Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  Leaving the office earlier, we saw no monks. Neither saw them nor heard them. At the very least, I’d expected some chanting. But there was, though (unless I imagined it), a trace of incense in the air. Looking through the ground-floor windows and into a darkened room did not reveal much besides our streetlighted reflections.

  At the Dream employee lockers, a young Ghanaian man also on the cleaning crew is getting out of his civilian shirt and high-tops and putting on the regulation long-sleeved white shirt and regulation black sneakers. He smiles at me, says, Haven’t seen you in a long time but I heard you were back. Just for the holidays, I tell him. You are not missing much, he replies. Except for a steady paycheck, I say. This is not a work for the old man, he says. I don’t want to be staying in it much longer than I have to. Old? I say. You’re what, twenty-five? Twenty-nine, he corrects. This is as much dialogue as I’ve exchanged at the Dream. Ousmane tells me that he hopes to be rid of the Dream in two years tops. He’s going to Queens Community College, picking up required English and math classes on the way to hopefully landing a degree in hospitality. But that means you’ll be back at a place like the Dream, I tell him. Yeah, he says, but not at the cleaning crew. How about you? he asks. I don’t know, I tell him. I don’t have a plan right now. This is the gig for the moment. This is the gig, he repeats, but it’s not the plan? Paying rent is the plan, I say. I hear you, he replies. He turns to me just as he’s about to leave the room. Do you believe in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? he asks me. There is a small, shy smile that I meet with my own. I shake my head. He gives me a good-natured look of understanding before leaving.

  Quiet night. Same zombie routine. Soundtrack: cart wheels on plush carpet and, overhead, the pernicious air-conditioning giving the corridors and rooms the feel of a sealed vault, a funereal atmosphere abetted by the dimmed lighting of evening hours. Behind passed doors, barely a stir, not even the sound of engaged televisions. The one advantage of the night-to-late-night shift is that there are fewer room assignments and each one is a relatively luxurious pod of unrushed work. Nighttime is also when we attend to the public spaces like the rooftop lounge and the pool and the tiny gym, expected to be underpopulated, although of course the few who happen to be there are even more sensitive to being walked in upon. People chilling out, frazzled casualties of the New York spin cycle taking advantage of the privacy to reiterate their self-improvement mantras; pot smokers; cell-phone quarrelers, spittle-flying mad; not a few of these being tearful, tucking themselves into corners as soon as they hear us coming.

  Exiting the tunnel of work, no one else at the lockers. On the subway, a big black man asleep in the posture of some tree marsupial, head dropped, chin tucked into torso, obscuring his soft neck. In fact, the entire impressive bulk of him bed-soft, tenderized by weariness—what work does he do, something involving his hands, which are encased in thick black gloves, splayed out and resting on his knees? Maybe an all-nighter at some outer-borough hospital, mopping floors, hauling beds. A welder? A butcher? A furniture mover, a furniture maker? I could write a book about all the sleeping marsupials on the 4:00 a.m. subway cars of my very late nights, as I stumbled out of clubs and dens of gay iniquity in my twenties, and now ambling out of grown-up but still low-down-seeming work, in my forties. Adult men abandoned of defenses, rolled and rocked by the train cars but waking only when some inner switch has been tipped. Their faces, especially the open mouths of sleep, all say the same thing: being grown-up is such hard work.

  I get off in Queens, walk toward the monastery along sparsely lit streets, so quiet, not a passing car to stir the thick soup of solitude I’m wading through. Climb up the steep stairs, on some steps hearing the bone-on-bone grind of my left knee. Open the office door, turn on the ceiling fluorescent, one hand above the radiators to make sure the heat is hissing its song, though the room’s stuffiness is clue enough. Go to the bathroom and take a leak. Avoid the mirror above the sink while scrubbing my face and rinsing my mouth with tap water. Find a spot away from the Laurence grid and lie down. Call Henry and leave a message for him to bring toiletries tomorrow—And oh, by the way, I’m spending the night at the office above the monastery, so please don’t come too early.

  Heft a pile of papers from one of the boxes.

