Concert of Ghosts Read online

  They emerged from the alley and continued along Schrader. He gazed up at windows. Any one of them might have been the window from which he’d watched traffic slide down Schrader to the Panhandle. Any one of them might have been the room from which Maggie Silver had been dragged away by persons whose faces he couldn’t recall. Windows yielded so little. Blinds, drapes, slats of plastic. Here and there a decal was pressed onto a pane, a bumper sticker. Or you could see a plant, flowers, the back of a piece of furniture. But what did these things really tell you about the inhabitants, the faces beyond glass, the shadows in dim rooms? He put his hand in the pocket that held the gun.

  “Which house?” Alison asked again.

  “I’m not sure. I need to think. Clear my head. We’ll walk around, come back this way.” So simple a pronouncement, he thought. Clear your head. People used it constantly and didn’t need to think about what they were saying.

  “Harry,” she said. “I don’t think we have the luxury of time to go strolling around the Haight like a pair of tourists—”

  “What do you expect of me?” he asked. “You imagine I can just point to a house and say, Yeah, there it is, that’s the very place. I wish to hell I could. I wish I could go straight up to some front door and ring a bell and everything would come back.”

  “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m getting jangled.”

  “You and me both.”

  She pressed her face against his arm. He liked the feeling: giving comfort and receiving it. He liked the sense of caring. “I spoke sharply,” he said. “I’m sorry too.”

  She smiled at him, and he thought he caught a shadow in the smile, as if the expression were just slightly out of focus. She wants to look bright, she can’t quite make it. That was all. This situation. This business. It wasn’t exactly compatible with cheerfulness.

  They reached the junction of Schrader and Haight. Tennant looked the length of Haight Street as if it were a menacing tunnel into his yesterdays. On the wall of a shut-down store somebody had spraypainted ABOLISH GOVERNMENT. Outside a donut shop a young man labored on the engine of his rusted Jeep; his bare feet were black, his clothes filthy. When the boy raised his dirt-streaked face from the hood and glanced in an antagonistic way at Tennant, Harry looked elsewhere, embarrassed. He must have been staring.

  Dazed young kids—summoned to the Haight by the siren of freedom past—sat on the sidewalk, passing paper-bagged Jack Daniel’s back and forth. But they looked more like fugitives from parental authority, runaways from distant suburbs, than seekers after an illusory liberty. A whiff of pot, the aroma of coffee beans.

  Tennant moved along the street, thinking he must have come this way thousands of times in a hundred mental conditions.

  The stores were changed. They’d become self-conscious—expensive leather, holographs, 1940s clothing. He didn’t notice any headshops, none of those crazy little places that had once proliferated in the neighborhood, selling hash pipes and roach clips and stash boxes, all the paraphernalia of the drug scene. The Weed Patch had vanished, and so had The Psychedelic Shop. There were no street dealers, formerly so prolific, offering acid, speed, lids. I can get you anything.

  The people who wandered along the sidewalk didn’t resemble the old crowd, unless you counted the occasional eccentric—a pale strung-out girl in Apache dress and headband, a tall black woman in velvet cloak and shades who chanted a mantra to herself as she passed. The place seemed to be a mixture of persevering residents who’d been in the neighborhood since the 1960s and a fresh influx of imposters who thought they’d find a freak show still. But the carnival had left town long ago.

  When Tennant reached Roberts Hardware, he stopped. This at least hadn’t changed. This at least was familiar. He’d gone in here once and bought something—what? Wooden shelves. Yes. Bookshelves. A sneaking little memory. Why could he bring back to mind such a trivial thing and yet fail to locate the house on Schrader? He’d hammered those shelves into a wall and they’d fallen down within days, but back then such trifles weren’t catastrophes, they were something you just shook your head over and got stoned and said fuck it, it didn’t matter in the cosmic scheme of things. A girl’s laughter, yes, and books coming down in a heap, and a glass bong splintering—

  “Something’s missing,” he said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Noise. Music. You always had people with finger cymbals or bells. Somebody was always playing conga drums. I don’t hear that now. It’s a touch spooky. The street was always noisier than this. It used to … vibrate, I guess that’s the word. But all the chaos is gone.”

