“When are you leaving?” Cam asks.
“Tonight.”
The doctor shoos me out of the kitchen, Jakob too, shutting the flapping door. Ear to wood, I listen to Cam’s shushed plea.
When I turn, Jakob is stooped at the screen, examining his reflection. He fingers the skin of his neck, forming a smile, another, and I laugh openly at him, like I want to hurt him, because I do.
I ask him, “Did you have any sisters or brothers before—” Always so hard to say it.
“Only child,” he says.
I want to say the words: I had a sister. I want to call up Bee’s name, but I haven’t said it in so long, haven’t worked up the courage, scared it’ll rip open the hole inside me that I’ve worked so hard to cover but never fill.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’d be different if she were around,” I say, closest I can come to the truth.
Jakob is silent, and I remember I’m talking to a stranger, to feel embarrassed.
“I know what you mean,” he says. “She’s a good friend, that Lilac. A good companion.”
“You barely knew her.”
“I joined that group looking for help, and she volunteered. Not many people would do that.”
“Help you how?” I ask when I see it, the silver glint from his jacket pocket—Nat’s taught me to spot guns.
Jakob trails my eyes, pulls it out. “You ever held one?”
I shake my head.
“Want to?”
It is cold and heavier than I expected. Jakob shows me how to aim, how to release the safety. His chin rested on my shoulder, we aim out the window at the neighbor’s cat. “Pow,” he breathes into my ear.
FOUR MONTHS SINCE QUARANTINE ENDED
CAM
SAN FERNANDO VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
San Fernando Valley is a wasteland of open-air malls and condo complexes in a pastel palette, tract homes along circuitous roads and swimming pools like blue jewels through the dust. Everything is a shade of yellow in this heat, the constant sunlight. I never knew a place could be like this—so sprawling and so much like a cage with nowhere to feel alone.
We have adjoining rooms at the Super 8, Jakob and me. When he got a glimpse of the rooms, he groaned, “What I wouldn’t do for a massage at the Four Seasons!” I would’ve liked that too, but he says the tabfeeds would be on him by the time he’d checked in. Besides, who has that kind of credit? So here we are, near the Burbank Airport where those people were killed trying to steal a plane at the height of quarantine. I can still remember the news taglines: Terrorists shot at Burbank Airport! Law enforcement lauded for keeping America safe. Had there been a reason besides escape? Had any of them been sick? The newsfeeds never bother with follow-up, so fast-paced and forward-moving.
After I slept off that long drive, the longest drive of my life, Jakob took me to a part of town that was all warehouses and office parks in shades of gray. We sat in the car, across the street from a building wrapped in security fencing, and told me that was it, the spot he was talking about, the one where we could get Lilac a body. There was no sign, the hedges clipped into rectangles, a guard at the entrance fiddling with his phone.
“Is this a Metis facility?”
“It’s a chop shop,” Jakob said, “spare parts, new bodies, repairs. For the ones who want to avoid Metis.”
When I asked him how we would get inside, he smiled and told me not to worry about it, and all I could think of was Lilac in that sock hat, the wound she was hiding—how could she hide such a thing from me?
A couple days later, in the motel, Jakob showed me footage of its insides—the building we’d visited, the companions, rows and rows of bodies, the tables where they were repaired or broken down for parts, the human-size boxes like coffins waiting for shipment—and I didn’t ask where he got it.
“Do you see one you like?” he asked. “For Lilac?” It was as if we were shopping at a store, bodies like clothes you could step into and out of.
I scanned them, pointed out the first one that was female and in the right age range, full face, long hair, soft of body. I turned away from her not because she wasn’t attractive, but because she wasn’t Lilac, not even close.
That night he took me out to dinner, an old Italian place, traditional, with a tiny waterfall trapped inside it. “Jakob!” the host called, coming out from behind his booth. They hugged and caught up while I stared at the signed photos of famous diners that hung on the walls until I found him—I found Jakob hanging there, frozen with that famous half-smile of his.
