The Angel of Losses

by Stephanie Feldman

  Simon just laughed. He seemed primed not to take me too seriously. Usually that made me crazy, but I appreciated it now. Sometimes I even exhausted myself. I smiled too.

  “Three thousand people,” I said. “It makes for a big university but a small town.”

  “Yeah, I think maybe we’ve met before. But I decided against mentioning it this morning. You seemed kind of upset.”

  “I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said. “I just had a rough morning. And I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  He shrugged off my apology. “What did you think of the book?” It was a given, in his mind, that I had read it immediately—just as he would do, probably.

  “It’s interesting,” I said. “It’s interesting—actually—that you picked it out. It’s similar to another book that just fell into my lap.”

  “A book on our mutual acquaintance?” he asked.

  “No. Well. No. Not really.” I paused. “No.”

  “Hmm,” he said, unfazed by my nonanswer. “The Wandering Jew wanders on. So why do you like him so much?”

  I had never thought of it that way—that I didn’t want to deconstruct the Wandering Jew, clinically unpack him like I would a sentence. Neuter him with theory. Maybe I just liked him.

  “I like ghost stories,” I answered.

  “I never thought of him as a ghost,” Simon said. “Being immortal and all.”

  “Death-in-life,” I said. “Life-in-death.”

  “Like the Ancient Mariner. ‘Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.’ That won me the oratory award in ninth grade. The girls were very impressed.”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s only the most famous line of poetry maybe ever.”

  Simon drew his shoulders back and brought his hand to his chest. “ ‘About, about, in reel and rout, the death-fires danced at night,’ ” he said, taking a few steps toward me. “ ‘The water, like a witch’s oils, burnt green, and blue and white.’ ”

  He delivered the raging words as quiet facts—fire just a blossom of perfume, the sea just a swirl of paint—as if the right intention could turn a word that destroys into a word that heals.

  “All right,” I said. “Maybe a little impressive.”

  He was right in front of me now, his eyes on my throat, and I felt my face grow hot. “Is that an evil eye?”

  I put my hand on the charm, cradled in the hollow of my collarbone, warm as my skin. “Is it?”

  Simon came an inch closer and then stepped back. The cool night rushed in between us. “I thought so,” he said. “But there’s something different about it.”

  The old man at the bar gave it to me, I almost blurted out. I could feel the flood of words cresting in my mind. If I began speaking, I wouldn’t be able to stop: That old man knew my grandfather. He knows me. I think he’s following me. Is that crazy? Do I sound crazy?

  The door flew open, a few drunk girls exiting, their high-pitched laughter like breaking glass. They stumbled down the street, toward the corner where a hunched figure slowly merged with the shadows as he rounded the corner.

  Grandpa’s friend, disappearing again.

  “Shit,” I said. “I have to go.”

  I ran down the block. The drunk girls had separated to the curb and the wall, but just as I tried to move in between them, they coalesced again, blocking me. How could I have missed the old man’s departure? I had been right by the door the whole time. Though he must have been in his seventies or eighties, when I finally came to the corner, he was already at the end of the block, the city spotlighting his hat, his white hair—even, it seemed, as he turned west out of sight, the strange blue of his eyes.

  I rounded the corner. The side street was empty except for the squat, hatted figure, already turning onto the next avenue. His speed was inexplicable. I ran faster, and at the end of the block I was out of breath. I took a few steps past the curb, for a better view up and down the hill, before oncoming traffic forced me back to the sidewalk. He was gone.

  “Unbelievable,” I muttered. I couldn’t have seen the color of his eyes from a block away, but I was sure it was him. Positive.

  I reached into my shoulder bag and crinkled the paper bag as I watched the traffic stream by and then hush again. Soon it would be closing time; soon it would be morning. Too late for medication. Sleeping through the day would only make it worse. I had come down here so I could sleep, and instead I found myself wide awake in the smoky river of night, headlights fish skipping across its slick surface. I turned slowly in place, and when I stopped I was facing a twenty-four-hour tattoo shop, its borders papered with Chinese characters and retro mermaids. The old man had led me on a nearly identical path to the one Holly and I followed on her nineteenth birthday.

