“Thank you so much, Asha. Your words seem to be returning, bit by bit. I’m sure your power will, too.” Red Feather smiles. “When you’re back at one hundred percent would you mind if we could get your statement on video?”
“Sure thing,” Asha chirps. “Do you think I’ll still be able to fly when I get my words back?”
“We’ll have to wait and see.” Red Feather is thankful for the reprieve from Günn’s disbelief. This interview is almost fun.
“Bummer. But I guess I’d rather speak.” Asha smiles and pops another gummy worm into her mouth. “Could you get a message to my mom? She’s at an ashram in India. I’d hate her to worry in case someone watches the news. She knows I party.”
“Sure thing. Got her info?”
Asha hands Red Feather a fresh piece of paper marked with her careful script:
Norma Jeane Baker
Auroville
00 91 555 78792
The office of the ashram has a phone.
Red Feather’s brow furrows at the name. His eyes widen as the information computes. Forget about tutus and ballerinas, this is a horse of a different color.
“Norma Jeane Baker? As in the Norma Jeane? Marilyn—”
Asha puts her hand up, “Yes, but don’t call her that. Her name is Norma Jeane. Please give her the message. And give her my number here, too?” Her chirpspeak is getting clearer and clearer, must be the practicing.
“You got it. Galactic Canary.” Daughter of Marilyn Freaking Monroe. Red Feather winks at Asha, now seeing the resemblance past her mocha-toned skin. Asha smiles and the resemblance deepens.
“Can I get some more gummy worms? I just ate my last one.”
“I’ll tell the nurse. And I’ll be back to check on you later.”
Asha nods and flutters back up to her perch on the bathroom door, slowly swinging and chirpsinging Crimson and Clover.
Galactic Canary, aka Asha Kinsella, feels bad about lying to the nice detective, omitting the fact that she and her friends were at the party to sell the marijuana they grow, technically illegally.
But Asha’s guilt quickly fades as her grief crashes over in a tsunami of pain. She holds back the tears, not wanting to start another fire with her sadness.
Icarus Lazlo, aka Ichor
You hear the detective and that little bird freak talking about you as you drink from a blood bag, the first venous human blood you’ve had in over a year. You’re tempted to pay that little blonde bitch a visit for telling the police about your humiliating defeat at her and her friends’ hands.
But you have more pressing concerns: As you drink from the blood bag—multiple bloodgasms—you’re worried that the killing lust will return with these red globules sliding over your tongue and into your throat. You can’t go back down that road, not after getting your soul back. But you’re starving.
Getting resurrected takes a lot out of a person. And you forgot how good non-menstrual blood can taste.
Staring out over the city, you’re struck with the enormity of what’s come to pass. So enormous, in fact, that the human response is to treat it as any event one-hundredth its size until they can wrap their brains around it. Not just the number of dead, but the sixteen miracle survivors.
You pull from the blood bag and you pull deep. A different sensation entirely from your usual menstrual fare. Sharper, filled with impurities, every bad memory, every failed dream, but still delicious and complex. Hope only springs eternal when fresh from the womb. And there’s the side effect of fresh blood you’ve forgotten: rage. The urge to bite, tear, feel the life drain out of a warm body and into yours, warming for the briefest moment, remembering what it feels to be an animal human.
This blood is a drug. You finish the bag and you already want another. Your palms itch with desire. You can smell the woman you had at the rave, the girl with more than one uterus. Hers is the drink you want, but this bag has poisoned you into thinking otherwise. You don’t need this rush. You don’t want it. Your mind spins and dances in and around itself as the drink kicks in, drunk you are on death.
You close your eyes and try to enjoy the sick feeling like you once did. It’s going to be harder than you thought to kick this habit again.
Just one more blood bag.
Just one more and I’ll be done.
One more and I’ll be done.
One more. One more. One more.
2:15 PM LAPD Forensics Department
Back at the lab, Stacey Chang receives a package of silver slivers from Detective Red Feather. The note reads:
These shot out of one of your alien girls.
Please test and ID ASAP. Thanks! ~RF
The alien girls. So cool. Chang wishes she’d been able to meet them in person. Guess she could have asked, but oh well. Nevermind. She gets to work running her usual battery of tests, none of which identify the material. Durable as hell, even when melted. And once solidified it re-forms to its original needle shape.
Chang’s eyes widen as she says to herself, “No fucking way, dude.” She takes a piece of the metal to the bathroom and slides it along the glass. It cuts through like butter, a perfect line bisecting her own reflection.
“Unbelievable.”
Could someone have actually manufactured adamantium? As far as she knows the only place it exists is in the world of Marvel Comics and its fictional universes.
Stacey Chang calls Detective Red Feather, whom she knows will entertain the thought.
The Roswell Institute, Chang thinks. I wonder if they’re hiring.
2:20 PM Spruce-Musa Hospital
Günn waits for Red Feather in the hallway, looking calmer but still not meeting his eyes.
“Wait until you get a load of this,” Red Feather says, handing the yellow legal pad with Asha Kinsella’s statement to Günn. “That bird girl in there is Marilyn-freaking-Monroe’s daughter!”
