by Bruce Bauman
“Yes, we did,” Moses said hesitantly.
“Moses, what are you thinking?”
He didn’t say what he was thinking. Death and mourning leave one so vulnerable, and although it is not uncommon, it is a treacherous time to seek to rekindle the embers of love lost. His desire to hold her, swear his enduring love, stalled at the barrier of the unknowable. Can this past be recaptured, a present restored, a future remade?
Instead, constrained by the memory of his outburst that signaled the death knell of his marriage, he offered blandly, “I need to grab a bite and then I’m going back in. You staying?”
“Is it too late for forgiveness?”
“Neither of us can answer that now.”
“Will you call me so we can answer it together?”
Moses recalled a graduate school history professor of his who scoffed, “The idea that most people claim to be brutal realists proves the opposite. Most of you fall into one of three categories of gullibles: those I classify as the less gifted, the willfully ignorant, and the perpetually delusional.”
For much of his life, Moses considered himself to be among the brutal realists. Later, he conditionally reclassified himself as willfully ignorant. Finally, he descended to the perpetually delusional. He researched and discovered that almost 10 percent of all divorcees remarried or lived again with their former spouse. He found no information detailing for how long or whether they stayed together.
He invited Jay to the premiere of a play written by Nightingale Grant recipient Hilaria Diaz. The ICEman Cometh was not O’Neill’s classic play but one portraying the plight of illegal immigrants. Moses thought that if he and Jay were to make a go of it, both of their Livability Quotients needed reformulating, and that formula now included his relationship with Laluna and Alchemy and his nonrelationship with Salome, all of whom would be there.
Alchemy and Jay greeted each other with amiable if jittery hellos. Laluna, who disguised her awkwardness in public appearances by feigning boredom, flashed a rare radiant smile of welcome. Jay took a bathroom break during the intermission, and Laluna, after edging her way to Moses, shifted her eyes in an exaggerated side-to-side toward a loitering Salome, who suddenly darted up the aisle. After they watched her disappear into the lobby, Laluna leaned over and whispered, “Mose, it makes me really, like really happy, to see you with someone.”
Throughout the evening, his emotions roiled—desire, resentment, distrust of Jay’s motives and his own, and the facile hope that love really could conquer all. Jay wanted to go out after the show. Moses claimed fatigue and asked if they could meet later in the week. They did, at an Indian restaurant on Pico. Over appetizers, they made small talk about the difficulties of her work after the economic crash, his contentment working at the foundation, and his mixed excitement and angst over establishing the Nightingale Party. Moses, blinders off, saw Jay at forty-five years old with tiny crevices arching out from the corners of her eyes, the crinkling of her lips, hair dyed to hide the creeping gray, glasses necessary to read the menu. To him, she sparkled as attractively as ever.
Between the appetizer and main course, small talk over, Moses took the plunge. “Jay”—he took a gulp of his water—“I don’t believe in more than incremental changes in our essence. Whatever you loved about me before still exists, and what you didn’t, that does, too. I am still the guy you no longer wanted to be with that day in the Cedars parking lot.”
Jay took a sip of her white wine.
Moses consciously chose not to push the Alchemy button by spitting out what he was thinking: I am never going to be a big enough guy to say, “So glad you screwed my brother.” He understood all partners lie, deny, omit, rearrange, and censor to avoid hidden relationship land mines. Only now, he couldn’t locate the danger line separating honesty and mean-spiritedness, so he continued cautiously. “The monstrous thoughts that stream into my head, well, I have to believe that everyone has them, only my filter is thinner than most.”
“I know that. But I can tell, just in the way you were at the play, I can feel even in our e-mails—you have changed in some way. Somehow seeing your father helped you.”
“I guess so, as horrific as it was. I’m sleeping better. My daymares, they’re much less frequent.”
“It’s not like you ever kept your, um, daymares a secret. I just didn’t think they included me.”
“If I could control them, I would have.”
“Moses, whatever it was that made us work so well for so long, to be silly and feel safe, I never found elsewhere. With us, I never felt alone. Not until, you know. And Moses … You?” Jay pressed her lips together, awaiting his response.
“I pretty quickly adapted to being alone. My life mostly revolves around the foundation and my brother and—you know they have a daughter?”
