Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  I will be Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly, said Gone-to-the-Spirits, trying to make the best of a bad situation.

  You sit, but you’re no grizzly, said the spy. Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly drew his knife but was driven off before any blood was spilled.

  He becomes an unlikely peace messenger, running among the tribes, translating. Berdaches are natural go-betweens, not too much any one thing. (Two-spirits, they’re sometimes called now.)

  In 1837, a band of Flathead is surrounded by Blackfeet. Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly brings a misleading message to the Blackfeet to stall them while the Flathead escape.

  When the Blackfoot warriors understand they have been deceived, they stab him in the gut.

  Another story: Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly’s wounds keep closing as though by magic until one warrior has the idea to make a deep gouge and reach in and cut off a piece of his beating heart. After that, when his heart is no longer whole, his wounds stop sealing themselves, and Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly dies.

  So he didn’t have powers, some people say when they hear. He died like anyone else would. So we can disregard all he said, because he didn’t know any more than we do.

  But, others say, I’ve heard his body lay in the forest for a long time without decaying, and no animals or birds touched it. That’s odd, isn’t it? Maybe it means something.

  Maybe, people say. It might. It could.

  Grace Kelly

  Four

  Not long before we broke up, Oliver and I had put on hats and sunglasses and gone out in the middle of the day to a superhero movie, the ninth one in a series. He’d seen all the others; I hadn’t seen any. I sat in the dark tugging on leathery Red Vines until there was dull pain in my incisors, watching a violent fever dream of huge, luminous faces, caroming bodies, buildings toppling and machines crashing and bursts of fire. Somewhere in a dark and gleaming room was a locked briefcase, and in that briefcase was a vial of mysterious white light, and whoever possessed the vial could either save or destroy the world.

  The fantasy, I said to Oliver afterward, is that you—you, Joe Moviegoer—might also possess extraordinary powers and not even know it, or you might at any moment be transformed into someone who does. But the fantasy is also about containment. Ungovernable forces come to roost inside heroic human bodies or are shrunk down and carted around in vials and briefcases. The end of everything is held inside a tiny ball of light.

  “Yeah, I guess,” Oliver said. “But mostly I like how the story keeps getting bigger. Like it’s not even just a universe anymore. It’s an extended universe. Like you don’t even know how much more there might be.”

  I said there was no such thing as an extended universe. A universe either was or wasn’t. Something couldn’t be more than infinity.

  “It’s just an expression,” Oliver said.

  * * *

  —

  I was hauled in for a shaming session with some studio executives and sentenced to lunch with Gwendolyn, the author of Archangel, and tasked with appeasing her. Then we’ll see, they said. They kept alluding ominously to decisions to be made going forward, and Siobhan did her best to defend my right to a personal life, but nobody was buying it. I sat there sullenly, not saying anything until, when prompted, I said, no, I didn’t know what I’d been thinking with Jones, and, no, I didn’t think Oliver and I would get back together, and, no, it hadn’t been my best idea to leave the club by the front door.

  * * *

  —

  In Hollywood, lunch is where dreams are made and broken; anything can happen at lunch; lunch is the alpha and omega. Behind every film is a mountain of spicy tuna, an ocean of San Pellegrino. No dessert for me, but do you have cold brew? With almond milk. Thanks.

  When I arrived, Gwendolyn had already been seated. Her fluffy little white dog was under her chair, surveilling everyone’s feet. Because she took her dog everywhere, Gwendolyn always chose restaurants with patios, and this particular patio was in a hotel’s jungly courtyard under angular maroon sunshade things that looked like the sails of a pirate ship. She watched me approach without smiling, her hands folded in her lap, her platform heels barely touching the floor. She’s five feet tall at most, and I felt like a courtier granted an audience with a malevolent child queen.

  The ripple of excitement that followed me across the patio must have bugged the hell out of Gwendolyn, even if everyone was only talking about what a slut I am and plotting how to surreptitiously take my picture. “Heyyy, Gwendolyn,” I said in a slow, cracking stoner voice. “Hey, poochie,” I said to the dog, its black button eyes burning with anxious outrage.

  Usually Gwendolyn would make a big show of standing up and wrapping her dinky arms around my shoulders and holding her hips a mile away while I stooped awkwardly over her, and usually she would say something like “There’s my gorgeous girl.” She was only in her late forties, so I don’t know why she always talked like she was my grandmother. This time, though, she just sat there and stared like she was trying to turn me to stone with her mind. Or maybe she couldn’t move her face. She’s starting to have work done. In twenty years she’ll be a skin balloon with eyeholes.

  “I know, right?” I said in response to her silence as I flopped into my chair. “Totally.” The waiter was all over me, draping my napkin across my lap, handing me the wine list, running through all the water options.

  Gwendolyn’s dog yapped, and she dragged the little peabrain into her lap, saying, “He thinks he’s big.” Literally every person with a small dog makes that exact same joke literally every day.

  “Must be hard being that dumb,” I said. I ordered a vodka soda.

  “Someone’s been busy,” Gwendolyn said when the waiter was gone.

