He walked back down from where he stood and passed concerned faces, confused faces, faces of only those two types, and he smiled.
***
The sounds of Henryk Górecki's Third Symphony turned too loud filled the space of his apartment and burst through the walls but no neighbors came to his door demanding silence. He cleaned the dust from his apartment, a constant battle without victories or beginnings or endings. The dust came from nowhere, from everywhere, and he collected it in bins, a sweep at a time. These days it left him weary and dizzy but even so the battle, not raged, but insisted. He wiped the counters, the mantle of a fake fireplace, the back of the toilet. He scrubbed the sinks, the toilet, the floors, the walls, washed his sheets, his blanket, his towels. He cleaned until the Symphony ran four rotations and sweat dripped from his nose, the wind blowing through the open windows gave no relief but removed the acrid stench of cleaning solvents.
The one smell remained and it was not his own. Not the stench of decayed flesh, rotting organs, or accidental urination, but of fires beside the ocean under a luminous nightsky and sex in the rain.
He stopped the record and opened a book that a man long dead gave him. He turned to a page more worn than the others.
Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?
He placed it down and sat.
And waited.
He spoke then in whispers he did not hear.
Understand, I'll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.
I'll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.
His lips danced in despair and a dam broke flooding the silence with sobs.
***
He showered once more but did not wash. He sat in the tub and let the water fall on his feet and run past him to the drain. He watched the flow of water from below and the steam took the room. He did not object or raise a hand, a battle did not ensue, for he opened the gates to this.
He tried to pull himself up from the tub but could not so he waited.
Many minutes passed and he spent most of them staring through the porcelain just beyond his penis. Clean but for the tears and all the many years he held them. His skin pruned, the wrinkles like roadmaps travelling over his body.
He grabbed the railing on the wall with his right hand, put his left to the base of the tub, breathed deep in and out twice, and timed his push with his pull, got his legs under him, and the hot water of the shower scoured his tender skin, nearly toppling him. He turned it off without more trouble.
i remember me
i remember you
Written in the mirror but the cloud of steam obscured and he did not see, walking as if blind, the fog from outside invaded. Opening the bathroom door, the steam rushed out but singlefile, taking its time.
***
The television told him about a riot in Cannes over a film called Who Do You Run To?. The festival burnt down and the offending film turned to ashes as, the official asserted, it should have remained. They went on to discuss the life of Sebastian Falke and he watched pictures from a lifetime ago, his own life, lost for all to see. Him and Sebastian, him and Alec, all three, Genevieve, too. He did not turn it off, but he walked about the apartment checking counters and tables and sills for dust that was already piled high. He closed the window to silence the howling wind that smelt of smoke, the fire approaching, and to keep the dust and soot from invading.
He cleaned the apartment again until he sweated and the programme turned from Sebastian Falke and his own life to a young man long dead named Marcel Maddox and his quest for Sebastian that led to his biographer, Miho Takitani, to the discovery of the lost and only feature length film of Falke's hidden and unknown career.
Years spent in search only to watch it burn within days.
A life measured by soot.
The man paid little attention as the dust waged war with him for supremacy of his habitat. He scrubbed till his wrists hurt, till his back ached, till arthritis immobilised him and he sat on his bed breathing deep through his nose with eyes closed. The television chattered on about Sebastian Falke and Marcel Maddox and all the people they knew, all the artists and vagabonds, and then onto other figures lost to obscurity or the asemic discourse of the avant gardists.
He wiped his brow and stared at the remote controlling the television across the apartment. For one minute he stared, his chest rising and falling, slowing, but he did not stand up. He lied down, turned from the television and out his window at the fog close at hand and the smoke closer than yesterday. The television spoke of fires spread over the west coast and others in Chile and France and Thailand.
The hours melted together and it was not until 3:19 that he fell asleep, the last conscious words were those of a man selling knives to a supermodel, his brain falling through his pillow and floor into a place where dreams birth reality.
At 6:01 he shouted himself awake to see the sunrise and the fires reach the shore. Sweat covered him and he looked around, his face covered in disbelief. Trembling lips, sinking ships, a name against them, a thousand names for the morning news. Rubbing his eyes, he shook the name away and watched the ship fall through the horizon, taking young men and women to their death.
***
I have a dust problem, he said.
'Hm?' a blank stare and a ten dollar haircut, 'Dust?'
Yes, I can't get rid of the dust.
The young man leaned back, crossed his arms, 'Dust?'
Yes, dust. Lots of dust. More dust than can be accounted for.
'How old are you?'
He walked away, shuffled away, a way through crowds and faces of humans racked with guilt, with fear, the acrid stench of the millennial fires assaulting nostrils. Pushing, shoving, the jostle of a crowd in market, summer heat and winds, but unnatural, contorted and distorted by cataclysm and catastrophe.
