Yok (27 page)

During this harangue Mike had crawled up in the armchair and was now sitting normally. He still didn't know what she was talking about.

“But, Mom,” said Mike, “you shouldn't take it all on yourself—”

“When you arrived, I was so happy,” Ilja continued; her tone was high and shrill, everyone in the store listened to her. “I couldn't have been happier. Of course your father didn't understand a thing, but I knew. You were chosen, Mike, you were special. Your musicality, your charisma, even when you started school it was clear that you would become something special. At the same time I knew you had a heavy disposition. You didn't get that from me; this constant questioning and brooding comes from your father's side of the family. What good has that done, tell me that? Why can't you ever be content? Was the Rozenblatt family not fine enough for you?”

“But, Mom, the Rozenblatt family . . . I love Cocker Spaniel, and . . .”

“With all your prospects,” Ilja Crocodile went on. “You could have anyone, Mike, anyone at all. There isn't a female who wouldn't run to the altar if she knew you wanted her. And then you can't even make this happen!”

“Mom, we're getting married in just a few—”

“Nothing will come of that, Mike,” Crocodile howled unhappily. “I get sad when I think about it. You have made your mother sad. Are you happy now? Are you proud of that? Seeing me like this, in tears?”

“Mom, why are you saying that nothing will come of—”

“But I'm angry, too!” Ilja shouted, almost surprised. “Really furious!”

She raised her handbag to give her son another beating, but he jumped up from the chair and took a few steps away.

“Mom, what are you talking about?”

“Don't put on airs,” Crocodile hissed. “Mrs. Rosenthal called. They're cancelling the wedding. You good-for-nothing. What have you done?”

M
ike Chimpanzee stood outside the Rozenblatt family's well-maintained town house in Amberville and pounded on the door. The narrow gravel walk up to the house from the gate was neatly raked, the sun was shining from a clear blue sky, yellow hollyhocks stood at attention in the flower beds on each side of the stairway, and the neighborhood rested in deep harmony. Mike's panting disturbed the calm. He had already terrorized the doorbell for a few minutes, without success. He knew someone was at home; he'd seen a movement behind the curtains in the kitchen just as he arrived.

What had happened? On the way from Vechado to Amberville Mike could not make heads or tails of what his mom had said. Had she been drinking? Was it the start of dementia? It seemed completely crazy that the wedding was cancelled and no one told the groom?

“Open up!” he shouted at Cocker Spaniel's closed door. “I see you're in there!”

Being noisy ought to be effective. If Mike knew the Rozenblatt family, there was nothing they feared more than being scandalized in front of the neighbors.

“Open up!”

Behind Mike Chimpanzee, a car pulled in with screeching tires. When the ape turned around, he saw that it was Mr. Rozenblatt parking his dark green Volga. His face beet red, Rozenblatt threw open the car door and ran up the well-raked path to the steps, where the chimpanzee was shouting.

“Now you shut up!” Mr. Rozenblatt yelled.

Mike realized what had happened. Someone inside the house—Mrs. Rozenblatt or Cocker Spaniel—had called Mr. Rozenblatt at work and asked him to come. Averting the conflict with the chimpanzee was a task for the head of the family, and here he was now, Mr. Rozenblatt, the knight in shining armor who would rescue his daughter from the wicked rock star.

“What are you up to?” an indignant Mr. Rozenblatt thundered, taking a few steps up the stairway. “Are you out of your mind? Get out of here!”

Mike proceeded carefully.

“My mom told me you called and said the wedding is cancelled,” he said calmly. “That sounds completely crazy, but I wanted to—”

“Everything is cancelled!” Mr. Rozenblatt confirmed.

Rozenblatt took the last step up to the top of the landing, and without thinking about it Mike took a step down. This reversed their positions, and Mr. Rozenblatt felt more comfortable.

“But—”

“And it's not even because of me,” Rozenblatt added ironically. “Cocker Spaniel is crushed. And even so . . . even so I can't help feeling satisfied! I knew it, Chimpanzee. That you would break her heart! You're a wretch!”

“Break her . . . but what happened?”

“My wife, Mrs. Rozenblatt, gets her claws painted once a week, do you understand, Chimpanzee? Does that ring any bells?”

