But now there were buildings for miles; there were red lights and sirens whirring; there were firemen with their long hoses chasing the fires down, and there was the clatter of the helicopters—those giant metal beetles with their hungry hidden eyes, their cameras aimed at the thick of the chaos, hungry for blood, for explosions, for the blackest of smoke.
Leo had finished his song and the people were clapping. “Encore, encore,” Psycho Barry chanted. And Leo pulled his pan flute from his coat pocket and launched into another song.
Valiant put a cigarette between his lips. He flicked the lighter with his thumb and the flame flickered and died in the breeze. He tried again and Gwen cupped the flame with her hands to block the wind as he lit the cigarette.
He coughed on the smoke. “Did I ever tell you my house burned down?” He was watching the horizon, and his voice was even, distant. “When I was a kid. Six years old. I don’t have any pictures from before that ’cause they all burned in the fire.
“It was electrical. A short. It happened in the night. My dad carried me from my bed, outside, and my mom and brother, we all watched the house burn. And after that, I started lighting things on fire. I lit things on fire just to watch them burn. Ants under a magnifying glass, leaves. And then bigger things. Textbooks and homework. And when I was in high school, I had these friends. We’d go out on weeknights. We’d go to the beach and get drunk, and then we’d torch things. Trash cans, chairs, sofas. Once it was a car. The car was on this hill and my friend set it on fire and released the parking brake. It rolled down the street in a blaze and off a cliff and landed in a canyon.
“The fire could’ve been worse than it was. It could have been a lot worse.”
Gwen took his cigarette, to take just a puff, and then she remembered. “I used to fantasize about fires,” she said, giving him back the cigarette without smoking it. “Sometimes I still do. About what it would be like to lose everything except what’s on your back. To start over. To know that a memory is really a memory, not because you have a photograph of it.”
A few of the fires were out now, and a fresh one had sprung up—a just-born star.
“Will you take one more?” said Valiant, lifting the camera from around his neck. “And then I’m going in. I’m tired.”
In the frame he was without pretense. He was the boy whose house was burning. His eyes wide, his face open to the heat and the light—yellow, orange-red, each flame with its blue secret center, its cool, disinterested heart. What had been home would be just a few bones, charred and fallen; but burning, it came to life, monstrous, ravenous. As if the home itself were done being a home, as if it were ready to move on, to lighten its load, to become ash, air, thin memories, thinner over time, until they were mere glimpses of once familiar feelings, triggered by the tone of a stranger’s voice, or by the scent of a passing woman’s lotion.
She gave the camera back to him.
Leo’s song was over and the small audience disbanded, leaving two girls standing, whispering. They were girls Gwen hadn’t seen before. One had hair down to her waist, and the other wore cutoffs nearly high enough to dance in. They were stealing glances at Valiant. A guy in a muscle shirt joined them. Gwen couldn’t hear what they were saying, but as they looked at Valiant, she knew they were seeing him as someone he wasn’t. His black, Brazilian skin, once exotic—adding a splash of color to the Cornell’s largely white resident population—made him dangerous now, as if, because of his skin color, he couldn’t be trusted. Who knew? He might torch his own building. The group was growing. There were five of them, talking, looking.
Valiant was frozen, watching them. Gwen took his arm and turned him toward the stairs. He was trembling. His face shone with perspiration.
“What is it?” he said. He ran his fingertips over his forehead, his cheek. “Is there something on my face?” He touched the sore on his neck. “Did the makeup come off? Is it showing?”
“No,” Gwen said.
“Is the wig too much? Or the bracelets?”
“You look gorgeous.”
Leo met Gwen and Valiant at the stairs. He stood before them, wind in his hair like a fan on a movie set and the sky behind him a scrim lit with an orange gel. He looked past them at the city—the city consuming itself, the city in need of redemption. After a dramatic pause, his eyes intense, unblinking, he spoke.
“I’ve had a vision. I know what I have to do.” And he turned from them, and headed down the stairwell and into the Cornell.
“Oh God,” said Valiant, happy again. “What now?”
