by Martyn Burke
“All of it. It will all be different when you meet her.”
“Will she recognize me?”
“That is not the question.” Constance was looking off into that light. Her voice again came from somewhere far away.
“What is the question, then?” Danny looked at her as if a stare could pull an answer out of her. She seemed not to hear him. “What?” Then suddenly he sat back. You could almost hear the tumblers falling into place, unlocking some vault within him. “Oh god. Are you asking . . . Is that the question? . . . Is that what you want me to understand? If I will recognize her?”
Constance did not answer.
19
It went on. In circles that kept coming back to that same silence. I was gagging on all this karma and anxiety.
I began looking for a way out, some graceful exit from the bombardment of whatever it was that Constance was dropping on us. I started to move toward the door, muttering a kind of preliminary goodbye.
Constance seemed to snap back into whatever world we were in. “Wait a minute. Are you leaving?” When I nodded, she looked indignant.
“Well, what about my cat?”
Somehow I got put in charge of Alfie.
We wrapped him in a towel that was taped together so that the only part of him you could see were his legs. The problem now was rigor mortis, so Alfie’s legs stuck stiffly straight out through the openings in the towel.
My initial impulse, which was simply to run like hell, got overruled by Danny, who wanted all the time with Constance he could get. There was almost an anxious quality to him now, exasperated maybe because he wanted to hear things that she wasn’t telling him.
The idea of this outing, we were informed, was to give Alfie a clairsentient sendoff. Or something like that. It had to be done by everyone involved in his demise. Which is why Danny and I were there. We’d started by standing in the Sunset Plaza parking lot overlooking a good chunk of L.A. I suggested we send him to the spirit world like the old-time Comanches or Sioux or whatever tribe it was who stuck their dead up on wooden platforms and let the birds peck them clean. I figured that should pretty much do it for Alfie, who was dangling from my side by a carrying harness I’d made out of 7-Eleven plastic bags. Perfect to hook over a tree branch and the birds do their work.
But apparently this was not clairsentient enough. Constance seemed to be drifting into a daze. I started to feel almost sorry for her. There was a kind of frail quality, as if something about being out in the light of day diminished her. “The ocean,” she said, like it had been revealed to her in a vision. “The ocean is calling Alfie.”
So with me sitting in the back of Constance’s old brown Ford Taurus with a green driver’s side door and a shattered rear window that was held together with gaffer tape, we started west toward the ocean. I told myself I was doing it for Alfie. On several counts this was difficult to sustain. The first was because Alfie was lying wrapped up on the seat beside me, with his legs sticking more or less straight up. The second problem was that Constance drove like a bank shot to the side pocket. She was all over the road. She drove as if she was still doing a reading. Her attention was in some other world, everywhere but on what was in front of her or on either side. Sitting in that back seat, bracing myself in whatever way was possible for the crash I knew was coming, I yelled over the intermittent symphony of horns for her to drive in a straight line.
It was like reasoning with a grenade.
At one point, after she had nearly sideswiped an eighteen-wheeler on the Hollywood Freeway, I yelled something about her getting us all killed. She turned around, that mass of Goldilocks curls spinning like blonde wind chimes, her little chin holding aloft a look of impatience. “Why are you so jumpy? There’s no need, you know. I had a reading done a month ago. I’m going to die in an earthquake in Mexico when I’m eighty-six years old.” As she said it, she was heading straight for a concrete bridge abutment that we would have hit if Danny had not grabbed the wheel and steered us back onto the inside lane.
“See?” she said as we lurched back into the lane.
I took over the driving, which seemed to be well received all around. That left Alfie buckled into the front passenger seat, legs in the air, while Danny and Constance were in the back seat. It almost turned into another session because Constance was staring out the side windows—transing, or whatever she called it—while Danny was going crazy wanting to ask her questions about Ariana.
He asked it outright. “Please, I just want to know where she is.”
But Constance acted like she hadn’t heard him, talking endlessly about clients—“Without naming names. I’m not a ‘read-and-tell’ kind of psychic, you understand.” All the way along Sunset Boulevard it went on, past Beverly Hills and out into Brentwood. I heard things like, “I had a client up there on Rockingham, divorced now, and I told her that was . . .” And then every mile or so it was leaning over, looking down at Alfie who was lying there trussed and stiff on the front passenger seat.
When we got to the end of Sunset Boulevard where it meets the ocean, she leaned forward and said, “Alfie wants you to go north.” I thought of asking her how she knew. I mean, Alfie was still lying flat on his back with his legs sticking straight in the air saying absolutely nothing. But after thinking it over, I decided the answer would probably just lead to more questions.
In the back seat, next to Constance, Danny was strangely silent.
We drove up the Pacific Coast Highway to where it becomes two lanes in each direction, past the Topanga Canyon road and the Malibu Colony. Constance was fixated on the hills on our right. “What are those hills?”
“The Santa Monica Mountains,” I said.
“I never get out this far.” She looked out the window as if she was in a foreign country.
“They have some nerve to call those things mountains.” Danny said, looking up at about three thousand feet of big hills.
