The Best of Lucius Shepard (71 page)

“I
know,” Alicia says. “I feel that way, too. That’s why I come here. To try and
figure out what’s missing.. .where I am with all this.”

She
looks at him inquiringly, and Bobby, unburdened now, finds he has nothing worth
saying. But he wants to say something, because he wants her to talk to him, and
though he’s not sure why he wants this or what more he might want, he’s so
confused by the things he’s confessed and also by the ordinary confusions that
attend every consequential exchange between men and women.... Though he’s not
sure of anything, he wants whatever is happening to move forward.

“Are
you all right?” she asks.

“Oh,
yeah. Sure. This isn’t terminal fucked-uppedness. ‘Least I don’t think it is.”

She
appears to be reassessing him. “Why do you put yourself through it?”

“The
job? Because I’m qualified. I worked for FEMA the last coupla summers.”

Two
of the yuppie couples have huddled around the jukebox, and their first
selection, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” begins its tense, grinding push. Pineo
dances on his barstool, his torso twisting back and forth, fists tight against
his chest, a parody—Bobby knows—that’s aimed at the couples, meant as an
insult. Brooding over his bourbon, Mazurek is a graying, thick-bodied troll
turned to stone.

“I’m
taking my masters in philosophy,” Bobby says. “It’s finally beginning to seem
relevant.”

He
intends this as humor, but Alicia doesn’t react to it as such. Her eyes are
brimming. She swivels on her stool, knee pressing against his hip, and puts a
hand on his wrist.

“I’m
afraid,” she says. “You think that’s all this is? Just fear. Just an inability
to cope.”

He’s
not certain he understands her, but he says, “Maybe that’s all.” It feels so
natural when she loops her arms about him and buries her face in the crook of
his neck, he doesn’t think anything of it. His hand goes to her waist. He wants
to turn toward her, to deepen the embrace, but is afraid that will alarm her,
and as they cling together, he becomes insecure with the contact, unclear as to
what he should do with it. Her pulse hits against his palm, her breath warms
his skin. The articulation of her ribs, the soft swell of a hip, the presence
of a breast an inch above the tip of his thumb, all her heated specificity both
daunts and tempts him. Doubt concerning their mental well-being creeps in. Is
this an instance of healing or a freak scene? Are they two very different
people who have connected on a level new to both of them, or are they emotional
burnouts who aren’t even talking about the same subject and have misapprehended
mild sexual attraction for a moment of truth? Just how much difference is there
between those conditions? She pulls him closer. Her legs are still crossed, and
her right knee slides into his lap, her shoeless foot pushing against his
waist. She whispers something, words he can’t make out. An assurance, maybe.
Her lips brush his cheek, then she pulls back and offers a smile he takes for
an expression of regret.

“I
don’t get it,” she says. “I have this feeling....” She shakes her head as if
rejecting an errant notion.

“What?”

She
holds a hand up beside her face as she speaks and waggles it, a blitheness of
gesture that her expression does not reflect. “I shouldn’t be saying this to
someone I met in a bar, and I don’t mean it the way you might think. But
it’s...I have a feeling you can help me. Do something for me.”

“Talking
helps.”

“Maybe.
I don’t know. That doesn’t seem right.” Thoughtful, she stirs her drink; then a
sidelong glance. “There must be something some philosopher said that’s
pertinent to the moment.”

“Predisposition
fathers all logics, even those disposed to deny it.”

“Who
said that?”

“I
did...in a paper I wrote on Gorgias. The father of sophistry. He claimed that
nothing can be known, and if anything could be known, it wasn’t worth knowing.”

“Well,”
says Alicia, “I guess that explains everything.”

“I
don’t know about that. I only got a B on the paper.”

