a second life
The Volkswagen Bug stopped twenty miles from Ames, Iowa. Its driver, a writer of children’s books, checked the shotgun seat for a silver briefcase, the sort used to carry cash and cocaine in action films. Still there. There was no real reason to stop; the ride had lasted five minutes, from his apartment near the university to this dirt road flanked by rows of corn. If he were to stop looking at the case, he believed it would run away, turn into a pumpkin, cease to exist.He heard the stalks rustle in the wind, and a thin squeal which might have been the voice of a little girl lost or at play far off to his left. He could faintly make out the bustle of Ames -- a truck backfiring, the murmur of traffic, dischoate rumblings coming from the mall.
It was ten o’clock in the morning. He egged the Bug on down the dirt road. The wind whipped through the cornfield and came out as barely incomprehensible voices. If he listened harder, he thought, these voices might tell him something.
The Volkswagen usually started shaking at fifty miles an hour, but today, though the road seemed bumpy, it was cruising at seventy-five, the needle pushing up to eighty. He pressed on the gas pedal. A smooth ride. The stalks on both sides of the road became bright green blurs. In his pocket he had a slip of paper -- flimsy, transparent blue -- which sealed his fate; he had received it this morning and had decided, over Cheerios and orange juice, that he had no intention of giving the briefcase back. It had given him terrible dreams. It had told him that it was to everybody’s benefit that he keep it. It had told him martyrdom had its merits. He did not believe most of what the case had to say, but he felt the need to keep it from its owners nonetheless, though it might mean forfeiting his second half of the fee, and, perhaps (hence his mad-dash, half-assed escape) death. As a writer of children’s books, he understood the logic of his actions perfectly. He was Dorothy, running away from the Wicked Witch. He was in the right. The case had been given to him for safekeeping. He was its guardian.
A figure blocked the road a mile away. He thought he recognized the girl from the faint outline up ahead, tall and wearing a close-fitting overcoat that came down to her ankles -- if, that is, it was her, and not someone else, or a scarecrow, or a ghost.
He didn’t press on the brakes. The bug rammed through the backlit figure in the cold of the Iowa morning. He heard the thump and drove on, and when he looked in the rearview mirror, he didn’t see anything, just the dirt road he’d gone through, twin tracks meeting in a corn-green horizon. The sky glared white, the clouds reminding him of bones. She hadn’t weighed anything at all. It’d been a slight bump.
The bug stopped of its own accord three miles later. It lay on the still road, the cold morning, the quiet field. The writer touched the case. He had not felt this calm since before his divorce. He remembered the pinpoint bliss he’d felt when he first addressed a class. He thought of his first GI Joe, his first Transformer action figure, watching a Yogi cartoon on Saturday morning.
There was something new in all this. He savored it. He felt whole, and calm, and, in a strange, vaguely religious way, born again. The light of the field was too bright. It burned in his eyes.
The bug had begun to bubble. Its canvas top seemed to be constructed of taffy. The steering wheel lost its shape. He tried to take his hands off it, but the stuff was sticky, though not hot. The roof covered him, nonporous, slick, still bubbling, and he couldn’t breathe, the side of the door caving in, cool, not too cold, the whole car wrapping around him, the odd bubble popping like chewing gum.
The car radio curled, fizzed, the chrome knobs sparkling, melting speakers cressendoing a crackly Donovan tune that sprung to life on its own, and the car, and himself, slowly peeling away, going up in white tufts of smoke. He waned lighter. The briefcase sprung open. He stared at it through smoky eyes, rising. The case, too, shed its solidity, turned to bright orange fog.
The smoke rose in the field. On the road, a door handle turned to quicksilver, droplets of mercury fizzing off into the air, till all that remained in the dirt was a damp patch, roughly the size of a car.
Her boots made dull thumps on the road. Her arms were crossed, shoulders huddled, the long overcoat listing to life, falling limp again, which each step. She sobbed.
"I’m sorry," she said, staring at a wisp of mist above her.
"It’s OK," the mist said. "Really."
She made a small, gulping sound. A short intake of breath.
"I’m fine," the mist said.
"I didn’t have a choice," she said. She was about to cry again, but stopped herself. The mist spiraled off, trailing, muttering, vanishing. The girl watched it -- the writer, the VW bug, the briefcase -- join the sky. She walked away.
