by Mark Teppo
Suddenly I’m in that moment: still in my grey flannel school slacks, dress shirt, and tie. This meant I hadn’t had a chance or hadn’t been made to change when I got home and made me feel more adult. My siblings were all in their pajamas. It was already dark out. We must have eaten dinner, but what came before all of us were in the TV room I can’t remember. As I recall it seemed like we’d been there for one of those eternities the Catholic catechism always talked about.
I sat on the couch, and my little sisters held onto my hands, my brother leaned against me. My siblings were four, five, seven years old and couldn’t quite grab onto what was happening. On the TV Maid Marian was sending the Sheriff of Nottingham off on a wild goose chase.
I heard the front door open downstairs and adult voices mur-muring. Getting up I opened the door a crack
The family doctor with his black horn rims, black mustache, and black bag was on an emergency house visit, following my father up the stairs and down the hall.
My grandaunt cried out when they went into her room. My mother was in there with her. The doctor said something. After a few minutes the crying stopped and there was silence. I wondered if she had died and wished someone would tell me what was happening. I thought of Aunt Margie, who could be nice and funny. I felt tears and fought them off.
A voice spoke, not in my ear so much as inside my head. "They gave her something to knock her out. Like when we broke our wrist." This was something I should have figured out by myself, but it felt like my brain was frozen. For a moment a boy’s face flickered beside me. Sometimes you don’t recognize your own features when you see them on another.
My siblings were amazed at being allowed to stay up watching TV. They were distracted by Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham’s clashing swords. I wondered if that was why they didn’t hear or see the one beside me.
The doctor and my father passed by again and the doctor said, "There’s no sense in moving her. I’ll be on call."
From down the hall there was a low moaning and my mother’s whispers to Aunt Margie. Again I felt kind of alone, and I looked around, but it was just my sisters and brother and me in the room. The one who’d spoken to me was gone. A cowboy holding a rifle galloped across the screen. I sat down on the couch, and the kids clustered around
Again there was a knock downstairs. Again I opened the door a crack. One of the priests from the church we went to, Father O’Dwyer, old, fat, and pink hauled himself up the stairs. O’Dwyer, I’d been told, was a late vocation. He hadn’t entered the priesthood until his mother died.
That other kid’s face was next to mine. "Last rites," I heard in my head: communion for the dying.
It didn’t take long. The priest on his way back, saw the door open a crack, came into the room, and blessed us all. I had always thought he was kind of ok, gave light penances when I made my confession. A few months before when I started confessing to, "Impure thoughts and deeds," he’d murmured, "Jerking off."
He looked my way, and the voice beside me said, "He goes for us." Thinking about it I kind of understood what he meant. As the priest on the stairs murmured solace to my parents. I heard my father say, "This is it," sounding kind of upset. Aunt Margie was quiet.
Then the doctor was back. And I didn’t need the one beside me to say he was checking to see if she was dead.
A bit later we could both hear guys coming in the front door, talking almost in whispers on the stairs and rolling what I’d later know was a gurney by the door. A couple of minutes later they rolled it past with something wrapped up on top. I knew without being told what it was and made sure not to cry because then we’d all be crying except maybe the kid beside me.
My father when it was over said I’d done well, which was as much praise as he’d ever given. I was surprised he didn’t see the kid beside me. Then I looked, and the kid wasn’t there.
Remembering all this I walk upstairs and out of the gym. It’s all low clouds and grey light, a sharp wind and a promise of snow. This is a tough winter, more like the New England of my childhood than New York. "That was the first time we ever worked together," my Shadow says. "I felt honored, almost like Pinocchio getting to be a human boy, you know. Not like that stupid book you wrote about us where I was evil incarnate."
"Where do you stay?" I ask. This is more conversation than we’ve had in a while.
"Most of the time in a tropical place," he tells me, "But I can see you, like you could see me if you gave a shit about me. Seeing that you were falling apart. I worked out, treated myself right for a few weeks, hooked onto you and came back here to save your life."
