Gypsies

  Strange thing to do, for someone who wasn’t affected.

  But “divorce” wasn’t the only unmentionable word around Michael’s house. Deeper and more disturbing was this business of the Gray Man.

  Michael thought of him as the Gray Man. He had come up with the description when he was six, back when the Gray Man started to appear in his dreams. Gray because of the slate-gray clothes he always wore; gray, too, because a kind of grayness seemed to radiate from him, like an aura, a gray aura. Even his skin was chalky and pale. Michael understood very soon that talking about these dreams disturbed his mother, that any other nightmare might elicit a hug or permission to sleep with the light on, but that the Gray Man would only invoke these frightened looks and frightened denials. No, there’s no such thing. And stop asking me.

  But it was a lie.

  He did exist. Out here in the world, out in the real world, a real Gray Man.

  Michael had seen him for the first time when he was ten years old. They were driving cross-country and they had stopped at a gas station along the highway somewhere out in Alberta. A hot day, car windows down, nothing but blank space and blue horizon and this shanty filling station, some old guy pumping gas, and in the shade of the plankboard souvenir store, obscure amidst all this clutter and dust: the Gray Man. The Gray Man peered out from under a gray slouch hat with a fixed, attentive look Michael remembered, too vividly, from his dreams.

  Terrified, Michael looked to his mother, but his mother had seen the Gray Man at the same time and she was terrified, too. He could tell by the way she was breathing, tight little gulps of air. Dad was paying the pump jockey, attention focused on his credit card as it ratcheted through the stamper in the old man’s hand, worlds away. Michael opened his mouth to speak but his mother laid a warning hand on his arm. Like a message: Your father won’t understand. And it was true. He knew it without thinking about it. This was something he shared with his mother, and only with his mother. This fear. This mystery.

  The Gray Man didn’t move. He just watched. His face was calm. His eyes radiated a profound and scary patience. He watched as Michael’s father started the car, watched as they accelerated down the highway. I’ll wait, the eyes promised. I’ll be back. And Michael returned the stare, kneeling on the rear seat, until the Gray Man and the gas station both had vanished in the sun haze.

  The horizon made him feel safe again. The Gray Man lost in an ocean of space: it was like waking up.

  He knew better than to ask about it. What bothered him most was seeing his mother so scared. Her fear persisted all that day; she was not reassured by distance. And so he was carefully silent. He didn’t want to make things worse. “You’re awfully quiet today, kiddo,” his father said. “Sure you’re feeling all right?”

  “Yes.”

  No.

  He was confused. How did he feel? Frightened, obviously.

  But there was something else: he recalled it all these years later, here in the power company meadow. He felt it again.

  Curiosity? But that was too mild a word. More like—

  “Fascination.”

  The word hovered in the cool September air like some dark bird.

  Startled, Michael turned.

  Briefly, the world seemed to go in and out of focus.

  He thought, I should have been safe here. This was home turf, his own territory. It was certainly not a place for the Gray Man, who was a lurker, an alley person, a shadow person. But here was the Gray Man only yards away, slouch hat pulled down against the sunlight, the same man Michael had seen at the gas station in Alberta five years ago, not appreciably older but maybe—it was a sour joke—maybe a little grayer.

  Michael took a shocked step backward and felt the fence press into his spine.

  The Gray Man spoke. “You don’t have to be afraid.” His voice was rough, old, but deep and calming. He smiled, and the smile made his angular face seem less scary. His eyes, small in their battlements of brow and cheekbone, remained fixed. A thin line of scar tissue ran from brow to ear and up into the shadow of the hat. “I only want to talk.”

  Michael suppressed an urge to run. With animals, they said, you should never show your fear. Did the same rule apply to nightmares?

  “Going home?” the Gray Man asked. “Home to your mother?”

  Michael hesitated.

  “Your mother,” the Gray Man said, “doesn’t talk much, does she?”

