Black Light

“T. Rex.”

“Duck season.”

“Wabbit season.”

“Duck season—”

“You are both total idiots.” I stuck my head out the window, trying to escape from flying tapes and Ali’s cigarette smoke. “Next time I’m walking.”

“Forget it, we’ll fucking compromise—”

Hillary punched off the tape player and fiddled with the radio dial. Finally he homed onto a faint signal.

I have to be careful not to preach
I can’t pretend that I can teach…

Ali joined in with her hoarse sweet alto, and after a moment Hillary did the same—

“And on the dance floor broken glass,
The bloody faces slowly pass…”

Then the signal faded, and the car filled with the soft hiss of dead air. I stared out at the late-autumn vista— golden hills, lowering sky—and recalled Hillary’s stricken voice the night before.

What the hell does it mean, Lit? What does it mean?

I rubbed my arms. Ali lay passed out on the seat between us, her head on my lap and her fist jammed up against her mouth. Now and then her leg kicked reflexively against his, and Hillary would gently push her away. I fixed on that tiny star-shaped bruise at the crook of her elbow, and tried not to think of Jamie Casson kissing her there.

“What is it, Lit?” Hillary said at last.

I shook my head. I had felt uneasy for so long it was like a dull pain in my breast, or a throbbing headache; not something that could possibly come from outside me. I gazed out the window a long time before answering.

“I—I don’t know. Just this—”

I gestured at the trees gone glimmering gold and crimson beneath tungsten clouds, the leaf-strewn river winding alongside the highway. I had always loved this stretch of the road, the secret knowledge that Kamensic Village was crouched behind that last dark curve of the river. Now I could hardly bear to look at it.

“All this…” I said numbly.

Hillary stared straight ahead, after a moment nodded. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

No you don’t, I thought. None of you even have a fucking clue.

I glanced down at Ali snoring in my lap. Then with all my strength I slammed my hand against the door.

“Lit!” cried Hillary. “What the hell are you doing?”

A long red welt immediately bloomed across my knuckles. Ali opened her eyes to gaze at me blearily, then dropped back to sleep. Hillary glared. “Lit—”

“This fucking life—this place, you’re just bored here but I feel like it’s killing me—”

Hillary reached across Ali’s snoring form and tried to take my hand, but I pulled away. “You know it’s true, Hillary. It’s not so bad for you—everyone loves you, everyone loves her—”

I poked at Ali, still oblivious, and Hillary sighed.

“I know,” he said. “But it’s not that long now. Probably you’ll miss it when you’re gone—”

“Never. I will never miss it. If Kamensic fell into the goddam river I wouldn’t shed a single tear—”

“Oh, come on. You’d miss me. And you’d miss Livia, and Unk—”

“I’m sick of Unk. What Jamie Casson said last night was true—all these has-been actors—”

“DeVayne Smith just won the Oscar, Lit. And Mariel Gillian’s doing that new Beckett one-act—”

“But it doesn’t matter. What difference does it make, even if they were all Shakespeare? Which they’re not— my mother’s in a goddam soap opera and my father is Uncle Cosmo—”

“Give him a break, Lit! Unk played Toby Belch last year at Avalon—”

“It’s all bullshit.” I set my mouth and stared straight ahead. “Bullshit. Eighteen million versions of Oedipus Rex, but it’s always the same goddam play, it’s been the same goddam play for two thousand years—”

For the first time Hillary looked pissed off. “So stop talking about it and write a goddam new play, Lit.”

“How can I possibly write anything here?”

“Maybe if you were sober once in a while…”

“Fuck you, Hillary. Just fuck you.”

“‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks—’”

I turned away. Outside railroad tracks appeared alongside the Muscanth River, so that I had a momentary vision of three parallel trajectories, road river rail, all arrowing into the heart of the village. A few minutes later, Kamensic itself came into view.

“That toddlin’ town,” Hillary sang to the tune of “Chicago.” In my lap Ali chimed in sleepily.

“Kamensic, Kamensic my home town—”

I stared resolutely out the window. And, despite myself, shivered at the sight of it—snowy church spires and courthouse bell tower, bare chestnut trees and white-gabled library all rising from the autumn haze like the memory of the drowned village that lay beneath the reservoir. Even after all these years, it still took my breath away.

Not because it was beautiful. Though it was, deceptively wholesome as a Currier and Ives print. Shops neatly tended, dogs sleeping peacefully on the sidewalk, a young boy leading a black horse alongside the railroad tracks. Healy’s Delicatessen, where lemons bobbed like turtles in a huge vat of iced tea; the library with its incongruous sphinxes standing guard beside the steps; and, hidden behind a bend in the road, the black depths of Lake Muscanth.

And everywhere the trees—four- and five-hundred-year-old oaks and ancient beeches, huge dark hemlocks and the pair of massive holly trees that fronted Mrs. Langford’s tiny cottage beside the courthouse. Like Bolerium they seemed to protect Kamensic, that phantom village, so lovely that even now I ached to see it.

Yet what haunted me was not its beauty, but the way it shut me out. For all that I had lived there my entire life, for all that every face that passed me on the sidewalk would greet me by name, remember my birthday—and not just my birth date, but the weather on the day I was born—still somewhere within the town there was a mystery.

And it was a secret kept from me. I was convinced of that, the way some children believe themselves to be adopted. What I had seen at Jamie Casson’s house proved it. A man with living trees in his eyes and horns sprouting from his skull; and for all I knew everyone in Kamensic had seen that creature, and had never bothered to tell me about it. So like any cast-out lover, I longed more than anything else on earth to hold Kamensic within my embrace. But the village only looked deep into the lake that mirrored it; and, dreaming, saw Bolerium’s decaying horns and turrets, and the shadows of the mountain.

A rattle as Hillary’s car bumped over the wooden bridge spanning the river, willow leaves like calligraphy upon its surface. Ali sprawled across the seat, her head bumping my knee.