Authors: Edward Lazellari
Fresh snow rushed from the sky to join its graying counterpart on the streets of Alphabet City. People huddled in their overcoats, trying to keep nature’s cold bite from their collars. Seth tried to lose the girl, but she kept pace with him.
“Is it far?” Lelani asked.
“Is what far?”
“The café.”
“Café?”
“The tea?”
“We’re not going for tea. I just said that to get Joe off my ass. I’m picking up some … uh, supplies.”
They arrived at a tenement on Avenue C. Two young girls were building a snow wall around the stoop.
“Hey, Mr. Picture Man,” one of them said. She raised her hand for a high-five slap.
“Hey, Ms. Sassafras, what’s happening?” Seth obliged.
“When you gonna take my picture and make me famous?”
“Caitlin, you don’t want to be famous. You want to read books and work in an office. And don’t tell anyone you have money or they’ll all come a-borrowing.”
“I already got a moms, Mr. Picture Man. What I need you for if you ain’t gonna make me a star?”
“Just keeping you honest. Building a fort, huh?”
“Them stupid boys from the projects come ’round and throw snowballs at us. We just minding our own business.”
“Why are you even out here in the cold?” Seth asked.
Caitlin gazed at her boot. She ground the snow beneath her toe.
“Your mom?” Seth guessed.
Caitlin looked up. “I hate it when she all shaking and throwing up.”
“Is your mother ill?” Lelani asked the girl.
Caitlin remained quiet. Seth felt pressure to say something right, but nothing came into his head. He pulled out five dollars. “Here. Take your friend to the pizza shop. Have a slice, play video games.”
Caitlin and her friend were halfway down the block when she turned around and shouted, “When I’m famous, I’ma buy you a limo, Mr. Picture Man!”
“What color, Sassafras?” he returned, but the girls were long gone.
Lelani looked confused. “Should we look in on your friend’s mother?”
Seth considered it, but decided against it. “None of our business,” he responded.
They entered the building. Five flights up, Seth rapped a coded beat on the door. There was a rustling in the apartment. Through the door a muffled voice sang,
“The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things: of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—of cabbages—and kings…”
“Open the fucking door, Earl,” Seth said, pounding.
Earl, in his boxers and tank top, looked like he just awoke from a long sleep. He showed them into the kitchen while ringing out his ear with a finger and said, “You know … the code’s for everyone’s protection, man.”
“Is the
insignificant
other around?” Seth asked.
“At work. Who’s the chick?”
“Nobody. Ignore her.”
“This is my place of business, man. How do I know she’s clean?”
“You don’t.”
“You think with your dick, man.”
“Hey, can we get on with it? I’ve got deadlines.”
Earl disappeared into the back room. They heard a window open and then the clang of boots ascending a fire-escape ladder. Seth sat next to a peeling radiator pipe on a wiry kitchen table chair.
Seth pointed to the other chair and said, “This may take a while.”
“I’ll stand, thank you.”
“Really, make yourself comfortable. He has to go up to the roof, across two buildings, and down three apartments. Most paranoid fucker I ever met.”
“Paranoia is just another form of awareness. These chairs do not look sturdy.”
“I’ve sat in them a dozen times. They’ve never let me down.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“Suit yourself.”
“You think I’m strange.”
“Well, you’re beautiful—that makes you crazy by default.”
Lelani took her overcoat off, revealing an olive turtleneck knit, blue jeans, and black riding boots. The pattern of her shirt ran vertically, hugging the contours of her body. Seth took measure of her in his professional capacity—too meaty for the scrawny centerfolds in his third-rate periodicals, since the camera added pounds, but perfect in reality.
“You find me comely?” she asked, smiling.
Seth blushed, a first for him. His world was full of promiscuous women, desperate for money, for whom no breach in decorum was likely. Lelani, however, had him on the ropes. He got the impression she knew something he didn’t—something profound. A face like hers could land the cover of
Playboy
. Red could have any straight man she desired, and convert a few souls from the
other
team as well. What did she want from him?
“You still think you know me from before the accident that killed my folks?” he asked.
