by Jenya Keefe
When he stopped talking, Oberon didn’t reply. But he seemed to be emitting a soft, subsonic vibration, more felt than heard. Ángel flushed; the skin on his arms erupted in goose bumps. “I mean, obviously you know all that.”
The almost-sound died away. “What other songs do you play?”
Ángel rubbed his chilled arms. “Um. The place I usually play is pretty laid-back. So nothing too loud, just background noise while people drink chardonnay. I do Cuban stuff. Folky stuff. I like Jason Isbell. Richard Shindell. I mix them with some Spanish guitar, and some songs everyone knows. James Taylor. Paul Simon.”
“I enjoyed listening to you play last night,” said Oberon.
The words were like a bucket of cold water dashed in Ángel’s face. The sandwich turned to cold lead in his stomach.
He was a professional musician. Playing for people was what he did. But he didn’t want to be eavesdropped on in his bedroom.
He stood up and began bussing their empty plates to the tray to take them back to the kitchen.
“Ángel,” said Oberon. “Why did you sleep under your bed?”
Ángel went still. Like a field mouse when a hawk’s shadow passes over.
When he didn’t answer, Oberon said, “I talked about it with Chandler. She said she thought it was because you were trying to avoid the camera. Is that right?”
Ángel carefully put the tray down. The cowardly part of him, the part that was afraid of a confrontation, wanted to politely deny that the surveillance bothered him.
Through lips stiff with anxiety, he said, “Yes. That’s right.”
“She said that you might think that the camera violates your privacy.”
“I do. It does.”
Oberon gracefully brushed his hair out of his eyes. “I have studied your culture my whole life, and I have been on Earth for eight years. Though I know it is very important, I still do not really understand the concept of privacy. We in the Otherworld have some similar ideas about it—we, too, have specific taboos about what is appropriate in public versus what is appropriate in private.”
He paused. Ángel didn’t reply.
“But I don’t understand why a person would need privacy from the people he lives with. Where I am from, within a house, with people who live together, there are no private spaces. Can you explain this to me?”
The warm, golden timbre had gone out of Oberon’s voice. Coupled with his expressionless face, the flat and cool tone made Ángel wonder if he were angry. Or if he was playing some game with Ángel. His angular face looked distant and cruel.
Ángel put his hands in his jeans pockets, unsure how to put words around something that was so obvious. “Just because I came to live here doesn’t mean I forfeit the right to privacy,” he said. “The camera—and also the microphones—in my bedroom should be deactivated.”
“Why?”
“It’s just wrong. It . . . it upsets me to think that you watch me when I’m alone. When I sleep.”
“Why is that? Everyone sleeps.”
Ángel knotted his brows. “. . . Are you kidding now? You really don’t get this?”
“No,” said Oberon. “I am not kidding. I gave you your own room, because I understand that you need to be alone sometimes for your comfort. For my comfort, I need the cameras. You have access to them too.”
“I don’t want access to the cameras,” said Ángel. “I want to not be under surveillance.”
“To sleep?”
“Yes. To sleep.”
“Is there a taboo surrounding sleep that I don’t understand? To me, there is nothing peculiar or shameful about sleep, that you must hide to do it.”
“Some things are private,” said Ángel. “Not peculiar or shameful. Private.”
They stared at each other. Then Ángel said, “Oberon. Please. Could you—could you just take my word for it? I won’t object to any of the other cameras, in the rest of the house, if there were one place—my room—where I knew I had privacy.”
“No,” said Oberon. “I don’t think so. You will get used to it. What other things are private?”
Ángel felt as though he’d been slapped. He worked his jaw, trying to relax the muscles in his face, then picked up the tray again and went to the office door.
“Ángel?” asked Oberon. “Are you going to go, before we’re finished talking about this?”
“We are finished talking about this.”
“We aren’t.”
