FIC: Die Sprache der Blinden 10a/?

[laguera25]

Title: Die Sprache der Blinden 10a/?

Author: laguera25

Fandom: Rammstein

Rating FRM

Pairing: Richard Kruspe/OFC

Disclaimer: Richard Z. Kruspe is a real person, with family and friends who love him. I am not one of them. I do not know him. This is a work of complete fiction, and should be read as such. No defamation is intended. For entertainment only.

Part I Part IIa Part IIb Part III Part IVa Part IVb Part V Part VIa Part VIb Part VIIa Part VIIb Part VIII Part IX


A little while longer" had turned out to be an hour and a half, and by the time he'd been ready to collect Calliope, brunch had become lunch. He'd been chagrined at keeping her waiting again, but Khira Li had proven maddeningly difficult to reach, and when he had gotten her on the line, she'd burbled endlessly and happily on about possible plans for the Christmas holiday. Skiing, she'd suggested with the oblivious exuberance of the young, and Richard's forty-one-year old knees had wept at the thought as visions of returning to the studio in plasters had swum in his head. He'd temporarily forestalled the idea by changing the subject, but if she was set on it, then there was no doubt that the subject would re-emerge at a later date. He'd hoped not, because he could refuse Khira nothing, and if her heart were set on skiing, then he would find himself stumping resolutely up a snow-blasted mountain and begging pardon from his mutinous knees.

And then there'd been the primping, of course. Preening, as Till calls it, he who wears his urbane, practiced indifference like an ensemble, and who attracts women with his air of brooding, wounded nobility and seething, primordial sex appeal. Till is a stallion, a creature of corded, rippling muscle and the promise of explosive power; Richard, on the other hand, has always been a peacock, a bird of vainglory who struts and fluffs and fans his impressive tail and secretly worries that his courtship display will be found wanting.

He would like to tell Till that he is mistaken, but he cannot. He does preen, mercilessly and ceaselessly, in front of steam-fogged bathroom mirrors and before immaculate full-lengthed ovals of silver-backed glass. He preens and pouts and pivots to and fro like a debutante in a ballgown, tutting and sussing and smoothing, looking for wrinkles and bulges and ill-fitting cuts of fabric. He fusses over his hair, teases and tugs and gels until it is perfect, and he has been known to use a tube of styling gel at a sitting on particularly important occasions. He plucks and clips and shaves and waxes and tries on cologne until he is sure that he has found the perfect complement to his outfit. It used to drive Caron crazy, the way he would obsess over the most minute details of his appearance, hunkered in front of the bedroom vanity and surrounded by cologne-sodden cotton balls as he had wrangled with an errant lock of hair.

For fuck's sake, Richard, she'd been wont to scream. It's a goddamn hair. We were supposed to leave an hour ago. Let it go. She had interpreted his stubborn insistence on perfection on simple vanity, and to be fair, vanity had played a role--he is, after all, a vain creature--but it hadn't been the sole impetus for it. He had obsessed over his appearance because he had loved her, and love always looked its best. Love had no patience with tousled hair and untidy clothes and unclean skin and ragged nails. Love was always beautiful. He'd wanted to be beautiful for her, but she hadn't understood, and so, she'd left him behind.

He'd preened for Calliope, too, had preened with an intensity bordering on mania. He'd showered and shaved and plucked his eyebrows and slathered his face with toner. He'd spent forty minutes styling his hair, had combed and teased and sprayed until each strand and spike was exactly as he'd wanted it, and then he'd spent another ten minutes turning his face this way and that to scrutinize the disymaying number of crows' feet that had gathered in the corners of his eyes. He hadn't remembered seeing them in October, when he'd met her at the produce market, or even in November, when he'd arrived in San Francisco with his guitars and his lofty ambitions. He'd grimaced and puckered and tugged on his skin in an effort to banish them, but to no avail. They had remained, ugly in the unflattering light of the bathroom, and he'd sighed and reached for the concealer.

The presence of those fine lines had filled him with a dull panic. He'd made a pretty living trading on his face and meticulously-maintained physique, had traded on them for popularity and the comfort of a willing woman, and it had been these attributes that had kept that woman willing long after the thrill of his personality and the novelty of his profession had faded. The world had little patience and even less love for an aging rock star whose face had collapsed in on itself like the facade of a tenement storefront. He had always feared the inevitable end of his career, when his face could no longer support the weight of the pancake required to maintain the illusion of godhood, and he had had no desire to spend what remained of his creative days in some pisspot bar while sweat carved streams into his sagging face and his doughy stomach seeped out the bottom of his shirt and the equally-aging strumpets circled like blowflies. He didn't want to end up like Kiss, Botoxed and bloated behind makeup that could no longer hide the creases in aging, over-indulged flesh, or like AC/DC, who tottered and blundered around the stage and croaked out songs to fans clinging to their own vanished youth by dint of nostalgia and pot-fueled denial. Or like Keith Richards, that living scrap of beef jerky who obdurately refused to relinquish his string-fingered grip on this mortal coil.

Of course, he'd reflected morosely as he'd dabbed concealer into the fine lines and smoothed with his fingertip, if he and Rammstein did slide into crass, gaudy decline, then there were certainly worse ways to go. Kiss, AC/DC, and the Stones were still profitable and relevant despite the grotesquerie of watching them fumble and bumble across the stage with mic stands clutched in their gnarled hands like walking sticks. They still mattered, were still revered, and none but the young and foolish pitied them.

