Broken Sleep (47 page)

Using four different-colored pens and in a neat curvaceous script, Salome had written:

“Have you shown it to Alchemy?”

“Not yet. I’m thinking of moving back to Eagle Rock with my mom until we start the tour next month.”

Moses advised her, “It’s hard to tell when Salome is being cunning or reacting from someplace she can’t control. I think she’s motivated by the belief that she’s Alchemy’s ultimate protector. Not that he is hers. Talk to Alchemy.
You
have leverage. Play Salome’s game. Stop her from putting a wedge between you.”

It turned out to be excellent advice. Alchemy, while reaffirming his love and commitment to always take care of her, made it obvious that Salome would lose a throw-down with Laluna. He gave his mother an ultimatum: Temper her demands and be more accepting of Laluna or they would make other living arrangements. Salome chose to stay in Topanga with the nurses he hired.

Laluna called up Moses to thank him. “Maybe, you know, if things get better with Salome and me, I’ll be able to return the favor someday.”

Semper Fie, 2009 – 2010

I’m surprised when, maybe a month after the meeting at Kasbah with Mose and Alchemy, at around 2 A.M. one summer night—me and Ricky Jr. are watching porn—Alchy calls. He says we must powwow. It’s more than a year since we seen each other one-on-one, the longest since we met. Week or so before I seen him on Larry King. He don’t apologize for his excesses. King asks if he is a “conflicted millionaire.” Alchemy quips, “more like hypocrite millionaire.” King busts out laughing and kisses his butt. “Why I love this guy. Why the world loves Alchemy Savant.” I don’t get how Alchemy pulls off that Regular Joe act. I go on TV for two minutes and come off like a jackass.

I head over to the upstairs private room at the Broadway Bar, which the owner keeps open for friends after the official closing time.

Alchemy’s eyes are high stepping to the biddy-bip-bip beat. He gets up from the couch and hugs me. I push him away. All-cuddly Alchemy gives me the creeps. “I missed you.” I don’t respond in kind. We get some beers and go out to the empty balcony that overlooks L.A.’s Broadway.

“So, ’sup?” I ask.

“You ever think back and wish we’d never made it so damn big?”

“Nope. Never.”

He laughed. “Of course you don’t. Once, when I was at Juilliard”—he stops for a minute taking his personal detour to Collidascope Land—“Absurda and I went to see Richard Thompson at the Ritz. We were standing in the back of a packed house while the first act was on, and Thompson slinks in and stands beside us. He’s so nondescript no one else recognizes him. An hour later he is blowing everyone away with his playing. I promised myself that that would not be me. Sometimes, I wonder if that wouldn’t’ve suited me better.”

I don’t think he regretted being him. Only he ain’t exactly lying neither. He always worried that whatever got Salome would get him, too. Maybe he didn’t have to be a rock star. Only him living a normal life was about as likely as me winning the Mr. Congenial award.

“You didn’t ask me here ta get my opinion on that.”

“Silky’s left the band. You hear Laluna’s joining?” I nod. “Lux and I want to do a free concert at the Grand Canyon. Then a farewell world tour. Call it quits after twenty years. We need you. We never found a permanent replacement for you.” This is true. They used session guys or friends in the studio and different hired hands on the road.

I don’t want to answer yet. “Whataya gonna do if you quit music?”

“I’ll always make music. No touring. Different stuff. I want to dedicate myself to the Nightingale Foundation.”

“C’mon, you’re going into politics.”

“Maybe.”

“Liar.”

“Yeah.”

“And you call me the ambitious one. Or maybe you was being sarcastic. Damn, taken me all these years to get it.” I’m wondering if the time is right for me to go back. He downs another beer in one go. From his pocket he takes out his iPod and hands it to me. “Put it on and listen.”

I do.

“Man, this ain’t saying enough, but that’s the most insane and beautiful three or four minutes a music I ever heard—fuck—I never heard nuthin’ like it before.”

“It came to me in my sleep and I woke up and just played it. Absurda gave it to me from out there …”

“I don’t buy that otherworldly shit.” I hand the iPod back to him. “When you are dead, you stay dead. No damn spirits is creepin’ around.”

“Probably. Only I don’t know what I don’t know … It’s eight years and I am still plagued by what we could’ve done for her.”

I keep it zipped. I learned that from him. Sometimes saying nuthin’ is as meaningful as saying something.

“Hey, look, I’m really sorry about what went down with us.”

I know he’s talking about the shit that went down at Madam Rosa’s. I just nod as if to say,
so fucking what?

“Are you finally ready to listen and believe me instead of blowing up and punching me before I can finish talking?” He closes his eyes and opens them, expecting me to bust out all gooey.

“I never doubted what I seen and heard, and it means what I think it means.”

“Listen to me, Ambitious. Absurda and I were taking leaks outside. But you’re right, she was thanking me—she was grateful for all she believed I’d done for her. The band and all. And, well, for bringing you into her life.”

“This ain’t no Alchemy creation to make me feel like shit?”

“After all this time you don’t think I can come up with something better than that to make you feel like shit?” He’s trying to joke, but his eyes, his body got the look of helpless sadness that I seen that first day years ago when he had to leave Salome in Collier Layne. In all the time I know him, I seen that look maybe five times.

I finish my beer. “You and her?”

“Never.”

“What about, you know, what I …” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I done beat myself up plenty over that night. “I’m sorry. I dunno—”

“Look, I get it. And neither of us will ever forget it. But we all have ugly shit in our heads. The guy I love as Ambitious Mindswallow—and I felt this from the day we met—is one angry motherfucker fighting against himself, who screws up … a lot, but in the end, you do the right thing.”

