the dead | the year | kansas city

charles byrne

The Dead

I MAY BE A PERFECTLY SANE POLISH WOMAN, and you may be subject to my whims for the length of this narrative, but I solemnly attest that you can trust me. Save for that which is lost in translation, or an error of translation, for which I am not responsible. And personally, I feel that there is little more interesting than the thoughts of a depressed and lonely recluse, so what the hell.

And so it is in preparation for death, I often wander the dark forestscape outside Klenica with my canid companion mammals, Karol Dwa and Karol Trzy. It was there, watching them shit in choreographed synchrony, that I found, and here I must attest to having always been acute of ocularity, the note on a bed of leaves. It was penned in a suspiciously familiar hand on a stack of hot pink Post-Its. To spare you the self-pitying disquisition, I will just tell you that it proclaimed intention of self-eradication by means of deer, yadda yadda yadda, signed ‘Until Soon, Cordially, Maja’.

‘Until soon’?? But of course, time was relative.

My voice was a little hoarse, given the minutes’ interval since the last of my numberless per diem black teas and given that I had not spoken, save grunts or throat-clearings, should those count as utterances, in at least a year, but I let loose my most feral screech. I was not in time: the half-decayed body of Maja lay before me, its limbs akimbo and bearing the indelible stamp of the even-toed ungulate.

WHY?!? I hoarsely screeched to the startled tumult of a pitying of European turtle doves. WHY!?! I swiveled to Karol Dwa and Karol Trzy for consolation, but they were unalarmed by the shrieking, presumably accustomed to at least my facial contortions, and unconcerned with the shocking revelation, enthralled as they were in thrall to a wayward dormouse that they had cornered in the crotch of an old oak. As they prepared to savage the wee thing in their usual tormenting glee, I felt palpable disgust with my tufted and adorkable Affenpinscher companions, who evidently felt the clarion call of ancestral ferocity native to their tiny wolf ancestors any time their eyes chanced upon some creature weer and more vulnerable than they. How could Nature be so pretty and so fucking gross at the same time, I asked myself in angsty wonder.

As the seconds passed and I reminded myself that Maja had departed peacefully, I came to finally accept the circumstances that the Universe had laid before me, and I felt a mollifying sensation pass through me like the calming halny would pass over the Tatras in the Novembers of my youth. Now I, too, at last felt true peace, knowing I had plenty of time left and it was only someone else who had died.

The Year

THE SHOW WAS IN ONE OF THOSE BASEMENT CLUBS that seemed to have arisen one night by virtue of four wasted punks with a sledgehammer. The stage abutted three walls, awkwardly inserted in the middle of a triptych that had once been three separate windowless rooms. Vestigial bricks remained glazed onto the floor where walls had been. Just as the stage had only one entryway, the venue itself was only approached awkwardly via a ramshackle alley with chain-link fences, as the façade with the parking lot, by all appearances a drab office building, had no entry point. The kid outside who had taken his ten bucks who seemed much too young to have such a blasé air.

The average age of attendees appeared to be twenty. When he entered, the clientele whipped their heads around to see the greyhair. Their gazes, even in the dim light, were feral, suspicious. One guy, with one hand holding a beer round the shoulder of his female companion, made no attempt for subtlety in his long stare backward.

The opening band were debutants and featured a bass player incongruously sporting a scraggly Van Dyke, overalls, and an outsized hat straight out of Fat Albert. He suffered their protracted set of tortured rhythms, then watched with bemusement as the headlining band, which he had never heard of, tuned up for 15 minutes and then left the stage for an extensive period. He decided to bail on what seemed with each passing minute more a mistake. Just as he had almost finished edging his way among the sulky audience members, who were reluctant to budge in the slightest to accommodate him, the band returned through the crowd, so he lingered near the edge.

The stage was short enough that the speakers mounted before it on the ceiling alternatively blocked one’s view, but he could see the lead singer’s hands shaking as she grappled to adjust her guitar. Finally ready, the band started without ceremony and her voice preternaturally vaulted from low to twangy Appalachian highs within seconds of their commencement. Her eyes darted from ceiling to floor, flitting at times to the audience. Her apparent anxiety seemed only to supplement the tremulous character of her voice.

