He would have been about ten, I think. Too old for Santa and the Easter Bunny, but still willing to play along with the ruse of the tooth fairy. He’d shown some interest in science and astronomy, so I told him what I could about the surface of the moon, and I explained the idea of pareidolia. He listened and nodded and asked questions. And I never saw him look out his bedroom window at the moon again.
The FreeMilo Web site continues to disgust me, and I continue to read it. What amazes me most is that these people—mostly young men, I assume—think they know my son. They’ve pieced together a man from song lyrics, videos, fragments of interviews, and they believe it’s genuinely Milo. Not that I can be so sure I know him much better, I suppose; I’ve just built my version of him from a larger sample of material.
I’m almost ready to put an end to this unhealthy gorging when I see a new headline, screaming at me from the top of the list: VIDEO OF THE MURDER HOUSE—BEFORE THE MURDER!!!
The Murder House. Of course, I’ve never been to Milo’s house, and it hadn’t yet occurred to me that it would now take on this added significance. I know that houses where murders take place become stops on a gruesome pilgrimage route, and I wonder if there are people there—right now, a matter of blocks from here—camping out alongside the yellow crime-scene tape, taking pictures and toasting the dead. I wonder if the house will be demolished eventually. Sometimes they are, more for real estate reasons than symbolic ones: the property values, the privacy of the neighbors, the decency of letting the dead rest. Still, it has the feel of an ancient rite. Purification by fire. On this site, blood was spilled.
I click on the subject heading. Inside, there’s a link, accompanied by the following explanation: “My cousin’s a film editor on Turf Wars, and he got this amazing footage of a Milo/Bettina episode that was supposed to air next month. They filmed it three weeks ago. It’s a rough cut, so it’s not as smooth as it would be if it were actually on TV. Check it out!!!!”
Turf Wars, I know, is a TV program that showcases rock stars’ homes. In each episode, two different celebrities lead the cameras on tours of their houses; afterward, viewers call in to vote on which house they like better. I’ve seen this show once or twice, and I’ve wondered, who are these children, and why are they living by themselves? They don’t seem fully formed somehow, even the ones in their forties who are already doing comeback tours. Video game rooms and waterfalls, ceilings painted with stars and clouds. Gold fixtures and shark tanks. Rooms full of shoes. I didn’t know Milo was slated to appear, though in the past I’ve followed the show’s listings carefully in the hope I might get to see where he lived.
I click the link, and my computer’s video player pops up. I press Play.
The clip begins with a shot of a white stucco house against a blue sky. It’s a Spanish mission–style building with a red tile roof and a wrought-iron gate. It’s a beautiful house, but I can’t imagine the process by which Milo would have chosen it above any other. I try to imagine Milo house hunting, ticking off his preferences for a real estate agent. It’s as foreign an idea as seeing him in a military uniform or a ball gown.
The camera lands on the door, a tall, imposing thing made of dark wood and intricately carved. The door opens a crack and Milo sticks his head out. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll take two boxes of Thin Mints.”
A prickle of nerve endings at the sight of him. A muted ache in my belly. The camera pulls back and Milo opens the door wider. He’s wearing a ratty maroon T-shirt with the word “Fizz” written on it—I’m not sure whether that’s the name of a band or some kind of product or simply an ironic statement I don’t understand. He’s wearing jeans and a dark wool hat, and he’s barefoot. You can see how tall he is—lanky. He’s looking down into the camera, which must be held by a cameraman of average height. Milo steps backward and gestures us in.
“Welcome to my turf,” he says. This, I gather, is the standard greeting for participants on the show. Milo voices it with a kind of smirking affection: Yes, this is corny, but I’m happy to be a part of it.
We’re in an entryway painted blue-green, bright like the pebbles you find at the bottom of a fish tank. There’s a heavy black iron chandelier hanging high enough that Milo doesn’t have to duck when he walks underneath it. In the background, off to the left, I see an oversized red couch. I wonder if that’s where Milo was sleeping when the police arrived.
