Still Life Las Vegas

by James Sie

  I try to say something, but all that comes out is a kind of half burble/half laugh. “I can’t—”

  “Of course you can! Come on, Walter, we go together! You help me write this movie. I give you story, you put down the words.”

  “Chrysto, you’re crazy! I don’t know anything about writing movies—”

  “So you learn! Is no problem. Hey, I come here from Greece with my sister: no visa, no passport, no money. I make it happen. There is no problems, only solutions.”

  Chrysto is perched on the arm of the couch now, a beautiful naked gargoyle, ready to pounce. My arms are wrapped around the couch cushion, clutching it like I’m about to go under. “Chrysto,” I say, “I can’t. My dad, I have to take care of my dad.”

  Chrysto kneels down on the cushion next to mine. “Hey, who is the father and who is the child? This is your life. What will you do with it?”

  That sounds so much like a sneaker commercial I almost laugh. He misinterprets my smile and returns it. “Yes, Walter, yes!”

  “No, Chrysto, no.” I shake my head. “I can’t. Really. I can’t.”

  Chrysto will have none of it. He stands above me in all his unclothed glory. I imagine wings unfolding. “Look at you. So scared. This is not an execution I am offering to you, Walter, this is life!”

  He pushes down on the cushion I’m holding and shakes it. “Why all the time ‘can’t’?” He darts his hand under and pokes me in the side. I giggle and try to squirm away, but he’s got me pinned. “Can’t! Can’t! Can’t!” he repeats, laughing and poking me. “Say yes!”

  “Stop, Chrysto, stop!” I shriek, laughing, tortured and turned on at the same time, but he keeps on tickling until I can’t find my breath. “Stop!” I gasp.

  And he does stop, not because of my pleas but because at that moment there is a pounding on the door, followed by Acacia standing in the entrance, keys in hand.

  * * *

  Chrysto doesn’t even try to cover himself up, but the moment he sits on the couch I throw my cushion on him. He hugs it sullenly as Acacia stares at him. She’s wearing a long yellow silk robe with dark purple, pointy flowers swirling on it. Her arms are folded in front of her chest.

  “What?” Chrysto says finally.

  “Get dressed,” she says in a low voice.

  Chrysto throws the cushion aside and stands up. He swaggers over to his clothes in the corner. “Come on, Walter,” he says, grabbing at his pants. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “You cannot drive,” Acacia sneers. “You are drunk!”

  Chrysto half turns his head toward me as he bends over to pull on his pants. “Tchss. Look who is talking,” he says under his breath.

  In four quick strides she is on him, striking him on the back of the head three times—forehand, backhand, forehand. The third slap topples him, but in the next moment Chrysto springs up, eyes blazing, fist held high, and just as quickly backs away and throws himself insolently on the couch. He looks casually at his fingers. “I don’t care,” he says under his breath, bored. “You drive him.”

  Acacia keeps staring at him, even as she talks to me. “Pick up your things, Walter,” she says. “You come with me.”

  * * *

  If I were expecting some kind of explanation from Acacia, I’d be disappointed. She doesn’t say a word the entire ride back. Being on a motorbike with her is much more terrifying than with Chrysto. She goes faster around corners, she’s lighter, and there’s nowhere I’d dare hold on to. I grab the bar behind the seat and pray.

  I didn’t say good-bye. Chrysto didn’t even look at me as I left.

  At the Plaza, Acacia stops her Vespa. “Where now?” she asks.

  “This is it,” I say, pointing to the hotel.

  “Walter.” Acacia takes off her helmet, turns, and gives me her patented withering stare. “My brother may be idiot, but I am not. I see your shoes, your clothes. You do not live at Plaza Hotel.”

  I swallow hard. “Just drop me here.”

  Acacia stares at me, supremely doubtful. She gives a long, hard sigh, and even without the cigarette I can imagine the smoke curling out of her mouth. She cocks her head sharply to the side. “Do as you will. Get off.”

  I slide off the seat. “Thanks,” I say.

  Acacia exhales again and I take that to mean I’m dismissed. I’m almost to the revolving doors when I hear her call me. She gestures for me impatiently.

