It was dark in The Tulle Box, and the flat, oblong shape of the main room made it feel burdened by a terrible weight from above; the original walls of rough-hewn granite — left exposed on the north and east — lent a certain chill to the place, and even when the dance floor was feverish with the heat of writhing bodies, the mist of perspiration would hang in the air like a cellar dankness. Over the years the long accumulation of spilt drinks and sweat, burnt food and cigarette smoke had left the place with a distinctive pungence, faint and sweet like old decay. It was a place good for remembering, and when it was quiet and empty, Richard liked to sit alone at his booth, where the track light shone down like an interrogation lamp and the dazzling beam, when he looked up, would leave him with purple afterimages of the past.

Jonathan slid clumsily into the booth and sat there dejected, his eyes hooded in shadow from the intensity of the track light. Richard hit the dimmer switch from the bar, took the lumens down to a 40-watt twilight, and went about his quick ritual of pouring last night's brew. The bartender had left an element on, and one pot had crusted black with the resin of coagulated coffee. Someone must have turned it off, Richard thought, or I would have smelt it over the usual stink. He checked the storage thermoses, hoping someone had remembered to fill them; the first was light and empty, the second left open, and the third decaffeinated. The fourth thermos was heavy, and when he pumped out the jets of black coffee it coughed and made harsh sucking sounds like a punctured lung. Some of the fluid sprayed past the styrofoam cups onto the counter rag, leaving it speckled with rose petal shapes in a dark reddish-brown.

At the booth, Richard put Jonathan's cup in front of his steepled hands; he brushed away the paper-light corpses of the dead moths that fell there every night, and sat down. "How've you been, Jon? Haven't seen you in a while."

"Look at me," Jonathan said after a long delay. "See this glint in my eye?"

"The light's bad in here," said Richard.

"Can't you tell when a guy's in love?" Jonathan sipped his coffee and grimaced as he held out his left hand. "See the trembling in the fingers? Hear the quaver in the voice?"

"Yeah," said Richard. "Who's the lucky party this time?"

"Party?" Jonathan laughed. "No, this time it's a girl. A real female woman. Lead singer of Scarlett Mott. What's it like, Rich? Tell me."

"What do you mean? What's what like? Shouldn't I be asking you that?"

"I mean the first time with a girl. Did you pick someone up, or what?"

Richard felt the coffee in his mouth. Heat. Steam. Bitterness and black aftertaste — that's what he wanted now. "You want a story?" he said.

Jonathan nodded and laughed a little nervously. "I guess so. A story is always instructive. Or cautionary."

"I was a freshman in college," said Richard. "I used to run into this girl late at night in the library. I offered to walk her home one night. No underlying motives. It wasn't until we were halfway to her house that I realized I had been picked up."

"What did she look like?"

"She was tall," he said. He remembered that her hair was auburn, and he tried to visualize her features, but there was nothing — only a sort of indeterminate blankness like the template for a face. When he struggled with his memory, the face that emerged was Sophie's. He tried to dissolve it, to replace it with any other face, but her features remained, indelible for the moment. "Jet black hair," he said, and Sophie's story effortlessly derailed the story of the auburn-haired girl. He remembered that she had once fallen a hundred feet from a cliff and dangled, in shock, on the end of a fraying nylon rope. She said it was like being hanged by your entire body, and visions of all her wrongdoings had floated through her mind. She had expected more pleasant images before death, she said. She was disappointed in herself, depressed, ready to cut free when they hauled her up to give her a second chance. 'Next time, it's going to be pleasant flashbacks all the way,' she said.

"Yeah?"

Richard focused his eyes back on the table.

Jonathan yawned. "Jet black hair. Didn't get very far, or did you?"

"Maybe this'll be a bedtime story," said Richard. "You stay awake much longer, and you'll land on your face."

"That would be good." Jonathan rubbed his face a little too hard and rested his chin on the heel of his hand. He kept the pose as he listened, his features relaxing like someone hypnotized, beyond the revitalizing power of mere caffeine.

