Katzenmusik

Saga had thirty-one names by sunset, and she had paid for them the only way she ever paid for anything, which was attention.

That was the job. Two hours before a show she went through the gathering crowd being thirteen and interested, which is the best disguise ever invented because it is not one, and she asked the questions nobody guards against. Whose baby is that. Who taught you to mend a net like that. Who are the figs for. People will hold the door of their whole lives open for a girl who asks about the figs. By the time the light went gold she had a fisherman up from La Caleta whose grandfather had painted his boat three colors because he couldn't choose, and a woman from the cave houses who had buried two husbands and outlived three doctors, and Doña Pino, down from Callao Salvaje with the Hidalgo cousins and a basket of the last figs of the year, who did not count because Doña Pino was not information. Doña Pino was infrastructure.

The names went into the notebook, and the notebook went to the tarot table, and that was the entire secret of the psychic act: there is no trick. People tell you who they are. They tell you all day long, to anyone who listens like it matters. And when the woman at the tarot table greeted you by name before you had given it ⁓ your actual name, said right, with the accent your grandmother put on it ⁓ what you felt was not fooled. What you felt was found.

The beach below the cave houses still got its fire nights ⁓ the small ones, the after-show kind, a brazier and the bass rolling off the water; Saga had danced one down to numb feet the night of the first Maisie show. But the big night, the one the whole coast walked to, had outgrown the sand years ago ⁓ a barranco path in the dark is no place for grandmothers carrying babies ⁓ and one year the big fire simply walked up the hill and stayed. Nobody decided it. The old Bienestar was there, the way ruins are there, and it turned out that what a half-built wellness resort wants to be, more than anything in the world, is an amphitheater.

The great unfinished swimming pool of the Playa del Bienestar Wellness Thalasso had waited twenty-one years for water that was never coming, and had made other arrangements. Its shallow end held the stage. Its deep end held the crowd, on blankets and fish crates and two church pews nobody asked about. The concrete gave back the day's heat through the blankets like a big animal sleeping, and the sunset came straight in through the ground floor of the shell behind it, three stories of poured gray with no glass and no doors, room after room of clean ocean light, and the rebar on the unfinished roofline had rusted into a scribble that looked, at this hour, like handwriting the building was still working on.

Gertie had spent the whole afternoon on the wall above the deep end. Maisie Ardilla stood there now, ten meters of squirrel in a too-big hat, magnifying glass raised toward La Gomera as if the sunset were a clue. The paint was so fresh Saga could smell it under the woodsmoke, and Gertie stood in front of it with a tin cup, splattered to the elbows, receiving compliments the way other people receive weather.

Jef had strung the fairy lights through the rebar whiskers along the pool rim, and Auxi held the ladder and considered this a co-signature. Up the slope, in the sand traps of the dead golf course, the jaira goats had folded themselves down for the night like laundry. Ruymán sat on the stage edge tuning the timple, which he had been doing for forty minutes, which meant it had been in tune for thirty-nine. Torbe worked the front rows in his ruff, electric blue, seventeen years old and vibrating like a puppy, taking tribute.

And two kilometers up the dark slope, small as a struck match, one window burned in a white house that nobody looked at.

Saga looked at it. Looking was her job too.

The dark came up like a tide and Mateo met it with the low stuff, the bass you feel in the concrete before you agree you're hearing it, and the fire night began the way it always began, which is to say nobody could have told you the moment it did.

Saga delivered her notebook to the tarot table and stayed close, because watching the names go home was the part of the job she would have done for free. The fisherman with the three-color boat sat down across from Yara, holding his cap like it might testify against him. Yara laid the first card and said his name ⁓ just his name, no flourish, the way you hand a man his own key ⁓ and Saga watched his face do the thing she never got tired of. The small opening. The you know me.

That was what the act sold. It cost thirty-one questions about figs and it was worth more than it cost and everybody went away richer. Find the scam in that. People had tried.

When the last of the light was gone off La Gomera, Ruymán stopped tuning, which was the signal, and stood up, and whistled.

