The Last Show

Tibor was working the bar with three quick fingers in three different glasses, and he set them all down at once and leaned across the counter to top off Anna's water.

"There you go, dear."

"Köszönöm," Anna said, badly, and Tibor grinned the way he always did when she tried Hungarian.

She was forty-one. She was at the bar at one of Tibor's shows for what was probably the eighteenth time. The wood under her forearms was warm. She was drinking water, watching the people who'd become her family.

The cave smelled of kerosene from the fire poi dancers' performance before the show. A tempting smokiness from the small charcoal grate at the far end of the bar, where her friend Linolada was turning fat pork sausages with tongs. The faint honey scented smoke of brezo drifting from the fire in the brazier. The hot breath and primal scent of three hundred people who'd been dancing in a cave since sundown.

Tibor stood behind the bar, made from beautifully shaped and finished reclaimed pallet wood by Linolada years ago ~~ there was nothing he couldn't make from pallet wood ~~ the place where Tibor could be found during most shows~~ unless, he himself was in the crowd juggling, poi dancing or DJ'ing himself. From the bar he could see everyone he loved, and most of the people in his care. He was sweating. He was happy. He was wearing the black T-shirt with NEM across the front ~~ Hungarian for no, the only Hungarian word most of the people in the cave knew.

Anna loved him in this T-shirt. She loved him in this cave he dug in the side of a volcanic ravine. It took him eleven months with a pickaxe, a head lamp, and a determined attitude. He came down from Budapest in the late 2010s with architectural visions of organic interiors carved into tuff ~~ the pumice-like volcanic rock the south coast was made from, soft enough to take a pickaxe but stable enough to safely live beneath. She loved him for making the interior glow with a deeply beautiful luminescence. The product of years of painted layer upon layer of fluorescent ultramarines and indigos, brilliant reds and yellows, and clusters of fairy lights strung through the cracks in the ceiling because, he said, the cave deserved its own constellations.

She'd bonded with him, in particular, from the morning he set his bag of mortar down in the scrub above the cove at Diego Hernández and asked if he could dig with her.

She'd arrived on the island fourteen months ago with three pieces of luggage. A suitcase, holding a minimum wardrobe and the things she couldn't leave behind ~~ legal documents that proved she'd existed in the country she was leaving, a collection of deeply important photographs and various small, personal treasures. A foam-padded carrying case for the AI server. And a soft cat carrier with Mishka inside.

She held the carrier in her lap the whole flight. Mishka settled as best he could against her thigh and went to sleep, purring deeply, the way he always slept against her. About four hours in, his purring got louder than she'd ever heard it ~~ louder than seemed possible for so small a body ~~ loud enough to hear over the jet engines in fact, and then stopped. She unzipped the carrier and put her hand inside. The small white-and-grey body was already losing warmth. He died in his sleep, mid-flight, purring against her leg. He hadn't, as far as she could tell, suffered.

She hadn't packed for a funeral.

She'd come off the plane and across the island to an Airbnb on the dusty edge of outer La Caleta ~~ a spare room, a key left under a pot ~~ and set her bags down without unpacking, because she couldn't put Mishka in a stranger's fridge and she couldn't leave him zipped in the carrier. The suitcase and the server case stayed behind in the unfamiliar room; only the carrier came. So she walked back out into the wall of Tenerife ~~ sunlight and heat, the dry herbal smell of the tabaiba plant, the salt off the Atlantic downwind on her tongue ~~ to find him a place in the ground. She'd been breathing fourteen hours of recycled airplane and airport air, and now the sun was on her face and coastal freshness filled her lungs. She was in the leggings she pulled on at five the previous morning in Boston, a thin t-shirt, and the hoodie that was necessary in the pre-dawn fog now tied uselessly around her waist in the Tenerife heat. She had the cat carrier in one hand and a beach towel from the airport gift shop folded around the small body inside ~~ the towel was bright blue with a cartoon gecko and the word TENERIFE in friendly letters. She walked along the coast path looking for somewhere to put him. No shovel. No trowel. Only a large slotted metal serving spoon she'd taken from the Airbnb's kitchen drawer on her way out. She walked until she found a thing that could be a headstone for him: a young nopal cactus, knee-high, just beginning to put out new green paddles, the kind that flowered yellow in summer. She knelt at its foot in the hard dry volcanic dirt. She tried breaking the earth with the spoon. The spoon bent. She tried with her bare hands. She tried with a stick. She tried a sharp wedge of volcanic rock she'd found at the edge of the path. She was getting nowhere.

