by John Warner
He shows it to his agent.
“Whoa,” the agent says at the end. The funny man is frowning as he tries to manipulate the foot back into proper alignment.
“What?”
“That’s weird.”
“Funny weird.”
“No, weird weird, gross weird. Cover your face and turn away and don’t even look at it through parted fingers weird.”
“Really?”
“Hell, yeah. Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Not as much as you’d think.” The funny man looks down and flops his foot around a little more. He’s found that if he does it for too long, the skin starts to turn blue, which is a little gross, but the flopping itself, hilarious.
His agent holds his hands in front of his face, not even parting his fingers, trying to block the view. “Don’t ever do that in front of an audience.”
“But it’s good. I know it’s good. You’re reacting. Reaction is good.”
“Laughter is good. Tears can even be good. Shock and horror is not good.”
The funny man sits down and tugs his foot back into place so his agent will stop wincing. “What a wuss,” the funny man thinks. “This is it,” the funny man says. “This is the new thing. This is the comeback.”
“I don’t think so,” the agent says. “I can’t let you show that to the world.”
Normally, the funny man would simply demand what he wants from his agent and he would get it, but in this case, he doesn’t just want what he wants, he wants to be right. It is important that the agent agree, that the funny man be redeemed, not just coddled or handled. “Tell you what,” the funny man says, “one show, a test, and then you’ll see that I know what I’m talking about.”
Relieved that the funny man is not going to take more flesh from his hide, the agent agrees.
30
AFTER ANOTHER TWO weeks at the center, following a relatively light day of treatment and a very gentle expulsion by the goo, Chet breezed into my bungalow wearing civilian clothes, a crew-neck sweater, white linen slacks, and loafers. He looked ready for the post-regatta yacht club reception or a J. Crew cover. He held a bundle of additional clothes covered in dry-cleaner cellophane over his arm.
“You dress up nice, Chet,” I said.
“Thank you, sir, and you will too.” He held the clothes out to me. They looked like carbon copies of what I wore for the press junket on my first movie, strategically distressed jeans, white button-up shirt, blue blazer. “Now, no time to waste, we’ve got a party to go to.”
By this time I’d pretty much figured out the WHC game and I was wholly on board. If it was stock, I would’ve made it 100 percent of my portfolio. They did not take your memories, there was no wiping clean of the slate. Rather, they cleansed your memories and they returned sanitized, 99-percent free of psychic harm. The theory was that over time, the damage accrued, memories piling up like plaque in an artery and at some point the blockage is complete and well … we’re getting close to hearing about the kind of harm that can cause.
They seemed to be a custom job on each guest, though. Mitch Laver had had his ability to feel physical pain cleared, but when I banged my head on the shower door in my room, I saw stars like I would’ve any other time. I wasn’t sure if all this was a good thing, but I couldn’t deny that I was feeling better than I had in a long time, and that things I never should have forgiven myself for no longer seemed so terrible. Everything from the past was at arm’s length, like a movie I’d seen once long ago starring someone else.
Just that morning, the goo’s final question was, once again, “What do you want?” and I said, “To be with someone,” and as I said it, I realized I meant it.
THE FOOD WAS familiar at the party: pureed meats on toast circles, cylinders of Parma ham skewered on toothpicks, cheese puffs. Apparently, even the Center uses the same caterers as everyone else. The faces were familiar as well since all of us were famous, and I’d seen most of them at Mr. Bob’s speech. The party was at a kind of mansion-plantation-style house with a grand entryway featuring a double-helix staircase leading upward. We were ushered into several separate drawing rooms with fireplaces and overstuffed furniture frayed at the edges that had been pushed to the walls, exposing large, ornately woven throw rugs. Soft string music came from an indeterminate place, but it sounded live rather than recorded. Everyone was in regular clothes, not a tracksuit in sight, but not everyone was dressed up. Apparently, we had been outfitted to look our best. In some cases that best meant urban-prep casual (me), while in others it meant three-days-from-their-last-shower grunge.
