She popped the hood and got out, leaning against the car. She lit a cigarette despite the sign that said No Smoking. She could hear Dale’s radio playing in the service bay, faint against the wind. Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues.” “Is it going to keep up like this all night?” she asked.
“Could,” Dale said. “This ain’t even bad yet. How far you going?”
“Twentynine Palms,” she said.
“That’s not far,” he said. “Stay to the center of the road, you’ll be okay. Want me to check your tires? It ain’t a night for a blowout.”
She agreed it wasn’t, and he checked the tires. They were low. He filled them, but they were pretty bald. They’d probably get her where she wanted to go, as long as she didn’t try to go very fast. “I could make you a deal on a new set, you’re gonna be around awhile.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Is there a liquor store open this late?”
Dale grinned. “Only thing that is. Not much else to do ’round here. I don’t drink no more so I work nights.”
“Is that a fact,” she said, just the way her uncle Dave would have said it.
She paid him and he took her money into the little station to make change.
Up here, the wind sounded like bombs, booming in the wide, high valley. A truck pulling a four-horse trailer slammed past on the highway, empty, wagging in the wind. She’d looked up Twentynine Palms on the map before she started. To the east was a vast nothing. The road just kept going, out to the state line and the shallow trickle of the Colorado River, no town until then, only the giant marine base to the north—nothing but mountains and valleys you’ve never heard of—Ward Valley, Sheep Hole Mountains, even a clutch of mines, the Virginia Dale, Lone Mine, the Gold Standard, the Rose of Peru. She could imagine lost prospectors wandering around out there with donkeys and beards like someone had forgotten to tell them the Gold Rush was over.
She hoped she could find the motel. The Paradise Inn. She should have made sure, found an address. But how big a town could Twentynine Palms be, anyway? She’d know it when she saw it. And if she didn’t, it wouldn’t be hard to find out. People in bars would still be talking about the suicide, some kid from LA who checked into the Paradise and blew his head off. If she didn’t find it tonight, she’d look in the morning.
She drove around the corner to Jerry’s Liquors. Dale was right, it was the only thing open. Jerry was a fat man watching pro wrestling on TV. The place was too hot. He looked up at her when she came in, then turned back to the TV. “I’d like a half-pint of Smirnoff, please,” she said. “And some Camels.”
He ignored her.
“Hey,” she said. “You open or what?”
“Read the sign, Blondie.” He pointed to one of the myriad signs behind him, counterfeit twenties, big-breasted beer models. An American flag. A Marine Corps flag. Oh yeah. The sign said We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone, and that means YOU. And again in Spanish, in case you didn’t get it the first time. How could she have gotten all nostalgic for the Folsom Prison blues? Patsy Cline and all that crap.
“You keep the swastika in another room?” she asked.
He was looking at her now. “You want me to come over there and pierce your ears in a few more places? Get your freako self out of my shop. This is a decent place. We’re Americans here.”
Yeah, it was America, all right. “Hey, motherfucker. Sit on this.” She gave him the finger and left his shop quick as he stood and started around the counter.
She walked out into the wind, got back to the car. Her filled tires felt strange on the road, like there was something wrong with them. She pulled out on the highway, taking Dale’s advice to hug the yellow line. No voddy tonight. Well. Just as well. You were either in or out. You wanted to know or you didn’t. No more of these blurred lines. No more taking the edge off. She needed the edge. The edge was all there was. She ought to thank old Jerry for being such a Nazi prick.
Just as the little man had told her, twenty minutes and she came over a rise to see the twinkling lights of spread-out Twentynine Palms in the distance. And there, close on the right, a one-story L-shaped motel at the ass end of the world. Paradise Inn. She pulled into the parking area before its sign. Vacancy.
