Yok (23 page)

Tom-Tom came out of the kitchen, so Mike avoided answering.

“Now damn it, all that's left is to go home,” the crow called out.

He and Gazelle lived in the apartment above the restaurant.

“Do you want to spend the night at our place, Mike?” he asked. “I can toast bread for breakfast.”

Mike weighed the invitation. In the one scale was avoiding the genie, in the other Gazelle's intolerable snoring.

“Thanks,” he answered at last. “But I think I'll toddle off home. Another time?”

Crow laughed happily and patted him hard on the back. It was the bird's way of showing his appreciation.

“Do I owe you anything?” Chimpanzee asked.

“An answer,” said Sam. “But we can deal with that later.”

Mike nodded. He had already lost focus, forgotten the crow and the gazelle, and instead was back at the verses he'd written. As he stepped out onto the sidewalk he completed the chorus in his head:

But do you believe what they're saying?

(Every thought has an end)

Do you believe what they're saying?

(Every life its outer limit)

Do you believe what they're saying?

(There's no way out again)

Do you believe what they're saying?

(Do you know how it feels?)

'Cause freedom is / freedom is / freedom isn't here.

 

5.

D
id you hear what Mike said?” Mr. Rozenblatt laughed out loud. “He suggested sole!”

Mrs. Rozenblatt, dressed for the day in a small pillbox hat, chimed in with strained but grandiose laughter, whereupon even Ilja Crocodile giggled and Mike himself smiled a little, even as his heart ached.

Mike Chimpanzee truly wanted Mr. Rozenblatt to like him. It might be put more elegantly, but it was just that simple. It was a wish the ape hardly dared admit to himself, and amateur psychologists could bicker about the reasons behind it. But it meant that Mike exerted himself much too hard, and fell even further down in Mr. Rozenblatt's eyes.

“There's nothing wrong with sole, is there?” Cocker Spaniel defended her intended.

This caused Mr. Rozenblatt to laugh even louder; he snorted derisively and slapped his belly.

“No, no, I was only joking,” said Mike, trying to make himself heard. “It's clear, darling, we can't have sole, can we?”

They were sitting around a pastry table at La Cueva. The legendary chef Jan-Henrik Swan sat at the end of the table, and he was the one who had just suggested fish as the main course. Over by the stoves the cooks were doing prep work for the evening; again and again Swan cast worried glances in their direction. He was having a hard time concentrating on the wedding planning and it was obvious he would prefer to end the meeting as quickly as possible.

“No worries, Mike,” Cocker Spaniel whispered, placing a consoling paw on Chimpanzee's shoulder. “He's only making a fool of himself. Of course you can have sole.”

Mike felt extremely irritated by this kindness. In her father's eyes the fact that Cocker Spaniel intervened and tried to rescue the situation hardly strengthened Mike's stock. But snapping at his intended in this situation would only make matters worse, so carefully he shook off her paw.

“I was imagining an organic salmon pâté,” said Chef Swan, unaffected by the stuffed animals' peculiar conversation, “with a whitefish roe sauce and my award-winning Brussels sprout risotto. For dessert a blueberry soufflé, resting on a bed of blackberries and raspberries, served tentatively with a young sauvignon blanc.”

“Oh, that sounds marvelous,” said Mrs. Rozenblatt.

“Dear Swan, you are a true artist,” said Mr. Rozenblatt.

Cocker Spaniel smiled happily, and Ilja Crocodile struggled with her saliva production.

“Perhaps we could replace the raspberries with cloudberries?” Mike suggested.

The words felt like slaps; that was how the Rozenblatt family understood the comment. Terrified and furious glances were aimed at Chimpanzee. He knew what he had done; he had wagered everything on a final, desperate card; after having been reduced to an ignorant lout time after time by Mr. and Mrs. Rozenblatt, this was how he sought revenge.

The silence was only broken by the clatter of the cooks at the stove.

After having stared at Mike with fury and contempt, the company turned their pleading eyes to Jan-Henrik Swan.

But the chef shrugged one wing without interest, and said, “Well, cloudberries instead . . . that might not be a bad idea.”

