Fearful Symmetries (23 page)

“It’s a dog,” she’d say, groggy and angry. “Jesus God, William. You woke me up to see a goddamn
dog
? Do you even
know
what time it is?”

She wouldn’t see what I see. She isn’t meant to.

The dog that might be a black lab tilts its head to one side, and, on cue, a long shadow, cast by nothing I can see, pirouettes across the concrete. The dog lies down and rests its head between its paws. The shadow dances for me.

I force myself to look back at my notebook, and I don’t look up again until the train is moving once more and there’s nothing to see in the window but my reflection, superimposed over the blur of a North Carolina night.

A few days before we leave for New Orleans, I’m walking along Newbury Street at dusk. I hear someone call my name, and when I turn to see who, there’s an instant or two of vertigo. An instant or two when the familiar cacophony of the crowded sidewalk shrinks down to a whisper, and instead of exhaust fumes and hot asphalt I smell jessamine blossoms. I recognize the sweet aroma of the flowers because I’ll smell it—
for the first time
—when I stand with my face pressed to the bars of an iron gate on St. Peter Street. On Newbury Street, I smell jessamine, and I see a large black dog padding away from me, snaking through the pedestrians. It isn’t on a leash, and no one else seems to even notice it. Then the dog is gone, as is the smell of the flowers, and all is ordinary again.

Over breakfast, I tell Anna what I saw when the train stopped in Salisbury. Well, I tell her about the dog, not about the shadow. I haven’t told anyone about the shadow.

“Maybe it lives at the station,” she says.

“Lives there?”

“You know. The way some shops have cats. Like that. A train dog. Well, a train
station
dog.”

“Maybe,” I say, picking at a dry croissant I suspect was baked days before. I’ve smeared it with butter and strawberry jelly, but it stubbornly remains the Sahara Desert of croissants. “Probably.”

Anna smiles and sips her steaming tea. The server pauses at our booth to ask if we need anything else, if everything’s okay; I resist making a crack about the desiccated croissant. I have a habit of making snarky comments to waiters and what have you, and it drives Anna nuts.

“We’re fine,” she says. “Thank you.”

When the server’s moved on to the next booth, I pinch off a piece of the croissant and frown at it.

“Maybe Black Shuck’s moved to Salisbury,” Anna says to me. “Maybe—”

“Black Shuck?”

“You know. Ghost dogs? Hellhounds? Barghests?”

“Barghests?” I drop the pinched-off piece of croissant onto my plate. “You lost me.”

“You truly do need to read a book every now and then,” she sighs. “You write the things, the least you could do is read a few.”

I wipe my hands on a paper napkin and lean back, watching as we rush past some bit of small-town trackside squalor. House trailers. Rusted cars precariously balanced on uneven stacks of concrete blocks. A scrubby brown lawn with a bizarre arrangement of life-sized plastic deer.

Meanwhile, in New Orleans, I peer through the wrought-iron gate on St. Peter, and the stingy breeze off the river stirs the banana leaves, lazily shuffling them about like the wings of enormous beetles. A woman is singing now, and the shadow sways in time to the “Basin Street Blues.”

Were the gate unlocked, I might find the courage to open it. I might also dance in that garden, with only a shade for a partner. Only an eclipse, and my own body’s eclipse melding in a ghostly
pas de deux
. Oh, there’s a word I haven’t dared to use until now:
ghostly
. But wasn’t it, that night? Even if I am not claiming the presence of an actual specter, in any conventional sense, surely this is a haunting. A haunted courtyard that’s haunted me. A bruised place or moment that has, in turn, bruised me.

On our way home, Lake Pontchartrain also burns, not by sunrise but by sunset. The
Crescent
speeds across that low span above marshes and then the big water proper. Our compartment is an even-numbered compartment, so the windows face westward out across nothing at all but the low, flammable waves. The incandescent waves. This fire is not white morning, but the red-orange herald of twilight. I take a few photos with my Canon digital, and Anna warns me that it’s terrible for the lens, aiming it directly into the sun that way. But I do, regardless, my sad-ass excuse for living dangerously. The sun is so bright and so much heat is filling up our compartment that it’s very quickly becoming uncomfortable. Anna wants to move to the one across the aisle; it’s empty, after all, and she can’t imagine anyone will care. I say no, this is something I’ve never seen before, something I might never see again. She scowls and doesn’t look at the lake. A tourist would gawk like I am gawking, and she is never a tourist.

