Everything You Need: Short Stories Read online

  Why couldn’t he hear the other hand clapping?

  He spent the afternoon on one of the benches that stood on the cliff overlooking Twin Lakes beach. There was nothing much to see. The weather was cool and it was a weekday. Every now and then a jogger would huff along the waterline, living the dream. Over the course of four hours, eleven people walked one way or the other accompanied by dogs, one of them flouting the rule that said canines on this beach had to be kept on leash. Unfortunately, they encountered someone coming from the other direction who took exception to their behavior. There was a discussion that rapidly accelerated into a shouting match. The words were not audible from a distance, only the mutual anger. It ended with the two parties storming off in different directions.

  Not much happened after that.

  Eventually Tony became aware that daylight was fading, and a low fog coming in off the bay.

  When he next noticed, the fog had crept most of the way up the beach and it was the other side of twilight. It had also started to drizzle. He looked at his watch.

  Twenty after six. Klara would be home.

  As he was standing up, he saw something. Down on the beach, a couple of hundred yards away, a small group of people were standing together. Four of them. All wore dark clothing. It was impossible to tell from where Tony stood — and they were mixed up in the fog — but it looked like they were wearing suits. Odd attire for a stroll along the beach in the coming dark, but in Santa Cruz stranger things have happened, and doubtless will again.

  Tony walked up 14th to the junction. He had to wait several minutes to cross East Cliff Drive. There was an unusual amount of traffic, many of them dark cars of similar size, none of which seemed inclined to let him cross, despite his standing right up on the curb.

  He eventually made it to the other side. He glanced across at the taqueria as he started up his block, vaguely thinking that maybe tacos would be good again tonight, and saw it was slammed in there too. Usually a busy night for the Taqueria Michoacan meant two or at most three people ahead of you in line. Right now he couldn’t even see the counter or soda fridge in there, the space was so crammed full of people. One of them was facing out and looking through the window. His pale, expressionless face didn’t move, but his eyes swiveled to follow Tony’s progress. This so unnerved Tony that he forgot to glance back and check the building on the corner. It didn’t matter. He was done caring about that place.

  Klara’s car was in the driveway. Tony realized his absence would provoke comment. He rubbed his face quickly with his hands, trying to warm it.

  He let himself in and trotted up the stairs. The sitting room was sporadically lit by dim lamps around the walls. Klara was sitting on the sofa, in the middle of the right arm, as was her custom.

  There were two men, one in a suit, sitting in the middle of the other. They were in conversation. Another man was sitting in the middle of the U. He was looking at the screen of something that looked like a very thin iPad. The other two men stopped talking and looked over at him, as if waiting for information.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Klara asked.

  ‘Walking,’ Tony said. ‘Who the hell are these guys?’

  ‘Um, what?’

  Tony indicated the men on the sofa. Klara turned to look, then back at him with a quizzical look on her face. ‘Are you talking about the lamps?’

  ‘No,’ Tony said. ‘The guys. The men.’

  He was distracted by a movement on the right, and turned to see a woman walking along the hallway toward the main bedroom. She vanished around the corner into the darkness, as if on the way to perform an errand.

  ‘Seriously, Klara — what the fuck?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, very calmly. ‘I was hoping you were going to explain it to me.’

  ‘Explain what?’

  ‘The fridge.’

  ‘The fridge? What about it?’

  ‘I tell you what, Tony. You go into the kitchen, then come back, and tell me what about it.’

  Tony could feel he was being pulled off course, and that whatever had happened to the fridge couldn’t be anywhere near as important as the question of what these people were doing in their house, but he could tell also that Klara was in one of her quietly combative moods. Fine. Play it her way.

  He strode into the kitchen. Three men sat around the table, having what appeared to be a meeting. None of their faces looked quite right.

  He saw immediately what Klara meant about the fridge, though. All the food was still laid out in neat rows on the floor on the floor in front of it. Christ. When he’d left the house, he’d evidently just stood up and walked out. He’d forgotten to put it all back.

  Okay, that had been dumb. But she could have put it back when she found it.

  He went back into the sitting room. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I was... clearing it out. I got distracted, forgot about it. I’ll put it back now.’

  ‘That would be good,’ she said, very calmly.

  ‘Yeah, okay. I’ll do it just as soon as...’

  Tony stopped talking. Up until the moment he’d started saying the word “soon”, the three men had still been sitting on the sofa. Now... they weren’t.

  They’d gone. Just blinked out of sight.

  ‘Now what?’ Klara asked. She sounded tired.

  Tony hurried back into the kitchen. There was no-one at the table in there now. Just the lines of food, leading out from the fridge.

  The doorbell rang.

  The sound of this always caused Tony to flinch. It was an old doorbell and it didn’t work well. What had been designed as a musical sequence of bell sounds had degraded over the years into a discordant and drawn-out cacophony. This time it sounded worse than usual.

  He stepped back into the sitting room. Klara was sitting looking at him, making no move to stand. Clearly she felt he was going to answer it.

