by Mat Osman
She was befraggled by sweat and pool-water, her breasts floating, magnified just under the surface. Light reflected in the water made her features swim. Her hand was hot and tiny.
“No cellphones on the floor, remember? If Gary hadn’t seen the fifty missed calls message I’d still be there.”
I looked around. “Aren’t we missing someone?”
“Collie has him. He was kind of gunky.” She wrung her hair out. “Healthy, but gunky.”
Collie was her duma, a quarter-Native-American stripper-cum-realtor who Rae had befriended in Whole Foods, whose name neither she nor Rae found as funny as I did.
“Col-lie,” she called and Collie emerged from the house, with the smallest of bundles in her arms.
“Who’s a good girl?” I said.
An hour later, as the water, pink with conjoined blood, gurgled down the storm drain, and the drone of Collie’s motorbike hung in the air, there he was. Robin Arturo Kussgarten. Wrapped up in Rae on her Caesar’s Palace lounger, her legs tucked underneath her, dusky in starlight, tired flesh in a sodden hotel robe. Robin was a tiny, scrunched-up thing in her arms — a fist, a walnut — and both of them were pink with blood and love. Their faces were trained on each other’s, Rae somehow both sleepy and alert, Robin’s eyes furiously shut against the indignity of the world.
Robin Arturo Kussgarten, a thing ancient and new, curled like a fat comma in Rae’s lap. And Rae herself salt-skinned and grubby, like an orphan kid herself with a toy, making Robin A Kussgarten something smaller still: a seed, an idea.
I watched the lovely, hopeful tug between their two faces, linked like earth and moon, like sea and sky, like Madonna and child. But no Madonna and child ever had this backdrop: the ghost house, the contour-map town and the pale roads, set under a crow’s wing of night littered with careless diamonds.
I could have watched them forever — the slo-mo blink of Rae’s grey eyes and the furlings and unfurling of Robin’s fists — if it wasn’t for some quality of the light that made me uneasy. There was a repeating swell of darkness, almost imperceptible until you looked up into the spangle of the Milky Way, dawn-bright in the raw air of the mountains. There you saw, vertiginously far away, a wheel of blackness obscuring the moon and stars in a smooth circle. Three shadows making a lazy sweep of the heavens, darkening whole galaxies, whole nebula, with a subtle angling of a wing, three black shapes on a black background: shadows on velvet, three silent vultures.
Rae finally slept around 5am, Robin curled into her, flesh on flesh. Their faces, even deep in respective slumbers, beamed information at each other, two satellite dishes in constant contact: I AM HERE I AM HERE I AM HERE, while I smoked and watched the vultures circle as the sun freed the landscape from night.
At this point there’s a drawing that takes up almost a foot of the reel. He’d cut three scraps of paper, each the rough shape of a bird with outstretched wings, from the bottom of the roll. Then he’d laid them on the paper and sprayed ink from his pen. It filled the page with hundreds of inky dots, like blood splatter. And then he’d removed the torn paper to leave three perfect voids among the stars.
Voodoo Rae — Act IV
So, Robin. Lucky even in the womb. Star-crowned. Vulture child, Indian born. Prince of a deserted kingdom. Born with a page-turner backstory on a million-dollar movie set. And blessed with what my family never gave me: fucked-up parents in fucked-up jobs in a fucked-up house on the edge of a fucked-up world. How lucky could a kid be? There’s not an artist alive who didn’t crawl, smoking, from some kind of family wreckage.
And this life was a gift that kept on giving. There were daily doses of drama, conflict and dysfunction to mould his infant mind. His babysitters were a revolving cast of Vegas’s temporary homeless, refugees from the city’s brutal gig economy trying to get back on their feet (or going down for the last time). There were croupiers between casinos who dealt endless practice hands of high-low over breakfast, even Robin in his high-chair getting his three-up, two-down. We took in RSI-stricken strippers whose box-fresh, milkless breasts had him mewling in frustration. Bus-station pimp-bait newbies, as big-eyed and helpless as baby birds, slept at the end of our bed and whined and kicked through bad dreams until Rae banished them to sleep by Robin’s crib. Tarot-card readers with front-seat iguanas. Card counters. Snake handlers. What boy wouldn’t want this freak show as a backdrop?
