I want to take photographs for the first time since Angel Juan left. But I don’t. I won’t use my eyes for anything except finding Angel Juan.
I try to picture Weetzie coming here, a long time ago with Cherokee tucked in her arms, all excited to show her new baby to her dad. She must have felt kind of weird though, standing in front of this building in the middle of the meat-packing district. Maybe that’s when she decided to stop eating meat when she saw the dead cows unloaded from the trucks. She must have been freaked about Charlie living here all alone. I wish I got to come meet Charlie too. I wonder if he would have thought I was his real granddaughter like Cherokee.
Inside the lobby is dark and musty-dusty. There is an elevator but it has an “Out of Order” sign on it so I find the stairs.
The stairs are even darker. As I walk up I think I hear somebody whistling a tune. What is it? Sort of silly but also sad, like whoever is whistling wants to stop but can’t or like a circus clown with a smile painted on.
I stop on the third floor and knock. A gray-haired slinkster man answers. He is one of the men in the tweed coats I saw on the street.
“I’m Witch Baby.”
“Witch Baby! Come in. Weetzie has been calling all day to see if you’ve arrived. Come in.”
The little warm apartment is covered—floor, walls, ceiling—in faded Persian pomegranate-courtyard-garden carpets. There are lots of velvety loungy couches and chairs that make me feel like curling up like Tiki-Tee does in the bend of my knees, lots of overstuffed tapestry pillows and bookshelves stuffed with old leather books. See-through veils hanging from the ceiling. Tall viny iron candlesticks blooming big candles frosted with dripped wax. What it makes me think about mostly is crawling inside that genie lamp Weetzie has at home—what it would be like in there.
The man who walked with a cane is arranging the flowers in a golden vase that almost looks like the genie lamp.
“Meadows, Charlie Bat’s grandchild has arrived,” says the first man. The man named Meadows comes over and holds out his hand. He has a sweet boy-face even though he is probably almost as old as the other man and he is still wearing his dark glasses.
“That’s Meadows and I’m Mallard,” the first man says. “For some reason your mother thought that my name was funny. Something to do with ducks. I didn’t get it.”
In my family duck means a pounceable guy who likes guys, which is what Mallard is—a very grown-up gray duck—but I don’t know how to explain it. “In my family names are a kind of weird thing,” I say.
“I can tell,” says Mallard. “Now where did they come up with Witch Baby? You are much too pretty for that. She looks like a skinny, boyish, young Sophia Loren hiding under a head full of tangles.” He turns to Meadows, who smiles and nods.
I sure don’t think I look like any gorgeous Italian actress with a big chest. “Weetzie tried to name me Lily but it never stuck,” I say.
“Lily sounds right for you,” says Meadows. “May we call you Lily?”
“Sure.”
Mallard says, “You must be exhausted, Lily. Would you like to sleep on our couch? It might be more comfortable than your grandfather’s apartment. There isn’t any furniture there.”
“He wasn’t really my true grandfather,” I say. “He was my almost-grandfather. He’s Weetzie’s dad and she met my dad when she was working at Duke’s because she had wished for him on the genie lamp that Dirk—that’s her best friend—Dirk’s grandma Fifi gave her and she also wished for a duck for Dirk and a house for them to live in and Fifi died and Dirk met Duck and Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man—that’s my dad’s name—all moved into Fifi’s cottage but then Weetzie wanted a baby and my dad didn’t want one so she had Cherokee with Dirk and Duck and my dad left and met Vixanne Wigg who is a lanka witch and stayed with her but then he came back to Weetzie and one day Vixanne brought me and left me on the doorstep in a basket and Weetzie and my dad and Dirk and Duck made me like part of the family but in a way I’m not.”
“Very confusing,” says Mallard. “Sometime you must draw us a family tree.”
“Okay. But I’ll be okay at Charlie’s.”
“What have you brought with you?” Mallard is looking at the globe lamp.
“Weetzie thinks it’ll be good luck.”
Meadows nods all solemn. “Apotropaic.”