  IT WAS HER FIRST SPRING AT COLLEGE IN THE CITY, MY FOURTH. I put the yakitori, the rounds of illicit drinks at Warsaw, where the waitresses didn’t even pretend to examine the fake IDs, on my flimsy credit card, but my real gift to her was to be her tattoo.

  We had decided long ago that we would do it together, our rite of passage, finally adults together in the big city. She had been drawing and discarding sketches for the tattoo all semester, and now she held a sketch of a wavering musical staff with two ascending notes (for her) and two descending notes (for me). Around us, the night hung on taxi lights and street lamps, and clouds of cigarette smoke rose from dive bars to the blackened tenement windows above.

  I had just stumbled upon the Wandering Jew, and I was trying to describe my interpretations to Holly: language as the law of society, the reality that transcends it, the inexpressible fundamentals written by our bodies. Theory was killing literature, people said, but it had allowed me to see a whole subterranean world: every text meant something profound, if you would only follow it into the dark.

  Maybe if I had connected the story to the White Magician, Holly would have shared my excitement. But we had both observed the injunction against Grandpa’s hero all these years, and my explanation fell flat. She was preoccupied and tipsy, her silence passing for polite attention. She was still reeling from her first serious breakup; she had just met Nathan, though they weren’t dating, and she didn’t yet know she would rearrange her life for him.

  Holly’s eyes shone under the blazing sign. “We spent all those years telling scary stories after Mom and Dad went to bed,” she said. “And it’s like, now you’re doing it professionally.”

  Yes, as kids we spent hours staring at each other across the room, trying to read each other’s thoughts, taking turns emptying our minds so that the other’s could flow into the vacuum. We watched slasher films. Holly read my palm and speculated about my past lives; she led slumber-party séances with candles and magic incantations and bowls of water.

  This wasn’t the same thing. I was steeping myself in sociology, psychology, history. I was learning German. I was building my life around this. I was hurt that it sounded like just a silly ghost story to her. We had been best friends when we ran to each other and hugged beneath the Japanese-printed awning; now I felt the first painful doubt worm into existence. We didn’t know each other’s friends. We didn’t see the same skyline outside our windows in the morning. Our bond could no longer be effortless. We had to make a choice.

  She folded the sketch in half and in half again. “I’m not going to do it,” she said.

  “Do you want to work on the picture more?”

  She shrugged. “I just don’t want to.” I wouldn’t understand why she had changed her mind until later. Her new friends, the Orthodox Jewish girls on her floor, the friends she had never introduced me to, would disapprove. It was against their religion.

  “You should really go ahead, though,” she said, encouraging me.

  But I didn’t want to do it by myself. I didn’t care about a tattoo. I just wanted to do something together, something momentous and memorable, however cliché.

  “We said we were doing this together,” I said.

  Holly touched my arm. “I’m sorry, Marjorie.”
<
br />   “Don’t be sorry,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed, trying not to sound angry. “It’s your birthday. We’ll do whatever you want to do.” She let go of my arm, and I pulled my jacket shut. “Besides, it’s bad enough we’re going to show up to Grandpa’s tomorrow hungover.”

  “You’re right,” she said. I had been joking, but she was serious. We hadn’t discussed it, but we both knew he was failing. “We promised we’d visit, and we never do. Even after. You know.” A few weeks before, he had stopped answering his phone; we’d all driven down to Brooklyn to find him, and when we did, he wasn’t pleased to see us.

  NOW I WATCHED TWO GIRLS BEHIND THE WINDOW, WALKING slowly through the shop, their eyes traveling up and down the walls of pictures. Occasionally one would point, and the other would come to stand beside her friend. Eventually they left, untouched, and hailed a cab.