The conductor—he must be a conductor—is moving through the sleeper car, letting people know we’re only about forty-five minutes from arrival. Our door is open, and he pauses and points out across Pontchartrain.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” he asks.

Just then, we pass the remnants of what was once a pier, but is now nothing but a series of rotting pilings jutting unevenly from the water. There is another ruined pier after it, and then another. They put me in mind of broken, rotten teeth; I photograph them.

“First time in New Orleans?” he asks me, and I tell him that yes, it is. He smiles, then jabs a thumb over his shoulder, back towards that unoccupied compartment that Anna wanted to move to.

“From that side, you can see I-10 and the Twin Spans. Took a hell of a beating in the storm.”

I don’t have to ask which storm.

“Surge pulled the segments apart, yanked them loose and tossed them around like Lego blocks. Hard to believe a thing like that if you didn’t see the aftermath. Fixed up good as new now, though.”

I snap another photo, a chalk-white egret wading through a patch of cattails growing beside the tracks. The photo comes out nothing but a blur.

“So, you guys hear anything odd last night?” he asks. He’s watching the lake, too, eyes shielded with his left hand. Anna wants to know what he means by odd.

“Had a couple of passengers say they heard something moving around, up and down the aisle.”

“Something?” Anna asks him. “Not someone?”

“That’s what they said. One of them said she thought maybe it was a dog, maybe. We do allow some types of service animals. Seeing-eye dogs, but they aren’t allowed to wander around like that. This lady, she said it was snuffling at her door the way a dog sniffs about. Said it sounded like a real big dog, too.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” I lie. “But I’m a very sound sleeper,” I also lie.

“I didn’t hear it, either,” Anna tells the conductor, and I assume she isn’t lying. She wouldn’t. It isn’t like her. “Rules or no rules, maybe someone’s dog got loose.”

“Maybe,” he says. “Asked around, of course, and no one would own up to it. But I figure they probably wouldn’t.”

I find it remarkable, even now, how so unremarkable a matter can strike me as simultaneously mundane and unnerving. But he’d said some
thing
, not some
one
. And I
had
heard it, and what I heard I knew it wasn’t a dog, same as I knew the black dog I’d seen back in Salisbury, the shadow’s dancing partner, had been something
more
than a dog.

I sound like a madman. I know that. I don’t believe that I am, but I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who reads this the right to doubt my sanity.

After Salisbury, after I finally drift off to an uneasy sleep, and not too long before dawn somewhere in South Carolina, the snuffling noise the conductor will ask about wakes me. I lay very still, listening. Some
thing
brushes against the wall of our compartment with enough force that I can tell it’s some
thing
larger than a seeing-eye dog. Unless maybe the blind are using Irish Wolfhounds these days. My back is to the door, and I don’t turn to see if there’s any
thing
to see. It lingers outside our compartment for, I guess, five minutes or so. At least, I listen to it for about that long; I can’t say how long it may have been there while I was sleeping. And then it makes a grunting noise and moves along. Its footfalls are heavier than I’d expect from a dog.

The snuffling thing woke me from a dream of the dog I saw on Newbury Street.

“Well, you two enjoy your visit,” says the conductor, and he smiles and leaves us with the blazing lake.

The night after I find the black gate and the courtyard, I take another walk, absolutely determined not to return to the garden and its waltzing shadow. I head down Royal and turn north at the intersection with Conti, turning away from Jackson Square and the river. I follow Conti Street past Bourbon and turn right at Dauphine, and by then I’m far enough from the courtyard that I’ve managed—at least consciously—to stop chewing over the events of the evening before. I have the shop windows and buskers, instead. I have a trio of drag queens—fellow tourists—who stop me and want to know how to get to a club called Oz. I have no idea whatsoever. They flirt with me, then wander off in search of the Yellow Brick Road. I watch them go, all platform heels and sequins and wigs, and I’m thinking,
Where does a train track begin and end?
Though clearly it is a
line
, does this one begin in Manhattan, or does it, instead, begin in New Orleans? Isn’t this as relative to direction as determining the beginning of a circle?

I don’t think a mathematician would say so.

