Port Judith in Winter: Part Two of Four

Tonight I do not dream of the farmhouse. Instead I dream that I am walking Canal Street, pacing restlessly beneath the winter streetlights. There are no stars, but there is a hint of a moon in the sky. It falls to earth through shards of swirling cloud, fragments of snow swimming in slow motion over my head. The streets are windswept, deserted. The lights are blazing, but the power lines are quiet, the city silent and snow-filled. I have never experienced it like this: the city sleeps only in dreams.

I keep walking. Miles collapse in the span of minutes, high-rises giving way to darkened houses, the hulking buildings of the port authority. The wind is even stronger here, a flurry of blades and voices: whispers, whispers. The voice of the ice and its shifting powder dunes. There are no ships at anchor. The harbor is filled in entirely, its surface iced-over. In the distance, the lake-wall is visible, its outermost periphery marked by a lighthouse. It is a negligible structure, automated, snowed-in. Its red light spins around and around. With each passing, the snow takes on a momentary shape, dissolving quickly through the sweep of starless night and shadow.

I follow the boardwalk to Lake Street. The lights are spaced farther apart here, the in-between dark more complete. When I glance up, the moon seems to be shrinking, sinking: its bottom edge buried in a rim of smog and cloud. Beyond the harbor, the concrete turns to dirt and the trees thicken around me, their branches growing together, braiding, blotting the moonlight.

* * *

Miles from Port Judith, I hear it. I pause, listening. A minute passes. I hear it again: the sound of motion off the road. It seems to be coming from a shallow depression beyond the curb. I approach it slowly, straining my eyes to see through the tree-shadows. It is a dog. A stray: half-bred, feral. A carrion eater. It bares its teeth at me as I approach. I'm not afraid. When I shout, it turns and scurries into the woods, its tail down. It leaves its prey behind. I stand directly over the ditch, peering through the gathering gloom, but I can't make out a thing.

I'm about to leave, but just then the clouds crack and separate, and in the lines of momentary light and dark, I see it: the body of a young girl, a teenager. Her throat is bound with a cord, her face pinched and swollen. Her tongue protrudes, frostbite black. But her eyes are open: a faded blue, nearly colorless. They are the color of winter itself, and I cannot look away. I stand that way for some time, watching the shadows race across her face, until a burst of crows rattles the nearby trees, and the whole night trembles and shakes, shattering to pieces on the rising wind.

* * *

I wake up shaking. I switch on the bedside lamp to read my watch. Just after three. At first I think the heat must be out again, but when I listen, I can hear its familiar hum in the walls and floorboards, and then I remember my dream. I turn off the light. I close my eyes. I try to sleep, but all I can see is her blue face and eyes, her black tongue, and I know I'm not falling asleep again.

So I get up. I dress in the dark, the city-shadows passing across my window. Police sirens rush in red squares across the far wall. Through the window, I can see traffic threading the street below, a young couple chatting in the window of an all night Laundromat. There is no moon, but the city is buzzing with light and activity, its streets awash in pulsing neon. A group of sharply dressed men and women navigate the drifted sidewalks under my window, stumbling and slipping between snow banks, obviously drunk. On their way from one club to another, one all night hangout to the next.

I shrug on my jacket and slip out the door. The hall is brightly lit as always, its windowless length spaced with blue bulbs. Every door is anonymous, unpainted, neatly numbered. I follow their descending order to the end of the hall. There is only a service elevator. It is blocked off at all times, a padlocked shutter drawn across the gate, so I take the stairs: two gentle flights to ground level. In the lobby, the noise of the nearby bars can be clearly heard. When I push through the revolving doors into the freezing street, it becomes deafening: bass-driven and beat-heavy, two heartbeats spun together, spinning.

I take a right outside my apartment, shuffling uphill, away from the harbor. As I walk, the lake-wind roars and battens my back. Four blocks from my building, I pass a woman standing in the mouth of an alleyway. She looks to be in her late thirties: tall and thin, her dark eyes ringed in darker makeup. Behind her, the shadows rise unbroken to the roofs of the surrounding tenements, cresting the gables in a sable wave.

"Hey baby," she coos. She raises a hand and motions to me, beckoning. Her nails are painted scarlet. "You lonely?"

