When the World Tips Over, page 7
I think I like her more than you, human dude.
Ouch, though I don’t blame you.
He head-butted Miles’s leg. Hard. How could you have not gotten her number?
I didn’t even get her name!
Miles had jumped out of the truck like they’d all be seeing each other again in an hour. Like the tattoo: They were together! He’d forgotten the rest!
Well, at least she knows where we live, Sandro said. She’ll come back for us. We’ll wait, right?
Miles reached down and rubbed Sandro’s head, then belly, as the dog flipped onto his back and shimmied in delight. Miles thought of the word she’d had on the small of her back: hiraeth. She’d said it was a Welsh word that meant homesickness for a home you can never return to or that never was.
He’d told her he always felt that way.
What he didn’t say was: Until now.
Until her.
Yes, he told Sandro, petting his exposed belly, we’ll wait.
An Excerpt from the 1956 Novel “Paradise Found” by Celena Jake-Adams Set in the Town of Paradise Springs, California:
Paradise Springs is strange.
Let’s start with the grapes, so many fermenting at any given time that the townspeople get inebriated just from breathing the air.
Then there’s the light, so bright, newcomers unused to the glare are easily spotted shielding their eyes with their hands and sometimes walking into trees and other passersby. Crepuscular rays, those thick beams of sunlight that break through clouds forcing you to momentarily believe in God or magic, are ever-present in the flower-frenzied town. Not uncommon are thirty-foot-tall sunflowers swaying like fools in the breeze, clarkias glowing in the night like pink moons, and orange poppies so animate, they might even tap you on the shoulder as you pass.
The surrounding forest is lush, primordial, and changes so much day to day that it’s believed groves of trees swap places and creeks reroute themselves in the night. It’s quite possible to walk into this forest one person and out of it another.
Then there’s the waterfall tumbling right into the square, the town’s endless hourglass.
Lastly, there’s the fog. When it descends, the town disappears, the whole valley does. Completely. As in: No trace.
Not even on maps. Not even in history books. Poof, gone.
In these times, no one can find the town, not even those living in it.
Clipping from the Paradise Springs Gazette:
The Devil Winds Are Back
Paradise Springs – Rumors abound in Paradise Springs about The Devil Winds. We’ve all heard the stories. How the attorney of Priscilla Jones, accused of murdering her husband Gabriel Jones, used The Devil Winds defense to keep his client out of jail. How Charlie Holmes stripped down to his birthday suit one blisteringly hot day, and with only The Devil Winds at his back, walked across the surface of the Paradise River like Jesus Christ himself in plain sight of several local fisherman, who snapped the now famous photograph. And most notoriously, how the sweltering winds drove one of Paradise Spring’s most beloved residents, Theo Fall, from the environs, never to be heard from again. Well friends, they’re back. We expect temperatures well over 105 degrees for the coming days and flame-hot winds. We advise keeping your ice trays full, your air conditioners blasting (except between 4PM and 8PM), and your heads on your shoulders.
Miles’s Emails to His Missing Father in the HELP ME! Folder on His Computer:
Dear Dad,
For two millennia the violin has been associated with Satan. The greatest violinist of all time Paganini supposedly sold his soul to the devil for his gift. Rumor has it, he used the guts of murdered women to make his strings. Draw what conclusions you will from this about your genius violinist son Wynton.
Miles
Dear Dad,
The house talks to me at night. It doesn’t say nice things.
Miles
PS. I’m gay. No one knows except the black Labrador next door. Not because I think anyone will really care or whatever. It’s just that no one except this dog knows ANYTHING about me. I feel like a human off switch. Are you like this? I did try to tell Mom I was gay once, got some words out, but then Wynton barged in, and I vanished. If Wynton or Dizzy are in a mile radius of me, Mom doesn’t register my existence. I don’t know why.
Dear Dad,
Where are you? How could you leave me with these people?
Miles
From Bernadette’s Notebook of Unsent Letters:
Dear Chocolate Cake at Annie’s Paradise Deli,
You make me want to hop on a motorcycle and ride like a banshee out of all my responsibilities.