But it seems that way to me.

A loop. An entirely unconventional Möbius strip, yes? Should I happen to
shout
within a three-dimensional Möbius, that sound would travel round and round and round. And if I shout along a straight
line
, the sound may echo back. So,
returning
to me either way.

A shout. Or dogs and shadows and unseen things that prowl the aisles of sleeper cars.

Over breakfast, on the way home, I say to Anna, “You never did tell me if you found that tomb you were looking for in Greenwood.” I’m trying, trying, trying not to think about my dream of the black gate. Fortunately, Anna would almost always rather talk about her work than anything else. Sometimes, like now, I use this to my advantage, though it’s a quality about her I greatly admire. She still has the sort of passion for her art that I lost a long, long time ago. She’s said it annoys her that I never want to discuss my books and short fiction.

“The 1861 Edwards and Bennett,” she nods. “Yeah, I found it. God, it’s in beautiful shape, that one. Exquisite craftsmanship”

“So, it was a very profitable trip for you.”

“Yes, indeed. Very, very. I’m thinking I may actually be able to get a gallery interested in an exhibition. Well, I was
hoping
that when I set up the trip, but don’t count your chickens, right? Anyway, I sent Carlotta some shots, and she agrees we could land a show. She’s excited.”

Carlotta is Anna’s agent, and is, by the way, a better agent than mine.

“Then at least I haven’t suffered this abominable croissant in vain,” I say, and she laughs.

“Your sacrifice will be duly noted, Brave William. As a matter of fact, I hereby dub thee
Sir
William of Mass Ave,” and Anna picks up her butter knife and leans across the table. She taps a flat side of the blade against my right shoulder, my forehead, and then my left shoulder. Several people in the dining car notice and they laugh.

I sit up straighter and bow. “You are too gracious, My Lady. I shall uphold thy honor and my knightly vows, never flinching in the face of perilous pastries.”

“
Fais ce que tu veux, le bon sire.
”

More laughter.

The laughter in the courtyard is high and shrill.

Despite my intent to avoid the gate, here I am again. Didn’t I turn
right
on Conti, turning north,
away
from the river, away from that black wrought-iron gate? I’m absolutely fucking certain that I did. But here I am, regardless. I would have had to turn east—onto Dauphine or Burgundy—then turn south onto St. Peter. So, the French Quarter has gone Möbius, or, lost in thought, I blundered right back to the exact place I intended not to go. Yeah, I know the latter is the more likely, but I can’t help believing the former is what actually happened.

The air carrying the laughter to me is so bloated with the cloyingly sweet smell of wisteria and bougainvillea that I cover my mouth and nose. I think I’d gag, otherwise. Wasn’t it a pleasant, soothing smell last night? But the voices are the same, and the laughter, and the jazz.

The woman singing.

The shadow’s there, swaying to the music. And if I don’t want to be here, why don’t I turn and walk away? Never mind the question of how I got here, leaving would be simple enough. But I stand with my face pressed to those black bars painted black, watching as the shadow sways and swoops and dips.

There’s a single gunshot then. I know the sound of a gunshot, a pistol shot, and this isn’t a car backfiring. It isn’t fireworks. It’s a gunshot.

The shadow stops dancing. Wherever that party I can’t see is going on, a woman has begun screaming and men are cursing. The trombones and clarinets and singer have all fallen silent, but I can hear glass breaking.

“Jesus,” a man growls. “Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.”

I’m not alone on the sidewalk. Other people are passing the gate, but if any one of these passerby heard the gunshot, or the screams, they’re busy minding their own business, pretending they heard nothing at all.

The sky above Pontchartrain is on fire.

The blade of the butter knife is cold against my skin.

“William, you’ve not heard a word that I’ve said.”

The sky is on fire.

“Have you?”

The garden gate is locked against me.

So, turn the little key.

A few days after we return from New Orleans, when Anna and I have each gone our separate ways until the next time she asks me to accompany her on a trip. Or calls to ask if I’d like to have dinner with her. Or see a movie. A few nights after we return from New Orleans, I wake from a dream that smelled of wisteria and jessamine and the faintest acrid stink of gunpowder. The shadow is dancing across the walls of my bedroom, and I can hear the snuffling sound, the sound from the train that
wasn’t
a black dog, just outside my bedroom door.