* * * *
On odd days of the week our people-finder detective emailed Charlotta and copied me. On even, the opposite. Two days earlier Raphael had bought a hat and four postcards. He had dinner at a pricey restaurante and got a fifty-dollar cash advance. That was Charlotta's email.
Mine said that this very night, he was buying fifteen beers at the Last Word Cafe, San Margais.
We googled that name to a single entry. 100 Ruta de los Esclavos by the river, it said. Open mike. Underground music and poetry nightly.
There were other Americans using the computers. I walked through, asking if any of them knew how to get to the Last Word Cafe. To Ruta de los Esclavos? They were paying by the minute. Most of them didn't look up. Those that did shook their heads.
Charlotta and I opened our umbrellas and went back out into the rain. We asked directions from everyone we saw, but very few people were on the street. They didn't know English or they disliked being accosted by tourists or they didn't like the look of our face. They hurried by without speaking. Only a single woman stopped. She took my chin in her hand to make sure she had my full attention. Her eyes were tinged in yellow and she smelled like Irish Spring soap. “No,” she said firmly. “Me entiendes? No for you."
We walked along the gorge, because this was the closest thing San Margais had to a river. On one side of us, the town. The big yellow I of Tourist Information (closed indefinitely), shops of ceramics and cheeses, postcards, law offices, podiatrists, pubs, our own pensione. On the other the cliff-face, the air. We crossed the narrow bridge and when we came to the 839 steps we started down them just because they were mostly inside the cliff and therefore covered and therefore dry. I was the one to point these things out to Charlotta. I was the one to say we should go down.
The steps were smooth and slippery. Each one had a dip in the center in just that place where a slave was most likely to put his (or her) foot. Water dripped from the walls around us, but we were able to close our umbrellas, leave them at the top to be picked up later. For the first stretch there were lights overhead. Then we were in darkness, except for an occasional turn, which brought an occasional opening to the outside. A little light could carry us a long way.
We descended maybe 300 steps and then, by one of the openings, we met an American coming up. In age she was somewhere in that long unidentifiable stretch from twenty-two to thirty-five. She was carrying an empty bucket, plastic, the sort a child takes to the seashore. She was breathless from the climb.
She stopped beside us and we waited until she was able to speak. “What the fuck,” she said finally, “is the point of going down empty-handed? What the fuck is the point of you?"
Charlotta had been asking sort of the same thing. What was the point of going all the way down the stairs? Why had she let me talk her into it? She talked me into going back. We turned and followed the angry American up and out into the rain. It was only 300 steps, but when we'd done them we were winded and exhausted. We went to our room, crawled up our three ladders, and landed in a deep, dispirited sleep.
It was still raining the next morning. We went to the city center and breakfasted in a little bakery. Just as we were finishing, our Italian walked in. “We kiss more, yes?” he asked me. He'd mistaken me for Charlotta. I stood up. I was always having to do her chores. His tongue ranged through my mouth as if he were looked for scraps. I tasted cigarettes, gum, things left in ashtrays.
"So,” I said, pushing him away. “Now. We need directions to the Last Word Cafe."
And it turned out we'd almost gotten there last night, after all. The Last Word was the last stop along the 839 steps. It seemed as if I'd known this.
Our Italian said he'd been the night before. No one named Raphael had taken the mic; he was sure of this, but he thought there might have been a South African at the bar. Possibly this South African had bought him a drink. It was a very crowded room. No one had died. That was just—how is it we Americans say? Poem license?
"Raphael probably wanted to get the feel of the place before he spoke,” Charlotta said. “That's what I'd do."
And me. That's what I'd do, too.
* * * *
There was no point in going back before dark. We checked our email, but he was apparently still living on the cash advance; nothing had been added since the Last Word last night. We decided to spend the day as tourists, thinking Raphael might do the same. Because of the rain we had the outdoor sights mostly to ourselves. We saw the ruins of the old baths, long and narrow as lap pools, now with nets of morning glories twisted across them. Here and there the rain had filled them.
