The Song is You (2009) Page 24

  Toshiro, his face much changed by his new sleeping habits, returned to his village under a false name, feigning sleep for thirty seconds every ninety. He learned of his beloved’s marriage to a nasty butcher, a loveless match, though with fully unsynchronized sleep, pleasing the traditionalist parents. The butcher was also a thief. Having weighed out an order, he would, when his customers fell asleep, wrap up a lighter package, charging them for the amount they saw before losing consciousness. (Although–Julian’s father had to give him his due—some of his customers often took meat off the scale themselves, hiding it in their bags when the butcher fell asleep.)

  The vengeful hero spied from the shadows as the butcher scolded his miserable wife, beat her until he fell asleep, then, waking, waited for her to wake up so he could continue the beating where he’d left off. Watching from behind a hanging pig carcass, Toshiro waited until the villain nodded off. Then he revealed himself, kissed the beloved hand, and hung his rival by his coat from a meat hook, leaving before the butcher awoke, letting the cur feel the presence of a devil, before returning to his hiding place in the forest where he caught his requisite eight hours of z‘s.

  “He’s going to win her back and teach her to sleep like him,” Julian recalled sleepily predicting, as he now fell asleep in 1A.

  One night, in the woods, in the midst of his long slumber, Toshiro awoke to find his beloved standing over him, sobbing silently. She had, with great difficulty, over several nights, followed him discreetly to his nesting area, one leg of the journey each night, since he was able to move so much more steadily. “I thought you were dead,” she moaned.

  “No, only wandering the countryside, learning, planning to return for you, and now I have.”

  “No! Not then, now. You have been asleep for hours.” She spoke this last word with disgust and finality, and then she fell asleep. Thirty seconds later she spat it again: “Hours!”

  She began her slow return to the village and her butcher. She awoke ninety times en route, forest and stream, moon and sand, and each time Toshiro declared his love, entreated her to elope, vowed to teach her the long sleep. But her repulsion was too strong, and the ninety-first time, she awoke alone, and she praised her father’s wisdom in having prevented this nightmarish match.

  “She preferred the butcher?” young Julian had demanded.

  “Other people are not like you,” his father explained from the bedside. “Look, Julian: love is not sufficient. It never has been. Stories that claim otherwise are lies,” kindly instructed the man still weaving from his losses. “There’s always something after happily ever after.” (“He used to tell you that? When you were a kid?” Aidan later asked. “And you think that guy was not a sick, sad bastard?” “Of course he was,” Julian had said. “That’s easy. But you refuse to see the rest of what he was.”)

  As with all childhood nighttime serials, this one had no end. It fizzled out, Julian reading to himself, or his father seeing him off to sleep with bedtime chat about jazz or baseball, or just a good night called up the stairs from beside the stereo, amidst liniment and beer and drawings of inflatable women.

  The sleepers, Julian’s father confirmed years later in a hospital in Ohio, had been born in the Japanese hospital where he had swum in and out of morphine slumber, unable to hold on to consciousness for long, unable to drop very deeply into the turbulent narcotic sleep, while actual Japanese people kept themselves at a strange distance, visible only through soap-smeared windows, behind rakes and leaves, murmuring to one another beyond the iron fence, on the dirt path under the bare branches of the reticulated plane trees.

  Julian awoke in darkness, not at first certain where he was, unsure how long he’d been asleep. His iPod was dead, so he plugged his headphones in to the armrest. He listened to the audio channels and soon heard Cait, singing for him even as she slept forty rows behind him. The corporate parody of a DJ called her “an Irish angel trapped in the body of your best dreams” and played “Bleaker and Obliquer,” their song, savored in star-eyed darkness, a red strobe on a wing somewhere behind him keeping the beat against the velour sky and the passing time zones, and she sang him back to sleep.

