Lone Star (35 page)

They didn't.

“Why is it so dark,” she whispered, almost rhetorically or inaudibly. She wasn't sure Johnny could hear her, though he was sitting right next to her, his bare arm pressed against her bare arm.

“It's cloudy,” he said. “We're not passing through any towns. There are no lights out in the forest, no roads, and no lights on the tracks.”

“But how can the train be moving if the power is down?”

“Diesel powers the train.”

“Doesn't it power the lights, too?”

“What did I tell you about Polish trains? It's a feast. Don't worry. The lights will come back on in a minute.”

She sat, the drunken jeers from next door getting so loud in the blackness that she became frightened. The children started to cry. They weren't next to Johnny anymore, but with their parents across the aisle. She could hear the priest muttering prayers in Polish. The drunks didn't seem afraid, just the opposite. “What are they yelling about?”

“They're trying to figure out if they're dreaming,” said Johnny. “Or if they're having a drunken blackout. Apparently they can't tell.”

They laughed, sang crazy loud Polish songs, broke things, dropped things. It was obnoxious and stupefying. How could this be allowed? The train continued to roll forward. There was no light of any kind.

She closed her eyes. It was black. She opened them. It was black. Closed, open, the world was free of all color.

On her lids were images of light, even through the fear.

“What are we going to do?” she whispered.

“We?” he whispered back. “You can't see light. You can only see what the light lights up.”

“Which is everything.”

“Not everything,” said Johnny.

Images of Riga. The rainbow-lit Old City, lovingly rebuilt, recreated brand new to look like the old. The blue roofs, the orange doors, the yellow window frames and sepia cobbles, the red tents of the men selling paintings in Livu Square, the lilac tents of the ice cream carts. The sun blinding everything into shade and white, and Johnny in the center, at the pinpoint of the kaleidoscope, in front of his microphone on a telescopic stand, mouth pressed against it (lucky microphone), eyes closed, gutbucket blues flying supercharged out of his throat, holding the note until Chloe felt it, telling her that all of love is forever and all of love is fleeting . . .

Eyes open or closed? She couldn't feel herself blink. Her mouth parted slightly to take in an inky breath. She reached out to touch his arm by her side, just to be sure of him, but it wasn't next to her anymore. His arm was behind her. She didn't feel his body turn, or even lean toward hers. She smelled his breath barely an instant before his open lips shivered like a tremor on her open lips. She gasped—into his mouth. His hand was in her hair. His tilted face was pressed against hers. He didn't let her take a breath, he kissed her for the length of the dream that was her life, all in that one ebony moment. He kissed her forever and not long enough, terrifyingly long (what if the lights came on what if everyone else could see what if everyone else could hear his mouth bruise hot against her lips what if they could hear her moan what if they could see the shadow of his face against her face what if what if what if what if), and anguishingly brief. Her hands trembled, her arms, her legs; her quivering back was slung low on the seat, her head was thrown back. She felt at any moment she was going to slide
down, onto her back, and he would fall on top of her, and crush her with his body (only if she was very, very lucky), with all t
he Poles, the children and the sick, the sinners and the saints, all manner of souls watching her.

He was first to pull away. The lights came on.

Or . . .

The lights came on. He was first to pull away.

She opened her eyes, so slowly, unwillingly waking in the winter dawn.

The noise from next door was insulting her senses, but it also made it difficult to speak, so Chloe didn't. She turned to the window, her hands shaking, her lips still wet, still parted. She clamped shut her mouth, clamped her hands into fists, and leaned against the glass. She was so hot. Drops of sweat streamed hot from her throat onto her breasts, her stiff nipples, down to her stomach. Her spine was wet with electric water. Everything on her was wrong and alive.

Maybe she had imagined it. What would it feel like if she had? Would it feel the same? It was so unexpected, so pulverizing. She didn't dare look his way, but from the corner of her half-blinded eye, she glimpsed him reading his survival manual. What did the book say about the kiss of life in an ice-cold space where everything was suspended without gravity? But she was both, floating and flying. And she wasn't ice-cold. She closed her eyes and imagined darkness.