Thirteen
IN THEIR APARTMENT, Gwen watched the news—the fires, the looters, the inferno the City of the Angels had become. The worst the country had seen since the Watts Riots of ’65. Tom Bradley, the mayor, had declared a state of emergency. Pete Wilson, the governor, was sending in the National Guard. And Bush insisted that anarchy would not be tolerated. Always the passive politician voice. Would not be tolerated by whom, she wanted to know. And there was a dusk-to-dawn curfew. So long as the sun was down, the citizens of Los Angeles had to stay in their homes.
“There it is. The fire I passed,” Gwen said. They were showing it, saying it was the biggest of the fires. The Arco station on La Cienega. And here it was, the fire, three feet by two now; the mass of flames, the thick smoke, the line of cars she’d been stuck in was contained in this small black box, so easy to watch. It had become entertainment. She saw flaming gasoline stream down the gutter and then ka-boom! A car exploded. It could have been me, she thought. But it wasn’t. She was still flesh and bones, curled up with Fifi on the sofa, drinking water from a mason jar. Cool and clear, glorious water.
“Leo,” she said. “Look.” For once the news mattered. At least to her it mattered.
At the kitchen table, he sat with his back to her, sketching.
“Hmm?” he said without turning around. He filled the purple water pipe (not bong) with the pot he’d bought that morning. He’d cashed the residual check and spent it on a quarter ounce. Carpe diem, he said when she mentioned the ring for his mother, back rent, and the Pay or Quit notice. We’re alive today. We still have a roof over our heads. How do we know Los Angeles is even going to be here tomorrow? And besides, he told her, the guy threw in some mushrooms, and hadn’t she wanted to take them again?
Communication was out of the question.
She picked up the remote to turn off the TV and found that she couldn’t. She was mesmerized. Here was an open gun battle, a Korean shop owner, or two of them, defending their store, their lives, firing at what looked like an all-black mob and people in that mob firing back at them. There were screams. The commentator said the police had fled the scene. She thought of Latasha Harlins, the fifteen-year-old black girl shot and killed by a Korean shop owner, a woman, just last year. The woman had thought she was stealing a bottle of juice, because she’d put it in her backpack, but the girl had died with the cash to pay for it in her hand. The woman claimed self-defense. She’d grabbed the girl’s backpack to get the juice and the girl had knocked her down. The woman had swung a stool at her, and the girl tossed the juice onto the counter. As she was leaving, the woman had shot her. Gwen remembered seeing the footage—security cameras showed her shooting the girl in the back of the head as she was trying to leave the store. The woman had gotten off with probation, community service, and a fine of five hundred dollars.
And now this. Gwen pressed the power and the TV went black.
She closed their windows to the sere April twilight, fastening the little metal latches that wouldn’t keep anyone out anyway. She left the long kitchen window open, so some of Leo’s smoke could escape, so her eyes might stop burning.
Their message machine was flashing. Two new messages. Before she hit play, she knew who had called.
Message one: Leo. Tesoro. Come va? I turn on the news and that city you live in. Pazzo. Why you don’t pick up the phone? Why you don’t call your mama? Porco canne. My son the bum.
Message
two: Gwen. It’s your father. You need to call me. I haven’t heard from you in weeks. I’m worried. Call me, you hear?
Gwen pressed erase all.
Her father. Every so often he’d surface from the law practice he lived for and give her a call. How was she, he’d want to know. He was thinking about her. And when she’d try to tell him how she was, she could hear him half listening. Uh-huh, he’d say, and she’d stop talking. She’d ask about him and half listen back. So what, exactly, was the point? Why did they bother?
She knew she wasn’t being fair. He cared about her as much, she supposed, as he could care about anyone.
She should be a good daughter. She should call him. Later.
“Leo, did you hear? Your mother’s message?”
“‘My son the bum.’ Yeah, I heard.”
She looked over his shoulder at his sketch. In it, a man was walking down the middle of a street, the buildings on both sides of him burning. She looked closer. The man in the sketch was naked—Leo had drawn in chest hair pointillist-style and doodled a dangling penis—and he held above him what looked to be a flag.