Günn accepts the pad, her anger at her partner taking second fiddle to the news. “No shit.”
Red Feather shakes his head in a different kind of shock. “I have her number in India.”
“She still lives there? I thought she moved back.”
“The bird girl says she goes back and forth, but Marilyn, I mean Norma Jeane, mostly lives there with Asha’s dad on an ashram.” This day is going down in history for so many more reasons than anyone will ever know.
“Do you think I should call her?” Red Feather really wants to be the one to speak with the pseudo-reclusive woman formerly known as Marilyn Monroe.
“As much as you’re jonesing to have a one-on-one with America’s most beloved sexpot turned whistleblower, you better give that number to the chief. Hell, the mayor might wanna make that call.” Günn throws Red Feather a pointed mom look.
Red Feather knows she’s right, but commits the number to memory regardless. Red Feather opens his phone and relays the message to Assistant Chief Ortiz, who makes an executive decision to speak to Ms. Baker himself. Lucky bastard, Red Feather thinks, then reconsiders. Who wants to give a parent the news that their child was found in pieces and now flies around a hospital room in Beverly Hills’s Spruce-Musa?
Red Feather returns to his partner.
“So,” Günn says, “I just got off the phone with the owner of the Tiger’s Tail in Vegas, strip club where one of our survivors worked. He filed a lawsuit against Cherie Beauxden, you know, the survivor with the huge rack? He claims she ruined his business because, get this, she went all Carrie in the middle of a performance.”
“Pig blood and fire?” Red Feather hates that part, such a tragedy.
“No. Got her period on stage. Then all the men in the club keeled over dead. Hospital found she’s got some kind of genetic anomaly—three uteruses. I mean, uteri. Whatever.” Günn shakes her head. “She has poison pheromones or something.
According to Cherie’s arrest statement, that was her first ever period. She claimed to be twenty-one, but turned out she was only eighteen. There was an APB out on her from her family, but that went null and void on her eighteenth birthday.”
“The hell?” Oh, this rabbit hole is deep.
“Let me do bird girl’s statement,” Günn says, waving the yellow legal pads in her hands. “Then let’s talk with Carrie incarnate.” Günn plops into a waiting-room chair and begins reading.
Red Feather shifts on his feet. “Hey, listen, about before—”
“Shush. I’m concentrating.” Günn feigns intensity over the pages, an act that turns real and fast. A menstrual blood-drinking vampire. I’ll be goddamned.
Red Feather sits, quietly bouncing his left leg in a restless motion, keeping an empty chair between him and his partner.
2:25 PM LAPD Headquarters
Assistant Chief Ortiz runs out of ways to describe the strangeness of this Mystery Science Theater day. One of the survivors is Marilyn Monroe’s daughter? Come on. Ortiz peeks into his office and Agent Quatro sits across from the still-passed out Natalie Crane. Ortiz gestures to Quatro that he’ll be next door making a call. She nods, turns back to studying Charles Wallace Crane’s note with her eyes closed.
Ortiz calculates that it’s 4 AM in India and hopes the fact that he’s calling an ashram means someone will be awake to answer the phone. The knots in his stomach could’ve been tied by sailors as the phone rings and a voice answers in a familiar breathy hello that hits Ortiz with a memory so hard he gasps.
He’s fourteen and his sister, Anita, is sixteen. She’s crying and listening to Marilyn Monroe records non-stop because some boy in the neighborhood broke her heart. Anita wasn’t just obsessed with Marilyn, she wanted to be her. Saved up and gave herself a terrible bleach blonde hairdo that brought out her thick dark eyebrows and faint mustache. That summer, and Marilyn’s wavering voice singing One Silver Dollar over and over again until everyone in the Ortiz family was ready to scratch their ears out. He heard that song so many times when he finally saw The River of No Return a decade later and there Marilyn was singing that dreadful tune, Gabriel found himself weeping. The boy that had broken his sister’s heart had done so much more: got her pregnant. Anita bled to death in the middle of the night trying to give herself a coat-hanger abortion just a few months later.
“Hello? Are you okay?” The voice says again, now concerned.
Tears prick Ortiz’s eyes and he blinks them away.
“Sorry, yes, uh, this is Assistant Chief Gabriel Ortiz of the Los Angeles Police Department, I’m trying to reach Ma—, Norma Jeane Baker.” Ortiz winces at his almost blunder.
“Speaking.”
That voice. Anyone would recognize that voice. Ortiz’s heart pounds. Hard.
“Hello, Ms. Baker. I hope I didn’t wake you?”
“No, sir, you caught me on reception duty here at the center. How can I help you? Interested in one of our retreats?” Ortiz can hear the smile behind her voice and cringes. Fuck this call.
“I wish I was.” Ortiz clears his throat. “It’s actually, um, your daughter. She’s in the hospital and—”
“Asha? Oh God, what’s happened? Is she okay?” The familiar voice sounds nothing like the movies now. It’s all mother and all worry.
“There was an incident here in Los Angeles last night at a rave party she was attending—”
“Well, just go and damn it! I told her to stop that nonsense and now—Well is she okay?” Only it comes out as one big word. Wellissheokay?
