Bound by Mystery Read online

  I reached back into the anarchic jambalaya of my memory. I’d been still fighting off my New Year’s hangover and had recently received my five-year anniversary gift from Cryotech—a fridge magnet. I’d like to think they chose this piece of memorabilia out of a wicked sense of self-referential humor, but it was probably just general corporate obliviousness. The other cleaners had agreed to grant me Ernesto’s naming rights as a special anniversary treat.

  “Ah, yeah, I know The Big Ch—ah, Ernesto.”

  Her eyes illuminated and she grabbed my shoulders again. “Great! Now we are getting to somewhere. Please, I have to see him!”

  “I’m sorry, you have to come back during visiting hours. We’ll be open at—” she shook her head angrily and blurted,

  “I have to be on a plane to Quito in four hours!”

  “Why do—?”

  “I am being deported.” Ava looked intently into my eyes, like she was firing ocular lasers from her pupils into mine. “There was a man from Immigration, he knew I was working illegally. I was bribing him to let me stay just a little longer, but my money and his patience are now all gone.” She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed, exasperated. “Listen to me, ah, I don’t know what is your name?”

  “Leon.”

  “Leon,” she repeated. “Leon, like ‘lion.’” My mother had said that when I was a kid. It’d been a long time since I’d heard anyone else make that connection.

  “Well, hah, sure. I guess.”

  “All right. Well, you don’t know me. And I have come here in the middle of the night, and I am screaming like I am crazy, and I have told you I am about to be deported, so maybe I do not seem like the most trustworthy person, but I am asking you, I am begging you, to please trust me. I have to ask you to do two things. The first is to let me see my father.”

  “I could lose my job…” even as I said the words I realized that this really wouldn’t bother me all that much. I was already dreading a tombstone bearing the epitaph “He Cleaned the Floors of the Frozen Dead, But Couldn’t Afford Cryo So Lies Here Instead.”

  “Please,” her voice was quiet but commanding. I bit my lip and nodded. We turned and started to walk toward the storage room. It was only then that I noticed that Sigur Rós was still playing, tiny and tinny in my headphones. I hit “pause” on my phone and the only sound was the echo of our feet against the floor.

  “What’s the second thing you have to ask me?”

  “I cannot tell you until I have done the first thing.”

  “Why not?”

  Ava said nothing for six and a half steps and then finally, “You will see.”

  We reached Ernesto’s dewar, she slid back the viewing window and pressed her hand to the glass. The faint outline of the moustache I’d drawn earlier was still there hovering over his face. I winced with embarrassment. She looked at the glass and then at me, and my face went bright red. My heart raced as I waited for the angry accusation to fly at me, but instead she reached into her backpack and pulled out a pair of gloves and a crowbar.

  “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” I screamed.

  “Now I have to ask you to do the second thing: stand back.” She placed the gloves over her hands and looked directly at me as she picked up the crowbar and rested it on her shoulder. I stood frozen to the floor, ironic given the circumstances. “Please, Leon, I have to do this. We have come this far. Also, if you say no, I will have to hit you with this crowbar, and I would like to not do that. You have a nice face.”

  She prodded me with the crowbar and I stepped back until I was pressed against the railing of the stairs. She readied her swing. “What the hell are you doing?” I repeated, this time it was a desperate plea rather than a demand.

  She sighed, rested the crowbar again and looked straight at me. “My father has spent all of his money on this ridiculous piping dream.”

  “Pipe dream?”

  “Yes. Thank you, this is what I meant. All my life he pummels into me, ‘Be a good little Catholic and when you die, Jesus will take you to heaven.’ Meanwhile, he sleeps around, he beats my mother when he drinks, he gambles all our money. He left us and moved to America when I was just a teenager.” She hung the crowbar by her feet and tapped her boots with it. “A year ago he calls me, tells me he has cancer. He needs help. He is an asshole, but he is still my father, you know? So I left everything behind for him. I sold my business, quit my band. My boyfriend didn’t want to live in America, so we broke up. I said good-bye to my friends, my home, everything, you understand?

