That’s why Celia bothered him so much now. It wasn’t her sluttish nature—that was Ronnie’s beef—but the fact that she looked the way Calvin looked in a mirror, for he did not see himself as the dead. He considered himself a man walking in a world that had fallen, yet survived without the knowledge that all of them, every damn one of them, were now living an existence of decay. And he was the only one living. To share his existence amongst the functioning dead with Celia bothered him. What made her so goddamned special?
Pulling into the parking lot at Balboa Park, Calvin couldn’t remember what the hell Ronnie had been talking about. He’d been responding—maybe not with riveting dialogue, but a series of nods and terms of agreement. There were other things on his mind and some of those things—obsessions if you will—were beginning to rule his consciousness. It wasn’t so bad when he was alone in his apartment with the brutality that was Death’s Door II playing in the background, but when his mind traveled away while he was with Ronnie his focus would stray, and then she would give him an accusatory look. Only so many nods would keep her at bay before her suspicions piqued.
There was a fine line Calvin had found himself walking. While at work he sometimes struggled, but he’d been working on a tract home development and had a lot of time by himself, didn’t have to entertain anyone with his wits.
He had to get into character.
Ronnie parked the car in the second parking lot, which was a few cars shy of overflowing. Good thing she had a compact vehicle. Some asshole parked a lifted truck in two spots.
Ronnie groaned. “What does that guy think he is, God’s gift to the world?”
“Huh?”
“Over there. Dumbass parked that bro truck in two spots. Everyone knows parking is at a minimum here.”
“How do you know it’s a guy?”
Ronnie lowered her sunglasses and raised her eyebrows in that you kidding me sort of way she does. “See the rubber testicles hanging off the back axel? You know a girl who’d drive something like that?”
Indeed there was a pair of large blue balls hanging from the rear of the truck. They were sagging cockeyed in a detailed scrotum with veins and all, implying that the truck had torque, cajones.
Calvin thought about cutting the rubber balls off of the truck, waiting for the douche bag who owned it, and beating him senseless then shoving the absurdly large fake testicles down his throat.
“We could cut ’em off,” Calvin offered.
“Sure, and then what? Probably some testosterone freak with a pitbull anyway.”
“Yeah, probably. Fucker.”
They took a path of sidewalk that led to the Prado where street performers, photographers, and vendors sold their wares for donations. There was a man playing a saxophone who wasn’t too bad, though you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. He had a hat on the ground with coins and dollar bills. Another guy was doing some kind of performance art where he flung paint onto a canvas and then smeared it around like a baboon or maybe a two-year old. You watched and wondered what the fuck he could possibly be doing, and then, low and behold, the mess was shifted with a drag of fingers and a smear of his palm and there was a cityscape or a horse. He had an open briefcase that was generously filled with loose greenbacks.
There were popcorn venders and a guy pushing boiled hotdogs and even a group selling an array of shelter animals from dogs to cats to exotic birds, but Calvin wasn’t really absorbing any of it. The birds, for instance, were featherless and gray, bones showing through and eyes eaten away by ants. The people were putrefied, some of them, others just dead, as if they’d recently strolled out of the morgue after a heart attack. The performance artist was a perfect mess of cuts from the top of his body to his toes. Some were so deep that they opened and closed as he moved, which was far more interesting and satisfying an experience to that of watching him create a portrait out of paint smears.
After walking through the Prado, Ronnie and Calvin made their way to the Organ Pavilion. The Spreckles organ is one of the largest outdoor organs in the world. On an average weekend one of the few people allowed to play the massive 4,000 pipe melody maker would be serenading the whole of Balboa, and this day was no different.
In front of the massive organ were a series of metal benches for concerts on summer evenings. People loitered around, listening to the music, eating lunch, taking pictures. As Calvin led Ronnie to an open spot on one of the benches, he realized just how morose the piped music was. It was like Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” meets the darkest depths of Brahms with a hint of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”. It wasn’t a piece Calvin recognized, not that he was a connoisseur of classical music, but it just didn’t feel right. It was depressing, and yet it fit when Calvin took a hundred foot view of the corpses mingling with one another like extras on the set of an epic zombie film. It fit quite nicely.
They sat there listening to the music—Calvin was sure that Ronnie was hearing something else, considering how happy she appeared to be when the music Calvin heard could paint a frown on a clown’s face—when he saw Hazel.
He lurched up and briskly sat back down as if tethered to the bench. How could he explain Hazel to Ronnie? Talk about awkward.
“Something wrong?” Ronnie said.
“No, nothing. I thought I saw someone I know.”
Calvin continued watching Hazel as she walked past the front of the pavilion, hand in hand with a man. Calvin didn’t recognize the guy from the Hall of Hell, but that experience had been kind of a whirlwind of madness and he really hadn’t gotten a good look at everybody who’d been there.
What bothered Calvin was that both Hazel and the man were as normal looking as him and Celia. They stood out in a sea of death like blood on an arctic plane.
“Who are you looking at?” asked Ronnie.
Calvin shifted his gaze. “No one, nothing. Thought I saw someone.”
“Who?”
“Uh, someone from work.”
Ronnie scowled a bit as if she didn’t believe him, but he figured she would get over it. To hell with her. If she didn’t believe him then she could kiss off.
“Come on,” said Calvin as he stood from the uncomfortable metal bench.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I dunno. Let’s just walk and see where we end up. There’s a lot to look at.”
“Sure, okay.”
Ronnie took his hand. Hers was cold to match the dreary music. They walked, Calvin leading the way.
He followed Hazel.
Chapter Twelve
Calvin didn’t want to make it clear that he was following Hazel, which was easy at first considering how many people were milling about.
“So I was thinking,” said Ronnie as they walked by the koi pond and botanical garden. “We’ve been going out now for over a year. That’s a pretty long time, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, sure it is.”
Hazel turned toward the museums, which could mean that she was going back to one of the parking lots. Could mean anything, really, but Calvin didn’t want to be led back to the parking lot.
“We haven’t gone on a trip together yet,” Ronnie continued. “Just you and me.”
“A trip? What kind of trip.”
Hazel and her guy walked up a small flight of stairs to a large hallway that was reminiscent of an old college campus. Lining the walls were doors that led to rooms for any variety of uses. A sign proclaimed a plant show in one room. Another was holding a free course on English as a second language.