FSF, October-November 2009 Read online

  He enjoyed sitting in the wicker chair after work with the lamp dialed low, vegetating until his energy returned, and then he would turn the light on full. He had discovered that he liked being smart when alone, liked the solitary richness of his mind, and he would sketch plans for the house he intended to build after he got off probation; he would read and speculate on subjects of which he had been unaware prior to the accident (Indian influences on Byzantine architecture, the effects of globalization upon Lhasa and environs, et al.); but always his thoughts returned to the town where he had sought refuge, whose origins no one appeared to know or question, whose very existence seemed as mysterious as the nation of Myanmar or the migratory impulses of sea turtles. He had supposed—unrealistically, perhaps—that the people of Halloween would have a clearer perspective on life than did the people in Beaver Falls; but they had similar gaps in their worldview and ignored these gaps as if they were insignificant, as if by not including them in the picture, everything made sense, everything was fine. He had hoped the town would be a solution, but now he suspected it was simply another sort of problem, more exotic and perhaps more complex, one that he would have to leave the light on a great deal in order to resolve if he hoped to get to the bottom of it.

  When he heard the winch complain, the chain slithering through the pulley, signs that Joanie was on her way up in the elevator that operated above the fifth floor, he would dim the lamp so he would be unable to perceive the telltales that betrayed the base workings of her mind and the fabrication of her personality. She understood why he did this—at least he had explained his troubles—but it played into her appreciation of herself as an entry-level girlfriend, and she often asked if she wasn't pretty enough for him, if that was why he lowered the lights. He told her that she was more than pretty enough, but she grew increasingly morose and would say she knew they were a short-term thing and that he would someday soon find someone who made him happy, as would she, and it was better this way—this way, when the inevitable happened they would stay friends because they had been honest with each other and hadn't gotten all deluded, and until then, well, they'd have some fun, wouldn't they? Even in the half-dark, he realized it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, that her low self-esteem foredoomed the relationship. Understanding this about her, having so much apperception of the human ritual, dismayed him and he would try to boost her spirits by telling her stories about his life topside (the citizens of Halloween referred to other parts of America as “topside” or “the republic") or by mocking Mrs. Kmiec's cat.

  Beside the bed was a trapdoor that had once permitted egress to the floor below, but now was blocked by a sheet of two-inch plexiglass—a plastic cube had been constructed within the old wooden room for the protection of its sole inhabitant, a fluffy white blob with a face and feet. When Clyde first opened the trapdoor, Prince Shalimar had freaked out, climbing the walls, throwing himself at the inner door; now, grown accustomed to Clyde and Joanie peering at him, he never glanced in their direction. The place was a cat paradise filled with mazes upon which to climb, scratching posts, dangling toys, and catnip mice. Infrequently the Prince would swat at one or another of the toys; now and then he would chew on a catnip mouse; but a vast majority of his time was spent sleeping in a pillowed basket close to his litter box.

  "It's not even a cat anymore,” Joanie said one evening as they looked down on the Prince, snoozing on his pillow. “It's like some kind of mutant."

  "Ms. Kmiec gives him enemas,” said Clyde.

  "You're kidding!"

  "Swear to God. I looked down there one time and she had a plastic tube up his butt."

  "Did she see you?"

  "Yeah. She waved and went on with her business."

  "Wasn't the cat pissed?"

  "She was wearing work gloves and holding him down, but by the time I looked, he seemed to have quit struggling and was just lying there."

  Joanie shook her head in wonderment. “Helene is very, very weird."

  "Do you know her?"

  "Not so much. She used to come in the bar with Stan. She's always been weird. My big sister was the same year in school as with her—she says Helene was already into the dominatrix stuff when she was a kid. She quit doing it for Stan."

  "Maybe she didn't quit. Maybe Stan was her only client for a while."

  "Maybe."

  Joanie leaned against him and Clyde draped an arm over her shoulder; the edge of his hand nudged her breast. They watched as the Prince gave a mighty fishlike heave and managed to flop onto his back.

