Radiant Days (16 page)

“Little Fly.” He slurred the words; turned aside and spat, then looked at me again. “What’d I tell you? Don’t look back.”

“I’m not looking back. I just—we just wanted to talk to you. About what happened.”

“Yeah?” Ted ducked into a tiny park, with a single wooden bench surrounded by young birch trees still clinging to their yellow leaves. He set down the bucket, water sloshing over its rim, carefully placed the guitar and fishing rod beside it. “And what exactly did happen?”

He took out a grimy cigarette, placed it in his mouth, and flicked his fingers beneath the cigarette’s tip. A cobalt spark leaped from his fingertips to ignite the cigarette; he inhaled deeply, then blew smoke into my face.

“That.”
I coughed, waving the smoke away.

“She’s right.” Arthur stared at him accusingly. “You did the same thing in Charleroi, along the canal. Lit your pipe without a match or striker.”

“There a law against that?” Ted opened his guitar case, fumbled inside, and withdrew a bottle. He uncapped it, took a swallow, and passed it to me. “Not much left. A swallow for each of you, if she don’t take it all.”

I took a sip and thrust the bottle at Arthur, my eyes watering. He finished it and threw the empty into the shadows.

“Any cognac left?” asked Ted.

“And that,” I said. “How’d you know we were drinking cognac?”

“Smelled it on your breath, Little Fly.” Ted laughed. “Good work. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

I decided to take another tack. “How did he get into the lockhouse? I locked it.”

“And the moon.” Arthur sat on the bench beside Ted. He took
out his pipe and filled it, nodding thanks as Ted lit it with that same eerie blue flame, then gestured at the sky. “When I saw you last night on the canal, the moon was full. You said it was good for carp.”

“That’s right. Three days before, three days after.”

“But the moon isn’t full anymore. And yesterday was Saturday, not Sunday.”

Ted shook his head. “Kid, if you want to know what day it is, you are talking to the wrong goddamned person.”

“And this.” Arthur held out the newspaper he’d shown me earlier. “Yesterday’s
Journal de Charleroi
. Saturday, October eighth.” He paused. “1870.”

“Was it only yesterday?” Ted rubbed his chin, then nodded. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“That’s insane,” I said, as Arthur moved aside to make room for me on the bench. “Today’s Monday—the clock struck one. And it’s 1978.”

“I told you, I’m not so good with dates.” Ted scowled and tossed his cigarette. “Look, I don’t know if I can explain this to you. But I’ll try. Have you ever noticed how minutes or hours seem to speed up sometimes, but other times they go really slow? And how you remember things that happened a long time ago and it was like only yesterday? Ever think that maybe it doesn’t just
seem
that way? That time really
does
speed up and slow down?”

I didn’t say anything, and glanced at Arthur to see how he was taking this. He’d leaned back against the bench, his legs
outstretched—long legs for someone not much taller than me—and was smoking his pipe, head cocked thoughtfully.

“I’ve felt that,” he said after a moment. “In Charleroi, everything takes forever. But Paris—that passed in an eyeblink.” He stared wistfully at his pipe. “And when I was in Douai with my friend’s aunts, that seemed like a year. But tonight …” He turned to me, puzzled. “Tonight is like a dozen nights, all run together.”

I nodded slowly. “It all seems … stretched out. From this morning until now, it seems like more than one day. Especially tonight.”

Ted picked up his fishing rod and began to untangle a knot in the line. “That’s because time is a river, and you can travel back and forth in it. But only sometimes, and only if you’re in the right place.”

“Like the lockhouse?” I said.

Ted was silent, the line taut between his hands and gleaming in the moonlight. “Sometimes” was all he said.

For several minutes no one spoke. Arthur smoked; Ted worked through the knotted line with a patience at odds with the slurred voice and unsteady gait he’d shown earlier. I slipped a hand into my pocket and ran my fingers over the oil pastels. The leaves on the birch trees stirred, gilded by waning moonlight; fallen leaves at our feet rose and fell as the wind gathered them. I shivered, cast adrift upon that midnight sea, the bench bearing us someplace farther than I had ever traveled, someplace I couldn’t begin to imagine.

