* * *
—
Cassidy notices changes in the pattern of Patrick’s footprints, preserved exactly in the sand: thirty minutes in, the imprints stagger forth, wobbly and irregularly spaced. Now and then, she sees a new shape on the trail that could be the print of a hand pressed into the scalding surface. There are holes in the pale sand, the diameter of a snake’s torso or the narrow body of a vole. Sharp, rustling movements at the fringe of her sight are lizards fleeing the fall of footsteps. Far from any road, traveling the spaces between clumps of sage and creosote, she finds a baby’s pacifier in light-blue plastic and a trail of barefoot prints that end a hundred feet away. She looks around for a body, but there’s nothing in sight.
How do things that have lasted for years, a lifetime even, suddenly come to an end? Do they break before they appear to be broken, or do ends come as suddenly as disasters, only without the bang or crash or explosion? After the fight at the Chateau Marmont when June told her that she was quitting her to go become a crystal healer, it was over before either one of them had understood it had ended. But the fury that rose in her every time she read those messages over seemed like proof that the thread of love was still there, red hot and waiting to be pulled at the right moment, to bring June running back into her life. She would pull it if she ever knew for sure that she had hit bottom, if she needed someone to recognize her in whatever state she happened to be in. But there was no bottom to land on, no solid surface to affirm a sensation of doom, just an endless depth around and beneath her, colder and heavier the further down she got.
* * *
—
Thousands of miles away, a beetle navigates the high-pile carpeting in Cassidy Carter’s second guest bedroom. The beetle is crawling from the center of the room to the edges, searching for a solid surface. Its glossy carapace heaves slightly left and right as it traverses the sea of beige. If anything, it hopes to find a hole back into the outdoors: the house is a death trap, inedible and synthetic, saturated with the taste of plastic. On the upper floors, the identically decorated bedrooms are photo-ready, beds still tucked tight and topped with ornamental pillows. But below, the wildfire has gnawed through the backyard plantings, blackening the landscaped beds and reducing the rosebushes to branching ash. Flame had devoured the perimeter of the house, igniting dried plant litter and dead leaves in the gutters, melting the plastic siding, and carving a black path from the back deck to the vaulted foyer and bricked façade. There’s a charred hole in the back of the structure through which you can see all the furniture inside, like a dollhouse. An hour west under current traffic conditions, industrial piping opens a pathway from the sewer system directly into the ocean. Thousands of gallons pour through every minute, the roar of it muffled in the vastness of the sea. Where the sewer exits, the churn is visible, white with fury and force. But even as the force dissipates and the new liquid begins to join the flow of currents and jet streams, it refuses to mix or dissolve, it won’t give up its difference. It descends to the colder depths and collects on the seafloor, caressing the bodies of urchins and crabs in a heavy grip, swaying like the wind.
* * *
—
It leaves you with a strange feeling, watching your own body on video doused with bucket after bucket of ice as your real body blisters and tingles in the heat. June left in April, and in mid-May Cassidy said yes to the strange phone call offering her a week partying on a remote Greek island: free alcohol and airfare and thirty thousand dollars, all for letting a small crew of professional photographers take pictures of her just being herself, having fun, cutting loose in the glittering Aegean waves. June would have told her not to take the gig, would have pointed out that the fee was low compared with how much the pictures might be worth to a tabloid, particularly if something bad happened. But June wasn’t around to point this out. At the airport, Cassidy realized that she hadn’t packed a toothbrush—for six months, she had been without an assistant, and things like this had started to happen all the time. It was okay, though. She had used a million different things as a toothbrush over the years: a finger coated in toothpaste, a tightly rolled Kleenex, the chewed-up end of a twig, stuff like that. The bigger worry was whether it was a sign of anything, a bad omen about the trip. Ever since she had watched that Buddy Holly biopic starring Miles Teller, she felt halfway certain she might die in a plane crash. She was just about the right age, too, to join the Twenty-seven Club a year early.
