Days Between Stations

by Steve Erickson

  One could not say Jason actually cheated. There wasn’t the duplicity involved to call it that. He was open about it. I fuck other women, he said, it isn’t that I love them. It’s the only way I know how to know them; knowing them, he told her, only makes me love you more. She answered, Well it doesn’t make me love you more. It makes me love you less. He understood that it hurt her, but he must not have understood how much it hurt, or else he didn’t care. It never occurred to him that he could lose her; he knew she was still madly in love with him, twelve years later.

  She knew it was not emotionless relationships he had. Perhaps they did not involve his emotions, but they involved the emotions of the other women. These women called and begged to speak with him when Lauren answered the phone. They wrote him letters that Lauren found and read. Jason made no effort to hide them; it wasn’t malice on his part, but the cruelty of indifference, which was worse than malice, because it didn’t have malice’s passion. It went on for years; he had sex with too many of them to count, and he had affairs that lasted months with five or six. He told her to go out with other men. She slept with two. She loved none. She saw no more of them.

  When the kittens had grown a bit, the mother took them away. Lauren came to the closet to find them gone. One of the windows was open, where they had escaped. Lauren had assumed escape was not an issue, she had assumed the cats weren’t prisoners. She watched sadly from her room, hoping for a glimpse of them in the street. The day after they left, Jason came back from northern California where he’d been racing. I used to be able to call all the cats when I was in Kansas, she told him. Yes, he said, but that was when you were young, long ago.

  It didn’t take long to find out about Jason’s newest affair; she called that night. Jason asked Lauren to tell the woman he was out. On the third call the woman began crying. It didn’t seem to matter to either Jason or the woman that the intermediary of this call was Jason’s wife. Or if it occurred to the woman, she didn’t care; she was that desperate; Lauren realized the woman assumed Lauren had already lost him. Lauren wasn’t certain the woman was wrong.

  She packed. She had done this before, but this time she was serious. She was leaving, she simply didn’t love him anymore. Jason came into the bedroom and watched her put the clothes in the suitcase. He sat down on the bed and stared at the blouses, the nylons, the underwear. I’m leaving you, she said; I simply don’t love you anymore. I’m serious this time. He said, You’re not serious. He made her sit down while he talked to her. He put his hand on her arm. You love me, he said. You know you love me, and that you belong here. What is this bullshit, packing? We’re supposed to be with each other, and it’s always been that way. That other woman, I don’t love her, he said. It’s fucking, that’s all.

  She loves you, she said.

  She doesn’t know what she feels, he said. She thinks she loves me.

  After a moment Lauren began to shake, pushing the palms of her hands into her eyes to stop it; she cried on through the night, and let him hold her. He kicked the suitcase onto the floor and took off her clothes. He had her; but whereas before, always before, she had rested on his chest never wanting to leave him or lose him, this time she blinked at the walls, listened to him sleep, and realized she had come very close to doing it.

  He told her the next morning he was leaving again, for Texas this time. Another race.

  Another dusk, and from the window she saw one of the kittens in the street, and ran down the stairs to the front door and stood in the long shadow of the block that touched her feet. In the setting sun the windows of the street gleamed like gold teeth, and first in a low din, ascending to something like sirens, she heard all the cats the way she used to in the fields. She opened her mouth to call them like she used to; she was so alone she couldn’t stand it. She opened her mouth again, closed it again. She said nothing, looking up at all the cats watching her. She could see their eyes glimmering between the gold teeth of the buildings; the way they watched her she knew she didn’t belong. One flash after another struck her. She stood in the light looking at all the cats far from her. She was terrified that she would call them and none of them would answer. After a while the cats turned from their posts and disappeared, leaving her there in the doorway.

  There were still times she heard Jules’ stuttering. Alone in bed at night it would wake her, and she always forgot, just for a moment, that he’d been dead two years. Then when she remembered, she would assume it was a dream. Then, after lying there several minutes and the stuttering didn’t stop, she decided it was her conscience. It was to remind her it was her fault, which she had always known anyway, since the first time he talked. It had taken so long; months and months he had remained mute, passive. When he did speak, it was G-G-G-Goodbye. He wasn’t going anywhere, but he was bidding her farewell anyway; he was planning to leave from the first.

  Somehow, she associated it with the lost night. The lost night was the one in San Francisco when she walked out of the apartment, having just talked to Jason on the telephone, leaving the baby on the bed alone. The next thing she knew she was staring at the bay and it was afternoon, the sun shining and the water blue, and she reached in her pocket and found a used roundtrip plane ticket to Los Angeles. The lost night was the first thing she thought of when Jules said G-G-G-Goodbye. When he died in his sleep—like belated crib death, one doctor said—Lauren realized it was the death he was supposed to die that night when she left him on the bed and went wherever she went. Nothing ever shook her from this conviction, and she could never tell it to Jason. So then she was alone without Jules, and without Jason most of the time, and without the cats, meaning without her childhood—all of this finally leaving her without the desire to be alive. This desire was so lacking in her that she was afraid to reach down inside herself for one passionate connection, because she was sure that passion would be just the thing by which she’d bring everything to a close; she didn’t have even the passion for dying. She spent long hours smoking dope, and by seven at night when the fog came in from the sea she’d get up from the bed to open the window; and lying back on the bed she closed her eyes, perhaps lost consciousness, perhaps not—she didn’t know how long it had been before she opened her eyes and saw, every night, the gray cloud hovering over in the light from the desk lamp, blooming like an ash rose and enfolding her. More marijuana; more fog; more guilt: and the shifting hejira into the longest lost night of all—that was where she was going. The wet heavy deadness was interrupted only by the floor, which seemed to hum; with everything wilting and cold, the floor swam beneath her like a smoking pond when all else was darkest. She often stared at the ceiling and the walls and the way the entire room seemed illuminated by the floor, though she knew there was no real light at all. It was something from beneath the floor, and then she remembered the neighbor lived down there.

