by Marilyn Horn
So Many Shoes
My project will never be complete.
So many shoes. I find them in abandoned homes and looted stores, and I bring them here to fill the sidewalks. In this way I can pretend I am not alone. These are not empty shoes scattered around me, I think. They are people. Mothers pushing trams. Businessmen making deals. Children skipping to the candy shop.
For a while I lined them up nicely, each shoe next to its match, but that looked to me as if the people had stopped in their tracks, which, if I am honest, is what happened. So many of them gone now, stopped forever. So I changed my tactic. I threw one shoe here, another there. Life seems fuller now. All these people I encounter as I wander the empty streets, they are slipshod, crazy, and completely human.
But, oh, so quiet.
A Big Gift
Past midnight, just as the planet Jupiter peeked from behind the old willow tree outside her window, Cassie heard Freddy stirring in the room next to hers, shifting and sighing, unable to get back to sleep. This was Cassie’s cue, and she got out of bed and snuck downstairs to the dark kitchen. She prepared her big brother a bowl of corn flakes by the light of the moon, pouring just enough milk so that, when the cereal was gone, the milk would be nice and sweet.
She tiptoed carefully back up the stairs, the bowl big in her little hands, and found him sitting up in bed, the dim bedside lamp the only light in the room. Poor Freddy always looks so tired now, Cassie thought. His face was so pale compared with his black, black hair, but tonight it looked even paler, and his eyes were red-rimmed again, because he’d been crying. She had heard him earlier, when Mother had brought in the medicine.
She handed him the bowl before she climbed into bed next to him, and he slurped and crunched the cereal down without a spoon. “This is good,” he said. He had hardly eaten anything all day. “My stomach hurts,” was his usual excuse. No matter how much Mother threatened or begged, he ate hardly anything anymore, except the corn flakes Cassie brought him at night.
“You can start,” he said. He handed her the empty bowl, and she put it on the nightstand and picked up the book, the one she had selected from the bookshelf in the room down the hall. Grandma’s old room. The bookshelf there held dozens of books just like this one: Our Wonderful Solar System. She smoothed her hand over the book’s shiny cover in an affectionate way, the way Grandma used to before opening it up.
“What chapter are we on?” He asked the same question every night.
“We’re on the outer planets now,” she said. They had finished the inner planets the night before. She opened up at the bookmark. “‘Jupiter and Its Many Moons.'”
The page had a big picture of Jupiter, banded in pale oranges and pinks and even purples, almost like an Easter egg, and beneath the picture, the caption: “The planet Jupiter is more than two times larger than all the other planets put together” — something Cassie and Freddy already knew. Freddy had read this same book aloud to Grandma during those long sad days before she died, had even set up the telescope in Grandma’s room, the same telescope Grandma had always set up in the one corner of their tiny overgrown backyard not dominated by the willow.
Cassie began to read. “‘The biggest wonder in our solar system, in terms of size, is the planet Jupiter. The Romans named this gas giant after the principal god of Roman …’ What’s that word again?” Cassie spelled the word out for Freddy, for his eyes were too weak to read in the dim light, even if he put on his big eyeglasses with the thick lenses.
“Mythology,” he said.
“‘… the principal god of Roman mythology.'”
Freddy interrupted. “Grandma said of all the wonders of the universe, the biggest is that we are here at all. That’s something to think about. Something to remember.”
The tone of his voice worried Cassie; she thought that he might start crying again. Some nights were like that, and no amount of reading could get him to stop.
She barreled onward. “‘Jupiter has 11 moons that we know of, but astronomers are certain many more orbit this gas giant. Its largest is Ganymede …'” She felt proud of herself for remembering how to pronounce the moon’s name, and pointed at the picture of it: a tiny black spot compared with the planet. But Freddy, although looking at the picture, could not be distracted from his train of thought.
“It’s like a big gift,” Freddy said.
“What is? Ganymede?”
“No. Being here. On earth.”
She sighed and attempted to start reading again. But he continued.
