Moonlight and Vines

  Slowly he laid his fiddle back into its case, loosened the frog on his bow and set it down on top of the instrument. When he finally made his way back down the stairs and out into the street, he left the fiddle behind. Outside, the street seemed overcast, its colors not yet leached away, but definitely faded. He looked up into a cloudless sky. He crossed the street and plucked a pretzel from the cart of a street vendor, took a bite even though he had no appetite. It tasted like sawdust and ashes. A bus pulled up at the curb where he was standing, let out a clutch of passengers, then pulled away again, leaving behind a cloud of noxious fumes. He could barely smell them.

  It’s just a phase, he told himself. He was simply adjusting to his new existence. All he had to do was get through it and things would get back to normal. They couldn’t stay like this.

  He kept telling himself that as he made his way back home, but he wasn’t sure he believed it. He was dead, after all—that was the part of the equation that was impossible to ignore. Dakota had warned him that this was going to happen. But he wasn’t ready to believe her either. He just couldn’t accept that the way things were for him now would be permanent.

  4

  He was right. Things didn’t stay the same. They got worse. His senses continued to deteriorate. The familiar world faded away from around him until he found himself in a grey-toned city that he didn’t always recognize. He stepped out of his house one day and couldn’t find his way back. The air was oppressive, the sky seemed to press down on him. And there were no people. No living people. Only the other undead. They huddled in doorways and alleys, drifted through the empty buildings. They wouldn’t look at him and he found himself turning his face away as well. They had nothing they could share with each other, only their despair, and of that they each had enough of their own.

  He took to wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets, the high points of his day coming when he recognized the corner of a building, a stretch of street, that gargoyle peering down from an utterly unfamiliar building. He wasn’t sure if he was in a different city, or if he was losing his memory of the one he knew. After a while it didn’t seem to matter.

  The blank periods came more and more often. Like the other undead, he would suddenly open his eyes to find himself curled up in a nest of newspapers and trash in some doorway, or huddled in the rotting bulk of a sofa in an abandoned building. And finally he couldn’t take it anymore.

  He stood in the middle of an empty street and lifted his face to grey skies that only seemed to be kept aloft by the roofs of the buildings.

  “Dakota!” he cried. “Dakota!”

  But he was far too late and she didn’t come.

  Don’t wait too long to call me, she’d told him. If you change too much, I won’t be able to find you and nobody else can help you.

  He had no one to blame but himself. It was like she’d said. He’d changed too much and now, even if she could hear him, she wouldn’t recognize him. He wasn’t sure he’d even recognize himself. Still, he called her name again, called for her until the hollow echo that was his voice grew raw and weak. Finally he slumped there in the middle of the road, shoulders sagged, chin on his chest, and stared at the pavement.

  “The name you were calling,” a voice said. “Did it belong to one of those watchers?”

  John looked up at the man who’d approached him so silently. He was a nondescript individual, the kind of man he’d have passed by on the street when he was alive and never looked at twice. Medium height, medium build. His only really distinguishing feature was the fervent glitter in his eyes.

  “A watcher,” John repeated, nodding in response to the man’s question. “That’s what she called herself.”

  “Damn ’em all to hell, I say,” the man told him. He spat on the pavement. “ ’Cept that’d put ’em on these same streets and Franklin T. Clark don’t ever want to look into one of their stinkin’ faces again—not unless I’ve got my hands around one of their necks. I’d teach ’em what it’s like to be dead.”

  “I think they’re dead, too,” John said.

  “That’s what they’d like you to believe. But tell me this: If they’re dead, how come they’re not here like us? How come they get to hold onto a piece of life like we can’t?”

  “Because . . . because they’re helping people.”

  Clark spat again. “Interferin’s more like it.” The dark light in his eyes seemed to deepen as he fixed his gaze on John. “Why were you calling her name?”

  “I can’t take this anymore.”

  “An’ you think it’s gonna be better where they want to take us?”

  “How can it be worse?”

  “They can take away who you are,” Clark said. “They can try, but they’ll never get Franklin T. Clark, I’ll tell you that. They can kill me, they can dump me in this stinkin’ place, but I’d rather rot here in hell than let ’em change me.”

  “Change you how?” John wanted to know.

  “You go through those gates of theirs an’ you end up part of a stew. Everythin’ that makes you who you are, it gets stole away, mixed up with everybody else. You become a kind of fuel—that’s all. Just fuel.”

  “Fuel for what?”

  “For ’em to make more of us. There’s no goddamn sense to it. It’s just what they do.”

  “How do you know this?” John asked.

  Clark shook his head. “You got to ask, you’re not worth the time I’m wastin’ on you.”

  He gave John a withering look, as though John was something he’d stepped on that got stuck to the bottom of his shoe. And then he walked away.

  John tracked the man’s progress as he shuffled off down the street. When Clark was finally out of sight, he lifted his head again to stare up into the oppressive sky that hung so close to his face.

  “Dakota,” he whispered.

  But she still didn’t come.

