A Perfect Universe

by Scott O'Connor

  We called a rehearsal in Dido’s garage, just like the old days, and everyone drank and smoked and wailed away, but I kept jumping every time Dido crashed the cymbals, to the point where I was literally freaking out after an overly long drum fill and had to leave the garage to catch my breath.

  Dido followed me, pissed. I was blowing our chance. We shouted back and forth while the other guys hung in the doorway and smoked and made half-assed attempts to intervene. A couple of the neighbors stopped watering the scrub brush in their front yards to watch. It was a real scene. You fucking this, you fucking that. You’ve always, you’ve never, blah blah blah. Dido started to run out of gas. I don’t think he expected me to push back so hard. I’ve never been much of a fighter, but it felt good to yell, so I shouted until I was the only one shouting. I didn’t care who heard—the neighbors, Dido’s mom back in the house. I just kept screaming at him that I couldn’t take the noise anymore, throwing up my hands and limping back to my car and shouting that we were a shitty band, we’d always been a shitty band, and three days pinned under the concrete hadn’t changed that.

  * * *

  I believed you. That’s what I said on the stretcher, on the way out of the pile. The last thing the woman had said through the megaphone, right before they got me to the ambulance, was I told you we were coming, baby. And I didn’t know if she could hear me or not, but I said, I believed you.

  * * *

  I still have trouble sleeping. I lie in bed for a few hours and then get up and walk the hills above my apartment, over around the reservoir. I come back dragging, out of breath, legs aching, but still not exhausted enough to sleep, or at least to sleep in the way I want to, without those dreams of Dodgers games and bars and concerts, Leticia Hull telling me that I’m the only one who understands.

  * * *

  A couple of the First Street cops came by my apartment. One black, one white. They were in civilian clothes and I couldn’t remember their names. I’ve been having trouble with names. We stood in the living room. I offered to make some coffee, but they passed.

  The black cop said there’d been a complaint. Apparently I’ve been calling Eva in the middle of the night, and when she answers I scream into the phone. I don’t say anything, I just scream. When she stopped picking up, I started screaming into her voice mail.

  He played me the recordings. It sure sounded like my voice. After a minute or so, he turned it off. The white cop stood by the door and looked at his shoes.

  The black cop said that they’d talked her out of filing a restraining order, convinced her not to speak to the news. I thanked him and told him that it wouldn’t happen again. I’d been having trouble sleeping, I said, but my doctor prescribed something and it wouldn’t be a problem anymore.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. I was embarrassed that he had to deal with this, with me.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Every day I wake up and think how lucky I am to be alive.”

  * * *

  The kindness of strangers has been overwhelming. The firefighters and police and rescue workers took up a collection to pay my medical bills, but the hospital waived them anyway. People from all over the world sent cards and letters, CDs and books. I received over a hundred Bibles. A car dealer in St. Louis sent me a brand-new Cadillac.

  After I got out of the hospital, I tried to go back to work, but the phone company promoted me to an office job and I had trouble sitting still. I’ve had other opportunities, offers to do ads for everything from survival-themed workout videos to a line of fashion eyepatches, but I turned them all down. I look at the interviews with the ghostwriter as my real job now. So when she says that I look tired, that we can take a break for a few days if I’m not feeling up to it, I tell her that I’m fine, that I need to do this. It’s good therapy.

  I wonder what she knows. If she’s talked to the police, or to Eva. She does a lot of research. Sometimes she brings up things about my life that I’ve forgotten.

  I ask her about the woman with the megaphone. She says that she hasn’t identified her yet. She wasn’t sure that the woman was important to the story. I tell her that I was just curious, because she keeps showing up on the footage.

  “We can ask one of the TV reporters,” she says. “They might have gotten her name.”

  * * *

  The whirlpool’s the best part of rehab. The stretching and weight training are brutal, but I like to sit in the big plastic tub and close my eye, stretch out my arms and legs and sink into the heat.

