A Dirge for the Temporal Page 4

  Before them, along a narrow street cut in half by shadow, the corruption unfolded. Bloated men on stick legs pecked about like chickens, looking for anything into which they might stab their beaks. Sleek favor girls—fingers glistening with the adhesive they used to secure their deposits—stuck their bottom lips out in a contest of who could pout the loudest. From neomodernrococo upper windows in the flanking walls, buxom citywives yelled down at their husbands and sons not to bring anything raunchy home, or they’d put them out with the garbage. The word garbage was instantly absorbed into the refuse spilling out from the crevices between business concerns. The entrances of these establishments were vague outlines behind exhaled vapors. A street in New Geneva was like the canal through which a fart traveled, without the expulsion of air.

  Leah must have had one of these joints in mind all along; otherwise they would have already been in the city center, with its fake antique European walls and cobblestone avenues. Someone knew something about something. Lane trusted her judgment implicitly, even though he was the infiltrator by trade. The sunken inner door didn’t fit well in its frame; dried up posters clung to flaking paint; the withins were dark and full of Miles Davis riffs and ripoffs.

  Over the sounds of the trumpet, a slurred voice made itself audible, addressing the player. “You are my man Miles, ain’t ya? Goddamn, how did you find your way here to the Jazzy Sloth?”

  The Jazzy Sloth. Indeed, where else would one be?

  Leah went straight to the bar, something of the mood of the place appearing in her eyes as she leaned up on her toes and elbows to address the bartender, whose back was turned to them. “Joy, it’s me. Leah.”

  “Leee-uh!” exclaimed a sandpaper voice as the woman twirled. “Hello, you beautiful bitch!”

  “I’m back to reclaim what belongs to me,” Leah said plainly. “Joy, let me introduce you to Lane. Lane is my…he is my Lane.”

  Lane felt a patter of delicate little feet race through him, hearing this confession from her.

  “Wait a minute,” said Joy in her abrasive voice. “You’re the one Leah hired to find her sister Gena.”

  “Yeah,” said Lane. Hearing the name reminded him that their mother had spelled it with an e so that it read like an abbreviation of Geneva, in honor of the splendid modern city where the sisters had been born.

  “Did you?”

  “She was a spiegel.” He looked over at Leah, whose eyes were the lightest suggestion of blue as they gazed at the trumpeteer on stage. He continued, “I forced her to come, nearly had to drag her, but we didn’t make it.”

  “She do herself?”

  “Fuck!” Leah let out unexpectedly. For the scattered patrons, she might have been hurling her frustrations at the musician. Joy passed Lane a protracted glance.

  It had been the last gig for Lane. For years he had been entering the city, finding them and bringing them out—or not bringing them out. The whole operation had come to an end when Gena, a not so random number, threw herself under a passing vehicle’s tires. He didn’t realize his level of investment until he delivered the news to Leah, who absorbed it without movement, her eyes the color of silence. In that moment in time he became lost with her. Through Leah and through his own sorties into New Geneva’s jungles, the city had sunk its claws into him, a non-citizen.

  Rarely did such outbursts come from Leah. Perhaps it was the being back. He felt the intensity, and the desolation, too.

  intensity in desolation. Our new motto in New Geneva.

  He put his hand on her shoulder, and she was stoical again. For a moment her eyes assumed the quality her sister’s had, which bespoke the absence of anything to offer this city which had developed its own desires and motives.

  “I need to know where the âme is brightest lately,” Leah said to her friend.

  “I can’t say really, as more and more are offering themselves. Don’t drink! The more of us who’ve joined, the greater its allure.”

  “Don’t say ‘us,’ Joy. Never say ‘us.’”

  Lane watched Joy’s expression, saw the shift in the hue of her eyes, to that of a glassy office-building exterior. God, if that ever happened to him…no, he mustn’t think of it. As long as he was rescuing them, he was sane.

  Joy said, “It’s just that waves of the city’s population go blindly—”

  “Go where, Joy? Where is the most active area? That’s what we need to know.”

  Joy considered. “I suppose there is a lot of activity in Germantown these days. But really every part of the city center is game.”

  “Thank you,” Leah said. “I’ll see you again. Stay here and don’t let anything change your mind.”

  “Leah,” Joy’s voice reached coarsely. “If you come across what was taken from me, will you retrieve it, too?”

  Leah’s hand went to her throat, realm of the larynx and its vocal cords. Joy nodded.

  “If I do, Joy.”

  ~

  In her silence, Leah focused through the congestion on the image of the item stolen from her. It was a simple thing, but an intrinsic one, with enormous personal value. Its color was that of the richest purple Holland tulip. Its material was that of wings, the birds of the air and aether. It had belonged to her mother and been a gift from her father. Both were dead. Leah’s thoughts were never silent.