  "He doesn't even have the energy to miaow anymore,” Clyde said. “He makes this sound instead. ‘Mrap, mrap.’ It's like half a miaow. A shorthand miaow."

  Joanie caught his hand and placed it full on her breast. “Something happens to Helene, the poor bastard won't stand a fighting chance. Nobody else is going to do for him the way she does. He'll be like a bonbon for that fucking thing."

  They made loud, sweaty love with no regard for Prince's sensibilities, banging the headboard against the wall, and afterward, with Joanie snoring gently beside him, Clyde was unable to rid himself of the image and lay thinking that they were all bonbons, soft white things in their flimsy protective shells, helplessly awaiting the emergence of some black maw or circumstance.

  * * * *

  Seven weeks after his arrival in Halloween, Clyde was working with a group of twenty or twenty-five in the central Dot, when he heard from Mary Alonso, a sinewy, brown-skinned gay woman in her early thirties, that Dell had been banished.

  "'Banished'?” he said, and laughed. “You can't banish people, not since the Middle Ages."

  "Tell that to Dell.” Mary leaned against the rocky wall, a pose that stretched her T-shirt across her diminutive breasts, making them look like lumps of muscle. “They sent him up to the republic and he can't come back. He'd been to the Tubes nine times. The tenth time and you're gone."

  "Is that some kind of rule? Nobody told me."

  "When you're through probation you get a book with the town laws. There aren't many of them. Don't kill anybody, don't rape anybody, don't screw up constantly. I guess they got Dell on the don't screw up constantly."

  "What the hell? Don't you have people believe in the Constitution down here?"

  "The Constitution's not what it used to be,” Mary said. “Guess you didn't notice."

  "Well, how's about Helene Kmeic?"

  "Huh?"

  "Helene Kmeic. Chances are she killed her husband. The way Joanie tells it, they didn't hardly investigate."

  "I wouldn't know about that.” Mary started raking again.

  "Is Dell still around? Are they holding him somewhere?"

  "Once they decide you're gone, you're gone. Only reason I know about it, I was at home and Tom Mihalic come around saying I had to work Dell's shift."

  Distraught, Clyde threw aside his rake and went splashing away from the ranks of toiling men and women, stomping down hard, trying to crush as many walnuts as he could. He didn't slow his pace until he had gone halfway along the narrow channel between the second and third Dot, and then only because he noticed the light had paled.

  Unlike the other two Dots, the third and largest (some ninety feet in diameter) lay at the bottom of a hole that appeared to have been punched through from the surface—probably an old sinkhole—and was open to the weather. At present it was raining straight down, raining hard (a fact that wasn't apparent back in the second Dot, where the walls of the Shilkonic all but sealed them off from the sky), and the pond was empty of laborers. The effect was of a pillar of rain resembling one of those transporter beams used in science fiction movies, except this was much bigger, a ninety-foot-wide column of excited gray particles preparing to zap a giant up from the bowels of an ashen planet, making a seething sound as it did, and amplifying the omnipresent damp smell of the gorge. Staring at it, Clyde's anger planed away into despondency. He and Dell hadn't been that close. They had gone out drinking three or four times, and he'd visited Dell's place
to watch DVDs, and they hung out during their lunch breaks, and that was it. But their relationship had the imprimatur of friendship. Dell's breezy, profane irreverence reminded him of his friends back in Beaver Falls. People gossiped about each other a lot in Halloween, yet he recognized that they shied away from certain people and subjects: Pet Nylund and why there was no cable TV and what had happened to Helene Kmiec's husband, to name three. Dell had talked freely about these and other taboos, though most of his talk was BS (perhaps that explained why he'd been banished), and while Clyde had been reluctant to respond in kind, due to his probationary status, neither had he discouraged Dell. A fly's worth of guilt traipsed across his brain and he brushed it aside, telling himself that Dell was his own man and he, Clyde, wasn't about to make this into a soap opera of recriminations and what-ifs.