  Empty. The Haight was empty.

  They crossed the street. On the corner of Clayton the Free Medical Clinic was still in existence. Troubled, Tennant looked at the sign; it pitched him back abruptly into the badlands of memory—he’d been in this place, he’d been given Thorazine here to bring him down from a vicious high when he’d freaked out on STP. The universe had tilted that night. Hooded figures stalked him. The stark moon over the Haight had singled him out for scrutiny. He’d tumbled into a terrible spiral of lights, a stroboscopic funnel at the bottom of which he’d seen himself decomposing in a coffin, flesh honeycombed with lice, his eyes red and staring into some godforsaken infinity. All this rushed back at him and he was pained. What he couldn’t remember was how he’d made it to the free clinic. If he’d been trapped in the violent seesaw of such a bad trip, chances were good he hadn’t found his own way. Somebody must have brought him.

  “I was in this place one time,” he said. “Bogus drugs. Very bogus. Thing is, I don’t remember who treated me. The doctor’s name, face, none of that stuff.” He heard in his voice a note of desperation. Had he truly been expecting a tidal assault of minutia, of those small details from which an ordinary life is forged? Nothing’s ordinary, Harry. You can’t have ordinary.

  Alison looked at him with sympathy. “Ever since we started, I’ve been trying to imagine what it must be like for you. All I ever get is this impression of scattered bits and pieces. Fragments. Like a bomb exploded inside your brain.” She shrugged, her expression rather forlorn. Then she caught his arm and drew him closer as they walked. “Nobody should have to live that way, Harry.”

  Bits and pieces. Tennant looked away. He was thinking of Schrader Street again. It was time to go back in that direction. But he hesitated, studying the menu in the window of a health food restaurant. Sprouted beans and cucumber and spinach on whole-wheat bread. He gazed through glass, watched a waitress move between tables. She was lithe, dark-haired, in her late thirties, early forties; it struck him there was some superficial resemblance between the waitress and Maggie, a chimerical thing that passed as soon as she turned her face. Similarities, small mockeries.

  When they reached the intersection with Schrader, Tennant gazed down toward the Panhandle. He wondered where the gray limousine had transported Rayland. Now go. Live your life. Forget all this nonsense. He saw the old man climb back inside the big car, recalled the juxtaposition of his father’s frailty upon sleek gray metal, the shadowed face of Harker in the back. Harker’s features had once briefly been known throughout America from the cover of magazines, a face that had become a symbol of war’s brutality, one that had forced ordinary Americans, people who went to church and were kind to their neighbors and who played with their kids in parks and sandlots, to confront the notion that savagery wasn’t confined to the Vietcong. Harker’s face was the maggot at the heart of the apple pie, scrutinized, removed, then eradicated, and in the manner of all such unpleasant things, totally forgotten.

  I have seen Harker elsewhere, Tennant thought. At some other place and time. Not on TV, not in the pages of magazines, somewhere else. I have seen him.

  They were walking down Schrader now toward the Panhandle. Tennant stopped. Across the way, located on the corner of a narrow street that intersected Schrader, was a large yellow house, Victorian, elaborate, something like a great cracked plaster cake. Where did I see
Harker?

  But then he wasn’t thinking about the colonel because the big yellow house seized his attention. He stared at it long and hard. His head buzzed. “That’s it. That’s the one. I’m sure of it.”

  Alison caught his hand and started to move across the street.

  “Wait,” he said. He was reluctant all at once. He had a sense of trespassing.

  “Why? All we have to do is go to the door. Check the names outside—”

  “For what? For Maggie Silver? You’re way off, Alison.” And it struck him like the blow of a hammer that Maggie was dead. She wouldn’t be here. Like Sajac, like Kat, like Carlos, she was dead. Only Harry Tennant of the group of five had been kept alive and functioning, if you could call it life. Diminished, reduced, it was an existence of sorts, sure, but it didn’t add up to a life. He was suddenly furious. With himself for having been busted, with Alison for interrupting his hermetic world, with Rayland for keeping him under observation, with Lannigan for whatever it was the Irishman had done to him.

