12
He had to admit, the guy was likable enough. And it
wasn’t exactly off-putting that a widely respected musician who had earned a
deal of wealth and knew how to live well should want to play show-and-tell with
Beau, when he must have given the same tour for a whole lot of other people,
too. Peers. People with connections. People important to him in his career.
What could Beau do? Nothing. And still this guy took the time.
“Omar,” said Beau, “I really
appreciate your taking the time to show me around.”
“I want you to be comfortable here.”
“No, I really mean it, man. You’re
all right. I can see how it must be hard to be so well off when it comes to
meeting people, because you never know if it’s you they like, or you they like
using.”
“Beau, you have no idea.”
“But then, here you go ahead and
treat me like a friend, first time we ever even meet. So, kudos, that’s all.”
He took a swig.
“Ready for another brew?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Well listen, Beau, I hear you. And
thanks. What line of work you in?”
“I work for an Indian tribe on a
salmon restoration project.”
“That sounds fascinating, man. Tell
me about that. What sort of stuff do you do?”
“Well, all sorts. If I’m scheduled
to stay at a site by a weir on a river, or maybe at a juvenile acclimation
facility, then I stay for several days, living there in the woods in a trailer
recording stuff in logs and keeping up any machinery needing to run. Or I might
not be on-site, but help maintain the needs of whoever is, bringing out water
in a huge vat and draining that into a tank. I might put on a wetsuit and be
required to snorkel down the river and look for any salmon beds, or salmon,
with a partner out of the water helping out and writing down the count. Or we
might catch the spawning salmon at a trap in the river and have to euthanize
some. That’s a controversial process.”
“Euthanize?”
“Yeah. Sorry, I didn’t mean to
ramble on so long.”
“You’re interested in your work.
That’s what it’s all about, man. Listen, I’m gonna go get those brews, bro.
Take a swim in the pool if you want. Towels are down there. The water’s nice
and warm.”
“Wow. I think I might take you up on
that.”
“I wish you would. Put it to some
use, I just had it cleaned for today and nobody’s used it yet. I want to hear
more about the salmon, but first I gotta get those beers.”
Having had the tour herself before,
Liliana had stepped away (to “use the little girls’ room”), but now Beau could
see her not far away, by herself, and the thought occurred to him that a nice
dip in the pool might really be in order. Beau went over to her.
“What are you looking at?” he said.
“A section of roof.”
“Sounds interesting.”
She looked at him. “Is there
something you needed?”
He looked back. “Ah, no, not really.
I was trying to be friendly was all.”
“Oh. All right.”
“All right then, what’s with the
roof?”
“What?”
“What’s with the roof? You said
that’s what you were looking at before.”
“Before you showed up.”
“You know, you’re the one who came looking for me. What happened to hands on the leg?”
“It was one hand, not hands.”
“Goddamit, you’ve been coming on to
me all day!”
“Excuse me, I don’t care to be
yelled at right now, thank you.”
She started off, but he grabbed her
arm.
“Let go of me.”
“Wait a second.”
“Let go!”
“Wait—”
She tore free. He let her go and
watched her head back to the main house encountering Omar in passing as he
returned with two brews carrying a quizzical expression on his face.
“What’s her problem?” he said
sitting down.
Beau shrugged. “I really haven’t the
foggiest. She said she was looking at that circular section of roof capping
your castle. I like those wooden shingles, by the way. Anyway, she was staring
at it. I thought there might be something to talk about. So I asked her what
was up with that and she freaked out.”
“You asked her what was up with the
roof? That’s good. I can tell you what’s up with that. It used to be the top of
the cultural center. But around the same time I bought Rasta Pasta, I also
snapped up the cultural center building, and it needed a lot of work. So now
we’re putting up a whole new building.”
Actually the Regal Lager wasn’t half
bad. He’d always heard people joke how crappy it was. Now he got to thinking
how it kind of grew on you, and almost mentioned this to Omar as a compliment
before catching himself. He didn’t want to be rude. Instead he said, “What
exactly do they do at the cultural center?”
“Fuck if I know. It won’t be that
anymore. I liked the old peak, though. Goes good there.”
From rooftops they jumped to solar
panels, from solar panels to sundry other alternative energy forms, until,
during a momentary lull, Beau blurted, “Diane Lane!”
“Who? What?”
“Sorry about that. It just occurred
to me, someone I saw. I knew she looked like somebody.”
“Okay, all right. I guess that
happens. Where was this now?”
“Out in the woods off the Avenue,
near Madrani.”
“When?”
“Earlier this evening. A pack of
women on ATVs.”
“A pack of them, huh? What were they
doing?”
