Killing Time in Crystal City Read online

  “You won’t,” he says with a friendly dangerous uncle smile. “You’ll reach around behind you and cover your own ass until I return. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Uncle Sydney claps a hand on my shoulder as we head off on our circuit of the neighborhood. He shows me where to get essentials that might not already be in the house, which would be none. He shows me the shoe repair shop, which I will never need in my whole life, but when we go inside and I meet Carlo and smell the leather and shake the old rocky hand, I feel like there was something beyond shoes in the visit and come out glad I had the honor. We visit three small eating establishments, each one smelling different, of lamb and baked goods, of simmering tomatoes and spring onions and basil and cinnamon and peaches, and none of which has a deep-fat fryer. Conspicuously, Syd and I stay by the entrance all three times. We breathe it in, the busy folks behind the counter notice us and wave, and Syd points at me before we exit again.

  “You’ll be well taken care of, any of these places. You’ll never go hungry.”

  “I’m not hungry now, but I want to eat in all of them anyway.”

  “Ha,” he says, “that’s the stuff. You’ll be great here. That’s the municipal pool right there, and the public library . . . it’s a great neighborhood. Never have to leave it if you don’t want to.”

  “I want to, though,” I say, not meaning any disrespect to the fullness of Syd’s neighborhood universe.

  He laughs again. “Of course you do, young man. You’re a young man. You want to go explore. So go, explore. I’ll probably be gone by the time you get back. You know what to do,” he says, pointing at me so close I can smell the soap on his finger.

  “I do know what to do,” I say.

  “And you know what to not do,” he says.

  “I do.”

  He gives me a hug and surprises me by holding it a fair bit of time, and firmly.

  “Are you sure you don’t need some money?” he asks while his DNA once again passes my smell test.

  “You must be joking,” I say as we part and I back away from him down the road. “I feel like I owe you so much already.”

  He stands steady, seeing me off with a big windshield-wiper wave.

  “I sort of feel like I owe you more, ’cause of him,” he says.

  JASPER JUDGE

  So who told you to go sneaking around the dark corners of his computer anyway? That’s insane, and guaranteed to produce nothing but horrors. Nobody could pass that test. I’m telling you, nobody.”

  Jasper apparently didn’t think it was smart of me to snoop on my father’s computer. He very nearly snapped the tops off of six of my fingers when he threw himself at the laptop and banged it shut.

  Truth be told, it was a relief.

  “I guess now we know why he didn’t want me to move back in with him,” I said.

  “So, he has a life,” Jasper said. “He’s entitled to that, isn’t he? Are you still four or something, expecting his world to cease whenever he’s not with you? If that’s it, then he’d be right to not want you for a roommate. I wouldn’t.”

  “You call that a life?” I shouted, jumping up out of my father’s private desk chair behind his private desk in his until-recently-private home, and pointing with my fist at that private computer and the shocks within it that I had no business looking at.

  It probably would have been a good idea to let him know when I was coming. I didn’t, because it never for a second occurred to me that he would have been anything less than totally thrilled at my returning to him. That possibility never crossed my mind.

  He was less than totally thrilled.

  “I do,” Jasper said, mostly calmly. “I call it a life. It might not be my version of life—or it might be—and it’s surely not your version of life, but it is definitely some people’s version, and without a doubt it’s his right to have it. Frankly, it’s not even that weird.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “You are very, very naive, Kiki my friend.”

  “I am not. Not naive, and not Kiki. And not wrong.”

  I didn’t really know whether I was or wasn’t any of those things. Because all I knew then was that I was hurt and that I needed to get over it or through it or under it or whatever a person was supposed to do with this kind of ache, but I was getting nowhere with it. Nowhere.

  It hurt a lot, feeling like I didn’t belong in Dad’s house, his life, his home.

  “Well, I suppose you could always virus his computer,” Jasper said, leaning over the back of me in the desk chair and reopening the laptop. He clicked back rapidly to the most appalling, not enthralling smut site of the many on my father’s favorites. Then he made a low ow-yeow sound of both injury and satisfaction right in my ear that made the whole thing infinitely ickier.

  My turn to slam it closed. Slam.

  “A virus?” I said, jumping up out of the chair quickly enough to bang Jasper’s chin with my shoulder. “Sorry,” I said, “but, I hardly think a virus is going to do much since I’m sure everyone at that party has already contracted every disease known to man. They are probably now a filthy invincible master race of degenerate—”

  “No, The Master Race was the name of the video before that one, where it was just those five naked guys in director’s chairs facing the—”

  “I remember the race, thank you.”

  I led him out of my father’s study and to the living room where I was determined to find the most normal and sensation-free programming on TV to numb the next hour or so.

  “You know that’s not the kind of virus I meant, right?” he said as we sat on the couch, searching.

  I turned to stare at him while I continued to blindly click through the stations. “Yes. I was making a joke.”

  “Oh. Sorry, I just never heard you do that before. I mean, you’re funny all over the place, but not usually with that kind of, you know, intention. That was good, though.”

