The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  Now, the music cuts out and the speakers amplify the static of a guitar being plugged in. The party’s attention shifts and the doorman is handing something to Lew. He looks for me, scanning across the heads of the party-goers, signaling with the DVD sleeve in his hand. This is his level of tech, something which at least has in common with film canisters a shape. The thing on the red memory stick, he distrusts, which is what he has me for. Now, the first strains of a song lift over the crowd, and Valerie, looking smug, reaches her lover’s side, but my leisure time is over. It’s time to get to work.

  But first, I detour to my boyfriend. The actress, sensing my approach, fades into the crowd. I think about whether she’s Paul’s type, or just another of Lew’s heartland girls, too bucktoothed or damaged to make it in legitimate film. Paul, apart from the crowd for a moment, looks—unlike himself. Maybe it’s just the drinks, or the recent incendario run. The puffiness is off him now, and here is where he looks his best. Maybe that is all I am reading, but in the pool light, I realize, he stands taller. It is as if the wariness, that he has carried on his back since the failed audition, has lifted.

  “I have to go,” I say. “Come with me?”

  “I might stay. Just for a bit.”

  “You used to hate these parties.”

  Paul smiles at me. It’s there again, the thing. Like he’s less knotted up. “I mean, they’re horrible, too, but I don’t have the same disdain. I bet some of these guys are terrific actors.”

  “Acting is not what the medium calls for, chiefly.”

  “No,” he says. “I mean, hear me out. You’ve got basically two veins of great performers. There’s the genius, and he’s a guy who just cracks open his chest, and there’s his inner life. But this other type is kind of the opposite. Blank slate. These guys, I’ve seen them get roles, who are just so—so—”

  A group of men has crowded onto the diving board. They hold shot glasses, and have begun to chant—Go. Go. Go.—drowning out the island music. The blonde actress—or is it another girl?—claps. The spring break portion of the evening is commencing.

  “Being an actor doesn’t require you to be a Neanderthal,” I say.

  Paul sips at his drink. “It’s not that. All right. You go on. I promise I won’t stay too late. And yes, I’m still thinking about it—Coolidge Corner, drywall, whatever.”

  So I hand him the keys and catch a ride with Lew. This isn’t the first night Paul and I have left separately, and the blonde is bucktoothed, and so far, all this time, he’s still come home to me. I lean against the window and let the cool glass salve me against the crawling cloud hunger. Vegetation. The prickly green and dry sweep of palms above, the periodic pulse of a lit driveway between the gated estates and the vagaries of the twisting road. Above, the night is light-pollution orange. Perfect, she whispers. Paul, at the party, the months of desperation lifted from him. My head against Paul’s chest, listening as the stutter leaves his body.

  Lew holds open my door and reviews the instructions before he hands me the disc. “One, tonight: make the changes to the code, screen the original. Tomorrow, two: we shoot, you do simultaneous post. Three, we upload. If you did your job right, those little codes plant themselves in hard drives.”

  “How much trouble can we get in, Lew?”

  “That’s the genius of this new program,” he says. “Everything up until a certain point is above board. Step four, is trickier. For step four, I’d feel safer in a place without an extradition treaty. I’ll explain step four after we shoot.”

  “Got it,” I say. I try to climb out, but Lew’s got me blocked. There’s something else.

  “Don’t be upset with me,” he says. “I couldn’t stand that.”

  I sense what he’s going to say, but gut-sense it. I don’t know the meaning of the coming news, but I start to feel the constriction in my chest, the acidic ache where my ribs meet. The lip gloss case is warm in my pocket.

  “Paul—don’t be shocked. I’m putting him on this one. There’s a part his look is perfect for.”

  “Paul agreed?” Things fly out of me at panicked angles.

  “Look, Mellie. I’ve been clear that this project would not be like our previous projects. That some discomfort, some crossing of lines might be involved. And you said—”

  “I know what I said.”

