by Tina Amiri
“I should have found a way to have him fired. And thinking really isn’t your strength.”
“Morgen, I’m in charge now, and if you want things to work out, then you better start to listen to everything I say.”
Morgen balked and then struggled to sit up at the edge of the bed. “Where’d Corbin take you guys? Dictator Boot Camp? I suppose I get how you got this way, but stick it somewhere, and get it through your head…there doesn’t always have to be somebody in charge.”
“I don’t understand that. There always is, everywhere. Even in the studio. Even in your family. And between us, it used to be you, but it isn’t now.”
“Well, suck me if you think it’s you.” Morgen’s legs collapsed when he tried to stand up. He simply gave into his pain and doubled over his knees. He couldn’t move as he tried to recover the air his lungs ejected on the way down.
Night placed the soup on Morgen’s nightstand. “See? You need me, very much.” He squatted and reached out to offer his assistance, but Morgen pushed his hands away. After watching another pathetic attempt to rise, Night lifted him up by the armpits and dropped him back on the bed. “Just eat what I brought you and maybe you’ll be able to stand again.”
Morgen inched up onto his pillow and closed himself to any further discussion.
“I know you don’t believe me,” Night persisted, “but I know what I’m doing, and I think you need to stay in the guestroom, from now on. We’ll switch. There’s no reason for anyone to go in there, so there’ll be a lesser chance of someone finding you like this.”
“Like what?” Morgen asked malignantly, but he gave in when Night answered him with a deadpan stare. “Whatever you think, Night. …You’re the one in charge.”
****
The first day of video-production arrived big and fast. Between the sets, the costumes, and the energy, the experience turned out to be as surreal as the final product that included a great deal of superimposition of shadow images and animation. The group’s first concert, under their big-time management, also left Night dazed, but here he also received his first real criticism. Apparently, he didn’t know how to move on a stage, so just after graduating from voice lessons, he had to start with a new coach.
Night could feel Morgen’s heart swell with all the glory that was truly his, but the rush couldn’t last. It got to the point where Morgen struggled just to talk, and unless he prepared himself by clearing his lungs first, he didn’t even bother to try.
Therefore, it surprised Night when he came home, on one occasion, to find his brother in the common room, sitting up, and staring at a piece of mail. Slouching over his knees in obvious discomfort, he greeted Night with relative pleasantness. Night walked over to take in Morgen’s view of the black and white portrait-postcard that he held in one hand.
Morgen flipped the card over and his eyes narrowed, but he didn’t comment.
Night thought he’d recognized the image. “Who is that?”
“I told you about him,” Morgen replied in a raspy whisper. “One of the greatest people in music history.”
Night plucked the card out of Morgen’s tense grip and read the tiny print on the back. “John Lennon…” Night’s stare shifted to the handwritten message in the open area. “‘May you follow in his footsteps.' Oh, that’s so nice.”
Morgen glanced up at Night. “Yeah,” he choked out. “Nice.”
Night studied the card again. “Look at this. Why is that, there?” he asked, showing Morgen the clock face sketched in one corner. The hands indicated a few minutes past eleven.
“How should I know?” Morgen stood up and swayed, which made him sit down again. “Do you remember what you have to do when the time comes?”
Morgen sounded more like ninety than nineteen. Night nodded shortly as the sum of their efforts poured from the radio in the corner of the room.
Morgen continued. “You’ve done it…and from here…you can go anywhere—do anything. Don’t let your past, anybody—not even Sean—stand in your way.”
Night tried not to look at Morgen. Seeing him like this was worse than in any nightmare in which he’d appeared. He couldn’t burden his brother with his updates about Sandy and Sean, but Morgen already knew something or Sean’s name wouldn’t have popped out of his brother’s mouth, in such a random way, a few seconds ago. What really surprised Night was how Morgen wanted to protect him in precisely the same way.
****
“You’re looking good out there,” Brandt commented from the doorway when Night finished his lesson with the choreographer. “You’re really hopping along.” He laughed infectiously, then stopped when Night started to grin. “So, what’s changed you, Morgen? Sean made me believe that you would be incredibly difficult to work with, and Aden didn’t exactly come to your defense, but so far it’s been a pleasure. Sure, you threw this at me,” he broached, slapping Night on the back as they left the foyer of the dance studio. “But other than that…”
“Well, what did Sean tell you?” Night questioned, equally curious about his brother’s notorious reputation.
“He said you’re bitchy, self-serving, stubborn, impulsive… He said you’ve shown up for rehearsals stoned, and I even heard that, not so long ago, you lost an opportunity for a big break because you just didn’t show up. You know, you’re lucky to be here today.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Brandt replied, obliviously. “You were quite sick for a while too, I heard. Are you still sick?”
“No,” Night churned out, as though he’d just been kicked in the stomach.
“Good. I guess you’re one of the luckiest people around. You’re going to need your health in the next few months. Touring can be rough, so don’t put any unnecessary strikes against yourself, if you can help it.”
Over coffee, Night tapped Brandt for his knowledge about the music industry, instead of bringing his questions to Morgen as he would have in the past. Reading didn’t pose much of a problem anymore, except when it came to deciphering his contract.
