by Todd Grimson
“Were you married yet?”
“Not until we returned. Victorious, with all kinds of booty and slaves. The warriors loved me because I was invincible and, without letting them know it was magic, I made them invincible too. I confused our enemies’ vision, caused their leader to be attacked by a black bird, which was a terrible omen … I had all kinds of tricks.”
“What happened with Xtah?”
A yellow jacket was hovering near Lisa, annoyingly; she waved at it, and it fled her hand but then came right back. Boro pointed his index finger at it, mouthed a silent “bang,” and the insect dropped lifeless to the ground.
“I was married to Xtah in a magnificent ceremony, and then I fucked her and fucked her, she was very hot and I thought she was liking it, but afterward she’d roll onto her side and say it hurt, that my penis was too big. I told myself that she really enjoyed it… the cries of pain in a woman are sometimes hard to tell from cries of pleasure … it’s a hard thing for a man to ever know. Maybe my penis had developed a secret barb like the male jaguar has, and it only comes out inside the female.”
“What about your monthly sacrifice?” Lisa asked, drinking from a glass of iced limeade the old fat woman had brought out to them without a word, taking away the flan cups and spoons.
“That went along fine for almost a year,” Boro said, “and then, just before the five unlucky days, Zaqui came to me, it was time for the next sacrifice, and she said, ‘Give me your wife/ That was the hidden part, I saw, of the bargain. She was jealous … cats can be very jealous—like your cat in your apartment. If he saw you petting another cat, talking to it in your private voice … he’d be, oh, mucho furioso.”
“So what did you do?”
“I was an idiot. Xtah still hated me; I could have kept the dummy and nobody but her family would have known the difference, and I could have taken care of them … what I did was, I left the twin in Xtah’s place, tied to the tree. I felt terrible, for even if Xbaquiyalo was a dummy, she was innocent, she had never had an evil thought in her head, she always smiled when she saw me. I left her there and then came back and raped my wife, and once again Xtah screamed like I was murdering her. I felt ashamed that the servants could hear. She cursed me then, and said she knew that I was a sorcerer, she said I could kill her if I wanted to, or put her under a spell, but she despised me, I was a lowlife … she spat on the floor, which back then was the worst insult you could do. It was too late to take her out to the tree and make an exchange. The next day, going against the number— because usually during the unlucky days you just took it easy, stayed inside, tried not to get in trouble, not to cross the path of a big green snake or anything else—I said that it was unlucky for the Chavin, that we would be unexpected, and I forced the royal astrologer to announce that it was all preordained, they invented some new math to make the numbers come out right. But it was doomed.
“We got our asses kicked. My magic was gone, and I was seeing things that weren’t there, that nobody else seemed to see … ghost warriors, I don’t know. We were driven all the way back, taking heavy losses all the way. The Chavin chieftains just wanted me, I was famous by then … and my own people had turned on me, there had been rumors about the sacrifices and they had feared me, but now Xtah saw that my magic was gone, so she denounced me. I was a witch who had changed the numbers and led them all to blasphemy, and so Ahcucumatz had me put in a cage and given to the enemy, with my hands and feet cut off, my tongue ripped out, castrated … the Chavin kept me alive, they wanted to take me south to show me to the emperor. On the way down, following the Yellow Road, Zaqui came one night and killed whoever stood in her way, dragging me away like a dead monkey, carrying me in her mouth. At the Big Lake, Xbaquiyalo was there, Zaqui hadn’t eaten her, she’d known what I was up to all along. My people were now under the administration of the Chavin … Zaqui came back with body parts, and Xbaquiyalo patiently sewed them on. Look,” Boro said, and pulled off the bands over first his left wrist and then the right, then pulling up his pants legs to show his ankles—all the terrible scars. Lisa saw that the skin tones did not quite match.
“So how,” Lisa said, her voice quavering just a little, “are you still here? And what happened to the jaguar?”
“Don’t you want to know what became of Xtah? She had helped them cut me up. You can guess what she chopped off. But she was pregnant and didn’t know it; later on she gave birth to twin were-jaguars. They killed her on their way out of her belly. Sort of like Alien, you know. And Zaqui, many years later, when she was tired and sick, was killed and skinned—the last I heard, someone had made her into a couch. A couch that still exists, with great powers, by the way. If you knew where it was … well, forget that. As for me, well, if I told you, then you’d know. And I kill anybody who knows. I’ve told you a lot, Lisa Nova, more than I’ve told anyone for years. I like you.”
“I like you too,” Lisa said. “It’s very weird, but I do. I’m a little afraid of you, though.”
“You should be,” Boro said. “You don’t act like it much, huh? That’s good. Did you like the flan?”
“I liked the whole meal.”
“Good,” he said, almost as if he were a bit drunk, waving his hand, then holding his face in both hands for a few moments, hiding his eyes. “You go now, and I’ll see you again.”
Lisa nodded, although he couldn’t see her, said OK, goodbye, feeling uneasy about the way his mood seemed to have just turned. His dreadlocks, his wristbands, his rings, his fading, thin-lined tattoos on ageless burnished bronze skin.
