Mystery Girl: A Novel (20 page)

“I’m grateful to him. But you know why? Storytelling. Now, you on the other hand use words, and ideas and paper, to tell similar stories, like, for instance”—he tapped the stack of manuscripts on the table between us—“in
Toilet,
remember the part when the men’s room attendant rescues the hooker who’s OD’d and choking on her puke in the stall, and he has to give her mouth-to-mouth, but when they kiss he has a vision of her as Jesus and starts crying?”

“Right,” I said, although actually that was all a dream sequence, cleverly inserted inside another dream sequence, built around passages from the
Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Buck snapped his fingers. “And then, right at that moment, wham, the pipes burst and the whole place floods and everything we’ve flushed away for the whole book returns. Now that, my friend, is storytelling!”

“Really? It is?” I myself had been afraid to look at the book for years, as if it were evidence of a crime I’d committed in a blackout. “Thanks. Thanks so much.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank your talent. The intern who read it for me went to Harvard and she was really excited. Though she says you have second act problems.”

“She’s right.”

“And it’s a little dark for the megaplex.” He laughed, a high, fast chuckle. “But hey dark is good sometimes. I can go dark too. Like with 9-11. Maybe you saw
Another Sunrise?
”

He was being disingenuous. Everyone on the planet had seen it, except for me. I stayed home in a silent protest that no one heard but Lala, who went with a friend. It wasn’t very good, she agreed, it was cheesy and fake, but she cried, like everyone in the theater, so what was the harm? That was! Crying at a bad movie, just because
it skillfully manipulated real suffering, was both to distort and deny what really happened while perversely and complacently enjoying our own emotions. It was middlebrow high art, an intellectual exercise for those who didn’t want to actually think about it, the feel-bad hit of the season.

“Of course I saw
Another Sunrise,
” I told Buck. “It was great.”

“Thank you, Sam, but I wasn’t the one who was great. That’s my point. Just like in
Toilet,
it was the story, and the characters, they were great. Well, not the terrorists of course. Though they were great villains.”

“Right,” I said. “Exactly.” He’d lost me, but it didn’t seem to matter. He sat down, finally, and cracked his water. I drank some of mine.

“I get so dry out here,” he said. “Even though it’s by the beach. It’s this wind I think. Anyway, tell me your story, Sam. What are you working on now?”

I froze. I drank more water. I realized too late that I should have come up with something. It was the sort of thing one discussed at these meetings, or so I’d heard. With no time for a lie, I was stuck telling the truth.

“Well, Buck, I am in fact working on a novel, like you said.”

He smiled and nodded.

“This one’s called
Perineum.
”

“Nice. I like it. Sounds, I don’t know, sort of Latinate. What’s it about?”

“Well, that’s hard to say. I’ve just started really. It started as a cycle of love poems just focused on that one… word, and now it’s evolving. It’s about themes of betweeness really, of being in some way between two points, two places, between life and death for example, pleasure and horror, birth and I don’t know, waste.” I exhaled, exhausted by my own bullshit.

“Great theme. But what happens?”

“Well, I don’t quite know yet, Buck. You see, I start with the voice.”

“Yes! Your voice.”

“Not exactly.”

“The character’s voice.”

“More the book’s voice. I’m trying to hear the book talking, the voice of consciousness talking, to itself, in a void, while no one listens.” I wanted to cry. As I rambled on, digging my grave deeper, I wanted to think my ideas were beyond this guy’s understanding, but the truth was I didn’t understand them either. No one did. Not really. I’d been working on this new novel for a year. I’d written ten pages of nonsense. I was done. I was an unnovelist. My grand experiment was over, the results were in, and the conclusion was: I suck.

Buck sat back. He looked at me, hard. I expected him to laugh or tell me to fuck off and get a real job, like private detective. He nodded. “OK,” he said. “I’m in.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Call me crazy but I love it. Look, I’ve heard a lot of pitches. A lot. And what are we always saying we want? Originality. Something we never heard before. Something that knocks our socks off. Well, I never heard anything like
Palladium
before, and believe me, my socks are off!”

“Really? Thanks. I can’t believe it.” I wasn’t sorry to hear he’d changed the name, in case he looked it up later, but I couldn’t picture myself delivering ten inscrutable pages. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

“You’re a writer, Sam. I want you to write. Write
Pandemonium,
here, with me. Let’s tell that story, together.”

