Thirteen Phantasms

by James P. Blaylock

  The pace of things seemed to be accelerating, and already I could too easily anticipate stepping out onto my tilted front porch some signifying morning, the wind out of the east, and seeing stretched out before me not a shaded avenue of overarching trees and root-cracked sidewalks but the sleek, desert-like technology of a new age, a new suburbia, with robots in vinyl trousers sweeping fallen leaves into their own open mouths.

  •

  There is a plaza in the center of town, with a fountain, and in the autumn—the season when all of this came to my attention—red-brown leaves from flowering pear trees drift down onto the sluggish, gurgling water and float there like a centerpiece for a Thanksgiving table. On a starry evening, one November late in the seventies, I was out walking in the plaza, thinking, I remember, that it had already become an artifact, with its quaint benches and granite curbs and rose garden. Then, shattering the mood of late-night nostalgia, there shone in the sky an immense shooting star, followed by the appearance of a glowing object, which hovered and darted, sailing earthward until I could make out its shadow against the edge of the moon and then disappearing in a blink. I shouted and pointed, mostly out of surprise. Strange lights in the sky were nothing particularly novel; I had been seeing them for almost twenty years. But nothing that happens at night among the stars can ever become commonplace. At that late hour, though, there was almost certainly no one around to hear me; or so I thought.

  So when she stood up, dropping papers and pencils and a wooden drawing board onto the concrete walk, I nearly shouted again. She had been sitting in the dim lamplight, hidden to me beyond the fountain. Dark hair fell across her shoulders in a rush of curl and hid her right eye, and with a practiced sweep of her hand she pulled it back in a shock and tucked it behind her ear, where it stayed obediently for about three quarters of a second and then fell seductively into her face again. Now, years later, for reasons I can’t at all define, the sight of a dark-haired woman brushing wayward hair out of her eyes recalls without fail that warm autumn night by the fountain.

  She had that natural, arty, blue-jeans-and-floppy-sweater look of a college girl majoring in fine arts: embroidered handbag, rhinestone-emerald costume brooch, and translucent plastic shoes the color of root beer. I remember thinking right off that she had languorous eyes, and the sight of them reflecting the soft lamplight of the fountain jolted me. But the startled look on her face implied that she hadn’t admired my shouting like that, not at eleven o’clock at night in the otherwise deserted plaza.

  There was the dark, pouting beauty in her eyes and lips of a woman in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, a painting that I had stumbled into in my clodlike way, grinning, I thought, like a half-wit. I too hastily explained the shooting star to her, gesturing too widely at the sky and mumbling that it hadn’t been an ordinary shooting star. But there was nothing in the sky now besides the low-hanging moon and a ragtag cloud, and she said offhandedly, not taking any notice of my discomfort, just what I had been thinking, that there was never anything ordinary about a shooting star.

  I learned that her name was Jane and that she had sketched that fountain a dozen times during the day, with the blooming flowers behind it and the changing backdrop of people and cars and weather. I almost asked her whether she hadn’t ever been able to get it quite right, but then, I could see that that wasn’t the point.

  Now she had been sketching it at night, its blue and green and pink lights illuminating the umbrella of falling water against night-shaded rosebushes and camphor trees and boxwood hedges.

  It was perfect—straight out of a romantic old film. The hero stumbles out of the rain into an almost deserted library, and at the desk, with her hair up and spectacles on her nose, is the librarian who doesn’t know that if she’d just take the glasses off for a moment…

  I scrabbled around to pick up fallen pencils while she protested that she could just as easily do it herself. It was surely only the magic of that shooting star that prevented her from gathering up her papers and going home. As it was, she stayed for a moment to talk, assuming, although she never said so, that there was something safe and maybe interesting in a fancier of shooting stars. I felt the same about her and her drawings and her root beer shoes.

