Still Life Las Vegas

by James Sie

  He looks sadly into my eyes, his eyes glistening with shared sorrow. “We are same, yes?”

  “Yes,” I breathe.

  Keys jingle in the lock, and the door opens. “Chrysto—” Acacia begins. She is holding a small bag of groceries. She stops when she sees me.

  “’Kash,” Chrysto calls out, “look who is here.” I can still feel the warmth of his fingers after he has slid them away from my face.

  “Ah,” Acacia says. “Walter.” She says my name like I’m a gymnast. Her lips spread out into a thin smile, but her eyes do not twinkle. They shift back and forth between me and Chrysto.

  “Acacia,” Chrysto says, eyes shining, “Walter, he is like us, he is orphan.”

  I shake my head to restart my brain. “No, no,” I say, “I’m not an orphan. I live with my father.”

  Chrysto looks puzzled. Acacia looks puzzled. Finally, she speaks. “Oh, you are trying to kill his father?” she asks Chrysto pleasantly, and disappears into the kitchen.

  Chrysto’s eyes harden.

  “It was my fault,” I call out to Acacia, “I wasn’t clear.” I can hear the sound of groceries being taken out of the bag, but she doesn’t respond.

  Chrysto has recovered and is waving the black sketchbook over his head. “Acacia!” he calls. “Walter is artist! Great artist! Come look!” There’s no answer. “’Kash!” he yells louder. “He has drawn picture of you, exactly! Come!”

  There is another moment, and then Acacia appears from the kitchen, clenching a jar of pickled asparagus spears. “Stavros from Athens, very famous painter, many times I sit in his studio.” Her shoulders are set back, her feet planted wide apart. “Hans Leipzig, number two artist in Germany, has made paintings of me. One of them, in Berlin National Gallery. More pictures of me, I do not need to see.”

  Chrysto mutters something in Greek, and judging by the way his teeth drag along his lower lip, I know it’s not a compliment. Much shouting follows, none of it in English. Lots of hand gestures. It’s all kind of scary and very European. Maybe I don’t want to live there after all. I don’t hear my name invoked, but several times the jar of asparagus spears is thrust in my direction.

  It ends with Acacia storming into the bedroom. “Get ready for work!” she shouts from behind the slammed door.

  Chrysto angrily pulls on a pair of jeans and grabs a shirt from the back of the couch. He flips a hand in the direction she has parted, dismissing her. “Walter,” he says, grabbing my shoulder and squeezing it, “come. There is still time for eating.”

  * * *

  “Bitch,” Chrysto says brightly. “My sister, I love her, but she is sometimes bitch.”

  Chrysto drips the last of the honey into his thick yogurt. We’re seated at a small table in front of a Greek café four blocks from where he lives. There’s a small white cup of muddy coffee next to his bowl. I’ve got a cold lemon–poppy seed muffin on my plate, even though I can’t stand lemon–poppy seed muffins.

  “She thinks she is mana mou, my mother, but she is not,” he continues. “Very unhappy, Acacia. Does not like this … Las Vegas. The choiros who stare at her. Also, she”—Chrysto waggles his fist, thumb extended, in front of his mouth—“too much.”

  “Ohhh.” I nod my head, like this explains everything. “How did you end up in Vegas?”

  He points the honeyed teaspoon in my direction. “Maybe … to find you,” he says, and smiles. I can’t tell whether he’s joking or not. He puts the spoon in his mouth and draws it out slowly, thinking. “There is something I am searching for…” he begins, but breaks off. A shadow darkens our table. It’s the waiter, who places the check down. He looks supremely uninterested in us, but Chrysto glowers until he goes away.

  “Some things I cannot say. Here. I could be killed.” He leans forward, conspiratorially, then suddenly cries out. I think for a moment he’s been shot.

  “My wallet. I have forgotten it. Idiot!”

  “It’s no problem,” I tell him, and pull out my own. He looks at me, pained, but I shake my head and draw the check toward me.

  He takes a last sip of his coffee. “I am happy, Walter. I am so happy to have a friend.”

  I’m happy, too.

  Chrysto leans forward. “One day soon, I will tell you everything. My story. Fantastic.” He mimes scribbling on a page. “You know … writer? Person who writes? I am looking for this.”