"Because when I die, you die," I say aloud, and a couple of students walking with their heads down against a cold wind, look up at me. "We’re like Siamese twins who don’t like each other."
He shakes his head. "Trust me, I’d love you even if my life wasn’t riding on you." I expect more, but when I turn he isn’t there. I know he’s playing with my head, but still I’m disappointed.
In these years of mad weather this is the Winter of Snow in Manhattan. There’s always some in the air and/or on the ground. It’s slippery and deceptive stuff. But for my health I’m supposed to walk a few miles every day. After the encounter with my Shadow I start doing that faithfully. I’m walking in the antique West Village. Ice is invisible on a shoveled sidewalk. Every corner is a minefield of slush.
The young jump over banks of snow. The elderly barely let their feet leave the ground. I grew up in a time and place where winters were bad by nature but where snow was a miraculous event that shut down the Boston school system for days and a few times for a whole week.
That magic began to ebb one grey, snowy morning. I was maybe fifteen and my father woke me up, handed me a shovel and told me to get busy clearing out the driveway. Snow went from being a miracle to being a hated-but-respected foe.
"Together we made one tough little sissy," says a voice in my ear, and my Shadow is back. I’ve reached the promenade along the Hudson. We walk uptown on the bike track near the river. The sun is an iron-grey light sliding down behind the skyscrapers on the Jersey Shore.
The ways that I was amazed and scared by him when we were young faded and changed. He’s right. At first when I was trying to stay clean I blamed him for all the troubles—drug-, alcohol-, and sex-related—that I got into. With sobriety I came to accept the fact the blame was all mine.
And that’s why, when he wants to remind me of our time on drugs and an awful afternoon on the junk run, I don’t try to stop him.
"You’d copped what, fifteen bags over on Avenue C and Seventh Street? Enough to get everyone we knew off a couple of times. Also enough to send us to the deepest slam if we get busted. And we were walking back when this guy attached himself to us. He was in jeans and leather, but he was a cop. We both knew that. He didn’t hide it, and there was no getting away from him. He was complaining that state troopers were being sent into the East Village to conduct drug sweeps. But they were lousy amateurs. Whereas the good old NYPD narcotics squad (of which we guessed he was a proud member) was highly professional and good at what they did.
"And you were shitting a brick, babbling to him about cops in the family back in Boston. I did my best to make sure he caught glimpses of me. I could tell he was bothered by it.
"When we reached First Avenue and St. Marks where we lived you kind of nodded and tried to step away from him. He grabbed your shirt and reached for the cuffs. I got in his face with my eyes all insane and wild. He saw me, no mistaking that, and let go of you. But he did slap you and say "I ever see you coping drugs over there again, you faggot, I’ll break every bone in your face and book you."
"We went upstairs, got off, and put it behind us," my Shadow reminds me on that cold late afternoon near the Hudson. He doesn’t need to say that without him I’d have been busted.
The sunlight’s failing: my Shadow leads me across the West Side Highway before the short traffic lights change and we turn east on Bethune Street. The
re are police and a crowd of people up at the next corner. I remember news from earlier that day. The actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman had been found dead of an overdose.
A detective stands talking into his cell phone at the door of a building halfway up the block. People stare intently waiting for what? Celebrities to show up? His wife and children to appear? Amazingly nice old cops quite politely tell people with flowers and candles that the street is closed and they can’t get any nearer.
I wonder why we’re here. We watch for a couple of minutes then go over to Twelfth Street and walk east. "Height of his career he starts doing junk again and goes dark for good," says my Shadow. "Remember that first time we did it? You said junk killed pain you didn’t even know you had. And your pain was my pain."
The block is almost empty in the frigid night. But there’s a cozy little bar right up ahead. "It always comes back to you wanting to control the action," I tell the doppelganger. "Maybe it’s an automatic response, something you do without thinking. Like just now: first you remind me of how you saved my ass when we were doing junk, and then you show me the site of a famous drug OD. Now you’re leading me to that bar knowing that if you can get me drunk or stoned you’ll be in charge."