And then there was the desert. Its rhythms were older, slower. In a place where a cactus might flower once every seven years, where you can go a decade without rain, what’s an hour, a day, a week? We spent days on the roof of the house where you might at least catch a breath of breeze, camped out under a tent of pilfered hotel bed sheets, reading and listening to endless records. Magazines and cigarettes and gemstone skies, flawless and bland. Shadows shrinking, disappearing and lengthening. Robin was our only clock.
As soon as he could stand he was out and exploring on a clunky metal trike that was years too big for him. Rae had found it at a heartrending garage sale in Henderson: wedding rings, baby clothes in their packaging and his’n’hers golf bags. From the rooftop we’d watch Robin as he pedalled furiously, his fireman’s helmet bobbing up and down with the effort. Down the main access road he’d go, over ground so hot that sometimes you could smell the trike’s rubber tyres melting, down to the main gates, then left along the far edge of the putative golf course.
Rae was nervous when he wasn’t visible from the roof-top so I’d rigged up a trailer for him. Inside was a gallon bottle of water, a walkie-talkie and a boombox. Once out of sight he’d press play on the boombox so we could follow his progress in the hidden sections. Music blared from the western perimeter and through the discarded drainage pipes down into the visitors’ car park. I made him mixtape after mixtape but the only one which really caught his attention was a compilation of Midlands rock, heavy on the Sabbath and Purple. He played it so often that I could place him on the map purely by the music. If Ozzy had finished with his woman because she couldn’t help him with his mind then Robin was crossing the Hunipui ballroom. If Black Betty had a child that was goddamn wild then he was skirting the catering block. And always, miles above him like a personal weather system, the trio of vultures circled, lazy and watchful, convinced that anything that tiny must surely die soon. But Robin trundled on and they rotated in the sky patiently.
He never sweated, never tanned, as if he belonged out there somehow, the accidental Native American-ness of his birth protecting him from the environment. Rae worried though. When he came back from his rounds he’d be obsessive and dreamy and shivery. He’d stop in the middle of what he was doing, frozen in thought, a sentence half-finished in his mouth, a sandwich hanging limply from his hand. But if she tried to make him stay home he threw monumental tantrums, vast symphonies of outrage that wracked his frame and left him puce with fury, wet-faced and breathless until Rae relented.
I started to work longer hours. The poker boom had crested and now there was a glut of Hold ’Em Poker dealers. Rae went back to work too. Sometimes we’d work the same room, leaving Robin in the care of countless Candys and Kittys and Sugars and Vixens. His trike rides grew longer and he was quieter at home. You’d ask him a question and he’d look back at you blankly, only to answer hours later, sometimes not until he’d gone to bed. He’d tiptoe through in his pyjamas and say, “it was Led Zeppelin daddy” or “there were forty-two of them”.
Which day was it when the shark of our relationship, which until then had always moved forward, began to circle and slow? One of those desert days, surely. Until Vegas every day with Rae was unique. Even the days in bed, listening to music, were, to me, as different from each other as individual people. But in the desert, time stretched like the shadows. Your body clock slowed. In the heat of midday a word would do you for an hour, moving the chair into the shade felt like a day’s work.
For Rae, I think, every day there was lit with Robin’s life; she marvelled in every tiny change in him and cried for an hour the
first time he scuffed his knee, but for me the changes were too slow and incremental to break the prison of the days. Friends of friends slept in unoccupied shells of the estate and then disappeared, leaving indecipherable flotsam on leaking airbeds: bowling trophies, sex toys, baby teeth. One evening I dealt to a high-roller who dropped a million while he waited for the Celine Dion show to start. Next day a college kid lost fifty bucks and wept in his seat. Rae’s fashion magazines yellowed after just a day in the rooftop sunshine — relics of the almost present. Their cover lines seemed to be exactly the same each month. HOW TO HAVE MINDBLOWING SEX WHAT’S HOT IN HAIR RIGHT NOW LOVE YOURSELF AND HE WILL TOO.
Rae suggested moving somewhere more wholesome for Robin. The mountains: Alberta maybe, Denver. I wanted to stay. The thinnest of cracks in our Nation of Two.
