The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  I hear the conversations around us, who’s made it through the visit with Child Protective Services, with his parole officer, with her drunk mom. There’s a new girl, teenaged with pink hair, picked acne and quick-bitten nails. She’s here on court order, talking too fast to Jim, a sixteen-year-old favorite among the grandma junkies, sober since he was thirteen.

  “—drop her at the mall with her eleven-year-old sister. She’s supposed to look after the sister, and, whatever, eleven. I took the subways by myself at that age, but these parents are overprotective, the sister’s sheltered, et cetera, so my friend is going to keep an eye. Anyway, an hour forty-five, the parents come to get them, and the sister is gone. The parents are like, where’s Shana, and my friend is like, who? I don’t know who you mean. Who is Shana? Panic, 911, the whole deal. Eventually, they locate little Shana in the security office, eating starlight mints and watching people pick their nose on the video monitors. My friend had turned her in. Like a lost coat. She keeps following me, my friend said of her sister. She won’t let me alone.”

  The boy shakes his head. “How many hits did the friend eat?”

  The pink haired girl doesn’t know. “Eventually, though, she comes down, it was the drugs talking. I’m so sorry. Of course I love little Shana. Everyone goes back to the country club and lives happily ever after.”

  “Except not really,” says Jim.

  “No,” says the girl. “Not really.”

  Emily knocks a shoulder into me as she slides off the wall.

  “How is job stuff going? I scanned the ads. There’s some video stuff might be up your alley. You finding anything?” Emily steadies herself beside me, then taps another smoke from the soft pack.

  I pull out my phone and open my browser. “Actually, something came through from my boss yesterday. Tell me what you think.”

  I turn my head away and watch Jim and the pink-haired girl while Emily opens the link.

  “It’s got a lot of traffic,” she says. “You’re not looking.”

  “Watch the video. Tell me what you see.”

  “It’s a woman. In her underpants. She’s in bathroom. I can’t see her head, it’s like cut off. What is this?”

  “Fucked if I know. I couldn’t watch it. I must have opened the link fifty times. Then, something happens. I’m in the bathroom, staring at my face in the mirror. No idea how I got there. I’m standing in front of the fridge.”

  Emily squints at the screen. “It’s asking me do I want to download. Should I download?”

  “G-d, no.” I glance over. The video is blocked by a window. Beneath I can see the bare feet of the actress, the curve of her breasts. Even cut off, the image gives me vertigo. “It’s weird. I mean, if the box pops, it means the embed’s already there. That’s what I did, when I did this work. So how’s this a job?”

  “He’s messing with you? Sending you a message?” She taps the headless woman beneath the dialogue box. “That’s not you, is it?”

  “Not possible. She’s got more—”

  Emily glances at me. “Yeah. I see what you mean.”

  “Are you watching it again?” I ask.

  “It—it stops right at the good part. Is there more to it?”

  “Maybe. We did them sometimes in sections, you know. Like, you had to click through to get to the climax.”

  Emily shakes her head, then turns it off. “There’s something weird about that video. It’s not that porny, really. But I get it, how a person could become addicted.”

  A few feet away, the pink-haired girl rants at Jim, and we both watch them for a moment, then Emily hands me back my phone.

  “This boss. He’s from the old life, right? Did you guys have a thing?”

  “Ew, gross. He’s like seventy. It wasn’t like that.”

  “But there was weirdness, right?”

  “He wasn’t a stellar human, but it’s like, you know those people who are there for you at the bottom? If they’ve seen you then, and they stuck around, it doesn’t really matter what kind of people they are.”

  “Here’s my advice: It sounds like you’re putting a lot on this one thing. You can find another job. You can’t find another chance.”

  I haven’t explained Lew right, but he’s tricky to explain. Still, there’s feeling there. We shared an ethic about our jobs, were both excellent at making shitty things where no one was ever going to hand us awards for what we did. It got into being friendly and personal, too. In the downtime between shoots, Lew would take me to the Philharmonic and minor league ball, and some nights, Trudi and he would have me over for starchy, un-Californian dinners. Lew’s son was a junkie fuck-up, so it was about that too, all the niceness. Not many people those days bothered to be just nice to me, and I wasn’t picky about motivations.

