by Tina Amiri
“Dog? You mean Lexi’s an animal? Because one got into the house the other day and I threw it outside. It looked kind of rabid.”
Morgen doubled over his guitar and began laughing, then coughing. “You threw out Mom’s fucking dog, you cretin…”
Night dashed from the suite, down the stairs, and toward the front door that had seen the animal out, but he stopped when he found himself between Sandy and Brigitte.
“It’s all right, Morgen. Thank goodness,” she cooed, already holding the small, sable-colored creature in her arms. She gave it an adoring squeeze. “Sandy found her in the back. I guess somebody wasn’t watching, probably when they opened the patio door.”
The animal’s shrill rumbling now ignited into fireworks.
“What’s the matter?” Brigitte fussed, instinctively turning the dog away from Night. “Make sure you tell your friends to watch out for Lexi when they come over,” she said before carrying the noisemaker into the kitchen.
Sandy, however, didn’t budge, his glare fixed on Night. “The dog’s been safe in the outbuilding ever since you heaved it into the front yard the other day. I saw you do it. I just wanted to see how long it would take you to go back for it, but you never did. Maybe you really shouldn’t be such an asshole to me all the time. See how I didn’t even rat you out?”
Night winced at the mess he’d assumed along with Morgen’s identity. Lost for words, he raced up the stairs to recount the scene to Morgen, but he quickly regretted mentioning it when his brother promised that “for once, the prick would be sorry for fucking with him.”
****
Lessons about living in the real world sometimes called for a field trip. Night commented how he liked Morgen’s convertible car and Morgen brought up, once again, that everything of his would belong to him soon enough…as long as he didn’t “fuck it all up.”
But Night felt little appreciation for this future reward; gauging his relationship with his brother consumed him much more. It didn’t promise to evolve into anything like he’d had with Daphne, or even Lila, but despite the fact that Morgen was testy and mean, it also wasn’t the same as what he’d known with Andrew.
“I wish it could have been different,” he aired as Morgen drove. “I wish you weren’t sick and that I didn’t have to pretend anymore.”
“Maybe you should just be glad,” Morgen suggested, his platinum hair blowing straight back as their speed reached sixty miles an hour. “Most people aren’t just handed a new life when their old one’s a bust.”
Night crossed his arms and Morgen turned up the radio.
“Listen… You’ve heard this song before. Tell me what this part of the song is called.”
“The intro.”
“Okay. Keep going.”
“This is easy, Morgen. The first verse is coming up and then the chorus. This song has three verses.”
Morgen peered at Night through his peripheral vision. “You actually remember that?”
“Like I said, this stuff is easy.”
“Well, you forgot about the pre-chorus…and there it is.”
The streets widened and the buildings along them started to spread out and up, and Night could no longer contain what Morgen would call a stupid comment. “Everything is so different, here. Are all of these houses?”
“No, they’re office buildings…where people work.”
“I never realized there were so many different kinds of work. All I ever knew about was working at a restaurant.” He lifted his hand as if to put his own words on hold. “Here’s the bridge.”
“What bridge?”
“The bridge in the song.”
Morgen did a small skip in his seat. “No way… I only mentioned that term once. It’s just like with the guitar; you're a bloody natural or an idiot savant,” he cackled. But as they drove, Morgen’s mood began to slide. “You know, I would gladly die tomorrow if I knew that even one of my songs would live on—or that my name would be recognized like John Lennon or Freddie Mercury or Bowie…Any amount of fame would be nice—and I have what it takes. I just don’t have the time. You would understand if you could feel even a quarter of what I do, but you might feel it yet, because you do have it…you have the gift. You probably have it a little bit more than I do.”
Night’s mouth dropped open at the startling compliment, but he abandoned his response. Morgen wasn’t hearing the world outside his head, and Night felt it could be treacherous to force him to listen.