A nursery, plants, humidity higher inside and the stench of smoking life exchanged for fecundity. He wandered about for fifty three minutes, touching a plant here, opening a door there, a maze that ever expanded the more his slow gait carried his absentminded shuffle through millions of species only the few had names for beyond flower, bush, tree.
'Can I help you?' A darkskinned woman with blonde hair, unnatural, cropped close to the scalp, stared at him, rubbing her hands clean on the apron, blue, she wore.
I have a dust problem.
'Dust,' she nodded. 'Follow me.'
He did, for eleven minutes and over two hundred paces, down stairs, through a door, left at a hallway, right at another, up stairs, another hallway, another door, and more stairs, up. He did not speak, nor did she. They walked in silence, his hand ruffling the leaves of certain plants and avoiding others. His eyes wandered halfseeing, halfdreaming, never resting upon anything, until the woman interrupted his ambulatory absence.
She stood before him holding a small pot with a small flower, purple like the evenstars, 'This is what you're looking for.'
This will solve the dust problem?
'This plant takes in many things, dust, memories, regrets, dreams, and purifies them.'
He frowned, his upper lip disappearing. I only need the dust, he said.
She smiled as if she knew a secret, her eyes narrow, her head cocked, coy, 'You want to forget.'
His brow furrowed. He stared at the plant for a moment, then the woman, the plant, the woman.
'You're afraid.’'
I do not want to forget.
'You do.'
He closed his eyes to hold back the torrent. He opened his mouth but nothing audible fell out, only the impressions left in the air of a name.
He took the plant from her and f
ound himself back in the crowd, carrying the plant like an infant, close to his chest, his eyes nowhere beyond its small petals. The crowd was thick, elbows to elbows, shoulders prying bodies apart, arms shimmied, feet scurrying for earth. A cloud overhead, black but not smelling of rain, a young man bumped and knocked the plant from the old man's hands, and he watched it spill to the earth, the soil mixing with the dirt and dust and feet. A young girl with ravenhair and eyes the color of its violet petals took the flower in her hands, cupped it, enough soil for it to stand, to live, she breathed onto it, the smell of rain grafted into his nostrils, expelling the effluvium of bodies and embers, and it was in his hands and the crowd was behind him, the fire off to the east and north and west and north.
***
He placed it in a small bowl that held sugar just moments before. Sprinkling with water, he set it on the coffeetable in the center of the room. For many minutes he stared at it, then he inspected the dust that piled on his counters, his floor, his mantle. The dust crept in through the walls but not the soot of the fireclouds. He pushed the table near the windows to give it sunlight. He watched it holding his breath and not blinking as if it held a great secret that it wanted to share with him. No secret appeared, perhaps.
***
He pulled out a clean notebook and opened it to its first page. The white stared back at him and so he stared harder, his brow knit, his upper lip swallowed by his lower, his eyes narrowed. He turned to the plant hidden in nightshade, past it to the hills far away on fire, and back to the blank page.
A pen in hand, he touched its point to begin. For one minute it remained there, his body frozen, and then, three deep breaths through his nose, he began.
I said your name the other day for the first time in decades. The first time this millennium. I watched a film the other day. Our film. Mine, yours, and Sebastian's. Do you remember? Sebastian and I spent two years writing a film without words.
His handwriting cramped, cursive and neat, without breaks. He shook his hand to make it stop shaking, perhaps.
It's because of that woman and that man. They came here so long ago that I had forgotten. He had wild eyes and talked too much. She never spoke. She was like a statue. I saw her at the film and she's the same. In these thirty years, time never touched her the way its ravaged me. You wouldn't recognise me. Like her, you're forever young. I cried. I keep crying. Even now, the tears well. It's been so long. Since you died the first time, I have not cried. I looked for you even after. You would not believe the things I did. Time took you too soon. I want you to know right now that I have missed singing with you. Singing silence. Our fingers tied, our mouths one, a music only you wrote. I loved you like I have never loved. I had forgotten. I forgot so many things but the film, our film, now there is only your absence. I am broken. I am old, the trousers yet unrolled, but I no longer sing or listen to the silence. The silence we created with Sebastian, that singularity that came from you and him and me. Do you remember me? Do you remember the poem you wrote? I found it in a book once many years later, many years after I forgot. It was not my book, and it did not make me laugh this time, but I did not cry then. It was not until recently, till I watched your ghosts naked in that hole that my body learnt to cry, to die one water molecule at a time. Do you remember what you said on the last day? You held my hand or I held yours, your body so frail, eyes so full, so big, too big. I kissed you but you told me you couldn't feel anything so I kissed you again and again even after you stopped breathing just in case you'd kiss me back, just in case all those stories we read on the coast of Dalkey were true, our bodies intertwined despite the threats of violence. I remember the Irish winds that brought you to me when we were still young enough to not know better, to not even know the name for the action we were caught in. Do you remember when Sebastian approached you? I thought he wanted you, wanted to take you from me. Even then, even when the jealousy came, I never thought of love as forbidden but that's why we left your home, wasn't it? Your mother let us share a room until she understood and kicked us out and your father never spoke to you again. I apologised then but you brushed it away, so I want to apologise now, for taking you from home and watching you die as the only one close enough to be family, though, even everywhere, it was still forbidden. That's why I think I thought then that a kiss could take you back. Instead it was the dream of a deadman and his biographer who returned your ghost from the grave to stain my sheets with the tears I bled away in your hospital bed, the kidney I lost, the lung I offered, the blood I gave, the marrow I demanded they take until they strapped me down only to release me a month later, your body already underground. I wish I could say that I returned to you every year, but half a century and three lifetimes have gone by. When you live too long as I have done, you imagine the ghosts of your teens and twenties have died and been reborn again. It is not so.