It was the pity that he'd feared most, the obsolescence. Age was the beginning of the end in this disposable, state-of-the-art world, and it brought with it a terrible invisibility and the cloying, infuriating pity of those upon whom time had not laid a cruel, diminishing hand. For every band venerated for its persistence and endurance, there were a thousand that had slipped into obscurity or the terrible half-life of the nostalgia circuit, where curious fans came to prod at the disintegrating clay feet of their dying idols and watch them fall from grace with the cold, gimlet-eyed sadism of children gathered around the carnival freakshow, all beer-rich breath and morbid curiosity as they waited for the battered old gods to shuffle out and perform antiquated miracles already eclipsed by descendants they had unwittingly sired in garages and abandoned warehouses and dry-rotted haylofts in the middle of nowhere.

He never wanted to be that guy, the sad-eyed old pensioner who shuffled down to the corner druggist for his blood pressure medication, only to be accosted by the shocked, sniggering whispers and pointing fingers of people who recognized the ghost of Kruspes past in the set of his shoulders or the sharpness of his face. He didn't want to hear it, the amazement in their voices as they realized that he was as mortal as they, and that time had not spared him. He didn't want to be "the guy who used to be in Rammstein", as remote and irrelevant as a kinescope or the dusty Victrola in the sitting room of some ancient New England manse presided over by the equally dusty members of the local historical preservation society. He didn't want to be a casualty of tomorrow.

Irrelevant was a synonym for unloved, for alone. He had been one for as long as he could remember, and he'd lived in terror of winding up the other, bereft and abandoned to the empty solitude of his New York penthouse or his Berlin flat. If he became irrelevant, if he grew old, then Calliope would have no reason to stay. She might not be as shallow or impatient as most of the women he had known, but she was still human, still subject to the same caprices of human whim and laws of attraction. She was a beautiful, vivacious, learned woman with nary a line on her face and limitless possibilities. Why would she want to waste her time and her loveliness on a grizzled relic with nothing to offer but his forgotten achievements and his tantrums and wounds that never healed?

So he'd blended and massaged and blended again, until he'd been sure that the lines were invisible, and then he'd agonized over which shirt to wear. After he'd settled on the safe bet of black silk, he'd fretted over whether or not to unbutton the collar, and if so, by how many buttons. In the end, he'd decided on the topmost button, and when he was dressed, he'd examined himself in the mirror, had sucked in his gut and tightened his glutes and checked his eyes for eye crust and stray smudges of eyeliner, and when he'd been certain there was nothing left to check, he'd sidled nervously before the mirror and pulled his lips back from his teeth in an exaggerated grimace to check for plaque and bits of old food.

A fresh coat of nail varnish and a surreptitious sniff of his armpits, and there'd been nothing for it but to find Calliope. He'd gone into the living room on legs that had been oddly light, and his palms had prickled with adrenaline and the unseemly urge to sweat. He'd scrubbed them on his pants just before he'd stepped into view of the couch and scratched the nape of his neck.

True to her word, Calliope had been on the couch that would then and forever after be known as the cathouse sofa, tucked into the corner with her lithe legs curled beneath her and one hand tugging idly at the hem of her white skirt. Her other hand had been full of book, and as he'd watched, she'd turned a page and nibbled absently on the edge of her bookmark. It had been such a serene, homey image that he'd quietly marveled at it, and his heart had thudded with a dull yearning, a glowing ember of repressed memory buried beneath a mound of cold, wet ash. When he was younger and more optimistic, he'd often pictured himself coming home to such a scene. Not the reading, perhaps--none of his previous lovers had displayed any discernible passion for the pleasures found between the pages--but the tranquility. He'd thought to come home to the comfort of a warm house, to find his lover at her easel or her mic stand or curled on the sofa with a glass of wine in one hand and the remote in the other. He'd thought to come home to cleanliness and light and the lulling solace of companionship, with a woman and a dog and a place to play his guitars while the world raged outside.

It hadn't quite worked out that way, of course. The women he'd installed in his homes had been at easel and canvas and mic stand, but they'd used them as a means to shut him out, and the wine glasses they'd held had often splashed their contents into his face or been hurled at his head as an exclamation point to their rage when he'd come off the road with too much baggage and too many other women on his clothes. He'd been a stranger in his own home, left to step over the domestic shrapnel of shattered glass and creep around the edges of the ugly silence that had filled his rooms.

And there had been Calliope, lifted whole and breathing from his young man's fantasies. She'd been radiant and clean, inviting as she'd turned the pages. She'd looked far younger than her years, too, as if she were a young university student of twenty-five and not a yeoman adjunct professor of thirty-four. Her errant curl had found its way to her temple, and he'd been tempted to brush it behind her ear, but he'd been afraid to touch her, lest his caress sully the sweetness of the impossible tableau before him. So, he'd swallowed a dry lump and watched her read.

I should have brought something, he'd thought ridiculously. Flowers, a bottle of wine, maybe a box of truffles. That's how one treats a lady. I shouldn't be standing here empty-handed, slavering at her like a moonstruck teenager.

Like a stupid, useless boy, his father had amended, and the ugly, glottal buzz of his voice had danced over the shell of his ear like the nettlesome, invasive legs of a fly. He'd fought the urge to swat the sensation away and toss his head like a spooked horse.

Get a grip, Kruspe, he'd ordered himself sternly. You're forty-one, not fourteen, and you know damn well how to behave around a woman. You've certainly bedded more than your share.

Yes, but Calliope is different, had insisted the still, small voice of the dreamer he'd once been.

