The Lie Spinners (The Deception Dance) (37 page)

Stephen
replies, “
Ja,
men
jeg
snakker
dansk.”

They
start talking in some other language, probably Norwegian, I don’t
know. And then they’re laughing and one of the girls, the
shorter of the two (brunette, curvy, face pixie-cute) holds her hand
against Stephen’s.

“
Here,
let me help you,” Polite Goon says, drawing my attention away
from the group by taking the unopened bottle out of my hands.

“
Thank
you,” I mumble

“
Aren’t
these supposed to have ice in them?” he asks.

“
Yes,”
I say, as I scratch my chin with my shoulder. Pixie-face has her hand
on Stephen’s arm, and for a second I think he might shrug her
off but instead he grabs her fingers, and they’re playing with
each other’s fingers while they laugh and talk.

“
Isn’t
someone waiting for this drink?” Polite Goon says, making me
jump. A hot feeling courses through me and I feel it gather in my
cheeks. I take the metal scoop, and bury it in the ice-bucket, but I
have trouble getting a full scoop and so I have to scoop several
times and the bucket-drink is still a little light on ice. After
Polite Goon pours in the bottles and I add some straws I hand it over
the bar to the Irish guy waiting.

He
practically shouts, “I ordered two.”

Oops.
“It’ll
just be a second.” I run back to the bucket station, speed pour
the bucket and give it to the guy telling him one of the buckets is
on me.
Great,
now I’m just giving away my non-existent money.

After
fumbling through four more bucket orders, Polite Goon says, “Why
don’t we leave the club early tonight?”

I
bang my elbow on the counter. “
Jezzzus!
That
hurt,” I whimper, holding my elbow.

“
You’ve
worked five days in a row, almost forty hours. You’re getting
clumsy and emotional, you need some time off.”

“
But
Nathan can’t leave until one, which isn’t for
another…what?
Two
hours
?”

“
Exactly,”
says Polite Goon.

I
glance back to where Stephen takes his own time off, on the dance
floor with bikini-clad pixie girl. He pulls her back tight against
his front which with her clothing (or lack thereof) is almost
obscene. I turn away. “If it’s allowed, yeah, I’d
like to leave.”

I
wouldn’t say that Pom is happy I’m leaving early but he
is so understanding that it makes me almost uncomfortable.
Knife-to-the-throat-guy comes out from the back room and takes my
place. My guilt at leaving diminishes substantially when I realize
knife-guy is like a bucket making whirlwind.

After
Polite Goon goes to tell Stephen, who doesn’t spare me a
glance, we leave out the back. The usual homeless zombies shift to
let us pass, then return to gather at the locked back door.

“
Do
they ever
actually
get
venom?” I ask Polite Goon, feeling a little reckless.

To
my surprise, Polite Goon answers me, “Not those ones.”

“
Because
the spiders on their moving tattoos are too small?” I continue.

He
doesn’t answer.

The
question: ‘
how
big is your spider?’
begs to be asked. But looking over at his entirely-webbed skin, I
obey my better judgment and shut up. The drive to my bungalow is
silent.

The
walk from the Jeep is silent. And sitting inside the bungalow
together we are silent. Tired of pretending to sleep when I know it’s
impossible, I turn to Polite Goon. “When we were with The
Spider,” I say to him, “he mentioned a story about a
courtesan, do you remember?”

“
Yes.”

“
Do
you know the story?”

“
Yes.”
Then he’s silent.

“
Will
you tell me?” I finally ask.

“
I
do not think this story will bring you luck.”

“
Have
you met… my life? My life and luck are like two negatively
charged magnets; who knows, if you cursed me with bad luck it might
switch my magnetism and make me lucky.”

Because
of Polite Goon’s ever-present sunglasses I can never be sure of
his expression; but from the purse of his lips my guess is he’s
either amused or disapproving. “I don’t want to tell you
and more than that the story is longer than I want to speak,”
he says. He huffs out of his nose. “I’ll write it down
for you, if you give me a couple of minutes.”

“
Sure,”
I say, “Thank you.”

He
doesn’t turn on a light, and though the waning moon remains
three quarters full I have no idea how he has enough light to write.
But he finds the bungalow’s paper (or what’s left after I
used it almost completely up) and pen and starts writing.

Eventually
he stands up, turns on a light and gives me the paper before going to
sit in the same spot.

I
read:

There
once was an emperor who valued only music. He gathered the most
talented musicians of the day in his palace; amongst them was Aito,
the most famous musician in the world. It was said that with a note
from his flute Aito could make a woman fall in love with him and with
a pluck from his zither break her heart; and the emperor tolerated
Aito’s wonton heart-breaking of many palace women, including
some of his daughters, because no one could match Aito’s sound.
For many years Aito enjoyed the emperor’s favoritism.