  “I come to this country and I work three jobs. This is in violation of my visa. I am paid beneath the table, and all of my money, all of it, I give to him for his ‘experimental treatments.’ I work until my back aches, my feet swell, my bones feel brittle and old.” She snarled these last few words and began knocking her fist with quiet rhythmic raps against the side of the dewar, staring into her father’s silent, icy face.

  “Then, on his deathbed, with his last breaths, you know what he says to me? Not ‘thank you,’ not ‘I love you.’ He tells me that he was never really paying for experimental treatments, but giving money to this fucking joke of a corporation. Every cent he had left—money that I would have inherited—and all of the money I had bled and sweated to make so he could end up a frozen skull in a tank.”

  Ava wiped an angry tear from her eye. I hesitantly began raising my hand to give her a commiserating pat, but she didn’t see the gesture and when she shook angrily and growled in frustration, I snatched my hand away. “And then? Not only this, he tells me I must keep working, keep being a good girl, keep paying for his fucking refrigerator fees. We have no insurance, you know? He tells me that if I do not pay the money, he will die. I say to him, you are going to die!’ and he smiles and says, ‘Oh, mi corazon, I’m just going to have a little sleep,’ and then he has the nerve to fucking die before I can tell him how stupid he is.

  “All his life he tells me be a good Catholic, heaven is waiting, and then he raises his middle finger to heaven, and to me. He went from putting all his faith in a God he ultimately did not believe in, to placing his faith in this bullshit corporate pseudo-science. No offense.”

  “None taken. I just work here.” She nodded, sighed and said, “Well, now I must do this. Please do not try and stop me.” She raised the crowbar again but then paused and asked,

  “Do you believe in God, Leon the lion?” It was a far more philosophical question than I was used to being asked during work hours, or ever. But spending hundreds of hours staring into icicle-encrusted faces meant I spent a lot of time ruminating on the nature of God and death.

  “I think that God is essentially an anthropomorphized metaphor for the infinitely complex relationship between energy and matter.”

  She raised an eyebrow, a dark semi-circle ascending the portrait of her face, then pulled the crowbar back behind her shoulder and aimed a stern glance at me. I wasn’t sure if this was a warning or a request for encouragement. I nodded at her, hoping this would cover both bases. “You are an interesting guy, Leon. My father would have hated you.”

  The crowbar made a dull ‘thud’ against the glass, cracks cobwebbing across the cold surface. Klaxons blared throughout the gigantic room that even Zoha couldn’t miss. I yelled out, “Hurry up!” and she shot me a deservedly withering glance. She pulled back and struck again. New cracks emerged and the old ones thickened, vents opened beneath Ernesto’s head and the liquid nitrogen drained quickly away. On the third strike, the glass splintered and fell to the floor. She tapped the crowbar around the edges, clearing the jagged fragments, then dropped it and reached in to grab the head.

  I picked up the backpack and held it out for her. Ava smiled at me, a beautiful, gracious smile. If not for the blaring sirens and the frozen head in her hands, it could have been quite a romantic moment. She put the head, her gloves, and the crowbar into the bag and slung
it over her shoulder. “Thank you, Leon. I am grateful that the last person I will meet in this country has been kind to me. This has not always been the case.”

  Or something to that effect. It was hard to tell, the alarm was really loud. I was probably farewelling a couple of hertz of my upper-range hearing with each minute I stuck around. Ava ran down the stairs and I followed; it was only when she reached the front door that she realized I was behind her. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to come with you!”

  I watched her brow furrow and her lips form a tiny o that would’ve surely developed into a bewildered ‘why?’ but she was interrupted by Zoha emerging from the bathrooms screaming, “What the hell is going on?”

  I held my palms up at him and said, “Zoha, I have to help this lady steal her father’s head!”

  It sounded pretty weird when I said it out loud. He looked at me and then at her and then at the frozen head peeking out of the backpack and then back at me again, like he was a spectator of some bizarre sepulchral sport. His face slowly transitioning from shocked to enthralled, he grinned broadly and said, “Is it for love?”