The bowl answered him. That was the first thing that made the night the night: the silbo went out over the crowd and came back off three stories of bare concrete, doubled, so that one old man announcing in whistle-and-voice sounded like a conversation between mountains. He did it the old way, each phrase flying twice ⁓ once from him, once off the building ⁓ and when he reached the ten whistles that spell LOS-MAG-NÍ-FI-COS-HER-MA-NOS-CHA-CHO, the silbadores in the crowd came in from the dark, and the bowl took all of it and handed it back bigger, and Mateo stood at his rig grinning like a man whose birthday had come early. He had spent the afternoon learning the building. The stairwell, it turned out, was a horn. The empty rooms were reverbs, every one a different size of night. Twenty-one years the shell had waited to be a resort, and it had taken one sound engineer one afternoon to find out what it had actually been all along, which was an instrument.

¡CHACHO! roared the brothers, from above.

They came off the second-story window frames on their lances, both at once, planted, pivoted, swapped poles mid-air over the shallow end, and went up to the wire ⁓ rigged that afternoon clean across the pool, rim to rim, the Canarian flag hanging off the tension pole ⁓ and the people sitting under it lay back on their blankets to watch, which is the correct way to watch a wire.

It was somewhere in the middle of the wire act that the headlights came down the dead road.

Small headlights. Close together, like the eyes of something modest. The access road to the Bienestar had a chain across it that had rusted open in 2029 and a surface the island had been taking back for twenty years, and the car came down it at the speed of a man reading his own upholstery, and it made the sound a solar Fiat 500 makes, which is the sound of a sewing machine with regrets.

The crowd had time to develop theories. The car parked itself at the top of the pool steps, at an angle that meant nothing to anyone who had never owned a parking space, and the firelight found the long scratched letters across the hood, old scars gone the color of the metal under them, and the door opened, and a man got out.

He was tall and old and ironed. That was the first thing Saga saw, that he had been ironed ⁓ trousers with a crease, a collared shirt the color of sand, ironed for an occasion that had retired before she was born. He held a laminated sheet the way the priest in Garachico held the big book. He stood a moment in the light of a fire he had not been invited to, on the deck of a resort that did not exist, and three hundred people looked up at him, warm and fed and raised on puppet shows, and being an audience, they did the kindest possible thing.

They made him part of it. Somebody clapped.

And Tibor came up out of the deep end like a whale surfacing under a rowboat, glasses pushed up somewhere in the gray dreadlocks, arms already open, and his voice when it came had a joy in it so total that there was nothing anywhere for it to bounce off.

"Neighbor!" he said. "Twenty-four years! You came!"

He said it the way you'd mark an anniversary. Something they had managed together, at last.

"There are papas," Tibor said. "The little wrinkled ones, with the green mojo. Doña Pino brought figs."

"I am not here to eat," the man said.

"No, no," Tibor agreed, warmly, and waited, in the manner of a man for whom the papas remained on the table as an option.

Saga knew who he was by then. Everybody did, in the loose way you know a landmark. This was the neighbor ⁓ Tibor's word, said the way other people say the weather ⁓ the man from the white house with the one lit window, who owned, on paper of a kind nobody printed anymore, the golf course the goats slept on and the beach the cave houses opened onto and the concrete bowl three hundred people were currently keeping warm.

She had just never seen him down here. Nobody had. He was a pair of binocular flashes on a far terrace at golden hour. He was a story Stef told with the good ending, the one about the irrigation line. He was two kilometers of uphill, made of years.

And now he stood at the top of the pool steps and raised the laminated sheet, and read from it.

"This," he said, "is an active development site."

He said it into the music, so it reached perhaps eleven people. Mateo, being a professional, kept the drone exactly where it was. Above him the brothers kept the wire, which cared even less.

"Construction will resume." He did not say when. Saga had the feeling the sheet said when, and that he had decided, at some final rank of privacy, not to share it. "The site must be kept clear. These modifications" ⁓ the laminate traveled, taking in the fairy lights, the church pews, ten meters of fresh squirrel ⁓ "are unauthorized."

"Unauthorized!" Gertie agreed from the dark, delighted, the way you'd shout bravo.

A woman near Saga said, appreciatively, that he was very good. Somebody passed him up a cup of nothing anybody had asked him if he wanted, and he held it, ironed and lit orange, a man standing in the applause of people he had come to evict, discovering that there was no surface anywhere on the night that his sentence would stick to.

Then he saw the wire.

Saga watched it land ⁓ the wire, the tension pole, the flag, two brothers trading places in the air above a concrete pit full of his trespassers ⁓ and watched him go looking, somewhere in the deep files, for the correct category.

He could not have picked a worse moment to find it, because Ruymán had just begun the build.