The Holy Trinity

When the Insatiables returned home after their latest tour, Alchemy asked me to fly back to L.A. I thought because, with Nathaniel gone, he wanted me to be with him. No. He wanted to lure me into an ambush. Somehow he believed I remained unaware of his DNA infusion to this “Mose.” That I had not overheard conversations between them about the foundation. I regretted my necessary malevolence to the unstillborn son—I couldn’t embrace him. I awaited the mystagogue Margarita to give me strength and guidance while the polar forces of ether and gravity ripped me apart. By denying his existence, I hoped to force Alchemy to choose between us—I couldn’t imagine he’d side with him over me. I hadn’t anticipated the power of the third player in their newly formed alliance.

Laluna. A graceful faun bathed in the microbes of stealthy determination and youthful ignorance. She addressed me with cordial respect I didn’t want and quickly dismissed me. She enchanted him with her beleaguered smile hissing with a touch of the homicider, and her sullen eyes that demanded his protection. She possessed a spectral sensuality that didn’t suppress her soulsmell of a rag doused in lighter
fluid—intoxicating and toxic. She rejected my initial offerings and made me a pariah in my son’s home.

In a grand gesture, a few months after she had ensconced herself permanently in Topanga, she decided to act like a concerned member of my family. She invited me for tea in the main house. It, too, was a trap. After small talk went nowhere, she zeroed in on her true reason for the invitation.

“I’m sorry if it didn’t go well when you met Mose.”

Of course, my son and the woman he lived with shared intimacies. “What business is it of yours?”

“It’s my business because I love Alchemy. You love him. Moses loves him. And Alchemy loves the three of us.”

“Do you love me?”

“I would if you’d let me.”

“Laluna, the real question is, Can you only love someone if they let you?”

The question flummoxed her. She answered with an indirect accusation. “Mose, he’s a great guy. Accepted me right away. Only, whenever your name comes up, his body clenches as if he’s preparing to be punched in the nose. I know that feeling, I felt it most of my life with my father.”

I now presumed Alchemy had instigated this meeting and conversation, so I decided to end it there and exile myself to my cottage, understanding that Laluna had usurped my position with Alchemy.

I got two guards to help me empty the bottom floor of all furniture except one black and one white director’s chair. I painted the walls, ceiling, and floor Savant Red. I couldn’t
talk to Alchemy, so I wrote him a letter. My nurse hand-delivered it.

I waited. I told myself,
Patience
 … Two nights later, I was talking on the phone to Xtine—she believed Alchemy would never desert me—when Laluna knocked on the door. “Xtine, I’ve lost. Call you later.”

Disoriented by my red cavern, Laluna sat in the black director’s chair. Alchemy was “worried” about me. She asked to come in his stead. Both of us donning a mask of deceit, we issued apologies that we didn’t mean. She for her insensitivity and seeking to intervene where she didn’t belong and I for overreacting. Laluna followed up with a further false olive branch.

“We’re leaving next week, but when we come back, I want us, just you and me, to spend time together.”

“Let me ask you this. Why do you seek my companionship?” She squirmed in the chair. Her lips scrunched in one
direction and her nose in the other. I reminded myself that she was barely twenty years old and uneducated in the distorting mirrors that reflect one’s own, often ineffable, multiple motivations. “No need to answer. Let’s agree that I have never been that warm to you. Let’s also agree that you have been wary of me.” She nodded. “The reason you want to befriend me has little to do with your empathy for my situation. Or interest in my life or my art. You want to please Alchemy. That is good. It’s the same as if I see him—it will be to please Alchemy.”

“If you mean Mose, Alchemy hopes you see him because you want to.”

“I don’t. But I would see him to please Alchemy. And therefore, because that is the wrong reason, I won’t see him.”

I’m not sure she understood, but I continued anyway. “You and I getting along will make Alchemy happy. We both want that. If he is happier specifically because you and I have a relationship, that ultimately benefits you. But does your relationship benefit him? In the short term, yes. In the long term, I predict your relationship, if it lasts, will hasten his Gravity Disease.”

She gaped, perplexed. Gravity Disease would be inexplicable to her.

“Laluna, to paraphrase your own words from the other night, I will let you love me, for now. And I have begun by confiding this to you.”

She thanked me but volunteered nothing else.

The three of us ate dinner together, and our conversation consisted only of shallow, enervating non sequiturs. The morning they left, I found a note under my door.

I found no solace in his words.

Selective Affinities

The Nightingale Foundation Prize hosted a funding soiree at the Palos Verdes home of Thessalia Bambucos, widowed courtesan–turned–queen of an Internet media empire. As the evening wound down, Alchemy tapped Moses on the arm and said, grave faced, “We need to a take a walk.” Alchemy’s one blue and one green iris seemed to have expanded, leaving almost no white in his eyes. Moses nodded and Alchemy went to thank Bambucos. They moved outside and silently began to walk down the street.

Moses assumed Alchemy wanted to continue their discussions for the transition from foundation to political party. Alchemy planned to use the foundation as the facilitator—affecting individuals’ lives with their programs while delivering their message that America needed a new path, a third way. Alchemy’s grandeur without grandiosity, his well-disguised drive that verged on monomania, and his total belief in
e pluribus unum
would eventually culminate in his running for the presidency in 2020.

Once they were far enough away from Bambucos’ home, under a darkness sporadically illuminated by lights beaming
from behind the curtains of the wealthiest strata of America and the yellow-orange hue of Alchemy’s cigarette, he asked Moses, “Your phone still off?”

“Yes.” Moses, who as a kid imagined that the people on TV could see him through the screen, shared Alchemy’s paranoia that the government possessed secret technology that could hear conversations through any live phone. Alchemy had told him Loo and Freiberg were working on just such a technology.