“Yes, she is okay. There was an explosion and your daughter is one of a handful of survivors.”
A pause that could fill a lifetime. Ortiz hears quiet crying.
“Ma’am, it’s okay, your daughter is fine.”
More crying and sniffling.
“It might be a good idea if you could come back to Los Angeles. She’s been asking for you. She said to tell you not to worry.”
Silence. And then, “I’ve always heard them say that your life flashes before your eyes before you die, but I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that’s what happens when you’ve lost your child, or almost did.” She blows her nose.
Ortiz’s turn to be silent.
“I’ll be on the next plane out of Madras. Can you please give me her number at the hospital? Which hospital is it? I’d like to talk to her before I leave if at all possible.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t give out that information since she’s still being questioned as a witness to last night’s tragedy.”
“Oh. Of course. I understand. Can I have your number? The detectives? Anyone? I’ll be checking in on my layovers. It’s an almost 24-hour traveling time from here to there.”
Ortiz hits her with a numbers soup of listings, she repeats each one back.
“Before I hang up, Chief Ortiz, how many people were killed at the rave?”
“Roughly thirty-five thousand.”
Norma Jeane muffles a scream, dropping the phone in the process. Ortiz hears a series of bumps as she retrieves the handset and puts it back to her ear.
“Please take care of my girl, I’m on my way.”
Ortiz nods and says of course even though Norma Jeane Baker, the former Ms. Marilyn Monroe and infamous whistleblower on the Kennedy family, has already hung up.
Norma Jeane Baker
You stare at the phone, your heart in your throat making it impossible to breathe. You take the deep cleansing breaths that guruji taught you, focusing on the present and clearing your mind of expectations. When your heart stops pounding and your stomach knots untie you pick the phone back up and call the local travel agent, waking her with the emergency. Three tickets. You, your husband, and your bodyguard.
Asha is okay, Asha is okay, Asha is okay. Your new mantra.
By now you thought you’d seen and felt it all, but nothing compares to the fear that something ill has befallen your child. Your only child. Your miracle baby. The doctors—every doctor you went to—all said it would be impossible to conceive. Your uterus so scarred from fourteen abortions, a woman’s life before birth control pills and your life after fame. And all you ever wanted was to be a mom. The irony still hurts. But conceive you did in 1975, long after you’d given up hope and made peace with yourself. That was when you met Navid Kinsella, the Irish-Indian knight in shining armor you’d always wished for, the love of your life who made your dreams come true. You wake him now and tell him the news. He holds you tight and then begins packing.
You work on your breathing, but the very thought of Los Angeles—being on its ground at all—gives you hives and palpitations. The last time you went was for Asha’s graduation from university four years ago and in spite of your security detail there was another attempt on your life. One of your bodyguards was critically injured. He’s now wheelchair-bound.
Never would you have imagined that thirty-eight years after your press conference on August 4, 1962—the one the papers said “blew the whistle on the entire Kennedy family”—your life would still be at risk. You had no choice but to give that press conference, divulge your relationships with the brothers, and share the photos of the gang rape they orchestrated while you were drugged and unconscious, the ones they tried to use to blackmail you. You had to make public all the notes in your little black journal, the one filled with names and dates and events so you could research what these intelligent men talked about in your presence to not look or feel stupid when they asked you questions or your opinion about politics. Who would have thought that all those little scribbles of yours would expose so very many secrets. Certainly not you. You just wanted to impress the most important men in the world. You wanted to prove you’re weren’t just a dumb blonde. You wanted them to know you were First Lady material.
Once you realized the Kenne
dy brothers didn’t love you—in fact it turned out they were incapable of love—they were only using you, and passing you around their friends like a living sex doll, that’s when you started to fear for your life.
You felt only the press could protect you. And to a degree they did.
The inquiry into John F. Kennedy revealed—among worlds of corruption, fraud, bribery, abuses of power, and sexual assault all under rug swept—he was indeed conspiring with his brother, the attorney general, to murder you to keep you quiet. If you hadn’t talked you’d be long buried, and the coroner’s actual report on your cause of death buried, too. You came this close to being one in a long line of Hollywood suicides.
And yet the public was not forgiving of your forthrightness. You had sullied the Kennedy legacy. They blamed you when JFK resigned, and when he killed himself on June 6, 1968. They blamed you again when RFK killed himself on June 6, 1968. They said you might as well have pulled the triggers yourself. They said you burned down Camelot. America was never the same. And it was all your fault.
When people began acting on the new death threats against you, and the scale and scope escalated, you packed up and left America. You had always been interested in yoga so you moved to India. And here you stayed. From India you finally retrieved the rights to your own image—those that had been stolen from you time and time again by more men who took advantage of your naiveté—and the rights to your own stage name. It makes you proud that it is now copyright infringement to publish any and all images of your face and body, and former name, without consent from your team. And these days you live comfortably on infringement lawsuits and royalties from your few films still in circulation. Small victories that often feel pyrrhic—everything came at such a huge cost—as you are finally in control of your assets, physical and otherwise. You brush these thoughts from your head. Now isn’t the time to dwell on the past when there’s too much happening in the present.
Crime Rave Page 21