For a long time Chloe didn't speak. The train lumbered on through a countryside she couldn't see. Inside, four people were sleeping, three were reading. The eighth had her face pressed to the window. This eighth person, a wraith of a girl, a ghost of the old Chloe, stared into the mystifying blackness thinking everything and nothing. She came here across the world to doom herself. Encore, encore! Was she an angel or a whore? Did she want to wrap herself in heavy cloth or rip the sheer blue cotton off her body? Go abroad, Chloe, and love a boy, not the one you said you loved, not the one you thought you
loved, the one who doesn't love you, but fly across the world to find another lover. In an epileptic tremble she bobbed with the train, in her pretend-penitent reverie entwined in his arms and legs, her hands on his bare back, in his black hair, swirling and swirling together to the murky watery bottom, both of them in a shipwreck.

After this train stops at Central Station in Warsaw, what happens next? Where was Blake to tell her? She and Johnny go together down the street, searching for the hostel, their bags in hand, like travelers, like lovers. And tomorrow? When the others come? Can she talk her way out of this one, see her way out, lie her way out? Can she turn her warm breasts away? Was she caught? And what if she wasn't? What was worse?

To not think, not feel, not be. That was worse.

Had his lips touched her? Encore, encore!

“Hannah is beautiful, isn't she?” Chloe said.

“That's what you're thinking about, Hannah?”

“Isn't she?”

“Maybe,” Johnny said, neutrally. “It doesn't matter.”

“Doesn't it?”

“She's blonde, she's tall, she's striking, yes,” he said. “But so what? Beneath the mask of her self-involved serenity is nothing but bitterness and boredom. She is frivolous. She is empty.”

Chloe disagreed. “No, not empty.” Why was she always defending her friends to him? One wasn't frivolous, one wasn't crabby, one did love her. “She is full of terrors like everybody else. She's trying to find her way, Johnny. Like you. Like me.”

He shook his head. “She doesn't know what she wants.”

“Do you know what you want?”

“Yes. Do you know what you want, Chloe Divine?” He lowered his voice an octave to rasp out her name. Otherwise nothing from their desultory words tells her if she dreamed the dream of his lips on her or lived it. She doesn't tell him what she wants. Because what she wants is the last ray of sun all gold on the white foamy water. A mad kiss on a red plate. His rough
fingers on her aching velvet skin. What if the boy you worship brings you a pitcher of lemonade? Would you drink it? How can you not?

I'm just frozen champagne bubbling and melting against his flame mouth, O Lord. Forgive me. There is a fine but wretched chance he did not touch me and will never touch me again, and clicking my little boots I'll be forced to walk away and live out the rest of my life haunted by what might have been, live out the rest of my life in the shadow of his streetlamp in the middle of pale night.

Chloe

On the outskirts of the Old Town in the center of Warsaw—the Old Town built in 1955 because the war that altered the world had leveled the old Old Town entire—there is a hostel nicer than the others, inasmuch as they could conclude when they read about it in Blake's indispensable guide to Poland. It stands on a quiet street two kilometers away from the Old Town. Not in a great central location, but cheap and clean. That was very important. They had booked two nights, reserving a room with four beds, a sink, and a bathroom down the hall, all for about twenty dollars a person, which was preferable to a hotel, which cost twice that. Of course a hotel would have had a shower in the room. They decided a private shower wasn't worth an extra hundred dollars a night. It was to this hostel that Johnny and Chloe arrived near midnight.

The desk manager, awakened and hostile, stood in his tatty robe behind the low counter, looking for her name in his book, in which row after row of names had been written out by a careless hand. That he found her name at all was a miracle. She was a day or two early, since they decided to cancel the travel to Gdansk. She could barely sweet-talk her way into the reservation. Beg, more like. The room was on the third floor. There was no elevator. He ordered them to keep it down as everyone else was
already asleep. What did he think they were going to be doing, and noisily, too?

Chloe didn't know what he meant by “everyone” because everyone she saw was wide awake and on the stairs and in the hallways, their doors flung open, smoke and smells emanating, the whole place like a foyer to a sewer.

“How can we stay here?” Johnny, the veteran of Daugavpils crack houses, asked about a three-star hostel in the capital of Poland.

“It's midnight. What do you see as our options?”

The room had four grungy beds, one in each corner, narrow like steamer trunks, the old mattresses bare and stained. The sheets, pillows, pillowcases, and blankets were folded in careful squares at the foot of each bed. The room was painted deep green with bright yellow trim. It had brown curtains and a warped wood floor. It was dark; three of the light bulbs were out, and one lamp cord was broken. The water didn't run into the sink. It didn't run at all. If it weren't so late, Chloe would have gone downstairs to complain. But she'd given up complaining for the night.

