Free ...And the Damage Done by Michael Marano Page A

hands, then. Staying warm, the way we did, even though your Granny brought the wrath of the PC police down on us.”
    “It was nice.” She smiles a bit wider, showing the capped tooth that crystal meth had cracked, and turns her filmed eyes, now flecked with dust, upward an instant as she touches the January night that we, in the corner of a bar near the Bay, had huddled beneath the heirloom that was her grandmother’s fur coat as if it were a quilt. The bar had no heat, and in back, near the old rotary pay phone, you could see your breath in air touched with sea smoke. Less well than my breath, I could see the beautiful array of ha’penny nails, less solid than sun-blindness, that would one day protrude from the bar’s blackened timbers. Under the fur coat, against the rich, silk lining, Marie and I held hands as we pressed our temples together. I could smell the sandalwood-like conditioner she used, and the ugly ghost of rubbing alcohol in the left sleeve of the coat.
    The mercy of that memory, of blood flowing to our fingers, of silk and the warmth of that unethical yet wonderfully thick coat, dispels the feeling of her un-living skin against mine. Her hands dawn with smoothness. I feel the flecks of paint beaded on her nails. She never scrubs off the flecks or dissolves them with thinner, always wanting to leave a reminder of the pallets she uses. Marie senses an echo of what I sense. Gooseflesh dews her skin, giving new texture to the indigo fan of peacock feathers painted into the milk of her right shoulder and to the cloud-whiskered face of Old Man East Wind tattooed on her left shoulder.
    Despite the chill that writes itself on her skin and the tomb-color of her lips, her inner light that I had partly snuffed is rekindled, and it feels again as if angels might grace the sky. And sitting behind Marie, one of
them
, in a taunt, removes a pair of shades from his jacket and puts them on. He then raises the ever-present newspaper to his face, and, as always, it is turned to tight columns of stock listings in print so fine as to make the paper seem a field of grey.
    Later, in the sun, I kiss Marie and say only half my good-bye. “Farewell” is a word that bleeds from two wounds. She can’t know what I see. I bleed alone. I can’t change what will come. I have tried to help others less dear to me. But the lessons of inevitability that most learn from a play about a Scottish king, I have learned through sifting the ash of failure.
    “You’ll come to the showing?” she asks, running her hand from my shoulder to my wrist. “I’d really like you to be there. I’ll be pretty scared.”
    “I’ll be there,” I say, and deny myself the luxury of letting my knees fall from under me, the luxury of screaming my grief at the mockingly bright sky knowing that she will not be at the showing. Her bus charges around the corner a few blocks distant. She must meet it at the stop. I embrace her. We are in a neighbourhood in which Spanish mingles with English. I whisper as a prayer by her ear what in Spanish is most often just a phrase: “
Go with God.
”
    She walks away, the circle of her twenty-nine years closing, her white skin graced by the sunlight that cloaks itself across her shoulders, that makes the peacock feathers and the face of the East Wind translucent in her flesh, that dances radiance off of the fog-dense glass syringe embedded in her arm below tightly knotted rubber tubing. Whimpers rise behind my throat as I watch her meet her bus, as I know with the certainty of each breath I draw that I will miss her each moment of each day for the rest of my life . . . as I know that in death, she will never be far from me, that she will loiter and brush against me in the way half-remembered dreams do upon my waking. One of
them
stands at the bus stop that Marie has marked with her absence, and pantomimes the pressing of a syringe into the crook of his left arm.
    It took me days to remember there are such things as