The Grand Ballast (8 page)

“
I’ll still visit her. All
the time.” He said it almost like a question, like he was asking
Kilroy’s permission to leave his mother.

“
So you want
to?”

He grabbed for Kilroy’s
hand. “Oh my God, yes. I want it so—” he hesitated only a second
“—
fucking
much.”

Kilroy looked up, still
grinning. “Listen to you and your dirty mouth.” He lowered his
voice to a whisper. “You rotten boy.”

Bode started. The
condemnation in those last three words seemed, for a second,
sincere. But an instant later, Kilroy had pulled Bode over his lap,
laughing. He gave Bode two light swats on the seat of his pants,
and Bode started giggling too. His cock hardened, and he sighed as
Kilroy rubbed huge, slow circles over his back, pushing his T-shirt
up a little farther each time.

“
I’m gonna be yours,” Bode
murmured.

Kilroy hooked one finger in
Bode’s belt loop and tugged gently. “Mmm-hmm,” he whispered.
“Mine.”

***

For years, Bode had
considered his parents one-dimensional. Though they were the people
he presumably knew best, they didn’t seem as rich in feelings and
experiences as the people Bode worked with. They’d done little to
combat their boredom. They passed their lives efficiently and
vacantly, and any efforts they did make toward creativity seemed
flat, embarrassing.

His mother had liked
dancing, but she hadn’t pursued it. She praised Bode for his
talent, but he wondered how she knew enough about what he did to
praise him for it, when she never came to his shows. His father was
a lost cause, certainly, but Bode still held some hope for his
mother. Hope that she’d look up from her marbles and
see
.

His father was amiable,
tall, and good-looking, with a shaved head that was always
sunburned and peeling in the summer. He liked to spend time
outside, fertilizing the lawn and then re-fertilizing it, until the
grass was brown and the soil overfed. By day, he was in the yard,
mowing down weeds and running over them repeatedly until they were
mulch. And then he came inside, sweaty and smelling of the
outdoors, and knitted all evening, his needles clicking as he
worked on scarves that grew to be ten, twenty feet long. Hats that
would hood him down to the chest if he were to put them on. He
simply had no sense of where to stop.

Bode’s mother was small and
whizzy, like a mosquito. On the treadmill each afternoon,
alternately bored and fascinated by her body. Buying clothes tight
enough to show her ridges of muscle, like superhero suits. She had
to work for her strange beauty, and Bode sometimes caught himself
feeling scornful of her. She had never been anything important,
because she had no natural gifts. He believed he would, by virtue
of his own excellence, lead a longer, better life than she’d
managed. He’d hated himself at first for thoughts like that, but
then the marbles began to justify his scorn.

Each evening, marbles.
Game after game. No rules as far as Bode could determine. She just
created shapes out of little glass balls, and then sent a white
marble spinning across the floor to destroy them. He didn’t
understand because she
had
been more than this, once. She’d held him when he
was a child and taught him constellations and songs. He hadn’t
grown up feeling completely ignored or alone. His parents had been
distant, but not cruelly so.

He’d known for a while he
ought to move out, get a place of his own. But he truly hadn’t
known where to go. Garland had offered his couch to Bode several
times after a late night out, and Bode had gratefully accepted. But
he couldn’t live with Garland, and he didn’t want to live by
himself. And he didn’t
hate
living with his parents. There was something
comforting about their disaffection, their pleasant dullness. About
remaining in the home where he’d grown up.

But now he had somewhere to
go. He had someone he wanted to be with. He told his parents about
the upcoming move. They nodded politely and seemed unaffected by
the prospect of letting him go.

“
I
love
him,” he said, staring at each of them in turn. “That’s why
I’m doing this.”

They nodded again. Bode’s
father’s ball of yarn fell to the floor and unraveled, and he
stooped to pick it up.

It’s okay. I don’t need
them.

