That was Monday, and there"s nothing the least bit remarkable about Tuesday. I make the commute from Providence to Newport, crossing the West Pa.s.sage of Narragansett Bay to Conanicut Island, and then the East Pa.s.sage to Aquidneck Island and Newport. Most of the day is spent at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum on Bellevue, shut away with my newspaper clippings and microfiche, with frail yellowed books that were printed before the Revolutionary War. I wear the white cotton gloves they give me for handling archival materials, and make several pages of handwritten notes, pertaining primarily to the treatment of cases of consumption in Newport during the first two decades of the Eighteenth Century.
The library is open late on Tuesdays, and I don"t leave until sometime after seven p.m. But nothing I find gets me any nearer to confirming that a corpse believed to have belonged to a vampire was exhumed from the Common Burying Ground in 1785. On the long drive home, I try not to think about the fact that she hasn"t called, or my growing suspicion that she likely never will. I have a can of ravioli and a beer for dinner. I half watch something forgettable on television. I take a hot shower and brush my teeth. If there are any dreams good, bad, or otherwise they"re nothing I recall upon waking. The day is sunny, and not quite as cold, and I do my best to summon a few shoddy sc.r.a.ps of optimism, enough to get me out the door and into the car.
But by the time I reach the library in Newport, I"ve got a headache, what feels like the beginnings of a migraine, railroad spikes in both my eyes, and I"m wishing I"d stayed in bed. I find a comfortable seat in the Roderick Terry Reading Room, one of the armchairs upholstered with dark green leather, and leave my sungla.s.ses on while I flip through books pulled randomly from the shelf on my right. Novels by William Kennedy and Elia Kazan, familiar, friendly books, but trying to focus on the words only makes my head hurt worse. I return The Arrangement to its slot on the shelf, and pick up something called Thousand Cranes by a j.a.panese author, Yasunari Kawbata. I"ve never heard of him, but the blurb on the back of the dust jacket a.s.sures me he was awarded the n.o.bel Prize for Literature in 1968, and that he was the first j.a.panese author to receive it.
I don"t open the book, but I don"t reshelve it, either. It rests there in my lap, and I sit beneath the octagonal skylight with my eyes closed for a while. Five minutes maybe, maybe more, and the only sounds are m.u.f.fled footsteps, the turning of pages, an old man clearing his throat, a pa.s.sing police siren, one of the librarians at the front desk whispering a little more loudly than usual. Or maybe the migraine magnifies her voice and only makes it seem that way. In fact, all these small, unremarkable sounds seem magnified, if only by the quiet of the library.
When I open my eyes, I have to blink a few times to bring the room back into focus. So I don"t immediately notice the woman standing outside the window, looking in at me. Or only looking in, and I just happen to be in her line of sight. Maybe she"s looking at nothing in particular, or at the bronze statue of Pheidippides perched on its wooden pedestal. Perhaps she"s looking for someone else, someone who isn"t me. The window is on the opposite side of the library from where I"m sitting, forty feet or so away. But even at that distance, I"m almost certain that the pale face and lank black hair belong to Abby Gladding. I raise a hand, half waving to her, but if she sees me, she doesn"t acknowledge having seen me. She just stands there, perfectly still, staring in.
I get to my feet, and the copy of Thousand Cranes slides off my lap; the noise the book makes when it hits the floor is enough that a couple of people look up from their magazines and glare at me. I offer them an apologetic gesture part shrug and part sheepish frown and they shake their heads, almost in unison, and go back to reading. When I glance at the window again, the black-haired woman is no longer there. Suddenly, my headache is much worse (probably from standing so quickly, I think), and I feel a sudden, dizzying rush of adrenalin. No, it"s more than that. I feel afraid. My heart races, and my mouth has gone very dry. Any plans I might have harbored of going outside to see if the woman looking in actually was Abby vanish immediately, and I sit down again. If it was her, I reason, then she"ll come inside.
So I wait, and, very slowly, my pulse returns to its normal rhythm, but the adrenaline leaves me feeling jittery, and the pain behind my eyes doesn"t get any better. I pick the novel by Yasunari Kawbata up off the floor and place it back upon the shelf. Leaning over makes my head pound even worse, and I"m starting to feel nauseous. I consider going to the restrooms, near the circulation desk, but part of me is still afraid, for whatever reason, and it seems to be the part of me that controls my legs. I stay in the seat and wait for the woman from the window to walk into the Roderick Terry Reading Room. I wait for her to be Abby, and I expect to hear her green galoshes squeaking against the lacquered hardwood. She"ll say that she thought about calling, but then figured that I"d be in the library, so of course my phone would be switched off. She"ll say something about the weather, and she"ll want to know if I"m still up for dinner and the movie. I"ll tell her about the migraine, and maybe she"ll offer me Excedrin or Tylenol. Our hushed conversation will annoy someone, and he or she will shush us. We"ll laugh about it later on.
But Abby doesn"t appear, and so I sit for a while, gazing across the wide room at the window, a tree outside the window, at the houses lined up neat and tidy along Redwood Street. On Wednesday, the library is open until eight, but I leave as soon as I feel well enough to drive back to Providence.