But Constance suddenly came alive. “Stop the car please,” she said. “Here! Here!” I pulled over to the dirt shoulder of the road and she jumped out. She stood staring at the mountains. “Where are we?”
“That’s Malibu Canyon over there.”
She sank to her knees, closed her eyes, and ran her hand back and forth a few inches from the ground. “We are close.”
Back in the car, we kept going north through Malibu, stopping once more, turning in at Paradise Cove, which she dismissed with a wave of her hand, and then going a couple of miles north to where Zuma Beach blossoms through the windshield as the roadside hills are peeled away.
“Ah,” she said. She was smiling and staring up at the mountains. In the rearview mirror she looked serene once again. “I feel Alfie’s energy.” Danny was sitting beside her, staring out at the ocean in some world of his own.
Not far past Zuma Beach a road turned inland, first passing a patch of scrawny tract homes and then rising up into the mountains past flimsy mansions built in defiance of nature. Further past these was the remoteness of asphalt intrusions into places no road should sensibly go. It was on one of these that we stopped at a turnoff overlooking the Pacific Ocean below us.
“Alfie is home,” she announced.
Fine by me. Truth was, Alfie was starting to get a tad whiffy. After all, the poor thing had been dead now for at least sixteen hours and not even the car’s wheezy air conditioner was wafting Alfie out through the open windows. Constance seemed not to notice. She had already grabbed him by the 7-Eleven bags and had laid him gently on the ground. “Help me,” she said. Which in this case meant gathering twigs, bark, and branches that I first thought were meant to be a good way to cover up Alfie in his final resting place. But it turned out it was Alfie covering the bark, in a lovingly constructed funeral pyre she was making for him.
Constance took out a plastic lighter and set fire to the twigs. “Cremation,” she said. “The surest path into the next life.”
And basically, that was the moment that I became an accessory to a crime.
Because, at that instant, I was silent in the face of whatever clairsentience trumped common sense. Or, put another way, I just stood there—even as I remembered what I’d read years ago about why Los Angeles was not fit for habitation: the earthquakes, the lack of fresh water, the mudslides, and all the rest. But the big one that stuck in my mind was, believe it or not, resins! The gooey stuff that is loaded into all those twiglike bushes and bark covering the hillsides of L.A. The resins that explode like a bomb when they ignite. No mere charring and crackling for these L.A. bushes—uh-uh, we’re talking flamethrower stuff here. These little bushes can literally blow up and hurl flame at you from all directions. All because of the resins.
I knew that. And yet, still I blankly watched Constance light the twigs and bark under Alfie, for some reason frozen into inaction. I probably even knew that bark was from one of the big eucalyptus trees, the rocket-propelled grenades of the local flora. To this day I can’t explain it. That was my part of it, my little chunk of guilt. But that alone didn’t open the gates of hell. It took nature to do that. A sudden wind whipped down the side of the huge hill, so hot and arid that you felt invisible sparks flickering across your body. It eddied and whipped around like a decoy before the blast out of the east that slammed in with a force that almost knocked us over.
“Santa Anas,” said Constance. “Winds of evil.” She yelled something else that we couldn’t hear because that eucalyptus bark, loaded with enough resin to humble napalm, suddenly exploded all around Alfie.
Alfie practically levitated above the inferno. “Oh dear,” said Constance as a satchel charge of manzanilla twigs blew up.
For me, Oh dear was not what first came to mind as I grabbed Constance, dragging her out of the way of the horizontal geyser of fire that shot out, peeling the paint off the trunk of her Taurus. Wind-whipped and leaping like a deranged dancer, the fire shot across the thin strip of asphalt to the underbrush on the other side of the road. Which was where the eucalyptus trees themselves were standing, with their sleek, scaly trunks suddenly reminding me of artillery shells.
We barely made it into the car as that patch of mountain blew up around us, the eucalyptus tree canopies erupting in sequence like Katyusha rockets.
“It’s like calling in air support right on your own position,” said Danny, looking amazed that I could get the Taurus out of there before the tires melted. We hurtled down the zigzag road with the rearview mirrors billowing with fire and the horror of what we had just unleashed.
Constance was practically swooning. Staring out the back window, she kept calling out, “Darling Alfie!”
“We’re practically ecological war criminals, do you know that?” I yelled. The car skidded around a curve, heading into the Doppler effect of the distant, onrushing sirens.
But she was operating on a more transcendental level. “Alfie was special,” she said proudly. “But who would have thought he had it in him?” In the rearview mirror I caught Danny’s wild eyes signaling me to let it drop. “Alfie is showing his anger,” she said. “Over what happened to him.” Police cars flashed past, a zipline of lights and sirens. Constance was exulting in it all. “The ocean,” she said grandly, stating the obvious. “We must reach the ocean.”
That was the easy part. Just straight down the mountain with a few minor course adjustments and we were at Zuma Beach watching Malibu burn on one side and the endlessness of the ocean on the other. Danny could only look at the ocean. In the warmth of the late afternoon sun he suddenly looked older than I remembered him. Or maybe just tired, more tired than I’d seen him after any of the battles we’d been in. The kind of exhaustion that comes when something inside slips and the floodgates can no longer hold.
“You okay?” I asked.
