Martell stopped her. “I’ve heard enough.”
Sandra looked like she’d been slapped. Then her face melted into this pity. She reached her hand across the table and stroked his arm like he was the only survivor of a car wreck. “Jack. If we don’t do this together, it’s never going to work. Remember? The imprinting? If you don’t experience this like I experienced it, then it’s just random.”
He remembered the books. He remembered that he was supposed to get turned on by this. To relive the excitement of Sandra’s first date with this boy as though it was their date. Supposed to keep the relationship fresh.
“You fucked him? Really? That quickly?”
She got up from the table. “Fine.”
Martell talked to his plate. “I’m not shaming you. I’m just surprised.”
Sandra kissed him. “I love you. You are my love.”
His head, spinning.
She walked out of the kitchen. Martell dumped his waffles down the drain.
He had been so close to convincing himself he had nothing to do with Rodriguez, but now it was more a question of why than if. Why would he have killed this guy? Why would he have killed anyone?
One time, about a year prior, Martell was dropping Sandra off at the airport, so she could fly to her mother’s for Christmas. When he pulled up to the drop off, he was nearly sideswiped by a limousine. He threw his hands in the air and made a face. The limo screeched to a halt, the passenger door opened, and the limo driver got out. He walked over to Martell’s car, made the “roll down your window” motion, and when Martell complied, the guy spit all over his shirt.
If he was going to kill someone, he reasoned, he would’ve killed that guy. No question.
The Tavern was quiet. Thick rimmed glasses reflecting laptop light. Gentle sips of hot coffee. Music Martell didn’t quite recognize. He ordered a coffee from a smiling woman and sat at a table. He blinked and when he opened his eyes he saw all the patrons as Russian nesting dolls. The couple that sat laughing and pointing at Cosmopolitan were very small dolls, freshly painted, intricate swirls and patterns. The quiet man and woman, each of them engrossed in the screens of their Macbooks, he saw them as slightly bigger dolls, each with a few chips, a few more layers. And him, sitting there, suddenly he felt big, like he could take up the entire coffee shop.
He missed his wife. Or rather, he missed a picture of his wife that he kept in his mind. Maybe that was the person he loved. There’s a possibility, he reasoned, that she never existed.
But he knew that wasn’t true.
Quick memories: the Grand Canyon, Roswell, San Diego.
He went to the bathroom. There was a small jar full of free condoms sitting on the lid of the toilet. He took one and washed his hands.
Threw his coffee in the trash. He walked around the backside of the counter and disappeared into the kitchen. There, on the rack of aprons, was a full body hanging, deflated, open in the front.
He saw red everywhere. The red of the microwave clock sitting on the breakroom counter. The red of some barista’s cellphone, blinking from her purse. Until there was nothing but red.
Martell picked the skin off the rack and stepped inside.
He fixed himself a double espresso and went to work. Customers came in for the lunch rush. He’d never made coffee before, but there he went: milk under the steamer, pumps of syrup in paper cups, tips in the tip jar.
Molly flirted with him throughout the day. Martell had known her for about three months and could feel that he was close to fucking her. Their talk consisted mostly of double-entendres. She answered most of her texts with a winky face. He was close.
He finished up his shift and waved goodbye to Molly. He checked his phone for texts and Facebook messages.
There was one from Sandra. He answered her back and put the phone in his pocket.
He took the bus home and waved hello to his roommates and flicked on the TV. He lamented the state of the world. He hated the stupid shows and the stupid commercials. He watched the news and hated every stupid opinion. He smoked a bowl and watched cartoons. He laughed with his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend. They were still tripping from the acid they ate the night before. They told stories of seeing skulls everywhere, of the vividness of the trees, and for a moment he was tempted to eat the last tab, waiting for him in the freezer. But instead he turned on his computer. He tweeted and downloaded music. He worked on a paper for his English class. He got on Facebook and looked at his ex-girlfriend’s changed relationship status and felt a deep jealousy overwhelm him.
He shut the computer down and texted Sandra. She answered back right away.
