“Where do you live?” asked Tyler, his back to a hedge, his legs crossed so as not to impede any foot traffic. He still expected someone to tell him to move along. He was clean-cut and neatly attired, yet there was never an excuse for lingering.
The homeless man, smiling at Tyler, didn’t care that his legs criss-crossed the sidewalk. One might consider the man a paralytic if he weren’t so quick to appear all over town. He wasn’t foul-smelling, which was a relief; although he didn’t seem to have a scent at all.
“Where I please,” he answered. “Just like you.”
“And where is that?”
“Did I ever answer your questions?” asked the man. “I didn’t have to, did I?”
The homeless man wasn’t his imaginary friend Monroe, concluded Tyler. But how did he know so much about something that didn’t exist?
“You just walk around?” asked Tyler.
“You assume too much,” answered the man. “That was your problem then and it’s your problem now – the usually excuse so you don’t have to pay attention. Though we had so much fun when we were boys. Remember when we snuck out at night and I showed you the world you always wondered about? The people on the streets. The noise. The revelry you were too young to see? You said she’d kill you if she ever found out, but she didn’t.”
Tyler racked his brain. Did he ever divulge these secrets to anyone? He would never have done such a thing.
“What’s your name?” asked Tyler.
“Magus suits me now,” answered the man.
“What did I call you then?” asked Tyler.
“You don’t remember?” asked the man, his face downcast. “How quickly you forgot about me. I talked to you and you never answered. I wanted to see you happy because you seemed so gloomy. But I couldn’t reach you anymore. It was like I didn’t exist.”
“What did I call you?” insisted Tyler.
“My favorite number was 5 so you named me after the fifth President.”
Tyler was dumbfounded. How did this man know such secret things. Tyler figured he couldn’t have been in his right mind. He’s discontinued the meds, but maybe he needed to start taking them again.
Tyler stood up, shaking his head. His mind was playing him false. Perhaps his mother had been right about him, that he was too trusting to anticipate the traps in his brain.
“Would you help me up?” asked the man. Tyler didn’t want confirmation of a flesh and blood human being. He wanted to sleep everything off and wake up, remembering nothing.
A sleeve dropped to reveal the man’s slender bare arm. It was like Tyler’s arm.
Tyler didn’t remember grabbing the man’s hand, which felt like any hand, the man’s weight throwing him off balance before he was standing next to him, their heights identical.
“What do you want?” asked Tyler. It was the only question he could muster.
“I want nothing, but I come when I’m needed.”
“How do I need you?”
“That’s for you to decide,” answered the man who called himself Magus. “Although, let me ask you this,” he added, turning to Laurel’s window. “Do you want to see her again?”
“Where did she go?” asked Tyler, thinking of Laurel.
“Where she pleased. But she won’t know her way back because nothing will work the way she expects it to. But you, you remember differently.”
“I tried to forget the past. I don’t want to remember anything.”
“If you really wanted to forget everything, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Look,” answered Tyler, recoiling. “I don’t know who you are. And I don’t know how you know things about me. But the problem is none of this is happening. None of it.”
Tyler turned and walked to his car. He had only to get home for everything to be alright.
“You can’t walk away from yourself,” yelled the man. “We’re the same, you and me.”
“I don’t know you,” snapped Tyler, turning to find Magus only a few feet behind.
“Because you’re not yourself, and you haven’t been yourself for years.”
“How am I not myself?”
“You told me you wanted happiness above all things. Did you forget?”
Tyler took a few steps back. “I am happy. My work makes me happy.”
“And what if you didn’t have that?”
“This is too much,” answered Tyler, shaking his head.
“It seems like too much when you’re in pieces,” explained Magus, his look almost heartfelt.
“I just need some sleep. It’s been a difficult time.”
“They don’t see you,” explained Magus, a hand to Tyler’s arm. Tyler recoiled again. “They don’t see you because you’re not yourself.”
“Who are you?” demanded Tyler.
“Who are you?” answered Magus, his gaze fixed on Tyler’s. It was almost like looking in a mirror.
Magus turned, his gaze distant.
“She’s like you, you know. She didn’t know who she was. But it didn’t stop her from looking anyway.”
“I’ll see her when she’s back.”
“She’s not coming back.”
“Where is she?”
“Beyond the Porto, where nothing is certain because all is in flux and everyone refuses to die. To the Shadowlands where the Olvidados endure by securing every memory. To the land of Ozymandias, the first among men, vanishing long ago, yet destined to return. ”
“The poem?” snorted Tyler. The man was babbling.