  “Mellie?” says Lew. “Don’t worry. It’s nothing too perverted, nothing too obscene. The industry has changed; the world. This is not like the shit we did in ’03. Haven’t I always looked out for you? Like, the real estate thing. I’m looking out for you bigtime.”

  Lew has been in interrogations; in Indochina; he’d been assigned to Psy-Ops. Which is why he always has leverage before he comes to a negotiation. This is how my understanding of the night shifts, the exchange in the safe, the way the information has unfolded.

  “Watch the video,” he says. “You’ll see why it has to be Paul.”

  He closes the door and the driver pulls out. I try Paul, but he isn’t picking up. I punch the code for his voicemail. There’s a new message from the whisperer. In the background, music plays. You’re perfect for it. Whoever made the call, whoever she was, it was this, some shitty copy of a leaked tape, that she though Paul was perfect for and he’d agreed.

  It is time for another confession. It wasn’t only yesterday that I listened to his voicemail. And it isn’t only his messages that I spy on. Sometimes, when he is at the gym, or on a run to Ensenada Sur, I enter his closets, feel around the bottom of his drawers, review his browser history. The video I found during one of these episodes was called Teen Ass. It was one of Lew’s, one with the missing girl Caty. When I edit, I skate lightly over the content. The taste of cloud, in my mouth, slowly dissolving, allows me to avoid thinking about things like the women we film, about what it might be like for them. But that day, I don’t know. I really watched. I paused at certain points, and put my hand over Caty’s mouth. If you do that, with a picture, sometimes you can see things in the eyes that the smile or the moan masks. What I saw in Caty’s eyes was not good. Teen Ass, I thought. I thought: maybe I should buy some better pants.

  Now, I slide Lew’s disc into the machine, and begin to map the tension points, and I dip, at last, into my supply of cloud. The lesson I took from Teen Ass was that porn was different for men, although had I not so badly wanted reassurance, there were other things to be gleaned, other insights I ignored. For example, watching a film is not the same as being in a film. For example, I had never put my hands over the mouths of the actors.

  —pop—

  Now the key is in the lock, and Paul’s shining face returns from Lew’s party. I hear his pocket change jingle, his feet as he steps around my work on the living room floor—Lew’s disc, the red chip reader. Then, he is standing by the hiding place, and lifting the lid, to take a gander of our future which I have already bargained away.

  “All of it?” he says.

  I’m half-asleep, and the code from the chip reader has been running over my eyes for hours. Vicious code, just a little beyond my skill set, but nonetheless troubling. I’m still high. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, Mellie,” says Paul. “You’re supposed to be smart at this kind of stuff. Judgment. Isn’t that right?”

  At last, I understand he is referring to my arrangement with Lew. “He gave me receipts. He has a banker. Look, I don’t like this thing of you on the shoot either. I won’t let him insist. I’ll go through headshots. There have to be a dozen guys.”

  “You misunderstand,” he says. “It’s not myself I’m worried about.”

  “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, Paul. But there are risks. I mean, physically. You should think it through.”

  Paul shakes his head, as if the pain were a given, or irrelevant, or even welcome. “I’m not delicate, Mellie. Anyway, if it’s weird, I can do it as Apollo,” he says.

  There is something drifty about him. Something vague. Maybe he’s just high, but I think of Ensenada Sur. The c
liffside Apollo.

  “Don’t make me explain it to you.” He turns to me, and comes to sit beside me on the bed. “Or let me say it this way: this is part of how I have to leave this place.”

  “So, are you? Are we?”

  He places his hands on my shoulders. “Do I love living off you? Do I want to go back to my father’s on a giant pile of your cash? More than a decade, Mellie. I have nothing to show for it. Maybe it’s not the Actor’s Group. Maybe it’s not going to make my page in IMDb, but it won’t be easy, right? It’s something to me. And anyway, I don’t have any other offers.”

  Why don’t I fight harder? I tongue into him, taste his night. There’s something unfamiliar, some seasoning I can’t identify, but he’s still mine. I don’t fight harder because his offering is fragile, can still be retracted, and that’s the thing I decide to push for.