And then, Henry Downs thought, there were dangers in being alone. He sat red-eyed with his back turned to the window, smoking a cigarette, tapping ash into a skull-shaped tray, gulping sweet, tepid coffee. Crinkle faced him, slumped in his chair, buzzed but not drunk. How Crinkle had gotten his nickname was a mystery. The sobriquet had stuck, however, and if Henry were pressed to recall Crinkle’s actual name, he would have had to think about it for five minutes or so. They were in a downtown Orlando diner. It was close to midnight. The Church Street traffic could be heard from here, the drunken squeals of tires, the blare of dance music, but the diner lay on a darkened corner of an intersecting road, cut off from most of the bustle.
"Tonight’s the night," Crinkle said. "Right?"
Henry shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette. Theatrically, deliberately, he pressed the half-smoked butt deep into the overflowing ashtray.
He glanced at the other patrons. Tall, good-looking, not quite drunk, not quite sober. Most had Day-Glo bands strapped to their wrists. He recognized the ones for The Edge from the orange wasp logo, and thought of Mae. Mae would still be at work right now. She didn’t get off till three in the morning. Which, he thought, suited him fine tonight. He heard the chatter. Loud, bantering voices. Crude jokes. Teeming with sexuality, it seemed, glistening in the fluorescent-lit teeth of twentysomething smiles, in hard-clipped words, sex lapping at the stiletto heels of the whole club scene. His bony fingers and chubby thighs seemed attuned to it. Not really. Drawn, maybe.
Crinkle had begun to say something. Henry half-heard him, mid-sentence.
"Cancer, all that shit, you don’t want that," Crinkle said. "I’m proud of you."
"That was the last one there," he said, pointing at the smoldering tray. "No more."
They had been working together for six months. Crinkle edited a low circulation lifestyles weekly, Strobe. Henry wrote film reviews. Strobe was a freebie, meaning it could be picked up at no charge, and depended on advertising to cover publication costs and staff salary. Pay-day was usually every other Friday, sometimes the Monday following it. Henry scraped nine hundred dollars a month. Enough to live on. Not enough for health insurance. But enough to live on.
"My dad," Crinkle said, "he gave it up when he had me." Crinkle was in his late twenties and, like Henry, sporadically depended on his parents when emergencies flared up. "He said he felt guilty about bringing up a child up in a world where people did that... killed themselves like that. Said he didn’t want to be that kind of guy."
Crinkle stood at six foot two, was gaunt, had long, lanky black hair and a heavy beard. His father, Henry remembered from the two dinners he’d had at the family home, was much the same way. Intense. Thin eyelids, metallic eyes.
"It’s like that," Henry said, "like wanting to die. It’s gone." He pointed at the open pack of Camels on the table, noticing, with regret, that there were still seven cigarettes in there. "It’s over. Done with."
He turned to face the window. He saw a couple walk past amber streetlamps.
A waitress, a plump blonde, re-filled his coffee mug. He mumbled thanks, eyes still trailing the couple. The pay-phone hung by the men’s restroom. Maybe I should call Mae, he thought, also thinking that he needed to pee. More than her voice, the often repeated queries as to how each of them were doing, and what do you want to do tomorrow, hon, and so on, Henry needed to know that he wasn’t alone, that there was a girl stocking shelves at Publix who cared, that he was part of an item. His bladder echoed this, a sharp twang. He stayed where he was. Sipped hot, sweet coffee.
He drew a cigarette from the pack. While hunting for his lighter in the pockets of his pants, shirt, and jacket, he noticed Crinkle’s frown.
"Last one," he said. "Really."
When twelve-thirty came around, Crinkle motioned to Henry. He slapped Henry on the shoulder. He tossed an unopened half-and-half into Henry’s cup.
"What?" Henry said. He had been spooning the same three packets of aspartame for the past ten minutes. Crinkle pointed at the clock. Henry squinted, kept on mixing the fake sugar, and took a drag from his next-to-last butt. The good thing about quitting smoking, Henry thought, was how much better it tasted once the resolution had been broken -- in this case, it’d taken about five minutes. It still applied. The clock. Yes. Twelve-thirty. He needed to get some sleep.
