by Ronald Malfi
“You are still thinking,” Isabella said. “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nicholas,” she went on. “Why is it men always say they are thinking of nothing?”
“Why is it women always ask what we’re thinking?” he quipped.
She laughed. “I like that. I like you calling me woman.”
“I didn’t call you woman.”
“It sounds so much like an animal pet name.”
“I didn’t…”
But she had already turned away from him, humming to herself. It was difficult now to tell if Isabella was paying more attention to him or Claxton’s CD. She moved away from the edge of the cliff and spoke half into the wind so that he had to strain to hear all her words…
She said, “Sometimes I think the meaning of life is to run through a succession of ideologies, trying each one on like a new pair of shoes. Slip, slip, slip. We are like Cinderella that way. Yes? And when you finally find the right one, the one that fits, you die.”
“That’s a hell of a reward.”
“I would think so. Why would it not be a reward?”
“Death?” he said. “Death is a reward?”
“Why not? What is so horrible about death? Do you know something I don’t? Did you see death when you were over in Iraq?”
He thought, not saying anything…then laughed. When Isabella did not laugh, he said, “Oh. You’re being serious.”
“Whether death is good or bad,” she said, “it is still something. It is still final. There is no more wondering, and no more waiting with death.”
“I feel like I’m waiting,” he said. The words were out of his mouth before he even understood them.
“Stop feeling,” Isabella told him. She crouched in the grass and withdrew the plastic Ziploc bag from her dress. “Feeling gets us in trouble, makes us malcontent. Are you malcontent? Yes, you are. Don’t bother to answer because you are, you are, you are. You sound completely ill with irritation when you speak. It is nearly overwhelming. Now come here.”
“Where?”
“Here,” she said. “Stand in front of me. The wind is coming over the hill. Stand in front of me and block out the wind, Nicholas, will you, please?”
“What are you doing?”
“Just stand for a minute,” she said. “Why do you always require an explanation? Just do it.” She had emptied the cigarette butts into the palm of her hand. From her purse she produced a fresh swatch of rolling paper. Nick stood in front of her, feeling the wind from the ocean at his back, strong and determined and chilling the sweat down his spine, and watched as she unraveled the cigarette butts and packed the tobacco into the fresh slip of rolling paper. She rolled one, licked the flap, and twisted the ends tight. It was not tobacco at all, Nick realized…and Isabella Rosales was not an eccentric fan collecting discarded cigarette butts from her favorite jazz musician. She fished a Zippo from her purse next, lit the end of the joint, inhaled deeply.
“Okay, okay. You don’t have to keep standing there,” she said to him. He was right in front of her, looking down at her hidden now behind a pall of sweet smoke. She held the joint out to him, referred to it as a muggle, and told him to take a puff. He refused. He could smell it and it smelled angry and bittersweet and he refused to touch it. Isabella pushed the joint back between her lips—poked it between her lips—and stood from the ground, brushing the dampness from her legs.
“Tell me more about the war, Nicholas.”
“No.”
“Nicholas…”
“No more,” he insisted. The stink of the marijuana was making his head spin. “Tell me something about photography instead,” he said because he suddenly could not think of anything else to say.
“You are such a man,” she told him, “with all your lines.”
“My lines?”
“Your fancy pickup lines.”
“No lines,” he said. “Just talk.”
“Photography fools your mind,” she said without missing a beat. “You can take any reality and make it better, if you want. Or worse, too, I suppose. How did you frig up your arm, my Nicholas?”
“A wall fell on it.”
“And it broke the bone?”
“In six places. Crushed my hand, too.”
“So they operated? There was surgery?”
“Several surgeries. There are metal plates and screws in the bone.”
“That is fantastic. You’re half robot. You’re, like—what is the word? You are, like, bionic.”
“Well, no, not exactly.”
“Bionic is the word?”
“No, I’m not bionic.”
“It hurts?”
“Sometimes, yes. But I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Talking about it doesn’t make you a hero.”
“I don’t care about that…”
“You do,” she said. “I can tell. You hate to be the hero. What the hell is that all about, anyway?”
“I just don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
“Malcontent,” she said back.
Sometime later, Goat-Man Claxton appeared as a dark shape on the horizon, strutting up the incline of the hillside and backlit by the sodium lights of the Club Potemkin. He looked like someone ambling out of a dream. The CD player was going through the last track of Mephistopheles: a number, Isabella had at one point enlisted Nick to know, titled “Slippage” which concerned itself with Claxton’s nearly fatal addiction to heroin—what Isabella called junk—when he was just twelve years old. Sounding like a schizophrenic’s cocaine nightmare, there were a lot of horns and a lot of drums and not much else.