“I don’t know who we’re going to be up against,” he says to the camera, “but I can tell you, you’re looking at the winner right here. You ain’t gonna find too many houses out there that can beat this one.” He’s clearly playing around, but I’m fascinated by his grammar decisions. I’ve never once heard Milo say the word “ain’t.”
We follow Milo into the dining room, which is surprisingly ornate. The walls are papered with flocked cranberry velvet, and there’s an old-fashioned light fixture of glass globes hanging from the ceiling. There’s a long bench along one wall, upholstered in red velvet, punctuated with a line of small round tables. Across the opposite wall there’s a full bar with a zinc counter and tall mahogany stools.
“I wanted to have fun with this place,” Milo says. “I was going for a kind of hyperreality, like an amusement park, you know? The way that when you walk through Disneyland, one minute you’re in the Old West, and the next minute you’re in outer space.” This is so completely Milo that I laugh out loud. I remember that when he was a kid, he tried to talk us into decorating his room with wallpaper made from undersea photographs, so that he would feel like he was living in the ocean. I can’t remember why we said no.
“So this room was modeled on a picture I found of a nineteenth-century French bistro. I didn’t really want some big table taking up the whole room. This leads to smaller, more intimate groups. We’ve had some nice dinner parties here.” He stops walking and addresses the camera with faux solemnity. “I take my duties as a host very seriously,” he says. “Later I can show you my four-car garage—I like to make sure my guests don’t have to park in the rain.”
He turns around and leads us into the kitchen. And there, suddenly, is Bettina, chopping fruit at the counter.
Somehow I’d forgotten she’d be here, though of course I’ve just read that it’s video of both of them. I’ve been so absorbed in watching Milo, this unfamiliar man, this homeowner, that I forgot that this house was more than just his. It was theirs: their love nest; their refuge; the laboratory where they built their particular monster.
Bettina’s wearing a white T-shirt and black shorts. Her hair is bleached platinum, styled in a pixie cut, shorter than in most of the pictures they’ve been running in the paper. Her makeup is light, natural. She looks very young.
“There’s my little homemaker,” Milo says. “Always busy whipping up a healthy meal, whenever she’s not darning my socks or scrubbing the floor.”
Bettina looks up and smiles. She kisses him quickly, on the lips. “Kill me now,” she says.
I press Pause.
I need a moment. Besides the inadvertent horror of the exchange I’ve just seen, the unfortunate sound bite that I know will be grabbed up by every morning DJ and gossip column, I’m breathless with the impact of seeing Bettina moving around the kitchen, living her life. Up until now, Bettina has been a creature of my imagination, a cipher to be filled in whatever manner suits me best. At some moments she’s innocent, a tragic victim, someone to be pitied; other times, you can’t believe what a bitch she can be.
But here she is, slicing mango for a salad, giving my son a kiss.
All right. All right. Play.
Milo’s already moving on, leaving Bettina to her fruit. “We don’t have any room called the living room,” he says, crossing the kitchen to a doorway on the other side. As he talks, there’s a burble of sound in the background; it’s a cell phone ringing.
“Hang on,” says a man’s voice, off-camera. “Bettina? Can you turn that off?”
The camera turns back to Bettina at the counter, looking
slightly irritated, the phone at her ear. “Yeah, just a second,” she says to the man who’s just spoken. Then, lower, into the phone, “Mom, I can’t talk. The Turf Wars people are here. Gotta go.” There she is again, my maternal double, making her presence known. Intruding in ways I’ve only dreamed of.
Bettina rolls her eyes in Milo’s direction as she turns off the phone. “Sorry,” she says to the room at large, smiling in a way that’s both self-deprecating and disarming. “I could’ve sworn it was off.”
“Okay,” says the male voice. “Milo, can you go back and walk across the room again?”
He does. “We don’t have any room called the living room,” he says again. It takes him a minute to get back to the easy, jovial tone he had before. “That’s way too vague. We like to live in all our rooms.”
He’s talking in sound bites; the repetition of the moment makes it more obvious. Nothing he says is genuine or revelatory. I’m not going to find my child here. I’m just another member of the audience.
