"Scissors," demanded Tommy.
"Second drawer from the left by the refrigerator," said Amanda.
The woman went back into the kitchen.
Tommy pointed the gun at their uneaten dessert. "What the hell is that?"
For several long seconds no one spoke.
"Durian,"
Drake said.
"Looks like a puddle of snot. That the latest among jaded trendettes like yourselves? There a special spoon for scooping it up, too?"
The woman returned, nervously clacking open and shut a large pair of yellow-handled shears.
"What are you going to do to us?" asked Brandon.
"Beats me," Tommy shrugged. "What do you think you deserve?"
"More than a visit from you," snapped Drake.
Tommy smiled. "Well, yeah, but you got it anyway, didn't you? Life's rotten with modest surprises. I know mine has been."
They sat quietly and allowed the woman to tape them up. From behind sealed mouths their frightened eyes sought the touch of one another, a lifetime of unspoken messages in those darting gazes.
Tommy turned up the wall rheostat. The room became as bright as a photographer's studio. "That's nice," he said, approvingly, then to the woman, "Turn on the lights in the living room, turn on all the lights. I can barely see a thing in here and I like seeing how other folks live. It's like visiting zoos."
"Hey," called the woman, "you should see the TV they got. Projection. Stereo sound."
"Certainly," said Tommy, "they're state-of-the-art people, they got all the right stuff." He was moving from chair to chair, rummaging through their heaped belongings, pocketing the paper money. "Twenty-three stinking bucks," he said, turning Brandon's wallet inside out. "I know you think you're oh-so-cool not carrying any green, but what happens when someone like me shows up who is in great need? What will you do? What
will
you do?" He took his time studying Brandon's driver's license. "Thirty-four?" he exclaimed in mock incredulity. "You're thirty-four? Coulda fooled me, buddy. You look at least forty. Better start eating right. Try to relax. Get more sleep." He slipped the license into his hip pocket. "Maybe we'll go over to your place after we're finished here, make a night of it, house party 'til dawn."
As Tommy rounded the table to where Drake sat waiting, Amanda suddenly jumped up, mouth, hands still taped, and bolted for the kitchen.
"Kara!" Tommy shouted, lunging back to cut her off, his outstretched hand just missing her canted shoulder as she passed. She never made it to the back door. He brought her down hard with a full flying tackle that sprained her back and caused something in her nose to go crack. "Stupid," he hissed at her ear. "Ver-y stu-pid." The heavy tip of the gun barrel tapping against her skull on each separate syllable.
Kara raced in, breathless, her fingers clutching an array of jewelry, gold chains, bracelets, earrings. She looked shocked. "What happened?"
"You stupid bitch! I said tight." Tommy tugged in disgust at the loose pieces of gray tape dangling from Amanda's ankles.
"It was tight," Kara protested. She couldn't believe what had happened.
"I'll show you tight, and I'll show you on you." He pushed himself off Amanda's body and slowly got to his feet.
Amanda's eyes had filled from the blow to her nose and now her tears were running out before her onto the nice gilt-patterned linoleum. This is my kitchen, she kept thinking, this is my house.
"Now stay here and watch her," ordered Tommy. "Can you handle that? Can you manage that one simple task?"
"Don't worry about it," said Kara.
"Well, I do, honey dearest, I truly do."
Tommy returned to the dining room. A gathering of eyes upon him like anxious birds ready to kite. "Don't look at me," he said, raising his arm as if to whip the gun barrel across Drake's face. One by one he snipped their ankle tape with the scissors and led them singly through the house, one hostage to a room, where he pushed them roughly down and retaped their feet. Tight. Brandon sprawled across the king-size mattress in the master bedroom, Drake on the twin bed in the guest room, Jayce on the rug in a utility room containing a sewing machine, an ironing board, an Exercycle positioned in front of a television set.
When he returned to the kitchen, Kara was sitting on the floor beside the bound Amanda, licking a Fudgsicle and kindly explaining to her helpless captive how all that she and Tommy needed or wanted was their money (they were operating under the duress of an unanticipated but temporary shortage) and when they had the funds, they would leave. Nothing personal. Their house had been chosen entirely at random.