34
Paradise
In the elbow of the L-shaped motel, she found the door with the hand-lettered card saying Manager. Light shone through dingy curtains behind yellow panes that were marked off in diamonds in a mistaken attempt at down-home charm. She rang the bell. The screen door rattled in its frame in the bitter wind, and the oleanders, growing in the gravel yard, shivered like dogs. A Joshua tree vibrated, stiff and stoic by the empty pool. The chain link sang. If Michael had come out here hoping for warmth, how desperate he must have felt right about now, in a cold that was bleaker than anything in LA. She banged on the door. “Hey!”
A silhouette appeared through the curtain, the fabric inched to the side. A girl in a knit cap, startled and suspicious, peered out as if she had no idea why someone would be banging on the door of a motel with a vacancy sign at eleven-thirty at night. The face disappeared and the lock scrabbled open. It took her a while to release the screen-door latch, she wasn’t looking at what she was doing, she was watching behind her. Finally, the girl managed to get the screen open and let Josie in.
She was about Josie’s age, nineteen or so, pale, with ashy brown hair and frightened eyes under bushy eyebrows. She moved behind the pine counter with its hooks for keys and kitschy calendar of Montezuma and his feather-clad court. Beyond a doorway, in what was clearly the rest of the apartment, a man and a woman reclined on matching plaid couches. The man, about fifty, also wore a knit cap, turquoise, on his bald head. The woman, hatless and just slightly older than the girl, glanced at Josie, said something to the man, who laughed.
“I’m looking for a room,” Josie said to the girl.
“How many night?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. Listen, you had a boy here, about eight weeks ago. He registered as Oscar Wilde.”
The girl flashed her a white-eyed look of fear before she dropped her gaze to the registration card she’d pulled out.
“He was here, wasn’t he? Tell me.”
The girl wouldn’t look at her. The man said something to the girl in a language that wasn’t English—French maybe. And the girl said something back. Angry sounding.
The man hauled himself off the couch, came out to the little office. He was hammered. “A room for this young lady,” he said, replacing the girl behind the desk. Not quite French. His eyes were astoundingly blue. There was something wrong about these people. Over his shoulder, Josie could see the girl going through a card file, glancing up at her suspiciously. Wasn’t this a public business? And why was the girl wearing fingerless gloves inside? The man smiled, leaning on the counter, as if he was enjoying a joke at her expense. She’d thought he was drunk, but he didn’t smell of booze. High on something, that was for sure. “Maybe we have a room.”
The keys hung off the hooks behind him, it didn’t look like many were missing.
She’d normally have left by now, they were weird and she didn’t like being jerked around. She wondered if the Frenchman had given Michael this same shit. She imagined not. Michael spoke French. He spoke everything, he could go into a Thai restaurant and chat up the waitress. Michael would’ve known enough to wipe that smile off the man’s face. Very, very far from Montmartre.
“How many nights do you stay?”
Just one, she imagined. “You had a boy here,” she said. “He killed himself.”
She thought that would have wiped the smirk off his face, but it didn’t. Only a slight narrowing of blue eyes, and the girl playing with the card file trying not to look at her. “Not here,” the man said. “People are happy here. It’s Paradise.” He opened his palms as if to let a bird go free.
The woman giggled from the next room. The girl with the fingerless gloves shot her a fathomless glance. She knew. If Jos
ie could only get her alone.
“How many nights did he stay?” Josie asked.
“Who?” the man said.
“The boy. The boy who didn’t stay here.”
The bald man turned to the rack of keys, ran his fingers along them, as if they were chimes. He pulled a key off the hook, the red plastic tag said Room 4. “How many nights?”
“Don’t know yet,” she said, taking the key.
“Got a credit card?”
She stared at him impatiently. She wasn’t exactly a girl credit-card companies opened their arms to. Art model. Actress, freelance. But then again, this wasn’t the Hotel Diplomat, Stockholm.
“Thirty-five for tonight,” he said.
She pulled out a crumpled twenty, ten, and five ones. He recounted them briskly, snapping the bills, creasing them longways like a gambler. Someone used to dealing with cash. “You have a suitcase?’
