by Martyn Burke
She stared right through me as I approached. Barely looking up, she negotiated a fee with the heavy woman seated in front of her. It was actually more like she was reeling in the woman, telling her tantalizing bits of some love-struck future and then demanding more money to keep going. I sat on that same bench trying to piece together what I was seeing.
Her voice was harder, almost metallic—like tinfoil being folded. And the faint, sun-burnished freckles on her face were now encased in heavy makeup, as if someone else had taken over Annie, replacing all that joy and gentleness with some creature crafted in one of Albert’s get-rich seminars.
She saw me watching her. “Can I help you?” she said in that aluminum-foil voice.
“What’s going on?”
“You got a problem?”
“Annie—”
“Wrong,” she said. And then kept staring at me in silence.
And I was wrong. It was not Annie.
By some feat of perverse zygotic logic, she had a twin. An absolutely identical—I mean seriously eerie—twin sister who resembled her in every way but the ones I’d fallen in love with. Susan Boudreau—Susie Boo, they called her—was back in town, trailing Vegas behind her where she’d left federal prosecutors wondering if the short trail leading to some rich Lamborghini-owning lover turning up dead under the proverbial mysterious circumstances had anything to do with her.
Susie Boo was different from Annie. She spewed sexuality in carefully calibrated amounts, turned on and off at will and in ways designed to do the most damage to its target.
That night, the story of her sister, all of it, spilled out of Annie, framed by a jittery smile that had me peering into the black pit we all keep covered. Annie was endlessly protective of her sister, nervously pouring out stories intended to show me that whatever Susie might appear to be, there was a reason for it. Really—there were reasons for it all. Stories even.
There was the abandoned-by-her-father-who-couldn’t-control-her story.
There was the never-being-loved-enough story.
But there was also the family tomb story—Susie Boo had discovered that the Boudreau family back in Louisiana had a much-sought-after above-ground tomb in a cemetery in New Orleans. She went back there, cleaned out the ancestral bones—including Grandma, who had only been in there for nine years—and then, at the age of eighteen, Susie Boo forged signatures and sold the tomb for enough to finance whatever she went on to do in Vegas for three years.
That night, after telling me all this, Annie and I slept in my little apartment. She shivered, called out strange names, and cried in her sleep. I lay beside her in the darkness, watching the Ferris wheel on Santa Monica Pier spin endlessly through the night in its neon journey to nowhere. She woke up as if she didn’t know where she was, as if it were a trance she was in, undressing, pulling off the T-shirt she wore, and then whispering for me to hold her, to go inside her. This time it was all different. She made love as if she were single-handedly holding off the night, beating my shoulders with clenched fists as she thrust against me, crying and calling out words I could not understand until I withdrew from her, rolling over and listening to her cry until she fell asleep lying on her side, my hand stroking the contours of that magical valley where her hips descended to her waist.
I remember wanting to be religious, wanting to be able to pray for her.
And then one night soon after all that, I looked out to the ocean and saw Annie running in the surf. It was that same dream. She was dancing through the water, trailing colors as the waves crashed around her and then pulled her out to sea. I was desperately trying to hold on, to drag her back to the shore, to safety, but whatever tide that tugged at her had a force I did not possess, ripping her slowly away, swirling her far out into the ocean. And not for a moment did she stop smiling at me as she vanished into the blackness of the unknown. And then I awoke drenched in sweat with her looking down at me.
“I don’t want to do this to you,” she said. “Really.”
“Do what?” I was still dragging myself back into the moment. She said nothing. “We can leave. Leave it all. Go somewhere else.”
“I know. But my sister is here now.” As if that explained it all.
“What has that got to do with anything?”
“We’re twins.”
“So?”
Again she was silent. And then she said what she’d always tell you whenever she didn’t want to talk about something: “Well, that’s another story.”
It was always another story, at least whenever her sister was involved. And that other story was one that never really got told—just scattered and murmured in fragments of speech and averted eyes. It formed a kind of emotional moat I just couldn’t cross. The castle was impregnable, behind some wall of her sister’s suspicions. It was as if a part of Annie seized up whenever her sister was around. She would weave insistent proclamations of love for me into some fabric of self-recrimination, telling me how wrong she was for someone as good as me . . . and how much she loved me.
I used to wonder if it was all because Annie and her sister were raised by wolves, self-involved ones trailing platitudes in their wake. And could it have been that her sister somehow protected her in those years? Was that the hold she had on Annie? Or was it that some hidden emotional scar tissue had stretched across Annie’s image of herself, until all she could see was an ugliness and disfigurement that no one else saw? On all those nights, when that Ferris wheel went round and round in the darkness, the colored lights forging on in their endless journey to nowhere, I would listen to her tell me that I should find someone else, because she could never be what she wanted herself to be.
“What do you want to be?” I would ask.
“Good,” she would answer. That was all. There was nothing more. Good.