Until her eyes chanced upon his. And settled there for stretches. As she sang, she would move her head until she was about to reach a key apex of emotion, at which moment she would turn her eyes directly to his. As she did, she would seem to settle into a focused state.

His usual practice when anyone, especially a pretty woman or confrontational man, stared so directly into his eyes, was to disengage immediately. This time, he didn’t. Of course, it was easier in a crowd, as much apart from it as he felt, but he sensed that he had to maintain the gaze because she needed him—her anchor to stabilize through the difficult vocal acrobatics. But he also had to maintain it because his body was so electrically alive in those moments that despite the painful tightrope, he would have been betraying his own body to let go.

For the next hour, she would swing her head once or twice a song and fix upon his eyes and his body would thrill. The gaze was obvious enough that a few of the young audience members stole glances when it was upon him.

There appeared one other geriatric in the audience. He was clearly inebriated and was hovering close to her, filming with his phone. ‘I love your voice!’ he shouted between songs. ‘Dolores Ri-ordan would be proud!’ The comparison was inapt but successful in making her flush. As the next song began, she turned steadfastly back to her anchor. The eyes’ caress would last a minute or more at times as the set neared its end.

She called last song and the set was finished in precisely an hour. He momentarily panicked when he realized that the surprisingly half-hearted applause from the audience meant that the obligatory encore would not occur. She would be coming his way in moments, as he stood in the only exit path off stage and from the room.

He turned and made his way to the door. Outside, he shook despite the blast of hot night air. For once, the feeling of being utterly alone was not unpleasurable. Cathartic, like the sensation of finally grasping a long-murky and terrible truth from childhood. The caress of her gaze lingered, and he would recall it for days.

The year, barely half over, had been unremittingly dire. Both parents dead, one death more surprising than the other, and then the layoff. The show had been a last-minute and stochastic decision to find distraction and escape the heat of the room. On the way to the show, the bus hadn’t come and he had walked an extra mile on the tumble-down sidewalk. Sweat had mushroomed on his shirt and he had felt the despair of another regret in a year full of them.

Now, returning on the same sidewalk, he felt as if he had just disembarked upon a long-ago visited land. The sights registered as familiar as they unfurled, but the feeling was new. After the overwhelming scent of beer and piercing sweat in the venue, the air, the same otherwise wilting heat of earlier in the evening, felt and smelled like summer after a cold spring. He even detected the soft vanilla of swamp milkweed. He moved down the sidewalks in epicycles to take it in.

As he did, in the distance behind him, the neon stripe of an e-scooter on the sidewalk lasered along opposite the boulevard. As it neared, he could perceive the dark outline of a young woman, propelled forward with the uncanny movement of green screen action in an old film. Could it be her? Desperately impelled toward him in the dark, a firefly seeking its partner? If so, she did not detect him and beamed on forward. Moments later, ahead, he saw the neon lights suddenly thrust into a blender, tumbling rapidly in the air, as a pickup truck sped over it without stopping.

He froze, examining the roadway for the silhouette of a mangled body. Instead, he caught the shadowy movements of the woman on the sidewalk. ‘Are you—’ he shouted across the din.

‘I am SO ok!’ she yelled, waving one arm wildly in the air as she walked on in the direction she had been going, but sideways, and unevenly, apparently missing a heeled shoe. It wasn’t her, he could tell. The scooter was abandoned, prostrated in the street. ‘I am SO ok!’ she yelled again.

Kansas City

IT WAS 1980, still on the tail end of the high wave of per capita auto fatalities and before everyone had power steering, A/C, something other than AM radio, and Japanese-inspired quality control. The two cars had been going opposite directions, due east and west, respectively, on Central Ave, and had collided on State Line Road in West Bottoms, Kansas City, which happened to be where Kansas City, Kansas; Kansas City, Missouri; and Kansas and Missouri coincided.

