The Mythniks Saga

by Paul Neuhaus

  “I can see how that’d be troubling.”

  “No doubt.” By then we’d walked up the front lawn and come to the door. Wiener knocked. “I have a key, but I don’t like to use it,” she said. “Fruit loop or not, a man has a right to his privacy.”

  “You’re queer for the fourth amendment.”

  “You’re queer for the fourth amendment.”

  It might’ve gone on like that if Jack hadn’t opened the door. I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years either, but he also looked more or less the same. Which is to say he looked more or less the same as Elijah. The men were identical twins. Except Jack had gotten the differentiator he so desperately needed. He had a crater in his forehead roughly the diameter and depth of a baseball. When I saw it, I cried out. Keri said a “sorry I should’ve warned you” out of the side of her mouth, but Jack was unfazed by any of it. “Dora!” he said. He rushed out onto the porch and pulled me in for a hug. A very heartfelt, very sustained hug.

  After what I’m sure was a full minute, I said, “It’s great to see you too, Jackie.”

  Finally, he released me, nodded to Keri and said, “Come in, come in.”

  He ushered us inside and I was taken aback by the orderliness of his place. It was like a surveying crew had laid out every aspect of the living room. Everything was at right angles to everything else even the little knickknacks on the end tables.

  The elder Wiener caught me looking. “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t like this before the, you know, the thing.” He pointed to the divot in his head as if I didn’t know what he was talking about. “That foul ball... It slammed a love of geometry into me. A love for precision. I’m OCD by way of SHT.”

  “‘SHT’?”

  “Severe Head Trauma.”

  “I wish I had a smattering of whatever it is you’ve got. My place is a dump.”

  Jack smiled a smile that was a little two wide. I started to notice how everything about him was... off. His movements, his expressions. It was like a robot slowly learning to be human. “You’re here about Elijah, aren’t you?” he said, sitting down on the couch and indicating I should do the same. I did. (He’d lost interest in Keri, so she sat down in a chair facing us.)

  “I am,” I replied. “Keri says he’s missing. She also said you said I was uniquely qualified to find him.”

  Jack suddenly remembered his niece was in the room. He turned to her. “Did I say that?”

  The younger Wiener nodded. “Words to that effect, yeah.”

  Jack turned back to me. “Well, there you go. If you guys say I said it, I must’ve said it. You know I live next-door to Elijah and he never goes anywhere. This is the longest stretch I’ve spent not seeing him since... Well, since we came out of the womb. It’s weird. It’s... what’s the word?”

  I looked back and forth between the niece and the uncle. “I dunno... unsettling?”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “Discombobulating?”

  “No.”

  “Upsetting?”

  “No.”

  “Confusing?”

  “No.”

  “Disquieting?”

  “No.”

  “Worrying?”

  “No.”

  “Distressing?”

  “No.”

  “Um... Angst-inducing?”

  “No.”

  “Perturbing?”

  “No.”

  “Frightening?”

  “No.”

  “Alarming?”

  “No.”

  “Flustering?”

  “No.”

  “Distracting?”

  “No.”

  “Scary?”

  “No.”

  “Rattling?”

  “No.”

  “Ruffling?”

  “No.”

  “Confounding?”

  “No.”

  “Debilitating?”

  “No.”

  “Agitating?”

  “No.”

  “Disheartening?”

  “No. Wait, what was the first one you said?”

  I had to think back. “Unsettling?”

  “Yeah. That one. It’s unsettling.”

  I sighed, more out of exhaustion than anger. “Okay, Jackie.”

  Jack nodded. In some ways, he was the guy I remembered. He’d spent a lot of time together with Elijah and I back in the day. I always took him to be sweet and well-meaning, but also sad. That guy was still in there behind the dented cranium. “I remember now.”

  “Remember what?”

  “Telling Keri she should get you to find El. I remember telling her that.”

  “Well, sure. She had to get it from somewhere, am I right?”