  “Me?” I frowned and considered, like, what has been going on with me? “Not really. I’m basically under house arrest. Oliver always said I should put in an underground bowling alley, and now I wish I had.”

  “I hope you don’t expect me to feel sorry for you.”

  Here’s a key fact about Gwendolyn: Gwendolyn wrote the Archangel books because she dreamed up Gabriel as a dorky sex fantasy and fell in love with him. She was working the night shift at some resort where people have conferences about medical devices and accounting software, and she was spending most of her time sitting behind the desk reading fat paperbacks about dragons and sexy wizards, and she came up with this magical pseudo-Russian dystopian world and told herself stories about forbidden teen love. Then one day she was like, fuck it, and started writing it all down. A good decision, financially.

  Here’s another key fact: Gwendolyn got confused like all the other crazy bitches and mistook Oliver-the-actor for Gabriel-the-character and fell in love with him. She’d light up like a Roman candle every time he was around, all fizzing and erratic and scary, and flirt relentlessly in a creepy, motherly way. I think she thought because Oliver once married an older woman she had a chance, but Oliver’s ex-wife was cool to a galactic degree, like David Bowie or Charlotte Gainsbourg, and therefore ungoverned by age. Plus, Oliver was a teenager when he met his ex, romantic and susceptible, and now he’s a movie star who hangs out with other movie stars and cheats on movie stars with models and singers and probably random normals, too.

  “I’m going to be honest,” Gwendolyn said. “I’m deeply concerned about the way you’re representing Archangel.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Spare me, Hadley.” It came out in a deep, ragged voice I’d never heard before, like she’d started to transform into a monster.

  “I just—” Suddenly I was too tired to keep messing with Gwendolyn. “I was eighteen when I signed on for this,” I told her. “I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

  “Right, how could you ever have anticipated becoming very rich and famous when you auditioned for a series of movies based on wildly b
estselling books? What possible precedents could there have been?”

  “I know, but this isn’t even like normal famous. It’s a fame tsunami.”

  “I don’t think you should make light of tsunamis,” she said.

  The waiter materialized with my vodka soda, all chipper and professional like he didn’t notice how tense we were, like he hadn’t waited for the most awkward possible moment to pop in. “Are we ready to order?”

  “Cheeseburger, no bun,” I said.

  “Fries or salad?”

  “If I were going to eat fries, I would eat the bun, dude.”

  He pursed his lips and scribbled on his pad.

  “The ahi salad with no wontons and dressing on the side,” Gwendolyn said, thrusting her menu at him. When he was gone, she said, “You think I don’t know fame’s complicated? I have a full-time security guard at my house. People keep coming out of the woodwork, asking me for money. I’m under a lot of pressure to write.”

  “It’s not the same as for me and Oliver. People don’t buy magazines because you’re on the cover. Nobody takes your picture when you put gas in your car. No one cares enough what you look like naked to hack your phone. Anyway, you’re not under that much pressure to write. Just stop. Wrap it up.”

  “My readers want more. I do it for them.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “You’d be nothing without me.” Her dog, whose head she was stroking so hard the whites of its eyes showed, started whining. “A face on a lunch box nobody buys at a garage sale. A dead girl on CSI. A loser trading blow jobs for new headshots. I created an entire universe. I made up a story that’s worth billions of dollars. What have you ever done? What have you ever made?”

  Before then, I hadn’t decided what I was going to do, if I was going to smooth things over or blow things up, but now I had clarity. I leaned forward. “Whenever someone reads your books or even mentions your books, you know who they picture? Me.”

  I didn’t know someone so small could emanate so much anger. It was palpable. Heat and vibration. She was like a space capsule reentering the atmosphere.

  “Okay,” the waiter said, swanning up, “an ahi salad and the cheeseburger. No wontons no dressing no bun no fries.” He set down the plates. “Is there anything else I can bring you before you enjoy your lunches?”

  “No, thank you.” I gave him my most gracious Star-Being-Gracious smile. When he was gone, I stood up. “This has been a pleasant and professional interaction,” I said to Gwendolyn, “but I’m afraid I really must be going.” She looked up at me, at a loss for how to best communicate her hatred. I dug in my pocket and slapped a flash drive down on the table. “A memento,” I said.

  Five

  It looks about like what you’d think. We made it on Oliver’s phone, so there’s lots of blurry jostling and shots of nostrils and armpits and double chins, and at one point the phone falls off the bed. Not the best production values in our extended universe. Oliver kept calling time outs during which I would sit there twiddling my thumbs while he got another close-up of his dick all by itself, like he was Hitchcock and his dick was Grace Kelly. I wanted to delete the video as soon as we’d finished, but Oliver wouldn’t let me. “I’m sentimental,” he said. So we both kept copies on USB drives that we locked up, nothing hackable.

  “Mutually assured destruction,” I said, though of course it wasn’t.

  The night before my lunch with Gwendolyn, I’d watched the video before I made the copy. I may have been a little drunk, and afterward I called Oliver, but he didn’t answer. I thought I should go somewhere, but I couldn’t think of anywhere. I thought I should fuck someone, but the only person I wanted to fuck was Alexei, and that wasn’t happening. “This isn’t who I am,” he’d said when he broke off our stubby little affair. “I don’t do this.”

