Maybe it was hypocritical to think that way, but I leaped to the assumption that whatever his sin, it must be worse than mine. Another part of my mind, the pitiless part, the honest part, said, Worse than driving a girl to suicide?
Still, something about Haarm felt worrisome. And yet I’d have given anything to find that imagined Starbucks and hear his story.
I didn’t shake his hand. I suspected that even we apprentices, if touched, might force upon the other person the painful memories we already carried. I would not inflict mine on him, and had no desire for the reverse.
Messenger wasn’t revealing much of his feelings—if he had feelings about this—but I could sense that he was not happy about acquiring a new apprentice.
“For now simply return to your abode,” Messenger said to Haarm. “My apprentice—my only apprentice, you must understand, for you remain apprenticed to your own master—and I will continue on existing issues.” Messenger was feeling his way through the words, obviously figuring it out as he went along. I could imagine that this kind of situation had never come up before, or at least not that Messenger had been involved in. “Yes, for now, that’s what we will do. You, Haarm, return to your abode. I will . . . at some point . . . just go, for now, and wait. I will need to seek advice.”
Haarm nodded submissively, but as he did he took the opportunity to let his eyes take me in fully. He shocked both Messenger and me with what he said next.
“Master,” he said to Messenger. “Have I permission to visit your apprentice so that she may teach me what she has learned?”
Well, there we go, I thought: that’s what it takes to startle Messenger. He stared. He blinked. His mouth actually hung open. Of course all of that lasted half a second, but I saw it.
“I . . . I suppose yes,” Messenger said, now clearly disconcerted. “If Mara wishes.”
Is it silly that I enjoyed hearing him say my name? He rarely did. Is it even sillier that I detected just the faintest whiff of jealousy from Messenger, or if not true jealousy at least a vague sense of concern that other boys would spend time with me? Probably, silly, yes. But my heart didn’t care if it was silly, it skipped a beat, maybe two.
Then, before I could respond, Haarm was gone.
We were alone, Messenger and I. The landscape around us was changing. The glowing tile had turned leaden. The thrones now looked more like ancient stone carvings. The whole scene had a feeling of neglect and antiquity. And at the edges of my vision I saw the yellow mist begin to roll toward us from all directions.
Messenger’s lips were pressed tight and his jaw clenched. He was not happy with any of this. None of it.
“Graciella,” he said, reaching a conclusion.
And with that we were gone from Yusil’s imaginary city and standing in a much less exotic one.
12
THE MARQUEE READ, NICOLET! AND BENEATH IT, in slightly smaller letters, the names of two bands that would open for her. From the outside the theater was grand enough—red brick decorated with white limestone and featuring three ornate wrought-iron balconies above the marquee.
It sat on Congress Street, Austin’s main drag, a street of less than a dozen blocks extending from the riverbank to the south and up to the domed capitol building at the north end. Congress Street is not the center of Austin’s thriving music culture, but on nights when the Paramount has live shows, it is the center of town.
We found Graciella across the street in a pizza restaurant. She was eating a slice of cheese pizza in the doorway and looking at the marquee through the bustle of people, young and old alike, who thronged, waiting to go in.
Where were we, when were we? The cars looked new enough, the clothing people wore seemed contemporary. Certainly this could not have been more than two years ago, perhaps less.
Graciella was dressed for the evening, short skirt, high heels, but not yet in the ostentatiously slutty way she would later adopt in pursuit of tricks. She did not look like a young prostitute, just like a girl dressing up.
She had her guitar slung over her back.
I glanced again at the marquee, in case I had missed her name. But no, it was just Nicolet and the opening bands. No Graciella.
Graciella stepped inside the restaurant and contemplated the bottles of water. She pulled out a change purse and counted five dollars and eighteen cents. Bottles of water were two dollars and fifty cents. It would mean half of what she had.
In the end she asked the counterman if she could have a glass of water and reluctantly he handed her a paper cup, half-filled, which she drank down greedily.