Tibor was on the coast path with a bag of mortar over his shoulder when he saw her ~~ fifty meters off the trail, on her knees, scrabbling at the hard dirt with whatever she could find. He walked over without a word. Anna looked up at him: a stocky man in his late fifties with long brown dreadlocks past his shoulders, a generous belly under a faded indigo cotton shirt, round wire-rimmed glasses, and a kind of nerdy sparkle she'd seen before: that look. The look of a polymath who'd taken hallucinogens and was forever changed. Which was, more or less, Tibor. He'd been an engineer in Budapest for fifteen years before the DMT trip where he met (in his own words) multidimensional rainbow cephalopods who re-aligned the compass of his heart.

Tibor set down the mortar. He looked at the bundle on the towel, at the bent spoon, the soil under her broken nails, and at her face ~~ at her sorrow and her loneliness. The look of a person who'd just learned that the place she ran to was real, and hard, and full of dirt ~~ and what he said was, Let me. I am very good at digging.

He was. He took his pickaxe out of his pack and cut the grave for her in seven slow strikes. Anna scooped the loose soil out with her bare hands and they buried the small cat together at the foot of the cactus. One day, when the nopal flowered, Mishka would be there for it. Tibor stayed until the last of the earth was patted back down and marked with a heart of small volcanic pebbles. Then, Tibor had shown her the cave that he'd made both his home and the most magical, underground venue on Tenerife. There she washed up, rested, and formed a life-long connection with both the island and her new friend.

Skjørn Þorbjörnsson was on the bar stool beside her, nursing a small glass of Zwack ~~ the warm, sweet, herbal Hungarian liqueur Tibor kept under the bar for special friends ~~ in the way he nursed drinks when he was not quite all the way present. Skjørn had a long mild history of overdoing it, and the only thing alcohol ever did to him was make him more charming, more lovable, more inclined to lean on whoever was nearest and tell them, in the warm cadence of his Faroese English, exactly what he'd been meaning to say. Anna first laid eyes on him fifteen years ago in Reykjavik, in the combination apartment-and-office where Bipoliotech was being born ~~ passed out face-down on the couch with one shoe still on. She loved him then too. She only knew it later.

Pipaluk was ten meters out on the floor, in her black sleeveless dress, the kakiniit on her chin catching blue light off the painted ceiling ~~ the geometric tattoo that ran along her jawline and under her lower lip, in the lines of the Kalaallit Inuit women, lines suppressed for a century and worn again by Pipaluk's generation. She was thirty-six. She had her kakiniit tattooed in Nuuk, Greenland, in 2014, the year she decided who she was.

Anna had known her for six years, since the afternoon Skjørn brought her to the empty, newly rented Boston office in Roslindale, which was to become the new Bipoliotech corporate headquarters. It was one of the terms of Juniper Ventures, the company which provided a modest $3 million in seed capital. Anna was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, assembling office cabinets, Die Antwoord playing on a bluetooth speaker. Pipaluk stood in the open-plan ~~ the scent of new carpet glue, the plasticky tang of unboxed monitors, the bright green and orange painted walls from one of the office's previous tenants, old piles of Wired magazines waiting to be thrown out. The office was a casualty of the dot-com bust of 2001 and had never quite recovered its dignity.

Pipaluk looked around the office and frowned with polite disappointment. She sniffed the air, then she gestured broadly and declared, "Who designed this. The place has no poetry."

Anna put down the hex wrench and stood up to meet her. "Right?! It's.. kind of gross and hilarious at the same time." Skjørn shrugged affably and said "It's only temporary, we'll upgrade to something bigger after the series A."

Anna loved Pipaluk on the spot. Pipaluk was a video artist; she'd spent her career thinking about what Greenlandic bodies looked like in front of cameras, which was why she had opinions about her brother's rap trio's stagecraft, and why she would not, ever, be anywhere else when he was on stage.

She reminded Anna, somehow, of everybody she'd ever loved.

Anna glanced further at the crowd, noticing a new face with the most amazing makeup. "Who's she?" Anna asked Tibor, gently tilting her head toward a young woman at the fire.

Tibor was wiping a clay cup with the cloth he kept tucked into his apron. He glanced over. "That's Yara," he said. "She came down from Vilaflor this afternoon. She's from Amsterdam. Doesn't know a soul. She read about the show in one of the chat groups and just walked here and introduced herself to me."