  By the time he reached the pond, the rain had stopped. Under ordinary circumstances, he kept clear of the third Dot (Spooz, as a representative of the council, had written a note excusing him from work there because of his sensitivity to light), yet Clyde felt he needed every jot of intellect in order to deal with his emotions and he moved out into the pond, glancing anxiously at the turbulent sky and the gaping crack of the gorge across the way—less than two months in town and he had already become an agoraphobe. To his left, a section of the granite wall evolved into a ledge. He boosted himself onto it and sat with his legs dangling. Twenty feet farther to the left lay a beach of sand and dirt and rubble, where grew several low bushes surrounding a stunted willow, the sole tree in all of Halloween. Clyde considered the complicated patterns of the bare twigs, thinking this was something the supporters of intelligent design, mistaking (as they frequently did) mere intricacy for skillful engineering, might point to in order to demonstrate the infinite forethought that had gone into God's universal blueprint. Hell, he could do a better job himself, given the right tools. For starters, he'd outfit everyone with male and female genitalia so they wouldn't be constantly trying to fuck one another over, and once they had experienced the joys of childbirth, they would likely stop trying to fuck themselves over, recognizing that survival was overrated, and would abandon procreation to the lesser orders and become a species of bonbon who placidly waited for extinction, recognizing this to be the summit of human aspiration. That question settled, he turned his attention to the matter at hand. He had been wrong in trying to banish Dell from mind, basically duplicating the action of the town. Not that he cared to hold onto guilt or any other emotion where Dell was concerned, but he needed to think about why he had been banished and how this might apply to him. He began to whistle—Clyde was an accomplished whistler and had gotten in the habit of accompanying himself while thinking. Whistling orchestrated his thoughts into a calm and orderly pattern, preferable to their usual agitated run. The sinkhole responded with a hint of reverb, adding a mellifluous quality to his tone, distracting him, and it was then he spotted a woman with pale skin and shoulder-length auburn hair peering at him through the willow twigs.

  "Jesus!” said Clyde, for she had given him a start.

  The twigs sectioned her face like the separations of a jigsaw puzzle, causing her to appear, as she turned her head, like a stained glass image come to life. She stepped out of cover, hopped up onto the far end of the ledge, scowled and said, “Get out of my way."

  She was slender and tall, and had on a white sundress that, being a little damp, clung to her body. She wore kneepads and elbow pads, and on her feet were a pair of brown sports shoes.

  "Aren't you cold?” Clyde asked.

  She pulled a pair of thin gloves from the pocket of her skirt and put them on. In a town where pale women predominated, her pallor was abnormal, like chalk. Her mouth was so wide, its corners seemed to carry out the lines of her slanted cheekbones, and was perfectly molded, the lips neither too full nor too thin, lending her an air of confidence and serenity; her eyes, too, were wide, teardrop-shaped, almost azure in color. She let the scowl lapse into a mask of hostile diffidence, but her face was an open book to Clyde. Her confidence was not based on her beauty (in truth, he didn't perceive her as beautiful, merely attractive—she was too skinny for his tastes), but spoke to the fact that she had little regard for beauty ... and not much regard for anything or anyone, if he read her right. She told him once again to move it so she could pass, and Clyde, irritated by her peremptory manner, pointed at the water and said, “Go around."

  "I don't want to get wet,” she said.

  "Yeah, I just bet you don't. That would be icky."

  She affected a delighted expression and laughed: two notes, sharply struck, from the treble end of a keyboard. “You're being clever, aren't you? Now let me by."

  Clyde was tempted to make her squeeze past, and perhaps he would have done so once upon a time, but he was fascinated by the way her face changed with the movement of eyes and mouth, with every shift in attitude, one moment having an Asian cast, the next seeming entirely Caucasian, and the next expressing an alien quality ... and this grounded the charge of his anger. Wondering how old she was (he would not have been surprised to learn she was forty or twenty-five), he eased off the ledge and into the water.

  As she walked past him on long, muscular legs, he tried to make nice, saying, “My name's Clyde."

  "How appropriate,” she said.

