Last Call For Caviar (2 page)

Victoria dismissed each and every one of my “but-you-don’t-understand-he-did-this-to-me” claims with such serenity and unwavering conviction that I started rethinking my first impression of her. She seemed more and more like an annoying, know-it-all old friend.

I didn’t go so far as to say Julian was a child molester and Lucifer incarnate, but the more Victoria extolled his virtues and the happiness we would one day know together, the more perversely I needed to point out his faults. I was the wronged party. I didn’t want her to like him more than me.

“He’s such a good person, very deep and spiritual. But he has old sorrows that have never healed. When I connect to him through my psychic abilities of clairvoyance and clairsentience, I am attuned to what he feels inside. It’s a terrible pain of loss and loneliness. He’s on his knees. Only through you will he be healed. “

Of all the psychics in the world, I’d found the one who happened to be on Julian’s payroll. I thought Victoria would give me a psychic pep talk and build up my confidence; instead, she was making me feel uncomfortably guilty.

And since it was my dime, it seemed like we were focusing way too much on the wrong person. I felt like I needed to wave a flag, or set off a flare.

“Let’s leave Julian aside for a minute. Do you see anyone else for me in my future? Or something new and exciting?” I was hoping we could talk tall, dark, handsome stranger instead, the kind fortune tellers find lurking in crystal balls.

But Victoria was stubborn, and I sensed a tinge of resentment in her voice.

“I do see that you could have other options. Of course there are other men. There’s one man who you will meet through some work or business. He would be a good companion. He’s a bit older, and you would have security and a pleasant life together. You might be content, but it won’t be the same kind of love or passion or fulfilment you will find with Julian.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad. I wouldn’t mind security and contentment. Could I have another dog also?” Visions of a rose garden and a pack of golden retrievers chasing butterflies as they gambolled about the green lawns that sloped down to the duck pond, everything bathed in a mellow golden light, filled me with a pang of longing and homecoming.

“Nope, I don’t think it’s going to happen. You won’t choose to be with this other man,” she replied, like a dark cloud casting a somber shadow over my daydream of endless safe and sunny days.

“Come on, you can’t tell me that there’s no one else? There’s got to be lots of guys. I mean, are you telling me this is the only option I have. He’s it? The buck stops with Julian?”

“Yes, you have free will, and of course you can try to change your destiny. But you and Julian will end up together. I’m never wrong.”

“Jeez, now we’re talking destiny here? You’re sure? Couldn’t you look behind the sofa, or something? See if you can turn anything or anyone else up?”

Her words were finally starting to sink in. Looming before me and blocking out anyone else, my destiny and future happiness held hostage by a guy whose only presence in my life was as a phantom who haunted my dreams.

“I’m sorry I can’t tell you what you want to hear, Maya Jade. He is coming back, and you are going to be happy!”

A hint of exasperation was definitely seeping into her homey voice as our reading drew to an abrupt end. I felt like Victoria had simultaneously given me unfounded hope, made me feel guilty and most decidedly drawn first blood. I had to admit, first round to Victoria.

A part of me wanted to believe that what she said was true: Julian would come back, and we would have the fairy-tale ending. But another part of me sensed an underlying cruelty in her words. It was as though Victoria had locked me in solitary confinement, sentenced me to a life of loneliness, when she said she saw no other love for me than Julian.

I laughed off the rather confounding reading and decided there was no way a voice a thousand miles away could foresee my future, or be able to tap into Julian’s emotions and pain. Still, I felt a prickle of unease. It was as though while I had been daydreaming, things had shifted slightly off-balance. A door was open somewhere, and something disturbing wafted inside.

That night, I dreamt of a sere land, all color leached from the stones, stunted and twisted trees dark sentinels against an ochre sky, everything else the color of old bone. In the midst of this desolate plain, Victoria and a pack of jackals feasting on my body and pain.

It took a half-bottle of vodka and—every light blazing to chase away the shadows—before I felt safe enough to close my eyes and return to sleep.

In the days that followed, something softened inside me. I felt a yielding: bits of mortar crumbling to dust; the stones coming loose and falling, one by one, from the wall I’d erected around my heart. As Victoria predicted, I felt my perspective shifting and the desire take hold to open myself up once again to something almost like hope.

It was only later I realized that Victoria had given me the cruelest gift when she had given me hope. Hope undulates before you in a promise of redemption, of a second chance. Hope’s a shape-shifter: one moment all warm and fuzzy. It takes on the form of your heart’s desire. Or it can turn into a thing of fangs and claws, ready to gut and eat anyone foolish enough to place her belief in the promise of something so fragile.

.

CHAPTER 2

J
UMPING THE TRACKS

Needles of freezing water ripped me out of my reverie. Slumped on the shower floor for the better part of an hour, I was oblivious to the fact that the hot water had run out; I was so lost in remembrance of things past. I shivered: my flesh dimpled in goose bumps, my hands and feet waterlogged and my hair plastered to my tingling scalp. For some reason I felt invigorated and alert because of the blast of frigid water. Not that I was planning on making it a daily practice to bathe in sub-zero temperatures!