“Oh, hell. I don’t know. Burning
bras, I guess.”
“I should probably get back inside
and see what’s going on. By the way, there’s a hot tub over there, too.”
“Hot tub, eh? Hmm, sounds goods. But
you know, it’s been a long day. I probably better see about hitting it.”
“You’re taking off?”
“I probably better.”
“You didn’t drive, did you?”
“That’s right. Shit.” Beau drained
his brew and ripped a burp. “Goddam, I better go find her.”
“You think she’s in a mood to help
you out?”
“She’s in a mood, all right.”
“Listen, I think you both ought to
stay the night.”
“Stay the night?”
“Sure, why not? We’re going to do a
late dinner before the convention. Is there somewhere you have to be right
now?”
“Yeah, there is,” Beau affirmed.
“Right here. Actually right there, in that hot tub.”
“Good man, Beau.”
* * *
Beau sank deep in the percolating
bubbles. The turn of the knob on the wall had dimmed the flambeaux in their
sconces, and the stars above the structureless tub streamed like bullet holes
shot in a dark shack on a bright day.
The
hot tub, he realized. It was speeding up the alcohol in his system. A fine
mist hung over the bubbling surface, vapors of steam rising as well,
perpetually undulating up, so that the night sky and all the cosmos beyond
seemed to issue from the cauldron in which Beau cooked, naked, cock pleasantly
bobbing. What a day. Holy shit. What a
goddam day.
His mind wandered back over the tour
Omar just gave. Standing on the squares of the giant chessboard patio. Liliana
on the other side. The scale model of Humbaba in the rec room. It was weird
beyond reckoning that he should be in two different rec rooms in the span of
one day. He tried his best not to remind himself that he had seen a dead body.
Eased back in the agitated water, he could not help but relive being shot at.
“This is the room that the main
house is built entirely around,” Omar had said when they reached a natural cave
in the hillside left completely intact. There was no door, only an open room
off a long hallway. Had the hallway not been there, from a distance it might
have looked like a large mural of a small cave, the tan sandy walls of which
were as barren as they were nondescript. “That’s really far out,” Beau had
said. “What made you build your house around this?”
“You know Beau, there are some
strange things in this world.”
“You mean like your scale model of
the county?”
“Ha! Yes, there’s always that. A
toast: To the rec room!”
“To the rec room!”
He could still see Liliana, back at
the Madrani Motel, when holding each other’s hands on the old sofa by the
coffee table with the Reader’s Digest compilations on it was pure magic.
The tub was exceptionally hot. Beau
brushed the sweat from his face, and closed his eyes as he thought of the stars
shining like flambeaux. Dark Ages. Middle Ages. There was no escape. Everywhere
he looked, Beau was Middle-Aged.
When he was eight he had to help his
sister with the paper route. If he listened, he could hear the sound of the
papers being folded
(Look,
I’ll show you again, you have to do it like this)
still smell the fresh ink and see it
stain the hands. Early on Saturday mornings, their mother would sit in the
living room, for moral support, and to remind him when his sister had to clip the
metal band on a bundle not to get too close, for fear of losing an eye when the
freed band whipped back.
If
I stay here like this with my eyes closed, I just might not get up. I could so
fall asleep right now. Must get up. On the count of three. One…two….
Beau opened his eyes and saw
Liliana. She stood for a moment on the far side of the tub, then quietly
slipped off all of her clothes and got in.
13
“Beau here works for an Indian
tribe.”
The peroxide cadaver sneered. “Doing
what?” This was not a question put to him.
Beau cracked the second big Dungeness
claw. He had been giving her the benefit of the doubt a lot. The other two as
well. They were from out of the area, and lacking a mall enveloping them, had
no idea what to do. These were people who came from privilege, and in seeing
from Beau no possibility of him either aiding them or harming, they seemed to
feel free to shit in his presence. With great nonchalance, he enumerated
numerous duties, all the while chewing crab and cracking claw, perfectly aware
that his tone clearly said: “And sure enough none of you scummy little
privileged punks could handle the same to save your worthless lives.”
The other cadaver’s cavernous mouth
puckered like a giant asshole, as her face produced a practiced wince to evince
predictable disdain.
“I’ve heard about these sorts of
things,” she said. “The power company funds the project at x cost for x years,
and I’m not going to say they intentionally sabotage
the project x number of ways, but I mean, my god, what more do those people
want?”
“Oh I see,” the peroxide cadaver
nodded. “Then when the project’s over, the company points to the results that
they paid for, so they can finally go back to making the real profit again.”
This observation she punctuated with narrowed eyes and a smirking sip.
