by John Brandon
CECELIA
She had been distracted, but had not forgotten her hostilities with Nate. She set up a meeting with the leader of the devoted Shirt of Apes fans, at a location of his choosing, which turned out to be the picnic area of a farmers’ market. The market was open on weekends but this was a Tuesday, so there was no food to be had, no drinks, no one around.
The guy was waiting for Cecelia, and when she walked up he gestured for her to sit down across from him at his picnic table. His sunglasses were crooked. They looked like they were about to fall apart. Cecelia had never seen this guy without his sunglasses on. He had attended the first month of vigils for Soren, she remembered, he and his gang, but they’d disappeared. Cecelia wondered if they’d quit for ideological reasons or because they’d found something better to do. She’d always been intimidated by him, at the Shirt of Apes shows, but the fact that he’d quit the vigils gave her a sense of superiority.
“I have five minutes,” the guy said. He didn’t shake Cecelia’s hand or smile at her.
“That should be sufficient.”
“I have something to say first. I think you’re beautiful.” He spoke hurriedly and with little intonation. “Maybe not now, without the band, but on stage you were beautiful. I’m telling you this as a person who takes a keen interest in beauty. The way you looked with your guitar, wearing that dress shirt…”
Cecelia wasn’t going to blush. She knew not to take the declaration personally.
“Yeah, must’ve been the guitar,” she said.
“You were an exquisite accompaniment. Reggie couldn’t have had a better bandmate.”
“I’ve never known your name.”
“It’s Marc, with a C.”
“Well, Marc, it’s the other band mate I want to talk to you about. The third Ape.”
“Nate,” Marc said. “He was necessary. There wouldn’t have been a band without him. Reggie wouldn’t have started one. You wouldn’t have.”
“He’s starting a new band and he’s going to use Reggie’s songs. Their first gig is tomorrow.”
Marc took this in. He brought his hands above the tabletop. “We’ve already had a ceremony, putting those songs to rest.”
“You had a ceremony for Reggie?”
“For the songs. We scored each one out as sheet music and put the papers in helium balloons and released them. No one’s supposed to ever play them again. That’s the meaning of the ceremony.”
“It’s despicable, right? What Nate’s doing. It’s a crime.”
“Of that, there’s no doubt. No doubt at all.”
Marc was starting to stew, but the ball was still in Cecelia’s court. She had to be specific.
“What I want is for you guys to do your thing,” she said. “I want you to show up at Nate’s gigs and make sure they don’t become popular. Like you did with us—scare everyone off. I don’t want Nate making money off Reggie’s songs.”
Marc rubbed his earlobe softly between two fingers. He knew how to enjoy mulling something. “The situation grieves me, but I cannot do what you ask. I wouldn’t take my fanhood lightly that way. I wouldn’t fake devotion and I wouldn’t ask anyone else to.”
“Just this once?”
“I’m sorry.”
“For Reggie?”
He made a disappointed face at Cecelia, his lips pressed tight, and she knew she wasn’t going to ask him again. What he was saying was correct and she knew it. She’d insulted him, maybe. He had no idea what Cecelia was going through and she couldn’t tell him—no idea she was being entrusted with new songs of Reggie’s by means she couldn’t fathom and that she needed to keep the old songs safe for reasons of principle but also because it was important that Nate suffered a loss. She was a curator of the mystical and was also a contestant in a common feud. Another song had arrived that morning, and Cecelia had recorded it on the cassette tape. She’d started to feel like a piece of machinery herself, equipment. She was compatible with a boxy, not-new tape recorder and also compatible with the hereafter. The song from this morning had been bluesy and the lyrics told of a man who’d tried to build his own river. The man digs the river out by hand and constructs docks on the river’s edges and rests boats down on the dry waiting dirt and plants thirsty trees up and down the shore. Then he has to wait for a storm. The chorus was whistling, and Cecelia could still hear a trace of her own voice whistling away. She had begun to wonder if this happened to other people, if others received transmissions from higher planes of existence. Why would it only be her? It was tiring to walk around like everything was normal when really you were a participant in a secret supernatural entanglement, but maybe lots of people were living under these conditions. Maybe Cecelia wasn’t anything special. Scores of folks were walking around with knowledge they couldn’t share and that, if they did share it, no one would believe.
“What are they called?” Marc asked.
“Nate’s new band? Thus Poke Sarah’s Thruster.”
“I’ll remember the name and pray for their failure. That’s all I can offer. I can’t do more than that. I’m a devotee, not a warrior. And anyway, I can’t hear those songs again. If I went to their shows, I’d hear the songs, and that part of my life is over.”
“I’ll take your prayers,” said Cecelia. “I’ll take whatever I can get.”
“I’ll truly do it. I’ll get down on my knees.”
Cecelia asked Marc if his group was following anyone else, if they’d found a new band, and he said they were considering a metal trio that sang half the time to Christ and half the time to Satan. He used both hands to adjust his sunglasses.
“Thanks for meeting me,” said Cecelia.
She got up and walked to her car, leaving Marc at the table. She was not disheartened. She knew it was better if she battled Nate on her own. She knew that. To have help would defuse the prospect of finding out what was inside her, finding out what she would do to win. That’s why feuds persisted, so people could test themselves.
