a gesture he interprets as the avoidance of impulse, a sudden clamping-down, and he also relates it to how he sometimes reacts on the subway when a girl he’s been looking at catches his eye and he pretends to be looking at something else. After a long silence she says, “We’re not going to be having sex. I want you to be clear on that.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s your fall-back position, is it? ‘Okay’?”

  “Whatever.”

  “‘Whatever.’” She curls her fingers around her glass, but does not drink. “Well, we’ve probably had enough mutual understanding for one night, don’t you think?”

  Bobby pockets the rubber disk, preparing to leave. “What do you do for a living?”

  An exasperated sigh. “I work in a brokerage. Now can we take a break? Please?”

  “I gotta go home anyway,” Bobby says.

  The rubber disk takes its place in Bobby’s top dresser drawer, resting between the blue half-shoe and a melted glob of metal that may have done duty as a cuff-link, joining a larger company of remnants—scraps of silk and worsted and striped cotton; a flattened fountain pen; a few inches of brown leather hanging from a misshapen buckle; a hinged pin once attached to a brooch. Looking at them breeds a queer vacancy in his chest, as if their few ounces of reality cancel out some equivalent portion of his own. It’s the shoe, mostly, that wounds him. An object so powerful in its interrupted grace, sometimes he’s afraid to touch it.

  After his shower he lies down in the dark of his bedroom and thinks of Alicia. Pictures her handling packets of bills bound with paper wrappers. Even her name sounds like currency, a riffling of crisp new banknotes. He wonders what he’s doing with her. She’s not his type at all, but maybe she was right, maybe he’s deceiving himself about his motives. He conjures up the images of the girls he’s been with. Soft and sweet and ultra-feminine. Yet he finds Alicia’s sharp edges and severity attractive. Could be he’s looking for a little variety. Or maybe like so many people in the city, like lab rats stoned on coke and electricity, his circuits are scrambled and his brain is sending out irrational messages. He wants to talk to her, though. That much he’s certain of—he wants to unburden himself. Tales of the pit. His drawer full of relics. He wants to explain that they’re not souvenirs. They are the pins upon which he hangs whatever it is he has to leave behind each morning when he goes to work. They are proof of something he once thought a profound abstraction, something too elusive to frame in words, but has come to realize is no more than the fact of his survival. This fact, he tells himself, might be all that Alicia needs to understand.

  Despite having urged Bobby on, Pineo taunts him about Alicia the next afternoon. His manic edginess has acquired an angry tonality. He takes to calling Alicia “Calculator Bitch.” Bobby expects Mazurek to join in, but it seems he is withdrawing from their loose union, retreating into some private pit. He goes about his work with oxlike steadiness and eats in silence. When Bobby suggests that he might want to seek counseling, a comment designed to inflame, to reawaken the man’s innate ferocity. Mazurek mutters something about maybe having a talk with one of the chaplains. Though they have only a few basic geographical concerns in common, the three men have sustained one another against the stresses of the job, and that afternoon, as Bobby scratches at the dirt, now turning to mud under a cold drenching rain, he feels abandoned, imperiled by the pit. It all looks unfamiliar and inimical. The silvery lattice of the framework appears to be trembling, as if receiving a transmission from beyond, and the nest of massive girders might be awaiting the return of a fabulous winged monster. Bobby tries to distract himself, but nothing he can come up with serves to brighten his sense of oppression. Toward the end of the shift, he begins to worry that they are laboring under an illusion, that the towers will suddenly snap back in from the dimension into which they have been nudged and everyone will be crushed.

  The Blue Lady is nearly empty that night when they arrive. Hookers in the back, Alicia in her customary place. The juke box is off, the TV muttering—a blonde woman is interviewing a balding man with a graphic beneath his image that identifies him as an anthrax expert. They sit at the bar and stare at the TV, tossing back drinks with dutiful regularity, speaking only when it’s necessary. The anthrax expert is soon replaced by a terrorism expert who holds forth on the disruptive potentials of Al Qaeda. Bobby can’t relate to the discussion. The political sky with its wheeling black shapes and noble music and secret masteries is not the sky he lives and works beneath, gray and changeless, simple as a coffin lid.

  “Al Qaeda,” Roman says. “Didn’t he useta play second base for the Mets? Puerto Rican guy?”

  The joke falls flat, but Roman’s in stand-up mode.

  “How many Al Qaedas does it take to screw in a light bulb?” he asks. Nobody has an answer.

  “Two million,” says Roman. “One to hold the camel steady, one to do the work, and the rest to carry their picture through the streets in protest when they get trampled by the camel.”

  “You made that shit up,” Pineo says. “‘I know it. ’Cause it ain’t that funny.”

  “Fuck you guys!” Roman glares at Pineo, then takes himself off along the counter and goes to reading a newspaper, turning the pages with an angry flourish.

