Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  “Cats jump up on tables all the time.”

  “No. Not during a reading. Never!”

  It was as if she was expecting the cat to do a head-spinning thing like that kid in The Exorcist. Or some slime tentacle like in Alien was going to shoot out of Little Fluffy.

  But it didn’t stop there. Alfie, that white fur ball of entitlement, sauntered across the table and sat on the black mirror, the one that was the portal and all that business. I was about to make some joke—If a white cat sits on a black portal—when the damn thing starts meowing like crazy.

  But it turns out that it’s not the one doing the meowing. All it’s doing is moving its lips. We’ve got Alfie the lip-synching cat on our hands. The real meowing is coming from below the table. It’s the black one, Omega, sitting directly below Alfie and bellowing out some cat aria like a diva.

  Constance backed away from the table like Alfie was about to explode. “It’s a sign.”

  “You think?” Danny said. He and Constance were in lockstep on this one, doing some kind of psychic three-legged race. They’d lapped me and were going for the gold.

  “The white cat mouthing the words of the black cat that come to it through the black mirror,” she said. Awestruck would not come close to summing up Constance at that moment in time.

  “You’re missing something,” Danny said. “Listen.”

  We all listened. All I heard was a black cat meowing under a white cat.

  “Don’t you get it? It’s music. A kind of music.”

  Constance agreed. “Yesss,” she said slowly three times. I was beginning to wonder if maybe the Afghan mountains weren’t a better place to solve what was ailing us. Or at least a simpler place. “This woman? Ariana? There are Luciferians using her voice.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She wants to talk to you. But there are others, devil-people, who are preventing her. Their voices are blocking out hers.”

  It was right then that the two cats had their otherworldly accreditation revoked by a pounding on the door that sent them diving for sanctuary beneath a couch. When Constance opened the door, some other guy was there, jonesing for his future-fix, looking like he’d stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad. We heard him talking through the partly opened door. We only heard fragments: “jesuschrist! . . . I need to have you on standby in real time, okay? . . . I made an offer . . . a hundred K square feet in North Hollywood tonight . . . zoned mixed usage . . . I need to know if I should pull the trigger . . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . . .”

  Maybe it was the whininess. Or maybe it was our general pissed-off truculence over having to sit in the fading aura of two transcendental cats and listen to this little shit. Stepping out of that Afghan night does give you a certain attitude injection that lasts longer than the guy’s Botox. We walked up behind Constance, opened the door and stared at him. His reflex defense was to get puffed up like someone had stuck an air hose in his ass for about as long as it took for Danny to fix him with that look of his, the one that could get stray dogs barking. The guy deflated like a party balloon, sputtering all over the cheap stucco, leaving trails of indignation like so much snail slime.

  They all drive Porsches here.

  • • •

  We’d returned from her place, neither of us saying a word about it, all the way back to the Star-Brite.

  We lay there in geometric patches of streetlight and darkness, on two big beds separated by a collage of dubious stains and cigarette burns on a rug that was marginally worthy of being framed. Neither of us spoke for a long time. We were both replaying our time with Constance, trying to figure what it all meant. If it meant anything.

  “What did you think of Constance?” he asked.

  “When she’s doing her act, you look into her eyes and you just know someone else is doing the driving.”

  “Chinese food—the minute you get out of her place you want more. Only your brain’s stopped working in all that fog.” Which was true. Maybe it was having your senses strained through all that darkness and incense and then draped around Shiva and God knows how many other deities peering down from framed posters all over the place. I definitely started seeing things in my mind.

  It was my turn to sit on the tiny space that passed for a balcony at the Star-Brite, so I got to watch the tweakers at the taco stand scratching and jitterbugging their way across the sidewalk in spastic circles, waiting for their meth to show up, checking the newspaper coin slot for the hundredth time, and parading through my fears like some ragged advance guard of an omen. Watching them, and thinking of Annie somehow made them linked and I didn’t know why.

  Back in the room, lying there again in that geometric light and darkness, I thought Danny was asleep. “Jesus!” His head arched back, looking at the wall behind his bed. “Oh, man. I don’t even wanna know.”

  “What now?”

  “Look.” He was pointing at the wall.

  About a foot or so above the laminated headboard were two faint and greasy outlines of male handprints, spaced just far enough apart to let the imagination soar.

  “Why would a guy be that far up on this bed leaning forward, supporting himself by putting his two greaseball hands on the wall, in front of where I am supposedly sleeping tonight?”

  I was trying to think of the word we learned in Ms. Lechowski’s English class for when nature adds to drama with things like thunder or lightning. Because right then, as Danny was having a fit about the greasy handprints over the bed, one transvestite hooker at the taco stand outside started screeching at another tranny, reaching high C in some demented aria that threatened him/her with what would happen if he/she didn’t get the ice out of his/her ass. And the second one was yelling that whoever hid it from the cops up his ass got to keep it—“So unless you intend to kiss my neon ass motherfucker you can go back to getting something else rammed up your own sorry butt and leave me the fuck alone, you get what I’m tellin’ you?”

