The Children(97)

“Missed that one, too.”

“Most people did. I think he intended it to be that way. Open only to the most committed. Like a pilgrimage.”

Arlene’s hair was pinned off her neck in a belle epoque job that would’ve been ridiculous on anyone else. She patted one puffed red wing, as if to soothe it, and went on.





Interstitial




Live at the Evernight (2022)

Ennis Sharpe (1991–)

Evernight Motel, Sunstone, Nevada





Ennis had been in Nevada about two months, working on the show, when I decided to drive up and surprise him.

I knew right away it was a mistake. He wasn’t angry, exactly, but he wasn’t too happy to see me, either. We had a fight, and when I woke the next morning, in his rented Airstream, he was already gone. I was pissed. I got dressed and drove straight to the Evernight.

The land was ugly, all wrinkled around the base of this wrecked motel. It smelled good, though. Like clean smoke. I felt nervous, getting out of the car. For some reason I didn’t want him to hear me coming. Not that I was quiet, going over rocks and stuff with my cane. I let myself into a lobby that was like 1980s Pompeii, and I thought, What has he been doing here all these weeks? The place looked untouched.

Then I heard him talking, somewhere out of sight. I would’ve assumed he was with Candy, but I’d never heard him sound like this. Soft and sweet and . . . deferential. I heard his tone, not the words, and immediately I thought, He’s cheating on me. Then whoever he was talking to answered him.

Guin, it was the voice. From the phone booth, in Whirlybird. One hundred percent, it was. This time, I didn’t like it. I felt—I should’ve felt safe, Ennis was there. But I didn’t. I turned around to get the hell out, and I put my cane down on some loose bit of something. It scraped across the floor and both voices stopped.

I can’t move very fast. It was hell trying to hurry over gravel. I drove straight to the Airstream and I lay down to think, and when Ennis came back, I pretended to be sleeping. I felt him standing over me awhile. Didn’t touch me, didn’t talk. I could smell the desert on him, stuck in his clothes. Then he went away again.

As soon as he was gone, I got up and drove straight to LA. I was mostly living with him by then, and when I got to his place Candy was there. She was waiting out front with all my stuff packed in boxes. Locks changed, the whole deal. That coward even blocked my number. I never saw or heard from him ever again.

So, Guin, what I wanted to say. About the voice, the person he was talking to. I know it’s not—I know it’s not. But what I thought when I heard it was it sounded so much like old videos I’d watched of your mother. The voice. It sounded just like Edith Sharpe.

You want another one of those?





Fifty-One

One day until Mother




Guin looked down. Her glass was empty, her mouth numbed and humming. As the cocktail warmed it gained dimension: a conifer tang, a sliver of quartzite placed on the tongue. The almost unbearable headiness of ripe stone fruit. It tasted, she thought, of the Farmhouse.

Her tongue moved sluggishly. “Are you sure it—that it really sounded like . . .”

“No.” Arlene was turned from her, making a second round. “I’m not sure.”

Four days ago a voice called out to Guin in the factory and saved her life. One word, dissolving even as she heard it. In that first hysterical instant, standing at the rim of that awful hole, she’d thought, Edith.

Arlene spun on her stool and held out a fresh drink. Circe offering the cup to Ulysses.

Guin took it. She wanted to ask the right things, catch the thread. Of the voice, the art, Ennis. What was he like, how did he talk, think, live? Questions clotted her throat.

“What do you think you’d have seen,” she said, “if you’d gone toward them instead? Ennis and—the voice?”

“I couldn’t make myself go any closer.”

“Right, but if . . .”

“I know. I mean, I don’t know.” Arlene looked nervy, suddenly. Her voice a little breathless. “Can I ask you something?”

Guin nodded, and in doing it realized she was drunk. Her head dipped too low, righted itself clumsily. Arlene didn’t notice, she was getting to the point. The reason she’d asked Guin to come here, when she had nothing useful to say.

“Is it real?”

Her gaze was so intense Guin thought she’d missed part of the question. “Is what real?”

“It. The Ninth City.”

Her voice skimmed the words, like a hand touching the hem of something holy. And Guin felt a wave of nihilism so intense she wanted to lie face down on the floor.

“Jesus, Arlene. No. It’s fiction. Entirely fiction.”

“Because Ennis had a way of disappearing.” She went on as if Guin hadn’t spoken. “Sometimes I’d wake up alone in the middle of the night. I’d walk through the whole house looking for him, then I’d go back to bed and there he was. Acting like he’d been there all along. His place was big, but it wasn’t that big. And after the breakup, whenever I tried to see him—in Vegas, in LA—I never could. He wasn’t avoiding me, he was evading me. I was always just missing him. Isn’t that weird?”