* * *
“Do you think she can see us from in there?”
“Naw—she’s busy.”
“She’s deep in thought, she is—but what could she be thinking about, do you think?”
“About the next word she puts her hard finger to.”
Distractions abound. Sometimes they become part of the story. Anyway:
The careful reader will remember that when I last left off the story of my final confrontation with Mary Sabon and her necklace of flesh—which, if you will remember, consisted, before the metaphor came to life and lurched forward, of two dozen of those social climbers who had become convinced she was the best historian since my brother—I was walking down the marble stairs in their direction.
I descended to the foot of the stairs. The marble shone like glass; my face and those of the others reflected back at me. The assembled guests slowly fell apart into their separate bead selves. Blank-eyed beads wink-winking at me as they formed a corridor to Sabon. Smelling of too little or too much perfume. Shedding light by embracing shadows. A series of stick-figures in a comedy play.
“What can she be typing so furiously?”
“How long’s she been in there?”
“At least five days. I bring her food and drink. I take it out again. She’s enough paper in there to last another week.”
“Do they mind?”
“What? They? Haven’t seen them here for weeks. They’ll not be around again.”
Mary Sabon. We are approaching Sabon now. Or I am, now that I’ve made it down the marble staircase. I suppose I must conjure her into existence before I can banish her … Red hair. Massive long locks of red hair, forest-thick and as uncivilized. Emerald eyes—or, perhaps, paste pretending to be jewel. A figure that. A voice which. A smile of.
I’m afraid I cannot do her the justice Duncan did in his journal entries, so I will stand aside to let him speak, even if he does stutter, enraptured by a school-girl-smell, white-socks fantasy with as much reality to it as a paper chandelier.
Mary Sabon. Sabon, Mary. Sabon. Mary. Mary. Mary Sabon. Sabon. Sabon. Sabon. The name burns like a flame in my head like her hair burns like her name burns like a flame in my head. She burns in my head. She burns in my head. I am delirious with her. I am sick with her. Blessed infection. I think of nothing but her. Walking home today, I could sense that the trees lining the boulevard contained her. I see her features when I stare down at the pavement upon which I tread. She is half-formed in the air. The faint smell of Stockton pine needles and incense. As of her. As of an echo of her. Her form a flame in the world that burns through everything, and there is nothing in the world but her—the world revealed as paper that burns away at the first hint of her. Above and below, a flame in my head. I cannot get her out. I am not sure I want to get her out. Rather banish myself from myself than to banish her from me.
* * *
“Does she tip well?”
“Well enough. I don’t mind her. She’s no trouble. Not like you lot.”
“That’s a rough thing to say.”
They are beginning to annoy me. I cannot keep them out of the text. Everything around me is going into the text—every dust mote, every scuff upon the floor, the unevenness of this desk, the clouded quality of the windows. I cannot keep it out right now.
Flame or not, at my party, Mary Sabon wore dark green. She almost always wore dark green. She might as well have been a shrub or a tree or a tree trunk.
Ignoring my presence—something she would have done at her peril in the old days—she said, “Duncan Shriek? Why, Duncan is not a human being at all, but composed entirely of digressions and transgressions. Assuming he is still alive, that is.”
As she said this, she turned and looked right at me.
I stared at her for a moment. I let her receive the venom in my eyes. Then I walked up to her and slapped her hard across the face. The impact shone as red as her hair, as flushed as the gasp from the necklace of flesh. It lit up her face in a way that made her look honest again. It spread across her cheek, down her neck, swirled between the tops of her breasts, and disappeared beneath her gown.
If the world is a just place, that mark will never leave her skin, but remain as a pulsing reminder that, at some point in the past, she hurt someone so badly that she hurt herself as well.
But I was not done. Not by half. I had just begun.
What did I do? You’ll find out soon enough. Jump pages. Jump time. Skip through the rest as if it were a park pathway on a Sunday afternoon, and you eager to feed the ducks at the far end, in Voss Bender Memorial Square. But I haven’t written the path yet, and you’d get lost without it—and, paper cuts aside, I’ll find ways to make you wait. Waiting is good. I’ve been waiting for over five days now. I know something about waiting. And afterwords.
“I say again: What’s she typing in there? Clack-clack-clack—it’s disturbing my peace of mind.”
“Wasn’t her brother the writer?”
“Obviously not the only one in the family.”
“You must be new to this conversation.”
“What’s she writing, do you think?”
“The story of your life, Steen. A history of the Cappans. How should I know?”
“Whatever it is, it must be important. To her.”
Pickled eyes in pickled light. A glimpse of cheddar-wedge nose.
“Funny. It’s like an echo. It falls away when we stop talking.”
…
“See. No typing. Do you think she’s…?”
She’s what? Typing your inane speech, perhaps? Why not? You’ve become my companions after a fashion. Although I’ve never talked to them, I’ve shared this place with them for days now. I ought to feel grateful for their interest. I ought to get out of this dank back room and go over and suggest a game of darts.
“Naw—she’s not typing us. Hasn’t got anything to do with us.”
I think I’ll go for a walk. I’m going to go for a walk. My hands are cramping. My stomach growls. The clock on the wall tells me I’ve been here much longer than I thought.
Even ghosts can take a walk, so why not me?
6
I was beginning to sound like a character in a book. I had to escape the relentless pressure of the words. I had to get away. From the typewriter keys. From my wrinkled hands, which prove my brain lies to me about my age. From the faces staring through the green crack where the corridors synchronize into a fracture of seeing. From the feeling that I had begun to parrot on these pages, blandly resuscitating facts. (Janice, once you start a project like this, it’s impossible to tell what is truly important or who will find what the most interesting, so it’s no use second-guessing your decisions, no matter how I may have protested against some of them.)
I went for a hobbling walk, leaning heavily on my cane every step of the way. But when you’ve lived in a place this long, no walk can occur solely in the present. Every street, every building, appears to you encrusted with memories, with perspectives that betray your age, your cynicism, your sentimentality, or your lack of feeling where you should feel something. Here, the site of a quick fuck, a fumbling moment of ecstasy. (“Lover’s tryst,” Janice, is, I believe, the preferred term; once again your style slips from Duncanisms to gutterisms.) There, a farewell to a departing friend. A fabled lunch with an important artist. The dust-smudged window of a rival gallery, still floundering along while you are forever out of business. A community square, where once you held an outdoor party, strung with paper lanterns. And if this were not enough—not relentless enough, not humbling enough—that unspeakable vision overlaying all of it, had you only the glasses to see: the mark of the gray caps on the city in a thousand secret signs and symbols.