Trudi opens the SUV door and nudges the man behind the wheel. There’s no response.
“Leave him,” says Lew. I resist, struggle to reach the driver of the car, but in the end, the nose of Trudi’s gun wins the argument.
My companions lead me toward a formerly white building. Trees press in on the foundation, but someone has made an attempt to maintain it. Together, we step into a vast and largely empty room which once served as the director’s residence for the summer camp. Inside, there is a faint human smell, like sickness and salt. A few rusted canisters of film still sit on shelves, from the time it served as a warehouse for contraband skin flicks. Now, it is a miserly sanctuary. Lew transfers his weight to a chair back, leaning painfully, his exposed veins beneath his wrinkled shorts throbbing. There are new discolorations on his face, a patch of blue by one ear. Trudi takes the weapon back from him and moves toward a pre-War ceramic stove. Her hair is longer, and almost entirely gray. They’ve been arguing—the crackle of the conflict is still in the air—and now Lew looks at her. I know that look, because he’s given it to me in tricky circumstances. The look asks, how are we going to play this?
Trudi sets down the gun on the stovetop, and lights the burner under a sauce pan, pours in water from a plastic jug.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Lew says to Trudi. “Didn’t I say?”
“Huh,” says Trudi. Then, she is placing three mugs on the table and shaking into them instant coffee powder. They feel just like family, but I know they are something else. There is a tiny, tender force inside me which reminds me I must keep sharp.
“You don’t look good,” says Lew. “Are you back on that stuff?”
The Cohens have been traveling. There is a battered set of Louis Vuitton luggage which appears stuffed mainly with paperwork and evening dresses. Through my scratched lenses and bent frames, I make out the source of the smell. It’s a kind of nest—bedding, an unrolled sleeping bag, a mildewed pillow that has been picked at by animals. A glimpse of orange which might be an empty pill bottle, a rusted Coke can. I have been in this place before.
“How much time do we have?” Trudi asks.
“Enough,” says Lew. “She might be injured. Let her drink a coffee, for Pete’s sake.”
There’s a laptop on the table, and they sit me down before it and slide the chip reader in. “Just look, kiddo. Let me show you how good you are, when you want to be.”
He opens the laptop and inserts my chip reader. I do, I see its beauty. And my fingers want to respond. They want to do the work.
“You’re great at this stuff,” he says. “No one else can do it like you do it.”
Finally, I speak. “There’s a video.”
“Of course,” says Lew. He taps his chest. Around his neck, where he used to wear the cyanide capsule, dangles a plastic case. “It’s funny, right? Unless it’s contraband, they can only keep seized property in evidence hold until the end of the trial. Turns out, there’s nothing illegal about making a dirty picture. That’s maybe part of the problem now. Back in the 1970s, when I started bringing in foreign films, the money leapt into your hand.”
My head throbs. The screen, too, is throbbing.
“Code, that’s the hot item now. That’s what everyone is after,” says Lew.
Trudi pours the hot water over our coffee grounds. “Drink up. You have to get to work.”
I used to take sugar, when I ate cloud. My mouth tissue was so damaged, I couldn’t tell the difference between coffee and water unless I sweetened it excessively. When I got clean, I realized it was terrible, not just the sweetness but the kinds of coffee I’d been willing to drink, burnt convenience store sludge from a filthy percolator. Lew and Trudi, we were the same for each other, the sweet that hid the bitter.
Lew sips, then winces at the taste. “Instant,” says Lew. “Everyone wants instant.”
“This is the same problem with the porn business.” Trudi pours water from a jug into the empty pot and replaces it on the lit burner. “Amateurs, free content, piracy. Quality programming cannot compete with the ceaseless supply.”
Lew shakes his head. “When I got started in this business, there was so little product that anything would sell. Slutty Svetlana! The ladies of Leningrad! I was importing these Russian blackmarket jobs, iron curtain girls in blue eyeshadow. You could get rich off subtitle porn. This was a business I thought was recession-proof. People have been looking at tits and ass since the dawn of the cave man.”
