by Bruce Wagner
Serena loved them back (but brought no Bulgari nibs). Here was a doctor who wouldn’t snip away at her guts! Here was the clinic as vanity fair, a fluorescent cotillion with a smooth maestro of emollients—here was a doctor with his gorgeous gals to coo over her Sandrine Leonard handbag and antiquarian brooch; to overlook her shrunken, balding frame; to studiously ignore the fecal odor following after like the devil’s courtship cologne.
Donny went down to the street to smoke and that’s when he saw Katherine Grosseck, love of his life. He wanted to run but managed a sickly smile as they collided. She was sleeveless and her chic workout arms carried bags from agnès b. “My mother’s seeing Les.”
“I heard she wasn’t well. I’m sorry.” Serena and Katherine had always gotten along. “I have to go now,” she said, then winced as if she were passing a stone. Donny got that hit-and-run feeling.
It was two years since the breakup, but their life together—for him—continued on a parallel, spectral track. He watched it unfold from a shadowy place he called the Imaginarium (after the toy store in Century City), watched as shadow-Donny and shadow-Katherine went about their daily couple-life: saw them vacation and marry, go to movies, buy a house. Saw belly swollen—saw child come. Watched them banter through the day the way they always did, like no two people in the world in the history of time. For the last two years, whenever idiot things happened (in the office, on the street, something glimpsed or overheard), he saw Katherine look at him the way she used to, the way no one ever had, no person in the world or in time, sly and throaty, sexy, knowing—watched them laugh away the nights and days the way they did—his shadow self staring into the sturdy well of her chocolate eyes with the kind of hyper-realism he imagined preceded psychosis.
Their love continued to grow the way nails were said to grow on a corpse.
“I’m the Dead Animal Guy.”
The family in the house at the end of the Downey cul-de-sac had been waiting a day and a half. When the handsome man with tight gray curls opened the screen door, Simon Krohn was already kneeling at the foundation to sniff a mesh-covered vent. Inside, the disdainful Latina was sorting her husband’s freshly laundered Water and Power shirts. She hated Simon on sight; his quirky metabolism put her right off. He was so white his skin glowed. “Make sure you show him the den,” she said. The smell was here, there, everywhere. She couldn’t be sure anymore—it was stuck to her nosehairs. After holding forth on the importance of durable screen installation, Simon was led to the bathroom. She didn’t want to get too close to this coveralled emissary of Creep. Like having a gravedigger in the house.
The door to the bathroom was shut, as if to trap a poltergeist. Simon the Discursive squatted at the bath.
“As I explained over the phone, if our friend has found himself a little home between the walls, that’s a problemo. There’s not much I can do short of busting in there, which doesn’t thrill me and I’m sure won’t thrill you. To summarize, if that’s the case, there’s not much to do but wait for our fine furry friend to burn itself out—you’re looking at anywhere from three to seven days. Sometimes,” he said, tap tap tapping, “they die just on the other side of the tub. And—as I said over the phone—that can also be a very large problemo.”
The eavesdropping wife flinched from her post by the Naugahyde E-Z chair. This asshole was saying the only thing that separated them from the infested, debris-strewn Valley of Mexico was a thickened toenail of bathtub porcelain. She wished they had called a professional, a proper man in proper uniform; she’d pinched pennies, and here they were at the mercy of an inept, cut-rate reaper. The husband, a city worker with a broader band of experience, was more tolerant.