I look at her. Her face is worn and pressed to lines: dryness, age, stress. Her eyes hold a silence, a sadness. Two kinds of darkness.

"Who isn't?" I say.

And keep walking.

* * *

Commuters. Every morning they stream over the Harbor Bridge, men and women from the suburbs on their way to work. There are thousands of them. Their cars pause and stall along the length of the span. Traffic builds at the stoplights, backing up like water rising at a dam. In less than a minute, it reaches the opposite shore. Drivers sound their horns and pound their steering wheels, lie back against the seat fuming.

I walk alongside them, proceeding in the direction of the city. Wind-dazzled, dizzy with the height, I am suddenly fascinated by the cars themselves. Each one possesses its own personality, or seems to. I note the sensual shape of a sports car, its streamlined edges and sloping curves. The quiet endurance of a rusty sedan. The brazen, masculine aggression of an eighteen-wheeler.

I can’t see the drivers through the sun-struck windows. They are shadows, specters. I wonder if they match their vehicles in personality and mannerisms, if there is any correlation at all. But I know there is not. Like the body, each car is only a kind of vessel: temporary, energy-starved, prone to breakdown.

Passing the eighteen-wheeler, I look down at my hands, mottled and pale, and I am suddenly ashamed. When the driver waves to me over his steering wheel, I look away. The lights change. Traffic thrums and screeches past me. I shuffle forward, the bridge swaying faintly underfoot, wind roaring through the tresses.

* * *

This is a city for the homeless. During the summer, they ride bikes from camp to camp, from boxcar to tent, sometimes sleeping under overhangs, bridges. In winter, they travel on foot between shelters, pushing shopping carts before them: painful miles over ice and concrete, alongshore where there are no trees to block the wind. To be caught outside is a death sentence. It happens often enough. Quickly. Quietly. Bodies molder in ditches under snow, undiscovered until spring, when the dogs return. Sometimes there is nothing but bones.

A report is filed. A police car arrives, an ambulance. Authorities search the body for identification, matching teeth against dental records. They perform an autopsy. If none of this is conclusive, they call for a priest. Following a perfunctory service, the Church inters the body in a cemetery outside of town. St. Stephen’s. There is a mass grave there, a tomb for the nameless, the unknown. The place is barely accessible, situated on the farthest outskirts the sprawl. I have never been there.

The paper used to report the deaths. They would print a notice in fine print under the obituaries. Homeless man, aged sixty. Vagrant: male, aged seventy. The names were left out, often unknown. But the Herald discontinued this practice years ago. As far as I can tell, no one else has noticed.

* * *

I see them in bookstores, coffee shops. In a Lake Street café, I watch an old man pay for a cup of coffee using a mixture of dimes and quarters. Wizened and tough with wiry hair, he counts out exact change, paying the barista and taking his coffee. He carries it gingerly, his hands trembling, arthritic. Instead of cream, he adds honey, squeezing the bottle until it is nearly empty. He catches my eye on his way out the door. Paused in the exit, he smiles faintly, as if in recognition. When the door closes behind him, the bells clang and jingle, and I lower my gaze.

* * *

The homeless are old, always old. In addition, they are nearly always male, men who have outlasted their families, their friends. They have no one. On warmer days, they wander the lakeshore, walking carefully, taking each step in time.

I follow one man at a distance, lagging twenty or thirty paces behind. I tread softly, as softly as I can. Sound carries far on a day like this, windless and wintry, and I don’t want to betray my presence. The man is wearing jeans and an army jacket, olive green with a tear down the back, three stripes at the shoulder. Sergeant stripes. He wears a blue beanie on his head, pulled down over his ears, a gray ponytail hanging out the back. He walks with a faint limp, and I wonder if he is a veteran. A dog trots alongside him, leashed with a length of twine.

We pass the harbor. Its freighters slumber in the late afternoon: placid, still. Black water spreads motionless beneath them, ripple-less. Their steel cables lie silent, swaying gently, lined with gulls. On the deck of one ship, two men stand smoking, talking, indistinguishable from each other in their matching black jackets.

We are all looking for the same thing, I think, as I trail the man past the port authority. He has nowhere to go, and still I follow him.

