Outro: The Serial Novel

Chapter 26, Part I

The Rediscovery of Kai

Twenty-Six

I have a powerful fetish for the rosetta figures etched into lattes by Northwest baristas. My knowledge of the process is limited to stolen counterside glances, but here’s my understanding of the basic steps: you lay down two shots of espresso, suffuse them with milk foam to create a dirty sienna canvas, and then pour a narrow stream of hot milk in a zig-zag weave, creating a ski trail of white that is then seamed into a rough symmetricality by a quick pour down the center. The result is an ivory sword fern, often with branches into the teens. And then you get to destroy the poor thing (philistine!) by drinking it.

I’m lying to you. None of this is important. I am seated in a corner of the Caffe Vita in downtown Olympia, and I am stalling. After staring at my ten-limbed rosetta for ten minutes, I move on to a chessboard balanced on the windowsill. The knights are staring at each other. I turn them so they’re back-to-back, pacing off a duel.

“Hello. Is there a guy named Kong in the mountaineering department?”

“Oh, you mean Kai. He’s not in today. Would you like someone else from that department?”

“Um, no. It has to be Kai.”

“Steve’s back there. Steve knows everything about…”

“Nope. Has to be Kai. He’s a Sherpa, you know…”

The man laughed. “I swear, that guy has more groupies than the Foo Fighters. Well, listen. He’ll be in tomorrow afternoon, um…” – sound of shuffling papers – “noon to six. So call back then, I guess.”

“Thanks. Thank you.”

“No prob.”

That’s how I found him. Apparently, he transferred from Tacoma to Olympia as a way of staying out of my sights. As if I were some kind of threat. It’s three-thirty-five, and I’m running a mental preview of every possible confrontation, like an improv group doing the same sketch over and over in different theatrical styles. Tennessee Williams. Shakespeare. Gilbert & Sullivan. None of them have the tiniest relationship to reality.

The weather has decided to directly contradict my mood. The air is laced with a brilliant lemon-sorbet sharpness. A bevy of college students, clothed in the latest thrift-store fashions, are cavorting on the sidewalk, taking in the UV rays like they’re spoonfuls of caviar. My foamy rosetta has completed its elevator ride to the bottom of my cup. It’s go time. I dig out the last bit of foam with my finger and lick it off, and then I fight off years of parental training and leave my cup and saucer on the table for somebody else to pick up.

The sidewalk rolls away before me. I cross the intersection and pass the old State Theater. On the far side, an old-fashioned storefront space plays host to Jenalyn Sports, the windows covered in red banners declaring fifty percent off cleats. Lest I lose my nerve, I keep right on, through the double glass doors, past the cashiers, gun counter, baseball gloves, and then I look up to find spools of rope in fluorescent colors. Kai, my ghost, is demonstrating a locking carabiner for a tall man in a business suit.

“See, you lock that in, pull it tight just to double-check, and there’s no way in the world that…”

He stops when he sees me, and our eyes lock in for a long time. Those dark irises are hard to read. I imagine him bolting like a frightened buck, three giant leaps into the stockroom.

“Excuse me a moment, would you?” He leaves the businessman with a dozen carabiners and comes to take my hands.

“Hi. I’ve got a lunch break right after this customer. Can I buy you a latte?”

There’s no reason to say no. And I’m back at Caffe Vita, deflating another rosetta. Kai is five times more calm than he should be.

“I’m sorry, Channy. I’m sorry for the way I took off like that. And I’m sorry I haven’t called you. I’ve been meaning to, but the more I put it off, the harder it gets to pick up that phone.”

“You can always talk to me, Kai. I’ve been through everything. Nothing’s going to kill me.”

He glances outside at the college kids, as if he’s looking for spies.

“The thing is, after that weirdness at the bar, I had to talk to my therapist. Army guy. Sal. Unbelievably cool dude. The thing is, I can’t see you anymore.”

I’m not surprised, but it sounds a little too much like Scootie’s breakup with Ruby. I’m imagining what a bottle of crème de menthe Torani syrup would look like, emptied over Kai’s head.

“I know he’s… gone, Channy. I know he shouldn’t play into this. But he does. He was my best friend. I let him down. I should have seen it coming. The sight of you will always remind me of what happened, of how I failed. There is a real, concrete limit to how much I can recover from that, of how far I can get back to normal. It’s just not realistic to carry around this living reminder of…”

He runs out of words, but I get the idea. I’m the reminder. I am Kai’s souvenir from Iraq. He buys a little time by taking a drink from his latte, then sets down his cup as a marker.

“I can’t do it. I can’t see you any more. I’m sorry.”

I’m fairly sick of my emotions playing dogpile with me, so I’m holding firmly to my rational demeanor. I glance at the chessboard and find that someone has turned the knights back around. I speak at them so I don’t have to look at Kai.