Longer weekends. Worse weekends. Champ was back after some unspecified problems in Mexico, so he and I spent long days under his rules of disorder. No plans. No baggage. Just a spot to meet — the corner of Eddy and Larkin in San Francisco — and one of Champ’s stolen credit cards. We’d go into any bar, any shop and just talk. Assume everyone, however unpromising, is the key to the next forty-eight hours. Say yes. Say yes to free Spanish classes. Say yes, you have been saved and you’ve seen the glory of the Lord. Say yes to a teenage house party where you buy beer and ciggies for four hundred people. Say yes, sure you’re a cab, driving four drunk businessmen in suits over to Oakland to “see the natives”. Say yes to police line-ups. Say yes to a third-floor Tenderloin walk-up even though your invitee has a gun-shaped bulge in his front pocket and track marks on either arm. Say yes because of that, not in spite of it. These weren’t lost weekends, they were hidden weekends — buried even while they were happening. We were snowploughs in a blizzard of nights that I knew would only reoccur as flashbacks: mirrors, tattoos, bar-light. Blood, gold teeth, strobe-light. Weekdays with Rae and Robin were just the filling of the reservoir, ton upon ton of dead black water, straining against the dam of Friday and the moment when Champ and I removed the bricks.
Then Robin started getting sick. Fevers. Cold sweats. Sleepwalking. Shivers. You’d find him frozen, mid-gesture, as if he’d forgotten how to move, and his skin would be clammy. I found him in odd places: rooftops and basements, in dark corners. We took him to the doctor in Vegas three times and each time as we descended from the scant air he’d flicker to life. His cheeks would pinken, his eyes would shine and his chatter returned. He was fresh-faced and alert in the doctor’s waiting room, bouncing onto the examination table like it was a birthday treat. Tests that cost more than I paid for my first car all said the same thing: CLEAR CLEAR CLEAR. But the drive home leeched the colour from his face and he shrank back into the seat.
We had no Wi-Fi in the desert so Rae bought a thick stack of medical encyclopedias from a pawn shop, books so old that they had entries for Hysteria and Mongoloids. His symptoms suggested dropsy or The Vapors. He might have the ague. Fainting sickness. Collie burnt burrobrush and shadscale. His room had the acrid smell of illness.
Rae and I worked more shifts, leaving Robin at Collie’s. He blossomed at sea level, stuffing himself with ice cream and junk TV before wilting on the journey home.
Every day now Rae was saying it was time to go, we should find a place in LA or the mountains, but it felt like a retreat. I liked how we lived. It was rough-edged and precarious and Vegas tossed out up a never-ending churn of house guests. Everyone I met was broken and sun-maddened and manipulable and sad.
Robin got nosebleeds, Robin got migraines. His hair was like bleached cotton and his eyes were always pink. On bad nights, when he writhed and muttered and tore holes in his bedsheets, the vultures circled lower and wider, like the holding pattern at LAX, a traffic system in the sky. Rae and I rowed all the time. Arguments about little things became arguments about everything.
There were suitcases in the hallway. New contacts appeared on Rae’s phone. The car was always full of petrol.
Robin, Rae: they were out of there.
Chapter Eight
I couldn’t picture Robin in the desert, and I couldn’t imagine him as a Native American at all, even as a technicality. Everything about him, from that pale skin so quick to take a blush to those busy, clever hands, spoke to me of a particular kind of British kid. He was someone from school who would gush over last night’s Doctor Who and Airfix models. He would grow up to be dreamy, and clumsy, with bursts of oddly aimed enthusiasm. I knew the way things moved in his mind. I could feel the ideas that would plant hooks in him.
I pulled out The Book of Umbrage and began to write. The story flowed from the nib of my pen, tugging ideas into place behind it. Once everything was down on the page I willed the two of them to wake but the screen stayed unmoving. I sent down for breakfast and tidied up. Still nothing.
I fretted over what I’d read that morning. I didn’t want to hear about good times between Brandon and Rae, even if they were years ago. I wanted my brother to be one-dimensional and hateful and gone.