From L.A. to Dublin to Athens to Corfu, on a plane so narrow it fit only two bodies per row; she was met by a bearded man who shuffled her onto a ferry, then onto a smaller boat that smelled of mackerel. The smaller boat stopped in the middle of the water to let an even smaller boat pull up alongside it: through gestures and sparse words, Cassidy understood she was supposed to take her luggage and climb over the side by herself. Not a single person had recognized her from the moment she left Athens; the language on the taxicabs and signage reminded her of hieroglyphs on the wall of some crumbling pyramid. Real Indiana Jones shit, she thought to herself. As the boats got smaller, they got quieter too, and the other passengers noticed her less and less. She felt something being peeled from her, the sensation like being skinned. She had spent the majority of her life under constant scrutiny, it made attention like water to her: the medium of life and of buoyancy, the solution to thirst, the unseen, unprompted support. Being outside of the world gaze was cold, like the moment you crawl out of the swimming pool and know the frigidity of air. The last leg of her voyage took place on what looked like a rowboat with a motor strapped to the back, sitting next to an old woman in black carrying a bag of oranges. For twenty-four hours, she didn’t speak her name or give a smile. Nobody even glanced at her face.
* * *
—
Brenda plays a little game while drinking her whiskey. She picks up the glass and, before allowing herself a sip, inserts a single gesture—swirling the tumbler once, for example, before lifting it to her lips. On the next sip, she performs that first gesture and adds a second one—tapping the side twice with a long, manicured nail. On the next, a 180-degree rotation. And so on. Curled at one end of the sinuous beige sofa, Brenda swirls her glass once, taps it twice, rotates it in her hand, tips it slightly forward three times with short, sharp movements, brings it to her nose and breathes in the paint-stripping scent, sets it down on the coaster and picks it up again, runs her finger along the entire rim of the glass, swirls it three times, holds it up to the light, swirls it one more time, and then, finally, lets a small mouthful slip past her lips. It burns a tiny fire in the space just above her lungs.
“I’m so bored,” she announces, putting her drink down and staring expectantly at Jay, who lies horizontal at the far end of the long sofa.
He sits up blearily. “Did I fall asleep?” He’s still wearing his dress shirt, buttoned all the way up to the bulb of his throat.
“It’s more like ‘did you fall awake.’ Jay, you’ve been such a downer this whole weekend. I wake up on my own, make coffee, drink it by myself. I order lunch, eat it alone, put the other half in the fridge as leftovers. I feel like a goddamn widow.”
“I’m right here,” Jay says, gesturing around him broadly. “I’m a little tired, is all.”
“I’m tired too. I’m tired of planning our life together and never actually beginning to live,” Brenda says with escalating drama. “I’m tired of the film, and I’m tired of pretending to be a film producer six to eight hours a day, when I couldn’t care less about cutting or keeping a line, getting the audio on mic or adding it in post. I just want to be a woman. I want to climb into a plane and fly to our place in New Zealand and start making it a home. I want to see a fucking wallaby.”
Jay smooths a stray patch of hair and leans forward, entering producer mode. His lips glisten in the tasteful interior lighting, invertebrate pink. The tips of his white teeth so bright they seem to glow in the half-light.
/> “Brenda, bunny, I hear what you’re saying, and I want to be there too, together in our future. But you and I both know that there’s no more fund-raising, no more movie money after we leave the country. All we’ll have is your share of your grandfather’s trust, sliced forty ways from Sunday. This is our last big fishing trip, so why would we cut it short? The Vikings, the Polynesian warrior-greats, Genghis Khan—they knew you take in as much as you can to last through the long winter.”
“There’s no point in trying to keep the movie thing going,” says Brenda. “Cassidy’s not coming back, and she and Patrick are probably going to tell everyone.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Just every single thing they said when they came over here.”
“What do you mean, when they came over? During the fund-raising event, you mean? I don’t think I said a word to either one.”
“The night before last, Jay. What, did you get conked on the head?”