Was he annoyed? Angry? Was Oberon toying with him? Ángel couldn’t tell. His gut was hot with thwarted fury, but he forced himself to speak rationally. “Sometimes, two people in a conversation have different goals. Right? Your goal is to learn and understand. Like you said, that’s why you’re here. But my goal, in this conversation, was to get you to turn off the camera and the microphone in my room. You said no. So for me, the conversation is over.”
Oberon stared at him with flat eyes. “I refused your request, so you are retaliating by not helping me understand?”
“It’s not retaliation,” snapped Ángel. “You can’t make me like it, and I can’t make you give a shit. So there’s no point in talking about it.”
“Isn’t there?”
Shaking his head, Ángel turned and walked out.
So much for courtesy. That had lasted for a day.
Ángel burned with frustration. He returned the tray to the kitchen, where he found himself pacing. It sounded like Lily was vacuuming upstairs. He didn’t want to see her—or anyone. He needed to get out of the house.
It was raining, a sparse nothing rain, totally different from the warm soaking Florida rain he was used to. He didn’t have any rain gear, so he just took off his shoes and socks and went out barefoot.
He could not believe how cold it was outside. His soles were hard from walking barefoot on beaches and boardwalks, but this grass was brittle and sharp, like needles. The rain blew in his face like tiny pinpricks of ice.
It was the end of August. Why was it so cold?
Gritting his teeth, and under no illusion that he was not being watched by outdoor cameras, he picked his way around the estate, letting the rain bead on his hair and soak into his clothes. It was an empty expanse of lawn, no bushes or trees or gardens. There was a detached garage, four bays, locked up tight. He peered through the dusty windows—there was only one car, a white Land Rover, and the walls were tidily hung with a variety of clean, well-cared-for tools.
Behind the house stretched a big swimming pool, long and narrow. White statues of naked goddesses stood at the four corners of the pool. It was probably really nice on hot days, but right now its surface, pocked with rain, reflected a dark-gray sky.
Ángel dove straight into the pool, and the water that closed over his head was so cold he almost screamed. He’d swum in cold water before, but this was six-minutes-and-you’re-dead cold. Who kept an unheated outdoor pool in Montana?
He swam down to the bottom of the deep end, where a black scum of fallen pine needles and twigs drifted in the turquoise corners. He hung there, hooking his fingertips into the grille at the bottom of the pool to hold himself below the icy water.
This is only the second day, he told himself. Day two. You got four years to go.
Four years, every instant of it on camera.
When he needed to breathe, he swam back up to the surface and, almost numb with cold, hauled himself out. Carefully, he squelched across the slate patio toward the back of the house. The door there opened into a mud room off the kitchen, where Lily was waiting for him. “What are you doing?” she demanded at the sight of his shivering, streaming form. “Oberon just called me to say you were swimming!”
“Por supuesto,” said Ángel, taking the towel she handed him. “Nice pool.”
“It’s fifty degrees out!” she yelled. “You’ll freeze to death!”
“It’s August.” He was shivering so hard his teeth were chattering. “Perfect day for a swim.”
She lightly slapped his arm. “You s
houldn’t make him worry like that.”
He headed upstairs. “Well, now he can watch me take a shower and see that I’m fine.”
After his shower, Ángel spent the afternoon in his bedroom, practicing classical fingerstyle arpeggios. He usually played with a pick, but he admired fingerstyle guitarists, and wanted to be better at the technique.
He wasn’t hiding. He really did need the practice. And the sound of his fingers stumbling repeatedly over the strings had to be far too boring to listen to.
Dinner was noodles with stir-fry vegetables and stilted, polite conversation. Ángel could think of nothing to say to Oberon, and as far as he could tell, the feeling was mutual. The envoy sat aloofly and ate very little of his food. Flat-voiced, he repeated his invitation to Ángel to come to his room for the night and, when Ángel shook his head, retreated to his office. Ángel was chilled.
Before bed, the tablet pinged. Ángel picked it up and found that Chandler Evanston had forwarded an email from his brother Michael. Michael was fine, his wife was fine, their brother Ned and his wife and children were fine. The weather in Georgia was good.
