This Heaven Too
The city was once alive at night. It’s the near future now, so there aren’t many people left. Concrete gravestones rise droning with the sound of computers, with escalators carrying ghosts, with the rush of water through veins that stretch under everything, beautiful or not, and pulse with heartbeat plumbing; somewhere far away is the sound of the sea, for those who listen. Breaking by is another sound—the grip of a wheel churning concrete, and stallions never could gallop like motorcycles—where rides bright-eyed Billy, and when he passes you he does it in a breath so that you can hardly see Sally hanging on tight, but I assure you if you look she’s there, just for tonight! so look, pry the dark with those eyes—there are young folk yet.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I won’t let go.”
“Don’t let go!” for he hardly could hear her over the engine, over the wind, over his racing heart.
“I’ll be fine, I’m holding on.”
Then they’re gone. Just like that the wailing wheels are gone, and the streets are empty with people in—
Red jackets
Blue jeans
Swamp hats
Graphic tees
Blouses
Leather coats
New Balances
Nary a watch in sight
But bright-eyed Billy and his Sally are burning rubber, and soon they find Oldie with his yacht beached and useless: for years and years he’d been repairing the ship and for years and years Oldie broke down more and more, and it’s hard to say if the ship’s any closer to being done than when it was first yanked out of the water and left to rot. But the Tintegel is proud in the same way as old love songs, a memento of another time (A time when men used boats for leisure).
“You kids don’t stay long,” croaked Oldie. “You kids know I’m workin’ on her, I’m workin’ on ol’ Tint and if there’s life in me, there’s life in her, so don’t stay long because I ought to be finished soon, and if I don’t then well—what the hell, they say the ice caps are melting and we’ll live in boats for homes; I don’t know about that, but I ought to be done with her soon.”
“Yeah, we won’t stay long,” but when Billy tried to squeeze on board Oldie grabbed hold of him and whispered to him: “That Sally’s a looker, she’s a real looker. You said she was and she is.”
“Woah, that’s enough gramps.”
“Well I had to say it once, I won’t say nothin’ like it again, just needed to say it once.”
Sally was already impatient. “C’mon Billy!” and they sidled through the too cluttered deck.
“It’s a damn mess,” said Billy. “He’s an idiot, that guy!”
“Well I like it here, and he’s old so you shouldn’t blame him.”
“Well we’ll get a rusty nail in our palms and get tetanus, for fucks sake.”
Sally reached the wheel of the yacht. “Look at me! I’m the captain.”
Bright-eyed Billy saluted. “Your orders?”
“Hmmmm, do we have the boat to ourselves tonight?”
“Yeah, Oldie’s heading home.”
“Then strip—then I want you to swab the poopdeck.”
“It’s cold, okay? I don’t wanna. And what poopdeck? It’s all tools and junk everywhere.”
“That’s mutiny so walk the plank, see if I care.”
Soon they were under a blanket watching the stars. “There’s a hundred million of ‘em.” “Yeah, I bet.” “You know any constellations?” “Nope—don’t care to, either.” “We should learn, one of us.” “Yeah; you always say stuff like that.” “It’d be good, when we’re exploring the seven seas.” “All day you’re working on your bike, you don’t even look at me; so how’re you gonna memorize the stars?” “Not true! I talk to you tons.” “Pass a beer?”
She sat up and draped Billy’s leather jacket over her shoulders. The only light there was glinted off discarded cans; cans of all kinds but Oldie’s fave was PBR, so mostly it was a faint blue.
“You shouldn’t have come out here,” said bright-eyed Billy. “I mean I’m glad you’re here but you shouldn’t have come.”
She never knew what to say. “I don’t want to talk about myself anymore.” The can stole the warmth from her hands and made her shiver. “I just wanna drink and make jokes.”
