Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

“Alisanne. Alisanne Des Rochers.”

William tugged awkwardly at the end of his scarf, a strange heat creeping up the small of his back. He had looked last night for Alisanne in the book and not found her, but now he recalled some jagged evidence of pages torn out in the D section.

“What did she want?”

“Who knows? She’s a maniac, I’m telling you. Sara caught her poking around Irene’s birdcage piece and totally flipped. She had Abeba make her leave. It was intense.”

After two mimosas, William excused himself to the bathroom where he went to the sink to splash some water on his face. He came out and sat down on an old Windsor bench in the reception area that creaked miserably under his weight. He took the address book out of his suit pocket and thumbed to the back, where there were a few loose photographs. There were the naughty Polaroids, of course, but also several PG-rated pictures taken in college days. George and Jacob dancing with Irene in the student center under a disco ball. Sara and Irene collapsed under shopping bags at a food court, sharing a root beer float the size of their heads. Irene standing ankle deep in a creek, arms stretched to a brilliant sun just out of the frame. Her face in the glow of twenty birthday candles on what appeared to be a penis cake honoring Jacob’s birthday. In another she and Sara and George were covered in white paint, and Irene was sticking her tongue out. Her shirt said I GOT RIPPED AT VAN WINKLE’S — NYC, NY. They all looked younger and happier.

Just then George stopped in from his own trip to the bathroom. “Thought we lost you,” he said. With a loud thump, George landed on the bench beside him, which complained but didn’t break. William tried to tuck the photos away, but George had already seen them. “Looks like sophomore year maybe? Habitat for Humanity.”

“You should probably have these,” William said, pushing them toward George.

He only pushed them back. “No, that’s all right. I’ve had enough nostalgia for a week. Sara just finally finished going through everything from her stuff we put into storage. Photos, dishes, jewelry, books… all those clothes. God. We took most of it back to that secondhand shop she liked so much with the vintage shoes. Mel’s? I guess now it’s thirdhand.”

He seemed to regret this observation almost right away, and William ignored it.

“I’ve been thinking — well, right before she—… I think she wanted me to get in touch with her father and stepmother. I think someone should, you know? It doesn’t have to be me, but… I just want to know who she was. Where she came from. You know, I don’t even know why she — why she liked me.”

George sighed and raised his hands into the air as if offering something to the heavens. After a moment William wondered if he hadn’t begun calculating field equations in his head, but then he finished with a stretch and a loud yawn.

“There’s a kind of apocryphal physics story,” George said finally. “Someone’s giving a cosmology lecture about how the sun is just one star in three hundred billion in the Milky Way galaxy, which is just one galaxy in two hundred billion in the universe, which is just one universe in the whatever-it-all-is — and this woman stands up and says something like ‘That’s crazy! Everyone knows the Earth is flat and rides around on the back of a giant tortoise.’ And the lecturer says, ‘Well, ma’am, in that case, what is the tortoise standing on?’ and she replies, ‘Another tortoise, of course!’ and he says, ‘Well, so what is that tortoise standing on?’ and she says, ‘Another tortoise, of course!’ and he says—”

“George!”

“Right. Sorry. So he says — he says, ‘And what is that tortoise standing on?’ and she says, ‘Sir, I’m telling you, it’s tortoises all the way down!’”

William got the sense that this was the punch line, and he gave George a perfunctory laugh before saying, “I don’t understand.”

“That’s Irene. She’s just tortoises all the way down. Mysteries on top of mysteries, however far down you go.”

William felt something seizing up in his chest and hurriedly tried to pay George for the mimosas, which he refused, of course. He looked about ready to fall asleep on the bench.

“My love to Sara,” William said quickly, before walking off to the men’s room. There he locked the door and rolled a joint on the counter by the sink, carefully, just the way she had taught him. Then he stepped outside and walked down into the Battery, where he could smoke it in relative peace and quiet. He stared out across the gray skies toward the Statue of Liberty, cold and alone in the open harbor, and thought about calling his mother.

They hadn’t exactly been getting along lately. Shortly after Irene died, she had asked him to join her for a Seoul Jinogwigut— a ceremony to usher the last of Irene’s seven souls to paradise. He didn’t expect her to understand that he didn’t want Irene’s seventh soul ushered to paradise, just as he didn’t want to hear her theories about how Irene’s cancer had been caused by jabkwi , wandering malicious spirits, who had nestled into the psychic hole Irene had created by turning her back on her family — her ancestors were pissed, in other words, and misfortune was sure to befall those who pissed off the ancestors. Whatever. Let her stand around shaking jujube sticks and burning paper effigies of horses and invoking the spirits. But now it had been a year, and his mother was still trying to come up with ways to help Irene’s soul reach the next world.

When the tightness in his chest finally dulled to a weak throb and he felt sleepy, he walked to the street and hailed a cab. It was only when he sat down in the backseat that he realized he had absolutely no idea where he wanted to go.

“You know a bar called Van Winkle’s?” William asked.

The driver nodded. “Up on Avenue B.”

William said that was the place, even though he didn’t have the faintest idea. He clutched Irene’s address book in his hand like a holy book as they headed uptown. Pressing one cheek against the cold window, he listened to the other cars. Their sounds began to overlap, repeat, and blur together. The foggy voice of the radio tuned to sports. A faint, charred coffee smell came from the front seat. The door hummed and the road sang, and soon everything was lost in a white wall of shrouded air slipping past the window.

Ice was quickly covering the windowpane. Strange — though not as strange as the warm hand he felt on his. Without looking, he knew it was Irene’s hand. It just was . And she just was there , as if she had always been. Not ghostly, not cold, nothing spectral or apparitional at all. Her hand on his arm and on the back of his neck. Her head pressed onto his shoulder. Fat snowflakes were falling outside the window. William could feel her fingers sliding between his, looking for a comfortable grip, as she sighed lightly and kissed the side of his neck and then a slightly firmer one, pecking at a spot she always liked. He was afraid to look directly at her.

Are you a ghost? he asked.

No. She giggled. I’m a bird. A very special, rare type of seagull.

What makes you so special and rare, Madame Seagull?

I hate the sea , she said.

That’s pretty inconvenient.

A long sigh that tickled his neck. I’ll admit, it’s a problem.

So where do you live then?

She jabbed her nose into his neck a half dozen times as he squirmed. I’m practicing to be a William-pecker. So I can make my nest inside Williams.

Outside a beam of blond sunlight fell onto the frosty window, and William watched as a million fine, symmetrical crystals of ice melted and condensed into steam, filling the backseat of the cab. He turned to try to kiss Irene, but she pressed his cheek the other way. He could almost see her hair out of the corner of his eye, falling down over the white shoulder of his shirt, spilling thick and golden. Then he pushed her hand away, turning the rest of the way — and woke up alone.