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Rappelle-toi qu'entre les doigts, lune fond en poussière
I met ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lesser_celery for lunch in Harvard Square today. Given the sudden summer temperatures, it was perhaps not the best day to walk with a backpack to Central Square and back, but I am not really going to complain. I took pictures.
In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I offer "Drink Down," written in August 2005 and published that September in Not One of Us #34. It is the story I wrote because I was obsessed with PJ Harvey's "Yuri-G." Anne Briggs is also to blame, and the Dresden Dolls; 7300 words, for those who like the numbers up front. Enjoy!
Drink Down
I stuck them in real clean . . .
She's got me so mesmerized.
—PJ Harvey, "Yuri-G"
Down in the street, firecrackers were going off like flashbulbs, a staccato ghost of the echoes rolling back and forth between the skyscrapers as the sky exploded overhead. "Like that," Brace said, one hand raised to the gunfire spray of silver that ran above the skyline, electric tag art on the darkened air. Someone had propped the stairwell door open with a radio, static and cannons and triumphant brass spilt out over concrete flagstones still warm from the day's deep heat; her voice was slow, clear, in the spaces between fireworks, and Maddy hitched herself up onto her elbows to listen. "Bright. Sudden. I never felt what I'd held in my arms until it was gone. Yeah, I fucked the moon once. But he waxed and waned like all the rest."
Flares were sinking in green and smoky gold, drifting anemones of smoke. On her back like a stargazer, Brace folded her bare arms beneath her head: reflections glinted down the paneled windows of the offices across the street, angled dark into the skyline's stitchery of neon and steel; ran like the sheen on oil over the silver loops in her ears, the tarnished twist of bracelet around her wrist, the slender ring in her lip. Her hair was the color of heavy cream, pulled back hard from the dense and delicate lines of her face. Beside all that pale glitter, with her own face as speckled as a songbird's egg and her hair too light for cinnamon, too dull for red, Maddy felt absurdly earthbound: mortal counterpoised to myth. "At least," she said, lightly, grimly, "you still see him every night." Last year, she had watched the fireworks in Charles' arms, hers crossed on the cement wall that overlooked fourteen stories' drop down into the sodium-hazed street, his linked around her waist and she could lean her head back into the cradle of his collarbone. Last week, she could have tallied him on her fingers like the elements of a spell. His maple-sugar hair, fine as a small child's, that always looked as though he had just shuffled his hands through it, distracted and intense; his fingers stained from eating oranges, that he bit like apples from within peels half skinned back; his eyes were the color of lime leaves. The kiss he dropped, light as a dead leaf, something outworn, onto her parted hair as he headed out to the library. It's not like there aren't fireworks every year, and she had not answered him before the door closed. A hail of white and punk-pink rained down the sky and she muttered, "One off night a month isn't bad."
"Oh, the light moon and the dark are the same . . ." Then Brace's smile slid up as wide and sly as Maddy always forgot to expect from her, as transforming as possession. "No offense, but Charles is no moon."
Charles in neoclassical draperies, silver paint on his face and the moon's crescent tilted in his hayrick hair: a burlesque Artemis, the bass-voiced huntress of the night. The laugh startled out of her, fireworks in her blood like voltage. She had to put a hand over her mouth to stop the snickers; before she started to hurt. Charles, thinning as she held him tighter until he dwindled to a rind of shadow in her arms. No bright regeneration, though she could still look to dark of the moon and hope. He had liked fireworks.
"No," Maddy said, and rolled sideways to sit up. Concrete scraped under one denim knee; she put her hand down for balance, onto grit and old sun-warmth, and the sky deafened. Blue to gold to verdigris thunder, aurora borealis detonation: all the skyscrapers' mirrored panes epileptic with reflection and Brace had her fingers in her ears. She wondered if Charles was watching, from his library window. Unheard in all the clamor, as though the words would change anything, "No. He's not."
The last echo boomed away over the river. Smoke tangled in the syrup-slow air. Into the aftermath of car alarms and conversation and the rooftop crowd funneling toward the stairs, eyes closed as though she were holding the last brilliant blast safe inside, Brace said, "I like that. Even if it goes so fast. It reminds me what it felt like. I still have dreams, sometimes . . ."
With the same abstracted candor, she had remarked on her six months in the Danish Merchant Navy, how she had backpacked across Ireland for free, and broken her ankle climbing down Mount Fuji in the dark: as randomly and reliably far-fetched as an ancient geographer. You don't believe me, she had said to Maddy over afternoon coffee a week or two ago—small, cliché small world, when Maddy realized that the pale music-store clerk lived three floors up from her own apartment; she had bought Le Tigre and Electrelane from her the day before—unoffended, amused. I don't blame you. But I don't lie. Not a tall woman, and not more than thirty; her brows were almost as light as her hair, her skin as faintly flawed as a plate glazed to crack. The lip piercing was fresh, still flushed, and she had tongued it exploratorily between sentences. The moon was a new story.
Whether she would tell the truth now, or a fantasy, or neither, Maddy did not care. If she could fill her head with strangers' loves, perhaps Charles would not stick so insistently in her thoughts, a fishbone that scraped as she swallowed. Or maybe she could come home tonight and find him still awake, waiting up for her as he had done in their early days, a care that had charmed her all the more because he never thought he was doing anything special, so that she could tell him he was more to her than any mythical one-night stand. Perhaps. Maybe. The words tasted like the smoke unraveling downwind, gunpowder and dissolution. Still she said, "So tell me about your moon. Do you mind? I'd like to hear what you dream."
"You're better off with Charles." Brace laughed softly; opened one eye, dolphin-dark. A spray of firecrackers a few roofs away sounded like incendiary bubble wrap. "It's easy to fall in love with the moon. It's afterward that's hard. But"—a slight shift of her shoulder, a horizontal shrug—"there's nothing unique in that."
* * *
The coffee grinder had broken the day after the Fourth of July, in a coughing whine and stutter of black-brown grounds that they mopped off the countertop with damp paper towels, so she put two mugs of water in the microwave to nuke for tea. Charles was reading on her bed, a wasteland of dark-blue sheets and three or four pillows in a crazy-quilt mismatch of pillowcases; framed posters for Kill Bill and City of Lost Children on the walls, the Decemberists on the stereo, and if she walked into the other room she would see the dogwood tree outside her window still flowering like May. On the floor, where she had sat down to file some scattered manga, Maddy listened to the hum of the big fan in the window and did not reach to pick up Angel Sanctuary. Their silence congealed in her stomach, cold and unmoving.
Charles turned another page of Novalis, mid-afternoon sun in his hair like molasses. He never wore T-shirts with images or logos; this one was blue-black, a size too small, a muscle shirt if he had had muscle worth showing off. No beauty, for all that she could watch him for hours on end: creases and angles as awkward as a stepped-on rake, his face constructed from fine components and no symmetry, like a blind collage. He always looked sleepy when reading. No, she don't know why she got all dolled up for a suicide . . . Faintly through Colin Meloy and the fan's white noise, Maddy heard the microwave beep.
She still had one hand on the mattress when Charles closed Novalis, the nearest corner of the sheet like a bookmark between night-hymns, and said as conversationally as a glance at his watch or her name, "Abwärts wend ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht."
His head was still bent toward his book, the nearest pillow with an ink-brush print of a sleeping cat wrinkled over fawn-colored cloth. On their second date, he had recited Jacques Brel in French until the nearest tables at the little noodle shop were all looking at them, and she had only heard David Bowie's version before. "And for those of us who don't speak German?"
"Oh, like I could call a cab in Berlin . . ." Translation unfocused him, as though he were winnowing words out of the spaces between the air: molecule by molecule, from somewhere he could never see, only feel. "'Down I turn to the night, holy, unutterable, full of secrets.'"
The cold in Maddy's stomach touched her throat, so that her voice was very soft. "What brought that to mind?"
Sunlight fingered a dozen kinds of green from Charles' eyes, bright and momentary as an edge of bottle glass, as he turned his face toward her for as long as it took him to say, "I just liked it. Is that a problem?"
More puzzlement than edge in his voice, this time: easy enough to sharpen if she let herself reply. Those words he might have declaimed to the darkness as it blossomed in fireworks, their moment slid past in days that simmered like sun-sticky blacktop, nights that clung like melted velvet to the skin, and now she could not listen.
"Fine. Jesus," and he reached for the paperback, place lost as he pulled it free of the sheets. As snappish as though she had slapped him with it, "I thought you'd like the imagery. Your sort of thing, isn't it?" The microwave was plaintive in the kitchen and she left the room before he could open the book again; before she regretted how she would answer him, this temptation of another night. He leaned over and punched off the music as she passed. Is it too late to tell you—
* * *
Under the hood, the engine snarls and buzzes like a ripsaw, until Charles pulls the slate-blue Civic over in the breakdown lane. The night sky smolders with stars like sea-salt flares, cold sapphire rages in the pure dark, each the size of Maddy's palm that she raises to measure the unfamiliar constellations; the hills and trees rimmed in silver, all this back-country desolation where the road coils like dropped ribbon, though she sees no moon. Her shadow on the gravel and scrabbly weeds is faint with starlight, even her freckled skin turned pale as skimmed milk.
