He pushed some dirt over the test with the toe of his boot. “Poor girl,” he said. Between his sensitive nose and sour stomach, we both knew the next nine months plus the eighteen to twenty-two years after that would wreak some manner of havoc.
I said I was sorry because it seemed like the right thing to say. I put the coffee cup on the ground because the trash bin inside was consumed by flames.
Kyle took my hand. We had to get out of there before the cops showed up to the fire and started checking IDs. He guided me to the car and opened my door. He bought half a dozen roses at the Kroger and laid them between us on the dash.
“Let’s get back to the Rio Grande,” Kyle said. He wanted to avoid Houston, which is sort of like wanting to avoid a talk from your mama when you come home with a Keno addict. I tipped my seat back and dug into sleep like sleep owed me an explanation. Kyle skimmed Houston on the tollway and headed for the coast, hitting cities with names like what you’d find across the spines on your grandma’s bookshelf. Blessing. Point Comfort. Sugar Land. Victoria.
It’s how we ended up in the Days Inn in Corpus. Kyle examined a road map in his underpants while I took the bucket to the ice machine. A crowd of tourists were standing in the laundry room. They were speaking languages.
A young woman touched my ice bucket. “We are looking for where Selena was murdered,” she said.
I said I didn’t know what she meant. “Selena the Tejano star,” the woman said. “Fifteen years ago at this very Days Inn. I am disappointed in you,” she said. One of the women was leaned up against the ice machine. She had her face pressed into her hands and her hands were pressed into the ice machine.
“They won’t tell us where,” the young woman said. “They changed the numbers on the doors so we won’t find out.”
I said I didn’t know.
She pulled me close. “There are secrets at this Days Inn,” she said.
I said that there were secrets at every Days Inn. The ice machine was broken and the women wailed for unrelated reasons.
“Our angel,” one woman said. She was holding a gilt-framed photograph of Selena singing on stage. She did look like an angel. I wanted to lie down on the laundry room floor.
In the room, Kyle was eating a waffle in the shape of Texas. I stood in the open doorway.
“The first ingredient is corn syrup,” he said. He was a shadow in the back of the long room. He said, “The second ingredient is high fructose corn syrup.”
I came in and locked the door. He was wearing his lucky buttoned shirt and a clean pair of pants. He had his shaving kit out on the table. The blade was drying and his face was shorn and cold. I told him he looked like he was getting ready for a funeral.
They say that hotel room floors have the e. coli but I lay down anyway. Kyle came and settled near me. When he pressed his cheek against my belly I could feel the machinations of his jaw grinding tooth on tooth. I said, These are the fables I will tell our child.
SEXTAPE
SIMON LOGAN
She rings the bell on Voodoo’s door and as she waits for him to answer she fingers the videotape in her bag and wonders if this is the worst thing she has ever done.
“You look like shit, Jess. What the hell time is it?” he says when he answers. He ties the cord on his robe and sweeps back sleep-ruffled hair from his forehead. “Come in.”
His apartment is almost as small as hers, everything crammed into a single living space as if it were the leftovers of some larger, more comfortable home. In the glow from his computer monitor he pushes aside a stack of trashy magazines to make room for them both on the sofa. He lights a cigarette and takes a drag.
“So what have you got?”
She hands him the tape.
“Bentley,” she says, taking the cigarette from him as he gets up and feeds the cassette into one of the VCR decks stacked up on his desk.
“Jade or Ludwig?”
She sucks on the cigarette and lets the images which flicker into life on the TV screen answer for her. Shaky shots of a mansion, moving through dark bushes towards it, towards a ground floor window. The camera takes a moment to adjust to the change in brightness. When it settles down a woman is visible in the room beyond the window, laid out on a table. Portable lights are gathered around her and a man in a surgical smock leans over her.
“You got onto the grounds of her house,” Voodoo says admiringly without looking away from the screen. “What am I looking at?”
“A private abortion,” she tells him.
Voodoo’s mouth drops open a touch.
“How the fuck did you . . . ?”
“So do you want it or not?” she asks. On the TV the surgeon walks away from the operating table, removes his bloody smock. The woman gets up gingerly then promptly throws up, dark vomit splashing the ground beside her. The camera zooms in, enough to see the tear stains on her cheeks.
Voodoo hits pause, freezing Jade Bentley’s grief in place. “It’ll be up within the hour,” he says, crossing to the kitchen. He takes out a box of cereal stuffed with cash and counts out two hundred dollars.
“Is there anything you wouldn’t shoot?” he asks her, handing her the money.
“Is there anything you wouldn’t buy?” she counters, taking it from him and shoving it into her bag. “Anyway once they’re on film they’re just stories.”
The bones in Voodoo’s face catch the glow of the TV screen. “You’re so thin I could cut myself on you,” she says.
Voodoo nods. “Until one day I’ll just disappear.”
She gives him back his cigarette, now ringed with her dark lipstick. “See you.”
“When was the last time you slept?” he asks her as she walks away.