“In the car.” She had all the essentials—a toothbrush, a change of underwear, nine assorted barbiturates, and a blue guitar. She took the key off the counter as the girl watched her, then quickly looked away.
Outside in the darkness, Orion hung, wind-scoured and sulking in the face of the accusing moon, like a man being scolded by a woman, as an unblinking planet looked on—Venus, or Mars? She remembered looking through the big telescope on the rooftop of the observatory, on a night just like this. All four planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, lined up in a row like mismatched chorus girls. Michael stood behind her on the ladder, his breath on her neck. How huge their garden was then.
So this was where he came, this shitbox motel, crouching low in the wind, yellow bug lights over the doors. She gazed up at the planet that stared without blinking, wondering what it thought of her at the Paradise. She preferred to think it was Venus, the only one likely to understand her being there. Jet trails scraped the sky with their long fingernails, lacing marks through the dark silhouette of the poolside Joshua tree.
She got her things from the car and headed down the flank of the motel to her room, bracing against the wind. Suddenly, a dog appeared, slim and smooth coated. It stopped right between her and the room. She wondered if it would attack her, its wide head up and alert. “Good dog,” she said, hoping it was true. The wind cut her, but she was afraid to move, all she needed now was a dog bite. Trying to find the closest hospital this time of night. “Go home,” she said. “Beat it.” Finally, it shambled away, behind the pool and off into the desert.
Crunching gravel under her boots, she saw room 3 but not 4. The next door had no number, it had to be right. Just as well, 4 was unlucky. Four was difficult and misunderstood, a genius before its time, it belonged to the planet of unexpected disaster. On the other hand, what did it matter if it was 3 or 4? She was past all that now, pennies in fountains, wishes and ladders and good and bad numbers. Once the worst had happened to you, all the rest was just stuff and absence.
Standing under the yellow porch light, she inserted the key into the cheap metal door and opened it. The smell of something sweetly chemical met her before she’d even turned on the light. Not disinfectant, but some kind of dry rot or ant powder. She turned on the switch. A bare lightbulb gazed down on a sad room with blue-shag carpeting, fake knotty pine paneling, a plastic chair, pressboard furniture. It looked like a set from a porno flick. That dreadful anonymity. She hadn’t expected better and yet, she must have hoped. That he had had that, on his last day on earth.
She closed the door and discovered there was no dead bolt or chain, just an insignificant doorknob lock which Bo could have opened in kindergarten. Did he give her this room on purpose, so he could pay her a visit in the middle of the night? Was that the joke the Frenchman made to himself?
She sat down on the defeated expanse of the bed, breathing in the poisoned air. This dirty quilt, navy and rust in a vaguely western design. This bedside light. These rust-colored ripcord curtains that didn’t close all the way, and the stink of ant powder. Not a single picture. Nothing to distract him or give him one shred of comfort. This is what he’d driven three hours to find, the boy who hated to drive, hated to be part of a machine. For something this ugly. A home for his death. Yes, you’d sit here and think, There’s nothing worth living for. Here you could convince yourself.
In the next room, somebody was watching TV. The buzzing sound of a newscast. A man with sprayed hair pointing to a map, charting winter storms in the Inland Empire. Maybe this was the last sound Michael heard, a bland recital of the weather tomorrow. Weather he wouldn’t be there to see. The storm inside never made the news, its fronts and eddies, unstable layers, sandstorms, Santa Anas.
The wind slammed into the window in a sudden punch, making her jump. The slit in the dusty curtains leered. She got up and tried to close it but the fabric had been cut badly, the two halves naturally fell away from each other. She could imagine the Frenchman or some other perv standing outside her window, jerking off. She found a roach clip in her purse and clipped the bottom of the curtains together. But that feeling, that someone was watching, continued to tug at her. She took the blue chair and edged it under the doorknob, tried the door. It slid out. She wedged it more firmly until it held.