  He laughed as if I’d just told the funniest joke ever. Partway in, he burst into tears. Full-on traumatic tears where he put his face in his hands and his head in his lap. He was convulsing by the time Keri and I got to him. (I leaned in, putting my arm around his shoulders and Keri got up and sat down on his other side.) He was talking but the words were incoherent around the sobs.

  “Oh, hey, hey, hey, Jackie, Jackie, Jackie, what’s wrong?” Even though I was weirded out by the circumstances, I was still moved by the despair of an old friend.

  Keri put her hand on her uncle’s back and said. “It’s okay, uncle Jack. Find your words. Find your words.”

  The elder Wiener said something but, again, it was muffled by his crying (and the fact his face was buried in his lap).

  “Is this about Elijah? Don’t worry. Keri and I’ll find him. We’ll find him as fast as we can.”

  Jack shook his head no. It wasn’t about Elijah?

  “Uncle Jack, if you want us to help you, you’re gonna have to sit up and tell us what the problem is. We can’t help you if we don’t know what the problem is.”

  The man nodded into his own lap. That made sense to him. He sat up and rubbed the tears out of his swollen eyes. He looked as despondent as anyone I’d ever seen. It took him a while to catch his breath and regain his composure. Keri rubbed his back the whole time. Finally, Jack found his words. “You’re here for Elijah?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “You’re always here for Elijah.”

  Keri and I shared a glance. “What do you mean, Jackie?”

  “You... were always here for Elijah, but I loved you too. I loved you as much as he did only I never got to say it. I loved you, but he got to you first, and then he pissed it away. Knocking up a tramp waitress from the Polo Club. And I never even got to see you again even though I didn’t do anything wrong. And then... after this...” he pointed again to the divot left by the foul ball. “After this, I wasn’t even a good catch anymore.”

  The teenaged girl stood and, her eyes bugging out, she said, “I’ll wait outside.”

  When Keri was gone, I returned my eyes to Jack. I felt like the floor had dropped out from underneath me. It sounded like my old friend and I had spent the last decade moving in similar directions. “Jack. You’re still a good catch. You were always kind and sincere, and I can see you still are. I... I’ve been in a funk for a while. A good long while. And then, out of the blue, Keri shows up on my doorstep and asks me to help find a man I haven’t seen in fifteen years. I was...”

  “Unsettled?” he said with a smile.

  I returned the grin. “Yes. Unsettled is exactly the right word. And I haven’t acclimated to the... unsettledness yet. I’m still all like, ‘Whoa, what is happening here?’”

  “And I’m not helping,” he replied, running the back of his right hand under each of his eyes.

  “No. Don’t think of it like that. You didn’t say what you said to throw me. You said what you said because you felt it. I respect that. I could learn from that. Will you... let me process this? I feel like we should talk again, but right now I don’t have my feet underneath me.”

  He smiled again. “Okay,” he said. “You’ll remember where I live, right?”

  As I stood, I bent and kissed the to
p of his head. To the side of the divot. “I’ll remember where you live.”

  When I got back outside, Keri was there. She looked curious but chose not to broach the subject of Jack’s confession. Thank the gods for small favors. “What now?” she said.

  “Is anybody home at your house?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “What about your mom? Where is she?”

  “Vegas. She goes to Vegas twice a month.”

  Another small favor. If I went to my long-delayed grave without ever meeting Addie, it’d be a good thing. “Does your dad have an office?”

  “A home office? Yeah.”

  “Okay. We’re gonna search it.”

  The girl was taken aback. “Search his office? I would never do that. Isn’t that like a civil rights violation?”

  “You really are queer for the fourth amendment.”

  As we crossed from one lawn to the other, I noticed Beardie was still watching us from the 3 Series. I did my best not to flip him off. “Elijah told you he found magic," I said. "Real magic, and he didn’t have to wish anymore. What do you think he meant?”

