by Jenya Keefe
“Of course I did.”
Ángel licked crumbs off his thumb and cocked his head, listening closely to the song’s final chorus. Not only was Ángel’s backing harmony layered under Con’s rich, flexible baritone melody, but his part was distorted by the production, and he was singing in a breathy falsetto completely unlike his usual voice.
The song faded to silence and Ángel said, “That is fucking amazing, Oberon. Did you isolate the backing track?”
“I did, but I wouldn’t have bothered if I hadn’t known it was you,” said Oberon. “Why is it surprising? I hear your voice every day. You often sing while you’re doing other things.”
“This song buries me, though.” Ángel shook his head. “I doubt most people would even realize that there are backing vocals, much less recognize my voice.”
“You’re playing the guitar too.”
“Yep, that’s me on lead guitar. Con’s playing rhythm. Are you going to eat that?”
Oberon looked down at the zucchini bread on his plate. “All right.” Without noticeable enthusiasm, he began to eat.
Around another bite of bread, Ángel said, “That’s really impressive. I mean, guitar’s pretty individual, but I don’t think any human ears could have picked my voice out. I wouldn’t know that was me, and we must have sung it fifty-seven times to get this take. I was singing this song in my dreams for weeks.”
With gentle politeness, Oberon said, “He sometimes tends to be a little flat.”
Ángel snorted. “Ya think? He wanted a live set for every song on the album, and he’s ethically opposed to auto-tune. All of which is fine if you can stay on key, but Con has trouble. Never go see him live. It can be tough.”
“I’ll cross his concerts off my schedule,” said Oberon gravely. “You are conspicuously the better singer, more controlled and on-pitch even though you’re singing above your modal voice. The only interesting thing about this song is that he’s singing the melody and not you.”
Ángel smiled. “Thank you, but it was his album, Oberon. I’m just a session man.”
“Why don’t you have an album?”
“Never really wanted to be a star. I like session work, and I like to write and play and perform in small venues. It’s fun, and I make a living. But I don’t want fame. Fame sucks. As you know.”
“And why did you have this song on your phone?”
That was a perceptive question. Ángel had been playing and singing other people’s music for years; he didn’t carry around many examples in his pocket. “We dated for a while,” he admitted. “Con and me. We broke up not long after we recorded this. I guess it’s nostalgia or something.”
“Do you love him still?”
“No,” said Ángel, surprised. They ate in silence until “Sunrise Love” automatically started up again, Ángel’s guitar ringing through the room. Then Conner started to sing, and Ángel winced. “I don’t even miss him much, not anymore. It’s just, I don’t really know what happened. Why we didn’t work out. He wanted me to tour with him, but I had my business, my clients, in Miami. It wasn’t personal. But he got mad.” He listened regretfully. “It’s too bad I don’t have a better song to remember him by, but the rest of his stuff isn’t any better. He has a pretty voice, but he’s not a very interesting songwriter.”
He stood up to collect their plates, and frowned to see that Oberon had barely eaten half his slice of bread. “Eat that.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I don’t care,” said Ángel, brusquely. “You work out for ninety minutes every morning. You can’t support that on no food. Eat.”
Oberon’s green-gold eyes glinted at him. “Will you stay with me for a few minutes, while I eat?”
Did he really just want company? Somehow it was easy to forget how alone Oberon was.
He sat in the chair. Oberon took another bite of his zucchini bread. “Happy?”
Ángel gestured in the air, indicating “Sunrise Love,” which was winding down again. “Kill this?”
Oberon brushed the crumbs off his fingertips, and tapped the surface of his tablet. Con Marr’s voice, blended with Ángel’s, cut off abruptly. “Magpie to the Morning” by Neko Case came on.
“Now I’m happy,” said Ángel.
They listened to the song, then discussed its cryptic lyrics. Ángel found himself enjoying the conversation—he could relax and enjoy talking to Oberon so long as he kept his eyes on the gray sky outside the window. The tension and fear only came back when he looked at him.