“You did a very stupid thing,” he squirmed over and rested his head on her thigh. “If I hadn’t—”
“But you did, so it’s okay now. Can we just fool around?” she bent down, it was uncomfortable to go so low but she did, and kissed him. Billy withdrew. “You hate my kisses now?” and she kissed him more forcefully.
“Hey—stop!” he couldn’t help laughing, no matter how hard he tried to be serious. “Listen!—no, listen for real,” he pointed at her and she bit his finger. “Ouch!”
Then as the days came and went things were like this:
Oldie came by and worked but couldn’t do anything, so bright-eyed Billy helped out as best he could and Sally was their “assistant,” though never once did she grab the right tool or take the right measurement. The three of them drank and Oldie told stories that changed each time; stories of impossible times the kids could never know, though they’d have loved to. These stories of men and wives, of working in factories, of cops and robbers: golden days, they all said and sighed, those were golden days. And Sally would worry sick when Billy lifted food or drink or little gifts, just dollar jewelry and little more, though no matter how much she worried she also loved being dolled up in plastic: she couldn’t help it, and Billy could never look in her eyes when he gave her a gift, he’d turn red and when he did she fell in love all over again.
“Hey,” said Sally to Oldie on a day when Billy was out riding. “Let’s swap our clothes, and when Billy comes back you give him a big ol’ smooch.”
Well Oldie almost wheezed himself to death at the thought, and he was never as comely as he was wearing her long woolen skirt. At the sound of a coming engine, Oldie and Sally took their places sitting on lawn chairs out front of the Tintegel. But Oldie’s ears perked up, and he sat up high in his chair. “That ain’t no chopper,” he said. “On the boat.” Sally froze. “Now! On the boat!”
From out back of his car Oldie grabbed a double-barrel half as old as he was and crouched low as his bad back could manage behind the vehicle. Soon there came a stout muscle car, a bad sunset looming behind it. The purple sky changed the yellow car to pure gold, its grills diamond. The car drifted to a stop, and out came three men. At the head of the pack walked Furious Andy: as mad as his moniker and armed with gold-plated pistols strapped under his jacket. He had a loose swagger, his head writhed like a snake as he walked, and he mosied back and forth as he spoke:
“Sally! Best you come out. We need you back—I need you back. You had a taste of a life long gone on my dollars, then dipped for what?—some blonde boy, and now you’re all stranded out of the city without a pretty dress to your name. I’ll forgive you—I’m angry, but I’ll only hit you once if you come out here right now.”
She was silent. A breeze picked up through the long abandoned marina. Unused mooring lines stirred from unwaking sleep. Seagulls cawed at the sunset, those superior birds who will outlast even the roaches. He stopped his pacing.
“Sally!” he yelled, “you come out. There’s a storm coming, it’s dangerous by the coast, so come with me you dumb bitch before you get your tits soaked. SALLY!” that final yell like a bark, and she flinched because the shock of sound brought to mind terrible things; memories of her father and his glasses and his work ethic and her mother with hair like straw babbling whilst using the computer all day. She rose and locked eyes with Furious Andy.
He scanned her, her in loose oil patched clothes. “What—the—hell!” and the shock of her faded beauty was blasted away by the greater shock by far of a slug to the gut, and knocked unconscious then dead he still couldn’t process what he had seen, for to him Sally was aged a hundred years in only a month. When last he saw her she wore sequins that hugged her hips, and her hair was wild and teased up, and her lips were red and she kissed him on his neck and arms: and that degree of difference is too much for any man in his final moment.
Andy’s men blasted Oldie to death with their pistols. He was dead flat against the car to a chorus of screams from Sally above. The two thugs turned to Sally, who cowered behind the yacht’s side rails. One took a step, then she said:
“You come up here I’ll blast you! I might not get both but I’ll get one!”
