Artificial Light Read online

  After Kurt’s arrival, not much changed. He’d arrived with very little furniture of his own, preferring to make use of the tattered remnants of Albion’s former splendor. With the exception of a small suitcase in which was heaped a tangled pile of monochrome clothes and an exceptionally large, heavy-looking chest which I never saw him open, he had very few possessions. When we started spending time with Kurt at Albion, we noticed that he liked to keep things sparse. No gold records lined the walls, no posters or artworks of any kind, even though I knew that Kurt himself spent a good deal of time painting in a room upstairs (another room I saw only once). This was something you rarely encountered even among people my own age, who often seemed not so much defined as advertised by their possessions. I would have expected that an older man would have even more stuff, not even less, and at first I found Kurt’s asceticism romantic, like in an existentialist novel.

  He had no car, not even a bike. Many of us used bikes to move around, but not Kurt. Kurt walked everywhere. To the bars, to the restaurants, to the coffee shop, to the record store. He most often walked north, downhill from Albion, to the quarter-mile stretch of Brown Street from Stewart to Wyoming, the central artery of the artier element in Dayton. Every once in a while someone’d see Kurt struggling uphill, south, on Far Hills Avenue, to the grocery store in Oakwood, which was almost a mile away, or even further up the road in Kettering toward some undiscovered place. In fine weather and rain or snow, he wore the same brown overcoat.

  A few weeks after he moved in we started to see Kurt in our locals, the Snafu Hive and The Pearl. These were the two poles around which our social lives revolved. The Snafu Hive was on the corner of Brown and Wyoming. Approaching across the short expanse of grass between the Quikburger and the fire station—the route I usually took from my apartment nearby, on Hickory—you could see the orange border of light around the bar, just above the rust-colored awning, and the sign, which was a blood-orange-fading-tomustard sun set in a deep blue sky, the sun grazing the tips of some dark leafy trees, and the words Snafu Hive below in the same orange-yellow shading. The sign was rimmed also in orange neon hanging from the unused second story of the windowless building. Even in the dark you could see the pale blue-green paint of the second story’s aluminum siding peeling, in the streetlight and the neon glow and the floodlights mounted near the angled eaves of the roof. The rough gray-and-white bricks of the ground floor reflected amber from the streetlight and orange from the neon border and the green-yellow-red of the stoplight at the corner and the red taillights of braking cars, too. Inside, black vinyl booths were set against tourmaline walls. Parallel lines of blue and green neon light lined the walls near their top. The stripes of neon from the walls were reflected in the curved glass of the jukebox front. When you tried to see what songs to play you had to hold your hand in front to block the reflection. Candelabras with coarse imitation Tiffany shades hung from the ceiling over each of the booths along the wall, and fake old-fashioned streetlamps were posted halfway up. The ceiling in the front room, where the bar itself was located, was tiled with the playing surfaces of every possible board game.

  The Pearl was about half a mile away, located in a remote nook of the Oregon District, but linked more or less directly from the Hive by a concrete pedestrian bridge that transversed the highway. Approaching The Pearl, which was a low red-brick building fronted by twin maples—both still young and lovely gold-and-red in the fall—you were alerted to the purpose of the place only by the muted blue-and-yellow neon beerlight in the transom. We went to The Pearl, which was darker and grimmer than the Snafu Hive, only when the collegiate presence at the Hive became overbearing, which often happened on weekend nights when the University of Dayton was in session.

  Kurt came first to the Hive. He sat by himself, for hours, turning pages in a notebook, occasionally drawing or scribbling something. He generally ordered a pitcher of beer and nursed that through the night, sitting in a corner table or an otherwise empty booth. Sometimes he would go over to the jukebox, flipping through the hundred or so albums on offer, and very occasionally he’d feed a dollar or two into the slot and ask anyone standing nearby to pick some songs, explaining that he had no taste in music, but liked the idea of it, which depending on whether they recognized him or not was either a good joke or the truth. At peak hours the jukebox was nearly inaudible over the buzz of the crowd, anyway.

