Where to find them?
Hard to say, but they’ve been seen in séance, beneath the night.
Who’s seen them?
Only Gwen Northward: pilgrim, orphan, and trash collector.
Where to find her?
Tonight you’ll find her at Crossroads Haven on the second floor, where a thousand memories, in hospice sheen, converge at once.
Who is she with?
There isn’t a soul in sight except the nurse, and the one that clings, half-departed, to her sleeping mother.
Her mother is dying?
Yes, and watch Gwen stroke her willowed hands, the still-blue veins, and wonder whether she ever knew the mother she had, if maybe she did once, but has forgotten…and what is this dream of her mother before her? And was that the final breath? The respirator grows silent, the gloveless nurse sighs from far away, but the hand is still warm, so what to believe? Blood or machinery? Skin or silicon? Life or death? It may be, as Pharaohs surmised, that the body splits at death, folds into a new fabric, shuffles through the god palaces and sups forever with the whole Line of Kings, in which case this hand Gwen holds is still her mother’s hand, the hand traced on the new canvas, now lifted off the page…
There is a dialogue here, she senses, between the medicinal instruments, their vile signaling, and the words of eons past. The scribal words, scrawled by sandstorm dust, dreaming of former flesh. Holy words intoned while the heart monitor reports a void. Christophany and flat-line drone. Samsara and circuitry groan. Deathbed fluorescence and the curtained young night. Around her are the humming systems of death, beyond her is the fetal dawn, the tattered starlight, and the dream of heaven. All this, in mysterious confluence.
So she is gone?
Yes, and now so is Gwen. The deathroom recedes, and she goes back God knows how many years, to a lost crayon summer and her old back porch, where she, thrilled to be out of school, is drawing the trees as they sway, emerald and glistening, in the slipping sun. Now, it is the mother’s hand around the child’s. She leans behind Gwen and looks at the trees as well, and somehow, through some occult maternal channel, sees what Gwen sees in the trees, the same faces, the same suggestions, and they don’t speak, and there’s no sound except for the birds and the gentle rush of leaves, and together they draw this tree that Gwen has dreamed. For a moment they are one channel, issuing forth, in crayon flourish, one and the same stream…and now Gwen holds her mother’s hand and finds this canal sealed, forever, and she left to row alone, to fight upstream against a flow now foreign, and the nurse is offering condolences, instructions, and the tears have come, and there are professionals to speak with, and there are arrangements to be made, and there is the bureaucracy of death…and then there is a fold in the ream of time, a period of blankness, and Gwen awakens walking, on the road alone, and aimless…
Where has she gone?
Drifted from the hospice into the darkness.
Where will she go?
She will wander. Now she is the night, now she is the exile. The other children of the dark come calling, her new blood.
Who are they?
They are the lightless windows, they are the streams of mist, they are the wombs of dawn.
And the Alley Rat Pack?
Yes, if you listen closely, if you listen for the beat, you can hear them, flickering, dancing, and calling out to the orphans of the alleyways.
Will they call out to Gwen?
If she’s seen them yet she hasn’t made any sign, she remains alone for now, alone in the world of the quick and the fleeting, with nothing to do but drift and collect the trash.
The garbage?
No, not tonight. A different kind of trash.
What do you mean?
I mean that the trash is the forces out there. The warbling of a rosy feeling, of a withered garden, of a glimpse, of a brief rebirth. And the clocks the vandals smashed, one by one, for forty years, and the glass shard alleys, and your irretrievable home.
This and more is the trash. The woebegone regions, lightning lashed, bring forth their harvest. All creatures must, from time to time, walk below the rain.
Gwen feels a drizzle now, her weeping face masked by seaborne spray, the whipping rain, the swarm shoreward, and in the far away, waves crackle beneath the storm. On a seaward trail she glides unknowing. Windswept and barren to the shore she is going. And the coming morning, and the echo of Eden days, and the half-words come jumbled and stitched, and her mother says things like “Good morning beautiful, and where is the sting in the hornet today?”
A very long pier and she is alone. The tide beats against the cedar legs of the boardwalk. She breathes the cold birth of the dawn and the wetness of it.
The sand is kicking up now, in the wind. As if they were guardians, little grains of warning. And above her, the cosmos unbound on the face of the sea, star-streaked, swathed in ether and diamond nebulae.
Behold the Alley Rat Pack gliding across the inkish trail of tide. A silhouette band, in spectral march.
Where are they going?
Skipping to some Victorium at the shore’s end, while Gwen watches them and the foam they kick moonward. She has passed through some threshold, marked, perhaps, by a bit of shell, or a seaweed ring, into another realm entirely…listen, they are calling to her.
“It’s the trash lady! It’s the waste lady! Follow us! Got any banana peels? Got any empty cans? Got any bike wheels?”
And now Gwen is prone on the baking pavement, blood streaming from her knees and her bicycle careening down the driveway toward the Oldsmobile. Behind her, her mother calls, as if from the bottom of a well…
The Alley Rat Pack: “Got any old clothes? Got any shoestrings? Got any old jewelry?”
