BY ROBERT NAZAR ARJOYAN
The heat in his heart and the shine of the sun poked Aram around five past midnight. He needed to shield his face, the gleam was so vivid. Scraping sleep’s sandy grit from his eyes, Aram saw through the slitted curtain that it was really the moon, full to bursting, peeping in on him.
A humid burp conjured up the damp dregs of jalapeño and orange Fanta, a nasty indigestion which loitered foul on his tongue even after several long droughts of water. Aram grabbed his Galaxy, put it back on the nightstand, considered the transient opportunity, picked it up again, and positioned himself on his elbow for a selfie. The photo came out grainy, a rectangle of flooding light cleaved a cool slash across his dark brow and hairless cheek. Aram was about to share the picture, but he didn’t have many followers, so he decided against the idea, and posted it anyway. He refreshed three times to no activity. People would see it later, for sure.
For sure.
He looked beyond his drapes and imagined store fluorescents, traffic lights, lamp posts, airplanes, cars, houses, smart phones, TVs, computers, all the sources of LA’s luster extinguished, empowering only the glitter of this giant flying rock. How bright the land must’ve been in the old days, like the vast expanses of the cowboy novels he devoured. Thinking of, Aram grabbed his current Western and read a chapter, slanting with the moon’s sailing spear.
His phone buzzed – someone had liked his pic! He smiled, but it was an ephemeral thing, like the ghosting shaft of autumnal illumination or those baseless hopes for his stupid shindig. Aram’s admirer was nothing but a bot.
He trawled through the dark of his quiet house and flipped on the fixtures in the living room, which was still ready to receive: yellow boxes of Hungry Howie’s Pizza, liters of soda, board games, his Nintendo Switch, and no one to make merry of them. Aram wanted that first-time-alone-debauchery-how-am-I-going-to-clean-this-mess-up type of hang, where everyone stayed up too late and got the cops called on them for being too loud. Something they’d talk about on Monday after giving him a fist bump or a bro hug or even a kiss – a something was better than the nothing.
Aram felt a babyish pull to call his Mom, to hear her say that the kids who didn’t show were idiots. But it was about three o’clock in New York and, really, this wasn’t so bad. If people forgot to come to the party, that means they’d forgotten the idea of the party, problem solved.
Means they’d forget Aram too.
So instead of bothering his mom on her getaway, Aram ate another slice of spicy pepperoni and pushed himself into the nascent morning’s black velvet.
The cold socked him good.
Aram jogged to the car, a used Honda Civic christened as safe and reliable. He didn’t want to sleep alone at a time when he had envisioned himself awake with new friends.
Never had Aram driven this late, along deserted streets with go-ahead greens stretching as far as the eye could see. There was a delectability, a deliciousness, to how he was carrying on. It was just Aram drifting across his city, like a ranger horsing for basic rapture. The young man aimed to keep this harmless adventure a secret, something he could look back on with the wrinkly approval of a life’s age. Aram wasn’t doing anything illegal, but still… it felt criminal.
No, no, no, it felt gan-
The growling speed of a blurred BMW whizzed by like angry lightning, giving chase to a whooping police cruiser, both of them raving eastwards on Glenoaks. Aram rammed the brakes with both feet, a cocktail of deference and shock spincycling in his stomach.
Way too fuckin close.
He was idling in the middle of the road, the cackle of the distant BMW’s tailpipe hewing the air. His own tin can rocked on its springy wheels, settling at the same pensive pace as its master. Aram had skidded and spread across two lanes but felt no inclination to move.
The sluicing runnels of adrenaline soon dammed up behind their spitting glands and Aram righted his course. Dipping beneath arced street lamps, the swinging evil eye on his rear view mirror appeared to be winking, a gesture Aram’s grandpa Gapriel would utilize with charming skill. It was the old man’s way of enfolding Aram into an upcoming joke, of reminding Aram that he’d always stand behind him, of loving Aram without words.
Gapo made Aram feel special, remarkable, and outstanding, even though the world already seemed to peg him as ordinary, inconspicuous, and unexceptional. Not once had a girl leaned on Aram’s locker to linger, and boys seldom tipped him a nod. Whenever he felt see through, the smallest glance from Gapo solidified him.
Aram began to feel hypnotized by the eye’s cadenced swaying, the heavy back and forth of its smooth, pendulous path. He made a right on Highland and a left on Patterson, leaning his vehicle in the direction of the bobbing pendant. Home was on the way and this wouldn’t be more than a minute’s diversion.
Gapo’s house looked like a skeleton with bits of flesh still clinging onto moldered bone, stripped as it was to the century-old two by fours. Aram would bet his prized first edition of Lonesome Dove that three years ago, on that very Friday – or any calendar Friday, for that matter – he would’ve been snoozing in the upstairs room that once belonged to his mother, dreaming of the In-n-Out he’d eaten with Gapo and the donuts they’d get in the morning.
