Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  Slowly, then, they readjust, studiously ignoring him, wiping him from awareness. Rendering him invisible: can’t see you, can’t hear you, safer for my fragile mind not to know you even exist.

  The vintage shop is at the end of the block — inside, a dim museum of mothballed memories and the years, decades, that some people cling to like desperate leeches. Kerry went through a phase last year, wearing the 1930s and ‘40s on her tall, slim frame. The clothing was authentic, hadn’t been cheap, won’t be cheap tomorrow hanging on the racks again.

  It’s his first time in here and will be the last. The woman who owns the place … her hair is a shelf-life shade of blonde, cascading with Godiva waves, and she has a toned body but a little wizened face like a monkey’s, filigreed from chin to hairline with cracks and creases, same as the otherwise taut arms emerging from her sleeveless top.

  He doesn’t want to watch those parchment hands as they stroke and paw and reclaim Kerry’s noirish year, so he turns away to find whatever diversions he can on the walls, but there’s no escape — a few framed pictures leaping out at him, the same woman long before her trampling by crows, production stills autographed to her by the people she’s sharing them with, most of them dead but he’s forgotten they’d ever been alive. He can feel her about to look his way so he diverts again, anything better than hearing her story of how thirty years ago she was in two or three pilots for television shows no one but trivia hounds knows about.

  Garrett used to be on TV too, just doesn’t feel the need to broadcast old news.

  “Now this is lovely,” she says, and he has to face her.

  From the bottom of the cardboard box she’s pulled a cameo box handed down from Kerry’s grandmother, a tarnished brass oval with carved ivory set into the lid. The sort of keepsake that’s among the last things anyone ever sells, because it’s one of the first anyone ever owns.

  The woman opens the lid to expose the velvety maroon cavity, faded by decades and worn smooth by a hundred thousand moments of jewelry going in, out, chased by groping fingers.

  “If they could only talk. Everything they absorb, year after year.” She sniffs the inside, delicately, as though it were a wine cork. “Yours?”

  “No.”

  Exactly what she wanted to hear. “A woman’s, then? Younger than you? It was a family heirloom?”

  He wouldn’t correct her even if she were wrong.

  “A pretty young woman. Beautiful…?”

  Garrett telling her sure, you’ve got her number. Thinking at least she was beautiful when we came out here and I still think so but what do I know, I don’t make enough to know anything anymore.

  Money changes hands, and like anyone he tends to think that’s it, this is both the surface and substance of the transaction. But he’s wrong, and every time he is, it reminds him how little anyone out here really knows about where they live and what goes on under its filthy polished gleam aside from drive-by shootings and the grinding of tectonic plates.

  His sunglasses, he realizes out on the sidewalk — he’s left them inside, on the counter.

  And when he ducks back in, he finds the woman sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. Clutching the cameo box in both hands, pushing it to her wadded up, thrown away, unfolded face. She makes eager grunts as she pushes her wet tongue as far into the box as she can. It squirms and glistens; it explores every crevice, every ridge of brass and tiny fold of velvet.

  After he watches her long enough to get the idea, her eyes pop open, glaring at him over the lid of the box, then she snarls and turns her back on him, as though he might try to grab it back, and resumes her efforts with a wheeze and a moan, feeding on the leftovers.

  Not that there would be much left by now, but she’s welcome to whatever she can find. No reason she should be any different from the rest of them, any day of the year.

  “Garrett? Are you still there?”

  “Still here,” he told her. Only this morning? Only just.

  “I know how this is going to sound, but could you bring some syringes when you bring the money? Lots and lots of syringes, as many as you can.”

  And Kerry was right, it was a strange request, syringes nothing that either of them had ever had need of before, or even any particular interest in. But then wasn’t that just the heart and soul of L.A. — always a new means of expanding your horizons.

  Soon after they had begun the relationship that destroyed his career — so this was years ago — Kerry told him that she’d grown up knowing she would go to California one day and there would never again be any other home for her but what simmered and sighed beneath a west coast sky. She may have been Boston-born and Boston-bred, but migration seethed in her blood, a timebomb of wanderlust sure to detonate as soon as she ripened into adolescence with its disdain of home and anything else too deadeningly familiar.

  Garrett understood. At once. Nearly a generation before, he had been young too, suffused with the same itches and burning his face in the sun to summer soundtracks of Beach Boys songs that extended cocoa butter promises of immortality and compliant pussy. Garrett thirty-five years old and ostensibly knowing better by then, how to recognize vacant bullshit myths, just no longer caring when Kerry brought it all back fresh again in wistful saltbreeze exultation, and if she was remarkably adult for seventeen, he supposed that even she needed the sham of some far fantasia glittering beside a different ocean.

  With Kerry, though, it really was a matter of legacy, a small historical bud far down her family tree. She was descended from the metalsmith, some multiple-great-grandfather, who’d cast the solid gold spike that had been the last one sledgehammered into place on May 10, 1869, in Promontory Point, Utah, to complete the first transcontinental railroad linking east coast with west. How, then, could she do any less than submit to this manifest destiny? How could he, in the end, do any less than follow?

