by Sandi Tan
“If they’re on the ground, it’s only looting. It’s not as if any of them’ll survive those crows. Better us than them, right?”
She noticed she’d been sitting on her hands and extracted them from under her thighs. They were clammy things. She looked at the house. There wasn’t a car in the wisteria-wrapped carport, nor even a bike.
“Wait. Is this a dare?”
“I don’t care for apricots either way. I was really just thinking of you.” He shifted his eyes to the tree and then back at her. “Go for it.”
She placed her fingers on the door latch. He was about to say something else when she sprang the door open and bolted across the green lawn. One crow squawked a warning to the others, and all three flapped away from the tree, apricots jammed into their beaks. The fruit was all hers now. Stretching out the front of her T-shirt like an apron, she filled it with the fuzzy little things, avoiding the mushy ones that leaked juice, yet they still stained her shirt. She turned to Mr. Z in his car and stuck out her tongue in victory. He gave her a thumbs-up, which pleased her more than she could fathom.
The next thing happened in a flash. A hairless man with beady eyes and a snarling snout leapt out of the bushes at her. All she saw were teeth. Incisors like knife blades. She sprinted, releasing fruit as she ran. When she looked back from the safety of Mr. Z’s car, she saw it.
A white bull terrier on a chain, its short legs pacing the perimeter. It couldn’t have gotten her, but it sure got close. She laughed hysterically. Her hands were shaking.
“Are you all right, baby?” Mr. Z caressed the back of her neck. It felt so good.
“That freaking mutt came out of nowhere!” Her fear was turning to outrage. “I lost everything!”
“Not everything.” Mr. Z reached over and picked up the one apricot that had rolled down the seat, between her thighs. He brought it to her lips. When she caught her breath, she took a bite. Juice ran down his fingers. “How is it?”
“Not worth risking life and limb for.”
Mr. Z took a bite of the fruit himself, then sucked at the rivulet of juice in the dell between his thumb and index finger. He smacked his lips.
“Oh, I think you’re being a little hard on the poor thing.”
He passed the fruit back to her and wiped his mouth on a Kleenex. With sticky fingers, he pulled down the handbrake and started steering the car with the ball of his hand. She saw now that her shirt was covered in juice splotches, evidence of her crime.
“By the way, for your future reference, that was my house,” he said, grinning. “Anytime you feel like apricots, feel free to plunder. That’s Constance. I promise you, she wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
– 8 –
TURF
“Let’s take a look at the master bedroom.”
The guy walked up the stairs of Raymond’s house.
“So what kind of business are you in?”
“I wrote books,” said Raymond. “Silly books, that people seemed to like.”
“Nice work if you can get it,” the guy said, and Raymond detected no sneer in there. Refreshing. The guy glanced at his clipboard. “Raymond van der Holt?”
“Yes, humbly so.”
“Never heard of you. No offense.”
“None taken.”
The guy walked ahead of Raymond, pausing in the hallway outside the bedroom.
“May I?” Before Raymond could answer, the freckled, forty-ish guy was in his bedchamber, pulling aside the bisque-colored Thai silk drapery and poking around the casement windows. He continued counting under his breath, “Thirty-three, thirty-four . . . thirty-five,” and made a note of his new tally.
“Would I really need to wire these upstairs windows?” Raymond asked. “Those little magnetic boxes you stick on them are just so hideous.”
“It’s beauty or safety, take your pick,” the man said. “Our boxes are highly sensitive. The alarm goes off half a second after the magnet on the window loses contact with the magnet on the frame. That’s a half second faster than our leading competitor.”
“I choose beauty.” Raymond trailed after the guy, smoothing out his drapes.
The guy gave him an estimate for the downstairs doors and windows, and said he would include a motion detector in the entry hallway “for free.” Raymond thanked him and asked to schedule an installation ASAP. They shook hands coolly, and parted.