It"s Thursday, and I"m sitting in that same green armchair in the Terry Roderick Reading Room. It"s only 11:26 a.m., and already I understand that I"ve lost the day. I have no days to spare, but already, I know that the research that I should get done today isn"t going to happen. Last night was too filled with uneasy dreaming, and this morning I can"t concentrate. It"s hard to think about anything but the nightmares, and the face of Abby Gladding at the window, her blue eyes, her black hair. And yes, I have grown quite certain that it was her face I saw peering in, and that she was peering in at me.
She hasn"t called (and I didn"t get her number, a.s.suming she has one). An hour ago, I walked along the Newport waterfront looking for her, but to no avail. I stood a while beside the "seal safari" kiosk, hoping, irrationally I suppose, that she might turn up. I smoked a cigarette, and stood there in the cold, watching the sunlight on the bay, listening to traffic and the wind and a giggling flock of grey sea gulls. Just before I gave up and made my way back to the library, I noticed dog tracks in a muddy patch of ground near the kiosk. I thought that they seemed unusually large, and I couldn"t help but recall the cafe on Monday and Abby relating the story of the werewolf priest buried in Middletown. But lots of people in Newport have big dogs, and they walk them along the wharf.
I"m sitting in the green leather chair, and there"s a manila folder of photocopies and computer printouts in my lap. I"ve been picking through them, pretending this is work. It isn"t. There"s nothing in the folder I haven"t read five or ten times over, nothing that hasn"t been cited by other academics chasing stories of New England vampires. On top of the stack is "The "Vampires" of Rhode Island," from Yankee magazine, October 1970. Beneath that, "They Burned Her Heart...Was Mercy Brown a Vampire?" from the Narragansett Times, October 25th 1979, and from the Providence Sunday Journal, also October 1979, "Did They Hear the Vampire Whisper?" So many of these popular pieces have October dates, a testament to journalism"s att.i.tude towards the subject, which it clearly views as nothing more than a convenient skeleton to pull from the closet every Halloween, something to dust off and trot out for laughs.
Salem has its witches. Sleepy Hollow its headless Hessian mercenary. And Rhode Island has its consumptive, consuming phantoms Mercy Brown, Sarah Tillinghast, Nellie Vaughn, Ruth Ellen Rose, and all the rest. Beneath the Providence Sunday Journal piece is a black-and-white photograph I took a couple of years ago, Nellie Vaughn"s vandalized headstone with its infamous inscription: "I am waiting and watching for you." I stare at the photograph for a moment or two and set it aside. Beneath it there"s a copy of another October article, "When the Wind Howls and the Trees Moan," also from the Providence Sunday Journal. I close the manila folder and try not to stare at the window across the room.
It is only a window, and it only looks out on trees and houses and sunlight.
I open the folder again, and read from a much older article, "The Animistic Vampire in New England" from American Anthropologist, published in 1896, only four years after the Mercy Brown incident. I read it silently, to myself, but catch my lips moving: In New England the vampire superst.i.tion is unknown by its proper name. It is believed that consumption is not a physical but spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation; that as long as the body of a dead consumptive relative has blood in its heart it is proof that an occult influence steals from it for death and is at work draining the blood of the living into the heart of the dead and causing his rapid decline.
I close the folder again and return it to its place in my book bag. And then I stand and cross the wide reading room to the window and the alcove where I saw, or only thought I saw, Abby looking in at me. There"s a marble bust of Cicero on the window ledge, and I"ve been staring out at the leafless trees and the brown gra.s.s, the sidewalk and the street, for several minutes before I notice the smudges on the pane of gla.s.s, only inches from my face. Sometime recently, when the window was wet, a finger traced a circle there, and then traced a circle within that first circle. When the gla.s.s dried, these smudges were left behind. And I remember Monday afternoon at the coffeehouse, Abby tracing an identical symbol (if "symbol" is the appropriate word here) in the condensation on the window while we talked and watched the rain.
I press my palm to the gla.s.s, which is much colder than I"d expected.
In my dream, I stood at another window, at the end of a long hallway, and looked down at the North Burial Ground. With some difficulty, I opened the window, hoping the air outside would be fresher than the stale air in the hallway. It was, and I thought it smelled faintly of clover and strawberries. And there was music. I saw, then, Abby standing beneath a tree, playing a violin. The music was very beautiful, though very sad, and completely unfamiliar. She drew the bow slowly across the strings, and I realized that somehow the music was shaping the night. There were clouds sailing past above the cemetery, and the chords she drew from the violin changed the shapes of those clouds, and also seemed to dictate the speed at which they moved. The moon was bloated, and shone an unhealthy shade of ivory, and the whole sky writhed like a Van Gogh painting. I wondered why she didn"t tell me that she plays the violin.
Behind me, something clattered to the floor, and I looked over my shoulder. But there was only the long hallway, leading off into perfect darkness, leading back the way I"d apparently come. When I turned again to the open window and the cemetery, the music had ceased, and Abby was gone. There was only the tree and row after row of tilted headstones, charcoal-colored slate, white marble, a few cut from slabs of reddish sandstone mined from Ma.s.sachusetts or Connecticut. I was reminded of a platoon of drunken soldiers, lined up for a battle they knew they were going to lose.
