Radiant Days (15 page)

“That was beautiful.”

Arthur started as though I’d awakened him; turned and nodded. Carefully, he folded the pages and put them back into his coat. “The poems I’m working on now are better. These are…” He paused, frowning. “Old-fashioned. Pretty words and pictures. People want poetry to be a nursemaid. I want to be a murderer and a thief. Art should be like this—” He took my hand, pointing at the fresh scab where I’d cut myself on the fish-bone key. “It should be ugly, and hurt so you can feel it. That’s what makes it powerful.”

I nodded. “That’s what I think! Clea said I need to learn the rules before I break them, but I think that’s total bullshit. That’s what my tag means—radiant days. Because right now I’m burning and alive, and I don’t even fucking know if I’ll be here tomorrow. Nobody does. I could die tonight. So I only have this one day to paint, all these radiant days, and when I’m gone my tag will still be there, and my paintings….”

My voice died. I had a flash of Errol running down Michigan Avenue with my bag, of the house at Perry Street reduced to a pile of rubble by a wrecking ball, of the D.C. vandal squad sandblasting graffiti from every brick wall in the city. I shook my
head, and said, “It doesn’t even matter if my paintings are there. The only thing that matters is that I do the work
today
. That’s the only thing I have.”

“Exactly.” Arthur looked at me, his eyes shining. “Where’s that key?”

I pulled it from my pocket and dropped it into his open palm. Before I could stop him, he jabbed one of the silver prongs into the ball of his thumb. He stared as a drop of blood welled, looked at me, and said, “Now you.”

I hesitated, then took it and dug the prong into the scab. It felt as though I’d pressed a hot match to my skin. I gasped, dropping the key. Arthur retrieved it, then extended a hand filigreed with blood. He pressed his palm against mine, and I looked down to see dark petals blooming across my hand.

“There,” said Arthur. His face was flushed. “Do you know what Plato said? In the beginning there weren’t two sexes. There were three: man, woman, androgyne. And each one of them had four legs, not two. Man is child of the sun, woman is child of the earth. But the third sex are people like us, and we are children of the moon.

“The three sexes were so strong that the gods cut them in half. So now each person spends his entire life looking for the missing part. That’s why men bed so many women, and why women are never happy once they marry just one man.”

“What about the androgynes?”

“They are the ones who can never be satisfied,” said Arthur softly. “Because when one of them finds their missing half, they
realize that their experience has nothing to do with what goes on between a man and woman. Their yearning is so powerful that no one else can ever understand it. Their souls mingle, and even if their bodies can never again become whole, their souls form one being, and that being can never be destroyed.”

He fell silent. Both of us turned to stare at the sky, the moon barely visible now above trees and rooftops.

“Radiant days,” said Arthur at last. “And what is this? A radiant night, because our souls set it on fire.”

He drew away from me, laughing, and kicked a plastic chair so it flew across the courtyard and crashed into the wall. Seconds later a light flicked on in the next building. An angry voice called down from another window.

“Time to move,” I said.

Arthur grinned and pointed into the shadows. “After you.”

Washington, D.C.

OCTOBER 9, 1978

THE ALLEY WOUND
through a labyrinth of backyards and cobblestoned streets before dumping us back onto M Street, down where the road begins its long curve toward Key Bridge. There was hardly any traffic, just a few cars, and no people except for a handful of figures who stood huddled on the sidewalk a few blocks ahead of us. I was reluctant to pass them, but when I glanced back, the empty black expanse of M Street seemed even more forbidding. I heard the clock from Georgetown University chime once—midnight had passed and I’d missed it. I zipped my bomber jacket and tugged the fur collar around my ears, for good measure looped my arm through Arthur’s.

“Stay with me,” I said. “Don’t say anything. Just try to act normal.”

“What? Like you?”

I glared at him, and he shut up.

