Burning Man

by Alan Russell

  With one hand I was pointing to Sirius; the other hand had found its way around Lisbet’s shoulder. Our heads moved from the stars to each other, and we kissed.

  CHAPTER 16:

  LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE

  Gravity didn’t seem to have quite the same hold on either one of us after the kiss. It had been a long time since I’d felt good like that, and that feeling of exhilaration kept bubbling up and going to my brain. Lisbet’s smiles and animated conversation told me she was feeling the same thing, which made the return drive to the Garden of Angels and Lisbet’s car seem all too short. As I came to a stop in the cemetery’s parking lot, Lisbet surprised me by asking, “Where are you sleeping tonight?”

  “I imagine the same place where I’ve slept for the last eight years.”

  “Someone wants you hurt or dead. Maybe you should find another place to stay the night.”

  “Sirius is the best guard dog in the world—no, the universe.”

  Sirius heard his name spoken and thought that meant it was time to socialize. He settled in for some serious scratching, acting more like a lapdog than a guard dog.

  “I do have a comfortable sofa bed,” she said.

  “You don’t need to spoil Sirius. He can sleep on the floor.”

  “He can sleep with you on the sofa bed.”

  “I thought your apartment didn’t allow dogs.”

  “As you’ve mentioned a time or two, Sirius isn’t a dog but an LAPD officer.”

  “You really don’t need to worry about me. I’m pretty sure those bad guys are either holed up or on the run. No one is coming after me tonight, Lisbet.”

  She didn’t look completely satisfied but didn’t push it further. I extended my hand, and we twined fingers.

  “I am not ready for the night to end yet. If you’re not too tired, you’re welcome to come to my place for a nightcap.”

  “I’d like that. But I will need to attend to bowser burger business on the way.”

  “Then I’ll not get in the way of your alliteration or Sirius’s dinner.”

  Sirius must have been eavesdropping—either that or his burger radar, which worked better than Pavlov’s bell, went off. The slap, slap, slap of his tail made it clear that he knew dinner was imminent.

  Lisbet lived in a multicolored apartment in West LA not far away from Loyola Marymount University. The apartment’s color scheme looked as if it had been inspired by the choreography of Miami Vice, with the exterior stucco painted in pastels of peach, pink, and lime. At least there were no plastic pink flamingos in front.

  She was waiting in her car out front, and per her hand gestures I followed her down to the garage and took a space in visitor parking. Then Sirius and I crammed into Lisbet’s Civic and all of us drove over to her assigned parking spot.

  “You better stay in the car while I make sure the coast is clear,” she said. “I don’t want to run into the apartment manager.”

  While Lisbet was doing her scouting, I broke Sirius’s three by three into pieces and fed it to him. He was already sniffing at the restaurant’s doggy bags when Lisbet came back and signaled for us to join her. We took the elevator up to the second floor and made our way across a walkway to her unit. Lisbet had personalized the exterior of the apartment with an entry mat that actually said “Welcome.” Her particular patch of stucco was the color of peach. The entryway was festooned with several ridiculously healthy hanging plants overhead. Decorative stained glass lined her windows. There was a wooden planter next to her door that held several succulents with eye-catching geometric shapes. I wasn’t the only one sizing up the plant life, but I was pretty sure Sirius wasn’t doing it for aesthetic reasons. Since I had taken him for a walk at the In-N-Out, I knew his need wasn’t to pee but to advertise.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  The circling leg stilled.

  Lisbet finished working keys to locks and opened the door. “Be it ever so humble,” she said.

  If I’d had the same living area, it would have remained institutional, but in a glance I could see that Lisbet had tailored her apartment into a warm nest.

  “Would you like the grand tour?”

  “Lead on.”

  The kitchen was small, but a rolling butcher block evidently served as an island when needed. There were two framed prints in the kitchen, Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night and a black-and-white picture of an old Earl Grey tea box. A ristra of red peppers hung down from one of the cabinets. Over the sink was a wooden overhang for wine glasses; above it were flavored oils and vinegars with sprigs and stalks that appeared to be as much for use as decoration.

  “Are you in the mood for a glass of wine?”

  “Only if it’s red or white.”

  She checked the refrigerator and found an opened bottle of sauvignon blanc. Before pouring, she twisted out the cork, sniffed the vino and decided the wine was still drinkable. We clicked glasses and she led me into the living room. There was one picture on the wall, a large black and white of trees shrouded in fog.

  “I love the fog,” she said, “except when I’m driving in it.”

  We continued down the hallway. As I entered the room I felt eyes tracking me: there was a Felix the Cat clock with moving eyes on one wall. The bedroom was set up as an office, with a light table, art supplies, two computers each with a different printer, and a photo workshop. One wall of the office was set up for cubby holes, with markers, pens, brushes, papers of all sizes and colors, proofs, and work supplies. I reached for a red Swingline stapler.

  “Don’t touch my stapler,” Lisbet said, using Milton’s voice from the movie Office Space.

