Aftermath in a Northern Town The old mansions are gone, replaced by a factory. The factory is dead, now. It is hollow. Cavernous. Empty. It is home to woodlice, rats, hedgehogs, and rumors. If Aromir Vitt believed in ghosts (of the ectoplasmic species) he might find them there: in the dead fabrication plant for war-things, the offices, the workers quarters and on the loading docks. Aromir Vitt does not believe in ectoplasmic ghosts. There are phantoms of another breed, however; he knows them intimately. They haunt him in those hazy moments before the onset of sleep, or at the end of it, when he has yet to rise from bed, water the toilet, and face the day. His father is such a ghost; his voice is immortal, now: at least in Aromir’s head. He is silent, however. For now. For the moment. For the day. He will speak, however. Later. “Is it strange to be back here?” Though gentle in its softness, Mara’s voice is a jolting shock: proof that Aromir has wandered far from the outskirts of town and into the domain of his internal specters. He is snatched back to the drought-golden field, the narrow dusty path, and the sound of wind in knee-tall grass. There are jackdaws and sparrows in the field and in the air and in the half-dead trees, their skeletal branches and lightening scars reaching above irregular, ragged clumps of sullen, drying foliage. The trees are ghosts of another sort. They mock his childhood memories of tall, arrogant oaks and serene, regal birches. He can see none of the shaggy, dreaming willows, their fronds on windy days like the hair of mermaids in some imaginary sea. They are all gone now and these half-skeletal things stand in their places like vigilant widows and tattered children as empty as the cloudless sky above them. Barbed wire rusts in loose, knotty lumps. It crowned fences that are now gone: stolen—long ago, when everything changed—and sold for black market aluminum scrap. The wire, already rusted by then, is all that remains and the wire is as brown as dried blood and snarled with wind-shreds of cellophane, newsprint, and errant hanks of animal fur: rabbit hair, perhaps, or strands of fox. He cannot remember where the fences stood, or where the military trucks and occasional tanks guarded the factories, but he remembers when everything changed and the tanks were repainted. He remembers when the red star vanished and pirate explosives toppled Papa Stalin’s concrete statue from its pedestal in Old Town Square. He remembers Papa Stalin’s head, blown clear from his neck and shoulders and arcing—neatly—though a bookstore window, while the headless body toppled, tumbled, crashed, its left shoulder (or was it the right?) smashing through the windshield of an unfortunate Lada with dead cigarette packages littering its dashboard. The owner of the car had planted the explosives and though the car died on the night that everything went a bit closer to right, the owner was happy that the vodka in the trunk remained in unbroken bottles. Drunk, the following day, he sold the remains of the car (and some of Papa Stalin’s internal metal structure) for scrap. Aromir was a child when everything back then. He lived in a world of giants, and on one night with revelry, explosions and toppling statues, he grew three centimeters taller. “Strange…?” he asks, tasting an odd temporal distance in his voice. “You promised yourself that you’d never return,” Mara says. “You went away to live more honestly than anyone could ever live here.” She shrugs. “Whenever someone leaves—and so many people do—they make the same promise: never to return, and when they do, they say it’s strange, and they immediately begin planning their next escape. They check and re-check their train tickets; they plan impromptu vacations to mark the end of whatever brings them here. Funerals, usually. Uncle So-and-So’s funeral always seems to end in Croatia or Cyprus…or Helsinki in the summer. When Lena’s father died, his funeral ended in a disco in Greece, and now she lives there. In Athens, I mean…not the disco. Her husband is the man who got her drunk on that one fateful night. And all because she vowed never to come back here, but couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t attend her father’s funeral. And so, for you, it must be strange, and I suspect that…well…where are you off to when you leave again? Where are you going, before you go back home? Croatia? Spain? A disco in Greece? No, Aromir…you’re not the type. Not Greece. Not a disco, but Florence, maybe, or Milan? That’s it, right, you’re off to Milan? It’s what you’ve been thinking about since agreeing to walk with me, here.” “I’m going back home,” Aromir says, all-too-aware