Ch. 6 Head and Shoulders

Grace and Paul sat across from one another three feet above the street-level seating at an upscale café with blue umbrellas crammed into a patio of spanish floor tiles. Below, more blue umbrellas crowded the sidewalk to shade tables of people eating kale and drinking tea in the sun. All sides were surrounded by boutique shops where women and girls spent thick wads on thin clothes. Paul was recently made redundant by a woman he loved. Grace could tell he was reeling less from the rejection than the fact that his young lady was equally as attractive, educated, and successful as Paul. A difficult item to replace in the city of the ignorant, arrogant, and pretty. “Do you want to talk about Gabby?”

“I sure don’t,” said Paul, cooly. The name irked him. So, Grace sighed through the breeze and changed the subject.

“I left Dad a message yesterday,” she said.

   “Oh yeah?” said Paul.

    “He didn’t get back to me. I asked if he wanted to take a weekend trip with me. Just to see if some relaxation might open his mind to some more possibilities. I’m worried. I don’t think you should have walked out last week the way you did…”

         “The way ‘we’ did.” Paul brought her into a chamber of culpability with a beckoning motion.

   “We need to show him that we’re here. I feel like we’ve sent him further down a dark path.”

   “What makes you think that?”

“Something I saw last night in a dream. It was like a rodeo in the Philippines. The stands were dark in certain areas because the lights were broken or there were none. Some skilled cowboys had just tamed their broncos. People were applauding.. There was some a lull. A gate opened, and a wild boar leaped out into the ring. It charged at everyone nearby. Everyone jumped up onto the rafters and out of the way of the its tusks. Then I looked around and saw people in the audience holding knives and forks. Then some more people entered the ring: a couple of rodeo clowns and matadors. Either they didn’t have the skills to handle bulls, or this place couldn’t afford to have one. A clown started teasing it and making faces at it. The boar charged at him. One of the matadors shoved a dagger in the boar’s back as it ran by. It was surprised and confused. So, it turned and ran after a different clown. Then a different matador shoved a knife in its back. The boar swerved again and looked at him. Then it started to kind of trot off, away from the clowns and ghetto matadors. But they chased the boar. So, it tried running while limping and dripping blood. There was nowhere to go. No corners. The place was a wide oval. The clowns caught up to it and slapped its back with their gloved hands. The audience laughed. The clowns bolted off while the boar reared again. Eventually, it got caught between the two matadors and a clown. The clown got down on a knee and held its arms out like a friend. When the hog was momentarily distracted, the matadors rushed in and started stabbing it over and over again! Like not even artfully or ceremoniously. It’s like they just wanted to hear the thing wail and make the audience jeer and rub their forks and knives together. Then I was the pig! And I just saw the clowns and matadors moving in on me as the light slowly faded from my eyes. I woke up crying. It was such a tragic and scary thing…”

        Grace could see Paul’s eyebrows rise and fall individually. He flared his nose, pursed his lips, then did it all over again. He was struggling somewhere between pity and ridicule. Bringing one another into the intricacies of their dreams was not something the siblings commonly did. Paul didn’t know how to take it. “What the hell does that have to do with Dad, you crazy ass bitch?” he said in loud whispers. “It sounds like another ridiculous attempt to make me eat vegetarian. Can we get together one time without you telling me about a pig being murdered? I’m trying to eat bacon here!”

“Screw you, Paul! Why are you whispering?” Grace looked over and saw a waiter standing beside an Arab family who were looking at Grace appalled, like ordering food here was no longer a good idea. “I’m going to go up to the house and check on him.”

        “What are you worried about? He asked us to kill him. He’s not going to do it himself.”

        “How do you know?” asked Grace.

        “Because he wants to make it fun, which makes me think it’s a bluff. He doesn’t want to die, and he defintely doesn’t want to leave his corpse somewhere for a dramatic discovery.” 

        “...You’ve thought about this.”

        “Yea, a little bit… I’m just kind of hoping it blows over, and Dad just gets his shit together and makes a plan to fight the diagnosis.”

        “I hope for the same thing, of course. But what if Dad is stewing in his old age and just thinking the world is out to get him because mom died? Maybe he wants to ‘get back at the world,’ first.”

        “He’s not even that old! I don’t get it. Do you mean ‘get the world, by offing himself somehow?”

        “Offing himself or doing something else weird! Did you ever hear about that guy who went down to Mexico to kill himself, then did a bunch of blow, screwed a bunch of hookers, and decided he wanted to live?”

        “Oh yeah. Great story.” Paul leaned back and smiled. “Are you saying that’s what’s in store for dad? Because that actually sounds ok….” 

Grace thought for a moment.  “I…I guess. I think Dad is freaking out. He’s alone in a house on a hill with that deranged psyche of his that made the plan to have us escort him to South Africa and watch him drink a bottle of scotch while a couple of ….did he say goons?”

        “Yeah goons.”

        “While a couple of goons force him out of the back of a plane!? What are ‘goons’ anyway?”

        “Where does one get goons?” said a flaky, unwashed hipster, who walked onto the terrace. “That’s going to be a pretty awkward flight back to Cape Town or wherever.” It was Matthew.

        “Hey bro!” said Paul. “I didn’t know you’d be here.” Matthew was looking rough. Grace could tell he had either not gone home or not gone to sleep from the night before; possibly both. 

