The Girl was full of questions for her street-corner companions, but she invariably found herself faced with a silence that proclaimed, You can’t get there from here.
Still, she was grateful to be here in this brief respite with two who were undeniably not mirages or puppets of the mist but actual people, regardless of what prohibitions they might have forced upon them.
There were other acquaintances she recalled, less as if she had met them on the way to her own daytime obligations and more as if they were characters in a story she had been told. Still, she could visualize them…almost: a Russian hot-dog vendor, she recalled dimly, and an impetuous, powerful young woman, and a wild-eyed homeless man. There was a veil there. Was it real or was it…?
In some way she could not quite summon, she knew they were real; had become a good deal more than that in later times.
But none of them were here now, that was for sure.
Papa Sky had come first, appearing on this street corner or one much like it days and days before (hard to tell how long precisely, with each day so similar). Inigo had arrived some time later, suddenly standing there as he stood now, seemingly drawn by the music, transfixed by it.
There was a familiar quality to him, although the Girl knew she hadn’t met him before, not this specific individual. But in the murkiness of memory she knew that she had encountered ones very like him, vague names in the cloudy waters coalescing into…Freddy? and…Hank?
The Girl had lingered on that day when Inigo made his debut, had drawn him aside into a shrouded alley curtained from prying eyes.
“Where are you from?” she demanded of him.
“Here,” he said simply, and she knew from how he said it that he didn’t mean these streets like her street, but really here, where this truly was, or at least what lay beyond her island home, the outside that was excluded from her.
Since then, she and Inigo had stolen moments away when there was a lull in her imposed schedule, blank spots to fill in. They went to the Guggenheim sometimes (the art was always different) or to Sbarro’s at Times Square (where she always had just enough money).
They had both been shy of each other at first, and wary, too. But longing for company, in time they had opened themselves in a slow dance of growing companionability.
She assembled his past from the tiny fragmented pieces he revealed to her, like a jigsaw with more missing than revealed.
He was alone, his mother and father gone.
(As was she…)
The father had disappeared first, under mysterious circumstances. There was a curious irony to that, because Inigo had been named by his mother after a character in The Princess Bride, one whose raison d’etre was to avenge the death of his father.
Then his mother had exited, too. Not departed into death like Tina’s own mother, but on a voyage of some sort, a searching. Inigo had been left in the care of some woman…a friend of his mother’s? At a place his father had worked?
The details were musty, uncertain. The Girl couldn’t be sure of any it….
Or that on a day back in summer, this friend of Inigo’s mother had vanished, too, removed in some appalling, different way, had left Inigo derelict and stranded here, abandoned yet somehow shielded….
Had that friend’s name been Agnes Wu, or was the Girl merely confused again, mixing up what she saw and felt and remembered? It was all jumbled and scrambled together, smudged and blurring in her mind as she tried to hold on to it, elusive as steam hissing off a subway grate.
She knew this, though: On that specific summer day, at a certain very precise time in the morning, Inigo had begun to change.
The same day and time as when the Girl herself-
As if her thoughts had somehow prompted it, a dark rumbling swept through the sky like a giant clearing his throat, the ground trembling in sympathetic vibration.
The Girl and Inigo both shrunk away from it, and there was even a ripple of concern across the old jazzman’s face.
But then Papa Sky began to play, and all grew calm.
The Girl knew this one, too, from her mother’s record collection, the collection the dimly, almost-recalled other had brought along with the books and bookcase so long ago.
“Stormy Weather.”
The Girl closed her eyes and danced and was free again.
But had she looked to see, she would have spied Inigo watching her from his place in the shadows, and would have known he needed nothing more to worship.
The music faded again and the Girl returned.
“Time you best be movin’ on,” Papa Sky advised. “Wouldn’t want you late for lessons.” She knew somehow that he wasn’t referring to the mockery of the classes that were the same, but instead cautioning her not to light here too long, to draw a scrutiny she would not want to incur.
“Later,” she said, already starting away.
“Bye, Tina,” Inigo said.
The Girl paused and turned back. “Call me Christina,” she said. A more formal name, but it suited this different time, this different place.
She headed off down the street to walk among the mists and shadows and echoes that were the same every day….
Every Mobius-strip day.
“This part always creeps me out,” Inigo said to Papa Sky.
New York was shutting down. Or at least this section of it, now that Christina was gone.
Growing dim, the people and buildings subsiding around them, losing detail, like clay sculptures submerged in water and drawn out again. Or Adam and Eve in reverse motion, God in an act of un Creation, returning them to the mud again.
The darkness encroached, not at all like a sunset with night coming on, but instead like the cessation of consciousness as death drew near.
The Place to Be turning into the Non-Place.
Inigo stowed the Gargoyle shades in his jacket pocket and threw back the hood, letting his blanched skin feel the caress of the thinning air.
“Quittin’ time…” Papa Sky crooned. To one who knew the blind man less well than the boy did, there might be the assumption that he was unruffled by the darkness because darkness was his constant state.
But Inigo knew this was not the case-Papa Sky was just cool, in the way that eight decades of hard road and iron discipline had lent him a calm and strength that were rarely shaken by anything.
The old man bent his long, lean frame to the open case that rested on the pavement, set the gleaming sax gently within it as though it were an infant, wadded with cotton to hold it safe.
He snapped the case shut and stood with it, felt blindly with his free hand for where his fiberglass cane lay against the edge of the nearby building. His fingers closed around it with deft assurance.
Time for them each to make his own way home. Or what they called home now. Sure as hell not here.
To go while they still could.
Inigo fished in his pocket. His fingers found the coin that was always there, always newly born.
He pulled out the buffalo nickel, not knowing the source of it, at least not precisely. Dr. Sanrio, he supposed. That would be his sick idea of a joke.
The buffalo had been the first to be affected, out beyond the mountains in the federal lands, and the Indian lands, too…and Inigo’s father had been the second.
They had left him here, his father and then his mother, and Agnes Wu, too, when the hard rain had come down.
Fortunately for Inigo, he had turned into something that could stand that hard rain, something that was pretty damn hard itself, little and wiry and tough. And although he had not been wanted by what remained to perceive him, It had not-fortunately, again-regarded him as sufficient of a threat to bother to dislodge him.