Simon stood. “I made a kind of covenant with God when I started this business—not that I’m a fervent believer, but I’m probably the most religious in my family. That’s an understatement. My mother’s an atheist and my sister’s a total agnostic. My little family joke is that we’re really pagan Jews. Anyway, I have two cardinal rules: never endanger public health, and never gouge the customer. Even though I charge one hell of a lot less than an exterminating company, before I actually come out I want people to know I can’t always save the day. In a situation where little Fluffy is trapped in a wall space, for example, I always try to make it very clear that coming to a site will cost you. I mean, it’s sixty-five dollars just to say hello. Depending on the amount of time I spend under the house, the supplies used, that can go high as a hundred and thirty-five. In your case, if everything’s cut-and-dried, I imagine the charge could be one-oh-five or one-oh-seven. That’s why I wanted to make it very clear as I said in our phone call this morning that if I go under the house and can’t find our friend Fluffy, I can only assume that, unhappily, Fluffy is between walls. And that is una problemo grande because equipment would be required to actually go through that wall and said equipment won’t make either of us very happy. Besides, I don’t do that. I work strictly under the house, as I said on the—”
Simon retrieved a stained sack from the Datsun. It held flashlights, Hefty bags, Lysol, gloves, surgical masks and a deodorizer called Zap. He slipped on the mask and went to the side of the house to another mesh-covered vent. Fur was stuck to its torn edge. He saw the cadaver right away and Lysoled the maggots. They sizzled—like the Top Ramen commercial, he noted aloud. Simon’s anarchic humor was his strong suit. He thought of himself as a Wired generation hepster, a kind of homegrown traveling cyberfolk Dadaist. He wouldn’t be crawling under houses forever; one day he’d write paperbacks or screenplays. These were preliminaries. Like Burroughs and Fante before him, the oeuvre would be drawn from this, from now. That he was thirty-five didn’t matter. At thirty-five, Van Gogh was barely painting with oils; Leary hadn’t even tripped, heh heh. As Lysol fumes hammered through the mask, he thought of Burroughs’s Cities of the Red Night. “You must touch Death, you must get close to Death.” Fuck that, he said loudly, and laughed. The haughty Latina was probably upstairs listening, ear to vent. She was the kind that would try to make him feel guilty when he asked for the money, even though it was half what anyone else would have charged. Simon put the saprogenic mophead of possum in the bag, Zapped the area and collected his due. His pager beeped but the third-world prig wouldn’t let him in the house to use the phone.
He drove straight to the pound (tossing the thing in a Dumpster would have been an outright violation of the covenant). He circumvented a long line of people adopting pets until he reached the hosed-down concrete outback, where an albino girl sobbed over a euthenized cat. Turn, turn, turn. A worker took Simon’s thoughtfully double-bagged quarry for incineration. The Dead Animal Guy was a familiar face, so they let him use the phone.
“Did someone page me? I’m the Dead Animal Guy.”
“Hello?” said a raspy voice.
“Did you page me?”
“Yes.” It was a woman. “Can you come?”
“What seems to be the problemo?”
“I think something died in the basement.”
“Are you on a slab?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The house—what kind of foundation do you have?”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Tell you what. I can come out and have a look, but I can’t guarantee anything. If it’s a situation where our friend Fluffy decided to take his permanent vacation inside a wall, there’s not too much I can do but tear the wall open, which I’m not actually equipped to do and which I don’t think would please either one of us—”
“Who is Fluffy?”
“Whatever’s down there, I call Fluffy. What I’m trying to say is, there are various situations where I can’t really be of great help, other than to make certain recommendations I could do just as well over the phone.”
“I would like you to come.”
“That’s fine, happy to, we all like to make money. At the same time, to summarize, I want you to know that I will have to charge you sixty-five dollars just to s
ay hello. If I do find our furry friend, depending on the size of el problemo and the amount of time I spend, I could wind up charging you anywhere up to a hundred and thirty-five.”
“Well…” Simon thought he had talked himself out of a job. That’s what happened when you tried to do the right thing. “I don’t care what it costs. How quickly can you come?”
The address was on Carcassonne Way, not far from where he grew up. His mother, the well-known psychiatrist Calliope Krohn-Markowitz, still lived in the old Brentwood family digs. Her second husband was an analyst, and the couple worked at home, seeing patients from opposite sides of a quaint guest cottage. Simon resolved to drop over when he finished with the new client.
