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Those of the World - Witness - Audience - Reader - Normal Men
It has good acoustics.
Lost in thought and lost in feeling Char Aznable is numb down to his bone and up his ears when he hears those words and the muted delay that parses them as words meant for him bring him up from the still image of where his eyes settled in distant space. He had a lot on his mind, and he had surrendered some part of the here and now to the what-if and could-be; consequence of new developments in his life.
He looks up from his piano’s bench, worn and broken in leather breaking black to mildew white as he shuffles, and sees the origin of those words.
Club Eden goes through workers like war itself. The hunt for wages amidst increase tax burdens and import taxes as placed by the Federation on Side 3 in an economic aggression that was only but one card of many in its subjugation of the Spacenoid has given Club Eden a long line of applicants, and unfortunately, a long line of those leaving from the service it required:
Long nights, hard work, loud and crass. The men are spat upon, the women are groped and taken for as they pass by as waiters and busboys. Most times it’s the customers and the visitors, but sometimes it’s each other. Char does his time on the floor even when he’s not performing, singing bird as he is and talent that is advertised in that underground, stony basement turned bar in Zum of Munzo, existent, but hiding it felt from the long shadow of its rulers and their distant installations whose shadow extended far beyond the pale blackness upon the colony’s surface.
The waitstaff, the bouncers, those in line in the kitchen and those who clean and fix that place, they are for Char, save for the most veteran and the managers, the same person with shifting faces and shifting heights and names that he has long since stopped trying to track.
Early on in his position here he had kept look of them, trying to see for faces that seemed interested in him; tracking him, but none ever stuck because the work there had been brutal. Everyone had been a replacement of a replacement, below him, who had become irreplaceable.
It is a young man who speaks, standing in the dark of dimly lit Eden. Unremarkable in form and in appearance beneath such light, a white shirt, an apron, dusted black hair unruly as he pushed upon a wet rag along the shined, chipped surface of a table, a particular table, where a one princeling of a ruling order sat and stared out upon the stage which Char sat now.
Char had seen this young man a thousand times. If not him particularly, but always in concept. They are the youth of Zum, like him, had it not been for the position of his birth he could’ve found himself shoulder to shoulder: unremarkable. A face in the crowd or a body of a population.
Char sits there a long time as the feeling of having to return to the then and now seeps back into him, his head tilted and having stared at the man longer than he intended.
Long nights have their toll on even him.
It has good acoustics. The young man repeats, mistaking his stare for a question of repetition. In the tenor of his voice and the way that he shuffles, wringing out his rag of soapy water onto the table where Garma Zabi oft prefers his presence there in Club Eden, Char identifies him of an age no greater than his own. His hands are worn, and they are well familiar with a rag as they polish and clean Garma’s table with a particular care that’s considerate and yet swift. Over the surface, the squeak of it echoes.
“Hm.” Char grunts once, blinking several times to rid the haze over his mind that has taken him.
Maybe that’s why that Garma comes, don’t you think?
In his hand crumpled are bars and lyrics, half-scribbles to music of his own and readjustments for the band for their sets to more properly play with their half-good instruments in that too loud place. Here, in the day, Club Eden is quiet. It’s why he comes here even on his off-days sometimes. This life, more than anything, was not his own in ways from benign to the lethal. The name of Char Aznable was not his own, and taken, but the talent on that stage which he had scrounged up, taken into himself from advice and from work and from performance, refining a mechanical, technical skill that people sometimes thought had too creative at times.
This was a dance, and it was a dance because it had steps to follow.
Char looks upon the young man as he goes from Garma’s table, as if polishing it specifically because it had been the youngest son’s preferred position, and then he moved on. He moved in light and in shadow, beneath light bulbs threatening to go forever dim and those too bright in contrast. In this light, Char Aznable sees his face, his eyes, but cannot put a name to this unremarkable man who saw fit to speak to him idly. A failure on his part, Char thinks. He’d been getting too soft around the edges for the sake of Garma, too pliable, too willing to fit into an image that he has assumed.
Garma Zabi came into his life by calculation and by charm; by the target of eyes and the hilt of his voice that spoke of words spoken in midnight durance, not to a crowd, but to him in particular.
Within Char Aznable had been a man of a goal so terrible he could not speak it, so he sings in other tones, because it masks that which within him that wants Garma Zabi closer, closer, close enough for his hands to be on his flesh. Close enough, that, in that instance days ago, he had been on his knees, in his own apartment in a place where princes didn’t belong and satisfied him so to a new order of things between them.
It was exhausting.
The papers within his hand were flattened out, put back onto its stand on the piano’s head, and soon the young man is at a table near the stage, looking up at him.
This close, he can see the freckles on his face, stars in his eyes hidden behind glasses that spoke of blue yonders. Blue eyes, like his own.
“Have we met?” Char idly goes back, remembering where he is and flipping a bone white page from back to front as if observing its detail in the same way the young man seemed to observe him.
No. I’m, ah, new around here. Just last week, actually.
“Hm.” Char mumbles again beneath his throat. Had he been one of those rare sorts who had known of him? Obsessed with him to the point of coming to Club Eden’s envoy to be closer to him? It wouldn’t be the first time, and if that was the case he’d be gone in the day when the shift manager showed up and he would say something. “Do you need something?” He breaths, and the intent so precisely placed in his air and in his words speaks that he does not want to be talked to.
The young man gets it, looking away with his rag and going to the next table. No. Just trying to make small talk, is all.
“I’m practicing.”
Last ten minutes you were asleep. The young man points out and suddenly his mind does concur that, in those last few moments he had been gone in his own self. Char scrunches his nose, a hand going to his thigh and his nails digging through his chinos. Red hot pain, but it is pain he is used to. Pain is familiar to him and he wouldn’t dare draw his own blood. He just cleaned this pair yesterday.
I figure there’s no harm in chatting to keep you awake. I know back on Earth, driving those long highways over in North America, sometimes all you could do is just talk to stay awake driving on them.
Oh? That had gotten his attention more than anything, this unremarkable man. “You’re from Earth?”
Guilty as charged.
