CHAPTER FIVE

THE PEBBLE BUDDHA

Kai

Kai couldn’t help it. He tried to avoid Bard—but there he was in his oversized gray tweed overcoat coming around the corner a block ahead. Kai ducked into a tobacconist’s shop and peered out the window, breath trembling, through the shelves of newspapers until he passed. He tried to not avoid Bard, thinking he could trick whatever it was that was making their paths cross. That worked for awhile, since it seemed Bard had stopped going to the Palmer Manufacturing offices and the record shop, but then he turned up at the office after a week, wearing very respectable pressed trousers and a blazer over a button-down, his ginger hair cut shorter, but still falling over his forehead and brushing the tortoiseshell frames of his glasses. Swearing under his breath, Kai got on a bus that was pulling up at the nearest stop, oblivious to where it was going.

When he finally arrived back at his Uncle’s flat, an hour later than he said he’d be, Jude was elbow-deep in cheesemaking, swathed in an apron, with his hair and beard tucked into nets. He’d been experimenting with new formulations and the pungent scent of goat milk permeated the flat.

“Don’t come in the kitchen!” Jude said when Kai looked in and greeted him. “I’ve got to keep my work area sterile!”

“I wasn’t coming in anyway,” Kai said. “You look like a mad scientist.”

“I could have used your help wrestling with the boiler,” Jude said. “What happened?”

“I got on the wrong bus.” Kai leaned on the door jamb, idly kicking his boot heel against the lime green linoleum floor.

“Kai, you’ve lived here for almost a year. How could you make that mistake?”

“I got on the wrong bus on purpose. I was avoiding someone.”

Jude wiped his hands, covered in cheese curd, on his apron and then went to wash them. “Do you want to talk about why?”

Kai considered for a moment, pressing his lips together. He thought of Bard, of his profile as he walked by the tobacconist, his instantly recognizable slim silhouette and gait, his hands behind his back, elbows turned out, as he came down the street. Kai had liked seeing him even though he was supposed to be staying away from him. It was secret, it was forbidden—and, he reminded himself, it was accidental. He didn’t have that to reproach himself with, at least. No, what he was angry about was his own inability to find the words to make Bard understand—and even if he could find them, he Bard wouldn’t let Kai talk to him anyway. Cassandra said that his intensity, his insight into Bard’s mind, is what scared Bard away. But wasn’t it proof that what he felt was real? He could see Bard in Cassandra’s thoughts, too, that faint image he caught a glimpse of. It was like Cassandra was his own sister, too. How could Bard not see that?

If anyone could understand this, it was his uncle, but Kai wanted to keep it to himself. But, judging by the way his uncle gazed at him with his clear brown eyes, his face creased in concern, Kai wasn’t going to be able to do that, not entirely.

“Not really,” Kai finally said. “Anyway, you know what’s going on—at least whatever it is you’re seeing now.”

Jude sighed and began to untie his apron. “Kai, we’ve talked about this. You have to stop relying on that. Nobody else here—well, that we know of—can do what we do, and you need to learn how to express yourself. Responsibly.” Jude took off the apron and tossed it onto the counter. “That means somewhere between saying nothing and saying everything. And staying out of people’s heads.”

Kai ducked his head. “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Yeah.”

“Now,” Jude said. “I’ll meet you halfway. Sound good?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether you’re going to take those stupid hairnets off,” Kai said. “I can’t take you seriously with them on.”

Jude laughed, pulling them off his hair and beard. His hair tumbled out over his shoulders, black-brown streaked with gray, and he rubbed his hands over his beard.

“All right, let’s sit down,” Jude said.

The sitting room was furnished with Danish Modern pieces from a decade before—warm wood in sleek lines, upholstered in striped gold, orange, and green. An enormous pebble mosaic of the Buddha hung on the wall. Jude had made it himself, using its construction as a kind of meditation.

“Real Buddhist monks wipe away the designs they create in sand,” he told Kai once, “but I think it really makes the room, you know? Gives it a focal point, and focal points are grounding.” 

Kai sat on the sofa under this Buddha, folding up his long legs and hanging his hands between his knees. Jude sat cross-legged on a beanbag on the floor, groaning as he eased himself down, and then looked up at his nephew, his eyes kindly, patient, but also with a hint of mischief—his uncle was ready to call out his bullshit if that’s what the situation required.

“So you wanna tell me about this redhead boy who’s been pacing through your brain for the past two weeks?” Jude asked. “It’s been making me dizzy, seeing him all the time.”

Kai took a breath in. “He’s not a boy, not really—he’s older than me, twenty-one, I think? He works at Palmer Manufacturing, but that’s not really what he does—he writes about music, and his sister says he writes songs, too, but I haven’t heard any. His brain, though—the way his mind works is so—so calculating. Like he’s an artist but he also knows how to make things work?” Kai raised his hands, gesturing as if molding a ball of clay. “That’s why he’s so good at writing about music—he can hear what each part is doing and how it affects the whole. Not like me—you know I do so much just because... because, but I hear everything at once and have trouble figuring out why it works. But he maybe thinks too much? Like he’s afraid to feel. There’s something in him—I can’t sense, like he’s blocked it off. He tries not to think about it. Maybe it’s like those things I can’t remember—from when I was in school back in San Francisco. I could help him, I think—tell him that he’s not alone, that I know what that’s like. And I really think that making music with each other would be great, you know? Teach us both a lot.” He paused to take another breath.

“But?” Jude said.

“But I fucked up,” Kai said. “I got too excited and made him think I wanted publicity instead to get to know him and—rrrrrggghhh!” He put his fingers in his hair and gripped his temples with his palms as he growled. “Like you said, I said everything—just no stop between my brain and my mouth. And he’s afraid, too—afraid what liking me means—not that he doesn’t know that about himself—but he’s not sure it’s worth it. And he wouldn’t listen to me. If he had just stopped being afraid for two seconds and listened to me, he would see it would be. Worth it, I mean. I just have to make him see that.”

“All right,” Jude said, in his “let’s calm Kai down” voice that was both annoying and, even more annoyingly, calming. “So there was a misunderstanding. People have them all the time and they get through them. Yeah?”

Kai rubbed his palms on his knees. “Yeah.”

“But you can’t compel someone listen to you. They have to decide to do that on their own. You have to respect other people’s boundaries, Kai.”

“I know, but what if they’re wrong?”

Jude sighed. “So does this boy have a name?”

“Oh—I didn’t—yeah, he does. It’s Bard. Bard Fox.”

Jude frowned. “Any relation to titan of industry Roger Fox?”

“Yeah, that’s his dad.”

Jude shook his head. “OK, that’s not great.”