The Best of Lucius Shepard

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

  He stays forever in the shower; he’s in no hurry to get to the pit, and he considers not going in at all. But duty, habit, and doggedness exert a stronger pull than his hatred and fear of the place—though it’s not truly hatred and fear he feels, but a syncretic fusion of the two, an alchemical product for which a good brand name has not been coined. Before leaving, he inspects the contents of the top drawer in his dresser. The relics are the thing he most needs to explain to her. Whatever else he has determined them to be, he supposes that they are, to a degree, souvenirs, and thus a cause for shame, a morbid symptom. But when he looks at them he thinks there must be a purpose to the collection he has not yet divined, one that explaining it all to Alicia may illuminate. He selects the half-shoe. It’s the only choice, really. The only object potent enough to convey the feelings he has about it. He stuffs it into his jacket pocket and goes out into the living room, where his roommate is watching The Cartoon Network, his head visible above the back of the couch.

  “Slept late, huh?” says the roommate.

  “Little bit,” Bobby says, riveted by the bright colors and goofy voices, wishing he could stay and discover how Scooby Doo and Jackie manage to outwit the swamp beast. “See ya later.”

  Shortly before his shift ends, he experiences a bout of paranoia, during which he believes that if he glances up he’ll find the pit walls risen to skyscraper height and all he’ll be able to see of the sky is a tiny circle of glowing clouds. Even afterward, walking with Mazurek and Pineo through the chilly, smoking streets, distant car horns sounding in rhythm like an avant-garde brass section, he half-persuades himself that it could have happened. The pit might have grown deeper, he might have dwindled. Earlier that evening they began to dig beneath a freshly excavated layer of cement rubble, and he knows his paranoia and the subsequent desire to retreat into irrationality are informed by what they unearthed. But while there is a comprehensible reason for his fear, this does not rule out other possibilities. Unbelievable things can happen of an instant. They all recognize that now.

  The three men are silent as they head toward the Blue Lady. It’s as if their nightly ventures to the bar no longer serve as a release and have become an extension of the job, prone to its stresses. Pineo goes with hands thrust into his pockets, eyes angled away from the others, and Mazurek looks straight ahead, swinging his thermos, resembling a Trotskyite hero, a noble worker of Factory 39. Bobby walks between them. Their solidity makes him feel unstable, as if pulled at by large opposing magnets—he wants to dart ahead or drop back, but is dragged along by their attraction. He ditches them just inside the entrance and joins Alicia at the end of the bar. Her twenty-five watt smile switches on, and he thinks that though she must wear brighter, toothier smiles for coworkers and relatives, this particular smile measures the true fraction of her joy, all that is left after years of career management and bad love.

  To test this theory he asks if she’s got a boyfriend, and she says, “Jesus! A boyfriend. That’s so quaint. You might as well ask if I have a beau.”

  “You got a beau?”

  “I have a history of beaus,” she says. “But no current need for one, thank you.”

  “Your eye’s on the prize, huh?”

  “It’s not just that. Though right now, it is that. I’m”—a sardonic laugh—“I’m ascending the corporate ladder. Trying to, anyway.”

  She fades on him, gone to a gloomy distance beyond the bar, where the TV chatters ceaselessly of plague and misery and enduring freedom. “I wanted to have children,” she says at last. “I can’t stop thinking about it these days. Maybe all this sadness has a biological effect. You know. Repopulate the species.”

  “You’ve got time to have children,” he says. “The career stuff may lighten up.”

  “Not with the men I get involved with…not a chance! I wouldn’t let any of them take care of my plants.”

  “So you got a few war stories, do you?”

  She puts up a hand, palm outward, as to if to hold a door closed. “You can’t imagine!”

  “I’ve got a few myself.”

  “You’re a guy,” she says. “What would you know?”

