Broken: A Plague Journal (45 page)

A veil of surrender obscured the room.

“Do it, then,” West choked out, his growl stumbling over resignation. “If we’re going to ruin this, let’s ruin it forever.”

Reynald’s hand joined Jud’s on the barrel. “It’s been an honor.”

Hank crumpled his hat in his callused hands, spit tobacco to the floor. “Yeah, a real fuckin’ hoot.”

Alina bent to the author, kissed his cheek. Took his hand. She tried to smile, her freckles shifting to new constellations.

Jud met each gaze. Histories and universes collapsed behind her eyes.

“Okay.” She grinned through tears. “Let’s go home.”

She pulled the trigger.

Flatline.

They walked, the streets shifting beneath their feet, sometimes cobble, sometimes pavement, sometimes the wooden planks of the pier. The buildings were different and all the same. People came and went around them, between them, through them. Sometimes she held his hand.

They took a left.

“You know where we’re going?”

He laughed. “Does it matter?”

She shrugged.

They stopped in front of a coffee house.

A heavy wooden door to a nameless, dark place. He held the door for her.

He didn’t recognize anyone. There were two stools empty at the counter. Ashtrays. The server was busy placing steaming cups in front of other customers, her hands balancing coins and receipts. They sat.

“What would you recommend?” She couldn’t read the menu.

“What do you like?”

“I’ve never had coffee.”

He felt an emotion for her, and it wasn’t fear.

“I’ll order,” he said, bringing the server over with a motion. “Hi, I’ll just have coffee, black, and she’ll—” He turned to Maire.

And she was gone.

Paul slowly turned back to the counter, struggling against the sudden stillness of the place. Took a Marlboro from the hardpack in his pocket, lit it. Inhaled, and the smoke tore at his eyes.

“Will that be all, sir? Just the coffee?” The server’s pencil hesitated over an order book she really didn’t need. There was a flicker of recognition that could not be. There was a system of desire that was fundamentally flawed.

And Paul felt decades older, the empty stool next to him only deepening that sensation of age and loss. He surveyed the shop, the people sitting together, engaged in important conversations that meant nothing, sipping and slurping and spilling, laughing, falling in and out of love. The stool remained empty.

Something’s wrong.

The server faded, the customers, the tang of bitter coffee and the jostle of cell phones, the tables and chairs, the street outside. He inhaled smoke. No more neon or important books, no more pastries or expensive soups, no more undercurrent of conversation. He was at the end of the pier. He was looking at the lightning over the gulf. His pockets were empty, the marble gone, the jigsaw Michigan. His wrist was bare, the silver bracelet lost. His hair danced in the wind and sand eroded the planes of his face. He couldn’t remember. He was lost. He exhaled, closed his eyes to the midnight winds. He could still see the lightning out in the gulf, still feel her touch.

He opens his eyes and finds himself at his kitchen table, the cat stalking a fly around the linoleum. The coffeemaker sputters its completion. He stands on grating knee. Stacks of newspapers. Boxes of memory. Photographs hidden away upstairs. An empty inbox. And he can’t remember what made him. Can’t remember the faces of the lost, the tastes of the dead. Can’t remember their songs or the textures of them, the warmth of skin or the secrets between them. Forever poised in the moment before a first kiss, the phantom scents of cheap beer and cigarettes and something rich and hidden, something fading from him no matter how he claws to hold it, something rending and beautiful hiding behind blue eyes.

He reaches into his chest and feels nothing at all. He’s hidden the artifacts, or someone’s stolen them. There are pictures on his walls of people he doesn’t know.

He has coffee. Another cigarette.

January cuts a deeper distance.

He stands at the window and watches the snow fill in the morning’s tracks. He loses something in that.

Love is the farthest unsteady light.

He knows they’ll all go eventually, leaving behind an unfinished equation, an unwritten song, a fragile calculus in which nothing is integral. Forevers are redefined in departures. He doesn’t have to do anything at all to deserve nothing. He can travel around the world to end up where he began. He can search a lifetime to find the one who will ruin him. He can fall to the floor, stumbling through bent physics, hands searching for the ineffable past, sobbing for the war dead, the faces he can’t remember, the whispers, the gasps:
Paul Hughes, come here? Paul Hughes, I love you.

Because suddenly he’s looking back and a week is gone, a month or a year, five, a decade, a lifetime, and it feels like a lifetime, a decade, five, a year or a month, a week, a day, hours, minutes, she’s there, seconds, she’s there and they’re together, instants, she’s there, moments, there, now, she’s there, now, there forever, there, walking together down thin paths into broken futures and todays, and they contain multitudes, lifetimes of stillness hovering in the air between them.

And they’re running down those ancient streets, hands held, eyes open, laughing and whispering and knowing.

Staring, but not seeing.

Thinking of the thought [itself].

Breathing, but not living.

In the struggling light, the snow looks silver.

He inhales.

I don’t know who I am anymore.

He exhales.

Bracketing those dead to us, delineating the forms and histories of our desires, in a breath, in tears, in the pattern two opposing collections of striation compose in the catalytic reaction of palm to palm, all physics are bent, and all probabilities, all convenient presuppositions and extrapolations of futures not yet lived are erased: all we have is now, this moment, this beautiful, fragile moment, and

Ω

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Evan Hughes is the seven-time Independent Publisher Book Award-winning writer and editor of Silverthought Press. His work includes the novels
Enemy
,
An End
, and
Broken: A Plague Journal
and the short fiction collection
Certain Devastations
. He lives in Evans Mills, NY with his wife and sons.