At least the furniture bore a dose or two of extravagancy, though the dismal redundancy of matching black common to every piece suggested images of a lived-in funeral parlor. The drapery of the patio doors echoed the apartment’s somber shades, and Ralston could never recall them being parted, regardless of day or night.
The air conditioner to the right of the drapes hummed softly, its mild currents of air providing salvation enough for the mock—novelist/rock star wannabe to maintain his sanity.
But it wasn’t Ralston’s place to condemn or criticize, and he often managed to ho-hum the apartment’s claustrophobic eccentricities away. He simply carried out his scheduled visits, lingered long enough to get what he came for, awarded Andrew in advance for a job well done with a brisk pat on the back and an envelope with a pre-agreed cash sum. He’d then return to his Brea home for a celebration screw with his girlfriend, to an anticipated publishing deal, movie deal, drug deal, cancelled band rehearsal, whatever his life brought him into doing as long as there was convenience in doing it.
The hell with Andrew, really; whatever Andrew Erlandson chose to do with his allowed earnings was Andrew Erlandson’s choice, in Andrew’s own little erratically reclusive mole-like way.
Besides, it was Andrew’s agreement.
Andrew’s work for him was a constant reminder of this agreement. The reasons behind it all were to Ralston both a shady mystery and a profoundly divine miracle. But he dared not question; questions and answers were not only excluded from the deal....
....they might conjure up horrifying atrocities that were embedded in both their pasts, the sort of things Ralston would far prefer lost within his past, the things which might remain still within Andrew’s secretive present.
There, diagonal from Ralston, mounted and framed in an open space upon the wall between book shelves, hung a single paperback book cover, preserved flat behind thin glass. Upon it, embossed in bold print and flanked by the glimmer of oil-painted silvery daggers were the words
INTO THE GRAVE II
a novel by
Andrew Erlandson
and below this the short scribbles of an autographed signature.
Further towards the sliding glass patio doors and after another series of book shelves, hung also a late 1960’s motion picture poster, glaring out from behind the transparent plastic of a poster frame. Sandwiched between the faded colors of crayfish-like costumed men and credits ending in the words FILMED IN TECHNICOLOR splashed across a spread of white-blank backdrop, there read
HIDEOUS MUTATED SEA DEMONS
and below this also, in the book cover’s similarly autographed longhand, looming in careful avoidance of the beginning credits,
To my son,
I in you, and you in me.
Loving timelessly,
-your Dad, A.J.
Ralston brought a hand to his lap and lifted the bulky stack of papers. As Aerosmith’s latest video faded from the T.V. screen, he thumbed through the manuscript, scrutinizing, perusing. The black of his fingerless gloves glimmered slick under the mild lamplight above. Webbed fumes rose from the mount of extinguished cigarettes within the silvery mouth of an ashtray stand at his side, one butt for nearly every three minutes of waiting for Andrew to emerge from showering.
From the view of his ghostwriter’s latest services, Ralston was pleased. He was very pleased.
This was exactly what he told Andrew when the bathroom door opened and the narrow umbra of the clandestine writer halted and rested against the living room’s entrance frame.
“Another guaranteed bestseller,” Andrew said without a hint of enthusiasm. “A sliver of my soul carved to fit medium weight bond paper.”
“Yeah,” Ralston added, nabbing what enthusiasm could have existed in Andrew and making it his own, “I’d say you’d done and shined like a million dollar penny....yeah, another six million figured penny. In a string of such, thanks to your craziness schemes and bloodletting pacts. I don’t fully understand why I’ve been ordained with such a noble existence, and frankly, why I’m the household name that I am scares the piss out of me if I think about it too much. But I’m famous, filthy famous. I have wealth, I have notoriety. And I have you to thank for it. I really must say, I didn’t know you had it in me.”
“You haven’t even read it yet,” Andrew said. “Maybe this’ll be that one downer you’re afraid of that’ll stop your roll....”
Ralston went for his coat, a black London Fog which hung on the rack near the kitchen entrance. He grabbed the bulky manuscript, cradling it within his palm against his side, his thigh toppling over a half-empty beer can which tumbled from the end table edge and emptied onto the carpet.
“Look at it this way,” Ralston told him. “Just as many millions will buy it anyway, and if they don‘t like it, well, I know I can count on you to come back with another one the critics will love. I’ve become quite a phenomenon and I’ve just now hit the ‘Big Three-Oh’, and I’m free and I have a say-so.”
It had always been important for Ralston Cooper to have a say-so. Before all of this, before he had a life, before Andrew and Andrew’s pact of taciturn lunacy, Ralston never did quite have a say-so of anything, with the exception of the renegade delinquents of his youth. Back then, he had truly been a delinquent authority, a Lost Boys Leader, a pot-smoking, shit-talking teen thing that was much to be feared among rebel-tough-guy slacker chick-magnets too good for varsity football.
Even then, however, say-so’s were few and far between. Far between fights and after-school detention, far between flights of fancy and wannabe rock-star dreams.
Say-so’s had to be won.
Until Andrew Erlandson came along.
Andrew Erlandson made say-so’s easy as pie.
Easy as a pact.