Crinkle had managed, three months ago, to trade a quarter-page ad for club passes for himself and the Strobe staff. The ad hawked the superior DJs and music of The Edge. The club, in return, allowed the people from the freebie to get in, no charge, from twelve-thirty to three. A job with an unstable salary almost always involves perks of this sort. There were also the free movie passes. And the dusky, half-acknowledged celebrity one got from distributor’s offices, their submissive attitude when he stopped by to pick up a package of eight by ten glossies to promote this action flick, that quiet film about self-discovery, knowing full well that most of it was crap and being, to the mild dismay of these lower echelon movie suits, brutally honest in his scribblings -- secretaries in high-heeled shoes and red, low-cut blouses offered him coffee while he waited, girls who usually got paid two or three times what he did.
And yes: The club. The Edge with its Day-Glo wasps and hot-pants pant.
"Time to go," Crinkle said. "C’mon."
"I’m going to stay a while," Henry said.
"It’s your one night out with the guys," Crinkle said. By guys, he meant Henry and himself.
Henry waved Crinkle off. He mumbled something about a headache, how that last hit off the bong had made him feel queasy about drinking -- which wasn’t totally untrue... It would only take him two or three beers to soothe him into somnolescence, but that wasn’t the point; the point was, well, he couldn’t tell Crinkle about tonight’s plans. He hadn’t told Mae yet, either. Crinkle left the diner. Henry realized that he’d have to pay for Crinkle’s coffees as well as his own.
He got up and went to the restroom. He found a quarter in his jeans pocket. Mae’s work number was written on the back of one of his business cards. The phone rang four times.
"We’re closed," a cracked, teenage throat said.
"I know," Henry said. "I’m looking for Mae. She works there."
"Hold on."
The silence on the other end of the line was the sort Henry would have associated with a large supermarket. He could hear lone footsteps echoing off aisles. He made out a mop slopping up cranberry juice. Or the shuffling of a re-arranged potato chip display. Or something. A steady, clicking beat grew louder -- Mae’s boots with the dangerously smooth plastic soles.
"What’s up?" she said, her voice worn, slightly hoarse.
"Nothing," Henry said. He had meant to tell her something, anything -- to construct a seemingly plausible excuse to call this late, but it had vanished. "Just wanted to say hi."
"We’ve been throwing this goddamn milk out by the dumpster," she said. "Some asshole left last week’s in the back, and no one checked, so the whole place stinks."
"Bummer," he said.
"It fucking stinks," she said. The cracked voice could be heard in the background. "I gotta go, hon. Call you tomorrow."
"OK," Henry said.
"Tell Crinkle I said hi," she said.
"OK."
"Don’t put the fucking jugs in that cart," she said. A terrifically wet toppling sound followed, then the background voice squealing, distinctly, oops. "Shit," she said, and hung up.
Henry heard the dial tone, but held on to telephone for ten seconds before cradling it. He walked back to his table.
The waitress had re-filled his coffee-mug in his absence. He fished out three packets of aspartame and, pressing them together with his left hand, ripped open the edges. He poured their contents into the skull-shaped ashtray, flicked ashes into the mug. He drank and gagged.
There are dangers in being too alone, he thought. He drank and waited and feared a stranger’s confession in the interim. People talked to him. Something about his face maybe, the thick eyebrows. Affairs, fears, rapes, suicides, suicide attempts, dispair, joy, sex, lack thereof, birthdays, bridal showers -- when he smiled back at someone, when he turned to see who had sat next to him at the bus, when he (take, he thought, now) drank coffee or beer alone, when he stumbled to the store for cigarettes or rummaged deep pockets for change for too long a time. When, don’t you know, ever. And it was closing in on one and he needed to wait till two. And no one talked to him. And he was saddened, though why he couldn’t say, by this orphaning from strangers. And the second hand ticked five, four, three, two, one. And it ticked on.
"I watched from the street across," a woman’s voice said. Hers. "Saw you sitting there -- hours and hours."
He looked up. Lucy loomed over his table, arms crossed at the elbows over a tight leather overcoat, a hint of her sunburnt neck peeking through a gray skeleton t-shirt. He looked down. She wore tight black jeans and boots crusted with mud.
"Don’t you ever get bored?" she asked.
Henry said hi.
She sat down across him, where Crinkle had been, and grimaced at Henry’s lit cigarette. She waved the smoke away from her face. He leaned the coal against the side of the ashtray, meaning to stub it out, but she stopped him, coughing.
"Thought you’d given it up," she said. She stood a head higher than Henry. She slouched, however, when sitting, so their eyes were at an even keel. Bad posture.
