“Beats me. But the good news is, the longer you’re away from the source of whatever put it on you, the weaker it’ll get.”
“And if it doesn’t go away?”
“Then you’ll only be comfortable with people like me who already believe. Who accept that there’s something else out there and it’s just as much a part of this world as you or me. The only difference is, it’s in some hidden part that most people don’t get to see. Hell, that most people don’t want to see.”
“Which is why I make them uncomfortable.”
He nodded. “What was it that you experienced?”
“I have no idea,” I told him.
I didn’t really want to get into how weird my life had become in the past two days—not with a complete stranger, no matter how helpful he might be.
“Can I do anything for you?” I asked instead.
“Hey,” he said. “You gave me a dollar and treated me like a human being—that’s more that ninety-nine percent of the people I run into would do. So no. I’m good.”
“But—”
“Just say hello the next time you see me,” he said. “Let me know how you’re doing.”
“I will. What’s your name?”
“Marc—with a ‘C.’ “
“I’m Saskia,” I said, offering him my hand.
He cocked his head as he shook.
“Saskia Madding?” he asked.
I nodded. “How would you know that?”
“I’ve read some of your pieces in Street Times. No wonder you took the time to talk to me.”
“Why—” I started, then stopped myself.
He’d already told me how he’d ended up on the street. It was none of my business what kept him there.
“Why do I live like I do?” he finished for me.
I shrugged. “I know it’s not like you’d be doing it by choice.”
“I suppose. But the truth is, I’m damned if I know. I guess I just gave up. Got tired of trying to find a job. I’m forty-eight and my back’s shot. So I can’t do heavy work, and nobody wants to hire an old man when he can get some bright-eyed kid with twice the energy and all the office smarts.”
“Forty-eight’s not old.”
“It is in the work force. It’s ancient. And it doesn’t help that I’m a little too familiar with the bottle.”
I paused for a moment, then asked, “Do you have someplace to stay?”
He smiled. “Come on now, Saskia. Don’t go all caseworker on me. Let’s just be friends.”
“I wasn’t trying to …”
“I know. It’s just that your heart’s too big. I already got that out of those pieces you wrote. But you don’t want to be bringing home strays— not unless you’ve got a mansion on a hill and more money than you know what to do with. If you’re not careful, you could end up with a mob of street people taking advantage of your goodwill and …” He gave me a toothy grin. “They wouldn’t all be as pretty as me.”
“But—”
“It’s okay. I’m sharing a room with a guy in a boardinghouse off Palm. I make do. And who knows, one of these days I might actually get it together and try to rebuild my life. Next time I see you, maybe we’ll go for a coffee and I’ll share all these great plans I’ve got for fixing the world— starting with yours truly.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll hold you to that.”
“Thanks for stopping by,” he said.
I smiled and stood up. “No, thank you for helping me figure out my problems. Maybe you should consider becoming a counselor.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I’m just chock-full of good advice, even if I don’t put it into practice for myself.”
“See you, Marc,” I said.
“You know something?” he said as I started to walk away.
I paused to look back at him.
“If it was me, I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get rid of that shine of yours.”
“Why not?”
“Well,” he said. “It seems to me that everything’s got a spirit, a mystery that most of us can’t see. But invisible or not, that doesn’t stop these secret spirits from being the heart of the world—sort of what keeps it beating. Are you with me so far?”
I nodded.
“Then tell me this: Why would you want to hang around people that get uncomfortable, or even scared, about that kind of thing?”
“Maybe just to feel normal,” I said.
He laughed. “Normal’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“You think?”
“Hell, I know.”
I don’t know if I could have taken Marc’s advice even if I’d wanted to. So far as I could see, whatever was different about me came from inside. How do you avoid yourself?
But he made a good point about normalcy. Except I don’t think it was so much that I wanted to be normal. It was more how nobody likes to be the brunt of other people’s ill will—especially when you’ve done nothing to earn it.
I think the bigger question for me was that I needed to know what I was, and not even the voice in the back of my head seemed to have an answer to that.
In the weeks that followed I made a point of getting out and seeing people. It was hard. Most of the time I got the same kind of reaction as I had from my neighbour across the hall, or the woman with her dog outside the Chinese grocery store. I’d go to music shows, art openings, poetry readings— any place that a person could go by herself to meet other people. Invariably some guy would start to hit on me—especially in a club—only to back off as though he’d suddenly realized that I had a third eye, or a forked tongue, or who knows what? I’d stay for awhile, but eventually the general level of barbed comments and ill will directed toward me would get to be too much and I’d have to go.
Later, when I got to know Jilly and her crowd, I discovered that I’d been going to the wrong sorts of events—or the right events, only attended by the wrong sorts of people. But at the time, I didn’t know and there were a lot of nights that I left hardly able to keep my tears in check until I was safe in my apartment with no one to see my despair.
