The Folk Of The Air Read online

  “What? I don’t know. Nine, ten.”

  “That was yesterday,” Farrell said. “Nine windows yesterday, eleven tonight. They never come out the same way twice.”

  Ben stared at him for a moment, then turned away to study the house again. Farrell said, “There are usually more of them at night. I’m not sure why that is.”

  “Eleven,” Ben said. “Eleven windows, counting that halfsort of thing in the pantry.” He smiled at Farrell, opening the car door. He said, “At my house, when we were kids. You remember how many times you fell down those last few stairs into the basement? All those years, and you never could keep track, you just kept stepping right off into space. Eleven windows, Joe.”

  He was halfway to the house before Farrell had even gotten out of the car. The front door opened for him, though no one was standing there. Farrell called loudly, following him, “They move around a little, too. Just a bit, but it’s unsettling.” Ben went on into the house without turning. The warm yellow light curled around him and lapped him up and swallowed him.

  Chapter 4

  He told Sia a bout Crawford Grant a few evenings later, while he was practicing. Ben was away at a meeting of the faculty senate. She sat in a chair with an old newspaper in her lap, carving a block of some dark wood into the shape of a woman. “I have heard of him,” she said. “He sounds like half my clients—they just know they would surely have been happy in some other time, some other civilization. They play endlessly with the stars, the Tarot, the ouija board, to find their real home. Play that one I like again.”

  Farrell retuned the lute and struck into the Le Roy galliard that was her current favorite. He loved practicing in the living room; the high ceiling did not dilute the sound, nor the small rugs absorb it, and the notes came out as hard and light as arrowheads. Sia said, “The displaced ones, they are mostly who come to see me. You can be uprooted from imaginary places too, you know.”

  The galliard, being played too fast, lost its center of gravity and flapped for balance like a child running downhill. Farrell started over. Sia did not look up from her work, but Farrell was coming to believe that her senses were not as stationary and specialized as those of other people. Her living hair watched his hands moving on the lute, if her head was bent away from him; he suspected that the brown, surprisingly delicate wrist that drove the X-Acto knife over wood as if she were caressing a child would have done as well. Thinking about that, he let the Le Roy drift to pieces again and irritably slapped the lute silent.

  When she raised her head, he expected her to ask if she were distracting him; but she said only, “There is something wrong with your music.”

  “I missed practicing last night. You lay off even a day with this kind of tune, and it shows right away.”

  Sia shook her head. “I didn’t mean that. Your music is beautiful, but it has no place, it belongs nowhere.” Farrell could feel his face stiffening and flushing even before she said, “Your music is like you, Joe.”

  He made a joke of it. He said, “Well, lute music belongs wherever the acoustics are good. I always keep that in mind as I go along.”

  She bowed over the carving again, but she was smiling, showing her neat white teeth with the little spaces in between. “Yes,” she said, “yes, you are a master at living in other people’s houses.” Farrell had been trying to float the galliard off the rocks; now he stopped playing for a third time. Sia said, “It is not such a bad thing. It is really quite lovely to see, like a hermit crab fitting himself into an empty shell. You can match yourself to any surrounding.”

  “That’s chameleons,” Farrell said. He fussed with the lute, running a cloth under the strings to dust the fingerboard, squinting as he checked the tied gut frets. The lute whispered in his hands, answering his anger.

  Sia began to laugh. “But you are so good about it all.” The knife never stopped its bright stroking. “The way you play in the evenings, every night, after you have washed the dishes. We would have to break your arms to keep you from doing the dishes. And the way you always bring home something extra on Thursday or Friday—wine, ice cream, cheese, pâté. Never cherries, not since the first time when I said they made my mouth hurt. You remember everything like that.”

  He stood up, but she made him sit again by moving her head. She said, “Oh, Joe, I don’t mean to confuse you. There is nothing gone wrong with your radar; you are still perfectly welcome here for as long as you like.” She had stopped laughing, but amusement continued to illuminate her voice, setting the words winking at each other. “You are good for Ben, and I like you; and in three weeks I am already in the habit of your little gifts and your music every evening. In another week you will have become indispensable.”