  He woke again to the unnatural morning and the sizzle of a vitamin tablet hitting water. “You have some serious sinus clutter,” 1B reported. “You should get that looked at.” Outside, glassy river deltas, like cardiac vessels in a green cadaver, displayed shadows of clouds and the plane. The reflection in the window of Julian’s book stained ponds and fields of green squares with translucent murder victims and the Paris mosque. Lower, the plane’s shadow skewered Dublin’s cars and fleeing birds. Ribbons of cloud still stuck to the plane and streamed behind the wings as, with a squeal and hydraulic barking, the world was made real again. Julian donned his hood and super-fly eyewear, hurried to the door, and hid behind baggage carousels like Toshiro behind hanging pigs, watching her and waiting for their perfect moment.

  15

  THEY LANDED EARLY IN THE MORNING, but already distant objects had begun to ripple. He raced her to the hotel. Surprise me.

  Surprise me. He couldn’t go to her before her tour had even begun, he decided, so in Dublin he posted to her website, just after she left them, the address of every shop and pub and old friend she visited; the cathedral where she sat in late-afternoon half-light listening to the organist rehearse and animate the statues and pillars and glass; even the police station from which she extracted her drummer late at night—a still life of her in motion, a fond hello, wish-we-were-here, a breath of inspiration blown into her ear by an invisible muse. He traced the stations of her journey on a map of the city, drew her final path as an ornately twisting snake with her face, added a high-sheen apple in the serpent-Cait’s open jaws and a self-portrait, as dubious Adam, J.D. on his fig leaf, reaching hesitantly for the tempting fruit, his own Adam’s apple high in his throat. He scanned and e mailed it to her from the Morgan le Fay business center, but when it came time for her tour’s opening notes, her triumphant return to Ireland, he couldn’t walk into the club. He paced outside because the bar was too crowded, too ordinary, and the Adam and Eve drawing already seemed stale. He had wanted to do something to replenish them before they met, the perfect last step before they touched, something to replace the lost poem and postcard, snatched by Rachel, but the new drawing was embarrassing now, just an old gag. There was no point to any more delay, but he went back to his hotel room, and while she sang across town, he sat there like the painting of tree-wrapped Merlin above the TV or the wood-mounted marlin above his bed, listened, on his iPod’s travel throne, to her demo, felt he was a serious contender for the most ridiculous man on earth, effortlessly the most ridiculous in Ireland.

  Six hours later, the Smiths’ “London,” the Clash’s “London Calling,” and Lenny Kravitz’s “Mr. Cab Driver” played on his iPod until he fell asleep on the London cab’s hard leather. He dreamt of Carlton, casually conversational, dispensing wise advice, snapping his little fingers to something on his own mini, scarlet iPod. When Julian awoke, it was all he could do to avoid her. She was on the radio in the cab. The details of her London gig were on the posters lining the walls of a motorway sound barrier, where she peeped out at him again and again from behind a lowered Greek fisherman’s cap covering one eye. Her fame was expanding like a boiling ocean.

  And then she was standing at Reception with Ian and the rhythm section and a manager of some sort, a boisterous bald Cockney translating from band to concierge with urgent unnecessity, drum and guitar cases piled high on the crimson velour of the brass-arched luggage cart, the groovy bellboy all in black, service fashions trying to keep up with Bohemia. No, not here, not in a group, not in the morning, not in a lobby, not with this lighting, not until he’d showered, not without a blast of pure desire animating him like an organ in an empty church, not unless she just came to him like his mother came to his father in the hospital, indifferent to his leg.

  Julian retreated as far as he could within the sleek and
barren lobby, couldn’t find a traditional potted plant and so squatted instead behind a transparent divan to fish out his hat and hood and glasses, then hid behind a mirrored pillar and looked hopelessly at the lobby’s three mirrored walls, its mirrored elevator bank, the mirrors of the reception desk, trying to find some angle by which he would not be projected onto the surfaces in front of her. He despaired at the infinite reversed and double-reversed and triple-reversed versions of himself, multiplying in all directions.

  Some long time after her carnival entered two mirrored elevators and vanished, he, official and keyed, pushed 15 and stepped to the back. It stopped on 12. He knew enough to look down at once, his cap’s Yankees logo floating backward in the murk. She stepped in, white terrycloth robe turned up to her ears, hotel-cresty slippers at the ends of smooth legs. The mirror-black marble floor reflected her up to the knees before the view melted into cloudy warm suggestion. She touched the oblong SPA button and didn’t face the swaying man but toyed with her key behind her back, its black-diamond plastic with gold numbers dancing from hand to hand, back and forth, knuckle to knuckle, upside down and right side up, a digit here, inverted there.

