Friend Is Not a Verb (4 page)
Emma sighed. “You better hope he doesn’t. He’s a fugitive from the law. I bet he keeps pretty close track of his possessions.”
“He won’t miss it,” I said, mostly to myself. “Don’t worry.”
She didn’t say anything. She ran a hand through her ratty hair.
“What?” I said.
“Worrying is
your
specialty, Hen,” she said. “You just don’t know it.”
Balinese Demons
I arrived home that afternoon to find my father at the dining room table, swamped in a sea of crumpled receipts and jabbing at an oversize calculator.
Dad insists on doing his own taxes, which I’m pretty sure is a weird thing to do. He also cuts his own hair, which depending on his luck and wardrobe alternately makes him look like an absentminded professor or a homeless person. He is the only adult I know who does either.
Last spring I even conducted a little survey to determine if doing one’s taxes was, in fact, as weird as I thought it was. Of the six adults I’d queried, every single one said that they paid someone else to do their taxes for them. Four (all teachers at Franklin) asked if my dad was an accountant, and laughed
uncomfortably when I told them he wasn’t. Three, including Mr. Aziz, added that doing one’s own taxes was an invitation to get audited. One—Emma’s father, who can always be counted on for something offensive (like I said, more on him later)—said simply that Dad was a moron.
It isn’t pride that drives Dad, and it’s something beyond stubbornness; it’s the belief that what makes
him
self-sufficient makes everyone else foolish, misguided, lazy, or all three. It’s admirable in a way, which I guess is what keeps the rest of us from complaining when he takes over the dining room four times a year and turns it into his own private little H&R Block. (The dining room table is the only surface in the house large enough to accommodate all the paperwork.) On the plus side, it also prevents him and Mom from entertaining. During those tense little stretches leading up to the IRS tax deadline every third month, I know I won’t be hearing, for example: “Hen, can you dust, vacuum, and set the table for five with the good china? Saul Levy’s hernia operation was a success and we want to have him and Myrna over to celebrate.”
To be honest, the sight of Dad slaving over the familiar mess made me feel sort of relieved. Sarah’s return was not cause for a breakdown in the household routine. Mom was right: There were rules, and we could all stand to stick to them, even the bizarre self-imposed ones. Sarah’s
disappearance
hadn’t prevented him from doing his own taxes, so why should he stop now that she was back?
“That was quite a long bass lesson,” Dad remarked as I shut the door.
Uh-oh.
Had Gabriel already discovered what I’d done and called the house, looking for his stolen property? “I stopped by Emma’s on the way home,” I said defensively, glancing down the hall toward the empty kitchen. “Where’s Sarah?”
“Out back with your mother. She says the garden is falling apart.”
For some reason, that irritated me. Who was Sarah to say that the garden was falling apart? And so what if it was? What had she expected, that we would all become expert horticulturists to make up for her absence?
Screw the garden,
I felt like saying. I didn’t know why I was so upset, but I found myself wishing we’d blacktopped the backyard and outlawed gardening altogether, in any form, period.
Dad leaned back in his chair. “Hen, what do you see yourself doing when you graduate from college?” he asked, peering at me over the rims of his glasses.
The question caught me off guard. “What do you mean?”
He nodded toward the bass slung across my back. “Do you see yourself being a professional musician?”
I didn’t answer right away. Dad almost never asked about my plans for adulthood. Any rare discussion of my future usually occurred at mealtimes and was pretty much limited to Dad’s insistence that I give up vegetarianism. (“You don’t want people not to trust you,” he’d told me in one of his more memorable non sequiturs—as if honesty and, say, hamburger,
were inextricably linked.) Obviously, this peculiar line of questioning had something to do with Sarah’s reappearance; I just wasn’t sure how.
“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Why do you ask?”
“I suppose I’d just like to know how seriously you take playing the bass,” he said.
“
You’re
the one who bought me that great bass rig,” I replied, feeling defensive again. “I have to take it pretty seriously, right?”
“Do you see yourself applying to a music school, like Juilliard, or that one in Boston…?” He tapped his chin.
“Berklee?”
“Yes.”
I glanced up the stairwell, wishing I were upstairs already. “I don’t know. Probably not. You have to pass an audition to get in. I don’t think I’d qualify.”
“Do you think taking bass lessons with Sarah’s friend might help?”
I laughed. Dad’s pensive expression didn’t change. “Um, I doubt it,” I said. “You know, I really don’t have to take lessons with him if you don’t want me to. I’ll look for some summer tutors first thing tomorrow.”
“The time for finding summer tutors was back in March,” Dad said.
