Kumbaya, Space Hippie

by Paul Neuhaus

  I glanced briefly from Jack to the Wiener house. Suddenly, being with Elijah was the better option. It hadn’t even occurred to me this awkward scene might take place, but I was off my game. Since Jack lived in the little house next-door to El’s, I should’ve expected to see him.

  Jack knew about Hope from the old days, so he wasn’t surprised when she interjected. “Hey, Jack,” she said.

  Jack brightened even more—which was a neat trick. Even when he was professing his undying love to you (and waiting for you to reciprocate), he was generally sunny. “Hope!” he said. “My god, Hope, I didn’t notice you there. God, it’s good to see you! What has it been, fifteen years? You know, I always liked you. You were always the yin to Dora’s yang. You always rounded off the edges. I wish I had a yin. I never had a yin. You really should look for people that’re different than you to be your friends. They can be strong where you’re weak, and you can be strong where they’re weak. That way, together, the two of you can almost make one whole person. That’s how I’ve always thought about it. I don’t think anyone’s complete. We’re all partial, if you know what I mean. It’s integrating with others that fills us out. Does that make sense?”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Hope said. “In fact, I agree with you. Here’s the thing, though… Dora’s been sick. She’s been laid-up at the house for a good while. Hasn’t had any visitors. Hasn’t really gotten out much. Now this thing with Keri’s come up, and she feels like she’s gotta pitch in. Even though she’s not a hundred percent. She’s too polite to say it, but I’ll say it for her: she’s not up for any serious talks right now. All she wants to do is find Keri and go back to bed. Maybe score a little chicken soup.”

  Jack rolled his head and adopted an aren’t-I-a-doofus expression. “God, look at me, prattling on and on about nothing with you sick and trying to do work. Derp. Of course, of course. Go. Do what you gotta do. We’ll talk later.”

  I nodded, a little dumbfounded. I muttered, “Okay, Jack. Thanks, Jack.” I threw in an affected cough to sell the lie.

  As we walked away from him toward Elijah and Keri’s, he said, “You take care now. Vitamin C! Get some vitamin C!”

  Once we were out of earshot, I muttered to Hope over my shoulder, “Gods, thank you. I thought I was hosed.”

  “You’re welcome. Although I wanna point out that Jack is a really nice man, and you owe him a follow-up.”

  “Like I don’t know…” I replied wearily.

  I had to knock three times at El’s house. When he finally came to the door, his hair was tousled, and he had a day’s worth of stubble. He could barely keep his eyes open. “Huh?” he said.

  “Why’re you sleeping? It’s the middle of the day.”

  “Probably because I didn’t sleep in the middle of the night. Or the beginning or the end of the night either. I’m worried. I’m really, really worried.”

  I stared at him, trying to puzzle out where his head was. Some kind of action—any kind of action—would’ve been better than sleep. For a moment, I thought he wasn’t worth helping, but I remembered I wasn’t there for him. “Get dressed. I know where Keri is.”

  He awoke in an instant. Had he been waiting around for someone to come and rescue him? The thought made me nauseous. He got out of the way, allowing me to enter. “Hang out here,” he said. “I’ll be ready in two seconds.” Then he ran up the stairs to his bedroom.

  While I waited, I looked around. The foyer was just as I’d seen it last with one exception. All of the photos of Addie had been taken down. I guess finding out your wife/mother is a petty Vengeance Goddess didn’t sit well with the Wieners. I barely had enough time to process the woman’s absence before El reappeared. He was wearing the same t-shirt. He’d just changed out of his sweats and into jeans. He hadn’t combed his hair. “Where is she? How’d you find her? What changed since I talked to you?”

  “She showed up.”

  “She showed up? At your place? Why? How’d she look? Was she okay?”

  “I’m not gonna lie to you: She didn’t look good. That haircut doesn’t suit her. Also, she looked like she was drugged up. And not in a good way. She came to steal. She tried to steal Hope, but she dropped her. She got away with my magic pinecone and my bass guitar.”

  Elijah tried to take all of that in. “You have a magic pinecone?”

