Authors: Delia Sherman
I pick up
Confessions of a Pet Psychic
and page through it. There is a chapter on communicating with dearly departed pets, and chapters about understanding the past lives of pets (all domestic cats remember Egypt, apparently), but there is nothing about communication with pets who witness a murder in a small apartment. I put the book back on the shelf.
"It happened again last night,” Arnold tells me when I get back to the register.
I stand perfectly still and wait for him to tell me who else has been murdered.
"What happened?” I finally ask.
"Hooligans ambushed me on the bike trail,” he says, and I start breathing again.
"Did they throw bottles?” I try to sound concerned rather than relieved.
"No,” he says. “They were hiding under one of the bridges, behind the big concrete columns. As I got closer they all came out, six or seven of them. They stretched across the trail and held hands like paper dolls, just to block my way."
"What did you do?"
He grins, impressed with himself. “First I shouted. Then I took the chain and padlock off my shoulder and started swinging it around like a lasso."
"Really."
"Oh, yes. They wouldn't budge, and I wouldn't slow down. So I swung the chain out in front of me and hit a pair of clasped hands. They let go, and I rode through the gap. No cries of pain. Nothing. Not a word. I'm pretty sure I broke some fingers back there, and I didn't even get a reaction."
"You could have killed one of them,” I say.
He shrugs. His casual attitude toward violence makes me want to kill him.
"No,” he says. “I don't think I could have."
"A heavy padlock to the head wouldn't have done it?"
He looks at the ceiling. “I got a pretty good look at them, and I really don't think I could have done much harm. Do you know how many places overlap with the land of the dead?"
"No,” I say.
"Me neither,” he says, “but I am pretty sure that the bike trail between ninth and fifteenth is one of them."
Other places of overlap include reflective surfaces, shadows, and dreams. This is because these are the three traditional methods of seeing someone without actually looking at their physical body. Be careful around people who don't have shadows. Don't trust anyone who doesn't show up on film. They have obviously misplaced their souls, or else never had them to begin with.
I know this because of a thick blue book in the folktale section, second shelf down from the top.
I am also fairly sure that the freight elevator in the back of the bookstore overlaps with the land of the deadânot because of shadows and reflections, though it is fairly dark in there, but because of the noises that the cables make.
Today the cables make a noise that sounds very much like Parsifal the dog. I'm bringing a huge pallet of books down to the basement, which is where we unpack pallets of books. I don't know what the dog-cables are saying. I don't know if there is any such thing as an elevator psychic.
This particular elevator does not stop automatically. You have to hold down the button, watch the wall of the shaft go by through the rusty fence-door, and let go of the button at precisely the right time to line up floor and elevator. You have to take inertia into account. It's tricky. I'm usually good at it, but today I'm listening to dogs in the cables and trying to understand them. Today I hold down the button until the elevator clangs against the bottom of the shaft and gets stuck.
I let go of the button, which does nothing because I am already as far down as the elevator goes. I push
up
, and this also does nothing. I do some shouting. Then I use my cell to call the front desk of the bookstore, and leave a message for Arnold when he doesn't pick up.
There is a manual crank upstairs, all the way upstairs on the fourth floor of the building. It should be possible to unstick the elevator with the crank. I tell this to voicemail, and hang up, and wait for it to happen. Then I start pacing. There is plenty of room for pacing. You could set up a Ping-Pong table in here. You could fit an entire car in the elevator, which used to be convenient because our storefront used to be a car dealership.
Verona loved knowing the history of a room, a building, or a broken piece of furniture. She figured that places have memories, and she tried to read the language of those memories. She painted moldy ventilation ducts and claimed that the mold was just the next stage of vent-evolution. It's lovely stuff, her art of urban decay, but it is also unsettling. It gives the papers another reason to imply that she flirted with dark and dangerous things, and therefore had it coming.
