by Daniel Pyne
“I’m Finn. Finn Miller.”
The engagement ring was out of the box, and she was spinning it on the bar like a top. Slightly older than he was, early thirties, he guessed, she wore more makeup and mascara than she needed, and it had smeared down into Marilyn Manson moons, like a center fielder’s eye-black.
“I never cry,” she said.
“I don’t know why. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
She slapped her hand down on the ring, stopping it dead. Even tear-slung, her eyes had a fierceness he didn’t expect. “I hate that I cry. It’s humiliating.”
He offered her a cocktail napkin. She didn’t take it, waiting instead for a practiced pickup line from him she clearly expected must be coming, only he didn’t have one.
“Yeah, that’s what it is,” Finn said. “Feelings. Who needs them?” He slid onto the stool next to her and pretended not to notice the ring between them. “For instance. There’s this lady scientist,” he said. “Who did, like, a study. Of this very thing.”
“Honestly, Finn Miller, who gives a shit?”
“With apes.” Undaunted: he’d crossed some crazy line, with no intention of going back. “Bonobo apes.”
Her eyes—hazel, green, who cared?—had a spark of life. “The singer, Bono?”
“—No. What? No. Not him,” and he said a little louder than he meant to, “Bonobos. Apes.”
“Why,” she said with rising irritation, “is it that when I don’t understand something, the guy thinks the solution is to SPEAK UP?”
She talked in capitals, which made him want to smile, but Finn stayed chill, didn’t flinch, didn’t miss a beat. Something about her had chased his nerves away. “I don’t know,” he said. “But they hooked all these men and women up to electrodes.”
“No, they didn’t.”
“No, they did, I swear. I read about it on the Internet, so it’s got to be true, right? She, the scientist in charge, found this footage, of bonobos, the noted species of ape, as I mentioned . . . footage of them as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were, frankly, dull—bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex, though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds so, like . . . she dubbed in some mash-ups of animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching.”
She said drily: “And that made it better.”
“These are scientists,” Finn said, deadpan, “but yeah: Chimp screeching can be totally hot when it’s the right, you know, kind of screeching. So then she shows the short movie she’s made of monkey sex to men and to women, straight and gay. To these same subjects she also shows clips of human heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man solo masturbating, a woman, same, a buff dude walking naked on a beach, and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.”
The redhead had turned toward him, slightly, and she’d stopped crying and a smile traced its way up from the depths. “So he’s on a beach. But she’s nude, so it doesn’t matter where she is.”
“If you keep interrupting I’ll never finish,” Finn told her. “The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in this small lab at the Center for Something-Something and Mental Health, I forget, but it’s a real place, this prestigious teaching hospital–type deal in, I don’t know—”
“Canada, probably.”
“Probably. And the genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs.”
“Ouch. Well, I didn’t see that coming.”
“I know, right?”
“Before you said it was electrodes. Not to criticize. Which are for, what, crazy people? As if I wouldn’t know that.”
“What?”
“Go on. I’m enthralled.”
“Hey, I didn’t realize at first that you could handle the technical stuff. But now”—he smiled faintly—“it’s obvious you can. The point is, it’s not what you think. Like, the guys, they weren’t into the chimp-on-chimp action at all. You could line up lesbian apes for, like, ever and guys were simply not responding.”
“Somebody thought they would be?”
“Well . . . I did.”
Then she laughed, in spite of herself. “Let me guess: guys liked the girl exercising, and, hmm, regular lesbians getting it on.”
Finn frowned. “Hmm. Okay, you got the easy one. But what about the women?”
The din of the bar asserted itself as the redhead looked blankly at Finn with what were definitely green eyes, an amber-flecked green that, even though Finn knew it was probably just his projection, had grown clearer, and they took a moment to appraise him, as if they were seeing him for the first time, and she evidently decided to let Finn finish, because she asked simply, “What about them?”
“The women surprised them,” Finn said. “Astonished science, as it were. The women responded to everything. Every form of contact. Didn’t matter who was touching who, guy, girl, primate, the women were aroused when they saw it. They were moved.”
The redhead waited warily for the punch line. Somehow knew he wasn’t finished.
“Which explains why women cry for what we mistakenly think is no reason. Everything affects them,” Finn said.
“Them being women.”
“It’s science, we objectify. So, see, it’s not that there is no reason to cry. But that there are too many reasons to even count.”
She stared at him, the smile still in play. “Not bad. Amazing, really, that you were able to bring that back around to where we started. Except . . . you forgot to ask me my name, Finn.”
Finn got self-conscious, then looked away, into his glass. “Yeah, well, I never do shit like this.”
“Shit like what?”
“This. Go for broke. Never. See a pretty woman across a room and stop thinking and just . . . walk over and say whatever.” Then, hearing himself, self-conscious, “Not that the things I said were fake, or like a pickup line or anything. They were genuine.” Finn faltered. “Although I guess I could be just saying that, too. From your perspective. I can see that.” Now it was a disaster. “Anyway.” Time to get up, mission accomplished, not press his luck. But he had to ask, “What is your name?”
“Usually you think more, is what you’re saying.” She ignored the question.
