excerpt from a short story/novella I never finished

from The Wonder of Wonders.


Elias had risen that previous morning with a strange impulse to see his gun, exactly fourteen hours before Andrew would hold the gun against his head,. He almost never looked at it. The heirloom held little value to Elias, and none of the performers knew about its existence, or so he thought.
“Iowa is goddamn humid,” Elias thought as he stretched his legs across the mattress. His undershirt, stained a pale yellow, stuck hard to his chest. Elias peeled it off and threw it into a woven basket where several identical undershirts lay. Above the basket hung a dusty black tuxedo with curling tails.
Elias fumbled under his mattress for the key that opened the strongbox inside his trunk. Inside the strongbox was yet another box, and inside that box lay the gun, quiet and deliberate as an Egyptian mummy. Elias looked behind himself and clicked open the trunk, the strongbox, and finally opened the cedar box where he kept it.
The gun glinted boldly in the blue velvet lining. Elias had no idea how old the gun was, or even what kind of bullets it took, or even if he could find the type of bullets anymore. All he knew is that the gun was the only thing given to him by his grandfather when he died. Every one of Elias’ cousins were stunned to know that the gun, kept safe in a severely dented strongbox, was given to their quiet, stoic cousin who barely said a word to anyone in the family.
Elias’ cousin Victor, oldest of the grandchildren and father of seven boys, vowed never to speak to Elias or anyone in his family ever again. On the day the Nadir patriarch died, he stormed out of the camp with his children and tiny wife in tow, never seen by anyone again. His sister claimed he told her that he went to Norway, but no one knew for certain.
People had told Elias what sort of gun it was, but he could never remember what they said. It was highly embellished with the etched silver monogram PBN. The handle was inlaid in mother of pearl and the barrel was slender but powerful. It looked like it could have belonged to a Spanish conquistador, an Italian nobleman, or a run of the mill American cowboy. Either way, there was something much more intriguing about the gun than it’s unique appearance. Elias’ grandmother, (a senile, hunchbacked woman with patches of thick black curls; with one cataract-stained eye; an ancient woman who carried a gnarled cane with an old scowling face carved in it) had said the spirits of every male ancestor of the Nadir family resided within the gun. She said if one ever tried to kill themselves with the gun, the male ancestors of the Nadir family would tell you the secrets of every person you know.
Elias knew this wasn’t true.
The only reason Elias kept the gun was that he knew there was one bullet inside of it. He knew that if he ever had to use it, it would be waiting, a little genie waiting to answer any request.
Elias closed the box as soon as the feeling began to creep up his back. He began to dress for the day, pulling on the same uniform of a navy blue button-down shirt and threadbare olive drab pants. The tuxedo stared at him from the corner, reminding him of his nightly routine.
Elias began to button his shirt, the silver gun still on his mind.

There had been three times that Elias came close to using it. Once was when his first child was dead at birth. When he saw his little daughter in that jar, stillborn and brainless, serene in clear yellow fluid, Elias spent an entire day holed up in a hotel room staring blankly at the gun and taking shots of cheap rum until the entire world became insignificant.
Elias rolled up the sleeves of his shirt until they were tucked neatly into the crevices behind his elbows. The hair on his arms was beginning to gray, as well as the ghostly white hairs spreading like phantoms at his forehead. Elias did not comb it during the day. It was always slicked back almost painfully at night when he wore the tuxedo…
The second time was when his sister, Rachael, was found drowned in a frozen creek among the black acorns and suspicious raccoons. Polite people said it was an accident, but honest people said it was suicide. Elias was not surprised, due to the fact that Rachael’s husband had a thirteen-year old mistress whom he photographed in secret and wrote poems to when he thought Rachael was asleep.
Suspenders and his stubbornly existing work boots seemed almost silly now, but Elias put them on anyway, carrying the strange accessories heavy as his heart. Elias leaned over his water basin and saw his face. He had never seen a man so tired, the only expression he could muster…
The final time was when his wife, the woman with paper roses in her hair and cracked gold leather sandals on her feet, the woman who told the most crude jokes and who always smelled of espresso and orange blossoms, the woman whose name he could no longer speak, the woman who read English poetry in Italian, the woman whom Elias held when their little daughter was buried and when Rachael was buried, the woman who played the flamenco guitar, when this woman whom Elias loved was eaten away by a cancer that attacked her womb and later her entire body, which had finally sunk into the illness and into obscurity, Elias held the gun so tightly against his throat that the metal circle was forever burning there. He collected all the roses that the people of their small California town laid on her grave and hung them from the ceiling of his car with embroidery floss.
At last, Elias clipped on his gold watch, the picture taped inside bearing a coyly smirking woman with her hair slicked back into a forced 20s wave and exploding into curls behind her shoulders. A paper rose winked over her shoulder. Her name was scrawled across bottom of the little round photograph in ink, in her own archaic cursive: Ava Maria Ramoni-Nadir…
Ten years had passed since he began the show, since he traveled the world to collect his cast of characters. Ten years had passed since he left that little cottage on the California coast, near the little town where he and Ava were to raise their family. Ten years had passed since he bought tangerines and lemons from the deaf, old Mexican woman named Pilar. Ten years had passed since he smelled that strange scent of espresso and orange blossoms when he woke in the morning, hearing flamenco guitar floating in from the bathroom.
“Why are you playing guitar in the bathroom?” Elias asked her as he kissed her wild brown curls. She turned her head towards him and her paper roses rustled against the tile.
“Because of the acoustics. It’s better here than anywhere in the house.”
“Why don’t you go outside?”
She gave him an exasperated look. “It’s raining, mi amore.”
Indeed, it was raining that day, despite the sun shining fiercely through the clouds.
“Why aren’t we in bed then?” He kissed her neck.
She looked at him blatantly and teased the strings a bit. “Because I prefer my guitar to men.”
They ended up in bed anyway, laughing and laughing at the absurdity that was their bodies.

