What now? Call the insurance company? She would need a police report first. That would mean calling the Ithaca Police and reporting her bass stolen from a van that had been reported stolen and that she herself had been suspected of stealing. She had had enough of the police for one day and just didn’t have the energy to nuance an explanation. She deferred the task for another day when her head felt clearer.
She went home, defeated. The engine light flickered off and on. Steam curled out of the seams of her hood by the time she pulled into her space. She grabbed the notebook, still in its plastic bag, and huffed her way back into the apartment, picking the day’s Ithaca Journal off the driveway.
She collapsed onto the sofa and peeled the sleeve off the paper and unfolded it, startled to find Eleni’s face peering back at her from a photo in the corner under the headline: ‘Twelve injured after performance art stunt goes awry.’
She proceeded to read the most superficial, inaccurate and insulting story. It described their music as ‘a wall of noise.’ The implosion was attributed to a ‘liquid nitrogen bomb’ and the thing that came out of it was described as ‘a sputtering ball of mist.’ Both Ron and Mal had been charged with reckless endangerment, but released on bail.
The phone rang. She didn’t even bother to check the caller ID.
“Hullo?”
“Aerie, this is Reggie. Are you sitting down?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Listen. The partners had a meeting this afternoon. And … we were under pressure to make some cutbacks in staff anyhow. You’ve kinda, sorta been put on furlow.”
“Furlow? What’s a furlow?”
“It means that you won’t have to worry about coming back to work right away. But we’ll be keeping your name on a short list. I’ll stay in touch. As the season progresses. Who knows? We can think about hiring you back.”
Tears popped into the wells of Aerie’s eyes. They spilled before she could blot them with her sleeve. “I’m fired?” She failed to control the warble in her voice.
“Not permanently. It’s just that you picked a bad day for all this … stuff … to happen.”
“I … picked a bad day?”
“We’ve been under pressure to cut costs. Traffic’s been light. We were going to have to reduce staff anyhow.”
“So you picked me. I guess I made it easy for you.”
“Aerie, you know that we love you as a person. Everybody is concerned about you. It was really a difficult decision. I understand if you want to look for another job. Feel free to use me as a reference. You’re a good worker. You really are. It’s just … a little more consistency would be nice.”
“Thanks, Reg.” She hung up. That old feeling, the one that used to plague her before she had pills to keep her elevated, started to settle in, weighing down her limbs, pinning her to the sofa like a butterfly in a museum display. She couldn’t remember when she had last taken her medicines or where she had left them. She didn’t particularly care.
Chapter 28: Flight
The Delta flight ascended from Dulles and banked over the Potomac. Donnie tilted his head against the window to watch the dying sun glint off the river. As shadows consumed Northern Virginia, rows of street lights flickered on like pixelated lightning.
Tammie leaned over his armrest and stared out the window.
“Did you want the window seat, Tam? I’m sorry, I should have asked.”
“Nah, I just wanted a peek. My old hometown’s down there somewhere.”
“You lived in Arlington?”
“Alexandria.”
“Miss it?”
“Not really. I was six when we left. I’m just curious what it looks like.”
Rank after rank of suburban developments shuttled beneath, crammed together in sinuous lines like cancer cells in a biopsy.
“Look at them houses,” she said. “Maxed-out square footage on those tiny lots. How can people live cheek to jowl like that? Do they never go outside?”
“Garage mahals,” said Donnie. “That’s what my ex-wife called them. Though, I'm one to talk. I suppose my latest place qualifies.”
“You’ve got a yard, at least,” said Tammie.
“Yeah. Though, not quite like the Swain’s, huh? With that Connecticut Hill place out back.”
“That’s no yard. That’s a dang pocket wilderness.”
Donnie felt like such a coward for leaving Jerry and Rand behind with all that unfinished business. Was he actually running from a fight? It sure looked that way.
America’s premier demon slayer, as PrayerFolk, that glossy Christian clone of People Magazine had hyped him. He, the Reverend Donald Beasley, was tucking tail back to Georgia.