“What the hell are we doing?” he said so softly I could barely hear him. “We wipe out mountains over there all the time. So we come all this way here to America and do the same thing?” Over at the water’s edge on that huge beach, Constance was standing knee-deep in the surf, eyes closed, her blonde curls piled like a parka hood around her small face. Danny watched her circling in the water. “What the hell are we doing? We should have saved ourselves the trip.”
Constance slowly turned around, her eyes opening. “Earth, water, wind, and fire,” she said.
“Been there, done that,” said Danny loud enough for her to hear. You could have cut paper on the edge in his voice.
“Excuse me?” she said. You could tell she’d grown accustomed to reverence from her clients.
“Coming down that mountain? After we’ve just fucked it up more than a B-52 attack? I started to wonder why we’d come halfway around the planet just for this.”
“Oh, really?” she said, eyebrows arching in tiny, sharp parabolas. I’ve always thought that really and fine are two words that women say way better than men. For starters, they come gender-equipped with their own personalized exclamation marks that no guy can duplicate. And, they come with about a million different meanings per word so that a really one day can mean the exact opposite of a really the next day. And no mere male is strong enough to cart around a dictionary big enough to translate every curled vowel, every different estrogen-soaked inflection that make Chinese intonations seem almost monotone.
“Yeah, really,” Danny said. Not in an angry way. It was just a tired, depressed, guy-type really. Flat. Unnuanced. But you could tell that, to Constance, it pretty much had the sound of a gauntlet being slapped down.
“Meaning what?” she said, wading out of the water, the forces of the Hollywood belief system rising invisibly behind her.
“Meaning that I came all the way from Afghanistan, crazed over the woman I love, praying, pleading for answers about how I find her. And what I end up with is a dead cat that sets Malibu on fire.”
She circled him, saying nothing. You could almost hear terrible things in all that silence. Even the waves made no noise.
“I vote we get out of here,” he said.
“Why?” she said. “What’s the rush?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe before we poison the water. Or cause an earthquake.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
She drilled Danny with a silent really?—another gender-specific tactical advantage—and then marched up the beach, the sun at her back. “Stand over there,” she ordered. At first Danny did nothing. I thought of two gunfighters waiting to see who would draw first.
“Why?”
“So you can go back to Afghanistan with more than a dead cat.” She adjusted her sunglasses, lowering them, looking over them to the ocean. Then she raised them again.
She stared past him. And then she took off her sunglasses, holding them up to the sky. “Polarizing,” she said. “Takes away the reflections. Bad for scrying,” she said. “Give me a minute.” She squinted into the sunlight and the ocean in silence.
“She sends you music. This Ar—Art—”
“Ariana?”
“Yes. Ariana.”
Merely her name stopped Danny in his tracks. “She does? The broken music you were talking about?” All that edge crumbled. Suddenly he was back to being the mendicant waiting for crumbs of information.
She stared into the ocean. “No. It is not broken. I hear a name. Another woman’s name. Elizabeth? Liza?”
“Elise?”
“Yes. Maybe. This woman you want to know about, this Ariana, she plays this Elizabeth or Elise music. Again and again. But only in her mind.”
Danny said, “Then it is broken. She played it on that old piano with the key missing.”
“No,” Constance said. “No, wait.” Behind her, all of Malibu looked like it was in flames. The news helicopters circled like mechanical vultures, waiting to feast on their own kind of carrion. Others in the same flock came clattering up along the coast and then cut inland.
Constance looked over to me. In a way I
didn’t like. A seriously impaling way. She looked back at the ocean. Then at me. Back and forth until I asked if something was wrong. She didn’t answer. At least not immediately. She went back to looking straight at Danny for a moment. “It’s not you,” she told him. “The broken music is his.”
She was pointing straight at me.
I snapped out of whatever mind space I was in. “I don’t have anything to do with this.”
“You do. Someone you love is trying to make music. But something stops her before she can finish it. That is the broken music,” she said.
“What about Ariana then?” Danny said, irritation, or maybe disappointment, stringing his words together.
“Her music never leaves her head. She is blocked somehow.” Constance turned back to me. “But this broken music you will hear comes from another woman.”
“Is her name Annie?” Suddenly all this psychic stuff didn’t seem so insane. “Annie Boo? As in Boudreau?” As I heard—
The first time ever I saw your face
I thought the sun rose in your eyes
It was in the rest of the lyrics where I almost lost it—the part where the moon and the stars were the gifts she was giving me. The moon and the stars back in all those frozen nights, staring up to the skies and listening to distant battles in the mountains—and why hadn’t I known it? It was Annie! Then and now. The broken music had to be Annie! She was singing to me?
“I’m tired,” Constance said. “Very tired. The light is growing dim. I’m having trouble feeling energy.”
“You have to tell me.” Instantly I was a believer, a zealot practically. All my what a crocks vanished.
“I feel noise,” said Constance. “She is somewhere where the music is too loud. She is looking for you there.”
“Where is music too loud?”
“There are too many people.”
“A club,” said Danny. “Like the ones we saw.”
She stared at the sky like some revelation was about to come from it. “You are both looking for the same woman,” she said.