lou-graves

[lou-graves]

Untitled

(Excerpted from the novel LET THE DOGSBODIES HOWL.)

...and Aisling smiled for the first time that day, and she said, “dreams are real, and the people in them are real,” and she shuffled nearer to Lou and rested her head on his shoulder.  “Do you remember when we used to look up at the sky,” she said, “and look for shapes in the clouds?”  And so they looked up at the sky, and they looked for shapes in the clouds, and Aisling saw a carousel and a polar bear on a unicycle and a wishing well with a bucket hung on a rope, and the bucket was swaying and dripping water, and the bear’s feet were turning the pedals of the unicycle around and around and his arms were stretched out like Christ to keep him from falling off, and Lou saw himself a lightbulb and a boulder and a mushroom and a battered sausage, and he saw a herd of sheep and some candyfloss and a bag of cotton balls, and Aisling saw a circus tent filled with clowns and freaks and elephants, jugglers and firebreathers and swordswallowers, and strongmen and tall men and midgets and bearded women,

and Lou saw a hairy cock and balls, the likes of which he often drew on his school notebook and would disguise as a face if Mrs. Shagworth walked passed.  And so Aisling saw the things she saw, and Lou saw them as well once she pointed them out.  And it was still spitting rain and so they peered through the rain, wiping their eyes now and again, and when he looked down at her it looked as though she was crying, the rain dripping down her face.  And she wiped her eyes and said, “clouds can be anything,” again resting her head on his shoulder, “a door or a window or a tunnel,” wiping her face with her sleeve, “but mostly they’re a curtain, and there’s a place beyond them, its where you dream of when you dream of somewhere you’ve never been,” speaking as slowly as though she were falling asleep, “rooms or houses or streets you’ve never seen before, and when you die you go there, you float beyond the clouds,” hooking her arm around his, crossing her legs and their feet touching, “is why if you die in your sleep you die in real life, and when you dream of dead people it’s because they’re already there, in the other place, and you can dream in a dream and you can wake up in one and fall asleep in one and it’s because dreams are more real than real life, and when they bury your body and your body rots the part of you that dreams lives on and continues to dream, and you live forever in the place beyond the clouds,” and she fell silent for a few moments and he thought maybe she had fallen asleep, but then she tightened and loosened, as though her whole body was yawning, and she said, “and it’s that simple,” her voice starting to tremble and a shiver went through them both, “you live and you die and in between you do the things you do, and hopefully you do enough to dream about,” her whole body shivering,

“and even if you don’t do enough it’s okay because you can dream of anything, and you can do anything and be anyone in a dream because it’s not the real world, it’s a world beyond the real one, and it’s more real than the real world and more real than anything else, and the only real people are the people who are there, the people we dream of,” shivering more and more and her body shaking and she was speaking faster and faster and though she were trying to get the words out before she was too cold to speak, “and the things we lose are there and the people we lose are there, and when you hear a song that makes you sad you’re sad because you’re remembering this place, and when you miss someone you miss the part of them that is there, in the place beyond the clouds where we all are in some way, and we are every age we ever were and every person we ever became,” and she turned to him, getting on her knees in the wet dirt, and she said, “it’s like those kaleidoscopes we used to play with,” and she said it as clearly as she could, as though she wanted him to understand her, “or it’s like the time we held my mother’s mirror up to another mirror and we saw a thousand mirrors, and they were all the same but some were smaller and some were bigger, and we couldn’t touch them and we couldn’t reach them, but we knew they were a magic hallway to some other place and we were going to go there, as soon as my mother fell asleep we were going to climb down the hallway of mirrors and see what was beyond it,” her voice trembling and her body shaking, and Lou tried to interrupt her and said, “but we couldn’t stay awake, we fell asleep before she did,” and Aisling laughed, and it was a desperate laugh, an exhausted laugh, and she said, “I know, we fell asleep, and I dreamed instead, and I dreamed we climbed into the mirror and down the hallway, but I couldn’t remember what was at the other end,” and she grabbed his head like a mirror, her soft hands on either side of his face, and she looked into his eyes and he looked into hers, and they saw themselves a thousand times, and if there was a fear in his eyes then there was a desperation in hers, as though she was pleading and begging him to understand her, and he thought he understood her but of course he didn’t understand her and he couldn’t understand her, and she began to shiver so violently and she couldn’t speak and so he picked her up and carried her inside the church, and they hid in the confessional booth huddled together like church mice.  

[lou-graves]

Untitled

(Excerpted from the novel LET THE DOGSBODIES HOWL)

“Dreams are bad habits,” Spider once said, “like smoking and drinking, quit dreaming and you’ll be better off, it’s all just nonsense in your head, your mind let off its tether,” and maybe he was right, maybe dreams were all nonsense, and so Lou wrote down what he said, he wrote down that dreams were nonsense, sitting across the table from the old man and supping his halfpint, an open notebook flattened on the pub table.  And Spider went on, almost as though he were talking to himself, telling himself that dreams were silly and absurd and meaningless, “playgrounds of the unconscious, nothing but sound and fury, bells and whistles, cock and bull and whatever else, worms in the brain they are, mold in the bread loaf.” 

And still, as a young lad in borstel, Spider wrote down his dreams in a journal, hoping to find something in them, hoping to find hisself somewhere in the dream, and he found nothing and thought them nonsense, and he never wrote down another dream, and after a while he stopped having them, or rather he couldn’t remember having them, and by the time he swung his legs over the edge of the bed the dream was forgotten.  Not that he forgot every dream, and some stayed with him for hours or even days or weeks, and some dreams he never forgot and they became and true to him as his memories.  He never forgot the dream about the two rancheros, it was as vivid a memory as tough it had happened, hisself and the two old men riding on a wagon and drinking from a bottle they passed between them.  And they asked him to tell them a story to pay his wagon fare, and he awoke before he could.  And although he thought dreams were nonsense and meant nothing, still he never shook the feeling that he owed those men a story.  And what story would he have told?  He wasn’t sure, and maybe it didn’t matter what story he told so long as he told a story, something to leave behind after he left, after they dropped him off.  Leave something behind to pay his fare, and the old men would pass the bottle back and forth and retell the story and in a small way he would still be with them.  Of course, he awoke before he could tell a story, and that became the story, a man haunted by the story he never told.  And with so much inside of him, having been so many places and having seen so many things, he sometimes thought he might go off like a hand grenade.  How could he carry so much within?  How could a person contain so many multitudes, so many contradictions.  There was a universe outside of hisself, but there was another universe within, and the universe within was the greater of the two.  It was the universe inside which was infinite. 

[lou-graves]

Untitled

(Excerpted from the novel LET THE DOGSBODIES HOWL)

Long after she was of age to do so, Aisling would suck her thumb.  What they call an oral fixation, the need to stuff your mouth with something.  And Lou would chew on his clothes until they were torn and stretched and soaking wet, stuffing his mouth with his necks and sleeves and collars.  And he would bite his fingernails and chew on the skin around them, and the adults would say “if you’re not careful you’ll have no fingers left,” or they’d say to his mother, “don’t you feed him enough, has to eat his own hand to keep form starving.”  And it’s true an octopus will eat its own limbs to stay alive, but for Lou chewing on his fingers was nothing more than a bad habit, something to do when his mind spun out. 

He’d think too much or too fast and would chew on himself to slow the thoughts down.  Is why a baby cries when its mouth is free for crying.  Stuff its mouth to shut it up, fill the hole with something.  And one time, when he was barely one years old, he threw a tantrum and a great aunt who was visiting from somewhere, from some cold and hard town up north, wrapped him up to the neck in a blanket, and so tight he couldn’t move his arms or his legs, and so he lay there cocooned in cloth with his wee head poking out, as docile as a opossum.  It was a trick she’d learned growing up on a sheep farm, wrap the sheep in cloth to keep them from bleating.  And when he was teething or his stomach aching or he wouldn’t sleep, his mother would dip his dummy in rum or whiskey, his first taste of the stuff.  And years later, when he no longer chewed his clothes, still he would bite his fingernails and chew on the skin, and he would smoke cigarettes and chew on toothpicks and stuff his lower lip with dipping tobacco.  And he was always supping on something, coffee or stout or whiskey or whatever was at hand. 

And while they say a man with an oral fixation is fixated also on a woman’s breasts, Lou was more interested in a woman’s legs, and Lorelei had long legs which came up two thirds of her body, and some nights he would watch them while she slept, each coiled around the other like sleeping snakes, like cobras waiting to be startled.  And when she bent over, either to pick up a dropped pencil or a paintbrush, or to take something out of the oven, or for whatever other reasons a person might bend over, her legs stayed straight up like fence posts, and the rest of her body dipped and bobbed and turned as though attached to her legs by hinges, or springs rather, and she could touch her toes and touch the ground and do whatever else without losing her balance and without bending her legs, and sometimes he even thought she might go through her own legs and come back up on the other side.  And while not a man likely to worship false idols, still he could have worshiped Lorelei’s legs, and would kneel and pray to them whenever she allowed him to, on bended knee, his head bowed between them in reverence, in pious devotion to the knobbly kneed deities, words of prayer on the tip of his tongue.  Such legs as were made for more than walking and standing on.  And how often he lit a cigarette and watched her turn around the room, walking as though she were dancing, and twisting and contorting and bending over in front of him, and snapping her fingers as though she was a Spanish dancer and was clacking castanets, and all the while knowing he was watching her, possessing him as a siren possesses a sailor, hypnotizing him with her legs.  And she would leave the room as though she’d forgotten something, and she would come back and wouldn’t look at him, and instead she would walked back and forth watching him sideways while he sat and smoked and supped his whiskey. 

And were they cartoons, her legs would have morphed before him into two honey glazed hams, and he would have floated out of his chair and bumped his head and seen stars or birds circling him, his cigarette hanging from his lips and rings of smoke rising from it.  And she was only a casual smoker, but she had other bad habits, and she would sit on the floor and bite her toenails as though they were fingernails, twisting her leg up to her mouth as though it were made of rubber.  And her worst habit was cracking her knuckles, and when he told her she would get arthritis and wouldn’t be able to paint, she laughed and said arthritis was caused by the weather and not by cracking your knuckles.  “It’s good for them,” she would say, “it wakes them up.”  And if you asked her what was Lou’s worst habit, she wouldn’t say drinking or smoking, and while she might have said dipping tobacco and spitting it out, she would more likely have said scribbling in his notebooks.  And he scribbled in them obsessively and stacked them up like bricks against one of the walls of their apartment, and when he sat at his typewriter, he would type out again and again what he had written in the notebooks, as though he was copying from them, even as they sat stacked like bricks against the wall.  It was as though he could read them without opening them, as though the words he wrote down were carbon copied somewhere in his head.  And so he lined a wall with notebooks and he click-clacked on his typewriter late into the night and first thing in the morning, and while Lorelei hated spitting, and hated it more than almost anything else, still it was this she considered his worst bad habit. 

[lou-graves]

Untitled

(Excerpted from the novel LET THE DOGSBODIES HOWL)

Beaten and battered.  Torn up and thrown around.  Sullied and soiled and the spine broken, and broken just shy of halfway, at the place where Lorelei’s favorite story was, the title story, about a girl named Marleroux who gets lost in woods and befriends a crow named Moongoose.  “Read it to me,” she would say, and that’s all she would say and Lou would know which book and which story and even which page to turn to, and pulling the book from whichever shelf or from whatever table it sat upon, rather than open the book he would let it fall open, opening itself to her favorite story, as though the broken spine knew which page and which story.  Touch has a memory.  