  “Well,” I said, “I can’t help but notice that you do.”

  I knew Alexei was a ruthlessly good agent, a shark that only eats money, but he was also a family man. He chose her, his wife, and them, his son and two daughters. I say that like it was some big surprise. We’d only hooked up twice. Once on location in New Zealand and once back in L.A. What did I expect? That he would give up his whole life for me? Sign on for a big scandal? Hitch himself to some girl who hadn’t finished college? Did I even want him to?

  “You don’t understand,” Alexei said. “I don’t have the benefit of the doubt. Ever. If this got out—you can’t imagine the shitstorm for me. It would be way worse than if I were white.”

  “You’re worried what other people think?” I said.

  He looked at me like I’d started speaking in tongues. “Yeah,” he said.

  When our thing started, I was filming the second Archangel in New Zealand, which was standing in for Archangel’s less icebound colony, Murjansk. Alexei had come to check on Oliver, but Oliver told him to go enjoy himself instead of hanging around set. Oliver told me I should go, too, since I had the day off. Make the most of it, he said. Alexei suggested we visit a system of caves where you put on a wetsuit and float through on an inner tube, and it’s totally dark except for glowworms. They live on the cave ceilings and walls, and their tails shine like stars and attract flies and mosquitoes as they hatch. The poor bugs think they’re flying into the night sky when really they’re just flapping up to get eaten.

  In the dark, my tube bumped against Alexei’s, and I grabbed his cold neoprene arm like one boat tying up to another. The only sounds were dripping and lapping, the glassy rustle of water, us breathing, all of it quietly echoing. The black water reflected a thousand points of wormlight. We rotated slowly. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I felt as though I were staring into the heart of the universe. My eyes hurt and my skin was tight across my face from looking so hard.

  “Didn’t you feel,” Alexei said later, in the car when we were about to drive back to the hotel, “like being in that cave and being out in space could have been the same thing? Like the difference didn’t really matter?”

  I turned to him, excited, worried my excitement would make me seem childlike. But his face reflected back my own enthusiasm, my own self-consciousness about being so thrilled by a tourist trap. (Our wetsuits and tubes and the polo shirts of the employees were all emblazoned with “Worm Cave Adventure!”) Our wormlight filled the car. “Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly how I felt. It was the sky, even though it wasn’t.”

  I told him how when I was little, I’d thought the stars were perforations in the sky, little pinpricks into some other, surrounding universe that was only light.

  He told me that his dad liked to say the stars were lanterns hung out by the past so the lost could find their way. “He thought he was so deep,” Alexei said.

  That night we were late to dinner with Oliver because we’d been in bed. But we weren’t having sex when we lost track of time. I mean, we’d had sex, but we were lying there talking, making those first big careless, gleeful excavations when everything about someone is new and unknown, before you have to get out your little picks and brushes, work tediously around the fragile, buried stuff. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to tell everything. We didn’t even notice the daylight fading in the room because the glow between us was so bright.

  “You guys seem to get along,” Oliver said later, in a different bed in the same hotel, stroking my stomach, trying to get me interested in sex, which worked because I was still all keyed up.

  “He’s a nice guy,” I said. “We had a good day.”

  When I got back to L.A., Alexei asked if he could come to my house, bring me lunch, and I shaved and fussed and obsessed over what to wear (cutoffs, old button-down) and changed my sheets and gave Augustina the afternoon off, and while we sat by the pool eating the grain bowls he’d brought from a pretentious salad place, he told me we had to stop. This isn’t who I am, he said. I don’t do this. I have a family
.

  I asked why he’d done it in the first place.

  “I’m weak,” he said.

  I looked at the avocado and amaranth in my bowl, at the papery bougainvillea blossoms sailing along the surface of my pool like little magenta boats. In retrospect, I think Alexei found weakness easier to admit to than the wormlight. Maybe he was already thinking about what version of the story his wife would find simplest to forgive if she ever found out: A momentary lapse in judgment or a powerful infatuation? Maybe he was thinking about which version he’d rather live with. Or maybe he was telling the plain truth, and meanwhile I’d been laboring eagerly up toward a bunch of fake stars.

  I made a helpless gesture. “If that’s how you feel.”

  “It’s not how I feel. It’s how it is.”

  In the moment, I had to do anything I could to change the way I was feeling, so I went to stand in front of Alexei, between his legs. “Hadley,” he said in a resigned voice, but he held the backs of my thighs and rested his forehead on my stomach. He’d taken off his suit jacket, and his dreadlocks were bound in a neat bundle down his back, against his crisp white shirt. “I think it’s the illicitness, to be honest,” he murmured, almost to himself. “You’re coated in it like sugar. Without that—”

  I said, “I’d be dull and disgusting instead of sparkly and delicious.” I stared off at the far corner of my yard, where my landscaper, an expert in drought-resistant plants, had planted rows of spiked and serrated yucca and agave and palms, ranks of them, like marching soldiers waving their weapons.