Milo leads us to a room filled with media equipment: a huge TV mounted on the wall, various shiny black boxes for playing music and movies. Instead of a couch, a wavy mass of overlapping cushions, several layers deep, fills the whole floor. He flops down, stretches his limbs like he’s making a snow angel.
“This is the padded cell room,” he says. “This is where I come when I start to be a danger to myself and others.” He grins widely for the camera.
I close my eyes. Already this video clip has the aura of a holy relic. Meaning has already shifted, lighting up some areas that would have been opaque a week ago. Emphasis added. It’s like someone’s taken a yellow highlighter to the dialogue.
More rooms, more themes. More explanations from this fictional character made up of pieces of my son. A guitar room with a built-in stage; an office, wallpapered with letters and artwork Milo’s admirers have sent. “Pretty soon I’ll have to move to a bigger room,” he says. “It gets pretty crazy. There’s one girl who cuts my horoscope out of the paper and sends it to me every damn day.”
Upstairs there’s a library—I scan the bookshelves for my books, their spines as familiar to me as the spines of my own children, but I find nothing—and a guest room I’ve never been invited to sleep in. A bathroom Milo calls “the sea monster room.”
He walks us down the hall. “We used to have a beach room,” he says. “But the sand got really annoying. Not to mention that we’ve got the actual ocean right out back. But I’m always changing stuff up. I’m kind of like that crazy lady who was afraid to stop building her house—you know who I mean? Her husband invented a new kind of rifle or something, and she thought that if the house was ever finished, all the ghosts of people who had been killed with those guns would come and get her.”
The Winchester Mystery House. I feel a brief electric twinge. I remember Mitch reading about it in a travel guide and telling Milo the story. We even made plans to visit it once, but we never made it there. It’s in San Jose, I think, not too far away. I wonder if Milo’s ever been.
He turns into the last room. “And finally,” he says, “the bedroom.”
The camera pans the room. It’s a big, airy room, colored in different shades of white. A corner window looks out on the Pacific Ocean; you can actually see the Golden Gate. The bed itself is massive and simple, a block of dark wood. A comfortable-looking chair with an ottoman, a night table with an art deco lamp. And in one corner, almost out of sight, a rack of exercise weights.
“We figured the bedroom didn’t need a theme,” Milo says. “Bedrooms kind of have their own theme.”
The sleep room. The comfort room. The lay-your-body-down room. The sex room, the sweat room, the fuck-me-any-way-you-want room.
“There’s just a really nice vibe here. I love waking up to that view.”
The sick-in-bed room. The pillow-wet-with-drool room.
“Top-of-the-line mattress. There’s, like, a three-year waiting list for these babies. Crazy expensive, but man, is it worth it.”
The waking-up-with-a-hangover room. The alarm-clock-ringing room.
“I hate staying in hotels now. They’re never as nice as this.”
The screaming room. The beating room. The skull-bashed-in room.
Bettina walks in. “You’re not telling them all our secrets, are you?” She puts her arms around him.
The breath-turning-shallow room. The falling-heart-rate room. The choking, the gasping, the bleeding-out room.
“Naw, baby,” he says. “But if walls could talk, right?”
The viscera room. The crime-scene room. The last-thing-you-see room.
“If walls could talk,” says Bettina, “we’d never get any rest.”
• • •
Later, after the sun has risen and the city has stopped holding its breath, I get myself dressed and head out for a walk. It’s still too early to call Joe—what time is acceptable? I wonder. Do rock musicians still sleep all day, or have they all turned into savvy businessmen who keep regular hours? And I need to get out of my room. Walking out into the pale morning, I try to imagine the landscape around me as a map of my son’s footprints. Milo has lived a life here, in this city of muted colors, this city as misty as a black-and-white photograph. He has walked these vertical streets and slept in these listing, seasick houses. I know nothing about the times he’s had here, though I’ve imagined them often enough: mornings in cluttered kitchens of group houses with shabby furniture and coffee in thrift-store mugs, nights stretched on couches I wouldn’t want to lay a finger on. Playing jagged, noisy music on a crowded stage plastered with gaffer’s tape; tracing a finger along the outline of a girl’s tattoo at some dark, rowdy party. Arguing with landlords. Living on pasta and cereal. And somehow, through luck and work and miracle, becoming the man I saw on my computer screen, the man who lives in a house on the ocean with a gold record on his wall. The man whose tragedies are front-page news.