“Sure. Your niece.”
Moses bowed his head and moved the bread crumbs and bits of spilled rice in a circular motion on the white tablecloth. He knew he must tell her, even if this truth reopened the wound that helped destroy their relationship, even if he risked losing Alchemy’s trust in him. Moses unbowed his head and stared into Jay’s eyes. “Persephone is my daughter.”
Her expression transformed from quizzical to shock when she realized he wasn’t joking. Moses explained the sequence of events. Jay nodded ever so slightly, still half disbelievingly, until Moses pronounced, “I am not delusional. I am not making this up. Persephone will never know. I am now complicit in my family’s, all of my families’, cycles of deception.”
“My God. Moses, this must be impossibly difficult for you.”
“It is and it isn’t.” What he wouldn’t admit to Jay, and only belatedly admitted to himself, that the least flattering of his reasons for agreeing was it allowed him to feel superior to Alchemy in this one way. “Laluna and Alchemy don’t make me feel like an outsider. So far, at least. Persephone will get all the advantages of being rich and enjoy the love of a mother and two fathers.” He shrugged. “Jay, I don’t know how to say this or if this is the wrong time or what is going to happen, but when I was so scared and lost, I always looked to the time with you to keep me awake and alive.”
Jay clasped Moses’s cold and shivery hands in hers, thinking, My Moses, abandoned by his parents, and yes, abandoned by me. We only wanted to love each other and failed. And so she said, “Moses, come home with me tonight.”
69
MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
Flushing Flashback, 2013 – 2015
In my second Insatiables afterlife I don’t see Alchemy or Lux much, and one more time I’m trying not to drown in a shit hole of my own making. I gigged with other dudes, but it don’t have the same fire. If Ricky Jr. ain’t visiting, all I do is play video games, watch sports, and try to stay away from losers who only wanna get high. I can’t find no woman I want to stay with for more than two days. Or maybe they don’t want to stay with me. I’m so bored I visit my brother and father in upstate New York so I can see the house my money bought and what they do with the $2K a month I still send them.
I hardly recognize my dad slothing around with a belly and balloon-size face and like three strands of gray hair. He still spits and snarls like he wants to stick thumb tacks in your eyes. My brother is a massive mashed potato blob of tattoos and half his teeth are gone or chipped. The two of them and my brother’s girlfriend all got DUIs so none of ’em should drive. We take a few days’ vacation in Lake George. My treat. We’re cool until we get back to the house. We’re all pretty wasted and watching some story about the pervey priests on TV, and my brother’s girlfriend says it’s a Jewish conspiracy against the Catholic Church. My father laughs, “Ya idiot, they just followin’ tradition because Jesus and his pals was a buncha Jew fags and Mary Magdalene was the first fag hag.”
I said, “Shut up, Dad. I got no more patience for your dumb-ass ignorant shit.”
“Oh, look at my liberal son with his Negro, homo, and Jew friends. You talk like some faggot girly man.
”
“Dad, I said shut the fuck up. The best thing I ever done was get the hell away from you. You fucked me up good with your ignorant bullshit.”
“I always knew you was a pansy-ass pussy who wishes he was a nigger. I was too fuckin’ soft on you. I should whip your ass right now.”
I’m ready to shut the fucker up for good when my brother’s girlfriend starts screaming words that ain’t even words ’cause she’s so wasted. Lenny claws her into their bedroom and two minutes later she wobbles out. “Lenny’s dick gone plurp. Ricky, ya wanna fuck me?” Lenny starts cracking from the bedroom like a typical no-sense-making drunk. “Ricky, ya better not fuck my woman.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t.”
“Why not? Ya too good for her? We’re gonna settle this like real men.” He passes out before he can crawl five feet.
It’s clear why I done my best to ignore them all these years. I drive back to the city the next day and, surprise, I discover my father “borrowed” my credit card and cell phone and bought $15K worth of computers, phones, and big-screen TVs online. I can’t press charges, so I pay.
