‘Oh yeah?’ Dennis leans over to look. ‘That you, Ramón? Kneeling down on the ground?’ He’s impressed.
‘Crazy hipsters got him talking about graffiti. You believe any of that shit you saying?’
‘No, I was playing them, brother,’ Ramón says. ‘Look, look how pretty Diyana looks. Don’t she look beautiful?’
‘She really does, Papi,’ TK says and then nearly falls off his chair as the creepy guy with the knife-blue eyes shoves into the room behind Dennis. He’s cut his hair so that it’s sticking up like white thatch, and still weirder, shaved his eyebrows.
‘You! You know computers. You have to show me.’ He’s swallowing his vowels, which makes it hard to understand him. Further gone than he was the last time, and that’s saying something. TK instinctively clicks away from the image of Ramón and Diyana. He feels like the man might taint it somehow if he sees it.
‘Nice to see you too, man, but we’re shut up for the evening. Why don’t you come back in the morning?’ TK says, putting his hand on his walking stick-machete just in case. ‘You take my advice and go for a counseling session?’
‘Please. I don’t understand what’s happening. I have to see the video. You have to show me. The one they’re talking about.’ He looks so broken that TK cracks.
‘All right, what video? And let me say straight up that we don’t tolerate pornography here.’
‘The Dream House. The body.’
‘Oh, that one. It’s been all over the news.’ TK types in the search. It comes up on the same YouTube channel as the video with Ramón. He doesn’t like it. This stranger all tangled with the crazy things on the news and in his head. The video takes a while to buffer, but when it finally loads, the man shoves his face right up to the screen, watching intently. ‘Play it again.’
‘Ah, come on, man. We’re busy here.’
‘They didn’t show the body.’
‘Guess it’s sensitive. Or maybe it’s a cover-up, like the journalist guy says.’
‘Who sees this?’ Blue-eyes grabs hold of the screen like he might yank it right out, make a dash for it. Wouldn’t be the first time someone tried that. There’s a reason TK has it chain-locked to the table.
‘Whole of the damn Internet. Anyone in the world. Look, this here counts the number of people who’ve seen it. So far it’s got 158,433 views. Shit’s gone viral.’
‘What does that mean?’ The man looks at him with what TK thinks of as gutter eyes, the expression when you’re desperate for something, anything, to pull you out.
‘Viral. It’s spreading, catching on. Like an infection, ebola or something.’
‘How do I catch it?’
‘You mean how do you make something go viral? Go big, man. Dress your cat in costume. Or do something fucked-up like this.’
‘The doors are going to open.’ He looks alarmed. ‘I … I have to go.’
‘Open door round here anytime, my friend,’ TK shouts after him. ‘Especially for counseling, you know what I’m saying!’ Good riddance, he thinks. ‘Yo, Ramón, how much this filmmaker pay you to be in his video?’
‘What? Uh, ten dollars each.’
‘He’s offering more than that here.’ TK reads out the words in the ‘about this video’ box. ‘“Got leads on the Detroit Monster? $50 for your exclusive interview. No chancers.” Phone number right here. Bet he gets a million calls in the first half hour. I bet I could tell him a story or two for fifty bucks.’
But Ramón isn’t listening. He’s staring after Mr. Crazy.
Disciple
Clayton’s body is pacing the sidewalk outside the church, head tucked down against the wind, a cap rammed down over his hacked-off hair while the dream tries to decide what to do, where to go.
Everything it had planned is in ruins.
It watched the girl coming down the steps into the dark garden, willing her to go away, go away, go away, but she went straight to the deer-boy as if he was calling out to her. She came so close, it could have reached out to touch her. It could feel how something opened in her head as she examined its creation, the dream stirring inside her like a million butterflies.
It wanted to go after her when she fled, but then the sirens came, and it felt the man’s fear of everything that meant, a thousand variations of TV shows in his memory. Trapped in a jail cell, or worse, being shot, killed. If Clayton died, his heart faltering, the blood in his veins slowing to mud, the neural stars burning out, would it be trapped within the physical flesh, watching helpless as the body started to break down?
