The Natural Order of Things (13 page)

“This is my husband’s domain,” she explains, brushing away a skein of cobwebs and stepping gingerly around a pile of mouse droppings. “As you can see, he has turned the basement into a warehouse for his plunder.”

“You’re married?”

She nods. “For ten years. Ever since I was a young girl, younger than you are now. I was very naïve when we met. He is a merchant marine, a free spirit, and sails the world on a cargo ship. He will never change. And I do not possess the power to persuade him to settle down.” She runs her fingers across the tops of the crates. “Twice a year he returns home with odd things, items he finds in bazaars and opium dens and brothels. I have warned him. One day I will toss his treasures onto the street. But I cannot drag these crates up the stairs on my own.”

Will sighs. He knew there would be a catch, a reason for the free drinks, but it’s too late to think of an excuse.

“Okay, which crates do you want me to haul to the curb first?”

“
Usipime, baga sosi
! If I actually did something like that, my husband would kill me. He would kill us both.” She slides against him, touches his shoulder, squeezes his hand. “Do you live nearby? Do you have a place to stay? If you do not mind the mess, there is more than enough room down here for you. An extra bed over there in the corner …”

But Will barely hears her. When it comes to matters of chance and coincidence, he has always been a skeptic, but suddenly he sees an irrefutable sign that his life is about to change yet again. Like a genuflecting penitent before the sacristy, he kneels down in the dust, glides his trembling fingers across the splintered wood of a crate, and though he has never had the ability to interpret omens and doesn’t really know what this one means, he whispers the improbable name that has been seared with a hot iron into the slats of wood.

“Zanzibar, Zanzibar, Zanzibar …”

The following afternoon he starts on the job.

Eager to attract a mainstream audience, he forgoes the death metal riffs and plays the bouncy pop tunes one might expect to hear in a small café, standards and ballads from Tin Pan Alley, jazzy numbers by Michael Franks and Billy Joel, but he learns that success is just as elusive in a small coffee shop as it is on the big stage. After each song he is greeted not with polite applause but with the rude slurping of cappuccino and the low contemptuous rumbles from the poets.

He is grateful when Salme closes the café for the night and he can retreat to the basement. Despite its gloom and solitude and faint odor of chemicals, a sour smell that reminds him of those high school lab experiments he once slept through—the fleshy bull frogs, pale green to the point of translucence, bobbing around in big glass jars of formaldehyde like things half-remembered from childhood dreams—the basement becomes a kind of sanctuary, shielding him from the whirlwind of disappointment and failure and his own needling ambitions that await him at the top of the stairs each day.

In the corner, there is a utility tub with running water where he brushes his teeth, washes his face and armpits, what the street people call a whore’s bath, and below the window, there is an end table with a lamp and a pile of travel magazines, the print faded, the pages brittle with age like the delicate parchment of an ancient codex. And of course there are the big wooden crates stacked three and four high like the turrets of an ancient fortress protecting him from any possible intruders who might slink through the darkness and do unspeakable things to him.

For weeks he has wondered what might be inside the crates, and now, out of sheer boredom and simple curiosity, he randomly selects one and pries it open. Initially he is baffled by the curious artifacts buried beneath the straw—peculiar wooden idols with grotesque leers, tin canisters packed with spices, leather-bound volumes written in indecipherable and ancient tongues, waxes and oils and fragrant sandalwood boxes filled with dust. The ashes of forgotten kings, revered mystics?

Inside the crate marked Zanzibar, he finds a glass hookah pipe with a half dozen hoses that reach out like tentacles to caress his cheeks and a canopic jar made of alabaster depicting an Egyptian god—Aten? Horus? Ra?—stuffed with hashish the color of desert sand at sunset. He packs the bowl, lights a match, and takes in the curative smoke that coils in thick purple plumes around his head. The stuff makes him feel disembodied, divorced from reality, in a vague state of turmoil. Spectral shadows dance along the basement floor. His mind is adrift in an incalculable waste; his thoughts gather like the heavy drops of moisture that collect and fall from the banging pipes, thoughts so small and scattered that they quickly evaporate and merge into the mossy cinderblock walls.

