Help me, says Batman.
I’m too sad to help you, says the Surfer.
Help me. I’m drowning over here.
Okay, okay.
I smoke a cigarette, dropping ashes into the toilet. I know that I shouldn’t smoke around him but this has been a long fucking day and I’m waiting for the boy to ask me about the rabbit. I want to tell him the rabbit wasn’t real. It was a fake rabbit and I know it looked real
and maybe that’s why it was so disturbing but I know this is bullshit.
If you lie to a child, he will smell it.
He will smell the untruth coming from your skin like the sweet smell of rot and he may accept it or he may not, but he won’t thank you for it.
Footsteps and there’s a knock at the door, soft. The boy is spooked and disappears underwater. I figure it’s Molly at the door, come to tell me something. But when I open the door it’s Jude and I guess she sees my face change. She hands me a glass of scotch and a clean T-shirt for the boy. Her lips move to form the words I’m sorry and she touches my hand before turning away. I shake my head. Her talent for slipping and sliding between evil and kindness is extraordinary. I tell myself that everyone is this way, that most people are just very clumsy about it. I take a small, medicinal swallow of the scotch and it feels good, it goes down like liquid smoke and I am surprised to realize this is my first drink of the day. I thump the side of the tub with my knuckles and smile, remembering how I used to lie underwater with my eyes shut tight, the faraway echoes stretching in my skull.
Knock, knock.
The boy comes up for air and I tell him it’s time for bed.
He convinces me to let him stay in the bath for five more minutes. Five more minutes. He says it like a mantra and I imagine he has had this conversation with his father a thousand times.
Five minutes, ten.
I am not too concerned about bedtime, you know. What difference does it make. The boy is a hostage. It’s not like he has a soccer game tomorrow. And after a while, he tells me that the water is cold, that his skin is getting a million wrinkles. I pull him out of the tub and wrap him in one of the big black towels. I offer to help him with
his T-shirt but he says he doesn’t need any help because he’s five and a half.
I’m big, he says.
Okay, I say.
I watch him wrestle with the T-shirt. He has a little trouble negotiating the second armhole but he sticks with it. The shirt is on backwards but he doesn’t care. His hair is sticking up all over the place and he looks like a little madman and when he smiles at me, I am tempted to take him to bed with Molly and me but I’m not sure this is a good idea and I know that Jude wouldn’t like it.
I take him through the library and down the stairs, taking care not to clue him in to the workings of the secret passage. This has to do with instinct, or respect for Jude. I tuck Sam into bed and he promptly burrows into the corner with the stuffed bear. He arranges the pillows around himself, like a fort. He’s got Batman in one hand, the Silver Surfer in the other. Vengeance and poetry. There are no books to read and I wonder if I should go up to the library and look for a copy of
The Lord of The Rings
, but the boy’s eyes are heavy already and I don’t want to leave him. I flip on the television, thinking cartoons will give him pleasant dreams, colorful and two-dimensional and easily resolved. If he was my son, I might lie down next to him and let the sound of my heartbeat ease his mind. But he’s not my son and I am reluctant to get too close. I don’t want to freak him out so I sit down on the floor beside his bed and halfway through
Johnny Quest
the boy is asleep and snoring softly.
M
OLLY’S ROOM, NIGHT
.
I lie on her puffy white bed, smoking a cigarette. I wear filthy blue jeans and nothing else. I am exhausted and pissed off about the rabbit, but I could be worse. I have a fresh glass of scotch balanced on my chest, my third of the evening. I am staring dumbly at the little television across the room. The sound is low but I can just make out the numbing dialogue of a sitcom involving a gang of attractive white people and their innocuous homosexual black pal. I flip around until I land on CNN, hoping to find something about Sam.
On the bed beside me is Miller’s script.
The Velvet.
Yeah.
I don’t know what I think of that title. Too oblique, too nihilistic, or too esoteric or something but it’s not my problem.
The Velvet
is Miller’s baby. Molly has left the room, to get into character. She wants to run a scene with me and of course she already has her lines down. I have agreed to cooperate, but I’m going to read my lines from the script in a voice composed of discarded feathers and broken glass.