of the pattern. The path back. It’s always a funeral, as Mara has said. They skirt the factory ruins, crouched like a vast, angular spider behind a fallen veil of dead-gold grassland. They walk—for a time—in silence. The wind and their footsteps are the only sound between them: enough conversation for now. It has been years since Aromir has seen Mara, and though he has promised himself to feel everything and anything but remorse, he remembers the twinge of that particular emotion as Father’s ashes (and the urn now holding him) were blessed by the bearded, Orthodox priest at the alter of Saint Stanislav. It happened—the lightening jolt of remorse—when Mother took Father’s urn to rest on a lace doily on the mantel, in the kitchen, or wherever widow’s sentiment might place him. The twinge was there: remorse and its guilty cousin, but it is Mara who received it: Mara who is something of a daughter to Mother and to what remains of Father…Mara is family, and in Mother’s mind, a daughter-in-law, despite the absence of any linking marriage. “You never left,” Aromir says, quietly. Mara shrugs. “I left three times. On the last trip out, my last escape, I got married. Two years after that, I got divorced. Each time I came back, however, I always faced the fear that I was on the verge of discovering the deepest, darkest secret of my life, and I still can’t face it, but it’s there…the nagging feeling that maybe I belong here. Everyone has to belong somewhere. Lana belongs in Greece. You belong in Milan or Madrid, even though you’re not in either of those places. Everyone else belongs…well…somewhere else. But me, maybe this is where I need to be. I don’t want to belong here, but maybe I do. With so many people leaving and wanting to leave, someone has to stay behind.” A shock chills Aromir’s spine. He hears everything that Mara says, but his mind is locked on one jolting revelation. “You were married?” he asks. “You’re divorced?” “Yes,” Mara says, wry laughter in her voice. “But I make a terrible wife. You’re lucky, Aromir, to have never fallen in love with me.” “But I did.” “As a friend, Aromir…but never as a suitor, and that’s why I love you now…that and for other reasons I never really said. But it’s not wife-love or even woman love for a scarecrow of a man who never smiles enough. It’s not innocent love either, but it’s love, nonetheless. I’ll never be your wife. Even if I could be, I’d drive you to madness, to insane rage, and I love you enough to not put you through that.” The day is all cloudless wind and chilly, springtime sunlight. It hasn’t rained yet and the rivers are low. It is warm, now, and Aromir walks in near-quiet, looking down and with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. His fists are clenched around emptiness in one pocket and the lone half-shell of a pistachio in the other. Though he is aware of his surroundings and of Mara at his side, he is elsewhere, now. From behind the factory or sprouting from it, like peak-roofed tumors, the old ghostly houses assert the echoes of their grandeur, their gardens, and their stories, though he remembers none of them. The houses were abandoned and dead even in his childhood. They were ruins. They were places where truant children went to play, or where teenagers went to explore the first glimmerings of clumsy, spasmodic sex. Now, the vast factory replacing them asserts its sullen demise and its own demand to be seen, recalled, and—if lucky—rekindled. But it is Mara who anchors his attention: his living friend. A stranger. If he is a taller, slender version of the boy who once played here, she is an eccentric figure in her long, purple skirt, her black windbreaker, and black top hat, stolen from her grandfather’s possessions. She has worn the hat for years now, she says, and for reasons that are wholly personal. Because of the hat, she is the town’s mad-woman and the resident artist, forgivably-eccentric by virtue of the gallery showings she’s achieved in Paris, in Moscow, and in Toronto. She is the one all of the children avoid, even as they stalk her, desperate to steal a glimpse at the exotic life she must lead, because of her hat and the nacreous, impressionistic breasts hanging on gallery walls. (Aromir has seen some of her work and shares gallery-space in Moscow, though it isn’t pendulous, impressionistic mammaries that center his own artistic focus.) An old man’s hat is all it takes, she says, for children to think that magic lives in the world, or in the woman who wears it; when they’re older, she says, they’ll discover tits and will probably follow her around for those: or at least haunt museums and galleries in search of them. She is