Chapter 9
It’s sunset and we are at a stupid restaurant-bar on Ocean Drive—one of those places that has a loud guy with very white veneers and a sleazy striped shirt standing on the sidewalk out front, trying to talk everyone who walks by into coming inside.
The hostess has some of the biggest altered breasts I’ve ever seen, and her amazingly small white dress seems to emphasize what a good job the surgeon did with the nipples.
Do surgeons do the nipples? Anyway, hers are good. Dick Face takes his time admiring them as she seats us at a round table with a marble top.
We are steps from the beach, but it feels like we’re sitting in a cave. My backpack is squished under the table. Music thumps like we’re in a nightclub (maybe called The Cave).
I get right to work. “Why did you disappear?”
“Man, you’re like one of those reporter types,” he grumbles.
“I need my drink first. My first drink.” He grins at the server coming toward us.
Her own buoyant breasts are only slightly smaller than the hostess’s.
I’m beginning to suspect that everyone in this town has gotten “work” done.
You’d think Dick Face would have, too, but he looks sunken, unimproved.
He orders food along with his whiskey, and his choices surprise me. They’re all veggie sides and appetizers. I ask for a water, since I don’t drink. Not since my depressed-hippie phase in Sedona, when I realized that impairing my judgment might make me too dangerous.
“Have you educated yourself about factory farming in this country?” Dick Face asks the server, pointing at some items on the menu. “It’s grotesque.”
She nods, smiles.
Oddly, he continues: “Meat destroys the body; it’s horrific the way you people mutilate yourselves. No respect for your own bodies, even though they die so quickly. You’d think you’d care more.”
“Oh, I agree completely,” she coos.
I stare at her. Her eyes are wide, the pupils fully dilated. She’s leaning toward Dick Face, her hands flat on the shiny surface of the table.
“I want to be a vegetarian,” she says with determination. “I love that.”
“Holy crap.” I grab his arm. “Stop it!”
He glances at me, smiles his slimy, wicked smile, his flabby, thin lips too fluid. “What? It’s true. They’re so self-destructive.”
The server is still watching him, rapt.
“You can go.” He waves her off.
“Of course!” She scurries away.
“Shit,” I mutter. “This is how you’ve lived? Making everyone do whatever you want?”
He shrugs. “Why not? If you have it, use it.” He chuckles.
I shake my head, shake it again.
“You should’ve heard me sing, kid,” he says. “The way they worshipped me. Man. Good times.”
For a second, I want to hear him sing. I refocus. “What happened? Why did you stop?” He definitely doesn’t seem like the type to admit he’s getting old and isn’t as relevant anymore.
He sighs. “Fallow period.”
I wait. The server is rushing over with his drink. He grabs it, tosses about half of it back without acknowledging her.
“Um, sorry, a water for me?” I remind her.
“Oh!” She seems to notice me for the first time. “Oops.”
“What’s a fallow period?” I know it’s going to be something weird.
“It’s like sleep for us.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his arm, coughs. “For us oldbloods. Usually only takes me a couple decades of laying low, then I’m back better than ever.”
This sinks in slowly and not very successfully.
“How old are you?” I ask, and in the beat before he responds, I am afraid.
I’m not sure I want to continue this conversation.
I’m not sure about any of it. There is no such thing as a dark power, as magic, as a curse.
There is no such thing as this strange, awful man whose sperm created me. There is no such thing as me.
“Eh. Hard to say at this point. . . .” He nods to himself, considering, or counting. “Two thousand and change. Been around the block.” He spits out a laugh, swigs his drink.
The server places his appetizer in front of him and he takes a quick scarfing bite, then grimaces. “Bring out the chef.”
She rushes off to do his bidding, and I am staring at nothing, my brain churning.
A sweaty, stressed-looking man, short and round, comes stomping out of the back, ready to argue.
“What are you doing?” I whisper. “Leave him alone!”
But Dick Face is living up to Dee’s name for him, berating the guy, telling him he can taste the rancid lard on his cauliflower fritters.
Within seconds, the cook is in tears, confessing, apologizing.
He’s actually wringing his hands. The party taking up a few of the surrounding tables has fallen mostly silent to observe the scene.
Looks like a famous-ish rapper and his entourage.
Some of the women are wearing bikini tops instead of actual tops; the lounging men are covered in tattoos.
“Enough,” I hiss.
Dick Face leers, waves the cook away.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I’m half out of my seat.
