Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Completing her routine in due course, the Girl ventured into the kitchen, nuked the coffee in its WNET pledge mug in the microwave. The level of instant coffee in the Sanka jar was always the same as she spooned it out, and the strawberry Pop-Tart always the last as she withdrew it from the box in the freezer and popped it in the toaster.

  Is it live or is it Memorex? The Girl couldn’t quite place who had told her of the commercial with the old lady jazz singer breaking a glass with her voice—only that it had been someone with a twin, someone who had had something horribly wrong with him. But the Girl herself had never seen the commercial, and—despite the melancholy variety of programming on the set now—it never appeared.

  She remembered, too, the story someone—she had trouble remembering who—had read her when she was little (but not too little to comprehend it) by that bearded guy who had written for Star Trek, in which strange creatures appeared at night and rebuilt an exact duplicate of the entire world for the next day, so you would think it was all the same.

  But invariably, of course, they screwed it all up.

  The Girl walked back out to the living room. She set the Pop-Tart and coffee on a side table and plopped cross-legged onto the burgundy recliner with the tear hidden in back. She reached behind her and selected a volume from the big maple bookcase that displayed the round jelly-glass stain, exactly like the one that had journeyed with them when she and the companion now walled off from her recollection had come from Hurley, Minnesota, when she was small.

  The book was a tattered leather copy of Little Women. The Girl knew it well; her mother had read this book to her, and that unremembered other had, too, and she’d read it many times herself. She flipped through it. All the pages were there, and all the words.

  Not so with many of the other works on the shelf, she knew. They might hold only half the words, or a third of the pages might be blank, or the cover a blur.

  She drew out another book, a dark blue one with a gold dragon on the spine, and the title A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. She had not inspected this one before. With mild curiosity, she blew the dust off and opened it, saw scrawled in a childish hand on the inside front cover, “This Book Belongs to Agnes Hilliard Wu.”

  The frontispiece showed a group of mustached and bearded men in animated conversation around a table, with the caption “The Doctor was evidently discoursing upon a favorite topic.” She fanned the pages. The words seemed intact, set whole. Agnes Wu must have cherished this book; must still, wherever she might be. There were other books on the shelves inscribed to Agnes, books in a lilting text that the Girl recognized (although she could not have said precisely how) as Thai; she wondered if Agnes Wu, whoever she was, might once have lived in that fantasy place.

  The Regulator clock on the wall chimed the half hour—seven-thirty. The Girl returned the book to its place on the shelf, uncurled and stood.

  Beyond her apartment, the city waited, and her regular classes, and the School of American Ballet.

  The train on its track, circling.

  The Girl emerged from her fourth-floor walk-up out onto the street, dressed in her school grays, the book bag with its toe-shoe insignia slung over her shoulder. The morning was bright and mild, with none of the weight of humidity nor razor chill she associated with so many of her days in Manhattan. Unseen, the robins and skylarks trilled their songs, and strangers bustled about on the brownstone street as if they were actually going somewhere.

  Eighty-first looked exactly right; the streets she most often walked on were always as she remembered them. Some of the other streets were complete, too—maybe St. Ives or Monteiro or the others knew them. But sometimes she’d turn a corner and be back on the street she was on before, or it would just be fog.

  Outside her place, the Girl passed the cherry tree within its circle of vertical iron bars, a prisoner of Eighty-first Street. It blossomed even in captivity.

  As she strode toward Columbus and St. Augustine Middle School, a gentle wind detached some of the blossoms from the tree and they pursued her, floated about her like a scene from Madame Butterfly. She caught one in her hand and ran it along her lips, her cheek; it felt like her own soft skin.

  Joggers loped past her and kids strolled bantering in easy, laughing conversation. The Girl knew by now not to try to speak to them. People looked real, too, but they wouldn’t engage her in conversation; they were like extras in a movie.

  Every now and then, though, someone would talk to her, and then she knew they were really real, or at least connected to someone who was.

  The Girl slowed as she came to Mr. Lungo’s home. It was the familiar curlicued Victorian wedding cake of a house she remembered. But really, with its warped and weathered shingles, its peeling paint, listing fenceposts and wild devil grass, it was more like Miss Havisham’s ruin of a cake in Great Expectations, the symbol of abandonment, and broken promises, and time stood still. Even when she was little it had disquieted her, seemed an anomaly brutishly inserted onto this ordered street of brownstones with their weathered stoops and muted foliage.

  It wasn’t like this every day. Sometimes the lot showed nothing more than blackened timbers and twisted wreckage, smoke curling up and choking the air, the way the house had been after disaster had befallen it on that riotous, murdering night.

  Other times it wasn’t there at all—just the houses adjoining on either side, butted up against one another.

  Lungo himself never made an appearance. But occasionally, his front-porch glider would rock with the slightest motion from the wind, in the shade of his scraggly jacaranda, and his twisted walking stick, like an arthritic, broken finger, would be resting against the rail.

  The realest people here are the ghosts, the Girl thought, and turned onto Columbus.

  She caught the sweet liquid sound from far off, way around the corner, like the smell of menthol, and honey on your tongue, and the azure sky at sunset when the stars were just peering through.

