Stories From the Plague Years (37 page)

I didn’t see that sunset.

Pulling the sled, I came to Aunt Louise’s home. Crispin was the only one to greet me, leaving the blood-jeweled snow on the porch where he crunched mouse bones to wrap himself around my legs. A note from Justine and Janice, written in the shorthand of the wards, told me that everyone in our household had gone to gather fuel from the abandoned lawns near the fallen overpasses, where no snipers or home-defenders would be. I fell into my bed still in my coat, and knew from the stray hairs on and the scent embedded in the pillow that Justine had slept there while I was gone.

I woke to the smell of smoke,
pure
smoke from a wood fire, not poisoned by fumes of human blood, hair and fat. The bills that had been in my pocket were gone, and I felt panic at what I might have done while Justine or Janice pulled the money from my coat as I slept gripping my gun beneath my pillow.

A plate on my nightstand dusted with soda cracker crumbs told me I’d woken and eaten. I had no memory of it. I touched a dim awareness I’d had . . . of being comforted by the sounds of sniper fire, that in my half-dreaming mind sounded like the fall of smiths’ hammers in a stable.

The silence told me I was alone (without even Crispin for company, since he’d have cried from the hallway at my stirring). I stripped and walked to where the fire I smelled burned in the yard. The insulated gloves and tongs I used to lift flagstones from the coals and drop them hissing into our cedar tub were stained from the times we’d used them for cooking shanks in the pits we’d dug in the summer. While the stones warmed the water, I scrubbed with snow, burnishing myself with the flush of a healthy man; the snow was clean . . . too close to the factories that were now crematoria to be stained by human soot, the way a man standing right under a fountain might not be hit by the spray. I washed in heat and cold until I felt faint, dried myself with a towel warmed by the fire.

Duck eggs, bought from a vendor or stolen from the nest, waited for me in the kitchen . . . along with a loaf of Justine’s bread, oven-warm in the center, and mare’s milk poured through pine branches and left by the stove to set. I’d slept long enough for the food to be bought on the black market the morning after my return, long enough for someone in this house to brave snipers near the center of town and return with food and fuel for the tub and stove, long enough for Justine’s bread to rise and be baked and for the milk to turn to a rich
qvark
.

No longer feral for being washed and fed, I wondered if Justine could still love me even as I heard her tread behind me, and felt the placing of her cool hand on the still bath-warm skin at the base of my neck. She took me in her arms as I rose, and as I crossed the threshold of her gaze into the one home I’ve ever known, I knew that she knew that I’d wounded my soul. And that she forgave me for marring something she loved.

I didn’t cry with her as we lay in bed. Crying is a flowing outward. I folded inward. Justine let me fall . . . and so pulled me from my hurt. Scarred, but healed. I knew I could come home, because the best part of me had never left. Justine and I rebuilt the quiet inner spaces that Allen and I had razed while we starved.

When next I shaved, I used the shard I kept wrapped in my pocket as a talisman, so I’d never forget what I’d survived. I barely nicked myself; more blood flowed from me because of the new toothbrush I found in the bathroom, which scrubbed red yolk from my gums in a way that made me look like a dying man spitting the milk of his ulcer. No razor has touched my face since.

My face smooth and resting on Justine’s breast, I asked her what had been the colors of the sunset the night I’d returned. She stroked my hair in rhythm with her speech.

“Burgundy . . . and a kind of ivory. There was green, too. The kind you see in marble, sometimes.”

I love her deeply for never asking me why I needed to know.

A mirror of steel is oddly silent. . . .

Yet what of a mirror that’s fallen mute? What’s the nature of that quiet, that shocks you to deafness? Is it the void of a retreating echo? The quiet after a gunshot? Is the silence odd because it’s really your twin who’s now dumb, the self that you can’t hear, yet with whom you speak in the language that’s too fragile to bear the weight of uttered words?

