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THE CRACKS IN HIS MARRIAGE had started to appear ever since the affair, and nothing they had tried in the years since had fully shored up the crevasse. It didn’t help that his wife couldn’t speak, for though it had never bothered him before, her muteness now more than ever seemed like an infirmity destined to compound the inevitability of their dissolution. He had never heard her voice, and so did not have the right to mourn its absence. She had ceased speaking due to a trauma that long preceded their union. But still, it frustrated him. She could hear him perfectly, of course. This, he knew. But without the benefit of inflection, her silent nods or shakes of head, or the slight gestures she made with her hands could only be read one way, or no way at all, and he needed the kind of closure the quiet seldom gave. She had never learned to sign, and he supposed this was a good thing. If her hands were not raised, he didn’t have to see the pale scars that bisected her wrists, and thus be reminded of how he had failed her.
To aggravate the situation, as they moved like ghosts through the gloaming of their lives together, he also began to develop the nagging sensation that something other than love had gone missing, something other than his loyalty had gone astray. It manifested itself as a vague certainty, a low voice in another room, the persistent conviction that someone had stolen into the house of their marriage and shifted things around just the tiniest little bit, just enough to create a subliminal feeling of violation, of something not quite amiss, but awry.
When he expressed this concern, his wife regarded him as she often did these days, with mute attentiveness draped like a dust cloth over the dark hunkering shapes of pity and resentment. If she felt the same absence of anything but mutual love, it was not evident on her face, but then nothing was.
It was at night, as he lay on his back in a bed that like so many things had seen better days, his back sunken into the valley in the old mattress, that it became clear what he must do. He must find and locate that missing thing, that wrong thing, and return it from whence it came, before he lost all that was left to lose.
After creeping wraith-like out of their bedroom, which seemed cavernous in the dark—a direct contrast to the lives shrinking within its suspiciously wavering confines—he decided to start at Moriarty’s, a place he had frequented enough times that surely the mahogany on his favored corner of the bar must still bear the scuffs of his elbows.
Dressed in a once-black threadbare overcoat and pork pie hat, he shuddered out into the cold and navigated the narrow dark streets with the same chaotic certainty as a marble through a tilted maze. Here in this forgotten neighborhood, the streetlights had died in time with the idea of prosperity and reclamation. The city had eaten it, and its coal-dark shadow had scalded everything from the gaps in the gutters to the morality of the disillusioned young who haunted its corners. Even they weren’t present now though, and his sigh of relief was visible as a transient specter that, despite the absence of a breeze to claim it, whipped away from him as if eager to be free of the association. In the suffocating quiet, his shoes made the sound of slow sarcastic applause in the dry, humorless rent of an alley which seemed all too eager to close in on him before he had a chance to clear it.
Freed of the garbage-truck like sensation of being crushed as flotsam, an impression aided by the stench that swaddled him upon his exit, he moved quickly toward the sole oasis of light in this otherwise claustrophobic urban labyrinth of forgotten streets and found himself within view of the bar. It sat crookedly on a corner that seemed merely to tolerate the weight, the amber light through the stained windows bleeding sickly into the gloom.
Buoyed at the reprieve from the darkness, the man quickened his step and then immediately regretted it, his enthusiasm writing signatures across his knees with an arthritic pen. Hissing like the steam that bullied its way from the vents in the street, he limped on, until he found his heart lightened by the idea of old friends and familiar faces, his hand warmed by the door handle, his mind settled, but only briefly, by the notion that here the mystery of loss might begin its unravelling.
He twisted the handle and pulled.
The door was locked, the single ratcheting cough it gave as abrasive as the poorly concealed laughter of pranksters.
He tried to peer through the frosted glass and made out only a series of still shapes clustered in a tableau around a bar, their blurred shadows paler toward the top where their faces were turned toward the door. The thought of knocking raised his fist. Uncertainty kept it an inch from the glass. Clearly, they knew he was here, and just as clearly, he knew he was not wanted within. But did they know who was standing upon their threshold? The weight of his own guilt this night told him they probably did, and that they had latched the door as soon as they heard the unsteady echo of his approach.
Still he stood, as still as they, and for a moment not even air nor light seemed to move, his shadow flung across the curb behind him as if the decision to depart had already been made. Moments passed, a part of him daring, wishing someone to let their own guilt sway their opinion by carrying them to the door to admit him, but no one moved, still they stared, and at last he placed a palm flat against the cold glass as if wishing it farewell, and moved away.
