“It is true. Read some books. Wiki that action.”
“I will look into it.”
“Hey, but if you’re not named after Aaron, I’m not calling you Burr. That’s, like, sacrilege.”
“You can call me whatever you—”
“How about ‘The Man From’?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“U.N.C.L.E.”
“Still drawing a blank.”
“United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. What, you don’t get TV Land in Arizona? Robert Vaughn? You know, Napoleon Solo running around with that tiny phallus-gun? Saving the world from whoever the world needed saving from? Which, go figure, at that time was always the Russians. Or, pretty much anyone with a turtleneck and a mustache.”
“I don’t watch much television. I prefer to sit by the fire and read the classics.”
“Are you for real?”
Uncle Burr pinched his arm. “I think so.”
Speed shift, third gear.
“I have another question.”
“Please.”
“What exactly does ‘the classics’ mean?”
“Oh, you know. Tolstoy. Wuthering Heights.”
Alexis shook her head. “But back in Anna Karenina-land, people like you were sitting there over a glass of absinthe in some drawing room going, ‘Oh, yes, well, I don’t really read Tolstoy. I prefer the classics.’ I mean, to them, your classics were like their Dukes of Hazzard. And Vronsky was Boss Hogg. If you weren’t reading Canterbury Tales and slagging Leo, you were some sort of knuckle-dragger.”
Burr stared at his hands, wearing a look of imminent dyspepsia. “I see your point,” he said finally.
“Do you? Do you really?”
“Frankly, no. But let me ask you, have you ever been to Arizona?”
“That’s a negative.”
“I think if you came, you’d find it to be quite a—”
“Don’t say ‘learning experience.’ Just don’t.”
“I was going to say quite a trip.”
“Literally or lysergically?” Alexis asked, channeling the spirit of LJ.
Burr’s face darkened. He stood and walked to the tiny, mesh-reinforced window. After a long silence, he turned and said, “I know what you’re doing.”
“You do?”
“Yes. And it’s very clever. If a bit juvenile.”
“Thanks. And ouch. But what is it I’m supposed to be doing?”
“You’re trying to dissuade me from taking you under my wing. You’re purposely making a bad impression. Fouling the water, if you will.”
Nailed.
“I don’t think so,” Alexis said, suddenly without much conviction. “Even Habib doesn’t take me under his wing.”
“You are your mother’s daughter, without question. Edith was never . . . demure as a child. And her intelligence was obvious from a very early age. But I feel quite certain you are not always this obnoxious. Either way, I’ve committed to bringing you into my home. I’ve signed the papers. I’ve taken on power of attorney. And I do not frighten so easily.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
Alexis took her boot off the table. The game was over. Almost.
“I’m gay.”
Burr blanched. He tasted eggs, forced them back down, failed, got it on the second try.
“You’re—”
“A dyke. One hundred percent flannel. How’s that flag fly in Sedona?”
“Excuse me a minute,” Burr said, getting up and leaving the room.
Alexis closed her eyes. The performance had been unpleasant, but it had to be done. Or did it? She considered her choices. They seemed to be: (1) accompany Burr to a picket fence in the desert, or (2) bust out like a Soledad Brother. A Soledad sister. Make a quick shiv out of a sharpened toothbrush and hold it to Not-Cop’s neck, hostage her way through the doors, demand a helicopter and a half million in Krugerrands. Of course, that was insanely stupid. There were no options. What, cry? Boring. Besides, it really didn’t matter what happened to her anymore. She still had one tiny piece of leverage.
When Burr came back in, he wore a stern look he’d probably just spent the last ten minutes assembling in the men’s-room mirror.
“We’ve had enough verbal sparring, don’t you think?”
Alexis nodded. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“You are?”
“Yes. I’ve made up my mind, I’ll do whatever you want. Go wherever you want. But on one condition.”
Burr chuckled. “Renegotiating your contract? Already?”
“My condition is that you don’t sell the Angeline. Not only do you not sell it, you don’t kick the residents out. Ever.”
