The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  “Perhaps you’re right,” he said, grinning. “The truth is, in spite of everything, I’m hopelessly optimistic.”

  Steven danced a little three-hundred-sixty-degree jig to demonstrate.

  “So you think it may not be too late? You think you still might find what you’ve been looking for?”

  “Since you seem to be willing to listen, I’ll tell you a little story. When I was around twenty years old, I was a very conventional kid. Along with most other things, I had conventional, white-middle-class taste in music. I liked popular rock bands like The Doors, Hendrix, Cream, that sort of thing. One day I paid a visit to the home of a guy I’d recently met at college. He had studied music, played classical guitar, and his tastes were somewhat more sophisticated than mine. At his suggestion, we listened to an album he’d just recently acquired and was obviously excited about: Miles Davis At Fillmore. Are you familiar at all with Miles?”

  “That was a landmark album,” I said.

  “You know it. Good. Anyway, I sat for the duration of the album, wondering what the hell this grinding cacophony of noise had to do with music. It was obvious to my friend that I didn’t get it. I must have looked like I’d bitten into a turd, or something. I was glad when the album ended, but a little embarrassed, too.

  “Later that day, I started thinking about the experience, wondering why I’d only heard noise when my friend had obviously heard music. I was sure nobody in their right mind would willingly subject themselves to that kind of auditory punishment. But it was also obvious that a concert hall full of people had paid to do just that. There had to be something I was missing. By evening, I was so obsessed I went to Tower Records and bought the LP. I took it home, put it on the stereo and listened again. And again. After a second and third hearing, it was still just an irritating, jumbled racket. There were stretches of rhythmic consistency, bits of melody here and there, but it just didn’t come together. Still, I was determined. Then on the fourth try, about half way through the album, something clicked and I could hear it. Not only hear it, I was dumbstruck by how amazing, how beautiful it was.”

  I suspected Steven was attributing more importance to the experience than it really merited. “That kind of thing isn’t so unusual, is it? You’ve probably had other similar experiences in your life, especially when you were a kid. Maybe everyone does. It reminds me of those optical illusions, like the duck/rabbit. Depending on how you look at it, your brain will interpret the image either as a duck looking in one direction or as a rabbit looking in the opposite direction.”

  “You’re right, I think. But the point isn’t so much that the brain can process the same data in very different ways. In my jazz experience, one way of hearing the sounds was chaotic and ugly and the other way was ordered and beautiful. At first there was an absence of something. Then that absence was filled with beauty. With the duck/rabbit, either way, all I have is a rough sketch of a duck or a rabbit. Neither enriches my life. Neither offers any deep aesthetic pleasure. With the music, it was the beginning of an enduring love of jazz. But more importantly, what changed was something inside myself. I was suddenly able to do something that a moment before I could not do. Something happened up here,” he said, tapping the side of his head.

  “And that,” I asked, not intending to sound skeptical, “makes you optimistic that something similar will happen again? Like what? Enlightenment?”

  “Well,” he said, chuckling, “perhaps not enlightenment. That might be setting my sights a little too high. Maybe just a more comprehensive, more harmonious way of ordering my experience. The world is a lot like Miles was before I could hear it. Most of it seems ugly and chaotic. But that could just be me. Maybe it’s really ordered and beautiful in a way I just can’t see, yet.”

  “How old did you say you were?”

  “Yes, I know,” he sighed. “It’s getting rather late in the game. But it doesn’t seem so outlandish. I suppose all it really comes down to is being right about the world in some better, more useful way, so that when the unexpected happens, my opinions and beliefs, whatever knowledge and wisdom I have, are not undermined. I want the world to surprise me, but without pulling the rug out from under me.”

  “It’s not easy having it both ways.”

  “But with luck I think you can. That’s where my optimism kicks in. Despite all indications to the contrary, I have to tell myself there is a positive side to being sixty-two. I’ve had sixty-two years to listen to the world’s noise. Something could still click up here,” he said, tapping the side of his head again, “and I could start hearing music. Experience a kind of phase transition. Be able to see a little deeper into the world’s depths.”

