The Best of Lucius Shepard (70 page)

She
pushes the disk away. “Didn’t I make myself plain last night?”

Bobby
says, “Yeah...sure,” but isn’t sure he grasps her meaning.

“I
want to understand what happened...what’s happening now,” she says. “I want
what’s mine, you know. I want to understand exactly what it’s done to me. I
need to understand it. I’m not into souvenirs.”

“Okay,”
Bobby says.

“‘Okay.’”
She says this mockingly. “God, what’s wrong with you? It’s like you’re on
medication!”

A
Sinatra song, “All Or Nothing At All,” flows from the jukebox— a soothing
musical syrup that overwhelms the chatter of hookers and drunks and commentary
from the TV mounted behind the bar, which is showing chunks of Afghanistan
blowing up into clouds of brown smoke. The crawl running at the bottom of the
screen testifies that the estimate of the death toll at Ground Zero has been
reduced to just below five thousand; the amount of debris removed from the pit
now exceeds one million tons. The numbers seem meaningless, interchangeable. A
million lives, five thousand tons. A ludicrous score that measures no real result.

“I’m
sorry,” the brunette says. “I know it must take a toll, doing what you do. I’m
impatient with everyone these days.”

She
stirs her drink with a plastic stick whose handle duplicates the image of the
neon dancer. In all her artfully composed face, a mask of foundation and blush
and liner, her eyes are the only sign of vitality, of feminine potential.

“What’s
your name?” he asks.

She
glances up sharply. “I’m too old for you.”

“How
old are you? I’m twenty-three.”

“It
doesn’t matter how old you are...how old I am. I’m much older than you in my
head. Can’t you tell? Can’t you feel the difference? If I was twenty-three, I’d
still be too old for you.”

“I
just want to know your name.”

“Alicia.”
She enunciates the name with a cool overstated precision that makes him think
of a saleswoman revealing a price she knows her customer cannot afford.

“Bobby,”
he says. “I’m in grad school at Columbia. But I’m taking a year off.”

“This
is ridiculous!” she says angrily. “Unbelievably ridiculous... totally
ridiculous! Why are you doing this?”

“I
want to understand what’s going on with you.”

“Why?”

“I
don’t know, I just do. Whatever it is you come to understand. I want to
understand it, too. Who knows. Maybe us talking is part of what you need to
understand.”

“Good
Lord!” She casts her eyes to the ceiling. “You’re a romantic!”

“You
still think I’m trying to hustle you?”

“If
it was anyone else, I’d say yes. But you...I don’t believe you have a clue.”

“And
you do? Sitting here every night. Telling guys you just got back from a
funeral. Grieving about something you can’t even say what it is.”

She
twitches her head away, a gesture he interprets as the avoidance of impulse, a
sudden clamping-down, and he also relates it to how he sometimes reacts on the
subway when a girl he’s been looking at catches his eye and he pretends to be
looking at something else. After a long silence she says, “We’re not going to
be having sex. I want you to be clear on that.”

“Okay.”

“That’s
your fall-back position, is it? ‘Okay’?”

“Whatever.”

“‘Whatever.’”
She curls her fingers around her glass, but does not drink. “Well, we’ve
probably had enough mutual understanding for one night, don’t you think?”

Bobby
pockets the rubber disk, preparing to leave. “What do you do for a living?”

An
exasperated sigh. “I work in a brokerage. Now can we take a break? Please?”

“I
gotta go home anyway,” Bobby says.

*
* * *

The rubber disk takes its place
in Bobby’s top dresser drawer, resting between the blue half-shoe and a melted
glob of metal that may have done duty as a cuff-link, joining a larger company
of remnants—scraps of silk and worsted and striped cotton; a flattened fountain
pen; a few inches of brown leather hanging from a misshapen buckle; a hinged
pin once attached to a brooch. Looking at them breeds a queer vacancy in his
chest, as if their few ounces of reality cancel out some equivalent portion of
his own. It’s the shoe, mostly, that wounds him. An object so powerful in its
interrupted grace, sometimes he’s afraid to touch it.

After
his shower he lies down in the dark of his bedroom and thinks of Alicia.
Pictures her handling packets of bills bound with paper wrappers. Even her name
sounds like currency, a riffling of crisp new banknotes. He wonders what he’s
doing with her. She’s not his type at all, but maybe she was right, maybe he’s
deceiving himself about his motives. He conjures up the images of the girls
he’s been with. Soft and sweet and ultra-feminine. Yet he finds Alicia’s sharp
edges and severity attractive. Could be he’s looking for a little variety. Or
maybe like so many people in the city, like lab rats stoned on coke and
electricity, his circuits are scrambled and his brain is sending out irrational
messages. He wants to talk to her, though. That much he’s certain of—he wants
to unburden himself. Tales of the pit. His drawer full of relics. He wants to
explain that they’re not souvenirs. They are the pins upon which he hangs
whatever it is he has to leave behind each morning when he goes to work. They
are proof of something he once thought a profound abstraction, something too
elusive to frame in words, but has come to realize is no more than the fact of
his survival. This fact, he tells himself, might be all that Alicia needs to
understand.

