by David Shafer
He had her pull around the block and go down the narrow, green-bursting alley behind his house. She nosed the front half of the Toyota beneath a tumble of blackberry vines so they both had to get out on the driver’s side. They hopped a fallen cedar fence into his overgrown backyard. At his back door, he took a spare key from the mouth of a little metal frog and let them into his kitchen.
She went to pee. Walking through his house, she thought Leo must be rich, or comfortable, anyway. He was a single man with lots of furniture. There was well-matted art on the walls. And there was expensive product in his bathroom—German skin tonics and organic soaps and a wooden toothbrush. If he was rich, Leo might not be well disposed to Dear Diary politics. Then again, it wasn’t like Dear Diary wanted to take away his German skin tonics, was it? For that matter, Leila was a big fat Western consumer herself, and if it was that kind of revolution coming, she’d be in trouble pretty soon after Leo.
Sitting on the toilet, she took her little Nokia from her pocket and composed a text to Sarah. Had to boost Crane from the facility you sent me to. Incriminating thing he has on Deveraux not really incriminating, just embarrassing. Pls advise. Lola
When she came back into the kitchen, Leo was arranging cookies on a plate. There was coffee burbling in a moka pot on the stove.
“You like apple?” he asked her.
She did like apple.
He cored and sectioned an apple and then pulled a jar of almond butter from the fridge. He added the apple boats to the cookie plate, put a schmear of almond butter beside them, and placed a little spreading knife beside the schmear. He was swift at his kitchen counters. In her family, the men were lost in the kitchen. Certainly her dad, who had some generational excuse, but also her brother, Dylan, who did not.
Leo took the moka pot from the stove, then racked a plastic tray of ice cubes into a heavy Pyrex pitcher and poured the hot coffee over the cubes, which cracked and popped dramatically.
“Listen,” he said. “About that movie I mentioned. I wanted to explain. I mean, about why I even have it still.”
“That’s none of my business,” she told him.
“Yeah, but I mean, I don’t want you to think that I still have it for any repressed homosexual reasons.”
Oh, great, she thought. That’s what he’s worried about. “I don’t care why you have it,” she said. But that came out too sharp. And he had made her this nice snack, and, yeah, it was a rather volatile thing to have and to keep—footage like that, of an old friend.
“So why do you have it?” she asked him, snapping a cookie in half.
He poured their iced coffees. “Milk?” he asked her.
“Not when it’s iced, no,” she said.
“That’s how I do it too!” he said, apparently pleased with this small commonality.
He sat down across from her at the kitchen table and started talking.
“When we were in college, Mark signed up with one of those sperm-donor agencies—it was called Cryogenetics or something—that trawled the Ivies for semen with good SAT scores. I always thought the idea was weird. It seemed to me unfair and unwise to scatter your seed far and wide. Men are supposed to want that, you know? Men are supposed to take pride in their genes. Like: Lucky you, world, here’s more of me. But I didn’t have that. I still don’t. Sometimes, I’ve even arrived at the opposite conclusion: that maybe my line is best stamped out. I thought Mark might feel the same way, and I asked him about it once. We didn’t really disagree about much back in those days. I asked him if he was bothered by the idea of being father to a child he would never see. And he said, ‘No, on the contrary, it seems to me like a good deal.’
“But I knew he’d had some fun with the Cryogenetics profile—he added three inches to his height, said he was planning to be a marine biologist. That sort of thing. So I said he should at least let purchasers of his seed know that he was actually a depressively inclined binge drinker whose cracker magician father had abandoned his family and probably committed suicide.
“Mark must have changed since those days, because back then he was never inflated or hypocritical; he was always willing to consider a thing. So he said that he was smart, white, and skinny, and that that was mainly what these people were looking for. But then he said, ‘You’re right, I should give them a better picture of myself,’ and he started doing this loony pantomime, like a silent-film actor. He tied a Harvard scarf in an idiotic bow around his head, like a guy with a toothache in a cartoon, and he grinned goonily and pretended to be masturbating. I started filming because I filmed everything that year, and because it was so funny. We also were probably stoned. We were usually stoned. And then he picked up a Wall Street Journal and fastened his eyes on it as though it were the most forbidden erotica. That made it even funnier. So when he took his actual dick out of his actual corduroys and started actually masturbating, what am I gonna do, be the prude who yells, Cut?”
She saw his point. The whole thing was honestly arrived at. Leo wanted her to know he was not a creep who’d secretly filmed his friend’s dick. Fair enough.
“But I know what it looks like,” he continued. “It looks like it was made by crazy idiot people mocking their own privilege and celebrating their own leisure and just generally being wildly unaware. And it looks like it was shot by a repressed gay best friend. It is nothing I want to be associated with. But that’s not even really the reason I can’t give it to you, that’s not the reason we can’t use it against Mark.”
“I know,” said Leila, seeing where he was headed. “Just because something is embarrassing doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
“Yeah. Exactly. We’d be not just blackmailers but creepy, prurient judgers.”
“Yeah, and you’d be the backstabbing old friend who kept the creepy footage,” she said.