  I flushed bright red and replied, “Well, I mean, we just met and she’s about to be deported so…”

  Ava looked at me, squeezed my hand and then ran over to Zoha, leaned into his ear and whispered something. He grinned, gave us a thumbs-up and said, “Okay, you’d better take the security footage. I’ll call the police, tell them some teenage hooligans broke in. You should have a couple of minutes.”

  I ran over to the desk and unplugged the external hard drive that stored the footage and stood staring at the security monitor.

  “Come on! What are you doing, checking your fucking Facebook?” Ava yelled.

  “The security footage auto-syncs to a cloud backup every half-hour.”

  “So turn it off!”

  “I told you I don’t have a login for the computers!” I kicked the desk, swore, and looked around the room. My trusty mop bucket sat where I’d left it in the kitchenette. I grabbed it and quickly covered the computer in a thick brown sludge. It made a series of grim thanatotic bleeps and hisses, then issued a cloud of sparks and smoke. I grinned at Ava and she rolled her eyes and said, “Steve Jobs would be very impressed. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  ***

  Her car was a derelict old Chrysler that started with a cantankerous series of clangs and wheezes. We pulled out onto the street and headed for the highway, wheels screeching at every turn. Somewhere in the distance I could hear a fleet of sirens. I let out an ecstatic whoop and turned to Ava, beaming.

  “Thank you for helping,” she said somberly. It was something of a buzzkill. That, and the fact that she had a disembodied head in her backpack. “Your car, did you leave it at the facility?”

  “No, I carpooled with Zoha.”

  Ava nodded and then asked, “You will lose your job?”

  “Probably.”

  She said nothing for a few minutes. “You are a good man, Leon the lion.”

  “Yeah, if I only had a brain.” I giggled, but she said nothing. “It’s from The Wizard of Oz…”

  “Yes, I know. We have movies in Ecuador, too, you know. But it’s the Scarecrow who wishes for a brain. The lion wishes to have courage.”

  “Oh.”

  “Which I think you do have,” she smiled at me and gripped my hand, then released it to change gears.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Well, I think I owe you at least one little favor. What do you wish to know?”

  “Why not just let your father stay in the dewar, let Cryotech deal with the whole mess?”

  She looked at me intently, held her gaze for long enough that I was worried she’d crash into something. Finally she looked back at the highway and said, “You know what they do to the bodies of customers who cannot pay?” I shook my head. “They burn them. My father lost his faith at the end, but still, the idea of him being consumed by flames. I could not bear it. It is too…ah, you know…”

  “Symbolic?”

  “Exactly.” She tipped her head toward the woods scrolling alongside us. “I think somewhere out here, it is quiet, no? Lots of trees. My father, he liked the out of doors.”

  “‘Outdoors.’”

  “What?”

  “It’s ‘outdoors’ not ‘out of doors.’”

  “Ah, yes. I knew this.” The sound of the indicator clicked rhythmically over the engine’s clunks and clanks. Its orange light pulsed over the dark highway. We drove onto a firebreak and jolted up and down as the car bounced over the unpaved ground. “From here, we must walk.”

  She killed the engine and grabbed her backpack. The sound of the door opening and closing was monstrously loud in the early morning silence. She popped the trunk, then swore loudly.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, stepping out of the car.

  “I remembered a torch but not a shovel. Fucking idiot!”

  “You could…use the crowbar?” I suggested.

  She shook her head, sighed and said, “Sure, why not? The perfect end to a perfect evening.”

  I held the torch as she plunged the crowbar into the ground and levered up some dirt. I wondered if the gentlemanly thing would be to offer to do the digging. I wasn’t sure if chivalry extended to illegal burials of severed heads, so I just stood there awkwardly, watching her breath form clouds of mist in the cold January air.

