The Best of Lucius Shepard (73 page)

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* * *

Bobby’s immunity to the pit has
worn off. In the morning he’s sick as last week’s salmon plate. A fever that
turns his bones to glass and rots his sinuses, a cough that sinks deep into his
chest and hollows him with chills. His sweat smells sour and yellow, his spit
is thick as curds. For the next forty-eight hours he can think of only two
things. Medicine and Alicia. She’s threaded through his fever, braided around
every thought like a strand of RNA, but he can’t even begin to make sense of
what he thinks and feels. A couple of nights later the fever breaks. He brings
blankets, a pillow, and orange juice into the living room and takes up
residence on the sofa. “Feeling better, huh?” say the roommate, and Bobby says,
“Yeah, little bit.” After a pause the roommate hands him the remote and seeks
refuge in his room, where he spends the day playing video games.
Quake,
mostly.
The roars of demons and chattering chain guns issue from behind his closed
door.

Bobby
channel surfs, settles on CNN, which is alternating between an overhead view of
Ground Zero and a studio shot of an attractive brunette sitting at an anchor
desk, talking to various men and women about 9/11, the war, the recovery. After
listening for almost half an hour, he concludes that if this is all people
hear, this gossipy, maudlin chitchat about life and death and healing, they
must know nothing. The pit looks like a dingy hole with some yellow machines
moving debris—there’s no sense transmitted of its profundity, of how—when
you’re down in it—it seems deep and everlasting, like an ancient broken well.
He goes surfing again, finds an old Jack the Ripper movie starring Michael
Caine, and turns the sound low, watches detectives in long dark coats hurrying
through the dimly lit streets, paperboys shouting news of the latest atrocity.
He begins to put together the things Alicia told him. All of them. From “I’ve
just been to a funeral,” to “Everybody’s ready to go on with their lives, but
I’m not ready,” to “That’s why I come here...to figure out what’s missing,” to
“I have to go.” Her transformation...did he really see it? The memory is so
unreal, but then all memories are unreal, and at the moment it happened, he
knew to his bones who and what she was, and that when she took the shoe, the
object that let her understand what had been done to her, she was only
reclaiming her property. Of course everything can be explained in other ways,
and it’s tempting to accept those other explanations, to believe she was just
an uptight careerwoman taking a break from corporate sanity, and once she
recognized where she was, what she was doing, who she was doing it with, she
grabbed a souvenir and beat it back to the email-messaging, network-building,
clickety-click world of spreadsheets and wheat futures and martinis with some
cute guy from advertising who would eventually fuck her brains out and
afterward tell the-bitch-was-begging-for-it stories about her at his gym.
That’s who she was, after all, whatever her condition. An unhappy woman
committed to her unhappy path, wanting more yet unable to perceive how she had
boxed herself in. But the things that came out of her on their last night at
the Blue Lady, the self-revelatory character of her transformation.. .the
temptation of the ordinary is incapable of denying those memories.

It’s
a full week before Bobby returns to work. He comes in late, after darkness has
fallen and the lights have been switched on, halfway inclined to tell his
supervisor that he’s quitting. He shows his ID and goes down into the pit,
looking for Pineo and Mazurek. The great yellow earthmovers are still, men are
standing around in groups, and from this Bobby recognizes that a body has been
recently found, a ceremony just concluded, and they’re having a break before
getting on with the job. He’s hesitant to join the others, and pauses next to a
wall made of huge concrete slabs, shattered and resting at angles atop one
another, holding pockets of shadow and worse in their depths.

He’s
been standing there about a minute when he feels her behind him. It’s not like
in a horror story. No terrible cold or prickling hairs or windy voices. It’s
like being with her in the bar. Her warmth, her perfumey scent, her nervous
poise. But frailer, weaker, a delicate presence barely in the world. He’s
afraid if he turns to look at her, it will break their tenuous connection.
She’s probably not visible, anyway. No Stephen King commercial, no sight of her
hovering a few inches off the ground, bearing the horrid wounds that killed
her. She’s a willed fraction of herself, less tangible than a wisp of smoke,
less certain than a whisper. “Alicia,” he says, and her effect intensifies. Her
scent grows stronger, her warmth more insistent, and he knows why she’s here.
“I realize you had to go,” he says, and then it’s like when she embraced him,
all her warmth employed to draw him close. He can almost touch her firm waist,
the tiered ribs, the softness of a breast, and he wishes they could go out.
Just once. Not so they could sweat and make sleepy promises and lose control
and then regain control and bitterly go off in opposite directions, but because
at most times people were only partly there for one another—which was how he
and Alicia were in the Blue Lady, knowing only the superficial about each
other, a few basic lines and a hint of detail, like two sketches in the midst
of an oil painting, their minds directed elsewhere, not caring enough to know
all there was to know—and the way it is between them at this moment, they would
try to know everything. They would try to find the things that did not exist
like smoke behind their eyes. The ancient grammars of the spirit, the truths
behind their old yet newly demolished truths. In the disembodiment of desire,
an absolute focus born. They would call to one another, they would forget the
cities and the wars.... Then it’s not her mouth he feels, but the feeling he
had when they were kissing, a curious mixture of bewilderment and carnality,
accented this time by a quieter emotion. Satisfaction, he thinks. At having
helped her understand. At himself understanding his collection of relics and
why he approached her. Fate or coincidence, it’s all the same, all clear to him
now.

“Yo,
Bobby!”

It’s
Pineo. Smirking, walking toward him with a springy step and not a trace of the
hostility he displayed the last time they were together. “Man, you look like
shit, y’know.”

