Strange City Read online

  "You know what my grandpa used to say about nights like this?" the orderly asked. "He said, 'The moon only shines this bright on nights when God pulls the wings off an angel and sends them home.' That's what he said."

  Donovan shuddered and walked away.

  The next morning, Donovan returned to the club. Desmond was waiting.

  "The way you rabbited after your second set last night, I thought I'd seen the last of you." The old man looked into Donovan's face and frowned. "So what do you have to say for yourself?"

  Donovan's lips trembled for a moment, then fell still. Instead, he walked up onto the stage, took out his guitar, plugged it into his amp, and powered up. His fingers stole over the frets as if they were desper­ate to recapture something that had been lost, an elusive, ethereal quality that might have been his again.

  Peace.

  He had found it in the arms of his wife, but she had been taken from him. He had found it in the chill of the wild, but that, too, had been taken from him. He had even glimpsed it in the wanton smile of an angel who had fallen, but not so far that she could not be picked up again and carried home.

  For the first time in ten years, the music poured entirely out of his soul. The music of sadness and mourning, the fragile moonlit concerto of hopelessness and despair that had become his world.

  The old man settled into a chair and grinned. "You got it, man. Don't know how you did it, but you got it back."

  Donovan ignored him. The notes came freely now and in them he could sense some vestige of the escape he sought. Perhaps when he found it, he could move on again.

  For today, the music played on.

  Glimpses of Before

  by John H. Steele

  Justin's last thoughts were not of bitterness, sur­prisingly enough. "Don't go. You can't leave me here," he told Randi.

  "I'm just going home for a few days," she answered as she stuffed clothes into her overnight bag, ignoring such niceties as folding. "You know these earthquakes wreck my nerves, and I'll never get any work done. I might as well get out of San Francisco. I can see these buildings going over like dominoes."

  "A three-story brownstone is not going over like a domino," he pointed out. "Besides, what'll I do?"

  "Come with me."

  "You know your mother doesn't want me there, and what about the job? I'm still waiting to find out about that restaurant job. Can't you use that nervous energy here? Paint some fucking dominoes or something."

  Randi stopped packing for a moment and pulled her dark hair back out of her face. "If you don't want to deal with my mother, don't come. I'm going."

  "Go then. See if I care."

  She stuffed in two more wadded-up shirts and zipped her bag. "Look, I'm not your baby-sitter, for Christ's sake." Her tone softened. "I love you, lustin, but I need to get away."

  And so, despite his protests, she left. The next day lustin found out that the restaurant job had fallen through. What else was there to do but stop by the liquor store?

  His last thoughts were not of bitterness or abandon­ment. Instead his mind turned to childhood, playing stickball in the wide alley behind his father's bar. The ball ricocheted off a trashcan, and Justin was running after it. As he dashed into the street, he could hear his mother's voice telling him always to stop and look both ways. The massive Buick was barrelling down on him. He froze as the seconds stretched into hours. The tires screeched. In that instant, Justin wanted to take those steps back, to undo them, but he could not.

  That car had been able to stop.

  Strange last thoughts, of deliverance, when he wanted to be angry—angry at himself, angry at everyone, angry at life. Justin did not ponder this for long; his life was being stripped away a layer at a time. The bitterness was already gone. The forgotten love was next, then his thoughts, memories, name, his entire sense of self, all stripped away, mercilessly, completely.

  There was release. He was floating in warm water. The soothing massage washed over him, much more potent than a hot bath. He could feel himself flowing into the pool, merging, ceasing to be separate from it. What had been before was no longer. Heartbeats Ebb and flow. Escape.

  The floating continued for... how long? Time also was washed away, lost to the tide. There was only basking in the moist warmth, and peace. The calm was enveloping; so complete, so without contrast, that it lost meaning.