  Night falls over Berlin. A redundancy. As, especially at this time of year, the city is already dark by midafternoon. And in the so-called daytime the sun sits in a gray soup that effectively dims its power. Berlin is like one of those fantasylands you wrought from shoeboxes and stray cardboard and tinfoil as a boy; hastily put together and then abandoned unfinished, thrown over when your father brought home a fort or city assembled by industrial hands, Lego, say. A block ends midway in rubble in Berlin and the people, so recently freed from regimentation—West and East; free and forbidden—are happy enough to let the physical landscape speak for their internal ones. Let rubble stand in for rubble, everything is ramshackle improvisation. And let the incongruences pile up: art in World War II bunkers; discotheques and nightclubs in derelict factories; sex clubs in dungeons, basements, abandoned subway stations, underground places that Berlin abounds in, places of unending night. So much supposed to be open to scrutiny in the unified Berlin but really, still today, no shortage of hiding places—Hitler related, Stasi related; evil is not a theory or a notion or even a memory in this city, at least not in the conventional sense in which memory is used to suggest something to one’s back. In this city, memory has teeth. I go down these granite steps that have been bitten into by some machine, it looks like. Time is that machine. Also, probably, some guns, artillery. I am in the former East Berlin, which has more of these kinds of spaces, flexible nowheres colonized and provisionally converted by fly-by-night entrepreneurs, mostly from the West. It is one in the morning. Nothing starts in this town until then. I knock on a black-black door. So glossy that a vaporous version of me is in it. A slit in the door opens, a pair of eyes checking me out. I am let in. The stuffy smell of men, of poppers, greets my nose. I am wearing a baseball cap, a strategic kindness of shadows extending from its brim to disguise my middle-aged ugliness. Young studs let guys like these, like me, made all-purpose by the darkness, near them, to kneel before their groins and take their cocks in our mouths. Let us pray. Let us be grateful. And let them hear some American-accented English fall from my lips, these democracy-starved German beauties, and they are even more eager to move to the dark corner of the dungeon where I situate myself, lest some stray light should reveal the Midwestern college professor reality of me and puncture the erotic spell. Let us kneel. Slut, dirty old man, sexual tourist, AIDS spreader, venereal vermin, nasty fuck, nothing you can call me can outdo the names I answer to in my own head. I live for sex with young men in dark dungeons like this place tonight, where, upon being let in, I descend some more dimly lit steps, heading toward the throb of electro music and the gravitational tug of unseen men whose gyrations I can feel in this foyer space, beckoning, just a few more steps, and then, the lights find me, strobes that in one instant reveal bodies jumping up and down and knocking against each other, keeping bad time with the music, but this being Germany, who’s to say what good time is, and in the next retreat to cloak everyone in the most dubious of darknesses, hard-on darkness, where everyone is available for sex and amenable to one another as partners, no questions asked, no offer refused, so, quick, old man, go find the dungeon space, is that through this throng of so-called dancers, just move, let the bodies knock into you, a kind of preview of the orgiastic knocking that will fill up your immediate future, just follow the scent of poppers and, if you can hear it through this techno warfare, the slurping and groaning and thwack of fucking with or without condoms, and yes, there it is, oops, too eager and you miss the step down, you practically fall into the sunken pit, and here you are, settle, calm yourself, let your eyes adjust to the darkness, catching the sheen of sweaty flesh, the winking of belt buckles and buttons and zippers and, like a bat, attune your sonar to the clicks of buckles scraping
the ground, the heels and soles adjusting to the wooziness of pleasure or the shifting needed to accommodate the intercession of more bodies and mouths, and there, look at that guy, and by look you mean sense, because there’s not much, as practiced as your eyes are to such mystery and cloaking, to see, nothing more than parts that you assemble, in your mind’s eye, into some desirable whole, but who am I, undesirable as I am, to judge, I’ll take all comers, and the night is only just beginning and my heart is already as one with the techno beat.

  An hour or so later I’m awakened and I have to let my stupor run its course before the sound all around me settles into a more localized spot underneath the floorboards—or rather, spots, as it seems to be stereophonic, part choric, part machine. And then I realize where I am, and a beat after that, that I must have been nudged out of sleep by the monks, who are engaged in their early morning routine. They are chanting, not knowing that I’m above their heads, and when I finally fall asleep again, it’s to the image of their work below me as a series of animated rises and falls, like an ocean, and me as their buffeted passenger, smiling.

  The Blue Hour

  Raven Leilani

  The night her murderer entered purgatory, Leah’s house disappeared. She remembered the beginning of his facial composite making rounds on the news, the luxury of evening airwaves. In the composite, his mouth was closed. In person, you could not miss his teeth.

  Though the dead rarely reached a consensus on the state of their environment, during his entrance, it was summer. A day later, there was snow. When her house was intact, it was also prone to fluctuation. The drapes were always changing color, and the stairs sometimes spiraled overnight. Some things were ornamental. A recipe book she couldn’t open, a landline in the bedroom that rang whenever it rained. She found the receiver in the snow, and when she put it to her ear, a despairing or perhaps orgasmic voice said, Oh, God, and her murderer emerged from the snowdrift with the blueprint for her new house.

  While everything in purgatory came from memory, and so was fundamentally unreliable, when Joe appeared before her, she could not reconcile the discrepancies. Many of the details of her life had been lost over time. There were pictures she kept in the linen closet that had become negatives, and the house itself was a hypothesis, the hardwood and glass derived from amygdala and ardor alone, but the memory she had of him was fixed. He had a low gumline, which made his smile seem enormous, but she had never once seen this smile reach his eyes. He had a thing for Dylan, an indeterminable accent that skewed slightly southern, and his eyes, while blank, were conspicuously brown. But the man before her was old. He was feeble and losing his hair.

  “I have instructions,” he said, his age apparent in his voice. Leah wondered what things time would have done with her body if she had lived. The women in her family aged spectacularly, as in they did not age well, but she had wanted this for herself, to be sun beaten and made into braille, to be a woman who was also a record.

  “Do you remember me?”

