Люциус Шепард: Eternity and Other Stories

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 blond 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, hand on 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 smoldering 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.