  “You listening to this?” I asked.

  Danny stopped his own rant for a moment, listened, and then said, “I’m not meant to sleep indoors anymore.”

  He started to get up, slumped down again, and said, “You know the scariest thing of all? Ariana’s mother. She’s a ghost. Invisible. I can’t remember one damn thing about her. I must have seen her five different times. And I can’t even remember what she looked like. She would come in, this little ghost, bundled up in all that cloth, serve the tea, and then shuffle out. That’s what they want to do to Ariana. She won’t let that happen. She won’t,” he said for added emphasis.

  After a long silence I asked, “What are you going to do if you find her?”

  “Not if. When,” he said.

  “When.”

  He lay there staring at the handprints for a while. “I don’t know.” More staring. “I’m going to ask her to forgive me for not protecting her.”

  “Hey. Women rule. It’s the zeros, the new millennium.”

  “The zeros of which century? Ours or theirs? I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

  “I thought you already tried that.”

  “Things were different then.”

  “Yeah, she wasn’t married then.”

  “She’s not married. She’s kidnapped.”

  • • •

  That night, Danny and I had the biggest fight we’d ever had. The problem was that I was starting to think Constance was possibly a Grade A wack job. I mean, even with all that spooky cat wailing, portals, and witches’ juniper, I wasn’t sure I really believed the whole fortune-telling business. I started wondering if maybe I’d always wanted to believe in Constance more than I actually did believe. Maybe I was too afraid of risking whatever chance I had to find Annie Boo on some woman who burned incense and peered into crystal balls. Or it could have been having Annabelle as my mother. And watching all her tea-leaf readings.

  Whatever the reason, Danny just couldn’t handle any doubts about Constance. Not after all that cat-on-the-portal business.
He was a believer now. Totally. Which is where the argument started.

  Sometime in the middle of that night, I woke up when I thought I heard him talking to someone. He was lying on his bed, sort of mumbling under his breath. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but I felt like I was intruding on something private.

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Who you talking to?”

  “Oh . . . sorry ’bout that.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Wait a minute—you wake me up talking and then you say you don’t want to talk?”

  “You’d think I was insane.”

  “I already do.”

  He lay there on the bed. This time it was the ceiling he was fixed on, where the occasional passing headlights would rearrange the shadow patterns. “I talk to Ariana sometimes. I swear to God it’s like she can hear me.”

  “I think we need to go slow.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not sure I believe in all this voodoo we heard tonight.”

  “It’s not voodoo,” he said indignantly.

  “Hey. My mother told fortunes.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I’m not sure about it all.”

  This was obviously a direct hit on the emotional ammunition dump. “Constance is not telling fortunes!”

  “I’ve already been through this with my mother.”

  “What’s your mother got to do with anything?”

  “She’s just kicked her husband out. For the third time. Every time she does that, she starts reading tea leaves. Which she says give her messages from the other side—whatever that is. And then she says, ‘He’s dead to me! I might as well be in mourning.’”

  Which was true. Whenever Annabelle pitched Albert out she made sure I knew all the stages of mourning so I’d be sure to be sympathetic when she smashed the china or keyed Albert’s car. There was Isolation. Anger. Denial. And some other things, and maybe not exactly in that order. That stuff always confused me.

  “I know all the stages,” I lied. “There’s Anger, Denial, and Isolation. You’re in denial.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Like my mother. With her tea leaves. They’re a kind of denial.”

  “Constance is not tea leaves.” He sat up in that same spring-loaded way he did in the Afghan mountains whenever his sleep got mortared.

  “Look, let’s run through it, okay? Ariana’s locked into South Waziristan or some fucking camel town, married to that fat dickhead with a Groucho Marx moustache whose balls you shot off way too late to stop him from probably filling her up with baby dickheads who will grow up to come hunting for you. Maybe she’s gone out of your life, okay? Gone. No matter what some wacko fortuneteller says.”

  “Fuck you!” he yelled and then leapt up with a whole lot more fucks, flipped the bed over, kicked the dresser, whipped open the door, yelled at the transvestites down at the taco stand not to answer the questions of the cops who’d just showed up, slammed the door, locked it, and then with his back against that door, slid down to the stained carpet and was quiet.

  “Feel better?” I asked after a while.

  “If the cops storm this room, filling the place full of bullets, do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “Tell her I love her.”

  “No problem.” I waited for a while. “Acceptance. Stage Four.”

  “I repeat . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “What if the bullets go right through the door and hit me instead of you?”

  “Then I’ll be sure to tell Annie Boo that you died in a hail of bullets in a bed in Hollywood. It’ll make a great legend that she’ll tearfully tell her other lovers. All dozens of them.”

  That was the last name I wanted to hear—the one I craved, longed for. “You know, sometimes you are truly a goddamn idiot. You just pushed the wrong fucking button.” Hot bubbles of indignation burst all around me. And he knew he had me. Which made me even angrier.