They met up in the park. They sat on the steps of an empty outdoor ampitheater. He felt comfortable around her. He talked about how frightening it would be if sharks had arms and legs and could breathe oxygen. He told her about his failed relationship and she listened carefully and gave him good advice. He liked being around her, a lot.
But he kind of didn’t want to have sex with her.
They went to a bar and she bought her own drinks. He asked about her husband.
“What happens after you and I . . . you know?”
“Well,” she said. “What will happen, is that I’ll go home, and tell him exactly what happened. There’s a process called imprinting. We both relive the experience you and I have, and our love gets stronger through that process.”
Martell thought that was a strange idea, but he nodded his head and sipped his beer.
As the night went on, the alcohol made them both horny. He didn’t want to take her back to his place again, and he also didn’t like the idea of fucking in a car. He wanted a nice bed away from his roommates.
So, she took him back to her place.
“Won’t your husband be home?”
“We’re not cheating,” she said. “He needs to be a part of this.”
The whole way there, Martell felt strange. He remembered, distantly, plunging a knife deep into someone’s neck. It was mostly shapes and colors, but the sensation of the knife penetrating the skin was very clear in his mind. But he couldn’t remember who it was he’d killed or why.
They walked into the living room and her husband was sitting on the couch. He didn’t say a word to them. Sandra gave a weak hello and set her keys on the counter. Then they went into the bedroom.
His pants were gone, she was on her knees. Then he was slipping on the free condom from the Tavern. Then she was looking up at him, saying, “You work so hard for me.”
He couldn’t finish. He took the condom off and she put him back in her mouth. He closed his eyes and concentrated. He gripped the sides of her head. He couldn’t tell if she liked it, but she didn’t stop him.
When he was done he put his clothes on and walked out into the living room. The husband was still sitting on the couch. He was looking down at his hands.
Martell looked closer and could see that the guy was holding a keychain, a green alien with big sunglasses.
He ran his hand through his hair and walked out the door, still without saying a word.
He stumbled down the steps, feeling the alcohol take hold. Everything spinning. The husband looking down at his hands. He got to the curb, threw open their garbage bin, and hurled. He tasted beer.
Jack Martell rested his arms on the bin. Sweet trash smell making him gag. And from the bottom of the bin, he saw a bouquet of flowers with a red card attached. He focused on the card, and kept focusing, until all he could see was red.
POPULATION: 2
CODY GOODFELLOW
Driving between Death Valley and the Mojave Desert at the expected pace of as quickly as one can get through a desert in a car, you would probably never notice the signpost somewhere shortly after Mile Marker 89 for “AGUA PERDIDO, POP. 1; NO SERVICES; NO SALESMEN.” And if you had stopped to consider the official-looking metallic flake green sign posted at the turnoff beside a formidable gate blocking a warped, half-buried two-lane road winding off into the scrub-
encrusted dunes, you would have thought it some twisted hermit’s address, or a tired road crew’s joke, or the last monument to a ghost town so unremarkable that it didn’t even show up on geological survey maps. And you would have returned to the highway—perhaps after stealing the sign, as three unscrupulous motorists had—because no one had ever jumped the gate and followed the road to its terminus since Dora Moss set up residence there.
Had a motorist ever got past the gate and reached the streets of Agua Perdido, he would have found the diner packed to capacity with its doors locked, the beaming patrons teasing the hungry traveler with their forever unfinished plastic breakfasts. The sheriff’s deputies, playing a hand of cribbage in their adobe jailhouse, would have found the game too gripping to answer their door. The town drunk in the gutter out front of the hotel wouldn’t stir from his dreamy doze if you dashed Chivas Regal in his face. Had anyone ever stopped at Agua Perdido, they might have figured it for a mock-up town awaiting an H-bomb test and peeled out for the highway with all due speed. But no one ever had, which was just as well with Dora Moss, who was never at home with people who walked and talked.