He removes his clothes and waits for Salme to join him in bed. Will attributes their affair to the obvious—she is lonely. But her eyes hint at something deeper. They are enigmatic, shrewd, ringed by dark circles that make her appear weary and excited, clever and naïve, intelligent and dull, creative and destructive, reasonable and unhinged.

“Oh, it has been such a
long
time,” she whispers, stroking his chest and flat pale stomach. She straddles him with the ferocity of a famished she-wolf about to eviscerate its prey, and if she has any thoughts of the merchant marine, whose ship even now may be sailing through a perilous strait that divides hostile lands, she gives no sign. They spend many nights ensconced in the warm cocoon of musty blankets. It’s an arrangement that pleases them both.

During that long, brutal winter, business slows to a crawl, and with the worsening weather Salme starts to worry that she won’t be able to keep the café afloat for much longer, that the IRS will audit her, that the authorities will deport her to Zanzibar. Ignoring the ornery poets’ insinuations about their beloved barista and her new “boy toy,” Will sets aside his guitar in the afternoons to help her with the day-to-day chores—he mops the floors, washes the dishes, and even scrubs the toilets. He refuses to accept any more of her money, but Salme never fails to show him her gratitude in other ways.

Then during the night of the Great Blizzard, when the snow piles up so high that it seems to absorb the ghostly blue streetlights so that the world is immersed in perpetual darkness, day and night indistinguishable from one another, Salme locks up early and instructs Will to wait for her in the basement. He stretches out on the bed and reaches for the hookah, but Salme doesn’t come down to join him.

For one troubling hour he shivers alone in the cold and listens to the shrieking wind that sounds more and more like a heated exchange. He props himself up on an elbow, his body tense, his teeth chattering. He attributes the noises to the raging storm and potent marijuana. Paranoia tends to get the best of him, that’s all. Besides, Salme is a smart woman, tough, experienced; she can probably handle any trouble without his help. He would only get in the way. But at the approach of midnight, he decides to investigate. Quietly he creeps up the stairs and presses an ear to the door. A deep voice demands to see the thing that she keeps penned up in the basement, the sniveling creature, the worm, the insect.

After a long silence, Salme says, “The café is now closed. Permanently. Gone out of business. No one is allowed inside. You must leave. You must—”

But her words are abruptly cut off. There is a struggle, a boom of shattering glass, a terrible gasp of strangulation, a piano wire pulled tight around tender flesh, a final desperate plea for mercy and forgiveness.

Will considers screaming for help, but in this neighborhood, who would dare come to his rescue? At this hour, even the police are reluctant to get out of their cruisers. He races down the stairs, stumbles over his own feet, nearly cracks open his skull on the claws of a pry bar. He searches for a closet, a crawl space, an alcove, but there is nowhere to hide. He turns off the lights and crouches behind a stack of crates. He tries not to breathe, not to think.

The door creaks open. A wedge of white light slashes across the cement floor. The heavy thud of steel-toed boots resounds in the basement like the slow, steady beat of a kettledrum. At the bottom of the stairs stands a man whose shaved head and pronounced cheekbones remind Will of those B-movie bandits that slobber with inhuman malice, a man who has known exile, driven from civilization time and again like a thief and forced to hide from marauding warlords in wadi-channels and cliff-hollows, burying his stool in the sand, burning scrub-brush for warmth, slitting the throats of pack-animals for sustenance, slipping across porous borders by the light of a gibbous moon, disappearing into towns reduced to ashes where children feral and skittish observe him from the shadows of mud huts, an ancient culture acting out the final cataclysmic scene of its long history, and he the last observer of the drama.

The man narrows his viper’s eyes and stares at the crate marked Zanzibar, sees that its lid has been ripped open, its contents scattered around the room. Calmly he lifts Will’s guitar from the corner of the bed, plucks a string or two, and with one mighty swing shatters it against the cinderblock wall. Tiny shards of wood fly in a hundred directions.

“Come out,” says the man.

Will raises his head. “Please …” he whispers.

“So, it’s you. Freddy Mercury.” The man smiles with grim satisfaction and tosses the busted guitar neck to the floor. He takes a measured step, then with a languorous wave of his hand motions not to the crate exactly but to the black and depthless dimensions inside.

