Still Life Las Vegas

by James Sie

I can’t find her hand.

  * * *

  Cool cloth. Cool cloth.

  Cool fingers cradle my head, bring it up to meet the wrung washcloth. Delicate fingers, not the rough claw of Vee, mold the towel to my head, pat away the heat, and send me away.

  * * *

  Away

  * * *

  Kitchen tiles.

  Black white black black white.

  A pattern to follow, each black octagon a shiny pool of dark water. There’s a quivering light within one, waiting to be captured. Slap down with small hands and find coolness.

  The light darts to the next black pond: follow the light.

  “Be careful,” she says, high above. Her voice is soft.

  “Don’t touch.”

  I look up.

  Cookies are blossoming behind glass in the oven, chocolate melting. The air is stiff with the smell of them.

  I reach out my hand, not to touch, but to imagine touching.

  Such sweetness.

  WALTER

  HOME

  Eyes open.

  It’s day.

  There’s a sheet twisted around me. My hair’s damp. I feel like a shipwrecked sailor washed up on the sand. There are bits and pieces of dreams floating around me, something I want to remember, but when I try to grab at them they dissolve, leaving behind the faint whiff of burnt chocolate.

  I sit up, slowly. The beer cans are gone, but there are crackers in their place, crackers soggy underneath a crumpled brown washcloth thrown on top. I feel sore and exhausted.

  “Hey, champ.” He appears by the side of the couch, holding a glass of water. I keep my head down while looking at him. He’s dressed—khakis, an Old Navy shirt tucked in and buttoned all the way up, with wire hanger impressions darting out from the shoulders, even a belt—but there’s nothing that won’t stop him from looking like one of those guys muttering to themselves at the bus station. The clothes just hang off his hunched body. He’s no one I know.

  “You’re just in time,” he says, a little out of breath. He holds the glass of water out for me. Who knows what else he’s put in there? I don’t move. Neither does he.

  “In time for what?” I croak, but there’s no answer, not without me taking the glass. I grab it at the top, as far away from his hand as I can get.

  Immediately, he disappears behind me. Before I can take two sips of water he’s back, holding out a large blue plate. On it is a lopsided, crumpled cake. It’s about two inches high. The chocolate frosting is melted off one side and lies in a blob at the base. Candles tilt on the top.

  “Happy birthday,” he says. I’ve never seen him smile so big.

  * * *

  The kitchen has been transformed into a war zone. Dirty bowls and pots have been flung onto every available space, including the floor; spoons are scattered around like shrapnel. Eggshells are dripping on the counter. I can’t remember the last time we’ve had real eggs in the house. Plastic Stop-N-Save bags are piled above the refrigerator.

  I touch the oven—it’s still warm.

  He got dressed. He left the house. He bought groceries. He made a cake. For most people, this would be an ordinary day. For him, it’s a Christmas miracle. And for me, it’s just old carrots in a new bag.

  I glance at him sideways as I pick my way through the rubble. He sits in the chair, breathing fast, looking expectant in front of the misshapen masterpiece he’s given birth to.

  He made a cake.

  “You coulda just bought one,” I mumble, reaching into the refrigerator for some orange juice.

  “No, no, no,” he says, smiling. “Not for your eighteenth.” His eyes are shiny with a look I don’t recognize right away. It’s pride. He’s proud of his cake, I think, turning back toward the refrigerator. He’s proud he remembered the date. Or that he got me through to adulthood, which technically, I guess, he did. A monumental achievement. He’s laid down a path of inertia and lies, littered with lives ruined and lives ended, that has led straight to this eighteenth birthday and the wondrous, glorious specimen that is I.

  The wondrous, glorious specimen puts the orange juice carton back in the refrigerator, because he’s shaking too hard to drink from it. There’s a surge of rage ripping toward Old Shiny Eyes behind me, the one waiting for me to turn around, the one who sits at the kitchen table, offering cake.

  “Ready for a slice?” he says.

  “Sure,” I say.

  * * *

  “Eighteen,” my father repeats in wonderment. He’s more animated than I’ve seen him in a long time. He drums his fingers on the table, not eating, and then reaches across to swat me on the shoulder. “Eighteen.” It feels like I should be congratulating him.

