Ghostlands

THREE

That night, she had the dream again. The one with the third blind man, the one who could see. It perplexed her, she didn’t know how that could be so, but he told her not to worry, she’d know when they met. And in that telling, at least, she came to a partial knowing, that somehow his name was Blindman, and that it was not his eyes that were blind.

In the dream, they sat in a park, the two of them, the wind scattering the dry leaves like frightened children, and she could look across the street to the strange house, the one that was shrouded in night, lights shining within, yet a bright daylit sky above.

With that odd split consciousness of dreamer and dream, she realized she had seen this image before somewhere-in a book? — that it was a painting, and there was a name associated with it that at first she could not summon to mind. Yet she also knew that name had once been the Blindman’s heart.

Magritte…

As if sensing her thought, the third blind man smiled, large even teeth dazzling against his young dark face, the old dark eyes. “The heart broken was Goldman’s,” he said.

She knew she should remember who the gold man was, too, but her mind felt muted as it so often did nowadays, as if pale fingers had brushed against her lips and stifled the answer.

A rumble sounded in the azure sky, rolling in from the west, and she smelled a sharp tang in the air, like fresh sheets off a clothesline, and she knew a storm was coming.

“Time to get you home,” the third blind man said.

There was a crackling and snapping in the sky like insane angry blue lightning. It swirled down at her faster than thought, seized her like the jaws of a big dog that was all the world. It tore at her and shook her and worried her as if she were a small dead thing, and it screamed and she screamed, too.

The Girl woke up in bed. The bed that looked just like her bed, under the blue and pink blankets that looked just like her blankets.

It was the same, and that was the really terrible part.

She threw back the covers and sat up and stretched, feeling the coil and ache of young muscles.

It was cold in the apartment, and she drew on the familiar terrycloth robe that lay at the foot of the bed.

She rose and padded across her room in the darkness, lithe as flowing water-navigating with easy familiarity the clutter of dance magazines, souvenir programs, textbooks and, of course, the Nijinsky diary-and emerged out into the hall.

The door to the other bedroom lay half open. She commanded herself not to look again, not to give in to the tiny hope that was so akin to hopelessness. But as ever she lacked the will.

In the predawn gloom, the hissing lights from Patel’s Grocery and the Amoco billboard shed just enough illumination to cast the room in noir starkness. The Marvin the Martian clock stood sentinel by the bedside, the covers tossed aside as if another had just awoken from unquiet dreams, too, and momentarily stepped away.

But it wasn’t so, the Girl knew. There was no one else here. But there should be, a part of her memory insisted. She should not be alone. He had promised her she wouldn’t be alone.

She continued on to the bathroom, where she showered and dried and did her morning things.

She looked at herself in the mirror, just like her mirror, the silvering coming away in the upper left and lower right corners. Her hair was dark and her eyes were dark-not blue at all, though strangely somehow she felt they should be blue-and her skin was smooth and pink, and her bare feet were planted solidly on the cracked blue tile.

What could possibly be wrong about that?

Her Danskin leotard and tights hung from the hook on the back of the door and she drew them on, feeling their snug familiarity with the subtle curve and flare of her body. She picked up the Grishko slippers from where they lay curled beside the cabinet and slid them onto artfully callused feet.

She glided out into the still, silent living room and switched on the television, turned the volume low. It shouldn’t be working, she told herself in some dim back part of her mind-as she told herself every time she turned it on-but it glowed to life as always. Sometimes it showed TV series or movies she knew well, remembered from when she was little, or from more recent times. On other occasions, it displayed a puzzling multicolored snow or revealed disturbing abstract patterns.

But mostly it broadcast snatches of scenes the Girl couldn’t place-disjointed moments in vibrant color or scratchy black-and-white, some in English but many in languages that sounded like they might be Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French. These she classified as being derived from Sakamoto or Sanrio, Monteiro or St. Ives, without clearly understanding what those names meant, or from where she summoned them.

