Dreams Underfoot

Tallulah

For the longest time, I thought she was a ghost, but I know what she is now. She’s come to mean everything to me; like a lifeline, she keeps me connected to reality, to this place and this time, by her very capriciousness.

I wish I’d never met her.

That’s a lie, of course, but it comes easily to the tongue. It’s a way to pretend that the ache she left behind in my heart doesn’t hurt.

She calls herself Tallulah, but I know who she really is. A name can’t begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that’s the magic of names, isn’t it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name. And connected to the complete person we call up in our mind with the alchemy of their name comes all the baggage of memory: times you were together, the music you listened to this morning or that night, conversation and jokes and private moments—all the good and bad times you’ve shared.

Tally’s name conjures up more than just that for me. When the grisgris of the memories that hold her stir in my mind, she guides me through the city’s night like a totem does a shaman through Dreamtime. Everything familiar is changed; what she shows me goes under the skin, right to the marrow of the bone. I see a building and I know not only its shape and form, but its history. I can hear its breathing, I can almost read its thoughts.

It’s the same for a street or a park, an abandoned car or some secret garden hidden behind a wall, a late night cafe or an empty lot. Each one has its story, its secret history, and Tally taught me how to read each one of them. Where once I guessed at those stories, chasing rumors of them like they were errant fireflies, now I know.

I’m not as good with people. Neither of us are. Tally, at least, has an excuse. But me ...

I wish I’d never met her.

My brother Geordie is a busker—a street musician. He plays his fiddle on street corners or along the queues in the theatre district and makes a kind of magic with his music that words just can’t describe.

Listening to him play is like stepping into an old Irish or Scottish fairy tale. The slow airs call up haunted moors and lonely coastlines; the jigs and reels wake a fire in the soul that burns with the awesome wonder of bright stars on a cold night, or the familiar warmth of red coals glimmering in a friendly hearth.

The funny thing is, he’s one of the most pragmatic people I know. For all the enchantment he can call up out of that old Czech fiddle of his, I’m the one with the fey streak in our family.

As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary. I’ve got such an open mind that Geordie says I’ve got a hole in it, but I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. It’s not so much that I’m gullible—though I’ve been called that and less charitable things in my time; it’s more that I’m willing to just suspend my disbelief until whatever I’m considering has been thoroughly debunked to my satisfaction.

I first started collecting oddities and curiosities as I heard about them when I was in my teens, filling page after page of spiralbound notebooks with little notes and jottings—neat inky scratches on the paper, each entry opening worlds of possibility for me whenever I reread them. I liked things to do with the city the best because that seemed the last place in the world where the delicate wonders that are magic should exist.

Truth to tell, a lot of what showed up in those notebooks leaned towards a darker side of the coin, but even that darkness had a light in it for me because it still stretched the realms of what was into a thousand variable whatmight-be’s. That was the real magic for me: the possibility that we only have to draw aside a veil to find the world a far more strange and wondrous place than its mundaneness allowed it could be.

It was my girlfriend back then—Katie Deren—who first con—

vinced me to use my notebooks as the basis for stories. Katie was about as odd a bird as I was in those days. We’d sit around with the music of obscure groups like the Incredible String Band or Dr.

Strangely Strange playing on the turntable and literally talk away whole nights about anything and everything. She had the strangest way of looking at things; everything had a soul for her, be it the majestic old oak tree that stood in her parents’ back yard, or the old black iron kettle that she kept filled with dried weeds on the sill of her bedroom window.

We drifted apart, the way it happens with a lot of relationships at that age, but I kept the gift she’d woken in me: the stories.

I never expected to become a writer, but then I had no real expectations whatsoever as to what I was going to be when I “grew up.” Sometimes I think I never did—grow up that is.

But I did get older. And I found I could make a living with my stories. I called them urban legends—independently of Jan Harold Brunvand, who also makes a living collecting them. But he approaches them as a folklorist, cataloguing and comparing them, while I retell them in stories that I sell to magazines and then recycle into book collections.

I don’t feel we’re in any kind of competition with each other, but then I feel that way about all writers. There are as many stories to be told as there are people to tell them about; only the meanspirited would consider there to be a competition at all. And Brunvand does such a wonderful job.