  “I did. Not anymore. I’ll tell you about it on the way.” I turned and opened the door for us both.

  As we stepped out onto the front porch, my ex- said, “When did you take up the bass?”

  “I didn’t. It’s a replica of the Gene Simmons KISS bass.”

  He nodded as he locked his door. “That’s cool. What does Keri want with Hope and a magic pinecone and a Gene Simmons bass?”

  I got into my side of the Firebird and reached over to unlock El’s door. I set Hope on the floor behind me. “I don’t know why she wanted the pinecone. The pithos is super-powerful. I think she took the guitar because it was shiny and neat.”

  “Right. Where we headed?”

  “To get some Greek food.” I set off, angling us toward Las Vegas.

  Unfortunately, since it was Friday, a lot of Angelenos were headed to Las Vegas. On any given weekend there’s a steady stream of cars Sin City-bound. Nonstop and without traffic, the trip takes about five hours. We were only going about halfway, so two and a half. As soon as we got on the highway, I knew it wasn’t going to be two and a half. The panic I felt talking to Jack resurfaced only worse. Jack wanted to be my lover, but Elijah had been my lover fifteen years prior. I gave him sweaty palms and he gave me a flip-flopping belly. So far, I wasn’t taking Hope’s advice very well. I wasn’t treating El as a just a means to an end. I told myself that things only have power over me if I let them, and it was time to let “Power Dora” make her debut. “Power Dora” continued to wait in the wings, still shy of the spotlight. Finally, Wiener broke the silence and his question was just the right level of inane for me to refocus. “What’s a magic pinecone do?” he said.

  “It’s a virtual reality magic pinecone,” I replied.

  That tripped him up. He was trying to visualize what I meant. “You, what, hook a headset to it?”

  “No, it’s an analog virtual reality magic pinecone. If you hold it in your hand, you get transported into a simulation of ancient Greece. Greece the way I remember it from childhood.”

  He nodded. “I gotta be honest with you: That’s way cooler than a Gene Simmons bass guitar.”

  “No argument. But it’s a simulation of ancient Greece the way I remember it with one important difference…”

  “Which is?”

  “It was designed and built for Pan.”

  “Oh.” Elijah had met Pan a few times, so he knew about the satyr’s interests. He sat back for a moment as all the possibilities washed over him. “So, I have to assume…”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s gotta be all kinds of…”

  “Yeah. It’s ancient Greece by way of Larry Flint.”

  “Right. What the hell would Keri want with that?” He said it with just the sort of discomfort you would hope for from a dad worrying about his daughter’s interest in something unsavory.

  “Full disclosure: I did not show the pinecone to Keri at any point. I didn’t even know she was aware of it. In fact, she’d’ve had no reason to be aware of it. Which means she was sent to get it by someone else. Someone from the Church of Reciprocity.”

  “What would a bunch of space hippies want with a sexy pinecone?”

  “Remains to be seen. Also, I wanna backpedal and address why I had the pinecone in the first place. Before you ask.”

  “Okay.” His expression was blank. Based on it, I couldn’t decide whether he’d been about to ask or not. Didn’t matter.

  “Pan didn’t give it to me as a gag gift or, worse, as something he intended for me to use. He gave it to me when he fucked off.”

  His eyes widened. “Pan fucked off? I wouldn’t’ve seen that coming
. He was so… fun-loving. So full of gusto. Pan was sort of disgusting, but I liked him.”

  “Yeah, me too.” That felt weird saying. It also felt weird when I remembered I’d used Pan as a booty call several times. I decided not to mention that part to El. “He got depressed. He felt like his time had gone. He gave me the pinecone, the commemorative Walking Dead plates and a copy of The Great Gatsby.”

  “The Great Gatsby?”

  “Yeah. It was his favorite book.”

  My ex- nodded with respect. “I wouldn’t have expected that. I guess Pan was deeper than I thought.”

  “He was.”

  “You’ve read it, right?”

  My head shrank down into my shoulders. “I never have. I meant to read his copy, but things got weird.”

  “You should read it. It’s really great.”