Johnny waited for her in the dirty pink corridor outside the bathroom. After escorting her back to the room, he told her to lock the door and not let anyone in. He took the key. She asked if he wanted her to wait for him in the corridor as he had waited for her. He half smiled. “What are you going to do, protect me, Chloe?” he said. Then he left.

Yes, she wanted to say. You should always protect the things you can't do without.

She made up her bed, next to one window, and then his bed, on the opposite wall. She sat on the bed with her hands folded. She sat and sat, and when she grew so tired that she couldn't sit anymore, she put down her head, for just a minute. The bed was hard, the pillow hard. She wondered if he was all right, but was too frightened to go outside to check. The trains and the drunk men, the noisy children and the violent beggars, the green weed
and the stark absence of her closest friends, it all intruded into the space where there should have been nothing but candlelight and ripe peaches. She waited and waited. She fell asleep.

She woke up in the middle of the night. She bolted up in bed, because she heard a man screaming in the corridor, walking up and down banging on all the doors. She yelped like a mouse, and then adjusted to the night and saw Johnny in his bed, under the sheet, sleeping. She didn't know how he could be sleeping because the man outside was raging as if everyone was about to die. Johnny, she whispered. Johnny, are you awake? He had propped two chairs against the door, one under the handle, one to the side. She crawled out of bed, because the man was now banging on their door, shrieking in Polish. She got so scared she started to cry. Johnny, Johnny. Kneeling by his low bed, she shook him gently. He didn't stir. In a few minutes the man's outraged voice was answered with another loud voice, then two more, and then the man stopped banging on their door, and was dragged away, shrieking. The noise died down. It was four in the morning. Everyone else had gone back to sleep, but Chloe could not. She sat by Johnny's side, not knowing what to do, and then crept into his tiny bed and squeezed in on her side in front of him. He formed a big C and she a little c. She lay awake, her back pressed against his sleeping inanimate front. He never woke up. And she never went to sleep.

Johnny, she whispered. Johnny.

He opened his eyes, sat up instantly, and smiled at her. They were both in his narrow bed. “Good morning,” he said. “Why didn't you wake me when you climbed in?”

“I tried,” Chloe said. “How did you not hear? There was a horrible hysteric outside our door in the middle of the night.”

“Chloe, if I woke up every time an addict yelled in the corridor, I'd be Al Herpin, the man who never slept, wouldn't I?”

“I don't know. Would you? I didn't get any sleep.”

He glanced at his watch. “It's seven. Time to go.” Still wearing yesterday's clothes, he jumped up. “I have to go get Emil and the tour van. I'm meeting my group at nine.”

Slowly she sat up, swooned, and bobbed back down again. “I feel run over,” she said. “Like I've been in an accident and my head came off and someone put it back wrong.”

He laughed. He was refreshed, clear eyed, full of energy. He leaned over her.

“I'm a very sound sleeper,” he said.

“Um, I noticed. Why was that man shrieking?”

“Someone probably pinched his stash. He was looking to knife that someone.”

“So why was he banging on
our
door?”

“I don't know. I was sleeping.” He was still by her side. He touched her face with the back of his fingers. “Can you get up? We have to get going. I hope you're a morning person. Otherwise you and I can never be.”

What a funny, tear-inducing thing to say. “Johnny, don't joke. I barely got five minutes of sleep. I can't go anywhere.”

“You got some sleep,” he said. “Because when I came back, you were out.”

“You were gone forever.”

“Five minutes. And you were out.”

“Well, those were the only five minutes I got.”

“Chloe, you have to come with me,” he said. “You can't stay here by yourself.”

“I'm just going to sleep.”

“I've slept in alleys that were safer than this place. You'll be robbed. Or worse.”

She shook her head. “Nothing could be worse than going without sleep. I'll go with you tomorrow. I can't today. Look at me.”

“I'm looking.”

“So stay with me,” she said, extra quiet.

He caressed her face. “I would. But I can't. I have five people waiting for me to tell them about death. And I've got a guy who needs to get paid for a van rental. We have to find you another place to stay.”

“I can't. We prepaid.”

“Yeah, that desk guy didn't seem like the type to offer refunds. Oh well. Forget about the money. Money is paper. Your safety is paramount. Let's jet. I'll take you to another place, but we have to hurry.”

“What about Blake and Hannah and Mason?”

“This room is paid for. And I don't know the address of the place I'm taking you. I just know where it is. In the afternoon, when you've had some rest, you can come back here and leave a new address with the manager.”

“Where am I going?”

“Castle Inn.”

