Sinner

  My back stung something fierce, like I’d been sliced in two with a cymbal. I tasted blood. She needed to hit me harder, because I could still feel everything.

  I couldn’t stop seeing Victor’s face mirrored in Angie’s. What I’d done to both of them would never go away.

  “Angie,” Jeremy said again, out of my view. “Think about what you’re doing. This is TV. This is your record, forever. This isn’t the way.”

  Leyla loomed over me. She gripped my hand and pulled me up. She didn’t say: This is the future growing the seeds you sowed in the past. She asked, “Are you okay, man?”

  I stood there in the middle of Shayla’s flat lawn, and suddenly there was no stage. It was just a bunch of drunk people standing in front of an old house. It was an ex-girlfriend looking defeated, a bloody microphone hanging in one of her hands. I’d scuffed the hell out of my patch of grass by jumping up and down while I sang. I looked at it, and at Angie, and then at Shayla. My face still felt warm, and I suspected from both that and the way she was looking at me that I was bleeding a lot. I’d stopped feeling anything, though.

  “Sorry I wrecked your lawn,” I said. “Tell the next band to put down a rug or some other shit.”

  She clutched her hands together. “Should we call the cops? 911?”

  Angie just stared at me. The microphone hung in her hand. She said, “You ruined him.”

  Then she dropped the mic and walked into the crowd.

  It seemed obvious that this represented the end of the set, but the thought of taking all this stuff down and finding a way to put it back in the Mustang suddenly seemed like a huge amount of trouble. Finding the Mustang, period, seemed like an enormous quest. There is a wave that leads you to a gig, but after it’s crashed you onto the shore of the show, there’s no similar wave that takes you away, especially after your knees are buckling and you can feel every one of your teeth loose in your head. After you can see nothing but your dead drummer and every girl you ever slept with and hated yourself for in the morning.

  Shayla was still going on about the cops, but I didn’t know what good they would do unless they were going to retrieve the car. I could hear my heartbeat in my forehead or maybe my temple. Jeremy’s voice went on, smooth and easy, echoed by Leyla.

  I should’ve thought of a way to wrap up this episode neatly, but I guessed they would probably edit that punch into something glorious.

  T’s camera eyed me. I told it, “That’s a wrap.”

  It was the best I could do. Hills and valleys. My mind curled up in the shadow of mountains I’d climbed and then plummeted from.

  Jeremy took my arm. “Cole,” he said, “come on, man.” He looked at T. “You’ve got enough on there. Turn it off.”

  Jeremy drove his old pickup truck while I sat in the passenger’s seat, leaning my head against the door. We didn’t speak. I was hoarse anyway.

  He lived in a house out in the Hollywood Hills. Even though it was not far geographically from the city, it seemed like a different state. The narrow streets snaked up the steep hills, crowded with mailboxes, yucca plants, orange trees, dusty pickup trucks, and BMWs. The houses were mismatched shabby contemporaries from the twenties, one-hundred-year-old denizens of an older Los Angeles.

  The streets kept getting narrower and steeper, the turns becoming more and more improbable, until finally we came to the place Jeremy shared with his girlfriend. The light green house was low-slung and lattice-covered. A eucalyptus tree grew beside it, appearing at one with the house, which seemed appropriate for Jeremy. A dusty and very busted Mustang from several decades before mine was parked half-in, half-out of a metal carport.

  Jeremy parked on the street. “I think you should leave your work phone in here.”

  I stared at him, not understanding. Then I said, “Isabel has it.”

  Jeremy frowned. Mentally, he catalogued my online presence over the past several weeks.

  “Yes,” he said simply. He pulled up the parking brake and put it in gear. “Well, leave anything else having to do with the show in the car, too.”

  We climbed crooked concrete stairs, me slower than him. Inside, the house was everything I would have expected from Jeremy: modest, airy, and very spare. He led me into a galley kitchen full of ugly, pristine ’70s appliances, and I leaned on the doorjamb and felt sorry for myself while he rummaged in drawers for a dish towel.

