A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  In her dreams, some distant murmuring, barely audible; she was in an immaculate, unfurnished white room, sitting on the floor. A voice whispered in her ear, and she awoke immediately. She felt someone’s breath on the side of her face and quickly turned on her lamp. The room was empty. It was four in the morning. “What?” she called. “What did you say?” The apartment was entirely still.

  She rose and walked into the living room. Rain rattled the window-pane. She checked the front door. The chain was still in place, the burglar alarm was untouched.

  She went back to bed and lay awake until morning.

  A strange dream: Susan was standing in line at the Motor Vehicles office, waiting to get her driver’s license renewed. Bereft-looking men and women surrounded her in line, shivering in their tattered clothes. The pigeon woman hovered above the crowd, muttering, wearing the same dirty coat; but her wings were radiant, and they cast a strange, fluorescent glow throughout the large room. Finally, Susan reached the front of the line, and she was surprised to see Joren behind the information window. He wore a brilliant white coat, and he, alone amongst the sad souls gathered in the desolate government office, seemed calm, and didn’t shiver.

  I’m so happy to see you again, Susan said. I was so cruel the other night, and I’m so happy to see you again.

  Joren smiled and put a finger to his lips. He asked her for her address, in a gentle, quiet voice. Then he asked her for her phone number. She leaned on the counter, smiling up at him, answering each bureaucratic query in a state of absolute bliss.

  I’m so happy to see you again, she sighed, but he kept whispering in her ear, asking her questions, never terribly personal. But as she gradually regained consciousness, his voice continued speaking, gently, soothingly, but too softly now for Susan to hear with any accuracy.

  She jerked her eyes open wide; she could feel breathing on the back of her neck, and she flipped over suddenly. A body lay beside her, silhouetted in the moonlight. She turned on her bedside lamp and the body was gone.

  The phone rang. She answered it warily, and, in the way that one knows things that usually turn out not to be true when one is very tired, groggy, barely conscious, she knew that Joren was calling her in the middle of the night, and she knew that, in some strange way, he had begun to love her back. He sounded relaxed and friendly. “I knew you’d be awake,” he said. “I don’t want to startle you, and I apologize. I just came to you in the night. Could you tell? Do you remember any of it?”

  She sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. She pulled the bed-sheets up to her neck. “What right do you have – ” She started. “What did you do? You came to me in the night, like one of those evil female spirits who make love to men in their sleep?”

  He laughed.

  “I was a perfect gentleman, though,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry if I startled you. You just gave me your phone number, just now. In your dream, do you remember? I wanted to talk to you but I didn’t have your phone number. This was the only way I could get it.” Then, more softly, “I didn’t know if I’d ever bump into you again by chance.”

  She yawned. She said that maybe it was all right, in that case.

  “I’m glad.”

  “I should apologize, again and again,” she said. “I accused you, and I was wrong.”

  She could somehow hear him smiling. “That’s all right,” he said. “That’s nice to hear, but it’s perfectly all right. I just think it’s good that we met.”

  She flipped out the light, and utter darkness enveloped the room. “It’s just you and me,” she said dreamily. “Turn out your light, would you? It will be just our voices, floating together in a void.”

  “Eerie thought,” he said.

  “Romantic thought,” she replied. “At least to me. Floating in the dark void of space, miles above New York City. If I look down, I can almost see the lights.” She could hear him laugh softly on the other end of the line, and she yawned. “Look, Joren,” she said. “I’m very tired and I’m half asleep, so I’m going to be very honest with you and I’ll probably regret it later.” She thought a moment, and almost drifted back to sleep. “I met you once,” she whispered, “and I don’t believe that I met you before, because I would remember it, but I don’t care if you lied because I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind since and I’m just glad that you were there in that bar and that I got mad at you and that you didn’t run off or yell at me, but instead helped me out of the rain and smiled at me. I don’t know you or understand you and maybe I never will and maybe I’ll regret all of this, but I would like to see your face again.” Her voice almost faded away. “I would like very much,” she repeated, “to see your face again.”

