Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  There were five of them, all dressed in white. We didn’t recognize any of them, which was odd because, in our wanderings, we’d clocked a lot of the missionaries in this city. Two of the women and one of the men appeared Chinese; the other man and woman were foreigners. Building gaps channeled yellow, purple, and green slashes and dots onto the blank screens of their suits and dresses.

  “Lovely night,” the same woman, the foreign one, repeated. “Are you children lost? It is getting late.”

  “We’re fine,” I said. “We’re on our way home.”

  “That is wonderful. Do you have a moment to hear about our Lord?”

  “No,” Puppy said.

  “What a shame. Are you certain you do not have even a minute to hear about how Jesus sacrificed himself to save you?”

  “No,” Puppy said more loudly, but to no avail. The five of them had, as if through teleportation, somehow closed the distance between us. In their hands they carried colorful leaflets, which they held out and then kept out for so long that it became rude for us not to take them. On mine was a line drawing of an angel with a large key ring, standing in front of a gate. The gate had what looked like thunderbolts coming out of it to show that it was shiny. “The City of God,” the title read.

  “The lighting here is quite dim,” the woman said. “Why not join us around the corner for some tea and cookies? You can read the material there. Your young friend looks like she needs the rest.” She gestured toward Rabbit.

  It was true, Rabbit had looked better. If we didn’t stop to rest, we might never get to the monster. We glanced at one another and took a silent vote: yes, yes, yes, cookies.

  Puppy took a deep breath. “Fine,” she said. “A minute.”

  As if connected through the ears by a single, invisible antenna, all five of them tilted their heads to the left at the same time and then stopped at the same angle. “Wonderful,” they said.

  We followed them out of the tunnel into a wider alley. A couple of people were milling about in the alley, but they seemed not to notice us. The missionaries waved us into an incandescent white unit that was maybe four strides from end to end. Metal folding chairs, also white, took up most of the space. On one wall, they’d outlined a cross with pink neon tubes, which burned the shape into the retina the way a UFO burned circles into crops.

  We sat. They passed out cookies on a porcelain tray and tea in Styrofoam cups. Only Mouse ate the cookies. In this light, the distinctions among them became clearer. The foreign man and woman wore matching glowing pendants whose contents appeared to be almost moving, flecks of silver white swirling against a dark-blue background. The Chinese man was older than the rest by a couple of decades. The two remaining women might have been twins—clones, really, because twins usually sought to distinguish themselves from each other, even if it was just with a bow in the hair or an overtheatrical laugh. These two dressed the same, moved the same, perched at the edge of their seats with their hands folded in their laps the same.

  “What have you children heard about heaven?” the foreign woman asked.

  “Angels playing harps, bright,” Ox said.

  “That is correct,” she said. “What else?”

  We shrugged.

  “There are many earthly cities,” she began. “Some are poor and crumbling, whereas others are grand and beautiful. But even the grandest of cities cannot rival the grandeur of the City of God.”

  She opened a photo album that one of the twins had passed her and flipped it to a colored illustration of heaven. It showed white archways and fountains, unbroken blue sky. Little people with wings raised their arms to something we couldn’t see.

  “Heaven is not just a beautiful place,” she continued, “but a state of communion with God and with everyone else there. Can you imagine that? Please, try. Imagine yourself far away from the grime and noise of this city. Imagine being connected to something so much bigger than you.”

  “I feel rested,” Puppy said. “Time to go.”

  The woman put out a hand to prevent Puppy from standing. “No, no, take a moment. It doesn’t matter what kind of place you live in here on earth. If you place your faith in Jesus, you will be saved and you will be granted a place in—”

  “What is it with you people?” Puppy yelled. She shoved the woman’s hand aside and, with a spitefulness I hadn’t known her capable of, dashed her cup of tea against the white linoleum. She marched out, and we followed, more out of confusion than solidarity.

  Actually, I pitied the missionaries a little. If tonight was our last chance to save this city’s monster, it was their last chance to save this city’s souls. When they arrived in Kowloon decades ago, they must have seen laid out before them their life’s work. So many people wandering in spiritual and physical darkness. They’d knotted their fates with ours, picking up addicts in alleyways and trying to get them clean, rankling the triads in the process. And tomorrow, they were going to be driven out like the rest of us.

  “We should have at least let that woman finish her speech,” I said to Puppy once we were back on the monster’s trail. “Rabbit could have used the extra rest.”

  “Now you care about Rabbit’s health?” she muttered.

  Ox trotted up to the two of us. “Why are you so mad?” he asked Puppy. “Those people just wanted to help.”

  “They want to tell us what to do,” Puppy said.

  “Grow up, Ox,” I said. “The only reason any of this is happening is because people like your parents listen to everything the outsiders say.”

  “Leave Ox’s parents out of this,” Puppy snapped at me. “They did what they had to for their family. Besides, what were we supposed to do against the government?”

  “I don’t know. Something. Anything.”

  “Oh, so it’s my family’s fault too? We didn’t try hard enough?”

  “You guys?” Rabbit said.

