Some of the men held wads of twenties; others, of fifties, though slightly thinner. Star money. A voice came from the speakers, interrupting Bach and introducing the dancer. The MC closed with a flourish, drawing out her name as a ring announcer would a fighter’s.
The room went dark, then silent. In seconds the faders came up: “The Ballad of Jayne,” another ghost of a song that had died decades ago. But again, not a bad one, if one had the stomach for the gratuitous. Still, it was an unlikely pick. It was wistful, or an attempt at it at least. Was it possible to strip wistfully? And even if, under the right circumstances, it was, can one really begin to strip that way, cold? Perhaps it was an eccentric challenge Skye, quickly becoming as porn-star famous as anyone, had set herself, to stave off the boredom of routine.
It was still dark, and it stayed that way for an uncomfortably long time, so long one couldn’t tell if it was the indulgent whim of the dancer or a technical failing. Finally heavy white light fell on a girl, just post-teen, inverted a yard off the stage. Her tanned, stockinged legs clasped the center pole; her dark curls dangled nearly to the floor. She loosened the lock and airily descended, her azure skirt falling upward. With splaying legs she carved half a circle in the air, gripped the pole tightly and brought her patent leather heels, an explosive black under now-strobing light, to the glossed floor. She sprung up and pranced to the front of the stage, her flowing proportions now appreciable. She was just feet from Stagg, burnishing appetites with an opaque hazel gaze.
With that the men were in her thrall, proving it possible to begin wistfully. He wondered about the makeup of that rapture, though, its less gleeful elements.
Skye’s repertoire seemed vast though her moves were mostly classic. The impression must have been achieved by small details — how else to explain it? — but he couldn’t pinpoint them. He wondered whether they would show themselves over the next weeks, or whether he would come to find it was only an impression.
Piece by piece, she shed the black blouse, the skirt, the lace bra and panties in white. The club’s DJ threw her a promotional tee shirt with her picture and their name emblazoned on it. She drew it slowly up her legs and held it between them. A spotlight appeared just in front of her and then the shirt was in it, a dark, wet patch on it against the bright white of the rest. She tossed it into the crowd as the men tossed cash onto the stage — small bills, large bills, everything. Stagg felt then there was nothing to fear from them or their rituals. And nothing to learn either.
It was too early, really, to say. One grasps so little the first time through, which was the way most of life was lived. But here was his peculiar advantage. He could bank on recurrence. It was his job. He would see and re-see all of this many times, a rerun with variations.
Skye made her way along the edge of the stage, taking a last round of tips and kissing each man on the lips as she leaned down and pulled the bills from his hand. She came to Stagg and looked at him with practiced sweetness.
“Was that fun?” she asked.
Stagg dug in his coat pocket for cash but came up with two quarters and a nickel. He looked away, felt himself shrug. “I think, I don’t…”
Her lips curled. She dropped to her knees and picked up a crisp twenty-dollar bill from the stage, folded it in two, and pushed it into his pocket. “Here,” she said. The staginess was gone from her voice. It was flatter now, but neither cold nor upset. “The next girl that comes on, you’ll be ready.” She leaned over the edge of the stage and kissed Stagg like the rest, her breasts pressing against his neck with the telltale firmness of silicone. Perhaps the kiss was different, though, he thought. She would have been racing through the space between personas when she gave it.
A young man appeared next to Stagg in a lush herringbone sport coat and a pinpoint oxford, his breath reeking of mixed drinks. “I loved you,” he slurred to her. “I did.”
Stagg retreated through milling patrons as Skye exited that space and claimed the young man’s money. At his table he found a short glass of tomato juice sitting on a five-dollar bill.
He thumbed the rim of the glass and sipped at what seemed almost a sauce. “You ready for another? Something else?” His waitress’s voice came from behind him.
“No… I don’t think so.” He lifted the glass into eyeshot.
“Oh. You haven’t done much with that one,” she said. “But take your time, you still have a while till the next one.”
“Thanks,” he said. He reached into his pocket and dropped the twenty onto the five and left.
The wind had grown stout on Fenton. Stagg fixed the throat-latch of his coat and squinted as the gusts drew tears from his eyes. He walked toward Harth, where the familiar portion of his route began (eventually this too would be shifted). A dust of plaster and wood filled the air as he approached a stretch of buildings under renovation. The sidewalk scaffolding shielded him from the worst of the thickening winds, though it also narrowed his vision.
The ovoid headlamps of a Lotus blinded him, just before bringing light to the grainy currents whipping about the metal framework. The car, of a dark, indeterminate shade, drifted down the street, and as it passed, he made out a long-faced man in a blazer behind the wheel and a woman with small bones and bronze skin beside him. Only the future could tell him if this was worth knowing, if it suggested anything, or if it was just one more of the thousands of observations that pointed only to themselves.
Stagg left behind the thin stream of people walking Fenton for its more sparsely populated cross-street, home to walk-ups punctuated by the occasional convenience store or gas station shining gauchely in the night. He came upon very little tonight on Harth: a few streetwalkers, a car parked with a small-time dealer he recognized behind the wheel, waiting, and two red-faced drunks, possibly a couple, in skullcaps and oversized coats, sitting on the curb collecting cigarette butts that had been stubbed out early. Nothing worth reporting.
A hundred yards on and the street darkened. The blue lamps gave way to dim yellow ones that appeared at ever-larger intervals. Finally the overpass came into view. The headlights of cars streaming along the bend in it combined to throw a pulsing beam over the edge, perpetually twisting leftward, as if on a pivot, with no clear terminus in the night sky.
The beam disappeared as he entered the passage beneath the overpass and walked alongside the short gray brick wall that ran the length of the massive structure. Long tubes of light encased in PVC lined the walls. Many had burned out; some only flickered. There were also those that had been diligently smashed by vandals, their casings caved in at the joints between lights, their weakest point.
The cement sidewalls bore a deep aerosol patina. Whirling outsize letters and images in washed-out colors that carried the trace of a former garishness, layer upon layer of them, applied over many years — they sealed the pocked surface like a primer. Scattered atop this base were more recent images, vivid, sharp-edged, soberly stenciled rather than freehanded: parasols, perched birds, nimbus clouds, and mathematical operators, the integer, derivative, and inequality signs among them. Other stencils were built from phrases in non-European languages: Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, and several African scripts. These palimpsests brought Stagg’s other work to mind, particularly his would-be draft about the Buddhist monk, Darasa. Even after months of mulling, that scene was no more than notes and thoughts. Maybe, he thought, he could just start at the fortress wall, the monk’s own palimpsest, and let the material find its own shape from there.