Lost Girls

chapter 35

Outside the window the night swirls and disperses like ink poured into water. ''The days are getting shorter,'' I hear the locals state the obvious to each other on street corners as I pass, their eyes held up to the sky. But for me the more accurate observation would be ''The night is coming sooner.'' And when it comes it stays longer, keeping me from sleep, from the fleeting distractions of work. I wish for night-lights. The pink plastic ones with the ten-watt bulbs. Maybe if I could stick a few of those around I could push the worst of the shadows back from all the corners.

Brush my teeth again. Never used to in the city, but up here I've really taken to it. I've found I can kill a whole seven minutes with a single meticulous scrubbing. What's important is to really get into ''those hard-to-reach places'' the packaging warns of. Such small pleasures also allow for a check to see how I'm scoring on the ghoul-o-meter. Every time I look in the mirror now it's like time-lapse photography, my face aging at the rate of one year for every passing day. Worse, these false years are not treating me with any kindness whatsoever, introducing colors to my skin better suited to the stuff collected in bus-terminal ashtrays. A little surprised I can still see myself in mirrors at all anymore the way I've come to live like a vampire: don't eat regular food, awake most of the night, fingernails the yellowed sharpness of talons. And feeling a little monstrous, too, in the pained, baffled way of the walking dead. Although I'm not. Not yet dead. There's still a heart (a clenched fist that sucker-punches surrounding organs from time to time). And still a soul. Or whatever weightless thing it is that lifts away on its own occasionally to look down at me as I try to work at my desk. Pauses before something jerks it back like a balloon whose string has almost passed beyond the tallest grasp. And whenever this happens I always think, plainly and briefly and in italics: I want to be alive. Not I'm too young to die or Life is good or even Happy to be here. Nothing else, neither gratitude nor relief. Just hangs there for a second like the product slogan flashed at the end of a commercial. I want to be alive. And then a wave of foolishness--it's a rather obvious thing to construct as a sentence, after all--along with a swift brush of fear, like hair pulled across your cheek.

Well, boo-hoo for me. When all this is over I'll treat myself to a week somewhere warm followed by the psychotherapy all my ex-friends pointedly recommended before writing me off. If that doesn't work I'll attend at the first church or suburban rec room that reports a weeping statue of the Blessed Virgin, light a candle, and leave a large donation. Later I will be reformed. But what I need now is a couple hours of headfuck-free work time. So I take my seat again, rub hands together to bring feeling to the fingertips. Pull my head back to whatever lies at the top of the To Do pile.

Laird Johanssen's file. Didn't I throw it out? I should've. I should now. But instead I pull it open and finger through what's inside. A full-size brown envelope with SOUVENIRS printed over it in marker that bulges sharply in places with whatever is kept within. Turn it over and spill the contents out onto the desk.

The first thing I see is two locks of hair, one dark and one light, each bound together by a small elastic band. The shameless fellow must have begged their stylists for a sample from whatever had been swept into a pile under the salon chair after they'd left. As this image plays itself out I find that I've lifted the hair to my own nose, one lock at a time, breathing in the faint scent of the different conditioners--one lemon, one vanilla--that still cling to the brittle strands.

There's a pellet of yellow chewing gum with a molar print dried into its smoothness like a fossil. A cheap silver-plated bracelet with Happy 13th Birthday, Ashley! Love, Dad engraved on the inside. A pair of sunglasses missing one of its arms with green lenses shaped like the eyes of a cat. A cassette of Nirvana's Nevermind, a wrinkled loop of tape pulled out and twisted into a waxy nest. A photograph of Krystal standing in front of her open locker and a pullout Leonardo DiCaprio poster taped to the inside of the metal door behind her. A startled smile on her face, her head swiveled to meet the camera's flash. There's something in the dry fatigue at the edges of the eyes that suggests that although she's been surprised to hear her name and turn to find her picture being taken, she recognizes in the same instant that it's only Laird. She was hoping for one of the cute guys, Josh or Steve or Matt, or at least one of the yearbook photo-editor geeks. Not pizza-faced Laird, always taking little pieces of you away for himself.