I have never liked writing my dreams down.
It is late Thursday morning, almost noon, and I pull my hand back from the cold, smudged windowpane. I have to be in Providence for an evening lecture, and I gather my things and leave the Redwood Library and Athenaeum. On the drive back to the city, I do my best to stop thinking about the nightmare, my best not to dwell on what I saw sitting beneath the tree, after the music stopped and Abby Gladding disappeared. My best isn"t good enough.
The lecture goes well, quite a bit better than I"d expected it would, better, probably, than it had a right to, all things considered. "Mercy Brown as Inspiration for Bram Stoker"s Dracula," presented to the Rhode Island Historical Society, and, somehow, I even manage not to make a fool of myself answering questions afterwards. It helps that I"ve answered these same questions so many times in the past. For example: "I"m a.s.suming you"ve also drawn connections between the Mercy Brown incident and Sheridan Le Fanu"s "Carmilla?""
"There are similarities, certainly, but so far as I know, no one has been able to demonstrate conclusively that Le Fanu knew of the New England phenomena. And, more importantly, the publication of "Carmilla" predates the exhumation of Mercy Brown"s body by twenty years."
"Still, he might have known of the earlier cases."
"Certainly. He may well have. However, I have no evidence that he did."
But, the entire time, my mind is elsewhere, back across the water in Newport, in that coffeehouse on Thames, and the Redwood Library, and standing in a dream hallway, looking down on my subconscious rendering of the Common Burying Ground. A woman playing a violin beneath a tree. A woman with whom I have only actually spoken once, but about whom I cannot stop thinking.
It is believed that consumption is not a physical but spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation...
After the lecture, and the questions, after introductions are made and notable, influential hands are shaken, when I can finally slip away without seeming either rude or unprofessional, I spend an hour or so walking alone on College Hill. It"s a cold, clear night, and I follow Benevolent Street west to Benefit and turn north. There"s comfort in the uneven, buckled bricks of the sidewalk, in the bare limbs of the trees, in all the softly glowing windows. I pause at the granite steps leading up to the front door of what historians call the Stephen Harris House, built in 1764. One hundred and sixty years later, H. P. Lovecraft called this the "Babbitt House" and used it as the setting for an odd tale of lycanthropy and vampirism. I know this huge yellow house well. And I know, too, the four hand-painted signs nailed up on the gatepost, all of them in French. From the sidewalk, by the electric glow of a nearby street lamp, I can only make out the top half of the third sign in the series; the rest are lost in the gloom Oubliez le Chien. Forget the Dog.
I start walking again, heading home to my tiny, cluttered apartment, only a couple of blocks east on Prospect. The side streets are notoriously steep, and I"ve been in better shape. I haven"t gone twenty-five yards before I"m winded and have a nasty st.i.tch in my side. I lean against a stone wall, cursing the cigarettes and the exercise I can"t be bothered with, trying to catch my breath. The freezing air makes my sinuses and teeth ache. It burns my throat like whiskey.
And this is when I glimpse a sudden blur from out the corner of my right eye, hardly more than a blur. An impression or the shadow of something large and black, moving quickly across the street. It"s no more than ten feet away from me, but downhill, back towards Benefit. By the time I turn to get a better look, it"s gone, and I"m already beginning to doubt I saw anything, except, possibly, a stray dog.
I linger here a moment, squinting into the darkness and the yellow-orange sodium-vapor pool of streetlight that the blur seemed to cross before it disappeared. I want to laugh at myself, because I can actually feel the p.r.i.c.k of goose b.u.mps along my forearms, and the short, fine hairs at the nape of my neck standing on end. I"ve blundered into a horror-movie cliche, and I can"t help but be reminded of Val Lewton"s Cat People, the scene where Jane Rudolph walks quickly past Central Park, stalked by a vengeful Simone Simon, only to be rescued at the last possible moment by the fortuitous arrival of a city bus. But I know there"s no helpful bus coming to intervene on my behalf, and, more importantly, I understand full f.u.c.king well that this night holds in store nothing more menacing than what my over-stimulated imagination has put there. I turn away from the street light and continue up the hill towards home. And I do not have to pretend that I don"t hear footsteps following me, or the clack of claws on concrete, because I don"t. The quick shadow, the peripheral blur, it was only a moment"s misapprehension, no more than a trick of my exhausted, preoccupied mind, filled with the evening"s morbid banter.
Oubliez le Chien.
Fifteen minutes later, I"m locking the front door of my apartment behind me. I make a hot cup of chamomile tea, which I drink standing at the kitchen counter. I"m in bed shortly after ten o"clock. By then, I"ve managed to completely dismiss whatever I only thought I saw crossing Jenckes Street.
"Open your eyes, Ms. Howard," Abby Gladding says, and I do. Her voice does not in any way command me to open my eyes, and it is perfectly clear that I have a choice in the matter. But there"s a certain je-ne-sais-quoi in the delivery, the inflection and intonation, in the measured conveyance of these seven syllables, that makes it impossible for me to keep my eyes closed. It"s not yet dawn, but sunrise cannot be very far away, and I am lying in my bed. I cannot say whether I am awake or dreaming, or if possibly I am stranded in some liminal state that is neither one nor the other. I am immediately conscious of an unseen weight bearing down painfully upon my chest, and I am having difficulty breathing.