        “Grace texted me. What was he thinking? It would be ‘hey, thanks for killing our dad. That was super righteous of you. Here’s a couple hundred grand and umm…lunch wasn’t included in the execution, but here’s another $35 for Chipotle.’ How are those guys supposed to feel that someone paid them to chuck them out of a plane? They’re going to feel like shit after witnessing themselves tossing some crazy drunken pigfucker out over the Western Cape. Who’s to say they don’t chuck us out of the plane? Who’s to say Dad doesn’t change his mind at the last-minute right after they let go of him over the ocean? Then what?”

        Paul and Grace watched Matthew’s spiel with great interest. But while Grace and Paul were lightly sweaty in LuLulemon shorts and T-shirts, Matthew wore pink sunglasses, black jeans, and a white shirt under an army jacket. A feather ring in his ear. He looked like the love child of a Cuban waiter and an East German radical who had met at a David Bowie concert. He was also breathing fairly heavily. Grace sensed that if she shook him, dust or ash might fall off him. And yet he stood, slightly hunched, smiling at his siblings and mocking their lifestyle with his hangover. “Are you guys going to stick around for a bit? Because I’m starving.” Matthew staggered a bit as he loudly dragged a metal chair toward them from a recently abandoned table. Some of the other snobs at the café regarded him with interest as if they were hoping he’d break into a story about what he did last night and possibly take a sip from a hip flask.

        Grace leaned her elbows on the table and looked at each of her brothers in turn. “Look, the point is all of us refused dad’s ‘radical request.’ It’s not going to happen.”

        “Wait. Why am I here?” said Matthew.

        “You look like shit, by the way, bro.”

        “Thanks.”

        “Because I want us all to go up to dad’s place again, together, and talk to him like a loving family and stuff.” Paul and Matthew looked at one another. Grace could see Paul scheming.

        “Unfortunately, I have plans today already,” he said.

        “I’m just not down,” said Matthew.

        “Ugh! This won’t do, you guys!”

        “Can you give me a ride home later though?” asked Matthew.

        “No. I don’t want to hear your rambling phone conversations or Instagram stories while you dirty my leather seats with empty drug bags and…dandruff.”

        “I don’t have dandruff! My hair is phenomenal!” He ran a hand back through it.

        “If I were you...I’d hope that were dandruff,” said Grace of the cosmic particles that had indeed started to flutter from Matthew’s head and shoulders. 

        “So that’s it? No?”

               “I have to go,” said Paul. He moved the chair back and shuffled out as if his scrotum were sticking to his thigh, and he desperately needed to get somewhere private to pry it off.

        “I’ll come with ya,” said Matthew barreling after him into the sidewalk to avoid Grace’s gaze as she gave him her best deserted puppy dog expression.

“Fuck you guys,” she said, offhand. They spun their palms at her. “He’s suffocating, you know! He wants to know he has a purpose. It might help you two to be a little less self-involved. He needs you.”

The boys both turned and looked back. Then shrugged, then kept walking. “You smell like a couch that’s been collecting STDs in the back of a nightclub since the 1980s,” said Paul to Matthew, “like your crabs wear their collars popped.” Matthew slapped Paul’s chin.

        Grace downed the rest of her creamy green drink, then steeled herself to go face her father. She took one last contemptuous look at her two brothers, who were starting to wrestle on a strip of grass beside the sidewalk where a family was trying to circumvent them safely. No surprise that Allen didn’t pick up the phone when Grace dialed it again to make sure he was at home. She didn’t want to get all the way up there to find Allen away or entertaining a woman half his age. But the scene she found at her father’s house was much more troublesome than the normal neurotic insanity she was used to putting up with these days. A broken mug in the driveway. A trail of crumbs between the basement and the master bedroom. The doors to Allen’s dresser opened. Apart from that area, there were no other lights on in the house. Grace seemed to remember her father telling her ‘never to show up on the weekends without speaking to him first.’ But some noise, other than the specters of memory and Allen’s growing madness, had fanned out in the house, like someone had left a window open for an ugly hornet. 

Grace entered her father’s study where he would spend many hours doing many things but accomplishing nothing because he had no demands on his time…  His laptop was in there. It was plugged in. It was on! “Dad? Dad, are you here?” The device’s fan was giving all its might to keep the machine on. Grace leaned in and lifted the screen. A website with a black background and matrix-green text was on the screen. 

Oh shit.

        “Oh, come on!” she demanded of the empty room. Grace hurriedly moved the mouse and tried taking stock of what else her dad had been doing when he put up the ad. And since when does he know how to use the dark web! Grace was genuinely surprised the FBI had not turned up already. She saw a tall bottle of brown liquor that was about three-quarters empty and wondered if Matt had been right about a fifth not doing the trick. She didn’t know whether she should be encouraged by that fact or mortified.

        A tab on the top of his browser said, ‘Your Booking is Confirmed’ “Oh shit! Oh no!’ She thrust the scroller at it and clicked obsessively. But, at that moment, the fan sputtered and gave out like an obese comedian’s heart. The screen became unresponsive to Grace’s incessant clicking. “Don’t you dare die on me now, you piece of shit! Come on! What’s the booking?” The screen went black. Grace could smell burning. “Are you kidding me!?” She raised her head and looked right to left.

        The early afternoon sun started to light the room from behind her. She forced back an involuntary smile at the beauty of her childhood home illuminated by natural light. Grace slapped herself.

        She dialed Paul. He seemed to have picked up on accident because Grace heard him say, “You know what? I don’t actually wanna talk to her anymore today,” followed by Matthew’s laugh. She tried calling her dad, but it just went to his voicemail box. She heard her father’s voice. “Please don’t leave a message.”

The room seemed to smile back at her and assure her that no, it was not kidding. 

It said, “Go chase the fucker down.”