There's also a scattering of papers, some clipped together and others on their own, leathery from repeated foldings. The first sheaf neater than the others, a handwritten essay with ''THE REAL TRAGEDY OF ROMEO AND JULIET, By Ashley Flynn'' printed in red pen across the top of the first page. I flip to the end and read the final sentence: ''In many ways Shakespeare's play is tragic because it puts the selfish interests of families in conflict against pure love, so that, in the end, neither are ultimately allowed to triumph.'' Beneath this, Tripp's written comments (''As usual, an excellent appreciation of Shakespeare's moral polarities'') and, in the bottom corner, a boldly encircled A+. Another is a page of newsprint ripped from the school paper, Perspectives. The bottom half taken up with a poem by Krystal McConnell under the headline ''1st Prize Winner: Literature'' and entitled ''What's Inside of Me.'' Again I skip to the last lines:

All the things on the outside are just a big show So what's really inside of me? You'll never know.

Two photocopies of the girls' entries in Laird's yearbook from the previous spring. The messages cursory, impersonal, obligatory. The first in Ashley's hand:

Hey L.J.

Well, it's been a great year (class trip to Stratford, the Cougars winning the Cup) and it's been nice having you around. Maybe we'll see ya in the summer.

Ashley F.

The Maybe we'll see ya a telling use of the corporate we, its purpose to remind someone like Laird of where he belonged. But the message also graced him by the promise of maybe an accidental meeting with someone important this summer. Who knows, they might even say hello to him as they passed.

Krystal even more dismissive, through a devastating, adult politeness:

Laird,

Good luck with whatever!

Krystal McConnell

But Laird didn't care that they wanted nothing to do with him. They didn't need to know him to be worthy subjects for capture, worship, and preservation. If hot girls were more accessible they would be less important to a kid like Laird Johanssen anyway. Maybe what makes the Lairds of this world love beauty from a great distance is the very impossibility of that love ever being returned.

So which was I? The adorer or the adored? The truth is I can't remember. And there's nothing to help me: no yearbooks stuck at the bottom of closets, photo albums, letters and notes collected in a shoe box. Somehow I emerged from youth without any evidence of my having been there. All of it made to disappear, just as Ashley and Krystal were.

Dead or alive something happened to them, and now all that's left is Laird's collected bits and pieces, a wrinkled envelope marked SOUVENIRS. Their handwriting speaks in my ear as I read it. The hair glints as though the dull light of the desk lamp is instead the brilliant luster of an afternoon sun. The bracelet warmed by an imagined wrist, its delicate pulses of blood.

Here and then not here.

Disappeared.

Taken from the world but not understandably, without motive or reason or story. To disappear is to be denied an ending to yourself, the one gift that death can give.

That night I turn on the TV and it fizzes and cracks to life. A bad picture tube that flattens heads and loses its vertical hold anytime a voice is raised. I get through a real-life cop show featuring a German shepherd separating a fleeing crack dealer from his left arm, the last half of Jerry Springer (the topic: ''You're My Sister and You're Sleeping with My Son!''), shots of expensive beachfront homes turned to sparkly piles of chrome and glass by a hurricane in Florida. All of it reduced to a comic routine, even the violence and domestic tragedy and the power of Nature all going for the laughs. The flat heads weep, resist arrest, slap each other across the face without consequence.

I turn it off to waggle a plastic spoon into the thermos, only to have it slip out of my fingers when the phone rings.

''Barth Crane here.''

''Oh, my. You're in! I hate to sound like your mother, but I must say it: Why don't you ever call?''

''Nothing to report, Graham.''

''Surely there's something.''

''Just been doing some research.'' I turn to the Lady's photo on the wall behind me. ''Pulling things together.''

''Very good. No problems, then? The locals stop their little shows? Les danseuses exotiques curtail their prank calls? No more old women falling through ice or attempts to freak you out?''

''This is my case, Graham. Do I call you up just to be a sarcastic bitch when you're working on a trial?''

''I wasn't talking about the trial, old man.''

What if Graham could see me now? The walls plastered in curling newsprint. Most of Tripp's file still unopened on the desk. A written account of Mrs. Arthurs's story of the Lady glowing out from the laptop's screen.

''Really, Graham. When I called that time I think I was drunk, for Christ's sake. Everything's peachy now, if you'd just stop smothering me.''

I turn on the TV again, mute the volume on the remote. It's the funny-home-video show, a family winning $10,000 for footage of its father being swarmed by bees and falling off a stepladder while trying to screw a basketball net over the garage.

''Smothering? I'm so sorry. We don't want to smother our boy, do we? Back to it, then. And you just ring if anything develops. We're following things in the papers down here, and you look good. Although, may I suggest a haircut?''

''Haircut. Right.''

''Night-night.''

I pick up the spoon again, dip deep. Tape the curling corners of newspaper down with another round of Scotch tape. Hold her picture in my hand, and instead of dreams stay with the hair transplant specialists, cellulite creams, and psychic hot lines until dawn.