“That’s all right, she seems snooty anyhoo.” The baba pinches Abby’s cheek. “Now, would you like an eggy-wegg, pretty girl?”
Inside, Swanny’s eyes adjust to the shade. The building’s electricity must have shorted out long ago, because although the many arched windows fill the scholarly sanctuary with the weak light of the afternoon, the light fixtures hang spent and useless from their ceiling chains. Here and there, glowing on the tops of long oak tables, are votive candles, and before them, bent over their books like supplicants at prayer, are the Librarians.
These are real Gray Ladies, and Gray Men too, tenuous creatures from which life has leached all color. Swanny’s old deck of paint samples would have called their wisps of hair Downy Owl, Whispering Spring, Misty Morning. Some heads are paler still: Linen, Baby’s Breath, Cream, Snow, Chantilly Lace. Striding past them, which she tries to do briskly, silently, is like fording a bank of clouds, the smoky exhaust of the past.
The stacks are labyrinthine, and she sometimes has to step over the body of a fallen Librarian, asleep or even deeper gone into the central fold of a tome. Swanny runs her fingers over the spines, with titles that read like clues—Lost Children, The Inner City, Swimming the Lethe, The Collected E. Hamish Plumbrick, Necessary Evils, The Magician Is Dead—until, with surprising ease, she finds it, the book she’s looking for: Power Suit by Chet Dahlberg.
“Your father, the poet.” Pippi mentioned it just once before that fatal night, some years earlier. Swanny thought then that it was a joke, since they’d drained the vermouth on their last round of martinis and Pippi was shrieking with laughter as she spoke. “Every morning to his secretary—‘Miss Langley, take a poem!’ The poor child would have preferred a pay cut, I’m sure.” Swanny checks the copyright page: PRINTED ON DEMAND. He really was an author, one the public clamored for. Who better to offer Swanny some solace, some instruction, at this trying time?
Outside, on the steps, Abby and the bird lady are eating soft-boiled pigeon eggs; the bird lady makes Hooligan perform tricks for the shells.
“Sit,” instructs the bird lady.
—spin around? bark?
—I’m not giving you a hint, Hooli!
—just kidding. so smart.
The apehound sinks back on his haunches, tongue lolling. The bird lady throws a yolky glob in his direction, but a pigeon pecks at it first. Angrily, Hooligan throttles its feathered throat. The pigeon coos in terror.
—Stop it. Remember what happened last time?
—not same. not magic. not friend.
“Put down my Lulu,” the bird lady orders sternly. “Bad dog. Give me the bird.”
—oh! know this one.
Hooligan drops the pigeon and joyfully flicks her off with both hands.
Meanwhile, Ripple is getting nowhere fast with the police department as represented by a tiny mustachioed visage on his screen, low resolution by design. “Pro, what do you mean this was the jurisdiction of a private security firm? Like, what does ‘jurisdiction’ mean?”
“We can’t issue reports on incidents from outside the district we police.”
“Who does police it, then?”
“Your father contracted a private security firm called HomeShield to monitor your property. When he signed the enhanced user agreement, he waived his rights to emergency services from the Metropolitan Police Department. By law, we’re not obligated to police parts of the city with that level of private coverage.”
“Seriously? My dad got house bouncers because you suck at law enforcing, and now you’re saying no cops even went to check it out? My mother-in-law’s dead!”
“Congratulations?”
“Too soon, doughnut patrol. You need to send your guys up there pronto. I’m not joking around. You’re going to hear from my lawyers about this.”
* * *
Swanny sits on the library floor, her back against a shelf of books as she reads. The text, though set in type, is printed in such an informal, whimsical sans-serif style Swanny feels as though her father might have lettered it himself.
The Love Song of C. Norman Dahlberg
Let us go now, you and I,
Where, like some seraph fallen from the sky,
My wife lies etherized upon a table.
For you’ll have time
To repair a face to greet the faces that you greet;
You’ll have time to murder and to birth
To burn a name upon the earth
To live a lifetime full of changes which a scalpel will reverse.
In the clinic, the women come and go,
Bitching about rhinoplasty.
The yellow smog presses its palms against the windowpanes
The yellow smog taps its fingers on the windowpanes
The yellow smog curls up before the hearth of a burning skyscraper,
Warms its thin hands, and falls asleep.
I have been here before; I know it well.
Hours in this waiting room are hell,
Measured out in cheap coffee, imagined crises,
Hellos to other husbands one scarcely recognizes.
In the clinic, the women come and go,
Bitching about rhinoplasty.
Then, at last, an audience with the wife,
Who smiles knowingly, without a sound,
As if to say, “I am Eurydice, come back from deep underground,
Which is why the light bothers me
And that’s absolutely the only reason I’m wearing wraparound sunglasses.”
It’s been worth it, after all,
The operations have rubbed out the marks of all her days
Except the hands, twisted with veins and knots,
Dotted with freckles and old age spots,
and plenty of fine lines and wrinkles.
So the yellow smog will have time
To seep in through these windows, to cloud our gaze,
To mellow the antiseptic air to a nostalgic haze.
For I have known these hands already, known them well:
Known them mornings, evenings, afternoons,
A pair of ragged claws clamped upon my arm,
Or scuttling a Rolodex of names to harm.
Such claws!
The siren crab that closes on the ankle, beneath the waves,
And pulls us all to our watery graves.
“Good lord, he loved her?” Swanny murmurs. Imagining her mother clutching a man by the arm, much less entertaining one from that most vulnerable of places, a post-op hospital bed, is like seeing a familiar face grinning out from a carnival cut-out board. Corona had a photograph of herself in one of those, her plain, maternal visage mismatched with a mermaid’s sensual frame. But this new picture of Pippi as siren crab is even more incongruous. And Swanny can’t see her father at all: no matter how far back she reaches in her childhood memory, he’s still only a silhouette, a contorted shadow puppet moaning behind bed-curtains. She flips ahead, past poems with indecipherable titles (“Vasovagal Syncope, or: The Bradley Method”) and ones with words scattered like vase shards all over the page. But she audibly gasps when she sees the title of the last verse in the book, doggerel this time.
Apology to My Daughter
We fucked you over, your mom and I
We have only ourselves to blame
We should’ve had the tact to die
And finish off the Dahlberg name.
But as old people past our prime
We saw in you a hopeful chance
To change the world one last time
And see the future in advance.