He'd taken a deep breath and done his best to ignore the butterflies that had made his stomach strangely buoyant, as though it were bobbing to and fro three feet in front of him like a poorly-tethered balloon. "I'm sorry to keep you waiting," he'd said. "My daughter was quite excited."

A dubious snort had come from the doorway to the kitchen, and Richard had belatedly realized that Christoph was standing in the doorway, watching him with a maddeningly knowing expression and munching contentedly on a bowl of instant macaroni and cheese.

Probably saw you mooning over her like some slack-jawed mouthbreather, Caron had mused. Really, Richard, who knew it was the tight-kneed little prigs who got you all hot and bothered?

"What?" Richard had demanded peevishly, irritated by Caron's unwelcome presence inside his head.

Christoph had given an elegant shrug. "Nothing," he'd said mildly. "I just doubt that Khira was what took so long. You've preened so damn much that you look like a Eurotrash Ken doll." He'd smirked and taken a prodigious bite of alarmingly orange pasta.

"It's not my fault I like to bathe before a date," he'd countered.

"Richard's got a date?" Olli, who'd materialized from the bedroom corridor to peer at the scene before him like an avid meerkat. "Oh, yes, I see. The hair."

What about my fucking hair? he'd wanted to shout, but he hadn't wanted to look the fool in front of Calliope, and so he'd set his jaw and bitten his tongue and allowed himself the immensely-satisfying fantasy of drowning Christoph in his bowl of macaroni and cheese.

Calliope had closed her book and unfurled from the couch with her customary woodsmoke grace, and then she'd carefully placed her book on the coffee table. "No worries. A girl with a book always has an escort."

She'd stepped nimbly around the toothy, predatory edge of the coffee table, and he'd caught a glimpse of his mother in the airy swirl of her skirt around her ankles, of her shadow as she'd loomed over him while he'd lain in the valley between the couch and the coffee table and screamed at the world through a throbbing, pulsing veil of white and black and netherworld grey, and then Calliope had been near, almonds and vanilla and infectious laughter, and the image had faded into merciful obscurity.

"You look...bewitching," he'd murmured softly, and clasped her outstretched hands. He'd brought them to his lips and pressed soft, lingering kisses to her knuckles and delighted in the pleased blush that had crept up her nape and into her cheeks.

"And you are shameless in your flattery," she'd replied, and stretched to plant a kiss on the line of his jaw.

"Occasionally, yes," he'd acknowledged. "But in this case, I am merely a repeater of truth." He'd held her hands a moment longer, and brushed the balls of his thumbs over the smooth skin of her knuckles in languid circles as he'd gazed at her smiling, upturned face and into her dancing green eyes. Christ, he'd been fifteen again, fifteen and dry-mouthed and giddy and bedeviled by the urge to kiss her, to plunge his hands into the thick fall of her hair and draw her into himself like sacramental wine. He'd released her hands with an effort. "Are you ready?"

"Absolutely." She'd turned and spared Christoph and Olli a polite, perfunctory glance. "Goodbye, gentlemen."

Olli had murmured a quiet farewell, and Christoph had grunted cordially around a mouthful of iridescent macaroni, and then they'd been slipping out the door and into the temperate San Francisco sunshine.

They hadn't spoken again until they'd pulled out of the driveway and into the flow of traffic. It had been comfortable and cool inside the climate-controlled Mercedes, and Calliope had surveyed the landscape beyond the windows with lively curiosity, occasionally twisting in her seat to track the progress of a treasure only she could see. Sometimes, she'd tilted her chin towards the sky and smiled in secretive delight, a rose turning its petals to the sun. He would have watched her for the entire drive if it weren't for the need to mind the road, and his stomach had given a nervous flutter whenever she'd torn her gaze from the window to grin at him.

"I take it your daughter was excited to have you home," Calliope had said at length, and stretched, fingertips tented on the roof as she'd bowed her spine with the muted pop of shifting vertebrae and lengthening muscles.

"Ha. She's outdone herself this time. She wants me to go skiing," he'd said plaintively.

"I take it you don't ski."

He'd shrugged. "I can wobble down the bunny slopes. Or I could, when I was twenty-five. Now, who knows? I haven't tried in years. Football and running and wrestling are more my thing. I suppose I can if I have to, but odds are, I'll end up going ass over teakettle down the beginners' slope and wind up in plasters for six months."

"Wrestling?" Calliope had repeated dubiously.

He'd nodded as he'd flicked on the car's turn signal. "Yes. I was twelve, and it help to get rid of my extra...energy," he'd explained carefully. He hadn't wanted Calliope to know his history of brawls and schoolyard scraps, to be tainted by long-ago violence on such a gorgeous day. When she had continued to look perplexed, he'd ventured, "Greco-roman wrestling."

Her expression had cleared, and she'd colored in embarrassment. "Ohhh." She'd tittered and shifted in her seat. "For some reason, I thought you meant the other kind of wrestling."

"What? The kind on television, with the spandex and the glittering capes and the screaming muppet of a commentator? The guy with the bad hair?" He'd laughed, a hearty belly laugh that had shaken the steering wheel.

She'd shrugged, blushing furiously. "Well, I figured you had to get your theatrical bent from somewhere. Besides, the TV stuff has its perks if you know where to look."

He'd scoffed. "It's all cartoons. Grown men in superhero tights. And what theatricality? Have you been Googling Rammstein?" The question had emerged more gruffly and accusatorily than he'd intended, and he'd winced internally.