  Telling him her stories, she’s sarcastic, self-effacing, almost vivacious, as if by sharing these incidents of male duplicity, laughing at her own naïveté, she is proving an unassailable store of good cheer and resilience. But when she tells of a man who pursued her for an entire year, sending candy and flowers, cards, until finally she decided that he must really love her and spent the night with him, a good night after which he chose to ignore her completely…when she tells him this, Bobby sees past her blithe veneer into a place of abject bewilderment. He wonders how she’d look without the make-up. Softer, probably. The make-up is a painting of attitude that she daily recreates. A mask of prettified defeat and coldness to hide her fundamental confusion. Nothing has ever been as she hoped it would be—yet while she has forsworn hope, she has not banished it, and thus she is confused. He’s simplifying her, he realizes. Desultory upbringing in some Midwestern oasis—he hears a flattened A redolent of Detroit or Chicago. Second-rate education leading to a second-rate career. The wreckage of mornings after. This much is plain. But the truth underlying her stories, the light she bore into the world, how it has transmuted her experience…that remains hidden. There’s no point in going deeper, though, and probably no time.

  The Blue Lady fills with the late crowd. Among them a couple of older middle-age who hold hands and kiss across their table; three young guys in Knicks gear; two black men attired gangsta-style accompanying an overweight blonde in a dyed fur wrap and a sequined cocktail dress (Roman damns them with a glare and makes them wait for service.) Pineo and Mazurek are silently, soddenly drunk, isolated from their surround, but the life of the bar seems to glide around Bobby and Alicia, the juke box rocks with old Santana, Kinks, and Springsteen. Alicia’s more relaxed than Bobby’s ever seen her. She’s kicked off her right shoe again, shed her jacket, and though she nurses her drink, she seems to become increasingly intoxicated, as if disclosing her past were having the effect of a three-martini buzz.

  “I don’t think all men are assholes,” she says. “But New York men…maybe.”

  “You’ve dated them all, huh?” he asks.

  “Most of the acceptable ones, I have.”

  “What qualifies as acceptable in your eyes?”

  Perhaps he stresses “in your eyes” a bit much, makes the question too personal, because her smile fades and she gives him a startled look. After the last strains of “Glory Days” fade, during the comparative quiet between songs, she lays a hand on his cheek, studies him, and says, less a question than a self-assurance, “You wouldn’t treat me like that, would you?” And then, before Bobby can think how he should respond, taken aback by what appears an invitation to step things up, she adds, “It’s too bad,” and withdraws her hand.

  “Why?” he asks. “I mean I kinda figured we weren’t going to hook up, and I’m not arguing. I’m just curious why you felt that way.”

  “I don’t know. Last night I wanted to. I guess I didn’t want to enough.”

  “It’s pretty unrealistic.” He grins. “Given the difference in our ages.”

  “Bastard!” She throws a mock punch. “Actually, I found the idea of a younger man intriguing.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m not all that.”

  “Nobody’s ‘all that,’ not until they’re with somebody who thinks they are.” She pretends to check him out. “You might clean up pretty nice.”

  “Excuse me,” says a voice behind them. “Can I solicit an opinion?”

  A good-looking guy in his thirties wearing a suit and a loosened tie, his face an exotic sharp-cheekboned mixture of African and Asian heritage. He’s very drunk, weaving a little.

  “My girlfriend…okay?” He glances back and forth between them. “I was supposed to meet her down…”

  “No offense, but we’re having a conversation here,” Bobby says.

  The gu
y holds his hands up as if to show he means no harm and offers apology, but then launches into a convoluted story about how he and his girlfriend missed connections and then had an argument over the phone and he started drinking and now he’s broke, fucked up, puzzled by everything. It sounds like the prelude to a hustle, especially when the guy asks for a cigarette, but when they tell him they don’t smoke, he does not—as might be expected—ask for money, but looks at Bobby and says, “The way they treat us, man! What are we? Chopped liver?”

  “Maybe so,” says Bobby.

  At this the guy takes a step back and bugs his eyes. “You got any rye?” he says. “I could use some rye.”

  “Seriously,” Bobby says to him, gesturing at Alicia. “We need to finish our talk.”

  “Hey,” the guy says. “Thanks for listening.”

  Alone again, the thread of the conversation broken, they sit for a long moment without saying anything, then start to speak at the same time.

  “You first,” says Bobby.

  “I was just thinking…” She trails off. “Never mind. It’s not that important.”

