francisco javier es una (pesadilla) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-05-15 00:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | cheshire cat, surreal |
Who: Sera Abbiati & Lin Alesi
What: An interception
Where: Turnberry → dive
When: Backdated, pre-13th Fairy Plot
Warnings/Rating: Some swears.
Since the demise of his iPod that fateful night with Star Fox and Captain Falcon in Denim Disaster Alley, Lin had decided that maybe he didn’t need to listen to music every moment of every day, since he, you know, couldn’t. He could like, listen to the birds and shit as he walked from his car into work or whatever. So, he didn’t put songs on his phone like a normal 21st century, first-world 20-something. He just kept his ears open. It was proving an interesting experiment, anyway. There were fewer birds than he imagined, but a lot more eavesdropping. People said crazy-ass shit when they thought no one else was listening. It was kind of great. That was how he heard her—the girl. He’d been shouldering inside, hefting a bag of cat food (and a sweater, since his t-shirt was thin, watery yellow and v-necked and all) because he was a good person even when conversations ended in death threats, when the name ‘Daniel Webster,’ smooth as parmesan and gelato (loljk), stopped him cold, left Adidas Superstar II (black with cool, multi-colored squares around the sole) hovering an inch above the gray-veined marble flooring. He blinked. Lin turned and saw a girl with close-cropped dark hair speaking very fervently and earnestly to the unmoved, hard-boiled man off to the side near the elevator. She was young, that much he could tell, with that doe-eyed look about her that indicated that she was either extremely lost in crazy-ass America or she was pretending to be. The man was shaking his head when Lin approached cautiously from behind. His mind, of course, heard the Italian curve to the words, the syrupy, warm cradling of the vowels, and leapt immediately to the dead, Italian ex-girlfriend. Carlita.—Not that he thought this girl was her. She was alive for one. (Spoiler alert!) And even though stranger things had happened in Lin’s life (like, he had another entity in his head and went through some kind of physics-defying door into an alternate universe and shit in his free time, and also there was that one time Daniel had drunkenly grabbed his elbow), he also studied the science of decomposition, and this girl was nothing but chemical synthesis. Hm. “You might want to start crying. That’s the only way I ever get in.” The boy in the t-shirt and fitted slacks raised his eyebrows at the girl and smiled at her. His own Italian wasn’t perfect, grammatically speaking, but his accent was slight enough that—like with his German—he’d been mistaken as a native with some kind of region-specific lilt more often than he’d been pegged as American—well, until he started in with the internet jargon, loudly. That usually gave it away. “I’m not joking.” Finding Daniel Webster had been easy. It was not that Sera had searched very long or very hard, but she had hired someone to do this for her instead. It had taken hardly any time, and she had arrived in Las Vegas looking for some kind of tether, and glad to have come to the place that was indicated on the odd package she had received. The key and device had come as a surprise, but she did not yet fear surprises, so long as they did not come at the altar or bearing coffins in their pockets like candies. She had read everything for days back, and then she had continued to read before that as well. Daniel W. She did not believe in coincidences, and this may have been something born in Amalfi, where life was different and simple, despite the influx of tourists. Then the call had come that Daniel was in Las Vegas, and she had gone. She rented a room in a hotel, with the hope that she would not be there long. It was another indication of a girl raised in another place, one not like this anonymous land in the desert, where people did not look into each other's eyes unless they were required to, but Sebastian made that a short lived haven. She thought she could see the man who had left her among tulle and taffeta, and she thought she would be fine with this; she was not fine. Sebastian, once the calming promise of a future, made her feel so much now, and feeling things brought back the past. Brought back the sounds from Carlita's bedroom that fateful morning, and the things she tried to forget. She did wish to find this other man, this writer who her sister had loved. It was a small thing, one of no importance, but he was the only tether to the memory of brown hair and brown eyes, and he carried within him her sister's laughter and sea-glare bright smiles that Sera only remembered in dreams. She had begun to write of it on the trip over. She had a hundred pages, and all of them nothing. Words that ran together into feelings, and feelings that ran back into words. She tried to write it all in Inglese, but she missed words here, and she missed words there. And this was the problem she was having with the man at the desk. She knew Daniel lived high up in this place. Why could she not see him? Were doors not opened for visiting here during the midday hours? She was trying to find the words for this in Inglese when she heard the voice. She turned, delighted, even if the young man's Italian felt like a tourist's tongue. "Why will he not allow me to enter?" she asked, the denim of her European skinny jeans rubbing together at her shin, where she crossed them. Her shirt was cap sleeves and the declaration that she was a Scrittore on the front, a quill beneath the red words. "He looks like he has tasted something bitter," she added, pulling a face to make her point, her pert little nose wrinkling up with the gesture. "I can weep," she assured him; she could. It would be a very good first chapter. (The girl entered the towering apartment complex, and she immediately fell into tears..) She looked down at the marble floor, trying to figure out if it would very much injure her knees. Several dots appeared then, bright halos, like palinopsia afterimages, burnt into the retinas and tiring the cone cells. Lin’s mind went to work connecting them as the girl spoke with animation. Her shirt claimed ‘author’ in red, punctuated with a quill, because, ostensibly, the word wasn’t enough. (That could be a reason for seeking Daniel out. A fan?) He’d witnessed her struggling to find words in English. (This was likely her first visit to the US; affective filler hypothesis in action, only in regards to output?) She was obviously enthused to be speaking to someone who understood her. (She hadn’t been here long; her accent sounded... southern maybe?) She knew where Daniel lived, but couldn’t get up to see him and didn’t seem able to convince the blank-faced man behind the desk to allow her entry, just as she didn’t seem to understand the reasons behind the denial. (If Daniel was as careful (read: secretive as fuck) with his whereabouts as he seemed, then the probability of the girl simply being a hardcore fan of his wonderful, excellent, asshole-y writing and a master Google detective were slim. She also couldn’t have known the dude