Back in L.A., I meet Alchemy and Lux for dinner and I ask about reuniting. No chance. They bug me to regroup Ferricide. I figure I’ll try it. I get two former members and two new kids and we write songs and some covers for Performance-Enhanced Death Drugs, which we call Pedd-o-file, and pisses lots of people off—which was fine by me. We end up having an indie hit with a cover of Mott’s “Rock and Roll Queen,” which the music blogs say is my subtle shot at Alchy. As he might’ve said, “not consciously.” Anyway, Sue and Andrew set us up for a tour, and we hit the road.
About six, eight months into the tour I run into Lux at a hotel in Austin. He’s drumming for Buddy Guy. I miss him, and after my show I head over to the blues club where he’s at and join the jam. Then me and Lux retire to the bar and we’re BSing about the best and worst times, the bomb scares and near riots. I ask why he is doing this because he can’t be making much money.
“Yeah, but playing music is all I ever wanted to do. Some guys are doctors or roofers. I’m a drummer.”
“Music’s the only thing I’m any good at. I wish Alchemy didn’t give us up for politics. Why can’t he be like Bono or even Billy Bragg, speechify about peace and brotherhood bullshit, donate money, and still make music?”
“You’re asking me to explain Alchemy?” No one can explain him, I get that. “He loved being famous and the girls and shit, but I’m not sure he enjoyed the success the way we did. The band, in its way, was part of his bigger plan. He’s not a musician, he’s Alchemy.”
He spoke truth. I drink up and get another beer. “Lux, the worst was Absurda dying.”
“For all of us. The night of the funeral, after you went to bed, Alchemy asked me to stay up with him. He was having, I guess, a minibreakdown. I’ve never seen him so vulnerable, before or since. He couldn’t stop shaking, saying he was as weak and nuts as Salome and he was going to check into Collier Layne. He kept saying, ‘It’s all my fault. I should have seen this and fixed it.’ And shit, when Heather came over—” I shook my head. “Yeah, I know. I wished I could’ve stopped them. What was creepiest of all, he kept calling her Amanda.”
“Why didn’t ya ever tell me this?”
“Didn’t seem right. If he wanted, he would’ve told you.”
“Think him and Absurda was in love? Like really in love?”
“Falling in love was not part of Alchemy’s big plan back then.”
70
THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2014)
Seeing Is Disbelieving
Almost naturally, as if there could be no other outcome, Jay and Moses once again became a couple. They took beach walks, went to movies and art events, and spent most nights at her condo. Only the barrier of meeting his new family, which he’d erected after the evening at the theater, stayed the cementing of their second-time-around relationship.
That afternoon, Jay was picking Moses up at noon at his acupuncturist (almost sheepishly he had begun a regimen as part of his recovery: acupuncture, a strict diet, yoga, and weight training). They were driving up to Topanga for lunch with only Persephone and Laluna, which suited Jay just fine. Alchemy had zipped off to San Francisco to meet with Frieberg and Loo, the Internet whiz kids behind riteplay.com. Alchemy’s Audition Enterprizes had supplied the seed money and became a major stockholder, and Google was making an offer to buy the company. Salome was in Chicago, accompanied by Tryx, where she was giving a lecture and receiving an honorary degree at the Art Institute.
They entered the hidden drive located about seven minutes up Topanga Canyon Boulevard from PCH. Fifty yards deeper into the woods, they stopped at the guardhouse manned by graduates of a Nightingale jobs program for former convicts, before driving up the half-mile private road. Jay parked the car in the large circular driveway.
In the garden, on her knees with a beer bottle by one side, Laluna tended to her flower bed. Dressed in woolen leggings that looked as if they were patched together from thrift shop sweaters, a thigh-length orange flannel shirt, short hair porcupining chaotically, no makeup on her smooth, tanned skin, Laluna struck Jay as carefree, young, and successful—yet her large, oval brown eyes seemed to deflect the gaze of anyone who stared too long and exuded an almost defiant aura that warned the uninvited to keep their distance. Jay guessed that it was the tension between vulnerability and stubborn independence that attracted Alchemy so ineluctably to Laluna.
Jay couldn’t balance her fluctuating emotions. Jealousy, because Laluna and Moses shared a child, hesitancy because Laluna seemed to float in her own world. Yet Jay found herself wanting this young woman’s approval.
