Unquiet Dreams (12 page)

Of course there are the tourists, too, but I leave them alone. They are just around for the night, the fun, the occasion. They have friends and families who will miss them. They are not safe.

I used to visit more places—bus stations, diners—but the choices were so hard. Who was a student? Who was simply poor? The homeless are no good—so many of them are either alcoholic or mentally incapacitated. Such a sad waste. It was so random at first, but you know how it is when you first strike out on your own. Your ears are so full of dreams and youth that advice, from those who know more or better, inevitably falls on deafened ears. I would be different! I was so certain. And they were so cautious—I would not live their life of safety and secrecy. This country was mine, too, and I would share in all its promise and wide vistas. I can chuckle now, but I was so sincere. And persistent—while I did not succeed as wildly as I had hoped, I have indeed carved out a different life from my parents, one they could not imagine, scarred as they were by their lives in the old country. When, infrequently, I stop back home to see them, they fuss and tsk and cry inevitable ruin, but I think they're happy for me—except, of course, for my still being alone. Yes, I know—my cousin Hardraed, up in Canada where he says things are much looser, much freer; they always remind me about him. His folks say he has settled down a lot and my mother raises her heavy brows encouragingly to me, but I always shrug it off. Yeah, soon, yes, I know I'm not getting any younger, but of course my secret dream is that there is another way. We cannot be the last.

So the lonely men, I understand. I'm not alone—I can talk to my folks anytime I want to or to any of the others of our race, though as the decades pass their voices seem increasingly feeble—but I am in a sort of exile out here. As the country has become more and more built up, I have tended to keep increasingly to the prairies and mountains where there's still a good bit of space between the yellow and pink blobs on the maps, where I can choose when to see people and enter their realms. It is not the life of legends, but legends adapt. Perspective: that's the advantage of a long life. Wasn't the vanishing hitchhiker just the vanishing pilgrim centuries before? Somewhere outside Santiago de Campostella the stories would have spread, the pilgrim returning from the holy lands, back to the loved ones who feared him or her gone. Arriving at the village home to find him—alas!—no more among the flock. The tears, the confession: he had been missing since the last crusade. Loneliness, loss, confusion, heartbreak—it is the human condition. An occasional few rise above it, find the secrets of the universe, of happiness, of genius. But so few.

Tonight I slip in, $5 cover to keep out the riff-raff, but the doorman has no curiosity about my slouched form, his ideals worn down by the steady drip of sadness, loneliness and cheap sorrow. I paid my money, so in I go. It is the same at a thousand or more oases across the great swath of the middle and west of this country: dim corners, desultory stares, and a haphazard décor poised somewhere between fantasy and squalor. Neon, the elixir of pizzazz and glamour, flickers to the siren calls of booze by well-known trademarks. "Hot girls," the sign promises, but the stage offers only a lukewarm creature of mechanical movement. She swings lazily around a pole, her mind elsewhere—bills, pimps, drugs, or maybe just a day job. Who can say? Their lives are as varied as their jobs are the same. I have talked to many over the years and developed a grudging respect. They live here, too. They know the score, and if they do not fight it, they make their use of it. Who am I to criticize? On nights when I have indulged in the fiery waters, I think of razing the place to the ground with my own flames, but I do not do it. Indeed, I seldom think of it anymore. But the fiery waters play havoc with one's thoughts—it's easy to see why they all indulge. Drunkenness makes us all gods.

I cast about for a likely one. It seems early and I feel choosey. At last I sigh and I settle at an empty table, deciding to wait for a more propitious time. There can't be more than half a dozen seats filled, half with tourists, so I can bide my time. When the waitress comes by, swinging her hips in a mockery of seduction, I order champagne and laugh at myself. Such nonsense. It would be better to stick to beer, but the drive has whetted my appetite for delight and only champagne can match that gentle bliss. I can see the waitress' eyes glow: hey, big spender. If she could see me, really see me, would her eyes glow? No, they would not; I have seen it too many times. Once in a while, once in a very great while, my revelation brings awe not abjection, but how long has it been? Years, no doubt. Visionaries are so few. And fear these days is omnipresent, stirred daily and ladled with paranoia in the cauldron of power. No wonder they seek escape.

