fic: The Fatherless, Set 2/5
Pairing: Zach Condon/Shia LaBeouf, RPS.
Wordcount: 3522
Notes: Installments four, five and six of fifteen.
set I - set II - set III - set IV - set V
iv. Our parents rue the day they found us kneeling
Shia goes down on Zach in his own driveway. He pulls in, throws the gear into park, kills the engine and says, “My mom is home,” which is probably the least sexy thing he’s said in three years.
Zach barely blinks. He looks a little dazed. Too many hours on the patio at Carmina, not enough water. And they’d gone to the shooting range before that. For all his protesting, Shia is pretty sure Zach got a rush out of it. Shaking laughter at his wide aim. Kneejerk alt-pacifism or whatever aside.
The orange glow off the streetlights angles through the dirt on the back windshield, and everything else stays black. The standard pause before Zach answers is something Shia is trying to learn to wait through, rather than just talk over. “So we should be quiet?” Zach finally says.
Shia says, “Probably.” And folds himself across the bench seat to put his face closer to Zach’s. He gets kissed immediately, no pause there, just a hum in the throat and a hand that finds his shoulder. Beer on their breath - and he probably shouldn’t have driven home - and Shia slips some tongue, just to speed things up, just to remind himself that yeah, he gets it. He’s getting it right now.
Going straight for the cock, though, that’s an insecurity thing. He does it because he wants to impress the kid, weirdly, like it’s just another service. Like paying for the four-hour meal. Like showing him how to aim a shotgun: with one hand curving under his forearm, the other on his shoulder, then his hip. Furtive glancing for rifle-toting Republicans coming down the gallery because it wasn’t the best place to be caught with his fingers in another guy’s waistband.
Zach chuckles in surprise as Shia reaches down to run a palm over the inseam, go one-handed at the fly. He smiles into Shia’s mouth and leans back on the seat. Looks at him like he’s waiting for the punchline, but then his smile slides and his mouth parts a little.
Shia’s fingers are clever and his palm is insistent; Zach’s dick is cooperative.
Shia watches Zach’s expression change, looking up through lashes. His pulse is rising: he doesn’t know why he can’t get enough of this kid. All day, every day, for the past two weeks. In a little while Zach will get sick of the sneaking around, he knows. They both have day jobs.
“Let me suck you off,” Shia says.
Zach doesn’t say anything at all, even though Shia waits for an are you kidding? or a flat no way, here? no way. But Zach just looks bemused, like he’s recognized someone familiar down the street. It makes Shia wonder about the time in Eastern Europe, the kinds of faces and suggestions he met with there.
But no answer is a yes - isn’t that the rule? - and Shia tucks himself closer even as Zach’s knees spread, slouching because his hips are straining up so hard. Shia splits the jeans open at the fly, rucks down Zach’s underwear to expose a few dark, flattened curls, the pink flush of his hard-on.
Zach says, “Jesus Christ,” breathing out all at once as Shia pulls it free and runs his thumb up and down the circumcision scar, and bends to follow the same line with his tongue.
Shia can feel the tension there, how still Zach is holding himself as he watches. Worried, maybe, that Shia doesn’t know what he’s doing. Or just feeling awkward because five minutes ago they were arguing Rainbow Six versus Call of Duty and making promises to hand over each other’s asses.
But the angle - sideways, bent-backed - is enough that Shia is actually a little afraid he’s going to ruin the moment and be forever remembered with the indie scenester crowd as the starlet who bit Zach Condon’s talented pink dick off.
Nothing’s worse than looking like you don’t know what you’re doing when you do. When you really, really do.
He pulls up off Zach’s cock with one final wet-lipped suck, and then lifts his eyes to say, “We could go inside.” He wipes the spit off his chin.
“Uh,” Zach says, looking down at himself.
“Whatever, she’s probably asleep.”
Zach gives him that look again, the one from this afternoon when Shia first said he moved in with his mother because he liked to be close to her. Unfortunate phrasing, yeah, but he really hates being alone in a house. Especially the house in Laurel Canyon, which feels more like a modern, sunlit cellblock - silent and gated - than a home. Home is an apartment block with shitty air conditioning, with the smell of roasting meat coming up the hall and screaming children and banging doors.
They push the truck’s doors closed, more a click than a bang, and Shia tries to make a show of being quiet in the foyer. Peeling off shoes. But Zach just staggers. Kid can’t balance for shit, and when Shia grabs his elbow he wheezes a quiet giggle, and kind of collapses sideways, just more slowly. Shia is all shushes and c’mons, but Zach just shakes his head, laughing on the floor.