“Wow.”

“Now.” Buck stood again and started pacing. “I’m not going to bullshit around with you, this idea is great but it needs a lot of, I don’t know, a lot of meat on its bones. Are you committed to anything else? Writing for anyone else?”

“No.” As a storyteller I was unemployed, but I thought of the fictional crime I was investigating and the obese madman who was
waiting for me to report my latest dream. “No, nothing. Well, I kind of have this day job.”

“Fuck it.” Buck toasted me with his water. “Sorry but really. A day job is to support the writing. The night job, that was your real life, right? Well, from now on it’s going to be all night.”

Buck said he’d have someone call “my agent,” Margie, and work out the details, but essentially I’d get a weekly salary plus various tasty “pieces” of “development” as well as a nice fat slice off the “back end.” Although it all seemed sure to fail, I couldn’t help but float back out to my car in a delirium of affluence. I could get a new car stereo. Or a new car. I could get a new wife. Or buy the lost one back. I was finally the man she’d meant to marry all along.

At the exit of the drive I met a new Prius coming in the narrow gate and stopped to let it pass. It paused beside me. Russ, the handsome hunk from Dr. Parker’s office, was behind the wheel.

“Yo, Sam. Great to see you!”

“Hey, what brings you here?” I asked.

“I work here, with Buck. That’s what brought me to Green Haven. Buck’s on the board. He’s a huge supporter of mental health issues. Usually I work in development though, so I’ll be seeing you around. We all love your stuff.” He winked, as though I were a young starlet in a bikini. “Welcome to the winning team.”

46

BACK ON THE ROAD
, my euphoria dissipated as I joined the endless creep of cars, their owners staring out at each other like captives sealed in glass. I checked my phone and found an urgent summons from my still current employer. So I rushed, very slowly, to the Lonsky headquarters, mentally composing what I figured would be my final report. Bucky’s job was almost as odd as Lonsky’s, but I had to consider
seriously an eccentric billionaire who won Oscars over an eccentric hermit who lost competency hearings.

I arrived to find the big man in an agitated state. Where had I been? A roast was in the oven, and he was worried my traffic problems might delay feeding time. I apologized and, without explaining, dove into my review of
Succubi!
He sank in his chair, low like a hippo in muddy water, eyes shut. The giant hands were chapeled before his lips, propping up the flying buttress of his nose. Then I told him about Mona’s appearance at my window that morning. As I began reasoning aloud, “I know what you’re thinking, horror movie plus beef jerky after midnight equals bad dream,” he raised a hand.

“I find little profit in wondering over that small difference,” he said.

“Life and death? It’s a big difference,” I said.

“A very important one yes, but perhaps not so big. In any case, what I intended to say is that there is no way for us to objectively establish the fact here and now, since you were the sleeper. Let’s say it was a dream? What of it? It is often in dreams that we perceive the truth. She will come again, I suspect, and then you can ask. Please continue.” His eyes slid shut.

I told him about Kevin. He remained impassive until I was done. Then his chins lifted, one by one, and his eyes opened on me. “One thing is certain. It was shortsighted of you not to take the tapes. You will have to return and obtain them.”

“What? How?”

“There are any number of ways. Perhaps if you disguise yourself as a census taker or, better yet, a worker from the public utilities company come to investigate a gas leak. I have a nice collection of mustaches and eyebrows…”

“Huh…” I tried to change the subject by mentioning Doctor Parker’s sad demise, but he was even more vexed. He sat almost nearly upright.

“You should have called me immediately as soon as you found out he’d been killed.”

“I didn’t think it was urgent. It was an accident.”

“When will you learn, Kornberg? There are no accidents. In The Case of Dora, Freud’s patient spurns an amorous advance from a young man. Distraught, the fellow dashes into the street without looking and is nearly run down by a carriage. Freud interprets this as an unconscious suicide attempt. Genius!”

“Yes, well, the cops say Dr. Parker had a blowout. Your unconscious can’t burst a tire, can it? On the other hand, Mona, who everyone says did commit suicide, you interpret as murder. Know how Freud would interpret that? Meshuggeneh.”