The memory of their faces split by smiles assailed him as he followed the cracks in the pavement with his eyes, but the more he remembered, the uglier those smiles became, the once bright eyes above them darkening like ink spilled in water, accusation and judgment flashing like silvery fish in the ocular depths. He shook his head to clear it and raised his eyes through the sudden veil of rain he was almost arrogant enough to believe had been sent solely to torment him. It hissed malignantly down around him, filling the holes in the pavement, seeping up through the battered leather soles of his shoes, and running in rivulets down the fissures in his face. With the rain came a cold that insinuated its way through the coat and his skin and settled in his bones. His body stiffened, the pain in his knees worsening until he was forced to stop and lean against a red brick wall emblazoned with graffiti that had long ago lost its vibrant rebellious color to the smoke and dust and decay that formed the breath of this dying place.
It would be so easy to give up, he knew, as he let his brow rest against the back of his hand, the rain tapping against the brim of his hat. It would be the easiest thing in the world to tamp down the compulsion that had plagued him of late. It was merely unfinished business, after all, and what life is not characterized by such things? Not everything gets to end. Sometimes you walk out of the theater before the movie is done, and never give it a second thought. How simple it would be to do the same now. Besides, despite the need within him to find whatever it was he had lost, perhaps it was his destiny to exist in a house haunted by the ghost of old love. What man didn’t suffer that melancholic torment at one time or another? He could use the pain as an excuse, for now it felt as if someone had struck his knees with a crowbar. Imaginary points of contact radiated fire. Hissing air through his teeth, he straightened, looked back the way he came, then ahead to where the ruined pathway. All was darkness there, the streetlights long broken and bent almost double so that they formed a steel ribcage around the street.
He could go home, but the thought of the silence awaiting him there kept him for the moment immobile, stricken by the kind of uncertainty that forces men to merely occupy their lives instead of living them. At the root of it all was a gnawing absence, a dark hollow within him from which something had been removed, something so critical to his composition he had grown to fear he might die if he didn’t recover it.
He moved back from the smoke-stained wall and raised his face to the sky. Towering above him was a billboard he had to blink the rain away to fully appreciate. The same dilapidation that had scoured the town of definition had not been dissuaded by the height at which the billboard stood. On its scabrous surface he saw a once gleaming silver airplane which had been shorn in half by the peeling of the paper upon which it had been printed. Beneath the aircraft, the tropical ocean looked speckled with ash and flotsam. To the right of the bisected plane, a man and woman clinked glasses full of mildew, their faces torn away by decay and hanging in yellowed flaps from their necks. Above it all was the message THE LAND OF SUNSHINE in large yellow block capitals, and though most of the letters were missing from the cursive text beneath, he was, after sleeving the rain from his eyes, able to put it together: WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
It seemed ominously appropriate, and as he lowered his face and spat rain, his breath like the chug of a steam engine, he decided to keep moving forward. Behind him was a life that had been robbed of love and color. Ahead might be the possibility of salvation, or at the very least, a kind of closure. If that closure came in the form of his own expiration on the sodden streets of this caliginous city, then so be it. It would still be an end, and that, he knew, was what was needed, was all that was even remotely attainable at this late hour.
But as he walked, something else began to nag at him. Head bowed against the strengthening deluge, he thought again of the sign. It had once been an advertisement for a travel agency, a summons to the sedentary to leave it all behind in favor of an escape, of a temporary reprieve from the familiar and the mundane. Respite from the gloom so pervasive here. Given the proximity of the billboard to his house, he was not surprised that he remembered it, but there was something else about the sign or the message it conveyed that thrummed a chord deep in his chest and brain, something that suggested he did in fact, at some point in his sixty years, accept that invitation. But if that was true, he recalled nothing about the destination, retained no warm memory of sunshine or tropical beaches. There was only the vague notion that he had once upon a time not been where he was now, the billboard triggering the synaptic suggestion that THE LAND OF SUNSHINE had been where he’d ended up. If so, he wished he could remember, for even the notion of such a place perforated a pinhole of light in the wall of black behind his eyes.