  I found the secret struggle between words and music, with its shifting front lines, sudden incursions of bright sound—a singer’s yelp, a guitar’s howl—followed by equally sudden retreat, as the sea of talk drowned the plaintive whine of some flowery folksongstress (for instance), one of the more entertaining aspects of bar-going. That and the talk itself, which, whenever I slipped into the bad habit of listening without paying attention, struck up a rhythm & blues of its own. When I was younger I had ambitions to chart the ebb and flow of the conversation among my friends, cross-referenced by personality type and amount of alcohol consumed, but I’m older now and my ambitions have consequently matured.

  Nothing about Kurt except the natural force field of fame seemed unapproachable, but for some reason we did not approach him for a while. Not even Mary Valentine or Amanda Early, who approached everyone male, regularly, in the hope that he would buy them a drink. Amanda and Mary were very charming, and silly, and manipulative, and pretended to hate each other. Both were pretty but in different ways. Mary was small and blond, had a face constructed of oblique angles, and wore very tight clothes to accentuate the camber of her shapely nates. Amanda was taller, moon-faced, dark-haired, with heavy, soft breasts that she hid (to the extent possible) under oversized shirts or sweaters. She was both proud and embarrassed of her breasts, which I can understand even though I’ve never had that problem myself. Mary was smarter, and Amanda neurotic to the point where she’d been prescribed lithium for what her doctor told her was a manicdepressive disorder, but she sold the lithium in order to keep drinking. She was also nicer than Mary, as slightly stupid people are apt to be nicer than slightly smart people.

  Boys loved Mary and Amanda, not least because for all their insincere flirting, they were both kind of slutty. I’ve determined after much research that boys like sluts. The kind of boys that hung out with us, anyway. I’m not really a slut but sometimes I feel like one. Usually when I feel slutty I’m just pretending, though. For fun. But sometimes you back yourself into a corner. Then you have to fuck your way out, which isn’t always fun or a good idea.

  Eventually, though, curiosity got the better of Mary, who was more outgoing than Amanda, sometime around October of last year, not more than a month after Kurt first showed up. There were about ten of us grouped around two adjacent booths at the Hive. I saw Mary stop at Kurt’s table on the way back from the ladies’ room. She leaned over him, her hands resting on the table, fingers restlessly tapping as she talked.

  Kurt nodded slightly and she slid into a chair next to him and laughed her frilly, girlish laugh, which was the thing I liked least about Mary.

  “What are they talking about? What’s he saying?” asked Amanda, sucking intently through a plastic straw at the half-melted ice cubes in her empty drink.

  After two minutes or so Mary rose and flitted back to our group. We quizzed her eagerly.

  “He says to please leave him alone,” she reported, flush with drink and the excitement of something new.

  “Everybody’s got a gimmick,” muttered Joe Smallman into his vodka and grapefruit, sitting next to Amanda.

  “What else did he say?” I asked.

  “He muttered something under his breath. I asked him to repeat but he wouldn’t. So I told him it didn’t matter anyway, because I only speak French. So then he said something in maybe French and I said …” Mary drew a breath before continuing, “… not that kind of French.”

  Amanda looked at Mary, puzzled. “What kind?”

  Mary giggled.

  “He didn’t buy you a drink?” I asked.

  “No. B
astard.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Cute, huh?” said Mary, still giggling.

  Once Mary had made contact, others followed suit over the ensuing days and weeks. We grew used to Kurt’s presence, and he grew used to ours, and more tolerant of our occasional incursions on his table’s turf. He was never what you’d call convivial, and certainly not forthcoming (he would never talk, for instance, about what he was writing or drawing in his notebook), but he was never less than kind. As he came to know more about us, he would ask polite questions about our personal lives, without ever seeming intrusive or unduly interested, but at the same time without seeming as if the questions were pro forma or mere conversation. Something about his manner encouraged us to reveal more than we would reveal, or consider wise to reveal, to each other. Had he been so inclined, Kurt would have made an excellent psychologist, so realistic was his engagement with the listener, so attentive and appropriate his questions, so benign and non-judgmental his expression. He could coax startling revelations from the most reticent people, though to be honest none of us were particularly reticent, and the greater part were glad of an audience that had not heard their particular tales of conquest and betrayal repeated over a half-drained glass of weak beer.