He lay on his bed, waiting
for Kilroy to call. Kilroy didn’t work—he had inherited a large sum
of money several years ago, he said. Bode had tried asking about
Kilroy’s parents, about his upbringing, but Kilroy seemed to loathe
the subject, and so Bode had dropped it. But what did bother Bode
was that Kilroy spent huge stretches of time alone and didn’t seem
to want company. On days when Bode had long rehearsals, it was
fine. But on days like today, it drove him crazy. Kilroy wanted
them to live together—to see each other every day. So why did it
still happen that Bode could ask Kilroy to spend an afternoon at
the park with him, and Kilroy could say,
“I have some things to do,”
and
“I’m afraid that won’t
work.”

Bode was startled by a
knock on his door. He sat up. “What?”

His mother pushed the door
open. “Bode?”

“
Come in.” As frustrated as
he got with her, he still desperately craved her attention. He sat
very still, as though she were a wild animal that might flee if he
made a sudden move.

She approached the bed and
sat on the edge of it. Looked at him. “Who is he?” she
asked.

“
Who?”

“
Kilroy
Ballast.”

“
He’s the guy I’m seeing.”
Bode forced his voice calm. It never helped to get angry. “I’ve
told you about him.”

“
But who is he?”

Bode flopped back on the
pillow. “He’s a genius. He’s going to create a revolution. And I’m
going to help.”

His mother was silent a
long time. “Is he kind?” She spoke so quietly he wasn’t sure he’d
heard correctly.

He raised his head again,
lacing his fingers over his stomach. “Kind?”

She scratched her arm. Her
head bobbed.

“
He’s good to me. He cares
what I want to do. He’s…strange, but I like him.”

His mother gazed around the
room. Suddenly she burst into girlish giggles. “We had your crib
right there.” She pointed to a corner of the room. She gazed at the
ceiling. “I’m sorry. I’m so…”

“
It’s all right,” he said
when she didn’t finish.

“
Click…click…
” she
whispered.

“
Mom?”

“
If he’s kind, that’s what
matters. Really, that’s it. That’s all. Your father…” She shook her
head. “I couldn’t do my taxes. For the life of me. And he sat down
beside me and showed me how. He does the yard, and he puts the
patio furniture under the deck when it rains.”

“
Uh, yeah. Dad’s
great.”

She smiled at him, like
there was more she wanted to say. Something he wasn’t
understanding. He studied the bulging muscles of her arm and tried
to remember her holding him, comforting him. “I think,” she said,
“if you can find someone willing to do a lot of little, good things
for you, it’s better than someone who gives you a big
promise.”

“
I think so too.” Part of
him wanted her to leave, even as he wracked his brain for things to
say to make her stay. “Mom?”

She squinted, as though
Bode were becoming hard to see.

“
I’ll miss you.”

She dropped her gaze to the
duvet. Nodded and nodded, like her head was on a spring, and then
she swallowed convulsively and stood. She left the room without
another word, and Bode wondered if he’d ever felt so
alone.

IN THE CITY OF THE WAR
GARDENS

Hilgarten was a choked
place, crowded with the drifting ambitions of its founders. Stone
foundations competed like roots for space in a bland gray loam, and
skyscrapers looked like stakes driven into the ground. Knobby
community centers and schools stood formless as rubble heaps. The
city was fantastic and decrepit, and Bode stared like a
child.

Mr. Lein had let them out
of their coffins so they could stand on the deck of the coffin car
and be seen by the people of the city. LJ looked dreary and faint.
Sibyata kept howling at the crowds like a wolf, and pulling the
neckline of her leotard down to show her breasts. As they lurched
toward the rail yard, people followed the wagons and held their
hands out. A boy threw flowers—fierce, spindly things, their stems
still trailing roots and dirt, showering the performers in black
grit.

The city was famous for its
war gardens. People intentionally grew plants that didn’t get
along, that robbed one another of nutrients and wound around other
stems and, like a brawl bursting out the doors of a bar into the
street, knocked down garden fences and strangled and pummeled one
another.