Now, as she drove in her car, the residents of the barrio all seemed to be noticing her, a stranger, and she didn’t want to get stuck in traffic here in East L.A.
At a red light, she could see workers at a construction site. A man in an orange hard hat looked down from above. There was the giant echoing buzz of some machine. Then hammering noises. The honk of a horn. A blue elevator, not part of the building but a temporary external addition, began to ascend. The big noise started again, drowning out all other layers of sound.
SIXTEEN
Lisa greeted her cat, glad to deal with him on his level, directly—she didn’t want to process all of this other stuff.
Daphne Stern had called her back about doing the commercial. It looked good, they wanted something stylized, she needed to meet with Lisa soon.
The next message caught her off guard, it was Code but she almost didn’t recognize his voice at first, she didn’t know what his problem was but it was disturbing to hear him say: “Lisa? You fucking bitch.” He said it halfway as an endearment, laughing. “I can’t believe it. Maybe it’s just a fucking coincidence … if it is, it’s too bizarre. Talk to me. Are you there? Hey, Caz. Meow. What’s Lisa up to, man? What the hell is going on?”
Lisa stopped the machine and punched his number, more puzzled and concerned than mad. When he answered, she said, “You tell me what’s going on.”
“You don’t know?”
“What?”
“No, I guess you don’t. OK, get this: Wendy got stabbed, this nineteen-year-old hustler boyfriend of hers got mad because she wrote him checks that bounced, and so he stuck a steak knife in her chest. She’s in critical condition in Beth Israel. Sterling called me … I guess I might wrap things up here and go back to New York. No lawsuit has been officially filed, and Sterling says we can go to France and do some gigs, he claims now he was fed up with Wendy anyway, she was just being a bitch….”
“Oh,” was all Lisa could say. Implicit in Code’s tone was the vivid memory of how yesterday Lisa had X’d out Wendy’s face in the picture of the band.
“Yeah. ‘Oh.’ And Adrian called me … the cops arrested Lou’s son, Jonathan—whom Adrian knows, or he’s met him a few times—supposedly he’s the one who blew up his own mother’s gallery I don’t know what their evidence is.”
“I bet he’s already out on bail’ Lisa said, considering all this, wondering when something was going to happen directly to Lou.
“You are!” Code said. “You’re an evil fucking bitch!”
“I don’t have to take that kind of jazz from you,” she replied. “No, I’m sure you don’t.”
“Listen, I don’t criticize you, Code. If you got in trouble, I’d stick by you without any questions.”
“You would?” Code said, mock disbelievingly but realizing, perhaps, that Lisa’s emotions might be a little frayed.
“Yeah, I would.” She dramatically sighed.
“Uh-oh, I’ve got company. I shouldn’t have given a key to Freak. Talk to you later,” Code said, and hung up.
Lisa was trying to cope with a lot of raw information. She wished she hadn’t come home. It might have been soothing to have spent some money, bought some stuff, some music or new clothes, accessories, maybe some semirare movies she meant to study, somewhere around here she had a list.
The phone rang, and she answered it at once, unthinking, maybe reflexively assuming it was Code again, or Christine. It was Roy Hardway.
“I’d like us to get together,” he said in his seductive actor’s voice.
“No,” Lisa said. “I don’t think we should.”
“I—
“What do you think you saw?”
“I saw you, I recognized something in you….”
“That wasn’t me.”
“How do you mean that? That you were acting? I don’t care. I saw you beyond all masks.”
His voice, coupled with her mental image of him, was hard to resist: It was a Pavlovian, scientifically tested response. The power of the personality expressed on the big screen.
“You don’t even know me.”
“I do. And you know me. You do. What you’ve seen is what there is. Decipher it. The message is all there. It’s in the eyes.”
“Please don’t call me anymore.”
“All right,” said Roy Hardway, as if thoughtfully, and hung up.
God. Jesus.
What the fuck.
The last message on the tape was from Christine, asking if Lisa was sure she didn’t want to go to Seattle. It sounded like Christine wanted to, for whatever reason, and without analyzing it, Lisa called her and said OK, let’s go.
Christine sounded like she wanted to talk, but some music was playing, Lisa sensed Oriole’s presence, so they just ran down the plan and said goodbye.
Then Lisa erased all the messages, poured herself a glass of iced tea, put on a CD of some interesting music her brother had sent her, a piano in “just” intonation played by one of Track’s friends. She was afraid, and she didn’t want to be. It would be too easy to be weak, to melt. She went out onto her veranda, put her bare feet up; Casimir soon followed, jumping up onto her thighs. The noises of the neighborhood blended in with the eerie piano music. Traffic, raised voices now and then, thump-a-thump bass beats from young males in their passing cars.
She wondered if Jules Brandenberg would be watching Girl, 10, Murders Boys tonight. Well, she didn’t know, it was out of her control. At least she had some work. The perfume commercial, if it came off, could lead to other things.
She refused to speculate about Boro. It wasn’t worth it. She didn’t want to worry about the implications of what he had said. No interpretation. No conclusions drawn. It wasn’t that she was incurious about the constellation of forces active all around her, but she thought it was wisest in this case not to think too much about what to do. Thought was an impediment, a snare. It would only make her more nervous than she was. She trusted her snap judgments.
