Are You Haunted (part thirty-seven)

Are You Haunted

(part thirty-seven)

He had been smoking a cigarette, a few minutes’ freedom before reporting for duty.

He took the jeep at a snail’s pace to an intersecting lane where rubble sat rammed aside, crawling back regathering itself, one brick hand ahead of another.

He drove over these (“you, and you”), and parked the jeep where it met the condition of being out of the way. Where it belonged was the failure he would hear about from Breedman.

The hotel met you at the lobby with brass bannisters Fred Astaire might come sliding, to dance on the black and white tiles. The rugs were all gone to cover mudholes. The switchboard had been rewired so phones could ring on a closed circuit; Davey Cronin, the operator, hunched in his curlicued alcove with his face out of Breedman’s sight.

Below an arch, a big empty room, a huge urn with a dead stick dotting every pair of windows. Breedman, by a fall of velvet curtain, hid his table from the leaded-glass doors…

Powell had to sign himself for duty and he had to tell Breedman about the jeep.

He had begun to fantasize breaking cover, drawing a bullet to end the odium.

“Hey, idiot,” Breedman said.

“Sir,” Powell said, “I have something to report.”

Blank windows, or shards reflecting neighboring shards, might conceal snipers or saboteurs. Or looters or squatters, who cared? This houseback on the courtyard, with its red bricks mortared like fat through fresh meat; the next a dried-up iron brown; the one after glazed yellow…

Corpses you would find were sometimes yellow.

But Powell couldn’t fit this conceit to a sort of trench-poem he wanted to compose.

You came here and you died and you left nothing behind.

How nice to be read out at memorials, in perpetuity…

He would not forget the hat-shaped attic, its deformation from a European bonnet to a Stetson. He found it funny that flames had charred the crater, smoke had marked a greasy checkerboard below two ranks of windows…

You could see past broken balcony panes, people’s davenports, fallen bookcases, sepia grandparents behind cracked glass, wallpapers rolling down from the rain.

Funny…that a fire brigade had saved this, after the bomb hit. No one lived here.

Miller, with his back turned, didn’t know Powell crouched, elled with his feet under the stairs, his arm locked in a crook of the rail. If he slipped, he would crash six floors. But that was not precisely his idea, to have an accident.

37

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part one)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)