Ever since Raymond bought his house, he’d been exposed to the world of Guys—the lawn guy, the tree guy, the drywall guy, electricians, plumbers, these very interchangeable manly men who knew how to fix things and work things, and therefore kept people who couldn’t fix and work things themselves at their mercy. The Guys he employed were straightforward, hardworking, life-loving men who played with Tonka trucks as little boys and grew up knowing they wanted to tear things down, blow things up. They were the ones who caused bottlenecks on the interstate when they vegged out at the wheel, gazing at construction zones; Raymond imagined that most of them emerged from the womb operating forklifts. They made huge investments in the American dream by breeding and buying, and constituted a formidable market force that sucked up a gazillion bucks’ worth of gas, porn, NASCAR tickets and freedom fries. Even their toddlers were champs—running marathons on Home Depot wall-to-wall. One could never fault these Guys for thinking that someone like Raymond, with his funny accent and Persian rugs, was phony or marginal, or a serial killer. Every TV show they watched trained them to think so. The USA was theirs and they knew it. Raymond was merely visiting until his visa expired.
As long as they did their job and charged honest rates, Raymond couldn’t give a rat’s ass what any of these subliterate lunkheads thought of him. He didn’t even need them to like him. No, as long as his house was comfortable, and safe, he didn’t care if they took their sons to the shooting range instead of the ballet. Let them get ass cancer on deep-fried pizza.
With his home security system installed, Raymond came and went with greater peace of mind. He began to enjoy locking himself in at night. It was poetry: Armed to Stay, No Delay. Beep-beep! The decals the security guys stuck on his windows became protective talismans, and the yard sign poking out of the flower bed was his secular crucifix.
One Saturday afternoon, he drove home from the Starbucks in a funk after reading a New York Times op-ed that declared American fiction dead, at least according to dwindling sales figures. The vile pundit claimed that ever since 9/11, Americans had been opting for nonfiction because they felt they needed to re-engage with the world and learn “real facts,” and that literary magazines had been cutting back on fiction pages or axing them altogether to make way for CEO profiles and reportage. Well, screw them all, Raymond thought, these selfsame people would have sent Faulkner packing off to punctuation school. Even the Guys who worked on his house sought comfort in the Bible—they were not the enemies of fiction.
The true enemies of fiction were the ponderous autodidacts who tyrannized him at readings with lists of factual errors found in his books, plainspoken guardians of regional arcana out to prove him out of touch with local lore and politics. Oh, and the literal-minded boneheads who showed up just to call him an old racist and wish him dead. These were the dreamless zombies of American life he wouldn’t mind seeing exterminated en masse. He was grateful he was out of the writing game—good fucking luck to those MFA-wielding kids Lena Ozova told him about. Let them cater to the capricious whims of the statistics-mad, the politically correct and the metaphor-challenged who made up the shrinking anemone once known as the American book-buying public. Good fucking luck to them.
Parking his Jaguar, he noticed pink rhododendron petals scattered across his lawn. They made a trail from the driveway to the front door. The sign from the security company had been plucked out of the flower bed and thrown facedown on the grass like aluminum roadkill. A police chopper was circling the afternoon sky. Something was definitely up down here.
The downstairs was clear. Upstairs, he found no one either. Nothing.
Then the phone rang. He let it ring five, six times before succumbing to its tyranny.
“Hell-o, Dad.”
Silence. The old man on another guilt trip.
“I said I would call you Sunday.”
Still nothing.
“If you’re not going to say anything, I’ll hang up . . . I have better things to do in this life than wait for you to speak up. Are you there, old man?” He waited. “Hello-o?” The line clicked and was dead.
Rat bastard. Replacing the baseball bat, Raymond felt a queasy twinge of guilt. Perhaps he’d been too harsh. The old coot was never one to thrive under the hard talk of ultimatums. He was probably now balled up in his recliner, weeping into his shirtsleeves. Raymond caved in and called Dartmoor.
“Hello,” his father answered phlegmatically.