It hid in the basement all night and all the next day, tormented by the man’s fears, but it needed to know what had happened, if the Police were coming. And it still held out hope that the deer-boy had transformed, and it had missed the moment.
It found the news on Clayton’s father’s television, but they didn’t show the boy, only dark images of the yard and the Police and a covered shape and the arrogant man, the one who was supposed to bring his camera. He kept talking about a video and how it was all over the Internet, but Clayton’s memories were blank about the Internet.
Which is why it came here to the church, remembering the big black man who said he knew everything about computers. But the video it saw was no different from the dull flickers on the television screen, and now it feels more adrift than before. The man at the church talked about viruses inside the mind, and maybe that’s all it has become – an infection trapped inside Clayton’s head.
It has to leave here. It has to get away, back to the cool dark of the basement where it can try to make sense of things. It is so lost inside its confusion, it doesn’t hear the little man approaching as Clayton slots the key into the door of the truck.
‘Wait! Por favor, I wanna talk to you.’ He reaches for Clayton’s arm.
The dream pulls away, horrified at the physical contact, the fleshiness of the scruffy man’s hand.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ says the man with red shoes, shaking with excitement. ‘The doors. You’re the one.’ He twists a rope of beads in his hand.
‘Yes,’ the dream says. The man inside the body is grateful to be recognized.
‘I can tell. Things are different around you. You make them different, but only a little bit. Like looking through the heat wave from a car muffler.’
‘It’s leaking out,’ the dream confesses. ‘I don’t know how to control it.’
‘But you know how to open the doors, don’t you? I can help you. I’m good at figuring stuff out. I used to be a mechanic. Maybe you can plug the leaks, or maybe you need to blow it all wide open? Flush the gasket.’
And all at once, it becomes clear. The art party was wrong. The scale wasn’t grand enough. There were other works fighting for attention, other consciousnesses beneath the surface, like the music and the voices at the party fighting each other.
The people are the doors. It needs to bring them all together, to focus them in one place, on its vision and purpose. Isn’t this what it has been working toward all along? Like the curator said, a solo exhibition.
But it will need – it drags the word from Clayton’s head, like a dirty string – a disciple.
‘What’s through the doors? What’s on the other side?’ the man says longingly.
‘Anything you want,’ it says through Clayton’s mouth. ‘Anything you can dream.’
If it is an infection, maybe it needs to spread.
Barking up Trees
Officer Marcus Jones is trying to type names into the onboard computer of Detective Boyd’s car, cross-referencing names from the spreadsheet of the participating artists they got from the curator, three pages of eight-point font. He's typing them in one by one to pull up their criminal records, if any. He wriggles his neck, still stiff from Gabi’s sleeper couch, and it cricks audibly.
‘Damn, son!’ Boyd is impressed. ‘You too young to have your bones clicking like that. You should see a chiropractor.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘I heard you stayed over at Ve
rsado’s. You get in there?’
‘What?’ Marcus drops the file and scrambles between his legs in the footwell to retrieve it.
‘Fine woman is all I’m saying. Divorced too. Bet she could use some company.’
‘I slept on the couch after taking her daughter home.’ Then he unbends. ‘She’s a good-looking woman.’
‘Careful, son,’ Boyd turns cold. ‘That’s a superior officer you’re talking about.’
‘But you said …’ Marcus is flustered.
Boyd laughs. ‘Don’t worry, I’m fucking with you. She’s a mess, same as the rest of us. Fine po-lice though. Take my advice, kid, don’t date within the force. But don’t date a civilian either. You want someone who understands the terrible hours and the drain of the job. A nice paramedic or a firefighter.’
‘Lot of attractive firefighters?’ he says.
‘Smokin’.’ Boyd snickers at his own joke. ‘They’d love you, Sparkles.’
‘You say so. Hey, you want to hear what I’ve found so far?’
