The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  “Me,” Trudi is saying, “I try to hole up for even one minute and it’s impossible. But you know all the little hiding spots, don’t you? You are a hard girl to find.”

  I can see from Muscle’s scowl that he’s been chewed out for losing me, for forcing Trudi to get involved at all.

  We climb the stairs past the actor’s dressing rooms to the editing booths. I am supposed to screen the original sex tape in Lew’s office, a space of wood panel and Marshall McLuhan hardcovers he’d had carted over entire from a defunct B-Studio. There is a bank of monitors which show, in small slices, the security feed of the studio below. Everything is being surveilled. Trudi watches one for a moment, the money men arriving through the studio door, Lew moving to intercept them. She signals for Muscle to take a place on the bench outside the office, then shoos me over the threshold.

  I see that somehow she’s managed to extract my purse from me in the process of the transaction. Now, she reaches into it and withdraws my lip gloss case. “I thought we made clear our expectations.”

  “It’s not—” I say.

  “Yours?” Says Trudi. “What I think? My position, Mellie, is that we’re in the middle of a shoot which has implications that aren’t visible to you. My position is that this is not something we can resolve today.” She closes her hand over the bundle of needles. “What you do at home, what you and Paul do, it can’t interfere here. So, tell me now, if there’s anything I need to know.”

  “It’s under control,” I begin, again.

  “Is that what you think? You think you’re pulling it off?”

  “Trudi,” I tell her. “Listen—” I shake my head. “I’m not getting high. It’s for—weight loss. I’m trying to lose weight.”

  She holds my gaze for a moment. “Be at your best today, and not so sloppy, not—what’s the word—erratic—like you have been.”

  And she opens the door, whispers briefly to muscle. “Focus,” she says to me, pressing play on the video. “And stay off the set. Very important.”

  And then I am being locked in the editing suite, and Trudi is walking away with my cloud.

  I try. For an hour or more, coasting the earlier hits of cloud, I avoid thinking about Paul. The distant burr of anxiety rises occasionally from the studio below, a white noise, but I tune it out. I press play and rewind and watch the pop star strip and unstrip, flirt and unflirt, and kiss and unkiss her husband.

  Sloppy, says Trudi again in my mind. Erratic.

  I can feel the edge approaching. A woman in underpants, her head and feet cut out of the frame, paces the bathroom. I freeze the image, press play. The husband of the pop star, invisible behind the camera, reaches for the waistband of her panties and snaps. Snap. Rewind. Snap. I look at the code again. Here is where I would dip into my cloud case, but instead I lick the pockets of my cheeks, hoping for a little lingering flavor. The need crawls up.

  I glance at the call list, and it’s puzzling. Paul, the first scene, he’s listed in every shot, but it’s just the woman, walking back and forth, her husband’s hand occasionally entering the shot. Where is Paul in this?

  I hear the PM call for Greene, for Greene on set one.

  I turn to search the live feed. I am maybe closer to my need point than I realized. I should be able to go five hours, six. But probably, it’s been a while since I tested that. The screens seem to pulse and then my vision clarifies. Where is he?

  On the first security feed, two assistants lead a man toward the set. His back toward me, the man shuffles, rather than walks, like a patient coming out of sedation. He could be sick, could be mistaken for sick. I catch glances from the crew, quizzical maybe. Maybe concerned. The camera drops him, as he walks through the door onto the active set. On the next feed, the crew are checking equipment, swapping out battery packs, taping X’s into the floor. The lights are already fixed; everything is poised and the man, the man who looks like a patient, steps onto the tile.

  His back straightens. His face tilts toward the camera. The anxious observers relax. He squares his shoulders. He is the spitting image of Guy DeLauris.

  You’re perfect for it, the whispering voice said. And now, the glow of the lights upon him, his bruises vanished under the makeup brush, his hair slicked, it is true. Now, at last, I can see the resemblance.

  The minor roles for which I’ve scripted him, the guy who brings room service and joins in, the bellhop, the maître d’, I’m prepared; but of course, they don’t use the enema girl for the bellhop. They don’t get hair and makeup to work on your track marks if you just bring room service.