One
of the couples begins to dance, the man, who is still wearing his overcoat,
flapping his elbows, making slow-motion swoops, while the woman stands rooted,
her hips undulating in a fishlike rhythm. Pineo’s parody was more graceful.
Watching them, Bobby imagines the bar a cave, the other patrons with matted
hair, dressed in skins. Headlights slice across the window with the suddenness
of a meteor flashing past in the primitive night. The song ends, the couple’s
friends applaud them as they head for the group table. But when the opening
riff of the Hendrix version of “All Along The Watchtower” blasts from the
speakers, they start dancing again and the other couples join them, drinks in
hand. The women toss their hair and shake their breasts; the men hump the air.
A clumsy tribe on drugs.

The
bar environment no longer works for Bobby. Too much unrelieved confusion. He
hunches his shoulders against the noise, the happy jabber, and has a momentary
conviction that this is not his true reaction, that a little scrap of black
negativity perched between his shoulderblades, its claws buried in his spine,
has folded its gargoyle wings, and he has reacted to the movement like a
puppet. As he stands Alicia reaches out and squeezes his hand. “See you
tomorrow?”

“No
doubt,” he says, wondering if he will—he believes she’ll go home and chastise
herself for permitting this partial intimacy, this unprophylactic intrusion
into her stainless career-driven life. She’ll stop coming to the bar and seek
redemption in a night school business course designed to flesh out her resume.
One lonely Sunday afternoon a few weeks hence, he’ll provide the animating
fantasy for a battery-powered orgasm.

He
digs in his wallet for a five, a tip for Roman, and catches Pineo looking at
him with unalloyed hostility. The kind of look your great enemy might send your
way right before pumping a couple of shells into his shotgun. Pineo lets his
double-barreled stare linger a few beats, then turns away to a deep
consideration of his beer glass, his neck turtled, his head down. It appears
that he and Mazurek have been overwhelmed by identical enchantments.

*
* * *

Bobby wakes up a few minutes
before he’s due at work. He calls the job, warns them he’ll be late, then lies
back and contemplates the large orange-and-brown water stain that has
transformed the ceiling into a terrain map. This thing with Alicia...it’s sick,
he thinks. They’re not going to fuck—that much is clear. And not just because
she said so. He can’t see himself going to her place, furnishings courtesy of
The Sharper Image and Pottery Barn, nor can he picture her in this dump, and
neither of them has displayed the urge for immediacy that would send them to a
hotel. It’s ridiculous, unwieldy. They’re screwing around is all. Mind-fucking
on some perverted soul level. She’s sad because she’s drinking to be sad
because she’s afraid that what she does not feel is actually a feeling. Typical
post-modern Manhattan bullshit. Grief as a form of self-involvement. And now
he’s part of that. What he’s doing with her may be even more perverse, but he
has no desire to scrutinize his motives—that would only amplify the perversity.
Better simply to let it play out and be done. These are strange days in the
city. Men and women seeking intricate solace for intricate guilt. Guilt over
the fact that they do not embody the magnificent sadness of politicians and the
brooding sympathy of anchorpersons, that their grief is a flawed posture,
streaked with the banal, with thoughts of sex and football, cable bills and job
security. He still has things he needs, for whatever reason, to tell her.
Tonight he’ll confide in her, and she will do what she must. Their mutual
despondency, a wrap in four acts.

He
stays forever in the shower; he’s in no hurry to get to the pit, and he
considers not going in at all. But duty, habit, and doggedness exert a stronger
pull than his hatred and fear of the place—though it’s not truly hatred and
fear he feels, but a syncretic fusion of the two, an alchemical product for
which a good brand name has not been coined. Before leaving, he inspects the
contents of the top drawer in his dresser. The relics are the thing he most
needs to explain to her. Whatever else he has determined them to be, he
supposes that they are, to a degree, souvenirs, and thus a cause for shame, a
morbid symptom. But when he looks at them he thinks there must be a purpose to
the collection he has not yet divined, one that explaining it all to Alicia may
illuminate. He selects the half-shoe. It’s the only choice, really. The only
object potent enough to convey the feelings he has about it. He stuffs it into
his jacket pocket and goes out into the living room, where his roommate is
watching The Cartoon Network, his head visible above the back of the couch.

“Slept
late, huh?” says the roommate.