  “Here’s what you do,” he said. “Get up now, put on some clothes. There’s a cab sitting outside of your building, just some guy on break. But he’ll take you to Penn Station, and he won’t charge you. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he’ll say, and he’ll ask you to give me his regards. Go to track 19 at the station. There’s a train waiting there, and no one will ask for your ticket. Get off the train at the last stop, walk down the stairs, take the first left you come to, then take another left. My house is at the end of the road. I’ll turn the porch lights on for you.”

  She got out of bed, pulled on black jeans and a sweater; she jumped every time the floor creaked. She put on her shoes and coat and walked outside into the light snow, where, just as Joren had predicted, an off-duty taxi was waiting.

  “Can you take me to Penn Station?” she asked. The cab driver glanced at his watch, then nodded.

  At West 56th Street, he called back to her, “Going to visit your boyfriend in the middle of the night?” She half nodded. “What’s his name?”

  “Joren,” she replied, and she grinned at the thought.

  At Penn Station, she asked him how much she owed.

  He stared back at her in the rear-view mirror. His eyes glowed with warmth. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said, trying to sound surprised. “But why? Aren’t there ten shopping days until Christmas?”

  The cabby said he just felt generous, all of a sudden. And besides, Christmas officially began Thanksgiving, at least according to the corporate power structure of America. And, as a mere pawn of capitalist giants, who was he, a cabby, to argue?

  Susan said Oh.

  “Anyway,” the cabby said. “Merry Christmas.”

  As she stepped out of the car, he called, “And send my best to your young man!”

  As previously noted, Susan has a number of things in common with a young lawyer named Emmett. For example, at the age of sixty, Emmett will see Susan’s daughter on the street and think: What a beautiful young woman. He also, at one time, shared sun-dried tomato pasta with Daniel, whom Susan loves. And several times Susan slept with Emmett’s brother Joe, a tall skinny fellow who told absolutely terrible puns. Strangely, Susan will die without ever having heard Emmett’s name mentioned, even though he may have changed the course of her life many times, in unknowable ways.

  Another thing she and Emmett have in common, tonight, is a cold wind tickling the back of the neck, and a mysterious tingle of anticipation and hope.

  In the middle of the night, in the middle of the desert, Emmett and Katherine sat on the hood of their car, by the side of the road, waiting for help to arrive. They’d broken down hundreds of miles from civilization. It was quite cold, and Emmett and Katherine were very happy; their hands were clenched together, and they both hiccupped a bit as they shivered. A car drove by, slowed, then sped up again.

  “He looked at us,” Katherine said. “He looked to see if we needed help, he saw the plaintive look on our faces. Why didn’t he help us?”

  “He heard what happened at the firm,” Emmett suggested, and it was almost funny now. Emmett felt that he could live here forever, in a desert night, here on the hood of his car, looking down a deserted road enveloped in starlight. He was wrong, but that’s how he felt now, Katherine leaning against him fo
r warmth. Occasionally, one of them would make a joke about dying on the hood of their car, and they would both laugh, and neither one of them knew why it was funny, or why this was a happy moment.

  “What do you want to do with your life?” she asked. “If you had a choice of anything at all? And if we survive this catastrophe?”

  He slung an arm around her, and she rested her head on his shoulder. “Something that will keep me home a lot,” he said. “Some business that we can both run out of our home. Like those ads you see in the newspaper, making $5000 stuffing envelopes. We could just talk, and look at each other, and stuff envelopes all day. And order food in. And by the time we were really old, we’d know all about each other, every thought. I could read your mind, and you could read mine.”

  He stopped, and he realized why this had become his dream. “You could protect me from the outside world, Katherine, from all the people out there.” Quietly, with a little laugh: “Those people. What is it with those people?” He glanced over at her quickly. Her eyes were shut, and she was smiling into the wind. “Is that what you’d like?” he asked, knowing what the answer would be.

