Whatever Remains

Mike has just got back from Alaska by way of Florida. “Tell you something,” he says. He says, “Went up to watch my father die. He never liked me, we never got along, but he sends me an email, says, I'm dying, come say goodbye. And I'll tell you, I was there when he went and I saw his spirit coming right up out of his body like a fog. My sister looked at me and she says, did you see that? I never believed in anything but now maybe I do.”

He smokes cigarettes he rolls himself from tobacco scrounged from discarded butts, long fingernails thick and yellow from picking apart paper and filters. He grew his hair out last year and it trails around his ears and gets caught in the collar of his windbreaker. “Tell you something,” he says. He says, “I was in a bar in Florida and who walks in but Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise with his little wife. He says no pictures, no pictures, please, we just want to get something to drink, please, please. I walk up to him and I say, hey, I know you're busy, but I just wanted to say that I liked you in that movie, and he says thanks you, and I say I wanted to say that I think I could beat you at pool. I bet you a thousand dollars I could beat you at pool. There's a pool table right here, and I've got a thousand dollars that says I can beat you. And his wife says, she says, honey, no, you promised but he says no, I can do this, it's not a problem. And wouldn't you know it but I beat him. No problem. Made a thousand dollars off of Tom Cruise.”

Scraps

They linger on, eidolons of an idea, histories and stories caught in the soft reflective surfaces of windows, mirrors, bowls of water. Listen, they whisper, lips moving soundlessly beneath their glass faces, listen, o listen. They act out dramas strange and meaningless, slam doors that stir no breeze, throw vases to shatter against walls that never existed.

We give them names: there is Old William, a somber sour-faced old squire, his muttonchops grey with dust and spiderwebs. There is Mary, sweet Mary, a plain snip of a girl in a crisp white cap with the mad staring eyes of a prophet. We think she is a domestic, but of course it's hard to tell in the brief glimpses we have of her. There is fiery Jack, the artist, ragged and spattered and dramatic, who shouts and stamps his feet and looks like he would thrust himself up out of the past he's fallen into if he could. We see glimpses of his art now and then, a canvas left propped where our eyes can fall on it, as if by accident. Jack is talentless, a hack, but he hacks and slashes at his mediocre canvasses and has found in our eyes fame, of a sort.

Homecoming

In the fall she comes back. The leaves are just turning, and she is dry with the memory of summer. She pauses at the long hill above the old house and watches the clouds move across the sky. The clouds are muscular, white; they cover the sky and give it texture. The long and endless darkness will come later. This is her favorite time of year.

She is thin, bone-thin, and hard as old wood. Her feet are black and filthy – she has tested the calluses with knives and matches and her soles are sturdy as leather. She shifts the pack on her high shoulders and breathes in the air of her home. She feels it pulling at her, like gravity, like the wind; she will lift her wings and let it carry her down the heathery side of the hill, but for the moment she is poised and still.

Far below the door opens and a man comes out. He catches sight of her when he reaches for the paper. She stops breathing. He stays stooped half-over, his arm outstretched, wary and disbelieving. The wind changes and the light fades as the clouds move and she is running down the hill, legs flashing through the grass, skimming over the earth's thrumming side, and for an instant she outraces everything, memory, hunger, travel and time, and she is a child again, running home to the strong and patient arms of her father.

Faultlines

You move out to California. While working as a caddy, you meet an old man who takes a shine to your dark eyes, your sweet and sinful mouth. He pursues you, woos you, weds you. He’s rich and he’s sweet and you say yes thinking it’s love, but after you’re married you grow to loathe his touch, his insistent caresses, his palsied, liver-spotted hands fumbling shakily at the hook of your bra. Even seeing him makes you quiver with the fury of your hatred – which you hide from him. Freedom is sweet but money is sweeter.

You notice his daughter, prowling around the house with the blocked fury of a zoo tiger. You talk to her; she is as caged as you are, as circumscribed by the old man, as hateful and angry. You fall in love, and in the sweaty, gasping darkness of your life a plan is born between the two of you, an old plan, simple as all the old plans are simple and spelled out in the one word MURDER. A bubble of air in the veins of an old man and it’s a heart attack and freedom for the two of you, money enough for the rest of both your lives and night after sticky night of hot love and cold recrimination.

Of course what you don’t know is that the daughter hates you as much as she hates the old man, hates your easy sexuality and your mercenary heart. When you have fallen asleep at last, spent and weary, she slips from your sheets and into the arms of her true lover, the bronzed gardener who followed her out to the coast from the small Midwestern college they attended, who would have married her if the old man hadn’t threatened to cut her off without a cent, who sends her screaming toward climax in a way you’ve never been able to. With you she’s sweet and demure, ashamed of her sex, her stiff outrage at your desire hidden in the folds of a pretended purity. From the moment you slid your way into the marmoreal halls of the mansion her fingers have itched to tear out your throat, and with her lover she has laid plans to destroy you along with her father. The instant you plunge the needle into his arm, she'll be there, full of outraged familial love, with the police and the gas chamber not far behind. She’ll be there when they drop the pellets, her eyes burning into yours through the glass, her mouth hot and dry with desire as you gasp your life away, her fingers trembling with release.

That’s the plan, anyway. The old man knows all of this, and laughs evilly in his throat as he plays with your petty jealousies and rages. He knows your plans and your betrayals: they are whispered into his ear each night by the gently curving lips of the gardener, their bodies twined together in the striped velvet light of the moon through the Venetian blinds, old and young, tan and pale, sex and death wrapped around each other like they always, always are.

Holofernes

On Holofernes Judith sets herself up as a madame and does very well, all things considered. It’s a beast of a job, but she runs an honest house and keeps everyone clean and more or less healthy. The wealthy sons find her and word gets around and almost overnight she’s become a power in the city, recognized if not spoken to, courted in a sly way by the powerful and those who would be powerful. She doesn’t take it very seriously – in the back of her mind is always that return ticket – but she plays the game and spreads her wings in a modest way over the rest of the district.

Things go sour sooner rather than later, there’s a backlash or a moral crusade or a reform movement or something, and just like that she’s back where she was or worse, rocks thrown through her windows, her girls beaten black and blue or worse, filthy fucking whore sprayed over the front of her largest house (which to be honest she finds more hilarious than anything, because of course) but finally they set fire to her house and she decides to pull up stakes. She calls the girls together for one last meeting.

“My dears,” she says, still smudged with smoke, “we had a good run but it’s over. You’ve all been priceless, and any place in town will be more than lucky to have you. Any one looking to get out of the life will find she has more than enough to set herself up in a modest way in any city on half a dozen planets.”

Miriam raises her hand. “Pardon me I’m sure, ma’am, but where are you going and can we go with you?”

Judith shakes her head, a little sadly. “No, my love, no. It’s a long road I’ve yet to travel, and years and worlds yet to go, but thank you for the offer. I will carry you with me.”

And then she’s gone, the dust of Holofernes scattered behind her, one more bright point in a sea of bright points, dwindling, disappearing, gone.