“I recognize many things about you.”
“People change.”
“So far, I haven’t been surprised by what I’ve found. Character stays constant, and you are who you are. Incidentally, what is your trade?”
“‘Mr. Picture Man.’ I’m a photographer.”
“An artist? No one at school expected you to succeed. At anything.”
“We went to school together?”
“The best in Aandor.”
“So I
am
Canadian?”
Lelani’s watch alarm went off. She pulled a pill case from her satchel. “Does your friend have any tea?”
Seth checked the refrigerator and found a can of iced tea.
“Cold tea?” Lelani said, examining the can.
“Beggars and choosers…”
She placed a purple pill into her mouth, then washed the pill down with the tea. Seth wondered if it was Prozac or some other mind-stabilizing substance.
“Vitamins?” he asked, innocently enough.
“Allergies.”
“Right. So tell me about our school. Did the girls wear those plaid micro skirts?”
“Why you were permitted into our school is a subject of much speculation. There was no evidence that you were intellectually gifted. And no, you are not Canadian.”
“Did you
search
for me just so you could insult my intelligence?”
“I found you because you have a duty to complete for some very important people, and I intend to see you fulfill it.”
“How could I possibly have had any important obligations at thirteen? Let me guess … I’m royalty.”
Lelani laughed. “Your mother was a tavern wench.”
“… Okay, you’re a time traveler. We have to save the future!”
Her cool manner and the earnestness of her gaze were unsettling. This was either the most amazing prank ever or the woman was deeply disturbed.
“You’re mocking me again,” she said. “You do have a healthy imagination, though. Good thing, because you’ll need it.”
“Now
you’re
mocking me,” he said, throwing her vernacular back at her.
“Things are seldom what they seem. There are thirteen years of your life which you cannot account for. Open your mind. Your origins will challenge everything you hold to be true—about your role, your world, even your universe.”
Seth burst out laughing. She was a sideshow drama queen; part carnie hack, part Rod Serling. “You’re so full of shit, sister…”
They heard shuffling in the bedroom, the clatter of blinds. Earl reappeared a moment later. He threw a ziplock bag full of herb on the table. “You owe me a hundred.”
“Put it on my tab.”
“Dude, you already owe me for last week. I’m not running a charity.”
“
Dude,
I’m tapped out right now. I’m good for it.”
Lelani picked up the bag and examined the contents. She arched an eyebrow at Seth. “Supplies?” The wave of contempt he imagined earlier had returned.
“Look, we have nothing to talk about,” he said, grabbing the bag from her. “You’re a space cadet.”
Lelani pulled out a photograph from her satchel and put it before him on the table—a man and a woman embracing cheek-to-cheek and smiling.
“Who are they?” Earl asked, craning his neck.
Seth was silent. He stared at the photo in disbelief, picked it up with both hands as though to disprove its existence, and fondled the glossy image with his thumb as one would a fine piece of velvet. A match had been lit in the dark recesses of his mind.
“Where the hell did you get this?”
“We have something to talk about after all.”
3
Alphabet City was a freshly shaken snow globe—four inches already on the ground, with no end in sight. Lelani’s hair billowed against the white backdrop of Tompkins Square Park like a flame. Its only competition came from the lights on a fire engine that blared past them on Tenth Street. Lelani refused Seth’s suggestion that they take a taxi back to his apartment.
“I’ll pay,” he insisted.
“I wouldn’t fit.”
“Do you mean physically?”
“Yes.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Quite serious.”
The knowledge she held boosted Seth’s tolerance for her eccentric nature.
“So dish,” he said.
“Dish?”
“How’d you come by a picture of my parents?”
“Parham and Lita Raincrest were not your biological parents.”
Seth’s heart sank into his gut. “I’ve been an orphan my entire life?”
“No. It was a cover. You were part of a group that emigrated here years ago to raise an infant. The environment at home was not safe. We lost contact with the group shortly after your arrival.”
“Where’s the kid now? Where’s the rest of the group?”
“I wish I knew,” she said. “You are the first one I’ve tracked. Luckily, you retained your name.”