Behind her, Charles curses and she hears him drop the wrench back into the canvas bag of tools he keeps in the trunk, though she can change a tire far easier than he—his fingers are for turning pages and taking notes, spider-scrambling over his laptop's keys, and the one time he tried to fix her toilet they had to call a plumber for the entire floor. "Sweet," he says. "I knew it was running too sweet," and when she leans to see beneath the raised hood, the engine is all one mass of hornets' nest, head gaskets and valves mummified in sugar-brown paper and seething with yellow jackets. Honey drips through the transmission and pools like amber-clear oil on the asphalt. His fingers are smeared with it, reddened with stings, and he sucks on them absently as he closes the hood. "Luna de miel," the way he loves to scatter other languages like largesse into their conversations. "The moon will have to fix it."
"What moon?" Maddy starts to argue, before she sees the silver bubbling up through the trees, sliding in rivulets over the hills, as the blacktop turns to poured and precious metal. If the stars are fists, the moon is seven clasped hands, and it does not rise so much as it burns through the darkness like a coal through cheap cloth. Its highlands are white as new paper. All its seas shine wet as inkstone, calligraphy in the language of meteoric time. But the letters write themselves together, word on word like the features of a face, as Maddy blinks in the alien blaze and Charles turns away from his wasp-ridden car and the revelation of the moon together, and she recognizes its parchment smile in the second before Charles reaches to cover her eyes.
She was blinking away silver, her lips parted on a word she could not remember if she had spoken, awake or in dreams. In the darkness where no stars burned and the fan only stirred the heat back and forth, she lay against Charles' sweat-warm back and watched the pages of her Bosch calendar flutter palely on the wall, hells of music and heavens of sex, until she felt him stir against her woken stillness. Half into the pillow, he mumbled her name. "Go back to sleep," she murmured. One hand over his tousled hair like a magician's pass, "I'm all right," and she repeated the words as strongly as a charm, for both of them, no matter whether it was true.
* * *
A sultry wind was rising as she closed the stairwell door, and far out on the horizon thunder grumbled. The city spread out around them in lights and tumbled architecture, the crisscross canyons of streets and avenues: as though traffic wore down through brick and concrete like a river through sedimentary years, chiseling out skyscrapers from tenements and street-stalls, erosion into metropolis. Car horns and conversation drifted up, blew away on the hot night air. Sweat was already starting down the back of Maddy's neck, and she waited for lightning in the star-faded sky.
Drink down the moon, Brace had said, and so she was looking for all the candles and crystals of new-age ritual, ley lines and wine in a silver cup; not Brace in a black tank-top and loose jeans, perched peregrine-careless where the roof steepened into old slates and a dust-crazed skylight that looked down into someone's forgotten attic, arms folded over her drawn-up knees and a carton of Canadian beers beside her. White light fanned out from the fixture over the stairwell door, paper-cut her shadow across the concrete flags, so that she turned to Maddy a face momentarily without shadows: an unmarked moon. Only the heavy braid of her hair held darkness in its plait.
For a second, Maddy half expected honey to drip, like strands of clotted sun, from the hand Brace raised in greeting. But she said only, "Hey. The show's just getting started," and moved over to make room.
In the shadows of their bodies, the beer was the color of Brace's eyes and tasted dark as earth on Maddy's tongue: less like a fermentation of grain than leaves. Condensation beaded between her fingers like sweat, dripped down the heel of her hand. Even halfway through her second beer, she still flinched a little at Brace's question. "No," she answered, and pressed the bottle against her forehead: no real chill left in the opaque brown glass. "Charles said to thank you for the invitation, because he's like that, but he's probably asleep by now. He's the one in classes and he gets more sleep than I do," but she could not even put her mouth into a smile, and she tilted her beer back so quickly her teeth clinked on the bottle's rim.
One foot propped on a strip of copper sheathing that rain and corrosion had flaked milky green, Brace took a handful of her shirt and twisted the cap off another beer: her third, or fourth, or Maddy had stopped counting. If anything, she spoke a little more carefully, placing her words as steadily as stones. "If you want—"
"No." The word was a drystone clack; she shook her head. "I really don't. I just . . ." The blink of stars descending on as straight a line as a theater's god-from-the-machine was a plane coming in to the airport. A cat's-claw darkness past full, the moon looked only like itself: an ash-white coin Maddy could cover with her thumb. "It's just stupid. With him. I can remember what we did, but I can't remember what the fuck I was thinking."
"I didn't even think." Briefly flicked over to her, Brace's look was not unkind. "I wanted. I couldn't think. I dreamed of her all night, every night. I wasn't sleeping—lying there, looking up at the sky. Imagining how it would feel, all that clean white, that cold burn. Like she was in me already, and it was over, and all I had left was the memory." Her mouth pulled an expression too sardonic for a smile, too soft for a sneer. "I knew the stories. Afterward. Tithonos, Endymion—who wants that kind of immortality? I would have walked away. But she put her hand on my wrist, like that," as Brace laid her fingers against the slates, dryly grey as a sea-cliff, "and she said, Those aren't the only gifts we give. And I laughed at her. Christ, I laughed and I said what was she going to give me, then? An all-expenses paid trip to Florida? I'd been to Rome . . ."
Maddy swallowed another mouthful of beer, that might have been water for all she noticed. The story was a thin wash of tinsel on her thoughts, sense less important than sound; only that Brace keep speaking, telling the moon as they drank it down. "What did she give you?"
Brace's smile came and went like an eclipse. The backs of her eyes were luminous, moonstruck: or their sheen might have been tears. "The usual," she said; and lifted her bottle, drank without taking her eyes from the sky. "Change."
She set before the moon did, subsiding from story to silence: half-curled on her side, her cheek against the slates like a tired child. Passionless and certain as a catechism, she had recited, But if I look at the moon herself and remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move among divine people, and things that have shaken off our mortality, the tower of ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted woods, the white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with his shining cup full of dream, so the same mouth could hold poetry-philosophy and lip piercings. No doubt Charles had a copy in Maddy's apartment or his, the pages all unbent at the corners and marked on the diagonal with his small, ink-slashed hand, neat as a script font. She did not wonder for how much longer; she listened to Brace, her murmured lyrics and confidences and lunacies, until there was no more to hear.
"Brace . . ." But she was asleep, without any of the little stirs and twitches of dream Maddy had been expecting, pale hair braided like fishbones down her back, the relaxed curve of her spine and all her skin turned to Italian marble in the late moonlight. Where her tank-top cut away from her shoulders, as grave with muscle as a swimmer's, the vertebrae showed fossil-fragile at the nape of her neck. A loose thread of hair had blown over her parted lips, and stirred faintly with her breath. Beneath her lids whose lashes were fairer than her hair, only her eyes flickered, and Maddy did not shake her awake after all.
There were no beers left, but their taste was still in her mouth, like rained-on earth. Only a few hours until the sun rose, and the moon still thumbtacked over the western sky; she settled down on one elbow to watch Brace in the haze of streetlight and reflection while the night gathered and faded toward the dawn, while Brace dreamed of her lover.
* * *
Far beneath their feet, the ocean booms like distant fireworks and mortar fire, but the cliff pushes back against her leaning palm rough and wet with spray. Shells coil within the stone, ammonites, trilobites, frozen in their silting seafloor that the earth has heaved up high and dry, that she fingers like a rosary as Brace tightens the cord, snaps one finger against the veins in the soft crook of Maddy's arm: a drum, or a watermelon that might be ripe. "She draws," Brace tells her. All enamel and filigree, her hair unfurled like phosphorescence by the salt-damp wind, "She pulls. The sea knows, you see. Our blood's no different."
Down through the darkness, silver slides and buckles on restive water, striations where the ocean floods one way and tide drags another. This moon has knotted itself into the sky, a netsuke puzzle of coral and bones; like black and disturbed mercury, the night bulges around its weight. All the filaments of its light are anchored in the waves, the cliff face, Brace's shoulders and hair and her hands now reaching for the syringe, all marionettes for the moon. The strings stretch and slant, and never slacken. When Maddy reaches for one, it breaks over her fingers as insubstantially as plain moonlight, fine as a laser's beam. "But it never hurts," Brace confesses, and folds Maddy's hand closed, holds it safe in her own as she sets the needle to Maddy's unmarred skin. "It only hurts when you pull the other way," and the moon flows into her like a spider line of light, hooking her up, plugging her in, brimful.