  “Thanks,” I said, still locking onto him as if somewhere in his eyes I might find answers to the questions I couldn’t even formulate yet. I stopped clicking and settled on the voice of somebody excitable selling us something fabulous involving juices. “Are you comfortable?” was the concoction that came out of me.

  Jasper’s expression went from amused to confused to concerned over several seconds. He inched a bit away from me, but it was more like he was trying to get me in focus than a prelude to fleeing.

  “Well,” he said, “it appears Daddy’s Pornotopia had a bigger effect on you than you thought.”

  “No, no, what I mean is . . . oh God, don’t call it that.”

  Strange as it may have sounded, Jasper and I were actually kind of perfect as friends. I watched him there, practically tumbling off the couch laughing at my reaction, my squawk of outrage, my feathers flying all over the room, and I could not help converting to his way of thinking. I laughed at myself, which I knew was far too rare an occurrence. My anxiety lessened, a little bit, for a moment. He made me get over myself, however briefly. And I liked it there, over myself.

  “What I am asking, Jasper, is what do you think of this place? Do you like my father’s house? Is it homey?”

  He scanned all around, serious and intense, which I knew meant he was nothing of the kind. Then he turned to me again, fixed me with spooky, unfocused eyes, and spoke in a sickly singsong voice. “This is a lovely home you have here. Lovely home. Lovely home. It just needs a juicer. You need a juicer, Kiki. Kiki, buy the juicer now.”

  I looked toward the TV, where the screechy and jittery info-pitchman was going on rabidly about the life-changing capabilities of the juicer.

  “Well done,” I said. “But, really.”

  “Really, um, no offense, but there’s not really anything for me to go on. It’s an all right place. Kinda bland. Not a lot of personality, warmth. But it’s okay, I guess
. Comfortable enough.”

  I looked at him silently for a few ticks, and I nodded.

  “I think the house makes me angry,” I said.

  Once more Jasper gave me the quizzical expression.

  “So, you want me to go have a word with my house, have it come over here and kick your house’s ass?”

  “Yeah,” I snapped, “would you, please, and then we can watch them fight? Just shut up for a second, will you? I think I know what I’m trying to say, and I need to say it before that window closes.”

  With that, Jasper pulled a shocking maneuver on a par with my attempting to construct a joke—he got earnest and respectful.

  “Go,” he said, hammer-punching my knee like a judge’s gaveling.

  “I was so sure this was where I belonged. I was so sure this was the right decision that I pretty well destroyed the remaining other part of my life to be here. Now I’m here, and Dad seems just confused by my presence. And this house, right, it’s not somebody’s home. Certainly not my home. And not his, either, in any real way. If I just broke in like a burglar I would not have a clue I was robbing my own father. He has no pictures, no . . . I don’t know, stupid knickknacks, mementos from those years, you know. It’s cold and it’s blank, and I hate it and it’s this way by design, I realize, because he is trying to forget it all. He’s wiping it, making like our previous life never was.”

  He was holding his composure an impressive length of time, and I appreciated the hell out of it.

  “It was a wicked divorce, you said,” he said.

  I nodded, nodded, nodded.

  “And I understand all that,” I said. “I really do. But, I’m here now, Jas. I’m fucking right here!” I was shouting, and aware, and did not care. “I am the solution to that problem, aren’t I? And now, look, I’m going to cry and I fucking hate that, too.”

  “That’s cool,” he said. “Afterward you’ll feel better. You’ll be able to relax some.”

  “I don’t want to relax. This is exactly the way I’m supposed to feel. I’m doing just what I’m supposed to and he is not, goddammit.”

  “Am I stupid if I say maybe you should talk to him about this?”

  “Yes, you are, but it’s not your fault. It’s him. Of course I talked to him. But I can’t talk to him, not about something he doesn’t want to let out. I never could. He’s good with words, you see.”

  “You’re good with words. You’re great with words.”

  I shook my head vigorously enough that I felt as if I could sense my brain sloshing against the insides of my skull. “No, he is of a different order. The only thing that ever drove me on to get better with language was to catch up with him, to meet him there. But there was always elsewhere by the time I got there. He would always leave me in a state of thinking we had talked about what I wanted to talk about but only later would I realize that the real things, the stuff he wasn’t offering up, didn’t come away with me at all the way I thought it did. The only difference now, since I have been here, is that I know this is how it goes. So when he starts it, when I see it happening, I don’t play on. I rage, Jasper. I pop off and I know I sound like I am criminally insane. I know it, but cannot do anything about it. It’s the fact that this time he is doing the puffs of smoke, the hymns in praise of his own evanescence, for the purpose of making me disappear.”

  He got up off the couch and walked toward me, and I only then realized I had walked and ranted, paced and panted, until I had taken up a kind of defense position in front of the TV screen.

  “No,” I shouted at him. “Stay there, I mean it.” I believed they were fists I had created there at the far ends of my arms as Jasper advanced, breached my defenses, and gave me what I could only guess was a mighty fatherly hug.

  “It was his fucking Robert Frost,” I said into Jasper’s shoulder.

  “Okay, pal,” he said patting my back with increasing firmness, which must have been the technique for bucking a guy up. “I don’t need to understand every damn thing you say in order to be supportive.”

