She spoke with her hands, illustrating the words her mouth revealed a half-second before she spoke them. Her hands were always ahead of her lips, even and especially when we laid together on top of rumpled sheets, with only the faraway moon for an observer.
She told a story: a wind-chapped, angry story about her last lover. He had marooned her in his boat at the marina. She'd woken to the sound of nothingness, a fuzzy heavy feeling in the air. The shadows under the benches and around the table were still, but seemed to breathe shallowly, as though her waking had caught them in the middle of some roundelay or caper. They waited for her lapse back into the soothing dark of sleep, to blink once and then yawn, and then curl back against the small pillow, nestling down and then, further down.
She didn't know at the time that he'd left her. The pocket of space behind each of her curves still seemed filled with him as she slowly climbed back to wakefulness. Her head throbbed with the fury of hangover, like something thrashing around in deep water, gasping for breath. Sharp, short bursts of electricity jabbed into the back of her neck, snaking up and around her head and invading her inner ear. This is what woke her up, what immediately forced her outstretched hand to seek his frame out - his big, broad frame, and - upon questing - found nothing.
Panic set in the way it always will, first like a fog and then like a fire. Frostbitten with it, she cast her gaze around the room. The immediate litany of locations fluttered through her head: ... bathroom, abovedecks ... She was half-dressed, and suddenly, acutely, felt her nakedness like a shame. Cheeks burning and eyes swimming in their shallows, she clambered into her pants and pulled the curtain of her hair back across her forehead. She called out his name, and heard it sink, forlornly, into the quicksand of silence.
That was the first time he'd left her. The second time, she began, was even worse ...
But the thunder abbreviated her telling, as her eyes slanted towards the window and the lightning's sky-grimace. She made the same motion: pulled her hair across her forehead, fear congealing in her eyes.
A month later, she, too, disappeared. It wasn't an entirely unknown phenomenon: this town had a habit of suddenly casting someone off, hurling them like a rider from the back of an angry bronco. A tear was shed, drinks were clinked together, and then the space at the bar where she sat was healed over like the space over an abscess in the mouth. It would be another number of months before she would be fondly remembered (a passing anecdote) and the feather of emotion and loss would tickle their sopping hearts.
One night, her last lover shambled in.
It was raining, though the day had been sunlit. The wind teased the oncoming storm like a prize on a string, blown first this way and then that, just out of reach. The smell in the air was of fish and gulls, and stale cigarette smoke.
He pushed his way through slant-wise. If he had stood up straight, he would have been barred progress by some invisible wall, would have had to lean against it every step of the way, pressing forward like a doomed mime.
One barfly leaned over and whispered to another, voice craggy with cynicism. It's him again.
His eyes were wild and his hair was matted down over his brow, as though he had been swimming. The scattering of patrons on their stools slowly swiveled their heads to watch his passage, like blinking, insensate seals sunning themselves on sea-slick rocks watching a freighter steam by. The bar glittered like the ocean beneath their elbows.
'Can I help you?' The bartender knew him, knew his glazed-over face and his glazed-over eyes. He was tolerated, though almost always politely asked to leave after one bottle of beer.
'Where's she.'
'I'm sorry?' The bartender blinked, though tilted his head to one side, as if examining an unknown variable in a math equation.
'Where's she.'
'I don't understand.'
'Yes. You do. She.'
'Look, man. You're obviously drunk. I think you should leave.'
He stubbornly shook his shaggy head, like a beast furrowing the soil, head lowered. He gnashed his teeth and listed from side to side. 'Not till. Her.'
They two were thrown into a momentary battle of wills, locked eyes, until the bartender chuckled and shook his head. 'I don't think you want me to call the police.'
He turned then, almost falling over onto one of the stools, causing a yelp of surprise to emit from the occupant, and finally pitched himself out of the bar, slamming the crash-bar hard with the heels of his hands as he went. The door gave a shrill whinny of alarm, but allowed his egress.
And that was the last time any of them saw him, either.
It wasn't that he, too, vanished into the particulate air, but rather that they all did. The Friday afternoon crowd. One by one, over the following weeks, in a staggered formation, until one day the morning lasted until the late afternoon with no one astride their seats. At two minutes til four, he entered, meaty hands manicured and hair slicked back from his clean-shaven face. Dried blood pocked the underside of his chin from where the dull razor had nicked the wriggling, subdermal capillaries. His left eye gleamed with a virulent sheen, as though someone had embedded a diamond deep within the mine-black of his pupil. He nearly swaggered.
The bartender raised an eyebrow as he walked in. 'Can I help you?'
