The Musician and the Monster

by Jenya Keefe

  Ángel looked up, trying to find the camera amid the crown molding. He couldn’t see it. “All the rooms have cameras?”

  “Yes. These household terminals show the rooms we use most frequently. There are several rooms I never go into—guest bedrooms and so on—and of course the security team at the gatehouse monitors those feeds, but they don’t show here. You can add them from this menu, if you wish.”

  “Oh.”

  “You have full access. Feel free to watch whenever you like.” The way he spoke was pleasant, and Ángel found himself baffled as to how to respond. Why would I want to do that? seemed rude.

  “Okay.”

  “Your room is upstairs. This way.”

  Oberon led him up a curving staircase, fingertips trailing on the wooden banister. “Do you like this house?”

  “It’s very nice,” said Ángel politely.

  “This is your room,” Oberon said, opening a door. The room was big, dark, decorated oppressively with a peacock theme: vibrant blue-green walls, curtains, and bedspread. “There is a bathroom through there. There are ten bedrooms, and they are all the same size—you may explore the others and pick a different one, if you prefer.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Mine is at the end of the hall, on the left. You are welcome to come there whenever you wish.”

  Ángel’s mouth went dry with terror. “Thank you,” he managed to say again.

  Oberon turned to look at him, eyes wide and expressionless in the dim room, and without warning placed a palm on Ángel’s cheek, fingertips tracing his ear.

  Ángel startled like deer at the sound of a gunshot. The elf’s skin on his face—it was inhuman, it was wrong. He flinched away, tripped over his own feet, and started to fall. Oberon caught him, strong hands gripping his upper arms, and Ángel’s strained nerve broke entirely. He wrenched himself away and crashed to the floor, his head bouncing hard off the peacock-feather rug. Oberon made another swift move to reach for him, and Ángel scuttled backward. He fetched up against the wall in the dark, dusty space under the bed.

  There was a long pause. Ángel curled his legs up against his chest, pressed a hand over his mouth, panting.

  The envoy stood motionless by the side of the bed for several long moments. Ángel stared at his well-shined black shoes.

  Then Oberon turned and silently walked out, closing the bedroom door behind him.

  Lily came to fetch Ángel a few hours later.

  “It’s almost dinnertime,” she said, kneeling by the bed and lifting the peacock-colored dust ruffle to peer at him. “Are you going to come out?”

  No. I’m going to stay right here for the next four years.

  He was the product of a Cuban and a Southern upbringing, though, and one thing both cultures agreed upon were firm ideas about courtesy and hospitality. It was the duty of a guest, not just to behave well, but to ease any social awkwardness by displaying pleasure with the accommodations. The host made the guest comfortable, and the guest assured the host that he was comfortable by enjoying himself. Hiding was unacceptable.

  But what was his role here? Was he a guest? An employee? . . . Something else?

  The envoy is lonely, the DOR agent had said. The envoy had paid ten million dollars and a generous salary for four years of Ángel’s time.

  Ten million dollars.

  Did the envoy expect him to be his lover? Had he been on the lookout for a vulnerable cutie he could pay to supply sex? Was Ángel the world’s most expensive fuck toy?

  If so, did his parents understand what was expected of him? Had they knowingly pimped him to the elf-lord?

  They wouldn’t have. Never. For God’s sake, Victor was a devout Catholic. But then Ángel remembered the way his father hadn’t met his eyes.

  “Is he angry with me?” he asked.

  “Oberon won’t hurt you.”

  “How do you know?”

  Lily shook her head. “I’ve worked here for years,” she said. “He’s very strange at first, but he’s nice when you get used to him.”

  Maybe you’re not his type. “You don’t sleep here, though.”

  “You can’t hide under there forever.”

  Can’t I?

  No, actually, he couldn’t. He needed to pee. “I know,” he sighed “Um. Does he want me to come down?”

  “He told me to make enough dinner for you both.”