The first time I read his The Vanishing Hitchhiker, I was completely smitten with his work and, like the hundreds of other correspondents Brunvand has, made a point of sending him items I thought he could use for his future books.

But I never wrote to him about Tally.

I do my writing at night—the later the better. I don’t work in a study or an office and I don’t use a typewriter or computer, at least not for my first drafts. What I like to do is go out into the night and just set up shop wherever it feels right: a park bench, the counter of some allnight diner, the stoop of St.

Paul’s Cathedral, the doorway of a closed junk shop on Grasso Street.

I still keep notebooks, but they’re hardcover ones now. I write my stories in them as well. And though the stories owe their ex—

istence to the urban legends that give them their quirky spin, what they’re really about is people: what makes them happy or sad. My themes are simple. They’re about love and loss, honor and the responsibilities of friendship. And wonder ... always wonder. As complex as people are individually, their drives are universal.

I’ve been told—so often I almost believe it myself—that I’ve got a real understanding of people.

However strange the situations my characters find themselves in, the characters themselves seem very real to my readers. That makes me feel good, naturally enough, but I don’t understand it because I don’t feel that I know people very well at all.

I’m just not good with them.

I think it comes from being that odd bird when I was growing up. I was distanced from the concerns of my peers, I just couldn’t get into so many of the things that they felt was important. The fault was partly the other kids—if you’re different, you’re fair game. You know how it can be. There are three kinds of kids: the ones that are the odd birds, the ones that pissed on them, and the ones that watched it happen.

It was partly my fault, too, because I ostracized them as much as they did me. I was always out of step; I didn’t really care about belonging to this gang or that clique. A few years earlier and I’d have been a beatnik, a few years later, a hippie. I got into drugs before they were cool; found out they were messing up my head and got out of them when everybody else starting dropping acid and MDA and who knows what all.

What it boiled down to was that I had a lot of acquaintances, but very few friends. And even with the friends I did have, I always felt one step removed from the relationship, as though I was observing what was going on, taking notes, rather than just being there.

That hasn’t changed much as I’ve grown older.

How that—let’s call it aloofness, for lack of a better word—translated into this socalled gift for characterization in my fiction, I can’t tell you. Maybe I put so much into the stories, I had nothing left over for real life. Maybe it’s because each one of us, no matter how many or how close our connections to other people, remains in the end, irrevocably on his or her own, solitary islands separated by expanses of the world’s sea, and I’m just more aware of it than others. Maybe I’m just missing the necessary circuit in my brain.

Tally changed all of that.

I wouldn’t have thought it, the first time I saw her.

There’s a section of the Market in Lower Crowsea, where it backs onto the Kickaha River, that’s got a kind of Old World magic about it. The roads are too narrow for normal vehicular traffic, so most people go through on bicycles or by foot. The buildings lean close to each other over the cobblestoned streets that twist and wind in a confusion that not even the city’s mapmakers have been able to unravel to anyone’s satisfaction.

There are old shops back in there and some of them still have signage in Dutch dating back a hundred years. There are buildings tenanted by generations of the same families, little courtyards, secret gardens, any number of slyeyed cats, old men playing dominoes and checkers and their gossiping wives, small gales of shrieking children by day, mysterious eddies of silence by night. It’s a wonderful place, completely untouched by the yuppie renovation projects that took over the rest of the Market.

Right down by the river there’s a public courtyard surrounded on all sides by threestory brick and stone town houses with mansard roofs and dormer windows. Late at night, the only manmade sound comes from the odd bit of traffic on the McKennitt Street Bridge a block or so south, the only light comes from the single streedamp under which stands a bench made of cast iron and wooden slats. Not a light shines from the windows of the buildings that enclose it. When you sit on that bench, the river murmurs at your back and the streetlamp encloses you in a comforting embrace of warm yellow light.

It’s one of my favorite places to write. I’ll sit there with my notebook propped up on my lap and scribble away for hours, my only companion, more often than not, a tatteredeared tom sleeping on the bench beside me. I think he lives in one of the houses, though he could be a stray. He’s there most times I come—not waiting for me. I’ll sit down and start to work and after a halfhour or so he’ll come sauntering out of the shadows, stopping a halfdozen times to lick this shoulder, that hind leg, before finally settling down beside me like he’s been there all night.