  I heave out a lungful of water and my trainer pulls his face from mine and rolls me onto my side. I heave some more and he pounds me on the back. My chest hurts from where he’s been pushing on it. I open my eye. There’s a circle of other trainers and patients standing over us.

  “Can you breathe?” my trainer asks.

  I nod, but can’t stop coughing long enough to speak.

  “You must have slipped and gone under,” he says.

  I nod, coughing, finally clearing my lungs. “Thank you,” I say. “I must have slipped.”

  * * *

  Cynthia Lopez meets me in the lobby of the TV studio. When we enter the newsroom, all of the reporters and newscasters are standing in the aisles between their desks, waiting for something. I’m afraid that it might be a birthday or retirement party, and I start to apologize for interrupting, but then they all applaud. For me.

  She leads me through the crowd. One of the reporters has a copy of the newspaper where I was on the front page, lying on the stretcher, surrounded by firefighters and rescue workers, holding my arm up. The headline says, Sole Survivor. The reporter asks me to autograph it for his daughter.

  We get to Cynthia Lopez’s desk and she opens a spreadsheet on her computer. “I didn’t know who she was. I assumed she was a city official. She had the list of the missing. She had a megaphone.” She finds the entry and clicks the mouse. An interview transcription comes up on the screen.

  “We only spoke for a second,” Cynthia Lopez says. “She said she had to get back to work. Her name is Margaret Hamilton.”

  Cynthia Lopez reads to me from the screen, as if without my eye I’ve somehow lost that ability, too.

  CL: Is that a current list of the missing?

  MH: Unless they’ve pulled somebody out that I don’t know about.

  CL: Are you with the mayor’s office? Is that where I can get an updated list?

  MH: I’m not with the mayor.

  CL: Are you from the hospital?

  MH: I work at the post office on Vine and Selma in Hollywood.

  CL: I’m sorry, then, I don’t—

  MH: I saw it on TV and came down.

  CL: Came down why?

  MH: Because there are people in there, honey. There are still people in there.

  Hamilton, Margaret Anne. Widow of George, mother of Linda and Davis, grandmother of Craig and Tamara and George III. Born forty-six years ago in the same hospital I was taken to. Employee of the United States Postal Service for twenty-one years. Member of the Bethany Baptist Church on Eighth Street. Resident of the 2900 block of South St. Andrews Place.

  I turn off the library computer. It’s late afternoon. There are high school kids at all the other tables, sitting close together, huddled almost, ignoring their homework to look at me. The man with the eyepatch, the scars. Whispering, snickering. I stand and snarl, show my teeth. This is what they want. I move closer, dragging my leg. I lift the eyepatch.

  The librarian asks me to leave, but I’m only giving them what they want.

  * * *

  The cops are back. This time it’s the ghostwriter who’s complaining about my calls. She’s had to get her number changed.

  The black cop puts his hand on my shoulder. It’s not the same kind of touch I get from strangers asking, What’s it like? It’s a firm grip, a warning. It feels good. It makes me want to keep calling the ghostwriter, calling Eva, anyone, just so he’ll come back.

  “Stay off the phone,” he says
, turning to the door, and I feel like shouting at him, swinging at him, so he’ll grab me again.

  * * *

  I couldn’t sleep and so I walked the hills and around the reservoir and then farther into the city, ending up at her building just as the sun started to rise.

  Her voice through the call box sounds just like her voice through the megaphone. Slightly over-amplified, metal-tinged, but deep and rich and warm. I have to stop myself from pressing the buzzer another time, just to hear it again.

  She opens the door and recognizes me immediately.

  “Oh my goodness,” she says. “You look worse than when they pulled you out.”

  She looks older than I imagined. Uncoiled white strands stand up spring-like from the bun of her hair. There are gray puffs of skin under her eyes. Years of worry or lack of sleep. She’s dressed in her postal uniform, getting ready for work.

  “Can you help me?” I ask.

  “Can I—”

  She reaches up to my face. I close my eye and I can see her pacing on the news videos, her back to the camera. I close my eye and see nothing, just the darkness under the pile, waiting for her voice.

