Eternity and Other Stories Read online

  ETERNITY AND OTHER STORIES

  Published by

  Thunder’s Mouth Press

  An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Inc.

  245 West 17th St., 11th Floor

  New York, NY 10011

  Copyright © 2005 by Lucius Shepard

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 1-56025-662-1

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Book design by Jamie McNeely

  Printed in the United States

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  To Deborah

  CONTENTS

  Only Partly Here

  A Walk in the Garden

  Crocodile Rock

  Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?

  The Drive-In Puerto Rico

  Jailwise

  Eternity and Afterward

  ONLY PARTLY HERE

  There are legends in the pit. Phantoms and apparitions. The men who work at Ground Zero joke about them, but their laughter is nervous and wired. Bobby doesn’t believe the stories, yet he’s prepared to believe something weird might happen. The place feels so empty. Like even the ghosts are gone. All that sudden vacancy, who knows what might have entered in? Two nights ago on the graveyard shift, some guy claimed he saw a faceless figure wearing a black spiky headdress standing near the pit wall. The job breaks everybody down. Marriages are falling apart. People keep losing it one way or another. Fights, freak-outs, fits of weeping. It’s the smell of burning metal that seeps up from the earth, the ceremonial stillness of the workers after they uncover a body, the whispers that come when there is no wind. It’s the things you find. The week before, scraping at the rubble with a hoe, like an archaeologist investigating a buried temple, Bobby spotted a woman’s shoe sticking up out of the ground. A perfect shoe, so pretty and sleek and lustrous. Covered in blue silk. Then he reached for it and realized that it wasn’t stuck—it was only half a shoe, with delicate scorching along the ripped edge. Now sometimes when he closes his eyes he sees the shoe. He’s glad he isn’t married. He doesn’t think he has much to bring to a relationship.

  That evening Bobby’s taking his dinner break, perched on a girder at the edge of the pit along with Mazurek and Pineo, when they switch on the lights. They all hate how the pit looks in the lights. It’s an outtake from The X-Files—the excavation of an alien ship under hot white lamps smoking from the cold; the shard left from the framework of the north tower glittering silver and strange, like the wreckage of a cosmic machine. The three men remain silent for a bit, then Mazurek goes back to bitching about Jason Giambi signing with the Yankees. “You catch the interview he did with Werner Wolf? He’s a moron! First time the crowd gets on him, it’s gonna be like when you yell at a dog. The guy’s gonna fucking crumble.” Pineo disagrees, and Mazurek asks Bobby what he thinks.

  “Bobby don’t give a shit about baseball,” says Pineo. “My boy’s a Jets fan.”

  Mazurek, a thick-necked, fiftyish man whose face appears to be fashioned of interlocking squares of pale muscle, says, “The Jets…fuck!”

  “They’re playoff bound,” says Bobby cheerfully.

  Mazurek crumples the wax paper his sandwich was folded in. “They gonna drop dead in the first round like always.”

  “It’s more interesting than being a Yankee fan,” says Bobby. “The Yankees are too corporate to be interesting.”

  “‘Too corporate to be interesting’?” Mazurek stares. “You really are a geek, y’know that?”

  “That’s me. The geek.”

  “Whyn’t you go the fuck back to school, boy? Fuck you doing here, anyway?”

  “Take it easy, Carl! Chill!” Pineo—nervous, thin, lively, curly black hair spilling from beneath his hard hat—puts a hand on Mazurek’s arm, and Mazurek knocks it aside. Anger tightens his leathery skin; the creases in his neck show white. “What’s it with you? You taking notes for your fucking thesis?” he asks Bobby. “Playing tourist?”

  Bobby looks down at the apple in his hand—it seems too shiny to be edible. “Just cleaning up is all. You know.”

  Mazurek’s eyes dart to the side, then he lowers his head and gives it a savage shake. “Okay,” he says in a subdued voice. “Yeah…fuck. Okay.”

