“Go to sleep. It’s late.”
“I don’t want to sleep.”
“Neither do I.”
She nestled against him. “What do you hear?”
“I hear a hawk killing a mouse.”
“Where?”
He pulled her closer against him. “Somewhere else.”
In the mornings, if he wasn’t gone already, they lay wrapped in a single white sheet, punch-drunk on a few meager hours of sleep, and exchanged small pieces of their histories in a game whose rules were left purposefully undefined—a story for a story, a past for a past. Each one told strategically, so as not to reveal very much, just little odd details that could belong to anyone or everyone or no one—truthful lies. They respected the other’s secrets. May told him about her arthritic Polish grandmother who played Bach and Chopin in half-time on the piano, slowing the notes until they almost hurt to hear, the grandmother who read the King James Bible in a heavy accent. And in return, he told her about vacations to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as a child, a cabin along a lake with pebbles that ran up to the shore. Lake Walton, he called it, savoring the words. He said he waded into the waters late at night and fished for bass and bluegill and walleye, his jeans rolled up to his knees, dragonflies humming still over the moonlit surface. He said he’d never been happier. And when he said this, she made a face as though to say, You sure? And to this he smiled, maybe laughed, and wrapped her closer into his warm and cold and beating body, as though to say nothing.
A sun warming in the window. A day yet to begin.
But beyond these fanciful pasts, nothing. They left whatever secrets they’d carried all these years tangled in the sheets between them.
* * *
“It sounds nice,” Marcus said after Miss May reached a long pause in which she relaxed back into the couch, signaling that she had arrived at the temporary end of her story. “It sounds like you two were very happy together.”
Peter sat perfectly still, one leg crossed over the other. Deep in some inscrutable thought.
“I don’t know if I’d say that,” Miss May replied after some consideration. “We were young and we didn’t know how those things worked. I still don’t know really what it was. I doubt he knew, either. He was just someone I used to know who crawled in my window most nights and slept in my bed after we had sex. Someone who kissed me when he left. Is there a name for that?”
“A lover?”
She weighed the term as if she’d never considered it before. She shook her head slightly. “I don’t think that’s it.”
“You mentioned that you asked him to leave with you,” Marcus said, “and to start a life together somewhere else. But he didn’t want to leave.”
She nodded.
“I guess that’s something I never understood,” Marcus said. “Why did he do what he did? What motivated him? He wasn’t getting paid. No one even knew who he was. And like you said, someone like him could have done almost anything he’d wanted.”
May laughed, softly, her eyes drifting out the window. “He never once told me, but looking back, it seems clear to me. I was too young then to realize that I probably already knew the answer and just didn’t want to know. He did it because there was something inside him, eating him from the inside out. Something had been done to him, something awful and unspeakable—I don’t know what it was, but I know it was there.”
“How do you know that?”
“If you know the feeling yourself, it’s not to hard to spot it in someone else, unless of course you don’t want to, which I didn’t at the time. I didn’t want to believe that someone like him could be hurt, because I wasn’t ready to accept the fact that I’d been hurt. And while I covered mine up with a smile and makeup, the only way he knew to keep that pain quiet, or at least quiet enough, was to go out on those streets and spread that pain to people he thought were more deserving of it than him. That’s why he did what he did. He may have been a solitary sort of man, but one thing I can tell you is that he didn’t want to be alone in his pain.” She smiled. “Maybe that’s the real reason why he came back to find me all those years later. Misery loves company.”
Peter mumbled something beneath his breath, his eyes glassy and distant.
“What’s that?” May asked him.
Peter sat up straight, blinking, as though awoken from a dream. “Nothing. Sorry.” He kneaded his temples with his fingers.
Marcus cleared his throat and turned to Miss May. “Was he ever bothered by your—well—your line of work?”
She smiled. “I don’t think it bothered him at first. In fact, I think he liked it. It was forbidden and exciting. But it got to him eventually, the longer we were together. He didn’t like sharing. Said he didn’t know why I did it. I told him it was my job. I told him I liked it. I told him unless the two of us left together, started a life just the two of us far away from this place, then I’d keep doing it. Because it wasn’t ever about the sex for me. I told him that. That’s not why I do this job. I explained to him that it made me feel good and free and powerful. I thought he of all people would understand that feeling, and maybe he did for a while, but it eventually got to him. Men being what they are.”
“What do you mean ‘it eventually got to him’? What happened?”
“Well, he started to follow me more and more often. I knew he was doing it, and I kind of liked it most of the time. At first it was because he wanted to watch. He liked it. I’d leave a window open for him to see through. But whenever I’d ask him about it, he’d say he was keeping me safe and protecting me. That really pissed me off, and I told him I didn’t need his help. I didn’t need his protection. So finally I told him if he ever followed me again, I was done with him. To his credit, he stopped. But then he only started getting jealous. More and more jealous. And then one night, he threw a fucking tantrum. Showed up out of nowhere and beat the living hell out of Richie and Richie’s driver. Not sure why, to tell you the truth. Maybe because I’d mentioned to him that I didn’t want to go with a certain john again, but Richie wasn’t having it. Maybe he was just fed up with the work I was doing. Personally, I think he just lost his shit. Seemed inevitable. Anyone who lives their life doing the sorts of things he was doing, they’re bound to come apart at the seams. But anyway, that’s the story you heard from whomever you heard it from. I never saw Richie or Olander after that. I don’t know what happened to them. Of course, I wonder sometimes,” she began, but her voice narrowed into a hum. “But that was also the last time I ever saw him.” She lit another cigarette. “He died just a few days later.”
