The Lemon Thief's Ex-Wife's Third Cousin

by Tom Lichtenberg

  We were entering from the north but neither of us could remember which parts of the town had been hardest hit by the mega-storm. All such details had been long since forgotten, but the city we were driving into looked as if that storm had happened only weeks and not decades before. Street after street was broken, ragged pavement hosting crews of equipment, detours and signage. On every block, several lots were flattened and surrounded by chain link fences that had seen so much usage they all had gaps and holes rendering their usefulness questionable. In between these hollowed spaces stood otherwise fresh and new looking homes and smallish office buildings of the latest designs, standing out in bright and friendly colors. These neighborhoods all had the appearance of having just been built, of only now being built for the first time ever. On nearly every one of the chain link fences we noticed small square placards. Hernan parked the car so we could satisfy our curiosity about those. They were all written in the same florid handwriting, and were either warnings of demolition or construction in progress, or notifications about re-locations. Harry's Hair Emporium has moved to 1231 Misterappleton Street. Rompom Thai is now at 657 Mistergrey Street. The Curtis Family has moved to 912 Mistersenster Avenue.

  We were the only ones on foot along these streets, nor did we catch a glimpse of anyone inside a home or store. We had the odd sensation of roaming about within a pre-fabricated up-to-date ghost town. Although it was nearly evening, it was still well above thirty five Celsius, but we were acclimated to the new hot reality which had settled upon all of us since the early days of the mega-storms. We didn't even break a sweat as we made our way up and down a few of the streets in the area. Hernan finally insisted we return to the car and carry on to our destination.

  "Which is where?" I asked. We hadn't really discussed it before. That we were going to Misterlittleton was all we'd decided on. I'd figured that once we got there we'd head downtown, take a look around there and check into a hotel or something, and grab a bite to eat. I felt like a tourist merely there to see the sights and otherwise do nothing. Hernan had other ideas.

  "44 Misteranibal Street," he said, clutching the steering wheel tightly as he maneuvered around even more orange cones surrounding unexpected potholes. "Did you notice there are no traffic lights?" he added. I hadn't but now that he mentioned it, I saw that every intersection hosted four way yield signs, that the entire place was on some kind of honor system among its drivers.

  "What about the other house?" I asked, remembering now that the address he mentioned was the one on the back of the postcard. "The one you said you grew up in."

  "I don't want to go there," Hernan said. "We're going to Misteranibal Street."

  "Do you know how to get there?" I stupidly asked. Of course he did. We had our navigational system enabled and fortunately it was updated enough to direct us around the city without too many inexplicable signal losses. Misteranibal Street was, according to the talking dashboard, three miles away, straight across the town, which meant we had to go right through the center of the city. As we neared the downtown, the blocks became more dense, more crowded together, but in many ways were only more of the same. Single residence houses became more scarce and connected two-story townhouses more common, but all of these were still bordered by small office buildings with tiny retail businesses occupying the bottom floors, and on every street there were two or more empty lots complete with the same old fences and evidence of some partial building or un-building going on.

  The downtown itself was an extreme version of the residential zones, with buildings as tall as seven or eight floors, no higher, amid rows of "luxury apartments" standing above arcaded shopping strips. All of these buildings looked newly painted in the currently fashionable adobe and pastels. There was traffic in the center of the city, but still no traffic lights. The cars lurched about from corner to corner, slowing or stopping at every one and everyone making way for everyone else as if not a single one was in a hurry or thought himself the first or most important. We saw people walking on the sidewalks as well, but not too many. There were no crowds. I would have liked to stop then and taken in the feeling of the city along with a nice cold one in any one of the inviting street-side cafes we passed, but Hernan would not consider it. He had been growing more and more tense. I assumed it was from the long drive and the stressful road conditions, but something else was bothering him. He was beginning to remember things that had never happened in his life.

  Chapter Six

  It was annoying. Here he was certain he had not set foot in Misterlittleton since the age of twelve, but now he knew for certain that the Royal Theater we just passed on Misterkettle Road had used to be on the other side of the street and had been wider and painted a deep royal blue, not the periwinkle it boasted now. Then there was the Happenstance Candy Shop which used to be right next door to that movie house and was utterly gone now. For some reason this brought tears to his eyes although he had never been allowed to go into that candy shop, no matter how many times they'd passed by it as a family.