The champagne is cheap, yet the bubbles tickle my nose no less. The pleasure is small and exquisite, like a well-carved jade ink stone. It is their inability to appreciate such small blessings that leaves so many of them unhappy. They dream of wealth and abandon. Even here, the televisions blare their endless coaxing of spending and oblivion over the bar opposite the stage, their ignored competition. Spend and you will be happy; this car will bring you sex; buy this beer and you will never be alone again. The girls change places, another on stage; taller shoes, lighter hair but still the same weary combination of strut and languor. I have reached the bottom of my glass for the first time when at last I spot one.

He sits alone at a table for three, jacket on, hat low. We are both in disguise—or is it our natural plumage? His hand rests lightly on the edge of the table, his fingertips clasp a sweating beer bottle. Despite the darkness I can see one swollen bead of moisture roll lazily down the side and join the pool at the bottom of the amber glass. My eyes are like that, meant for distance. Even the flickering colors in here do not distract my sight. He is alone. That matters most, and I can tell from his posture, from his beer, from his clothes that he expects that his state will not change. But tonight it will. He is here seeking the communion of flesh and dreams that makes him feel less alone for an hour or two, yet more alone later. I know, I have talked to his twin in so many small towns. So lonely, so lonely.

I wait until his beer is half-empty. He has not relaxed, exactly, but he has released the clench in his other fist and appears to be marking the languid moves of the stripper with some desultory attention. Enough, anyway, to distract him from my approach, so I have to clear my throat to ask, "Is this seat taken?"

His surprise is genuine. An actual woman accosting him was certainly not part of his plans for the evening. The surprise quickly metamorphoses into suspicion. I would want money, no doubt. The radiating hostility makes clear his unwillingness to offer any. I sit down anyway, slipping my now half-empty bottle of champagne onto the table opposite his brew. He maintains his glare and I avoid challenging him. I will always be nervous about my appearance before them. My brothers could never pass this close, but fortunately my hybridity shows most in my face. Yet its incongruity can easily provoke suspicion and unease. I keep my head down, look at him out of the corner of my green eyes. It is the habit of years to draw my nose back into my face as much as possible, a practice that gives me the false sense of confidence in the murky anonymity of the bar, but never completely removes the fear that my truth will be seen.

But they never look you in the eye here.

True to that edict, he squints across the dark expanse of the table to take in my form—or as much of it as he can guess beneath the voluminous folds of my wrinkled coat. He sees woman because it is what he desires. Auburn curls cover most of my head so the points of my ears and other protrusions are masked in the tumble of hair. I seek in vain to recall a line from an old movie about a homely female character who disguised as a man was merely passable, but as a woman, she "was a dog." The description fits. Among my kind I am merely passable—diluted blood perhaps drawing scorn from the oldest, but who among us immigrants can claim any purity of essence? But to pass as a human woman, I must rely on darkness, the trick of the light and the broad strokes of assumption. Curls, the right profile, somehow they may add up to "female" though I show as little skin as possible to conceal my florid hide and the scales—tiny, even graceful for our folk, but nonetheless distinct.

It must be working because his cautious face has begun to look speculative. Sometimes we do come to money. I have had decades to figure out how much is too much—and how much suspiciously too little. The art of haggling—old as the species—will never dull. Everyone wants a bargain. The desperate ones—like this one—they will not offer money. They are far too cautious. But the lure of sex often eases their doubts, particularly when the exchange can make them feel magnanimous. "Gotta place?" I ask quietly, so quietly that he must bend toward me. He fingers his beer, noncommittal. "I need a place to stay," I wheedle, "I got no money." He can draw his own conclusions about what I might have to trade.

"Why you drinkin' champagne, then?" he asks, proud to be so observant. He was no pushover, he congratulated himself. Not born yesterday, as many might say.

Hmm. Good point. "It's my birthday," I say with just a little catch in my voice, fueled by the sudden inspiration. For all I know, it could be. Silently I curse myself for my giddy purchase. Ah well, it still tasted wonderful. He remains mutely watchful. I reach in my pocket and pull out the crumpled bills and change hiding there. "It's all I got and not enough to stay somewhere. Maybe buy a burger. How about it, mister? I'll make it worth your while." Perhaps not in the way he intends, but what price miracles?