In the plastic bucket, one of the carp thrashed. Murky water
spattered my face. I shook my head, the dream broken, and leaned over to peer inside the bucket. The two fish floated side by side, their strangely prescient black eyes staring back at me. One of them turned lazily, exposing an underbelly that flickered red-gold and amber before it righted itself and rose until its head broke the surface of the water. Its beaklike mouth opened and closed, its liquid eye fixed on mine, before it slowly sank to the bottom once more.

I looked away, unnerved, and saw Arthur gazing at the carp. “You caught something,” he said.

“Sometimes you get lucky.” Ted brought the fishing line to his mouth and bit it in two. “Plus you got to know where to look for ’em. What’s important is to keep your eyes open and keep moving. Don’t ever stop. And don’t look back. Looking back is deadly.”

He tossed the knot aside and threaded the line along the pole. When he was finished, he held it out at arm’s length and eyed it as though setting his sights upon a target. After a moment he nodded and, grunting, got to his feet.

“Okay. Time to see a man about a dog.” He tucked the pole under his arm and picked up his guitar case, weaving slightly. “See you two later.”

He hoisted the bucket in his free hand. Arthur hopped to his feet, knocking the ashes from his pipe. “Wait, I’m coming.”

“No can do.” Ted’s voice was gruff. “Time waits for no man. Sorry, kid. Beat it.”

Again he shook the guitar case threateningly, lurched from
the tiny park, and began to walk downhill, toward the canal. Without a backward glance at me, Arthur headed after him.

I hurried to catch up. But as my foot touched the sidewalk, light blazed around us, a blinding red flare. I fell against Arthur, shading my eyes.

“Stop right there.”
A staticky voice crackled from a bullhorn.
“District Police.”

Arthur grabbed me and we raced down the sidewalk after Ted. He continued to walk unsteadily, water slopping from the bucket, seemingly unaware of anything behind him.

“It’s that cop,” I gasped when we caught up with him. “That same guy from before, I think it’s him.”

Ted glanced back at me, and then at the black figure silhouetted in the glare behind us.

“Ted.”
The voice echoed through the empty street.
“Hold it right there, please.”

Ted narrowed his eyes. “Jesus wept. Here, Little Fly.” He handed me the bucket of carp. “Hang on to this—be careful, and for chrissake don’t drop it.”

I grabbed the metal handle and winced—the bucket must have weighed thirty pounds.

“Here.” Arthur’s hand closed over mine. “Let me.”

“Now get the hell out of here!” Ted commanded. “Both of you, go!”

I stared at him blankly. “But—”

“Stick together.” He clasped my shoulder, and for a moment I glimpsed that same leaf-green flare within his eyes, incandescent
in the cruiser’s headlights. “Find the lockhouse. And whatever you do, don’t drop my goddamn fish.”

He pushed me away, turned, and strode into the street, holding his guitar case as though it were a machine gun and shouting, “You’ll never take me alive, coppers!”

Beneath the bullhorn’s crackle I heard a laugh.
“Stay right there, Ted. And you two—”

I hesitated. A flashlight’s beam moved across my face as Ted yelled, “Don’t look back, Little Fly!”

I turned and fled.

Washington, D.C.

OCTOBER 9, 1978

I CAUGHT UP
with Arthur at the corner, glancing nervously back at the cruiser. When there were no cars in sight, we crossed, Arthur doing his best not to spill the bucket. We walked as quickly as we could, leaving a trail of black water on the asphalt.

“God, this is heavy,” Arthur gasped when we finally reached the curb.

“We can do it like this.” I grasped the handle. “Both of us together.”