  Michael reached out and wrapped his fingers in the links of the fence, steadying himself. He felt weak, bewildered. His legs felt tremulous and distant.

  The Gray Man stood beside him. The Gray Man was tall and calm. The Gray Man put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Walk with me,” the Gray Man said.

  Michael’s attention was tied up now in the Gray Man’s voice, the sweep and cadence of it; he wasn’t conscious of the route they were following, the places they passed. By the time he thought to look around they had left the power company meadow far behind.

  “You feel different,” the Gray Man said. “You’re not like other people.” His hand on Michael’s shoulder was firm, fatherly.

  The words brought back a flicker of fear. “Because of you,” Michael said accusingly. “You—”

  “Not because of me. But we can start there. What is it you call me?”

  “The Gray Man.” It was silly. It was a childish thing to say out loud in the cool September air. But the Gray Man’s laugh was indulgent, amused.

  “I have a name. Well, I have lots of names. Sometimes—” His voice lowered a notch. “Sometimes I’m called Walker.”

  “ Walker,” Michael repeated.

  “ Walker. Tracker. Finder. Keeper.”

  Like a song, Michael thought absently.

  “What matters is that I know things about you. The things your mother won’t talk about.”

  Michael asked in spite of himself, “What things?”

  “Oh, all kinds of things. How lonely you feel. How different you feel. How you wake up sometimes… you wake up sometimes in the night, and you’ve been dreaming, and you’re afraid because it would be so easy to wake up inside a dream. As if dreams were real, a place you could go, maybe a place you visited once.”

  And Michael nodded, strangely unsurprised that the Gray Man knew this about him. It was as if he had passed beyond fear and surprise into an altogether stranger realm. Sleepwalk territory, Michael thought.

  They walked past darkened houses and brittle, silent trees. There was no wind. He didn’t recognize the neighborhood; he wondered fleetingly how far they had come. Nowhere near home, anyway. There was no neighborhood like this near home.

  “We don’t go to the obvious places,” the Gray Man said, and Michael felt included in that we: a brotherhood, a special few. “We don’t walk where other people walk. You know that already. Deep inside yourself… you know that.”

  He had never spoken about it. Seldom even thought about it.

  But yes, it was true.

  “You could walk out of the world if you wanted to.” The Gray Man stopped and bent at the waist and looked into Michael’s eyes. “The world has angles other people don’t see. Corners and doors and directions. You could step sideways and never be seen again. Like this.”

  And the Gray Man moved in a direction Michael could only just perceive. Not away, exactly, but somehow… beyond.

  And Michael took a tentative step after. “This,” the Gray Man said, smiling now. “This. This.”

  A step and another step.

  Michael felt an electricity flowing in him, a tingling sense of power. He was dizzy with it. Angles, he thought. Angles and corners and doors. A door in the air.

  He could see the place the Gray Man was standing now, a cobbled hilly street, a horizon of hard blue sky and old industrial smokestacks, a faint smell of fish and salt in the air. He could not hear the Gray Man’s voice but saw him beckoning, a subtle but unmistakable motion of his pale hand. This way. This way. Only a step, Michael thought. This quiet m
iracle. It was only a step away …

  “Michael!”

  The sound came from far away. But his attention wavered.

  “Michael!”

  Closer now. Reluctantly, with a sense of opportunities lost, faltering, he turned away from the Gray Man, the cobbled street, the cold blue sky.

  The sky he faced now was dark. A few stars blinked above the blue nimbus in the west. He did recognize this neighborhood: old houses and a slatboard grocery store on the corner, a mile or more from home and school.

  His mother’s Civic was at the curb. The door opened and she was framed in it, breathless and frightened, beckoning him in. It was like the gesture the Gray Man had made. He wondered how much she had seen.

  But he turned back to look for the Gray Man and the Gray Man was gone … no blue sky, no cobbled street, only a tattered hedge, this cracked slab of sidewalk.