The young man seemed hardly bothered, drying out his hands as he patted down upon his blue apron bearing Club Eden’s faded signature. Out from his pocket, a flask, small enough to have in there, inconspicuous.
Got deported about six months ago. Just me. Told the officer in charge of my case that I had no skills so they sent me out here to Side 3, he said.
The silence between them is of Char’s accord as the young man sucked back a slug and exasperated in satisfaction. Just water. He nodded. If he were lying Char could not tell, and that had bothered him greatly. He had been a liar all his life, he knew of its stench and the man had smelled more of cleaning supplies.
“My condolences.” Is what Char can give at least, softly enough. To be taken from Earth and its Gravity, it’s no small loss; not a tragedy that could be taken so easily. If in his flask had been hard alcohol he would understand. “Your name?”
He told him.
He spoke with a clean voice, one that had been refined in some place in the past, that much Char’s ear can pick up. The comment he had made about acoustics, about knowing the sound, he had not been quite wrong. Club Eden is acoustically isolated from the world outside by its place underground, the great brick and barrel of its construction soaking up ugly reverb and offering a clean, albeit controlled sound that had done much to improve word itself. It was an articulate sound, but not a sound unkind to music as was in that hall.
“How do you know anything about acoustics?”
The young man settled back upon that table, a slight tilt to it settled as he looked up upon Char. He told him that he had once been a choir boy in a church named Saint Matthews upon the Earth, and that he had been a happy choir boy and good child of the church until the priest was not of God and instead found himself in congress with the daughter of the flock no more than twelve years of age, and when the town came for him there had been no holy institution left and no power that could save the man as he fell upon his cross and the church burned for it.
I had a voice, the young man nodded, but I’ve been out of practice, and any song I could sing no one around here would listen to.
“I’m always looking for backup vocals.” Char turned back to the piano as if to divine in himself whether or not he was serious. The young man had a better voice than him and he hadn’t even heard it sing. The point of it all, him being there, a singer, was that he had been the star. He. Not anyone else.
It’s not my show, the young man said, raising his hands as if caught with accusation.
It’s yours.
Char sees him more still as he plays through those days. He does not include himself in men or in women unnecessarily, and the young man does not seem keen to try. They fall in the routine of worker and singer as it had been for a hundred others that worked there in Eden, collecting their wages, and working their roles. For that, the young man is a tolerable presence.
It was always a part of his own conduct as a singer, and to himself. Playing hard to get was still in his retinue, but perhaps that paradigm had been harder when recent events had put upon him a brand, or rather, a cover photo.
How thrilling. (The desire of those who had wanted to challenge a prince for him.)
On that cover photo depicted a daylight outing of him and none other than Garma Zabi. Garma-fucking-Zabi, his foot daintily rested upon the foot rack of a shopping cart, caught in candid as Char himself looked down upon him, over his shoulder, looking at a list that became scandalous only because of its capture in image. The image itself reeks of paparazzi and its paronomasia; he never saw any of their takers.
In less than fifty words it tells a story, even if shrouded in non-committal statements and debasing language befit of gob magazines and those who read them.
Young, gorgeous talent, Char Aznable has caught the eye of Garma Zabi, son of the Sovereign, and they were so intwined so far that they went out for groceries together.
In that subject a thousand rumors and topics were put to the air and they storm up until Orion rode over above the colony and down again each night, coalescing in Club Eden as more and more came to see the curiosity of a singer, and a prince. In those turbulent times, Universal Century 0078, everyone needed their fey wild fairytales. His mother once, long ago, read to him and his sister of those type of fables. Artesia enjoyed them, but he had been ambivalent to them as a child. What he craved instead was his mother’s voice, lulling him to sleep.
He’s been having trouble sleeping recently.
No help to the man who sits so splendidly in a booth he has become too comfortable in. The table before him shines. “They know my order by now.” Garma Zabi speaks, so looking at the nicest tall boy glass they have and the sweet water within it. He is so amused by that fact he does not see what Char does: the Zeon security service agents that come into the club silently, one who looks at the stairway entrance that descends into Eden from one side of the room, and another by it who looks inward and all those who partake in that place. He’s not sure if Garma knows they are there.
“They should.” Char’s words, honeyed and enticing and as always with Garma, just for him, they dip, and he hadn’t meant it. Garma picks it up as his smile remains but it lessens, looking up at him as he puts his butt so very much so on that table that had been shined just for Garma. Garma dares, even in front of a crowd that tries their best not to look at them, packed as Eden is and trying to put up appearances that Garma Zabi is not among their regulars and in tonight. The princeling’s hand darts to a place Char cannot see, and if he had been so bold to grab his ass then his evaluation of how willing Garma was wanting to go after a single blowjob was miscalculated. But the man had his decorum, even if his touch was tantalizing, the broad of his palm warm and steady is at the base of his back.
The table below scuffs.
“You look exhausted,” Garma says, looking up to him as if he had been his whole world.
The sickness that lurches within Char’s core wakes him up fully, but his face does not change for it. “I’m not.” Char lies.
It was either look at Garma, or weather Artesia’s glare. She was in tonight, in her place in the band when she played with them. She was a passable musician, and her brother had more than covered. This bar had been historical in their family for them, and if they had been bad none would politely let them know unless dire, but those days had been long gone and the two of them had taken to the mantle of their mother for midnight wage.
So, he looks at Garma, face warm, but flashing between concern and settlement as he lets Char has his lie, even as the touch on his back squeezes reassuringly and goes to the drink instead, looking at it slyly.
“This’ll be the last time I can come out to see you for a while.” Garma admits, and there is softness there despite the sound of the world: The piano tonight is grating to his ears, unheard to anyone else. The reason being because the pianist is his sister. In piano note she calls for him back angrily, and angrily more, tension building and building as if evoking for vocals, but she still keeps up appearances. Char Aznable knows Sayla Mass’s rage, because they are of the same blood, and they boil at the same point. She plays on, longer after giving up in her playing. The longer she goes means the longer he has to spend with him, for there are two stages that night: the stage itself, and here, before Garma.