Isabella had already set up her equipment. She hadn’t turned on any of the lights, though; like Stonehenge, they had been erected in a semicircle where they stood, like flowers thinly-stalked and top heavy. Claxton arrived on the wind, smelling vaguely of alcohol and cigarette smoke. Out from beneath the stage lights, he looked even younger than he had originally appeared. Nick wondered if he was even eighteen years old.
“Hey, you were really terrific tonight, man,” Nick said hurriedly.
Claxton eyed him—cold-stared him. He had deep, black eyes, both physically and spiritually.
“Who the crumb?” Claxton said to Isabella, his eyes still on Nick.
“My assistant.”
“We ain’t talked ’bout no assistant,” Claxton said. “He the boogie man?”
“He’s going to help me with the lighting,” Isabella said. “Nicholas,” she said, louder. “Nicholas, come here and hook these lights together.”
Nick stepped around the cords and plugged the lights together. The power switch was on the back housing of one of the lamps, but he did not turn it on. He watched Claxton, cool in his loose-fitting shirt and tight-fitting jeans, meander over to the portable CD player, hover just briefly above it in an exercise of incredible balance…then drop a single finger on it, turning it off.
“Ain’t no boundaries wit’ jazz,” Claxton said, talking to the portable CD player. “You get it sexed, do it all so fine and good, then do it even better till y’all feel just ’bout good’s y’all ever goan feel. You dig?”
Claxton stood, thin black arms akimbo, long-fingered hands on his hips. He turned and stared at Nick.
“You dig?” the jazzman repeated.
“Sure,” Nick said.
“You goan be kind to the Goat, boogie man? You goan write me up real nice? I fractured the whole scene tonight, boogie man. You catch that?”
“I don’t…” Nick began. He glanced in Isabella’s direction, but she was busy with her camera now and was not interested in looking at him.
“You catch how I fractured that whole scene, boogie man?”
“I don’t un—”
“Question is, crumb: you dig the Goat-Man for real-like, or you jus’ posturing? You dig the voice of the claxophone, or you jus’ some out-to-lunch cat in it fo’ the scratch?”
“He thinks y
ou’re with the press, writing a review,” Isabella said finally.
“I’m not the press,” he told Claxton, recalling what the large Hispanic man back at the Club Potemkin had said to him.
“You ain’t come to see the Goat-Man thinkin’ you goan see no sugar band. That yo’ fault, not the Goat’s. You dig? That fo’ sure.”
“I’m not the press,” he said again.
“Yeah, you the assistant. I heard. Right on.”
Nick started to laugh. Isabella looked up sharply, first at Nick then at Russell “Goat-Man” Claxton, then at Nick again. He could not stop laughing. Claxton had been playing with him and he could not stop laughing. Claxton himself only stared at him as well, those intense little eyes unmoving and unfeeling…and then he, too, broke into a wide, toothy grin, and started to laugh. The sound of Claxton’s laughter was not unlike the sound of his music: steady, confident, yet too rambunctious to settle on any particular straightaway for an extended amount of time. It was up-and-down, a seismograph printout in C-major.
“Hey,” Nick said, “how do you play those two notes at the same time like that?”
Claxton stopped laughing. Isabella continued watching them, her eyes volleying back and forth between the two.
“What?” Nick said. “What?”
“You down,” Claxton said to him, nodding, then pulled his tee-shirt up over his head. His chest was birdlike and hairless and black as night. His nipples were tiny charcoal discs, the texture of which resembled the coagulated film atop day-old pudding. Claxton tossed his shirt in a ball on the ground. He kicked off his boots then, too, and each one thumped on the wet grass. Squatting, Claxton pressed both his hands flat on the wet earth, tilted his head slightly back on his neck, gingerly closed his eyes. It appeared as though the jazzman was smiling—though if he was, it was such a subtle gesture that it could hardly be catalogued as one. With his eyes still closed, he began moving his hands slowly overtop the wet grass. His fingers splayed, each one moving independently and machinelike, he drummed a soundless beat into the grass. Then he paused, his eyes still closed, the ghost-like smile still haunting his lips, and he pressed two long, tar-colored fingers straight into the earth. He pushed them down easily enough, as the soil was still wet from the storm, and pushed them down straight to the final knuckles. Nick found himself mesmerized. Claxton’s face was the most unconcerned face he had ever looked upon. He tried to imagine Claxton in Iraq—Claxton in war—and found such an image was impossible to conjure. Claxton would never find himself in war; at any such prompt, he would simply dematerialize into nothingness, leaving a streak of vertical heat-waves in his wake never to be seen from again.