Aram relished those young hours and had come to hate their hurry.
From where he sat, he could see that old bedroom and the perilously narrow stairs climbing to it. Aram had stumbled upon masturbation up there, the mindless fiddling becoming pointed and consuming, until he shot his charge and scared himself silly. So much newness took place at Gapo’s, but more than that, so much comfortable routine.
The emaciated remains of the house creeped him out, especially lit as they were by the glaring full moon. The radiance carved rotten, gaunt faces from the wood, a gallery of dilapidation right next door to normalcy. Like sitting beside a dead dude in English class.
A pleasant laugh seized his ears. Vague motion snared his eyes.
Aram eased his foot off the brake and crept near the long, broken driveway. Through the bars of splintery lumber, he saw people in the backyard, radiated from above in ivory. Dancing, lounging, having a ball! The music he couldn’t quite discern, but it was a jaunty melody that pissed him off. Aram felt his flame justified and opened the door to scatter these trespassers.
This was Gapo’s place, his place, not a fucking speakeasy.
But the moment his line of sight went above the car window, the intruders were gone. And God, it got so quiet in that limbo linking the hell of the living with the hell of the dead.
Huh? Just what was happening?
Sleep, that’s what Aram needed. Good-old-fashioned-strangling-the-duvet-sleep.
He brought his butt back into the car and shut the door but that was when the music started up again. Aram swallowed, the initial rage, snuffed out by weariness, was now an aborted tangle of confused fright.
They were looking at him. They were coming to him.
A group of four, led by a woman wearing a jewel for a dress. She flickered with every passing step. Aram could see through her smile.
Literally.
As they walked across the exhumed driveway, Aram could make out no rising dusts of dirt, no clods of earth coming undone beneath their heels.
Like breezes they moved.
“Is that Aram?” asked the woman, bending down to meet his eye. Despite the glass separating them, and the still decent distance, Aram heard her voice all too well.
“Why, it is Aram! Our little blob of sunshine, always full of sparkle. I swear, look how thin you’ve gotten! A toothpick could knock you down, boy. Come on, we’re all outside. Such a surprise seeing you like this. Oh, we’ve missed you, you know it?”
Aram watched her speak and by the time she put the question to him, the woman was whole. So were the three who accompanied her.
“I want to play with your arms,” announced a too-tall man with a glimmering pate. An idea skirted the edges of Aram’s mind like a mosquito’s razor whine or the war cry of a bat: this tower of anatomy was the ghost who lived in the attic, the wraith that plucked the pipes at night for as long as Aram could recall.
“Gibraltar, you muzzle that talk now. Don’t pay old Gib no mind, Aram, poor thing’s been unalive so long, he’s forgotten how to talk pretty,” said the woman as she opened the door.
“Well, come on! Everyone will be so pleased to give you the glad hand.”
“What’s your name?” asked Aram, his heavy eyes suddenly ablink and locked on her dazzling opals. Stars made invisible by the unconfined moon seemed to exist right there.
“I am Cordelia. First and final and forever Cordelia. Used to sleep in your room- well, your mama’s room. When it stopped being mine, I just sorta sat in the corner and swayed.”
Cordelia smirked at Aram, lips taut around her teeth.
“I gave you my back when you discovered yourself, sweetheart, don’t fret. Cordelia still has her manners. Up now, child, up and out.” She gave her shapely thigh a couple of taps.
Fuck it, man. He didn’t have anywhere else to be.
Cordelia let her smile grow slowly and it was a gorgeous unfurling, the corners of her mouth soaring into a summer crescent. Aram would have never guessed her unalive.
Gibraltar turned first and was followed by his two cronies. One of them was a stout man who shimmered in a pressed suit. The other was hard-bitten, tattooed, and probably the handsomest man Aram had seen.
“Cordelia?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Are you guys… did you used to live here? I mean, were you the boarders?”
“Indeed we were, young fella. Quite the deductive bean you get there.” She turned and rubbed his hair. The touch sent a spring of warmth to Aram’s pupils.
Through the frame of the pillaged garage, where Gapo used to tinker and teach, Aram could see a collective of about seven figures, all firm in their composition.
“Make room for one more, gang! It’s our lad become a man.”
A communal ARAM! blasted like a claxon call. They rushed at him with arms wide open and jockeyed for position, spirits all jostling to have speech with the guest of honor. Not once in that frenzied second amidst the no-more did Aram feel threatened.
On the contrary, he felt wanted, popular, invited, accepted, welcome, seen, liked, and definitely dizzy.
“Remember the guitar that twanged itself? That was me! I miss performing…”
“Are you still doing puzzles? You’d plow them like gangbusters.”