I'm still pacing, and I notice that I'm angry, and I wonder if I have any right to be, if the stages of grief are reserved for family members rather than friends and classmates and other peripheral mourners. I feel like a poser, monopolizing someone else's tragedy for an emotional thrill. Then I feel like a bastard for ever not-grieving, for letting Arnold's inane, ironic obsession with bad new-age books distract me. Then I feel nothing much. Then I'm angry again. Then I laugh because Verona would knock her knuckles against my forehead and tell me I'm a dink. I could always count on her to tell me I'm a dink. She would love this elevator, with its old wooden floor and its rusty fence-doors at either end.
I stop pacing to open one of the doors, behind which is the concrete wall of the elevator shaft. I can hear a faint cable-squeak. I can also hear the sound of countless people standing perfectly still.
"What happened?” I ask her. She doesn't say. She isn't there.
Cables whine, and the floor shudders.
"Shut the door!” Arnold shouts from very far above me. “I can't turn the crank with it open."
That night I dream that Parsifal has been mummified and left in Verona's apartment. The eyeballs, each one already larger than the dog's little brain in its little cranium, have been replaced by stones that are even larger. It blinks, dry skin scraping over stone eyes.
"He isn't allergic,” says the mummy dog in a deep baritone.
I wake up.
I remember how Verona's boyfriend cried on my shoulder at the wake. He left a small snot trail on my suit. I wonder if the police know that he isn't allergic to dogs.
Arnold misses his shift the next day. He doesn't pick up his phone. This is not necessarily cause for alarm. Arnold never picks up his phone.
His mother stops by in midafternoon. She wears a commanding pinstripe suit and looks at me as though she wishes that she didn't have to.
"My son will not be coming in today,” she says. “He is getting stitches."
"What happened?” I ask.
"Someone threw a bottle at his head,” she says.
"I'm sorry,” I say.
"So am I,” she says. She looks around to make sure that there are no customers nearby. “I'm also sorry about your friend.” She does sound genuinely sorry. I reluctantly abandon the speech I've prepared about fact-checking.
"Thank you."
"Are they making any progress?” she asks.
I shrug. “You would know before I do."
"Not necessarily. Do you have any theories of your own?"
I am very much aware that this might be on the record. “Beats me. She knew some pretty strange and intense people."
Arnold's mom shakes her head and waves one hand in the air. “Don't worry about strange and intense,” she says. “Worry about the ones who aren't really there, the ones who give shitty hugs."
She gives me a hug, and it's a pretty good hug. I can't remember the quality of Verona's boyfriend's hugs. I try to remember if I've ever seen his shadow.
That night I close the store, count the cash, and turn the key. I ride to the bike path. I take the opposite direction from home.
No one throws bottles or shoots arrows down from the sides of the ravine. I pause underneath every bridge, waiting. Sometimes I can see hands and faces in the bridge support pillars, revealed by crumbling cement.
Verona would have loved these pillars. She would have mixed pigment with the pulverized cement dust and made wonders with it. She would have known what the cement remembered, and she would have encouraged a stretched piece of canvas to know it, too.
I pause underneath the Ninth Street bridge and wait.
They come out from behind the pillars, and from within the pillars. They are all children. They are all male. This bothers me. They are not holding hands. They don't touch each other, and they do not touch me, but they have me surrounded. Two sodium lights are whining above us. None of the children have shadows.
This bridge overlaps with the land of the dead, but dead is a very big place. It is probably absurd to assume that they all know each other. When I meet someone from Australia, I always ask whether they know the only other person I've met from Australia. They never do. I still have to ask.
The dead who live under bridges and throw bottles might know what happened to her. They might be able to tell me what story she is actually in.
Maybe Verona's boyfriend will be arrested by a Violent Criminal Apprehension Unit when forensic tests are finally concluded. Maybe he will confess to every brutal detail and give a tearful and truthful confession that explains absolutely everything.
It won't happen. I'm sure of that. They may track down
who
, but never a satisfactory
why
. He won't say, whoever he turns out to be, because he doesn't have a shadow. The dog won't say, not even in dreams, because the dog doesn't know.
