Forget the Sleepless Shores Page 14

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  The last few days of the month, as the fragile rind of feather-white moon and the stars she could not see for the city’s horizon glow pronounced; coincidence of lunar and Gregorian calendars, and some of the nights had begun to turn cold. Clare had hauled an old quilt from the top shelf of her bedroom closet, periwinkle-blue cloth from her childhood washed down to the color of skimmed milk, and occasionally woke to a sky as wind-scoured and palely electric as autumn. The day before yesterday, she had worked her last shift at The Story Corner, said goodbye to Lila until next summer and turned a small percentage of her paycheck into an Eric Kimmel splurge: some of the stories too old to read to her class in a couple of weeks, most for herself, tradition and innovation wound together as neatly as the braided wax of a candle, an egg-glazed plait of bread. Cross-legged on her bed, she read two retellings of Hershel Ostropolier aloud to the little pool of lamplight that made slate-colored shadows where the quilt rucked up, yellow and steadier than any dancing flame. She had lit a candle on the windowsill when the sun set, but it had burned down to the bottom of the glass; wax and ashes melted there.

  When she leaned over to lay the book down on the jackstraw heap accumulating near the head of her bed, her shadow distorted to follow, sliding bars of dark that teased the corners of her vision, and she made a butterfly shape with her hands against the nearest wall. Out in the other room, Blood on the Tracks had finished and Highway 61 Revisited come on, Dylan’s voice wailing right beside his harmonica, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Homeless, nameless, roving: Clare had never been any of these things, but she knew something of how they felt, and she sang along as best as she could find the melody while she stripped off her clothes, black and white Dresden Dolls T-shirt and cutoff jeans, unremarkable underwear and socks all tossed into the same milk crate in the far corner, and stood for a moment in the lamp’s frank shine before turning back the covers. Another chill night, wind like silver foil over the roofs, and she would have welcomed some warmth beside her as she tucked her feet up between the cool sheets; but she had chosen, she might sleep cold for the rest of her life, and she was not sorry.

  If she pressed her face into the pillow, she could imagine a scent that did not belong to her own hair and skin, her soap that left an aftertaste of vanilla: slight as a well-handled thought, the slipping tug of reminiscence, a memory or a blessing. Zichrono liv’rachah. But her eyes were already losing focus, the Hebrew wandering off in her head toward smudges of free association and waking dream; Clare turned over on her side, arm crooked under the pillow under her head, and said softly into the shadow-streaked air, “Zise khaloymes.”

  A murmur in her ear that no outsider would ever pick up, lover’s tinnitus with the accent of a vanished world, Menachem said back in the same language, “Sweet dreams.”

  Together they reached out and turned off the light.

  LIKE MILKWEED

  There was a monarch banging against the window when Alicja woke, the glory of its wings filling the glass like sunset. As if she were still dreaming, she watched its reflection tremble over books, folders, peach-tinting the laundry at the foot of the bed, a dilute wash of tangerine on the pale slices of wall between shelves and drawers; sleeping, she had imagined the door rattling in its frame, the skillet dancing on the stove as the earth shivered her building from linty basement to weather-loosened slates. Scatterings of light billowed in her vision like the silk of a hot-air balloon, a lit sky-lantern. Then the monarch’s shoulder thumped into the window again, hard as a buffet of wind, and she thought of bluebottles, moths, buzzing things battering themselves to death against the hot glass of lightbulbs or summer screens. Kath at her computer as Alicja always remembered her, glasses patched with a paperclip, more than a year ago now, said warningly, We don’t even know if they’re sentient, Lish. She was kneeling up on the bed already, T-shirt hanging loose over her collarbones; the monarch hovered outside her window, impossible as a hummingbird in slow motion. When she unlocked the window and slid up the sash, she thought it hesitated, or perhaps it was only gathering direction. She moved back on the bed and let it in.