I. Love. You.
I thought I had it this time. Was certain the secret ingredient was lemon juice. Went to Annie’s yesterday with a slice of my latest attempt to do yet another side-by-side tasting. I didn’t have it. It wasn’t lemon juice. If only Annie would just tell me what’s in the freaking recipe, but alas, she’s having too much fun with my obsession.
It’s been three months, dear chocolate cake, since I first had you. Still, you do not have a chance. I will figure out what you’re made of.
Bernie
PS. Wait, is it vinegar? Annie! Omg, it’s vinegar!
Wynton
Encounter #3 with the Rainbow-Haired Girl
What no one knew (except Dizzy) was that Wynton Fall still heard his father’s trumpet. In the distance, just out of full earshot. Not all the time, but enough for Wynton to think, however illogically, that his father’s music stayed when the man himself left, that it got caught in treetops, in the wind. People in town thought it was strange how Wynton played his violin outside, a fiddler not only on roofs, but by creeks, on hilltops, in meadows, but he had no choice.
He went wherever his father’s ghost-music took him.
Once, years ago when he was thirteen, it took him to a meadow reeling with sunflowers and buzzing with yellow jackets where he found a girl crying. They’d sat back-to-back, he and this girl, that’s what he remembered, his back to hers, the perfect fit of it, the perfect feel of it. And her smell, like all the flowers in the world blooming at once. (This being the reason he was so flower-crazy to this day.) That afternoon in the meadow, he’d closed his eyes and tried with all his supernatural might to take the sadness from this girl, to pull it out of her, like he sometimes did with Dizzy, and it had worked. Soon she was happy and chatting with him in a big, deep, froggy voice – weird coming out of such a slight girl – and this had turned him into a new boy (for that moment anyway), one without the bad parts.
To this day, when anyone asked him if he’d ever been in love, he thought of this girl who smelled like flowers, this moment in the meadow, thought of how he’d asked her to marry him (at thirteen!), and she’d said yes. (Just like that book of his mom’s that was in the can for a while, Live Forever Now with Samantha Brooks-something and Jericho-something-else who decided at thirteen they’d marry one day.) Except unlike that pair, he never saw this girl again, never was called to that meadow again by his dad’s spectral music, but he went back anyway to play there when he was the most lost and alone, when he heard nothing in the wind but wind.
The night his father left and disappeared like smoke, he came into Wynton’s room and placed his trumpet next to him on the bed. (Wynton still needed it beside him to sleep, which was embarrassing but whatever.) He was seven years old and awake, but he pretended to be asleep because he knew his father died that night, and so this replica had to be a ghost, and Wynton was scared of ghosts then. The look-alike said, “For you, Wynton, music is another body part like hands or knees. Never stop playing.” It was the rightest thing anyone had ever said to him. A decree. An oath. Just thinking it – even all these years later – felt like religion. It made him hold his breath.
So that was why Wynton was repeating it now, like a mantra, a prayer, as he had a smoke outside the Paradise Lounge in the mad heat – the whole stupid world had a fever – before heading in for his first solo show, the night he’d been waiting for his whole useless life. Because tonight he was going to meet Destiny. Tonight would be his farewell to this Podunk town and all the Podunk people in it. Goodbye to The Devil Winds too, to this stifling heat that made him feel even more trapped in his skin than usual. Sweat ran down his face, his neck, his arms. He was melting probably.
He took a sip of vodka from his flask. He had the perfect high going, the kind of galactic high that took away all the soul-ick, the heart-ick, the mind-ick, all the ick-ing ick. He just had to sustain it until showtime. Hell Hyena and the Furniture, one of his favorite bands and one of the only ones that showcased an electric rock violinist, was coming from Los Angeles to scout him. Him! All this, thanks to the universe sending that rock critic to Paradise Springs for a wine-tasting holiday months ago. The dude waltzed into the local dive Better Luck Next Time and caught Wynton’s band The Hatchets doing their regular gig. After, he wrote on his blog: “Wynton Fall plays violin like it’s his last night on earth, and if it were mine, this would be the way I’d choose to go out: listening to him. The kid is astonishing.”