This is a story about not-knowing. It is frustrating, and I am sorry about that, but I don't get to know why this happened to her, and neither do you. Just please remember that she is not Red Riding Hood. She is not in that story, not unless you can accept
woods
and
wolf
as extremely large variables. She did not have it coming.
I am surrounded by children without shadows. I should ask why she died, because it is possible that they know.
"Is she okay?” I ask instead, even though I know better, even though there were multiple instruments, even though the casket was closed at the wake.
They turn around, almost in unison but not quite. Each one of them leaves, walking back between concrete pillars and across overlapping borders. This might be my answer, but I don't understand it. I can't read it. Verona might have known. She might have found this place legible, with its crumbling pillars and sodium light, but she is not here. No one is under this bridge but me, and I'm leaving.
I ride back the way I came.
It has occurred to me a couple of times, at a couple of different funerals, that eulogies are interstitial sorts of stories. They contradict, acknowledging loss while trying to put it off awhile longer. They take memories and make them more memorable for having been shaped and shared, and therefore just a tiny bit more permanent. They are stories told at thresholds, in the borderland places where the rules change, and a ghost story is a eulogy with a flashlight held under the chin.
William Alexander
Shira Lipkin
1.
The waiter's name is Valentine. He has long, slim fingers, and he writes down my order instead of pretending to commit it to memory. I like that, his pen on the paper bringing forth one simple thing about me. My lunch. Just a tiny fragment of information. I honor him by doing the same. “The waiter's name is Valentine,” I write in my battered notebook, “and he has long, slim fingers."
Information is sacred. I don't remember why, or who told me. But I know that information is sacred, so I write it down, scraps of knowledge and observations. I used to write in leather-bound journals with elegant, heavy pens, but my fetish for elegance has fallen by the wayside in my rush to commit everything to paper. Now I use cheap marbled composition books, purchased by the dozen. The pen is still important, though. It must write in smooth lines of black, not catch on the page. There is too much to capture.
I order chai and butternut squash soup. I write that down as well, just after Valentine does. I watch him walk to the kitchen, slender and graceful, and I wonder what Valentine does when he is not refilling coffee mugs. I wonder if he dances. I write that down: “Perhaps Valentine dances.” I watch him flirt with the barista, their movements around each other a careful ballet of hot espresso and soup and witty banter, and I curl up in my armchair and wrap my hands around the mug of tea when Valentine brings it to me with his usual smile and nod. I observe. I record.
I write on the bus, on my way home. I write about the bus driver, and about the woman sitting across from me, wearing a too-heavy jacket ("perhaps she is sick"). I write about the barista and the patterns of her movement around the large copper espresso machine, the way she admires her reflection. When I get home, I carefully tear the pages from my notebook, and I tear fact from fact, isolating each bit of information, and I file them in the rows of small boxes nailed to my walls. Miniature pigeon coops filled with paper instead of birds. Facts. Ways to build the world. I copy things over when necessary, when I must file “perhaps Valentine dances” under both “Valentine” and “Speculation.” I must separate speculation, after all. My shreds and fragments of information comprise my image of Valentine (for example). I cannot allow speculation to color that. I can allow his grace, but not the possibility of his dancing.
With enough data, maybe I can figure out the world.
2.
The waiter's name is Val. His hands are stained a burnished yellow from nicotine, and guitar-callused. He is bored and impatient, waiting for his shift to end. He does not write down my orderâwhich is fair because it's just coffee and blackberry pie, and the pie is right at hand. He slices it and slaps it on the plate; it falls over just a bit, slides, and blackberry oozes out onto the plain white plate, the color almost shocking. I write that down, and the way the steam dances over the coffee mug. The mug is smooth and unadorned, the same bone white, and the coffee is rich and dark and bitter. The diner is a diner, no more and no less, retro-1950s tube with aproned waitresses and meat loaf and pie and Val, leaning forward by the register, staring at the door. Waiting for something else.