Get in Trouble: Stories (7 page)

“Nowhere to go,” he says.

“Come on,” Meggie says. “Let’s get you something to eat.”

Ray doesn’t follow; lingers with his cigarette. Probably staring at their yoga-toned, well-enough-preserved celebrity butts.

Here’s the problem with this kid, the demon lover thinks. He sat in a theater when he was fifteen and watched me and Meggie done up in vampire makeup pretend-fucking on a New York subway car. The A train. Me biting Meggie’s breast, some suburban movie screen, her breast ten times bigger than his head. He probably masturbated a hundred times watching me bite you, Meggie. He watched us kiss. Felt something ache when we did. And that leaves out all the rest of this, whatever it is that you’re doing here with him and me. Imagine what this kid must feel now. The demon lover feels it, too. Love, he thinks. Because love isn’t just love. It’s all the other stuff, too.

He meets Irene, the fat, pretty medium who plays the straight man to Meggie. People named Sidra, Tom, Euan, who seem to
be in charge of the weird ghost gear. A videographer, Pilar. He’s almost positive he’s met her before. Maybe during his AA period? Really, why is that period more of a blur than the years he’s spent drunk or high? She’s in her thirties, has a sly smile, terrific legs, and a very big camera.

They demonstrate some of the equipment for the demon lover, let him try out something called a Trifield Meter. No ghosts here. Even ghosts have better places to be.

He assumes everyone he meets has seen his sex tape. Almost wishes someone would mention it. No one does.

There’s a rank breeze off the lake. Muck and death.

People eat and discuss the missing P.A.—the gofer—some Juliet person. Meggie says, “She’s a nice kid. Makes Whore-igami in her spare time and sells it on eBay.”

“She makes what?” the demon lover says.

“Whore-igami. Origami porn tableaux. Custom order stuff.”

“Of course,” the demon lover says. “Big money in that.”

She may have some kind of habit. Meggie mentions this. She may be in the habit of disappearing now and then.

Or she may be wherever all those nudists went. Imagine the ratings then. He doesn’t say this to Meggie.

Meggie says, “I’m happy to see you, Will. Even under the circumstances.”

“Are you?” says the demon lover, smiling, because he’s always smiling. They’re far enough away from the mikes and the cameras that he feels okay about saying this. Pilar, the videographer, is recording Irene, the medium, who is toasting marshmallows. Ray is watching, too. Is always somewhere nearby.

Something bites the demon lover’s thigh and he slaps at it.

He could reach out and touch Meggie’s face right now. It
would be a different story on the camera than the one he and Meggie are telling each other. Or she would turn away and it would all be the same story again. He thinks he should have remembered this, all the ways they didn’t work when they were together. Like the joke about the two skunks. When Out is in, In is out. Like the wrong ends of two magnets.

“Of course I’m happy,” Meggie says. “And your timing is eerily good because I have to talk to you about something.”

“Shoot,” he says.

“It’s complicated,” she says. “How about later? After we’re done here?”

It’s almost full dark now. No moon. Someone has built up a very large fire. The blackened bungalows and the roofless hall melt into obscure and tidy shapes. Now you can imagine yourself back when it was all new, a long time ago. Back in the seventies when nobody cared what you did. When love was free. When you could just disappear if you felt like it and that was fine and good, too.

“So where do I stay tonight?” the demon lover says. Again fights the impulse to touch Meggie’s face. There’s a strand of hair against her lip. Which is he? The pyromaniac or the masochist? In or Out? Well, he’s an actor, isn’t he? He can be anything she wants him to be.

“I’m sure you’ll find somewhere,” Meggie says, a glint in her eye. “Or someone. Pilar has told me more than once you’re the only man she’s ever wanted to fuck.”

“If I had a dollar,” the demon lover says. He still wants to touch her. Wants her to want him to touch her. He remembers now how this goes.

Meggie says, “If you had a dollar, seventy cents would go to your exes.”

Which is gospel truth. He says, “Fawn signed a prenup.”

“One of the thousand reasons you should go home and fix things,” Meggie says. “She’s a good person. There aren’t so many of those.”

“She’s better off without me,” the demon lover says, trying it out. He’s a little hurt when Meggie doesn’t disagree.