"That's a long walk," observed Anna. She watched the tall girl tend the fire ~~ small, careful, in love with it. The firelight caught the long line of her jaw and the soft pale rope of her dreadlocks. There was something in the way Yara held her shoulders that was familiar somehow. Anna's heart went a little tender for her, the way it did sometimes for strangers. "I like her energy. I hope she sticks around."

Tibor nodded slowly. "We're always welcoming new people. She could make a nice addition to our little circle."

Skjørn snorted into his glass. "A nice addition to our social circle," he said. "Are we recruiting now?"

"I am only saying," said Tibor. "She seems good hearted. I told her she could sleep in the back tonight if she needs to. I'll introduce you when the time's right"

"I'd like that," Anna said. She watched Yara for another beat. Then she turned back to her water.

Skjørn took his phone out of his pocket. He'd taken it out twice already that evening ~~ the small gesture of a man checking the news the way you check a bad tooth with your tongue. He'd been off-tempo all night, his shoulders a half-inch higher than they sat when he was actually present. Anna was keeping a quiet eye on him without making it a thing.

Onstage, Aaju was eight bars into a verse he'd been writing, in one form or another, since he was sixteen.

Anna knew the verse. Pipaluk sent her early versions of it over the years ~~ voice memos, rough video, the occasional late-night call ~~ through the chat their small group lived in since the office days. Anna sat at her own kitchen counter in Roslindale listening to Aaju find his lines, never fully understanding the Kalaallisut but she knew its meaning. Aaju and Pipaluk's grandmother was twelve in 1953 when the Americans decided their air base needed to be larger. The Danish government agreed and forcibly moved her family 150 km further north with only three days' notice. The verse was about what the dogs sensed. About the houses they built and had to leave behind. About the bulldozers that came after. He'd been writing it, in one form or another, his whole life.

fifty-three. February. three days to pack.

sledge in the polar dark, a hundred-year house at our back.

the dogs knew first. the dogs always know first.

they bulldozed the walls when we couldn't watch.

they wanted a runway. they got it. still got it.

still landing planes on the runway poured over our kitchen.

they call it Relocation, capital R,

when they have to call it anything at all.

The cave roared. Three hundred people who didn't know what Thule was, but who knew what a man rapping at the top of his lungs about something that happened to his grandmother sounded like. The response was bigger than the song. Aaju leaned into it. He always did.

Anna marveled at Pipaluk out on the floor ~~ still moving with the music the way she'd been moving for the last twenty minutes, her face open in the way it only ever opened when her brother was on stage, the blue light from the painted ceiling catching the kakiniit on her chin. Anna had no other word for her in that moment but divine. It was the kind of observation that alighted in her heart now and then like a butterfly ~~ a small gratitude that life and beauty existed, that any of them existed at all.

Beside her, Skjørn had his phone out again, and his thumb was scrolling slowly, and he was making the face.

He read the post.

He read it again.

He read it a third time, in case he'd mis-read it. He hadn't. He played a short video ~~ Anna saw, out of the corner of her eye, forty-five seconds of motion on the small screen.

He set the phone down on the bar.

He said, very softly, "Harra Gud."

Anna had heard him say it twice in fifteen years. It was the Faroese for Lord God ~~ the thing he said only when something broke.

He stood. He didn't look at Anna. He didn't look at Tibor. He picked up the phone, pushed off from the bar like a man who had urgent work to do, and he began the hardest thing he'd ever done, which was to walk through three hundred ecstatic people toward his wife, who didn't yet know.

Anna watched him go.

Anna helped Skjørn launch Bipoliotech fifteen years ago, in another country, in another life. A small company together that was going to take down the big games industry. The industry absorbed it instead, turned it into something monstrous. They watched the thing they'd built together get tainted by the people who came in with the money: best friends pitted against each other, old friendships lost, power that was once theirs handed off to a board that did, eventually, something the industry news called egregious. They grieved every part of it together. They'd spent the years since trying to find meaning somewhere venture capital couldn't reach. Anna knew that expression on Skjørn's face all too well.

"What was that about," asked Tibor, quietly.

"I don't know," Anna said. "Something.. pretty bad."

Anna and Tibor watched together as Skjørn moved through the crowd the way crowds part for tall men with serious faces ~~ not fast, but making room. He reached Pipaluk in the middle of the second hook. Pipaluk looked up at him. She looked at the phone in his hand. She looked back at his face.