  She had expected it to alight like a bird or climb in like a person; she had seen monarchs on warm days clinging to enough trees and cornices to know that those slender limbs were strong as ivy, small gripping hands latching to bricks and branches, immovable. Instead it seemed to blow in, furling like a parachute until it crouched on her floor with its wings trailing stained glass across the scratched boards and the ragged oblong of carpet she had put down to hide the last tenant’s carelessness, night-blue and unraveling. They were most the color of marigolds, she thought, clustered with brighter orange peel and veined with a soft black like ink running into wet paper. In their tawny shadow, the monarch’s hands moved restlessly, something loose and questing about the fingers that had always disturbed her in video; they curled more than they bent and she could not count their joints, though she knew they would feel stiff as slick plastic if she covered them with her own. Its face beneath its vinyl-black caul looked blind. It was not bigger than she was, but she was not a small woman. She could not tell what it understood about her.

  Kath had read all the articles in the early years: that each set of wing patterns was unique, a visual signature like the flukes of humpback whales; that whatever they used for senses could detect more wavelengths of light than the human eye, yet seemed utterly indifferent to heat or cold; that despite their name no one could prove the monarchs consumed the nectar of flowers or any plantlife, although they did migrate, here to elsewhere, and it was not possible to follow or even discern the route of their coming and going. She had evaluated published research against conspiracy theories and colorful reporting; she knew which factions believed them aliens, angels, mutants, experiments, the reincarnated dead or the time-traveling children of the post-apocalyptic future, although opinion was still divided on the kind of apocalypse that would produce a dominant species that flew. Just get the tattoos already, love, Alicja had teased her early on, although it was sharper than teasing and Kath had known it, drawing her arms tight around her palely reflecting legs as she turned away on the bed, tablet glowing on the blankets in front of her. They both knew which sites to search for the images she meant, human skin partitioned and inked to resemble those blossoming fractals with their luminous heartbeat of fruit and fire, human hands as black and cracking as chitin; mask-wrapped faces pushing through black elastic sheets, cowled statues with sealed open mouths. Gorgeously altered photos, jack-o’-lantern cathedrals flaring from human backs. Or small butterflies in orange and black, neatly needled at wrist or shoulder, innocuous and attractive, not quite insignia. If you don’t even know that they’re sentient, why do you want to fuck them? She had not been able to take the words back even as she knew she did not mean them; she had watched Kath’s mouth open a little, as though she meant to speak, and then close, as if there were nothing left worth saying. Not long after that, Kath had taken the two-thirds of books in the apartment that were hers, the half-closet of clothes she had brought over in garbage bags and the pair of long-legged, sandy cats that had been kittens pouncing on every rustle when they met, the two computers and six boxes of kitchen equipment and the wireless on her phone and none of their friends had even helped her pack out; she had called a taxi. Blocked Alicja on all forms of social media she knew of and one or two more, Alicja suspected, just in case she signed up for them later. Difficult as it was to disappear in a constantly wired world, Kath might have done it. Or she had died, but Alicja did not think so: that would have gotten through the communications blackout of their fracturing mutual friendships. Small and indissoluble as a stone in the mouth, she did not forget and did not think about the fact that she had not looked for Kath at all. She had known exactly what she would need to say if she found her.

  The monarch was not breathing, waiting in her bedroom; they did not seem to respire like insects or humans, but she saw a faint shivering across all its skin and scales, a mirage a
bove hot blacktop. Its body was the right color, glossy as sucked jet. She could not remember any more if touching a monarch was supposed to feel warm to the touch, or cool, or as much like nothing as their passage; she was not going to find out. She imagined its substance closing around her wrist like tar, falling her into the elsewhere of their absence. A sharp, unwilling flicker, she saw Kath disappearing instead.

  Alicja said, “Some people believe you’re us.”

  She was not waiting for a response; no scientist or hobbyist had ever heard a monarch make a sound and very few experiments had produced much in the way of reaction to human speech, however affectionate, threatening, clinical, or carefully rehearsed. It tipped its head a little. It might have been the air pressure in the room.

  “You know, that we’re the larval stage; you’re what we become after the chrysalis. Not that anyone’s ever been able to explain what this chrysalis looks like, or how the metamorphosis works, or why it is there’s nothing like you attested before the last five years, unless you count angels, which is a stretch for art history. But once someone remembered the psyche, the Greek soul, with the wings of a butterfly, then everyone knew what you were, even if no one wanted to be the first to say it. Some of us lucky few choose, and change, and come back as you. Just there’s no way to prove it. And you wouldn’t remember us anyway, from before.”