I can see the thoughts ticking around his brain, weighing risk against gain. He looks me up and down, not to gauge my beauty—beauty is beyond his wallet—but to gauge my danger. I am large. There's no disguising that. But this culture makes size a shame for women and I have learned to mimic the hunched reluctance such females descend to as the ruthless ebb of confidence creeps away. To complete the effect, I twist my fingers nervously as if in suspense of his decision. Inside I am calm. If not him, then another will come. Yet I admit to liking the game. My father is scandalized, but I enjoy this playing at concealment; it makes the revelation that much more pleasing. Where did I get this flair for the dramatic? I hear the chorus of my family's disdain: human culture. It's true. They fascinate me, especially their depictions of us. Our old heroic stories, passed from one generation to the next for eons uncountable, show the slow dissipation of our folk. The stories have become stale, without resonance. Every one of us knows the story of how Kulili first spat forth the fiery ball that became the world, how we ruled for ages keeping the lesser creatures in order—until these upstart humans found out we gods could die. Then our heroics became tragedies, while their heroes grew bigger than human size. They never realized what they had lost, how tiny they made their world without real gods, without goddesses who spoke. Oh, one or two through the centuries has paused to think, to speak out, to decry the crimes of their kind. But it is rare. Even we gave in over the centuries, sought seed from one or two along the way, diluted our essence, the old timers say. If we could not have awe, perhaps we could absorb them. It is we who were absorbed, made smaller, made less. It is to such crimes I owe my delicacy, but to legends I owe my majesty however reduced.

I remember as a wee one, sneaking into a play by Marlowe and grinning with delight, for he understood us. Not entirely, and certainly the limitations of Elizabethan costuming were not up to the job of accurately portraying our majesty, but he came the closest to touching the magic—no wonder he died so young. Who that is shadowed by our flames is not scarred? And that appalling George! Marlowe knew what a rank opportunist that "defender of the realm" truly was. He wasn't even English. But how the English love their unlikely heroes—even fake ones like that. And made us their enemies, their monsters—at least there was still awe then. Of course, centuries are a long time for their little lives and they cling to each sparkle of the extraordinary in the hope that it will shine on them, too. Until they decide it is nonsense and belittle us into oblivion. Anal nathrach, indeed! I think that was about the time we left England for the open plains of America, just as so many of them were beginning to do. Although not all of us left. A few years back, my great great uncle on my mother's side posed for Blake, another uncommon mind. He knew what he saw and painted it with as much accuracy as he could manage. His name will live on as long as we do.

But how long is that?

"All right." The words startle me out of my reverie of reminiscences. My victim has acceded. I nod and gulp down the last of my bubbly and we both scrape back our chairs to depart. Accompanied by a fanfare of gaudy rock-n-roll, we wind our way through the maze of tables, more of them taken now, than when I arrived, and head for the door. The doorman nods—acquiescence, congratulations, acknowledgement? Who knows—and we step once more into the warm spring evening. To my surprise, he does he does not make his way to a ramshackle beater, but across the parking lot and down a side street of low-rent apartment blocks. At least I won't have the nuisance of driving someone else's car back to the club. Or walking far; I hate to walk. I don't mind driving, in fact, I love it. But walking; somehow it's just undignified.

At the third building, distinguished from its predecessors only by the lack of pizza boxes stacked haphazardly outside, we turn. Walking into the dimly lit lobby, I immediately discovered the reason for the lack of detritus outside—here, they were stacked inside. When I say stacked, I mean only that the pile was taller than it was wide. It made it easier to draw my nose in tighter. I can understand why people treated like refuse in turn see the world as their trash heap, but it does not make it any easier to bear. We skirted the pile and began the slow ascent up the filthy stairs. I was tempted to let my tail hang out behind me and clear the clutter in my wake, but there was still the chance someone might see. Conversations reverberated from the corners of the stairwell, distinctly voiced but muffled by the twisting path of the cage. It was early enough in the evening that the voices were low and cordial—no doubt later they would be mostly belligerent with too much liquor and too little hope. "Death trap" ran through my head, and all the hours on the road added "suicide rap." I almost chuckled. Lyrics float up from the subconscious. I can be almost anywhere in the country and sing along with the songs on the radio. There is a small but exquisite pleasure in knowing all the verses of "American Pie," of knowing that tiny tweak of disappointment when you realize they're only playing the short version. For all its differences, for all its divisions, this is one nation, united by song.