Люциус Шепард: Eternity and Other Stories

He stays forever in the shower; he’s in no hurry to get to the pit, and he considers not going in at all. But duty, habit, and doggedness exert a stronger pull than his hatred and fear of the place—though it’s not truly hatred and fear he feels, but a syncretic fusion of the two, an alchemical product for which a good brand name has not been coined. Before leaving, he inspects the contents of the top drawer in his dresser. The relics are the thing he most needs to explain to her. Whatever else he has determined them to be, he supposes that they are, to a degree, souvenirs, and thus a cause for shame, a morbid symptom. But when he looks at them he thinks there must be a purpose to the collection he has not yet divined, one that explaining it all to Alicia may illuminate. He selects the half shoe. It’s the only choice, really. The only object potent enough to convey the feelings he has about it. He stuffs it into his jacket pocket and goes out into the living room, where his roommate is watching The Cartoon Network, his head visible above the back of the couch.

“Slept late, huh?” says the roommate.

“Little bit,” Bobby says, riveted by the bright colors and goofy voices, wishing he could stay and discover how Scooby Doo and Jackie manage to outwit the swamp beast. “See ya later.”

Shortly before his shift ends, he experiences a bout of paranoia, during which he believes that if he glances up he’ll find the pit walls risen to skyscraper height and all he’ll be able to see of the sky is a tiny circle of glowing clouds. Even afterward, walking with Mazurek and Pineo through the chilly, smoking streets, distant car horns sounding in rhythm like an avant-garde brass section, he half persuades himself that it could have happened. The pit might have grown deeper, he might have dwindled. Earlier that evening they began to dig beneath a freshly excavated layer of cement rubble, and he knows his paranoia and the subsequent desire to retreat into irrationality are informed by what they unearthed. But while there is a comprehensible reason for his fear, this does not rule out other possibilities. Unbelievable things can happen of an instant. They all recognize that now.

The three men are silent as they head toward the Blue Lady. It’s as if their nightly ventures to the bar no longer serve as a release and have become an extension of the job, prone to its stresses. Pineo goes with hands thrust into his pockets, eyes angled away from the others, and Mazurek looks straight ahead, swinging his thermos, resembling a Trotskyite hero, a noble worker of Factory 39. Bobby walks between them. Their solidity makes him feel unstable, as if pulled at by large opposing magnets—he wants to dart ahead or drop back, but is dragged along by their attraction. He ditches them just inside the entrance and joins Alicia at the end of the bar. Her twenty-five watt smile switches on, and he thinks that though she must wear brighter, toothier smiles for co-workers and relatives, this particular smile measures the true fraction of her joy, all that is left after years of career management and bad love.

To test this theory he asks if she’s got a boyfriend, and she says, “Jesus! A boyfriend. That’s so quaint. You might as well ask if I have a beau.”

“You got a beau?”

“I have a history of beaus,” she says, “but no current need for one, thank you.”

“Your eye’s on the prize, huh?”

“It’s not just that. Though right now, it is that. I’m”—a sardonic laugh—“I’m ascending the corporate ladder. Trying to, anyway.”

She fades on him, gone to a gloomy distance beyond the bar, where the TV chatters ceaselessly of plague and misery and enduring freedom. “I wanted to have children,” she says at last. “I can’t stop thinking about it these days. Maybe all this sadness has a biological effect. You know. Repopulate the species.”

“You’ve got time to have children,” he says. “The career stuff may lighten up.”

“Not with the men I get involved with… not a chance! I wouldn’t let any of them take care of my plants.”

“So you got a few war stories, do you?”

She puts up a hand, palm outward, as to if to hold a door closed. “You can’t imagine!”

“I’ve got a few myself.”

“You’re a guy,” she says. “What would you know?”

Telling him her stories, she’s sarcastic, self-effacing, almost vivacious, as if by sharing these incidents of male duplicity, laughing at her own naiveté, she is proving an unassailable store of good cheer and resilience. But when she tells of a man who pursued her for an entire year, sending candy and flowers, cards, until finally she decided that he must really love her and spent the night with him, a good night after which he chose to ignore her completely… when she tells him this, Bobby sees past her blithe veneer into a place of abject bewilderment. He wonders how she’d look without the makeup. Softer, probably. The makeup is a painting of attitude that she daily recreates. A mask of prettified defeat and coldness to hide her fundamental confusion. Nothing has ever been as she hoped it would be—yet while she has forsworn hope, she has not banished it, and thus she is confused. He’s simplifying her, he realizes. Desultory upbringing in some Midwestern oasis—he hears a flattened A redolent of Detroit or Chicago. Second-rate education leading to a second-rate career. The wreckage of mornings after. This much is plain. But the truth underlying her stories, the light she bore into the world, how it has transmuted her experience… that remains hidden. There’s no point in going deeper, though, and probably no time.

The Blue Lady fills with the late crowd. Among them a couple in their sixties who hold hands and kiss across their table; three young guys in Knicks gear; two black men attired gangsta-style accompanying an overweight blonde in a dyed fur wrap and a sequined cocktail dress (Roman damns them with a glare and makes them wait for service). Pineo and Mazurek are silently, soddenly drunk, isolated from their surround, but the life of the bar seems to glide around Bobby and Alicia, the juke box rocks with old Santana, Kinks, and Springsteen. Alicia’s more relaxed than Bobby’s ever seen her. She’s kicked off her right shoe again, shed her jacket, and though she nurses her drink, she seems to become increasingly intoxicated, as if disclosing her past were having the effect of a three-martini buzz.

“I don’t think all men are assholes,” she says. “But New York men… maybe.”

“You’ve dated them all, huh?” he asks.

“Most of the acceptable ones, I have.”

“What qualifies as acceptable in your eyes?”

Perhaps he stresses “in your eyes” a bit much, makes the question too personal, because her smile fades and she gives him a startled look. After the last strains of “Glory Days” fade, during the comparative quiet between songs, she lays a hand on his cheek, studies him, and says, less a question than a self-assurance, “You wouldn’t treat me like that, would you?” And then, before Bobby can think how he should respond, taken aback by what appears an invitation to step things up, she adds, “It’s too bad,” and withdraws her hand.

“Why?” he asks. “I mean I kinda figured we weren’t going to hook up, and I’m not arguing. I’m just curious why you felt that way.”

“I don’t know. Last night I wanted to. I guess I didn’t want to enough.”

“It’s pretty unrealistic.” He grins. “Given the difference in our ages.”

“Bastard!” She throws a mock punch. “Actually, I found the idea of a younger man intriguing.”

“Yeah, well. I’m not all that.”

“Nobody’s ‘all that,’ not until they’re with somebody who thinks they are.” She pretends to check him out. “You might clean up pretty nice.”