The one time I got Annie away from Los Angeles, when we drove up into mountains between Palm Springs and Idyllwild, it was as if a spell had broken. That chrysalis of haunted looks fell away from those laughing eyes, replaced by a magical delight in gathering clouds roiling silently over the mountains, in the dustings of snow and the bolting of a deer that shot across the road. There were the nights, three of them, precious memories now, in the little rented cabin under a canopy of towering cedars. It had a fireplace whose flames somehow transfixed us until we found something else to laugh about, rolling on the bed and talking of the future, our clothes festooning the furniture.
“Further,” she whispered to me in the flicking light. It took me a moment to hear what she’d said. I had drifted into some unworldly state, watching the light of the fire dance on her bare back as we lay across the bed. “I want to go further.”
“Where?”
“Just somewhere further. Away.”
“Why?”
“No one will know us.”
“Why don’t you want people to know us?”
“So I can be good.” The light flickered off her back, rolling in across her legs and thighs in the silence.
I hadn’t ever really thought of a future. I’d pretty much just existed by piling days on top of one another until they toppled over backwards and became the past. And then started all over with a new pile.
Our future ended when there was cell phone reception again. I hadn’t realized how much I owed to the silence of the mountains, where our phones had stopped functioning, out of range of whatever towers that brought in the outside world. Only an hour into our drive home, near Banning at a gas station not far from the 10 Freeway, I went inside to buy water. When I returned to the car, she wasn’t there. I got in, thinking she was in the washroom, until an image of her, small, distant, and frenetic, appeared in the rear-view mirror. She was pacing back and forth beside the highway, staring at the ground as she talked on the cell phone.
I called out to her but the roar of the highway swallowed my words. Only when I got closer could I hear her pleading. “Susie, no, no, no! It’s not like that . . . C’mon, please . . .”
She didn’t
notice me watching her. I went back to the car, got in, and waited. When she returned, the chrysalis had been reconstituted, her face blank until I spoke.
“You okay?”
She looked over, startled. “Fine.”
It was the last word spoken until the tangle of interchanges outside L.A., when she reached over and rested her hand on my arm. “I’ll always love you. I want you to remember that.”
She was looking straight ahead.
• • •
It was the bony finger of Hugh Hefner that did it. That desiccated finger would have singled them out in some way that only Susie Boo could have organized, curling her way around the ankles of Hollywood like a cat.
Annabelle trumpeted the news, almost running up to me, holding the National Enquirer aloft, opened to the spread of the Boo Two, the two gorgeous blondes—identical twins no less—chosen by Hugh Hefner to be part of his harem!, the movable feast of blondes he claimed as his own in whatever way he wanted to consume them. The blondes of eternal youth who never aged because they were discarded regularly, replaced by their mirror images; the blondes who forever lived in the present because there was no tomorrow, only replacement, and she’ll be famous now—my son’s girlfriend! Ex-girlfriend.
Annabelle.
My mother was telling everyone who would listen that Hugh Hefner—the inventor of Playboy!—had confirmed her own son’s good taste, the man who discovered Marilyn Monroe! the eight-million-year-old mummified hard-on choosing Annie! who would now be seen on television and, better yet, probably get rich. While regularly being impaled by a Viagra-mainlining legend who will have her move into the Playboy Mansion with all his other blondes!
I listened to Annabelle tell all the neighbors what a cool guy her son was for having spotted this Annie, such a famous person, way before she became famous.
In situations like this, you have no choice; you simply descend the usual rope ladder of despair. You know the drill: disbelief, rage, pleading, whatever. Until you’re reduced to rubble. Even before you learn that whatever you say is Wrong! digging you deeper into whatever shit hole you happen to be in at the moment.
Racing over to her Venice cottage to confirm that all this craziness was not true, I almost ran headlong into a caricature. It was Annie, the new Annie, the ready-to-be-test-driven, sleek, late-model Annie, chopped, channeled, and polished to a high gloss of makeup, hair styling, and whatever else she had once scorned.
“Please.” She said it like I was standing there holding a club or something.
“Please?”
“Don’t make this any more difficult than it is.”
“Me make it difficult?” Wrong!
“Don’t upset my sister. Please.”
“Me? Upset her?” Wrong!
“Just don’t make her angry. I don’t like it when she gets angry.”
“Her? What about when I get—” Wrong!
“I have to go back inside.”
I hadn’t even noticed what she was wearing—a tightly cinched S&M outfit that no doubt would rock them at the Playboy Mansion. “Have you had something done to your breasts?” Wrong!
“No.” Coming at me like a volley. “. . . No! No!” Fired from the moral high ground she suddenly found herself on. “Can’t I wear a new bra without you telling me what to do? Hef likes it.”
“Oh, I’m sure he does.” Wrong! For all eternity. And whatever follows after eternity. “Aw Annie, come on . . . I’m sorry. For whatever I’ve done. Or haven’t done to help you.” The first non-wrong thing I’d said. For a moment she faltered.
“Hank . . . I can’t explain.”
“Annie . . .”
Behind her, from the party, the one being thrown in the little cottage on the canal by her dope-addled parents who had rationalized it all by deciding that Hefner—in anointing their recovering-virgin daughter in what would surely be a well-compensated defloration ceremony—did not in any way contextualize the objectification of women as . . . you know the rest.