After a while Oberon said, “What made you decide to seek me out today?”
Ángel continued staring out the window. “Well,” he said, reluctantly. “This is why I’m here, isn’t it? To keep you company. I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain.”
“Because you are afraid that I’ll hurt you?”
“No— I mean— I’m not really sure what I’m afraid of.”
Oberon sipped his tea. “I am bad at communicating with humans. I am only now realizing how very bad at it I am. I thought that learning a language would be enough, but there seems to be so much that I am incapable of either conveying or understanding. No wonder people want to kill me.”
Ángel dared a glance at him. “Your English is great.”
“It isn’t enough. And you—well. You are confusing. Do you want to know what I think?”
“Okay.”
“We of the fae—we speak a language, just like you. And like you, we have another way of speaking, which helps us understand when language is not precise. Your second way of speaking is visual. You move your faces, you send signals with your expressions. And your clothes, and ornaments. You constantly speak without sound. It is part of what makes you such a beautiful species,” he added. “You are so colorful, so visually varied. So constantly in motion.”
We are? Ángel bit his lip. I guess we are.
“But my species does not speak that way,” continued Oberon. “Our faces are always the same. While I think humans are lovely and I enjoy watching you, I can easily misinterpret the signals you are sending.”
Ángel thought about this, with the sensation of puzzle pieces falling into place.
Oberon said, “The fae’s second way of speaking— We feel each other. You’ve asked me if we read minds. We do not. But we feel each other’s feelings, we experience feelings together, in our skin, and in our hearts. Do you understand?”
Creepy. “Neat,” Ángel said, a little hoarsely, looking out the window so that he wouldn’t be confronted by Oberon’s eyes. “Do you have to, um, touch, skin to skin, to pick up each other’s emotions?”
“Not at all,” said Oberon. “Nearness is enough. But when we do touch, it is especially beautiful. Sometimes, when we touch, the emotions of two will combine and blend in our hearts; we will feel each other, in our skin, and the feelings will change. Like voices in harmony, in a song. It is a language to which you have no access at all. And since I came here,” he added, “neither do I.”
And did that grieve him? How could it not? But the sight of that still, angular face told Ángel nothing.
“So you can’t feel humans’ emotions?”
“I can,” Oberon said, “but it’s like when you hear another language. I don’t understand them. I have come to understand Lily, a little, and Chandler. But you, you are baffling to me. The first day you were here, your heart was beating fast. You were almost dancing. Your skin seemed warm, and I thought you were excited to be here. I thought you were happy. I didn’t understand that you were terrified. I could hardly have made a worse mistake.”
“I wish I knew this sooner. Am I still baffling?”
“Yes,” said Oberon. “Constantly. I can tell you are having feelings, but I have no idea what they are. It is very disconcerting, Ángel.”
The way Oberon’s lack of expression was disconcerting to Ángel, presumably. They both spoke English, but there was a communication gap that they couldn’t seem to bridge. But Oberon wanted to bridge it. O
beron was reaching out to him for help.
“For me too,” he offered. “You know, you have another way, as well. Your voice changes when you talk. And sometimes I can sort of smell you, and your smell changes. I suppose that over the next four years, I’ll learn how to interpret the way your voice changes. And you’ll learn to interpret, uh, me.”
“I hope so,” said Oberon. “But until that happens, I have a request, Ángel.”
Ángel forced himself to meet Oberon’s green-gold eyes again.
“My species’ sensitivity to magic makes it almost impossible for us to lie to each other. But I could easily lie to you, because you can’t interpret my magic. And you can easily lie to me, because I don’t reliably understand your expressions and movements. So I ask that, since we must rely upon spoken language, we do so without lies. Or do not speak at all, if we cannot speak honestly.”
“Okay. I’ll try.”
“Shall we try now?”
“Oh, you want to . . . Okay. Sure. Ask me anything.”
“You’ll answer truthfully?” Oberon was watching him fixedly.
