Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

  “Too much chlorine in the pool.” His dad had laughed as the girl, Shirelle, had shrugged, like Who cares. “Better go fix the balance and let Mr. Rooter finish cleaning the pipes.”

  “Darlo?” Jesse said. “Suggestions?”

  “Try the pool,” he said. “Have you seen anything about all this shit on the news?”

  “Do you want me to say no?”

  “What channels?”

  “I just saw something on the Entertainment Network. What the hell’s a racketeer?”

  “Racketeer?”

  “Oops.”

  Darlo banged the phone on the glass. What about all the other girls in the dungeon? What about every time he hadn’t gone down there to stop the screams, and what about the year — no, years — he had been away?

  Someone had to get down there. Someone without a badge.

  Darlo told him. He spoke of the stairway, way down. He spoke of hidden rooms and dungeons and a girl there, and screams through the canyon.

  “So I need you to go down there,” he said. “The combination on the lock is 664. Neighbor of the beast — 664.”

  “No way, dude.” Jesse’s voice had gone sharp. “Even if I did believe you, no way.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “A girl, hidden in a dungeon, part of a sex-slave ring, your dad?” He said this with the cadence of a man, a plan, a canal, panama. “No, I fucking don’t.”

  “Why is that hard to fucking imagine?”

  “Because if it’s true, I don’t want to know, dude. I don’t want to get the fuck involved with your sick family.”

  Darlo knew Jesse was serious. He heard the jaunty tone leave his voice.

  “How could you do this to me?” Darlo said. “I thought you had my back. After all we’ve been through.”

  “What have we been through, exactly, besides squillions of drugs?”

  “I’ll call you back,” he said, because Jesse had him cornered. “Just sit tight. Can you at least do that?”

  “Sure. I’ll help you whatever way I can. But no way I’m going —”

  “I heard you the first time.”

  26

  SARAH FOUND BOBBY on the sidewalk outside the Van Gogh.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Let’s go back inside.”

  “You’ve gone pale,” she said, and stopped him. “What’s happening? I can tell when something is wrong.”

  “I don’t want to bore you,” he said, and heard the sound of people chanting, marching down a nearby boulevard. “Seriously, Sarah, I’d put you to sleep with my patheticness.”

  “What would I be doing here if I was bored, huh?” She shook her head. “Now come on, tell me what’s wrong.”

  He spoke of band woes, and laid it on pretty thick, trying to get her to shut him up with a kiss. That was the way they did it in movies; if he didn’t know which way was up, then fuck if he was going to go gently through this confusion.

  “I hate the band, but it’s my life,” he was saying. “I dream of slicing up Darlo and —”

  “Darlo?” she said, as if he’d never said the word before. “That’s a nice name.”

  “Nice name?” He nodded though the back of his head pulsed. “Yeah, I guess it is. But just wait until you meet him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He stood on a precipice of envy. The wind blew in his eyes. An icy cliff. Would he fall?

  “Look at that,” she said, getting him off the hook. “Right on.”

  From the direction of Vondelpark came a few hundred protesters, small in number but making a racket. Even from a distance, Bobby noticed how nicely their skin glowed. They looked as if they were on a school field trip.

  “I should be marching today,” Sarah said. “That sick war.”

  “My brother, Darren, was in Seattle during the WTO,” Bobby said. “He went down there just to see what was happening and ended up right in the middle of it. The National Guard was out, and they carried, like, five-foot blocking poles.”

  “I’ve seen books about that,” she said. “People running and screaming while clouds of tear gas hover in the air. The pictures are beautiful, which is crazy. But they are beautiful.”

  The kids marched by, lightly singing.

  Bobby’s phone rang. He let it vibrate in the dark of his pocket and watched the protesters skip on. She took his hands by the wrists and looked them over. Band-Aids fluttered, discolored. Raw flesh glistened in stygian pools of lymph.

  “We need to get you some new bandages,” she said. “My house is not far. Ugh, you poor thing — they are falling apart.”

  “What about Van Gogh?”

  “He’ll always be here, but your hands may fall off. Come now.”