  “I don’t mean to disabuse you,” I said, “but it’s been my experience that when people think they’re plumbing the depths, what they’re really doing is losing touch with the surface. As the poet, Homero Aridjis, once wrote, ‘What we weave in solitude is unraveled by the doorbell’s ringing.’”

  “I like that,” he said, chuckling. “I realize I probably sound a little deranged. As if all I have to do is fill my head with more and more noise, and sooner or later, magically or what have you, some higher level of organization will emerge. It sounds a little crazy to me, too. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe everything will come together in a new way.”

  “The sum will become greater than the parts.”

  “Exactly. The sum will become greater than the parts.”

  “So, how is it looking, so far?”

  “So far?” he repeated, with a wry smile. “So far the sum still seems to be a little less than the parts.”

  •

  I continued my walk home, leaving Steven to his inner orchestrations. Our conversation had been oddly soothing, in a way I didn’t often experience with humans. The feeling surprised me a little, if for no other reason than the fact that Steven seemed to be putting his faith in a pipe dream. He wasn’t ignorant or stupid, but what he’d come up with left him hanging by a very slender thread. So slender, in fact, that blind faith and perverse optimism were the only things keeping it from snapping. At sixty-two, he was holding out for an epiphany that, if it came, would have to emerge out of the sheer complexity of his mental life. How was that for an act of faith?

  On the other hand, I had to give him credit. The only way most people seem to be able to console themselves is by sabotaging their own critical faculties. They have to dull themselves down to avoid being eviscerated by their own gullibility. There may have been something inherently paradoxical about Steven’s idea that he could stuff himself with knowledge and thereby arrive at enlightenment. As if by piling up enough debris, he could clear the way to his goal. But maybe it wasn’t impossible. The world was full of surprises. I was a good example of a seemingly miraculous transformation.

  In the end, Steven and I weren’t all that different. We both wanted the clarity of a better story. His optimism may have been perverse, but perhaps no more so than my determination to find convincing reasons for who and who not to kill. Maybe we were both clutching at straws. Maybe we were both just giving ourselves something to do while our clocks ran down. The difference was that his clock was going to stop a lot sooner than mine. It would have been nice if becoming a vampire increased my clarity as much as it increased my strength and speed, but it didn’t. It just gave me a lot more time to stumble around in.

  •

  I was nearing my house when I saw two cats squared off against each other, one on each side of a row of small junipers demarcating the boundary between adjacent front lawns. I slowed my pace as I drew nearer, hearing the tension boiling to a hiss in these two ferocious, supposedly domesticated animals. One of the cats suddenly leapt forward, his adversary meeting him in a screeching ball of fur, claws and teeth. This lasted about half a second before the loser took off at full speed, the victor close on his tail.

  The cats had been too preoccupied to notice my presence, and both came across the lawn straight at me. Bits of grass flew into the air
as the first cat saw me and clawed its way through a high-speed ninety-degree turn. It was a nice move. The second cat had a bit more time to negotiate and veered in pursuit. I stepped forward and snatched up the little demon by the scruff of its neck. Holding it away from my body, I watched as it tried to free itself, slashing the air with its extended claws. I thought about my conversation with Steven, wondering if complexity might really offer solutions that simplicity lacked. Wasn’t it better to keep things simple? Could you ever get the soup right just by tossing more and more stuff into the pot?

  I gave the cat a gentle toss. It landed as cats will, and darted into the night.

  Chapter 21

  The weather cleared over the weekend. I’d given Karla a call on Sunday and arranged to be picked up the following evening at 11:00 p.m. I suggested that she dress warmly because she might have to wait for me in the car and I wasn’t sure how long I would be. Monday night was clear, cold and windy. It would be colder still at the higher altitude of Pollock Pines. I wore a long sleeved black jersey made of some kind of microfiber under a dark blue nylon windbreaker.