  “I write,” I blurt out. “I mean, I can write. I have written … stuff.”

  Chrysto grabs both my hands. “You are artist and writer both! Excellent!” He looks me directly in the eyes and pulls me closer. “What have you done with this talent?”

  I mumble the truth because I can’t think of a lie. “I, uh, I did a comic. You know comics?” The school once ran a series of strips I did, the adventures of Jerry Jackrabbit, the school mascot. The strips usually ended with Jerry being run over by some vehicle, or having his eyes explode from some cosmetics lab experiment. As soon as the teacher sponsor got around to reading the paper she pulled it. That’s pretty much the extent of my literary career.

  Chrysto frowns and crinkles his forehead, either because he doesn’t know what I’m talking about or because he does. “Hmm,” he murmurs distantly. He places both hands on the table, like he’s made a decision. “You are young. I am young. Together—” He clasps his hands together, then spreads them wide; I half expect a dove to magically appear.

  “What?” I ask. “Together, what?”

  He smiles at me, that dimpled, wolfish smile that sails like a thunderbolt straight into my heart. “Everything, Walter. Everything.”

  And he did tell me many things, little nuggets of information like honeyed nuts that he’d feed me by hand, and I’d lap them up, happy little love-starved puppy that I was. I became privy to some of the tricks he and Acacia employed, like how they managed to get up unnoticed onto the pedestals at Venice Venice. There were doors high up on the wall, next to the pedestals, and when the gondoliers commanded attention by banging their oars and singing on their march to the docks, Chrysto and Acacia would slip into place. He showed me the special powder they had smuggled all the way over from Greece, a white dust ground from the river rocks of Taygetos Mountain, and how, by mixing it with spring water, a clay could be made that was smeared on the body like a second skin, creating the look of statues without any cracks or imperfections. Chrysto even let me in on some of his training, though I could not begin to learn even the easiest exercises; I was too old, too rigid in my joints and tendons, even at the age of seventeen. He had been refining his body since the age of four. There were the exercises he did to slow the pulse down, to calm the breath, to deaden the eyes. He described the horrible and sometimes fatal rituals they practiced, where they would place the young boys in slim wooden boxes, like caskets, and lower them into narrow cracks in the earth, to see how long they could remain perfectly still, and how some would scream the first night and others would emerge three days later, fresh as if they had just stepped out of a bath. Chrysto boasted that he had control of every minute muscle in his body, even many of the involuntary ones, and how he used them to control his breath, his nerves, and his heart.

  Chrysto divulged many secrets; I later appropriated some of them in my work. But he didn’t tell me the most important thing. Not until it was too late.

  WALTER & CHRYSTO

  ROMA

  An alarm goes off in the dark. Not mine, someone else’s; mine is high and whiny, this one grumbles. No, it’s not an alarm, it’s something else. It’s the doorbell. It’s the air conditioner breaking down. Can it be a goat? No, it’s my cell phone, glowing and vibrating on the coffee table, and in the stillness of the night it sounds as loud as a slot announcing Jackpot!

  I plunge down off the couch, scrambling to pick it up. I know who it is, because there’s no one else it could be, no one else I want it to be.

  “Hello?” I whisper, blinking my eyes into focus.

  “Walter, I need your help.” His voice sounds ro
ugh and strained. He’s been crying. “Help me to find her.”

  “What? Who? Acacia?” I ask, shaking the sleep out of my head.

  “No,” groans Chrysto. “Not Acacia. Mara. She is here.”

  At first I think he’s saying “Mother,” but then I remember the girl from the cave in Greece. “She’s here?” I whisper. I feel my way to the sliding glass doors and step out onto the balcony. What was she doing in Las Vegas?

  “Not her. Her image.”

  His story rushes out of him, lurching and stalling, punctuated by heavy sighs and swigs from a bottle. It involves Mara and an American sculptor, who had come up the mountain the winter before the whole lost-in-the-woods disaster and picked her to pose for him.

  “Why would someone go all the way to Greece just for a model?”

  “Please, Walter, do not be so thick,” Chrysto says. “It is done this way, always. For many centuries, sculptors, painters, those of highest artistic quality, have come to us. The Petrides of the Mountain, we are known. Our training makes for us to give the excellent posing, the … inspiration. Is easy to understand, yes?”