Claxton withdrew his fingers from the soil. Nick noted something white and wriggling in the jazzman’s hand—something he had pulled from the earth. It was a cicada, he realized, albino and not fully ripe. Roughly the size of a human thumb, the insect thrummed and buzzed between Claxton’s fingers, its collection of whitish legs stirring the air. Nick was close enough to see its beady red eyes.
“I can feel the music,” Claxton mused as the critter buzzed between his dark fingers. “Yeah…yeah…yeah…oh, yeah…”
“That’s amazing,” Nick heard himself say. His own voice sounded very far away.
“All music amazing, crumb,” said Claxton. “Right on.” And he lifted the cicada up to his face. For one horrific moment, Nick thought the jazzman was going to ingest the creature—but at the last second, Claxton, cocking his head back on his neck again, placed the insect directly on the surface of his wide-bridged nose. Slowly, as if not to frighten the insect, Claxton pulled his hand away. It was like watching a balancing act of sorts.
A succession of snapshots exploded behind Nick; he whirled around and was partially blinded by an attacking flashbulb. Isabella, behind the camera, started laughing. She opened her mouth wide when she laughed.
“I should move,” Nick said, stepping out of the semicircle of erected lights. “I should get out of the way.”
“You could never be in the way, Nicholas,” Isabella said. She snapped a single photograph of him. Silver magnolias bloomed before his eyes. “Oh, my broken Nicholas…”
He retreated into darkness. When his eyes fell again on Claxton, the cicada was gone. So were Claxton’s pants. The jazzman had removed all his clothing and stood, now stark naked and as black as a midnight oil slick, across from Nick and half hidden under the darkness of night. The sight jarred Nick; he could only stare and not look away.
All he could say was, “Oh—”
“Step into the light, lovely,” Isabella said. For the briefest moment, Nick thought she was talking to him. But then Claxton, tar-black and with a nearly hairless body, stepped into the center of Isabella’s lights. She began shooting photographs. Claxton did not smile and did not even open his eyes. He moved lithely, sinuously, clasping his hands together at one point and rotating his arms back over his head. His long, dark, sybaritic body seemed to elongate. His black skin was taut over xylophone ribs—his black seal’s body. Hands still up over his head, he pushed his head forward on his neck, his long neck, and managed to lift his right foot off the ground. The leg bent at a curious angle. Claxton’s right foot seemed forever long, his toes like enormous peach-colored pearls. He balanced that way for what seemed like an eternity. There was a strong wind at the crest of the hillside where the three of them stood, but it did not seem to have any influence on Claxton; he remained balancing on one foot, deeply breathing, hardly breathing, his eyes still closed and his wide lips not smiling. Isabella’s flashbulbs exploded over and over again, the light briefly igniting Claxton’s black skin, over and over making him look like a skeleton. In fact, Nick thought he could almost see completely through him each time the flashbulb went off.
Claxton rotated slowly at the waist, his arms still over his head, his right leg still awkwardly bent. For a split second, Nick thought the jazzman was going to lift his left leg, too. And he would have floated in the air—Nick had no doubt.
A ghost, he thought; a phantom.
“You are a beautiful monster,” Isabella whispered. There was a malicious laughter in her voice. She moved in circles, powered by her art, fueled by it, snapping photograph after photograph after photograph. “Nicholas—is he not a beautiful monster?”
Nick only watched as another flashbulb, like a strike of lightning, illuminated the dark nest of pubic hair between Claxton’s legs; the Goat-Man’s genitals—lightning-lit, there and then gone—resembled the neck of a goose.
Suddenly he was dizzy. He felt the world tilt to one side, attempting to shake him off into space. Legs rubbery, he felt himself slide down toward the ground, dumped into the wet grass. He had hardly drank at all and he hadn’t done anything more but inhale the recycled marijuana’s secondhand smoke…yet he felt as though he had been struck severely at the base of his head with a baton, just where his head greeted his neck. In his ears rang the incessant shudder of Isabella’s camera and the din of her laughter. His vision blurred and became pixilated. Looking up, he attempted to lock eyes on Goat-Man Claxton’s stoic form, as the jazzman was the only fixed point he could find at that moment, in an attempt to prevent the world from continuing to spin out of control. But even that did not help. Each time Isabella snapped a photograph, the ghost-like white glow that fell over Claxton’s body was nearly seizure-inducing.