* * *

The Siren is the city's oldest movie theater. It is distinguished by its boxy marquis, its ticket booth that faces on the street. Out walking, I decide to stop for a matinee. I don't know why. I know nothing about the movies showing, so I pick one at random. The young man takes my cash beneath the window and slides my ticket across the counter. I thank him and go inside.

The gilded doors fold into a vaulted lobby. The floors are richly tiled, the walls hung with velvet curtains, everything rendered in the deepest, purest shade of red. There is a young man working the snack bar. He sips coffee from a Dixie cup while reading a men's magazine. He nods at me, his ears pierced and hooped, his nose studded. I return the gesture as I head into the theater. The lights are still up inside, and I can see the theater is decorated in the same ornate manner as the lobby, everything gilt and ruby, a red curtain drawn back from the gray screen.

I find my way to the middle row and take a seat on the aisle, scanning the theater as I go. I'm the only one here. I look back over my shoulder, craning my neck to see into the projector booth, but it is empty. A wan light spills through the window, pallid and yellow. I sigh. I glance down at my watch, sink lower in my seat.

I wait. The minutes creep together, one into the next, and I'm almost sleeping by the time I hear the projectionist enter the booth. He coughs, the sound echoing throughout the empty theater. He fumbles with the machinery, setting the reel. It ticks and sputters, the house speakers crackling to life. But the lights don't dim. He forgets about them until the very end, slamming the switch only as the first frame fills the screen. The effect is instantaneous, a heartbeat stilled. The lights wink out, leaving me in the dark.

Over the film score, its first swells of music, I hear the projectionist exit the booth. The door slams shut behind him, the echoes fade into the soundtrack, and I'm alone.

* * *

The film ends abruptly. After the credits, the projector clicks loudly and turns itself off, the reel finished. I wait for the lights to come up, but there is no one in the booth. The theater is lightless, black and impenetrable. “Hello?” I call out. My voice echoes among the padded chairs, the velvet curtains. No response. The room is too dark to suggest anything but darkness. No horror, nothing to fear: only the slow and even swirling of every lightless space, black ribbons separating from black.

Sighing, I get to my feet. Breathing slowly, evenly, I feel my way along the seats to the central aisle. One foot in front of the other: I surface from the darkness, pushing through the doors and into the daylight.

* * *

The elms. We walk together along the road, their boughs crossing over our heads. Leafless, they form a kind of lattice, each twig visible in relief against the weak autumn sun. It is in the east still, nearly hidden by the mountains, its rays spilling like sand through the gaps and hollows. They are young mountains, a row of teeth left by the glaciers. There is snow on the highest peaks. A cap of purest white marks each summit, its edges feathering at the tree line, blurring into the deep green of the forest, the nearly black masses of spruce and fir.

"I still miss this sometimes," I say. We walk together, side-by-side, so that our edges appear to shift and ripple together, even though we do not touch. "It’s been gone for so long, but I still miss it. All the time, really."

"The country?"

"Yes. More than that, though, I mean the elms. These trees. They're gone."

"What happened to them?"

"The rot." I stop, stepping backward into my own reflection, my own tidal flow. “Even now you can see it.” I approach the nearest tree, touching my fingertips to the bark. "Farther up." I point, and her eyes follow my finger to the tree's midriff. Some of the bark has fallen away from the trunk, leaving a bare patch. Through the wood, the heartwood is directly exposed, the bark scaling at the margins, discolored and flaky.

“It’s only just starting. As it spreads, the rot girdles the tree in two, cutting off the roots from the leaves. After that, it's only a matter of time. Nutrients from the roots can’t reach the leaves and vice versa. It’s like starving to death."

"It's sad," she says. "Did they all die?"

"Every last one," I say. "Once one tree catches it, the sickness moves rapidly from tree to tree—my father thought it used the root systems. It happened all over the country too. One year, the disease came in with the ships, and by the next, the elms were gone.

“During that year, my father used to come out first thing every morning. I remember: he stood here, about where we are now, and scanned the trees, searching for signs of rot. As soon as one appeared sick, he chopped it down. First he used a hammer, driving a wedge to determine the tilt. Then he used an axe, hacking by hand through layers of wood and age and time. Once the tree began to shriek and groan, my father drew back, letting it buckle and topple under its own weight. If you haven’t seen a tree felled before, you can’t imagine something so graceful and so sad. In the end, it was all for nothing.”