It hadn't been that he was ashamed of Rammstein; indeed, fewer things in his life have given him greater pride. But he'd been with too many women--and people he'd thought friends, for that matter--who'd fallen in love with the face he presented to the world and been disappointed in or repulsed by the one beneath, the one that was lined and careworn and puffy with lack of sleep and too much catered food. He'd been tired of being adored for who they'd thought--hoped--him to be and ignored for who he was. He'd wanted Calliope to appreciate him for who he was, not who the stills and videos and press photos proclaimed him to be.

And you're afraid that she'll come to love the illusion you present more than the truth you carry, that she'll desire the stage clothes and their trappings more than the man who wears them, and then when she closes her eyes and surrenders to the pleasure of your hands, it won't be your hands she feels at all, but the usurping, plastic hands of the character you become every time you don your liar's skin.

"I didn't, but my mother and sisters have done. They're the nosy sort, and I made the mistake of mentioning you during my visit to Fishkill, and by the time I got back to the city, my inbox was full of links and pictures and scandalized tutting. Between the picture of you and the rest of the band on leashes and the naked video, I think my sisters are convinced I've taken up with a dangerous sex pervert."

"And you?" he'd asked warily.

"What did I think?"

"Yes."

"Well," she'd begun, and tugged on the fabric of her skirt. "I might have stared at the photos of you in those silver Hammer pants longer than was strictly necessary," she'd admitted, and squirmed in her seat. She'd been positively scarlet, and she'd worried her lower lip with her teeth.

He'd swallowed the urge to laugh. "You're as ass, er, woman, then?"

"Yes. Don't you have an attribute that appeals to you?"

"Legs and breasts," he'd answered promptly.

"Well, one out of two isn't bad, I suppose." She'd cast a rueful glance at her cleavage.

"Nonsense. They're exquisite," he'd blurted. Then, flustered, "They might not be as ample as others, but at least they're firm and natural. Do you know how many times I've gotten a woman's blouse open, only to discover she's got artillery shells inside her chest?" He'd blinked as he'd realized what he'd said and implied thereby. "Erm."

A beat of silence. "Do I want to?" Calliope had inquired mildly.

"Perhaps not." Discomfited, he'd busied himself with checking the car's gauges.

That's right, Richard. Let her know you're an unapologetic pussy hound. That'll sweeten the pot.

"I meant, what did you think of the music?" he'd said after a moment, careful to keep his eyes on the winding street in front of him.

"Oh. Some of it was quite excellent, I suppose. I'm more of an 80's hair metal child, myself." When he'd snickered, she'd said, "What? It's the perfect music to prance around naked to after a shower. "Not that I do that often, you understand," she'd said primly, and coughed discreetly into her hand.

"'Old Time Rock and Roll'?"

"'Girls, Girls, Girls,' and 'Naughty, Naughty.' And if you repeat that, I'll deny everything. I have my dignity to uphold."

"'Dirty Deeds(Done Dirt Cheap),'" he'd confessed, and then they'd both been laughing, snorting and hooting and wheezing. Calliope had bent nearly double in her seat, hands planted on her knees, and shoulders heaving with breathless merriment, and he'd had to slow the car to wipe his streaming eyes and avoid swerving off the road.

"I bet you did the whole Angus Young thing, too, didn't you?" Calliope had managed between watery snorts, and wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands.

"Genau. I used to grab my mother's broom before I got my first guitar and hop around my bed, like, fifty times a night. Strumming and hopping. Then I got my first guitar and used that instead. I thought I was so cool, you know, but I probably looked like an idiot."

"Or like Jim Croce with fire ants in his buttcrack."

Another helpless hoot of laughter. He'd felt loose and free, and he couldn't remember that last time he'd felt comfortable enough to laugh about his turbulent childhood, which had boasted precious little about which to laugh. He certainly couldn't remember the last time a date had referenced music that had seen its zenith in the sixties and seventies. Most of them hadn't been old enough to remember it. Some of them had even drawn their first breath while Reagan was in office. He should've felt old, he'd supposed, but instead, he'd been exhilarated, unencumbered by the endless expectations of youth and free to be himself.

"It might've impressed your sisters."

"Maybe," she'd conceded. "They were usually my backup dancers for my post-shower concerts."

"How many sisters do you have?" They'd been approaching the quaint, downtown enclave and the bakery he'd spotted on one of his solitary rambles through the city, and he'd craned his head and scanned the narrow street in search of a parking space.

"Three sisters and two brothers. I'm the fifth of the litter and the youngest girl."

"Were you spoiled, then?" He'd eased into a parking spot a few blocks from his intended destination and killed the engine.

She'd snorted. "A Daddy's girl, yes. Spoiled, no. I had chores just like the others, and the same expectations, and the same punishments if I failed to meet them. My parents were never draconian, but they were firm and could be hardass when they had to be. And if I ever thought of playing the wilting violet, my younger brother was there to pull my hair and kick my ass and keep me on my toes."

He'd pocketed the car keys and turned to look at her. "You were close, then?"

"Ciaran and I?" She'd shrugged. "Not really. I love him, but I've always been closer to my sisters and older brother. We were of a piece, all born within a few years of each other. Ciaran came later, a happy codicil. Siobhan and Patrick were my partners in crime, and Antigone and Io were the tagalongs."

"Antigone and Io?" he'd repeated incredulously?"

"I know, I know. My mother is a Classics professor, and my father is a sociologist and historian with an interest in geopolitics. I'm lucky I'm not named Bodicea or Clytemnestra. According to my father, my middle name was almost Rhea or Merope."

"How did you become Calliope Jane, then?"