  She’d always told him that she never saw him as simply one more older man in the neighborhood, nearer her father’s age than her own, who leered at her across the lawn during the summers. No. He couldn’t help but be different because he was, after all, on TV every night. Garrett Keneally At Eleven, at his anchor desk to deliver news of Boston and the tantalizing hinterlands. More than just another neighborhood face. Besides, Garrett, with blue eyes and chiseljaw dynamics, looked like he still had youth on his side, with none of its spotty crudeness.

  Linking hands, they plunged into it, and dear god, the revitalization, the sweet musky moss of her, her newness and her fearlessness and all the futures that lay before her smooth arched feet — he wanted them back. He wanted it all to do all over again.

  Soon enough. Soon enough. This was exactly the choice forced upon him after they were discovered, the sort of indiscretion that can kill a marriage and topple a career balanced on credibility. He had no choice but to give in, even when he knew that not one of those who ran the network affiliate would’ve passed up the same chance had it been set before their sagging jowls.

  Southern California it was. Where else would their age gap raise so few eyebrows? Where else would they blend so well? Where else would anyone care so little — even Roman Polanski could still make money here. Where else might it even be an asset, Garrett now one of those who not only appreciated the aesthetic, but he had reconfigured his entire life just to surrender again to the need and allure and the delicate salty sweetness of unblemished skin only now grown to contain the complete young woman inside.

  For the first few months, as she took to the west coast and peeled away the last of the east, it was like watching the birth of a painting from the potential of its sketch, as brush strokes and luscious oils and the play of just-so light wove their spell. She was meant to be here. He was only the catalyst by which it had happened. The sun gilded her skin and plaited streaks of new color through her auburn hair. By night, he could see only the Cheshire crescent of her teeth as she smiled over his groin.

  Some days they would fuck at an open window, Garrett turning hi
s back on the cerulean walls as Kerry balanced her rump on the sill, locking both legs around his hips, the yellow-orange chiffon curtains ignited by the blazing sun, and drenched in this molten light they would cling to each other so furiously that there were moments he would have an impulse to shove with both legs and launch them twelve floors to the street below — let gravity preserve the moment, the fantasy of his being here with her, every second chance at life he ever wanted and he knew he’d never get a third, so why not go out at the peak.

  His medications overlooked one day, Garrett otherwise sane and happy to be alive, the seizure enveloped him in its dependable warnings and dumped him onto his knees, Kerry disengaging from his wilting cock as he braced against the windowsill like a praying child.

  Outside their apartment, the streets and other buildings and the billboards and every single improvement that his species had brought with it had been taken away. For as far as the diseased mind’s eye could see, nothing but sprawling grasslands, a ten-thousand-year-old savannah the sight of which shook him so hard it seemed to rattle bones. Right under their noses and shoe soles, the ghost of something even Africa could no longer dream of being. Beyond a grove of cypress bobbed the great gray humped backs of a herd of mammoths. He watched them only long enough to want them to never leave when they began to shimmer like a desert horizon, and a Jeep Cherokee started to materialize through the transparent barrel ribs of a huge bull. It misted away altogether then, along with the rest of its herd, and he stared after it in awe and in grief, feeling a stirring of hatred for that artery of traffic, driving over their bones.

  Kerry found a tissue to wipe the wet slick from his chin.

  It had never happened this way before, the slipstream of time flowing the opposite direction. But just because you’re epileptic doesn’t mean you can’t see the past.

  “Is Skip still alive?” Garrett asked, daring to, finally. Only this morning? Only barely.

  “Is there any reason you think he shouldn’t be?”

  “I found the test results. In the desk drawer. The day after you left.” Garrett listened to her listening to him breathe, both of them knowing that he needn’t be in a hurry for any diagnosis of his own. They’d always had a way of sharing the worst. “We’re not going home again, are we? Either one of us.”

  “Oh, Garrett,” she whispered. “We haven’t really been home for twelve years.”

  An epileptic with a mission, Garrett spends the afternoon in a way he’s never thought would be necessary. Taking their lives apart layer by layer, then seeing who bites, who’s hungry for the peelings. Furniture, appliances, clothing, music, electronics — you name it, it’s on somebody’s menu.

  Possessions are for the living.

  Until finding Kerry’s test results the other day, he felt as healthy as ever. Since then, a morbid resignation has settled over him and he thinks he can sense the invader in his body. Knowledge is power? Not so fast — just as often knowledge is hopelessness, too, especially in the presence of viral awareness. Then again, maybe it’s only the power of suggestion causing that pain in the vicinity of his liver. Fat diseased organ, its shape like a deflating football, one of these days it’ll be turning his skin yellow.

  Ever since that seizure at the window, when the last day of the last Ice Age showed him its ghost, part of him feels as though it has never truly released him. Pulling him back every couple of months to the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, where he can wander amid the robust skeletons of dire wolves and bears, sabertooths and sloths. Each visit he stands made small and diminutive by the remains of an Imperial Mammoth, twelve feet tall at the shoulder and how those future freeways must have rumbled beneath its feet. Its brownish tusks are vastly long and curved, tips crisscrossing into a cradle wide enough to lie in.

