Shadow Man: A Novel (17 page)

What a letter it was, 133 pages; some written in longhand, some typed; some pages flowing with ornate penmanship, others a jumbled, dizzying thicket of words. I read of Egypt, deserts, souks, the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, horses and tents, ablutions, drinking wine and making love in whitewashed bungalows with sea-blue shutters. It wasn’t a letter. It was an autobiography of a mother. My mother. The man from Marrakesh was there, a lover at first, but
growing more sinister as Vera’s story unfolded and her alphabet turned blockish with demons, yes, tiny devils drawn and lurking between q’s, g’s, and o’s.

Page 107: “He was there today, but I couldn’t see him, although I spotted him yesterday, slipping around the corner behind me, like a breath, a wicked breath. He will kill me. But when? I am an antelope; he a lion. The watering hole is shrinking. No one believes me. That’s because he’s clever, clever like the night. He will find me here, even in this place where the white shoes squeak and the windows are crisscrossed with wire. My daughter, wherever you are, believe what others do not. He is here. Omnipresent. Dust gathering and dispersing in an ancient wind. How old are you, my daughter? I do not know. They’ve taken my calendars, my maps. They even took you. You never suckled from me. They laid you blue and bloody on my belly, my legs splayed, held apart by shiny metal. I felt your life, your heat. You seeped into me. And then they carried you away, out a swinging door. Down the hall. Squeaking. If I can escape here I will find you. I will draw new maps and find you …”

It is not coincidence that I am a nurse and James is a man in need of a nurse. The world has joined what should have been bonded all along. The hand of God reaching through His sea of mortals has set something right, or maybe it’s just the power of nature to reunite blood. I am the woman in white. I stand guard over my half brother. He is fading, I know. He doesn’t know me. I haven’t told him yet. I haven’t told Eva, either. James doesn’t know that his skin, his pigment, the color of his eyes, the way he dips his head to the left when he listens are all me, too. I wonder sometimes that others don’t see the obvious.

In the morning, when I go into his room and open the curtains, I wonder if this will be the day that the sunlight hits him just right and brightens what’s dark in him. I know better. I am a nurse; I know biology, the sciences of decay. I chart with precision. But we
can hope. People wake from years-long comas; drowning men are pulled from the sea.

Vera’s letter. Page 121: “My daughter. What have they named you? There is something you must know. Something to make you complete. You have a brother. I guess he is a half brother, since you are my only child. His name is Jim. He is thin the way boys are thin, unformed, knees, elbows, and arms, but you can see where the muscles and lines will be. Boys are like that, growing from the inside out. His mother died. But his father is your father. Jim reads the dictionary. All the time. He slips big words in, so you have to watch. A conversation is going along and then, out of nowhere, a strange word warbles out of his mouth. It’s cute. Jim is cute. I’ve lost him. I’ve written him letters, but have heard nothing. His last name is Ryan. He’s from Philadelphia. I don’t know if he ever believed me about the man from Marrakesh. Things ended quickly with us. I don’t know when, or if, you’ll ever get this letter. I’m looking at all the pages now; it’s certainly grown into a very, very long letter. A confession? An apology? I keep it in a folder. The people here are nice that way. Time, as I mentioned earlier, is vague to me. I can’t seem to grasp a minute, and I don’t know if the minutes are flying past, or dripping by, one slow drop at a time. But Jim will be out there. He may be a lot older, become someone much different than who I remember. But I remember him well. His hair going every which way in that Impala. His face tan. His diving into waves and laughing, and the way he looked at me sometimes, like I was a bird flown in from a distant wind. Sometimes he would smile and look down, bashful, as if he couldn’t figure me out, even with all his vocabulary. He liked the Beatles. The
White Album
, if I remember correctly, was his favorite. That is Jim.