  I think of Apollo, high atop the crowds at the Venice Venice shopping plaza.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “But this is not important,” groans Chrysto. “This artist, he has come on commission to make a statue. He tells of this to Mara while she sits and he builds her body small, in clay. Mara whispers this to Acacia that night, but Acacia”—he spits out her name—“she does not tell me! She keeps this from me all these years. Only now she tells me!”

  I don’t know if I’m still sleepy or just naturally dense. “Tells you…”

  Chrysto shouts so loud I’m afraid my father will wake up. “Las Vegas! He was making statue for hotel in Las Vegas!” His voice falters then, shrinking down to a piteous mewing. “She is somewhere here, Walter. I must find her. What can I do? You must help me. You understand this city. Find with me this statue.”

  Honestly, I don’t see how finding it would make any difference. Who knows? Maybe the sculptor was a modern artist and he’s elongated all of Mara’s limbs or put a giant hole in her torso. Or more likely she’s somewhere attached to a slot machine, with a Wheel of Fortune spinning inside her belly. How would finding that help?

  “Walter.” Chrysto’s voice rings darkly in my ear. “For so long, I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, I always am weeping and thinking, thinking only of Mara, of what I have done and what has happened to her. I must see her again, to finish with it. Everything will change, my life will go on, better, when I find this statue. You understand?”

  The soft, pleading tone in his voice vibrates inside me. Of course I understand. I know what it’s like to go looking for pieces of your past, no matter how pointless. And even though I don’t have a great track record with finding lost women, locating one who’s fixed in one place should be a lot easier.

  “When do you want to meet?” I ask.

  * * *

  Two days later, it’s getting on toward evening, but the path of my day isn’t narrowing down to sleep, like usual. It starts off the same: I’ve changed out of my work clothes, peeled back the plastic of my father’s dinner, checked the Night cup with its evening’s meds. But now, in this alternative universe, instead of dismantling the couch and burrowing in, I’m going OUT, out into the bright night, which spreads before me, open and unexplored.

  I’m on a mission.

  We meet in the concrete alleyway outside of Venice Venice. Chrysto’s just finished work, and he’s his usual high-energy self, not a trace of desperation or anxiety to be found. He pulls me in for a quick kiss on each cheek, and I notice a streak of clay on his neck, just under the right ear, a spot he must have missed. I resist the urge to wipe it away, to take my finger and swipe a little U on the V of his neck muscle.

  “Where to, Walter?”

  I point out that only the newer, more expensive casinos would be able to afford a commissioned statue, and that maybe we should start looking in one of those places. It just makes sense. I suggest Roma, the newly renovated Caesar’s Palace, which is definitely high-end and has a boatload of statues.

  Chrysto squeezes my shoulders appreciatively, blasts me with all the blue of those Mediterranean eyes. “Hey, I think my luck is changed already,” he says. I smile goofily back. I’m a head taller than he is but I can nestle easily right in the palm of his smooth, long-fingered hand.

  * * *

  Being on the Strip with someone else makes all the difference. I’m not just pushing past crowds and through them and into them, I’m one of them. Well, not really one of them, I’d never want to be one of them, but it’s not just me. I’m part of a pack. A pack of two.

  It’s clear who the alpha male is. Chrysto pulls me through the crowds, always a little ahead but then suddenly right next to me, tugging my arm this way or that or touching my shoulder to direct attention toward some hidden statuary. I follow, jerked by an invisible thread that keeps me within a body or two of him. I’m learning to navigate in his wake, to make my way through the crowds. The air smells of exhaust and cigarettes, but there’s something else, too, a sweaty muskiness, absolutely masculine. The heat coming off my skin mingles with the heat in the air, my molecules mixing with everyone else’s molecules until we’re all covered with this thin membrane of animal warmth that binds us together until the next sanitized blast of air-conditioning blows it apart.

  We arrive at Roma. It’s huge. I can’t imagine that the real city could be much bigger. Gigantic lobbies, multiple casinos, four swimming pools, two temple gardens, forecourts, after-courts, tennis courts, and a mini Colosseum. We stride through room after room, me spotting statues and Chrysto dismissing them. He barely looks at the figures but can point out all their flaws. This Jupiter is too dull, that Venus is lacking in grace; none of them impress him in the least. “This is no muse, this is a cow,” he says of an unfortunate nymph kneeling by a marble fountain.