dismissive of what she has accomplished, and she sees it in relation to the local children (future escapees?) who eye her with voyeuristic dread and suspicion. I am the odd carnage in the train wreck they get to witness. * The walk ends as it began: in the tight and dusty square marking the heart of Old Town. Sunset colors are beginning to smear themselves across the west, and advance of the day’s inevitable end, bats wheel through the air diving, twirling, and drawing drunken arabesques in their energetic hunt for insects. Aromir can hear their clicks and their twitters as he walks beside Mara. A quiet mood has overcome him and he cannot find words to say to her. She’s admitted to loving him, and he doesn’t know how to respond to that. He’s always known it, in some unspoken way, and it seems right—in this moment—to leave it unspoken. There’s been too much said already: at Father’s funeral, among relatives who have seen him all-too-infrequently. He knows which aunts and which uncles have already asked questions behind his back, which ones suspect unspeakable secrets, and the depravities of a life out there beyond the boundaries of the town, the municipality, and even the country itself. He has read their wordless inquisition, even as Father’s ashes received their blessing. Where is the woman to stand beside you? Where is your wife…your girlfriend…your mistress? How selfish are you, Aromir? Why not give your mother grandchildren…she’s lost her husband and children are the best things for her in this time. You’re remiss in your duties. Why? Why? Why? But they answer their own silent inquisitions with sniffs of the nose, with pursed lips and whispers behind his back: looking for signs of something in the way that he walks, and listening for it—oh, so overtly—in every word he speaks. Even in absence, they are listening to him and they will know—soon enough, and somehow—that he walks here, now, with Mara. Some may hope that Mara is the wife to come and the mother of future grandchildren, but others will guess at other truths: none bearing on what a terrible wife Mara admits to being, but on what a terrible husband he is because he is not a husband at all. Not a legitimate one, at any rate. Old couples stroll: arm-in-arm, or stiff with silence between them. Teens smoke and spit at pigeons, or read on the edge of Kaszimov’s Fountain: the town’s desperate, rococo homage to the most famous of her expatriate poet-sons. The fountain is an overwrought flourish of mermaids and fish spewing jets of water, of Neo-Classical pretense, stained green with oxidized copper, bleeding over concrete…or is it limestone? Two people sit on the edge of the fountain, and both are reading. One with her back to the splattering display and the other with his army boots beside him, socks rolled neatly inside. He is something of a punk by his manner of dress, by the leather jacket and dog chains, like something out of a fever dream of American motorcyclists. He is a gaunt scarecrow of a figure, young—and maybe handsome, when seen up close—and burdened with a crown of hair like an electrocuted hedgehog. The book he reads is a thick one and frayed-end markers are inserted between a few of the pages. He is totally absorbed by what he reads. He smokes. His black jeans are rolled up to the knees and his naked feet are likely death cold in the fountain’s shimmering water. It ripples just beneath his knees. “I’m not ready to go home,” Mara says. “Then stay out.” “What about you?” Aromir shrugs. “Mother has her sisters to keep her company.” “Don’t be cold, Aromir.” “I’m her disappointment.” “Are you?” Silence. They walk for a few steps. Mara is moving toward the fountain, toward the literate punk, and Aromir, like a moon trapped in her gravitational pull, follows. She walks half a circuit around the fountain and sits on its edge. Aromir sits beside her, his hands together and shoved between his knees. “Is there someone in your life?” The question is blunt and unexpected and it approaches some obscure point, Aromir knows. Mara makes her points in a sideways manner; it’s all she’s ever done with him: sometimes as a game and sometimes not. “Yes,” Aromir says. “There is.” “In the city?” “No. In the USA. We lived together, for a time, in Prague. He’s coming here next summer.” “Not here,” Mara says, gesturing to the town square. “No,” Aromir says. “To the city.” “He…?” Mara asks, feigning surprise: toying with him, he thinks. “He,” Aromir says. “And he is American?” “Yes.” Mara smiles. “Good,” she says. “He can be your mother’s disappointment. This spares you the burden of cruelty. “That’s not funny, Mara.” “It isn’t supposed to be.” “I want to talk about something