  • • •

  Midnight, after the shift ends, they walk over to the Blue Lady. Bobby doesn’t altogether understand why the three of them continue to hang out there. Maybe because they once went to the bar after work and it felt pretty good, so they return every night in hopes of having it feel that good again. You can’t head straight home; you have to decompress. Mazurek’s wife gives him constant shit about the practice—she calls the bar and screams over the phone. Pineo just split with his girlfriend. The guy with whom Bobby shares an apartment grins when he sees him, but the grin is anxious—like he’s afraid Bobby is bringing back some contagion from the pit. Which maybe he is. The first time he went to Ground Zero, he came home with a cough and a touch of fever, and he recalls thinking that the place was responsible. Now, though, either he’s immune or else he’s sick all the time and doesn’t notice.

  Two hookers at a table by the door check them out as they enter, then go back to reading the Post. Roman the barman, gray-haired and thick-waisted, orders his face into respectful lines, says, “Hey, guys!” and sets them up with beers and shots. When they started coming in he treated them with almost religious deference, until Mazurek yelled at him, saying he didn’t want to hear that hero crap while he was trying to unwind—he got enough of it from the fuckass jocks and movie stars who visit Ground Zero to have their pictures taken. Though angry, he was far more articulate than usual in his demand for normal treatment, and this caused Bobby to speculate that if Mazurek were transported thousands of miles from the pit and not just a few blocks, his IQ would increase exponentially.

  The slim brunette in the business suit is down at the end of the bar again, sitting beneath the blue neon silhouette of a dancing woman. She’s been coming in every night for about a week. Late twenties. Hair styled short, an expensive kind of punky look. Fashion model hair. Eyebrows thick and slanted, like accents grâve. Sharp-featured, on the brittle side of pretty, or maybe she’s not that pretty, maybe she is so well-dressed, her makeup done so skillfully, that the effect is of a businesslike prettiness, of prettiness reined in by the magic of brush and multiple applicators, and beneath this artwork she is, in actuality, rather plain. Nice body, though. Trim and well tended. She wears the same expression of stony neutrality that Bobby sees every morning on the faces of the women who charge up from under the earth, disgorged from the D train, prepared to resist Manhattan for another day. Guys will approach her, assuming she’s a hooker doing a kind of Hitler office bitch thing in order to attract men searching for a woman they can use and abuse as a surrogate for one who makes their life hell every day from nine to five, and she will say something to them and they will immediately walk away. Bobby and Pineo always try to guess what she says. That night, after a couple of shots, Bobby goes over and sits beside her. She smells expensive. Her perfume like the essence of some exotic flower or fruit he’s only seen in magazine pictures.

  “I’ve just been to a funeral,” she says wearily, staring into her drink. “So, please…Okay?”

  “That what you tell everybody?” he
asks. “All the guys who hit on you?”

  A fretful line cuts her brow. “Please!”

  “No, really. I’ll go. All I want to know…that what you always say?”

  She makes no response.

  “It is,” he says. “Isn’t it?”

  “It’s not entirely a lie.” Her eyes are spooky, the dark rims of the pale irises extraordinarily well-defined. “It’s intended as a lie, but it’s true in a way.”

  “But that’s what you say, right? To everybody?”

  “This is why you came over? You’re not hitting on me?”

  “No, I…I mean, maybe…I thought…”

  “So what you’re saying, you weren’t intending to hit on me. You wanted to know what I say to men when they come over. But now you’re not certain of your intent? Maybe you were deceiving yourself as to your motives? Or maybe now you sense I might be receptive, you’ll take the opportunity to hit on me, though that wasn’t your initial intent. Does that about sum it up?”

  “I suppose,” he says.

  She gives him a cautious look. “Could you be brilliant? Could your clumsy delivery be designed to engage me?”

  “I’ll go away, okay? But that’s what you said to them, right?”

  She points to the barman, who’s talking to Mazurek. “Roman tells me you work at Ground Zero.”

