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  Bam! Thunderclap! “All right, how about some funnel cake instead?” Love!

  As a result of the slightest change in lunar gravity caused by the comets’ crash, a wave off the coast of Pago Pago poured over a thousand newborn tortoises and enfolded them back into the warm sea. A rock was wrested from its position by the faint concussive force and tumbled into a creek in the Americas, minutely altering the course of the stream, which poured over a slowly eroding cliff. A gentleman astronomer of Arabia saw the blast of two young stars in his telescope and fell from his stool backward, knocking his head, then called his assistants to his aid, including the assistant whose job it was to turn the dial each calendar day.

  You might consider what I’m saying a bunch of overwrought lovey-dovey talk. You might think I’m being a sentimentalist, schmaltzy, or “grazing corn.” Yeah, yeah, you’re saying, that’s a story for moms to forward a dozen times on e-mail. Sell it to Hallmark, buddy. That kind of thing.

  And you might be right, but then I’d say don’t push me, punk. I like this part, and I can schmaltz your face off. And more important, it’s not corny when it’s true. To some of you, it may be corny because it’s true, and that puts you beyond my help.

  For the rest of us, I will say that when Chloe and Giacomo bumped into each other in the middle of the crowded fair, their sudden love set off fireworks in space. It ushered in life and the tide. It was earth-shattering. And in a way, even time stopped for a while (the assistant finally remembered around midnight and snuck back into the madrassa in his nightclothes to set the calendar right).

  Chloe blushed. Giacomo smiled like a doofus. Her eyes had seen the tops of clouds and were blue. His neck could pull a plow through parched clay. She opened her lips and said, “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur.”

  He looked at her and said, “Huh? . . . Mi dispiace — non capisco.”

  And thus came to light a slightly important detail: Giacomo couldn’t speak French, and Chloe didn’t have a lick of Italian.

  At that same instant, both Babbo and Pierre spied their son and daughter fraternizing with exactly the last person on the planet they should be fraternizing with. The two of them interrupted their admirers and rushed toward the new lovers.

  Also at that same moment, from his seat on the elevated stage, Prince Dimple Pimple noticed Chloe. He noted her darling freckles but didn’t fall in love. At any given time he had two dozen chicks on speed-beckon. He was constantly in that greedy state of wanting the next thing, so he thought of women like a spice rack — each one was good for a single flavor. Chloe was the darling freckle flavor.

  I hope I’m not the first person to tell you that beauty is a little more complicated than the box-of-crayons approach.

  Well, the Dimple Pimple didn’t know that, and he wasn’t in any kind of position to recognize that Chloe — just another hottie by his standards — was in fact the most beautiful woman alive. Too soft-spoken, perhaps, but a heart as shiny as the diamond as big as the Ritz. Real beauty is important in my industry, so I’m using the word as a technical term. She was actually the most interesting person to watch among you people. Best alive. My professional opinion.

  So on the plus side, there was no sleazebag prince butting his head to steal our heroine away. But, on the other hand, Brutessa, who lurked behind the prince’s throne, had seen Giacomo, promptly developing her first-ever crush (which at first expressed itself as a gassy buildup and then a toady belch).

  This all happened at the same time — love, hate, indifference, and burps that smell like burro. The old red hound asleep on a sunny patch of cobblestones perked an ear, then woofed under his breath. The lovers realized that language is almost completely useless, anyway. Brutessa was already clubbing Giacomo in her mind and dragging him back to her hovel of love. All in a few seconds, just like that. And just like that the easy ending — the happily ever after — wheezed its last breath in my arms.

  By that I mean it got complicated.

  NOT TWO SECONDS after Chloe and Giacomo exchanged their first few pleasantries in languages the other couldn’t understand, their dads keelhauled the whole pretty picture.

  Pierre squinted so hard that his eyes couldn’t be seen behind the glare of sunlight on his spectacles. He took his daughter by the elbow and said to Giacomo in almost perfect Italian, “You? You? I’d rather she marry a beast or someone in advertising. Or become an au pair for the orcish horde. Or . . .”