“Hand me the phone, will you?” He took a bong rip and dialed. “Ciao, Mama. Yeah, yeah. I’m fine. We’re fine. Hey, Mom. You’re watching the news? Well, keep watching. Yeah. You’ll see. I’m going to be on the TV. Yeah, on the news. Tomorrow.”
Gwen couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Don’t worry,” he was saying. “Yes. I’ll be safe. Aren’t I always safe?
“Va bene, va bene. Anche io te amo, Mama.” He hung up the phone and knocked the ash from the pipe, repacked it.
“What the hell, Leo. What the hell.” She wanted to smack his head, knock some sense into his brain. Or else she wanted to punch him, to give him a taste of the world—the one out here, the one she was living in.
A shadow darted across the table and Leo sprang into action. In a single swing of his arm he detached the DustBuster from its holster and vacuumed the roach before it reached the edge. Va-room. The great mouth of a god, inhaling. He held it up to the light and peered through the poop-splattered brown plastic at the roaches crawling up the sides and over each other. “Hello, my little friends,” he said, tapping the canister. “Don’t worry. Soon you will be free, you will be in roach heaven, in the promised land, in the Dumpster of your dreams, climbing mountains of pepperoni and chicken and cheese, spelunking caves of beans and tuna fish and Spam, swimming in oceans of spaghetti and meat sauce. Soon, my little friends, you will feast.”
Fifi leaped from the couch and yipped at the door. Gwen heard the knocks through her piercing bark. One, two, three, and four. It was Valiant. He always knocked four times, and besides, he was the only person who came to their door—apart from the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whom Leo, depending on how high he was, would invite inside, afternoons, for a captive audience.
She unbolted the lock. He brandished a smile, creasing the thin skin of his cheeks into tiny ripples. In the stark light of their hallway, it seemed to Gwen he had aged ten years. He had swapped the wig for the turban, and he was wearing a red smoking jacket over a pair of faded jeans that, in spite of the cinched belt, hung off his hips like pajama bottoms.
“Thank God,” she said, taking his hand. “You have to see.”
She led him to the table where Leo was hunched over the paper, sketching. Valiant pulled out a chair and sat down. He plucked the sketch from Leo’s hands, leaned back, contemplating, and crossed his legs. Shaking his head, saying nothing, he put the sketch back on the table. Leo took it back, glared at him, and started drawing again, and Valiant took a Camel from the box. In front of him, Gwen set the ashtray she had made of clay in the shape of a V, for Valiant and his visits. He lit the cigarette and she held her breath. More smoke.
Gwen walked the aisle between the stacks of books and videos into the living room, and lay down on the sofa. Isn’t that what you did when there was a fire? To avoid inhaling the carbon monoxide, you got close to the ground. She could feel the walls closing in. The ceiling was lower and, like the sky above it, laden with smoke. And on all sides of her there was the city—the city of people like her, hiding in their homes, afraid, which she’d never wanted to be. If something made her heart beat, she did it. That was her pact with herself. Not to back away from life. Not to cower, but to strike out. To go where she needed to, even if it wasn’t pretty—that place she needed to go—even if she had to move through its darkness and grit by feel.
Her heart sped. She was trapped, stuck in this apartment, or, to be exact, the building. She couldn’t leave the Cornell until morning.
She could feel her blood pulse in her head, in her hands, in her feet, as if she’d shrunk, as if her body—once her ticket to freedom, her instrument for expression—were now a cell.
If she was the inmate, who was the jailor? The child inside her? Her silence? Her fear?
The cell had a door, open a crack. Leo didn’t know yet. If she got an abortion he’d never know.
But then she’d never know either—never know what life her fear had deleted. It would haunt her, that choice, follow her everywhere, a skulking, hungry shadow, the way her mother’s abortion had followed her, waiting on those afternoons for her to open the bottle of wine and fall into her melancholia. By sundown there would be the choking sobs. Gwen remembered stroking her mother’s hair as she lay on the ground in the garden, between the Mexican primrose and the poppies. It was the only thing that helped, she’d told her. Feeling the earth beneath her. Gwen’s father hadn’t known about the abortion. It had happened years before they had been together, and her mother hadn’t thought it was something he needed to know. And he was at a loss to understand her pain. “Is it like a three-putt in golf?” he’d asked her mother once, confused, and she’d looked at him as if she had no idea who he was.
