Death Will Have Your Eyes (14 page)

They came in
fast when they came, at four-something the following afternoon, in the tree-shrouded streets just above Tulane, two of them, one in front of me when I turned a corner, the other closing in behind.

No one said anything. I looked from one to the other, instinctively turning sideways. Somehow their concentration wasn't as focused as it should have been, and that didn't make a lot of sense. A little like Doc Holliday stopping off to bird-watch on his way to the O.K. Corral.

Catching an arc of intent that flashed between them, in what amounted to a single motion I looked at A, feinted towards B and came back around in an easy circle to strike at A, who was already moving in to help his partner. The force of my blow, riding on his own momentum, took him down, hard, on his back. And from there it was a simple thing to follow the line of force, feeding it into a body roll that slammed me up against B and dropped him with a loud crack of head against sidewalk.

Frankly, I had no idea that I still had that kind of movement in me.

Education is a wonderful thing.

I looked through their pockets and found the usual half-nothings: faceless keys and a tensor pick, an array of official identification. One wore a suit with Hong Kong's version of an English label and carried British travel papers. The other, in jeans and leather jacket, bore a Polish passport.

That seemed to be all the action. We waited. Finally Planchat stepped out of the cover of trees to join me.

That's life, I was thinking. All the things you wait for, so anticlimactic when they finally happen.

“A disappointing catch, old friend,” Planchat said.

Then he looked up—maybe intuition took his gaze there, maybe at that moment (I think he did) he somehow
knew
—at the rooftop of a boarded-up Victorian house nearby.

Silently a black-rimmed hole appeared in his forehead.

I dove for the shelter of the nearest parked car.

One eternity went by strutting.

Then another.

Birdsongs had just started up again when a body came over the roof's side, tumbled through the limbs of a huge pecan tree, and fell motionless to earth.

I waited.

Waited some more, then went over to the body. It had been taken down quite expertly. Garotted, most likely, with a silken cord. Most likely with the silken cord now tied in a bow about the man's genitals.

“Garbage,” a voice said beside and above me. “Garbage everywhere. Piled up, tottering, ready to fall. Great stinking bags of it, like this one.”

She gestured towards the body there at our feet as I stood.

“Now he can have the eternal hard-on he always wanted. Bastard'll just go on fucking the Void, sticking it in that last dark hole he'll ever sniff at, working away at it forever, while he rots and rots and never comes again.”

She smiled.

I remembered a story I'd read in some obscure literary magazine or another. A man is in his psychiatrist's office and the psychiatrist tells him that after exhaustive tests they've found out what's wrong with him. The man awaits this revelation. Well, basically you're crazy as bat shit, the psychiatrist tells him.

I knew her, of course. She was the woman in the vision I'd had in Cross, standing in front of the paintings.

And at our feet was the man with her then, the one whose biography, whose life, I'd acquired afterwards in bits and snatches.

“This really has nothing to do with you,” she said. “It was Planchat—Planchat altogether from the start of it. Something from a long time ago, probably now we'll never know what. Not that it could possibly matter.”

Her eyes and smile were dark pools where deadly, quiet things lived.

“We all had our borrowed lives. Those careful, makeshift shelters. Then”—she held out, momentarily, a trembling hand—“the web was shaken.”

Like a gate springing open, it dropped into my thoughts:
Michael
. The shipbuilder's son, the man who had turned himself into a wolf.
His inquiries had started all this.

“It was simple for him,” she said, nodding to the man at our feet, “to pull the others in. Inevitable that they'd be attracted—so much water rushing to a drain. Like frog legs. Irretrievably dead. But put them in the pot and they go on kicking.”

Her mad eyes nudged one last time at the man's body. Then it was as though the body were no longer there. Perhaps not even the memory of it.

“When Planchat felt the circles closing about him and went to ground, his pursuer turned his attentions to you. Thinking this would draw Planchat back into play. Never suspecting, not at first at any rate, that
you'd
already been called back out to pursue
him:
by fleeing, as it turned out. And certainly with no notion—none of you could have had any such intimation—that I was out here as well.”

A car came down the street, slowed almost to a stop alongside us, then hurried on. We started away, just another couple out for an afternoon walk beneath the gentle bower of uptown trees. Soon this place would look like an anthill.

