James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

The birds’ tropics would be back, of course. They had only to wait here, gossiping among themselves. But my mother’s happiness, the happiness I saw in that photo, once fled never returned. Would David?

LaVerne was gone. Baby Boy McTell. Hosie Straughter. Harry, the man I killed up by Baton Rouge. Don’s son. All of us, eventually. Before long, before anyone notices.

You’re always quoting other people, Verne told me once. Anytime something important happens or some thought logjams in your head, there you are, hopping up like a schoolboy, pick me! pick me! with what Dante or Camus or Thingamabob said. You think anyone gives half a damn, Lew? And half the time, anyway, you’re only using it to avoid digging in, avoid having to find out what you think. Or what you feel.

Deborah’s arm came across my shoulder, pulling me up from the depths, back safely to land. (Did I struggle? Drowning men often do.) Spread of sunlight on every surface. Wall and curtain, bureau, nightstand, quilt, rib cage. Whole world become surfaces now: how long will they hold? I feel Deborah’s breath on my neck as she pushes into me. Warm the whole of her length, she smells faintly of sweat. Blankets and history, even this morning light, weigh us down.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“Oh yeah. Courtesy of our friends the birds.”

“Who won’t have us missing a single moment of this exciting new day.”

“Not to mention Bat, who’s been in here at least twice already, demanding to know why his food’s not been replenished.”

“Or the pneumatic truck collecting curbside garbage.” Grunting and sucking air through pursed lips, slamming hands against wall and headboard, she did a great take on bad brakes, tailgates, whirring pickup motors.

“Ah, civilization.”

“Not just Twelfth Night and Faulkner, is it, Lew?”

“Or Ricki Lake.”

“Point taken.”

Then: “Got some good points there yourself.”

“Hard little buggers, aren’t they? Anytime I have my period I get horny-you know that, right?” Her free hand moved down, rested on my stomach. “Sleep okay?”

“Mostly. I had this dream that seemed to go on and on all night, though I’m sure it didn’t. Couldn’t have. We were getting ready for a trip, fitting things into the car. Two friends (in the dream I knew who they were, even if I’m clueless now) had these old coins with distinctive dates, dates that jumped out at you, nickels I think. They kept putting them down in front of us, wherever we were. We’d be drinking coffee, one of them would come along and slap down a nickel there between cups. Standing on queue at a movie premiere-you looked quite wonderful, by the way, wearing one of your crinkle skirts, low heels, a sleeveless sweater, long earrings-there they were again with the nickels.”

I turned towards her. We made necessary adjustments, tugged at covers.

“Damn cold, isn’t it?”

“Houses just aren’t built for it.”

“Neither are we.”

We lay there quietly for a time.

“Play going okay?”

“Way better than I have any right to expect. Turned into something of a marvel last night, actually. Everyone felt it at the same time. Suddenly the play wasn’t us: we were the play.”

“That’s good.”

“It’s what you work for. You never know if it’s going to happen.” Moments later she added: “Most of the time it doesn’t.”

Doors slammed shut and dogs barked outside. A car alarm racketed on. Cans and bottles rang together as a neighbor emptied trash. From open windows in a third-floor apartment across the street, Mahler fought his way up through strings and brass to a deafening crescendo.

“Time for us to put the nickel down, Lew?”

Whatever the nickel was.

Obviously this man has come to and found himself onstage. He looks about him, off to the wings, out at the audience. Then back to the wings, where a prompter reads him a line. He repeats it. The stage crew comes on and begins carrying off parts of the set, a chair, a screen, a table, as he speaks, looking back and forth from prompter to audience. Then a second person steps out and begins speaking. Their stories, we soon realize, interweave. And now there’s a third….

Something familiar, too, in what they’re saying.

I recognize lines from Suddenly Last Summer just as Deborah leans towards me to whisper: Ionesco. The crew reappears, lugging yet another character in its wake, and goes back offstage bearing further bits and pieces of the set, a bookcase, a teapot, leaving this new character behind. Like the first, he looks about, disoriented. Then lines of Sartre spring from his lips, not The Flies , I think, something a bit more obscure.

Moliere, O’Neill, Ben Jonson and Vian soon follow.

Gradually we come to realize that these are characters left over, as it were, from other plays, secondary characters, supporting roles-all those to whom, in whose stage lives, nothing much happened.

Afterwards at a coffeehouse on Magazine, as I watched powdered sugar from beignets drift in a blizzard onto her dress and cafe au lait’s breath struggle up from the cup, Deborah was quiet.

“I miss it, Lew.”

“Theater, you mean.”

“It’s as though something’s been torn from me. As though there’s this huge vacant lot in the middle of my life, buildings all around.”

“So plant a garden. Take back the lot.”

“It can’t be that easy, can it, Lew?”

And of course it wasn’t. In the weeks following, Deborah began play after play, at length abandoning them all.

“It’s gone,” she said, weeping against me in the deep of night. “How do people live without passion, without that one bright blue light? How do they go on without something central in their life?”

We were agreed on the idiocy of good advice, that only a fool would give it, a greater fool accept it. That night, three in the morning with Deborah’s body shuddering against me and wind padding predatorily about outside, was no different.

“That’s what people do,” I said. “They go on.”

I wasn’t looking for him, you understand.

Long since an adult, he was equally capable of making his own choices and declining to make them; he’d never hedged at accepting the fallout from either. Nor could I plead to having had much impression or influence on his life, not having been around to offer understanding, a sympathetic ear, least of all an example. I knew something, myself, about not making choices.

So as I rummaged the city, touching down with beer-drinker fishermen at their ordained posts on the levee off Tchoupitoulas, benching myself to reminisce in a statue-guarded, pie-slice park on Magazine, prowling Decatur with its shoulder-narrow sidewalks and balconies like shrugs above, wading across river-wide Canal down Esplanade to the Faubourg Marigny and rising back up through the Quarter past Simple Suzies, Eds and Professor Bills, past lean-to missions with tureens of watery soup and hope, past the library and City Hall, Leidenheimer Bakery, wooden stoops and swayback cement stairways, shipwreck islands of storm-tossed furniture, cable spools and milk crates on the neutral ground, I wasn’t looking for my son.

For something within myself, rather. At some level that’s what all our searches are about, of course.

“Can’t help you much, Lew,” his mother said that morning when I called. “Far as I knew, everything was going well. Last heard from him-I’d have to check to be sure-four, five weeks back? One of those trademark postcards of his, where the message starts off in regular script and becomes ever more crabbed, final sentences squeezed in sideways at the margins or asterisked in between lines.”