Very unladylike, thought Henry. Her eyes, through some trick of diner light, shone a deep green, making him think of moss and forests, dark, scented recesses, abandoned pools, the veins on the underside of dead leaves or live wrists. Nobody’s eyes could ever be quite that shade, he thought, maybe it’s contacts, maybe the fluorescents, maybe I need some sleep. Fine black hair, bobbed. Illumined skin. He liked her nose. What had she asked? He remembered, cropped up a no, thought he should explain himself.
"I did," he said. "For like an hour. Crinkle said I’d puffing away in no time."
"Who?" she asked, motioning for a waitress.
"Guy I was with a while ago. A friend. My boss." He picked up the ashtray and was about to put it to his lips. The smell of ashes made him sneeze. He spilled some of the tray’s dust on himself. "That’s what he said." He coughed.
"It’s your life," she said, coughing.
"I’m babbling," he said. He thought he could see her pupils dilate as she turned her head towards the cash register counter, irises the color of old Coke bottles. He drank cold coffee and realized his girlfriend was off duty. Would she try to call? Mae’s gray eyes changed hue with stormy weather, summer skies, television static. He sneezed.
"Whatever. You still interested?" Lucy said.
He nodded. Again: theatrically, deliberately. This, he thought, is how they’d do it in a movie -- in a cheap thriller. A dark suit would have been suitable, a sleek Armani, but he had never learned how to properly tie a tie, and dress pants made his crotch itch. Henry Downs, the suave critic cum criminal. He did own Wayfarers though.
She uncrossed her arms and rested them on her lap. Her shoulders wriggled. They kept on wriggling. It took him five minutes to figure out that she was trying to slip him something under the table.
Their fingers met. His pinkie brushed against her wrist. Groping, his left hand found a piece of paper. She let it go. He dropped it, jumped off the chair, got down on all fours, hunted around for it, bumped his head against the table’s marbled underside, and finally found it -- a slip of flimsy blue paper. He rubbed his head. Bonked it again as he staggered for his chair. He sat down and immediately proceeded to spill coffee when he reached for a sore spot on the back of his head. He knocked the napkin holder against the cup, which clattered, teetered on the table rim, and crashed on the floor; he pulled a thick sheaf of napkins and mopped the spill while tidying the cup pieces into a tiny pile with his feet. And the chubby waitress with the pale hair walked over and asked Lucy if she wanted anything, and Lucy said no.
He pocketed the paper. Lucy appeared movieish, a fluorescent glare illuming her head, stray strands of hair masquerading as rays in a corona of light. Upturned, kindly smile. Pagan halo. Maybe, he thought, that’s what they mean when you see stars. He could feel a headache coming on.
"That there," she said, pointing at Henry’s jacket pocket, "that’s a hand grenade I’m giving you. It’s your life, like I said. I just arrange things. Sleep well."
But she walked out smiling, patting him on the back of his head, which felt, almost immediately, miraculously better. The door closed. He saw Lucy cross Orange avenue, then lost sight of her. He paid his bill. His cigarette coal grew bright orange on the diner’s darkened window, his reflection somber and distorted and merging with the streetlights overlooking the empty street, reddened eyes, ruddy face hazing into a ghost walking out, twin sets of hands joining at a door handle, one hand real, the other something else. Heading home.
Alone, in bed, he flicked ashes onto a plate with chicken bones in it. He scribbled on engineer’s quadrille. A cold summer night. The blue slip Lucy had given him was tucked into the cellophane of an empty Camels softpack. Orange Blossom Trail lay purple and still on the open window. It was five thirty in the morning. He rubbed his eyes and wondered if he needed glasses or sleep or more coffee. He was smoking generics, a buck fifty a pack, endurable but with a metallic aftertaste. The radio played classical music by lesser-known talent -- the Counts who amused themselves with a few sheets of notation, musicians who were big at the time and forgotten now, and he couldn’t tell the difference in quality from that to the masters, it sounded just as good, he thought, very pretty, though it didn’t stir him, and he wrote a stray thought down on the margin of the fifth page of the stiff-bound quadrille notebook after falling asleep and waking up to remember to stub out the cigarette and put the laundry in the dryer. The minor composers played on.