Molly enters, wearing white underpants and a little white tank top. Her hair is wet. She’s carrying an open bottle of red wine and an orange. She tosses the orange on the bed beside me. Takes a drink of wine and wipes her mouth on her wrist. She offers the bottle to me and I shake my head. I put the glass of scotch aside and sit up, the script in hand.
What’s the orange for, I say.
I have a vitamin deficiency, she says. I’m getting rickets.
That would be scurvy.
What?
You’re getting scurvy. And deaf, too.
Oh, shut up.
Have you seen a doctor?
I toss the script aside because I remember how it goes. This scene is based on an actual conversation between Jude and me, so long ago that I feel sick with loss. I take a shallow breath, realizing that Jude must have at some point collaborated with Miller on this thing. Molly ignores me, bends to pick up a shirt from the floor. She smells it, apparently decides it’s relatively clean and begins to rub her hair dry with it. I watch her for a while.
Isn’t that my shirt? I say.
Yeah, she says. I already used my shirt to dry my poor body.
Oh.
Why don’t you buy some towels? Your houseguests might appreciate it.
I take the shirt from her. I rub her head gently with it.
What houseguests? I don’t have houseguests.
You have me.
Well. I don’t know where they sell towels.
They? she says. Who would they be?
You know. The household luxuries people.
Molly laughs. Phineas…towels are not luxuries.
They are if you don’t have them.
You have sheets, she says. You have nice, clean sheets.
Yeah, well. My girlfriend bought the sheets. Before, all I had was a dusty mattress and a sleeping bag. She said I would never get laid unless I had real sheets.
Molly’s hair is dry. I toss the shirt aside and lean over, reaching for my scotch. Molly bites me on the shoulder. Then we wrestle for a minute and I let her pin me to the bed, or so it goes in the script. Molly is wiry and strong, though. She doesn’t need a lot of mercy from me.
Your girlfriend was right, she says. Wasn’t she?
There is a long silence, which Molly interprets as me being lost. I am lost, but not in the way she thinks. Molly sighs and takes a drink of wine and her lips come away dark as berries.
I don’t know, I say. This was a nice sleeping bag, a mummy bag.
She rolls her eyes. Why don’t you ask this girlfriend to buy you some dishes, too. Wine glasses, for instance.
I have coffee cups, I say.
Two coffee cups. One of them is dirty. The other one has a plant growing in it.
At this point, the script calls for Molly to nonchalantly remove her tank top. I am weirdly nervous about this. Because while Molly and I
have been slowly, painfully seducing each other for days now, and it seems reasonable to assume that any day she might in fact remove her top, there is a sense of detachment and hostility between us that seems to arise directly from the script. Anyway, after slight pause, Molly shrugs and pulls the tank top over her head and she is exposed to me.
The script now suggests that I fondle one of her breasts as if I’m preoccupied, distracted. I am supposed to randomly tweak and pinch her nipple between thumb and finger as if fiddling with the tuning dial on a car radio. This seems rude but I give it a whirl. Her nipples are hard. She tolerates my affection for a minute, then slaps my hand away.
What is that, she says. Foreplay?
I shove her off me, gently. Then pick up the orange and begin to peel it.
Why do you have a vitamin deficiency?
Because I never eat vegetables, she says. Because I’m anemic.
Yeah, I say. Maybe you should lay off the coke.
Phineas, she says. Don’t…
I feed her a fleshy chunk of orange.
Okay, I say. What kind of towels should I buy?
Thick ones, she says.
What color?
Dark colors. Something that won’t show blood.
Of course.
Then you will be the perfect man.
I feed her more of the orange. Molly nibbles at my fingers and I notice a flicker of electricity in my chest.
By your definition, I say. The perfect man is one who has clean sheets and plenty of nice, thick towels that don’t show blood.
That’s right, says Molly.
She begins to giggle. I feed her the last of the orange and juice runs to my wrist. Molly licks at it, then kisses my hand, sucks at my fingers. Her mouth moves to my throat.
Jesus, I say.
What’s this girlfriend of yours like?
I glance at the script, suddenly uncomfortable…She’s like a hummingbird, I say.
Does she drink sugar water?