I never spoke to Allen again. After what we’d shared, I couldn’t, any more than nerves can speak to a severed limb. I waited to know what happened to Allen, and to me, while we roamed in exile. Spring came, as did barges heavy with crops from upriver and seafaring ships that didn’t bring new plague strains along with cargoes of fruit and grain. The Charles spoke as its frozen sheets cracked and icebreakers made paths for flatboats that brought livestock to the Magazine Beach slaughterhouses. Among the stalls of the open-air Cambridgeport book-market, I saw a boy whom I knew to be Allen’s cousin, who wore colors of mourning that were burgundy and ivory . . . and the kind of green that hides in marble, sometimes. I led him away from the beehive hum of writers and poets reciting their works to potential readers to a spot by the shore, where the most distracting sound was the blows of rivermen cutting blocks of the Charles to cart to icehouses in midtown and to fish markets by the harbour. Under the buds of a willow tree, he told me that I’d had by proxy a brother whom I’d never meet, even though I knew his face, and his spirit, with an intimacy I’d shared with very few.

I’ve played in comedies about twins as separated as two drops in the ocean who seek each other, and who are reunited. I’ve made burlesque of mistaken identity and farce of confusion. I know now that it’s a great loss that there are no tragedies or mourning plays about twins. No farce can speak of the language that is rejoined when two who’ve shared a womb meet again. The language of twins is urgent as the language of your heart-beat. Words are the lies we place between a thing and what it is, like when we say that
lightning
is
flashing
, even though we know lightning can’t exist without a flash . . . any more than you can exist without that which is reflected in burnished metal. Maybe this realization, not a sword, killed the Gorgon.

Allen had been cut from himself, as cruelly as language cuts lightning from its flash. I was scarred the moment that he was cut, burdened with a
wyrd
that was as inescapable as the birthmark of a seer. Allen’s twin brother had been born simple, choked into that state by the birth-cord of his brother. He could speak with Allen as he could with no one else, his speech as limited as that of the street kids who lurked on the peripheries of the wards who’d cut themselves to be let in and treated, the kids who were raised feral, who didn’t fall to that state, but were stunted to it, cut off from human voices and human touch . . . so much so, it was rumoured that some had been raised by dogs.

Allen and his brother shared language the same way they’d shared womb’s blood, and so had bled into each other. I, sharing a crucible far crueler, had bled into Allen. His brother . . . frightened . . . dying of fever, and maybe not knowing what dying truly was, reached out to Allen, through whom I’d felt Death as it took Allen’s brother, my twin, whose name I’ll never speak, because I’d “heard” his name through the language that is felt, not spoken. Through the silent language of steel mirrors. By touching that dying boy I’d felt the soul of one who was becoming a ghost, the presence of a shade-not-yet-dead who’d followed Allen and me into the dead lands we walked so the ones we loved could live. The boy had died in delirium, between two worlds, between dreams and waking. From there, he’d called to his brother and summoned me into a dusk the mere sight of which changed my sight, the way that vision of our world as seen through a birth caul changes the sight of a child born with one draped on his face.

A mirror of steel is silent, as are the ghosts I still feel each day as I walk streets that plague has emptied. Ghosts, like reflections in steel, have only the voices we give them, even though what they speak is theirs alone.

I look at myself in a mirror of steel, newly shorn by a glass blade, unable to bear the vertigo inspired by the too-slow, counter-clock swirl of stubble and glycerine foam down the drain that will remake stubble, dead skin and foam into food that I will not eat. I pushed the basin flush with the wall, then activated the spray of water that streamed too thinly and slowly to truly be called a shower.

The droplets fell so that I saw through them as if through tears wrung by gusts of bitter cold. The ceramic walls of the train could never know the voices of ghosts such as I’d been taught to hear by Allen’s brother. No ghost’s voice could be heard over the train’s engines and the spin of its turbines that kept my feet too lightly pressed to the floor. No ghost could ever walk from such dim shadows as those cast by artificial light, amid hallways and corners that, even while they were constructed, had never been touched by sunlight.

Washed for the first time after half a year of sleep, I walked back to my compartment and spoke a
kaddish
into those voiceless spaces for the brother I’d lost and whom I’d never know, and through whom I’d tasted the bread and the prayer of his deathbed Communion.