He doesn’t much care to be patted, but I’m usually too busy to pay that much attention to him anyway. Still, I enjoy his company. I’d miss him if he stopped coming.

I’ve wonder about his name sometimes. You know that old story where they talk about a cat having three names? There’s the one we give them, the one they use among themselves and then the secret one that only they know.

I just call him Ben; I don’t know what he calls himself. He could be the King of the Cats, for all I know.

He was sleeping on the bench beside me the night she showed up. He saw her first. Or maybe he heard her.

It was early autumn, a brisk night that followed one of those perfect crisp autumn days—clear skies, the sunshine bright on the turning leaves, a smell in the air of a change coming, the wheel of the seasons turning. I was bundled up in a flannel jacket and wore halfgloves to keep my hands from getting too cold as I wrote.

I looked up when Ben stirred beside me, fur bristling, sliteyed gaze focused on the narrow mouth of an alleyway that cut like a tunnel through the town houses on the north side of the courtyard. I followed his gaze in time to see her step from the shadows.

She reminded me of Geordie’s friend Jilly, the artist. She had the same slender frame and tangled hair, the same pixie face and wardrobe that made her look like she did all her clothes buying at a thrift shop. But she had a harder look than Jilly, a toughness that was reflected in the sharp lines that modified her features and in her gear: battered leather jacket, jeans stuffed into lowheeled black cowboy boots, hands in her pockets, a kind of leather carryall hanging by its strap from her shoulder.

She had a loose, confident gait as she crossed the courtyard, boot heels clicking on the cobblestones.

The warm light from the streetlamp softened her features a little.

Beside me, Ben turned around a couple of times, a slow chase of his tail that had no enthusiasm to it, and settled back into sleep. She sat down on the bench, the cat between us, and dropped her carryall at her feet. Then she leaned back against the bench, legs stretched out in front of her, hands back in the pockets of her jeans, head turned to look at me.

“Some night, isn’t it?” she said.

I was still trying to figure her out. I couldn’t place her age. One moment she looked young enough to be a runaway and I waited for the inevitable request for spare change or a place to crash, the next she seemed around my age—late twenties, early thirties—and I didn’t know what she might want. One thing people didn’t do in the city, even in this part of it, was befriend strangers. Not at night. Especially not if you were young and as pretty as she was.

My lack of a response didn’t seem to faze her in the least.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Christy Riddell,” I said. I hesitated for a moment, then reconciled myself to a conversation.

“What’s yours?” I added as I closed my notebook, leaving my pen inside it to keep my place.

“Tallulah.”

Just that, the one name. Spoken with the brassy confidence of a Cher or a Madonna.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

Tallulah sounded like it should belong to a ‘20s flapper, not some punky street kid.

She gave me a smile that lit up her face, banishing the last trace of the harshness I’d seen in her features as she was walking up to the bench.

“No, really,” she said. “But you can call me Tally.”

The melody of the ridiculous refrain from that song by—was it Harry Belafonte?—came to mind, something about tallying bananas. “What’re you doing?” she asked.

“Writing.”

“I can see that. I meant, what kind of writing?”

“I write stories,” I told her.

I waited then for the inevitable questions: Have you ever been published? What name do you write under? Where do you get your ideas? Instead she turned away and looked up at the sky.

“I knew a poet once,” she said. “He wanted to capture his soul on a piece of paper—really capture it.” She looked back at me. “But of course, you can’t do that, can you? You can try, you can bleed honesty into your art until it feels like you’ve wrung your soul dry, but in the end, all you’ve created is a possible link between minds. An attempt at communication. If a soul can’t be measured, then how can it be captured?”

I revised my opinion of her age. She might look young, but she spoke with too much experience couched in her words.

“What happened to him?” I found myself asking. “Did he give up?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. He moved away.” Her gaze left mine and turned skyward once more.

“When they move away, they leave my life because I can’t follow them.”

She mesmerized me—right from that first night. I sensed a portent in her casual appearance into my life, though a portent of what, I couldn’t say.

