Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

He lifted his right hand, raising it to chest height. His eyes on the other man’s, he coughed, once.

A small glow puffed into life in his palm, at first very dim, but quickly growing into a little ball of bright orange fire, about the size of a golf ball.

The old man watched the flame. ‘Huh,’ he said, as if impressed.

‘Right,’ Nash said, closing his hand and lowering it back to his side. ‘That answer your question?’

‘I suppose it does.’

‘Good. Got any more, or are you going to leave? Or I guess you could stay, and we could beat up on you for a while. For practice. That could work.’

‘How’d you do it? The fire.’

‘It’s a gift.’

‘From whom?’

‘From him. The Dark One. For doing his work.’

‘How? What kind of thing?’

‘We pray to him,’ Nash said. ‘Every day. And we make sacrifice.’

The old man nodded as if someone was explaining an important change in the terms and conditions of his health insurance. ‘What kind? Animals? People?’

‘No.’ Nash laughed scornfully. ‘That’s retro bullshit. You do the wrong thing with the right intent, you don’t need that Dennis Wheatley crap.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘We break, we burn. We spoil.’

‘You say “we”?’

The other men watched from the background, silent, as if knowing this conversation was out of their league.

‘Me, mainly. These guys … they got a ways to go.’

‘So show me something. The kind of thing you do.’

Nash hesitated. On the one hand the situation was kind of whack. He didn’t have a clue who this guy was. Could be a cop for all he knew. But if so, he couldn’t have anything on Nash or he’d have come with back-up and guns – even assuming Miami PD kept detectives on the payroll after they got so old they looked like they should have their feet up on a porch, waiting for the grandkids to come visit so they could go to Disneyworld and waste enough money to feed an Opa Locka family for a month.

The other thing was that Nash did want to show someone, someone other than the hangers-on lurking in the shadows. He’d shown those guys what to do, countless times, but none of them was making progress. They couldn’t get it to click, and that failure was holding him back. Nash understood that it wasn’t enough to walk this road by yourself. You got status from how many you dragged along with you. It was a gift you had to keep on giving. Day after day. Night after night.

He put his hand in his jeans and pulled out a small cardboard container, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He held it up.

‘What’s that?’

Nash opened it. The interior had been padded with cotton wool. Lying in the centre was a tiny box. He removed this and held it up for the old man to see.

The man leaned forwards and squinted, seeing an intensely shiny black surface over most of the box, apart from the lid. There, someone had spent a great deal of time painting a detailed winter scene: pine trees and snow and a horse-drawn sleigh with two people on it, wrapped in old-fashioned coats and furry hats. It was so precise that it looked as if it must have been painted with a brush of a single hair, white and green with highlights of intense red and purple and dots of gold, all the more striking for the blackness of the box. It was extraordinarily shiny, too, as if coated with many coats of colourless varnish. In its detail and lustre it reminded the old man of something else, a far larger box he had once commissioned to be built.

‘And?’

‘Old guy who lives a couple blocks from here,’ Nash said, putting the tiny box carefully down on the floor. ‘I heard him talking in the store. His wife’s dying of cancer. Her mother was from Russia. The one thing she brought with her from the old country was a box like this. A lacquer box, they call it. It got stolen when this guy’s wife was a kid, but she’s remembered it all these years. Like it stood for her mom, or some shit. So this guy, he knows his wife’s dying, and he’s got cash salted away she doesn’t know about. He’s been saving all these years for the right time, putting a buck away here, fifty cents there. He figures this is the right time. So I overhear him telling all this to the guy behind the counter – who doesn’t give a crap, I mean he really could not care less – telling him that he’s blown this money, seven hundred fifty dollars, on buying one of these on the internet. Spent weeks tracking down a box like the one he’s heard his wife describe all these years. It’s her birthday in a week. He’s going to give it to her then. Or … he was. Until I paid a visit to their house, last Sunday morning when they were at church.’

‘You stole it. Nice.’

Nash smiled. ‘Right. But that’s not it.’

