Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

I took the quarters and my drink and elbowed my way through the room. By the time I reached the jukebox I wanted another beer.

“Hillary.”

“Hey, Lit.” Hillary handed his bottle to me. I took a swig—lukewarm, he’d been here for awhile—and glanced at the boy on the jukebox. “Jailhouse Rock” segued into “Born to Be Wild.” Behind the bar Jim gestured at me frantically, and I jingled the quarters in my fist.

“Hang on, I got to do something about this music”— I looked pointedly at the boy sitting on the old Seeburg. —“but first your friend has to move his ass.”

“Right.” Hillary made a low bow. “Jamie? This is Lit—”

I stared at him and nodded. I felt the weird clarity that came over me sometimes when I drank, when suddenly I could see how my friends would look when they were old: where the lines would fall alongside Hillary’s mouth, where his hair would thin at the temples. Other times it was an awful certainty that was like a rank taste in the back of my throat, the fear when I stared at Duncan dancing in Deer Park that something terrible was going to happen to him; the less numbing recognition that Ali was never going to make it as an dancer, no matter how much she still wanted to. These were things I didn’t talk about anymore. Ali laughed at me, and when I tried telling Hillary it made him nervous.

Standing there now I felt that same strange sense of recognition, and a profound, almost nightmarish, unease. I glanced at Hillary, but he just grinned. I swallowed, my tongue thick with whiskey and cheap beer, and looked at the boy on the jukebox. He wore black jeans low-slung on narrow hips, dirty black Converse high-tops, a moth-eaten black sweater.

“What are you, Johnny Cash?” I asked.

He met my eyes disdainfully. He was rangy, a few inches taller than me, with dark blonde hair cut so short you could see the shape of his skull, sleek as a ferret’s. That more than anything else made him seem otherworldly. Everyone I knew had long hair. The boys I hung out with, the boys I slept with, all resembled Hillary. Beautiful straight teeth courtesy of Doctor Tolmach, skin kept clear by weekly visits to dermatologists, shoulder-length hair thick and glossy as a golden retriever’s.

Not Jamie Casson. His skin was faintly sallow, and so fair I could see the tracery of capillaries across his cheeks, like a leaf’s fine-veined web. His eyes were huge, heavy-lidded; the flesh beneath them looked bruised. Great wounded eyes, of a startling turquoise, deep-set above a pug nose and thin, girlish mouth. The only person I’d ever seen who looked remotely like him was Lou Reed on the cover of Transformer, or maybe Louise Brooks in an old photograph I’d seen in the Courthouse Museum. I could imagine my parents approving of Jamie Casson’s hair, if nothing else.

But I thought he looked decadent and faintly sinister, perched there on the old Seeburg. The music rattled on; he continued to stare at me. When the song ended, he raised himself up slightly on his hands, then abruptly sat down, hard, on top of the jukebox. There was the scrape of a needle on vinyl, and “Born to Be Wild” started again.

“LIT?” From across the bar Jim Charterbury yelled. “What the fuck are you doing ?”

I mouthed Sorry! Hillary and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. The boy on the jukebox tipped his head to one side and regarded me through slanted eyes.

“I’m Jamie Casson.” It sounded like a challenge. “What the hell kind of name is Lit?”

“Her name’s Charlotte, that’s what everyone calls her,” Hillary explained, then added conspiratorially, “She is the madhouse nurse who tends on me, It is a piteous office.”

“Don’t mess with her, man,” warned Hillary. “She’s got a temper, she’ll clock you if you mess with her—”

“Right,” I said, pretending to swing as Hillary pulled me close in a bear hug.

“— and she’s crazy,” he yelled.

“Crazy like a fox.” Someone poked me from behind and I turned to see Ali. She raised her eyebrows quizzically to Jamie Casson. “Umm…?”

“This is Jamie,” I started to say; but then I saw the two of them looking at each other. Like that Aubrey Beardsley black light poster Ali had up above her bed, “How Sir Tristam Drank of the Love Drink.” Two beautiful children etched in violet and dead-white, so intent upon each other that the air between them all but glowed; heavy stage curtain drawn at their backs but you already suspected what lay behind it.

“Well, hey, Jamie,” Ali repeated. “How’s it goin’?”

I shifted and knocked up against a table. Bottles rattled; Hillary rolled his eyes.

“Sasquatch,” he said, looking at my boots. I blushed, but no one else had noticed. Beside me Ali had drawn back into the shadows. Her amber eyes were half-closed, but already I could see the faint glister of desire there like a burgeoning tear. I looked away, embarrassed.

“Jamie Casson,” Hillary went on, leaning over to drape an arm around Ali. “He just moved up from the city. His father’s doing something up at Kern’s place.”

“Oh yeah?” said Ali throatily. “So you want a beer, or—something?”

I glanced at Hillary, to see if he was taking this in. Because this was nothing like witnessing love at first sight; more like watching a pair of cars approaching each other way too fast on a lonely stretch of old Route 22, and being too paralyzed with fear to yell for help.

“Great,” I muttered. I edged toward Hillary, wanting his opinion on this. There was a thunk as I bumped against a chair, and with a clatter it toppled onto Hillary’s feet.

“Ow—god damn it, Lit!”

Ali laughed. “Man, you are such a klutz!”

Only Jamie said nothing; just looked up and for a long moment held my gaze. Light blazed from the jukebox, making him seem washed-out and insubstantial, the shadow of another figure I couldn’t quite see. There was something odd about the way he looked at me. His pale eyes were questioning, almost pleading, as though he was waiting for me to speak. But I felt awkward and ugly in my heavy boots and Hillary’s old jacket. So I just stared back, challenging him to recognize me as something besides Hillary’s clumsy best friend.

Finally, “I got to get back,” Jamie said. He swung off the jukebox, ambled to a table and hooked a worn suede windbreaker onto his thumb. “I’m broke, anyway…”

I felt a pang, until Hillary nodded. “I’ll give you a lift. Lit? You want to come? Ali?”

I nodded, hurrying to the jukebox and sliding in the quarters Jim had given me. “Yeah—I’ll meet you at the car—” I punched in a half-dozen songs, downed a beer that had been abandoned on the old Seeburg, and went to join them in the parking lot.

The rain had stopped. The sun was going down in a smear of orange and black, and a small crowd had gathered on the steps, passing joints and bantering. Duncan Forrester and his girlfriend Leenie, Christie Smith, Alysa Redmond: the usual suspects lowlighting with bikers and trying to score. If the cops ever decided to bust up Deer Park, the papers would have a field day; there were enough Famous Children at that dive to fill an inch of column.

“Charlotte!” Duncan shrieked, throwing his arms around me. “Don’t say you’re leaving —”

“Ouch!” I cried, wriggling free. Duncan was skinny and lank-haired, with a hatchet face that was so enormously improved by stage makeup he’d taken to wearing it on weekends, whether or not he was in a show. Even more incongruous was Duncan’s voice, a rich baritone that (in my father’s words) could charm the teeth from a snarling Doberman. When he’d played Billy Bigelow in Carousel last year, entire busloads of cheerleaders had wept during his death scene. “Dammit, Dunc, that hurts. I got to catch a ride with Hillary.”