“Perhaps. But unlike your scientific speculation as to whether you are dreaming or not, my meshuggeneh ideas are based on evidence.” He drew a letter from his desk drawer. “I received this in today’s mail. It’s a letter Mona left for me, to be delivered after her death. Her final testament. I believe it is what Dr. Parker was hiding in his safe, and what, fearing for his own life, he meant to give you. When you didn’t respond in a timely manner, he mailed it, perhaps on his way to work that fateful morn.” He unfolded the letter and cleared his throat. “My Darling Solar…”

47

WHEN WE FIRST MET
, you reminded me of my father, though I know that’s a cliché. And I only met him once, my real father, assuming he even really was. I was seven. I remember because it was my birthday. I was having cake with my mom. We were about to light the candles, and she said to wait, that someone was coming. I didn’t know who she meant. It was just she and I, like always. I didn’t have many friends, and we had no family. For some reason, I got this crazy idea it was Big Bird. I was in love with him then and watched that show obsessively and I’d heard at school other kids talking about the amazing figures who came to their parties, parties I was not in
vited to, and I guess it occurred to me that maybe my mother had arranged for Big Bird to come as a surprise. Imagine my disappointment when it was a human man, though I had to admit he was very large. And despite his lack of feathers, I was also impressed with his general hairiness. Of course he brought a gift, a big box wrapped in pink paper with a red bow. It contained a My Pretty Pony, which is what I wanted most of all. I was shy but the Pony won me over, and I consented to sit on his lap and blow out the candles. I recall he ate two huge pieces of cake, which also impressed me enormously. After he left, my mother told me that he was my father, but that he was a very famous and important man who was too busy working to come visit and that for the same mysterious reasons we had to keep it a secret. Though I wonder if it was at all true. Maybe he thought it was. Unfortunately, just because my mother tells you something is no reason to believe it. I’m afraid I have inherited this trait, though often I’m the one that I lie to. In fact, now that I think about it, I am not even sure that this incident ever occurred. It’s quite likely that my mother merely told me about this mythical meeting much later. Or maybe I dreamed it up myself, high on my medications, after seeing a movie here in the hospital on TV. So you see my dear how it is when you are lost. Even your memories are not your own. Where are they? Where did they go? Who took them? My doctors, my lovers, my captors, my enemies, my friends? I sometimes imagine that late at night, they come into my room and erase my mind, like a disk or a sheet of paper, and imprint the clean white surface with the image they want to project, the image of Mona. I imagine that I do not even look like I think I do, that the face I see in the mirror is not really mine. Is this other face the one you see and love? Or are we both caught in this same delusion? I imagine when Dr. Parker takes me in his office for a session, that he is hypnotizing me into believing who and what I am and that he does the same to you. Maybe we are both really asleep, and dreaming all this. That is my sweetest fantasy, that I am napping in the library right now, close to you.

Sometimes I dream that I am the widow of a famous artist, a great filmmaker. I’m a glamorous and beautiful woman, being taken to parties at nightclubs and grand dinners in castles, seduced by men and women, given the finest wines and drugs, then rushed off to a yacht at midnight to sail into the middle of the sea, and drink champagne at sunrise. I imagine that is my life and that I just got a bit too drunk and high, a bit too tired to lift my eyes, but when I do, in a moment, this hospital room will be gone and I will see the sun, the empty blue sky, and smell the clean ocean air. This is Fabricio’s yacht, or his father’s, some sort of count who owns a shoe factory and a vineyard. The son does nothing but collect motorcycles, gamble, and chase girls, while he waits to inherit the title and the money. Does this make him a viscount or is that different? He takes me riding on his Ducati and we go so fast I think we will lift off into flight. I feel the engine pulling up, up, like a winged stallion, while we lean over the neck, holding it down. I am so terrified I leave claw marks in Fab’s sides where I clutch his rib cage, but the vibration of that machine, that power beneath is almost unbearably exciting. Like all of the men I meet, he is fascinated with my husband, with his work, with our life together, my young marriage, his suicide. I refuse to discuss it, which they love. It makes it even more mysterious. Some propose but I refuse them. I consider myself still married and in the end, after five years abroad, I return to Los Angeles, to Hollywood.