very well, or she would have either been allowed up or not have come to visit him at all because, face it, the man could be ...uh, a little abrasive.) “Tragically, I think he was born that way. Came out of the womb unsweetened, I guess,” the boy said of the poor sour-faced man, at whom he flashed his most charming smile. He received in return only a dull bit of staring that simultaneously warned and promised Lin that had the man not been bound behind a desk, he would have had his hands around the skinny kid’s throat in half the time it took to blink. Hilar. “I think he likes me.” Lin shifted the bag of cat food from his chest to under his right arm. The assumptions—the connections his overbusy mind made as it searched for answers and tried to come up with a larger picture, he knew, were nothing more than semi-but-mostly-not-educated guesses. He couldn’t let any of them act as a stand-in for the potential truth. The only person who could tell him anything was the cute Italian girl and her triangular arch eyebrows. The boy didn’t extend his hand for a shake, but he did deflect the wattage of his winsome grin from Sourpuss Hates-His-Job to the girl in the cigarette jeans. “My name is Lin.” He gestured to himself with his left hand. “Please don’t actually weep. He won’t believe it if you start sobbing suddenly. You’ll need to leave and come back to be convincing.” Lin tipped his head to the side, dark eyes alive with curiosity. Who was she? “You’re looking for Daniel?” The name was uttered stripped of its stilted American accent and Lin quirked a brow. Lin was molto Americano. It was not his looks, which were boyish tan and bronze, with messy hair that could fit in any street in Europe. It was not this. It was something about the way he addressed her, the way he spewed witticisms like they were air. It was like the person - Sunny - who had drawn the sunburst sky on the tablet and then claimed to not enjoy the process. This was also Americano to her, creation for having created, and not for the process of creating. And witticism, for the sake of witticism, was one in the same. But she wrote. She wrote in the same way she breathed, and she had to appreciate someone who could have thought flash bright behind his eyes, while he managed this twist of sarcasm that still sounded sweet. She laughed behind her hands, which ruined any chance of falling prostrate with grief. The chapter had narrowed and her options had lessened. The door above was still denied her, and she paused and looked around the space. "I'm not looking. That implies I have lost him," she said, her strangely dark smile teasing. She was a pixie cut, harmlessness, and yet there was something dark behind the blue eyes. Something much more serious than the skinny jeans would imply. The doorman rolled his eyes, unimpressed with all the Italian, and Sera leaned on his counter a moment later. The drama was almost visible behind her eyes as she crafted her tale of woe, and the old, old ancient stack of Carlita's letters was brandished at the doorman with a flourish of wrist. When the doorman barked at them both to Leave! she fell into a sulk, and then a pout, and then a wibble of lip. See, she listened well. This was her version of coming back. "Signore, I've come to this country looking for this man. You must let me in. I have letters from his long deceased sister, and I bring them for him," she explained, intentionally making her English worse, her accent thicker. "It was her dying wish that he read them in my presence." Which was, perhaps, a weak addition, made only when she realized he might try to send the letters up without her. The letters disappeared into her bag a moment later, and she sighed. "Please, can you only tell him I am here?" she added, sounding much more educated in the mother-tongue of Las Vegas. The doorman continued, impassively refusing to do anything, which was hardly a continuation of anything. She huffed, and she pulled her phone out of her pocket. Swipe, swipe, and she flashed the screen at him. "That's what you look like," she said very dire, very serious. The corner of the doorman's mouth twitched. The girl offered no name, only teased, and Lin said nothing. He smiled, though he disagreed that ‘looking for’ implied a loss of. No. It only asked for a desire to discover or uncover. After all, if something was hidden, it wasn’t necessarily lost, and if someone was searching after said hidden thing, they were looking for it without loss being involved at all—at least necessarily. Semantics and the study of meaning were dear to the boy’s over-academic heart and he happily would’ve argued his point, the denotation being quite clear, however muddy the connotation was taken to be. But, it seemed to him, this was a moment begging for observation, not participation, and the semantics would wait. The brandished letters were a curious addition, appearing as they did, like so many 2-D rabbits from an Italian magician’s hat. There were so many of them too, yellow and brittle in their decidedly traditional envelopes. (Boring.) No drawings or hearts or silly notes adorned these letters. (Boringer.) The handwriting Lin recognized, only it stood soldier-straight, rather than staggering to the side. Damn. The fucking letters were old, weren’t they? The boy paid no heed to the mention of a dead sister. That was a question Italian Jean Seberg could answer later. Lin was at least 88% certain that Daniel was an only child (he certainly acted like one, the fucking baby) and he was good at guessing these things. And anyway, the letters were from Daniel to—wait. No—he saw it. The name. The address. Carlita Abbi—something. It was there. Written in hard black, lines pressed into paper with intent. Obvious intent. But, the letters were stashed back in the cool mod hip Italian bag before Lin’s eyes, slow to remember they could translate aforementioned lines and accompanying circles on the parchment into like, actual words, rather than just identify handwriting, could make out the rest. So, if the boy then appeared a little shell shocked, a little paler and wide-eyed, it was because he was shell shocked, paler and wide-eyed. Carlita. The dead ex-girlfriend. He hadn’t expected to see her again. (Well, her name, but. You know.) Right. Yes. Fuck. Okay. That fucking settled that. Lin remained quiet as the girl snapped a photo of the stolid doorman, whose only wish was to go home and drink a fucking beer. He relocated his weight on his feet restlessly and almost wished he’d brought headphones for his fucking phone. Some Bikini Kill would have saved him from this impending mess. “Don’t remind him.” That was all he said. It was meant in reference to the doorman and his puckered face, but it doubled perfectly, didn’t it? Lin juggled the cat kibble back into his left arm. Sera was oblivious to all of the boy's musings. She had no notion that he was questioning semantics, or that he had any personal interest in the old letters that were safely in her bag once more. She knew only that he had a gatto, and that he knew Daniel's name. But he wasn't helping her, and neither was the tired doorman, and she was at the end of a very long week that had only resulted in Sebastian. She didn't