Fear, by itself, can be lived with, like teenagers worried about Armani while living in downtown Beirut.
SEVENTEEN
“I was very impressed by it. You had that visual sense of something always about to be revealed, so that even a scene that seemed neutral enough played with my expectations. I kept thinking, What is going on here? What is this all about? And I really wanted to find out. Lvery shot was full of the draw of the future, of possibilities suggested … it kept me watching. All this momentum without any of the traditional narrative props.”
“I want to do melodrama now,” Lisa said, wanting to get this out
and have it be understood, because despite the flattery she was afraid he was leading up to saying, in one way or another, that she was too “arty” to ever do a regular film.
It had been just an impulse that had made her call Jules Brandenberg’s office; at 8 P.M. she expected only a machine, she planned to leave the possibly pointless message that she would be in Seattle for a couple of days. Once she began talking to the tape, however, Brandenberg himself picked up the phone. He said he’d watched her film the night before, he wanted to talk to her about it. He hadn’t realized, he said, that he’d stayed in the office so late— would she like to meet him for dinner? Or, if she’d eaten … Sure, she said, and he named a place, Michael’s, in Santa Monica.
So, out of nowhere, she had a date of sorts. A meeting. The revelations of Boro seemed somewhat distant now … she was excited by the fact that Brandenberg liked her film. She took a shower and changed into what seemed a pretty basic outfit: black minidress, black tights, her studded black leather jacket, a necklace that looked like it was made from spaceship wreckage, unidentifiable bits of hardware intermingled with cobalt blue marbles encased on wire spirals, one matching earring of pseudospaceship debris with a cobalt chip, the other ear with just its three gold little rings. She put on makeup and considered trying to do something about the ink tattoos on her arms, but she couldn’t wash them off, even with an alcohol swab. That fucking Boro. Oh well. Given his films, one would think that Jules would be intrigued by intimations of excess.
Now he sat across from her, in warm and generous candlelight, eating grilled free-range chicken, while she had sauteed red snapper with ginger and thyme. He was well-mannered, he seemed intellectual but he had that corrupt-to-the-point-of-innocence air that basically translated as a kind of boyishness, like he’d perfected an act of not being anywhere near as worldly and wised-up as he really was.
“I was really taken by some of the images… like, ah, that unusually soiled T-shirt the girl was wearing when she was out on the fire escape. The compositions were tilted, angled, cropped … but it didn’t seem gimmicky, it contributed, with the flashing camera, to the mood of vulnerability, or sexual vulnerability. Oh, and something that I’m personally obsessed by: the lighting. Do you know Selwyn?” Jules said, looking up and smiling. Lisa had been so absorbed in listening to her work being praised that she hadn’t even noticed the master, the acknowledged “genius”—he had apparently just arrived, with his party of four, and he stopped by to say hello to a fellow pro.
“This is Lisa Nova,” said Jules, introducing them, and she made eye contact with Selwyn Popcorn for only a microsecond, thinking that he probably thought she was Brandenberg’s equivalent of rough trade.
“I’ve heard your name,” said Popcorn, much better dressed than she had often seen him in casual shots. “Take care, Jules,” he said, putting his hand on the younger filmmaker’s shoulder, ambiguous parting words and an ambiguous parting gesture that made Lisa blush. She tried to hide her loss of composure by taking a long sip of white wine.
Then, when she had regained her poise, she saw, across the room, at Popcorn’s table, Lou Greenwood, Lou Adolph, Lou Burke, his wife, Veronica, the blond actor Christian Manitoba, the Australian body-model-turned actress Polly Fairchild, and a young guy with longish hair whom she didn’t know.
Lou didn’t see her, but the unknown guy did: He stared at her, kept staring … Lisa stared back, then she shifted her gaze back to pay attention to Jules, as the waiter meanwhile had taken away their plates.
Oh yeah, Lou had noticed her. She felt suddenly brazen, fuck all this, she’d like to give him the finger but it would give too much away. He’d get his, she thought, and Jules Brandenberg must have noticed something in her expression, for he reacted, giving her a strange, shy little smile.
He had a little gold ear
ring in his left earlobe, and he was wearing an expensive olive green shirt with khaki trousers and, when he put it back on, a khaki jacket.
“I’d like to see what you could do with LA. Ripper II” he said as they were on their way outside, desiring neither coffee nor dessert. “The script is all fucked up, but maybe you’ll have some ideas. I know you’d probably rather do something of your own, but the sequel’s got to happen, I don’t have any desire … I’d just as soon have somebody new give it an interesting twist. Can you stop by my place on the way home, pick up the script? And I should give you one for My Evil Twin. You’re Ramona … you’re in the big Halloween scene. I’m in Laurel Canyon—is that too much driving for you to do?”
She followed his Porsche. It wasn’t all that far. His house was something else. The gate opened electronically, letting them enter the property. The house was white and well lit, quasi-Frank Lloyd Wright. Very modernistic.
