Then the sound of something like a distant horn, a howl, flap of wings. The Oracle.
Rushing toward the cage, he saw the owl scurry back and forth across her branch, taking tiny hops meant for flight, crashing against the bars each time. Excel kept shouting for help, tried spreading his arms around the cage to lift it, but the entire thing was bolted down to the table, the tiny door padlocked shut. Shaking the cage did nothing, only frightened the owl even more, and there were no tools close by to pry the bars apart. But he saw cinder blocks stacked against the table and he picked one up, slammed it hard against the cage, again and again until two bars gave way, bending just enough that the owl could squeeze through, but she was panicked and jumpy, oblivious to the escape route before her.
The fire trailed closer, the air thick with smoke. Excel reached through the bars and pulled out the owl, her body squirming, her beak taking tiny stabs at his arms. He dropped her to the ground, shouted, “Go! Leave!” but the Oracle stayed where she was, as if she’d forgotten how to fly from all the years caged. Only when Excel stomped on the ground did the owl finally take flight, rising and fading into the dark sky.
The stage was all flames, the food carts were burning away, and the fire didn’t stop; nothing of the Square would be saved. Excel ran back in the direction of the bus. He’d left his flashlight behind, but the fire was so bright, it lit the path back home.
BY EARLY MORNING EVERYONE WAS AT THE SQUARE, WHAT WAS LEFT of it. The charred frames of the food carts. The perimeter of the stage, its center a black hole. Unaired Television Pilot was a sunken wall, melted and burned, and Red searched through it, trying to find something worth saving. Excel had lifted so many of those TV sets, had helped find the words that glowed in their screens.
Everything else was rubble and ash, though a folding lawn chair had somehow stayed perfectly intact, bore no signs of fire.
Rosie surveyed the damage with members of the Hello City Town Council, then stood on a crate and addressed the crowd. “Well, as you can see, the Square is gone,” she said. “Those of us who’ve been here long enough remember what it took to build it. All that sweat, all that hammering, and all that hooch, of course.” She tried laughing, but her breath seemed to catch, and her face squeezed tight to hold back tears. She cleared her throat, then reported that damages were in the thousands, maybe ten if they were lucky. “May not seem like much to the outside,” she said, “but for the folks in Hello City, it’s a lot. So as a start”—she removed her cowboy hat, dropped a bill in it—“here’s a buck. Let’s see where we go from here.” She wiped her eyes, passed the hat around, then picked up her fiddle and played. People donated what they could, mostly coins or a few dollars, though Lucia dropped in a fifty, which drew some applause. She passed the hat to Sab, who put in five dollars, and she passed it to Excel, who, it turned out, was the last to receive the hat. All eyes were on him now, and he stood dazed and numb from everything he and Sab had told each other, from everything he’d burned down after. But it was Rosie’s music—a mournful, twangy tune—that almost made him break.
There were no good options. The thing to do was tell the people what he’d done, take responsibility for it, and, if they’d let him, find a way to make it right. But telling that truth, he knew, could spiral into telling more, and what if the fire department got involved? The police? Confessing to crimes, even accidental ones, required your name and information, the circumstances of your life.
He cut through the crowd, brought the hat back to Rosie. She looked at him and smiled, mistaking his tears of guilt for sympathy. She winked, mouthed “Thank you,” and played on.
After, people scattered around, walked through the damage. Excel went off on his own, the previous night still bright in his mind. He’d fled the fire and made it back to the bus, but didn’t go inside. He sat on the helipad instead, let the fire burn all it could until the end. Only in the morning, when Sab came out to tell him that Lucia had called, telling her a fire had broken out in Hello City, did he finally get up.
People started leaving. Sab and Lucia. Red. Excel stayed behind, sat on a still-intact bench near the stage, watched as Rosie and two other town council members examined the burned cage of the Oracle. The owl, at least, had been saved. Excel thought of that first night in the Square, when Red asked him to guess the owl’s age. He’d guessed five or ten, but it was actually thirty-three, and he remembered what Red told him about the bird’s life span, its possibilities. Fifty years in the cage, fifteen in the world.
SAB WAS LEANING AGAINST THE STEERING WHEEL OF THE BUS when Excel entered. “The whole night,” she said, “you were out on that helipad?”
