by Simon Jacobs
On the side of my left leg, pressed against the wall of the train car, I notice a slight weight has materialized, a rigidness. My eyes water. I bite my lip, turning back to the window. I don’t make any sound, don’t breathe in, because that would make it obvious.
I stand up as carefully as I can and turn toward you. I say something about trying to find the conductor; it’s clearly bullshit, but you turn to let me pass. My right knee touches your leg.
I walk down the aisle between seats with almost a limp, as if my leg’s been paralyzed or bound in a cast, an old wound returned. I stumble walking in the opposite direction as the train is moving, I’m suddenly not used to more than one thing in motion at once. I put one hand out to balance on the seatback, trying to keep my pace natural.
I slide open the door at the end of the car, emerging outside, the wind at either side. I look through the little window in the door behind me, at your scalp; you haven’t moved from the seat. I decide to go another car ahead. I open the door and stride quickly through the next one—not even thinking about my leg now, really, but lost in the momentum of purposeful movement. I open the door at the end, and close it behind me.
I’m standing in the divider between cars. There’s a waist-high railing to either side of me. Beneath my feet, the tracks churn by in a blur; beyond the railing, the landscape rolls past, familiar in its shapes. All around me, the train rattles and thunders. The wind buffets my hair.
I undo one latch on the shoulder of the vest, and peel the thing away from my chest, revealing the dark shirt taken from the last mansion plastered flat to my body, into every crevice, white lines of salt wrapping strata of dried sweat. I unbutton it from the top down, the wind insistent. Cold air wraps around my upper half, taking the moisture. When I undo the final button the shirt flies open. Just above my left breast there’s an enormous welt, dark red at the top, purple and sickly yellow at the base. The pain is mostly gone, but when I test it with my finger, it returns acutely, localized but intense.
One hand planted on the railing, I reach down my left side and draw the knife from its sheath on my leg. If it’s the same knife—the kitchen knife from the mansions, the combat knife from the dead commando or the man in the city, a gun—it doesn’t matter. I angle it inward. The train roars, but this is the sound they’ve always made.
I jam the knife under my ribs as deep as it will go.
It catches on some bony part of me as it enters. The feeling vibrates up into my jaw. I experience a moment strangely absent of pain, as if my mind is calibrating its reaction, and then, I feel like I’m being split in two. As soon as it’s in, I pull the knife out, two fingers pressing the skin together around the wound. I drop the knife over the railing into the fleeting world without looking too closely. It goes shooting away into the past.
Before I even register the sight of blood, of anything, I pull one side of the shirt tight across my chest, then double the other half over it. I press the vest as hard as I can into my body with one arm and use the other to re-fasten it at the shoulder, tightening the straps as much as they’ll go. I step quickly back into the train and start walking through the car. I hear the door slam behind me. I walk briskly so as not to feel anything moving beneath my clothes; besides the sensation of my upper half gradually lightening, slowly separating and lifting off, I don’t detect any change.
I open the door to our car. I take eight steps to the row where you’re still sitting. I stand next to you and clear my throat. “Excuse me.”
You push your legs to the side, and I shuffle in—the empty sheath grazes your knee again as I go by. I’m keeping my movements short, my body parts close together, warmth on warmth, thinking to myself: I’m doing so well, despite the fact that I’m probably as white as a sheet.
I fall into the seat; it probably reads too much like relief, though you don’t make any acknowledgment of it. My limbs are shaking slightly, all of them now, but combined with the vibration from the train, it’s not really noticeable. Though I have the vest pulled as tight as possible, I feel, once seated, the motion of something down my stomach, toward the places where my body is creased. I’ve ceased to be able to discern hot or cold.
I turn to look at you. You’re staring dead ahead, purposefully not at me, I think, but your jaw is set, pushed forward slightly, and within there I can see a muscle quivering, your front teeth and canines grinding against each other. This minute movement, reflected down your body, into your neck, pulled in and defined in anger, your arms folded and rigid, your thighs tensed. There was another option I’d failed to consider, and that was to simply disappear, to not come back.
I rotate my head to look out the window. The rest of me, I’d rather not unseat. Beneath my layers, the sensation is transforming from the tingling of motion into decisive wetness. I say, my eyes looking out, “That’s—” but nothing else. The rest of the sentence sinks into me and disappears.
“I know what you’ve done,” you say.
I flop my head back to face you. It’s operating more or less on its own at this point. My gaze falls to your feet, one sneaker still marvelously intact, the other with frayed laces, broken and disintegrating from too much man-handling and sweat. From the corner of my eye, I notice the crotch of my dark pants is much darker, soaked through. I prop up the phrases You’ve done, You did inside my head, but can’t make the effort to address them. On my own dusty, filthy boot, I see something glimmering, trickling out in a line.
My vision dips again, and then rises once more. You’re in front of me now in the seat with both hands out, blinking furiously, pushing at my chest as hard as you can, giving in to the impulse that enough pressure can stop any bleeding.