In five months of therapy, Donny hadn’t revealed much. He’d seen shrinks on and off for twenty years; it wasn’t like he didn’t know the game. Then why was he being such a tightass? He hadn’t even mentioned his obsessive fantasy life with Katherine. He sat in Calliope’s office week after week, bullshitting—agenting. And he knew she knew it. Donny was starting to feel the pressure to unkink. Sometimes he thought he would have been better off with some out-of-the-way therapist, say in Sherman Oaks, one who wasn’t so hardwired to the business.
There was no denying Calliope Krohn-Markowitz’s charisma. In her mid-sixties, she looked like a collagened Georgia O’Keeffe. She was fit and authoritative, with twinkly eyes and actor-perfect teeth. Like Dr. Trott’s, her clientele was almost strictly the scarily famous. Calliope didn’t believe in lengthy analysis, preferring short-term crisis intervention, usually seeing patients in three-, six- and twelve-month modules. On cynical days, Donny saw true brilliance in the high-octane turnover of this imperative; no one was immune to the seductions of the Big Star–fuck, let alone the renowned shrink who had given herself the celeb gangbanger’s supreme gift of a gossipy gigawatt carriage trade. As Donny waited outside in a green Adirondack, he turned on the spigot and let the petty resentments flow.
Celebrity psychiatrics was a specialty as bona fide as diseases of the retina or surgery of the hand. It seemed to Donny that famous people were probably less interesting on the couch than those who’d never known the effluent murmur of publicist and toady—by the time Big Stars found their way to the now-itself-famous cottage, they cathected with all the drollness and showy urgency of a talk show appearance (at Calliope’s, clients flogged themselves instead of a film). Simply letting others know one was “seeing Calliope” was enough to set peculiar alchemical forces into play. One instantly garnered a quiet, casual dignity that was almost spiritual; an admittedly lower rung from, say, the level of dignity conferred by the purchase of a Vajrakilaya Center for one’s pet Tibetan master—but a rung nonetheless. Donny noted a distinct symbiosis in transaction of analyst and analysand: Calliope blushed and swelled with the borrowed energy of her temporary acquisitions. The interesting thing was that during visits he never saw Big Stars come or go. This, he surmised, was because Thursday morning—his time—was probably C-list material: potluck, charity, favors, dross. Most of his visits were bracketed by a Castle Rock business-affairs gal and Hiram Joggs, Oscar-winning cinematographer. Donny wondered what they had on the shrink—they seemed more like material for husband Mitch.
Donny was thinking he should probably start telling her things, otherwise she might fire him. Shrinks did that these days, especially one who was turnover-crazy. Make way for that Big Star coming ‘round the bend. He was at a temporary loss. His tried-and-true litany of early sorrows (recited to shrinks throughout the years) was exhausted—not an abreaction in the lot.
“I ran into Katherine the other day.”
“Where?”
“On Bedford. I took Serena to the doctor. Did I tell you she was with a woman?” Calliope looked like a tourist who’d asked directions but got gibberish instead. “Yeah. Katherine’s supposedly been having this hot woman thing for months now.”
Her dim, abstractly sympathetic smile reminded him of the mother on Little House—all “rerun.” The expression shifted to that of tender inquisitiveness; the paranoid agent took it as the veneer of a shrieking tabloid curiosity.
“Do you know this person?” she asked.
Donny shook his head. “A novelist, with a Kathy Acker haircut.”
“How do you feel about that? Are you angry with Katherine?”
“I don’t know. If I wasn’t on Zoloft, I’d probably be depressed.” He paused. “I still think about her—actively. Sexually.”
Calliope had the Give Me More look and Donny told her about the games. How Katherine would lie in back of the Land Cruiser like she was unconscious, panties off. They’d pull up to someone, anyone—a mechanic or a Mexican selling maps to stars’ homes—and the agent would ask if he knew where the hospital was because his girlfriend was sick. Shifting and showing herself while Donny got directions. On the freeway, too: Katherine in back like she was asleep. The truckers went insane.
