Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

He said, as if he was quoting: “And all because real people seemed too frightening and the machines promised to take the pain away.”

“That’s exactly right,” I said, amazed, sober. “Who said that?”

“I did,” he said, and turned to go. “I know you won’t come back. You don’t want to come that far in with us again. And I can’t come back out anymore to be with you, even if I wanted.”

“Touch my hand,” I said. “Take your mitt off, touch my hand.”

“In the virtual worlds people think they can do anything, darken as much as they want, and it doesn’t matter, doesn’t have any effect in the real world. Strikes me they might be wrong. A shadow cast from that side to this, staining us,” he said, still sounding so lost and poetic and smart. Handsome too, in a rough-hewn way.

“I thought that was just propaganda really, hype, that whole no-touch thing,” I said, half meaning it. An outlaw culture’s romance, I’d always figured. For it to be true would be too frightening by half.

He waved his wet woolly mitten at me, walked away. His footsteps sounded cold and lonely.

“And where is the one old story now that will tell us the way out of this?” I called after him, but then, I’m always saying that; it’s my thing. He stopped, turned towards me, took his mitten off. And touched the icy metal bridge rail instead. It stuck. He pulled it away, leaving behind tiny bits of skin.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, “so sorry,” the snot freezing in my nose.

“I guess they lied,” I thought I heard him say, walking away again. We were already too far apart, couldn’t hear each other anymore.

Broken mirrors. We are all holding pieces of a broken mirror, trying stubbornly to glue them back together. Maybe we should leave it shattered.

It’s too bad I couldn’t tell him that, he would’ve liked it. That’s the thing; he seemed so nice, much nicer than Martin really, in spite of his preferences. I think about him a lot, of how our hands froze on the railing, looking down at the river. Your tongue would get stuck there forever if you let it. Something so stupid only an ignorant kid would do it.

Denise’s cigarette package is red. Du Maurier King Size. She lights her smoke with a real lighter, a fake gold one and not a Bic click flick dick or whatever. She inhales as if nicotine were prana itself.

“Maybe I went to another city last night and just don’t remember,” I say, thinking what harm can utter frankness do after everything’s already gone so wrong?

She looks at me levelly. She’s been around the block a few times, this one. Knows the score. “But,” she says, blowing smoke rings, “you’d have to do an awful beer and pills cocktail to forget that much, down it with even more tequila.” Denise speaks so slowly, as though she has more time than the rest of us, only it isn’t very pleasant time.

“Problem is I don’t remember if I did that or not. Mind if I have one of your smokes?” I ask.

“Oh, please do. Please do. But finish your breakfast first. It’ll help.”

But I push my half-eaten egg away, light my butt, don’t inhale. I don’t really smoke but it seems like the right thing to do; keep my molecules moving so I don’t get petrified in the fifties like Denise. And I entertain a thin hope it might make Martin show up, like he used to do to make the streetcar come. He wouldn’t have kept doing it if it hadn’t worked so often. That’s what we were like together: two lost lambs making up our own mythology, taking solace in an urban sympathetic magic, at once invented and uncovered.

“Say, Denise?”

“Yes, dear?” She’s staring out the window at the dead buildings, the grey afternoon light.

“Do you know where anybody celebrates Carnival around here? Maybe if I could find Carnival I could find my friend.”

“Carnival? They started it up here a few years ago, right? Kind of like down in New Orleans. I’ve never paid much attention; it’s not something for us old folks. But there’s a dance at a place called The Aquarium, a week from Tuesday. Somebody left me a poster for it, but I haven’t put it up yet.” She gets up and walks ever so slowly to the counter, retrieves the poster lying there. Watching her is like watching time itself. A bad time. “Maybe if you go to this dance…”

She shows me the little map at the bottom of the poster. The Aquarium is a club just four blocks away from where we are. My life is like a video game this morning. If I follow the clues I’ll find Martin, remember where I am, how I got to be here. “Well, I guess I better get going. It was really nice to meet you, Denise. You’ve helped me out a lot.”

“Okay, dear. Hope you feel better. Do drop in again.”

I walk till night falls. I’ve slept in parks before and would do it again if I had to, but still. The street door is open: relief. The stairs as I walk up are still, so still. I don’t hear anything except my own feet, one at a time, although once I hear footsteps running along on an upper floor, but maybe it’s just a trick of memory, of desire, like knowing he’ll be there. But he isn’t, and neither is the red shirt. A stack of boxes is gone, but everything else is the same. I lock the heavy steel door and go to sleep.

I make myself at home (haha) and wait for more clues.

I look in the mirror; hold a mask to my face. Still, I can’t see: eyes in the way. I cut them out with an X-Acto blade but leave the eyelids, so they open and shut, eerily mechanical, over mine. For hours then, I sit at the workbench, cutting the eyes out of a few stacks of dolls. I don’t know why, but it makes me feel good. Cut out all those fake eyes, all that sacrilege.

There’s a landline and someone calls it while I’m working, orders masks. I have to find x number of a certain type, box them, courier them to her Carnival store. “Make sure all the eye holes are cut out,” she says sharply. “They weren’t last time.”

I tell her I’m strapped, ask if she could pick them up herself, bring cash. She agrees, somewhat surly. If I’m going to be staying here, I’m going to have to have money to eat.

Wherever this is.

She shows two hours later, just as I’m finishing up. Harried and businesslike, she takes the box I’ve packed for her and gives me fifty bucks. Doesn’t bat an eye at my masked face, like she sees weirder every day.

I go to the Dew Drop for dinner, remembering at the last moment to go maskless, order a hot beef sandwich. Thick powdered gravy poured on white bread, a slab of beef and pale peas floating on the surface tension of melted marg. The fifties isn’t even my mother’s childhood; how come this place got stuck so far back?

I’m the only person there again, and Denise joins me, can of Tab and red cigarettes in hand. I tell everything I know, there’s bits that come back just in the telling. “Once Martin and I had this dream we’d get a studio together. In the east end where rent was cheap. We’d work our butts off; he’d be an artist and I’d do the production and management, and then after we got rich we could move somewhere else, like to Hamilton Beach maybe,” I explain.

“It didn’t work, did it?” she asks, and I have to nod. I ask her where we are and she laughs. I guess she thought I was kidding and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth.

The next morning I take an old motorcycle helmet out of a cardboard box full of junk and trade it for my mask. I look in the mirror. Darth Vader. Could be. Just a little modification on the shape. Dig under all the workbenches; find a box of stuff for working with Plexiglas resin. I learned how to use it in art school, a million years ago, before I met Martin, back when I still had dreams of being an artist myself. What a fool.