That office, the numbers didn’t add up. Wastebaskets overflowing, piles of half-open boxes, new office supplies and phone books worn with age. They’d been there a while, but nobody came to clean the place. The furniture was worn, but no pictures on the walls, no calendars. No nameplates, no desk plates. I knew what I was looking at and I didn’t care. Laundering money, sports booking, importing God knows what, it wasn’t my problem. So long as I didn’t have to deliver any heroin or plutonium or severed hands or dead fish. Sign by the X, print your name below and I’ll be gone.
Except there, I wouldn’t be. Except there, Jimmy walked through the door with Fingernails, who resumed his seat at the couch, now behind me, between me and the door.
“Six of Diamonds,” Jimmy said, grabbed me in that manly shoulder-backslap hug that men do, said, “The fuck you been?”
He was friendly, smiling, and the fuck you been could have meant either ‘How’ or ‘Where’ and it wasn’t good either way. He had his hand on the back of my neck, that way of looking like a friendly shoulder grab to a stranger but with enough force to let me know I’ll be turning blue if I did anything but follow him.
The guys that worked the strip joint where I met Sudden used to call me “Red,” predictably. When Sudden tipped them to my hand, they wanted to see, so I showed them, and some of them started to call me “Six,” like it was a much more clever nickname. So, Red and Six quickly became Six of Diamonds, but usually just Six, for short. It never bothered me. Anytime somebody was compelled to give me a different name, I let it happen. That made a lot of things easier for me.
Through the labyrinth of gunmetal grey cubicles, more boxes and half-used furniture. A guy worked an industrial-grade shredder, pushing phonebook-fat mounds of paper through its jaws.
“One of those can take your hand right off,” Jimmy said. “So fast you won’t even feel it. At first.”
I counted four other men, sitting in arbitrary desks and chairs throughout, reading newspapers. Back office with a large glass window and a door, Jimmy walked me through, two big men in suits stopped talking when we entered. The smaller one smiled. Tailored black suit with a bright red floral tie and a screaming white shirt. He’s older, and aside from me, he was the smallest person I’d seen in the office, and the only one dressed like an executive instead of a labor foreman.
My portable two-way radio kept blaring out pickups and re-routing orders, like shattering glass in church.
“Put it down there,” he said. The light bounced off his brown eyes in little white pinpoints. With the faint curve to his mouth, it looked like he was smiling, but he wasn’t. I set the package down. The other man didn’t move or speak. Huge and inert, he didn’t stop staring at me.
“My associate,” he nods in Jimmy’s direction as he signed for the package, “speaks very highly of you.”
I was quiet.
“He says you’re a real self-starter. Highly motivated. A valuable addition to the team.”
I tried to say thanks, but my mouth was dry.
“James, can you fetch our man here something to drink. We’ll meet you outside.”
The big, quiet man opens the door and the executive walks out first. Quiet Man nods for me to follow. I’m loosely sandwiched between the two of them, down the hallways to a door labeled Emergency Exit Alarm Will Sound but it doesn’t.
Outside on a gravel rooftop, no rails, just the breeze and a brown ring of Los Angeles haze all around us, and we walked to the edge. I slowed down. The Executive kept ahead and Quiet Man was behind me, walking fast and not letting me out of his way.
My eyes couldn’t measure the open space and it felt like I was spinning, so I looked at my feet, got it to stop. My radio hissed again.
“Turn it off,” said the Executive. That same curve to his mouth, the same slivers of rebound light in his eyes. He turned away from me while I did so, staring out at the empty air just beyond the building’s edge, two hundred above a steel sewer grate.
“I owe you a rather large debt of gratitude,” he said, his back to me. “The State Department, INS, and who knows who else would have delayed the immigration of my colleagues for months, perhaps years, and at considerably more expense.”
