Alyzon Whitestarr (18 page)

“Good to meet you, Harrison,” Da said and shook his hand.

“Harrison? After the
Star Wars
guy?” Mel asked.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Harrison answered. “I think ma parents wanted tae make sure I’d have an inferiority complex so they could control me better.”

Da grinned, but Mel launched into his If-I-was-running-the-world speech, shifting the focus to attack oppression and injustice within the traditional bourgeois family unit.

“Mel, give us a break,” Da groaned. “Harrison, this man is not related by blood to us, so don’t worry.”

“Oh, he likes crazy people,” I said, and hustled Harrison out and up the stairs.

“Very funny,” Harrison said. “Now your father thinks I’m a nutter.”

“It’s OK, he likes crazy people, too,” I said.

Mirandah was coming out of the bathroom, her hair wet and dripping and very green.

“Green is a very organic color, don’t you think?” she asked in that vague way she has when in the process of changing colors. I think it’s like the trance snakes go into before they shed their skins.

“Is she on drugs?” Harrison asked when she had drifted downstairs.

“She’s on colors,” I said, opening the door.

Harrison stopped in the doorway at the sight of Serenity’s side of the room. “What’s this? You’re schizophrenic, or does that just represent your dark side?”

“I wish. That’s my sister’s half of the room. Her name used to be Serenity, but she is turning herself into Sybl.”

Instead of asking if Serenity was a vampire like Mirandah’s friends always did, Harrison asked quite seriously if there was something wrong with her. This was so unexpected that I found myself telling him about her transformation into Sybl, her growing isolation within the family, her thinness, and her strange aggression. I didn’t mention the thoughts I’d had that day about her transformation having been triggered by the fate of Aya and her family, but I ended up telling him about how she had suddenly appeared outside the library, claiming to have been inside all along, although I had looked for her without success.

“She accused me of following her.”

Harrison turned his gray eyes to me. “Maybe you should.
You said she goes tae the library every Monday. Go after her next time. See where she goes.”

“Wouldn’t it be kind of sneaky?” I asked doubtfully.

He shrugged, a light lift of his shoulders. “She’s your sister, and you’re worried about her. What else would a decent person do but be sneaky?”

I laughed, as he meant me to. Then I sobered. “I
am
really worried about her.”

“Maybe subconsciously you ken that she’s in some kind of trouble. After all, the things you consciously notice are only part of what your mind takes in. A lot of other information comes tae you subconsciously. I believe our senses extend right from our conscious tae our unconscious.”

I actually felt dizzy. “Extended senses.”

“Aye. A lot of abilities that we call paranormal are probably just extensions of normal senses that work beneath the level of consciousness.” Harrison walked over to Serenity’s table and reached out to touch a finger to the slightly withered lily. He said softly, “People can be crumbling inside without anyone knowing about it. Ye shouldnae think you have all the time in the world tae do something, Alyzon. Bad stuff can come so fast it’ll make your head spin. You’d never forgive yourself if something happened and you hadnae tried tae act.”

His words made me feel cold.

“I’ll do it, if you like,” he offered diffidently. “Less chance of her spotting me.”

* * *

As I walked Harrison back to his bus stop an hour later, I told him that Gilly was coming to dinner on Friday if her gran agreed. “Do you want to come as well?”

“Another time,” he said. “It’s better if your sister doesnae know what I look like if I am going tae follow her. The main thing is that I ken what
she
looks like.” He patted the pocket containing the photo that he had chosen from those I had offered. It was actually a newspaper clipping of Serenity and me taken during the Shaletown protest.

I felt amazed at how much I had told him, let alone that I had agreed he should spy on my sister for me. It was what he had said about extended senses that had made me trust him so much. I mean, what was the chance of a person whose senses had been accidentally extended meeting someone who would mention extended senses?

It made me think of this book called
Cat’s Cradle
, where one of the characters in it believes that some people—and animals and even objects—are linked into groups, destined to tangle and intersect with and affect one another over and over, because of some central thing connecting them all, which they don’t know about.

Harrison and I could be members of that kind of group. It would explain why I had felt so easy with him as soon as we met, and maybe even how we had happened to bump into each other on the bus. The only thing I couldn’t figure was what the central focus of our group could be.

When I got back home, Mel’s van had gone and there was a gleaming white limousine in the driveway.

Inside, Aaron Rayc was seated at the kitchen table on the same chair as before, wearing a dark gray tux and a snowy white shirt. Beside him was a stunningly beautiful woman with a black evening dress so plain and perfect that even I knew it had to be a designer gown worth thousands. Her hair was black, too, and coiled into a perfect lacquered chignon secured with enormous diamond-studded spikes.

“Alyzon, you remember Mr. Rayc?” Da said. “This is his wife, Dita.”

I nodded to the entrepreneur, and once again I felt the little fish of his attention nudging and butting at my screen. Afraid the dislike I felt would show on my face, I turned to his wife and was startled by how familiar her face seemed. Then I realized it was probably on account of the perfectly made-up beauty she had, which you saw every other minute on magazine covers.

“Pleased to meet you, Alyzon,” Dita Rayc said in a smoky,
caressing voice. I muttered something and slipped out. Mirandah was sitting on the stairs, eating an apple and playing with Luke.

“What’s going on?” I asked, nodding back toward the kitchen.

“Who knows,” she said. “They just turned up and that guy and Da have been talking up a storm ever since.”

“About what?”

She shrugged. “Life, love, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“All of them, even the wife?”

“Dita, Dita, on the wall?” Mirandah trilled softly, fluttering her eyelashes, and we both laughed.

“I wonder what they want.”