As the host led us to the table, I leaned into Jakob. “I thought you were worried about being noticed.”
“Shh,” he told me, “let me enjoy this tiny pleasure. It’s the Valley, for Christ’s sake!”
While a woman in a sparkling evening dress played a harp with the waterfall as backdrop, Jakob ordered me a bottle of red. Appetizers that he couldn’t eat were brought to our table, and he told me things were going to work out. “Your Lilac is a special one.”
“She is,” I said, skeptical despite the wine, the whole bottle, I’m ashamed to say.
Later, curled up in the too-soft motel bed, his movie kept me company, the original in that series—how many times had I seen it? This time I fell in love with him a little, the way he held her, the companion he’d never be able to save, bawling when she died in his arms like it wasn’t bad acting.
* * *
In the morning I woke hungover and vomited in the sink. I was washing up when I heard the knock at the door that connected our rooms. Jakob, his voice too loud: “I’m taking you to Hollywood!”
Traffic was awful, like nothing I’d seen before, knots of freeways converging into a city with no center. I could feel the rage pumping off the drivers, beating off their cars, over the sounds of their loud music and horn wails. In the distance were the white letters of the famous Hollywood sign, much smaller than they appear on-screen.
We pulled into a metered spot, on a quaint street with shops and cafés and a yoga studio.
“What are we doing?” I asked Jakob, too embarrassed to tell him I was hungry, dying for a bathroom, my head pounding. It felt silly complaining to a companion about the pains of the body, my poor choices. And I knew from Lilac that he could read me, smell the alcohol I was sloughing off like dead skin.
“Just checking on an old friend,” he said, focused on the great bay window of the yoga studio, all those women braced on their arms like bridges. We sat there for a half hour before a woman emerged, long hair tied back in a loose braid, yoga mat strapped to her back.
I could see Jakob’s eyes following her, and I asked him, “Who is that?”
“That’s Greta Greene, one of our greatest living actresses.”
I didn’t like it, watching the woman without her knowing, as she paused to examine a shoe shop’s window offerings.
“Hold on,” Jakob said, out of the car before I could stop him, across the street, walking briskly to catch her as she unlocked a tiny silver convertible.
I could feel myself hoping she’d brush him off as he came up behind her, linking his arm in hers. She sprang away from him; then, seeing who he was, she threw her arms around his neck, Jakob grinning into her hair.
They talked a few minutes in that fevered way people talk when they haven’t seen each other in ages. Laughing, smiling into faces, touching each other on the arm, the shoulder, the cheek, like are you real?
A kiss, on the lips? I couldn’t tell from the car.
“What was that?” I asked Jakob as he slid back into the driver’s seat.
“Dinner. We’re having dinner tomorrow night.”
“Is that wise?”
“No idea.” I could see that he loved her, my heart reminded of Lilac, tucked into the nightstand of my motel room. But what I didn’t know was whether this Greta loved him back, what would happen if she didn’t.
* * *
I could hear Jakob humming through the thin walls of the Super 8 as he prepared for
his date, or dinner, or whatever it was.
“Where are you going?” I called.
He pulled the door open, smelling of overgenerous cologne. “To her house. She’s separated! And her child’s with the ex tonight. I haven’t been this excited in ages.”
It seemed dangerous, his excitement, manic, so easily flicked over the edge.
“Does she know you’re not—”
“I haven’t decided whether to tell her.”
“How can you not?”
He was humming again, at the mirror, saying, “It’s good to see you,” again, again; each time it was different, his delivery, like he was trying on different versions of himself.
* * *
It was seven when I woke, and I hadn’t heard him come in. I knocked, and when he opened the door, I stopped myself from asking, how was it? I could see it in his face, the same kind of look the residents got after they’d lost a peer. Terrified, alone—those words never seemed to do justice to whatever it was they were experiencing. Something outside words. A deep kind of grief.
“She’s sober,” he said.
I was careful with my response, one of the skills I’d acquired at Jedediah Smith, before that even, in the Sunset duplex where I lived with strangers who were family. “That’s not bad, is it?”