"Ha. I was the one my father got to name. He said I sounded quite musical when I greeted the world, all indignation and bewilderment, with just a hint of laughter."

"Bells and smoke," he'd murmured absently.

"What?"

"Nothing," he'd said, and gotten out of the car. He'd closed his door behind him and gone around to Calliope's side of the car to open her door in a display of gallantry, but she'd already stepped out and been smoothing her skirt and studying her face in the rearview mirror.

"What about you? Were you the spoiled princeling?" she'd asked lightly when he'd joined her.

He'd stiffened. "No," he'd said diffidently. "My mother preferred my older sister. And my father preferred to beat the shit out of me.

"Ah." Calliope had floundered for a moment, clearly at a loss. Then, "Well, it was her bloody loss."

I don't need a fucking cheerleader, he'd thought pettishly, but he'd realized she had only been trying to make the best of an awkward situation, so he'd said, "Shall we?" and offered her his arm.

The bakery had been a nondescript, hole-in-the-wall square of building designed to look like an adobe hut. The outside had been painted a textured, fired-clay red, and the inside had been sleek and modern and boasted round, white cafe tables and a glass-and-steel display case that had run the length of the shop. A menu board had been mounted high on the wall behind the cash register, listing the bakery's various wares, but Calliope had ignored it and made a beeline for the display case.

He'd drawn up beside her and placed his hand in the small of her back. "Anything you like," he'd whispered into her ear as she'd peered at the contents of the display case.

"Richard," she'd begun.

"I know you can pay for it yourself," he'd interrupted, and nipped her earlobe, "but I want to. Come, Calliope, let me spoil you a little."

"As if you haven't already." But she'd kissed the side of his mouth. "Thank you," she'd said softly, and pressed the small of her back into his palm.

She'd taken her time perusing the wares in the display case, had bent to scrutinize the heavy card-stock placards placed before each. She'd stepped back twice to allow others to order, and by the time they'd collected their order, the shop had been bustling with customers. The only empty table had been in the corner beside the freezer case full of ice cream cakes, and it had wobbled precariously when they'd set their cups of coffee and hot chocolate on it.

"Mind your winkus," Calliope had noted cheerfully as she'd sat down with her enormous blueberry muffin. She'd smoothed her skirt and begun to peel the paper from her muffin with such purse-lipped gravity that he'd fought the urge to laugh.

"I'll do my best," he'd assured her, and blown on his coffee before taking a careful sip. Hot and bitter, almost scorched, and he'd sat and reached for the packet sugar in the center of the table. "When did people forget how to make coffee?" he'd groused.

Calliope had grinned and plucked a hunk from the top of her muffin. "Blame Starbucks." She'd popped the hunk of blueberry muffin into her mouth.

"As if you've never been there."

"Of course I have. I'm a sucker for a latte with caramel and white chocolate shavings. But that doesn't mean that other businesses haven't given up. If you want good coffee, then you've got to make it yourself. My mother brews a mean chicory coffee, and her Colombian isn't bad, either. She and Dad splurge on the stuff. Every now and then, they even spring for the Blue Hawaiian. And don't even think of asking for a cup. I think Siobhan might've gotten a cup on her wedding day, but that might be family rumor. I certainly didn't see it, and I was with her all morning."

"What, no tea?" he'd teased as he'd poured two packets' worth of sugar into his coffee and stirred it with the tiny, red straw the cashier had provided.

"Are you kidding? We had tea by the tin--Earl Grey, green, jasmine, chamomile, oolang, white, even saffron. I loved the Irish Breakfast tea, growing up. Never was fond of Earl Grey; it had this bitter smokiness that reminded me of burning leaves. I'd kill for some Ceylon black tea, but that's wishful thinking on a glorified T.A.'s salary." She'd sighed wistfully and broken off another piece of muffin.

He'd made a mental note. "So, what do your sisters and brothers do?"

She'd stretched her legs beneath the table and taken a measured sip of hot chocolate. "Patrick and Io followed my parents into teaching. Patrick teaches introductory physics at SUNY, and Io went into the oh-so-lucrative high-school French racket. Antigone got her degree and promptly tried her hand at fashion design. When that flopped, she became a seamstress. Mostly does alterations and wedding gowns. Enough to make the rent and feed the babes, but it's been a tough go of it. Siobhan works as a paralegal for the Manhattan ACLU. And Ciaran..."

She'd trailed off and turned the styrofoam cup between her hands. "Ciaran is...well...," Another gusty sigh.

Ah, so the family closet has a skeleton, after all, he'd thought. There had been no exultation in it, only a dull empathy.

"The black sheep?" he'd offered.

She'd considered that. "More like the wayward son. He came later than the rest of us by nearly ten years. The family surprise, we called him. He liked the nickname at first. He used to scream it every time my grandparents came to visit. 'Hi, Nana, hi, Poppy! I'm the family surprise! Surprise!'" Calliope had put down her hot chocolate and waved her hands wildly on either side of her face, and a young man in a University of San Francisco hoodie had scowled at her over the flaccid, curling edges of his newspaper.

"He thought it made him special, just like when he was the ringbearer at one of our weddings. Then he got older, and he didn't feel special anymore. Instead, he just felt different." She'd dropped her gaze to the contents of her cup. "It didn't help that he didn't look like us. Redheads, the lot of us, and there he was, black-haired and blue-eyed and introvert. Antigone used to tease him, call him a changeling and tell him that he'd been left on our doorstep by a runaway. My parents tried to quash it, of course, but two sets of eyes are a sorry match for five vicious, witless little mouths attached to brains that didn't think past their vocal cords, and Ciaran got it pretty hard. None of us realized how hard until later, but by then, it was too late. Whomever said that words were lesser weapons than sticks and stones was a blithering idiot. Sticks and stones you can pull and gather, but words stay where they land, and there's no getting them out once they've burrowed in."

