Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

Alchemy replied, “To see if there is any benefit in Mose meeting you.”

“Acting as his savior was insufficient? Now you have anointed yourself the family unifier.” Malcolm dismissed any pretense of politesse.

Alchemy’s expression turned to one of slight amusement.

“You’re implying what? That I’m upset because you screwed my mom? You grossly overestimate your importance in her life. You’re just another slug in a very long line of unmemorable slugs she fucked and discarded.” Alchemy paused, barely repressing a rueful smile. “I imagine a man of your instincts would be curious to hear how she remembers you.”

“Your imagination reflects your ego’s need, not mine.”

Undeterred, Alchemy continued, “After I met Mose, I asked her about your relationship. She’d never mentioned you.” Alchemy chose his words with precision. “She said she wished you were her best friend Kyle when you fucked. She called you a ‘fiendish little man with the soulsmell of sour pickle juice.’ ”

Malcolm laughed jovially, as if he’d been complimented. “You should have been my son. You are hard. But he, he behaves like a weakling.”

“Mose is not weak.”

“If he were not so cowardly, he would be here instead of you.”

“That is where you are wrong. It takes great fortitude to accept your emotional deficiencies rather than pander for love and recognition.”

“Are you sure you are not speaking of your own situation?”

“Perhaps.” Alchemy conceded the point and shook his head solemnly. He relaxed his elbows on the chair’s armrests and clasped his fingers together in front of his chest. “Perhaps your ego is still smarting over the way Salome tossed you out because you loved her?”

“That assumes you believe I am capable of love.”

“I’ve made only one assumption about you.” Alchemy leaned forward, picked up his drink, swished it around his mouth, and then, like a Clint Eastwood avenging hero, spit it on the grass a foot to the right of Teumer’s chair. “Nothing you’ve said so far leads me to believe you have any remorse for how you treated Mose or Hannah.”

Malcolm stood up and grinned eerily. “Follow me.” This insolent child needed a lesson in humility. They entered the house and walked into a room dominated by one of the untorn canvases from Salome’s Flowers, Feminism, Fornication exhibit. “Wait here.” He turned and left the room.

Malcolm returned in less than two minutes. He handed Alchemy a medal — a silver iron cross with a red, silver, and black ribbon. “For you.”

“Why? Why do you have this? I don’t want this.”

“Give it to him, if you prefer. And these.” He placed a slim sheaf of stapled and typewritten pages on the table. “Take them. Show them to your half brother. Or destroy them. The choice is yours. It seems you are now his keeper. It has been my pleasure to entertain you.”

The day Nathaniel departed, I took refuge in Orient. I didn’t want to beg him to stay. Still, I wrote him often, and although I missed him, through autumn I contentedly flaneured about.

At Alchemy’s Christmas break we flew to Paris and stayed at Nathaniel’s flat on Rue du Cherche-Midi. The three of us would lah-di-dah to the Luxembourg Gardens, where we read Alchemy the French canon of subversive lit.

Nathaniel often convened with the Babacools, a group of aging or neo-hippies, at the Rond Point café for a nightcap or three. In another noncoincidence, one night Marlene Passant, the Nouvelle Obs arts writer, rumbled into the café flanked by two aspiring artists. She shed them and sat beside me. After ten nonstop minutes condemning America, praising me, and a candid admission, “I, too, have been incarcerated for unbecoming societal behavior,” she fluffed her henna-colored hair and grinned like a feral cat. “I both detest and comprehend French sneakiness so I am sneakiest of all. You could use a viper like me on your side. Gibbon is selling the works you release to him too cheaply. You don’t have an exclusive with him, do you?” I shook my head. Marlene was a surefire homicider with a soulsmell mix of shag carpet soiled with dried semen and freshly minted French francs.

She called the next day. “I secured a commission from a collector for forty thousand dollars. Do whatever you want. I have access to a studio on Rue de la Roquette that you may use.” With a rush of adrenaline, I finished a Scourge painting: Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People with the face of Arletty (a famous pre-WWII French actress who became infamous because of an affair with a Nazi officer) as Liberty leading faceless Holocaust victims to the camps. On the painting I scrawled my version of the French motto: “Liberté, Egalité, Mendacité.” Marlene and the collector were more than pleased. She paid me sixty percent rather than the usual fifty.

After Christmas I flew off alone to London, ostensibly to see an exhibition of work by the conjurer William Blake. My true motive was to infiltrate the spirit of Phil Bent, Alchemy’s genetic dispenser. I located him through an executive at EMI, Bent’s former record company, who arranged the meeting but warned me to expect “a rather decrepit and pitiful sod.” I checked into the Hotel Russell Square, and the next morning I took the Underground to Earls Court. A gray and matted-haired Macbeth -like witch, with a golden front tooth, answered the door of the ground-floor hovel. If it weren’t for his scraggly three-day beard, I might’ve thought it was his mother. He reeked of old sweat, hard snot, vomit, beer, cigarettes, and greasy wrappings of fish and chips. “Who de, heh, fu — Salome? Wha?” Next to him, Keith Richards would’ve sounded like Churchill. I didn’t know if he’d forgotten our appointment or he was pretending. I blurted out, “You stink. Why don’t you take a bath?”

He regained a speck of lucidity. “It’s cold in ’ere and ain’t got rot to ’eat up the water.” The tub’s heater only worked when you deposited some coins. “Maybe you could gimme a nice body wash. You always did get ’ot in a loo.” He lamely reached to grab my right tit. I slapped his hand.

“The kid with yer?”

“Do you want to see him?”

“What the bloody fuck for?”

“Good goddamned question.”

“That why you ’ere? ’Ow much is it worth to yah?”

He was collecting royalties, though perhaps not much, from the Baddists’ records. “Fast Enough” remained a staple of oldies rock radio stations. Any money I gave him would go for heroin, pills, and alcohol. I muttered, “Nothing.”

I cursed myself all the way back to the hotel. I wished he were dead. Terrified of the frailties he, and yes, I, too, had given to my son. I called the apartment. No one answered. I checked out of the hotel and left London a day early without going to see the exhibition.

I got back to the Paris around 8 P.M. Ana, the wife of the Portuguese concierge, was babysitting Alchemy. I found him in Nathaniel’s office, which we’d temporarily converted into a bedroom, lying flat on the top of Nathaniel’s desk listening to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica , which along with Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America Nathaniel had bought him for Christmas. I stood silently in the doorway until he sat up. My almost-thirteen-year-old-going-on-forty son turned his head and winked at me. I winked back. “Do you like it?”

“It sure is different. Nathaniel told me I had to listen a few times before it made sense. I’ve listened to side one four times.”

“And?”

“I’d like to meet the Captain and ask who he listens to.”