“Little
bit,” Bobby says, riveted by the bright colors and goofy voices, wishing he
could stay and discover how Scooby Doo and Jackie manage to outwit the swamp
beast. “See ya later.”

Shortly
before his shift ends, he experiences a bout of paranoia, during which he
believes that if he glances up he’ll find the pit walls risen to skyscraper
height and all he’ll be able to see of the sky is a tiny circle of glowing
clouds. Even afterward, walking with Mazurek and Pineo through the chilly,
smoking streets, distant car horns sounding in rhythm like an avant-garde brass
section, he half-persuades himself that it could have happened. The pit might
have grown deeper, he might have dwindled. Earlier that evening they began to
dig beneath a freshly excavated layer of cement rubble, and he knows his
paranoia and the subsequent desire to retreat into irrationality are informed
by what they unearthed. But while there is a comprehensible reason for his
fear, this does not rule out other possibilities. Unbelievable things can
happen of an instant. They all recognize that now.

The
three men are silent as they head toward the Blue Lady. It’s as if their
nightly ventures to the bar no longer serve as a release and have become an
extension of the job, prone to its stresses. Pineo goes with hands thrust into
his pockets, eyes angled away from the others, and Mazurek looks straight
ahead, swinging his thermos, resembling a Trotskyite hero, a noble worker of
Factory 39- Bobby walks between them. Their solidity makes him feel unstable,
as if pulled at by large opposing magnets—he wants to dart ahead or drop back,
but is dragged along by their attraction. He ditches them just inside the
entrance and joins Alicia at the end of the bar. Her twenty-five watt smile
switches on, and he thinks that though she must wear brighter, toothier smiles
for coworkers and relatives, this particular smile measures the true fraction
of her joy, all that is left after years of career management and bad love.

To
test this theory he asks if she’s got a boyfriend, and she says, “Jesus! A
boyfriend. That’s so quaint. You might as well ask if I have a beau.”

“You
got a beau?”

“I
have a history of beaus,” she says. “But no current need for one, thank you.”

“Your
eye’s on the prize, huh?”

“It’s
not just that. Though right now, it is that. I’m”—a sardonic laugh—”I’m
ascending the corporate ladder. Trying to, anyway.”

She
fades on him, gone to a gloomy distance beyond the bar, where the TV chatters
ceaselessly of plague and misery and enduring freedom. “I wanted to have
children,” she says at last. “I can’t stop thinking about it these days. Maybe
all this sadness has a biological effect. You know. Repopulate the species.”

“You’ve
got time to have children,” he says. “The career stuff may lighten up.”

“Not
with the men I get involved with...not a chance! I wouldn’t let any of them
take care of my plants.”

“So
you got a few war stories, do you?”

She
puts up a hand, palm outward, as to if to hold a door closed. “You can’t
imagine!”

“I’ve
got a few myself.”

“You’re
a guy,” she says. “What would you know?”

Telling
him her stories, she’s sarcastic, self-effacing, almost vivacious, as if by
sharing these incidents of male duplicity, laughing at her own naïveté, she is
proving an unassailable store of good cheer and resilience. But when she tells
of a man who pursued her for an entire year, sending candy and flowers, cards,
until finally she decided that he must really love her and spent the night with
him, a good night after which he chose to ignore her completely.. .when she
tells him this, Bobby sees past her blithe veneer into a place of abject
bewilderment. He wonders how she’d look without the make-up. Softer, probably.
The make-up is a painting of attitude that she daily recreates. A mask of
prettified defeat and coldness to hide her fundamental confusion. Nothing has
ever been as she hoped it would be—yet while she has forsworn hope, she has not
banished it, and thus she is confused. He’s simplifying her, he realizes.
Desultory upbringing in some Midwestern oasis—he hears a flattened A redolent
of Detroit or Chicago. Second-rate education leading to a second-rate career.
The wreckage of mornings after. This much is plain. But the truth underlying
her stories, the light she bore into the world, how it has transmuted her
experience...that remains hidden. There’s no point in going deeper, though, and
probably no time.