else. Or nothing at all.” “Okay,” Mara says. “Let’s wet our feet in our lovely poetic fountain, here, and talk about pleasant things…or nothing at all. Let’s sit together and be civilized. I had a lovely day, walking with you, and let’s not ruin it by starting a stupid argument…like we did last time.” Last time… …before she got married. Before she got divorced. Before she came back, again, and a third time as well. There is nothing to say for nearly one half of an hour, or maybe there is too much and it’s all lumped into the muddle of silence. Mara has pulled the hem of her skirt to above her shins and sits with her feet plunged into the fountain’s rippling water. Aromir has pulled off his shoes and rolled his pants legs. His socks are bundled neatly inside, still warm from contact with flesh, from the intimacy of his shoes, and from walking-sweat, tinged—he thinks—with field scent and the ghosts of a factory and older, vanished houses. The fountain spits and splatters in dumb contentment to itself. Cold water, up to Aromir’s shins, tickles the scant hairs there. If he slides his feet (and he slides his feet now) he can feel grit on the floor of the fountain, and the faces of coins. The water is cold with the echoes of winter. He remembers a time, once— (…after everything changed…) —when, in darkness, he shared this fountain, the square, the whole cloud-clotted night with Jurij: each of them giddy and terrified of what the other might say, or might not say, and at the end of it, neither of them had said anything at all. Not with words, at any rate. But they sat on the edge of this fountain, with water up to their shins and lapping at their knees, brushing the outside edges of their feet together, and—in brazen, shameless moments, Aromir found the tops of Jurij’s toes with the underpads of his own, or Jurij did the same with his shorter, rounder toes, digging and curling them under, until their blunt nails scratched at the hollows between Aromir’s. In retrospect, Aromir knows that this is how they came to know one another. They’d made love with their toes, never calling it that, never naming it in any way: not even when they met in a bar in the City, a few years later. They’d talked on barstools and flirted with each other through reflections in the bar-back mirror, rubbing the toe-edges of their shoes together, as if their feet remained naked and plunged into the water of a town-square fountain. They talked, talked, and laughed a few times. Jurij had taken up the habit of smoking, and Aromir, never one for tabak accepted a single, white-paper roll of the stuff, simply because Jurij lit two and offered one, wordlessly, the faintest hint of spittle on its filter like the promise and the aftermath of a kiss…everything but the kiss itself. Aromir did his best to smoke, but hated the experience. He desired, only the kiss, and at the end of the night, each of them went home with a different stranger Aromir knows nothing of what has since become of Jurij. Now, seized by a chill across his shoulders, he glances at Mara and then drops his gaze to the ripple of water around his legs. “There’s no future in this town,” he says. Mara shrugs, toying with a strand of hair, fallen over one eye. “That’s why everyone leaves.” “Since being back, I’ve thought only of the past.” “That’s because this town is the future: the end of time. Everyone who leaves is a time traveler, going back into the past where things still happen, where things still change. To live here is to be stuck in the future, in the aftermath of everything.” * Aromir finds himself alone at midnight. He has attempted sleep, but the bed—his old bed, his childhood bed—is uncomfortable to him; it is too soft, too small, and too crowded with memories he wishes not to recall. He doesn’t pry under the sheets in search for the small, half-visible stains of semen-salt or sweat. He doesn’t examine the walls in darkness colored orange by streetlamps beyond the window. He knows the patterns on each of the walls here, the small imperfections, the hints and whispers of fingerprints in paint, from a time—long, long ago—when he tried, in boyhood innocence, to free a fly trapped in the paint Father had just applied. He’d been able to remove the fly, but he hadn’t had the skill to save its life. It died between his fingers, wet and half-smashed, suffocated—he knew—by the paint on its body. Its wings were immobile and white, plastered to its back, its sides. He remembers the amazement and then disappointment at the new, childhood knowledge that a dead fly didn’t feel any different from a living one. He swings his legs from bed, planting his feet firmly on the hardwood floor. He