  Then the husky, lulling murmur of the saxophone paused in mid-phrase.

  “Well, if it ain’t Anna Pavlova….”

  The blind black man turned his milk-sheened, useless eyes toward her and smiled with that smile that was like sinking into a warm bath. How he could know she was there before she spoke was always a mystery to her, and it felt right.

  He was not young like the third blind man in her dream, nor pale like the other, malign one. His skin was a deep burnished brown, like old, oiled furniture, and when the light hit it just so, it showed a subtlety of gray, like a fine coating of ash.

  “How they treatin’ you today, sweet girl?” Papa Sky asked.

  “Okay,” she replied, and both the question and the answer soothed her, although she couldn’t have said who she thought “they” were.

  “Well, you just hang in there. You got friends in high places. What you wanna hear today?”

  She shrugged, which was a request in itself. Dealer’s choice…and when the dealer was this good, it was all flow.

  Papa Sky put the shaved Leblanc reed of the 1922 Selmer alto sax (this instrument that was almost, but not quite, as old as he was) to his wetted lips, and it was an incantation and supplication in one.

  The glorious sounds poured out, smooth perfection, throaty and soaring and exultant.

  The Girl recognized the tune. The last time he’d played it, the old blind black man (the half cubano as he called himself) had told her it was called “Night and Day.”

  She closed her eyes and let the melody fill her, began to move to it. And this was no longer just going through the motions, nor feigning interest in the arabesque and pas de deux that had once been her universe.

  Night and day, you are the one….

  She gave herself over to the river of harmony, let its cool voice fill every pore, engulf eye socket and fingertip, ankle and neck, liberated into expression and movement.

  The way it had been before, when Luz Herrera had taken the photo (so exactly like the one atop
her night table now) of her as Giselle at the March recital in mid-jété, enraptured, effortless.

  Freed from the pull of earth, and its cares.

  Weightless.

  Before weightlessness had become a curse and a shaming, and a constant source of danger…

  But that pang of memory was not for now; if that waking-dream existence lingered in her it was pushed far down and away, like a sliver imbedded and grown over with flesh, like venom lurking in a vein.

  Let it go….

  There was only this moment, this gift, here and real and fine if she just held on to it….

  As she twirled and swayed, inseparable from the tumble of exquisite notes one on another, the image came to her of Nijinsky as the Faun and the Rose, posed with that excruciating, incredible mix of delicacy and power that only he could attain, so expressive and perfect that these weren’t still images to her—she saw him in the glory and magnificence of motion.

  The clear, undeniable message, the siren song that had drawn her so long and with such constancy…You are your real self when you are removed from self, when you give yourself over to what the cosmos calls you to be, and that thing might be called Destiny. Or simply Truth.

  To see that truth, to not be blind to it…

  And yet Nijinsky thought he saw it, heard what he took to be its call. He followed it, and that false god led him to his destruction.

  She knew that god, too, now, had been snared by it.

  But not in this moment, this sanctuary, blessed and released…

  The song ended, the notes held, then drifting away, to unknown, unreachable places.

  The Girl settled to stillness, exhaled a slow breath. She opened her eyes.

  Inigo was there, watching her. As she knew he’d be.

  Hanging back in the shadows against the cold stone wall of an office building, gazing at her through Gargoyle sunglasses. Though she could not see his eyes behind them, she knew from past encounters that they were white as pearl, with only the faintest vertical slash of gray for the pupil.

  White like the old jazzman’s eyes, like Papa Sky’s. But not blind; Inigo could see as well as she could; better, particularly at night.

  He was her age, but shorter—smart like her, though—bundled up not against the cold, because there was no cold, but against the light. The dark navy hood was pulled low over his broad forehead, the sides of it drawn tight against his bony face, that pale skin that was blue-gray and spoke of sickness but also, paradoxically, of strength.

  The Girl couldn’t say why he looked this way. But then, she couldn’t say why she looked the way she did, wasn’t sure she wanted to know, to hear the insistent thrumming deep in her bones. It was quiet now. Sometimes it seemed aching to scream.

  Is it real or Memorex?

  Let it go….

  “Hey,” Inigo said to her.

  “Hey yourself.”

  Papa Sky smiled his smoky smile. “Now we got enough to really make an audience.”

  “Nearly didn’t get through,” Inigo said. “The Bridge—”

  He stopped himself, shot a worried glance at Papa Sky, whose face had darkened, a silent caution.

  The Girl knew he hadn’t meant the Brooklyn or Verrazano Narrows or any of the others familiar to her and to Manhattan. There were things that could be said here and things that couldn’t, and the rules were always unspoken.

  She remembered her friend Margie Daws once confiding about her own family, as the two of them had loitered after phys ed beside the volleyball net at St. Augustine’s, “The best stories are the ones we never talk about.” (And she wondered just now how she could so clearly recall Margie Daws, but not the owner of that other room in her apartment—the one who slept in that perpetually rumpled bed.)

  The Girl was full of questions for her street-corner companions, but she invariably found herself faced with a silence that proclaimed, You can’t get there from here.

