Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  Kerry smiles then, fumbling with her hair, about to tell him something like he doesn’t have to stay, he should leave now, but he shakes his head and touches a finger to her lips. Save it, too late for that now.

  He’s known for hours she doesn’t need that many syringes to inject anything. Nobody would.

  Garrett picks up the sack and follows her through the house, the sort of place that never runs out of boring white walls and black trim and open, slatted stairways. There are enough framed movie posters to comprise a small gallery, most if not all of them for Skip Ackerman productions. Nothing to brag about, and few of them ever seen on a big screen — direct to cable and DVD, cannon fodder for absolute boredom when you’ll watch anything, then not even remember it.

  Skip’s personal assistant for four years now, Kerry has seen only two of his movies all the way through. Couldn’t really tell you what they’re about, either, only that they were loud.

  She’s got Skip in the main room, a cluttered little cavern with plate glass and sliding doors spanning one wall overlooking the hill. Probably more impressive by night, shades of darkness sprinkled with lights like an inverted sky, but now, in waning daylight, it just looks like any ragged pit mucked up with a haze of air you wouldn’t want to breathe if there was a choice.

  Skip is facing this view from across the main room, wrists lashed to his ankles as he kneels, leaning against the back of his leather sofa with his neck tied to the railing of the stairs to the second floor. He can sag a bit, shift some of the weight off his knees and to his rump, but she’s not left him much. His eyes track Garrett when he sees this first new face all day.

  “It’s been a couple years, but you remember Garrett, don’t you?” she asks Skip. “Back home, he used to do the news on TV, but nobody out here would hire him after somebody back east leaked his medical records. You wanted to meet him until you found out that last part. Remember?”

  Skip says nothing, but then, he can’t. Garrett wishing Skip could ask him what he does instead, and he’d admit it, that the best he can do now is teach others how to read the news at some third-rate broadcast institute. Yeah, Skip would love that a lot.

  Garrett has hated him from afar these years but has learned to temper it to a dull red glow, like the rim over the ocean in the last instants of sundown. He’s always known what it takes, some days, for Kerry to keep her job. Skip pays just well enough that losing those checks really would hurt. At least it’s infrequent, Kerry says, and he comes quickly. They’ve consulted a couple of lawyers about suing for sexual harassment, never happy with the results. You want to get realistic about it, that’s for other industries, not this one.

  The best Garrett can figure it, some men simply like a brush with scars every now and then, as long as they don’t have to feel them every day.

  “I have to pee,” she says. “I’ve been holding it in awhile.”

  Garrett steps over to Skip as she leaves, reaches for the gag. She’s improvised, clever, stuffed a big lime into his mouth and forced him to bite down. Garrett tugs it free, watches Skip work his sore jaws.

  Be honest, you’re saying: She could’ve quit her job whenever she wanted, or Garrett could’ve forced the issue. So maybe Kerry hasn’t really minded all that much, and maybe he hasn’t either. A safety valve — that’s how he’ll look at it. Can’t call it adultery, not when they never married, just a mandatory cock on the side to keep them together, because what woman still wants the same man at twenty-nine as she did at seventeen? Sometimes he thinks he stole more from her than she’ll ever realize, more than she could ever forgive him for if she did.

  Call it lucky, then, that they have another head on which to heap all this blame.

  “How old do you think I am?” Garrett asks.

  Skip peers at him, owlish, blinking. Not a good-looking guy, but not bad, either; nondescript. His hair is wild and mussed, exposing a balding patch the size of a silver dollar. A dry wound is caked bloody on the side of his forehead where Kerry must’ve swatted him with something earlier.

  “I hate that game, it’s always a loaded question.” Skip sighs. “I don’t know, about like me? Close to forty?”

  “I’m pushing fifty.”

  Skip shows genuine surprise, hasn’t shaved off years in the interest of playing the game. “Is that with surgery…?”

  Garrett shakes his head.

  Now it’s grudging admiration. “Even better. I didn’t know you and Kerry were that far apart.”

