Stories From the Plague Years (36 page)

A shoe . . .

The first solid thing I saw in the un-breathing dusk of that crypt. The shoe was alien—finery from Before made with tight factory seams, not stitched by a cobbler. It was of a kind worn in the stead of foot-binding, that women stilted on while dancing, while trudging stairs, while walking the smooth sidewalks without
pavés
that had been the skin of the city before the concrete flagging had been wrenched up for foundations and breakwaters. The angle of the shoe in the dust evoked the snapping of an ankle. My eyes trespassed on the burial mound of a dead kingdom, a sin that in other eras would have them bewitched to wooden orbs by barrow wraiths. Allen and I stepped into folklore, walking past the shoe that lent a seed of truth to the stories we’d heard about what kinds of detritus of Before had been left here when the place was shut down. We entered a legend, to find treasures in the ruin that might save us.

Panic leaves strokes distinct as smears of bloody lymph on carpet. Meals, left when I’d been a child and had seen grainy footage of this place besieged by gunfire, lay finished at the bar by rats and fungi, reduced to dust-furred shapes beside cutlery rusted to abstractions. Coats were draped over chairs, some made of quilted down like the sleeping bags Allen and I carried. They were chewed, most of the feathers inside taken away to make nests for the animals that thumped near the ceiling at our coming. There was no smell of death here, because not even death walks a place so forsaken, and the smell of death is still a smell of nature. This place stank of an emptiness that didn’t oppress our breath, but pulled it out of us.

A woodsman without his tools can’t know who he is. I’ve seen them wander into town . . . their hands dead at their sides for want of an axe or saw. Allen and I, in this death-forsaken place, didn’t know who we were without the sled of tools we’d left outside the sword-bramble, didn’t know who we were without the gear that defined the world we knew. Even our thresher’s knives had become dream-things, dulled by our hacking the bramble and dripping a thick sap like the blood of a thing killed by a warrior saint. Not knowing ourselves, intruded upon by each other, poisoned by crematoria fumes the Furies would savour as wine, followed by an un-bodied thing in a place that worried our hearts the way incubi and infant-handed
maras
worry the backs of sleepers, we were in a Hell like that of the peoples who’d been old before the Greeks had been young.

We risked a fire in the great steel sink of the kitchen, risked the poison smoke of varnished wood cracked from gnawed chairs that rose to the high ceiling as if in a curing house. We made a cauldron of a soup pot, pouring spring water from age-brittle plastic bottles to cast a transformative spell on ourselves. The dishtowels we soaked with liquor turned grey-black and reeking from the filth we scraped off our goose-fleshed skin. I sweated in the cold as I saw steam cake the windows, and in my malnourished state, the sweat that ran to my mouth was salt-less as rain. The beer and gum-thick dish soap we worked into our hair foamed slick as grease pools near rendering plants. Our newly scrubbed skin had the look and scent of the laudanum addicts who sprawl in the shallow hallway graves where they let go the fruit-sweet musk of their last breaths.

Colognes and hand soap from the washroom nearly completed the guise we needed to take: that of wealthy boys indulging in the sin of the rich who make a game of poverty. The sin that lets debutantes play at being whores, knowing they can cast off that life while the disowned girls of port cities can’t. That lets students make a hobby of addiction and the Japanese tea-ceremony of melting smack and shooting up, knowing they can take cures in Lucerne clinics, their track marks closing near the platinum bands of watches custom-made in Geneva. The sin that lets boys whose nascent beards are shaved in bed by servants frolic in the shit-holes in which boys like Allen and me toiled, that makes a sport of what we do to survive . . . that lets these lads boast while being seen by the right people lunching with the right heiresses in the right clubs.

To perform such a masque—that of boys who masqued themselves as what Allen and I really were—we’d have to scrape off the mange-whiskers we’d grown, the beards frayed by starvation and worry, that marked us as two who could be easily killed and forgotten. We’d packed no razors, why should we? Cooking oil and dish soap made our lather . . . warm water from the pot took a rust tinge from our flayed palms as we wet our faces. As I’d seen done by vagabonds who rode freight rails from city to city, I smashed a bottle that had held a sugar drink and tested the keen of the longest, sturdiest shard. With hands that felt gloved within their new scars, I raised the shard to my throat. When the ugly scrape of the first stroke fell quiet and even the crack of the fire was mute, Allen grinned and asked me, the universe, and maybe even God, should He have bothered to look down, “Did you know that we’re cool?”