They try for the bedroom, or at least the room with the xbox and the couch and the entry to the pool, but they don’t get very far.
His mom is in the kitchen, asleep in an armchai she’s dragged in from the living room. The flatscreen over the counter is on the History channel and all the lights are off except for that grey glow.
Zach stops still, and Shia grimaces. Gestures to continue down the hall, “Follow right,” he whispers.
“It must be late,” she groans at them. “How late is it?”
“It’s like, twelve-thirty mom. Don’t you want to go to bed?” Shia raises his voice to a normal tone, and Zach stays where he is.
“I was watching Isadora Duncan. Very interesting lady. Yes, probably.” She levers herself out of the chair, and her henna-dyed hair is all over the place. There’s an empty wine glass with her lipstick smeared on it sitting on the counter. She puts it in the sink and peers at the clock, “Twelve-thirty. You were out with the boys?”
“Mom, this is Zach,” Shia says, and Zach steps forward like a debutante and waves a hand at waist-level, mumbles a hello.
She angles a sideways glance at him, already shifting away down the other hall to her room. “Have I seen you before?” she asks.
“I don’t think so, ma” Shia gestures as he clicks off the television. “He’s a musician. From Santa Fe.”
“Oh, good. Very good.” She says, and, from deeper down the hall. “Good night then.”
Zach raises his eyebrows as Shia pulls him by the hand down toward whatever soft surface they hit first.
“Santa Fe?” Zach asks, minutes later, when Shia’s already on him, a bedside lamp lit, the windows open for the air because yeah, his bedroom kind of smells like socks.
“She loves Santa Fe. She goes there for art festivals like, twice a year.”
Zach grunts, but Shia doesn’t know if it’s in response, or because that dedicated hard-on is back and ready. So he goes down on Zach again, eager as a college co-ed, and this time Zach gets so into it that Shia actually has to stop and hand him a pillow to moan his hoarse oh gods into.
After, he swallows, and Zach crawls backwards on the bed just to lie there, clammy skin in the dim light and breeze from the window.
Shia flutters around a bit, picking up stray underwear, a few dirty dishes, eyeing the kid in his bed and feeling a little spooked. He skulks back out into the kitchen and grabs them a couple of cokes - he really doesn’t do the drunk thing in his mother’s house - and returns to find Zach still boneless on the bed, pillow chastely shifted to cover his damp bits, smiling at the ceiling. “You’re a really great girlfriend, Shia,” he says.
Shia doesn’t know whether to laugh or sulk - he’s being a good host - and then Zach pulls him down to the bed, wraps him in warm and sticky legs, and shows what a great girlfriend he can be.
v. There was diner breakfast and a lot of coffee
It’s not funny, the way Shia hangs off the girders under the freeway. It’s not funny because Zach has a feeling about the strength of those popped white tendons in his wrists and the rush of midmorning traffic below. And maybe about the cops that would write them a ticket or take them in, but also probably about the ambulance and the fractured skull. Mostly he has a feeling that he doesn’t want to see that grin wiped off Shia’s face as showing off turns into falling down. A glance: maybe fifty feet down to the underpass pavement.
“For fuck’s sake,” Zach says. The eighth time. He’s holding his thirty dollar ukulele by the neck, reaching out with it like a hook. He taps a bony hip with it, Shia’s belly showing tanned and tight just above. “Shia.”
Shia swings, plants his sneakers on the railing, hops down with a hoot. “Gross, my hands.” He wipes the rust flakes and sweat on his t-shirt, grimacing.
“Man,” Zach shakes his head. Starts walking. Turns back and pauses, keeps walking until Shia follows.
“I love that dude who does the unicycling. Along cliffs, skyscrapers, whatever. You seen him?”
“No,” says Zach. They’re supposed to be going to the beach. Zach can see the beach from his hotel room, but they’ve been walking for like, forty minutes now. He can’t say for sure that it’s wrong, yet. They’re in this nest of freeways snaking around and under each other where the air smells like metal, exhaust and garbage, and maybe the beach could be a hundred yards away, but he couldn’t see it if it was. Anyway, Zach keeps his mouth shut because he isn’t really the best at directions.
But maybe either is Shia. Shia gets distracted by things like toying with imminent death.
“I want to do all that. The parkay stuff. You know? Run up buildings.”