  Kath would have read the details of the cases. Perhaps they had discussed them once, Alicja chopping burdock and celeriac in the tiny kitchen while the rice steamed and Kath distracted the cats with twists of junk mail, absentminded and domestic; she could not remember now. What she knew were the outlines of rumor: people as far back as the first migrations who had believed without evidence or hesitation that some individual monarch was a missing loved one—father, wife, child—and would not be swayed by counseling or forensics. Sakae’s syndrome, after the woman in Amami-shi who had set out her husband’s favorite soba and sea grapes and bitter melon every morning for the monarch that roosted on the balcony of her high-rise, streamed inward through her window like a blown candleflame. Even Alicja had seen the videos, the administrator at Naze Port with nothing absurd or disturbed about her folded hands or her grey-lined hair, saying in automatically subtitled Japanese, Do you think I wouldn’t know my own husband? My Hirozou? Do you think me grieving, gullible? I would go to a medium if I thought he were dead. Leave us be. We are as happy as we need to be, and then the shot of the monarch’s hands darting over the glassy, stranded, olivine pearls of umibudou, as if trying to reinforce the myth of a shared meal when Hatsu Sakae must have known very well that, husband or no, with a monarch on the other side of the table she would eat alone. In later years the media had lost track of her: with the parents of runaway kids combing the latest migrations like bulletin boards and husbands with records for assault claiming their bruised and missing wives had just turned into monarchs and flown away, the eponym of a cultural delusion—practical, faithful, politely not at home to gawkers—was very nearly normal.

  Beside the shorter bookcase, the monarch reached out and laid one hand on a line of books. Its palm curved over their tops, as if it did not recognize separate volumes as such; it might have been holding on to the top of a wall, one of dozens clustering in the sunlight, as normal a sight every summer and fall as the shaggy green of August trees, the kindling fire of September. They could carpet the side of a building, turn an orchard into a burning bush. She had grown used to vast shadows dappling the sidewalks, amber-paned thrashings of light underfoot.

  “It’s such a pleasant fantasy, isn’t it?” The monarch’s fingers lifted, resettled; Alicja made herself look down at the blankets, charcoal-colored quilt, sea-green wool, before she shivered and stopped being able to speak. “They didn’t leave you. They didn’t run away, they weren’t kidnapped, they didn’t fall off the boat and the subway never touched them. It’s science, not superstition; they’re not returning, they never died. A woman thirty-six years old with a recent breakup and a steady job drops off the grid and there’s no point in calling the police—they hear worse every day and she didn’t take anything she didn’t have a right to. No one was violent. You fought. It’s not their business to track down runaway girlfriends. Probably she has more right to be protected from you, some of the things you said to her. And then it’s six months, and nine months, and twelve months is a year, and the last time you went that long without seeing her was before she came into your life.” Conversationally, as if the monarch were nodding sympathetically rather than presenting its blank, blind face to the air, seeing nothing, seeing through everything, she could not think about it any more than she could think about Kath propping the window open on sultry summer nights as the trees thickened with saffron-mantled bodies, snowdrift and strange blossom, as casually as Wendy hoping for her Pan, “So it’s better to imagine she turned into something that wouldn’t know your name or your face or your address from a knot in a tree than to accept that she cut you out of her life that suddenly, that completely, right? She just woke up different one day. She’s out there somewhere, unfettered, unharmed. She’ll never come back, but she’s happy, or at least as happy as anyone conjectures—whatever you are—can be.”

  The monarch’s wings shirred, throwing light the color of apricots. She tensed, expecting it to take flight: the film run forward this time, bright and dark traceries blooming outward into the morning-blue sky. The spirit crawling wet-winged, newborn from the dry mouth of the dead; she could imagine it on Kath’s lips, a tiny slip like the petal of a poppy, gathering the sun to itself until it was shadow and substance enough to take wing. Her fingers knotted in the blanket’s edge, unconscious as the cats who had never understood about scratching posts.

  She said harshly, “I’d rather know she was dead.”

  Briefly and crazily, she had imagined that would stir the monarch: that it would remove its hand from the bookcase, shadow replaced against shadow on the floor; turn to look at her from the polished hollows where eyes or cheekbones might have been, communicate somehow, if only by the scent that had breezed in with it, spicy and chemical at once—acrid as the inside of an Erlenmeyer flask, until she smelled cinnamon and turmeric and her mouth watered, her eyes burning with fury and confusion.