“What?”
“It means something to ward off evil. You will be comfortable wherever you sleep. Can you have dinner with us tomorrow night?”
“Sure.”
Mallard hands me a set of keys on a big silver ring. My wrist is so skinny it could almost be a bracelet.
“We know a macrobiotic place with the best tofu pie,” Meadows says.
Soybean-curd pie doesn’t sound so great to me but I don’t say anything.
“Meanwhile, you must take some of our groceries.” Mallard goes to the kitchen and comes back with a paper bag full of food.
“That’s okay.”
“You must. You have to eat and it’s not a great idea to be running around alone at night. I’ll show you up to Charlie’s place.”
I say good-bye to Meadows and walk up six flights of stairs with Mallard, the keys, the food and a stack of blankets to Charlie Bat’s apartment.
Mallard opens the door and lets me in. “No one’s lived here for a long time,” he says. “We take care of it and we tried to make it as nice as possible for you but still…”
The apartment is smaller than the one downstairs and it’s cold and empty except for an old trunk thing made out of leather. The paint on the walls is peeling. But there is a view of the city, not a speck of dust-grunge anywhere and a Persian rug like the ones downstairs on the floor. Suddenly I feel so tired I want to fall into the garden of the rug, just keep falling forever through pink leaves.
“Now you’d better eat something and get right to bed,” Mallard says, putting down the blankets. “We thought you’d be safe and comfortable on the rug. There’s no phone but you just run downstairs anytime if you need anything.”
He hands me the groceries. “Remember dinner tomorrow. Good night.”
As he closes the door I feel loneliness tunnel through my body. I look inside the bag of food and there’s granola, milk, strawberries, bananas, peanut butter, bagels, mineral water and peppermint tea. I sit on the old trunk and eat a banana-and-peanut-butter bagel sandwich to try to fill up the tunnel the loneliness made. Then I try to open the trunk but it’s locked. I go stand by the window.
New York is like a forbidden box. I am looking down into it. There’s the firefly building on Angel Juan’s card and the dark danger streets. All these sparkling electric treasures and all these strange scary things that shouldn’t have been let out but they all were. And somewhere, down there, with the angels and the demons, is Angel Juan.
I plug in the globe lamp and lie down on Mallard and Meadows’s carpet under the blankets in a corner.
“Apotropaic,” Meadows said.
I hold on to the globe like it is my heart I am trying to hold together. But my heart isn’t solid and full of light like the lamp. It’s cracked and empty and I just lie there not trying to hold it together anymore, letting my dry no-tear sobs break it up into little pieces, wanting to dream about Angel Juan—at least that.
But when I do fall asleep it’s like being buried with nothing except dirt filling up my eyes.
Morning. Strawberry sky dusted with white winter powder-sugar sun. And nobody to munch on it with.
I drink some tea, get my camera and go out into the bright cold.
As soon as I start skating I get the sick empty feeling in my stomach again. But it’s worse this time. How am I ever supposed to find Angel Juan in this city? It is the clutchiest thing I have ever tried to do. What made me think I could find him? Here is this whole city full of monuments and garbage and Chinese food and cannolis and steaks and drug dealers and paintings and subways and cigarettes and mannequins and a million other things and I am looking for o
ne kind-of-small boy who left me. As if I know where he would be. As if he wanted me to find him. Why am I here at all?
I see men crumple-slumped in the gutters like empty coats and women who hide their bodies and look like their heads hurt. I see couples of men that look older and thinner than they should and kids that look harder than everybody pretends kids look. Everything vicious and broken and my eyes ache dry and tearless in my sockets. I can’t even take pictures.
Subway.
In Angel Juan’s letter: I close my eyes underground to try to see you jammin’ on your drums, your hair all flying out like petals, beat pulsing in your flower-stem neck.
I go down, tilting my roller-skate wheels into the steps and holding on to the rail so I don’t free-fall.