And so often had he held the book he knew it better than even Lorelei.  He knew every cut and scratch, every scrape and scar, every tear and fold and crease, every stain and smudge and smear and bruise and blemish.  Torn on the corner it was.  Torn on the corner and the corner torn and folded in to keep it from tearing off. And the other corner was torn and torn from the top of the spine down the cover of the book.  Twice torn.  Spine violently broken in several places, but most savagely and most severely broken just shy of halfway, at the place where her favorite story was.  Cover torn, twice torn.  Pages yellow and frayed and some loose, held in place like pressed flowers, a page held captive by other pages, tattered and torn and turning yellow, and every page was dogeared as though she’d read each one on its own, without the others, away from the story of which it was but one piece.  And of course she would read the odd page on its own, but mostly she read the book as a book, and she read the stories as stories and had read them so many times that she had dogeared every page at one time or another.  And so each page was dogeared, and each page was torn and tattered and turning yellow, and some were stained with coffee rings and wine rings and little holes from cigarette ash, and some were even spoiled with notes in pen or pencil, and though he had never read the notes and didn’t know the handwriting, he knew they weren’t written by Lorelei and that she would never write inside of a book and would die before she circled a word or two words or underlined a sentence or god forbid and entire paragraph.  “Like branding cattle,” she would say, and she hated tattoos for the same reason.  And while most of the coffee stains and wine stains were hers, most but not all, the cigarette burns were Lou’s fault, reading to Lorelei while he smoked a rollyourown, his cigarette held between the wrong two fingers, leaving his finger and thumb free to turn the pages, and turning the pages a little ash would fall from his cigarette and burn a wee hole in the paper.  Torn on the corner and the corner torn, and she folded the corner in so it wouldn’t tear off, and it worked in a sense, in so much as it didn’t tear off, rather it only looked as though it had torn off, folded over and showing a patch of yellowed paper.  And the other corner was torn, and torn from the spine down the middle of the book, and so torn it was it tore its way through the inky drawing of a child and bird silhouetted and stood beside a river.  Spine broken and twice torn, and torn nearly in half it was, like the trunk of a tree struck by lightning, and as it tore its way between the inky splotches of a child and a bird, each stood by the river, each seeing themselves in the rippled water, it was as though the bird were tearing itself away from the child, as though the book were rending itself from itself.  And they stood by the river, and staring back at themselves from the rippled waters, each side beside the other, they were not yet torn apart as they were on the riverbank.  Torn on the corner and the corner torn from the broken spine down through the inky splashes of mountains and trees and clouds, but torn no further than the riverbank where the little girl stood.  And the sky cracked and the mountains split, and the water simply rippled, disturbed by the tossing in of a stick.  And they stood by the river, Marleroux and Moongoose, and they saw themselves in the rippled waters, four splashes of ink, each of them either side of a Rorschach drawing.  Spine broken. Pages yellow and frayed and stained and burned and written on, tattooed like the bodies of cannibals.  “Branded like cattle,” Lorelei would say, even as she wrote her name on the inside cover and drew pictures in colored pencils. And she hated tattoos even though she had tattoos, and so she contradicted herself, and of course and why not, so vast and multitudinous she was.  Do the oceans and the skies not contradict themselves?  Does a garden not contradict itself?  And since the book was written in black ink on pages once white but now yellowed, and since the cover was mostly black with patches of white, as though an inkwell had upturned itself on the writer’s desk, she wrote her name inside with colored pencils, each letter in a different color, a red L and a blue O and a green R and so on, and she drew pictures of parrots in different hats, a tophat and a bowler hat and a fez, each perched upon a branch grown out of the broken spine, and such was the only color in an otherwise black and white book.  Branded her cattle she had.  Tattooed her savage child.  And still the publishers crest had some color.  A dab of yellow perhaps, and what was it?  A sunflower or a bumblebee or a wellyboot?  He couldn’t remember.  It was some small picture with the names of the publishers underneath, someone and someone, or someone and sons, him and him, or him and him and him.  But just a dab of color it was, a smidge of yellow, and would have been the only color had not Lorelei drawn the parrots in hats and written her name in colored pencils, a purple E and a pink L and a yellow E and an orange I.  And one time Lou held the book aloft and proclaimed, “RICHARD OF YORK GAVE BATTLE IN VAIN,” and then foolishly and sheepishly had to explain to Lorelei what on earth that meant, red and orange and yellow and green and so on, each first letter standing for a color, “Richard for red and York for yellow and battle for blue,” and she rolled her eyes and twisted her mouth and said, “and what the hell is indigo and violet?  It’s purple and pink and to hell with anyone who says otherwise.”  And sometimes from their window they would see the man who lived two doors down walking his dog, and always he wore a tattered housecoat striped with all the colors of the rainbow, and since they didn’t know his name they called him Roy, as in Roy G. Biv, and again Lorelei would roll her eyes and twist her mouth and say, “Roy will do, there’s no need to include that other nonsense.”  G and Biv, green and blue and purple and pink.  Roy G. Bpp.  Richard of York gave battle… pee pee? Pea pod?  Pol Pot?  Richard of York gave Barry pulled pork.  Piss poor. Pear pip.  Pick pocket.  Peter Piper picked a peck in vain.  Peter Piper picked Pol Pot’s poor pocket, pissed a pea pod and plucked a pear pip. Peach pie.  Pudding podge.  Pulp page. And not a page of course but pages plural.  Pulp pages. Pp x to y, ten or so, yellowed and torn and loose, edges frayed, stained with wine and coffee and burned with cigarettes.  And the spine broken and broken at x because x was where her favorite story began, and then broken again, though not as much, at y because y was where the story ended. And on the inside cover was her name in colored pencils and drawings of birds in hats.  A parrot in flatcap and another in a baseball cap, with a logo on the front of the Boggy Socks, the baseball team in Niceville where she grew up. And although she hated sports almost as much as she hated Niceville, still she was proud of the logo having drawn it in a competition.  “It was for school children,” she said, “to draw a new logo for the team to use, but only for a year,” and yet she did so well they not only used the logo that year, but the next year and the year after that, “and even now, years and years later, they still have never gone back to the old logo.”  And of course she never got any credit for it, not that she cared one bit, it was all just part of a chapter she’d left behind.  And drawing was second nature to her, more her mother tongue than English was, and she drew all the time on everything, adding color to an otherwise black and white world, drawing on walls and cupboard doors, on tables and desks, on playing cards and shoes and plant pots, drawing on receipts and takeaway menus and on napkins and tablecloths in restaurants using the little crayons they left out for children.  And she even drew on the bathroom mirror, and so each morning Lou would find a different picture waiting there, a splash of color to brighten his day, sunflowers and roses, clowns and jesters and jokers, cats and dogs and hedgehogs and rats and frogs on lily pads with their tongues out catching flies, jam jars and honey jars and honeybees and balls of different colored wools, baseballs and billiard balls and juggling balls, eight balls and crystal balls and disco balls and marbles and gobstoppers.  And often she drew the two of them, in funny ways, like the cartoons in the newspaper.  Him crying over his spilled whiskey or snoring in his chair or dropping a heavy book on his foot and hopping around on one leg, and her with her head on backwards or her feet in plant pots or putting her makeup on with an easel and a paintbrush and cutting her hair with garden shears.  And so every night before going to bed she would draw on the mirror, and since Lou was often still awake, he would use the toilet without turning on the light, not wanting to spoil the drawing, and if he needed a shave he would shave in the dark, and he would brush his teeth in the dark, and he would see only shadows of a picture on the mirror, ink smudges on dark paper, and in the morning he would see them as they were, in full bloom, strange plants that grew only in the darkest corners.  And even after she left and he was alone in the apartment, still he would use the toilet without turning on the light, and he would shave in the dark and brush his teeth in the dark, and some mornings as he shuffled to the bathroom, not yet awake but no longer asleep, he would think maybe there was a picture on the mirror, something bright and colorful, a little drawing she had done the night before, a strange little plant that sprouted and bloomed in the night, and all he would see was himself, grey and overcast, eyes black and hollow, a skeletal visage, a face in the clouds.  Dead in the night, dead in the day.  Always in the bleak midwinter.  And if he was winter than she was spring, or summer or autumn or all three.  And if he was night than she was every hour of the day, from morning to afternoon to evening, from dawn to noon to dusk and every second of every minute between them.  She was the sun and he was the rain, and one time, at a street festival, he put on a sombrero and she couldn’t stop laughing, and told him that he looked like “one of those Mexican ghosts, the ones who play guitar and whistle.”  Día de los Muertos, the day of the dead.  And he did look dead, with his hollow eyes and ghostly pallor.  And another time he put on a suit he bought at a secondhand store and she laughed and said he looked like an undertaker.  “Tall and grey and long in the face,” she said, jabbing him in the ribs, “a walking rain cloud.”  He was grey and the world was grey and everything in it was grey, and so she painted her life.  Her world was a garden of colors, and they bloomed and sprouted and wilted and withered, changing as the seasons change, as people change and places turn into other places, other walls and windows, other rooms and roads and weather, other sounds and smells and voices.  And death was just another color, and not something to be feared but something to be celebrated, something to be mocked.  And if Día de los Muertos was a colorful celebration, than so too was her life, and she might have been Mexican had she not been so bloody Irish, with her red hair like dead leaves and her eyes like green emeralds and her skin as white and pale as the pages of a book.  Life was a canvas to be drawn upon, and so she drew on everything.  And she drew parrots in hats on the inside of Moongoose and Marleroux, and she wrote her name in colored pencils using a different color for each letter, and other than a dab of yellow on the publisher’s crest, the book would otherwise have been black and white and grey, like the world and everything in it.  Not to say that the stories themselves weren’t colorful, any and all colors imaginable were found within them, and even some colors unimaginable, colors not of sight but of touch, colors not seen but felt, colors so strange and yet so real they existed somewhere within, in a place deeper than any of the senses, beyond the world of things, beyond people and places, beyond even words and music. Strange colors that grew in the darkness inside oneself.  And yet, and still they were printed in black ink on a paper once white but yellowed with age and stained with wine and coffee, and the edges were frayed and the corners were dogeared and the cover was torn twice and torn through the inky drawing on the front, of a wee girl and a bird stood beside a river.  Or was the girl stood beside the river and the small bird sat on a branch in a tree?  He couldn’t remember, but the girl was Marleroux and the bird was Moongoose, a crow who finds her lost in the woods and helps her find her way out.  It was Lorelei’s favorite book, given to her by her grandmother, and the title story was her favorite story, read so often she broke the spine.  And Lou’s favorite story was the one about a watchmaker who falls in love with another man’s wife, and one night when he couldn’t sleep he copied the story word for word into one of his notebooks, just so he could know how it would feel to have written it.  He wrote out each word as though he thought of them, as though each word was pulled out of his mind, and he wrote each sentence and paragraph not as though he were copying them, but as though he were the author, Gus Valero, composing the stories from scratch, ex nihilo, from the depths of his imagination, using words in the way a musician uses notes or in the way a painter uses paint.  And for a moment he was not himself, he was Gus Valero, queer author of Moongoose and Marleroux, who lived above a costume shop in Paris with his three cats, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, in a quiet loft apartment a stone’s throw from the brothel where Vincent Van Gogh caught syphilis. As said Gus himself in the foreword to his book, writing about how he would sit by the window and watch the customers going into the costume shop and leaving with a bag concealing a new person, a different identity, a secret self they would later become.  “It was as though there was a body hidden in the bag,” wrote Gus “and not just a body but a person, complete with a sense of humor and with an intelligence and a confidence and with all the qualities lacking in whoever was carrying the bag.  Hidden was the person the customer desired to be.”  Not that he said he was queer, but Lorelei inferred as much from his writing, and said as much as though she were talking about someone she knew, a favorite uncle whom she alone understood.  “He’s a Parisian but not a Frenchman,” she would say, “a citizen not of France but of Paris only, and he wrote in the cafés because the street life inspired him, the whores and the pimps and the drug dealers, the artists and the poets and the musicians,” all of the outcasts among which he himself was counted, and among which Lorelei counted herself.  “You’re too boring to be an outcast,” she would say, “you belong in a classroom or at a newspapers, or in a factory making machine parts,” and so that night when he couldn’t sleep he sat at the kitchen table, writing in his notebook as though he were composing a story which was his, made of his words and his thoughts and containing the secrets of who it was he desired to be, his true self hidden within a world made of ink and paper, and when he at last looked up from his notebook and saw the window across the room, he knew it was no longer the window looking out on Aviles Street.  Rather it was a window beyond which were the Paris streets and bars and cafés, the whores and the pimps and the artists, and if he opened the window and looked down he would see not the leather smithy beneath him, but rather a small striped awning hanging over the door of the costume shop.  Je est une autre.  Lou was gone, and gone in the way a character in a story is gone when you close the book.  Schrödinger’s antagonist, forgotten until he is read again.  No more was he the longfaced raincloud who couldn’t write even half a page without tearing it up. He was Gus Valero.  And so Gus sat at the kitchen table, writing a story about a watchmaker who falls in love with the wife of a vintner, and for a moment Gus was not Gus.  Rather he was the watchmaker, alone and lonely and in love with the wife of another man.  Gus was another, for a moment.  And he finished writing the story and closed his notebook and the watchmaker was gone and Gus was Gus again.  And so Gus poured himself a drink and rolled himself a cigarette and sat for while by the window.  And when at last he crawled into bed he lay side beside a sleeping woman, a stranger to him.  And the woman turned to him and her lips found his lips and he held her for a while. She kissed him in her sleep, and so he held her while she slept and in the morning the strange woman was gone, and Gus was gone, and Lou sat on the edge of the bed rubbing his eyes and ruffling his hair while Lorelei pottered about the kitchen, grinding coffee beans and singing, “beautiful dreamer awake unto to me,” while Lou cleared his throat and sneezed into his hands, wiping them on his t-shirt, “starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee,” her voice light and soft and distant, dreamlike as it floated down the hallway, and scratching his armpit he looked longingly towards the pillow where his head had been only moments earlier.  “Beautiful dreamer out on the sea, mermaids are chanting the wild Lorelei,” singing Lora-lee instead of Lora-lei since it rhymed with me and sea. And Lou sat on the edge of the bed wishing he was still asleep, wishing he was still dreaming.  Not that he was awake yet either.  Rather he was between the two worlds, with one foot in one and the other foot in the other, and though he had already forgotten whatever dream he had been having, still he could feel the dream as though he were holding a piece of it in his hands, as though it had left a part of itself behind.  He could remember not the dream but the feeling of the dream and knew only that he had dreamt he was someone else.  Perhaps he dreamed he was the watchmaker, in the same way he thought himself the watchmaker as he lay in bed holding Lorelei, and when Lorelei kissed him it was as though she were the wife of the Vintner and they were together in a bed of sin and adultery, in love in each other’s arms under a bronze sky.  And this is how he fell asleep and he dreamt he was someone else, and in the morning he sat on the edge of the bed, between two worlds, his head in his hands, and his notebook sat on the kitchen table where he’d left it, side beside Moongoose and Marleroux, and Lorelei pottered about the kitchen grinding up coffee beans and heating a pot of water on the stove, and singing “then will the clouds of sorrow depart, beautiful dreamer awake unto me,” and it was all so real and close and happening now, in the present moment, and he could smell the coffee and hear her singing and if he stood up and walked into the kitchen he would see her, pottering about, grinding coffee beans and boiling water, barefoot and with her hair wrapped up in a gypsy scarf.  And he could have held her and kissed and looked into her eyes, and if some of her hair had come loose he could tuck it gently behind her ear.  There she would stand before him, made not of memories but of flesh and blood.  As real as the coffee and the boiling water, as real as the notebook and the tattered and torn storybook, as real as the window and the floor and the kitchen table.  She was within reach, a voice at the other end of the hallway, and now she was gone and the storybook was gone and both seemed so far away and so long ago, nothing but memories, the feeling a dream he had once but couldn’t remember.  And so he lay in his bed, unable to move, trying to create in his mind the same book which he would hold in his hands, reading to Lorelei as she sat in the bath or on the floor or by the window, drinking wine and smoking a cigarette, or standing at her easel, him reading to her and her dipping her brushes into the jars of paint she kept on a small wooden table, old jam jars and honey jars and sauce jars, all rinsed out and filled with paint, and an empty jar for her brushes and another for pencils and sticks of charcoal, and a jar of menstrual blood which she used for shadows and flowers and naked flesh, a watery and pale red, side beside the pinks and purples, the blues and greens and yellows, the oranges and reds and blacks, and the blacks of course were inkwells and not paint jars because ink was more black than black paint, and all was sat upon the small wooden table they found in somebody’s trash, soggy and splintered and with a faded chessboard stenciled on the top.  And covered it was in cobwebs, and lived in by little spiders and beetles and Lou had to hose it down and sand it down and clean it up.  And now she was gone and he lay in his bed unable to move, held down by some unseen body, and the small table still sat in the other room, and sat upon it were the paint jars and the inkwells all dried up and hardened like lakes in winter, and so he closed his eyes and not only could he see the paints sat upon the table, but he could smell them, and he could feel the cobwebs as he brushed them off the table, and he could smell the rotten wood as he sanded it down and he could hear the scuttering of tiny footsteps as he shook the table and the beetles and spiders ran away.  His tooth aching more than yesterday, and he ran his tongue along its jagged edge.  And his leg was aching, the wound had opened up no doubt, blood on the sheets no doubt. And he couldn’t move and couldn’t even turn onto his side.  Somebody was holding him down, and so he closed his eyes and he created in his mind the book he once held in his hands, the book from which he once read, with all its tears and folds and tatters, all its stains and blemishes, its broken spine and loose pages and the cover twice torn and torn down the middle, from the spine down through the inky drawing of Marleroux and Moongoose.  And he not only saw the book but he held the book, and he opened it and saw on the inside the drawings of parrots in hats and her name in colored pencils, with a different color for each letter, a red L and a blue O and so on, and he felt its weight and he turned the pages and the pages were stained with wine and coffee, and although he could see the words written on them, words written in black ink on yellowing paper, he couldn’t read the words, in the same way that when he dreamed he couldn’t read the words written within his dream.  He could see the words, but it was as though they were written in a language he didn’t know, a strange and foreign alphabet, the words and letters of a forgotten tongue. And so he tried to remember the story as best he could.  Marleroux was lost in the woods, and she was afraid because the sun was setting and she might never find her way out.  And she saw a crow in a tree and the crow asked her why she didn’t fly out of the woods. “Because I don’t have the wings for flying,” she said.  And he asked her why she didn’t swim out of the woods and she replied, “I don’t have the gills or fins for swimming.”  And he asked why then did she not walk out and she said she didn’t know the way, and so Moongoose flew up above the trees but the sun had set and it was too dark to see, and so he tried to lift her but she was too heavy, and so he flew from tree to tree while she wandered through the woods searching for a way out.  And when she came again to the river she fell to her knees and wept knowing that she had circled the woods and was back where she started.  “It’s the same river,” she cried, and Moongoose laughed and said it couldn’t be the same river since the water is always changing, flowing in and out of the woods, into other rivers and lakes.  “Moreover,” he said, squawking from a branch which bent so low from his weight that he was eye level with Marleroux, “you are not the same little girl who first saw the river.”  And so she tosses a stick into the river and follows the stick and it leads her out of the woods.  And there was more or course, but he couldn’t remember the rest.  Something about how Moongoose was a dumb name since he couldn’t see at night. And there was an owl who could see at night and he was named Sonny but he wouldn’t help them unless she gave him a mouse which she refused to do.  And was it Moongoose who found her the stick to throw into the river, or was it the mouse, and the mouse had a name but he couldn’t remember what it was.  And was it Heraclitus who said no man could step in the same river twice, because it was not the same river and he was not the same man?  And no doubt Gus Valero knew this when he wrote the book.  And Lorelei’s grandmother no doubt knew as much when she gifted the book to Lorelei.  And wherever Lorelei went the book went with her.  And when she left Niceville with nothing but a suitcase and the clothes she was wearing, the book was in her suitcase, wrapped in piece of cloth, and as she hitchhiked her way north the book hitchhiked with her, sleeping in cars and trucks, on benches and in doorways, from place to place and from town to village to city, from one strange room to another.  And her clothes fell apart and she stitched them up, and her paintbrushes wore themselves down to the handle and the pages of her sketchbooks shed like dead flower petals, and even her suitcase fell apart and she bought another, just as she bought knew shoes when hers wore themselves down to the soles, and when the stitches in her clothes came loose and they couldn’t be mended, she would steal whatever clothes she could from washing lines and laundromats.  And even the people she met along the way came and went and were gone and through it all, wherever she went the book went with her.  And wherever she was and whoever she was with, the characters in the stories were there too, and Gus Valero was there, in a way, alive through the stories he told and through the characters he gave birth to, things of heart and soul conjured up by his imagination.  Marleroux and Mongoose, the watchmaker and the vintner and the vintner’s wife.  All were alive within a world he imagined.  Or rather, all were alive within a world Lorelei imagined.  It was a world they imagined together, a writer and a reader, and they were all there, inside the pages, and even the parrots were there, sat upon branches in different hats.  And her name was there, branded onto the inside cover, and so wherever she went her name went with her.  The red L and the blue O and the rest, the green R and so on.  She lived not in the world around her but in a world within, lost inside herself, in a place she commanded and conjured and controlled, a world of magic and madness, of chaos and color, a world of mythology and folklore and all the stories she told herself.

[lou-graves]

Untitled

(Excerpted from the novel LET THE DOGSBODIES HOWL)

Lou stumbled out of Stogies Pub, stoutsodden and keglegged, and staggered down the three stone steps, making of them four or five steps, or even six steps, the sixth landing him in the street, in the headlights of a car which would have killed him had the driver not seen him, topheavy and tripping over himself, holding the handle of the open door to keep from falling down the steps, and then falling down them anyway, or dancing down them rather, shuffling down them like a vaudevillian, with a clumsy hop, skip, and a jump, and with two left feet and rubber knees and his eyes half closed and a head too heavy for his neck.  And the car stopped and thank god it did, and there he stood floating buoylike in the headlights, his one leg anchored to the cobblestones and the other walking around him, searching the ground around him, finding its footing to steady its drunken master.  