He dreamt he was in his grandfather’s house, a whitewashed farm in Arkansas. A girl he didn’t know was eating petals off a rose bush, violins played in the background, the walls glared with reflected light from a river he didn’t know in real life but could identify in the dream, the Magdalena, crisscrossing a country whose landscape he glimpsed through a bright window, the broken vertebrae of the cordillera, the three main ranges planted like brown and withered hands on green cloth, Colombia. A monk walked by the window and waved. The monk’s face mirrored his, though it was darker, the hair dark brown, not light, the eyes just as red but black, not hazel. The monk told him that the woman he knew had preyed on souls in a previous incarnation. That she was atoning for her sins here (robed arm pointing inside) while sinning there (celibate finger arched towads the mountains). That the penitent had no knowledge of the sinner. That it was happening now. The girl kept on eating the petals. Red petals. White. Each petal, Henry realized, was a soul. He wondered if the monk had gotten the roles confused. And he didn’t know the woman. Then she turned into Lucy. The monk walked out of view. Henry floated out of the rose room and into a sun-soaked patio striated by the shifting shadows of the river. A white rose grew on the concrete floor. He plucked it. Naked, holding the white rose with both hands, he walked back into the rose bush room, which had turned dark, with a spotlight shining on the woman he barely knew, Lucy, the beam highlighting the creases of her black leather overcoat, her deep green eyes and pale neck, the gray t-shirt, her tight black jeans. A man’s deep disembodied voice read traffic and weather reports, drowning the violins. He knelt, offered the rose. She took it, pressed it to her lips, kissed a petal, and kicked him in the balls.
He woke up. It was five forty-five, Saturday morning, the Orange Blossom sky a more livid purple. A car drove by. He drew a cigarette from the pack and crushed it. Then he crushed the whole pack, walked to the window, threw it out. He turned off the radio. He slept, dream forgotten, sun crawling into his room. The voices of Portuguese tourists chattered two floors below. It rained at three in the afternoon and, at four, when he woke up, the Wet’n’Wild amusement park glistened like an empty museum. He ate breakfast cereal in his underwear. Maybe asking Mae to live with him wouldn’t be such a bad idea. He felt alone and in need of a cigarette, and he called Mae and asked her if she wanted to go to The Edge that night, and she said yes.
On hiatus from Amor en las Piedras, a Colombian soap-opera, Alma E. Junno drank Bud Lite and smoked Kools in a biker bar off Semoran. She usually headed for Boca Raton on breaks, but the soap had cut her screen-time in half, brought in a twenty-two year old with a tighter ass, and she thought Orlando might be cheaper. It wasn’t. The Hyatt charged two hundred dollars a night for the suite, the Spanish she overheard truncated and strange, a Puerto Rican patois, the Florida Mall a whirl of garlicky Portuguese following a tour guide’s red flag and sullen, pimply Americans wearing baggy jeans -- so she had the cabbie drop her off at the bar, ten blocks down from her hotel, to drink cheap beer and think about the future, and whether to take the offer from the Peruvian channel or stay home. She wiped beads of sweat from her forehead. The left sleeve of her short mink coat was dotted with ash, as was her fish-stockinged right knee, her neon tube-top damp between her breasts. A fantastically fat man stared at her from a dark corner of the bar, by the jukebox, next to the darts. She tried asking the barkeep if they could turn the a.c. on. The barkeep nodded, walked to the opposite end of the bar, and came back with an Old Fashioned. "There you go," he said, looking at her cleavage. She shook her head and pointed at the a.c. unit. The barkeep brought her a shot of tequila.
"Zena Marti," somebody said, behind her. She turned around.
"You’re Zena, aren’t you," a man said -- youngish, twenty-four, maybe twenty five, holding a slip of blue paper in his right hand, a stiff cardboard-bound notebook in his left. Light brown hair. Fat around the thighs, scrawny shoulders.
Alma shook her head, then nodded. Miramisol. Zena Marti -- she’d played a character by that name back in, what, 1985? She’d been twenty-one. Eleven years ago.
The man said, in broken Spanish, that he watched Miramisol back in college. She asked him what his major had been. He said Journalism. His Spanish professor encouraged his students to watch soap operas in Univision, and he got hooked. He asked her for an autograph, tearing a green sheet from the notebook and handing her a ballpoint. She asked whom for. He said Henry. They shook hands. Alma smiled and fanned herself with the mink coat.
"Henry!"
They both turned around. The immense man in the corner of the bar was waving. Henry looked at his slip of blue paper. Alma peeked. The letterhead, neatly printed, read "Pragma". She couldn’t make out the rest. Henry said excuse me and walked over to the fat man, autograph forgotten.
