Broken Sleep (10 page)

“You see, my pretty, splenetic young seedling, there are two main species of bipeds in the world—homiciders and suiciders. A few fit into the smaller category of those who would kill their enemy or lover, and also themselves. Most of us lie about what we are.” She pauses and almost hisses. “Then there are those, like my son here, who think they are too superior for any one designation. Right, honey?” That don’t sound like a question, but a threat.

“No, Mom, I’m an apple cider.”

“As long as you’re not a matricider.” She points the flashlight at him but don’t turn it on. “Doing much fucking lately?”

I think,
yeah, like half an hour ago
, but he slides right beside her and he takes her outstretched hand in his, and like Fred and Ginger they do a pretend tap dance while singing to the tune of that awful Three Dog Night song, “Sub-li-mate, Sub-li-mate, dance to the mew … zak …” and chortle like they’re both nuts. They had what Alchemy calls their “undercover language.” Then she turns to me.

“Now, I’ll ask you again. What are you?”

“You bes’ believe I’m a killah.”

“Yes, I bes’ believe you are. Oh, that Queens accent, it’s such an aphrodisiac.” She sidles up to me, and she rubs this tiny kind of sexy scar on her right cheek. Then she scratches my right cheek with her long fingers and pulls almost too hard on my skull earring. With the nail on her pointer finger, she circles the tatt on my right forearm. Then she kisses me on the lips in the sexiest way. This daffy bitch gave me a fucking hard-on! Then she grabs my cock, my balls, really, and squeezes them so I’m doubling over in pain.

“Mr. Ricky Mindswallow, you are rotten. I smell that. You smell like a pestilential rat encased in fossilized peanut butter with rusted nails for claws.” She shrugs and lets go. I kind of want to slug her and I feel like she sees that. I don’t hit no women. So she just giggles again, and in a real motherly way—well, not
my
fuckin’ mother—she takes my hand between her hands, and I don’t know what the hell she is gonna do next. She says, “My son needs a Sancho Panza
of evil by his side.” I’m wondering who the hell is Sancho Panzer?

I say, “Okay.” I mean, Christ, what do you say to that?

“Mom, let him be. Let’s go talk to Ruggles of Red Gap.”

“Just a piece of advice, Ricky. You also smell ambitious, like bathrooms on the stock exchange.” I got no freaking idea what she’s talking about, but she’s so intense, like some funky TV goddess, so I’m listening close. “If you want to be friends with my son, who is, in ways you cannot fathom, more dangerous than anyone you have
ever
met, you better grow some extremely resilient testicles to go with your ambition.”

Alchemy gives me the eyebrow signal to wait for him, and they disappear into the back rooms of Collier Layne to “commiserate” with the doctor. I’m twiddling my thumbs, half watching the game, thinking this duo is too loony toons for me, and maybe I should beat it back to New York.

They come back, almost an hour later, silently holding hands like they’re doing a slow step to the gallows. Salome stops, eyes half closed, says, “My teenage killah, I was, I am a good mother. I love my son more than my own life. Because I can’t now, please take care of him.” She rests her head against Alchemy’s chest for a minute, before he gently tugs himself away. I’m not into any woe-woe-pity-me shit, but I never seen two people look more beat than Alchemy and Salome that day.

We walk back to the car through the parking lot and he ain’t saying squat, just spitting on the ground every few feet. We get to the Benz. He asks, “You coming?” like he senses my hesitation. “I’ll take you back if you want.”

“Nah, California, here we come.”

He flashes that Alchemy combo sheepish-wolfish smile that says, “I know what you want even better than you know what you want.” Guy could read people’s faces, voices, body language like no one I’ve ever met.

I suggest, “Since I’m a car thief, why don’t we sell this jalopy and get some bucks and buy a cheap piece a shit?”

“It’s a loan.”

“What?”

“That was the deal. I’ll call that guy when we’re ready to dump this car and they can come get it. Mr. Mindswallow,
a man got to have a code.”

At first I’m thinking,
What the fuck?
Actually, way too often he had me thinking What the fuck? But one thing I got to give him, Alchemy always had
his
code.

The Sun, the Moon, and Eleven Stars

Moses flew to Albuquerque, rented a car, and spent the night at the airport Best Western. The next morning he drove north, past Santa Fe and Los Alamos, the womb of the nuclear dream. As he got higher and higher, seven thousand feet above sea level, out of the clouds appeared the Anok Monastery, glorious and ominous, like a castle in the sky from an Italo Calvino parable in a Douglas Sirk film.