Her vision is turning to platinum and the slideshow blur of waking, the moment when dream becomes memory, but all she can feel now is the burn of silver in her veins and Brace's hand clenched on her own as the light hardens, as the strands form, and through them she drinks down the moon.
* * *
Charles came for his books in the morning, his knock at her door so unfamiliar that she almost forgot, listening for the clink and ratchet of keys, the doorknob thumped against the nearest shelf, to let him in.
Awake before noon, he looked as blurry as a bad photograph, stunned even by the bits and breaks of light slanted through the dogwood branches, speckled like dust motes over her rust-orange carpet, the stacks and slopes of books, the birch-framed couch still half a bed with a pillow at one end and a bundle of hospital-white sheets stuffed against the arm of the other. Night sharpened him, as though late hours were strong coffee, so that he wrote all his articles before sunrise; so that at four in the morning, as she had turned away from him under sweat-rumpled covers, from his flesh that pressed too close to hers, he could be articulately unkind. Don't bother. You don't even want me in your bed anymore, do you, and he had risen and pulled one pillow out from under her shoulder before she could answer. Through the fan's whine and whir and the hard beat of blood in her own ears, she had listened to Charles rummaging through the plastic bins of her dresser and known that kindness or unkindness came to all the same end; after all the silence and the shouting, she would have said yes either way. Now he said, flatly as teletype, "You said this was a good time," but she had to ask him twice before he would come in.
Heat filled the apartment, drowned their movements slow as undersea in summer. On his knees to gather up paperbacks, split-backed science fiction and Norton Critical Editions, he was too familiar not to touch and Maddy picked up last night's tea mug and filled it at the kitchen tap instead. Running water so she would not hear him, cool and sun-shot spill over her fingers when she held the mug under the faucet too long; when she drank, it tasted like the dregs of rose hips, metallic, a hangover ghost of homeopathy. Blue-glazed earthenware was impenetrable to the teeth, only a little harder than language as she walked back in to watch him.
"Charles." He did not raise his head at his name, though she saw it register in his shoulders, his back, the way his hand closed on a well-thumbed reprint of Sturgeon's Venus Plus X. Today's T-shirt was graphite-grey and so oversized that it hung off his shoulders as though still on the bargain rack, loose sleeves down past his elbows like a tunic. A scarecrow child, sticks and sanctuary. He had never looked his age. "You don't have to take everything. I really don't care."
"So? Maybe I do." He rested one arm across his knee, looked over at her. With his eyes narrowed against the light, all the fine lines in his face were creased as deep as cuts. Then he said, as though she had spoken in the brief, considering silence, "I'll sound like a real asshole if I ask, won't I?"
"Ask what?"
"If this is because I don't have tits."
Sunlight shifted on the carpet like a kaleidoscope; the wind-crooked branches, laden salmon and white with late blossom, drew and re-drew shadows on the dust-flecked panes. Maddy's voice was somewhere unmanageable, her stomach or her knuckles, and she retrieved it in more pieces than she had meant. "Yeah," and she sipped more tea-flavored water, so she could finish the sentence. "Yeah. You really will."
Charles sat back on his heels, the battered paperback still in one hand. Flakes of acid-browned paper had crumbled onto the knee of his cargo pants: pockets always empty, shirt always tucked in. "Does that mean it isn't true?"
Two and a half years, if she counted from September. The sun made highlights in his hair, flyaway and disordered as ever. His eyes were green enough to slice: and burn in the wound.
"Fuck you, Charles," she said, finally. The words might have been I love you, for all the difference they made.
Arms full of Spider Robinson and Goethe, Schiller and Le Guin, all the philosophies and speculations she would never read, he paused once in the doorway to brace the heavy white cardboard box against one narrow hip and reach for keys that were not there. Sweat darkened the collar of his T-shirt, the patch where it had stuck to his spine as he knelt in slow, restless sunlight. "I don't really care, you know," and she heard her own words inverted back at her, a mirror with a flaw. "If you want to fuck men, women, Shetland sheepdogs, more power to you. But don't—" He shook his head, dazed with the intricacies of explanation, with early waking and all the broken places between them; she had forgotten that he, too, might hurt from this. "You could at least have told me."
There might have been humor in his words, however unwieldy, but she felt only the barbed-wire snarl that every spoken exchange had become: the rips and scratches of common courtesy, until the only unambiguous language lay between their bodies; and not even that now.
"I don't want to fuck Brace Williams," Maddy said. As true as false and the other way round, and her voice shook only a little; she laid the words down between them and did not look away. "Okay?"
"Okay." The door had almost swung shut; Charles propped it open with his foot, his unbeautiful, intimate, foreigner's face blocked between the doorframe and metal painted brown as old wood. "But," he said, like a riddle, like the last line of a theorem, "you say her name in your sleep," and the lock clicked home behind him.
* * *
Cried raw, she fell asleep with the afternoon sunlight on her mouth, her arms wrapped around the feather pillow from the couch. The powder-blue pillowcase smelled like Charles' hair, and the CD in the system under her desk was a mix she had made for him, that he had never taken home: why bother, with every other night spent in her bed, in her arms? Tom Waits' voice heaved itself up like rusty anchor chains, pitched back down the other side of the verse, a red rose, red rose blooming on another man's vine, and the tears seeped between her eyelashes to mark the other, foam pillow beneath her cheek. "Damn you," Maddy whispered, to both of them, to either, but she was asleep before the next track started up. Somewhere in the dark that smells as cool and mineral-pored as a cavern where no sun ever reached, Johnette Napolitano's sweet hoarse voice tears open over itself, ache and anger like stone and soil, and Charles pulls another page from the book he holds open on his knee. Light diffuses up over his face, spectral as foxfire, the photophore glow of abyssal fish. On the torn paper, luminous ink in snailshell characters slowly blackens to illegibility—silver to tarnish, the scattershot shorthand of dream, and she cannot take the book from his hands.
* * *
Sky and skyline had reversed themselves, so that she looked out onto a nightscape inverted. Beyond the opened window, the geometric dazzle of signs and lit windows marked shops and apartment blocks like stars pinned to earth, butterfly-collected; only coal-dust darkness above. After the day's broil and simmer, the breeze that threaded in from the street might almost have felt cool. Salt still lay on her skin like a residue of tears. "Did you ever think," Maddy said, softly, "your moon would come back?"
"You had to ask. God. I don't know," Brace answered, her smile an implication at the edges of her mouth, and reached for the bottle of soda on the windowsill. With no beer in the refrigerator, she had fished out a raspberry lime rickey from behind the water filter, sugar-sour and transparently red as stage blood; Salome or Snow White. As softly, she said back, "Charles?"
This time last week, Maddy had been transcribing tapes while Charles read Wilde's De Profundis and played all the Enigma CDs they owned between them, Gregorian chant and backbeat every time she slipped off the headphones and neither of them spoke. Brace on the same couch, a book of Annie Dillard essays in her lap, might have been swapped in from some alternate universe: or some sea-depth of Charles' subconscious, cream-braided anima as decorated with silver as a talisman. The thought tweaked her mouth up a little, so that she could answer; only a little. "I don't know. I should miss him more. Or maybe if I never saw him again, the sky could stay dark for all I cared."
"It's dark of the moon." Brace shifted, zazen on canvas-colored cushions. "You could get your wish."
"Oh, yeah. For one night."
Brace said mildly, "Sometimes that's enough."
"For what." She stopped herself before the words became a question. "It doesn't matter. Like you said," so tightly that the words were cords jerked in her throat, "Charles is no moon. And I never—he thought—" Maddy's fingernails were picking at the back of the couch like a cat's impatient claws, hard enough to snap threads; head bent away from Brace, so that she saw only couch, carpet, books, and between them the partition of her own dying-leaf hair. Brace's gaze was as palpable on her flesh as the faint stir of air through the screen, less heated, as patient. She looked up at last in frustration: no lunar phase or fairy tale sufficient to this ache shoved hot through her heart. "There isn't anything enough for what I want."
"Should I ask what you want?"
Sweat on Brace's skin looked more like oil, thumb-stroked over the submerged line of her collarbone, the channel of her throat; or she was a fair-haired woman in black combats and a sleeveless grey shirt, broad-shouldered, clear-voiced, recognizable. No strings of moonlight and desire vanished upward from her elbows and knees into a sky as darkly restless as the sea beneath. Her face held no honey, no craters. Maddy twisted her fingers in the torn threads of couch; dry-mouthed, salt on her lips. Adrenaline stitched her chest like a scar.
"No," Maddy said. The sound was little more than the shape of her lips, a shake of her head. "You shouldn't." But she was moving as she spoke, had knelt up on the couch and her hand closed clumsily on the cloth at Brace's shoulder, as though she clung a moment for balance before her fingers opened, slid up to the alien smoothness that was Brace's unstubbled cheek.