  “Tomorrow,” I say. “Before we got to the set. I want you to call your father tomorrow.”

  “OK,” he says. “All right. I promise.”

  He drops his shirt on the floor, and I see the new lines of him. He prepares a needle, his bedtime dose of incendario. He squeezes his eyes shut, and I can read like slowed frames of a film, the shadows he is trying to banish, and then he depresses the syringe.

  He speaks next when he is lying beside me. “Should I be scared?” he asks.

  “Of which?” I want to know. “Of what?”

  But sleep and incendario have taken him before he can answer.

  Four

  Toward Kif-Vesely’e

  2010

  Apollo, the god, was a wrestler. He defeated Ares in combat, and he is the oracular god. He is, therefore, also a Jacob figure. The struggle through which one comes to know the mystery.

  In the rainy dawn, as Emily flees, the man and I grapple at the side the black SUV. We fight teeth and muscle and neither of us concedes.

  We are not only fighting each other, as we fight. He fights to break something out of me, aiming for my head, pummeling down. Whatever remains in me, he must force it out. I fight to even the score, aiming for his soft parts. I hit him in the place on his chest where a child would rest, and I shove my fist into his mouth like a handful of cloud. I scratch and I bite and I kick and I kick and I kick. I don’t need to win, only to distract long enough. There are years in our fight, a tonnage of things unsaid, of hurts we held in secret, of battles we were to weak or afraid to launch.

  We are not only fighting, as we fight. Our faces are strange to each other, but our bodies are known. His muscles, his patches of fat, his jaw—alien and beloved. He lifts me, pushes me against the car. He is stronger than me, much stronger, but when my hand finds his skin, the curve from his waist to his spine, he shudders. Disgust? Arousal? I use the advantage.

  Slippery with rain, I slide along the car body toward the open door of the vehicle and fall inside. He stumbles. Knees, then on his feet, he throws his weight on top of me. Forearm, elbow, sternum, stomach, fist, fist, fist. The car alarm silences, and silence after such an intensity of noise shocks. In the distance, I hear an ancient engine catch. Emily. My chest, and the man’s chest heave against each other, but we remain gripped on the uneven floor of the vehicle. The gear shift digs into my back. My face on the car floor has come to rest against a familiar nylon. An odor, tinged with plastic, holds a bodily mustard to it I recognize, a slight yeast.

  The stolen bag. My face is pressed into Juni’s diaper bag.

  Far away, a church bell rings the morning. Light is breaking and I am four hours from home. Back in Quincy, Juni will be waking from sleep, expecting the usual weekend routine, a private breakfast meal of frozen waffles in our efficiency, then cartoons while the mothers do church and chores and prepare the Sunday dinner. She will wake in the wrong place, the routine broken. Instead of me, there will be the caregiver’s support stockings, the nursery smells of tempera paints, Lysol, and spit-up. The social worker will be waiting already, the paperwork being signed. Twenty-four hours. The process will begin by which my rights and responsibilities as a parent are suspended, by which Juni’s mother is replaced by a flawed and merciless bureaucracy.

  I can feel my baby’s distant body pull away from me as if we are attached by an impossibly long, slender cord. There is the beige pocketbook of the woman who has come to take her away. There is the battered car seat into which she is strapped, the distracted reassurance from the front seat.

  In some geography, this place leads to that place. There, time does not matter, but the spot at my breast bone which might allow me to leap has gone cold. The thing which links us becomes thinner, and thinner and then it snaps.

  Through the SUV window, morning has picked out shapes, a collection of rude dwellings, the frame of a swing set, the white crater of an ancient pool. The rain pours through splintered roofs. Here, where I am, is not the place of my childhood, but some earlier echo. It could have been a bungalow colony, the houses for families rather than children alone.

  Children alone. My grief will not come. My missing heart remains a monstrous blank. I release a sound into the man’s chest, the man with whom I have wrestled, my breath sobbing into his clothes. His skin finds my skin, and I shudder, too. It waits for me, the old feeling, the familiar feeling. It beckons me to fall into it. Here you belong, it says. Here you have always belonged.