  Karla was right on time. She’d dressed warmly, as I’d suggested, wearing a heavy wool sweater under her leather jacket, what looked like logging boots, and some kind of fur-lined, leather head piece reminiscent of an old-fashioned aviator’s helmet, complete with dangling ear flaps.

  “I know,” she said, “I look like a beagle. But it keeps my ears warm.” She examined my attire while she was saying this, her expression mildly incredulous. “Is that your idea of dressing for the weather?”

  “According to the ads, this shirt is a wonder fabric. Very popular among the mountain-climbing set, as well as with car-campers who want the technical look. Under the windbreaker it’s surprisingly warm.”

  Karla looked momentarily dubious, but dropped the subject to focus on her driving. We took Howe Avenue to I-50 and headed east toward the Sierras. Karla seemed quieter than normal, but after a few minutes she broke the silence.

  “How’s Mio doing?” she asked.

  “She’s fine, I’m sure.”

  “She said she was going to Mexico.”

  I was still curious about the intimacy they’d so quickly acquired.

  “She told me at the club in San Francisco,” Karla explained, as if sensing my curiosity.

  “She seems to have taken a liking to you.”

  “You think?” she asked, after a long thoughtful pause.

  “I’ve known Mio for a long time. Trust me, she likes you.”

  “I like her, too. But, I don’t know, she seems so...”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess she makes me feel something I’m not used to feeling around other people.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  She changed her grip on the steering wheel, as if she needed to brace herself for the admission. “Inadequate.”

  “Mio has a very forceful personality,” I said. “She takes some getting used to.”

  “You know,” she said, “I’m not blind or stupid.” She gave me one of those looks designed to make it clear that she wasn’t fooled by my evasions. “I didn’t see what happened, but I know it was Mio who broke that guy’s leg at Satellite.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, still reluctant to get tangled up in an explanation. “But I suspect he had it coming.”

  My attempt to deflect further questions was only half-hearted. On the one hand, I didn’t want to start an explanation I wouldn’t be able to finish. But on the other hand, I was curious about how Karla rationalized the things she witnessed around Mio and me. She obviously wanted to keep her job, and that meant turning a blind eye to things that might otherwise frighten her away. But eventually she would cross a threshold beyond which the power of denial would no longer shield her. What would happen then was anyone’s guess.

  “I don’t often give advice,” I said. “But since this has to do with Mio, I’ll offer a word of caution. If you should ever tell her that you’re going to do something, make sure you do it. Everything else will take care of itself.”

  “That sounds a little ominous.”

  “I don’t mean it to. It’s just that, as things stand, you can count Mio as your friend, and that makes you very lucky. Believe me, it’s far preferable to having her as an enemy.”

  Karla looked deeply puzzled. “Is that supposed to ease my mind?” she asked.

  “Ease of mind wasn’t exactly what I was aiming at.”

  The tension broke and she chuckled. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Shake, you’re very calculating.”

  “I suppose I am at times,” I admitted. “People tend to blunder through things, as if they were trying to make their lives interesting through mishaps. Mostly avoidable mishaps. You’re really not like that, even if it seems to you at times that you are.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, “like most of the time.”

  “It only seems that way, Karla. You’re a smart girl. You have a wild streak, but the fact is, you’re cautious even when you’re wild. And that’s good. Especially where Mio is concerned. She’s not something you want to blunder into.”

  Karla’s eyes were fixed on the road, but her mind was no doubt swarming with questions I wasn’t eager to be asked.

  “It’s good to maintain a degree of detachment,” I continued, “because you can never be sure what’s at stake. You never really know what’s riding on your actions. None of us ever knows.”

  “You’re sounding ominous again,” she said, though without the tension in her voice.

  We were just passing through the Folsom area, where the freeway still paralleled the American River. In the mid-nineteenth century, right around the time of my human birth, the land along the river had all of its soil washed away through hydraulic mining. The miners took the gold and left mounds of boulders neatly spaced for miles, like a storage yard of smooth, head-sized rocks. A hundred and fifty years later, many of these mounds were still visible, covered with whatever grass and shrubs were able to fix their roots in the thin soil that had collected between the stones.