“A wonderful gift. But one we can’t keep forever. Like a balloon.”
His mention of a balloon caught her off guard. She’d had a balloon once. She and Freddy had ridden the trolley to Santa Monica Pier where he had bought her a red one, but it flew away when they went on the Ferris wheel. She frowned. “I hated losing my balloon.”
“Yes, but your balloon was lucky. Think about it, flying up to space like that.”
“No.” She shook her head and her eyes teared up as she remembered the balloon, and how it had sailed away without caring how much she loved it.
Freddy nudged her with his shoulder. “Yes, it was lucky. Really it was. It got to float all the way up to the sky. I bet it got to visit everything we see in Grandma’s books. The moon and the asteroids. Mars and Venus.”
“And boring old Mercury?” She didn’t like that idea, her poor balloon circling around a big stupid rock.
“Mercury, too. But that’s not all.”
His voice had become more storyteller-like, less sad, and she decided to stop fussing about the balloon and encourage him. “What else then? The sun?”
“Maybe the sun, but I bet the balloon didn’t want to get too close to that.”
She imagined the balloon with its silver string, wilting near the sun, and she began to feel sad again. “And Jupiter?” she asked quickly, to snap herself out of it.
“Of course Jupiter.”
“I’d like to visit Jupiter best of all.” She ran her fingertip over the picture in the book — the bands of orange, pink and purple.
“Wouldn’t you want to visit Saturn?”
“I suppose so,” she said. “But everyone loves Saturn ’cause of its rings. But I love Jupiter. It’s so big and gassy. Grandma was gassy. Maybe she’s on Jupiter. Could heaven be on Jupiter?”
“Maybe.”
“Mother says there’s no heaven.” Cassie felt embarrassed saying it aloud, like it was something they had agreed not to discuss.
“Mother doesn’t believe in anything. And she doesn’t know everything, either.” Freddy had never said this before, and for a moment Cassie was shocked to hear him say it. “No one knows for sure what happens … you know.”
“After you die.” She felt bad because she knew it made him feel bad, talking about dying. She patted his hand, feeling like the older sibling, not the younger. “I want to go to Jupiter someday,” she said. “Can you breathe on Jupiter?” The thought made her take a deep breath, which made her lungs feel funny and she gave a little cough.
“You don’t need to breathe when you go to Jupiter,” Freddy said.
“But if you could?”
“Well, I suppose the air would be sweet and rotten. Remember when the sewer line broke in the street?”
“That smelled bad.”
“But you’d get used to it,” he said.
Cassie’s little cough had agitated her lungs so that another little cough followed, and another.
Freddy sighed. “You should go back to bed. Mother will get up soon, to make her rounds. ”
“Okay.”
She climbed out of bed and tucked him in like Grandma used to and kissed his forehead before tiptoeing back to her room. She lay down and looked out her window. Jupiter had moved just the tiniest bit so that it now sat atop the willow, like a Christmas star. But Jupiter was not a star at all; she knew that. The biggest planet in the solar system. The third brightest thing in the sky, after the moon and Venus, and she l
iked how Jupiter was so big and yet not a show-off.
She coughed again, this time harder and longer. She hated when the coughing started.
When Mother came in to give Cassie her medicine, Jupiter still sat atop the tree, but four hours later, when the coughing started up again and Mother came back, Jupiter was out of sight.
Cassie fell back asleep. Jupiter, meanwhile, continued through the cold, vast blackness of space as it journeyed around the sun. The weeks passed, and then the months, while Jupiter — stormy and turbulent, unaware of those passing weeks and months — continued on the path set out for it.
One night, the sun had only just set when Jupiter winked at Cassie through the window. But she didn’t notice. Her ventilator mask blocked her view.
Freddy saw it, though, and he told her how Jupiter shimmered in the pearl-like sky. His lips were against her ear, his voice louder even than their mother’s. Louder even than the ventilator. Freddy’s voice, the only thing Cassie heard: “The light — when you see it, it’s Jupiter.” Over and over he said it until she did see the light, orange and pink and purple, just like Freddy said it would be, and someone up ahead called to her, and with her last great effort she tore off the mask and gulped in the sweet rotten air.