  As she led Lane like an umbilical cord from a sister dead in blood on a concrete field, she thought of her father, who had locked himself in a room with four bottles of absinthe, three packs of non-filter cigarettes, and his wife’s corpse. When the authorities came, with the hint of New Geneva in their eyes even then, they found a burnt-out cigarette resting between Leah’s mother’s dead lips, dry as her body and memory. Dad, meanwhile, was not so easily approached, all the hallucinations standing like ranks of soldiers in defense of him. His tongue hung out and his eyes bulged towards the treasure at the flat end of an empty green goddess bottle. Granted. Let nothingness process you while your children face the city alone.

  Baby sister in her arms, Leah had fought her way through the officers—whom she had phoned when she could not get into the room—to look at him a last time. His soundless voice cut through the images on which his eyes still fixed to remind her that the biblical Leah had lovely eyes too, and to encourage her to wrap herself in her feathery prize and run until her feet turned to wings. He had known what he would do when he had given the article to her that morning, before brushing away her tears and singing her to sleep again. Looking at her mother, whose eyes did not stare, she had demanded the officials tell her what they had done with the gift. They didn’t know what she was talking about but allowed her to look around while they did what they could to shield the madness that had been her parents. For a moment it was there, hanging from the mirror like Hollywood and tropical islands, but no, that was one of the lingering hallucinations.

  Soon enough she found it in her own room, coiled around the pillow, some of its feathers distorted from her tears. She put it around her neck, and remembered that her mom hadn’t been able to recall where it came from. Some dime store. Some souvenir shop. Somewhere unimportant.

  Leah felt its whispery comfort around her neck now, but refused to reach up and caress a phantom. Before her, before the silence of her, cherubs winked from beneath their brimmed hats as the neomodernrococo gates of the alley gave way to sleek perpendicular scapes of reflective gray. She looked to her right and saw herself, her naked shoulders in the surface. The lucid illusion, like a lucid dream, died. She squeezed Lane’s hand, but it was as cold as the condensation that formed to obscure even the nakedness. She looked up at the polished walls hemming them in and felt her diminutiveness and powerlessness.

  Ahead, at yet another architectural change, an archway of stone-substitute displayed
the message: Ein Bißchen Deutschland

  The inner city thrived on their ghosts before them. The âme, on vagabond tongues, pushed out to meet them. Ragged preachermen cried contradictions: God would tear New Geneva down; God greatly favored New Geneva, hence the âme; God was New Geneva. Behind these came the voices of unity. Of merging. Of urban nirvana. Then came the âme itself, in faint, luminous faces and figures, those who had given themselves willingly. Occasionally the eyes of a spiegel appeared, mirroring the decorative corners, the strangers and citizens that were Leah and Lane, but not the specters that comprised the âme. For the spiegel were the antithesis of the âme, in that the latter gave everything while the former had nothing to give, or take from.

  Leah, at last, touched her shoulder, but the boa was not there.

  ~

  There was a fountain in the middle of Germantown, and that’s where it was happening.

  Half-timbered houses with flowers and maidens in Bavarian outfits huddled around the square, while propaganda posters were flown on flagpoles. Shaven NeoNazi heads rolled angrily by, only to be thumped, when accessible, by hater haters. Brät and Schnitzel stank the place, and beer fountained like the gods.

  Lane cautioned Leah not to act on emotion, but advice like that was snatched right out of the air like electricity. She moved with the flow to the rim of the pool and, against the pull of his arm, splashed her face, licking her lips, her eyes becoming like the water, like the âme. He knew she sought to get into the “active thought” of the city, but as she turned her head towards the sky, he wondered if she would begin to speak in tongues. Looking around at the other pilgrims wishing to unite with the âme, he discovered similar textures.

  He surrendered to the reverse gravity, eyes drawn upward. Amazingly, something had punctured the miasmal shelf, a small dark something which he deduced immediately to be made of wicker. Luxurious, temperamental flames gushed occasionally, as from a dragon’s mouth. Nylon broke the miasma, stripes of color seeming to pour from aloft. The balloon blossomed over Germantown’s square. Cheers rose, calling not for unity in diversity but for the owner of a strange, unconnected name.

  “Who…?” Leah said to Lane.

  “Citygirl!” a voice chided them. “Only the biggest pop star in the world!”

  “Aha,” Lane said, looking at Leah. But she was engrossed again, eyes only for the heavens.

  A crackling sounded as speakers came to life and music spat upon the square.

  “Citygirl!” they shouted in a shatter of unison.

  As the basket descended, its passengers came into view. One face made itself visible, one voice singing down:

  “I walk the streets, the streets walk me…”

  Lane was about to tell Leah that he believed he had heard the song before, but her expression froze him.

  ~

  In her silence, Leah did not lose sight. Faces from balloons were faces from balloons, even when they circled into the face of her mother.

  Her mother had been terrified of whirlpools. Something about them had imbedded in her subconscious and many a morning had been spent untangling herself from the tornado of the covers. She had stilled her lips and eyes and illogic when Leah’s dad had purchased just such a toy to enhance their New Geneva-style home. Leah had heard her say, “You use it, Edward. I will rely on my boa.”

