“You got anything a little less revolting? She’s from Outside.”
“Oh, I don’t think I can eat,” says Swanny. It’s the most curious thing yet: a fog is rolling in, gray and muddlesome, and with it comes the sensation that the room is filling up—not merely with vapors, but with presences, malevolent and otherwise. “Not in this weather we’re having.”
“You’ll eat,” Sharkey tells her. He turns back to the waiter. “Anything with less than twenty-two percent unaccounted for?”
“You always were a numbers man,” the waiter concedes, glancing at his missing fingers. Tendrils of miasma nudge the stumps. The smog warms its thin hands, and falls asleep. “For the diner discerning enough to request another option, there’s these cans of dead dog. All ground up, we’ve been mixing it with noodles. That’s the stroganoff.”
Sharkey is skeptical: “Never had dog meat from a can.”
“It’s got a picture of a dog on the label.” Following a menu’s logic is impossible in this murk; Swanny wonders why he can’t just leave them be.
“That means it’s for a dog, not from a dog. Listen, let’s save some time here. I want you to go downstairs and tell your chef to make something fit for human consumption. We’ll take two of those.”
At last, the waiter phases out of view. The fog now fills Swanny’s entire frame of vision; even just across the table, Sharkey seems so far away.
“What’s happening to me?” she asks. “I’m up in the clouds and I can’t come down.”
“They’re not clouds. And those weren’t snowflakes either.”
“No?”
“Nah. They’re smoke and ashes. Ashes, then smoke. Passing through.” Sharkey takes out his chaw wallet, removes a one-penny plug. “Bringing back what they took.”
“What do you mean?”
He works his jaw on the dose. “When something’s gone, it’s gone for good. But it leaves a space behind. A negative space. It used to be that when I chewed, I’d see smoke and ashes dusting over all the negative spaces. Making it so I could see what was missing. Sounds like that’s starting to happen to you.”
“But you said the things I’d see wouldn’t be real.”
“They ain’t. Not anymore.” Unlike the waiter, Sharkey is a familiar of these mists. His melancholy allows him to dissolve, ever so slightly, into the air she breathes.
“How did you learn to make chaw?” she asks.
“Same way the last Nick learned to run this place. An old inmate taught me.”
“Your father?”
“Not all of us grew up so cherished as yourself.”
The waiter returns triumphantly: “We had a couple of these left in the deep freeze. Less than a year past expiration.”
GRANDMA BETTY’S MILITARY RATIONS, reads a logo printed on the clear plastic wrapper affixed to the top of the tray. Inside, a bloodless slab of protein lies alongside mysterious purees of yellow, green, and orange. ? HEART HEALTHY ?
“I liked this place better under the old management,” grumbles Sharkey. But for once, Swanny isn’t focused on her food. The waiter startles as she grasps him by the wrist.
“How extraordinary,” she murmurs, examining his ruined hand. Where earlier she saw only stumps, she now sees fingers, tapering to elegant completion, rendered in translucent grayscale. The lined knuckles, the nails, even the whorling prints, are all delicately visible, sculpted from the ether. “But wait. This didn’t happen in a fire.”
The waiter glances at Sharkey uncertainly. Sharkey answers for him: “Not a fire.” As soon as she loosens her grip, the waiter skitters away.
The smoke dissipates, like the ashes before it. Swanny is out on a date with her mother’s killer, a murderer of children, and an apparent torturer too. She looks longingly down at the dining hall below. A saw player has joined the bucket drummer, and the parquet floor is filling up with writhers and swayers.
“I’d like to dance,” she says. She doesn’t add, alone. But he hears it anyway.
“Stay where I can see you. And leave your coat.”
Swanny descends to the dining hall below. Without Sharkey’s anchoring presence, the floaty feeling returns, but this time she doesn’t discorporate; instead, she’s light, so very light that her feet barely skim the ground. She’s been heavy all her life: heavy of flesh, heavy of heart. But now, for the first time in recollection, gravity is her friend. She moves into the crowd of torchies—sparkers, cocottes all—and they move together, almost weightless, particles agitated by a flame.
Enjoy life, for our sake.
You will never die.
She lets herself forget.
Swanny only stops dancing when she notices the cat. Or rather, the space a cat left behind. The feline phantasm slips between the feet of revelers, as lithe as a magician’s scarf. Swanny works her way out from the throng to follow it as it stalks between the tables, finally leaping atop one to lap at an abandoned jar of Embalming Fluid.
“Here, kitty,” Swanny coos, and the specter looks up, alarmed. Its ears are frayed, its left eye gouged; in its place is a hollow socket, seeping ectoplasm. A one-eyed hooch-drinking ghost cat. But Swanny’s never had a pet, and it’s too late to be choosy now. She takes another step toward it, and the cat leaps down, darting into the shadows, past an Emergency Exit sign and down a dim hallway to the right of the stage. Swanny isn’t quite sure why she follows, but she does.
“Kitty?” she calls, scaling some wooden steps, pushing open an ajar door marked PERFORMERS ONLY. But Felis domesticus is hiding, or else dematerialized. Swanny takes a look around. She’s standing on the forsaken stage. The scene is still set for some long-ago production, most likely a musical or cabaret; two chairs face each other across a narrow table and instruments rest here and there, collecting dust. One in particular attracts her attention. It’s as though it’s been left out just for her.
Swanny once called the klangflugel a “tuned typewriter,” because that’s what it resembles. The instrument before her now poises on its rickety stand, brass and badly kept, its winglike bellows faded at the creases. Swanny places her fingers on the keys, forty-one little metal disks indented for her fingertips—specifically for her fingertips—and taps out a few soft chords. The velvet curtain is thick enough to dampen the music; if she keeps it pianissimo, no one will notice she’s back here.
“Close the door behind you.”
Swanny looks up. Her mother sits over at the table, glowing gray and transparent, smoking a cigarette. The puffs leaving her mouth look just like the rest of her, but while they dissolve, Pippi stays. Her left arm is invisible where it touches the light slanting in from backstage.
“Mother,” Swanny says. She wonders at her own unsurprise. But of course this is exactly whom she’s journeyed here to meet.
“Come in or go out, but make a decision. There’s a draft.”