  At 13 a little American boy in a Boston Red Sox cap entered with his father. The boy stared relentlessly at Julian’s head until he couldn’t keep it in any longer: “The Yankees suck.” His father hushed him, tried to smile at the New York fan stubbornly facing the floor. At 15 the doors opened, and Julian could not move, and she didn’t look behind her but only touched SPA again. An unlit indicator circle read REMAIN CALM. HELP IS ON THE WAY. But it didn’t light up, and Julian feared he would shout for her or bite through his cheeks or melt backward into the black mirror, leaving a vaporized Hiroshima shadow as the only evidence he’d ever existed. The father and son exited at 18. Now, now, now, now’s the time. His lips would no longer function. They knew, if he did not, that his touch would corrupt; she would, with his fingerprints steaming on her, erode. Any beginning would begin the end, even to steal a ticklish touch of that terrycloth would start killing them, a murder even if the cameras in the high corners didn’t notice. She floated off into the clatter of weight machines and clouds of eucalyptus-scented steam, and the doors closed, and Julian dropped all the way back to the lobby before he could rebound again to 15, his rolling suitcase handle dripping.

  He scolded himself in his room, slapped his own cheeks: How much of life could he spend aching? Aching is not a stable condition; it must resolve into something. The time had long since come to remove the poison thorn from his groin, wriggle free of the constricting past by scraping against new landscapes. He sat in 1529, thirty feet above her London home, and pictured himself rappeling from curtain to balustrade along knotted sheets, cutting his legs on the glass of her balcony door as he burst through, sputtering blood, unraveling DNA, fiber evidence, the shreds of his heart… and, never mind, she’s not there, have to take the elevator back upstairs, bleeding, call a nurse. Time zones swept back and forth across him. He struggled first to stay awake and then to stay asleep, like a Japanese butcher.

  How much of life can be spent aching? He woke, went out, wandered for a place to eat and get a little drunk and find a new way to charm, amuse, inspire, tempt O’Dwyer. He passed a playground. Its giant wooden ship—beached in sand halfway up its hull, its cannons able to shoot tennis balls in short arcs just past the bow, HMS WHIMSY on its side—was almost completely unmanned in the sporadic rain. On the swing suspended from the bowsprit, a too old girl, fifteen, was listlessly drifting, trying to recapture something she’d last seen here.

  He watched Cait sing that night at Liquide, a bigger place, a bigger crowd, bigger noise, London in the rain duly ready for her and, despite some of her fears, taking her as its own, not Dublin’s or New York’s, and London’s fearsomely bored critics purred and sighed, offered their tummies to her for rubbing. She’d never sung so beautifully. She amazed him, again, and he vowed to give her what she needed and wanted, to be who she wanted, and to begin whatever came next, melt himself down for that voice, that woman.

  16

  IN PARIS, he still hadn’t thought of how best to proceed, though he’d decided it couldn’t happen in Paris, when the concierge at l’Etoile Cachee handed him an envelope:

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  Apres la foule, toi seule.

  Apres la fete, ton souffle.

  Dans l’ombre, je te trouve.

  Apres la chaleur de la danse,

  Ta main, fraiche et seche,

  Pour prendre et surprendre.

  Apres le monde et ses monstres,

  L’amour, calme, calme, calme.

  –Jean Seurat, 1949

  Even with a dictionary and his high school French he still needed an online translation, and then he learned that she had decided for them: the rue Quincampoix, tonight. She decided. She had to, and he wouldn’t resist. He sat in the hotel lobby walking his finger along the map.

  He followed his map to the rue Quincampoix, a crooked medieval lane stuffy with neon and art galleries and smut and irritability. He walked it from end to end in the afternoon heat so he would know where to stand at midnight when she would slip away from her band and admirers at le Nid d’Araignee and come to the place she had chosen. At the top of the road their poem was mounted on the wall in relieved bronze.

