“If little Nasja fails to divert you,” Clavius said, “then Aja had indicated an attraction. You know Aja—the Norwegian?”
This was getting worse and worse. Even the names on the sex parade were starting to blur into one another. Aja. Amanda. Natalia. Nastasia.
“I need to fuck my work right now,” I said and instantly regretted it.
“Quite. I think you’ve already sensed that Nasja is a dead end. Bought Russians have few desirable qualities beyond the initial attraction; they’re just too mercenary. One can’t blame them but one does not have to let them bulldoze you, either. Remember our friend Hofmeister, the fellow with the gallery? Lately he’s gone for mute Koreans, purchased through Chinese brokers. I find them so thankful and servile that they’re amazingly dull. But they were a godsend for Chinese men, and we in the West are only just catching the cultural coattail.”
He paused to see if he still had my attention. True, my mind was on the wander due to larger and more pressing events. He held up a finger, ever the calm academician. “This does have a point,” he said, “and it relates to your feelings about Nasja and Char in regard to my participation.”
“Sorry.” I said that too much, to nearly everyone.
“Bear with,” Clavius said. “Chinese cultural preference and dogma has always held that female children were undesirable. The one-child-per-couple mandate only made the situation more heinous. Where before, female children were simply abandoned, now they could be aborted if ultrasound revealed them to be the wrong sex. As a result, available Chinese men began to outnumber available—that is, marriageable—Chinese women. Bond slavery was the result. The border between China and North Korean became what they call a ‘wife market.’ Female Korean refugees fled their economic distress by seeking Chinese husbands. One out of every three was fated to be sold by Chinese gangsters, if they were not collected by the even more predatory gangs of ‘wife hunters.’ The good ones cost less than $2000. They receive the birth statistics of a dead person. The Chinese men, who would never admit to having ‘bought’ a wife, in return get someone especially pliable, hard-working, and most important of all, submissive. And everyone makes out along the way—border guards, identity brokers, all the needed intermediaries. Many of these people also thrive within the adoption sector. Business is booming, and bureaucracy charges by the hour. Serving up Chinese babies for foreign adoption has become an industry, and an irresistible windfall if you happen to be stuck with a female child you couldn’t otherwise give away.”
You may have noticed the cost of having Clavius’s mostly undivided attention: Every question is the start of an opera.
“The point being—?” I asked.
“Just this: what I do for the women who come under my umbrella, so to speak, is not bond slavery, nor indentured servitude, nor blackmail. Nor is it the addiction-and-prostitution paradigm. Nasja and Char and all the others like them do what they do voluntarily, and are free to leave anytime they choose. I’m not some kind of black-hearted puppet master, pulling internecine strings to make your life a living hell. I just want to help people. I cannot save the world, but I can choose those I wish to help.”
You may have noticed Clavius’s ego is one of the few things larger than his bank account.
“Fair enough,” I said. But it was not fair at all. What Clavius had, the rest of the world lusted for. Between that and capitalism was a lot of wiggle room.
To be honest, how could I really blame Clavius for any of this? He had marched right over and told the truth. I think.
I pressed him on the matter of the photos and video. He did not seem too hooked.
“Frankly, I don’t spend a great deal of time online,” he said. “It’s too frustrating. All that advertising.”
We shared the same pain. When I said I “uploaded the video,” that was the short version of the story. It was more like three hours of keyboard-punching and teeth-gnashing. Unless one had the latest computer—and yours is outmoded by the time it leaves the factory—navigating the nation formerly known as the World Wide Web was an exercise in sheer self-abuse. Simple pages took ages to load because they were piggybacked onto advertising. Nine times out of ten, the “apps ‘n’ feeds” incorporated a video, animation, or god knows what to bog down the load time. On my computer this molasses-retardation frequently prompted a browser crash. Start again. Then the load times for what you wished to disseminate threatened to overflow the cup again. Pop-ups were scotched only to be replaced by sneakier pop-ups that circumvented the filter while tons of attached spam sniffed for your in-box. Start again. Ad clicks, widgets, and error messages sucked up entire minutes until they forced another restart. Repeat as needed until you’re in a padded cell.