  We settled back into quiet for a while. I looked out at the sea of cars in front of us. If we could just get outside the city limits, things would open up. I found myself longing for desert vistas. I also wanted one of the kabobs from the Parthenon. I had to remind myself we weren’t going there for chow. A thought struck me, and I reached into my pocket and pulled out the canary yellow flier. I handed it to El.

  “This is where we’re going?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Makes sense. This was a good catch. I’m glad you put this together. But we’re a day early.”

  “Oh, I know. I wanna get the jump on them. Maybe do a little scouting ahead of time.”

  “Right. Can I say something to you? And this is in no way a come-on or anything else designed to make you uncomfortable.”

  Uh-oh. What did that mean? “Um… I guess.”

  “You were always way smarter than me. Seriously, you could’ve been a detective. You’ve got a very clean, logical mind.”

  For no good reason, I decided to be challenging. Belligerence was one of “Power Dora’s defining characteristics. “By that do you mean ‘calculating’?”

  He shook his head. His expression was benign. “No. I don’t. Calculating implies intent. Evil intent. You’re not calculating. Addie was calculating. Calculating was her middle name.” He shifted in his seat, so he was facing me. “There’s something I’m concerned about. I’ll tell you what it is, and you can tell me whether I need to be worried?”

  I shrugged with my elbows since I had my hands on the wheels. “Shoot.”

  “Since my late ex-wife was a demigoddess, that makes my daughter a demigoddess. We all saw her do… crazy, powerful shit. Should I be worried about her being basically kidnapped by a cult? I mean, in her own way, she’s just as valuable a get as your pithos. Do you think they’re aware of what she can do? Do you think they’ll try and exploit her?”

  Oh, shit. Somehow, with everything else going on, I’d lost sight of the fact that Keri was partly divine. Turns out Elijah had a clean, logical mind himself. He was right, of course. He was right to be concerned. I stewed on the problem for a moment and decided not to sugarcoat it. “Yeah. I think maybe you oughta be worried about that. It also adds to the puzzle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think we’re dealing with an organization that, for whatever reason, is aware of Mythnik culture and history. If they sent Keri to raid my trailer—and I think they did—that means they probably know who and what Keri is.”

  Elijah gripped his stomach. El had always gripped his stomach when he was worried. He was a lousy poker player. “What do you think it means? What do you think they’ll do to her?”

  “So far, they haven’t done anything to her. Here’s my best guest: They’ll use her as one of their celebrities.”

  “Celebrities?”

  “Yeah. You know how the Church cultivates celebrity members. They’re great P.R. Show me a better get than a demigoddess.”

  “What good is a demigoddess in a world that doesn’t believe in demigoddesses? Wouldn’t they have to go public? Show the world Mythniks are real in order to utilize Keri in that way?”

  “The thought’d occurred to me. It’s a giant question mark we can’t answer right now.”

  My ex- took his hand off his stomach and we resumed looking at the parking lot beyond my windshield.

  It took us an hour just to get out of Los Angeles. L.A. is a city for the young. You can’t go anywhere without it taking at least double the time it should. I was fine, but Elijah was drowsy as we finally hit the highway. I wove around the other cars and cut the most unobstructed path I could between us and the cult meeting somewhere near Barstow. I found an eclectic radio station and turned up the volume. Back in the days when we were a couple, I was the one that drove the most. El knew talent when he saw it. He also knew I had a tendency to be a front seat driver, so his decision to take himself out of the equation was a good one. He also knew that, when I turned on the radio, it was quiet time. He knew it and Hope knew it too. With a smirk, he violated the longstanding rule by speaking over Van Halen. “We’re done talking now I see.”

  I played the false-innocence card. “We don’t have to be done talking. What did you wanna talk about?”

  “The obvious thing to talk about would be the fact you and I, once upon a time, had an absolutely perfect romantic relationship only I screwed it up and had to marry the other woman. After that, we spent fifteen years apart, but then we came back together when my wife got herself a giant sea monster and killed some bronies. But then she died—under circumstances which are still unclear.”