  “I look exactly like him,” says Paul-the-actor, as he is guided to his place, someone dabbing from his lip a drop of saliva. “I’m perfect.”

  A smirk settles on his face, Guy’s famous smirk. It’s Paul, of course. I know it, but he has done something to himself, altered himself at some strange cost I cannot yet understand.

  Someone steps onto the screen in the pop star’s bra and panties. At first, I see only her body. And it is like, very like, the pop star’s. Then the actress steps forward, into the frame, and I recognize her. Perfect, she had said. There had been music in the background, tropical guitar. Which is why, scrubbed of the peach dust, her painter’s weeds shed for expensive underwear, Valerie Weston is now onscreen with the actor, being encoded into the tiny microchip of the single camera.

  I think of the silences which have been dropping between us, Paul and me, since our visit to Ensenada Sur. I think of the boxes he has thrown away. I think of the half-promises he’d made to his father this morning.

  The actor onscreen kisses the woman, and the kiss is marital. Comfortable, boring, a little contrived and full of real affection. It is not a kiss I will ever have with him.

  “You’re my husband,” Westie says to the man who won’t marry me. Valerie looks up—and I know she’s looking for me in particular. She’s not sorry. Sorry isn’t Valerie’s thing. But she is curious, curious how the movie is going to end. Maybe, she looks pleased with herself, like she’s done me a favor.

  Leaked Celebrity Sex Tape

  A Screenplay

  Handheld camera, ECU: a shoulder. A hip. An elbow. A breast. It takes a moment to orient, then . . .

  For an instant, the frame is empty, then a torso and trunk begin to pace between the camera and mirror. POP STAR wears black underwear (new, tag visible above the waistband). There are two light sources in the room, an overhead compact fluorescent and the array of incandescent bulbs around the vanity. One of the bulbs is gray and dead. POP STAR mutters indistinctly. DELAURIS laughs. He is the cameraman and he films from his perch on the rim on the bathtub while POP STAR gets ready. The setting is the bathroom of a new condominium.

  POP STAR

  Of course. You’re my husband. You’re supposed to.

  DeLauris

  Tell us what you’re doing, you beautiful beast.

  POP STAR

  You’re like obsessed. You always film me.

  DeLauris

  [indistinct] to the same stupid [indistinct] again.

  POP STAR

  It’s Wednesday. It’s standard.

  DeLauris grabs POP STAR’s hand as she walks past. She pulls out of his grasp and he catches her again, this time by the tag at the back of her panties. SNAP. He snaps her waistband.

  DeLauris

  I can smell your [indistinct] I can smell

  [indistinct] leaking out of you.

  POP STAR

  Don’t talk to me like I’m some animal.

  POP STAR pulls down her panties, granting us a brief view of the hairless skin below.

  POP STAR

  You’re supposed to talk nice to your wife.

  What do I feel? Stomach-sliced. Monstrously alive. The throb of it, sharp like cloud, cuts through all the worries. It is a kind of feeling so rare, it’s almost pleasure.

  I freeze the frame, transfer the code from one chip to the other. At some point, someone has entered the room behind me and inser
ted the chip in the editing apparatus. The first scene is in the can. I watch Valerie approach the actor who is Paul on the monitor, knowing it has already happened.

  It’s over, I think. Almost. Soon everything will be over.

  Time splinters into three: Valerie’s first scene loops. On the live feed, the gruesome final scene begins, and running five minutes ahead, the pop star original speeds toward its conclusion. Thirty-two minutes. Twenty-seven minutes. Now. I shift my attention between monitors.

  In the pop star’s version, the camera is perched on the bedside table, positioned to capture her extended congress with Guy Delauris. It is a single, sustained shot, without breaks or cuts. I am coasting from need to peak. Something about this shot has me troubled.

  I squint at the original as the scene approaches its climax. Guy, the husband, pulls out. Pornography has to end this way, with the money shot. I read a paper about it in college, how necessary it is, how it provides visual evidence to the viewer that the sex on screen is real. I freeze the frame. The pop star’s face is like something melting, like a melting thing I saw once long ago. If I had some cloud, I could see it. I run my hands along Lew’s bookshelves, feel around his drawers. Nothing.