“The only reason I still have it is that I have all the film I shot that year and most of the tape I shot in the years after I gave up film. To discard a reel of film because my old friend’s semi-hard dick appears in three minutes of it, that would be weird, wouldn’t it? Like, methinks he doth be a bit too repulsed by penises.”
“But then why did you threaten him with it? You called it incriminating. That’s why I’m here.”
He deflated a bit. “I was so mad at him, Lola,” he said. She was getting used to the name. “He dumped me. Like, as a friend. And in one of the so-called parables in that idiotic book of his, he made up this character based on me. I’m clearly the ‘spoiled son of a toy tycoon.’ Apparently, my insulation from the rigors of the market has kept me spiritually scrawny. ‘Like a hatchery fish.’ He actually wrote this shit. He still owes me eight hundred bucks.
“Then a few months back, I guess I just started having a hard time. I mean, at first it was great and then it got harder and harder, you know. And I ended up making some terrible decisions…or just, you know, forgetting to keep remembering that I’m not the center of things.”
“I don’t understand,” said Leila. This was how Rich used to talk sometimes. She’d learned to steer paragraphs toward a conclusion. “Do you mean you went crazy? Like, actually psychotic?”
It worked here. “Not psychotic, no,” he said. He spread almond butter on an apple boat. She waited. “My mind jumped the rails just before that happened. Or maybe I made that decision. It was like: Keep going up on this ride—which you’re going to have to get off eventually, inevitably, by the way—or jump off now. Anyway, my mind and I chose to jump off, which was the right decision, I think. But we landed in a terrible place. I wrote that broadside just before I jumped off.”
But here’s the thing, thought Leila. He doesn’t look crazy. Quite the contrary, with his apple boats and his well-matted art. And his eyes were soft and deep and they didn’t even seem that troubled. She had seen troubled. Refugees. They had reason to be troubled.
“But that was a rehab facility I picked you up at, right?”
He nodded, like he knew where she was going. “Yeah. Yeah. It was. And I
know, maybe I’m not really crazy. Or anyway, I probably fall within the functional types, the shouldn’t-complainers. Probably the drinking and the marijuana made it worse, you know, tipped me over? And that was dumb. So I’m going to remove those from the equation and see if I’m still a fucking teacup, see how hard life is then.”
This too reminded her of certain Rich conversations. Too many. Rich was a man of broken resolutions. People like that will waste your time.
“That’s great. I mean it. I mean, if what you just said is that you plan to get sober,” said Leila, tamping out the little fire her heart had started to build for him. “But I’m not your sponsor or anything. I came here to see if you would give us the thing against Deveraux.” This was a kind of war; the Committee had done worse things to her dad than blackmail him. She would ask again. “Will you give me that movie?”
Leo walked to the open back door. A mild breeze, honeysuckle-sweetened, was coming in, enough to stir the dish towels hung on the handle of the stove.
“No. I’ve been up and down the question, Lola. I see no way around the moral prohibition against blackmail.”
“But the thing we’re trying to bring down is just terrible, Leo,” she said, exasperation creeping into her voice. “Who cares about Deveraux’s dick, or your feelings about it?” He winced. “They want to enslave us all. We have to stop them.” She didn’t want to go into her family troubles.
“I believe you. Please tell me what else I can do.” He had raised his voice. “There’s gotta be something else. Maybe your asking me to do this is some sort of test question, like a test from Dear Diary.”
She hadn’t thought of that. “No, this is not a test question. This is just a request for a thing.”
“Or maybe you were sent by my judges.”
“What do you mean, judges?”
“You know: God, Higher Power, angels, Santa, Elvis. Whatever.”
“And in your case?”
“Dead parents.”
“Your parents are dead? I’m sorry.” Her heart blew on the little embers of the fire.
“Not your fault,” he said.
“But you think I was sent by them?” She leaned on the interrogative there a little bit, to make a point.
“Well, whether you were sent by my dead parents or by a global online underground trying to stop the nefarious plot that I made out more or less correctly when I went near-psychotic, my decision is the same: you’re asking me to do something that you know I should not do, that I know I should not do.”
That’s why he was turning her head. He let her see his confusion, but he would not budge from the place his conscience had told him to stand. It was usually the other way around: people pretended to be so certain of things, but they were just guessing at what they thought was right, and they could be swayed easily. Also, he smelled like coffee, and beneath that a very mild dank, like a barn. Also, he had nice hands.
He asked if she would like to take a shower or a rest or anything. Both sounded nice. She hadn’t had a real night’s sleep or a run in seventy-two hours, and she still needed to drive to LA tonight. That was fifteen hours at the wheel. It sounded brutal. Vehicle accidents still danger number one in conflict zones, she’d learned on those courses. People make poor decisions when they’re pushed, when they’re ragged. And she hadn’t yet heard back from Sarah or Dear Diary. She looked at her watch. Three hours, maybe. If she had three hours’ sleep, maybe she could take stock, at least.
He showed her to a room upstairs. It was very clean: a mattress on the floor, stacks of books arranged in some organizational system around all the walls. There were blinds on the windows that cut the light into bars.
