“I hear different things from different people.”
“Four million dollars! For a…” She paused to cast an appraising eye over my entryway. “Two bedroom like yours, that’d come to nearly thirty-eight thousand dollars.”
My shocked inhalation gratified her. She put her hands on her hips. “That’s why I’m coming around. If you’re not planning on going to the meeting, I can vote your proxy for you.”
“It’s not in my nature to let other people handle my vote.”
She looked me up and down, unimpressed. “What is in your nature?”
“To come to the meeting and see for myself.”
I closed the door in her face.
###
Before the evening of the meeting finally rolled around, though, I had been approached multiple times for my proxy by people volunteering to cast my vote for me if I couldn’t make it that Wednesday. All of them seemed to have a different figure for the special assessment. However, no one seemed to think it didn’t exist. That was what concerned me.
The culture that had sustained me was long gone and I was living on the small investments I had made over the centuries. I wasn’t badly off, particularly compared with many other aging mythological creatures, but I couldn’t afford too much of a hit on my capital.
I consulted my banker to figure out if I could weather a special assessment of the size that had been predicted. I crunched through the numbers, even after he’d told me the results, wanting to see for myself. No matter how I added them up the fact was clear: I couldn’t afford it.
I wasn’t the only person in that boat. Tempers were high and dry as a result.
Even the cactus garden was talking about the special assessment.
I usually don’t visit the tiny, pebble-strewn garden near the lake. For one thing the cacti like to talk all at once. They ramble and they repeat and they are overly fond of puns.
One said, “It’s a cabal! They’ve been waiting to seize power for years now, and rob our reserves, turn us over to some real estate agent so the complex can be demolished for a high rise.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They’re not organized enough to be a cabal. And this place isn’t zoned for high-rises,” said another, its tone dark, “No, what they have in store for us is much, much worse.”
“Did you give your proxy to anyone?” asked the third.
I shook my head and fled.
Rumplestiltskin was by the dumpster, sorting out recyclables. He looked wretched and smudgy as an old sheet of newsprint. As I passed, he looked up, and said, hopefully, “What’s my name?”
“Not today,” I said, despite the hives I could feel forming along my inner arms and elbows. “You won’t escape today.”
I felt guilty at the look on his face, and the injustice of the situation did leave its mark. I went inside to run cold water over the strawberry blotches on my skin.
I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t on the board, and they were the ones in charge. It’s been so hard to find a maintenance worker here that I could understand why they had done it.
Sometimes when you find good help, you have to keep them from leaving. Unscrupulous? Yes, undoubtedly. But the needs of the many outweigh those of the few. Or the one, in his case, in the opinion of the board.
###
Every year, they held the meeting in the same place. The gymnasium of a small, private school that would have liked to have wiggled out from under the contract that had been in place since the school was built. Psychic decontamination after each meeting, ripe with anger, ill wishing, and hatred, was expensive.
That was why we didn’t hold the meetings back at Villa Encantada.
I parked and made my way toward the curved glass doors of the entrance. To one side was an ashtray and two people huddled beside it, smoking. You could see the shape of an invisible umbrella above one, empty space in the air from which raindrops rebounded and slid. It was tilted to drip directly on the other smoker, who seemed oblivious.
I said, pausing beside them, “Has it started already?”
“We should be so lucky,” said the first smoker.
I recognized him as one of the candidates, a warlock named Danny. His flyers had harped on the iniquities perpetrated by the workmen in the complex, who had trampled flowers and ferns, cut down most of the trees near the stream bordering the northern side, and were replacing the building skirting much more slowly than they had removed it.
I didn’t know the man beside him, who wore a tattered olive raincoat, its edges embroidered in blue and green. Insects clustered on his water-sodden white hair, worn in a thousand braids, each one fastened with a bee or dragonfly. The tip of his cigarette glowed red as he inhaled and smacked his lips. He said, “They’re still trying to see if there’s a quorum or not. You’ll need to sign in.”
I pushed through the glass doors. They led to the building’s lobby, an open space two or three stories high, walled in red brick, institutional carpeting stretching underfoot.
Rumplestiltskin sidled up to me.
“What’s my name?” he whispered hopefully. I pushed past.
A current board member, the dryad who also handles all landscaping for the complex, sat at a table, flanked by a bored teen girl holding a clipboard with one hand and texting with the other. The dryad looked at me as I stepped up.
“Unit one four two?” she snapped.
“Yes.”
“Sign here.”
The teen set down her phone to shove the clipboard at me along with a black quill pen. I signed. She spun it around in order to read it off. “Astraea Jones?”
“That’s right.”
The dryad looked me over with pursed lips.
“You’ve known me for twelve years, Laurel,” I said. “Don’t act like you don’t.”
She sniffed. “I understand you’re not running for the board.”
“That’s right.”
“What are you spending all your free time on? You can’t give us a few hours a week?”