Michael didn’t ask Ángel how he was. Maybe he had in the original email, and Chandler had edited it out. There was an attachment: a Word document that Michael said was a letter from their mother. Ángel wondered again if the Ponzi scheme had been hers, or her husband’s. It must have been. Somehow she’d gotten Victor to pay the price for it. Somehow she’d gotten Ángel to pay the price for it, and he hadn’t even known about it. Ángel shook his head, deleted the letter unread, and replied to his brother: I know you’re not a message boy between me and Mom. But I’m not reading anything from her, okay? Tell her not to send any more. I got the message when she told me to come here.
There was no email from Marissa. Ángel suppressed the intense desire to send her another one, begging her to reply.
He retreated to his cave under the bed to try to sleep. It was less dusty today; apparently Lily had vacuumed under the bed, and had also pulled the peacock green comforter off the bed and folded it underneath like a sleeping bag, arranging two pillows at one end.
He needed comfort, so in hurried, intense silence, he jerked off. He felt even more alone when he was done.
The security goons were in the house when Ángel came down the next morning. Oberon was talking quietly with Chandler Evanston in the lavender dining room while Ángel prepared his tea and toast. One of the goons, a handsome Asian man, had his arm around Lily. That must be her husband. The young goon who had searched Ángel, Logan—the one who had said that Oberon gave him the willies—was here, too, carrying an overnight bag. He looked nervous.
Oberon came into the kitchen while Ángel was squeezing water out of his teabag. “I’m going to New York,” he said. His voice and face were inscrutable. “My foundation gave some money to schools there, and they’re having a banquet. Chandler is coming with me, but a small security team is remaining here to protect you. John Va is in command, if you need anything.”
“Okay.” Ángel tucked his hair behind his ears. “Oberon?”
“Yes, Ángel?”
“Did I get any email?” He was conscious that Chandler and the rest of the team were listening.
“No,” said Oberon.
“Okay. Thanks.”
Oberon turned to Lily. “Lily, when you go to town tomorrow, will you please pick up some winter clothes for Ángel? A coat, and some boots. He doesn’t have any warm things.”
“Of course,” said Lily.
“Thank you. I will be back tomorrow afternoon.”
“Can I go to the store too?” asked Ángel.
Oberon briefly met Ángel’s eyes. “No,” he said, and walked out, Chandler and the rest of the security team falling in behind him.
When the door closed behind them, Ángel and Lily looked at each other. Chilled and unsettled by the encounter, Ángel hugged himself. Lily put the kettle away and began wiping down the countertops. “The banquet will be on TV,” she said. “We can watch it, if you like.”
“Why would we do that?”
“It’s at the Tiepolo Ballroom. He’ll give a speech. He gave a million dollars to keep arts programs open in New York schools.”
“He gave ten million to get me to come here,” said Ángel.
Lily’s chin went up. “He did that? Why?”
“I was hoping you’d know.”
“I didn’t even know he had ten million dollars.”
Ángel sipped his tea. “Four albums. Seven Grammys.”
“Oh. Fae music, is it?” She shook her head, rinsing out her sponge. “I don’t like it. It sounds like wolves howling.”
“I think they teach it in schools. Will you let me come to the store?”
“It’s not safe. You need to stay here.”
“Please?”
“He said no.”
She began to take dishes out of the dishwasher and stack them on the counter. When she pulled a stool out of the pantry, he realized that she was too short to reach the cabinets. “Oh, let me,” he said, and began to put the dishes away. “When you buy me clothes, will you take it out of my account?” He was earning a gross salary of about $100,000 per year living here, all of which was going straight into an investment account that the DOR was managing for him.
“No. He didn’t tell me to. He’s not paying for them, either—I have a DOR expense account.”
He sighed. She was the only one he had to talk to in this place. “I like your shirt.” Lily often wore wear soft boho cotton shirts in pastel colors.
“I get them at Wal-Mart.”
“Can you get me some of those? They’re cute.”