I even looked better after my improvised spa treatment. The steam of the shower had acted like a hammam, opening my pores, and I felt cleansed; the unplanned ending worked like a dip in a cold plunge pool. I looked almost human.

One hour later, I was sitting at my kitchen table, dressed and hair blown dry. I saw it wasn’t yet 7:30 a.m. I flipped through my emails and was pleased to see a reply from Charlotte.

Hey, M J,

Great to hear from you! Sounds like your reading with Psychic Victoria was quite a hoot, though this character, Julian, sounds kind of shifty to pull a disappearing act like he did.

But then, you know what I always say: When it stops being fun and becomes hard work, my motto is, “Next!”

I really miss you, girlfriend. You know you have a bed in Sausalito if you ever get your ass back over here. But the way things are going here in the States—it keeps going from bad to worse—I can’t imagine anyone wanting to come back to this nightmare. I wish I’d never left France. You’re well out of it. You were the smart one to stay But then again, you always were the sensible one. Lol!

Take care and remember there’s still plenty of fish in the sea! Throw Julian’s ass back in and hook yourself an even bigger and better one!

Kissssses,

Chazzles

I laughed as I read her words. I’d become friends with Charlotte twenty-odd years before at the Institute Francaise, when we were both newly arrived in the south of France and enrolled in the Institute’s French language program.

The Institute was housed in a rambling villa nestled in the hills above the waters of the Rade de Villefranche. The white-washed walls were overhung with spills of bougainvillea, and the slightly unkempt gardens contained a jumble of roses, birds of paradise, palm trees and secluded corners sheltered by trellises of jasmine. The ancient fishing village of Villefranche lay at our feet, and the stately villas dotting the Cap Ferrat teased the eye towards the light shimmering on the Mediterranean.

I spent three months at the Institute, surrounded by aspiring linguists from different cultures and different lands, learning this most romantic of languages. When the program finished, Chaz and I rented a small flat together in Villefranche and enrolled at the university, Le Faculte des Lettres, in Nice. I began my studies in architectural design, and though Charlotte, officially, pursued a degree in French literature, in actuality, she majored in the male population of the south of France, from Monaco to Saint Tropez.

By the end of her university stint, Charlotte spoke boudoir French like a native, had an extensive collection of love mementoes, scalps and a trunk full of war stories about her various conquests. In fact, she was able to parlay her French university experience into a moderately successful memoir entitled
France Sans Culottes: A Bedroom Guide to French men and Their Fetishes
.”

I remembered thinking, when I first met Charlotte, “I have absolutely nothing in common with this person.” Little did I realize at the time, she would become a friend for life.

I haven’t seen Chaz in over three years. She’s trapped in America, and the news out of there is worse by the day. The internet is still up, providing a sense of normalcy, since we can still connect with family and friends in these uncertain times. The social pundits who predicted that social media would ruin face-to-face human contact never imagined it would become our lifeline.

But then, no one knew how bad things were going to get—even though we’d had plenty of prophets and warning signs—until it was too late. Our heads in the sand, we were distracted by the minutiae of everyday life: romance and heartbreak, paying mortgages and bills, wrapped up in our individual pursuit of the elusive dream of happiness, while we blindly trusted our governments to mind the store.

It’s not only in America that society is descending into anarchy and Mother Nature is plotting her revenge. Chaos has overwhelmed most of the world, like a tsunami leaving in its wake pockets of humanity strewn along the shore.

Welcome to the Mad House. Welcome to the year 2014.

Charlotte’s joke about the multitude of male fish swimming in the sea struck a chord. I connected to Google and typed in “world population.”

Even though every day it seems more and more clear that the world is sliding towards a catastrophic evolutionary event in which a significant percentage of the world’s population won’t survive, still, when the dust settles, I hope there will be the odd billion or so left standing.

Victoria may have said that Julian was my destiny and there would be no one else, but I wasn’t buying it just yet.

Reading further, I learned that the total amount of people who have ever lived is estimated at between one hundred billion to one hundred and fifteen billion. Just thinking of how many children our Mother Earth had brought forth and nurtured gave me pause.

To show our gratitude, we’d ground her down, using and abusing her beauty and abundance. It was almost like a woman who had been beaten and dishonored for too long by the man she loved; one day she had enough and turned a double barrel shotgun on her tormentor while he slept.

Mom was pretty much fed up with our ungrateful lot and the mess we’d made of her earthly paradise, if the intense earthquakes and weekly volcanic eruptions along the Pacific Ring of Fire, the perfect storms howling out of the Atlantic to flatten the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf states of the U.S., and the towering tsunamis turning the atolls of the Maldives and Micronesia into the lost islands of Atlantis were anything to go by.

Make no mistake, this isn’t the first time the universe has grown petulant and decided that this particular experiment, with this particular life form on our planet, isn’t going to work out. Sixty-five billion years ago, the universe decided to start over, and hurtled a thunderbolt in the form of the K-T meteor that struck with the force of 100 million mega tonnes and wiped out of existence seventy percent of all species. It was “buh-bye, Jurassic Park, and come to Mama, my furry little mammals.”