Mike didn't know what Mr. Rozenblatt was talking about, and admitted so.

“Mrs. Rozenblatt has gone to the same claw sculptress for many years,” said the satisfied Mr. Rozenblatt. “A charming little stuffed animal. But yesterday she was sad.”

Mike shook his head. Everyone seemed to be talking in riddles, as if there was an agreement among the parents.

“Yesterday she was sad, Chimpanzee, my wife's claw sculptress, because a ruffian had broken her heart. Can you imagine that, Chimpanzee, breaking such a sweet deer's heart? It turned out that the ruffian . . . he'd had several relationships at the same time, and one of the females he was seeing he intended to marry!”

Mike's heart stopped beating.

“But we can make the deer happy about that, at least. That there won't be any wedding. Get out of here, Chimpanzee, and don't ever, ever come back!”

V
oices conversing, dishes clinking, the stuffy warmth that smelled of nicotine, grilled meat, and heavy perfume. Through the loudspeakers Larry “Car Crash” Hyena howled to the painful climax of the warped guitar. The HateLites rocked on to the best of their ability; the drums rattled out a rolling rhythm that the bass transformed into a tightly wound carpet of sound. Plopping and dripping synth sounds dotted the carpet and above it all was Larry's scratchy voice.

Mike nodded gloomily to himself. Lancelot Lemur must despise the HateLites, he thought; they were much too intellectual for a hit machine.

“Another?”

Mike nodded. Tom-Tom Crow filled the glass to the brim. The whiskey smelled smoky, the joint tasted sweet, and life was bitter.

“I'll be damned,” said Crow. “So it's all over now, huh?”

It was the third time in as many minutes that Crow had said just those words. Mike nodded. Even he had a hard time believing it. Yesterday he was engaged, today he had been dumped. Yesterday life had been mapped out, today it was unpredictable again.

Mike drank. He was already drunk, but he could get drunker. Larry croaked on in the background.

“Mike, darling, I heard . . .”

Sam Gazelle came running from the kitchen. He hugged the surprised ape hard and much too long, not releasing his hold until Mike freed himself with controlled force. Sam's eyes were shiny with tears, his eyebrows raised in empathy.

“You must be crushed!”

Mike mumbled in agreement.

“Oh, honey,” said Sam, who mistook quietness for sorrow, “what a bummer. She was really pretty.”

Mike nodded.

“But the family, Mike? At the same time, you got rid of her mom and dad. There's always something to be happy about. Do you want any pills?”

Gazelle dug in his pants pockets and pulled out an impressive number of colorful pills and vials. But Mike shook his head.

“But you have to stay here with us tonight,” said Sam. “We're not letting you be by yourself. If you try to leave here, Tom-Tom is going to carry you back, honey. Oh, Mike, what a bummer. She was the one your heart had chosen, wasn't she?”

Mike mumbled something and emptied the glass. He hated being reduced to a victim. But he didn't dare protest. Cocker Spaniel had been his betrothed, they were going to be married in only a few weeks; these were unequivocal facts. Sam Gazelle's concerns were logical. Mike ought to feel abandoned and rejected. He had reason besides to be ashamed. It was his own infidelity that was behind all this misery.

“I don't intend to do anything stupid, Sam,” he said. “I'm not the type, you know?”

“Under circumstances like these, you never know,” Gazelle replied. “Right now we're standing here, in a well-lit bar with lots of stuffed animals around. But tonight, when you're alone . . .”

Mike Chimpanzee gave his genie a thought, and thought that alone would be marvelous.

“ . . . when you're alone,” Gazelle continued, “then perhaps everything will feel different. That's why we want you here.”

Mike nodded. Maybe the gazelle was right, and Mike almost wished that were the case. Because when the shock subsided after the visit to the Rozenblatts in Amberville, it was not despair that was visible behind the fog of emotion. Instead, Mike had experienced an unpleasant feeling of liberation. It was as unexpected as it was intense.

And Mike would not dare admit that even to Sam Gazelle; he felt relieved to escape the wedding and Cocker Spaniel.

 

11.