Strands of pale hair slipped over her knuckles, loosened from Brace's customary braid; the shaded lamplight made fire-specks of the piercings in her ears, a gilded wink at her lip. Her skin was soft with sweat, and she held very still under Maddy's touch. So low her voice might have been a stranger's, she said, "You don't want me."
Each breath was transformation: possibilities breaking down into potentials, into present. This close, Brace's eyes were the next shade of brown up from black. Electricity barbed the underside of Maddy's skin. For answer, for argument, she dipped her head to meet Brace's mouth, and her lips were sweeter than soda, warm as afternoon.
Neither midnight nor silver: and the same mute cold spilled through Maddy so quickly, desire stripped from her bones and ice laid there instead, that she pulled back even before Brace could say, with no grace at all, "I told you."
Her face was feverish and her gut churned cold; she had known the minute their skins touched. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I thought—"
"I'm not the moon!" In that moment Brace looked more mortal than ever, caught wrong-footed for conversation. She wiped the back of one wrist over her forehead where sweat shone, damp-dark streaks in her hair where she had pushed it back; a split of anger in her voice that was always even as the wheel and rising of stars. "You thought I was the moon." Only flesh and blood, transformed and still vulnerable. The anger shook out of her voice, left it boneless and her face as stark as a tinsnip circle of light. "I'm not even the next best thing."
For this, Charles. For this, dreams. Like a dead echo, clean white and cold burn and ashes in her outstretched hand, Maddy whispered, "I didn't think."
"I know. I know. Nobody ever . . ." and when Brace shoved herself up from the couch, strong forearms and her swimmer's shoulders, feet bare on the iron-rust carpet and fewer books to step over than before, she was already as insubstantial as the distance of sunlight.
Still she knelt by the door, as wordless as her own reflected ghost, lacing her black and steel-toed work boots as blindly as though she were crying. Dry-eyed, dark-eyed, she looked finally back at Maddy. "And you wouldn't want me anyway. The light moon and the dark are the same." Speaking, she almost sounded as easily unhurried as ever, but silence hitched and caught between every word. "It's what she gave me. He. And you will always think I'm what I'm not."
Someone had broken all the bones of her chest; Maddy breathed in against the matchstrike rasp of tears and said helplessly, "Brace. I'm sorry."
"It's okay." Lying, Brace sounded even less like anyone Maddy had ever known. To the carpet beneath her knee and her hand on the doorframe, she said, "Be glad I'm not the moon," and rose to let herself out.
* * *
Silver smells like oysters and lit magnesium, as chill and incendiary as Sirius distantly alight in the depths of time. Silver feathers her skin like the moment when flakes of snow, falling, distinguish themselves from the whalebone sky, and silver pulls beneath her flesh like hunger and loss, tendons and ligaments of immaculate light. If she parts her lips, silver will drown her, moonstruck, moon-drunken, and cast her in its image from the inside out. Flesh shelled around metamorphosis; a husk of story to peel from a dream. She will never hold it all.
"Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt," says the man who was Brace, the woman whom Brace will become, or both in the same braid of light and dark, "Gießt Nachts der Mond in Wogen nieder." As recitative as Charles, bard of libraries and Romantic pages, "'The wine that one drinks with one's eyes, the moon pours down in waves at night.' But I drank down that white, white wine, and he waxed and waned. And me along with her. Kainis was Kaineus until they hammered him into the earth." Very little in the broad, solemn bones of her face has changed, the strength in his shoulders and the casual precision of her voice, but he has unbound his wealth of moonlit hair and it trails away into the dark and silver until Maddy cannot tell where Brace stops, where the moon's curve begins. They hang like iris and pupil, the night's unblinking regard; the celestial, inconstant lover and the androgyne who fucked the moon. "But I keep coming around," and there are centuries in Brace's wry smile.
To answer, she must open her mouth, inhale night that she will shape into language, and silver frosts on her tongue like alcohol's gaslight flame. Of course I love you and of course it's what inside that matters . . . With moonlight splintered between her teeth, molten in her throat, Maddy starts to ask, "Is it too late?" but Brace's finger presses silence to her lips, angel of the world before preserving secrets into the world to come, and his eyes are the only reminder of earth in all this star-skinned night.
"It's always too late."
Her scarred hands—as though he caressed fire, once, or bitter cold—comb through Maddy's hair that is the color of leftover autumn, gently touch her face as though to read freckles like Braille. The full moon gleams in her left ear, the new moon in his right; a crescent on her lips and he carries the moon's orbit at his wrist, like a thin-skinned planet. The anemone bloom of her hair rays as palely on the dark as the moon's puppetry, drifts close around them as Maddy cups his cheekbone in her palm, this memory more real than all the rest and it feels even more like a dream. This time, she will hold him no matter which face of the moon turns to her, no matter that she does not hold the moon. This time, no matter how many late nights, how many uneasy silences and conversations that could hurt, she will not let go.
"From the moment you look up," Brace tells her, unalterably, not unkindly, "it's too late."
Silver is streaming like acid through her, in her nails and capillaries, her lashes and her ribs, revelation and obliteration in the same phase. Fireworks that fade. Maddy answers, "I know," and what she knows, she will forget when she opens her eyes. But this moment, she twines her fingers deep in Brace's cream-colored hair and pulls her mouth, his mouth, close to her own, so that she can murmur, "This is not for the moon," before she kisses Brace as the moon never did, and its light is eclipsed between their mouths.
* * *
Over in the west, across the roofs as blackened in silhouette as something charred, the sun had fallen and the sky flamed up all the colors of firelight and tangerine peel. And it lies in blood, but she had no lovers to ask where they were and the eastern sky was still clear, ash-streak clouds and no moon. Distinct as pencil scratches on the warm-water air, a canted aerial and an empty clothesline stood like the remnants of an older decade. Even moonlight was eight minutes in the past.
Slate under the heel of one hand and concrete under the other, Maddy had her eyes closed against the honey-thickened light; memories skinned too close to the surface, but she would have been deaf before she missed the metallic scrape of the stairwell door pushed open, the scuffed and striding footsteps, and shadow dropped sideways across her feet like a greeting.
"I never," Brace said, each word like a weight dropped down, lead for the seafloor, sounding depth, "thought the moon would come back."
When Maddy twisted her head up to look at her, sunset burned across her vision and she blinked through a Rorschach smear of afterimages to find Brace with her hands in the pockets of her jeans, her black T-shirt for a band Maddy had never heard. She had cut her hair, thick as a sheaf of barley and styled back from her face; there was a stitch of silver across her right eyebrow, and the earrings were plain studs. Straight-faced, "I felt like a change," and for a moment Maddy would not even have sworn that her voice was the same. But Brace crouched down beside her, monochrome figurehead if residential roofs were clipper ships, washed to amber by the declining sun, and finished, "Never."
Trading in used CDs for store credit over the weekend, Maddy had looked for Brace among the racks of alternative and blues, showtunes along the wall and operas on their own shelf behind the counter, and seen no one familiarly straight-backed and braided. She had not even drawn breath to answer, now, as though some incautious movement might startle Brace back into her own moon-haunted dimension; but she would have bet that Brace was not the one dreaming of deep skies and silver, night after night. Her addiction was aftermath. Thirdhand sunlight; and some reflections never faded.
When she looked over at Brace, the woman's earth-dark gaze was fixed on the horizon: where the clouds caught fire, not where they cooled. Were the lines of her face less delicate, cut to a harder scale? She had never been voluptuous. Or had she never been what Maddy saw all along? The question would mean as little as the answer: they had lain all night beneath summer haze and landing lights, drunk on folklore and fantasias, wasted on the moon, and Brace in dream or daylight had not been wrong. Like a proverb up-ended, the beloved of my lover is mine. But no one made love to Brace and felt the moon like an echo in her flesh. You don't want me. It's always too late.
Maddy had nothing less mundane to say; still she offered the words. "At least you had her once. That's more than most people."
"Wax and wane," said Brace. Her smile was as sly and reminiscent as the last crescent of light on the old moon, the first sliver of dark for the new. Once she must have looked only human. Her piercings glittered like tears. "Wait and see."
Their shadows slipped east, and the skyline was putting out the sun.
So until your blood runs to meet the next full moon
Your madness fits in nicely with my own.
—Tears for Fears, "Sea Song"
lesser_celery for lunch in Harvard Square today. Given the sudden summer temperatures, it was perhaps not the best day to walk with a backpack to Central Square and back, but I am not really going to complain. I took pictures.In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I offer "Drink Down," written in August 2005 and published that September in Not One of Us #34. It is the story I wrote because I was obsessed with PJ Harvey's "Yuri-G." Anne Briggs is also to blame, and the Dresden Dolls; 7300 words, for those who like the numbers up front. Enjoy!
Drink Down
I stuck them in real clean . . .
She's got me so mesmerized.