“It was one of those atonement scenarios,” he said, burying his head in his hands, pulling at his silver hair.
“Oh.”
“She doesn’t want me. She wants to start fresh. She’s trying out celibacy!”
“Oh,” I said again.
“Is that all you’re going to say? Oh, oh, oh?” I had never seen him angry like this. He seemed a little off-kilter and I was afraid of him. Didn’t know him, not really. Never had I felt so far from home. “The things I did to get here,” he said, as if not to me.
“What did you do?” I asked him.
His eyes slid in my direction and I regretted the question, wishing I could suck it back inside me.
“It’s over,” he said, falling onto the bed dramatically. “I’m going into sleep mode.”
What was there to say?
Back in my own room, I opened the nightstand, what was left of Lilac next to a Bible that appeared brand-new. Seated on the bed, I cracked its spine, flipping the pages for the smell, pressing my hands to them to remember.
* * *
For two days I didn’t hear a sound from his room, and I thought of waking him. Thought better of it. I was just back from a sad attempt at a walk, winding roads until I was lost, on a street with no sidewalks, trampling the plants there to beautify this stretch of office parks and strip malls and condos—where were the trees? I was in a bad mood, a little sunburnt and dehydrated, when I heard the knock at the door that connected our rooms—her, the companion I’d picked out, dressed in Jakob’s beige tracksuit, younger than she’d seemed on the screen, late teens? Too young for me, I thought, but that didn’t make any sense, and I looked in those round, brown eyes for her, for an answer.
She sat me down on the bed, told me she was sorry she couldn’t remember. That there was no use trying. Gone. They were gone, the last four years, everything since the moment Diana woke her in that body. I felt like dying when she put it that way, thinking of her body, the one I loved, every experience she’d had in it erased. He’d explained it all, she told me.
“Jakob?” I asked, but of course it was Jakob who’d stolen into my room, stolen her from the nightstand, stolen off without telling me, bringing her, this body, back.
“Yes,” she said. But she was touched by what I’d done for her. Touched! She actually said that. I didn’t mean to pull away, to turn small. She didn’t recognize me; I didn’t recognize her.
“We can try,” she said, and I said okay, and she does try, to be kind, to shine her attention on me, but I can see the soft focus she gets when she’s processing, not here, not entirely.
* * *
At night when I try to sleep, she’s next door with Jakob. Sometimes I listen through the walls. Once I caught them laughing, thought to myself, there’s a joke there, two companions laughing in a hotel room, and I turned and turned with the guilt until sunup. How could I make fun of her like that? Even if it was only in my head.
The other night we went out dancing, the three of us. Jakob led us down a vomit-scented alley, his silver hair hidden in a hoodie as we ducked into the back of a West Hollywood club. It was after two, the dancing drug-enhanced and convulsive, bodies oiled up in sweat. On the dance floor, I could feel the pull between them—Jakob and Lilac. Not sexual, but an inside joke, a shared look I didn’t understand.
Before, it was us, just us. Now when she touches me, I turn cold. I slick over with sweat. I think: programming. I tell myself: maybe it’ll change. But there’s no retracing our memories to finding before, there’s no finding it again, not like this. Not with him, Jakob, all, Darling, could you give us a moment? Or, Oh, Cam, dear, that is not what I meant. Gabe knew he was trouble. I should have listened! He says just a couple snips and he’ll be free of his past, totally free. “Travel,” he says, and Lilac says yes, even when I tell her I want to put down roots, to go home.
“Home?” she says, and I remember that she’s forgotten our years with Diana. The best years, huddled warm and safe in the guest room, watching the neighbor’s cat slink along the fence from our bed, the tingle of Lilac’s fingers tracing up and down my arm, a tower of books that she would read to me. Funny thing: I liked it best when she read Diana’s textbooks, her pronunciation of words like infundibulum and lingual gyrus and optic chiasm exquisite and totally sexy. It didn’t bother me then, her programming. I guess it was part of why I fell in love with her. And it was easy to forget, so warm and alive and next to me as she was.