  I suck on the end of the fork, scraping the both undercooked and burnt cake off the tines with my teeth. There’s nothing to say. Nothing that won’t start the spinning all over again, the whirlpool that sucks in him and me and everything. It’s not worth it, and even if I wanted to I’m not sure I could. I’ve been trained too well. Easier to stick a fork in my mouth, seal it shut with chocolate.

  The buzzer surprises both of us. My father looks up, apprehensive. An image of Chrysto and flowers comes to my mind, but I stomp hard on that thought and head for the door.

  It’s the man in brown, making a delivery. For me. He’s got a large box, almost too big to carry. “What’s that?” my father calls out from the table.

  I state the obvious and carry it to the couch. It’s heavy. The return address is from Wisconsin. The first thing I see when I open the box is a cream linen envelope, floating on top of a bunch of white packing curls. Walt, it says, in a spidery script.

  Walt:

  This was your mother’s. I thought you might like to have it. I have also decided to make an early deposit into your bank account. From the looks of it, you need funds sooner rather than later. Please buy some shoes.

  Vee

  She’s enclosed a copy of a bank transaction. There’s a number on the bottom.

  Shit, I think. Holy shit. That’s a lot of pairs of shoes. A lot of pairs.

  I start digging into the cardboard box, sawing into the curls with the flat of my hand. Immediately I come upon something hard. I push away the packing peanuts and see a dark, pebbled surface. A handle, two clasps. Beneath, in flowing script, gold lettering: Rossetti. I scoop out the packing curls from either side of the case, spilling them onto the couch. Click the clasps back, push it open. There it is, still-gleaming and red.

  The accordion. Her accordion.

  And her.

  Taped to the top, a photograph. Small, rectangular, and bordered in white. An accordion, the same one, held by a little girl, maybe nine or ten. Long black hair. She’s also holding a trophy and she’s smiling wide, but her eyes are all serious, staring at me, at my eyes, which are the same eyes.

  Push that girl ahead eight years, and she’s me. Walk her back eight and see what little Georgia might have looked like. Flash her forward twenty years—I don’t know. I don’t know how to do that.

  Bedroom door.

  My father has disappeared from the room.

  I feel the slow dip and tilt, dip and tilt, of a room about to revolve.

  * * *

  The medicine cups in the bathroom are both empty. Morning and Night. Everything makes sense now: the burst of energy, the baking a cake. He’s off his meds. He’s been loose and fancy-free, and now, well, here we are. What goes up, whatever.

  I grab the pill bottles in one hand and head over to the closed door. It’s all so familiar. I could do it with my eyes closed. Here’s my past, and my future, too. Morning and Night.

  My father’s sitting up in his bed, staring at nothing, dragging his hand slowly across his face. I’ve seen that gesture before, many times. He’s thinking great heavy thoughts that will eventually topple him. He’s going down.

  “You haven’t taken your pills,” I say.

  He mutters something into his hand that I don’t understand. I ask him to repeat it.r />
  “Erinyes.” He mumble-quotes: “‘Ever-pursuing, those avengers of blood, remorseless and inescapable.’ The Furies. I should have expected them.”

  “It was Vee,” I say, shaking out the dosages from each bottle. “Vee sent it to me. I saw her the other day. She came to visit.”

  “I always fancied myself an Orpheus,” he says, speaking to someone who may not be me. “Orpheus made the Furies cry with his sweet sad song; he almost made it out, you know, but then, he looked back, and, well, we all know what happens when you do that, away she goes again, away—no, no, better to be an Orestes! Orestes with his blood curse, he didn’t save anyone, but at least he got free.”

  “Dad, they’re just myths,” I say, unfolding the hand that isn’t holding up his head and dropping the pills into them. “They’re not real.”

  He puts the pills in his mouth, one by one, then sips the water I hand him, obediently, like a child. He finally looks at me. “Myths may not be real, but they’re true,” he says.

  I kneel down, prying the shoes off his feet. “Vee told me the truth. About Emily. And Georgia.”

  My father leans his head against the wall and closes his eyes. Gives a long sigh.“I can’t right now, Walt,” he whispers. “I can’t. Sorry.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? About what really happened?”