I stared back, projecting flinty unamusement.
She sniffed and glanced away. “The candidates have furnished snacks for the evening. Help yourself.”
I went into the auditorium. Several board members were struggling with a projector toward the front of the room while other people called out helpful suggestions from a few seats away.
I found a chair at one of the small tables scattered throughout the room. The seat beside me creaked as someone invisible sat down. A plate holding a single deviled egg appeared in front of them, as though to mark the spot off.
“Good evening, Gertrude,” I said.
A cold breeze touched my face in greeting, but the ghost, as usual, chose not to speak.
Rumplestiltskin began to wheel the cacti into the room, setting them up on chairs along the back window. They buzzed among themselves, calling out insults at people going past them, trying to lure them closer. Everyone seemed to be able to resist the taunts, however.
No one bothered much with the cacti. While most of us had a single vote, the cacti, having been created from the splinters of a single soul, each held one 12th of a vote. People had learned long ago that the cacti’s votes inevitably offset each other, usually not from differences of opinion but rather a desire to spite each other.
“If people will find their seats, we’ll get started,” Martha said from the front of the room.
They began, as always, with a Powerpoint presentation showing an abbreviated history of Villa Encantada. Successive slides mentioned Elenora, the Spanish witch who fled a Californian settlement to come north with Dmitri, a Catholic vampire, and founded the complex here on a lake near what would eventually become Seattle. The tiny settlement grew as it accumulated more denizens of the supernatural realm. When Russian fur traders stopped on their way down from Alaska, they left behind twin brothers, shamans, who built many of the buildings that eventually became a condo complex in 1969.
All documented in loving detail accompanied by cl
ip art. I closed my eyes and let myself drowse, figuring I would wait and ask my questions after we had made our way up to the present day.
But while we were still in the 1940s, someone jumped up and shouted, “What about this special assessment?”
Several other people shouted, “yes,” and “do tell us,” and “what’s the truth?”
The board, flustered, clustered together conferring in whispers. Finally Mr. Bland, the current president of the board, said, “That is the secondary point of this meeting, however we prefer to observe all the formalities first.” He directed his gaze towards the back of the room. “Do we know yet if we have a quorum?”
This led to more conferring and whispering on the board’s side of things, and general restlessness on the part of everyone else. Finally, it was confirmed that indeed 77 percent of those owning, as opposed to renting, property in Villa Encantada were present and the meeting would be binding. There was the usual round of furious whispers when the word “binding” came up, but finally the whisperers were reassured that no hint of demonology was present.
That was when all the arguing began, really.
The cacti went berserk when the Mother raised the incident of Martha offending the local lake god. People were irritated not to be able to use their boat slips and several cats had been lost to things lurking beneath the thick growth of water lilies.
Several people mentioned that if certain board members didn’t have people skills, then perhaps they shouldn’t be the ones dealing with the public.
The cacti had strong opinions on all of this, since they were down near the water and not particularly eager to see more traffic there.
However, the special assessment overshadowed that by far, making the other issues mere squalls with a vaster storm sneaking up behind them. It turned out, and here the language of the board grew rich with figures of speech intended to shift blame, certain sacrifices had not been performed and certain spiritual maintenance had not been undergone.
What should be focused on, the board unanimously agreed, was the fact that the cost of spiritual cleansing to repair the damage would be very high.
Of the five board seats, three were ensconced and would not be deposed in this particular round, which meant I was curious how the sitting board members stood on the question of special assessments. I asked the dryad, who never became impassioned about anything other than trees being removed. When I raised the question of the special assessment, she simply shrugged.
The second board member who was not being elected, was Mr. Bland. No one knows much about Mr. Bland, who is perfectly unobtrusive to the point where one forgets he exists when not in his presence.
The third was Jerry Deeb, as human as they come, and as always thrilled, bewildered, and somewhat confused by everything that was going on. It was long ago established that Mr. Deeb’s vote would simply belong to whoever had spoken with him last, so I didn’t bother asking him.
Someone joked nervously that maybe we should just sacrifice a board member to pay for the spiritual cleansing.
In the subsequent flurry of statements justifying the board’s existence, several people pointed to Rumplestiltskin (careful not to refer to him by name) as a victory of sorts, given that the complex’s brownies had been leaving every three months. Despite the ethics of enslaving a magical creature, an issue everyone was careful to skirt around just as carefully as they avoided saying the name that would free him, it was generally viewed to have improved the complex’s overall appearance.
During all of this the cacti attempted to inform us of past history that had mirrored these crises. No one paid attention to them, which simply made the cacti raise their voices.
Finally, somehow, order was restored. The candidates would each get a chance to speak, we’d go over condo association business, and then we would be presented with our special assessment options. With that announcement, the elections began with the presentation of the candidates.