“Well,” Graciella said to herself, “I’m broke with a guitar in Austin. Wouldn’t be the first musician.”
Back out on the street she dithered for a while, starting to cross the street, stopping herself, biting her lips.
Finally she nerved herself up to cross the street, threading her way through the slow traffic, keeping an elbow cocked back to stop her guitar from slipping off her shoulder. She passed the front of the Paramount and went down the alley to the stage door. It was conveniently painted red with the words Stage Door right on it. A dozen or more people, many of them younger, clustered around the door, surveyed by a large man with a Bluetooth earpiece and a clipboard.
Graciella walked straight to the stage door as if she had business to conduct and a right to be there. Given her earlier indecision her nerve now impressed me.
It did not impress Mr. Clipboard.
“Hold up there, miss. You can’t go in there.”
“But I’m Graciella. Nicolet knows me. I’m her songwriter.”
This was a sufficiently bold claim to get Mr. Clipboard’s attention. He considered the possibility that Graciella might be telling the truth. He searched for her name on the clipboard. “Any other name you might go by?”
Graciella shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Then you can’t go in.”
“Okay, look, can you ask Nicolet? Can you tell her I’m here? I swear, she knows me. I wrote, like, three of her hits. She knows me.”
Mr. Clipboard sighed, looked skeptical, but tapped his earpiece to make a call. “I have a person here name of Graciella, says she knows Nicolet.”
Graciella waited, nervous, and then Mr. Clipboard pursed his lips and said, “Yes, sir, she’s right here.” Then to Graciella he said, “Her manager, Mr. Joshua, is coming out.”
“Good, I know him! I know Mr. Joshua and he knows me.”
In a few minutes the manager appeared. He did not look happy. He brushed past the doorman, rudely shouldered some of the fans aside, grabbed Graciella’s arm, and pulled her down the alley to a quieter spot.
Messenger and I followed.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Mr. Joshua demanded.
“I’m here to see Nicolet,” Graciella said.
“She’s got a show to do. She doesn’t want to see you.”
“But I wrote ‘Jesus Tweets’ and ‘Hard By,’ and they’re on the charts,” Graciella said.
“You wrote nothing, kid. Look at your contract. Nicolet is listed as songwriter. She owns all the rights. And you signed an NDA.”
“I . . . what’s an NDA?”
“The document you signed that says you can’t go around making wild claims about supposedly writing those songs. That’s what it is. NDA. Nondisclosure Agreement.”
“But I did write them! You know I wrote them!”
“Kid, get lost. Do yourself a favor and just get lost.”
Graciella stared at him. “This isn’t right, Mr. Joshua, this isn’t right.”
He shrugged. “I don’t care. It’s legal. And if you make a stink I’ll sue you for violating the NDA. I’ll have private detectives all over you, finding out every last detail, trashing you, making you look like just another pathetic obsessed fan with delusions.”
For a moment Graciella just looked blank.
Mr. Joshua smirked. “It’s the music business, kid. Nothing personal, but Nicolet want
s cred as a songwriter, she’s going to be huge, so you are out of luck.”
“I have other songs, what if I start singing them? People will see what I can do, and then they’ll believe me!”
“Any and all songs you ever write—ever—belong to Nicolet. You sing, we sue. Unless I decide not to wait around for the law to take its course.” With that he moved closer to her, definitely invading her space, making himself seem large and threatening.
“Are you trying to scare me?”
“You ought to be scared. You don’t know who you’re messing with. Nicolet is a gold mine and I am in for ten percent. You get that? Having you dragged into a dark alley and beaten up, that’s pocket change. I can find six guys in six minutes who’d do it for twenty bucks each.”
“I . . . Are . . .” She was rendered practically speechless. Then she rallied. “I don’t care. Go ahead and have me beat up, I’ll tweet it out, pictures of my bruises or whatever, go ahead!”