She said severely, “You aren’t here to make friends with me.”
He raised his eyebrows and gave her his best smile. “But there’s nothing preventing it, is there?”
The house was enormously less tense without Oberon in it, but somehow even lonelier. Ángel tried not to think about Marissa. Why hadn’t she written him back? He was in the home of the cultural envoy from the Otherworld, and she waited days to send him an email? Was she mad at him? Maybe she was sick? Maybe she just had better things to do?
No. But it wasn’t like her. He was torn between anger and worry.
Chandler had uploaded his playlists as well as his songs to the house computer, so he had his favorite dance playlist for exercising. He ran on the treadmill in the gym. He walked around the outside of the house, this time keeping his shoes on— It was cold enough to turn his breath to fog, and he was glad that he was getting some warmer clothes.
He practiced his guitar. Without worrying about anyone listening—except John Va and the goons at the gatehouse, who didn’t bother him—he was able to relax into the music, and the arpeggio practice resolved itself into a fragile melody. He fingerpicked it out, slow first, then faster, tapping the rhythm on the soundboard as he played. It was a wistful little song, flamenco-inflected but sadder, and he played with it for hours, trying this and that variation, until Lily brought him a bowl of stir-fry and rice and told him to stop and eat.
Finally, he gave in to the temptation that had nagged him since Oberon left, and snuck into the envoy’s room.
Long before he’d had any association with Oberon, he and Marissa had wondered why the elf-lord always wore the same clothes: did he have twenty black shirts, twenty pairs of black pants? How many pairs of shiny black leather dress shoes did he have? Did he own anything else? Now Ángel had an opportunity to snoop in Oberon’s closet—his very closet, as Marissa would say, in his indubitable bedroom. He would look, and describe it to her in an email, and then she would write back.
Not sneaking, he told himself, padding down the empty hallway to the last door on the left. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been invited.
Oberon’s room was different from the rest of the house. Clearly it had been redecorated. Whatever fanciful décor had originally adorned this chamber had been stripped away, down to white plaster walls and bare
windows overlooking the distant forest. Somewhere Oberon had collected a lot of oriental-style rugs and laid them over every inch of the hardwood floor, several deep, overlapping and at odd angles, some rug corners curled up the wall. As a result the floor was a soft, uneven, lumpy mass of carpeted pattern: red and blue, purple and green. The bed was unmade, piled with an overabundance of duvets and throws: brown, indigo, blue, green. You couldn’t lie down on that bed, you’d have to crawl into it, and be surrounded by softness.
Nervously, Ángel peeked into the closet. Sure enough, there were ranks of black shirts, black pants, black shoes. A tidy hanger of black belts. The clothes seemed at odds with the colorful carpets and mounds of soft bedding.
But one item—back behind the shirts—didn’t. A turquoise silk kimono, embroidered with green and orange and pink leaves.
Oberon had arrived naked in the world. So he must have bought this since he arrived, or chosen it. Or it had been a gift. No one, as far as Ángel knew, had ever seen him wear it.
In the evening, he and Lily went into the room with the empty wet bar and the flat-screen TV, where John patched through Oberon’s speech at the Tiepolo Ballroom. It was a black-tie event; the other people were wearing tuxedoes and evening gowns. Oberon looked like an eccentric human, slim and pale in his crisp black shirt, his green-blond hair shining under the artificial lights, his essential weirdness flattened and disguised by the television. He was talking about the importance of the arts in education.
“He always wears the same thing.” Ángel generally had little use for fashion for himself, but he enjoyed it on others. His mind on the turquoise kimono, he asked, “Have you ever seen him wear anything else?”
“When he exercises,” she said. “Black sweats.”
“Huh.”
“I don’t think he understands clothes,” said Lily. “Lord, the questions he asked when he first came here. Why do people dye their hair? Why do people wear earrings? What is the significance of Chandler’s tattoo?”
“Chandler has a tattoo?”
“The Tasmanian Devil, on her ankle.”