There was a Roman arch, a Moorish garden. When we were wetter than we could bear to be we paid the eight euros entrance to the civil war museum. English translation was extra, but we were on a budget; there are no bargains on last-minute tickets to San Margais. We told ourselves it was more in keeping with the spirit of Gigo if we didn't understand a thing.
The museum was small, two rooms only and dimly lit. We stood awhile beside the wall radiator, drying out and warming up. Even from that spot we could see most of the room we were in. There were three life-size dioramas—mannequins dressed as Gigo might have dressed, meeting with people Gigo might have met. We recognized the mannequin Fra Nando from the statue we'd seen in the city center, although this version was less friendly. His hand was on Gigo's shoulder, his expression enigmatic. She was looking past him up at something tall and transcendent. There was clothing laid out, male and female, in glass cases along with playbills, baptismal certificates, baby pictures. Stapled to the wall were a series of book illustrations—a bandito seizing a woman on a balcony. The woman shaking free, leaping to her death. A story Gigo had written? A family legend? A scene from the civil war? All of the above? The man who sold us our tickets, Senor Brunelle, was conducting a tour for an elderly British couple, but since we hadn't paid it would be wrong to stand where we could hear. We were careful not to do so.
We spoke to Senor Brunelle after. We made polite noises about the museum, so interesting, we said. So unexpected. And then Charlotta asked him what he knew about the Last Word Cafe.
"For tourists,” he said. “Myself, my family, we don't go down the steps anymore.” He was clearly sad about this. “All tourists now."
"What does it mean,” Charlotta asked first. “Poetry to the death?"
"Which word needs definition? Poetry? Or Death?"
"I know the words."
"Then I am no more help,” Senor Brunelle told her.
"Why does it say it's by the river when there's no river?” Charlotta asked second.
"Always a river. In San Margais, always a river. Sometimes in your mind. Sometimes in the gorge. Either way, a river."
"Is there any reason we shouldn't go?” Charlotta asked third.
"Go. You go. You won't get in,” Senor Brunelle said. He said this to Charlotta. He didn't say it to me.
* * * *
The Last Worders:
On the night Raphael took the open mic at the Last Word Cafe, he did three poems. He spoke ten minutes. He stood on the stage and he didn't try to move; he didn't try to make it sing; he made no effort to sell his words. The light fell in a small circle on his face so that, most of the time, his eyes were closed. He was beautiful. The people listening also closed their eyes and that made him more beautiful still. The women, the men who'd wanted him when he started to talk no longer did so. He was beyond that, unfuckable. For the rest of their lives, they'd be undone by the mere sound of his name. The ones who spoke English tried to write down some part of what he'd said on their napkins, in their travel journals. They made lists of words—childhood, ice, yes. Gleaming, yes, yesterday.
These are the facts. Anyone can figure out this much.
For the rest, you had to be there. What was heard, the things people suddenly knew, the things people suddenly felt—none of that could be said in any way that could be passed along. By the time Raphael had finished, everyone listening, everyone t
here for those few minutes on that night at the Last Word Cafe, had been set free.
These people climbed the steps afterwards in absolute silence. They did not go back, not a single one of them, to their marriages, their families, their jobs, their lives. They walked to the city center and they sat in the square on the edge of the fountain at the feet of the friendly Fra Nando and they knew where they were in a way they had never known it before. They tried to talk about what to do next. Words came back to them slowly. Between them, they spoke a dozen different languages, all useless now.
You could have started the movie of any one of them there, at the feet of the stone statue. It didn't matter what they could and couldn't say; they all knew the situation. Whatever they did next would be done together. They could not imagine, ever again, being with anyone who had not been there, in the Last Word Cafe, on the night Raphael Kaplinsky spoke.