A prop dagger, sharpened, can stab a man through the heart, then be put in its scrap-leather sheath and be a prop again. Allen and I were costumed, wearing what had been sweaters of spun glass that hadn’t rotted over the years they’d been left draped over chairs. We packed wet cooking salt on our boots, so they’d be stained as if by road salt, making us look like we’d walked streets populated enough to have been ploughed and salted, and not the roads of the decaying outlands. Our “make up” of freshly shaved skin howled in the brittle air as we walked the path we’d cut through the bramble that smelled of citric extract and the tannic vinegar used to clean head wounds. We were keened props, things of reality pretending to be false. We felt sheltered by our deception, as if we held a lock of the Elf-Queen’s hair that would turn a sniper’s bullets to frost. Like Orfeo or Lot, we knew not to glance back at the place we’d quit.

The
we
that Allen and I had become let our thoughts be non-verbal, let us speak in near-grunts as we hiked to the checkpoint that would grant us passage into the city. Our approach was a dumb-show, done for groundlings whose displeasure would leave exit wounds. As we reached the wall of ill-shod soldiers milling in front of what had been a tollbooth, Allen muttered to himself, and the mutterings we’d shared and understood became gibberish to me. I was suddenly afraid to be so alone in my own mind, unable to be aware of the third being I’d felt trail us. I realized that I’d welcome awareness of that spectre . . . who else but the dead could bear witness to my death?

Some of the soldiers, as they weighed life and death under a forest of smoke columns swaying in the east, couldn’t be bothered to close their phones while they listened to the Evangelical plays broadcast at that hour. Allen, I realized, wasn’t muttering, but
praying
. He, a Catholic, walked beside a Jew along a corridor of wrecks towards death as if in some Romantic Era parable, whisper-praying as did the Hasidim who’d taken me in after the first Center to which I’d been sent was burned down. I wished to pray, but couldn’t while walking that frozen path, while the river that had been the lifeblood of my home became that of Babylon. I felt overwhelmed by Allen’s faith, a
converso
for the span of those heartbeats as the storm of my soul was billowed under by the storm of his soul . . .

. . . and which I knew was too strong to be his alone.

Amid the noise in my mind, like the memory of the plague-mad revelers’ music, I felt a wish to kill the soldier who walked up to question us in the filthy air. Behind him, commandeered backhoes widened the pit in which he’d gladly burn us. I hoped the wish was a goblin-thought. Something nurtured by the memories of the music made by rioters maddened as if by Hearn’s horn. Maybe it was Allen’s blasphemy that put me in such a Godless mindset, because as we’d entered the checkpoint I’d heard Allen tell the God to whom he muttered to
hush
, as if he spoke to a noisy pup he trained.

There was a rawness in the soldier’s voice. It filled me with a dread like that of falling in a dream. Because although he wielded deadly force, he himself was not deadly—he was far worse. I’ve known deadly men. They’ve never frightened me the way this man did. True deadliness is patient, like a predator waiting in reeds by a stream. It’s a decision to be lethal that’s never impulsive and that can be countered like a chess move, by the recognition of that willingness to kill. Men who aren’t deadly are wielded
by
the power they think they wield. And they’re jealous of that power . . . knowing it can abandon them like the wives they beat into fidelity. Anger shakes in the eyes of a man who’s not deadly while he holds a gun, palpable as the misogyny in the eyes of those who first “become men” as clients of whores.

I’ve since learned that to look at an enemy is to look at yourself. But then, as a boy, I didn’t know why I looked to see if the soldier had the scars that would tell me if he’d had the kitchen table surgery that would have torn the corners of his mouth while a butcher-priest cut the wisdom teeth out of his jaw amid prayers shouted in ecstatic tongues. I wondered, as he looked at Allen and me, if he’d had the other surgeries that would have removed his appendix, tailbone, and one rib to rewrite his body in accordance with Scripture, erasing the lies that Satan had written into his flesh the same way the Deceiver had hidden fossils under the skin of the Earth.