"Are they extinct?"

"Not yet. Not everywhere. But it's close enough. You'll probably never see one."

She smiles—a soft smile touched by dawn light. "I'm seeing them now, aren't I?"

* * *

Later. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure," she replies. "Fire away."

"Anything?"

She rolls her eyes. "Just ask already."

I let out a held breath. "Are you real?"

She blinks, surprised. Dryly: "Am I real?"

"Yes."

She regards me carefully, searching my face. I can see the trees in her eyes: their tangled branches, their claw-like reach. Winter trees among summer fields. "Of course," she says finally. “Don’t you think I wonder the same thing about you? Of course I'm real."

"But how do I know that? How do I know you exist in the real world? That you’re not just in my head. Not just in dreams.”

Her expression wavers in her eyes, reflected elms swaying. She smiles. Without a word, she takes a step closer to me. Reaching up, she places her hands on my cheeks, cupping my chin.

I blush into her hands.

She asks: "Do I feel like a dream?"

* * *

Morning Hill. It is the highest spot on my father's property, named for its prominent eastward lookout. We take seats on a ledge of exposed granite, sunlight slicing the overcast sky, revealing strata of soot and iron. It is going to snow.

I shiver. It is always coldest at dawn, when the heat from the previous day is all gone. Rosemary sits beside me, her small hands clasping the fissured rock. For the first time, I notice her clothing. She is wearing a denim jacket over a cream-colored dress: a summer dress, linen, its hem terminating above her knees. Her legs are bare, and I can't help but notice their slender curves, her strong calves sloping to delicate ankles, also bare.

"Aren't you cold?" I ask. "Dressed like that."

She shrugs.

"You're not?"

"Not really. I just don't think about it. Do I look cold?"

Her skin is well tanned, her legs delicately shaded. Her cheeks are rosy and flushed, undeniably warm. She is almost glowing.

"No," I concede. "You don't."

"Exactly. This is a dream, remember? Forget the cold and it forgets you."

So I do. Closing my eyes, I will my body to thaw, to warm itself. It happens almost instantly. My muscles relax, shivers dissipating. When I heave a deep breath, the air is spring-like, balmy.

I open my eyes to see her watching me intently. She sits with chin in hand, nose wrinkled, brow furrowed. Hot blood rushes to my face, pouring through every capillary, and we both smile. It is the first time I've felt warm in many months.

"Better?" she says, raising a single eyebrow.

"Much."

"Good."

"Thanks," I say.

“Don't sweat it.” She turns her face in her hands, gazing east to the dawn-lit mountains. It is just after sunrise, and my father's fields spread before us, completely open: the orchards barren, the hedges stripped of foliage. When I look closer, the dead grass seems to shimmer as daylight creeps across its frosted surface, the ice flaring as it melts, shrinking to puddles of standing sun.

"It's beautiful," she says, distantly.

“Some holidays,” I say, remembering, “My father would set off fireworks in the fields. He bought them from a merchant in town, ordered them specially. When I was a child, my mother would take me here to watch them. The two of us huddled together on this ledge, my face drawn to her chest, resting against it, lightly so I could hear her heartbeat, while over our heads, the sky filled with noise and fire.”

“That sounds gorgeous.”

“In hindsight, I know they were nothing special, the fireworks. But at the time… in all their color and intricacy and beauty, in their momentary nature, the way each image faded so quickly… it seemed like heaven to me.”

I trail off. From the south, we hear a train's keening call. Its electric shriek echoes off the mountains. Moments later, the engine itself pulls into view, trailing a spume of black smoke. It is a freight train, but the cars are empty except for the caboose, where a lone figure stands, watching the rails recede.

"This is how it started," I hear myself say.

"What?"

"The changes. The development. It began with the diesel trains."

She waits for me to continue.

"One morning, I was watching for the usual steam engine, listening for the whistle. I was probably ten, eleven years old. And then I spotted the diesel, dragging its acrid smoke behind it. Later on, I asked my father about it and he told me what it was. He said it wouldn't be long before the city reached us. And he was right."