  The question unsettles Bobby, leads him to suspect that she’s a disaster groupie, looking for a taste of the pit, but he says, “Yeah.”

  “It’s really…” She does a little shivery shrug. “Strange.”

  “Strange. I guess that covers it.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to say. I can’t think of the right word to describe what it does to me.”

  “You been down in it?”

  “No, I can’t get any closer than here. I just can’t. But…” She makes a swirling gesture with her fingers. “You can feel it here. You might not notice, because you’re down there all the time. That’s why I come here. Everybody’s going on with their lives, but I’m not ready. I need to feel it. To understand it. You’re taking it away piece by piece, but the more you take away, it’s like you’re uncovering something else.”

  “Y’know, I don’t want to think about this now.” He gets to his feet. “But I guess I know why you want to.”

  “Probably it’s fucked up of me, huh?”

  “Yeah, probably,” says Bobby, and walks away.

  “She’s still looking at you, man,” Pineo says as Bobby settles beside him. “What you doing back here? You could be fucking that.”

  “She’s a freak,” Bobby tells him.

  “So she’s a freak! Even better!” Pineo turns to the other two men. “You believe this asshole? He could be fucking that bitch over there, yet here he sits.”

  Affecting a superior smile, Roman says, “You don’t fuck them, pal. They fuck you.”

  He nudges Mazurek’s arm as though seeking confirmation from a peer, a man of experience like himself, and Mazurek, gazing at his grungy reflection in the mirror behind the bar, says distractedly, weakly, “I could use another shot.”

  • • •

  The following afternoon Bobby unearths a disk of hard black rubber from beneath some cement debris. It’s four inches across, thicker at the center than at the edges, shaped like a little UFO. Try as he might, he can think of no possible purpose it might serve, and he wonders if it had something to do with the fall of the towers. Perhaps there is a black seed like this at the heart of every disaster. He shows it to Pineo, asks his opinion, and Pineo, as expected, says, “Fuck, I don’t know. Part of a machine.” Bobby knows Pineo is right. The disk is a widget, one of those undistinguished yet indispensable objects without which elevators will not rise or refrigerators will not cool; but there are no marks on it, no holes or grooves to indicate that it fits inside a machine. He imagines it whirling inside a cone of blue radiance, registering some inexplicable process.

  He thinks about the disk all evening, assigning it various values. It is the irreducible distillate of the event, a perfectly formed residue. It is a wicked sacred object that belonged to a financier, now deceased, and its ritual function is understood by only three other men on the planet. It is a beacon left by time-traveling tourists that allows them to home in on the exact place and moment of the terrorist attack. It is the petrified eye of God. He intends to take the disk back to his apartment and put it next to the half shoe and all the rest of the items he has collected in the pit. But that night when he enters the Blue Lady and sees the brunette at the end of the bar, on impulse he goes over and drops the disk on the counter next to her elbow.

  “Brought you something,” he says.

  She glances at it, pokes it with a forefinger and sets it wobbling. “What is it?”

  He shrugs. “Just something I found.”

  “At Ground Zero?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She pushes the disk away. “Didn’t I make myself plain last night?”

  Bobby says, “Yeah…sure,” but isn’t sure he grasps her meaning.

  “I want to understand what happened…what’s happening now,” she says. “I want what’s mine, you know. I want to understand exactly what it’s done to me. I need to understand it. I’m not into souvenirs.”

  “Okay,” Bobby says.

  “‘Okay.’” She says this mockingly. “God, what’s wrong with you? It’s like you’re on medication!”

  A Sinatra song, “All Or Nothing At All,” flows from the jukebox—a soothing musical syrup that overwhelms the chatter of hookers and drunks and commentary from the TV mounted behind the bar, which is showing chunks of Afghanistan blowing up into clouds of brown smoke. The crawl running at the bottom of the screen testifies that the estimate of the death toll at Ground Zero has been reduced to just below five thousand; the amount of debris removed from the pit now exceeds one million tons. The numbers seem meaningless, interchangeable. A million lives, five thousand tons. A ludicrous score that measures no real result.