“What day is it?”
“Thursday.”
She stops, thinks about it for a few moments. “What month?”
Now seated in a booth at the back of an all-night diner. She feels herself drifting, everything muffled and distant, then snaps back when Barker sits down across from her. A waitress coalesces beside them and tips coffee into a mug for Barker.
“So did your blogger friend take it?”
Jess drops the crumpled notes onto the table before her and Barker cocks an eyebrow.
“That’s all he gave you for it?”
She shrugs. “Standard.”
“You realize that’s not even 10% of what he’s going to make feeding it to the networks don’t you?”
“Which is why you’re here,” she says.
Barker smiles. He takes a sip of the coffee and his face crumples into a grimace. He spits the mouthful back into the cup, glancing across at the waitress to make his disgust clear. He hands Jess an envelope folded in half and wrapped in an elastic band.
She reaches across to take it but Barker holds tight.
“You’re certain it’ll make the networks? Your payment is predicated on that footage going viral, not rotting on some shitty little website that nobody cares about.”
“That shitty little website that nobody cares about will absolve the networks of any blame or guilt showing the footage,” she tells him. “They’re not exploiting Jade Bentley—Voodoo Woycek is. They’re just reporting on it.”
“Good,” Barker says, smiling again and letting her take the envelope. “You do realize I’m only doing this in the best interests of my client?”
“Do I look like a priest to you? I’m not here for you to confess your sins.”
“And I have no need to. I’m just doing what an agent is paid to do. The film roles are drying up and she’s not getting any younger. She just wants to feel loved. They all do.”
“Good for her,” Jess says, standing. “I gotta go.”
“Wait,” Barker says, sticking a leg out from under the table to block her exit. He indicates for her to sit back down. “I might have another job for you.”
And as tired as she is the thought of returning to her apartment, her bed mockingly tempting her with a sleep she knew wouldn’t come, mak
es her rejoin him.
Barker slips a hand into the inner pocket of his designer suit jacket and removes a Hi-8 tape. He places it upright on the table between them.
“What’s on it?” Jess asks.
“It’s a sex tape.”
“Who?”
“To be honest I’m not sure. This is a favor. For a friend of mine. “
“Which friend?”
Barker’s expression remains neutral. “Just a colleague.”
“You know how hard these things are to sell nowadays? Nobody gives a shit any more.”
“I realize that . . . but if you could at least try I would greatly appreciate it—and of course would recommend you to my colleagues for any future work.”
Jess takes the tape, standing again. “No promises,” she says then walks out.
In the darkness of her apartment the red light of her answer phone strobes. The digital readout displays the number four.
Without turning on any other lights she hits the PLAY button then crosses to her refrigerator, hunting around for something edible whilst the messages play.
The first is a tip off about some movie directors’ drug deal that will be going down the next night, offering her exclusive rights to the bust. The second is her bank reminding her about overdue loan payments, the third Voodoo letting her know that the Bentley footage was now live and had already drawn in 20,000 hits.
The final message plays, nothing more than a background hiss. The hiss continues whilst she pushes aside old jars of mayo and cartons of Chinese food which have developed a thin fur of mold. Then there’s a voice.
“Open the door.”
Jess stands up. Nothing but hissing again. She hits BACK on the answer phone and listens to the message again.
“Open the door.”
Now wishing she’d turned on another light she slowly crosses to the apartment door, described in a fuzzy glowing outline. She listens for the sound of anyone outside then reaches for the handle. Turns it. On the answer phone the static continues, seeming to grow louder, urging her to follow the instruction.
She opens the door. Beyond, the corridor is empty. Halfway up one of the ceiling lights flickers from a faulty connection. Behind her the answer phone beeps then goes silent.
She closes the door, locks it then engages the security chain. Turns on every light she can find including those in the bathroom and finally her bedroom. Staring down at her bed, the sheets still unmade, she again becomes aware of her overwhelming tiredness but resists the urge to lie down. She knows by now that the sensation is a trick, that as soon as she lies down her mind will rouse once more.
Instead she empties her pockets onto the kitchen counter, the money from Voodoo, the money from Barker—and the tape. From in amongst a pile of VHS cassettes she finds a Hi-8 adaptor and clicks Barker’s tape into place then slides it into her VCR. Her TV shivers into life with a static drone which echoes that from the answer machine message.
At first there is only darkness and the sound of heavy breathing, sexual groans, then an image blurs into view. A naked couple wrapped around one another, lying on a bed. The man is on top, pinning the woman by her arms as she bites down on his shoulder, their movements slow and intense. What at first seems like his hair then looks more like a hood of some sort, fastened around his neck. The camera’s focus keeps changing as the operator zooms it in and out, the bodies merging and distorting.
Jess sits forward, trying to determine who they are. The man’s back arches, the woman’s nails digging into him and then he moves his head to one side and as the camera finally steadies the woman’s face is revealed.