“Yes, actually, but I’m wondering-”
“Wait, wait, wait, how about the face you saw looking in on you that afternoon? The white face that looked like candle wax? Ain’t I familiar or what? I’ve had plenty of time to practice, you know. Allow me to audition some looks, if you like!”
“I want to play with your arms.”
“Quiet, Gibraltar!”
“Slimmed down and shot up, eh, whippersnapper? I bet you’re a one for clandestine crushers.”
“We’ll, he’s probably still doing the karate, Morris, look at him.”
Aram was numb in the best way and had yet to realize that he was grinning the same goofy grin he always grinned when at Gapo’s.
“Hang it all, what a pleasure to see you again, Aram.”
“Truly is, kid. It’s been hard living for us lately, out of doors and all.”
“Thank God we’re in LA and not Maine, am I right or am I right?”
“Are you saying you’re all, like, basically homeless?”
“Unhoused, Master Aram, unhoused is the locution you must deploy.”
“Cut the lesson, Aldric. Say, Aram, ya made any more of them little movies? The one you shot here with those toys of yours looked like a real smash.”
It hurt Aram to think that, for his whole life, there had been a cheering squad within a touch’s range that consisted of the unreachable. “Believe it or not, I’m editing my latest.”
“Good on you! I used to do stunts in the pictures-”
“Hey, over here a minute: it was me who moved your shit around every now and then.”
“Hang on,” interjected Aram, “did you also knock the TV down that one time?”
“Nah, that was Haxley.”
“Reporting for duty, Aram! I was also in charge of turning the faucets on and clinking the dishes. Sometimes things gets dull, chum. Blasé. The TV gag was a necessity of invention. So was pushing you down those whacko stairs.”
“You… you pushed me down the stairs? My leg broke!”
“Haxley’s only being a jokester, Aram, our own Puck in-house. You fell of your own accord, sweetheart, just like I did once. It’s a tough tumble, ain’t it? Right, so did Emerald over there, and…” Cordelia faltered, the end of her sentence sticking. “And alas, your granddad.”
Something yowled in the hush of the advancing night, probably a coyote, but it was doused by a passing train, a metallic uproar with which Aram was intimate.
“Did it kill you guys too or was it just Gapo?”
“Just him, love. Just Gapriel.”
“Puncture the gaiety, Cord, puncture it!” trilled Haxley.
The ensemble of ghosts vociferated at Haxley, damning him, but one voice cut the clamor, a voice Aram had yet to hear. It was a controlled grumble, low and stiff.
“Shut your yap, dandy. You yapped too much then and yer yappin too much now.”
“Aram, guess you ought to meet the man who built this home way back in, gosh, when was it, Jed? Aught-nine?”
“Ten. Nineteen ten, Deely. Howdy, kid. I’m sorry about your grampaw. Seemed like a good man.”
“Thank you,” replied Aram and Jed touched a thickened finger to the brim of his Stetson as an incisor glistened silver behind the bristle of his mustachioed mouth.
“Yessir, Jed McCullough here rode out from Texas. A genuine cowboy turned boarding house landlord.”
Didn’t they have stairs in Texas? Any saloon worth its salt had a room for whoring and it was always on the second floor. And yet his failure to construct them soundly resulted in a broken leg for Aram and a broken life for Gapo. Aram surveyed Jed with a leering audit and saw through the outfit, the accent, the vibe. Who yesterday would’ve been a genuine wrangler was today a devastating letdown.
“Drove cattle?”
“Yep.”
“How many head?”
“I’ll be, what do you know about that, you bein between hay and grass?”
“I read.”
Aram used the frigid past tense.
Jed McCullough shuffled his toe box, and again, Aram saw no consequence – the soil sat still – when that coyote howled and recaptured Aram’s attention. It persisted this time around and the anguish was audible. But… was it a coyote? The melody of its pain rang nearly human.
Aram turned toward the source of the baying and clocked movement inside the house. At a diagonal from his position, something supine was struggling to stand.
That was no coyote.
“Aram! Aram, is that you? Are you home?!”
It was Gapo.
Aram made a break for it and Cordelia moved to grab him, but her hand melted through his shoulder, leaving Aram with a ghastly admixture of freezing fever.
“Be careful where you step!”
Aram wasn’t conscious of his footwork, but after she sent out the warning, he looked down and got tangled up. He hit gravel and silt with all one hundred thirty pounds, but his head landed on something yielding and sickly soft. The oldest part of his brain registered it from the fuzz, but Aram hadn’t had much one-on-one time with those crevasses at ripe sixteen. The possum’s mouth was a festering wound, its remaining insides now squelched all over Aram’s neck. The damp smell of nature slid its fingers down his gagging throat and made him retch. Up was surging the pizza, the soda, and even some of the confetti cake he himself had baked.
“Aram? My boy, please help me. I can’t feel myself!”