  He knows she was on the verge of suggesting that they should get together, but that once again the urge did not rise to the level of immediacy. Or maybe there’s something else, an indefinable barrier separating them, something neither one of them has tumbled to. He thinks this must be the case, because given her history, and his own, it’s apparent neither of them has been discriminating in the past. But she’s right, he decides—whatever’s happening between them is simply not that important, and thus it’s not that important to understand.

  She smiles, an emblem of apology, and stares down into her drink. “Free Falling” by Tom Petty is playing on the box, and some people behind them begin wailing along with it, nearly drowning out the vocal.

  “I brought something for you,” Bobby says.

  An uneasy look. “From your work?”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t the same…”

  “I told you I didn’t want to see that kind of thing.”

  “They’re not just souvenirs,” he says. “If I seem messed up to you…and I’m sure I do. I feel messed up, anyway. But if I seem messed up, the things I take from the pit, they’re kind of an explanation for…” He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated by his inability to speak what’s on his mind. “I don’t know why I want you to see this. I guess I’m hoping it’ll help you understand something.”

  “About what?” she says, leery.

  “About me…or where I work. Or something. I haven’t been able to nail that down, y’know. But I do want you to see it.”

  Alicia’s eyes slide away from him; she fits her gaze to the mirror behind the bar, its too-perfect reflection of romance, sorrow, and drunken fun. “If that’s what you want.”

  Bobby touches the half-shoe in his jacket pocket. The silk is cool to his fingers. He imagines that he can feel its blueness. “It’s not a great thing to look at. I’m not trying to freak you out, though. I think—”

  She snaps at him. “Just show it to me!”

  He sets the shoe beside her glass and for a second or two it’s like she doesn’t notice it. Then she makes a sound in her throat. A single note, the human equivalent of an ice cube plinking in a glass, bright and clear, and puts a hand out as if to touch it. But she doesn’t touch it, not at first, just leaves her hand hovering above the shoe. He can’t read her face, except for the fact that she’s fixated on the thing. Her fingers trail along the scorched margin of the silk, tracing the ragged line. “Oh, my god!” she says, all but the glottal sound buried beneath a sudden surge in the music. Her hand closes around the shoe, her head droops. It looks as if she’s in a trance, channeling a feeling or some trace of memory. Her eyes glisten, and she’s so still, Bobby wonders if what he’s done has injured her, if she was unstable and now he’s pushed her over the edge. A minute passes, and she hasn’t moved. The juke box falls silent, the chatter and laughter of the other patrons rise around them.

  “Alicia?”

  She shakes her head, signaling either that she’s been robbed of the power to speak, or is not interested in communicating.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  She says something he can’t hear, but he’s able to read her lips and knows the word “god” was again involved. A tear escapes the corner of her eye, runs down her cheek, and clings to her upper lip. It may be that the half-shoe impressed her, as it has him, as being the perfect symbol, the absolute explanation of what they have lost and what has survived, and this, its graphic potency, is what has distressed her.

  The jukebox kicks in again, an old Stan Getz tune, and Bobby hears Pineo’s voice bleating in argument, cursing bitterly; but he doesn’t look to see what’s wrong. He’s captivated by Alicia’s face. Whatever pain or loss she’s feeling, it has concentrated her meager portion of beauty and suffering, she’s shining, the female hound of Wall Street thing she does with her cosmetics radiated out of existence by a porcelain Song of Bernadette saintliness, the clean lines of her neck and jaw suddenly pure and Periclean. It’s such a startling transformation, he’s not sure it’s really happening. Drink’s to blame, or there’s some other problem with his eyes. Life, according to his experience, doesn’t provide this type of quintessential change. Thin, half-grown cats do not of an instant gleam and grow sleek in their exotic simplicity like tiny gray tigers. Small, tidy Cape Cod cottages do not because of any shift in weather, no matter how glorious the light, glow resplendent and ornate like minor Asiatic temples. Yet Alicia’s golden change is manifest. She’s beautiful. Even the red membranous corners of her eyes, irritated by tears and city grit, seem decorative, part of a subtle design, and when she turns to him, the entire new delicacy of her features flowing toward him with the uncanny force of a visage materializing from a beam of light, he feels imperiled by her nearness, uncertain of her purpose. What can she now want of him? As she pulls his face close to hers, lips parting, eyelids half-lowering, he is afraid a kiss may kill him, either overpower him, a wave washing away a tiny scuttler on the sand, or that the taste of her, a fraction of warm saliva resembling a speck of crystal with a flavor of sweet acid, will react with his own common spittle to synthesize a compound microweight of poison, a perfect solution to the predicament of his mortality. But then another transformation, one almost as drastic, and as her mouth finds his, he sees the young woman, vulnerable and soft, giving and wanting, the childlike need and openness of her.

