Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  “What are they saying?”

  “I can’t understand them.” There was a silence. “You are a hunter,” she said. Part statement, part question.

  “Sort of.”

  “There’s something you’re hunting now.”

  “Yes.” Silence. “But why don’t you ever look at me when you’re talking?”

  “I need to look through the window.”

  “What window?”

  “It’s a portal. A window, a mirror, a pond—where all the information comes through.” More silence. “It’s a man you’re hunting?”

  “Sort of . . . yes . . . no.”

  More silence. Danny was making me crazy. Just say it, for christsakes! “He’s looking for the woman he practically died for,” I blurted out.

  “Shh,” she said, shooting me a look that must have melted a portal or two in some other world.

  “I have never loved anyone else. Not like Ariana,” said Danny.

  “Ariana?”

  “The girl I went to school with. We were in love. Going to get married.” He was almost having to force the words out. “But they kidnapped her. And sold her off to an old man. Back where she came from.”

  Constance stared. And then stared some more. “I see a white veil.”

  “A white veil?”

  “Was there a wedding?” When she said it, all the color drained out of Danny’s face. “I see whiteness. Something that looks like a veil. Yes . . . yes, a wedding maybe?”

  “She had to marry some old guy. They would have killed her if she didn’t do what they told her. But there wouldn’t have been a veil.”

  “I see a veil. A white one,” Constance said in that voice so flat her words sounded like they’d been ironed. “And you.”

  “Me?”

  “When she wears the veil you are there.”

  “Are we getting married?” said Danny, suddenly exuberant, even hopeful.

  “No.” Then the silence of hope withering. “But she wants to talk to you.”

  “Oh God . . .”

  “She is with you. Always.”

  “Ariana? Can you hear me?” Danny was almost yelling, clutching the table as if he saw her across from him.

  “No. She can’t. The energy flows are all wrong.”

  “I have to get through to her.”

  “Blood.”

  “Blood? What blood?” Danny’s hand slapped the table. He was ratcheting up the intensity, his leg jackhammering under the table.

  “A man’s. She knows him, the one who is bleeding.”

  “She has a brother.”

  “You know this brother.” Part question, part statement. “He was a friend of yours?”

  “Once. Now we hate each other. I almost killed him.”

  “How?”

  “In the war.”

  “Did you intend to?”

  “It was war.”

  She heard this with her eyes closed, saying nothing. After a while she said, “There’s more. Isn’t there?”

  Danny did not want to answer her. Finally he said, “He kidnapped her. His own sister. To marry her off to an old thug, a warlord, this guy Zadran, who has a tribe and . . .”

  “Yes, yes, that one’s alive, the one you think you almost killed.”

  Danny sat up like he’d been sprung on a stiff hinge at the waist. His eyes went wide as he tried to draw in her stare that was still fixed on the window behind him.

  “He is laughing. He thinks he has won.”

  “Let him.”

  “I hear him.” Another silence. “I have to stop for a moment,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Please. Give me a moment.” She suddenly looked as if she hadn’t slept in a year.

  “Please,” said Danny, sounding like he’d never sounded before. He looked like he was going to collapse. “Ariana. I need to know if she thinks about me.”

  “She is trying to reach out to you. But everything is blocked.”

  She took a deck of Tarot cards out of its velvet bag, told Danny to shuffle them and then pick four cards. She studied the cards he picked, asked him to repeat it, and then studied the results a second time. “I see death.”

  “What death?”

  “Someone else’s.” She put the cards away and took something down from a shelf, something covered by a thick black-velvet cloth, which she removed. It was a mirror, not an ordinary one; it was almost black. She put it on the table and looked into it. “I had to stop because someone else has come in. He wants to talk to you.”

  “Someone else?”

  “Another man. He was close to you. He died. And you blame yourself?”

  “I don’t know if I want to hear this.”

  “I see the color red.”

  “Oh God . . . no.”

  “What?”

  “Red? Rubi? As in ruby red?”

  “I need more information.”