DANNIE
She was still in a mood and spent the night cleaning the condo. The furniture was dusty. There was grease on the stove and countertops from all Arn’s bacon. It was even on the floor. Dannie wiped down the sticky honey jars and then got up on a chair and threw away a bunch of canned goods the trucker had left in a high cabinet. It felt good to clunk them right in the trash rather than setting them aside to be donated. Arn had tracked clumpy red dirt into the front hall and Dannie vacuumed and then banged a pair of his shoes out on the front stairs. She looked out at the night and there was a weak ring of light around the whole horizon. Dannie didn’t know where it came from. She went into the bathroom and got on her knees with a bunch of harsh products and started scrubbing. The only reason the toilet needed cleaning was that Arn couldn’t pee straight. There was a bar of soap in the shower drain. Dannie wanted to be pregnant, and Arn was proving no help with that. Dannie had thought she was falling for him, falling in love, but now she couldn’t even tell what that meant. It meant fights and secrets, in Dannie’s experience. Arn was the one who should’ve been young enough for love, but who knew what was going on in his heart? Dannie had begun to resent sleeping with him. She could feel the start of that. She wasn’t getting pregnant so she was just giving away her body and her roof and her food. The resentment was there. And resentment never did anything but grow.
When Arn got home, Dannie told him he had to be neater in the kitchen and that he had to help out with chores and that she wasn’t doing another shred of his laundry. She told him not to drop her soap that had cost eleven dollars a bar at a shop in Pasadena into the drain and leave it there, and also to pull the curtain open after he showered so it wouldn’t get mildewed.
He was looking at her with that look like he was about to smile or cry. He was going to do neither. He only said, “Okay, Dannie.” He hardly ever called her by her name.
“You haven’t bought me one solitary gift,” Dannie said. “It’s one of those customs humans observe when they’
re courting. The male buys the female a gift or two.”
Dannie gave Arn a chance, but he had no idea what to say. He no longer looked like he was about to smile.
“You’ve never cooked me a meal,” she said.
“I don’t know how to make anything good.”
“You have to figure it out. You have to make an effort to learn. You have all night sitting up there doing absolutely nothing.”
“All right,” he said.
“Take your shoes off and leave them outside. Where do you find mud, anyway? We’re in the middle of the desert.”
Arn sniffed. He turned around and went back down the hall and Dannie retreated to the kitchen. She sat and listened to the sound of Arn patiently removing his sneakers. He was being patient with her and she didn’t know how she felt about having an ignorant child act patient with her, like he was exercising forbearance in the course of dealing with a crazy person. This kid had one important task to accomplish and hadn’t accomplished that task. She did know how she felt about it. She fucking resented it.
SOREN’S FATHER
He went to Gee’s house thinking that if the opportunity arose to stay the night he would take it. Gee had some of those otherworldly roadrunners stooping here and there in her flowerbeds. She didn’t sell them, she told Soren’s father. She gave them away as gifts. Gee’s house had a big skylight in the roof and a decked-out kitchen with a hundred pots and pans hanging overhead. Gee cooked Chinese food, Szechwan she called it, and while she cut peppers and pounded on steaks that were already thin, she told Soren’s father about her son, who was grown and lived in what Gee described as a soulless suburb of Phoenix, where he sold real estate and dated women who sold real estate. When Gee and her ex-husband had split, they’d given the boy his choice of who he wanted to live with and he’d chosen his father and Gee had never forgiven him. The boy had been a teenager then, old enough to know his own mind. Gee and her son had a series of nasty arguments and had become estranged. Gee planned to attempt reconciliation, but it hadn’t been long enough for the anger to dissipate. More time had to pass or else something bad had to happen. Someone in the family had to pass away or something like that. Soren’s father listened, trying and failing to imagine a scenario in which he would refuse to speak to his son, hoping there was no scenario in which his son would refuse to speak to him.
Gee and Soren’s father ate, and once again it was the best food he’d ever tasted. It was better than the food at that chef’s house and better than the raw fish. It was absurdly spicy, but somehow he wanted to eat it faster and faster. Gee watched him scarf it down and then gave him a tour of the house. She showed Soren’s father the little loft where she worked on her memoir. She had her computer set up where she could talk into it and her words appeared on the screen. She said to the computer, “Tonight will never make the book. Nobody wants to read about other people being happy,” and the words blinked right up.
To Soren’s father’s surprise, dessert was a pair of Klondike bars. He and Gee sat under the skylight with the night above them, the stars tiny and evenly scattered, and Gee, as she often did, began questioning Soren’s father in a tone meant to challenge him, to steel him. She’d had quite a bit of white wine.
“Your son might not know you when he wakes up,” she said. “You might be strangers, making first impressions on one another.”
“Oh, he’ll know me,” said Soren’s father.
“What if he wakes up when he’s thirty?”
“I’ll be old, but he’ll know me.”
“You’ll be alive when the coma breaks,” Gee said. “That much I can feel. You’ll be around to welcome him back.”
“That’s right. There I’ll be, in my wheelchair.”