“Something like that. I guess.”
“Is that why your friend is staring at us?”
Joaquin, on the other side of the barroom, still alone at the table where Finn had abandoned him, was taking a deliberate pull at a clearly empty beer bottle and making a meal out of pointedly not looking their way all of a sudden.
“Yeah. My buddy probably thinks you’re going to send me packing any second. He doesn’t want to miss it.”
Finn had no idea what Joaquin was thinking, and the redhead was no longer smiling. She nodded, looked to be considering a lot of things, most of them having nothing to do with Finn. She tugged at the straps of her dress, uncrossed her long, pale legs. She lifted her hand like a sidewalk shark running a shell game, and they both stared at the ring, on the bar between them, its diamond throwing sparks of light as she absently turned it with her fingernail. He looked up, and found she was watching him, not the ring. She put it in her pocketbook. Drained her gin and tonic. Kept looking at him, with green eyes dusted amber, the best eyes he thought he may ever have seen, and Finn looked back at her, raw, exposed, expecting nothing.
She said: “And what’ll he do if I don’t?”
—
HIS LOFT WAS in a small concrete factory building just off Atlantic Avenue; Finn triggered only five of the elaborate octet of deadbolt locks on the steel entry door as his redhead bar pickup giggled, wobbly on the heels that made her taller than he was, the slinky dress all scrunched crooked, she seemed pretty drunk—maybe she had to be—but amazingly lucid.
“I change the order of which ones are locked and which are open,” he explai
ned, about the deadbolts. “That way a burglar can’t know if he’s opening or closing one.”
“What are you protecting, Finn?” She’d washed her face in the bar restroom, and hadn’t bothered to reapply the war paint, so she looked younger, like a weight had come off her. Finn liked her better this way. He wondered if the artifice was for Lennox.
The door swung open.
“Cameras, lenses. Laptop and scanner, hard drives—any and all assets easily pawned by your financially challenged local meth-head.” Finn flipped on lights, one by one, revealing bare floors, smog-grimed windows, and not much furniture, most of it yard sale and sidewalk salvaged. A ratty, barely functional open kitchen with a fussy convection cooktop and a refrigerator that had a slow leak. “I got broken into twice, before the locks went on.”
“Bonobo apes,” the redhead sang tunelessly, gliding past him. “And screeching. And Canada.”
“That’s right.”
“Canadians are the most polite people in the known universe.”
“I know. It just makes you want to slap them.”
The dominant workspace was cluttered with tripods, light stands, a huge drawing table and chair, backdrop paper spooling down from a ten-foot roll along the back wall, and featured, hanging from clotheslines that crisscrossed the loft like a lazy spider’s web (“What’s all this?” she wondered aloud), old-school black-and-white photographs, and lurid digital color laser prints of the soldier girl murder scene that Finn had documented earlier that night. Character studies, rich in saturation and exquisitely composed: the soldier and her family, the cops, the dead man. Neither collection was anything like the photographs Finn turned in to the crime lab on contract.
“Art of the human condition,” Finn quipped, self-conscious, and then realized how pretentious that sounded.
The redhead stared at them, running her hand absently through her hair. She looked moved. Transfixed. Momentarily at a loss for words. He still didn’t know her name.
“I shoot crime scenes,” Finn said. “For the police. That’s what I do for a living.”
She allowed softly he was underselling his work. And stepped close to a hard-shadow black-and-white of Willa Ko, knees pulled up to her chest, head down, back against the condo wall.
“Did she kill him?”
“I just take the pictures.”
She kicked off her pumps and weaved in and out, ducking under the crisscrossing lines, graceful, maybe only pretending to be tipsy, Finn thought. Trailing her fingers, she caused the whole clothesline to shiver and sway. She frowned. “These don’t look like they would be very useful for the police.”
“Yeah, well. No, there’s no real forensic point to them, in an evidentiary sense—but they aren’t the official crime scene photos, I turned those in. These, I sort of take these at the same time . . . and in addition to . . .”
“Are you allowed to do that?”
“Um. Not—no,” Finn admitted. “But I don’t normally show them to just anybody. So.”
“Just anyone.” She smiled slightly and nodded faintly and kept moving through the suspended mosaic of Charlie Ko’s murder, stopping here and there to study something, the shadows and light of the loft dappling her legs, dancing over the pivot of her hips, bending across the sturdy roll of shoulder.
A dream, Finn thought; surely he would wake up now.
Now.
Or now.
“Darkroom?”
“You’re leaning against it,” he said, indicating the corner large-format printer she’d put a hand on, for balance.
“I can’t do anything with them, really, ethically,” he said, back to the pictures, “on account of privacy laws, so they’re just . . .”
“. . . Beautiful,” the redhead said. “Even when what’s in them—”
“—Isn’t. I know.” She was the first person who’d ever noticed. He raised his camera from the workbench and took a series of pictures of her among the pictures, backlit, half hidden, hair aglow. Either she didn’t hear the shutter or she ignored it.
“The whole idea of capturing something, isolating it from the flow of time, is strange, I guess. Right?” She turned, saw that he had the camera, and still said nothing.