“Get in,” he says.

Will backs away. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“But why?”

“You know why.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Rubbing the stump of an amputated finger across his lips and angled teeth, the man says, “I’m not a very patient person.”

Will knows it is useless to deny his culpability. If experience has taught him anything it’s that guilt is malignant and unconquerable, something from which no one can ever truly escape. Like death, it never tires of stalking its prey. He accepts his fate, resigns himself to it totally, and to his amazement all of his fears vanish, in an instant, and he feels a sense of morbid tranquility. He climbs inside the crate, crouches down, tucks his knees against his chin, curls into a tight ball.

The man goes to work. He slams the lid down, hammering it shut with a pry bar and a handful of rusty nails. The wood splinters at the corners of the crate and gouges the back of Will’s neck. Grunting and cursing, the man drags the crate across the floor and up the stairs. Will’s head bounces violently against the sides. He cradles his legs, rocks back and forth. The café door opens, and through the thin slats of wood, he feels a sharp stab of icy air and sees pins of indigo light. The hinges of a tailgate open, a truck engine rumbles to life. In a reassuring voice the man speaks to him, tells him that the loading docks of the shipyard are not far from here. “All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well …”

Will sleeps and dreams of a new melody in the dissonant twelve-tone musical scale. There is no middle C, no starting point from which to center his consciousness. He envisions himself writhing on his deathbed, suffering from some unnamed affliction, one that utterly baffles a group of doctors, who with perfect impassivity listen to the final beats of his heart and watch his body go limp; the plaintive motif turns into the lamentation of his grieving parents as they stand before an open casket at the funeral parlor to view his corpse, his eyes glued shut, his lips wired together, his broad features dulled by the artless application of makeup, his fingernails manicured and positioned in an unconvincing imitation of repose. “What a misguided boy,” they say, “what a terrible disappointment.” During the funeral at the Jesuit chapel, the band members reunite a final time to play a dirge, transforming the motif into an insidious danse macabre, but they shed no tears for their fallen comrade. For them this is just another gig, another way to buy more dope and booze. Their performance is rushed; it lacks passion and conviction. Out in the blizzard, two gravediggers wait by the door, whistling the tuneless melody, shovels at the ready.

At some point, Will opens his eyes, though he can never be entirely sure if he is finally awake or still dreaming. In the darkness of the crate, it’s hard to tell. He hears the crashing surf and the demon piping of birds heralding a new day and sees seeping slowly from his lips the wraithlike quarter notes of his dream song. He breathes the stale air and worries that he will be forgotten in this box, just another amusing curio, mummified and leathery like a thing dredged up from a haunted bog, but in time the lid of the crate will surely fly open, and instead of the overcast skies of home he will see the bright blue sea that surrounds the faraway island of Zanzibar.

The Jesuits place a high value on the written word, so much so that they hire an outsider to run the literary magazine. Under the direction of Batya Pinter,
The Millstone
garners recognition as one of the finest publications produced by any high school, private or public, in the United States, its stories and poems one step removed from the divine Logos, its contributors destined to achieve great things, heirs to the throne of Carver and Cheever, tutelary gods that guide the pens of these fledgling scribes and lead them toward the sweet promises of alcoholism and sexual dysfunction.

With the release of each issue, agents and publishers pore over the journal, hoping to discover and capitalize on the most original voice of a new generation, some
enfant terrible
who will gleefully stir up trouble on the literary scene, but
The Millstone
has, at least so far, produced only well-mannered boys who dwell on mainstream subjects almost hagiographic in their depictions of common people. According to these young men, the world is populated not by cynics and miscreants, but with unrecognized saints who feed the hungry and provide shelter for the homeless. While many of these teenage boys fall prey to the shameless sentimentality of conventional storytelling, some of them do recognize the sad fact that life is not without its tragedies and injustices, and occasionally they compose poignant pieces about the unexpected loss of a beloved parish priest or a loyal family dog. With whatever protection pseudonymity affords them, they even publish the rare ribald story, chronicling the secret liaisons of an unconventional couple whose forbidden relationship ends, depending upon the temperament of its author, in either comedic or catastrophic circumstances.