Soul Mate
He hoped she would die today and return to him. He was so tired, waiting for her, in this so-called heaven. It was only half-heaven for him, until she returned. Until then, this place — despite its golden light and sweet aroma, despite its steady 72 degrees — didn’t seem heavenly at all. Just crowded. Packed with soul mates, reuniting. All around him, the other soul mates crooned, sighed and moaned as their wounds healed and they became whole. Hearing them, seeing them — it all made his loneliness that much harder to bear. To make matters worse, the others pushed and jostled him, without apology.
He maneuvered his way through the crowd until he reached the edge of the heavenly sphere and gazed down at the blue-white orb that, until recently, had been his home and was still hers. Waiting for her to return was particularly lonely this time. It was always like that, when their lives hadn’t connected. His most recent incarnation, as Jeff D. Karnes (what did the “D” stand for? — he was starting to forget these things), had been one of the worst in that sense. He saw his soul mate nearly every day, and yet they had never touched. Never talked. Never even made eye contact.
Circumstances had conspired against them, he thought, and then he laughed aloud, causing the other soul mates pressing against him to jerk away momentarily. Conspiring circumstances? No. The truth of it: She had scared Jeff D. Karnes, with her ragged clothes and matted hair. And being afraid, he could not love her. He could not love someone so obviously lost, so cut off from the world. “Love” — he laughed at himself again. He had not even come close to loving her. When he had walked the earth as Jeff D. Karnes and encountered his own true love, his eternal soul mate, he could barely even stand to look at her. Instead, he would avert his eyes and think “poor gal,” or “dear god,” or “where’s her family?”
“You know what she will say when she returns.” It was the Assistant Director — the AD — not a presence he could see, just a sweet quiet voice in his ear. Sometimes when he was waiting for his soul mate, the AD would talk to him to keep him company.
“Yes,” he said, “I know what she will say. She will say ‘You must be braver next time.'”
No response. The AD had moved on or else was just letting his own words sink in.
You must be braver next time — yes, his true love had said that before, and more than once. She had said it not so long ago, after their lives as two girls from the same village near Smolensk. Her as Klara, him as Lisle. He didn’t usually remember what their names had been when they walked the earth, but he did when the life ended badly. And that one most certainly had. At the end, Klara and Lisle had clung together in a root cellar as that nasty little man (Neapolitan, he thought at first, but then remembered) Napoleon and his awful soldiers scourged their village, burning, raping, and killing as they went. Lisle had not lived much longer after that: She had swallowed rat poison and died in the root cellar before the soldiers could find her. But Klara, she had made it through and lived on — not much longer, true, but long enough to see soldiers die at her own hand. She sold them poisoned apples as they made their long cold retreat. They caught her at it and slashed her throat. He had watched that part from here, from this half-heaven, and when she returned, she had said, “You should have stayed alive,” and “It was great fun, killing those bastards,” and, of course, “You must be braver next time.”
“Were you braver this time?” the AD whispered, and he had to shake his head. In his most recent life, as Jeff D. Karnes, he had not been brave at all. He had not been brave enough to bring her into his life, or to step into hers, and yet he could not keep away. As Jeff D. Karnes, he saw his true love on his lunch hour runs after the — (for a moment he couldn’t remember what it was called. “The daily call,” that was it.) — After the daily call with his boss, he would go on a run at Griffith Park, never anywhere else. Every day at lunch and even on weekends (his studio apartment was just across the street from the park, with a big window looking out toward it), he ran the park trails. He did not know then why he did so, but it was all so obvious now. Despite all the conspiring circumstances, the scared little heart beating in Jeff D. Karnes’ chest had yearned to be with her.