Barker comes to the door after three solid minutes of her ringing the bell of his compact mansion. He wears an expensive silk robe with a handgun butt sticking out of one pocket.
“What the hell are you . . . ?”
She pushes past him hard enough to knock him to the ground, snatching the weapon as she does so, slams the door shut and locks it. She holds up the Hi-8 tape, still in its adaptor, and aims the gun at his crotch.
“What do you want? Who put you up to this?”
“Put me up to what?”
He’s far calmer than he should be. Jess figures this probably isn’t the first time he’s had a gun pointed at him.
“Get up,” she says and forces him through to his living room. She puts the tape into his VCR deck and powers on the enormous TV. She stands next to it, the gun still trained on him, watching his reaction. Sex noises fill the room via expensive surround sound speakers.
“I don’t understand,” Barker says. “What?”
“That’s my bedroom. That’s me.”
Barker frowns, squinting at the grainy footage. “No it’s not.”
Jess tightens her grip on the gun. She figures he’s just trying to trick her into looking at the screen, distracting her enough to grab the weapon back, but is compelled to look anyway.
And it’s not her. Not her bedroom.
“What are you doing?” she asks, the gun shaking in her grasp. The static beneath the sex noises disorients her. “What are you up to?”
“I’m not up to anything,” Barker says.
On the TV the woman slides out from under the hooded man, her hair far longer than Jess’s. She spreads her legs and pulls him into her desperately.
“Who gave you the tape?”
“I told you already, a colleague.”
She cocks the weapon.
“Okay, okay,” Barker says, holding up his hands. “I was at a club, Chiaroscuro. This guy came up to me in the bathroom. It happens all the time when people figure out who you are. Audition tapes, stolen CCTV tapes, you name it. Normally I pay no attention but this guy . . .
His words trail.
“Who was he? What did he look like?”
“I don’t remember. I was a little high and one of the lights kept flickering. Are you okay? You look . . .”
“Shut up,” she says, then ejects the tape. She puts the gun down on a shelf next to the TV and strides past him, needing to get out of there and away from the echo of the static-filtered sex noises which fill the room.
Back at her apartment she switches the lights on one by one before entering the bedroom. She turns on the bedside lamp and looks down at the rumpled sheets, the scene blending with that from the tape and she calculates where the camera would have to have been positioned. She studies the opposing wall, running her finger across each crack, knowing how small covert cameras could be, but finds nothing.
She moves aside a small drawer unit to check behind it though the angle seems too low then stops dead. With the drawer unit gone a set of shoe prints are revealed in the carpet pile. She turns, placing her own feet next to them but not daring to come into contact with the impressions themselves, and when she looks back down at the bed it is framed in exactly the same way as on the footage.
Someone has been in her room.
The realization is quickly shattered by the ringing of her phone and she rushes through, suddenly compelled to be out of that room. She puts the handset to her ear and there’s a noise like a de-tuned radio.
“Open the door,” a voice says.
The panic which had begun to swell within her in the bedroom now threatens to overwhelm her, the phone shaking in her hands. The message is repeated. Open the door. She stares at her front door, wanting to run but unable to move. She can’t shake the feeling of there being something else in the apartment with her and then the screaming begins, pouring down the phone and into her head and she drops it, throwing open the door and running out into the corridor beyond.
The screaming follows her all the way out into the parking lot.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” she says as Voodoo leads her towards the couch. He tries to get her to sit but she resists, too full of nervous energy.
“Jesus, Jess, look at the state of you. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” she says, pacing back and forth. “I don’t fucking know.”
She pulls the tape from her jacket and gives it to him, tells him to put it on.
He loads it up and images emerge from the darkness of his TV screen.
“A sex tape?” he says, unimpressed. “And this should interest me why?”
“Do you recognize her?” Jess asks, pointedly not looking at the screen, still pacing.
Voodoo studies it for a few moments, cocking his head from side to side. “I don’t think so.”
And now she looks at the screen herself and once again it’s her in the footage and she’s too disorientated to know if she should feel relieved or not.
“That’s my bedroom, Voodoo. Someone was in there. Someone filmed me.”
“You’re saying this is you?”
He studies the footage further, the couple writhing sluggishly like drugged murder victims. “It doesn’t really look like . . . I mean I guess it could be but . . .”
“I don’t know who the guy is. I don’t remember any of this, Voodoo.”
“You think he slipped you a roofy then filmed himself fucking you?”
“Not him. Someone else was there. You have to tell me, is that really me?”
“I can’t really tell, Jess, it looks like you but . . .”
“How would we know?” she asks. “How would we know if that’s really me in that tape or if it’s really me here with you? Both can’t be real.”
“Jess what are you talking about? Look, sit down, let me get you . . .”
She snatches her arm away when he tries to take it, stabbing the PAUSE button on his VCR deck. She stares at the screen, the frozen image a zoomed-in frame of the woman clutching the sheets in a fist.
“Jess? What is it? What do you see?” Voodoo asks, his voice full of genuine fear.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 33