Pipaluk's face went, in this order, from confused, to alert, then to stunned coldness. Anna hadn't, in six years, seen the third one. Pipaluk put her hand to the side of her face and pressed, hard, against the kakiniit, as if to confirm that her face was still hers. Her other hand found Skjørn's wrist and was holding it tight. The song was still going on without her. Then she nodded once and she said something low, two very long words in Kalaallisut that meant I have to tell him. Pipaluk crossed the floor toward the stage with a severe and deliberate stride.

"Oh," Tibor said, very quietly, beside Anna. "Oh no."

Aaju was four bars into the third verse and didn't see his sister until she was at his right knee. From the bar Anna watched Pipaluk put her hand at the back of Aaju's calf, under the cuff of his shorts, the way they'd been doing it since they were small and gave a squeeze that meant I have to tell you something, then more squeezes in a particular rhythm that meant this is urgent and bad and you will not like it. Aaju kept rapping.

Then he looked down. He saw her face. The verse he was on was about a school in Nuuk that taught him that Greenland was Denmark and that this was the new normal. He was nine bars in. The chorus eight bars away. He kept going. He looked back at QILLAQ behind the deck ~~ Markus Olsen, called QILLAQ on stage ~~ who saw Aaju's face and didn't understand, and kept the beat going.

Aaju finished the verse.

He did the chorus once.

He stopped before the second verse.

He looked back at QILLAQ and gestured stop, palm flat, fingers slowly spreading. QILLAQ let the beat drop. The cave went, in the space of fifteen seconds, from a Greenlandic hip-hop trio's biggest crowd of the year to a place where three hundred people who had been very loud were now, unexpectedly, listening for anything.

The walrus-tusk tupilak on top of the speaker cabinet watched on silently ~~ an old Greenlandic vengeance figure, the kind once carved ritually to harm an enemy, this one carved lovingly by Aaju and Pipaluk's grandfather. Microphones stood clutched in three of its four arms.

Aaju leaned to the mic.

He said, in Kalaallisut: Sister, come up here. I am not the one for this.

Pipaluk came up. She took the mic.

She didn't say anything for about six seconds.

Then she said it. In Kalaallisut first, because there were maybe eight Greenlanders in the cave and they deserved to hear it in their own language. Then, after a pause that allowed the Kalaallisut listeners to begin the work of understanding, she said it in English, because the other two hundred and ninety-two people in the room deserved not to be guessing.

She said: The United States has landed troops at Nuuk Airport. Our Premier is in custody. Communications have been severed.

She didn't say anything else.

She handed the microphone back to her brother and stepped down off the stage.

There was no applause. There was a sound that wasn't a sound: a kind of intake, three hundred people breathing inward at once, and then a long held nothing.

Three Greenlandic men near the front of the crowd began to weep. One of them was a tall thin person who, ten minutes earlier, was calling out yes! yes! to Aaju's verse.

From the bar, Anna's hand had found Tibor's across the counter. Neither of them remembered reaching for the other. Tibor's other hand was still holding the cloth he was wiping the cup with.

Aaju stood at the mic.

He looked at QILLAQ. QILLAQ looked at him.

Aaju did the smallest thing.

He nodded.

QILLAQ tapped the high-hat once on the drum machine. Tk. He tapped it again. Tk. He left the kick out. Uyaraq, on a laptop, brought up a single sustained note in the lowest register of the synth: not a beat, a drone, holding, the kind of tone that was in the air after a bell stopped ringing.

Aaju closed his eyes.

He sang.

He didn't rap. He sang in the way Greenlanders had sung for longer than the existence of Denmark ~~ aya-yait, the drum-song, half-improvised, half-remembered, the form in which you said the thing that could only be said by singing it. Anna had heard the form once or twice in recordings Pipaluk played her over the years ~~ the song the women in Pipaluk's family carried for centuries. She'd never heard it sung in a cave.

There was no drum. There was QILLAQ's fingertip on the high-hat, very small. There was Uyaraq's droning synth. There was Aaju's voice, in Kalaallisut, doing something the cave had never heard before and would never hear again.

The rough English of what he sang ~~ Anna caught pisilluni, the dried-fish-and-potato dish Pipaluk made her once when she had a flu ~~ was something like:

my mother made me pisilluni in the kitchen.

my mother is in the kitchen still.

my mother does not know yet.

my mother will know in an hour.

and i will know that she knows.

and we will be in two rooms.

a long way apart.

