Work Text:
1. HEM CONMIGO
Chez Oskar is the name of the place where he works. Chez Oskar, Chez Oskar. Shack Zero, Rob thinks, but that's not necessary. It's a nice restaurant. It wants to be a french bistro, with low lighting and a well-stocked bar and live music three nights a week. Sort of romantic. He would probably take a date here himself if he didn't get the food for free in styrofoam at the end of the shift.
The other possibilities don't make much sense: Cork Hazes, Rock Hazes, Shock Raze. Like shock-and-awe. Rob works out the anagrams with pen-and-paper when it's slow. He can't keep the letters in his head very well; it's just not how his mind works. He always carries a pen on him, anyway. Always will.
If there wasn't a line out the door on Saturday night, Rob would never have seen him. His party got seated at a banquette in the front, outside of Rob's section, but Fabian is loitering in the nook outside the bathroom, conducting some kind of important business via text message, and those four-tops really need to get turned over – there are people waiting, the hostess is pissed – and Rob ends up being the one who busses the front tables. He doesn't mind. The bussers all share tips here anyway, so why not.
Chez Oskar is nice, just a few blocks away from Fort Greene Park. There are a lot of choices for that. Genre After Pork. Grape Enter Fork. It's easy. He's stacking the plates when he realizes, recognizes. Rob locks the silverware down with a thumb. It makes sense, really. He lived just around the corner.
He is with two Latina girls about their age, neither of whom look familiar to Rob, but who knows, one of them might be Gaby. It's been such a long time. They are putting on their jackets, looping scarves around their necks. "Alejandro," he says, and the girls look up, like who is this guy?
"Rob!" Alex drops a glove under the table without seeming to notice. "Rob Baker?"
"Yeah, man." It's hard to know what to say. He ducks to retrieve the glove, the dishes still balanced on his left arm, and puts it down next to where the waitress left the check and Alex's MasterCard and the pen. They got the prix fixe, all three of them.
"I thought you moved," Alex says. "To South Africa?"
"Australia. That other place where they speak English really funny."
Alex grins. "You're back," he says. "And I never left." He scribbles his phone number down on the customer copy of the receipt. "We definitely need to hang out."
Rob raises an eyebrow. "¿Quieres salir conmigo?"
One of the women Alex is with gives him a funny look. "Shut up," Alex tells him. "Just call me."
2. GEM OH MI CON
They meet in the park in the middle of the afternoon, just when the kids are getting out of Brooklyn Technical High School, and they're all over the sidewalks in groups that break up and re-form, laughing and cursing and hitting each other with their backpacks. They are so small. It's hard for Rob to believe he was even younger than this the last time he saw Alex.
They're going to Rob's favorite Caribbean place to get roti. It's too late for lunch and too early for dinner, but Alex just got out of class and Rob's shift tonight starts at 5. This is the time they have. They walk up Dekalb Avenue and cut over to Willoughby on Clermont. The Fernández bodega used to be at Clermont and Lafayette Ave, a block away in the opposite direction – still is, as far as Rob knows.
"The neighborhood looks just the same. Less graffiti, maybe, but pretty much."
Alex kicks through the fallen leaves. He's got clean Nike high-tops, the puffy throwback kind in black, red and green. "Fort Greene is getting bougie. And kind of gay – lots of gay black professionals. Jamal says they call it the Chocolate Chelsea."
"That's funny."
"Yeah. It's safer and nicer now, which is a good thing, but people who have been here forever can't afford the rents here anymore."
Brooklyn is gentrifying like crazy. It started a decade ago, when people like his dad and Lenni's moved into these old brownstones. Now white guys like Rob are priced out too, and they're looking further afield. His own current sublet is over the invisible border into Bed-Stuy, and some of the African-American families who used to live there are moving to Crown Heights or East New York. Rob feels shitty about this. The young men on his streetcorner stop talking when they see him walking to the train station and give him dirty looks. They don't know him, and he doesn't know what else he can do.
The restaurant is up ahead. It's called Buff Patty, which you can't really rearrange into any other configuration except Puff Batty. Rob thinks P. Diddy's agent or publicist or whatever should have given that some consideration before he changed his name.
"Hey dude, you're looking pretty buff," Alex says in a mock-surfer voice when he sees the sign.
"Don't make fun of the Buff Patty until you've tried their beef patty."
Alex isn't listening. He's still going with the surfer thing. "Like, pretty jacked, you know? Totally."