The fire exit door opened, I heard Jimmy’s footsteps on the rooftop gravel. He handed me a soda, warm. I snapped the tab open, drank the thin, sweet-flavored tar syrup and had to choke back a ballooning memory of juvenile hall—Dad’s chipped and scabbed fingers fiddling with his sobriety bracelet.
“No problem,” I said.
“That’s good,” said the Executive. “I’m glad to hear it’s no problem, because we’ll be in need of your services again, very soon.”
I tried to work it, figure out how I could explain to him that it was harder than I made it look, that I was going on a fraction of the information that I normally use for myself, that the risks were far greater when dealing with the State Department or the INS than with the DMV or a county hospital, and those risks increase with each attempt. I tried to keep it simple, but my thoughts ran rampant in every direction without the confines of walls and ceilings. The Executive turned to face me again, smiling, but not.
“We have a business to run here,” he said. “By ‘we’ I mean my partners and me, and our investors overseas.”
He took a few steps to the right, then to the left, back and forth while he spoke. I watched him pace, just so I could keep from fixating on the monstrous, empty gravity in front of me.
“We have operational expenses, production costs, research and development, distribution,” he continued, then said “legal costs” and couldn’t contain his own laugh. On cue, Quiet Man and Jimmy snickered. I took another swallow of soda and got more thirsty with it.
“But our chief asset,” he continued, “is our personnel. Talent. Intellectual property.”
He stopped pacing, stepped up to me, sunlight rebounding off his eyes and his nose an inch from mine. He had three thick hairs between his eyebrows, a flake of chapped skin on his lower lip, and he’d had a very strong mint, recently.
“People who know things,” he said, “are our most valuable resource. We’re in a highly competitive business. We can’t afford to get sloppy with writing things down. We can’t risk having names and papers and numbers and records lying about for our competition…” his eyes move in the direction of a distant siren, then back to mine, “our competition to get their hands on and use against us. Do you follow me, so far?”
I did.
“People like you, who don’t have to write things down, who have a certain talent for keeping their records here,” he tapped my temple once, twice, with a manicured forefinger, “are very valuable to my investors and me. Consequently, when we don’t know where this is,” he touched my temple again, firmer, “we have what is known as a security risk, or a leak. Some call it a ‘brain drain.’ And nothing scares our investors like a security risk. Nothing damages morale like a brain drain. That’s the sort of thing we have to rectify very quickly. All sorts of people get involved. Public Relations,” he nodded to Jimmy, “Personnel,” he nodded to Quiet Man, “all sorts of people. It gets very complicated, doesn’t it?”
“Very complicated,” said Quiet Man, at last. “Very messy. It means we have to mop up.”
“Exactly,” said the Executive. “We have to bury a mistake like that immediately. It could be a media disaster for us otherwise.”
He held my gaze, taking in my heat with the pit between his eyes. Without a glance to his watch, he said, “Goodness, I’ve made you late, haven’t I?” He sounded genuinely distressed for me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve got a flat and my radio’s broken. I just need to phone the dispatcher.”
“Well, I appreciate your time,” he reached into his pocket, pulling out a reptile skin wallet. “Orientation is tedious for some, but I rather enjoy it. It makes me happy to meet the new members of our team. James has an eye for talent.” He handed me a sheaf of stiff bills. I didn’t cou
nt them.
“I understand that you prefer your status as an outside consultant. For now, as long as you remain a valuable member of the team, I see no reason to change that.” He turned his back to me.
“Don’t be a stranger,” he said.
SEVENTEEN
Keara. Five-foot-five in her bare feet, with almond skin that straddled some blurry border between sunshine and vestigial ethnicity, brown eyes. Her hair was a chaotic blast of auburn-copper curls with pale streaks spiraling out from her forehead and temples. Straight nose, almost pointed, and perfectly straight teeth behind a strange smile that stretched more to one side of her mouth than the other. I liked the way the leotard strap stretched taut, suspended above the pit of her collarbone. A dark pierce of a small mole beside it, cluster of freckles on her neck, like a star map, the slope of her breasts.
