Lone Star (50 page)

Dear Chloe,

In Trieste, there's a clock—on a tower by the sea, on Piazza Unita Italia.

I will wait for you by the fountain under that clock at ten tomorrow night. I will wait for two hours, until midnight. I will wait tomorrow night, and the night after. But then I will have to go.

I left you some numbers that may be helpful, if you dare.

Near Trieste overlooking the sea there is a castle on a cliff. The bus that goes to the castle is number 136. If I see you, I will tell you why that matters.

But now I'll tell you another thing that matters.

Pi never terminates, never repeats, never ends. I want to believe 3:14 is human, and 3:15 is divine, and we live in the irrational space between the two, the space with five trillion numbers and counting, the space with no patterns. We lumber on senselessly, transcendentally, to infinity.

But pi is not the key to infinity.

It's the key to eternity.

And sometimes, if we are lucky, we get to Proverbs 3:15.

I ask you, Chloe Divine, do you dare disturb the universe?

Johnny Rainbow

She grabbed a cab to the train station, waited barely twenty minutes, and boarded the late-night express to Katowice, where she found a hostel at three in the morning close to the station. Perhaps it was not as terrifying as a field of blood, but only by a matter of degree.

She lay on the cot, fully dressed, with her backpack under her head. She slept poorly, and was up at six without being woken. The train she had to catch was leaving at eight. Johnny's Xeroxed numbers, now deciphered, said so. She had just enough time to buy herself some coffee and two sweet rolls, just like Johnny had taught her, and once on the train, she found a seat next to the window in a spotless compartment for four, placed her little fake-leather brown backpack between her and the sparkling glass, leaned against it, waited fifteen minutes to show the conductor Mason's Eurail pass, closed her eyes, and didn't open them again until she was a half hour away from Vienna, Austria.

In Vienna, she missed an unnervingly punctual train to Udine, and had to wait over an hour for the next one. But she bought a toothbrush, a T-shirt, and some underwear, and felt grateful for the delay.

She spent the next six hours with the light on her face, and the staggering Alps in her eyes, the dales and foothills violent with lilac lupines, seeing things that even she, accustomed to the glory of the White Mountains, had never seen.

She thought about Hannah and Blake, about how Hannah had pursued him, and how he had fallen for her. How much Chloe had envied her at the time, that Hannah had snagged someone who felt about her the way Blake seemed to feel about her, even early on, on the cusp of forming the union that had brought them three years later to another picnic bench, this time in Krakow, where what began so promisingly at a high school
barbecue dissolved into Hannah's being pregnant at eighteen with another man's child.

Chloe's heart hurt through the Alps all the way to Udine as she tried to forget Blake's astonished devastated face.

She got into Udine at eight in the evening and caught a train to Trieste. It took nearly two hours. There was an intimation of a sea to the right of her window, but she couldn't be sure about the black void with the moon behind the clouds. She had noticed a change in the trains in Vienna and again here in Udine. There was a marked upgrade from what she had been recently riding. For one, there were no drunks in the cars, no noise, no unmodulated anything. The floors were swept. The seats were clean. The lights didn't go out. No one kissed her.

Once in Trieste, she reached Piazza Unita in twenty minutes by foot, walking along the rough and unquiet harbor. To reach the fountain took three more minutes. It was nearly eleven. He had said he would wait until midnight.

But he wasn't there.

I will wait until midnight.
But those were just symbols of his intent. They weren't real. He was real. But he wasn't here. That was real. She hadn't asked herself what would happen if he didn't wait. What if she miscounted those damn numbers, blundered up the days by one, and yesterday was in fact the day after tomorrow, and he had already left her behind? What if she hadn't missed the train in Vienna?

She was sure of nothing. Was everything just a lie?

She waited for him until midnight.

What if nothing in her brightest life would ever compare to the carved-out moment in blackness on the Polish train with him when he kissed her? The ebony night flying by with his lips on her lips would remain vivid like fireworks, then intermittently, and then never again. That was the dread fear.

She asked an Italian closing up his café on the piazza for help. He directed her to a hostel nearby, clean, not that Chloe cared. Twenty American dollars bought her a bed in a dorm, another ten a hot shower, and five more a combination lock on the bathroom door, “for the just in case,” as the hostel manager put it.

Chloe didn't know if she was starved or exhausted.

She was frightened she had been such a fool.

She had found a Bible in the hostel lounge. Placed there by the Gideons.

She sneaked it back to her bed and slept with the Gideon Bible pressed to her chest.

Proverbs 3:15.

She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.

I
N THE MORNING SHE WANDERED AROUND
T
RIESTE, MOODY
and gloomy, both she and the city. At ten she was back at the piazza with the clock, thinking maybe she had made a mistake and he meant morning, not night. Did he write noon and she read night?