Something happened over in Iraq, was all he could surmise. Some agent has gotten into your brain, into your bloodstream. It is a poison and a ruining agent and something that has been slowly eating away at you since you set foot back on American soil. It is just now showing up. You will die here on this island. You will die here.
It was Myles Granger’s voice.
In his mind’s eye, he saw young Granger as clear as day: his body covered in a yellow powder, his legs soaked a deep brown-black with blood, his face pressed, not moving, into the sand. Around young Granger, the dust was still settling. The greasy, burnt smell of gunfire still clung t
o the air. And suddenly Nick was no longer on the island and no longer on the hill in the middle of the night—suddenly he was back there in broad daylight, half delirious from the searing pain that coursed up his right arm, his own mouth and throat dry and filled with dust, suddenly not sure if he was dead or alive…and if he was alive, for how much longer? He tried to move—couldn’t. He tried to turn his head and found that, yes, that was all he could do, all he could move. Something was on him. Something had fallen on him. He tried to shift his legs. They shifted. His eyes, though, could not move: he could not remove them from Myles Granger.
And that sound, that voice…
Lieuten—
But he was on the island, in the grass, in the dark.
“My poor, funny Nicholas,” Isabella sang.
And his memories now were as faint and as hopeless as the ghosts of children.
—Chapter VIII—
Later, back in the hotel room, all was black and timeless. In the darkness he could hear Emma’s breathing in bed. It was not the deep, untroubled breathing of someone asleep. He did not say anything and did not turn on the light. Instead, he went directly to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the shower. Stripped out of his clothes, he sat on the edge of the tub. The water was cold and would not get warm. The entire hotel could not get warm. Not since the storm came. Sitting there, he could not stop thinking of Iraq. It was because of Isabella, and all the damn talk of war. He could not stop thinking of Iraq and he could not stop thinking of Emma, either. Both things had become connected in some ubiquitous mental ceremony and he found he could not separate the two. Wetly, his thoughts slipped into one another. He could not separate them. And he could not stop thinking, either. Why couldn’t he stop? Why couldn’t God be kind for once and just allow him to stop? It was all here in his mind and in his soul, and he could not shake any of it. He recalled the Iraqi children. Passively, the children had watched as he and the rest soldiered into the village. Most of the children mastered ways of disappearing, of slinking away rat-like. Those who remained were sentinels of the refuse of their village—protectors of all the unwanted things that defined their lives and the lives of their families and now defined only the war—their souls depleted, their faces taxidermic, vacuous, undead. These children would sometimes peer around corners or out of gaping, toothless portals carved along the bombed alleyways. They buzzed around you like flies. He remembered standing ankle-deep in crushed debris and burnt sawdust, the expressions on the faces of the children who remained (when expressions were in attendance) flushed with a confusion of mistrust and false hope. A film of powder had textured the air, and a rising conical of black smoke defined the horizon. Everything was gray and like bone. Myles Granger had attempted to befriend a piss-scared, shaking mongrel: a hand extended, the mongrel snapped at it and hobbled brokenly away. (In the sand behind it, the creature left asterisks of black, diseased blood.) And the whole village smelled of disease. He’d witnessed dead children, injured children. He did not feel sorry for them. He couldn’t. To feel sorry was a weakness none of them could afford. Feeling sorry could get you killed. As Karuptka had been fond of saying, “Kids here would eat an American kid alive.” Pitying others was signing your own death warrant. But it wasn’t difficult to avoid feeling sorry, they had found; not really. Because to feel sorry also required a sense of reciprocated empathy, and he knew that did not exist. It was an unspoken universal understanding, even with the children of the village—that here loomed death, black and inevitable for some, stark and capering and not hiding, and that was just the way it was, and no one expected anything to be different. The soldiers certainly knew it. And the civilians had been raised to adopt notions of militia from youth, so they certainly knew it, too. The children knew it as well. In fact, the children probably knew it better than anyone, because it was all they had ever known. They should have been so lost and frightened and confused, but they weren’t, and that only confirmed that they knew it better than anyone.