  "My father had a thing about sweets," Hernan said, wiping his eyes with his sleeve as he followed the sleepy traffic nodding off at the maximum twenty kilometers per hour. "He thought they were a plot of some sort."

  "A plot?"

  "He had all these crazy conspiracy theories. My dad," Hernan sighed. "He was something of an idiot. He wasn't religious, not at all, but instead of believing in one big giant story, he believed in all these little stupid ones, like how many people it had taken to kill somebody famous, or even if that famous person had ever really died. Or about candy, how it was being foisted on the human race in order to prepare us for an invasion by sugar-loving aliens. Then they would suck on our artificially sweetened brain cells, or something like that."

  "So you never had candy when you were a kid?" That might explain a lot, actually, about certain aspects of my friend's personality.

  "Oh, my mom would sneak me a Twizzler or some gummy bears from time to time," he smiled, blowing up my nascent theory of his psychological evolution before it even got underway. "She used to hide them in my room, so I had this habit of making a thorough inspection whenever I got home from school. Every now and then I'd get lucky."

  "Whatever happened to your dad?" I suddenly wanted to know, as it occurred to me that I'd heard a lot about that guy but never met him or even knew where he was.

  "No idea," Hernan shook his head. "I haven't seen him since the wedding." I knew he was referring to his own wedding with Magdalena. It had apparently been a traumatic experience. This was just before I'd met him. As it happened, I'd known Magdalena first and we'd met through her. She was a foot doctor and I had bad feet. Most of what I knew about the wedding I had heard from her while she was pounding away at my soles with her heavy metal graston bars. She'd grind extra hard as she recounted the scene where Mr. Kaitel, as she always referred to his dad, as if the man never had a first name, had set about smashing all the glassware at their reception using a bright blue aluminum baseball bat he'd somehow thought to bring along for the occasion.

  "He's probably up in the hills somewhere, preparing for the end of the world," Hernan said, chuckling. It was a good guess. His father also believed that our over-heated climate was not the mere accident of our misadventures with fossil fuels, but part of an intentional plot on the part of the mind-controlling brain-sucking sweet-toothed aliens to make the planet more comfortable for their hot blooded physical needs. Then there was more about the aliens' sensual predilections that nobody really wanted to hear about.

  "Right over there," Hernan was pointing out the window at some corner grocery storefront, "that's where Molly and I decided to have a baby."

  "Molly?" I asked. This was not a name I'd heard him mention before. As far as I knew, his first wife's name had been Izbetia. Hernan stopped the car in the middle of the road. Although there were a few cars behind us, no one honked while we sat there unmoving for several seconds until I gently reminded him we were still on the road and he start
ed the car back up again. During that interval he had seemed to be in a sort of trance. Once we were on our way again, I asked once more about Molly.

  "I never met her," he said.

  "Now you're really confusing me," I said.

  "I never met her," he repeated, "but somehow I know that we had a daughter and her name was Candy."

  "That sure would have pissed off your dad," I muttered, and he laughed.

  "That's probably why we did it," he said. "Molly hated my dad. Of course, she hated my mother, too. We hardly ever saw either of them after we got -"

  Hernan stopped speaking in the middle of the sentence. He pulled the car over to the side of the road into a parking space marked for thirty minutes max.

  "You're going to have to drive now," he said, as he opened to door and got out. I guessed it was only fair, seeing as he had driven this far and we only had a few blocks left to go, according to the dashboard. I could manage that much. I slid myself into the driver's seat as Hernan came around and piled into the passenger's. He stared out the window as I pulled the car out onto the road.

  "So you're not going crazy, right?" I asked. "I mean, about this Molly and all, because I know for a fact you never had a daughter named Candy."