'No.' The man sat down at the bar, directly in the middle of the empty barstools. One free hand moved carefully over his hair, as if cautious of any disturbance. This hand motion followed down his front, adjusting his dark tie somewhat absently, before coming to rest like a malformed, fleshy bird perching on the bar. 'You didn't even try to help last time.'
'I'm not sure what you mean,' he said, tilting his head to one side in the same manner as a dog does, upon hearing a sound whose origin he cannot determine.
'She disappeared.'
'People have a habit of doing that in this city,' the bartender replied, and went on to polish another glass that didn't need polishing.
'I know that,' the man growled, and his hand formed a fist.
'If you're not going to have a drink, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.'
'Fine. Gimme a scotch.'
'Which one?'
The man glared at him balefully, one eye squinted near-shut, the other glittering, malevolent, quasar-like. 'Whichever. The cheapest.'
The bartender turned, sizing up the man. He'd ordinarily turn him down, but something had changed. 'Fine. Neat, or rocks?'
'Neat.' A wolfish grin, as if on springs, rent the bottom half of his face.
Outside, the wind picked up, and slapped the awnings rudely with its big invisible hand.
The glass, redolent of antiseptic, slid suddenly in front of him, the liquid inside slopping from side to side. 'Quiet in here today,' the man said suddenly, a trace of amusement lingering on the words like scurf from the breakers.
'One of those days,' the bartender said, shrugging.
'One of those days,' echoed the man, and toasted the thin air with his glass.
A week later, the bartender disappeared, and someone new slid into his place like a picture in a frame. This one, a bit stockier, paunchier, balding at the edges, and not just around the head. He seemed worn down by the eraser of the world, as though by some miraculous coincidence he had escaped being completely folded down and compacted into a ball by shrugging through life as quietly as possible. He had never had a woman, never had a mother or a father, never even had a new pair of pants. He was colorless, his body like a pause between empty space and empty space. When people ran into him on the street - as would often happen - they simply bumped around him like the waters of stream encountering a rock. People eddied around him.
Perhaps it was no coincidence that his name was Eddy, or at least, that was the name the orphanage had given him. When he was fifteen, he asked who his mother had been, and his case-worker (he was #999178-1) had (somewhat rudely) told him that she was a crackwhore who gave birth to him in an alley and that the only reason he'd survived was because his incessant squalling kept a tenant in the apartment complex above from fornicating effectively. Even as a baby, he would reflect ruefully, he would prevent those around him from having sex. He had lived an uncommonly long life for a human prophylactic, but felt just as discarded as a French letter.
He had come by this job in a somewhat haphazard fashion. Most of the time, you would imagine a bartender should be friendly and personable, ready and willing to lend a sympathetic ear. Eddy ruminated he would only be lending a pathetic ear, having the prefix truncated by his sad-sack demeanor.
It had been the pram's fault, really. Rolling, racketing down the hill. The mother's blank, terror-taut face as it relinquished itself from her grasp and went speeding by. He had watched it, uncaring for a brief moment, more thrilled by the proximity of disaster than by the prospect of rescue. It wasn't until he heard the thin, piteous wail of the baby that he was galvanized. A thread of electricity snaked through him, starting in the soles of his feet and rioting up to the stem of his brain and causing sparks behind his eyes. Before he was fully aware of what he was doing, he was to his feet and dashing, somewhat lumberingly, after the carriage. Just as it was about to smash into a post-office box, he snatched the handle and yanked it backwards, causing he himself to fall to his buttocks and exhale loudly in the process. The baby within set up an even more piteous howl, somehow seeming louder now that the forward motion had ceased.
She was suddenly behind him, tear-tracks on her face like snail's footsteps. She gabbled out her apologies, her remonstrances, her heartfelt thank-yous, all the while pumping his hand up and down - even from his awkward, sprawled position. He slowly got to his feet and stared down into the carriage, ignoring the mother.
The child had uncannily blue eyes. That's what he'd remember, he thought to himself, extending a finger down to the earnest, pink-whorled face. He brushed the back of his knuckle against the infant's cheek, who immediately went quiescent and stared up at him in awe. That, he thought with some satisfaction, is how you should treat your rescuer. Like God.
The mother was the proprietress of the bar. Her name was Judy, and she needed a replacement, and he needed a job, and so one piece fit with the next, and the puzzle was complete. He showed up the next day, donned the apron and bowtie, and begin fastidiously polishing the glasses like his pre-decessor had and, no doubt, much like his successor would. In a city such as this, such thoughts were not only commonplace, but also necessary. He knew where his last will & testament was.