And a crowd was gathered outside Stogies Pub, jeering at him and heckling him to get out of the street.  And the driver was leaning on his car horn and shouting “get off the stage, get off the stage,” from his open window, and of course he wasn’t shouting “get off the stage” but rather “get out of the street” or “get out of the way” or some such thing, and still all Lou heard was “get off the stage.”  Unwanted he was in the spotlight.  A forgotten actor, jeered at and heckled by an angry mob, booed and hissed at, laughed at as he rushed the spotlight, hurried and panicked and tripping over himself, his arms spread like Christ and his eyes as wide and googly as a vaudeville minstrel.  Spread your arms like Christ and embrace the crowd.  Forgive their indifference for they know not who you were.  They know only who you are, a past player, a darkened star, an old ham, pitiful and pathetic, pleading and begging to be loved by an audience who has long forgotten you.  And alone he stood in the spotlight.  And the driver was leaning on his horn and shouting from his open window, and the crowd was jeering from the side of the street, a wall of clawing arms and hands and snarling teeth, his one leg stiff as a fence post and the other walking around it like a dog choking itself with its own chain.  And just as he began to fall, just as the ground began to slide out from under him, he felt a hand on his arm pulling him to his feet, and he felt a warm body beside his and he leaned against it and knew whose body it was, and whose hand it was now holding his and leading him out of the street, his one leg dragging the other like dead weight.  And she sat him on the lowest of the three steps, sitting on the step behind him and working her fingers through his hair.  Searching for bugs, she used to say, “searching for a little bug to eat,” sitting behind him on the floor or by the window, or the time she pulled him into the bathtub with his clothes on and his hat fell off and floated across the water like a wee boat.  “Hold still,” she’d say, “I’m searching for a liddle bug to eat,” and he would huff and grunt and scratch his armpit, lifting his feet and curling them like an orangutan’s, and with his toes picking up anything within reach, a pencil or a paintbrush or a dropped matchbook, and though he could never get the match to light still he would hold it between his toes, and holding the matchbook with his other foot he’d rub the two together.  “A liddle biddy bug to eat,” she’d say, working her fingers through his hair, “a widdle iddy biddy buggy,” and although she didn’t say anything as they sat on the steps outside of Stogies Pub, still he thought the words as though she had said them, as though she was saying them in her head and he was hearing them in his. He imagined her saying the words she used to say, and If he thought the words and imagined her saying them, maybe she thought them too, and maybe she imagined herself saying them as though they were back at the apartment, back in their corner of the universe, him sitting in the chair by the window and her sitting on the arm, working her fingers through his hair as they shared a cigarette.  “A widdle iddy biddy ugly buggly bug to eat.”  Touch has a memory.  The sailor’s legs still move on phantom waves.  And with his eyes closed it was as though she had never left, as though they were still sitting on the floor of the apartment, him with a glass of whiskey and her with a glass of wine, working her fingers through his hair while he painted her toenails or rolled her a cigarette or read to her from one book or another, from Moongoose and Marleroux or from some other book pulled blindly from the shelf.  Sometimes he read from the newspaper.  She would play with his hair and he would read to her the cartoons and described the pictures, or he’d read the obituaries and they’d drink to the dead, to the “old fellas who had a good run at it and were now resting in the dirt,” or to the “blue haired biddies, sweet as pie and feeding the worms,” and when she’d ask him what the weather was up to he’d pretend to read the weather but instead he would prophesy frogs and locusts, fire and brimstone, rivers of blood and boils and the death of the first born, and always a slight chance of rain in the afternoon, and tossing the newspaper across the room he would intone, his voice rolling like thunder, “and deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.”  And she would pull his hair and shake his head, “shaking out the demons,” or sometimes she would pull on his ears and say, “what big fwoppy wabbit ears you have.”  And his ears were big and floppy, and so he didn’t mind her saying so or laughing at them or pulling on then, twisting and scrunching them as though ringing out a wet cloth.  And she would flick his nose and make a cartoon springing noise as it bounced to the left and to the right, and with his jaw held in her hand she would open and close his mouth, saying things he would never have said, her voice as deep as she could make it, a caricature of a male voice, low and lifeless and without emotion or expression, and she would laugh and he was happy to hear her laugh.  Her laughter was like music, and he was her fool and clown and jester, dancing at the foot of throne.  And now her laughter was more or less forgotten, distant echoes in the dark corners of his mind, the dark hallways haunted by her memory.  And so they sat on the steps outside Stogies Pub, with nothing more to say and nothing to laugh about, and still her hand found his head, her fingers once more searching for bugs, and rather than feeling content as a dog or obedient as a servant or a slave, he felt as penitent as a cruel master, as unworthy and shameful as a fallen knight.  He was Lancelot, on all fours like a hound begging for scraps, and he wanted to turn to her and to fall at her feet and wash them with his tears and dry them with his hair and anoint them with his lips.  He wanted to repent at the foot of her throne and to beg and plead not to be loved but to be forgiven.  He wanted to take her sorrow as his own, to carry her weight as his.  And if it meant she would never shed another tear he would shed them all for her.  He would hang himself as a thief on the cross, a sacrifice to the gods he had cursed and damned every day since she left.  He would curse himself instead, he would damn himself if only she could live forever, in a thousand ways, as a thousand different people.  For her he’d give his soul to the devil.  And if it meant he would never laugh again then so be it, if only she would laugh instead. She could laugh for both of them and her laughter would be a music so sweet and sad that he would cry both their tears.  Hang himself he would as a thief on the cross.  Touch has a memory.  The sailor sleeps on a phantom ocean.  And they sat on the stone steps and she dragged her fingernails across his scalp, and when she spoke she spoke not from the step behind him, but from somewhere within, someplace inside himself where they sat together, him in the chair by the window where he often fell asleep and her on the arm of the chair, ruffling his hair to wake him up.  Fallen asleep he had with a cigarette and the cigarette had burned its way down to his knuckles.  “Come on,” she said, giving his head one last shake, “let’s go to bed,” and he put out the cigarette and followed her, and had she said so that night, sitting on the steps, he would have followed her again, and followed her to the ends of the earth and to the depths of hell and back again.  Touch has a memory.  The sailor dreams of the manatee.  

