Sitting at the window after the shower last evening, she’d had a smoke to warm her, lighting the cigarette as if all her fingers were thumbs. Ghost, my ass, she’d thought. His ghostliness didn’t stop the police from finding him. That’s what she had wanted to tell him yesterday. You’re such a fucking ghost, every time you do some shit they find you. Or, Ghost, why don’t you just disappear from my life. Not that, not that, she felt rotten when she thought that. The smoke hadn’t calmed her. Smoking was an affectation she had started early, in high school, in the café across from Harbord Collegiate, in the park on Grace Street, where she and her friends would sit on the embankment, puffing and joking.
When the telephone rang, she hadn’t answered. Her father? Not likely. Tuyen from next door or Oku, Jackie? Or was it Jamal calling again, collect? Whoever it was—she hadn’t answered all evening. And it couldn’t have been Jamal, she’d soon realized, if it was all night. He’d given that privilege up to the suits and the uniforms. Listening calmed her in an icy way. The more the phone had rung, the more distant she became. She looked out the window, blowing smoke into the air.
Tuyen had rapped on her door. Carla had heard her voice calling through the seam, asking her, “How was it, Carla? How is he? Come on, come talk to me.” Tuyen’s voice soft, then gruff, then giving up. Then she’d heard her go back to chipping away at the wooden lubaio. She didn’t want to tell Tuyen about it right then. Tuyen was her best friend. They shared everything, but it was long understood that some things, for both of them, were unknowable, unshareable. It was usually Tuyen who pushed and pulled at the borders of these things. Tuyen’s artist’s curiosity getting the better of their restraint. Carla had ignored her, trying to warm her icy body with her cigarette.
Carla’s place was sparse and grew even more sparse after every visit to Tuyen’s. She had a futon and three cushions on the floor, a tiny fridge and stove that came with the rent, her stereo and a small television on a few red-and-blue milk crates, and her bicycle hung on the wall. Her clothes, which she kept to a minimum, were neatly, ascetically, hung in two closets. Her shoes she left in a military row outside her door. She didn’t want to tread dirt into her rooms, and since she and Tuyen were the only tenants on the second floor, her shoes were safe. She was frightened by clutter.
The street below the window seemed distant, blurred, soft-lit last evening. She’d watched the street people haggling, the store owner trying to move them along, the man who went to the Mars ten times a day for ice cream, the lottery ticket man, the café sitters, the trail of plastic-bag-laden people coming from the market. She watched and watched until the light went and the street lights came on and the crowd changed, with the exception of the regular homeless—the man who always told her, “Have a nice day, have a very nice day”; the chain-smoking woman who, on bad days, declaimed herself ugly to anyone within a few feet; the other woman who waited in the alley each day to tell the unsuspecting passerby that her dog had died; and the short, swollen, barefoot man with black hair. Then she watched the sun set—not the actual setting but the way anyone in a city sees the sun set, taking it for granted that the pinkish orange hues enveloping the buildings reflect the sun’s going light. So she had watched from her window, the undivided phalanx of buildings eat away the sun.
Much later, eaten away herself into the gaze of the ebbing street and the perennial clicking of the streetcars, she had fallen asleep below the window. When she woke at the still-open window, the air had gone a little cold, and the jaundiced light of the street lamp had hit her in the face, “blessed” her face, as her mother used to say. “When I blessed my eyes on you.” Why had she remembered that? Blessed, blessé. When my eyes wounded you, when the sight of you wounded me, which one did it mean? She felt the stroke of light, which is why she must have awakened. The street was now a damp quiet. It must have been three or so, perhaps four, in the morning, the time of the morning when streets seem to be their own selves, reflective, breathing some other breath, going some other way without the complications of people.
She had awakened then with a clarity and thought, If you expect that I could help you. She reached for her notebook and wrote it down. She had been dreaming it, over and over again, this line of words said to someone in her dream. “If you expect …” echoing under the rest of the line, “that I could know you, that I could see the thing riding you, if you expect that I should … if you expect to see God in me …” Well, it was a little dramatic but not hard to figure out who her dream was talking to, she thought, throwing the notebook aside. She wished her dreams were more complicated. She always wrote them down thinking they might be, then read them in the mornings knowing they were not parables but just extensions of her day life. She wished they were more cunning, hiding some secret that she might discover there.
One of the arms of Tuyen’s lubaio was closest to the wall against which Carla’s bed lay on the floor. Carla had grown accustomed to Tuyen chiselling all through her sleep. Last night she had dreamed
