The Empty Ones

by Robert Brockway

  Nelly: But you ran into a little trouble with at least one teen last year who—

  Marco: The only trouble we had was finding a nice smooth spot for Rollerblading! I love LA—amo mi cuidad—but they gotta work on those roads, Nelly!

  Nelly: I was referring to the incident with—

  Marco: Haha!

  Nelly: I … yes, it does sound like a … rough situation.

  Marco: You got that right!

  Nelly: Haha, okay. Thanks for coming down to talk to us today, Marco.

  Marco: Thanks for having me. Muchas gracias!

  Nelly: And be sure to check out the second season of Marco Luis’s From the Barrio to the Bellagio, only on E! But first: Up next, how low can J. Lo go? It’s a Lo down dirty shame, and we’ve got the pictures to prove it. Jennifer Lopez does the limbo—commando—and shows her no-no. Oh no! Back to you, Tad.

  …

  You could feel the tension break as soon as the camera flicked off. Nelly let out a sigh that lasted for an entire minute. She wiped at her watery eyes, blinked her contacts back into place, and smiled at Marco. Genuinely, this time. It was a more subdued expression. No more cheeks stretched taut to show off the glimmering wall of teeth. It was a small, nervous smile. A little sad.

  “So how did you stop that dolphin?” she asked Marco. Her voice was twenty decibels lower off camera. A slight southern accent chased about the edges.

  “What.” Marco responded. There was no intonation at the end to mark it as a question. His voice was flat and still.

  He had also lost his camera mask, but while Nelly’s had been replaced with a version of herself ten years older and a hundred IQ points brighter, Marco’s was replaced by nothing at all. A mannequin sat in his place, perfectly still, just waiting for somebody to come and put him away.

  “The dolphin?” Nelly tried again. “The one that wanted your son’s ice cream? How’d you get it away?”

  “There was no dolphin,” Marco stated. When she looked confused, he continued: “It was a cute story. People like cute stories about famous people. It makes them feel like they are like us. Like we are just the same as them. I have people that write down cute stories for me to tell. That was one of them.”

  “Oh…” Nelly tried to think of something else to say, just to keep the conversation going, but she came up blank. She pulled at a thread in her tight pencil skirt instead.

  “If I had to stop a dolphin,” Marco continued, seeing that something more was expected of him, “I would hook my fingers into each of its eyes and push up and in until they popped.”

  Nelly’s mouth went dry.

  “Everything has eyes,” Marco said. “Eyes are always a weakness.”

  Marco stared at her, unblinking and unmoving. Nelly got the sense he was not awaiting a response from her, or even trying to discomfort her. It was just that his face was already pointed in her direction, and he saw no reason to look elsewhere. She felt sweat spring up on the back of her neck. She tried to think of a polite reason to walk away. Then an impolite one. Then she just tried to get her legs to work. They would not.

  Steele, her wardrobe assistant, paused as he walked by them. He frowned deeply at Nelly and made an extravagant series of noises.

  “Now why do you have to pick at your skirt like that, Miss Nelly? Nasty habit. Nasty! Here, come on, that was the last reel for today. Let’s get you in your civvies and out of my damn expensive clothes before you do any more damage.”

  Steele grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to her feet. She let him lead her across the set like a blind woman. He pointed out the various cables and rigs so she didn’t trip on them, and only released her when they were safely around the corner and out of sight. She slumped into the beaten and stained break-room sofa while Steele filled a Styrofoam cup with stale coffee.

  “Miss Nelly, I thought you were supposed to be a smart girl.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Smart girls know better than to keep talking with the Empty Ones once the damn camera stops.”

  “I didn’t know…” Nelly said, “I didn’t know he was one of them. I’ve never met him before. Just seen him on TV. He always seemed so…”

  “Nice?” Steele laughed and handed her the tiny, wholly inadequate cup of coffee. “You sound like one of the rubes, Miss Nelly. You know they like to put on a show.”

  Nelly made an affirming noise, and sipped at her terrible coffee. It burned her tongue, but she didn’t really notice.

