Before (8 page)

Above, there is the language like the Russian Ghost-Man heard sometimes in the Mideast, but with more of a hushing quality to it; he ducks a little into the shadows and looks up, but the window of the old European couple is at too steep an angle for him to be noticed. The voice of an American woman says, “I'll get that, Anna,” over running water. This is Tika LaFond, who dines there often: Ghost-Man closes his eyes in this sunflower darkness, breathes deeply, imagines the scent of Tika's white cotton coverlet, the fragrance of skin lotion there, just after she has showered and gone out. He was there this evening when she was showering, pressed to the wall just beneath the bathroom window, listening to that water, how her body altered the velocity of the spray. He was there earlier this morning. Sunflowers before him grow; he hears a steady crackle of stems and capitula, thousands of eyes stare from endless circles of orange black. Alison Tiner is bending, writing something.

He can sense the rush of fire: this from the street performers blocks away in Harvard Square who, with a gaggle of people around them, take torches and dip them into raised mouths, so that the flame is burning within their throats (Ghost-Man imagines fire smoldering within human red, tunnels of wet flesh), then removed, swaths of orange blue heat against the night. Alison Tiner is gone from the window now; later, he shall find out what sort of evening she has in mind for her gentleman. But first there is something that he must do.

*   *   *

In twenty minutes Ghost-Man is behind 38; there is a spread of elm trees here, a strong smell of earth and the cement of the garages. On Monday nights Tika LaFond and Susan Bristol are often gone until midnight or one o'clock. Ghost-Man watched Tika LaFond come down the steps of 39 ten minutes ago and wave to the old man on the balcony above. The man spoke to her in that language, and she laughed and waved and said, Don't worry, Jiri, I'll be fine. She was carrying her camera case and she turned onto Cambridge Avenue, toward Harvard Square. She is going to her job at the pub or to see her musician (hard to tell, for she carries the camera case with her always); Susan Bristol left with the Australian man earlier—Ghost-Man saw them packing when he came through Trowbridge in his car—the Australian putting a suitcase into the back of Susan Bristol's Ford.

The women leave the back door, where there is a wonderful blackness, simply open. Tika LaFond with her new, short-cut hair makes Ghost-Man think, as he goes quickly up the wooden steps, of the Admiral, the club he will be at later in Medford. There is a dancer there named Velvet Queen, who has short-cut black hair and violet eyes and black vinyl boots—a slender, then wide back like Tika's and a proud neck and long, long legs; Velvet Queen comes to the stage completely swathed in darkness, in dark veils that swirl about her. Last night, the dancer was sitting to the side of the entrance and recognized Ghost-Man as he came in. She motioned him over, and when he bought her a drink she was unusually talkative; she told him about the massage therapy she was learning, the money she was putting away for a house. She caught him looking at her with his yearning and smiled, and stretched there, with her elbows back on the bar, ran a hand through her hair, let him wish. He likes to see Velvet Queen talk, likes to watch her face, so bold and perfect and frightening in its makeup. He enjoys that she can take him into her confidence so easily and then quickly slip into being a slightly cruel woman. She whispers words into his ear, asks him which of the dancers he likes—Shiloh, on the main stage? Tanya or Autumn in the circles?
You,
Ghost-Man says.
Good answer,
Velvet Queen will say, smiling with her bloodred lips.

Tika LaFond has a different color of hair, a more golden hue of skin, but she moves in a similar way as the dancer, and sometimes, late at night, Ghost-Man stands on the porch in front of this building where, if you look carefully and patiently through the thin lace curtains, you can watch the girl sleeping, make out the way her mouth parts as she dreams. She is like Velvet Queen before corruption, before poor decisions set her into the sexual fishbowl, the circle of wishing men.