“Did you ever want to?” I asked her.

“Want to what?”

“Follow them.” I remember, even then, how the plurality bothered me. I was jealous and I didn’t even know of what.

She shook her head. “No. All I ever have is what they leave behind.”

Her voice seemed to diminish as she spoke. I wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder with my hand, to offer what comfort I could to ease the sudden malaise that appeared to have gripped her, but her moods, I came to learn, were mercurial. She sat up suddenly and stroked Ben until the motor of his purring filled the air with its resonance.

“Do you always write in places like this?” she asked.

I nodded. “I like the night; I like the city at night. It doesn’t seem to belong to anyone then. On a good night, it almost seems as if the stories write themselves. It’s almost as though coming out here plugs me directly into the dark heart of the city night and all of its secrets come spilling from my pen.”

I stopped, suddenly embarrassed by what I’d said. It seemed too personal a disclosure for such short acquaintance. But she just gave me a lowwatt version of her earlier smile.

“Doesn’t that bother you?” she asked.

“Does what bother me?”

“That perhaps what you’re putting down on paper doesn’t belong to you.”

“Does it ever?” I replied. “Isn’t the very act of creation made up of setting a piece of yourself free?”

“What happens when there’s no more pieces left?”

“That’s what makes it special—I don’t think you ever run out of the creative spark. Just doing it, replenishes the well. The more I work, the more ideas come to me. Whether they come from my subconscious or some outside source, isn’t really relevant. What is relevant is what I put into it.”

“Even when it seems to write itself?”

“Maybe especially so.”

I was struck—not then, but later, remembering—by the odd intensity of the conversation. It wasn’t a normal dialogue between strangers. We must have talked for three hours, never about ourselves, our histories, our pasts, but rather about what we were now, creating an intimacy that seemed surreal when I thought back on it the next day. Occasionally, there were lulls in the conversation, but they, too, seemed to add to the sense of bonding, like the comfortable silences that are only possible between good friends.

I could’ve kept right on talking, straight through the night until dawn, but she rose during one of those lulls.

“I have to go,” she said, swinging the strap of her carryall onto her shoulder.

I knew a moment’s panic. I didn’t know her address or her phone number. All I had was her first name.

“When can I see you again?” I asked.

“Have you ever been down to those old stone steps under the Kelly Street Bridge?”

I nodded. They dated back from when the river was used to haul goods from upland, down to the lake. The steps under the bridge were all that was left of an old dock that had serviced the Irishowned inn called The Harp. The dock was long abandoned, but The Harp still stood. It was one of the oldest buildings in the city. Only the solid stone structures of the city’s Dutch founding fathers, like the ones that encircled us, were older.

“I’ll meet you there tomorrow night,” she said. She took a few steps, then paused, adding, “Why don’t you bring along one of your books?”

The smile she gave me, before she turned away again, was intox—

icating. I watched her walk back across the courtyard, disappearing into the narrow mouth of the alleyway from which she’d first come. Her footsteps lingered on, an echoing taptap on the cobblestones, but then that too faded.

I think it was at that moment that I decided she was a ghost.

I didn’t get much writing done over the next few weeks. She wouldn’t—she said she couldn’t—see me during the day, but she wouldn’t say why. I’ve got such a head filled with fictions that I honestly thought it was because she was a ghost, or maybe a succubus or a vampire. The sexual attraction was certainly there. If she’d sprouted fangs one night, I’d probably just have bared my neck and let her feed.

But she didn’t, of course. Given a multiplechoice quiz, in the end I realized the correct answer was none of the above.

I was also sure that she was at least my own age, if not older. She was widely read and, like myself, had eclectic tastes that ranged from genre fiction to the classics. We talked for hours every night, progressed to walking hand in hand through our favorite parts of the benighted city and finally made love one night in a large, cozy sleeping bag in Fitzhenry Park.

She took me there on one of what we called our rambles and didn’t say a word, just stripped down in the moonlight and then drew me down into the sweet harbor of her arms. Above us, I heard geese heading south as, later, I drifted into sleep. I remember thinking it was odd to hear them so late at night, but then what wasn’t in the hours I spent with Tally?

