memoria

PART I

I emerge from a deep dreamless ocean of sleep. Cotton dryness cakes the inside of my mouth, and dull cramping aches nag my muscles along shoulders and spine. It takes me a few disoriented moments to realize I must have fallen asleep on the couch last night.

Corbin is letting the light in, throwing back the pinch-pleated linen curtains with the scrape of its brass rings and a heavy fabric rustle: sunlight streams from the window into the living room. When the glare strikes my eyes and I clench them shut again, I’m not sure whether I should thank or murder him for waking me.

“Bastard,” I finally tell him. It’s all that comes to mind.

He stands bathed in the sunlight, a man of roughly my own height and size, enough that he and I can share suits, and maybe that’s part of the idea. His is the spare utilitarian black of a funeral mourner or bureaucrat, dark like an eclipse against the window.

Dragging my fingers across my face, massaging the ghost of an ancient-feeling ache from my temple, I glance at Corbin’s tamely smiling face. Patient. Good-natured enough to accept my ingratitude without comment, shrewd enough to keep me from getting off easy.

“Late night, Master March?” he asks, playing the dutiful butler, the feudal manservant, my vassal, my right hand. But he’s making sport of me, even when his allegiance is unquestionable. Corbin’s got a slow, easy New Orleans drawl, softening the r in master until it melted away entirely, and my name transforms the same way: Masteh Mauch.

“Damn you,” I answer, aware of the irony, and I push to brace myself up on the armrest of the Italian leather sofa.

“Needed some time to think,” I tell him, when I’ve swung my legs around and straightened my back, settling into the davenport like a broad throne. I fell asleep with my shoes on, and the way the pinstripes down the three-thousand dollar Castangia suit twist with the careless wrinkles I left in it momentarily distracts my attention. I imagine white hairline serpents across a landscape of obsidian glass.

“Thinkin’ a lot lately?” he asks, briefly, efficiently moving around the room to straighten, to arrange the habitual mess of discarded ties and overturned ashtrays I leave behind me.

“What?” I ask. An old brass serving tray. He’s left on the sofa’s end table, and now that I’m aware of it, the scent of eggs Florentine and ristretto hits me with enough force that I forget about the cigarettes in my pocket, the low-frequency crave receding. Best of all, Corbin’s placed a heavy M9 (beautiful matte black, the magazine empty, the chamber clear, solid American warmachine) to rest alongside the sterling utensils like an apéritif.

“You haven’t been sleeping, My Lord,” the vassal clarifies, glancing at me briefly, soberly. He smiles with an easy caretaker’s humor. Knows me better than anyone alive; and he should, he’s been with me long enough. Corbin and Merle, the two of them.

“I’ve been restless,” I tell him succinctly, between a mouthful of eggs, toasted English muffin, and an espresso chaser that scalds my tongue. The heat, the sensitizing burn, grounds me in this body—the visceral pleasure of being flesh and blood, sinew and bone. Fucking gorgeous.

“Since ‘the White girl’,” he supplies, cutting to the heart of it without pausing or flinching. He uses my own turn of phrase instead of his, though the words are faintly incongruous coming out of his mouth. His brow pointedly rises, and Corbin’s slim white smile flashes bright against his smooth milk-and-coffee skin, the mulatto’s Creole complexion. And he says, gently baiting me:

“You’ve been sullen as an old crow since her ghost passed through. Why don’t you go pay the pretty child a visit?”

He’s more of a trickster than I am, with his practiced charm—the rough and tumble bayou warmth blended seamlessly with Old World French sensibility. I think he’d have chosen this guise even if it didn’t soothe me, remind me of where I spent my most cherished decades of the twentieth century. But Corbin would have loved Louisiana for himself, if he’d never chosen to follow me. He relishes the witching dusky-skinned women, the fever of Mardi Gras like a retelling of Venice Carnival, the moaning blues that gives a voice to what we’ve lost too.

But he can’t hook me this time. I shake my head, and he doesn’t press. I can still watch Bobbi Pascal White with my starfield eyes, my devil’s clairvoyance. The spy legions at my call are endless, perched raven-light on the power lines outside her private academy, riding the updrafts on soot-colored feathers, silently vigilant in the boughs of her bedroom elm. I’ve gifted her with summoning charms and the warding Seal of Solomon. She’ll be safe. Safer, I tell myself, without me.