He raised his right foot and paused, closing his eyes as if in supplication, and then brought the heel of his boot down on the lacquer box, smashing it to pieces.

He was quiet for maybe ten seconds, relishing the moment. Then he opened his eyes.

‘That’s what he likes.’

The old man was motionless, as if listening for something. After a few moments he shook his head. ‘I got nothing,’ he said. He seemed irritated, and something else. Disconcerted, perhaps.

Nash was confused too, having anticipated a very different reaction. ‘What?’

The old man stood there, lips pursed, furrow-browed. Up until this point he’d seemed relaxed, as if their discussion had been quite interesting but no big deal. He didn’t look that way now. He looked unhappy, and thoughtful. He looked serious.

‘What’s up, dude?’

The old man glanced at Nash as though his mind was already on other things. ‘What’s up? I’ll tell you what is up. I like your style, but there’s a problem.’

‘What kind of problem?’

‘A big one. I don’t know who you’ve been sacrificing to, my friend, but he is not the Devil.’

‘Oh yeah? How do you know he’s not?’

‘Because I am,’ the old man said.

He turned to the man in the shadows who was still holding his wallet, held up a hand, and clicked his fingers.

The man exploded.

There was utter silence. None of the men standing there, sprayed though they were with blood and brains and internal organs, said a word or made a sound or moved a muscle. It was so very quiet that it seemed possible they might even have stopped breathing, until they all blinked, in unison.

‘Don’t try that at home,’ the old man said, bending down to pick up his wallet from where it had landed conveniently by his feet. ‘Otherwise, keep up the bad work.’

He walked out into the night, purposefully, a man who’d determined that it was finally time to get down to business.

Chapter 5

The flight was OK except that a woman from the airline kept coming to check on Hannah, talking to her like she was five years old. At first, Hannah had been glad. She was a little nervous at the prospect of the journey, never having flown by herself (though also excited, as it would be the most compelling proof yet that she was, in fact, extremely grown up). Her dad was there to see her off, of course, but he still had not shaved and his voice was quiet and he was blinking an awful lot. He hugged her tightly when it was time for her to get on the plane and stood watching her walk down the corridor until she had to turn the corner and couldn’t see him any more. A kind-looking old lady with long grey hair told her not to worry, she’d see him again soon. Hannah didn’t think it was any of the lady’s business, but said thank you anyway.

She didn’t like to think of her dad driving back over the hill to their house and walking into the silence all by himself. So she did not, and read her book instead.

The flight passed, as they all do, eventually.

The first person she saw when she walked out of arrivals in Seattle was Granddad, standing with his hands in his corduroy trousers, chubby and pink-faced and irrevocably bald. His face lit up when he saw her, and she ran over and buried her face in his sizable stomach.

‘It’s OK,’ he said, putting his arms around her, smelling as always of peppermint. ‘Everything will be OK.’

Half an hour later they were in Granddad’s car on their way out of Tacoma. It was, Hannah believed, the same car he’d had when he came to visit in Santa Cruz – though it was hard to be certain. He seemed to delight in changing them regularly, and in picking vehicles in colours that had no name, somewhere on the spectrum between brown and green and sludge, hues of which it was impossible to imagine someone ever thinking: Ooh, yes, let’s make it look like that. Their shape was also hard to describe beyond that they looked like cars, the kind a small boy might draw. The sole constant – and this is what made it tough to tell if this was a new one or the same old one – was that the inside would be flamboyantly, outrageously untidy.

When Granddad opened the trunk to stow Hannah’s bag he had to move a birdcage, two bags of old alarm clocks, a broken DVD player, quite a lot of shoes, a length of green hosepipe, two large metal springs made of copper, and a stuffed raccoon. Hannah wasn’t sure whether she was allowed by law to ride in the front of the car with him, but there wasn’t any choice as the back seat was full of too many things to list unless you had a piece of paper ten feet long, a pencil, and a sharpener.