  Not so much me: I too preferred to listen, especially when Amanda gave an explication of the ways and means of her obsession with Druids, with sloppily drawn diagrams on a series of sodden bar napkins, later taken by Kurt and shoved into the jacket pocket of his pea coat, which was chocolate-brown in color, almost ginger-dark, so that when you first looked you thought maybe suede, but no, the material while soft and texturally similar to suede—like moleskin—was a wool blend. Kurt tried to put the napkins into his pocket surreptitiously, balling them in one quick movement, but I saw. I see more things than I want to see, sometimes.

  It’s okay, though. I was part of the group, sure, accepted long ago by virtue of my reliability as a gobetween in matters of love and a fortress of neutrality in the (inevitable, and frequent) event of fallings-out. I was the Switzerland of our circle. A little too clean, a little too respectable for most people’s taste, but safe, and remote, and unwilling to commit to either side in an argument. I have very definite opinions, but I don’t like to state them publicly. I understand how that makes me useful, and how that usefulness is the basis for the general amicability of my relations with the members of our group. But I don’t have any close friends—I never have, not even when I was small.

  I was an only child, and my mother and I lived outside of Dayton, in a place called Lewisburg, north of town. We lived in a desanctified Pentecostal church, which had been renovated completely by my father before he died, when I was exactly three. I don’t remember him at all except through the pictures my mother saved. There’s one in particular where I’m in our backyard, on the verge of a stand of fir trees striped with the occasional birch, bent over a small fern with the concentrated interest of a botanist, or a child. In the background, my father watches me, arms folded. The photo’s taken with a flash, so it’s hard to tell the time of day, but my best guess is that it’s late afternoon, in spring, two months before he fell off a roof he was retiling in Vandalia and impaled himself on the post of a chain-link fence. On my birthday, I always forget to say. He slipped—this is the way I imagine—because he was hurrying to finish work in time for my party, where we had chocolate cake with white and pink frosting, and little green frosting florets, and my name in frosting and three pink birthday candles. I don’t remember anything about the party, of course. The description of the cake is from another photo, taken by my mother shortly before the policeman showed up to tell her the news. When she snapped this picture, of me looking small and confused in front of a cake too big for myself and two kids my age whose names I could not tell you if you held a gun to my head, if you pulled the trigger, if I died and went to heaven and my entire life were available for review—mom probably recruited them from families at church—she was doubtless angry or at least irritated that dad was late, doubtless ready to give him an earful of holler, as we liked to say. I don’t know if we liked to say that, actually.

  There weren’t many kids my age in Lewisburg: there weren’t many people in Lewisburg. I spent most of my time growing up alone, and then when I started at school, which was several miles down the highway in Tipp City, I didn’t know how to talk to the other kids. At first I was the girl in the corner of the playground staring at dirt, but gradually I assimilated. I “came out of my shell,” in the words of my third grade teacher, Mrs. Handerlich. I never liked that expression, with its reptilian or piscine associations. I was neither turtle nor hermit crab. I was a girl who did not like to talk to other people but who gradually accepted the necessity for doing so, on the condition that I not be required to form actual friendships. Thus, after a slow start, I became social, and even popular. My popularity was based on a simple principle: I did not care about being popular. I did not care about anything or anyone. I was never rude, I was never gossipy, I smiled readily and listened with attention to my schoolmates, even contributing a few gnomic comments when absolutely necessary to prove that I was not weird.

