The Everborn (12 page)

As it always had been.

Andrew took several steps backwards, leaned likewise into the hallway.

“I don’t wish anymore, if I can help it, and I don’t wish to talk to you tonight as well, Bari,” Andrew grumbled with bridled contempt. “You know how I get when I let go of another work like that, to that conceited drug geek. You made it so I have no choice....you’re responsible for this goddamn arrangement, you made it happen. And each time I write him another book, I’m stuck wondering what Dad would think of all this.”

“And just what
would
he think of all this?” An obscure figure accompanied the voice now, a mere silhouette, a shady sketch of blackness, seen yet unseen.

“You know what he would think, and you know he would be insulted,” Andrew spat, then added quite reversely serene, “Unless he knew about
you
.”

Andrew turned and headed for the coat rack, situated between the recliner and the space between the front door, reaching for a black and grey blazer.

“Tonight I drink, Bari. Tonight I hear the music of Ralston Cooper, if you can
call
it music, and I don’t usually do that either. In fact, I
never
do that if I can help it. Dammit...I just need to get out, get away....” Marching towards the front door, Andrew paused, turned to the darkness, hesitated, then continued, “Bari...did my father know about you?”

“You’ve asked me that before, I gave you my answer.”

“What good is an answer you’ve made me forget? Everything I want to know about my father and who I am, you tell me it’s all been already answered by you, and that you’ll bring it back to my memory in due time, when the moment is meant to be. Fuck
meant to be
, fuck Ralston Cooper, and
fuck you!”

“Yes, you must go,” Bari sighed. “Tonight is not the night for dwelling in this confusion of yours. Go, have a blast at this boozer emporium of yours. And for heaven’s sake and all the saints, meet someone.”

Andrew was at the front door,
on his way
out the front door, was about to
slam
the front door: when someone gives you
what for
and ends it with a
fuck you
, you wouldn’t expect him to say very much more before he heads out, even if he
was
an innocent, clean-cut vessel of a twenty-something kid personality like Andrew Erlandson.

“You can’t be serious,” he wheezed. “You don’t want me to be with anyone besides you. What do you mean,
meet someone
? Bari...what are you saying?”

Bari was unmoving and quiet as her companion lightly closed the front door, stepped close, closer and then closer still until she could smell the eternal aroma of his breath penetrating the gentle expanse of her presence.

Like a son.

Like a lover.

And Andrew could feel her understanding, her compassion, even in the midst of the chill of the apartment’s inner hallway. He heard himself utter, tenderly, “Bari...show me your eyes again, show me your beautiful eyes.”

Just as the orange streams of the bathroom nightlight reflected from his pupils in the cloudiness of the bathroom mirror, the dual glows appeared. There, before him, hovered the lambent orbs of the presence...a presence not unlike his own, but at the same time a presence alien to him.

“Go now,” whispered this presence, so sweet, so soothing, “for tonight may very well be a night of nights, young one. A night of destiny. Soon, you shall become as new. Soon, yes, in time.”

The eyes disappeared then into empty darkness, leaving only the wispy remnants of a swirling breeze of warmth.

Wondering, as usual, what Bari had meant, Andrew clenched his blazer tight against him and commenced his departure out the front door, this time his spirits free of forgotten hostility.

The being within the hallway retreated into the bedroom, for but to catch sight of her young one as he would minutes later stroll across the sidewalk three stories below and disappear down the darkness of the nighttime street towards
The Crow Job
.

7.

The Watchmaid Bari

Empty shades of night idled upon the tenebrous presence within Andrew Erlandson’s apartment’s hallway.

The Watchmaid remained there, unmoving. She enjoyed the stillness of the apartment, hushed with the exception of the systematic ticking of the living room wall clock. Often, she considered this solitary sound welcomed and even necessary.

And time always reminded her of the days when she was human, when she had been but a young woman Andrew’s age, many ages past, when she and he were once lovers, and she became pregnant with his child.

That was when things changed. That was when she was first made aware of what her lover truly was, what he became before
the rebirth,
reborn through her into another succession of lives.

That was when she became the creature she was destined to be.

She decided to move. Hovering, she made her way from the mouth of the hallway and through the living room. As she went, a mild current of air brushed across a ceramic vase containing outstretched peacock feathers, fluttering and flipping the covers and pages of several nearby magazines. In a similar way, her mind’s eye browsed through pages of the past.

Memories of the past, echoing prophecies of the future. Sensual, yes. But also horrific. Also cataclysmic.

Time always tended to play those games, flip through those pages.

The Watchmaid arrived at the patio doors. Drapes parted, no longer obstructing her third-story view of the night and the quieted street below.

Her thoughts shifted again, retreated inward, into herself, resuming inward thoughts, again into distant memories. How very soon things were going to change again, as they always did before.

But as destiny was about to unfold another time around, Bari had the strangest feeling that
another time
was beginning to unfold over the present. Perhaps this feeling, this foreboding aura encompassing both young man and guardian, was merely generated by the apartment’s claustrophobic setting.

Or perhaps this feeling dealt with Ralston Cooper’s latest novel, ghostwritten by Andrew, ghostwritten in turn by the hands of the very near future, the very hands responsible for Bari’s insistence of Andrew’s anonymity, his freedom to create and to continue creating under the guise of secrecy and behind the name of a very real and unsuspecting identity. Perhaps this was why Andrew worked so relentlessly before his typewriter and for so long to meet Ralston’s deadline.