The chuckling stopped. “I’m sorry, even if I wanted to, I’m not in a position to do that.”
“Why not?”
“The fact is that every single resident of the Angeline is behind on their rent. Some stopped paying entirely a long time ago. The hotel loses a substantial sum on a yearly basis. I am not in a position to carry that sum as a matter of sentiment.”
It occured to Alexis that maybe she hadn’t been watching enough TNT with Mr. Kenji.
“So, what you’re really saying is the Angeline needs a good manager. That could be me! I know it inside and out, the rooms, the plumbing, even the mortuary equipment. Please? We can work out a deal with the tenants. Garnish their SSI checks. Collect a little at a time. Bake sales or whatever.”
“Bake sales?”
“Listen, the point is, we could make it work. I could. Ursula can’t just go out into the street. Kato and Kevin can’t fend for themselves. Mr. Kenji needs room and the right light to create his art!”
“I’m afraid that really isn’t an option.”
“It’s not? Then is this the point where Nurse Ratched comes in and sticks a big hypo of lithium in my neck and I wake up in a room somewhere, all nice and sunny with a pretty bedspread and I sit up and my arms and legs are in leather restraints?”
“Your imagination, Alexis, is truly a thing of wonder. Have you ever considered writing?”
Alexis blushed more than she wanted to, trying not to smile. “Well, I do write poetry sometimes. But as I understand it, being a writer sucks. It’s all about self-promotion. It’s all about schmoozing and meeting other writers and pretending to care about their books long enough so that you can talk about yours. Plus, you’re always doing readings no one shows up to, and these endless charity events.”
“You have a point there,” he said with a knowing laugh.
“Listen, Uncle, the bottom line is that I am not going to abandon the people at the Angeline. So you need to find a way to make that not happen, or I guarantee you will not want me under your roof. I will resent you forever. You’ll never be able to turn your back. You’ll never have a pot on the stove without wondering if the pet rabbit’s in it.”
“Is that, perhaps, an allusion to Fatal Attraction? I actually did see that. Ghastly film.”
“Yeah, so you get my point. Make it work, Uncle, or I will so make this not work.”
Burr stood with his hands behind his back, again looking out the tiny window. Birds congregated in the tree below him, dozens of them, almost if they were flying in a coordinated arrangement.
“Are all teenage girls this . . . challenging to negotiate with?”
“I don’t know about all of them. But yeah. Probably. Get twenty of us in a room, throw in a gift card and a copy of Twilight, turn off the light, lock the door. Come back in an hour and see what happens.”
“Well,” Burr said, getting up and knocking on the door—shave and a haircut, tap-tap. “I can’t promise anything. Except that I promise to consider it. I will pore over the financials one more time. But this isn’t a movie, Alexis. Richard Gere doesn’t just show up out of nowhere with a bouquet of roses, leaning out the sunroof of a limo, about to take Julia Roberts away from a life of Spandex.”
Not-Cop came into the room wit
h a stack of papers. Burr took a Mont Blanc from his inside pocket and signed them all, twice. Not-Cop led Alexis to the discharge desk, where Linda was waiting. She broke away from her stepfather’s grip, ran over and took Alexis in her arms, kissing her at first gently, and then with increasing need. Tears ran down Linda’s cheeks.
“Kenneth says this guy’s taking you to Arizona.”
Alexis, barely able to keep from crying herself, nodded.
“And you’re OK with that?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“Shit, chica. You always have a choice!”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t. At all.”
Two plainclothes cops brought a boy through the steel door. He was handcuffed, kicking, and wrestling. One of his sneakers had come off, a big hole in his sock. The police muscled him over to the desk, slamming him against it.
“Don’t!” Alexis yelled, but the police ignored her.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Linda snapped. “Get involved in what’s happening to someone else. That kid, the freaks at the Angeline, bums in the park. Look at everything except what matters. Everything except what’s standing right in front of you.”
“Linda.”
“So go!” Linda said, and pushed out the front doors. Kenneth nodded and followed his daughter.
Burr and Alexis took a cab back to the hotel.