  * * *

  I flicked the television off, then decided I didn’t like the silence. It would just give me time to think about what I saw. Digest it, swallow it, and let it slowly poison my thoughts until I’d lost another night to sweat and anxiety dreams. Instead, I flipped the channel a few times and dropped the remote onto the duvet cover that the ’90s forgot. It was pale pink, shot through with pastel blue fractals and little squiggles of orange. It looked like the cover to my old Trapper Keeper. The Trapper Keeper I had in fifth grade. The same one that used to hold my embarrassing pictures of Marco Luis, in his role as hunky jock J.C. Sable on the teen sitcom Home Room. I had three pictures, I think, and all of them were as precious as fine art to my childhood self. I had lovingly cut them from those preteen girl softcore porno mags—Tiger Beat, Seventeen, Teen Vogue—with a pair of blunt scissors, and got them laminated in the library. The librarian laughed at me when I made the request, and my ears had turned red, but I braved the embarrassment, shoved the glossy papers across the desk and waited.

  They were worth it.

  There was Sable in the pool, shirtless and staring back at the camera with his self-satisfied “I know you want me” smirk. Sable dancing with Kristi at the prom, her head leaning on the shoulder of his sleeveless white tuxedo. Sable with Mack, the two of them posing against an old cherry-red Impala. God, I couldn’t count how many times I’d stared at those pictures and imagined myself as Kristi, my great big puffy ’90s bangs crushed up against the wide lapels of Sable’s tuxedo/vest. Imagined myself in the backseat of that Impala, belting out all the wrong lyrics to classic rock songs while Sable drove and Mack played air guitar. How many times I pictured myself in that pool, Sable’s strong hands lifting me up and swinging me around, entwining in my bathing suit and …

  And then I met him.

  I actually met him!

  Jackie had dragged me to an industry party in the Hollywood hills—the kind where underpaid waiters wander around with trays but everybody’s on some specialized diet and nobody takes the food. You know how those things go. There’s never anybody to talk to at those things except the people you came with, and they always ditch you in the first fifteen minutes. And then out of nowhere, there was Sable.

  Marco Luis.

  He was funny. He was self-deprecating. He was a little odd. He was also so goddamned pretty it hurt to look at him. He should have been in a museum, surrounded by little velvet ropes and a stern-eyed guard that would clear his throat at you if he saw you start to reach out to try to touch him. We had an awkward conversation.

  Obviously.

  What do you even say to somebody like that?

  “Hey, funny thing—I learned to pleasure myself to your poster above my bed. You know, back when I was twelve. I used one of those squiggle pens with the battery-powered motor. Working on anything interesting lately?”

  Jesus Christ, it was a nightmare. I tried to bail, but Jackie volunteered him to take me home, and I very nearly stroked out from embarrassment. But then the impossible happened: He said yes.

  What?

  Nobody gets that chance. Nobody gets to slip out of some glitzy showbiz party with their teenage crush and glide away into a masturbation fantasy turned reality. Well, nobody except me.

  All of my preteen puberty dreams—those confused young fantasies that kept cutting out right as they got to the good parts, all stuck partway between disgust at the gross mechanics of sex and the desire to finally experience them firsthand—they were going to come true. I was
there, in Marco Luis’s expensive exotic car, and he had his J.C. Sable smirk on when he leaned over to kiss me.

  It wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured it. I had imagined some rock ballad blaring softly from the stereo while the full moon cast a pale and romantic light through the foggy windshield, his lips just brushing me at first, and then harder.…

  I did not picture Marco then trying to drain the humanity out of me because he’s some kind of immortal sociopathic monster. Didn’t imagine the army of faceless people at his beck and call, and the screaming balls of light they worshipped as “angels.”

  Haha, listen to me! This is my life. This is what I would say, if I ran into an old acquaintance at the supermarket and they asked what was new.