  “I’m sorry,” the brunette says. “I know it must take a toll, doing what you do. I’m impatient with everyone these days.”

  She stirs her drink with a plastic stick whose handle duplicates the image of the neon dancer. In all her artfully composed face, a mask of foundation and blush and liner, her eyes are the only sign of vitality, of feminine potential.

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  She glances up sharply. “I’m too old for you.”

  “How old are you? I’m twenty-three.”

  “It doesn’t matter how old you are…how old I am. I’m much older than you in my head. Can’t you tell? Can’t you feel the difference? If I was twenty-three, I’d still be too old for you.”

  “I just want to know your name.”

  “Alicia.” She enunciates the name with a cool overstated precision that makes him think of a saleswoman revealing a price she knows her customer cannot afford.

  “Bobby,” he says. “I’m in grad school at Columbia. But I’m taking a year off.”

  “This is ridiculous!” she says angrily. “Unbelievably ridiculous…totally ridiculous! Why are you doing this?”

  “I want to understand what’s going on with you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, I just do. Whatever it is you come to understand, I want to understand it, too. Who knows. Maybe us talking is part of what you need to understand.”

  “Good Lord!” She casts her eyes to the ceiling. “You’re a romantic!”

  “You still think I’m trying to hustle you?”

  “If it was anyone else, I’d say yes. But you…I don’t believe you have a clue.”

  “And you do? Sitting here every night. Telling guys you just got back from a funeral. Grieving about something you can’t even say what it is.”

  She twitches her head away, a gesture he interprets as the avoidance of impulse, a sudden clamping down, and he also relates it to how he sometimes reacts on the subway when a girl he’s been look
ing at catches his eye and he pretends to be looking at something else. After a long silence she says, “Were not going to be having sex. I want you to be clear on that.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s your fall back position, is it? ‘Okay’?”

  “Whatever.”

  “‘Whatever.’” She curls her fingers around her glass, but does not drink. “Well, we’ve probably had enough mutual understanding for one night, don’t you think?”

  Bobby pockets the rubber disk, preparing to leave. “What do you do for a living?”

  An exasperated sigh. “I work in a brokerage. Now can we take a break? Please?”

  “I gotta go home anyway,” Bobby says.

  • • •

  The rubber disk takes its place in Bobby’s top dresser drawer, resting between the blue half shoe and a melted glob of metal that may have done duty as a cuff link, joining a larger company of remnants—scraps of silk and worsted and striped cotton; a flattened fountain pen; a few inches of brown leather hanging from a misshapen buckle; a hinged pin once attached to a brooch. Looking at them breeds a queer vacancy in his chest, as if their few ounces of reality cancel out some equivalent portion of his own. It’s the shoe, mostly, that wounds him. An object so powerful in its interrupted grace, sometimes he’s afraid to touch it.

  After his shower he lies down in the dark of his bedroom and thinks of Alicia. Pictures her handling packets of bills bound with paper wrappers. Even her name sounds like currency, a riffling of crisp new banknotes. He wonders what he’s doing with her. She’s not his type at all, but maybe she was right, maybe he’s deceiving himself about his motives. He conjures up the images of the girls he’s been with. Soft and sweet and ultra feminine. Yet he finds Alicia’s sharp edges and severity attractive. Could be he’s looking for a little variety. Or maybe like so many people in the city, like lab rats stoned on coke and electricity, his circuits are scrambled and his brain is sending out irrational messages. He wants to talk to her, though. That much he’s certain of—he wants to unburden himself. Tales of the pit. His drawer full of relics. He wants to explain that they’re not souvenirs. They are the pins upon which he hangs whatever it is he has to leave behind each morning when he goes to work. They are proof of something he once thought a profound abstraction, something too elusive to frame in words, but has come to realize is no more than the fact of his survival. This fact, he tells himself, might be all that Alicia needs to understand.