"Okay, hero, let's go." Tommy heaved Amanda to her feet, walked her out into the living room. He looked around, then guided her over behind the couch, shoved her brusquely onto the floor. "I don't want to look at you anymore." When he retaped her ankles, he pushed up her pant legs so that the tape adhered to her bare skin. When he finished, he patted her familiarly on the ass, promising, "I'll be back."
Amanda lay there like a trussed animal, immobile, docile, as scared as she'd ever been, especially when they began calling each other "Tommy" and "Kara." She hoped those names were aliases. She stared at the fine weave of the rug and listened to the sounds of the intruders moving through the house. She heard furniture being overturned, drawers flung against walls, glass breaking. She didn't feel human or even real, she felt like an object, a thing. She started to gag on the tape.
When Tommy and Kara were through, they settled onto the couch to assess the situation.
"Eighty-six fucking dollars," complained Tommy.
"There's the TVs," suggested Kara. "They got a shitload of TVs, stereos, VCRs. Plenty of clothes. There's a big goddamn TV in every room. Every one."
"Crap," declared Tommy. "What would we do with that fucking crap?" And he was up on his feet, pacing the floor. At the end of his turn, Amanda could see his shoes. Expensive Nike Cross Trainers.
"I could use some clothes."
"Then take them!" he snapped. "What the fuck do I care?"
"Let's go, Tommy. If eighty-six dollars is all there is, that's all there is."
The man paced.
"I want to go, Tommy," said the woman. "I've had enough of this place. I've had enough of you."
The man's footsteps moved away to the other side of the room and off down the hallway. The woman sat on the couch. She lit a cigarette.
Suddenly, from inside the house, there was a pop. It was the loudest sound Amanda had ever heard. "Tommy!" shrieked the woman. She leaped off the couch and out of the room.
Amanda imagined the flash. She imagined the short explosion of light and that was all. The rest was unimaginable.
The woman kept screaming Tommy's name, then, "Oh my god! Tommy! Jesus hell, what did you do! Are you crazy! No, Tommy, don't, please don't." There came the furious sound of a second pop. "Oh shit, oh my god, this isn't what you said. This isn't what you said at all. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck."
The man's voice was quiet, remarkably calm. "I want you to do one."
"No I can't no please don't make me Tommy." She sounded as if she were crying.
"Stop it now," said the man. "Open my pants."
"What?"
"Open my pants. Now!"
"Please Tommy don't make me."
"Feel with your hand."
"I don't want --"
"Do it!"
"It's wet. You're wet."
"Yes. I want you to share in this experience. I want you to feel what I feel, know what I know. This is important. I want you to do this for me."
"But I can't oh my god I can't do it Tommy don't don't."
"Stop now, stop and think. Would I ask you to do something I didn't believe you could do?"
"No but --"
"I'm here, I'm with you every step of the way. We're a team, and after tonight no couple will have ever been any closer."
"I don't know I don't. . ."
And their voices trailed away as they moved down the hallway toward another room.
Amanda was alive, she was still alive, and this was life, knowing this. She could hear her heart kicking against the confining walls of her chest. She could feel in her nostrils the wind of her breath rushing out and back. She could see the terrified mouse that was her mind running round and round, searching for an exit. Then came the sound of the third pop and the footsteps heading back down the hall as from the stereo speakers the gamelan orchestra played deliriously on, nothing pleasing or placid about that discordant noise now, its bronze vagaries conducting sense down fun house steps into the randomness of hell. Death is not a natural event. It is caused only by magic or violence. . . It had always been a formidable achievement to acknowledge that you, personally, as a body, as a consciousness, were someday to have an end, unthinkable to comprehend that that day might be this one. But for now, for this particular chiming now, Amanda was alive and anything was possible, she could see, she could hear, she could feel the advancing numbness of fettered hands and feet, under her the rock finality of the floor, the urgent pressure of its absolute otherness, and she could endure in all its strident simultaneity the madness of consciousness, whole worlds flaring and gone like sparks in a void; the beauty, the horror, pasteboard categories masking the all-inclusive something that was upon her now, though there was even time to wonder, in a singularly incurious manner, after the police had come and gone and the medical examiner had removed the duct tape from her lips forever, would her departing soul emerge from the chrysalis of her mouth in the shape of a rare enamelled insect or as a fabulous bird on rainbow wings?