Elias was thirty-one, but he could easily pass for forty. Eight years of holding in the memory of the woman with the paper flowers had severely aged him. Wrinkles like deep cuts were the Rosetta stone to his past, but no one could read the language. Not one of his cast of characters knew about his wife’s photograph, or Rachael’s face gray in the water of the frozen river, the white lace cuffs of her thin green dress clinging to her bleeding wrists. Not one knew of the baby in the jar.
Elias had come close to telling Priya once. Everyone told Priya everything. Normally when Padma had gone to sleep, one person from the show would sneak into the car and whisper their secrets to Priya. She would just nod and record them in her mind. Priya kept a collection of their secrets, all of which she drew with an old fountain pen on thin loose leaf and hid them a hatbox underneath clothes and old books in her trunk. Elias watched her write them, he watched her draw pictures of naked women and men, pictures of an old man’s face, pictures of dogs, pictures of birds in cages…he had glimpsed them once or twice. She had everyone’s secrets all to herself, but he decided she wouldn’t have his. He wanted to keep Ava to himself, a secret too wonderful to be translated…

It had been just after he had received the gun, after his grandfather had been buried and the family dispersed. Elias was alone with nothing but Victor’s bitter resentment and the weight of the gun in its cedar case locked within the suitcase.
All Elias knew was that he needed a drink.
In those days, you couldn’t get a drink just anywhere. If a man wanted a whiskey, he couldn’t waltz down to the bar and get it. There had to be some extra hoops to jump through, some extra steps to complete before you could forget.
So, with his thumb out and his mind only on a hotel room and a bottle of whatever he could obtain, Elias made his way to the nearest town, and after a few odd jobs and selling a couple of his father’s silk shirts, Elias bought himself a ticket to Seattle. He wasn’t sure why he chose that city. Yes, it was far and he was tired of traveling, but something about that city meant something to him, or it would in time.
When Elias arrived, it wasn’t raining, as he might have expected. It was actually one of the brightest days he’d seen in a long while. He still hadn’t gotten that drink he needed so badly, but down the street the smell of coffee wafted out of the windows of a little shop with dark green awnings. People sat outside in rusty metal chairs, mostly old folks talking over a cup of dark roast, a couple or two drinking out of small white ceramic espresso cups.
Elias reached into his pocket: twelve cents could get him a cup of joe, then maybe he could find a job for a few hours in order to get a room for the night.
Sleep deprived, he ambled through the door, only to hear a long stream of Italian from a rotund woman occupying a stool near the end of the coffee bar. Her younger son took orders at the ancient brass cash register and her daughter poured and mixed the milk and espresso slowly, momentarily twitching at the sound of her mother’s voice.
He caught her eye and there was an immediate reaction, quick and scientific. Neither had to think of whether or not they liked the other, what to say next or what time of day it was. It was as easy as a first breath of air after nearly drowning, a shower after a long day of work. Their love clicked into motion instantly, without any sort of human hesitation. An expansive spirit moved through them, and it began.
“Hello, what can I do for you, sir?” The son broke their gaze.
“Oh, I’ll just have a drip coffee. Something dark.”
“Get him a cup of Sumatran, Ava.” The mother said, wiping sweat from her upper lip with the back of her hand.
Ava.
He repeated it. A name spelled the same backward and forward. A strong, feminine name, nothing musical or flowery or classical. Just Ava.
Ava poured the dark coffee into a thick green ceramic mug and handed it to him, her hand brushing his. He noticed her chewed nails at the end of long, graceful fingers. A contradiction.
“Thanks” He smiled and sat down at the opposite end of the bar.
Ava smiled back at him. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around this side of town. Are you new here?”
“Yeah, for awhile at least. Just got off the train.”
Ava laughed. “I see. You look a little tired.”
Out of some secret, spontaneous corner of his tired subconscious, Elias smiled and asked, “Do you know where I can get a bicycle in this town?”
And just like that, he forgot the whiskey and couldn’t wait to part puddles with the tires on his way to that shop with the green awnings. He wanted to know something for certain, and he wanted to be in that same chair every day, talking to the same girl until she mopped the floor and had to shoo him out.

Clearing his throat, Elias creaked open the door to the car and stepped out into the eddies of dust.