  Four young couples enter the bar, annoying with their laughter and bright, flushed faces and prosperous good looks. As they mill about, some wrangling two tables together, others embracing, one woman earnestly asking Roman if he has Lillet, Bobby slides away from the suddenly energized center of the place and takes a seat beside Alicia. She cuts her eyes toward him briefly, but says nothing, and Bobby, who has spent much of the day thinking about things he might tell her, is restrained from speaking by her glum demeanor. He adopts her attitude—head down, a hand on his glass—and they sit there like two people weighted down by a shared problem. She crosses her legs, and he sees that she has kicked off a shoe. The sight of her slender ankle and stockinged foot rouses in him a sly Victorian delight.

  “This is so very stimulating,” she says. “We’ll have to do it more often.”

  “I didn’t think you wanted to talk.”

  “If you’re going to sit here, it feels stupid not to.”

  The things he considered telling her have gone out of his head. “We
ll, how was your day?” she asks, modulating her voice like a mom inquiring of a sweet child, and when he mumbles that it was about the same as always, she says, “It’s like we’re married. Like we’ve passed beyond the need for verbal communion. All we have to do is sit here and vibe at each other.”

  “It sucked, okay?” he says, angered by her mockery. “It always sucks, but today it was worse than usual.”

  He begins, then, to unburden himself. He tells her about him and Pineo and Mazurek. How they’re like a patrol joined in a purely unofficial unity, by means of which they somehow manage to shield one another from forces they either do not understand or are afraid to acknowledge. And now that unity is dissolving. The gravity of the pit is too strong. The death smell, the horrible litter of souls, the hidden terrors. The underground garage with its smashed, unhaunted cars white with concrete dust. Fires smoldering under the earth. It’s like going to work in Mordor, the shadow everywhere. Ashes and sorrow. After a while you begin to feel as if the place is turning you into a ghost. You’re not real anymore, you’re a relic, a fragment of life. When you say this shit to yourself, you laugh at it. It seems like bullshit. But then you stop laughing and you know it’s true. Ground Zero’s a killing field. Like Cambodia. Hiroshima. They’re already talking about what to build there, but they’re crazy. It’d make as much sense to put up a Dairy Queen at Dachau. Who’d want to eat there? People talk about doing it quickly so the terrorists will see it didn’t fuck us up. But pretending it didn’t fuck us up…what’s that about? Hey, it fucked us up! They should wait to build. They should wait until you can walk around in it and not feel like it’s hurting you to live. Because if they don’t, whatever they put there is going to be filled with that feeling. That sounds absurd, maybe. To believe the ground’s cursed. That there’s some terrible immateriality trapped in it, something that’ll seep up into the new halls and offices and cause spiritual affliction, bad karma…whatever. But when you’re in the middle of that mess, it’s impossible not to believe it.

  Bobby doesn’t look at Alicia as he tells her all this, speaking in a rushed, anxious delivery. When he’s done he knocks back his drink, darts a glance at her to gauge her reaction, and says, “I had this friend in high school got into crystal meth. It fried his brain. He started having delusions. The government was fucking with his mind. They knew he was in contact with beings from a higher plane. Shit like that. He had this whole complex view of reality as conspiracy, and when he told me about it, it was like he was apologizing for telling me. He could sense his own damage, but he had to get it out because he couldn’t quite believe he was crazy. That’s how I feel. Like I’m missing some piece of myself.”

  “I know,” Alicia says. “I feel that way, too. That’s why I come here. To try and figure out what’s missing…where I am with all this.”

  She looks at him inquiringly, and Bobby, unburdened now, finds he has nothing worth saying. But he wants to say something, because he wants her to talk to him, and though he’s not sure why he wants this or what more he might want, he’s so confused by the things he’s confessed and also by the ordinary confusions that attend every consequential exchange between men and women…Though he’s not sure of anything, he wants whatever is happening to move forward.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “Oh, yeah. Sure. This isn’t terminal fucked-uppedness. ’Least I don’t think it is.”

  She appears to be reassessing him. “Why do you put yourself through it?”

  “The job? Because I’m qualified. I worked for FEMA the last coupla summers.”

  Two of the yuppie couples have huddled around the jukebox, and their first selection, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” begins its tense, grinding push. Pineo dances on his barstool, his torso twisting back and forth, fists tight against his chest, a parody—Bobby knows—that’s aimed at the couples, meant as an insult. Brooding over his bourbon, Mazurek is a graying, thick-bodied troll turned to stone.

  “I’m taking my masters in philosophy,” Bobby says. “It’s finally beginning to seem relevant.”

  He intends this as humor, but Alicia doesn’t react to it as such. Her eyes are brimming. She swivels on her stool, knee pressing against his hip, and puts a hand on his wrist.

  “I’m afraid,” she says. “You think that’s all this is? Just fear. Just an inability to cope.”