"I promised that I"d call on you," she says, and, with great effort, I turn my head towards the sound of her voice, my cheek pressing deeply into my pillow. I am aware now that I am all but paralyzed, perhaps by the same force pushing down on my chest, and I strain for any glimpse of her. But there"s only the bedside table, the clock radio and reading lamp and ashtray, an overcrowded bookcase with sagging shelves, and the floral calico wallpaper that came with the apartment. If I could move my arms, I would switch on the lamp. If I could move, I"d sit up, and maybe I would be able to breathe again.
And then I think that she must surely be singing, though her song has no words. There is no need for mere lyrics, not when texture and timbre, harmony and melody, are sufficient to unmake the mundane artifacts that comprise my bedroom, wiping aside the here and now that belie what I am meant to see in this fleeting moment. And even as the wall and the bookshelf and the table beside my bed dissolve and fall away, I understand that her music is drawing me deeper into sleep again, though I must have been very nearly awake when she told me to open my eyes. I have no time to worry over apparent contradictions, and I can"t move my head to look away from what she means for me to see.
There"s nothing to be afraid of, I think. No more here than in any bad dream. But I find the thought carries no conviction whatsoever. It"s even less substantial than the dissolving wallpaper and bookcase.
Now I"m looking at the weed-choked sh.o.r.e of a misty pond or swamp, a bog or tidal marsh. The light is so dim it might be dusk, or it might be dawn, or merely an overcast day. There are huge trees bending low near the water, which seems almost perfectly smooth and the green of polished malachite. I hear frogs, hidden among the moss and reeds, the ferns and skunk cabbages, and now the calls of birds form a counterpoint to Abby"s voice. Except, seeing her standing ankle deep in that stagnant green pool, I also see that she isn"t singing. The music is coming from the violin braced against her shoulder, from the bow and strings and the movement of her left hand along the fingerboard of the instrument. She has her back to me, but I don"t need to see her face to know it"s her. Her black hair hangs down almost to her hips. And only now do I realize that she"s naked.
Abruptly, she stops playing, and her arms fall to her sides, the violin in her left hand, the bow in her right. The tip of the bow breaks the surface of the pool, and ripples in concentric rings race away from it.
"I wear this rough garment to deceive," she says, and, at that, all the birds and frogs fall silent. "Aren"t you the clever girl? Aren"t you canny? I would not think appearances would so easily lead you astray. Not for long as this."
No words escape my rigid, sleeping jaws, but she hears me all the same, my answer that needs no voice, and she turns to face me. Her eyes are golden, not blue. And in the low light, they briefly flash a bright, iridescent yellow. She smiles, showing me teeth as sharp as razors, and then she quotes from the Gospel of Matthew.
"Inwardly, they were ravening wolves," she says to me. "You"ve seen all that you need to see, and probably more, I"d wager." With this, she turns away again, turning to face the fog shrouding the wide green pool. As I watch, helpless to divert my gaze or even shut my eyes, she lets the violin and bow slip from her hands; they fall into the water with quiet splashes. The bow sinks, though the violin floats. And then she goes down on all fours. She laps at the pool, and her hair has begun to writhe like a nest of serpents.
And now I"m awake, disoriented and my chest aching, gasping for air as if a moment before I was drowning and have only just been pulled to the safety of dry land. The wallpaper is only dingy calico again, and the bookcase is only a bookcase. The clock radio and the lamp and the ashtray sit in their appointed places upon the bedside table.
The sheets are soaked through with sweat, and I"m shivering. I sit up, my back braced against the headboard, and my eyes go to the second-story window on the other side of the small room. The sun is still down, but it"s a little lighter out there than it is in the bedroom. And for a fraction of a moment, clearly silhouetted against that false dawn, I see the head and shoulders of a young woman. I also see the muzzle and alert ears of a wolf, and that golden eyeshine watching me. Then it"s gone, she or it, whichever p.r.o.noun might best apply. It doesn"t seem to matter. Because now I do know exactly what I"m looking for, and I know that I"ve seen it before, years before I first caught sight of Abby Gladding standing in the rain without an umbrella.
Friday morning I drive back to Newport, and it doesn"t take me long at all to find the grave. It"s just a little ways south of the chain-link fence dividing the North Burial Ground from the older Common Burying Ground and Island Cemetery. I turn off Warner Street onto the rutted, unpaved road winding between the indistinct rows of monuments. I find a place that"s wide enough to pull over and park. The trees have only just begun to bud, and their bare limbs are stark against a sky so blue-white it hurts my eyes to look directly into it. The gra.s.s is mostly still brown from long months of snow and frost, though there are small clumps of new green showing here and there.