"Oh yeah," Rob agrees. "I'm totally ripped. Cut."
"Cut up. Cut to pieces."
"Ugh," Rob says pushing Alex hard on the shoulder.
They've both always liked playing with words. Right now, he is writing poetry with found language, a series of poems that rearrange and recontextualize passages from James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking books. He is making the old man talk about the frontier and the Last of the Mohicans in different way.
He thinks Ghostwriter would dig it. Probably a lot of people have an ideal reader, a sort of made-up critic at whom they direct their work, consciously or unconsciously. Rob is just the only writer he knows who has a non-corporeal one. Like an imaginary friend.
They go inside and order their food. Alex whips out this nice leather wallet and tries to pay, but Rob won't let him. He carries the orange plastic tray to the only booth in the small seating area, and Alex goes back to the counter and gets napkins and straws for their Snapples.
"So. What are you studying?"
"Business." Alex slits the skin of his roti with the plastic tine of his fork, exposing nuclear-looking curry inside. "So I can take over the Fernández family empire when the time is right. And a little bit of philosophy."
"Does it help?"
"Oh, definitely. Kierkegaard, bro. He's off the hook.
"Never read him," Rob admits.
"You should check him out. What are you doing?"
After two years in Perth, they moved back to the States, and Rob finished high school in one of the nicer suburbs of Cincinnati. Since he left his dad's house, he's been in Seattle, LA and Pittsburgh. Anyone from his senior English class would freak out if they found out he never went to college, but Alex takes it in stride. Maybe some of the guys they both knew at Hurston Middle are at Columbia or John Jay now, on their way to being doctors and lawyers. Maybe some of them are drug dealers or anarcho-syndicalist performance artists. There are all kinds of ways to live in New York.
"Being a busboy," he says. "Writing for a music blog. Writing term papers for rich kids."
"That is so wrong," Alex says, obviously amused. "Using your powers for evil. What else?"
Rob shrugs. He likes it, that he knew to ask that. "Writing short stories. Poetry. And some Galaxy Girl fanfiction," he adds, making Alex laugh and spit out a piece of gristle. "How is Jamal? How are your folks and Gaby?"
"They're fine." He pokes at his food without looking up. "Jamal's at Amherst, in Massachusetts, but he's minoring in Education. I have a feeling he'll be back. He'll end up teaching in Brooklyn." He looks sideways up at Rob, and Rob can tell he's trying to decide what to ask in return. "Your father – he still in the Air Force?"
"No, he's retired now. I'm glad, too. We might not see eye to eye, but I wouldn't want him in Iraq. It's a fucked-up war, none of us should be there. All these kids got conned – I feel bad for them."
As soon as the words are out of his mouth, he knows. It's not even the expression on Alex's face that tells him. It's a flash of insight, like the words are hanging in front of his face, the way they used to.
Shock Raze.
"Gaby," Rob says.
Alex nods, cheeks flushed, and he's getting to his feet. Rob remembers this about Alex, how he could get so angry in a second. He used to turn red, tongue-tied. Back in the day, Rob thinks, he might have gotten punched in the face in a situation like this, but Alex is speaking now, and his voice is surprisingly controlled and even. "Don't get me wrong," he says. "I always liked you, Rob. I just don't think I want to talk about this with you."
3. MOOCH ME GIN
Fabian comes to get him where he's standing out behind the Dumpster with a paperback of The Pathfinder from the Assignment shelf in the public library, copying sentences into a notebook. Everybody else takes cigarette breaks, but Rob doesn't smoke. "Yo, someone here to see you," Fabian says.
Rob wrote out some anagrams yesterday on a napkin. The best one was Relaxed Fan Zen, although he didn't know what to do with the accent mark. "Who is it?" he says, deep breath in, trying to feel Buddhist but hoping hard.
"Some dude. He's inside."
Alex is standing at the dark wood bar, shifting from foot to foot like he wants to leave, but as Rob approaches, the bartender slides a tumbler over to him on a coaster. He already decided to order. He's going to stay.
Rob remembers this about Alex, too. How once the anger was past, he was always brave enough to try to work things out. Not like Rob.
He takes off his coat and sits on the stool that's one over from where Alex is. "Valerie, this is my friend. His drink's on me, all right?"
The tables are empty of customers. The manager is not on the floor. Val gives them both a wink. "No, I'm pretty sure it's on the house. You want something too, Rob?"