I woke alone in the morning, the subject of some curiosity by a couple of old winos who casually watched me get dressed inside the bag as though they saw this kind of thing every morning.

Our times together blur in my mind now. It’s hard for me to remember one night from another. But I have little fetish bundles of memory that stay whole and complete in my mind, the grisgris that collected around her name in my mind, like my nervousness that second night under the Kelly Street Bridge, worried that she wouldn’t show, and three nights later when, after not saying a word about the book of my stories I’d given her when we parted on the old stone steps under the bridge, she told me how much she’d liked them.

“These are my stories,” she said as she handed the book back to me that night.

I’d run into possessive readers before, fans who laid claim to my work as their own private domain, who treated the characters in the stories as real people, or thought that I carried all sorts of hidden and secret knowledge in my head, just because of the magic and mystery that appeared in the tales I told. But I’d never had a reaction like Tally’s before.

“They’re about me,” she said. “They’re your stories, I can taste your presence in every word, but each of them’s a piece of me, too.”

I told her she could keep the book and the next night, I brought her copies of my other three collections, plus photocopies of the stories that had only appeared in magazines to date. I won’t say it’s because she liked the stories so much, that I came to love her; that would have happened anyway. But her pleasure in them certainly didn’t make me think any the less of her.

Another night she took a photograph out of her carryall and showed it to me. It was a picture of her, but she looked different, softer, not so much younger as not so tough. She wore her hair differently and had a flower print dress on; she was standing in sunlight.

“When ... when was this taken?” I asked.

“In happier times.”

Call me smallminded that my disappointment should show so plain, but it hurt that what were the happiest nights of my life, weren’t the same for her.

She noticed my reaction—she was always quick with things like that—and laid a warm hand on mine.

“It’s not you,” she said. “I love our time together. It’s the rest of my life that’s not so happy.”

Then be with me all the time, I wanted to tell her, but I already knew from experience that there was no talking about where she went when she left me, what she did, who she was. I was still thinking of ghosts, you see. I was afraid that some taboo lay upon her telling me, that if she spoke about it, if she told me where she was during the day, the spell would break and her spirit would be banished forever like in some hokey Bmovie.

I wanted more than just the nights, I’ll admit freely to that, but not enough to risk losing what I had. I was like the wife in “Bluebeard,” except I refused to allow my curiosity to turn the key in the forbidden door. I could have followed her, but I didn’t. And not just because I was afraid of her vanishing on me. It was because she trusted me not to.

We made love three times, all told, every time in that old sleeping bag of hers, each time in a different place, each morning I woke alone. I’d bring back her sleeping bag when we met that night and she’d smile to see its bulk rolled under my arm.

The morning after the first time, I realized that I was changing; that she was changing me. It wasn’t by anything she said or did, or rather it wasn’t that she was making me change, but that our relationship was stealing away that sense of distancing I had carried with me through my life.

And she was changing, too. She still wore her jeans and leather jacket most of the time, but sometimes she appeared wearing a short dress under the jacket, warm leggings, small trim shoes instead of her boots. Her face kept its character, but the tension wasn’t so noticeable anymore, the toughness had softened.

I’d been open with her from the very first night, more open than I’d ever been with friends I’d known for years. And that remained. But now it was starting to spill over to my other relationships. I found my brother and my friends were more comfortable with me, and I with them. None of them knew about Tally; so far as they knew I was still prowling the nocturnal streets of the city in search of inspiration.

They didn’t know that I wasn’t writing, though Professor Dapple guessed.

I suppose it was because he always read my manuscripts before I sent them off. We had the same interests in the odd and the curious—it was what had drawn us together long before Jilly became his student, before he retired from the university. Everybody still thought of him as the Professor; it was hard not to.

He was a tiny wizened man with a shock of frizzy white hair and gasses who delighted in long conversations conducted over tea, or if the hour was appropriate, a good Irish whisky. At least once every couple of weeks the two of us would sit in his cozy study, he reading one of my stories while I read his latest article before it was sent off to some journal or other. When the third visit went by in which I didn’t have a manuscript in hand, he finally broached the subject. “You seem happy these days, Christy.”