The fat man raised his hand, motioned to Alma, called out her name. Puzzled, she got up from her stool, the beer and the tequila shot and the Old Fashioned craddled awkwardly in her hands, and made her way in high heels to the dark corner of the bar, where the fat man sat and Henry stood. She took a side seat. The fat man told her, in perfect Spanish, what a huge fan he was. He asked her if he could buy her a drink, then smiled.
"But you seem to be doing fine," he said, fingering a gaudy carnation pinned to his lapel. "My name is Phogg," the fat man said. "Please join us." He turned to the young man with the notebook and said, still speaking in Spanish and pointing to the chair facing him, "Henry, sit down."
Henry sat down and squealed and jumped back up. He leaned in on the seat of the chair. When he rose, he held a thumbtack which, frowning, he presented to Phogg. Phogg chuckled.
To Alma, it seemed as though the fat man found the joke as unfunny as Henry did, and he was just laughing to be polite -- to himself. Phogg took the tack from Henry and pocketed it. The fat man spoke. In English.
"Yuv tolkd too Loosee, rayt? Sha tail yu wat yur soopoasd too du?"
"Sha jost rote dawn wair da bharr wus, ees ole," Henry said, shaking his head. "Sha deent sae, deent tail mi wat aive ghotta, u no, wat aim sooposd too du."
Phogg knelt down and pulled a silver briefcase from between his legs. Alma recognized the brand -- slim, light-weight, expensive. She drank her tequila shot. Phogg slid the case across the table, towards Henry. Henry took it.
"Eets gat ah kombeenashun lok an u donno da kombeenashun," Phogg said. "Ole u du ees hald eet. Avrywair u goad, shi," he said, pointing to the case, "goas. U taik ah krap, da kais goas too da batrum weet u. Kad eet?"
"Ja," Henry said. He pulled a wrinkled cigarette out of a pack and lit it.
Alma lit a Kool. She wondered what number she should dial to talk to the police, and whether anyone over there spoke Spanish. She got up but Phogg pulled her back down, asked her to stay, told her that his people needed an actress for an ad in Spanish, and was she interested. She said no, but remained seated.
"An wan wi one eet," Phogg said, "Loosee fans u. Sha geebs u sum eenstrukshuns, u fall dem an -- shoozum! Uv gat ur sahkon haff."
"An da furs?" Henry said, right palm up.
Phogg slid a thick, manila-wrapped bundle to Henry. The young man put it in a jacket pocket, stood up, was about to walk away. Alma downed the Old Fashioned in two long gulps. No escape. Trapped. Actress Death Unexplained, Authorities Say. Embassy Demands Immediate Investigation. Colombia Mourns.
"Juan moar teeng," Phogg said.
Henry sat down again.
"Lak ma flour?"
Henry leaned over the fat man. Water squirted out of the carnation and doused the young man’s face. Henry frowned, turned to Alma, smiled, and said, "Your acting in the television is very much wonderful. My speaking Spanish is very much terrible. Sorry. It was very much wonderful to understand an important woman from the television."
She told him that his Spanish was fine, and wiped his face with a cocktail napkin. The young man walked off. Alma grimly waited for the fat man to pull out a gun.
Phogg reached into his pocket. Alma threw the Old Fashioned glass at him. It missed his head by a few inches and crashed against the jukebox instead, which instantly began playing a very loud, guitar-driven song.
"Here," Phogg said, "I want you to watch this." He held a miniature television set, headphones, and a felt headband with gold wiring and small, black LCD sensors on the inside. Alma put everything on. Phogg pushed a button and the screen flickered to life.
{ WHAT ALMA SAW } Cue the killing music, the stompbox madness. Red guitars celebrate a killer and a pederast. Kyle sits on a shiny chair tapping his engineer on his bald spot with the rubber end of a pencil, muttering this is it, this is it, this is it, with a tiny tap on it, a bonk on the is, a tap on the this. It is midnight. The next to last tape for this season. On screen: a good looking man with a knife approaching a bed, a blank and darkened stage, fake fog, red lights, a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack. Fade to a glare of sunlight. A still photo of a dead child.
Would Donovan’s Jennifer Juniper be too much? Yes, it would. He nods. Public domain violins. Make it weepy.
