Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

“Man, is that wrong. You have no idea why I was in that limo. Let’s just say a two-faced woman paid for the limo and that well is nearly dry.”

I think, Sure, whatever you say, bub. You call yourself Alchemy and we’re visiting your mom in biddy-bip-bip land .

We walk into the lobby. He whispers to the guy at the desk and they start laughing. The guy leads us into this large sitting area with all of these fuckin’ trees growing out of the roof. He calls it the “arboretum.” I’m looking up for birds and squirrel monkeys that’ll be dropping their turds on me.

I find a safe spot and plop down in this fluffy sofa by a TV that is on to the Mets game. Alchemy sits down, too. Turns out we’re both Mets fans.

Five minutes later, the hottest middle-aged babe la-di-dahs out, dressed in tight-assed pedal pusher pants and a bikini bra and a fishnet shawl, in sandals with her toes painted purple, and holding a flashlight in her left hand. I do a Jackie Gleason — like double take. Really, she is about the sexiest any-thing, any age, I ever seen. I would’ve done her in a Flushin’ flash.

She and Alchemy hug and hold hands. He says, “Mom, please meet Ricky Mindswallow, a car thief from Queens.” I look at him thinking, like, Whoa there, that was your idea . And that name? I don’t say nuthin’ before he says to me, “This is my mom, Salome. A shape-shifter from another dimension.”

She looks at me, her eyes a popping deep green and unblinking, and her skin is damn pale. She takes the flashlight, turns it on, points it at his feet, and slowly moves the light up his body.

“Mr. Mindswallow, take a close look at my son of the multicolored eyes,” she says, kinda snarky, “I am not the only shape-shifter in this family.” Then she turns and shines the light in my face and I can’t tell if she notices my glass eye. “A car thief, hmmm. What I need to know is this: Are you a homicider or a suicider?”

Alchemy starts chuckling. I try to block the light with my hand until she turns it off.

“You see, my pretty, splenetic young seedling, there are two main species of bipeds in the world — homiciders and suiciders. A few fit into the smaller category of those who would kill their enemy or lover, and also themselves. Most of us lie about what we are.” She pauses and almost hisses. “Then there are those, like my son here, who think they are too superior for any one designation. Right, honey?” That don’t sound like a question, but a threat.

“No, Mom, I’m an apple cider.”

“As long as you’re not a matricider.” She points the flashlight at him but don’t turn it on. “Doing much fucking lately?”

I think, yeah, like half an hour ago , but he slides right beside her and he takes her outstretched hand in his, and like Fred and Ginger they do a pretend tap dance while singing to the tune of that awful Three Dog Night song, “Sub-li-mate, Sub-li-mate, dance to the mew … zak …” and chortle like they’re both nuts. They had what Alchemy calls their “undercover language.” Then she turns to me.

“Now, I’ll ask you again. What are you?”

“You bes’ believe I’m a killah.”

“Yes, I bes’ believe you are. Oh, that Queens accent, it’s such an aphrodisiac.” She sidles up to me, and she rubs this tiny kind of sexy scar on her right cheek. Then she scratches my right cheek with her long fingers and pulls almost too hard on my skull earring. With the nail on her pointer finger, she circles the tatt on my right forearm. Then she kisses me on the lips in the sexiest way. This daffy bitch gave me a fucking hard-on! Then she grabs my cock, my balls, really, and squeezes them so I’m doubling over in pain.

“Mr. Ricky Mindswallow, you are rotten. I smell that. You smell like a pestilential rat encased in fossilized peanut butter with rusted nails for claws.” She shrugs and lets go. I kind of want to slug her and I feel like she sees that. I don’t hit no women. So she just giggles again, and in a real motherly way — well, not my fuckin’ mother — she takes my hand between her hands, and I don’t know what the hell she is gonna do next. She says, “My son needs a Sancho Panza of evil by his side.” I’m wondering who the hell is Sancho Panzer?

I say, “Okay.” I mean, Christ, what do you say to that?

“Mom, let him be. Let’s go talk to Ruggles of Red Gap.”

“Just a piece of advice, Ricky. You also smell ambitious, like bathrooms on the stock exchange.” I got no freaking idea what she’s talking about, but she’s so intense, like some funky TV goddess, so I’m listening close. “If you want to be friends with my son, who is, in ways you cannot fathom, more dangerous than anyone you have ever met, you better grow some extremely resilient testicles to go with your ambition.”

Alchemy gives me the eyebrow signal to wait for him, and they disappear into the back rooms of Collier Layne to “commiserate” with the doctor. I’m twiddling my thumbs, half watching the game, thinking this duo is too loony toons for me, and maybe I should beat it back to New York.

They come back, almost an hour later, silently holding hands like they’re doing a slow step to the gallows. Salome stops, eyes half closed, says, “My teenage killah, I was, I am a good mother. I love my son more than my own life. Because I can’t now, please take care of him.” She rests her head against Alchemy’s chest for a minute, before he gently tugs himself away. I’m not into any woe-woe-pity-me shit, but I never seen two people look more beat than Alchemy and Salome that day.

We walk back to the car through the parking lot and he ain’t saying squat, just spitting on the ground every few feet. We get to the Benz. He asks, “You coming?” like he senses my hesitation. “I’ll take you back if you want.”

“Nah, California, here we come.”

He flashes that Alchemy combo sheepish-wolfish smile that says, “I know what you want even better than you know what you want.” Guy could read people’s faces, voices, body language like no one I’ve ever met.

I suggest, “Since I’m a car thief, why don’t we sell this jalopy and get some bucks and buy a cheap piece a shit?”

“It’s a loan.”

“What?”

“That was the deal. I’ll call that guy when we’re ready to dump this car and they can come get it. Mr. Mindswallow, a man got to have a code.”

At first I’m thinking, What the fuck? Actually, way too often he had me thinking What the fuck? But one thing I got to give him, Alchemy always had his code.

Moses flew to Albuquerque, rented a car, and spent the night at the airport Best Western. The next morning he drove north, past Santa Fe and Los Alamos, the womb of the nuclear dream. As he got higher and higher, seven thousand feet above sea level, out of the clouds appeared the Anok Monastery, glorious and ominous, like a castle in the sky from an Italo Calvino parable in a Douglas Sirk film.

After parking the Ford Focus in a small, unpaved area, he walked fifty yards to where cement walls closed upon a rusting wrought-iron gate seven feet high and circling the monastery grounds. His chest tightened from the altitude. He peeked inside the gate at a haphazardly maintained Japanese garden. No one was visible. A sign on the gate with words written in Magic Marker read PLEASE LEAVE ALL MESSAGES ON THE BULLETIN BOARD. Moses wrote “Urgent — Life and Death — for Alchemy. Please Call.” He wrote his cell phone number. Outside the gate, half buried among the grass and weeds, under the shady native aspen and pine and a few imported eucalyptus trees, was a corroded cement bench. Moses lay down. With stress taking its toll on his already battered immune system, and amid the hum of the soporific surroundings, he fell immediately asleep. When he opened his eyes, a rail-thin, angular-faced middle-aged woman dressed in white pajamas hovered over him. “I am Desiree. I dared not awaken you. I hoped you were resting peacefully.”