  “I don’t know,” Keri said. “As goofy as he is, he usually doesn’t talk like that. In riddles, I mean. He was completely sincere when he said it. He was like a little kid. You know how you can tell when a little kid is lying? Well, there’s the opposite of that, too. You can always tell when a little kid is being straight. They haven’t developed their poker faces yet, so whatever they’re feeling shines through. Pops was like that when he said it. I shrugged it off at the time, and then he went missing. Just him saying that got me thinking; thinking and worrying. I mean I woulda been concerned anyway if he went missing for three days without saying that, but him saying it added to the strangeness. I thought he might’ve been talking metaphorically. About a woman. That kinda ties in with my affair theory.”

  The girl opened the front door of her home, and immediately I felt weird. I felt like I was in a place I didn’t belong. A place that’d been built up over the last decade and a half in my involuntary absence. There were pictures on the wall. Pictures of Elijah and Addie. Of Elijah and Addie and Keri. Of just Keri. I hugged myself. “Does your mom know Elijah is missing?”

  Keri’s mood darkened. “Addie doesn’t know much of anything. Excepting of course Addie.”

  “So, you and your mom’re pretty tight.”

  The teenager pointed at me and said, “Sarcasm.“ Then she shifted back to the matter at hand. “Look, I don’t see any reason not to be straight with you. Addie’s human wreckage. She’s like a grifter, sizing up every situation, looking for the angle. I’d say she’s like some kind of hustler robot, but that implies she’s flat and emotionless. She’s not emotionless. She’s a walking raw nerve. A bag of hormones with a hair trigger.”

  I grinned. “Keri, if I’m gonna help you, you’re gonna half to stop sugarcoating the pill. Give it to me straight, girl.”

  She actually laughed. “I guess we must look like a real shit show to you. The Wieners, I mean.”

  “No, you look human.”

  The girl cocked her head. “Are you human?”

  “Yeah, I’m human. What do you mean?”

  “Don’t get offended. You know why I’m asking. You say you’re human, but, according to local legend, you’re thousands of years old and you catch evil spirits in a magic jug.”

  “That... is true. But all that was just bad luck. I had a hex put on me and it complicated my life. Apart from that, I’m as human as you are.”

  “Debatable,” Keri said with a smile. “Even if you take out the curse part, you’re still eight inches taller and you look like a pleasingly plump Monica Bellucci.”

  “Not my fault. If you like this particular look, try getting born Mediterranean next time.”

  “Should we get started on our warrantless search and seizure?”

  “Yeah. Where’s this office of Elijah’s?”

  “Come on,” Wiener said, and she led me up the steps to the second floor.

  A bath and three bedrooms, one for mom and pop, one for Keri, and one kept as an office. The door was shut and there was a traffic sign hung on it. “No Trespassing,” it said. Just the kind of accent you’d expect on a tween boy’s room. My guide took me to the office and put her hand on the doorknob. “I have never been through this door. I have no idea what’s inside. If we find mangled bodies or something, you can’t testify in court. I won’t let you. I have a low center of gravity and I’m mean. You may be bigger than me, but I think I can take you.”

  I grinned. “I believe you. Do you think Addie’s ever been in here?”

  “No. And it isn’t out of respect. It’s out of a complete lack of interest. Again, if it doesn’t help Addie, Addie doesn't care.” Keri turned the knob and opened the door. Which revealed not mangled bodies but another door. The office had a teeny tiny little vestibule. Elijah really was serious about his privacy. After she opened the second door, Keri clearly wished there had been mangled bodies. She was mortified by what we found. I was just dumbfounded.

  The walls were covered with pastel-colored ponies with huge eyes. Cardboard pastel ponies hung by strings from the ceiling creating pony mobiles. Plush pastel ponies stared back at us from wooden shelves. It was hard to find a square inch of space that wasn’t occupied by a pastel pony. “What the fuck?” I said.

  Keri plopped down on the leather couch against the right wall. She put her chin in her hands and looked stricken.

  “What is all this?”

  “Apparently my dad is a brony.”

  She might as well’ve said, “My dad is ham sandwich with provolone” for all the good it did me. “What is a brony?” I said, turning my head here and there to take in the brightly-colored equine tableau.