A name that belonged to people who allegedly weren’t even his parents, Seth realized. “Who were my parents, then?”
“Your mother is Jessica Granger, a tavern wench at the Grog and Grubb Inn. Your father … unknown. A merchant who visited the pub. Once.”
“What city? Toronto?”
“You are not Canadian.”
From orphan to bastard in less than five minutes,
Seth thought. “You said Jessica
is
my mother.”
“To the best of my knowledge she still works at the Grog.”
The flood of questions came too fast for Seth to absorb: What was his mother like? Was coming to the U.S. his own choice? A fear grew within. To his surprise, Seth realized he was not ready for the whole truth.
“How’d I get into your school?” he asked, changing the subject. “If you’re any indication, it was probably a snob society. ‘Tavern wench’ doesn’t sound like a high-paying career.”
“Magnus Proust gives scholarships to the less fortunate. He believed in your talents…”
“Magnus Proust?” The name rattled around Seth’s mind with no slot to settle in. It sounded more like a new brand of Trojan condom than a headmaster at some elite school.
“What’s the school like?”
“Thirty students spend their first year as Novitiates. The subsequent cycles are two-year programs: twenty from the first year advance to become Apprentices. Ten are graduated from this lot to be his Acolytes. Of them, only four finally achieve the honor of becoming Magnus’s Adepts. I am an acolyte. You are an apprentice.”
The titles were odd, but Seth had heard stranger things. Some of his models came from the well-to-do class—rebels acting out against their banishment to Exeter and Vassar. But more important, Seth had found a big chink in her story. He was five or six years older than she was. No way was she a senior classmate to him. The suspicion that this was an elaborate con or the musings of an unbalanced mind crept back, but this time he experienced trepidation, as though he might lose something important—something he
wanted
to know. “What did we study?” he asked, playing along.
“Alchemy, transmogrification, sorcery, enchantments, curses…”
Seth stopped. His teeth ground together painfully. He turned away from Lelani.
“… You were the group’s mage,” she went on. “Though little true magic remains on this world, it was considered a necessary precaution.”
His lips clenched into a line. Seth hid his trembling fists in his pocket. The brick wall he faced, with its perfect uniformity, beckoned to be punched.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
Seth took three deep breaths and turned to face her. “You forgot to mention the talking hat that chooses which house we belong to.”
“What talking hat?”
“I’m a schmuck for buying your crap! You think this is funny? Leading me on to think I’ll finally know something about my past?”
“Seth…”
“Shut up! Just shut up. I’ve spent years in a dozen homes. You’ll never know what it’s like, walking the streets, wondering if the hotdog vendor or subway clerk or the bum on the corner is a cousin or an uncle. Do you even have a clue what it’s like to not know who you really are? Where you come from?”
The stiffness of her lips broke. It was the first time Lelani looked unsure about anything. “No,” she responded. “I’m not aware of what you have endured.”
Seth had her on the defensive for a change. He closed the gap between them and stared into her eyes. He was hoping for just a hint that Lelani was being sardonic, an invitation to smash her pretty mouth. Instead, for the first time since they’d met, that air of condescension receded from her. She gazed back into his eyes and touched his soul, a warm hand on a cold spirit. She put her arms around him. Her body was strong and comforting—a shelter in the snow. Her cheek touched his. What surprised him most was the sincerity she exuded. His anger drained through their embrace.
“I’m not handling this very well,” she said. “I apologize.”
“Yeah,” he said, and walked off without her. Then Seth stopped. There it was again, that nagging curiosity.
Is she crazy?
Even the most ambitious swindles used pieces of truth to snag victims. “Is there any way we can get to the facts without the crazy talk?” he asked.
Lelani bit her lip as she considered it. “I’ll try.”
A minute later, they turned the corner onto Avenue A to spot a cluster of red flashing lights down the street. The moment turned surreal when Seth realized his building—his apartment—was the subject of the attention as smoke belched from his living room window.
They passed a group of local youths who raised their arms pushing against the sky and in unison chanted, “The house—the house—the house is on fire!” Then they broke into laughter.