  We turned around just in time to see Rabbit’s knees buckle. She folded softly to the ground. We checked her over: she hadn’t hit her head as far as we could tell, but her knees were scraped up from the landing.

  “I’m OK,” she said.

  Ox turned to glare at me. “This is your fault.”

  “I didn’t know this was going to happen,” I said.

  “Forget this stupid city,” Ox said, helping Rabbit up. “We can explore the new place when we get there. It’ll have a better monster.”

  “Haven’t you figured it out yet?” I said. “I’m not going to the new place either. There won’t be a ‘we’ anymore.”

  Ox’s eyes widened. “Oh.”

  I hadn’t told them because I didn’t think I needed to. My mother wasn’t exactly the quiet type. Judging by their faces, Puppy and Mouse had already guessed. Even Rabbit appeared unruffled, though she might have just been woozy. Ox stood there, opening and closing his mouth as if he were chewing cud. This night couldn’t get worse, I thought.

  Then we saw the chalk mark.

  I hurled my flashlight on the ground. “Damn it, Mouse, we’ve been going in a circle!”

  “You lied about the monster, didn’t you?” Ox said to Mouse. “Liar. Liar, liar, liar.”

  “Shut up!” Mouse cried. “You guys always make fun of me. I hate you.” He ran off. No one chased after him.

  “I guess we should head back,” I said after a couple of minutes or so. My chest hurt. I didn’t want this to be our curtain call, the five of us wandering in the dark, with nothing to remember us by.

  Because if we were being honest with ourselves, the idea sounded crazy. How was it possible that, in the densest city on earth, where the sighs and coughs of sleeping neighbors duetted like shakers and rattles at a parade, there would be a giant monster that no one had ever discovered? By all logic, our story should have ended here.

  Suddenly we heard Mouse’s voice from a distance. “Wait, wait, I found the path! I know how to get there!”

  We ran toward his voice; he met us halfway. Even Rabbit rallied. We squeezed between b
uildings, the backs of our arms chafing against concrete. We swung from laundry pole to laundry pole across mountains of trash. We prowled over balconies and wriggled under dangerously low-hanging electric lines. Finally Mouse stopped. We followed him out of the tunnel into a cavern bigger than we’d known possible, so wide and deep we couldn’t see the ends.

  Maybe no one would ever believe us, maybe some part of us didn’t even believe what was happening, the way no one in the future would ever believe what it was like to live in this city, with all the noise and the music, the darkness and the coruscating neon, the gambling dens and Christian missions and temples that smelled like burnt paper money and joss. But we were there, and there the monster was: coiled, a translucent white, with a mesh-like pattern on its skin that rippled silver when the angle was right. It might have been a lizard or a snake, this creature that had always been with us.

  I reached for Puppy’s hand. She took it and held on.

  The monster looked pained, tired. From its open mouth came low, regular hisses, less like warnings and more like attempts to breathe. Its eye, the one visible to us, had clouded over, an expanse of unbroken pale blue as if there were sky behind it, as if the monster contained within the walls of its body heaven.

  “We’re too late,” Rabbit said. She started crying, then Ox did too, then Puppy. I was doing my best not to follow suit. But Mouse was squinting at something. He crept closer to the monster, which seemed to recognize him because it squiggled closer in return. Then it uncoiled itself to reveal a single silver-white egg about the size of a newborn child.

  “We need to keep it warm!” Puppy said. “I read that reptile eggs have to be kept warm!”

  Ox immediately shrugged off his overshirt. Mouse stepped forward, and, kneeling next to the monster, gently wrapped the egg in Ox’s shirt before placing it in my arms. Rabbit tiptoed up to me and carefully wound her jade necklace—Auntie Lai’s jade—around the bundle. Together, we carried it into the night.

  In the Next Night

  Gillian Conoley

  In agitation along sleep’s surface

  dreams the monster, the angular, the slimy, the anything goes, the corpse

  who strokes the tigers with rather weak jaws

  in a jump cut, on an icy blue couch, red queen

  on mute–

  the nearly taken, the just-about-to-escape voices caught midstream

  say they do not want the story to end when what they mean is

  how do we separate

  the next night from its screwed-in

  light, the weariness of fearing a man in the dark comes a blade out of nowhere

  while visionaries we carry like pepper spray

  play hangman, visit solitaire,

  clear clouds off the moon

  so we can see our lady weep, our boy–

  genitalia gently shaped into other genitalia

  the brain fluid in its cave each to their own needs

  and the old wandering in black robes, opossums, the star magnolia

  stilling, trembling, coyotes, foxes,

  rats, red and blue states commingled into a silvery waxy balm

  with ocher highlights and peach

  undertones, a cosmogony

  grown distant, unconstituted,

  darkness materializing

  until every house–if there is a house–

  becomes more a faint shed in an interplanetary dust, apothecary-like, something it

  would take

  a fluoroscope to see–

  And the women weep because they have been violated

  and not for the first time, and the men clench through what they have done

  and the men who did not do it and did not not do it

  learn to stand next to the women

  a shoulder-to-shoulder thing and the women and the men

  who had been violated get so exhausted they lie down to spoon

  with all who have been violated the women who did it

  The softest of sheets fall

  A clef of music occurs

  Images (almond soap, tea tree oil) tossed like

  wash on wash, clean laundry on top of dirty.