In her demeanor, if not in her gender or outward appearance, Dora Moss would handily meet most peoples’ expectations of a twisted hermit.When she first discovered the defunct water-stop and filling station on a seventy year-old map, Dora Moss knew she had found a home. A discarded time capsule of everything good and useful that human beings had made, it was all the modern society as she could stand. She set up housekeeping in the old hotel, her kitchen in the diner, her office and studio in the jail, and her garage and tool shed in the gas station. The loneliness of the arrangement suited Dora Moss’s fervent misanthropy, but its blankness soon came to violate her aesthetic sensibilities. Thus, it was out of a need to decorate and not any neurotic longing for company, that Dora Moss populated the town with mannequins.
She ordered thirty of them from a factory outlet in North Hollywood that specialized in “normal” people—fat, old, ethnic and, to custom specifications, mundanely or monstrously ugly. Their faces were picked out of old newspapers, mugshot books and movie magazines. The hotel manager was modeled on Ben Turpin; Mayor Mudd was modeled on Sunny Jim Rolph, while Friar Buck owed his plug-ugly mug to Rondo Hattan. She costumed them from local thrift shops, but the sheriff’s and deputies’s uniforms had to come from a vintage police outfitter in San Bernardino. A few props here and there fleshed out the illusion of a picture-postcard Western town of the late 1930’s, a petrified oasis filled with people who didn’t care if the world outside was still there, just like Dora Moss.
So she was caught completely flat-footed on the night the Traveling Salesman came to town.
Dora Moss had chicken-fried steak with white gravy and eggs over easy for dinner at her usual booth in the diner. The jukebox noisily swapped platters, from “Peg O’ My Heart” by Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats to “Delicado” by the Three Suns. Pausing between bites, she would freeze and blend into the diorama she had built, merging with the static past, embracing eternity. Reedy, cross-eyed Norbert Prawn, the manager of the Dollhouse Hotel, forever passing the salt to Sheriff Fudd. Dottie the senior waitress laughing at a joke told by Mike the Milkman—or was she gasping in shock at the good-natured goosing Mayor Mudd had just given her in the moment his blue-haired battleaxe wife was scolding Timmy the simple busboy for spilling her coffee? Dora Moss finished her meal with the certain knowledge that she could live here happily until the day she died and the mummifying desert wind made her one with her mannequin subjects.
Someday the press would get wind of Agua Perdido and make another roadside sideshow out of her hermitage. Her town would be ruined someday by tourists curious to enjoy the haunting solitude they destroyed with their RVs and motocross bikes. But for now, she floated in a moment that had lasted undisturbed for two years, and might as well go on forever.
She tipped her spare change into Dottie’s apron as she headed for the door. She hated carrying coinage around, and always forgot where she put it around the house. Dottie was as good a piggy bank as one could ask for. Outside, a buttery harvest moon rolled across a cloudless sea of starry ink. The desert at night had shown Dora how primitive peoples could have believed it was a chariot, and children accepted that it was a wheel of cheese. She pinched a cigarette from the overall bib pocket of Snuffy, the oldest of the three Old Coots on their rocking chairs in front of the general store, struck a kitchen match off his blackened, cauliflower nose. What she saw by its light made her blow it out with a sharp breath of shock.
“Aren’t you a bit old to be playing with dolls, ma’am?”
The man standing before her was wearing the bottle-green sharkskin suit she’d dressed Dino the town drunk in a few weeks ago. She’d doused the mannequin in gin every once in a while for effect and because sometimes she hated drinking alone. The suit stank, and looked like a month in a gutter in Death Valley. But the man in it wasn’t Dino, or any other mannequin.
“Where did you get that outfit?” A foolish question, the only thing about the stranger that she did know.
He looked up at the sky and let the moon make a show of his big piano-key teeth. “I traded a drunk for it.”
“Those are my clothes! What the hell did you take them off my drunk for? What do you think this is?”
“It was a fair transaction, make no mistake. He was most eager to trade.”
“Trade? No, I don’t even want to know. Get the hell off my property right now.”
“You own this town?” Somehow, his smile got even bigger. “Well, gee, what a stroke. You’re just the person I want to talk to, because this kind of offer has to go straight to the top. You think for a second about what we’re talking about. Okay, where can a fella get a good slice of pie in these parts?”