  “Please,” I say.

  She’s shaking, but her hand feels warm on my cheek. “Hold on, baby,” she says. “You hear me? You hold on. We’re going to get you out of there.”

  It Was Over So Quickly, Doug

  So she’s standing at the counter and she orders a tall half-caf. She’s blonde, well-dressed. Business suit, nice shoes. She’s got a phone bud in her ear and the cord down to the phone actually goes through her hoop earring, which means she put her jewelry on around the phone, got dressed around the phone, which probably tells you all you need to know. She’s talking to her assistant or somebody on the other end of the call and ordering from me at the same time, and she’s got this attitude, you know? Like I’m just some girl at the coffee shop who should just do whatever and not mind that she is so unbelievably rude for talking on the phone while she’s ordering a cup of coffee from another real live human being.

  It had already been that kind of morning, Doug. You remember. The markets were running off the fucking rails and I had a million messages from clients who all needed to be talked down from the ledge, so I really didn’t need the hostility. I can’t stand these coffee shop girls with chips on their shoulders because they’re making five bucks an hour but they’re still hipper than you. Than thou. It’s like: get me my goddamn cup of coffee now, Nose Ring.

  I’m already late, and the business lady was agitated, and the coffee chick had an attitude, and I’m checking the time and thinking, Ladies, can’t we all be pals and get this transaction done, because I’ve got a script meeting on the other side of the hill in half an hour.

  I go over to the urn, start to pour her coffee. And she says into her phone, “Hold on, Doug—holdonholdonholdon,” like really fast, and then she says to me, “Waitasecond—let’s make this something else, all right? I’ve changed my mind.” I have to tell myself, Jessie, do not spit in this woman’s coffee. I have to take an actual moment to stop myself. So I turn back to her, and raise my eyebrow, waiting, like, All right, what can I do for you now?

  I just wanted something sweet, Doug. I didn’t want regular coffee. It tears up my stomach. Even half-regular. I knew this was going to be a bitch of a day and I wanted something sweet, so I changed my mind.

  So now the business lady is thinking and the coffee chick is glaring, and I just want to order, you know? Can we do without the drama? I’ve got somewhere to be.

  She’s staring at the menu up on the wall, twisting her mouth as she thinks, and then she says, “Let’s make it a grande chai latte, half soy, half skim.” Like, enough with the halves already. She sees the half-caf in my hand—the one I just poured, for her—and she says, “Hold on a second, Doug,” into the phone cord, and then she waves her hand at me and points over at the counter by the urn, and says, “Just put that there. For someone else. Someone else will order that.” In that voice. Like, excuse me? Like, I don’t know how to do my job? And this has been such a shitty morning so far that it’s all I can do to put the half-caf down on the counter and not throw it in her lipsticked face.

  As if I’ve just destroyed her whole little world by changing my mind. God forbid she should take orders from someone without a tattoo. She looked at me as if that coffee was such a waste. Like there were thousands of little Chinese kids going without half-cafs this morning because I decided to order something that cost four times as much. Jesus, Doug. And the guy behind me, some film school wannabe with a goatee and a black knit cap and the whole nine yards, he sighs. He sighs like this is such a burden to him, like I’ve just increased his time in line by such a monumental amount that he’s going to be late for his catering job or his shift at Kinko’s or wherever the hell he’s off to. And that girl behind the counter sees him sigh, and then she looks at me and raises her eyebrow, like, See? See how much trouble you’re causing? I mean, Screw you, right, Doug? Screw you, Goatee Guy, and screw you, Nose Ring.

  Nobody was going to budge, not the business lady or the coffee chick. A real standoff. So I think, I’m not gonna wait any longer, I’m just gonna stop at the coffee place near the studio. And just as I step out of line, the coffee chick raises her eyebrow at me. You know what I’m saying? Like, now we’re having a little private moment. And she’s kinda cute, despite the nose ring. So I get back in line, intrigued, and that’s when the window shatters.

