She Walks in Shadows (33 page)

“You can’t practice here,” the security guard said, after Circe’s wheelchair had gotten stuck in the door. “You’re not a student.”

Circe first stood up and got the chair out of the door jam. She then placed her fists on her hips and faced the woman in a pressed khaki uniform. Time had weathered Circe’s dark skin, so that she had permanent circles under her eyes and creased wrinkles streaking her face.

“I’m an employee here,” she said, indicating the ID around her neck. “I was a professor. In vocal training.”

“Are you on the staff now?”

“I’m retired,” Circe said. “Had a stroke couple of years back.”

“How sad,” the security guard said. “But if you want to practice here, you need to get a sticker on your ID, like everyone else.”

“Come on.” Circe pointed at the empty rooms. “No one is practicing here now. I just wanted to test out my vocal chords. The doctors say I need intellectual stimulation.”

The guard repeated herself and made it a point to help out Circe with her wheelchair. She grabbed the older woman’s arm.

Circe finally sat down, biting her lip. Visions of pigs and flashing, sting-angry red swirled around in her head, and her fingers crackled with energy.

“Could you wheel me to the bus stop?” she asked. “It’s such a long distance from here.”

In the old days, sting-angry would turn a foolish mortal into a pig. The lady had flicked her fingers several times, so the colors would fly out and drown men while they were eating, until their skin sagged and hung out to dry off round, stupid faces.

Then rocks crashed onto barren earth and exploded in various shades of orange, indigo and yellow. Sting-angry red concentrated in pink flesh, writhing against wilted bones and helpless eyes. Power trapped within a stupid form.

Wait, vengeance. Wait. Colors released soon.

Much later, Circe slipped into the auditorium office, and met with the graduate students there. They remembered her and gave her a sticker for her ID. It was a small, green sticker with the school year listed on it.

“You should practice on Fridays,” her old student Sylvie said. “That’s when the nice security guard Toby comes. He loves hearing people perform. All the newbie guards act more stuckup.”

“Must be part of their training,” Circe joked.

“Oh, yeah. They’re mainly night students who think they can get a degree by doing less work.” Sylvie scowled. “Usually a bunch of ghetto dudes who are compensating for something.”

“I took night classes,” Circe said. “When I first got married. That was the only way that I could get my degree, having to work another job.”

Sylvie immediately backtracked and apologized, but there was nothing to forgive. She had innocent eyes, despite her encounters with harsh reality and having to battle extreme stage fright. Circe had mentored Sylvie for two years.

She straightened up in her wheelchair. Her posture had always been good, even for a singer. She had never had intense back pains, not like her friends who spent their days sitting in front of computers.

“Do you think I could try out my voice on you?” she asked. “It’s been too long and I don’t want to go all the way back to the practice room.”

“Of course.” Sylvie stood back a few paces, to give her old teacher room.

Circe drew in a deep breath. She made sure that her diaphragm expanded and contracted; at least the stroke hadn’t affected that part of her body. Her throat throbbed with anticipation. She heard the accompaniment in her head, a gentle-but-fast piano tune:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion,

shout, O daughter of Jerusalem,

behold, thy King cometh unto thee.

She felt the years peel off her as if they were bits of old skin, the deeper that she dug into the tune. Her gray hair seemed to curl at the ends, as if she had just gotten a permanent. Circe hadn’t gone to a stylist since her stroke and kept her hair at a short, curly bob.

He is the righteous Saviour,

and He shall speak peace unto the heathen.

Sylvie watched as Circe managed to stand, so that she could give her lungs more air, the much-needed air that they deserved for doing a good job. Her voice sounded powerful against the still, stale air in the office, defiance against Grandmother Time and what lay beyond wrinkles and wheelchairs.

“Rejoice, rejoice,” she trilled, letting the notes sail up and down. “Rejoice, greatly.”

As she dived into the repeated phrases, about the King coming to Jerusalem, the linoleum floor seemed to harden into polished wood and the plain white walls fluttered into curtains. Circe was onstage, dressed in a wine-red dress and belting against an orchestra. There was one year when they had done an experimental song cycle based on a novel about ancient Greece and she had volunteered her services when the tenor had fallen ill.