“Thursday night? I guarantee you,” Jay says firmly, “that never happened.”
“Then what did we do instead?”
His enamel gleams; the smile doesn’t waver. After a moment, Jay shrugs. “Look, what is it they say? The lady is always right. Remember that phrase and you’ll live a happy life. I’m not here to argue with you, bunny, I’d rather keep my eyes on the prize: seventy-five acres of pristine farmland an hour outside Wellington, an off-grid bunker with a hot tub and indoor lap pool, fully equipped with solar panels and reverse-osmosis filtration system for the well water. A sous-vide machine for me that runs on sustainable geothermic power, and a room for you to do your paintings. One big California king, and no kids knocking on the door on Saturday morning.”
“And wallabies,” Brenda adds, breaking out in a dazzling smile.
“Wallabies,” Jay agrees. “As far as the eye can see.”
* * *
—
As far as Cassidy could see, the island was brown, dry, and studded with gnarled black trees: she had traveled thirty-six hours straight only to arrive back in California. Nikos, a dense-bodied man in a loose cotton shirt, collected her from the small dock in a scuffed-up truck with a Mercedes hood ornament. As they crawled up the narrow, dusty roads toward the top of the island, Cassidy saw a block of hulking white squatting on a rock outcrop above them: it looked like a clod of snow, a glacier fixed improbably to the side of the mountain. She rolled down the window to smell the sea breeze and Nikos immediately rolled it back up. “Women shouldn’t breathe hot air,” he explained.
The white block on the hillside was where she’d be filming and sleeping. Past a shiny steel gate, the driveway led to a bricked courtyard with a single shriveled tree crouched in the center. Four bikinis were laid out on the bed in her room, each in a sparkly, metallic pattern. When she came back down in a cute tunic she had brought, a small group of men sitting and smoking on the terrace called Nikos over to confer. Irritated, Nikos walked over to Cassidy and asked if the swimsuits didn’t fit her or what. She said, “I’d rather wear my own clothes,” and he nodded and said, “For today, okay, but tomorrow the costumes.” The pool was scattered with girls in skimpy tops and thong bottoms who weren’t drunk yet and didn’t seem to know one another. They stared forward, some on their phones, others silently looking at nothing specific. Necks festooned with leis of fake plastic flowers. Elsewhere, a button was pressed and techno gushed from the speakers. When she asked how many days the shoot would last, Nikos said five days, and then he said six.
The first couple days, Cassidy lay beneath anonymous hands rubbing her body with globs of sunscreen, turning and smiling for the camera whenever they said. She took shots of cloudy liquor and fell backward into the pool, shrieking with laughter; then they’d pull her out, blow-dry her hair crispy, and do it again and again. Slathered in glitter, she took shots from the flat bellies of bored girls, unprofessionals who didn’t know whether they should smile or act sexy; she poured the milky ooze over their oiled bodies straight from the plastic bottle, and waited for them to get hosed off, and did it again, with a big toothy grin on her face, until Nikos said they had gotten the shot. She got trashed in the vertical noontime sun and passed out under a blue-and-white-striped umbrella; then the men dumped ice on her to wake her up and make her party again. She looked like a nobody, she realized, as they played the footage back for her. But a few days in, Nikos came with instructions from the men: she was to hold the container of sunscreen up in front of her, smile big, and say with a loud and happy voice, “Party with Eidos!” Cassidy explained to him that product endorsements were a whole other thing, they needed thick contracts and big fees. Because being the face of one cosmetic product meant, for example, that she wouldn’t be approached by other brands. It was a future loss of income, so she needed to be compensated accordingly.