“Dude, just get a new computer,” my fireball Joey would advise. I admit I murdered my first one by punching it off the desk. After that I tended to keep them until they died from their own obsolescence. With Joey, the concept of upgrade was an urgent minute-to-minute reality. He could probably do more with his phone—“mobile device”—than I could with all the devices in my home.
“Personally, I think Char was quite taken with you,” Clavius said.
“But she had other goals.”
“As do you,” he said. “Try not to be morose for more than a day or two. Transcendency magazine wants a fashion model spread using my surgical studies as big poster-sized backdrops; we’re making the giclées right now. Call Willeford Whats-his-name to set it up, yes?”
Clavius had said “his” studies but I had shot them. I felt a large boa constrictor around my neck taking an interest in me as food.
* * *
Google the word “kitty” sometime, just for shits ‘n’ gigs. You’ll get seventy million choices.
The bullet Gun Guy had left me stood like a little pewter-colored sentry on the desk as I uselessly cruised online, looking for a clue that might expand what Gun Guy had meant when he told his enforcers, “Take him to the Kitty.” “The Professor” was useless—nobody had come close to mentioning the mortician’s real-world name. If I wanted my sad clues to mean more, my best option would be to stake out the Beverly Hilton and wait for Cognac to breeze through the lobby. Or whatever her name was.
You don’t want her to wind up in a can of cat food like your buddy Dominic Sharps … do you?
“Kitty” meant cat food. That didn’t narrow the field much.
Kitty Comfort, Super Kitty Cat, Royal Kitty, Kitty Dry-Blend, Kitty Kat Club Casserole, Kitty Kafé , Special Kitty, Kitty’s Favorite, Wild Kitty (recalled for salmonella, I noticed), Kitty Weightloser, Kitty Liver Heaven, Kitty Gourmet Select, Malchin’s Private Kitty Reserve … my eyeballs were about to melt and cascade off my face.
“I smell the boss’s cologne,” came a voice from the foyer, followed by the traditional door slam. Joey was in da house, yo.
“Shitty Kitty,” I murmured.
Joe clapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, my brother used to say that to his girlfriend: ‘Tough titty, shitty kitty.’ Or, like, ‘One in the kitty and one in the shitty.’”
“What?”
“You know! One in the pud and one in the mud. One in the pink and one in the stink. You know—DP.”
“Director of Photography?” I said. Dom Perignon? Dr Pepper? Diet Pepsi?
“Double penetration, dude—DP. Try to keep up.” He shrugged as broadly as a Catskills baggy-pants comedian, which should tell you something about the disparity in our ages.
“Oh, yeah, that classic payoff to porn film structure,” I said. “Silly me.”
“Don’t laugh.” Emotions on Joey’s pierced face were always amplified, fluid, then gone in an instant. “People who use porn expect a certain progression. First the phony make out, then blow job, then twat-licking, then missionary, doggie, horsy, then two chicks, then a guy with two chicks, then maybe sometimes a chick with two guys, then freestyle, then roll credits.”
“That sounds like really hard work to keep track of.”
He gave
me the finger and grinned. “Fuck you. As if you’re interested in any of that shit; I know where the duck shit on the wood.”
(I thought it best not to correct him.)
“Hey, what happened to the picture on the wall?”
“I wish everybody would stop asking me about the picture on the wall,” I said. “The picture on the wall went bye-bye.”
“Where’d you get the bullet?” He already had it in his hands, marveling.
“Not bullet,” I said. “Cartridge. Round.” I had learned a few rote factoids, too, before “kitty” jeopardized my sanity. “The bullet is the nose, the slug, the projectile. The casing is the brass part, but this one is some kind of special mint. The gunpowder’s in there. The primer that sets off the powder is on the bottom—the little silvery disk in the middle. Primer ignites powder, big bang, bullet flies off to do mayhem.” I had never fired a gun in my life, let alone held one containing live rounds.