Thanks to his haste, the consecration service that afternoon had been slapdash and superficial. Half of Mac’s parish had shown up. John had put together trays heaping with tasty little cucumber and chicken salad sandwiches. A little singing, some prayers and he and Tam were dashing for the airport.
He had worried how Mac would react to his flight, but his ex-friend, for the most part, seemed satisfied with the services Donnie had rendered. He had ribbed Donnie a bit about his leaving so soon, but seemed satisfied with having Jerry follow-up the intervention. He gave no indication that they had left any obligations unsettled.
It helped that his paramour seemed perfectly fine with his leaving, feeling blessed to have a deliverance Minister of such eminence take the time to visit her in person. Cindy seemed convinced that the problem with the hell house was solved, and that her abode has been purified and sanctified, so much so, that she had even brought her little boys back to stay for good.
Throughout the service, Donnie had watched the tykes being trundled about by their grandparents, a pair of the nicest South Carolinian transplants one could hope to meet in the Great White North. He had struggled to find a way to get the Swains to exert a little more vigilance, but couldn’t phrase it in a manner that wouldn’t destroy his rationale for leaving. Cindy seemed to assume that he was displaying an overabundance of caution in leaving Jerry and Rand behind to keep a watch on things.
And then at the airport, he almost took a spill as he walked by a news rack. There on the front page of the Ithaca Journal, a picture of a young woman being led down some stairs, arms held out, a pained expression on her face—one of the girls from the hell house gang. There had been an incident downtown, some sort of weird vandalism involving music. Twelve had been injured by a swirly thing that had burst from a glass vessel.
Donnie knew he was leaving Ithaca with the threat by no means contained. They had tamped it down in one place only to have it pop up in another. Now that he was gone, what was to prevent it from returning to the hell house, not to mention whatever lay in wait for them in those woods.
He said a quick prayer for Jerry and Rand and laid his head back against the seat. The plane lifted into a patch of wispy clouds. The landscape below lost all definition and transformed into a grid of darkness and light.
Jerry would be fine. He was a warrior. He might not enjoy the same level of relationship that Donnie shared with God, but he could scrap with any demon. Besides, he had the Holy Fire and his arsenal of silver, not just the bird shot, but heat-hardened stilettos and chains and Lord knows what else in that tool case in the back of his F150.
The Holy Fire they had brought was not the most potent in their collection, but it was the purest. It was the sort that would do as it was demanded, and only as demanded via prayer, and not bite back its wielder the way some of the fiercer ordinance in their armory behaved. The more Donnie thought about the situations that Jerry had been through over the years and come out on top, the better he felt about the whole decision.
The worst by far had been the Dominican case involving that hell hound. An evangelical ministry had called them in to handle a case of animal possession, a monster dog that came out only at night to maul the urchins and elderly of San Cristobal. An elusive beast, the local constables had been unable to dispatch it wit
h their handguns. Either they were bad shots or, as they insisted, the beast bore unearthly protections that rendered it bulletproof.
For three nights, Jerry had stalked the thing, and had been bitten himself when he had cornered it in a junkyard, tearing into his thigh above the calf-high boots he had worn for protection. Rabies, said the authorities, but from what Jerry was able to capture on video, this was no mere sick dog. It was too strong, too wily, and had the oddest tendency to rear up on its hind legs, as if it had once been a man.
Jerry had ended up fooling the thing on the abandoned street where it prowled, dressing up in the smelly, louse-infested rags of a homeless person the thing had murdered one night. He had let the damned thing stalk him as if he were meat, and as it pounced, had taken the thing down with a wrestling move, slipping his silver dagger under its ribcage as he delivered his prayer for deliverance.
Jerry was proudest of those scars, and although his story did grow a bit wearisome on a long ride, it made for some wonderful marketing copy.
