A Dirge for the Temporal (3 page)

  Stepping back out of the water, she found his gaze across the reaches,
holding her palm to him, triumphant. He waved back…as he had waved at Laura, her own palm white and segmented against the misty window of the cab. She hadn’t even let him see her to the airport, though he went anyway, without her knowledge, saluting again as the plane flew away.

  Verena wasn’t flying away. Verena was coming back. Verena was here, now, alive to him, accessible…though he had watched her bathe in the sacred falls. The moroseness he had glimpsed had been replaced by something incalculably more difficult to define.

  “Will you come soon?” she said.

  “To…oh yes, of course. Dinner. Would you care to…I mean, may I invite you…?”

  “Loneliness dwells with me too, Galen. I know.”

  Yes. She knew. Somehow he knew that she knew.

  “Look,” she said, holding up her palm. “It didn’t wash away.”

  “What didn’t wash away?”

  “My hand…the hand that you touched.”

  Now an emotion that he did not like visited him. An emotion with tentacles that wrapped themselves around his nerve bundles, caused his
breath to come sudden. Its name was old, old, and it chilled in any season,
though the mercury never drop and the wind never blow.

  He reached for her suddenly, as if he could compel his arm to stretch that far, far enough to take her hand in his own. “What has happened here?” he queried. “Where is everyone?”

  “I’ve told you,” she answered, a curtain falling over her features. “There is no one.”

  “I’m afraid,” he said quietly.

  “Shhh. Be still,” she said.

  He was, not realizing what he was opening his senses to. Almost immediately the perception of place warped out of all familiarity. A sound that was both deeper and more vast than silence held him suspended. It was as if the Void were coming in like a great sighing maw to devour them.

  “What is it?” he whispered, eyes darting around him, up at the purpling sky.

  “The gears of September,” she said. “Your return has brought them to life again.”

  His skin felt as if it were being pulled from his bones. He clutched his head between his fists and prayed it go away. When he opened his eyes, a tear emerged, slipping down his cheek. In its magnificence she was reflected. He knew; he saw her at the same time in the waterfall.

  “Your table will be ready within the half hour,” she said.

  He fled into his room, sliding the glass door shut. As the compartment pressed in on him, with its strange, mysterious objects and props—TV, pictures, safe, bed, mirror,
mirror
—he knew he could not remain here. Not now.

  He left the Gasthaus for a ship that might right itself again without him aboard. The lobby was empty as he passed.

  Outside, the afternoon grew a deeper purple, the sun long gone behind a ridge. The stream flowed inevitably. Smoke pumped inevitably. Yet there were no cars except for the wagon he had brought in. There
were no people save him. He felt as if he existed in the lull of nightmarish
sleep. He foresaw the key turning in the ignition, the engine coming to life, the tires snatching at the asphalt in their haste to obey him. He saw the sign as it would appear in his rearview mirror. Would Verena run after him, pleading about the gears of September?

   
September is May and May is September,

    Nor free to forsake, when bound to remember.

  He would laugh as he drove away, he swore. Laugh for the being done to. For the goddamn being done to, Laura. The keys in his fist were like tangible her, biting into his skin, cold, inflexible. He shook from the others the one key that mattered. The noise of the stream lifted as he neared the wagon.

  “Galen!” came the voice of Verena over the rushing water.

  He wasn’t going to look back. He stepped around to the driver’s side of the car, key in front of him like the stolen screwdriver or ice pick in the hand of the prison escapee. As he grasped the handle of the door, he caught sight of something on the stream.

  His eyes locked on the object, instantly recognizing it as a body, a limp, naked human body riding the flow from the direction of the high
Alps, now passing under the footbridge, a rag doll at the will of the cur
rent. A half second elapsed between its clearing the shadow of the bridge and passing the line of Galen’s vehicle, but it was enough time to reveal the change that visited the body, a shift which shook Galen the witness down to the bone and marrow.

  The body had turned on the current and opened its eyes to mark him.

  No sooner had he beheld this terror than another body passed under the bridge, emerging in a similar surprise of flesh and awakened eyes, rolling against the force of the current, pulling and dragging as if to
impede its momentum. In its wake came a third—the other two now having
swept out of sight—and behind the third came a fourth. In all Galen counted seven before their abrupt cessation reminded him that he was supposed to be inside his wagon and on his way out of this haunted pass in the foothills of the Alps.