And now Gwen, newly-divorced, is drinking wine and watching Wheel of Fortune with her long-widowed mother, and her mother is saying things like “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere, not until it gets too dark to see…”
The Alley Rat Pack: “Got any of snow-capped ceilings? Got any crumbled leaves? Got any ripped up books?”
And now Gwen sets the book on the mantle, glowing in honey gold, strewn with Christmas lights. The room is misshapen, disfigured and dismembered. It is her mother’s living room, or rather, its spiritual counterpart, pulsing here in Gwen’s memory. She sees the wisps of her mother’s hair over the piano on which she plays a morphing melody that Gwen can’t quite name. She sits down beside her mother and watches her hands breathe automatic along the keys, and Gwen joins in, dives into the flowing melody that she is just about to remember, can almost name…their song floats out of an open window toward a glittering sea, and the tide is keeping the time. She feels the heat of the fireplace, the heat of this whole room, a room that glows in her mind, like a candle on a desk in a dark room…
The Alley Rat Pack: “Enough of that, enough of that. Keep up, we have to take you somewhere. We have to show you something.”
They sprint away and disperse into the shadows, beckoning.
So follow them, Gwen, to the ragged edge of the beach and up the ruined stairs, down the rotting ramp and onto the sidewalk, now dart across the road and leap over the guardrail, coiled in vines, into the line of trees…and emerge in the back-alleys of a forsaken graveyard neighborhood, and don’t lose the Alley Rat Pack.
You’re trespassing here, Gwen. Where once there was stasis, there is now a stirring. Just a moment ago, all that you see, the street signs, the storefronts, the billboards…until your entrance their messages had languished in abyssal depths and projected soundless into the void. But now, as you track the Alley Rat Pack through the cracked and sunken asphalt, they rise, in groggy resurrection…
Keep your eyes on the blank and fading walls and watch what issues forth. The Alley Rat Pack is near, waiting.
“Do you see yet?” they ask, impatient.
See what, Gwen wonders.
“Have the walls come alive?”
No, I can’t see anything, it’s too dark. She stares at the walls, squints, focuses all her energy onto them…but nothing, nothing yet…“keep looking!” they call.
Well, what is she supposed to see?
A secret from the Alley Rat Pack.
A secret about the walls?
A secret about what they can be. That they can be both windows and canvasses, portals and movie screens.
“Look down at your hands!” they tell her.
She is now holding binoculars, paintbrushes, keys, and rolls of film. These are the instruments they’ve given you, Gwen, and how will you use them?
Gwen gazes at a warehouse husk and the fossils of its former tenants, all in proper strata: BARKOWSKI AND SONS, QUALITY MEATS—(an echo of a certain lakeside picnic) —and below POE WILSON, OPTOMETRIST—(the miracle of glasses, transforming the blurry world) —and further down ONE NIGHT ONLY, THE MARBLE GANG AND THEIR CIRCUS OF WONDERS…
A Saturday night one week before Gwen turns ten, and for days she’s watched the circus vans drive down the city streets and imagined what wonders they concealed, and her mother has watched Gwen gaze, rapturous and mute, at the proceeding like an apostle on Palm Sunday…on Monday mother and daughter strike a deal, the terms: tickets will be your birthday present. Saturday night is a long time coming and school days are little pockets of dull eternity but now, at last, they look down at the circus pit where performers in Saracen garb ride atop elephants draped in velvet and all around there’s fire, blazing the hoops through which tigers leap, eaten by the torch-wielding tribesmen, conjured out of the air by the mustachioed magician, and Gwen and her mother are surrounded by stadium lights, seated in plush stadium chairs, drowning in oceanic stadium din. But now, the scene has changed. All of the dramatis personae of Gwen’s life are in the ring, in suspended half-motion: her ex-husband, her wayward son, her stillborn daughter and her sickly father, fragments from hazy toddler dreams, her shifty Uncle Harold in leather jacket, Misty the terrier who tramped beside her for the adolescent decade, her teachers, her various enforcers, her school friends including Lorraine with whom she first got drunk, Nathan the pot dealer to whom she lost her virginity in clumsy backseat bliss, her Cockney-accented piano instructor, the priest who blessed her thrice on her christening day, her grandmother’s spirit trailing warmth and the scent of cinnamon, the homeless and legless youth she saw dragging his jar along the ground of the concrete jungle, the violinist on the boardwalk who, unknowingly, introduced Gwen to that instrument’s weeping, a friendly zookeeper, a nasty branch manager, her doctors, her bosses, her book-club acquaintances…the parade rounded out by faces without names, feelings without nexus, scraps of parchment memory, all dancing beneath the ashen rain of life…next to her, her mother remains, and gestures with the binoculars, and together they look through the lenses, once more, in joined vision. And out of the gates, into a sea of darkness, the Alley Rat Pack disappears, back to the nether world, back to their nocturnal, neural patrol, collecting what bits of trash they will, taking them to their mapless temple where they will transfigure what they have gathered, to give to you.
The hospice rises from the void and fills Gwen’s eyes with a searing, revelatory light, and they are together blinded.