No, Donnie didn’t have to worry about Jerry. He and Rand would be just fine. He took a deep breath. His lungs seemed to fill more easily than they had in days, as if free of the strictures that had limited their expansion.
“I feel lighter, Tam. Do you feel lighter? Do you feel blessed?”
“I feel thirsty,” she said.
“But we’re going home, Tam. Getting away from all that wickedness.”
“It ain’t like there’s no shortage of wicked things in Athens or Atlanta. I’m just glad to get away from that chill. Did you see that frost covering everything this morning? We’re hardly into October.”
“But there was a heaviness enveloping everything up there that seems to be gone. Do you not feel that? It’s like the good Lord pulled back the blanket of wickedness that had been smothering us.”
“I’m sorry, Donnie, but I’m not really feeling that. But, then again, I didn’t get the tummy bug that you got.”
“Tummy bug? That was not just some tummy bug.”
“You really think—?”
“You betcha. I’ve had possessions attempted before, but never as close to succeeding as this.”
Tammie’s eyes seemed to pop open a little wider, as the implications seemed to sink in. “Maybe they went after you, because they saw you were the biggest danger to them. Even with Jerry and all his silver bullets, you were the biggest threat.”
“I kind of feel bad, leaving Jerry and Rand up there all on their own.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad, Rand’s having fun. And this is Jerry we’re talking about. He’s in his glory.” Tammie chuckled. “For one thing, he's got an excuse to go hunting on the company dime. Did you see that place? It's crawling with deer and turkey and quail.”
“No,” said Donnie. “I think he’s after bigger prey.” A thick deck of clouds had conspired with the night to turn the view opaque. Donnie saw his own image staring back at him in the reflection. “I just hope … they don’t turn out to be predators.”
Chapter 29: Fading
Sun lapped the thick, silk pile of Aerie’s favorite rug—a royal blue clash of abstract flowers and diamonds. She had spent half the day curled up in the sun, following it around the corners of the carpet like a human sundial, pivoting around her Hello Kitty lunchbox, repository of her dearest treasures.
Empty pints of Purity ice cream lined the coffee table, chocolate bittersweet, peach, coconut—a dirty spoon in each. Ice cream was about all she could stomach over the last few days. She didn’t even enjoy the way she should have. Eating had become just a mechanical shoving of nutriment into her mouth.
Her supply was running out and she could not fathom she would ever drag herself off the carpet to go out and buy some more. The smothering force she knew so well from the time before the pills had moved back into her life like a ten ton quilt.
Like a skeleton propped in the corner, her empty bass stand kept snagging her gaze and clutching at her heart. Two days of haggling with police, carpet cleaners, tow men and insurance adjustors had yielded nothing.
None of the parties involved would acknowledge that the thing had ever existed, never mind take responsibility for its loss. It was as if five feet and thirty pounds of spruce, maple, ebony and steel had simply vaporized. Neither the Staties nor the locals could be convinced to prepare a theft report for her, and without it she had no chance of procuring a replacement. She no longer had strength or will to tangle with these idiots.
Whatever vortex had consumed her bass had also apparently made off with her new friends. There seemed no trace of them in Ithaca. Ron, with his debts, was perhaps laying low from Julius. Sari could be off somewhere in Toronto with Vida. Their MySpace page told of a new string of gigs across Ontario. Eleni? Mal? Who knew?
Before the funk had consumed her, she looked up Hollis on the web. From what she could discern, his jazz career seemed in full and promiscuous resurgence. She found new listings in the Village Voice entertainment calendar and even a new review in some Harlem weekly. He seemed in high demand as a sideman again, playing free jazz as well as bebop.
Her urge to go see him, so strong only days ago, had since faded, like all those other needs that seemed to matter less of late. Besides, it would only be awkward, showing up at one of his gigs out of the blue and without a bass. He would have probably snarfed a reed up his nose.
As her patch of sun dwindled, she reached deep to try to summon the energy she needed to drag herself onto the sofa, but it was nowhere to be found. She just laid there, cheek against wool.