  “Okay.” Ángel chewed his lower lip. “Tell him . . . Tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  She left, and he crawled out from under the bed and went into his bedroom’s attached bathroom. It was tiled in radiant turquoise dichroic glass, and the fixtures were golden and shaped like sea turtles. There was an enclosed shower and a pink enamel claw-foot tub.

  In the vast, impeccably clean mirror, Ángel looked at his hollow-eyed reflection. His curly dark hair had glued itself into rat tails around his face; his shirt was wrinkled, streaked with dust, and he smelled sour with fear-sweat.

  “Get a grip, mongo,” he whispered to himself.

  Oberon was a nonhuman creature from a different world. Less closely related to human beings than starfishes or palm trees. His beauty wasn’t the beauty of a good-looking man; it was fluid and graceful and toxic, like a jellyfish.

  Elf-lord. Demon.

  But he was Ángel’s housemate for the next four years. So Ángel was just going to have to learn to live with him.

  He took a fast shower, brushed his hair and teeth. Back in the bedroom he found that Lily had unpacked and hung up his few T-shirts and jeans in one corner of a walk-in closet that was nearly the size of his childhood home’s dining room. Dressed, he steeled himself and headed down to the kitchen.

  He hesitated in the doorway.

  The fae was perched on a stool at the granite-topped kitchen island, dressed in his black shirt and pants, eating with chopsticks. Under the electric lights of the kitchen, his face was white—not the white of a white man, but the white of fresh cream, faintly golden on his lips and under his huge, tilted eyes. His skin was poreless and faintly lustrous, more like extremely high-quality suede than human skin. His hair—translucent, fine as corn silk, streaked in shades of wheat-blond, ivory, and pale green, was shoulder-length and tucked behind ears that came to an infinitesimal point.

  Oberon looked up and regarded Ángel. His eyes were large, shining, green as leaves beneath winged green brows, and utterly without expression.

  Wordlessly, he gestured to a stool.

  For a moment, Ángel remembered the legend: don’t eat their food or you’ll be trapped. Well, he was already trapped, and he would need to eat. Ángel climbed onto a stool. Not the one right next to Oberon. Lily handed him a bowl and a pair of chopsticks: brown rice, stir-fried vegetables, some kind of white fish. A goblet of ice water. Clumsily, Ángel managed to pick up a snow pea and bring it to his mouth. He tasted ginger, garlic, the crisp greenness of the pea pod. Lily folded a dishtowel, gave him an encouraging nod, and left the room.

  He picked at his food, studying the envoy with a kind of horrified fascination. In general outline, Oberon was human: the structure of his body, the arrangement of his limbs. It was the little details that disconcerted: his hands seemed extra long, perhaps because the fingers were all the same length, straight across, pointer to pinkie. And, of course, there was that strange white skin.

  The more he looked at the differences, the more his heart thumped. His skin felt tight and cold, and his stomach fluttered.

  “You are shivering,” said the envoy.

  After a moment, Ángel managed to reply in a shaking voice, “Sorry about that.”

  The expressionless voice was polite. “Did you hurt your head when you fell?”

  “No, no,” he said. “The rug is thick. So’s my skull.”

  “I upset you,” said Oberon.

  It was an observation, not a question. Unnerved, Ángel said, “Do you think I could use a fork? I’m not actually very good at eating with these.”

  “In t
hat drawer.” He waved a white hand, a gesture so impossibly elegant for such a mundane situation that Ángel wondered if it was some kind of mockery.

  Ángel hopped down from the stool and went around the island to find a fork. Then he found himself unable to go back to his seat. He remained where he was, hands braced on the cool stone counter, the island between himself and Oberon, eyes lowered with humiliation.

  “Will you accept my apology?” asked Oberon.

  Surprised, Ángel looked up and met the fae’s eyes for the first time. They were luminous green shot through with gold and amber, fringed with straight, sweeping gold lashes.

  He nodded. “It’s fine.”

  “Why do you say it is fine when it is not fine?” asked Oberon calmly. “Right now I think that you’re either about to attack me or run away.”

  “No, I—” Ángel consciously relaxed his grip on the countertop, stepped back from the island. “No.”