Saga knew the build the way she knew weather. The timple dropped to a single struck note, over and over, like a dripping tap. Ruymán stood, and the bowl leaned in, and he began to announce ⁓ whistle first, then voice, each phrase twice, once from the man and once from the building ⁓ that what the brothers would now attempt had never been attempted on this island, or on any island, or possibly anywhere on the flat of the earth. The Hidalgo cousins were already coming down the pool steps carrying a cushion, and on the cushion, chewing, riding the applause like a duchess, sat one of the jaira goats from the sand traps.

"That parapet was poured in March 2020," the man said. "It has never been load-tested. There is an anchor bolted to it. Who bolted an anchor to my parapet."

«whistle» said Ruymán. LA BAIFA ⁓ «whistle» ⁓ VOLADORA.

The flying goat. The bowl began to stamp. The goat, who was being paid in carob pods and had insisted on payment up front, surveyed the crowd with the calm of the only professional present who had no nerves at all about the wire, on the grounds that she was a goat and the wire was, at most, a ledge.

"This is an incident," the man announced, to the crowd at large, in the patient register of a man explaining weather to children. "All of you are now part of an incident history." Ayoze, upside down on the wire at that moment, waved. Echedey took the goat up onto his shoulders at the far rim and stepped out over the deep end. "When underwriting resumes" ⁓ the man had to raise his voice now, because the silbadores had started and the stamping had found its rhythm and the timple's one note was coming faster ⁓ "when underwriting resumes, no carrier in Europe will insure a site with a documented incident history. You are creating a file." Down front, two kids raised on puppet villains booed him with enormous affection, which on this island is also applause. The brothers met at the middle of the wire, above everyone, and stood facing each other with a goat between them, and the whole bowl held one breath. "I am required" ⁓ and Saga watched his face arrive at a color the island mostly keeps for sunsets ⁓ "to KEEP THE FILE" ⁓

"¡CHACHO!"

The trade happened in the middle of the word. Goat from shoulder to shoulder, one clean swing across the drop, ears up, her expression that of a landlord inspecting a stairwell, and three hundred people and one concrete building bellowed the brothers' name at the same instant, and the night came down on top of the man's sentence like a wave on a sandcastle. Nobody ever heard the end of it. It is possible he didn't either.

And he took out a small leather notebook anyway, and uncapped a fountain pen, and stood in the light of a party three hundred strong ⁓ a tall ironed man documenting a flying goat ⁓ and kept the file.

Saga, who kept a notebook of her own, watched him write with a feeling she couldn't put a lid on. She wrote things down to hold on to them. She could not work out, watching him, what he thought he was holding on to.

Doña Pino, who had raised four children and did not believe in anyone standing empty-handed at a fire, made her way over and put a fig in his free hand. He looked at it a long moment. Then he held it the way you hold evidence.

He had more. Saga could see that he had more, the way you can see a wave still coming.

But the wire act ended the way it always ended, the flag produced out of nowhere at the top of the world while the goat took her bows from a Hidalgo shoulder, and in the long roar of it the night changed acts. The timple changed key. Yara walked out onto the shallow-end stage with the chains coiled in her hands, Torbe's backpack parked at the pool rim with his head sticking out of it, blue and patient, and the fire drew its first circle on the dark.

Saga had seen the fire act more times than she had seen rain. That night she barely watched it. She watched the man instead ⁓ which is how she came to be the only one looking at him at the moment he stopped, because he had seen the fire.

Not the fire. The spinner. She watched his eyes leave the page and find the tall woman in the shallow end with the burning chains writing on the dark, and stop there, and stay. His face did nothing at all. It was the loudest nothing Saga had ever watched a face do.

The fire went around. The timple climbed a little, working, unaware.

"Jürgen," he said. "Tell them the pool deck is not load-rated."

It was not a loud word. It was not even aimed like a stone, which was the strangeness Saga kept turning over afterward ⁓ he said it flat, administrative, a line off a form, the way you'd say a docket number, and he said it toward the stage and stood waiting, the way a man waits who believes he has delegated something.

Saga knew every name on this coast. Names were her trade; she had thirty-one of them in her notebook from that evening alone, and none of them was Jürgen, and nobody in four years of working these crowds had ever been Jürgen, and she was already turning, out of habit, to find the who of it ⁓ and then she followed the line of where he had said it, and stopped turning.

Yara's shoulders took one long breath. In over four counts. Held ⁓ the way she taught it on the sand, hands flat on your knees, the breath is the one thing they can't schedule. Then the fire came around, unhurried, and kept going.