“That’s funny,” he said. “No headstamp. Looks like a .45.” He saw my reaction and pointed. “Here on the base. There’re usually numbers for caliber and abbreviations for maker, stamped around the primer. The letters mean all kinds of shit—who made it, what it’s for, what arsenal it came from, if it’s military. This one’s naked. Where’d you find it?”
“Literally in the street,” I said. “It caught the light. So no numbers and stuff means what?”
“Could be a custom load. Could be a reload. You know—bang-bang, the shells fly out?” He did an action-movie pantomime. “Guys reuse that empty brass all the time. Saves money.”
Put a pin in that thought: Joey knows a tiny something about firepower. Right now it was time to divert his attention into the kitty zone. “Here. Maybe you can help me with this fruitless quest.”
I sat him down in my place and gave him the parameters. He was wearing a Cable T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, to showcase the Celtic and Maori stuff on his arms—almost full sleeves themselves, now, I noticed. A good full-color inkwork of Karloff as the Frankenstein monster lowered at me from the back of his neck, peeking from behind the collar.
Just the potential number of clubs and restaurants with the word “kitty” in their names was threatening to stormfront a migraine.
“Okay,” Joey said. “Cat food only. Manufacturers. Probably not Chinese, then. There can’t be that many.”
“Los Angeles area,” I said. “Figure not more than an hour’s drive from the Strip.”
“Good, that gives us a radius.” He squirmed around as though bioconnected to the computer.
I was best-guessing, relieved to have an assistant to hoist the burden. “Just be a genius,” I said.
“Dude. It ain’t rocket surgery, okay?”
* * *
Joey helped me keep one foot in the current world of things. He was aware of this intermediation, but instead of clubbing me with it or treating me like an antique old fart lost in the mists of over-forty, he acted and reacted as though I were a nonhostile older sibling of the same tribe—that is, an older iteration of himself. He performed this kindness countless times, at least to my face. In return for this, he asked nothing. Beyond the mentor-apprentice dynamic we could have been any two guys hanging out.
With the usual qualifiers.
For one, Joey was priapic as his carefully cultivated persona suggested. He was a demonstration of what Clavius meant when he said all human congress is based on sex, and in this we are no different from bacteria, which is why it is called a sex drive. Eat, excrete, and make more. Our entire culture and civilization was a by-product of the be-fruitful-and-multiply mandate. Power devolves to sexual dominance; ditto success. We had more pretensions than amoebae, but when you boil away the snow we were all just organisms hardwired to keep procreating. And what do happy little microorganisms do besides eat, excrete, and reproduce? If they have enough spare time after those depleting activities, they kill each other. Then they die.
One day Joey and I were plowing through especially strong espresso, seated at an outdoor table ostensibly so he could smoke. It was also a much better vantage for the flesh parade outside a designer gym in a plaza containing the Newsroom restaurant, on Robertson, near the Ivy, where paparazzi loitered around with the mien of hunters who didn’t care about stealth. This was back when New Line Cinema’s offices were still upstairs in the plaza. So we had actresses, celebutards, and workout tarts in abundance doing the in-and-out platelet flow. For every single one that cruised past, Joey asked me, “Would you? Would you? Would you?”
No. No. Sure. I guess. Maybe, if she has a job or isn’t really a man. I read them differently than he did. As a game it was tiresome. Joey could not see the baggage, just the containers. Safer to detour him onto another topic. Music. He begrudgingly acquiesced while keeping one eye on the make.
“Redhead,” he snorked. “Awesome. Hope the curtains match the drapes.”
Was Joey even aware of what he was saying, half the time? In a former life I would only have said the word “awesome” if I was staring into an erupting volcano or a nuclear explosion. But I understood what Joey meant whenever he said it, which meant we were still capable of communicating, sort of.
Now that I had a premium audio system, I rarely listened to music on purpose anymore. The interesting stuff was there as always, but it was harder to give a damn. Joey found this to be sacrilege, but I felt the same way about books, about films, current affairs, topical news, politics, religion, in fact everything except the minute focus of the job at hand. To generate anything artistic that has meaning, you had to proceed without distraction in a universe devoted to breaking your concentration. Sometimes stress yielded surprises, but that was not dependable, and if you were a professional you had to consciously invoke the mind-set more and more, and hoard privacy in which to apply it.