“Susan Sontag says photographs don’t explain, they acknowledge.”
“Ooo, Sontag, he quotes. Tra-la.”
“She says that photography is identified with the idea that everything in the world can be made interesting—”
“Instagram. Or Pinterest?”
“—but that entire supposedly objective purchase on the world, with its insanely unlimited comments and false insights on reality, makes everything homologous.”
“Big words!”
“Disclosing the thingness of human beings, the humanness of things.”
“Uh-huh. And apes?”
“Pictures don’t capture anything, really. I mean, we say they do. But you can’t really understand something . . . not visually, anyway, if it isn’t in motion.”
The redhead considered him for a moment, her expression a language he couldn’t read. “Can you stop now, with taking the pictures, Mr. Blowup? Or is that camera the only way you can get intimate with the world?”
Chastened, he put the Nikon down.
She smiled. “She’s wrong. Sontag. I’m sorry. Or right and wrong, I don’t know, because, okay, she’s way, way smarter than I am, but . . . I think yes, you can. Understand. You just can’t understand it in the same way. In a photograph, when everything is standing still, certain parts jump out at you. Distortions, even, can direct you to what’s underneath, another story that’s working inside of it. Not real. But true.”
She steadied the print hanging closest to her. The murder suspect, soldier Willa Ko. A stark, unsettling portrait of despair. “Or sometimes, the smallest thing is all the understanding you need. You know what I mean?” Her fingertips slid across the lips of the soldier. “It’s like she wants to smile.”
“Or cry.”
An awkward silence followed. And the redhead, as if just then becoming aware of the rest of the place, turned in circles, frowning: “Wait. There’s no . . . Where do you sleep, Finn?”
Finn crossed to the kitchen, to where there was a big cartoon lever set into the stub wall on the far side of the counter island.
“You might wanna . . .” He gestured for her to move to one side, and as she did he yanked the lever and a massive Murphy bed dropped angrily down out of the main wall, slammed down to the floor to fill what remained of the loft, landing so hard and terrifying the comforter on it jumped and she gave a startled squeak. Lights dimmed automatically, and a ceiling panel slid open to reveal a skylight framing a sliver of silver moon.
“Holy shit.”
“I know.”
“First the locks. Then this.”
Finn explained, “I didn’t—It came with the loft . . . I don’t know why it’s all connected.”
The redhead rolled her eyes. “Yes, you do.” She kept smiling in wonder as she wandered to the bed and sat on it, bare legs hanging, toes turned in like a little girl. “Nothing else? No motion disco ball with the mini-mirrors, descending from the ceiling like in eighties porn?”
“Not familiar with eighties porn,” Finn said.
“Liar.” She fell back, tipsy, arms out, as if to make a snow angel in the rumpled duvet. “No. You cross bars to rescue boo-hoo babies.” She stared up at the moon. “Okay, well, I think you should call me Riley.”
An electric pause. “Because it’s your name, or . . . ?”
“Would it scare you if I told you I was a hooker?”
“Riley’s not really a hooker name. And last I checked, cops don’t marry hookers, except on TV.”
Call Me Riley went quiet and closed her eyes, drunk or tired. “You’d be surprised,” she said emptily.
Finn cro
ssed and sat on the edge of the mattress, politely distant. He wasn’t sure how this should proceed. She’d invited herself home to his apartment, found the bed—and he was beyond rational judgment, where she was concerned—they were both all in, two consenting adults. But it was like, after a life of driving Hondas, somebody was offering him the keys to a Pagani Zonda. He felt so dizzy with the impossibility of this ever having happened, he half believed it wasn’t happening, and was scared that he’d somehow break the spell.
“Okay, yeah, so I’m vaguely acquainted with online porn,” he lied. “Strictly free stuff, mostly amateurs, of course, female friendly, because I’m sensitive, erotic with a good underlying story, usually involving clothes coming off and a natural progression leading to the viscous release. Nothing too adventurous or, you know, pandering—sensual and tasteful, normal-sized sexy bits, and a lot like healing massage, plus educational: exposing the surprising number of erotic breeze-blown love nests which can be improvised in just one tropical hotel setting.”
She laughed, reached, grabbed his shirt, and, surprisingly strong, pulled him over and down onto her. “You gonna be okay with this, Finn Miller, or do you need to get your camera?” He couldn’t speak. Her body was hard and soft, all curves and planes, a perfect fit. “What about the X-ray shower curtain,” she went on then, as if they hadn’t veered off course, “or the robot cat, or the electrodes that zoom out of the microwave and fly across the room and, by some mysterious geek math, arrive here, on the magic crash-down bed where you’ve cleverly arranged that I would be disarranged with plethyzizzerodes clamping—”
“—Plethysmographs.”
“Whatever, clamping onto my temples and, zing, I’m a zombie. Living in Canada. Having lesbian sex with an ape while everyone takes notes, and just one more statistic, crying her eyes out.”
“All that was supposed to be a surprise,” Finn said.
She kissed him then. Or he kissed her. It didn’t matter. It was sweet and real, even awkward, to Finn’s embarrassment, and she didn’t care.
Perfectly lovely, she told him after a while, with the moon and all.