After parking the Ford Focus in a small, unpaved area, he walked fifty yards to where cement walls closed upon a rusting wrought-iron gate seven feet high and circling the monastery grounds. His chest tightened from the altitude. He peeked inside the gate at a haphazardly maintained Japanese garden. No one was visible. A sign on the gate with words written in Magic Marker read
PLEASE LEAVE ALL MESSAGES ON THE BULLETIN BOARD
. Moses wrote “Urgent—Life and Death—for Alchemy. Please Call.” He wrote his cell phone number. Outside the gate, half buried among the grass and weeds, under the shady native aspen and pine and a few imported eucalyptus trees, was a corroded cement bench. Moses lay down. With stress taking its toll on his already battered immune system, and
amid the hum of the soporific surroundings, he fell immediately asleep. When he opened his eyes, a rail-thin, angular-faced middle-aged woman dressed in white pajamas hovered over him. “I am Desiree. I dared not awaken you. I hoped you were resting peacefully.”

Moses pushed himself up to a sitting position. Desiree remained standing while Moses explained his dilemma. Looking confidently knowing, Desiree nodded, grinned, revealing tiny teeth. “I will seek him out. It is his choice.” Desiree spoke in a wispy, soft voice. “From the cocoon comes the butterfly when the winter rains turn from tears to laughter.” Moses barely nodded, thinking,
Sure thing, whatever you say
. “Wait here. Meditate if you can. Listen to the songs around you.” Desiree strode barefoot to the gate, and Moses fell back into a semiconscious semisleep state. His head filled with gauzy visions of breathing tubes extending from his nose and IV tubes from arms as he lounged poolside beside hospital beds holding both of his mothers while prehistoric birds soared above in a smoldering sky.

After some time had passed, he couldn’t say how much, the monastery gate clanked open and shut. He jumped up to a sitting position too fast, leaving him feeling as if his head was aloft in space and detached from his still supine body. Not entirely clear of his somnolent visions, Moses watched an almost translucent, shadowy puppetlike form floating out from a liquid mist of yellow-whiteness. This waking reverie solidified into a human form dressed in white pajama pants and a white T-shirt, a shaved head, with a face perfect in its symmetry. Walking barefoot, a duffel bag slung over his right
shoulder and a guitar case in his left hand, this apparition was, unmistakably, Alchemy.

Moses slumped in his spot, feeling like an unraveling ball of crumpled clothes masquerading as a body.

“I see that my reputation
exceeds
me,” Alchemy said laconically. His voice did sound remarkably familiar to Moses.

“No, yes, um, I was asleep and you startled me,” Moses answered, a bit embarrassed by his dishevelment.

“The sleeper is the proprietor of an unknown land.” Alchemy smiled enigmatically, dropped the duffel bag and guitar on the wild-haired grass. “I am so glad you came. Not because of why, but I discovered I am just not that Zen-ish. I need to get laid. And have a smoke.” He spoke with a self-assured intimacy, as if they were old friends. He bent over and pulled a pack of Camels from his duffel bag. He tossed the pack in the air and caught it nimbly in his right hand. “Had these for the entire time and didn’t touch them. You’d think now I’d want to quit for real.” Alchemy lit up, puffed, sat down, and relaxed his lean body against the back of the bench. “Desiree said you might be my brother. You’ll be the first.” Alchemy’s luminous eyes, one blazing blue and one quiescent green, further unnerved Moses. Alchemy narrowed his gaze with the slightest condemnation. “So far I’ve had three brothers, two sisters, a dozen kids that weren’t mine, and about fifty guys who claim to be my father.”

Moses knew nothing of Alchemy’s paternal parentage, and although he was more than a little curious, for the moment he decided to forgo any prying. Alchemy tapped his chin with his hand that held the cigarette and sneaked a peek at Moses’s bald head. “The chemo?”

“Yep. Though it was eking back even before …”

Alchemy pursed his lips but only nodded in sympathy. He took one more drag on the cigarette and put it out. “So, if we are related, looks to me like you must be a scion of Salome.”

“I guess. Yes.”

“You got the family feline mouth and lips.” Moses hadn’t had time to process any resemblances, physical or psychological. He hadn’t yet been face-to-face with her. “I guess you spend too much time in a classroom to be an L.A. sun worshipper.” Moses glanced down at the slightly pinkish–off-white, freckled skin tone of his wrist and hand and then glanced at Alchemy’s unblemished, lacquerlike copper complexion.