In five minutes the cut’s been made, a sharp twenty second sequence. If, Kyle thinks, and not that he believes it, or would like anyone to believe it, if what he’s just done is art, what’s the source then, the inspiration, not the killer, not the act, not the acting, not life, but what, an intrinsic understanding of the plasticity, the beat of the deed, the audience’s gut-level reaction to this trash? He taps the engineer once more. Done.
"You’ve got the actor for the Turner sequence, right?" the engineers asks.
"Sure," he says, thinking, didn’t we do the Turner sequence? The man they’d caught already, in some photogenic diner, the photograph flashing on the screen, "if you see this man...", and a waitress turning around from the TV to the short order cook who was, from the prison shot on Kyle’s show, one of the Ten Most Wanted bastards, the man who killed his sister with a set of nail-clippers, Ivan Turner, the waitress thinking, holy shit, Kyle, when getting the news, also thinking, holy shit, remembering that scene from Fahrenheit 451 when the tube asks everybody to step outside to see if the criminal’s out there, and Kyle getting a hard-on and humming, I’ve got the power... and now, what? They’d done the Turner sequence. Hadn’t they? They’d done about a week’s worth of shoots, roughly enough programming to keep night-owls happy for six months. It’d been a blur, yes, but had he, could he have actually forgotten to do that one particular shoot, dramatizing the one time the 3 a.m. true crime toss-off had, in all actuality, caught someone, a true-blood brooding assassin, flesh and blood? Holy shit, Kyle thinks. The shoot’s tomorrow. Five a.m. Four hours from now. And now he thinks that he might have dreamt that shoot, it’d been so perfect. And maybe (he thinks) the dream’s right now, a nightmare spiraling from a moment’s lapse, an oversight. But he’s not dreaming.
He puts on his overcoat. He walks by blinking, brooding lights and overweight, chain-smoking infomercial editors, blinking shadows, blind corridors, an angel disguised as a phone operator, a strange executive type disguised as an angel, the devil in Haggar slacks, the men from Pragma who have been tracking him since the night before, who sacrificed a chicken and a newborn baby to Beliel to find out if everything’s on track, red candles saying yes, black candles humming no, yellow candles saying, wait, we’re not sure, could you hold on a minute?
Night is mostly noisy, cold, New York bowery, down to So Ho in a parody of a New York subway, quiet and dirty, followed now by just one Pragma man. Kyle is paunchy, dark, losing his hair -- he is a caricature of what he thought old people looked like when they turned fifty. Fifty’s not old now. He taps out a Camel and lights it and no one tells him not to. No one’s there. Pragma has taught its people techniques to keep them from being noticed. They have spent years meditating, listening to self-hypnosis tapes tucked under their pillows, following a strict vegan diet, wearing rawhide underwear. They know their stuff.
A shade taps him on the shoulder. He apologizes immediately and is about to stomp out his smoke when a dead voice tells him not to.
"We’ve got your man," says the Pragma man. "He’s a good actor. Classically trained."
Kyle realizes he is not talking to a ghost. He is talking to a man impersonating a ghost. There is nothing to make him out, hardly anything in front of him but the man’s presence, and the card handed to him has that shimmering quality too till he tucks it in his wallet, and then he knows that it’s real, and takes up space. He must get on another train to get to the club etched on the card, to get the actor. Get, get, get, it’s on his mind right now, it’s the down beat in his head. And the Pragma man is gone. And maybe he should have asked some more, or acted suspicious, but what, and why?
There is music blasting from a block down, Lou Reed’s Romeo Had Juliette, the last few lines of the song trailing down the subway stairs as Kyle walks up them -- then a song he’s never heard of, strange and squeaky, about how everyone’s your friend in New York City, and everything looks beautiful when you’re young and pretty. He is thinking of another Lou Reed tune, half-gasping the words, "we’re going to have a real good time together / we’re going to laugh and shout together," thinking, maybe this actor won’t be so bad. It’s nearly two thirty. A few blocks away is a man considering a protracted love affair with a watermelon he’s kept in his refrigerator for months. There are people awake, and most are, in the biological sense of the word, alive, and some are reading minds or hunting dogs, and there are people cleaning or sweet-talking their guns right now, and some are levitating, and two and a half are falling in love, and the men from Pragma are looking into a 1952 Zenith television set and adjusting their reception to make out Kyle as he walks into the club, and taping the other shows for later. New York is not known for good reception. The V-hold isn’t holding.
