Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

“What’s so important you had to fly to Arizona to take target practice for an hour?”

“You took the CAA assignment, right?”

“Can’t tell you anything about it.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you. You received a report saying Miranda Wright and I had sex when she was only fourteen and she got pregnant and I paid oodles of cash to cover up the affair and her abortion.”

The corners of Vulter’s mouth twitched ever so slightly. She tilted almost imperceptibly back on her boot heels, forcing a glacial expression.

“Thank you.”

“Alchemy, for what? I can’t help you.”

“ You can lie but you can’t hide …”

“… When you’re standing naked at my bedside …” Vulter laughed, blushing, as she sang an off-key version of the line from “Eight Is Just Enough,” on which Absurda and Alchemy shared the lead vocals.

“Louise, why’d the IRS and your committee stop looking into Godfrey Barker and his church?”

“Who says we were?”

“Fine, you weren’t. Who most wants to discredit me so I go away?”

She shrugged.

“C’mon, play along.”

“The desperate and strategically shrewd mainstream Democrats. I got the same scared types in my party.”

“Exactly. Barker gets big funding from Hollywood Dems. Louise, I’m going to help you. Next week you will receive some damning information on Mr. Barker and his associates. Use it wisely.”

“To what do I owe this honor?” She leaned forward, coyly provocative.

“I’d like you to quash the upcoming subpoena on my brother. And don’t tell me it’s not happening.”

“It is and I seriously doubt I can stop it. There are people on that committee who don’t trust me because of my relationship with you. Fact, if news of this meeting gets out — not good.”

“For either of us. I don’t understand why you need to subpoena Moses. Or Sidonna Cherry, for that matter.”

“Let me put it this way: You’ve stood naked by many a bedside. And yet, truths remain hidden. And mysteries still abound.”

The party began under a cloudless sky, another ideal seventy-six-degree SoCal January day, the kind that inspires envy in the rest of the world and lures millions, who too often disregard the unwritten warnings of man’s covenant with nature.

Valets took the guests’ cars, and an experimental solar-powered van shuttled everyone up the hill. Thirty tables with ten chairs each, and four outdoor TVs dotted the grounds: two tuned to the game, one playing Horse Feathers and the other North Dallas Forty . Twenty solar-powered heaters would warm and illuminate the area next to each table if, as the sun set, a slight chill entered the air. This spread qualified as modest in high-end L.A. circles, where $25,000 events were rated bowling alley worthy. The waiters circulated outside offering appetizers, and inside were two banquet tables filled with main courses. Everything was organic and locally grown or raised, except for Twinkies and pigs in a blanket, which were a concession to those with a Mindswallow-style palate. Apocalypse Now blared in the small screening room while the game played on a large-screen TV in the living room.

Jay and Moses, among those who were allowed to park up the hill in the driveway, arrived at kickoff. Moses’s transformation from professor to boss did not subdue his feelings of fraudulent outsiderness in any large gathering. He understood that the currencies of the cliques that formed this party were money, fame, and power. Beauty and intelligence were commodities, bought and sold like art or SpaghettiOs. He couldn’t help feeling more like a SpaghettiO in this menagerie of famous faces and heavy hitters, who, on the surface, appeared as an anachronistic mix of old and young, staid and hip, all brought together by the catalytic bond of Alchemy.

With balletic grace, Alchemy glided among the guests: Euge Baltzer, aging metal rocker of the band Samureye; Romy Milton, granddaughter of a major pet food mogul and sex tape “star”; Chipper Ronan, machine tool heir and aspiring screenwriter; riteplay.com founders and Nightingale Party supporters Frieberg and Loo, who donned football jerseys with DIGITAL DRUID printed across the back. Laluna — in a low-cut powder blue San Diego Chargers jersey, blue-and-white-striped leggings, orange high-top sneakers, black hair growing longer — locomoted aloofly about as the marginally engaged hostess of the festivities.

Moses and Jay chose a table at the outskirts occupied by some of the younger guests who worked with the party or foundation. Moses looked at the Insatiables crowd: Lux and his wife Sue, Andrew, Kim Dooley, and two of the Sheik brothers. He zeroed in on the group fawning over Crouse and Barker. He and Jay exchanged glances while listening to two of his Nightingale “kids”: “Crouse sure is pretty.” “Yeah, pretty stupid to be hooked up with that Swami Barker.”

Jay spotted the graffiti artist known as Krankey. Moses nudged her. “Go. I’ll let you know when I need you.” Moses watched Jay grab a second glass of champagne off a waiter’s tray as she made her way toward Krankey. Behind her he saw Barker being escorted to his meeting with Alchemy.

As he entered the cluttered office, Barker seemed to be addressing, possibly praying to, the gaudy silver insignia necklace that hung to the middle of his kurta, bequeathed to him by the church’s deceased founder. Alchemy shook his head, dismayed. How could anyone, especially Laluna, take him seriously? Alchemy pointed to a chair.

“No. I’ll stand. I’ve been expecting your little reprimand. You can’t tell me not to talk to Laluna.” Barker’s voice took on the yogi-esque air of the unruffled transcendent.

“Not my intention.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“Last week Laluna brought you to my mother’s studio again. You proceeded to lecture her that psychiatrists and psychotropic drugs caused her illness and that if she and Laluna joined your church, you ‘guaranteed’ the tension between the two of them would end. True?”

“Let them undergo Cosmological Kinetic purification and I’ll be proven right. Your problems with Laluna and your mother far exceed your abilities to fix them.”

“Perhaps. But it is my problem, not yours. Your problem is dispensing disreputable information to the Committee on Anti-American activities about me that you insinuated came from Laluna.”

“That’s slanderous. I’ve never talked to anyone on that committee. Don’t blame me because you’re jealous of Jack’s relationship with Laluna.”

“I don’t. I blame you for being a charlatan.” A scene with Crouse and Barker, messy as it might be, suited Alchemy just fine. It would leave no doubt that their association was one-sided. “You can see Laluna whenever she wants, but you are not welcome here or anywhere near my mother. Tomorrow morning a judge will be granting a restraining order against you and you’ll be properly served.”

“What? How could you? I’ll fight it.”

“Go ahead. Enjoy the festivities.” Alchemy exited, leaving the door wide open behind him. He addressed a muscular security guard stationed in the doorway: “Dave, please escort Mr. Barker downstairs.”

Moses took a sip from his water bottle, and suddenly, for the first time in months — a daymare.

I’m sitting alone in the back row of a roofless Budapest temple. It’s pouring but I can’t move. Beside me appears the dybbuk, Shalom, dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans. She touches my cheek .