The dead file by dancing jerkily like marionettes, but he doesn’t notice. They stream around him like a rush-hour crowd past a street musician, a musician so absorbed in his intricate rhythms that he’s forgotten the street, and worse, has forgotten how dangerous losing one’s street sense can be. Possessed by his own drumming, he’s become infused with forgetfulness. He has forgotten to drum in supplication to whatever spirit governs this place. He has forgotten to drum for the iku. He has forgotten to dedicate his drumming to his patron saint and guardian, Elleggua, whose necklace of sacred cowrie shells he wears under his fatigue jacket, entangled with his dog tags.
It is for Elleggua, the trickster, Master of Doors and Crossroads, that he should be drumming. Instead, he now drums solely for his lost love, the girl, who, legends say, falls endlessly. One of her perfumed, black nylons is knotted around his head like a sweatband. He has refused to allow his longing for her to turn to grief. The rhythm he weaves for her has never been played before — a slap and swipe of fingertips and palms on the drumskin that evokes the sounds their sweating bodies made against one another. Its ebb and flow is like the lilt of a melody.
His drum song is amplified by the tunnels. Its echoes return delayed almost as if someone far off is at last responding. His conga answers its own echoes. His blurred hands pound still faster and the echoes multiply, first, into a trio of sacred bata drummers, and then into a corps of drummers. He disperses his drum corps in search of her. Their frenzied drumming reverberates down every tunnel as if time is pulsing through the underground like blood, and finally, still dazed, she steps summoned from shadow.
He leads her back from the underground. She follows each beat of his conga as if retracing the footprints of a complicated dance step. The way they walk to the rhythm makes it look as if their hips are leading them. Death has not disfigured her beauty, and yet she wears her youthfulness like a mask. Beneath it, her eyes seem glazed, gazing inward as if completely self-absorbed in her still new, utter lack of self. She is serene and silent as he’s never seen her. What’s been done to you already? he wants to cry, but says nothing. Having glanced at her once, he can’t look back at her again until they have returned to the world of sunlight and substance — a world where sparrows twitter in the sapling that has insisted on sprouting from the rubble of a vacant lot, and the only shadows are those of green awnings unfurled above stands of fruits and flowers.
Even in high heels, she floats so lightly that her footfalls aren’t audible above the scurrying of rats. Yet, he can’t look back to be sure she is following, perhaps because with each step her renunciation of death makes her more terrifyingly beautiful. Or perhaps he doesn’t dare to meet her inwardly gazing eyes for fear they will distract him from the steady, urgent domination of his beat. If his faith in his power to keep time here in the confines of eternity is shaken and his beat disrupted for even a moment they will both be lost.
Think only of light, little dove, he wishes to tell her. Open your memory as if you’ve just awakened and are slowly drawing a window shade up on noon. You’ll return to who you were that moment when I first saw you standing in a doorway, sunlight streaming through your dress, illuminating your legs, the lace petals of your underclothes. In broad daylight, I could see the shadows of your breasts as if my eyes had special power.
But when they reach the knot of tunnels, the confluence of steel and slime where subway track and sewers interconnect, he stops. Still drumming, he stands otherwise motionless at the junction where sinkholes bottom out, and dry wells, abandoned mine shafts, and caverns intersect, then burrow off in all directions. The corridors are dark, a labyrinth of catacombs dropping into chasms and black canyons. His drumbeats collide with blind alleys and dead ends, and the cacophony of so many ricocheting echoes overwhelms him. Suddenly, his hands are confused; he’s not aware at first, that they’ve dropped silently to his sides. The drumming continues without him — incessant, chaotic, shattering time rather than keeping it. Where is his guardian, Elleggua, Master of Crossroads, who should have been his guide? If one’s patron saint is a trickster, must his blessing be a trick? He looks back to tell her he’s lost, but she’s no longer there behind him. And when he turns again, she is standing before him as if she has been leading them, as if she is the one who has led them here. He follows her now, his drum dragging behind him, his eyes on her back as they move off deeper into the twisting passageways. Slowly, he begins to realize that from the start he has not been the one who has done the summoning.
The kiss, blurred on the window of a subway car, rockets by them down a tunnel lit by cobalt switches. The tunnel walls are stained with seepage where the train crosses beneath the river. The conductor’s voice of rattling static calls out the stops where memories disembark and passion and desire are left behind. The walls of the stations the train rushes by are graffitied with names, dates, and epitaphs. The train hurtles past the station where those who died before their time now stand patiently waiting, and past the station of those who waited too long to die. It passes the station of those who died for love, and the jammed station of those who died for lack of love. A cavalcade of shadows open their eyes an instant and reach out to touch the kiss, to catch it on their extended fingertips — fingertips from which the prints have vanished — but the train is already gone, leaving them behind. Tonight, there’s no stopping for loneliness or grief. The third rail, stretched thin, tuned like the string of a violin, senses the ineffable weight of the kiss and seems to shoot forward. Charged with current, the third rail does not belong to the kingdom of the dead, and the kiss follows its path as if tracing a silver thread out of a maze.
A kiss crosses the city. It travels along streets named for coasts — North Shore, Lakeside, Waveland, Surf — that echo as if paved with wet tile. Above the streetlights, nighthawks wheel, yiping like gulls. Beneath windowsills, the shadowy mark of the last tide fades like an impression of elastic on a bare waist.
A kiss crosses the city, floating facedown like a reflection over the dreamers gazing up from a neighborhood of flooded basements and attics. Behind grated shop windows, the mannequins are mermaids; each night they reenter the sea as if drawing a zipper down the spine of a blue-green gown.
Her kiss crosses the city along a bridge arched like the bluest note of a saxophone, an unfinished bridge extending out over a night sea of sweet water. The beacon revolving at its end may be the dome of a squad car or the lantern of a fisherman. Trailing less shadow than a fish, her kiss slips undetected past lamps, past the flashlights of night watchmen, past gates, alarms, curfews. Not even the lips it’s meant for feel the secret entry of her tongue, the scrape of her teeth, or, when she pulls away, the clinging thread of briny spit.
The River
In the rain, the alley becomes a river that winds through sleepers. Lovers listen to it flow through the dark — or so a man unable to sleep imagines. He can almost hear the river too, although he knows that listening for it may merely be a way of occupying his mind, which should be dreaming. There may be no lovers at all. Even if there are, they may be asleep with mouths opened and backs turned to each other.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’s measured his life by imagining lovers. He remembers, on a morning when he was younger, standing at the window of the copy room in the highrise office building in which he worked, and gazing across the busy avenue at the shade-drawn windows of an old hotel that still retained its elegance. Even now, he recalls the surprising rush of emotions when it occurred to him as if he could sense it that, while he stood listening to the clatter of Xerox machines, lovers were waking just across the street. Perhaps he’d only imagined the lovers then as well, but at that moment their presence behind the shade-drawn windows seemed so palpable that his own life felt insubstantial beside it, and he was filled with an ache for something he couldn’t name but knew was missing. If they were only a daydream, then it was the kind of daydream that sometimes precedes a revelation. That was the morning he’d become certain that he wasn’t right for an office job and needed to change the direction of his life while there was still time. A week later, he had quit and returned to school.