He makes a move to do it again: bounces off the iron bar to the cement wall across the narrow sidewalk. Zach’s afraid he’ll make that sick jump up to the girders above again. Hands catching like a knife in the lungs: slipping, stuck. Feet swinging.
Traffic seethes below in six lanes: polished convertibles, dark-windowed SUVs, rusted-out hatchbacks.
But Zach grabs Shia’s hand - it’s warm, and damp - to stop him. Actually has to tug a bit: firm. A bit of a yank. “Seriously, stop it.”
Shia gives him an indignant look, a bit of a comical pout. His palm has calluses with which Zach is barely familiar. It was just last night, and those few drinks before and then he woke up with this child-actor action hero in his bed. This kid’s casual deathwish.
Zach squeezes, a bit, with his whole hand to append a please and thank you to this suddenly shortened leash. This collar, period.
“I’d love to do a movie with that stuff,” Shia says, the last word, the end of the conversation. He doesn’t let go of Zach’s hand, though. The smile doesn’t slip.
vi. The one who insists on doubt
Mostly, Zach thinks, Shia spends his time driving around and buying shit. He comes to this conclusion after he gets a text message from Shia at 8am that says, saks. be at ur place in 20.
He’s sitting on the floor next to the bed, trying not to look too closely at the integrity of the grey carpet that he’s spread the contents of his trumpet case across. Except for the trumpet, which is on the bed. So on the carpet: all his papers, two pens. Lists, mostly - people to call, birthday gifts from last year that he never bought, names of books and artists - and a few scrabbled melodies that came out half formed for experimentation later, when he’s with his equipment. He does not belong to that long lineage of composers that write their music before they play it. Maybe after, he writes it down. Sometimes, if he has to pass it on to someone and doesn’t have time for weeks of rehearsal. Really, he wouldn’t write anything down, music or otherwise, except these things come to him at inconvenient times, and then he just stuffs everything into the interior pocket on his trumpet case, where it doesn’t get touched again.
Except when he’s alone in a cheap hotel room in Los Angeles, trying to justify staying another week, another two, another month, and can’t come up with any good reason besides a sudden panic in his chest at the thought of the airport, a kind of fear of death and endings that he’s always had.
So no good reason.
Zach looks at his papers and can’t find anything that will help him with the aborted soundtrack that he’ll have to turn into an EP sometime soon. Or sometime later, maybe. But that’s what he really wants. To produce, not regurgitate. But there are a hundred obstacles between him and that. Namely a handful of shows, but even more relevant as he tries to explain to Nick what the hell he’s doing: he’s in LA because he’s getting his dick sucked by a movie star, even though everything and everyone else is in Brooklyn where they’re supposed to be, working.
Shia arrives forty-five minutes later with a light knock and two lattes. “Oh my god, the line up at Barrietti’s, holy christ. Yours is rice milk, tenderbelly.”
Zach ties his shoes and takes the lukewarm cup. Shia has already wandered into the room and drawn open the curtains and stepped around the piles of paper. “The cleaning staff come in here they’re gonna think you’re the unibomber. You know that, right?”
Why Shia is so perky in the mornings is a mystery. Maybe it’s his protein diet. Zach just scowls and puts the do not disturb sign on the door. He’s made a lot of use of it, lately.
As they head for the stairs Shia says, “This is probably costing you a fortune, dude. You should come stay in our guest room. Or pretend to. You should come be my bedwarmer.”
Zach shrugs. That’s it - he just shrugs. He can’t think of a polite way to say, no, oh god, no.
But Shia waits. Sometimes he does that. Forces Zach to answer just by virtue of awkwardness. They’re in the truck before Zach comes up with something: “I’m going to have to leave soon anyway.”
Shia doesn’t start the truck. “What? Oh.” He doesn’t say anything else because they both have to pretend to not be surprised by this.
Zach says, “You have to start filming, don’t you?”
Shia nods. Or maybe he nods, Zach is trying not to look.
Zach says, “I haven’t been home since January. And then I have these shows up north at the end of the month. One more down here on the 30th, but otherwise.”
Shia says to the steering wheel, “I bet everything’s falling apart without you.”
More like nothing exists without him. Zach’s own solipsistic orchestra. Beirut is either one person or twelve, it’s impossible to tell.
Zach says, eventually, “If it is, it’s my fault.”