  “Where are your TPS reports?” I asked, and we exchanged grins at being in synch with movie shorthand humor.

  I moved to the next wall and looked at two different René Magritte prints. Lisbet must have interpreted my nod as meaning something and asked, “Do you have any art at your house?”

  “I don’t, but Sirius does: Dogs Playing Poker. It’s not as bad as it sounds, though. It’s on velvet.”

  There was one other piece of wall art in the office, a reproduction of an old map of the world. It bore some resemblance to the present-day world maps, but there were the notable omissions of a continent or two.

  I pointed to the words “Here there be dragons” and said, “The cartographer got it right.”

  “How is that?”

  “Where he wrote those words is right where LA is.”

  The master bedroom was filled with mission-style furniture. Along the longest wall were shelves that held books, CDs, and an assortment of keepsakes. In the corners of the room were sconces for soft lighting. Lisbet’s green thumb was evidenced in a number of houseplants, and a variety of fresh and dried flowers filled half a dozen vases. One of the walls was devoted to a display of framed familial pictures, and among them were a number of smiling faces that resembled Lisbet.

  “Four sisters,” she said, “three nieces, two nephews, and one brother.”

  “And a partridge in a pear tree,” I sang.

  In the air was the scent of potpourri, the balsam of pine sachets, the sandalwood of scented candles, and the fragrant gummy smell of eucalyptus leaves. It was a feminine room, because few men would take the time to make a space so appealing to the senses, but it was a room that would be easy to leave your boots in.

  Her apartment couldn’t have been more than eight hundred square feet, but she’d managed to pack a lot in. Mirrors, recessed lighting, and Lisbet’s good taste made the space feel much larger than it was. She left exploration of the loft—or what she called “my meditation space”—for last.

  The loft was a fusion of East and West. There were definite shrine elements to it: a tatami mat, a shoji door, and a small rock garden with trickling water. The space was set off by wall dividers of shadowed ravens and cranes. There was no altar but a table that seemed to be a memorial of sorts. Laid out on it were items Lisbet must have deemed significant: a piece of amber with a
fossilized insect; some sea shells; a few interesting-looking stones; a tiny pink baby blanket that held an ostrich egg; a cameo locket; a feather; a snow globe; a well-thumbed Bible; a book-sized container filled with white sand and a tiny rake; a small music box; and a framed black-and-white picture of the Garden of Angels.

  I picked up the picture and studied it for a moment. It wasn’t one of those views of a cemetery with creeping fog and shrouded images, but neither was it an inspirational shot of the sun rising. The picture showed the youthful reminders without the youths. It was sort of like seeing a deserted playground; you knew what was missing and what should have been there in place of the grave markers.

  “You’ve made a special place on this planet,” I said, carefully returning the photo to its place.

  “A lot of people have made it a special place. Today you saw how many are involved. I always like to quote from one of the memorial bricks: ‘Our share of night to bear.’”

  “Sometimes it seems like a long way to dawn.”

  “Sometimes it does, but not tonight.”

  “No, not tonight.”

  I took her in my arms and we held one another. The moment seemed to stir a lot of memories and feelings in me: the burial of Rose, Sister Frances’s miracle, the pleasure of holding Lisbet, and the thought that I wouldn’t be alive if she hadn’t saved me with a fortuitous phone call.

  “If you’re ever up for sainthood, I wonder if you saving my life would qualify as a miracle.”

  “I already told you that I don’t want to be a saint.”

  As if to emphasis this, she offered up a long and passionate kiss. When our lips finally disengaged I said, “I’m beginning to believe you.”

  She felt along the right side of my face, gently touching the scar tissue there. “Do you mind?”

  “Do you?”

  “I want to feel free to touch you.”

  “I hereby give you permission to ravage me wherever you want.”

  “Are you sensitive here?”

  “I can show you a few spots where I’m a lot more sensitive.”

  “I’m being serious, Michael. If touching you here isn’t pleasurable for you, I’ll stop.”

  “Don’t stop. What’s prickly is my personality, not my skin. The scarring makes that area not as sensitive to the touch as other parts of my face, but your warm hand still feels good to me.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “You’re actually feeling my buttocks, you know.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “That’s where they took that particular skin graft from.”

  “So you’re speaking out of your ass?”

  “You really have forever dispelled your saint image.”

  “Good,” she said, still stroking my face. “You know, the first time we met I asked around about you. That’s when I learned that you were the officer that was burned while bringing in the Strangler.”

  “That explains why you were nice to me. You felt sorry for Quasimodo.”

  “You mean I heard bells ringing?”

  I used the pretense of stretching to move my face away from her hand. I don’t like being self-conscious, but I am.

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” I said, changing the light tone of our conversation to something more serious.

  Lisbet took a read of my eyes and then a more pointed read of my scarred face. “I hope you’re not implying that this is some kind of mercy date. Yes, the first time we met I couldn’t help but notice the scarring on your face, but I stopped seeing it after that.”