From time to time Granddad would make odd sculptures, one of which – apparently fashioned from the insides of a small television, some watches, a toy mouse, and other things she didn’t have names for – graced the bookshelf in Hannah’s bedroom. She had no idea what it was supposed to be but she liked it anyway. He had given her parents several such works in the past, too, but Hannah’s mother had evidently decided they would be seen to their best advantage in the garage.

When she sat in the passenger seat Hannah had to angle her legs because there was an ancient suitcase in the footwell. It was made of leather and had a dusty dial on the front. She asked, politely, if it was possible to move it.

‘I’m afraid not,’ Granddad said. ‘It has to be there or the car won’t go.’

As often, Hannah wasn’t sure whether this was true or not, but managed to get her legs comfortable. ‘So where are you living now, Granddad? Where on earth?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Will it take long?’

‘Quite a while. I’m going to take the scenic route.’

‘Should I chatter senselessly the entire way, or gaze quietly out the window instead?’

He looked at her and smiled, putting deep, kind lines in the skin around his eyes. ‘That, my dear, is entirely up to you.’

As he pulled out of the parking lot, Hannah settled back into her seat and took a bite of the sandwich he’d brought for her, knowing she’d probably do a bit of both.

Hannah had learned early in life that the thing about her grandfather was he didn’t live anywhere in particular. He did not fail to live anywhere in the way most people did, like the ones who sat on street corners in Santa Cruz, displaced or unplaced, submissive or cranky, overly tan and wary of passers-by, the people her mom and dad had taken pains to explain deserved as much politeness and goodwill as everyone else, possibly more. Those people didn’t have homes because they couldn’t afford them, or due to being unwell in body or mind.

Granddad was different. He didn’t have a house because that was the way he liked it. For a long time – before Hannah was born – he’d had a home. He lived with Grandma, whom she never met, in a house in Colorado. Even then he would have preferred a more itinerant life, but his wife felt differently and they had children to bring up – Dad and Aunt Zo – and so he’d consented to being shackled to one particular house, one particular road, one set of grocery stores and local news stations and weather patterns and group of people and ways of being, and a ludicrous little dog belonging to a neighbour who’d barked the whole damned time for years and years, a memory which evidently still rankled.

Once he’d got over the death of Grandma, however, he’d done what he’d always wanted. He sold the house and everything in it, and went on the road. That was twenty years ago. Now he was a quantum elder, and there was almost no means of predicting his whereabouts at any given moment – where on earth, as Mom and Dad always put it, rolling their eyes, the old man might be. He rattled around the United States (and occasionally other countries, like Russia and Mozambique, but mainly he stayed in America) in a succession of battered cars (or perhaps one car, of surprising longevity, no one was sure). Sometimes he’d hole up for several months, renting an apartment or cottage or shed. At other times he’d pause for only a few days, lodging in a hotel or motel or even, Hannah’s mom speculated darkly, somewhere so far off the beaten track that there were no places to stay, which meant he was presumably sleeping in his car.

Hannah thought this was an exaggeration. Having seen Granddad’s car/s, she was confident there would simply never be enough room for him to stretch out.

They drove for a few hours. At first it was busy city streets and highways, and Hannah kept quiet because her grandfather was concentrating. He drove at a consistent, sedate pace, which from time to time provoked irritation in other road users, manifested by honking and the waving of fists. Unlike her father, who responded to this style of criticism in kind, Granddad hummed serenely – before suddenly stepping on the gas and leaving the other cars for dust, out-smarting them with deft multi-lane manoeuvres. Just occasionally you might feel inclined to close your eyes during one of these dogfights, but you rarely believed there was a genuine chance of dying.

Soon they were out of the city and driving around the Olympic Peninsula. For a while he played music on the car stereo, the kind of quiet, complicated music he liked, which he said was called ‘baroque’, but when it ran out he didn’t put on any more. At times he took them close to the woods and at others he drove along the cold, craggy coast, flicker-lit by sun glinting off the ocean between stands of silver and paper birch. Sometimes they talked, about school and stuff, and where Granddad had lived recently (he’d been lodging at their destination for several weeks now, a long stay by his standards: before that he’d tried a spell in the hills of somewhere she’d never heard of, called Syria, but hadn’t liked it much, too dusty and hot).