“And now I have to tell you about your father. His name was Kurt. He painted ships and played tennis. It was in the morning I lost him. I think just before dawn; the air had that speckled, fuzzy
grayness. It is a conspiring time when night meets the coming day. Things appear not as they are. Nothing is certain in twilight. You will learn this. Kurt was in the twilight, but there was another shadow commingling, too. You know, if you’ve read this letter, who that shadow was. He was there. I know it. He was moving behind Kurt, slinking like he did, like he did so many times, like a spirit, a jinn, but this time he was so much closer, there in the twilight with Kurt and me. Kurt didn’t see him, because as I told you, he was behind Kurt. I reached into my bag. It was a big macramé purse. I felt the handle. The next thing I knew, light had filled the room. Men with dark suits and radios surrounded me. They kept asking me questions. Writing things with their little pencils …”

Vera’s eyes locked on mine. The crack of the door sent a blindfold of light across her face, like in those horror movies when the girl, usually a virgin or a babysitter, hears a sound downstairs in a big house on a windy night. The camera moves with the stealth of a spider, capturing the girl’s darting, spooked eyes, black doll’s eyes, while a tree branch scratches at the window and dead leaves blow in a courtyard. Vera looked to the gun on the nightstand, reached for it, but then must have recognized me. Her hand retracted under the white sheet and she curled around Kurt, who was in a deep sleep, his head tilted toward the open curtains to the balcony and the sea.

“Go to bed, Jim,” came Vera’s voice from the darkness.

I closed the door to Room 501 and tiptoed back to 503. I sensed somebody in the hall, just around the corner, but I heard no key slide and figured it was Alice’s gimpy uncle walking his night rounds, counting bars of soap and bottles of shampoo, inspecting shower curtains in vacant rooms, fixing the housekeeper’s cart, ordering more toilet paper, tinkering with the hidden machinery of the hospitality industry. I went inside and closed the door. Turning on the TV; turning it off. Flicking through the Bible and looking under the bed to see if an earlier guest had left something of value, some clue to bring two strangers together. A hotel room is a prison cell when you can’t sleep. The breeze billowed the muslin curtains; they seemed like big white lungs in the darkness, filling and collapsing, breathing. I went to the balcony.

“Out wandering, boy?”

Alice sat staring at the ocean through the railing.

“What are you doing?”

“Counting waves. Four hundred and seventy-three. Shouldn’t leave your door open. Don’t know who could come and gitcha in the night. My daddy says at hotel conventions managers tell stories of all the strange, unexplainable things that happen in their hotels. My daddy figures hundreds of people a year disappear from hotel rooms. Just vanish, like they were kidnapped by space aliens.”

She turned toward me, an ember like a firefly lighting her face.

“You wanna hit?”

“You Baptist girls sure smoke a lot of dope.”

“Tonight’s my night off.”

“Who’s at the front desk? Your uncle?”

“No. This guy Slim. Daddy knows him from church. He was gonna be a preacher but didn’t have the calling.”

“The calling?”

“The gift.”

She sucked again; the glow around her face brightened.

“The gift is speaking the words as if they were written just for you. Some preachers have it, most don’t. My daddy calls it ‘magnetism.’ He says only God can put it on your tongue.”

She switched the joint to her other hand, blew its ash into the night, and relit it with a silver lighter.

“Wasn’t the ocean nice today? I liked being out in there with you,” she said. “I liked kissing and floating, the currents spinning us slow.”

“I never kissed in the ocean before …”

“Bet you never saw a girl’s breasts in the ocean before, either.”

She laughed. I blushed, but it was night and Alice couldn’t see. I took the joint.

“I didn’t really see them. The water obscured the detail.”

“I could take that as an insult if I knew what obscured meant. You ever think how you’ll die?”

“No.”

“I do sometimes. I think it’s church. Preachers make you feel like there’s so much out there. Like the world is full of tiny, invisible traps of darkness. If I could choose how I’d die, I’d choose the ocean. Being swept out gently by the currents, the water turning colder and colder and my body going numb, slowly filling, all the time having the sensation of floating, like a sea angel flying on the tide toward God.”

Her voice was a little cracked from the smoke; it was huskier, but soothing. I closed my eyes and listened. She was a radio in the night, talking into the ether, making shapes with sounds in the scratchy distance. I wasn’t high. I was simply peaceful. Vera’s hand was off the trigger and all seemed quiet in 501, while in 503 a girl with breasts, a lighter, and a bag of her brother’s marijuana talked and talked, a merry-go-round of words, raspy against the waves. I heard a crinkle.

“You want half? Milky Way. I got it from the box we stock the vending machines with.”

“You must have a lot of stuff like that, supplies I mean.”

“A truck is always dropping something off. One time we had three deliveries of soap in one day. It was a screwup, but we had all this soap and Daddy said it was enough to wash every soldier in the entire US Army. It was in winter and there were hardly any guests, so you know what we did? We lined the soap up like dominoes, setting them up in the shape of a Tilt-A-Whirl, you know, a spiral tightening. And then we let ’em fall. It was beautiful. They fell so fast and they made a kind of soft clattery music.”

