In the next room, a man and a woman exchanged listless but antagonistic dialogue over the background noise of the TV. Lives separated by walls as thin as want ads in local newspapers. Life was just like that. Like people in a motel. You checked in for a few nights, and for a short time, you lived side by side, you heard their voices over a TV broadcast, they heard you weep in your dreams. But you never really knew what went on in the next room. You listened, you made your best guess. But when you saw them outside, you stared at each other blankly, pretending they’d never heard you weep, you’d never heard them cry out. Parallel lines met only at the vanishing point, that’s what they taught the baby artists.
What a shithole this place was. Ten times worse than the Sunnyvale, where she’d worked in Bakersfield, full of thrifty travelers on old Highway 99, retirees and families, salesmen who sold things like gaskets and pneumatic wrenches. No salesman would stay at the Paradise, unless he was setting up a drug deal, enough weight that it was worth thirty-five dollars to buy some anonymity. Good enough for hookers, or if your car finally died and you were waiting for parts, or for truckers to catch a few hours’ sleep. A place to plan a crime, or have an affair. She imagined a housewife from Yucca Valley coming here, waiting for her lover—the front of the L would conceal her car from the road. But the affair would be over soon. Love could never bloom in a concrete-block room that smelled of ant powder, no matter how great the need.
But it was the perfect place to gather your courage to put the barrel of a gun in your mouth. This oxidized paneling, the western bedspread. No one would disturb you here while you wrote your letters, while you sat on the bed with the gun in your lap and readied yourself for the dark. No beauty to distract you from your intention to depart.
That gun. Tomorrow she would go into town and find the motherfucker who’d sold him that gun. Who looked into his face and told himself the kid wanted a gun for target practice, home protection. She would find that son of a bitch and break his motherfucking face.
What were you thinking, you piece of unholy crap?
But she knew. She could see the whole thing. A concrete-block building on the edge of town, the firing range in the desert behind. He’d paused for a moment before going in, working out his story.
Just window-shopping. A gift for a friend.
How fascinated and equally repelled he must have been in the supermarket of death.
The owner would spot him as soon as he came in. A hard man with a hard face like her uncle Whitey, who was like her father but without Glenn’s charm and with a double helping of
fuck you.
Watching Michael eyeing racks of hunting rifles, knowing he’d never shot anything more alive than an arcade duck. The city-boy skin, circles under his eyes, that tweed jacket, he’d have thought,
College boy. He’ll be good for it.
Wondering coldly what he was after, suicide or murder. Clearly no case of home-owner anxiety. This was a gun about to be used, and no doubt the hard man approved. Probably it pained him more to think of a poor gun in a shoebox in somebody’s closet, uncleaned, unfired, forgotten.
He’d show him handguns on a pad on the counter, felted, like a pool table. Snub-nosed revolvers and sleek automatics. Long-barreled Colt .45’s. Michael would ask intelligent questions and the man would be surprised, he’d show him some of his treasures—assault rifles, dueling guns, Chinese souvenirs from Vietnam. Then finally, after circling the matter for a half hour, they’d get down to the thing itself, tailored to his needs. It nauseated her to think how he lifted the various candidates, weighed them in his hands, sighted down their barrels. Then finally decided, like a man choosing a whore.
This one.
Paying—with what? Where had he gotten the money? Cal. Of course, Cal. Christ. Poor Cal. She thought of his red eyes at the Lotus Room bar, the weight sitting on those broad shoulders. Of course it was Cal. He could never ask Meredith.
The man would invite him to shoot a few rounds, out behind the building. To get the feel of it.
She pictured him in earmuffs, squeezing off shots into a paper target on a bale of hay. She wondered if he was a good shot. Probably. Probably left the guy’s jaw hanging in the dust. Hadn’t he lied about everything else? He was probably a sharpshooter with certificates up the wazoo. She imagined he stood behind the gun shop that day, killing them all. In the end it was easier to kill them inside his own head.