  “This afternoon, as I was showing you to your room, your heart rate was elevated, as was your breathing. You were emitting a signal that I misinterpreted. I thought you were . . . happy. Excited. I was plainly quite mistaken, and you might have been injured because of it. I am sorry.”

  What did emitting a signal mean? “Can you read my mind?” asked Ángel.

  “Obviously not.”

  Part of what was most disconcerting about Oberon was the lack of expression on his face, the stillness of his body as he spoke. His voice, however, was flexible; its timbre changed on words like happy, changed again on sorry. It wasn’t quite an accent, just a subtle shifting in the color of his voice.

  Oberon said, “Are you going to eat your dinner?”

  “Yeah.” Ángel pulled his dish of stir-fry toward him and speared a piece of fish with the fork. It was good, but his stomach ached with tension.

  Courtesy. Courtesy was a performance, as much as playing a concert. It had its rules, its proper moves. Ángel couldn’t bring his heart to this performance, the way he should, but he could follow the rules.

  He said, carefully, “Of course I accept your apology. You have been very kind. Thank you for making me feel at home.”

  “You are welcome,” said Oberon, in the exact polite tone that Ángel had used. As if he, too, were just following the rules of courtesy.

  Or mocking him.

  After dinner, Oberon said, “Would you like to see the house’s music system?”

  “Sure.”

  He led Ángel into the music room and sank into a chair shaped like a swan. He was slim and graceful in his concealing black clothes. If you didn’t know he was an adult male, he would look as much like a tall boy, or a strong tall woman, as a man. Maybe he wasn’t a man, not the way human men were men. Maybe gender wasn't the same for his people.

  “There are speakers in most of the rooms,” said Oberon, picking up a tablet and tapping the touch screen. His hands were long and weird, but graceful as they moved across the screen. “Very good ones. You can listen to music wherever you are. Here.”

  He handed Ángel the tablet, which showed a list of pieces of music.

  Ángel sat cross-legged on the white rug, his interest engaged despite himself. “You have a lot of stuff,” he said, scrolling. The list seemed endless.

  “This is one of the projects I’m working on,” said Oberon. “I’m sending Earth music back to the Otherworld, along with transcriptions and annotations about the historical and cultural context of each piece.” He leaned over Ángel’s shoulder, causing chills to skitter up Ángel’s spine; Ángel kept his eyes on the screen.

  Everyone knew that the elf-lord sent information back to the Otherworld—but how? And why music?

  “You see,” continued the fae, “the ones with the yellow dots are the ones I’ve decided to send.”

  “What’s the blue dot mean?”

  “It means I’ve listened to them, but I’m not sending them. Red means I haven’t decided.”

  “So no dot means you haven’t listened to it yet?”

  “That’s right.”

  Ángel thumbed through the endless list. Oberon was a musician himself, of course. But while he had played Chopin at the White House that one time, Ángel had never pictured him listening to human music.

  No surprise Oberon hadn’t gotten to it all—there was so much music on here, in every possible form and genre: symphonies, operas, chamber music, folk music, dances, country, jazz, pop, rock. Fascinated, Ángel scanned the enormous collection, trying to find any organizational principle or logical pattern. Blue dots for the Violent Femmes and Anton Bruckner. Yellow dots for Bob Marley, Richard Strauss, Thelonious Monk.

  He tapped on a muezzin’s call to prayer, which also featured a yellow dot, and a clear, rippling skein of song filled the room from hidden speakers. For all the room’s ghastly decor, the acoustics were indeed excellent.

  “Nice,” said Ángel, when the last echoes had faded.

  “I think so too,” said Oberon.

  “But why do this? Your people are interested in our music?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? I’ve heard your music. It’s completely different from ours.”

  “It is the same in many ways. And the differences are interesting, don’t you think?”

  “So you really like it? You’re not just . . . just studying it? Studying us?”

  Oberon paused. Ángel kept his eyes on the tablet, afraid to look at him. After a moment, the fae said, “I have studied music my whole life. I would not do so if I didn’t like it. We are a musical people.”