His face in his hands, he turned his head to the flower watching him.
I smell you on my hands and hear your voice when I lie in bed. I no longer sleep. I no longer breathe. My heart stopped beating. Yet, still, I live. I live, but you remind me of all the years I spent with cords around my neck, carrying a gun in my pocket in case I drank enough to give myself courage to follow. I always played at Orpheus but I couldn't. I couldn't. I wanted to. I wonder if you waited for me. If you still wait. I didn't. I want you to know that. I stopped waiting. But, today, I wonder if it's true. If all these years, these decades even happened, or if all my life's been a dream that I can't escape from. You told me a story once about a man who talked in his sleep who was trapped in his sleep by a lover, jealous. You said that if you talk to a person who talks in their sleep then they won't wake up but just keep on dreaming. What if I smell you now because you're still beside me? All these lives I've lived have been hallucinated behind my eyelids and we're still twenty three, in bed, fighting hunger and the cold, trying to make it last forever, not just us, but the films that no one remembers.
The pen dropped. He rubbed his wrist, his teeth chattered, but his eyes dry. He turned to the window, the pyre burning, the ash rising, the clock, 2:56.
I think we caused the world to catch fire.
He let the pen go again and stepped away from the notebook but did not close it. He turned off the light and stood in the darkness, his eyes closed. He sat, then lied on the floor, stretching his enfeebled body in all directions. The joints cracked, pain coursed, lungs seized, heart fluttered, and vision blurred into ecstatic white despite the fullness of night. His mouth open wide, eyes rolled back, fingers tapping, toes reaching, he pulled himself from the edges and corners of his frame back to its center, and smiled.
***
The taste of sawdust and acid in his mouth that he opened and closed, running his tongue over the contours of his teeth, smacking his desertlips. Still on the floor, the sunlight crawling up his chest, 11:11 said the clock. A night of sleep, longer than days. A dampness, at his middle, he disrobed, tossed his pants, shirt, and trousers into the washing machine. He smiled when he pushed the button, walking in the nude, the sky cascading through his window, the black cloud blowing out over the ocean, the fires closer than the night previous, no ships or boats on the water.
The steam filled the bathroom and he let the water burn the dead and old skin from his decaying life. He whistled, a song he wrote sixty seven years before at a piano now buried underground.
In the sound of water hitting porcelain was a voice without a body, the voice of a memory. It weaved into the song he whistled, the sparse notes and the humming melody.
He dried himself, holding onto the rail to keep himself balanced. Dizzy, the steam mist blinding him. The mirror reflected nothing nor did it hold any words. He yawned and dressed. The plant he acquired the day previous grew and emanated a cold but faint violet light. His eyes narrowed, a hand over the remains of his hair, and the beard he was ignoring since returning home. He whispered to it two syllables, Alec, and then closed his eyes for a moment, the light bright
er when he opened them.
The counters, sills, and mantles were dustless, as was the floor and the sunbeams that showed the galactic ellipse of dust particles adrift in the space. He turned back to the plant and smiled, put a finger to its petals, warm, burning like ice, caustic. Withdrawing, his right eyebrow twitched, and his face wore abhorrence.
He shuffled to the other edge of the apartment and heard the battering of wind on the building. The windowed door that led to the balcony shuddered and he opened it, the outside sucked in and the inside blown chaotically. The wind in his hair on the balcony, his eyes barely opened against the assault, embers danced through the air, trees catching light while men doused the flying flames.
Hey Mister, they said, but he did not respond or even acknowledge the rest of their speech broken by the torrential wind. The sound stolen, a silence behind impenetrable white noise that deafened him, taking more and more frequencies from his auditory spectrum. Spreading his arms, the wind threatening to push him to the ground or over the railing, he braced himself and stared out to the ocean. No more humans on the beach or ships on the water, the sky filling with thousands of fireflies drifting and flickering across the atmosphere, born from the fires that run north from Santiago and south from Vancouver and west from Cannes.
***
The notebook lied open on the table yet the pages blew past where he left his words, his letter to the dead. His faltering steps returned him to the seat, which he dropped heavily into. Paging back he reread the words that slipped from his hand and brain to be left stained there before him, to exist so long as the fire did not reach them.