The trains are all I can hear burning through the emptiness inside of me like acid on a cut—no music. There aren’t any boys playing guitars down here, their eyelashes grazing their cheekbones to protect them from the fluorescent light, their bodies shivery like guitar strings.
I get on a train and stand in between all the padded people with puffy faces and blind eyes.
I climb up the subway stairs with my skates still on, using my arms to hoist me.
On the street I see a scary-looking girl with jungle-wild hair and eyes and then I see it’s me reflected in a stained oval mirror that’s propped against some trash cans. I drag the mirror back to the apartment holding it away from me so I don’t have to see my face.
I’m thrashed and mashed—starving and ready to cry again. My arms and legs are shaking and I can hardly make it up to the ninth floor carrying the mirror, even with my skates off. My head is full of wound-pictures, my camera is empty and I feel farther away from Angel Juan than ever.
On the door of Charlie Bat’s apartment is a note.
Lily: Meet us in the lobby for dinner at 6:00. Your benevolent almost-almost uncles, Meadows and Mallard.
I would rather collapse in the pomegranate garden of the Persian carpet and go to sleep forever, but I make myself wash my face and go downstairs.
Mallard and Meadows are waiting for me in the lobby wearing their tweed coats.
“How was your day?” Mallard asks.
I shrug.
“You look tired. Did you eat anything?”
“We are going to buy you a nice big dinner,” Meadows says.
They walk on either side of me like tweedy angels or like halves of a pair of wings as we go through the streets past the meat-packing plants. Meadows’s cane taps on the cobblestones. Some six-foot-tall skulkster drag queens wait in the shadows flashing at the passing cars. Mallard picks a wildflower that grows up between the stones. It’s a strange-looking lily and I wonder why it’s growing here in the middle of the meat and dark.
The restaurant is hidden on a narrow winding side street. We come in out of the cold.
This place is like somebody’s enchanted living room. There’s flowered paper on the walls. If you look close you can see tiny mysterious creatures peering out from between the wallpaper flowers and the lavender-and-white frosted rosette-shaped glass lights strung around the ceiling blink on and off, making it look like the creatures are dancing. On every table there are burning towers of wax roses that give off a honey smell. The music isn’t like anything I ever heard before. It’s crickety and rivery. The waitress has a dreamy-face, long blonde curls and a tiny waist. She is wearing a crochet lace dress. She serves us tea that smells like a forest and makes my headache go away. Then she brings huge mismatched antique floral china plates heaped with brown rice and these vegetables that I’ve never seen before but taste like what goddesses would eat if they ate their vegetables. Miso-oniony, golden-pumpkiny, sweety-lotusy, sesame-seaweedy. The food makes me stop shaking.
“How did you find this place?” I ask.
“We try everything but this is the best,” says Meadows.
“This food helps us write better,” says Mallard. “We commune better when we aren’t digesting animals.”
“What do you write?” I ask.
Mallard looks at Meadows. Then he says, “We write about…phenomena. Supernatural phenomena.”
“Ghosts,” says Meadows.
“Like what my family’s movie is about.”
“Really?” says Mallard. “That must be why they sent you here.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe they thought you’d find a ghost here.” Mallard chuckles.
“But you won’t,” Meadows says. “We haven’t found a single ghost in our building.”
The waitress brings more tea and a cart of desserts that she says are made without any sugar or milk stuff. Mallard and Meadows and I share a piece of creamy you-wouldn’t-believe-it’s-soy-curd tofu pie, a piece of scrumptious yam pie and a dense kiss piece of caroby almond cake. The carob reminds me of the walk Angel Juan and I took before he left when we stepped on the St. John’s bread pods and they cracked open and smelled like chocolate.
Why aren’t you here? I think. Why aren’t you here, Angel Juan?
We’re sitting on cushions in Mallard and Meadows’s apartment listening to Indian sitar music. If I close my eyes I can see a goddess with lots of arms and almondy eyes moving her head from side to side like it’s not part of her neck, hypnotizing a garden of snakes. Maybe she’s hiding behind the veils that hang from the ceiling.
