Keys of Babylon

by Minhinnick, Robert

  So far away, sang Fabien. So far away. He was standing above the city as the Bar Unique revolved. Its own planet, the Bar Unique, the city lights exploding behind him, the police helicopters moving between the towers, and behind the towers the forests ghostly in rainsmoke.

  5

  He waited with his pack and guitar in a room he used to run through, whooping, whooping. There were electronic boards there now and he studied the city names. So many places south and west he had never been. He knew he would never go there. Because it was north he was travelling. The great El Norte.

  He sat in the room until it was dark. Children tore around him. Of course, what arrives with the darkness is lightning. Fabien was the great connoisseur of lightning. That night its incendiaries raced out of a sky the colour of a tattooist’s inks. It flashed as he stowed his bag and as he entered the cool cometa.

  Fabien travelled all night and the only sign of human life was firelight struck in oil drums and bodies prone around each dying blaze. Ahead swung the meniscus of the new moon, pale as a palmito.

  His seat was next to the coffee machine. The cometa coffee was black and hot and so sweet he shivered the first time he tasted it trembling with the saccharine rush. But soon he held his cup with both hands as if refusing to let go while the land dried out, the forests changed, the savannah stars burned huge and indecipherable, and gauchos rode with him a moment out of the barbarous thorn.

  At dawn Fabien glimpsed a pool of herons, and there were the herds and there the stars’ junta, for still there were more stars than steers. And as he gazed at the roots of the day, flocks of parrots passed overhead, their voices full of stones.

  A day later, outside Salvador, Fabien thought he might have reached Africa. It’s all too much, he decided. There are so many rides. And the timetables don’t work.

  In the dirt, by a barraca made from drinks cans hammered flat, thatched with banana leaves, he asked how to get to the airport. This he knew was a very stupid question, but it seemed one more risk wouldn’t matter.

  The taxi driver was playing a CD of voodoo drummers. It bored Fabien immediately. He’d heard all that Macumba mumbo back home. Why should he be superstitious? Slavery was over. It’s over, over, he hummed to himself.

  Hey, that will be a line, he said to himself. That will be one of his great lines in one of his great songs. Yes, he smiled, a song in the key of A. Because A was freedom’s key and A was childhood’s key. And wasn’t A the sunshine on his hairless face when he had strolled the barrio?

  6

  He slept on Venice beach. At dawn the kelp was cold and lay in swathes along the shore. He could hear a siren. Fabien showered at the pipe before the dogwalkers arrived and then he stepped into the city. Two hours later he had a job.

  He had passed a café and turned a corner. There was a police car up the street so he glanced into a shop front, paused and went back. The café was painted purple and there was a name written so curiously it was difficult to read. Maybe the place was called The Purple Palm.

  Coffee, yes? he asked.

  Okay, said a harassed man behind the counter. We’re just opening.

  Fabien looked round. Last night’s glasses had not been cleaned up. There seemed hundreds of them.

  You have a toilet? asked Fabien.

  The man shrugged. Through there, he gestured.

  It was dark in the corridor and Fabien slapped the wall until he found the switch. He pushed a door, the striplight ticking.

  Around him the walls and ceiling were covered with coloured laminates. The pictures were of men, men golden and men black, and no daylight between them.

  These men seemed to be devouring one another. Above Fabien and below, the fresco filled the room and its cubicles. Yes, a feast, he thought. For the starving. Because the bodies he saw were ravenous. But the men here were only part men and the best part of them had been taken away. These men were only thighs and shoulders and the orchid-coloured cocks that erupted from their loins. These men seemed armoured by their own flesh.

  Iron, thought Fabien. Scrapyard iron, weeping rust. Or statues of warriors released from their plinths, flinty statues that rubbed sparks from other statues. Statues that dreamed of fire. Or desperate men imprisoned in stone.

  Was there an eye to look into? A face to understand? Fabien saw not one. But he laughed as he wandered the bathroom and laughed as he shat in a Kleenex-strewn stall and laughed as he gazed at the taut and electric skin of these men golden, these men black. He thought of the cathedral in Republica. There was a cupola there painted with angels wrestling with demons. How cumbersome these figures seemed in comparison. There was no lightness in them, and Fabien understood that lightness was all.