  I walk back really slow.

  “Listen,” she says, when I finally sidle up next to her. “My brother, he is not the same … as you.”

  I feel my face getting hot. “What do you mean? What do you mean by that?”

  Acacia stares at me for a long moment, but there is nothing that can be read on her face. When she finally speaks it’s clipped and cold. “So. You stay away from him. Is better. Okay?”

  “No,” I say. “Not okay.”

  Again, the half-lidded glare. “You are big fool.”

  And with that, she delicately straps on her helmet, guns the Vespa once, and speeds away.

  Sketch #3: A pretty early drawing. The Weeping Madonna—now with customizable sorrow!

  WALTER

  VIVA LAS VEGAS!

  My cell phone is one of those cheap disposables you get at liquor stores and gas stations, the ones favored by drug dealers and terrorists everywhere. No games, no music, no Internet connection. Bare-bones calls and text. I bought it three years ago, after my father left the LV Med Center with those new pills that gave him the awful side effects. It was Elantrazine; no, the one before that, Rellexor. Vertigo, nausea, and a fluttering heart. We didn’t want to take any chances, so I got the disposable and taped my number to the telephone at home. I threw it in my backpack and it’s lain there, dormant, until just this month, when I’ve roused it from slumber into active service.

  It’s never been as silent as it is now. I’m staring at this piece of plastic clenched in my hand, hoping if I squeeze it hard enough it will produce sound once more. Speak, damn it, speak!

  An entire day and night and day, and no word from Chrysto. It’s been the longest two days of my life. No invitations to hotel adventures, no art classes. I’ve called him twice (oh so very casually) and I’ve texted a few times, equally casual:

  << Hey, anything up tonight? Seen any statues lately ?? :) >>

  Ugh. I’ve been reduced to smiley faces. I need an intervention.

  No answer.

  Work drags on, endless. Every tour of duty through Las Vegas history, desert oasis to gift shop, is another eon my phone’s not ringing. I have it hooked onto my belt, under my vest, and check it, on average, three times per tour: once in the MegaResort room, again during the video, and a final time when the last guest has cranked through the exit turnstile. I’m waiting for my last tour to start. I turn the phone off, then on, to make sure it works. I know it’s got juice; I replaced the batteries at lunch. I turn it off again, then on.

  Kenny sidles up. “Hey, Walter, expecting a call? Got a hot date lined up?”

  “Fuck you,” I say.

  Finally, Yrma gives the go-ahead. Only three people are waiting for me: Midwestern housewives, squeezed lumpily into HARD ROCK CAFÉ T-shirts.

  “LadiesandgentlemenwelcometoVivaLasVegas,” I mutter, and push in.

  I give my guests the opening speech about the meadow and Rafael and blah blah blah, and then just let them free-range. I’m blaming Acacia for Chrysto’s disappearance. Maybe she’s gotten to him, persuaded him to stay away. I don’t understand why she hates me. I was once her hero. Maybe it has something to do with ethnic purity, or maybe she’s told him I’m a sham. But what I’m really afraid of is that she’s pointed out to him what should have been obvious about me and now he’s uncomfortable. He’s repulsed. Aren’t Greeks supposed to understand things like that? Didn’t they practically invent it?

  I’m alone in the room with mechanical Rafael and the snake. My guests have wandered off. I find them in the last room, staring at the diorama with arms f
olded across their chests. I’ve skipped my entire spiel. Shit. If Kenny found out I’d be ratted out to management for sure. “Just let me know if you have any questions,” I say lamely. The women stare at me with puckered mouths. I quickly lead them to the video room.

  In the cover of darkness I contemplate my next move. I could hang out by his apartment building. Or watch the alley where he leaves from work. Standard stalker procedure. Maybe it wasn’t Acacia at all, maybe he’s pissed I didn’t want to go with him to Los Angeles. I’m useless to him.

  My stomach hurts.

  The “Las Vegas Today” music is thundering in my ears when the call comes. I don’t even hear the ringing, but there’s a tiny, insistent vibration at my side. I claw at my waist, wrenching the phone off the belt while vaulting past the turnstiles. Lumpy 1, 2, and 3 can find their own way out. I run to a corner of the lobby and punch the “talk” button. Press the phone against my ear.