“I can’t believe we actually found a cab in Seattle,” he marveled.
“I can’t believe you’re actually letting us stay here tonight.”
“Our flight for Arizona isn’t until tomorrow. I thought you might want a chance to see your friends.”
Alexis reappraised Burr, giving him a sincere nod. “Thank you.”
He held the door for her. She stepped onto the filthy sidewalk in front of the Angeline, looking upward.
While Uncle Burr paid the driver, Alexis spread her arms, Jesus at Corcovado, soaking all four floors in.
CHAPTER 29
DAVE BOLING
ALEXIS OPENED HER EYES AND viewed the Hotel Angeline anew.
Jesus, what a fleabag, she thought. So much work needs to be done. But it would be someone else’s problem now. A leaky gutter leaned off a gable like a tilted brow, allowing grime to seep down on the decaying hotel sign. A growth of moss had taken over the right side of the sign, leaving only the letters on the left side visible. It read:
HO
ANGEL
She’d never noticed the way the forces of nature and neglect altered the sign. Is this the range of options for women? Ho or Angel? Was the sign an advertisement for the women inside? Where did she fit in?
“Are you all right?” Uncle Burr asked.
“Just looking at the old place,” she said. “What a mess.”
Alexis leaned into the front door. It jammed where it usually did, leaving her just enough room to squeeze through. She wondered if the house had been trying to keep her out, or forever trying to trap her inside.
She’d only been away from the hotel for a couple days, but the smell struck her as vile. It was far worse than the detention center. It smelled of mushrooms and mold and crow shit and decay, with a hint of embalming fluid. The last scent reminded her of Linda. Linda. Linda on top of her in the coffin. She flushed, remembering the feel of the velvet lining on her bare back, and the silky quilt of Linda’s skin against her bare front. She tasted Linda’s strawberry-tipped tongue. She shivered, and wondered if she would be forever aroused by the scent of formaldehyde or the sight of a funeral procession.
Uncle Burr had shoved through the front door and was standing at her shoulder.
“Do you want help packing?”
“No—could I have some time, please?” Alexis reached out and touched the sleeve of his jacket. She held it there for a moment and looked in his eyes. He froze in place. She had reached out.
By the time she summited the stairs, she was out of breath. She had no idea how drained she’d been by the shitstorm she’d waded through the past few days. Light-headed, she leaned her forehead against the door. She didn’t know what to expect inside—what had the police taken? What had they done to her things?
She eased into the door, and was surprised that it swung open without the usual blockage of dirty clothes. Yes, the police had gone through everything. She wondered if hers was the first room in history that police have “tossed” in a search that finished being more tidy than when they started. She thought to double-check her underthings to see if the perverts had pocketed any of her panties.
On her bed was her Garfield sweatshirt. “Go Bulldogs!” she said in a mock cheer. Shouldn’t she be getting ready for some kind of game? Doing things with other fourteen-year-olds? She pulled on her sweatshirt, but stopped when it covered her face. She broke down again, crying beneath the soft veil of fabric. In that darkness, she recognized a fear that she was losing her mind.
Images of fantasy flashed like snapshots. How much of this was real? Her mind fixed on the image of a crow carrying a length of pipe. Crows can’t carry pipe, can they? And the swarming birds, as if on a mission? Were those birds or fragments of the black October night fluttering down from a sky suddenly torn apart? She flashed again on LJ with the giant wedge of glass in his throat. Dear God. She saw it in vivid colors. Backlit by the building ablaze, the bloody glass shone red and orange like one of those Chihuly works.
And LJ? Should she even call him LJ? His last name was Robinson. Nothing was true. Nothing in this entire fucking building. No one was who he seemed. Halloween was coming, but it turns out that everyone had been wearing masks all along. Halloween, she thought. Goddammit, I should be carving a fucking pumpkin or something now instead of wading through all this mental shit.