—PJ Harvey, "Yuri-G"
Down in the street, firecrackers were going off like flashbulbs, a staccato ghost of the echoes rolling back and forth between the skyscrapers as the sky exploded overhead. "Like that," Brace said, one hand raised to the gunfire spray of silver that ran above the skyline, electric tag art on the darkened air. Someone had propped the stairwell door open with a radio, static and cannons and triumphant brass spilt out over concrete flagstones still warm from the day's deep heat; her voice was slow, clear, in the spaces between fireworks, and Maddy hitched herself up onto her elbows to listen. "Bright. Sudden. I never felt what I'd held in my arms until it was gone. Yeah, I fucked the moon once. But he waxed and waned like all the rest."
Flares were sinking in green and smoky gold, drifting anemones of smoke. On her back like a stargazer, Brace folded her bare arms beneath her head: reflections glinted down the paneled windows of the offices across the street, angled dark into the skyline's stitchery of neon and steel; ran like the sheen on oil over the silver loops in her ears, the tarnished twist of bracelet around her wrist, the slender ring in her lip. Her hair was the color of heavy cream, pulled back hard from the dense and delicate lines of her face. Beside all that pale glitter, with her own face as speckled as a songbird's egg and her hair too light for cinnamon, too dull for red, Maddy felt absurdly earthbound: mortal counterpoised to myth. "At least," she said, lightly, grimly, "you still see him every night." Last year, she had watched the fireworks in Charles' arms, hers crossed on the cement wall that overlooked fourteen stories' drop down into the sodium-hazed street, his linked around her waist and she could lean her head back into the cradle of his collarbone. Last week, she could have tallied him on her fingers like the elements of a spell. His maple-sugar hair, fine as a small child's, that always looked as though he had just shuffled his hands through it, distracted and intense; his fingers stained from eating oranges, that he bit like apples from within peels half skinned back; his eyes were the color of lime leaves. The kiss he dropped, light as a dead leaf, something outworn, onto her parted hair as he headed out to the library. It's not like there aren't fireworks every year, and she had not answered him before the door closed. A hail of white and punk-pink rained down the sky and she muttered, "One off night a month isn't bad."
"Oh, the light moon and the dark are the same . . ." Then Brace's smile slid up as wide and sly as Maddy always forgot to expect from her, as transforming as possession. "No offense, but Charles is no moon."
Charles in neoclassical draperies, silver paint on his face and the moon's crescent tilted in his hayrick hair: a burlesque Artemis, the bass-voiced huntress of the night. The laugh startled out of her, fireworks in her blood like voltage. She had to put a hand over her mouth to stop the snickers; before she started to hurt. Charles, thinning as she held him tighter until he dwindled to a rind of shadow in her arms. No bright regeneration, though she could still look to dark of the moon and hope. He had liked fireworks.
"No," Maddy said, and rolled sideways to sit up. Concrete scraped under one denim knee; she put her hand down for balance, onto grit and old sun-warmth, and the sky deafened. Blue to gold to verdigris thunder, aurora borealis detonation: all the skyscrapers' mirrored panes epileptic with reflection and Brace had her fingers in her ears. She wondered if Charles was watching, from his library window. Unheard in all the clamor, as though the words would change anything, "No. He's not."
The last echo boomed away over the river. Smoke tangled in the syrup-slow air. Into the aftermath of car alarms and conversation and the rooftop crowd funneling toward the stairs, eyes closed as though she were holding the last brilliant blast safe inside, Brace said, "I like that. Even if it goes so fast. It reminds me what it felt like. I still have dreams, sometimes . . ."
With the same abstracted candor, she had remarked on her six months in the Danish Merchant Navy, how she had backpacked across Ireland for free, and broken her ankle climbing down Mount Fuji in the dark: as randomly and reliably far-fetched as an ancient geographer. You don't believe me, she had said to Maddy over afternoon coffee a week or two ago—small, cliché small world, when Maddy realized that the pale music-store clerk lived three floors up from her own apartment; she had bought Le Tigre and Electrelane from her the day before—unoffended, amused. I don't blame you. But I don't lie. Not a tall woman, and not more than thirty; her brows were almost as light as her hair, her skin as faintly flawed as a plate glazed to crack. The lip piercing was fresh, still flushed, and she had tongued it exploratorily between sentences. The moon was a new story.
Whether she would tell the truth now, or a fantasy, or neither, Maddy did not care. If she could fill her head with strangers' loves, perhaps Charles would not stick so insistently in her thoughts, a fishbone that scraped as she swallowed. Or maybe she could come home tonight and find him still awake, waiting up for her as he had done in their early days, a care that had charmed her all the more because he never thought he was doing anything special, so that she could tell him he was more to her than any mythical one-night stand. Perhaps. Maybe. The words tasted like the smoke unraveling downwind, gunpowder and dissolution. Still she said, "So tell me about your moon. Do you mind? I'd like to hear what you dream."
"You're better off with Charles." Brace laughed softly; opened one eye, dolphin-dark. A spray of firecrackers a few roofs away sounded like incendiary bubble wrap. "It's easy to fall in love with the moon. It's afterward that's hard. But"—a slight shift of her shoulder, a horizontal shrug—"there's nothing unique in that."
The coffee grinder had broken the day after the Fourth of July, in a coughing whine and stutter of black-brown grounds that they mopped off the countertop with damp paper towels, so she put two mugs of water in the microwave to nuke for tea. Charles was reading on her bed, a wasteland of dark-blue sheets and three or four pillows in a crazy-quilt mismatch of pillowcases; framed posters for Kill Bill and City of Lost Children on the walls, the Decemberists on the stereo, and if she walked into the other room she would see the dogwood tree outside her window still flowering like May. On the floor, where she had sat down to file some scattered manga, Maddy listened to the hum of the big fan in the window and did not reach to pick up Angel Sanctuary. Their silence congealed in her stomach, cold and unmoving.
Charles turned another page of Novalis, mid-afternoon sun in his hair like molasses. He never wore T-shirts with images or logos; this one was blue-black, a size too small, a muscle shirt if he had had muscle worth showing off. No beauty, for all that she could watch him for hours on end: creases and angles as awkward as a stepped-on rake, his face constructed from fine components and no symmetry, like a blind collage. He always looked sleepy when reading. No, she don't know why she got all dolled up for a suicide . . . Faintly through Colin Meloy and the fan's white noise, Maddy heard the microwave beep.
She still had one hand on the mattress when Charles closed Novalis, the nearest corner of the sheet like a bookmark between night-hymns, and said as conversationally as a glance at his watch or her name, "Abwärts wend ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht."
His head was still bent toward his book, the nearest pillow with an ink-brush print of a sleeping cat wrinkled over fawn-colored cloth. On their second date, he had recited Jacques Brel in French until the nearest tables at the little noodle shop were all looking at them, and she had only heard David Bowie's version before. "And for those of us who don't speak German?"
"Oh, like I could call a cab in Berlin . . ." Translation unfocused him, as though he were winnowing words out of the spaces between the air: molecule by molecule, from somewhere he could never see, only feel. "'Down I turn to the night, holy, unutterable, full of secrets.'"
The cold in Maddy's stomach touched her throat, so that her voice was very soft. "What brought that to mind?"
Sunlight fingered a dozen kinds of green from Charles' eyes, bright and momentary as an edge of bottle glass, as he turned his face toward her for as long as it took him to say, "I just liked it. Is that a problem?"
More puzzlement than edge in his voice, this time: easy enough to sharpen if she let herself reply. Those words he might have declaimed to the darkness as it blossomed in fireworks, their moment slid past in days that simmered like sun-sticky blacktop, nights that clung like melted velvet to the skin, and now she could not listen.
"Fine. Jesus," and he reached for the paperback, place lost as he pulled it free of the sheets. As snappish as though she had slapped him with it, "I thought you'd like the imagery. Your sort of thing, isn't it?" The microwave was plaintive in the kitchen and she left the room before he could open the book again; before she regretted how she would answer him, this temptation of another night. He leaned over and punched off the music as she passed. Is it too late to tell you—
Under the hood, the engine snarls and buzzes like a ripsaw, until Charles pulls the slate-blue Civic over in the breakdown lane. The night sky smolders with stars like sea-salt flares, cold sapphire rages in the pure dark, each the size of Maddy's palm that she raises to measure the unfamiliar constellations; the hills and trees rimmed in silver, all this back-country desolation where the road coils like dropped ribbon, though she sees no moon. Her shadow on the gravel and scrabbly weeds is faint with starlight, even her freckled skin turned pale as skimmed milk.
Behind her, Charles curses and she hears him drop the wrench back into the canvas bag of tools he keeps in the trunk, though she can change a tire far easier than he—his fingers are for turning pages and taking notes, spider-scrambling over his laptop's keys, and the one time he tried to fix her toilet they had to call a plumber for the entire floor. "Sweet," he says. "I knew it was running too sweet," and when she leans to see beneath the raised hood, the engine is all one mass of hornets' nest, head gaskets and valves mummified in sugar-brown paper and seething with yellow jackets. Honey drips through the transmission and pools like amber-clear oil on the asphalt. His fingers are smeared with it, reddened with stings, and he sucks on them absently as he closes the hood. "Luna de miel," the way he loves to scatter other languages like largesse into their conversations. "The moon will have to fix it."
