I

 

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Rockyrun, out the gate of the Pen and Pencil to slalom the sidewalks, Latimer to Locust, Becket Steitz having surrendered his senses has lost his way. Middle-aged man on a mid-summer night. The middle-aughts. Twilight of the flip phone.

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A message shaken in from Spencer: Meet me @McGillin’s. Let’s talk about it.

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Track him. Into the aureate glow of gas lamps at the opera house, where he pulls up short, hands on his knees, crossbody satchel dangling like a placard on the pilloried. His thin shadow flutters over black nickels of chewing gum. Philadelphia. City of spitters.

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We understand they’re not biographies, per se. But they don’t quite cohere as a compelling narrative-

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Or any narrative.

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Jim. They’re narratives-

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Which neither cohere nor are compelling.

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Let’s call them discretely coherent.

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Go ahead. His previous work was structured. And dramatic. I had no doubt then-

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A current of pantlegs is slipping past Becket as he straightens, Ebrius erectus, and pushes up the sidewalk into a palisade of headlights, apparitions in these windshields prompting dignity enough he might slip the haughty lions that fix the Bellvue’s arch.

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He passes, imperceived. Exile unaccounted.

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Atop City Hall even William Penn has turned his back.

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To Calder’s dismay... A monument man.

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What Becket’s done, Jim, is taken dramatic liberties with their histories. Nothing wrong in that. Notables passing through his neck of the woods-

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I’ll permit some potential in this school Edward Weston attended. Why not focus on a history of that place? The instructor, Newall. Who’s he? I found nothing on him anywhere.

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Speculative biographical fiction. Well within the committee’s guidelines.

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Be that as it may, what Dr. Jenkins charitably finds coherent, I find obnoxious. For an award of this caliber. The committee aims to support a writer approaching the cusp of publication. Not foster a retrovert. Let me read you Dr. Lerner. “Scene after scene of vaunted heroics, connected by coincidences so dubious as to make Twain blush.” Even the better of them, frankly, I found ruined by a sense of…

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Addytood.

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…vainglory. On your part. Where’s the subtlety? Your measure? A finalist, you’ve burdened us with evaluating a sophomoric work for what is a significant grant.

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You palooka.

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…these half-baked Hollywood vignettes…

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Speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

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Headlong onto Walnut, Becket’s agitating westbound traffic. Shouts and horns, further slurs and aspersions. He squeezes his phone, magic egg to pause the parapets zagging wild overhead. They do not stop for him. Avenue of the Arts. His mind stalls and surveys his failure. Yesterday was. Often has been. Best not conjugate the ways.

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Tonight even. Failing McGillin’s red letters over Drury Street--failing in fact Drury altogether--his body skews homeward. The horse knows whither the barn. Spencer must wait.

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Pace him south now, by darker capillaries trickling through the grid, satchel full of pages chafing his hip, their every word in need of language as assured as Lerner, Jensen and Linus’s letter of denial. No forest in my trees. Three woven stories. A tripartite helix. Thomas Newall, stereoptician. Skip James, bluesman. Farley Llewellyn, ostracized chemist.

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At his rear, a siren scolds the northern blocks.

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In Ewington not sirens so much as trains. Crossing gates that shut the town down at lunch. Dreamkillling four a.m. freights. Same rails that once pumped coach cars and at all hours. Skip James smoking up to Grafton, not money nor winter clothes, just a guitar they replaced the minute they saw it… Newall, stubborn no-show for Yamamoto’s stopover, Boston to Mexico...

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Philly’s streetlamps burst and blur in Becket’s eyes then are streetlamps again, but the ground gives uncannily at his next step and whacks him with the yips--a hypnic jerk. This empty stretch of Camac Street cobbled with wooden pavers that have buckled here in a taut hump as if leavened. He toes the blister to prove his mind unfeeble and trudges on, across the asphalt perpendicular, past the boarded windows of The Lincoln and down a tapering brick corridor smothered in feather fans of ginkgo and further yet to shadows which seep like crude about the Venture Inn’s hunting horn and hurricane lamps.

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You Are Welcome Hither.

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Beneath this inscription, a painted pair holding tableau. Lofted cigarettes.

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“Careful there, cowboy.”

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Becket grasps a post.

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The colonial lane as tight as the tomb.

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“Christ, honey. Call us a cab before you get hurt.”

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He waves a hand at them, spell cast, and picks his way dumpster by dumpster down a last alley, hobo in search of tonight’s boxcar. Loose downspouts and razorwire. These walls of crumbling brick sagging in rolled latex further sprayed by hooligans. Here a solitary lamp aglow in a rampart of tarpaper. The back side of home. There’s a smell of oilfry and a slickness underfoot. Whispering hard at the world to keep it aright Becket’s interrupted by a scrabbling and a high hiss.

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Its form takes shape atop a can, the lid scraunching as it tamps about, black lips pulled back and tail up like a wire brush. What wits left, Becket shields himself. The stream greases his courier. The skunk leaps for the shadows, visit made.

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The smell stupefying.

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At the alley mouth he keels, stage-lit beneath a portico. In his periphery the nightman is pulling the flophouse door tight and Becket retches and coughs and wipes his lucky washer clean. Some blood. He tucks the laced ring into his collar and checks his reflection in the glass. Dear dirty Parker. Flux with Philly’s ghosts. Jersey’s runaways. Any given day out front see the abruptly single with their busted luggage. Missing wheel. Gaping duffel. Half-hoisted farewells to out-of-state plates.