  “Oh, you know, just running from a former teen heartthrob and his army of half-people because I somehow managed to kill one of their energy-gods. How about you? Got rid of the braces, I see…”

  Of course it has occurred to me that I’m completely, gibberingly, smear-my-crap-on-the-walls-to-insulate-against-the-government’s-thought-rays insane. It occurs to me every single morning, when I wake up in another scabby anonymous motel and briefly wonder where my life went. I had a good one, you know—not great, but waiting tables and doing low-grade stunt work on the side was better than huddling behind the closed drapes in a Motel 6 by the highway. It occurs to me that I’ve gone mad every single time I step into the stained and forever broken shower to stand under five minutes’ worth of tepid water that smells like pennies. It occurs to me when I eat my breakfast of stale chips from the vending machine—maybe fast food, if Jackie or Carey weren’t too hungover to go out in the morning. The notion is occurring to me right now, as I’m narrating my own life to myself, swaddled in a scratchy comforter that looks like something Vanilla Ice would have worn. But if I’m insane, the pills aren’t working. Maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe this is all just some impossibly elaborate prank.

  It would be really funny, if it was.

  “You got me!” I yelled, louder than I meant to. “You got me good! Come on out now. Come on, guys—I see the camera. Right there in the sad plastic fern thing. Pretty sneaky!”

  I waited for a response. I rubbed at the sixth finger on my left hand. The ugly, malformed little extra digit that had hurt me every day of my life, except for three: The night my sister died, the first time I saw an angel … and the first time I killed one. It hadn’t hurt for a single moment since.

  “—she’s never going to come,” said the TV. A scrawny, weaselly-looking dude moped into a bowl of cornflakes.

  “I bet that sounds familiar,” Charlie Sheen quipped back at him.

  A fat child looked at the camera, smiled and shrugged like, “what are ya gonna do?” The only sound in my room was canned laughter.

  A drink.

  I need a drink.

  But the thought of joining Carey and Jackie at the bar of the chain restaurant in the far corner of the motel parking lot (Was it a Chili’s? Might have been an Applebee’s, or a T.G.I. Fridays, or a Fuddruckers—or one of any other million identical buildings full of identical people only temporarily joined together by their lack of a better idea when somebody said they didn’t feel like cooking tonight) only made the anxiety worse. Carey didn’t exactly fit in with drunken middle America—in his ancient, patchwork leather jacket, grinning through a broken face and slurring through a Brooklyn accent—but he seemed able to tolerate just about anything as long as the drinks were free. Which they were, if he agreed to go and keep Jackie company. She actually seemed to like the chains. She got some perverse satisfaction from trying to “pass” as a local.

  She never did.

  I did not have the energy for that. But I still wanted that drink.

  My motel room was too crappy to have an overpriced minibar full of little liquor bottles, and the thought of going to the store—out there, alone, in a world full of teen heartthrob monsters and screaming orbs of light and people without faces—well, even sober reruns of Two and a Half Men seemed better than that.

  Marginally.

  I changed the channel. A man with a bumpy stomach screamed something about abs and held up a device that looked like a torture implement designed by Nerf. I changed the channel. Four women sat around a tiny table in a hip, modern-looking bar. One of them said something slutty and the rest crawled all over each other trying to out-slut her. I changed the channel. Synth-pop covers of Mozart. A clean blue grid, broken up by white blocks of text forever scrolling by at a snail’s pace. A picture of a resort in one corner.

  The local channel guide.

  Thank god.

  Wherever you go, anywhere in these great United States of America, you will find a local channel guide that always looks and sounds exactly the same as the one you know. An unadorned grid of text-boxes listing the day’s programming on an eternal loop, one portion reserved for pictorial advertisements for local restaurants and bowling alley specials. The local channel guide plays music rejected from elevators for being too boring. The listings scroll by like cold molasses, so that you always forget what was on the first channels by the time the last ones pass through, and you end up watching the whole thing again. This is how we meditate, in Motel America: to the tune of an all-saxophone “Moonlight Sonata.”