  “Hold still,” he said. I rested my cheek on the counter while he dabbed at the side of my face. The towel came up covered with dirt and grime.

  “Jesus Christ! Jeremy! Cole? St. Clair?”

  This was how I found out that Jeremy’s girlfriend was the ukulele player for a band that had opened for us two years before. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen in a bra and shorts. Probably some girls would’ve been bothered by suddenly discovering guests while in this condition, but everything about her posture indicated she was not one of them. The last time I had seen her we had been in Portland doing a benefit concert for orphans.

  “Hi, Star,” I mumbled.

  Star looked at Jeremy. “Did you do that to him?”

  Jeremy probed my forehead with his fingers. “Do you know if we have a first-aid kit?”

  Star joined him and bent over me. She smelled like patchouli, sweet and dreamy. I could see her bare legs and Jeremy’s bare legs. The way they stood together was so comfortable, so unaffected, that I suddenly felt incredibly shitty about all of my life choices. I wanted — I wanted — I must’ve hit my head harder than I thought.

  I wanted Isabel, but she was such an impossible thing to want.

  Star touched my hair, very gingerly. “Maybe he should go to the hospital, Germ.”

  I closed my eyes. I would have rather died on this counter.

  “He needs to be someplace quiet,” Jeremy said. “We’ve had a bad day.”

  They moved away from me, into the other room, and I heard their murmured voices. In my head, their voices were like this house, settled and modest and familiar. I heard them say he a lot, and knew they were talking about me, but I didn’t care. People were always talking about me.

  “I need a toilet,” I told Jeremy, and they both gestured around a corner.

  In the bathroom I locked the door and turned on the light and the fan, and I leaned on the stand sink and rocked back and forth. There was no mirror, and so I kept seeing Angie’s face and Victor’s face and remembering every conversation Victor and I had ever conducted about drugs or wolves or suicide. I got a needle from one of my pants pockets and stripped and curled up beneath the sink and stabbed the point under my skin.

  I was gone for five minutes. It wasn’t long enough to do anything but tamp down the worst of the jitters and maybe heal the bruise on my head a little. I hadn’t broken anything and the door was still locked and Jeremy wasn’t pounding on the other side of it so I couldn’t have been loud.

  I got dressed and flushed the toilet as if I’d used it and then washed my hands.

  I felt better. Or different. I’d been temporarily reset.

  Outside, Jeremy stood pensively in the kitchen. He sighed when I walked in and then he said, “She’s going to get some Neosporin and some Korean barbecue. You still aren’t a vegetarian, right? Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

  He gave me a glass of water, a clean dish towel with a bag of frozen edamame beans in it to hold to my head, and we wandered through his house, looking at his lack of furniture and material goods and plethora of bamboo mats and potted plants. Probably it would have been insufferable if he hadn’t also had a very comfortable-looking sofa and an orange bust of Beethoven and all of the wood-sided old speakers he’d brought to the very first episode.

  “I like this place,” I told him, because the way he took his shoes off and walked around barefoot and proud through the house made me think he’d like to hear me say it.

  “I do, too,” he said.

  “You’re dating Star,” I said.

  “I am.”

  “She got hot. How
long’s that been going on?”

  “Two years.”

  “Wow.”

  “You were gone a long time, Cole.”

  I abandoned the bag of beans in the kitchen sink and we headed back outside and downstairs to wait for Star. As we stood by the lattice overgrown with red roses, he explained how he’d bought this house with his last NARKOTIKA advance, and now he gave the money to Star to pay bills and make sure the taxes were sorted out and he worked band gigs when she said they needed more to keep things on the level.

  “She takes all your money?” I asked. A hummingbird zoomed by my head.

  He looked at me. “I give it to her.”

  Basically, what was happening was this: I had gone away for almost two years, and when I came back, Jeremy had grown up and gotten a house and gotten happy — no, he’d always been happy, now he was just happy and with someone — and I had instead come back and become myself as I always was.