  I imagined the night of Holly’s birthday having gone differently. We each got our half of Holly’s picture—small, just an inch in height, on our hips or backs, somewhere easily hidden. When Holly rejoined her new friends the next day, with their modest clothes and strict rules, she would have felt apart from them. She would have felt more like the woman she once imagined she would become, a woman I would recognize. We would have shared a secret, at least for a little while. We would finally look alike.

  Or maybe if I had followed Holly’s urging and gotten something myself, I would have more easily shaken off my hurt, my senseless anger. We would still have our secret, and I would still have her drawing, the work of her hand in my skin. She wouldn’t question our relationship or which family she belonged to. She would always belong to us. Maybe the next day we wouldn’t have learned that while we were threading through the East Village—retelling old stories about friends and neighbors, ghosts and exorcists—Grandpa was dying of a heart attack in his apartment above the bay. He called for help at eleven thirty, and breathed his last in an ambulance not long after that. Our father drew comfort from the hospital’s claim that he didn’t suffer long, but I knew that wasn’t true. There was a voice mail from him on my campus apartment phone. He’d left it at eight o’clock, and his voice was already strangled, his words slow, his breath wheezing. I trembled at the way he dragged each syllable from the violent collapse of his body.

  He’s coming, Grandpa told me. He’s coming for me. Then he’s coming for you.

  Now here I was again, another hand-drawn picture at my reach, not from Holly but from Grandpa. Maybe I could rewrite the story Holly and I had begun that night. Maybe the ending we were moving toward—the alienation, the resentment—wasn’t inevitable after all. Or maybe I was just reckless, slowly abandoning all the old rules, just as Holly had, hoping to strike something better; maybe I just didn’t want to go back to my room alone. I went inside instead.

  WE MEET IN A STERILE VISITING ROOM, NOT UNLIKE THE CONEY Island Senior Center where he spent most of his time those last couple of years, surrounded by plastic trees in cheap baskets and murmuring televisions. We sit in hard beige chairs on opposite sides of a laminate folding table.

  I know our allotted time is brief, and desperation flares inside of me—I can’t say good-bye for a second time.

  I reach across the table and take his hands. His skin is cold.

  He smiles. Oh, how weak I am, he says.

  The fluorescent lights strain and buzz.

  No, Grandpa, I protest. His gray hair is thick against his temples, his skin pink instead of sallow, his eyes bright and clear. Gray-blue, like mine.

  I’m so happy to see your face, he says. Despite everything that is to come.

  Now I’m aware that someone has orchestrated this meeting and that he’s given us very little time. This knowledge weighs on our moment together like the earth weighs on carbon, making it even more precious.

  What do you mean? I ask.

  My notebook, he says.

  Don’t worry, I tell him. I have it.

  He doesn’t look relieved. He doesn’t look relieved at all.

  I SAT UP IN BED. THE ROOM WAS FLOODED WITH LIGHT, AND I covered my eyes. My headache was gone, replaced by an alertness eerie in its intensity.

  I had dreamed of the dead before, flashes of my second-grade teacher (cancer), the neighbor down the block (car crash), a junior high friend (overdose). But I had never dreamed of Grandpa, and those dreams never felt like this. Grandpa knew he was dead. There was something he needed to tell me. We met in a world adjacent to my waking one, invited by an unnamed other.

  I lifted my arms to wind my hair away from my face, and something sharp dug into my back. The tattoo. I slowly maneuvered out of my shirt and stood with my back to the mirror. As the artist scraped through my skin, and the pain wore deeper and deeper, I had begun to worry that I had been too impulsive, that I would wake with massive regret. Besides that, it wasn’t exactly right—I had sketched it for him, but it was so complex that the third time he traced the guides on my skin, I had conceded it was close enough.

  I had a sudden urge to call Holly and tell her I had done it, that it was for Grandpa, but that it was for her too, for that time in our lives when we stayed up late, meticulously imagining our futures, me contributing to hers, she contributing to mine.

  It would be a mistake. Her whole nineteen years before Nathan were blasphemous, but the particularly gentile memories, the Christmases, the Tuesday-night cheeseburgers, the bikinis, the red heels that were the most expensive shoes she ever bought and would never let me borrow—it all seemed to embarrass her now.