  I moo coquettishly.

  “These statues were never alive,” Chrysto says with disgust.

  “Isn’t that the fault of the artist?” I ask.

  Chrysto shrugs. “One who sits is equally to blame. One must give the spark for the fire. There must be something for to capture, some emotion, or the artist is looking at … plate of fruit. Model must give something of himself, but also, to hold back. This is the true art.”

  We reach the atrium, where there’s a statue I know I’ve seen before in books. It looms over us: three naked figures, a large man and two youths who are being attacked by a giant snake. The serpent curls around their legs and arms; its open mouth is about to sink into the man’s side. I point it out. “Can’t complain about this one,” I say.

  Chrysto scans the statue impatiently. “Yes, yes, of course it is amazing. But, it is only copy. The original stone, the paint, the clay, this contains life that is not translating to copies. You come to Greece, you will see statues that Petrides have posed for. These statues look to be only pausing.” Chrysto gives the figure in the middle one more flicker of attention. “This man, he was without doubt a son of Deukalion. Is obvious.”

  Copy or no, there is something different about the man in the middle. Besides the fact that he’s proportionally larger, his body contorts in a way that feels more … tortured than the other two. It’s hard to look away from the agony. It’s like the pain was etched into the marble.

  “Hey, Walter.” Chrysto’s voice slices into my right ear, low and flat. He’s standing close behind me. “Why do you all the time look at the men’s bodies?”

  I feel my face burn. “Whaa?” I say, and stammer something utterly incoherent, but it doesn’t matter because Chrysto has already walked away.

  * * *

  We scope out the rest of the casino, mostly in silence. There’s nowhere else to go. We’re back at the main concourse, outside the Gorgon’s Lair Vodka Bar. Chrysto’s distracted, withdrawn, carrying on some kind of discussion in his head while his eyes dart back and forth.
I’ve got my own dialogue going on, too. I tell myself that Chrysto’s frustrated, that he’s thinking of all the places we haven’t gotten into, the hotel floors and the private gambling rooms, and that he’s not blaming me for a wasted night and he’s not bored with my company and looking for a way to ditch me. I wonder what I’ve done wrong, and I’m afraid of doing it again.

  The Gorgon’s Lair has drawn back its black velvet curtains, revealing two life-size papier-mâché partygoers, real drinks in their frozen hands, who greet the living couples that glide past them and disappear into the darkness. I’d suggest going in to check the place out but there’s no way I’d ever be allowed in. The bar has velvet ropes barring folks like me from wandering in. The Medusa at the doorway, the one with a leather minidress and the bleached, ironed hair, has already given me the stony once-over and curled her glossy, gelatin-injected lip at me. If I were close enough she’d hiss.

  Chrysto’s eyes are gleaming. His head bounces to the beat of the music. Suddenly he turns to me and pats me on the chest. “Walter. Stay here. Please.” Without waiting for an answer, he vaults over the velvet rope to the host stand. The pounding music blocks out his words. Medusa bends her head toward Chrysto but he does not turn into stone. Instead, she is the one transfixed, riveted into place by his breezy banter, the toss of his dark curls, the full-wattage smile he flashes at her. His hand cups her bare shoulder as he pulls her in, whispering in her ear. The hand disappears from view, takes a brief trip down her bony shoulder blade, and then travels back to the top, where it warms and inspires.

  My own shoulder has never felt so lonely.

  Another laugh, and he’s gotten by. I can only guess that he’s of age, but it wouldn’t matter anyway. Chrysto passes the ropes and disappears into the blackness. He doesn’t look back. Medusa smiles and twirls her snakes. I walk four steps away and park myself against a marble column, loyal dog.

  Ten minutes pass. I wonder how long I should wait. And what am I waiting for anyway? “Why do you look all the time at the men’s bodies?” His eyes get harder every time I replay it, his lip curls upward with disgust. He’s disgusted by me, by my mutant head and skinny body and puppy eyes. He’s hiding in there until I leave.