Irene the medium comes over with Pilar and the other videographer. The demon lover can tell Irene doesn’t like him. Sometimes women don’t like him. Rare enough that he always wonders why.

“Shall we get started?” Irene says. “Let’s see if any of our friends are up for a quick chat. Then I don’t know about you but I’m going to go put on something a little less comfortable.”

Meggie addresses the video camera next. “This will be our final attempt,” she says, “our last chance to contact anyone who is still lingering here, who has unfinished business.”

“You’d think nudists wouldn’t be so shy,” Irene says.

Meggie says, “But even if we don’t reach anyone, today hasn’t been a total loss. All of us have taken a risk. Some of us are sunburned, some of us have bug bites in interesting places, all of us are a little more comfortable in our own skin. We’ve experienced openness and humanity in a way that these colonists imagined and hoped would lead to a better world. And maybe, for them, it did. We’ve had a good day. And even if the particular souls we came here in search of didn’t show up, someone else is here.”

The A2 nods at Will.

Pilar points the camera at him.

He’s been thinking about how to play this. “I’m Will Gald,” he says. “You probably recognize me from previous naked film roles such as the guy rolling around on a hotel room floor clutching his genitals and bleeding profusely.”

He smiles his most lovely smile. “I just happened to be in the area.”

“We persuaded him to stay for a bite,” Meggie says.

“They’ve hidden my clothes,” Will says. “Admittedly I haven’t been trying that hard to find them. I mean, what’s the worst thing that can happen when you get naked on camera?”

Irene says, “Meggie, one of the things that’s been most important about
Who’s There?
right from the beginning is that we’ve all had something happen to us that we can’t explain away. We’re all believers. I’ve been meaning to ask, does Will here have a ghost story?”

“I don’t—” the demon lover says. Then pauses. Looks at Meggie.

“I do,” he says. “But surely Meggie’s already told it.”

“I have,” Meggie says. “But I’ve never heard you tell it.”

Oh, there are stories the demon lover could tell.

He says, “I’m here to please.”

“Fantastic,” Irene says. “As you know, every episode we make time for a ghost story or two. Tonight we even have a campfire.” She hesitates. “And of course as our viewers also know, we’re still waiting for Juliet Adeyemi to turn up. She left just before lunch to run errands. We’re not worried yet, but we’ll all be a lot happier when she’s with us again.”

Meggie says, “Juliet, if you’ve met a nice boy and gone off to
ride the teacups at Disney World, so help me, I’m going to ask for all the details. Now. Shall we, Irene?”

All around them, people have been clearing away plates of half-eaten barbecue, assembling in a half circle around the campfire. Any minute now they’ll be singing “Kumbaya.” They sit on their little towels. Irene and Meggie take their place in front of the fire. They clasp hands.

The demon lover moves a little farther away, into darkness. He is not interested in séances or ghosts. Here is the line of the shore. Sharp things underfoot. Someone joins him. Ray. Of course.

It is worse, somehow, to be naked in the dark. The world is so big and he is not. Ray is young and he is not. He is pretty sure that the videographer Pilar will sleep with him; Meggie will not.

“I know you,” the demon lover says to Ray. “I’ve met you before. Well, not you, the previous you. Yous. You never last.
We
never last. She moves on. You disappear.”

Ray says nothing. Looks out at the lake.

“I
was
you,” the demon lover says.

Ray says, “And now? Who are you?”

“You charge by the hour?” the demon lover says. “Why follow me around? I don’t seem to have my wallet on me.”

“Meggie’s busy,” Ray says. “And I’m curious about you. What you think you’re doing here.”

“I came for Meggie,” the demon lover says. “We’re friends. An old friend can come to see an old friend. Some other time I’ll see her again and you won’t be around. I’ll always be around. But
you, you’re just some guy who got lucky because you look like me.”

Ray says, “I love her.”

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” the demon lover says. He goes back to the fire and the naked people waiting for other naked people. Thinks about the story he is meant to tell.

The séance has not been a success. Irene the medium keeps saying that she senses something. Someone is trying to say something.

The dead are here, but also not here. They’re afraid. That’s why they won’t come. Something is keeping them away. There is something wrong here.

“Do you feel it?” she says to Meggie, to the others.

Meggie says, “I feel something. Something is here.”