  “You wouldn’t, would you. Not now. I don’t know how it came about that way, it just did.” Garrett looking at the warm lime in his hand, the curves of teethmarks in its skin. “A lot of good that does me now, though.”

  “So what do you want me to say, ‘I’m sorry I gave you both Hepatitis C, I’ll never do it again, now can’t we all just get along?’ Sure, whatever makes you happy, but you and her, you’re not the only ones suffering here, buddy.”

  And Garrett’s heard enough already, Skip’s remorse about as convincing as most of the actors he hires. Garrett jams the lime back into his mouth and waits for Kerry, and when she comes back downstairs he can tell that she’s washed her face and straightened her clothing, and when she kisses him he can taste toothpaste, and then he supposes there’s really only one thing left.

  Kerry retrieves the first of the boxes, each filled with one hundred Becton-Dickinson five-cc syringes tipped with twenty-five-gauge needles. Skip frowns at first, confused, and after she peels the spike out of its plastic wrapper, he gets nervous. By the time she angles it into a vein along his bound arm, he’s trying to squeal behind the lime.

  “Quit squirming, Skip,” she tells him. “It’s just going to hurt more, and if I break a needle off in your arm, does it look like I’m going to run out anytime soon?”

  Slowly, as if coaxing the blood, she draws back the syringe’s plunger and the plastic cylinder fills with red bright as a ruby. She withdraws the needle and recaps it and sets it aside on the glass-topped coffee table.

  Her hand dips into the box for another syringe, strips away its wrapper — “You love L.A. so much?” — and she pierces it into the wormlike vein squiggling across the back of his fluttering hand — “Then let me give you my perspective on it” — and pulls back the plunger — “not that you ever asked my perspective on anything” — and that’s five more cc’s down — “but now there’s no phone and no day-planner and goddamn you, you’re going to pay attention.”

  Another syringe. Another five cc’s drawn from the throbbing vein beside his temple.

  “See, this is how L.A. killed me, Skip—”

  Garrett, watching her slow, methodical fury, then his stomach knows first, weightless and frustrated, wanting to fly. A flash of light and a sense of unstable ground; the snap of gulls’ wings in his ears and a smell like wet limestone in his nose.

  “—a tiny little bit at a time.”

  He weaves away from the escalating panic in Skip’s eyes and falls to his knees before Skip’s plate glass window on the world, and whatever there will be for him to see. Past, future, either place he goes there’s no real time, only their intersection with a now that has outlived its usefulness.

  And just look at them up there in that sky, circling in their patient hunger like the black blades of giant scythes.

  “What do you see, baby?” she’s asking when he comes back. “What is it this time?”

  “Condors,” he tells her. “Dozens of them. They smell what’s coming.”

  The click of another syringe onto the growing pile.

  “Tell them to wait their turn. I got here first.”

  “Do you still love me?” she asked. Only this morning? Only ever. “Can you?”

  “Watch,” he said. “Just watch.”

  It’s hours past midnight when they find their way back down out of the Hills, and they’ve tried to sleep after it was finished but neither of them could, so instead they lay holding each other after this longest day either of them could rem
ember, until they felt rested enough to leave.

  South to Sunset, then Santa Monica Boulevard, then west, same as before, same as ever. Always west, always and forever.

  They leave the car behind so they can walk the last couple of miles to the beach, and while the final hour of the night is cool, the sand still retains a tiny pulse of yesterday’s heat. Thirty yards to their left it’s somebody’s bed, but ignore them and they go away.

  For a while they’re content to sit close to the wet boundary where the ocean meets its soft, foaming limit on the shore, as far west as they can go now without drowning. At Kerry’s side, the sack, now bulging and irregular, filled with hundreds of capped syringes no longer empty. Soon she drags them the last few feet, then takes them by the fistful and flings them as far out to sea as she can, where they fall glittering like garnets.

