Shaking out the Dead (21 page)

Choices. She was fed up with them. Yes or no. This or that. Duality, it was such a bore. Free will says, sure, eat the apple, but do and you'll pay. That didn't sound so “free” to her. Free
dom
, on the other hand, says eat the apple if you must. It will lead to something different than not eating the apple, but see what you get and go forth from there. Free will had a distinct undercurrent of right and wrong, reward and punishment, that freedom was, well, free of.

She slipped out of her clothes and into her robe. Returning to the bathroom, she pushed back the shower curtain. Through the heating vent came the sound of muffled laughter. It made her think of John. She would've asked God for a sign —
should I call?
— if she hadn't just questioned his almighty judgment.

Stop looking for answers, she told herself, turning on the water in the tub, drowning out the laughter. As the tub filled, she thought about the sayings, axioms, and pithy quotes pasted on her refrigerator and written on fragments of envelopes and napkins, tossed into drawers and kept for unknown reasons. She had more answers than questions. No wonder she wrote an advice column. The imbalance between the two, she thought, just went to demonstrate that there weren't any answers, or rather, there were dozens, hundreds, millions. They just didn't necessarily match up with any particular questions.

She slipped out of her robe and into the tub, settling into the warm water. What could it mean, she wondered, that she was a person who had accumulated more answers than questions?

But she decided not to answer. It would only contribute to the problem.



Tatum's hips balanced at the edge of the mattress. Paris knelt on the floor between her legs and kissed with a warm and open mouth. His tongue lashed out. It dragged, slick and gritty. His hand slid up Tatum's stomach to her breast, up the curve of it until he pressed her nipple between his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger. She caught her breath. Her pelvis softly tilted, then tipped. Paris's other hand stretched across the flat side of her chest, fingers curling inward, slowly, as though he could fold her scar into his palm.

Tatum was present as a drip on a faucet. The tension stretched her. Orgasm, when it came, was not coming down. It was a pumping, a diffusing, a spreading out like waves, creating space as it pushed outward. It served only to raise the stakes. She wanted more.

Paris leaned back on his heels and wiped his chin on his shoulder. Still fully clothed, he stood and headed up the basement stairs. Tatum turned to her side and pressed her legs together to still the hum. The bathtub turned on above.

Dragging the sheet across her body, Tatum slid up the mattress and propped herself on an elbow. Faint light from the window wells cast a green hue across the well-swept concrete floor and the walls with boxes two and three deep. Few of the boxes were hers, yet she zeroed in on her modest stack. Just a couple of months back, she had puttered among them, nervous and anxious, as though she were stashing a body. But it wasn't a body. It was a book. The Book of Rachaels. At the time of the stashing, there had been no plan for Paris to be moving in. The basement was still the domain of the past. A desert for personal items. Exile.

Tatum's eyes settled on the green leather spine just visible over the box's edge. The past loves crashing the present's party.

“So, we meet again,” Tatum said, and then she rolled onto her back.

Upstairs, the water shut off.

Tatum heard Paris before she saw him, and she sat up. He hit the bottom of the steps and came to the end of the mattress. His feet were bare. Tatum felt tempted to kiss one, the top of it at least. Kiss the monster. He pulled his shirt over his head, and it caught on his glasses, tangling for a second. Tatum pushed away the sheet and came to the edge of the bed on her knees. She kissed at Paris's softly muscled chest and placed a hand on the pale circle of hair surrounding his navel. Paris pushed her backward and came down, one knee at a time, between her legs.

Tatum wrapped her legs around his hips. He pressed her arms over her head and held her wrists with one hand as he braced his body with the other. Torso grazed torso. And then it was all heat and steel and velvet.



They had stolen the moment, like new lovers do. A pocket of time that is what it is. Not part of the great march toward something else, not one of seven plates to keep spinning. Stealing moments draws the attention of grace, serves as a lure, and so she too was tangled in the arms and legs and entwined fingers. They lingered on the mattress, the three of them, insulting the self-importance of time.

When duty did call at last, they dressed in a satisfied silence. Outside, Tatum sat on the stoop, watching Paris behind the wheel of her car acquainting himself with the controls. She felt turned inside out, cool air reaching long closed-up places. The iron-gray sky above was splitting open to reveal ragged, blue portals, and the trees seemed to sigh as though washed clean. They had taken a beating from the hail, but it was somehow all good, the ordeal having left them ravaged and refreshed.

“Wow,” Tatum said, wrapping herself in her own arms. Sex between her and Vincent had become so tragic in the end that she had forgotten this post-coital purged feeling. Vincent had always gotten her off, but in those last months, it seemed more something he did to assure himself of the kind of lover he was than a drive that had to do with her. She orgasmed to avoid insulting him.

