Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

‘Hello?’

Simon is startled. It’s Daniel.

‘Hello?’ Daniel repeats. ‘Anybody there?’

Simon clears his throat. ‘Hey.’

‘Simon.’ Daniel releases a long, ragged breath. ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ, Simon. Where the hell are you?’

‘I’m in San Francisco.’

‘And Klara’s with you?’

‘Yeah, she’s here.’

‘Okay.’ Daniel speaks slowly and with control, as if to a volatile toddler. ‘What are you doing in San Francisco?’

‘Hang on.’ Simon rubs his forehead, which pounds with pain. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at school?’

‘Yes,’ says Daniel, with the same eerie calm. ‘Yes, Simon, I am supposed to be at school. Would you like to know why I’m not at school? I’m not at school because Ma called me in a fit on Friday night when you hadn’t come home , and being the good fucking son that I am, the only fucking reasonable person in this family, I left school to be with her. I’ll be taking incompletes this semester.’

Simon’s brain spins. He feels unable to respond to all of this at once, and so he says, ‘Varya’s reasonable.’

Daniel ignores this. ‘I’ll repeat myself. What the hell are you doing in San Francisco?’

‘We decided to leave.’

‘Yeah, I got that far. I’m sure it’s been groovy . And now that you’ve had your fun, let’s talk about what you’re going to do next.’

What is he going to do next? Outside, the sky is a clear, endless blue.

‘I’m looking at the Greyhound schedule for tomorrow,’ Daniel says. ‘There’s a train leaving from Folsom at one in the afternoon. You’ll have to transfer in Salt Lake City and again in Omaha. It’ll cost you a hundred and twenty bucks, which I hope to God you didn’t travel across the country without, but if you’re stupider than I’m giving you credit for, I’ll wire it to Klara’s bank account. In that case, you’ll have to wait and leave on Thursday. All right? Simon? Are you with me?’

‘I’m not coming back.’ Simon is crying, for he realizes that what he’s said is true: there now exists a pane of glass between him and his former home, a pane he can see through but not cross.

Daniel’s voice softens. ‘Come on, big guy. You’re dealing with a lot, I understand that. We all are. Dad’s gone – I can see why you’d get impulsive. But you have to do what’s right. Ma needs you. Gold’s needs you. We need Klara, too, but she’s more of a . . . a lost cause, you know what I mean? Listen, I get how it goes with her. She doesn’t like to take no for an answer; I’m guessing she talked you into it. But she had no right to rope you into her bullshit. I mean, Jesus – you haven’t even finished high school. You’re a kid.’

Simon is silent. He hears Gertie’s voice in the background.

‘Daniel? Who are you talking to?’

‘Hang on, Ma!’ Daniel shouts.

‘I’m staying here, Dan. I am.’

‘Simon.’ Daniel’s voice hardens. ‘Do you know what it’s been like around here? Ma has lost her godforsaken mind. She’s talking about calling the cops. I’m doing my best, I’m promising her you’ll come to your senses, but I can’t hold her off for much longer. You’re only sixteen – a minor. And technically, that makes you a runaway.’

Simon is still crying. He leans against the counter.

‘Sy?’

Simon wipes his cheeks with his palms. Gently, he hangs up.

By the end of May, Klara has filled out dozens of job applications, but she gets no interviews. The city is changing, and she missed the very best parts: the hippies, the Diggers, the psychedelic gatherings in Golden Gate Park. She wants to play a tambourine and listen to Gary Snyder read in the Polo Fields, but now the park is filled with gay cruisers and drug dealers, and the hippies are just homeless. Corporate San Francisco won’t have her, not that she would have it. She targets the feminist bookstores in the Mission, but the clerks glance at her flimsy dresses with disdain; the coffee shops are owned by lesbians who laid the cement floors themselves and certainly don’t need help now. Grudgingly, she submits an application to a temp agency.

‘We just need something to tide us over,’ she says. ‘Something easy, something that makes fast money. It doesn’t have to mean anything about us.’

Simon thinks of the club downstairs. He’s passed it at night, when it’s full of young men and dizzying purple light. The next afternoon, he smokes out front until a middle-aged man – barely five feet, with bright orange hair – walks up to the door carrying a jumble of keys.

‘Hey!’ Simon crushes his cigarette beneath his shoe. ‘I’m Simon. I live upstairs.’

He sticks out his hand. The other man squints at him, shakes it.

‘Benny. What can I do for you?’

Simon wonders who Benny was before he came to San Francisco. He looks like a theater kid with his black sneakers and black jeans, a black T-shirt tucked into the waistband.

‘I’d like a job,’ Simon says.

Benny nudges the glass door with one shoulder, then holds it open with his foot to allow Simon through.

‘You do, huh? How old are you?’

He strides through the space: flicking on the house lights, checking the smoke machines.

‘Twenty-two. I could tend bar.’

Simon thought it would sound more mature than bartend , but now he sees he was wrong. Benny smirks and walks to the bar, where he heaves down the stools that wait in stacks.

‘Firstly,’ he says, ‘don’t lie to me. You’re what – seventeen, eighteen? Secondly, I don’t know where you’re from, but you gotta be twenty-one to tend bar in California, and I’m not losing my liquor license over some cute new hire. Thirdly –’

‘Please.’ Simon is desperate: if he can’t get a job and Gertie keeps after him, he’ll have no choice but to go home. ‘I’m new here, and I need money. I’ll do anything – wipe your floors, stamp hands. I’ll –’

Benny holds up a palm. ‘Thirdly. If I were to hire you, I wouldn’t put you at the bar.’

‘Where would you put me?’

Benny pauses, one foot propped up on the rung of a stool. He points at one of the tall purple platforms spaced evenly throughout the club. ‘There.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Simon looks at the platforms. They’re at least four feet high and perhaps two and a half wide. ‘What would I do up there?’

‘You’d dance , kid. Think you can handle that?’

Simon grins. ‘Sure, I can dance. That’s all I have to do?’

‘That’s all you gotta do. You’re lucky Mikey quit last week. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have anything for you. But you’re pretty, and with the makeup . . .’ Benny cocks his head. ‘With the makeup, yeah – you’ll look older.’

‘What makeup?’

‘What do you think? Purple paint. Head to toe.’ Benny drags a broom out of a side room and begins to collect the previous night’s debris: bent straws, receipts, a purple condom wrapper. ‘Get here by seven tonight. The guys’ll show you how.’

There are five of them, each with their own pillar. Richie – a forty-five-year-old veteran with bulky muscles and a military haircut – has earned pillar number one, by the front windows. Across from him, at number two, is Lance, a transplant from Wisconsin whose ready smile and round, Canadian o ’s are playfully mocked. Pillar number three is Lady, six foot four and dressed in drag; number four is Colin, skinny as a poet and sad-eyed, so Lady calls him Jesus Boy. Adrian – devilishly beautiful, his golden-brown body entirely hairless – takes pillar number five.

‘Number six,’ calls Lady, when Simon enters the dressing room. ‘How do you do?’