  She was distracted, never really looking at me. Maybe the image of the fountain was still sketched across the back of her eyes and she couldn’t see me clearly. It was just a little irritating, and I would discover later that it was a habit of hers, being distracted was, but on that night there was something in the air and it didn’t matter. Any number of things don’t matter at first. We talked, conversation dying and starting and with my mind mostly on going somewhere—my place, her place—for a drink, for what? There was something, an atmosphere that surrounded her, a musky sort of sweater and lilacs scent. But she was distant; her work had been interrupted and she was still half lost in the dream of it. She dragged her hand in the water of the fountain, her face half in shadow. She was tired out, she said. She didn’t need to be walked home. She could find her way alone.

  •

  But I’ve got ahead of myself. It’s important that I keep it all straight—all the details; without the details it amounts to nothing. I grew up on Olive Street, southwest of the plaza, and when I was six and wearing my Davy Crockett hat and Red Ryder shirt, and it was nearly dusk in late October, I heard the ding-a-linging of an ice cream truck from some distant reach of the neighborhood. The grass was covered with leaves, I remember, that had been rained on and were limp and heavy. I was digging for earthworms and dropping them one by one into a corral built of upright sticks and twigs that was the wall of the native village on Kong Island. The sky was cloudy, the street empty. There was smoke from a chimney across the way and the cloud-muted hum of a distant airplane lost to view. Light through the living room window shone out across the dusky lawn.

  The jangling of the ice cream bell drew near, and the truck rounded the distant corner, the bell cutting off and the truck accelerating as if the driver, anticipating dinner, had given up for the day and was steering a course for home. It slowed, though, when he saw me, and angled in toward the curb where I stood holding a handful of gutter-washed earthworms. Clearly he thought I’d signaled him. There were pictures of frozen concoctions painted on the gloss-white sides of the panel truck: coconut-covered Neapolitan bars and grape Popsicles, nut and chocolate drumsticks, and strawberry-swirled vanilla in paper cups with flat paper lids. He laboriously climbed out of the cab, came around the street side to the back, and confronted me there on the curb. He smiled and winked and wore a silver foil hat with an astonishing bill, and when he yanked open the hinged, chrome door there was such a whirling of steam off the dry ice inside that he utterly vanished behind it, and I caught a quick glimpse of cardboard bins farther back in the cold fog, stacked one on top of another and dusted with ice crystals.

  I didn’t have a dime and wouldn’t be allowed to eat ice cream so close to dinnertime anyway, and I said so, apologizing for having made him stop for nothing. He studied my earthworms and said that out in space there were planets where earthworms spoke and wore silk shirts, and that I could fly to those planets in the right sort of ship.

  Then he bent into the freezer and after a lot of scraping and peering into boxes found a paper-wrapped ice cream bar—a flying saucer bar, the wrapper said. It was as big around as a coffee cup saucer and was domed on top and fat with vanilla ice cream coated in chocolate. He tipped his hat, slammed his door, and drove off. I ate the thing guiltily while sitting beneath camellia bushes at the side of the house and lobbing sodden pink blooms out onto the front yard, laying siege to the earthworm fortress and watching the lamps blink on one by one along the street.

  •

  There are those incidents from our past that years later seem to us to be the stuff of dreams: the wash of shooting stars seen through the rear window of the family car at night in the Utah desert; the mottled, multilegged sun star, as big as a cartwheel, inching across the sand in the shallows of
a northern California bay; the whale’s eyeball floating in alcohol and encased in a glass fishing float in a junk store near the waterfront; the remembered but unrecoverable hollow sensation of new love. The stars vanish in an instant; the starfish slips away into deep water and is gone; the shop with its fishing float is a misty dream, torn down in some unnumbered year to make room for a hotel built of steel and smoked glass. Love evaporates into the passing years like dry ice; you don’t know where it’s gone. The mistake is to think that the details don’t signify—the flying saucer bars and camellia blooms, rainy autumn streets and lamplight through evening windows and colored lights playing across the waters of a fountain on a warm November evening.