  When she’d cleared about a foot of earth she glanced at her watch and said, “That will have to do. I don’t have much time before my flight. Give me the bag.” I did as instructed and she tossed the backpack into the hole and covered it in dirt. She stomped the ground down, placed a rock over the top and then wiped her brow and looked at me. “I guess I should say something? He never actually had a funeral, you know. Because he did not think himself dead.” She laughed bitterly and shook her head. “What an arrogant delusion, to not even accept your own death.”

  “A funeral would be a good idea, for closure?”

  “Right. I’m going to do it in Spanish, if that is okay. So the words can travel right from my heart to the mouth without having to stop at my brain for translation.”

  “Of course. I understand.”

  She closed her eyes, crossed herself, and began murmuring in rapid Spanish that was mostly incomprehensible to me, although I did notice that her eulogy contained more profanity than was traditional. She opened her eyes and said awkwardly, “Do you…ah?” she waved her hand in dizzy circles at the broken earth.

  “Um…sure.” I stepped forward, stared at the stone and said, “Ernesto, I didn’t know you well. Or at all. But you raised a confident, intelligent, beautiful daughter, which I guess means that for all your faults you must have had some good in you. At least enough to bring her into the world. It’s a better place for having her in it.” I felt her gaze on me, but willed myself not to look. “I hope you find heaven, in spite of this rather unusual detour.” I turned the torch back to the car and said, “We should probably go.”

  Ava nodded and we half-jogged back to the car. She opened the trunk and pulled out a packet of baby wipes, then removed her jacket and said, “I will need you to get in the car and not turn around please. I am going to have a ‘camping shower’ before I go to the airport.” I nodded and got in the car, listening to the sound of zips and buckles and finally the slamming of the trunk.

  She sat down next to me in a fresh change of clothes, gunned the engine, and asked, “Were you flirting with me, just then?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck and replied, “Well, I don’t know if I’d call—”

  “I have never had someone use a eulogy to hit on me before. I do not know if I should be flattered or disgusted. Perhaps both?” She drove out onto the highway.

  I said nothing for a minute and then asked, “What did you say to Zoha,
back at Cryotech?” Her smile was fluorescent in the early morning darkness.

  “I told him that ours was the kind of love story that Shakespeare would have killed the Queen to have written, that we were going to run away and start a new life together. The old man is a romantic, I could see it in his eyes.”

  I laughed and replied, “Well, you’re right about that. So, ah, did you really mean…?”

  “Leon, we are on our way to the airport. I am leaving the country forever.” Silence hung between us. The city glowed in the distance, a dull orange aura obscuring the stars above it. “But now that you have no job, perhaps you have time to travel somewhere? South America…maybe Quito?” I studied the highway lights strobing across her face as we drove.

  “What’s Quito like this time of year?”

  “Beautiful, filled with color and music and wonderful people. It is the highest capital city in the world, the closest to the stars. You know, of course, that the word ‘Ecuador’ comes from ‘equator’? It is at the middle of the Earth, never too hot, never too cold.”

  “Like Goldilocks?”

  She laughed and said, “Yes. Exactly.”

  “That’s what they call theoretical planets that can sustain human life—not too hot, not too cold. The Goldilocks principle.”

  “Ah, I did not know this. Perhaps Ecuador might be this for you, ‘just right.’ Like in the story.”

  I stared up at the night sky, filled with the ghosts of stars that stubbornly refused to acknowledge that they’d long ago been extinguished. So many of those pinpoints of celestial light were merely luminous afterimages rippling through the cold vacuum of space. Someday, myself, Ava, and every other living thing on Earth would be reduced to particles hurtling through the infinite void. But for now, we were simply two tiny creatures spinning around the sun at sixty-seven-thousand miles per hour, and there was an infinite array of possibilities and potential futures unfurling in front of us.

  Nantucket Plunder

  Steven Axelrod

  My path to Poisoned Pen Press was halting and circuitous. I wrote some sketches about Nantucket. The only hint of a plot was a side story about a wealthy homeowner who stiffed all the people who worked on his house. When he was killed, every tradesman on Nantucket was a suspect.