  “Could I could ask you a question, Shake?”

  “You can ask.”

  “What do you do? For a job, I mean. For money?”

  “I don’t do anything for money,” I said. “Not in the conventional sense, anyway. I don’t have to.”

  “So you’re just, like, rich?”

  “By some standards. I have enough money not to have to worry about it.”

  Karla seemed distracted, as if she wasn’t really listening to what I’d said.

  “I have the feeling there’s something else on your mind,” I ventured.

  “Shit!” she said, shaking her head. “On top of everything else, I hope you’re not psychic, too.”

  “Ask whatever you want, Karla.”

  “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” she began. “I’m not having second thoughts about the job, or anything like that.”

  “Okay.”

  “I just have this feeling, like, at some level I’m not used to feeling, that you’re... I don’t know, dangerous.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that, Karla. Like I told you, I’m on your side.”

  “I believe you, Shake. I’m not sure why, but I do. And maybe that’s what gives me the courage to keep this job. But, to be honest, that’s not the question I really wanted to ask.”

  I didn’t say anything, just gave her the time she needed to get to what was bothering her.

  “This may sound weird, but is Mio as dangerous as you are?”

  I could see then that Mio had made a very deep impression on Karla. Not that I was surprised. Mio was like a knife. A knife so sharp that it could only cut deeply. “I told you when you took the job that I wouldn’t bullshit you. I may refuse to answer a question, but if I do answer, I’ll tell you the truth, in so far as I can.”

  “You can tell me the truth. I can handle it.”

  Maybe so, I t
hought. But then, people so often think they can handle reality, right up to the moment it buries them like an avalanche. I must have been taking too long to consider my answer.

  “So,” Karla asked, interrupting my thoughts, “is she as dangerous as you are?”

  “In all honesty, I would have to say Mio is considerably more dangerous.”

  Karla was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, it was as if she’d resolved something for herself. “Thank you, Shake,” she said. “I just needed to ask.”

  •

  We took the Sly Park exit off I-50. There were motels and an all-night convenience store near the exit.

  “I don’t want a repeat of our Sloughhouse adventure,” I said, “so I suggest you come back here after you drop me off. I didn’t see a 24-hour restaurant nearby, but you can park for a while by that convenience store.”

  “I could use some coffee, anyway,” Karla said. “How long is this going to take?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not long. If you feel uncomfortable parked at the convenience store, just drive to one of the motels and park there for a while. I’d suggest checking into a room, but I don’t think it will be necessary.”

  We followed the route Levko had shown me. Just past the Pines Guy’s access drive, I had Karla stop at a wide spot on the shoulder. I got out and she turned the car around and disappeared back in the direction we’d come.

  There wasn’t any need for bushwhacking—the house was a good half mile in—so I walked up the access drive, not bothering to conceal myself until I was about a hundred yards from the house. From my approach, the ground sloped gradually down toward the house, giving me a good view of both the front and the open area to the left. Like the night with Levko, there were outside lights burning, but inside, the house was dark. I stopped behind a low thicket of manzanita to consider the layout and to give a little thought to why I was doing this.

  People often say they don’t believe in coincidence, that there is no such thing as coincidence, that everything happens for a reason. Once someone is operating under this kind of misconception, it’s only natural to take the extra step and put yourself at the center of the drama, where the reasons that drive the universe orbit around you. Even if you aren’t vulnerable to this particular delusion, when something really improbable happens, it’s natural to suspect some agency of operating behind the scenes. Sheer improbability makes us incredulous of chance. But the truth is, the world is so densely replete with possibilities that seemingly improbable juxtapositions are commonplace. Things bang into each other not because of any grand design, but just because there are so many things moving around. Patterns arise out of deeper patterns, linger briefly, then fade back into the vastness.