Don’t Let Me Go(2)

“No. Not at all. Not in any way. I’m not in any business now.”

“Didn’t you like being a dancer?”

“I loved it. I adored it. It was my world. I sang, too. And acted.”

“So why’d you stop?”

“I wasn’t cut out for it.”

“You weren’t good?”

“I was very good.”

“Then what weren’t you cut out for?”

Billy sighed. He had come out here to ask questions, not to answer them. And yet it had seemed so natural, so inevitable, when the roles reversed on him. In fact, he wondered why he’d ever thought he could be the grown-up in this — or, for that matter, any other — conversation. Just good acting skills, maybe. But who even knew where those skills had gone off to these days? What you don’t use, you lose.

“Everything,” he said. “I wasn’t cut out for anything. Life. Life is something I’m just not cut out for.”

“But you’re alive.”

“Marginally so, yes.”

“So you’re doing it.”

“Not well, though. I am not turning in a suitable performance. Thank God the critics have moved on to more promising pastures, and not a moment too soon. Could you go inside if you tried? I mean, if you needed to?”

“Sure. I got the key right here.”

She held it up in the fading light. Held it for him to see. A shiny, new-looking key dangling on a cord around her neck. It caught and reflected a beam of light from the streetlamp, which had just come on. A miniature flash for Billy’s eyes.

Shine, Billy thought. I do remember the concept.

“I’m having a little trouble,” he said, “understanding why anyone would be outside when they could just as easily be in.”

“Don’t you ever go outside?”

Oh, good God, Billy thought. Here we go again. There was just no way to stay on top of the conversation.

“Not if I can help it. Aren’t you scared?”

“Not if I stay this close to home.”

“Well, I’m scared. I look out and see you out here all by yourself, and I’m scared. Even if you’re not. So maybe I could talk you into doing me a favor. Maybe you could go back inside so I don’t have to be scared any more.”

The little girl sighed grandly. Theatrically. A girl after Billy’s own heart.

“Oh, OK. I was really only going to stay out till the streetlights came on, anyway.”

And she trudged up the stairs and disappeared inside.

“Great,” Billy said out loud, to himself, and to the dusk. “If I’d known that, I could have saved myself a whole lot of honesty.”

? ? ?

Billy didn’t sleep well that night. Not at all. He wasn’t able to prove definitively that the massive, unspeakable act of going outdoors had caused the upset and the bad night, but it seemed reasonable to think it had. It was a place to which he could direct blame, at least, which was better than nothing.

When he did drift off, usually for just a few minutes at a time, he experienced the flapping of the wings. A recurrent dream, or half-dream, or illusion. Or hallucination. The more disturbed by life he felt on any given day, the more the wings would beat in his sleep by night.

They tended to startle him awake again.

He did finally, eventually, get to sleep for real, but not until an hour or two after the sun came up. And by the time he finally woke, stretched, and rose — for it didn’t pay to hurry these delicate issues — it was well after three thirty in the afternoon.

He rose, and tied back his hair in the usual manner — a long, narrow ponytail down the middle of his back. Then he leaned over the bathroom sink and shaved by feel, sometimes keeping his eyes closed, sometimes gazing into the plain wood of his medicine cabinet as if it contained a mirror, as it probably had at one time, and as most medicine cabinets did.

He made coffee, still halfway hearing the rustling of those wings in his head. A kind of non-macabre haunting. But a haunting, nonetheless.

He opened the refrigerator, only to remember, just as he did, that he was out of cream. And groceries would not be delivered again until Thursday.

He dumped three spoonfuls of sugar into his sad black coffee, stirred without enthusiasm, then carried the mug to his big sliding-glass door. He pulled back the curtains in order to peek at the spot where he’d seen the little girl the previous evening. Maybe she’d only been a dream or a vision, like the beating of wings, only louder.

She was still there. So apparently not.

Well. Not still, he told himself. Inwardly, silently, he corrected his own thinking. She had slept inside. Of course. She must be out there again. Yes, again. That felt at least slightly less disturbing.

He looked up to see old Mrs. Hinman, the woman who lived in the attic apartment of his building, make her way down the sidewalk toward home.

“Good,” Billy said, out loud but in a whisper. “Tell her to go inside.”

The old woman moved in a slow but determined waddle, paper shopping-bag clutched tight, the neck of her single bottle of red wine protruding over the top of the bag. There was always a bottle, Billy had noticed, and it always protruded. Only one bottle, so it wasn’t that she drank all that much. Was she advertising? Or, as seemed more likely to Billy, keeping it close at hand in case it should be needed as a weapon?