And he wanted to turn to her, to look into her eyes and to see the planets moving within them, to see himself in her eyes as she would no doubt see herself in his, each looking out on themselves, each contained within the other, but he was afraid that if he turned around she would disappear, gone like a smoke cloud, and so he watched her shadow instead, side beside his own shadow, two puppets moving in the lamplight, dancing on the cobblestones.  They were alone and together, Orpheus and Eurydice in the caves of the underworld, him with his back turned and her on the step behind him, searching his hair for bugs.  And his head was cloudy and his mind was foggy and all around them was darkness.  They were alone in the spotlight, shadows on the waves.  And then the light was gone and there was only darkness and nothing else.  Nothing but darkness.  And then there was nothing, not even the darkness, and he awoke in his bed, unable to move and unable to remember anything else that night. The gods had torn out some pages, and although he would spend the next two days in bed, rewriting those torn out pages, piecing together what happened in the dark, it was the memory of sitting on the lowest step, while Lorelei sat on the step behind him, running her fingers through his hair, to which he awoke and to which he would return again and again. A man haunted not by a sight or a sound but by a feeling, the memory not of having heard something or seen something, but of having felt something, haunted not by her words but by her touch.  And touch has a memory.  The sailor drinks a drink to steady his hands, to calm the waves in his head.  And words are things we say is all, is what Dorothy said, dancing her radio around the room, the antenna reaching for the clouds, reaching for open windows and doorways, searching for some place without static.  Words are things we say is all.  And touch has a memory, and so he awoke hungover, unmoving and unfeeling, the black dog at the foot of his bed, Snarling Cerberus, as black as the room in which he lay with bottles on the bedside table, some empty and some almost empty and some with cigarettes floating at the bottom.  And he couldn’t move.  And he couldn’t open his eyes.  And when he moved his lips they moved like a cow’s lips, wetting each other and saying nothing.  Kveisalgiaparalysis.  He couldn’t make a sound.  And he couldn’t move to drink the drink he needed.  Similia similibus curantur, like cures like, the drink drunk by the drunk to steady himself, to still his shaken nerves.  Words are things we think and thoughts we say.  The drunk he drank a drink of drink and thunk the thoughts he thought to think, when morning came hisself to blame, the stink he stunk the stank of stink.  Drunk as the Dickens.  Sober as Noah.  Drank his Lot and had his fill he had.  And now as sick as a salty dog he lay in his bed, sober as sin and drunk as a drudge. Take a hair it is well written of the dog by which you’re bitten.  Voices in the dark, bodiless, the songs of the dead.  There was a man and he was wise who fell into a bramble bush and scratched out both his eyes.  Hair o’the dog that bites.  Fur of the cat that scratches.  Sing a songs of dead mens, pocketsfull of rhyme.  Blind and legless he’d been, and now he lay on a bed of thorns, sober as a drudge and drunk as sin.  Wine is fine but liquor is quicker, and beer is near when stouts about.  Liquor up front, poker in the rear.  Spread me legs and kiss me on the lips.  No dogs allowed.  No blacks or Irish.  No darts or dominoes.  Drunk words are sober thoughts.  Liquor quicker and poker rear and see her grin from ear to ear.  You can rollyourown but you cannot pullyourown.  We’ll pull it for you.  Smoke what you have and drink what we give you.  Sings a songs of drikkepenge.  Pull your pockets out.  Empty your pint glass.  Last orders. No halfpints for the half dead.  No coins for the ferryman.  Tripple his tipple and send him home sodden.  I drinks till I is drunk and I sleeps till I is sober.  And with his eyes closed he felt a hand on his cheek, smaller and softer than Lorelei’s, and he heard a voice say, “what’s up, doc?” and the voice was soft and light and innocent, a voice both melodic and childlike saying “there there, just a little sting, it’ll all be over soon,” her soft hand on his cheek and in her other hand she held a doc leaf, rubbing his wounded leg and saying “there there, not to worry, everything will be okay.”  And he felt her hand on his cheek, and he felt the phantom stinging in his leg, and because his eyes were closed he could see so much more than the dark with the empty bottles.  He saw beyond the room, into the streets and alleyways of Saint Augustine.  And he saw beyond the streets and the alleyways, beyond Aviles Street, beyond Charlotte Street and Stogies Pub, beyond the rocky shores and the sunken church, beyond the oceans and the lighthouses and the Southampton Docks, beyond even the days and months and years, down the winding roads and through the fields and orchards and churchyards, to the woods where he and Aisling had gone after school searching for Harry, her brother’s tarantula whom they set loose a few weeks before, him with a large stick, to clear the path and to fight off whatever threats they might encounter and whatever obstacles might stand in their way, and her with a sandwich bag filled with dead flies.  And god knows where they got the flies, some windowsill no doubt.  He carried the stick and she carried the flies walking two steps behind him, wolfwhistling and singing “here Harry, come on boy, we brought you some treats,” shaking the bag of dead flies the way she’d seen her mother shaking the bag of dog food when their dog Oscar wouldn’t come inside.  “Here boy, heeeeere boy,” and she shook the dead flies, and when Lou stepped over a large tree root, swinging his stick to clear away the branches in front of them, Aisling ducked under the stick and tripped over the tree root instead, and she fell to the ground, grabbing her ankle and screaming bloody murder.  “I think it’s broken,” she said, and although she wasn’t crying her eyes were wet and her voice was shaking.  And her ankle wasn’t broken, nor was it twisted or busted or sprained, and her only wound was a knee slightly scraped and a little bloody, and still Lou carried her, leaning his stick against a tree and leaving the bag of dead flies on the ground beside it.  “We’ll have to come back for them,” he said, holding her in his arms the way he’d seen in the films and on television, when a man and a woman got married and the man carried his wife into the house.  He carried her back the way they came, and since the way they had come had been mostly downhill, he carried her uphill, stepping over tree roots and brambles and fallen branches, her arms around his neck and her head on his chest.  He was Lancelot carrying Guinevere, and he swore he would carry her as far as he could, and when they came to a low-hanging branch she would move it aside and he would carry her through, as though she were the arms and he were the legs.  Her warm body against his, and her head resting on his chest.  And she smelled nice.  Girls always smelled nicer than boys.  They smelled of fruits and berries and boys didn’t.  It was the shampoo no doubt, and perhaps they bathed more often and didn’t sweat as much.  Or perhaps they were just made to smell nicer, just as they made to be softer and lighter and full of music, made of sugar and spice and all things nice.  And what were boys made of?  Snakes and snails was it?  And little dogs’ tails?  And girls didn’t spit or shit or drool, and they didn’t scrap or climb trees or make noise the way boys did, shrieking and hollering like steamwhistles.  And girls never swore.  Or rather, ladies never swore, is what Mrs. Shagworth said.  And yet, Aisling must not have been a lady because she swore more than any of them, and she knew all the words because her brothers said them, and she taught them to Lou and the others and they spread like a disease.  Shit and piss and fuck and feck and cunt and bollocks and all the others.  And of course, shag was the word which spread the fastest, since it rhymed with their teacher’s name.  And Mrs. Shadworth became Mrs. Shagworth.  And it was funny to Lou whenever Aisling swore, and when she called Mrs. Shagworth a dumb cunt he laughed even though he didn’t know what a cunt was.  And he got into trouble for laughing, and Aisling got into worse trouble and had to stay home for two weeks doing her schoolwork at the kitchen table.  And when he asked her what a cunt was she didn’t know either, was just a word her brothers said was all, and so she said it, and Lou laughed, and although neither of them knew what it meant, still they got themselves in trouble.  And all that was a month ago, or two months, and now he was carrying her in the woods and her body was warm and she smelled nice and if they weren’t home before dark they would no doubt be in trouble again, and worse off than before.  Not that the sun would go down any time soon, but still he knew he couldn’t carry her all the way home, no matter how brave and strong a knight he was, and soon his pencil arms would tire and he’d have to put her down.  But still he swore he’d carry her as far as he could.  And so focused he was on carrying her, so distracted by her smell, and since his pencil arms were getting tired, without knowing it he walked through a patch of nettles, stinging his legs from the ankles up to his knees.  And still he didn’t drop her.  Or rather, he didn’t drop her in the nettles.  Instead he found a patch of dirt and dropped her there instead, and he sat down and sank his head between his legs trying not to cry. “You just wait here,” she said, and even with her wounded foot she ran off and came back with a handful of doc leaves, rubbing them on both his legs.  And he didn’t cry.  Soldiers don’t cry, and he was a soldier, wounded in one of the World Wars, half blind and one legged, and she was his nurse, on her knees in the dirt at his feet, rubbing his legs with doc leaves.  “This will make them better,” she said, “they’ll pull the needles out,” and to keep him calm she placed her hand on his cheek.  It was first time she’d touched him in such a way, laying her hands upon him to heal him, to cure the wounded soldier of his wounds.  And when she was done she held the doc leaf to her mouth, stuck into her fist as though it were the leafy part of a carrot, and with a munching rabbit sound she said, “what’s up, doc?” and laughed, and he laughed, his eyes wet and his legs sore but no longer stinging.  It was as though his legs had burned, and not by a fire which burned the skin but rather by a fire which burned in some other way, in some part of the mind where flesh neither rotted nor bled nor bruised.  He burned not without but within, healed by her touch, by the laying on of her cold hands.  “What’s up, doc?” she said, and they laughed, and though his eyes were wet and his voice was weak, he didn’t cry, and they sat side beside each other in the dirt, a pile of doc leaves on the ground at their feet, and resting her head on his shoulder she sang softly an old song she’d heard her mother sing, Molly Malone perhaps, or the Rose of Tralee or She Moved Through the Fair or something else, singing the song without the words and even without the words her voice made him want to cry, and not on the outside but on the inside, and so he wept not without but within.  And the sun moved behind the clouds.  And the wind shook the leaves and howled up and down the river, howling and wailing amongst the trees as though the trees themselves were howling and wailing, as though as Aisling sang the woods sang with her, howling and wailing de profundis, from the depths of the womb.  And with her arm behind his back she rubbed his head, ruffling his hair the way she’d ruffle the fur on Oscar’s back, her fingers raking back and forth and wriggling like worms, pulling on some tufts and smoothing over others, and it felt so nice that had he done it over again he would again have walked through the nettle patch, he would walk through an entire forest of nettles if only he knew she was on the other side with two handfuls of doc leaves and her soft touch and her soft voice.  Everything about her was soft.  And although he was young and soft in some ways, still everything about him seemed as hard and as rough as the world around them.  It was hard and he was hard and she was soft and her softness made it all worthwhile, it made the hard world not seem so hard.  And when she placed her hand on his cheek, her hand as soft and as cold as clay, he no longer felt alone.  They were alone together, and the world was so far away, as far away as the clouds and the sun and the birds.  Or rather, it was as though they were the ones who were far away, drifting further and farther into an endless sky.  “Just a little sting,” she’d said, “it’ll all be over soon,” and she placed her cold hand on his cheek and as she did she wounded him, and not without but within.  He was struck by an immortal wound, touched for the first time by a healing hand, and although it was a touch which he felt again and again, with other hands in other ways, they were all Aisling’s hands, or rather they were shadows of her hands, cast throughout the years and from place to place and from moment to moment, from one night to another, never quite healing him as she had that day. No other hand could put out the fire. Never again would the wounded soldier be cured of his wounds.  He opened his eyes and closed them again.  And he moved his lips, each wetting the other, his tongue flapping around his dried gums like a mad cow.  Drank too much he had.  Poisoned by his own hand.  And what was the song Aisling sang, her hand on his arm and her head on his shoulder? So long ago it was he couldn’t remember. She was always singing, and always she sang the songs her mother sang.  And they had the greatest stories, and sometimes she would tell the stories rather than singing them.  Stories of dead soldiers and spurned lovers, of stoic battles and tragic murders and crooked men cursed by witches, of Kings and Queens and Gypsies, of gamblers and tinkers, of drunk husbands and adulterous wives, of fishmongers and bootleggers and Orangemen.  And of the girl who moved through the fair like a swan on a still lake, and how her lover watched her disappear into the crowd, not knowing he would never see her again.  “She died of a cough,” Aisling said, “and one night, as he tossed and turned in his bed, she came into the room, cold and shivering and as pale as the moonlight, and she told him that soon he would be dead and they could be together at last, bound to one another for eternity,” her voice rising and falling like some ancient storyteller, and wailing as she spoke the dead woman’s prophesy, “it won’t be long till our wedding day.”  And Lou would listen and see it all as though it had happened, as though her words were drawing pictures in his head, pictures of a tormented man and his dead lover, and her ghost moving through the room like a swan on a still lake.  And there was the story of a wounded soldier, lying in a muddy trench, “and all around him his comrades are either dead or dying, some lying face down in the mud, some sitting with their backs to the wall, and all above them the sky explodes with German lighting, violent flashes of heaven and hell,” her hands above her head, and her fingers opening and closing like flashes of light, “and so he sits in the mud with a bullet wound in his stomach, and as his life slips away he thinks of his girl back home, as lovely and as fair as a rose, and he remembers the green valley where they would lie together, watching the sun sink slowly into the ocean, and he closes his eyes and he holds his stomach in, and the last thing he sees before dying in the mud is not his fallen comrades, nor the bloody trenches of the Somme, but his darling rose back home in the Vale of Tralee.”  One day, sitting on the wall beside the churchyard, they were caught by a storm and took shelter in the old shed beside the church, and he found an old wooden box and sat Aisling on it while he searched for something warm to wrap around her, a blanket or a cloth of some kind.  And she started singing, “in Dublin’s fair city, where the girls have big titties,” but so cold she was, and soaked head to toe, she couldn’t sing without shivering, and so she told him the story instead, about a Dublin girl named Molly Malone.  “She was the daughter of a fishmonger, and the prettiest girl in all of the dear dirty city, and each day she walked up and down Grafton Street selling cockles and muscles and other sea urchins out of a wheel…” her voice shaking and shivering, as though she were choking on her words, “out of a wheelbarrow,” folding her arms and shaking so violently she almost toppled the wooden box she was sitting on.  “What’s a sea urchin?” Lou said, throwing a stack of boxes to one side and finding an old coat hung on a nail.  “Like the street urchins from Oliver Twist,” she said, “only they live in the sea,” looking up at him as he wrapped the coat around her, “and they were worth more if they were alive, and so she would walk up and down the streets singing alive alive-o.” And she sat there shivering.  And Lou knelt on the ground beside her, his clothes soaked through.  And he was cold as well but he wasn’t shivering, and besides he knew well enough to breathe long and slow breaths so he wouldn’t tighten up.  He knew how to be cold and wet better than she did.  And although they were soaked through and wouldn’t be dry anytime soon, still the shed was warm enough, more or less, and dry enough, and Aisling was wrapped in the old coat, and so he did what he always did, he sat and listened.  “Alive alive-o she would sing, flogging sea urchins from her wheelbarrow, and she sold a lot because she was so pretty,” still shivering, and stuttering on pretty, “but she had her old dad to look after and her little sisters and selling cockles and muscles from a wheelbarrow still wasn’t enough to feed them all, and so by night she would sell her body,” shivering on her wooden box, her voice shaking, and seeing the confused look on his face she said, “men would pay her to have sex with them, and because she was so pretty, and because the men were as dirty as the city, she was able to feed her old dad and her sisters, and she even fed herself once in a while, but still it wasn’t enough and one day she caught a cold and died,” wrapping the coat tighter and stomping her little feet.  In her stories everyone died of a cold, or rather women always died of a cold, or they were murdered, and the men all died in war, and so dying for Aisling meant dying of a cough and cold.  “And so by day she lay in the ground, her wheelbarrow abandoned in some corner of some garden, the wheels tied up in weeds, but by night her ghost would rise from the grave and walk up and down Grafton Street singing alive alive-o,” and she sang the last few words and she was warm enough to sing them without shaking and so she sang the whole song, sitting on a wooden box with an old coat wrapped around her, and Lou knelt on the floor beside her listening as her voice echoed around the old shed, stomping her feet for warmth, and still rain was falling on the roof and on the windowsills, and the wind howled and shook the shed and the shed leaked, and the more it shook the more it leaked, as though the storm was trying to break in.  They were alone at the end of the earth and the earth was coming for them, surrounding them as a kraken surrounds a ship.  Of course, the little shed was not a ship, it was a rickety old boat, and still Lou put himself between Aisling and the shed door, and should he have to hold back a storm then so be it, he would hold back the storm, for her he would throw himself at the kraken.  And so they rode out the storm, and she sang him songs and told him stories, and he found a broken broom handle and used it to hold the door shut.  And years later, when Lorelei would sing in the apartment, standing at her easel or sitting by the window, a pencil or a paintbrush in her hand, or sometimes a pot or a pan as she stood washing them in the kitchen sink, Lou would lie on the floor and listen to her, and he would close his eyes and imagine it was Aisling singing, as though they were still in the old shed.  Or he would think of the woods and imagine them sitting together, his legs burning from the nettles and Aisling’s knee bloodied, her head on his shoulder and her hand ruffling his hair the way she’d stroke her dog Oscar, pulling and tussling his hair like fur.  And Lorelei would do the same and say she was searching for bugs to eat, and one time she cut his hair and cut it so badly she had to shave it all off, and she sat laughing on the kitchen floor while he sat on a chair with an old sheet wrapped around him and his bald head poking out of the hole in the top, his face as red as the apples on the kitchen table.  And it took weeks to grows back and when she rubbed his head she’d say, in a child’s voice, “I wished ah had a watermelon, I wished ah had a watermelon.” He opened his eyes and he closed them. And in the dark room he saw most clearly, not the drawn curtains or the closed door, or the chair in the corner where Lorelei would sit combing her hair in the mirror, but shivering leaves and the trees moving from side to side, and he heard the wind howling and wailing down the river, and he felt a hand on his head and heard a voice saying “I wished ah had a watermelon, I wished ah had a watermelon,” and another saying “what’s up, doc?” and both voices came from a phantom mouth that was neither Lorelei’s nor Aisling’s, as though each possessed the other, saying things the other would say and singing songs the other would sing, and the hand rubbing his head was neither Aisling’s hand nor Lorelei’s, but some ghostly hand reaching out of the darkness, from the depths of some unknown place, a place where he still ached and wept and where his legs still burned.  He was a man haunted by the things he saw with his eyes closed, wounded and hunted by a black dog.  He opened his eyes and he closed them.  And still he couldn’t move.  His mouth dry.  His lips opening and closing like a mad cow.  Sometimes, on quiet nights when he couldn’t sleep, he would hear voices in the wind and the rain, strange voices that were not quite Aisling’s and not quite Lorelei’s, but were somehow both of them at the same time, as though rather than memories of people and places, he was haunted by the memories of sounds, ghosts not of flesh but of song, and where once he ached and wept because of them, aching and weeping not without but within, he now heard the songs as though he were the one singing them, singing not without but within, from the wounded depths, his own sad ghost howling down the river.  He opened his eyes and closed them again.  And his head hurt.  Swollen brain, they say.  Had too much to think the night before.  Thought he’d have another drink, and another and another.  Thought he’d have some more after that.  I think I’ll drink a drink of drink.  Thought you’d fall down the steps and into the street, didnae ye, you droonken bastard.  Cannae hold ye drink.  Can ye hold yeself, lad?  Can ye even find your prick?  Och, go piss yeself and sleep in the gutter.  And had he slept in the gutter?  He couldn’t remember.  It all happened in the dark.  Drank too much he had, and now like a boat against the rocks his brain was rubbing on his skull.  Hair of the dog for a dog bite.  Sad songs for a sad soul.  Similia similibus curantur, like cures like.  Dried out he was and needed a drink, and not a drink of drink but a drink of water.  Get some water in your gills lad, do yourself some good.  Fight fire not with fire but water.  Like curses like.  Fire begets fire as drink begets drink begets drink.  And sadness begets sadness.  One too many and twice hungover.  And like a fish dried out beside a river, the kitchen and the kitchen sink seemed so far away.  And although the bathroom and the bathroom sink was closer, still it seemed too far away, too long a distance for a dried out fish.  Crawl to the bathroom, lad.  Stick your head in the sink.  Stick your head in the toilet.  Lay in the tub with the tap on.  But he couldn’t move, as sick as he was, as sick as a dog with the mange.  Only his eyes would move, and so he opened them and he closed them.  And he thought of water.  He thought of water until he could taste it, and not from the kitchen sink or the bathroom sink, or from the toilet bowl, but from the river in the woods where he and Aisling went searching for Harry.  And he could hear it splashing against the rocks and against the trees roots in the riverbed, drinking from his cupped hands and washing his face, and they sat with their legs in the river, him to heal his burning skin and Aisling to heal her bloodied knee.  And she told him a story, about Sionnan, the daughter of a gypsy king, who with her hands could heal the lame and the crippled “and the weak and the wounded and those sick and dying, and she could even heal the dead, lifting them from their graves by laying her hands upon them,” her hand on his thigh, moving in small circles, “and grey and stiff and rotten they’d walk about the room, breathing again having breathed their last breath, and the cripples would walk again having long ago taken their last step, and those who couldn’t speak or see or hear were gifted speech and sights and sounds and all the beauty and music the world could offer,” reaching for a stick and drawing circles in the dirt, “and any and all ailments were cured by the laying on of her hands, and because of this she was worshiped as a goddess, which for a wee girl is quite boring,” rolling her eyes and tossing the stick she’d been using to draw circles in the dirt into the river, “and so one day she ran away, and she ran into the woods in search of Connla’s Well, the Well of Wisdom, and legend said that anyone who drank from the well would gain all the knowledge and wisdom in the world,” reaching for another stick, and again drawing circles in the dirt, and drawing smaller circles inside of the larger ones, and even smaller circles inside of them, and with his own stick Lou dug a hole and buried a rock in it, as though he were planting a rock tree, “and so she drank from Connla’s Well and she gained all the worldly wisdom,” and here she paused and looked him dead in the eye, “all the wisdom the world could offer, and with it she gained the knowledge of all worldly pain and suffering and misery, and she was so sad and upset she drowned herself in the well,” again tossing her stick into the river, and the stick floated drownstream, and she lifted her legs in the air, her legs wet and dripping and her knee no longer bloody, “and the well rose up, enraged by her spirit, and the waters flowed through the woods and through all the towns and villages and into the sea, and from the sea her spirit flowed back into all the lakes and rivers the world over,” sinking her legs once more into the river.  And here she thought for a moment, as though she were making the story up in her head. Or as though she had forgotten the ending and was searching for it, for the memory of when the story was told to her. “My mother says Ireland was once the Garden of Eden, and it was there Adam and Eve lived and spoke to god and god told them not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  And they ate the fruit anyway and were banished from the garden, but my mother says that the tree hung over Connla’s Well, and the fruit fell into the well and that’s why the well contained all the knowledge and wisdom in the world.  It was the knowledge of life and death.  