“Turns out, there’s no such thing as permanent profitability,” says Trudi.
“You adapt,” says Lew. “We did a spell helping people come to America. They call it trafficking now, but what we did was good work. This was right after I got back from Indochina. We started with boat people, then we branched into the Soviet Union. That was another line I thought wasn’t going to dry up. Then, end of the decade, so many visas get issued, you can’t make money from people. So we got into the chemicals. Great business until people figure how to cook their own. Now the same thing is happening with domestic porn.”
Lew taps the screen. “This is where the money is now,” he says. “Only, I’m too old for it. This is not stuff I can make on my own.”
I’ve begun to move through the code. It isn’t mine, isn’t something I could have written, but I can see the insertions I’ve made, and I recognize them as routing numbers. It is as if the name which has been returned to me, Paul’s name, has begun tentatively to find other things in me, as if the name itself is a branching through which I am still traveling to a place more whole than before.
“You need the infrastructure,” I say, remembering. “You need the infrastructure or you need time.”
Lew nods. “You listen, Mellie. You learn. What’s happened so far is nothing.”
“Everything aboveboard,” I say.
“You pirate a video ever?” Lew asks. “Half of those fakes dump some shit into your hard drive. Do the feds show up? Are police knocking down your door? No. It rises to the level of nuisance. Nuisance is how I want it to be until I am wheels up, general aviation, from a lesser airfield in the Catskills.”
“And then?” I ask.
“And then we’re in stage four.”
I think of the code from the headless woman video that has already hooked the data from three quarters of a million hard drives. There is an interval to prepare, to get yourself on a plane to an island somewhere. Here is the code that will collect it, siphon it, deliver it to Lew.
“The account, the one for the routing number you entered, it’s still sitting there,” he says. “We have taken care of you, kiddo. We will keep looking out for you. Everything nice and easy. Like it should have been two years ago.”
There’s a pause, in which I’m clearly meant to be saying something, but I’m watching the elegant code on my screen. Trudi scrutinizes me. “It’s that junk. That’s what I’m telling you. She doesn’t even remember enough to be grateful.”
“It was a messy time,” says Lew. “A debt situation developed, and you, Mellie, were not incidental to all of those losses. These are the circumstances under which we became entangled with the foreign actors. They kept us afloat, and how it was fixed, also most of the profit.”
“A bad deal is still a deal,” says Trudi. “Only, one aspect of it was that Lew and I, and our people, were meant to shoulder less of the risk. Police surveillance is not less of the risk.”
“So this is the point at which the cost-benefit begins to shift. From the beginning, the profit situation was uneven, but now we’re being surveilled. If there’s a legal threat, it only seems fair that the compensation shift in our favor. There would have been a justice to it, Trudi and me on a plane with all those motherfuckers left in Los Angeles.” Now, Lew swaps out the chip reader, and inserts the other chip.
“You ready for the video?” asks Trudi. She has moved out of my field of vision, and so it is only Lew I can see now, but I hear her going for something. There’s a click. The conversation, thus
far, has had the quality of a negotiation, but I know that’s not what it’s really been.
“Wait,” I say.
Trudi clicks her tongue. “You can’t ‘wait’. You don’t get to delay anymore.”
“I can’t,” I say. “I can’t look at it.”
“Be a professional,” says Trudi. “Be a professional person.”
“You have a good life,” says Lew. “Thanks to us. You and Juni.” This is how he means my daughter’s name: as a thrust to the heart. He thinks he knows me, what I live for. He thinks he can make me behave. He thinks that what is inside me is weakness, but it’s something else.
“This could all have been handled,” says Trudi. “You’re on a plane to Boston. We had our tickets. When the code wakes, it’s an instant, then it’s wheels up, in the air, gone. That was the plan.”
“Even after it went south,” says Lew. “We looked out.”
“You remember how we left things?” asks Trudi from behind me. “The movie is worthless. Cops, crawling all over the studio. It’s unsalvageable. But we got you out anyway.”