  5

  The day he found the infant wailing in a heap of trash behind what had once been a restaurant made John wonder if there wasn’t some merit in Clark’s anger toward the watchers. The baby was a girl and she was no more than a few days old. She couldn’t possibly have made the decision that had left her in this place—not by any stretch of the imagination. A swelling echo of Clark’s rage rose up in him as he lifted the infant from the trash. He swaddled her in rags and cradled the tiny form in his arms.

  “What am I going to do with you?” he asked.

  The baby stopped crying, but she made no reply. How could she? She was so small, so helpless. Looking down at her, John knew what he had to do. Maybe Clark was right and the watchers were monsters, although he found that hard to reconcile with his memories of Dakota’s empathy and sadness. But Clark was wrong about what lay beyond the gates. He had to be. It couldn’t be worse than this place.

  He set off then, still wandering aimlessly, but now he had a destination in mind, now he had something to look for. He wasn’t doing it for himself, though he knew he’d step through the gates when they stood in front of him. He was doing it for the baby.

  “I’m going to call you Dolly,” he told the infant. “Darlene would’ve liked that. What do you think?”

  He chucked the infant under her chin. Her only response was to stare up at him.

  6

  John figured he had it easier than most people who suddenly had an infant came into their lives. Dolly didn’t need to eat and she didn’t cry unless he set her down. She was only happy in his arms. She didn’t soil the rags he’d wrapped her in. Sometimes she slept, but there was nothing restful about it. She’d be lying in his arms one minute, the next it was as though someone had thrown a switch and she’d been turned off. He’d been frantic the first time it happened, panicking until he realized that she was only experiencing what passed for sleep in this place.

  He didn’t let himself enter that blank state. The idea had crept into his mind as he wandered the streets with Dolly that to do so, to let himself turn off the way he and all the other undead did,
would make it all that much more difficult for him to complete his task. The longer he denied it of himself, the more seductive the lure of that strange sleep became, but he stuck to his resolve. After a time, he was rewarded for maintaining his purposefulness. His vision sharpened; the world still appeared monochromatic, but at least it was all back in focus. He grew more clearheaded. He began to recognize more and more parts of the city. But the gates remained as elusive as Dakota had proved to be since the last time he’d seen her.

  One day he came upon Clark again. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since the last time he’d seen the man—a few weeks? A few months? It was difficult to tell time in the city as it had become because the light never changed. There was no day, no night, no comforting progression from one into the other. There was only the city, held in eternal twilight.

  Clark was furious when he saw the infant in John’s arms. He ranted and swore at John, threatened to beat him for interfering in what he saw as the child’s right of choice. John stood his ground, holding Dolly.

  “What are you so afraid of?” he asked when Clark paused to take a breath.

  Clark stared at him, a look of growing horror spreading across his features until he turned and fled without replying. He hadn’t needed to rely. John knew what Clark was afraid of. It was the same fear that kept them all in this desolate city: Death. Dying. They were all afraid. They were all trapped here by that fear. Except for John. He was still trapped like the others; the difference was that he was no longer afraid.

  But if a fear of death was no longer to be found in his personal lexicon, despair remained. Time passed. Weeks, months. But he was no closer to finding these fabled gates than he’d been when he first found Dolly and took up the search. He walked through a city that grew more and more familiar. He recognized his own borough, his own street, his own house. He walked slowly up his walk and looked in through the window, but he didn’t go in. He was too afraid of succumbing to the growing need to sit somewhere and close his eyes. It would be so easy to go inside, to stretch out on the couch, to let himself fall into the welcoming dark.

  Instead he turned away, his path now leading toward the building that housed High Lonesome Sounds. He found it without any trouble, walked up its eerily silent stairwell, boots echoing with a hollow sound, a sound full of dust and broken hopes. At the top of the stairs, he turned to his right and stepped into the recording studio’s lounge. The room was empty, except for an open fiddlecase in the middle of the floor, an instrument lying in it, a bow lying across the fiddle, horsehairs loose.

  He shifted Dolly from the one arm to the crook of the other. Kneeling down, he slipped the bow into its holder in the lid of the case and shut the lid. He stared at the closed case for a long moment. He had no words to describe how much he’d missed it, how incomplete he’d felt without it. Sitting more comfortably on the floor, he fashioned a sling out of his jacket so that he could carry Dolly snuggled up against his chest and leave his arms free.

  When he left the studio, he carried the fiddlecase with him. He went down the stairs, out onto the street. There were no cars, no pedestrians. Nothing had changed. He was still trapped in that reflection of the city he’d known when he was alive, the deserted streets and abandoned buildings peopled only by the undead. But something felt different. It wasn’t just that he seemed more himself, more the way he’d been when he was still alive, carrying his fiddle once more. It was as though retrieving the instrument had put a sense of expectation in the air. The grey dismal streets, overhung by a brooding sky, were suddenly pregnant with possibilities.

  He heard the footsteps before he saw the man: a tall, rangy individual, arriving from a side street at a brisk walk. Faded blue jeans, black sweatshirt with matching baseball cap. Flat-heeled cowboy boots. What set him apart from the undead was the purposeful set to his features. His gaze was turned outward, rather than inward.