"What moon?" Maddy starts to argue, before she sees the silver bubbling up through the trees, sliding in rivulets over the hills, as the blacktop turns to poured and precious metal. If the stars are fists, the moon is seven clasped hands, and it does not rise so much as it burns through the darkness like a coal through cheap cloth. Its highlands are white as new paper. All its seas shine wet as inkstone, calligraphy in the language of meteoric time. But the letters write themselves together, word on word like the features of a face, as Maddy blinks in the alien blaze and Charles turns away from his wasp-ridden car and the revelation of the moon together, and she recognizes its parchment smile in the second before Charles reaches to cover her eyes.
She was blinking away silver, her lips parted on a word she could not remember if she had spoken, awake or in dreams. In the darkness where no stars burned and the fan only stirred the heat back and forth, she lay against Charles' sweat-warm back and watched the pages of her Bosch calendar flutter palely on the wall, hells of music and heavens of sex, until she felt him stir against her woken stillness. Half into the pillow, he mumbled her name. "Go back to sleep," she murmured. One hand over his tousled hair like a magician's pass, "I'm all right," and she repeated the words as strongly as a charm, for both of them, no matter whether it was true.
A sultry wind was rising as she closed the stairwell door, and far out on the horizon thunder grumbled. The city spread out around them in lights and tumbled architecture, the crisscross canyons of streets and avenues: as though traffic wore down through brick and concrete like a river through sedimentary years, chiseling out skyscrapers from tenements and street-stalls, erosion into metropolis. Car horns and conversation drifted up, blew away on the hot night air. Sweat was already starting down the back of Maddy's neck, and she waited for lightning in the star-faded sky.
Drink down the moon, Brace had said, and so she was looking for all the candles and crystals of new-age ritual, ley lines and wine in a silver cup; not Brace in a black tank-top and loose jeans, perched peregrine-careless where the roof steepened into old slates and a dust-crazed skylight that looked down into someone's forgotten attic, arms folded over her drawn-up knees and a carton of Canadian beers beside her. White light fanned out from the fixture over the stairwell door, paper-cut her shadow across the concrete flags, so that she turned to Maddy a face momentarily without shadows: an unmarked moon. Only the heavy braid of her hair held darkness in its plait.
For a second, Maddy half expected honey to drip, like strands of clotted sun, from the hand Brace raised in greeting. But she said only, "Hey. The show's just getting started," and moved over to make room.
In the shadows of their bodies, the beer was the color of Brace's eyes and tasted dark as earth on Maddy's tongue: less like a fermentation of grain than leaves. Condensation beaded between her fingers like sweat, dripped down the heel of her hand. Even halfway through her second beer, she still flinched a little at Brace's question. "No," she answered, and pressed the bottle against her forehead: no real chill left in the opaque brown glass. "Charles said to thank you for the invitation, because he's like that, but he's probably asleep by now. He's the one in classes and he gets more sleep than I do," but she could not even put her mouth into a smile, and she tilted her beer back so quickly her teeth clinked on the bottle's rim.
One foot propped on a strip of copper sheathing that rain and corrosion had flaked milky green, Brace took a handful of her shirt and twisted the cap off another beer: her third, or fourth, or Maddy had stopped counting. If anything, she spoke a little more carefully, placing her words as steadily as stones. "If you want—"
"No." The word was a drystone clack; she shook her head. "I really don't. I just . . ." The blink of stars descending on as straight a line as a theater's god-from-the-machine was a plane coming in to the airport. A cat's-claw darkness past full, the moon looked only like itself: an ash-white coin Maddy could cover with her thumb. "It's just stupid. With him. I can remember what we did, but I can't remember what the fuck I was thinking."
"I didn't even think." Briefly flicked over to her, Brace's look was not unkind. "I wanted. I couldn't think. I dreamed of her all night, every night. I wasn't sleeping—lying there, looking up at the sky. Imagining how it would feel, all that clean white, that cold burn. Like she was in me already, and it was over, and all I had left was the memory." Her mouth pulled an expression too sardonic for a smile, too soft for a sneer. "I knew the stories. Afterward. Tithonos, Endymion—who wants that kind of immortality? I would have walked away. But she put her hand on my wrist, like that," as Brace laid her fingers against the slates, dryly grey as a sea-cliff, "and she said, Those aren't the only gifts we give. And I laughed at her. Christ, I laughed and I said what was she going to give me, then? An all-expenses paid trip to Florida? I'd been to Rome . . ."
Maddy swallowed another mouthful of beer, that might have been water for all she noticed. The story was a thin wash of tinsel on her thoughts, sense less important than sound; only that Brace keep speaking, telling the moon as they drank it down. "What did she give you?"
Brace's smile came and went like an eclipse. The backs of her eyes were luminous, moonstruck: or their sheen might have been tears. "The usual," she said; and lifted her bottle, drank without taking her eyes from the sky. "Change."
She set before the moon did, subsiding from story to silence: half-curled on her side, her cheek against the slates like a tired child. Passionless and certain as a catechism, she had recited, But if I look at the moon herself and remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move among divine people, and things that have shaken off our mortality, the tower of ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted woods, the white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with his shining cup full of dream, so the same mouth could hold poetry-philosophy and lip piercings. No doubt Charles had a copy in Maddy's apartment or his, the pages all unbent at the corners and marked on the diagonal with his small, ink-slashed hand, neat as a script font. She did not wonder for how much longer; she listened to Brace, her murmured lyrics and confidences and lunacies, until there was no more to hear.
"Brace . . ." But she was asleep, without any of the little stirs and twitches of dream Maddy had been expecting, pale hair braided like fishbones down her back, the relaxed curve of her spine and all her skin turned to Italian marble in the late moonlight. Where her tank-top cut away from her shoulders, as grave with muscle as a swimmer's, the vertebrae showed fossil-fragile at the nape of her neck. A loose thread of hair had blown over her parted lips, and stirred faintly with her breath. Beneath her lids whose lashes were fairer than her hair, only her eyes flickered, and Maddy did not shake her awake after all.
There were no beers left, but their taste was still in her mouth, like rained-on earth. Only a few hours until the sun rose, and the moon still thumbtacked over the western sky; she settled down on one elbow to watch Brace in the haze of streetlight and reflection while the night gathered and faded toward the dawn, while Brace dreamed of her lover.
Far beneath their feet, the ocean booms like distant fireworks and mortar fire, but the cliff pushes back against her leaning palm rough and wet with spray. Shells coil within the stone, ammonites, trilobites, frozen in their silting seafloor that the earth has heaved up high and dry, that she fingers like a rosary as Brace tightens the cord, snaps one finger against the veins in the soft crook of Maddy's arm: a drum, or a watermelon that might be ripe. "She draws," Brace tells her. All enamel and filigree, her hair unfurled like phosphorescence by the salt-damp wind, "She pulls. The sea knows, you see. Our blood's no different."
Down through the darkness, silver slides and buckles on restive water, striations where the ocean floods one way and tide drags another. This moon has knotted itself into the sky, a netsuke puzzle of coral and bones; like black and disturbed mercury, the night bulges around its weight. All the filaments of its light are anchored in the waves, the cliff face, Brace's shoulders and hair and her hands now reaching for the syringe, all marionettes for the moon. The strings stretch and slant, and never slacken. When Maddy reaches for one, it breaks over her fingers as insubstantially as plain moonlight, fine as a laser's beam. "But it never hurts," Brace confesses, and folds Maddy's hand closed, holds it safe in her own as she sets the needle to Maddy's unmarred skin. "It only hurts when you pull the other way," and the moon flows into her like a spider line of light, hooking her up, plugging her in, brimful.
Her vision is turning to platinum and the slideshow blur of waking, the moment when dream becomes memory, but all she can feel now is the burn of silver in her veins and Brace's hand clenched on her own as the light hardens, as the strands form, and through them she drinks down the moon.
Charles came for his books in the morning, his knock at her door so unfamiliar that she almost forgot, listening for the clink and ratchet of keys, the doorknob thumped against the nearest shelf, to let him in.
Awake before noon, he looked as blurry as a bad photograph, stunned even by the bits and breaks of light slanted through the dogwood branches, speckled like dust motes over her rust-orange carpet, the stacks and slopes of books, the birch-framed couch still half a bed with a pillow at one end and a bundle of hospital-white sheets stuffed against the arm of the other. Night sharpened him, as though late hours were strong coffee, so that he wrote all his articles before sunrise; so that at four in the morning, as she had turned away from him under sweat-rumpled covers, from his flesh that pressed too close to hers, he could be articulately unkind. Don't bother. You don't even want me in your bed anymore, do you, and he had risen and pulled one pillow out from under her shoulder before she could answer. Through the fan's whine and whir and the hard beat of blood in her own ears, she had listened to Charles rummaging through the plastic bins of her dresser and known that kindness or unkindness came to all the same end; after all the silence and the shouting, she would have said yes either way. Now he said, flatly as teletype, "You said this was a good time," but she had to ask him twice before he would come in.
