Thirteen Phantasms (36 page)

The biblical procession stopped in front of his house, and Harrison walked down the path to the sidewalk. Jesus grinned at him, clearly glad for the chance to pause amid his travail and catch his breath.

One of the women handed Harrison a folded flier. “I’m Mary Magdalene,” she told him. “This is about a meeting we’re having at our church next week. We’re on Seventeenth, just past the 5 Freeway.”

The shopping cart had stopped too, and Harrison carried the flier over to the black man and woman. “Here,” he said, holding out the piece of paper. “Mary Magdalene wants you to check out her church. Take a right at the light, it’s just past the freeway.”

The black man had a bushy beard but didn’t seem to be older than thirty, and the woman was fairly fat, wearing a sweatsuit. The shopping cart was full of empty bottles and cans sitting on top of a trash bag half full of clothes.

The black man grinned. “We’re homeless, and we’d sure like to get the dollar-ninety-nine breakfast at Norm’s. Could you help us out? We only need a little more.”

“Ask Jesus,” said Harrison nervously, waving at the robed people. “Hey Jesus, here’s a chance to do some actual
thing
tonight, not just march around the streets. This here is a genuine homeless couple, give ‘em a couple of bucks.”

Jesus patted his robes with the hand that wasn’t holding the cross. “I don’t have anything on me,” he said apologetically.

Harrison turned to the Roman soldiers. “You guys got any money?”

“Just change would do,” put in the black man.

“Nah,” said one of the soldiers, “I left my money in my pants.”

“Girls?” said Harrison.

Mary Magdalene glanced at her companions, then turned back to Harrison and shook her head.

“Really?” said Harrison. “Out in this kind of neighborhood at night, and you don’t even have quarters for phone calls?”

“We weren’t going to go far,” explained Jesus.

“Weren’t going to go far.” Harrison nodded, then looked back to Mary Magdalene. “Can your church help these people out? Food, shelter, that kind of thing?”

The black woman had walked over to Jesus and was admiring his cross. She liked the wheel.

“They’d have to be married,” Mary Magdalene told Harrison. “In the church. If they’re just. … living together, we can’t do anything for them.”

That’s great, thought Harrison, coming from Mary Magdalene. “So that’s it, I guess, huh?”

Apparently it was. “Drop by the church!” said Jesus cheerfully, resuming his burden and starting forward again.

“Get along, King of the Jews!” called one of the soldiers, snapping his length of rope in the air. The procession moved on down the sidewalk, the wheel at the bottom of the cross squeaking.

The black man looked at Harrison. “Sir, could we borrow a couple of bucks? You live here? We’ll pay you back.”

Harrison was staring after the robed procession. “Oh,” he said absently, “sure. Here.” He dug a wad of bills out of his pants pocket and peeled two ones away from the five and held them out.

The man took the bills. “God bless you. Could we have the five too? It’s Christmas Eve.”

Harrison found that he was insulted by the God bless you. The implication was that these two were devout Christians, and would assuredly spend the money on wholesome food, or medicine, and not go buy dope or wine.

“No,” he said sharply. “And I don’t care what you buy with the two bucks.” Once I’ve given it away, he thought, it shouldn’t be my business. Gone is gone.

The black man scowled at him and muttered something obviously offensive under his breath as the two of them turned away, not toward Norm’s and the dollar-ninety-nine breakfast, but down a side street toward the mini-mart.

Obscurely defeated, Harrison trudged back up to his porch and collapsed back into the chair.

He wished the train record was still playing inside—but even if it had been, it would still be a train that, realistically, had probably stopped rolling a long time ago. Listening to it over and over again wouldn’t make it move again.

He opened the door and walked back into the dim living room. Just as he closed the door he heard thunder boom across the night sky, and then he heard the hiss of sudden rain on the pavement outside. In a moment it was tapping at the windows.

He wondered if the rain gauge was still on the roof, maybe measuring what was happening to Jesus and the black couple out there. And he was glad that he had had the roof redone a year ago. He was okay in here—no wet carpets in store for him.

