The Everborn (27 page)

The somber hush of the apartment moments before was now disrupted as Fleetwood Mac began to spread “Rumors” from the living room compact disk player.

Adjacent to the dining room and sharing the same pale, white-tiled floor space was the kitchen. On the stove top, a kettle of water and oriental vegetables boiled, emitting vapors of steam rising to the noiseless vents directly above. A mixture of succulent mushrooms and onions, pea pods and tri-tip steak slices simmered upon a sizeable wok over a low fire. Nearby, a tray, full of delicate wontons and plump egg rolls, was partially covered with aluminum foil, pulled open from one side and dug into by the golden-skinned, slender fingers of a spectral woman.

Bari simply
adored
Andrew’s Chinese wontons.

“What are you doing? Bari,
stop that!”
Andrew entered the kitchen and halted before the sight. He was wearing a black, thick-cotton dress shirt, black Levi’s and a slim white tie. “Those aren’t for you.”

Bari was caught, startled, vanished immediately into whatever dimension she next occupied. The consumed food, of course, material as it was, plopped onto the tile floor in a semi-digested, disgusting pile from where her midsection once was. She then reappeared a few feet away, the lower torso of her slender golden body wispy torrents of air, which blew and swirled against the hem of the tablecloth in rippling waves, much in the same fashion as the tips of her waist-length flowing black hair.

She looked upon Andrew apologetically, like a sorrowful puppy dog. She could no longer find nourishment nor sustenance in food, but she could sure as hell taste it.

To Andrew, it was almost like living in
Bewitched
.

“Only a few. They’re for you and your monumental date, I know. I just couldn’t help myself. I was once human too, you understand.”

“So you’ve always told me.” He checked and rewrapped the aluminum foil, lowered the flame on the kettle and covered it. He then turned to face her, could not avoid the serene glare of those orange glowing eyes, how they never failed to mesmerize him, even after all those years. “You set me up with her, didn’t you?”

Bari was silent, watched him.

Andrew continued, “You don’t have to tell me. I know. You’ve never allowed me to see anyone so easily, so...coincidentally. I’ve thought about this and it didn’t take me long. You’re not as much a mystery to me as you think you are.”

“Oh, but I am,” Bari told him truthfully. “You just perceive me on a human level. And you’ve become quite used to my presence in your life. My intervention. But as I’ve told you oftentimes before, you still don’t know exactly what I am. You only know me as who I am. As the mystical Bari that no one else has but you. And you don’t even know who exactly it is that are. You’ve just lived in your awareness of me long enough to accept me and to keep me a secret.”

“Yeah, like
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.”

“I am not a television show.”

“Well, you sure make it seem like I’m in one. No Other guy I’ve ever met or heard of has what I have with you. And no one would ever believe me.”

Andrew let out a sigh, reentered the living room and seated his anxious self into the black leather recliner under the bookshelf lamplight. He glanced at the wall clock, which returned a 7:05 glare. In the kitchen behind him, Bari swept her scrumptious residue into a dustpan with her hands, as he knew she would.

Then came the sudden, awaited door chime.

His date had arrived. This was a given, since he scarcely had visitors and the time was right. He catapulted from the recliner, re-checked the kitchen and dining room area. Bari had vanished from sight.

***

The directions Andrew had given Mel during the prior day’s brief phone conversation proved simple enough to follow, but it was only until she was en route early that Sunday evening when it began to strike her as curiously odd that the place Andrew called home lay right smack in the armpit of
The Crow Job’s
nefarious backyard. It didn’t seem to make much sense that Andrew would choose such an unlikely dive of a region to reside in. Working under Ralston Cooper’s wing should have elevated his living standards alone, unless Andrew’s income was grossly unjust or unless there was a premeditated purpose to it all.

Melony arrived at the address, pulled up and parked along the street’s curb directly in front of Andrew’s three-story apartment complex. She hoped she hadn’t underdressed, but the date was informal and her goal wasn’t to seduce him but to get to know him. And maybe she would allow him a bit of insight on herself, too. Maybe more than a bit. She gathered a Nikon and its shoulder strap from the passenger seat into her purse and emerged with the purse, from her vehicle, locked the door and set the alarm. She wore blue jeans and an almost silky thin orange tank top.

The apartment complex was plain, but maintained noticeably well for its hum-drum and run-down surroundings. Entering through the building’s towering wrought-iron security gate after finding it unlocked, she made her way past a battalion of mail boxes beneath a curved archway, and across a concrete floor which split into separate directions leading through an arena of green grass and hedges and a spacious, lawn-chaired gazebo.

The setting appeared remarkably quiet and restful, and perhaps catered to a select clientele of respectful, low-income and low-profile adult types with no children and habitually tedious lives. There were no signs of the tenants which lived there but for a dozen or two lights within windowed and curtained front rooms.

Melony made an immediate right and proceeded up three flights of stairs and across the top floor walkway, while she rationalized how Andrew’s choosing to live here seemed more and more fitting, as fittingly low-profile as he was.

At the corner of the walkway she made a right into an enclosed hallway, which reached in the direction of the street and sheltered the doorways of three separate apartments. She approached the only door at the inner hallway’s left. She took a deep breath to calm herself from the constricting assault of tension that threatened to make her flake out at the last minute. A polite series of knocks to announce her arrival and the finality of crossing over the threshold between consistent reality and persistent curious abandon and it would be behind her.

It’d better be.

Because when she knocked and then waited a minute and then a few seconds more, raising her curled knuckles to try again, the door opened and what she saw on the other side was a reality as consistent and as unimpressive as her own.