At that Mr. Joshua slapped her hard across the face. Hard enough that Graciella’s head snapped to the side. Then he grabbed her by both shoulders and pushed his face within an inch of hers. “Those six guys I’m talking about? They can do more than rough you up. You know what I’m saying?”
For a minute he looked as if he might strike her again. There was a violence to his expression, a ruthless determination. And he wanted to hurt her, that much was plain, he had enjoyed slapping her, had enjoyed her fear. He was breathing hard.
Graciella stood stunned, speechless now, hand to her slapped face, tears filling her eyes.
“Get the hell out of town, and if I ever see you again, or hear your name, you’ll regret it. You hear me?”
When she didn’t answer he pushed her, hard. “I asked if you heard me.”
Graciella nodded.
Mr. Joshua made a sneering sound, turned on his heel, and walked away.
Graciella sat with her back against the bricks and cried. After a while she pulled out her little purse again and counted the few dollars and coins. A choked sob, a wiping of tears, a stiff climb to her feet, a fearful yet still somehow hopeful glance at the stage door, and she walked off into the night.
“So this is what set her on the path that led to her shooting heroin in an abandoned convenience store in Nashville,” I said.
“In part,” Messenger said. “There’s more.”
“But we’re going after Mr. Joshua, right?” I admit it, I was caught up in a rage toward the manager. I would have happily summoned the Master of the Game to deal with him right there and then, and had no pity for the results. Graciella had endured horrifying mistreatment at the hands of the incubus posing as her father, treatment that I think would have destroyed me for all time. And now this.
“You no longer despise her,” Messenger observed.
I shook my head. “No. I was wrong to judge her.”
Messenger nodded. He looked at me appraisingly, and I think it was an approving look. “You do learn,” he said.
Okay.
Okay, I know it’s ridiculous to be so pleased with a simple, grudging compliment, but the truth is my heart swelled, and it was all I could do to keep from yelling, Yes!
Something positive, finally, from Messenger. I’ve gotten A pluses on term papers that did not give me one tenth of the pleasure of that simple, uninflected, “You do learn.”
“Thank you, master,” I said with all the humility I could manage which, right at that moment, was not a lot.
I do learn. Yes, I do.
Hell yes.
I would have hugged him, but that would have ended badly.
“I am leaving you to learn more about Graciella,” Messenger said.
That shocked the smug self-satisfaction right out of me. “What?”
“I have another . . . something else to do. It is a simple matter: learn more of Graciella’s fate. Then return to your abode.”
“But . . .”
“Yes?”
“But I don’t know where to . . . when to . . .”
He nodded. “True, you do not have the sight from above, but you can follow her now. And you know how to speed ahead to reach the inflection points.”
“But . . .”
That second “but” was said to the air. He was gone. As was my brief period of self-confidence.
I looked in the direction Graciella had gone, and hurried after her. Before I knew it I had caught up to her. She wasn’t walking very fast, and I . . . well, I could move as fast as I liked.
She wandered the streets of Austin for a while. Occasionally she cried. Twice men tried to hit on her, but she told them to go away and when one man persisted she walked into a bright convenience store and waited until he was gone.
But she had obviously not created a Plan B. It had taken all her money and resources to get her to Austin to try and connect with Nicolet. Now she was lost.
It was after midnight when the skies opened up and poured down on her. It wasn’t rain, it was a deluge, water coming down in buckets not drops.
She had by this point wandered far from downtown and found herself on a road that crossed the freeway, I-35. She climbed over a guardrail and tried to make her way down to the freeway, but the slope was steep and the ground already wet, so she fell and slid, arriving at the bottom muddy and soaked.
She stood shivering beneath the freeway overpass, hugging her shoulders, as cars and trucks roared past, their headlights blinding, throwing up sheets of water.