  “Enrique Rubicalba. Rubi we called him. Born in Cuba. He was my scout for a while. Before Hank and I teamed up.”

  “What is a scout?”

  “The guy who goes out with you. Who looks through the binoculars while you’re firing at the enemy.”

  “Why do I hear music?”

  “Liberace?”

  “Who’s Liberace?” she asked.

  “Some flowery guy from years ago. He played the piano on TV and charmed old ladies who wanted him to marry their daughters when all he wanted was to marry their sons. Hank’s mother downloaded all his records and sent them to me.”

  “All I know is that I hear music.”

  “It’s Liberace. We played his music up in the mountains. Right in the middle of the war. We played it in the Afghan mountains because Ariana’s brother absolutely hated Liberace. But the problem was Rubi hated Liberace too. Rubi was all salsa and congas and he almost went out of his mind when we were lying there, hour after hour, blasting out Liberace from speakers hidden all over that damn mountain.

  “He got shot while it was playing. Rubi died listening to that stuff.”

  She stared at the mirror. “Do you have anything that belonged to him?”

  Danny took out his wallet and removed a little photograph. “That’s him.”

  She stared at it. And then at the mirror. “Rubi’s ready to talk to you.”

  Danny was all wrapped around the big oak table, like his arms and legs were tentacles trying to subdue it. “Does he know I didn’t mean to get him killed?”

  A long pause. “He knows.”

  It was Danny’s turn to sigh, which was actually more like a blast of throttled memories running for their lives. “Is he okay?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Danny said with a kind of Marley’s ghost look.

  “Because he says he’s going to have to listen to Liberace for all eternity.”

  The Mountains

  2

  I believe in the dialectics of lousy first impressions. The contradiction of opposites and all that. So on the surface, Danny and I had no business becoming friends.

  From the starting points of our lives, we had almost nothing in common. Neither of us could have remotely understood the other’s life until we met over there on the side of that mountain where it felt like everyone was trying to either kill us or get us killed.

  Or maybe it was simply the circumstances of that first meeting. Along with about a hundred other guys, I had crawled out of the Afghan mountains, all eleven thousand feet of them around the Shah-e-Kot Valley, with my ribs feeling like sandpaper just from breathing, and my head still ringing from the altitude and from our own 120mm mortars that had a way of sucking the clockworks out of an eardrum if you were too close. Two days earlier we’d dropped out of a frozen dawn into what turned out to be a hot LZ—which officially became hot the moment one of the big Chinooks, the helicopter we were in, got torn up by enemy fire as it was landing. In one fear-thrashed instant, we were hurling ourselves out onto the hard ground, a screaming kaleidoscope of rucksacks, weapons, men, ungo
dly sprays of blood, and the Copenhagen chewing tobacco that some hyperventilating grunt couldn’t hold in.

  Opening my eyes, I was staring into that loopy grin of his peering over the maple leaf patch the Canadians wore like a bullseye on their uniforms. I mean, for me, Canada might as well have been Mongolia. All I knew about those people was that they played hockey, fought a lot but acted polite. Danny was none of those things. Except for maybe the fighting part. That came to be true.

  But that was only because of Ariana, after they kidnapped her.

  • • •

  Dialectics again.

  That first time I saw Danny was moments after I was lying there exhausted and terrified, pinned to the mountain, watching the earth and the air regularly being ripped up as someone was screaming my name above the surround-sound effects courtesy of Central Command and its F-15s. It was Captain Ellers who was yelling at me. You could always tell when Ellers was upset because his face took on the symmetry of a pothole. Too small for his massive body, it looked like it was about to fly apart, as if the springs working just below the surface of his face were torqued way past the manufacturer’s recommended tolerances. His mouth would be working in opposition to the rest of his face, like it was trying to quell an uprising somewhere between his eyebrows and his chin. It made his helmet bounce whenever the brigade commander’s voice came on the radio. The brigade commander’s main duty seemed to be assigning blame for all the fuckups to someone else in the lower ranks.