He walked past her, sat at the table. “I didn’t want to be in here,” he said. “And I thought you needed space.”
She nodded. “I noticed this morning, when I went out there to tell you about the fire, you came back in and changed clothes.” At her feet were his black T-shirt, his jeans. What he’d worn when the Square burned down.
She went to him, looked him in the eye. “Those clothes smell like smoke. You smell like smoke. And what happened to your arms? What are these marks?” Excel looked down, remembered the owl’s stabbing beak as she tried to break free.
He looked at Sab, moved a strand of hair from her face, realized that the purple streaks were gone and that her hair color was, for the first time since knowing her, completely brown. She looked exhausted, beaten down by everything they were learning about each other and themselves.
“Tell me, Excel,” she said, “and don’t lie. Did you have something to do with the fire?”
“All of it,” he said. “Everything.”
THEY WENT TO LUCIA. THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO.
It was evening, just past dark. The Airstream’s door was closed, the curtains drawn, and Lucia paced back and forth, rubbing the back of her neck with both hands. “This really isn’t good,” she said. “I mean, I’m basically the one who brought you here. How do you think that makes me look?” She considered the options: Should Excel confess? If so, to whom? Would the town council kick him out of Hello City? Could anyone even be kicked out? And would they tell the police? “This kind of thing has never happened before,” she said, “not since I’ve been here. I mean, the only real law around here is ‘do unto others,’ you know?”
“Did I break it?” Excel asked quietly. He was sitting on the floor. Sab sat away from him, in one of Lucia’s Helsinki-inspired design chairs, her back perfectly straight and rigid, her face deliberately neutral, no emotion at all.
“I don’t know,” Lucia said. “But there’s a bigger problem. Rosie saw the Oracle’s cage.”
“What about it?” Sab asked. She looked at Excel, like he was guilty of even more.
“The bars were pried open. With a crowbar or a hammer or something. It doesn’t take a forensics expert to know that someone let her out because of the fire. Was that you, Excel?”
He nodded.
“The Oracle is ancient. All she knows is living in a cage. You think she can survive out there?”
Excel’s last glimpse of the Oracle was of her rising in the sky, receding into the dark. But she had been reluctant to leave, didn’t know how, and Excel could imagine the owl pivoting, flying a route back toward the Square, perched somewhere just on the edge of Hello City. Here, but not really.
“She might survive,” he said. “Hopefully.”
Lucia closed her eyes and took two deep breaths, reached into her refrigerator, and poured herself a glass of cucumber water. “Here’s the plan. Excel, I believe you’re a good person, but you fucked up. Big time. And while the people in Hello City are good people, I’m not sure they’d forgive you. So none of us, none of us, will say anything. But you”—she pointed at Excel—“you owe Hello City. You have to pay them back.”
“How is he supposed to do that,” Sab said, “without them knowing?”
“Call it a donation. Say he inherited money or had a bunch of cash saved, I don’t know. But
whether it’s tomorrow or a year from now, doesn’t matter. Hello City is my home, and it needs to happen.”
He didn’t argue, agreed with everything Lucia was saying. “What do I do now?” he asked.
Lucia looked over at Sab, then back at Excel. “There’s no work for you here, no way you can make that kind of money,” Lucia said. “The best thing is for you to go back. And when you’ve got the money, you can return.”
“When should I go?” He looked at Sab. The fire, he knew, wasn’t the only reason he should leave.
“Sooner is better,” Sab said softly. “If you wait too long . . .”
“I’ll find a bus schedule,” Excel said. “But if people ask why I’m gone, what’ll you tell them?”
“People here mind their own business,” Lucia said. “No one will ask about you.”
Sab said they should get back to the bus, start packing, figure out a plan for getting Excel home. She walked past him and exited the Airstream. He was still on the floor, almost forty-eight hours with zero sleep. Standing up, just the thought of it, seemed impossible.
EXCEL DID NOT HAVE MUCH TO PACK. HIS CLOTHES FIT INTO HIS backpack and duffel bag, and the things he’d bought at the Square—a small brass lamp on the floor by the bed, the plastic bowls for their ramen—belonged in the bus.