Eight
THIS IS NOT AN EXIT
Shirtless and hipshot, the man leaned in idle solitude upon the rail, gazing fixedly out to sea, out to the edge where the world stopped and the clean sheet of blue sky was stained with the faintest discoloration, a careless smudge of charcoal that seemed to suggest that somewhere over the horizon there was fire upon the water. Then the smoke, if that was what it was, simply vanished as if it had never been, leaving nothing to look at but a stale rerun of the same old sea, the mirthless folly of the waves in perpetual curling and planing up and down the deserted beach. It was December, though unseasonably warm, the air streaming with bright surfaces, broken-bitted, a steady, dry rain of clear light. The day seemed like an arrangement set in miniature inside a crystal ornament. Behind the man, the sliding glass door stood wide open, a thin white curtain flapping intermittently in the Pacific breeze. The waves broke. The man did not move.
Inside the house a well-proportioned woman wearing only a pair of black bikini bottoms descended the spiral staircase into a living room whose aggressive decor, southwestern antiseptic, was defiled by a single dissonant note: the vulgar design of the magazine cover lying carelessly atop her polished glass cocktail table. She scooped up the November issue of
Guns & Ammo
and paused for a moment to study the slumped shape of the man lounging alone out on the deck. Beyond Will's head she could see a gracefully ugly gray pelican hovering nearly motionless in the wind before plunging, beak first, into the heaving green swells. Everywhere the currents, seen and unseen. The man did not move. The woman went on briskly into the kitchen, returning almost immediately with a handful of red grapes. She passed behind the man without speaking and took the stairs stealthily, two at a time.
Sometime later the man came back inside, closed and locked the door. He went to the bottom of the staircase, listened for a few seconds, then called abruptly up. "Tia!" he called. He waited a moment and called again. When there was still no response, he mounted the stairs heavily, one at a time.
He found her sitting up in bed, rubbing self-tanning cream over her breasts, an open book spread casually across her lap. "Oh," she exclaimed, looking up in surprise, "I didn't know you were in the house."
He remained motionless in the doorway, a huge presence filling a frame. "I called your name -- twice."
She continued rubbing. "I'm sorry, I guess I was lost in this daffy book."
He came forward into the room. "The Bible?"
"I know, don't laugh. But have you ever read it? Stranger than you could even imagine."
He sat down on the bed beside her. "I didn't even know there was one in the house. Are we permitted to own a copy in this county?"
"Hector was talking about the Old Testament yesterday at work."
"Hector knows how to read?"
And then her lively eyes, dark and shiny as beetle shells, so attentive to the movement and moods of him, blinked once and abruptly went out, as if an unknown hand had reached in out of nowhere and simply snapped the switch. She seemed to be reading again, but the cold words on the page were nothing more than noises in her head to mask her thinking. One sure lesson she had learned from her years among the men was to always hold some portion of herself in reserve, the transparency of womanhood in this insidiously surveillant society requiring here and there certain opaque gaps in order to maintain even minimal standards of sanity. And, strangely enough, it didn't seem to matter exactly what part of her life she withheld, what memories, what emotions, what daily episodes, so much as that
something
that was hers and hers alone be kept secret from the man she was living with. After all, that was what they did, that's how they'd protected themselves for all these years. Tia had already outdistanced three tolerable husbands, the last a disappointed film producer whose naked body had been discovered by a passing neighbor dangling from a yellow boat cord beneath the rear deck. He was the one who'd left her with the cute son, Todd; the fancy house; and the money to purchase her own business, The Babylon Gardens, nursery to the stars, which she'd operated with great success both financial and personal, having met there many fun boyfriends and now Will Johnson, her fourth husband. He'd shown up one busy morning in response to the
help wanted
sign in the window. He looked healthy and "interesting" and certainly strong enough to haul bags of manure on his broad shoulders, which he did with brisk efficiency and dispatch for several "interesting" months until finally he just moved into the famous house on Valhalla Drive. He hadn't worked since. And now he wasn't going to get to hear Hector's fascinating religious theories that had sent her leafing curiously through these queer pages: of how the Bible was most likely a literary con job that employed words as vestments to desexualize, to denature, to disremember the origins of Christianity, the origins of all theological belief; that under the grand guise of revelation Holy Scripture hawked amnesia and obscurity; that all beginnings were mired in pain and blood and beneath every church was buried an executioner's knife. We are descended from kings, Hector's father had told him, a people who did not shrink from the truth of the Sun Stone. Hector was working for Tia by day and attending law school at night. He and Will had never gotten along. Like repels like. So now here she was on her one day off, trying to locate this bizarre story of Abraham and Isaac in an unfamiliar text without a damn index, and not only was she not about to ask for Will's help, she wasn't even going to tell him about it.
