The Dead Circle (3 page)

What used to be Shirley, the owner and sole employee of Scoops, who hoped someday to be known as ‘The Ice Cream Lady,’ strides down the street completely naked. The only thing covering her now is her distinctive cat-eye makeup. She walks with a steady gate, not quickly, but purposefully. Her journey is only interrupted by the frequent and seemingly random muscle spasms. In another moment, she arrives at the corner of Adams and Clifford, the southeast corner of a large empty lot in the center of downtown.

She begins a slow journey around the perimeter of the open space.

PART 1 - THE WATER

Chapter 1

“Holy shit!” Sarah’s voice echoes through the main library, down a flight of stairs, and floats into the kitchen.

“What is it?” Chris turns off the faucet.

“I just discovered something you’re going to like!”

Chris walks up the first few steps so he can see into the library and spots his wife above, leaning against the rounded balcony railing.  She’s looking down at him trying to hide a sneaky grin. Intrigued, Chris quickens his steps. This type of grin always means she’s up to something naughty.

“Is it porn?!” He shouts up.

“No, it’s-” She stops and looks down at him incredulously. “Wait. How could you possibly have guessed it was porn?!”

He grins and shrugs. “You had a porny face on.”

 “You’re ridiculous.”

“You know, kinda guilty, kinda excited. We’ve been married for thirteen years. I know your porn face.”

He enthusiastically jogs up the stairs and into the large room. He hops over their coffee table and dodges a beautiful Steinway grand piano on his way to the ladder. In thirty seconds, and slightly out of breath, he joins Sarah on the balcony that encircles the room.

“Funny, you never move that fast when I ask you to help me with the sanding.”

“Blah blah, get with the porn. Where did you find it?”

“Well in order to paint this edge I had to pull the bookshelf back a bit.” Sarah has been scraping off the old paint and priming the edges of bookshelves encircling the library’s second level. “Check it out!”

Chris kneels down and uses his iPhone to illuminate the space behind the shelf, taking time to write his name in the dust.

“Cool! Must be the first time the bookshelves have been moved since they built the place.”

“Definitely. Nothing’s been touched for eighty years.”

 Chris reaches under the shelf and comes back with nothing but cobwebs. “Fascinating, but where is the dirty stuff?”

She laughs and hands him the dusty magazine she had been holding behind her back. The cover features a black and white photo of a nude woman relaxing on a chez lounge. “Here ya go husband. You finally found grandpa’s porn stash.”

“Pep! Magazine: New Spicy Stories and Art. June 1926. This is so cool. History and boobs.”

Sarah laughs. “I thought you’d like that.”

“So we bought an abandoned eighty-year-old library and the only book in it was pornography from the roaring twenties?”      

“You complaining?”

“Hell no! I think it deserves a prominent placement on our shelves.”

She rolls her eyes. “Of course you do.”

A year and a half into their renovations, Chris and Sarah are finally ready to start painting and hanging pictures. Sarah has spent the last month starting a mural on the rounded walls above the bookshelves on the second level. She’s made it halfway around the ring, replicating the city of Detroit as it looked in its 1920’s heyday. She is painting one side of the room to show the skyline at night and plans to have it gradually transition to a daytime view on the far wall.

“Wow, this looks great! I keep thinking I’m going to get used to your talent, but I never do. Now if you’d just charge people more than ten bucks for your paintings, we’d have enough money to buy real furniture for this place.”

“IKEA is real furniture.”

“This beautiful library is made with marble and antique handmade mahogany bookshelves and we’re filling it with furniture we assembled with an Allen wrench.”

“It’s eclectic?”

“It’s poor-clectic.”

“Oh yeah? I figured when I married a classical pianist, he’d make all the money and we’d be whisked all over the world to play concerts in Paris and Rome.”

“I played in a concert in Rome!”

“Rome, Italy you goof, not upstate New York.”

Chris shrugs and heads back down the ladder to the main floor. On his way, he discreetly wipes a splatter of paint off the railing. Sarah is a brilliant artist, but a complete klutz with her brushes. “You knew I was a blue collar concert pianist when you married me.”

“When I married you I thought that was an oxymoron.”