Ángel squirmed. “Or I won’t answer.”
“I will do the same. Do you miss your home?”
“Yes,” said Ángel. “So much.”
“I miss mine too.” They were quiet for a moment, and then Oberon gently said, “Now you.”
Ángel imagined asking Oberon if he’d been brought here for sex, and quailed. Instead he ventured, “Are you angry with me?”
“No. Did you think I was?”
“Yes.” Ángel could no longer look at him; he focused on his own knees. “Because I destroyed the cameras in my room.”
“Where I am from . . . we live, many, in one home. And we all sense one another all the time. There is no privacy, because we can feel one another, from anywhere in the house. For us, that is . . . comfortable, to know our friends can tell how we feel, or if anything is wrong. It’s a feeling of safety, of home, to know that the people I live with can feel me, and I can feel them.” He paused. “I often cannot feel you, and when I do I cannot understand. So I use the cameras, so I can see you. It is comfort. Or it was.”
“It comforted you to watch me on the cameras when I slept?”
“Yes. Does it comfort you, to watch me?”
“On the cameras? No. I would never.”
“Even if I said I didn’t mind?”
Ángel shook his head.
“I thought I was offering you contentment.” Oberon’s voice was soft, and his scent had taken on a wintery note, like snow. “Easing your loneliness. But I think I only made it worse. Are you angry with me?”
Ángel bit his lip. “Sort of. Sometimes. But I agreed to come. And I know you’re doing what feels normal to you. It’s not your fault that it isn’t normal to me. I’m trying my best.”
“I will try harder. I should have listened to you, when you said you hated the cameras. Thank you for not lying to me, Ángel.”
“You’re welcome, I guess.”
“I have another question.”
“Okay.”
“Do you really like this house?”
Ángel laughed. “Oberon,” he said, “this is the ugliest house I have ever seen.”
Days passed, and Ángel and Oberon eased into a sort of careful friendship. They had lunch together. Oberon ate, and Ángel was pleased that his color returned to what seemed to be its normal golden cream. They talked about music. The jazz influences and unreliable narrators of Steely Dan; the function of the movie score, and if it could stand alone without its movie; whether punk music had any aesthetic value or redeeming social importance at all. (Oberon was not a fan of punk.) Sometimes Oberon would consult Ángel about a song’s cultural significance, or meanings of lyrics. More often he would share his greater technical knowledge with Ángel. One afternoon, they had a discussion of harmony and counterpoint that so vastly expanded Ángel’s largely instinctive understanding of the topic it made his head spin. Ángel ruefully thought that his four years in Oberon’s company could easily be the equivalent of a graduate degree in music theory, if he paid attention.
“How do you send stuff back to the Otherworld?” asked Ángel one day. “Music, and your notes and things? I thought the veil was one-way only.”
“That is a simplification,” said Oberon. “There are libraries of books on the veil, universities of scholars who study it. I am not a scholar, but I understand that it takes a huge amount of energy for something to pass through the veil. Exponentially more energy to pass from this side to the Otherworld, than from the Otherworld to this side. But either way, it is very difficult. So I am alone here.” He gestured toward the rose bush by the window. “Except for that plant, which is an Otherworld plant. It is full of magic—its magic ceaselessly draws it toward home, through the veil. So I use a spell to put music and my notes and my ideas into the flowers, and it passes them through.”
Ángel hesitantly examined the rose bush. In its large ceramic pot, it was not a particularly graceful plant: sturdy stems bristling with hooked thorns, shiny dark-green leaves. It bore flowers in all stages of development—tight buds, flowers that were just opened, perfectly formed flowers that were blown wide, all silver-white, almost sparkling. “It’s magic?” he asked. “If I touch it, will it suck me through?”
“No. Neither you nor I can go through.”
Ángel touched a flower with a fingertip, and the whole rose bush seemed to tremble. “And they can, like, read the roses, there?”