Then again, what did she expect, anyway?

The next moment found Melony crossing the threshold without so much as a second thought to it, forsaking her expectations, but for the simple rule of thumb to expect the unexpected.

As she entered and greeted the shy young man, dressed modestly in a black dress shirt and white tie as he was and clearly delighted by his date’s arrival, it came to her that consistent reality was what she’d expected all along. After all, she wasn’t boarding a crystal ship to the stars. It was all down here on Earth, in a down-to-earth apartment; Melony was simply beginning to fear that perhaps everything about Andrew had a down-to-earth explanation.

But that just couldn’t be.

“Melony, welcome,” Andrew said cordially. He was in the gladdest of spirits, free and easy and lighthearted. If she had a coat, he would’ve offered to take it for her. He was indeed no ordinary gentleman. “I’m ecstatic that you’ve made it! Dinner is pretty well done, Chinese like I promised. But in French,
je vis de bonne soupe et non de beau langage
, it’s good food and not fine words that keeps me alive. First, though, let me give you the grand tour. It’s not very often I get to show off.”

Andrew listed several beverages in almost rehearsed order, and Mel surprised herself in agreeing to a brandy against her own projected intentions.

His grand tour was a thorough presentation but determinedly hurried, as Andrew interjected more than once that they’d better sit down to dine before he’d be resigned to microwave the finger foods. His attitude and the way he carried himself was like a humble rich kid host on an excursion through a luxurious mansion that wasn’t a mansion nor was it luxurious. Andrew maintained the same innocence and boyish charm which had so attracted her to him at the club. She found herself fascinated by the littlest things, all the while alert to those little things which might present a small portion of insight or clues to what may be hidden behind his innocent persona.

But then, she also found herself forgetting what she was truly there
for
, caught up as she was in the intriguing normalcy of it all.

His bedroom tour went first, after the introduction of where the bathroom was and she would’ve taken this as a sly insinuation if it wasn’t for his preoccupation with a closeted toy collection, something he was quite proud of. Melony distracted him with minor questions concerning his workspace, a lengthy wooden desk flanked by file cabinets and enthroned by shelves of books and a typewriter surrounded by piles of papers and office accessories, all a few feet from his Niagra adjustable bed.

He didn’t seem at all interested in his writing or of his affiliations with Cooper. This was all his forum, with his interests and flamboyant showmanship, until they could both get comfy and settle down in the kitchen. Mel could wait for that.

The living room was the final and only frontier as
eccentric but otherwise cozy as it was, with its atmospheric black-and-green-clovered wallpaper and legions of books, and its prominent large-screened television. Melony was drawn to the exhibited relics of yesteryear, the framed book cover of
Into The Grave II
, penned by Andrew himself in his late teens and of his once-famous director father’s signed and framed poster of a sixties B-horror flic....

To my son
,

I in you, and you in me.

Loving timelessly,

-
your Dad, A.J.

A.J. was just as much a mystery as Melony was convinced Andrew was, maybe more so in consideration of his sudden and still yet unsolved disappearance, though Mel seemed certain that the matter was unsolved in Andrew’s mind as well. Or was it? Only dinner conversation would tell.

Then it would be
her
forum.

The Chinese food was splendid. Every last morsel of it. Andrew’s conversation was tedious, talk-of-the-weather, but Melony made sure to turn that around as subtly and as mannerly as she could. But it was important to listen to Andrew regardless of what he said, for each word was an insight into a personality somewhat foreign to her, somewhat familiar, somewhat universal in the underlying human loneliness of it all. And she couldn’t help but notice how handsome he was, how attractive he was to her, though regardless of everything else she had at least ten years on him. And she was married. To an asshole.

A half an hour had passed, give or take some minutes. Fleetwood Mac were repeating their rundown of song selection from the living room stereo. Mel discussed her safe drive to Andrew’s, commented on the wonderful food, reiterated over her likes and dislikes of Ralston’s gig the other night.

Andrew took it from there, “So tell me more about what you do, Mel. This
Diverse Arcanum
newsletter. It’s a
newsletter
, and yet you got yourself a table for Ralston’s big night when more reputable publications were knocked back to corner barstools.”

“I’ve got connections,” Mel told him. She sipped her second glass of Brandy. “Besides, I got lucky. There was only so much space in that dive to begin with. Is there a reason why you happen to live down the street from such a place, a place which eventually happened to be the showcase for such a night?”

“There’s no coincidence. I’ve lived here for a while. Ralston and I hung out together to discuss projects at that club. It’s his kind of place. He’ll go on to bigger and better places, whether or not he did well there. It was an experiment, to see if he could do well with his dream......which was music, not really writing at all.”

“Oh yeah,” Melony said, “but
your
dream is writing, isn’t it? And surely writing must be part of Ralston’s own dream. How could it not be? He’s an international bestselling author, for Godsake. No one put a gun to his head. He must love his work.”

“Let’s get one thing straight,” Andrew told her. “I don’t like working for him. He uses me and that’s all I do now. It pays the bills and I’m just fine living here. Until I can....”

“Until you can write something for yourself again...?”

Andrew felt suddenly restless, squirmish, uneasy and wary with this. Was she hinting at his personal life just then, his personal track record, could she know his intimate history, had brushed up on these things since their introduction to one another Friday? Or had he disclosed to her some disconcerting bit of information that Friday night that since then memory could not summon?

“I can’t write for myself anymore,” he found himself saying. “I just do what I do, and I live my life here. It’s a good life, actually.”