Mingling was at a minimum and if they’d been as isolated as me, I understood why. The only person I’d spoken to on a semi-casual basis since I’d arrived was Chet. The unfamiliar faces were obviously the handlers, the handler/celebrity ratio pretty much being one to one. Without explanation, Chet had left me alone to nibble my canapé and sip from my goblet. (At the Center, the only glasses are goblets.) We all drank the omnipresent Center mead.
As I was about to go in search of a goblet refill, Chet reappeared with one in his hand. With his other hand, he was steering a very recognizable face toward me.
“I believe you two are acquainted,” Chet said, exchanging my empty goblet for the full one.
“We got toasted together,” I said, and she smiled.
“Wonderful,” Chet said. “Perhaps you’d like to spend some time getting to better know each other.” He disappeared as quickly as he’d arrived.
I took a good look at her for the first time. Of course I’d seen her face a million times before. She was in my magazines, on my television. Her face looked at me from my box of cereal and I could chew and stare at her like we were having breakfast together. A breakfast for champions. Like the rest of the world I’d followed her path from child athletic prodigy, in a grand slam final at age fourteen, to an early adulthood of as-yet-to-be-fulfilled promise. She was nineteen now, maybe twenty, and she looked it; fresh, healthy, unspoiled. She wore a sheer white top pulled just off her shoulders that emphasized the broadness of her back and straight black pants that emphasized the length of her legs. I remembered she was tall, but being close again, I saw she had a half inch on me. Her hair was down from its usual ponytail, which softened her face from the competitive mask we were all used to. She looked both beautiful and powerful. I felt like a used-up brute next to her, even with all my good work with the goo behind me.
I had no idea what to say. I knew everything about her already, didn’t I? She’d arrived fully constructed, fully understood.
“Those are some shoulders you have there.”
“Thank you,” she replied, half twirling and smiling shyly. “They’re what allow me to have such a devastating arsenal from both sides.”
“You don’t say.”
“I did. I did say.”
“Yeah, well, my material is killer,” I said.
“My serve is a howitzer, the forehand a rifle.”
“I’ve slayed entire audiences before.”
“I also have a slice backhand that I sometimes use to drive a dagger into my opponents’ hopes for victory.”
“When I murder my jokes, I bomb.”
“Does that happen often?” she asked.
“It didn’t used to.”
“When I’m tired, my serve occasionally misfires,” she said.
“Does that happen often?” I said.
“Too often, apparently,” she replied. She held out her hand. “I’m Bonnie, but everyone calls me Bunny, which I hate with a burning, passionate intensity of a thousand suns.”
“Most everyone calls me a washed-up hack.”
“Nice to meet you, Hack,” she said, smiling.
“You too, Bunny.”
We were starting to get to know each other, but I already felt out of words. We weren’t allowed to ask, “What brings you here?” And besides, I pretty much already knew. She couldn’t manage to win the big one. At a tour stop in Minsk she would be raising the trop
hy above her head at the end of a fortnight, but in the majors she would devastate her opponents as she moved through the draw until the finals, when she would fold in on herself and lose, often to obviously inferior players. One of the sports weeklies had put her on the cover, a crown askew on her head with the caption MISS RUNNER-UP.
Just as I was about to say, “nice meeting you” and go looking for my Chet life preserver, she placed her cool, dry hand in my sweaty one and said, “I think I saw a pool in the back.”
31
I AM DEBATING whether or not to tell my therapist that this will be my final session. On the one hand, it will be a delicious feeling to let him know I am leaving. On the other, our relationship has been changed by his testimony, and even though I am assured that any fresh sessions are re-covered by the privileges of confidentiality, now that I have born witness to how he sees me, it can’t help but color our present. The White Hot Center managed to hit my reset button, but I don’t seem perfectly immune from fresh wounds.