  We had spent the last two years building a wall. Her casualness—her chitchat in the car, her way of not meeting my eyes—her refusal to fight, to acknowledge my anger, just made me more angry, and I stacked brick after brick of silence between us, waiting for the wall to grow so high that she would be forced to beat her fists against it. Yet there were chinks in the wall too. We could stand on either side and whisper to each other, and listen.

  I peeled off the plastic wrap taped over my skin, took a deep breath, and looked at my reflection. Thick black lines, glowing in a pink aura of tortured flesh. A three-inch-high wound on my back. Over my heart, but also following behind me, protection. It was beautiful. It was alive. I realized there was a part of my brain that I had learned to bludgeon, a primal thing desiccated by so much study, so much stale air. The symbol printed in my skin was newborn and tender. It was mine.

  Three

  During Holly’s first semester at college, she fell into a whirlwind romance with a guy on her floor—he was tall, pre-med, from Connecticut, so good on paper that my mother began fantasizing and fretting about their life together. I hated listening to her excited speculation. I had never had a boyfriend serious enough for those kinds of conversations, and her claims of pride over my English Department awards sounded dry, forced. I was jealous.

  My sister didn’t have a lot in common with her roommate, an Orthodox Jewish girl from Brooklyn who seemed to have arrived at school with a hundred of her closest friends. She was nice, but she ate at the kosher cafeteria with her girlfriends and disappeared all Friday and Saturday. Holly spent more and more time with her boyfriend. They slept in his room almost every night, studied side by side for Chemistry 101 and Introduction to Architecture, arrived at every party hand in hand.

  My mother’s worries shifted from the future to the present. “I think he’s Holly’s only friend,” she said.

  “It’s normal,” I reassured her. “Anyone who has a boyfriend is joined at the hip.”

  “Well, you’ve never been like that. And she says the two of you’ve only gotten together once. She can’t even make time for you?”

  “We’re both really busy,” I said, but her observation bothered me. I realized that the last time we had made plans was three weeks earlier—and I had canceled on her. There were few people, even then, that I would choose over work; Holly was one, but her boyfriend wasn’t. When I found out he was coming to the movies with us, I had told her I had a paper due and could
n’t make it. In the time since, I hadn’t heard from her.

  By Christmas the boyfriend was done.

  Holly was devastated. I asked her what happened, and her explanation gushed forth in fragments: something his friend had said, a favor he had forgotten to do, a comment she made that came out wrong, an explosive argument before her European History midterm. I could barely follow the story—I had missed so much of the buildup. I didn’t even know what he looked like, except for a fuzzy cell phone image of the two of them on top of the Empire State Building at night, their faces bleeding into the darkness.

  Holly spent all of winter break crying. I didn’t know what to say. Grandpa had refused to come home for Christmas, and I went to visit him in Coney Island. He had let the mail pile up, and the windowsills were streaked with dirt.

  “Grandpa,” I said. “Your gas bill is here. It’s already a week late.”

  He waved his hand in front of his face. The corners of his mouth had sunk into a permanent frown. “What is money?” he asked. “Nothing. The dirt of this world. One day there will be yards of it above me. What do I care if it’s already starting to show?”

  Grandpa wanted to go to the beach. I pointed to the snow already salting the fire escape. “This is nothing. This is swimming weather!” he said. It wasn’t a joke; he sounded disgusted, like I was weak, spoiled.

  We stood in our coats and hats and gloves by the sea. He was still as stone. I gritted my teeth, willing myself not to shiver.

  “When I was a boy,” he finally said, “I could hardly imagine this—water as big as the world. If the Almighty could be perceived by the human mind, he would be this. The filthy ocean biting down on Coney Island.”

  “Grandpa,” I said, as if to be sure it was still him—the Eli who never spoke of his childhood, the Eli who insisted God was a myth. He didn’t answer me. Eventually he returned to his apartment, and I returned to mine, and we never spoke about it again.