Despite
having urged Bobby on, Pineo taunts him about Alicia the next afternoon. His
manic edginess has acquired an angry tonality. He takes to calling Alicia
“Calculator Bitch.” Bobby expects Mazurek to join in, but it seems he is
withdrawing from their loose union, retreating into some private pit. He goes
about his work with oxlike steadiness and eats in silence. When Bobby suggests
that he might want to seek counseling, a comment designed to inflame, to
reawaken the man’s innate ferocity. Mazurek mutters something about maybe
having a talk with one of the chaplains. Though they have only a few basic
geographical concerns in common, the three men have sustained one another
against the stresses of the job, and that afternoon, as Bobby scratches at the
dirt, now turning to mud under a cold drenching rain, he feels abandoned,
imperiled by the pit. It all looks unfamiliar and inimical. The silvery lattice
of the framework appears to be trembling, as if receiving a transmission from
beyond, and the nest of massive girders might be awaiting the return of a
fabulous winged monster. Bobby tries to distract himself, but nothing he can
come up with serves to brighten his sense of oppression. Toward the end of the
shift, he begins to worry that they are laboring under an illusion, that the
towers “will suddenly snap back in from the dimension into which they have been
nudged and everyone will be crushed.

The
Blue Lady is nearly empty that night when they arrive. Hookers in the back,
Alicia in her customary place. The juke box is off, the TV muttering—a blonde
woman is interviewing a balding man with a graphic beneath his image that
identifies him as an anthrax expert. They sit at the bar and stare at the TV,
tossing back drinks with dutiful regularity, speaking only when it’s necessary.
The anthrax expert is soon replaced by a terrorism expert who holds forth on
the disruptive potentials of Al Qaeda. Bobby can’t relate to the discussion.
The political sky with its wheeling black shapes and noble music and secret
masteries is not the sky he lives and works beneath, gray and changeless,
simple as a coffin lid.

“Al
Qaeda,” Roman says. “Didn’t he useta play second base for the Mets? Puerto
Rican guy?”

The
joke falls flat, but Roman’s in stand-up mode.

“How
many Al Qaedas does it take to screw in a light bulb?” he asks. Nobody has an
answer.

“Two
million,” says Roman. “One to hold the camel steady, one to do the work, and
the rest to carry their picture through the streets in protest when they get
trampled by the camel.”

“You
made that shit up,” Pineo says. “‘I know it. Cause it ain’t that funny.”

“Fuck
you guys!” Roman glares at Pineo, then takes himself off along the counter and
goes to reading a newspaper, turning the pages with an angry flourish.

Four
young couples enter the bar, annoying with their laughter and bright, flushed
faces and prosperous good looks. As they mill about, some wrangling two tables
together, others embracing, one woman earnestly asking Roman if he has Lillet,
Bobby slides away from the suddenly energized center of the place and takes a
seat beside Alicia. She cuts her eyes toward him briefly, but says nothing, and
Bobby, who has spent much of the day thinking about things he might tell her,
is restrained from speaking by her glum demeanor. He adopts her attitude—head
down, a hand on his glass—and they sit there like two people weighted down by a
shared problem. She crosses her legs, and he sees that she has kicked off a
shoe. The sight of her slender ankle and stockinged foot rouses in him a sly
Victorian delight.

“This
is so very stimulating,” she says. “We’ll have to do it more often.”

“I
didn’t think you wanted to talk.”

“If
you’re going to sit here, it feels stupid not to.”

The
things he considered telling her have gone out of his head. “Well, how was your
day?” she asks, modulating her voice like a mom inquiring of a sweet child, and
when he mumbles that it was about the same as always, she says, “It’s like
we’re married. Like we’ve passed beyond the need for verbal communion. All we
have to do is sit here and vibe at each other.”

“It
sucked, okay?” he says, angered by her mockery. “It always sucks, but today it
was worse than usual.”

He
begins, then, to unburden himself. He tells her about him and Pineo and
Mazurek. How they’re like a patrol joined in a purely unofficial unity, by
means of which they somehow manage to shield one another from forces they
either do not understand or are afraid to acknowledge. And now that unity is
dissolving. The gravity of the pit is too strong. The death smell, the horrible
litter of souls, the hidden terrors. The underground garage with its smashed,
unhaunted cars white with concrete dust. Fires smouldering under the earth.
It’s like going to work in Mordor, the shadow everywhere. Ashes and sorrow.
After a while you begin to feel as if the place is turning you into a ghost.
You’re not real anymore, you’re a relic, a fragment of life. When you say this
shit to yourself, you laugh at it. It seems like bullshit. But then you stop
laughing and you know it’s true. Ground Zero’s a killing field. Like Cambodia.
Hiroshima. They’re already talking about what to build there, but they’re
crazy. It’d make as much sense to put up a Dairy Queen at Dachau. Who’d want to
eat there? People talk about doing it quickly so the terrorists will see it
didn’t fuck us up. But pretending it didn’t fuck us up.. .what’s that about?
Hey, it fucked us up! They should wait to build. They should wait until you can
walk around in it and not feel like it’s hurting you to live. Because if they
don’t, whatever they put there is going to be filled with that feeling. That
sounds absurd, maybe. To believe the ground’s cursed. That there’s some
terrible immateriality trapped in it, something that’ll seep up into the new
halls and offices and cause spiritual affliction, bad karma.. .whatever. But
when you’re in the middle of that mess, it’s impossible not to believe it.

Bobby
doesn’t look at Alicia as he tells her all this, speaking in a rushed, anxious
delivery. When he’s done he knocks back his drink, darts a glance at her to
gauge her reaction, and says, “I had this friend in high school got into
crystal meth. It fried his brain. He started having delusions. The government
was fucking with his mind. They knew he was in contact with beings from a
higher plane. Shit like that. He had this whole complex view of reality as
conspiracy, and when he told me about it, it was like he was apologizing for
telling me. He could sense his own damage, but he had to get it out because he
couldn’t quite believe he was crazy. That’s how I feel. Like I’m missing some
piece of myself.”