And she says all the rivers in the world flow out of the Shannon, and all the lakes and oceans, and even puddles and bogs and rainclouds,” wiping her hand across the dirt to erase the circles, “and so wherever there is water, from the Shannon river to the Nile River to the Ganges, from a leaking tap to a water pump to a garden hose, there you’ll find the healing touch of Sionnan, daughter of a gypsy king and goddess of the river,” and so the story ended, and Lou tossed his stick into the river and pulled from the water his nettlestung legs, and his legs no longer burned and Aisling’s knee no longer bled, and slowly he walked her home having left behind the bag of flies for Harry, “in case he gets peckish,” she said.  Lou opened his eyes and closed them.  And his curious tongue was writhing about his dry mouth, wetting the teeth and gums. One tooth missing, pulled out years earlier.  One tooth rotten, burned away like a candle, and the edges were as sharp and jagged as a ruined tower.  Man is mostly water, is why he needs so much of it.  Is why it heals and cures.  Half fish he is and dried out.  Drink a drink of it, get some in your gills.  And he couldn’t move and didn’t move.  He just opened his eyes and closed them.  And he moved his lips like a mad cow and his tongue writhed in his mouth.  And he cut his tongue on his rotten tooth and tasted blood.  Tastes almost like rust, and his mouth was wet with it and his throat was still dry. Swallowed blood and spit and his throat was still dry.  Tonguetorn from wroughtentoof.  Torntongue from twatenroof.  Gotten rotten from sugar and spice and all things nice.  Words are things we say is all.  Throat dry and a mouthful of blood, and a mouthful of teeth, one rotten and one missing.  Eight legs had Harry.  And Harry had eight legs.  And Harry had eight eyes.  Take a hair it is well written of the spider by which you’re bitten.  Pish and piffle.  A mouthful of nonsense and a mindful of babble.  Hair o’the spider that bites.  Rotten truths from a bagoflies.  There was a man and he was wise who fell into Connla’s Well and scratched out both his eyes.  And his leg was wet.  Opened his wound up no doubt.  Fresh blood from an old wound.  And blood in his mouth from his cut tongue.  He needed water, but he couldn’t move and so he thought of water.  He thought of rivers and lakes and and rain dripping from leaves and branches.  He drank a drink of the mind and it wet his mouth.  And he moved his lips like a cows lips, and his tongue wriggled and writhed about his mouth like a worm stuck in the rainsodden mud.  His leg stiff and stuck and soggy.  And again he heard Aisling’s voice, not within the room but within himself.  “What’s up, doc?” she said.  And he opened his eyes and he closed them.  And again he heard her voice, and again it was not within the room but within himself, and not within the woods or within the old shed beside the church, but within her bedroom, and she was in bed with the blankets pulled up under her arms, and he was sitting on the end of the bed, his hands folded on his lap, his shoes on the floor by the window.  “Do you remember that time in the woods,” she said, “when we were wee’uns and you were carrying me and you walked through all those nettles?”  And he remembered, of course, and for a moment he felt his legs stinging.  “You had to run off and find a doc leaf,” he said, and laughed.  But she didn’t laugh, and her forehead creased and she said, “why were you carrying me?”  “You hurt your foot,” he said, “tripped over a tree root,” and only then did she laugh, not looking at him but rather looking at the wall on the other side of the room, or looking through the wall rather, as though she could see something on the other side.  Or as though there were shadow puppets cast by ghostly hands, moving and dancing across the wall, telling her a story, a tale of all the things she had forgotten, all the little things which happened in the dark, all the secrets long forgotten by those who first told them.  Speak, memory, and tell us a story.  And with the blankets pulled up under her arms she sat looking at the wall, or rather she was looking through the wall, her eyes looking beyond it, to some other place.  It was something he was used to.  She was staring into the abyss, and when she stared into the abyss he knew well enough to let her stare, and to wait for her. And so he sat on the end of the bed and waited.  “I was faking it,” she said, still looking at the wall, “I was so mad that you didn’t warn me about the tree root, and that you made me carry the flies because you needed your hands free to carry the stick,” her eyes starting to close, “and I wanted to carry the stick and so when I fell down I pretended my foot was hurt,” her eyes closing and opening, “and you knew I was faking it but you carried me anyway,” and she closed her eyes and kept them closed and for a moment he thought she had fallen asleep.  “We never did find Harry,” she said, speaking through a yawn.  “He must have been hiding,” he said, and her eyes opened, but only for a moment, and they closed again.  “We were so small then,” she said, “so small and innocent, and everything was so…” searching for a word, her tongue poking through her teeth like a snake, making a ssss sound as though she were about to say the word simple, “…so easy, so happy and funny and light, summer was summer and winter was winter, and in the spring all the flowers grew and my eyes watered and I couldn’t stop sneezing, and in the autumn all the leaves died and fell off the trees, and when it rained there was always a tree to hide under, and wherever nettles grew there was always a patch of doc leaves growing nearby,” yawning and turning her head to the side, rolling her shoulders and sinking her head deeper into her pillow, “we were so small and soft and everything made sense.” And she fell silent, her chest rising and falling under the blankets.  And of course they were still small and soft only they didn’t know it.  The world felt so heavy on their shoulders.  And having dug up Roddy’s grave, the world felt that much heavier.  They dug up Roddy’s grave and nothing changed.  Aisling still saw someone at her bedroom window, and she still talked of ghosts and spirits and the undead.  And when the others abandoned her, Pete and Mash and Dimdum, and all the rest, still Lou walked her home, just the two of them, just as it was when they were wee’uns and the world was simple and easy, when summer was summer and winter was winter and everything made sense.  And yet, nothing had ever made sense.  Nothing ever does.  Sometimes it rains and there’s not a tree to hide under.  Sometimes a patch of nettles will grow without a patch of doc leaves growing nearby.  And though summer was always summer and winter was always winter, still each season came and went not as old friends but as strangers, with secret smiles and their hands in their pockets, and when they left they took something with them, they stole something from the children.  With each summer and winter come and gone they lost a piece of themselves, and having lost a piece of themselves the world became that much heavier and that much harder to navigate.  The storm was getting worse.  And so Lou walked her home and made sure she ate something, and at night he climbed in through her bedroom window and sat on the end of her bed until she fell asleep. She was still seeing things and hearing things, and even though they’d dug up the grave and seen his skeleton buried within it, still she was sure it was Roddy at her bedroom window at night. “It was him,” she would say, staring off into the abyss, staring back at herself, looking not without but within, her eyes wet and her voice shaking, “it was him only he looked older,” and then shaking her head she’d say, “no, not older, he looked younger, but he looked older, his clothes were older, and his hair was older.”  And when she fell asleep Lou would climb out of the window and in the morning she would see his footprints in the dirt and say, “see, he was here, he was here, those are too big to be yours, he was standing by my window,” and though they were Lou footprints, and were the size not of a grown man but of a young lad, still some of them seemed bigger, as though he had stepped in the same place twice, the one footprint left on top of the other. It was as though the footprints were made by two different feet.  One of them a child and the other a man.  “They’re my footprints,” Lou would say, showing her the bottom of his shoes, and he would walk over them, retracing his own steps, and she would fold her arms and pout and say, “he was here, after you left, I pretended I was asleep and he stood at the window and watched me.”  Then one day Lou showed her the photograph he stole from Roddy’s house, of Roddy’s father and the other man, the old man who played his violin on Sackville Street. “Were they in the army?” she said, and Lou shrugged.  He didn’t know.  And she was holding the photograph so tight it folded nearly in half.  “Is that him?” Lou said, pointing at Roddy’s father, “is that the man at the window?”  And Aisling shrugged.  She didn’t know.  It could have been him.  “But he has kind eyes,” she said, still holding the photograph, her grip loosening and the photograph unfolding itself, “he looks innocent and childlike.”  And the man at her window had dark and lifeless eyes, “like a snake’s eyes, black and dead, and deep as oceans,” her grip tightening again and the photograph again folding itself in half, “like his,” pointing her finger at the other man, “eyes like blackened mirrors.”  And so they decided to go and find the man in the photograph, and not Roddy’s father, but the other man, the one who plays his violin on Sackville Street, and sure enough they found him standing outside the Eager Poet Pub, his violin case at his feet to catch the coins tossed by passersby, and his violin held by his long spidery fingers, pulling the bow across the strings as though he were stabbing the air.  And a cold wind was blowing and it was spitting rain.  And as they stood across the street and watched, staring at the old man, he stared back at them smiling from time to time, his snake eyes peering over his violin.  And almost as though he was afraid of them, or as though he was trying to hide something, to conceal from them some dangerous secret, he softened his playing.  Gone was the violent stabbing bow and the wailing strings, gone was the pain and the agony, and instead the strings sang of sorrow and sadness and melancholia, of anguish and longing.  So sad was the music, and so beautiful and tortured, it made Lou want to cry.  Of course, he couldn’t cry and he didn’t cry. But still his body ached, and his heart ached, and some other part of him, some piece he carried inside of himself, ached and wept and longed for something unknown and unseen.  It was something felt, and felt not on the outside but on the inside, not without but within.  He was aching for some ancient wound, for blood older than his and for a sadness which came before him.  He felt his heart break as though pierced by an arrow, and he cried not without but within. Inside himself, in some hidden place, his soul wept the tears of stigmata.  “I know this song,” Aisling said, “my mother used to sing it to me when I couldn’t sleep.”  And she sang along, about the wind that doth blow and the drops of rain, and how never had she had but one true love, “in cold clay she is lain,” her voice soft and clear as it echoed off the cobblestoned street, “I’ll sit and mourn upon her grave for twelve months and a day,” the old man’s violin slowing and softening, making room for the little girl’s voice.  And yet, rather than the voice of a little girl, it was the voice of some long dead ghost, an ancient voice singing for all the lost and departed souls who still wept in the grave, tormented by an aching and a longing even death couldn’t take from them.  Such a beautiful song it was and such a sad song too, of a man who mourns his dead lover, and for twelve months and a day he cries over her grave and then a voice speaks to him from beneath the dirt, and it asks who it is who cries for them. “Tis I, thine own true love,” he says, “for I crave from thy sweet lips one kiss,” but one kiss from her lips as cold as clay would kill him.  “My time be long” he says, “my time be short, tomorrow or today, and may god in heaven have my soul to kiss your lips of clay.”  And his dead lover reminds him of a place once green and wild where the two of them would walk, hand in hand through a garden of flowers.  “The sweetest flower,” she says, “that ever grew is withered down to the stalk,” her voice muffled by six feet of mud and soil, and she says, and Aisling sang, standing on one side of Sackville Street while the old man with his violin stood on the other, her voice ancient and haunted and carried by the wind and the spitting rain, “the stalk is withered dry my dear, and so will our hearts decay, so make yourself happy my love until death calls you away.”  And the song ended.  And a small crowd who had gathered applauded the old man and the wee girl, each on either side of the street.  And the old man and the wee girl shared a smile, as the rain fell harder, as the crowd scattered in search of storefronts and doorways, and the old man tossed his violin into the violin case and shuffled into the Eager Poet Pub, swinging his leg as though it were made of wood, and Lou thought of the photograph in his pocket and knew that if they stood for too long in rain the photograph would be ruined, and so they crossed the street and into the pub, standing in the doorway like stray dogs and shaking themselves dry.  And the pub landlord shouted at them, “Oi, you lad, you’re the lad what broke the window,” his voice as loud and sudden a thunder, as though it were coming from outside, shaking the walls and the roof, and for a moment Lou thought lightening would strike, and not out in the street, in the rain, but inside the pub, striking the floor between them.  He was a forest of a man, his eyes buried deep in his tangled beard and his head sprouting from his oak chest, and covered he was from head to toe in moss, on the northern side, from the squashed nest beneath his hat to his arms like fallen tree trunks, and if his fingers were as hairy as they were no doubt his toes were two, like fattened grubs covered in dirt and wet leaves.  Of course, they couldn’t see his toes, covered as they were by his dusty boots. But there he stood across the room, widelegged and with knees like tree stumps, a bear of a man he was and with his hands curled into fists the rag he’d been using to wipe down the bar only a moment before looked like nothing more than a handkerchief, a dainty tissue swallowed by his coiled grublike fingers.  “Think you’re funny, lad, coming back in here,” his voice rattling the pint glasses on the shelf and swinging the lamps which hung from the ceiling and shaking the dart board and the radio and the cigarette machine, and had Lou been wearing a hat the hat would no doubt have blown off his head and out the door.  “He’s one of those giants,” Aisling said, hiding behind Lou and wrapping her arms around him, as though rather than inside the pub they were outside of it, face to face with a thunderous wind which had she not held on might carry her away. “He’s one of those giants who eats children and sucks on their bones.”  And he was a giant, but not the kind who eats children.  He was Goliath, only he was a Goliath who having been struck by David’s stone still stood, taunting the smaller man.  “Thought you were a big lad didn’t you, tossing that stone,” his five wet teeth shinging deep within his beard, and his beard stained yellow at the corners of his mouth, “come to pay for the window have you?”  And Lou said nothing, and Aisling’s arms tightening around him.  And what if the giant charged, what then?  What if the bear attacked?  Lou stood there, wobblykneed and with arms like pencils, and swore upon the names of every god he knew that he would stand his ground, that he would fight the good fight, and though it would be a fight to certain death, it would at least be an honorable death, a noble death, and it would give Aisling time to run.  And of course, once she ran she would be alone with the wolves, out in the rain, Guinevere tossed to the dogs of Mordred.  But he would stand his ground none the less, Sir Louis the Knight Errant and the Giant of Sackville Street, and if it came to it he would blind the good man, he would scratch out both his eyes and work him over with a table leg.  And drown him he would with his own ale, and thus Sir Louis, gallant and brave, would stand upon the slain beast with his table leg held aloft in honor and victory. “He’s alright, Barney,” said a soft voice at the bar, “he’s with me,” and the old man looked over his shoulder, his violin case on the ground at his feet, “pour them a drink would you.”  He was talking through his teeth, a pipe clenched between them, and striking a match to light his pipe he said, “pour them each a stout.”  And the landlord shrunk a little.  No longer was he a giant.  Instead he was no more nor less than what he was, a fat and hairy bloke, a bearded slob, a frightened tarantula let loose from its cage.  “They’re just wee’uns,” the landlord said, and the old man, puffing his pipe, shook out the match and tossed it into the ashtray.  “So pour them a halfpint,” he said, and the landlord poured a halfpint of stout and handed it to Lou.  “Share this with your sister,” he said, “and don’t spoil your supper,” turning his back to them and wiping down the bar.  And the old man took his pipe and his violin and sat at a small table by the window.  “Come along,” he said, and along they came, sitting across the table with a halfpint between them. And they supped their halfpint, passing it back and forth, and the old man supped his stout and puffed on his pipe, covering the pipe with his fingers as though he were making smoke signals, covering the pipe and uncovering it, wisps of smoke rising from the pipe and clouds of smoke rising from his mouth.  He supped his pint and they supped theirs, and Lou noticed how stiffly the old man held his glass, as though his hands were made of wood, and his fingers covering his pipe didn’t bend, instead they moved up and down like two pencils, wooden fingers on wooden hands and they hung on invisible strings. And he raised his wooden hand, and pointing with his pipe at the window behind them he said “I knew it would rain,” supping his stout, “as sure as your shoes are untied I knew it would rain,” and Lou’s shoes were untied, or rather one of his shoes was untied, and so he tied it, resting his foot of the edge of his chair.  “I woke up stiff,” the old man said, shaking his hands, shaking the stiffness out of them, “which means it’s going to rain, and sure enough,” and again he pointed at the window with the stem of his pipe and then stuffed it back into his mouth, and he puffed some more and again a cloud of smoke came from his mouth, and he puffed again and again there was a cloud a smoke, only it was smaller than before, and when he puffed again his pipe made a gurgling sound, and there was no cloud of smoke, only a wisp of it.  And then not even a wisp, and he turned his pipe over, banging it against the table.  “You’re not saying anything, lad,” looking inside his pipe, sticking his finger in the hole like a monkey digging a grub out of a tree trunk, and he turned his pipe over and shook it and the last of the ashes fell onto the table.  And with his wooden fingers he took a wad of tobacco from a pouch in his coat pocket and stuffed it into the pipe, and striking a match he lit the pipe and again the table was shrouded in smoke.  And as the smoke cleared the old man smiled at them and winked.  And he said the strangest thing.  He said, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and he supped his stout and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his hand as stiff as wood, as though an invisible string was dragging it across his thin lips.  And his other hand held his pipe, and his one leg stretched out from under the table, and now and again he would slowly bend the knee, bending it a little more each time, as though he were thawing it out of a block of ice.  And although Lou would come to know the old man and his unusual mannerisms well, it was then both odd and strange, and he seemed an odd and strange man, and of course he was an odd and strange man.  He was Pinocchio grown old, an aged puppet on invisible strings, and when he spoke he spoke with a voice both familiar and strange, and not with the ordinary piglike grunt of the local men, but as though he was a stranger, the mongrel dog of other places and other peoples, a voice as ancient as it was unusual, and yet as odd and strange as it was it had within it the ordinary sounds of Sackville Street, a voice as hard and piglike the other men. It was as though he was at once both strange and familiar, and he moved with the same oddness and strangeness with which he spoke, as though he was a thousand years old, as though he’d been preserved for centuries in resin.  And all of this Lou would come to know well, and so well he could imitate Spider as though he were a caricature, and although she never met him, he would do impressions of the old man to make Lorelei laugh, and he would say things the old man once said, and sometimes he would do so without meaning to, walking stifflegged down the street or lighting a cigarette without bending his fingers, and when he slid off his barstool he did so as though only one leg would bend, using the other to pivot in whichever directing he was going.  It was as though in the years and days which followed, sitting across the table from Spider, he would absorb a piece of the old man’s spirit, a part of him would possess the young lad and he would carry that part with him, over the roads and oceans and years and days, from Sackville Street all the way to Charlotte Street, from the Eager Poet Pub all the way to Stogies Pub, and from the small table by the window, where the old man and the young lad sat across from each other, each with a pint and a halfpint of stout, to the dark end of the bar where Lou so often sat alone, with his pint and his packet of cigarettes, and his head buried in a tattered notebook.  And not only was he possessed by the old man, he would come to know him so well he could write about him as though he were writing about himself, as though in writing about the old man he left a piece of himself on the page.  Or rather, it was as though he was Spider and Spider was the one writing about hisself, telling his stories about the Eager Poet Pub and the church and the churchyard and the girl who sold flowers on Sackville Street, and when he wrote about Spider running with the bulls in Spain or sleeping with the matador’s wife, or about the long days and days of nights he spent in borstal, it was as though he was writing about himself sleeping with the matador’s wife, himself lying on a hard bed in a room with bars on the windows, lying on his back with a picture of Polly on the wall and the crows sharpening their beaks on the iron bars, their shadows stretched across the floor by the rising moon.  He knew the old man so well he could create him again on the page, a living thing made not of blood but of ink, alive not through thoughts but through words.  And words are things we say is all, and the old man’s face appeared in the cloud of smoke, smiling and winking, and he said “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and it was an odd and strange thing to say, as though somehow he knew what Lou had in his pocket, just as he knew his shoes were untied or that it would rain. And although Lou would come to believe that Spider knew such things because of some cursed gift, some sense given to him by the gods, and that he might even hear the voices of the dead and was maybe even dead himself, or had been dead before and was born again in another place as another person, and although he would take this with a grain of salt, as ordinary and commonplace as such a thought was about such an odd and strange man, there was nothing ordinary or commonplace that afternoon, sitting across the table from him for the first time, himself and Aisling sharing a halfpint of stout.  And he said, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and Lou’s hand found his pocket, and he took the photograph from his pocket and slid it across the table and the old man smiled, holding the photograph so tightly it folded nearly in half. And his grip loosened and his eyes were wet, and still he smiled at the photograph.  “Where did you get this?” he said, and then shook his head and set it down on the table.  “Never mind,” he said, “I know where you got it,” and Lou asked him if he knew the man in the photograph.  “Of course, lad, that’s me.”  And of course Lou meant the other man, the one standing next to him, each with their arm around the other.  “Is that Roddy’s father?” Lou said, and the old man nodded.  “You were in the army together?” And the old man shrugged and his head tilted from one side to the other.  “More or less,” he said, “we were in bootcamp together,” and he tossed his matches across the table and said, “be a good lad and strike a match would you, me pipes gone out,” and Lou struck a match and lit the old man’s pipe, his pencil arms reaching across the table.  “He was a good fellow,” the old man said, “Roddy’s father, and I knew his mother as well, she grew up around here, same as myself, same as Roddy, same as the two of you,” puffing so heavily on his pipe the whole pub nearly filled with smoke, “she sold flowers across the street, a long time ago, and me and Roddy, Roddy’s father that is, Roddy Senior, we would sit at this very table and drink, much the same as we’re drinking now,” and he supped his stout and Lou supped his halfpint and passed it to Aisling, but Aisling just sat there, staring at the wall.  She was a thousand miles away, looking not at the wall but through the wall, and so Lou took the halfpint and finished it off.  And the old man smiled at him.  “You ought to pace yourself, lad, else you’ll spoil your dinner,” and when Lou said nothing the old man leaned forward, resting his elbows on the pub table, and in a voice so soft he was almost whispering he said “you’re the lad what broke the window, I remember because I was sat next to it when you tossed that stone,” and he laughed and said, “let he who is without sin,” and again he laughed and said, “I wouldn’t worry about it, lad, I was your age once, had me own share of mischief, and I got locked up for it, daft as I was, so you’ve at least got more sense than I do,” and he looked at Aisling, a thousand miles away and staring at the wall, “or maybe you’re as daft as I was.”  “How did he die?” Lou said, taking the photograph and putting back into his pocket.  “Am I your dog am I?” the old man said, “come to show to show me the stick have you?” and Lou asked if Roddy Senior died in the war and the old man shook his head.  “No, he never made it out of bootcamp, fell asleep with a cigarette in his mouth and burned the whole place to the ground.”  And he drank the last of his stout and puffed his pint and said, “I’d stand you another drink but,” and he never finished the sentenced, and Lou never knew but what and why he wouldn’t stand him another drink.  Because he was a child, no doubt.  And still he sat across the table and felt like anything but a child.  He felt like one of the men, like he was Roddy Senior sat not across from the old man but from the man in the photograph, stood side beside Roddy Senior, each with their arms around the other.  “You were locked up,” Lou said, “in a gaol?” and the old man smiled and he winked and he puffed on his pipe and said, “in a borstal, and they only let me out to join the army, else I might still be there,” and again he leaned his elbows on the table, and he said, “that was a long time ago, lad, best to let sleeping dogs lie, eh?  No sense digging up old bones.”  And it stopped raining, and the old man got himself another stout, and Lou and Aisling left him to it, passing the pub window without looking in, even as he waved at them, and even as they crossed Sackville Street Lou could feel the old man watching them.