PART II

We let a few minutes pass in silence. I’m savoring the lingering taste of coffee after the cup’s empty, the simple animal gluttony of a filled stomach. My eyes drift briefly to the nine-millimeter; but war can wait a little while longer.

With a few of my discarded ties gathered off the floor and draped over his arm, Corbin crosses the living room’s broad space—over impractical Saxony carpet, weaving past the antique furniture that I’ve bought at auction since the poltergeist obliterated the flat’s previous fixtures. My precious detritus. And he pauses by a hefty-looking cardboard box sitting next to the hallway that wasn’t there when I stumbled home last night.

“What’s that?” I ask, and curiosity’s got me leaning forward like a dog on a scent. Somewhere in the sea of my unconsciousness, memory moves in liquid ripples: something familiar that I can’t quite place, an old echo from another time or another life.

He’s quiet for a beat, just a half second, and the pause is enough to tell me that whatever’s inside isn’t trivial. “Take a look,” Corbin says, keeping the silk neckties from falling as he carefully lifts the box in his arms. He holds the flimsy cardboard thing—aged and falling apart—like bishops handle gilt reliquaries for petrified bones of long-dead saints. Steady but reverent.

He places this holy ark down at my feet, and tells me, “This place is too empty, Master March.” Corbin’s mellow drawl is quiet, discreet. “You need to fill it up with things again. Good things. Beautiful things.” Like he knows what’s best for me, even when I don’t. I’ve got a twitch across the corner of my mouth, and it’s either going to curl into a scowl or a laugh, but they both mean the same thing: Damn you, what is it?

He steps away. The vassal turns his back to give me privacy, and a few moments later I hear the sound of the water running in the kitchen as Corbin begins washing the dishes from the breakfast he cooked for me.

Ophélie’s things. Ophélie, Ophelia, my O, my Oh. Delicately packaged in faded newsprint, the paper crinkling under my fingertips. Headlines from five years ago, when I boxed them all away, when I couldn’t bear to look at anything that once belonged to her but that she wouldn’t touch again. I gingerly peel back the flaps of corrugated cardboard with trembling hands; and I could stop now, close the box again, send it back to storage. Scream at Corbin until my already-ruined throat chokes with rage and frustration and the welling tears I will not shed, because they mean that death is final, that I’m defeated, that Father has won.

But I can’t stop.

Here, through whispering layers of fragile paper, some fragile porcelain ballerina I’d given to her on her seventh birthday, and I remember the smell of her hair when she laughed and threw her arms around my neck, and how she’d kept it until she was an old woman dying here in New York City, miles and eons from old Paris and Fulcanelli and her father Canseliet.

There, a read and reread copy of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, one that she’d paged through until it was battered and dog-eared, desiccated now—and I remember how I’d loved to read it with her. I recognized myself in Dantès, in the way he burned with hate and revenge and love all at once. She with her wicked-sweet voice coyly asked to be my Haydée, and I, laughing, had asked which of us was the slave, and which the master.

Toward the bottom, sifting through substance and memory, my fingers brush a small leatherbound photo album we bought together in the Champs-Elysées. Beside it, steadfast companion, I can feel the hard geometric lines of her Super-Eljy Type 3, and I remember how pleased she’d been that the first photograph she ever took was of me—sitting with my thoughts distracted by Fulcanelli’s research, startled by the sudden flash, and the child crowed with laughter because I, the so-grand Marquis of Gehenna, had been surprised.

In the kitchen, the water shuts off.

But he was right. Corbin’s always right. Since O died on a pure-white hospital bed, I’ve been empty; and since the White girl swept all of my comforts away, there’s been nothing left to hide behind. It feels strange, imbecilic to unearth Ophélie’s old possessions and arrange them in my own space—as easily smashed as those things I’ve lost already.

But it’s the memories, the pieces of my history, that matter more than the physical objects I can caress in my hands. These are already on the verge of collapsing under time’s weight. Seeing them once, I’m almost, almost back in Paris—not younger or kinder, but happier.

It’s better that they be blown to dust than for me to keep them hidden away.