  His coffee waited on the counter but the bar was empty. He wandered round and came to a framed text. Fabien composed himself and recited it to the room:

  The first time I became famous I was too young to understand.

  The second time I became famous it was over too quickly.

  The third time I became famous I was preoccupied with the jealousy of my contemporaries.

  The fourth time I became famous I was addicted to laxatives and painkillers.

  The fifth time I became famous I urged others to save the planet.

  The sixth time I became famous my image rights were stolen by aliens.

  The seventh time I became famous I vanished in a vortex of vodka and cocaine.

  The eighth time I became famous the contents of my dustbins were sold on eBay.

  The ninth time I became famous I was arrested for shoplifting. My attorney said it was a cry for help.

  But the next time I become famous I will retire undefeated. Because now I know how to do it.

  When the man came back, Fabien was ready.

  Your coffee’s bad, he said.

  I know, said the man. Sorry.

  You want help? asked Fabien.

  The man gestured. One of the boys quit last night, he said.

  I make good coffee, said Fabien.

  The man regarded him. You know what this place is? he asked.

  Yes, said Fabien.

  7

  Sometimes Fabien thought he had been too lucky. Venice was full of cafés and bars. There were markets and music and always the cries of street theatre. There was work everywhere. Perhaps he should have been choosy. But when he wasn’t making coffee or cleaning up, they let him play his guitar and sing songs, his new songs and the ballads of his own city. A few times he tried choro rhythms, Paulista style. That was when he wore the black shirt, and although no one stopped talking or drinking when he sang, his boss seemed pleased.

  And they gave him a room above the café. This was great good fortune. It was really a stockroom, but he shifted the boxes and they found him a couch. He wrote to his mother and to Maria proud of his new address.

  Gradually he came to know the district. There were musicians aplenty and poets who declaimed to the street. Crowds gathered in the coffee shops, everyone shopped for organics. On TV, politicians talked about the war and a need for surveillance. Even the bar had a camera installed.

  Late afternoons were quiet times. Fabien was sometimes the only one working. A banker or realtor would come in, put their case on a seat, and adopt the bar identity, which Fabien knew was something they never used outside. In The Purple Palm they could be melodramatic, either mad or sad, and Fabien would have to ask them about the latest crisis, smiling his smile as he used his gang knife to take the plastic off the neck of another bottle of zinfandel.

  One day, he was pulling the dead fronds from the palm tree. This palm grew in a purple pot and was the centrepiece of the bar. Years earlier someone had brought in a seed from the beach. People thought it was a coconut. Eventually it was planted but nothing happened and it was forgotten. Then, ages later, as the legend had it, shoots appeared. Now there it was, The Purple Palm’s palm tree. Dependent on Fabien’s husbandry.

  Hey, said one guy, his jacket on the seat. You seen the news?r />
  No, said Fabien.

  They found this tribe in Brazil. Living in the forest, about fifty of them. There’s this clip of them waving their spears. You know, stone age types, never contacted by white men before.

  There was a silence.

  Oh yeah, grinned Fabien. Those white guys.

  And he laughed. And when Fabien laughed it was a certainty that everyone else would laugh, the realtor in his cufflinks, the Citibank youth, pale, frail, whose first day this was at The Purple Palm. He sat under the poem and observed the protocol of laughter. So did the other stranger who coughed from a barstool, briefcase between his feet.

  Hey, I’m a comedian already? announced the realtor, beaming around the room. What I say?

  8

  Sometimes the police came in and joked self-consciously. Fabien didn’t have a work permit. The boss had never asked and the police had never asked. Once, a patrolman enquired where he came from, but it was part of a conversation with some of the regulars, and Fabien had his answers well rehearsed. In Venice, everyone came from somewhere else, and if he didn’t deal drugs he guessed the law would leave him alone.

  One Tuesday afternoon, Fabien was playing a set. There might have been twenty in, chatting, listening.