Now the guy with custard hair joined
in. Turning toward Beau he said, “And how much do you make?” Beau thought the clipped tone with which he asked this
made him sound like a total priss, his mouth stretched tight in the practiced
smirk, custard head jiggling atop a concentrated posture.
“I don’t know,” said Beau. “They
pretty much just pay me in crappy hair dye.”
Under the table, Liliana put a hand
on Beau’s leg. “Would you crack my claws, please? I can’t seem to do this.”
Omar raised his glass. “A toast: To
cracking open the infinite and pouring forth its abundance!”
This, thought Beau, was something of
an odd toast to make. It did, however, provide some sort of placating effect on
the others at the table. Handing Liliana her plate back with the crab claws
cracked, he grabbed his glass and said he had a toast of his own to make. “Live
fast, die young, and leave a good-lookin’ corpse.”
The cadavers shook their heads with
half-lidded eyes and worked their faces into sneers.
“I think I’ve heard that somewhere
before,” said Omar, nodding with thought as he seemed to search through his
mind. “James Dean, right?”
“If you say so. I heard it
somewhere.”
“Oh my god!” The guy with the
custard hair looked like his dearest enemy had just publicly fallen down and
accidentally vomited all over himself. “Where did you hear that one, from all
the little fishies you feed?”
At this rebuke from one of their
own, the cadavers expressed unmitigated joy on cue, swaying in their chairs
like plastic palm trees in a hurricane, caked-on makeup cracking.
Beau had encountered this sort of
thing before. Like the time when he was in grade school, and he’d had to face
every other kid in class but one, his pal, who had laughed at another kid the
day before and made the kid cry, and because Beau hadn’t been there that day,
the blame from the specific incident of the crying mutated into misdirected hostility
toward him in general, because he had been the friend of the kid who laughed
when someone else threw up, and he wasn’t there to defend himself, and so was
made a scapegoat, and though on the next day when he did return his pal had
crumbled under the sanctioned barrage, a solemn smirking event planned to take
place after the lunchtime recess, which literally every single person in class
knew about but Beau, and per the teacher’s instructions maintained silence
right up to the moment when everyone got to vent their encouraged pent-up hate,
Beau, however, did not crumble, but defended himself against every claim, and
though the teacher, middle-aged, told Beau he would have his turn to defend
himself after it was all over, Beau didn’t let that happen, and had to go and
ruin the whole thing.
Like the time when he was
twenty-five, leaving early in the morning on the way from Carata down to a
construction job in Radley, and before he could even reach the overpass to
merge with the highway, someone gunned a car from behind and whipped in front
of Beau just barely in time to take the exit into town, someone who thought,
“Here it is early in the morning, I’m in a moving steel cage, I bet there will
be no repercussions at all if I initiate asininity,” but Beau had to go and
ruin everything, without the slightest hesitation taking that exit, too,
following the car all through town, until the driver finally stopped, and Beau
got out and gave him what for right in the face with his fist through the open
window, saying, “You ever cut me off like that again, I’ll fucking kill you,”
while the driver whined, “Get off of me, get off of me,” till Beau let him go, considering
justice met, and continued on down to work.
Nothing had changed. The cadavers
with their gaping mouths—“Little fishies,
here little fishies!”—uproariously
tittering, feeling safe to be awful together, reveling as though they’d all taken
some magical exit, and left Beau trapped in traffic, the hateful exhalation
passing for their laughter like a corpse giving birth to a child.
* * *
“This is something from Caliphornia.” Caliphornia was Omar’s upcoming compilation, and the something from
it was an instrumental song.
The suede bean bag Beau sat down in
seemed to sink forever. Everybody’s eyes were closed but Beau’s, this much he
could see even with the lights down low. So much so, the cadavers’ plastic lips
looked a little less like inner tubes dipped in red latex and stitched to their
skin. The bird-like bones of their meatless bodies twitched like the strings
which Omar’s fingers plucked, and their friend with the custard hair (who
turned out to be an investment banker—Beau never did find out what, if
anything, the other two did) stood rooted to the Afghan, dreamily wetting the
ends of his fingertips and swiping the air, as though he were tasting the
musical notes which issued from Omar’s guitar and filled the cathedral-like
high-ceilinged room with lofty vaulting arches reminiscent of Piranesi, while
Liliana, perfectly composed, sat on the couch like some inscrutable monument to
the fashion industry.
Beau’s vision penetrated through the
cadavers and their friend to the days of their youth, for he saw that their
viciousness stemmed from insecurity, and their insecurity grew from childhood.