like life's lessons, and she never wanted to be anywhere so much as she wanted to be home just then. This place seemed unkind to her, just as Sebastian had been unkind on the journals, acting as if she had done something wrong, as if she had come here to inconvenience his life. It all seemed very unfair then. She sagged. It was visible. A droop of shoulders, a loss of posture as she tucked her cellphone away. She shouldn't have come to this place, and the expression on her face said as much. She didn't cry, but her lip trembled, and she looked like the dam might burst at any moment. Don't remind him. She turned to the young man with the cat food. "Do you mean this man, or Daniel?" she asked, motioning to the doorman. The nuance wasn't lost on her, and there was a crisp, celery-snap to her voice. She was a string pulled tight, over-tightened on the neck of the violin. She was shrinking, Lin observed, growing smaller out of resignation or defeat or something, her spine the spine of a bowed S in a humanist, serifed hand, a Roman type by Nicolas Jenson someone had distorted and folded in on itself. It heralded a storm. She was going to cry. The boy felt the impending Adriatic Sea of tears, aquamarine as hell, as a physical thing, a tightness in his own throat. No, no, no, no. He couldn’t handle someone else crying—not now, not this little girl, so small and brittle, hard beams of the Italian sun pressed to glass, too fragile. His own sudden intake of breath was audible and suddenly, he smiled. Whatever he was thinking or feeling, he decided, didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they get out of the stupid foyer/lobby/snobby-ass room as quickly as they could. Fresh air, he decided for no reason at all, would help. That was probably the first and only time he’d ever fucking come to that conclusion. Lin didn’t answer. Crypticism didn’t suit him anyway. He was no fucking oracle. He watched her lower lip wibble, dangerous and threatening, a hole in the dike, and caught the spring green edge in her voice as she faced him, and he just nodded his head toward the doorman uselessly. The honeyed vowels that poured so sickly sweet from her mouth a moment before, two ristretto shots of espresso, caramel colored with strata of crema, turned curt in a torsion of an arricciare. “I have an idea.” Lin twisted away from the girl and deposited the bag on the desk, pushing it against the doorman’s chest inadvertently. He spoke quickly, lightly, like before, like it was all a joke to him. “This is for the asshole with the dead sister, dude from the Great Triumvirate. He was on a stamp. Well, the shit’s for his cat, but give it to him. He might be hungry. Thanks, bro.” On any other day, he might have tried to sweet talk the doorman into brofisting him or chest bumping maybe, but his priorities had shifted and the holes in the dike needed attention. No more time to confuse Daniel Websters for fun. He didn’t wait for the unpleasant man to react in any way. Lin started to drift back toward the exit, his magpie eyes back on the Italian girl and her European jeans so very, very lightly. There was no pressure applied. “Want to get coffee with me? Maybe his shift will end and you can try again.” Lin, now relieved of the burden of being a good Samaritan for QP, put his hands in his pockets. He lifted his shoulders. “Daniel isn’t going anywhere, I promise.” That was as much as he could offer at the moment. He hoped it was enough. She considered. She was a maelstrom of feelings, and they all flitted across her dark blue eyes. Resignation, sadness, anger, and something dark and churning. Small she might be, but there was something in the gaze she gave the doorman that spoke of old wounds and things never healed. It was a chilling look, something incongruous to the pixie hair and the skinny jeans. She held the gaze long enough to make the man squirm, because she'd never learned the fine art of looking away. No one had ever taught her not to stare, and no one had ever taught her that some people feared eye contact as much as they feared anything. And then, once the man shrank, she turned and looked at Lin once more, eyes still threatening to overflow. She considered. And then she nodded. She sniffled, and she hoisted her bag higher on her shoulder, and she walked toward the door with her head held high. She was tired of being buffeted by the winds. She was tired of uomini with their infuriating ways. Perhaps she shouldn't have come when she was so raw from seeing Sebastian. Perhaps she should have returned home and forgotten her intention to find the man Carlita had loved. Her fairy tale was crumbling, and the last stone was threatening to fall. Dreams always looked so much smaller when they were in pieces on the ground. In the end curiosity won out. "Why isn't he going anywhere?" she asked, before she even managed to push the door open ahead of him. "Who are you? How do you know him? Or do you only know his gatto?" She turned outside the lobby, and she faced him. A pause, and then she thrust out an ink-finger stained hand. "Mi chiamo Sera." “Because he’s basically Simeon Stylites atop his pillar, but without the humility and refusal to see women. And you know, not in Syria.” It was as easy an explanation as any, Lin felt, machine-gun English or no. Daniel was a hermit. Simeon was a hermit (well, “ascetic saint,” but, really, hermit). And they were both dudes with infuriating uomini ways. It worked. The boy shrugged in his too-thin shirt painted in that delicate watercolor yellow and shifted the sweater that was hooked over his shoulder. The answer as to who he was was a little slower in coming (he had an inkling as to the answer she wanted, but did he want to give it?), and by then, the girl had her hand held out to him though they had yet to exit the building. Lin could almost feel the doorman’s eyes as they rested on the back of his head, heavy and judging. He smiled, took the bird bones in his own hand and shook lightly, his palm dry and cool against hers. “I’m still Lin.” There was a smart-ass smile tagging along behind the words, one that was all too comfortable on the boy’s lips, and Lin sidestepped the girl to make for the door. He opened it and stepped back out into the Vegas sunshine, radioactive and noxious, but certainly brilliant. Square, flat black sunglasses were pulled from Lin’s back pocket and settled on his face. He paused to wait for Sera—her name short, but pretty like the girl herself. “We were originally... uh—” He searched for the word in Italian, groped the backlog and margins of his mind for it, but came up empty-handed. Whatever. “Penpals. Or close enough. And the cat’s name is Quintus Pedius. He’s about the size of my hand and is deaf. We were never penpals. QP isn’t yet literate, but I assume once he is, he’ll join in.” It was an unsatisfactory answer and Lin knew it. He smiled, hoping the thunder peal of tears was rolling back, or at least dimming to brontide rumblings, rather than the crack and snap from earlier. It wasn’t as if he could tell this girl who’d only just told him her name—‘oh yeah, totally met him on these weird forum things some preternatural, abandoned hotel moderates. And by the way, we go through the doors in the hotel to become different people. It’s basically like meeting in a chatroom, right?’ It was better to stick with obtusion, he thought, at least for now. At least until pressed. “Why?” She didn't know Simeon Stylites. She'd been raised Catholic, but it was just a technicality while her parents lived, and it wasn't even that once they died. The only religion Angelo had believed in was Carlita, and she had been martyred on that altar in his name. The Fioris, once Angelo left her at their doorstep, had gone to services on Sundays, but Sera had always preferred to wander the choir loft, to listen to the bells, to sit in the confessional lost in dark thoughts and memories of sins heard through thin villa walls. Her expression was all confusion. Her English was very good, thanks to Sebastian and her years with him, but she didn't understand, and it was evident in the way her pert nose crinkled, the way her head tipped further in question. "Lin, still," she said, repeating his name. "I don't know who Simeon Stylites is." She gave him a disbelieving look when he said Daniel was his penpal. She didn't believe it, but she didn't come close to imagining the truth. In her mind, Daniel had been as enamored of her sister as her sister had been of Daniel. She remembered Carlita writing in secret, beneath blankets, late into the night. She remembered curling up with her sister, feet tucked together for warmth, and listening as Carlita read Daniel's letters. It had been the kind of love affair she always aspired to, and she was too strong in her convictions to think Daniel had any relationship with this dark boy that was so different than her sister. "Where are you going to find opposable thumbs for the cat?" she asked, deadpan. And it was an unsatisfactory answer. It spoke of secrets, and Sera knew more about secrets than most. She was fully outside by the time she responded to his why? He hadn't given her a truthful answer. Why should she give him a truthful answer in return? She walked to the sidewalk, where she expected a cab would pass, or where he could point her in the direction of a coffee shop. "Should I be honest with you, even though you weren't honest with me?" she asked him. There was no sarcasm in her tone, no anger in her voice, but there was something there that was reminiscent of that string pulled too tight. Lin owned a cello. He knew the sound of tension. He had wound gut strings around pegs, pulled up from the tailpiece, and he knew that high-pitched hum, the warning behind it. She was smaller—wound catgut on a violin, perhaps. Still, he had to move quickly, whatever the string instrument comparison. The boy continued strolling toward his car just a few spots away in the eerie ghost town of a parking lot (seriously, if a tumbleweed went on by, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised). The car was an old thing, actual molded metal, no fiberglass in sight. It was a squat Volvo station wagon with dorky, four-eyes looking headlights, born in the early ‘80s and painted a red-brown, the color of warm chocolate cake just out of the oven, except not as delicious and a little redder. Its backend, though unseen from the angle at which it was presently being approached, was wallpapered with, you guessed it, geeky-ass bumper stickers. Everyone in Vegas with the luck to actually catch up to the lead-footed Lin was privy to the fact that the 28-year-old’s other ride was, apparently, a Firebolt, TARDIS, chocobo, Firefly-class, time machine, and a unicorn—whether all at once or one at a time was left up to the imagination of the tailgater. He didn’t know the word ‘opposable’ in Italian, but context informed him of the translation. He grinned at the short-haired girl over the roof of the car. “The store. Pet section.” After unlocking the Captain (as it was so christened by Lin’s father, nicknamed Adama by himself), Lin ducked inside, into the groove in the driver’s seat that fit his body, leaned over the console (full of glitter and, yes, Euros), and opened the passenger side door for Sera. He waited for her to join him. Keys were jammed, with fondness, into the ignition and immediately Chuck Berry roared to life over the tinny, thirty-year-old speakers, yelling something about a stubborn seatbelt. Lin dialed the volume back and glanced at his passenger. He turned in his seat, peering over his sunglasses. His dark eyes met hers, the blue there nothing like the blue of Daniel’s, but not in a bad way. “Look, it’s complicated. It’s nothing, but it’s complicated. It doesn’t really matter. I’m helping him with the cat because he’s useless and used the word ‘Google.’ Tell what you think you’re walking into here, because I have a strong feeling Daniel is different than you might -- remember? Think? Whatever. Different than the person who wrote those letters, at least. Or so I’d imagine. Maybe he really is Ötzi. Idfk, tbh.” She'd grown up in a place where feet were more practical than cars. But, even if she'd been familiar with many makes and models, this one would have caught her attention. She walked around the back, catching a glimpse of the stickers and then peering at him around the side. "I bet you like Eleven," she said, a reference to the TARDIS sticker. A moment later, she was at the passenger's side door, tugging it open and giving him a look across the station wagon's interior. "They don't sell those at the pet store," she told him unnecessarily of opposable thumbs. Until her introduction to the internet two years earlier, Sera had a decided dearth of sarcasm in her life. Her adoptive parents were old and quiet, grandparents doting on the child they never had. They were never sarcastic. They were, in a word, accomodating. And the village was many things, but not sarcastic. Or perhaps sarcasm just tasted difference on that azure coast, where she knew the people employing it, and where she knew how hard she was being poked before replying. But, mostly, her knowledge of sarcasm came from Tumblr, from forums, from gifs and memes. She gave him a look, and she settled herself in the passenger's seat. She didn't recognize Chuck Berry as anything but old, and she looked at the radio and almost requested something familiar to balance out all the unfamiliar things this day was dragging along in its wake. Almost. "How do you know what I'm expecting?" she asked him. She didn't like the secrets, the very obvious attempt to get her to spill information, when he had none to share. He knew about the letters; or she thought he did. She assumed he knew about her sister. And he knew Daniel. All of that gave him more than she had, and she didn't like it, not this week when Sebastian had already disquieted her, and when she'd had to pick up and move unexpectedly. It was intentional when she slipped out of the familiar and comfortable Italian. It was her version of tossing off a blanket, standing, and preparing for war beside an unmade bed. "If you have something to say, please say it. If not, then can we change the subject?" she asked. It was polite, the request, even if it wasn't truly a request. She wasn't going to spill her guts if he didn't, and she had been raised with enough money not to back down easily. Lin was careful with his words. It didn’t often come across that way, and he fumbled them on occasion (...a lot), but they each carried some meaning with them, some care, some reference, however tangential, and none of them were on accident. Except for the ones after which he clapped a hand over his mouth, but he tried to keep that kind of shit to a minimum.