The gardens had perhaps, at
one point, interested their designers. But now they required no
maintenance but admiration, and those who lived in the city were
mostly inured to their strangeness and violence.

Several breeders of
botanical oddities had lived in the town where Bode had grown up.
Years ago, Bode and Kilroy has fallen in love with a plant called
empress weed that thrived in the yellow field where they’d
sometimes picnicked. It had a bloom wispy as cobwebs, pink as
bubble gum, and it stuck to fingers and clothes. It changed color
as the seasons went on—sometimes a raw red like damaged skin,
sometimes gold, sometimes a bristling electric blue. Its stems were
striated and thick, with thorns so sharp their ends looked like
little bits of thread.

The ring stick was made
from empress weed, the blooms plucked, the thorny stem dried to
bone white.

Their performance area in
Hilgarten was huge. A ring with silver gates around it, and a thick
layer of fine sawdust on the ground. The big top tent barely
covered it; there was some talk of doing an open-air
show.

Dee, the high-wire walker,
was already in Hilgarten, wearing a high-collared pink dress and
massive sunglasses. She’d been waiting there for some time, as her
agent made clear. Her agent had a comb-over and bad taste in
ties.

“
We took a detour,” Kilroy
muttered, striding past the agent. “I wanted to stop at the
border.”

“
Pal,”
the agent said, “if you’re letting O’ Fauh fill your head with
nonsense about you not having the best, I mean the best, X-show,
then you’re—let me tell you something. Dee had a lot of offers.
A
lot
of
offers. And you know what I said? I said no, honey. No. You gotta
take Kilroy Ballast’s offer. This man, this Ballast, he’s goin’
places.” The agent turned to Dee. “Didn’t I say that,
babe?”

Dee sighed and patted her
curls.

Lein gave the call to come
to the dressing area—which was in a side room of a local church. As
Bode headed over, he caught Dee looking at a tangle of vines that
had choked itself to death on the ground. Bode glanced back and saw
that her agent was still talking to Kilroy, who looked on the verge
of giving the man a clout with the ring stick.

“
Dee?” Bode
whispered.

Dee turned slowly. Her eyes
were hidden behind her huge shades.

“
Um, I
was just wondering. How do you do it—perform without the Haze? Is
it…?”
Humiliating? Difficult?
Depressing?
“Is it hard, having to listen
to what the people in the audience say about you?”

The Haze didn’t render its
user unable to hear or see or understand. It simply blunted
everything—shuffled thoughts, snipped the dark parts off feelings,
made it possible to obey mindlessly, to snarl and clash with those
around you without really putting your teeth into it. Bode had
probably heard thousands of foul comments from spectators over the
years, yet the words had never pierced him. Tonight,
though…

Dee lowered her shades
slightly. Kept them pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “I’ll
have to check with my agent,” she said.

***

The performance started, as
always, in blackness. A thin silver beam searched the dark. The
music started, slow and sinuous, crawling into the corners of the
tent. The beam of light thickened, caught a patch of black and blue
sequins high above the ground. Through the speakers came soft
sounds—murmurs and giggles, the tearing of fabric. Gentle
breathing, growing louder, bolder, wetter. Sighs and moans, edging
toward an illusion of climax, covering any lingering audience
chatter.

Then—silence.

The lights came up. Music
roared like an engine. Giant torches on either side of the ring
erupted into columns of flame, and silver confetti rained from the
air like shards of glass. On two opposite platforms twenty feet in
the air stood Sibyata and Roulette, naked except for patches of
sequins stuck to their bodies in odd places, covering nothing of
importance.
Roulette and Sibyata soared
toward each other on the bars, meeting in the middle and tangling,
her limbs wrapping around his body. They both wore microphones, so
their breathing filled the tent. Sharp, animalistic panting, and
then a harmonious moan. Even if you were seated far away, you could
imagine their sweat, feel the wetness between their
legs.