“There’s nothing for you here.”
“What about that diner there?” He came close and sniffed her, sucking up air like he usually had to pay for it. “You had the steak and eggs. Do they have good white gravy? You’ve gotta love a town, makes good, lumpy gravy. Shows they’ve got heart, and don’t skimp on the little things.”
“The gravy is made out of naugahyde. Would you please get the hell out of here?” Dora pressed her fists to her ears and walked around the pitch-man in the purloined wino-suit, telling herself if she could get inside the hotel, the intruder would lose interest and leave, and everything would freeze again. If she had to, she could get the shotgun in her closet, but would she be killing in self-defense, or in defense of her eccentricity? Skeleton key in hand, Dora approached the lobby door of the hotel, then leapt back as a pale phantom staggered out of the shadows behind the porch glider. Gibbering and hooting exultantly, it tottered down the steps into the street. The moonlight turned the naked lunatic into an alabaster satyr, illuminating visible waves of gin fumes. Dino the town drunk spun in clumsy circles, showing off his flabby nakedness, showing parts she hadn’t ordered from the mannequin company.
“I’m alive! AAAHAHAHAHA! I’m alive! Oh, ’scuse me, Missus. Which way to the saloon?”
Dora Moss locked the door behind her and all the doors between the lobby and the master bedroom of her suite on the third floor of the Dollhouse. She went to sleep cradling her shotgun.
Dora Moss was a late sleeper, but a light one. When she awoke to the shrieking and laughter from the street at the crack of dawn, she wondered where she was. Then it sank in: this was her suite on the top floor of the Dollhouse Hotel, in her town, and somebody was wrecking it.
She bundled up in her housecoat and slippers before she peered out the window. What she saw made her sure she would wake up for real now, and wherever she found herself, it would be more sane, more acceptable than here.
The whole town was out in the streets, shaking and swinging like Times Square on an ergot-trip. The jukebox had been pushed out onto the sidewalk in front of the diner to spray Bert Kaempfert’s Swinging Safari and whip the crowd into a spastic muzak frenzy. The mayor, naked as a jaybir
d, purple with exertion and hickies, promenaded his wife on one arm and his secretary on the other, jealousy suspended for the festival day.
Dottie paraded out of the diner laden with plates with something like chocolate pudding with little flags and paper umbrellas stuck in them. She brought them to Friar Buck, who squatted on the hood of Dora’s pickup truck, with his robe rucked up about his waist, his hairy buttocks hovering over her Franklin Mint Limited Edition Memorial Serving Platter of the Challenger Disaster. As he stuffed his face with the suspicious dessert, flags and umbrellas and all, a long chocolate tail snaked from his backside and fell in neat, steamy coils on the plate, which Dottie grabbed and brought back to the kitchen.
Sheriff Fudd and his deputies chased skirts like the amorous automata of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, only they caught theirs. A breathlessly giggling Fudd bent Minnie the Happy Housewife over the bus bench, while she pulled Mike the Milkman towards her by his belt and ripped the buttons off his white shirt with her teeth.
“Top of the morning, Miss Moss!” Sheriff Fudd bellowed. “Ain’t it a glorious day to be alive?”
Dora Moss raced downstairs with her shotgun held like a club. She had been prepared to run off an intruder in her town, but what to do with this? Life had invaded her diorama; how could she drive it out?
Norbert was waiting at the door, a ribbon of scrip in one hand trailing back to the antique adding machine in his office. His chinless, thumb-shaped face beamed with an unacceptable newborn’s delight.
“You ain’t fixin’ to shoot anyone with that thing, are you, Miss Moss? Sure would put a damper on the birthday party.”
Dora leveled the shotgun on his face. “You stop living, damn you! Be a goddamned piece of wood like you’ve always been, or I’ll blow you to matchsticks!” His unspeakable grin only widened, full of smug knowing that he could swallow buckshot and keep on smiling, that he was a symptom of her long-overdue nervous collapse, and could never die.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 4