[lou-graves]

Untitled

(Excerpted from the novel LET THE DOGSBODIES HOWL)

Spider couldn’t sleep, sitting in his chair, staring at the television.  Or rather he was staring at the wall behind the television, looking down now and then at the flickering screen, his body washed over by the pale light.  And over the sides of his chair hung his arms, each with a sharp pain in the elbow, a twitch of arthritis, an itch spreading slowing towards his hands.  On the television Charlie Chaplin stood upon a stage, alone in the spotlight, his flea-dance seen by a crowd who had more or less forgotten him, as the spotlight more or less forgot him, moving across the stage without him.  And although it wasn’t a silent film, with the volume turned down his lips moved as silently as they always had, his footsteps silent, and the pale light of the television was the only light in the room, casting onto to the wall a shadow of an old man who was tired but couldn’t sleep.  

He couldn’t sleep and he couldn’t stand staring at the ceiling any longer. Better off on his arse than on his back. Better off staring at the wall or at the television.  His violin silent in the corner of the room.  His hands itching to play it, and he would have played it were it not for Mary asleep in the other room.  Perhaps he could hold it.  Hold it around the neck to mute the strings.  But even that would wake her up.  Even so much as a mouse fart would wake her up, so light a sleeper she was. And likely he had already awoken her with his tossing and his turning, but as easily as she woke up she would fall back to sleep, sliding back into the dream from which she’d been pulled, and pulled like a vaudevillian pulled from the stage by a walking stick hooked around the neck.  She always fell asleep so easily, and when she awoke she awoke rested and tickled by odd and peculiar dreams.  When Spider awoke he awoke restless and tired.  He was always tired.  And as hard as it was to wake him up was as hard as it was to fall back to sleep. And so he tossed and turned and then tiptoed out of the room, sitting in his chair with his arms hung over the sides, his body washed over by the light of the television.  As a young lad Spider ran with the bulls in Spain.  Though he didn’t do much running.  Instead he was tossed in the air and trampled, rolling over and covering up and then crawling to the sidewalk where the local boys put him back on his feet, slapping his back and laughing, and saying “Viva San Fermín, Gora San Fermín.”  And later he slept with a matador’s wife.  Though they didn’t do much sleeping.  And now he sat staring at the wall, thinking of the matador’s wife, and he couldn’t help but laugh.  It was a long time since he’d lost sleep over a woman, and though he had slept with a lot of women, and even married some of them, still he never forgot the matador’s wife. And now he was an old man who couldn’t sleep, staring at the wall, looking down from time to time at the television, his arms each hung over either side of his chair.  And a twitching in both elbows, an itch slowing spreading up his arms towards his hands, his hands stiff and curving inwards as though clutching a whiskey glass.  And holding the phantom whiskey glass, a phantom cigar clutched between his teeth, he raised his hand and said, “Let the dogsbodies howl, and we shall laugh all the better in bedrooms of noble ladies.”  A slight sound of rattling ice, rocks in a whiskey sea.  And a stirring in the other room.  He sat still.  Sit still and she’ll soon fall asleep, as easily as she was awoken.  Sit still and she’ll slide back into the dream.  He sat still and thought about the matador’s wife, and though he had forgotten her name, still he could remember the softness of her skin, and the way she smelled in a small dark room in Paploma, with the Spanish moon watching them through the window, a voyeur caught in her almond eyes like moonlit drops of rain.  And if he closed his eyes he could almost feel her lips on his, her hands on his body and his hands on hers.  Their bodies moving together, and sweating together, washed over by the pale moonlight. The universal language, nounless and verbless.  Eros, the two-backed beast.  And though he spoke little to no Spanish, still he remembered her voice, softer than the sheets and warmer than the whiskey, and strong in a way he’d never known a woman’s voice to be strong, stronger than the carajillo they drank on the balcony, side by side with her head on his shoulder.  The women we remember are not the ones who make us think, but rather the ones who made us feel, who soothed the misery of feeling nothing, the ones who made us forget.  No more stirring in the other room.  A twitch in either elbow.  And he wondered what Mary was dreaming about.  Not that he needed to wonder, he’d find out in the morning, at the kitchen table. She would say, “Bejesus, I had the oddest and most peculiar dream,” and would tell him all about it.  And he would listen, drinking his coffee.  And through all the years of nights of dreams they’d been married, he never tired of hearing the odd and peculiar stories born of her sleeping mind.  And the more odd and peculiar they were, the sweeter her voice was in telling them, the softer it fell, the more featherlike it rose, as lilting and melodic as birdsong. He turned the television off, turned on a lamp and walked over to the window.  The streets looked different at night.  Less real.  More odd and dreamlike, whitewashed by the moonlight and made peculiar by the shadows which seemed to move and shift in doorways and alleyways and windows, lying stretched across sidewalks and rooftops and storefront awnings, clinging to curbs and front steps and windowsills.  And across the street a bicycle leaned against a lamppost, not so much still as it was unmoving, suspended between its shadow and the lamplight which cast it.  And down the street, in the mouth of the alleyway leading to the churchyard, two small figures moving in the darkness.  Two small figures, one carrying something long and slung over the shoulder.  Was it a flagpole or a sword or a stick?  A rifle, perhaps?  Or was it a shovel?  Two small figures, one of which he recognized the moment they stepped out of the alleyway and onto the street.  Stood beneath the light of a streetlamp, a shovel slung over his shoulder, was the lad who threw a stone through window of the Eager Poet Pub, the same lad he’d seen a few days before crawling out of the window at Polly’s old house on Sackville Street.  But Polly was dead and her boy Roddy was dead and the house was abandoned, and a young lad had no business being in there.  No matter, lads will be lads, as curious they are as dead cats.  But what business had a young lad in a churchyard with a shovel?  And not with another lad, but with a young girl none the less.  It all felt odd, as peculiar as a strange dream and he wondered if he was dreaming.  He wondered was he not imagining them, stood beneath the light of a streetlamp, nothing more than dark figures of his imagination.  They stood beneath the street lamp, and she took the shovel slung over his shoulder and leant it against a wall.  Then she kissed him.  And for a moment they stood so still he felt he was looking at a photograph, and it was only when the young lad looked over the girl’s shoulder at Spider’s window that Spider moved to one side, peering around the window frame in time to see them walking away, the shovel once again slung over the lad’s shoulder.  He watched them disappear around a corner, sat down in his chair, turned off the lamp and closed his eyes.  His thoughts began to turn odd and strange, twisting themselves each around the others, forming peculiar patterns and images, odd dreamlike scenes, a house of thought and feeling built upon a foundation of nonsense.  Losing himself he was in the funhouse, twisted and distorted he was in the funhouse mirrors.  Falling asleep he was, and the thought that he was falling asleep woke him up.  But only for a moment, and soon his thoughts turned odd and strange again, and peculiar, and more and more odd and strange until they no longer seemed odd or strange.  And slowly, with his arms each hung over either side of his chair, he sank into a dream, losing himself in a playground of absurdities.  Dreamscapes, strange worlds unto themselves.  The playgrounds of wise men, they say, the wellsprings of soothsayers and sages.  And they say we are all fools in love.  But Spider thought the inverse was true, that we are fools when we dream and wise in love. A man in love knows too much, he has looked through the mirror and met himself on the other side, in a place without masks or mythologies.  He’s seen himself naked in the garden.  Only when we dream are we young again, and mad and foolish.  Only in dreams can we fly or float or breathe under water.  Fools in that little death, in utero.  And what of the other death, the sleep in which who knows what dreams may come? Fools again in death, again in utero, again able to fly or float or breathe under water.  “Dreams don’t mean anything,” Spider would say, “nonsense of the head is all, rats in the attic, pay them no mind, Freud was a madcap who couldn’t keep his hands off his prick.”  And that time in Spain, with his suitcase and his violin and nothing else, when he sat on the balcony with the matador’s wife and she drew from a Tarot deck the fool card, and he couldn’t help but laugh when she pointed at the card and then pointed at him.  But she didn’t laugh, and when she drew the death card he took the cards from her and threw them to one side.  He tried to kiss her, but she pulled away and he saw something in her eyes.  And although she spoke no English and he spoke no Spanish, he knew what she wanted to ask him.  What are you running from?  And so he told her.  He told her he had been in prison, and had burned a mattress once during a riot.  He told her he had the blood of an innocent man on his conscience, that he was an army deserter, a man of cowardice and treason, that he was a fool and lost the girl he loved, the only girl he had ever loved. He told her this and more, and she listened, and although she couldn’t have understood the words, something in her eyes understood what he was saying.  Her head to one side, her hair like a muddy waterfall cascading over her naked shoulder, the moonlight caught in her eyes like drops of rain.  And somewhere the fool card lying face down. Spider was born on the first of April, in an upstairs bedroom with his mother and a midwife and a lady who lived down the street, a friend of his mother’s, and the midwife had to slap his arse to wake him up.  An April fool, and his father would say, “you’re a fucking joke, lad.”  And in some ways he was, but his father said this so often it became a kind of joke.  He would get himself into trouble and his father would say, “you’re a fucking joke, lad,” as though one was the set up and the other was the punchline.  He was a fool and his father the straight man, the stoic king sat upon a throne at the foot of which knelt a jester, as bad at sports as he was at school, and good for nothing more than getting himself into trouble.  “You’re a fucking joke, lad.”  But it was a joke without a punchline, or rather a joke with a punchline as lost on his father as it was lost on Spider.  The punchline was simple, and however many years later when he died on the same day, it was though his life had resolved itself like a well written joke.  From one April to another he lived and died, as foolish in death as he had been in life.  Born in one house and dead in another, and although he’d spent much of his life running with the bulls and had seen much of the world, and although the two houses were each on either side of Sackville Street, one to the north and one to the south, if you slammed the door of one on a quiet morning you might hear it through the other’s open window.  And just as he was born in a upstairs bedroom, with his mother and a midwife and a woman who lived down the street, so too would he die in an upstairs bedroom, sat in his chair in front of the television, his arms hung over either side of his chair, his hands crippled with arthritis and no good anymore to play the violin.  When we die we die alone.  Alone we walk that pathway into oblivion, and no one knows the thoughts of a dying man. Still, Lou liked to think that Spider was in on the joke, that he had a good laugh the night he died, or that morning even, when he awoke with pains in his chest and arms and a shortness of breath, a shortness more severe than the breathless staggering of old age.  He must have known something, and knowing Spider he would have had a good laugh, a good and foolish laugh.  “Some fucking joke,” he would have said, speaking not to himself or to the room, but to something beyond the room, someone either without or within.  He would have laughed knowing the gods were laughing with him.  “You’re a fucking joke, lad,” his father said when he came home from his first day of school without shoes.  The older lads took his shoes and kicked him around and he walked home in the rain barefooted.  And years later when he was kicked out of school for fighting, and kicked out for good this time having opened another lad’s head with a cricket ball in a sock, again his father said, “you’re a fucking joke, lad.”  But taking off his sock and dropping the cricket ball inside, then swinging the sock the way a medieval knight might swing a mace, Spider felt anything but foolish, and for years after he would smile every time remembered the sound the cricket ball made when it collided with the lad’s head, not unlike the sound it would make colliding with a well swung cricket bat.  And even the sight of the blood spilled out on the cricket field made him smile.  Dark red on yellow and green grass.  “You useless cunt,” the lad said, scolding Spider for turning away from the cricket ball rather than catching it, and he called him a sissy and a son of a bitch, and so Spider took off his sock and dropped the cricket ball in it, then swung the sock at the lad’s head.  Like David he slew Goliath and left him on the ground covered in blood, screaming like a sissy, shrieking and crying like a son of a bitch.  He had turned away from the ball, and turned away because he was daydreaming and didn’t see it until it was too late, turning away at the last moment before the ball struck his head, and before he was back on his feet already the lad was calling him a cunt and a sissy and a son of a bitch.  After that first day of school, when they took his shoes and kicked him around, Spider swore he would never be made a fool of by anyone.  And since he was a lad of few words, too shy to say much of anything at all, he let his fists speak for him.  And after he opened the lad’s head with a cricket ball, still he didn’t say anything, and when they told him to leave he left and that was that.  “You’re a fucking joke, lad,” his father said.  But the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and his father, like his uncles, and like most of the men in town, worked in a factory making machine parts, and they worked long hours for little money. And every night he came home covered in grease and sat in his chair so tired he could barely lift his arms, his arms each hung over the sides of his chair.  And yet, it was the tiredness in his eyes that frightened Spider, and no matter how tough he looked sitting in his chair, covered in grease and clutching a bottle of whiskey, something in his eyes wept.  And he saw the same look in the eyes of his uncles, and in the eyes of the other men, each of them beaten and broken and left with nothing to show for it but a payslip each week and a bottle of cheap whiskey.  They were forgotten by the world, ghosts who walked the earth without hope and without purpose, working in factories and sitting in chairs drunk, and on Sunday mornings they went to church too tired to pray. They were dead men, and Spider would likely have ended up as dead as they were, with the same tiredness in his eyes, working in the same factories and sitting in the same church, had it not been for one slow morning when he heard the saddest and most beautiful sound he had ever heard.  One slow Moanday morning, or Tearsday, or Wailsday, or some other day, Thumpsday or Frightday, some day other than Sunday.  Shatterday perhaps.  Though most likely it was a weekday since weekdays were workdays, and having been thrown out of school, Spider now worked as a custodian at the Church, a job of work he’d found himself by catching the priest on his way out of the Eager Poet Pub. “Steady on, father,” he said, “a little tipsy are you?  Looking for a handyman are you father?  I noticed your church is looking worse for ware, run down like a protestant building, and filthy too, as filthy as sin.  Buy you a drink, father?  What’s your tipple?”  And though he was only fourteen, still he was hired to work on the upkeep of the church. And hard work it was but quiet work, alone with himself and his cigarettes and a flask of coffee, and it kept him out of the factories.  One morning, whilst sweeping the cobblestoned alleyway which lead from the churchyard to the street, he heard music coming from inside the church, and not church music but something else, something more real and raw than an organ and more devastating than any choir he’d ever heard, and the more of the alleyway he swept the louder and more possessing the music was until he reached the end of the alleyway and stood in the church doorway holding his broom handle with both hands. At the far end of the room was Mrs. Fleischpeitsche, the music teacher, her hands wrapped around a violin, her violin weeping at the foot of a cross, and behind her were the empty pews and the unlit candles and the unrung bells, and him stood in the doorway, holding his broom with both hands as though holding on to keep from falling.  If he fell he might miss the floor and keep falling, and fall further and farther into something endless, an endless something, and so he held onto the broom handle.  And though he had never heard the Kreutzer Sonata, or anything like it, and thought it impossible that anything like it had ever been written, still he felt as though rather than hearing it for the first time he was remembering it, remembering something he heard in past life.  He knew it as well as he knew his own voice, as imtimately as he knew the voices in his head, the thoughts to which he fell asleep.  There were no gods or devils in the music, it was him alone in every note, a piece of him pouring out in every scratching and drawing of Mrs. Fleischpeitsche’s bow.  He closed his eyes, struck in a way he’d never been struck, wounded in a way he’d never been wounded, and when he opened his eyes Mrs. Fleischpeitsche stood facing him, holding her violin around the neck, her song’s throat strangled.  There was a fury in her eyes, and so he took his broom and left, but whenever he heard the music he would set his broom down or hang up his rag or dustcloth, or he would set aside his knife or hatchet or whichever tool he was using for whichever odd job he was doing, and he would stand in the doorway and watch as Mrs. Fleischpeitsche conducted an orchestra of students, of violins and violas and cellos, of flutes and tubas, and any number of instruments he couldn’t name.  And always it was the violins he watched, held captive by the weeping of bows on strings.  Mrs. Fleischpeitsche didn’t believe in god, or at least she didn’t go to church on Sundays and pray and confess and such.  And neither did Spider, and sometimes it seemed they were the only two people in town who didn’t.  Rather she used the church as a place to teach her students and to rehearse with her orchestra.  Spider hadn’t been to church since his mother died, but unlike Mrs. Fleischpeitsche he not only believed in god, he hated him, and if he ever met him man to man he would spit in his face and call him a bastard and a son of a bitch.  Sundays were for the flock, but workdays were for the wolves, himself and Mrs. Fleischpeitsche, and a homeless man who slept in the graveyard, the cold dirt for a blanket and a tombstone for a pillow. And if this was funny to Spider, it was a joke no doubt lost on the humorless Mrs. Fleischpeitsche, a hard woman and a lonely woman, a refugee from Germany, and since she spoke little to no English she would instruct her students instead with a long thin stick. One strike on the back of the hand, or the back of the legs, or even the forehead, could say far more than words ever could.  And by placing the stick under your chin or across your ear she could, almost without touching you, move your head in any direction she so pleased.  In this way, and by striking at the offending limbs, she taught her students not only to play the music, but to feel the music, to speak so beautifully the language of the soul, nounless and verbless, the language of the gods, the Mousai, Apollo, the agony of Beethoven struck deaf. Strike not the sins but the sinner. Scorn not the devil but those possessed by the devil.  Cursed is a mind torn by daemons and touched by gods, cursed and wretched and pure. And when he found the church empty one day, Mrs. Fleischpeitsche’s violin resting against one of the pews, he couldn’t help but pick it up and hold it the way he imagined he would hold a woman, running his hard and callused hands over her soft curves and her smooth neck, her mahogany skin with scratches and knots and curlicues, the smell of living wood and the resin on her strings.  Everything about it was beautiful, and most beautiful of all was the mystery, the songs he knew she could sing even as he held her silently in his hands.  Such songs as were kept behind locked lips, her neck held softly by the tips of his callused fingers.  Then something struck him, a long thin stick struck him first on the shoulder and then on the side of the head, and as blood spilled into his eyes he felt a sting, and somewhere else, somewhere within, he felt something burning.  “Thief,” cried Mrs. Fleischpeitsche, hitting him again with her stick, and so he placed the violin down gently and turned to leave. But she struck him again, and as he ran out the door she followed him, swinging her stick and crying “thief, thief.” She cut him up pretty good, just above the eye, and so he rinsed it off with a hose and held a rag against his head until the bleeding stopped, sitting in his shed in the churchyard, a cup of coffee to steady his nerves.  And his hands were shaking, and not from the pain but from something else, something that was neither anger nor rage nor shame, but all of these together, and something else, something for which he had no words.  He held the bloody rag and his hands shook, and above his eye a stigmatic wound, and not the blood of Christ but the blood of Judas, or the blood of the devil himself, the fallen one.  Later that day he got a visit from Bobby Billyclub, a peace officer who carved onto his truncheon the name of the first person he killed with it, a young boy he beat to death for looking through his daughter’s bedroom window.  Bobby Billyclub, or just Billyclub, or sometimes Bobby Blue, but most often he was called simply Bobby.  And if Bobby hated Spider’s father, he hated Spider in the same way.  And Spider’s father hated Bobby, and had always hated him, since their schooldays when he would kick him around and call him Billy Bobbysocks.  Strike not the sin but the sinner, cast out the outcast.  But the beaten never forget their beatings, and since Bobby was afraid of Spider’s father, as he was afraid of most of the men in town, most of whom stood by and watched when they were school children and he was being thrown around and kicked around, he instead looked for reasons to use his truncheon on Spider, as though in striking the son he was striking the father.  “If you fuck up, lad,” he would say, “if you so much as spit in the street, I’ll open your head on the sidewalk,” gently tapping his truncheon against his open palm, the way policemen do in films and cartoons, and always with a crooked smile and a light in his eyes.  But that evening, as he stood on Spider’s doorstep, something was off.  Gone was his crooked smile and dimmed was the light in his eyes.  It seemed something was weighing him down, and had he been his ordinary self, he likely would have pulled his truncheon from his belt and dragged Spider out of the house.  Instead he just stood there, as though selling encyclopedias door to door.  “The lady thinks she overreacted,” he said, “thinks maybe you were just curious,” his truncheon hung on his belt like a sleeping dog.  “Of course, we know better, don’t we lad,” and for a moment his smile was back and a light shone somewhere deep within his eyes, “you’re a born thief, like your old man, rotten to your core.”  And as he turned to leave he stopped himself and said, “as rotten as your dead mother,” smiling now with his eyes, and his hand found his truncheon.  “Let’s dig her up, have a nibble on her apple.  What do you say, lad?  Bet there’s some worms in there.”  Spider said nothing, but again he felt something within him burning, and again he felt the sting of blood in his eyes.  “Goodnight, lad,” Billy said, and he must have seen the look in Spider’s eyes because his smile widened and the light in his eyes shone brighter.  Spider closed the door.  And with the door closed he stood in the hallway not moving, his fists clenched so tight his hands were stinging, and his jaw locked so tight he left pieces of tooth in his mouth like sand.  His mother’s photograph on the wall, and another of him and his mother and the old man, and upstairs, above where he stood in the hallway, was the room where he was born and where his mother later died, coughing blood into a tin bucket while he sat and read to her.  He was too young to remember much at all about her, but he remembered reading to her from books of fables and fairytales, and when he struggled with a word she would say, “take your time, sound it out.”  He remembered this, and he remembered the sound the blood made hitting the side of the tin bucket, but not much else.  Leaning against the wall in the hallway, left there by his father in case of burglars, was a cricket bat, and without thinking too much about it, Spider took the bat in hand and opened the door, but when he opened the door Bobby was gone.  And still, something burning within him, he had to hold himself back, to keep himself from swinging at the empty streets.  And he had to pry his fingers from the wooden handle.  A few days later, as he was adding paint to a weatherworn window pane, he felt something tapping the foot of his ladder, and looking down he saw Mrs. Fleischpeitsche striking the ladder with her stick, and with her stick she led him into the church and put a violin in one hand and a bow in the other, and holding the bow the same way he held a paintbrush, the way he held a hatchet or a hammer or the handle of a broom, he drew it across the strings and it made a godawful sound, not so much weeping as shrieking and wailing.  But within a few days he could make a nicer sound, and within a few weeks he could play a song or two, his long fingers wrapping around the violin in a way Mrs. Fleischpeitsche’s never could.  “Verdammter Scheiß,” she would say, holding his hand and stroking his long spidery fingers, “Gottgegeben,” and whenever he struggled to learn something, whenever his fingers tangled up or tripped over each other, he would hear his mother’s voice saying, “take your time, sound it out,” and within a year or so he was playing in a way beyond the other musicians in the orchestra, and beyond even Mrs. Fleischpeitsche.  He found within himself a language more natural to him than words, and his violin, held in the same hands with which he once fought, the hands with which he mopped the floors and swept the alleyway, wept as it sang, as anyone who heard him wept, as angels and demons, had they heard him play, would no doubt have wept. And all his father ever said was “you’re a fucking joke, lad,” and he sat in his chair with his whiskey bottle, and he sat at the back of the church too tired to pray and too hard to weep. He was a broken toy, and in his turn Spider too was a broken toy, a rotten apple fallen not far from the tree. Of course, he hadn’t been to war, like his father and his uncles, and the other men in town.  And if he was wounded by demons so too was he possessed by angels, touched by the gods of music.  One night, as the orchestra rehearsed, it began to rain and it rained so hard that when he looked up he saw tears pouring down the faces on the stain glass windows, an audience of Saints, and of Mary and Jesus, and even Lucifer, all of them weeping even as the sky wept, and all of them weeping for him. There he stood beneath the storm, his bow stabbing the air like the spear of destiny, like the wounding daggers slung on the Ides of March.  Et tu, lad. Stabbing the air with his bow, holding his violin by the neck and slicing his finger on one of the strings, and from his wounded finger and down his wrist, and down the neck of his violin, poured blood, as the rainwater poured down the windows, as Mrs. Fleischpeitsche raised her hands in praise, conducting the storm and conducting an orchestra of gods and men.  That night he fell in love with music.  And of course, he fell in love with a girl, as every story goes, whether sung or slung, he fell in love with a girl in the same way he fell in love with music, struck and wounded in the same way.  She was a flautist in the orchestra, and was so shy she almost never spoke.  Music was her first language and she spoke through her flute, and he spoke through his violin, and slowly they fell in love.  But still she wouldn’t speak, or rather she wouldn’t speak to him, and so he followed her and watched her from a distance.  Her name was Polly, and just saying her name made him smile, popping his lips and tapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth.  And he would lie awake at night and stare at the ceiling saying her name, and finding as many ways as he could think of to say it until he fell asleep.  “Polly.  Pretty Polly,” popping the P’s, and the way his lips parted reminded him of school, when they would chase the girls and if you caught one you could kiss her on the cheek. “Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly picked poppies, Pretty Polly played possum picking poppies, picking pecks of peppers, pecks of posies, pretty Polly picked pecks of peppers and posies,” and he always thought the girls allowed themselves to be caught, that they wanted to be caught and kissed on the cheek.  She was an Irish girl, the daughter of Bobby Billyclub, and she sold flowers on Sackville Street with another girl, a girl as short and as plain as she was forgettable, and together they stood on Sackville Street holding baskets of flowers and singing songs of poppies and posies, of violets and lilies and roses, or whichever flowers they were selling that day.  He would stand on Sackville Street, leaning against the lamppost in front of the Butcher’s Shop, or in the doorway of the Eager Poet Pub, rolling a cigarette or packing his pipe with tobacco, and he would watch her selling flowers and singing songs of flowers, and even though she was across the street, still he could smell the flowers as she sang of them, and he wondered if she smelled of flowers.  And the other girl, Margret her name was, Margret Shagwidth or Shagwort or Shagmoore, or some such name.  No doubt she smelled like turnips.  But together they sang pretty songs in pretty harmonies and even danced as they sang, their dresses windswept, their baskets swinging from their arms, singing “ring a ring o’roses, a basket full of posies,” and pretending to sneeze as they sang “a-tishoo, a-tishoo,” and sometimes they would even fall down, springing up in time to sell a rose or a posy to a passerby.  “It was the truth in her eyes ever dawning,” they sang, “that made me love Mary the rose of Talee.”  And they sang, “daisies, daisies, give me your answer do, I’m half-crazy all for the love of you,” and “red is the rose that in yonder garden grows, fair is the lilly of the valley,” and across the street Spider would sing along, singing under his breath, “clear is the water that flows from the sea, but my love is fairer than any.”  And in November, with a basket full of poppies, as they sang, “we shall not sleep though poppies grow, in Flanders Fields, in Flanders Fields,” a crowd gathered around them and wept.  Still, most of the time it was the men to whom they sold flowers, lured in by their songs like sailors to sirens.  “For the wife,” they would say, handing Polly a couple of coins for a rose or a daisy, and later Spider would see them giving the flower to a barmaid at the Eager Poet Pub, or to some drunk old girl sitting alone at a table.  Sometimes they turned the corner and tossed the flowers in the gutter but always returned to buy another.  And Polly, though shy as a cocoanut stand, knew just how to smile and tilt her head and lower her eyelashes, and when she gave them a flower her hand lingered just long enough for their fingers to touch.  And though their fingers had never touched, Spider would watch her from across the street and wonder if anyone had ever watched her that closely, if anyone had ever really seen her.  Her saw her, and thought perhaps he was the only one who did, the only person in the world who saw her, swaying her hips, bending her knees, her foot swiveling on the tips of her toes, a lazy pirouette, her dress windswept, her mouth open and smiling and singing songs of flowers, her tongue moving around inside of her mouth, tapping her teeth and sliding along her lips.  He watched her eyes change with the words of the songs, her hair caught by the wind, as alive as any animal, as alive as a grounded bird flapping it wings.  And always with a ribbon in her hair, and always the ribbon matched some color on her dress, some part of clothing, her shoes or shawl, or even her eyes or hair, and often her clothes and Margret’s clothes blended, each the opposite of the other, and each had a ribbon which matched their dresses, and each ribbon the opposite of the other’s ribbon.  And if Margret was short and squat, Polly was tall and thin.  And if Margret’s eyes were as dark as her hair, Polly’s were light and full of color just as her eyes were light and full of color. They were the sun and the moon together in a starless sky.  And if Margret scowled and snarled and pouted, Polly smiled and smiled not only with her mouth, but with her eyes as well.  Her whole body smiled, and he watched her smiling at passersby and handing them a flower and cupping her hand to receive a couple of coins, and every time she dropped a coin into her pocket her hand shivered, or fluttered, or shimmied in some way, as though she were a magician performing a sleight of hand coin trick.  