—Here, now, he sat impassive in the driver’s seat, conscious of the girl next to him, the way her hands cut through the (pleasantly scented) air (thanks, little tree-thing!), the way her eyes settled on him and dug. He had qualified his ‘expectation’ with ‘I have a strong feeling’ for the express purpose of not needing to answer the ‘how do you know what I’-da-da-da-da-da question. When it bubbled forth from Sera’s lips, Lin looked at it. He did. And then he waved it away. He twisted in his seat, hooked his phone up to the little cassette-adapter, selected some JLo (circa 1999), turned up the volume, gripped the gear stick, and reversed out of the spot, fully trusting his passenger to buckle up. “What I’m saying is that I don’t know what to say, because I don’t know what you expect. But if you’re coming here with love letters or whatever from—whatever, I assume you have a mental image of someone who no longer exists. I never knew Daniel before and I hardly know him now, but I’ve seen glimpses and I get the feeling he’s changed a lot over the years.” Lin spoke rapidly, chirruping over the music, hardly processing the switch to English. Challenges he understood, but right now he was distracted. He glanced sideways at Sera as they bumbled through the parking lot. “For example, he no longer travels to foreign lands and woos women. At least as far as I can tell. I don’t honestly know. He mostly drinks, I think.” JLo continued explaining what life would be like if they had her love and Lin shook his head. Blue light slanted through the cracked windows. He made a right turn out of Turnberry, just past the heavy gates, and pressed the pedal to the floor. Allons-y. The music was still a little too old for Sera. In 1999, Carlita had still been alive, and Sera hadn't spoken any English. JLo was not a part of her life then, and while she had tutors and a schoolgirl's English after Angelo left, she hadn't really learned anything true about America until Sebastian had come to Amalfi. The thought made her look out the window as Turnberry's parking lot puttered by, and she exhaled a very loud, very obvious breath. This must be what fish out water felt like, she thought dramatically, only without the dying. Feeling like she was dying on the inside, she knew by now, would not really kill her. She'd survived that particular wound too many times to believe in the melodrama of dying for love in any capacity, even though she understood the desire with perfect clarity. She said nothing while he spoke. She watched Turnberry's gates open, and she watched Turnberry's gates close. "I don't expect anything from this. I only wanted to see him, but if you think it is a bad idea, I will consider not seeing him," she said easily, finally looking at him with haunted blue eyes. How did she explain that she didn't care what Daniel was now? It was only the link that mattered to her. Whatever Daniel Webster was, he was the last thing she had of her sister. Be he good, or be he bad, he was a string that led back to something she'd lost to dirt and decay and mottled bruises. She looked out the window again; it most certainly wasn't a promise not to see Daniel. It was only a promise to think. But she'd wondered so long about why he hadn't come to the funeral, why he'd never come back to Amalfi. How could he write those letters and never come back? Maybe she'd scribble later, jot it down and try to make sense of it on paper. She had no illusions about being a great author, but that didn't dim her delight in writing. It would help her decide in a way the boy behind the wheel of this strange car could not. His presence seemed to be almost entirely artificial, and she didn't know what to make of that. The car, the stickers, the language. She wondered what bled beneath that surface, but she didn't scratch. “What I think is that Daniel is not about to let you in, despite your impressive set of Bambi-eyes—Ariel eyes, maybe since they’re blue?—and regardless of the letters—maybe especially because of those letters. It’s not really a question of consideration of ‘should’ or ‘should not,’ since that shit is usually bullshit anyway. I do plenty of shit people tell me not to do.” Lin licked his lips and shook his head as they turned left at the next light. JLo continued to serenade them at top-notch volume. She danced in her white cargo pants in a hallway. Lin drove. His dark eyes were watchful and his mind ran. JLo gave way to Marina and the Diamonds. ‘Oh No!’ He had a small, out-of-the-way place in mind (not strictly a coffee shop, but), halfway between his place and Turnberry (which were actually grossly near to each other), so he wasn’t bothering to think about where he was going. No. He was considering what kind of mess he was getting himself into and he was thinking back on what he’d heard Sera say. She mentioned she’d come to this country to deliver the letters that rode shotgun in her bag. Lin didn’t doubt her there, for whatever reason. She wanted to see Daniel and she had traveled this far to do it. That was something. His saying ‘I don’t think you should do that’ wasn’t going to cut it, and he didn’t want it to, anyway. He didn’t know why. It would be boring? He considered the letters. He considered the fact that she had them. He squinted at the rushing pavement. It stood to reason she was either a friend of this Carlita’s or a relative. Friends didn’t tend to make these journeys. “Carlita.” The boy sucked on his bottom lip. His voice was quiet despite the music. He didn’t make eye contact. “Sister?” Sera turned those blue eyes on him in confusion, and that confusion had nothing whatsoever to do with Bambi or any other Disney animal doomed to a parentless existence. What he was saying didn't make much sense to her. She didn't disbelieve him, precisely, but she was raised in a very different kind of place. She didn't understand Daniel's apparent refusal to see her; she'd never done anything to him, so why would he refuse? The mention of the letters made her eyes narrow slightly. This young man knew too much, and she knew nothing in return. She was accustomed to a life of powerlessness, and she was starting to learn that it fit poorly upon her shoulders. Marina and the Diamonds was better, familiar, and she breathed the music in, a landhold amidst a sea of nothing. What would she do if Lin was right? She wasn't sure she could handle the rejection without throwing a tantrum worthy of her sister. Sera looked nothing like Carla. Carla was tall and dark and beautiful. She could laugh with a man and make her laughter sound like a secret. She could wind men around her finger, and with her it wasn't a cliche. Sera was nothing like that, and she'd never felt like she belonged with Carlita and Angelo, where their love for each other crowded the room and barely left space for her. But she could throw a tantrum just as well as her