When Morgen reached his first destination, he showed Night a small cove that he called his beach, a place separate from the rest of the sandy shoreline that snaked on forever. There were no cliffs in sight, just sunbaked sand and a few blissful pedestrians.
“I feel like I was dead for all these years,” Night said, more to himself. “I can’t believe all this existed and I didn’t know.”
“Maybe I’ll come back and let you know how ‘dead’ really feels.”
Morgen clearly didn’t know his potential for doing just that. He still didn’t believe that he’d already invaded a few waking moments, and countless dreamscapes, while still alive.
Morgen grinned at his brother’s scowl. “Come on. Let’s get the next stop over with.”
Walking back to the car, Night noticed his brother pressing his palms into his hips. He began to realize that, if he tried, he could feel Morgen’s exact malady of the moment and that he could expel the sensation as readily. This control over what he experienced suggested to Night that he didn’t have the condition, as Morgen feared.
They left the last neighborhood behind and soared into wild vegetation. Dense chaparral gave way to evergreen and walnut trees as the car reached high into the San Gabriel Mountains. The scenery changed quickly, on account of Morgen’s speeding, but somewhere at an altitude of about two-thousand feet, Morgen finally brought the car to rest.
Morgen led him a fair distance from the road and beckoned him over to a particular spot.
“Sorry…but it’s a critical piece of the plan, and you need to be prepared to see it through at any time. When you take over for good, it will have to be like I never existed. You understand?”
Morgen’s fingers dug through the earth until they found the edge of something beneath the dirt. He proceeded to shift a camouflaged board to one side, which revealed a roughly four-foot hole in the ground.
Night’s mood had taken a rare flight after the compliment he received earlier, but it crashed hard at the sight Morgen’s final destination.
“I’m thinking it’s going to be like a nightclub up here after dark—I mean, with all the murder victims that’ve been dumped in these parts,” Morgen quipped in the face of Night’s horror.” He stood up. “So, when I die…”
Night turned his face.
“Look at me! When I die, you will have to put my body in there. It’s not very deep, but I’ll fit. Then you’ll pour gasoline on top. I’ll leave some in the trunk for you. Then, you will throw a lit match into the hole—and remember to stand back unless you plan to go with me.”
The image of that scene already burned behind Night’s glassy stare, retrieved from his mental file of unexplained nightmares. This brought up some more of these files—the documentation of Morgen’s experiences and impressions over the years—maybe even blueprints of the future.
“I think this is all your fault,” Night accused softly. “It’s like you don’t even care if you live.”
With a growl, Morgen shoved Night hard enough to knock him to the ground. He kicked the ground and sent a shower of sand over Night, who scrambled to get away from the edge of the pit that had just collapsed beneath his hand. “Listen to me…!” he continued once Night was upright. “When I’m toast, you’ll have to fill the hole again and make it look natural.”
When Night released a stressed sigh, Morgen mistook it for objection and gave him another push.
“Someone will have to do something with my body—”
“I know!” Night snapped. He barely tur
ned his head enough to look at Morgen. Here was one thing Andrew hadn’t lied about: being dead and being buried. “Just don’t make me do it anytime soon.” In the light of the setting sun, he found himself accepting Morgen’s car keys after making another comment: “I don’t even really know how to drive.”
Chapter Twelve
Night’s incidental introduction to Frederick Dahlsi did nothing to lessen his prejudice about fathers, but it did put to rest another misconception.
He never understood why Frederick allowed Morgen to have a minibar in his suite, stocked with alcohol for his unlimited consumption. The bar also contained snack foods and soft drinks, but it was behind these benign things that Morgen stashed the rum, vodka, tequila, and the white powder box that still mystified Night.
It happened during a tequila-enhanced guitar lesson that someone in the hallway tried to turn the door handle. Morgen had locked the door, but his father’s voice demanded retroactive entry. Night flung the guitar to the side and scurried into the bathroom, leaving Morgen to scramble to conceal their drinks before opening the door.