  “So that’s what set you off last night? This work thing?”

  I hesitate, and then I nod.

  “And how close did you get?”

  I’m not a bad liar. I know you’ve got to focus on your own eyes, think about making your gaze shallow and blurred. I know it helps to think of the way in which your lie is almost true. “You know how it is. You do the drive-by at the old dealer’s house. I was at the door, Emily.”

  “I’ve been there, you know, cruising in circles, then acting like it’s providence when you happen to see your guy. God put the junk in your face. God wants you to get high.” Emily shakes her head. “It’s funny, though. My instinct said it was a man thing.”

  “I wish.”

  “More trouble than it’s worth,” Emily says. “Three-quarters of the time, it’s not even any good. It’s heartbreak and dirty sheets and you’re still lonely as fuck after.”

  “What about the other quarter?”

  She laughs. I laugh.

  “You’re not off the hook. We’re going to talk about this again.” Emily’s a great sponsor. If I were crackable, she’d crack me, but I can’t say about the driveway, the man in the driveway.

  The Monday noon meeting isn’t vast like the Tuesday night one, does not run to the hundreds. But on this particular blustery March day, there are probably forty people in the room. Cloud is a gradual drug. It took a very long time to wreck me. But also, I lost something small each time. From the very beginning, the slow catastrophe had begun.

  The pink-haired girl is at the mike, one of those rehab enthusiasts for recovery who take to meetings like babies to the boob, but don’t always have the staying power. She’s still bitching about her roommate in the in-patient program, how spoiled she is, how crap her sobriety, but the pink-haired girl is no poverty-line case study herself. It takes insurance to get into those private programs. Even though the rich don’t have it easier, the money boosts your percentage of success, oils the wheel of grace.

  I watch the girl talk, but my attention wanders. Somewhere in the gathered group, the crowd of thirty-five or forty, there is someone I should be paying attention to. I feel it like the flicker of my old cloud sense, the thing that made me so good at videos when I was high, which is the same thing which woke me to the car in my driveway last night. I scan the crowd, but some people blur, or don’t quite become people. It’s a kind of face blindness that happens to us, cloud people. Anyone can turn into a stranger. Any person you meet might harbor your secrets and you’d never even know.

  Then, they are calling for the thirty-day chips, and I raise my hand.

  I don’t do commitments. I don’t tell my story. At my first meeting, when I asked Emily to be my sponsor, I told her the condition was I wasn’t going to put on sentimental public displays of penitence. This was over coffee, at the Dunkies across the way, and not technically even a meeting. How it happened: in the mornings, when I was trying not to use, I would stroll Juni on these epic, like five mile walks. I always ended up in this neighborhood: nostalgia, probably. Then I’d stroll Juni around in circles, circle after circle, fists whitening on the plastic handles of the baby jogger. Emily saw me, a strung-out mom hovering by the meeting entrance, and st
arted just walking beside me.

  “What are you going to say to yourself, when you come to the end?” she asked me. It was the first damn thing she ever said, and she read me just like that. “Are you going to say, I got really close? I came to the door? But I just couldn’t go inside?”

  I told her to fuck off, mind her own business.

  “Look at your baby,” said Emily.

  There was Juni sucking on her cracked pacifier and not complaining.

  “She’s watching you, already, you know. It’s not like with an infant. She’s learning how to be.”

  A cracked pacifier, Emily told me, provides no satisfaction to a toddler. The hole’s too big. They’re just getting air. It’s out of habit, Emily said, if she’s still sucking on it. Or maybe something else.

  “Like what?”

  “I got a kid,” she says. “Big boy. Hormones, pimples, practically impossible to love, though, you know, I do. Even at her age—what is she? Fourteen months?”

  “Eighteen,” I say. “She’s, whatever, a little late on the physical development.”