“And weren’t you surprised that there are as many of us classical musicians struggling in the minor leagues as there are in any other sport?”

“It’s not a sport.”

“Sure it is. And it doesn’t matter that I could hit fifty home runs on fastballs if I never learn to hit the curveball. Until I do I’ll never get into the major leagues and I’ll forever be taking the bus to the theater in my worn-out tux.”

She looks down at him as he sits at the piano and opens the lid. He’s joking, but she knows he feels a lot more than he’s letting on.

Chris is a professional pianist, but not a particularly successful one. He plays concerts of the great piano pieces, but often with ‘b’ and ‘c’ orchestras in medium-sized cities: Rochester, Fort Wayne, Macon, even though the orchestras were sometimes only semi-professional. As a soloist, he was paid just enough to survive, if not overly comfortably. He occasionally resorts to taking jobs playing at churches, parties or even auditions for the professional theater companies in the area.

“You’re an amazing pianist. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you play a wrong note.”

“Yep. I’m a piano machine. Practically perfect in every way,” a tiny bit of bitterness sneaks into his voice, but he masks it by playing ‘Jolly Holiday’ from Mary Poppins. “But nobody in New York or Chicago wants to hear a soul-less computer make music. So I’m stuck playing in Akron for three hundred bucks and a meal stipend.”

“So I should cancel delivery on the Faberge eggs I was going to put on this shelf?” She climbs down the ladder and sits next to him on the piano bench.

Chris laughs. He appreciates her poking him out of his impending self-pity tailspin. “Of course, when I married you, you were a fancy architect making six figures a year, not a struggling artist. If anybody should be complaining about not having a sugar daddy, it’s me!”

“Touché!” She smiles and looks down at the strange square of contrasting flooring in the middle of the room. It was where the marble staircase connecting the balcony to the main floor was supposed to have been. Since it was never built, they tried to fill in the empty spot with matching hardwood, but it was still obviously not original. After considering putting a rug over it, they gave up and embraced it as a historical quirk. “Are we ever going to finish this?”

Chris stops playing.

“Finish? This place has been under construction for almost ninety years and it’s never been close to completed. I don’t know why we ever thought we could accomplish this.”

“Cuz we knew we wouldn’t get waylaid by the Great Depression and lose all of our money. Crash away Wall Street! When you don’t have any stocks, your life is so much more secure.”

“You know, when I said I wanted a fixer-upper this wasn’t exactly what I meant.”

“You wanted space. You wanted character. You wanted something we could afford. King, embrace your kingdom.”

Chris stands up and stomps around the room imperiously. “King? That sounds pretentious. I’d prefer to be a dictator.”

“Oh yeah?”

“A benevolent dictator though!”

 “You’re such an idiot.” Sarah laughs, tossing a pencil at him.

Chris jumps away from the attack, and sits back down at the piano. Without glancing at the music, he begins to play a section of Schumann, gliding his fingers up and down the keyboard with impressive dexterity and power for his relatively slight hands.

 “On the plus side, the acoustics in here are fantastic.” Chris says, repeating a difficult passage as Sarah climbs back up to her painting.

“You know-” Sarah stops, knowing Chris can’t hear her.

“What’s that?” He stops playing.

“There’s plenty more sanding to do up here. I can’t do the next part of the mural until we scrape off all of this lead paint. You could come up and help me.”

“I was helping! I thought underscoring would make it seem more dramatic.”

Sarah rolls her eyes yet again as Chris climbs the ladder and picks up a Brillo pad.

“Don’t eat the paint chips husband.”

“You’re no fun.” He starts to scrape and sand the plaster until it is completely smooth, while Sarah follows behind with a bucket of primer. “You know, this mural is turning into a ton of work. Have you considered a nice off-white?”

Sarah laughs. “I’m considering offing my husband at the moment.”