Now I worry for her all the time. I ask, “What’re his plans?” and I can tell by the way her face slackens that she’s processing. She doesn’t know me now, doesn’t know how to read me save my body signals. But I know her, waiting until she blinks and answers, a tell, not the truth.
She says something about Jakob’s former agent, a party, no big deal, but I can feel it—whatever it is she’s not telling me.
Often I picture that first night, riding on the back of her motorbike when we’d run off from Jedediah Smith. Too tired to continue, worried I’d fall asleep, fall right off the back of Lilac’s bike, over the cliffs as we wound our way down the coast. So she found us a cove, found us some sand warmer than the air. No blanket, I was freezing, slept fitfully, maybe a few hours. She lay next to me awake, not knowing how cold I was—she’d already forgotten what it felt like to be cold.
Maybe love is a matter of temperature. The wrong adjustment, and you’re uncomfortable, too aware of your surroundings. The right one, and you’re scissored on the bed, air like water.
I think of going home to San Francisco, but I’m low on credit. San Diego—that’s as far as I can afford, farther still from home, but I can’t go back to nowhere, and I’m not asking Lilac for help. It’s hard enough telling her I have to leave. Just when I’m about to say it, she fixes her eyes on me and I see her in there, or maybe I want to, and I stay another day, another. At night, when Lilac’s next door, I trace this room with my memory, naming each shade of bleak brown: tree trunk, dry dirt, hot dog. Each stain and watermark and pattern of mold becomes a friend, animated in the shadow lighting of the bedside lamp. I close my eyes, picture the redwoods. I can nearly feel their bark tickling my palms, and I tell myself again: Time to go.
GABE
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
Now that the guest room is empty, the doctor lets me sleep in there. Neither of us mentions the necklace I stole all those years ago, but I remember it—thin gold chain like thread, red stone circled in gold, my little glowing lion. When the late afternoon sun hit it, the stone burned so bright I had to hold it. For fun I check the dresser drawer where she used to keep it, but now that Cam and Lilac are gone, their stuff in garbage bags in the garage, the drawer is empt
y, mine to fill.
Sometimes I find a sock or an old dirty bra and I can tell by the smell whether it was Cam’s or, by the lack of smell, if it was Lilac’s. I wonder if they’ve made it to Los Angeles or if Jakob had other ideas. I thought Cam might screen us with an update, but weeks have passed and not a word.
Nat hasn’t given me a lesson since we arrived a month ago—it’s like he’s avoiding me—so I draw more and more and start in with Anne Frank again.
It’s the part where Anne and her sister, Margot, are writing letters back and forth about Peter and relationships and trust, and it’s kind of funny because there the two sisters are, trapped together in the cramped Annex, breathing in the same old air—why can’t they say what they feel?
Then Nat breezes into the house after being gone all day, without so much as an explanation, and I don’t pester him—I don’t say a word. I know how much he hates to idle, but it’s nice, sleeping in a bed, having a room to myself, small enough that I can see all the corners even in the dark, with a door that squeak-warns me if it’s opened.
One morning the doctor picks up my sketchbook from the kitchen table as I’m doing the dishes. “My goodness, Gabe.” She pages through my drawings. “You’ve gotten quite good, haven’t you?”
I show her sketches of Cam, Lilac, Nat, even the doctor herself.
She lets out a raspy laugh that shifts into a cough. “Do I look that old?”
“I was mad at you when I drew it.”
Tapping the drawing, she rattles in a breath. “So you’re not mad anymore?”
I stare down at my sketch, just lines really, somehow coming together to show the picture of her, but more so, I’m seeing now, the picture of myself.
* * *
It’s nearly noon and I haven’t seen Nat yet. Normally he’s at the table fixed to the screen and drinking his third cup of coffee by the time I zombie in, rubbing crust from my eyes. I can’t believe how well I sleep in a real bed.
The Companions Page 10