Easy as forgetting how that pact came to be.
Easier than dealing with
(nightmare memories, memories of nightmare)
He’d convinced himself that it was merely Andrew who confronted him one day with the reasonless offer to pen his own works and to submit them under Ralston’s name, for Ralston to receive credit and money as long as Andrew received a certain reasonable sum in return.
As though Andrew couldn’t receive credit himself.
As though Andrew was somehow
(forced into it)
hiding something, running from something, yet he had to write, had to publish.
But it was the (nightmare memories, memories of nightmare) desperation, the offer Ralston couldn’t refuse, which passed the torch of having say—so ultimately to Ralston, and ultimately to Ralston’s fate.
And by now, Ralston was pretty much used to it.
And Andrew seemed pretty much the sap.
“You’ve worked your ass off, Andy-man,” Ralston told Andrew. “Go, get yourself a beer at The Crow Job, check out my new band. I got a seat toward the front just for you. Had to, knowing it’s gonna be hella packed, everyone there to see the big book writer rockin’ and all. But this is really me doin’ this, Andy. I can do this. Watch me. And watch the fans see me kick ass. By the way, nice title. I can’t wait to read The Everborn myself.”
With that, Ralston slipped a hand into his overcoat and withdrew a white envelope, presented it sealed and slipped it into Andrew’s front shirt pocket.
With a brief snicker and hurried anticipation, Ralston turned and departed across the darkened living room, past the flickering music television, out the front door and down the apartment complex’s inner hallway, leaving Andrew standing snug and silent and alone.
And if it wasn’t for the distraction of the deep and disorienting sleep he’d awakened from, Andrew would have wondered what Ralston meant by The Everborn, which wasn’t the title of the novel he believed he’d written.
***
Andrew remained still for a moment’s time until he softly padded across the living room carpet and closed the front door. Turning, he stepped to the recliner, reached for the TV remote, and paused as he viewed an MTV news report a
bout the trampling of several teenagers at a metal concert mosh pit. Kurt Loder signed off with the image of an electrode-studded globe and station logo. Andrew signed off with depression, both from his thumb and his sigh.
There were times like these when Ralston and Ralston’s crock of flamboyant cockiness would indeed get to him, get his goat and leave him fucked like one on a witches’ sabbat, but times few and far between in recent years. He’d learned to accept what needed to be, what (he was convinced) was meant to be, and in truth this ghostwriting racket remained an ongoing sacrifice Andrew would just as soon sign off as drink goat piss.
This conviction made Andrew clench his teeth and bite his tongue whenever his father came to mind, the great B-movie director father he never knew, the father he wished were alive somewhere but doubted was anywhere but six feet under.
A.J. Erlandson was declared missing sometime before Andrew was born, and had been missing since, yet remained an inspiration and an icon to Andrew, yeah even a legend to not only he but many, and what many who knew of him remained to this day as thinking of the heralded director as one would fancy the likes of Elvis....not so much as a king of things but nevertheless working in some obscure Burger King in Utah. Anything but being dead. For some concealed, undercover reason. Though even more so for A.J., since his body was never found, no body at all.
Nobody except for maybe the Weekly World News.
And when someone was missing from someone’s life for so long, as long as Andrew had been alive, which had been twenty-eight years so far, in similar circumstances, one might as well declare them dead. Andrew had done so, quite a while back, and so had Andrew’s mother, who’d refused to so much as date anyone let alone marry until a little under a decade after the disappearance. Deep down, it was all due to wishful thinking. After thinking of the impossible-become-probable for so long, thinking can really become quite dominated by wishes.
“Wish you may, wish you might, what is it you wish tonight, dearest Andrew?” whispered the hallway darkness which led to the bathroom and single bedroom. “Tell me of your wishes.”
It was the distant echo of a voice, calling, speaking, a woman’s spoken caress, smooth and hushed and provocative, beckoning into close intimacy. Within the apartment, within the single bedroom, in the hallway. Somewhere, yet everywhere.
As it always had been.
Andrew took several steps backwards, leaned likewise into the hallway.
“I don’t wish anymore, if I can help it, and I don’t wish to talk to you tonight as well, Bari,” Andrew grumbled with bridled contempt. “You know how I get when I let go of another work like that, to that conceited drug geek. You made it so I have no choice....you’re responsible for this goddamn arrangement, you made it happen. And each time I write him another book, I’m stuck wondering what Dad would think of all this.”
“And just what would he think of all this?” An obscure figure accompanied the voice now, a mere silhouette, a shady sketch of blackness, seen yet unseen.
“You know what he would think, and you know he would be insulted,” Andrew spat, then added quite reversely serene, “Unless he knew about you.”
Andrew turned and headed for the coat rack, situated between the recliner and the space between the front door, reaching for a black and grey blazer.
The darkness was silent for a moment, until it asked, “Where are you going?”
“You heard the ass wipe,” came Andrew’s determined reply. “I hear a beer calling me.”
“Are you so sure you should drink tonight?”
“Tonight I drink, Bari. Tonight I hear the music of Ralston Cooper, if you can call it music, and I don’t usually do that either. In fact, I never do that if I can help it. Dammit...I just need to get out, get away....” Marching towards the front door, Andrew paused, turned to the darkness, hesitated, then continued, “Bari...did my father know about you?”