Because yes, he cancelled the European tour to take the time to finish the EP, and now he’s here, instead. Driving to a boutique-department-store-whatever with a kid in a baseball cap and dark sunglasses while half the band goes back to their day jobs at coffee shops to pay the bills and the other half says yes to more and more supplemental shows that will eventually screw up the Beirut schedule. Maybe, probably. He hasn’t talked to Nick in a week. His name was on the to-call list, anyway. It always is.
Zach stills his fidgeting hands, looks over at Shia.
But no, he really doesn’t want to leave at all.
They spend an interminable hour on the freeway, and Zach makes Shia take his pirated copy of Flying Club Cup out of the stereo and turn on the radio instead. And when they get to Beverly Hills Zach has to kill an urge to ask to stay in the car while Shia goes in.
“What are you buying?” he asks as they skirt the parking lot.
He feels like he asks this a lot. The last time they were in the produce section of a cornerstore grocery at eleven-thirty on a Friday, and Shia said, “Soy cream, dumbass, chocolate or strawberry?” and picked Zach’s hand up and kissed his wrist right over the horn tattoo. Right there in the fluorescent lights, with a woman in track pants picking over the frozen pizzas six feet away. Shia also bought three quarts of regular ice cream in vanilla, cotton candy, and tiger. They ate most of it perched in the truck bed in the parking lot. Zach ate too many bites of the regular ice cream and was up half the night with a stomach ache.
“I need, um,” Shia pauses right inside the door to check his phone, or his email, or whatever, “Shoes, I guess, for Letterman. Mandy says they’re argyle? I guess I need to pick a size.”
Zach tries to lose himself in the wares as Shia finds a salesperson to go fetch his designer sneakers. But someone still tracks him down in the shadows of the sunglasses display anyway: a blonde in slim brown slacks and a white poplin shirt so narrow that he looks like his entire body runs in parallel lines. He smiles at Zach and asks him if he’s interested in the D&G summer line.
Zach looks around and says, “Nuh.”
And Shia calls, from halfway across the floor, “Yes. Yes, he is. Go ahead and help him with that. No white t-shirts.”
It would be funny if it wasn’t so painful. They go two floors up and Shia finds them later, with his shoebox, and then when they leave Zach is carrying two bags of tissue-wrapped clothing that didn’t get paid for but Shia says is taken care of. Honestly, the only thing he saw with a price tag on it in that store was a keychain - also, D&G, whatthefuckever that is - that read 150. Zach has to assume for his own sake that someone just forgot the decimal point.
Shia says, in the truck, “Ok, put on the Burberry shirt. That’s the green stripes.”
Zach says, “Dude, I really-”
Shia raises his eyebrows, “Do you need help undressing?”
The parking lot is sunny and full of luxury cars and tiny women. Zach tries not to look sulky, and pulls off his sweater, but keeps the white t-shirt underneath on. They must’ve steamed the collared shirt at some point, because there are no wrinkles, no weird creases. It just fits.
“Ok, and the cardigan.”
“Screw you,” says Zach, feeling both poverty-stricken and doll-like. Also, warm in the sun-baked truck.
“The cardigan is awesome,” says Shia. “C’mon.”
“I’d say thank you if you weren’t such a douchebag.”
“I don’t want you to say thank you, I want you to wear the stupid clothes.” Shia takes the keys back out of the ignition. “Zach, you dress like a manorexic thirteen year old from Idaho.”
Zach puts on the cardigan. And then the pants, which Shia admonishes are dry-clean only. “Are you gonna put on your shoes?” Zach asks, after Shia’s made him open the door and put on the belt beside the truck. And turn around. Et cetera.
“Hell no.” says Shia, “I only wear that crap when they pay me to.”
He starts the truck.
They find some lunch at a little Mexican place in Shia’s old neighborhood, and then, while they’re paying at the counter, Zach says, “Can we go to the desert? Isn’t there a desert around here?”
Shia looks at him, smiles, and says, “Yes.”
So they spend that last night building a stupidly big, and subsequently brief, fire in the dry-as-dust dirt just under the mountains. And Shia runs around grabbing stuff to feed it with even as it flares and dwindles. And Zach takes his ukulele from the back seat and strums it tunelessly until a melody comes out of his throat.
It’s a surprise, but he’s so happy to sing it. To mumble words that fade in and out of meaning. Shia sits across the fire and listens to all of it with his eyes open, his hands in the dirt.
The next night, Zach tries to remember the tune as he sits in the lounge at LAX. The chords are there, C minor and B flat, but the melody is gone, and all of the words. So that song never gets written down, either.