He takes very light cotton gloves from his pocket and puts them on. Into that back door: It is easy on its hinges, making no noise, staying finally, as always, a few centimeters open. He trembles, flushed with adrenaline and fear. Ghost-Man takes off one glove and reaches into a shirt pocket for methamphetamine, his second pill of the night. He puts it on his tongue, swallows, puts the glove back on. He can hardly wait for the soaring, the rush in his legs and chest that makes him feel as if he is watching Velvet Queen onstage, when the dancer locks her high-heeled boots on either side of him and moves her body at him. It is so fucking dark in here, and he cannot make mistakes, so he waits, lets his eyes adjust so he doesn't knock some damn thing over; Ghost-Man has an image of Susan Bristol for a moment, with her chin jutting out, walking out of this house to the back garage, to her old Ford, on a day of rain. This was in July, his first month of Trowbridge occupation. She had been talking to herself, and it was very matter-of-fact, direct talk, as if she were trying to reason something out with someone. Standing in a shadow at the back fence of the Topalka house, Ghost-Man had been unable to make out what the girl was saying, but she slammed the Ford's door harder than she usually did and fairly rocketed backward out of the cement garage.

Now he sees a glimmer of Susan Bristol's bike, the rattling old Schwinn with its basket, and he moves to it and closes his eyes (there is not much to see in here, anyway, beyond the outlines of the school through a dusty glass window) and imagines that he can smell Susan Bristol's chamomile shampoo, the nice bite of it; he runs his fingers over the handlebars of the bike and hears them slide there, dry, and feels the girl's restlessness. His fingers go over the seat, sensing the split of woman. He smells mildew in this wooden, close darkness, and when he opens his eyes he is facing the door and the slight vertical line of light, and about eye level, working its way down the length of door, a large centipede is filing its legs steadily, the head occasionally stopping, probing, a hateful motion against the night. Ghost-Man is startled, then angry, to open his eyes upon this. He takes an old newspaper from the plastic recycling box, rolls it up, tips the door out, and brushes the large insect toward the outdoors, then replaces the newspaper quickly, just in case the centipede managed to somehow cling to the paper. He hates those fucking things.

He steps quickly into the apartment—to civilization. There is still the smell of Tika LaFond in the air—of her coconut shampoo. Tika is the more attractive of the girls, but the brunette Susan often dries herself after she showers in the kitchen window, where she believes no one will see her; only the Topalka wall is there, the garden, the sunflowers, without a window. Susan's breasts are naturally, beautifully large and tug with her drying. Ghost-Man once smiled, one summer evening, hearing Tika LaFond admonish her roommate for being naked before the glass. Susan had said,
We live in the
city.
Creeps are
every
where. I'll live the way I
want
to live.
It's the only time Ghost-Man has heard them fight, though when he sees sneakers that have been thrown against the wall in Susan Bristol's room or a coat or hairbrush tossed in haste on Tika LaFond's bed he can tell that the females have been quietly angry with each other. The hairbrush was on Tika LaFond's bed this morning; her bed, too, was unmade, truly uncharacteristic of her.

Susan Bristol is usually mixing the towel drying with eating something from the refrigerator, and now, stepping into the kitchen, Ghost-Man hears the refrigerator come on, as if on cue. He does not open it for fear of any sudden, unexplainable crack of light in this place, and that makes him think again of the centipede filing, filing downward, and he thinks if somehow he found a centipede on the refrigerator door it would be so maddening and frightening that he would have to leave quickly.

But there is a homey smell to this place where the girls cook; one of them—he assumes it was Susan Bristol—has made spaghetti this night, and Ghost-Man smells thyme, basil, garlic. He takes the K-Bar knife from his packet (he has wiped it only in leaves), draws it from its sheath, and turns on the faucet. He washes the knife, letting the hot water run over the blade; the sink is dark, the water a black, refracted flow off the steel. It is dangerous to leave the water on for too long: He shuts off the faucet and swings the knife over the drain, air-drying it, then tugs his shirt out of his pants and dries the metal thoroughly, and returns the knife to its sheath, and the sheath back to the package. The package is tight now with the papers and the knife. He tucks in his dampened shirttail.

Light stretches in from the windows facing the street; the floorboards have a creak to them, so Ghost-Man steps across them in a pattern that has proved quiet in the past, and then he is on the rug, and he crosses the living room to the darker hallway. The phone message counter there reads
0,
glowing on the small mahogany table. There is mail for Susan by the phone. He picks up the envelopes carefully and reads them, replaces them. He glances into Susan Bristol's room: dark swatches of lace over her windows in sweeping, upturned V's (in daylight the material is violet) and the hideous chair—straight, high-backed, gothic swirls of wood—in a corner by the wide bed. The chair makes him shudder; it might have been reserved for a judge in Salem three hundred years ago. It is Susan Bristol's chair because the Ford is Susan Bristol's car, because the blunt clogs she wears are her shoes; she loves boxy things that suggest a certain masculinity, a certain territory she has a right to. There is a framed portrait of Marilyn Monroe over the bed, a faint, enticing set of curved lines in these shadows.