  At the bottom of the road he noticed a second plaque—blue enamel with white letters. The coincidence was uncanny, unnerving, dream material:

  ICI A ETE ASSASSINE PAR LES NAZIS

  J. DONAHUE,

  LE FRANC-TIREUR ET PARTISAN IRLANDO-FRANCAIS,

  LE 23 AVRIL 1944.

  N‘OUBLIONS JAMAIS.

  His French was good enough. He stood, blinking, his hand half-lifted to touch the dust-dulled words she had discovered for him. At which end of the street did she expect him? She sent him to the poem, their fitting moment? Or she sent him the poem to guide him here, to learn of a namesake’s murder?

  He would not hear her sing tonight, wouldn’t even listen to her on the iPod but would await her without music, his ears as hungry for her as the rest of him. He ate alone and walked a spiral spun out from the top of the rue Quincampoix, walked past the building where his mother grew up, rode a boat up and down the black Seine while Cait was serenading her conquered city. The tour boat’s spotlights lit the river’s brick embankments, and the shadows of the skinny trees on the riverside walkway were projected against the walls of the higher promenades, and the swaying, branching shadows wandered down the walls as the boat pulled its lights down the river; the trees watched a film about trees that could move.

  The path he walked through Paris had not been entirely random. He had avoided the small hotel where he and Rachel had slept late for a week. He had turned his back when the boat passed the Eiffel Tower, and he had conjugated verbs out loud to mask the prerecorded narration in four languages of any site they’d shared. Paris had to be large enough to contain two separate, nonoverlapping love stories.

  Ideally, they should have selected somewhere he had no history at all, and he did consider skipping the appointment, somehow leaving word for her to find him in unknown Bucharest, unclaimed Berlin, wherever there were no competitive memories, but he didn’t have the energy or courage. The thought of touching her was now fixed like a window screen over everything he saw and did and bought and read and heard and tasted.

  The two women—one a figment of his past, the other a figment of his future—did battle for Paris. When the boat described something new to him—Napoleon’s battles, Richelieu’s manipulations, rash responses to a plague, the palace burnt by long-dried grievances set aflame by a rhetorical spark—he listened and tried to absorb it as part of his and Cait’s history. When the lights carried his eye too quickly to a spindly bridge where he’d kissed his new wife, or the department store’s awning shadows where they’d stolen shelter from another drizzle, he stuffed his ears with headphones like one of Odysseus’s sailors and turned his mind i
nstead to the street Cait had chosen, the poem in bronze.

  He returned early to the rue Quincampoix; she was probably still onstage. The street faded out below him at an obtuse angle, cut twice by other narrow roads. Too tight for modern life, still it blinked its reactions to the expanding world: GALERIE D’ART, DISQUES VINYLES, 24/24 SEXE. He touched the bottom edge of their plaque, another era’s rendezvous after music and crowds.

  He walked the length of the street a dozen times, imagining it gray and shadowed sixty years before, imagined an old film of himself meeting a long-pursued love in those days, the cool of her hand, the warmth of her breath so overwhelming after the world and its monsters.

  He prepared for all her approaches, from the north, by the poem, him caught unawares as she came straight from the club and her latest triumph, swimming to him from pool of light to pool of light. Or at the middle intersection, the terrace doors unfolding now, the shouting in Arabic, a bright bar open to the street, lined with hookah hoses. Or from the south, the dark end nearer the river, the peep-show club at the crossroad, him walking down to her, meeting at that eerie postcard from an unknown ancestor, sent to arrive at the most crucial moment of his life, as a warning or a blessing. He worried over spending too long at either end, missing her arrival, her thinking he’d rejected her, her departure.

  He compromised, sat at the hookah bar, smoked through a woven hose the dried fruit and tobacco, watching toward both hidden ends of the street while the bulky Arab owner who smelled of cumin-scented sweat warmly welcomed him and asked about New York, shared with Julian the secret that all the Jews who worked in the World Trade Center had stayed home that fateful morning, warned by their central authority.