It was late. What she really wanted was some vodka and a red, but that was all over, she was going to the end now, one way or another, to the place where the bodies were piled along the train tracks. Why did she never pay attention to the end of the poem? She just wanted to think of the golden domes of Moscow, the thousand and three bell towers and seven train stations. But now she would take it all the way. Give up the picture he had painted of himself and know who he was, what he’d suffered. Be there for him as she hadn’t been when he was alive. He deserved that. She wasn’t going to be Meredith, skipping over the gaps, running off to Frankfurt and Hamburg, Salzburg and Vienna, as if what had happened couldn’t catch her if she ran far enough. There was no end to that. Josie had once loved him enough to let him have his secrets. Now she had to love him enough to know it all.
She was tired, but the room was icy cold, she couldn’t even take her jacket off. She went to the wall heater, tall and narrow, its ancient metal vents clogged with dust. She ran her hand along the cobwebby grate, felt the hot air coming out, but it still hadn’t heated the room. She pushed the thermostat to eighty degrees in hopes it would do something, but then thought of the manager’s girl in fingerless gloves.
She doubled the quilt, lay under it in all her clothes, shivering spasmodically, it wasn’t getting one bit warmer. Finally, she pulled the mattress pad out from under the sheet and made a bedroll of the pad and the spread and the thin blanket and sheet and got in again, turned off the light. It was a little better. She wasn’t planning on sleeping but she dozed off, listening to the wind.
She dreamed she was in Red Square. It was wintertime, and the colored domes of a great church rose over her head. She knew she was little Jeanne, bright and hopeful in a rat-fur coat and a hat with a brave feather, picking her way through the snow, slippery, so easy to fall. She was supposed to meet someone inside the church, someone had something for her, but it was intimidating. She pushed open the enormous carved-wood door.
Inside was much darker than in the brightness of snow, the colors of the fantastic domes replaced by gloom. Light flickered only from small smoky lamps, and the gold of the icons glowed faintly in the dark. The strong smell of smoke and incense, pine and mothball. It was no warmer inside than out, her breath made clouds in the air. The icons glared in mute outrage, knowing she, a whore and a stranger and an unbeliever, was violating the church with her presence.
A monk stepped out from behind the screen of gold icons. His matted hair hung long and dirty around a face distorted behind a long beard, his skin darkened with grime and soot. He wore a coarse black robe that smelled moldy, and his pale glaring eyes stood out in his dark face. His teeth were all rotten. It was Michael. She was shocked, how had he let his teeth get so bad? “Michael, it’s me,” she said, trying to show her sweetness, hoping he would see her face and remember that he loved her, that she was kind, and harmless, on the side of good.
But instead of allowing her to embrace him, he grabbed her, knocking her hat off, yanking her toward a basin of holy water, it was filthy, rank with algae. She thought he might just put some on her forehead, but then he was pushing her face into the basin. She flailed but he was too strong, she could grab at nothing. He was determined to baptize her in the murky tub, whether or not it drowned her.
Room 12
J
osie jerked herself awake, out of the font. Dark, and cold. The cold, the bedroll. She sat up, still feeling his hands on her head, the smell of dank water, the feeling of being drowned like a cat in a pond. He knew she was a whore, that she’d violated his sanctuary by entering there, with her ridiculous hat and rat-fur coat. But who had left such a magnificent church in those grubby, long-nailed hands? He’d lived in its darkness too long, brooding behind that golden screen of saints. Jeanne wasn’t the only guilty one.
She turned on the light. The raw, ugly space swarmed with bad dreams. The TV still murmured next door, the people had crashed and just left it on. Now what? She rubbed her face, cold as a rubber ice bag, lit a ciggie and sat in the heatless glare of the bare bulb. The emptiness of the room was so profound, it was as if the world had turned itself inside out, like a pocket. Michael was gone, and there was only the mad monk. This was the end of the road. What did she think she would find here anyway, some answer, like a comet blazing with light? There was nothing to understand. It was chaos, it was madness, and now he was gone.