  I like you, said a man to Fabien. He looked mid sixties. I can see it in you. Boy, it’s there.

  What’s there?

  The gene, son. You got the rock ’n’ roll gene. I’d like to put you on.

  A gig? asked Fabien.

  Sure a gig. Plenty of gigs. You’re the Jean Genie, son. And look at this.

  The man shook a tiny silver box.

  Got the whole act right there, he said. Sound and vision. We’ll put it out on the street as a bootleg. YouTube, you name it. Get some important people talking about you. You know, I just don’t think you understand how good you look.

  The man paused. Hey, is there anywhere we could go to talk about all this?

  Upstairs in his stock room Fabien looked at the man’s grey pony tail, his parboiled hams. In his right hand the guy’s balls felt like soap. He squeezed and the man burst into tears and buried his face in Fabien’s hair, his black hair oiled and glossy as a grackle, his hair that was longer now and tied with a black ribbon.

  Sorry, kid, said the man, zipping up his leather pants and wiping his face. You don’t need this. Maybe I owe you one.

  Downstairs the boss shook his head in mock disbelief and poured Fabien a decent Napa Valley.

  Well for Chrissakes, the boss said. There’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil. Play ‘Yesterday’, quick. It’ll do us all good.

  Fabien shrugged and grimaced and forgot about it. He was becoming good at forgetting. He rarely thought about Olimpio now. Life was changing for him. He’d put on weight and he didn’t wear the shirt any more.

  At times he imagined he’d like to get married and take his kids to the beach for them to see the sea lions. He’d go to the beach deliberately after the bar closed at 4 a.m. And listen.

  Two hours before dawn a sea lion would start barking. Fabien would look at it slumped over the crosstrees of the pier. Its voice seemed black and made of rubber. For Fabien, the sea lion voice was a stress ball clenched in the night.

  Sometimes he imagined that the ocean came almost to the door of his room, all night its pulse alive in his sleep but a lullaby he could not trust, the seep of a black sea through the crazed beachfront cement of the street.

  He would crouch in the sand. Soon all the sea lions would be squeezing their voices out of the corals of California. The black rain would lie agleam on the deck, like a torrent of bottles tipped into a bin by some bar worker such as Fabien himself, a glass avalanche one hour before dawn, the streetlight broken into cullet, armfuls of Sierra Nevadas slithering into the return bin. The sea lions under the pier would roll like lobes of mercury, fat as jeroboams, while the pier neon printed itself further out in the kelp and shale-coloured shoals.

  For Fabien, the sea didn’t seem to move. But he knew it slid like broken glass, this sea in its cisterns and in its fireboxes, the Pacific that flung itself at his feet and smelled like a damp attic room thirty minutes before dawn. He’d wander through mist and through salt, and outside his window the palms would be black snowflakes against first light. Fabien had never seen snowflakes. Yet that’s what he thought. When he looked from the pier he thought he might glimpse lightning. But lightning was rarer now.

  Occasionally he felt he was being observed. In the gloom of Ocean Park he’d stop and the echo of his footfall would stop. Then Fabien would turn around to see nothing. Who watches the watchman? he sang to himself. That could be a tune. Yes. The music would sound mysterious and his voice would merely breathe the words of that slow and smoky song. One day he’d write that song.

  9

  Phil, the boss, was good to him. Fabien ate his meals at the Palm, found all his drinks there. He sipped red wine now, from lunchtime on. Phil needed a drinking partner, and introduced him to the indigo malbecs he bought at a local importer, the staple merlots.

  You know what I like about you, Fabby? the boss would sometimes ask. You’re fastidious. You see, so many guys your age are out there screwing like cockroaches. They’re led through life by their dicks. And you got a fan club here, make no mistake. But you don’t give it away, do you? People sense that. They can tell there’s a something else about you. A something almost special. Compared to these airhead bodybuilders and roller-skating assholes that have taken over the shore, you got a little bit of mystery in you.

  Fabien was eating a baguette. He picked his teeth. He had started to feel he needed a bigger room.

