The Weapon of Young Gods #43: The Weapon and the Witness

I possessed very few of my father’s old things, but one of them was a warped and discolored old acoustic guitar that I nominally shared with my brother. “Nominally” because it didn’t feel right to take it to school with me last fall; R.J. had been playing it more often since he’d formed the band, and once I had my own electric bass guitar, I couldn’t really exert much ownership over the battered old acoustic anyway. Still, it was important to strum a few chords on the thing every once in a while, and one day, as my internal rhythms settled into the simple slog of summer vacation, I took it down off the wall to finish the re-stringing that R.J. had begun the night before.

I figured I owed him at least that much, since he’d been running phone interference for me all week; Frankie had called at least once a day, but he’d always picked up for me. R.J. wasn’t being entirely altruistic-he had the legit excuse of waiting for Hannah Haynes’ calls-but I’d made it clear to both he and my sister that under no circumstances would I ever willingly speak to Frankie again. Robin had shrugged it off, but R.J. knew the circumstances and so was happy to oblige. I was so used to ignoring the phone by then that it took a while to notice its ring, even when I’d found myself alone in the room we shared, surrounded by the mess of band gear we’d accumulated-cables, amps, a tangled orange extension cord.

For some reason, re-stringing acoustics always felt like it should be done more delicately than electrics. Maybe it was just that this particular acoustic was so beat-up, but I’d been almost pain-stakingly careful doing the E and A strings, and was about to start the D when the phone rang and I absent-mindedly picked it up. I realized my mistake a split-second too late, and was silently cursing my own stupidity when I received the first of many shocks that day.

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Soundtrack (mp3): ‘The Weapon and the Witness’ by Low Tide

“Roy? Is that you?” It wasn’t Frankie at all-it was Olivia’s voice that crackled through the line. Shit. Shit! I hadn’t spoken to her for a while-hadn’t even thought of her, really, except to anonymously flick her like a switchblade in Frankie’s face last week-not since fleeing her sexual tentacles in cowardly terror three months ago. My heart sank deep beneath a cold sea of shameful fear.

“Yeah, um…um, hi Liv.” I began to fidget with the D string in my left hand.

“Um, hi,” she echoed weakly. “Hey, um…can I maybe…um, come see you today? Like…like now? I really need to talk to you, Roy. Es muy importante.”

The unusual tremors of instability in her voice were drowned out by a volley of monkey wrenches assaulting my brain. “Uh…okay,” I droned, obliviously putting down the guitar. “Now. Important. Yeah. Today.” My hand wandered across the carpet.

“Roy, please?”

I caught the edge of it then, a few sharp, desperate notes, but I couldn’t stammer anything else out except “I guess, um…” and sat back against the bedroom wall, grabbing at something coiled on the floor. “Yeah, sure,” I said, shaking off the absolute worst of the fear, though there was still some vague embarassment hanging around. “Yeah, come on-Ow! MOTHERFUCKER!!”

She said something that I never heard as a violent jolt shot through every cell of my body, and the phone fell out of its cradle in my neck. Instinct jerked my hands apart instantly, but not fast enough, and as I dropped the D string from one hand and the extension cord plug from the other, a vicious, searing white line pulsed into being on my left thumb. I thrashed around in stupid, animalistic pain for a minute, yelling and swearing at the pathetic dumbness of it all, until I remembered that Liv was still on the phone. I picked up the receiver with my right hand, gingerly observing the left’s tiny, excruciating new feature. Olivia was calling my name quizzically into the phone as it touched my ear.

“You won’t believe this,” I grunted, “but I just electrocuted myself.”

“What?” she asked, almost giggling in spite of herself. “How the hell did you do that?”

“A situationally-arrgh-unique combination of nerves, guitar strings, and-ow-absolute careless idiocy-and that’s really all you need to know.”

“Hijole, pobrecito.” Now she really was laughing.

“Yeah, I think you better get over here. I’m obviously in no condition to be unsupervised right now.” Then her previous urgency finally trickled into my head. “What’s up, Liv? What’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you when I get there,” she said, serious again. “Let’s just go for a drive or something, okay?”

I’d just finished bandaging my throbbing wound when she showed up ten minutes later, and in no time we were cruising through half-empty streets and 5th-of-July heat. It was a glorious day-no clouds at all-and the impossibly blue sky was a perfect compliment to the rich green of roadside suburban landscaping and the ubiquitous, but today not-so-tasteless, red-tile roofing of Laguna Niguel. Hell, even the pavement seemed to be a richer gray. Liv gunned the engine to careen through a yellow-tinted left turn, rolled the pickup’s windows all the way down, and blasted some old shoegazer noise out of the stereo, lashing the universe with angsty feedback.