“Dad, it’s me again.” Raymond put on his most contrite voice.
“Son, can I call you back later? The game’s on.” The TV could be heard in the background blasting some kind of live sporting event.
“No, no, don’t call back. I just wanted to say . . . Well, I’m sorry for yelling at you just now.”
“What?”
“When you called me.”
“Why on earth would I be calling you in the middle of my game?”
“Because you have been known to act against reason.”
“Did you phone me up to pick a fight?”
“No!” Raymond shook his head, cursing himself. “Forget this conversation ever happened.”
“What?”
“Yes, exactly. What.”
Raymond walked to the bathroom, perplexed. As he lifted the toilet seat, he noticed that he was standing in a puddle of clear liquid about two feet wide. It wasn’t water from any leak—he looked up for telltale mold on the ceiling. He crumpled down on his haunches and dipped his fingers into the puddle. It was gooey, thicker than water but lighter than paste, and had a consistency close to that of Woolite.
“Goddammit.” He recognized the substance. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
He paced the living room, trying to think what he should tell the police if he called in a report. Hey officer, there’s Astroglide on my floor . . .
Minutes later, it hit him. That was no Astroglide! How could he have forgotten? Ectoplasm. He’d written about it so much in the past. Oh, you know, officer—it’s that primordial ooze created out of moisture and dust by, well, ghosts? Ah, but ectoplasm sounded even worse than Astroglide.
Raymond had dealt with otherworldly beings so much on the page that it never once occurred to him he might have to deal with them in life. He neither believed nor disbelieved in them. They were literary props to be exploited, as philosophy-free as piano wire or ice picks. Unless he wanted to encourage a high-maintenance relationship with this entity, he’d have to treat it like a nuisance to be evicted, like a smelly possum in the basement. The worst they could do was irritate the hell out of you with their now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t routine. The main question was, why now? Why, after years of his writing stories about them, had one finally decided to make contact? What did it want?
He smiled. He was flattered by the attention.
No sooner had he finished mopping up the damp spot than the phone rang again. He felt a shiver. He let it ring a few times more. He picked it up without saying a word, and was met with the same sickly silence on the other end. Seconds later, “Raymond?”
He sighed. “Hello, Dad.”
“Game over.”
“What?”
“The Jayhawks won. I can talk now.”
“Unfortunately, now’s a bad time.”
“Why is it a bad time?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for that, Dad.”
Mr. Z told Rosemary and Arik that the two of them were henceforth exempt from attending class with all the others. They could show up just for the play rehearsals—what he now called Workshop—and have that count toward a credit. They were that special. Mr. Z immersed them in European literature, showed them movies. They read the lyric poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and the medieval love letters of Abelard and Heloise, and watched films from the French New Wave like Breathless and Jules et Jim, which Mr. Z praised for their fresh, passionate naturalism. Afterward, they engaged in trust exercises that would look to any outsider like creative riffs on Twister. Workshop became to Rosemary and Arik a gateway to an earlier, more romantic world.
Mr. Z said he demanded raw honesty in his “company”—the grandiose term he used when referring to his two star pupils. His company had to be one where trust was the key operating principle. Nothing that happened within the Safe Room—their windowless black box studio—was to be shared with the outside world, and nothing that happened within would ever be considered weird, dumb or taboo. He said trust was so crucial in the creation of drama that it was why the Sundance Institute held its workshops for writers and directors in the isolated mountains of Utah. If the outside world was ever allowed to intrude, the magic of their Arden would be lost.
“Safety, and in particular, the safety of emotional freedom, is a very fragile thing,” he said.