  When she reached the end of the ledge, she grabbed a miniscule projection of stone, placed the toe of one shoe in an equally imperceptible notch, and then went spidering across the granite face, making the traverse with such speed and precision, it was as if she were wearing sucker pads on her fingers and toes. Within seconds she had disappeared into the channel that led back to the second Dot.

  "Whoa!” said Clyde.

  * * * *

  He told no one about having seen the woman. He did not tell Joanie because he knew she would leap to the conclusion that his interest was more than casual (which it wasn't, or so he believed) and be upset; he did not tell Mary Alonso, who had taken Dell's place as a source of gossip and information, and with whom he went out for drinks on occasion, usually along with Mary's partner, Roberta, a fey, freckly, dark-haired girl, because he didn't want to learn that the pale woman was a shrew or unstable—he preferred to let her remain a mystery (since we rarely feel compelled to mythologize the humdrum or the ordinary, his interest was likely more than casual). He began coming in early to work and staying late, using the time to practice his whistling in the reverb chamber of the third Dot, hoping to catch sight of her again. He worked on octave jumps, trills and ornamental phrasings, and developed a fresh repertoire of standards and novelty tunes. After a month he became sufficiently confident to essay a few numbers of his own composition ("fantasies,” he called them), foremost among them a ballad that he entitled “Melissa"—he thought the woman looked like a Melissa.

  Whistling, for Clyde, was its own satisfaction, but when Mary Alonso told him about the talent contest held at the Downlow every year and urged him to enter, he thought, What the hell? He devoted himself to perfecting “Melissa,” adding a frill or two, reworking the somber middle passage, trimming the coda so the song fit within the contest's four-minute limit, and one afternoon in March, with the contest less than a month away, while he sat practicing on the ledge, with a circle of wintry blue sky overhead and shadow filling the sinkhole, all except for a slice of golden light at the brim, the woman, dressed in jeans and a burgundy sweater, came poling a skiff from the south, emerging from the darkness of the gorge with lanterns hung all over the prow and sides and stern. Something about her posture announced her even before he made out her face. She beached the skiff near the willow and climbed onto the ledge and took a seat about three feet away. Her flat azurine stare seemed as hostile as before, but Clyde saw curiosity in her face. Neither of them spoke for a couple of ticks and then she said, “That's a cool tune, man."

  "It's something I'm working on,” he said.

  "You made it up?"

  "Yeah."

  "Very cool. What's it
called?"

  "'Melissa.’”

  "Is she your girl ... your wife?"

  "I don't know why I called it that. The only Melissa I ever knew was back in grade school."

  "It sounds classical. You ever hear the opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, by Debussy?"

  "I don't think so."

  She appeared to have run out of questions.

  "What's it about, the opera?” asked Clyde.

  "I don't remember much. This sad chick's married to this prince, but she's in love with his brother. She cries a lot. It's kind of a bummer. Your thing reminded me of it."

  She kicked her heels against the rock and gazed out across the pond. Clyde realized that at this distance he should be reading her more clearly—he should have seen past the level of body language into her chaotic core, where need and desire steamed upward and began to solidify into shards of thought; yet he could find no trace of her fundamental incoherence ... or else, unlike the rest of mankind, she was fundamentally coherent, her personality rising in a smooth, uninterrupted flow from its springs, a true and accurate extension of her soul.

  "Not the notes,” she said. “The feeling."

  "Huh?” said Clyde.

  "Your song. It reminded me of the opera. Not the melody or anything, but the feeling.” She said this with a trace of exasperation and then asked, “Why're you staring at me?"

  He was inclined to tell her that she had a smudge on her cheek (which she, in fact, did) or that she looked familiar; but she gazed at him with such intensity, he half-suspected that his inability to see into her basements signaled a commensurate ability on her part to see into his—afraid of being caught in a lie, then, he told her about his accident and its aftermath and explained how she appeared to be something of an anomaly, at least as regarded his hypothesis concerning light, intellect, and the chaotic underpinnings of human personality.