“That flower holds Bach’s Suite number 1 in G Major, played by Johannes Moser,” said Oberon. “Perhaps they will feel your touch too.” Ángel snatched his hand away. “The entire experience is there. I put my notes in this one—” Oberon indicated a different flower “—so that they can listen to the music without my interpretation.”
“Is that something that you are born knowing how to do?”
“Oh, no, I studied. I am not a naturally gifted spell-caster—I had to learn. And also, one person doing magic alone can do very little. Great spell-casters work together; they dance together, and their magic combines, and becomes stronger than anything any one spell-caster could ever do. Because I am alone, I am weak in magic.” He touched the rose. “But the plant helps.”
Ángel pictured groups of dancing fae, creating magics. He had read about things like that, in folktales: faerie rings, spells.
To help Ángel pass the time, Lily began to bring him library books with her weekly shopping: biographies, mysteries, poetry, romance novels, whatever was new. Ángel read them all and begged for more. He asked for fewer romances—not because he didn’t like them, necessarily, but because he got through them too quickly. Plus some of them were pretty sexy, and his libido didn’t need the encouragement. Dense and slow was better. Nonfiction. Classics. Tolstoy.
Craving stimulation, he began to teach himself to play the mandolin. He watched technique and tuning videos on YouTube, and got Lily to bring him books and sheet music from the library. He practiced at tedious length, getting used to the small neck under his left fingers, keeping his right wrist loose as he picked the paired strings. It was probably agonizing to listen to, but Ángel wanted to sound like a mandolin player, not like a guitarist messing around on a mandolin, and for him that meant learning the instrument deep, through repetition. He needed to embed the instrument into his hands’ muscle memory.
And he tried to understand Oberon. To not be distracted by that predatory face, but to pay attention to his words, and the fluid gestures of his slim hands, of the tones and timbre of his voice, and to correlate them to the scent of his body and the color of his skin.
One day they were eating cucumber hummus sandwiches and tomato soup, listening to the throbbing strains of a piano concerto.
“What is this?” asked Ángel. “It’s so sad.”
“Rachmaninov.” Oberon was leaning back in his chair, his head resting on its cushion, his eyes closed.
Hesitantly, Ángel asked, “Are yo
u sad?”
Oberon didn’t answer the question directly. “Each thinning of the veil, I expect a message from Otherworld. I thought it would happen this summer, but it hasn’t. That makes me very anxious.”
“The veil thins? Is another envoy coming?”
“No, I am afraid not,” he said, regret washing through his voice like a drop of blue ink in a glass of water. “No. When the veil thins, I hope for messages. I am longing for news of home.”
Ángel considered his own loneliness and desperation for contact with the outside world. He had only been here for two months. “How often does the veil thin?”
“Every few months. But I have had no messages.”
Ángel wrinkled his brow. “When was the last time you had news from home?”
“Almost three years.”
He grimaced with horror. “Oh shit. I’m so sorry. That would be driving me crazy. I can barely go three days without an email from Marissa. I don’t know how you can concentrate on this crap.” He gestured in the air.
“What else can I do?” asked Oberon. “Do you really think it’s crap?”
“No—”
But the Rachmaninov was wildly emotive, a tumult of agitated sorrow. Somehow it made Ángel think of the protests—the Molotov cocktails, the hateful signs. The assassination attempts.
What would those people think if they knew how homesick Oberon was? That he sat around listening to Rachmaninov and pining, because he’d had no news of home?
“Oh my God,” said Ángel. “I just had an idea.”
He sprang to his feet and began pacing, running his fingers through his hair to pull it back off his face, tugging it by the roots as if to stimulate his brain. Oberon leaned forward and turned off the music.
“The problem is that people want to kill you,” Ángel said.
“That is one of my problems, yes,” agreed Oberon. If Ángel didn’t look at him, he thought he could hear warmth in his voice. Amusement?
“They want to kill you because they’re afraid of you,” said Ángel. “But you’re really only scary when people can see you. I mean, your face is scary.”