She sipped something iced that smelled caramel-sweet. Or maybe the Baroness gave off the tantalizing scent; she certainly looked fantastic. Her tailored duster came to her knees, over a black crushed-velvet pantsuit. Gold subtly flecked the variegated gem-tone blue duster, giving the illusion that perhaps the jacket had been formed from lapis lazuli. The blue set off her fiery hair, which she wore in a soft, complicated braid ending in a fishtail below her hips.
Tyson immediately understood Encludsmo’s poetics, and further he recognized the Baroness as the type of woman Annie always admired. “There goes a woman without a single pair of big cotton jobs in her underwear drawer,” she’d say.
Without delay, he purchased coffee and sat across from the Baroness, dumping sugar into his cup while the steam fogged his glasses. “I don’t know what I was thinking buying hot coffee,” he babbled. “It’s been so hot outside lately you’d think I’d know better.”
“It’s August in Los Angeles. We can skip the small talk. Besides, you’re too smart.”
Tyson felt himself blush. “What makes you think that?”
“You’re an American who speaks Luci’s native tongue.”
So the sister was Luci now. Well, he could comprehend that; something about the Baroness put him instantly at ease, in the dangerous way of opiates.
“Encludsmo’s English was never good,” he explained. “His advisor sent him to my department to improve his English. But I was more interested in learning his language. I wanted to communicate better with him, have conversations—we had a lot in common. And his language is interesting to me, since it’s challenging.”
“As opposed to?”
“French, which is just like Spanish, which is just like Italian. Or all the Germanic languages, or anything Cyrillic, right? You get the heart of one, you get the gist of them all.”
The Baroness stirred her icy drink. “Just how many languages do you speak?”
“Seven.”
“How many if you don’t lump them together?”
Tyson, never comfortable in the spotlight, ran a hand through his hair and stared at the table. “Seventeen.”
“Nothing on your resume indicated this.”
“It was irrelevant.”
“This is the era of globalism. Everything is relevant.”
Tyson squinted at the table some more, trying to determine just what his former company president was getting at and how to respond intelligently.
The Baroness saved him. “I know Miguel fired you from tech support,” she said. “But I have other departments that could use a translator. And super-genius scientists are always welcome.” She slid her card across the table. “You said you expect your friend to call. When he does, ask him to contact me. If I get him, I’ll come get you too.”
“Is that blackmail?”
“No, it’s a bribe. Is that a problem?”
He looked at her face now, into her amazing violet eyes which he suspected could lie convincingly. He frowned, gulped some too-hot coffee. He understood that he had the upper hand.
“Did you hire Melvina?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I have my reasons. They don’t include getting anybody fired.”
“I did nothing but stand up for him. Her. I didn’t have a problem with Melvina.”
The Baroness shrugged. “The world judges us by our words. But the universe judges us by our actions.”
Tyson gazed at her. His eyes hooded. “Why do you need Encludsmo so badly?”
The Baroness sat back in her chair, met his gaze, bit her crimson lip like some femme fatale. “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “My father is a winemaker. He owns three vineyards. At one time he owned four.
“In 1986, in Moldova, Gorbachev ordered hundred-year-old vineyards to be systematically eradicated. When news that this would happen reached my father he traveled there to stop it. Of course he could not. His friends later told me that he sat in the middle of his desecrated fields and wept, not for himself but for Mother Russia and Moldova and Georgia as well, for their jointly defiled histories.
“But some vineyards remain, they survived. Why not his? It is rumored that the director of Ukraine’s Magarach Wine-Making Institute in Crimea hanged himself rather than fulfill the orders to obliterate his ancient vines. My father felt guilty for years that his had been destroyed, until he realized that even if he had hanged himself, it would have done nothing. The soldiers obeyed their command and my father was not informed soon enough to buy them out.”