  Strange, he thought. Strange. He was so close.

  His mother tugged him into the car. She was trembling but not angry. Shaking his head, still dazed, he buckled the shoulder strap around himself in an automatic motion as she gunned the car away from the curb.

  “We’re leaving,” she said between her teeth. “We’re leaving tonight.” “Leaving?”

  “We’re going to California.”

  3

  Karen stopped at the house long enough to pack a couple of cases, drove north to the airport, and left the car in the garage. God knows when she’d be back to claim it. But, technically, the little Civic belonged to Gavin, anyway. Let him worry about it.

  She managed to buy two one-way tickets on a redeye flight to Los Angeles, departing a couple of hours before dawn. They waited the night out in the gate lounge, Michael stretched out over a bench. He looked dazed and sleepy against the comfortless vinyl. Karen hugged herself, watching him. The air conditioning was relentless.

  After midnight she remembered the letter in her purse, the one she had written to Laura. She stood up, laid out her coat over her sleeping son, and went to the rest room in the lounge. Her face in the mirror was haggard and thin, cheekbones projecting under pale skin. It was the face of some stranger, some fugitive.

  She dictated her letter over the phone to a telex agency. The telegram might make it across the continent before they did.

  She had to wake Michael when it was time to board the plane. His eyes were heavy; he leaned instinctively against her. Long time since he had done that.

  She did not want to think of how far she had driven to find him, or of how lost he had looked, standing on that broken sidewalk with one foot out of the world—or of the shadow she had seen beyond him, tall and patiently smiling.

  4

  Michael slept through the long plane trip.

  He woke once a little after dawn. His mother was asleep; most of the plane was asleep. A sleepy-looking stewardess moved up the aisle, smiled absently at him, moved on. The drone of the aircraft filled his head.

  He looked down through the window and saw the desert. He guessed it was the desert. It was swept with morning light, stark with shadows, a complex undulating wilderness. It was pathless, strange and empty, another world. Canyons and arroyos; arid Triassic seabed. Full of hidden angles, Michael thought, curious corners.

  You could walk out of the world if you wanted to. And it was true.

  Angles, Michael thought. Angles and corners and doors.

  Chapter Three

  1

  Later, when Karen explained why she had come, her sister Laura said, “I can take you to a place. A safe place. It’s where I live.”

  And Karen turned to face the window of the hotel room. A crescent of beach, tousled palm trees, the murmur of the traffic. “You mean,” she said, “not here.”

  “Not here. No. But not far away.”

  Coming into California was like walking into a memory.

  She had spent a week here in 1969. It was a bad time; she had argued with her sister; they had not parted amicably. Times change, Karen reminded herself. But the streets had not, the hotel in Santa Monica had not, not in any significant way. Michael sat dazed beside her in a miasma of vinyl and stale cigar smoke as the cab barreled down these broad, gray freeways from the airport. Involuntarily, she recalled odd bits of knowledge she had picked up over the course of a lifelong magazine addiction. Fact: palm trees are not native to Southern California. Fact: without irrigation, these endless stucco housing tracts would be as dry as the city of Beirut. But most of all she was struck by the quality of the sunlight, its angularity, a kind of light you never saw back East. It was not a brighter light but whiter, opalescent; it made hard shadows that faded, in the distance, to a wash of gray.

  And of course the ocean. She remembered the ocean, the reach of it, how it filled the horizon. She stepped out of the taxi into this strange sunlight and marveled a moment at the distance she had come.

  They were alone in the hotel for a few days. Michael didn’t talk much. He seemed to understand why they had come, the urgency of the trip, and Karen figured he was disoriented by it: certainly she was. He asked one morning why Aunt Laura hadn’t met them and Karen explained about the post office box—“She won’t have picked up her mail yet.” And so they waited in the room, ordered their meals from room service, left a message at the desk when, one afternoon, they went out to walk along the beach. Karen guessed she had become very Canadian in the years she had spent in Toronto, because the people she saw along the littered beach seemed very strange to her. A man wearing roller skates and a striped tank top bowled her off the sidewalk and, as she sat bewildered in the sand, looked over his shoulder and said something abusive. The words, thank goodness, did not register.