“I am.”

He’d smiled. “So is it true what they say—an artist must suffer to produce good work?”

I hadn’t quite caught on yet to what he was about.

“Neither of us believe that,” I said.

“Then you must be in love.”

1,

.

I didn’t know what to say. An awful sinking feeling had settled in my stomach at his words. Lord knew, he was right, but for some reason, just as I knew I shouldn’t follow Tally when she left me after our midnight trysts, I had this superstitious dread that if the world discovered our secret, she would no longer be a part of my life.

“There’s nothing wrong with being in love,” he said, mistaking my hesitation for embarrassment.

“It’s not that,” I began, knowing I had nowhere to go except a lie and I couldn’t lie to the Professor.

“Never fear,” he said. “You’re allowed your privacy—and welcome to it, I might add. At my age, any relating of your escapades would simply make me jealous. But I worry about your writing.”

“I haven’t stopped,” I told him. And then I had it. “I’ve been thinking of writing a novel.”

That wasn’t a lie. I was always thinking of writing a novel; I just doubted that I ever would. My creative process could easily work within the perimeters of short fiction, even a connected series of stories such as The Red Crow had turned out to be, but a novel was too massive an undertaking for me to understand, little say attempt. I had to have the whole of it in my head and to do so with anything much longer than a short novella was far too daunting a process for me to begin. I had discovered, to my disappointment because I did actually want to make the attempt, that the longer a piece of mine was, the less ... substance it came to have. It was as though the sheer volume of a novel’s wordage would somehow dissipate the strengths my work had to date.

My friends who did write novels told me I was just being a chickenshit; but then they had trouble with short fiction and avoided it like the plague. It was my firm belief that one should stick with what worked, though maybe that was just a way of rationalizing a failure.

“What sort of a novel?” the Professor asked, intrigued since he knew my feelings on the subject.

I gave what I hoped was a casual shrug.

“That’s what I’m still trying to decide,” I said, and then turned the conversation to other concerns.

But I was nervous leaving the Professor’s house, as though the little I had said was enough to turn the key in the door that led into the hidden room I shouldn’t enter. I sensed a weakening of the dam that kept the mystery of our trysts deep and safe. I feared for the floodgate opening and the rush of reality that would tear my ghostly lover away from me.

But as I’ve already said, she wasn’t a ghost. No, something far stranger hid behind her facade of pixie face and tousled hair.

I’ve wondered before, and still do, how much of what happens to us we bring upon ourselves. Did my odd superstition concerning Tally drive her away, or was she already leaving before I ever said as much as I did to the Professor? Or was it mere coincidence that she said goodbye that same night?

I think of the carryall she’d had on her shoulder the first time we met and have wondered since if she wasn’t already on her way then.

Perhaps I had only interrupted a journey already begun.

“You know, don’t you?” she said when I saw her that night. Did synchronicity reach so far that we would part that night in that same courtyard by the river where we had first met? “You know I have to go,” she added when I said nothing. I nodded. I did. What I didn’t know was

“Why?” I asked.

Her features seemed harder again—like they had been that first night. The softness that had grown as our relationship had was more memory than fact, her features seemed to be cut to the bone once more.

Only her eyes still held a touch of warmth, as did her smile. A tough veneer masked the rest of her.

“It’s because of how the city is used,” she said. “It’s because of hatred and spite and bigotry; it’s because of homelessness and drugs and crime; it’s because the green quiet places are so few while the dark terrors multiply; it’s because what’s old and comfortable and rounded must make way for what’s new and sharp and brittle; it’s because a mean spirit grips its streets and that meanness cuts inside me like a knife.

“It’s changing me, Christy, and I don’t want you to see what I will become. You wouldn’t recognize me and I wouldn’t want you to. “That’s why I have to go.”

When she said go, I knew she meant she was leaving me, not the city.

“But—”

“You’ve helped me keep it all at bay, truly you have, but it’s not enough. Neither of us have enough strength to hold that mean spirit at bay forever. What we have was stolen from the darkness. But it won’t let us steal any more.”