  Fascism, facial, fascism, facial,

  requiring all the oxygen would inevitably become an elegiac outcome for the human.

  Storying all night and dead asleep all day Scheherazade said

  she did not want to finish when what she meant was

  stay, I am a spirit just coffining up his dream timer.

  Day done, we sweep

  our clippings from a desk. no end.

  near to God. a finish of the finish on a finish in the balm.

  in the great chain of unbroken events, nothing–

  no end. one voice beside another. a chain,

  a pulling at one end makes a movement

  on the other.

  I am only a howl of wind,

  no one to make afraid, stay.

  Anosognosia

  Paul Park

  —For John Crowley

  I don’t sleep much except during the day and I work at night, my habit for several years. In autumn in this northern climate, the dark extends its arms a little longer each day. The sky is still black in November when Maggie gets up, and I am at my desk in the corner of the room. When it’s hard for me to do my work, as now, instead I watch her as she sleeps, her lips pushed out of shape against the pillow, her face soft and indistinct, functioning at that moment as a mnemonic device, other faces, other rooms.

  Just a circle of light under the desktop lamp, making the red lacquer surface appear wet. She’s in shadow. It’s still dark when she gets up, takes a shower. She is a beautiful woman and I love watching her, the efficiency with which she lays out certain garments, her ironic expression in the mirror as she makes up her face. I can see into the bathroom from where I sit. She’s not paying attention to me. Is it any wonder she gets things wrong? She’s groggy from sleep.

  After some time, the advantages of marrying a younger woman fade from the mind. But it’s worth reminding yourself at certain moments: Maggie dressing for work, reaching over her shoulder to zip up a yellow dress, her tongue in the corner of her mouth. Maggie tugging the fabric into place over her sleek thigh. Maggie with one foot on a stool, fastening a strap over her instep. Maggie with a pearl earring, both hands pinching at a single lobe. She is aware and not aware. Always you have to remind yourself that the tricks you use to seem attentive and engaged, other people use them too, while their minds like yours are buzzing with a thousand things. “Well, a psychosomatic condition is still a condition, right?”

  “It’s not the same,” I say.

  “Don’t get mad,” she says, choosing her words poorly. “I mean you’ve told me about the kinds of questions doctors ask about these things after an accident. Psychiatrists and their surveys.”

  We are discussing the article that I am writing. This is some of what I have so far:

  A paralytic lies in bed thinking she’s too tired to walk across the room. A blind man complains the light is too dim for him to read the newspaper. These disabilities are real. But the lack of knowing is separate from that, the anosognosia, the result of an injury or else a deterioration. …

  I had wanted to describe the causes and effects. But something kept going wrong. What would it feel like, I wondered, not to know something indispensable about yourself? Exasperated, in that early morning before dawn, I got into an argument with Maggie, something that came up out of nothing. I needed a distinction between what I was talking about and simple denial, which she failed to see.

  When I was forty-nine and she was twenty-four, it was possible for me to think that I could make her happy, especially since she had pursued me with such stubbornness. Ten years later I was no longer convinced, mostly because of physical alterations that I hide from her. I have the type of sharp wasp features that work fine for a long time but then turn rapidly into a skull. I have kept my hair but now wonder about how to restore some color, a
formerly unthinkable notion. In my defense, the original shade of chestnut always struck me as artificial, especially when matched with pale or peeling skin.

  I was once athletic, which means my joints now are stiff and brittle with arthritis, particularly when I’ve been sitting for a long time. Now I get up from my desk and hobble to the bathroom. But I imagine her contemplating my backside from where she stands, appraising the imaginary dent in the back of my head.

  My work, which she once admired, presents a version of the same decay. As for sex, I take a tablet of sildenafil citrate. I divide it in half with a razor blade. I don’t like to admit these things. In boys’ adventure fiction one encounters a recurring device, the fortress defended by a waning garrison until its defenses crumble all at once.

  I wonder if there might be jealousy in store for me. As a prophylactic measure I have started an affair with a senior editor in the publishing house where Maggie works. I met her at a party and then later at my gym, after dark. Sometimes I am obliged to take a full sildenafil tablet and schedule both women on the same day, which saves me money. A man’s life after a certain point is entirely a process of erection management, as my father once advised me. Entirely? I take that back. It’s sad, he conceded in a moment of candor.

  After Maggie leaves, I watch the light fill the long east window. Later, I’ll pull the curtains, turn off the lamp. But I dread the moment when I lie down and close my eyes, my mind assailed by images as clear and crisp as photographs, one after the other, as if I’m shuffling through the pictures in a Zip drive transferred to my phone. Here is one, posed as if by a professional cinematographer, yet with the urgency of something captured through a voyeur’s telephoto: Maggie at a table in the back room at Chez Guillaume, everything white—evening gown, tablecloth, teeth, candles, Russian. I myself no longer drink.