Sitting in front of him this final time, I realize that I can’t not talk about what I want to talk about.
“This is our last session, I’m afraid,” I say.
“Are you fearing the outcome of the trial?” We are close to a verdict, close enough that it may come between now and our next scheduled session. It’s just that I won’t be around to hear it.
“Not at all.”
“Then how could you know that this will be our last session?”
“Because I’m leaving.”
“And where are you going?”
“I’m going back. She and I are going to be together.” I think that I hear a sigh start to leak out of him, but he’s too much of a pro to give in to that temptation. He knows that if he sighs there will be a fight over the sigh and that if he’s doing his job we shouldn’t be fighting over a sigh.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I say. I believe I do. Having seen him on the stand I now know how he takes what I tell him in therapy and filters it into what he calls the patient’s “overall personal gestalt,” in short, my modus operandi.
“And what’s that?” he replies.
“You’re thinking that I’m crazy.”
“We’ve talked about this before,” he says. There’s an extra wrist flick at the end of the gesture, a dismissal.
When I returned from the White Hot Center, I told him everything. I thought, just maybe, as the therapist to fallen stars that he might have had other clients who had spent time at the WHC. We had one session between my return and the shooting, and I explained how I had been transformed, how I had been washed clean, how I had met someone and that from that moment forward I would be getting what I wanted, that I had been temporarily deflected, detoured by some failures, but that was over, my eyes were firmly fixed back on the prize, which was a lifetime of soul mating with an amazingly sensitive and nubile young woman and that after everything I’d been through, that maybe, just maybe, I deserved it.
I didn’t necessarily yet believe that last part at the time, but he pushed my buttons.
“And where is this place?” he says.
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“And how did you get there?”
“I told you before, two male models kidnapped me.”
He responds with the gesture. He is testing me for consistency in my story.
“Two male models kidnapped me, they tranquilized me and when I woke up I was on a boat. For several weeks I spent my days encased in goo sharing all of my memories, many of the same things I’ve told you over the last several years, the only difference being after I told these things to the goo I felt better, whereas when I tell them to you, I feel like I might be the lowliest shit on the planet, and if you don’t wipe that look off your face, I may leap across the room and smack you.”
He doesn’t flinch. He knows I’m not going to do anything. I hate him for knowing these things. “I wish you could see what I see,” he says.
“And what’s that?”
“I see somebody who should be working to integrate his life but instead remains rooted in a fantasy.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, for one, we both know you didn’t go anywhere.”
“And how do we know that?” I say.
“Because you are the sort of person who is kept track of and no one saw you leave your apartment. Because there is no such place like the one you describe. Because people can’t be hit in the face with a baseball and not experience broken bones. Because when people die, they stay dead. I could go on, but why should we bother?”
“If I didn’t go anywhere, how did I kick the drugs?”
“Is that what you think happened?”
There is a long silence at the end of which I say, “I’m not going to miss you.”
“I have to ask,” he says, “are you going to do something foolish?”
“I’m sure you’d think so.”
He shakes his head like a pitcher waving off the catcher’s signs. “That was my fault. I should’ve been more clear. You’re not going to harm yourself, are you?”
“Of course not.”
He stands up from his chair. Our time is up. Somehow he knows, even though he never looks at a watch or a clock. “Then I look forward to seeing you next week.”
Maybe it’s better this way. He’ll be as surprised as anyone, my little bit of revenge for him believing he knows me so well. We shake and on the way out I nod at the receptionist and she tells me to have a wonderful day as she picks up the phone to place the call that will give me exactly twenty-four minutes to be back inside my apartment. I hit the streets and put on my sunglasses and pull a cap out of my pocket and yank it down over my head and even though everybody knows me, as I walk home, nobody recognizes me.
