As a Madman Shakes a Dead Geranium

After T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night”

Midnight shakes the memory as magnetic bombs once shook the quaking walls of houses. Rebels quivered in their army boots while federal planes blasted neighborhoods to bits. Ceasefire! Ceasefire! We were better off before. And the blame descended squarely on the rebels, who shouldered the weight like half-dead horses.

Twelve o’clock. Time had run on madly. Through the darkened streets of Savannah, Cristian took the long way toward their old apartment. Behind him, the lights of the bus terminal glared at his back, demanding to know how he presumed to come back now.

Beneath a streetlamp, a poem scrawled across his brain, a poem his mother taught him when he was a child, when they sat on his bed and watched through the slats of his window blinds, counting solitary cars rolling through the night. She told him that the streetlamps were hired by the sun keep watch. When he woke from nightmares, he would look out the window and talk to them. He would ask them what they had seen. Had they seen the shadows that crept into his room while he slept? He pretended they answered him. Yes, we saw them, and we woke you as quickly as we could. They did not tell him these were shadows of substantial things to come.

Midnight shakes the memory as fear shook the line of soldiers waiting in the long ditch. The federals counted them off: one, two, three; one, two, three. Cristian was a Three. He climbed out of the ditch with the other Threes, flanked by federal marines. They marched toward an empty airplane hangar. Behind them, the federals fired into the ditch. Later, they called it the Jefferson City Surrender.

Half-past one, the street lamp muttered. A waitress stood outside a 24-hour information café, vaping. Cristian went inside. The waitress followed him in, and he asked for a bowl of rehydrated noodles and any information on Lucy Beckman Hall, DMP. The waitress eyed him skeptically. He was still wearing the ripped work pants and duct-taped boots from the forced labor camp in Nevada and the stained, white t-shirt they had given him at his release. His hair had reached shoulder length, a scraggly mass of off-blond. The waitress’s gaze settled on the brand on his wrist. 10574.

“Method of payment?” she said.

“Cash,” he said and dug everything he had out of his pocket.

The waitress went to the back, and a 3-D image of Lucy appeared in the center of Cristian’s table, an unsmiling government ID photo. It almost seemed he could run his fingers through her hair. If Lucy herself had been here, she might have called it the substance of things hoped for or the evidence of things not seen.

Information popped up on the tabletop screen. Assuming it was up to date, she still lived in the apartment they rented before he was arrested a year ago. The waitress emerged from the back with the noodles. Cristian read on. Six months ago, on February 22, 2058, Lucy had nearly been murdered by a lynch mob, intent on “executing” Dismissed Military Personnel. Cristian gripped his fork and plunged it into the noodles. He ought to have been here.

Cristian looked at his hand, the one holding the fork, and watched it tremble. The hand was callused and bony, young and old, toughened and frail all at once. Earlier, he had seen his reflection in the window of the bus, and the sunken cheeks frightened him. He realized suddenly that he had no plan for what he would do if Lucy didn’t want him back.

Before he could lose his nerve, Cristian logged into his government account, both hoping for and dreading a message from Lucy. The government had sent her a formal notification of his release, so she should know. But there was nothing—no message from Lucy at all, only the government’s automatically generated reminder to register in Savannah’s Office of Dismissed Military Personnel. The bright lights of the tabletop screen poured up at him like reversed acid rain.

It had been drizzling off and on the night Cristian met Lucy. It was June, 2054, three days after the surrender, and Cristian was in a line again, this time outside a military office at the Jefferson City airport. Behind him, past the line of waiting soldiers, beyond the Missouri River, the lights of Jefferson City grinned.

Now the line moved and he was inside, and he couldn’t see the river or the moon or the watery stars. Missouri. Misery. Murder. Mangle. Massacre. Memory. And he was next in line. Cristian held out his left wrist and gazed at the florescent lights, barely glancing at the man with the brand or the man who gripped his forearm. The brand sizzled against his skin, like white electricity that shot up his veins and sent air hissing through his teeth. It felt as if it were smoldering down to the bone, and he could smell it burning. He felt a sharp prick, just above the burning, and he knew that was his tracker being inserted. They would know where he was for the rest of his life.