  “One night I’ll convince you to join me,” he said. “You’d have the time of your life.”

  One drunken night she had dived in on her own. The intoxication, like its wellspring, had great power. Gena existed in a toddler whirlpool of her own, Leah in nightmares that hadn’t fully formed. But so did many in this new enlightened age, in this its model city, with the alcohol pouring from every fountain and every faucet and the philosophers dancing in the streets. Yes, one night their mother had dived in on her own—but not until after she had tucked her two girls in, confessing that fears must be confronted, doors musn't be left ajar letting light spill in from the hall. The little girls hadn’t argued because they could see Mom’s own light shining in her eyes. As it turned out, she had missed securing the door in its frame and her voice sang thickly and cheerily as she faded along the hall. “Swimming,” she sang. “I’m going swimming.”

  Leah had never known how it happened. Whether the city had sucked her through its pipes, pinning her against the drain, breathing water into her lungs. Or whether Leah’s dad, who had been out on the sofa, had woken into a moment of clarity and performed the deed himself. Still another possibility was that their mother had set the example for Gena to follow, maddened beyond repair by the snap-together city she called her home, committing the act against herself. Leah knew only that she woke to her dad’s howls sometime in the night. She found him standing over the whirlpool, holding the boa in his fists, perhaps the only article Leah’s mom had worn to her date with death. The reflections on the walls were the color of skin.

  As Leah looked up at the face in the wicker basket, it sang that special song from childhood. I’m going swimming.

  The square cheered the singer on and the singer raised a hand to wave at them. Clutched in it was a feathery scarf of Holland tulip purple.

  Leah opened her mouth, but her silence would not let it out.

  ~

  Her eyes had become the hue of the scarf that Citygirl waved. Lane grew alarmed as several spiegel, perhaps sensing the local temperature change, began to gather around Leah. The silky tulip purple reflected in the mirrors that were their eyes. Lane pulled her against his chest, feeling enveloped as he always did when she was this close, spinning her silence around him. Eager hands caught the balloon’s basket at it landed in the square. The speakers posted about the place continued to pump the music of the pop diva. The mirrors abandoned Leah for her, the petal flames whispering out in their eyes. With the release a single word spilled out of Leah’s mouth:

  “Mine!”

  Lane watched her raise an accusatory finger, but for a moment could make no sense of it. Then realization, on its own parachute, arrived.

  “Is that it?” he said. “The thing in her hand?”

  “That’s it,” she said.

  “Then by God, let’s grab it now.” He tried to lead her through the pressing throng, but was squeezed out. Looking around, he located a patch of âme converging on the same icon that attracted everyone else. Using Leah’s envelope of silence as a sail, he steered them into the ghostly caravan. The physics of it were such that the pocket of liquid and light swept them along as part of its own. Citygirl grew into a face with features, a voice with nuances. And suddenly the sail narrowed to the pitch of a knife’s honed edge.

  “That voice…” Leah said. “I know that voice.”

  Lane looked at her narrowly. “Don’t say it’s Joy’s voice. Don’t you say it’s Joy’s voice appearing with your scarf. There are a million people in this city.”

  “Yes, but Joy’s voice is in that voice. Maybe this Citygirl is a product of all the most unique voices, a thousand of them, combined.”

  He looked from her face to that of the pop star. Muttered, “…in diversity.”

  The caravan bore them to the very rim of the basket, the transparent arms of the âme reaching out to caress Citygirl lovingly. As Citygirl’s eyes turned on Leah, Lane saw the bands of the spectrum exhibited there, mimicking the panels of the parachute above her. And he understood that the creature he looked upon was the city of New Geneva personified.

  ~

  In her poised, tense, fragile silence, so did Leah. She raised her open hand to the girl whose eyes were ribbons of color, and the girl accepted the invitation, bringing the boa with her as her hand landed in Leah’s grasp. At that instant, as if in obedience to a separate instinct, burners exploded with air-heating flames, and the balloon
began to lift. Leah would not let the boa go and felt her body rise on its toes, then off the ground, then suddenly lurching upward, arm nearly dislocating from the socket. Her lungs took in the air of the event as she turned to look down at Lane. His arm, its hand extended futilely, grew smaller, more desperate with every clenching of the fist.

  The people and their own empty hands and their recorded music diminished. The miasma embraced. The glass monolith that was the Prism appeared, rising through color-wrenched strata, and Citygirl, in a swirl of purple feathers, entered Leah’s sphere. Hostess breathed of her guest and when her guest didn’t object, tossed the scarf around Leah’s neck and put her mouth over hers, pulling at the silence within her. Losing all sense of who and what and where she was, Leah broke the contact, and in the interim the bands of the spectrum warped and spiraled. She felt herself falling.

  The rush of air was noise again, great mysterious noise again. A hand reached down towards her, but it had no rope to reach so far, no feathers on which to hitch a ride.

  ~

  The city did not have a name now. Leah had been a name and more to Lane. Gena had been a name. Even Joy, whom he did not know, was a name. But now…