Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

“Does that mean you know who my mother was?”

Lively crossed his long legs and wet his cracked lips with his tongue. “What do you mean? Hannah is your mother.”

“No, she only raised me as my mother.” Moses straightened his spine and leaned forward, his posture strict. “I’m here because I am sick and I need a donor. All other treatments have failed. I need to know if he can help me or if he has any relatives who can. Or if my mother is alive and if she had any other children. I want nothing else from him. Nothing.”

“Who told you Hannah isn’t your mother?”

“She did. For over forty years I lived that lie.”

Lively shook his head. “He left the country this morning. Not sure he’ll be back.”

Moses, sensing perhaps this was his only chance to gather new information, pressed on. “You must have known his sister, Magda? The detective couldn’t locate her with the little information I had.”

At seventeen, Moses, with Hannah’s reluctant help, located Magda in North Carolina. When he called, she lambasted him sourly, “I have not’ing to say to you. I don’t know where he is. I have not seen him in years. I am not his keeper, and thanks God, he is not mine. Do not call me again.” With that, she hung up. Moses, defeated, gave up his search for Malcolm.

“After three, maybe four marriages, Mal refused to help her financially anymore. They lost contact until he was notified that she passed six years ago.”

“I’ll tell the detective. Did he tell you about his time in the camps?”

“I think it is Mal’s responsibility to tell you about that.”

“Why would he? Because he’s acted so responsibly for the last forty-five years?”

Lively crossed his right leg over his left leg and slowly shook his head. “I am sorry.”

“Mr. Lively, if you or he won’t help me, I am going to die.”

Lively’s expression went dark, as if the fuse to his emotional box had blown out. He uncrossed his legs and leaned back. “I’m leaving for Houston later tonight. It’s my granddaughter’s sweet sixteen tomorrow and I am not missing that. Family means something to me.” His slow Texas accent, laden with the air of gentility, unnerved Moses.

“If I can’t see him, I at least need to talk to him.”

Lively leaned forward. “May I be so bold as to ask you a favor?”

“Sure.”

“When you talk to your mother Hannah, say hello for me.”

“You knew her?”

“We met when they were still married. Attractive woman.”

“So you’ll help me?”

“I’ll try.” Using his cane, Lively pushed himself up. Moses and Jay followed, and all three turned toward the door.

“Can I use the bathroom for a second?” Moses didn’t really have to go; he wanted to poke around. Lively nodded and pointed down the hall. Moses saw nothing of any consequence; still no photos of anyone. He checked the medicine cabinet but found nothing exceptional.

When he came back, Jay and Lively had moved to the far corner of the hallway leading to the door. They were examining a sculpture, which he had not noticed upon entering. Jay had seen the strikingly different piece among the banal furnishings of the apartment and stopped to look as she made her way back to the door. She was kneeling beside a miniature guillotine with a life-size head of Richard Nixon cut off from its body. The headless body was made of the faux aged and crinkled yellow paper that you get when you buy a cheap copy of the Declaration of Independence, which upon closer inspection it turned out to be. The words DO NOT DISTURB hung above Nixon’s head.

Moses heard Lively answering what he assumed was Jay’s question.

“It was a gift from a friend—”

“Who?” Moses interrupted, almost too aggressively.

“A friend.”

Jay, noticing Moses’s reddening cheeks, stood straight up and interjected, “That’s a Salome Savant piece. It’s very rare. She destroyed much of her work before she was institutionalized and doesn’t like to sell it. When I was working with Kasbah, I tried to get her son, Alchemy Savant—”

“Excuse me.” Lively abruptly put his big hand on Jay’s shoulder while looking at Moses. “I’m sorry to be ill-mannered, but I have a meeting before my flight. I will call you. I know how to find you.”

Jay and Moses rode the elevator in silence, attempting to absorb what they’d just seen and heard. As they stepped gingerly outside and crossed the street, Jay squeezed his hand. She whispered, “You’re a good man, no matter who your father is”—she half grinned—“or how distasteful his friends are …”

That night, Moses, listening to Jay’s steady breathing, fell in and out of the semialert state where dreams seem real and reality seems dreamlike. At 6 A.M., he pushed himself out of bed, the maxim he often stressed to his students racing through his head: One person’s version of history is another person’s version of an incomplete truth. He slipped quietly into his room, where he read an e-mail from his mom saying that she’d checked into the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, just blocks from his father’s apartment.

The night after the Art Is Dead happening, the scenesters gathered in the back room of Max’s Kansas City. Andy, who I think always wished his body were a mesh serigraph, tiptoed in with Viva and a new companion I nicknamed Velveeta. I must say, I outshone them all. I wore an all-plastic see-through top over a silk-and-lace bra and a microminiskirt made of flattened Coke cans (which I figured Andy would appreciate) with thigh-high red boots. I draped a black cape over my shoulders and knotted a red bandana around my forehead. When Horrwich saw my outfit, he susurrated lasciviously, “You’re one radioactive treat wrapped inside a cellophane coating.” Xtine couldn’t stop fawning. “You must come over to my place at the Chelsea. I must photograph you.”

Everyone kept handing me drinks. Leslie Tallent, wearing red socks, Homburg hat, bow tie, and the beginnings of a goatee, read aloud his essay, which he intended as the ultimate analysis of the work “as a new kind of art that is the offspring of Duchamp. It poses the question: Is art, like God, now dead?”

I kissed him on his cheek. “Perfect, Leslie. I’ll leave the analyzing to you.”

I bathed myself in the sweet bacchanalian fever until Raphael Urso, a misogynistic beast who happened to be a lovely street urchin poet, cornered me with his two playmates — some shy guy I didn’t recognize and Blind Lemon Socrates. Socrates is all but forgotten now, but back then he was a sardonic old junkie with a cult following of joy boys who wanted a blow job from the author of Sonic Nudewords and the underground film Hooked . Urso kept calling me his “fuck for the night” and introduced me as “the soupçon du jour who you better fuck now ’cause she’ll be opening soup cans in suburbia for her babies in no time …” I rabbit-punched Urso in his shoulder. He snarled. Socrates and Urso moved on. I was left standing in front of this shy guy who just lowered his head and turned his swamp-water-brown eyes behind gold-rimmed circular glasses away from me. He had dark, short hair covered by a camouflage baseball cap and a reddish-brown five o’clock shadow, and wore scraggly jeans, a beat-up khaki jacket, with a satchel slung over his shoulder. His fists were clenched, not in anger, I sensed, but in defensiveness. I pictured him as a human hand grenade waiting for someone to pull the pin.

“So, did you like the happening?” I asked him.

“Do you want me to answer that extremely egotistical question honestly?” His voice edged out with a slightly patrician Southern accent, yet still sounded kind.