Moses picked up and hugged Persephone, who settled happily in his arms. “Say hi to your auntie Jay.” The greeting instilled a special sense of security in Jay about her future with Moses. Persephone tucked her head shyly into Moses’s chest. Jay noted Persephone’s pale skin and light brownish hair, like Moses’s, and her hazel eyes that looked like neither Moses’s, Alchemy’s, nor Laluna’s.
Laluna waved to Moses and washed off her hands with the water hose. She and Jay shook hands. Moses carried Persephone as the four strolled along the gravelly paths winding around the grounds, until they stopped in front of Salome’s studio.
“Jay, Mose says you’re a fan of Salome’s art.” Jay nodded. “You want to peek inside?”
“Love to but …”
Moses had never been inside. His eyes darting anxiously, he muttered, “I don’t know.”
“C’mon, Mose.” Laluna glanced at Jay, her first sign of kinship. “We know you want to. We’ll protect you from her evil spirits.” Laluna turned to her daughter. “Perse, honey, you want to visit Granmamma’s studio?” She nodded emphatically. “Perse sits or naps with her while she’s working.”
Laluna dropped her empty beer bottle into a recycling bin and took Persephone from Moses, and with her free hand pushed open the two glass doors. “I call this her ‘mad room.’ She gets mad when anyone goes in without her permission, but when you do, it might drive you mad.”
Laluna held the door. Jay, then Moses, stepped gingerly into the first of three 750-square-foot spaces with twenty-foot ceiling and multiple skylights. They were engulfed by scores of clocks. Clocks with numerical signs and in languages ranging from Old English to Arabic to Chinese. Clocks with no numbers at all. Some hand-carved in wood, some one of a kind, some purchased at Ikea. Others made of cheap plastic or various forms of cast metal. Two clocks made out of rocks. One sundial on the floor. A seven-foot-tall wire spiral clock. A slew of wristwatches side by side: Salvador Dalí with his mustache as the hour and minute hands, Annie Oakley with six guns as the hands, Smokey the Bear and another with Jesus on the Cross. A replica of an ancient Greek water clock. From hundreds of years old to digital. Three cuckoo clocks. Not one clock ticktocked. Salome set and then disabled each clock to the moment she got it. In bold two-foot-high letters, scrawled across the floor in red cha
lk: THE END OF TIME STARTS NOW.
“Got no idea what she intends to do with this stuff. She’s told me she doesn’t believe in time. I look at this and, hmm … Who am I to question her?” Laluna led them behind a black curtain into a space of equal size, without windows or skylights. Paints, brushes, signs, books, rocks, twigs, stacks of torn wallpaper, coins, movie posters, piles of newspaper and magazine images, Kewpie dolls, Indian Ganeshes, an old, empty gumball machine filled with tiny pebbles.
Laluna clicked on a remote control and a TV nestled in the corner started playing. The images began with Salome’s youthful, near-perfect face morphing into its present profile, marked by the vicissitudes of age and madness, followed by images of her creations melting and distorting in a distinctly trippy fashion through various stages of her career. The soundtrack played splices of the Insatiables’ “Savant Sensation Bluz,” Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green,” and Davis’s version of Lauper and Hyman’s “Time After Time.” A half-delighted, half-frightened squeal erupted—it sounded as if it might be coming from the video, until they heard “Unc Mose!” They hurried through another black curtain to the back room, where Persephone stood beside a nude life-size body caste of Salome, and was staring at the never exhibited collages, done in Baddist Boy style, of Salome and a man dressed in Nazi uniforms. They were holding a baby that they were either throwing into or pulling from a fire pit. The baby’s head was a photo of Moses taken off the SCCAM Web site. Across the top, in skeletal letters, she’d scrawled “Child Sacrifice?” Moses eyed Laluna and signaled, Time to go.
Jay clasped Moses’s hand as they speed-walked back to the main house. They avoided speaking of what they’d seen. They ate a late lunch on a glass patio that overlooked the Pacific. Laluna kept nudging Persephone to eat her lunch instead of play with it. Moses offered support. “My mom said I never ate much until I was ten or so.” Laluna’s stare fixed on her caprese sandwich. Moses quickly changed the subject. “I hope Alchemy gets what he wants from Spencer and Amy. Those teen titans of the tech world could really help the foundation.”