  Slamming the door behind him, he turned the key to the beautiful greeting of a trusty engine waking from a doze. He pulled the shifter into reverse and backed out somewhat slower than he would have liked, in case Verena had decided to come running up behind with her plea. He caught her in his mirror as he shifted again, preparing to speed off in the direction from which he'd come. Out in the street in front of the
Gasthaus,
she stood akimbo, striking him—rather perversely—as stirringly sexy in
the pose. Nonetheless, he put the pedal to the floor and was almost out of there when they appeared in the road in front of him—four, five, six, seven of them, all sexless, of a sickly yellow hue, flesh leeching to their bones.

  He slammed on the brakes—too late as one went flying over the top of the car and another buckled underneath. As the others stared through the windshield at him, mouths stretched in every rictus and scowl, he saw that their expressions were the only thing of life they possessed,
making them, as he saw it, fair game. As he yanked it in reverse, howev
er, bringing the RPM to critical mass, the creatures divided, rushing by the car, more interested in what was behind it than what was inside.

 
Verena
! He let reverse carry the car all the way around, one hundred and eighty degrees, paused only long enough to convince himself that he wasn’t about to invite real-life blood into a hallucinatory reality, then he rode them down like pylons in a road course, too tempting to leave be. Having punched through the last of them, he found himself and his wagon, in a haze of hot rubber and clutch and brakes, facing Verena. Verena and the akimbo. Would he or would he not come to dinner?

  She did not protest, in spite of her impatient stance, as he dragged his victims one by one back to the stream, where the water accepted them eagerly, instantly sweeping them away. He never looked at them as he did the work. He did not know their nature and did not want to know. To his hands they were cool, moist; it was enough. He glanced once they were in the clutch of the stream, then just for a second, to make sure they obeyed.

  He left the wagon in the middle of the road. It was an admission.

  To be denied no longer, Verena held out her hand to him.

  Inside, at their neatly laid table, the candles provided a scent as well as light, but the light was exclusive and the shapes of their faces drifted radiantly. She made him eat the petals of flowers, drink water from the falls, kiss her face when there wasn’t enough. She was Laura, she said. And Ginger.

  “Once, a long, long time ago,” she recalled, “a stranger ambled in off the
Wanderweg
. His arrival caused the gears of September to freeze. His presence caused the stream to flow backwards into the wilderness of ice
and snow, carrying with it the vitality of our little village at the end of civ
ilization. Now you have returned.”

  “Sept is a delightful name for a village.”

  “Your village,” she said. She raised a glass. “Unforsaken.”

Indulgence

M
y mother was a manic-depressive, my father was a circus clown, and I have never suffered for it more than now, nearly twenty years since their departure.

  The hunger-lust, in one form or another, has been around since my
adolescence, but the ritual is developed. Things dark or red, sweetly deca
dent, satisfy my cravings. Things reminiscent of my deeper moods, things that can be savored by candlelight. You might say I am a sort of
vampire for cherry pies and chocolate cakes, Bloody Mary mixes and richly
red wines. My mother’s binges, on the other hand, went somewhat beyond the sweet tooth. But I become one with her through abandon not mimicry. Abandon is bliss.

  Abandon is when the curtains are drawn, the candle lit and the feast spread out before me. Only then may I cease to suppress my magnificent
appetite. Only then may I fully give over to the voraciousness and sav
agery that define my nightly indulgences. But the banquet goes not without its pauses, moments to close the eyes and to relish our finding each other
over the chasm, my mother and I, dripping fingers interlocking, feet gingerly
balancing on the red polka dots scattered across the whispery white fabric that serves as the bridge.

  I often use my father’s only surviving costume as a tablecloth. The
reds have long since bled into one another—thanks to my utter lack of eti
quette—but there is some comfort in having the clown suit there, some…sanity. One day I will burn it. One day, when its simple motif is no
longer recognizable, I will set the candle flame to its flowery cuffs and listen
to the clown scream. As for tonight, I will let it serve the practical purpose. I am hungry, after all, and the shadows are already dancing around me.

  Ah, the rich, the delectable, the sinful and luscious! How I do anticipate these feasts. From the early office hours to the bakery’s last call, it is all I can do to contain myself. You see, my deeper moods have become my shallower moods, abiding, as familiar to me as my own face. And the darks and reds blur my vision with such incessancy that the lenses of my glasses might as well be tainted. The ritual becomes as much a leash as a release, and the world is spared the monster even as the monster suffers.