Sab waited in the car, engine running. Before stepping out of the bus, he took Sab’s mother’s picture, propped it up on the dashboard, just to the right of the steering wheel.
They drove to the Greyhound station in El Centro, the ride so silent and smooth against the road that it lulled Excel into dozing off, long enough that he dreamed they were back where they started, driving down the freeway to Hello City, the map of California spread over his lap, his head resting on Sab’s shoulder.
The tick of the turn signal, when Sab was taking the exit into El Centro, finally woke him up.
She pulled up in front of the Greyhound station, a rectangular building the size of a small post office. “I’m sad to see you go,” she said. “You know that, right?”
He unbuckled his seat belt but held on to it, the strap still across his chest. “I know.”
“But so much has happened. You have this whole life I never knew about, and with this”—she placed her palm on a spot at the bottom of her chest, just above her belly—“I don’t know what I want to do. Let’s take the time to figure it out.”
“I already figured it out. I want to be with you.”
She leaned back against her headrest. Excel could see the tiny lightning bolt tattoo behind her ear. He’d noticed it back in the movie theater parking garage, the first time they’d kissed. “I’m tired,” she said. “I need to sleep.”
“I’ll go,” he said.
They stepped out of the car. Excel grabbed his backpack from the backseat, and Sab walked around to his side. She took his hand, asked him for some time. “Don’t call,” she said, “not for a while.”
He promised he wouldn’t.
They didn’t kiss. Sab just placed her hand on Excel’s cheek, two fingers pressing, gently, into his temple. “Be safe,” she said, then pulled away. She got in her car and drove off, the red taillights shrinking into the dark.
He entered the bus station and walked up to the man behind the ticket counter, told him he needed to get home and asked how to get there.
27
Maxima’s plan, for now, is more of the same. She schedules more talks with Jerry, sometimes twice a day, and Excel constantly hears laughter behind her door, sometimes tears, even singing—yesterday she belted out the Titanic love song in a falsetto he never knew she possessed. Always, she makes sure that Excel makes an appearance, if only just to say hello.
Excel and Jerry exchange e-mails, and to keep Jerry’s interest, Excel researches more articles on ships in a bottle and looks up facts about New Hampshire, where Jerry lives (“Your state has impressive granite!” he writes). They mostly stay on topic, though Jerry sometimes asks questions, or offers bits of life advice, which Excel thinks through carefully before he responds. When Jerry writes, “Are there any places in the world you’d like to visit?” does Excel reply as himself and tell him that he’s always wanted to visit those hotels made of ice, like the ones he’s seen on the Travel Channel? (He ends up writing “Disneyland! It is my #1 dream.”) Or when Jerry writes, “The key to success is hard work, belief in yourself, and finding good lifelong mentors,” should Excel write the truth, that those people don’t exist in his world, and even if they did, why would they mentor someone like him? No matter how he replies, he reminds himself to do it as the person Jerry sees on the screen: it’s Perfecto who will get what Excel needs.
At work, Excel looks after Z as best he can, keeps an eye out for bruises, scratches, any sign of pain, and every so often, just to make sure, he asks, “Do you still want to go home?” and Z always answers twice. “Yes, yes,” he says. One day, after an early shift, Excel goes to the public library, gets online to price one-way tickets from San Francisco to Serbia. Belgrade, he learns, is the city of destination, and the flights take fifteen hours, sometimes longer. He’s never been on an airline website before, had always assumed that booking a flight was a circuitous process that required writing long statements about your destination, your reasons for going, your reasons for leaving. But mostly, it’s just type and click, type and click, pay and hit Submit. That’s all.
All those years—his whole life—of watching the blinking airplane lights shooting through the sky from San Francisco International Airport. If he’d only had those documents, he could’ve been up in the air too. But he knows that the first flight he took, the one on which he was born, was possibly his last.
He doesn’t buy the ticket; once he understands the routes and times of possible flights, that’s all the information he needs. But he plays around on the airline websites until the library closes, typing destination after destination, learning the different ways to get there, the stops along the way.