Wordcount: 3522
Notes: Installments four, five and six of fifteen.
set I - set II - set III - set IV - set V
iv. Our parents rue the day they found us kneeling
Shia goes down on Zach in his own driveway. He pulls in, throws the gear into park, kills the engine and says, “My mom is home,” which is probably the least sexy thing he’s said in three years.
Zach barely blinks. He looks a little dazed. Too many hours on the patio at Carmina, not enough water. And they’d gone to the shooting range before that. For all his protesting, Shia is pretty sure Zach got a rush out of it. Shaking laughter at his wide aim. Kneejerk alt-pacifism or whatever aside.
The orange glow off the streetlights angles through the dirt on the back windshield, and everything else stays black. The standard pause before Zach answers is something Shia is trying to learn to wait through, rather than just talk over. “So we should be quiet?” Zach finally says.
Shia says, “Probably.” And folds himself across the bench seat to put his face closer to Zach’s. He gets kissed immediately, no pause there, just a hum in the throat and a hand that finds his shoulder. Beer on their breath - and he probably shouldn’t have driven home - and Shia slips some tongue, just to speed things up, just to remind himself that yeah, he gets it. He’s getting it right now.
Going straight for the cock, though, that’s an insecurity thing. He does it because he wants to impress the kid, weirdly, like it’s just another service. Like paying for the four-hour meal. Like showing him how to aim a shotgun: with one hand curving under his forearm, the other on his shoulder, then his hip. Furtive glancing for rifle-toting Republicans coming down the gallery because it wasn’t the best place to be caught with his fingers in another guy’s waistband.
Zach chuckles in surprise as Shia reaches down to run a palm over the inseam, go one-handed at the fly. He smiles into Shia’s mouth and leans back on the seat. Looks at him like he’s waiting for the punchline, but then his smile slides and his mouth parts a little.
Shia’s fingers are clever and his palm is insistent; Zach’s dick is cooperative.
Shia watches Zach’s expression change, looking up through lashes. His pulse is rising: he doesn’t know why he can’t get enough of this kid. All day, every day, for the past two weeks. In a little while Zach will get sick of the sneaking around, he knows. They both have day jobs.
“Let me suck you off,” Shia says.
Zach doesn’t say anything at all, even though Shia waits for an are you kidding? or a flat no way, here? no way. But Zach just looks bemused, like he’s recognized someone familiar down the street. It makes Shia wonder about the time in Eastern Europe, the kinds of faces and suggestions he met with there.
But no answer is a yes - isn’t that the rule? - and Shia tucks himself closer even as Zach’s knees spread, slouching because his hips are straining up so hard. Shia splits the jeans open at the fly, rucks down Zach’s underwear to expose a few dark, flattened curls, the pink flush of his hard-on.
Zach says, “Jesus Christ,” breathing out all at once as Shia pulls it free and runs his thumb up and down the circumcision scar, and bends to follow the same line with his tongue.
Shia can feel the tension there, how still Zach is holding himself as he watches. Worried, maybe, that Shia doesn’t know what he’s doing. Or just feeling awkward because five minutes ago they were arguing Rainbow Six versus Call of Duty and making promises to hand over each other’s asses.
But the angle - sideways, bent-backed - is enough that Shia is actually a little afraid he’s going to ruin the moment and be forever remembered with the indie scenester crowd as the starlet who bit Zach Condon’s talented pink dick off.
Nothing’s worse than looking like you don’t know what you’re doing when you do. When you really, really do.
He pulls up off Zach’s cock with one final wet-lipped suck, and then lifts his eyes to say, “We could go inside.” He wipes the spit off his chin.
“Uh,” Zach says, looking down at himself.
“Whatever, she’s probably asleep.”
Zach gives him that look again, the one from this afternoon when Shia first said he moved in with his mother because he liked to be close to her. Unfortunate phrasing, yeah, but he really hates being alone in a house. Especially the house in Laurel Canyon, which feels more like a modern, sunlit cellblock - silent and gated - than a home. Home is an apartment block with shitty air conditioning, with the smell of roasting meat coming up the hall and screaming children and banging doors.
They push the truck’s doors closed, more a click than a bang, and Shia tries to make a show of being quiet in the foyer. Peeling off shoes. But Zach just staggers. Kid can’t balance for shit, and when Shia grabs his elbow he wheezes a quiet giggle, and kind of collapses sideways, just more slowly. Shia is all shushes and c’mons, but Zach just shakes his head, laughing on the floor.
