by Trevor Eve
The church inside was basic, but he presumed it was the same God, not a more basic version with less influence, that would be a blow. It was a Missionary Church painted creamy white with benches, a central aisle with brass chandeliers, three running up the centre hanging over the green and cream tiled floor. Quite ordinary, thought Ever, a spectacularly ordinary place to be praying about a very extraordinary event.
A once in a lifetime, life-ending event.
He felt the need for a drink and said his goodbye to God, wondering if it would be his last goodbye inside a church.
When he returned tomorrow would Lomita be alive? Should he go back?
What had he made Lomita do?
What had Lomita done to him?
He didn’t care.
Have a diazepam.
He took a right out of the church and walked down the opposite side of the road to a bar called the Retro Bar. It was one flight up, hulked above a respectable, touristy restaurant called the Tropicana. The Retro Bar advertised television. Bare wood on the floors, and a little higher up on the benches: same wood, in fact, and the same wood on the table. Same tree?
He ordered guacamole, totopos, beer and tequila – Patrón Silver: taking him back to the comparatively innocent days at Gil Turner’s before he met the woman who changed his world.
Televisions.
There were four televisions around the bar playing sports. He asked if one could be put to the news on an American channel; it was only him and five other people; this was not an outlandish request.
He was afforded his own television and sat watching the news on the Fox channel which was starting its predictable roll. All blonde, the women, all handsome with parted hair, the men, all Republican, and all aliens. Humiens.
He had to face the music, so to speak, beyond Lana Del Rey.
The main story was the assassination, as they called it, of one of the world’s most celebrated art collectors, leaving the legacy of his gallery behind, having been tragically taken from this world in a motiveless killing, and so it went on. There were respects paid by the great and the questionable: his wife, tearful, ran an interview about the purposelessness of it all.
Even as someone who was once fixated on the death of this man, Ever couldn’t disagree; there was a definite pointlessness to the event; once again he was covered in the slime of guilt, this time with the additional coating of being pursued.
Not by a pale blue hand, but by the world.
For justice.
But he hadn’t been carrying a gun.
He had not been intending to kill Mr Lorken.
There were no leads, no witnesses, no motive. Ever found it difficult to analyse his feelings, watching this outpouring of grief and concern and recognition of injustice. He experimented with a few different emotional concepts.
Fuck him; sorry for him; laughter; comeuppance; hatred; compassion; relief; a strike for the people; sorry for the wife; for the family; joy; celebration; achievement; success.
The last two would have at one time carried the most connection for him, the appreciation of a job done, but now, he felt the foulnesss of having polluted himself with his thoughts, thoughts that had permeated into another person’s brain.
A parasitical involvement.
That’s what he had wanted.
Osmotic dependency.
And now. Now he had infested Lomita’s brain and those parasites had multiplied to the point of total colonisation.
Ever felt at this moment in a bar in San José that he should not be alive.
He tried to fix on his obsessional hatred for the man who initiated his father’s collapse toward death, for some respite at least; but felt only the guilt oozing through the cracks. He didn’t attempt to wipe it away.
This was going to cause the death of Lomita: he would be the cause of the death of Lomita.
He downed the shot of tequila.
Eventually the police would make their way down here to check out where the paintings were ordered to be delivered by the woman who was the last to have lunch with Mr Lorken. Lomita Nairn.
He drank the Corona in one sustained hold of breath.
Days. Hours. Minutes. A lifetime of seconds.
He ordered a second round.
He thought of Clarissa and Jacob and envied their ignorance of the circumstance.
But he was completely unable to communicate in any form.
He wondered if he ever could, or would, again.
*
His night came to an early end.
He walked down to the taxi rank by the Pemex gas station and the start of the bridge across to the East Cape; he took a taxi to the waiting osprey. Thirty-five minutes later he was paying the man, walking towards the house with the intention of sitting by the ocean and having a final tequila for the night. The osprey whistled and flapped its wings; Ever attempted a whistle back but the dryness on his lips made it sound feeble and ungenerous. A sad musical call, a failed response to the clear warmth of the bird. He was dried up and at the end.
He sat on the terrace with his drink; his head fell back at an angle, facilitating his look at the stars.
The moonlight takes 1.3 seconds to reach us, some of the stars are still there and burning, but some died when Ancient Rome was in its heyday – their light is only reaching us now. Ever could never grasp this, his mind would not take it in; like infinity, it was a concept that defeated his already defeated brain.
But he had to count a hundred stars before he could go to bed.
A hundred stars a hundred times. It got worse the longer he sat. The stars would have a problem with this concept.
It works both ways.
Star fuckers.
*
Lomita was lying in bed in a state of fear.
Abject fear: she felt she wanted to take her own life although the disease inside her gave her the comfort that was not going to be necessary. That was going to be done for her: she was going to be taken care of.