  “Hello?” I say breathlessly.

  “Walt,” my father says, “come home.”

  * * *

  When I arrive at the apartment my father’s on the couch, but barely. He’s facedown on the edge, one arm wrapped around his head, the other dangling over the side, phone in hand. I can’t see his face but his breathing is shallow and fast. The rest of him is absolutely rigid.

  I squat close to his head. “Dizziness?” I ask quietly. He gives the tiniest nod.

  The anti-vertigo medication’s in the medicine cabinet. I push a pill in between his clenched lips and he swallows it dry. We wait. I hadn’t noticed how much weight he’s lost. He’s out of his robe and into clothes, jeans and a baggy T-shirt. His hair is greasy and too long. I should have cut it weeks ago.

  Finally, his body relaxes. He’s able to turn himself over and lets out a small sound.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  He gestures toward the kitchen table. There is a jumble of clean, wrinkled T-shirts, underwear, socks, and a couple of my work shirts dumped on the table, a few half folded.

  “I did the whites,” he mumbles.

  I feel the back of my neck getting red. All around the apartment are the signs of my neglect: dishes crusting over in the sink, a clump of my dirty clothes skulking by the side of the television, bills spilling out from their spot at the corner table. “I was going to do whites tonight,” I say.

  My father exhales and gives a slight shake of the head, meaning, What does laundry matter? Meaning I’m not mad at you, meaning cut yourself a break.

  * * *

  Dad’s sitting hunched at the table, sipping a glass of water and watching me fold laundry. “Your mother,” he says out of nowhere. “You fold clothes like her.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “No, really, she’d smooth the shirts down, just like that.” He saws his flattened hand in the air to demonstrate. “She also folded the underwear in thirds. Where’d you learn that?” He’s witnessing a miracle.

  “It’s how you fold underwear,” I reply. Really, that’s how they come in the package.

  My father continues. “When I brought the laundry up I was thinking about your mother. I think it was the smell, you know, when it comes out of the dryer, is it the bleach?”

  “Softener.”

  “Softener. That’s the smell. And she would come up from the basement with a basket of laundry, this was when you were just a baby, and there’d be your little socks, just like mine, but so tiny! And she’d hold out one of your socks and say, ‘Can you believe a foot could fit in here?’”

  I’m not sure where this conversation is going. It could be a sign that he’s getting better, or it could go south very, very fast.

  He grabs a pair of my briefs from the table. “—and I remember when your underwear used to be so small. Now look how big it is—”

  “Could we not talk about my underwear?”

  “—look how big you are!” My father’s eyes boggle, like he’s just seen a magic trick. “You’re so tall! Grown up! How could I not have noticed?”

  “How ’bout a bucket of chicken tonight?” I ask quickly, but he’s already retreated to somewhere in the back of his mind. He slumps in his chair, staring at the corner of the table. I’m thinking, his brain’s about to capsize, but after a minute it seems to steady itself. He looks up, blinks twice, slowly brings the water glass to his lips, and takes a sip.

  “The laundry used to be much whiter,” he says.

  “We’ve got a shitty washing machine,” I say.

  “No, bleach. Bleach,” he says. “That’s where that comes in.”

  * * *

  I can’t eat fast enough. This is our usual triumphant, welcome-home-back-from-the-dead meal—take-out fried chicken with little white tubs of sides. I’m plowing through it. There’s a pile of bones on my plastic plate, and I’m grabbing for more. More chicken. More coleslaw. More mushy baked beans. I scrape the Styrofoam bowls frantically with my hard plastic spoon, and little white flecks melt on my tongue along with the last bits of scooped-up brown sauce and soggy cabbage strips. I’m not even hungry.

  I look up, mid-gnaw, to find my father staring at me. His hands are folded in front of him, a half-eaten drumstick and a biscuit on his plate. He looks concerned.

  “What?” I say, a strip of chicken tendon dangling from my lower lip.

  “Everything all right?” he asks.

  “Yeah, sure,” I say, grabbing another biscuit. “Why?”