"I think you're jealous," she said.
"Who, me?" His eyebrows knotted in boyish perplexity over those innocent gray velvet irises. "I don't get jealous."
"That's not what you were admitting so sweetly the other night at dinner."
"I must have been drunk. Besides, what does it matter? I'm a different person in every room of this house."
She had casually cupped one breast in the palm of her hand as if to weigh it. "Do you think this nipple is larger than the other one?"
"Yes," he replied impatiently, "and you're gonna need expensive and painful surgery to get it corrected."
"Well, perfection is costly," she said, staring down at herself, "but then, so is ugliness."
"You're already perfect."
"I'm getting there."
"Maybe I should have something done, too," he said, pulling at the image of his face in the mirror on the far wall, "plump up these cheekbones, straighten out this nose."
"Please. You'd probably end up looking like Boris Karloff in that awful movie you like."
"The Raven."
"Yes, and after that sadist finishes operating on his face --"
"Bela Lugosi."
"-- doesn't he lock him in a room full of mirrors where he goes mad from his reflections?"
"Would you still love me?"
"We'd have to cover your scars or only make love in the dark."
"I could wear a paper bag over my head."
"Or a leather mask," she mused. "That might be fun. Everyone's doing it."
"Then, by all means. We wouldn't want to be caught with our pants down in an unfashionable pose, for Christ's sake. What would the sex police think?"
"You're so cruel," she said, handing him the greasy bottle of lotion and shifting around to present her exposed back. "That must be why I love you."
Later, when Todd awoke from his afternoon nap and immediately began crying for his mother, Tia sent Will to deal with him. Todd was a nervous child whose need for reassurance was constant and exhausting. Every man who came into his mother's harried life, for any duration whatever, he simply referred to as "Dad." Fatherhood to the boy was neither a physical presence nor a biological fact but a concept of slippery, dubious quality, a role that could be, and was, played by a whole troupe of itinerant actors of varying shapes and sizes and odors and theatrical ability. He seemed to like Will, though; he responded well to his particular performance.
Will gathered up the boy and carried him down the winding stairs and through the spotless room and down the salt-seasoned back steps to the soft brown undulating beach. Todd liked to play tag with the surf, running along with arms outstretched a tiny step or two ahead of the slick sheets of cold foamy water. An oil tanker sat on the bumpy horizon like a toy silhouette pasted to a slate board. They found the petrified carcass of a dead gull half buried in the damp sand, its tail feathers stripped and torn, ridges of smooth bone showing through the left wing and shoulder. They dug birdie a decent grave and covered him over and blessed his soul and planted at his head a clumsy cross twisted out of a shredded Popsicle stick.
Afterward, the boy sat quietly in Will's lap, pale forehead wrinkled in furious thought. Then he said, "Kids don't ever die, do they, Dad?" Will looked down into his stepson's clear blue guileless eyes. "No, Todd," he answered, "they never do."
When Tia joined them, she was wearing sunglasses and her wide-shouldered Joan Crawford bathrobe. She inspected the fresh grave with the dignified sorrow of a general contemplating her losses. "Poor birdie," she said.
"He flew away home," muttered Will, leaning back to toss a small pebble out into the surf.