  They walked half a mile. The neighborhood turned to single-family houses that looked like the pictures of where the Beatles grew up, which to Bobby, in their ponderous black-and-white exposures, were Dickensian and foreboding, as if the electricity were always out and the gardens always dead and the air-raid sirens always ten seconds away. Sarah stopped at one of these bleak houses, but up close the signs of children appeared: child-painted doors, washable rainbows on the panes. Toys littered the yard like flowers. A few empty garbage-can lids were strewn on the grass.

  They went through the main hall. The smell of sausage cooking held dominion, mingled with that of tobacco. Cigarette smoke radiated from the kitchen.

  “Marcus is home,” she said, annoyed. “My stepfather.”

  Marcus had a bushy mustache and sat at the table reading the newspaper. His glasses covered half his face; they were the kind worn only by biology teachers and mass murderers. On top of that, he wore a lumberjack shirt that was pure Green River Killer.

  “I hope you’re nicer than the boy I met this morning,” Marcus said when Sarah introduced them. “Your sister really outdid herself. She brought home a boy who looked like a junkie. Disgusting.” He waved his hands around, dragged on his cigarette. “But what can I do — she is not my daughter. There is nothing I can do to make her more like you, sweet Sarah.”

  Sarah smiled in a way that indicated that she was both the good girl of the two and no fan of Marcus. Bobby kind of liked him. He liked guys who looked like one-hundred-percent highway-roaming psychopaths.

  “We’re just stopping by to get Bobby some bandages,” Sarah said.

  “Nothing like you,” Marcus said, not to be interrupted in his groove. He lit a cigarette and cupped it in his hand. “Why can’t she be?”

  Sarah pulled two bottles of Heineken from the fridge. She cracked one for Marcus and one for her and Bobby to share, then proceeded to stroke the man’s head as he talked to himself, becoming more heated as he recounted how fed up he was with Danika, her sister, and how this guy she’d brought home had matted blond hair and looked as if he’d been living out of a Dumpster. Stroking his head had the effect of turning down a burner.

  “He looked like slime from the Dam,” Marcus said, his face tightening into a twisted modulation of the permanently upset. “But I showed him.”

  “What’s for dinner?” she asked. “Are you cooking?”

  “I followed him outside and showed him.”

  “Is Mom going to be home for dinner?”

  “Clapped him around the ears is what I did.”

  Sarah tapped on the beer bottle. “I think we should wait for her before we eat, don’t you?”

  “He was asking for it. Little punk.”

  She smiled at Bobby and rolled her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “We should wait for her.”

  Family life. He hadn’t seen it in so long in any form. He hadn’t been around fathers and daughters interacting. He had forgotten about fathers and daughters and taking out the garbage and ruminating at the dinner table and every other shade of the domestic spectrum. Never before had families seemed enviable. The heat of reassessment pulsed through his mind.

  Bobby wondered how a dysfunctional Dutch family differed from a dysfunctional American family. What were the mores
by which this dynamic occurred? Could a young American woman cook up the cocktail — two parts coddling, one part ignoring, a splash of disgust — that constituted Sarah’s strategy with her stepfather?

  “We’ll be upstairs,” Sarah said when Marcus took a breath. “OK?”

  “Fine,” he said, and winked at Bobby. “See you, boss.”

  Climbing the stairs, Bobby stared at the curve of Sarah’s ass. “Nice guy,” he said, imagining her crotch in his mouth.

  Sarah stuck out her tongue so it lolled at the side and made the crazy sign with her hand. “Speaks English for you,” she said. “Wants to impress you.”

  After Bobby had covered his hands in a new set of bandages, he sat on a chair in her room and marveled at this Dutch plot of IKEA modern, soft spongy couches and clear glass tables and a bed of the finest Swedish pine. He wondered if he could stay in here while everything shook out. It wasn’t a cozy room, but he would be fine here. He would hide while Darlo and Shane fought, Joey fudged and frittered, and Adam ran out the clock.

  On her blue dresser stood a bunch of pictures. One was of Sarah and some dude locked in a kiss of clear passion. He looked like Shane.