  Then Babbo came up behind Giacomo, grabbed him in a headlock, and turned back toward his booth, dragging his son behind him. He said over his shoulder, in almost perfect French, “Shut up.”

  As she was being pulled away, Chloe watched her love, Giacomo, hunched over, bucking to free his head from Babbo’s grip. He looked like a spaniel in a banister. Undeterred, Chloe sent swooning missives with her eyes to Giacomo’s preoccupied rump.

  Babbo didn’t pay attention to Giacomo’s kicking as he strolled through the fair. For a marble painter, Babbo was abnormally beefy. He looked like he smelled like cedar and old spice. If there was an adjective for lumberjack — lumberjacked, maybe — he’d be that. He strolled with Giacomo’s neck under one arm, eating a rainbow sno-cone and slurping the excess from his beard.

  Back at the flower-quilting booth, Pierre ruffled a display of gingham geraniums just to keep his hands busy.

  “Oh, stop googing at that boy already,” he said. The comment was pretty harsh in person. I’m bad at describing it, but it had that dismissive quality that makes your biggest feelings seem stupid all of a sudden.

  “I’m not googing at him, Daddy. I . . .” Chloe trailed off. It was “I love him” that she had stopped herself from saying. Pierre knew it, and it wrinkled the crap out of him. But worse was that she hadn’t said it. As if he would overreact — which he probably would — but he didn’t want his little girl to think that he was the kind of person who would. And that wrinkled him, too.

  Chloe was still staring in the direction of Babbo’s booth, which was a few rows away but sporadically visible through the clutter of other stations. Pierre watched her watching. Already, she seemed lost to the old man. Pierre’s tongue could be as sharp as his pins and needles, but he hadn’t pricked his daughter since she’d returned to life. He regretted it, and regretted that he wasn’t the man who could make everything better anymore.

  At the marble booth, Babbo had let Giacomo go from his headlock but refused to explain himself. He just went back to licking his sno-cone. Giacomo, who was a grown man now, or at least a young man, demanded to know why his father had interfered.

  Nothing from Babbo. Then a loud slurp.

  Giacomo said, “And another thing. How in the name of Peter’s Papal Pardon did you know French and her dad know Italian?”

  Babbo Giovanni said, “See? You’re still too young to understand. I’ve been writing letters to that fop since you were this big.” He held up a marble the size of a ball bearing and continued. “I had to learn French because I ran out of dirty words in Italian. I even learned calligraphy just to add curlicues for emphasis. And you, you want me to send my son to grovel for his daughter? You think I’m nuts? You think I’m some kind of nincompoop? You’d be his stable boy. And he’d mail me oven mitts or hot pads or some sewn thing with pictures of his cottage on it and a nice newly painted barn with a little silhouette of a strapping young boy, my boy, painting. The master you could become, painting a barn. And no one would believe me, when I show them, because that gerbil of a man would sew it so it looked like a shadow. But I’d know. I’d know it was my boy sweating his life away. I’m telling you, he’d do it. It’d be you on the oven mitt, Giacomo, the damned bucolic oven mitt.”

  And Giacomo simply wasn’t prepared to counter an argument that crazy. Obviously, Babbo had marinated for years on just such a nightmare scenario. It didn’t even make sense. Pierre would never stoop to making oven mitts.

  It didn’t matter to Babbo. He kept going, “And for what? For him. And some girl — okay, she’s beautiful,
I’ll say that much, Giac-Giac, cute as every button in the old man’s caboodle. But you just have to find someone else.”

  That was what tipped it over for Giacomo, who’d been playing with a purple teardrop launcher — a half-pounder. The idea that he would have to find anyone other than Chloe. Giacomo flung the marble at the back of Babbo’s head. It smacked Babbo in the neck and sprayed a cloud of sno-cone mist from his beard.

  Babbo turned around, slowly. Giacomo wasn’t sure whether to run. He was smart enough to grab a few more marbles, though. Babbo chuckled. A stray dream-catcher rolled behind him like a tumbleweed.