  Farrell said, “I should have a place by the middle of the month. There’s a man supposed to call me at work tomorrow.” There came a knocking, heavy and slow; it had a dull power behind it that made the whole house jar and ache. Sia went to the door.

  The carving was of a woman growing on a tree like some lovely gall. She was free of the trunk from shoulders to thighs, and one knee was bent so that only her toes touched the tree; but her hair had just begun to emerge, and her hands still trailed in the wood to the wrists. Farrell fancied that he could see them, bending away as if they were shining through water. The woman had no eyes.

  Farrell put the carving down as Sia came back, followed by a short man in a dirty overcoat. She passed the doorway quickly, pausing only to say, “Tell Ben I am with a client.” Her face was flushed and angry; it made her look young. The man peered into the room and flinched from the sight of him, from the sight of everything, as Farrell had once seen a hospital patient recoil, one who had been so badly burned that the least stirring of the air around her was a firestorm. The man was no taller than Sia, but his shoulders were almost grotesquely wide and thick, and he walked with an awkward, flat-footed stamp, like a hawk on the ground. Farrell had a glimpse of an overshot, downturning mouth under a stiff yellow moustache, of pale reddish skin, and of small yellow eyes vague with terror.

  The Le Roy was an unsalvageable shambles by now, and the Robinson fantasia that Farrell tried next came out equally as muddy. He gave up on tunes for the evening and went back to sixteenth-century finger exercises. They gave him the comfort of doing something fluently and room to think about the short man and the other frightened people who came to visit Sia.

  She always referred to them as her clients—there was no surer way to anger her than by calling them patients. Farrell had rather expected them all to be pouty undergraduates, but they turned out to range from lawyers to parking-lot attendants, from a dance instructor to a paramedic to a retired policeman. A few seemed almost as withdrawn as Suzy McManus; most passed Farrell on the stair in a smiling frenzy of control. The night visit was in itself no surprise; Sia kept office hours of a sort, but Farrell had quickly grown used to the voices in the next room, crossing each other from all sides of his sleep—Sia talking in her voice that always made him dream of the ocean, the seabird misery of the travel agent, and the headwaiter’s hoarse complaining. Farrell could tell them apart in his sleep, by sound, if not by sorrow.

  Now, plinking his thirds and fifths and listening to the sound of the yellow-eyed man’s voice, he knew that he had never heard it before. It was deep and slow, almost drawling, and it spoke English with a sprung, halting rhythm that put a dance step in the middle of the few recognizable words and made them stumble over weak vowels at the end. And Sia’s voice, when she answered was full of the same limping music, as powerfully soothing as the man’s was fear-tattered, but no more comprehensible to Farrell, nor less disquieting. He changed his mind about tunes, and began on Mounsiers Almaine as brightly as he could; but the lute voice in his lap sounded to him now like a third stranger singing upstairs.

  From that evening, he gave up actively looking for a place of his own. He began to pay for his board, inventing an amusing new name and reason for the payment each week; and he took over, little by l
ittle, such chores as walking Briseis in the evening. The Alsatian had fallen distractedly in love with him and would sleep nowhere else but across his feet. He continued to bring home imported delicacies around the end of the week, to cook dinners occasionally and swim with Ben, and to stay out of the way with a gracefulness that made Sia smile. At night he helped Ben massacre slugs and snails in the garden, convinced that he could hear the windows snickering behind him as they winked on and off. The house itself increasingly lured and alarmed him; certain small rooms upstairs also seemed to come and go entirely as they pleased, and he hung his clothes and stacked clean sheets in closets that never stayed quite the same size. He told himself that he was overimaginative and needed glasses, both of which were true. He never saw the yellow-eyed man again.

  Now and then he still made a telephone call, or put in a few Saturday hours driving in Madame Schumann-Heink to investigate any advertisements that seemed safely out of the question. He no longer spent his free time studying bulletin boards in shopping centers and coffeehouses, but usually let himself be drawn up to Parnell Street, near the campus, where the sidewalks all but met, looping out in cake-icing swirls to protect fragile shade trees—trees had right of way in Avicenna—and constricting traffic to a single furious lane. There he sat outside a cavernous place called the South Forty, drinking bowls of caffe latte and watching to see whether the costumes were ever coming back.