And though not a word had passed between them, still they shared what was said by their instruments, the words spoken by his violin and her flute, the language of Apollo and Eros.  And as closely as he watched her on Sackville Street, he felt closer still in those moments when he looked up from his violin and saw her looking back at him, their eyes meeting in the middle the room.  He saw her, and perhaps she saw him too.  Perhaps she was the only person in the world who did.  Tobacco and roses.  Fiddles and Flutes.  And there was another lad in town named Roddy, known as Muckspout since his tongue was too big for mouth, and he was a nice enough lad, the gentle type, an innocent who wouldn’t harm even a fly, but he was slow in the head and often the others in town made fun of him or kicked him around.  Stepped on he was by the crowd, kicked and beaten like a dog with the mange.  And like a dog he would follow Polly and the other girl, wagging his tail, his tongue hanging out of his mouth.  And rather than kick him like a dog, Polly was patient with him and kind and would fix his hair or straighten his tie, licking his handkerchief to wipe smut off his cheek, and with her nearby nobody made fun of him.  Shy as she was, she wouldn’t allow it, and flew into a small rage if anyone even smiled or snickered his way.  And if anyone took a flower from her basket and refused to pay for it, Muckspout would puff out his chest and back your man down until he gave him either the flower or a couple of coins.  And once in while he even sang a song, the Unquiet Grave, and with his tongue hanging out of his mouth he sang “never have I had but one true love,” and across the street Spider would sing along and feel as though he was the one singing the song, as though he was stood beside Polly, holding the jar of coins and making sure nobody stole her flowers, and as he sang along he felt as though he had not only written and spoken the words in the song but had lived them and carried them somewhere within him.  Such words he knew all too well.  “My time be long, my time be short, tomorrow or today,” and “I crave a kiss from your cold clay lips and that is all I crave,” and all the other lines of the song were sung by both men and each man thought himself the one for whom the lines were written.  And if Polly looked across the street, to the doorway of the Eager Poet Pub where Spider stood smoking a roll-your-own and leaning against the doorframe, quietly mouthing the words to the song, she would smile and he would smile, but neither of them crossed the street, and standing each on either side it was as though they were separated by an ocean, or a wild river, him stood on the east bank and her on the west, him leaning in the pub doorway and her with a basket of flowers swinging from her arm.  The Eager Poet Public House, his home away from home, as they say.  And more and more he found himself leaning in the doorway, or sitting at the bar or at one of the small tables, drinking a drink of stout, so often drunk it seemed his father’s house, rather, was his home away from home.  There he slept but otherwise he was either at the pub or at the church, either leaning in the pub doorway or sitting in his wooden shed with the small window looking out over the churchyard, over the graves and the tombstones lined up like empty bottles, and there in one corner was his mother’s grave, and beside it an empty plot for his father, an empty space waiting to be dug up.  Restless dirt.  And the thought of restless dirt him angry, and though old enough to know better, still he was young enough to think he would never die, and would never be buried. He would outlive even the dirt. “They’ll never bury you, Spider,” Muckspout said one time, rolling a cigarette on the pub table, and licking the edge to seal it, “you’re too stubborn to be buried, they’ll have to burn you instead.”  Muckspout was about the same age as Spider, maybe a year or so older, and from time to time they would see each other at the Eager Poet Pub and one would buy the other a drink.  And off came their considering caps.  “Come, lad,” Muckspout would say, “let’s sit down and chew some fat,” and chew some fat they did.  He was easy enough to talk to, and Spider found he could talk to him for hours, about nonsense and nothing, and he found also an odd wisdom to what he said, a kind of ancient wisdom hidden within his simple head.  “Animals are sometimes cruel,” he said one time, his tongue flapping about his lips, “and people are animals, so people are sometimes cruel.”  Another time Spider asked him if he believed in god, and he said “maybe there’s a heaven and a hell, or maybe it’s the same place, like it is here.  Heaven is here, but so is hell.”  And god damn if that wasn’t the truth.  Spider drank his pint and didn’t say much else.  He’d been through hell, and still there was music, still there was love and light, and laughter, all born out of the same depths, out of the same darkness. One evening, as Spider left the Eager Poet, rolling a cigarette and stumbling down the steps towards the street, he heard Polly’s voice, so soft and sad and melancholy that it stopped him dead.  And there he stood and listened as Polly, alone on the other side of the street, sang a song so mournful and haunting and sorrowful, singing to the moon and to the empty streets, or singing to herself, singing a song she alone would hear.  And as he listened he found himself possessed by some spirit, and he felt transgressive, as though she was alone in her room and he was watching her through an open window.  Like the moon he was a voyeur who having climbed the heavens now gazed upon the earth, spellbound and speechless and left with nothing to do but witness, nothing to do but listen.  “I remember my mother’s smile when I was very small,” she sang, her voice echoing on the cobblestones, “sitting in her rocking chair and reading to us all, but while life does remain, to cheer me I’ll retain, a small violet I plucked from mother’s grave.”  At her feet a basket, and in the basket the last of the violets she hadn’t sold, bodies still warm and touched by the memory of having lived, of having loved and laughed.  Touch has a memory.  Life lingers, even in the shadow of death, even there a light flickers like a dying a candle.  Cobblestones at his feet.  His shadow cast into the street by the lamplight.  And as he stepped clumsily down from the curb and crossed the street his shadow crossed ahead of him, and as he tossed his cigarette into the gutter his shadow did the same, both leaving a trail of sparks on the wet stones. Spitting rain it was and the streets were wet, and he stood there looking at Polly who looked back at him, their shadows cast into the street by the lamplight.  And if his shadow was long and thin and distorted, so too was hers distorted, only more delicate and gentle and flowerlike.  He looked down at her basket of violets, laid out with their stems crossed, raindrops gathering on the petals.  “Didn’t sell much,” he said, and she shrugged.  "They want roses, not violets.”  She turned to leave and he followed her, carrying her basket while she walked several steps ahead of him, looking now and again over her shoulder, but never looking at him, rather she would look at something in the street or in a nearby window, watching him out of the corner of her eye to make sure he was following her.  And with his footsteps slow and steady, and hers as light as windswept flowers, almost as though they were floating across the cobblestones, she led him to the church and down the alleyway to the churchyard, through the gate and between the sleeping graves and the rain touched tombstones, and between the empty patches of restless dirt, to his mother’s grave, and they placed the violets beside her tombstone.  Still spitting rain, their feet sunk into the churchyard mud.  And holding her basket in one hand he held her hand in the other, and she sang “red is the rose that yonder garden grows, fair is the lily of the valley,” and even though his voice was deep and rough and clumsy, he joined her, his voice like mud and hers like rain, and they sang “clear is the water that flows from the sea, but my love is fairer than any.”  Her hand in his, hers soft and his hard, a flower and a weed in the rain, and beneath their feet the churchyard ground softened and their feet sank deeper and deeper.  And when the rain began to fall heavier and harder they took shelter in the shed where Spider kept his tools, his shovel and his rake, his ladder, his knives and saws and hammers, and tins of paint or varnish, striking a match to light a lantern hanging from a hook.  Often he sat in his shed between odd jobs at the church, and before rehearsals with the orchestra, drinking coffee or sipping on a whiskey bottle he kept hidden behind boxes filled with rosary beads and old bibles and hymn books, and whenever it rained and he took shelter in the shed, he would drink his coffee and sip his whiskey and listen to the rain.  It was greatest sound he’d ever heard, raindrops on a wooden shed, and he would imagine himself alone on a ship in the middle of the ocean, as far away from people as one could get, as far removed as possible from the rest of the world. “Are these your digs?”  Polly said, looking around the shed and wringing the rainwater out of her hair.  “This is my kingdom,” Spider said, searching for whiskey glasses, “my home away from home,” emptying two jars, each filled with odd nails and screws and bolts, and pouring whiskey into them from his hidden bottle.  “I thought the pub was your home away from home,” she said, and as he handed her a jar of whiskey she drank from it and her face twisted and distorted.  “Good lord,” she said, and they both laughed.  “I take it you don’t drink whiskey.”  “I prefer wine,” she said, holding her jar with both hands, her wet hair running down one side of her face, down her neck and shoulder, dripping water onto the floor.  And with her head titled to one side her eyes seemed to be studying him.  “They say you’re a rotten apple,” she said, “red enough on the outside but rotten at the core.”  “And what do you say?”  She shrugged, “I’m not sure yet, I don’t think you’re rotten, I think you’re rather sweet, a little confused perhaps, and angry, but not rotten.”  He drank his whiskey and poured himself another. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “we used to scrump apples from the orchard just outside of town, the one with the big red barn.”  “It burned down,” he said.  “We burned it down,” she said, looking away for the first time, “or my brother did, one day when we hid from the farmer, and we found a book of matches and tried to light a lantern the farmer hung on the wall.”  She took another drink from her jar of whiskey.  “It took us three or four tries to strike the match, and even then the lantern wouldn’t light, and the match burnt his fingers he dropped it in the hay.  We went back later, after they put the fire out, but no one said anything, and even when they caught us scrumping a couple of months later still they didn’t figure out we’d burned down the barn.”  She took another drink of whiskey, and she smiled, remembering something, looking passed Spider to the shed window and the drops of rain running down the dirty glass. “I don’t know why we stole the apples,” she said, “they were too sour to eat, and too hard to throw at anything, and too large to carry much farther than the road which ran alongside the farm. But we stole them anyway and we carried them out onto the road and threw them to see how far we could throw them. My brother always won, he could throw them much farther than I could.  He could likely throw them as far as the adults could.”  Her voice soft and ghostly in the storm battered shed, her whiskey jar held in both hands.  Spider poured himself a third glass and as he finished his she finished hers, and with the storm rattling the walls of the shed, she blew out the lantern and climbed onto Spider’s lap.  She was less shy in the dark, her mouth finding his, her hands finding his belt buckle and pulling it open, her legs wrapped around the back of the chair as he tried to keep it from toppling over.  And outside the storm battered the wooden shed and lightning struck the churchyard filling the shed with brief moments of light, sudden moments when he could see her, soaking wet and with their clothes half on and half off, her eyes closed and biting her lower lip, and when it at last stopped raining the churchyard was so bogged with water he had to carry her to the alleyway which lead to the street, her basket lost somewhere amongst the graves.  “No matter,” she said, as he walked home, “I’ve got other baskets.”  A few nights later, walking home from the Eager Poet Pub, Bobby found him and threw him up against a wall, his truncheon held under Spider’s chin, and with his other hand he grabbed a handful of hair, grinning in Spider’s face like a hangman fastening a noose to fit the neck.  “Where you coming from, lad,” Bobby said, and when Spider told him he was coming from the church, that he stayed late to clean the stained-glass windows, Bobby laughed.  “You think I’m idiot,” he said, “like that halfwit Muckspout, you think I was born with dust cloths for brains.”  And pushing his truncheon into Spider’s throat, so tight he couldn’t breath, he said, “I’ve seen the way you look at my Polly, following her like a mangy dog. Do you really think a mutt like you has a chance with a girl like her?”  Spider tried to say something, but with the truncheon held against his throat nothing came out, or not words at least, and all he made was a raspy choking sound.  “Still, it’s not a crime to look at girl, no harm in a lad looking at such a pretty flower as my Polly,” then leaning in so close Spider could smell his whiskey breath, “but somebody has been sneaking in and out of her bedroom window,” lifting the truncheon up and forcing Spider’s chin so high he had look down his nose at Bobby.  He let go of the handful of hair and took hold of Spider’s hand, lifting it to his nose and sniffing his fingers.  “That’s her,” he said, grinning in Spider’s face, “that’s my Polly,” and he sniffed them again, “and I was sure it was that halfwit Muckspout.”  Spider felt nauseous, not at the truncheon pressed into his throat, nor at the vulgarity of Bobby Billyclub sniffing his fingers, and not even at the thought of being forced up against a wall like a mangy dog on a short leash.  He felt nauseous at the thought of Muckspout climbing in and out of Polly’s window. Something sank inside of him, some hole opened within him, and as Bobby loosened the truncheon at his neck, Spider was able to breathe again.  “I know about you,” he said to Bobby, catching his breath, “about you and my mother, thought you had a chance with her didn’t you,” Bobby’s hand tightening around his truncheon, “and if I’m a dog than you’re a dog, a bastard dog and a son of a bitch.”  Barely had the word left his mouth when Bobby struck him with the truncheon, first on the side of the head again on the chin, and when Spider didn’t go down he hit him a third time, a kidney shot.  Spider dropped to his knees and Bobby hit him again and again, and likely kicked him a few times.  Not that Spider could remember.  So fast it was and sudden, no sooner was he on the floor than Bobby was walking away, swinging his truncheon and whistling a tuneless songless whistle.  Spider stumbled home, bleeding from his nose and mouth, his head split open, a stabbing pain in his side, and as he stood in front of the bathroom mirror something burned inside of him, a fire in his stomach that was neither anger nor fury nor rage, but something else, something base and carnal, and he thought about one morning as a wee’un, not long after they buried his mother, when he was in the bushes behind the church digging up worms to fish with, and he heard Bobby and the preacher laughing through an open window, laughing at Spider’s mother, remembering when they young lads and used to smell each other fingers.  “She smelled like apples,” the preacher said, laughing, and Bobby laughed and said, “fruit from the tree of good girls and loose morals,” and together they laughed, a man of the law and a man of the cloth.  And something burned in Spider.  And the room started to sink or float, twisting itself around itself, and he saw himself in the mirror, distorted by the circus glass, the ground gone at his feet, and he had to hold on to the sink to steady himself.  His father found him the next morning on the bathroom floor, his clothes covered in blood, and fetched a lady down the street, a friend of his mother’s, to clean him up and stitch up the wound on his head.  “You’re a fucking joke, lad,” his father said, thinking he’d been scrapping with another lad at the Eager Poet.  “A stitch in time saves nine,” said his mother’s friend, kneeling beside the bathtub while Spider lay naked in the warm water, a glass of brandy to numb the pain.  “Don’t worry about me, lad,” she said, “it’s not the first time I’ve seen you in your altogether, I was there when you were born, naked as mole rat, and even then you didn’t cry, even when the midwife smacked your arse,” kneeling beside the bath as though praying, working away at his head with a needle and a piece of string.  “A stitch in time saves nine,” she said, “you’ll be better soon enough, don’t you worry, lad, bright as sun and right as rain in no time.”  But she could have stuck the needle into his eye and he wouldn’t have felt it.  His mind was somewhere else, and the more he drank the further away he was, and if his closed his eyes he saw flashes of lightning, and he saw Polly with her eyes closed and biting her lower lip.  It was his mind which needed stitching up, not his head.  It was his thoughts which hurt the most.  But he didn’t say anything not having the words to say anything. “You daft sod,” his father said, standing in the doorway, “scrapping down the pub were you?” and he left, laughing to himself, and from down the hallway he said, “that lad’s a fucking joke,” sitting in his chair in the other room, turning the dial on his radio, trying to find something to listen to, something to drown out the silence. Spider listened to him turning the radio dial and it sounded like rain, rain inside of which were voices and music. And of course water dripping from the tap over the bathtub.  And his mother’s friend, kneeling beside him with a needle and thread and saying, “a stitch in time saves nine, don’t you worry, we’ll fix you up good and proper.” A shiver ran through his body, and she said, “what’s wrong, lad, somebody walk over your grave?”  But he barely heard her, his mind was elsewhere, on another night, in another room, where Polly was combing her hair in front of the mirror, singing softly to herself, and in the mirror, asleep in the bed behind her, snoring like an animal, was Muckspout.  “Somebody walk over your grave?” she said, and he barely heard her.  Such a morbid thought, that somewhere he was dead and buried and somebody was walking on his grave, that even as he lay in the bathtub, still bleeding from a half stitched wound, somewhere else his body lay rotting in the ground, or was long since rotten, nothing but bones and dirt, not food anymore for the worms, his mouth stuck in an infinite grimace.  A walking shadow, dead soon and dead already.  And somewhere else, sitting at his desk with a cigarette hanging from his lips, his lips moving silently as though talking to himself, Lou scribbled in his notebook, scratching at the page and writing down a story told to him many years ago by an old man many years removed from the young lad he had once been, the young lad who stood outside the Eager Poet Pub, rolling a cigarette and watching Polly on the other side of Sackville Street, with her basket of flowers and a ribbon in her hair.  Spider liked to tell stories, and would tell the same stories over and over, and so enthralled was Lou, so entranced and possessed by them, no matter how many times he heard them he listened as though hearing them for the first time.  And rather than simply hearing them and imagining them in his head, he felt as though he was there when they happened, as though he was Spider standing outside of the Eager Poet Pub and watching Polly on the other side of Sackville Street.  And even as he sat at his desk scratching at his notebook, as Spider slept six feet under the ground, buried now for however many years, he felt as though rather than writing down a story told to him by an old man, he was instead remembering something, reliving some memory from a past life.  He could see Polly standing on the other side of Sackville Street, and he saw Muckspout and Margret and Bobby Billyclub, and he saw Mrs. Fleischpeitsche and felt her long thin stick striking him on the knuckles, and he heard the storm battering the outside of the shed and as the lightning struck the churchyard he saw Polly, soaking wet from the rain, her eyes closed and biting her lower lip.  And he heard her breathing heavily in the darkness.  And he heard her voice as though he was remembering her voice, and he felt her lips on his as though remembering how soft they were, and how warm her mouth felt against his, her arms wrapped around his neck, the walls of the shed trembling under the storm.  And somewhere a voice said, “a stitch in time saves nine,” and he felt the needle going in and out of his wounded head, not as though he was imagining it, but as though he was remembering it, as though he remembered the needle piercing his head, each sting softened by mouthfuls of cheap brandy.  Of course, the real pain was inside his head.  It’s not the skin which needs stitching but what’s under it. Thoughts worse than wounds, unstitched even in death.  And maybe that’s why skulls grimace.  But the voice he heard most clearly was Spider’s, and as he scribbled and scratched in his notebook, a cigarette hanging from his lips, smoking itself into a small pile of ashes, he forgot he was sitting at his desk, and he forgot about his notebook and his pencil, and he even forgot that Spider was dead and buried, and long since eaten through by worms.  He heard Spider’s voice, telling him the story for the first time, sitting across from him at the Eager Poet Pub with a pint of stout, his green eyes shining out of a grey face, and Lou with his back to the window shielding his half-pint from any old biddies who might be passing by, who might look in and see him drinking.  With his back to the window they would see only a small boy sitting across from an old man, his grandfather perhaps, the old man waving his hands in the air and talking on and on about god knows what, likely boring the young boy.  But Lou was anything but bored, hanging on every word that fell out of Spider’s flapping jaw, his mouth opening and closing like a puppets mouth and smoking his cigarette in the way always did, holding it to his lips with his thumb and finger and taking a heavy drag, then tossing it into the ashtray and leaving his hands free to paint violent shapes in the air, then picking it up again with his thumb and finger and taking another heavy drag. And although he was old and grey, his eyes were still young and alive, shining green out of his grey face, as though he could remember Polly’s lips on his and Polly’s arms around his neck, as though he could hear her singing on the other side of Sackville Street. “That night I couldn’t sleep,” he said, “and not because my head hurt, but because of something in my head that hurt, some worm inside my skull, burrowing in like a bastard, and as soon as the sun came up I went downstairs and took the cricket bat my dad and I kept in the hallway, in case of burglars.”  Lou sipped from his half-pint, swallowing a mouthful of stout and doing his best not to make a face.  Men don’t make faces when they drink.  “And then what happened?” Lou said, taking another mouthful of stout and putting it away with a heavy swallow.  “And then what happened was I went looking for Bobby, swinging the cricket bat by my side like a sword or an axe, and anyone on the street must have seen something in my face, or in my eyes, because they moved out of the way when they saw me coming.  Must’ve been something in my eyes, the devil in me looking out, searching streets and doorways and alleyways, windows and storefronts.  Eventually I found him on Sackville Street, outside the butcher’s, and he had Muckspout on the ground and was sitting on him so as he couldn’t move his arms, and he was slapping his face and spitting on him, not hard like but hard enough to hurt him, hard enough to humiliate him.  The bastard son of a bitch was sitting on his arms, and all Muckspout could do was scream like an animal, screaming to be let go, yelling, get off me you bastard.  Poor lad, he wouldn’t have harmed even a fly, and all around them both a crowd gathered and they were laughing at him.”  “Even Polly?” Lou asked.  “Except for Polly, she was doing everything she could to pull him off, hitting him in the head and back.  And when she looked up and saw me coming, she must have seen the same devil the others saw, and she got out of the away.”  “And what did you do?”  “I hit him the bat, on the side of the head, and when he looked up at me I hit him again and put him on his back.  Then I went for his legs and hit him over and over, and a few shots to the ribs.  And during the…” and here Spider searched for a word, taking his cigarette from the ashtray and taking heavy drag and realizing it had gone out, then lighting it again, taking a drag and again tossing it into the ashtray.  “During the… kerfuffle, the rough and tumble, as I was hitting him with the bat, Polly was trying to pull me away and I clocked her one by mistake.”  “You knocked her unconscious?”  “Not quite, she was sat on the curb holding her eye and her eye was already blackened.  And when she looked at me, the way she looked at me was,” again searching for a word, “well, I don’t know how to explain it, and I still see it sometimes when I close my eyes or when I stare into the mirror, her sat on the curb and holding her face, looking at me as though…” shaking his head and taking a long drink from his stout, his hand shaking and clawing at the pint glass.  “I just left her there, sitting on the curb, and I went looking for the bastard priest, that son of bitch.”  And he found the bastard son of a bitch in the church, lighting candles ready for the afternoon mass.  “Father,” he said, and when the father turned around he hit in the side of the head with the bat and left him on the floor like a shadow of the large crucifix at the foot of which he fell with his arms outstretched, his feet crossed, his eyes blinded by the blood spilled from his head.  “They arrested me later that day, took me from the house in handcuffs, and all my father said was that I was a fucking joke.”  He fell silent then, pulling his cigarette from the ashtray with his thumb and finger and taking a heavy drag, and again his cigarette had gone out, and again he lit it and tossed it into the ashtray.  And as he sat there, drinking his stout, he looked almost as if he had forgotten about Lou, as though he was talking to himself. “It was a stupid thing to do,” he said, a strange smile on his lips, “such a stupid thing to do.  Man thinks himself into to stupidity.  Homo sapiens sapiens.  Twice wise he thinks himself and all the more stupid he is for thinking it. Give us enough rope to hang ourselves and we’ll hang ourselves, and the gods always give you enough rope.  Don’t be stupid, lad.  Find yourself a good women and marry her.  And find yourself a quiet corner and sit in it.”  “Pride goeth before destruction,” Lou said.  “Damn right it does,” said Spider, “destroyed by thoughtfilledness, the world belongs not to the wise but to dunces and imbeciles, it belongs to the emptyheaded.”  Lou took another heavy drink, and another, and with each one it tasted better, with each one he made less of a face.  “Did you go to prison?” he asked, and Spider shook his head.  He should have gone to prison, but he was just young enough to be sent to borstal instead.  “Not a bad place.  A bit rough, but rough was all I’d ever known.  And I couldn’t play my violin, but I learned how to play chess, and I read books, the Russians mostly, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.  It was in Dostoevsky I found a mind like my own, the same demons, the same devil inside the skull looking out.  I read Dostoevsky and thought myself not so sick and wicked after all, not as odd and strange as I thought.  Two years I was in, and it passed slowly.  Playing chess and poker for cigarettes, and drinking coffee and reading every book I could get my hands on.  Two years for a moment of stupidity.  And I lost everything, and I didn’t go home because I didn’t have a home to go home to. I lost everything, even Polly.”  He finished his cigarette and starting rolling another one, his hands clawing at his tobacco pouch, his stiff fingers struggling with the papers.  He gave up on the cigarette and took his pipe from his pocket, filling it with tobacco and packing it in with his thumb.  Lou finished his half-pint.  “Give us a cigarette,” he said, and Spider laughed, striking a match to light his pipe and glancing at Lou through the cloud of smoke.  “Not on your life, mate, now run along before you worry your mother.” And again he laughed.  And Lou laughed, sitting at his desk, a crushed pack of cigarettes tossed next to his ashtray, his ashtray filled with punched out cigarettes, most of them crippled and twisted ends, and others only half-smoked, forgotten and left to go out on their own.  He laid his pencil down on his notebook.  It was a story he had heard many times and it changed slightly every time Spider told it.  Some parts he forgot, others he embellished or fattened or exaggerated, and sometimes the order in which things happened changed, or something said by one person was instead said by somebody else, or said in a different way.  But the backbone of the story remained the same, and always it ended with Spider in borstal, playing chess for cigarettes and drinking coffee.  Lou closed his notebook and went into the bathroom, and standing in front of the bathroom mirror, himself staring back from the other side, he saw something in his eyes he hadn’t seen before, not a weight or a darkness, but a stillness, the stillness of two lifeless planets.  His was a hollow shell, his light as low as his whiskey bottle, his face as grey as Spider’s had been, only his eyes didn’t shine.  He saw in the mirror neither youth nor the memory of youth. And behind him the bathtub, filthy as a coffin and unused since Lorelei left.  Often she took baths and always for hours at a time.  Lou would hear her running the water and would go to the pub for a pint or two, and when he came back always she was still in the bath, surrounded by candles, sometimes with a cup of tea and a cigarette, and the door open so she could hear the radio in the other room, turned on low and touched at the edges with white noise and crackling static.   And now the bathtub was filthy and empty and cold as a coffin. Unused since she left, and in the other room the radio sat silent on the windowsill.  Lou would rather wash in the sink.  But even the sink was dirty, as the bathtub was dirty, and even the mirror was dirty.  Still, through the dirt on the mirror he saw the empty tub and for a moment he thought he saw Lorelei, her arms hung over the edge, her eyes closed, her wet hair clinging to her body like dead leaves.  And he heard her voice.  “You should eat something," she said, “you look sick.”  And he was sick, in a way.  Poisoned he was by memories.  And he knew that if he turned around all he would see was an empty bathtub, and so he watched her in the mirror, placing her hands on the edge of the tub and resting her chin on her hands, smiling up at him.  “Can I have a kiss?” she said, and when he shook his head she looked cross, lifting her chin from her hands and asking him, “and why not?”  “Because you’re not there, darling, you’re nothing but undigested beef.  Less grave, more gravy.”  And she said, “pure gravy, baby,” again resting her chin on the edge of the tub. “You said that the night we met, or the next morning rather, sitting in that café by the beach with all those stuffed birds on wall, and it was raining, and I asked you how your coffee was and you said pure gravy, baby.”  And again she asked him for a kiss and again he ignored her, standing with his back to the bathtub, his haunted face in the mirror.  She was right, he needed to eat something.  His eyes hollow, his lips cracked and broken from chewing on them.  And scratching his head.  Scratching his arms.  Fleas again, no doubt, like he had before Lorelei came and threw powder all over the apartment, some mixture of baking soda and turmeric, and something else, pepper perhaps, and she threw so much of it around that months later they were still finding powder in the strangest places, in the cracks and crevices on windowsills and in walls and doors and corners, most of all the corners, and even under things and behind them.  And once in a while he would reach his hand into his pocket and find a handful of powder, or he would pull off one of his shoes and a cloud of powder would rise out of his sock.  Scratching his head.  His eyes hollow and haunted in the mirror, hunted by something.  And no food in the fridge.  Still, he needed to eat something.  Getting sick, lad, sick and thin, losing weight and mind, thought needs food, fuel to think and think and.  And although the bathtub was empty, he heard Lorelei’s voice echoing off the bathroom tiles. “There’s some eggs in the fridge,” she said, “why not cook them up and throw on some salt and pepper.”  His face hollow, his eyes haunted and hunted.  One time Lorelei ate hallucinogenic mushrooms and watched him as he slept.  “There was this old man,” she said, “illuminated by some kind of pale light, and he was watching over you.  He was so beautiful.  So kind and gentle and calm.  I knew then you would be okay, that no matter how far you sank you would always find a way out.”  Another time she was so sick that she ran a bath and sat in it, not smiling or laughing, not talking, not even eating.  The radio turned off, and no candles lit.  She just sat in the bath in the dark, so sick she refused to get out, and so he made her a sandwich and lit a couple of candles, and he sat on the floor reading to her from her favorite book, Moongoose and Marleroux, reading her the last story in the book, about the watchmaker and the vintner and the vintner’s wife.  But now the bath was empty and the mirror was dirty.  He closed his eyes.  He scratched his head.  He scratched his neck and his arms.  He could hear water running.