“Listen,” he said, “that guy we saw was probably just the mailman. But keep the blinds the way they are, I guess, and stay away from the windows. Right? I mean, until we know what’s going on and have a plan. It’s pretty hot in here. But that little plastic fan kicks ass.”
It would do just fine. “Knock on my door at six, will you?” she said. “If I’m not awake.”
“You got it,” said Leo, and closed the door.
She sat down on the mattress. There were nice sheets on it. I bet these sheets do not come in plastic envelopes, she thought, I bet you have to buy these in a linens store. Her shirt stank. She stripped to her bra and lay down. She set the alarm on her Dear Diary phone for 6:03 and put it on the floor beside her. A fat fly bumped against the bright window behind the slats of the blinds, which rattled in counterpoint. She fell into a vat of sleep.
The door swung open a bit and squeaked.
“Lola. Lola Montes,” he said. He was standing in the doorway, backlit. She shuffled her feet beneath the sheets as her eyes adjusted to the gloom of the room. Behind the slatted blinds, there was still daylight. Three hours hadn’t been nearly enough; the sleep held her like vines. “What time is it?” she asked.
“It’s six o’clock,” said Leo.
Her phone began its reveille; she sat up to quash it, and the tawny cotton bedspread fell from her shoulders to her lap. Her near nakedness lit up the room. She covered herself swiftly. Leo launched himself out the door. She should have been embarrassed—she was a principal’s daughter, after all—but she was too tired for embarrassed.
“I got your duffel from the car. It’s here outside your door,” he said from the hallway. “Okay, well, I’m going to go make dinner. Come down whenever.”
She took a long, North American shower. After studying the ingredients, she used some of Leo’s German skin tonics and his hippie body wash.
Dressing, she checked her phone. 1 New Message.
What diff btwn incriminating / embarrassing? If CRANE no use leave him. We’ll keep an eye on him. Proceed to LA.
When she went downstairs, there were two fish on the kitchen counter, headless and frozen. A pot of water on the stove. Leo had begun some sort of rustic preparation around the fish—there were lemons and garlic and some peppercorns that had spilled from their fancy tin and rolled themselves away. It looked like Ernest Hemingway was trying to make dinner.
“You want a drink or something?” he asked her. “Though it would appear I have been relieved of all my ethyl alcohol.”
“Water, please.”
“You sure? I may have some Grey Goose in the toilet tank.”
She didn’t laugh.
“That was a joke,” he said.
“Oh,” she said.
He handed her a glass of water. “So I was thinking,” he said.
“Were you?” she said. “A dangerous pastime.”
“Indeed, Lola.”
She almost told him then that her name was Leila, not Lola. Because now they were actually bantering, and the fake name seemed unfair and unnecessary. But she held back. She had to leave tonight.
“I was thinking that you never told me how you hooked up with Dear Diary. You said you were new. Is this really just about keeping us from all being enslaved by our digital overlords? Or are you in it for some other reason?”
Stall. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. Because of the urgency, I guess. There’s something in your eyes. Like a part of your life is being threatened even as we speak.”
Her phone rang and vibrated in her pocket. ROXANA, announced the little screen.
“I gotta take this,” she said. She moved to a sofa in the far corner of the big living room.
Before Leila could finish saying, Hello, big sister, Roxana was yelling down the phone: “This number’s been going to voice mail for, like, two days,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I’ve been traveling. You have me now.” Big-sister outrage was sometimes best tabled, ducked, averted.
“Where the hell are you?”
Could she say? Yeah. The Diary phone was secure. “I’m in Portland.”
“Oregon? Why?”
“I’ll explain when I get home.”
“When’s that?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Okay, well, it be
tter fucking be tomorrow is all I gotta say.”
“Back off, okay? I’m trying to help here.”
“How? By mysteriously delaying your arrival home?”
“It’s complicated.”
“It always is, with you.”
Ignore. “How’s Dad?”
“Suffering through Dressler’s syndrome,” said Roxana. “Usually follows a myocardial infarction: Pleuritic chest pain, tachycardia, fever, fatigue, malaise, anxiety. You’ll be home tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Well, I need to talk to you before you see Dad. And you need to talk to Dylan about the lawyers. They’re saying it’s not the slam dunk you sold them, and suddenly they want to be paid up-front. Call me at work when you land. You have the number?”
“Not the one at that new place. I’ll call your mobile.”
“My mobile doesn’t work in that building. The number there is—” She said ten numbers.
“Got it,” said Leila.
“Say it back.”
This was just big-sister bossy. Roxana could recall long series of digits or words or random code. She could call up whole conversations and repeat them verbatim. It was one of the freak capabilities that had emerged early and made her parents know that she was something else, along with being severely disabled. A phone number was easy-peasy for either sister, though.
Leila said the phone number back to Roxana.
“Okay, I gotta go. Dad came home yesterday. But I want him moved downstairs. We got a hospital bed for the den. The bed guys are outside. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Only after Roxana had quit the line did Leila really let it all sink in. Her throat thickened with grief. She began to cry.
“My big sister was super-pissed at me too,” said Leo, from the doorway.
“What?”
“My big sister. Well, one of them. The one they thought you were at Quivering Pines. She’s flying back up here to talk to me. Very sternly, I bet.”
