The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  We left her back at the porn house, lying out by the pool, staunching her nosebleed. We didn’t discuss what we’d do next. Rae’s house was all the way across LA, an hour of shuttered strip malls, menthol cigarettes and Depeche Mode remixes. She lived in Runyon Canyon, on a street so dark and serpentine it felt like frontier times. As the car climbed out of the basin she switched the music off to listen for coyote calls and we watched winged things flit through the twin cones of the headlights.

  Rae admitted that the girl had told her about the narcolepsy when they’d first met, but that, “I thought it was just something she’d made up to make her seem more interesting, like being gluten intolerant, or a sex addict or something — one of those bullshit LA things. Why can’t anyone here have an illness that they haven’t made a movie about?”

  We sat on her porch looking out over a pool of lights lapping against the mountains and the shore. Joy Division played from the lounge and I swam in the disconnect: skulls rolling in the surf, palm trees on fire. Rae stood up from her chair and reached out into the dark. Her hand came back clasped around a neon-bright orange which she peeled thoughtlessly. The smell was cloying in the stillness. I went inside to get more cigarettes and when I returned she was sleeping, curled up like a cat on the deck, a twist of hair shivering with each out breath, her lips wet with orange juice.

  I let the record play on as the mountain ridges paled into sunrise. The air shimmered and a movement caught my eye: a hummingbird, all straight lines and clockwork movements. It hovered over the pot plants one by one, finding nothing of interest and then settled gyroscopically into a square of airspace over Rae’s face. The sound of its wings was as tiny a noise as you could imagine: the sound of snowflakes hitting the ground, the sound of the hair rising on your arms. It balanced perfectly in the air, unmoving bar the blur of wings and it extended its neck so that it could reach a bead of juice at the corner of Rae’s mouth. Every sound competed to be the smallest: Rae’s breaths, the shuffle of wings, distant waves, distant cars.

  I held my breath. The bead of the hummingbird’s eye was a pinhead. Its wings were impossible.

  I never really went home again.

  Four neat sketches run down the margin here: a hummingbird in flight, its wings captured at different points of their arc. The wings have been partially erased and redrawn, making them gauzy against the clean lines of the body.

  Voodoo Rae — Act II

  I moved in by osmosis, the slow spread of my possessions through Rae’s house charting our relationship. My paperbacks companionably face-to-face with hers in the bookcase. My hair in her bin after she cut it short one night. My vodka crowding her frozen peas out of the ice box. Mine became ours. Hers became ours.

  My records sounded different through her stereo, with its one broken speaker, leaving certain LPs gutted and thin, runtish versions that I can never quite shake. My fingers in her thick hair. Her perfume on my collar. Her balled-up wads of gum found days later in my jeans pockets. And that house, our house finally, with its wooden walls and open windows and the way that nature encroached until it was as if we were camping up in the canyon. The smells of frangipani and jacaranda and the high notes of orange trees and the bitter musk of coyote droppings and avocados rotting on the trees mingled and multiplied with the coffee and tobacco to create a place neither inside nor out. It was two miles to the store for ciggies. Ten for petrol. Butterflies bigger than your hand flattened themselves onto the glow of the TV screen at night. We hauled speakers into the branches of an avocado tree that draped itself over the deck to play Joni and Judee and Gram and Tammy. Breakfast on the porch: roll-ups and fresh orange juice. Skies of blue and orange as bright as food colouring. Coke nights and dope dawns. And with it all the endless fascination of new love, wanting to know everything, to reach back into each other’s pasts and install yourself there.

  Night after night, moonlit and stoned until we were nothing more than voices, telling each other the story of who we were and where we’d been. Cicadas, wind chimes, car tyres: when I hear Rae’s voice in my mind these are the background noises. Her clotted mid-western roundness, slow over a story and always a laugh for herself, a deep burble of pleasure. Every story containing the germ of the next, stories like mountain streams, talking for the very pleasure of it until I was inside her world, lost in her woods. I liked her smaller stories best: what a normal day at her high school was like, the shows her parents watched, every haircut she’d ever had.