That was all. The chains did not change their arithmetic. The ribbons closed where ribbons close. Saga had once seen Yara catch a dropped club mid-pattern without her face admitting that anything had happened, and this was less than that. This did not require catching.

The name lay on the concrete where it had landed. Nobody picked it up.

There was nobody standing where it fell.

The timple hit the gallop, which was Torbe's cue, and Torbe took his cue, because Torbe had never missed a cue in his professional life.

He came out of the backpack like a cork out of cider, seventeen years old and electric blue, ruff up, ears up, tail going like a pompom in a stiff wind. The crowd loved Torbe the way crowds love the smallest performer, which is completely. And Torbe, a professional to his eyebrows, went first to work.

The act was this, and nobody remembered teaching him it: Yara grounded the chains, knelt, and fanned the deck face-down on the concrete, and Torbe walked the fan once, considering, with the gravity of a customs inspection ⁓ then took one card in his teeth and set off into the audience to deliver it. He chose his person the way he always chose, by standards known to nobody but himself, past reaching hands and much better offers, all the way up the rows, and that night the card went to the fisherman with the three-color boat, who stood up to receive it the way you stand for a verdict. The law of the bit ⁓ island-wide, non-negotiable ⁓ is that you read your card to the whole assembly. "El Sol," the fisherman read, holding it overhead, damp at one corner. The Sun. The bowl roared. Named twice in one evening and dealt the best card in the deck by a dog: he would be lucky all winter now, and everyone within a hundred meters was glad about it, and Ruymán's timple said so, twice.

Torbe took the applause at a trot, past the fairy lights, past the pews, up along the rim ⁓

⁓ and stopped in front of the ironed man.

He looked up at him for a long moment. The man looked down at the blue dog and did not know him.

Torbe barked once. It was a small bark, and it was complete. It had a beginning, an argument, and a conclusion. Then he turned, with the full ceremony available to a Pomeranian in an Elizabethan ruff, and showed the man his pompom, and trotted back down into the light and the love.

The applause came in like the tide, and it was for the dog, and for the fire, and for the night, and it was not against the man at the top of the steps. It was worse than against him. It went around him, the way water goes around a piling, and closed warm on the other side, and left him standing in it holding a cup he had not asked for, under ten meters of squirrel, on the deck of the future, with his notice laminated against weather that was never going to touch it.

Saga thought he would leave then. He did not leave. He stayed at the edge of the light through the whole next act, cup in one hand, fig in the other, the notebook put away, all his objections filed ⁓ a tall ironed man at a party, which is a thing there is no procedure for.

And between acts, while Yara knelt at the pool rim re-wicking the chains, he crossed toward her. Saga saw it start, and could not have said how she knew from the first step that this was a different walk ⁓ slower, nothing laminated in it ⁓ the walk of a man arriving at a counter where the thing he needed was not sold and never had been.

"Hören Sie," he said. Quietly. Two words, in the voice you keep for strangers.

That was as far as the sentence went. He stood with the rest of it somewhere on him and no way to say it, because every road into that sentence went through a name, and he had one that did not work, and would not use the one that did.

Yara looked at him then. The only time that night. She looked at him the way she looked at a spread laid out on her table ⁓ unhurried, reading, adding nothing ⁓ and then she gathered the chains and stood, and whatever she had read, she left it on the table, and walked back into the light, and the finale took her.

He said one word then, in German, quietly, to nobody.

"Katzenmusik."

Saga was close enough to hear it. She kept it, the way she kept things.

Tibor walked him back to the car. Nobody asked Tibor to do this; it would not have occurred to anybody to ask, or to him not to. He walked the neighbor out the way you walk out a guest, one big hand hovering an inch off the ironed shoulder, never landing, and he talked the whole way, warmly, about the pool.

"You built a good bowl, neighbor," Saga heard him say. "The best fire bowl on the coast. It holds the wind off. Everyone says so. This is not nothing, to build the best of a thing."

At the car there was a delay. They heard it before they saw it: a slow rubbery creak, a squeak, then a patient, rhythmic gnawing, like somebody thoughtfully eating a spoon. It was La Baifa Voladora herself ⁓ the flying goat, earthbound again, her carob fee long since eaten ⁓ at work on the passenger-side mirror, thoroughly, unhurried, in the manner of a contractor who had been meaning to get to it for years. The man stood with his hand on the door. The goat did not look at him. She finished what the mirror had needed finishing ⁓ the housing crimped all the way around with little crescent bites, the glass swung to a new heading ⁓ and strolled back up toward the golf course without once checking what she was leaving behind.