Susie Boo was approaching, scorching all she came near. Brittle and spreading a shroud of control over her surroundings. She flailed me with her eyes, the way she did whenever she saw me with Annie.
“Annie, you’re missing the party,” Susan Boudreau said, now looking straight at me. As in: Can I help you?
“Coming,” said Annie. She turned back to me. “All this—” she said, motioning around her, crinkling her nose in that little girl smile, “—it’s another story.”
And not for a moment did she stop smiling at me as she vanished out of my life.
• • •
For months afterward I held parties that were as wild as a cattle drive in a bungalow. Dissolute, frenzied, and stupid.
And the planes flew into the Twin Towers.
And I moved back into my mother’s spare bedroom, caught glimpses of the Boo Two on ET. Fucked Muriel, the neighbor lady, when her husband was at work. Which was bad, real bad.
And regularly drank myself right into next week.
And enlisted, and then went off to fight for civilization as I understood it.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I did.
More or less.
5
All this happened in those wild, early days of Afghanistan right after 9/11, back before the war mechanics tightened the bolts on the killing machine. Back then everything ended up being pretty much improvised, which is another way of saying that chaos ruled no matter how much the systems analysts tried to reason with all the usual madness.
Otherwise, Danny and I wouldn’t have stood a chance of being paired up. And not just because of some regulation submerged in the depths of an Army Field Manual. Merely watching him come flapping over the opposite hillside had me figuring out ways to avoid going into battle with this overgrown kid who acted like nothing was important enough to be taken seriously. Under that thatch of unmilitary hair, some steering device straight out of a video game was seeing the world as a mad points system to be laughed at. At least, that’s what came through in the confusion of that Listening Post with Ellers and the rest. Everyone was screaming into PRC radios, SATCOM phones, and anything else that could get across whatever degree of terror and desperation best described our situation as we were hurtling through a twisting black tunnel of fear with no visible guard rails. From the Somme to Hamburger Hill, unheard voices were calling out from military abattoirs. And now us? It was our turn now? With the added treat of knowing in real time that no amount of that shock-and-awe shit had stopped these Ninjas who were attacking us.
Each time air support vaporized a bunch of them, a new bunch would pop up from their caves and jeer. A goddamn horror movie on a loop was what it was. And we were a captive audience suddenly yanked onto the screen in supporting roles. While this guy Danny stood there in the midst of all that rasping madness, grinning like something about it all was absurd.
But nothing about it was funny, and I was it. No amount of trying to get Ellers to change my it status remotely registered with him as he screamed into various wired-up pieces of plastic and metal, trying to find out what happened to our Ninjas—the Afghan army unit, our so-called allies, our buddies who suddenly pulled a vanishing act whenever the first shots were fired.
I didn’t remotely take Danny seriously. And that was my first mistake. That grin was just his default look, a kind of natural camouflage that hid something very different from what I saw that morning.
Once he got past the business with the psychic, he went on to what was more important. “So, you actually encountered Zadran?”
“About a month ago.”
“Big guy? With a black turban and a moustache that looks like upside-down handlebars of a Harley? Leads a whole tribe? The Zadrans—the Black Zadranis.”
“Yeah.”
“Treacherous son of a bitch.”
“You mean, like, smile and slit your throat?”
“Yeah. That.”
“What do the Canadians want with him?”
“My bat
talion doesn’t even know he exists.”
“Then why are they after him?”
“They’re not,” he said. “I am.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“It’s personal,” he said.
“Nothing’s personal. This is war.”
“Zadran’s got the girl I was going to marry.”
“None of this makes sense. Aren’t you from—”
“He kidnapped her.”
Somewhere around then I realized that the grin had gone. It was as if he’d exchanged his face for someone else’s. Someone else who definitely did not have a crinkly grin.
• • •
Even though he was a sniper with all the lone wolf qualities those guys have, there was also this Vesuvian side to Danny that pulled the doors of life off their hinges. It was that force-of-nature way he had. And maybe that grin of his that could warm an Afghan night at eight thousand feet.
I’d never seen anyone in a combat situation with as much freedom to do whatever he wanted. In those early days of the war you sometimes found guys like Danny who were practically freelancers. And since orders came down that I was to be OpConned, we became two freelancers. Danny was the sniper and I was the scout. Roaming the mountainsides of Shah-e-Kot as if we were the free spirits of the Apocalypse, somehow disconnected from the high-altitude warfare all around us. Even when the navy’s F-18s ripped the sky in half, delivering thunder on demand, or the unseen B-52s left the mountains whimpering. That stuff was almost like it came from another war than the one we were fighting. Or maybe from the one Danny was fighting. Danny had this ability to make you want to help him, partly because help was the last thing he wanted.
Back then the Canadians were way looser than we were. And snipers in their army were given great freedom, often either ignoring or advising their own commanders all the way up to battalion level. It was as if their army had been peacekeepers for so long that they’d forgotten how to fight a war, and only raw Celtic hell raising kept them going. And yet, while our guys were gunning for targets at eight hundred meters out, the Canadian snipers were bringing them down at two thousand meters.