  Dawn is starting to break behind them when the needles begin to wash up again, like a surf of hospital waste. A new day rolling westward across the land. Boston’s been up for hours, but they leave it where it belongs, at their backs, looking out over an ocean meeting a sky still black as tar.

  Seawater laps at their feet with its loose cargo. Kerry gives in, reaches down to retrieve a pair of syringes.

  “Blood rots first,” she says, and he has to ask her what this has to do with anything. “That’s why the people who make bacon are in such a hurry to drain the pigs. Blood always rots first.”

  She stirs the damp, clumping sand with her toes. Holds up the pair of syringes.

  “They make vaccines out of what’s already dead,” she says.

  Kerry uncaps the needles and he accepts the one she offers, and it only takes him a moment to work up enough courage to drive it into his vein and press the plunger home — anything worth a try now, an unconventional cure, or their last chance at belonging out here, truly belonging.

  He knows it will not kill them, not today, because the last time he’ll see her, Kerry’s hair will be blonde, yes, but the roots will be growing out, auburn, nothing to have been ashamed of in the first place. Where had she ever gotten the idea it was?

  They toss the dead spikes back out to sea, and eventually the tide should be going out again, so they can scoot a little farther along, waiting for whatever comes next.

  Little Holocausts

  There must have been signs first. There always are — subtleties we’re afraid to imagine go any deeper than one day’s mood. So I don’t suppose it was until our latest funeral that I broke down and admitted that something inside Jared was truly changing, and not for the better.

  This one had been particularly rough on Jared. Neither of us had been strangers to funerals over the past few years, but this time it was for an earlier lover of Jared’s, amicably parted from after a growing realization that all he and Terry had in them was the honeymoon.

  People — lovers, especially — have a million ways of changing on you, most of them bad. Not inherently, maybe, but bad for you. Because you couldn’t or wouldn’t follow along.

  You’ll hear people say that only the dead don’t change, but obviously they’ve never thought this through, because to the dead change comes naturally, as they seek their return to earth and air and water, while we survivors who loved them manage to forget all the flaws that kept things interesting. Remake them into idealized versions that we’d never be able to tolerate if they came walking back through the door this way, so perfect we’d eventually want to kill them all over again. You … you’ve changed, we’d accuse them, feeling somehow betrayed.

  Terry had died at home — the virus, what else? — his current lover helping the nurses and hospice volunteers care for him. It’s where we gathered after the funeral, his brownstone apartment with vintage wood as solid as a bank vault and laid out shotgun-style, one long chain of rooms full of friends, acquaintances, strangers. Everybody was welcome, except for the righteous assholes who’d showed up at the cemetery to gloat in the distance, toting picket signs.

  SODOMITES REPENT, that was one of the gentler ones. Some of them got almost as ugly as the faces underneath, eyes frightened and angry, prissy mouths crinkled tight like drawstring purses.

  “And those are the ones with the nerve to claim they’re made in God’s image?” Jared had whispered hoarsely in the cemetery.

  “I’d always pictured God as better looking,” I said. “That doesn’t make much of a case for omnipotence, does it?”

  He appeared not to have heard me, staring at this wretched Greek chorus. “But what if they are? What if they really are?”

  At Terry’s apartment we threw our coats atop the pile already on the bed, Jared lingering over all the empty sleeves that seemed caught up in some pointless struggle for supremacy. I wondered if he was remembering being in this same bed three years earlier, maybe recalling a conversation or some good night’s love.

  “Déjà vu?” I said.

  Or maybe he was thinking that here was where Terry must have died. Jared pushed hair back from his eyes, saying, “It’s felt like déjà vu all afternoon. I’m just getting way too familiar with days like this.”

  “We’re here, we’re queer,” I murmured, “we’re dropping like flies.”

  “And you’re not helping any, with your laughter from the gallows,” he said, so I just held him, limp and unresponsive even when I squeezed along the back of his neck, where he liked it, and would ordinarily flex back into my hand like Voodoo, our cat. “Was it this way for you when Serge died?”

  I stiffened. “What way?”