There were details to be ironed out. How to get the money to eat. Where to live, where to sleep. How to survive now, in a suddenly clueless world.
But there was time to make these decisions. Those who had cars fetched them. Those who did not climbed in, fastened their seat belts. On the night Raphael Kaplinsky spoke at the Last Word Cafe, the patrons caravanned out of town without a last word to anyone. The rest of us would not hear of the Last Worders again until one of them went on Larry King Live and filled a two-hour show with a two-hour silence.
* * * *
Or else they all died.
* * * *
Charlotta and I had dinner by ourselves in the converted basement of an old hotel. The candles flickered our shadows about so we were, on all sides, surrounded by us. Charlotta had the trout. It had been cooked dry, and was filled with small bones. Every time she put a bite in her mouth, she pulled the tiny bones out. I had the mussels. The sauce was stiff and gluey. Most of the shells hadn't opened. The food in San Margais is nothing to write home about.
We finished the meal with old apples and young wine. We were both nervous, now that it came down to it, about seeing Raphael again. Each of us secretly wondered, could we live with Raphael's choice? However it went? Could I be happy for Charlotta, if it came to that? I asked myself. Could I bear watching her forced to be happy for me? I sipped my wine and ran through every moment of my relationship with Raphael for reassurance. That stuff about the acid experiment. How much he liked my boots. “Let's go,” Charlotta said and we were a bit unsteady from the wine, which, in retrospect, with an evening of 839 steps ahead of us, was not smart.
We crossed the bridge in a high wind. The rain came in sideways; the wind turned our umbrellas inside out. Charlotta was thrown against the rope rails and grabbed on to me. If she'd fallen, she would have taken me with her. If I saved her, I saved us both. Our umbrellas went together into the gorge.
We reached the steps and began to descend, sometimes with light, sometimes feeling our way in the darkness. About one hundred steps up from the bottom, a room had been carved out of the rock. Once slave owners had sat at their leisure there, washing and rewashing their hands and feet, overseeing the slaves on the stairs. Later the room had been closed off with the addition of a heavy metal door. A posting had been set on a sawhorse outside. The Last Word Cafe, the English part of it said. Not for Everyone.
The door was latched. Charlotta pounded on it with her fist until it opened. A man in a tuxedo with a wide orange cummerbund stepped out. He shook his head. “American?” he asked. “And empty-handed? That's no way to make a river."
"We're here for the poetry,” Charlotta told him and he shook his head again.
"Invitation only."
And Charlotta reached into the back pocket of her pants. Charlotta pulled out the orange paper given to me by the boy on the train. The man took it. He threw it into a small basket with many other such papers. He stood aside and let Charlotta enter.
He stepped back to block me. “Invitation only."
"That was my invitation,” I told him. “Charlotta!” She looked back at me, over her shoulder without really turning around. “Tell him. Tell him that invitation was for me. Tell him how Senor Brunelle told you you wouldn't get in."
"So?” said Charlotta. “That woman on the street told you you wouldn't get in."
But I had figured that part out. “She mistook me for you,” I said.
Beyond the door I could see Raphael climbing onto the dais. I could hear the room growing silent. I could see Charlotta's back sliding into a crowd of people like a knife into water. The door swung toward my face. The latch fell.
I stayed a long time by that door, but no sounds came through. Finally I walked down the last hundred steps. I was alone at the bottom of the gorge where the rain fell and fell and there was no river. I would never have done to Charlotta what she had done to me.
It took me more than an hour to climb back up. I had to stop many, many times to rest, airless, heart throbbing, legs aching, lightheaded in the dark. No one met me at the top.
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Da, da, de, da: Dah!
Amelia Beamer works at Locus, where she is responsible for administrative-type tasks involving envelopes and databases, as well as catching watermelons as they fly around the office. She has a Bachelor's in English Literature and enjoys researching science fiction as an independent scholar. Before Locus, she worked at Clarion East, taking care of the pros and the students and trying to raise enough money to run the workshop. She attended Clarion in 2004, and was twice a finalist for the Dell Award (previously the Asimov award).