We watch the train roll past. Eventually, the smell of its smoke reaches us on the wind: sulfuric, slightly sour. I cough and cover my mouth. Rosemary makes a face. She pinches her nose, smiling faintly as she waves the odor away.

By the time the train has passed, its smoke trail evaporating along the length of the track, the sun is nearly up. It slips free of the highest peaks, glimpsed only briefly before disappearing again, vanishing behind the gray sky.

She rises to her feet, glancing skyward. When I follow her gaze, the first flakes of snow settle on my face, adhering to my eyelids, the bridge of my nose. Gray pieces of a gray sky, suspended in their slow descent. A three-dimensional silence.

Rosemary laughs loudly. As I watch, she pivots on her right heel. She turns slowly, her arms spread, her head upturned. A breeze rises from the north, sweeping the hillside. It whips through her summer dress, its linen folds filling like sails while snow billows in clouds about her, speckling her jean jacket, her amber skin, her auburn hair.

* * *

I surface in a place far from Morning Hill. For a moment, I don't recognize my own apartment, its outlines looming strange and terrible in the dark. As my eyes flutter open, a flurry of red lights crosses the window, their shadows racing in parabolas over my bed, streaking the far wall. An ambulance. A fire truck. A police car. In the corner, the radiator clicks and purrs.

Rolling on my stomach, I bury my face in the pillow, breathing hard. The case needs to be cleaned, and I can’t stand my own smell: the stench of aging, living decay. I draw the blanket over my head, seeking sleep in its folds, but I can hear the couple next door. Their cries pierce the early morning, the woman’s voice rising, growing shrill, even as the man’s voice deepens to a baritone moan. I bring my hands to my ears, but I can’t block them out.

I get to my feet, the blanket draped around my shoulders. I cross the apartment to the kitchen, where I hear the couple even more clearly. Their breathing is audible, emanating from the pockmarked paint, the cracking plaster. I can make out every gasp and sputter, every rushed intake of air.

Stepping back, I kick the wall as hard as I can, as hard as my bare feet will allow. I use the side of my foot, and the wall trembles with the force of the blow. Loose plaster rattles inside like sand in a rain stick. Bringing my foot back, still stinging, I place another kick. I strike the wall over and over until I grow tired. I pause, bracing myself on the counter. My foot aches and burns beneath the skin. The pain spreads quickly, racing through every bone and sinew, intensifying in the joints. On the other side of the wall, there is only silence.

I head for bed. I drag my foot behind me, exhausted and angry, limping homeless home. Drifting off, I search for the farmhouse, but my dreams hold only darkness, the black churning of an empty movie theater, and when I wake hours later, faint daylight clinging to the window, there is nothing to do but face the morning.

* * *

Death is not an end. It is not even a beginning, not really. It is only another moment, as fleeting as the others that preceded it. But it is the moment we learn to see time for an illusion and ourselves for ourselves. Growing up, my father told me that God exists outside of time. Because of this, He sees our entire lives at once. I love that. It has always seemed too beautiful to be false. By dying, we see ourselves as He has always seen us. We view our lives at once, made whole like the city will never be. And we see our loved ones that way too. In the space of a heartbeat, we will watch their lives unfold before us: impossibly fluid, immovably static. Face to face, we will see them as they are, as they have always been, but it will be for the first time. The father will be reunited with his infant son, and the same child will be a grown man to his wife, the man she met and married: strong and swift and passionate. She will be a wife, a mother, an old woman, a young daughter—just as she has been, so she will be, and she is.

I stand on the Harbor Bridge. I balance with my feet wedged through the icy railing, listening to the lake-ice crack and boom below. It is well before dawn, but I gaze eastward, straining my eyes to see past the farthest skyscraper, the dimmest blue light. I imagine the distant mountains, and they are the purple ranges of my dreams: silent and shadowed, snow-capped in autumn. Beyond the peaks, there is only darkness. It is not night, but the total absence of light and color—sound too, but for the howling of the wind. Within that featureless landscape, I imagine the faces of my parents, long dead. They are young like I never knew them, their cheekbones padded in baby fat. It is how they would have appeared to each other, the night they met. I see my brother too, wearing the uniform that killed him. He is scowling: fierce, proud. Is this the future or the past? Below me, hundreds of feet below me, the ice is black, black and still.