The cemetery has been in use since 1640 or so. There are three Colonial-era governors buried here (one a delegate to the Continental Congress), along with the founder of Freemasonry in Rhode Island, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, various Civil War generals, lighthouse keepers, and hundreds of African slaves stolen from Gambia and Sierra Leone, the Gold and Ivory coasts and brought to Newport in the heyday of whaling and the Rhode Island rum trade. The grave of Abby Gladding is marked by a weathered slate headstone, badly scabbed over with lichen. But, despite the centuries, the shallow inscription is still easy enough to read: HERE LYETH INTERED Ye BODY OF ABBY MARY GLADDING.
DAUGHTER OF SOLOMON GLADDING esq & MARY HIS WYFE WHO.
DEPARTED THIS LIFE Ye 2d DAY OF SEPT 1785 AGED 22 YEARS.
SHE WAS DROWN"D & DEPARTED & SLEEPS ZECH 4:1 NEITHER SHALL THEY WEAR.
A HAIRY GARMENT TO DECEIVE.
Above the inscription, in place of the usual death"s head, is a crude carving of a violin. I sit down in the dry, dead gra.s.s in front of the marker, and I don"t know how long I"ve been sitting there when I hear crows cawing. I look over my shoulder, and there"s a tree back towards Farewell Street filled with the big black birds. They watch me, and I take that as my cue to leave. I know now that I have to go back to the library, that whatever remains of this mystery is waiting for me there. I might find it tucked away in an old journal a newspaper clipping, or in crumbling church records. I only know I"ll find it, because now I have the missing pieces. But there is an odd reluctance to leave the grave of Abby Gladding. There"s no fear in me, no shock or stubborn disbelief at what I"ve discovered or at its impossible ramifications. And some part of me notes the oddness of this, that I am not afraid. I leave her alone in that narrow house, watched over by the wary crows, and go back to my car. Less than fifteen minutes later I"m in the Redwood Library, asking for anything they can find on a Solomon Gladding, and his daughter, Abby.
"Are you okay?" the librarian asks, and I wonder what she sees in my face, in my eyes, to elicit such a question. "Are you feeling well?"
"I"m fine," I a.s.sure her. "I was up a little too late last night, that"s all. A little too much to drink, most likely."
She nods, and I smile.
"Well, then. I"ll see what we might have," she says, and, cutting to the chase, it ends with a short article that appeared in the Newport Mercury early in November 1785, hardly more than two months after Abby Gladding"s death. It begins, "We hear a trange account from lat Thursday evening, the Night of the 3rd of November, of a body diinterred from its Grave and coffin. This most peculiar occurrence was undertaken at the behet of the father of the deceaed young woman therein buried, a circ.u.mtance making the affair even tranger till." What follows is a description of a ritual which will be familiar to anyone who has read of the 1892 Mercy Brown case from Exeter, or the much earlier exhumation of Nancy Young (summer of 1827), or other purported New England "vampires."
In September, Abby Gladding"s body was discovered in Newport Harbor by a local fisherman, and it was determined that she had drowned. The body was in an advanced state of decay, leading me to wonder if the date of the headstone is meant to be the date the body was found, not the date of her death. There were persistant rumors that the daughter of Solomon Gladding, a local merchant, had taken her own life. She is said to have been a "child of singular and morbid temperament," who had recently refused a marriage proposal by the eldest son of another Newport merchant, Ebenezer Burrill. There was also back-fence talk that Abby had practiced witchcraft in the woods bordering the town, and that she would play her violin (a gift from her mother) to summon "voracious wolves and other such daemons to do her bidding."
Very shortly after her death, her youngest sister, Susan, suddenly fell ill. This was in October, and the girl was dead before the end of the month. Her symptoms, like those of Mercy Brown"s stricken family members, can readily be identified as late-stage tuberculosis. What is peculiar here is that Abby doesn"t appear to have suffered any such wasting disease herself, and the speed with which Susan became ill and died is also atypical of consumption. Even as Susan fought for her life, Abby"s mother, Mary, fell ill, and it was in hope of saving his wife that Solomon Gladding agreed to the exhumation of his daughter"s body. The article in the Newport Mercury speculates that he"d learned of this ritual and folk remedy from a Jamaican slave woman.
At sunrise, with the aid of several other men, some apparently family members, the grave was opened, and all present were horrified to see "the body fresh as the day it was conigned to G.o.d," her cheeks "flufhed with colour and lufterous." The liver and heart were duly cut out, and both were discovered to contain clotted blood, which Solomon had been told would prove that Abby was rising from her grave each night to steal the blood of her mother and sister. The heart was burned in a fire kindled in the cemetery, the ashes mixed with water, and the mother drank the mixture. The body of Abby was turned facedown in her casket, and an iron stake was driven through her chest, to insure that the restless spirit would be unable to find its way out of the grave. Nonetheless, according to parish records from Trinity Church, Mary Gladding died before Christmas. Her father fell ill a few months later, and died in August of 1786.
And I find one more thing that I will put down here. Scribbled in sepia ink, in the left-hand margin of the newspaper page containing the account of the exhumation of Abby Gladding is the phrase Je-rouge, or "red eyes," which I"ve learned is a Haitian term denoting werewolfery and cannibalism. Below that word, in the same spidery hand, is written "As white as snow, as red as red, as green as briers, as black as coal." There is no date or signature accompanying these notations.
