Elizabeth Hand - Errantry - Strange Stories

Whereas Angus retained the body he’d had as a teenager, his skin smooth and unblemished, pale as barley; he slept curled on his side and breathed softly, like a child, occasionally sighing as in some deep regret he couldn’t acknowledge in waking life. Then the lines on his face seemed to fade, and his eyes, closed, held no hint of what burned there when he stared at you.

“Let’s stop for a minute,” I said as we crested the hill overlooking the Old Court.

“He won’t be there.” Angus glanced into the rearview mirror. “You said he left.”

“Yeah, he left.” Tommy opened his window. A green smell filled the car, young ferns and the leaves of crushed meadowsweet. “But stop anyway.”

Inside, the Old Court was sunlit, its curved oak bar glossy as caramel and warm to the touch. A few elderly bikers sat drinking beer or coffee and watching the Golf Channel. We sat at the far end, where it was quieter, in front of the brass bowl that held the Folding Man’s handiwork.

“Back already?” Nance, the bartender, smiled at Tommy, then glanced out the window to see whose car was parked there: not Tommy’s, so she could serve him. “You want the same?”

Tommy and I had red wine, Angus a rum and Coke. Tommy drank fast—he always did—and ordered another. I drank mine almost as quickly, then shut my eyes, reached into the brass bowl and withdrew a piece of folded paper.

The Folding Man’s work isn’t exactly origami. Tommy has showed some of it to a woman he knows who does origami, and she said it was like nothing she’d ever seen before. The Folding Man doesn’t talk about it, either, which is probably why Tommy became obsessed with him. Nothing gets Tommy as revved up as being ignored—Angus says he’s seen Tommy get a hard-on when a woman rejects him.

Not that Tommy had ever actually met the Folding Man, until now. None of us had, even though he’d been a fixture at the Old Court for as long as we’d been drinking there. We first began to notice his work in the early 1980s when, before or after a wild night, we’d find these little folded figures left on the floor near where we’d been sitting.

“This is like that guy in Blade Runner ,” said Tommy once. He’d picked up something that resembled a winged scorpion. “See?”

I looked at it closely and saw it had the face of Angelica Huston and, instead of pincers, a pair of spoons for claws.

But then Tommy carefully unfolded it, smoothing it on the bar.

“Don’t get it wet,” warned Angus.

“I won’t.” Tommy looked puzzled. He slid the crumpled paper to me. “It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?”

I looked at the paper, and saw it was a square taken from an ad for Yves St. Laurent Opium perfume—the word OPIUM was there, and part of the bottle, and I could even smell a musky trace of the fragrance.

But there was no woman anywhere in the ad. I turned the paper over: nada. No spoons, either.

“Edward James Olmos.”

Tommy and I turned to stare blankly at Angus.

“That’s who played that character. “ He took the paper and scrutinized it, then flicked his cigarette lighter and set it on fire and dropped it in his ashtray. “In Blade Runner . Edward James Olmos. Great actor.”

The Folding Man’s stuff was always like that. Things that were never quite what they seemed to be. Sea anemones with eyes and wheels, body parts—vulvas were a popular theme—that sprouted fingers, exotic birds with too many heads and hooves instead of feathers, a lunar lander printed with a map of the Sea of Tranquility, the extravagant effects produced by some infernal combination of paper-folding and whatever was actually printed on the paper. None of them was any larger than the area I could circumscribe with my thumb and forefinger, and some were much smaller.

But if you unfolded them, they were never what they didn’t seem to be, either—you ended up with nothing but a page from a magazine or travel brochure, or a paper menu from McDonald’s or the Kamensic Diner, or (in the case of the lunar lander) a fragment of the Playbill for Via Galactica. They were like origami figures from the Burgess Shale, beautiful but also slightly nightmarish.

And what made it even stranger was that no one except for me and Tommy and, to a lesser degree, Angus, ever seemed to think they were weird at all. No one paid much attention to them; no one thought they were mysterious. When Tommy started asking about who made them, Nance just shrugged.

“This guy, comes in sometimes to watch the game. I think maybe he used to smoke or something, like he wants to do something with his hands. So he does those.”

“What’s his name?” said Tommy.

Nance shook her head. “I don’t know. We just call him the folding man.”

“You don’t know his name?” Angus stared at her, his tone slightly belligerent, as it often was. “What, he never puts down a credit card? You know everyone’s name.”

“He drinks rail whiskey, and he pays cash. Ask him yourself if you really want to know.”

But before now we’d never seen him, not ever, not once, though over the years Tommy had chased down customers and bartenders to receive detailed descriptions of what he looked like: older, paunchy, gray hair; weathered face; unshaven, eyes that were usually described as blue or gray; glasses, faded corduroys and a stained brown windbreaker.

“He looks like a fucking wino, Tommy,” Angus exploded once, when the hundredth customer had been quizzed after a thumbnail-sized frog with match-head eyes and the faces of the original Jackson 5 had materialized beneath Tommy’s barstool. “Give it a fucking break, okay?”

But Tommy couldn’t give it a break, any more than he could keep from getting fixated on women he hardly knew. Neither could I, and, after a while, neither could Angus. Though Angus was the one who made the ground rule about never taking any of the folded paper figures out of the Old Court.

“There’s enough crap in my apartment. Yours, too, Tommy.”

Nance didn’t like customers taking them from the brass bowl, either.

“Leave them!” she’d yell if someone tried to pocket one at the end of the night. “They’re part of the decor!”

I knew Tommy had nicked some. I found one under his pillow once, a lovely, delicate thing shaped like a swan, or a borzoi, or maybe it was a meerschaum pipe, with rows of teeth and a tiny pagoda on what I thought was its head (or bowl). I was going to make a joke about it, but Tommy was in the bathroom; and the longer I lay there with that weird, nearly weightless filigree in the palm of my hand, the harder it was to look at anything else, or think of anything except the way it seemed to glow, a pearlescent, rubeous color, like the inside of a child’s ear when you shine a flashlight behind it.

When I heard Tommy come out of the bathroom I slipped it back, carefully, beneath the pillow. Later, when I searched for it again, I found nothing but a crumpled sale flyer from the old Kamensic Hardware Store.

Now I set my wineglass onto the bar, opened my eyes and looked at what I had picked from the brass bowl. A fern, gold rather than green, its fiddlehead resembling the beaked prow of a Viking ship.

“Let’s go.” Tommy stuck some bills under his empty glass and stood.

“We just got here,” said Angus.

“I don’t want to lose him.”

Angus looked at me, annoyed, then finished his drink. “Yeah, whatever. Come on, Vivian.”

I replaced the fern and gulped the rest of my wine, and we returned to the car. I sat in the back so Tommy could ride up with Angus and navigate.

I said, “You didn’t tell us what he looked like.”

Tommy spread the piece of paper on his knee. “He looked like a wino.”