  All the collected pieces of our imagistic memory seem sometimes to be trivial knickknacks when seen against the roaring of passing time. But without those little water-paint sketches, awash in remembered color and detail, none of us, despite our airy dreams, amount to more than an impatient ghost wandering through the revolving years and into an increasingly strange and alien future.

  •

  I came to know the driver of the ice cream truck. We became acquaintances. He no longer sold ice cream; there was no living to be made at it. He had got a penny a Popsicle, he said, and he produced a slip of paper covered with numbers—elaborate calculations of the millions of Popsicles he’d have to sell over the years just to stay solvent. Taken altogether like that it was impossible. He had been new to the area then and hadn’t got established yet. All talk of money aside, he had grown tired of it, of the very idea of driving an ice cream truck—something that wouldn’t have seemed possible to me on the rainy evening of the flying saucer bar, but which I understand well enough now.

  He had appeared on our front porch, I remember, when I was ten or eleven, selling wonderful tin toys door-to-door. My mother bought a rocket propelled by compressed air. It was painted with bright circus colors, complete with flames swirling around the cylindrical base of the thing. Looking competent and serious and very much like my ice cream man was a helmeted pilot painted into a bubblelike vehicle on the top of the rocket, which would pop off, like a second stage, when the rocket attained the stupendous height of thirty or forty feet. I immediately lost the bubble craft with its painted astronaut. It shot off, just like it was supposed to, and never came down. I have to suppose that it’s rusting in the branches of a tree somewhere, but I have a hazy memory of it simply shooting into the air and disappearing in a blink, hurtling up through the thin atmosphere toward deep space. Wasted money, my mother said.

  Our third meeting was at the Palm Street Market, where I went to buy penny candy that was a nickel by then. I was thirteen, I suppose, or something near it, which would have made it early in the sixties. The clerk being busy, I had strayed over to the magazine shelves and found a copy of Fate, which I read for the saucer stories, and which, on that afternoon, was the excuse for my being close enough to the “men’s” magazines to thumb through a couple while the clerk had his back turned. I had the Fate open to the account of Captain Hooton’s discovery of an airship near Texarkana, and a copy of something called Slick or Trick or Flick propped open on the rack behind. I read the saucer article out of apologetic shame in between thumbing through the pages of photographs, as if my reading it would balance out the rest, but remembering nothing of what I read until, with a shock of horror that I can still recall as clearly as anything else in my life, I became aware that the ice cream man, the tin toy salesman, was standing behind me, reading over my shoulder.

  What I read, very slowly and carefully as three fourths of my blood rose into my head, was Captain Hooton’s contempt for airship design: “There was no bell or bell rope about the ship that I could discover, like I should think every well-regulated air locomotive should have.” At the precise moment of my reading that sentence, the clerk’s voice whacked out of the silence: “Hey, kid!” was what he said. I’d heard it before. It was a weirdly effective phrase and had such a freezing effect on me that Captain Hooton’s bit of mechanical outrage has come along through the years with me uninvited, pegged into my memory by the manufactured shame of that single moment.

  Both of us bought a copy of Fate. I had to, of course, although it cost me forty cents that I couldn’t afford. I remember the ice cream man winking broadly at me there on the sidewalk, and me being deadly certain that I had become as transparent as a ghost fish. Everyone on Earth had been on to my little game with the magazine. I couldn’t set foot in that market without a disguise for a solid five years. And then, blessedly, he was gone, off down the street, and me in the opposite direction. I stayed clear of the market for a couple of months and then discovered, passing on the sidewalk, that the witnessing clerk was gone, and that went a long way toward putting things right, although Captain Hooton, as I said, has stayed with me. In fact, I began from that day to think of the ice cream man as Captain Hooton, since I had no idea what his name was, and years later the name would prove strangely appropriate.

  •

  It was in the autumn, then, that I first met Jane on that November night in the plaza, and weeks later when I introduced her to him, to Captain Hooton. She said in her artistic way that he had a “good face,” although she didn’t mean to make any sort of moral judgment, and truthfully his face was almost inhumanly long and angular. She said this after the three of us had chatted for a moment and he had gone on his way. It was as if there were nothing much more she could say about him that made any difference at all, as if she were distracted.