  The little puzzle, a thing not right.

  Outside, Muscle is moving, some chatter or anxiety reaching him from the studio floor. Bottom drawer of Lew’s desk, left side: I find a keyring. I’m thinking of cloud, of the Lucite boxes still in Valerie’s studio. Silence in the hallway. I try first one key, and then another, and finally the lock turns.

  At the other end of the hangar, the final minutes of the last scene are being encoded. 34:58 34:59 35:00 35:01. Shadows move at the edges of the set, tension rising. Even now, as the actor-husband’s face contorts with effort, he inhabits the role. It is extraordinary, an extraordinary performance, but something is off. Something is wrong about his body.

  In Valerie’s studio, I unearth the last box of cloud. Staggeringly famous paintings surround me, but they, too are wrong, the dopy zucchini waving his gloved hand from the scene of the execution. Valerie delights in failure, the melting penguin, the kitten in the copy, the boy so eager he throws himself from a train. Everything she makes ruins itself. The cloud is on my fingertip, my mouth already open when I realize what has been troubling me about the final scene: Paul is not equal to the requirements. He cannot perform the money shot.

  On the perimeter of the pop star’s bedroom, a clipboard drops to the ground.

  “Now, Goddamnit,” screams Lew.

  I drop my hands, and begin to run, weaving through disused sets, pool party, cowboy ranch, apartment, drug den. He cannot do it anymore, unless—in my head, as I close the distance between us, I start to tell him the one story. It is the story which is the only way he can get off anymore. There is a woman. She is holding your head under water. You try to surface—I am the only one who can tell it to him.

  Because isn’t this love? The place where we keep each other’s terrible secrets, the dark patches which will never find closure or resolution or healing? The evil things about us we can’t change? So what if he’s vain, if he’s mean to me, if he doesn’t really think I’m pretty, if he won’t give me a baby or a ring, so what if loving him means I always live here on this coast among these shallow and hard humans? So what? Who has it any better?

  The husband pumps, five times, ten, again. Valerie sits up, not acting, not the pop star, but herself, radiant with art and attention. The scene is magnificent, a perfect facsimile. Then, the husband stops. He opens his fist and reveals the terrible soft part of himself. It looks pale, like one person’s organ grafted onto another body. People shrink, as from a maniac or an explosive. Then, limp in front of the twenty-person crew, the husband plucks his silk robe off a chair and strides, still naked, toward the hangar’s exit. I call his name. Between us, crew step backwards, hands going involuntarily to mouths and in their wake, Lew pushes through, followed by a clump of men.

  At the door, the husband-actor turns, seeking something. Our gazes intersect. I wait for pleading, for need. I am the only one who knows the story, so he is mine. I wait only for him to recognize it. We know each other. But it is not need he shows me. It is perfection. Naked, soft, he throws his shoulders back and steps into the punishing sunlight. Then, Lew and the other men close between us.

  Hands grab and restrain me. Things go white, blur closing in. There is a floating quality to everything now, all that was verge becoming. I struggle and struggle and then I am released. I burst onto the parking lot. Only Lew remains, staring at a black smear on the pavement, dark and glistening. My boss wipes some organic matter onto his Chino pants. Distantly, a radio crackles to life, an incident being phoned in from the surveillance vehicle. Within the hazy interval, the naked man has vanished.

  If you use cloud long enough, it is said, you will begin to intersect yourself. Your toothbrush replaced with one very like. The keys on your ring will no longer fit your lock. You will ask certain questions, such as where is my father? And find you do not know the answer. Some people call these things memory problems or problems of recognition, but there are things these explanations fail to account for.

  Six

  Kif-Vesely’e

  1986/2008/2010

  I am lying before the faded red wall.

  Lightning cracks; the world splits and another sky opens. The color of the wall resaturates, darkens and deepens.