Could she believe anything LJ had ever said? Ever? The horror of the explosion had pushed from the front of her mind some of the things that LJ had said on that final recording. She tried to remember them now, but they were in broken shards, too. Was any of that real or just the mind fugues that overtook him so often? And her father drove a car off a ferry? Did they find the car? Did they find her father’s body? Did they find his fucking body? What if he swam away? Goddamn LJ for saying these things on the CD and then getting himself blown across half of Fremont.
She tried piecing it all together, to find logic in the absurd. Could her father have been a criminal? She had just learned that the man played the violin for Christ’s sake. What was it like when LJ and her father were together? Did “Dad” work on his pizzicato fingering techniques while LJ fiddled with high explosives?
No wonder she struggled with her identity; her father was a sociopath violinist. Fine, nobody is all one thing, she thought. We’re all bits of things that fit together—or sometimes don’t, or sometimes fit and then come apart.
She wiped her eyes on the sweatshirt again. “Go Bulldogs,” she whispered. She saw nothing she wanted to take with her from that room, from that box, from this house of deceit. She had enough baggage. She turned her back to the room and pulled the door closed.
As she walked down the hall, she passed LJ’s room. She knew it would be a mess from the police search, but maybe she could find something—even a hint or two about her father—something that hadn’t spun wildly from LJ’s delusional mind. She was hoping to find some evidence that her father hadn’t been as wrong or as violent in his protests as LJ had been.
The pictures were torn from the wall, bureaus gutted of their drawers. She dug into the strata of LJ’s clothes as if on an archeological dig through the 1960s. Jesus, did he never do laundry? Soiled jeans, crusty bandanas, flannels and cowboy shirts—and a small doll.
“Holy shit.”
LJ had taken her monkey, the doll that had perched on her shelf and watched over her—the sentry against bad things that might come to harm her in the night. It had been gone for years. She was certain it wasn’t coincidental that her life had gone in the crapper in the monkey’s absence. She petted it. It felt worn and
old and looked frayed.
But here it was. Without thinking, she brought it to her cheek. It was cool and smooth, and felt like Linda’s cheek on hers. But those two thoughts collided in her mind. Her doll and her girlfriend. Don’t they trap her in time? She hugged the doll harder, and felt so much a child. And she thought of her times in the basement with Linda. On the top floor a child, in the basement, something different. The child, the woman. The ho, the angel. Where was she headed? Forever on the stairs between the two?
She would not leave the guardian monkey. If she took nothing else, she would keep the monkey. But she wanted no one else to see it, and jammed it deep in her jacket pocket.
“Alexis—do you need help?” Uncle Burr called.
Do I need help? Do I need help? she asked herself. What kind of question is that? God damned right I need help. But not with carrying anything beyond bad memories and this heavy cargo of lies and questions.
She closed the door to LJ’s room, but before heading down the stairs, she turned back. Where was Habib? She opened the door again. All she saw was crow crap everywhere. But no black bird. She hadn’t seen him downstairs. The window to LJ’s room had been closed. Wait—had anybody fed the python lately?
Somebody else’s problem, she thought. Somebody else can worry about the leaky gutters, the mold-covered sign, the faulty pipes, the peg-legged pirate. But could she just walk away from it all the next day? It had been her home, her only home . . . such as it was. She was surprised to feel that, yes, she could leave. The future, in fact, felt like an open door. Open to her, that is, once she managed to squeeze out of the Hotel Angeline the next morning, for the last time.
CHAPTER 30
PETER MOUNTFORD
AN OFFICIOUS REAL ESTATE AGENT, whose gender fluctuated but who was always toothy, sparkly eyed, with an eerily orangeish tan, led Alexis and Linda around an old mansion. In the capacious kitchen, a dozen-plus refrigerators lined the walls. The agent opened the first refrigerator and Alexis saw a cadaver inside on the chrome table—an elderly man, his pasty bald head turned to the side. The agent appeared embarrassed and shut the door quickly. Alexis felt sick. She opened the next refrigerator—she was alone in the kitchen now, and found LJ there, cold and dead, his face waxy and alabaster. She opened the next refrigerator and there lay her mother, in repose, milky eyes open unseeingly.