“Remember what I said about choices,” he tells me.
And then he’s gone.
It’s forever before I can get up the nerve to walk back out through that door myself and go home.
2
They’d all gotten together at The Harp to share a pitcher of beer after finishing the evening classes they taught at the Newford School of Art. After the quiet of the school, the noisy pub with its Irish session in full swing in one corner was exactly what they needed to wind down. They commandeered a table far enough away from the music so that they could talk and hold forth, but close enough so that they could still hear the music.
They made a motley group. Jilly and Sophie, alike enough in the pub’s low light that they could be sisters, except Jilly was thinner, with the scruffier clothes and the longer, curlier hair; Sophie was tidier, more buxom. Hannah, all in black as usual, blonde hair cropped short, blue eyes sparkling with the buzz her second glass of beer was giving her. Desmond, dreadlocked and smiling, dressed as though he was still living on the Islands, wearing only a thin cotton jacket, despite the below-zero temperatures outside. Angela, the intensity of her dark eyes softened by her pixy features and a fall of silky Pre-Raphaelite hair.
It was Hannah who’d come up with the question—“What’s the strangest thing that ever happened to you?”—and then looked around the table. She’d expected something from Jilly because Jilly could always be counted on for some outlandish story or other. Hannah was never quite sure if they were true or not, but that didn’t really matter. The stories were always entertaining, everything from affirmation that Bigfoot had indeed been seen wandering around the Tombs to a description of the strange goblin kingdom that Jilly would insist existed in Old Town, that part of the city that had dropped underground during the Big Quake and then been built over during the reconstruction.
And, of course, she told them so well.
But the first story had come from Angela and instead of giving them a fit of the giggles, it made them all fall quiet. Her calm recitation created a pool of stillness in the middle of the general hubbub of the tavern as they regarded her with varying degrees of belief and wonder: Jilly completely accepting the story at face value, Desmond firmly in the rational camp, Sophie somewhere in between the two. Hannah supposed she was closest to Sophie—she’d like to believe, but she wasn’t sure she could.
Angela smiled. “Not exactly what you were expecting, was it?”
“Well, no,” Hannah said.
“I think it’s lovely,” Jilly put in. “And it feels so absolutely true.”
“Well, you would,” Sophie told her. She looked around the table. “Maybe we should order another pitcher so that we can all work at seeing the world the way Jilly does.”
“We’ll be needing a lot more than beer for that,” Desmond put in.
Jilly stuck out her tongue at him.
“So?” Angela asked. “Was he the devil?”
Desmond shook his head. “As if.”
“What do you think?” Hannah asked.
“I have no idea,” Angela replied. “I was young and impressionable and certainly upset at the time. Maybe I saw what I thought I saw, or maybe I imagined it. Or maybe he was suffering from one of those deforming diseases like elephantiasis and those weren’t horns I saw coming up out of his hair, but some sort of unfortunate growth.”
“I’ll side with Desmond on this one,” Jilly said.
Everyone looked at her in surprise. Jilly and Desmond never agreed on anything except that their students needed a firm grounding in the basics of classical art—figure studies, anatomy, color theory, and the like—before they could properly go on to create more experimental works.
Jilly rolled her eyes at the way they were all looking at her. “I mean that Angela didn’t meet the devil,” she said. “Or at least not the devil according to Christian doctrine. What she met was something far older—what the Christians used as a template for their fallen angel.”
“I definitely need that beer,” Desmond said and got up to order another pitcher.
“But in a church?” Hannah found herself saying.
Jilly turned to her. “Why not?”
“Who exactly are we talking about here?” Sophie asked.
“Well, think about it,” Jilly replied. “You’ve got him talking about chasing a nymph into the reeds and making music that can’t compare to her singing. He had goat’s horns and probably goat’s feet—Angela says his footsteps sounded like hooves on the floor.”
Angela nodded in agreement.
“And then,” Jilly went on, “there’s this business of being dead but living forever.”
She sat back, obviously pleased with herself.
Hannah shook her head. “I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“Old gods,” Jilly said. “She met Pan. Like it says in the stories, ‘Great Pan is dead. Long live Pan!’ ”
“Not to be picayune,” Sophie put in with a smile, “but I think you’re quoting the Waterboys.”
Jilly shrugged. “Whatever. It doesn’t change anything.”
“I thought about that, too,” Angela said, “but it makes no sense. What would Pan be doing here, thousands of miles from Arcadia, even if he ever did exist and was still alive?”
“I think he travels the world,” Jilly told her. “Like the Wandering Jew. And besides, Newford’s a cool city. We all live here, don’t we? Why shouldn’t Pan show up here as well?”
“Because,” Desmond said, having returned with a brimming pitcher in time to hear the last part of the conversation, “Roman gods aren’t real. Aren’t now, never were, end of story.”
“He was Greek, actually,” Sophie said.
“Whose side are you on?” Desmond asked.
He poured them all fresh glasses, then set the empty pitcher down in the middle of the table.
Sophie clinked her glass against his. “The side of truth, justice, and equality for all—including obstinate, if talented, sculptors.”
“Flatterer,” he said.
“Hussy.”