She reached for the envelope of barbs in her purse, counted them. Nine. She could take one and sleep the rest of the night. Or she could take them all, and just sleep.
Pull a Marilyn,
why the fuck not? Even Marilyn had more to live for. How much longer could a person go on, living from one breath to the next?
You take care your own soul. Have more respect yourself.
She was trying to, but it was getting hard to even imagine.
A sound stirred outside. Crunch of footsteps on gravel. Someone walking around, the Frenchman? That weird fucking asshole, thinking he was going to have a little fun with his new guest? Well, he’d better fucking get ready. She wasn’t a girl like the ones he was used to. She swept the reds back into their envelope, turned off the light. Unclipping the curtains and parting them ever so slightly, she peered out. There, in the yellow bug light, bouncing on the balls of her feet, arms tight around herself, stood the manager’s girl. It had to be four in the morning. She reclipped the curtain, yanked the chair out from under the knob, opened the door. She tried to smile, but her face wasn’t cooperating, not after this kind of night. “Hey.”
The girl glanced back toward the office, then at Josie, her clear blue eyes wet and frightened. She opened her mouth and then closed it again.
“Come on in,” Josie said.
The girl slipped inside. Josie locked the flimsy door, turned the lights back on. The girl’s gaze rattled around the room, panicked as a squirrel that comes in through the dog door. It came to rest on the linens still folded in their bedroll. Sense of duty seemed to focus her. “Oh, you are cold?”
Josie opened the roll and flicked the bedclothes into place over the stained mattress. Fuck the cold. She didn’t want the girl to feel accused of anything. “No big deal. Hey, have a seat.”
The odd mousy girl sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap over a bulky, fuzzy hippie purse that looked like it was made out of a rug. “I see . . . your light on.”
Josie sat in the plastic chair, making no sudden moves, not wanting to spook her further. The girl clutched her purse, hands like little traps.
“I don’t sleep too well these days anyway. Not since Michael . . .”
Those prominent blue eyes searched Josie’s face, the ravaged, broken-apart face, as if asking something, but what? Then they skidded away, dropped to her hands. “To me he is Oscar,” she said quietly.
So she had met him. Josie had guessed right. This weird little girl. But to her he was Oscar Wilde. “Oscar Wilde’s a poet,” Josie said. “His name was Michael. But he liked poetry.”
Picking at the wool of her hippie purse, the girl nodded.
Josie didn’t want to ask the hundreds of questions that seethed in her tired mind, afraid the frightened bird would bolt. Instead she stood, very slowly, and walked around the bed to the nightstand, lit a ciggie. The packet of reds lay by the lamp. Now she was ashamed that she’d even thought of it. Wasn’t there enough suffering in the world? She picked them up and pocketed them. “Yeah, he liked poetry, and old records. Garage sales. He played the piano.” Quietly, she returned to the plastic chair, opposite the manager’s girl in her dirty blue parka. “We loved each other. But he didn’t remember.”
The girl’s cheeks grew even paler. Finally, she burst out, “But why? Why he do this?”
The thing they all wanted to know. “Did you guys talk?”
She nodded again, wiping her eyes on the back of her fingerless glove. How pale she was, paler even than Josie. Where did they keep her, locked in the basement?
“He speak German.” She smiled, a wavery, watery smile. “Like a Viennese.”
German, that’s what it was. Not French. And not just any German,
Viennese.
How like him.
Café Central, Wien.
Michael had never even met his grandfather, but he’d made a shrine to him, out of his own flesh and bones.
“His mother, his father, he miss them. Climbers.” And now she could hear it, yes,
muzzer, fazzer.
Not French at all. The girl pronounced the
b
in
climb.
“They send him to America for study. All over the world they are climbing.”
Like Godzilla and King Kong. Making it theirs, making sure he had nowhere to go that could be his own. So he could end up in this godforsaken corner of the universe, lying to this wretched girl. Creating himself on the canvas of her mind, the picture of himself he wished were true.
It doesn’t help, Michael. It just hurts more.
