Epilogos

Sylvie doesn’t come round so much anymore. Winter, sometimes; summer, rarely. Last I heard, she was having a baby.

I thought I’d miss her, but I don’t. I don’t have the time. Things at the shop are busier for me than they’ve ever been, what with being away half the week, touring the markets and the auctions, going farther and farther afield to plumb the hidden troves. Then back to the attic to sort through the haul, to clean and price and catalog. There’s no end to the bedlam, never any shortage of disarray. But it gives me a good feeling to know that, in at least this one corner of the world, I can bring some semblance of order to what would otherwise be chaos.

I haven’t trained since that time in the bathroom, not now that the middle fingers of my left hand no longer do what I tell them. The training I do miss. But I’ve found other ways to redirect that pent-up energy, when my scars start to sing and my whole body crackles with muffled static. Now, I run. Out past the edge of town, away from the highway and the train track that splits the mountain like a sutured wound; out past the lake and the straggle of weatherboards along the ridgeline; out to where the trees thin and the ground drops away and the forested wilderness stretches on forever, fading into a blue haze where it meets the horizon. My feet pound the track, heart aflame in its cage of meat and bone.

I don’t think back often to that night, but sometimes there are flashes. I’ll be cleaning a ship in a bottle, or pricing silver candelabra, and it’s as though I’m back in the smoke-filled bathroom. I’ll remember a face, one of the strangers who crowded around me as I lay on the floor, remember them clearer than I ever saw them at the time. Sometimes a man with a moustache. Sometimes a woman with a bonnet. Sometimes faces I don’t recognize, but can picture clear as day, limned in coiling black smoke. But then I’ll come back, to the attic and the object in my hands, and it’ll be just whatever it is right now, here, with none of that other stuff. Just a cigarette box, or a napkin ring, or a soapstone figurine.

I do wonder sometimes about what I saw, there in that halfway place of black smoke and shadow. I wonder about Sylvie, the faceless Sylvie from beyond the bathroom—how could she be both there and here? In both places broken. Nowhere her true and complete self.

Sylvie never called them ghosts, but that’s what they are. Though I can’t see them, sometimes the attic feels close, crowded with all that forgotten history, the weight of all those unremembered lives cooped up within each keepsake and memento. On the bad days it hems me in, the pressure of all that latent meaning; it’s invisible to me, yet I still feel it, heavy as a storm that won’t break.

On the good days, it’s not them I feel but her—neither the Sylvie who left to marry Dane, nor the Sylvie of that other place, but my Sylvie, the perfect Sylvie of my memory. Those are the days when the attic is dark and moribund and rain pelts the skylight, drumming at the shingles, loudly overflowing the broken gutter. On those days, I forget my chores, leave Christophe tinkering in the shop below. I lay back on the cracked leather couch and let the sadness rise within me like a flood. My flesh tingles and my scars hum, a chorus that sings in ragged harmony of the true ghost of Sylvie and the wound in my heart. It is a melancholy song, and beautiful, of the ghost that lives forever in the wound forever open; the wound that never heals because it is not of the body.