She vibrates, I say. She moves so fast you can barely see her.
And should I be jealous of her? she says.
You, I say. You’re a blur. You’re already gone.
This is the end of the scene but I slip my hands under her ass and lift her onto my lap again. Molly fumbles with the buttons of my jeans and I think I’m going to come any minute. I touch her through her panties and she’s wet, she’s melting. Molly pulls my cock loose and begins to run her hand up and down, barely touching me. I push her panties to the side and slip my fingers inside her and now she moves her hips, pushing her pubic bone against my hand and one of us is groaning and then suddenly we pull away from each other.
Whoa. What the hell was that?
Drama, she says. Her voice is bitter.
What’s wrong with you?
You, she says. You still haven’t kissed me.
Bright pocket of silence.
That dialogue, I say. What a load of shit.
I think it’s romantic, she says. Or it would be, if it were real.
It’s embarrassing, I say. It’s pap.
What is pap, exactly? she says.
I stare at her and realize I am not sure. Pap is a sticky, sweet mucus type substance the color of pus. Jesus, I don’t know. Pap is fucking pap.
Well, she says. I think he sounds like you. Your character sounds just like you.
Molly folds her arms across her chest. I shove myself back into my pants, rather grimly. I sit beside her, listening to my rapid heart. I want to scream. I lean over the side of the bed for the bottle of wine. I take a long, greedy drink and pass her the bottle. She lifts it to her mouth and stops, staring at the television.
Oh fuck, she says.
There is a picture of Sam on the screen.
…Samwise Cody, five years old…presumed to be kidnapped… blond hair, brown eyes. Forty-nine pounds, with no identifiable scars or birthmarks…missing two days now.
The camera cuts away from photo of Sam to footage of his father at a press conference. Distraught, unshaven. He appears to be unable to speak.
…is the son of MacDonald Cody, popular U.S. senator from California and one of the power players in the Democratic party, figures to be a factor in the next presidential election…. There has been no ransom demand, no contact from kidnappers at all.
I look at Molly. The bottle of wine still tucked between her legs, forgotten. One hand over her mouth. Her hair still wet and she is naked, lovely. But I feel nothing resembling desire. I feel nothing much at all.
This is wrong, I say. So fucking wrong.
It will be over soon, says Molly.
I sink back and yes there is rage in me but not enough. Pale rain
clouds faraway and they may not get here anytime soon. They may pass by, they may fade away. I remember nothing but ailments. Impatience, affliction, and morbid restlessness. I cut my hair last night and saw your face. I saw the uselessness of the organism, the sequence of maladies. Disorder of the stomach and love letters amount to threads. The imperfection. The difficulty in forming ordinary vowel sounds. The sleeve of the female engages threads of the male. This is the hum of empty space. This is a photograph of a boy no longer a boy. Please, don’t. Don’t interrupt me. Badly drawn stick figures and the voice of another is like a forgotten blue T-shirt on the floor. He came inside me and said he didn’t mean to. This room has such poor light. Why did you buy an orchid of all things. Because you were not home. Because the phone just rings.
The light touch of rose petals on my shoulder.
I am asleep, or nearly so. I’m dreaming in my own voice. This can’t be good for anybody. Molly has turned the light off and she lies half-naked beside me, not quite touching me. But I can feel her breath on my skin and the rose petals might have been her lips. The television is still on and I am grateful, because the silence can be too much to bear. I might have been dreaming but I thought I heard the rest of the news. The sports, the weather. Partly cloudy tomorrow. Partly, partly. Uncommonly hot. A train wreck, brutal traffic. Power lines down. Forest fires and earthquake weather. Followed by a story about a monkey. A monkey has apparently escaped from the Oakland Zoo. A three-year-old ring-tailed lemur by the name of Casper.
And then in the dark hours, the following conversation. Awake or dreaming. Drunk and still dreaming and who is speaking I can’t say.
He could be mine. He’s the right age, anyway. And he does look like me.
Are you talking to yourself?
But a lot of guys look like me. I have an ordinary face and god knows who else she was fucking.
Who.
The whore with the ruined face.
Jude, you mean.
You’re not the father. You’re dreaming.