  You weren’t born here. You came here from somewhere else, he often thinks. You came here across a land bridge from another time and world. You came here because there was no place left to go. You came here and on your worst day you were still one of the most magnificent things that ever walked, and you should’ve lived forever. You came here … and then you died.

  It’s opened up so much, that empathy. It has led to so much understanding. Even if it’s taken epilepsy to get here, maybe the price still hasn’t been too steep. He knows what no one else would even dare to guess, knows the secret of this cracked and fissured earth that was never meant for cities: It is saturated with the bestial rage of extinction. It is fractured by the dying roar from animal throats. It is steeped in blood of giants that drained and rotted in the soil, or was cooked away in hot tar.

  And every day, ten million conquerors went about eating and drinking and breathing a little more of the dregs inside themselves.

  And on this last day of his and Kerry’s former lives, Garrett stripping them down to their cheapest resale essence and leaving the dross along Ventura and Van Nuys and nowhere else that matters anymore, he can finally tell this city the kind of truth he never could on TV.

  News flash: You’re welcome to it here. All of it. All of you. You slick wet-haired hustlers waiting at the bus station and you executive producers and every one of you in between, you’re no different from each other — a cannibal’s a cannibal, no matter what grade of meat he prefers. You live in the place where dreams come to die, but if they’ll make money you’ll plug them into life support first. I’m ashamed of myself for ever wanting to belong, but now, finally, I do. I do. Because now you’re in my blood.

  He knows there’s a reason he’s saved the gun for last. Better be, when now it’s one of the most valuable things he owns, could bring in a couple hundred dollars. He bought it ten years ago, one week too late to spare Kerry the assault in the center courtyard of their second apartment, and it’s never been fired since.

  Syringes, she wants — except it’s not like either of them have a prescription for insulin or run with the junkies.

  But if there’s anything L.A. has, it’s plenty of pharmacies, and a healthy respect for a pistol in the face, held by a man who knows what he wants.

  She started to cry then. Only this morning? Only. Only.

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, “I’m so sorry. It’s why I had to go driving up and down the coast for a few days, I just couldn’t face you yet,” until he shushed her and told her it didn’t matter any more, if indeed it ever did.

  “I’ll see you at Skip’s house,” he said. “Promise me you won’t do anything until I get there.”

  After his business at the pharmacy is finished, the sun is sinking toward the west in a streaked haze like blood and fire, and the peppery winds sweep the city with the roasting breath of perdition. When Garrett drops down to the Hollywood Hills, the car turns sluggish as the road climbs and winds past prime real estate as cramped as any street in Calcutta. Driving from memory and making a few wrong turns — if you live here, confusion is your best defense against anyone you don’t want to see, the paradox being sometimes even the cops get lost when you really want them.

  Skip Ackerman’s house — he rents — sits abutting the street, and Garrett has barely enough room to park out of the way, along the garage door. One house across and down, a lawn crew is stowing their gear in the bed of a dirty white pickup truck with crumpled fenders. Three dark-skinned men, laughing, pouring water over their heads. Mexican, he assumes — anybody would — but realizes his mistake when he gets a better look. They’re Indian.

  He wonders if they have the remotest idea what they are. Shot and shoved across the country a few hundred miles at a time, well, sure, but that’s yesterday’s agenda. Deeper than that, then — the next wave after the mammoths. They’re in good company, at least.

  Kerry lets him through the door after he rings the bell a couple of times, then triple-locks it after him. When he closes his eyes as they hold each other he can still feel the slim and hopeful creature she was a dozen years ago, the one for whom he gave up everything and has never gotten it back.

  Yet he still has he
r. Against all odds, he still has her.

  Days ago, when she disappeared, he had time to think maybe this was it, the accident of love that would rip them in half. He’d spent years dreading her awakening — that he would be an old man long before she was an old woman. Now, with any luck, they can die together. It would be hell on her, though, knowing she’s the one who brought it home.

  But Kerry is the last one he would ever blame. The way he sees it now, this has been a long time coming.

  When he pulls away from her arms and brushes the uncombed hair back from her face, out of self-conscious habit she tries to turn her head the way she always does, but this time he won’t let her. Wants to see her face, all of it, realizing now that he even missed the scars — two fine red ridges that curve away from either corner of her mouth, all the way to her ears, giving her what some would think looks like a huge Sardonicus smile.

  Coming up on her ten-year anniversary of receiving them that night in the apartment courtyard, the assault never solved. Two men and one knife — no rape involved, only disfigurement, so maybe they knew her but probably not. Mistaken identity seemed likely, Kerry on the pool deck after the knife blade had split open her cheeks like apples, the two guys high-fiving each other while they walked away, in no hurry, as if this were just another job with her blood spreading like red fog across the lit blue pool.

  “You got them, then,” she says, nudging the sack that he set on the floor so they could hug. “Did you have any trouble?”

  “Not much, no.”

  She pulls a sealed box of syringes from the top of the sack, then looks in at the others.

  “My god,” she says, “you really came through. There must be, what, over a thousand of them in here?”

  “At least that.”