“Okay—we’ll confer for a while,” said the shorter thug, and they talked in low voices: “Boss is dead, we’ve got bigger problems than some whore.” “Yeah true. Still, we should nab her.” “I don’t wanna get blasted.” “We might do it without getting hit. I give it seventy thirty odds, if we do it like this. We climb at the same time from different angles, maybe toss something as a distraction,” he peered at her, then continued, “cuz she’s jumpy—look at her, she’s real jumpy so we gotta split her focus.” “That’s all good but that’s thirty that we’re blasted, so between the two of us that’s a fifteen percent chance of me getting hit.” “You’ve been shot before, you didn’t die.” And the taller one whacked the shorter one on the head. “That’s why I don’t wanna get hit!”
“We’ve come to an agreement,” the short thug said, rubbing a fresh bruise on his bald head. “We’re going.” When she didn’t say anything he felt embarrassed. “Sorry about all this.”
The two drove off and Sally thanked God they didn’t call her bluff.
Oldie was cold dead. She prodded his body but he didn’t move. The corpses—Andy and Oldie staring at nothing—made her fall into a deep hole inside of herself. She couldn’t stand and pulled herself onto the Tintegel. Somehow it was safer there.
Bright-eyed Billy soon roared up with a hardwon necklace robbed from a jewelry store—real gems of almost diamond moissanite: silicon carbide tear drops on a silver chain, and she would’ve been a princess should it be worn around her neck. Then he saw her laying dead—he saw, in the last of sunlight, her shoes, her skirt, her white shirt: all of it bloody and slumped dead. The tragedy saw him howl at the coming moon and tear his shirt in two; he yelled until Sally called from above and, hearing her voice, he thought she was an angel but no—those circling wings were a seagull and below them was her in flesh. He clambered up the side of the yacht and held her for a long time. Both mourned and thanked Oldie in their own way, though it was odd to Billy that who he held smelled like his dead mentor.
“I got this for you,” he says in a cracking voice. He puts the necklace round her neck and it is so so beautiful; it is a wedding ring for them, and she smiles for the first time since Oldie got shot. They look out at the moon, at the water. Rain whips them, first in small droplets but very quickly it becomes a storm. The tide rises and laps at the boat. The waves pick up: more and more, until Oldie and Furious Andy are afloat, their bodies catching on one another, their guns sinking below them.
“I have to tell you something,” she says. “Why I left.”
“You don’t gotta tell me nothing. I don’t care, I just know I love you.”
“I can say it now,” she removes Oldie’s hat and holds it to her heart, just beneath her necklace. “I left because I didn’t want to die without having tasted something like the music I loved or the movies I watched; I left because mom terrified me—I don’t talk about it much but she did, she really really did; I left because dad wanted me to be all these things that didn’t exist anymore, and no matter where I looked I could never find the old stores and restaurants he talked about. Most of all I left because I needed to find a way to live as myself,” she started to cry, but Billy couldn’t tell her tears from the rain, “and Andy was bad to me but not that bad, and never so bad as not taking a risk in my whole life, because you know as well as I do that that’s gonna be over with, that the kids growing up now are never gonna have a shot at what we did.”
“We never had what they had before us,” the water climbed, the boat began to bob, just slightly.
Sally saw the water sweep away the piled detritus of the abandoned marina. Frothing waves scraped the roof of the yellow muscle car and swallowed Billy’s bike. “You think this boat works?” she asked.
“One way to know,” and he raised the sails and checked the motor.
Each year the city shrinks. What once was is swallowed by an inch more water; inch over inch, then gone. The buildings will one day become the ridged bones of forgotten dinosaurs, indecipherable and strange when disordered and half unearthed, while for now people weave their way between blanched hollows in an unseeing spatial solipsism trained since youth. There are very few riders left; I dare you to spot them! There are very few perverts or mad men, or sluts or cretins, or hysterics or prophets, or crackheads or strippers—
Yet on the ever growing sea the ghosts of two lovers breach the white fringe of crashing waves, and though no one sails anymore they would, if they did, hear the voice of a woman asking: “Is this heaven too?”