Chapter 19 #3
“I’m fine. Just forgot all my schooling.
” Caspar unfolded the directions for the table and scratched his head.
Everything was in French, and despite being pretty good in elementary school, it all seemed like gibberish to him now.
He blinked and sighed. His body hurt like he had run a marathon.
No, I’ve run through centuries. Legacies.
Lifetimes. IKEA’s got nothing on me. William looked up at him with wide eyes, as if he was an injured puppy.
“Were you always this tall?”
“Yes. No. I mean…” Caspar stretched out his back, which ached far more than he remembered. “I’m just from a long line of hunchers. I hunch. I’m reading directions, so I hunch, but now you’re seeing me in full form.”
“Somehow I don’t think so, but okay.”
Caspar went back to hunching and building. The clicks of Malek’s fingers over his digital keyboard filled the room, reminding Caspar of how quiet everything had become. After several minutes of working, Malek finally set down the phone, but the silence lingered.
“You need some help over there?” Malek eventually asked.
“I am struggling to figure out where this piece goes,” Caspar said. “The French instructions are throwing me. My brain keeps short-circuiting to reply with ‘comme ci, comme ?a.’”
“Comme ci, comme ?a” was the French equivalent for saying “so-so” when someone asked how you were. Malek laughed at the joke much more than it deserved. Caspar figured they were both feeling pretty ragged after this long day.
“I’d offer to help, since my French isn’t too bad, but I’m…”
“In another time period?” Caspar asked. When Malek nodded, Caspar added, “I know the feeling. We’ve both been down memory lane today.”
“Uh-huh. And I’m getting pretty tired of running.”
Caspar put aside the instructions and shuffled closer to the couch where Malek sat.
His body didn’t hurt when he was close to him.
He no longer felt old or confined next to him.
Caspar licked his lips, but didn’t get to kiss Malek before William slumped down on the couch and started to flick through the cards again.
Dammit.
As much as Caspar was warming up to this kid, he could sure ruin the mood.
William shuffled the deck and started to withdraw all the cards that represented All Trades, laying them on the coffee table.
He seemed to pause when he noticed that the same yellow figure holding drums on one of the jack cards appeared on a king card as well.
Malek’s blue profile also appeared on a subsequent king card.
“Wait. Why do you get two cards?” William asked. “And why are these both kings instead of a king and a queen?”
“Ugh. Fucking Nat,” Malek said. “My old friend Nat, a firestarter, made these. He… went on tour with us. So of course, he saw the behind the scenes footage and wanted to memorialize it. Ugh.”
“Oh.” William laughed.
“Wait. What do you mean?” Caspar asked.
“Come on. You should know.” William held up both king cards.
The yellow and blue profile shots mirrored one another, making them seem as if they were about to embrace.
William knocked the cards together and made kissing noises as he did.
The realization rolled over Caspar like waves and landed like a punch to his stomach.
Not only did Malek lose his band, he lost his boyfriend.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s… well, it’s not fine. But it happened a long time ago. Abe and I were together, then we weren’t. Life goes on, more or less.”
“Tell me about him.”
Malek shook his head. He made a grabby motion toward the king cards until William passed them over.
Malek gazed at both of them, touching the edges lightly, and then tore them both in two.
William gasped at the action, while Caspar remained mute until he was sure Malek was done.
Malek didn’t stop until he ripped up the remaining halves into confetti.
“Malek,” Caspar said. “I want those cards again. I want to know about Abe.”
“No, you don’t. And I’m not doing that.”
“There’s not much you can do if I use a wish for this,” Caspar said.
“What?”
“You heard me. Stop acting like you didn’t.” Caspar rubbed his finger along the ring, thinking over the specific wording in his mind. “I’m either going to wish to hear a song from your band, because I’ve never heard them before, or I’m going to wish to get these cards back together again.”
“I’ll play you something if you want to hear me sing, but not a song from All Trades. We don’t have enough people here to even get the right sound. And that music scene is dead, anyway. My band is dead, and I don’t want to think about that fact anymore.”
“Fine, that’s fair about playing. But I still want those cards replaced. Because even if the scene is dead, you should still keep that memory alive.”
“But there’s no point.”
“Yes, there is. There’s a reason we remember things. There’s a reason why these jewels delivered a history to my consciousness like inherited memory. Even if I can’t recall everything verbatim, I still know that I’m not alone now. I know there’s something much deeper going on here.”
“But what good is a memory if it’s painful?”
“I don’t know exactly, but there has to be a reason,” Caspar said. “Maybe what Katja told me earlier today, about the difference between mourning and melancholia, is true. Melancholia is when you let grief touch everything you own. You wallow in it. It’s painful and you never let it go.”
“Exactly. So I don’t think about it. So I don’t—”
“But not thinking about something is thinking about it. You know? That’s why I was knocked off my feet today.
My memories ruined me for a couple hours because I’d been denied all this information.
Even though I didn’t think about it, the lack of that piece still left a hole inside me.
But mourning,” Caspar said, speaking stronger than he had before, “Mourning is okay. It’s feeling the pain, then moving on.
Because yes, you have to move on, but you also can’t deny that something bad happened.
It sucks about my parents. It sucks about Abe and your band.
But it happened. So I want the cards to remind me—and you—that it did happen.
I don’t want to sweep it under the rug.”
Malek balled his hands into fists, but he didn’t say anything.
Caspar figured that was as far as they were going to get, so he started to wish.
“I want the exact version of the king and king cards in this deck. I want the exact version of the king and king cards in this deck.” Caspar took a shaky breath before he repeated it the third and final time.
Malek picked up the confetti pieces of the torn cards and held them in his hand.
Caspar thought Malek would simply replace the cards using another deck out there (meaning the owner would lose their king and king cards), but maybe Malek’s magic was getting stronger.
Maybe he could repurpose the actual torn shards of the cards and make them whole again with a flick of his wrist. After thirty seconds, Malek held the two cards between his fingers.
Even the water stain in the corner of Abe’s card was there again. Perfect.
“Thank you,” Caspar said. “Now tell me about Abe.”
“You already know most of the story. I was in love with Abe. Then our items were found. He died, I lived, and I knew I couldn’t do anything like that again.”
“Be in a band?” Caspar asked. “Or be free?”
“Both. Music is freedom.”
“It is,” William said. “I get that.”
Caspar shot him a look. He failed to notice, yet again, that Caspar and Malek were trying to have a private moment. Caspar wished desperately that this apartment building had a pool or daycare centre so William could have something else to do.
“Can I ask you something, Malek?”
“Depends,” Malek said.
“Your songs. Your band. I know it’s not the same playing without them, and I’m not asking it to be the same, but I’ve never heard All Trades before. I didn’t even realize what you played until the guitar showed up. And you sing too, I’m guessing, based on the microphone reference?”
Malek seemed saddened before he nodded. “I sang in our band, though I co-wrote the lyrics.”
“That’s great. So play me a song.”
Malek sighed. “Are you really going to use your last wish for something like that?”
“Only if you won’t give it to me freely.” When Malek didn’t answer, Caspar added, “Play anything for me. A cover. A new song, an old song. I don’t care. I just… really want to hear music.”
“I can play drums,” William added after a long silence. “I know there are no drums here, but there are empty boxes, pots and pans, and this plastic bin—”
“Sure,” Malek said. “At least that way, it won’t be completely like All Trades. And Caspar won’t have to use his last wish.”