“You’ll remember me that day. You’ll think of me when you get your son back.”
“Where are you planning on being?”
“I’m planning on being with you,” Gee said. “That’s how I know I won’t be. My plans never work out.”
Soren’s father itched his jowl. He was still holding the wrapper from the Klondike bar and he crumpled it small and rested it on the end table.
“I’d like for you to come up and see him,” he said. “I’d like to invite you up to his room.”
Gee picked up a heavy ink pen and rolled it in her fingers. “When I pursued you, I didn’t think I’d be successful.”
“Well, I’m easy,” said Soren’s father. “I’d hang around with anybody.”
Gee put the pen down and moved her hand toward Soren’s father. She stopped short of touching his arm, and he did the least he could, which was to reach out and meet her halfway.
MAYOR CABRERA
It was one of those winter days that, from indoors, appears to be a summer day. He was eating a can of nuts as slowly as he could. In front of him, on his desk, was a letter from Ran, the leader of that church that was considering Lofte. Ran was pleased to inform Mayor Cabrera that the decision-making process wasn’t far behind schedule. They were hoping to wrap things up in March. The church’s taxes were complicated and would tie Ran up for the next few weeks. A couple divorces within the church had to be settled. But March, for sure.
Mayor Cabrera had thought he was going to know Ran’s decision before the town council meeting, but it looked like he would not. This would be an unpleasant meeting. Nothing would be revealed that Mayor Cabrera didn’t know, likely nothing the other four town council members hadn’t sensed, but it was different when you saw it in numbers on paper, when you saw it with other people and had to look at those other people.
Mayor Cabrera ground a hazelnut with his molars, looking vacantly out the lobby windows. He picked Ran’s letter up and held it in front of his face. Ran had given Mayor Cabrera homework. He’d asked Mayor Cabrera to answer a single question for him, to answer the question however he saw fit, to write the answer down and mail it back to him. He’d enclosed an addressed envelope, with postage. Iowa.
Mayor Cabrera watched the teenagers spill into the parking lot, disconsolate like only teenagers could be. The Javelina had enjoyed a decent night—the usual loners, an old couple, and then this gaggle of youngsters. There were twenty of them and they’d split themselves between five rooms. Mayor Cabrera always hesitated to rent rooms to teenagers, but he could tell the moment he’d laid eyes upon this group that they would not be rowdy. Upon arrival, they’d milled about in front of the hotel like cattle, their eyes somber. A boy had broken their ranks and come into the office to rent the rooms. He’d explained that they’d driven nine hours to attend a concert in Albuquerque, only to hear on the radio, an hour from their destination, that the concert had been cancelled. The band was from Croatia and they hated touring. They would never come back to the States. This had been it. This had been the teenagers’ chance to see them. Last night, about eleven, Mayor Cabrera had walked by their rooms and he hadn’t heard a peep.
And here they were again, filing back into their caravan of beat-up SUV’s, each teenager with one plain bag. The same boy approached the office. He wore canvas shoes and a diving watch. He came in and gave Mayor Cabrera the keys and settled the bill. Mayor Cabrera offered him some nuts and he turned them down. He extended his arm for a handshake and Mayor Cabrera went along with this. The boy didn’t seem ready to leave. He turned to the side and looked out the windows.
“It’s no big deal,” he said, embarrassed, aware that he and his friends were being dramatic. “There will be other concerts.”
“Sure there will.”
“We all saved up for the tickets and gas money and the hotel and everything.”
“I see,” said Mayor Cabrera.
“We were singing their songs the whole way here. No one else at our school has even heard of them.”
Mayor Cabrera exhaled.
“It’s still an adventure, right?” The boy laughed falsely.
“Let me ask you something,” Mayor Cabrera said. “Someone asked me this question and I need an answer: Where do we all g
o wrong?”
The boy looked out at his friends. He repeated the question under his breath, turning a dial on his watch. “Thinking that because you want something and it’s a reasonable thing to want and you make proper preparations and you deserve the thing, that you’re going to get it.”
Mayor Cabrera pushed aside his can of nuts and rested his elbows on his desk. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “That’s not bad.”
Mayor Cabrera watched the boy shuffle back outside, the door dinging as it closed behind him. Mayor Cabrera had never, as a young man, wanted anything. He’d never been as crushed about anything, as a youngster, as these young people here. He’d never made preparations. He’d glided through the years blindly and then lucked into a better life than he’d known existed, his life with Tam. That life had been taken away. Now Mayor Cabrera distracted himself, and when he wasn’t distracted he sulked. He’d lost Tam and it was his own fault that along with her he’d lost his sister-in-law and his niece. He was still sulking. He was shuffling around in the hotel parking lot of his life.
Mayor Cabrera understood that he could not pursue Dana, if he was indeed going to pursue Dana, until he made things right with his family. Dana was a woman Mayor Cabrera had fallen in love with, not a quick fix for the ills of his life. He didn’t want to use her to patch over holes he’d been allowing to widen for over a decade. Dana would make his days ornate, but at present his life had no foundation. He was as much a drifter as any of the poor dusty souls that bunked down in the motel for a night, cheap whisky in tow, and then disappeared the next day just before checkout time.