  —just collapsed, really. Just, like, smashed and fell into the store like a sheet of water. Like a crashing wave. Crrisshhhh. It was like, crrisshhhh-shishhhhhh. I dropped the coffee I had just made for her. The first one, the half-caf. Dropped it right on the counter, and I guess it must have splashed up.

  —and well, of course, I screamed. What am I, not human? I screamed because that bitch just threw a full cup of coffee at me and the front window just shattered and there was a car out at the curb shooting into the coffee shop, Doug.

  I covered my head and hit the ground. I heard the shots before the window shattered, so I knew what had happened. Maybe a TEC-9. Or a Glock. Probably a Glock. I know what goes down up here, the gangs and shit. Believe me. I’ve got a script about it. L.A. gangs in the Valley. It’s actually about these kids in the Valley who get so bored being Valley kids that they join a gang. But it’s—look, I know, trust me, I’ve done the research. These gangbangers don’t care if it’s eight forty-five in the morning. They don’t care that you’re at a coffee shop in North Hollywood and not on a street corner in Watts. So I covered my head and hit the ground. I wasn’t going out like that. No way. This motherfucker was not going out like that.

  I kind of stick my head up a little, and look over the top of the counter, and this kid with a gun just jumps right through the huge hole where the window used to be and runs into the store. He was young—

  —maybe fifteen, thirty, eighty-five—how could I tell, Doug? Mexican, maybe? White?

  Classic gangbanger. I know the type, I’m telling you.

  And all the customers in line had like, hit the deck, so he’s running through the store hurdling bodies and he points his gun back at the car by the curb and starts shooting at them through the hole where the window was.

  —running right at me, with this gun that he’s shooting back over his shoulder. And he says, “Get the fuck out the way, lady”—right, Doug—“out the way,” not “out of the way”—and then I realized I was the only person in the coffee shop still standing up.

  I thought, Oh shit—that dude is gonna pop a cap in the business lady’s ass.

  She was the only one still standing. The kid with the gun was running right at her. I wanted to yell over the counter, like, “Get out of the way, you idiot!” You know? “Get out of the way!” But whoever was in the car was shooting into the store and the kid was shooting outside and you couldn’t hear anything except the gunshots and the screaming. So she just stood there, this big coffee stain on the front of her blou
se, holding her phone out like a shield.

  “Get out the way, lady!” he’s yelling. “Get out the motherfucking way!” Doug, what was I supposed to do?

  The gangbanger plowed right into her. And they both go down onto the floor in this tangle of arms and legs, and he’s trying to get up and away but the business lady’s caught in her phone cord—

  —and she will not let that goddamned phone go, so she goes back up with him, like, they’re tied together at this point—

  “Let go,” I said. “Let go!” Doug, it was all I could think to say.

  The business lady is yelling at him, and the gangbanger grabs her by the front of the shirt, really hard, really rough, and kind of holds her out at arm’s length, and, just, without—he doesn’t even think twice—he just—

  He just pointed the gun at her head—

  Doug, what else could I say?

  Pow.

  He was just a kid, but he had the gun at her head and then he did it.

  Doug?

  Then the gangbanger was loose and he ran out the back door and the car tore after him. I think they were still shooting. It was hard to tell, my ears were ringing. It was like, Fuck! Did I just see this?

  She didn’t fall. She just stood there, with her head like that. And she was holding her phone up, out in front of her, like, triumphant. Like she had won—she still had it. The cord was still attached, and the bud was still in her ear. Her mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out.

  They were all staring at me like I had two heads, Doug. I thought, Why are these people staring at me? Why doesn’t somebody chase that guy with the gun? Why doesn’t somebody do something?

  I got on my phone and called Pat at the studio to tell him what the fuck I had just seen. I figured somebody else was calling the cops.

  And there was this pride there, on her face. Even from back behind the counter I could see it. This strength in her body. Like she wasn’t going to fall. She was just not going to do it. And then she says—