There was nothing he could say that they would understand. They were broken,
desensitized through heavy scarring. A music review in The Freethinker, the paper out of Bargerville, lay where it was
thrown down on a redwood burl table. All three had offered the requisite gift
of derision, lambasting the reviewer for not supporting Omar’s music.
Privately, Beau found the review entertaining, informative and supported with
detail, whereas the lockstep lackey’s sneers were informative of nothing,
supported with no detail at all, and were only marginally entertaining to Beau
as examples of hypocrisy. As critics of the writing, they were unaware of the
irony, the baroque display of their pretention a dense and twisted outgrowth.
Some people were twigs, Beau mused, and some were burls, but all were part of
the same thing. It was hypocrisy he hated, not hypocrites.
“I call that one ‘Tree-Spirit,’”
said Omar, when his hypnotic tune had ended.
“Why do you call it ‘Tree-Spirit?’”
asked Beau.
The groan from the guy with the
custard hair, sudden and unsurprising to Beau, shifted from misery to vehemence
just as quickly as Omar put a stop to it by raising a hand and drawing him
over. Beau couldn’t catch what Omar said, but whatever it was, the custard guy
bore the expression of a teenage boy who’d been rebuked, and he quietly stomped
off to a corner to lick his wounds.
Omar returned his attention to Beau.
“You’re the only one who’s asked me that about this song yet, Beau. I
appreciate that. And I’ll tell you, I really don’t know. I was out in the
woods. Around here, of course. And I got this feeling. You know? And then I
started to listen. Like, really
listen. Then I started to hear, the music, you know? There’s no telling when or
where inspiration will strike. You have to be open, and listen. I try, anyway.
I suppose this song came to me from the consciousness of the trees. That’s why
I call it ‘Tree-Spirit.’ I thought you might be someone open to that sort of
thing.”
“I don’t know anything about
tree-spirits.”
“Well Beau, you know, you can find
all sorts of books written on the subject. Most books you find will take it
from a folklore perspective, or a mythological perspective, and they break it
down into parts they can understand in terms of what they think they already
know, into the context of the disciplines of which they are the disciples, see?
But what if it turns out there’s more to the story than what they think they know
so far shows? You don’t think we’re the only life in the universe, do you?”
Beau shook his head. “Far from it.”
“Well there you go.”
Now Beau closed his eyes. “Wild with
roots,” he said, slowly savoring every syllable, “a Gorgon head: my young eyes
cogwheeled at the tangled waist-high mass riverbar trucked, and my squat mallet
sent thick flakes like flack off my checkerboarded chest, hints of burl beneath
the busted rock stuck in the dirty redwood, till the giant’s clubbed wart clean
of stone gave a milled slab set rickety on two paint-thick sawhorses, wobbling
in the pull of the screaming grinder’s wire bristles spitting back the loose
punk wood. Renegade spiders ran, nooks invaded by the violent metal wand, and
brushed sawdust left the surface clear for belt sanding before subjection to
the stages of the orbital. When the meaty red cross-section doused gleamed, and
the scrubbed rings’ fluctuating bands rippled, torched edges blackened shone
silver where the blue acetylene tip had spread, and set on the knotted legs of
a less charred base, the finished tabletop took center stage in the showroom
for your more and less impressed tourists, whilst in the side yard my grimed
thumb spun a bowl.”
All was quiet. During the course of
this unannounced recitation he had kept his eyes shut. To what extent the
lackeys evinced kneejerk derision, Beau never saw, but he did hear Omar say, in
the direction of Liliana, “I had no idea we had an artist in out midst.”
Beau ignored this. “Holy crap,” he
said, trying to get up with the help of a mushroom coffee table under an elbow.
“I think I’m about to explode.” Half a brew still in hand, he tottered off to
the nearest of the bathrooms, savoring the feeling of whipping out his artistry
as with bowed back he let loose like a fantastic downspout even as he drained
the Regal Lager. He’d turned the tables on them. Turned the tables good and
proper. This he thought as he chucked the empty in the trash. There a box, he
could not help but notice, lay in the trash as well. A little white box, with
easily recognizable packaging. Raisex. Even Omar had a bottle.
Beau took a peek. In the medicine
cabinet there was a bottle. The directions, right there on the side, said to
take two. So he did. Then he went back out and sat down.
Omar was demonstrating how to play
guitar. On the one hand, it made Beau feel sick to see the cadavers and the
custard guy smiling their wretched suck up smiles. No doubt having criticized
him behind his back. Still, he could almost feel sympathy for their having
suffered whatever had made them act the way they did toward him. They could not
have heard him say so without assuming he was as disingenuous as they
themselves would be. So he kept it to himself, and about ten minutes of that
seemed like an hour. At least Beau wasn’t tired. Indeed, he seemed to have
caught a second wind.