Paris pulled away from the curb. Tatum watched him go, thinking about the fact that Vincent had never called like he said he would the day he had showed up at Geneva's. In fact, Tatum had begun to wonder if Vincent had ever even said it. She didn't want him back, she felt sure of that, but the possibility that he might want her was an attractive one. She had hoped to reject him, look him over like a table of trinkets, wrinkle her nose, and shake her head no.

She placed her hands on her knees and stood. “Do you have to bring a problem everywhere you go?” she remembered Vincent saying on more than one occasion.

Perhaps he had a point, she thought. After all, she had been happily humming along with big plans for a big day, and now she had gone and polluted it with thoughts of him.

She went inside determined to get herself back on track. The itch to return to the workforce had been growing, and she even felt up to giving her oncologist a call. She was ready to follow through with the mammograms and health care plans discussed years ago. She felt alive. She wanted to stay that way.

The first step was to dig up her address book. She knew where it was, dumped in a junk drawer under the kitchen counter. It was the bottom one, and she squatted down to open it. She pulled miscellaneous instructions and never-mailed warranties from the top of the mess. She knelt down to shuffle through the rubble. Duct tape. Napkin holders. Sunblock. String. She pushed around the debris until she spotted her old address book. But then reaching for it, she noticed a picture frame peeking out from beneath. She knew the frame and remembered what had been in it when she had tossed it into the drawer. The picture had been of Vincent. She pushed aside the address book and pulled out the frame. It was empty. She flipped it over. It was intact. Not broken. She looked back into the drawer. She pushed aside an opened pack of batteries, a Christmas ornament, and a trivet. She dug through the drawer, looking for Vincent.



The hailstorm had left a kind of afterglow in its wake. Small splotches of sky peeked through the cloud coverage, and the grass seemed to illuminate itself from within. Paris thought of Tatum's eyes as he drove, a green so different than the grass, which was both pale and bright at once. Tatum's eyes were green like a swamp, a green pulled under water to stand in muddy bottoms.

Paris drove to his old apartment and parked out front. As he came around the car, a passing woman lifted her eyes to him and smiled. She was no girl. She was a woman, with tiny laugh lines at the corner of the eye that looked out from beneath her beret. Her loose black pants billowed slightly, rustling the Chinese symbols that climbed the outside seams. He smiled back and watched her pass. Her satchel strap cut her back in half along the diagonal. She was happy. Paris could feel it because he felt it as well. Like a million bucks. Maybe two.

The woman on the street was just the latest of many. Not just women but people. People had been noticing him. The women in the diner squinted softly and stole sidelong glances. Blair did double takes. It was a foreign experience for Paris, drawing attention. But even strangers on the street found their eyes drifting in his direction, choosing him from the littered world, from the people, storefronts, and traffic, choosing him above even their own thoughts. Perhaps, he was their thoughts. The thing they'd been looking for. Not him.
It
. The
it
he now had. The
it
everybody wants.

He bounded down his steps and opened the door he had left unlocked. His apartment was nearly empty now. Other than the contents of his closet, only a dank smell and a beat-up industrial ambiance remained. Paris crossed the room, wondering what its future was. Mailroom? Storage room? He imagined it filled with rows of metal shelving, office supplies, stacked and organized. Bodies would move in and out of the space. But would anyone ever see how at night the streetlight cut through the railing above and spilled across the tiled floor? It was no different than moonlight on water. It lifted one from the press of schedule and duty and made you remember,
this is your life
, and you feel the joy, the melancholy, or the sadness that comes from the recognition. It doesn't really matter what you feel. It's just good to feel it. It's good to know.

It had been the invisibility of the apartment that had endeared it to Paris. The way it blended unobtrusively into the world, it may as well not be at all. And now, they were finished with each other. Eventually, everything becomes the past. A fact that is a comfort when your life is in the sewer. Less so, when you're walking on air. Recognizing the impermanence of things set off a cautious voice in Paris's mind.
With or without her, you will be fine
, it said.
One's happiness is not dependent on anything outside oneself.

Paris gently kicked an empty box toward his closet, smirking at the voice. It spoke from some well-laundered world where business cards were exchanged. It spoke from black words on a white page, books concerned with love's health, bearing white-coated advice. Paris knew what the clinician did not: his life would be damaged without Tatum. Ruined, even. Simple as that. He didn't need to believe otherwise for the comfort of knowing he could go on should he lose her. More than wanting to feel safe, he wanted to feel
this
.

At his closet, he went down, one knee at a time. He reached into its deep corner and pulled out his canvas. He leaned it in the door jam and found himself wanting to stare into it. But he forced his attention to the task at hand. He pulled the empty box he had kicked over toward him. He tossed into it boots and tennis shoes. He hadn't packed them earlier because he didn't want them in the car with Tatum and Ron. Even if he had duct-taped the box closed, he hadn't been certain that the stink wouldn't seep through before they reached the duplex. Footwear packed, he opened a shoebox of bank statements and bills and other official documents. As he tossed the contents between two piles, one to keep and one to trash, the canvas kept drawing his attention. Like the dead hounds a psychic, spirits called to Paris out from grainy, white surfaces. Incoherent murmurs reached him, a thing existing, awaiting invocation. When he finished his sorting, he turned his attention to the final corner of the closet. One last box. His paints, brushes, and charcoal.