"What are you having?"
"Tom Collins," Alex says quietly.
"What's in that?"
Alex doesn't answer.
"I'll take one," Rob tells Valerie anyway, and pulls a couple of crumpled dollar bills out of his pocket for her. He doesn't know where to start with this. He pulls the knotted bandana off his head and scrapes his fingers through his hair. "Is she OK?" he asks at last.
"Yeah. She's doing good."
"Is she Army or National Guard or what?"
"Guard. 1569th Transportation Company. She's on her second tour now. She went down to the recruiting station on 4th Ave right after September 11 and enlisted." Alex takes a long pull from his drink through the tiny red straw. "Look, I don't know if you can understand what it was like here when it happened. You weren't even in the country."
"I was. But not here. I know what you're saying."
Alex spreads his hands flat on the bar. "OK," he says dubiously.
"I'm sorry," Rob says. "I shouldn't have said what I said. We're coming from different places."
He's thinking of his stubborn dad, who is rah rah Bush and being an asshole about the connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and about this guy he met in LA who was a journalist in Kuwait during the first Gulf War and still dreams about burning oil raining down, greed, problems that never got fixed. Rob is thinking of his old friend Double T, messed up since Vietnam, not able to get his shit together, not even for the daughter he loves. He isn't going to say any of this stuff to Alex Fernández. If it were Jamal, maybe he could, because Jamal wanted to know every side of every question, but he knows Alex, always wishing things were clearer than they are.
Rob remembers how, at night, you could see the lights of Lower Manhattan from the rooftop of his building on Lafayette Avenue. "It doesn't matter what I think politically," he says. "I care about your sister. I don't want us to have to fight."
"Me neither," Alex says. He sounds relieved.
"I'm glad you gave me a chance to say this, though. I wanted to call you, but I was kind of too scared."
Alex smiles a little. "You're a lot taller than me now."
"It's just, she's a kid, Alex. In my mind, anyway."
"You think it's different for me? She's my baby sister, man. Twenty years old."
Rob looks down at the melting ice in his gin. "I guess that's really not a kid, when you think about it."
"When was the last time Ghostwriter talked to you?"
This is not a question Rob expects. He's never said anything out loud since he was thirteen and left Brooklyn; he promised, after all. He picks out letters and words, he makes his poems and he doesn't think too hard about why. He doesn't believe that he's crazy – not really – but sometimes it seems like the most reasonable explanation.
He glances down the length of the bar. Val is cutting up lemons at the far end. "When I moved."
"I had it after that," Alex says. "Into high school. It sort of faded out or tapered off. One day I realized I hadn't gotten a message for a year."
"Oh."
"Gaby says she still can see them." Alex is looking at Rob very carefully now, his shadowed eyes dark. "Do you think I should be worried about that? In fucking Iraq, man. She sees the letters. Sometimes it's Arabic, but he uses English, when it's around to take."
"What does he say?" Rob asks.
"I don't know. Gaby won't tell me."
"Does it make her feel …?"
"Safe. Not alone."
Rob takes out his notebook, flips to a clean page. "Then I think it's a good thing. Do you have something to write with?" He has his own pen in his pants pocket, of course, but he's curious.
Alex is shaking his head at the blank paper. "I already tried that, believe me."
Rob holds out his hand. After a minute, Alex tugs at his neck, pulling a pen on a string out from under his shirt, the kind they all used to have. He takes it off, over his head, and hands it over. When he sees it, Rob's heart gives an involuntary squeeze. THANK YOU, he writes in careful block letters. "There."
They both stare at the blue-ruled page for a minute, maybe two. Nothing happens.
"What do you think?" Alex asks.
"I guess he's not going to show. It's a mystery. It always was."
"Told you so."
And then, because he can't help himself, Rob writes HANKY OUT underneath, on the next line.
Alex crosses it out. "That's terrible." TO A HUNK, he prints.
"You forgot the Y. Do you want Toy A Hunk or To A Hunky? What would Ghostwriter say if he was here?"
"Neither. He would, like, use the menu or something and write a message that made sense. Something reassuring." Alex pushes the notebook away. The metal rings of the spiralbound click against Rob's glass. "Hey. Do you think we're nuts?"
"No," Rob says, meaning it. He doesn't feel even a flicker of doubt. "But I think we should write Gaby a letter."
"He always had six people writing to him," Alex says.
They turn the paper over, and Rob is glad he's home.
THE END.