  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there/they have to take you in. Robert Frost. He gave me that, goddammit. He planted it right inside my skull, and right inside my rib cage. He knows.”

  “Though, in fairness,” Jasper said tentatively, “he did take you in.”

  “Like hell he did,” I growled, and simultaneously felt him go stiff and then loosen his grip.

  I turned just in time to see my father evanesce, out of the doorway, up the stairs.

  GOOD IDEA

  My uncle’s no-guests rule strikes me as a pretty decent cruel-funny joke since at this very moment the only active member of my invite-a-pal-over list would be him.

  So it’s natural enough that I am headlong on the path to rectifying the friendlessness situation. I feel the strangeness of the key in my pocket, withdraw it, then pause staring at the dangling brass beauty hanging off the end of the moose-head key chain. This constitutes one of the simple pleasures I plan to enjoy in the new life I’m composing for myself. It had been six months since I had had my own key, to let myself in if I was curfew transgressive. Not only do I not now ever have to sleep on the porch, I can come home to my own, empty place. Mine.

  As I stride the street I have a shiny black Montblanc in one pocket, a key in another, and something of a waddle to my walk because dammit, I ate every last bit of Syd’s beautiful beast breakfast and it feels like it will be with me for some time. Because Kiki Vandeweghe doesn’t skip the most important meal of the most important day.

  Crystal City indeed.

  I passed through a good bit of the city when I bumbled around trying to find Syd’s place, but I couldn’t really say I saw it. As I retrace much of it now it begins opening itself more fully and I begin entering it for real.

  It’s not quite as polished as the name might imply. There are lots of shiny parts, that’s for sure, with some blocks being completely unbroken strings of neon-and-video shopfront windows. I like the fact that some parts of the commercial zones are a complete jumble of different businesses like cheap electronics next to a tarot reader next to a shoe shop next to a holistic medicine and massage therapy shop. I like the fact that that district is followed immediately by another block that is all about motors—used cars, car repairs, car parts, motorcycles, and biker gear.

  I like the fact that the city is large enough to even have zones. Ass Bucket was just one zone.

  When I feel I’ve picked up enough of the city’s bars and restaurants and gyms and playgrounds full of guys like me just sprung loose for the summer, I catch a whiff of the river not far off. I follow my nose until I reach it. It’s a canal, actually, and I walk along the towpath between the water and the hip-high dry grass for a while. I feel like a big cat, all stealth and stalking, as I walk into the sun and toward the bus station.

  It is the only idea I have, other than to walk aimlessly and endlessly for the rest of my life until I find her again. And if I don’t find her, it will be the end of my life even if that’s tomorrow. Because then I’d just start yet another new life and hope it works out better.

  I figure there’s no limit to the number of times you can reboot if you need to. Unless there is a limit. Let’s hope I never have to find out.

  As I approach the line of glass doors at the front of the bus station, I suffer a small flutter of worry that had not troubled me at all as I’d marched my way through my new city, all new, clean slate, yet to be written. Suddenly, as I see my reflection there, I see the uncertainty, and the need. I see the chump who was not supposed to follow me onto that bus. The reality is that you can be anybody you want to, as long as you don’t have to see yourself.

  I shove the door out of the way as I muscle myself into the station like a real man on a real man’s mission.

  “Hey, jackass,” she snaps as she catches the door with her good hand.


  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I say, nothing at all like a real man on a mission but everything like a little boy on his knees. Then, “Hey! Stacey!” I shout, again letting honest emotion obliterate my cool. Got to stop that.

  “Did you try and bash me with that door on purpose?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Well, you were staring right at me when you did it.”

  “Staring right at . . . ? No, no, it was my reflection. In the glass. It’s very bright out here. Completely unintentional I assure you.”

  “Okay, good. ’Cause the door assault was bad enough, but that foul look you were giving to whoever it was, that was true murder.”

  “Yeah, well, I am a killer after all.”

  “Um, uh-huh, sure. So, killer, what happened yesterday? With Mr. Derek? We were motoring so fast, by the time we stopped for a breath he was nowhere to be seen and neither were you.”

  “Oh, that. I kicked his ass.”

  “Phwaaaaa-ha . . .”

  She laughs for long enough that I look at my watch. Then I join in, but at roughly 10 percent of her gusto.

  “Sorry,” I say, “did I say ‘kicked’? I meant ‘tripped.’”

  “Ha. Really? Did you get him?”

  “Right onto his face. Broke his cast in half too.”

  “Way to go, you. The Cast Avenger!” She extends her cast-fist and bumps with mine.

  Then, emerging out of nowhere or possibly Stacey’s backpack, is Molly. She sticks her cast into the celebration. “What’s this for?” she asks.

  “Hi, Molly,” I say.

  “We’re paying proper respect to the boy who saved the day yesterday,” Stacey says. “Word’s all over town how he gave that Derek character a good public flogging, defending your virtue.”

  “Real-ly?” she gasps and looks up at me with a big dewy-gooey-eyed expression that nobody has ever looked at me with before. It’s a little bit thrilling and frightening.