  I’m a stranger here, she thought. I don’t belong here. No future in this place.

  She was grateful Michael hadn’t seen. He was at a stall buying hot dogs. They ate silently, staring out at the ocean. Michael had always been quiet, Karen thought, but this new silence was disturbing. He seemed to be bracing himself for the next inevitable disaster. She sympathized with this intuition that their troubles might not have ended: it was her intuition, too.

  And then they walked back to the hotel, and found Laura was waiting in the lobby.

  Karen saw her first. She had that privilege, for a moment, of seeing without being seen. She found herself wanting to prolong it, to avoid announcing herself. Looking at her sister Karen felt a strange sensation of double vision, of time turning back on itself.

  Laura was older, of course. But the two decades since 1969 had been kind to her. She was lightly tanned, very California, her hair cut boyishly short. Her figure was good. She was wearing a white sundress, a gaudy headband tied at the back, and cheerful bracelets at her wrists. As she turned, the bracelets chimed.

  Their eyes met, and Karen thought for a fleeting moment: I could have been like that. She looks like me, Karen thought, but airier, lighter. Karen had always thought of herself as solid, earthbound; her sister looked as delicate as the wind.

  She wondered, Is this envy? Am I jealous?

  “Aunt Laura,” Michael said, seeing the recognition that leaped like a spark between the women.

  Laura came across the tiled lobby with a mad grin and hugged them both.

  They had lunch in the hotel coffee shop. Laura devoured a massive salad. “It’s the smog,” she said. “I’m not used to it. It does weird things to my appetite.”

  Michael looked at her oddly. “I thought you lived here.”

  Laura exchanged glances with Karen. “Not here,” Laura said. “Not exactly.”

  Karen left Michael in the hotel room to pack— and to catch the end of a Dodgers game on TV—while she and Laura took a brief stroll down the boulevard.

  “I don’t know,” she said. Everything seemed strange and sudden now, the appearance of her sister, these old connections and older barriers. She felt a kind of panic, the urge to back off a step, to reconsider. “I’m grateful for the invitation. And it’s what we came here for. Of course. To see you ?
?? to visit. But I’m concerned about Michael.”

  Laura said, “He doesn’t know?”

  Karen thought, We always did this, didn’t we? Talked in these ellipses. We do it still. “There was never any need for him to know.”

  They found a bench overlooking the tarry beach. Offshore, against the white glare of the horizon, a tanker moved toward port.

  “I’m not like you,” Karen said. “I’m even less like Tim. I never wanted it—to be able to do what we do. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t ever want it.”

  “None of us asked for it. What are you saying, that Michael doesn’t know anything?”

  “Why? Why force it on him? If he can live without knowing, why make him conscious of it?”

  “Because it’s in him,” Laura said calmly. “It’s part of him. You must feel it.”

  Maybe she could. Maybe she had felt it from the first, since his birth, before his birth: that he was different in the way she was different, that the frightening ability to walk between worlds was there in him— enclosed, like the bud of a flower, but real and potent.

  But it was not something she wanted to consider. She said, “I worked hard, you know, to give him a normal life. Maybe you don’t know what that means. I guess it never mattered to you. But a normal life… it was the best thing I could give him. Do you understand that? I don’t want to throw it away.”

  Laura put her hand on Karen’s arm. The gesture was calming, and it seemed for a moment as if she and not Karen were the older sister. “Don’t blame yourself. He forced the issue. Not Michael but—what do you call him? The Gray Man.”

  The memory was like a weight.

  “Stay with me,” Laura said. “At least a while. It’s been too long since we saw each other. And I want to get to know my nephew. And I want you both to be safe.”