The
empire was poor, and the its citizens’ taxes high; taxes
collected from an agricultural province on the far side of the empire
doubled one year, then tripled the next. The emperor sent a man to
discover the source of his new wealth and prosperity and the
messenger brought back news of a young woman who could sing the rice
to sprout, the fish to jump into nets and the animals to be heavy
with young. The messenger reported that her song was so beautiful the
flowers would turn away from the sun and toward this young woman when
she sang.

The
emperor said he must have this woman’s song; he sent his
fastest horsemen to retrieve her. The woman was a commoner, but young
and fresh faced. Before his court she sang a song of the spring and
children quickened in barren wombs; she sang a song of summer and the
winter trees burst with blossoms; when she sang her song of autumn
persimmons dropped from dead branches; her song of winter caused
elderly men and women to kiss their families and find contented rest.

For
a short time the emperor was happy just to have the young woman in
his palace singing. The frozen land grew fruit, bellies grew big with
new life and many who had clung to the world passed away, at peace
and not afraid of what was to come. But the emperor grew possessive
of her songs, and decreed that her music was for him and him alone.

He
built a house around her favorite tree and decreed that all who
served her stuff their ears with wax so that they could not hear her
voice. So they did. The flowers and fruit withered and died. The
women miscarried. People again were afraid to die.

In
the short time that this woman had been in the Palace, Aito, the
greatest musician in the world, was forgotten. And because Aito had
been forgotten and uninvited, he had never heard the woman’s
song. Aito, consumed with curiosity on both why he was put aside and
about her song itself, climbed into the woman’s house through
the gaps in the branches of her tree. The woman sat cradled in the
roots of her tree singing. Aito instantly loved this woman, her song
was like nothing he had ever heard; still hidden in the branches he
played a harmony to her melody with his reed flute. Eight
bush-warblers burst out of the flute, each carrying a different note;
the eight small birds flew down to surround the women in his song.

Surrounded
in Aito’s song of love the woman sang songs that made her tree
burst with fruit and flowers; the tree grew far beyond the house, so
tall that branches cast the turrets of the palace in their shade.
Every night Aito would crawl through the gaps in the branches, pull
out his reed pipe and play this song of love that would be carried to
the woman by eight new bush warblers.

The
emperor too visited the woman every day, he showered her in cold hard
treasures that she could not eat, wear or love. She sang only one
song now, Aito’s song. The emperor began to resent the trees
and the birds because each flourished on her music, and he wanted her
song only for himself. He ordered her tree chopped for firewood, her
birds caged and killed, her roof and walls remade of gold, with only
the smallest of windows and a door that only the emperor had a key
to.

But
Aito did not forget her song of love, and at night he played it,
sending his bush warblers to her through her small window. They would
sing through the night, and in the morning the emperor caged and
killed them.

Wanting
to know the source of these warblers, the emperor watched through the
night, and witnessed Aito’s playing his song on his flute.

The
emperor called a great concert, where he told Aito to play for all
his people, and Aito knew it was death to refuse. Each song that Aito
played was interrupted by the Emperor; “Not that song, Aito,
play another one,” he would say. Soon Aito knew no more songs,
but his own song of love. Aito put away his flute and picked up his
zither; for the first time plucking this song, rather than fluting
it. Upon the first note plucked of Aito’s song, an archer shot
an arrow into Aito’s chest. More arrows flew, each hitting him
but Aito kept plucking his song. Right before the eighth arrow hit
Aito directly into his heart, Aito plucked the final note.

As
Aito slumped over his Zither in death, eight great cranes burst from
his instrument and flew to the golden house of the woman. The cranes
were too big to fit through her small window, so they took to the air
and flew in the eight directions of the world.

The
emperor, having heard Aito’s song of love sung every day by the
woman, could not live without it. Breath short, heart failing, he was
carried to the golden house of the woman. When he entered the only
thing he found there were mounds of gold and jewels, but no woman, no
singing birds; for without the nourishment of her tree the vivacity
of her birds or the love of Aito, the woman had faded and
disappeared.

In
desperation the emperor tried to hum the song, but he had never
learned it, so he died without it.

“
This
story isn’t about a woman,” I whisper, folding the story.

“
No,”
Polite Goon responds.

“
I
can see why you thought it would be dangerous to give me this,”
I say.

His
response: getting up and turning off the light.

“
Kasem,”
I say, using Polite Goon’s real name for the first time, “Why
do you follow
him
?”

I
get what I expect, silence.

But
truly, I was only asking for him to confirm what I’ve already
figured out. Why would intelligent people like Kasem or May follow a
volatile, easily manipulated, insane leader?

Venom.

If
these pills create the web, and May and Kasem are covered in that
web, it’s only a small jump of logic to figure out that they
are taking the pills; which means their ‘Spiders’ were
big enough for them to not join the ever growing crowd of Venom
addicts in the back alley behind the club. Along that line of
thought, Venom may or may not be the source of Kasem’s ability
to open doors with his mind…or May and the other fire dancers
being able to dance the way they did…the pills that make
Stephen’s demon-detector-tattoo-thingy turn black…