Heat filled the apartment, drowned their movements slow as undersea in summer. On his knees to gather up paperbacks, split-backed science fiction and Norton Critical Editions, he was too familiar not to touch and Maddy picked up last night's tea mug and filled it at the kitchen tap instead. Running water so she would not hear him, cool and sun-shot spill over her fingers when she held the mug under the faucet too long; when she drank, it tasted like the dregs of rose hips, metallic, a hangover ghost of homeopathy. Blue-glazed earthenware was impenetrable to the teeth, only a little harder than language as she walked back in to watch him.
"Charles." He did not raise his head at his name, though she saw it register in his shoulders, his back, the way his hand closed on a well-thumbed reprint of Sturgeon's Venus Plus X. Today's T-shirt was graphite-grey and so oversized that it hung off his shoulders as though still on the bargain rack, loose sleeves down past his elbows like a tunic. A scarecrow child, sticks and sanctuary. He had never looked his age. "You don't have to take everything. I really don't care."
"So? Maybe I do." He rested one arm across his knee, looked over at her. With his eyes narrowed against the light, all the fine lines in his face were creased as deep as cuts. Then he said, as though she had spoken in the brief, considering silence, "I'll sound like a real asshole if I ask, won't I?"
"Ask what?"
"If this is because I don't have tits."
Sunlight shifted on the carpet like a kaleidoscope; the wind-crooked branches, laden salmon and white with late blossom, drew and re-drew shadows on the dust-flecked panes. Maddy's voice was somewhere unmanageable, her stomach or her knuckles, and she retrieved it in more pieces than she had meant. "Yeah," and she sipped more tea-flavored water, so she could finish the sentence. "Yeah. You really will."
Charles sat back on his heels, the battered paperback still in one hand. Flakes of acid-browned paper had crumbled onto the knee of his cargo pants: pockets always empty, shirt always tucked in. "Does that mean it isn't true?"
Two and a half years, if she counted from September. The sun made highlights in his hair, flyaway and disordered as ever. His eyes were green enough to slice: and burn in the wound.
"Fuck you, Charles," she said, finally. The words might have been I love you, for all the difference they made.
Arms full of Spider Robinson and Goethe, Schiller and Le Guin, all the philosophies and speculations she would never read, he paused once in the doorway to brace the heavy white cardboard box against one narrow hip and reach for keys that were not there. Sweat darkened the collar of his T-shirt, the patch where it had stuck to his spine as he knelt in slow, restless sunlight. "I don't really care, you know," and she heard her own words inverted back at her, a mirror with a flaw. "If you want to fuck men, women, Shetland sheepdogs, more power to you. But don't—" He shook his head, dazed with the intricacies of explanation, with early waking and all the broken places between them; she had forgotten that he, too, might hurt from this. "You could at least have told me."
There might have been humor in his words, however unwieldy, but she felt only the barbed-wire snarl that every spoken exchange had become: the rips and scratches of common courtesy, until the only unambiguous language lay between their bodies; and not even that now.
"I don't want to fuck Brace Williams," Maddy said. As true as false and the other way round, and her voice shook only a little; she laid the words down between them and did not look away. "Okay?"
"Okay." The door had almost swung shut; Charles propped it open with his foot, his unbeautiful, intimate, foreigner's face blocked between the doorframe and metal painted brown as old wood. "But," he said, like a riddle, like the last line of a theorem, "you say her name in your sleep," and the lock clicked home behind him.
Cried raw, she fell asleep with the afternoon sunlight on her mouth, her arms wrapped around the feather pillow from the couch. The powder-blue pillowcase smelled like Charles' hair, and the CD in the system under her desk was a mix she had made for him, that he had never taken home: why bother, with every other night spent in her bed, in her arms? Tom Waits' voice heaved itself up like rusty anchor chains, pitched back down the other side of the verse, a red rose, red rose blooming on another man's vine, and the tears seeped between her eyelashes to mark the other, foam pillow beneath her cheek. "Damn you," Maddy whispered, to both of them, to either, but she was asleep before the next track started up. Somewhere in the dark that smells as cool and mineral-pored as a cavern where no sun ever reached, Johnette Napolitano's sweet hoarse voice tears open over itself, ache and anger like stone and soil, and Charles pulls another page from the book he holds open on his knee. Light diffuses up over his face, spectral as foxfire, the photophore glow of abyssal fish. On the torn paper, luminous ink in snailshell characters slowly blackens to illegibility—silver to tarnish, the scattershot shorthand of dream, and she cannot take the book from his hands.
Sky and skyline had reversed themselves, so that she looked out onto a nightscape inverted. Beyond the opened window, the geometric dazzle of signs and lit windows marked shops and apartment blocks like stars pinned to earth, butterfly-collected; only coal-dust darkness above. After the day's broil and simmer, the breeze that threaded in from the street might almost have felt cool. Salt still lay on her skin like a residue of tears. "Did you ever think," Maddy said, softly, "your moon would come back?"
"You had to ask. God. I don't know," Brace answered, her smile an implication at the edges of her mouth, and reached for the bottle of soda on the windowsill. With no beer in the refrigerator, she had fished out a raspberry lime rickey from behind the water filter, sugar-sour and transparently red as stage blood; Salome or Snow White. As softly, she said back, "Charles?"
This time last week, Maddy had been transcribing tapes while Charles read Wilde's De Profundis and played all the Enigma CDs they owned between them, Gregorian chant and backbeat every time she slipped off the headphones and neither of them spoke. Brace on the same couch, a book of Annie Dillard essays in her lap, might have been swapped in from some alternate universe: or some sea-depth of Charles' subconscious, cream-braided anima as decorated with silver as a talisman. The thought tweaked her mouth up a little, so that she could answer; only a little. "I don't know. I should miss him more. Or maybe if I never saw him again, the sky could stay dark for all I cared."
"It's dark of the moon." Brace shifted, zazen on canvas-colored cushions. "You could get your wish."
"Oh, yeah. For one night."
Brace said mildly, "Sometimes that's enough."
"For what." She stopped herself before the words became a question. "It doesn't matter. Like you said," so tightly that the words were cords jerked in her throat, "Charles is no moon. And I never—he thought—" Maddy's fingernails were picking at the back of the couch like a cat's impatient claws, hard enough to snap threads; head bent away from Brace, so that she saw only couch, carpet, books, and between them the partition of her own dying-leaf hair. Brace's gaze was as palpable on her flesh as the faint stir of air through the screen, less heated, as patient. She looked up at last in frustration: no lunar phase or fairy tale sufficient to this ache shoved hot through her heart. "There isn't anything enough for what I want."
"Should I ask what you want?"
Sweat on Brace's skin looked more like oil, thumb-stroked over the submerged line of her collarbone, the channel of her throat; or she was a fair-haired woman in black combats and a sleeveless grey shirt, broad-shouldered, clear-voiced, recognizable. No strings of moonlight and desire vanished upward from her elbows and knees into a sky as darkly restless as the sea beneath. Her face held no honey, no craters. Maddy twisted her fingers in the torn threads of couch; dry-mouthed, salt on her lips. Adrenaline stitched her chest like a scar.
"No," Maddy said. The sound was little more than the shape of her lips, a shake of her head. "You shouldn't." But she was moving as she spoke, had knelt up on the couch and her hand closed clumsily on the cloth at Brace's shoulder, as though she clung a moment for balance before her fingers opened, slid up to the alien smoothness that was Brace's unstubbled cheek.
Strands of pale hair slipped over her knuckles, loosened from Brace's customary braid; the shaded lamplight made fire-specks of the piercings in her ears, a gilded wink at her lip. Her skin was soft with sweat, and she held very still under Maddy's touch. So low her voice might have been a stranger's, she said, "You don't want me."
Each breath was transformation: possibilities breaking down into potentials, into present. This close, Brace's eyes were the next shade of brown up from black. Electricity barbed the underside of Maddy's skin. For answer, for argument, she dipped her head to meet Brace's mouth, and her lips were sweeter than soda, warm as afternoon.
Neither midnight nor silver: and the same mute cold spilled through Maddy so quickly, desire stripped from her bones and ice laid there instead, that she pulled back even before Brace could say, with no grace at all, "I told you."