Richard, who'd had intimate experience with the damage that words could wreak beneath the skin where the bruises never showed, and who had spent his life with the voice of his father rattling and hissing inside his head as though it were on a dusty, warp-reeled tape recorder, had sipped the sweet, cooling sludge of his coffee and said nothing. He had, however, thought of his own sister, who lived in Schwerin with her children and the stranger of the moment who'd agreed to assume the mantle of fatherhood this time. He'd thought of her perfect hair and her fake designer clothes and her careworn face and dishpan hands camoflaged by cheap acrylic nails and wondered if she'd ever regretted the childhood cruelties she'd committed with such unknowning glee, if she'd ever been sorry for pelting him with dirt and pebbles and scree from the courtyard or for pinching him in the market while their mother had pawed through the wilted produce with grit-eyed determination.

Or for the terrible, piercing stones she'd hurled from behind her teeth shortly before he'd packed his few precious belongings into a rucksack and a cracked, vinyl suitcase he'd stolen from a discarded trash pile and moved in with a friend. She'd been twenty-one and married and smug in her escape from the endless parade of anonymous men who had taken his father's place in his mother's bed. She'd cut and torn him to the bone with her cannibal's mouth and left him to reapply her cock-smeared makeup in the bathroom in which he'd so often crouched as a terrified child.

Somehow, he'd doubted it.

"Hindsight is useful to no one in situations like that," Calliope had been saying. "It was certainly of no use to Ciaran, nor was the vicious gossip that my father wasn't his father." A long gulp of hot chocolate. "Rubbish, of course."

Ah, but it isn't. At least, you don't think it is. You're not sure; you don't want to believe your mother cheated; mothers are saints, even when they aren't, and maybe there's that odd, dark time that you don't talk about, when the house was thick with tension and people's smiles were brittle as old china and no one breathed out of turn for fear of upsetting the delicate, dangerous balance. Maybe you and your sibling spent a nervous, miserable year walking the tightrope between parents who barely spoke--a mother who pretended nothing was wrong and a father who hid behind his newspapers and told himself he didn't loathe the screaming child his wife bore to someone else and dared to give his name.

You don't want to believe the worst of your mother, but you, with your love of books and knowledge, can't dismiss the truths of genetics, either. So you close your mouth and your eyes and hold on to the lie because it's the glue that binds the family together. And if you can live with a lie for long enough, sometimes it becomes true.

"He grew up rougher than he should've, and he took the rougher road just to spite us, but he's trying to find his place in the world the best he can. He works odd jobs at the docks when he forgets his anger. It's not much, but it's better than shoplifting and back-alley craps and stealing the neighbors' pension checks." She'd picked a blueberry from the top of her muffin and eaten it. "So, what about your family?"

"My mother worked in factories and offices. My father worked as a janitor and handyman. My sister is a former housewife raising children who scream too loudly and listen too seldom."

"You're an uncle, then?"

"Yes. Uncle Rich, the one who brings the coolest toys." His mouth had twisted in a wry, bitter smile. He'd adored his niece and nephews, but he'd never been certain of their affection for him. Sometimes, he'd thought they loved him only for the toys and music he brought from America at Christmas, the records they flaunted to less fortunate friends forced to wait for European releases and the cosmetics his niece coveted with the gimlet-eyed avarice of Scrooge with a farthing. He didn't think about it much, had chosen to accept their smiles at face value and hope that he wasn't being a stupid, useless dreamer again.

Calliope had rested her hand atop his and begun to scratch the top of his hand with slow, torpid curls of her long, white fingers. And then she'd changed the subject.

They'd talked of the last-minute preparations for the following day's flight, and of the organized chaos of life in the villa. He'd talked of late-night noodling sessions, and she'd chatted about her rambles through the city, the museums she'd visited and the markets she'd explored. She'd told him about walking through Chinatown with a bowl of dim sum and letting the hot broth trickle down her throat while she poked idly through the stalls in the open-air market. "I almost bought a black chicken," she'd confessed, "but then I realized that I had no idea how to prepare it."

She'd talked of eating shrimp teriyaki cooked on an outdoor wok by a man who reeked of road dust and sesame oil, of the fermented-wine richness of soy sauce on her tongue, and the crisp, woody crunch of cabbage between her teeth. She'd described her potterings through the countless junk and curio shops, the yellow dust of age and poor quality on her fingers like adipose, the vivid, whispering red splash of silk beneath her fingers, the dance of a thousand gold dragons on the breeze from the bay. Kitsch and culture and the patchwork world that only Calliope could weave.

She'd talked of the museums, with their somber gloom and reverent, monasterial light, and the flashes of human imagination mounted and pinned to the walls like so many poisoned butterflies, their wings spread to reveal a beauty dimmed by death and captivity. The velvet ropes that separated man from his wonder and the faux roman couches upon which to contemplate the loss of God. The gleaming hardwood floors that had reminded her of mahogany casket lids and the murmuring shuffle of feet as a patron wandered among the exhibits with an expression as indifferent and fixed as the reproduction of Augustus Caesar's bust in the Romantic wing. The smells of floor varnish and canvas cleaner and the latex gloves worn by the caretakers and curators who stave off the ravages of time with patience and dental picks and camel-hair brushes and soft-bristle brushes and chamois rags the texture of a woman thigh. The hum of the recessed lights hidden in tracks and alcoves and the muted clack of a museum guide's heels on polished hardwood. The secret, scuttling life of a living tomb, a pyramid built without knowledge by dumb hands moved by instinct and vanity and an atavistic desire to preserve those brief glimmers of light tossed out by screaming, hairless monkeys who so often wallowed in their petty hatreds and boasted souls gone black as pitch.