  The monarch did not move, a stick-black sculpture with a marigold explosion of wings. The sun sketched its silhouette on Alicja’s carpet, not quite blurred with the same flywing vibration as its body. Its hand still lay over the books on their shelf; between its fingers she could make out only fragments of titles, publishers’ logos. The surgical separation of her library and Kath’s had not been perfect. Piled over with magazines, lurking under clothes in the bedroom, mystery novels Alicja had never read and nonfiction on subjects she had never taught turned up for months afterward like flints in a field, shrapnel rising to light. She had filed them meticulously on the shelf by the door where they left mail to sort and library books to return; they were there still, with no way even to tell Kath what had become of them. Kath with her voice as cold and small as a bodkin, so quick with its steel, there was blood before either of them knew: I thought you understood about transformation.

  “She got through my transition,” Alicja whispered. “I didn’t forget her.”

  The monarch’s fingers rippled and knocked Jan Morris’ Venice to the floor. She could not tell if it noticed; it made no movement to retrieve the book or even touch it where it lay, a secondhand paperback with a green-watered cover and the price still penciled inside. It was not like anything Kath would have done, more careful with the printed word than with anything but the cats and her grandmother’s saucepans. It did not look any more human for its moment of clumsiness, any more like anything she could mistake for a woman she had loved and hurt and grieved and failed to forget. She did not even want to lean forward off the bed enough to pick up a book she had read more times than she could remember: the monarch’s shadow would touch her, its smell of cooking and corrosion stick to her skin. The first time she had s
een one—waking in a neighbor’s grape arbor, its wings unfolding like tiger lilies among the fluttering patchwork of leaves and tendrils and dusty-blue fruit—she had understood at once why early sightings had compared them to angels: beautiful, flaming, incomprehensible. It was easier to believe in aliens, she thought. One of Kath’s ex-boyfriends had never been persuaded not to refer to them as Mi-go.

  It stayed where it was as she reached for the wrapper half-hanging over the bookcase, artificial silk the color of rhododendrons; it clashed with the monarch’s wings, but at least she did not feel so much of its nearness on her skin like a static charge when she stretched the necessary six inches to get hold of Venice, at which the monarch did absolutely nothing at all. If she could find her phone before it left, she could take a clean picture of the wings; she could see if it had already been identified and named, how many years it had been returning from nowhere she could imagine. The numbers changed every year. Amateur watchers claimed they were steadily increasing; official reportage, so far as Alicja could remember, disagreed. Kath would have had the statistics.

  Morris’ book was familiar in her hands, undamaged by its short fall. Cities drowning, a voice she recognized calling the wreckage and the romanticism, not sparing itself. Before she could move farther away from the monarch, Alicja said, “I can make you some okra, if you like. She liked it. She read somewhere it was like milkweed.” If it came back tomorrow, she could photograph it then.

  IMPERATOR NOSTER

  He was the Emperor Retiarius and he never ruled from Rome, but they called him Caesar and Imperator nonetheless. Who else would rise from the Tiber-mouth with laurels dripping greener-grey than the waves of Tyrrhenum, a glistening rustfurl of cloak pinned at the shoulder with a whelk? He laughed at the name of Neptunus; he refused the Greek trappings of split-tailed Triton, his shins greaved in armor the pale gleam of an oyster’s inner shell. His cuirass was of the same twisting pearl, ornamented with small snails and figures of murex-red algae that crawled so slowly, an observer could not mark the changes except by glancing back to see their stances had shifted: the riding figure was kneeling now, head bent before an edge of water that a moment ago had been crown-spiked rays of sun, and then a tree was a stream, and then the figure was rising, and then the waves had swallowed it. Caligula had claimed victory over him, he said, while Claudius had given him a tribute of land. His trident was bronze-barbed, taking his weight as if he stood on sand where ships of Egyptian grain rode low in the harbor. His eyes were blacker than mussels, than onyx or opal or depth in the eyes of drowned men. None saw him come ashore; some say he could not. The sailors kept to Ostia’s docks and prayed.