  Emily nodded—no judgment—though G-d knows I deserve to be judged. “Even at that age,” she said. “They know how to fake it for you. That it’s OK. Even when it’s terrible.”

  So it was Juni, quiet, in the stroller, that made Emily willing to take me on, even on my crappy terms. And here I am. When they call out thirty days, I raise my hand, walk to the front, but I do not take the mike. Emily waits till they hand me the chip, then she slings her arm around my shoulder and pulls me in.

  “Skin of your teeth,” she says, which is Boston for ‘congratulations.’

  It’s meaningful to hold the object in my hand. It has a certain weight, a certain thingness to it. I haven’t lived a life of acquisition where I’ve gotten to keep much, accrued cabinets full of Lenox or Limoges, but there are one or two objects that matter to me. My paperback full of notes is among these treasures, its photographs and its ticket stubs, its glued pages and its fingerprinted corners and maybe now, this chunk of metal. On the West Coast, there’d be hugging and crying, but I’m back east and Emily’s on lunch from work. She typically has Monday off from the courthouse, but the other girl is out with a repetitive stress injury, and there’s a jury trial getting coverage in the papers. I get a quick squeeze on my shoulder and she’s off.

  Emily has told me that one of my deficits in recovery is that my world is under-populated. She’s never been to California, to Houston or Mexico; she goes to New Hampshire to buy cheap cigarettes, and she spent two months in New Jersey training to be a court reporter, but otherwise, she’s tethered to Boston like she’s on permanent supervised release. Still, she’s got people in her life, and mine is like a map without dots on it. “You need folks,” she’s said. “Old ladies with lots of patience, or girlfriends who you can owe favors. Whatever. Folks. People who can stand for you to screw up.” I’ve used up all those people, I guess. Or maybe I never had them.

  The only exception, possibly, is my boss Lew. The months of his silence had weighed on me like a rebuke. I wanted to be working. My bank account, fat when I’d arrived, was draining at an unsustainable rate. But those weren’t the reasons I kept checking the server, even long after it was reasonable. What if I’d already failed him, I thought? What if the time for the thing I’d hidden away had already passed? When the file came through, I received it like a love letter from a married boyfriend, gratified, thrilled, even though I shouldn’t have been. I received it like forgiveness. At long last, he’d written. You have your part and I have mine. Complete as discussed according to timeline. It wasn’t the first time he’d given me a second chance, but each time, always, my debt had increased.

  Case in point: 2007, when I was nearing the end of still being able to cope, I decided to go visit my mother in Belize. I should have known that I couldn’t handle it, international travel and passport stamps, but my mother and a boyfriend I’d never met had bought a patch of jungle from a sketchy broker, and things were going bad. I still thought I was high school Mellie with the report card on the fridge. I still thought I could help, so I left without telling anyone to try to go fix things.

  I booked a flight through Houston, but I dumped out on the connecting to score cloud. Out there, in the Texas summer, I had an attack of the sickness, and vanished. Meanwhile, back in LA, this home video—the one with the swimsuit model and the rock star—starts blowing up all over the internet. Lew sees the opportunity, but where am I? He hasn’t made a picture without me since the ’90s, since the market was in truck stop rentals. Trudi, his tech assistants, they’re all like, so what? It’s superstition, his attachment to me, sentiment. All right. Lew lets himself get convinced: he pulls the trigger, goes into production, gets the new project online before the traffic starts to fall off. Everything is as it should be, and yet. Nada. Nobody clicks. And so of course, none of the magical money things happened either. What it looked like was it was me who made the difference, my skill, and I was AWOL somewhere in the sweltering Southwest.

  When I got back, Lew had his driver waiting for me. So maybe I was a lucky charm or a security blanket, but so what. Lew needed me, so I needed to get right and get to work. I was collected. Riding in the back of his car, I felt briefly like an errant child, or a precious, misguided tabloid star who would now be returned to the bosom of her pink bedroom. The driver was terrific behind the wheel, and I understood that that was what Lew liked about him. He admired excellence, in any field. So I leaned back, and felt the wheels almost lifting on the hairpin turns. Maybe that was my taste of grace, what it might feel like to have what Emily talks about, folks who can stand for you to mess up. But I was wrong. I was wrong in my feeling about Lew.

