Spirits in the Wires (4 page)

Aaran was a good-looking, confident man in his thirties—very trendy with his goatee, his dark hair cut short on the top and sides, drawn back into a small ponytail at the nape of his neck. One ear lobe sported two earrings, the other was unadorned. Pinky ring on each hand. He was wearing Armani jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tailored sports jacket that night. Shoes of Italian leather.

But the best thing about him—what let me overlook his overly suave mannerisms, what meant more to me than his appearance or his sense of fashion—was that he didn't get the look in his eyes.

Five minutes went by. Ten. Fifteen.

Not once did he seem to get creeped out by me. We just talked—or at least he talked. Mostly I sat on my stool, leaning one arm on the bar top, and listened. But it wasn't hard. He was well-spoken and had a story about anything and everybody: droll, ironic, sometimes serious.

We had two drinks at Huxley's. We went to the reading—Summer Brooks had a new book out,
So I'm a Bitch,
a collection of her weekly columns from
In the City
—and it was just as entertaining as you might imagine, if you follow the columns. We had a lovely dinner at Antonio's, this little Italian place in the Market. We went down the street to the Scene for another drink and danced awhile. Finally we ended up back at my place for a nightcap.

We'd been getting along so well, it seemed inevitable to me that we would end up in bed the way we did. I remember thinking I was glad I'd worn some sexy black lace underwear instead of the cotton panties and bra I'd almost put on when I'd been getting dressed earlier in the evening.

Sex had definitely been one of the things I'd wanted to experience as soon as I could. My own recollections of it seemed to have come out of books, and like everything else in my life, I couldn't find one real tactile memory of it in mind. From what I did know about it, it was supposed to be totally amazing, so it was disappointing to have it all be over as quickly as it was.

Later, I realized it was only because Aaran wasn't a particularly good lover, but at the time I just felt let down. Not so much by him, as by the whole build-up about the act of making love.

“Is that it?” I let slip out as he rolled over onto his back.

I hadn't meant to say it aloud and when I saw the dark look on his face, I really wished I hadn't.

He sat up. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Wasn't it good for you?”

“Of course. It's just… I thought…”

I stopped myself before I made it worse, even though what I wanted to say was, no, it was disappointing. I thought it would be more tender, and also more abandoned. That it would last longer. That the world would turn under me. That everything would stretch into this long moment of unbelievable bliss before finally releasing in long, slow waves that would leave me breathless. The way I could make it feel with my own fingers.

Yes, I stopped myself from saying any of that, but it was already too late.

“Jesus, I can't believe you,” he said.

He swung his feet to the floor and stood up.

“I mean, it's not like I didn't know there was something weird about you,” he added as he put on his briefs. “But I was willing to overlook it— you know, that twitch you put in people that just makes them want to back away?”

I stared at him, speechless. He found his T-shirt and pulled it on over his head, stopping to smooth back his hair.

“It's not like I'm alone in this,” he said. “Sure, you look hot, but everybody who's spent any kind of time with you talks about how you've got this thing about you that just rubs them the wrong way.”

“You've
talked
to people about me?”

“Well, sure. It's a small world. When a good-looking woman like yourself turns out to be such a cold fish, of course it's going to get around. What did you think? But I thought, ‘I'll do her a favour. Show her a good time. Teach her how to loosen up a little and enjoy life.'“

“Get out,” I told him.

“Right, like you're the one who should be pissed.”

I got out of bed and gave him a shove toward the doorway.

“Now you just wait a—” he started, but I pushed him again.

He was still off-balance from the first push and stumbled backward, out into the main room. I collected the rest of his clothes and followed after him. There was a moment right there when I thought he was going to hit me, or at least try to, but I dumped the clothes and shoes into his arms and he instinctively grabbed hold of them. That gave me time to slip around him and open the front door of the apartment.

“Out,” I told him, pointing to the hall.

“Jesus, would you let me put my pants—”

“Out,” I repeated.

I grabbed my umbrella from where it was leaning by the door and held it like it was a baseball bat. He took one look at my face and went out into the hall. God, I wish I'd had a camera to capture that sorry image of him standing there, as good as bare-assed, skinny legs coming out from under his T-shirt, the rest of his clothes all bundled in his arms.

“This isn't the end of this,” he told me.

“It is for me.”

He shook his head, his face flushed with anger.

“Nobody treats me like this,” he said. “I'll make you sorry you ever—”

“I already am,” I said and shut the door in his face, engaged the lock.

I cried for a long time after he was gone. It wasn't because of what had happened with him—or at least not
only
because of that. Mostly it was because I felt so bereft and alone, abandoned in this unfair world where my only intimate human contact so far had been with such a sorry excuse of a loser. Now that the happy blush of just being accepted for once had been swept away, I realized that he was completely self-centered. He was full of words, but empty of anything meaningful. Our evening together had been for him, not for me, or even to be with me.

If Aaran Goldstein was an example of what it meant to be human, I wasn't so sure that I wanted to be one anymore.

I had my flying dream again that night, soaring over an endless landscape of circuit boards, their vast expanse cut with rivers of cruel electricity. …

I had gained some useful experience from my evening with Aaran, but otherwise not a lot had changed. Everything was still new and fresh. I knew what things were—and if I didn't, the voice in my head could give me its history—but not how they tasted, or felt, or sounded. Not how their essence reverberated under my skin.

I didn't stay away from readings or openings or clubs after that—I was too stubborn to give Aaran that small victory—but I didn't look to find acceptance or kindness at them anymore, and didn't find it either. Turns out, what honest friendships I came to make, I made on the street.