The phone rang. She let it ring without answering, as she had with every other call for the last day or so. No more rushing to the phone, hoping it would be Ron or even Sari, calling to commiserate and reflect on what had happened the other night at the Arts Coop.
Every call turned out to be someone she had no desire to speak with: her landlord, a telemarketer, her Aunt Sadie. It was if her little band of misfits had vaporized.
She had gone to great lengths to find them, taking long walks to every corner of town, ducking into bars, book shops, Salvation Army stores, staying out all day, all night, hoping to bump into someone, anyone.
The skaters kept mum about Ron, to the point of pretending not to know him, through they knew she knew better. She could tell from their eyes that they knew something they weren’t telling.
And then yesterday, something inside her crumbled. Her will had become disconnected from her body, and started to fritter away. She didn’t care anymore about finding anyone. She didn’t care much about anything. Eating. Washing. Changing her clothes. Other than one nocturnal excursion to Purity Ice Cream, getting up to fetch a glass of water or use the bathroom was about all she could muster.
But at the same time, an odd little kernel giddiness grew, infesting her heart like a parasite. It hadn’t yet manifested into anything tangible or specific, but she could feel it nudging her towards some semblance of a path where there had only been a wall.
She recognized the feeling from that dark time in Tokyo after Hollis left and everything started to fall apart. Then, she had spent her waking hours huddled in a little nomiya micro pub buried deep among the back alleys of Shinjuku. She had wasted entire days there, subsisting on soba and sake, waiting for something or someone to give her a reason to continue, returning to her room smashed and alone night after night.
Twelve, she counted, before the ringing stopped. This had been someone who really, really wanted to speak with her. Most callers gave up after five. And then it started ringing again. This time she picked up. Who was she to deny a wish so fervent?
“Hullo?”
“Aerie?”
“Mommie?”
A pause. “You haven’t called me mommie since you were in fifth grade.”
“I must be regressing.”
“Your voice. It sounds slurred. Have you been drinking?”
“Just … sleepy.”
“It’s almost one o’clock in the afternoon.”
/>
“Nappie time.”
“I thought you worked lunches on Tuesdays.”
“Why’d you even call if you thought I was at work?”
“Because I haven’t been able to reach you any other time. I thought I’d give it a shot. Why didn’t you show up at Sadie’s? What gives?”
“Sadie?”
“She had invited you for dinner last night.”
“Must have forgotten. I’ve been … busy. Been having car trouble.”
“You could have called her to let her know—”
“Coulda, woulda, shoulda.”
“Are you taking your medications?”
“Why wouldn’t I? I mean, I might miss a pill or two, but—”
“My biopsy was negative.”
Silence. “What biopsy?”
“I told you, I was having something checked. That’s why I haven’t been able to travel. But now that it’s negative—”
“Biopsy for what?”
“Oh, it was just a lump that showed up on a mammogram. But it was negative. So it’s nothing to worry about. So I’m coming up there. To Ithaca.”
“When?”
“Thursday. Can you pick me up? It’s Piedmont Airlines. I get in about eleven.”
***
Aerie kept the phone pressed to her cheek long after her mother had said goodbye. Her mom had ended the conversation in tears, sensing from the shift in Aerie’s tone that something was terribly wrong with her daughter. She threatened to send Aunt Sadie there, now, not realizing that only made things worse.
As Aerie surveyed the sty she had let her apartment become, a riptide of despair overtook her. Between the ice cream drips, week-old dishes in the sink, soiled laundry and dust bunnies everywhere, it would take a week to get the place in order enough to pass muster with her mom and conceal the disorder cluttering her brain.
She rose slowly onto her knees, gripping the coffee table to pull herself up, laboring like an oxygen-deprived mountaineer trudging up Kilimanjaro. She went into the kitchen, and paused before the drawer where she kept the sponges and dust cloths, but couldn’t bring herself to open it. Instead she went to the freezer and retrieved the last pint of ice cream that was left. Pumpkin.