He stumbled into another room to face a woman in iGlasses who said, “10574. Hall, Cristian,” and gave him a bus ticket chip, a government voucher, and a dismissive glance. In the next room, other Threes waited: several dozen men and a few women in uniforms from all branches of the military, surrounded by federal marines with Magnetic Assault Rifles. One of the Threes held his wrist out in front of him and muttered, “Indelible ink would have been just as efficient.” “That’s not the point.” This from a young woman whose short white-blond hair appeared singed on the ends. She was rubbing her thumbs over a cloth medic’s cross, torn from a uniform.

When the room was full, the guards led them out into the drizzly night and herded them onto shuttles across the river and deposited them at the Jefferson City bus terminal. Then the guards left without a word. The Threes shifted, looking around at one another like people waking up. They roamed toward the glowing kiosks of bus routes, heads down against the intermittent rain.

As Cristian stood in front of a kiosk, the girl with the scorched hair stepped up on his right. She looked too young, and her army fatigues hung large on her body, as if she had borrowed them from an older brother.

“Where are you going?” she asked. Her voice seemed like a sudden sound in an empty room.

“Charlotte,” Cristian said. “North Carolina.” There was no going back home to Raleigh. His family were federals to the core.

“I’m going to Savannah,” the girl said. “My grandmother lives there. We’ll take the same bus until Nashville, I guess.”

Cristian looked down and got a good look at both sides of her face. The left side was Scandinavian-pale, but the right side was red and stiff with blisters on her cheekbone and forehead. Her blue eyes reflected the glow of the map kiosk, deep lakes in a sun-scorched land.

“Yes, I’m old enough to be here,” she said, as if he had asked.

“Okay,” he said, and a rusty chuckle crawled up his throat.

“Lucy Beckman,” she said, “but you can call me Charity.”

“What?”

“Charity. We could use a little more around here, don’t you think?”

She turned away abruptly, but not before he saw her face twist like a wrung-out dishcloth.

“Lucy,” Cristian said to her back, uncertainly. “Or Charity. Or whatever your name is.”

She cleared her throat and faced him, blinking rapidly.

“We can’t see everything, can we?” she said. “Like Charity. We know what it is, but we can’t actually see it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Cristian was beginning to think this girl had seen more of war than she could handle.

“Love,” she said, and he could almost imagine her stamping her foot. “I’m talking about love. Faith, hope, and love.”

Cristian glanced around and saw a few other soldiers eyeing them curiously. Most hadn’t seemed to notice, though. They stood under the awning to avoid the drizzle; they sat on benches; they spoke to each other in undertones. Lucy faced the map kiosk and ran her fingertips down its glass screen. The glass squeaked with moisture. Lucy muttered, “We can’t see everything.”

Cristian considered moving away and leaving her to her quasi-religious ramblings, but he couldn’t do that. In fact, he didn’t want to do that. He wanted to stay. After a few minutes, Lucy turned around. Her face was composed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. The left side of her face had turned red now, a deep blush. “You just seemed like someone who would listen.”

“I was,” Cristian said. “I mean, I am.”

She smiled with the good half of her face—a sheepish smile, but a smile nonetheless, like a guttering candle in a large and empty room.

That night on the bus, Lucy fell asleep against the window. The good side of her face was turned toward him, as unmarked as if the war never happened.

Cristian crossed his arms and stretched his legs out, leaning his head back against the seat. He fell asleep and woke up ducking his head between his knees with his arms shielding his head. He thought he had spotted a Chameleon breaking camouflage with the sky. The spider bombs were falling.

“Cristian. Cristian. Wake up.”

Cristian lifted his head. Lucy was nudging his leg with the toe of her boot. When they made eye contact, she said, “I see those things, too, except I see them when I’m awake.” She turned and looked out the window. Under the new morning sun, the scenery rolled by, punctuated by the broken bones of cities. Sometimes, the bus had to leave the main highway to avoid blasted sections of road.

“I’m not a soldier,” Lucy said abruptly, still looking out the window.

Cristian didn’t interrupt. He studied the burnt ends of her hair.

“I volunteered,” she said. “My brother was a medic. I thought I could help.”

He noticed the past-tense about her brother. Too many people were in the past-tense.

“And then,” Lucy said. She thrust the palms of her hands away from each other, an explosion of fingers. “I was stupid to think I could help.”

“We all thought so,” Cristian said.

As they travelled southeast and changed buses, the soldiers dispersed, shrugging into frayed jackets, pulling the sleeves down over their brands, and ripping the patches with the rebel insignia from their sleeves. Some pocketed the insignia, the blue field with its circle of stars disappearing into their pockets. Some threw them into trash cans at bus terminals. Displaced civilians boarded the bus, their faces like closed doors. They cast suspicious glances at the soldiers’ uniforms.