He chanted it. He sang variations of it. He sang the same line twice, the second time a little lower. He sang another line that was about his grandmother and Thule in 1953, a rhyme he never believed would happen in his lifetime and which was happening now. He sang for a long time. The cave didn't know what to do with itself, so it did the only thing it was capable of, which was to stand there and listen.

Tibor, beside Anna, didn't move.

Pipaluk was sitting on a folding chair somebody brought her, between the merch table and the stage. Skjørn was standing behind her with a light hand on her shoulder ~~ a hand that was a question and an answer. Pipaluk hadn't yet cried.

Anna stood up from the bar and crossed the cave slowly, while Aaju was into the next iteration of the song. She sat on the floor next to the chair, knees up. Pipaluk didn't look at her. After a long minute, Pipaluk's hand came down off the arm of the chair and rested on the top of Anna's head, and stayed there. They didn't speak. Skjørn didn't move his hand from Pipaluk's shoulder. The song went on.

It went for a long time. It might have been forty minutes. It might have been two hours. Nobody in the cave was counting.

QILLAQ kept the high-hat going. Uyaraq held the note. Sometimes Uyaraq let the note glide down a half-step and then back up. Aaju sang. People stood. Some sat. Some sat down where they were, on the floor, drinks held loosely in their hands, listening.

Then, from the brazier at the mouth of the cave, a second voice came in ~~ very quietly, in a deep register Aaju hadn't heard a non-Greenlander reach before.

Anna, from the floor with Pipaluk's hand still on the top of her head, lifted her eyes toward the sound. It was Yara ~~ the tall girl from the brazier whose energy Anna wanted to understand. Yara was still cross-legged at the fire. She folded her voice into the lowest register of the song the way a person folds themselves into a chair beside someone in grief. Anna's heart caught.

Yara didn't stand up to do it. She sang into the fire. Aaju heard her anyway. He turned slightly. He let her in. He sang toward her. She sang back. The song folded her in.

The cave held as the carved walrus-tusk tupilak watched over them.

When Aaju finally stopped, there was no applause. The held note from Uyaraq's laptop faded the way held notes do ~~ by becoming, at some moment, no longer there. QILLAQ's high-hat tapped twice more, then once, then not at all.

Aaju put the microphone back on the stand.

He stepped down.

People didn't leave. They drifted. Some of them came up to the stage, slowly, to put hands on Aaju's shoulder or Pipaluk's. Others sat where they were. One of the weeping Greenlandic men was now sleeping on the floor behind the merch table, his head on a folded jacket.

Then Tibor came.

She'd watched him do this kind of thing a few times in her fourteen months in the cave ~~ the thing where Tibor moved through his own room with the certainty of a man who'd already decided what was needed and was only carrying it out. He didn't come fast. He had a clay cup of something hot in one hand and a folded brown wool blanket over his arm ~~ the one he kept under the bar for cold nights. He walked the length of the cave with the loyalty of a person who had no questions about where he was meant to be. When he reached Aaju he didn't say anything in English. He put the cup in Aaju's hand. He laid the blanket around Pipaluk's shoulders where she sat. Then he said something in Hungarian that meant, approximately, you are in my cave for as long as you need it. Aaju, who didn't speak Hungarian, understood.

Outside, the sky was turning light gray.

Skjørn had Pipaluk's hand in his. His phone, in his pocket, was buzzing every few seconds with the small intermittent vibration of urgent news he chose not to read.

Tupilak Squad's gear stayed where it was. Nobody touched it. The carved tupilak stayed on top of the speaker cabinet, watching whoever was still in the cave, which was most people, sitting or sleeping or quietly speaking in small groups about the things that needed to be said before the dawn arrived.

Above Playa de Diego Hernández the sky lightened. Charcoal went to a warm gold over the barranco, the ravine, the way it would have on any other morning, and the air at the cave mouth went from cold to a warmer kind of cold.

Pipaluk leaned her head against Skjørn's shoulder. She said, in Kalaallisut, we are not going home.

Skjørn nodded.

Anna, on the floor, felt Pipaluk's hand still on the top of her head. She felt the warmth of the brown wool blanket where it brushed her shoulder against the chair. She felt Tibor somewhere behind her, still tending. She felt the dawn coming in cool through the cave mouth where Yara was, presumably, still feeding the fire.

The day began.