Broken Sleep (45 page)

I figure I’ll talk to Lux on my own. Maybe I can change his mind. He says if Alchemy agrees, it’s okay by him.

A couple of nights later, Alchy plays me this new song “Mysteries and Enemies.”

I ask, “So you think Camille’s doing me just to get the part?”

“What makes you think this song is about you?”

I don’t answer.

Before we start shooting, me and Camille talk about the video. She says rejection’s part of the business and she’s fine with it. I ain’t so fine. I say to Camille that we’ll get married the next day—then they have to give her a part. “Ambishoos”—I loved the way she said my name—“that is very kind but a bad reason to marry. We are fun together. And you are a better man than you think. I feel you don’t really love me.” And wow, she is harsh, but she is right. “Please, don’t be angry wheez me, but no one who loves you should marry you. Not now. Even eef you fight, you are too much in love wheez Alshemie. You need to break from him before you are free to love so strong like you did wheez Absurda.”

I don’t say nuthin’ to Alchy or no one else. We shoot the video and head home. I’m sad about leaving Camille. She gives me one last piece of advice: “Don’t be impulsive. Break when you feel strong.”

Before recording more songs for
Dieseasee
and starting the South America and Asia tours, we take a little time off. I’ve given up the lease on the Hollywood Hills house, and Alchemy says I can stay in Topanga. I accept but don’t plan on staying. Alchemy is preoccupied with Mose, Salome, and Nathaniel, who had more strokes and talks so slow it ain’t even fun jousting with him.

Andrew calls me up saying Alchemy is buying a building in downtown L.A. for Winsum Realty. I answer, “You never ask me before. Just do it.” He says Alchemy thinks I should check it out. Bastard knows me so damn well, ’cause I love it. I end up claiming the top floor for myself. While it’s getting fixed up, I take a trip back to New York. I spend a little, very little time with my mom and sister. See some old guys from Flushing. I jam nights with some guys from ’70s and ’80s NYC bands. It’s fun and we talk about doing some recording together.

And get this, they built a condo on the site of the puke-filled Gas Station club where I slept outside as the good-for-nuthin’ Ricky McFinn. I buy myself an apartment.

The whole time, I’m doing some heavy reconsidering about my future. I am feeling pretty good about myself. So when Alchemy summons us to regroup in L.A. to start planning the tour and recordings, I’ve decided, after almost fourteen years, it’s time to cut the cord. Alchemy don’t try to dissuade me. Just
says, “If that’s your decision, I’ll have to accept it. Lux asks, “So, what’s your plan?” I’m ready for that. “I been playing with a bunch of guys from New York and we’re talking about doing something together.”

Later, when we’re alone, Lux says, “Are you sure about this? It’s cool to play with other guys, but it won’t be the same.”

“Lux, it ain’t been the same with us for a while. For now, I’m good.”

I call up a coupla the NYC guys, but they end up punking out on me. So I take a trip to see Ricky Jr. When I get back to L.A., I call Lux about hanging out some night. He can come check out my new place downtown. He says he can’t do it. They’ve finished auditioning bass players, chosen one for the tour and are rehearsing like mad.

I hang up the phone feeling like,
Holy fuck! What the fuck have I done?

Into the Mystic

I told Bellows a few more times that I had some information that would interest Palmer and his committee of investigators. He ignored Bellows’s bidding for a visit with Persephone.

I sing to Persephone, as I sing to Nathaniel.

I found him. Napping, I first thought, in his wheelchair on the porch. I tilted his head up and removed his glasses. I kissed his lips one last time. His face laden with Gravity Disease. The last years offered so few rewards. He felt like his life’s work had been debased. He willed himself to stay with us and experience my Hammer retrospective, which delighted him.

That morning on the porch I breathed, for the final time, the purity of his soulsmell. It spread from his essence to his corporeality, and suddenly—the Gravity Disease lifted. His face appeared almost youthful. Tranquil.

I lay down next to him. His left hand was draped over the chair’s side. I held it in mine. With the ministrokes coming more and more frequently, he had left me a note a month before. “No wishing you’d not done this or had done that. Make more art. I treasure the life we lived together.”