Her face was feverish and her gut churned cold; she had known the minute their skins touched. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I thought—"
"I'm not the moon!" In that moment Brace looked more mortal than ever, caught wrong-footed for conversation. She wiped the back of one wrist over her forehead where sweat shone, damp-dark streaks in her hair where she had pushed it back; a split of anger in her voice that was always even as the wheel and rising of stars. "You thought I was the moon." Only flesh and blood, transformed and still vulnerable. The anger shook out of her voice, left it boneless and her face as stark as a tinsnip circle of light. "I'm not even the next best thing."
For this, Charles. For this, dreams. Like a dead echo, clean white and cold burn and ashes in her outstretched hand, Maddy whispered, "I didn't think."
"I know. I know. Nobody ever . . ." and when Brace shoved herself up from the couch, strong forearms and her swimmer's shoulders, feet bare on the iron-rust carpet and fewer books to step over than before, she was already as insubstantial as the distance of sunlight.
Still she knelt by the door, as wordless as her own reflected ghost, lacing her black and steel-toed work boots as blindly as though she were crying. Dry-eyed, dark-eyed, she looked finally back at Maddy. "And you wouldn't want me anyway. The light moon and the dark are the same." Speaking, she almost sounded as easily unhurried as ever, but silence hitched and caught between every word. "It's what she gave me. He. And you will always think I'm what I'm not."
Someone had broken all the bones of her chest; Maddy breathed in against the matchstrike rasp of tears and said helplessly, "Brace. I'm sorry."
"It's okay." Lying, Brace sounded even less like anyone Maddy had ever known. To the carpet beneath her knee and her hand on the doorframe, she said, "Be glad I'm not the moon," and rose to let herself out.
Silver smells like oysters and lit magnesium, as chill and incendiary as Sirius distantly alight in the depths of time. Silver feathers her skin like the moment when flakes of snow, falling, distinguish themselves from the whalebone sky, and silver pulls beneath her flesh like hunger and loss, tendons and ligaments of immaculate light. If she parts her lips, silver will drown her, moonstruck, moon-drunken, and cast her in its image from the inside out. Flesh shelled around metamorphosis; a husk of story to peel from a dream. She will never hold it all.
"Den Wein, den man mit Augen trinkt," says the man who was Brace, the woman whom Brace will become, or both in the same braid of light and dark, "Gießt Nachts der Mond in Wogen nieder." As recitative as Charles, bard of libraries and Romantic pages, "'The wine that one drinks with one's eyes, the moon pours down in waves at night.' But I drank down that white, white wine, and he waxed and waned. And me along with her. Kainis was Kaineus until they hammered him into the earth." Very little in the broad, solemn bones of her face has changed, the strength in his shoulders and the casual precision of her voice, but he has unbound his wealth of moonlit hair and it trails away into the dark and silver until Maddy cannot tell where Brace stops, where the moon's curve begins. They hang like iris and pupil, the night's unblinking regard; the celestial, inconstant lover and the androgyne who fucked the moon. "But I keep coming around," and there are centuries in Brace's wry smile.
To answer, she must open her mouth, inhale night that she will shape into language, and silver frosts on her tongue like alcohol's gaslight flame. Of course I love you and of course it's what inside that matters . . . With moonlight splintered between her teeth, molten in her throat, Maddy starts to ask, "Is it too late?" but Brace's finger presses silence to her lips, angel of the world before preserving secrets into the world to come, and his eyes are the only reminder of earth in all this star-skinned night.
"It's always too late."
Her scarred hands—as though he caressed fire, once, or bitter cold—comb through Maddy's hair that is the color of leftover autumn, gently touch her face as though to read freckles like Braille. The full moon gleams in her left ear, the new moon in his right; a crescent on her lips and he carries the moon's orbit at his wrist, like a thin-skinned planet. The anemone bloom of her hair rays as palely on the dark as the moon's puppetry, drifts close around them as Maddy cups his cheekbone in her palm, this memory more real than all the rest and it feels even more like a dream. This time, she will hold him no matter which face of the moon turns to her, no matter that she does not hold the moon. This time, no matter how many late nights, how many uneasy silences and conversations that could hurt, she will not let go.
"From the moment you look up," Brace tells her, unalterably, not unkindly, "it's too late."
Silver is streaming like acid through her, in her nails and capillaries, her lashes and her ribs, revelation and obliteration in the same phase. Fireworks that fade. Maddy answers, "I know," and what she knows, she will forget when she opens her eyes. But this moment, she twines her fingers deep in Brace's cream-colored hair and pulls her mouth, his mouth, close to her own, so that she can murmur, "This is not for the moon," before she kisses Brace as the moon never did, and its light is eclipsed between their mouths.
Over in the west, across the roofs as blackened in silhouette as something charred, the sun had fallen and the sky flamed up all the colors of firelight and tangerine peel. And it lies in blood, but she had no lovers to ask where they were and the eastern sky was still clear, ash-streak clouds and no moon. Distinct as pencil scratches on the warm-water air, a canted aerial and an empty clothesline stood like the remnants of an older decade. Even moonlight was eight minutes in the past.
Slate under the heel of one hand and concrete under the other, Maddy had her eyes closed against the honey-thickened light; memories skinned too close to the surface, but she would have been deaf before she missed the metallic scrape of the stairwell door pushed open, the scuffed and striding footsteps, and shadow dropped sideways across her feet like a greeting.
"I never," Brace said, each word like a weight dropped down, lead for the seafloor, sounding depth, "thought the moon would come back."
When Maddy twisted her head up to look at her, sunset burned across her vision and she blinked through a Rorschach smear of afterimages to find Brace with her hands in the pockets of her jeans, her black T-shirt for a band Maddy had never heard. She had cut her hair, thick as a sheaf of barley and styled back from her face; there was a stitch of silver across her right eyebrow, and the earrings were plain studs. Straight-faced, "I felt like a change," and for a moment Maddy would not even have sworn that her voice was the same. But Brace crouched down beside her, monochrome figurehead if residential roofs were clipper ships, washed to amber by the declining sun, and finished, "Never."
Trading in used CDs for store credit over the weekend, Maddy had looked for Brace among the racks of alternative and blues, showtunes along the wall and operas on their own shelf behind the counter, and seen no one familiarly straight-backed and braided. She had not even drawn breath to answer, now, as though some incautious movement might startle Brace back into her own moon-haunted dimension; but she would have bet that Brace was not the one dreaming of deep skies and silver, night after night. Her addiction was aftermath. Thirdhand sunlight; and some reflections never faded.
When she looked over at Brace, the woman's earth-dark gaze was fixed on the horizon: where the clouds caught fire, not where they cooled. Were the lines of her face less delicate, cut to a harder scale? She had never been voluptuous. Or had she never been what Maddy saw all along? The question would mean as little as the answer: they had lain all night beneath summer haze and landing lights, drunk on folklore and fantasias, wasted on the moon, and Brace in dream or daylight had not been wrong. Like a proverb up-ended, the beloved of my lover is mine. But no one made love to Brace and felt the moon like an echo in her flesh. You don't want me. It's always too late.
Maddy had nothing less mundane to say; still she offered the words. "At least you had her once. That's more than most people."
"Wax and wane," said Brace. Her smile was as sly and reminiscent as the last crescent of light on the old moon, the first sliver of dark for the new. Once she must have looked only human. Her piercings glittered like tears. "Wait and see."
Their shadows slipped east, and the skyline was putting out the sun.
So until your blood runs to meet the next full moon
Your madness fits in nicely with my own.
—Tears for Fears, "Sea Song"
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Thank you! You are very, very welcome!
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At the start, when you said "a staccato ghost of the echoes rolling back and forth between the skyscrapers"--nothing has ever instantly called to mind watching/listening to the fireworks from Kendall square for me like those lines. [pause for nostalgia]
Well... I could have written down pages of beautiful lines, but here is a very small bouquet, your own words offered back to you:
Passionless and certain as a catechism....
Down through the darkness, silver slides and buckles on restive water, striations where the ocean floods one way and tide drags another...
Adrenaline stitched her chest like a scar...
With moonlight splintered between her teeth, molten in her throat, Maddy starts to ask, "Is it too late?" but Brace's finger presses silence to her lips, angel of the world before preserving secrets into the world to come, and his eyes are the only reminder of earth in all this star-skinned night.
"It's always too late."
Well, this is a true gift. Thank you very much.
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Thank you!
Did you post anything? I would not have minded seeing where Jake is now.
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I know you had graciously asked to read that last Jake story I had done in my four-hour break, and I'd be glad to send you it (though when I write Jake stories, they tend to be so spare, no lush luxurious poetry in them). I'm always afraid to send them because of the subject matter, but you've read him before. I'm not quite sure what I think of it yet; it needs some space.
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I'm not quite sure what I think of it yet; it needs some space.
Fair enough. If and when you decide, I would still love to see it.
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Thank you. I am so very glad you liked it!
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You're welcome. Thank you!
I'd give my sorry eyes.
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Thank you so much, truly. You are a reader I care about: I'm glad you saw this one.
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Thank you. I am glad.