And thereafter he declared the meeting over and returned to his proper element, where his colleagues were waiting.

A
few hours later Mike Chimpanzee still had a hard time letting go of Mr. Rozenblatt's condescending attitude, but he did his best to focus on the moment and aimed his light blue gaze at the lovely deer.

“Doll,” he said in a voice so smooth it made the Breeze outside seem pushy, “I'm always going to love you.”

Tears were running down her cheeks. The sun settled in her lap, the weather was midday and they were sitting across from each other in one of the booths at Scheherazade.

“Mike Chimpanzee,” she answered, “you are a swine.”

He smiled a tired but loving smile and shook his head almost imperceptibly. He could not help it that the music playing in the background claimed all his attention for a moment, the syncopated eighth notes on the rider just as the bass line ground on in quarter notes; only Nikki Lee and the Suspects could rock like that.

Then he again recalled the lovely deer, on whose cheeks the round roses had been sewn with a master's hand.

“We're torn apart, you and me,” he said seriously. “We don't have the ability to make ourselves whole.”

She looked at him as if he were the last, disintegrating bite of a hamburger with too much mustard and mayonnaise.

“You're a cowardly, miserable wretch, Mike Chimpanzee,” she spat out.

“That I am,” he exclaimed. “Guilty. Have I ever said anything else? I'm cowardly and I'm miserable. But a hope lives in my heart, a hope that one day you are going to understand, and forgive.”

The scent of burnt almonds and marijuana drifted past the table. The chimpanzee twisted his head to hold it back a little while before it disappeared out on the street. Behind the bar stood Tom-Tom Crow, drying glasses. From the kitchen Sam Gazelle was heard trying to sing harmony to Nikki Lee. The muffled sound of the gazelle's carving knife against the cutting board—Sam was slicing cucumber, leeks, and carrots—kept time with the beat.

Mike was sitting parallel to the table, his feet on the bench and back against the wall, and looked her deep in the eyes. They had not known each other more than six months, but until now he had always been able to persuade her.

Not today.

“I'm not coming back,” she said.

Her tears had dried, and he heard how angry she was.

“Doll, believe me,” he said.

“The last time you called me. And I came. But that's not happening again.”

“Doll, I would never—”

“And stop calling me ‘doll,' damn it!” she screamed.

He held his hairy fingers up in the air in an attempt to defend himself. Scratched his ear and placed the other hand on his chest.

“It hurts,” he stated.

The intent was to show that his heart was bleeding, but she misunderstood him.

“In your ear? I don't give a damn about that,” she hissed.

She slid quickly out of the booth and remained standing for a moment in front of the table to heighten the drama. Then she left the restaurant with furious steps. At the bar Tom-Tom Crow continued drying glasses, unconcerned. He was not the most sophisticated stuffed animal in Yok, but there was something mysterious in the crow's small porcelain eyes that made you want to gain his sympathy. Now he mostly appeared bored. Through the open door to the street the sound of the deer's high heels was heard as she ran down toward flax yellow Piazza di Bormio. The chimpanzee could not help noticing that her running was not in sync with the music.

“Sam!” Mike called out toward the kitchen. “Today you'll have to share the weed!”

But the hacking from the kitchen counter did not stop.

Mike leaned his head back, against the window, and closed his eyes. He had let it go on far too long. He should have ended it the same evening he proposed to Cocker Spaniel, but he hadn't been able to. The deer was too beautiful, her eyes too large. Yet they had never been meant for each other, him and her. Mike sighed. He did not understand how he could love so intensely—which had actually been the case with the deer—and lose so easily. Was it pain he was looking for, this self-contempt that caused him to literally feel sick?

The anxiety then increased when he thought about the pink rosettes in his lovely Cocker Spaniel's ears and her moistly glistening glass nose.

“Sam!” Mike called again. “I have my own at home, but I didn't bring any with me. You've got to share!”

Sam came out of the kitchen. He untied his apron and set it over a bar stool. Under it he had on a light blue ruffled shirt that was much too small.