She climbed up the concrete slope to the space just beneath the freeway. There was a flat area, a concrete bed where she lay with her face just inches beneath the roadway. Trucks rumbled overhead and screamed by below and the rain poured unabated. But the little crawl space was dry. Hard, loud, and chilly, but dry. She curled into a ball and cried herself to sleep.
I watched this, disheartened, worried for her. Somehow not having Messenger with me made me feel more vulnerable myself and I couldn’t easily shield myself from her pain. When Messenger was with me, I had his discipline to rely on. And I suppose in some way I could shift the blame for everything onto him.
But now, I stood alone, in the rain, but dry as the water simply slid past me, and knew that I could, if I chose, speak to Graciella. I could say, look, call the cops on your father—he’s not just as bad as you think, he’s worse and he’ll never stop being a monster. And go find a lawyer to represent you and go after Nicolet and her manager.
It would be useless, of course. Useless. I had already seen where Nicolet would end up. It was like watching a terrible car accident in slow motion. I saw and could do nothing. I could not save her any more than I could save Aimal.
This was my life, I thought, me, standing helpless, watching people’s lives be destroyed. I felt wetness on my cheeks and knew it was not the rain.
This was what Messenger meant me to experience. He wanted me to begin to grasp what it would be like when I was the Messenger of Fear and had no one else to lean on. It made me sad for him. He was, after all, not so different from me. He was a boy, a young man, a kid, suddenly thrust into a position of overwhelming responsibility, and such emotional torment that I was sure by the end of his service he would have suffered more than any of those who faced the Master of the Game.
“Well, this is cheerful.”
Oriax. She just popped up, standing off to the side, as indifferent as I was to the water coming from just about every direction. Her arrival seemed to turn down the ambient noise, the road sounds and the rushing of water. And the lights of oncoming cars dimmed.
She was dressed for the weather, in her own way. Tall boots, of course, but no peekaboo outfit, no bared midriff or back or legs. Instead she was covered entirely in a black second skin, as if she’d been shrink-wrapped in latex or patent leather. I didn’t know what to say to Oriax. The truth is, I was almost glad of her company. She must have sensed this because she moved closer, into a companionable range, arm’s reach. She gazed up at Graciella, looking like a street person, whic
h I supposed she was.
After a while I said, “What do you want, Oriax?”
For once she did not fire back with a glib answer, but seemed to consider the question carefully. Then, she said, “I want you, Mara.”
It wasn’t said in a seductive tone, just a simple declaration. Surely she didn’t mean she wanted me in that way. But even this toned-down Oriax had the power to make my insides roil.
I forced a laugh. It wasn’t very convincing.
“There are two kinds of people,” Oriax said.
“Just two?”
“Two for the purposes of our discussion, Mara,” she said. “There’s the kind of person who thinks life is a grim march from birth through childhood to adulthood to old age and death. A grim march of virtue and self-denial and endless effort to do the right thing, for the right reasons. All to satisfy a god who does not exist, or in the case of our mutual friend, Messenger, a god who exists but whose demands are cruel and absurd.”
I waited, absorbing this, confident that she would go on to tell me the second kind of person in her cosmology.
“The second kind of person understands that they get only one life, however long or short. That life has no deeper purpose. No great moral father figure in the sky looks down on us, or if he does look down on us, he cares nothing for our pain.”
She turned to face me, and I was drawn to do the same, to stand directly before her, to meet her dark gaze, to watch with fascination as her now-green-tinged lips formed each word.
“The second person knows that life is pain, so we must seek out all the pleasure we can find. The second person knows that the only person who really matters is themselves. We are our first responsibility. Our own pleasure, our own joy, our own desire is all that really matters, and self-denial is . . . foolish.”
“You serve Malech. He’s only as real as Isthil,” I said, not quite sure if I was right.
Oriax laughed softly. “Oh, Malech is real, all right. I hope someday to introduce you to him. Malech, who maintains the balance between pleasure and denial, and understands that there is way too much denial, far too little pleasure, and wants all humans to enjoy life a little more.”