“Feel better?” Meadows asks.
“Yes, thanks for dinner. I’ll take you guys out tomorrow night.”
“We have to go on a trip, Lily,” Mallard says. “We leave tonight.”
“It’s for our book,” says Meadows. He turns his head to me. He isn’t wearing his glasses and suddenly his eyes catch the light. I have this feeling that he can see. “We are visiting a house in Ireland where a woman’s father keeps appearing.”
“Except he’s dead,” says Mallard.
“Except he’s about this big,” says Meadows, holding his hands a few inches apart. “Sitting on her teacup.”
“If you want you can stay at our place instead of upstairs while we’re away,” says Mallard. “It might be more comfortable.”
He looks very serious and I wonder if he’s thinking about how Charlie Bat died up there. I hadn’t even thought about it last night because I’d been so tired and crazed about Angel Juan: Charlie Bat probably OD’d in the same corner where I slept. But I kind of like being in my almost-grandpa’s place.
I try not to show how I feel about my new friends going away, how I know tonight with its macro-heaven dinner and goddess music will fade, leaving me just as empty as before, loneliness attacking all my cells like a disease.
“Thanks but I’ll be okay,” I say.
“Did you sleep all right last night?” Meadows asks.
“I didn’t even dream.”
“We’ll leave keys to our place,” says Mallard. “In case you change your mind. Use the phone anytime and whatever is in the fridge.” Then he goes, “I’m sorry we won’t be with you for Christmas.”
“But we’ll be back New Year’s Eve day,” says Meadows.
When I leave he hands me the meaty white lily Mallard picked.
I carry the lily in front of me up the dark staircase like it is a lantern. And then a creepster thing happens. Light does start coming out of the flower. At first I think from the flower but then the light starts jumping all over the walls in front of me lighting the way. Someone is whistling somewhere. No, the light is whistling.
I get to the top of the stairs on the ninth floor. The light goes out and the whistling stops. I must have imagined it because I’m tired. Maybe I’m going crazy.
I think that all of me is broken. Not just my heart which cracked the night Angel Juan told me he was going away. Not just my body slammed with the sadness I see with no one there to put me back together in bed at night. Now it feels like my mind too.
In Charlie’s apartment I put the flower in a teacup and look at myself in the mirror I found on the street. I can hardly stand to see my fac
e. Pinchy and hungry-looking. I don’t need a hummingbird around my neck for people to see I am searching for love.
I wrap the mirror in a sheet and hit it with a hammer I found in a kitchen drawer. Feeling the smooth whole thing turn into sharp jags shifting under the sheet, spilling out all bright and broken. I don’t even care about seven years’ bad luck.
But then I look into the jags and there I am—still all one scary-looking Witch Baby in every piece.
I just want to disappear. Everything to stop.
That’s when the whistling flower lights up again. I sit staring as the light jumps out of the flower, all around the apartment and lands inside the globe lamp, making it day all over the world. And instead of whistling the light starts singing a song—soft and snap-crackly like an old reel of film.
“R-A-G-G M-O-P-P, Rag Mop doodely-doo.”
Lanky lizards, as Weetzie would say. Maybe I am cracking up.
“Who are you?”
The voice doesn’t answer. Only keeps on singing—“R-A-G-G M-O-P-P.”
Why would somebody write a whole song about a mop made out of rags? And why would they spell it?
The light dances out of the globe lamp and all over the walls to the tune it is whistling. It’s jiggling doing a jig.
Then it flashes in a piece of broken mirror and I go over to look but instead of me I see this guy.
He’s black and white and flickery like an old movie; he’s wearing a rumpled black suit and a top hat like a spooky circus ringmaster. Light is filling him up like he swallowed it and it is coming through his pores, making him kind of fidget-dance around in the mirror like one of the plastic skeletons on my charm bracelet. His eyes are ringed with dark shadows like the negatives of two moons before a rain. He wrinkles his forehead, moves his hands and opens and closes his mouth.
Beautiful Boys Page 3