  Though the only suffering I know now is the oblivious suffering of gluttony.

  But—a syrupy cherry has fallen from my maw. And—I look at it against a brief, very brief patch of white, watching it saturate like ink, like blood, the ridiculously virginal bit of fabric. Now the flicker of the candle…the flicker, flicker, moth wings...

  You bitch, you bitch, you BITCH! I have watched you deteriorate to this state, throwing your black shadow over our home, devouring everything in sight, for the last time!

  Ah, Daddy, home from work at last, still in his clown costume…

  I’ve had damn well enough. Do you understand me, you bitch? ENOUGH!

  …wielding his bottle of bourbon like a club.

 
There! How’d that feel? Still hungry, you?

  Now like a knife.

  I’m going to take you apart like a chicken!

  Daddy, home and screaming. Must be in that sort of black mood Mommy gets.

  The tablecloth’s motif is scarcely discernible, I notice. The polka dots are no longer distinguishable from the rest of it, the entire garment now saturated by the ritual syrup. I should do the baptism tonight. Baptize. Uncle Trace used that word after they took Daddy, naked and screaming, away.
The costume—my god, we’ll have to baptize it with gasoline and a match.
Uncle Trace is my mother’s side.

  Like a chicken! Know why? Cause I can’t help it, that’s why! I’m famished!
Ravenous as a wild dog!

  Now like a fork. A dinner fork.

  The candle flame to the tablecloth’s flowery cuffs and listen to the clown scream. This time in pain. And not the sort that a painted tear and a bottle of cheap bourbon describe.

The Shades of New Geneva

F
unny, they had built the great triangular Prism in the center of New Geneva as a symbol of what they called “unity in diversity.” Now the dispersed bands of light melted into the miasma enveloping the city, creating a spectral stew. Like the population itself. Like the streets of the dreadful place.

  As he stood looking down into the valley of the city, Lane didn’t want to go back in there. He would never speak those words to Leah, who stood tautly beside him, her temporarily concrete-colored eyes refusing to reflect the weird lights below. She had lost something to New Geneva, something intrinsic, and she had finally summoned the courage to go searching for it. He would not compromise that. The strange silence surrounding their merged roads, an infection of which she was the source, must end. The possibility of leaving her had long since evaporated. She had infected him too thoroughly.

  He glanced at her, finding that she had fixed on a point beyond the valley, in the direction of the sea. He followed her gaze to a motley object sewn into the deceptively clear fabric of the morning sky. It was a hot air balloon, and moving towards the basin, as if to enhance its navigator’s high with the toxic vapors of the city. The French Alps to the north and the Mediterranean to the south, New Geneva had once been a favorite
destination for adventurers and their colorful toys. Not anymore. If pleasure
was the function of this vehicle, then it was piloted by either a fool or a madman.

  “Come,” he said, motioning her ahead of him. She led the way down the path with a sureness to her light step, the familiarity its own brand of homecoming. They wouldn’t be giving her a parade in New Geneva. They might toss her a dwarf or a senseless riddle, ogle her with swollen tongues and drunken serenades. They might even allow her to pop off a few shots at the rats, or pose for the
spiegel
, or partake of the
âme
, but they wouldn’t be giving her a parade. New Geneva took more than New Geneva gave. Lane knew because he had been here multiple times on business. Lane knew because Leah knew; she had been a citizen.

  As they descended, the city’s structures sank into its miasmal aura, leaving only the Prism itself, filtering the rising sun into the chaos over which it stood sentinel. The hot air balloon grew, letters beginning to take shape out of its stripes. As the city welcomed them, so did the obsolete advertisement:
unity in diversity
.

~

  The city got its name from the melting pot of cultures and languages and peoples that Swiss Geneva was. Only the namesake was to be an even more civilized, more organized, more modern-day Babel.
unity in diversity
. Lane looked around him and he saw exactly one half of that equation, to the extent that he suddenly felt physically distanced from Leah, who was right beside him, her hand grasped tightly in his. The eyes she turned on him told tales of their own. The concrete color had dissolved to make way for the iridescence which he had seen on occasion, a quivering rainbow stolen from the armor of a beached fish in the sun’s glare. Or from the swamp lights drifting within New Geneva’s poisonous nimbus.