  When I first got there he barely noticed me, the almost indecipherable crackle of PRC radios and squawk codes filling the air around him. “Zadran,” was all he yelled.

  “Sir?”

  “Zadran,” Captain Ellers rasped. “You the go-to guy for Zadran?”

  If go-to was all about almost having been ambushed by that jovial throat-slitter, the Afghan version of the Frito Bandito complete with fat handlebar moustache, the guy who could shoot up your convoy in the morning, swear allegiance to you in the afternoon, and demand your wallet by sunset, then yeah, I was the man.

  We were up at the Listening Post on the forward ridge looking over at the smoke and the immolated earth that heaved in peristaltic convulsions on the opposite hill. That was when Danny raced through enemy fire, making his cubist charge—everything about him looked like it was going in a different direction as he hurtled toward us.

  “See that guy, the Canadian?” Ellers yelled, pointing to Danny careening through the smoke below us. “He needs to get to Zadran. You’re it.”

  “It?”

  “It,” he yelled. “You and him. You’re a team now.”

  “A team? What team?”

  “How the hell would I know? Orders.”

  Watching Danny come swooping over a ridgeline, I began debating the merits of personal grooming. His enormous shirt was billowing around him like he had wings, and that thatch of reddish-blond hair looking as if it could get caught on the air alone. He was dishevelled in a totally different way than anyone else on that mountain. I mean, battle haute couture is not exactly Marine dress whites, but with him you just knew he’d never clean up properly. He was born disheveled, the kind of kid who wouldn’t know what to do with a comb and probably hadn’t ever bothered owning a suit.

  “The psychic,” he gasped.

  “The psychic?”

  “Are you the outfit with the psychic?” he wheezed into the thin air after he lunged over the ridgeline, sprawling beside me.

  “How did you know?” It was something that our guys had tried to keep secret. Militarily speaking it was sort of embarrassing.

  “Word travels. A psychic? Really?”

  I nodded.

  “Good deal,” he said, reaching out to shake hands and introduce himself. “Danny,” he added as the enormous sniper rifle swung around his shoulders, almost clocking him in the back of the head. “I need to get to your psychic.”

  • • •

  Like most Americans, when I was growing up, all I knew about Canada was that it was some place north of Wyoming filled with people who were irritated because we didn’t know anything about them. The Santa Monica school system wasn’t too big on Canada. Mostly I grew up in the Ocean Park section near the beach with a mother who trailed husbands and lovers the way the surfers there discarded entangling seaweed, a mother who had led a life in Paris and London that humbled my schoolboy existence, a mother who, like a stopped clock, was unshakable in her belief that sometime soon she’d be right.

  I think my mother’s real name was Annabelle. But I’m not really sure. She was one of those creatures of the sixties and seventies who made themselves into what they had dreamed of becoming, and then couldn’t sustain all the splendor they had willed into that image.

  But even as a kid trudging off to school in Ocean Park, the low-rent section of Santa Monica, I knew my mother was unique. I figured out that she was like Mae West’s old line about times being so tough she never knew where her next husband was coming from. I also figured out that my mother gave off lust like a crop duster. (An observation of uncomfortable Freudian implications but, as the Master said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.) The most fertile fields got sprayed the most. Many a night I was told to “do my homework,” which meant to lock myself into my little shag rug bedroom while mother “entertained” the latest candidate chosen to propel her—actually us—back to the life she had known in Paris, where she was a house model for Chanel and Givenchy. Even in her more gravity-challenged years, she routinely chose suitors who dined in restaurants like Le Taillevent. (And would claim to have brought home a doggy bag for me, which I knew really came from the Tunisian falafel seller at the end of Rue Jacob.)