They try for the bedroom, or at least the room with the xbox and the couch and the entry to the pool, but they don’t get very far.
His mom is in the kitchen, asleep in an armchai she’s dragged in from the living room. The flatscreen over the counter is on the History channel and all the lights are off except for that grey glow.
Zach stops still, and Shia grimaces. Gestures to continue down the hall, “Follow right,” he whispers.
“It must be late,” she groans at them. “How late is it?”
“It’s like, twelve-thirty mom. Don’t you want to go to bed?” Shia raises his voice to a normal tone, and Zach stays where he is.
“I was watching Isadora Duncan. Very interesting lady. Yes, probably.” She levers herself out of the chair, and her henna-dyed hair is all over the place. There’s an empty wine glass with her lipstick smeared on it sitting on the counter. She puts it in the sink and peers at the clock, “Twelve-thirty. You were out with the boys?”
“Mom, this is Zach,” Shia says, and Zach steps forward like a debutante and waves a hand at waist-level, mumbles a hello.
She angles a sideways glance at him, already shifting away down the other hall to her room. “Have I seen you before?” she asks.
“I don’t think so, ma” Shia gestures as he clicks off the television. “He’s a musician. From Santa Fe.”
“Oh, good. Very good.” She says, and, from deeper down the hall. “Good night then.”
Zach raises his eyebrows as Shia pulls him by the hand down toward whatever soft surface they hit first.
“Santa Fe?” Zach asks, minutes later, when Shia’s already on him, a bedside lamp lit, the windows open for the air because yeah, his bedroom kind of smells like socks.
“She loves Santa Fe. She goes there for art festivals like, twice a year.”
Zach grunts, but Shia doesn’t know if it’s in response, or because that dedicated hard-on is back and ready. So he goes down on Zach again, eager as a college co-ed, and this time Zach gets so into it that Shia actually has to stop and hand him a pillow to moan his hoarse oh gods into.
After, he swallows, and Zach crawls backwards on the bed just to lie there, clammy skin in the dim light and breeze from the window.
Shia flutters around a bit, picking up stray underwear, a few dirty dishes, eyeing the kid in his bed and feeling a little spooked. He skulks back out into the kitchen and grabs them a couple of cokes - he really doesn’t do the drunk thing in his mother’s house - and returns to find Zach still boneless on the bed, pillow chastely shifted to cover his damp bits, smiling at the ceiling. “You’re a really great girlfriend, Shia,” he says.
Shia doesn’t know whether to laugh or sulk - he’s being a good host - and then Zach pulls him down to the bed, wraps him in warm and sticky legs, and shows what a great girlfriend he can be.
v. There was diner breakfast and a lot of coffee
It’s not funny, the way Shia hangs off the girders under the freeway. It’s not funny because Zach has a feeling about the strength of those popped white tendons in his wrists and the rush of midmorning traffic below. And maybe about the cops that would write them a ticket or take them in, but also probably about the ambulance and the fractured skull. Mostly he has a feeling that he doesn’t want to see that grin wiped off Shia’s face as showing off turns into falling down. A glance: maybe fifty feet down to the underpass pavement.
“For fuck’s sake,” Zach says. The eighth time. He’s holding his thirty dollar ukulele by the neck, reaching out with it like a hook. He taps a bony hip with it, Shia’s belly showing tanned and tight just above. “Shia.”
Shia swings, plants his sneakers on the railing, hops down with a hoot. “Gross, my hands.” He wipes the rust flakes and sweat on his t-shirt, grimacing.
“Man,” Zach shakes his head. Starts walking. Turns back and pauses, keeps walking until Shia follows.
“I love that dude who does the unicycling. Along cliffs, skyscrapers, whatever. You seen him?”
“No,” says Zach. They’re supposed to be going to the beach. Zach can see the beach from his hotel room, but they’ve been walking for like, forty minutes now. He can’t say for sure that it’s wrong, yet. They’re in this nest of freeways snaking around and under each other where the air smells like metal, exhaust and garbage, and maybe the beach could be a hundred yards away, but he couldn’t see it if it was. Anyway, Zach keeps his mouth shut because he isn’t really the best at directions.
But maybe either is Shia. Shia gets distracted by things like toying with imminent death.
“I want to do all that. The parkay stuff. You know? Run up buildings.”