The early daylight sun shone through the slats of the window blinds, painting the walls and the Girl with shadows like prison bars. She folded back the faded area rug, ran through her regimen of stretches. Then she assumed first position before the large practice mirror, went through her variations and barre work, felt the call and response of finely tuned muscle and sinew.

Once these motions had been primal to her, almost the totality of her past, present and future.

But now they were just something to do to fill the time, on the track of remembered action, like a train that returned you to where you started.

And beneath everything, like a low vibration just below the threshold of sound, the sense of wrongness, humming in the marrow of her bones, in the helixes within her cells.

Completing her routine in due course, the Girl ventured into the kitchen, nuked the coffee in its WNET pledge mug in the microwave. The level of instant coffee in the Sanka jar was always the same as she spooned it out, and the strawberry Pop-Tart always the last as she withdrew it from the box in the freezer and popped it in the toaster.

Is it live or is it Memorex? The Girl couldn’t quite place who had told her of the commercial with the old lady jazz singer breaking a glass with her voice-only that it had been someone with a twin, someone who had had something horribly wrong with him. But the Girl herself had never seen the commercial, and-despite the melancholy variety of programming on the set now-it never appeared.

She remembered, too, the story someone-she had trouble remembering who-had read her when she was little (but not too little to comprehend it) by that bearded guy who had written for Star Trek, in which strange creatures appeared at night and rebuilt an exact duplicate of the entire world for the next day, so you would think it was all the same.

But invariably, of course, they screwed it all up.

The Girl walked back out to the living room. She set the Pop-Tart and coffee on a side table and plopped cross-legged onto the burgundy recliner with the tear hidden in back. She reached behind her and selected a volume from the big maple bookcase that displayed the round jelly-glass stain, exactly like the one that had journeyed with them when she and the companion now walled off from her recollection had come from Hurley, Minnesota, when she was small.

The book was a tattered leather copy of Little Women. The Girl knew it well; her mother had read this book to her, and that unremembered other had, too, and she’d read it many times herself. She flipped through it. All the pages were there, and all the words.

Not so with many of the other works on the shelf, she knew. They might hold only half the words, or a third of the pages might be blank, or the cover a blur.

She drew out another book, a dark blue one with a gold dragon on the spine, and the title A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. She had not inspected this one before. With mild curiosity, she blew the dust off and opened it, saw scrawled in a childish hand on the inside front cover, “This Book Belongs to Agnes Hilliard Wu.”

The frontispiece showed a group of mustached and bearded men in animated conversation around a table, with the caption “The Doctor was evidently discoursing upon a favorite topic.” She fanned the pages. The words seemed intact, set whole. Agnes Wu must have cherished this book; must still, wherever she might be. There were other books on the shelves inscribed to Agnes, books in a lilting text that the Girl recognized (although she could not have said precisely how) as Thai; she wondered if Agnes Wu, whoever she was, might once have lived in that fantasy place.

The Regulator clock on the wall chimed the half hour-seven-thirty. The Girl returned the book to its place on the shelf, uncurled and stood.

Beyond her apartment, the city waited, and her regular classes, and the School of American Ballet.

The train on its track, circling.

The Girl emerged from her fourth-floor walk-up out onto the street, dressed in her school grays, the book bag with its toe-shoe insignia slung over her shoulder. The morning was bright and mild, with none of the weight of humidity nor razor chill she associated with so many of her days in Manhattan. Unseen, the robins and skylarks trilled their songs, and strangers bustled about on the brownstone street as if they were actually going somewhere.

Eighty-first looked exactly right; the streets she most often walked on were always as she remembered them. Some of the other streets were complete, too-maybe St. Ives or Monteiro or the others knew them. But sometimes she’d turn a corner and be back on the street she was on before, or it would just be fog.

Outside her place, the Girl passed the cherry tree within its circle of vertical iron bars, a prisoner of Eighty-first Street. It blossomed even in captivity.