I started to speak, but she just laid her fingers across my lips. I saw that her sleeping bag was stuffed under the bench. She pulled it out and unrolled it on the cobblestones. I thought of the dark windows of the town houses looking into the courtyard. There could be a hundred gazes watching as she gently pulled me down onto the sleeping bag, but I didn’t care.

I tried to stay awake. I lay beside her, propped up on an elbow and stroked her shoulder, her hair. I marveled at the softness of her skin, the silkiness of her hair. In repose, the harsh lines were gone from her face again. I wished that there was some way I could just keep all her unhappiness at bay, that I could stay awake and protect her forever, but sleep snuck up on me all the same and took me away.

Just as I went under, I thought I heard her say, “You’ll know other lovers.”

But not like her. Never like her.

When I woke the next morning, I was alone on the sleeping bag, except for Ben who lay purring on the bag where she had lain.

It was early, too early for anyone to be awake in any of the houses, but I wouldn’t have cared. I stood naked in the frosty air and slowly got dressed. Ben protested when I shooed him off the sleeping bag and rolled it up.

The walk home, with the sleeping bag rolled up under my arm, was never so long.

No, Tally wasn’t a ghost, though she haunts the city’s streets at night—just as she haunts my mind.

I know her now. She’s like a rose bush grown old, gone wild; untrimmed, neglected for years, the thorns become sharper, more bitter; her foliage spreading, grown out of control, reaching high and wide, while the center chokes and dies. The blossoms that remain are just small now, hidden in the wild growth, memories of what they once were.

I know her now. She’s the spirit that connects the notes of a tune—the silences in between the sounds; the resonance that lies under the lines I put down on a page. Not a ghost, but a spirit all the same: the city’s heart and soul.

I don’t wonder about her origin. I don’t wonder whether she was here first, and the city grew around her, or if the city created her. She just is.

Tallulah. Tally. A reckoning of accounts.

I think of the old traveling hawkers who called at private houses in the old days and sold their wares on the tally system—part payment on account, the other part due when they called again. Tallymen.

The payments owed her were long overdue, but we no longer have the necessary coin to settle our accounts with her. So she changes; just as we change. I can remember a time when the city was a safer place, how when I was young, we never locked our doors and we knew every neighbor on our block.

Kids growing up today wouldn’t even know what I’m talking about; the people my own age have forgotten. The old folks remember, but who listens to them? Most of us wish that they didn’t exist; that they’d just take care of themselves so that we can get on with our own lives.

Not all change is for the good.

I still go out on my rambles, most every night. I hope for a secret tryst, but all I do is write stories again. As the new work fills my notebooks, I’ve come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.

I’m trying to change that now.

I look for her on my rambles. She’s all around me, of course, in every brick of every building, in every whisper of wind as it scurries down an empty street. She’s a cab’s lights at 3:00 A.M., a siren near dawn, a shuffling bag lady pushing a squeaky grocery cart, a darkeyed cat sitting on a shadowed stoop.

She’s all around me, but I can’t find her. I’m sure I’d recognize her I don’t want you to see what I will become.

—but I can’t be sure. The city can be so many things. It’s a place where the familiar can become strange with just the blink of an eye. And if I saw her

You wouldn’t recognize me and I wouldn’t want you to.

—what would I do? If she could, she’d come to me, but that mean spirit still grips the streets. I see it in people’s faces; I feel it in the coldness that’s settled in their hearts. I don’t think I would recognize her; I don’t think I’d want to. I have the grisgris of her memory in my mind; I have an old sleeping bag rolled up in a corner of my hall closet; I’m here if she needs me.

I have this fantasy that it’s still not too late; that we can still drive that mean spirit away and keep it at bay. The city would be a better place to live in if we could and I think we owe it to her. I’m doing my part. I write about her

They’re about me. They’re your stories, I can taste your presence in every word, but each of them’s a piece of me, too.

—about her strange wonder and her magic and all. I write about how she changed me, how she taught me that getting close can hurt, but not getting close is an even lonelier hurt. I don’t preach; I just tell the stories.

But I wish the ache would go away. Not the memories, not the grisgris that keeps her real inside me, but the hurt. I could live without that hurt.

Sometimes I wish I’d never met her.

Maybe one day I’ll believe that lie, but I hope not.