“So, what do these letters mean?” He began reading them off the page. “A-S-C…”
“It’s one of the performing rights societies. Didn’t Chandler go over this with you?”
“I can’t remember.”
With one hand Brandt seized the papers, and with the other he pressed Night’s hands to the table.
“Will you just relax? You’ve got a great lawyer and a great manager, and it’s their job to worry about this. Anyway, at this rate, you’re going to trick me into revealing the secret of life, and you know what the penalty for that is?”
Night shook his head.
Brandt flung his clenched fists against his chest to represent the plunge of a dagger. “And then who is going to take care of you?”
“I don’t need you to take care of me,” Night retorted, but it relieved him to know that Brandt thought he did.
****
Between work at the studio and their small-venue performances that their booking agent called rehearsal, Night found himself removed from his secret responsibilities more than he wanted to be. Morgen needed his help constantly, even for the simplest tasks.
“Just stop…I don’t care anymore,” Morgen declared one day after Night spent almost a half hour pounding on his back. “I can’t breathe…and I’m tired of trying.”
As Night irritably brushed Morgen’s shabby dye-stripped hair, he started to notice how much of it remained in the bristles. He couldn’t imagine that, in a short time, this life, this body, this replica of his own that had once housed so much ambition, would just cease to exist. He felt himself missing him in the past, and missing him in the future, and missing the soul that had always supplemented his own. But he didn’t say a word as he continued to work dutifully in both areas of his new life.
The music scene became Night’s welcome escape from the morbidity of his private life. It baffled him how he could be earning so much money for doing something he gla
dly would have paid to do. But he rarely had a chance to spend these staggering gratuities, and many of his smaller royalty checks went directly into the Sandy extortion fund.
****
Sandy had caught on to the fact that Morgen now resided in the guestroom. He realized this after sifting through his latest volume of recorded video, so he finally snuck back into Morgen’s suite to retrieve his camera unit. It all didn’t matter anymore since he’d already acquired enough evidence to cram every single page of every tabloid in the state for a year. He would hold out for a bit longer, probably until the tour, for the big splash.
****
One evening, Night arrived home from the studio to find a tacky, gold, chocolate-filled Valentine heart in front of Morgen’s garage door. He assumed Doris had left it there since it only made sense from what he’d learned about the occasion. Morgen would only throw up at the sight of them, so he tucked the gift under his arm and carried it up to his suite where he planned to dig into it as soon as he set down his keys.
As he wriggled off the heart-shaped lid, he considered that the gesture could even have come from Beth—until he saw the contents that caused him to flinch and hurl the whole thing straight off the end of the coffee table. The dead scorpion tumbled across the carpet and came to rest against a baseboard. Night stared at it for a while, not really trusting it to stay inert.
He found Sandy in the third place he checked—the kitchen—leaning over a pot on the stove. He turned around to receive the back of Night’s hand across his face, right before Night seized his hair and drove him facedown onto the kitchen floor.
“What do you want from me?” Night roared. “I’m giving you what you want!”
Sandy flipped himself over. “What the hell is your problem, you little faggot?”
“What’s yours?” Night tackled him on the stone-tile floor, dropping his forearm against his throat. “What did you mean by giving me the big ugly bug?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“As if you don’t know! Come and take it back!” After lifting his arm, Night rocked back on his heels and stood up. “Come on, and get it out of my room!”
Sandy scrambled onto his feet and straightened his shirt before reasoning out loud. “As much as I’d like to know what you’re talking about, I can’t really go into your room—I mean, with your brother crashed out in there an’ all.”
Night ran from the kitchen and returned to the suite by himself. He used the empty heart-shaped box and strewn lid to scoop the creature inside, and then he marched it back to the kitchen where Sandy had resumed his work. This time, he had Sandy’s attention right away. Night ripped off the lid and shoved the box in Sandy’s face, sending the housekeeper recoiling against the boiling pot on the stove.
Springing forward, Sandy snatched the box and lid from Night and, at arm’s length, attempted to put the two back together. “Well…” he remarked, “I see I’m not the only one who Morgen has pissed off. Big surprise. Believe me…I did not send him this.”
Sandy’s frankness made Night believe him, but it brought on a new conclusion. As Sandy implied, the heart, and likely the postcard, had come from somebody else who hated Morgen…someone like Sean.
Night collided with Beth, in the south hallway, at the top of the stairs. They hadn’t been alone together since before the tabloid scandal, and with that still weighing oppressively over the household, they backed away from one another.
“Now, do you understand why we can’t…you know…?”
He nodded, but it wasn’t the scandal that strained his features.
“What’s going on, Night?
Beth was more than helpful when he asked her what he couldn’t, as Morgen, ask anyone else.
She looked at him with surprise. “‘What happened to John Lennon’? Well, he was shot a few years back, if that’s what you’re asking?”
Night nodded and walked away, having reaped all he needed from this consultation with Beth. If Sean thought he was going to pull a trigger on him, literally, or figuratively, then he was dead wrong. Sean didn’t realize he was matched against a new opponent—one that with all of his feral inadequacies considered few restrictions when it came to his own survival.
