Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

‘Hey, buddy, good thing you called. Have you got time for me on Saturday?’

He wanted to know whether I could play at a reception, some charity thing, they were expecting celebrities.

Outside I asked someone how to get to the courthouse, and set off after the demonstrators. Sarah was standing in a circle of demonstrators in front of a Victorian building set among tall trees. There was, I was told, already a delegation inside; the stay-behinds were chanting prayers and dancing and singing. The leader had stayed behind as well. He stepped into the center of the circle and said it was time to pray and sacrifice. He put a shell on the ground in front of him.

‘Which way is east?’ he asked his lieutenant quietly.

Calling on the spirits of the four winds and the cosmos itself, he then made a burnt offering. The smell of rosemary.

‘Brothers and sisters,’ he said, ‘let us pray for the misguided spirits inside this building, who are also our brothers and sisters but have been blinded by greed. Let us send them love.’

Sarah nodded. There was a devout gleam in her eye. The Indian placed dried sage in the shell, lit it and fanned the smoking fire with a white wing. The group fell silent. I looked over, Sarah was standing beside me, her eyes closed. I knew she was sending love into the courthouse, or at least thought she was doing that. I thought about other things, about how much better suited she would be for the boy now leading the prayers at the center of the circle, how the two of them could lead a life of activism and holistic conviction and fuck till the stars fell from the sky — a pang of sweet jealousy. I placed my hand on her lower back, gently, in order not to break her concentration. The Indian stood up and invited the others to lay their offerings in the shell. A black man with feathers in his hair stepped forward. He knelt down before the shell and made a few karate-like gestures. His voice was that of a gospel singer. The smell of a burning feather snapped at my nostrils.

‘Oh, Lord!’ he shouted, ‘the time has come to destroy Babylon! Is the time not ripe, Lord? We beseech thee, bring Babylon down. Down with Babylon! Down with Babylon!’

He stood up, bowed, and rejoined the circle. A lineup of weirdos followed. When I yawned, Sarah elbowed me.

‘Behave yourself, carnivore,’ she said.

The prayers died out, the leader raised the megaphone to his lips.

‘Concerning the toilet situation,’ he said, ‘if you need to use the toilet, you can do that in the courthouse, but then you need to show your ID, okay? Don’t make a scene, we can accomplish more by being cooperative.’

The cooperative attitude appeared to me to be the result of an endless row of defeats suffered by his people — cooperation was all they had left.

‘I admire it, I really admire it,’ I told Sarah later that day.

‘But?’

‘No buts. You guys, you have something you consider greater than yourselves. To do that, you have to have something I don’t have. The ability to cast yourself off, like a sannyasi.’

‘Don’t act like we’re a bunch of freaks, some sect of idiots. Isn’t there anything you believe in? Isn’t there anything sacred to you? Not even love, Ludwig? Giving yourself away for another person?’

I knew that my answer would be important to everything that came afterwards. I plumbed my inner depths, and said truthfully, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

The day my mother left Loews, I played in the hotel for the first time. The celebrities in the room manifested themselves as coagulations in the crowd, humanity clotted around a core. It was some kind of charity thing, sometimes someone would ask me to stop playing for a minute while a man shouted numbers enthusiastically into a microphone: so many dollars for this, so many for that. The celebrities auctioned themselves off, you could pay to have your picture taken with them. Berny Suess had come into the room twice and drummed his fingers on the piano as he looked around at the proceedings. Afterwards I went past his office.

‘Well done,’ he said. ‘I doubt they heard much, but it was better than nothing.’

I thought that was funny, better than nothing. I could pick up my money on Monday, the safe was locked for the weekend. It had to be in cash because I didn’t have a work permit.

Sarah was with the Indians — she had followed the caravan to San Francisco and would be back on Sunday night.

I walked out into the gentle evening. On the map I located Washington Way, on the border between Santa Monica and Venice, where my mother had found her rental. She had taken my suitcase along with her.

I found the house in the shade of low trees. Whispers of lonesomeness in the branches. Our possessions were stored in a barn in Suffolk, I hadn’t given them a thought since the journey started, weeks ago — there was nothing I wanted more than to have them around me and to say the word home .

I knocked. Then again. A little window in the door opened, like in some fairy tale.

‘Who’s there?’

She was wearing a bathrobe from Loews. Did I fancy a cup of tea? We sat down at the table, a couple of candles, shadows. I looked around at the little house with its spare furnishings. Bars at the windows, gleaming pans on the kitchen wall.

‘Sugar in your tea?’ she asked.

I looked at her.

‘Sugar, yes. And a dash of milk, please.’

‘All that sugar is bad for you.’

‘You use it too.’

‘Only a tiny bit. Mostly sweeteners, really.’

There was something about her I couldn’t quite place. I looked at her more closely. She seemed older. Perhaps it was the candlelight, but there were lines around her mouth, her eyes, the place where life resides in a face. Sleep had lowered her defenses and removed the mask of eternal youth.

‘I played tonight,’ I said, ‘at Loews. I can pick up my money on Monday. The first dollars I’ve ever earned.’

‘On to stardom,’ she said.

‘It went pretty well. They said Tom Cruise was there.’

‘Were you all by yourself?’

‘Tom Cruise was there too, I just told you that.’

‘Was Sarah with you?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, where is she?’

‘Demonstrating with Indians.’

‘So now you have time for me again.’

‘In San Francisco. She’s coming back tomorrow.’

‘I enjoyed meeting her.’

She thought about it for a moment. Then, ‘She’s not particularly pretty or anything. Is she Jewish?’

I looked at her, thrown off balance. Why would she say something like that? Why dispel the timid spirit of peace flitting over the table?

‘I think she’s pretty,’ I said. ‘What you think. . well, you know, forget it.’

She sighed.

‘You always think the worst, Ludwig. I thought she was nice, I said that, she seems very special.’

‘Is there any food in the house? I haven’t eaten yet.’

‘At this hour? Eating so late isn’t good for you.’

‘Not that either.’

She came back with crackers and a tube of cheese spread.

‘Fruit,’ she said. ‘Would you like some fruit?’

She put an apple down in front of me. Unless I was mistaken, I had seen this same apple a while back on the windowsill at the hotel. I squeezed a gleaming worm of cheese along the length of the cracker and smeared it out with the opening of the tube. I kept my eyes fixed on this chore all the while as I asked, ‘So what are you up to, during the day I mean? Globally speaking.’

‘Globally?’

‘No details.’

‘I don’t really feel like talking to you about that right now. Some other time, okay?’

‘When’s the next Lilith film coming out? You can talk about that, can’t you?’