And when you think about the immensity of the universe, at the end of the day, K-T was just one puny little pebble skipped across the pond.

Planet-wide instability seemed to be gathering momentum, a harbinger of the evolutionary weeding process that awaited us all. I don’t know if there was any one specific event—a tipping point—when everything started to unravel. If I had to hazard a guess, it started with the earthquake in Japan.

The earthquake of March 11, 2011 had been just the start of the destruction of Japan. Radiation kept leaking from the Fukushima nuclear reactor, leaching into the soil and sea, poisoning everything for generations to come. The government lied to its people, assuring them that the leaks were contained, and that food and water were safe to consume. “Pay no attention to those clouds of radioactive vapor that are periodically released!”

It was a year after the first quakes hit Japan that my friend Kai went to Tokyo to persuade her mother and brother Noren to leave Japan and return with her to the safety of Monaco. Kai was the owner of the architectural design firm where I’d been employed in Monaco. She had been my mentor. Eight years ago, when I branched out on my own, renovating distressed and abandoned properties for resale, I’d turned to her for guidance on all of my projects.

But Noren managed a thriving restaurant. He had forty employees-and their families—dependant on him. His sense of honor and duty wouldn’t allow him to abandon those in his care and flee. What was supposed to be a two-week trip for Kai became one month, then two.

The story that everything was fine only bamboozled the populace for so long, until the number of deaths from radiation poisoning became too large to conceal. Then, the once-disciplined and law-abiding Japanese populace exploded in blood-filled riots against the governmental and corporate duplicity. When the authorities, in turn, used force to quell the protests, the archipelago erupted in an even greater paroxysm of looting and burnings. Japan became an inferno of desperate people fighting for their survival and dignity.

Six months after she left Monaco, Kai went dark; no more emails, texts, or posts on Facebook. Radio silence.

The subsequent series of 9-plus earthquakes that hit Tokyo in the summer of 2013 literally tore Japan apart. The images and video footage that found its way onto the web, posted by survivors and people who wanted the truth known, was more frightening than the bleakest of any imaginary sci-fi film set in a dystopian future.

I followed the unfolding disaster, watching countless user—generated videos and news feeds, hoping to catch a glimpse of Kai lost amidst all that chaos. But all I saw were legions of people, homeless and sickened by the radiation poisoning. An army of zombies roamed the streets, scavenging through a ghostly landscape of toppled buildings and yawning abysses, explosions and flames burning out of control, desperate for food, shelter, or to escape the spiraling madness of slow-moving death. The government and rule of law collapsed; the rest of the world quarantined Japan, hoping to stop the contagion of anarchy and radiation.

Even after all this time with no word, I still searched every day for a sign Kai was somehow alive, hoping against hope that an email or a Facebook post would arrive. Her account was still active, so how could she be lost to us forever, swallowed by the nightmare that Japan had become?

Even if the world community wanted to do more to save the Japanese, almost every nation was dealing with its own natural disasters and descent into anarchy. Though there were still pockets of relative stability scattered around our bristling and pissed-off globe, humanity was waking up to a new world disorder of panic and fear.

The problem facing everyone was where to find sanctuary. In previous wars or natural disasters, there always seemed to be some country that symbolized safe haven and succor from the death and pestilence and misery. Now all of humanity was imprisoned within the same out-of-control juggernaut, helpless to do anything as we raced towards the wall.

The Chinese have a saying, “May you live in interesting times.” If nothing else, we had front-row seats to witnessing the mother of all systems breakdowns, a catastrophe that appeared to be building towards an apocalyptic end. Strange but true, it was weirdly mesmerizing, watching the world unravel right before my eyes.

People have an amazing capacity for denial. Often, it’s a perfectly legitimate coping mechanism to protect us from facing harsh realities that we can’t process. But then, when we emerge from this protective bubble, after meandering along the paths of least resistance, kicking the can down the road, the harsh realities must still be confronted.

And that’s where I found myself today. While I had been locked in solipsism, losing track of time in my own dream world of grief, the planet and all its people seemed to have passed the point of no return.

Luckily, I hadn’t missed the boat. But that’s only because there didn’t seem to be any boat coming to rescue anyone. I would have to rescue myself if I intended to survive. I had nowhere I could easily flee to, no family or sanctuary near at hand, to take me in and shelter me.

What little family I had left was in the last stages of preparing to flee Las Vegas and retreat to the redwood forest of southern Oregon to make their last stand. However, even if I wanted to join them, they were half a bad world away.

Then, as if to prove coincidences do indeed exist, my inbox pinged. Clicking on the icon, I saw an email from Leah:

Hey, Baby,

Just to let you know, we’re almost ready to leave Las Vegas. We got Mama and Kobe out of Cali. She’s safe with us now. I’ll shoot you an email when we are on the road.

Have you decided yet what you’re gonna do?

Maya Jade, how long can you keep waiting on a ghost…?

Tick Tock…Tick Tock

Leah

My big sis—my dearest enemy growing up, but now, the one I’d want to have on my side in a fight.