God was looking after her, and preparing to welcome her. She stopped with the horror that what if he wasn’t. What if he was not going to welcome her. She had committed a murder; a cold-blooded, unpremeditated act, but an impulsive act to save the life of another.
Her sweat was soaking the sheets, she reached to press the bell for some water and to be made dry: the sweat was making her shiver.
She was cold.
She didn’t press the bell.
She fell asleep, then woke and slept and woke. No pleasure in either state, she was always waiting for the knock on the door. How long would it be? How long would she be alive and have to wait?
She was starting to hallucinate in her fever.
A companion, a lover, wearing a white dress, walking down an aisle, with somebody wanting her through love, doing the things she had never done as a woman, as a human being, having a child, carrying it in her arms, breastfeeding. Loving with physical pleasure the body of Ever, enjoying all the things that happened to a man and a woman that she never enjoyed. The physical pleasure that only came to exist for a passing minute in an entire lifetime, once, in a passing minute, in a shower.
Sharing a life free of guilt about her past; just an emotional relaxed freedom. No abuse.
But never was she infused with any ingratitude or regret.
To her it was always the way it had been, the no-alternative never permitted a regret, because like Ever there was nothing to compare the journey of her soul with anything.
These were objective hallucinations: her in positions of life she had never been in.
It was like viewing another person on a screen.
A silver one.
*
This was her state as Ever walked into the room.
The next morning. He had changed into his newly acquired forty-eight pesos T-shirt from La Comer Supermarket in a dark shade of grey, depositing the Toyota F J in the parking lot, carrying a little bunch of red fishhook cactus flowers, picked from the roadside, with a smile cr
easing his face out of a love that he beamed into the room. Manita was already there; Guillermo was due in one hour. They sat passing the idle time of day with talk of weather and whales but nothing medical, nothing about her condition. No questions were asked: it was an inevitability.
Ever could smell that smell that he had only smelt once before: not her unique smell, but the one he had smelt on himself.
When he was near to dying, when he was fifteen.
*
Guillermo Gonzales, a long-time acquaintance, knocked and entered with a tentative respect.
Small and neatly combed, late fifties, besuited in an almost well-fitting suit in dark grey with a white shirt, and, rather ominously, a black tie.
Lomita spoke weakly and economically.
‘This is simple and I want no contradictions or objections. I do not have the energy. Manita gets my house in Beverly Hills and fifty per cent of all my monies. The tax, Guillermo, you have to work that out, but we are well prepared in all that for Manita. Manita we have already taken care of. The only change is regarding Ever, who gets Casa Lomita and money to live and look after it. It is in my Mexican company’s name so I do not anticipate a tax problem, as you are also a director of the company, Guillermo.
‘That is all, and would you please execute this as my full and final will.
‘Palm Springs would you sell and divide the revenue between the three of you, so we include Ever. That is a thank you Guillermo, for your work and loyalty to me, and Guillermo, if there are any issues of any sort regarding Ever bring in adoption papers for me to sign, later, and I will adopt him as my son and therefore he will be my heir. If that makes life more straightforward. There are no other beneficiaries. And I would like to be cremated, but I guess burial is fine. What do I care? My death, as was my life, towards the end, is in Ever’s hands.’
Ever sat silently in thought, questioning the adoption section. Acquiring a new mother was an interesting concept, but it complicated things for him: he would then have had two mothers and would have fucked them both.
That put him in the realm of being a true Motherfucker.
Lomita, breathing from just the top of her lungs, in shallow gasps, continued.
‘And I would like to take full responsibility, this is going to shock two of you in the room, for the death of Ingmar Lorken. I would like, Guillermo, for you to arrange the police to come in so I can make a full confession. Do you think I should do that?’
There was an expected silence, no one confident as to who she was asking.
‘The murder weapon is in the house. It is in my Fendi bag, Manita.’
Not a hair turned on Manita’s head.
Guillermo had shut down into a frozen pose.
Still not a word was spoken; Lomita closed her eyes.
‘Just for a little rest.’
She said.
Guillermo who had been typing all this on his laptop had long since stopped. He looked at the instrument as if it had told him to go fuck himself. He was pallid and red at the same time in different parts of his face. After a struggle that was apparent with the sweat that oozed out of his forehead, Guillermo spoke with a higher voice than before.
‘I will need your full name and the address of your permanent residence for my paperwork, Señor Ever.’
It was duly offered; a thank you was returned.
‘I need to find a printer.’
He said exiting with the relief of a sickly bowel movement.
*
The two of them sat.
Not a word was spoken until Guillermo returned with forms for Lomita to sign, which she duly did. There were then copies handed to both Manita and Ever.
They studied what she had dictated. It started with the name at the top of the document.
I, Lomita Tracy Nairn, have dictated this as my full and final settlement.