  “Boyfriend?” he said, motioning to the picture.

  “Ex-boyfriend,” she said, and smiled, a little bit sad. The room went warm all of a sudden.

  “I’ve got an hour before I have to go to dinner,” he said. “It’s going to be like a last supper.”

  Sarah lay on the bed. “Come over here.”

  He lay down next to her. Her covers portrayed some kind of ironic scene involving deer in the forest. Well, he hoped it was ironic. If it wasn’t, they should just put him in handcuffs for being such a chicken hawk.

  She leaned up on her elbow. A chain-linked onyx bracelet hung from her wrist. “When I saw you at that café,” she said, “I thought you were so cute.”

  “Really?” He tried to hide his hands behind his body, but it just looked like he was arresting himself. “Seriously?”

  “Mm-hmm. I thought, how am I going to get his attention? I didn’t need to check my e-mail, just killing time before school, but I sat down and checked it anyway, and then you sat down opposite me but wouldn’t make eye contact.” She played with a stitch in the comforter, looked down, looked up. “Very hard to get. So I went outside to have a cigarette, but you didn’t take the hint, kept looking up at me but didn’t get up. I was just about to leave when you had that tantrum and Ullee kicked you out.”

  “He’s a nice man,” Bobby said. “That was shitty of me.”

  “He’s a perv,” she said. “He stares at my tits. Those computers are shit. And his dreads — nasty.”

  Bobby started picking at the stitching too, bringing his hand closer and closer to hers, moving among oak trees and Bambis, woodchucks and daisies.

  “And then I came stumbling out,” he said. “A mess.”

  Their fingers touched, took apart a seam.

  “And there you were,” she said. “And here we are.”

  She dimmed the lights. Stars covered her ceiling, glow-in-the-dark constellations. She rolled over him softly, throwing off her shirt, and as her shadow grew on the wall, he thought of Roy Batty, the replicant played by Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, and the soliloquy he gives in the moments before his death.

  Her tongue was hot and slick. His hands went all over her. She didn’t care about their condition.

  “Press lightly,” she said. “Slow and light now, Bobby.”

  At the end of Blade Runner, Batty stands on the top of a building, having just saved the life of Deckard, the man hunting him down, played with a most potent dude-itude by Harrison Ford. Batty’s quest to stay alive, to escape the internal robotic clock that marks him for imminent expiration, is over. Atop the rain-soaked roof of some rotting art deco building, the lights of dystopian progress sputter in their vision. Handfuls of vapor sheet down their faces. Batty rises over Deckard, who looks up in terror and wonder. He rises over him, as thunder and lightning spit sound and light. He rises over him, mountain-sized.

  “I have seen things,” Batty says, “you people would not believe.”

  He understands that he cannot fight against the predestined, understands certain inevitabilities, finally, completely.

  “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,” he continues. “I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.”

  Sarah removed his shirt, ran her hands along Bobby’s spotty-haired chest, got on top and pinned him down. The replicant’s face loomed in his sight. But the replicant was him, come to rest once and for all.

  “All those moments,” Batty whispers, “will be lost in time. Like tears in rain.”

  In Bobby’s eyes, the room dropped away in the tunnel vision of desire and flight. Sarah was a burning little star, dwarfing the Milky Way behind her, moving, unhurried, in the dimmed-down gloaming.

  “Lost,” Batty says, lowering his eyes. “Like tears. In rain.”

  But still, streaming over her henna-red head like a halo, Bobby saw the Big Dipper, and the spindly necklace of Cassiopeia, and, poised like a little diamond earring, the North Star.

  “Like tears,” he said, stretching to meet her. “In rain.”

  She reared up. Had she heard him at all?

  “You smell like vanilla,” she whispered. “What do I smell like?”

  “Salt,” he said. “Water. Fire, baby. Fire.”

  She laughed, and her teeth glinted, and further off, past her, lay oceans of stars, oceans that had lain upon so many ceilings, from all the vantage points, on skies painted in blue and white, oxblood and sea green. On beds in countless states and cities, foreign and domestic, these glow-in-the-dark constellations, these dioramas, couched him and the numerous burning feminine celestias that had hovered and crested and zoomed in his vision, creating points of bearing by which he navigated all the differences of escape. She and he, coasting and grooving, up into the night sky.