  Farrell had last lived in Avicenna during a time of halfwit marvels; a short-lived season when all imaginings were amill in the streets, wheeling and shrilling and rolling by like constellations. The country girls and the mountain men, the Chakas and Murietas and the innumerable starveling Christs, the double-breasted Cagneys and booted McQueens, the zombies and Rasputins, the pirates, the lamas, the Commanches—they were mostly gone now, leaving behind them, as far as he could see, only a lot of shaggy-styled businessmen, a lot of children named Cosmos and Startraveler, and the occasional clutch of bald, pale, pimply devotees in robes the color of canned tuna. Farrell missed costumes. He had enjoyed playing for them, whatever they concealed.

  The strange part is, they were forever running around yelling at people to get naked, to strip off their masks and let the sunshine in on their most secret faces, their true and deadly dangerous and lovely selves. Not me, boy—the more costumes, the better, you want my opinion. Masks on top of masks, images like layers of winter underwear, that’s more like it. Costumes brighten the air, and they still let you get your practicing done. Naked people don’t do either one, hardly ever.

  The day that he quit his job at Thumper’s—early spring and a new entree called Hippety Haunches proving an irresistible combination—Farrell spent looking desultorily for construction work and for someone who might be able to build a wooden case for the lute. By five o’clock he had come conditionally to terms with a cheerful Bengali cabinetmaker and he was feeling lazily adventurous and pleased with himself when he wandered down to the South Forty for coffee and baklava, a Holborne tune he had never been able to finger correctly suddenly beginning to explain itself to him.

  There never were any empty tables at this time of day. He sat at a table near the door, next to a young man wearing white chinos, Hush-Puppies, and a purple shirt with a map of the Hawaiian islands on it. The sky was full of little shadow-bellied clouds, but the air was honey-warm and seemed to have golden bubbles in it, like honey; and everyone walking on Parnell, from the backpacking Amazons to the tattooed, expectant motorcyclists, moved as lingeringly as if they were journeying through honey, in that hour.

  The young man in the Hawaiian shirt had not even turned his head when Farrell sat down at his table; but when Farrell went inside and returned with a glass of water, the young man looked sharply round at him, saying in a hoarse Kentucky voice, “I hope you aren’t planning on drinking that water.” His square, lumpy face was ribbed lightly with acne scars.

  “As a matter of fact, I was,” Farrell said. “Got some baklava stuck in my throat.”

  The young man shook his head violently and actually moved the glass away from Farrell. “Don’t you do it, sir. That water is poison. That water is nothing but plain poison.”

  I still pick them out, Farrell thought. That hasn’t changed, anyway. There could be one Ancient Mariner on the 747, and I’d sit down by him four out of five times, by independent laboratory test. He said “Oh, I know that, but everything’s poison these days. I surrendered way back when they were just painting the oranges.”

  “No, don’t give up,” the young man said earnestly. “Look, when you want some water, I’ll tell you the best place to go to. Inverness.”

  He sat back loosely and grinned with freckled teeth. Farrell nodded, gazing straight away over the young man’s shoulder. My eyes get me into trouble. Look directly at this one and he’ll follow me forever, nagging me about loving all creatures great and small. But he said, “Inverness. Yeah, I’ve heard that’s good water around Inverness.”

  “Go up there all the time,” the young man said. “Gilroy too. Gilroy’s not as good as Inverness, but it’s all right. And Arnold. There’s a little town called Arnold, they’ve got great water, better than Gilroy.” His eyes were dark blue, unnervingly tranquil and benign.

  For the first time Farrell noticed the empty glass on the young man’s side of the table. He raised his eyebrows at it, but the other only smiled more candidly than ever. “I didn’t drink any water out of that. You look and you’ll see it’s dry. I just come here for the glasses.”