For much of the time, as the afternoon wore on, they drove in equable silence. Something she liked about her grandfather was that if you wanted to talk then he’d listen, but if you didn’t want to talk, he’d listen to that too. His mind wouldn’t immediately fly away to work and emails or all the things that seemed to have Mom and Dad in their tractor beams. With them you had to talk all the time to keep their attention, to remind them you were there. Not with Granddad.

And sometimes, when a lot has happened in your life, much of it inexplicable, silence is what you need to say the most.

After a while she fell asleep.

It was almost dark when she woke, stirred by a sudden decrease in the car’s speed. Hannah pulled herself upright, blinking, as her grandfather turned off the highway and on to a narrow two-lane road leading into the hills.

‘Are we here?’

‘We’re always here,’ he said. ‘That’s important to remember. But in the specific case of the place to which we’re going, we very nearly are.’

‘What?’

‘Sorry. “Yes” is what I meant to say.’

The road wound up and over the hills. At the top you could see the ocean for a few minutes through the trees, and then the road headed down again on the other side.

At the end of it stood a hotel, an old-looking two-storey lodge made of wood, but Granddad turned towards a crop of cabins dotted along a pathway that meandered along the low bluff above the beach. He parked in front of the last of these.

‘Welcome to Kalaloch.’

The cabin was made of wood and painted white and grey, though not recently. It was clean but had a musty smell, like old sea breezes retired into stillness. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom with a tub so tiny Hannah thought she might have difficulty stretching her legs out in it, and a living room with two chairs and a couch but no TV. At all. Not even a small one. She checked several times, baffled by this overturning of the natural order.

The outside wall of the living room was taken up with a pair of sliding glass doors, with a view out over the path to the ocean. When he’d put her suitcase on the bed of her room, Granddad opened the doors and led her out on to the path, past a couple of battered plastic chairs evidently designed for enjoying the view from the minuscule deck, assuming you’d brought a thick sweater or two.

The beach was twenty feet below the edge of the bluff, a wide stretch of grey sand reaching out towards an even greyer sea. A few pieces of driftwood, large and very white, were strewn across it. There was no one down there, no footprints even. It looked like the end of the world. The ocean seemed as though it went on forever and then a bit more.

A gull sailed by, high overhead, and disappeared.

Even with Granddad only feet away, Hannah felt very alone. Her hand folded around the iPod in her jeans pocket. ‘Is there Wi-Fi here?’

‘Not in the cabin. There is in the lodge, though, when we go over there to eat dinner.’

Hannah nodded.

‘You want to Skype your dad?’

She shrugged. He looked out at the ocean for a moment, then put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but it’s been a long drive, and I’m rather hungry already.’

She smiled at him. He always heard.

Chapter 6

Meanwhile, about a thousand miles away, a man was sitting at a table in a diner called Frankie’s Food Fiasco, situated at the edge of a small town in North Dakota. The man was called Ron – though a lot of people had another name for him.

The restaurant had got its name because it was owned by a guy called Frankie: sometimes that’s the way it is. Frankie was a capable cook, and his diner was regarded as pretty much the only place you’d voluntarily eat in town. Less well known was that Frankie had never wanted to own a diner. He’d wanted to be a movie star. For a while it looked like it might happen, too, after he scored a lead supporting role in a TV series about a maverick chiropodist turned surfing detective, called Undertoe, which by odd coincidence was the first show Hannah’s dad worked on. It was also the only one that had got a second season, and thus constituted his biggest and, kind of, only success. Frankie had played the star’s dour buddy, prone to mutter the word ‘Fiasco!’ whenever things went wrong – which became a moderately popular running gag in society at large for about five minutes.

Once the show got cancelled and he’d realized the world of entertainment appeared not merely willing, but keen, to get along without him, Frankie had enough smarts to head back to his home town, where he used his savings to buy a failing restaurant, largely because he had no idea of what else to do. Through trial and error – and a degree of bloody-mindedness – he’d rewritten himself as a cook, and now if you wanted to eat out in Shendig, North Dakota, Frankie’s Food Fiasco was where you’d go.