  Part III

  1

  SOMETIMES THE BUDDHA HAD a tough day. No problem. Shane was in rags, a fucking Untouchable, but some roles were worth the humiliation.

  His ears were really ringing now. That Dutch bastard had popped him good. But it made the suffering more complete, richer, gave the experience more bragging rights.

  He stood in Joey’s hotel room, a real nice spread, still a little bit stunned that she’d actually left their names at the front desk.

  “Yes, Mr. Warner,” the petite suited punk-rock boy with the nose stud had said, and handed him a key. “Enjoy your stay.”

  Shane grabbed the boy’s arm. “Is there a wet bar in the room?”

  “Yes, sir,” the clerk said, in the blandest nonconfrontational monotone. “Please let go of me.”

  And what a wet bar it was. Big-ass mother. Little gimp tramp.

  Joey’s tan Vuitton suitcase lay next to the bed. Shane wondered where the rest of her luggage was — that bitch would take a suitcase to buy a pack of cigarettes — and pondered the worth of rifling through the contents. Who knew what he’d find, besides unsent love letters to Darlo. Next to the suitcase lay a box of thirty CDs, right from the printing plant. A Post-it note stuck to the box said For Revvy at Guild Records.

  Shane had no idea who Revvy or Guild Records was. He ripped open the box and grabbed a CD; their four faces in that Queen-wannabe pose, looking up from darkness.

  “Wow,” he said, stroking the cover, like an old crone looking upon an image of her princess self. “Man.”

  He regarded the opulence of Joey’s suite. If she cared at all about us, Shane thought, she would have gotten each of us a room. That would have been a nice thing, a generous thing, but the manager wasn’t nice or generous. She was a sewer rat, chewing away with her spiked rodent teeth at the bottom of their mighty rock-and-roll vessel, doing nothing while Darlo steered it right into the shoals of show-biz breakdown.

  In the sparkling clean shower, dirt and peanut butter fell off him in a sheet, m
aking a putty on the five-star porcelain. He pleasure-groaned until water ran into his right ear and imitated a ballpoint pen going jab-jab-jab. His knees buckled and he cried out, but he loved the pain too. Ear stigmata to the max. He steadied himself. Rode it out.

  “And I have suffered,” he sang into the detachable brass showerhead, trying to croon like Sinatra, his only croon frame of reference. “Oh za-za-zoom I have suffered. Oh I hate Darlo, za-za-zoom, and I hate Bobby, ya-za-ba-za boom, thank you, New York, thank you so much. No, you’re much too kind, no, please, I don’t deserve it!”

  Steam filled up the shower, reminding him of a certain moment in a shower in a hotel in Portland, where two Reed coeds had taken him on. He leaned against the wall, jerking off, and remembered the brunette’s shattered heart tattoo across her shoulder, and how he had gotten down on his knees and played the part of the sexual penitent as they offered soft, complex communion. He leaned against the wall and grew stiff as a board in the desert.

  Then a jet of water blasted his ear. The pain this time left no room for reminiscence, bisected his head in a nonnegotiable agony, a sharp, burning lance straight through to his brain. His legs gave out and he fell to the floor. The position he assumed was similar to that of prostration at New Fundamentalist Baptist Church, Anaheim, the church where he’d tithed away his fortune, the holy house at which he’d been a once-and-future-king but where, now, if he entered in his peanut butter aura, he’d be immediately and forcefully ejected. But the position was also an evolutionary still life, of one headed out of, or back into, the silty tide pools of some Mesopotamian floodplain.

  The agony, he knew, was guided by the invisible, all-powerful hand of God, malignant and devious, never showing its face, piercing and playing, halving and quartering. Shane coughed up water and pounded the tile floor in theological frustration.

  “Why is this happening?” he said. “Why are You doing this to me? Why are You doing this? I have tried so fucking hard! I have looked for You everywhere!”