Can you hear me?

Van Garza knew his father was omniscient, that he could see, among other things, the small square adobe house near the university where Van lived with his girlfriend Darlene. He could see the prickly pear, tall as trees, standing guard, and the chili pepper Christmas lights strung around the front window.  Sometimes Van listed the things his father would approve of:  Van’s breakfast, even though it was high fat—after all, fat was not what had killed his dad—the time Van painted the house so he could get a month’s rent free, the fact that he had taught himself to play guitar, and the frequency with which he made love to Darlene.  In death as in life, his father didn’t want to know intimate details, which is one reason Van had to jam his signals and banish him from the bedroom and, at times, when Van got really lucky, from the bathroom and the living room. There were also, of course, things which triggered his father’s disapproval: smoking dope. Any kind of dope, actually. No matter how ingested. Tequila.  (Which had killed him.)  The worries Van had heaped upon the shoulders of his mom and twin sister, Zee.  And last but certainly not least, the current scheme with James and Jim B. 

            Van felt his father’s presence most acutely when he was making himself breakfast.  In the dim natural light of the kitchen, while he let the whites of the eggs sizzle, their round yolks as yellow as the chicks they would not become, while he gingerly heated tortillas on the open gas flame, he felt his father watching.  Just over his right shoulder. He slid the juice eggs out of the pan onto his plate, folded his tortillas in quarters, poured coffee out of the black enamel percolator they’d used for camping, and stirred in the half and half.  Sometimes he heard his father say his name, Ivan, which in Spanish is Eevahn.  Softly.  Eevahn.  Sometimes he felt as if he were his father, as if he were standing over his own right shoulder watching his hands.  Kind of like when he was the sniper: there was the gun, there were the hands, right in front of him, but they weren’t his.  There was always a moment of disorientation.

            He set the plate of eggs on the round plastic table.  The midmorning light was sliding down the window.  He rested his forehead against it.  Warm already.  Next door they were talking about demons again.  The woman was wearing a tee shirt that said “slave.” The man was lying in the dirt, welding his Harley. Someone, in an announcer’s voice, suggested demons were at the heart of the insurgency.  In a car, up on the next street, a woman was looking for Van.  Maybe she was a cop.  His eggs were getting cold.  He pulled his cell from the pocket of his cargo pants and opened it.  No messages from Zee.  Izzy.  Isabel.  She was in Italy.  She never answered.  Van said her name aloud in Spanish.  As their father would have.  Ees-ah-bel. As if that would call her to him. 

§§§

Zee was sitting on a bench high above the small town of Riomaggiore, the southern-most of the five small towns of the Cinque Terre.  Below her and beyond (all the way to the coast of Spain, which she could not see), stretched the blue blue Mediterranean.  There was a single red geranium in a pot on the wall in front of her.  Behind her, two women, possibly lesbian housewives, she thought, married to men they did not love, were whispering in Italian.  They sounded furious but it may have been passion.  Behind them, in the school, small children were singing.  Far below, somewhere in the waves, Zee’s current (although temporary) Scottish boyfriend was snorkeling beyond the huge black slabs of slate that edged the coast.

She had just snapped closed the fancy cell phone that bounced her mother’s voice off of a satellite somewhere far above the earth. Van was short circuiting again.  Her mother was frantic.  Of course.  Van had been off and on anti-depressants, in and out of rehab so often that frantic had become her mother’s default mode.

No, Zee told her, she would not cut her trip short. 

Sorry, can’t hear you, she’d said.

Sorry, you’re cutting out.

Which was true.  Bad connection. And now the phone said Emergency Only. So much for technology.  How could air waves be full, as in so saturated that not one more voice could come across? Zee didn’t get it.  But Emergency Only, post 9/11, made her slightly nervous and she was not one to be neurotic. Neurosis seemed to her self-indulgent, narcissistic, because like a child, you put yourself at the center of the universe,  forces conspiring against you, as if you were more than a speck of sand on a beach of specks. Giving in to unfounded fear was a sign of a weak mind, a failure of logic. This, she firmly believed.  Usually she, Isabel, for instance, could flip a switch and turn off her own fears as easily as she could disregard her mother’s.

On the other hand, perhaps these fears were not unfounded.  She had been getting strange text messages. The world is a lonely planet.  That was the first one.  She’d dismissed it as some kind of joke. Van knew she used Lonely Planet Guidebook. Stoned, he would think that was clever. It would be his way of saying, ‘call me, I’m lonely’ without ever having to say ‘call me, I’m lonely.’

But, then, this morning, simply:  z can u hear me. . .