“My name’s Keara,” she said. She held out her left hand—clever woman, she’d written my order with her right hand. “I saw you at Raji’s about a week ago.”
I had been there—Raji’s was a basement club at the eastern, nether-edge of Hollywood, and this woman had seen me and remembered me. I work hard not to be remembered, don’t like it when I catch someone’s eye. But I’m willing to make exceptions.
I kept my left hand on my pint, extended my inverted right hand to meet her left and introduced myself, Eric Bishop. Had I liked the band? Where else did I go? Where did I work? The same conversation kick-starters that men just can’t do as well as women. Moments like that one come back to me, like when her voice or her face or her smell flickers in my brain, and I’ll close my eyes and hang onto that flicker for as long as it lasts.
Business was slow, so we talked. She said Come back and see me tomorrow and I did. When I left at midnight, she stopped long enough for a kiss, and the next time I stayed until the lights came on and followed her home.
Keara went to change, said Make yourself comfortable. I opened a beer, sat down on her couch, a sidewalk throwaway leaking clots of upholstery stuffing, half-covered with a sheet. A paint-chipped window with four panes of glass lay flat, milk crates beneath each corner for a table, buried under a mound of fashion magazines, junk mail, nail polish bottles and an ashtray peppered with bong flakes.
Fine grey hair stuck to my hands and the bottle, then I noticed it on my jeans, recognized the smell of a cat. When I heard him yowl, I saw him in the corner of her living room, looking in my direction with empty eyes like chunks of glass. Looking at me but not. That’s Rasputin, she told me later, scratching the side of his neck. He was in an accident.
Sounds: Running water (sink, shower, sink again), the scrape of particle wood drawers. The phone rang—2:40 in the morning—once, twice, and on the third ring, Keara darted out to catch it, wearing a T-shirt and a triangle of red silk with shoestring straps, an inch-wide band of belly curving over the top of her underwear. Hello…? Hello…? She hung up, stood with her back to me.
Behind her, I slid my left hand onto her stomach, spread all six digits wide. I drummed my fingers, feather light, skin-on-skin count to six. Her hand on mine, matching me digit for digit minus one. I held it up, let her stare, back down again, brushing her belly. On the couch, she held my hand to her face, taking each finger in her mouth slowly and back out again. One, two, three, four, five, six. I couldn’t tell if she was a freak or not.
Three weeks later, I was washing my hands in her bathroom sink when I fell in love with her. A shelf by her window, covered with a paisley kerchief—candles, a jar of bath salts and an eight-by-ten black-and-white print bowed inward from the repeated and prolonged assaults of bathroom humidity: Keara on a couch between two other women. She held a glass of wine and looked at the camera, a spark in her eyes and a Mona Lisa smile that was bigger in your memory than in the picture. I never asked about it, where it was taken, the occasion, who the other women were or who took it—ex-boyfriend or not, I didn’t care—nor why she chose to display it on the wall of her bathroom. I didn’t tell her how it cemented something within me. That being with her became as important as changing my name, stopping the godsplitters, or reading and learning whatever I could to stay out of a hospital, only I couldn’t put a number to it, couldn’t measure it. That wanting burst inside my head and inside my chest fast as striking a match, and it stayed. My heart has a mind of its own. I don’t decide these things.
I stood holding a towel in my wet hands, staring at her frozen silver print face staring back between two candles, air-pulse flickering from my movements in the small space, when I heard my name.
“Eric, you still in there?”
In her kitchen, she was opening a bottle of merlot.
“I’m back,” I said.
She was playing Dave Brubeck while she cooked. I recognized the opening percussion of “Take Five,” the soft, precision drumming like grains of sand hitting glass, you had to listen for the shift from cool to manic and back, the first pulses of sax vacillating from menacing to playful.
“I like this song,” I said. “I don’t follow jazz, but this one is different.”