  The outside world was thin after that. These were the months of castings: modelling for her, acting for me. We’d drive the long way round, away from the city out into the hills, past the Manson house and the tweaker huts, just to get to that crest of hill where Malibu and the Pacific are laid out before you. It was always at that point that the radio kicked back into life. KDAY, the rap station with its cartoon horror music for a cartoon horror city. “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and “Murder Was the Case”. Rae doing her toenails up on the dashboard, ciggies and mints in the parking lot.

  We went everywhere and got turned down most places. At least with acting it was a matter of interpretation. I could — and always did — argue that I was rejected because the casting agent simply did not understand the power of my performance. Rae’s modelling was simpler and more brutal. You drove miles in a car you couldn’t afford, to stand in front of a director who would reluctantly look up from his Blackberry, look right at you, for a moment, a staggeringly brief moment, certainly less time than you’d spend picking out a lobster in a restaurant, and shake his head, which meant “no, you certainly weren’t a person that other people would pay to look at” so you’d drive back another twenty miles through the snarl and snark, back to the warm bubble of The Canyon and try not to take it personally.

  Back to the universe of The Canyon, with its army of two. And its anthems and symbols, its sacred books and holy places. Curled around each other in the hammock as the Thousand and One Nights of Rae unfolded and the smallest possible unit of time was one side of an LP. I didn’t read the papers or watch the news and I couldn’t have told you what was going on in the world, but I knew, exactly, how many times Rae had managed to top up her father’s vodka with water before he realised what was happening (eight) and who had been number three on the super top-secret list of “guys who I’d go to bed with” that her and Carly Jameson had made, which they were supposed to burn afterwards but Carly instead had showed around everyone in their class (Henry Winkler).

  It was a life of constant little losses and rare big wins. Coke and Champagne when we got a job, cigarettes and coffee the rest of the time. I suffered jealous aches when I read in LA Weekly which of my compatriots were playing The Strip. Who among them had reached escape velocity: Pulp at The Roxy, Lush doing Lollapalooza. Dillon on Leno.

  My vices were booze, women and pills; Rae’s were shoplifting and open houses. She was relentless with the open houses. On weekends we’d lie in late, listening to records and eating, listening to records and fucking, listening to records and reading, until the pull of it grew too strong for her. She’d get antsy and dress up in Sunday clothes: Fifties sun-dresses and thrift-store sunglasses. Heels, plastic jewellery. Then into the Jetta, Rae with her feet up on the dashboard and a copy of the LA Times folded and pencil-ringed in her hand.

  We’d drive for hours to wherever had caught Rae’s magpie eye. We saw split-levels in Palm Springs that Frank Sinatra was always supposed to have stayed at. We kept our shoes on for fortieth-floor K-Town rat-holes, and ducked our heads into Long Beach houseboats so tiny that the owners had to wait outside. We always parked a block away to hide the Jetta with its garbage-bag side windows and scuffed bumpers, Rae doing her lipstick in the wing mirror, preparing her haughtiest face. She’d be rigidly alert through the whole visit, scanning every inch of each property like she was a camera. With that feminine radar she could extrapolate the owners’ entire lives from the contents of the bathroom cabinets or the notes left on the fridge. I’d be left with the re
altor, making small talk as they tried to work out if our raggedy second-hand-ness was actual poverty or some new, tech-money thing, while Rae scraped every surface clean with those watchful grey eyes. I used it as acting practice, a new character with every trip and I dropped contradictory hints about our financial standing just for something to do.

  So, a year and a half into our life together, we were deep in the desert south of Vegas, where I thought I had a buyer for one of the last things I’d kept from Dillon’s place, a battered 1966 P-Bass in its original case. Rae was along for the ride so when I saw a sign reading PALATIAL ESTATE — OPEN HOUSES I kept quiet. I thought she hadn’t seen it but then she leant over and flicked the indicator.

  “Not so fast B-Boy. A ten-hour round-trip? I get something.”