  “Oh, so my buttons are okay, but poor sensitive you—”

  “Reasoning with you is like putting contacts on a blind guy.”

  “Wow. Just because I talked about Annie Boo’s other—”

  “Yes!”

  “You know what you need? You need a session with Constance.”

  “Tea leaves.”

  “How’d she know about Ricky Rubi then?”

  “Luck.”

  “You sure about that?”

  I wasn’t. And staring off that Star-Brite balcony at what passed for my own personal Hollywood, I decided that the whole Annie Boo journey was weird enough to begin with. And somehow Constance was only going to compound all that weirdness. If I was looking for that to happen, I could always let my mother handle it.

  “Constance is a genius,” he said.

  “Then she’s your genius.”

  He thought about that for a while. “You’re gonna miss out. Already she broke the code, you know. She figured it out—the broken music thing she was talking about. ‘The portal is bringing in broken music’? With that cat? It was that old beaten-up piano, the Schroder. The one in the empty house on Algonquin Avenue that Ariana and I went to. She played it even though it was missing a key.”

  “Wow.”

  “Okay. Be a moron. ‘Now Ariana’s trying to fix the music’—you heard Constance say that.”

  “Yeah? And? What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

  “She’s trying to reach me. Like I’m trying to reach her.” Sitting on the floor, his back against the door, Danny’s face was completely in the shadows. “She is trying to reach me. I know it.” Only when a car passed by on the street outside and the shadows were fought back by the charge of reflected light that passed across the room could you make out the expression on his face. It was like someone who’d taken a direct hit.

  “Hey, let’s talk about sports. Or beer or something,” I said.

  “Oh, great idea.” His voice was so low I could barely hear him.

  But neither of us could think of anything to say. We just sat there in silence as the light and the shadows fought for supremacy on the ceiling.

  “That first time? When she and I were naked together,” he said. “When I almost made love to her? I didn’t. Because she was crying so hard when I was . . .”

  “Was what?”

  Danny sat there staring at the floor. I thought he hadn’t heard. He had. He just didn’t want to answer. “You’re right,” he said after a while.

  “About what?”

  “We should be talking about sports or something.”

  • • •

  Back on the Star-Brite balcony watching the tweakers:

  I folded and unfolded one of the scraps of paper with two phone numbers on it. They were the phone numbers I used to dial to talk to Annie. I’d carried and cared for them all through the Afghan mountains, inscribed on a growing number of pieces of paper in various stages of decay. You could never be too safe with something so precious.

  On that other piece of paper was Annabelle’s Highly recommend you do not call this number. Coming off the page like a dare.

  I had spent all those months over there looking at those three numbers, waiting for this moment, rehearsing it, refining it, that pause after she answered, which was when I would say quietly, “I’m here,” and then listen to her telling me . . .

  . . . I never really settled on what she would tell me.

  But now these numbers immobilized me, blotched markers eating into tattered shards of paper that I had carried like talismans. It wasn’t until the first wedge of light over Hollywood sent the tweakers stumbling home on silent streets that I got the courage to dial the numbers. One of them had been her cell phone; another was the house on the Venice canals; and the third one had simply shown up a year or so ago on Annabelle’s caller ID. I was no longer sure which was which.

/>   The first number yielded a Spanish-speaking female voice on the answering machine. The second one told me I had come to the right place for health care products. And the third one, the Highly recommend you do not call this number, lay across the screen on my cell phone in my own version of perpetuity as I tried to imagine her voice. I phoned.

  But what came through that cell phone was an angry, sleepy male voice gaining consciousness with each new curse. Didn’t I know what the fucking time was? Didn’t I know that he hadn’t seen that fucking bitch in a year? Didn’t I know . . . ?

  I knew none of it.

  18

  The sound was like having a kazoo playing Beethoven in your brain.

  I grappled my way out of a dream-riddled sleep, blinking into the sunlight as the musical clatter went full fortissimo. On the next bed, Danny might as well have been in another county, snoring like a rusted muffler, not even stirring as his cell phone blasted out its strangled symphony. I found the phone under the nachos bag and flipped it open.

  It was Constance. “Is this one of the soldiers?”

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t ever called someone who I’ve done a reading for. Never. They call me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve been working the caller ID list on my phone, trying to find out which one was your number.”

  “We were going to call you.”

  “My cat just died.”

  I waited for some punch line.

  “Hello?” Exasperation blasted through the phone. “I said, ‘My cat died.’ Didn’t you hear me?” She was talking very fast. And emotionally. Not at all like last night when she had this low, slow way of talking.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Alfie, the white one. When I woke up he was dead.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “I’m devastated.”

  “I can understand that.” But I was lying. I had come from seeing men destroyed, obliterated, vaporized. So I could not really understand. I apologize to all cat lovers. But I was no longer capable of that kind of understanding. At least, not yet.

  “It’s a sign.”

  “It is?”

  “Alpha—Alfie—was only the mouthpiece last night when Omega was channeling all that evil. He paid the ultimate price.”