“Oh? Well, I’ll be sure to put on my best show tonight before you get on back to world domination.” Char intwines, breathing lightly as his eyebrows playfully pulse and he shimmies his head as if an active man, an active puppet of his own control to put on an act as he had in his life since his father died, so long ago, because of this man’s father.
“I’d rather prefer you have stayed home and let me know you were under the weather. I would’ve taken care of you.” He speaks, barely louder than the glassy keys and the mumble of conversation.
Garma had not come back to his place ever since their first sexual tryst, and Char is not quite sure if he could stomach another. “You’re cute.” And all the subtleties of implication, narrowed eyes down at the man that had captured Eden. Garma meets him in eyes and gaze alone, silent between them.
A woman nears and as he feels her close, he knows who she is. Madeline, working as she is tonight with the low dip of her shirt and her bra, well already stuffed and contained within it the fruits of her labors so early, cants over as her heels click above it all. Char doesn’t turn as she takes his arm and plants a cigarette scented kiss upon the corner of his mouth quickly as an excuse to get by his ear. “Hey, babe, you’ve got about thirty before your sister raises hell.” She is in top form tonight based on performance and mood as she cockily does as she does to Char, right in front of Garma-fucking-Zabi. She’s always been bold and is thus one of Char’s favorites, and if there is a laugh they share it is silent and fleeting and fast as Garma takes an eyeful of it and huffs amusement himself.
“We wouldn’t want that, would we?” The name of the club could only be defiled so much.
“Well, go on then,” Garma leans back into the leather of the booth. “Put on a show.”
His show.
The piano raises, and this time, there is no turning back. As he moves off the table he notices parked on it is that same magazine with the cover. “I’ll take this.” Char says, reaching across. “I don’t know how you deal with all this undue attention.”
Garma stops him, taking his hand before threading his fingers in them once, letting just one more nice moment between them go by before he lets go. “I’m used to it, dear Char.” There is no sobriquet for Char from Garma. As far as Garma knows, all that he is is Char Aznable.
Char no longer reaches out, and he reels back back onto the floor proper, and all eyes are on him. The same act has to continue as his longer hair flows in his haste, and the hand that cards through is one that his shadow mimics. In it, he graces, those who came; the regulars, the newbies, the women and the men and the soldiers and the salary men and the curious and the innocent and those who did not care at all. With his hands he brushes their forms in shoulder touches and in returned gazes himself. For all that the servers, the hosts, the hostesses and the whores have made Club Eden where they lie, it has become a battlefield, and, here, walking among those who did not come here for him but for wage and work, he feels the closest to home then he has in his twenty years alive. They, who walk to serve, are more like him than they would ever know; as was his belief. Because he, in the end, was a man of different color.
He steps up on the stage, his long legs on for their own display as he drags it out and looks upon the crowd before him.
His sister burns holes into him as he steps up, her fingers on fire, and her face cold, turned toward a fight that she would never win but he would never admit victory himself in.
“You’re going to be the death of me.” Sayla Mass tells her brother as the saxophonist tonight jeers.
“Only thing that’ll kill either of you dead is lightning outta the sky, and even then it’s gotta strike twice.” The saxophonist had been living in their drama, but as the band revels, Char raises his fingers in a barely perceptible signal that calls upon all the players like dogs. Their playing the next half of the night as if royalty was watching. (Because royalty was). Behind him the bassist groans and swears and the saxophonist chuckles again. Sayla Mass is silent.
“For those of you who really want me on your cover, how about you get my good side, this time?” Char holds the microphone in his hand as he twirls the line of it around one hand, crafting his body in motion to every angle upon the stage as he walks and gives the audience what they want. They want him, they want his eyes, his skin, his ass and his affection. They want him on their arms and attending to them and singing just for them tonight. This is how he captures them. Shutters go off, people laugh at the open topic of gossip and paparazzi. His finger starts the rhythm so casually, strings rolling to that pace as they are plucked. “I don’t mind the limelight, just try not to make our highness here jealous. Who knows what will happen to you?” And his eyes gaze to the Zeon security agents to his right, and then at the door, and then finally to Garma himself, who is shocked to be finally in plain word called out, and as the crowd laughs and raises a toast to him, he smiled, he laughs, he raises a hand as if it could deflect attention, and then as he was since that party long ago, his attention falls upon Char Aznable.
All the world looks at Char, save for the workers, the servers.
And as he begins and his voice warms to the volume of performance, the young man appears from the dark where he once was at Garma’s side and he wipes down the table, and takes the magazine into under his arm, and then moves on.
Garma doesn’t even notice the man.
They would never cross paths again.
Char sings, as he was expected to. He sings to Garma Zabi, and everyone believes themselves Garma that night. He sings to the stars, to the flashes of cameras seeing Garma’s new supposed arm candy at work. He sings to the life he has found and to the opportunities before him. He sings for his place on the stage because no one else could be in his position because he was Char Aznable, the talent from Side 5 who came to Side 3, who sings pretty songs and curls his pretty hair and accepts the pretty gifts that petty people who think their chance is alive give him. In his golden hair people are entranced, and they put themselves before him as if he had been priest to an order, and many were willing to speak their sins or give him tribute. He accepts, he listens, and he never forgets because he has a plan, burning in his heart like a red comet.
But would it be so nice to not be him, Char thinks, as, for the first time in hundreds of nights, his mind wanders. Because of exhaustion. Because of Garma. But his mind wanders to an idea of a life where he was not Char Aznable, or Casval Rem Deikun.
At the night’s pace, the young man goes from table to table as each finish their arrangement ordered, and he, without notice or without being called for gathers up the plates into his implement and with each clink of ceramic it joins his tone.
He is not noticed.
How nice it would be, Char’s mind wanders until the final note, the final word.
“Thank you!” He screams, and the crowd cheers. All of them save Garma: who looks upon his place with a dreamy look in his eyes so honest that it is the calm reprieve of storm epicenters. “That’s all we’ve got, and all I am!” He gestures to the lenses, to the cameras who look upon him and those who are trying to read him. “Tip your bartenders, thank your waiters, how about you give a fuck about them for once?!” It comes out ferocious and in the cacophony of crescendo ending from the band, the rage that turned to fury in his heart and came out of his mouth is but boasting and celebration and the crowd roars with him.