He makes a move to do it again: bounces off the iron bar to the cement wall across the narrow sidewalk. Zach’s afraid he’ll make that sick jump up to the girders above again. Hands catching like a knife in the lungs: slipping, stuck. Feet swinging.
Traffic seethes below in six lanes: polished convertibles, dark-windowed SUVs, rusted-out hatchbacks.
But Zach grabs Shia’s hand - it’s warm, and damp - to stop him. Actually has to tug a bit: firm. A bit of a yank. “Seriously, stop it.”
Shia gives him an indignant look, a bit of a comical pout. His palm has calluses with which Zach is barely familiar. It was just last night, and those few drinks before and then he woke up with this child-actor action hero in his bed. This kid’s casual deathwish.
Zach squeezes, a bit, with his whole hand to append a please and thank you to this suddenly shortened leash. This collar, period.
“I’d love to do a movie with that stuff,” Shia says, the last word, the end of the conversation. He doesn’t let go of Zach’s hand, though. The smile doesn’t slip.
vi. The one who insists on doubt
Mostly, Zach thinks, Shia spends his time driving around and buying shit. He comes to this conclusion after he gets a text message from Shia at 8am that says, saks. be at ur place in 20.
He’s sitting on the floor next to the bed, trying not to look too closely at the integrity of the grey carpet that he’s spread the contents of his trumpet case across. Except for the trumpet, which is on the bed. So on the carpet: all his papers, two pens. Lists, mostly - people to call, birthday gifts from last year that he never bought, names of books and artists - and a few scrabbled melodies that came out half formed for experimentation later, when he’s with his equipment. He does not belong to that long lineage of composers that write their music before they play it. Maybe after, he writes it down. Sometimes, if he has to pass it on to someone and doesn’t have time for weeks of rehearsal. Really, he wouldn’t write anything down, music or otherwise, except these things come to him at inconvenient times, and then he just stuffs everything into the interior pocket on his trumpet case, where it doesn’t get touched again.
Except when he’s alone in a cheap hotel room in Los Angeles, trying to justify staying another week, another two, another month, and can’t come up with any good reason besides a sudden panic in his chest at the thought of the airport, a kind of fear of death and endings that he’s always had.
So no good reason.
Zach looks at his papers and can’t find anything that will help him with the aborted soundtrack that he’ll have to turn into an EP sometime soon. Or sometime later, maybe. But that’s what he really wants. To produce, not regurgitate. But there are a hundred obstacles between him and that. Namely a handful of shows, but even more relevant as he tries to explain to Nick what the hell he’s doing: he’s in LA because he’s getting his dick sucked by a movie star, even though everything and everyone else is in Brooklyn where they’re supposed to be, working.
Shia arrives forty-five minutes later with a light knock and two lattes. “Oh my god, the line up at Barrietti’s, holy christ. Yours is rice milk, tenderbelly.”
Zach ties his shoes and takes the lukewarm cup. Shia has already wandered into the room and drawn open the curtains and stepped around the piles of paper. “The cleaning staff come in here they’re gonna think you’re the unibomber. You know that, right?”
Why Shia is so perky in the mornings is a mystery. Maybe it’s his protein diet. Zach just scowls and puts the do not disturb sign on the door. He’s made a lot of use of it, lately.
As they head for the stairs Shia says, “This is probably costing you a fortune, dude. You should come stay in our guest room. Or pretend to. You should come be my bedwarmer.”
Zach shrugs. That’s it - he just shrugs. He can’t think of a polite way to say, no, oh god, no.
But Shia waits. Sometimes he does that. Forces Zach to answer just by virtue of awkwardness. They’re in the truck before Zach comes up with something: “I’m going to have to leave soon anyway.”
Shia doesn’t start the truck. “What? Oh.” He doesn’t say anything else because they both have to pretend to not be surprised by this.
Zach says, “You have to start filming, don’t you?”
Shia nods. Or maybe he nods, Zach is trying not to look.
Zach says, “I haven’t been home since January. And then I have these shows up north at the end of the month. One more down here on the 30th, but otherwise.”
Shia says to the steering wheel, “I bet everything’s falling apart without you.”
More like nothing exists without him. Zach’s own solipsistic orchestra. Beirut is either one person or twelve, it’s impossible to tell.
Zach says, eventually, “If it is, it’s my fault.”