No. At noon she left, cold and damp. She changed the last of her zloty into euros and found a department store where she bought herself a pair of jeans and a green sweater. Her flouncy coral minidress was suddenly ludicrous, like black tie at a backyard barbecue. She bought a pair of cheap sneakers, an umbrella, and waterproof mascara because it hadn't stopped raining. Half the money he had given her was gone. After changing into her new, less absurd clothes, she found a corner café with tall tin ceilings where she had a pastry and a cappuccino. She just wanted to stay somewhere warm. She sat in the café for an hour waiting for the rain to end. When it didn't, she left and walked on, her sneakers soaked by the next block. There was an embankment that led to the sea, but the sea was invisible, because the gray air was so thick and low upon it. All the twisty little alleys and wide boulevards of Trieste were wet with rain. There were hardly any people on the streets. There was certainly no Johnny.

He had told her Trieste was a beautiful historic city, and perhaps it was. She listened for music, for troubadours. She found a sax player, and asked him if he knew a guy with an angel's voice. He didn't understand. She gave him a euro. She
found an oboe player who spoke English. “You mean,
I
don't have an angel voice?” he said. She gave him some money, too.

She kept hearing music, songs, but it was almost wishful thinking, like dreams close to waking, yet nothing in her hands, nothing in her eyes.

She found him by the granite harbor.

He was walking ahead of her in the pouring rain without an umbrella, his guitar case wet, his green duffel dripping. When she saw his back, in the soaked leather jacket, the beret on his head, the black hair untied, she cried. Johnny, she thought she said, Johnny, she whispered. Johnny!

He didn't turn around. Oh my God, was it not him? But his guitar, his duffel! She ran to catch up with him. Johnny! She cut him off on the sidewalk, stood in front of him.

“Johnny.” She tried not to shake.

“Chloe Divine,” he said. “I can't believe you came.”

He looked terrible. He was haggard, his eyes black-circled, his skin the color of fog, his red lips blue. She couldn't understand it. When he hugged her, his body shook. He had looked aimless from the back, and when she stepped in front of him and called his name, he seemed surprised she had made it.
I can't believe you came,
is what he said, but that could mean anything. I can't believe you came when I wasn't expecting you at all, is what he could've meant.

“Are you okay?” Her troubled heart didn't know what to think, what to feel.

“Yeah, just cold.” He wiped the rain off her face. It was rain, right?

“What happened to you?” she asked. “You told me you'd wait for me till midnight.”

“When, yesterday?”

“Yes, yesterday.”

“I don't remember yesterday,” he said. “It was today I said I'd wait.”

“You said tomorrow.”

“Yes. Today was tomorrow yesterday.”

“But you said you don't remember yesterday.”

“I meant today. When did you get here?”

“Yesterday,” said Chloe.

“I don't know how you managed it.” There was truth in his face, in his weak arms draped around her. “Sorry you waited and I didn't come.”

“Where were you?”

He struggled to recall. “I met my dad. I was late for him, too, I think. He was pretty pissed at me. Like you? Then I caught up with some friends.”

“You have friends in Trieste?”

“I have friends everywhere.”

“Why was your dad here?”

“We were supposed to go visit my mother together. Remember I told you about my mother?”

“Yes, of course. I didn't know you were going with your dad. Did you go?”

“Of course I didn't go yet,” he said quietly. “Tarcento is far from here.”

They stood in the rain.

“Did you play today?” Chloe asked him.

“Why, did you look for me?”

“Everywhere.” Her voice broke.

“I didn't play today.” He sounded so sad when he said it.

“So what did you do yesterday, and today? Were you with your dad?”

“No. I was with my friends. I was really out of it. I slept a lot. Which is why I must look like shit.” He nudged her. “Kind of like you after Kaunas, remember?” He smiled nostalgically, as if Kaunas was years ago.

They stood on the street. He made no motion to move or to speak. He twitched a little.

“So what do you want to do now?” she said. “Are you hungry?”

“Starved. Problem is, I got no money.”

“How can that be? What happened to it?”

“Well, I gave most of it to you.”

She was skeptical. He hadn't even given her what he had promised them. He gave her four hundred dollars, not five hundred. And she'd spent nearly a third of it on jeans and toothbrushes and hostels. They never talked like this, discussing mundane things, almost bickering. “I owed my friends some money,” he went on. “After I paid them, we hung out. Then I had no more money. How much do you have left?”

“A few hundred. I had to buy some clothes. I—” She broke off. “Do you want to get out of the rain? I can tell you what happened. Where were you headed?” she asked as they started walking.

“I don't know,” he said. “I really didn't think you would come.” His long arm went around her, but they were both too wet to hold on to each other. Pulling away, he held her red umbrella over their heads.

“Where's all your stuff?” he said.

She opened her hands. She pointed to her backpack. She said nothing. His dark eyes cleared a bit, turned up at the corners, glistened.

“Maybe after you feed me,” Johnny said, pressing his shoulder into her shoulder, “I'll play a little to get us some cash, we don't need that much, and then we can ride a ferry to a place I hope you'll never forget.”

She was hardly going to forget the hostels either.