That night, Char does not slip out the back. That night, Char stays. That night, Garma says goodbye to him as he leaves Club Eden before him, pressing a kiss so much more wanton in desire and affection than that of Madeline’s upon his lips and Char nearly bites his lips in return before almost pushing him away in such a way that Garma interprets as friendly.
He does not leave until the waiters, the bar tenders, the staff and the crew clean up, dress down, and attend for a night that goes on longer still. Char makes the excuse of breaking down for the band and helping them pack, but Sayla knows better. Char never does this, and as she herself is too exhausted to bring up her frustrations with him, all she can do is wish her older brother good night as he stays long until the first gooey blue skies unseen from Club Eden poke out from the colony’s weather system.
He stays, and he watches the workers, the young man, go about their work until they disappear into the night, and when they do, he finally is allowed to disappear himself.
In December, the young man talks to him again.
It was October when they spoke last.
You’re angry, the young man told him as he wiped down the tables again. New tables. More traffic meant more income. The floors hadn’t been as sticky, the tables far less broken, the glasses and cups far less cloudy. The work still needed to be done.
“You’re still here.” Char raises an eyebrow instead. His coat is new. Nicer. Not off of a department store rack but rather tailored to Garma’s design. He hangs it as he enters Club Eden, shedding a skin that he didn’t know could be shed. He was responsible for it, and yet he did not know of it. He’s been gone more often than not, galivanting upon the Sides with Garma and his family. Dates, Garma thinks of them. Char allows himself to think of them as such as well.
The young man nods, breaths, throws a rag over his shoulders and hands akimbo. Not that you’re making it any easier for us.
Char chuckles. “I’ll be sure to bring in less business.”
You’re angry, the young man says again. Plain as day. We all saw it.
“I have no idea what you mean.” With all his travelling along the sides Char, even while entertaining Garma at dinners, he hasn’t had time to really nail meaningful practice in his trade. He deposits his bag with his notes and his sheets upon the stage by the piano, and he assumes his place all the same as the young man leans on the table and looks up at him all the same. “You look like you have something to say.”
You may be playing for other people, but we hear it too. You’ve got a mean way about you, the way you sing, and who you’re singing too.
“If you’re in this place every night, of course my music might get old. I’m not offended.” Char brushes off. But the young man speaks for more.
Ain’t that, the man said. You got the right words, right voice, but it’s coming from a place that most don’t see save for those of us familiar. We know it is when it is. The man looked up at him and there was no accusation. Just concern. I’m speaking to you, as a man, to a man. You’re angry.
For all that time he had sung in Club Eden none had ever came to him about this, and if it were so obvious he was sure to have heard it before. The way his words were in the way they danced across the air, was that really the point of him being there for those who watched on? This young man who divined something wrong in him, he could only imagine it was a fluke, a whim. It was a wrong assumption and yet on his face the young man had thought it true because he thought it true in unison.
We all heard, and listened. We seen you. He spoke with the language of where he had come from, but it had more of Earthen tone in its origin. I ain’t been around long, but we compare notes, those who see you.
“You do like talking in mysteries, don’t you?” Char says in scorn.
From the kitchen, the words of those else in the back:
¡No enciendas una vela aquí, idiota!
¡Nos matarás a todos!
The young man’s face twists inward, and then outward, nodding to himself with a shake of his head.
No sir, not my intention. I’m just a normal man, born of Earth and cast out to here, same as any other feller around these parts.
Normal.
Of the people Char Aznable acquaints himself with none could be described as normal, and, he, of all, could not be told as normal. If there was a path in his life where he had been amongst those crowds of normal men, innocent men, he did not know if he would’ve taken it. Yet in their unremarkable stead they are below, yet apart from the destinies of the other.
They stand like that, a normal man, and he, Char Aznable, fresh from touring the Sides on the arm of Garma Zabi, looking to get back to some sort of rhythm, standing before those who he had barely remembered the name of. Behind him, the staff for the day go about their preparatory duties for the night to come as they had all nights before. They swirl around the pattern of tables, wiping them down and arranging the chairs in their order as one by one each new table is anointed with a candle. They look and watch as a woman with crow’s feet at the age of thirty gathers up from her arms candles held within a glass cup and puts it in the center of each round and perfect surface. The wicks are burnt, but they hold as she enkindles within her hand a flame from a match in her palm and lights them each aflame until there is an audience of candles gently baying against the mildew dark of Eden.
Each of those workers go on about what they are expected to do and at the end of their duties they look upon Char from their candlelight shadows. They are familiar yet unfamiliar to him, and yet in all the time he has sang, only they have heard him entirely. This revelation taken to him means nothing, for, in the end, they are as this man is: normal. The songs he sings are not for them, even if they have held them in their entirety for far longer than he would ever allow. Even Garma does not know them all. Even Sayla does not know them all.
They are his eternal audience: these normal men, these normal women.
I have a song for you, it’s written down here. The young man offers him a sheaf of papers, and before Char even looks upon it weighs like a cantata. Something that all of us here put together.
Char in his mind tries to summon a different song in his mind that lulled him to rest, but the dream world of Lalah Sune is so far away, and yet present all the same.
This was real, and the man and the women and the servants who went on about their duties as he practiced for his act all waited upon him as if in silent observance. Stirring, another waiter, speaking out from his wooden corner in jeer, speaking much too fast for Char, even for his knowledge of his language could not parse it complete as it rolled.
Parece que ha visto demonios. No tiene razón.
He’s just been travelling, is all, the young man said in response. Ain’t that right?
Char blinked several times. He was tired, and yet no rest came from sleep or from purpose. They could see it, all of them: those who he did not sing to. He held out his hands as if to steady the world but the world was already still.
Take a look, see if you like it.
On written staff he sees individual elements of music, names of things he knows and the line that flows from beginning to end. If he saw each part of it perfectly he did not know when he tried to look at the sheet in its full view. He shuffled through each, and it is music that goes on for nine acts completely. Overture to Crescendo and then Senna and to, at last-
He can’t read it.