  I remember that it irritated me, although why it should have I don’t know, except that he had already begun to mean something, to signify, as if our chance meetings over the years, if I could pluck them out of time and arrange them just so, would make a pattern.

  “He dresses pretty awful, doesn’t he?” That’s what she said after he’d gone along and she could think of nothing more to say about his face.

  I hadn’t noticed, and I said so, being friendly about it.

  “He’s smelly. What was that, do you think?”

  “Tobacco, I guess. I don’t know. Pipe tobacco.” She wasn’t keen on tobacco, or liquor either. So I didn’t put too fine a point on it because I didn’t « want to set her off, to have to defend his smoking a pipe. It was true that his coat could have used a cleaning, but that hadn’t occurred to me, actually, until she mentioned it, wrinkling up her nose in that rabbit way of hers.

  “I keep thinking that he’s got a fish in his pocket.”

  I smiled at her, suddenly feeling as if I were betraying a friend.

  “Well…” I said, trying to affect a dropping-the-subject tone.

  She shuddered. “People get like that, especially old people. They forget to take baths and wash their hair.”

  I shrugged, pretending to think that she was merely trying to be amusing.

  “He’s not that old,” I said. But she immediately agreed. That was the problem, wasn’t it? You wouldn’t think. … She looked at my own hair very briefly and then set out down the sidewalk with me following and studying my shadow in the afternoon sun and keeping my hands away from my hair. It looked neat enough there in the shadow on the sidewalk, but I knew that shadows couldn’t be trusted, and I was another five minutes worrying about it before something else happened, it doesn’t matter what, and I forgot about my hair and my vanity.

  Her own hair had a sort of flyaway look to it, but perfect, if you understand me, and it shone as if she’d given it the standard hundred strokes that morning. A dark-red ribbon held a random clutch of it behind her ear, and there was something in the ribbon and in the way she put her hand on my arm to call my attention to some house or other that made me think of anything but houses. She had a way of touching you, almost as if accidentally, like a cat sliding past your leg, rubbing against you, and arching just a little and then continuing on, having abandoned any interest in you. She stood too close, maybe, for comfort—although comfort is the wrong word because the sensation was almost ultimately c
omfortable—and all the while that we were standing there talking about the lines of the roof, I was conscious only of the static charge of her presence, her shoulder just grazing my arm, her hip brushing against my thigh, the heavy presence of her sex suddenly washing away whatever was on the surface of my mind and settling there musky and soft. There hasn’t been another man in history more indifferent to the lines of a roof.

  •

  In the downtown circular plaza each Christmas, there was an enormous Santa Claus built from wire and twisted paper, lit from within by a spiral of pin lights, and at Halloween, beneath overcast skies and pending rain, there were parades of schoolchildren dressed as witches and clowns and bed-sheet ghosts. Then in spring there was a May festival, with city dignitaries riding in convertible Edsels and waving to people sitting in lawn chairs along the boulevard. One year the parade was led by a tame ape followed by fezzed Shriners in Mr. Toad cars.

  Twice during the two years that Jane studied art, while the town shrank for her and grew cramped, we watched the parade from a sidewalk table in front of Felix’s Cafe, laughing at the ape and smiling at the solemn drumming of the marching bands. The second year one of the little cars caught fire and the parade fizzled out and waited while a half-dozen capering Shiners beat the fire out with their jackets. It was easy to laugh then, at the ape and the Edsels and the tiny cars, except that even then I suspected that her laughter was half cynical. Mine wasn’t, and this difference between us troubled me.

  In the summer there was a street fair, and the smoky aroma of sausages and beer and the sticky-sweet smell of cotton candy. We pushed through the milling crowds and sat for hours under an ancient tree in the plaza, watching the world revolve around us.