Now it became clear that the watchful silence of the foreign men was about power, not language. They came over a few at a time to ask Nikos what was wrong, then turned to Cassidy, saying with childlike firmness, “You want the money, you say the line. We don’t pay unless you do the job.” Then they shoved the product at her and she gave it back and they put it in her hand and she lifted it high above her head and threw it, then overturned a table littered with glasses and liquor bottles. An area by the pool was covered with thick shards of glass, and she could hear the women fleeing into the house, their murmuring unintelligible but for its tone of fear. Someone held her by the arms and tried to drag her indoors—she gave him an off-center head-butt that bloodied her brow. Then there were men grabbing at her, holding her arms and shoulders and waist, a hand on her face pushing it down and up again. Soon Cassidy was in her room, with the door locked from the outside. When she threatened to call her agent, the police, the secretary of state, they told her to go ahead and call, only her phone got no service. Around ten at night, the sky finally grew dark, and someone unlocked the door for long enough to shove a plate of chicken and potatoes across the threshold. She ate the cubes of chicken and brothy potatoes with her bare hands, wiping them on a towel and looking out the window at the flat blue line of the sea, which moved ceaselessly and imperceptibly in the distance.
Nikos woke her up in the morning, sheepish and muttering apologies, and handed over a tray of fried eggs, toast, and oil-drizzled tomatoes. It was not a big-budget product or well-funded project, he explained, and everyone thought the terms had been made clear enough in the invitation sent by email. The producers hoped that she would be willing to come out of the room and do the few product shots that were left, as a favor to all of them, at which point they would pay her fee and put her back on the boats with a complimentary case of product to bring home and share with her Hollywood friends. Cassidy Carter listened, nodding and gently smiling, and when he finished speaking, she calmly asked for her fee to be tripled. They could keep the case of their gross, flower-reeking cream—maybe give it to the background girls, who all had a sort of trafficked vibe. Nikos said no way, then he said he’d check with the bosses; she heard shouting in the halls and the sound of feet scuffling against tile. “It’s not possible,” he reported back. “Then I guess I’ll be here in this room until you put me on a plane back to California,” she replied. As the door locked again, she wondered why she had said that: Was she truly worried she would screw up a future deal? Was anyone going to offer her deals at all after Five Moons of Triton? Was she angry that she had made another mistake, as June had implied was bound to happen given her recklessness, the impulsive spending, the bad public behavior? Or did she believe she deserved a big mistake she couldn’t undo, something that would decide for her that her career was over? When she imagined herself with no acting, no endorsements, no paparazzi, all she saw was her own body, smaller than life, sitting alone in her big, generic house.
They didn’t deliver any more food that day, and nobody came to check on her. As she thought about their anger, Cassidy grew afraid: who knew wha
t they were capable of, what other people in the world were capable of. Someone rich enough and crazy could buy her and keep her as a human pet. In some parts of the world, she would never be recognized, no alarm would be sounded, nobody would even find out. In the night, when the sky turned a desolate blue, she threw as many clothes as she could into the duffel and tossed it out the window into the garden below. She dangled her legs out the window, testing the proximity to the knotty old olive tree growing close to the side of the building. One sharp inhalation and she let her body fall onto the broadest branch—once this was done, she knew she could find the placements she needed to get the rest of the way down, this tree was made for climbing. But first she stopped to gaze around her: a view over the wall and onto the vastness of the world around it, a view of the steep, twisting hills and miniature boats that made it all look like a found postcard, a postcard from someone she didn’t know at all, from someone long gone.
* * *
—
Alison stares into one of the three communal fridges, looking for lemons among half-finished jars of sunflower butter and obscure Tupperwares. When she finds some hard and shriveled citrus, she slices it to float in the pitchers of water she’s preparing, one for each end of the five long cafeteria tables. Setting the table is the Earthbridge task Alison volunteers for most often, because it resembles a family dinner at home—scaled up to a hundred, yes, but still familiar. Thick scoops of vegan butter for the bread baskets, a pile of laundered napkins in the bin by the door, all of it in known quantities waiting to be parceled out. For these shifts, they work two to a kitchen, and the other worker is usually someone quiet like herself; together, they focus intently and separately on each action, as though they are each alone in the room.
Something New Under the Sun Page 31