He can read it, but his mind won’t let him as he closes his eyes and in the darkness there is reprieve. He groans, the papers fluttering closed upon themselves. The young man looks different now, curly hair and freckles and tired but the same man all the same.
“What’s it about?” Char asks the man instead to smooth this all over, to take it as a request like the hundreds of others that are written in his book that he too would not read. Maybe there would be special preference for those who worked in Club Eden.
He shrugged. It’s right there. And it was made for you.
“A summary then. I don’t like singing songs I don’t understand.”
The regular type of stuff, but it’s something we all know. Day-to-day life.
Embers purr, in the kitchen, the scrub of grease. Foreign language surrounds him in a way that he does not remember had been so prevalent in Club Eden. He hears modern languages and older folk tongues and hushed whispers responding to the language of fingers. They talk around him, and, he feels, he knows, as he holds their offering, they talk of him.
He’s been gone too long. He’s getting paranoid and not in the way that has to do with his ferment, his mission, who he had really been that had made sure that the life he lived was not going to be a normal one.
The dust of the brick is kicked up red from the floor and it is swept away with particulates floating in the air around in waves until they dissipate forever.
You only gotta sing it once, the young, curly haired man said. It would mean a lot to us if you finished it through.
Normal men, innocent men.
Char Aznable had enshrined himself in the shadows of the guilty all his life. He did not know what to do with the innocent, because in all of the world’s turning he did not intwine himself with the innocent, for all those that did come in his life were held accountable to sins which had burned him so. Char Aznable did not know what to do with innocence.
“I’ll sing it.” Char says without looking at the sheaf again. “At some point. Just for you.”
Not just for me, for all of us.
“Sure. Sure.”
He turned away, and the invisible crowd went on.
He got no practice done that day. All he could was try to read what was given to him, and as night came he had been on a stage that he was not scheduled for, and when he had left there was great disappointment in that crowd.
On his phone had been a text from Garma, which was an odd thing to consider, after all this time, the princeling of Zeon had traded photos and texts with him as if he had been just any other boyfriend on the block, and they had been of pictures and candids taken on those vacation. On Island Iffish, sunshine and beach. He in a floral pattern shirt taken upon the night where he had been staring at the horizon of the colony as if there had been one and not the dark border where those could pretend that there had been world beyond it and not the curvature of manmade places. Garma loves the photo, how stoic and mysterious of him, he tells him in word, and those words Char can read, because they are words of Garma’s origin. He can think of his problems no longer as he looks at himself staring out against a known dark world, and returns to his apartment just as he left it, Zack, feline occupant of his apartment, greets him, but that too falls upon deaf ears as Char Aznable finds his bed and falls upon it and wishes for a woman to tell him right these words he has not let go from his hand written by normal men, innocent men.
More and more, they come out to see him, and more and more as the world becomes an unsure morass of rhetoric pointing toward that horrible thing of war in the name of the Zabis, Zeon comes out to see him play in that bar below and he goes through his known sets and even some new, but the songs he sings are now known to him as for a particular audience and not for all. In those good acoustics of Club Eden, he sings words written for a different purpose in a world that bore his name, the name of his father. Millions live there, and they come to him and in the songs he sings they assume the role of who he sings too: He sings to Garma, now, more than ever, and if it was not something he would admit, then the thousands who shuffle by, day by day, week by week, night by night, assume that answer for him.
But there are those, and they are the majority he believes my numerical, statistical reality, that do not assume the name of who they are not.
They are who they are completely, and they are those that walk among Eden and do the dishes and not be held in captivity with his voice, as he had been captive to his role, on his stage. He sees their freedom, but they are slaves to other matters of the life around them.
The young man comes to him, from time to time with idle comment in practice, and he’s not always the same man. Sometimes he’s a woman, a young woman, who had to drop out of college to attend to ailing parents that have died because of the embargo on certain medications that left her with sour memories and large debts. Sometimes he’s an old man who had been even before Side 3 had been built, who works those rows because working is the only thing keeping him alive. Sometimes he is a teenager, forced to work because the food to buy raises in price, day by day, and if he steals scraps from the plates unfinished Char notices but does not tell. They are matters of them and not him and he wonders more and more as he looks, inside to the out, what if he had been of their troubles, and not the ones he had. He looks down upon them, and, one night, when his neck seems to give from the way he twists his head back and forth that night to show his jawline, to let people know of where they could kiss him if they were ever allowed in their own dreams, he realizes that in his position he has to look down upon them.
In unbidden ritual, those who are not sung to sway across the tables as those who are entranced by his tune do not see them. They walk along that world unaffected, and in that dim light of his operatic jazz that speaks to love and to the possibilities of what could be, Char Aznable imagines more and more if he were of their number. Those service workers in Club Eden, they are unaffected by the Zeon trooper who sits and wastes away on cigarettes as pretty women who mark their value at four hundred for a night ask him for his protection in scandalous transaction; they are unaffected by the politician who sits there and dreams of a night of passion with him; they do not hear the violent wishes of those youth that come to Club Eden and drink themselves to his tenor and wish death upon the Federation. The waiters touch hands often, passing notes or checks, unburdening each other of the weight of others excess and ferrying drink to drink. They dip into each other’s spaces, they whisper secrets and requests. In their connection of their shifts, they support each other in a way so complete that standing over them all, Char Aznable for the first time feels Mankind vindicated. The young man chuckles as the candle lighter pats away some spilled drink upon his apron, and the Filipinos who speak Spanish who came from Side 2 because even in that Universal Century the Filipino took upon their work migrations further than ever before, they speak with uncommon intelligence that they had seen this all before.
Artesia does not play with him anymore. He thinks nothing of it, even as a brother and sister pair who came to work at Eden as bar tenders spill liquid gold to those who need it, and they, even in agreement with Char to speak the secrets that matter to him when it arises, they hold lesser mysteries for themselves. They look happy, they look amused, as the brother leans upon his sister’s shoulder after a rather showy cocktail mixing, and together they shake their heads and they laugh and they take their tip and they look at Char to see if he has sung their song yet.
The shrewd older man who owns that place but never comes does not know of what community he cultivates beneath the business, and neither did Char until men of the country came to him and told him that as he had read those of Zeon who he wanted to see gutted and crucified, they had read him. Eden is dangerous now, but not for his body, not for his life.