"She invited me in for coffee, but there was no coffee pot, so she had to strain each cup through a cloth filter she rigged in a plastic lab funnel. It was worse than this shit. We went into the living room, put our mugs on the floor. She turned on a little black-and-white TV and flipped the channels looking for a late night horror movie. No movies. Too bad. We watched something else until the station went off the air, and then she turned the TV off and sat down next to me on the couch." Her voice was uncertain, each sentence ending like a question, and he thought it was odd, given how strong she seemed. She looked uneasily around the living room, listening intently for sounds that would tell her if her house mates were awake. She breathed faster. "After a while of talking — I don't remember what about — she asked me if I wanted a back rub. You know about the back rub — the universal prelude to sex." He didn't know what to do. Nervousness seeped into his voice, his hands. He consciously slowed his own breathing, relaxed his stomach muscles, and imagined that if it were just a back rub, he shouldn't be afraid. "I said yes — but only if I could return the favor. Of course, this meant taking off my shirt. It meant she had to take hers off, too. So she gave me a back rub, then I gave her one." She kneeled with her knees on each side of his thighs and leaned her weight onto his back. Her palms were like hot leaves as she laid them flat on his back. She molded the flesh on his shoulder blades, smoothed heat into his spine. Her hands had an urgency, too, that said they did not belong there, lonely, on his back; they were moving with the kind of energy he could feel but never quite imagine feeling. In a few moments her hands stopped, heavy with that energy. He opened his eyes and twisted his neck to look up at her. She rolled down from the couch. 'Your turn?' he said. She unbuttoned her denim shirt and let it fall to the floor. There were fine scratches along the tops of her pale breasts and deeper scratches on her ribs. She noticed his eyes. 'Running through the woods without a bra,' she said, and lay down in the space he made on the couch. Her voice was more relaxed. He climbed over her, straddled her hips, and rested his hands on the middle of her freckled back. As he massaged, he noticed her flesh was loose and pliable under his fingertips. He rubbed the knots of her spine, smoothed her lower back and kneaded the tension from her shoulders. 'Where did you learn that?' she asked as she turned over.

Jonathan leaned his head on his upper arm. His eyes were closed.

"Then we kissed. I don't remember who kissed who. She accidentally knocked her mug over and put a big black stain on the rug." Richard tipped his empty styrofoam cup onto its side. "The stain must still be there." But she was far off now in a place unknown to him. "We went into her room, took our clothes off, and made love." She had several lengths of nine-millimeter nylon rope — the one that had saved her life — and she made him tie her to the bed so she was like an upside-down letter Y. She told him to get the handcuffs she kept in her dresser drawer. 'Cuff your hands behind your back,' she said. 'I want you to do everything without your hands,' and he discovered that night exactly how much he could do without his hands while she arched under him, pulling the ropes tight while his abdominal muscles shuddered with fatigue. In the morning it took a very long time to undo the handcuffs without being able to see the tiny key in his hand. "I told her I hadn't had much experience with these things," said Richard. "She told me not to worry about it."

"Was it good?"

"Well, I didn't feel like a new man the next morning, if that's what you mean. It felt like a very natural thing to do." To hide his smile, Richard looked out the window at the black trees confined in the concrete courtyard behind the club. He blinked quickly to clear his vision. "She's traveling through Europe this year. I think."

Jonathan's breathing was slow and relaxed. "You're not much of a storyteller," he said. "Left out all the details, Rich. I'm too tired, you know. Or else I would tell you all about the wild stuff we did with the ropes and chains."

"What?" said Richard.

"That's what she's into. I met her right here a few nights back. Jet black hair, like your woman, but the hair on her head is bleached now. She's just your type, Richard. Too bad you were away for so long."

"What's her name?"

"Sophie."

"Sophia," said Richard. "Wisdom." He looked out again at the black trees, at their frail branches trembling in the almost-frozen rain. The few remaining leaves clung like difficult memories, shuddering, yet unable to fall. He crushed his cup and reached across the table, hesitated before he tapped firmly on Jonathan's shoulder. "Jon. . . . Jon."