Splatter splash, exile in Rome, wailing purple in mourning, the black in the water —

Circe stopped. She took a moment, to let her vision return to normal, and then sat back in her wheelchair. There was a heavy thud from that, as if she weighed five hundred pounds.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Sylvie gushed, after a few moments of silence. “How do you do it so effortlessly, remembering to have fun and all?”

“If I didn’t sing, I would die,” Circe responded, breathing in hard. “Making an effort is much less dire than testing my body, so I have to belt out when I can.”

She coughed a bit. Sylvie looked startled and then concerned.

“Are you okay, ma’am? Do you need help?”

“No,” Circe wheezed. She fumbled and found her inhaler. “Bad lungs, from years of smoking.”

“You smoked?” Sylvie sounded horrified. “But you’re a singer!”

“Tell me about it,” Circe wheezed, after she gave herself several puffs. “At the time, my voice wasn’t giving out, so I thought I’d be fine. It was a hard habit to kick, but I had to. I got pregnant.”

“That’s not what I meant. Your voice doesn’t sound strained,” Sylvie said. “I’ve heard smokers and usually, they’re fighting to breathe or sound scratchy. You don’t sound like that at all. You sound perfect.”

Circe gave a crooked smile. She heard the good intentions behind Sylvie’s words and her fingers remained still.

“I guess I was lucky.”

Evening faded into a rainbow of pain, of might. Mourning blue, to celebrate the return of a lady.

A certain apartment with yellow walls, peeling paint, and chipped glass. Plants dried into withering husks. Work uniforms rotted into torn threads.

A woman with a husky voice screamed. Her screams became higher-pitched as a beer bottle fell to the ground.

The neighbors heard the crash and ran to the door. Crashes and broken screams echoed against the walls, until the super came with a key. A beeping cellphone, the promise of sirens.

The open door revealed broken glass, spilled beer. A pig squealed within a pile of t-shirt and pajamas, tottering. Its flesh shriveled at one of the neighbors’ touch.

Sunday morning. Day of strolling to the park, drinking coffee and eating a slice of whole-wheat toast at a café. The doctors had said that caffeine helped with the aftereffects of stroke, so she made it a point to drink a cup a day.

Circe licked her fingers and turned a page of the newspaper, trying not to notice where she scorched the pages. The local opera company was having financial troubles, plagued by years of debt, a money trap of a theater that housed various pigeons and rats, and budget cuts from the city. Not to mention that sleazy investor who had embezzled funds meant to pay for the new makeup and wardrobe.

Buzz buzz, chalky yellow of betrayal, the timbre of sting-angry red against a black backdrop —

She closed her eyes. Circe had performed in that opera for about ten years, on and off, putting on makeup and belting out various solos and choirs. Several of her friends in the university orchestra played for the operas well, usually balancing sheet music and practice with crying babies and long commutes.

What’s happening to us?
She asked herself.
Why are we all getting old, losing our jobs, and having encounters with the Grim Reaper?

The opera didn’t deserve this crap. Everyone who belonged to it worked their butts off to make the shows work and to keep production on time. Now, new people were going to suffer the loss of potential careers.

She remembered one of the singers, an exchange student from Spain. Hector had been heartbroken because his girlfriend back home had attracted another boy’s attention and, to put it in layman’s terms, committed a form of adultery. It was a form of adultery because she and Hector hadn’t married, so she had committed no legal wrong. But in terms of moral wrongs, it had torn him. Circe had introduced Hector to REM in hopes of comforting him. The singer had then asked her out to dinner several weeks later.

That had been a strange year. One of her friends called it “blossoming into awesome.” Circe had been a gawky, myopic teenager with a slight belly, but that year, suddenly, guys looked at her and saw something prettier within it. Except she hadn’t felt prettier on the inside:

Go and catch a falling star, get with (misbehaving!) child a mandrake root, tell me where all past years are (in your pocket, milady), or who cleft the devil’s foot —

Circe started. The paper turned black beneath her fingertips. She took a deep breath and wiped her hands with a napkin.

That singer, well, she ought to look him up. It had been too long. From what she remembered, he had had a long career in Canada and then toured Europe before settling down with another local girl that had studied law. Why hadn’t she followed up with him?

The meteor. Crash, choke, swirl —

She took another rattling breath. No one could forget the meteor. She certainly hadn’t.

Circe finished her coffee. She left her usual tip for the waitress, who smiled at her and unfolded her wheelchair. Circe settled in, lost in memory.