It went on but Ever was incapable of reading the rest: he reread the first sentence, then again, and then again.
The Tracy who had HIV/AIDS: this person would change his life.
It carried no concern for him, it was his ultimate gamble, the reason for his life.
The journey.
The arrival.
The final destination.
There was no panic, no nausea, no shaking, it had a beautiful justice, the most perfect eventuality.
This was his Tracy, it was now revealed, the weakness, the illness, the tiredness, the medication, the wasting, the wheelchair: it was all clear, beautifully, star-gazingly clear; as clear as the universe in its ultimate justice; the perfect sky; the rounding of all in life; the returning of the soul; the reason for existence.
She was his Tracy.
His very own.
She had led to him the clearest picture of life that he could ever have contemplated, imagined or constructed.
She had given him his reason for life, she had rounded and completed the circle.
The purpose and reason to stop it all.
The madness.
His destiny.
His fate.
Lomita spoke.
‘Is everyone happy? Oh, and Guillermo, if there is a civil action brought against me after my death, I am sure you will be able to make any financial compensation that is pursued impossible with the complex structure of my offshore companies. What I am basically saying is, and it may seem ungracious, but I do not want a billionaire’s wife, even though I killed her husband, benefitting in any way from my estate. Do I make myself clear?’
Lomita smiled in the face of the bluntness of her statement.
‘Yes.’
Was all Guillermo could muster. No one else spoke a word; not even a thank you.
This seemed to have a finality, an end. A full stop.
For Ever it had produced a gurgle of laughter at the back of his throat, a result of excitement.
He swallowed hard.
Recognising a remnant of the gangster’s moll.
*
Dr Serrano came in; again, following a knock.
He wanted to discuss her medication and state. This time, again, they were asked to leave but Lomita requested Ever to remain. The doctor started the way doctors do, with the assessment of a situation that was not good.
‘Owing to your immune system being so debilitated with Acquired Immune Deficiency…’
Ever took in the medical diagnosis, but it was characterless, like hearing the weather. He had already felt the rain. He breathed deeply, this moment did not belong to him.
‘Your blood count has revealed the CD4 cells are not picking up beyond the two hundred mark. Unfortunately the prognosis is therefore not positive; we are not having any luck combatting the fungus.’
It’s not really about luck though is it doctor? It’s not cards.
Ever, always critical of the medical profession, gave no voice to his thoughts, but that didn’t stop them coming.
‘You don’t put luck into the equation in the world of medical science.’
This last part he apparently had voiced as the reply was coming from Dr Serrano.
‘Well, shall we say the body has its own form of fortune and sometimes rallies to the cause with less medication than might have been felt to be necessary, but in this case the body has not had good fortune on its side. The unknown quantities, the unexpected and unexplained turns of nature have not been playing on our side. Does that clarify the position a little better?’
No not really, it was just annoying to introduce a sports analogy.
More thoughts: this time private.
‘There is now the issue of oxygen starvation at tissue level that is becoming apparent, hypoxia; this will facilitate the eventuality of a high arterial carbon dioxide presence in your lungs.’
‘I do not care now. And I do not understand or want to understand anyway.’
Said Lomita.
‘I have one request please, to stop my medication, all of it, and leave me with Ever here, and I would like a bed for him to stay next to me.’
/>
Dr Serrano did not look like he had an ounce of agreement in relation to her request. The bed maybe.
‘It is your choice to not take medication, though it will be presented, and our advice of course will be to take it: and we will attempt for that to be enforced.’
Yeah, thought Ever, empathising with Lomita’s request, what are you going to do, hold her nose?
*
The bed arrived and was put alongside Lomita’s.
In anticipation that her death was imminent; that was unspoken but accepted. They could lie as they had done in their familiar position, side by side. His tiredness hit him in the middle of the afternoon, while she was in a permanent state of drifting in and out of a fevered sleep; his extended hand reached for hers and in silence, as one, they held each other’s hands and drifted to meet in their sleep.
After a time that had not defined itself, there was a knock at the door, a knock that carried with it a knocking unlike other knocks and he knew it was the knock.
*
Ever said:
‘Come in.’
The need for the command indicated it was not hospital staff and before him in his vulnerable lying position stood two members of what looked like the police.
Was this the result of Guillermo’s summoning?
Ever scrambled like an egg to his feet, a mush. Lomita was not capable of taking in any of this, she attempted to awake from a deep sleep. The nurse who was hovering in the background came forward to continue the waking up process, propping up Lomita on some pillows.
Death waits for no man: neither do the police.
Lomita drooped her eyes open, smiled and explained unnecessarily to the gentlemen that she was not well.
They introduced themselves as members of the Baja California Police fugitive squad who had been contacted by the US Marshals Service and were acting as liaison officers for the LAPD.
This was not Guillermo’s summoning.