sister could; she'd learned that after Sebastian, after yards of white and a lace veil. "Pieces of knowledge are not understanding," she told him, slipping back to the Italian and looking out the window once more. “No. But they’re more than nothing,” was all Lin said as the Captain’s wheels filed on sandy pavement, tar on tar. He took the cryptic answer as an unadmitted yes, sister. The car slowed, easing into the wide, sun-baked parking lot of a low, coral-roofed strip mall. Chains lined the place. Save for the harshness of the sun, they could have been anywhere in God’s America. Minivans dotted the parking spaces, lane after gas-guzzling lane, varied colors of robin’s eggs. The boy ignored them all and sought out a spot with the well-trained eagle-eyes of an American driver. He didn’t bother trying to get near any door or anything. He didn’t mind walking a gray strip of asphalt, no matter how hard the sun beat down. Marina was cut off and the engine died. The windows were left open. Lin looked at Sera through black lenses, eyebrows riding the frames low. He offered her a half-smile, a little thing that flashed, and he studied her blue eyes. It wasn’t his intention to make her feel powerless. Not at all. He wondered what he could give her. “We’re friends. Daniel and I.” It was a partial lie, spoken earnestly. Lin was used to bending words and he could do it without batting an eyelash, not always, but usually. He certainly didn’t believe anything he was saying, but he said it all anyway. The words seemed pieces to the sort of solid answer the girl was looking for, something more palatable and satisfying than penpals or allusions, a bit of footing. He didn’t tack on a joke, he didn’t pause, nor was there a ‘as much as one can be friends with someone like him lol.’ Nope. It was all trimmed down, nice and neat, fat-free, English syllables snapping on teeth. Lin opened his door, careful not to hit the ugly white Hyundai in the neighboring spot. Heat poured in and out. Italian followed. “When I told him I thought he was okay—as a human being, he got angry and told me there was something wrong with me. So there’s a beautiful fucking snapshot for you.” It wasn’t overly optimistic. In fact, it was hardly optimistic at all, as far as these things went, but the boy figured, half-heartedly, he might as well tell her the -- cloaked -- truth. Lin undid his seatbelt, locked the doors, and got out of the car in a short stretch of legs. "You wouldn't be a very good writer. You don't know how to tell a story," she told him once he he assured her that pieces of knowledge were better than nothing. "Pieces of knowledge can make things very bad," she said, and the understanding of someone who had listened from behind closed doors for the entirety of her young life whispered between the syllables and vowels. She didn't care where he parked. She was accustomed to walking, and the need to drive everywhere here was one of the things she liked least. When he cut off the engine, she opened the door, but she didn't exit the car immediately. When she looked back at him, he was looking at her, and she met that half-smile with something that wasn't quite a smile. She could be a blank, at times, but even then it was a facade. The maelstrom that roiled beneath the surface was always visible in her eyes. She blinked. She waited. But she believed him when he said that he and Daniel were friends; she didn't think it was more than that. She believed the lie, but not because he was a good liar; because she didn't conceive of an alternative. His story about Daniel's anger, though, that felt true. And the beautiful fucking snapshot didn't surprise her. She could easily imagine a gothic and dramatic story, one where Daniel knew who had killed Carlita, and who had never recovered from her death. She had been young, but she hadn't been blind. She'd heard the fight, and she'd heard her sister die, and she knew Daniel was the cause. Maybe Daniel knew too. She made a thoughtful sound. This time she held her tongue. She exited the car, and she closed the door behind her with quietly thoughtful sedateness. What was more American than a motherfucking parking lot? Gray-faded asphalt, stretching as far as the eye could see, circling desolate smears of ‘80s art deco strip malls in suburban purgatory and chain grocers around the country. The shit was impervious, suffocating, polluting the earth with gasoline, with chemicals that ran off into water, which was about as American as shit got. Americana apple pies had nothing on parking lots and baseball was stupid. Lin liked parking lots, actually. They offered a nice segue from interior to interior, he thought, an isthmus of open space to sing or tease or ride on the backs of carts after running twenty or so feet. They were good for rollerblading too, seamed with lines of sun-hot tar or not. And as they left the Captain behind, the boy hummed to himself (Why do you build me up, buttercup, baby, just to let me down?). He busied himself with his keys and he adjusted his sunglasses and he walked like someone who was singing to themselves and maybe dribbling an invisible basketball, in time to a tempo only they were privy to. The only thing more American than a motherfucking parking lot was probably Lin. He wasn’t the red-blooded, rednecked, shoot ‘em up, tear-the-legs-off-animals-and-eat-them-r The boy said nothing further, not until they were inside the cool, low-ceilinged joint. It wasn’t hip. It was a dive, sticky seats, pearly Formica tables, table jukeboxes, laminated menus done up in that mustard yellow so favored by places like this. Lin didn’t even know the name of the place. All he knew was that they had good milkshakes. Their coffee was probably instant. A waiter, a teenage boy of the disinterested emo make, lank-limbed and lank-haired, led them to a booth and left to fetch them two piss yellow bubble-plastic glasses of room temperature tap water. Lin really knew how to show a girl a good time. “I’m more whizzywig. I understand that can be flaw, especially when it comes to writing,” he said finally, his voice loud, American, over the hum of the 40-year-old solid steel air conditioner that pumped the dim room full of cool, cloying air. ‘Whizzywig’ being a reference, of course, to WYSIWYG programs like Dreamweaver. Duh. He fingered the menu, the press of plastic booth against his neck very soothing, actually. It was almost cold enough in here to rival Daniel’s Dom. Lin had left his sweater in the car. Goddamnit. He took off his sunglasses. “But mostly it’s that I see life as more convoluted than most people, I think, because I’m a dumbass, and I can’t make a clean story of any goddamn thing. Everything’s always stuck to something else.” He shrugged and looked at the menu, holding his tongue on Daniel until he got a fucking milkshake in him. Sera had no opinion about parking lots. Like many things here, she found them to be lacking. Grey, grey and more grey, and the only purpose behind any of it was to park big vehicles that were only necessary because the people here refused to touch one another. In Amalfi, the houses were built on an incline, built tight and cramped with narrow roads that no car could traverse. Even the manor