  Eventually, slowly, there was movement. It was less satisfying than the tranquility but still not unpleasant. The gentle swaying, however, became a rocking and then a spinning. He saw brief flashes of rooms, ceil­ings spinning—evenings of revelry ended, but the consequences only beginning. He could see fingers clutching at the sheets of a bed, circles that would not end. The spinning became faster. The calm, all he wanted, was being sucked away like dirty water down a drain. He felt a cold breeze. It was not skin and nerves that felt; there were no goose bumps, yet he was chilled. The wind blew through him. It penetrated every hidden place, picking him apart, exposing that which should not be seen, sparing nothing.

  Then he was plunging, being pulled and thrown down into the depths. Farther and deeper—speed, sound, motion, colors—always falling. The pressure of the Tempest was all around him, suffocating, crush­ing. He was being pulled in every direction at once; terror gripped him. The calm was so distant, timeless years, distanceless miles away. If only the storm would pull him apart. If only he would explode. Surely that would be better. That must be where the calm lay, the sweetness of Oblivion, an end to the chaos.

  He realized suddenly that he was not alone. Among the roar and the swirling din were voiceless screams that were sensed but not heard, flailing souls that whisked past, always just out of reach. He tried to go to them, but they passed so quickly, and he could control nothing.

  There were other voices also, familiar voices. Embrace the Void, they whispered. Peace lies this way. You have it within. This is truth. The voices dripped of honey. Reassurances swirled about, form­ing an eddy against the chaos. They beckoned. Follow this way. But there was a blackness. There were teeth behind the enticing lips, yet it would be so easy to succumb to the entreaties. An end to suffering. A lover's voice, caressing in the night. An end to fear. A mother's voice, and suckling at a breast.

  An end to all. The crone's voice, crumbling to dust.

  He was not strong enough to refuse them. The call of Oblivion was powerful. He might well have gone that way, but he was being pulled in another direc­tion. There was something incomplete that would not let him go yet. They tried to hold him; they scratched and clawed, and he wanted to be embraced by their talons, but the eddy was sucked away into the dis­tance. He heard the once-sweet voices screech and curse, raging against him. He mourned their passing as one mourns a grudgingly surrendered vice— pornography carried to the trash heap and set afire.

  He was once again careening through the chaos, first this way then that. All around were more of the voiceless screams floundering in the sea of souls. Some wailed for lost pasts, others bemoaned horrific futures. Many sim­ply howled madness. This, perhaps, was another escape—the safety of insanity, the abandoning of fetter­ing, burdensome reason. But Oblivion lay along that road as well, and he was being pulled elsewhere still.

  Gradually the screams and the deafening roar of the Tempest began to diminish, to recede if not to disappear. There was a darkness now, and a quiet of sorts, but it was far from the calm of before. It was a pregnant silence. He felt a tension, as if the cacopho­ny of the storm and the screams was only held at bay, not far away at all, ready to rush in again at any moment. He began to visualize points of light, small flames. The light did not shine forth to dispel the darkness; rather, the darkness tolerated the light, allowed it to exist, not to be swallowed. The flames held no warmth. The dark and the cold permeated all.

  Each flame was atop a smooth, white candle. No wax ran down their sides. He felt drawn toward these glimpses of the old world, the human world. He could not have turned away had he wanted. There were
hun­dreds of them, or were they endless? The flames flick­ered, although there was no breeze here. He could still feel the tension pressing in upon him, the hover­ing storm trying to get at him, never far away.

  His vision expanded. Next to the nearest candle was a glass full of bourbon. At this sight, a parade of images and sensations steamed through his consciousness. He saw three boys, young teenagers, scrunched behind trash cans in an alley splitting a stolen six-pack of beer, Pabst Blue Ribbon. The brick walls on either side of the alley seemed insubstantial, fading in and out. The scene was familiar, yet distant somehow. It tugged at him, but only fleetingly, then was gone.

  The alley was replaced by a car. He felt he knew the car, yet details—year, make—were just beyond his reach, not quite available, not quite important. The car was rocking from the movements of the two older adolescents in the back seat. Their gyrations and con­tortions meant very little to him. On the floorboard was an empty flask. It held his attention more than anything; sparkling, it called to him.