It was difficult to carry it between us, but we did, breaking into an awkward trot when we spotted a stand of trees near the river’s edge. The ground beneath us shifted from concrete to pounded earth to brittle grass, ankle high and studded with trash—bottles, crumpled glassine envelopes that had once held dope, a wisp of cloth, all strewn like sea wrack on a beach.

But beneath the trees, the grass was soft and unlittered by anything save dried bracken and scattered leaves. The moon was
invisible here. The air smelled of the river, of granite and moss and mud. There was a strangely charged tension to the encroaching darkness, as though we’d stumbled onto a stage immediately before or after a performance. Instead of traffic, I heard only the purl of running water and the wind in the trees.

“Thank God.” Arthur set the bucket down and flopped onto the grass, his slender form enveloped in shadow. “How could two fish be so heavy?”

“I don’t know.” I settled beside him, glancing into the bucket. “Shit. The water’s almost all spilled out.”

We knelt and stared into the bucket as though it were a magic mirror. Only instead of our own faces staring back, we saw the two carp struggling in a scant few inches of water, fins and tails thrashing, their mouths making desperate Os as they fought to breathe.

“They’ll die.” I looked at Arthur, fighting panic as I recalled the carps’ prescient onyx gaze and Ted’s command,
Whatever you do, don’t drop my goddamn fish.
“We need to get more water.”

We turned and stared past the trees, down to the Potomac. Without speaking, we each grasped the bucket’s handle and headed to the river. A tumbledown stone wall ran alongside the water’s edge, overgrown with moss. We set the bucket down and I clambered to the top of the wall, sneakers sliding on the slick rock. Arthur followed with the bucket.

“I don’t remember this.” I tugged at the collar of my bomber jacket and shivered. “It’s all wrong.”

Above the trees on the far shore hung a full moon, so brilliant
it cast a shining path across the river, a phantom road that rippled with the water’s passage and ended on the shore, a few feet from where we stood. There was no sign of Key Bridge; no sign of the glittering high-rises in Rosslyn, or of traffic moving behind the scrim of trees.

“The moon.” Arthur gazed at it, enraptured. “It’s as it was last night.” He looked at me, his eyes candled with moonlight. “The world has changed again.”

Before I could stop him, he jumped from the wall onto the sandy ground at the water’s edge. Ted’s bucket swung wildly from his hand.

“Wait!” I scrambled after him, but my foot skidded across damp moss and I fell, crying out as I slammed onto the ground. Arthur ignored me; he had already stepped onto a flat stone in the shallows, and stretched one long leg until he could hop onto a smaller rock in the center of the silvery passway, maybe ten feet from shore. I watched as he balanced precariously, teetering back and forth. He caught his balance and turned to look at me, his face radiant in the moonlight.

“Look, I’m on fire!”

He grinned and batted at an imaginary blaze. As he did, the bucket slipped from his hand. Twin arabesques spilled from it, twisting and gleaming gold as though he’d summoned flames from the night. I had a glimpse of a thrashing tail, a glint of onyx as first one carp and then the other struck the surface of the water and disappeared.

“No! You can’t do that!”

I stumbled to the river’s edge. I saw Arthur poised on the rock, staring at the river with disbelief and unabashed delight. Without a farewell word or glance at me, he jumped.

The air blurred into a haze of silver-white, like the watery mirage that appears on the road on a blinding-hot summer day. Arthur hung suspended in that quicksilver light, eyes wide in astonishment.

Then, as though a sudden gust swept the night, the blaze was extinguished. He was gone.

“Arthur!”

I waded into the river, screaming his name and floundering until I reached the rock. Water flowed around me, barely knee-deep. I stepped onto the rock, dazzled by moonlight, and looked around in vain for any trace of him; waded out until the water reached my waist and the current began to tug at my legs.

I saw no sign of Arthur. He had disappeared, as though he’d been a stone cast into the river. Fighting tears and now shuddering with cold, I somehow made my way back to shore, and collapsed on the stony ground.