She stopped hiccupping and looked Josie in the eye. “It is me. I find.”
It took a moment for her understanding to unfold, like a paper flower you drop in a glass of water. This girl had been the one to find Michael. She had found him like that.
Wiping her eyes with the glove that must have been sodden, she continued. “I go in to change the room. He is in the bed. The wall, the . . .” She pressed her hands over her eyes—it was too late. There was no shutting out that sight. “Mein Gott. Mein Gott.”
They held one another tight tight tight, Josie’s cheek against the girl’s knit cap that smelled of old cats. This was what she had been spared. It could have been her, in her house in Lemoyne, but he’d come out here to keep her from that. The girl went on, “The blood, everywhere, so much blood. How he can do this . . . I just see . . . we just talk . . . nothing he say, nothing . . .”
“I know.” Yes, that was how it was. You were just talking. About an art project, about baked beans. And then suddenly you were on your knees cleaning up bits of brains and freshly spilled blood. You were at a funeral. You were living in an empty house, like a dog waiting by the door.
“And then I must clean. After the police go.”
That fucking Frenchman German whatever he was had made this girl clean the motel room where Michael had shot himself. That bastard. She’d kill him. She’d go in there and beat his head in with a brick. She could imagine the blood on the wall, quarts of it, the smell of it, butcher thick, and this girl on hands and knees with a bucket, weeping. There was no justice. To think that this girl could have had the strength. The girl sobbed like she was going to vomit. Josie kept holding her until she was just sniffling.
Finally, she sat up, wiped her eyes. “I want to tell you, but he don’t let me.” She knit her bushy eyebrows. “So I wait until they sleep. Look.” Out of her fuzzy hippie bag, she pulled a black notebook. “I don’t give to police.” It was one of Michael’s journals. What the fuck was this girl doing with his journal? She’d stolen it, or maybe he’d given it to her. In any case she’d been protecting it. From everybody, Meredith, the cops. She’d probably never done anything so brave in her life, but she’d wanted it that much. The girl hugged it to her parka’d breast as if it was Michael himself, her eyes red, nose red, but her chin raised in defiance, as if daring Josie to rip it from her arms. Then she thrust it out. “Here. You take. Is better.”
She felt the heat of the girl’s body still on the black cover, as the girl stood. From her pocket the German girl took something else, that jingled. A key, with a red tag. She gave Josie a quick hard hug. “Bring back before he wake up,” she said. She smiled weakly, and slipped out into the night.
Josie sat on the bed, looking at the key and the book in her hands. She gazed at the tag on the key. Room 12. Twelve, the number of the Hanged Man.
Outside, it was even colder than it had been, bleaker, more forsaken. The stray dog lay curled under the block wall of the patio, as if it was warmer there, outside a room where a human being breathed. She walked quickly down the long side of the motel. Half the doors had no numbers, but the last one was marked 12. Of course, it would be the last room. Something quiet, please. The young gentleman wouldn’t want to be disturbed. She glanced over her shoulder toward the closed door of the manager’s office, fumbled the key into the lock. She let herself in, closed the door, turned on the light.
It was the same as number 4, though the bed sat against the other wall. Table, blue chair, bare bulb. And then she saw the paneling. No longer the dark knotty pine, some lighter wood. The headboard was new. She swayed, sat down on the blue chair. You wanted to see it. There it is.
She could taste his blood in the air. She was breathing his death, under the ant powder. If only she had known how desperate a person could be. There, with a gun in his mouth. She could taste it, the metal, smell the gunpowder, the bite of it. Why couldn’t he have just told them all to fuck off? He could have disappeared into a new life. He didn’t have to do this. He could have remembered pedaling a boat on Echo Park lake and playing the blue guitar and singing “Just a Gigolo.”
And that girl had cleaned up the mess, bucket running bloody.
Here it was. Everything she hadn’t wanted to know. He sat in this room, and wrote his notes, and put the gun in his mouth. Alone, in this dismal cell, inscribing smaller and smaller circles around himself until there was nowhere for him to go but out. He was the one in the corner, not the girl. Now she was here. She could not keep it from happening, but she could keep him from being alone.