‘Hit me.’
‘Running the names from the list, I’ve got a painter with a felony charge for car-jacking. A musician with a restraining order for stalking his ex-girlfriend, and the artist who made the Bone Hall.’
‘Was that the one with the skulls and bones? Seems like a fit with our man’s other work to me. You got an address? I think we should do that one first.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Marcus pulls up the details and types them into the GPS.
But the day is a wash-out. The artist who did the Bone Hall takes them through to his casting studio, his wife following them anxiously, carrying their baby on her hip. He makes his pewter models out of plaster of Paris, molded from a plastic skeleton he bought from a science shop. He shows them the pictures of the Capuchin Crypt in Rome that inspired him. ‘It’s about mortality – how short our lives are, how the dead are always with us. And it looks cool.’ He was out of town the night Daveyton was killed, interviewing for a job as an animator at a company in Chicago. ‘Art doesn’t exactly pay for diapers,’ he says.
The former carjacker is a biker-type with tattoos and graying hair. ‘I was nineteen and stupid. Haven’t so much as run a red light since then.’
They work their way through the same list of questions with everyone: Where were you, who were you with, ever do ceramic work, do you know the Lafonte family or Elizabeth Spinks? Ever work with transglutaminase?
The man with the restraining order is living with the girlfriend who took it out. They have the ravaged bony look of dope fiends, and Marcus has no illusions about what people out of their minds on meth are capable of. Not usually given to elaborate forward planning, though. They pick their way into a room with a sagging mattress, everything littered with beer cans.
The woman climbs onto the man’s lap. She’s not wearing a bra under her faded black top, but not even Boyd can bring himself to look.
‘I was with him all night, officers. Same as every night.’ She sticks her tongue down his throat.
‘Why’d you get a restraining order on him, then?’
‘It’s performance art,’ says the man. ‘We like to push the boundaries of sexuality and social norms.’
She chimes in. ‘It was commentary on how you can’t legislate love.’
‘So you wasted the court’s time and police time for your art?’
‘I’m afraid so, Detective. Do you want to punish me?’ She offers her wrists to be cuffed with a gruesome pout.
‘You know how many women need a restraining order and don’t manage to get one?’ Boyd is livid.
‘I’m sorry you weren’t there for our performance last night – you’d definitely have had to arrest us. Public indecency.’ She grinds on her boyfriend’s lap by way of demonstration.
‘I see your name on a complaint form again, I will have you arrested for obstruction of justice. C’mon, Sparkles, I’ve had enough of this shit. We’re done.’
‘You sure you don’t want a closer examination of our piece, detectives?’ the skank calls after them. Boyd drives them back to the precinct, complaining all the way. ‘You think you’ve seen it all.’ He shifts his weight onto one butt cheek and lets off a massive fart. ‘That’s what I think of them.’
Marcus winds down the window, choking and laughing at the audacity of it.
‘Don’t laugh, kid. Special privileges. Comes with getting your detective’s badge.’
‘I’m supposed to go back to patrol soon,’ Marcus says, serious now. ‘My partner’s out of hospital. They had to take his appendix out, but he’s gonna be back at work next week.’
‘And you want to stick around.’
‘I like it,’ Marcus says. ‘It feels like what I’m supposed to be doing.’
‘Don’t sweat it. I think Detective Versado will find a way to keep you on this until it wraps up, don’t worry. And don’t let the other guys give you shit. I know we rag on you about being her mascot, but you’re doing good work, kid. Maybe we’ll see you in Homicide proper in a few years. Now get out my car ’cos I need to fart again. And if you thought the first one was bad, this one’s going to blow the roof off. I don’t want to have to tell Versado, yeah, sorry, I killed the rookie with poison gas.’
‘You don’t got to tell me twice.’
‘Go home, Sparkles, get some rest.’
‘Yes, sir.’
