The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [44]
She flips through his music collection, a couple of long shelves of dusty albums and several more of CDs, finding everything from Brazilian jazz to Ugandan court music to Mexican reggae. More than a few of the hundreds of CDs have never even been opened. She picks out one of these at random. On the cover, a monk wearing a cassock and a large pair of earphones smirks at her from behind a mixing board. She opens the plastic with a ragged fingernail and pops the CD into the player, unwittingly unleashing a postmodern Inquisition, a choir of chanting monks getting scratched on turntables, beaten by synthesized drums and bounced between speakers.
The bass line makes her bowels ache. She finds her bag and retreats to the bathroom. After shitting and washing and making herself halfway presentable, she opens his medicine cabinet and checks the prescriptions: a bottle of Hismanal; a tube of something called Nizoral; a bottle of pills called Augmentin, the expiration date on which has passed; a bottle of something called Eskalith, with instructions to be taken daily. She’s looking primarily for information about his alleged mood disorder and secondarily, as she always does with men she’s slept with, somewhat uselessly and after the fact, for any possibility of venereal disease. She commits the names to memory.
On her way to the kitchen she stops at the doorway to a large room, in the center of which sits a worktable littered with paper scraps and art supplies. Aside from the table, the room is empty of furniture, but the walls themselves are covered with a staggeringly intricate collage of scribbled notes, swatches of fabric, pages torn from magazines, sketches of people, buildings, and garments, and long, curving arrows connecting one item to another. Walking into the room and taking a closer look, she discovers to her burgeoning amazement that the thing is rigorously ordered. It appears to be some sort of trend time line that runs around all four walls, beginning at different points in the antiquities of Greece, Egypt, China, and other cultures she doesn’t immediately recognize, then progressing through millennia and centuries, slowing down to decades, years, the present year, and finally projecting beyond to the future. Covered on the chart is the emergence of fashions, social mores, scientific and philosophical ideas, in a series of ever-diverging and -regrouping colored lines and boxes marked by red, orange, and green sticker dots and hastily scribbled notes on ledger paper. The words Tribalism, Virtualism, Elective Affinities, Mysticism, Spiritism, Self-Creation, and Invented Origins are given color-coded boxes just below the ceiling. At the very end of the fourth wall—above the space where the little swaths of color, movie stills, typeface samples, advertisements, and fashion plates peter out and the hair-thin colored lines end in boxes left mostly blank—the words The Light Age float below the elaborate molding markered in gold cursive script.
Before she has a chance to examine the walls more closely, Javier calls out to her. She follows the scent of coffee and browned batter into the dining room, where he stands in a sky-blue apron worn over his bathrobe, setting a long table surrounded by a half dozen mismatched high-backed, gilded chairs.
“This place is too much” is all she can say at first.
He finishes filling the coffee cups, then looks up. “Not what you expected?”
“More or less. Actually I expected an astrolabe somewhere. And a big sepia globe. You really dropped the ball on the whole nautical-theme thing.”
Javier nods thoughtfully. He disappears into the kitchen, returns with bowls of blueberries and sliced strawberries, and sets them down on the table.
“And I expected a mincing servant in a white jacket and red astrakhan,” she goes on. “And a parrot.”
“A parrot?”
“I thought