They had a seven-hour delay in Grand Rivers, Kentucky, where rubble blocked the road and only half of the bus station was standing. Cristian and Lucy took the chance to buy sandwiches with part of their government vouchers. They ate them behind a pile of rubble. The meat on the sandwiches had been labelled “Turkey Flavored,” and it seemed to be made of Pressed Excess, but Cristian couldn’t remember when he had last eaten, and the mustard went a long way to improving the flavor.

After she ate all the crumbs on her paper plate, Lucy leaned back against the rubble and cupped her hand around the tender side of her face to shield it from the afternoon sun. She began to move her hand away from her face and back, away and back, staring at her hand.

“Shadow,” she murmured pensively.

“What?” Cristian said.

“Nothing. It’s just weird. That light always makes a shadow.”

Cristian was trying to decide if Lucy was waxing philosophical or going nuts when she abruptly sat up and changed the subject.

“Would you do it again?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“You know. The war.”

Cristian sighed. He remembered reporters tried for treason, a priest before a firing squad, the president who wouldn’t step down. These were reasons, but they seemed to crumble like the rubble of the bus station.

“I don’t know,” he said. “A lot of innocent people died. We were supposed to be protecting them.”

“But if a thing is right, then it’s right,” Lucy said. She leaned forward on her pile of bricks and mortar, hair sliding down her temples in ragged drifts.

“The world’s more complicated than that,” Cristian said.

Lucy stared at the sky for a long time.

“There’s an awful lot we can’t see,” she finally said.

Two fifteen, the streetlamp sneered, when Cristian left the information café. The streetlamps said, we do not warn you of the shadows. We make the shadows. We send them after you all night, tugging at your heels.

In the labor camp, he had watched the search lamp, throwing darkness around like the rusted nuts and bolts of many lives. He’d had every intention of holding out. But after the interrogations; after the cold and the heat, the stiffened joints, the creaking mind; when he lay stiffbacked and empty, looking for sleep, he found barely a residue of hope. And what was one name? What was just one name?

An orange cat leaped across the sidewalk in front of Cristian and stood in the gutter arching its back. Don’t go on. Don’t bother Lucy. She hadn’t known she was marrying a traitor. The cat bounded away east, toward the Savannah River. They used to go down to the river sometimes, Cristian and Lucy, and sit in the park by the statue of the Waving Girl.

Local legend had it, this woman spent 44 years welcoming ships to the harbor. Some people said she was in love with a sailor who never returned. Lucy said this was hope if she ever saw it. “And what good did it do her?” Cristian had asked one day as they sat on the base of the statue. Their fingers were intertwined in his coat pocket against the November chill. “Well, she got a statue,” Lucy said gazing up at it.

Midnight was just that sort of time when memories were created and bent in all directions. It was midnight in April 2055 when Cristian arrived in Savannah the first time. He spent the night on a bench near the river. It had taken him seven months after the surrender to realize he wasn’t going to stop thinking about that odd girl, Lucy Beckman. It had taken him another three months to consider the possibility she might not mind seeing him again.

When he found her, she was burying the war in a new cause: she’d gotten involved in the Georgia underground. She had a 3-D printer in her apartment living room that spit out fake IDs for rebel fugitives and political refugees.

“I never even have to leave the comfort of my apartment to be subversive,” she said, tapping her wrist where the government tracker lay beneath her skin.

“I find subversiveness highly attractive,” Cristian said with a goofy grin.

Lucy laughed. Her hair had grown and showed no evidence of the explosion. The right side of her face had not been so lucky. It was a mountain range of warped and crinkled skin.

Another time, they were sitting in a café halfway between his job at a cereal plant and her job at a motel. She said, “What if we had won?”

Cristian was eating his sandwich quickly, checking his watch. “Never was much chance of that.”

“But what if we had? Would it really be so much different, so much better? I’d like to think so, but I’m not sure.”

Cristian paused in his sandwich-eating and looked at her. If not for the war, she was the sort of person who might have floated through life as a permanent idealist.

“If we had won, I wouldn’t have met you,” Cristian said. It was the best he could do.

Lucy frowned. “I guess we can’t see everything, can we?”

He had learned that this was her short-hand, her code-speak, for her belief in the oversight of God.

“Nope, we can’t,” he said.