The westward car, a preternaturally orange 1977 Ford Pinto, had been turning down State Line, and the eastward car, a doo-doo brown 1975 AMC Hornet, had swerved into its turn at the last second, so that the result was more arrowhead than T-bone. While no rear-end collision had caused the Pinto to fireball like the pint-sized ICBM that everyone feared and expected and might have caused Ralph Nader to materialize in a newscast, it was a fuck of a mess: skid marks, humped steel, broken glass littering the intersection, and a vaporizing radiator.

The Kansas KC police were first on the scene, to the surprise of none of the patrons of the only establishment in the industrial quarter, wandering over from the nearby bar that had been built by Pabst, himself maybe, in 1911. They carried bottles of Schlitz, cigarettes scissored in fingers. The first officer stepped into some droplets of blood, but inferred it was just the Pinto driver’s gashed forehead from the steering wheel. Imagine if she had been like your typical KCMO dipshit and weren’t wearing that belt, the officer muttered, ambling on the east side of the street.

An ambulance rolled up from the Missouri side with a trailed-off siren wheeze. Pinto flapped her arm at the EMT, but did accept some gauze, which she held to her forehead and bled through while she stood and began yattering off her nervous energy to him as he took the opportunity to light up. The Hornet driver had exited his passenger’s side door half-conniptioning. Aw shit, he said. Just shit! As the Kansas cop watched, he crawled back in and started his car anew and tried to disengage it, but it dragged the Pinto with a harrowing metal shriek for but a yard or two. God-damn it! Hornet ejaculated and clambered back out the passenger door, slamming it. Opening it and giving it another perfunctory slam. He jostled a pack of Benson & Hedges Menthol Lights 100 in aggravated fashion until one dislodged, lit it after six or seven tries from the lighter, then placed his hand on the roof and relaxed his body into a question mark, accepting the new trial life had laid before him.

The Missouri KC police rolled up casually only after the ambulance. Missouri lit his Marlboro with the dash lighter while seated and stepped out with it wedged under his walrus mustache. He strolled up to Kansas and they parleyed, arms quoined on hips, standing on State Line’s center dash, near the nose of the still-steaming Pinto. One shrugged, then the other. Missou-ri tossed his still-lit cigarette on the pavement, then walked back to his car and pushed his fingers through his hair with one hand while he talked on the radio mic with his other. Pinto sat on a curb while Hornet talked, arms folded, with some of the loitering bar patrons. Kansas and Missouri moved their cars off to the side and passing citizens occasionally swung their cars around the wreck unsettlingly late in their progressions down Central or State Line. The ambulance departed languidly into the setting sun.

After about an hour, as twilight glittered down, tow trucks arrived from Kansas and Missouri and sat rumbling on either side. Missouri and Kansas got out and spoke again, nodding. Hornet became newly animated and threshed his arms. Kansas said again, sir, we’re right on the line here, would you want this mess to deal with, well, they don’t either?

The trucks rumbled off. Darkness slid in. Most of the bar patrons had been drawn back to the yellow light of the bar, though a few swapped out in shifts to smoke and monitor. The cars were no longer steaming, cooled into one mass as they had been sculpted hours earlier. Pinto was on the curb next to a Schlitz bottle someone had given her, examining her nails under streetlight, with a crusted hunk of gauze from her forehead bobbing lightly in the breeze. Hornet was napping in the backseat of his car. Kansas’ shift had ended and he had been replaced by a smooth-faced and far more taciturn recruit, thumbs in loops.

The bar closed at midnight and by that point, Pinto had been picked up some time ago and Hornet had walked off discharging oaths. Missouri had been called to a shooting, and new Kansas had left warily, but not before commandeering a single wilting orange traffic cone to perch near the mass—on the Missouri side for the greater need of warning of the inherently more limited populace.

It stayed that way, an installation that cars chugged toward, then lurched around, until thirty-two hours later, some hours af-ter a piqued citizen had notified the office of the Kansas City, Missouri, City Manager, when, under cover of night, two tow trucks approached from the east, one of which circling around, and they yanked the cars asunder before hauling them to an auto yard in Northeast Kansas City, Kansas.