The vodka bottle was still on the table, but he could see tiny reflected flickers of light in the glassy depths of it—red and green and yellow and blue; and, though he knew that the arm of the phonograph was lifted and in its holder, he heard again, clearly now, Bing Crosby singing “We Three Kings.”

To hell with the vodka. He sat down in the leather chair and picked up the snow globe with trembling fingers. “What,” he said softly, “too far? Too long? I thought it was supposed to be forever.”

But rainy gusts boomed at the windows, and he realized that he had stood up. He pried at the base of the snow globe, and managed to free the plug.

Water and white plastic flecks bubbled and trickled out of it, onto the floor. In only a minute the globe had emptied out, and the two figures in the sleigh were exposed to the air of tonight, stopped. Without the refraction of the surrounding water the man and the woman looked smaller, and lifeless.

“Field and fountain, moor and mountain,” he whispered. “Journey’s done—finally. Sorry”

He was alone in the dark living room. No lights gleamed in the vodka bottle, and there was no sound but his own breath and heartbeat.

Tomorrow he would open the door to anyone who might knock.

It was several months after I had dismantled my aquaria that I heard a rustling in the darkness, a scraping of what sounded like footsteps on the front porch of my house. It startled me out of a literary lethargy built partly of three hours of Jules Verne, partly of a nodding acquaintance with a bottle of single malt scotch. In the yellow glow of the porch lamp, through the tiny, distorting panes of the mullioned upper half of the oaken door, I saw only a shadow, a face perhaps, half turned away. The dark outline of it was lost in the shaded confusion of an unpruned hibiscus.

The porch itself was a rectangular island of hooded light, cut with drooping shadows of potted plants and the rectilinear darkness of a pair of weather-stained mission chairs. Encircling it was a tumult of shrubbery. Beyond lay the street and the feeble glow of globed lamps, all of it washed in pale moonlight that served only to darken that wall of shrubbery, so that the porch with its yellow buglight and foliage seemed a self-contained world of dwindling enchantment.

I couldn’t say with any confidence, as I sat staring in sudden, unexplained horror at the start this late visitor had given me, that the leafy appendages thrusting away on either side of him weren’t arms or some strange mélange of limbs and fins. With the weak light at his back he was a fishy shadow suffused in the amber aura of porchlight, something which had crawled dripping out of a late Devonian sea.

In the interests of objectivity, I’ll say again that I had been reading Jules Verne. And it’s altogether reasonable that a mixture of the, book, the shadows, the embers aglow in the fireplace, the late hour, and a morbid suspicion that nothing but trouble travels in the suburbs after dark combined to enchant into existence this troublesome shade that was nothing, in fact, but the scraping of a branch of hibiscus against the windowpane. But you can understand that I wasn’t anxious to open the door.

I put the book down silently, the afterimage of the interior of the Nautilus slanting across my consciousness and then submerging, and I remember wondering at the appropriateness of the scene in the novel: the crystal panels bound in copper beyond which floated transparent sheets of water illuminated by sunlight; the lazy undulations of eels and fishes, of lampreys and Japanese salamanders and blue and silver clouds of schooling mackerel. Slipping into the shadows beyond the couch, I pressed myself against the wall and crept into the darkened study where a window would afford me a view of most of the porch.

My aquaria, as I’ve said, were dismantled some months earlier, six, I believe—the water siphoned out a window and into a flower bed, the waterweeds collapsed in a soggy heap, the fish astonished to find themselves imprisoned in a three gallon bucket. These last I gave to a nearby tropical fish store; the empty aquaria with its gravel and lumps of petrified stone I stored beneath a bench in the shed under my avocado tree. It was a sad undertaking, all in all, like bundling up pieces of my boyhood and packing them away in a crate. I sometimes have the notion that opening the crate would restore them wholesale, that the re-creation of years gone by could be effected by dragging in a hose and filling the tanks with clear water, by banking the gravel around rocks heaped to form dark caverns, the entrances of which are shadowed by the reaching tendrils of waterweeds through which glow watery rays of reflected light. But the visitor on the porch that night dissuaded me.