  It is the middle of the night, and I am twelve years old. I’m in the woods. I’m looking for my friend who has snuck out of the cabin to be with the teenagers. We’re not supposed to be out of the cabin, but I’m turned around or I took the wrong path because the way back has vanished. From far away, there’s a splash, and a cry of alarm as a little girl dives into the iced-over water, but I am here, following the only light in the woods toward the wall. I’m out of bounds, and you can get in trouble for being out of bounds, but everything else is dark, and so I stretch out my hands and move slowly forward.

  Lightning cracks again. On the dock, the teenagers begin to scream, but I am too far away to be part of that story. I take another step toward the wall and then, my foot trips on a root and I am smashing into a barrier, my chin knocked into my skull, my neck bent back. My glasses go flying. I’m lying on the ground and I can’t see. I don’t know where I am, and I’m alone in the woods, and I’m lost.

  “Who’s there?” Someone is near. It’s a boy. It is his light I have been following and now he sweeps the beam of his flashlight over the leaf-covered ground.

  I lift my head, and I see him, folded against the wall. Even close, he is blurry. He balances, cigarette in one hand, flashlight in the other, a book resting on his knees. Even blurry, I can tell how beautiful he is.

  “I’m lost,” I blurt. “I lost my glasses.” And then I’m crying, like a little baby. In front of this boy who already smokes.

  “Hold my book,” he says. I can’t see the title of the book in the darkness, but as I watch the boy’s flashlight and cigarette coal move along the wall, I touch its pages. It’s a paperback, a library book. When he hands me my glasses, I see his name on the borrower’s card, written again, and again. Then I look up and I see his face.

  “This is the worst camp,” he says. “I hate this camp.”

  He’s scared, too. He is also lost.

  “Let’s go back,” he says. “It’ll be easier together.”

  Lightning cracks again.

  It is daylight. I am weak with thirst and exhaustion, my adult body heavy with another creature’s weight. I have been here for days, in these woods. I reach the wall, the red wall.

  There’s a boy. A beautiful boy. I know him.

  “Not yet,” he says. “You have to go back.”

  There was once a beautiful boy in a forest. It was cold, and the grownups were gone, and we had only each other in darkness. In a moment, and for a lifetime, we would be wrapped again in our crueler disguises—we would wear the thick skin which would seem better than bei
ng hurt—but for that moment, briefly, we sliced ourselves open and were afraid together. That moment has persisted, through my highs, through my all of my losses. A point of inversion.

  I might have stepped into it, in the hangar—he was naked and open, but I could not reach him. Then I was in the parking lot, and there was only a dark smear on the pavement.

  Lightning, and after a moment, thunder. I am lying on the ground, stunned beside the wrecked SUV. It is daylight, but the sky is dark with rain. Get up. Get up. Fucking get up, a voice urges, and it has in it the voice the boy in the woods, of Emily, of Leo with his forceps scars, of the Monday meeting crew, the Independence women, the perfect man in the hangar. Get up, I tell myself in my own voice, which carries all of them, get up and stay sharp. You have to stay sharp.

  Something has begun to worm its way into my circuitry. It is like a virus. Paul Greene. Paul Greene. His name, over and over again, inside a library book.

  “Get up,” says a voice.

  And another adds, “Come on, Mellie. Get on up. It’s time to come through.”

  The two figures move toward me, come to either side. She is small, powerful, and she is holding something like a shadow in her hand. He is larger, and weak, but she steadies him, and together they are reaching for me now. Trudi and Lew. She gives him the object in her hand, and I am close enough now to see it is a gun.

  She begins to touch me intimately, as though feeling for bruises. But it’s not that. Her hands slip in my pocket, and she nods at her husband.

  “She’s got it with her,” says Trudi.

  Stay sharp.

  “Oh, kid,” says Lew, and there is family feeling in his voice, real relief. “Kiddo. It’s all going to be OK.”

  “We’re with you. We’ve got you. Take it easy,” says Trudi. She hands me my mangled glasses.

  I stand, and I see the collision point of the wall. The impact has splintered it, but on the far side the wooden supports were already listing. Crumpled, the hood of the SUV has accordioned into the trunk of a pine. Its driver is motionless beyond the red smear on the glass, but I see his boy face in the darkness, and his name, Paul Greene, branches out and out and out.