Tonight, he senses their presence again. He’d rather feel the presence of lovers, imaginary though they may be than the absence of the woman he’s separated from. If only for a night, they’re a respite from the conversation he carries on without her, addressing her as if she can hear him. The lovers are silent. They lie listening to the river, and with his eyes closed he can almost hear it as they must: a high-pitched echo of sewers, a sound of darkness laced with flowing water. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. Each drop encases its own separate note, the way each drop engulfs its own blue pearl of light.
Between wakefulness and dreaming, with his eyes closed he can see the light reflected by the falling river of rain: fogged streetlamps and taillights streaked along the Outer Drive, a downtown of dimmed office buildings and glowing hotel lobbies, acetylene sparking behind blue factory windows, racks of vigil candles in the cathedral, always kept open, across the street from the neon-lit bus terminal. If he were to rise and walk along the river, he’d see the shades raised and curtains parted, and find himself in a neighborhood where the dark buildings, as he’s always suspected, are populated by lovers. Their silhouettes stand undressing, framed in windows, naked and enigmatic like the lovers on a tarot card — men and women, men and men, women and women, embracing. Lovers in the present appear superimposed over lovers from the past so that it’s impossible for him to tell who is a shadow of whom. The rooms, parked cars, all the sites of their private histories, glimmer as if their memories have become luminous as spirits. Even the loners are visible beneath single bulbs, appraising their desire in mirrors. The El clatters by above the roofs, its lighted windows like a strip of blue movie.
Nearly asleep, the man listens to the clatter of the El train, fading over viaducts, merging, as it grows distant, with the sounds of sporadic traffic and occasional sirens, all swept along together in the rush of the river. Listening to the river is another way of thinking about the woman. He’s drifting on a flood of night thoughts — thoughts he may try to dismiss in daylight, the way dreams are renounced and forgotten, but his restless nights have begun to inform his days. Almost dreaming, with the river flowing beside his ear, he understands why the lovers have been summoned: because the memory of the woman is becoming a shadow, one he carries like a secret, close to his heart; because beside this memory he has grown insubstantial. It draws him along behind it like a shadow — a shadow of a shadow. It has made him dark and incomprehensible even to himself. The lovers from the present have appeared, as they did when he was younger, to remind him that there is only so much time to change the direction of a life. The lovers from the past have appeared because it may already be too late, because it may be time to release his memories so that they can begin to assume a life of their own.
And what about the memory of the boy left at the window, staring out past his own spattered reflection? The boy could disappear behind a single breath fogged on the glass, then wiped away. The room has fallen asleep behind him; the bed, without his weight, is light enough to levitate. Downstairs, the Ukrainian kid, a maestro now, has begun to fiddle a nocturne to pacify the dead. Across the alley, prayers rise like an attar of roses from a basement flat. Love, rain has replaced nighthawks. It drums on the helmet of a blue light. Each drop contains its own blue bulb, and when they shatter they collect into a blue river that continues to gleam. The river, the same river sweeping them both away, is all that connects the boy and the man. It flows through the inland city, down streets it submerges, to the slick highways that bank a black sea of prairie. It empties by the piers where the rusty barges are moored along the ghostly coastline. From his window overlooking the alley that has become a river, the boy can see this. He can see the blue of that single bulb diffused in the sheen of breakwaters and distant winks of pumping stations, in the vague outlines of freighters far out on what, come morning, will be a horizon. He could glimpse the future passing, reflected in the current, if he weren’t watching the streetlight slowly sinking as it swirls into the vortex of a sewer, if he weren’t still waiting for the silhouettes to come for him. He doesn’t realize — he won’t ever know — that, like them, he’s become a shadow.
Nighthawks
The moon, still cooling off from last night, back in the sky — a bulb insects can’t circle. Instead, they teem around a corner streetlight, while down the block air conditioners crank, synchronized with katydids.
There’s a light on in a garage where a man’s legs, looking lonely, stick out from under a Dodge. What is it that’s almost tender about someone tinkering with a car after midnight? The askew glare of the extension lamp propped in the open engine reminds me of how once, driving through the dark in Iowa, I saw a man and woman outlined in light, kissing in a wheat field. They stood pressed against each other before the blazing bank of headlamps from a giant combine. It must have been threshing in the dark, for dust and chaff hung smoldering in the beams, making it seem as if the couple stood in smoke or fog.
I was speeding down a gravel-pinging road and caught only a glimpse of them, but took it as an omen to continue following the drunken divorcée I’d met earlier in a roadside bar and grill where I’d stopped for a coffee on my way back to Chicago. Divorcée was her word, the way she’d introduced herself. “I’m celebrating becoming an official gay divorcée,” she’d told me. I must have looked a little surprised because she quickly added, as if I’d gotten the wrong idea, “You know, not gay like with other women, but gay, like, you know, wild.” We had several drinks, danced to the jukebox, and ended up in the parking lot, necking in her pickup. When I started to unbutton her blouse, she asked, “You intend to sit out here all night like teenagers or do you want to follow me home?”
I didn’t know the countryside. I followed her down highways, one veering into another, so many turns that I thought she must be taking a shortcut. I had the windows rolled down, hoping the streaming night air would clear my head. Beyond the narrow beams of my headlights, I could feel the immensity of prairie buoying us up, stretching in the dark without the limit of a horizon, and I felt suddenly lost in its vastness in a way I’d only felt before on the ocean, rocking at night in a small boat. She kept driving faster, and I could imagine the toe of her high heel pressing down hard on the workboot-size gas pedal of her truck. I wasn’t paying attention to where she was leading me and couldn’t have kept track if I’d tried. Unlit blacktop tunneled through low hanging trees. By the time we hit the dirt roads she was driving like a maniac, bouncing over railroad crossings and the humps of drainage pipes, dust swirling behind her so that her taillights were only red pinpoints, and I wondered what radio station she must be listening to, wondered if she was drunker than I’d realized and she thought that we were racing, or if she’d had a sudden change of heart and was trying to lose me on those back roads, and I wondered if I ought to let her.