  Then, one afternoon, the pony tail guy walked back into The Purple Palm.

  Hey presto, the man said. All right, it’s not a world tour. But there’s a day of local talent at this place I know. Just up the coast in Santa Barbara. You’re part of it.

  That’s a long way, said Fabien. What about the Venice Theatre?

  Believe in me, said the man. Look, who introduced Jim Morrison to Ray Manzarek? Who told Jim about the Doors of Perception?

  Yeah, said Phil, red in his goblet. And who gave Morrison his first leather pants?

  You want it, it’s yours, said the man. Okay?

  I’m thinking about it, said Fabien, holding his glass as Phil poured.

  10

  There were two thousand graves on the beach at Santa Barbara. ‘Veterans for Peace’ had erected this ‘Arlington West’ for Veterans’ Day, a national holiday.

  Happy Veterans’ Day, someone said to Fabien. He didn’t know how to respond. A sign said the two thousand crosses represented the American dead in Iraq.

  A crowd with go-cups had gathered to listen to the veterans’ speeches. Fabien tried to peel a persimmon. The demo did not simply involve an antiwar group of those with first-hand experience. Veterans for Peace linked ‘the Iraq resource war’ with ‘the twilight of worldwide petroleum reserves and climate stability’. You gotta connect terror and oil and all these hurricanes, bellowed a man with a megaphone.

  The persimmon was the sweetest fruit Fabien had tasted in California. It was sweeter than the Rees’s chocolate and peanut butter blocks which he bought in the Korean store next to the Palm. People in the crowd cheered, a few cursed under their breaths, and the vets played rock music and read poems. Some had a barbecue going and were offering wings and ribs.

  The yellow fruit dissolved in Fabien’s mouth. His lips went numb as he knew they would. Then his tongue. But beach volleyball had restarted and the sea ached blue. Five miles out, the oil rigs were almost invisible in the haze. Fabien tried to order a beer but couldn’t speak. A man put a Sierra Nevada into his hand and waived the charge.

  An hour later he was sitting in the Lobero Theatre, waiting his turn. The sound check for the rock groups had been endless and Fabien was bored. Pony tail kept dropping by, asking how he felt. They had driven up together that morning, the older man playing Ventura Highway on the CD.

 
; This is it, kid, he kept saying of the road. America was a great band and that’s their finest song. And we’re right on top of it all. Yeah, this is Ventura. Feel its fabled curves.

  In his theatre seat, Fabien shrugged and waited for the pill to kick in. There was no space for him in the dressing rooms, full as they were of men and guitars.

  By the time he played, the show was running an hour late. The crowd kept coming in and out and there was a racket back stage. He’d spoken to the boy at the mixing desk who was doing his best, but through the open theatre doors he could see the sky turning white over the boulevard and hear the sirens, the constant sirens, worse than Olimpio these days, he caught himself thinking, distracted and mid song.

  You did good, said Pony Tail in the bar afterwards. But the Lobero’s not your scene. It’s like a fucking opera house in there. As to Santa Barbara, maybe I was wrong. Money’s killed it. Those vets on the beach are getting a hard time. Look, here’s some cash. Take the Surf Rider back to LA, it’s a great trip.

  Get me a glass of wine, said Fabien, slumped. Cabernet.

  Whatever the pill was doing, it wasn’t what the pill should do. Fabien was starting to feel far away. So far away.

  The dead-letter men

  It’s white bread from the shop in Fort William. No seeds in it, only a yellow crust. And soft as snow. Just how I like it. But the meat is dark, dark red sausage meat marbled with fat. Cheap, nasty meat, Alice would have said. Alice would also have said it’s mechanically recovered spare parts from the slaughter house floor. Well too bad. I’m starving. I cut a slice with my penknife and make a sandwich. John has a sachet of mustard and I squeeze that in. Then I sit and sigh with my back against the pine tree. It’s not comfortable but the food puts things into perspective. As food will.

  After another sandwich, concentrating on tearing bread, slicing meat, drinking this isotronic orange cola whatsit stuff from a plastic bottle, I’m able to relax and look around.