Her mother had always confided in her. That confidence, that trust, had been the cement, the bond between them. She wished she could talk to her now.
Gwen thought of the other option. Not adoption. She couldn’t live with that, either. Knowing her child was calling someone else “Mother”? A child she’d never know being raised by a stranger? That was out of the question.
The other option was leaving. She could leave Leo some afternoon when he was on his street corner. Or else she could leave tomorrow. Her heart hopped into her throat. She thought it might leap from her mouth like a toad.
Could she do it? She’d just pack her things into her car—everything she owned would easily fit—and she’d disappear. She’d raise this child on her own.
Some women did that.
“I don’t care what you think,” said Leo, packing another bowl.
“I haven’t said anything,” the Count said.
“But you’re thinking. You’re thinking you know.”
“All I know is this sketch looks dumb. A naked guy in the middle of a burning city? Ouch.”
“Holding a white flag. I’ll be naked, holding a white flag. The message is clear. Isn’t the message clear, Gwen?”
“What?” she said from the sofa.
“The message. A man naked with a white flag. What does that image say to you? It says vulnerability. Peace. Innocence. It’s Eden, for Christ’s sake. Starting over. A second chance at this society thing. This life on earth.”
“So that makes you . . . Adam?” the Count said.
“If that’s how you want to look at it. I’ll walk from here. Barefoot.”
“You would look kind of odd in only high-tops,” Gwen said.
“At dawn, when the curfew lifts. I’m going to walk into East L.A.”
“Naked, holding a white flag,” said the Count.
“And you’re going to walk beside me,” Leo told him. “You can photograph the whole thing.”
“Really? You know I’ve always wanted to photograph you naked.”
“So you’re game?”
“Leo, you’re out of your fucking mind.” The Count laughed—he was havin
g a good time with this. “You’re loaded.”
“All the more reason.” Leo tugged at the elastic tie in his ponytail, yanking out a few hairs as he freed the dark tangle. “I’m not confined by common sense.”
“Leo, you’re insane. You’ve been smoking too much pot.”
“Well, isn’t that the pot calling the kettle.” He lit the bowl, and the chamber filled with smoke. He took his finger off the carburetor and sucked the smoke down.
“Yeah,” said the Count. “I drink and smoke, but I don’t smoke like you. You don’t stop.”
Gwen was ready for the Count to leave. She loved him, but the arguing and the cigarette smoke were making her queasy. She turned toward the back of the sofa, closed her eyes, and tried to drift. It was here where she’d first lain beside Leo, where he’d first held her in his arms and told her he didn’t know how it was possible—they had just met the day before—but he loved her. It was here she’d looked into his eyes and known she loved him back.
Fifi jumped onto the sofa and turned in a small circle until she settled down on Gwen’s feet. Gwen opened her eyes, the smoke making them burn and water. The apartment was bleary. When it had been his and she was a visitor, it was different. Maybe she was romanticizing things, but she thought it was. There weren’t the piles of debris to negotiate. The room was clean and the windows were open. Even Fifi had looked presentable. Her hair had been short and white—not the bedraggled, matted gray it was now. She’d even had pink satin bows on her ears. That first afternoon, Leo had been expecting Gwen’s visit, and he’d had roses on the coffee table, opera on the phonograph.
And there’d been the painting, the one above the sofa. The one she’d taken her time looking at. There were note cards taped to the wall around it now, but it was still there, in its gilt frame, with its scene, its inkling of a story. Impression of a woman in a white dress, under a broad white hat, heading toward the mottled gray-blue lake in the distance, toward the sky of the same color, impression of a man in a dark suit and a bowler hat coming from that lake, passing her, almost. They were close, the man and the woman, his hat skimmed her parasol, and yet each faced the direction in which they were, respectively, headed, as if their lives would have them meet, and then continue on their separate ways.
Further Out Than You Thought Page 10