  Before them, along a narrow street cut in half by shadow, the corruption unfolded. Bloated men on stick legs pecked about like chickens, looking for anything into which they might stab their beaks. Sleek favor girls—fingers glistening with the adhesive they used to secure their deposits—stuck their bottom lips out in a contest of who could pout the loudest. From neomodernrococo upper windows in the flanking walls, buxom citywives yelled down at their husbands and sons not to bring anything raunchy home, or they’d put them out with the garbage. The word garbage was instantly absorbed into the refuse spilling out from the crevices between business concerns. The entrances of these establishments were vague outlines behind exhaled vapors. A street in New Geneva was like the canal through which a fart traveled, without the expulsion of air.

  Leah must have had one of these joints in mind all along; otherwise they would have already been in the city center, with its fake antique European walls and cobblestone avenues. Someone knew something about something. Lane trusted her judgment implicitly, even though he was the infiltrator by trade. The sunken inner door didn’t fit well in its frame; dried up posters clung to flaking paint; the withins were dark and full of Miles Davis riffs and ripoffs.

  Over the sounds of the trumpet, a slurred voice made itself audible, addressing the player. “You
are
my man Miles, ain’t ya? Goddamn, how did you find your way here to the Jazzy Sloth?”

  The Jazzy Sloth. Indeed, where else would one be?

  Leah went straight to the bar, something of the mood of the place appearing in her eyes as she leaned up on her toes and elbows to address the bartender, whose back was turned to them. “Joy, it’s me. Leah.”

  “Leee-uh!” exclaimed a sandpaper voice as the woman twirled. “Hello, you beautiful bitch!”

  “I’m back to reclaim what belongs to me,” Leah said plainly. “Joy, let me introduce you to Lane. Lane is my…he is my Lane.”

  Lane felt a patter of delicate little feet race through him, hearing this confession from her.

  “Wait a minute,” said Joy in her abrasive voice. “You’re the one Leah hired to find her sister Gena.”

  “Yeah,” said Lane. Hearing the name reminded him that their mother
had spelled it with an
e
so that it read like an abbreviation of Geneva, in honor of the splendid modern city where the sisters had been born.

  “Did you?”

  “She was a
spiegel
.” He looked over at Leah, whose eyes were the
lightest suggestion of blue as they gazed at the trumpeteer on stage. He continued, “I forced her to come, nearly had to drag her, but we didn’t make it.”

  “She do herself?”

  “
Fuck
!” Leah let out unexpectedly. For the scattered patrons, she might have been hurling her frustrations at the musician. Joy passed Lane a protracted glance.

  It had been the last gig for Lane. For years he had been entering the city, finding them and bringing them out—or
not
bringing them out. The whole operation had come to an end when Gena, a not so random number, threw herself under a passing vehicle’s tires. He didn’t realize his level of investment until he delivered the news to Leah, who absorbed it without movement, her eyes the color of silence. In that moment in time he became lost with her. Through Leah and through his own sorties into New Geneva’s jungles, the city had sunk its claws into him, a non-citizen.

  Rarely did such outbursts come from Leah. Perhaps it was the being back. He felt the intensity, and the desolation, too.

 
intensity in desolation
. Our new motto in New Geneva.

  He put his hand on her shoulder, and she was stoical again. For a moment her eyes assumed the quality her sister’s had, which bespoke the absence of anything to offer this city which had developed its own desires and motives.

  “I need to know where the
âme
is brightest lately,” Leah said to her friend.

  “I can’t say really, as more and more are offering themselves. Don’t drink! The more of us who’ve joined, the greater its allure.”

  “Don’t say ‘us,’ Joy. Never say ‘us.’”

  Lane watched Joy’s expression, saw the shift in the hue of
her
eyes, to that of a glassy office-building exterior. God, if that ever happened to him…no, he mustn’t think of it. As long as he was rescuing
them
, he was sane.

  Joy said, “It’s just that waves of the city’s population go blindly—”

   “Go
where
, Joy? Where is the most active area? That’s what we need to know.”

  Joy considered. “I suppose there is a lot of activity in Germantown these days. But really every part of the city center is game.”

  “Thank you,” Leah said. “I’ll see you again. Stay here and don’t let anything change your mind.”