  I stared at the channel guide, unfocused my eyes, and let it wash over me. The grid calmed my psychic wounds. The synthesizers refreshed my soul. I was very near to a state of adequate numbness when Carey kicked the motel door open, sang six consecutive refrains of “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am”—each somehow louder than the last—and then passed out at the foot of the bed, curled into a ball like an old hound. Jackie stumbled in after him, wearing a children’s activity menu that she’d folded into a paper cowboy hat.

  “K!” She said, then started laughing. “I’m wearing a cowboy hat! And I’m so happy! I’m a jolly rancher!”

  Jackie fell on the floor beside Carey, and giggled herself to sleep.

  I got up and closed the door behind them. I slid the dead bolt. I fastened the chain. I dragged a chair underneath the knob. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and watched it until the sun came up.

  FOUR

  1978. London, England. Carey.

  A girl with frizzy green hair and black tape over her nipples danced in front of me. It was only when she flailed into my chest that she looked up long enough for her bleary eyes to focus. I gave her the widest, most earnest smile I could muster and waited for her to flip me off.

  I did not wait long.

  As soon as she lifted her hand from her side to give me the finger, I reached into her purse and snatched the can of hairspray that I’d seen poking out.

  “The fugg you lookin’ at, mate?” Green Hair slurred at me.

  “My future wife,” I answered.

  She spit in my face. I wagged my tongue at her. She laughed and danced a bit closer.

  God damn it! Here I am clearly meeting my soul mate, and I have to ditch her—and the no doubt beautiful moment we’d share in the men’s bathroom later—to save some stranger’s life? It just ain’t fair.

  I slid away from Green Hair, ducked under her spiteful kick, and made for the alcove that the chubby girl and her faceless pursuer had disappeared into. The Rainbow was a weird place for a punk venue, but then, that’s all we usually got—the weird places. Abandoned factories, condemned restaurants, old pharmacies converted into concert halls with huge bars and tiny stages. The Rainbow used to be a theater, I think. Maybe even in the proper British sense of the word—like, live-action, guys in wigs and makeup saying shit like “forsooth”-type theater. I don’t know, maybe it was just a holdover from the times when movies were a big affair you dressed up for, and not someplace cheap you went to sleep it off for a few hours.

  Either way, the Rainbow was huge—it was Grand Central Station compared to the clubs I was used to in New York. If the main hall hadn’t been jam-packed with drunken flailing punk rockers, I could have thrown a football around in there.
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  Well, if I could have thrown a football.

  The inside of the Rainbow was old, gold, and decaying: Flaking paint, crumbled plaster, faded spray paint in the corners. Looked like a set from one of those cheap ’60s horror flicks. These big, ornate pillars lined the lobby, surrounding a giant sculpted fountain that looked like it should be attended by chicks in poofy dresses holding little umbrellas, instead of six fat skinheads huddled together to block the view of whatever it was they were smoking. They looked at me like wolves spotting a lone hiker—not sure if I was a threat or dinner. I locked eyes with the biggest one and ran my tongue across my lips seductively.

  He looked away.

  Where did the hell did the unnoticeable girl go?

  I swear I saw her duck behind the musty red curtains after the chubby English broad. I followed right after them, went down the short, smelly hallway and got spat right out into the lobby. No other doors. No other way to go. She was here. She had to be here.

  I scanned the room, found nothing of note, and started to turn around.

  I stopped myself.

  God damn it, they can do it even when you know they’re doing it.

  I scanned the room again, slower this time, carefully cataloguing what I saw in my mind.

  Pillar. Pillar. Slashed painting. Pillar. Girl in torn tights giving a painful-looking blow job to a skinny guy with a death grip on a bottle of cheap gin. Pillar.

  Nope. Nothing out of the ordinary here—

  There.

  I looked at her twice before I could convince my mind she wasn’t just part of the scenery. Brown spiked hair, black lipstick, short black skirt, and combat boots. It wasn’t that she was invisible, or faceless. She had normal, maybe even pretty features—but you had to squint to make them out, like putting on somebody else’s prescription glasses. And the second I looked away, my brain shuffled her face off into the “irrelevant if she’s not going to fuck me” folder.

  That is a huge folder. Bursting at the seams. There are subfolders. Indexes.