There was Marc, of course. I'd see him from time to time, always in some different doorway, panhandling on a street corner, dozing on a park bench. He carried a constant undercurrent of bitterness inside him— directed at what he saw as his own personal failures, as much as at the uncaring world he was in, a world that had no time or place for those such as himself who, for one reason or another, had fallen through the cracks.

But most of the time, he kept that bitterness locked behind a cheerful front. I think what he liked best about me was that, no matter which face he showed me, I accepted him as he was and made no judgments. I also didn't hand out advice, or try to change him. I'd just buy him a meal or a coffee, and share it with him as though we were simply friends out to enjoy each other's company.

Charity didn't enter into it. He knew I'd give him a place to stay, or money, if he asked. But he didn't. And I didn't offer.

Then there was the woman that everyone called Malicorne whom I met on the edge of the Tombs one day, that part of the city that the citizens have abandoned, leaving I don't know how many blocks of empty lots, rubble-choked streets and fallen-down, deserted buildings. Factories, tenements, stores. The only legally-inhabited building was the old county jail, an imposing stone structure that stood on the western border of the Tombs, overlooking the Kickaha River, just north of the corner of Lee and Mac-Neil, but you couldn't call what the prisoners in there did as living. They were just marking time.

Malicorne was tall and horsy-faced, her eyes so dark they seemed to be all pupil. Her long chestnut hair was thick and matted, hanging past her shoulders like dreadlocks. But the thing about her—the strange thing, I mean—is how she had this white horn curling up into a point coming right out of the middle of her forehead. Now that's unusual enough, but even stranger is how nobody really seems to notice it.

“People don't pay attention to things that don't make sense to them,” she said when I asked her about it.

Now I had a maybe strange origin, if my dreams and the voice in my head were anything to go by. She had one for certain. So why didn't people treat her the way they treated me?

She laughed. “Look at me,” she said. “I'm living in a squat here in the Tombs, sharing meals and drinks with hobos and bums. Regular citizens don't even see me. I'm just one more street person to them. And if they don't see me—if I don't even register on their radar—how would they ever notice anything strange about me?”

“So why do you stay on the streets?” I asked.

“You mean, why don't I become a citizen?”

“I guess.”

“Because the only stories that matter to me are the ones that are told here—on street corners, under an overpass, standing around an oil drum fire. It wouldn't be the same for someone else, but I'm not someone else, and they're not me.”

I liked talking to her. She didn't just absorb stories other people told; she had countless ones of her own to tell. Stories about strange places and stranger people, of gods living as mortals, and mortals living with the extravagance of gods. I often wondered what my own story would sound like, coming from her lips. But I supposed first I'd have to figure out what it was for myself.

She left town before I could. One day she just wandered off and out of our lives the way street people do, but before she left, she introduced me to William.

He was living on the street at the time, too. There was a whole family of them that got together at night around the oil drums. Jack, Casey, William, and just before Malicorne left, a slip of a girl named Staley Cross who played a blue fiddle.

William was in his fifties, a genial alcoholic—as opposed to a mean drunk—with weather-beaten features and rheumy eyes. Something about Malicorne's going motivated most of them to get off the street. In William's case, he started attending AA meetings and got a job as a custodian in a Kelly Street tenement, just up from the Harp. He's still there today, surviving on the money he gets from odd jobs and tips.

I go to the AA meetings with him sometimes, to keep him company. He's been off the wagon for a few years now, but he's still addicted to one thing they don't have meetings for: magic. I don't mean that he's a conjuror himself, or has this need to take in magic shows. Or even that he's some kind of groupie of the supernatural and strange. He just knows a lot of what he calls “special people.”

“I'm drawn to people like that,” he told me one afternoon when we were sitting on the steps of the Crowsea Public Library. “Don't ask me why. I guess thinking about them, listening to them talk, just being with them, makes the world feel like a better place. Like it's not all cement and steel and glass and the kind of people who pretty much only fit into that kind of environment.”

“People like Malicorne,” I said.

He nodded. “And like you. You've all got this shine. You and Malicorne and Staley with that blue spirit fiddle of hers. There's lots of you, if you look around and pay attention. You remember Paperjack?”

I shook my head.

“He had it, too. Used to give you a glimpse of the future with these Chinese fortune-tellers of his that he made out of folded paper. He was the real thing—like Bones and Cassie are.”

“So we've all got this shine,” I said, remembering how Marc had told me he could see mine that day I first met him.

William gave me a smile. “I know it makes some people uncomfortable, but not me. I guess maybe I don't have a whole lot else left in my life, but at least I've got that. At least I know there's more to the world than what we see here.”

“I suppose,” I said. “Still, I wouldn't mind learning how to turn it down a notch or two.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, exactly. So that I can fit in better when I want to fit in, I suppose. It's hard walking into a room and after five minutes or so, pretty much everybody's making it clear that it'd all be so much more pleasant if you'd just leave.”

“That's important to you?” he asked. “Fitting in?”

“Maybe. Sometimes. I guess it's mostly wanting to do it on my own terms.”

“Well, I know a guy who might be able to help you.”

We tracked Robert Lonnie down at the Dear Mouse Diner, just around the corner from the library. He was sitting in a back booth, a handsome young black man in a pinstripe suit with wavy hair brushed back from his forehead. There was a cup of coffee on the table in front of him, a small-bodied old Gibson guitar standing up on the bench beside him.

“Hey, Robert,” William said as he slid into the other side of the booth. I sat down next to William.

“Hey yourself, Sweet William,” Robert said. “You still keeping your devil at bay?”

“I'm trying. I just take it day by day. How about you?”

“I just keep out of his way.”

“This is my friend, Saskia,” William said.

Robert turned his gaze to me and I realized then that he was another of William's special people. Those eyes of his were dark and old. When they looked at you, his gaze sank right under your skin, all the way down to where your bones held your spirit in place.