  He looked warily to left and right; then, with a clumsy slapping motion, he swept the glass off the table. Farrell heard it break, not on asphalt but on other glass. He glanced down to see a wrinkled paper shopping bag squatting openmouthed by the young man’s foot. In the sunlight the gleaming curved fragments were heaped as close and as brightly as snow. The young man said, “See, I eat glass. I’ll eat all the glass there in two days, maybe three days.”

  Two feet away from them, three children were haggling loudly over the price of a drug designed to sedate the larger carnivores. A white man and a black woman, both middleaged, strolled very slowly by, formally arm-in-arm, nodding slightly to acquaintances. Farrell saw them on Parnell every day, invariably dressed alike, whether in frayed suits of red velvet or in bib overalls faded to the color of nursing-home mattresses. He knew them to be direly poor and mad; and yet each afternoon at this time, the man’s pace and manner reclad him in the grandly perilous dignity of an iceberg, a rhinoceros, while the black woman carried herself as if she were the swaying, murmuring clapper of a bell of crinoline and taffeta. At the table just behind Farrell, several Iranian students were beginning to hit each other.

  “This place has the worst water in Avicenna and the best kind of glass,” the young man said. “Funny, but that’s how it is. Real quality glass.”

  Farrell cleared his throat. “You know, I really wouldn’t eat all that glass. I really don’t think you should.”

  The young man said, “I been struck by lightning two times.” Farrell looked up and down Parnell, wishing with a sudden aching fierceness to see someone he knew coming along. “Once in the back, and once right in the back of the head,” the young man said. “Two times.” He was leaning across the table again, his meaty breath damp on Farrell’s cheek. “That’s why I eat glass. Good glass, colored glass a lot, like wine bottles. Desert glass, them old mason jars been out in the sun for years and years. I eat all that stuff.”

  The mention of wine bottles reminded Farrell that it was Thursday, his usual day to pick up some small dinner present for Ben and Sia. He scraped his chair, mentally choreographing his flight to clear sidewalk: a buttonhook around the Iranians to cut between the regular Rastafarian debating society and two women playing Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary on musical saws. Vaguely he thought that it might be useful to start wearing a hat or carrying something like a portfolio. You put it on the table when you sit down, and when you pick it up even the Ancient Mariner knows you have to go. He lo
oked along Parnell once more, yearning angrily past the street merchants, the record shops and the tiny bead-curtained restaurants down to where the medical office complexes abruptly began. I’m lonely, he thought, this nut’s made me lonely. What a dumb thing.

  The young man said against his face, “And when I’m all full of glass, right up full, and it’s all in my bloodstream and my bones and in my brain, and I go somewhere it’s dark, in a closet or somewhere, how I’ll shine! I’ll be like one of them pictures you make with little bits of colored stones, tiles, I don’t know what they call them—”

  “Mosaic,” Farrell said automatically. Then Julie Tanikawa drove her motorcycle slowly past the South Forty, and Farrell got up and went after her without a word, bumping into tables.

  Traffic was backed up for several blocks, as always on Parnell in the late afternoon, and the huge black BSA was barely moving at a walking pace. Farrell plowed into the street like a machine himself, bulldozer-blind and deaf to everything that was not Julie. On his way to her, he knocked a board covered with copper brooches out of the hands of a hobbitish young couple, caromed unaware off a pushcart selling hot soft pretzels, and charged straight through an incipient religious conversion. It never occurred to him to call her name.

  The BSA was actually at a standstill when he reached it, Julie having braked for a covey of sign carriers who appeared to be picketing a speed bump. Farrell swung his leg over the bike, sat down behind her and put his hands lightly on her waist. “Akiko Tanikawa,” he said in the whining beggar’s voice of a Kabuki demon. “You wear short dresses and do not go to the ritual baths. You have broken faith with the eight million gods of Shinto. The footless dead will come to you when the grasses sleep and bitch in your ear.”

  Julie gasped softly and went momentarily rigid, but the traffic was moving again, forcing her to drive on without turning. Out of the side of her mouth she said, “Farrell, if that isn’t you, you are in very deep trouble.” The motorcycle jolted forward, nearly scooting out from under Farrell, who yelped as the tailpipe singed his ankle.