  I hadn’t told him Keri had been the one that killed Addie. I wasn’t about to bring it up then, so I let him blaze ahead. “After that, with the decks cleared, you told me you weren’t interested in me anymore, and I did the adult thing: I accepted it and gave you your space. But then, when Keri went missing, I saw you’d fallen back into the hermit lifestyle you had between the time I had to break it off and the whole Addie with the sea monster thing. But, again, since I’m doing the adult thing, I didn’t ask you about it. Those are all things we could talk about, but we have an understanding, so we can’t.”

  I gripped the wheel a little tighter. This was exactly the scenario I didn’t want to be in. I got a quick flash of vertigo then tamped it back down. “You know, if we have an understanding about not bringing something up but you bring it up by way of talking about how the understanding works, it’s still bringing it up. That’s called being passive aggressive.”

  He folded his arms in front of his chest. “Right. Which is what you are.”

  I’d had enough of David Lee Roth, so I shut off the radio all together. “Which is what I am? How am I passive aggressive?”

  His eyes flicked to the left then came forward again. He was clearly flashing on the definition of “passive aggressive”. Was he in the right to call me that? He wasn’t sure. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe not passive aggressive, but something. When you shut down a conversation that involves two people without giving the other person a vote, that’s—well, I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s not good.”

  I shook my head vigorously. “No. Uh uh. If Addie hadn’t died, we wouldn’t’ve been in that room together, poised to have a talk we had no business having. Your wife dying wasn’t a good enough reason to wake sleeping dogs.”

  “You lost me. What better reason would there have been than having Addie finally out of the picture?”

  “Because it assumes I was just waiting around for Addie to keel over. It assumes that, as soon as she dropped dead, I’d just step over her body and into your life. It assumes, I had nothing better to do than wait for your sorry ass.”

  “But you didn’t have anything better to do! Fifteen years alone in a trailer kind of bears me out!”

  I cut the wheel hard, pulling the Firebird onto the right roadside. “Get out,” I said.

  He realized he’d gone too far. “‘Get out?’ I can’t get out. What about Keri?”

  Our eyes were locked for a long time. Mine shot daggers. His reluctantly absorbed them. I put the car in gear a
gain and merged with traffic.

  Elijah sighed. “Alright. That was out of line. And I’m not just saying that because I don’t wanna get dumped by the side of the road. Here’s the thing that I wanted to say before I got pissy and said what I shouldn’t have: You took away my agency.”

  “I took away your agency? What’re you some kind of crazy, left-wing college professor? Speak plainly.”

  He gripped his stomach again. “All I meant was you took away my turn. I deserved the right to say what I wanted to say, and you robbed me of that. I don’t mean you had to go along with whatever shit came out of my mouth, but you did owe me the chance to say it. It would’ve been… the civil thing to do.”

  I nodded vigorously. “You’re right. It would’ve been the civil thing to do. You know what else is a civil thing to do?”

  He cut me off since he knew exactly what I was going to say. “Not tripping and winding up with your dick in a waitress’ vagina?”

  “Correct.”

  His voice grew quieter. “Dora, I was miserable too. The entire time. The whole fifteen years. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  “No. Not at all. It counts for nothing. Whether you were unhappy, or you were so ecstatic you could shit, it doesn’t factor in. It doesn’t take away from the fact you made a choice. In retrospect, it might seem to you it was the wrong choice and you paid the price for it, but that doesn’t entitle you to anything. You’re looking at it like you did your time in jail and now you want society to greet you again with open arms. Society isn’t obligated to say, ‘Get in here, you! Give us a hug!’ Society can totally say, ‘Look, we still don’t trust you because you murdered all those nuns, so don’t expect to be invited to the… ice cream socials.’”

  “You’re Society in this scenario?”

  “I am Society. Yes.”

  “Let me say something—for myself without you saying it for me: I was not looking at it like I’d done my time in jail and I was owed something. I wanted to have the talk because I still loved you. I never stopped loving you even while I was putting up with my weird, belligerent wife. I wanted to tell you that, I never got the chance, and I was pissed. But I never thought me telling you would fix everything. Not at all.”