  “You’re doing better than me, then. Sometimes I’m still startled when I see myself in the mirror.”

  “Sounds like me when I have a bad hair day.”

  I didn’t have to force my smile. “I’m getting used to the new me, but I was really self-conscious when I first started going out in public and noticed all the surreptitious staring directed my way.”

  “I’ll bet not as many people were staring at your scars as you thought.”

  “You’d lose that bet.”

  “I’m not saying that people weren’t staring, but not all of them were looking at your scars. They were staring at a hero. Your capturing the Strangler was a huge story. I still remember all those breaking news reports on how you and Sirius were doing.”

  “I guess I missed all the hoopla being in the burn unit. Everything was sort of a blur the first few days. There was a TV in my room, but I couldn’t watch it because the fire had burned my eyelids and corneas, and my face was swaddled in bandages.”

  “That must have been awful.”

  Her sympathetic voice kept me talking. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so isolated. What made it even worse was that my doctors told me I might lose my sight. So there I was in my personal darkness with nothing to do but worry, except on those too frequent occasions when I was being tortured.”

  Thinking that I’d offered up too much poor, poor, pitiful me, I finished with, “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you enjoy the play?”

  Lisbet had the good sense to groan.

  I said, “You’d think all of that would put a few scars in perspective, wouldn’t you?”

  “Didn’t it?”

  I shrugged. “I wasn’t only worried about my life or my sight. I was afraid that without a full recovery I wouldn’t have a job on the force.”

  “If I was fighting for my life, the last thing I’d think about was my work.”

  “When Jen died, work took on a new importance for me. It gave me a reason to keep going. So even when the doctors told me I was out of the woods, I kept worrying about the department finding some medical reason that would prevent me from returning to the force. That’s why I memorized eye charts and prepared for how to best answer questions about my physical and mental health. To tell the truth, I’m still paranoid.”

  “Is there a reason to be?”

  Instead of answering, I did a De Niro parody straight out of Taxi Driver: “You talkin’ to me?”

  Her smile afforded me the opportunity to echo the same bad impersonation, and the second time around it even got a laugh. That spared me from having to provide Lisbet with a real answer.

  We made our way back downstairs and settled on her sofa. I asked Lisbet about her work, and afterward she asked me about mine, and I told her a little bit about the Special Cases Unit.

  “I am glad the LAPD considered Moses and Rose special cases,” she said. “It wasn’t that way in the past.”

  I didn’t tell her the department hadn’t had a change of heart. “I guess Moses and Rose are a little more personal to me than they would be to most other cops.”

  She waited for me to elaborate. Anyone but Lisbet would have had to wait for a long time.

  “I was abandoned as a newborn. It’s likely my mother was a druggie, but I don’t know for sure. The police never found out who she was, but it’s not like they looked very hard either for her or for answers.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I had two great adoptive parents. And I’ve found some unexpected bonuses to not knowing my background.”

  “And what might those be?”

  “I get to celebrate every ethnic and religious holiday like it’s my very own. On Saint Patrick’s Day I’m an Irishman, on Cinco de Mayo I’m Mexican, and on Chinese New Year’s I’m Chinese.”

  Lisbet looked at me skeptically. “Chinese?”

  “Gong xi fa cai,” I said, establishing my Chinese credentials. “What’s your ancestry?”

  “I’m a mongrel. I’m part English, French, German, and Italian.”

  “That’s perfect. The two of us can celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, Bastille Day, Oktoberfest, and Ferragosto.”

  “What? No Druid holiday?”

  “It’s not December twenty-first without a winter solstice pagan ritual.”

  “Do you sacrifice a virgin?”

  “Druids don’t appreciate that stereotype. Solstice Day finds me and my brethren imbibing in pot
ent Druid fluid and dancing around oak trees.”

  “It sounds like you have a full dance card. Is there any holiday you don’t celebrate?”

  “I haven’t celebrated Valentine’s Day in a long time.”

  My announcement made for a prelude to a kiss. It was a long time before we came up for air.

  “Valentine’s Day is still three weeks off,” Lisbet said.

  “I believe in precelebrations.” We kissed again.

  “That’s why I never did one of those DNA ancestry searches,” I said. “I prefer being an international man of mystery.”

  “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Lisbet said. She raised her wine glass and said, “L’chaim.”

  We clinked and drank.

  “Were you really considering doing one of those DNA tests?” she asked.

  I nodded. “I think what stopped me is that I was afraid of opening Pandora’s box.”

  “It’s better to not know some things?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Did you ever consider trying to track down your birth mother?”

  I was already shaking my head halfway into her question. “In my book my birth mother is guilty of a lot more than child abandonment. It was only by luck that I didn’t end up like Rose. Even if she is still alive, why would I want to establish a relationship with a woman that discarded me and left me to die?”

  “You have good reason to be angry with her, but you don’t know the circumstances of her life.”

  “And I don’t want to know. There are some crimes that aren’t forgivable.”