Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman

asides. The revolution slumbers in damp coats and cigarette smoke; the pope is in the Vatican; Reagan and Gorbachev are toe-to-polished-toe; the world hangs on sound-bites and secret meetings. What comes tomorrow, we will see. I hear the roll of waves. Maybe, we are in Danzig, or as the Poles call it Gdansk, waiting for a protest amid blowtorch light and broken ships. Eva opens her arms. “You want to chase it, don’t you? Chase what’s out there in the dark and bring it back and put words to it.” I don’t feel like writing tonight. I fall into her and she laughs, Eva, older Eva, the imprint of her youth just below my fingers. Let me trace. Her face tighter, beauty stretched, and lines, just a few, as if drawn with a needle, float around mouth and eyes. The lips are full and the shoulders, oh the shoulders, the muscle beneath taut as the strings of a mandolin; all her power is there, imperceptibly bowed like a fighter stepping into his jab; the breasts and down to the hips, white as if rolled from flour, always so white she was, glowing in darkened rooms, and sometimes the black hair of her head and the black between her legs were one with the night as if a white figure was being pulled and formed from a sea of ink, and the wet warmth between those legs, that was Eva, and she is here, beneath me, in the trace and the touch, but when I move across her … suddenly, thingsshift and flash the way house lights flicker before a storm. I see Eva. I see a woman. I see Eva. I see … It goes. She sits up, pushes me back, turns on the nightstand light. She holds my face in her hands like a vase, her eyes looking through mine.
    “You’re slipping away. For a moment you were here. Do you remember?”
    “The kiss. Something happened. But now I’m confused. Where are we?”
    “The doctors say it comes like that. A moment of clarity. They call it ‘triggers’ and ‘mechanisms’ like the words for a machine. These clear moments will become fewer and then one day you won’t find the path back, not by a kiss, not by a scent. Remembering has been briefer, James. When you come back now, you are like a man on a doorstep peeking into a house with your car running in the street. Where do you go when you run into the street? Why can’t I follow and bring you back? Is it a fortress in there? I am Eva, James. Eva. We made love in rooms like this across the world, and now we are two bodies, separate. I feel like a beggar following you for change.”
    “Tell me more.”
    “I used to bring you back with a story. The time in Europe, a headline, one of your clippings, even a funny remembrance from a train or a border checkpoint, something that clicked inside you. They no longer evoke. I see your eyes; they have become the stories from a history book, not a life. You can’t place yourself. It’s as if the puzzle is done except for one piece, the piece you hold in your hand, but you can’t see that the piece fits perfectly into the picture before you. Now it’s only primal, James. I bring you back with this bed, our bodies. It’s a straight line to the core, no words, no time to think or remember. Be still James, not confused. Touch me.”
    She takes my hand and moves it across her face and to her breasts and below. Warm, wet; the scent of her rising through the sheets, the scent on my fingertips to the nerve endings and into me, theseelements to remember, and now I am on my back and she is over me and I am inside this warmth, this place I know, where all of Eva’s nerves are alive; they pull me to her like a net and she is moving over me and her eyes she won’t take off me; she is using her body in place of words, this strong body, older yes, but this body is what I know, it is my map and wherever I was, I am back now; the face before me is not a ghost from a scrapbook, not a gray clip from a newspaper, it is Eva, my rhythm, my light, and I know how much she loved sex, she craved it at day’s end, even at day’s middle, and it is