Rose Black lives by the Union Pacific Railroad tracks in Oakland, CA, where she and her husband operate Renaissance Stone, a studio and supply source for stone sculptors. She has a passion for the prose poem. Some of the publications in which her work has appeared or is forthcoming are Runes, Spillway, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Hubbub, RiverSedge, Soundings East, Pennsylvania English, Oregon East, Owen Wister Review and The South Carolina Review.
David Blair's first book of poems Ascension Days will be available from Del Sol Press in September. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and teaches at The New England Institute of Art.
Gwenda Bond knows a little too much about public health. She recommends books and posts pictures of pets at www.gwendabond.typepad.com.
Steven Bratman: a collection of I-once-believed stories, formerly enfaithed this way or that, now hot on the trail of original bamboozlement.
Laura Evans will cook for you, pour you a glass of dark red wine, lay a linen napkin across your lap, and tell you stories you may or may not want to hear.
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of two story collections and four novels, including the New York Times bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club. Her story “What I Didn't See” won the Nebula award in 2003. She has taught creative writing at Stanford, UC Davis, Cleveland State, Alabama University, and numerous summer workshops.
Neile Graham is Canadian by birth and inclination. She has three published collections of poems, most recently Blood Memory (BushekBooks, 2000), and a forthcoming poetry CD, She Says: Poems Selected and New. Finishing her novel scares her, but she is bravely doing it anyway despite the skepticism of her spouse and three cats who say they've heard that before.
Jon Hansen is a writer, librarian, and occasional blood donor. Since the birth of his son Ian last summer, he is currently quite sleep-deprived. His wife Lisa thinks he's adorable. His incoherent ramblings can be seen online at logicalcreativity.com/jon.
Michael Hartford lives in Minneapolis with his wife and twin sons. His stories have appeared online in Small Spiral Notebook, Failbetter, and The Summerset Review, and in print in Duck & Herring, Ballyhoo Stories, and Going Down Swinging.
Meghan McCarron teaches English and film at a boarding school in New Hampshire. She would like to take up snowshoeing, but global warming has so far prevented this. Her stories have appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons, Twenty Epics, Rabid Transit, and Say ..... She is working on a YA novel about the downsi
des of being a girl who kicks ass.
Edward McEneely was born in 1983, and received a BA in the Humanities in 2003. He has a pet cat and a pet hedgehog, both named after prominent figures from the Great War. This is his first published story, and, by happy coincidence, also his first submission.
Anil Menon worked for years in the software industry worrying about things like secure distributed databases. Then he shifted to a different kind of fiction. His short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies such as Albedo One, Chiaroscuro, InterNova, New Genre, Strange Horizons, TEL: Stories, and From The Trenches. He was nominated for the Carl Brandon Society's Parallax Prize for his story “Archipelago". His SF novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet is scheduled to appear in 2007 (Wisdom Tree). He is a 2004 Clarion West graduate.
Nathaniel Meyer is an artist/illustrator living and working out of Portland, Maine. A graduate of Boston Univeristy's School of Fine Arts, he teaches drawing and painting at Lewiston High School. In addition to producing his own work, he also paints collaboratively with his brother, Matthew Meyer. More of his work can be found at www.brothersmeyer.com.
M. Brock Moorer lives in Lexington, KY, and is one half of the band Lip Kandy.
William Smith makes spanky new books and sells dusty old ones. Find him at trunkstories.com and hangfirebooks.com.
Marly Youmans just completed a residency in fiction at Yaddo. Her most recent novel is The Wolf Pit, her most recent Southern fantasy for young adults is Ingledove (both from FSG), and her first poetry collection is Claire (LSU). A limited edition novella, Val / Orson, is forthcoming from P. S. Publishing.
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Visit www.lcrw.net for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
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