  He gives a smile and a little shrug, but there are a lot of unasked questions hovering in his eyes.

  “Everything’s cool,” I tell him, before shoving the biscuit in my mouth.

  “Your leg’s shaking,” he points out. I look down. It’s quivering beneath me like an idling motor.

  I push my heel down on the floor. “Sorry,” I say.

  He pulls at his beard for a minute and then says, “Do you have to … go somewhere?” He says this very carefully.

  “No. No,” I say, resisting the urge to look at my black backpack on the couch.

  He nods. “Oh.” He stares off to the side for a bit, then comes back, remembering. “I saw the letter.”

  I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “It was open on the counter,” he adds, but my brain’s not focusing right. “Las Vegas University,” he says, and it finally clicks.

  “Oh yeah,” I say, “I got accepted.”

  He leans forward and grabs my hand with his big mitt. “That’s great, Walt! Congratulations!”

  I shrug. “Lobotomized lab rats get accepted into LVU.”

  “Still…” he says, trailing off. He grabs at another thought. “Anywhere else?”

  “It’s the only place I applied.”

  He adjusts his glasses. “Why?”

  I shrug again. A flick of my eyes takes in the entirety of our apartment, of our world here. My dad’s eyes flicker back in comprehension. He looks away, drags the tines of his fork across his plate.

  “College is very important,” he says, almost to himself. I take another swig of Coke, wishing it were something stronger.

  He stops his fork and asks, hesitantly, “You’re done with high school, right?”

  “Yeah. Early.”

  “Graduation?” He looks alarmed. He’s afraid he’s missed it.

  “Next month, but don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal.” I wasn’t even planning on going.

  He pulls at his beard again. “You’re all right, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I say, deflecting his question with a don’t-be-crazy smile. I start to clear the table. My father continues to mess with his beard, staring at me, trying to work out something in his head.

  “You’re so different,” he says finally. “I look at you and … in some ways, I don’t know who you are.”

  He pauses, and when he looks back at me, his eyes are the most clear they’ve been all day.

  “That’s a good thing,” he says.

  * * *

  So here we are. He’s sitting on a kitchen chair, facing
the television. His hair is still wet from the shower and lies flat against the back of his neck. One of our old white sheets is wrapped around his body; he’s a vanilla sundae with a head on top. His eyes are closed; the lines on his forehead and by his mouth have relaxed. He might as well be lounging by the tide pool at Mandalay Bay, listening to the waves. I’ve got the scissors poised in the air.

  We’ve done this a million times before.

  I started cutting my father’s hair four years ago, around the time he stopped leaving the house. I was fourteen. I remember coming home from school to find him hacking away at his bangs—“Just getting it out of my eyes”—and doing a spectacularly bad job of it. I grabbed the scissors from his shaking hand and proceeded to do a slightly less spectacularly bad job, but one that at least didn’t involve bloodshed. The end result was a hairstyle that suggested a show poodle that had been chased around the dog pound one too many times.

  We kept trying. I’d get out magazines and lay them out on the kitchen table. They’d be open to those ads of men shaving, stroking their smooth faces in the bathroom mirror, or the ones with fathers lounging around in their underwear, sipping mugs of coffee. Their hair was smooth, perfectly shaped. And then I’d wade in, hacking away at the tangled wavy mess that was my father’s head, using these men as a guide. I’d cut off any tufts of hair that I found sticking out, snipped away at any nonconforming curls. Huge swaths of hair would be mown down to try and make it flip this way or that, but in the end his hair was too resistant to structure. The top of his head became an origami project gone haywire.

  “It’s perfect,” he’d say.

  Things have improved since then. I don’t go for any particular look now; I just try to tame the beast. Snip snip snip; little pieces of him flutter to the floor as he becomes himself again. It takes no time at all. I mean, he’s not going to win any prizes, but he doesn’t look homeless, either.

  I step back, viewing him from a bit of a distance. His hair’s more gray, but the head is familiar. Snip snip snip. I’m shaping him, fashioning him into a father I remember.

  “How’s it looking?” I ask, holding up the toaster in front of his face. We’ve never gotten around to getting a hand mirror.