The street curved to the left, the cracked macadam giving way to cobblestone that glistened like gray boils in the rain. Here the street grew narrow again, the tops of the buildings leaning over on both sides as if eager to engage in congress with their brethren. As he squinted into the murky light, the source of which eluded him, he saw a shadow detach itself from a doorway on the left, cross the street, and scurry into another on the right. Another few steps, his knees aflame, and he discerned that it was from this building the foggy feeble light emerged.
For a long time, he watched that building, the memory of it the tip of an iceberg in frigid water, the greater truth an immense form beneath the surface. He was cold, so cold now, his muscles aching from the strain of not relenting to the shivers that danced in his bones. He would have to enter that building if only for the shelter, but even as this awareness settled upon him, he knew it was a deception. There was another, much more significant and infinitely awful reason why that building was here, why he was here, dallying on the threshold. This was where the night had been leading him all along. It was why his old and long-lost friends at the bar had not admitted him. To do so would have been to halt the greater journey, to deny him his ultimate destination, to muddy his thoughts with saccharine sentimentality when the time and opportunity to indulge in such things was long gone.
He was here, without fully knowing where here was, unable to move as surely as if his feet had grown roots to bind him to the rain-slick cobblestones.
Again, the sign: THE LAND OF SUNSHINE.
And: WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
He knew what he was waiting for. Here, in oblivion, there was no further hurt, no revelation that might destroy him, reduce him to a further degree of nothing. Here, right now, he was still safe in ignorance, even as he admitted to himself that that had never really been the case. Not really. There had been inklings and suspicions, decades spent close to home for fear of seeing the cues Out There that would force him to accept what had been done, force him to come face to face with whatever entity had expelled him from The Land of Sunshine and erased even the tiniest recollection of the happiness he had found there.
Here, in that building, the answer, the closure he sought, awaited.
And so, frozen on this cold wet street, he would not move.
On the first floor of the building into which the man had run, dirty yellow light began to breathe through a mullioned window. He watched that jaundiced light, watched it swim as figures moved within it, and in an instant, knew who was there.
In agony, he forced himself to move, his legs feeling as if metal spikes had been driven through the soles of his feet into his thighs and found himself in the doorway. It was open, revealing an old wooden stairway littered with trash. The walls were marred with smudged handprints, perverse messages, and crude cartoons written with whatever the author had had on hand. He ignored them as he grabbed with a shaky hand the equally unsteady balustrade and hoisted himself up the steps. On the landing above, a light hung from a fraying cord, the bulb stained and smoking, filling the stairwell with the smell of burning dust.
There was no sound from up there, only his breathless grunting and the shuffle and squelch of his saturated shoes on the steps.
Halfway up the stairs, a figure appeared on the landing, and stood for a moment looking down at him. It was a man, his angular face lined and haunted, his eyes like pools of oil, the sockets turned to shadowed craters by his position beneath the naked light. He held his hands together like a man about to pray.
“You too?” he said.
The old man did not reply, but, possessed of the absolute certainty that an affirmative response was in every way the correct one, nodded slightly.
The man’s passage down the stairs felt like a hollow breeze, his feet making not a sound on the steps, and then he was gone.
The old man took a breath and continued upward until his face was level with the landing and he could see the stranger’s footprints in the thick layer of dust on the floorboards. With gnarled, aching fingers, he reached the landing almost on all fours, and collapsed against the wall, his trembling body obscuring the salacious script tattooed upon the crumbling green paint.
Behind his eyes, veils were falling away. He did not want to be here, shouldn’t have come, but this was, for his purposes, exactly where he needed to be. He thought of his wife sitting quietly at home, not blind but refusing to see him, refusing to hear him. Waiting. And now, finally, he knew what it was she was waiting for too.
To his right, a door stood slightly ajar, the light within flickering and casting strange shapes against the visible sliver of wall. A vintage song he could not place played on an old radio and reached him through curtains of billowing static. He slid along the wall until he was at the door, reached shaking fingers toward the wood, and gently prodded it further open. The hinges were mute; the door opened liquidly. He looked down at the threshold, at the long deep scratches in the wood, and knew if he was to change his mind about how this night would end, he would have to do it now.
Then, in an instant, the choice, assuming it had ever really been his, was removed. There came a shuffling scraping sound. Down on the floor, just inside the door, an ornate mahogany box was shoved into view. Behind it, a pale slim hand with chipped red fingernails withdrew, leaving him paralyzed with terror. He knew the owner of that hand; he had always known her.