He wiped condensation from the skin of the heavenly sphere and focused on the spot where she lived: the brown and green hills, the massive oaks, the dusty trails, and the most precious thing of all to him — the black tarp draped across a row of shrubs that protected her little hovel. Maybe she would crawl out today.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. He hoped she wouldn’t; he hoped …
“It’s usually like this, isn’t it?” the AD asked. “You waiting for her? And not the other way around.”
He had to nod at that. “She likes to linger in the world.”
The AD kept silent for a while and then said, “Funny, isn’t it, how she’s always crawling out of places.”
It was true. He had stood at this very spot in the heavenly sphere and seen her crawl from a root cellar, her skirt full of poisoned apples; from a mine, covered in coal dust; from a trench, wearing a gas mask. And this time: from her hovel behind the shrubs.
When he was still Jeff D. Karnes, sometimes she surprised him when she emerged. He would be running along listening to his — (what was it called? he wondered, and then it came to him) — his iPod, and suddenly there she’d be, always in the same loose and soiled clothing (an old gray pea coat, army pants, worn-out boots), her long black hair thick and tangled.
“That was all you noticed about her,” the AD said, sounding terribly sad. “You didn’t even notice the color of her eyes.”
He knew more about her constant companion, the little gray mutt. “Her dog’s eyes were black,” he said, partly to the AD, partly to himself. The dog was a friendly thing, always wagging its tail when Jeff D. Karnes approached, looking up at him, so trusting, so honest, and once it had even rolled onto its back, begging for a belly scratch. Not once had he kneeled to scratch the dog’s belly or pat its dirty little head. He had stayed away from the dog, not wanting to interact with its owner.
“You should have stopped to talk to the dog, if not to her.”
But he never had. Circumstances had conspired to make his heart hard.
“What were those circumstances you keep on about?” the AD prodded, but he could barely remember them — the parents, the siblings, the friends. The schooling, and then the first job, and the second, and the third. Jeff D. Karnes — maybe the “D” stood for “discontented,” he thought now, because that was what he was.
What a miserable life he’d had! Living alone. Running at lunch time. He would add it to his list of failed lifetimes. Maybe even worse than the life before this one, when he lived in the great tundra. That time, she had come into the world just as he did, but it
took more than 15 years for them to meet, and then she had turned up as Banak, a boy in a band of wanderers — nomads who followed the tuktu herds. “Come with me,” Banak had said to him. But he had not gone, he had watched Banak the nomad boy trek across the barren land until there was nothing more to see. He had lived long after, nearly 100 years in total, with children and grandchildren to attend to, but lonely all the same.
But when that life ended, she was not waiting for him in heaven. He’d had to wait for her! (He waited for the AD to bring that up, but it was an awkward point that no one, not even the AD, apparently, liked to broach.) And when she finally did return, she confessed that she had lived two other lifetimes while he wasted away in the tundra. “I got bored, waiting,” was all she said. And so, he learned that, while he had hunted whale and patched canoes, she had killed her share of Tommies and doughboys, and later, as he had watched his children and then his grandchildren start their own families, she had traveled muddy jungle trails, preaching peace in long saffron robes. “I can’t just sit around waiting for you,” she had said, but with a laugh and kiss, and then they had reunited, bathed in the sweet golden light, and half-heaven became all heaven.
The AD woke him from his reverie. “She always needs a mission. That’s what spurs her on.”
“The dog is what’s keeping her going in this incarnation,” he said. “But now the dog is gone.” For the past few days, whenever his own true love emerged, she did so alone, no dog in sight, and only to quickly scrounge through the trash cans, picking out old bags of potato chips and small milk cartons, before disappearing behind the shrubs again.
The dog was dead, most likely. And now she had nothing left to live for. Surely she must be ready to return to him. He saw a rustling in the shrubs and felt giddy. Maybe today she will commit suicide, he thought, just like Jeff D. Karnes did.
She emerged, brushing leaves and twigs from the same loose clothing she always wore. When she returned to him, he would ask about the conspiring circumstances, and how she had ended up living behind a shrub in Griffith Park — alone, dejected, an outcast …