  Ten seconds later, both men were hopping around the booth, pelting each other with marbles. Priceless spheres of every color whistled through the air. They ducked and yelped and screamed at each other, “Stop! I’m serious — just stop, seriously.” But neither would stop first. They started to throw fistfuls at a time. They stood on either side of the booth with both arms swinging, while leaning back, trying to keep their faces out of the line of fire.

  One-inch welts popped up all over them. Finally Babbo ran around and caught Giacomo in a bear hug. It only deteriorated from there into Giacomo elbowing his dad in the belly, and his dad giving him noogies.

  By the time they hit the dirt, they were both bruised, panting, and slumped with their backs to the booth.

  Babbo caught his breath and said, “That bad, huh?”

  And Giacomo said, “I love her, Pop.”

  And Babbo laughed, then groaned and touched his swollen jaw. “You coulda just said that.”

  They got up and started gathering the marbles. After a little while, Babbo said, “You know he’ll never —”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Giacomo.

  More talk would have killed the solemnity of Giacomo’s trouble. Their marbles were scattered all around, so they hunched over the dirt in silence as the sun sank into the horizon like a marble they could never retrieve.

  Night was falling on the fair, and shadows of the surrounding forest began to extend branched hands farther and farther into the great glade.

  A few people began to notice that there were no lampposts at this fair. They had all admired the ribbons drawn across the tops of the trees, girded with honeysuckle vines that hung down every few feet, creating aromatic curtains above their heads. But now the fear of night obscured even the flowers’ scent. And the glass baubles that hung between each flower curtain, what good were they, people whispered, if they weren’t lamps or candelabras?

  A worried murmur began to rise among the row of blacksmiths, big dudes who were getting skittish. They grumbled that they never would have put out their smelting fires if they’d known it’d be pitch-black. A few of them scuttled over to the lady who made night-lights out of glow-in-the-dark seashells.

  Personally, I like the dark. But then, I guess deep down you guys aren’t really afraid of the dark, so much as meeting me somewhere in it. Thanks for that, by the way. Real good for my ego.

  I said that to a guy I knew once, and he goes, “I’m not afraid of meeting you in the dark. I am afraid of being left alive after getting mutilated by a bear.” That was nice of him to say.

  So the last sliver of sunlight faded out in the fairground. The blacksmiths made a collective whimpering sound. It was so dark, you could only make out the eyes of a thousand different were-creatures, watching from the surrounding edge of the Black Forest.

  When some poor girl in a corner booth got her ankle nipped by a were-mole, her scream sent fear through the crowd. If you ever want to see true chaos, get a bunch of artists in an enclosed space and threaten their work. It gets ugly. They’re like monkeys in a fire.

  In that second before someone screamed bloody artwork, a dozen drums pounded a single beat, and the stage at the head of the fairground suddenly lit up with a single flash. Then the darkness descended again, but everyone turned toward the stage. Another drumbeat, another flash.

  A few people thought they could make out the outline of an extremely hot guy. The drums thumped a third time. The light flashed again. By this time everyone could see one very stylish person, obviously Prince Kaiser Dimple Pimple, standing in the middle of the stage. It was obvious because a huge backdrop behind him said his name in shiny ten-foot sequined letters that lit up with every flash.

  The prince was standing with his hands crossed in front of his crotch and his head down. The light and the drums slowly sped up the beat.

  As their eyes got used to the bursts of light, the audience recognized the source. Every land pirate in Bavaria stood around the stage and held an outrageously long fishing pole. At the end of the fishing lines dangled paper stars. Candles flickered inside the spiky white lanterns, and when all the pirates strained to cantilever the long poles out over the stage at the same time, it made a sudden synchronous flare. The bulbs of celebrity. The light of awesome.

  It must have taken weeks to choreograph the land pirates. In perfect unison, they bowed the stars before Prince Kaiser and lifted them to create a strobe effect.

  The drums and stars pulsed, and every heartbeat ramped up, until suddenly, with a surge of radiant sex appeal, the prince looked up. The stars flew up and away. The drums abruptly halted in the dark.

  A beat.

  The crowd vibrated and possibly wet its pants.