We hurried on, slowing as we approached the half dozen
people gathered around a streetlamp. Beneath it, a man sat on a dirty white plastic bucket, flanked by a fishing rod and an open guitar case. He was hunched over an acoustic guitar, wearing the same grimy clothes as when I’d seen him that morning.

I halted. “That’s Ted.”

“That’s the man I saw last night.” Arthur stopped, frowning. “The tramp. The one who told me to look for the lockhouse.”

“That’s exactly what he said to me.”

We stared at each other, then walked over to the guitar case. A second plastic bucket stood beside it, three-quarters full of water. Two dark shapes moved slowly inside, like a living yin-yang symbol, their scales glittering dull gold.

“Sorry, kids,” Ted announced in his gravelly voice. “Technical difficulties, be another minute here.”

The body of the guitar had been repaired with duct tape. Ted tuned it, grimacing, reached for an open bottle of beer, and took a swig.

“That’s Ted Kampfert,” someone whispered. I looked up to see a guy with long hair and wire-rimmed glasses, his arm around a girl wearing a red peacoat. “Know who he is?”

“That guy from the Deadly Rays.”

Her boyfriend nodded. “I saw them at the Ontario a few years ago. They were incredible.”

“He looks bad,” said the girl.

The guy squinted, mimicking Ted’s expression. “The years have not been kind to him,” he said in a mock-serious tone, and they both laughed.

“Look at him.” Arthur nudged me. “He’s a troubadour.”

I didn’t think so. Ted looked like what he was, a homeless man too drunk to stand. Even sitting, he seemed to be having trouble staying upright. His head was bowed so you could see that fringe of gray hair, his badly sunburned scalp. He tapped the body of the guitar with scarred, blackened fingers, and started to play without a word. Everyone fell silent, and he began to sing.

His voice was as hoarse and raspy as his speaking voice, but he didn’t sound anything like a middle-aged white man. He sang like an old black man, like someone so ancient it was incredible he still had a voice to sing at all. I couldn’t make out the words: something about a man on a river.

But it was beautiful—astonishingly beautiful—and also strange, as though a crow opened its beak to sing like a mockingbird. I’d never heard anything like it—that croaking voice and battered face, the scarred fingers dancing across a guitar bandaged with duct tape. The everyday world fell away like torn sails cut from a shipwreck, and suddenly the ship burst free and I gasped, the cold wind bearing the scent of the sea, of limes, of spilled wine. There was an endless moment when the final notes hung in the air before fading into the night. Then people began to clap and whistle and yell uproariously.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” Ted growled without looking up. “You’re a lovely audience.”

He finished his beer and tuned his guitar again, tipping his head to peer into the little crowd. I stepped off to one side, shy at the thought of being recognized.

Yet he looked past everyone and gazed at me as though the two of us were alone in a small room. He didn’t smile or wink, or act surprised. He just stared, his expression impossible to read. Before I could move away again, he rasped, “This is a song for a little friend of mine I just met.”

People looked around to see who he was talking about. Arthur pulled me to his side, his heavy overcoat enfolded about us. The song was by Bob Dylan, the one about the girl who’s an artist; Ted sang it with his head bowed, his expression invisible from where I stood.

Yet even if he hadn’t said a word, I would have known the song was for me—a gift, like the way he’d pointed at the heron the previous morning and said,
Lookit that
. I couldn’t make out all the words. I felt on the verge of sleep, and more awake than in my entire life. Then he sang the refrain, and I remembered what he’d told me when we first met.

You can’t look back, Little Fly. You lose everything if you look back.

He lifted his face to the night, to where the moon hung above the Potomac, and squeezed his eyes closed, his voice breaking, then turned to stare at me again. A flash of greenish light slid across his eyes, like reflected lightning; but from where?