  “Harry, I don’t know what we’ll find, but even if it only serves to jumpstart your memory, it’s worth a look.”

  Tennant stared up at a score of windows. Which had been his? His eye roamed upward. Window after window, blank cartridges of glass. But then as he crossed the street, his perspective was lost and the shadow of the big house fell over him.

  Alison studied the array of doorbells and nameplates. There were at least fifteen of them. More than twenty years ago people thumbtacked scraps of paper on which they’d written their Haight names. There were sometimes sundry rainbows and marijuana leaves inscribed lavishly on cards. But these had been replaced by small nameplates, all very tidy, completely at odds with the way things had been before.

  Tennant struggled with his rage, which had nowhere to go; unfocused, it dwindled into blind frustration.

  Alison gave up on the names. She tried the door in her usual direct way. It had been left unlocked, opening into a darkly painted lobby that led over exposed floorboards to a flight of stairs.

  “We’re in,” she said.

  Tennant followed her inside. He was having trouble breathing. The air was thick. A certain density hung in the shadows. He moved toward the stairs. On the landing above, light was filtered through a stained-glass window. A curious design, an abstract of simple slivers in reds and blues. He stopped at the foot of the stairs.

  Give up all this nonsense.

  He looked up toward the stained glass. Sweat from his scalp slid over his forehead, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. The house was charged with heat. His past was all about him, yet it wasn’t tangible; familiarity, yes, but nothing on which he’d pledge his life. The stained glass—had that been in place before?

  No. It hadn’t. It was recent.

  He imagined climbing these steps years ago. He thought of himself going up and up into the recesses of this huge house to a room perched at the very top, where attic ceilings sloped down to a window. The house had been raucous once, a raunchy run-down place that vibrated continually with rock. Doors were always open, rooms filled with boys and girls, the laughter of freedom, the perfume of reefer. Day and night hadn’t mattered, time was a useless bourgeois device, nobody cared: It was a world without appointments, without clocks.

  He climbed, Alison just behind him.

  When they reached the landing Tennant found himself looking at the stained-glass pattern: a kaleidoscope effect. He gazed up the next flight of stairs. His head ached. He felt raw, unfinished around the edges of himself, someone on the edge of disintegration. Keep climbing, Harry. Up and up.

  On the second landing, corridors stretched off gloomily to left and right. Here Tennant stood motionless. Left or right—he wasn’t certain of anything. He wasn’t even sure this was the correct house. Maybe he’d chosen it without any foundation in fact because he wanted to please Alison, wanted to say, Look I remember this. But now the house seemed to wrap itself around him and propel him upward, as if he had no real choice in the matter. He was at the mercy of a force he couldn’t name.

  I must have climbed these stairs with Maggie Silver. Hand in hand we must have come this way. In the room I must have touched her breasts, drawn her skirt up over her thighs. Was any feeling worse than this—that love had become a fire blown out, a collection of cold cinder? He had a black moment, a forgetfulness of purpose. I’m Harry Tennant and I’m trying to close a circle that may not make it.

  “Left or right, Harry?” Alison asked.

  “I think left.” This decision was prompted by the sight of an ancient lightshade that must not have been changed in more than twenty years, a dingy fringed thing that was slightly familiar. The shade had an intensity about it, as if it existed in a realm where all objects were infused with a heightened reality.

  At the end of the corridor a door faced them. Tennant had the feeling it was about to be thrown open unexpectedly, exposing him to a rectangle of blinding light. But it didn’t happen. He moved forward. He thought: In the old days the door hadn’t been numbered—who cared about the gravity of numbers in those giddy years?—but now it was. Fourteen. One four. White plastic numerals from a hardware store. Screwed into the dark brown wood.

  “Is this the place?” Alison asked.

  Tennant didn’t reply. Even if this was the room, what difference would it make? Some stranger occupied the place, a face Tennant had never seen in his life, what would it matter?

  Alison touched his arm gently. Encouragement. “Do you think this is it?” she asked. She whispered her question eagerly.