Jonathan started. "Huh? Oh . . . . I guess I fell asleep, huh?"

"Why don't you go home and crash?"

"Yeah." He yawned and stood up. "Thanks for the story. I wanted to
hang out and see her tonight."
"Go get some sleep, man. I'll say hello for you."
Jonathan turned to leave. He stood still for a moment. "How was your
vacation?" he asked over his shoulder.
"Fine."
When Jonathan had gone, Richard tore his broken cup into tiny fragments
and blew them off the table, and he walked over that scatter of white styrofoam,
hearing it squeal under the black soles of his boots. At the bar he mixed himself
a margarita while he waited for Sophie to arrive.
He had known it would be her. He had dreamed her just that morning
and his dreams always had some odd configuration of truth and foreshadowing
about them. He took a sip of his margarita, letting the cold soothe his throat.
The bite of lime, the heat of tequila, the chill of ice, the irony of salt — it was an
odd mix with the aftertaste of bad coffee. He found himself swirling the flavors
in his mouth, savoring their oddness as he recalled his dream; then a harsh
intake of air through pursed lips as the ice jabs a tooth, and he forgets he is
remembering — he's sitting high up in the bleachers of a dimly-lit auditorium; it
could be a theater — or perhaps The Tulle Box rigged for a stage act. He's sitting
as if he were waiting for a performance and the dream consciousness begins
quite suddenly: the goddess Kali standing before him as if she were walking up
to find a seat, but she has appeared so abruptly he is startled. She is incredibly
tall — nearly seven feet — and though she is standing on the step beneath him she
is still a head taller than he is when he rises to greet her. He's rather confused.
He knows she is Kali, and yet it must be some special occasion because she has
taken on a different aspect. Instead of her belt of skulls, she wears a chain of
creamy white lilies around her waist — tonight she is The Keeper of Flowers —
and though she is usually naked she wears a bustierre of black lace that supports
her blue-tinged breasts, her flesh so pale he wonders if she has been bleeding.
She gives him a hug as if she were an old friend, and she asks him, rather
bluntly, "Do I remind you of Sophie?" And then she sits down at his side on the
bleachers, which have now curved into a long, flat slab of a bench, where her
companions appear. One of them is a thin, sandy-haired youth ,with bad
posture and a bad complexion, who shakes hands with him, mutters a few
pleasantries. Keri is also there. She just smiles at him and sits off to Kali's left,
and now her presence makes perfect sense because she was a close friend of
Sophie's. "How do you know Sophie?" he asks The Keeper of Flowers. She tells
him something that never enters his memory — he knows this because the words
float briefly in the air like smoke, and then vanish without even an afterimage;
but the gist of it is that Sophie is traveling the world, engaged in some leisurely
pursuit — she hasn't become a doctor as planned; she never went to medical
school to study forensic pathology. The weirdness of the situation makes him
semi-lucid now, but still he doesn't wonder what it might mean for Kali, The
Keeper of Flowers, to know Sophie. Instead, he mentions how Sophie had read
some of his earliest writing, and then he says — mostly for Keri's benefit — "My
God, she might still have some of it!" Keri gives him a half-smile of amusement
and leads him down to the stage, which has become a dance floor, its three walls
mirrored from floor to ceiling. Kali follows them. Her face is a mask — a shiny
gray-green mask that looks like the gauze wrappings of a burn victim coated
with a thick acrylic paint. Along the wall, to his left, she performs a series of
incredible acrobatic moves — tumbles, backflips, somersaults — never quite
touching the floor. He turns to see if Keri has noticed, to voice his awe, but she is
also on the dance floor, wearing a blue silk prom dress, doing her own
remarkable spins and turns, her feet gliding just above the surface of wood. He
wonders how this is possible with her bad knees, after all those skiing accidents,
and the thought reminds him that he's in a dream. It's a dream. He goes out
onto the floor himself, somewhat self-consciously, and begins long, gliding, ice-
skating moves across the wooden floor; he tries a spread-eagle move, stretching
himself out like the spars of a human kite, and he lets the dream wind take him
in a wide orbit around the center of the floor where crowds of people are
dancing to an obscure song about a human drum.