The journal was number XX. She’d never opened his journals before. Even now, it seemed like the last violation. Forgive me, Michael.
The pages were dense with drawings, ink and charcoal, sticky with the hair spray he used instead of fixative. She was surprised, she thought there would be more writing, but these were just pages and pages of drawings, mostly self-portraits. Himself with three eyes. With one eye. Eyes on the same side of his head like a halibut. A truncated body with a second set of legs where the arms should be, limping past a shell and a human skull. Heads with faces tangled in the hair. Snatches of writing, chains of words in blotchy pen, running downhill, the backward-leaning d’s, the e’s like 3’s, Can’t get back into the parade. Even tried to make a virtue of it. WHERE IS THE ROSE GARDEN GODDAMN IT WHERE IS IT? A hand with six fingers, severed from a wrist, the blood running down onto a piano keyboard. A series—severed hands, severed heads, arms without hands, a man carrying his own head in his arms.
And there was her name, JosieJOSIEJosieJOSIE. Written in chains, in suns of Josies. Her face, over and over again, he could do it from memory. Don’t leave me, please God don’t leave me.
I’m such a piece of shit. I disgust myself. How can she still be in love with me. She should leave. I would if I were her. Everything I touch turns to shit. Her love just makes it worse.
She shivered, she couldn’t stop, it was so cold in here. Her love made it worse. How could that be? She couldn’t understand, why was she so stupid, she read it over and over again but she still couldn’t take it in. She hit her forehead with her fists, trying to wake her brain up, trying to force this into her head, how such a thing could be.
I don’t know how. I don’t know the first fucking thing about life. I wish she wouldn’t look at me like that, for Christ’s sake. Like I had crushed her last dream. What does she think I am, Jesus? I’M NOTHING. I HAVE NOTHING. STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT. STOP LOVING ME LIKE THIS I CANT BEAR IT.
Josiejosiejosie, you’re all I’ve ever had. Every scrap of joy. Don’t leave me, please God, please God.
She read that part over and over. He had loved her.
But it hadn’t helped.
He had loved her, but he hated himself more.
Such suffering, so much pain. And he thought it made him hateful, as if suffering were shameful, disgusting. As if pain were a crime. Why didn’t he tell her? She could have helped him if only he’d let her. She could have done something. But it wasn’t what he wanted. How hard he’d pushed her away. And then said, Don’t leave me, please God. You’re all I have. He’d loved her, he had. And he knew she loved him, he knew it! But it wasn’t enough. She couldn’t have imagined such a thing was possible. Love wasn’t enough.
Her mouth bent itself square in mute anguish, but she kept turning the pages, trying to see through the blur of tears, the marks they left spattering the pages.
Clocks. Pages of them. Grandfather clocks in black cases, dense charcoal marks. Wristwatch with a broken face. A clock nestled in the crotch of Michelangelo’s David. What’s the good of all my so-called gifts? I should have been a pair of ragged claws . . . HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.
After clocks, the mazes. Naked men up against the blind ends of passages. A labyrinth that bled into the distance, as if it covered the world. A labyrinth in a graveyard, the space between tombstones. A self-portrait, a labyrinth superimposed over his features.
And carefully, lovingl
y rendered, a dead man, lying across the lap of a huge mother, in the pose of Michelangelo’s statue of Jesus and Mary, only the dead man had a bull’s head. Minotaur. She remembered the story. A queen who fell in love with a bull. They had a child, half bull, half human. And the queen was ashamed of it and kept it in a maze under the palace. It turned murderous, the king fed it youths from Greece. Feed me, he’d written. I strip your living flesh from your bones.
And here was Josie, trailing a ball of string. The black mouth of a cave in the background, the entry to the labyrinth. The string was the way out, it was how the hero killed the Minotaur and escaped. But Michael wouldn’t take the string, would he? He wasn’t the hero in the story he was telling himself. He was the monster. And the maze wasn’t just a prison, it was also a palace, his dark home.