And now it is almost Friday night, and I sit alone on a wooden bench at Bowen"s Wharf, not too far from the kiosk advertising daily boat tours to view fat, doe-eyed seals sunning themselves on the rocky beaches ringing Narragansett Bay. I sit here and watch the sun going down, shivering because I left home this morning without my coat. I do not expect to see Abby Gladding, tonight or ever again. But I"ve come here, anyway, and I may come again tomorrow evening.
I will not include the 1785 disinterment in my thesis, no matter how many feathers it might earn for my cap. I mean never to speak of it again. What I have written here, I suspect I"ll destroy it later on. It has only been written for me, and for me alone. If Abby was trying to speak through me, to find a larger audience, she"ll have to find another mouthpiece. I watch a lobster boat heading out for the night. I light a cigarette, and eye the herring gulls wheeling above the marina.
Hydraguros The very first time I see silver, it"s five minutes past noon on a Monday and I"m crammed into a seat on the Bridge Line, racing over the slate-grey Delaware River. Philly is crouched at my back, and a one o"clock with the Czech and a couple of his meatheads is waiting for me on the Jersey side of the Ben Franklin. I"ve been popping since I woke up half an hour late, the lucky greens Eli scores from his chemist somewhere in Devil"s Pocket, so my head"s buzzing almost bright and cold as the sun pouring down through the late January clouds. My gums are tingling, and my f.u.c.king fingertips, too, and I"m sitting there, wishing I was just about anywhere else but on my way to Camden, payday at journey"s end or no payday at journey"s end. I"m trying to look at nothing that isn"t out there, on the opposite side of the window, because faces always make me jumpy when I"m using the stuff Eli a.s.sures me is mostly only methylphenidate with a little Phenotropil by way of his chemists" Russian connections. I"m in my seat, trying to concentrate on the shadow of the span and the Speedline on the water below, on the silhouettes of buildings to the south, on a G.o.dd.a.m.n flock of birds, anything out there to keep me focused, keep me awake. But then my ears pop, and there"s a second or two of dizziness before I smell ozone and ammonia and something with the carbon stink of burning sugar.
We"re almost across the bridge by then, and I tell myself not to look, not to dare f.u.c.king look, just mind my own business and watch the window, my sickly, pale reflection in the window, and the dingy winter scene the window"s holding at bay. But I look anyhow.
There"s a very pretty woman sitting across the aisle from me, her skin as dark as freshly ground coffee, her hair dreadlocked and pulled back away from her face. Her skin is dark, and her eyes are a brilliant, bottomless green. For a seemingly elastic moment, I am unable to look away from those eyes. They manage to be both merciful and fierce, like the painted eyes of Catholic saints rendered in plaster of Paris. And I"m thinking it"s no big, and I"ll be able to look back out the window; who gives a s.h.i.t what that smell might have been. It"s already starting to fade. But then the pretty woman turns her head to the left, towards the front of the car, and quicksilver trickles from her left nostril and spatters her jeans. If she felt it if she"s in any way aware of this strange excrescence she shows no sign that she felt it. She doesn"t wipe her nose, or look down at her pants. If anyone else saw what I saw, they"re busy pretending like they didn"t. I call it quicksilver, though I know that"s not what I"m seeing. Even this first time, I know it"s only something that looks like mercury, because I have no frame of reference to think of it any other way.
The woman turns back towards me, and she smiles. It"s a nervous, slightly embarra.s.sed sort of smile, and I suppose I must have been sitting there gawking at her. I want to apologize. Instead, I force myself to go back to the window, and curse that Irish c.u.n.t that"s been selling Eli f.u.c.k knows what. I curse myself for being such a lazy a.s.shole and popping whatever"s at hand when I have access to good clean junk. And then the train is across that filthy, poisoned river and rolling past Campbell Field and Pearl Street. My heart"s going a mile a minute, and I"m sweating like it"s August. I grip the handle of the shiny aluminum briefcase I"m supposed to hand over to the Czech, a.s.suming he has the cash, and do my best to push back everything but my trepidation of things I know I"m not imagining. You don"t go into a face-to-face with one of El Diamante"s b.a.s.t.a.r.ds with a shake on, not if you want to keep the red stuff on the inside where it f.u.c.king belongs.
I don"t look at the pretty black woman again.
The very first thing you learn about the Czech is that he"s not from the Czech Republic or the dear departed Czech Socialist Republic or, for that matter, Slovakia. He"s not even European. He"s just some Canuck motherf.u.c.ker who used to haunt Montreal, selling cloned phones and heroin and wh.o.r.es. A genuine Renaissance crook, the Czech. I have no idea where or when or why he picked up the nickname, but it stuck like s.h.i.t on the wall of a gorilla"s cage. The second thing you learn about the Czech is not to ask about the scars. If you"re lucky, you"ve learned both these things before you have the misfortune of making his acquaintance up close and personal.