feels grit beneath his soles and spreads his toes and presses them against the cool, worn wood. His feet, he thinks, are the feet of a ghost, colored pale in hepatic-orange streetlight. He dresses, without thought; and, as quietly as he can, he steps out of the bedroom and into the parlor. He finds spare keys in the kitchen and knows that they are left for an aunt, asleep in the front-room sofa-bed. He remembers her adamant refusal of his childhood bed and the private room surrounding it. “You’ve lost your father, Aromir; that’s sacrifice enough. Take your old room. Take it.” And now, snoring softly in the darkness, the Aunt is unaware of his movement, his quiet, ghostly steps. He steps out of the apartment and into the hallway outside, the door closing as quietly as possible behind him. He pockets the borrowed keys, descends three flights of stairs, and steps outside. Rain has come, and gone: an errant atmospheric sneeze. It has spent itself. It is a memory, and even less than that, but an oily slickness gleams on the cobblestones underfoot and beads on the windshields of parked cars. A hepatic tinge of streetlight colors each glass-touching rain-bead, and each watery gem promises to show him a convex distortion of his own reflection in crisp, back-lit shadow. He doesn’t need to see himself. He knows that his hair is blond and recently cut, receded at the temples and thinning at the crown. He isn’t twenty, anymore; he isn’t thirty, either. He has elfin features, according to the most intimate of whispered descriptions offered in Prague, beneath the wandering caress of dark, American fingers, their tips tracing the arch of his eyebrows and the bridge of his nose, the cupid’s-bow of his lips, and the sweep of his jaw. Kisses followed, and he thinks of those kisses now, and that description, spoken with a soft, American accent. He recalls that comfortable bedroom on Biskupcová Street. Near the post office, near a bar, and near an apothecary next to a WiFi shop, gaudy with lasers and flashing LEDs. That description and its associated memories are enough: raindrops beaded into dew can show him nothing he wants to see, nothing he wants to recall or conjure. And so, unseeingly, he makes his way through empty streets with only the sound of his own footsteps for company. After a while, near-rural architecture falls behind him, giving way to vast stretches of emptiness, clumped with irregular patches of bramble-growth and weed-trees from Asia. He follows them—walking parallel to them for a while—and then angles down a broad path with only the barest semblance to a road. He follows it out of town. He follows it into a field of knee-tall grass, with a dead factory crouching in the night. He can see very little. In the distance, he can see nothing, but a waft of wood-smoke tells him that he isn’t alone and that a longer walk forward may bring him into unkind company. He pauses where he stands, sniffing the night air. He glances up and searches for stars in the night sky, but there are only clouds, an unctuous blanket of them, colored by the town-lights below. Nothing but the dimmest, most indistinct signs of the town greet his gaze, and Mara’s words echo through his thoughts. “That’s because this town is the future: the end of time. Everyone who leaves is a time traveler, going back into the past where things still happen, where things still change. To live here is to be stuck in the future, in the aftermath of everything.” It is time, he thinks quietly, to travel back in time. To leave for the City. Again. The day after tomorrow. The skies elsewhere are clear, he thinks; and elsewhere, anywhere but here, he thinks, he might see the stars in this moment, each a promise of something…everything…anything at all. Here, there are only the clouds, and the fountain, its water tinged with vague salt from between all of the toes that have soaked in it. He closes his eyes for a moment, hands in his pockets. His fists clench: the left around nothing and the right around the borrowed apartment keys intended for his aunt. He decides to walk back, to climb the stairs and enter the darkened rooms once again: because, walking will bring him no peace, no clarity of mind, and no renewed focus on the things he lives for…out there and away from here. Sleep is the only option the night leaves for him; and so, resigned, he will try to sleep in his boyhood bed while ignoring the phantom buzz of a fly smothered in house-paint or of a father shocked and sullen at his new residence in a funeral urn. THE END As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting; and, hopefully, you've enjoyed this brief foray into...well...Aromir's home town.