  My face throbbed, or my heart did. I was so tired of being alone, but I was always alone, even with people around me. And I was so tired of being surrounded, but I was always surrounded, even when I was by myself. There was so much talk about how everyone wanted to be goddamned special. I was so tired of being the only one of my kind.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I said.

  Jeremy didn’t say what? He just rubbed the edge of the dusty, busted Mustang where it poked out into the evening sun. The hummingbird I’d seen earlier zoomed by again. It paused by the roses, but they weren’t what it was looking for.

  “I don’t think I can go back out on the road. I don’t think I can take it.”

  He didn’t answer right away. He climbed onto the hood of the old Mustang and sat on it cross-legged. The bottoms of his bare feet were very dirty and he wore a hemp anklet, which he plucked at. “Are we talking about tour, really?”

  “What else would I be talking about?”

  He said, “Is it really going on the road you can’t do? Or is it being you?”

  I looked at the grass at the edge of the tiny, sun-bitten yard. Tire prints marked the gravel and dirt. Star had taken the pickup with my phone in it. Possibly not taken. Possibly Jeremy had given her the keys.

  “Cole, I think we have to talk about this.”

  “You don’t want to know, Jeremy. You really don’t.”

  “I think I already do, though.”

  I stared off down the dusky street. Way, way down the street, a little boy was tooling around on a faded blue bicycle. What a safe place this neighborhood seemed like. It was somehow more like California than the rest of L.A. More like the land itself. Like the dry stucco and faded wood houses and the dust-covered cars had slowly been pushed up from the dry landscape by generations of heaving quakes. It wasn’t that I liked it better than the rest of Los Angeles. It was just that it seemed like it required less work to keep it looking like this. It seemed like a place that wouldn’t notice you as much if you had a day off or got old. It seemed like a place where it might get dark at night.

  Jeremy said, “Do you know what makes it bad? It’s that you do it alone. It’s that you lock yourself in a bathroom. It’s not the thing itself. It’s that you make it secret. It’s that you only do it when you’re upset.”

  I didn’t move. I just kept staring at the little boy making uneven circles at the end of his short driveway. I felt as if the world was being crumpled like paper around me. Even if I could figure out how to open the sheet back up again, it would always be wrinkled.

  “There are other ways to be unhappy, Cole. There are better ways to cope than just pulling the plug on your brain.”

  My voice was rougher than I expected it to be. “I’ve been trying.”

  “No, you’ve been happy. You haven’t had to try until now.”

  I didn’t answer. There was no point arguing. He knew me as well as I knew myself. He’d played bass for my thoughts for three albums.

  “Victor’s dead,” I said.

  “I know. I guessed.”

  “It’s my fault. The whole thing. I got him into it.”

  “Victor got himself into it,” Jeremy said. “We were all kids from New York. I didn’t follow you down any rabbit holes. Victor would’ve gone without you.”

  I didn’t believe that. I was very persuasive.

  “How do you do it?” I asked.

  “I just live, Cole. I don’t go away in my head. I deal with the crap as it happens, and then it’s gone. When you don’t think about it, it lives forever.”

  I closed my eyes. I could still hear the little boy riding his bicycle down the street. It made me think about the boy on the roof, the one who had crashed his plane because it wasn’t about the landing, it was about the flying.

  “I always thought you’d be the one who died,” Jeremy said. “I kept thinking one day I’d get the call while I was sleeping. Or I’d come to get you in your room before the show and I’d be too late. Or I —”

  He stopped, and when I turned to look at him, still cross-legged on the hood of the Mustang, his eyes were shiny. He blinked, and two tears shot down his face, fast and shiny as mercury.

  It was possibly the worst and best that I’d felt in my life. I didn’t know what to say. Sorry? I hadn’t meant to hurt anybody else?

  “Nobody told me it would be this hard,” I said.

  “Why is it always harder for you?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t even know if it really was harder for me, if I was just a flawed model. I wiped my nose with my arm and pointed to the Mustang beneath Jeremy.