“You never talked to him about that night?” Peter asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “Like I said, I never saw him again.”
Marcus adjusted his seat on the couch and turned a page in his notebook. “I hate to ask you this. But I have to.”
“Go ahead, Marcus.”
“Can you tell me about when he died?”
“What about it?”
“Just what you know. What you remember. Anything and everything, I guess.”
“Anything and everything,” she repeated in an amused singsong. “Well, I guess the first thing I’d say is that it came as much a surprise to me as it probably did to you, which isn’t to say it was much of a surprise at all. It was a matter of time, really. But I came to cope with it even before he died. I learned to see him as a ghost when he was still living. A walking chalk outline. I mourned that thick-headed man every morning that he walked out my door, slipped through my window.”
“Did that help?”
She thought about it for a moment and pressed a finger gingerly to her lips like they would crack. “No. No, it didn’t help at all.”
* * *
In the days after he’d beaten Richie and Olander, May still expected to see him again. Maybe she even wanted to. She wanted to ask him why and she wanted to hear him apologize and she wanted to look at him when he stood before her. But he didn’t come to her. She remembered him those
years ago when they were practically children, jumping from the train car and wandering off into the dark and dusk and the coming day. But she was certain he would return this time. She could feel it. The same way she had felt his stare on her skin.
Those short days of waiting had the consistency of a sleepwalker’s delirium, nights of half sleep while watching a smudgy window for a face to appear just as she had for four years. So she distracted herself. She began contacting her regular clients. Told them Richie was taking a break. She scheduled appointments and handled the money, saving Richie’s percentage for whenever he would return. She walked, took the L, hopped on the bus. She met with clients in hotel rooms with unmade beds. Anything to get out of her apartment, anything to keep her from staring at that empty window.
And when the news broke, it was everywhere. His name on every corner, on every tongue. The newspapers proclaiming his death seemed to come alive and take to the streets—they littered every curb, were folded on every barstool, were displayed in every window. The radio disc jockeys dedicated songs to him—slow, downbeat, synthesized tunes. A children’s choir sang “Amazing Grace” on the nightly news and May wept, the tears transforming from grief to sorrow to hatred, because she hated him for dying and she hated herself for hating a dead man, a dead man she loved more than any living person.
She still felt him the way she felt herself. Warm and cold and beating. At night, she continued to wait for his face in the window and prayed for the impossible, if only to be able to ask him if she were somehow responsible for this, all of this. She filled the empty, dragging hours by carefully constructing an elaborate and alternate world that the two of them might have shared in some other life altogether—two lovers living in a cabin along Lake Walton, taking a rowboat out onto the water at night, raising the oars, and falling asleep next to each other beneath layers of quilts and stars as a gentle wind slowly guided them back to shore.
She canceled her appointments for a week. This was the amount of time she gave herself to mourn—seven days. And at the end of the seven days, it was over and hadn’t she always known this day would come and what difference did it make, really, if it came now or tomorrow or a hundred years from now?
The first client she saw after her seven-day furlough was a man she’d never met, referred from a regular. They met at a hotel, the fourth story that looked out over a construction project. The skeleton of some new office building, scaling higher than she could crane her head. Rows of scaffolding, girders—vectors all pointing a hundred ways at once. She stood at the window while the man undressed hurriedly, his heavy breathing ringing in the walls, his belt buckle jangling in his frenzied hands. She pressed her fingertips hard into the glass window and it felt cool. Her breath fogged against the glass and she closed the curtains to make the room dark enough to disappear.
The day of the city’s funeral for him, May put on her clothes with the stoicism of a soldier headed to the front line. A red tank top, white leather jacket, and denim jeans. She would not wear black. She had already mourned him many times before, she told herself as she exited her apartment into the static-still street. She had mourned his death a hundred times before—sleepless and countless nights perched at her radio when he didn’t come over, reciting to herself the many euphemisms for death, preparing herself for the inevitable.
Let the rest of them wear black.
The funeral was along the lake. Promontory Point. The newspaper the next day said that nearly half the city had attended. But she remembers seeing no one. A city abandoned, some vision of a distant future set into motion. She remembers the sidewalk, covered in a fine film of snow, frozen over. She remembers the somewhere-song of a street performer with an out-of-tune guitar—“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” She remembers ice and dirt scattered along the deserted streets. She remembers the hollow whistle of the Chicago wind pressing through buildings as though the city itself were singing a dirge.