I kept quiet, not wanting to get into another argument about what should have been done in March, especially during what Emma now calls my Lost Weekend. Dad had been invited
to attend a freelancer’s conference in Palm Beach, Florida (fun!) and Mom decided to tag along. Before they left, they charged me with a) finding summer tutors to help get my math and science grades back up, b) doing my laundry, and c) weeding the garden. The date of the conference was March 23, which coincidentally happened to be Sarah’s birthday. Unfortunately, being left home alone for this conspicuously uncelebrated occasion depressed me so much that I sat in front of the TV for two days straight—not only accomplishing none of my appointed tasks but also allowing an ant problem in our kitchen to go unchecked. The exterminator ended up costing more than $400. Mom and Dad’s subsequent freak-out marked the first time Mom threatened to burn my socks, in fact.
Dad exhaled deeply. “If these bass lessons are legitimately helping you achieve your goal of being a professional bassist, it’s worth the risk,” he said.
“The risk?” I repeated.
“Sarah and her friends…Well, they’re technically fugitives until certain legal matters get straightened out. That’s all I can tell you. And aiding and abetting criminals is not something I generally condone; but, like I said, I’m willing to let the circumstances slide for the time being. God knows I’ve let a lot worse slide this past year.”
I slung the bass case off my back and propped it up against the stairwell banister. “Dad, are you okay?” I asked. I figured this question was better than the ones I felt like shouting at the top of my lungs, which were:
Why is that all you can tell me?
What have you let slide? What is the big freaking deal? She’s back, goddammit!!
“I’m fine,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. Things are sort of weird, aren’t they?”
“I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but I assume you’re talking about Sarah’s surprise homecoming. I guess I’d just like to see people in this household taking some responsibility for their futures. If professional bass playing isn’t your goal—”
“It’s just a hobby, Dad,” I interrupted. “Playing an instrument is good for you.”
“Yes, well.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and turned his attention back to his taxes. “Like I said, if you
don’t
intend on becoming a professional musician, I’d skip the lessons. Use your free time this summer to find a job or an internship that will help get your foot in the door of whatever you
do
intend to pursue as a profession.”
I blinked. This odd little chat was fast degenerating into the realm of the creepy. Did he really expect me to have any idea what I wanted to “pursue as a profession”? Had he been dead certain that he’d wanted to be a freelance managerial consultant (I’m still not sure what that even is) when
he
was sixteen? Maybe he had. Whatever. If he couldn’t tell me what was really bothering him—and I doubted very much it had anything to do with my employment status—then we were done.
“Fine, I’ll look for a job, okay?” I said, grabbing my bass and scurrying upstairs. Odd: A long time ago, this would have been exactly the kind of nonsensical conversation that Sarah would
have jumped right into on my behalf. I suddenly missed her more than ever, and she was right out back.
“You don’t have to play the martyr here, Hen,” Dad called after me.
I almost smiled, pausing on the top step. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You sound bitter,” he said.
“Bitter? Really? That’s funny. Because I’m totally not.”
I waited for him to laugh. Or something. He didn’t. Which pretty much clinched what I’d already suspected: Now that Sarah was home, the lines of communication in the Birnbaum household had disintegrated completely.
Once I was alone, it took me a minute to muster the courage to remove Gabriel’s manuscript from my bass case pouch. The plastic cover trembled slightly in my hands. It took me another minute to open it, even though I’d locked the door and hidden myself in bed half under the blanket and sheets. I was careful not to make a sound. My heart thumped loudly as I turned to the first page.
October 10
Recently my life has become a series of broken promises to myself.
I’ve promised to exercise, for one thing. I’ve gained fifteen pounds in 122 days. True, I’m not fat yet. I verged on emaciated in college. But I’m definitely more unkempt.
I should probably promise myself to get a haircut, too, or at least to shower more often. But it’s hard to stay motivated.
In theory, there’s no reason to stay motivated. I’m twenty-two. I call Puerto Plata, the Dominican Republic, my home, and it’s sunny and seventy-five all year, except for the rainy season. I don’t pay taxes. I’ll never have to work. But on some level, I keep trying to tell myself that I’m also sick of excuses. I think maybe my father’s skewed values have rubbed off on me more than I would like to admit—primarily the belief that hard work, regardless of its purpose or end, is the key to a guilt-free existence.
I smiled faintly. I could almost relate to the last part. But I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. The less I had in common with Gabriel, the better—on many, many levels. I skipped ahead a few pages.
October 23
Pouring a glass of whiskey at 4
P.M
. every single day has become crucial to maintaining a precarious ability to relax. It’s not the whiskey itself, although that helps. It’s the act. It’s watching that luscious amber liquid flow into the glass precisely as the hour hand and second hand overlap, pointing skyward in unison. I can’t have it any other way.
I keep the whiskey on the mantel in the living room, in the exact center of the house, in a windowless cell that was
originally built as a shrine for the Hindu god Ganesh. To get there, I have to walk through several narrow corridors, down two ramps, and up at least one partial spiral staircase. There are four spiral staircases altogether.