Frederick strode into the room, turned to Morgen and burst into a lecture about never seeing him anymore, and something about not quite trusting his activities. From the crack in the bathroom door, Night peeked at the man who Brigitte had married almost as soon as she’d left Andrew. Frederick’s face was scarcely in view, but his Nordic traits, especially his still mostly flaxen hair, made him look like he could very well have been Morgen’s biological father. He leaned closer to Morgen, suddenly, placing the rest of his sentence on hold.
“I smell booze,” he said, which made Morgen back away.
“I just had a drink with my friends, Dad. That’s all.”
“Uh-huh? I didn’t notice anybody coming or going tonight.” He left Morgen and walked behind the bar where he quickly located Morgen’s stash. He pulled out Night’s half-glass of tequila and Morgen’s empty glass, and each bottle of liquor that he’d tried to conceal behind soda bottles, bags of potato chips, and all the groceries Night had bought in the past and not yet consumed. “This is great,” Frederick proclaimed, dropping all the illicit items on the countertop before opening the cabinet doors. His eyes widened before he pulled out the prescription pills and then the box that contained Morgen’s white powder. Night couldn’t see how intensely Frederick’s pinkish complexion had washed over in red.
Morgen stood on the other side, pinching his hanging forehead before staring obstinately at the invader.
“Just leave me alone, Dad.”
“I don’t think so, Morgen! Why would you do this after everything you’ve been through? Your health has never been great—you almost died—and now you’re just begging for something else to set you back!” He came around the counter and appraised Morgen’s weight, visually at first, and then by gripping his arms. “Tell me about those pills. You tried to hide it from us last time. Are you sick again?”
“I’m not sick. They’re old, okay?”
Finally, it made sense to Night why Morgen always scraped the labels off his prescription drugs. He carried them around everywhere he went and he’d wisely anticipated some version of this happening.
“And all this other stuff?”
Morgen shrugged, closing his arms. “I’m in a band. It’s no big deal.”
“This is unbelievable! How many times since you were born has life given you another chance—and not only when it came to your health?”
Morgen’s stance, instantly, grew more defensive.
“We’ve given you everything, but nothing matters to you. I wish you could only remember how your mother took you from doctor to doctor and tried every trick she could think of to beat the odds and keep you alive.”
“How frustrating that must have been for you.”
Night winced in the split-second calm, and then came the sound he expected…the sound of Frederick’s hand colliding with Morgen’s face.
“For what it’s worth,” Frederick continued as Morgen clutched one hand to his cheek, “I’m going to arrange for you to see our doctor. At least, then I’ll know what’s really going on with you.” He gathered the liquor bottles and turned toward the bathroom.
Morgen dropped his arms in full panic and Night backed away from the door. Night’s heart almost stopped. He knew he couldn’t squeeze through the sticky guestroom door quickly or quietly enough, so he leapt into the sunken bath. Morgen’s father charged into the room and, in his tirade, didn’t seem to hear the rings that suspended the shower curtain slithering on the rod.
One by one, Frederick poured the bottles of liquor into the sink and then he returned a second time to empty Morgen’s white powder into the toilet, but he ignored the pills. He left the suite after making a final decree. “You will eat dinner with the rest of the family from now on and, until further notice, you can also cancel your meetings with those helpful band buddies of yours.”
Night wasn’t sure about the activity outside the bathroom so he stayed in the tub until Morgen found him.
“And that…” Morgen announced, flinging the shower curtain aside, “was Dad.” He barely glanced at Night before storming out again. Night came after him and Morgen spun around in his face. “But that never happens. He actually hit me.”
“Not until you begged him to. You kind of deserved it.”
“Thanks, asshole. And thanks for running out like that instead of doing something useful to help me clean up. And you can start taking over for me anytime now—like at supper tonight.”
Night rattled his head. “I’m not ready.”