  "I did and I didn't," Hernan said. "I know it never happened but I remember that conversation so well. We were walking along back there, me and her. She was short. Molly was. Really short, and had a mop of thick black hair on her head. It was all her idea. I was talking about something else entirely. I know, it was about Edgar. I was talking about Edgar and the book he was writing about pigs, and all of a sudden she told me she wanted to have a baby. At first I thought she meant she wanted us to get a baby pig, and I had a vision of the thing, all pink and snouty and wrapped up in a blanket and cuddling in my arms. Sure, I said, thinking it would be fun to have a baby pig, especially with what Edgar had been telling us about them just the night before when we had dinner at his house on Misteranibal Street. Wait!"

  "Is that where we're going?" I asked. "To this Edgar's house?"

  "No," Hernan replied. "His place was on the seven hundred block. It's weird, though. I can see it now. He had this brown leather chair that was so amazingly comfortable. I was afraid to sit in it because I worried I could never get up again, like the chair would hold me hostage."

  He paused as we arrived at our destination. 44 Misteranibal Street was on our left, and it was an old brick house behind a chain link fence in a state of half-demolition.

  Chapter Seven

  It was actually more like an excavation than a demolition. The left side of the house was completely gone, but in its place were a number of sticks bearing orange and yellow flags, arranged in a complicated pattern on the ground. Wheelbarrows full of tools lined the far side of the diggings, while a neat gravel path led from the sidewalk to the center of what looked to be a pit covered by a sheet of black plastic. Floodlights were pinned to the remaining walls of the house pointing directly into that area and an official-looking sign was posted on the remnants of the front door warning of official business and official penalties if disturbed. We stood there gaping at the sight as if it were some prehistoric tar pit with an entry fee we were debating about paying. I know that I had no idea what to do next. I was still clinging to my quaint little daydream of simple sightseeing followed by going home the following morning. I'll never know what Hernan was thinking at the moment, because the next thing we knew, an older woman emerged from the newish-looking house next door and came toward us down her walkway.

  "Can't stay away, eh Nando?" she called out as she neared. Hernan looked up in surprise while I looked around for another person who had to be the one she was talking to.

  "They were asking for you yesterday," she continued, walking right up my friend. She was a short-ish, heavy woman of maybe sixty, with curly white hair that rested above her wide pink face, which was dotted with a pair of tiny black eyes. I was reminded of the baby pig Hernan had just been talking about.

  "What did they want?" he asked her in a friendly tone.

  "They didn't tell me," she said, emphasizing the final word with a hint of resentment, as if she'd felt deliberately and unfairly left out. "Probably about all this," she added, waving her arm toward the ruins. "Lord knows they're keeping mighty quiet about it. You'd think it was the tomb of King Tut the way they're going on."

  "I don't understand," Hernan told her, and she merely shrugged.

  "It's your house," she said. "So if they did find anything, it's bound to belong to you, right? Anyway, Ricky told them you'd be sure to be here first thing Monday morning. Tomorrow, that is."

  "Ricky?" I asked, but neither of them seemed to hear me. At that point I wasn't sure I even existed, the way the old woman had looked right past me. I double checked to make sure. At least I could still see my hands. That was good enough for me.

  "Some house I've got," Hernan said with half a chuckle, which got the old woman clucking along with him.

  "It'll be gorgeous," she promised. "Of course it won't be yours anymore, but at least it'll be in the latest style. How is your new place, by the way?"

  Hernan held his palms up and made a non-committal face, which seemed to satisfy her curiosity. She wobbled off after advising him to get there early, as there were bound to be a lot of questions. Apparently, people from the government, the university and the historical museum were involved, not to mention all the attorneys. These last remarks left us even more puzzled than before, or at least it left me that way. I couldn't be sure about my friend. He seemed to take it all in stride, as if he was watching a movie and was content to let it all unfold in its own time and in its own way.

  "Who was that?" I asked him as we got back into the car. I had decided to take us back downtown, to find a nice hotel and somewhere good for dinner. Hernan didn't seem to have any opinions on these matters, or at least he didn't answer when I asked him about them.

  "Mrs. Handke," he said. "Priscilla Handke. My neighbor, it seems."

  "How long have you known her?"

  "Never met her before in my life," he said. "But I think I've known her for about five years."

  "You're not making any sense, you know," I advised him.

  "I could go for some spaghetti," he replied.