“Men can’t be hussies.”
“Can too!” all four women cried at once.
3
The talk went on for hours along with another couple of pitchers of The Harp’s draught lager. By the time Sophie said they should probably call it a night—“It’s a night!” Jilly pronounced to a round of giggles—Hannah was feeling dizzy from both.
She and Angela had the same bus stop, so after a chorus of goodbyes, they left together, slightly unsteady on their feet, breath clouding in the cold air. Happily the bus stop wasn’t far and there was a bench where they could sit while they waited. Hannah settled back in her seat, not really feeling the cold yet. She looked up at the sky, wishing she was out in the country somewhere so that she could fully appreciate the stars that were cloaked by the city’s light pollution. That was one of the things she missed the most about having moved to the city—deep night skies and country quiet.
“Did that really happen?” she asked after a moment.
Angela didn’t need to ask what.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can joke about it, but the truth is, that was a pivotal moment for me—one of those crossroads they talk about where your life could have gone one way or the other. It doesn’t matter to me whether it was real or not—or rather, if I had some extraordinary experience or not. I still came away from it with the realization that I always have to think my choices through carefully, and then, when I make a decision, take full responsibility for it.”
Like moving to the city, Hannah thought. It was no use bemoaning the things she missed, though of course that didn’t stop her from worrying a half-dozen times a week over whether she’d made the right decision. She wanted to be a painter, and the community and contacts she’d come here to find were what she needed to be able to do it—not to mention the fact that back home she could never make her living with the odd sorts of jobs she held here: art instructor, somet
ime artist’s model, waitress, messenger, the occasional commission for an ad or a poster. Maybe when she was somewhat better established she could afford to move back to the country, but not now. Not and feel that her career was actually moving forward.
But that didn’t stop her from missing everything she’d left behind.
“Think it through first,” Hannah said, “but then don’t look back.”
Angela nodded. “Exactly. If you embrace the decision you’ve made, everything seems that much clearer because you’re not fighting self-doubt.”
“You got all that when you were fifteen?”
“Not the way you’re thinking. It wasn’t this amazing epiphany and my whole life changed. But I couldn’t get him—whoever or whatever he was—out of mind. Nor what he’d told me. And whatever else happened, I had my mom back.” Angela touched a mittened hand to her chest. “In here.” She got a far-away look in her eyes. “Jilly’s always saying that magic’s never what you expect it to be, but it’s often what you need. I think she’s right. And it doesn’t really matter if the experience comes from outside or inside. Where it comes from isn’t important at all. What’s important is that it does come—and that we’re receptive enough to recognize and accept it.”
“I could use a piece of magic to change my life,” Hannah said. “I seem to be in this serious rut—always scrambling to make ends meet, which also means that I never have the time to do enough of my own work to do more than participate in group shows.”
“Well, you know what they say: Visualize it. If you see yourself as having more time, being more successful, whatever, you can make it happen.”
“I think if I’m going to visualize magic, I’d rather it was dancing on a hilltop with your horned man.”
Angela’s eyebrows rose.
Hannah smiled. “Well, that’s what I think magic should be. Not this.” She waved a hand to take in the city around them. “Not being successful or whatever, but just having a piece of something impossible to hold on to, if only for a moment.”
“So visualize that.”
“As if.”
They fell silent for a time, watching the occasional car go by.
“Did you ever see him again?” Hannah asked.
Angela smiled and shook her head. “I think it was pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime sort of experience. That piece of something impossible you were talking about that I only got to hold on to for a moment.”
Her bus arrived then.
“Can you get home okay?” she asked.
“I’m not that tipsy,” Hannah told her.
“But almost.”
“Oh, yes.”
Her own bus took another five minutes to arrive.
4
Later that night, Hannah lay in bed, studying the splotchy plaster on her ceiling, and let her mind drift. Visualize, she thought. How would she visualize Angela’s mysterious visitor? Like that painting in The Wandering Wood, she decided. The watercolor by Ellen Wentworth that depicted the spirit of the forest as some kind of hybrid Greek/Native American being—goat legs and horns, but with beads and feathers and cowrie shells braided into the red hair and beard, even into the goaty leg hair.
She smiled, remembering how she’d copied the painting from out of the book when she was twelve or thirteen and had kept it hanging up in her room for ages—right up until her last year of high school when the sheer naiveté of its rendering finally made her put it away. She was doing such better work by that time. Her grasp of anatomy alone made it difficult to look at the piece anymore. What had become of it? she wondered.
She got up out of bed, but not to go searching through stacks of old art—most of that early juvenile stuff was still stored in boxes on the farm anyway. No, she’d had a cup of herbal tea when she got home and now she had to pay the price with a trip to the bathroom. She got as far as putting a thick flannel housecoat on top of the oversized T-shirt she slept in before being distracted by the scene that lay outside her bedroom window.
There was nothing particularly untoward to catch her eye. Back yards and fences, half of the latter in desperate need of repair that they’d probably never get. Narrow lanes made more narrow by garbage cans, Dumpsters and snowbanks. Above them, fire escapes and brick walls, windows—mostly dark, but a few lit from within by the blue flicker of television screens—rooflines, telephone poles and drooping wires crisscrossing back and forth across the alleys and lanes.