As she strode toward Columbus and St. Augustine Middle School, a gentle wind detached some of the blossoms from the tree and they pursued her, floated about her like a scene from Madame Butterfly. She caught one in her hand and ran it along her lips, her cheek; it felt like her own soft skin.

Joggers loped past her and kids strolled bantering in easy, laughing conversation. The Girl knew by now not to try to speak to them. People looked real, too, but they wouldn’t engage her in conversation; they were like extras in a movie.

Every now and then, though, someone would talk to her, and then she knew they were really real, or at least connected to someone who was.

The Girl slowed as she came to Mr. Lungo’s home. It was the familiar curlicued Victorian wedding cake of a house she remembered. But really, with its warped and weathered shingles, its peeling paint, listing fenceposts and wild devil grass, it was more like Miss Havisham’s ruin of a cake in Great Expectations, the symbol of abandonment, and broken promises, and time stood still. Even when she was little it had disquieted her, seemed an anomaly brutishly inserted onto this ordered street of brownstones with their weathered stoops and muted foliage.

It wasn’t like this every day. Sometimes the lot showed nothing more than blackened timbers and twisted wreckage, smoke curling up and choking the air, the way the house had been after disaster had befallen it on that riotous, murdering night.

Other times it wasn’t there at all-just the houses adjoining on either side, butted up against one another.

Lungo himself never made an appearance. But occasionally, his front-porch glider would rock with the slightest motion from the wind, in the shade of his scraggly jacaranda, and his twisted walking stick, like an arthritic, broken finger, would be resting against the rail.

The realest people here are the ghosts, the Girl thought, and turned onto Columbus.

She caught the sweet liquid sound from far off, way around the corner, like the smell of menthol, and honey on your tongue, and the azure sky at sunset when the stars were just peering through.

Then the husky, lulling murmur of the saxophone paused in mid-phrase.

“Well, if it ain’t Anna Pavlova….”

The blind black man turned his milk-sheened, useless eyes toward her and smiled with that smile that was like sinking into a warm bath. How he could know she was there before she spoke was always a mystery to her, and it felt right.

He was not young like the third blind man in her dream, nor pale like the other, malign one. His skin was a deep burnished brown, like old, oiled furniture, and when the light hit it just so, it showed a subtlety of gray, like a fine coating of ash.

“How they treatin’ you today, sweet girl?” Papa Sky asked.

“Okay,” she replied, and both the question and the answer soothed her, although she couldn’t have said who she thought “they” were.

“Well, you just hang in there. You got friends in high places. What you wanna hear today?”

She shrugged, which was a request in itself. Dealer’s choice…and when the dealer was this good, it was all flow.

Papa Sky put the shaved Leblanc reed of the 1922 Selmer alto sax (this instrument that was almost, but not quite, as old as he was) to his wetted lips, and it was an incantation and supplication in one.

The glorious sounds poured out, smooth perfection, throaty and soaring and exultant.

The Girl recognized the tune. The last time he’d played it, the old blind black man (the half cubano as he called himself) had told her it was called “Night and Day.”

She closed her eyes and let the melody fill her, began to move to it. And this was no longer just going through the motions, nor feigning interest in the arabesque and pas de deux that had once been her universe.

Night and day, you are the one….

She gave herself over to the river of harmony, let its cool voice fill every pore, engulf eye socket and fingertip, ankle and neck, liberated into expression and movement.

The way it had been before, when Luz Herrera had taken the photo (so exactly like the one atop her night table now) of her as Giselle at the March recital in mid-jete, enraptured, effortless.

Freed from the pull of earth, and its cares.

Weightless.

Before weightlessness had become a curse and a shaming, and a constant source of danger…

But that pang of memory was not for now; if that waking-dream existence lingered in her it was pushed far down and away, like a sliver imbedded and grown over with flesh, like venom lurking in a vein.

Let it go….

There was only this moment, this gift, here and real and fine if she just held on to it….

