American War(77)

“It ain’t coming back,” said Sarat. “If they wanna dream, that’s their choice.”

Layla cupped her hands on Sarat’s. There was a warmth to her palms that seemed to emanate from her eyes. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. But let me ask you this, and be honest: if they did have a time machine up in that Northern hospital, and you had a chance to go back—back to a time when none of what happened to you happened, a different world altogether where there had never been any war—wouldn’t you take it?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Sarat. “They can’t ever make that happen.”

“But if they could…”

“They can’t.”

The bar owner smiled. It was a sad smile, and behind it Sarat suspected something akin to pity. “It’s getting late,” she said. “They’re gonna be out on the docks unloading all night, and then tomorrow the shirt factory dealers are gonna join them, and it’ll be a carnival for three days straight.”

She passed a set of room keys to Sarat. “Get some sleep while you can,” she said. “Room’s all set up how you like it.”

Sarat thanked her. They hugged and Layla retired to her own home, which stood about ten blocks south of the boardwalk, insulated from the riverside cacophony.

Layla Jr. rang the bell: Last call. Sarat finished off the Joyful in her cup and she stumbled off her chair. She climbed the stairs near where the pensioners were getting ready to leave for the dime-bag motels and the VFWs, repurposed now as VDWs. As she climbed the stairs, she leered at Layla Jr., who caught her eyes but said nothing.

The bedroom upstairs was small. The bed was made of a steel bunk salvaged from a ruined Southern destroyer. The bunk bed’s frames had been severed from each other and reset side by side to make a crude double bed. A lamp lit the room, its light sinking into the brown-painted walls. A ceiling fan spun, its bamboo arms warped and wobbling. A small window overlooked the boardwalk and the docks and the river.

Sarat smelled the sheets. They’d been recently washed and they smelled of jasmine. It was the first thing she did whenever she stayed at the Belle Rebelle; the scent of other people on the sheets disgusted her. If she ever detected it—even the slightest remains of another body’s signature—she stripped the sheets from the bed and slept on the naked mattress, or on the floor, where the dust tempered all other scents.

On the nightstand there was an old music-player, the kind that carried songs in its own memory instead of fetching them from the clouds. It had once belonged to Layla’s mother, and had reached that useless middle age between novelty and antique—it was simply old.

Sarat searched it for a song she’d heard before, a slow number she liked. The player had a little display on its face but that had long ago stopped working. Instead she listened, and skipped past song after song until she found the one she wanted. From the speakers came the sound of bourbon-clouded piano keys. A shredded nightgown of a song. You moved like honey, in my dream last night.

Sarat undressed. She set her shirt over the lamp shade, and the soft light turned from amber to blood. The shirt depicted the flag of South Carolina, drawn against a red background instead of blue.

Sarat listened. Layla Jr.’s footsteps were light against the stairs outside. She opened the door. With her apron off she appeared even smaller, a milk-skinned apparition under Sarat’s looming shadow. She closed the door behind her.

“Come here,” said Sarat.

“Say it nicer,” Layla replied.

“No.”

Sarat smiled. She wanted Layla to stand her ground, and Layla knew Sarat wanted it. Because it made what came next sweeter, made the roughness sweeter. And it was the roughness Sarat craved. She wanted not love itself but the taking and giving of it; the parched hardness of her tongue scraping along Layla’s skin, a harvest of goose bumps in its wake. She wanted her to feel love the way a bone feels a break, to make her scream in a language she never even knew she knew, a language deposited from her lips like secrets into the vault of a muffling pillow. She wanted it to hurt, and for Layla to want it to hurt.

The sound of them seeped through the brittle bedroom window and was drowned by the bustle of the docks. Outside, the river rats worked the cranes and the trucks, readying to relieve the gift ships of their contents. Soon the freight ships would arrive and their cargo of rations and tent materials and charity blankets would be moved throughout the Red. Then in the days that followed the ships would be loaded with their reward in the great barter: crate upon crate of clothing from the Southern shirt factories; cheap electronics from the sweatshops along the Alabama coast; fruits and vegetables from Atlanta’s vertical farms. Then the ships would depart, and Augusta would grow quiet once more, the giving and taking complete.

Layla’s heartbeat echoed in the springs. Sarat rolled away. The fan turned slow, easy circles overhead.

She felt Layla’s finger on her back, tracing a wound. The cut was thin and long, running from the top of her left shoulder to the middle of her back.

“How did you get this?” asked Layla.

“Don’t know,” said Sarat.

“Yeah you do. You just don’t want to tell me.”

“That’s right.”

Layla sat up in bed. She leaned over and picked her shirt off the floor and put it on. It was stretched out a little around the collar from when Sarat had pulled it off her. Outside on the boardwalk, there shone a great blinking lantern. A sliver of its light came in through the bedroom window. It cast Layla momentarily in a wash of white, and in this moment the places where her skin was red and flush were made porcelain and clean, the newness of her restored.