Even certain apartment complexes would come equipped with small glass enclosures, for the storing of such documents, labelled, rather comically,
BREAK IN CASE OF DISAPPEARANCE
Eddy didn't have that luxury. He lived in a run-down, shabby apartment building ruled over by a thundercloud of a woman, as egregiously nosy as she was conversationally inept. Continually followed around by a brood of gaggling children, she would accost him on the stairs as he drooped home from another shift at the bar, fistfuls of grubby tip-money shoved into his pockets. 'Rent's due in one week,' she'd remind him, underchin wobbling with gobbets of fat about ready to drip off and splatter on the warped floorboards. He rather thought she was so full of bile that the fat-gobbet would eat away at the wood and sizzle through the to the third floor landing, the second, and eventually on down into the concrete of the basement, where it would eat at itself relentlessly until only a small, shaded stain would remain - for years to come, even after the rest of her body's inevitable disappearance.
And what do we, any of us, leave behind, after we've gone?
The question curled around itself like an ingratiating cat, tail tickling the stem of his brain. He felt suddenly, disgustingly fat, and climbed the stairs all the more quickly. Once within, he sneered at the air and bared his teeth like an incensed wildcat.
Experimentally, he snarled, and then, feeling foolish, grimaced, made a moue with one hand, and sank into his easy-chair.
The night would be long, longer than any day, and not even the rumble of (yet another) approaching thunderstorm would provide him with a much-needed frisson of excitement. He closed his eyes and imagined that he had a dog - heard the familiar panting and click-click-schuss of nails and paws on the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Felt the corrugated rupp of tongue against his cheek. Maybe tomorrow, Eddy thought to himself, he'd get to the gym. Stop smoking. Take up drinking. Maybe tomorrow he'd vanish into the particulate air, just like all the rest of them.
His last thoughts before he tumbled into the yaw of sleep: wondering whether or not the police station still had a 'missing persons' department, or if such things were now superfluous, if people just had grown accustomed to suddenly losing people - strangers, their loved ones, even celebrities wiped right off of the television screen ...
How the ragged fall apart. Something just tugs at the threads dangling from the edges of a person, a great unknown something with dextrous fingers.
Eddy, back on the job, behind the deserted bar, humming along with Sarah Vaughn's muffled voice, percolating from the old and dingy speakers tucked in their crannies behind the bar. His thoughts swirl around the inside of his head. One customer, so far, today: a fecund, broad-lipped young woman who ordered a Cosmopolitan. He made it a little too strong on purpose, hoping she would unlock herself to him and spill out secrets. He wanted to hear a secret today. Wanted to break a promise to someone. Wanted, above all, to feel human.
'So, when do you think you'll disappear?' she asked, trailing her finger over the rim of the martini glass. Her expression had gone from quiet to dour, and her hands, once tremulous, had stilled.
This was not the question he had wanted, but, in keeping with his profession, he shrugged and pointed at the clock. 'Quarter to nine,' he quipped.
She stared at him, uncomprehending.
'When I get off work,' he supplied.
She disapproved, with both lips. 'Not what I meant.'
'Just trying to lighten the mood, miss.'
'My mood doesn't need lightening.'
'My mood always needs lightning,' he mis-heard, perhaps on purpose.
Her lips only tightened. No laughter seeped through that ossified crack in her face. She downed the rest of her drink and stared at it for a long moment, as if willing it to refill of its own accord.
'Another?'
She shook her head, from side to side, slowly at first, as if unsure. Then, once more, and definitively. She'd already paid, but she made no motion to stand. Eddy watched her, and then returned to polishing the glasses, to wiping the bar, to standing just to one side.
She rested her head in one hand, neck arcing west as if waiting for a monster to divest her of her blood-supply. She looked blankly into the air, at nothing in particular, and certainly not at Eddy.
He was afraid, for a brief moment, that he'd turned invisible - somehow become even more colorless, faded. Then, abruptly, a shocking bleat of noise issued from his mouth. The woman startled, her elbow jostling the empty martini glass, which toppled to one side and fell with a loud report against the bar.
'I'm sorry,' he apologized awkwardly. 'I was afraid I'd disappeared.'
'You're a weird one,' she accused. 'Have a good day.'
And with that, she gathered herself around herself like a thick fog and vanished out the door.
'Yes, I know,' Eddy murmured, haplessly, to himself and to no one at all. To the ghosts of those long gone. Aiming his words up; through the low, dim ceiling, piercing the rain-heavy clouds, and finally, galloping toward the petulant, eternal sizzle of the sun.