  Jason became more interested in the neighbor when he began going to clubs. Sometimes he took Lauren along; often he went out alone, his evenings always ending with somebody else. Lauren wearied of clinging to him simply to keep him faithful. She preferred just dying a bit. “You won’t believe this,” Jason said to her early one morning, having just gotten home.

  She stared up at him in the dark, from far down in the center of the ash rose.

  “The guy downstairs, with the eyepatch.”

  She did not remember an eyepatch.

  “He runs the Blue Isosceles.” She nodded. “I see him there all the time, up on the stairs behind the stage. I saw him tonight and said, You show up here a lot, and he said I’m the manager.”

  They both waited for him to say it.

  “Well,” he finally said, “we ought to go down and meet him sometime.” He said it with the most barely discernible trace of anxiety in his voice. Lauren was mystified. She’d never heard anxiety in Jason’s voice. But she felt something in her stomach when he said it. His face was far up there, beyond the petals. She nodded, and the flower closed.

  The next morning she wasn’t cer
tain she’d heard it at all. And yet Jason mentioned it again, and though the anxiety was still there, he seemed to press it, as though it was something he wanted over with. She resisted, passively. Some weeks went by.

  Jason took her to the Blue Isosceles one night, after months of leaving her alone in her room. Outside the club along the Sunset Strip were kids wearing leather and steel. Cop cars flashed in the street. The clanking of metal was everywhere, and in the dark of the club, cables lay like snakes. Girls with bare breasts in leather vests passed back and forth with trays of glasses, and in the unlit halls Lauren could see men covering their faces when someone lit a match. The smell of tequila and gasoline was in the air. The band onstage was fronted by a female lead singer who stared out at the audience with a deadness in her eyes, sweating beads of petrol; her voice, harmonically discordant, sounded full and extravagant in the heat, as though the song itself was wet and bloated. Fumes rose visibly from the stage. With every match struck, the club seemed on the verge of ignition. At one point Jason said to her, “There,” and pointed to the stairs behind the stage.

  The man stood on the balcony overlooking the club with his arms folded, tapping a high-heeled black shoe not to the music at all. He brushed the night-black hair from his left eye sometimes. Over his right eye he wore a black patch. Tell me about the owner, Jason said to the waitress. The waitress looked up at the man on the balcony. He isn’t the owner, she said. He’s the manager. You want to talk to the owner? No, said Jason, I was wondering about the manager. The waitress said, Do you want a drink? I don’t know anything about the manager. No one knows anything about the manager. Jason said, How long’s he been manager? The waitress said, Two years.

  I’ll have a beer, Jason said.

  When she first saw him, she looked away, though she had no idea why. Now she watched him gaze over the crowd as though looking for someone he didn’t really expect to find. She watched a woman alongside him hand him a drink, and then he leaned against the rail of the stairs gazing out into nowhere again, saying nothing. He was watching the lights sweep across the room and the people’s heads; and as they swept back across him, his own head seemed momentarily afire: around him the conversation was rendered senseless, and everyone rendered a stranger.

  Nothing appeared of interest to him. Not the people in the crowd hurling themselves into each other, nor the bouncers hurling them in turn out the back door. Nothing seemed to exhilarate or appall him, and the fact that, for a moment, all of these people became anonymous somehow made him less anonymous, standing there untouched by it and unimpressed. The light from above kept sweeping across the room, and it was in those moments when the light touched him that she really saw him, in a series of glances—but they were moments that negated the moments that preceded them and, in a way that was absolute and which she couldn’t quite bring herself to challenge, negated all the moments before them. Suddenly she found herself stripped of every lost night she could remember. For a moment she thought perhaps he saw her; the light moved and he went dark, and she found herself caught there, waiting for the light to find him again. When it did, his face seemed only a haze, profile endlessly tangled. The light continued back and forth, and Lauren continued staring, waiting—and she saw him again and lost him again until, after this had happened three or four times, he was a sheer glow that she could have still seen had she shut her eyes, as though she had been staring at a hovering moon there in the tumultuous club. Then the light seemed to fade, and as he sank into dark for what she thought might be the last time, he looked straight at her, and she could see his one exposed eye glisten just as the sight of his face vanished.

  She knew him.