"Let's talk about something else," said Tia brightly. "Let's see who can race down to the old pier and back." And she was off, clots of wet sand flying from beneath her toes, playfully pacing herself just out of Todd's reach until his frantic laughter eventually gave way to cries of complaint, then anger, and when he at last stopped, refusing the diminishing delights of this stupid game, so did Tia, and she leaned down and took his soft warm hand in hers and together they walked on side by side, mother and son. Slowly, Will rose from his seat in the sand, brushed off the back of his pants, and followed after. In the rich light of the declining sun they appeared as figures of gold risen up out of the sea to adorn for too brief an interval the unrefined blandness of the air.
Years ago in that section of the beach had once stood a long wooden pier that time and tide had reduced to a broken row of ruined pilings, barnacled, algae-furred, jutting haphazardly above the swell like ancient menhirs in a rolling field. They watched the ocean lift and fall, measuring itself against these rotting shafts. Todd chased after the ubiquitous sandpipers strutting along the beach like a convention of unemployed waiters.
"You'll never guess who dropped in to buy a Christmas tree yesterday," said Tia. She could feel a shift in mood approaching and she wanted to deflect it.
"Even if you tell me," answered Will, "I probably still won't know."
"Evan Fontanelle."
He stared blankly.
"The director," she explained impatiently.
"Interstate Inferno, Blue Veins, Schweitzer!"
"Never saw 'em."
"His mother was the actress Ghana Dander, who shot her husband with a hunting rifle right in the middle of the living room right in front of the son. He was six at the time."
"Was that his father?"
"No, of course not, his father is Lars Thorwald, the head of Flagstone Films."
"I assume he got a good tree."
"Our very best."
"That's nice. Everyone likes a good tree this time of year."
They were down on their knees, drawing with sticks in the sand (he a cubist-style dog with Xs for eyes, she a larger-than-life finely detailed rose), when she casually announced, without a glance in his direction, "I feel that Si's been around quite a bit lately."
Will continued to sketch. His dog had developed a piggy corkscrew tail. "Did you call Ghostbusters?"
"He heard that, too."
"Well, and what's he gonna do about it -- get together with a couple of his spook friends and go 'Boo!' outside my window?"
"You can be sure that wherever Si is, he's made the right connections. Si couldn't tolerate civilian status of any kind. So go ahead, rub him the wrong way and you're coming back as a toad or a cockroach."
"And how do you know that wouldn't be better than. . . than this?" He gestured vaguely about the scenery with his stick.
She stood and scuffed at her drawing with her foot. Then she turned and called for Todd. When she looked back at Will, he was standing there not three feet from her with the strangest expression, balanced so precisely between mirth and anger it was impossible to read. When the aliens landed, these were the faces they would wear and earthlings would be powerless to interpret their meaning. "Stop it," she said. "You're scaring me." Men, she had learned, wanted to be the hierarchs of their lives. They were not. Even so, none of the ones she had met wished to entertain seriously the notion of ghosts, the fact that they were real, they haunted, they hovered, transparent space swarmed with them, their presence so intimately familiar because many of them were us, the shades of our former lives. "Sometimes I think you're composed of more gross matter than anyone I've ever met."
"Outside of California," he replied, "I'm normal."
What could she do? The crinkle in his smile was a boon of the universe. They strolled together back to the house, and as the sun ponderously, majestically, sank, they settled down in the warm dunes to watch, a happy family enjoying the quiet close of a leisurely day, the lambent air, the slow flaming of the sky, the insistence of the waves slapping a ragged rhythm against the shore.
And later, after dinner, when it was time for sleep, they separated and retired to separate rooms, private people who respected one another's privacy.
Will lay sprawled across his unkempt mattress, staring at the television with the look of someone who had placed a bet he can't afford on a number he's certain cannot win, the remote riding his breaths up and down his bare chest. He rarely watched anything more than a few minutes before leaping channels. Around and around the carnival dial. What was the point in lingering? It was always the same: bodies, guns, cars, and food. Around the dial around the clock. The vague unappeasable itch that worked without respite under his skin seemed to believe it could find what it was seeking somewhere on that magical screen. But, typically, the more he watched, the more restless he became. He was helpless to stop. The same futile routine day after day, night after night. Click, click, click. He wanted to see something he hadn't seen before.