Because the flare wasn’t in his eyes. It was
behind
them, as though Ted’s face were a mask. For a fraction of a second someone else had gazed at me, staring through Ted’s eyes as if they were knotholes in a fence—someone whose eyes were green, not topaz. I shivered uncontrollably as Ted’s voice swelled to fill the air above the sidewalk, above the street, drowning out every
other sound—traffic on Key Bridge, distant voices, the ceaseless churning of the Potomac River.

The guitar fell still. There was nothing but a raw wild voice that trembled at the edge of a scream, and at last died away. I heard the people around me gasp. A girl was crying, and a man repeated a woman’s name in a choked voice.

Then everyone went crazy, whoops and whistles as Ted nodded, unsmiling.

“I didn’t write that song,” he said. “But I taught the guy who did.”

People laughed. They kept on clapping and calling out, but Ted just sat there. Finally he picked up a bottle in a brown paper bag. He took a long swallow, wiped his face with his sleeve then drank some more.

The crowd broke up. People stepped forward to toss money into the open guitar case. A few stopped to thank Ted. The couple beside me linked arms, and the guy turned toward the street. His girlfriend asked, “Aren’t you going to give him something?”

“He’ll just buy drugs or beer with it.”

“So? That’s what
you
do.”

She pulled away and dropped a handful of bills into the guitar case.

“Thank you. That was beautiful,” she said, and returned to her boyfriend.

A middle-aged woman walked up to Ted. She wore a trench coat with an Hermès scarf and expensive boots, and carried a large handbag.

“I saw you years ago, in New York. It was the best show I ever
saw. I met my husband there.” She reached into the bag, pulled out a wallet, and handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “Thank you.”

Ted mumbled and lit a cigarette. “You still married?”

The woman laughed. “No. But that wasn’t your fault.”

As she strode off, Arthur grasped my arm. “We need to talk to him. About what’s happened—to the time, and the moon … to the world.”

“Nothing’s happened to the world,” I said.

But I didn’t believe that was true. I wasn’t sure what had changed—if Arthur’s presence had somehow altered the sidewalks and back alleys around us, the way his poem had shaken something loose inside of me, something I couldn’t articulate and maybe couldn’t even paint: not so much a different way of seeing the world as a different way of
feeling
it. Maybe because when I was with him, I didn’t need to explain who I was; maybe because he seemed even more out of place in the streets of Georgetown than I was. With him, I felt the way I did when I gazed at
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
—as though the world held a secret that I was on the verge of discovering.

I had never felt any real desire for a boy before—in a perverse way, I had never even felt desire for Clea, only the obsessive need to paint her—and now it wasn’t so much that I wanted to be with Arthur. I wanted to
be
him, to see things the way he did, as though every traffic light and discarded syringe or empty aerosol can held a mystery inside it.

“You’re lying,” said Arthur. He pulled me until my face was inches from his. “You know it’s changed. Because
I’m
in it, and
that means nothing can ever be the same. Even if I go back to Charleville or Charleroi—even after I get back to Paris, it will all be different.
You
will be different—you already are.”

He took my hand, the one that had been pierced by the fish-bone key, and interlaced his fingers with mine. “Whatever is broken is beauty, for you and me; whatever is scarred. That’s how this world was made, by destroying the old one. It scares you, doesn’t it, this new world?”

I shivered, unnerved that he read my thoughts. “It’s not new to me.”

Arthur’s pale eyes glimmered. “Oh, yes it is. And
he
knows how it happened.”

He pointed across the street. Ted stumbled along the sidewalk, his guitar case in one hand, plastic bucket in the other, fishing rod beneath his arm.

“Come on,” said Arthur.

I hesitated, then followed him. We caught up with Ted as he turned down a side road toward the canal.

“Wait!” I yelled. Arthur grabbed at Ted’s coat, but Ted angrily pushed him away, shaking his guitar case threateningly. He seemed drunk and also crazed, eyes swollen and his face beet red.

“Hey, sorry,” I said, and backed off. As I did, Ted’s gaze settled on me, and he seemed to relax.