“I think you and I are missing out on something pretty great, and frankly I’m pissed off at Harvey for taking this away from me, too. I think he’s done enough fucking damage. But there’s no way I’m going to talk you into anything. I can’t begin to imagine the things you’ve gone through, the things you might have seen. But Kai, I do want you to consider one other thing. We were friends before all of this, and I know it might take you a while to straighten things out, but if you come out on the other end, I’d like to think we can be friends again.. You don’t even have to call, just… show up at Karz some night.”

He waits for more, but that’s all I’ve got. I watch a skateboarder with dreadlocks grinding a curb. I’m feeling suddenly exhausted, and I can’t understand why this man cares about my dead husband more than I do.

“Kai? Could you just… go? I’m not up to all the niceties.”

He’s gentleman enough to not say another word. He seems to think it’s a good idea to take my hand from the table and give it a squeeze, and I’m too tired not to let him. And then he’s gone, the front door swinging in his wake. I stare at my caffeine rosetta for a long, long time. When I get around to my next sip, I’m surprised to find that it’s cold.


Next: Secret Agent Man

Purchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1

Image by MJV

Outro: The Serial Novel

Twenty-Five

Floy and the Phantom Poodle

Judging by the things I’ve read, the part of a dream that we remember is the part that comes right before we wake up. That way, it’s still fresh on our short-term memories, like words spelled out in flour that have not yet blown away on the wind.

If you picture my dream-world as a stage, the left half is a small apartment in which everything – furniture, draperies, appliances – has been fashioned from a pure, snow-white material. The right half is an identical apartment in which everything is pure black. (That bastard Scootie would call it mars black.) There is no wall between these two apartments, but there is a sort of clear, fluid separation. Viewed from either side, this divide resembles the surface of a swimming pool.

The residents of these apartments are horses – a white horse in the black apartment, a black horse in the white. Both horses are made of polished stone, and both wear expressions of utter neutrality. Their sole occupation seems to be to stare at each other, and despite the blank expressions you can feel hostility rolling from the stage like heat from a furnace.

When I wake, my eyes are fixed on a pencil-thick hole in the ceiling, previously occupied by a hook for hanging plants. Cottage cheese texturing spreads to all sides in a sparkly moonfield flecked with mica.

And immediately, I have my answer. On a chessboard, the figure of a horse represents a knight. Knights in adjacent squares can do nothing to capture each other, since their moves are limited to a combination of one and two squares (for instance, two forward, one to the side). For these two, however, the stony, hateful faceoff has become their all-consuming occupation, so they’ve decided to set up permanent apartments.

My epiphany arrives with the sound of panting. I look up to find an actual horse, sitting on its haunches in the center of my room.

“Java?”

Java comes to my bedside and spatulas his long snout under my hand.

“Young dog! What the hell are you doing here?”

“Jah-vah!”

This is a muted call, coming through the hole in my ceiling. It sounds a lot like Floy. I take my phone from my nightstand, hit #1 on my speed dial and get Floy’s puzzled response.

“Hello?”

“Hi. I don’t know if there’s a drip in my ceiling, but there seems to be a big poodle in the middle of my floor.”

“Oh, that’s hilarious!” says Floy. “But how the heck did he get there?”

“Doggy dumbwaiter? Extra-terrestrials?”

“I’m so sorry, Channy! I’ll come down and get him. If that’s okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s fine.”

A minute later, there’s a rap on my French doors, and Java rushes over to inspect. I slip on my robe and undo the lock.

“Hi!” says Floy. I’m surprised to find her in her nursing uniform. Java pokes his head through the doorway, and she gives him a playful bop. “You goof! How did you get down here? Have you invented teletransportation?”

“Going to work?” I ask.

“Just got back.”

“You are kidding me.”

The ol’ Sunday morning six to ten. We call it Hell Shift. This morning, however, we delivered triplets.”

“Wow! That’s gotta be rare.”

“Only the second for me, and that’s forty years of maternity.”

“Damn.”

Something else is on Floy’s mind, but she’s not coming out with it. We sprawl into one of those awkward silences where the only option is to play the housepet card. I scratch Java on the neck and say, “So how do we get him to reveal his secret passage?”

Floy runs a finger under her frosty-blonde bangs and rightfully ignores my question.

“Is there anything the matter, Channy?”

“No, everything’s fine. Since John fixed the garbage disposal, I…”

“No, no. Not the apartment. I mean, with you.” She laughs, a nervous piece of birdsong. “I don’t know, all that time around the birth canal seems to have endowed me with gyno-radar, and you seem sort of… flat lately. Like you’re really not here. Boy trouble?”

The housepet card is gone, so I hallucinate a piece of lint on my sleeve and pick at it.

“Hard to have boy trouble when ya got no boy.”

Floy’s expression is immediately swamped with disappointment. “You broke up with Kai?”