32
THERE WAS A pool in the back, with a patio empty of people and a view that went straight to the ocean. The pool was shaped like a dolphin with blue tiles lining the sides and bottom. The water was perfectly clear. As she approached the ledge she dropped her slacks and stripped off her top, revealing the athletic underwear beneath. With three skips and a double-footed jump she launched herself gracefully into the water at the dorsal fin before swimming underwater to the snout and surfacing, her hair parted perfectly down the middle and slicked to the sides of her head.
As she treaded water her eyes sparkled, beckoning. Her body appeared to be built for movement, the muscles working in efficient conjunction, while I had the body of a nearly middle-aged stand-up comedian. I imagined that I was buoyant, but I was definitely not a strong swimmer. In fact, I wasn’t sure I could swim at all unless swimming is defined simply as not drowning. The one time I tried for real, things did not go well. Though there were extenuating circumstances. I had told it to the goo, my answer for its question of What was a time when you thought you were going to die?
“Jump in,” she called. On her back she frog-kicked to the ledge and rested there in the water, her arms outstretched along the sides.
When I was a freshman in high school, swimming was required as part of the physical education curriculum. The class was coed, the suits school-issued, and it was a kind of hell.
The rationale for the whole enterprise was solid, the swimming a backstop against the flagging fitness of my generation, the first weaned on television and video games. Our thumbs were mighty, but our muscles were flabby. To allow the students to bring their own swimwear would be to risk embarrassment for the disadvantaged, and coeducation would show that we were the same, boys and girls, learning together, even as our morphing bodies most definitely highlighted the differences.
Between classes, the school-issued suits moldered in a soggy cardboard box, a dank pile of failing purple Lycra. They were neither shorts nor Speedos, rather a kind of one-size-sort-of-fits-some hybrid with a tie at the waist and elastic meant to snug up against the legs and seat. The daily laundering had left the fabric pilled and the elastic brittle and fried, making the overall appearance more
diaper than swimsuit. Once in the pool, they instantly filled with water, ballooning in the crotch, making what once looked merely ridiculous, absurd.
At least I was in the same boat with the rest of my pale, sunken-chested male classmates yet to experience any of the benefits of puberty: the increased height, mature musculature, doughy faces hardening into chiseled manliness. No, this curse had visited only its worst parts on us, cracking voices, wispy, embarrassing hairs in the pits—soft as down, rather than the coarse curlies of manhood— that nonetheless trapped the smell of cabbaged cooked in iodine after any kind of exertion. My mother had often half-jokingly remarked that she thought teenagers should be locked up, and looking at us furtively changing in the locker room, terrified that someone else might see our pathetic junk, I was inclined to agree.
Somewhat buoyed by the strength of numbers, I exited the locker room to the pool area, towel clutched around my midsection, hiding as much of the suit and my ghostly, hairless legs as possible. The vast majority of the girls sat in street clothes on benches that ran the length of the pool, clutching excuse notes cadged from sympathetic gynecologists that testified to urinary tract infections, the inopportune coincidence of “monthly flow” or other swimming-prohibited ailments. Oh, how I hated them. I had splashed around at the municipal pool once or twice growing up but had never exactly “swam” before. A pile of kickboards massed at one end of the pool buoyed my spirits. Clinging to the Styrofoam wedge and kicking around for awhile seemed do-able. Certainly the school feared lawsuits. Nobody would be drowned or humiliated. Nobody would be drowned, anyway.
I skirted far enough away from the pool edge to ensure no inopportune slips into the water and everything looked acceptable until I saw Chris Darntoff moving toward me. Unlike the rest of us, puberty had greeted Darntoff both early and quickly, leaving broad, rounded muscles at the shoulders, and a small patch of hair in the cleft between his pectorals. In the locker room, Darntoff would stand naked and make a show flexing his muscles in the mirror, performance as intimidation in front of his as-yet-to-be-endowed classmates. As Darntoff approached, he bunched his hand into a fist, being careful to extend the middle knuckle into a slightly higher peak. Arm cocked back, he drove the fist, pointed knuckle first, into my left shoulder.