  “Remember that picture from Vietnam? Of that Buddhist monk? He’d set himself on fire in the middle of a street and just sat there burning. Didn’t move? Well … like I wish I had the kind of control he must’ve had, not to feel the flames,” Jared said into my neck. “That way.”

  “Serge was different. You can’t compare the two.”

  And Jared knew better. Serge and I weren’t broken up, not exactly. Serge hadn’t been sick. I felt something stir down deep, like the rusty scraping open of a hatch on a ship long sunk, and hurried to slam it shut again. In its saltwatery grave.

  “Serge … Serge wasn’t the same at all.”

  “This isn’t a good day to split hairs,” Jared said. “Not if they’re both dead when they shouldn’t be.”

  We joined the others, who wandered from room to room in a kind of subdued humor, by turns warm, then mordant, everyone here instinctively craving each other’s company and heartbeats. I’d not known Terry, never even met him, and so spent awhile staring at a picture that Jared pointed out, contrasting the vibrant guy on Kodak paper with the one I’d first encountered in his coffin. Had I not had Jared’s word on it, I doubt I’d’ve made any connection.

  An hour later I went looking for Jared after I hadn’t seen him for a while, and found him alone in the middle of the kitchen, the final link on the chain of rooms.

  “You doing okay?” I said to his back.

  When he finally turned, he had a look on his face I wasn’t braced for, a look that balled up its fist and sucker-punched me right in the heart. He pointed across the room, where he must’ve been staring for too long, toward the floor along the back wall, near the door, where you’d probably set something too large to fit in the trash can until you could run it out to the dumpster. It was an unused box of Depends. The way Jared pointed it out, looked at it, the box embodied all the loss and sorrow and indignity that had ever escaped Pandora’s.

  “Diapers,” said Jared, like an accusation. Approaching tears. “That’s what it comes down to? Goddamn diapers.”

  Whenever he came to the next town, the stout man in the soot-gray top hat spent a few days getting to know it from the inside out before plying his varied trades. By strolling its streets and alleyways, by poking amongst piles of rubble with his lacquered walking stick, by sniffing over puddles of spilt blood, both psychic and sanguine, he made of each town a lover from whom he could ferret out prizes most delicious. In tipping his nose to a breeze he might sort its c
omplex mélange into component threads — here, garlic; there, despair; further along, mingled excrements of men and machines.

  Such habits served sentiment more than utility now. The world held no more surprises for him, and frontiers were illusory. Cities all smelled the same, the populace of one burning and burying, pissing and shitting, in equal measures to those of the one before and the one to come. He could expect nothing else so long as they in their millions suckled from the same monstrous tit.

  He missed the land’s Byzantine variety of the old days, or as he remembered them to be — time did possess a peculiar gilding. Three hundred years hence, he might very well look back on these present days with nothing but fond nostalgia. Great gods! he would marvel, but back then how they knew how to suffer!

  And they did. Boom times, these, everywhere he went.

  He’d trod here before, fuzzy on how many decades ago, but enough such that he scarcely recognized it now. How the city had grown; how the city continued to do so, beyond all sensibility, a body sprouting brick and iron tumors in frantic abundance, beyond the needs of healthy expansion. Arteries of thought and commerce met, only to choke one another. Idled factories sat scabbed with corrosion, dead hearts presiding over the decay of a system they’d once nourished, while tenements suppurated, spilling infections into the streets.

  As they had sown, so would they reap, and reaping time had come.

  The pack which set stealthily upon him one evening he likened to maggots squirming from the fetid cavity that had hatched them. He listened to them jeer him, his appearance, his obvious differences. It was English they spoke, but no English he’d heard the last time he’d walked these lands, a newer dialect sprung up that would set the Queen to spinning in her grave.

  That they wanted his money became quite apparent, regardless.

  “Don’t be absurd,” he told them. “I’ve very little use for the currency of the realm.”

  They glanced at one another, translating.

  “Dead man walking,” one decided. “Only he don’t know it yet.”