Darkness coiled between what he wanted them to believe and the self he despised. It only made him more alone. How could you save someone when he didn’t let you know him? Not really, not all the way.
But Josie knew about that. The glamorous model, the silver lily. She’d been the same kind of liar.
“How long was he here?”
“Almost a week. I did not know he will do this.” Her begging eyes. Her forehead pleated like a lampshade. “You must believe.”
A week. Josie leaned back in the molded chair, staring at the lightbulb, the chunky white ceiling, trying not to cry. A week meant he’d never gone to Meredith’s at all. It meant he knew what he was going to do the day he kissed her goodbye. That day, she’d kissed a dead man. Jesus Christ.
“Here he is happy,” the girl said, leaning forward, trying to convince her, trying to convince somebody. “Very much he is liking it. He hike. Always he draw. Look.” The girl wiped her nose on the back of her fingerless glove, and fumbled from her fuzzy hippie purse a picture drawn on thick unlined paper. Where it had been torn from a notebook, the edge was ragged. Josie held it up, let the light come through. Pen and ink, of the girl posed in the L of the motel. It perfectly captured her kicked-dog expression. Composed into a corner, you could see how boxed in she was.
Or who was?
It was good, probably took him all of five minutes. What waste. The beauty he murdered in this place. He could never see what he had, only what he failed to achieve.
And she thought of the barbs in her pocket. So what was it she had that she was forgetting?
Take care your own soul.
And he’d chatted away with this poor little girl, his plan stinking under the floorboards like a murder victim. Telling her only a piece, the piece he thought she wanted to hear.
Josie handed the drawing back to the girl, who looked deeply at it, as if it was water and she was dying of thirst. “So
schön.
In New York, don’t go over the fifth floor. The tall ladders nobody climb.”
Josie knew the poem. The skyscrapers on fire, and the ladders nobody would climb. Elevators that went right to the floor of the fire, their doors automatically opening.
These are the warnings that you must forget, if you’re climbing out of yourself, if you’re going to smash into the sky.
His Sexton, all the beloved suicides. Plath, Rothko, Van Gogh. He was telling the girl without telling her, knowing she wouldn’t understand. Leaving him safe with his secrets, like a man sitting on a grenade.
“I—he . . . he make you feel . . .
Wert.
”
Worth. He made you feel worthwhile. That was his gift. If this girl hadn’t been so pathetic, Josie would have been jealous of her, that he’d shared that with her, after kissing Josie goodbye. “Did he say anything about . . . having a girlfriend?” Who was the pathetic one?
Did he talk about me?
The girl dropped her eyes to her hands. They were surprisingly beautiful, with healthy, clean nails in narrow pink beds. “I ask if he have a girlfriends . . .” She shrugged, flushed red in the cheeks and the ears. She was in love with him too. Well, why wouldn’t she be? When would a girl like that ever meet someone like him, talking to her, bathing her in his attention? She knew what that felt like. Like heaven. In that she and Josie were exactly the same.
The girl shrugged again, brought her hand to her red face, spoke from behind her glove. “He say she die. In Siberia. A train . . . smash. In his arm her last . . . breathe.” She dropped the hand, let Josie see the quivering mouth, the liquid eyes. “Please, I did not know. How I know? I believe him. Everything . . .”
Gazing up at the ceiling, Josie traced lumps of stucco like gobs of dirty snow. So that was how their story ended. Jeanne dying in a train wreck, in Blaise’s arms.
What was it that died, Michael?
His love, his faith? Little Jeanne had been his hope for love, for the true world. Once she was gone, all that was left was war, cholera, a new .38.
The girl fidgeted unhappily with her ugly purse. She wiped her nose again on her glove. Josie wanted to offer her a tissue but the place was so cheap, there didn’t even seem to be a tissue box in the room. The girl’s skin was creased with worry, fine lines already etched into her forehead. Josie got up and, hesitating, hoping it wouldn’t frighten her, sat next to her on the bed. “None of us knew. He was keeping a secret.”