Liliana, on the couch a few feet
over, noticed Beau looking at her. Unspoken communication occurred. Garbled, at
first. It wasn’t clear whether Beau had a problem with his neck, or was on the
verge perhaps of passing out. When he got up, though, she understood. A moment
later, she followed.
“Hey,” he hissed, when they met
around a corner, “I took a couple Raisex! Come on, let’s go!”
It had been soft as a banana slug
before. But not anymore.
They ducked into a guest room. A toast to Omar’s guest room! Beau
thought as he half-playfully threw Liliana on the bed, finding himself somewhat
thrown at the surreal sight of the yielding surface before realizing it was a
waterbed. And now came the moment of truth. Lying on top of her, somewhere deep
down he knew: If he hadn’t had all the Regal Lager, he never would’ve taken the
Raisex, and if he hadn’t taken the Raisex, he wouldn’t be on top of her at all.
“Oh my god,” she said. “What’s
happening to you?”
Beau looked at his arms. His clothes
were not removed, but he had turned back his sleeves half an hour earlier, and
now saw that his skin was changing colors. Pale green to salmon red. Flailing
on top of Liliana only compounded his labored breathing, but bent as Beau was
on achieving his goal, his rapidly worsening condition precluded fruition. Beau
rolled off of her and thrashed about, groaning, the image of Fred Sanford
gripping his chest pronouncing, “It’s the big one!” assailing his
consciousness.
In a haze he barely registered
Liliana hurriedly composing herself. Where was she going? Was she going to tell
the others about the body in the woods? But then he looked again and she was
back, with Omar now.
From far away: “What happened?”
“He said he took two Raisex.”
“Oh, fuck! It’s not pot! This shit’s
hardcore! You have to do Raisex just right, and even then you can go into
convulsions! Fuck! He can’t die here! Beau, can you hear me?”
Beau.
They were calling his name.
Beau?
“Beau?” Omar’s voice.
The ground was hard. It took him a
while to realize where he was. Beau’s throat was dry. A fact which the
scratchiness of his voice betrayed. “What am I doing in the cave room?”
“You ran in here.”
“I remember being in the bedroom.”
“You ran out of there. Do you
remember taking any Raisex?”
“Yeah. I took a couple of yours. I
can’t believe I did that.”
“The main thing is, you’re still
alive. You ran around like a madman. Funny how you came to the cave, though. I
told you there were some strange things in this world.”
Beau sat up and rubbed his temples.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the reason why I keep this
cave. It’s because I found something in it. You want to know what I found? Right
about where you’re sitting? A rock. A big, weird-looking rock. Looked to me
like it might be a meteorite. About the size of a human head, actually,
grayish, almost metallic, and with smooth scallop-shaped indentations.”
“My head’s killing me.”
“I had that rock a long time before
I found out what it was. And that was only by accident. But that’s not
important now. The main thing is, I did find out. You agreed with me earlier
that we can’t be the only life in the universe. And we’re not. As you say, far
from it.”
By now Beau had buttoned his stolen
band room pants, though whether he’d held them up when running like a madman
with a hand or with his hard-on he had no way of knowing. From somewhere in the
winding corridors, the sound of a guitar reached his ears.
“What would you say, Beau, if I told
you we were visited a long time ago?”
“I’d say you ripped off ‘2001.’”
“That’s good, Beau. But it doesn’t
matter what you say, because we were. I don’t know about any monoliths. What
they left was an accident. You remember we were talking about tree-spirits
before? Well, what happened was, these things from far away escaped from the visitors. Once that
happened, forget it. There was no way to round them all up. Whatever it took to
do that, the visitors didn’t have the time, or maybe the means, or maybe the
inclination. They might have even thought it was a good thing. A sort of happy accident. Time passed on, and now here
we are. I guarantee things around the world like the one I found here have been
affecting the course of events for longer than we’ve even been around as a
species.”
Beau shook his head as he rubbed his
eyes and yawned. “I’m sorry. I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do, Beau. You just can’t
handle it.”
Suddenly the music stopped. “That’s
not the end of ‘8-Track Mind.’ I think our guest of honor has arrived.”
“What did you just say?”
“The guest of honor.”
“No, the song.”
“‘8-Track Mind.’ It’s one of my new
ones on Caliphornia.”
“You wrote it?”
“Of course I wrote it. I write all
my music.”
“I thought that was Shreveport
Stevie’s song.”
The sound of approaching footsteps
echoed through the halls. Omar checked his watch. “It’s nearly midnight, Beau.
Time for the Gothic Convention.”