“You’ve asked me that before, I gave you my answer.”
“What good is an answer you’ve made me forget? Everything I want to know about my father and who I am, you tell me it’s all been already answered by you, and that you’ll bring it back to my memory in due time, when the moment is meant to be. Fuck meant to be, fuck Ralston Cooper, and fuck you!”
“Yes, you must go,” Bari sighed. “Tonight is not the night for dwelling in this confusion of yours. Go, have a blast at this boozer emporium of yours. And for heaven’s sake and all the saints, meet someone.”
Andrew was at the front door, on his way out the front door, was about to slam the front door: when someone gives you what for and ends it with a fuck you, you wouldn’t expect him to say very much more before he heads out, even if he was an innocent, clean-cut vessel of a twenty-something kid personality like Andrew Erlandson.
“You can’t be serious,” he wheezed. “You don’t want me to be with anyone besides you. What do you mean, meet someone? Bari...what are you saying?”
Bari was unmoving and quiet as her companion lightly closed the front door, stepped close, closer and then closer still until she could smell the eternal aroma of his breath penetrating the gentle expanse of her presence.
Like a son.
Like a lover.
And Andrew could feel her understanding, her compassion, even in the midst of the chill of the apartment’s inner hallway. He heard himself utter, tenderly, “Bari...show me your eyes again, show me your beautiful eyes.”
Just as the orange streams of the bathroom nightlight reflected from his pupils in the cloudiness of the bathroom mirror, the dual glows appeared. There, before him, hovered the lambent orbs of the presence...a presence not unlike his own, but at the same time a presence alien to him.
A welcomed, familiar presence.
“Go now,” whispered this presence, so sweet, so soothing, “for tonight may very well be a night of nights, young one. A night of destiny. Soon, you shall become as new. Soon, yes, in time.”
The eyes disappeared then into empty darkness, leaving only the wispy remnants of a swirling breeze of warmth.
Wondering, as usual, what Bari had meant, Andrew clenched his blazer tight against him and commenced his departure out the front door, this time his spirits free of forgotten hostility.
The being within the hallway retreated into the bedroom, for but to catch sight of her young one as he would minutes later stroll across the sidewalk three stories below and disappear down the darkness of the nighttime street towards The Crow Job.
7.
The Watchmaid Bari
Empty shades of night idled upon the tenebrous presence within Andrew Erlandson’s apartment’s hallway.
The Watchmaid remained there, unmoving. She enjoyed the stillness of the apartment, hushed with the exception of the systematic ticking of the living room wall clock. Often, she considered this solitary sound welcomed and even necessary.
It reminded her of her whereabouts.
It reminded her of her duties.
It reminded her of time.
And time always reminded her of the days when she was human, when she had been but a young woman Andrew’s age, many ages past, when she and he were once lovers, and she became pregnant with his child.
That was when things changed. That was when she was first made aware of what her lover truly was, what he became before the rebirth, reborn through her into another succession of lives.
That was when she became the creature she was destined to be.
She decided to move. Hovering, she made her way from the mouth of the hallway and through the living room. As she went, a mild current of air brushed across a ceramic vase containing outstretched peacock feathers, fluttering and flipping the covers and pages of several nearby magazines. In a similar way, her mind’s eye browsed through pages of the past.
Memories of the past, echoing prophecies of the future. Sensual, yes. But also horrific. Also cataclysmic.
Time always tended to play those games, flip through those pages.
The Watchmaid arriv
ed at the patio doors. Drapes parted, no longer obstructing her third-story view of the night and the quieted street below.
An occasional vehicle drove by.
At first, Bari silently regarded the scene, regarded the surrounding apartments, the mid-evening’s overhanging stars.
The stars.
Her thoughts shifted again, retreated inward, into herself, resuming inward thoughts, again into distant memories. How very soon things were going to change again, as they always did before.
But as destiny was about to unfold another time around, Bari had the strangest feeling that another time was beginning to unfold over the present. Perhaps this feeling, this foreboding aura encompassing both young man and guardian, was merely generated by the apartment’s claustrophobic setting.
Or perhaps this feeling dealt with Ralston Cooper’s latest novel, ghostwritten by Andrew, ghostwritten in turn by the hands of the very near future, the very hands responsible for Bari’s insistence of Andrew’s anonymity, his freedom to create and to continue creating under the guise of secrecy and behind the name of a very real and unsuspecting identity. Perhaps this was why Andrew worked so relentlessly before his typewriter and for so long to meet Ralston’s deadline.
Perhaps it wasn’t for Ralston’s deadline at all....but for another deadline entirely which Bari had foreseen years ago, but had little idea until now when it would be and how, or of the magnitude of its significance upon herself and so many others.
8.
Melony Polito at the Crowjob
It was not supposed to happen this way, not any of it. And certainly not to Melony Polito. Yet she was a part of it, immersed in it, immersed into every sort of chaotic and intriguing encounter a private investigator could ever dream of cramming into his or her career, even for the wife of a UFO researcher.
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