At the end of the night, after the set is done and the crowd leaves, he still sets himself up upon the stage one more time before he leaves. The microphone still is on, and the staff all do their patterns, their dance. In their uniforms and their unremarkable faces they look up in unison and they put upon silent wishes with him. For the night was dying but they would be risen up again and called to Club Eden again and again for as long as he was there.
His hand traces his Adam’s Apple, as if his fingers could curl the block in it, to give his mind’s eye time to recall those words upon the sheaf. He recalls, but he cannot speak, and as he backs away from the mic the dance goes on and the staff are no more taken by him than when they started out.
“Why do you want me to sing your song?” He asks, and his fists curl. He says it so quietly in his exhaustion he doesn’t know if he had said anything at all. “Are you ashamed of me?” He asks. For not doing it, for being asked at all?
No, they say, and there is care in the word because once long ago he had been but a child and all of them there had once been children of Zion as well.
He does not go home that night.
He walks that night beneath a starless sky, and he cannot will himself to go home to end what he sees. When he walks through Zum, he walks the neighborhoods, his eyes hidden from God by those sunglasses. Dark is the world but his inner thoughts are clouded darker, so the shades do nothing as he stalks up and down neighborhoods in a walking haze, and in that veiled blackness he looks up and sees windows of apartment buildings still alive of people who in the dead hours require themselves alive. He looks from afar, inward into those bright squares of life amidst the dead others. He sees the silhouettes of families, of singular lives come into their homes and lament and live so quietly, so alone in their lives away from the History of their time, and they go on. Silent embrace. Silent night. He sits upon raised terrain in a park of Zum as a homeless man sleeps in his foreground on a bench, those distant golden squares going out one by one as, even in this late night hour, the busses run, and those who ride them shamble silently along sidewalks back to their abodes.
In final attempt to a nameless feeling of satiation, he tries to walk with them in their quiet masses as they move from work to home bundled up in themselves. He finds himself on the public transportation of Zum that is driven by midnight workers all the same. They are out there in their unseen migration together wholly in unity and solidarity and understanding. There is no serenade for them for all of their troubles and all of their tragedy and all of their lives, normal lives. A paper flower is tucked into the pocket of a single man, the age of which would be his own father’s had he lived. The man pats it once, affirming that it was there before he left the bus which Char rode on, just for him, packed even beyond midnight. There is no singing there, for the old, the young, or the poor, or those that had known space all of their lives or had been taken from Gravity. There is no one there, singing for him.
Shoulder to shoulder, they all say nothing to each other but there is warm ritual even now among them, saying thank you to the drivers, saying excuse me warmly as they shuffle past to a place where they are all going.
He wants to go with them.
He can’t.
He will not dream that night in sleep, so he dreams while awake.
The novelty of going out to groceries with Garma return to him, and this time there is no camera man in his mind save for the frame of this scene: Here Garma is in his mind in those crowds, not a prince, but a normal man, with him, for he too sees two people holding hands together for warmth and for comfort and for a place in that world they belonged and they leave together. His own hands are empty, but in his waking dream he sees Garma standing upon the floor of the bus as it rides through Zum alive yet dead with those that worked for it without celebration, with a paper bag of groceries in his hand and glancing occasionally at him with innocent thoughts.
What it would’ve been, he thinks, to have seen Garma as a normal man, and he, a normal man to be of that dream, with windows smearing the urban world of Side 3 and all who came to be born, to live, and to die in Space.
Last stop.
Though he is awake, he returns from night dream rides in the back of a bus, and the bus driver, a black man, his cap in hand, says those words. Char looks at him blankly.
I said last stop.
“Right, yeah. Sorry.” Char adjusts his sunglasses and rises himself, and the exhaustion he feels lays on and on.
Long night? The bus driver asked.
Char nods, and he moves from the bus and out to the last stop, and mercifully, it’s not long to his apartment.
Only Garma’s good morning text, three hours later can bring him alive again.
There would be longer nights still.
January 3rd, UC 0079.
The greatest war in all Human history has begun.
The young man at the end of the night when all have gone home to mourn or to cry or to consider the new world they would all wake up in, goes into the jakes of Club Eden, and, busting the latch of a stall open, finds Char Aznable ruined, his flesh used terribly, and the remains of the act lathering him and dried over as he sat unbottomed at the seat of the stall’s floor. The young man gathered him up, and brought him to the kitchen, where those who worked of Eden saw him, as he was. The whores, the waiters, the hosts and the hostess, and the young man, when unhanding him, put him upon the floor and although he might have seen of the dead body then, he came to life and flailed with his arms groaning until a bottle of hard liquor was in his hand and he had popped the cap and begged himself and all those for drink, more drink, as he chugged and he chugged until in those five seconds of confusion and shock of seeing the dead come alive, they had wrested the bottle away from him but the damage had been done.
“More!” Char Aznable yelled, and sobbed, and believed. “More!”
A radio outside goes through a long list of names, the male announcer morose, tired, but it was ordained by the Zabis that each and every one of the dead would have their names spoken over the air to eternalize their sacrifice for Spacenoid rights.
Another radio: a tuned to a pirate frequency, spoke of the literal events and each word spoken evokes another shock through the crowd of the kitchen of stainless steel and rust.
Gas attacks in Sides 1, 2, and 4. Places Char Aznable has been. Places where he had romanced a man, to history, of incredible prominence.
A single number rings out: Two billion dead and counting.
Char is joined upon the floor with a woman that has fainted as shrieks cry out.
An old man is upon Char, and Char readies himself again to be demeaned. If not the drink, then the cock of man to abuse him.
He does not get that. He gets one frail punch, across his face.
Protests wail, the clang of steel and pans as the old man is pulled off.
The candle lighter is now on him, and through her tears she pats down his face with a rag and although he can never be clean, she tries. This is worse than to be beaten or fucked. He does not deserve this care of maternal writ even as his soul craves it so.
She leaves him, and the young man is by his side and he is naked before all of them. He is Char Aznable, and yet, he is only a man.