I could see death hovering over Danny the Warlock, ready to tap him on the shoulder in what looked liked perhaps eighteen months down the line, and while I was sworn not to mention such things, I was not sworn to ignore them when making decisions. I scratched him off my list.
The next candidate was Glumpf who, like the smoker outside, I couldn’t remember ever meeting before. He identified himself as living in an RV, waiting for an apartment to be cleared for him.
Someone asked, a little suspiciously, “Aren’t you a golem?”
Glumpf scratched his head as though the question confused him, then nodded.
The questioner left it at that. No one wanted to be accused of racism.
Martha set my teeth on edge. As far as I could tell, she had the same effect on everyone. However, she was efficient and managed the many-itemed bookkeeping associated with Villa Encantada as well as any board member had in the complex’s long memory.
She was a brusque and abrupt woman, disinclined to considering other points of view, and prone to tactlessness. For this last trait, she had been rewarded by being voted off the board twice in the past decade, most recently last month.
Her seat was open again. You could tell by the way she held herself that she planned on being re-elected to re-occupy it.
The mayfly wore a demure little blue wool suit, looking corporate and sharp and laser-eyed as she was introduced.
Candidates made speeches. When it was Glumpf’s turn, someone asked, “Were you created?”
He nodded. An uncomfortable silence hung in the room before someone else asked, “Who is your creator?”
When he pointed at Martha the room erupted into protests.
It had been a good attempt on her part, but of course the golem was disqualified immediately.
It was at that point that a motion was made that no one who had been voted off the board twice could run again. This was passed with dazzling speed. In the end everyone except Martha and the stolid Glumpf looked pleased. Beside me, Gertrude murmured something I didn’t catch, but refused to repeat it when I leaned over.
Back in the day, when I was worshiped, I thought I understood people. But there’s something about a condo home-owners association—perhaps any sort of association with little power and much responsibility—that showcased them at their worst.
When the mayfly brought up reconciliation with the lake god, he turned out to be the second smoker I’d seen when coming in. It emerged that his main objection, other than Martha, was the illicit use of the oracular carp. Since it was a fish, the lake god felt that the carp fell into his domain.
This feeling was not echoed by the carp, a bitter socialist sitting in a bucket near the cacti. He loudly proclaimed that the old ways were dead and this was a democracy now.
The cacti, who had been engaged in a decade-long feud with the carp, vigorously cheered the notion of transferring the carp to the lake. The motion did not pass.
Finally, we came to the assessment.
We were introduced to three possible plans, each with a different price tag.
The first plan, which was the most expensive (mental calculations quickly told me this one was far outside my reach), included a truce with the lake god and expending a costly, domestically-raised bear to take care of the spiritual cleansing, with monthly sacrifices for three years after that consisting of lesser animals, and fireworks on three of the major holidays.
The second plan, created by the mayfly, promised many of the same things for a smaller price tag. People objected to the way the cost was offset, which was to impose weekly days in which everyone would be required to sing all conversation, and thus secure additional funds from a neighboring and much wealthier complex, whose motivations were unclear but they also wanted to hook into our sewer system and use our boat launch. I divided the new figures in my head by twelve and winced at the result. Again out of my pocketbook’s grasp.
The third plan lacked a number of items, including the truce with the lake god, which produced a general stir and an approving b
uzz from the cacti (never a good sign). However, it was affordable.
When they called for general comments, Martha rose to her feet. A cactus cheered. The carp muttered, “Oh, here we go.”
She said, her voice pitched to carry without a microphone, “I can save you from all this, if you will agree to put me back on the board. And you didn’t really vote me off anyway. I’ve talked to several people, and they said they didn’t want to vote me off. So, how about it? I’ll show you here and now how to cleanse the complex and appease the lake god.”
Her eyes rolled in the direction of the god, who stood in the back of the room near the cacti although careful not to drip on them, glowering at her.
People murmured. People muttered. Conversation swirled, some angry, some considering. The board conferred as well. Finally the mayfly stood up. Her face was scornful.
“Sure,” she said. “Show us what you’ve got.”
Martha beamed with triumph. She looked over at Rumplestiltskin, crouched beside a table. She beckoned.
He dragged his feet as he rose and approached her.
I didn’t blame him. Emotion twisted her face, triumph and anger and hatred. I hadn’t realized how important being on the board was to her. Was it simply being able to control people? Was it something that she built the core of her being on, a point of pride?
Motivations are complicated.
Results, less so.
“I know your name,” she crooned.
His face brightened with hope. Every board member looked panic stricken.
“Your name is…” Her finger rose, pointing. “Rumplestiltskin!”
He threw his head back and shouted something wordless, full of joy. The room gasped. Even Gertrude’s inhalation was audible.
A blade glittered in Martha’s other hand.
“The death of a free creature is worth tenfold,” she said as she plunged the knife into his chest. Pain echoed in my heart at his anguished cry as she unjustly snatched his life away. “I dedicate this death to Villa Encantada!”
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