I awakened Alchemy with my phone call. “Nathaniel’s gone. I’m okay. I just need you to come here from wherever you are.”

And he did.

As Nathaniel wished, we buried him in Virginia beside his parents. There was a memorial service in New York City. I didn’t go. The tentacles of the dark matter beckoned. I resisted. Alchemy, before going back on the road, stayed with me and then Xtine. Ruggles, now retired, visited briefly. No one could replace Nathaniel. I’ve never stopped missing him.

Obey My Voice, and Arise

Moses often speculated that as memory compresses and expands, time slows down and speeds up almost inexplicably. For when he reflected upon the year immediately following his operation, it passed in an elongated and vivid slow motion, and the next years felt compressed, swiftly passing into indistinguishable, barely recalled moments, interspersed with incidents that expanded to significant and memorable in the present or in retrospect. And now, today, almost a decade after finding his brother, Moses girded himself as time nearly stopped. Salome was on her way to the foundation.

The pseudoreasons for this visit were to get her approval on how her work and Xtine’s photos were to be used to decorate the walls and to review the final applications for the first Nathaniel Brockton Fellowship for Political Activism. Since her few oblique comments after the Hammer opening, she had never hinted at even suspecting the truth, so Alchemy and Moses decided that Alchemy should not broach the subject of Moses’s existence with Salome ahead of time.

This latest attempt to meet had been delayed not by his illness, pathos, divorce, or the perpetual recording and touring
of the Insatiables, but by the passing of Nathaniel Brockton and Salome’s descent into self-imposed isolation at the family’s Shelter Island home.

Moses scoured Nathaniel’s obituaries for insight into his mother. He found precious little. Moses admired Nathaniel’s devotion to his ideals, but he didn’t think much of
Tag
. He wondered if Salome had ever mentioned him to Nathaniel.

Moses paced around the office, occasionally glancing at the tantalizing Suzan Woodruff abstract on the wall. He’d hired Jay as a consultant to furnish and decorate the offices, in hopes of keeping her close to him. Foolish move. Of course she was sympathetic when he relayed the events of the Teumer meeting. But she glided over his hints at attempting reconciliation. Whenever she left to meet someone—he couldn’t ask who—the wound breached and bled.

Although they e-mailed a few times a week, and spoke on the phone erratically, they’d last met at the office three months before. He had told her about the upcoming “Salome summit.” How he wished she were beside him now.

His friends pushed him to end all contact with Jay, to lower the unattainable standards set by his rose-colored vision of her. They encouraged him to start dating. He placated them by going on a few setups, which “didn’t work out.” After the Evie misfire, he understood that he couldn’t approach sex as a good meal, gratifying yet disposable. He was terrified that, literally, he wouldn’t survive another failed relationship. So Moses made one simple decision: He would remain alone. It never occurred to him that his emotional retreat imitated his mom’s behavior. Hannah, too, had forsworn the risk of romance after
the rejections by her first husband and Teumer. With no child to love, the Nightingale Foundation became the recipient of Moses’s adoration and passion.

Ten minutes before Salome’s scheduled arrival, Moses began to feel faint. He texted Alchemy: “Call it off.” No response. Moses paced—
I should leave. I should call Jay. No. I can’t
. He scurried into the bathroom, doused his face with cold water, and took a Xanax.

He decided to wait in the conference room. It was bigger and safer than his office. Moses stood in front of a wall where a series of Jasper Johns prints hung. They’d been donated to the foundation by Salome’s onetime dealer Murray Gibbon, after he met with Alchemy’s lawyers, who’d uncovered some dubious accounting practices. In time, they would be auctioned off.

Moses heard the front office door open. He peeked out from behind the door. “In here!” he screamed too loudly. His eyes focused on his mother, dressed for the winter cold of New York in a camel hair coat. She rewound a flaming red scarf around her neck before slowly removing her tan leather gloves and stuffing them in her coat pockets. Alchemy said something to her that Moses couldn’t hear. With the elegant Savant sashay, which had bypassed Moses, they entered the conference room. Moses retreated to the far side of the marble table.