  It was a winding backroad through parched scrubland, punctuated only by gunshot-pocked road signs and uncategorisable roadkill. The AC was broken so the windows were open to that dusty, herby desert air. Cacti threw shadows up rocky outcrops: Roadrunner territory. The valley had been brutally landscaped, with huge horizontal platforms cut deep into the mountainside so that it looked like dried-out paddy fields. It was a rough-hewn feat of geo-engineering, made all the more alien by its barrenness.

  “Looks like they were expecting to do a lot more building, huh?” Rae did her makeup: Sixties kohl, scarlet lips. “It’s a modern ghost town.”

  The road wound through platforms of earth like a contour map: the subdivisons and traffic systems were just lines in the dirt. Only one platform was occupied. A cul-de-sac of dust-blown, mock-Spanish bungalows with empty swimming pools thick with dried sagebrush and windows open to the elements.

  There was no sign of human habitation. Everything rang in the dead air. The slams of our car doors were like gunshots.

  Rae’s hello, anyone here? hung in the air until a door opened somewhere inside.

  The caretaker was a rangy, elastic-limbed stoner kid. His centre parting and handlebar moustache were pure 1973 Haight-Ashbury, his Air Jordans and Nike skullcap ten-minutes-out-of-date Nineties, and his tartan shirt classic grunge; he looked like a remnants bin.

  As he kicked the door closed we could see into his room. The entirety of his furniture was an airbed and a bong. He smoothed down the ends of his moustache as he talked.

  “You didn’t think the sign looked sort of fucked? We haven’t had an open house here for months. Should take it down I guess.”

  He had the slow cadence of someone who was very stoned or who hadn’t heard their own voice for a while. Probably both.

  “They stopped building coupla’ years back. It was s’posed to be five hundred homes. Big ol’ gym, mini-mart, gas station even.” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the lopped off hilltops. “High-end community.”

  He looked us up and down. “Not sure it’d have been your kind of place even if they finished it. No offence.”

  Still, he seemed to feel that a tour was in order. We walked in silence along the main road as waves of dry heat reflected from the tarmac. The whole estate was like a picked-clean skeleton. Glassless windows were gaping eye sockets. Yawning garage doors were jaws open to the desert air.

  We walked into one of the homes at random, the kid waiting outside like we might want to talk in private. The terracotta tiles were gritty with dirt, flashing me back to Dillon’s place. We walked through it all without speaking, the only sound a constant whistle of wind. A window framed cowboy-film views out over the valley. Mile upon mile of levelled ground, stepped like a ziggurat with outlines of roads and gardens that would now never be. This central section was high enough that you could look down on distant birds riding thermals. Rae was bored; without human beings the place was dead to her. She pushed open the kitchen door and reared back. There was a flash of white and Rae’s hand shot to her mouth. A mule deer, spooked, had leapt neatly out the open window. We watched it bolt across the lot and then pick its way gently down the hillside, nibbling at bushes.

  We were three-point-turning outside the main house, the car a sweatbox after half an hour in the sun, when the kid loped back over. He went to rap on the window and made a face as he realised it was open.

  Rae stopped the engine and his long, slow face filled the window. “I don’ s’pose you guys want a job?”

  (There’s a sketch here, very rough, in smudged black pencil. Three figures wearing the same kind of headdresses as the one that I found on my very first day here. They are standing around something, a something made up of rough pencil cross-hatchings, drawn so hard as to almost tear the page. It looks like a pile of rags maybe, or a rook’s nest. The figures’ heads are down and the heavy line of a shotgun hangs from the rightmost one’s hand.)

  Voodoo Rae — Act III

  After we moved up there everything changed. Rae waited tables and took a distance-learning degree in Makeup for Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Film from the Toni Basil School for Professional Development. It wasn’t unusual for me to come home from a night shift to find a squadron of giggly zombies drinking breakfast smoothies through straws so their wounds didn’t fall off. I did six weeks as a stand-in John Lennon at the House of Blues’s Starry Cavalcade, part of a faux-Beatles whose other three members were OxyContin-addicted Las Vegans, pancaked in makeup to disguise their Latino heritage, who practised their Scouse accents by watching episode after episode of Thomas the Tank Engine backstage. Seeing which way the Vegas wind was blowing, Rae and I enrolled at croupier school to learn to deal poker, which was where the big tips were. We graduated in the winter, receiving photocopied scrolls in the cleared out card-room of the Winchester Days Inn Hotel. There was one mortar board between the whole class, which we passed around for solemn photos, before redeeming our Graduate Bounty: $100-worth of chips and vouchers for three free margaritas.