“Don’t be misled by words. They will only obscure what you need to see.”
“It’s a fiction,” answered Tyler, relieved by his newfound certainty.
“That’s what they say about this place. But one is nothing without the other.
“This is real, though I’m not so sure about this conversation.”
“What you call real is only the reflection on the surface. You have to dig deeper to understand.”
“So Laurel is digging deeper somewhere?” asked Tyler.
“She’s not digging, she fell. But you can help her because you’ll remember everything.”
“So where’s this Porto. Is it a club?”
“It’s the precipice,” answered Magus with a grin.
“Is she alright?” he asked, wondering if her disappearance intimated the possibility of mental instability.
“That’s for you to discover,” answered Magus.
Tyler liked Laurel, but it was only a single meeting. He didn’t know her. If she’d gotten herself into trouble, it had nothing to do with him. But he was imagining all of this. It was sleep he needed, and lots of it.
“No. If she’s missing, we call the police.”
“Have you lost all curiosity?” asked Magus, his face twisted in disgust. “It’s so hard to recognize you anymore. You were supposed to be different. You were supposed to see what they couldn’t see, but you’re just as blind, telling stories that are just like all the other stories people tell. But what could they understand with their eyes closed?”
Tyler wasn’t expecting his artistic integrity to be impugned. “My stories are different.”
Magus shook his head. “They can’t be different if you’re not yourself, otherwise there’s no telling you apart from anyone else.”
“You don’t know anything about my writing,” answered Tyler.
“I know you because you’re me and I’m you, and you hate the fact that you’re pretending to be yourself when you’ve already forgotten who you are; though all will be remembered beyond the Porto. All the mistakes will be corrected and all will be as it was meant to be.”
Life was a pretense. That much Tyler knew. But that wasn’t his fault. Realizing he’d given the absurd conversation more time than it deserved, he unlocked his car door.
“The fact that you and I are separate,” said Magus, “means you have a problem to fix. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“It isn’t happening.”
“And nothing happens when you see nothing.”
“I’m going home, alright?” said Tyler, climbing in his car and closing the door behind him. The silence was exquisite.
Tyler raced off. It took only five minutes to get home but, fearful Magus would be there to greet him, Tyler rounded the black a few times, ensuring Magus was nowhere to be seen before parking his car. To walk to his apartment was still fraught with risk of uncomfortable conversation. So he stayed in his car.
Something stabbed him in his coat pocket. Dropping in his hand, he fished out the card Laurel showed him. The map showing Porto on Temple Street seemed of no use. He turned the card, not expecting to read anything.
“If I disappear, please find me,” read the card.
It was a woman’s careful cursive, possible Laurel’s. It gave him a chill, thinking she’d undertaken something dangerous. How could he possible help her? Did he need a weapon? Should he call 911?
There was no other writing on the card. How had he overlooked those words?
He contemplated the map. The location was downtown. Curiosity had begun to overcome caution. He considered the people in his life and concluded that there wasn’t anyone he cared for, and no one who didn’t care for him without some ulterior motive.
Now Laurel offered a possibility, a rare and unexpected one; and most importantly, she still felt human, unlike others he knew who followed the same unthinking patterns and expected him to do the same.
And by calling Laurel a real human, Tyler meant Laurel as full of surprises; although he resented her for impressing him into some kind of rescue service, which was a little too damsel-in-distress for his taste. Why would she go someplace dangerous and expect he’d expose himself to the same dangers? It was thoughtless.
But perhaps what she did was for the best motives; that or curiosity got the better of her.
Tyler noticed something else. There was additional writing, almost illegible, in the crease of the card. It read “Find Faye Rand.” How had he overlooked this too?
Was it possible Laurel had seen Faye Rand too and gone looking for her? Was it possible that this Porto would lead him to both of them?
He wished he had a weapon, but there was a penknife in the glovebox. He pocketed it.
He didn’t realize he’d resolved to seek Laurel out until he was driving east down Third Street. It was insane, but what was the alternative? A day of disappointment contemplating the people in his life? There was still his graphic novel to finish. He trusted this matter at Porto wasn’t going to take long.
Tyler found some meterless parking on Temple before trudging up the hill toward Hill. The Hall of Records loomed overhead, but Tyler was seeking out a little box that looked like an elevator door. Tyler glanced about, hoping to find something similar, but the building was practically flush against the sidewalk.
He examined the card, estimating he needed to walk east.
“I knew you’d come,” said a voice that almost sounded like his, only deeper, as if he’d been a heavy smoker.
Tyler turned to find Magus. “I’m not here for you.”