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He is not of it.

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His building next door.

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A trawling hack catches the air and seals his window and speeds to the corner, heedless through the light. Becket pulls his materials from the sticky satchel, two reams--manuscript and ungraded essays--divided by the committee’s envelope, a letter of death on linen stock. He flips the ruined bag into the corner barrel, no longer his, and tilts the last yards home. Wobbles aboutface to a squat. Sits the chipped stoop to undress. Slides wallet, phone, keys into an empty boot and rises as such, jaybird but thin skivvies and the washer’s thong about his neck. The bistro’s last diners will witness this perpwalk from across the street, a denuded man taking his wad of clothes back to the trash basket. See him return to the marble step. As if to a gallows.

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He isolates a key on his ring and enters softly the tiny vestibule.

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Dead letters, propped against the tarnished slots like prayer cards about a reliquary. The front door clicks shut with the punch of a timeclock and through the door’s smudged panes Becket spies a squad car already arriving at the intersection. Honor Integrity Service. He flies the bolt.

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Dignity.

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Armful of typescript and dangling boots. His pale gibbous lists up the flaking wainscot.

 

3B.

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Two plaster rooms and a bath. Throat scorched by skunk musk, he gargles antiseptic at the sink and showers in the painted tub where, to no avail, he wears the soap down to a chip. White wafer. See him swallow it, cross himself, glands pinching. Absurd. Spits. Opens his mouth to the showerhead and spits again. He pushes the empty shampoo bottle at his head and puffs, point blank. Surrenders, dries, is terried.

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Glugging again from the sink he sees the mouse scampering to the radiator’s hole and rattles his jar of slugs after it menacingly. Dabs his eyes with the robe’s white hem. Lo, a deflated pack of Camels in the pocket well.

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There’s barking in the field along the highway. They’ve cornered something.

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Miss James?

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She’s startled but her shoulders drop to hide it.

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Good evening, Miss James. I just came to talk. To you.

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Of course. Come sit, Farley.

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She glides around the counter toward the pair of worn armchairs, though Farley Llewellyn remains straight as a lamp one step inside the motel’s screendoor. A low ceiling. This pale young man, a few years older than she. College graduate. A chemist, he’s said. His father the grocer. But with no business talking to her in the motel lobby past dark.

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You had any to eat?

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No, I can’t. Thank you.

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A visitor a few months now, since not long after Mama left in Mr. Weldon’s car. Farley came calling first to hear all Edina James could see about him, all the cards would tell. His eyes drift to the bakelite radio where the quiz questions are playing softly from Chicago. Borax, he says, as if shooting the thing dead. He’s correct.

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Not a gun, but paper glasses in his hand. One lens red the other blue. Miss James…

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His voice as high and slow as the man’s whose name she took.

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Let me tell you what I saw tonight. He sits the other side of the table lamp. His legs fold mechanically and he pushes the glasses to her with the nugget of cash. He nails are dirty and there are small burns on his hands, an anxious clicking behind his lips. Third Dimensional Murder, he says.

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But Becket finds smoking in the skunk’s reek he’s carried in none better than smoking in abject dark. He flicks the butt through the open window and clambers onto the fire escape with his blanket and his boots and shuts the sash as if to spare his hovel from himself and this world he’s ruined. The whole block ripe. Chance people astounded by it.

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Wrapped, a tamale, he lies flat on the irons and stills himself amid the sounds of Center City’s nightly capitulation.

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It’s wonderful, Miss James. And terrifying. The women were screaming. Absolutely terrified. He stifles a laugh and raises the paper glasses again. It’s called Third Dimensional Murder…

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You said. She closes her eyes as her mother would. His eagerness is palpable. Tell me about it, Farley.

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Farley Llewellyn relates an inane story of movie monsters, their onslaught rushed by his glee. The audience’s horrors he details are particular to the person. Beulah Cordes and Aline Kearney. Calvin Kilpatrick flailing his arms.

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…and they think it’s over, but the skeleton pulls off his skull… and it flies out at all of them, just yelling and screaming as the movie ends.

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Her eyes open. At some point her visitor has risen from the armchair. Their terror made you feel good?

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Outside the dogs have stopped.

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Oh, only what terror they deserve, Farley says. A quaver to it. He sits. I waited through the feature to watch it again at nine o’clock, and I stood at the exit down by the screen, so I could watch them be terrified with their glasses on, swatting at the dark. I had to come tell you. His hands adduct to his lap.

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You’ve burned yourself, there.

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Not badly.

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You been sleeping, Farley?

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Oh, I can’t, Miss James. Not much.

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Sorry to hear. It’s as it was then.

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Not altogether. I don’t wake up hollering like that anymore. Now it just starts while I’m lying there, he says. Wide awake.

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In the west a last siren throbs and recedes until there’s nothing but the hums and pecks of the window units floating about Becket like buoys. Bound by these flannel cerements, suspended three stories high in a web of rusted ironwork, he drifts in fantasia.

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Come a weer hour, a voice barks from The Parker’s upper decks and snaps him from his doze--this sharp malediction against God and all his animals. Becket’s bleary huffs are laughs. He practices better ones, sotto voce, until he’s dead asleep.