In this hothouse atmosphere, Rosemary found herself enjoying the company of Arik, who, beneath his rugged good looks, turned out to be a shy, oddly sensitive boy who swallowed his words. He worried excessively about his low, manly voice, yet neglected to shave off the downy Fu Manchu patches bracketing the sides of his mouth. He and Rosemary found a shared connection in the fact that they both had fatherless homes—Arik’s dad had “gone out for smokes” years before. His housewife mother, who couldn’t prove that she started college in Yerevan and graduated in Beirut because her papers were lost, worked as a seamstress at a dry cleaner’s. They liked to say his father was dead but sightings of him continued to surface, making dignity hard; he’d be spotted buying baklava in Glendale or driving an airport taxi on the 405. Arik had an eight-year-old brother whom he both adored and abhorred; both of them were bound by embarrassment and pity for their mother, a hirsute bowling ball of a woman who pickled her own root vegetables and spoke with an impenetrable accent. Their living room, he said, was crowded with other people’s suits and gowns that his mother brought home to alter while she watched Lebanese soap operas and wept.
In one of the final sessions of the summer, Mr. Z kicked Workshop up a notch. He wanted Arik and Rosemary to talk about their most private desires. Nothing would be too profane, he stressed. They must learn to channel their insecurities into narrative art.
As usual, they sat cross-legged on the floor, in a small circle facing one another. Circles represented openness and community, Mr. Z liked to say. But with just three people, the shape they formed was in fact a triangle.
Mr. Z gave Arik’s shoulder an encouraging tap. “We don’t judge here. We share. Now, tell us what you want, tell us what you need . . . and remember that wants and needs are two separate things.”
Arik cleared his throat self-consciously and tilted his head from side to side to loosen his neck.
“I was having another one of my feuds with my mother . . .” He paused, looking sheepish.
“Feuds are fun,” nodded Mr. Z. “We are nothing without conflict. Go on.”
“As much as she disses my dad, I can’t help but miss him,” Arik mumbled. “I can’t get over how somebody who seemed so normal and so there, could just disappear like that, like some kind of a ghost . . . But then I realized it’s not my dad that I’m missing but, you know, like, a conceptual dad?” Arik found his groove and began to let go, stretching his
long legs out and letting his voice rise with his emotions. “I realized that the thing I’ve been wanting and needing all my life is somebody who could tell me which bands were cool in the eighties and what books to read and how to dress . . . all that stuff. My dad, when he was still around, never even played catch with me, he didn’t know shit about American sports . . . I want, I guess, a cultural dad. And I need, I guess, a positive male role model, someone to impose their tastes on me so I can rebel against them. Right now I have nothing to rebel against . . . My mom is fine with everything I do because she doesn’t know anything.”
When he was done, he looked at Mr. Z for approval, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down as he swallowed and waited. Mr. Z blinked slowly, then shook his head with a wry smile.
“Come on, you can’t be serious,” he said, not unfriendly. “Those are your wants and needs?”
Arik looked genuinely wounded. “Are they not good enough?”
“In this day and age, when you can get anything your heart desires, anything, and all you want is dear ol’ Daddy?” Mr. Z laughed. “Come on, Sweet Prince. Dig deeper.”
In a quiet voice, Arik said: “I thought you said there’d be no judgment in the Safe Room.”
“Well,” Mr. Z scratched his chin, “I’m speechless. I truly am.” An unnatural pause. “What about you, Rose? What do you desire?”
Rosemary gazed downward demurely. “I think I’ll take the Fifth on that.”
Mr. Z looked at his two acolytes, with their lowered heads, and sighed.
“All right. I feel like I owe you both an apology. I wrongly assumed that we were more comfortable with ourselves than we are. I wrongly thought we’d get to the Truth.”
“But I was saying the truth,” Arik objected, still wounded.
Mr. Z refused to meet his eye. “Now that we’ve reached a certain understanding, I’d like to inform you that next week we’re going to start you two kissing. That’s right, each other.” He caught the kids exchanging a look. “Look, we can’t have star-crossed lovers in our play who, when they finally get together, only want to hold hands and listen to Coldplay. Come on, people! When real soul mates hook up, you can’t tear them apart. That’s how I want you two to be.”