Trembling With Fear 5-12-24

The Devil and His Leaves, by Robert Nazar Arjoyan

Andy always trespassed on his sister’s kindness. It was a flaw and a worry he could never completely put down. His brother-in-law would bitch about this later—what didn’t that man bitch about?—but Andy was certain that his nephews were fast asleep, unaware of their mommy’s absence, and this picture afforded him a modicum of ease. 

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cup of coffee?” asked Andy.

“Yes, positive. There’s a twig in your hair, do you know that?” replied Mina.

“Better off, anyway, nobody comes here for coffee.”

“Two twigs, actually.”

“They come to cram or dry out their drunk.”

“Andy—”

“Late night shit.” 

“Bro! I’m still in my fucking PJs because you dragged me out of bed. Talk.”

Andy took hold of his straw’s paper wrapping and began to twirl both ends nearer to each other, mirroring the microcosmic entropy accordioning within.    

How should he tell her what he had to tell her?

“What is going o—”

“Can I get you two anything?” A rail thin waiter sauntered by with pad and pen.

“Two coffees,” ordered Mina. She might as well have told the old timer to beat it, prick.

“And mozzarella sticks, please!” shouted Andy at the emaciated waiter’s back.

Mina gave Andy a look that hadn’t altered one iota across thirty-six years or two continents.

“Why am I the only other dumbfuck sitting here at the Conrad’s patio? Please speak.”

A voice came whispering on a cold sail of wind. It finally felt like autumn.

“I saw the Devil on the northwest corner of Glendale and Harvard.” 

Andy had on an open-throated shirt and he felt a breezy gale sneak inside, shimmying across the hair on his body. 

“Right in front of the oil change place.”

The temperature orbiting Andy began to drop, relief of confession mingled with the crisp, capricious air.

“He called himself my pale neighbor.”

Like the leaves it had snatched from his grasp only hours ago, so too did the capering draft steal Andy’s mind, dropping it on the banks of that frozen, faraway lake, where he and Mina danced as children and nearly died.

“He… he forgave me.” 

Mina sipped water with the only hand she had.

“It was very handsome of him.” 

“Little brother, are you using again?”

“No, Meen. I gave you that promise when Jonny was born.”

“Fine, but how am I-”

The patio door swung open with an arresting clang as the skinny waiter returned, yoked with stale coffee and fried cheese. Andy noted a sprinkle of stucco breaking off the adjacent wall where the man had struck the silver doorknob.

“Anything else?” he asked, sucking in a shiver and setting down the fare. 

“No, thanks,” Mina bit off, eager to seize Andy’s tale by the tail. She grabbed the steaming mug and drank, scrunching her mouth against the bilious heat.

“My God, they have not improved the coffee. Right, then, will you please enlighten me with mo—oh, shit, hang on.” Andy ate as Mina took out a vibrating iPhone from her coat pocket.

“Hi, honey. Yeah, we’re fine, I’ll be home soon. Yes.” Mina listened and blinked.

“Remember… remember we came here totally shitfaced after the System concert?” Andy mused, absent, weak, tired.

“Boys still sleeping? OK. Yes. I love you too.” 

“Think it was even the same waiter.” Andy turned round to confirm his suspicion.

“Bye. Uh-huh. Bye.” Mina hung up and wiped a water ring off the table. She placed the phone on the dry surface.

“Kris says hey.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

Mina chuckled as Andy shoved food and drink into himself.

“Drink, eat, shut up and talk now, come on. You say the Devil forgave you.”

Andy nodded, his mouth a slosh of caffeine and mozzarella.

“For what?” she asked, taking a stick of her own. 

Andy swallowed the mixture and raised his eyebrows. “For that.”

“For the… crappy food?”

“No, Meen, for your—for your hand.”

She stopped chewing for a second.

“And for Mom.” 

Mina took a napkin and spat out her food into its huddled pocket.

“Maybe… maybe he shouldn’t have, I don’t know, but he said I deserve it.” 

“Of course you do, Andy, we were stupid kids.” 

“Yeah, but it was my idea.”

“Honey, if this is some… Andy way of trying to… Look, I’m not mad at you—”

“You should be, though. You fucking should be. Weren’t for me, you’d be able to throw Jonny in the air or give Glen a really good tickle.”

Mina curled her lip, as if to confirm her brother’s divination.

“He really was pale too. Wasn’t red or anything like that. He was like a length of bone or, or a slab of snow… like the ice on Parz, even. The ice on the lake.”

“Or like Mom, after she jumped in and pulled us out,” Mina added.

We didn’t even get to know her, thought Andy, buried alone in an ancient country thousands of miles in the past. 

A group of high school kids broke the stewing silence between Andy and Mina by taking a table at the other end of the patio, their backpacks and laptops in tow.

“Did you see a black van in the parking lot, coming in?”

Mina remapped her entrance and answered, “No.”

With a swish of his head Andy said, “Come on.”

“Well, leave the bastard a decent tip because I’m never coming back here again,” she replied.

So heeding, Andy left their gaunt server the last twenty from his wallet. Mina pulled the twigs from Andy’s hair and tossed them into the nearby shrubbery.

“He made me shovel leaves into that van over there,” Andy announced, pointing to a Mercedes Sprinter, tucked into a far corner. “They were leaves from the woods, damp, crushed underfoot. They were those leaves.”

Mina and Andy reached the back doors of the van. The brother placed his hand on the knob and the sister braced.

“I was walking home from the movies, not thinking about it but thinking about it, I guess, and I looked both ways to cross the street. Right, nothing, left, nothing, right again, nothing again, left again, and boom, there he is, standing under a street light. His head was arched back, stiff, but his eyes were on me, dead on me. Wait, please, let me tell it. I couldn’t move because I was terrified. It was the fucking Devil, you know? He had these very round cheekbones and a big smile. I heard him ask me to come closer but he hadn’t moved his mouth. Speaking Armenian. I turned around, like, is anyone else seeing this shit? But it was just the two of us. So I go, and the smell, that lube shop smell, is strong, maybe that’s just him, I have no way of knowing. All the lights in the shop are on but it’s way beyond closing. He shows me the van and tells me what to do. He felt… He told me he finally felt like being a help. She wasn’t there then but he promised she’d be here now.”

“Andy, wha-”

But he didn’t let her finish. If he did, his nerve would boil away and he’d abandon that car and tell himself the whole thing was some aberrant hallucination borne from years of unresolved grief and guilt and gloom. 

Andy burst open the doors. A hill of leaves met them, nearly touching the ceiling.

“Mom?” called the younger. 

The heap hissed with a shaky sussurence. 

“Mayrik?” echoed the elder.

A hot wind turned on from somewhere and shot the pile out toward the siblings, whipping them with the forest floor. Mina started screaming and Andy joined her when a knotted branch lodged itself into his right eye. 

Finally, at last, he felt at home.

Lines and contours of a dripping woman, their thawing mother, were plucked free from the frenzy of foliage. The drenched figure stepped out of the van, her arms outstretched, much in the same way as when she saved her children and traded places with them.

“Oh,” intoned Mina, “oh, oh, oh”, a looping chant of disbelief and surrender. She entered the embrace and wept and wept and wept.

Andy wanted to apologize to her, but he couldn’t make his mouth move. He tasted the blood of his eye and moved toward the woman who’d twice given him life. Across the street, Andy saw his pale neighbor standing under another street lamp, his head crooked up toward the orange light, suckling the nighttime sky.

They tangled, a mother and her children, on a carpet of the Devil’s leaves.