"She likes the car," Tibor said, warm as ever, as if this settled several things.

The man looked at the mirror a moment, and set it straight. Then he got into the little car without answering, and the mirror, at its own rate, swung back to where the goat had decided it went ⁓ so that what it showed him now, and would show him the whole way home, was nothing at all but the night sky over the road. The door made its tin sound.

"Come for the finale next time," Tibor said to the closed window, with perfect sincerity. "There are always papas."

The Fiat started, sewing-machine dignified, and swung itself around, and took the dead road up the headland the way it had come down, at the speed of a man who had stopped being expected anywhere years ago. The road climbed in switchbacks. At every turn he touched the brakes, and when he touched the brakes, the brake lights lit, and the long word scratched across the back of the car came up red out of the dark ⁓ lit, and gone, lit, and gone, turn after turn, all the way up the hill, like something the car had decided to keep saying for him.

Saga read the word whole on the third flash: KREUZWEISE. She didn't speak German. Crosswise, is all it means ⁓ though it is also the tail end of a very old and extremely impolite instruction about where, exactly, a gentleman may kiss you, and the front half of that instruction, if you want it, was scratched across the hood, so that the little car had been driving around inside one rude sentence for eight years without its owner ever sanding away a letter of it. Saga filed the word the way she filed everything. She watched it go up the mountain in red flashes, patient as a lighthouse, until the one lit window took him back.

Up in the sand traps, La Baifa Voladora ⁓ back in her bunker, tasting of wing mirror ⁓ put her head up once, considered the coast, and put it down again.

The finale was the finale. Tibor came down into the shallow end with his clubs, the frosted ones he builds himself with a little sealed heart of circuitry in each, and turned them loose to drift through their colors, a slow aurora he could throw, and Yara answered him with the true fire, and for a while the two of them filled the bowl with it ⁓ the invented light and the older kind, arguing gently, agreeing completely ⁓ and the crowd made the sound crowds have made around fire since before there were crowds. The concrete gave back the day's heat. The fairy lights did their small faithful work in the rebar. Ten meters overhead, Maisie Ardilla raised her magnifying glass toward whatever the night was hiding, which is a detective's way of saying it will keep.

Afterward the night came down slowly, the way good ones do. Blankets folded. The Hidalgo cousins stacked the pews with the seriousness of pallbearers being paid in being seen. Doña Pino's basket went home lighter by every fig. Auxi was asleep before she finished claiming she wasn't, and was carried. Doña Pino, packing the empty basket, was already calling it la noche del vecino ⁓ the night of the neighbor ⁓ and the name walked up the coast road with the crowd, and somewhere before the trailhead it stopped being a joke and became simply what the night was called.

Saga sat on the warm concrete with her notebook and put the night away.

She wrote Katzenmusik, spelled the way it had sounded, because it had been said to everyone and belonged to anyone who caught it. Under it she wrote about the goat, and the fig held like evidence, and the cup nobody asked him if he wanted, and Tibor saying this is not nothing, to build the best of a thing, which she suspected was going to turn out to be about more than the pool, the way Tibor's sentences did.

Then she set the pen against the page to write the other word. The name that had landed on nothing.

She looked at it a while, the empty line.

She did not write it. Some things you keep by writing them down. Some things you keep by leaving the line empty and remembering why. She was thirteen, and she could already tell the difference, which is further along than most of us ever get.

The closer was hers now, officially, and she did it for the twenty or thirty still awake ⁓ the small chains with the candle cups, little circles, the goodnight piece, fire scaled down to the size of a kept promise. And somewhere in the second minute she noticed her own breathing. In over four. Held for seven. Out over eight, slow, the way Yara taught it on the sand with her hands flat on her knees ⁓ and she was three rounds in before she noticed she was doing them at all, because the rounds had arrived on their own, the way your name arrives when somebody says it right. Hers, without asking.

Across the deck, on the pool steps, Yara sat with Torbe asleep against her hip, blue and ancient and entirely satisfied with his evening, and watched her do it.

She saw Saga notice. Saga saw her see.

Neither of them said anything, and it was the whole conversation, and it was enough. The candles went around, small and sure, drawing their circles on the dark, and up the hill the white house kept its one window lit a while longer, and then it didn't, and the island held everybody, the way it does.