As she twirled and swayed, inseparable from the tumble of exquisite notes one on another, the image came to her of Nijinsky as the Faun and the Rose, posed with that excruciating, incredible mix of delicacy and power that only he could attain, so expressive and perfect that these weren’t still images to her-she saw him in the glory and magnificence of motion.

The clear, undeniable message, the siren song that had drawn her so long and with such constancy…You are your real self when you are removed from self, when you give yourself over to what the cosmos calls you to be, and that thing might be called Destiny. Or simply Truth.

To see that truth, to not be blind to it…

And yet Nijinsky thought he saw it, heard what he took to be its call. He followed it, and that false god led him to his destruction.

She knew that god, too, now, had been snared by it.

But not in this moment, this sanctuary, blessed and released…

The song ended, the notes held, then drifting away, to unknown, unreachable places.

The Girl settled to stillness, exhaled a slow breath. She opened her eyes.

Inigo was there, watching her. As she knew he’d be.

Hanging back in the shadows against the cold stone wall of an office building, gazing at her through Gargoyle sunglasses. Though she could not see his eyes behind them, she knew from past encounters that they were white as pearl, with only the faintest vertical slash of gray for the pupil.

White like the old jazzman’s eyes, like Papa Sky’s. But not blind; Inigo could see as well as she could; better, particularly at night.

He was her age, but shorter-smart like her, though-bundled up not against the cold, because there was no cold, but against the light. The dark navy hood was pulled low over his broad forehead, the sides of it drawn tight against his bony face, that pale skin that was blue-gray and spoke of sickness but also, paradoxically, of strength.

The Girl couldn’t say why he looked this way. But then, she couldn’t say why she looked the way she did, wasn’t sure she wanted to know, to hear the insistent thrumming deep in her bones. It was quiet now. Sometimes it seemed aching to scream.

Is it real or Memorex?

Let it go….

“Hey,” Inigo said to her.

“Hey yourself.”

Papa Sky smiled his smoky smile. “Now we got enough to really make an audience.”

“Nearly didn’t get through,” Inigo said. “The Bridge-”

He stopped himself, shot a worried glance at Papa Sky, whose face had darkened, a silent caution.

The Girl knew he hadn’t meant the Brooklyn or Verrazano Narrows or any of the others familiar to her and to Manhattan. There were things that could be said here and things that couldn’t, and the rules were always unspoken.

She remembered her friend Margie Daws once confiding about her own family, as the two of them had loitered after phys ed beside the volleyball net at St. Augustine’s, “The best stories are the ones we never talk about.” (And she wondered just now how she could so clearly recall Margie Daws, but not the owner of that other room in her apartment-the one who slept in that perpetually rumpled bed.)

The Girl was full of questions for her street-corner companions, but she invariably found herself faced with a silence that proclaimed, You can’t get there from here.

Still, she was grateful to be here in this brief respite with two who were undeniably not mirages or puppets of the mist but actual people, regardless of what prohibitions they might have forced upon them.

There were other acquaintances she recalled, less as if she had met them on the way to her own daytime obligations and more as if they were characters in a story she had been told. Still, she could visualize them…almost: a Russian hot-dog vendor, she recalled dimly, and an impetuous, powerful young woman, and a wild-eyed homeless man. There was a veil there. Was it real or was it…?

In some way she could not quite summon, she knew they were real; had become a good deal more than that in later times.

But none of them were here now, that was for sure.

Papa Sky had come first, appearing on this street corner or one much like it days and days before (hard to tell how long precisely, with each day so similar). Inigo had arrived some time later, suddenly standing there as he stood now, seemingly drawn by the music, transfixed by it.

There was a familiar quality to him, although the Girl knew she hadn’t met him before, not this specific individual. But in the murkiness of memory she knew that she had encountered ones very like him, vague names in the cloudy waters coalescing into…Freddy? and…Hank?

The Girl had lingered on that day when Inigo made his debut, had drawn him aside into a shrouded alley curtained from prying eyes.

“Where are you from?” she demanded of him.