I didn’t have the same problem when people weren’t actually in my presence. I was able to submit pieces to Street Times, In the City, The Crowsea Times, and some of the daily papers—soliciting commissions over the phone and submitting the finished pieces by e-mail. I developed a number of friendships that way, though I made sure to maintain them at a distance. The one time I didn’t was a complete disaster.
Aaran Goldstein was the book editor for The Daily Journal at the time— still is, actually. I’d done a few reviews for him and we’d talked on the phone a number of times when he asked me if I wanted to get together for a drink before a book reading that he had to cover that night. Against my better judgment, because, logically, I knew it wouldn’t work out—why should this be any different from all those openings and shows I’d attended?—I said yes.
We made plans to meet at Huxley’s—not somewhere I’d have chosen on my own. It’s that bar on Stanton across from Fitzhenry Park where the young execs on their way up congregate after work. Lots of chrome and leather and black glass. Lots of big exotic plants and various flavours of ambient techno music on the sound system. Lots of people who want nothing to do with mysteries or myths or magic, so you know how they’d react to me.
I started to tell him I was blonde, but he stopped me and assured me we’d have no trouble finding each other.
“Descriptions are for peons,” he said. “But you and I … fate has already decided that we should meet.”
The weird thing is, he was right. Not about fate—at least not so far as I know—but about our not needing descriptions. I stepped in through the front door of Huxley’s at a little past seven that evening and immediately saw him standing at the bar. I’ve no idea why I recognized him. I guess he just looked like his voice.
He lifted his head and turned in my direction, smiled, and came to meet me.
“You see?” he said, taking my
arm and steering me back to the bar where a pair of martinis were already waiting for us.
He clinked his glass against mine.
“To radiance,” he said. “By which I mean you.”
Aaran was a good-looking, confident man in his thirties—very trendy with his goatee, his dark hair cut short on the top and sides, drawn back into a small ponytail at the nape of his neck. One ear lobe sported two earrings, the other was unadorned. Pinky ring on each hand. He was wearing Armani jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tailored sports jacket that night. Shoes of Italian leather.
But the best thing about him—what let me overlook his overly suave mannerisms, what meant more to me than his appearance or his sense of fashion—was that he didn’t get the look in his eyes.
Five minutes went by. Ten. Fifteen.
Not once did he seem to get creeped out by me. We just talked—or at least he talked. Mostly I sat on my stool, leaning one arm on the bar top, and listened. But it wasn’t hard. He was well-spoken and had a story about anything and everybody: droll, ironic, sometimes serious.
We had two drinks at Huxley’s. We went to the reading—Summer Brooks had a new book out, So I’m a Bitch, a collection of her weekly columns from In the City—and it was just as entertaining as you might imagine, if you follow the columns. We had a lovely dinner at Antonio’s, this little Italian place in the Market. We went down the street to the Scene for another drink and danced awhile. Finally we ended up back at my place for a nightcap.
We’d been getting along so well, it seemed inevitable to me that we would end up in bed the way we did. I remember thinking I was glad I’d worn some sexy black lace underwear instead of the cotton panties and bra I’d almost put on when I’d been getting dressed earlier in the evening.
Sex had definitely been one of the things I’d wanted to experience as soon as I could. My own recollections of it seemed to have come out of books, and like everything else in my life, I couldn’t find one real tactile memory of it in mind. From what I did know about it, it was supposed to be totally amazing, so it was disappointing to have it all be over as quickly as it was.
Later, I realized it was only because Aaran wasn’t a particularly good lover, but at the time I just felt let down. Not so much by him, as by the whole build-up about the act of making love.
“Is that it?” I let slip out as he rolled over onto his back.
I hadn’t meant to say it aloud and when I saw the dark look on his face, I really wished I hadn’t.
He sat up. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Wasn’t it good for you?”
“Of course. It’s just… I thought…”
I stopped myself before I made it worse, even though what I wanted to say was, no, it was disappointing. I thought it would be more tender, and also more abandoned. That it would last longer. That the world would turn under me. That everything would stretch into this long moment of unbelievable bliss before finally releasing in long, slow waves that would leave me breathless. The way I could make it feel with my own fingers.
Yes, I stopped myself from saying any of that, but it was already too late.
“Jesus, I can’t believe you,” he said.
He swung his feet to the floor and stood up.
“I mean, it’s not like I didn’t know there was something weird about you,” he added as he put on his briefs. “But I was willing to overlook it— you know, that twitch you put in people that just makes them want to back away?”
I stared at him, speechless. He found his T-shirt and pulled it on over his head, stopping to smooth back his hair.
“It’s not like I’m alone in this,” he said. “Sure, you look hot, but everybody who’s spent any kind of time with you talks about how you’ve got this thing about you that just rubs them the wrong way.”
“You’ve talked to people about me?”
“Well, sure. It’s a small world. When a good-looking woman like yourself turns out to be such a cold fish, of course it’s going to get around. What did you think? But I thought, ‘I’ll do her a favour. Show her a good time. Teach her how to loosen up a little and enjoy life.’“
“Get out,” I told him.
