Others had their own names for shadows. Downstairs, the Ukrainian kid who practiced the violin slept with his arms extended in the shape of a cross to ward off the dead. Across the alley, in a basement flat, a Puerto Rican girl prayed as if begging before a vigil candle flickering the picture of the Virgin on her bureau, and sometimes the smell of the coal furnace behind the grate that opened on purgatory would fade into a faint scent of roses. There were guys who carried knives taped inside their socks to school, who still slept at the edges of their beds in order to leave room for their guardian angels. There were girls who wore mascara like a mask, who swore they’d seen Niña, the beautiful high school girl who had plunged from a roof one summer night. Niña had sneaked out that night to meet her boyfriend, Choco, a kid who played the conga and had gone AWOL to see her. Choco, his conga drum strapped over his shoulder, had led her up a fire escape to the roof where he slept on an old mattress. They took angel dust, which made the moon seem near enough to step onto from the roof. The girls said that on moonlit nights music would wake them — a song whose beat they all recognized, though none of them could hum back its melody — and they would see a fantasma, Niña, her hair flying and blouse billowing open, falling past their windows, but falling so slowly that it seemed as if it might take forever for her to hit the street.
And there were apparitions in broad daylight: the mute knifesharpener pushing his screeching whetstone up alleys; the peddlers with clothesline whips flicking blindered horses as their wagons rumbled by tottering under jumbled loads of uprooted cellars and toppled attics; the hunchbacked woman who walked bent from the waist as if doubled over by the weight of the lifetime’s length of filthy, gray hair that streamed from her bowed head and swept the pavement before her.
They seemed part of the streets. If anyone noticed, it was only to glance away, but the boy secretly regarded them as if he were witnessing refugees from a cruel fairy tale groping their way through the ordinary world. He wondered where they disappeared to, where they slept at night, and what they dreamed.
Beside the daytime apparitions, the silhouettes seemed nearly invisible, camouflaged by night, shadows who’d broken their connections to whatever had thrown them, and now wandered free, like dreams escaped from dreamers. They emerged from viaducts on nights when viaducts exhaled fog and manhole covers steamed. Where they stood in dripping doorways, they made the doorways darker. When they stepped into the open — shadows, but shadows no longer supported by walls or trailed along pavement — the rain, slanting through the glow of streetlights and shop signs, beaded off them like molten electricity. Oncoming headlights bent around them; flashes of lightning traced their outlines. The boy could sense them moving along the street and wondered if tonight was the night for which he’d been summoned awake, when the silhouettes would finally come up the alley, past the guardian streetlight now swirling and sinking, and assemble below his window, looking up at his face pressed against the spattered pane, their eyes and mouths opened onto darkness like the centers of guitars.
Love, it’s such a night, laced with running water, irreparable, riddled with a million leaks. A night shaped like a shadow thrown by your absence. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. The screech of nighthawks has been replaced by the splash of rain. The rain falls from the height of streetlights. Each drop contains its own shattering blue bulb.
Laughter
I knew a girl who laughed in her sleep. She had been in the States only a year and I wondered if being foreign didn’t have something to do with her laughing that way. Her eyes were a gold-flecked green more suited to cats, and ringed with the longest lashes I’d ever seen. In the right light her half-lowered lashes threw small shadows across her face. She didn’t look American yet. Once I woke her and asked what was so funny. She seemed confused and a little embarrassed, and I never asked her again.
We met at the ice cream factory where I worked the summer between high school and college. She was the first girl I was serious about. I felt too young to be serious — a feeling I kept secret.
She kept me a secret from her uncle Tassos.
Her uncle was the one who had brought her over and got her the job at the ice-cream factory. She worked on the bar tank line with the other, mostly foreign women, sitting before a conveyor belt and packing Popsicles, Fudgsicles, Creamsicles, and Dreamsicles into freezer cartons. At the end of the day her hands were stiff with cold and her fingers stained the colors of whatever flavors had been run.
Her uncle Tassos worked on the ore boats out of Calumet Harbor. He would be away for two-week runs, and then off work for five days straight. When he was back home the only place I would get to see her was at the factory. I was still living with my parents and began to feel ashamed for not having my own place to take her. When Uncle Tassos left with the barges again — as safely off somewhere around Petoskey as if he’d sailed for Peloponnesus — she’d sneak me up to her one-room apartment that overlooked Halsted Street.
It was an old neighborhood that Mayor Daley, despite his campaign promises, was preparing to demolish to make way for a new university. But life went on that summer as it always had — daily newspapers printed in strange alphabets; nuts, cheeses, dried cod sold in the streets; the scent of crushed lemons from the bakery that made lemon ice; Greek music skirling from the restaurant downstairs. And once she’d let me in I wouldn’t leave until morning, but sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’d have to get up and pace while the dark room filled with laughter.
Everything
A couple of months after he’d married Joan, the phone rang in the middle of the night. The phone was in the kitchen and seemed to ring through the dark apartment like an alarm. He had always been afraid of phone calls at that hour. They triggered a dread in him that something terrible had happened, and he almost believed that if he didn’t answer, whatever catastrophe had occurred might be undone by morning. But this time he leapt to answer. It was better to get the news firsthand than to listen to his new wife answer the phone and then break into sobs.
“Hello,” he said, trying to sound composed.
“Yellow. Guess who?”
“I know who.”
“Guess what?”
“I give.”
“I’m tripping on MDA.”
“Oh.”
“‘Ecstasy,’ you know, the ‘Love Drug.’ Whatsamatter? You don’t read Newsweek and keep up?”
“My subscription ran out.”
“It’s a body rush. Incredibly erotic. I’m so horny — climbing the walls.”
“Nice of you to call and let me know.”
“It heightens memory, too. Hey, I’m still a little nuts about you. Is that Joanie flushing the toilet?”
“Yes.”
“She probably wants to know who’s on the phone.”
“Exactly right.”
“That’s why you’re talking to me in that funny flat voice. So quiet. Not saying my name. You didn’t use to be such a monosyllabic type of guy. Well, at least say something.”