My head lolls once more to the window, leaving your face elsewhere. I watch the landscape ebbing by, the same as when we arrived: outside, in opposition, the trees bend inward, while within, a steady pulse beats out.
AFTERWORD
Vandalia, Ohio
I’M ADDING A NEW SECTION TO THE SLEEVE, THE least dangerous and most rebellious thing I can do. As a backdrop to the hum of the tattoo machine, the Beach Boys are playing, one of the early-’70s albums not immediately identifiable as the Beach Boys, without overt Brian. The shop is a converted two-story house on a quiet street off 40, just north of Dayton. The floor is satisfying, creaky wood; the walls are hung with arcana and framed photos of Chad’s wife and two daughters.
“Do you ever hear from any of those Richmond kids?” I ask, two hours in. It’s a broad question—he’s been in this county his entire life—but there’s a specific answer I’m looking for.
“Not a whole lot,” Chad says, without looking up. “I just see what’s online, mostly. A few years back I used to tattoo a whole group of those kids on a pretty steady rotation. But now most of the Richmond punks have either gone off to school somewhere, left town, or, you know, can’t afford it anymore.”
He tells me about Rats, who I’d met a few times but existed mostly as a figure in the background, one of the repeat-faces, and his girlfriend Kelly, and where they are now—someone’s in engineering—but I don’t really care about Rats or his girlfriend. I watch the birthmark on my right arm disappear in a wash of blues. I wait for him to finish, to exhaust the list, and then I ask, “What about Allie Moore?”
He juts out his chin. “Punk rock Allie?”
“Yeah—we came in here together my first time. She got some kind of Edward Gorey image on her back?” I remember the image exactly, of course, had helped her select it from an omnibus of Gorey’s artwork, chosen not only for its thematic appeal—the subject, a young girl, is faced away from the viewer—but for the complexity of its technique, the lines thin and densely packed. “We were really close for a few years,” I say, “and then she just kind of vanished. It’s been probably two years since I had any kind of real contact with her.”
“Yeah, her. She had a baby,” Chad says, nodding. He adjusts his foot on the pedal. “She was one of those huge pregnant chicks. You’d see ph
otos of her at punk shows with her belly out to here, standing in the front like raaaaah!” The needles leave my skin and he makes a metal gesture with both arms.
“Seriously? Allie? Allie Moore?” It’s a moment of almost primal dissociation, in which the world as I think I understand it shifts, takes on a different character. I try to reconcile the disparate, slight pieces of information about her that I’ve picked up over the last two years with what he’s saying, but my mind seems to stutter in the process, like you never really know anyone. A child seems like a trap, a stereotype you fall into, nothing she’d ever plan or allow near her life.
“Yep, pretty sure.” His focus is back on the arm.
“I can’t even imagine that.”
“She’s cutting hair now,” he says. “I guess her father or grandfather owned a shop, so she’s working there.”
A vision, hazy around the edges, begins to slide into focus, a picture of her as a working mother, standing behind a salon chair, foiling layers of harshly treated hair, estimating bangs and cutting with a straight blade, the air thick with a nearly visible haze of aerosols and whatever other gently toxic chemicals, her face in stark resolution beneath hot white light. I can’t help but think: This is what happens to people who never get out.
“She’s right around here, too,” Chad says, “like two streets over. She’s not in Richmond anymore. I’m pretty sure—let me check my phone, I’m terrible with names.” He sets down the machine, wipes my arm with a wet paper towel, and peels off his black gloves, heels the trashcan open and throws them out. He goes to the counter. “Punk rock girls with weird hair—man, I know three hundred chicks like that, most of them named
Allie.”
“We can wait,” I say, now desperate, both to retain this image and to shatter it, “I don’t want to break your flow or anything.”
“No no, I’m curious now too.” He picks up his phone and scrolls through it across the room, thumbs moving. My mind, as always, swells with new meanings and associations, disappearances and unexpected returns, a network of lives unfurling, connected at arbitrary points. I pull into the parking lot of a strip mall after dark. The shop is closed, but the fluorescent lights are still on, and there’s just one person inside.
“Nope,” Chad says from afar, shaking his head. “Sorry, wrong
Allie.”
Related to no one else, in its isolation, the moment just passes, means nothing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to John Bennett “Blackjack” Baren: I didn’t know about this nickname until after the fact, and I still don’t know if it’s real or not.
Thanks to my family: my parents, grandparents, and my brothers Eli, Michael, and Jack.
Thanks to Alyssa Bluhm, Joey Holloway, Jac Jemc, Ben Kopel, Eric Kranz, Graham Nissen, Tyler Pry, Jeanne Thornton, Two Cakes, Ross Wagenhofer, Brandi Wells, and Chad Wells.
Thanks to Two Dollar Radio: Eric, Eliza, Brett, and the rest of the crew.
Excerpts from earlier versions of Palaces were first published in Forklift, OH and Everyday Genius: I’m grateful to the editors of these publications.
—SAJ
April 2013–November 2017, NYC
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