  My father shakes his head and says, “Hmmm,” in a sleepy voice. Suddenly, his eyes squeeze together and he sucks in a breath as if he’s been struck. He holds his breath, one, two, three, four seconds. It releases in a name. “Emmie,” he gasps. “Emmie.”

  And then he’s quiet again, shrinking into himself, sinking down into the bed.

  But I don’t stop. “Why did you make up those stories?”

  When he speaks, he sounds far away. “It’s what I remember happening, champ.”

  He’s almost gone, but I don’t leave. Not just yet. I sit on the edge of the bed and put a hand on his shoulder, not to remind him that I’m there, but just so he won’t be as alone, going down to whatever dark place he has to journey to.

  “Orestes. How’d he get free?” I ask, though I already know.

  When he answers, it’s from deep inside himself, as if in a dream. “He ran.”

  And then I ask him the other question, the one I’ll never have the answer to, but by that time, he’s already too far away to hear.

  WALTER

  NEVADA

  Back to the beginning, or the end.

  I’m leaning over the Bridge of Sighs at the outside courtyard of Venice Venice. The crowds and traffic drown out the gondoliers singing below, but the passengers look happy enough, with such goofy expressions of contentment on their faces. Most of them keep their eyes open during the ride, which surprises me. That’s no way to maintain an illusion, staring at escalators and tourists and blue toilet-bowl water while pretending to be in Venice. But maybe, maybe they’re not wanting to pretend to be in Venice. Maybe they’re wanting to be in Las Vegas, pretending to be in Venice.

  In my fist, a tiny Murano glass gondola, streaked red and blue.

  I’m traveling light. A backpack stuffed with some clothes, my sketchbooks, and my ten-year-old mother tucked between pages. The Rossetti strapped down behind me. Everything else, I’m leaving behind. All last week there’s been organizing and lists, arrangements and instructions and bits of paper stuck everywhere, but now I’m done with all that.

  Let it go. Let it blow away.

  Fifteen minutes later I’m flying down the highway. Acacia gave me a pretty good deal on Chrysto’s Vespa; it was one of my first buys. Learning to ride a motorbike was a lot easier than I thought it’d be. I was sure I’d miss a body to cling to, but I don’t. It’s far less complicated than maneuvering a car; I’m just responsible for me and what’s under me. There’s no passenger side, backseats, doors that won’t open, or windows sealed shut. I can speed along, unburdened.

  Of course, I’m only going forty-five miles an hour, but still.

  I’m on I-15. There’s an ancient white Pontiac Firebird ahead of me, with an old lady driving whose head doesn’t even come up to the top of the seat. She’s going so slowly that cars and trucks and campers and even trailers are weaving around her, gunning the motor and giving her the finger as they pass, but her pace is fine by me. The Firebird’s my spirit guide, escorting me onward. Anything could happen. There are only possibilities ahead.

  I’m soaring through the middle of nowhere, in the untamed space between towns, where there are no meaningful boundaries or demarcations. Mountains and scrubby plants are the only landmarks. The sky has unfurled itself wider than I could have ever imagined possible. Enormous clouds roil ahead, slowly attaching and detaching themselves. The sky is so intensely blue, and the clouds so many shades of white, that I could swear they were painted. But they’re not. They’re real.

  The wind is wilder here, far from Las Vegas. It rushes and grabs at my clothes, flapping them roughly, constantly reminding me that I’m in motion. And for just a moment, I allow a little thought in, the thought that maybe, as she was driving toward her suicide, my mother rolled down the window of her car and felt this same wild wind, leaned her head out of the window, and, for a moment, maybe, it made her happy.

  She drives alongside me, eyes closed, smiling, and then I let the wind take her away, too, her and the blue Volvo and Milwaukee and Venice and Little Peach and my father, everything gets carried off by the wind and blown away behind me.

  And I’m not going to look back, not once.

  EPILOGUE

  And now it’s done.

  A nice sentiment. Like never looking back. It’s never worked out that way, of course. But I think I am really finished now. I’m done with writing and drawing and conjuring up this particular passion play. I mean, how many times can you dig up the bodies and reanimate the corpses? At some point you’ve got to just give them a little peace.