Frankie could have been content with this state of affairs, but he was not. He wished he was still an actor, and in the intervening years had developed a churning resentment of the people who frequented his diner. What did they know about the life he should have had? Nothing. Zip. Nada. They just wanted their burgers and wings and fries and beer. They sat and stuffed their greedy faces not caring that the food they were shovelling down had been prepared by a man who, were this a fair and just world, should be lounging on the deck of a beach house in Malibu, stupefied with money and success.

In revenge for this, every night Frankie would, at random, screw up a single dish. He’d put in way too much salt, or a big dollop of hot sauce, or mix untoward ingredients in such a way that the result tasted quite unlike anything you’d generally regard as food. Though it was never explicitly discussed, some of the restaurant’s customers realized the danger, incorrectly assuming it was a recurrent accident. You couldn’t say anything should you be unlucky enough to be served the booby-trapped dish because Frankie was prone to banning people if they got uppity, and you didn’t want that to happen as the only other place to eat in Shendig (apart from Molly’s Café, which was dependably disgusting) was the Burger King downtown. If you received Frankie’s nightly food bomb you forced down as much as you could and politely told the waitress you were full, declining the opportunity to have the remainder boxed – knowing that statistically you were unlikely to get the booby prize again for a while.

Unless, that is, you were Ron.

Ron ate at Frankie’s at least once a week. It was just down the hill from his apartment and he enjoyed the low ceilings, the wood panelling, the fact that the music was never too loud. He also liked the food, though it seemed like his entrée tasted really weird about one time in three. Ron hadn’t heard the rumour about the food bombs. He just shrugged and put it down to fate.

Ron put a lot of things down to fate. He had to. Like the fact that the booth he was sitting in tonight – and he couldn’t move, because the place was packed: people liked to come in when it was busy, as it lowered the probability of receiving a dish that tasted like it had been cobbled together from things that had died out on the highway and then spent a few days simmering in snot – happened to be right under a spot in the exposed piping hooked to the ceiling that had developed a leak, and was intermittently allowing droplets of very cold water to fall on to his head. He’d tried moving to the other side of the booth, but it happened there, too. Except the drops were boiling hot.

Tonight his ribs tasted great, but he was barely aware of them. He was concerned instead with two other matters, the first being that he’d totalled his car that afternoon. It had snowed heavily a couple of days before and while most people had managed to avoid the very obvious icy patch at the end of the road, Ron had not. As he’d recently lost his job at the picture framer’s after dropping (and damaging, cataclysmically and beyond hope of repair) what had turned out to be a rather valuable painting, Ron wasn’t in a position to get his car fixed. Without one, it was going to be hard to find a new job.

The second thing on his mind was his girlfriend, Rionda. Or rather, he realized gloomily, his ex-girlfriend. She worked at the Burger King and was the nicest person he had ever met. She’d seemed to like him too, but their association had been plagued by disappointing events, including him setting fire to her favourite dress when lighting a candle that was supposed to be romantic, and accidentally backing his car over her foot.

She’d put up with most of this reasonably well, but the last weekend had seen a new low point. Invited for the first time to meet Rionda’s parents, Ron became entangled in a series of calamities during a visit to their bathroom that he still didn’t understand, but which had ultimately led to a need for the services of not one, but two teams of emergency plumbers, working in shifts, an estimated refurbishment bill of six to ten thousand dollars, and an odour which experts were now saying would probably never go away. When Ron had trudged away from the house at the end of the afternoon, Rionda and her mother were standing on the porch in floods of tears, and her father had been brandishing a shotgun.

Ron guessed that was probably the end of it.

He sighed and reached for his soda, not realizing until too late that he’d dipped his sleeve in his barbecue beans, at which point this distracted him sufficiently that he knocked his drink over. Not all of it dripped through the hole in the table on to his trousers, but most did.