“Is it a hotel or a hostel?”

“A hotel,” he said, smiling. “Funny how one letter makes
all
the difference. Right in the Old Town, near the River Vistula and the Royal Castle. You want to see a castle, don't you, princess? Quick, and I'll take you there.”

Blake

After a trip that was torture, after a terrible, terrifying, cramped, hungry, eighteen-hour hell ride with three changes and numerous delays, we arrived in Warsaw at almost midnight only to discover that Chloe wasn't where she was supposed to be.

The hostel looked a lot less attractive than it did in the photos, as if a little bait and switch was going on, and when we knocked, no one opened the firmly locked door for nearly ten minutes. When a half-asleep gentleman in a robe finally turned the lock, we were ready to give up.

“You have reservation?” he barked. “Why does everyone come at such hours?”

“This is when the train from Vilnius gets in,” I said.

“I don't care,” he said. “What name reservation?”

I gave him Chloe's.

“Ah, yes. Khloya Deveeny.”

“Chloe. Divine.”

“Room on third floor. You are paid until tomorrow, but you have to leave by ten.”

“Do you have a key?”

“I gave key to her,” he said.

“Her who?”

“Khloya.”

“Is she upstairs?”

“I don't know where she is,” he replied. “I have one key to room, I gave it her. The rest I don't know.”

“She's probably in the room, bro,” Mason said. “It's late.”

“She not upstairs,” said the manager. “She left this morning. Not come back all day.”

“I thought you said you didn't know where she was?”

“I made mistake.”

“She left this morning?”

“Yes. With suitcase.”

“With suitcase?”

“Why you repeat what I say? Yes. Left. This morning. With suitcase. And with man with guitar.”

Mason and I exchanged a look, his quizzical, mine murderous.

“Where did they go?” Hannah asked.

“Miss, I not know nothing. I give key, they go to sleep, or whatever. This morning, they come down with suitcase, and they not come back.”

“Are you sure?” It was his
whatever
I found especially ill-mannered.

“This my place. You think I not know who come and go?”

Hannah made exhausted, unhappy noises. “Can you just let us into the room, please?”

The manager made exhausted, unhappy noises. “Your
names are on reservation, otherwise I no let you upstairs, you understand?”

Really, asshole? I wanted to say. This is your great and proud commitment to the safety and security of your guests? Was Johnny Rainbow's name on the reservation? Yet you let him upstairs. Explain that, why don't you? Elaborate on that pinochle, if you will.

“Thank you so much for your consideration,” is what I said.

He gave me a key off his master ring, but would not walk us upstairs. We all went, me pulling my suitcase and Hannah's, and Mason helping her up three flights of shabby, stinking stairs.

I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't this. A dank, square room with a bed in each corner, two of them made, two of them with their mattresses still exposed. There was no sign of Chloe, no sign of Johnny, the window was closed, and it was suffocatingly stuffy. I traipsed downstairs to give the manager back his key.

“You really don't know where they went?” I asked.

“You think I lie to you before? If I know, I tell you. I don't know. Give me key. I have to go to bed.”

Slowly I made my way upstairs. Inside the room, there was a round table with two chairs. The other two chairs had been dragged and left on either side of the doorway. I stared at them, trying to figure out why they would be there.

“Blake,” Hannah said, “are you going to stand there and analyze the room or are you going to help me push our beds together? I can't seem to move them. They're stuck or something.”

I went to help her. The beds were stuck. I felt around on the floor by one of the legs.

“The beds are bolted to the floor, Hannah,” I said.

She was putting the pillowcases on and didn't turn around. “I don't think we can both sleep in this bed, Blakie,” she said. “It's too narrow.”

It did look like half of a twin bed.

“It's fine,” I said, suppressing a small sigh. “Don't worry about me. I'll sort myself out.” I hoped that was true.

Hannah went out to use the bathroom. Mason and I followed her down the hall like dogs. The hallway smelled worse than the one in Daugavpils, and I didn't think that was possible.

“I know you're worried, dude,” Mason said, “but it's okay.” He smiled. “You saw the two made-up beds. They're as far apart as they can be.”

“Well, they are
bolted
into the floor,” I said. My back was to the wall. I didn't look at my brother. “And you're the one who needs to be worried about
that
part, not me. What I'm worried about is more obvious.”

“Like?”

“Where the fuck are they?”

That Mason had no answer to.

“Exactly.”

“Don't get so worked up. There's a good explanation. You'll see.”