“I’m just messing around.” He shoves a few more fritters into his mouth.
He finishes his drink, yells for another, not even feigning normal manners now.
“Simmer the fuck down!” someone calls at him, and he mumbles, “Fuckin’ try me, asshole,” without even glancing their way. And then, “I’m a little stressed. Gotta let it go. Gotta just let it go. Breathe in, breathe out.”
“What are you stressed about?” This man could own the world. In fact, I’m not sure why he doesn’t.
He hesitates for a moment, then says, “Fabian. My son. Impressive man. I got attached.”
Fabian. I know that name. The MMA fighter. His son.
Hold on.
“Motherfucker took him out.” And suddenly he is crying. First he sniffles, then tears cut haphazard paths down his pitted cheeks. He doesn’t try to hide them. He’s gasping, drawing shuddering breaths. “Fuck. Shit. Fuck it all. He killed my boy.”
I experience an alarming, instinctive pang of sympathy.
“The demon hunter,” I hear myself say. Grub’s moniker for the serial killer I’ve assumed was imaginary. Until now.
He looks up sharply, blinks, wipes his eyes hard with both hands, exposing the red insides of the lids. “We aren’t demons. Someone made that shit up.”
“What are we?”
“He’s coming for my kids, trying to kill them all. Trying to wipe us out.” And then, muttering: “So alone. No one around.”
“All your kids?” I am still talking but my mind feels too quiet, like it’s shutting off.
He’s balled into himself. He tries to straighten his shoulders. “Girl, I’m the original. The OG. They’re all my kids! He thinks he’s gonna win and we’re just gonna give up or somethin’.”
My brain slides off the tall, slick sides of this revelation.
I can’t grasp any part of it. He goes on in a mumble, eyes on the table: “That’s right, I’m the original.
And now everyone else is gone. It can drive you crazy, when you’re alone like this, y’know?
Like I am. It can drive you crazy.” He stares suddenly, blearily at me.
His eyes fill again with tears, his mouth sags.
He coughs. I reach reflexively toward him, startling myself, and my hand lands lightly on his wrist. He doesn’t seem to notice it there.
I ask, “Who is he? Who’s the one who thinks he’s going to win?”
He guzzles his second drink, which seems to revive him a little, and scoops a slick of spinach into his mouth.
“One of those, y’know—guardians, the friggin’ cops.
We called them . . .” He says a word I can’t understand at all.
And now that he has said it, I am noticing a faint accent underlying everything he says.
Not one I recognize. He adds unhelpfully, “When they got started.”
“What are they?”
“Didn’t think there were any more around. Been a while. Been a long time. Hardly anyone left anyway.” He finishes the drink, bellows for another. He’s picking up speed now.
“Shut the fuck up!” yells the same guy as before. It’s getting crowded in here, the music louder, but Dick Face is still audible enough to piss people off.
“Make me!” he shrieks, rising a few inches. There’s something pitiably defensive in his voice; I think of Ella for a second, when she gets overstimulated and frantic with fear.
And then a towering muscle-bound guy in a tank top lumbers over, animal eyes expressionless, neck tattoos flexed. “I don’t like to hurt an old man,” he growls.
“No, you don’t, you pathetic prick.” Dick Face smirks.
The man freezes in his massive tracks, eyes narrowing in confusion. Then his face goes even blanker.
“Had something to say?” asks Dick Face with smarmy pleasantness.
“I am very sorry to interrupt you,” the man rumbles.
“Okay, great. And would you also like to say that you are a stinking little cunt?”
I wince, all my pity instantly evaporating.
“Yes. I am a stinking little cunt.”
“Thanks for your service. Bye-bye.” The incongruously lovely voice goes singsong.
The man in the tank top turns obediently away. The server brings two more drinks, anticipating Dick Face now.
“You should slow down.” I don’t want him to pass out. I want him to answer all my questions.
He ignores me.
“You said there’s hardly anyone left,” I remind him. “Left of who? What did you mean?”
He screws up his face in toddleresque annoyance.
“It used to be there were so many of us, before the shift. . . .” He drifts, sounding drunker by the second.
These drinks are enormous. “Now they have to root it out. Any of the old power, they’re rooting!
They call it ‘the dark’ now. There was no dark! It was all just power.”
He swivels in my direction. “What can you do, anyway? What did I make this time?”
“I’m a . . .” I can’t say it. “Every man I’m . . . romantic with dies.”
He whoops. “Wowie. Fun one. Done anything interesting with it?”