She paused, gazed at the table, took and held a breath then let it out slowly, seeming to force a welling memory back down. “Our country,” she continued, “though known today for its wine, does not have hundred year old vineyards. Our country is known, is renowned in the scientific community for its intellectual prowess. Because you are The Doctor’s friend, you don’t smirk at that.”
Tyson shook his head. “Not at all. America makes a greater number of scientific discoveries in a year than all the other countries put together. I know that. But I don’t know that people would hang themselves for it. To preserve it, I mean.”
“Possibly not, no. Not the average person. But the average person possibly would not sacrifice himself for anything not his own. So, just for the sake of argument, let’s forget the average person.”
Tyson pulled a worn newspaper clipping from his wallet. He unfolded it with care, pressing it smooth against the table, and turned it so it faced the Baroness. “Does your interest in Dr. Stuckhowsen have anything to do with this?”
To his surprise, the regal woman smiled. “If only that were our worst problem,” she lamented.
“What do you mean?”
“I wouldn’t be chasing down an unknown, wayward scientist for a cure we already have, now, would I?”
Tyson mulled her equivocation. “But we’re being sued. Or at least we were. Now suddenly we’re not?”
She blinked, still smiling.
“It’s true, then. And something even worse is true, too. Something you need Encludsmo to solve for you.”
Her violet eyes beseeched him, told him clearly she had a much longer, uglier, more threatening story that she couldn’t divulge Finally she spoke again. “I’m giving you early, distant warning.”
* * *
The drive back from Ishmael’s brought him to the mall intersection at the same time driving to his job used to, but facing the opposite direction. He’d spent the fifteen or so minutes lost in the vivid imagery of the Baroness’s story; a hanged official, determined soldiers, a man on his knees weeping in a burned out field. Were they lies? The woman herself embodied contradiction, simultaneously so grounded yet so wraith like. Permanent, yet otherworldly. Not so much a ghost as a goddess. Who could know?
He stopped for his light, and found the copper-haired girl with the angel tattoo running toward him for a change. In his rearview he found the blonde. Both women held their heads high, bodies straight with determination against the smog and the heat and the strain. They passed each other, as they did every morning, but now Tyson had a new perspective, and this serendipitous situation granted revelation.
The blonde’s yellow, ladder-back tank top covered very little of the tattoo Tyson had never known she had. Just as her clothes changed with the season, while the copper-haired girl’s seemed to be lifted from Morticia’s closet, so contrasted their tattoos.
On the same shoulder, the opposite image: A devil woman, a demon succubus, inked in sickly green and bruisey purple, her batwings as hideous as the angel’s were beautiful, and equally painstakingly rendered. The demon leered over the blonde’s shoulder, gazing into the distance and seeming just about to head there, to launch up with great clawed feet and feed on some unsuspecting innocent driver.
A strange sense of well-bein
g overtook Tyson. A moment of A-ha. Like when he’d been struggling to learn algebra and suddenly one day, just when he’d about given up, all the pieces fit together. He could subtract X from both sides and not change the equation. A punk rock girl could have a guardian angel needled into her body, while a cheerful housewife bore the mark of a female beast. A man could wear a dress.
As he turned onto his street, he noticed that the air felt cooler, realized fall was on the wind, and began to believe that perhaps the world could in fact be saved by this purple-eyed devil. Tyson could simply tell his friend that his company president was in search of him. Relay everything the Baroness had told him and let The Doctor decide what to do about it.
And if the world didn’t get saved? Well, Tyson, like the Baroness’s father, wouldn’t be well-connected enough to bother hanging himself.
II: (Departures)
Cracked Looking Glass
The Comic Who Couldn’t Laugh
Rough Passage for
Biiiiig MacDaddy (Part 1)
CHAPTER 3
Vonnie Upchurch couldn’t turn her head, so she could only see the nurse who was changing her eye tape in her peripheral vision. Vonnie’s eyes couldn’t blink, so the nurses had to put these horrible sticky drops in them and then tape them closed. Only between tapings did Vonnie get to see anything.