  Tennant imagined he stood on the edge of an unpleasant revelation—ill-defined, something half-glimpsed on a moonless night, scudding along the horizon of his recollection. He was shivering now despite the heat that pressed against him.

  A toilet flushed somewhere. A domestic sound, the banality of which might have reassured Tennant of some commonplace reality, a humdrum universe totally manageable. But he was outside that structure, beyond ease.

  Tennant stopped outside the door. Do you simply knock and see the face of a stranger and say, Sorry, wrong place? Alison reached past him and rapped her knuckles on the wood.

  There wasn’t an immediate answer. Tennant, breathless, waited. He might have been suspended in an airless pocket. Don’t answer, he thought. I don’t want anyone to come to the door.

  Alison knocked again.

  Tennant looked back along the corridor. It was strange how memory, like a net thrown randomly in the air, sometimes snared butterflies. He heard Maggie Silver laugh, and he saw her in shadow at the end of the corridor. She had her head tossed back, and the laugh was as flamboyant as the clothes she wore, the great floppy broad-brimmed hat under which her black hair flowed, the plum-velvet long coat, the strands of beads that sparkled against her breasts. The laughter roared in his head, smoky, uninhibited, genuine. He slipped through the grids of remembrance and imagination, the places where truth and fancy met, those intersections where what might have taken place and what had actually happened came together in remarkable collisions. Maggie Silver, Maggie Quicksilver—she had once said, We’ll love each other forever, Harry, no matter what, no matter what. You know why? Because some loves are a matter of destiny and you just can’t fight against them.

  Destiny. People spoke of destiny and kismet in those times as if they were familiar objects you could buy in your local headshop along with glass coke straws and hash screens and Rizla papers. The stars were hip, baby. If they said you were to fall in love, that’s what you did.

  Tennant turned away from the empty corridor and faced the door where Alison was knocking a third time.

  A sound of running water, a toilet being flushed, came from inside the room. Then the door was opened.

  A woman, peering over the tops of steel glasses, asked, “Yeah?” Her long silver-black hair fell over her shoulders. She took off the glasses. She looked from Alison to Tennant. “You collecting for something? What is it?”

 
; Tennant heard it clearly from some place way back in his head, old music, a chord plucked out of an arrangement of strings, a disembodied fragment of melody.

  Alison said, “We’re looking for somebody.”

  The woman took a step forward, peering in a myopic way. “Who?”

  Tennant slumped against the jamb of the door, suddenly sure, as certain as he’d been of anything in his life.

  “Maggie,” he said.

  He stretched out a hand tentatively, as if he might simply grasp the past like the head of a fragile flower.

  17

  The woman said, “You’re out of your mind,” and tried to close the door, but Tennant put a foot forward, advancing into the room. The woman, nervously pushing hair away from her face, continued to back up. Maggie, indisputably Maggie, the same but different, as he himself was different; his mind fogged, his senses reeled, he focused on nothing but this woman, who had raised one nicotine-stained hand in a gesture that mean halt, stay away from me. He kept going toward her, thinking how the differences in her were less than the similarities—there were lines around that fine mouth, and the eyes lacked some of the old vibrancy, but they were bright and knowing still. The waist was thicker, the clothing sensibly plain instead of outrageous, but she was Maggie. What hasn’t changed is my heart, not in the slightest way. Breathless, he had the urge to hold her, as if by that simple act all his years of solitude and separation, all those forlorn spaces, might be erased.

  “Maggie,” he said again.

  “Check out that telephone. You get the hell out of here or I call the cops.”

  “I don’t think you understand,” Tennant said. He’d hardly heard a word she’d said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  The woman appealed to Alison. “I don’t know what’s going on but you better get your asses out of here before I pick up the goddamn phone.”

  Tennant put a hand out toward her. One touch, he thought. It would take one touch and she’d give up this strange masquerade of ignorance. I love her the way I always have. Love was the constant, whether forgotten or not. It persisted even in neglect, in amnesia, it sustained itself in concealed corners and shuttered rooms, in damp lonely spaces.