Chapter Twenty-One
In the twilight hours, Sandy looked out of his window and watched a figure drawing closer, scuttling through the bushes along the south driveway of the Dahlsi mansion. He couldn’t make out a lot of detail from his midpoint window, at the front of the house, but he could tell by the figure’s massive size that it wasn’t either of the twins.
Sandy activated his video equipment and aimed the camera out the window, just in time to record the intruder literally leaving his mark on the garage door like a tomcat. Tonight, he would allow the offender to complete his task, which included scrawling something on Morgen’s garage door, but next time, he would confront the intruder with the means to extort a few bucks from him. Then, taking into account the weekly payments from Night, he’d be raking in money, hand over fist.
****
Night didn’t say anything about the ugly bug gesture when he saw Morgen at the end of the day. That morning, he’d already erased the familiar clock-face that had been sketched, in chalk, on the garage door. Night figured out that the hands on Sean’s signature clock held the greatest significance, moving through the hour of eleven, toward a moment of certain doom at the top of the hour.
He also answered a few telephone calls that complemented the offerings from Sean, but Night always hung up before any threat could be spoken. Another clock-face arrived in the mail, and again, the minute hand had moved inexorably onward.
Morgen didn’t witness these things or much of anything anymore, except with Night’s help. Morgen’s unmistakable nervousness also made Night feel uneasy. Perhaps Morgen saw the worry in his face, but he couldn’t be sure if Morgen knew about Sean or Sandy’s threats with neither of them willing to bring up the subject.
“Everything is going well,” Night reported as he injected morphine into his brother’s vein.
Morgen glanced down at the needle in his arm. “Isn’t that a little much…or are you trying to hurry things along?”
“You need it. I thought you said you’re in a lot of pain.”
“I’m almost out, aren’t I?”
Night nodded. His brother could no longer venture out of the house to take care of his own business, so Night anticipated his request.
“If I tell you where to go and who to see, do you think you can do it?”
****
After the evening routine was completed, Night made a telephone call and then left the house to find Morgen’s illicit contact. He parked his brother’s white convertible under the sapphire sky, not far from the unfamiliar nightclub on the outskirts of town. A strong electronic beat pounded through the glass doors and exploded on him as he entered. He found it difficult to navigate the room between the crowds and strobe-lights.
Morgen had assured him that he wouldn’t be dealing with any of Sean’s pals tonight—that Sean had only been useful for cocaine. But all Morgen really needed anymore was morphine.
As the blue and yellow lights flashed in time with the music, he stood face-to-face with Edward, the morphine guy, who Morgen had described meticulously. Night offered him a quick signal and then a handshake with a palm loaded with a tight roll of green bills. Edward placed his hand inside his own jacket and drew out what appeared to be a candy bar, then another. After that, the man turned and danced back to the bar as though nothing had happened.
In the car, Night ripped open one of the candy bar wrappers and a series of small glass vials, filled with clear liquid, spilled out of a roll of cardboard, and onto his lap. Headlights from another vehicle flashed into his eyes, sparking an entire scheme.
Through all the big hair and black leather, he sought out the morphine guy for a second time tonight, This time, Night asserted himself, demanding that Edward follow him.
“Is there
a problem?” Edward assumed, stuffing his hands into his purple sport coat that hung loosely over his beige slacks.
“I want to buy something else,” Night stated. “I want to know if you can help me.”
After hearing Night out, the man nodded and offered him some instructions. They parted ways, with Night returning to his car and the morphine-guy heading for a telephone booth. If all went as planned, the morphine guy would come out of the booth with his arms crossed, indicating that arrangements had been made for the imposter-Morgen to meet with a second contact tonight.
****
Twenty minutes later, at a roadside lookout, Night waited for a man on a motorcycle to show up. When a bike finally pulled in, he admired how easily this slight person managed to climb off and settle such a large bike. But the final surprise came when the rider in the tight jeans and the black leather jacket took her helmet off.
“Hey Doll,” she started in a syrupy drawl. “It’s late. Did yer car break down or are you maybe lookin’ for somethin’ here?”
He nodded and stepped away from his car.
“I hoped so.” She flicked back her layers of two-tone hair before she sauntered over to the railing and pulled a small pistol out of her jacket. Night took it into his hands as though it were literally burning hot.
She peered at him, up and down. “D'ya know how to use it?”
He looked from the revolver to her face, still mute.
Grinning, she took back the weapon and aimed it into the blackness over the railing. He flinched and she laughed. “Here,” she said, releasing the thumb catch and flipping out the cylinder. “See? It’s already loaded. Should do ya unless yer a real bad shot, or yer plannin’ some kinda killin’ spree.” She pointed out the main parts and showed him how to cock the gun and release the hammer, before placing it back into his hand. “No harder than firing a toy gun. But it ain’t a present, Doll.”
The scent of leather and cigarettes swelled between them as he leaned toward her and began placing one bill after another into her gloved hand. She closed her fingers abruptly at the correct sum and slid the money into her jacket.