“I
wondered if I did,” Bobby says. “I figured you’d tell me.”

“It’s
what I’m here for.” Pineo fakes throwing a left hook under Bobby’s ribs.

“Where’s
Carl?”

“Taking
a dump. He’s worried about your ass.”

“Yeah,
I bet.”

“C’mon!
You know he’s got that dad thing going with you.” Pineo affects an Eastern
European accent, makes a fist, scowls Mazurek-style. “‘Bobby is like son to
me.’”

“I
don’t think so. All he does is tell me what an asshole I am.”

“That’s
Polish for ‘son,’ man. That’s how those old bruisers treat their kids.”

As
they begin walking across the pit, Pineo says, “I don’t know what you did to
Calculator Bitch, man, but she never did come back to the bar. You musta messed
with her mind.”

Bobby
wonders if his hanging out with Alicia was the cause of Pineo’s hostility, if
Pineo perceived him to be at fault, the one who was screwing up their threefold
unity, their trinity of luck and spiritual maintenance. Things could be that
simple.

“What’d
you say to her?” Pineo asks.

“Nothing.
I just told her about the job.”

Pineo
cocks his head and squints at him. “You’re not being straight with me. I got
the eye for bullshit, just like my mama. Something going on with you two?”

“Uh-huh.
We’re gonna get married.”

“Don’t
tell me you’re fucking her.”

“I’m
not fucking her!”

Pineo
points at him. “There it is! Bullshit!”

“Sicilian
ESP.... Wow. How come you people don’t rule the world?”

“I
can’t
believe
you’re fucking the Calculator Bitch!” Pineo looks up to
heaven and laughs. “Man, were you even sick at all? I bet you spent the whole
goddamn week sleep-testing her Certa.”

Bobby
just shakes his head ruefully.

“So
what’s it like—yuppie pussy?”

Irritated
now, Bobby says, “Fuck off!”

“Seriously.
I grew up in Queens, I been deprived. What’s she like? She wear thigh boots and
a colonel’s hat? She carry a riding crop? No, that’s too much like her day job.
She—”

One
of the earthmovers starts up, rumbling like T-Rex, vibrating the ground, and
Pineo has to raise his voice to be heard.

“She
was too sweet, wasn’t she? All teach me tonight and sugar, sugar. Like some
little girl read all the books but didn’t know what she read till you come
along and pulled her trigger. Yeah.. .and once the little girl thing gets over,
she goes wild on your ass. She loses control, she be fucking liberated.”

Bobby
recalls the transformation, not the-glory-that-was-Alicia part, the shining
forth of soul rays, but the instant before she kissed him, the dazed wonderment
in her face, and realizes that Pineo—unwittingly, of course—has put his grimy,
cynical, ignorant, wise-ass finger on something he, Bobby, has heretofore not
fully grasped. That she did awaken, and not merely to her posthumous condition,
but to him. That at the end she remembered who she wanted to be. Not “who,”
maybe. But how. How she wanted to feel, how she wanted to live. The vivid, less
considered road she hoped her life would travel. Understanding this, he
understands what the death of thousands has not taught him. The exact measure
of his loss. And ours. The death of one. All men being Christ and God in His
glorious fever burning, the light toward which they aspire. Love in the
whirlwind.

“Yeah,
she was all that,” Bobby says.

<>

*
* * *

Jailwise

During my
adolescence, despite being exposed to television documentaries depicting men
with weightlifter chests and arms, wearing ponytails and wife-beater
undershirts, their bodies spangled with homemade tattoos, any mention of prison
always brought to my mind a less vainglorious type of criminal, an image
derived, I believe, from characters in the old black-and-white movies that
prior to the advent of the infomercial tended to dominate television’s early
morning hours: smallish, gray-looking men in work shirts and loose-fitting
trousers, miscreants who-although oppressed by screws and wardens, victimized
by their fellows-managed to express, however inarticulately, a noble endurance,
a working-class vitality and poetry of soul. Without understanding anything
else, I seemed to understand their crippled honor, their Boy Scout cunning,
their Legionnaire’s willingness to suffer. I felt in them the workings of a
desolate beatitude, some secret virtue of insularity whose potentials they
alone had mastered.

Nothing
in my experience intimated that such men now or ever had existed as other than
a fiction, yet they embodied a principle of anonymity that spoke to my sense of
style, and so when I entered the carceral system at the age of fifteen, my
parents having concluded that a night or two spent in the county lock-up might
address my aggressive tendencies, I strived to present a sturdy, unglamorous
presence among the mesomorphs, the skin artists and the flamboyantly hirsute.
During my first real stretch, a deuce in minimum security for Possession With
Intent, I lifted no weights and adopted no yard name. Though I wore a
serpent-shaped earring, a gift from a girlfriend, I indulged in no further
self-decoration. I neither swaggered nor skulked, but went from cell to dining
hall to my prison job with the unhurried deliberation of an ordinary man
engaged upon his daily business, and I resisted, thanks to my hostility toward
every sort of authority, therapy sessions designed to turn me inward, to coerce
an analysis of the family difficulties and street pressures that had nourished
my criminality, with the idea of liberating me from my past. At the time I
might have told you that my resistance was instinctive. Psychiatrists and
therapy: these things were articles of fashion, not implements of truth, and my
spirit rejected them as impure. Today, however, years down the line from those
immature judgments, I suspect my reaction was partially inspired by a sense
that any revelation yielded by therapy would be irrelevant to the question, and
that I already knew in my bones what I now know pit to pole: I was born to this
order.