  The kiss lasts not long, but long enough to have a history, a progression from contact to immersion, exploration to a mingling of tongues and gushing breath, yet once their intimacy is completely achieved, the temperature dialed high, she breaks from it and puts her mouth to his ear and whispers fiercely, tremulously, “Thank you…Thank you so much!” Then she’s standing, gathering her purse, her briefcase, a regretful smile, and says, “I have to go.”

  “Wait!” He catches at her, but she fends him off.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “But I have to…right now. I’m sorry.”

  And she goes, walking smartly toward the door, leaving him with no certainty of conclusion, with his half-grown erection and his instantly catalogued memory of the kiss surfacing to be examined and weighed, its tenderness and fragility to be considered, its sexual intensity to be marked upon a scale, its meaning surmised, and by the time he’s made these judgments, waking to the truth that she has truly, unequivocally gone and deciding to run after her, she’s out the door. By the time he reaches the door, shouldering it open, she’s twenty-five, thirty feet down the sidewalk, stepping quickly between the parked cars and the storefronts, passing a shadowed doorway, and he’s about to call out her name when she moves into the light spilling from a coffee shop window and he notices that her shoes are blue. Pale blue with a silky sheen, and of a shape that appears identical to that of the half-shoe left on the bar. If, indeed, it was left there. He can’t remember now. Did she take it? The question has a strange, frightful value, bor
n of a frightful suspicion that he cannot quite reject, and for a moment he’s torn between the impulse to go after her and a desire to turn back into the bar and look for the shoe. That, in the end, is what’s important. To discover if she took the shoe, and if she did, then to fathom the act, to decipher it. Was it done because she thought it a gift, or because she wanted it so badly, maybe to satisfy some freaky neurotic demand, that she felt she had to more-or-less steal it, get him confused with a kiss and bolt before he realized it was missing? Or—and this is the notion that’s threatening to possess him—was the shoe hers to begin with? Feeling foolish, yet not persuaded he’s a fool, he watches her step off the curb at the next corner and cross the street, dwindling and dwindling, becoming indistinct from other pedestrians. A stream of traffic blocks off his view. Still toying with the idea of chasing after her, he stands there for half a minute or so, wondering if he has misinterpreted everything about her. A cold wind coils like a scarf about his neck, and the wet pavement begins soaking into his sock through the hole in his right boot. He squints at the poorly defined distance beyond the cross-street, denies a last twinge of impulse, then yanks open the door of the Blue Lady. A gust of talk and music seems to whirl past him from within, like the ghost of a party leaving the scene, and he goes on inside, even though he knows in his heart that the shoe is gone.

  Bobby’s immunity to the pit has worn off. In the morning he’s sick as last week’s salmon plate. A fever that turns his bones to glass and rots his sinuses, a cough that sinks deep into his chest and hollows him with chills. His sweat smells sour and yellow, his spit is thick as curds. For the next forty-eight hours he can think of only two things. Medicine and Alicia. She’s threaded through his fever, braided around every thought like a strand of RNA, but he can’t even begin to make sense of what he thinks and feels. A couple of nights later the fever breaks. He brings blankets, a pillow, and orange juice into the living room and takes up residence on the sofa. “Feeling better, huh?” say the roommate, and Bobby says, “Yeah, little bit.” After a pause the roommate hands him the remote and seeks refuge in his room, where he spends the day playing video games. Quake, mostly. The roars of demons and chattering chain guns issue from behind his closed door.