Three aquarium shops sit neatly in my memory by day and are confused and shuffled by night, giddily trading fishes and facades, all of them alive with the hum and bubble of pumps and filters and the damp, musty smell of fishtanks drip dripping tropical water onto concrete floors. One I discovered by bicycle when I was thirteen. It was a clapboard house on a frontage road along a freeway, the exhaust of countless roaring trucks and automobiles having dusted the peeling white paint with black grime. Inside sat dozens of ten-gallon tanks, poorly lit, the water within them half evaporated. There wasn’t much to recommend it, even to a thirteen-year-old, aside from a door in the back—what used to be a kitchen door, I suppose—that led along a gravel path to what had been a garage. These thirty years later I can recall the very day I discovered it, the gravel path that is, easily a year after my first bicycle journey to the shop. I’d wandered around inside, shaking my head at the condition of the aquaria, despising the guppies and goldfish and tetras that swam sluggishly past their scattered dead companions. My father waited in a Studebaker at the curb outside, drumming his fingers along the top of the passenger seat. A sign in pencil scrawl attracted my eye, advertising another room of fish “outside.” And so out I stepped along that gravel path, shoving into the darkened back half of the garage, which was unlit save for the incandescent bulbs in aquarium reflectors. I shut the door behind me for no other reason than to keep out sunlight. Banks of aquaria lined three walls, all of them a deep greenish-black, the water within lit against a backdrop of elodea and Amazon swordplant and the waving, lacey branches of ambulia and sagitarius. There was the faint bursting of fine bubbles that danced toward the surface from aerators trapped beneath mossy stones. On the sandy floor of one aquarium lay a half dozen mottled freshwater rays from the Amazon, their poisonous tails almost indistinguishable from the gravel they rested on. A half score of buffalo-head cichlids hovered in the shelter of an arched heap of waterfall rock, under which was coiled the long, finny serpent’s tail of a reedfish.

The aquarium seemed to me to be prodigiously deep, a trick, perhaps, of reflection and light and the clever arrangement of rocks and water-plants. But it suggested, just for a moment, that the shadowed water within was somehow as vast as the sea bottom or was a sort of antechamber to the driftwood and pebble floor of a tropical river. Other aquaria flanked it. Gobies peered up at me from out of burrows in the sand. An enormous compressiceps, flat as a plate, blinked out from behind a tangle of crypto-coryne grasses. Leaf fish floated amid the lacey brown of decaying vegetation, and a hovering pair of golfball-sized puffers, red eyes blinking, tiny pectoral fins whirring like submarine propellers, peered suspiciously from beneath a ledge of dark stone. There was something utterly alien about that room full of fishes, existing in manufactured amber light, a thousand miles removed from the dusty gravel of the yard outside, from the roaring freeway traffic not sixty feet distant. I stood staring, oblivious to the time, until the door swung open in a flood of sunlight and my father peeked in. In the sudden illumination the odd atmosphere of the room seemed to decay, to disperse, and it reminds me now of what must happen to a forest glade when the sun rises and dispels the damp enchanted pall summoned each night by moonlight from the roots and mulch and earth of the forest floor.

One dimmed tank was lit briefly by the sunlight, and in it, crouched behind a tumble of dark stone, was an almost hidden creature with an enormous head and eyes, the eyes of a squid or a spaniel, eyes that were lidded, that blinked slowly and sadly past the curious scattered decorations of its tank: a half dozen agate marbles, a platoon of painted lead soldiers, a brass sheriff’s star, and a little tin shovel angling from a bucket half full of tilted sand and painted in tints of azure and yellow, a scene of children playing along a sunset beach.

I was old enough and imaginative enough to be struck by the incongruity of the contents of that aquarium. I wasn’t, though, well enough schooled in ichthyology to remark on the lidded eyes of the creature in the tank—which is just as well. I was given over to nightmares as it was. A year passed before I had occasion to visit the shop beside the freeway again, and I can recall bicycling along wet streets through intermittent showers, hunched over in a yellow, hooded slicker, my pantlegs soaked from the knees down, rewarded finally with the sight of no shop at all, but of a vacant lot, already up in weeds, the concrete foundation of the clapboard house and garage brown with rainwater and mud.