  Then the car too was gone. Where it had been was a woman. She was lying at the bottom of a staircase cradling her right arm against her body. He could not make out her face; her features were blurry. She stank of whiskey. Red tulips covered the wallpaper next to the stairs.

  The images began to pass more quickly—a balding man; a cozy restaurant and bar; a woman with obsidian hair and stark, white skin. Each vision brought ques­tions closer to the surface, but like the shimmering and dissipating visions, the questions were not fully formed. They were not whole; they were germs of ideas, remote nagging itches. He was connected once again, vaguely, tangentially, to what had been before.

  The aroma of the bourbon brought him back to the candles, except now there was a glass by each candle, hundreds perhaps. He was aware of a thirst growing within him, a thirst so great that all those glasses might not quench it. He saw a hand (his hand?) reaching for the first glass. He had noticed no physi­cal body up to this point, and he could discern no connection with the hand except that it was doing his will. He picked up the glass. The pungent odor poured from it, almost visible. As he held the glass, it began to crack. The whiskey dripped out. Then, as the fis­sures widened, it streamed over his hand, more liquid than the glass could possibly hold. As the last of the bourbon drained out, the cracks became jagged and sliced into his hand. He still was not sure that it was his hand. He had not felt the smoothness of the glass, the hard comfort that he almost remembered, but he could feel the sharp pain. There was no reflex to drop the glass as it became increasingly fractured and more shards bit into the flesh. The alcohol burned as it entered the wounds, but it was a sensation, an indi­cation of being. Soon blood also dripped from the hand. The fragments of the glass were grinding each other smaller and smaller, constantly peeling away skin, embedding themselves down to the bone, until they all sifted through the red fingers. The smell of blood mingled with that of the whiskey.

  He reached for the next glass which slipped in his grasp as it became smeared with blood. Once again cracks appeared and the bourbon began to flow out. It poured into the lacerations on his hand and bubbled and spit. More blood welled up from the cuts. This glass also broke apart and cut deeply into him. One sharp edge entering the palm extruded from the back of the hand. Other shards again were grinding their way down to the bone. The second glass crumbled away and was gone, leaving only the sticky, dripping, tattered hand.

  He did not want to drink, but he reached for anoth­er glass. The results were the same. Again and again and again he picked up glasses only to have them crumble and cut him. The pain was intense, but it was so vital. The slice of the glass, the searing burn of the whiskey pulled memories closer to the surface. They made him more real.

  How many glasses? It seemed to go on for days, one after another after another. There were always more. They did not diminish in number, nor did the pain lessen; it stayed sharp and clear. The hand disin­tegrated. One finger dangled below the rest, connected only by a thin muscle or tendon, a last bit of gristle. Most of the skin was peeled away. Soon the hand that reached for the glasses would be skeletal, picked clean of flesh as much as if vultures or rats had gnawed it down. He was giddy with the pain. As the last bits of flesh were sliced away, his vision began to fog. The glasses were gone. The candles began to sputter and then to blur. They were vague forms of light again, not discernible shapes. The glowing areas shrank until, one by one, they disappeared completely.

  There was darkness.

  The violence of the Tempest was not far away. He could hear it; he could imagine it flooding in to engulf him once more. The thought evoked fear, but fear, like pain, was familiar and comforting in a way. It gave him a point of reference.

  He was in a room. It had not appeared suddenly; he simply was in it. His vision was cloudy. He wanted to rub his eyes—did he have eyes now? he was not sure— and wipe away whatever obscured his sight. The room seemed to be a basement. It had that damp, under­ground feel. The walls were a dingy cream color, the floor drab grey cement. On one wall thick wooden steps led upward to a closed door. The room was empty.

  It had been empty, but no longer.

  A man stood in the room. There was a strange familiarity about the human form. The man's face was blurred, his features indistinguishable. He knew this man, this man who radiated anger, contempt, disap­pointment, disapproval. All these things he could feel, he could almost remember, yet he still longed to fall into the man's arms and weep, to be held, to be safe and lose himself, to be wanted.