I was too bewildered with wild sensory input to feel anything specific for a few minutes, but once I noticed that we were powering up Pacific Island to the Aliso hilltop, I began to panic at world-collision levels of anxiety. What the fuck was she doing? Why were we going to that lonely, horrible place? She was determined, though, so I didn’t bother guessing, and stayed strapped in for the rest of the brilliant, sunlit climb. I sat perfectly still until Olivia stopped to park outside the gate of the still-unfinished, hulking white elephants that commanded the same old stunning ocean view. She pulled the brake and looked at me expectantly.

“I would like you to come hiking with me, por favor.”

“Hiking? You hike?”

She smirked and stepped out. We soon strode over the sidewalk onto the gravelly trail, and she set a brisk pace, like she knew every inch of the way. I flinched and cringed a hundred times as we approached the slab of wall that grew disembodied arms in the dark, but Liv kept going, not noticing my stolen glances at the bright white stucco; not registering my sharp pangs of rekindled terror. The trail eventually bent away from the wall and went abruptly downhill, and I staggered clumsily along behind her as she plowed on, down the little gully and back up another scrub-infested incline. There was almost no indication that the surrounding area had burned to the ground nearly nine months ago.

At the top of the next hill the trail ended in a wide, uneven jumble of dirt, gravel and scrub that nevertheless looked down to an astounding view of South Laguna. The beach was a slim line, Catalina lay flat a ways out to sea, and then the blue stretched out to infinity ever after. Sailboats glided across the placid summer ocean, and the breakers’ roar reached our ears as faint hissing. I was still taking in the scenery when Olivia turned around sharply to disarm my senses again.

“Do you know what my mom said when I went down to breakfast on the morning after you ditched me?”

“Huh?” I gaped stupidly.

Olivia continued without missing a beat. “My mom said, ‘I like him-I always hoped you two would get together.'” She let that hang there for a second so I could process it.

“Did you, uh…” I asked weakly, “…did you tell her-”

“Of course I did,” she said dismissively, “and she did exactly what a mom is supposed to do-she comforted me while I sobbed myself fucking dry, and then made mimosas for both of us.” She smirked again. “Now, that’s not why we’re here, but I thought you should be reminded that pitiful cowardice has consequences, because I know you’ll learn from it this time.”

I stared at the ground, drowning in shame. “Liv, I’m sor-”

“Basta. Forget it-it’s done,” she snapped, “it’s history, and we can start over if you want, but we’ll have to get to that later. Ahora you need to listen to me.”

“Hang on, ha-”

“Look, Roy,” said Olivia, her voice cracking and eyes watering, “I’ve got a really frayed fuse right now, okay?” She closed her hand tightly around my right arm. “My sister relapsed and overdosed three days ago, and today I’m really fucking exhausted from staying up all night at the hospital, and you’re almost enough of a distraction right now, so just…just humor me, huh?”

“Lisa O.D.’d?” I was stunned. “That’s…that’s awful…what’s go-”

“Roy,” she said, with so much powerful authority it shocked me. “Just sit. Sit down here and listen to me. I know that’s one thing you’re good at, so just plant your pinche culo and don’t say a thing. Trust me, it’ll be much easier if there are no interruptions, okay?”

“But why-” I began, before she groaned with exasperation and then did the last thing I ever expected-she kissed me right there, long and hard, high up on top of the known world-and I bent to a stronger will, the way I always had. It felt darker and bitter this time, though.

“That was to keep your cabeza aquí,” she said, jabbing her finger into my chest. “You won’t like some of this, but you need to know, so please, Roy, just listen, will you?”

So I listened. I listened for what seemed like forever, even though ten words into it I knew I’d never wanted to hear something less. The whole world fell away and the only thing that ever existed in it were her wide, round, liquid eyes-and her hypnotic voice full of the most psyche-dismantling things I’d ever heard. Things like fire and death and destruction raining down on me. Things I thought weren’t possible, but that explained so much. Things I just can’t repeat right now because I’m too fucking ashamed and afraid of what might happen.

Sometimes she got stuck, sometimes I made her repeat the shit that seemed absolutely unreal-because I think even she knew that I was quickly becoming too numb to be frightened anymore, and she needed to keep me scared. One time she paused a little longer than she had been-enough for me to snap out of my fear and back to the surrounding beautiful day-and I saw she was crying, really crying, but silently-but I was too scared to feel anything.

“I’m sorry, Roy.” She reached out and squeezed my hand, hard, and the electrical burn screamed its way through my nervous system. “I really, really am, but that’s what I saw, and that’s what I know, and that’s what you should know.”

I hunched forward and hugged my knees and felt like rolling right down the hill and why not-who gives a shit what happens now?

“This is fucked. Fucked. I’m…gonna go-go crazy.”

“I’ve been loca all day, Roy. It fucking blows. But if you need to, well…just come…back? We’re both knee-deep in the shit right now, okay? We should maybe try to trust each other.”

Liv stared at me, but I looked back out to sea, my mind a merciless hiss of blank tape. I mean, it was utterly unreal. It’s not every day that someone learns they are an unconscious slaughterer of men. A mindless, uncontrollable vessel of chaos. A weapon of young gods.