Perhaps it wasn’t for
Ralston’s
deadline at all....but for another deadline entirely which Bari had foreseen years ago, but had little idea until now when it would be and how, or of the magnitude of its significance upon herself and so many others.

8.

Melony Polito at the Crowjob

It was not supposed to happen this way, not any of it. And certainly not to Melony Polito. Yet she was a part of it, immersed in it, immersed into every sort of chaotic and intriguing encounter a private investigator could ever dream of cramming into his or her career, even for the wife of a UFO researcher.

And she never thought she would end up
here
, in a two-bit dive of a bar, as a result of a joint effort between her and her famous UFO-freak husband. It made her miss the days when the only real joint effort worth enjoying was when she and a few close college friends would pass
around
joints and get high off grass and pure speculation. Just because a cloud resembled Steve Reeves to her and whoever tripped out with her lying across a dandelion patch in the good ol’ days a decade ago, didn’t mean she wanted to enlist at NASA so she could one day space-shuttle up to see if she could fuck the damn thing.

It never used to be this way; she never thought it would be this way, always thought differently, all along, and already things seemed to have changed and not only so...things suddenly seemed to have been changing for a long, long time.

All along.

Private Investigator. When all she ever wanted to be was to be creative. To paint. To mold pictures. Not to mold pieces of pictures into real—life scenarios of criminal injustices and mysteries for a fee. And despite each and every effort on her part to revive and nurture her personal passions, it was beginning to seem that most of her time had been spent in pursuit of other people’s passions, other people’s obsessions and desperations, with little or no time for her to privately investigate
herself
.

Around about a decade ago, Melony Lambert’s works of art could have been found displayed on consignment within several privately-owned art gallery chains located throughout Southern and coastal California. And she had not yet had her fill of twenty-something frolic and friction.

Until the friction came when both of her younger brothers went cruising into a broadside collision between their Chevy Nova and an RTD bus on a drunken en route to nowhere smack dab in the center of the Orange and Hollywood Boulevard intersection, in front of tourists, before Mann’s Chinese, splashed and splattered glass and stifled lifelessness on the third page of the
Los Angeles Times
.

And Melony became an only child from there on out, a free-spirited being with a soul stunned and stunted from a loss she could never prepare for. Her inexperience with a grief of this magnitude left her vulnerable to the clueless black uncertainty of chance and change, the very same uncertainty which finds and seizes us all as its flailing playthings, spinning our blindfolded intentions like tops and then stopping us, leaving us naked and grasping a pinned tail for the donkey’s ass life’s pointed us towards.

At first, all of a sudden, a donkey’s ass was what life seemed to be taking her for. Almost directly after her brothers’ deaths, Melony’s believably faithful boyfriend of two strong years weakened under the pressure of her newfound stress, about-facing the couple on a Valentine’s Day emotional ka-boom when he wouldn’t give in and she wouldn’t put out. Fleshing the matter out, her insistence on canceling his expensively reserved plans for a calm, quiet evening home crowned Melony as Queen of the Stubborn “I’m Spending The Rest of My Life Feeling Sorry For Myself-ers.” Just when Melony had thought she’d won the understanding support of her lover, two bottles of red rosé and straight liqueur became enough to convince his frustrations that a decent lay would at least settle his Valentine’s score.

Relationships which end up looking like that were usually enough to fracture anyone’s abilities to stir up trust in the dustbowl of needing someone, wanting, finding someone. Keeping someone. The whole of Melony’s life, so it was lived, was done so with little depravity and an abundance of openness and acceptance. Then, all at once, as it was with her lover and her relationship with him, every ounce of bliss and meaning and giving collapsed like a straw house under a wolf’s breath.

And all which had come so easily for so long became to her a lie.

The passing of the week of Valentine’s Day was climaxed with the joint funeral of Melony’s two brothers and the high school buddy who shared their fate.

And it was at that funeral where Melony met a man.

Who, by coincidence, albeit far more mercifully so, was an only child, too.

Officially, there within and about the small Long Beach cathedral, Melony Lambert met Maxwell Polito for the first time. Since then, they came to prefer the less detailed story of having met one another on a March day of that year, their match made by Melony’s younger brothers, both of which attended the same university and the same Ancient History class taught by Max, one a student of Max’s the previous semester and the other a student from last Spring. The elder brother had become a favorite of Maxwell’s, and this semester had enrolled afresh into Max’s Human Psyche and Behavior, simply due to Max conveniently being the teacher in a minor curriculum course.

It was the brother’s deaths that brought Max to the funeral, that brought Max to meet Melony, that led Max to eventually exchange sympathies and then phone numbers,, that finally coaxed Max to phone Melony for a coffee date on that often-reminisced March day.

And it was from then, when Melony began to learn that though life may at times seem like a lie, what really matters is not to live it like one, but to live it in truth right the hell back.

Like she had been doing before, all along.

And like she learned to do all over again.

If only she’d left it that way, instead of signing up for a shuttle mission to the clouds for a sky-high straddle with a truth that’d most likely prefer her to lie.