  She did not open her eyes. “If you stay like this,” she said. “Don’t go back to the way you were. Stay the sort of person who smiles when his car breaks down, who doesn’t care if he’s late, who doesn’t mind spending the night in the desert on an empty road. OK?”

  Emmett said he would, and he said he would never leave Katherine’s side, not if he could help it. Katherine reminded him that this was the sort of promise that all men make. Emmett said he knew that, but he promised again, and again, and he meant it.

  “Suppose I hardly make any money after this at all?” Emmett said. “Would you mind?”

  She said no, she wouldn’t mind at all, just because that was the right thing to say.

  “Anyway, I’ve always earned a living, you know,” she said.

  “So I could be your kept man. Your trophy husband? OK, then, I suppose.”

  “Good.”

  “I think,” Emmett said finally, plucking a notion out of the air, “that I’ll write stories about movie stars for a living. What do you think of that? I’ll go see movie stars, write little stories, and hang around the house. Good?”

  Katherine nodded, and she said she thought that idea was fine.

  After speaking with his wife about the collapsing universe and the eternal questions of existence, Daniel went home and immediately phoned the gallery owner, who seemed rational, which put Daniel somewhat at ease. “When people are working through these sorts of doubts, they sometimes find regression therapy helpful,” she added gently. “Find out who you were in a past life.” She recommended her regression therapist. Daniel thanked her politely, but ambivalence began to rise within him. Past lives! Why was this more ridiculous than the idea of ghosts? He didn’t know, exactly. He called up the medium, who sounded just like a rabbi. They made an appointment for the following day. He called the regression therapist, who sounded just like a serious mental health professional. They made an appointment for the hour immediately following Daniel’s appointment with the medium. After he hung up the receiver, Daniel took out some vodka which he drank right from the bottle, not because he really wanted to or needed to, but because it helped him create a tragic-romantic self-image. He watched afternoon TV. A crazed young woman named Judith was sitting on a stage in front of a hushed studio audience, while a kindly looking talk show host stood in the aisle. The talk show host had a complicated but pleasant name. Calliope-Luu. Never just Calliope. Always Calliope-Luu. She was a national treasure. Calliope means “beautiful voice” in ancient Greek, she would often say; and Luu means “servant of knowledge” in a lost tongue. (She had once had a different name, back when she was a local anchor.)

  After you left the mental hospital, Calliope-Luu said, you had a bad experience. The audience cooed sympathetically.

  Calliope-Luu, her tremendous hair bobbing dramatically, leaned forward. Her eyes grew wide. Would you like to tell us about this experience? she asked.

  Devil worshipping Jews stole my baby, Judith said, almost calmly. But tears began streaming down her cheeks. Jews eat babies, she added. They eat babies to appease the devil.

  Calliope-Luu nodded. Her voice cracked just a bit as she remarked, This is the first time that I’ve heard about this form of Jewism. Um … Jewishism.

  They put me away, Judith said. They put me in the psychiatric hospital so they could steal my baby and eat my baby.

  Calliope-Luu turned to the camera and offered a disclaimer. Of course, she added seriously, not all Jews eat babies. So don’t write in. We’ll be right back, she added, and she broke into a warm smile, tinged with just a trace of sadness, just a hint that she too knew what it meant to suffer, that once she had lived a quietly desperate life, a life filled with devil-worshipping, baby-eating Jews, abusive ex-husbands, married men, sodomy, rape, group rape, group sodomy. She had not always lived in a polished, ivory mansion. She had not always starred in television movies about important subjects. She had not always been America’s sweetheart. She had been there.

  After several commercial messages, Calliope-Luu returned to interview a brother and sister who enjoyed what Calliope-Luu described as “mutual masturbation.” An oxymoron, Daniel thought, briefly entertaining the notion of writing to Calliope-Luu to point this out.