“A ferry . . . or a bus?”

He smiled, as if recollecting his not-so-distant words to her. “Ah, yes. Bus number 136. We could. But wouldn't you rather go by sea?”

“I don't know where we're going. Why were you wandering the streets, Johnny?”

“I wasn't wandering.”

“Where were you going?”

“To find a place to play.”

“But it's raining.”

“The ferry costs money, food costs money, and I've got none.”

“Why didn't you ask your dad for some?”

Johnny's body got skittish. “My dad is long out of the business of giving me cash. Moms would give me some, but she doesn't have any herself. Plus she's far away. A pickle, really. Dad offered to feed me, though.”

He didn't look as if he'd taken his father up on the offer. He didn't look as if he'd eaten or washed or played since Warsaw. Chloe didn't know what was the matter with him.

“Nothing, princess. I'm just beat. And hungry.”

How can you be beat if you slept all day? she thought. But after they found a Greek-Italian place, and he had spanakopita and avgolemono soup and tagliatelle with sausage, he livened up. He was still weak tea, but at least he was Johnny tea.

He listened with great interest to her story of the picnic table at Krakow Square. “So that's how you were able to leave them,” he said. “I don't know how you engineered that.”

“Maybe the same way you engineered a tour on which all of our things got stolen,” she said.

Unoffended, he laughed soundlessly. “That helped me almost not at all. And put quite a damper on our day in Treblinka.” He clucked and tsk-tsked and asked more questions about Mason and Blake and Hannah. “What a waste of beautiful Krakow,” he said in conclusion, shaking his head slightly and then groaning from the effort. “Everyone sore and undone.” He didn't seem to be surprised by any of it, except by Blake's relative silence.

“Why shouldn't he be silent?” Why was Chloe annoyed by this? She was still smarting from before. Johnny didn't jump when he saw her, didn't run into her arms, didn't turn around when she called his name. Well, the last one was easy to figure out. He didn't turn around because it wasn't his name. But what about the rest of it? “What was Blake supposed to say?”

Johnny didn't stipulate.

“I left before the worst,” she said. “He probably said it all after.”

“I'm surprised he didn't say it before you left. Never mind. I suspected from the beginning Hannah was a heartless guttersnipe.”

“Don't say that. She's not a guttersnipe.”

He took her hand across the café table. “What do you think of Trieste? It's been raining nonstop since I got here. A drag, right? It's usually such a lush tropical multi-everything city.” He leaned forward, bringing his stubbled face down to her hands, kissing one by one the tips of her fingers. “The place I plan to take you to, high on a cliff,” he said, “I want it to take your breath away. But we've got a few challenges ahead of us, princess. We can't go there without some money. That's one. And two, I have to, have to, have to, be on the 8:00
A.M.
plane in two days. And three, I have to, have to, have to, visit my mother before I fly back.”

“Is that all we have?” she said, flinching from the sting of regret. “Not even three days? And it's raining.” We would've had more, she thought. We would've had one more day, one more night had you not taken it from us by your mystifying absence.

“There is that. But Trieste is a great city for music lovers. You'll see. Rain or shine, they come. And you'll help. Let's get some hot coffee for the road, with some butterscotch whiskey in it, and we'll be all set.”

“Whiskey? Won't that hurt your voice?”

He grinned like Johnny Vaudeville. “You mean won't that make it better? Fret not. Wasn't it Mason's favorite philosopher Bart Simpson who said that whiskey was the solution to all life's problems?”

“Um, you're misquoting both Mason and Bart,” Chloe said. “Bart said alcohol was both the cause
and
the solution to all life's problems.”

Johnny laughed, almost back to his old self.

“Very wise is Bart,” said Johnny. “Like a little Yoda is he.”

The unrelenting downpour continued the evening Johnny sang to take Chloe to a cliff by the sea. There was an ugly wind, whipping the rain into a circus of misery. She still hadn't seen the waters of the Adriatic.

The streets were empty, but they found one near Piazza Unita that was only a quarter empty and made their perch under a partial enclosure. She held the red umbrella over his head and guitar. With her green sweater, she thought she looked like a Christmas tree. She felt the shiver in her veins even before he began to sing, before he reached for the notes he reached only by birthright.

Where was Van Gogh to paint them in their ragtag threads, with the red umbrella over Johnny and his Gibson, with Chloe a small green trembling stalk? The air cold cold. He sang. Without an amp, without a mic, without incompetent Chris on the drums, without electric strings or Robert Plant. She was wrong about that. Acoustic Robert Plant was channeled through Johnny's electric throat all the way to heaven. Did Chloe get what she came for? Joe Cocker unchained his heart. Springsteen was blinded by the light. Radiohead was high and dry, Bryan Adams got his six-string at the five-and-dime, and Freddie Mercury wanted to live forever. Johnny wanted to be young the rest of his life. And all the stars were shining. “E lucevan le stelle.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, he said. Come and get me. I said come get me. And you got me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got me.