  ‘Aren’t you going to?’

  ‘What?’ she said. She didn’t look like she’d even heard the bell.

  He opened the door and clomped down the stairs. When he got to the bottom he could see three men standing outside. He opened the door. Cold air came in.

  ‘It’s working again now,’ the man in front said. He, like the others, was wearing dark glasses. All had short, curly hair.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You won’t see anything like that again,’ the man said. ‘We apologize for the inconvenience.’

  Tony wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Whether it was the building down on the corner, or the men and woman up in their house. Or maybe even the people who’d been crowding out the taqueria, or the unusual number of cars driving along the road. The feeling the world had this evening, of being much fuller than he’d realized, as if there were always people there whose presence he’d previously been unaware of. Who’d always been there, and very close by. He realized that none of the men in front of him were wearing dark glasses after all. There was merely something about their eyes that performed the same function. That hid them. That clouded their effects, muffled or negated the sound of the impact they had on the world. These people were single hands, silently not-clapping, but still present for hundreds of years.

  ‘Are you... always around?’

  ‘In a way,’ the man said. ‘But not one that should concern you. It really would be better just to accept that the problem has gone away.’

  He stepped to the side. The motion revealed a vehicle out on the street, its engine running. Even in the darkness it was easy to see it was the car that had been inside the building on the corner. Curdled yellow light leaked from its headlamps, sparkling in the drizzle. Two further men sat in the back, but it was a very big car. The inference was clear. There was plenty of room for them, the men at the door... and Tony.

  ‘I’ll tell,’ Tony said, impotently.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ the man said. ‘It won’t go well. She won’t believe you. Nobody will.’

  The men turned as one and walked down the dr
ive to the waiting car. Tony watched as they got in. The car reversed back up the road, far too quickly and smoothly.

  When he was sure it wasn’t coming back, he shut the door and ran upstairs. Klara was sitting with her arms folded. She was alone in the house and it no longer looked or felt as if there was anybody else there, or ever had been.

  ‘We need to talk,’ Tony said.

  ‘Yes, we do,’ she said, looking relieved.

  She did not believe him. He did, however, eventually believe what she went on to tell him about her and one of her male colleagues, and all the late meetings that had turned into something else.

  For a time he clung on, emailing, rewriting. The bug that existed between them, hidden somewhere in the lines that looked so grammatical, resisted detection. He kept watch the building on the corner meanwhile, but there was no car inside now, no tape over the panel on the stairs, and nothing interesting ever happened.

  After a while he found it harder to see, not least as there were more pressing things to worry about. Structures collapse remarkably quickly.

  Job, wife, house, life. It crashes fast when it crashes. Soon he left Live Oak.

  Now he lives around downtown.

  By the end of the second coffee, Tony had become incoherent. I left him to it. I’ve seen him on the streets since, several times, but he has made no attempt to talk to me again. He thinks I’m not really listening, and he’s right.

  I said this was his story. I didn’t say I believed it. I don’t. You shouldn’t either.

  That would be best.

  The Good Listener

  I got into Santa Cruz just after noon, an easy three-hour drive up from Big Sur. My mood was murky and I found Santa Cruz’s road system difficult to parse once I got off the highway, so I asked the rental car to negotiate the last few miles by itself. The nav was so accustomed to me feeding it very specific route instructions – gleaned from the itinerary, reconstructed from location services data off my father’s phone – that it asked if I was sure about this. I said I was, and it told me that it would guide me to the Dream Inn by the most efficient means it could determine. I said that would be fine. In the meantime it spooled my notes up onto the windshield because that’s what I’d asked for every day at this point. I knew what they held for this evening so I just turned the wheel and pressed the gas and tapped the brake and watched out the window as the car piloted me smoothly toward the ocean, the last stop on my journey, and its one small mystery.

  I remember the first truly adult thing my father said to me. I would have been around fifteen and we were on the deck after an evening meal at home. I asked him why he didn’t say much at such family events – except, because I was fifteen, what I actually said was along the lines of why was he so quiet and why didn’t he join in the conversation like other people’s more fun and engaged dads but instead sit there looking like he was thinking about something else the whole damned time. He was leaning against the rail smoking a cigarette and looking out into the woods and after a moment he turned and looked at me, coolly, but with something I later came to understand was a measured and long-game kind of love.

  He said: ‘There came a point when you and your sister had started talking and I realized that with the two of you and your mom there was just never going to be that much dead air in the family, and I could either fight to get every damned sentence out . . . or not.’

  I don’t remember my reply. I’m sure it was smart and would have earned a high five from my school buddies for getting off a good one against the older generation, but I doubt it was thoughtful or polite. This would have been around late 2011, early 2012.

  Six years later my parents split after my mom hooked up with a colleague. In 2020 the divorce went through. I remember my mom making a joke at the party that evening – her arm around said colleague – about how finally she’d got twenty-twenty vision of reality back. I didn’t laugh. By then I was at college and had started to dimly appreciate that the world was a little more complicated than I’d thought. It just also seemed mean-spirited.