that her adoptive parents had called home, open and cool tiles and cream stone, was sandwiched beside small, tall buildings that reached for the sky. The parking lot was American, yes, but she didn't find it beautiful or impressive. It was an example of what she disliked about life here. That wasn't to say that she hated everything. Some things, she loved. Just not the parking lot, and not the cars. She didn't understand Lin. There, staring at him, with him staring back, she didn't understand. She was too serious, but she'd always been. Even when she was young, before her parents had died, she had been the wide-eyed girl that clung to her father's leg and stared at the world in happy silence. Then, older, she'd been the quiet wallflower that wanted her older brother to look at her the way he looked at her sister just once. She didn't understand Lin, but she could appreciate that he was dynamic in a way she wasn't. She followed where he led, and she looked at the yellow glasses and the warm water. She wondered if there was a shortage of ice. She leaned forward, and she peered into the cup, looking for an icecube in the most obvious of ways. There was no icecube. She sighed, and she sat back against the plastic and crossed her legs on the seat. She touched the menu, but she didn't lift it. Her fingers traced the plastic. "Doesn't it get tiring?" she asked, not addressing the whizzywig, not even understanding the reference beyond the obvious, that he was a whirl. If he was things that stuck, she was things that never did; she'd learned that the hard way. When the waiter returned, she turned those blue eyes on him. "Is there ice? Are you sure there isn't a shortage? Molto bene. I would like a soda with ice." She turned to look at Lin. Lin laughed. The waiter did not. He reacted the way of the doorman—with a burning inner ire that radiated outward toward the two small people boothed by the window who carried their secrets in vastly different ways. It was hilarious. The dark-haired boy lifted his menu to cover his face as he suppressed his mirth in the face of that righteous, computer-paled adolescent irritation, until he was fit enough to sit up and smile like a real adult who didn’t laugh at slow, cool jabs. The waiter didn’t even ask what kind of soda the foreign girl with the short hair and the buttery accent wanted and he didn’t wait for Lin. He simply left to get the asked for ice and cola, muttering as he went, the chains that dangled from his jeans making a music of their own. “Tiring?” With his composure regained (you know, as much as it ever was), Lin had to rewind a bit. Was it tiring to be someone who saw the threads that webbed from every little thing like so many fingers—to feel the compulsion to follow said threads, which, of course, led to more threads, nodes connected to nodes, chemical synapses neuron to neuron, on and on, forever until you died? Yes. Kinda. But it was all he knew. There was no mental blade sharp enough to cut that habit from the boy. He saw the big picture, in pieces, and he assembled it as he went. His brain whirred fast enough, generally, to keep up. It was only explaining it that was difficult. (And, like, not being anxious about useless things, but whatever.) “Nah. It’s hard to be exhausted by something for which one has no comparison.” The glass of cola, which, by the looks of it, was more ice than anything else, was slid in front of Sera wordlessly. Lin bit his lips and looked up at the waiter. He ordered a chocolate milkshake, no food, no mention of Kelis, and the kid left. Lin leaned on his elbows on the tabletop, tracing designs with the sweat from his water. He tapped out a message to no one with yellow-painted nails. -- .- -.-- -.. .- -.-- STOP. --. .- -.-- / --. .- -.-- / --. .- -.-- “I can try to help you get in,” he said finally, boyish smile waning, and eyes bright, but serious. He didn’t have the milkshake yet, but the boys, they were coming to the yard, regardless. Lin lifted his shoulders. “But I make no promises. He’s an unpredictable fucker and a terrible ass cardinal-priest. And if he’s sober, I might just run for it.” Sera smiled a pixie smile at the annoyed waiter. She didn't squirm, and she didn't look abashed. If she felt any discomfort in his ire, it wasn't anywhere to be seen. It could be assumed that particular trait came with a decade in a very wealthy family, servants and people who ducked their heads respectfully when she entered a room, but the trait was much, much older than that. It was born at the side of a pine coffin, her fingers splinter-dug as she gripped the pale wood and refused to let go. It was glares at priests and attendants, and it was a snarl for her brother. It was a feral child, grown to a hurt woman with a pixie cut and slim jeans. She was comfortable with it, even if no one else was. She'd striven to hide it from Sebastian, all smiles and sweetness. And that was honest, too, but it wasn't everything, it wasn't all of her. "I'm slow," she said once the waiter was gone, once Lin had explained that it wasn't tiring or exhausting. "I would be exhausted," she admitted with a hint of admiration. "Carlita was energy," she admitted, fondness drenching the words like a heavy spring rain. She watched his fingers, then, distracted by the very deliberate tapping. She took a sip of her soda, and then she emulated the tapping, perfect spacing and timing and lengths of taps. "Cardinal-priest?" she asked, and her expression said she knew it was expected, asking. She tapped out the rhythm again, knowing there was an explanation to that as well, even if she didn't quite understand what it was. "Do you say and do confusing things on purpose?" she asked in Italian, assuming the answer before she even finished asking the question. She sipped her soda daintily, old Aubrey Hepburn grace in the twirl of her straw. "He was young," she said of Carlita's Daniel. "Younger than you. Maybe younger than me. He was amazing. He was passionate, and he was charming, and Carlita said he was dangerous, but she said it with a secret smile." She paused, sipped her soda, and slipped into Italian when she continued. "We didn't have money, and I don't think she'd ever met anyone like him. Even the tourists weren't like he was, she said. I remember him having the bluest eyes I had ever seen, and I didn't know hair could be that black and curly. He was like the film stars everyone talked about. It went on for years, and Carlita spent every winter waiting for him to return, but she never let him know that she waited. She was good at being coy." She sent his message back to him, and Lin grinned openly, a reincarnation of Morse’s electromagnetic smile that day in 1844 when he first tapped out Annie’s ‘What hath God wrought?’ and the query reached the B & O Railroad Depot in Baltimore, scratched onto paper. He was obviously pleased with the quickness with which Sera memorized and transmitted. There was no doubt that it was a simple echo. She hadn’t reacted to the taps that formed letters that made words that created a message in a way that bespoke of understanding. But that didn’t diminish the act itself. “I think you have energy,” said the boy. .. / -.. .. -.. / .. - / .