A Kiss After Dying by Ashok Banker

Author:Ashok Banker [Banker, Ashok]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2022-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

31

There are almost two dozen of them, packed into Mel’s apartment, sitting on the bed, couch, squatting cross-legged on the rug, leaning against the furniture. They’re a fairly typical cross-section of Cal folk: I know a couple of them by first name, a few more by sight, but several I’ve never seen before. They’re all colors, all mixes, even a half-dozen white kids. I don’t need a pamphlet to tell me what their common cause is: antifascism. I punch Nazis, and I like it! A bunch of them even have the half-masks with the skull-face dangling around their necks, like they might need to be ready to mask up and wade into action right here in Mel’s living room in case Nazis start popping up out of the cracks.

Mel makes a sound like a person shooing away gnats and comes over to me, her face twisting irritably. ‘You should have texted.’

‘I was just cruising by,’ I lie. I deliberately dropped in uninvited to see if my suspicions were founded.

I’ve been noticing Mel acting weird the past week or two. Ever since Monty announced that he was hosting Ansel Énard for a special session of the DClub Talks. The Democracy Club Talks are an institution unto themselves, a regular feature of Cal U dating back, oh, like a hundred years or so. It’s a famous forum for controversial speakers on a variety of topics. A tenured prof can invite one speaker each year. Monty chose Énard. The minute Monty announced his speaker, Mel’s face turned bright red; several of the lab peeps, even the new batch of interns, wore varying expressions of outrage, shock, betrayal, disappointment, disbelief. One surfer-dude-type from Malibu even laughed, thinking Monty was joking. When he realized he wasn’t, he stared blankly at the ceiling for a good ten minutes, like he was scanning for a reason that helped him make sense of it.

But it’s Mel whose reaction troubled me the most. Which is why I’m making this unannounced visit tonight, despite her clearly telling me this afternoon at the lab that she had ‘this thing she can’t get out of’ with her brother and suggesting we hook up tomorrow.

‘You should have called,’ she hisses to me, grabbing my arm and trying to lead me back the way I came. ‘It’s not a good time.’

‘Which one’s your brother?’ I ask, still playing the part. ‘Is it some kind of family thing?’

‘I’ll explain later,’ she says soothingly, making a shooing gesture, ‘right now, you need to go, OK?’

‘Oh God, I didn’t mean to interrupt,’ I say. Aloud to the roomful of intense, suspicious faces: ‘Sorry to barge in, guys! I was just passing by and thought I’d stop and see my girl here.’

Nobody responds. A few are either looking at the floor, the wall, their phones, or anywhere but at me. One tall, red-haired dude, the man who was speaking when I walked in, tracks me with hot-coal eyes burning into me from the instant I walk into the room till the time I exit to the hallway.

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