  Chapter Eight

  I would have guessed spaghetti on the first, second and third attempt. It was not only his typical fallback, but the only food he truly seemed to enjoy. He liked cooking it as well, and not by just plopping some old bottle of sauce into a pan, but he experimented and was quite skilled at developing his own particular sauces, ranging anywhere from clam or beans and sausage to more traditional cacciatores, carbonaras and bologneses. He was also quite particular about the pasta itself and employed the strictest unvarying methodology in order to result in the perfect texture according to his tastes. It was always risky, therefore, to eat spaghetti out. Every time I was certain he would be disappointed in some ingredient or another and make that face he usually reserved for his own less than stellar attempts, but he never did. He was a polite diner, the same way he was overly polite and formal with good-looking women and very small children. With them he would shrink into little more than a rather tall gaunt grimace and a whisper.

  I casually suggested we should visit his new home, wherever it was, but Hernan didn't like the idea. He said he didn't know the address, anyway.

  "You seem to know everything else," I mumbled as we pulled up in front of the Mistercharleton Hotel on, you guessed it, Mistercharleton Street near the town's center square.

  "It's all coming to me," he said.

  "What is?"

  "These memories," he said. "Or images. Ideas. I'm seeing things and knowing things. I don't like it, but there it is."

  "Like Molly and Candy," I asked as we entered the lobby.

  "Who?" he turned at me with a blank look on his face.

  "I guess they're coming and going," I said. "Why don't you wait here? I'll get things together."


  I left him in the seating area of the lobby where he looked around with that same expression of watching a half-decent movie, one not interesting enough to engage his full attention, but not terrible either. He could take it or leave it, it seemed. I stopped and studied him for a few moments. I had known Hernan a long time by then, and if someone asked I would say that I knew him well enough. He worked for me and he lived in my house. I had known him when he was married and now when divorced. I had seen him at his best, a calm and generous and considerate man, and at his worst, impulsive and lost and helpless. He did seem a little lost at that moment, but not in the careless, fitful way he was when on one of his rampages. That Hernan, "the bad one" as Magdalena called it, would show up unexpectedly and at random, when everything otherwise seemed to be going well. He would be working on some translation or other, making steady progress in that bland, easy-going way he had of transferring thoughts and words from one culture to the next, when he would stand up, turn around, grab a jacket and head out the door, not to be seen again for days.

  Maybe Misterlittleton is where he was during those dark times, I considered. Maybe he was living a double life all this time. But it couldn't be. It didn't add up. Those escapades were rare and widely spaced. I'd been around for only three or four of them in the past ten years or so, and there had been none at all since the previous year when he'd thrown it all away. I had believed it had cured him, losing everything like that. Since then he'd been back to being the docile, dopey Hernan we all knew and sometimes loved, the one whose shaggy brown hair looked as if it had been randomly cut by the lousiest student at the barber college, the one who cooked spaghetti, and only spaghetti, the one who was happy to sleep on the floor, who woke up early to listen to the singing of the birds, who walked too slowly, ate too fast, and spoke eleven existing languages fluently.

  I got us a suite and the name of a decent Italian restaurant that was just around the corner. Since we didn't have a reservation, we had to put our name on the list and come back in an hour. I didn't mind. I'd wanted to get a chance to play tourist, and as it turned out, that was it. The downtown was in the same remarkable condition as the rest of the city we'd seen til then, largely brand new with gaping holes and half-built projects on every block. When they talked of the perpetual re-beautification program, they weren't kidding. This town was in a constant rebuilding mode. High-rises that looked perfectly good were already posted for impending demolitions. Buildings that would have been considered avante-garde standouts in our home town were apparently old-fashioned here, and were slated to be replaced. Everywhere we saw notices of re-locations in the same fancy script. Fourth Fidelity Bank, now at 514 Misterappleton Drive. Sue's Home Cooking: visit us at our new home at 881 Mistergates Street. The Lowry's are now at Mistersilva Court. It was a wonder. At least, I thought, the construction business is guaranteed to do well here. It occurred to me that economics was probably behind the whole idea. Some builder likely owned the whole planning commission.