  He’s not certain he understands her, but he says, “Maybe that’s all.” It feels so natural when she loops her arms about him and buries her face in the crook of his neck, he doesn’t think anything of it. His hand goes to her waist. He wants to turn toward her, to deepen the embrace, but is afraid that will alarm her, and as they cling together, he becomes insecure with the contact, unclear as to what he should do with it. Her pulse hits against his palm, her breath warms his skin. The articulation of her ribs, the soft swell of a hip, the presence of a breast an inch above the tip of his thumb, all her heated specificity both daunts and tempts him. Doubt concerning their mental well-being creeps in. Is this an instance of healing or a freak scene? Are they two very different people who have connected on a level new to both of them, or are they emotional burnouts who aren’t even talking about the same subject and have misapprehended mild sexual attraction for a moment of truth? Just how much difference is there between those conditions? She pulls him closer. Her legs are still crossed, and her right knee slides into his lap, her shoeless foot pushing against his waist. She whispers something, words he can’t make out. An assurance, maybe. Her lips brush his cheek, then she pulls back and offers a smile he takes for an expression of regret.

  “I don’t get it,” she says. “I have this feeling…” She shakes her head as if rejecting an errant notion.

  “What?”

  She holds a hand up beside her face as she speaks and waggles it, a blitheness of gesture that her expression does not reflect. “I shouldn’t be saying this to someone I met in a bar, and I don’t mean it the way you might think. But it’s…I have a feeling you can help me. Do something for me.”

  “Talking helps.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. That doesn’t seem right.” Thoughtful, she stirs her drink; then a sidelong glance. “There must be something some philosopher said that’s pertinent to the moment.”

  “Predisposition fathers all logics, even those disposed to deny it.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I did…in a paper I wrote on Gorgias. The father of sophistry. He claimed that nothing can be known, and if anything could be known, it wasn’t worth knowing.”

  “Well,” says Alicia, “I guess that explains everything.”

  “I don’t know about that. I only got a B on the paper.”

  One of the couples begins to dance, the man, who is still wearing his overcoat, flapping his elbows, making slow-motion swoops, while the woman stands rooted, her hips undulating in a fishlike rhythm. Pineo’s parody was more graceful. Watching them, Bobby imagines the bar a cave, the other patrons with matted hair, dressed in skins. Headlights slice across the window with the suddenness of a meteor flashing past in the primitive night. The song ends, the couple’s friends applaud them as they head for the group table. But when the opening riff of the Hendrix version of “All Along The Watchtower” blasts from the speakers, they start dancing again and the other couples join them, drinks in hand. The women toss their hair and shake their breasts; the men hump the air. A clumsy tribe on drugs.

  The bar environment no longer works for Bobby. Too much unrelieved confusion. He hunches his shoulders against the noise, the happy jabber, and has a momentary conviction that this is not his true reaction, that a little scrap of black negativity perched between his shoulderblades, its claws buried in his spine, has folded its gargoyle wings, and he has reacted to the movement like a puppet. As he stands Alicia reaches out and squeezes his hand. “See you tomorrow?”

  “No doubt,” he says, wondering if he will—he believes she’ll go home and chastise herself for permitting this partial intimacy
, this unprophylactic intrusion into her stainless career-driven life. She’ll stop coming to the bar and seek redemption in a night school business course designed to flesh out her resume. One lonely Sunday afternoon a few weeks hence, he’ll provide the animating fantasy for a battery-powered orgasm.

  He digs in his wallet for a five, a tip for Roman, and catches Pineo looking at him with unalloyed hostility. The kind of look your great enemy might send your way right before pumping a couple of shells into his shotgun. Pineo lets his double-barreled stare linger a few beats, then turns away to a deep consideration of his beer glass, his neck turtled, his head down. It appears that he and Mazurek have been overwhelmed by identical enchantments.

  Bobby wakes up a few minutes before he’s due at work. He calls the job, warns them he’ll be late, then lies back and contemplates the large orange-and-brown water stain that has transformed the ceiling into a terrain map. This thing with Alicia…it’s sick, he thinks. They’re not going to fuck—that much is clear. And not just because she said so. He can’t see himself going to her place, furnishings courtesy of The Sharper Image and Pottery Barn, nor can he picture her in this dump, and neither of them has displayed the urge for immediacy that would send them to a hotel. It’s ridiculous, unwieldy. They’re screwing around is all. Mind-fucking on some perverted soul level. She’s sad because she’s drinking to be sad because she’s afraid that what she does not feel is actually a feeling. Typical post-modern Manhattan bullshit. Grief as a form of self-involvement. And now he’s part of that. What he’s doing with her may be even more perverse, but he has no desire to scrutinize his motives—that would only amplify the perversity. Better simply to let it play out and be done. These are strange days in the city. Men and women seeking intricate solace for intricate guilt. Guilt over the fact that they do not embody the magnificent sadness of politicians and the brooding sympathy of anchorpersons, that their grief is a flawed posture, streaked with the banal, with thoughts of sex and football, cable bills and job security. He still has things he needs, for whatever reason, to tell her. Tonight he’ll confide in her, and she will do what she must. Their mutual despondency, a wrap in four acts.