“Oh, you’re ready, smartass, and you can go visit Doc with him too. I can’t believe this…” He raked his hair. “You said you felt some pain in your hands before?”
“I feel it right now, right here.” Night put his palm to his hip.
“Shut up. Just shut up, okay? You’re probably just watching how I’m walking and you can tell that it hurts.”
“No,” Night insisted. “You tell me like you used to tell me through my dreams. I don’t know why you won’t believe me when you’re the one who came to me all the time.”
“Will you stop it? Why the hell would I come to you? I can barely stand you, and if you didn’t serve a purpose here I would throw your ass to the curb in a second!”
“I’m just telling you…”
Morgen brushed past him to reach his pills. “Just go into my room, open the drawer next to my bed, and bring me one of the packages that are in there. It’s all I got left. I’ll just have to get more when I see Sean, later.”
“Maybe you should listen to your father and not take any of that stuff.”
“Night…maybe you should just take that stuff and stop listening to ‘father.'”
****
The dinner atmosphere might have been a bit tense if it hadn’t been for Beth’s continuous chirping. Night insisted he wasn’t ready, so Morgen masked his weight loss under layers of clothing and joined his family for supper. But he couldn’t quite hide his lack of appetite. He did his best with the food, and when he couldn’t swallow another bite, he announced: “I don’t want any more. I really don’t like this,” just as Sandy poked into the dining room. It was unintentional, but perfect. “Can I go now?” Morgen asked, challenging the stare from his father across the table.
Brigitte, who also never ate very much, came to his rescue. “Of course, honey. But you hardly touched anything. Sandy might take you something else later, if you ask him to.” She glanced at the housekeeper who suddenly ducked as though he was too tall for the fifteen-foot ceiling.
“Will you, Sandy?” said Morgen, wide-eyed. “Just a sandwich would be fine.” He beamed in the presence of Sandy’s tart smirk before it disappeared with him into the kitchen.
Morgen rose from the table and Brigitte followed suit, blocking his next step, and confirming for him that she’d been told about the incident.
“We’re just worried about you.” With both hands, she stroked back his
iridescent hair before pulling him against herself. “Tomorrow, your father will take you to see Doctor Barrett. I’ve made the appointment. You know that this is a time when you have to be especially responsible considering the scares you’ve had in the past—and with your father working so hard on his campaign. You know he has to stay focused on it if he hopes to win and also go further someday.”
Morgen bit his words. He’d have to remember to puke in red white and blue from now on. “I know that. But I have to meet with the band this week. That’s still okay, isn’t it? Dad doesn’t want me to lose what I’ve been working for…?”
Beth shot up from her chair. “I knew you weren’t serious about giving it up.”
Brigitte held him to her shoulder for another moment while she spoke the words he predicted. “No, no. That’s not what anyone wants. Why would you think that?”
With a mild grin, Morgen lifted his pale eyes to his father’s. As he pulled away from Brigitte and moved toward the corridor, Beth looked ready to chase after him, but she refrained and simply admired him as she settled back into her chair.
Morgen found Night in the guest room, playing with the acoustic guitar when he returned from dinner. “I quit. It’s your turn. I can’t do this anymore—and they have to get used to seeing you.” He held his mouth as he raced into the bathroom where he threw up for the next minute or so. With Night lingering outside the bathroom, he continued to speak like nothing was hindering him. “I’m taking off for tonight, and you can stay here and be the jailbird. Sandy will probably bring some food up, later, which you’re welcome to. Just check to make sure there’re no pins in it or anything.”
Morgen phoned Steve and arranged to meet him on the outskirts of the neighborhood park. He instructed Night not to sleep in the guest bedroom tonight, in case someone insisted on barging in again, and with that resolved, he threw the strap of his guitar case over his shoulder and slipped out of the house, into the coal-black air.
****
The lights of Steve’s gray Datsun highlighted Morgen’s fair head where he slouched on a bench, in front of the park.