  On November 14 of 2025, my dad was killed in a car accident.

  The Dream Inn stands on a cliff above Cowell Beach, somewhere you’ve heard of if you’re a surfer. It and Steamer Lane just up the road are meccas for those who are into the sport, which does not include me. The hotel stands upon the cliff and hangs over it, in fact: a draping 1960s-styled structure re-gooded into boutique hotel status twenty years ago, and still doing well.

  I put my car in the lot opposite – there was no entry for valet parking on my dad’s bill for his stay, so I assumed that was what he’d done too – and carried my bag across the road. I checked into the room next to the one he’d had, for three nights. I put the suitcase on the bed and went out onto the balcony to look at the sea. It was sunny and clear, and I could see all the way across the bay to Monterey. From the eighth floor, all you could hear was the sound of waves and the barking of sea lions.

  I took my dad’s phone out of my pocket and held it in my hand. It had been in my possession for five months, from the day when we all visited his place in the week after his death. As we stood in his little apartment wondering what we were supposed to be feeling and how on earth to articulate it, I noticed the phone on the table by the window. It was part of the collection of belongings that had been salvaged from his car after the wreck, and it caught my eye because it was the same one he’d had the first time I’d come to visit him in the city, after the divorce became final. He’d moved back to New York three months before and we’d gone walking around Greenwich Village and then sat drinking coffees outside some place he’d evidently become familiar with.

  He took me by surprise in two ways. First, by talking. It wasn’t like he said so much, but he said something. I’d undertaken the trip out of a feeling of duty and because the party my mom had held made me feel uncomfortable. I had not expected much of the visit. I certainly hadn’t expected him to sit asking me questions and apparently engaging with the answers.

  I was also struck by the fact the phone he’d put on the table was brand spanking new, in fact the same model that I had myself. I commented on this.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ he said, looking sheepish. ‘I don’t have communication on tap like I did in the old days. Have to make more effort myself.’

  After that the conversation dried up and it felt more like business as usual.

  The phone on the table by the window in his apartment was the exact same one, looking a little battered and bordering on retro, what with it being five years old now. I slipped it in my pocket without asking my mom or sister if that was okay. I figured they wouldn’t care. I’m sure I was right.

  I spent the first day in Santa Cruz following the itinerary as closely as possible, as I had throughout the trip. I went to the two coffee shops he’d stopped at and also the restaurant where he’d taken lunch. I matched the times as best I could, though I ate and drank what I wanted. The second-hand bookstore he’d visited was closed for the day. I couldn’t be sure exactly what period he’d spent in it, but I walked away a couple of minutes after four, the time at which his accounts logged that he’d paid $26.14 (including tax) for a book on local history.

  Early evening I ate a burger in a place called Betty’s on Pacific, the main drag. Again I ate what I wanted, which is what he would have done. Then I went back to the hotel. It was still early but it appeared he’d done that too, according to a Speke logged at 9:34 which told the world — or the portion of it listening on that social network — that he was about to turn in. Tired, I guess. He’d been nearly thirty years older than I was now, of course.

  I don’t know how it went for him, but it took me a while to get to sleep. Tomorrow was the last-but-one day of the trip, and also the big one.

  Not the last day, but the day with the hole.

  I gradually started to visit him more often in NYC. On one of these trips about a year and a half ago he mentioned how he’d always wanted to make the drive up from L
.A. to San Francisco up the Pacific Coast Highway, and now he was going to go ahead and do it. I asked him whether most people didn’t make the journey the other way, heading south. Aha, he said, but if you drove north then the driver got the best view of the sea all the way. Of course if you shared the driving you’d have to share that too, but there’d be other advantages.

  It was too subtle for me. I didn’t get it.

  By the time I realized he’d been issuing a low-key invitation, he was already dead. I was real busy at work and even if I’d got it then I would have said I didn’t have the time. Things were sufficiently affable enough between us by that point that I would have gone ahead and made the mistake of thinking it’d be no big deal if I didn’t go.

  I would have assumed there would be some other time.

  My dad’s phone lay in a drawer in my house for five months after he died. Then one night, for some reason, it occurred to me to take it out. I guess I was missing him or something, maybe regretting all the silences there had been, now there was no way of ever filling them.

  As I held the phone in my hands a thought occurred to me. I dug in another of my drawers and sure enough, found the charger I’d owned for the same model of phone. The stores may be full of new tech but there’s an awful lot of the old stuff still knocking around in people’s homes. I slotted the charger in the wall and plugged the other end in the phone, savoring the old-school vibe of having to connect power to a device by wires, rather than just dropping it on an inductance pad.

  Seconds later the screen blinked into life. I pressed the virtual home button. It pinged and the OS locked onto the free neighborhood wifi and started bleating about the million software updates that had happened in the intervening months. I paused them all, not wanting to change the state of the phone as it had been on the day he died.