She'd drawn him further and further away from the crumbling precipice on which he'd been teetering when she'd innocently asked about his family and the unspoken history of him that only family ties could tell, away from the dangerously-sagging tightrope of her own family scandal, the younger brother who stank of a stranger in her father's house and whom she and her siblings quietly shunned as Other without knowing why.

So, he'd been surprised when she'd abruptly brought the subject back to family by asking, "So, besides the inevitable ski trip, what did you get your children for Christmas?"

"Nothing yet. I usually just take my daughter window-shopping. When she was younger, it was simpler, a doll or a dress or something with a lot of stuffing, but now..." He'd spread his hands. "Her mother and I made sure she wanted for nothing, and now, she needs nothing. I'm sure she'll come up with something, if only to give me the opportunity to spoil her."

"You like that, don't you?"

He'd raised an eyebrow and taken a sip of tepid coffee. "What, spoiling those I care for? Very much." He'd let his gaze linger on her shy smile, and she'd laughed, a soft exhalation behind her cup. "I take special joy in spoiling my children. I don't see them as often as I'd like. Penalty of the road."

And of your narcissism, his father had grunted. Even before Rammstein, you were obsessed with your precious music. You spent hours in dingy warehouses and filthy flats, lavishing your devotion upon your mistress while Angela stayed at home with a squalling Khira. Angela used to plead with you to come home and help with the baby, and you would promise to come home with diapers and blankets, and ten hours later, you'd still be in the warehouse, cradling your beloved guitar as though it were your child and leaving Khira to the mercy of Angela's patience. It was only fortune that she wasn't like me, a viper who delighted in poisoning her children.

And yet, she was not so unlike me, after all. She never hit Khira or belittled her, but she wasn't above using her as a pawn, a finely-honed stiletto with which to cut you. When you refused to marry her and moved out and on, Angela avenged her wounded pride by withholding Khira, as though she were a trophy to be awarded for good behavior and not a child created in a moment of lust and hope, a little girl who understood that her parents hated and spited and warred over her like a standard on a battlefield. Sometimes, Khira would call on the telephone and ask why she couldn't see you for her birthday, and while you sat on the edge of the bed with your chest cleaved in half and your heart in your hands, the phone would rattle, and then Angela would be on the line, demanding to know what the hell you were doing, upsetting your daughter, you heartless asshole. As though it were you who used her as a carrot on a stick. She'd hang up with Khira still crying in the backround and leave you with nothing to do but pace and pluck and smoke and tap-tap-tap your fingers until they felt spongy and bruised, hating Angela and hating yourself for your stupid, useless, impotent pettiness.

You had to beg to see her for an hour on her birthday or a few hours on Christmas. Khira needs a holiday with a proper family, not a collection of alcoholic lunatics, Angela would snarl at you, and you could offer no defense. Overnights were a miraculous rarity, and she called every few hours to make sure you hadn't spirited her away. It was nearly impossible to do anything but sit in the living room and watch Khira open the few presents you could afford and make marzipan in the tiny flat kitchens.

Then Rammstein ignited, and the time you could call your own grew less, and so did your time for Khira. There were rehearsals and endless meetings and press junkets and photo shoots and tours and recording sessions, the white glare of flashbulbs and the black, shoe-polish reek of Sharpies and warm, seawater scent of willing flesh. There was scarcely time for a little girl with your eyes and your stubbornness, and when you did ask to see her, Angela bridled and howled and insisted that backstage was no place for a child.

You saw Khira when you could, squeezed her in between tour legs and recording sessions. And as Angela's hurt and bitterness at your rejection faded, so did her resistance to your relationship with Khira. Visitations were easier to arrange, and she no longer hovered at the periphery of your time together, an agitated gatekeeper jangling the keys to the kingdom and counting down the minutes until she could expel you from its borders. She might have hated you for your selfishness, but she was determined that Khira should not hate her for hers.

While the visits might have been easier to arrange, the time in which to enjoy them grew scarcer. You had to resort to bringing her into the studio and to the concert hall, to tag her with an all-access pass and let her roam the warrens of your demigod's temple with no shepherd but your easily-distracted hand and the hulking road crew who became her uncles and played hide-and seek among the stage rigging and the backstage area, huge, beef-necked men who gladly squashed their bulk into cabinet crates and transformed into ogres and trolls and chased her through the venues.

But Angela was right: backstage was no place for a child, even if the soft-hearted road crew did their best to make it somewhere else, somewhere more innocent. There were too many strangers and too many outstretched hands that offered no kindness, only greed, and there was too much risk that she might wander by in her curious child's innocence and discover the cocaine so like powdered sugar, cut into neat lines on your dressing room table, or find Christoph's pot stash and decide to seed her Chia Pet with it. Backstage was a lions' den, and Khira was the unwary lamb.