Near the possum was a cat, near the cat was a hawk, near the hawk was a snake, and writhing all on top and around and beneath was a bulge of worms and roaches and maggots and oh, Jesus, what a fucking nightmare, if only he could wake up, if onl-
“It’s because of us.” Cordelia’s soundless advent wrenched a scream from Aram’s dribbling lips and saved him from spewing.
“All of us here, out in the open, we might as well be one big magnet. I think it’s the reason why no one will build here – they’re afraid.” Her voice cracked with the confession.
“Aram, damn it, who are you talking to? I need you already, call an ambulance!”
“He doesn’t know, huh?” It was more of a statement than a query from Aram.
Cordelia bunched up her mouth.
“Gapo,” Aram announced. “I’m coming.”
Aram maneuvered around the carnage, passed what used to be the guest bathroom, and knelt at the landing, where Gapo lay sprawled. His right knee plunged into the give of mud.
“Aram, Aram, where’s Nana? Didn’t she hear me fall down the goddamn steps?”
“Gapo… Nana moved out. Mom and Dad helped her move out.”
“The hell you say?” Gapo tried to move his head, but Aram remembered overhearing that the poor man had severed his spinal cord in the fall. He was stuck in amber.
“Can’t you help me?” pleaded Gapo.
When Aram was shopping for plates and cutlery yesterday after school, he saw a middle aged lady helping her mom or her aunt – some meaningful older woman – cross the street. As he waited for them to make their way, a baby blue Tesla honked, and Aram tossed a surprising fuck off wrist flip at the impatient piece of shit. Aram watched the old lady clutch her loved one’s hand for steadiness and a tide swelled in his chest. He couldn’t align the sentiment into a cogent point because the prick started honking when the road opened, but it unfolded before Aram then, looking down at his Gapo.
Holding a hand tight, keeping an eye out, offering a good word: actions viewed as ordinary and inconspicuous and unexceptional. Aram glimpsed the error of that presumption deep in the dead man’s face, he who’d done all that for Aram. These were the bricks of everyday existence but it was their very irregularity which made them special and remarkable and outstanding.
“Aram,” Gapo beseeched.
All the strength that his grandpa had planted in Aram began to flower. The young man felt a triumphant stir of wind at his heels and knew without turning that it was the boarders, standing near and steady. Gapo had a tattoo just below the thumb of his right hand, a black spot that toddler Aram would try to clean by scratching it off. He bled Gapo most times, but the man never said a word, even when it bubbled with infection. Aram held that hand now, tight as he could. He looked Gapo square in both eyes, committed him to memory, and said the very best thing straight from his crying heart.
“I love you, Aram. I love you, my boy.”
Aram winked at the old man and a teardrop managed to squeeze itself free.
After a great sucking of breath, Gapo faded away.
Aram remained where he was for a while and watched the moon move.
“Sugar?”
“Yeah, Cord.”
“You were marvelous.” “Crackerjack.” “Tuff.”
“Gallant.”
“True.”
“Ace.”
“I want to play with your arms.”
Aram was not accustomed to such flurries of adulation so he was thankful for the collapsing laughter that Gibraltar’s loop gifted him. He got up and surveyed the people that used to call this ruin their residence.
“I know you guys can’t eat but I’ve got boxes of pizza just going to waste. Come over.”
“…You mean it?” purred Cordelia.
“Totally.”
The group liaised in a huddle, Aram catching only murmurs. When they disbanded, Cordelia spoke for the lot with a contagious, curving simper.
“We’ll follow you.”
“Great! It’s not far.”
Aram walked away, certain he would never willingly come here again, and that was alright. He stopped for a final up and down and noticed Jed hanging back. His first instinct was to abandon the cattleman there, as punishment, but Aram had once more discovered a layer of himself at Gapo’s and employed the newness that would become routine.
“Ain’t you comin?” asked Aram.
“Mmm. Better not.”
“Come on. We can watch The Magnificent Seven.”
“How’s about that movie of yours instead? The one you’re cuttin together at the moment.”
“We can… we can do that.”
“Then I’m agreeable.”
So Aram drove the old safe and reliable along the streets of his city, a herd of ghosts streaming behind him. Sleep was out of the question, entirely impossible in a place stuffed with Cordelias and Aldrics and Haxleys and Gibraltars and Jeds and Morrises and Emeralds. They passed a bank of lights revolving red, blue, and orange.
Like breezes they moved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Nazar Arjoyan was born into the Armenian diaspora of Glendale, California. Aside from an arguably ill-advised foray into rock n roll bandery during his late teens, literature and movies were the vying forces of his life. Naz graduated from USC and has worked as a screenwriter, director, and editor. Prose, however, has beguiled him in the recent months, weaving its potent spell and liberating his imagination.
The Green Shoe Sanctuary 