The kid is astonishing!
Him, the astonishing kid!
Wynton had printed out the review, folded it up, and kept it in his pocket ever since. He even slept with it inside his dad’s trumpet, right by his head. He’d admit to no one how many times a day he read it – probably around eighty, so on average five times each waking hour, and when he wasn’t reading it, he was touching it to remind himself he wasn’t a colossal waste of space.
Four months after the critic posted on his blog, Hell Hyena and the Furniture saw it, then found Wynton’s YouTube video, which had a whopping thirty-one views (that he suspected were mostly Dizzy), and tracked Wynton down.
The first thing Wynton did when he got the voicemail from Sylvester Dennis, the lead singer of Hell Hyena, was go to The Blue Spoonful to play the message for his mother (“See, Mom!? See?! I told you!”), but she was too angry on account of her totaled truck and the money she was out for the statue of Alonso Fall (20K!) and of course the subsequent jail misunderstanding and the booze he stole from the restaurant and the pièce de résistance: the heist of the sapphire engagement ring, which he’d pawned so he could buy the bow he needed for this gig that was going to change his life, selling his motorcycle (like pulling his heart out of his chest) to buy the ring back, only to have Perfect Fucking Miles break the bow.
Or whoever was possessing his brother’s body this morning. Jesus.
Anyway, that day Wynton had tried to play the message from Sylvester Dennis for his mother over her tirade and her face turning devil red and all the tears, but she just took his phone and threw it into a simmering pot of onion soup.
So again, this morning he’d tried to explain to her the importance of tonight’s gig but to no avail. He was still kicked out of the house which was a bummer because his sort-of girlfriend Chelsea also kicked him out because he’d accidentally fooled around with her hot roommate Bettina and then his best friend Max kicked him out because he found out about hot roommate Bettina, who happened to be Max’s hot fiancée Bettina. Yeah. He was a dumb prick. Chelsea had called him a human wrecking ball, which had made him prouder than it probably should have. He also thought it’d be a good name for a band.
He tried not to be a dick in life, he really did, but he never got very far with it. When he wasn’t playing violin, he’d get bored. Like pour-gasoline-down-his-mouth-and-light-a-match bored. And he’d get this hungry feeling too, life-hungry, life-ravenous. Then he’d do all the things he shouldn’t. Really, he didn’t understand how everyone else remained so calm when they too were alive for such a finite amount of time. Why wasn’t everyone else coming apart? Shaking up the snow globe? Trying to lick out every pot? They were all just paper people in a burning world, weren’t they? Dizzy once told him about these foot-long snails in Africa that eat houses. He wanted to eat houses! He wanted to eat everything.
The only problem Wynton foresaw for tonight was that he’d already been triple-hexed today. First by Miles when he broke his new bow. (WTFF, yes, but also: Props to Perfect Miles. First time he did anything shocking in his seventeen years.) That said, still, a most serious kind of hex. And it had forced Wynton to “borrow” a bow from his ex-violin teacher Mr. Bliss, who was away in Europe. He’d had to break into Mr. Bliss’s house, additional bad mojo. He knew he should’ve “borrowed” an old cruddy bow Mr. Bliss wouldn’t have missed, but then he saw the CodaBow Marquise. And well, dude. That was that. He was going to bring it back after the gig anyway, and so no one would be the wiser. And he figured Mr. Bliss would want him to play with the Marquise tonight, even if he hadn’t spoken to Wynton since the recital incident five years ago. However, the new replacement bow, though awesome, might, in and of itself, be bad luck. But the third hex by Uncle Clive was the most upsetting. What the hell kind of dream was that to have? That Wynton no longer had any music inside him? The night before the biggest gig of his life! He hated to think of Uncle Clive dreaming of him. He hated to think of Uncle Clive, period.