Anyway, he has a car waiting for me when the train dumps me out at Broadway Station, but I make the driver wait while I pay too much for bottled water at Starbucks. The lucky greens have me in such a fizz I"m almost seeing double, and there are rare occasions when a little H20 seems to help bring me down again. I don"t actually expect this will be one of those times, but I"m still a bit weirded out by what I think I saw on the Speedline, and I"m a lot p.i.s.sed that the Czech"s dragged me all the way over to Jersey at this indecent hour on a Monday. So, let the driver wait for five while I buy a lukewarm bottle of Dasani that I know is just twelve ounces of Philly tap water with a fancy blue label slapped on it.
"Czech, he don"t like to be kept waiting," says the skinny Mexican kid behind the wheel when I climb into the backseat. I show him my middle finger, and he shrugs and pulls away from the curb. I set the briefcase on the seat beside me, just wanting to be free of the package and on my way back to Eli and our cozy dump of an apartment in Chinatown. As the jet-black Lincoln MKS turns off Broadway onto Mickle Boulevard, heading west, carrying me back towards the river, I think how I"m going to have a chat with Eli about finding a better pusher. My gums feel like I"ve been chewing foil, and there are wasps darting about behind my eyes. At least the wasps are keeping their stingers to themselves.
"Just how late are we?" I ask the driver.
"Ten minutes," he replies.
"Blame the train."
"You blame the train, Mister. I don"t talk to the Czech unless he talks to me, and he never talks to me."
"Lucky you," I say and take another swallow of Dasani. It tastes more like the polyethylene terephthalate bottle than water, and I try not to think about toxicity and esters of phthalic acid, endocrine disruption and antimony trioxide, because that just puts me right back on the Bridge Line watching a pretty woman"s silver nosebleed.
We stop at a red light, then turn left onto South Third Street, paralleling the waterfront, and I realize the drop"s going to be the warehouse on Spruce. I want to close my eyes, but all those lucky green wasps won"t let me. The sun is so bright it seems to be flashing off even the most nonreflective of surfaces. Vast seas of asphalt might as well be G.o.dd.a.m.n mirrors. I drum my fingers on the lid of the aluminum briefcase, wishing the driver had the radio on or a DVD playing, anything to distract me from the buzz in my skull and the noise the tires make against the pavement. Another three or four long minutes and we"re b.u.mping off the road into a parking lot that might have last been paved when Obama was in the White House. And the Mexican kid pulls up at the loading bay, and I open the door and step out into the cold, sunny day. The Lincoln has stirred up a shroud of red-grey dust, but all that sunlight doesn"t give a s.h.i.t. It shines straight on through the haze and almost lays me open, head to f.u.c.king toe. I cough a few times on my way from the car to the bald-headed gook in Ray-Bans waiting to usher me to my rendezvous with the Czech. However, the wasps do not take my cough as an opportunity to vacate my cranium, so maybe they"re here to stay. The gook pats me down and then double checks with a security wand. When he"s sure I"m not packing anything more menacing than my mobile, he leads me out of the flaying day and into merciful shadows and muted pools of halogen.
"You"re late," the Czech says, just in case I haven"t noticed, and he points at a clock on the wall. "You"re almost twelve minutes late."
I glance over my shoulder at the clock, because it seems rude not to look after he"s gone to the trouble to point. Actually, I"m almost eleven minutes late.
"You got some more important place to be, Czech?" I ask, deciding it"s as good a day as any to push my luck a few extra inches.
"Maybe I do at that, you sick h.o.m.o f.u.c.k. Maybe your a.s.s is sitting at the very bottom of my to-do list this fine day. So, how about you zip it and let"s get this over with."
I turn away from the clock and back to the fold-out card table where the Czech"s sitting in a fold-out chair. He"s smoking a Parliament and in front of him there"s a half-eaten corned beef sandwich cradled in white butcher"s paper. I try not to stare at the scars, but you might as well try to make your heart stop beating for a minute or two. Way I heard it, the stupid son of a b.i.t.c.h got drunk and went bear hunting in some Alaskan national park or another, only he tried to make do with a bottle of vodka and a .22 caliber pocket pistol instead of a rifle. No, that"s probably not the truth of it, but his face does look like something a grizzly"s been gnawing at.
"You got the goods?" he asks, and I have the impression I"m watching Quasimodo quoting old Jimmy Cagney gangster films. I hold up the briefcase and he nods and puffs his cigarette.
"But I am curious as h.e.l.l why you went and switched the drop date," I say, wondering if it"s really me talking this trash to the Czech, or if maybe the lucky greens have hijacked the speech centers of my brain and are determined to get me shot in the face. "I might have had plans, you know. And El Diamante usually sticks to the script."
"What El Diamante does, that ain"t none of your business, and that ain"t my business, neither. Now, didn"t I say zip it?" And then he jabs a thumb at a second metal folding chair, a few feet in front of the card table, and he tells me to give him the case and sit the f.u.c.k down. Which is what I do. Maybe the greens have decided to give me a break, after all. Or maybe they just want to draw this out as long as possible. The Czech dials the three-digit combination and opens the aluminum briefcase. He has a long look inside. Then he grunts and shuts it again. And that"s when I notice something shimmering on the toe of his left shoe. It looks a lot like a few drops of spilled mercury. This is the second time I see silver.