Yet at some mysterious juncture in the past couple of decades, I became aware that as far as most things are concerned, I was suddenly outside looking in, observing. This was notably different from the glandular reactionary verve of my twenties, where every pursuit had been a passion and every emotion overwrought. I saw that in Joey still. His art—even if it was fetish videos or nudie shoots—was his lifeblood; he felt he would die if he could not participate, even to the point of using his own flesh as an ever-evolving free-form canvas. I felt the incipient danger of becoming one of those people that does not have time to read books, or listen to music, unless it directly impacted the latest job. And I already knew the contempt in which I held those people, those pedestrian droids … even as I felt the tug of becoming one myself. To pinpoint the stage at which I had parted company with the flow of the world was futile. It just happened, somehow, while I wasn’t looking.
Part of it was a disinclination for the been-there, done-that. The world rehashes new art in terms of old, generationally. Nostalgia for the 1990s? The 1980s? I had been there and didn’t feel the retro charm. (Disco sucked in the seventies and still sucks now, thanks. And don’t get me started on the Beatles, those kings of supermarket muzak for the twenty-first century.) Sturgeon’s Law held that ninety percent of everything was shit, and that included ninety percent of the ten percent that was worthwhile. Without filters in place you would simply drown in the overflow of crap.
Then again, my idea of perfect harmony pretty much began and ended with “Don’t Worry Baby.”
During the course of one beery late-night discourse on such things, I told Joey that part of my retreat had to do with the human brain, which switched him right on. In brain-land, the ninety percent was the portion we still did not comprehend. Brain-mapping scientists had determined that there was a specific part of the brain devoted to memory for music. We carry all the music we have ever heard in that unfathomable little quadrant, accessible at will, and indeed I could “hear” it any time I wanted without the cumbersome physical requirements of cueing it up or putting it on. Joey loved the idea of the “built-in Nano” and would have sprung for an implant that moment.
Then h
e played me a song by Nerveblock that sounded like Inquisitors torturing Pygmies to death with flamethrowers during an airline crash into a mental hospital. I didn’t know if it was one song or three, and had no idea of the titles, but I did like the energy and urgency of it. If it was too loud, I was officially too old, and I always liked my music loud.
You should do pictures to some songs, Joey had said. Visually represent them. See what plops out.
Lacking that, I could get kidnapped by gunmen and made a post-facto accessory to murder for a huge payoff I assumed was some kind of dirty money.
And see what plopped out.
I did not tell the abduction story to Joey. Not yet. I talked around it because telling Clavius had worked like a busted flush. But Joey’s angle might be valuable if I waited for the right time. Never discount the opinion of someone who carries so much steel in his face. All that made me think of was my bullet. In my face.
There were other bullets just like it, and although I did not know it, they were looking for me right now.
* * *
In the time it took to hook up with the improbably named Willeford Grimhaven for drinks that elongated into dinner, I lost most of my loft. The door was ajar when I returned, and in spite of traffic neither I nor Joey would have left the door hanging open.
Every single framed picture—there were more than a hundred—had been smashed, or yanked down and then smashed, probably with the fireplace poker left behind in the crushed-ice fragments littering the floor. The glass tabletops, likewise. The furniture was overturned, legs up like snipered dead beasts. It was the first time I had ever seen the inside of my hard drive, now strung across the floor like freed guts. My swell stereo had been angrily eviscerated from its niche. The flat screen had become unlikely Cubist sculpture by being impaled on a plinth meant to hold an oil lamp. My shelf of antique cameras had been volleyballed into broken debris. The stainless steel fridge was lying on its side, its interior light still on. Splashes of red wine bloodied everything where hurled bottles had disintegrated. The whole place looked hit by an explosion or a passing hurricane, vandalized in the time it had taken me to order dessert.
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