  “Leah,” Joy’s voice reached coarsely. “If you come across what was taken from me, will you retrieve it, too?”

  Leah’s hand went to her throat, realm of the larynx and its vocal cords. Joy nodded.

  “If I do, Joy.”

~

  In her silence, Leah focused through the congestion on the image of the item stolen from her. It was a simple thing, but an intrinsic one, with enormous personal value. Its color was that of the richest purple Holland tulip. Its material was that of wings, the birds of the air and aether. It had belonged to her mother and been a gift from her father. Both were dead. Leah’s thoughts were never silent.

  As she led Lane like an umbilical cord from a sister dead in blood on a concrete field, she thought of her father, who had locked himself in a room with four bottles of absinthe, three packs of non-filter cigarettes, and his wife’s corpse. When the authorities came, with the hint of New Geneva in their eyes even then, they found a burnt-out cigarette resting between Leah’s mother’s dead lips, dry as her body and memory. Dad, meanwhile, was not so easily approached, all the hallucinations standing like ranks of soldiers in defense of him. His tongue hung out and his eyes bulged towards the treasure at the flat end of an empty green goddess bottle. Granted. Let nothingness process you while your children face the city alone.

  Baby sister in her arms, Leah had fought her way through the officers—whom she had phoned when she could not get into the room—to look at him a last time. His soundless voice cut through the images on which his eyes still fixed to remind her that the biblical Leah had lovely eyes too, and to encourage her to wrap herself in her feathery prize and run until her feet turned to wings. He had known what he would do when he had given the article to her that morning, before brushing away her tears and singing her to sleep again. Looking at her mother, whose eyes did not stare, she had demanded the officials tell her what they had done with the gift. They didn’t know what she was talking about but allowed her to look around while they did what they could to shield the madness that had been her parents. For a moment it was there, hanging from the mirror like Hollywood and tropical islands, but no, that was one of the lingering hallucinations.

  Soon enough she found it in her own room, coiled around the pillow, some of its feathers distorted from her tears. She put it around her neck, and remembered that her mom hadn’t been able to recall where it came from. Some dime store. Some souvenir shop. Somewhere unimportant.

  Leah felt its whispery comfort around her neck now, but refused to reach up and caress a phantom. Before her, before the silence of her, cherubs winked from beneath their brimmed hats as the neomodernrococo gates of the alley gave way to sleek perpendicular scapes of reflective gray. She looked to her right and saw herself, her naked shoulders in the surface. The lucid illusion, like a lucid dream, died. She squeezed Lane’s hand, but it was as cold as the condensation that formed to obscure even the nakedness. She looked up at the polished walls hemming them in and felt her diminutiveness and powerlessness.

  Ahead, at yet another architectural change, an archway of stone-substitute displayed the message:
Ein Bißchen Deutschland

  The inner city thrived on their ghosts before them. The
âme
, on vagabond tongues, pushed out to meet them. Ragged preachermen cried contradictions: God would tear New Geneva down; God greatly favored New Geneva, hence the
âme
; God
was
New Geneva. Behind these came the voices of unity. Of merging. Of urban nirvana. Then came the
âme
itself, in faint, luminous faces and figures, those who had given themselves willingly. Occasionally the eyes of a
spiegel
appeared, mirroring the decorative corners, the strangers and citizens that were Leah and Lane, but not the specters that comprised the
âme
. For the
spiegel
were
the antithesis of the
âme
, in that the latter gave everything while the former
had nothing to give, or take from.

  Leah, at last, touched her shoulder, but the boa was not there.

~

  There was a fountain in the middle of Germantown, and that’s where it was happening.

  Half-timbered houses with flowers and maidens in Bavarian outfits
huddled around the square, while propaganda posters were flown on flag
poles. Shaven NeoNazi heads rolled angrily by, only to be thumped, when accessible, by hater haters. Brät and Schnitzel stank the place, and beer fountained like the gods.

  Lane cautioned Leah not to act on emotion, but advice like that was snatched right out of the air like electricity. She moved with the flow to the rim of the pool and, against the pull of his arm, splashed her face, licking her lips, her eyes becoming like the water, like the
âme
. He knew she sought to get into the “active thought” of the city, but as she turned her head towards the sky, he wondered if she would begin to speak in tongues. Looking around at the other pilgrims wishing to unite with the
âme
, he discovered similar textures.