But the next morning, he sees his error – the fine print he missed on the back of the last page of the spreadsheet. It’s because he’s so sleep-deprived, all of them, running on empty, trying to piece this together. And hey, it’s probably nothing. Another dead end, but he’ll check it out on the way in to the station, so he has something to tell Versado.
Marcus pulls up outside the house in a quiet street of mostly abandoned homes in various states of disrepair. This one somehow looks resentful, he thinks, like a man with his shoulders hunched up.
He rings the doorbell, but there’s nobody home, then tramps around to the yard past the dirty slit window of the basement, but the high blank walls block his way. He gets that same ugly feeling as when he saw Daveyton under the bridge, and he knew that it wasn’t a dead dog or a trick of the light off a trash bag.
He shouldn’t have come here on his own, he thinks, reaching for his phone in his top pocket, his fingers brushing against the merit ribbons.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17
Blogger vs Cop
‘Mr. Haim,’ the lady detective says, calling in via the call-forwarding number he set up for his YouTube tip-line, which means she’s seen the video. Crap. ‘You seem to have given me the wrong phone.’
‘You know, I realized that when I got home. I’m so sorry. It was the heat of the moment. All the excitement.’
‘I’d appreciate if you could bring me the correct phone, and also take down your video.’
‘I would, but I’d need a court order.’ He doesn’t point out that she could send YouTube a simple ‘inappropriate content’ notice, and they’d take it down faster than a how-to-breastfeed video.
‘We can discuss that when you come down to the station.’
‘Do I need to bring my lawyer?’
‘Do you think you need a lawyer?’
Uh-oh. Tough-cookie alert.
He does not take a lawyer down to the station, because he figures he has more chance of persuading her to give him access for Murder48 on his own. She invites him for a friendly chat in one of the interrogation rooms. She leaves the door open, and offers him a coffee, which he declines, but takes as a good sign. It is not.
He shoots the phone across the table at her and she takes it, flicks through the video folder and tests some of the footage.
‘Anything else you’re withholding?’
‘No, officer.’
‘Detective. You know you’ve compromised this investigation, you shit-bag? You’ve set us back thirty-six hours, because what, you needed to get your little video out?’
‘I’m doing my job, same as you. You would
n’t take the footage off a TV crew.’
‘It’s not a job. It’s jerking off. You’re like the kid in the playground yelling look at me! Look at me! Do you know what I spent the whole of my Sunday doing, while you were wanking online?’
‘Working a murder scene?’
‘Tagging and bagging things that might or might not be evidence. Trying to hunt down four hundred people. Showing the parents the remains of their child down in the morgue and trying to explain why someone would do this to him. Do you know what that was like? Did you think about them before you put your sensationalist crap up? How they would feel?’
‘The people have a right to know,’ he flusters.
‘That’s all you got? “The people”? Fuck you.’
He blinks. ‘Isn’t there supposed to be a good cop?’
‘We’re short-staffed.’
The jowly black detective Jonno saw on Saturday night – the guy must have bribed his way through his last physical – sticks his head in. ‘Versado. You gotta phone call.’
‘Take a message, Bob.’
‘It’s important. I think you better take it.’
‘Excuse me a moment.’ She pushes away from the table and leaves, taking his phone with her.
‘Everything okay?’ Jonno asks the fat guy with his most winning smile.
‘None of your fucking business,’ he says, and walks away.
‘Hey,’ Jonno calls after him. ‘Hey! Can I change my mind about the coffee?’
It’s fifteen minutes before she comes back. Long enough for Jonno to have composed several possible pieces in his head. ‘10 Most Outrageous Alibis.’ ‘10 Ways To Entertain Yourself In A Police Interrogation Room’ (thinking of top-ten lists is number three on the list). ‘10 Photos You Should Have Deleted Off Your Cell Phone Before You Handed It To The Cops’. Like the ones of your girlfriend wearing only her tattoos.
When the detective comes back, she looks even more tired and mad than before. She sits down and shoves a piece of paper at him. ‘This is a list. Of times and dates.’