Magus answered with an apish grin before gesturing him forward.
“There’s nothing here,” said Tyler, gesturing triumphantly to the building, glad to prove the nonsense with the card false.
“There’s an elevator,” answered Magus, “but we don’t need their elevator. All you need is Porto, as long as he gives permission.”
“It’s a person, not a place?”
“It’s both.”
A metal grate about seven feet by seven feet looked almost like a grave in the grass just behind the Hall of Records.
To Tyler’s surprise, there was a noise behind him. The front of an elevator appeared on the side of the Hall of Records. It was an old graffiti-scarred elevator that looked at least forty years old, shuddering as it appeared on the outside of the wall. A door opened, and out stumbled an emaciated homeless man, toothless and spindly in tattered layers.
“Who seeks passage?” wheezed Porto, who was anything but imposing despite his folder arms and rigid jaw.
“I do,” answered Tyler.
“You don’t look right,” concluded Porto after sizing Tyler up and dismissing him with a sneer. “Everything’s off. You have no business here.” How easy to throw the man aside and take the elevator down, thought Tyler.
“Both of us seek passage,” explained Magus.
Porto sized up Tyler’s companion, his eyes appearing glassy as if they weren’t even real.
“Very well. But you mustn’t leave him alone. They don’t want his kind in there.”
“We’re inseparable,” answered Magus with a broad grin, much to Tyler’s discomfort; although Tyler couldn’t have been more relieved to have the support. He didn’t know what he was doing, where he was going; perhaps Magus did.
“He don’t smell right neither,” announced Porto after sniffing the air around Tyler chest. It was a provoking observation considering how filthy Porto looked, dirt smeared across his face, and his fingernails practically black as if from rot; although Tyler could smell nothing noisome.
“Why did you let Laurel Harrington in?” asked Tyler.
Porto puzzled over the question before remembering.
“Yes, I remember a girl. She had the good sense to show me an admission card. You can’t expect to get far without an admission card.”
Tyler remembered his card and produced it. Porto grabbed it with his fingers, producing a magnifying glass from his pocket and studying it.
“Well, it’s genuine. Where’d you steal it from?” asked Porto with an accusatory glare.
“Are we going in or not?” asked Tyler, impatiently.
Magus entered the elevator. Tyler followed. Once Porto entered, the doors closed and the elevator began its slow descent.
Porto glared at Tyler suspiciously until the elevator shuddered to a halt, the doors opening to reveal polished, cylindrical hallways, impenetrable cement on all sides.
Tyler stepped out, Porto scurrying ahead before turning a corner. An iron gate squeaked as Porto pushed it open.
Porto ambled ahead, pulling open another iron gate before gesturing to a painted outline of a door on the cement wall.
Tyler glanced back at the iron gate. Reaching for it, he realized it was locked. How would he return?
“What’s the hold up?” yelled Porto, glowering at Tyler who ran to catch up.
“How do we get back?” asked Tyler.
“You don’t know anything do you?” chuckled Porto before turning to Magus.
“Whatever that one does, it’s on you,” growled Porto.
Magus nodded, sporting his customary grin, before turning and stepping through the wall.
Tyler hesitated, reaching for the cement wall but feeling nothing.
“You’ll come to trouble,” announced Porto. “I’m sure of it.”
To linger was to weather Porto’s insults. With his hand before him, Tyler hesitated. And then Porto pushed him. Tyler staggered forward, his sense of balance upended and his footing lost. He thought he was falling until he felt his feet on cement.
He opened his eyes to find himself in a storage room, boxes of rum, vodka, whiskey and gin stacked high on either side. Bottles rested on shelves.
Magus stepped close, adjusting Tyler’s jacket before stepping back. “They’ll know you don’t belong here. But stick close to me and you’ll be fine.”
“What is this place?”
“A place that still labors under the belief it’s an unlicensed saloon,” answered Magus. “It’s the curious thing about this town. Once people take to doing things a certain way, there’s no changing them. Ever.”
Magus opened a door, revealing a wood staircase.
“And how do we get back?” asked Tyler, turning to the far wall, wondering if he could simply walk through it to return to Porto.
“Don’t worry about that now. We have more pressing matters.”
As Magus trod upstairs, Tyler hesitated before entering the stairwell too. Their feet echoed through the narrow space until Magus opened a door, a light revealing a clutter of shadows, applause and laughter punctuating a raucous jazz tune on a piano.
If Laurel was upstairs, it wouldn’t be long before he could find her and take her home. The festive atmosphere was alluring though.