“Do you like the Beatles?”

“Didn’t they break up?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m still hungry. I got another candy bar. Want half?”

“Sure.”

“Almond Joy. Shit. I meant to get Mounds. You can have my almond.”

Alice flicked the joint over the railing. We ate in silence, Alice handing me her almond. When she was done, she stepped over to where I was leaning and kissed me. We tasted almost the same. She kissed me the way she did in the water. Soft. I felt her back, bare in her halter top, and it was warm, as if her skin had stored up the day’s sun. Her hair smelled of dope and the sea, a little perfume on her neck. She pressed against me and lifted a hand to my cheek and then another, holding my face as if it were something delicate, like crystal or the blown glass of a Christmas ornament.

She kissed me again. Brief. Her tongue traced my chocolate lips and I felt that somehow she was older, older in the way that girls are in elementary school, when they are better than the boys in penmanship and arithmetic. Maybe she was a little scared like I was, but I didn’t think so, she seemed to know about skin and kisses, and how to blow a breath across a neck. She took my hand and led me through the curtains into the dark room and onto the bed. We lay like fallen wood, side by side, pressed together, but then, like we did in the ocean, we seemed to float. I opened my eyes and in the bits of gray and dark I saw her looking at me, not like Vera with her gun, not scared and waiting, but looking at me like I was her own private mystery, a boy on a bed in her daddy’s hotel, floating with her above the waves in the warm stillness of her breathing. I stroked her hair.

“You still checking out day after tomorrow? Your daddy and that woman he’s with haven’t changed the reservation.”

“I don’t know what we’re doing.”

She kissed me again, then sat up and took off her halter top. She lifted off my shirt, and we lay back down. I didn’t know what to do; boys pretend but they don’t know, and I didn’t know. She took my hand and put it on her breast. Nothing was blurry like it had been in the ocean. Even though it was gray-dark, her breasts were white,
blooms of white, a girl’s unfinished white, rising from her tanned body.

“Can you feel my heart?”

“It’s going fast.”

“I feel it, too. We can’t do no more than this, Jim. Just this kissing and touching.”

“That’s okay.”

“You taste like a big candy bar.”

She laughed and rolled on top of me, her hair fell around me, and she lifted and dipped, like a kite, on my breathing. I didn’t know what to say. I said nothing. I was glad we weren’t going further, to a place I didn’t know. Part of me wanted to, but most of me didn’t. I wasn’t an altar boy. I wasn’t gay, but I wasn’t a Beatles’
White Album
song, either. Alice made me feel like a boy sensing his manhood out there a dozen waves from shore, gathering but not yet arrived. Her voice made me imagine I was kissing Lizabeth Scott. The tone vulnerable, a voice of hurt or waiting to be hurt; Alice’s voice invited you in, wrapped you up like you were her conspirator, but then it held you at bay. She sat up and straddled me.

“Trace me.”

“What?”

“Trace me with your fingers. Trace me and you’ll never forget me.”

I traced her. It seemed I was cutting her from the night. Neck, shoulders, down the arms, elbows, hands; skimming her waist, up her stomach to her breasts and around them, moving to her collarbone and slipping over her chin, like slipping over a dune, to her face, her forehead, my fingers disappearing into her hair. I did it twice. She lay beside me, the way Mom used to lie beside Kurt on the couch after a long day.

“Let’s sleep,” said Alice. “When you wake I’ll be gone, and you’ll wonder if this all ever happened.”

“I traced you. I’ll remember.”

I closed my eyes. I could feel Alice’s heart beating beside mine. I wondered what we would look like in Nut Johnson’s telescope. Two specks of flesh in the night — a boy and a girl — tangled together by kisses and arms, and sleeping in a room by the sea below the great constellations and the ghosts of old sailors who charted the stars toward doom or fortune. I could talk to Nut like that. He would understand. He would see me through his telescope and know that something had happened, that I was the same, but somehow changed; that seeing a girl’s breasts, touching them, having them press against you was wonderful, but not in the way a boy expects in his mind before it actually happens. It’s different. Better. But somehow you feel tricked in the nicest kind of way. Nut would know this without my having to explain, just like he knew, when peering at Mrs. Romano’s silhouette through her lighted shade, the splendor of shadows that spin before us.