The club is of the generic sort, a slight disappointment given the unusual source for the man, a nigh-invisible source, tolerant of smokers. Thinking back, Kyle recalls a bookish pipe tobacco scent to the shade. There are two naked women playing chess with Styrofoam phalli on-stage. There is moody, noisy music. He asks the bartender for a beer. The bartender says he has been asked not to give him one, and could he please talk to the young man in black by the glow-in-the-dark wasp? Kyle sifts through the crowd. They are all older than him, in their eighties, grooving to music made by children who could beat them at video games. Get, get, get. There’s the kid. In black. White trash from the looks, from somewhere out in pre-fab housing, and locked down strip malls, and the smell of rot and sea wafting in, but how do you know? A democracy of bad taste and turned out labels. The obviousness of the expensive get-up. He’s either truly rich, Kyle thinks, or dirt poor and not showing it, double on the latter. He sits across from the kid. A girl in beat uniform sidles up to him to a torch-song track.
"I want you to meet my sister," the kid says.
Kyle nods. Good legs, same blonde looks of her brother, both distinctly ruddy, well put together. She sits on her brother’s lap. Her brother puts an arm around her waist.
"I’m your man," the kid says. He slides over a manila envelope.
Kyle opens it. Standard glossies. Uneventful resume. A videotape formatted (at this he wonders for the first time tonight, truly surprised, almost aghast) in Beta, of all things.
"We don’t have a player for these things," Kyle says.
"Look, you don’t know where I’m coming from," the kid says. "You need an actor. I know your situation. My people know who you are, get it? We know."
The kid is making it sound like it’s a huge conspiracy. But, he thinks, it’s just an oversight, is all. Nothing else. He blooped on the schedule. A naked woman has just shouted out her checkmate, piercing over the club’s din. The chess-player bears an uncanny resemblance to the twins, cuz that’s what they are, he realizes, twins, identical to a t save minor differences in gender. The sister is curling up to her brother. He feels like an intruder, a beggar... I am the only one in-between in this club, he thinks, everyone else is either too old or, take these two strange strangers here, too young. I’m the only one who makes sense. Get, get, get, he thinks, get. This is an important white trash person. Get.
"The shoot’s today at five," he says, defeated. There is something more to this kid, these people, these ghosts. Something in the works.
The kid says yes, he’ll be there, he knows where it is. On stage a new game is starting. The men from Pragma are watching the blurry women and arguing over whether to get cable. He offers to escort the kids to the studio but he says no, and when he asks if his sister would be keen on watching the shoot, the sister shakes her head, not a word from her, she slides off into a room of identical twins, forty-eight of them, twenty-four male, twenty-four female, partitioned by a bubble-wrap curtain splotched black and magenta, tacky eighties decor, and on their wrists is a U.P.C. code and on their left ankle, a Pragma tattoo, a rose, handcuffs, a hummingbird. The name of the club is, of course, the Parabola.
He walks back to the studio. It is four-thirty. The engineer is there, having just woken up from a night of fitful debauchery with Belial, courtesy of the Pragma people. On his face is the smile of hidden knowledge. The engineer has fallen. Kyle doesn’t know it but he senses it, but there is nothing to set it apart from any other smile, but it is the source of plasticity, the secrets revealed to seraphim and short order cooks. The yellow candles are saying sure. The V-hold is holding. There is a tattoo of a rose on the engineer’s left ankle. He has learned to play chess overnight. He has lost twenty pounds. He has a healthy head of hair.
The kid comes in at five, on the dot. They do the shoot in two hours. The killer caught in a set of a diner built to resemble a diner that looks like a set of a diner. The waitress a parody of a waitress. A jumble of guitars. Sound f/x of a heavy cell door slamming shut. Kyle whispers cut. He hears a click. The engineer has shut the camera off and is winking at him. There are invisible men in overcoats pounding at a Zenith. There is a camera winking at a dark balding man who is walking head-on into morning, down a reasonable facsimile of the city, thinking of killers and mirrors. There are incontrovertible sounds and smells all around him, all real.
"You understand," Phogg said.
Alma nodded.
He handed her a slip of flimsy blue paper, which she put in her purse. She walked outside. Hailed a cab. She called her agent from the Hyatt, and told her she was going to do a brief spot for an American company, and the agent said, congratulations, what is it? Alma said that she didn’t know. She called a travel office and booked a round-trip ticket to New York.