Cries in Spanish.
¡Mi familia está muerta!
¡Mi familia está muerta!
Mátame ahora. Te lo ruego Dios, mátame ahora.
The weeping, the crying. The pain.
You knew about this? The young man asks, and the rag in his hand is heavy.
Char does not answer as he looks dimly up at the ceiling. The crumbs of the kitchen press into his back as he is laid out like meat to be quartered up. It doesn’t matter if he did. All those places he had been, and now, what were they? Hell. Graves.
A Filipino woman wails as she kicks over tables in the mail room, and glass and fire crash and the others scream for agua and the matter is settled but the woman still screams in tragedy.
She was- she is, a mother. The young man says to Char below, and all those that remain in the kitchen look down upon him as if he had been a visitor from some place beyond and they had found him as if he had been killed upon their bathroom stalls.
Ardyn Strandh, Simon Sellton, Katy Vasuedva, Wang Ben, Aoba Haruse, Kalan Korona. The names go on and on and they are the names of the dead and if given a thousand years those names lost tonight could not be spoken and given their due but even then, the man on the radio tries. If it is a song for them, it is a horrible song: the names of the dead, the names of the innocent. The names go on, and he moves to life as his hands move to his face and he covers his eyes to block out the world that looks upon him.
(He will beckon Garma to return to Club Eden as celebration for starting the war that would save them all. In the crowd will be those who have lost, and only those. And he sees Garma come to this place which has become a refuge for him and Garma will ask him to come closer to the stage.)
(And he sees the young man and the candle lighter occupy the Zeon security agents and the knife that will go into their sides will be silent. And when they fall Garma will not notice until it is too late.)
(Garma will come into the crowd and Char will welcome him into it with open arms, but the crowd will not let go of him. He is the bait, he is the cage.)
(And he looks down upon Garma as the crowd turns in on him, and they put their hands upon him in much the way that man had taken him that night in the bathroom before their hands go from carnal lust to carnal rage and they take from him what could never be made right again. He sees tendon and bone broken by hand, for he has seen them who have worked in the kitchen do it for bones and wings before. He sees his cheek by the hook of a man’s finger and his eyes gouged out. He sees his jaw stomped in and his chest caved by boot. Hair ripped, lavender between fingernails.)
(Garma’s body twists in unnatural angles as the crowd goes upon him and they pull and they tear and they scream and they cry and they do the damage that he alone could not do, and when the Zeon security agents come to Eden Char will get away with it because it was the crowd that did it and not him)
(They will discover Garma’s body, turned into a thin paste, and Club Eden will be painted his favorite color.)
[Garma, stands with him on the bus, and he leans on him because he’s tired after a long work shift, but they still needed to go out for groceries and the only time left to do it was in the dying hours of the day. Char lets it happen, because Garma is warm and the weather outside is dipping lower, lower.]
When he opens his eyes, lets his hands slips from his wettened face, the world is the same.
“I could’ve stopped this.” Char Aznable realizes.
Those around him are silent; convened despite all that they think and all that they know. This night, and in nights to come, Char Aznable blinks of in between dreams this court of normal men, innocent men., who now look down upon him lower than where they are.
And here are the sufferers, the burdened. The burdens of their lives also beset by the burdens put upon them by those that look down.
(Instead of Garma, in a thin paste upon Eden’s floor, it is him.)
Could you have? They ask.
(They wouldn’t suspect a thing, for he has been there now, in the inner sanctum, playing a piano as all the children of Degwin Zabi lounge and plan in the same room. Zenna, perhaps, would be collateral, but if he had done it then, how many billions would’ve been spared?)
(He could’ve brought a bomb, some sort of implement, inside of a sling bag and none of the guards would ever double check Garma Zabi’s lover.)
(He would call all the Zabis in because Gihren, upon his last visit, asked for a waltz, and that he had made one just for all of them, and when they were all in attendance he would go up to greet them all and he would kiss Garma one last time and bite his lip and then hold the bag to his chest and then pull a ripcord and recreate the tragedy of Space Station Laplace in the halls of what was once his home.)
We all could’ve. They say. When he was here. But we believed him because we are who we are.
He would’ve never seen us coming.
In concurrence, in hindsight, the right way was always true and the differing opinions of them all is suddenly revealed. For all that Char looked down he had never known, that even in Zeon, he was not alone in dissent.
He never knew the hearts of those who had been at hazard of the world.
He never understood them.
They speak to each other, of concern, of worry, but eventually, back to him, of him.
His body was not of his own but that was never the case, not since that day, long ago, when his father had keeled over and those who bore the name of Zabi took his name from him and every day raped it beyond all recognition until its corpse put today horrors not seen ever in all Human history enacted. Purpose: vengeance. And yet that was not where his inclinations took him.
[Garma, he frets over the pan as he flips the toast onto the egg patty and the top of it is expertly buttered crisp. He makes a passable chef, but a perfect egg sandwich, he proclaims as he slides it to the dining table.]
[Garma, he meets his mother, and there is no bad blood between them and although Astraia Deikun has never met the man, she has heard a lot from Naliss. Garma Zabi could’ve been like a son to her.]
[Garma, his hands cross over his jaw line as they pass to get ready at night, and he craves the feeling so, standing in silhouette against the window against the dark of Zum.]
“Tell me how.” Char asks above. “Tell me how I could be like you.”
And they all look down upon him, those who have seen him, read his story over and over with every line he spoke and every song he sung and every detail from where he had been beyond those walls, either inferred or told in the way his dalliance with a new devil has resulted in this new demesne where said lover with his proceleusmatic words lulled those who lived normal lives into form to prepare them for the genocide of tonight and to come.
They cannot tell him the answer, because there was nothing they could tell or show or give that he could understand.
Because Char Aznable was not an innocent man, and he would never be.
Char Aznable was not an innocent man, then, perhaps, Casval Rem Deikun was, but before he screams out who he really is he sees it coming even in his own disaster. Animating, he reaches up to a bottle nearby, and he drinks it down, down, until the young man seizes it again and takes it away from him.
And he begs for more, and he screams, arms reaching out like a great infant.
He knows what he really demands.