  It wasn’t that my mother was greedy. It was just that she changed somewhere around Number Three, the husband billed as a French aristocrat, whose proclamations of love were in direct proportion to the envy shown by other men when he was with her. The problem was that the aristocrat turned out to be a former waiter with a carefully invented past, impeccable manners—and women stashed all over the 8th Arrondissement. Something in her imploded around that time, and some illusion we all need in affairs of the heart clouded over, becoming so opaque that she could no longer see through to what had once sustained her. She simply stopped believing in what had been the goal of her entire life: love. Or at least the illusion of it. Even as an eight-year-old in that, my final year in Paris, I remember the change that came over her as she ditched the fake aristocrat, looked in the mirror a lot, stopped singing around the house, smiled less, and tried to feed us both on what were scraps the butcher gave her pour le chat.

  Love became an abstraction for Mother in that headlong rush to reinvent herself. At least for a while. She dragged me from Paris back to Santa Monica, where she’d grown up. And began looking at men with an appraiser’s eye.

  Which is why, many husbands and lovers into the marital scorecard, she ended up with Albert, the biggest liar of them all. Albert drove a Rolls that was fourteen years old and was usually parked where the repo guys couldn’t find it. Albert was short and shaped like a pear with a round, shiny face that looked like an egg with a jagged crack for lips, topped off by hair transplants that had gone seriously wrong and created a kind of unwanted Afro. As shrewd as they come, Albert had one goal in life: to be rich. Which is why he became Number Four.

  Albert was one of those guys with the face of a weak king. Ten years earlier, he would not even have rated a second look. But the sight of that Rolls cruising up the hillside on Ashland Avenue toward our eviction-pending, run-down little stucco apartment clinched the deal. Within months after the wedding, the truth about Albert started to come out: The Rolls had five different sets of license plates to confuse the repo people, and that Afro was the result of Albert being too cheap to pay for a proper hair transplant job. He’d found an orthodontist who wanted to get into the transplant business and was looking for volunteers for an experimental procedure. The experimental part involved transplanting pubic hairs, which explai
ned why Albert looked the way he did. Afterward, the orthodontist went back to teeth and Albert wouldn’t talk about any of it.

  Albert was shrewd, but he was also cheap, a truly dangerous combination. By the time the truth about Albert became evident, Mother had chosen to ignore it. Probably deciding that at this stage of her life she had no choice. I figured she was suffering from the Stockholm syndrome, because she started to become like Albert, who worked on the to-a-hammer-everything-looks-like-a-nail principle of instant wealth. Pretty soon she was examining everything we did as a way to make money. Just like Albert. She invented a dish detergent that doubled as a sexual lubricant and turned our kitchen into a bottling factory. After the lawsuits on that one, she and Albert went into ghetto foreclosures, but that ended when the Rolls was burned to the wheel rims by an angry homeowner in South Central L.A. When I got into scuba diving, there was the spear gun path to wealth. But that scheme pretty much took out the flimsy kitchen wall when Albert inadvertently fired the gas-powered prototype he was positive was going to revolutionize spear fishing and, incidentally, make us all rich.

  At a certain age, I learned to tune out a lot of this. I’d spend hours down on Venice Beach either surfing or doing my homework. It was easier concentrating on things like memorizing the poems for English class or reading history. Trying to work at home was like painting in a blizzard. One day I memorized “Ozymandias”—“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”—in between the best waves of the season. And when I quoted parts of it that night to Albert, he told me not to interrupt him, he was doing something important. He was watching a videotape about how to get rich in real estate.

  The idea of being rich drove Albert with about as much subtlety as a dog looking for a crotch. Whenever he even looked around, you could almost feel dollar amounts being assigned to everything he saw.

  But it was the franchise oil painting thing that really did them in. Albert looked at the millions some guy named Kinkade was making selling old-fashioned paintings and decided they could make those same millions by selling modern art. So Mother got a bunch of modern art books to study and then turned our kitchen into a culture factory where she was the artist. Her style was pretty much like throwing a bird into a jet engine while holding a canvas up on the other side. Everything she did was just one big splatter. The kitchen caught the worst of it. The walls became gelatinous with drying trickles of paint. I told them to forget about the canvases—just sell the kitchen.