Because yes, he cancelled the European tour to take the time to finish the EP, and now he’s here, instead. Driving to a boutique-department-store-whatever with a kid in a baseball cap and dark sunglasses while half the band goes back to their day jobs at coffee shops to pay the bills and the other half says yes to more and more supplemental shows that will eventually screw up the Beirut schedule. Maybe, probably. He hasn’t talked to Nick in a week. His name was on the to-call list, anyway. It always is.
Zach stills his fidgeting hands, looks over at Shia.
But no, he really doesn’t want to leave at all.
They spend an interminable hour on the freeway, and Zach makes Shia take his pirated copy of Flying Club Cup out of the stereo and turn on the radio instead. And when they get to Beverly Hills Zach has to kill an urge to ask to stay in the car while Shia goes in.
“What are you buying?” he asks as they skirt the parking lot.
He feels like he asks this a lot. The last time they were in the produce section of a cornerstore grocery at eleven-thirty on a Friday, and Shia said, “Soy cream, dumbass, chocolate or strawberry?” and picked Zach’s hand up and kissed his wrist right over the horn tattoo. Right there in the fluorescent lights, with a woman in track pants picking over the frozen pizzas six feet away. Shia also bought three quarts of regular ice cream in vanilla, cotton candy, and tiger. They ate most of it perched in the truck bed in the parking lot. Zach ate too many bites of the regular ice cream and was up half the night with a stomach ache.
“I need, um,” Shia pauses right inside the door to check his phone, or his email, or whatever, “Shoes, I guess, for Letterman. Mandy says they’re argyle? I guess I need to pick a size.”
Zach tries to lose himself in the wares as Shia finds a salesperson to go fetch his designer sneakers. But someone still tracks him down in the shadows of the sunglasses display anyway: a blonde in slim brown slacks and a white poplin shirt so narrow that he looks like his entire body runs in parallel lines. He smiles at Zach and asks him if he’s interested in the D&G summer line.
Zach looks around and says, “Nuh.”
And Shia calls, from halfway across the floor, “Yes. Yes, he is. Go ahead and help him with that. No white t-shirts.”
It would be funny if it wasn’t so painful. They go two floors up and Shia finds them later, with his shoebox, and then when they leave Zach is carrying two bags of tissue-wrapped clothing that didn’t get paid for but Shia says is taken care of. Honestly, the only thing he saw with a price tag on it in that store was a keychain - also, D&G, whatthefuckever that is - that read 150. Zach has to assume for his own sake that someone just forgot the decimal point.
Shia says, in the truck, “Ok, put on the Burberry shirt. That’s the green stripes.”
Zach says, “Dude, I really-”
Shia raises his eyebrows, “Do you need help undressing?”
The parking lot is sunny and full of luxury cars and tiny women. Zach tries not to look sulky, and pulls off his sweater, but keeps the white t-shirt underneath on. They must’ve steamed the collared shirt at some point, because there are no wrinkles, no weird creases. It just fits.
“Ok, and the cardigan.”
“Screw you,” says Zach, feeling both poverty-stricken and doll-like. Also, warm in the sun-baked truck.
“The cardigan is awesome,” says Shia. “C’mon.”
“I’d say thank you if you weren’t such a douchebag.”
“I don’t want you to say thank you, I want you to wear the stupid clothes.” Shia takes the keys back out of the ignition. “Zach, you dress like a manorexic thirteen year old from Idaho.”
Zach puts on the cardigan. And then the pants, which Shia admonishes are dry-clean only. “Are you gonna put on your shoes?” Zach asks, after Shia’s made him open the door and put on the belt beside the truck. And turn around. Et cetera.
“Hell no.” says Shia, “I only wear that crap when they pay me to.”
He starts the truck.
They find some lunch at a little Mexican place in Shia’s old neighborhood, and then, while they’re paying at the counter, Zach says, “Can we go to the desert? Isn’t there a desert around here?”
Shia looks at him, smiles, and says, “Yes.”
So they spend that last night building a stupidly big, and subsequently brief, fire in the dry-as-dust dirt just under the mountains. And Shia runs around grabbing stuff to feed it with even as it flares and dwindles. And Zach takes his ukulele from the back seat and strums it tunelessly until a melody comes out of his throat.
It’s a surprise, but he’s so happy to sing it. To mumble words that fade in and out of meaning. Shia sits across the fire and listens to all of it with his eyes open, his hands in the dirt.
The next night, Zach tries to remember the tune as he sits in the lounge at LAX. The chords are there, C minor and B flat, but the melody is gone, and all of the words. So that song never gets written down, either.