“Right, like you’re the one who should be pissed.”
I got out of bed and gave him a shove toward the doorway.
“Now you just wait a—” he started, but I pushed him again.
He was still off-balance from the first push and stumbled backward, out into the main room. I collected the rest of his clothes and followed after him. There was a moment right there when I thought he was going to hit me, or at least try to, but I dumped the clothes and shoes into his arms and he instinctively grabbed hold of them. That gave me time to slip around him and open the front door of the apartment.
“Out,” I told him, pointing to the hall.
“Jesus, would you let me put my pants—”
“Out,” I repeated.
I grabbed my umbrella from where it was leaning by the door and held it like it was a baseball bat. He took one look at my face and went out into the hall. God, I wish I’d had a camera to capture that sorry image of him standing there, as good as bare-assed, skinny legs coming out from under his T-shirt, the rest of his clothes all bundled in his arms.
“This isn’t the end of this,” he told me.
“It is for me.”
He shook his head, his face flushed with anger.
“Nobody treats me like this,” he said. “I’ll make you sorry you ever—”
“I already am,” I said and shut the door in his face, engaged the lock.
I cried for a long time after he was gone. It wasn’t because of what had happened with him—or at least not only because of that. Mostly it was because I felt so bereft and alone, abandoned in this unfair world where my only intimate human contact so far had been with such a sorry excuse of a loser. Now that the happy blush of just being accepted for once had been swept away, I realized that he was completely self-centered. He was full of words, but empty of anything meaningful. Our evening together had been for him, not for me, or even to be with me.
If Aaran Goldstein was an example of what it meant to be human, I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to be one anymore.
I had my flying dream again that night, soaring over an endless landscape of circuit boards, their vast expanse cut with rivers of cruel electricity. …
I had gained some useful experience from my evening with Aaran, but otherwise not a lot had changed. Everything was still new and fresh. I knew what things were—and if I didn’t, the voice in my head could give me its history—but not how they tasted, or felt, or sounded. Not how their essence reverberated under my skin.
I didn’t stay away from readings or openings or clubs after that—I was too stubborn to give Aaran that small victory—but I didn’t look to find acceptance or kindness at them anymore, and didn’t find it either. Turns out, what honest friendships I came to make, I made on the street.
There was Marc, of course. I’d see him from time to time, always in some different doorway, panhandling on a street corner, dozing on a park bench. He carried a constant undercurrent of bitterness inside him— directed at what he saw as his own personal failures, as much as at the uncaring world he was in, a world that had no time or place for those such as himself who, for one reason or another, had fallen through the cracks.
But most of the time, he kept that bitterness locked behind a cheerful front. I think what he liked best about me was that, no matter which face he showed me, I accepted him as he was and made no judgments. I also didn’t hand out advice, or try to change him. I’d just buy him a meal or a coffee, and share it with him as though we were simply friends out to enjoy each other’s company.
Charity didn’t enter into it. He knew I’d give him a place to stay, or money, if he asked. But he didn’t. And I didn’t offer.
Then there was the woman that everyone called Malicorne whom I met on the edge of the Tombs one day, that part o
f the city that the citizens have abandoned, leaving I don’t know how many blocks of empty lots, rubble-choked streets and fallen-down, deserted buildings. Factories, tenements, stores. The only legally-inhabited building was the old county jail, an imposing stone structure that stood on the western border of the Tombs, overlooking the Kickaha River, just north of the corner of Lee and Mac-Neil, but you couldn’t call what the prisoners in there did as living. They were just marking time.
Malicorne was tall and horsy-faced, her eyes so dark they seemed to be all pupil. Her long chestnut hair was thick and matted, hanging past her shoulders like dreadlocks. But the thing about her—the strange thing, I mean—is how she had this white horn curling up into a point coming right out of the middle of her forehead. Now that’s unusual enough, but even stranger is how nobody really seems to notice it.
“People don’t pay attention to things that don’t make sense to them,” she said when I asked her about it.
Now I had a maybe strange origin, if my dreams and the voice in my head were anything to go by. She had one for certain. So why didn’t people treat her the way they treated me?
She laughed. “Look at me,” she said. “I’m living in a squat here in the Tombs, sharing meals and drinks with hobos and bums. Regular citizens don’t even see me. I’m just one more street person to them. And if they don’t see me—if I don’t even register on their radar—how would they ever notice anything strange about me?”
“So why do you stay on the streets?” I asked.
“You mean, why don’t I become a citizen?”
“I guess.”
“Because the only stories that matter to me are the ones that are told here—on street corners, under an overpass, standing around an oil drum fire. It wouldn’t be the same for someone else, but I’m not someone else, and they’re not me.”
I liked talking to her. She didn’t just absorb stories other people told; she had countless ones of her own to tell. Stories about strange places and stranger people, of gods living as mortals, and mortals living with the extravagance of gods. I often wondered what my own story would sound like, coming from her lips. But I supposed first I’d have to figure out what it was for myself.