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- .-. / - .... . / -. --- --- -.- .. ., said the boy’s spindled fingers, the index and middle of his left hand working in quick, practiced tandem, the kind that was more instinct than conscious effort. He smiled again, listening even as he tap-tap-tapped on the composite table top, each sound marking a second, a grain of sand through the sieve, the way it had so many years ago in the gray rooms of high school calculus. Each counted out a lash of pointed, purposeful irritation aimed at the classmates who didn’t like the know-it-all boy in the Buster Keaton shirts, just loud enough to distract their already wandering minds from polar equations of conics and Kepler’s Laws. rmin = p / 1 +tap-tap-tap She asked if he said and did confusing things on purpose. Lin thought about it. “Sometimes.” He mentioned Joachim knowing fully well that Sera wouldn’t know what he meant, but it wasn’t so much about intentionally misleading her or anyone else as it was that Lin was caught up in those stuck threads, a spider in its own web, it was self-referential, it was reflexive, it was how his mind worked—indeed, it was usually an audible reflection of some line of thought in his head that no one else followed but him. His words were deliberate, yes, but they could be aimed inwardly, as well as outwardly. He certainly sometimes meant to introduce confusion, and such instances were hard to tell apart from the others. As it was, in this case, Lin was only talking to Lin. But the conversation moved forward and the boy didn’t bother trying to explain. His hands stilled as Sera sipped at her soda and spoke of Carlita and of Daniel, both painted in that rosy, sun-warmed tint of nostalgia, of cobbled Italian streets that rose crookedly from dirty, and of sighs for those days, longing apparent. He shifted to rest his chin on his palm and his eyes held on the girl across from him with the direct, unadulterated attention one could imagine being the same make as that with which he approached his scholarly undertakings, the same kind of attention that let someone learn Morse code and its attending history after an afternoon in the dusty, molding stacks of a small town library, pen tip nicking hardcovers in time. He stored the bits of knowledge away in his mind, the snippets of memory, along with Sera’s tone of voice and what she did with her hands, how she sipped from her straw. He continued painting his picture. He frowned, a slip of his smile. He knew how the story ended—not through which machinations, but how. Badly. Like a Russian film, sadness in bleak proletariat black-and-white, charcoal shadows and all. Youth and beauty taken too soon, the throat of life ruthlessly slit, bleeding rose petals and blood. A man in his cups, blue eyes dimmed, dashed by loss. The end. What hath God wrought? The ex-Communist state was atheist. Lin opened his mouth to speak, but the milkshake came then. She didn't know what to make of his pleasure, and she didn't know how to counter his assertion that she had energy. Perhaps she did, but it was nothing like his brand of energy. It was something quiet, an undercurrent, as opposed to a power source that blazed bright. She didn't have the kind of insecurity required her to want to change that, to want to change herself. She had things she'd wanted, things that had never been hers, but she didn't want to blaze. Maybe it was too outside the lines, the crayons squiggling past borders erected in childhood. Maybe, like she said, she simply thought it exhausting. Either way, the word - energy - had different meanings for the two of them, and she didn't strive to change that. It could be that way. It didn't hurt her. "Sometimes, like the tapping I don't understand?" she asked, glancing toward his fingers. Maybe if she'd had a father that lived out her childhood, she would understand the morse code for what it was. But she hadn't, and she didn't, and it was an inside joke she wasn't privy to, a secret she wasn't in on. She didn't like it, and her blue eyes said as much, no words required. But she smiled at him, even then, and she shook her head. "Do girls think you're wonderful?" she asked. It wasn't that she didn't think he was herself. It was that she imagined a landscape where he wrapped girls around his fingers. Yes, girls. Not her, but other girls. The frown came right before the milkshake, and she finished her soda and fished money from her pocket. Coins clattered on the table, tangled up with dollars. She was paying for more than the drink, maybe. She was paying for the silence, perhaps. For whatever had made him frown and find himself wordless, which she already knew was unlike him. "I'll walk," she said, and like the command for ice, it wasn't a question. The plastic covering of the booth squeaked as she moved, and she dipped her fingers into her glass and liberated an ice cube on her tongue. "You don't need to tell him I'm here. If it's that bad, I'll stay away. I only thought he might want-" That he might want what? How could she even explain that connection? She couldn't, and she very starkly felt that it wouldn't live up to whatever the boy at the table had with long-buried sister's lover. "Grazie." Lin hadn’t intended the tapping as an alienating activity. It was something to do, a semi-constructive(?) way to channel his nervous energy that was better than unfolding and refolding napkins for thirty minutes. God, but, he seemed to be awfully good at making people feel out of place. He tried to think of a way to say sorry that didn’t involve more tapping, but then it was Italian again, and she was smiling at him, the snap in coast-blue eyes easing, the winds dying down, if only just. The seas calmed. She shook her head. Lin made a sound of disbelief at her question. “Girls, boys, everyone,” he answered with conviction and a crooked cut of a grin that, hopefully, let on that he was joking. Not about the genders so much as the fact that he didn’t really think anyone thought he was particularly wonderful once they got past a certain point of knowing him. Then he just became annoying. And then the milkshake came, and the frown, and all of it. Lin didn’t protest. His mouth was open, eyes torn between the dreary waiter carrying the dessert and the girl exiting the booth with obvious haste, but he didn’t protest. The coins fell loudly on the Formica. The bills fluttered. They said something in Morse code he couldn’t make out, but he knew it was dismissive. Lin snapped his jaw shut and took the nostalgic glass from the boy, the ‘50s mold of the thing fitting firmly in his palm. He stuck a long-necked spoon into the shake. “You should tell him—see him,” said Lin loudly as the girl turned for the door. He was careful not to pick at whatever wound he’d opened, careful to look away from the half-uttered admission. She had come so far. And whatever it was that burned navy in her eyes, whatever pain, whatever the fuck it was, if it could be helped by seeing Daniel, then... she should, he thought. He put the wide straw lined in red in the milkshake. He peered at Sera, at her wet fingers as they carried an ice cube to her mouth. An ice shortage. He blinked and almost smiled, but by then she was gone. |