I could have been a part of that long stretch of life if I’d tried harder. If I’d … what? Shown up on the doorstep of his mission-style house with a suitcase? Told him that the man in the moon was real? I don’t know where the magic line might have been. That’s how it is with children, or at least how it’s been with mine: you have chances and chances and chances. And then you have none.
I walk along the streets surrounding Union Square, but I have no real destination. I remember reading that there’s a plaque somewhere around here, a plaque that was put up to mark the site where Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, was killed. A monument to a fictional event, a murder that never took place. In this present situation, I have no desire to track down such an artifact, but I like the idea that the stories we write can occupy that kind of space on our own physical plane. I’ve always hoped that my characters will outlive me, though in my darker moments I suspect my books aren’t important enough for that. Walking a still-empty block of Mason Street, I wonder how long anyone’s characters will last. Sooner or later we will bring this world to its end; that much seems all but certain. My own self dead, the demise of everyone I have loved—we all know to expect that. But the thought of an empty world, all our books waterlogged or turned to dust, with no eyes ever to see them again … it fills me with terror. The story to end all stories, and no one will be left to tell it.
As the streets begin to repopulate themselves, I find myself trying to meet people’s eyes as they pass by. Just a single smile, a compassionate look, would mean so much to me. But they’re all good city dwellers and they keep their eyes to themselves.
Solitude is a much more shaded condition than I used to think; it’s not just a matter of being alone or not alone. It would not be wrong to say that I’ve been alone for eighteen years (if we start counting from the time Mitch died) or nine years (since Milo moved out of our house to go to college) or four years (since the last time we spoke). But it would also not be entirely right. I’m not a hermit, though the isolated nature of my job means that I spend more time by myself than a
lot of people do. Still, I teach writing classes; I meet friends for dinner; I get invited to take part in literary events. I visit my mother several times a year, and I’m in touch with a sprawling group of cousins and their children, some of whom are willing to serve as my informants on the rare occasions they hear anything from Milo. In the years since Mitch died, I’ve dated a few men (either four or five, depending on whether I’m counting the ill-considered night with the author of angel-themed mysteries that I met at a conference in Atlanta), a few of them almost seriously. I receive e-mail from readers, and I have daily opportunities to chat with neighbors and supermarket clerks. There are baristas who know me by name.
But there’s no one to watch bad TV with, and no one to run to the drugstore when I’m sick. When something happens that strikes me as funny, it’s sometimes weeks before I find anyone who might like to hear the story. And when underpaid interns writing jokes for late-night talk shows build entire monologues around the topic of my son’s guilt, there’s not a fucking person on Earth who knows exactly what I’m feeling.
• • •
I stop at a coffee shop for a listless breakfast, which I spend trying to avoid reading the headlines in other people’s papers, before returning to my hotel, once again at loose ends. Time to myself—I certainly have it now. I check my e-mail. There’s a note from my agent, listing seven different magazines and newspapers that would like to interview me about Milo. A month ago I would have been thrilled by the interest.
I page through the other debris that has accumulated in my little corner of digital space. My in-box is filled with messages of support and curiosity, some of them from people I haven’t spoken to in years. One of them is from Lisette, offering condolences and asking if I’m coming to town. Just yesterday I was thinking that this wasn’t the kind of trip where there would be time for social calls, but her e-mail to me is kind—the surprise smile I was looking for a few moments ago on the street. I write back, briefly. “Yes, I’m here. Don’t know if I’m going to be wallowing in free time or busy every minute. If it’s the former, maybe we could have lunch …?”
The Nobodies Album Page 6