She remembers standing at the lake and she remembers seeing his ashes scattered. She was a long distance away, but she saw it, sure enough, a cloud of black ash. It roiled out over the lake, skittering along the frozen surface until it disappeared. And she left. She didn’t turn around. She left. She walked to nowhere. She wandered the city, directionless. This was the only way she felt him, whatever was left of him. She paused and stared into the windows of abandoned shops, waiting for a reflection that did not come.
And she likes to think they were alone that day in the city they’d built in brief and unspoken exchanges.
33 TRANSITORY
MARCUS KNEW WHEN MISS MAY WAS FINISHED. It was in the way her body had nowhere left to withdraw into itself. Throughout their conversation, she had compacted herself within her wooden chair, pulling her legs up to the seat, wrapping her arms around her shins, laying her head against her knees. She had reached the deepest recesses of herself and appeared content with whatever she had found.
She looked like a child fighting sleep. Her head was turned and she was looking out the window where the sun was falling into the outfield of Wrigley.
Peter was pacing the room, wandering the walls, leaning into his uneven and pained steps, processing everything May had said.
Marcus caught Miss May’s reflection in the window, and he saw her blinking heavily, and each time he thought that it was her last for the evening, that she would fall asleep in this precarious position, maybe dreaming of someone she once knew.
He saw her looking back at him in the window.
“You’re looking at me like I’ve got six heads,” she whispered.
“I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“About him,” Marcus said.
“Me, too.” She smiled.
“He found her,” Peter muttered to himself across the room, moving like a planetary body in orbit. “He found her.”
“It’s funny, actually,” Marcus said to May, ignoring Peter’s ramblings. “It’s funny to hear you talk about him, because none of it matches with what I’d imagined. I pictured him as an ascetic, the lifestyle of a monk. I pictured meals of gray porridge every day, meditating on his head in a bare room. I even thought he might be some psychopath, a cruel person who occasionally did good things. But to hear you talk, he was almost like anyone else. I don’t know how I’ll manage to somehow reconcile these two different people.”
“I’m not so sure he has to be one or the other.” She adjusted her hand to cradle her chin on the armrest.
“Why do you say that?”
“I’ve never known anyone who couldn’t be cruel when they wanted to be. Only difference is that there are people who are cruel to the wrong people, people who are more cruel than other people. People whose occasional cruelty is written about in the morning paper. It doesn’t matter much in the end.”
Marcus considered it, but he was too mentally exhausted to work through the logic.
Peter passed by them, his steps slower, whispering inaudibly to himself. He turned on his heel and directed his gaze to Miss May. “You said earlier you saw a man break his hand on his jaw. In the Wasteland.”
“I did.”
“And there’s witnesses who say they saw him get shot, but the bullets had no effect.”
“I’m sure that never happened.”
“How would you know that?” Peter asked defensively.
“I know what you’re getting at.” May leaned forward, smiling without affection. “But I touched his skin with my own hands. I felt every inch of his body several times over. And his skin was the same as mine. It was the same as yours. That man wasn’t bulletproof. He wasn’t like us, but he also wasn’t indestructible. He was what he was.”
“Which was what?” Marcus asked.
“Not us,” she said. “He wasn’t like us. I don’t know any other way to say it.”
“You never once thought he might still be alive?” Peter interrupted. He was sweating although the room was cool, a draft passing through the window.
“Never.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Peter.” Marcus held out a hand.
“You didn’t know him,” May interjected. Her voice hadn’t risen even a fraction, but it still sounded louder as she directed herself toward Peter. “You never met him. You don’t know who you are talking about. But I did know him. I knew him better than anyone else in this world ever knew him. And I can promise you that he is dead.”
“But how do you know that?” Peter said. “You can’t possibly know that for certain.”
“I do know that for certain,” she said, her chin jutting out, her voice hollowing into a hoarse insistence. “Because one day he was gone and he didn’t come back. And I knew him. He always came back.” She stabbed her finger at Peter. “He always came back. But one day he was gone and he didn’t come back. That’s how I know he’s gone. And that’s enough. Think what you want to think, but he’s dead. He’s gone.”
Peter remained standing there for a moment, shook his head, and continued pacing the apartment. May leaned back in the couch, pulling out another cigarette. She didn’t light it. She only held it in her fingers and then laid her head back on the couch, studying the ceiling with a tired expression. Her eyes closed and Marcus didn’t know if she was simply falling asleep or contemplating something unspoken.
“Do you miss him?” Marcus asked.
She opened her eyes slowly. “Why do you ask?”
“You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. I’m just asking out of curiosity.”
She thought about it and smiled, as if she’d just understood some unspoken joke. “I’m not sure there was a time, even when he was alive and lying there next to me, that I didn’t miss him. There are some people like that, I think…” Her voice trailed off. “Transitory is the word for them. They can be looking at you right in the eyes and you’re already feeling the full weight of them not being there. Each time you reach out to touch them, you worry you’ll pass right through them. You’re always surprised to feel your hand touch their skin. Feel their heartbeat. Maybe this is how it is with all lovers. If that’s even the word for what we were.” Her voice was softer now, tempered by the onset of sleep. She blinked slowly, each time her eyes shut for a second longer than the last.
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 30