The journey takes exactly thirty-four seconds. My bedroom is on what I suppose could be called the second floor, though there are no “floors” in the true sense of the word; there are levels at varying heights. The house isn’t designed for ease of movement. It isn’t designed to be comfy or homey. It’s designed specifically to repel
leyaks:
Balinese demons who assume the form of monkeys, birds, and occasionally headless bodies.
The odd construction made me pretty anxious at first. It took me some practice and time (thirty-two days) to master every single distance, from any room to any other, down to the second. Now I’m used to it. The distance-to-time ratio is firmly ingrained. But the worry still lingers: Will I be late?
If I am, I will have to pay the consequences. What worries me more than anything is the terrible unknown catastrophe that will inevitably occur if I screw up.
I paused for a second, confused. Was this a real-live diary, or something Gabriel had made up as he went along? It didn’t read like a diary. I wasn’t sure
what
it read like. A bad novel? I squirmed in bed, wishing I could ask Sarah if any of this were true. Funny: Emma was right, but not for the reasons she’d
imagined. The manuscript wasn’t bursting with any horrifying secrets or acts of depravity. I still couldn’t figure out what Sarah and her friends had actually
done
.
I turned to the next page.
October 24
Today I raise my glass to toast our home’s original owner: a middle-aged heroin dealer from Bali named Raj Bhutto. He planned to move to the Dominican Republic because he feared deadly reprisals of two kinds: the first being from rival dealers, the second being from the spirit world, for all the terrible sins he had committed. But poor Raj never even made it out of the Eastern Hemisphere. He mysteriously choked to death on a big fat glob of frozen yogurt at a Baskin-Robbins in Hong Kong. According to Sarah, frozen yogurt—“frogurt”—was his “favorite snack.”
His cruel demise wasn’t an accident. Obviously not. The
leyaks
had gotten to him. I don’t believe in accidents. I believe in reasons. It was no accident that Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died after eating four ham rolls and drinking forty shots of vodka, was it? John Bonham loved ham rolls and vodka. Likewise, this Balinese heroin dealer hadn’t died eating grits or a tuna melt. Neither of these foods would have been fitting. Neither was his “favorite snack.”
On the other hand, the whole story might be a lie. Part of me thinks that Sarah could have made it up in order
to justify why the kitchen isn’t near the dining room. It isn’t even on the same level. A criminal’s desperate effort to evade Balinese demons, or at least to keep them off the premises, certainly provides a convenient excuse for the annoying architectural quirks. If every cubic inch of this place were conceived according to the complex laws of Hindu cosmology, then who are we to complain?
Before we arrived, Sarah had described the house she’d picked out as a “brand-new mansion on the ocean.” This phrase became a sort of mantra among us. I thought I’d be spending the rest of my life somewhere huge and gaudy, with gold fixtures and marble floors and unused-but-fully-stocked refrigerators—like the houses on MTV’s
Cribs.
But no: In spite of everything, Sarah’s heart is still too pure to be such a creative liar. Plus I know better. I was a religion major. Someone built this house out of fear of a greater supernatural power, and I respect that. Nobody else does. Sarah says she loves the place, but she secured the deal to buy it. Admitting that she hates it would mean admitting to accidentally screwing the rest of us over—me, most of all, because this house was supposed to be my victory and retribution. The others freely complain that it’s a big pain in the ass. Madeline outright loathes it. Every day, she rants about the lousy ventilation. But I, for one, am reassured by the building’s spiritual fortitude.
Not that
leyaks
pose any threat to me. They don’t waste time tormenting non-Hindus. Yet, where matters of
faith are concerned—anyone’s faith—I reserve a degree of respect, even awe. Our residence is probably the only one in all Hispaniola that can boast of being
leyak
free. And so I feel the need to pay tribute to this anonymous Indonesian drug dealer in a personal, sacred way, whether he ever existed or not.
I know that we’re living in his home for a reason. We made our escape. He didn’t. Fate left his sanctuary abandoned on a desolate strip of unnamed beachfront road, and through Sarah’s wheelings and dealings in the Dominican cash-up-front real estate market, it became our sanctuary. There must be a connection, some mystery involving the intervention of an Unseen Hand. Not that I necessarily want to figure out the particulars. There’s a reason you hear an eerie voice proclaim: “Here’s to my Sweet Satan” when you play the vinyl of “Stairway to Heaven” backward on a turntable. But nobody understands why. And maybe nobody should. Robert Plant didn’t put it there; that’s for sure. No way was Robert Plant smart or motivated enough to think of backmasking. This is the same goofball who shouted, “I am a golden god!” from a hotel balcony.
The point is: Investigating the supernatural is a risk that certain people shouldn’t take. For all we know, it might bite back.