  “Sure,” he said, offering her the blueprint.

  “I don’t need this many windows. There are no stars.”

  “There are no stars?” He put a hand over his face, and when she saw his concern over this, she had to turn away. A star was nothing. A cold projection that could not be touched. However, there were eight thousand nerve endings in the clitoris and twenty-seven bones in the human hand. She wanted to be there when he realized that beyond the death of the stars, the citizens of purgatory could not dream, taste, or bleed.

  He’d killed six women before he got to her. All were between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-seven, and all were black. Four were gone before it made the news. When the fifth one turned up in the woods, a prominent black minister held a vigil and said, The problem is that they don’t respect themselves. The first victim disappeared four days before her flight to Paris. In her last Facebook post, she went live and fed pink yarn into her braids. She rooted through a box of rainbow Kanekalon and said, Fuck American men. The third victim was going to school for pharmacology but did amateur burlesque on the side. In a grainy YouTube video of a studio show, she had on kneepads and introduced a cannoli into her act. The fifth victim taught kindergarten, practiced light Brujería, and sold hand-carved opal figurines. When they found her, she didn’t have any of her fingers. The news was happy to stoke the public appetite. Black parents destabilized by the camera’s eye and inarticulate in their grief. During this spree, Leah tried to stay off of the Internet. She was an anxious person and she felt both anonymous and specific enough to be next. Like most people, she had imagined her own funeral and worried about attendance. Unlike most people, she had been doing this frequently since she was eight. This feeling of inevitable catastrophe started with the family dog. There had been something wrong with his bones. In adulthood, she rose each morning and felt her breasts. She had water ionizers and T-cell boosters and the version of anorexia that was less about deprivation and more about compulsive exercise. Smoking weed made it worse, but somehow she was the outlier who could get hooked. The night Joe followed her home, she had smoked herself into a fugue.

  Because the seasons in purgatory were so abrupt and insusceptible to consensus, there were natural ironies built into the land. Frost and plenty, blueberries and crocuses cast in ice and long clouds of dismayed bees. There was an excavator parked in a field of lavender, and she watched as Joe cleared the snow and broke ground. The house was going to have three rooms. As they began to pour concrete and secure the batter boards, she watched him closely. He had aged, but in motion she saw the man she knew, the man who was taciturn and averse to cinema, who killed women with little fanfare in their own homes.

  In the suspended twilight, she understood the time by the calluses on her hands. It could’ve been hours, or perhaps days. They laid rebar and he came around with the lumber for the walls. He extended his hand for a corner stake and said, Seven, and it took her a moment to remember that this was what he called her instead of her name. She gave him what he asked for and resolved to say nothing, but as they finalized the foundation, she couldn’t hold her tongue.

  “My name is Leah,” she said, and he shrugged and went off into the snow. His indifference embarrassed her, and while he was gone she found better words. What she meant to say was that she was distinct, that she had been a person before he made her into a person who was on the news. Though there was a possibility her death didn’t make the news at all. After death, there was only conjecture, and so maybe no one noticed until she was late on rent, maybe the seventh kill was the point at which it became redundant, or maybe she was famous, the victim who had done very little with her terminal degree, who had written some regrettable poems the Internet would not let die, and who, on the night of her decapitation, was completely stoned.

  During the last year of her life, Leah began a relationship with her dentist. He was a kind, professional man who said she had the most extreme case of bruxism he had ever seen, and once they determined that she was grinding her teeth while she slept, they began to trade accounts of their dreams. He took an impression of her mouth, and on their first date, he presented her with a bespoke, laminate mouthguard. It turned out that they were not attracted to each other, but that he felt great concern for her dental nerves, and that she had some very sublimated issues about the functionality of the mouth, which had manifested in her teens as a tongue piercing and an appetite for chalk dust and public fellatio, which she optimistically branded as an oral fixation. But the grinding went on, and the dreams worsened. She was dying, her parents were dying, and she couldn’t get into this exclusive discotheque that was suspended in space. That she had not been able to dream since arriving in purgatory was a relief. But after they put down the flooring, after Joe disappeared into the snow, she began to dream again.

  The next morning, Joe came with further instructions. They needed additional material for framing and had to venture into town. The frost had let up and the season was slowly inching into sprin
g, but the town was an architectural disaster, a quaint Frankenstein’s monster with five gazebos and an arching tenement with spongy walls. The citizens of purgatory could not collaborate. They tried in earnest to make their memories touch, and out of this dissonance came chaos. However, there were trees. The orchard at the center of town was the only thing that was static, and its offerings were diverse and pristine. Granny Smiths, Pink Ladies, Galas. Joe retrieved his ax and started on one of the trees. Again, he appeared familiar and unfamiliar, the man who entered her home still inside this old man’s body, which was at once degraded and spry, strong enough to restrain a string of women, and now to fell this tree. The leaves shuddered under the force of the blade, and Leah receded, disturbed by what she felt, which was not dramatic as far as feelings went, but which was still a departure from the nothing she had become accustomed to. She picked an apple, stuffed it into her coat, and returned to where Joe was working on a few more trees.