She squinted at him hard. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

Lucy lived like a coiled spring always about to snap in two. But somehow this strange sense she had—that hope was there, just out of sight—this sense always seemed to bob back to the surface. And he hung on to her helter-skelter hope without even knowing he was doing it.

Half-past two, the streetlamp said. Cristian was several blocks from the apartment. He walked slowly. He caught a flash of light above him, and he looked up to see a curtain drawn from a window above. The silhouette of a woman stood dark in the light. Wouldn’t it be odd—wouldn’t it be something—wouldn’t it be fantastic if the woman in the window were the woman he’d betrayed—how many—three days ago? No odder than falling in love on a bus in the wake of a massacre.

But that woman, no. The name he had given—there was no reason to believe she was in Savannah. He didn’t know where she lived. That wasn’t his job, as he told the interrogators at the labor camp. He only printed the IDs.

The curtain above swished closed. The woman was gone. Closed, like a cell or a gate or a second-floor apartment door. Closed like a case or a mind or a heart. Why hadn’t Lucy sent him a message?

Light flashed again. Just the streetlamp flickering, the blub almost burnt out. His shadow wavered in front of him. Funny how light always makes a shadow, hadn’t Lucy said? His mother said the streetlamps were hired by the sun.

The streetlamp went dark.

An awful lot he couldn’t see.

It was midnight when they married. Lucy wanted to be married in a church, but most of the churches were closed, so an old Presbyterian pastor opened the back door of a church and married them by candlelight with his two middle-aged daughters and their husbands to witness. This was 2056.

They kept making the fake IDs from the real photos and false names someone left in a box on their doorstep sporadically. Someone else in the underground—they didn’t know who—was busy tampering with the data in the information cafés, and someone else was evaluating ID requests.

Faces zipped by through the printer, people Cristian didn’t know with stories he hadn’t heard. It was better that way. Then one day, he did know a face.

“Lucy,” he said, staring a young, non-descript woman with brown hair. Adeline Rhodes was the fictitious name. She couldn’t be older than twenty. “Lucy. Why do I know her?”

Lucy looked over his shoulder. They should never have contemplated it. They should have put it in its box, unnoticed, and left it outside their door to be mysteriously picked up, the way they always did.

“Oh,” Lucy said, and at the same moment, Cristian remembered.

The woman in the photo was Katherine Emerson, whose father and brother were two of the rebellion’s foremost leaders. Right after the war, her face had been plastered on screens and billboards, wanted for treason.

“Put it away,” Lucy said and snatched it out of his hands. But they couldn’t un-remember.

Half-past three, the lamp sputtered. Cristian sat on the bottom of the stairs. At the top of the flight was the landing and two closed doors. One was his and Lucy’s door.

Wake me up, he told the lamp. Take me back to Nevada. I will make it right.

The streetlamp showed him nothing he didn’t already know.

It was midnight, a week after their one-year anniversary when the police stormed their apartment and caught them forging IDs. They took the printer, of course, but what they really wanted was a list of the falsified names.

“We don’t keep those,” Cristian said. Lucy was staring down the barrel of an MAR, lips white. It was like waiting in line in the ditch. “We just print them.”

“But you might remember this one.” They showed him a picture of a girl in her mid-teens, a non-descript, skinny girl with brown hair. And he did know her, oh, he did. A younger Katherine Emerson.

The pools of Lucy’s eyes stirred. Don’t you dare.

“I don’t recognize her,” he said.

They could have said right then and there, “A name, or we shoot your wife.” But they didn’t. Maybe they knew he was strong there beside Lucy, the one who saw so much, in spite of not seeing everything.

Instead, they shipped him off to Nevada, worked him, starved him, and then they said, “A name, or your wife is dead.” And then he said, “The first name was Adeline. I don’t remember the last,” which wasn’t true, but it was his last attempt at loyalty.

The lamp said, “Four o’clock, here is the number on the door.”

He knocked. He heard her footsteps, almost immediately. She must have been awake already. She must have known he was coming. His stomach jolted so hard, he almost vomited rehydrated noodles on the step.

Lucy opened the door. The light behind her filled up the apartment, and her shadow met him in the doorway. Her arms came next, wrapping around him, then her hair spilling over his 30 shoulder. But she had to know he’d said the name. She saw too much to miss that. Deep pools in a sun-scorched land. Don’t you dare. Charity Beckman Hall.

He let her pull him inside. The streetlamps did not know the time. They looked at one another in bewilderment. The light of things not seen was outshining them.

First published December 2015 in The Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal, p. 24-30.