A
t home there was a small, black piece of plastic on the desk. It was almost triangular, chipped on the corner with a white line that went from edge to edge.

Mike Chimpanzee couldn't help it, but when he returned to the antique store on Calle Gran Via the next morning—in the end he had been forced to stay with Tom-Tom and Sam—he did so at a run. Cocker Spaniel and the Rozenblatt family had intruded, distracted him, and caused him to think about other things. But when morning dawned and Mike came to life, with a bursting headache and a tongue that felt like it was dipped in acetone, it was not the wedding that was on his mind. Instead it was the second wish that the genie had granted him. And this caused his pulse to race.

The genie flew right behind him on the indigo blue sidewalk, trying to calm him.

“Sir, there's no danger, I swear. I was there the whole night. Took the opportunity to change the sheets on the bed, it must have been a while, why don't we burn the old ones? Then—and I'm sure there's a proper reason, but let's not go into that—I threw out all the cigarette butts in the desk drawer. I've had the situation under control the whole time.”

But Mike continued running, threw open the door to the store, and hurried over to the desk.

The piece of plastic was still there.

He sank down into the desk chair, out of breath. Thought a moment. And could state with confidence that he didn't regret it at all.

When at last he had dared to wish for Nikki Lee's guitar pick, the magical piece of plastic that would transform his life and give his pathetic songwriting the lift he couldn't achieve on his own, he had been worried that he would regret it the next day. But . . . Mike breathed slowly and closed his eyes . . . no, nothing.

Ever since Nils Gull told the story about Nikki Lee, the idea had been there. Integrity had hindered him. There were no detours to finding his artistic expression. To express the contemporary version of Truth and Pain, you couldn't use the help of ancient genies. Call it pride or madness, but at first Mike had not even given the idea any serious thought. It was more the enticement of personally finding a counterpart to Nikki Lee's guitar pick that incited him.

But night after night after night, he had failed in his attempts. The songs didn't work, and he didn't know where he should start looking for his good-luck amulet.

Then the idea occurred to him: What if he asked the genie?

M
ike pulled out the phone jack, turned off his cell phone, made a pot of strong coffee, and sat down at the desk with the tape recorder ready, notebook open, and guitar in his lap. Solemnly, he took the guitar pick between thumb and index finger, raised it in the air, and turned it slowly in the light from the desk lamp. It was impossible to imagine that this piece of plastic had been in Nikki Lee's throat the day she was delivered to her parents. Mike had asked the genie if there might be two identical pieces of plastic in Mollisan Town, or if Nikki Lee had lost hers, but the genie had not answered in a way that was comprehensible.

Whatever.

Mike Chimpanzee would finally write the songs that would outlive him.

He set the guitar pick carefully on the top E string, let his hand fall and listened to an E minor that sang in the guitar in a way he'd never heard before. He was on his way.

Mike worked without interruption for ten hours. Not even the genie disturbed him. Possibly Fredrik felt sufficiently satisfied to be one wish closer to his own freedom, or else he kept silent out of respect. Chimpanzee had never before radiated this sort of focused energy.

Over and over and over again
, Mike hummed to the guitar chord that filled the room with its metallic roundness.
Over and over and over again
. It was so simple and so clever at the same time.

When the Evening Storm waned and darkness fell, Mike pulled on a jacket and walked quickly around the corner—he carefully avoided Scheherazade—to Reza's ToGo, where he bought a kebab and a cola. Then he continued working until he literally fell asleep at the desk a few hours after midnight. He woke up early with a nasty pain in his back, and considered lying down on the sofa bed for a few hours' proper rest. He saw his notes out of the corner of his eye and was again seized by the frenzied joy of creation.

Mike Chimpanzee was experiencing the most intense surge of creativity. To say that he found himself in a blessed flow was to reduce his condition to something general and familiar. He actually felt that he was in direct contact with Nikki Lee, that an invisible line of communication had been drawn from her soul right into his guitar, and that out of her life and suffering he was granted a wisdom and intuition that he had never been close to.

Over and over and over again
.

Something inside him also said that this was urgent, that the power he was experiencing would end and that the genie's “theft” must soon be discovered and punished. He worked to keep up with his brain's energy.