I say this out loud, but I keep my voice down. He gives me a pained expression, like it grieves him to see me go all crazy on him like this. But I say, "You want me to live so you can live? Then get the fuck away from me."
And he’s gone. Walking home I wonder if the Shadow’s actions really aren’t just basic instinct and not his fault—like a cat killing birds.
Old age is an endless round of doctors’ appointments. And since my double’s visit I’m being very diligent about them. The first Friday in February is my annual eye exam. I squint through goggles at ever-diminishing rows of letters and numbers. With a pirate patch first on one eye then on the other, I try to spot little green dots on a dark surface.
Drops are dribbled onto my corneas. I follow lights to my right, then to my left. The little optometrist I see once a year nods and says my eyesight is perfect. If only anything else in my body or mind was.
I haven’t seen my Shadow since that night on West Twelfth Street. My dilated pupils distort my vision. But I see him in the waiting room when I come out. He’s real and solid enough to hold the door open for me. Nobody notices him do that. I’m actually not unhappy to see him.
On my walk home the eye drops make the sun glow off the snow. The light is alive. Washington Square Park looks like the world did when I was young and on acid. Except this time I don’t have the paranoid fear, which often came with acid, that I’m a giant lizard.
My Shadow gets all this. I sense his amusement as he looks behind me and says, "That green tail must be six feet long."
I laugh and think of my favorite song, "These Foolish Things," and its lyric about how a ghost can cling.
A young couple stares at me. We walk past the fountain and out the other side of the park. The curb is a mixture of melted slush and ice. I look down at my feet as I negotiate this thinking that on balance my Shadow’s been mostly good for me this time.
I won’t say this little adventure has made me feel young again. But it makes me feel middle-aged, which at this point is as good as I can expect.
When I look up intending to admit to my Shadow that he’s made me look after myself, I don’t see him in the glare. I say, "Hello?" a couple of times. Nobody notices. But there’s no response, and I know at least for now that my Shadow is gone.
You Can Go Anywhere
— Jennifer Geisbrecht
"You can go anywhere," her father told her. "Graduated with honors. You’re young and healthy. I mean literally anywhere."
She goes to Earth. Wretched, ruined Earth with its deep, black oceans and electric yellow stripes of pollution guttered into the cold soil. It used to be blue and green, when it was loved. No one goes to Earth because they want to, or even because they need to. The other members of her detail are two interns, a man doing parole for vehicular manslaughter, and an environmental recovery specialist who expressed a particular preference for the ruins of Mars or Ganymede. When she tells them who she is and where she comes from, they say to her: "You could have gone anywhere."
She doesn’t. She goes with them to take soil samples. She lags behind, watches them move through the fog ahead of her like shapes beneath the water. Thinks of swimming in a muddy lake and looking down to see that your own limbs have been swallowed up by a darkness you can’t touch. She thinks about what it would be like to switch off the life support mechanism in her suit: one button at a time, each heavy click unspooling the weight on her shoulders until the toxic atmosphere rasps its dirty claws down her throat and pulls her open.
They call her name. "Don’t fall behind," They advise. "The air is thick. Even inside the suit, you’re going to feel a little light headed." One of them laughs, "Cheapest way to get drunk I know of." She nods, but doesn’t reply. She’s concentrating on looking busy; there is a slab of pockmarked stone with the blurred outline of a human being on it. She runs her finger along the outside of its skull, takes her time doing it, trying to imagine how the angles would have matched up to form a nose or hollowed concave to make space for two eyes. She waits until her detail disappears beneath the shadow of a shapeless, glass behemoth. It crooks earthwards near the apex, melted beyond recognition. It’s a little marvelous to imagine a twenty-story building bending in the wind like a reed in the tide.
She turns off her radio and begins walking in the other direction. She walks for a very long time.