“Well, I’m not… sure. It was weird – like, off-the-charts weird. And my pal Ruby’s off on a cruise, so I haven’t had a chance to… Well, you know, sometimes you really can’t process something until you tell a friend about it.”

“Pancakes,” says Floy.

In my fuzzy state, I take this as a synonym for “Pshaw!” or “Nonsense!”

“No, really, I…”

“No!” says Floy, snorting into her hand. “Why don’t you shower up, and I’ll make some gooseberry pancakes. John’s off to Bremerton to use the gym, so we’ll have a nice unhindered session of gyno-psychology.

“Floy, I… Yes! I’ll be up in fifteen minutes.”


The Craigs’ living room is bright and playful, a canvas of beige carpeting and ivory tiles underpinning shelves and windowsills of beach objects: driftwood, seashells, a vase filled with frosted glass. They spend a lot of weekends cruising the Oregon coast, hunting new pieces for Floy’s assemblage. The item that always gets my attention is a brass pendulum that swings over a shallow pit filled with sand. When you pull it to one side and let go, it inscribes a Celtic flower of close-knit lines, drawing closer to the center with each small dose of gravity.

“Ah!” says Floy. “You found our favorite toy. Java managed to topple that over once. We had to search every shop in Northwest Oregon to find the right kind of sand for it.”

“He’s a rambunctious critter,” I say.

“Too long-limbed for his own good. He’s also just crazy for French B-R-E-A-D, which I think is just painfully cliché.”

Java cocks his head, which in this case means, I have no idea what you’re talking about, but at least you’re paying attention to me. When I turn back to the table, Floy has loaded me up with a steaming stack of pancakes, spotted here and there with igneous burstings of gooseberry.

“Oh Floy! I can’t tell you how many different parts of my body appreciate this.”

Floy runs a gob of butter along her cakes like she’s waxing a surfboard. “Ha-HA! What makes you think I’m doing this for you?” She cuts out a triangle and forks it into her mouth. “Mmph! Oh! So how did karaoke go last night?”

“Well. Much as I appreciate all the care and concern being tossed my way, the whole fleeing-boyfriend thing was way too public, and I guess I’m feeling the scorch of the microscope.”

“Yes, my family does that to me all the time. Which is endearing, when it isn’t utterly annoying. So how did this little spectacle come about?”

It takes me a whole stack of pancakes to fill her in. She follows with great interest – this, after all, being the woman who lives beneath her floor. But I forget some of the things I haven’t told her.

“…so I can’t figure out if this is coming from a run-of-the-mill relationship thing, or a post-traumatic thing – or if it has something to do with Harvey’s suicide.”

Floy holds up a hand. “Wait a minute. Who’s Harvey?”

“My husband. Kai’s best friend. Who died in Iraq.”

Floy’s expressions freezes into place.

“Oh God,” I say. “Oh God. I never told you this.”

Floy reaches a hand to mine on the tabletop. Her fingers are shaking.

“Channy! So that’s… All this time. God, I’m so sorry.”

I’ve had almost a year and a half to deal with Harvey’s death. For Floy, he has just appeared and then died within a paragraph.

“It’s just that… Well, I wasn’t able to talk about it for the longest time. The last few months, I finally found someone – Ruby – to listen to the whole miserable story. And now – God, look at me, blurting out suicides over breakfast. I’m so sorry.”

Floy seems to recover a bit, but her eyes are still damp.

“I don’t mean to be dramatic, honey. But you don’t know how many times I’ve imagined this kind of thing with John. There was this one night, terribly late, when he got a call, rushed into his flight suit and headed off – and he couldn’t tell me what it was. We all knew what it was – it was the October Missile Crisis, and John was flying a P-3 Orion over the Atlantic to look for Russian subs – but I played along, kissed him goodbye, wished him luck. And then spent the night torturing myself with every possible scenario, up to and including nuclear holocaust. At daybreak, he woke me on the couch, still in uniform, and the feeling of relief was so overwhelming that I went a little delirious. I think I cried for an hour straight.”

“Floy, I’m so sor…”

“Stop apologizing!” She’s crying now, too. “God, honey. I just wish I could have been there to help you.”

“But Floy – you were.”

These are the words that send her into speechlessness. She holds up a hand, excusing herself, and goes to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. She takes a long time to stir the sugar and cream, and then returns to the table, ready to deliver her summation.

“You need to find Kai. You cannot afford to let this hang. He probably needs to get some therapy. And you need to figure out if you’re up for this kind of drama. You’ve already had enough for someone three times your age.”

It almost seems like I’m getting a homework assignment from a stern-but-caring teacher. So I say, “Yes, ma’am.” And I get back to my pancakes.

Next: Spywork

Purchase the book at: http://www.amazon.com/Outro-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/1440111405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231020486&sr=8-1

Image by MJV