In the bathroom, she pulled the chain that turned on the light. Broken bubbly blue tiles surrounded the mirror. The toilet seat had been repainted but the paint was peeling, rough against her thighs. No ants though. Washing her hands, she gazed at herself in the mirror. Hollow eyed, with a cold sore making her look like a kid’s Halloween corpse. She got her toothbrush and brushed her teeth in alkaline desert water, washed her face, and dried it on the small rough towel.
Sitting quietly on the bed, listening to the wind and an occasional truck banging past, she peeled back the weeks and hours to the day Michael had arrived here. Pulled up in his rented Chevy, took the room, found a gun. But how? How did you decide to take your own life? How did you get to the Paradise? How did you get this far?
In stages, that’s how. First you let go of the things you loved. Blaise and Auntie Ono’s guava cake and Louis Armstrong. You gave up Oscar Wilde and the shadow theater of M. Rivière, the domes of Moscow. Brahms and Schiele. The smell of laundry and moonlight on Echo Park lake. Tangerine sunsets from Dante’s View. Making love as breezes trailed through open windows. He had so loved the world, its ten thousand things, but he’d peeled them off, one by one, dropping them to the floor like a woman stripping. That was how you did it. You let go, you left all that behind, you refused to remember. You let the dark in. You let your head become a ruined flower bed, overrun by rank growth, coarse and ugly as castor beans on a neglected hillside, monstrous and throbbing with cancerous life, the red and green poisonous leaves, the spiny testicles of its seedpods. Your black thoughts colonized you like a disease, the absence of faith most of all.
Finding your way here was only one of a series of choices. By the time you got to Twentynine Palms, your world was already vanishing.
Then came the smaller choices, one by one, until the last one. How she wished Zeno’s paradox really worked, stretching out forever the small divisions between zero and one.
But wasn’t it possible he had simply wanted to get away from her, from Meredith, their feminine agendas, their judgment, their unfillable need, their awful possessiveness? From them and from Cal, the father he could not equal, who had replaced him with other children, again and again. Haunted by his nightmare of failure, thoughts of it hounding him, running him to ground—failure everywhere he looked, failure to find the true world, to be one with the people, to achieve greatness by age twenty-two.
He came here. Not to Palm Springs or Rancho Mirage, white golf shoes and hyperfertilized grass, but to this elemental place, wind and rock and sand. He turned off the main highway onto the two-lane, looking for a harsh solitude, like a prophet in the Bible. Seeking some final truth.
She imagined him sitting there, at the rickety table, writing his notes on motel stationery. His dark cropped curls, his feverish face with its we
ek of stubble, sleepless glitter in his eyes. She went to the low dresser beneath the TV. In it was only a Gideon Bible, and a slender phone book. No stationery. She picked up the Bible and opened it at random, the way Michael would have, pointed to a line. It said, Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein . . . She closed the book and put it back.
He’d asked for it at the desk. He’d wanted that stationery. Paradise Inn. It was so like him, like checking in as Oscar Wilde. She’d thought a sense of humor proved you hadn’t gone to the bottom, but that wasn’t true. He could sense the ridiculousness of life even as it tore the guts out of him. She saw that now. And death lay coiled in the dark between the perception and the pain.
And so he’d poured himself a drink. Sat down to write. Tequila, maybe mescal. He loved knowing the right thing, so Sei Shonagon. In Twentynine Palms when you are preparing to kill yourself, you should drink mescal while you’re writing your suicide notes. She wondered what he’d written to Meredith and Cal.
He’d been so angry. Always, even at the beginning, but it was outside the circle of their love. She didn’t know how it would prowl there in the dark, like tigers outside a campfire’s glow. Rage at Meredith, rage at Cal, rage at his own weakness. And she’d known it, a fury no less than any Tyrell’s. It was the dark streak in all that brightness. So he came here, to punish them all for an infinite range of failures and sins. He was his own hostage. He pushed you away and thought that’s what you were doing to him. Like her father yelling Don’t you raise your voice to me before he belted you. Michael had wanted to hurt them back the same way.