They know what he really wants.
His screams sound like the mother who had lost her family mere feet away, and together they sing the same song: What could’ve been, and what will never be. So, he asks for the burn, because the sting in his throat is the closest he can get to lighting himself on fire to purge it all away. He begs for mercy, his hands grasping at air as his body is lost to him.
He does not want to be.
The court of man can do nothing tonight except create their own funeral pyre.
They together, baptize him, clean him, not with water but of burning liquid until the semen and the blood and the tears are burnt away. Casval, lolling his tongue out, taking in this liquid, demands it, screams for it and needs it, and when he is nearly drowning of it, he shuts his mouth and opens his eyes and collapses to the floor as the women cry, the men gravely look on, and the deaths of several billion more are ordained.
May 1st, UC 0079
Mid-way, Char asks the chauffeur who would take him from the Zabi Estate to the space port to make a quick detour to Club Eden. The chauffer can’t say no.
He was asked to come to Earth because, in the end, Char Aznable became something else: He had gone higher. He was, as he had surmised from dream and in intuition, that promised generation his father spoke of.
A new type of person.
It is bitter, but it gives him cause and reason for where he would go. In this case: Earth, and its Newtype Labs there. But in between, with Garma.
With Garma.
Because of it, he doesn’t want to leave him wanting. Despite a ridiculously popular album, despite his new place in the world, he still preformed at Club Eden. Why? He could not say. For his mother’s history, for his own history, for the connection that bound him to a past where his sister was still there for him.
He left his bag there on accident, with all of his material.
It was early morning, the part of the morning where none would be in Club Eden that is, where truly it is solitary in its existence. He knows where the light switches are when he walks down those steps, and it is cleaned from his presence last. He looks to the small backrooms, to under the bar, to where the equipment was stored. He walks that place like a mine field because Club Eden was set in its perfect arrangement by those who worked there, and he could not afford for his own sake to disturb it. He looked in that frozen scene for a long time, long enough that even a chauffeur as polite as one appointed to the Zabis had to honk his horn and summon Char up.
So he rose himself up from that place he would not see for a long time, who had harbored him and provided him bread and a place to sing. It was, if he was a caged bird, his own cage, but this cage was historical to his existence for his mother was as he had been here. He wondered, distinctly, if perhaps his father came across his mother in the same way Garma did, and when he realized that perhaps had been the case, he never wanted to return.
(But he would).
When he arises from Eden, they are waiting for him.
They hold what Char was looking for in their hands. They are young and they are a man and they are a woman scorned and a mother who lost and someone who was able to set fires against the dark. They are everything he was not.
I know where you’re going, they say. They are alone in that alley and the morning light is behind them, the morning crowds commuting to their work to start their cycle all over again fill in foreground background as the car that will deliver him to the spaceport that will take him again to Earth waits unnoticing.
“Do you? Secret military orders?” Char cants his head and tries to smile, but he cannot toward those who had seen him on that night, seen him bare and who he would’ve given it all up for for the sanctuary to be among their number in that world.
They say nothing, but their eyes told the story. It’s an old story, Char knows. He gives no graces to God because God was not in his life, and the world of his creation if his had been was a world that had not been considerate of him at all. But in their eyes is a book of revelations and he has read it back and forward and through, cutting through Char’s own vainglory. They had read each character and their place.
In their hands is Char’s bag, and it is given to them with little ceremony. In it, the weight of song.
“I’m sorry,” Char says aloud and in these words in which he had never spoken to his sister now lost among all space, and to the man who had taken this name from, he says to them. “I’m sorry for not singing the song you wanted.”
They stare on, into him.
You could’ve sang that song at any time.
“I couldn’t read it.” Char grit with his teeth.
Course you can. You could’ve read it. You couldn’t done all those things which would’ve stopped all this a long time ago, but you are who you are and you can’t seem to accept yourself, no less change yourself. The enemies of God control this country, and you lay in bed with their son.
“I can’t read it!” Char yells instead, and in that alleyway where Eden can be entered it echoes up and down and back through it. “It’s- it’s- it’s impossible for me… What are you getting for seeing me like this?”
Out of the years which he had ushered his own destiny he had not known that he could deny it to himself for the sake of his own life. Written on the sheets of music as he had sang had been variations of his own name forever and again and again until he recognized it truly as his and not a false name that store back at him in its black lines and twisted into entertainment.
Entertainment, for it is what you provide. You exist in a jurisdiction of your own choosing, exiled from your own life and the lives you could have lived happily.
The shadow of them enshadowed Char from the dawn of the world. The shade, the frame, their object. As if the night would not end.
You’ve got a longer night still.
“I can sing your song, just tell me what it is!”
They do not answer, they only look at him, and wait, and wait for him to move. To go upon the Earth.
“Tell me.” He begs, and this man who only twenty years on Earth spoke with the weight of lives who were claimed of distant, other worlds. He felt them.
He felt Gravity, and his soul triplicated, threatening to tear from his body and to go out and live his desires so scattered.
He stands before Them, some unholy other, greater than their sum, who had always seen him as if he was to be judged and there had been a correction coming. He had spoken, and wished, for another life, a normal life, but that desire for change had been mutated beyond the recognition of those who watched.
Lalah had told him in his dreams to be who he was and to accept within himself what had been there. But in the waking world with those who walked there had been Them, who had been who he could not be, who read him, and waited for him to go to his ends.
Char, with his leather in his hands, a sheaf beneath it, asks to fix this, but nothing can be fixed because that time was gone.
They look at him, and they turn away, into the crowd of unremarkable faces and indistinct origins, forever lost to Char Aznable.
On Earth, Garma has asked him to sing at a party in the manor of the New York Eschonbachs, and he does so. It is a party where those who attend are totally occupied with themselves, and Garma, so busy, so concerned with the world at large, does not listen. Dressed in the clothes of a military man, and he, in the suit and tie of a pretty thing, no one understands him anyway.
There are papers he has brought with him from Eden, and although he cannot understand them, he goes with them anyway.
No one listens. No one cares.
His singing is nonsense, but he wants to try regardless, even if it’s too late, to sing the song of normal men.