[lou-graves]

Lonely Towers and Anthills

(From the story collection Moongoose and Marleroux)

[lou-graves]

If We Should Meet

If we should meet someday, somewhere on a winding path, our footfalls softened by the fallen leaves, I won’t ask you where you’ve been, or what you’ve seen, but only if the dead leaves look as red to you as they do to me, like poisoned apples fallen from a wounded tree.

.

And if we should meet someday, somewhere on a storm-washed beach, barefoot in the sand, I won’t ask you why you’re there, but only if the sky looks bronze to you, as it does to me, and if the rolling clouds remind you of chariots, if the thunder sounds like cannons, if the lightning cracks the sky and shivers in the distance.

.

And if we should meet someday, on a slow train somewhere, with the red sun crawling over the hills, I won’t ask you where you’re going, or what you’re running from, but only if the sound of the tracks makes you sleepy, and reminds you of windshield wipers on a slow drive in the rain down a long and endless road.

[lou-graves]

The Coin Toss

They say the sun never set on the British Empire.  That it never rises on a drunk.  That the dawn always follows the darkest hour.  Somewhere is something you’ve hidden.  It’s in your pocket, in your desk drawer, in the cigar box under your bed. On that thing the sun rises and sets, and rises again.  Nobody knows the things you remember.  Not even you know all the things you’ve forgotten.  Nobody knows about that little thing you’re chipping away at, that little thing with which you’ll one day leave your dent in the universe.  But it’s there none the less.  The gods are watching you.  They laugh when you laugh.  They feel sorrow when you feel sorrow.  They sit on the edges of their chairs waiting to see what you’ll do next.  But not even you know what you’ll do next.  Each day unfolds like a coin toss.  Heads the sun rises.  Tails it sets.  Heads you’ll remember something.  Tails you’ll forget it.  Whatever else, the sun always rises.

[lou-graves]

Icarus, and Moths in Jars

It’s been some time now since Icarus, with burnt wings, fell and sank into the ocean like a back stone.  And last night I caught a moth in a jar and set it by the window.  

Some time now but still Icarus, with his charred wings now cold as a black stone, the abyss around him, must still feel the warmth of the sun.  I couldn’t sleep, the darkness like an unending sky, like an abyss, expanding, a moth out there somewhere, and so I reached for the lamp switch and the jar.  And now, with the light on, the room seems so small, so contained.  I caught the moth and set the jar down by the window and not wanting to see her as I now saw her, I saw her as I remembered her, trapped in a jar, looking at me and smiling like she used to smile, her voice sounding like it used to, remembering things she once said, her eyes the same eyes I once saw staring back.  With memory we have the gift of roses in winter, and once she wrote, in ink on a small piece of paper, “let the rain tell you what I cannot” and now, every time it rains, I hear her voice and think, the abyss is not outside of us but within.  I can’t sleep, and the moth is now dead but if I shake the jar it appears to move, it gives the illusion of Icarus in flight.