It was midday before I saw the first movement: Rae in a robe, with damp hair hanging down over her face. She waved a silent hello and put a finger to her lips. There was the tap, tap, tap of fingers on keyboard — she had to go out but Robin would be down soon. I wanted to hear just a moment of her voice. I messaged to tell her I had something to show Robin.
After she left I made some coffee. The light from their kitchen window inched its way across the wall like a sundial. I cut myself a line and waited. Somewhere in their flat a clock was ticking. When Robin finally appeared he came onscreen in a blur of limbs too fast for the camera.
“Mom says you’ve got something for me what is it hi hi morning Daddy what is it?”
I opened up the Book of Umbrage and Robin sat cross-legged with his hands on his knees, inches from the screen. He ate cereal noisily.
“There’s a throne,” I told him, “carved from ivory, in an abandoned building called The Folly, up in the mountains. It’s overgrown, but one New Year kids from the valley below dared each other to go up and explore. It took a couple of hours, but they didn’t mind. It was one of those boring, grown-up days when nothing interesting happens at home anyway.”
The endoscope was positioned inches from the top of the mountain and I flicked it on. A dusty path through a landscape strewn with boulders, the only vegetation wizened and black. I uncoiled it uphill until the top of a damaged tower came into view.
“When they got to the top, they set to exploring. Nature had reclaimed much of the folly. Vines forced their way through the cracks between rocks and started to work away at the fabric of the place.”
I focused on a piece I’ve always been proud of: a row of balsa wood blocks into which I’d planted seeds. Nowadays the blocks were veined with roots that twisted them up and away from the ground.
“When they got inside they found a badger cub sleeping on the throne. They got close enough to see its little ribs rising and falling but they didn’t wake it. That evening one of the boys told his father, a priest, what they’d seen. Well, I’ve told you how much the Umbragians love an omen” — Robin nodded furiously, spoon in mouth — “so the priest declared that the next twelve months would be the Year of the Badger. Everything the citizens did, every decision they took, would be done through the filter of badgerishness, if there’s such a word.”
“Badgerdom,” whispered Robin.
“Badgerdom, of course. So, when they were unsure what to do they invoked the qualities of the badger: tenaciousness, patience, independence. And every year since they send a child up there to see if there’s an animal on the throne.”
“And is there?”
“Usually. The kid’ll camp out there for days if need be, waiting. Even a butterfly, alighting on the throne for a split second, that counts. The Year of the Butterfly was a strange one. There have been a couple of years though…”
I flicked open the book again, “About twenty years back no animal was found so they continued wit
h the Year of the Lizard. And quite recently we had three straight years of the crow.”
“What are crow years like?”
I read from the book. “Craft is preferred over hard work, beauty is prized, waste is abhorred.” I knew he wouldn’t understand all of the words but meaning isn’t always the most important part of a story.
“And this year?”
“That’s why I thought of it. It’s Umbragian New Year today. I thought you might go and see if anything is there.”
His spoon stopped in mid-air. “Really? And I’ll see what’s on the throne? Just me?”
“Of course.”
He had a nervous tic, one that I could feel the ghost of across my own face: opening his eyes wide, three times in succession, like he was trying to wake up.
“But will I really see it, or, y’know, make it up?” He whispered the last bit. It was the right question.
“Well, you see it but you don’t see it, do you know what I mean?”
He nodded with that seriousness only children can have.
I ran the endoscope up the side of one of the hills that overlooked Au-Hav, snaking it between model trees and over pencil-thin streams. “Here’s The Folly.”
The whole hilltop, unlike the parched landscape around it, was thick with moss and mould. It spilled down the sides, reaching slender fingers down the grooves in the hillside’s surface. Somewhere under the fuzz of vegetation was the outline of a curved spire and a rectangular base. There was a slot cut into the moss, opening out into a dark-emerald chamber with a single ivory chair at its centre. The thickness of the foliage around The Folly meant that Robin got no sight of the structure until the endoscope was almost on top of it. Then it loomed, sinuous and verdant, to fill the screen.
“It’s spooky,” he said, sounding delighted.
I ran the camera up the side of the spire. Near the top the off-white of the original wood showed through in places and burned bright on the screen.