“So you don’t need anything but a dose of my marrow?”

“That’s plenty, because if I can’t tolerate your marrow …”

“It’s time we get going, then. Now fill me in.”

Moses detailed what Ruggles told him about Salome believing he was stillborn and his now urgent medical situation as succinctly as possible. While he did, Alchemy stared intently at Moses, slowly transforming from meditating monk into the quintessence of rock star cool, changing into black jeans, retro suede Beatle boots, turquoise T-shirt, and an unbuttoned red denim jacket. When Moses finished, Alchemy edged closer and bent over so they were at eye level. Moses pressed himself harder against the bench. Alchemy announced in a cryptically serene voice, “I’ve been to your grave with my mom.” Moses shivered. He imagined himself compressed inside the small coffin. Still alive. Was he implying that he thought Moses was an imposter? Lying? Moses was afraid to ask. Alchemy stood tall and backed away. “Someday, I’ll take you there. Maybe we’ll
have an unburial ceremony.” Alchemy reached down into the duffel bag again, and this time he pulled out a pair of sunglasses and a .22 caliber pistol. He put on the sunglasses and inserted the clip into the gun and then returned it to the bag. “When I don’t have Falstaffa or Marty, or my bodyguards, Mr. Beretta is my companion.”

“Have you ever used it?” Moses decided this was not the moment to bring up his opposition to all guns; he believed the Second Amendment had been parsed in such a twisted way to misinterpret its meaning.

“Used … as in useful. Never shot anyone. I’ve had dozens of spurious threats and a few serious ones. People come up to me all the time. Most are cool, but some are belligerent. They want to fight because they think I’ve fucked their wife. Or because I won’t fuck them. Or they caught their girlfriend getting off to a photo of me. Or I’ve stolen their songs. One guy stalked me because he said he was the true Son of God and I was the Antichrist. You wouldn’t believe this shit. You just wouldn’t.” Alchemy’s accent struck Moses as that rare mix of American everywhere and nowhereness that sounded as if it were created for someone speaking Esperanto. No matter the angst or impatience of his words, and here Moses felt they differed, the melody of his voice possessed the tranquil quality of a Bach sonata.

“Or they want your bone marrow.”

“That I can give. Desiree sensed you have good juju. Me,
too
.” With those two words Alchemy assured Moses that he believed him.

“Thanks.”

Alchemy’s tone lightened. “Can I drive?”

Moses hesitated. “It’s rented and—”

“I got insurance policies and lawyers you wouldn’t believe exist. I’ve been sued by someone who claimed I copped his wallet at an Insatiables concert. I testified at a trial ’cause two brothers swore I recorded secret messages in ‘Papa’s Gun’ for them to kill their father. You know the song?”

“Sorry, no. Not that one.”

“Good. I like that. Anyway, fucking two-legged leeches make them all go away but they bleed me. Me driving someone else’s car? Popsicle money.”

Moses, overwrought and achy, didn’t want to drive anyway, so he gave him the keys. “I thought we’d stop in Santa Fe for the night and then fly to L.A. My doctor’s there.”

“Have you told anyone?” Alchemy tossed his bag and guitar in the trunk, took out the pistol, placed it under the front seat, and got in the car. He adjusted the seat. He was about six one, long-legged, and lean to Moses’s five nine and, before the onset of his illness, stocky build.

“Just my wife. And my mom. Geez, well, the woman I call my mom, not my biological mother. This is going to get confusing.” He laughed nervously. “She’s the one who told me about your—our—mother.”

“Make sure, for your sake, they keep it to themselves,” Alchemy warned. “I prefer we drive. We can stop in Jerome, in Arizona, for the night. Best for you to remain unknown for now or your life will be hell.”

“How so?” Moses asked, naïvely curious.

“The princes of the paparazzi.”

“I’m beginning to see.”

Alchemy replied, “You. Have. No. Fucking. Idea.”

As soon as they got close to Santa Fe, Alchemy asked to use Moses’s cell. His own was in New York or L.A. or any of a number bedrooms. Moses dialed for Alchemy, who talked as he drove.

“Trudy, I’m coming through in about six, seven hours. Staying one night.” He hung up and talked to Moses. “She’s an old friend. Did some of the first pics of the Insatiables. They paid for the down payment on her place. Now she teaches yoga and does nature photography.”

“You mind if I ask how it went up there? I always wondered about that much isolation, if I could do it. I think so. Maybe ten percent of the time, because I want to keep that hope, I believe in God or an afterlife. I want to believe but …”