She recognized the voice, though, and had seen the woman’s face before—striking, even at a good ten years senior to most of the other nurses. She had the thick, black wavy hair for which Vonnie had always envied Filipino women.
The nurse finished taping her eyes and patted Vonnie’s arm. “There you go, balasang.” She stood and Vonnie heard her swish across the floor in her near-silent shoes.
The nurse made friendly chatter with the assistant, a Spanish-speaking girl Vonnie knew to be heavyset with big brown eyes. She heard the meds cart roll by in the hallway and it occurred to her that her hearing had intensified.
“Is this that poor famous girl?” So the meds nurse was new. Her accent said Filipino; similar to a Spanish accent but more…bubbly.
“Yeah. She’s easy.”
“Pretty.”
“It’s a waste.”
“Maybe not. Maybe that’s her glance backward, and she’ll learn from it. You know what they say. ‘Ang hindî marunong lumingón sa pinanggalingan ay hindî makararatíng sa paroroonan. ‘”
Vonnie had no idea what this parable meant, but the other nurse responded with a low, skeptical “Mmmm….” Something about the sound—its resonance? Its doubt? left Vonnie simultaneously hopeful and lonely.
The nurses all thought Vonnie couldn’t hear because she was in a coma. She was in a coma because ten days ago she’d taken a bottle of Xanax and a bottle of some painkiller and a bottle of some unlabeled stuff belonging to her husband which, knowing her husband, was probably illicit. She’d washed all these down with not quite 750 mL of vodka while watching Empty-V’s live airing of her husband’s concert.
Bagga’ Chips’ newest album, titled BITCH!, was comprised of a litany of ferocious hatred set to a heavy metal beat. Over double bass drums and screaming guitars he rapped—or shouted—to the world (or at least his fans) his version of their rocky marriage. She’d watched the performance like a football game, poured the pills into a glass bowl like so much colorful popcorn, and sat in front of the TV swallowing them one by one.
Which was why she now lay pinned to a hospital bed by her own cruel body, unable to move, even to blink or squeeze the hands of crying relatives, but with all senses fully functioning.
God love the nurses, she thought. God love them for their lack of sympathy.
But then the voices retreated, they all left for what Vonnie assumed was nighttime, and the floor went deathly quiet. No pun intended.
Having nothing else to do, Vonnie mostly thought about stuff. Her life and her place in the world. She felt an odd tranquility for the most part, tinged just slightly by sadness. Sometimes she wished she could read a book or watch a movie. But after the first couple days she resigned herself to her situation and began thinking of her own life in movie form. Where would she start? What single moment defined her?
Two moments. Same scene. Standing on my back porch tugging at my father-in-law’s shirt tail.
Yeah. For Johnny Cash it was when his brother sawed himself in half. For Edward R. Murrow it was the WWII broadcast from the London rooftop. For Vonnie Upchurch it was pleading with her father-in-law that first summer of New Jersey marriage, and then again that first summer in L.A.
“Please, Dad,” she nearly whispers the first time. “Please don’t hit your boy.”
And the ex-boxer’s shoulders rising and falling with his breath, with his rage. Frankie is a big man, six three, broad shouldered, ham-fisted. He sets one of his mitt-sized palms against her face.
Vonnie’s friend Chloe had called him, knew to call Frankie instead of the police. Mid-April and still threatening to snow one last time. Vonnie is wearing sweat pants and one of TJ’s white shirts—he’s still TJ, not yet Bagga’ Chips—and her feet ache with cold, bare on the concrete stoop.
Frankie’s dark brown eyes pity her and he shakes his head sadly. “Baby. That’s not how we conduct ourselves in this family.”
He kisses the top of her head then tosses open the screen door and lurches into the house before she’s even able to return his embrace. Her hand just catches the tail of his stone-grey work shirt.