Chapter 2

If a Detroit Tigers fan leaving after a game at the shiny new Comerica Park walked down Adams Avenue for two blocks, he or she would find themselves in an enormous vacant lot. It’s a strangely empty area in relation to the dense city around it. It looks as if someone came along and deleted almost twenty acres out of the middle of downtown. Stretching five blocks in each direction, all the way to the Fisher Freeway, sits an uneven spiderweb of empty streets breaking up abandoned blocks. There are no buildings, no bus stops or mail boxes, just blank space. Some of the streets are still relatively smooth but some have more potholes than pavement. Several of the blocks still sport the faint outlines of buildings long torn down. Other areas are adorned with faded parking spots drawn on the concrete though few cars would dare park alone in the dusty wasteland. There are no security cameras aimed in this direction. There’s nothing to guard.

In a couple of spots, crabgrass stubbornly pokes up through cracks in the asphalt. It looks as if nature is slowly trying to reclaim what humanity lost interest in. Yet, the vast vacant space sits in the shadow of modern skyscrapers, busy streets and the MGM Grand Casino.

The juxtaposition of large modern buildings and strangely deserted swaths of land is not unique to Detroit, but this area is a very pronounced example. In the early twenty-first century, the gleaming visage of the city has become dotted with empty lots like liver spots. There are abandoned buildings, abandoned blocks and even abandoned neighborhoods, as if the city is being eaten alive by a cancer metastasizing into almost all areas of the once-healthy landscape.

Many proud citizens of Detroit work feverishly to keep the city alive, but it’s too late to reclaim much of its past glory. Hope comes from much smaller successes: a flourishing coffee shop, a craft bicycle store, or even a streetlight being repaired. 

More than twenty-five percent of the population left Detroit altogether in the span of four years starting in 2009. The people who remain are the strongest—those willing and able to fight in and for their city, and the weakest—those who were not physically or economically capable of escaping.

***

Kevin usually liked Fridays. He had gym class for final period so his weekend started early. This week they were doing floor hockey, which was his favorite sport. But that morning his enthusiasm was dampened by a math test. He hated math. Something about long division just made his mind turn to jelly
. Why would I ever need to do that without a calculator?
I mean, maybe in the olden days before literally everybody had a calculator on their phone, people needed this? But today, it’s a colossal waste of time.

He couldn’t concentrate in math anyway. This was the class he sat behind Karen Tyson.
That
Karen Tyson. The one that single-handedly reshaped his biggest hopes and dreams from football cards and Spider-man comic books to… the
great and powerful bra strap
. The magical bra strap was connected to the even-more-magical bra itself. And the bra touched something so powerful, he could barely even process the thought; Karen Tyson’s boobs. He’d never seen her boobs, but the bra strap, like a shining beacon of wondrous light, proved that they were there.
How in God’s name could you even pretend to concentrate on long division when Karen Tyson’s bra strap was right there in front of you?
He could almost reach out and touch it if he wasn’t afraid his heart would literally explode if he did.

And now, he had a test.
Shit
.

The anxiety that Kevin felt before and during the test was only mildly relieved when it was finished. He knew he’d been completely lost on the second half and wasn’t really sure if he’d gotten anything right on the first half. As he walked to the gymnasium, Kevin tried to push math out of his mind, not wanting his nervousness about a stupid test to bleed into his enjoyment of floor hockey.

Within ten minutes of running around pushing a plastic puck across the floor of the gym, he was reminded of what was truly important: scoring a goal and impressing Karen Tyson. Not that he thought it would make a difference, not really. Karen Tyson was so far above him in the social food chain, she was completely unreachable. But on some level, her being so far out of reach made his desire feel safer because Kevin had no idea what he would do if he ever caught her attention. So, he focused on scoring a goal and the beautiful fantasy of her being so swept up in his floor hockey prowess that she would hold his hand on the bus home.

He did score a goal. In fact he scored two. But alas, Karen Tyson was not as dazzled by his hockey skills as he had hoped. By the time he got out of the locker room, Karen Tyson was already on the bus and sitting with her impenetrable and terrifying gaggle of friends. Kevin sat down in the third row and pretended not to care.

A moment before bus twenty-eight pulled away from school, Kevin was hit with a shot of blazing panic when he remembered that he had left his earth science book in his locker.
Shit! Do I need it? Oh man, there’s a quiz on chapter seven on Monday. But I’ll miss the bus!
He stared at the green vinyl seat ahead of him for a moment, thinking.
It’s OK, I can just walk home. As long as I get there before Mom does, she’ll never know.