Her feet are heavy, so she lays in the dust, flat on her back with her hands folded over her sternum. Above her, a ribbon of light slices through the clouds like an angel’s clavicle gone radiation-bright beneath its skin. It’s a much better sky, she thinks. It is a much better sky than any she’s seen before. She is glad that when they don’t come back for her.
"Hello," It asks. "Are you sad?"
"No," she answers. "This is perfect."
"The way you are laying is how many humans before you have died."
"Yes," she answers again.
"Do you love Earth?" It asks.
She raps the blunts of her nails over the cartilage between her ribs. The lead lining of her suit is so thick that neither part of the body feels the impact. "No," she says.
"Do you love Humans?" It asks.
Beneath the layers of fabric and sealing coolant, something inside her stirs. She sits up and looks at It, her heart warm and calm in her chest as she takes It in. Its face is wide and flat, inlaid with black stones and pieces of glass long made smooth and opaque by the nuclear winds. It has two snow globe eyes that roll around inside their clear carapace shells, full of stars. Its limbs disappear into the earth, long, charcoal fingers that spider through the dust and encircle her like a crib.
"I love Humans." It tells her.
"What are you?" she asks. Fear is a cavity inside of her. It’s abruptly absent from her, a distant memory, as if she’s only read about its existence in a novel or an encyclopedia. Its limbs snake up her back, over the rounded tips of her knees. They brace her, hold her in place with her legs crossed and her hands held out, palms to the sky. It wants to talk.
She gasps when It pulls Its limbs from her skin, a smooth unspooling of thread from a healed wound. "Not so beautiful anymore," she laughs sadly, "but someday. We’ll come back to you eventually."
It spins Its eyes sadly, "No. You are the last one."
"Are there more planets like ours?" she wonders, reaching out.
"With sentient life? Yes, of course. Thousands."
"You can go anywhere," She says in amazement. She touches the clear carapace of Its eye, the heel of her palm warm even through the double-stitched layer of lead and canvas.
"Yes," It says, "but I would rather stay here."
It stays by her side until the sun goes down.
Twilight for the
Nightingale
— David Tal
lerman
Doctor Eponymous massaged the flesh beneath the albino Siamese’s wiry fur. The animal arched against his fingers, purring radiantly. It turned its head, to gaze at him with blank fondness through pinkish-blue eyes. A beautiful creature, in its way, he thought—and remarkably costly.
Eponymous spun in his chair and stood, catching the cat by the scruff of its neck before it could tumble to the aluminum floor. The animal yowled, swiped at his wrist. Ignoring the pain and the swelling lines of red, Eponymous stepped forward, to the pool that filled most of the command center’s higher tier. He released the Siamese, which he’d never bothered to name. It had time for once last howl of fear and fury before it broke through the water’s surface.
The piranhas, too, had been expensive. In a moment, there was nothing to see but white flotsam on a spreading crimson carpet.
"Understand," cried Eponymous, "that nothing and no one is indispensible. Agent Nightingale will be here soon. The kid gloves are off. No holds are barred. Nightingale is the finest secret agent in the world, the finest who has ever lived, and he will show no mercy."
Skull and Bones, henchmen extraordinaire, gazed back at him with expressions as vacantly adoring as the Siamese’s had been. They would go to hell and back for their master; two decades of brainwashing demanded no less.
Skull—mangled by Elephantiasis, insane but cunning—grunted, "We won’t let him stop you this time."
Bones—horribly anorexic and unscrupulous—added, "He’ll never decipher your plans."
Eponymous allowed himself the briefest flicker of a smile. "Don’t be so naive. Nightingale is almost my equal in intellect, and he has the weight of a nation behind him. He will already have found the seven bodies I left in Rome. He will have understood the significance of their arrangement immediately. He’s no fool! And that pattern will have led him inevitably to Chichén Itzá."
How long had they been playing this game? It had begun with ideologies, with simplifications like ‘crime’ and ‘justice,’ ‘chaos’ and ‘order.’ Now there was only Eponymous and the Nightingale, locked together hand and throat. It could only end one way.