Mirandah said darkly, “Guys like Aaron Rayc don’t just drop by to shoot the breeze. Everything they do is for a reason. But if he wants to manage Losing the Rope, why doesn’t he just say so? What’s with all the pussyfooting around?”

I shrugged, thinking of how my extended senses had shown me Aaron Rayc’s concealed excitement the last time he had been here. I didn’t know what he wanted, but like Mirandah, I was sure he wanted something.

Aaron Rayc began to laugh and we both stopped, listening to it.

“That’s a seriously great laugh,” Mirandah mused. “Pity the guy who owns it is such a … a …
nebbish”

“All right, what’s a nebbish?” I asked.

“It’s someone who, when they walk into the room, it feels
instead like someone walked out. I think it’s a Yiddish word. Here, take Luke. I better get my act together. I’ve got a hot date with Ricki.”

Luke stretched his arms out to me and I took him, thinking Mirandah had found the perfect description for how Aaron Rayc struck me. A walking absence. Maybe that was why I couldn’t smell him.

Mum called out to bring Luke in for his bath, and I carried him into the bathroom where she was stretched out like a mermaid with her hair flowing in wet lines over her white breasts and shoulders. I was struck again by how amazingly beautiful she was.

“Did you meet that Aaron Rayc guy?” I asked, undressing Luke and handing him to her.

Mum lowered him into the water, and he chirruped with delight and splashed wildly. She laughed and began to kiss him all over. She hadn’t heard me. But I wasn’t annoyed. There was no point in being annoyed with Mum for being who she was.

I watched Luke wriggle and plow the water for a bit, thinking how it must remind him of being inside Mum. I knew it was really cramped in there by the time a baby was ready to be born, but somehow I could only ever imagine Luke lying at the rippled edge of a vast sea under an endless reddish dusk, waiting to be born into the world. Partly it was how Mum’s stomach had sounded when she was pregnant that made me think that way. Listening to it had been like listening to the sea inside a shell. But also it was because of how
Luke was born beside a sea that was on fire with a bloody, luminous light from the setting sun.

I left Mum and Luke to their bath and went back down to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich. Da and Aaron Rayc were still intent on their discussion.

“It’s true,” Da was saying. “Great art comes out of suffering, but you can’t suffer at will.”

“Exactly,” Aaron Rayc said eagerly.

Dita Rayc had curled her legs up under her on the chair, and she was now watching Da like a cat watches birds when it’s too fat and full to chase them. I moved close enough to smell her and almost gagged at the weird sickly combination of wet cement dust, overripe banana, and musky incense.

“I’m not saying it’s obligatory to suffer,” Da was saying earnestly. “But you do have to go down into yourself to see what you’re made of, and I don’t see how you can do that if you’re worrying about changing the world. It’s looking outward when you should be looking inward.”

“But don’t you think that striving toward the world is also a kind of suffering? A generous suffering, because it’s less ‘I’ focused?” Rayc asked.

Da thought about that. “You have a point. Maybe it is possible to be a true artist with integrity and a desire to save the world from itself, but I’m not that kind of artist. For me it’s very introverted and very personal.”

“I can see that,” Rayc said. He turned to Dita. “You can see that in his music, can’t you, my dear? I mean,” he added to Da without waiting for her to respond, “you could see it
better if you were a solo artist, of course, or if you had a band that was more in the background.”

“How do you mean?” Da asked.

Rayc shrugged. “Today your striving was a little … obscured by all that was going on in the music and on the stage. Each of the musicians in Losing the Rope is so different. I can see what you say about this personal questing with music, but I find it hard to equate that with being in a band, and with this band in particular.”

Da frowned. “I think Losing the Rope has an energy that comes from our being individuals as well as from our unity, and from our having a respect for one another.”

Rayc made a self-deprecating gesture. “I am only a man who takes an interest. But when I see you onstage, Macoll, I see a band built like scaffolding around a soloist with a vision that gets a little muddied. In any cae, I enjoyed the performance today, and the organizers were very pleased.” He laughed that gorgeous welling chuckle. Dita gave him a radiant, strangely avid smile, and Rayc lifted a tailored cuff and looked at his watch. “We’d better get moving, my dear. We have a reception to go to. Thanks for the coffee and the chat, Macoll. Once again it has been edifying.”

Da got up. “Well, thanks again for suggesting us for the charity function and, of course, for the Urban Dingo gig. I had no idea that it was your doing until you told me.”

They shook hands, and I was aware again of the way they both affected the air around them. I tried to figure out the difference in the effects, but the distortion was too hard to see
clearly. Then I remembered how clamping had enabled me to hear the disembodied whispering more clearly, and I wondered if it might not do the same for the distorting air. I tried it, and the sound of Da’s voice saying goodbye faded along with the color in the room. The whispering grew louder, but my attention was riveted on the distortions in the air around both Da and Aaron Rayc, which now showed quite clearly. Around Da, the air bent outward, as if he was emanating something; but around Aaron Rayc it bent just as strongly inward, as if he were sucking something toward him.

It was as if they were exact opposites.

I let my senses go back to normal and watched Dita insinuate herself off the chair like she’d taken a course in it. Da went out to their car to see them off, and I gathered my wits and pulled the phone book toward me.

It took me less than a minute to learn that there was a Shaletown Elementary and a Shaletown High School in Shale-town, but no private school with
Shale
in the name. In fact, there was no private school in Shaletown at all, so far as I could tell. I was pretty disappointed, but I wrote down the number for Shaletown High just in case.

Da came back in. “That is an interesting man, but he has some pretty strange ideas about what it means to be a creator of anything.”

“Probably because he’s not,” I said.

Da looked surprised. “That’s true. I suppose his ideas are quite legitimate, from the point of view of a manager.”