  With a blast of starlight, a thunder of drums, the prince is back. He looks left. The dimple is honestly stunning. Another blast, and he looks right. The other dimple is, impossibly, even better. His cheeks must have been worked on. They’re just too perfect. A final blast, and he does a little chin flick and walks toward the crowd. They’re freaking out, screaming like banshees on vacation. A few jewelers have already gasped and given up consciousness.

  The land pirates stake the fishing poles into the ground, creating ambient starlight for the stage. The drummers go silent.

  Prince Kaiser sashays his pretty self to center stage and says, “—.”

  It doesn’t really matter what he said. The guy talked too much. He welcomed a few dignitaries from a craft factory in Manchester and some muckety-mucks who appeared onstage for a few seconds before getting rushed off to restore the prince’s limelight, and then he says, “—.”

  It was nothing special, actually; he just introduced the two great grandmasters among them, the flower quilter, Pierre Vouvray, and the marble painter, Giovanni Chianti. The crowd went insane. The blacksmiths couldn’t stop clapping. Dimple Pimple basked in the glory.

  After the crowd settled, the prince casually mentioned that the crafts fair had all been a trap, they were all his prisoners, and anyone who tried to escape through the forest would be keelhauled and promptly eaten. Turns out land pirates are cannibals. Who knew?

  WELL, IT’S NOT technically cannibalism, because dwarves aren’t people. I mean, little people are obviously people. But I’m talking about Old Timey Europe dwarves. Which are like elves, which aren’t human. So the fact that land pirates happened to be dwarves means that when they eat people, it’s not exactly cannibalism. It’s just super gross is all.

  But that wasn’t the point. We’re not getting started talking about all the things land pirates eat. That’s a car game that’d keep your kids preoccupied till you hit the ocean.

  The point is that after all the showboating, his royal good-lookingness was holding the entire fair hostage. It was brilliant really. Lure all the greatest artists in the land with the promise of adulation and sales potential. And they swarmed to it like flies to roadkill.

  A riptide of terror overcame the artists as they realized that, yes, in fact, this had all been a ruse, and no one would be appreciating their art after all. They began to replay, hungrily, every comment they had received from every customer. They finally understood why they had all been so carefully thought out, expressed as though in a writing workshop, and perhaps tinged with a little jealousy. “These macaroons are sentimentally interesting. I feel like I’m consuming childhood as well as marzipan.” “Are these wreaths made
of wagon wheels? Heavy, aren’t they. And wrought with meaning.” “I like that it’s a sundial and a wind vane, but what would it be if it weren’t either one?”

  Only artists had been invited to the fair. Every customer had a booth of his or her own somewhere. Dear God, they had been selling to other artists!

  Other artists didn’t count as true fans. They bought art out of professional obligation, or competitor research, or the raccoony obsession to own shiny things. Think about it. No one is impressed with the Girl Scout who has twelve rich fat uncles.

  Suddenly a wave of nausea, worse even than knowing they were slaves of a ruthless dictator, crashed upon the crowd. They had not, in fact, helped the uncultured swine of the world better themselves with threaded candy-corn necklaces. The unwashed masses would stay unwashed, even though scented soaps and body scrubs took up an entire aisle. The churlish “left brain” types would go on with their usury, the clacking of the abacus their only music, the blood of artsy children their only wine.

  Most of the crowd curled into the fetal position, rocking themselves and humming tunes by their favorite singer-songwriter before the prince could finish his announcement.

  Giacomo, however, was already sneaking through the hedgerows of angsty creatives to find Chloe. As the prince trumpeted on about his elaborate trap, and the fact that the head of every artisans’ guild was here somewhere, and that everyone would be put to work on a project so ambitious it might stop the wind, all Giacomo could think was, What do you suppose would make Chloe happy?

  As the prince instructed the crowd that they’d be grouped in pairs and imprisoned in different wings of his castle in order to work on his project, Giacomo thought, I know. Flowers. She seemed to be into flowers, what with her dad and all. But then again, maybe she wouldn’t want flowers because she always had them. But maybe she couldn’t get enough flowers. What would Chloe say about all this? Chloe would have the answer. She seemed clever. And cute. Chloe was the cutest. . . . Maybe she’d like perfume. . . .