The snow covering softened some of the usual harshness of the scene, and yes, it could be almost magical during a snowfall, the kind when big sleepy flakes came drifting down, but it was still hard to imagine the city holding anything even remotely as enchanting as Jilly’s stories of gemmin, which were a kind of earth spirit that lived in abandoned cars, or Angela’s mysterious goatman—even if such things were possible in the first place. If she were a magical being, she wouldn’t live here, not when there were deep forests and mountains an hour or so’s drive north of the city, or the lake right smack at the southern end of the urban sprawl. She’d run through the woods like one of Ellen Wentworth’s elfish tree people, or sail off across the lake in a wooden shoe.
She smiled. Leaving the window, she went and had her pee, but instead of getting back into bed, she pulled on a pair of jeans under her housecoat, stuck her feet into her boots and left her apartment. She took the stairs up to the roof. The door was stuck so she had to give it a good shove before she could get it open and step outside into the chilly air.
She wasn’t sure what time it was. After four, at any rate. Late enough that you could almost tune out the occasional siren and the vague bits of traffic that drifted from the busier streets a few blocks over. The wide expanse of the rooftop was covered with a thin layer of snow, granulated and hard, clinging to the surface of the roof like carbuncles. Her flower-boxes were up here, a half-dozen of them in which she grew all sorts of vegetables and flowers—a piece of the farm transplanted here so that she didn’t feel quite so cut off from the land. The dirt in the boxes was all frozen now and snow covered them. She’d pulled most of the dead growth out in the autumn, but there were still a few browned stalks pushing hardily out of the snow that she hadn’t gotten to. Cosmos and purple coneflowers. Some kale, which was better after a frost anyway, only it was finished now.
She shivered, but didn’t go back inside right away. She looked out across the rooftops, a checkerboard of white squares and black streets and yards. There was a sort of magic, she supposed, about the city this late at night. The stillness, the dark, the sensation that time seemed to have stopped. The knowing that she was one of a select few who were awake and outside at this hour. If you were going to discover a secret, if you were going to get the chance to peer under the skin of the world, if only for a moment, this was the time for it.
Are you out there? she wondered, addressing the mysterious man Angela had met in a church long before Hannah had even thought of moving to the city herself. Will you show yourself to me? Because I could use a piece of magic right about now, a piece of something impossible that shouldn’t exist, but does, if only for this moment.
Her straits weren’t as desperate as Angela’s had been. And compared to how so many people had to live—out of work, on the streets, cadging spare change just to get a bowl of soup or a cup of coffee—what she had was luxury. But she still had a deficit, a kind of hollow in her heart from which bits and pieces of her spirit trickled away, like coins will from a hole in your pocket. Nothing she couldn’t live without, but she missed them all the same.
She wasn’t sure that magic could change that. She wasn’t sure anything could, because what she really needed to find was a sense of peace. Within herself. With the choices she’d made that had brought her here. Magic would probably confuse the issue. She imagined it would be like an instant addiction—having tasted it once, you’d never be satisfied not tasting it again. She didn’t know how Angela did it.
Except, not having tasted it created just as much yearning. This w
anting to believe it was real. This asking for the smallest, slightest tangible proof.
She remembered what Angela had said. Visualize it.
Okay. She’d pretend she was thinking up a painting—a made-up landscape. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the cold air. It wasn’t winter, but a summer’s night, somewhere near the Mediterranean. This wasn’t a tenement rooftop, but a hilltop with olive trees and grape vines and . . . the details got a little vague after that.
Oh, just try, she told herself.
Some white buildings with terra-cotta roofs in the distance, like stairs going down to the sea. Maybe some goats, or sheep. A stone wall. It’s night. The sky’s like velvet and the stars feel as though they’re no more than an elbow-length away.
Where would he be?
Under one of the olive trees, she decided. Right at the top of the hill. Starlight caught on the curve of his goat horns. And he’d be playing those reed pipes of his. A low breathy sound like . . . like . . . She had to use her father’s old Zamfir records for a reference, stripping away the sappy accompaniment and imagining the melody to be more mysterious. Older. No, timeless.
For a moment there, she could almost believe it. Could almost smell the sea, could feel the day’s heat still trapped in the dirt under her feet. But then a cold gust of wind made her shiver and took it away. The warm night, olive trees and all.
Except . . . except . . .
She blinked in confusion. She was on a hilltop, only it was in the middle of the city. The familiar roofs of the tenements surrounding her apartment were all still there, but her own building was gone, replaced by a snowy hilltop, cleared near the top where she stood, skirted with pine and cedar as it fell away to the street.
She shook her head slowly. This couldn’t . . .
The sound she heard was nothing like the one she’d been trying to imagine. It still originated from a wind instrument, was still breathy and low, but it held an undefinable quality that she couldn’t have begun to imagine. It was like a heartbeat, the hoot of an owl, the taste of red wine and olives, all braided together and drawn out into long, resonating notes. In counterpoint she heard footsteps, the crunch of snow and the soft sound of shells clacking together.