He placed the box on his lap and looked again into the canvas. The thing was still there, trying to focus itself. A tight spray of lines. This was what he saw first. The corner of an eye? The woman from the street? The tilt in his neck unconsciously adjusted as he became the thing, felt it moving up from inside of him even as it moved out from the canvas. But then, as it came into focus, Paris found himself pulling away. It wasn't the woman from the street. It was Linda.

Linda's absence had been weighing on him. She hadn't appeared in the diner, not since that night in the janitor's closet. He had pretended that night that she was Tatum, and hours later, Tatum had called him to her. Paris wondered if it was some strange magic and worked both ways. If he kissed Tatum and thought of Linda, would Tatum disappear?

Paris jerked himself backward, farther from the canvas. It was a stupid thought. He didn't even want to kiss Tatum and think of Linda, but now here it was, like someone saying no matter what you do, don't think of an elephant.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Paris said aloud, trying to drown the idea in inner noise.

He tossed both the box and the canvas back into the closet. He didn't want Linda in the canvas. He didn't want anybody in it. He gathered up the pile for the Dumpster and shoved it to the middle of the room. He shredded old bank statements by hand and told himself that he would be taking his art supplies to the trash too. His life was not going to be about something that wasn't happening or wasn't there. An empty stool. A door not knocked on. A blank canvas. He had plenty of something. He would not obsess about nothing.

When he finished the shredding, he gathered the debris. He turned his back, though, on the canvas and shoebox of supplies. He went to the Dumpster without them. He would not throw them away nor would he take them with him, he decided. He would leave them to their own fate.

Paris packed the last boxes into the car and paused before closing his front door for the last time. Only the aluminum kitchen table and chairs that were there when he moved in and the art supplies shoved back into the closet remained. Paris would not miss this place, he thought, because it had been good. Complete. And now they parted at their crossroad. He sighed and closed the door. He climbed the steps to the street.

Outside, the sky was gaining ground, breaking through the clouds by a force of sheer will. On the sidewalks, people walked with slightly upturned faces, and above the quaint downtown skyline, the mountains reached and stretched, snow-tipped and too old for preferences. Paris drove slowly, under the speed limit, and took a convoluted route through downtown. His eyes scanned the sidewalks. He was looking for Linda, even though he had never seen her in daylight before. In the illogic of spells and magic he told himself that if he saw Linda, the curse he had accidentally placed on himself would be broken.

Pulling past the Deluxe, Paris slowed the car even more and looked out his window. Then, at the next intersection, he took a hard right and came back around the block. He had never gone into the Deluxe in the daytime, not since turning in his application. But he had to look. Maybe Linda's disappearance was nothing more than a change in schedule.

He parked the car and left the noon hour light behind as he slipped into the casino.

Life under a rock is self-satisfied. Left to their own affairs, the crawlies and the beetles beneath go about their business. They chop wood and carry water in the sludge and muck with satisfaction. There is no low self-esteem. No one is ugly in the land of slime. But if you lift that rock on a sunny morning, to the prying eyes, the scene is a ghoul fest, creepy and unclean. Such was the Deluxe during the day.

Paris walked through the stale beer and cigarette reek of the casino to the diner. The diner was empty except for Jerry, the Vietnam vet who worked the day shift. He stood behind Paris's counter, smoking and staring into the distance. Jerry, Paris, Blair, and a daytime bartender named Betty were all the employees left at the Deluxe. The other rats had deserted the sinking ship. These four were the most reliable of the bunch and were each offered a five-hundred-dollar bonus if they stayed on until closing.

“What's up?” Jerry asked in his gravelly voice.

Paris gave the diner the once-over.

“I lost something,” he said to Jerry, and Jerry didn't ask what.

Paris stepped behind the counter and back into the kitchen. He bent over and looked beneath cabinets in order to appear authentic. Then he stepped into the janitor's closet and stood there for a moment as though feeling Linda's presence in the past might reveal where she was in the present. He saw her almond eyes looking up into his from on her knees before him. A flush of shame overcame him. But he fought back.

He had helped her. Given her what
she
needed, money, and not the silly soup he always wanted to give. It was about time.

He didn't hear Jerry come back into the kitchen.

“Any luck?” he heard him call.

“Yeah,” Paris said, stepping out from the closet.

Paris slipped back out through the casino, raising a hand in greeting to Betty as he passed. He returned to Tatum's car. Everything was fine, he told himself. No Linda. Which means he found nothing. “Nothing” can't be figured out or solved. “Nothing” isn't even there.