  Daniel took another swig of vodka, was repulsed by the two siblings, now in their forties, gray and fat. He switched channels, watched a bit of “The Jetsons,” and was quite comforted. The program ended, the news came on. Erich Honecker, the East German leader, had just been placed under house arrest. The man who had supplied the voice of George Jetson for twenty or thirty years had passed away a few hours earlier. Communism and George Jetson had died on the same day, and perhaps there was a message there someplace about the impossibility of utopia. An old woman, a radical from the 1920s who now lived in Florida, remarked, If Communism can’t work, then Marx was still right about one thing. There is no God. Daniel took another gulp of vodka, now wondering what he was doing all this drinking for, and he fell asleep on the living room couch.

  Still speaking, her tired voice seeping into his dreams, the old woman on the news said, In my day, we had important things to worry about. Power to the masses. Equality for everyone. I’m not happy about causing tyranny and murder and starvation, but I’m still proud of the struggle.

  He slept until eight pm, woke up, ordered a pizza, took a few bites, threw up, called his firm and left a voice mail for Dolores, told her he had the flu and made a mental note to over-bill next week to make up for missed time. He would leave the light on in his office and a jacket hanging from his chair when he left work each evening. Maybe someone would be fooled. Then he passed out on the living room floor.

  At 9 pm, Natalie called their answering machine and told Daniel that things were happening, and that she needed time, that she loved him and missed him, and that he shouldn’t call the studio, because she wouldn’t answer.

  She painted furiously until about midnight, when she took a break, sat back and stared at her work. She poured herself a glass of cream soda, took a few sips, then heard a knock at the door. It was a guy who lived by himself in the big apartment that took up the other half of the top floor, a kid, really, just eighteen years old, who didn’t seem to have any job or go to school, but always dressed well and smiled brightly, jeunesse dorée. Sometimes in the evening, when Natalie went out to sit alone on her deck, she saw this young man, sitting on his deck, sometimes by himself, sometimes with one or another young woman; sometimes he would look over at Natalie and catch her eye. His name was Tommy, and Natalie had a crush on him.

  Tommy was sitting on the floor. He’d brought a couple of bottles of French wine.

  “Do you like the new work?” she asked him mildly. She was lying back on the couch.

  “Picasso and Munch aren’t really cutting edge,” he said. “I’d go easy on the terror-stricken eyes and fl
aring nostrils. Remember, the best emotion is no emotion.”

  “Well,” she said. “I don’t really care what you think.” She glanced at her watch. “Don’t you have any place to go?”

  “I have every place to go,” Tommy said. “But I happen to be here.” He smiled. “Listen, tomorrow let’s take a car out to my country place. You’ll get out of the city, clear your head, we’ll walk through the woods in our winter coats and listen to the twigs snap underfoot.”

  “Your parents out of town?”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding vigorously.

  She sipped her wine, as Tommy took a big gulp. “Tommy,” she said. “You’re such an idiot.” The wine tasted wonderful, but Tommy probably knew only that it was expensive.

  They drank some more, and suddenly it was 1:30, and they were sitting together on the couch, listening to the music from some French movie. “This is the part where the girl dies,” Tommy said. Natalie felt warm all over. She picked up a lock of his hair, ran her fingers through it gently. This small gesture changed everything.

  “Draw my picture,” Tommy said.

  “It’s too late,” she said. “I’m fuzzy.”

  “That’s better,” he said. “It’ll be more honest.”

  “I’m not interested in honesty.”

  “You’ll see what I look like in your inner mind.”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t.” She picked up a pad of drawing paper, set it in her lap. She picked up a piece of charcoal, stared at Tommy. “Stand up,” she said. He got up from the couch and walked a few feet away, then turned and looked at her.

  “How’s this?” he asked.

  “Uninspiring,” she said, squinting.

  “What should I do?”