  Still, she was grateful to be here in this brief respite with two who were undeniably not mirages or puppets of the mist but actual people, regardless of what prohibitions they might have forced upon them.

  There were other acquaintances she recalled, less as if she had met them on the way to her own daytime obligations and more as if they were characters in a story she had been told. Still, she could visualize them…almost: a Russian hot-dog vendor, she recalled dimly, and an impetuous, powerful young woman, and a wild-eyed homeless man. There was a veil there. Was it real or was it…?

  In some way she could not quite summon, she knew they were real; had become a good deal more than that in later times.

  But none of them were here now, that was for sure.

  Papa Sky had come first, appearing on this street corner or one much like it days and days before (hard to tell how long precisely, with each day so similar). Inigo had arrived some time later, suddenly standing there as he stood now, seemingly drawn by the music, transfixed by it.

  There was a familiar quality to him, although the Girl knew she hadn’t met him before, not this specific individual. But in the murkiness of memory she knew that she had encountered ones very like him, vague names in the cloudy waters coalescing into…Freddy? and…Hank?

  The Girl had lingered on that day when Inigo made his debut, had drawn him aside into a shrouded alley curtained from prying eyes.

  “Where are you from?” she demanded of him.

  “Here,” he said simply, and she knew from how he said it that he didn’t mean these streets like her street, but really here, where this truly was, or at least what lay beyond her island home, the outside that was excluded from her.

  Since then, she and Inigo had stolen moments away when there was a lull in her imposed schedule, blank spots to fill in. They went to the Guggenheim sometimes (the art was always different) or to Sbarro’s at Times Square (where she always had just enough money).

  They had both been shy of each other at first, and wary, too. But longing for company, in time they had opened themselves in a slow dance of growing companionability.

  She assembled his past from the tiny fragmented pieces he revealed to her, like a jigsaw with more missing than revealed.

  He was alone, his mother and father gone.

  (As was she…)

  The father had disappeared first, under mysterious circumstances. There was a curious irony to that, because Inigo had been named by his mother after a character in The Princess Bride, one whose raison d’être was to avenge the death of his father.

  Then his mother had exited, too. Not departed into death like Tina’s own mother, but on a voyage of some sort, a searching. Inigo had been left in the care of some woman…a friend of his mother’s? At a place his father had worked?

  The details were musty, uncertain. The Girl couldn’t be sure of any it….

  Or that on a day back in summer, this friend of Inigo’s mother had vanished, too, removed in some appalling, different way, had left Inigo derelict and stranded here, abandoned yet somehow shielded….

  Had that friend’s name been Agnes Wu, or was the Girl merely confused again, mixing up what she saw and felt and remembered? It was all jumbled and scrambled together, smudged and blurring in her mind as she tried to hold on to it, elusive as steam hissing off a subway grate.

  She knew this, though: On that specific summer day, at a certain very precise time in the morning, Inigo had begun to change.

  The same day and time as when the Girl herself—

  As if her thoughts had somehow prompted it, a dark rumbling swept through the sky like a giant clearing his throat, the ground trembling in sympathetic vibration.

  The Girl and Inigo both shrunk away from it, and there was even a ripple of concern across the old jazzman’s face.

  But then Papa Sky began to play, and all grew calm.

  The Girl knew this one, too, from her mother’s record collection, the collection the dimly, almost-recalled other had brought along with the books and bookcase so long ago.

  “Stormy
Weather.”

  The Girl closed her eyes and danced and was free again.

  But had she looked to see, she would have spied Inigo watching her from his place in the shadows, and would have known he needed nothing more to worship.

  The music faded again and the Girl returned.

  “Time you best be movin’ on,” Papa Sky advised. “Wouldn’t want you late for lessons.” She knew somehow that he wasn’t referring to the mockery of the classes that were the same, but instead cautioning her not to light here too long, to draw a scrutiny she would not want to incur.

  “Later,” she said, already starting away.

  “Bye, Tina,” Inigo said.

  The Girl paused and turned back. “Call me Christina,” she said. A more formal name, but it suited this different time, this different place.

  She headed off down the street to walk among the mists and shadows and echoes that were the same every day….

  Every Möbius-strip day.

  “This part always creeps me out,” Inigo said to Papa Sky.

  New York was shutting down. Or at least this section of it, now that Christina was gone.

  Growing dim, the people and buildings subsiding around them, losing detail, like clay sculptures submerged in water and drawn out again. Or Adam and Eve in reverse motion, God in an act of un Creation, returning them to the mud again.

  The darkness encroached, not at all like a sunset with night coming on, but instead like the cessation of consciousness as death drew near.

  The Place to Be turning into the Non-Place.

  Inigo stowed the Gargoyle shades in his jacket pocket and threw back the hood, letting his blanched skin feel the caress of the thinning air.

  “Quittin’ time…” Papa Sky crooned. To one who knew the blind man less well than the boy did, there might be the assumption that he was unruffled by the darkness because darkness was his constant state.

  But Inigo knew this was not the case—Papa Sky was just cool, in the way that eight decades of hard road and iron discipline had lent him a calm and strength that were rarely shaken by anything.