“I was being chased by this man, and his eyes were made out of fire, and he wanted something from me but I didn’t know what it was. I was running through this weird apartment with all these windows and on the walls were these terrible paintings of people being tortured, and everywhere there was this music and it was getting louder and louder. And all I wanted was to stop and go to sleep there and forget everything, but I knew if I stopped the man would never let me leave again.” As she talks a cloud moves across the sun and the light in the kitchen dulls. Cass closes her eyes, reaches forward, touches Aurora’s forehead with two fingers. She whispers something, opens her eyes, takes her hand away.
“I’ll make you some tea.” She takes away Aurora’s coffee mug. Aurora makes a noise of protest as Cass pours the coffee down the drain and sets the kettle on the stove.
“Humor her,” I say.
Cass takes jars down from her shelves, measures out herbs. “Will you tell me if you have that dream again?” Like me, she’s trying to keep her words light, but I know she is as unnerved as I am.
“Sure,” Aurora says, yawning. “Can I have a little coffee?”
“Later,” Cass says.
“It was like I wanted the man to catch me, though,” Aurora says. “In the dream. Like I knew he could give me something in return, for whatever it was he was going to take, and I wanted to know what it was. There was something beautiful about him, too. The whole thing felt so real.”
“It’s a mask,” Cass says quietly with her back to us. “Beauty like that is always a mask.”
“It was a dream,” Aurora says. “Can I have some bread, at least?”
Later, after Aurora goes home, and Cass takes her cards and her crystals and her charts and goes to meet a client, I try to draw Jack. I rifle through my records and put on the Gits, smooth the blank sheet of paper with my palms, get out my pencils, arrange and rearrange them, pick them up and put them down again. Whenever I close my eyes all I see is him. I draw a line and it’s wrong, another line and it’s worse, turn the paper over, try again. I can see him in my mind but not with my hands. Everyone at the party had moved toward him when he played, unseeing, their mouths open, their eyes blank. My work does not have that kind of power, or anything close. There is no magic in anything I ever draw; only labor, and love, and sometimes a grace that becomes larger than the paper or the canvas, so that you can see for a moment the person inside as though they are about to speak to you or come alive. But that does not happen very often, and most of the time my pictures are only pictures, and a lot of the time they are not very good at all. I put the pencil down. I don’t want to draw him. I want him here, in my room, his hands across my skin again, his mouth. I want him to play me songs. I want tangle my fingers in his hair. I want things that make me blush. It is unseemly, I think, to want someone this much. I can’t draw what I’m seeing. I would have an easier time trying to draw the shape of a cloud moving across the sky.
I draw a line instead, a line of trees that becomes a dark wood with eyes peering out of it, shadows moving through the trees, dark shapes flitting from one branch to another. The afternoon shades into evening, and my room dims. The figures in the trees seem to move without my drawing them, as though they have taken on a life of their own, reaching out to me, whispering my name. I can see into a world without sunlight, a darkness so dense I can shape it with my hands. My bare feet are on a rough dirt path through the trees and the air has gone cold. Thick vines bristling with thorns wrap around the trunks, a viscous sap dark as blood running down the bark where the thorns have pierced it. The darkness around me is alive, creaking and rustling. The branches of the trees are bare and dry as bones. I hug myself, shivering. I am at the river again, the river in my dream. It gleams with a dull sheen as though it were made out of oil. I am looking for someone. Someone I must find, before it is too late. I can hear the dog howling. A figure steps onto the path between me and the river, a darkness blacker even than the darkness around it, and it speaks my name aloud in the dark and reaches its arms toward me. I scream and jerk backward, and my room floods with light from the hallway, and I hear my name again, over and over, Cass running through the open door. The darkness is an ordinary darkness again, my own small room with the lights off, my unmade bed, my stereo, my windowsill lined with candles and dried flowers, the disintegrating rag rug underneath my feet. “I didn’t hear you come home.”
“I thought you were asleep, and then I heard you scream.”
“I was drawing.” I turn to my desk to show her the forest but the paper is blank.
She lets go of me and walks into the kitchen. I wonder how long I was in that forest. Where that forest was. Cass brings me a steaming mug of something bitter and sharp-smelling. I climb into my bed without taking off my clothes and she sits with me while I drink the tea, stroking my forehead, and when I fall asleep at last I do not dream again.
“You have got it bad,” Raoul says. I’m so dopey with lust I’ve been tripping over fruit crates all day. We’re sitting in the street behind the stand now, on a smoke break, watching the fish-stall boys chuck salmon. They look good and they know it. They’re like a tribe of Norsemen, all bulging muscles and piercing blue eyes. Tourist ladies are always trying to get their pictures taken with the handsomest ones. Not so much my speed, but I like to watch Raoul flirt with them. Across the street, the pierogi girls are reading each other’s palms. Occasionally the summer breeze brings me a whiff of their patchouli.
Raoul is wearing tight black leather pants, despite the summer sun, and a black tank top that hangs soft and loose and shows off his tattoos and the wooden rosary I’ve never seen him without. Me, threadbare black T-shirt, black jeans, black boots. The fish-stall boys call us the vampire twins. “Vampires be happy!” the one with the green hat likes to shout at us. “Cheer up, vampires!”
“You don’t even know,” I say now. I want to fling myself across something but I settle for flailing my arms. “He’s, like, I don’t even know. Oh my god.”
“Like so good he takes away your capacity for intelligent speech,” Raoul suggests.
“Shut up.” I pretend to chuck a peach at him.
“He’s pretty hot.”
“Right? But it’s more than that. He has this, like, power. Like a magnet. I wish you could have seen him play.”
“A magnet. Wow. That must be so compelling.”
“You’re impossible.”
“What do you talk about?”
I blush. “Um. Not a whole lot, so far.”
“Ah, yes. The magnet.”
“You are such a dick.”
“I would never malign the power of the magnet.” He stubs out his cigarette on the bottom of his boot and tucks the butt in the compost pile.
“
“What?” he says, a portrait of innocence. “Just doing my part for the earth.”
After work I follow Raoul home like a puppy. He heats up tamales, and I eat mine with my fingers. Raoul eats his tamales with a pair of chopsticks and turns on MTV.
“When I was little I thought everyone’s best friend’s aunts and uncles were in music videos,” I tell him.
“Yeah? That’s kind of weird.”
“You want weird, try being Aurora.”
Raoul’s apartment is much smaller than mine, one room with tiny bathroom and a tinier kitchen. He’s covered the walls with velvet and dried roses and white Christmas lights, crucifixes and paintings of saints. On a table sits a big wooden Virgen de Guadalupe surrounded by candles and flowers and ceramic skulls and rosaries, crystals and cones of incense and miniature bottles of liquor. He has a Pendleton blanket folded on his bed, triangles of color that repeat themselves mosaiclike, and an old acoustic guitar his father gave him. I am not allowed to touch the blanket. When Raoul looks at it his face glows.
I often wonder what it is like for Raoul here, in this city where white people spring everywhere from the damp earth like fungi, but I never ask. I love Raoul because he does not treat me like a teenager, and because he is funny and kind and wise, and because he makes me weird techno mixtapes, stuff like Autechre and Orbital and Plaid, the Chemical Brothers, Carl Craig. I know his family lives in Arizona, and he grew up in the desert, and he spoke Spanish before he spoke English, and he is teaching himself Navajo, which his dad never spoke at home because he got beaten at the reservation school for using it when he was a kid. But that’s about all Raoul’s told me