It is much easier to see in Tika LaFond's room, for here the streetlights send triangles of pale light across the floor, the Lennon drawing, the mirror. Only the numerous books on photography, set in shelves against the northern wall, are in complete darkness. The bed is made now. Ghost-Man kneels and puts his package on edge against a leg of the bed and lowers his face and smells the cotton coverlet, the girl there: soap like lemons, legs smoothed with lotion, the apricot scent of the gel she uses in her hair. He buries his nose and breathes, surrenders to it, makes a noise in his throat. There is so much that he would like to tell this girl, that he
must
tell this girl. He slips his hand beneath the bed, finds the shoebox, takes it out, and places it on the coverlet. There are two cards from the famous sister since he last checked: birds lighting on a fountain in Milan; Carnival in Rio. He turns and stands and looks and, just below the mirror, there is a new postcard of Christ above the city, His arms spread—beyond Him city, sea, a fading horizon like something from a fairy-tale. Ghost-Man had his honeymoon in Rio, during Carnival; he remembers the brightness, the quick, glad eyes of women, his own wife, Jenna, looking very white next to all of those dark skins.

He picks up the card and tilts it over to read Kascha's message. He puts it back at the same angle on the dresser, on top of the bills. There is a small photograph of the sister on the opposite wall: a face nearly that of Tika's—Ghost-Man has seen Kascha LaFond in advertisements for beer and whiskey, in glass city windows advertising perfume, jeans, Internet sites, and even on the huge billboard above the Admiral, selling gin. When he sees the famous eyes looking at him, Ghost-Man senses that he shares a secret with the model about her younger sibling.
We know, don't we, what a woman can do to a man, but Tika still does not know.
He turns and puts the two postcards back in the box in order, and slips the box in place under the bed.

He thinks of Tika sleeping here, on her back, idly stretching her legs. Here, right here: He is in the universe of her. He gets up and takes two steps and opens the closet. He parts dresses, some in plastic bags, and he can smell the plastic and Tika LaFond's lavender perfume, and he turns around and pushes into that darkness backward, the shutterlike doors swinging slightly shut behind him. He can rest here, against plastic and cloth; he smells the darkness, the fragrance of these dresses, these skins of the girl. Sheath and georgette chemise dresses and short-sleeved sweaters and skirts of cotton and rayon; he is closest to a smooth black skimmer dress that she wore recently to a party with her boyfriend. He remembers now how, from the shadows of the willows across the street, he'd watched her get out of the boyfriend's van when they returned, wearing high-heeled sandals and this dress that flowed so beautifully about her legs. Her dark-haired musician talking, joking a little with her, Tika LaFond smiling up at him. Then on the porch teasing her musician, holding his collar, saying,
Just come inside and fuck me,
uncharacteristic of her, really, something like her slut roommate Susan would do.

Ghost-Man brushes the dress with his forearm and hand, moves it against his cheek. And he is a boy in Kentucky, at the condominium complex that is over the hill from his mother's home; he plays with some boys there and one boy named Jim Dorling has a very beautiful mother who wears dresses like this and takes off her high heels and sinks into the couch when she returns home from work, with her legs tucked under her and a drink, and she talks to the boys kindly and as if they are adults and asks them about their day at school. The woman has black hair cut short and wide, beautiful eyes that take you seriously when you talk to her. Then Ghost-Man is on school grounds, just a short walk from his home. It is recess and the teachers are calling the children in from the swing sets and the children are already lining up at the brick stairs but he does not go in. He begins to climb the chain of one of the swings, as high as he can, and Mrs. Dorling is one of the recess monitors today, calling him, and he is rubbing against the metal and cannot answer, can hardly move; other students, lined up at the door, are staring at him, small, writhing
him,
there on the tight metal, and Mrs. Dorling has come close and is looking up with her hand shading her eyes and saying,
It's okay, honey, just come on down now,
and he slides down, still with that unbearable soaring dance within him.