  It is light enough to see one another, the person with whom each of us has wrestled. We turn our heads. Light to lens to optic nerve; signals travel a million fibers, a branching and rebranching. Looking at him is like falling into sickness, layer over layer over layer. Things flicker and vanish. Me, too. I am flickering.

  He considers me for a second, two, three. Then he leans back. “You get it now, I think,” he says. “You understand. Before, you wanted to go back. Undo, redo. Whatever. You thought you could get yourself into some nice life, hang some pictures on the wall? Live there?”

  “But why not?” I say. I reach for my paperback. “I feel like, if I could just hold on, it would appear. It always felt so close. But things keep falling out.”

  He looks at me, and the looking is strange because we see each other but cannot see each other. “I don’t know, lady honey. Maybe no one really has that,” he says. “But even if they do, it’s not for people like us. There’s only one way, when you’ve been where we’ve been. You’ve got to get rid of it; every last thing.”

  From the paperback, the borrower’s card, crowded with names, protrudes. He tugs at it. He’s no longer a reader, but he has the muscle memory of an afterschool library regular. He turns it over, blinks, and then hands it back to me.

  “There’s nothing there. There’s nothing back there.” His voice is rich with molasses, with campfire, and I want to listen to it. I want it to tell me everything it knows.

  “Where was that? Where have you been?”

  He looks at me, at what stands for me for him. “Let me tell you where I come from. There’s this place, like a crack in the rocks. Outside, it looks like nothing, but you slip in and everything is there. You can go anywhere. You only have to choose. Maybe you’ve already been inside, Amelia. Maybe where we are, it’s where you chose to go. Inside is the desert, and the ocean, and the inside of the earth, and the sky and nowhere. And when I came out, I took nothing with me, and I was perfect. Oh, God. To bring nothing with you. That’s perfection. But the world is tricky, does not like nothing. You have to destroy it all, every little thing. Or else things follow you.”

  He jimmies the cover on the dash, slips his hand beneath the plastic, and extracts a roll of felt. He unwraps it on his lap. The sharp point of a needle gleams. Granules shift in a glass vial.

  He dribbles a little water into the vial, sloshes it around. “Look at my face,” he says. “I’m nothing, right?”

  “It’s not nothing. You’re not nothing.”

  The smell of mineral rises from the moistened substance.

  “When we were driving around, when I first found you. That was something wasn’t it? I love t
o listen to music. I love driving. Why not? Because there is still this one thing, Amelia. And it doesn’t want to release us. Here’s easy: we can get high. Then you and me, we drive off and we can stay high for as long as we want. Nothing will follow us. Even that face you try to wear. It doesn’t have to stay.”

  It feels possible, what he says. We will be two people without faces. This is the perfect place for that to begin, a place of ruin with nothing left inside of it.

  He glances at the time. “You got a little left?”

  I nod.

  “I don’t have to force it. You see things, Amelia. You’ve got this thing. It’s in the videos, right? So many people watching them, when there’s nothing there? That’s the problem, see? It wants to copy itself, to be everywhere, and then how will I stop it? But, it’s the solution, too. I know you can get me there. We have three hours left. There’s one more lake.”

  I am so exhausted, so bruised and spent. Parts of me throb. Inside parts. It almost doesn’t matter that I know he’s lying to me. There is nothing at the fourth lake. So, there will be no driving and listening to music. I have no special talent that will fix this. He’s in a different geography, where this place can get us through to where he wants to go.

  “It’s almost done. The last of it, Amelia. It’s not too late to end it.”

  He turns the key in the lock and the engine starts. He leans back against the seat. “It felt like something was close. Something in this place.” With his free hand, he ties off. “I thought we had it. But I couldn’t quite get across.”

  He pushes the needle into his arm. For a moment, the shadows lift from his face. I think, it all begins when we are so young. There is no unwinding it. There is only going forward.