“Here,” he said simply, and she knew from how he said it that he didn’t mean these streets like her street, but really here, where this truly was, or at least what lay beyond her island home, the outside that was excluded from her.

Since then, she and Inigo had stolen moments away when there was a lull in her imposed schedule, blank spots to fill in. They went to the Guggenheim sometimes (the art was always different) or to Sbarro’s at Times Square (where she always had just enough money).

They had both been shy of each other at first, and wary, too. But longing for company, in time they had opened themselves in a slow dance of growing companionability.

She assembled his past from the tiny fragmented pieces he revealed to her, like a jigsaw with more missing than revealed.

He was alone, his mother and father gone.

(As was she…)

The father had disappeared first, under mysterious circumstances. There was a curious irony to that, because Inigo had been named by his mother after a character in The Princess Bride, one whose raison d’etre was to avenge the death of his father.

Then his mother had exited, too. Not departed into death like Tina’s own mother, but on a voyage of some sort, a searching. Inigo had been left in the care of some woman…a friend of his mother’s? At a place his father had worked?

The details were musty, uncertain. The Girl couldn’t be sure of any it….

Or that on a day back in summer, this friend of Inigo’s mother had vanished, too, removed in some appalling, different way, had left Inigo derelict and stranded here, abandoned yet somehow shielded….

Had that friend’s name been Agnes Wu, or was the Girl merely confused again, mixing up what she saw and felt and remembered? It was all jumbled and scrambled together, smudged and blurring in her mind as she tried to hold on to it, elusive as steam hissing off a subway grate.

She knew this, though: On that specific summer day, at a certain very precise time in the morning, Inigo had begun to change.

The same day and time as when the Girl herself-

As if her thoughts had somehow prompted it, a dark rumbling swept through the sky like a giant clearing his throat, the ground trembling in sympathetic vibration.

The Girl and Inigo both shrunk away from it, and there was even a ripple of concern across the old jazzman’s face.

But then Papa Sky began to play, and all grew calm.

The Girl knew this one, too, from her mother’s record collection, the collection the dimly, almost-recalled other had brought along with the books and bookcase so long ago.

“Stormy Weather.”

The Girl closed her eyes and danced and was free again.

But had she looked to see, she would have spied Inigo watching her from his place in the shadows, and would have known he needed nothing more to worship.

The music faded again and the Girl returned.

“Time you best be movin’ on,” Papa Sky advised. “Wouldn’t want you late for lessons.” She knew somehow that he wasn’t referring to the mockery of the classes that were the same, but instead cautioning her not to light here too long, to draw a scrutiny she would not want to incur.

“Later,” she said, already starting away.

“Bye, Tina,” Inigo said.

The Girl paused and turned back. “Call me Christina,” she said. A more formal name, but it suited this different time, this different place.

She headed off down the street to walk among the mists and shadows and echoes that were the same every day….

Every Mobius-strip day.

“This part always creeps me out,” Inigo said to Papa Sky.

New York was shutting down. Or at least this section of it, now that Christina was gone.

Growing dim, the people and buildings subsiding around them, losing detail, like clay sculptures submerged in water and drawn out again. Or Adam and Eve in reverse motion, God in an act of un Creation, returning them to the mud again.

The darkness encroached, not at all like a sunset with night coming on, but instead like the cessation of consciousness as death drew near.

The Place to Be turning into the Non-Place.

Inigo stowed the Gargoyle shades in his jacket pocket and threw back the hood, letting his blanched skin feel the caress of the thinning air.

“Quittin’ time…” Papa Sky crooned. To one who knew the blind man less well than the boy did, there might be the assumption that he was unruffled by the darkness because darkness was his constant state.

But Inigo knew this was not the case-Papa Sky was just cool, in the way that eight decades of hard road and iron discipline had lent him a calm and strength that were rarely shaken by anything.

The old man bent his long, lean frame to the open case that rested on the pavement, set the gleaming sax gently within it as though it were an infant, wadded with cotton to hold it safe.