He touched the lucky blue horse tattooed on his wrist – it was glistening with sweat. He whispered, “I need your help, blue buddy.” Like he always did. Then he shook a pill from the container he’d swiped, broke it in half, and popped it into his mouth, swallowing it with his saliva. This shit was a big score, a gift from the universe, well, from Miles, anyway, who’d probably had a wisdom tooth pulled or something and had never taken the painkillers. Twenty effing pills! He’d found them stashed in Miles’s sock drawer. Most likely their mother had told Miles to hide them from him. What dummy hid anything in a sock drawer? It was the first place people like Wynton looked for anything. His mom had hidden the engagement ring in a button box in her sewing kit. That was a pretty good spot. It had taken him a whole day to find it. He was very good at finding, at stealing. Sometimes he felt like he turned invisible the way he could lift items off store shelves, money out of wallets, the way he used to pocket everyone’s cash tips at the restaurant before his mother canned him for stealing a $400 bottle of Cabernet.
Wynton flicked the cigarette, stamped it out, lit another one. Man. He’d expected a thank-you at least from Miles after that bonkers night a couple weeks ago. Or sainthood even. Instead, he’d broken his goddamn bow.
Well, he probably deserved it for everything else he’d done to Miles over the years. If he were Miles, forget the bow, he would’ve snuck some glass into his own food by now.
Wynton sighed, guilt at the front door of his mind, banging on it with both fists. But he wouldn’t let it in. No, he wouldn’t let himself think about Perfect Miles today.
Ah, too late.
He took a good hard drag off his cig. It hadn’t always been so messed up between them. When they were little, before their father left and everything changed, Wynton had been so into Miles. Thought the kid had magic in him. Thing is, he still kind of did. Like, get this: If Miles stayed in one place in their mother’s garden for a bit, the flowers all started to turn toward him like he was the goddamn sun. Yes. Wynton tried it multiple times, staying in the garden for hours. Nothing moved his way but flies. Very disappointing because of his thing for flowers, especially those teeny-tiny purple-and-yellow petal-heads that smelled the most like the girl from the meadow.
Hello? If Wynton had Miles’s looks, brains, athleticism, plus some weird-ass ability to make flowers turn their heads, he’d rule the universe. People were physically unable to peel their eyes off the oblivious kid too. Total strangers went gooey and catatonic just to see Miles walk across the street. Lucky fuck. Dizzy was plain on the outside, like Wynton was, but unlike him, she was a geode, had a sparkling kingdom of glory within. He had a rodent farm inside.
But that wasn’t why Wynton couldn’t stand his brother—
The growling of two dogs snapped him back. They were straining toward him on their leashes like they wanted to rip him to shreds. A harried woman with short hair in a white tennis outfit cried, “They’re never like this! They’re golden retrievers! Therapy dogs! I don’t know what’s gotten into them,” as she jerked the dogs away, crossing the street. Wynton sighed. He’d gotten used to canine hate, couldn’t remember a time when a dog walked by him in town without letting him know they could see all the way to his ugly soul.
Unfortunately, this counted as another hex, which made four.
Things were not looking good.
He realized he was hugging his violin case like someone was trying to steal it, noticed that next to him now was a guy with long gray hair in a ponytail also having a smoke, leaning against the wall on the other side of the door. He was watching Wynton, wearing doctor scrubs. There were damp patches under his arms. “You okay?” he asked as their eyes met.
“A-okay, Doc,” Wynton said, unspooling and getting up quickly, wiping his brow of sweat, trying to unfreakify himself. How long had this guy been studying him like this? He stamped out his smoke.
The doctor cracked a smile, offered his hand. “Everyone calls me Doc Larry.” He had a baritone voice, kind of like a tuba, that Wynton liked right away. Liked him right away too, the irony of him – a hippie doctor sucking on a kill stick – until he said, “What you taking there?”
“What? Oh, nothing, aspirin. Headache.”
Doc Larry’s face did not seem to believe him. “Ah, I see, well, if you need help with… Well, we have a clinic at the hospital—
He gave Doc Larry The Glare. The Wynton Fall Glare was epic. He used to silence the whole cafeteria at Paradise Springs High with it. It worked less well in juvie but was still pretty effective one-on-one with people like the doc here, who presumably wasn’t a violent offender or a sociopath.