There's some interruption. A problem. The dance studio has vanished,
and Kali is leaping down, head first, fast as a bungee jump, past three levels of
tiny stone balconies on the outside of the building. He's at the balcony now,
looking down at her, stunned, until he sees the thin nylon rope that's tied to the
stone rail in front of him. Kali climbs back up the rope, backwards — she has
looped her calf around it in some secret way that only experienced climbers
know. He sees the soles of her heavy black boots coming up. She's warning
everyone that the police are there to bust the party, so he goes back into the
dance studio to find it empty. He runs through a narrow doorway into a spiral
staircase that winds down a stone turret; it's like going down into catacombs,
thick with the sweet musk of decay, and the stone is dry and crumbly; his very
presence fills the place with dust. The staircase grows darker and narrows until
it opens up into a small chamber — inside, a claw-footed ceramic bathtub
partially filled with jaundiced water, empty pots, pans, and boxes all around. He
knows the police are coming and he must hide here, so he slides under the tub
and presses himself between it and the wall, folding his hands over his chest as if
he were in a sarcophagus. In this position he will be hidden unless the
policemen who come down bother to lean over the tub. He waits. He hears a
policeman enter the room — a thin man with greasy, shoulder-length blond hair.
The policeman is malicious — he knows someone hiding under the tub, but he's
taking his time, enjoying the torture of it.
Somehow, as if he had floated through the ceramic, he finds himself now
just under the surface of the yellowish water inside the tub, holding his breath;
and he knows this cannot go on, he must breathe, he cannot hold his breath
forever, and just as he is about to inhale a lungful of water, he leaps up and grabs
the policeman, who is so startled he is paralyzed, and he pulls him face first into
the tub with a violence and force so shocking it nearly wakes him out of the
dream. The policeman utters some pathetic warning about the consequences of
drowning a cop, and that infuriates him even more, and he holds the man's face
firmly under the water, banging his forehead against the ceramic until the
bubbles stop and he knows he is dead. He yanks up on his dirty blond hair,
pulls his head up, and then, with his other hand he calmly thumbs out each of
his eyeballs. Odd. They go flat, becoming two-dimensional, and when he slits
them open with the black-handled hunting knife that has appeared in his hand, it
is like cutting disks of beach-ball plastic.
Now he puts on the dead man's leather jacket. He had two to choose from
— one a black motorcycle jacket and the other a deep blue, of softer leather. He
takes the black one, though it suddenly has a hood attached, making it look
rather ugly. And although he knows he should be far underground, he can see
outside through a window: it's night in Yugoslavia, and he sees himself walking
away in the black jacket. He looks like the policeman he has just killed. He
looks like Jonathan. He's ready to leave. He's been partially awake since hiding
under the bathtub, and now he becomes fully conscious, still in sleep paralysis
with his hands totally numb, still folded over his chest. It takes a while to get his
bearings — he keeps lapsing back into dream as he remembers, and remembers,
and remembers, and then he opens his eyes to the garish light of day, glancing
fearfully, left and right, into the far corners of his empty room.
He recalled a warning he had heard — a Mexican friend of his had once
told him to be watchful of the things he glanced out of the corners of his eyes.
Ghosts, he had said — and other things that are only tenuously in this world. It
was in those momentary glimpses into the periphery of attention and
consciousness that you saw the things that lingered in the border between
worlds, between the living and the dead, between dream and reality, between
memory and hallucination. Each day when he woke, Richard felt he was left
with tunnel vision, the sort of constricted focus you get when you are drowning,
just before your life begins to flash before your eyes and your vision goes finally
black.
He turned the track light back up and went to his table to drink his second
drink — Absolut, straight from the bottle. He liked the idea of it more than the
vodka itself — the clarity of it, the transparency like glacial water, because
drinking itself was such a transparent act.

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