I had been more correct than I knew: circles within circles within circles. Michael's high-minded program to complete his father's gratitude spiraling down to the tight curl of unwarranted killings, to flurries of heedless motion, to young Adrian's senseless death on that service road. Metal shavings falling to the floor.

We walked down Freret and across Broadway to St. Charles, to a streetcar stop on neutral ground by the K&B. Tulane and Loyola students in shorts, T-shirts, chinos, polo shirts. Catholic schoolgirls, Amazon-like, pushing the envelope of womanhood in plaid skirts and unpressed white shirts. There my companion looked off into trees bearded with Spanish moss.

“When the hood's taken off,” she said, “the hawk has little choice. He's a kind of soft machine, exists only to breed and to kill. And killing is what he does best. Killing's the very reason he lives.”

She looked back at me.

“It's been good to see that none of us has lost the fine edge they gave us. You understand that I had to protect you, of course. Because you're my kind. My
only
kind now, I guess.”

So she was indeed one of us, with Planchat and myself. Or just myself. The program's rumored third survivor.

“Wait,” I said as she stood to leave. The streetcar lumbered camel-like towards us, bucking and swaying. With a shock, with embarrassment, I realized that I still expected, still wanted, it all to
mean
something.

“Johnsson,” I said. “Johnsson must have known.”

“Yes. Yes, he must have. At some level. If not at first, then surely later on.”

It rained all that night in New Orleans. I sat on the balcony of a new hotel in the Quarter picking at scraps of food on my tray, picking at scraps of my life in memory.

Rain obscured the rest of the world and washed over me, and when dawn finally came and I left, it was with a sense that, should I look back, I'd see, abandoned in that chair, my old selves: locust husks clinging to the trees of my childhood.

Six days later
I was sitting across the table from Gabrielle in a small restaurant in Washington, D.C. From the outside it looked like a fast-lube shop with an awning tacked on; inside, it was replete with healthy plants, waiters in waistcoats and fiftyish men wearing Rolexes in the company of twentyish women wearing red dresses. It was replete also with an appetizer of quail you'd kill for, and with fine, understated continental cuisine, the impression of which had been but slightly diminished by the maître d's response to our wine order: “You bet.”

Gabrielle was dissecting a spinach salad with infinite care as I attempted to get down two swallows of coffee before having my cup refilled. Blaise sat by her, knife spreading venison pâté onto bread as though there would never in the history of this earth be any more. I'm not certain, but I think his eyes rolled back each time he took a bite. Then he would sip at his wine, a Brazilian cabernet, and his eyes would roll back again.

Our conversation had been resolutely superficial, as it often is when huge issues loom, all of us tiptoeing about the rims of various abysses. We spoke of wine and food, music, Cendrars, Pavese. Of weather and the way sudden winds come rolling in over New Mexican plains as doors of colored lightning begin opening in the sky.

Over soup, sorbet and salmon, I filled Gabrielle in on what had happened. Events of these past weeks, my personal history insofar as I knew it, the reasons I'd asked her to leave—much as I've written it here. Letting her graft the facts to whatever frame, whatever understanding, she had already. I told her that when first Planchat, and then his pursuer, died, I had died along with them, locked irrevocably to each by those rushes of
otherness
I'd experienced in the past in times of crisis. That, nailed in place, unable even to think or react, I had felt their lives, felt my own, contract to a single gray point, a point that, pulsing, grew ever smaller, smaller, until it was gone—until there was nothing.

Nothing.

Then I looked into her eyes.

“So which has come back to me?” she asked at length. “Creator or killer?”

“Will it frighten you to hear: both?”

“It would frighten me to hear anything else.”

To discover what we know, we have only to decide what we will not see. My memories might well be false, but they would, after all, do as well as any others. Every day we reconstruct ourselves out of the salvage of our yesterdays. And a man who has been, even briefly, other men, one who has gone with these men into the shadow—surely he has brought something valuable back from there, surely he must have things to tell us.

I would return to my studio. There I would live for weeks at a time on coffee and hot-plate dinners of stew and soup, and I would produce a stream of sketches, paintings, impressions, life studies, sculptures much like the one long abandoned. Many of these works, these pieces, would be dreamlike. Others would bear into this crowded, wind-torn world an astonishing calm: still places.