  She lay there in bed that night trying to place him, as Jason slept next to her. She went back over and over all the places from which she might have known him, charting coordinates across her heart for the telltale latitude or longitude that would reveal the secret to her. She thought maybe she met him with Jason, since Jason seemed interested in knowing more about him; but then she remembered Jason’s mystification. This made her all the more curious and anxious, as though there was something about the neighbor Jason knew but Lauren did not; but this was countered by Jason’s own apparent anxiety. No one knows anything about him, the waitress said.

  She got up and went to the window, watching the street that ran before her; against the night sky the rise of the wind was spinning a row of weather vanes, and in a crossfire of gusts each vane swirled a new direction. She listened to the traffic on Sunset Boulevard at the bottom of the hill, and then she heard steps below her, a door opening and closing. Above the row of lights from the windows was a mad blur so frenzied the vanes seemed to rise from the rooftops in flight; she was sure they were cats with wings.

  She heard the door of the apartment below open and close again.

  Then she listened to the steps on the stairs, and heard them grow louder and louder. She found herself breathing quickly, saying to herself, Who are you? when the final word caught between her lips, at the knock on the door.

  He knocked again. Jason stirred in the bed. “Jason,” she said. A third knock. “Jason.”

  Jason sat up in bed, still more asleep than awake. He blinked at her stupidly. “What?”

  “Somebody’s knocking.”

  Jason sat listening. “I don’t hear it,” he finally said.

  “Somebody knocked several times.”

  He turned the sheets aside and moved his legs to the floor. He went out into the other room. She heard the door open, and the exchange of voices that followed. A moment later Jason came back. “The guy downstairs,” he said. “Do we have any spare fuses?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “In the kitchen, perhaps. The drawer by the sink.” She said, “What is it?”

  “He needs a fuse,” he said. “Why don’t you come out?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it may take me a while to find the fuse. Come out and talk to him.”

  “Like this?”

  He stared at her. “Put a robe on,” he said. He went into the kitchen. She sat a moment and then put a robe on, and left the bedroom.

  The neighbor was standing in the living room. He was wearing a long blue coat that looked very old. Like before, she had to look away at first. He looked up when she walked in, and watched her expectantly; she nodded and smiled casually. “No light?” she said. The one uncovered eye stared at her intently; she was still tying the robe around her waist. “What’s that?” he said.

  “The lights in your apartment.”

  He said, “At first I thought it was another blackout. It isn’t a bulb, so I’m assuming it’s a fuse.” He added, “The clocks have all stopped.”

  There had always been an element of beauty in the things to which she was attracted; but he was not beautiful. His face was long and there was a hooded, almost dazed look to his eyes, or at least to the one exposed. “I’m sorry,” he finally said, after a pause. “I didn’t catch—”

  “Lauren,” she said. “You’ve met Jason, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.” He looked around, almost sullenly.

  She waited, and finally gave up. “You’re—”

  “Adrien,” he said abruptly, as though hoping she wouldn’t ask. She nodded, a little nonplussed, and said nothing. He breathed deeply. “Uh—” he started. He stopped and she looked back up at him. He watched her very closely, and she wasn’t sure if she |felt offended by it. He said, never moving his gaze, “Were you ever in Paris?”

  “No.”

  He nodded, and now looked off a bit. He seemed a little perplexed.

  “Are you French?” He didn’t answer. “Adrien’s a French name, I guess,” she said.

  He looked back, rather startled. “Adrien?” She blinked at him. “Why do you call me Adrien?” he asked excitedly.

  This is a very strange conversation, she thought. “You just said your name is Adrien.”

  He laughed, and now she definitely felt offended. “No,” he said.
“My name isn’t Adrien. I don’t know why I said that. I said that? Uh,” he shrugged, smiling. “It’s Michel, actually.” He nodded.

  “Michel.” She nodded back. “You’re sure.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Not at all sure.”

  “Well, can I call you either one then?”

  “That would be fine.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which eye is it that bothers you? Or is it one when you’re Adrien and the other when you’re Michel?”

  He smiled. Jason was still knocking around in the kitchen, looking for a fuse. “That’s it exactly,” Michel said. He looked very impressed, for the first time that night. He looked down at his feet and then back at her when he said, “You know, yours is the first face I’ve seen in two years that looks exactly the same from either eye.”

  Jason came out with the fuse. “Is that good or bad?” said Lauren.

  “Good,” said Michel.

  “Here’s the fuse,” said Jason.

  “Thanks,” said Michel. “Sorry if I woke you.”

  “Need a flashlight?”

  “No. I have one.”

  “We were at the club tonight.”

  “I know,” Michel said. He opened the door. “I owe you a fuse.”

  She stood there awhile looking at the door. Jason went back to bed. She listened to the door downstairs open and close again, and continued standing there until the sounds below waned. She stood there a few minutes when Jason’s voice came from the bedroom. “Funny,” she heard him say. “Guy couldn’t wait until morning to borrow a fuse, when all he was probably going to do was go to sleep anyway.” She sat in the bedroom awhile longer, wondering. In the hush of the night an answer came to her later, and she couldn’t believe it.