  Ángel scrolled, chewing the inside of his lip. It seemed unlikely that the Otherworld would send one guy in eight years, just to have him listen to and annotate songs. But he only said, “This is a cool idea. How do you decide which to include?”

  “I try to pick pieces that are significant. Historically interesting. Illustrative of some factor of human character. Although truly, much of it is personal taste.”

  “I’ve never even heard of some of this stuff. I see you’re sending lots of Mahler.”

  “Yes. I admire Mahler.” Oberon’s voice had gone warm. “Do you like Mahler?”

  “I haven’t listened to much classical music. I guess I’ll have time to do that now. Ay, so many show tunes.”

  “I’m still working my way through those. Chandler recommended them.”

  “Chandler Evanston? Really?” Ángel smiled at the thought of the cool chief of security listening to Les Misérables. “I wouldn’t have spotted her for a typical show-tune fan.”

  “What is a typical show-tune fan like?”

  “Oh. A queer like me, I suppose. But that just goes to show you can’t make generalizations. I think Les Mis is terrible. But probably, if you wanted to understand show tunes, you’d need to see the shows live. So you’d get the context.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Hmm, who recommended all this Pink Floyd?”

  “I think he was on a list of great rock and roll,” said Oberon. “You can see I have not listened to him yet, either.”

  “They. It’s a band. I had a big Floyd phase when I was a teenager, but it’s been ages since I listened to them.” Ángel selected “Run Like Hell,” hit Play, and David Gilmour’s guitar chattered menacingly through the room.

  They sat and listened to the song together—driving power chords, ominous lyrics, weird laughter echoing over thumping rhythm guitar. When it was over, Oberon asked, “Do you like that?”

  “I love it.” Ángel looked up at the envoy for the first time. “Do you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Ángel smiled. “No? But you really would have to listen to the whole album. It’s a story about a man who is slowly losing his mind; that song is, like, a paranoid fantasy he’s having. Their guitarist es volao.”

  “Volao?” repeated Oberon, eyes on Ángel’s face.

  “Crazy good. Listen to this one, I think it’s like their most famous song.”

  Ángel played “Comfortably
Numb.” When Gilmour launched into the closing guitar solo, Ángel closed his eyes, letting the sound swell and soar through his chest. As the music faded into silence, he opened his eyes, and found that Oberon was still watching him.

  He swallowed, looked away. Come on, Ángel, get it together. He could manage a polite conversation about music. “What do you make music about in the Otherworld?”

  “Haven’t you heard any?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t understand it very much.”

  “Well.” Oberon leaned gracefully back in the swan chair and pulled his feet up, curling his legs beneath him. “It’s about love and sex and fear and anger and joy. The same as your music.”

  Ángel dropped his eyes to the tablet as his face heated, the weirdness of the situation feeling hollow in his chest.

  “Also,” continued Oberon, “we have many pieces of music about trees. It seems strange to me how few tree songs you have.”

  “Tree songs?”

  “Yes, joy in a tree, grief when a tree dies. You don’t ever seem to sing about that.”

  “No,” admitted Ángel. “I can’t think of any.”

  That’s when his eye fell on the yellow dot next to “Hopelessly Devoted to You” by Olivia Newton-John. His vision blurred the dot into a smear of yellow.

  He bit his lip and tapped the song.

  Swoony opening chords. Then the love ballad from Grease filled the room. Ángel snickered. By the time the song reached its climactic conclusion he was doubled over laughing, the tablet having fallen from his nerveless fingers to the carpet.

  Oberon sat in chilling silence. Ángel tried to get control of himself, but when he thought of the elves of the Otherworld listening to Sandy’s lament for Danny, the hysteria bubbled up again. “Oh God,” he said, giggling. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why does that song make you laugh?” asked Oberon.

  “It’s— I mean—”

  “It expresses a universal sentiment,” said Oberon gravely. “The pain of rejection. Loss of love. And she has a very attractive voice.”

  “No, she does.” Ángel laughed again. “She absolutely does. It’s— There’s cultural associations that I’m not sure I can explain.”