And there was the chance that she might stumble upon one of you in the middle of debauching another man's daughter, slipping it up a groupie's ass while she braced herself against the grimy arena wall or clutched the vanity table while her cheap nails scrabbled like a vulture's talons and makeup clattered and rolled in seismic waves. She'd known about sex since she was four and been exposed to nudity since she was old enough to focus on the television; German children are neither so coddled nor so ashamed of their bodies as their American cousins, but you saw no need to expose her to the seamier side of the natural, biological imperative, to the tawdry rutting of strangers connected only at hip and mouth. Sex was not always sacred; sometimes, it was simply release, but it could be, and you wanted Khira to make that judgment for herself when the time was right. You didn't want her first memory of the act to be some band bunny's frantic grindings on her high, spraddle-legged father, with emptiness in his eyes and Peruvian salt riming his raw nose like the salt on a margarita glass and blood in his indifferent idiot's cock.

Groupies were verboten in your area when Khira came to visit, as were the dealers and hangers-on, and the roadies were instructed to sweep the area for stray pills and bindles of coke, and to steer her clear of nosy fans with cellphones and a Till too blasted on cocaine and Vicodin to see where he was going. Till's rage was incendiary and dangerous when he was wasted, and you were afraid that in his stupor, he would see your eyes looking at him from his ex-wife's face and unleash his resentment into her innocent, unsuspecting face. Not with his fists--even at his blackest, Till was never a brute, never me. But he could be just as savage with his mouth, just as brutal. You were afraid that he would squat in front of her, massive hands hanging limply between his knees, and whisper that her daddy was a wife-stealing bastard who had spilled her onto her mother's clenching thigh during an illicit fuck in the flat kitchen. He never had, of course, because Till was never as bad as you suspected him to be, and your paranoia was out of control, fueled by cocaine and guilt and too much time alone.

So, visits with your Khira Li were limited to three days, because that was as long as you could stand to go without the burn of cocaine and the sweet narcotic of a woman's touch to muffle my voice inside your head. You could never keep me out, boy, no matter how desperately you leaned against that shitty bathroom door with your bare feet braced against the cold, white bulge of the toilet bowl, or how deeply you retreated into your simpleton's mind when the belt bared its fangs and sank into your jumping, crawling flesh. There wasn't enough booze or pills or pussy to shut me out, either, though, stubborn, puling creature that you are, you tried.

You're like your bitch of a mother that way.

Khira was the angel who flitted into your life with a teddy bear in the crook of her arm and drifted out on a cloud of perfume and lipgloss and preteen hormones. Khira never begrudged you for your absence, but the truth remains that she grew up without you. Rammstein gave her the dresses and the toys and the mobile phones and the private school education and the trips to Greece and the private tutors for her studies and the means to indulge in her hobbies of the moment, but it deprived her of you. You weren't there for the moments that mattered, for her rites of passage. You missed her first steps and her first loose tooth and her first romantic drama, though you were given the play-by-play after the fact by a sobbing, hiccoughing, heartbroken thirteen-year-old who still miraculously thought you could mend her broken world over the phone.

You've only begun to know her these past few years, when the leviathan of Rammstein has slept undreaming and Khira's studies released her from their rigorous grip. With every moment that you spend together, you marvel at the brilliant, driven young woman that she's become, but you also realize that you missed her becoming. You know who she is, but you will never have that chance again.

And your son? Well, he was an accidental afterthought, conceived in a moment of convenience and proximity. Tatjana was a redhead firebrand with calluses on her fingers to match yours, and creation breeds a passion all its own. So you bedded her kissed her mouth, full and full of smoke and lies, and made your son, and though you love him fiercely and would die for him fearlessly and without regret, he is different, is not Khira. You never had to fight for him. Tatjana understood your life because it was hers, too, and how could she badmouth you when she was a Stasi whore, spying on her neighbors and informing on the men she bedded with the same mouth she used to suck their cocks? You and Tatjana had fucked and created a son, but you were never truly lovers, bound at heart and hip and hand, and so there was less bitterness when the relationship dissolved, eroded by indifference and your endless restlessness. He spent the first few years of his life being lulled to sleep to the subterranean thrum of his mother's bass coming through the amplifier and toddling around scummy dives on the edges of towns all over Europe, climbing onto chairs caked with the tackiness of a thousand anonymous asses and hiding under the dry-rotted bars of a thousand squalid pubs. He was a child of the road, and Tatjana thought it better he was with you, in your clean dressing room and tidy catering area, than playing among the sour beer puddles and filthy butt-studded floor of the half-empty nightclub.

Your son was a gift freely given, but Khira was a prize to be won, and what must be fought for is dearest to the heart. You are proud of your son, but Khira is your heart, your hope, and you can't imagine your life without her. And that boy of yours knows it.

He loves you because you are his father, but he does not adore you. He does not rush to embrace you or beg you to take him on holiday or ask to move in with you or call you in the middle of the night just to hear your voice and tell you he loves you. He does not call you 'Vati'. He hugs you, but he does not linger, does not breathe you in as Khira does. Why should he when the scent on your skin is so much like his--cigarettes and leather and hair gel and the resentment of being the child loved least?

That he resents you is beyond argument, boy, though I know that you would try just for the adrenaline-fueled spite of it. You see it in his eyes when your rare visits are interrupted by calls from Emu or Till or your publicist, or when you refuse to loan him that outrageous vanity car of yours, the BMW with your face airbrushed onto the trunk liner and floormats. You hear it in his voice when he sulks and snarls and asks why you care about what he does with his life when you have so little part in it, hear it in the click of the phone when he's wearied of your attempts to exert parental authority from six thousand miles away. He does not hate you, the son who shares so much of his father, but he doesn't miss you, either, and sometimes you fear that his eyes will be drier than the earth into which they'll lower you in the end.

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