  The teenager sighed a full-bodied sigh. “There’s this show. It’s a show for little kids. For little girls, actually. It’s called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. They put it on, expecting to, I don’t know, grab the pre-teen chick audience and sell some merch, only something weird happened. All these dudes started watching it. And, by that, I mean dude dudes. Old dudes. Like twenty- and thirty-something dudes. They started gathering online and then meeting in person and they’d talk about how they loved ‘My Little Pony’, and they bought dolls, and they wore t-shirts, and they cosplayed. It’s fucking bizarre, but I assure you, it’s a real thing. I heard about them online, and then I watched this documentary about them, and I remember thinking, ‘Man, these are some broken-ass motherfuckers. Only now, my dad is one of them and, I gotta tell you, I’m shook.”

  I tried to reassure her. “Maybe you’re jumping to conclusions. Maybe this isn’t what you think.”

  Keri bugged her eyes out at me and said, “Really? Take a look around.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll grant you, it looks bad, but let’s not worry about it right now. Mission number one is still finding Elijah.” I moved around to the business side of the desk and sat down behind the iMac. Next to the computer was rack of papers and next to the mousepad was a little date book. Before I picked up the book, I opened the drawer in front of me and saw me looking back. El had an old photo of yours truly. Nice, I guess, but I was still thrown enough to slam the drawer again. I picked up the little book and started to thumb through it. “Where does the term brony come from?”

  “Bros. Bros who like ponies. Bronies.”

  “Right. Of course.” I flipped to the current week and saw all the dates Elijah had been gone were blocked out and labeled “B.K.”. “Bingo,” I said and handed the book to the teenager.

  “‘B.K.’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Search me. But whatever it is, it accounts for Elijah’s whereabouts.”

  “B.K.? Could that be the woman he’s having an affair with?” Then she snapped her fingers. “B.K.! Beyonce Knowles! Do you think my dad’s having an affair with Beyonce Knowles?”

  “I do not think your dad is having an affair with Beyonce Knowles. Beyonce Knowle
s would never date a brony.”

  Keri scrunched her face. “Yeah, you’re right about that.”

  I took the papers out of the rack next to the computer. They were all printed receipts for various and sundry. The third one I looked at was another piece in the puzzle. “Double bingo!” I said and handed the sheet to Wiener.

  “It’s a receipt,” she said. “For the BronyKonfab. Confab with a K. Two hundred and forty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents.”

  “Look underneath the two forty-nine.”

  “There’s another charge. For a hotel in Santa Monica. BronyKonfab must be a convention.”

  “Mystery solved.”

  “Ugh. I wish he’d been having an affair instead.”

  I smiled. “Now, now. Try and be charitable.”

  “I can be charitable all day long with someone like uncle Jack. He didn’t choose to be the way he is. My pops chose this.”

  “How do you think it happened? I mean, when I knew him, Elijah never displayed any... brony-like tendencies. Sure, he was a nerd, but this brony thing feels like a lifestyle choice.”

  Keri sighed. “Well. You’ve had your hard knocks. Jack’s had his hard knocks. Pops had some hard knocks too. For a while, he was doing well. Doing what he wanted to do. He made enough scratch to keep us all comfortable, but he lost it and it hurt him. He wanted, more than anything, to make movies, but he had a business partner. Money started disappearing. The ground got shaky. Do you see this poster?” She flicked her thumb over her shoulder and, for the first time, I noticed a non-pony item in a sea of pony-ness. It was a framed poster for a horror film. The Grim Reaper standing in front of a spooky forest. The logo underneath.

  “Yeah.”

  “Look closer.”

  I looked closer and saw what she wanted me to see. The words on the poster were “A new Experience in Terror: The Grim Raper.” I sighed. “The Grim Raper?”

  “Right. That poster marks the end of my dad’s professional life. He had his production company. They made a little movie called The Grim Reaper. They spent their last dime on those posters, and they came back from the printers as ‘The Grim Raper’ and that was it. They didn’t have the scratch to get them redone, and you can’t market a movie called ‘The Grim Raper’.”