Chloe stands in the grassy gravel, leans against Frankie’s Buick. Her pale blue eyes search Vonnie’s face. She’s wearing a short red dress, and with her curly black hair and black boots she perfectly matches the showy car, a slut-red monster with an engine the size of Vonnie’s kitchen.
“I might never forgive you!” Vonnie hisses at her friend.
Chloe steps forward, hesitates, then strides to the foot of the stoop. “There’s a fine line between objects and people,” she says. “And even finer between animals and people.”
“So I should leave him because he got a little frustrated and shoved my dog?”
“He hurled your dog through a window! Your eighty pound dog.”
Vonnie wraps her arms around herself. She trembles with the need to cry but fights back the tears. “He’s working a lot, you know? Like, double shifts, three nights a week. And his band has been playing out all the time and he’s been trying to fix shit around the house. He needs some sleep, okay? Jocco wouldn’t stop barking.”
“What happens when it’s the baby that won’t stop crying?”
“You know I don’t want kids.”
“They all say that.”
“You’ve known me since kindergarten, I’ve never wanted kids!”
“You’d have them, though—”
“TJ doesn’t want kids either.”
“—for Frankie.”
As if in apocryphal response, Frankie’s voice rages from inside the house and something—big, glass—shatters. The knick-knack cabinet most likely. Full of TJ’s high school track trophies, photos of their wedding and Vonnie’s recently retired bong. They were the inverse bad-boy couple: He was the good one.
Frankie’s voice poses impossible questions to his son: “Is this how I raised you! To beat up girls? Are you proud!” TJ’s response is inaudible.
Vonnie cringes, shakes harder. The tears finally spill out of her. She stands shaking and sobbing, her breath ragged gasps. Chloe walks up the three steps of the square concrete porch, wraps her arms around Vonnie. Chloe is only a few inches taller, maybe five-six to Vonnie’s five-two but at this moment Vonnie feels tiny. Like a child. She allows herself to be eased to sit on the stoop, despite the cold.
“If I really thought you should leave him,” Chloe tells her softly, “I’d be packing your bags. I know TJ is a nice guy. Under all that chrome and broken glass. But i
f you play long enough at being an asshole, eventually, you know, you become one.”
Vonnie sniffles and nods.
“I figured Frankie could sort of…realign him. You know?”
Vonnie nodded again.
“Before he realigns you.”
Vonnie shook her head. “He wouldn’t.”
“They all say that.”
Silence. Then Chloe’s voice is light again. “Remember what my mom used to always tell us?” She imitates her mother’s smoke-gravely voice: “You kids’ll get hemorrhoids sitting on the cold concrete like that! Get a chair like a normal person!”
Vonnie laughs, glad to be able to, glad for the break in the storm. She laughs and cries all at the same time and snot runs down her face which Chloe is gracious enough to wipe away with the tail of TJ’s shirt.
It’d been Chloe holding her then and it was Chloe holding her now. Every evening she came to the hospital and told Vonnie about her day.
“I started at that Survivanoia place today. Inside sales. They sell weird stuff, my favorite so far is the Tin Foil Hat clothing.”
She laughs and Vonnie relishes the sound. Chloe’s always had a contagious laugh.
“You know those poor people who are scared of radio frequencies and mind-control rays? Survivanoia has this line of clothing? Pretty fashionable actually, made with wire-core threads to absorb electromagnetic waves.”
She paused and Vonnie envisioned her shrugging just one shoulder, her left, the way she knew Chloe did.
“It’s pretty cool there. My boss is hot. He looks like, you remember that Faith No More band?”
Chloe had loved Faith No More in high school. Vonnie knew her boss must look like the singer.
“He looks like their singer, Mike Patton. And he drinks at work, which I think is hysterical. Oh, I met this guy in line last night at the grocery store. He doesn’t have TV either! I was sort of waiting for him to ask for my phone number but he didn’t.”
Baroness Von Smith Page 5