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
With great difficulty, he reached down and retrieved the box, fearful that the woman’s hand would shoot out and latch onto his wrist. But she did not interfere, and there was no need. They were beyond that now.
He cradled the box, took a moment to wipe away the patina of dust with the heel of his hand, and moved his fingers to the latch. He unclasped it, then paused, suddenly possessed of a soul-shredding horror that almost took the legs out from under him. He staggered, the wall to his right the only thing that prevented his fall. Paint chips sprinkled to the floor. He could not breathe, could not keep his grip on the box, but was terrified to let it fall. Instead, he allowed himself to slide down the wall until he was sitting with his back to it and set the box down beside him. He closed his eyes only briefly, long enough to see dark red notes pulsing in the darkness there, and when he opened them again, she was standing before him, as he knew she would be.
This was the ending.
Amusement had characterized her strange face the night he had met her, and it was no different now. He did not recall, however, her skin being translucent enough to see the blue worms of her veins through it, or her eyes being quite so dark, her hair so dead, but then the years here had cloaked his mind in verdigris, and clearly if anything was absent from this place, it was the notion of beauty.
She said nothing, just stared down at him. Like her skin, the gown she wore was sheer enough to allow him to see what there was to see beneath it, but he had no desire to look. It was hard enough to look upon her face, with its queer smile and eyes that swam with malevolent cheer.
Once upon a time he had sought this woman out, willfully departed The Land of Sunshine to be with her, and with a few ropes and a carving knife, she had condemned him to The Land of Darkness, where he existed still. The answers and the memories had come slowly, but he had found them now, and felt a small pulse of satisfaction that he had been right all along in knowing something had been taken from him, and that she had been willing to give it back.
An eternity passed beneath her silent attention, until abruptly, and with a wider smile than he had seen thus far, one that tore the corners of her mouth and almost split her face in half, she leaned over and shoved her face into his, the sparks in her eyes burning coals in a dying fire, and she spoke two words on a breath of ashes.
“Go, lover.”
Only when she was gone, the shadows on the wall revealing her orgiastic gyrations somewhere inside that room, the taste of ash on his tongue, did he get to his feet. The pain in his knees and hands was not nearly as bad as before. It had migrated to his chest and head. Like a drunken man, he staggered down the stairs, the memory of her burning eyes scalding his mind.
A short forever and he was outside on the street again, and alone. He was gratified at least to see that the rain had stopped.
His shadow vanished as the light behind him went out.
Without a look back at the building in which he had lost everything that mattered, he went home.
✽✽✽
She was not awake when he entered the bedroom, and for this he was relieved. There was no reason to think that she would feel compelled to speak to him ever again or accept the words he offered as truth. But now there was an element of hope, the possibility of maybe. Resolution was a myth. Such a thing could never exist here. The best he could expect was some small degree of understanding, but maybe even that was preposterous.
Exhausted, he slipped out of his wet shoes and carefully lowered himself down onto the bed, where he sat for some indeterminate amount of time, long enough to see the sun not rise and the sky not lighten from anything other than permanent dark.
On his lap was the box, the clasp undone.
He thought again of the sign and remembered. Remembered the other place, where the sun indeed rose and the sky knew color other than black, which was no color at all, only the absence of it, and he remembered the warmth of that sun on his face, the light in his wife’s eyes. He remembered knowing her love and filling her with his. There had been no shadows there, and he felt an ache at the loss of it because it was the only thing he could never get back.
Behind him, his wife stirred. He turned to look at her and saw that between the unkempt locks of her iron-gray hair, one blue eye regarded him coldly.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and handed her the box.
She accepted it, but did not open it.
He removed his shirt and slipped into bed beside her, his hands by his sides, his eyes on the cracks in the ceiling he had grown to fear would one day open up and swallow him.
At some point in the night, his wife’s fingers found the edges of the gaping cavity in his chest, but she did not replace what had in some other place and time been removed. Instead, she held the box close to her chest as if it were a child, and to him, that was just fine.
His heart belonged to her now, after all.
As he sank into sleep, he allowed himself the thought of a smile but did not allow it to reach his mouth. Even if he’d wanted to, he could not remember how.
No hope, perhaps, and no light, but some indefinable something in place of nothing.
For now, and forever, that would have to do.