  "Your mother was an idiot, a whore, and you're little better." Words. Human speech. The man spoke.

  He wanted to respond. He wanted to speak. Hold me. What is happening? Make me safe. I want to be warm. I want to be whole. But the words would not form.

  "You always were a whiner. You could have been a little girl, always running to Mommy. We were happy before you. I wanted a son I could be proud of."

  A son. A father. Father. Hold me. If only he could reach out.

  "I should have tied you in a sack and thrown you in the bay like a dog. Everything would have been okay then."

  Hold me.

  "You were all she cared about. She couldn't love both of us. You needed this, and you needed that. Always you."

  The scene of the woman at the bottom of the stairs came back to him—the red tulips, her shattered arm, her pain. His mother's pain.

  His father pushed her. She smelled of whiskey. He threw his drink at her and then pushed her down the stairs.

  Rage welled up inside.

  "Why don't you use it? You always were a gutless little bastard."

  Use it? He realized there were two hands (disem­bodied? his?) holding a shotgun pointed at his father. This time he could feel the cold steel. He wanted to put it down. How could his father have hit her?

  "Go ahead, shoot!"

  The shotgun roared to life. No! Sparks rained from the barrel. He felt the kick, but he had not pulled the trigger. He had not fired. For only a moment he saw his father's eyes clearly, unobscured, wide with sur­prise, then the image was blurry again. The shot ripped apart his father's chest and stomach. Shredded flesh and blood splattered all around. But he had not fired.

  "So this is the thanks I get for trying to support a family, a wife and kid. Fucking ingrate. Always wanted to blow away the old man, huh? About time you had some guts, chickenshit son of a bitch."

  He could not look away from his father's churned innards. He had not pulled the trigger. He just wanted to be held. This was not how it had happened, or was it? Something was not right. Blood still gushed from his father's body, the gaping hole in his front. A pool of scarlet was spreading, covering the entire floor. His father's shredded heart kept pumping out more and more, as if it wanted to fill the entire room, floor to ceiling, with its venomous blood.

  He moved toward the stairs. He was not sure how he moved or what he moved; he still could perceive no body of his own. He just knew that he was moving away from his
father.

  "Go on, run! That's all you ever did! Might as well keep running!" his father screamed. The walls of the room were becoming insubstantial, blurring and melt­ing away. Only the steps were solid, and the door. From behind the walls the Tempest poured in. Waves of voiceless screams crashed in about his father, drowning his curses. The torn body was out of sight, buried by the storm. Swirling chaos filled the room. The door opened before him. He was through and it was closed, the sea of souls lapping at the other side.

  He was in a restaurant, a small bar. He knew this place, a human place. His vision was still clouded. Large patches of blurriness floated slowly through his view. There was a large sign on the wall. Why was the sign not outside? The familiar setting was slightly askew. "Parker's" was the sign, with a flourish from the tail of the "s" that underlined the other letters. Parker. A name. Hi's name. His name was Parker. His father's name was Parker. He felt pieces coming together, more complete but far from whole.

  Through the dimness he could see the narrow room. The brass rail along the edge of the bar shone.

  The mirror behind the bar, bordered by various bot­tles of liquor, reflected the sparse light. The room smelied like whiskey. Across from the bar, a man sat in one of the booths along the wall. Below a severely receding hairline the man's forehead glistened with sweat. He motioned for Parker to sit. Parker was at the table, across from Uncle Vinny. From where did that knowledge come, that name? But he knew it was true. Occasionally Parker caught clear glimpses of Uncle Vinny—the whiskers on his neck and chin, the paunch, the hair sprouting from his ears.

  Uncle Vinny chuckled as he spoke. He always chuckled for the benefit of others. "Well, Sonny, looks like the fat lady's singing this time. Hell, she ain't just singing, she sat right damn on top of us!" His rum­bling laugh was mixed with the thick coughing of cigarettes not given up soon enough.

  Sonny was not Parker's name. It was just what Uncle Vinny called him. He was sure of this.