  Instead of going to the studio, we drove into the hills. Lew was almost seventy, by then, but still wearing a cyanide pill necklace from his Laos days. Trudi had been a typist in the American embassy at Saigon, and the story went he single-handed rescued her before the helicopter airlift that would have left her behind. He was grotesquely overweight and on the stomach flesh that emerged from his shirttails, you could see the tattooed incision marks and instructions to would-be assassins for making a clean kill. Family dinners and ballgames aside, he was a guy who had a comfort level with violence. These were the things going through my mind as the car climbed above Los Angeles. No one was talking, not Lew, and not his driver. It didn’t feel like forgive and forget.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, at last. Neither of them replied.

  Eventually, we came to the bungalow where Lew and Trudi lived. It wasn’t large, but there were outbuildings, a gray stone pool, and a view of the whole smoggy valley below. This was real estate worth a couple of oil wells. The driver took a gasoline canister from the back, pulled a cigarette from a pack, and Lew came around to hand him a book of matches. I couldn’t make sense of what was happening, but I thought of the word pyre, of draped fabric igniting. I looked into the valley, and it was like I was already crashing against the rocks. Then the driver guy started to walk away from us, swinging the gasoline canister.

  “Take the keys,” said Lew to me. “You’re driving.

  I was still shaky when he directed me to park on a cliff overlooking his compound.

  “What do you think of my chauffeur?” he asked. “I like that word, chauffeur, but I guess it’s pretentious.”

  I shrugged. It felt like anything I said, a body might wind up broken.

  “He fucked me,” said Lew. “These new guys I unfortunately have to work with. The backers. Very tricky characters, making retire-to-an-island type money, and paying me like I’m some contractor. So how should I feel when I find my guy is on their payroll, making reports? Not good. But we worked it out, even that. My chauffeur and I figured out a deal.”

  “Sorry,” I said again. “Shit, Lew. I’m so sorry.”

  He started to shake his head. “I love you, Mellie,” he said. “Like my own kid almost. And what you do, I need you to keep doing. All these ban
kruptcies? These mortgage companies going south, that’s going to hit us. Days, I’d like to hop on a plane to wherever, too. So, I get it. You need to get out? We can work that. But not without a word. Not without warning. There have to be terms.”

  That was when I heard the sirens. Below us, on the curving road leading up the canyon, fire trucks were snaking toward something. I made out a column of gray smoke. Then, I smelled the burning in the air.

  “Is that your house?” I asked.

  Lew shrugged. “I have insurance. Trudi’s been wanting a remodel, anyway. Besides, they’ll probably make it in time.”

  This, the conversation with Lew, has worn a bit over the intervening years, as things do for users. I know there was more to the discussion. For example, I know there was a more specific conversation about my leaving, how we needed our own retire-to-an-island plan. I agreed to take classes, to learn what we’d need. He was going to call on me, when the time was right. But the rest, I’ve lost. I do know what he said, before we started back down the hill.

  “The whole business is going to be fucked, Mellie. But as long as I can hang on, I’m hanging on to you.”

  It’s what was repeating in my head, yesterday, as I tried to watch the video.

  It’s not completely true what Emily says, that I don’t have people. After the meeting, a group of us get a table at Pizzeria Uno. These are fragile and new connections, and I don’t know if things like trust or loyalty or screwing up will be possible. Still, they’re company, and that’s a beginning. Among the people who used to get high, there are doctors and teachers and union carpenters, but the Uno’s crew, we’re the addicts with marginal or irregular jobs, with nothing on for the afternoon. We order the personal pizza, or if we’re not on a restaurant budget, just a black coffee. Our waitress is a recovering meth head and so the refills are free.