Things stay the same—calm, quiet—for several days. Maxima makes more progress, and on a late Friday night, while drinking a wine cooler at her desk, she reports that Jerry has sent another two hundred dollars, this time to fix leaks in the communal kitchen and bathroom that Perfecta and Perfecto share with fifty other tenants. “Maybe I’ll keep half for myself?” she says. Excel, standing in her bedroom doorway, blinks, unsure what to say. “Joke lang, joke lang,” she says. “Don’t worry. We’re doing this for you.”
“Thanks,” he says, though the right thing to do is insist on splitting the money, give Maxima the larger share. But if Jerry does come through, Excel will need every dollar he can get.
Maxima sips her wine cooler, sets it on her desk by the keyboard. Next to that, Excel notices, is the rubber wound. “Where’d you get that thing, anyway?” he asks.
She picks up a pencil, pokes at it. “At that magic shop, the one by the good Target.”
“Kadabra’s? What were you doing at a magic shop?”
“Just looking, walking around. I did a lot of that when you were gone.” She takes another sip. “The owner was nice. From someplace—Georgia? Jordan? I can’t remember. I’d stop by sometimes, and we’d talk. It’s too bad they closed.”
“It’s gone? What happened to the owner?”
“Hindi ko alam,” she says, shrugging. “Maybe he went back.”
“Why do you say that? He seemed happy.”
“Did you know him?”
Excel has never told Maxima that he’d applied to work there, that he’d almost gotten the job. He’s already confessed to throwing the spelling bee; no point in telling another story of coming close and losing in the end. “I’d gone in once.”
“Well, he always said he was fine when I asked, but I could tell”—she takes the last gulp of her drink—“it wasn’t true.”
She looks at the clock. It’s 10:52 p.m. “Early call with Jerry tomorrow,” she says, “get some sleep.”
“I will,” Excel says, but knows he wo
n’t.
EXCEL IS SITTING ON THE FLOOR OUTSIDE MAXIMA’S OPEN DOOR AT five a.m. the next morning.
He stares at the mustard-brown carpet, fights to stay awake. Dingy and worn, it’s older than he is, and he thinks about the thousands and thousands of footsteps it’s had to bear. Eons from now, what evidence might be found in the carpet to show they were the ones who walked over it? He imagines a far-in-the-future archaeologist examining a scrap with gloved hands. This is where a TNT walked, this is how a TNT lived. It’s the kind of scenario he imagined when he described the fake job in the desert to Maxima. Maybe one day, this carpet will be someone else’s important discovery.
Maxima continues talking to Jerry, and Excel tracks the line of sadness running through their conversation. She was distant at first (“I’m just tired, don’t worry, darling,” she said at the start), seems utterly hopeless now. Despite the generous money Jerry has sent, Perfecta’s life just gets harder—the kitchen is still flooded, which means they can’t cook, their water has been shut off for days, and every night she fears the future so much she gets chest pains from her racing heart. But what’s truly devastated them is the loss of work: the market where Perfecta sells plastic sandals was burned down by an arsonist and is permanently closed, and Perfecto, hard as he tries, can’t find a job. There’s no money for tuition, and without school, what hope does her son have now? “But I have a solution,” she says, her voice on the edge of breaking. She tells Jerry that a second cousin named Maribel, who works as a live-in maid in Saudi Arabia, has offered to connect Perfecta to a similar job. The demand for Filipina maids is high in Saudi Arabia, and though she knows Filipinos, the women especially, aren’t always treated so well by their employers, she’ll make the sacrifice if it means paying for Perfecto’s school. “But to leave him”—her voice finally breaks—“I won’t see him for a long, long time. Maybe forever.”
She weeps, and that’s Excel’s cue. He rushes to her, sits beside her in front of the camera. “Hello Sir Jerry,” he says. “I’m sorry for this, sir.” He tells Maxima, “Sshh, sshh, waag iyak, don’t cry, don’t cry,” and pulls her close so that she can weep on his shoulder, a moment they’d planned carefully (to see a son be strong for his mother: How can Jerry not be moved?). Maxima keeps crying, slumped so low she buries her face in Excel’s chest, but now she says things in Tagalog that they didn’t rehearse, things Excel understands only in bits and pieces: I want to be something, but I am nothing. There is a child. What can I do? Stay and be poor. Leave forever, fly away. I try, I try. It’s not enough? Screw it. I go on. I grow old. But what is the life?
The Son of Good Fortune Page 20