This is hours later, and I"m back in Philly, trying to forget all about the woman on the train and the Czech"s shoes and whatever might have been in the briefcase I delivered. The sun"s been down for hours. The city is dark and cold, and there"s supposed to be snow before the sun comes up again. I"m lying in the bed I share with Eli, just lying there on my right side watching him read. There are things I want to tell him, but I know full f.u.c.king well that I won"t. I won"t because some of those things might get him killed if a deal ever goes wrong somewhere down the line (and it"s only a matter of time) or if I should fall from grace with Her Majesty Madam Adrianne and all the powers that be and keep the axels upon which the world spins greased up and relatively friction free. And other things I will not tell him because maybe it was only the pills, or maybe it"s stress, or maybe I"m losing my G.o.dd.a.m.n mind, and if it"s the latter, I"d rather keep that morsel to myself as long as possible, pretty please and thank you.
Eli turns a page and shifts slightly, to better take advantage of the reading lamp on the little table beside the bed. I scan the spine of the hardback, the words printed on the dust jacket, like I don"t already know it by heart. Eli reads books, and I read their dust jackets. Catch me in just the right mood, I might read the flap copy.
"I thought you were asleep," Eli says without bothering to look at me.
"Maybe later, chica," I reply, and Eli nods the way he does when he"s far more interested in whatever he"s reading than in talking to me. So, I read the spine again, aloud this time, purposefully misp.r.o.nouncing the Korean author"s name. Which is enough to get Eli to glance my way. Eli"s eyes are emeralds, crossed with some less precious stone. Agate maybe. Eli"s eyes are emerald and agate, cut and polished to precision, flawed in ways that only make them more perfect.
"Go to sleep," he tells me, pretending to frown. "You look exhausted."
"Yeah, sure, but I got this f.u.c.king hard on like you wouldn"t believe."
"Last time I checked, you also had two good hands and a more than adequate knowledge of how they work."
"That"s cold," I say. "That is some cold s.h.i.t to say to someone who had to go spend the day in Jersey."
Eli snorts, and his emerald and agate eyes, which might pa.s.s for only hazel-green if you haven"t lived with them as long as I have lived with them, they drift back to the printed page.
"The lube warms up just fine," he says, "you hold it a minute or so first." He doesn"t laugh, but I do, and then I roll over to stare at the wall instead of watching Eli read. The wall is flat and dull, and sometimes it makes me sleepy. I"d take something, but after the lucky greens, it"s probably best if I forego the c.o.c.ktail of pot and prescription benzodiazepines I usually rely on to beat my insomnia into submission. I don"t m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, because, b.o.n.e.r from h.e.l.l or not, I"m not in the right frame of mind to give myself a hj. So, I lie and stare at the wall and listen to the soft sounds of Eli reading his biography of South Korean astronaut Yi So-Yeon, who I do recall, and without having to read the book, was the first Korean in s.p.a.ce. She might also have been the second Asian woman to slip the surly f.u.c.king bonds of Earth and dance the skies or what the h.e.l.l ever.
"Why don"t you take something if you can"t sleep," Eli says after maybe half an hour of me lying there.
"I don"t think so, chica. My brain"s still rocking and rolling from the breath mints you been buying off that mick c.o.c.ksucker you call a dealer. Me, I think he"s using drain cleaner again."
"No way," Eli says, and I can tell from the tone of his voice he"s only half interested, at best, in whether or not the mad chemist holed up in Devil"s Pocket is using Drano to cut his s.h.i.t. "Donncha"s merchandise is clean."
"Maybe Mr. Clean," I reply, and Eli smacks me lightly on the back of the head with his book. He tells me to jack off and go to sleep. I tell him to blow me. We spar with the age-old poetry of true love"s tin-eared wit. Then he goes back to reading, and I go back to staring at the bedroom wall.
Eli is the only guy I"ve ever been with more than a month, and here we are going on two years. I found him waiting tables in a noodle and sushi joint over on Race Street. Most of the waiters in the place were either drag queens or trannies, dressed up like geisha wh.o.r.es from some sort of post-apocalyptic Yakuza flick. He was wearing so much makeup, and I was so drunk on Sapporo Black Label and saki, I didn"t even realize he was every bit gai-ko as me. That first night, back at Eli"s old apartment not far from the noodle shop, we screwed liked G.o.dd.a.m.n bunnies on crank. I must have walked funny for a week.
I started eating in that place every night, and almost every one of those nights, we"d wind up in bed together, and that"s probably the happiest I"ve ever been or ever will be. Sure, the s.e.x was absolute supremo, standout state of the f.u.c.king art of f.u.c.king but it never would have been enough to keep things going after a few weeks. I don"t care how sweet the c.o.c.k, sooner or later, if that"s all there is interest wanes and I start to drift. I used to think maybe my libido had ADD or something, or I"d convinced myself that commitment meant I might miss out on something better. What matters, though, there was more, and four months later Eli packed up his s.h.i.t and moved in with me. He never asked what I do to pay the rent, and I"ve never felt compelled to volunteer that piece of intel.
"You"re still awake," Eli says, and I hear him toss his book onto the table beside the bed. I hear him reach for a pill bottle.
"Yeah, I"m still awake."