The girl’s mouth twitched and then she broke into heavy sobs. Josie put an arm around her, awkwardly patting her knit cap, her frizzy ash brown braids. “Shhh. It’s hard. I know.”
She stopped hiccupping and looked Josie in the eye. “It is me. I find.”
It took a moment for her understanding to unfold, like a paper flower you drop in a glass of water. This girl had been the one to find Michael. She had found him like that.
Wiping her eyes with the glove that must have been sodden, she continued. “I go in to change the room. He is in the bed. The wall, the . . .” She pressed her hands over her eyes—it was too late. There was no shutting out that sight. “
Mein Gott. Mein Gott.
”
They held one another tight tight tight, Josie’s cheek against the girl’s knit cap that smelled of old cats. This was what she had been spared. It could have been her, in her house in Lemoyne, but he’d come out here to keep her from that. The girl went on, “The blood, everywhere, so much blood. How he can do this . . . I just see . . . we just talk . . . nothing he say, nothing . . .”
“I know.” Yes, that was how it was. You were just talking. About an art project, about baked beans. And then suddenly you were on your knees cleaning up bits of brains and freshly spilled blood. You were at a funeral. You were living in an empty house, like a dog waiting by the door.
“And then I must clean. After the police go.”
That fucking Frenchman German whatever he was had made this girl clean the motel room where Michael had shot himself. That bastard. She’d kill him. She’d go in there and beat his head in with a brick. She could imagine the blood on the wall, quarts of it, the smell of it, butcher thick, and this girl on hands and knees with a bucket, weeping. There was no justice. To think that this girl could have had the strength. The girl sobbed like she was going to vomit. Josie kept holding her until she was just sniffling.
Finally, she sat up, wiped her eyes. “I want to tell you, but
he
don’t let me.” She knit her bushy eyebrows. “So I wait until they sleep. Look.” Out of her fuzzy hippie bag, she pulled a black notebook. “I don’t give to police.” It was one of Michael’s journals.
What the fuck was this girl doing with his journal?
She’d stolen it, or maybe he’d given it to her. In any case she’d been protecting it. From everybody, Meredith, the cops. She’d probably never done anything so brave in her life, but she’d wanted it that much. The girl hugged it to her parka’d breast as if it was Michael himself, her eyes red, nose red, but her chin raised in defiance, as if daring Josie to rip it from her arms. Then she thrust it out. “Here. You take. Is better.”
She felt the heat of the girl’s body still on the black cover, as the girl stood. From her pocket the German girl took something else, that jingled. A key, with a red tag. She gave Josie a quick hard hug. “Bring back before
he
wake up,” she said. She smiled weakly, and slipped out into the night.
Josie sat on the bed, looking at the key and the book in her hands. She gazed at the tag on the key.
Room
12
.
Twelve, the number of the Hanged Man.
O
utside, it was even colder than it had been, bleaker, more forsaken. The stray dog lay curled under the block wall of the patio, as if it was warmer there, outside a room where a human being breathed. She walked quickly down the long side of the motel. Half the doors had no numbers, but the last one was marked 12. Of course, it would be the last room.
Something quiet, please.
The young gentleman wouldn’t want to be disturbed. She glanced over her shoulder toward the closed door of the manager’s office, fumbled the key into the lock. She let herself in, closed the door, turned on the light.
It was the same as number 4, though the bed sat against the other wall. Table, blue chair, bare bulb. And then she saw the paneling. No longer the dark knotty pine, some lighter wood. The headboard was new. She swayed, sat down on the blue chair.
You wanted to see it. There it is.
She could taste his blood in the air. She was breathing his death, under the ant powder. If only she had known how desperate a person could be. There, with a gun in his mouth. She could taste it, the metal, smell the gunpowder, the bite of it. Why couldn’t he have just told them all to fuck off? He could have disappeared into a new life. He didn’t have to do this. He could have remembered pedaling a boat on Echo Park lake and playing the blue guitar and singing “Just a Gigolo.”