“Mom, I want you to meet Moses. He is the driving force as well as day-to-day operations runner of the foundation.”

Moses planted his hands flat against the tabletop to still his trembling. The maneuver didn’t stop the fast-spreading
schvitz
stains under the armpits of his light blue button-down shirt.

Salome began to sing: “I just saw the devil and he’s smiling at me …”

Despite weeks of role-playing with his newest therapist, Moses’s armor melted away. Past became present. He stood in front of his mother at the age of fifty-three, suddenly an infant—defenseless and bereft of language.

“What? Stop.” Alchemy recognized the tune. Indignant, he glared at his mother, who glared at Moses, who looked bewildered. Salome unfurled the scarf from her neck and wrapped it around her fist as if loading up to land a right cross.

“You think I don’t know about your
blood
sucking?”

Moses and Alchemy glanced at each other. Alchemy mouthed, “Oh, shit.” Her ability to keep her awareness a secret flabbergasted Alchemy—and rendered him momentarily speechless.

“Alchemy, how did this
Moses
”—Salome’s voice was witheringly derisive—“beguile you?”

“We’re brothers. It’s an incontestable fact.”

“If I taught you anything, you know that there are multiple truths, but there is no such animal as an ‘incontestable fact.’ ”

“Mom, listen to me,” he pleaded, “he is my brother and your son.”

“I’ve lived fifty years with the loss of my child and lost he shall remain. I’m leaving.”

Alchemy stood beside Moses as they watched their mother make her way toward the door. Alchemy patted Moses on the back. He said resolutely, “You are my brother.” Moses wished he could dissolve and fade into a faraway cosmic soup. He managed a what-can-you-do? shrug.

“I’ll be right back.”

Alchemy followed Salome to the car and asked the driver to take her home. She got in the backseat. “Traitor,” she hissed.

“Mom, we can talk about this later.”

“Not to me you won’t.” She closed the door. The car drove off.

Alchemy returned to the conference room holding a bottle of Grey Goose taken from the office fridge. He held the bottle by the neck in one hand and two glasses in the other.

“Mose, I never suspected …” Still unable to find any words, Moses waved away Alchemy’s placations. “She’s a fanatical maker of myths that become even more unshakable when the myth is exposed.” Alchemy poured a glass and swooshed his vodka like mouthwash before he swallowed it. “It’s small consolation, but at least you had Hannah and she loved you.”

“It is more than consolation. It was a treasure and I’m so grateful for that.”

“Mose, you understand quantum physics?”

“Only sort of.”

“I thought I did. I just met Amy Loo and Spencer Frieberg, from riteplay.com, the music site, and we’re investigating making quantum computers. When they whip out their equations …” He smiled sardonically. “I love the idea that anything can appear one way and then another depending on how you look at it. Salome is right about this—all truth is subject to interpretation.” Moses flinched, unable to suppress a sudden feeling of betrayal. “When we first met I was really laid low by Absurda’s death. Remember, you asked me if I believe in God?” Moses nodded, not sure where Alchemy
was going with this. “I didn’t answer because, well, I had no answer. I spent many hours meditating on that question in the monastery. No matter how I looked at, I couldn’t make that leap of faith.” He finished his vodka and poured another one. “Ambitious, searching for a reason, blamed me for Absurda’s death. In the monastery I realized that when reason fails—and it always fails when tragedy hits—everything and anything can be blamed on someone else or the ‘mysterious ways of God.’ Shit, Salome is proof that reason is irrational and the irrational is reasonable.

“Mose, even with everything I have in life, the emptiness, the terror of the nothingness, it can paralyze me. I realized my aim is finding meaning in life in a world without God.”

“I’ve always struggled with that. When the cancer hit, the struggle to understand why became as hard to comprehend as the cancer itself. I accept I may never grasp the reasons for my cancer or Salome’s behavior. Or plenty of other things.”

“Maybe. I didn’t try to find you, but I’m sure lucky you found me. Look at your situation and your bad health. What if I hadn’t been born? Or you couldn’t find me? Was it worth finding out all of this shit? If you hadn’t …”