The demon lover extends himself outward into the night. Lets himself believe for a moment that life goes on. Is something here? There is a smell, the metallic stink of muck farms. There is an oppressiveness to the air. Is there malice here? An ill wish?

Meggie says, “No one has ever solved the mystery of what happened here. But perhaps whatever happened to them is still present. Irene, could it have some hold on their spirits, whatever is left of them, even in death?”

Irene says, “I don’t know. Something is wrong here. Something is here. I don’t know.”

But
Who’s There?
picks up nothing of interest on their equipment, their air ion counter or their barometer, their EMF detector or EVP detector, their wind chimes or thermal imaging scopes. No one is there.

And so at last it’s time for ghost stories.

There’s one about the men’s room at a trendy Santa Monica
restaurant. The demon lover has been there. Had the fries with truffle-oil mayonnaise. Never encountered the ghost. He’s not somebody who sees ghosts and he’s fine with that. Never really liked truffle-oil mayonnaise, either. The thing in the bungalow with Meggie wasn’t a ghost. It was drugs, the pressure they were under, the unbearable scrutiny; a
folie à deux;
the tax on their happiness.

Someone tells the old story about Basil Rathbone and the dinner guest who brings along his dogs. Upon departure, the man and his dogs are killed in a car crash just outside Rathbone’s house. Rathbone sees. Is paralyzed with shock and grief. As he stands there, his phone rings—when he picks up, an operator says, “Pardon me, Mr. Rathbone, but there is a woman on the line who says she must speak to you.”

The woman, who is a medium, says that she has a message for him. She says she hopes he will understand the meaning.

“Traveling very fast. No time to say good-bye. There are no dogs here.”

And now it’s the demon lover’s turn. He says: “A long time ago when Meggie and I were together, we bought a bungalow in Venice Beach. We weren’t there very much. We were everywhere else. On junkets. At festivals. We had no furniture. Just a mattress. No dishes. When we were home we ate out of take-out containers.

“But we were happy.” He lets that linger. Meggie watches. Listens. Ray stands beside her. No space between them.

It’s not much fun, telling a ghost story while you’re naked. Telling the parts of the ghost story that you’re supposed to tell.
Not telling other parts. While the woman you love stands there with the person you used to be.

“It was a good year. Maybe the best year of my life. Maybe the hardest year, too. We were young and we were stupid and people wanted things from us and we did things we shouldn’t have done. Fill in the blanks however you want. We threw parties. We spent money like water. And we loved each other. Right, Meggie?”

Meggie nods.

He says, “But I should get to the ghost. I don’t really believe that it was a ghost, but I don’t not believe it was a ghost, either. I’ve never spent much time thinking about it, really. But the more time we spent in that bungalow, the worse things got.”

Irene says, “Can you describe it for us? What happened?”

The demon lover says, “It was a feeling that someone was watching us. That they were somewhere very far away, but they were getting closer. That very soon they would be there with us. It was worse at night. We had bad dreams. Some nights we both woke up screaming.”

Irene says, “What were the dreams about?”

He says, “Not much. Just that it was finally there in the room with us. Eventually it was always there. Eventually whatever it was was in the bed with us. We’d wake up on opposite sides of the mattress because it was there in between us.”

Irene says, “What did you do?”

He says, “When one of us was alone in the bed it wasn’t there. It was there when it was the two of us. Then it would be the three of us. So we got a room at the Chateau Marmont. Only it turned out it was there, too. The very first night it was there, too.”

Irene says, “Did you try to talk to it?”

He says, “Meggie did. I didn’t. Meggie thought it was real. I thought we needed therapy. I thought whatever it was, we were doing it. So we tried therapy. That was a bust. So eventually—” He shrugs.

“Eventually what?” Irene says.

“I moved out,” Meggie says.

“She moved out,” he says.

The demon lover wonders if Ray knows the other part of the story, if Meggie has told him that. Of course she hasn’t. Meggie isn’t dumb. It’s the two of them and the demon lover thinks, as he’s thought many times before, that this is what will always hold them together. Not the experience of filming a movie together, of falling in love at the exact same moment that all those other people fell in love with them, that sympathetic magic made up of story and effort, repetition and editing and craft and other people’s desire.