He snapped the case shut and stood with it, felt blindly with his free hand for where his fiberglass cane lay against the edge of the nearby building. His fingers closed around it with deft assurance.

Time for them each to make his own way home. Or what they called home now. Sure as hell not here.

To go while they still could.

Inigo fished in his pocket. His fingers found the coin that was always there, always newly born.

He pulled out the buffalo nickel, not knowing the source of it, at least not precisely. Dr. Sanrio, he supposed. That would be his sick idea of a joke.

The buffalo had been the first to be affected, out beyond the mountains in the federal lands, and the Indian lands, too…and Inigo’s father had been the second.

They had left him here, his father and then his mother, and Agnes Wu, too, when the hard rain had come down.

Fortunately for Inigo, he had turned into something that could stand that hard rain, something that was pretty damn hard itself, little and wiry and tough. And although he had not been wanted by what remained to perceive him, It had not-fortunately, again-regarded him as sufficient of a threat to bother to dislodge him.

(And perhaps, too, some residual affection Agnes held for him-or whatever of Agnes was still left-had lent him some sort of asylum, reprieve.)

Which hadn’t made the loneliness any easier…

Until, that was, the new arrivals made it onto the scene, these two good souls, these friends…and the additional interloper who was anything but Inigo’s friend.

Inigo slid the coin into the breast pocket of Papa Sky’s suit, just behind the white handkerchief that was always immaculately folded. He said the words he always said at this point, the ritual. It was what his father had said whenever he’d given Inigo his allowance, before Dad headed out on his rounds at the facility, or set off into the Badlands.

“Something for the ferryman.”

Papa Sky nodded. “Always got to pay your own way…”

Inigo started off, but Papa Sky beckoned him back. He leaned down and whispered into the boy’s ear, the ear that was so delicately pointed, tufted with fine, white hair.

“I had a word with the Leather Man,” Papa Sky said. “He told me it’s time.”

Inigo drew in a tight breath of thin, chill air.

It wasn’t a surprise, not really. He knew this day would come. But still, he felt far from ready.

Not that any of that mattered, though.

Yoda could be a little green dude, or he could be an old blind black man, or something with scales and wings.

There is no try, there is only do.

Inigo was the messenger.

Christina returned home as the sun was dipping below the spires of the city, the sky streaked and fiery.

Her body ached from the hours of practice at the School of the American Ballet, obeying the commands of the shade that looked and sounded like the essence of the retired prima ballerina she had so idolized and emulated in recent years, years that seemed more a dream than the dream that had awakened her this morning.

Wearily, she climbed the four flights to her flat, her book bag feeling as if weighted with stones. She fished out her key as she drew near the door-then saw that it stood half-open (and she knew she had locked it on leaving that morning).

With a choked cry, she dropped her bag and the key, dashing inside, the hope surging in her like a drowning man swimming for the surface that at last he had found her-the one she could almost, not quite, remember-that he had come as he had promised her, back in the place she could not summon, but that her mind told her was named Boone’s Gap.

But the figure sitting in the one good chair, silhouetted against the dying embers of the day that slanted in through the window, was not the one she waited for.

From the outline of him, she knew he was wearing his manshape again. He drew on his cigarette in the darkness, and the red tip of it was a malevolent eye.

What monstrosities would walk the world were men’s faces as unfinished as their minds….

“What a day I’ve had,” he muttered.

She settled into the rocker that her lost mother had sung lullabies and held her in; that her lost father had torn the runners off in a fit of rage, before she was born.

Soon you’ll be past the pain, her visitor had told her long ago, on a rooftop over a thousand miles away.

She wondered when that would be.

He had never touched her in violence, never physically harmed her in any way. But he had committed horrors, and she had been the unwilling witness to much of it. Like the inhuman being in the Harrison Ford movie that was older than she was, the one who in the end found a dreadful and curious compassion.

I have done questionable things….

She said nothing as he unburdened himself through the night, opening his dragon heart to her once more.