I know
now
that I looked at him so because I was aware in a deep, wordless way that if he knew I was a Jew, he’d search my brow for traces of horns.

The man’s hand shook as he questioned us in his lazy-tongued dialect, under a bank of meat hooks hung on the chain link fence like wash drying, by rusted barrels of thickened fuel that with their patches of red, waxy polymer looked like an art installation made of junkyard salvage. The Church Militia patch on his shoulder, stitched over the flag there as if to cover something shameful, told me he was used to the spirit of God working and flowing through him the same way as did lethal power, moving him to do things for which he’d have to take no personal responsibility—from dervish-running in circles at revivals to proselytizing strangers to shooting a man. I didn’t shake. Because that would loosen the mask I wore of the spectre he’d been raised to fear: that of the shape-shifting Jew who passed for “normal.”

I stood before him, to his eye with the complexion of a saint and the condition of a devil. I was the fiend that boys such as he had been told would carry him off in a sack if they were bad. I addressed him as if he were a recalcitrant Gabbo, acting impatient and weary and invigorated beside my friend as if we were on our way home from a day of shovel-board and bear baiting, speaking to him as if he didn’t grip a weapon, but loitered expecting an undeserved tip. We were each other’s monster. To me, he was the villain, descendant of the shiftless
villein
of old dramas. I feared him because what I’d seen of his kind stranded at docks and rail yards, who cursed the Sodom in which they were marooned and that I called “home” . . . when the Sodom they endured was what they brought in their hearts along with their scar-widened grins, as they awaited passage to the countries that let them pursue the Hammite slave trade they claimed as their lost heritage. I know now that by looking for traces of crude stitch-work at the corners of his mouth, I wished to put a mask on him out of anger for the mask I’d been coerced to put on . . . that made me the embodiment of the mask-wearing fiend he dreaded.

The living mind can stand only so close to death and remember its face. Death is eternal, an infinity of mirrors with no object of focus. It’s indifferent to time, and while we breathe, we can’t grasp an unchanging end. That’s why drowning men spin into a pit of memory as they die, awaiting the heaviness of the sea in their lungs. That’s why sailors, knowing such a crush of memory might await them, always carry the horizon’s span in their eyes, even when inland. Death smothered my memory of passing that checkpoint. Yet in that darkness, I know I felt the being to whom Allen had prayed and knew him not to be God, even though he touched me as would God, granting me some small peace in my terror. It was a peace I felt he granted Allen out of a kind of love I’ll never know.

I slumped like an old man as we walked away from the barbed wire gate bordering the converted tollbooth, our masque (our farce?) ending as we crossed into the Commonwealth of Boston, out of the jurisdiction of the soldiers. Allen looked about to fall in the snow like a drunk whom the cold would either sober up, or numb to sleep and let him freeze to death. We became the starved and desperate boys we were, home in our dying city as smoke stained skies the color of bile, too tired to flinch as shots rang out from the checkpoint; the people behind us on the road must have been worse actors than we. They’d burn in the failure of their performances, executed by men enraptured by phone plays about their promised Rapture while they sent strangers to the Heaven they’d have to earn, and not be lifted to.

As we parted, Allen had the expression of a diver looking at water from a height he’d never attempted before. The
“we”
that we’d been was dying. Through that death, I knew whatever pained and frightened him waited for him at home. Years later, with my lover Cynthia in her studio redolent with paints, clays and exotic yarns, I felt pain behind my eyes and heart the moment she set down her brushes after doing my portrait, when she severed the connection we’d shared while I sat in active stillness and as she pressed her will onto a blank canvas. Looking away from her was like tearing stitches in my mind. That pain echoed the pain of leaving Allen, as our famine-sharing of our selves rended. Torn from him, I could see, but not understand, the grief that waited for him, the grief that made me hate myself for hating this boy who in his desperation had clung to my mind the way a drowning man would cling to driftwood.

There was another sadness standing at that corner with us, besides that which nearly bent Allen double. The being that had walked with us faded from our senses as its sadness grew. It billowed to nothing the same way our breaths did, lifted by the cold air. And for the first time in my life I knew that I’d stood beside a ghost of someone newly dead, who’d just recently let go his last breath and his soul with it. Allen looked to the plumed sky, and I knew the colors of that twilight would be the colors he’d wear in mourning.