  “That’s a thing,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jeremy said, his voice much different. “Yeah, it conveyed with the house. It came with a trash compactor, too, but Star broke it.”

  We both sighed.

  “There she is,” said Jeremy as his pickup truck appeared at the bottom of the hill. It stopped beside the little boy, and the kid came over to talk to Star through the driver’s window. I saw her long brown arm hanging out of the side of the truck, bracelets hanging around her wristbone, and I saw her hair hanging in hanks on either side of her face, and the kid on his busted bike keeled over talking to her with his hair all scruffed up. And suddenly I was just eaten by nostalgia, for a past that wasn’t mine.

  I just wanted to be happy. I just wanted to make something.

  “You have to take it off the table,” Jeremy said, finally. “It’s always going to be an option, otherwise. You’re going to have to give it up and mean it, or it’ll always be your solution when things go bad.”

  The pickup truck pulled up beside us. Star put it in park and leaned across to gaze at me through the open passenger window. She grinned easily at me.

  “Did you choose life while I was gone?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  Jeremy asked, “Did you mean it?”

  It hurt, but sort of in a good way, to look him in the face. “Yes.”

  That night, I arrived at Sierra’s house in the canyons with my shivered-ice eyes and my slaughter lips.

  Party time.

  I was in a dress that was white vinyl or leather — I couldn’t tell the difference; could anyone else? If they bothered to analyze it, it meant I was wearing it wrong, anyway. I was also wearing white sandals with enormous white heels. The only color to my wardrobe was my horror lips. No one could say I hadn’t warned them.

  I used to wonder what partying was really like. When I was eleven or twelve. Everyone in movies seemed so eager to go party. All the television shows were girls wondering if they were going to be invited to this or that party, talking like there were different levels and qualities of party. I couldn’t imagine what was luring them to these places, but the desperation to get there promised that it was something good.

  Now I’d been to more than my fair share of parties. And it turned out that the TV parties had not been lies. They boasted most of the features of real parties: booze, making out, music that sounded better on your own speakers. Maybe some drugs or drinking
games or pool or witty banter. Possibly witty banter should have been lumped in with drinking games or with making out.

  Maybe I was always too sober at these things.

  The house was located in the Hollywood Hills, in a high-altitude fancy neighborhood that overlooked the lights of other, slightly less fancy neighborhoods. It was an enormous white, gated compound, a sort of mesa of smoothed concrete and windows. Tastefully hidden floodlights guided me out of the taxi to the courtyard. Because it was Sierra’s house and Sierra’s party, the music was dreamy shoegaze. It sounded like a cross between a spilled water glass and a slow-motion electronic lynching. The place was already full of people.

  God, I hated them all.

  I stalked in. The irregular beat of the music and the mass of people made it feel like the ground was moving. Heads might have turned. I couldn’t tell. Being me meant that I couldn’t do more than a dismissive sweep of my eyes over any given person.

  Part of the problem with parties was that I couldn’t even tell what the goal was, so I never knew when I was done. I searched for Sierra. At least if she saw me, I got credit for coming.

  I walked by the big pool. It was full of splashing nymphs and was lit with color-changing lights. Pink, purple, green. A boy, half-in, half-out of the pool, grabbed my ankle with his wet hand.

  “Come in,” he said.

  I looked down at him. He wore glittery eyeliner. I wondered what brand of eyeliner it was that it didn’t wash off in the pool water. His wet hand on my ankle reminded me of Cole doing something very similar months and months before.

  I said, very coolly, “I don’t like to get wet.”

  I expected the boy to protest, but he just looked abashed and then slid under the water along with any respect I might have had for him.

  In the middle of the pool, a girl floated on her back in slow, lazy circles while a guy paddled lazily beside her and kissed her hand. I wondered if there was ever a world where I might have turned out like them. I wondered if that was the person I might have been if we had never moved from California; if my brother had never died; if we had not moved away from Cole; if my parents had never gotten separated.