She handed me a glass, said “My mom used to play this on the piano when I was a girl. I’d sit under the piano and watch her feet work the pedals.”
Brain flicker slide show: I’m picturing her as a girl, then trying to picture her mother and brothers and sisters and the rest of her life before she met me, and the rest of her life now that she has met me.
I took a swallow of wine to loosen my tightening throat, then kissed her.
“Hey,” she leaned into me, wrapped her free arm around me and put her face next to mine. “What was that for?” Softly.
“I need a reason?”
“No.” She laughed.
“I need a permit? A waiver? There a form or something?”
“Stop.” She kissed me back, and we stood there by her counter with the saxophone, drums and piano doing their cautious mating dance. She kissed me again and went back to her cooking.
Moments with her leap to mind when I’m alone. We were celebrating one night—she’d found a better-paying cocktailing job and done a week of work on a film set as an extra. Things were looking up for her, and I kissed her and put a small package into her hands.
“What’s this?”
“Open it,” I said.
Weeks earlier, I’d sat at the bar during her slow shift, and she’d told me about a woman that had come in earlier. Keara had been struck by the woman’s perfume, so much so that she kept lingering just near the end of the bar where the woman sat with a girlfriend. Keara finally worked up the courage to ask her what she was wearing. She’d told me that story midway into my fourth bourbon, having smoked the last of a roach out back during her break.
When she opened the package and sampled the perfume on her wrists, she stared at me in amazement.
“How did you know?” She put her wrists to her face, breathing deeply.
“You told me, remember? The woman you met at work? But it was too expensive.”
“You remembered that? I can’t believe you remembered anything from that night.”
“I remember every waking second with you,” I said, and kissed her.
Memories like that made my throat catch. Each new detail I learned about her added to the bits and flashes that I remembered while I was away from her. Like when I was younger, that eager ache of knowing I would see Dad soon, when Mom said he might be coming home.
Apart from her sister, whom I never asked about again, she never spoke of her family. I wanted to know, wanted to ask her about school and when she moved and why she decided to pursue acting, but I didn’t want to answer the same degree of questions in return. It’s different with someone who’s not writing it down, who wants to know because they do, and for no other reason.
Sometimes I couldn’t sleep, because I wanted to tell her everything, but instead I’d hold her so tightly I thought I would hurt her. She never said anything, just moaned, quiet. I’d measure her breathing, count how many times she’d s
troke my knuckles before she stopped, and then I knew she was asleep. I’d draw her profile in the dark, over and over, happy except for knowing that everything she knew about my life was fiction.
———
En route to Mexico, where I knew a place that stocked the drugs I needed, I had between sixty and eighty minutes before the buzz saw cut through the middle of my head, and I held onto the wheel trying not to roll my car and kill myself and a hundred other people on the freeway. I gutted my bag—notebook, change of clothes, toothbrush belched onto the floor—for the bottle of Darvocet I’d stashed.
Over-Nite in yellow block capitals and Motor Hotel in pink neon script atop an arrow trimmed with bulbs pointing to an asphalt courtyard. I’d passed it before on this route, always in the dark. That evening, I saw the blue background behind the letters, clear and bright and loud, and the sky—almost black moments before—shone like the still, Jamaican ocean. These minutes of beauty, when I can see blue so easily, tell me I need to get inside quickly, somewhere quiet and dark where there’s not enough light to see any blue at all.
In the office, beyond the pink Vacancy neon that would soon make me squint, sat the couple running the motel. They were old, watching a religious talk show blare from a black-and-white television the size of a mailbox opening.
“Can I help you?” The woman approached the counter, cigarette wedged between her first two fingers. The man, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, remained sitting in an ancient, leprous barcalounger, oblivious. He wore a flimsy, V-necked undershirt and his legs weren’t crossed so much as draped over each other like wet seaweed. A cadaverous five and a half feet of sun-weathered bone and nicotine stains. I didn’t see a wheelchair, so someone must carry him.