Trying to get it right.

Later, all this took on a more reasonable pace, and I emerged from the studio in the evening to music, the smell of a cassoulet I'd put in the oven hours ago, and sometimes friends. And when friends left, when cassoulet, salad and bread were finished, there was always a warm fall night filled with stars and the smell and sounds of life, always a last glass of wine or a final cup of tea, always the moon up there grinning as though it knew the joke. And Gabrielle, always.

James Sallis is a poet, critic, essayist, translator, musicologist, and novelist, best known for his Lew Griffin mysteries (“the bug books”), his landmark biography of Chester Himes, and
Drive,
which became the acclaimed Nic Refn film. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he plays regularly with his band Three-Legged Dog.

There were of course early miscarriages, but the first story I wrote that felt like a story, walked like a story, and quacked like a story was “Kazoo.” It was published in
New Worlds.
Two others quickly followed, one for
F&SF,
and one for Damon Knight's
Orbit,
inculcating in me the absurd and sweetly naive notion that I could make a living writing. From such moments are lives ruined.

I was twenty-one and impoverished—excellent training for a writer, by the way—so I probably took my wife out for a fine meal at Howard Johnson's.

As though in a pitch black room where I am trying to find the black door, stumbling over black furniture all the while. And I swear that furniture keeps moving about.

Mostly it's all on computer nowadays, though each page, each line, gets questioned, revised, rewritten, buffed, trimmed and filleted hundreds of times.

Here's what writing well feels like to me. I begin a story or a novel and it's as though I almost see movement over in the corner of the room. But when I look that way, there's nothing. As I write on into the story I start to hear breathing over there; there's more and more furtive movement; and as I go on, the breathing gets louder, defined. That thing in the corner begins to take on shape.…

We could talk for quite a while about that word “mistake,” implying as it does that, like characters in poorly written fiction, we have simplistic, monosyllabic motives, i.e., that we know what the hell we're doing and are in control of it.

Commercially, not sticking to one genre might be construed a mistake. Who is this guy? Poet? PI novelist? Avant-garde weirdo? Fish? Fowl?

The sole “mistake” to which I'd admit without reserve: Not writing enough. Though I'm pretty sure laziness accounts for that more than does misdirection.

Molly Bloom. I wouldn't have to say a word, wouldn't even have to bring along my satchel of punctuation.

There's the very specific, almost physical pleasure of feeling a story or novel slip into form, become of a piece, a whole. A kind of click, that stops your breath for a moment. There's the moment—with
Others
this was at the very start, before I'd written a word, when Jenny's voice came to me as I walked down 16th Street in Phoenix—when you realize that you've fallen through into another mind, come to inhabit another world. And in many cases there's the inability to read the final pages—of
Salt River,
of
The Killer Is Dying,
of
Others—
without crying, when, with those few touchstone pages, the whole of the experience floods back.

Truth to tell, I don't buy a lot. Because of my many years as reviewer for the
Washington Post,
Los Angeles Times,
Boston Globe,
and others, I still receive dozens of books weekly from publishers. Others are sent me directly by editors and by the writers themselves. And Gordon at
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
for whom I write a quarterly books column, keeps me out on the dance floor with recent releases there. When I do purchase, laziness (see above) slouches me towards the Bethlehem of Amazon.

We have specific tastes; we look to literature to provide different things. A review is a sort of thinking aloud about fiction, a conversation about it. I would ask only that the reviewer is indeed thinking, and that he or she is in fact in a conversation—with the reader, and with the heritage of the reviewed piece—rather than talking to him- or herself.

“Write what you know.” Hey, guys, this all about imagination!

Actually it began as a novel; the short story version that appeared in
Phoenix Noir
was carved at Patrick's request from the novel while it was in revision.
The Long-Legged Fly
began as a short story but then wouldn't shut up. And though I recognized
Drive
to be a novel from inception, the short story version was a test drive to see how roadworthy it might be. All the others, I believe, arrived with book covers in hand.

The original version of this interview appeared on LitReactor, available from litreactor.com and Keith Rawson.