Missing In Rangoon

Calvino smiled and took a long drink.

“She sounds like the kind of woman who gets under a man’s skin.”

He was getting an image of Mya Kyaw Thein as someone who’d volunteered to set fire to the big tent, and Rob had been detailed to buy the matches.

Alf sucked hard on the spliff, the tip burning hot, ashes spilling.

“You can say that again. She’s a woman a man would do anything for. Take my word for it.”

Gung took the spliff from Alf, inhaled, eyes hooded, and said as the smoke rolled from his lips: “She wanted Rob to be Henry Miller walking the earth—fucking whores, hungry at midnight with no money but with a fire in his belly, and figuring out how to stop the world from stepping on his shadow and capturing his soul, selling it to the devil for a weekly paycheck.”

“Fuck that,” Mya Kyaw Thein had said, according to Gung.

Alf had returned to the stage along with the other band members.

Over the roar of the electric guitar, Calvino leaned forward and shouted, “Does her mother live in Rangoon?”

“Man, I’d love to meet her mother. If you find her, tell her she can drink at this bar any time on my tab,” said Gung.

Smoke curled out of his nostrils, which were rimmed with tiny gold rings. The world of Monkey Nose might be in fragments, but the gravity of the music gathered the pieces slowly through the night, bringing an underlying harmony.

A waitress brought Calvino a slip of paper. He opened it and read the scrawl in the dim light.

“Mya’s mother sells jewelry in the market. Unsubscribe.”

Calvino read the note a couple of times.

“Unsubscribe?” he muttered to himself.

He called the waitress over and asked who’d given her the note.

“Jazz,” she said, pointing out the drummer on stage.

Gung had drifted off to another table with his rum and coke. Calvino stood in the doorway and watched the drummer run through one of those two-minute high-speed drum solos where sweat flies off the performer’s face and into the crowd. As he finished, the drummer banged his cymbals, making a sound that, though muted, had a head-cracking quality. Calvino and the drummer nodded at each other.

In Calvino’s mind there was only one question: unsubscribe from what?

Interviewing people in a bar with a band blaring always turned up a surprise or two—someone with information, biding their time before sending it down the river of tears, believing that it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. Earlier that night the drummer, who’d sat with a woman straddling him—a woman with silver and gold looped through her ears and around her wrists and ankles, squeezing her breasts against his chest—had brushed off Calvino’s questions. But Calvino’s timing had been right after all. For a drummer in a band, timing is what it’s all about, and apparently for this drummer “fuck everybody” didn’t mean “fuck everything.”

The drummer tipped his hand as another man who had succumbed to Mya’s charm and found that nothing quite like it had happened to him before or since. She’d only been gone a week. Maybe she’d be back and he’d close in for another chance.

The band wanted her back. Gung wanted her back too. She was a big draw. Those left behind were as much in love with the Black Cat as Rob was.

As Calvino paid the bill, Gung came back to the table.

“Monkey Nose plays every Tuesday and Thursday night. Come back. And if you find Mya, ask her about the Big Show, the Lesson and Henry Miller. She’s something else, that woman.”

He didn’t seem that interested in whether Calvino found Rob. Electric bass players weren’t that hard to find. But a singer like Mya was. Even though a performer like that always came with baggage, packed with beliefs, emotions and the past, it didn’t matter. Everyone at Le Chat Noir wanted La Chatte Noire back on stage.

There was nothing more for Calvino to ask, and he paid his bar bill. Listening to one more Monkey Nose song as he waited for his change, he thought he remembered it from somewhere. The waitress refreshed his memory.

“It’s called ‘When Can I Kiss You Again?’”

“Romantic,” said Calvino, leaving a large tip.

“Not really. It’s from Michael Brecker’s Pilgrimage, the last album he made before he died. He wrote it for his kid, who said those words to him as he was dying of cancer.”

She disappeared to another table with the tray bearing his tip. You get what you pay for, he thought—isn’t that a Calvino’s Law? He was no longer sure he remembered the thinking behind that law or whether it much mattered.