  We started out with shifts at the least prestigious off-Strip casinos. I enjoyed it. That white-noise jangle of Vegas: slots, bullshit conversations and roulette rattle, like an orchestra tuning up forever. It was pure anticipation. People were pulled tight as guitar strings, vibrating with the tension of it all.

  They fascinated me, the actual gamblers. Not the ones who said “never bet more than you can afford to lose”. That’s not gambling. Betting what you can afford to lose is an investment, or, if you’re seriously rich, just a way of killing time. One Texan guy put fifty thousand on a corner number when I was running the roulette wheel and then something caught his eye across the room and he forgot to even watch the spin. It came up 34 and I had to get someone to chase him down with his four hundred grand. Like I said, just killing time. I don’t understand those people. In a town as amoral as Vegas you can do some seriously freaky shit for fifty thousand, so why waste it among the rubes? Gambling, true gambling means risk. It means the risk of losing everything, the risk of getting swept away. That’s why it’s addictive, because it can be life-changing either way.

  In the most transient town on Earth I felt weirdly settled, out among the microwave mornings and ice-box nights and the million cicadas and billion stars. It was timeless and blank and if you lay out on the house’s flat roof and slowed your breathing you could actually see the dome of stars rotate around you.

  Every weekend Rae and I blagged and borrowed swag from the casino hotels: nearly new mini-fridges and last year’s flat-screen TVs and erotic sculptures and hibachis and thousand-dollar bathrobes and golf carts and listening devices and nightsticks and Bang & Olufsen CD towers and sushi rolling kits. The Jetta’s trunk was often so stuffed that it crunched horribly on the rear axle as we drove home through the Monday morning dawn. We were living like high rollers and hobos: pure luxury and real poverty and nothing in between. Just as it should be.

  This then was the world my son was born into. His birth certificate read PLACE OF BIRTH: Wokova Reserve, Nevada. Technically the whole estate was on Native American land. It was one of the parcels of waterless, cropless, sun-blasted earth that was given to the Paiute Tribe like so many glass beads, back in the Fo
rties when the idea that anyone would want to live out here was laughable. Then Vegas boomed and the realtors came back to clear the Paiute off the land for a second time; real Indian givers. This time it cost them a slew of charitable donations and a “heritage programme” that meant everything on the estate had a Native American name. (The hopelessly optimistic map in the entranceway listed a Winnemucca golf course and even a Nün‘wa Paya Hup Ca’a‘ Otuu’mu cultural centre.) So Robin is technically a Paiute, though I can’t think of a nationality that offers less in the way of perks.

  He was born up there in the moonscape of the Sierra Madre foothills, among silence and stars, a week early while I was dealing blackjack in the old Atlantis Casino. The Atlantis was one of those rudimentary gambling dens that crowd the state line between California and Nevada. It had none of the bells and whistles of the Strip: no free buffet, no hostesses, no big-name attraction playing downstairs. It was simply the very first place you could gamble if you were coming from the south, making its clientele the most depressing in the whole state. If you couldn’t wait the forty minutes it took to drive to Vegas proper then you had a problem.

  And they had a no-cellphones rule which meant that Rae’s texts that night, as they ran from the lightly concerned (I feel weird but I can’t tell if it’s baby weird) through rising worry (can u come home I really think this might be it) onwards into intelligibility (fucksake B just be here FFS), just set my jacket pocket jangling inside my locker.

  It was only on a break, smoking outside in the starlight with the busboys, that the under pit boss caught up with me. Rae had called him in desperation.

  I got home too late. Rae was starfished in the paddling pool, her body luminous in the harshness of the halogen, hands gripping the rubber handholds on the rim. A ribbon of red unfurled between her legs.

  She looked frazzled and half-drowned. Her first words to me as a mother: “Where have you beeeen? I’ve been calling for hours.”