“You may be worth a break, honey,” he said, gliding down on the bench in the booth where the deer had just been sitting. “Have you made someone sad again?”

Sam Gazelle lit two joints, and with studied slowness he pouted his full lips around one before he gave it to Mike, accompanied by a long look.

“I'm the one who's sad,” the rock star answered, ignoring the gazelle's seduction tricks. “I'm not in control of my own feelings, Sam. I can't help it. I know I've hurt others, but most of all I've hurt myself.”

“Poor silly little you.” The gazelle sighed, smiling wickedly. “You run off with a beautiful deer, dump her because you're going to marry someone else, and feel endlessly sorry for yourself. Honey, you know that I love you, but—”

“It's not like that!” Mike protested, letting the cigarette paper flare with a deep puff. “I don't know why I . . . I guess I thought that . . . it's like never the idea that I . . .”

But he didn't know what he wanted to say because he didn't know what he felt.

“You're so young,” said Sam, and the gazelle's voice was suddenly serious. “I've seen it happen with others, too, darling. It gets to be too much. Overwhelming. Honey, your enormous success, it was not about whether you did or didn't deserve it. And no one can blame you for wanting it to happen again. What stuffed animal wouldn't? Of course you'll have to toil hard to get this record to work out as well as the last one. But when that happens, remember it was something you wanted. Something you struggled for. That it was okay to want that. And that it's okay to enjoy it. It's not you they love, Mike, it's what you've achieved. It's absolutely not the same thing. But it's okay to let them love what you've achieved.”

Mike nodded. And smoked. And nodded again. Then, unexpectedly, a tear fell from his eye.

“Are you crying? Darling, are you crying?” Sam Gazelle exclaimed, and his emotions overflowed.

The gazelle was about to slide off his bench to throw himself around the table and hug the poor star, but Mike—who realized what was about to happen—was just as quick from his side. Before Gazelle was able to exploit this golden opportunity, Mike was standing by the door, waving to Tom-Tom at the bar.

“Got to go now,” he said. “Tom-Tom, Sam, see you soon. And, Sam? Thanks.”

 

6.

B
rown Brothers' showcase recording studio was in the attic of the National Bank offices on cucumber green Place St. Fargeau. Hundreds of superfluous square feet of white-glazed oak parquet, daylight streaming in through the skylights, casually placed, oversized white lounge suites and walls black with guitar and bass amplifiers. There were freestanding kitchen islands encircled by bar stools, and housing refrigerators stocked with ice, beer, and pop next to cabinets full of alcohol and chips. Musicians could move in here for weeks at a time to torment themselves through monotonous rehearsals and recording sessions that in the end gave the record company twice as much money as the musicians themselves.

“It's in the silences that you get the groove.” Lancelot Lemur nodded. “You know,
ticka-ta-tick ticka-ta-tick, cha-cha
.”

They were each sitting in an overstuffed black leather armchair in front of the massive mixing board in the studio. The number of slide controls and knobs gave Mike a headache, thinking of the possible combinations. Lemur nodded four beats and let his long fingers indicate the rests; the silences he was talking about. He had on a black, see-through shirt and a pair of tight, black leather pants. His silver armband with a dozen skulls rattled as he moved his hands, the music streamed out of the speakers; they were listening to the afternoon's recordings.

Mike mumbled a confirmation: Sure, he felt the groove.

They smoked in silence. Both of them tore the filters off their cigarettes, both had double espressos, and though they had never worked together before, they felt a connection from the first day. Lancelot Lemur was one of Mollisan Town's most successful producers; earlier in the year he had made the Screaming Canaries a phenomenon, but his career was as long as it was legendary.

Gavin Toad maintained that Lemur was fired up at the chance to work with Mike. That couldn't possibly be true, but all the same Mike was secretly flattered to be sitting here discussing pauses with the great Lancelot Lemur.

“Gavin only heard the chorus,” the chimpanzee now explained, “and it wasn't even quite finished. Now it is. The verse, too, more or less. I'm still polishing a few things, but . . . it's going to be . . . well, you can listen yourself. I really think I'm onto something.”