“I waited for you,” I say. “You never came.”
“You know why,” says Trudi. “Lew did time. Two years. At any point, he could have given you up. You were the one who had what they wanted.”
“But then you would have been involved,” says Lew. “The state you were in. We insulated you. We tried to insulate you.”
Details, I think. I am good at details. On the stove, the second pot of water has begun to boil, Trudi moving just out of view. “There’s also the money,” I say.
“Well, of course there’s the money. Private sex. A monumentally famous woman. Two years ago, this was the holy grail. But a couple of circuits around the sun, and even this is now boring. People make money electrocuting themselves; you can watch a live beheading if you know the right channel, and my actresses, the women that used to work for me, you know what they do for cash these days? Sit in front of a camera and take direction from some basement amateur. But you know what the view count is for our picture in sixty days’ time? You want me to speculate why? I think Weston saw it coming. Misery is the only turn-on left, the only thing that gets through. The best porn is the ruin of a life. Anyway, I’m not interested in analysis. I’m interested in hits. We’ve got this chance to make it right. And it’s your money, too. Yours and Juni’s. You could use it, right?”
“And then what?” I ask. “Do I vanish too?”
“Whatever you want, Mellie.”
“We’re almost out of time,” says Trudi. She shifts again, so I cannot quite see her, but I catch the blackness of her gun’s nose as I swivel in my chair.
“How I want this to go,” Lew says. “Is that you do this for us, and then we’ve got you. But Trudi and I disagree. Even if you pull it off, in her opinion, there are still outstanding accounts. What she’s not clear on is, why didn’t you warn us? I say, the outcome’s the same, maybe better. But, she points out that time in a prison cell has not been excellent for my health. She points out, if it weren’t for the unfortunate occurrence on the set, this would all have been done. Not to be intimate. But of all people, you would have known. Wouldn’t you?”
Now, the video opens. The counter at the bottom reads thirty-seven minutes. The still shot reveals a bed, two bodies which have just pulled apart. In the frame, the man’s hand blocks his nakedness, but you can see his face. I see his face. It is the face of the man in the car, of the boy in the woods, of the person I loved so badly for so many years, that this was how it had to end. It is Paul’s face.
The things that return are terrible, a naked man moving across the hangar, a smear of organic matter on the pavement, but I steady myself and then I stand. “He was the one I should have warned,” I say. My hand goes to the chip reader.
“You want to blame us?”
“You hurt him,” I say.
“I was angry, sure,” says Lew. “My people were very, understandably, angry. But you think we what?”
“You did something to him. You hurt him.”
“What we did was we arranged things. For his continued safety, Mellie. There were people he had over the border, I understand. That’s where we left him. It was exactly what he wanted.”
“I can see why you’d tell yourself that,” says Trudi. “The state we found you in. Filthy, Mellie. I mean, infections, not to mention that stuff you were putting inside you. Inside Juni. What kind of man would leave a girl that way? You’d rather think he was dead, wouldn’t you?”
“You want to go outside, tend to him? Cry over his body? You feel loyal to him now, after everything he’s done? Even if he didn’t love you—”
“Love,” says Trudi. “It’s not sacred. You can leave a person you love.”
“Even if he didn’t still have feelings, shouldn’t he have helped you, for the sake of the baby?”
“It’s on him, too. What you put inside yourself. Maybe not equally, but the dad counts, too.”
“Mellie, it’s this simple. He left you, and we were the ones who showed up. It’s not even about debt, about owing. It’s about who has been there.”
Lew is right. He has been there. He’s a pornographer, a psycho who made his money off young people and trafficked in misery and has done harm upon harm. People have disappeared from his set. What he’s offering, forgiveness, security, may be real, but I have taken such bargains all my life, and it has made me small.
I pull the chip from the drive, and I turn. It is their surprise that gives me the moment I need to reach the lit burner and drop the tiny object into the flames. Too late, Trudi fires her weapon.