  Enough. A moratorium on zombies.

  Liberace’s museum has vanished. It was plowed under quite a few years ago, I believe. All the rhinestones, furs, and pianos that used to be housed there—they’ve disappeared like the rest of my family’s history. The squat shopping plaza where the museum once sat was converted into a hideous, Kelly-green parking garage, as I discovered on my last trip to Las Vegas.

  It wasn’t an ideal location to pay my respects, but you work with what you have.

  I carried the remains of my mother’s accordion with me. Heirlooms shouldn’t be entrusted to itinerant eighteen-year-old boys, I’m afraid. Its pristine condition soon gave way to rapid decay. The straps went first, as I recall, followed by cracks in the casing and a ripped bellows. Finally, after the eviction, the bipolar lover, and the fire, all that was left of the miraculous instrument were a few ivory keys. Who knew accordions were so flammable?

  Those ivory keys were rattling in my pocket when I got out of the car. The morning traffic rushed by yards away. I half expected to see Big and Little Bang come squealing by in the blue Volvo, feathers flying in the air, but there was no sign of them, no sign of anything but the unrelenting green.

  It didn’t matter. I knew my mother was somewhere under there, beneath all the concrete and asphalt, just as surely as I knew she was buried in a plot in Chicago, next to my little sister. For that matter, she was also forever floating down the canals of the Venetian with my father, serenaded by a harlequin Liberace. That’s the way my father had remembered it, all those years ago, and who am I to say otherwise? It’s as good a story as any. Better, maybe.

  Walking around the outer walls of the garage, on one lonely, weedy side, I found a small tribute to Liberace. It was a silver plaque shaped like a piano, with an undulating keyboard beneath. Inscribed on it was LIBERACE—MASTER SHOWMAN. The score to the “Beer Barrel Polka” was painted onto the bricks above.

  I couldn’t think of a better place to lay a rose.

  By the silver plaque I bowed my head, accordion keys in hand. I took a moment of silence, and then offered a few p
roper words:

  I hold the bones of my mother. I throw them behind me. Where they land, life begins again.

  I tossed the keys.

  And now it’s done.

  —Walter Valentino Stahl

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would never have seen the light of day but for the singular talents of Sungyoon Choi, who took a gamble on a stranger from Los Angeles and never wavered.

  Thanks to Diana Wagman, in whose class the first lines were written and who has remained a discerning fairy godmother to the project ever since, and the trio of writers from that class who pushed me to completion: Kelley Coleman, Elissa McDade, and, most especially, Catherine Fink-Johnson, midwife to the book ’til the last word.

  When things were darkest, the wise and savvy Christopher Schelling from Selectric Artists swooped in like a Manhattan Gandalf and lit the way out, finding me a path that led to Sara Goodman, my editor at St. Martin’s Press (Galadriel, perhaps?), for whose advice and encouragement I am forever grateful. The whole team behind the book at St. Martin’s (including pinch hitter extraordinaire Alicia Adkins-Clancy) has been nothing short of miraculous, transforming my rough scraps of leather into a most excellent pair of shoes, complete with shiny, brass buckles.

  Though I’ve never formally met Neil Gaiman, his published graphic novel scripts gave me a great blueprint for smooth communication with the artist. Adriane Harrison helped with legal questions, Michael McCormack and Ted Davey gave me insight into the Las Vegas behind Las Vegas, and Adam and Aleksandra Tolczyk found just the right Polish flavor for my Milwaukee scenes. The amazing, enthusiastic Renee Albert gave a soul to my Rossetti accordion with her many insights. Peter Hastings very generously created a cinematic encapsulation of the book, for kicks. I mourn the passing of the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, source of much (fictional) inspiration, but the Liberace Foundation lives on and was very gracious in granting me permission to one of Liberace’s songs.

  Thanks to all the readers of early drafts, including (but not limited to): Meryl Friedman, Steve Totland, Noël Alumit, Carrie Kaufman, Sherrie Lofton, Maiya Sykes, Doug Wood, Jake Bauman, Christina Calvit, Harry Althaus, Denis O’Hare, and my wonderful sisters, Susan, Debbie, Michelle, and Allison.