  “Hello!” John called after the stranger as the man began to cross the street. “Have you got a minute?”

  The stranger paused in mid-step. He regarded John with surprise, but waited for John to cross the street and join him. John introduced himself and put out his hand. The man hesitated for a moment, then took John’s hand.

  “Bernard Gair,” the man said in response. “Pleased, I’m sure.” His look of surprise had shifted into one of vague puzzlement. “Have we met before . . . ?”

  John shook his head. “No, but I do know one of your colleagues. She calls herself Dakota.”

  “The name doesn’t ring a bell. But then there are so many of us—though never enough to do the job.”

  “That’s what she told me. Look, I know how busy you must be so I won’t keep you any longer. I just wanted to ask you if you could direct me to . . .”

  John’s voice trailed off as he realized he wasn’t being listened to. Gair peered more closely at him.

  “You’re one of the lost, aren’t you?” Gair said. “I’m surprised I can even see you. You’re usually so . . . insubstantial. But there’s something different about you.”

  “I’m looking for the gates,” John told him.

  “The gates.”

  Something in the way he repeated the words made John afraid that Gair wouldn’t help him.

  “It’s not for me,” he said quickly. “It’s for her.”

  He drew back a fold of the sling’s cloth to show Gair the sleeping infant nestled against his chest.

  “I see,” Gair said. “But does she want to go on?”

  “I think she’s a little young to be making that kind of decision for herself.”

  Gair shook his head. “Age makes no difference to a spirit’s ability to decide such a thing. Infants can cling as tenaciously to life as do the elderly—often more so, since they have had so little time to experience it.”

  “I’m not asking you to make a judgment,” John said. “I’m just asking for some directions. Let the kid decide for herself once she’s at the gates and can look through.”

  Gair needed time to consider that before he finally gave a slow nod.

  “That could be arranged,” he allowed.

  “If you could just give me directions,” John said.

  Gair pulled up the left sleeve of his sweatshirt so that he could check the time on his wristwatch.

  “Let me take you instead,” he said.

  7

  Even with directions, John couldn’t have found the gates on his own. “The journey,” Gair explained, “doesn’t exercise distance so much as a state of mind.” That was as good a description as any, John realized as he fell in step with his new companion, for it took them no time at all to circumvent familiar territory and step out onto a long boulevard. John felt a tugging in that part of his chest where his heart had once beaten as he looked down to the far end of the avenue. An immense archway stood there. Between its pillars the air shimmered like a heat mirage and called to him.

  When Gair paused, John came to a reluctant halt beside him. Gair looked at his watch again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to leave you now. I have another appointment.”

  John found it hard to look at the man. His gaze kept being drawn back to the shimmering air inside the arch.

  “I think I can find my way from here,” he said.

  Gair smiled. “I should think you could.” He shook John’s hand. “Godspeed,” he murmured, then he faded away just as Dakota had faded from his living room what seemed like a thousand lifetimes ago.

  Dolly stirred against John’s chest as he continued on toward the gates. He rearranged her in the sling so that she, too, could look at the approaching gates, but she turned her face away and for the first time his holding her wasn’t enough. She began to wail at the sight of the gates, her distress growing in volume the closer they got.

  John slowed his pace, uncertain now. He thought of Clark’s cursing at him, of Gair telling him that Dolly, for all her infancy, was old enough to make this decision on her own. He realized that the
y were both right. He couldn’t force her to go through, to travel on. But what would he do if she refused? He couldn’t simply leave her behind either.

  The archway of the gates loomed over him now. The heat shimmer had changed into a warm golden light that washed out from between the pillars, dispelling all the shadows that had ever taken root in John’s soul. But the infant in his arms wept more pitifully, howled until he covered her head with part of the cloth and let her burrow her face against his chest. She whimpered softly there until John thought his heart would break. With each step he took, the sounds she made grew more piteous.

  He stood directly before the archway, bathed in its golden light. Through the pulsing glow, he could see the big sky Dakota had described. It went on forever. He could feel his heart swell to fill it. All he wanted to do was step through, to be done with the lies of the flesh, the lies that had told him, this one life was all, the lies that had tricked him into being trapped in the city of the undead.

  But there was the infant to consider and he couldn’t abandon her. Couldn’t abandon her, but he couldn’t explain it to her, that there was nothing to fear, that it was only light and an enormous sky. And peace. There were no words to capture the wonder that pulsed through his veins, that blossomed in his heart, swelled until his chest was full and he knew the light must be pouring out of his eyes and mouth.

  Now he understood Dakota’s sorrow. It would be heartbreaking to know what waited for those who turned their backs on this glory. It had nothing to do with gods or religions. There was no hierarchy of belief entailed. No one was denied admittance. It was simply the place one stepped through so that the journey could continue.

  John cradled the sobbing infant, jigging her gently against his chest. He stared into the light. He stared into the endless sky.

  “Dakota,” he called softly.