  One girl I might have called friend. Her name was Eileen Gregg, and she could read 814 words per minute. I could read pretty fast, I could read pretty well, but I could not read as fast or as well as Eileen Gregg. She was ten years old, same as me, and had frizzy dark hair held in place with red barrettes, and tortoiseshell glasses behind which blinked narrow green eyes that never stopped moving down the page. Her prowess was no parlor trick, either—she could quote whole chunks of text, after reading, and showed by what she’d committed to memory an affinity for the same sorts of things (purply clumps of Dickens; Dylan Thomas’s unfathomably luscious verse) I’d found and loved; and so by natural extension I loved Eileen Gregg, too. She was my first crush. Ours was not a showy love. Its depth and sublimity was expressed, by me (I’m not sure Eileen was ever aware of her part, but so hotly was our bond forged in the fire of my imagination that the less she acknowledged, the more I sighed), largely through a series of glances and gestures untranslated by anyone. I don’t think we exchanged more than two sentences: “Did you drop this?” “No.” “Okay.” “Okay.” Something like that. Something like this is what I heard: “There is nothing under round Phoebus’s face so lovely to me as your smile, nothing so precious as your fingers, pale as swan’s down. I would drown in any river at your command. I would and will read the book of your face at 814 words per minute for every minute my heart still beats, and beats, and beats.”

  Had I invited her over to my house, what then? She could come on the bus with me, but Mom would’ve balked at driving her all the way back to Tipp City (forty minutes round trip) in our embarrassingly ratty Primavera, which belched white smoke from the exhaust and overheated if you breathed too hard. Or if she hadn’t balked, I would have, and probably long before the car subject arrived. Because the fuss my mother would’ve made over Eileen, over anyone-een, would’ve killed me sooner. (The subjunctive case—harbor of wishes and the flotsam of unseen futures—fills my sentences with would, which contrary to what I’d been led to believe doesn’t float. I’m almost certain that’s a good pun.) So the invitation remained unextended, and eventually Eileen Gregg moved away, or went to private school, or died of shock upon realizing the brutal truth of human existence.

  No boyfriends, either. I go through periods of letting boys have their way with me, and once even thought I liked one for about two weeks who turned out to be gay (how absolutely banal, right?). Making things worse, I actually walked in on him and some guy. I almost never let anyone in my apartment except infrequently the Rose Scholar. Her real name was Cinnamon, which is bad enough, but I always called her the Rose Scholar—we have nicknames for regular customers at the library—because she knew everything about roses and seemed to have a genuine passion for botanical knowledge. I appreciate people with genuine passions, which in my experience are scarcer than Albus
honorifica, a very rare varietal occurring only in the mountains of Peru, according to the Rose Scholar. I let her in my place to look at my botany books.

  Thus I entered an apartment not my own to find my erstwhile lover humping another guy, or what looked like humping but what he claimed was “nothing, we were just messing around, it’s not what you …” But, no, it’s always what you think. I knew, on some level, even before I pushed open the broken screen door of that rat-trap(y) and followed the sounds of huffing down the dust-encrusted hallway. I had ascribed his reluctance in physical matters to a sensible disdain for my less-than-curvilinear physique, but turns out my boyish figure’s exactly what drew him. The apartment, in any event, belonged to the hypotenuse of our brief, unshapely triangle. That’s why the door wasn’t locked—no one expected me, the base leg. I had stopped by to ask advice on a present I was planning to buy for a friend; as luck would have it the friend in question was already present.

  That was two years ago. In hindsight, I’m guessing my attraction to the homosexual was based mostly on his indifference to me, which is a very nineteen-year-old-girl attribute, I think—to find indifference sexy. Since then I’ve been alone, and often lonely, but no lonelier than my childhood, which despite its underpopulation never felt particularly empty. My feeling’s that the isolation of my upbringing was just a truer reflection of the Facts of Life—the bride stripped bare (I don’t know why that article of rote popped up just now but we’ll leave it)—and so rather than being deprived I had been gifted with a head start in the reality stakes. I remember trying out that theory on Kurt one night very late, at a stage of cozy drunkenness (cozy because I was curled up on an old carpet in front of a dying fire, drunkenness because I was drunk) that rarely fails to elicit from me bogus insights; I thought he would suffocate from laughing so hard. At the time I didn’t see what was so funny, but now I get the joke: The joke’s on me.