In these voiceless spaces, what voice have you, that we may speak in this way? What prayers in what language shall we offer as mirrors silent to each other?

Irwin Shaw, a member of what we’ve dubbed “the Greatest Generation”, even though not so long ago as a Boomer-dominated culture we vilified and ridiculed that generation as a kind of two-headed monster in the form of Peter Boyle in
Joe
and Archie Bunker, wrote how he and his stories are products of their times (. . . the Depression, WWII, the rebirth of Europe, McCarthyism, Kennedy, Vietnam . . .). I’m not a product of my times. I’m a carrier of them. My times, those of my friends and my work, don’t end. They go into remission. In my boring middle-class neighbourhood of Buffalo, New York in the early 1970s, it seemed a really good idea to get home from school one day by cutting through neighbours’ yards because there were rumours of an impending race riot, and the prospect of taking a stray “Kent State” bullet and dying like a lung-shot deer in my Garanimals-like polyester finery and Keds didn’t seem that much fun. This was the same school, PS 22 on Huntington Avenue, where as a kindergartner, I’d played “House” with an Asian girl, Leni Wong, and we used a Black doll as our baby, not knowing in 1970 the extent we were realizing the Dream of a certain Reverend who took a slug through the neck on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis 20 or so months before.

That fever returned when I was an apartment building manager in a crack neighbourhood in Oakland—reading Jack London’s
People of the Abyss
and sitting in a chair that had been re-upholstered with a bed sheet by one of my tenants before she’d abandoned it upon moving out around the time someone torched a drug dealer’s car under her window—when the Rodney King riots broke out. I’d been thinking of going to see a band I liked in San Francisco that night when the radio said that the Bay Bridge and Market Street were shut down. Unlike what had happened when the legacy of a different King had defined how we all got along, there’d be no neighbours’ yards for me cut through to duck the violence.

If what Henry Miller said is true, that all a writer “succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment,” then these stories hold strains from the Plague Years. In the interest of medical disclosure, and to steal from William S. Burroughs when he wrote about “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork,” here’s what’s on the tip of the vaccination needle pressing into your skin.

“D
ISPLACEMENT
”

I wrote the first version of this in the early ’90s. The original back-of-the-junkmail-envelope note read: “Guy with cancer kills knowing he’ll get chair but killing makes him better.” Thought I’d write it as a 10-page Henry Slesar riff and send it to
Hitchcock’s
or
Ellery Queen
. Then I read Michael Crichton’s autobiography/memoir
Travels
, in which Crichton describes a bug-fuck-crystal-rubbing New Age ritual he undertook to rid himself of a child-shaped agency that was the vessel of his rage and that clung to him like a psychic lamprey.
Yep . . . when you think of hard-science advocate Little Mikey Crichton on CNN telling you that Global Warming is as about real as Santa, keep in mind this was a guy who participated in rituals like that, who claimed to have Uri Geller’ed spoons with his mind, and who said he’d had a meaningful, tear-streaked psychic dialogue with a cactus. Groovy. Crichton’s rage-child nudged my idea about the killer cancer guy into what I’d read about
egrigors
and
tulpas
—externalized thought-forms that act independently of those who create them.

I wrote this while my friends and I dealt with AIDS, crack, yuppie trickle-down oppression, and street-corner death threats being no more uncommon an urban occurrence than stepping in dog shit all while stepping in human shit was even more common than that. I showed it to my neighbour Cori Crooks, who’s now an accomplished feminist writer and who was at the time roommates with Amber Tamblyn’s sister (really!) and it freaked her out good. This made me happy.

I was getting nice feedback from editors for this piece when
Se7en
came out, and I said, “I’ll never place this!”
Se7en
was just too good, and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker developed too many of the same themes too goddamn well. I figured Walker, a guy my age, was stepping in the same shit on different streets and came up with a similar idea. But over the years
Se7en
so completely rewrote the mythology of the “killer with a purpose” (without
Se7en
, there’d be no
CSI
,
Cold Case
,
Millennium
,
Taking Lives
. . .) that with tweaking, I could incorporate that new mythology. Hell, I felt obliged to incorporate that mythology.