Seven
Los Angeles, California and
Baja California, Mexico
2008
When I return from the studio to Carson City, enter my apartment, an alien presence is everywhere, Paul completely absent. The roaches skittering across the counter are not my roaches. The dampness on my pillowcase is not my pillowcase. A cat, smoky gray, suns on the sofa. I do not own a cat. Paul and I detest cats. I am afraid of the cat, of what it might mean. Sometimes, when I come off a cloud high, there is a sensation like this, like a stranger’s life has been swapped with yours. But then, logically, it is also possible that one day you might get lucky. All the bad decisions unmade, the life you might have had. From the back of the freezer, from behind the frozen peas, I extract a box of cloud and shovel a couple of tabs in my mouth.
—pop—
The cat meows.
At the gym, they’re not sure. Maybe Paolo? Could that be who I mean? None of his guys he dealt to will speak to me. When I call Brookline, a contractor answers. The owner is selling, is what he heard, not that it’s any of his business. From my phone, I send an email to Ensenada Sur. On the way home, I stop by my guy in Koreatown and score a one-off of cloud. Is there someone I normally come here with, I ask him? Please. Can you tell me? Something about the way I ask must scare my dealer, because he is backing away, closing the door. Sure, he says. Of course. Big guy, muscles, like something out of a beach movie. I come here with him all the time.
—pop—
The cat is crying as I open the door to the apartment.
Online, I search for old videos of Paul’s, the hate sites from his dirty anime—I listen to the audio and it’s not his voice. I find dozens of Paul Greenes, his PhD namesakes, a chef and a Canadian soccer star, but none of them is my Paul. It is as if, piece by piece, all evidence of him is being extracted from my life. I eat another tab.
—pop—
The cat kneads at my pant leg.
I let her out, and I follow after. It’s night—nine, maybe. I wander into the Best Buy at the end of my street looking for a soda pop cooler. Televisions surround me and a perky nineteen-year-old commentator discusses what’s going viral, what’s trending, what’s so last week. Then the show cuts to a clip. I recognize the kitten Rothko. I recognize Valerie Weston, her dark bangs and massacre eyes. She’s about to go down on an actor. I squ
int at him. I watch carefully. He’s on every screen in the store, magnified and multiplied, and it’s not Paul. It’s Westie and some man I’ve never seen before in my life. Some weird Paul replica and Valerie Weston about to go at it like porn stars. Spicy! says the commentator. Next up, this superstar teen went on a Malibu joyride, and we’ve got it all on tape! I puke on a gaming console, and then pop a square of cloud to wash out the taste.
—pop—
The cat slips between my legs as I open the door. In the apartment, male evidence is everywhere, but even the clothes are brand new and scented with the mineral odor of incendario. I rove the rooms looking for proof. Underneath the sofa, I find three pages of an old audition script. CRAIG: Male. 28. All-American type. Newly arrived in the city, his whole life before him. ACT I Scene A. I pop the lid on the Koreatown cloud, but it’s already empty, the freezer, too. Then I’m in the bedroom with the fucking cat, opening the lid on the secret hiding place, pushing aside the cracked boxes. I pick up the long-overdue library book. Ten-year-old receipts stick in the spine. In the margins, I have scrawled incomprehensible messages to myself. Bed frame, Tomato sauce from scratch, softball girl? Why this book? I can no longer recall. When did I begin? So much has dissolved like lemon in my mouth.
Even the library book where I have tried to keep a record: every time I open it, something falls out. Tonight, it’s the borrowing card. Squinting in the light, I make out the stamped due dates. 1 Jun 1986 20 Jun 1986 14 Jul 1986. The names should appear beside, but at some point—today? Twenty years ago?—someone has blacked out the letters in angry ballpoint impasto. My hands shake. Shadows swim in from the edges. It feels so like cloud, so like the way cloud steals things from me. And yet, something of the flavor is wrong; there is something about it too crude, too deliberate. Cloud, when it takes, takes completely and suddenly—
The Likely World Page 40