She needed a cigarette, needed to breathe air that didn’t stink with death. She opened the door, leaned in the doorway, sucking in the night air. She gazed up at the stars, which had retreated still higher. We don’t know, we don’t have problems like yours. He’d loved her, and she’d loved him, and it wasn’t enough. She struggled to understand how that could be possible. Love, it seemed, wasn’t as big as she’d thought. There were bigger things. She felt her heart being crushed, it was going to pop like a grape. But she closed the door and sat back down at the table. The black book had not finished unfolding its black tale.
Across two pages, he’d drawn a picture of a man on a bed, feet closest to the viewer, wearing black pants and a white shirt. It was an iron bed like Michael’s at his mother’s, the bars of its headboard and footboard like a jail. He’d splattered black ink on the wall behind the bed—just shaken the pen. Underneath, he’d written, Mayakovsky criticized Esenin. Who can judge another man’s suffering?
She gazed at the blobs of India black, brushing her tears with the back of her hand. She had to look at that. She had to look and let it come in. It was one thing to say, Why couldn’t you hang on, why couldn’t you have gone somewhere, started again? But she could never know what he suffered, there, under the palace. Even if he had told her everything, could she have known, understood, the depths of his despair? And what if she had? In the end, she couldn’t go there with him. She couldn’t follow him the rest of the way. She’d tried to remind him about life and a way out, handed him the end of the string, but he’d only backed deeper into the labyrinth.
Who can judge another man’s suffering? Was this before or after the dog? There were no dates anywhere, it wasn’t Meredith’s chronicle of her historical life. What went on inside had no time. Did it matter whether it was before or after the dog? It wasn’t about what she did or said or hadn’t done or hadn’t said. She’d been cruel, but he knew why, that she loved him, that she wanted him. The dog day had been one more cruel thing, but not the darkness itself.
Large, Gothic German lettering: Mauritz Friedrich Loewy, 1898-1956.
Ming.
But she didn’t believe in destiny. She refused to believe. Even if the game was rigged and the house always won, you could still go on playing, even as you lost.
Who can judge?
She turned the page and there it was. The mad monk. Wrapped in his black cloak, gaunt, hungry, smoldering with fury. Underneath, Michael had written, I accept you, demon.
She stared into the seething eyes of the wretched monk. How she hated that thing. She could taste the murky water of the baptismal font all over again. His demon? His? She’d always thought the monk was accusing her, punishing her. Her body felt pierced, like the chests of Indians who flew on windmills, hanging from hooks through their flesh. He was depicting his own madness, the thing that tormented him, accused him. But of what, Michael? You didn’t do anything wrong. It wasn’t the dog, it wasn’t even Saint-Tropez. But what? She stared at the large crazy eyes of the monk, his bony body in its crow black robes like the wings of a dirty bird. What did you accuse him of?
WHERE’S THE GODDAMN ROSE GARDEN? WHERE IS IT?????
It was a poem too. Down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden. That was all he wanted. Simple happiness. But the mad monk tortured him because he wanted it. The monk despised it, mocked it. He couldn’t let him believe it was possible. That was the thing stopping him. That mocking, evil thing that had his own face.
She covered her eyes with the heels of her hands. The anguish of missing him, all these days since the cops called, since seeing him in the morgue like a giant, wooden mannequin. With his poor battered face. That fucking crow-bodied thing had won. How gleeful it was now. All because he’d wanted to live, forget genius and destiny, and simply be happy. And it wouldn’t let him.
It had all come to this, like poisoned bread squashed to the size of a pill. Death like a lover, caressing him, promising him peace, running its fingers through his hair, its tongue in his ear.
They have ladders that will reach further but no one will climb them.
I would have, Michael.
But maybe she wouldn’t have. Maybe she would have had to stop somewhere, unless she’d wanted to follow him into the night. She didn’t know what she believed. In any case, he didn’t want her to save him. He had retreated into his labyrinth, out of reach.
The ant powder was making her dizzy, the stink of fear and his despair under the sweet poison. She lay down on the bed, on his side. But as soon as she did, she knew he would have taken the other side, her side, a last shred of comfort, like the dog curled up by the patio wall. She moved onto the right side. She sat in the bed, arranged the pillows behind her. He’d poured himself a last shot of mescal. I’m sorry. I just want to stop now. And put the gun in his mouth, sour, cold, smoky. She put her own two fingers in her mouth. I’m so sorry. And pulled the trigger.