In the last few months, they picked up people in bars. He remembered the first time they did that. The fantasy was that the guy would give her head, nothing more. Safe. They had to be in agreement on the candidate. No women—boring, that. Passé. Someone who they thought could be trusted was usually to be found, but the danger was still there. They liked the danger. When they found their mark (or Joe or Jim), they took him home and had a few drinks. Smoked some pot, Katherine fumbling at cold Thai, self-conscious laughs. This guy was cute and tried to kiss her in the kitchen but Katherine said Hey! the deal was head only. More laughs. She kissed him anyway. They “adjourned” to the bedroom and she tried chickening out, but Donny could see the chickening was only pretend and that made it hotter. Donny tied a kerchief around her eyes and the guy started licking her and she groaned “Oh God” as Donny left the room. Where are you going! she shouted, splayed like an animal on their bed, saliva-stained thighs gripped and spread by the hands of a stranger. Her neck crooked, the blindfolded eyes: Donny? I’m just getting a drink, he said. Katherine said she didn’t want him to go—already overcome. The whole time never taking the scarf off. Donny, love of her life, taking that as a sure sign of abasement and delirium. He left them there and had the drink, pulling at himself as he listened to the moans of his wife, the woman he loved to annihilation, saw them moving in the distance in the dim bedroom light. It excited him beyond belief. Donny? she called again and he thought he’d pass out he was so aroused. Donny—token bleats now, the name meant nothing in her mouth, something he’d read in a book flitted through his head, how a girl had been raped and the men let her use the bathroom before they poured Drano down her throat and how she’d padded back after doing her business, terrified, nude except for smelly socks and said, Guess I really had to go, huh? The agent circled around the house and watched from the terrace. He deliberately left the sliding glass door open when they first arrived and now the stranger’s pants were down around his ankles and Katherine no longer called for her love. The guy put her hand on his cock and the mask rode up on the ridge of her nose enough for her to see the show, to watch with a horse’s crazy eye as he sank it in, grinding, and after a minute she bellowed as the scarf came all the way undone….
It was impossible to gauge Calliope’s reaction; she was a pro. Her expression might have been the same had he spent the hour bitching about office politics. On the way out, in place of the Oscar-winning D.P., sat Phylliss Wolfe. Donny had promised to help with casting on her go-nowhere indie remake of Pasolini’s Teorema. They laughed when they saw each other.
“Ho ho. Ships in the night,” said Phylliss.
“It’s like a New Yorker cartoon,” he said.
“Only better drawn.”
The diminutive man in coveralls squinted as the day nurse led him to the living room. In the center of the space was a round marble table with a gigantine flower arrangement befitting the lobby of a small hotel. Modern paintings—little Dines and Twomblys—mixed with sculptures of antiquity and a piano so grand it seemed a parody; upon it, a thicket of family photos i
n the small, elaborate, variegated frames favored by the rich. Serena Ribkin sat on a Donghia sofa, on a slice of bedsore-repelling sheepskin. Simon realized what he’d smelled at the door was emanating from the frail, elegant woman with black bangles and grayish skin.
“What seems to be the problemo?”
“There is a family of raccoons on the hillside,” she began, most grandiloquent, “and I am worried one of them has died in the house.”
“Okay. Yes. That could be una problemo.”
“It’s particularly strong in the guest room and den.”
“Okay. Right. How long have you been aware of the smell?”
“Juana?” Simon thought it an odd name for the nurse, who looked Danish. “Juana, how long have we had that smell?”
“A few days.” With this, the saturnine aide took her leave.
“What makes you think it’s a raccoon?”
“I feed them at night. They come right down the hill, a mama and her two babies. But now they don’t come.”
“Right. Okay. And you think one of our friends died under the house.”
The woman looked stricken. “I hope not! If it was one of the babies, do you think the mother would—what would she do? Keep vigil by the body?”
“Right. Uh huh. Okay.”
“Would she try to bury it?”
“That’s one for Marlin Perkins. Can I go to the—den, did you say it was?”
“Please. What is your name?”
“Simon. But people know me as the Dead Animal Guy.”
“I am Serena Ribkin.”
“Beautiful home. Used to live a hop, skip and a jump from here, on Saltair. My mom still does.”
“The smell is so awful.”