36
Rock
Dawn tinted the darkness like watered ink. She sat outside number 4, wrapped in the spread she’d pulled off the bed, her chair tipped back against the rough stucco, smoking. The smell of the tobacco didn’t begin to offset the smell of Michael’s death. The landscape stared back at her, obstinate in its silence, spiny and hostile as the Joshua tree stretching its twisted limbs to the slate-colored sky. Dry and empty, where everything not mineral armored itself with leather and spines. The dog had gone.
She thought of Michael on the porch on Lemoyne, holding a cantaloupe like a skull on his fingertips. Mock-heroic, tilting his profile like Laurence Olivier. “To be or not to be . . .” She hadn’t even known that speech was about suicide. “It’s the only question, really,” he’d said. “Zero or one. Accept or reject.” The expressive gesture of his long fingers.
And she’d laughed. Laughed. “The only question?”
She hadn’t even begun to understand the length and breadth of her idiocy, so enormous, its gravity field alone would crush anything for light-years around.
And so the zero had sprouted in their garden. Small and secret, it would bloom as this gaping cold absence where he’d torn himself away from the fabric of the world. Zero a red hole in his head. The number that lodged in his brain. He once told her that the Arabs invented zero, because they were a desert people, at home with absence. Now she knew why he’d come here to answer the question, this desert, this graveyard. This was his landscape, bitter cold, populated only by rocks and strange leafless trees, no softness or mercy, no touch of green. Her eyes cracked with the emptiness, the dry scoured ache in the pit of her heart. Why hadn’t she argued, when he said that was the only question?
She waited for morning against the rough wall, humming softly to herself, Tricks ain’t walkin’, tricks ain’t walkin’ no more . . . Now she knew why he liked those old blues. Nothing had ever happened to man or woman that wasn’t in the blues. If your life came apart, Lucille had been there before you, Louis, Bessie. You could learn how to keep on, you could count on them. A better guide to the labyrinth than anything she could offer, her pathetic ball of string. The blues had mapped the place inside and out.
The horizon bega
n to lighten. White chalk marks appeared overhead in the colorless sky. Jet fighters from the marine base. Piloted by boys like Jeff McCann and Steve Coty, the football gods of Bakersfield High, nothing filling the domes of their skulls but thoughts of applause and their dicks and the crudest outlines of reality. Boys who wouldn’t have appeared in public with Josie Tyrell, but if they gave her a ride, shared a joint or a forty ouncer, she could nurse the illusion she could be seen by a boy like Jeff McCann. And maybe, if she got him off right, he might talk to her, smile at her in the hall, call her up for a date on an off night, dance once with her at the prom. So eminently exploitable. I hope you find someone . . .
Michael had given her a dream better than any that Bakersfield could imagine. He made you feel . . . worth. That was his greatest gift, to see something more and believe it into being. But what happened when you were someone’s idea, when the person thinking you up checked out? What happened to a dream without a dreamer? I hope you find someone who can meet your needs . . . Where did he think she would find that phantom? She had needs she hadn’t even known about till she met him.
Someday, you’ll be washing dishes in a trailer in Lancaster . . . Was that what she wanted? Even now, she could go with Meredith. But the labyrinth covered the world. The thing that had crippled the crippled boy, that had deafened the deaf-mute. The dark church of the mad monk. Michael wasn’t in Europe, drivers and pony-skin coats, the Hotel Diplomat. That was the cross he had been nailed to.
The sun crawled up over the horizon as if risen from a bad night, dreading its passage over the landscape. It vomited on the wall of the motel and splashed the door where the 4 should be with unnecessary gold. Her nose was as cold as a coyote’s dug in under a tumbleweed. She gathered the quilt around her and gazed out at the motel yard and its pool—empty—the lone Joshua tree. Beyond that, no line of painted white rocks or ocotillo fence marked off the boundary between the motel and the desert, one bled right into the other.