Numb

by Sean Ferrell

  Bernie came back around the curtain a little more awake, a little less bleary. He stood before me, hands in pockets, sniffing, licking his lips. I remembered then that Karen had called him a drug dealer and wondered if it had been exaggeration or accurate. I saw nothing in the room that looked illegal. In fact, other than the lamps all I saw was a curtain, part of a mattress on the floor behind it, and a box spilling pornographic magazines.

  Bernie waited for me to explain my visit, and the fact that I didn’t know what I wanted or expected from him stood between us. I pointed at the lamps nearest to us, hoping to find my way by starting with small talk.

  “Could we turn off a few of these lights?”

  “No.”

  “Uh…”

  “Because fuck my landlord, that’s why.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Your friend was an okay guy, but we were roommates, not buds. He and I didn’t really get along, okay? Fact is, he ruined my car. So if there’s something you need other than his things, you can ask or not, I don’t care, but do it now ’cause I’m too tired to fuck around.”

  “His things?”

  Bernie pointed at the box of porn. “Might be a few more things at the bottom of the closet, but I can’t tell anymore. He was only here a short time and that was months ago.”

  “Right. Can I?” Already heading for the box, standing it up, riffling.

  “Help yourself.” Bernie sat on his mattress and munched saltines from an open box. He watched me with the same interest one watches rain, to see what it touches and whether the wetness amounts to anything.

  Beneath a thin layer of skin magazines I found a stack of books and article clippings. The books tended toward literature and self-help. Dickens and Powers. The Stranger and Wishcraft. Beneath these were clippings from newspapers and printouts from a computer I didn’t see in the box. I looked toward Bernie, still watching from his bed, fresh crumbs salting the hair of his beard, and wondered if he might have sold some computer Mal had owned. The clips and articles all dealt with freakish stories, bizarre accidents, or ill-advised stunts. The oldest of them, from only a few days after my final Redbach show, placing Mal already in LA much earlier than I could have imagined, was of a woman who, through no fault of her own, wound up with her hand stuck inside a vending machine. At work late, she’d struggled with an insubordinate soda dispenser and lost. It had been a Friday, after hours, so she was forced to wait through the weekend and most of Monday morning until a coworker finally came to get a diet soda and found her, unconscious, on her knees, pressed against the side of the machine, in a pool of her own fluids. Stories and printouts from the same period revolved around similar random accidents and poor plans. Circus-performer accidents were popular with him. As I flipped through the pages I saw the focus narrow over time to self-inflicted acts, public stunts that drew wild attention. Magicians who dared to put on uneventful performances in public—standing in ice, lying in water, suspending themselves above the ground for days. Climbers who scaled office buildings, sculptures, bridges, only to be arrested. Actors and musicians who insisted on public acts of personal distaste. Again the articles refocused and became about certain of these performers, and then re-refocused, toward one in particular. Me.

  The first references to me were online pieces about “freakish” acts that had taken place in a circus somewhere, or a bar, or on a street. The printed images were grainy, poor copies of video frames. It was a homemade version of the research that had trailed out of Michael’s office, pages fluttering and worn, yellowed with age and poor care in Bernie’s closet. Mal, it was obvious, had been on the same trail as Michael’s investigators, even having references to some events that they hadn’t found, such as the cook who, at the height of the dinner rush, neglected to notice that he had severed and served a finger in a Caesar salad, or the construction worker who had been riveted without much complaint to a high-rise in Dallas. The pages lacked any of the notes or insane speculation of Michael’s, but they centered on the same subject. I saw myself in each one. And when I found a DVD with no label near the bottom of the pile of papers I wondered if I was in this too, in exactly the same way. Was I on the disk by not being visible, by being not the one on screen but hunted for nonetheless?

  I held the disk up and waved it at Bernie. The light from dozens of bulbs cast circular reflections on the walls around us, as if we were trapped inside a diamond. Bernie blinked out of his meditation on me and raised an eyebrow, something of an effort given the totality of hair across his face.

  “Do you have a way to play a DVD?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  A slow minute later he finally stood, knocking half-crackers from his beard as he did so, then fumbled through a closet, its door hidden behind a hanging blanket. When he returned with an old laptop we exchanged a silent accusation and denial that it had once been Mal’s, and I turned it on and loaded the disk. It played without prompting, having dreamt of the moment for so long at the box’s bottom.

  There was a burst of humming and some scratchy feedback. I played with the volume and the bass and treble. The hum never stopped. Occasionally a pop or crackle rose up. Nothing else. I stopped the playback and started it again. It played the same crackle and hiss as before.

  The camera technique was nonexistent, wavy and shaky and panning fast enough to make you think of a tennis match. Aside from the setting—the bottles on the cart, the medical apparatus, the stethoscopes and white masks, it looked like any hospital—the film had all the unmistakable signs of a home movie, either a reel-film camera or a very early video with no sound, or one in which the sound had been lost or damaged somehow.

  It began with a long shot of a man’s back. When he turned toward the camera, he was all mustache. He said something to the camera and then stepped aside and behind him rested a baby on a table. Instinctively I wondered if the baby was me.

  The baby sat awkwardly and drooled on itself and made fists that it shook in the air and then stuffed, whole, into its mouth. It wore a little blue jumper with a teddy bear on the front. Clouds were painted on the wall behind the baby.

  The camera spun, blurring the room, to a doorway. In it stood a man with the unmistakable air of a doctor. White coat, hand in pocket, stethoscope, heavy sideburns and thick, wavy hair. The mustached man approached the doctor and said something that could have been “How do you do?” or “How are you?” The doctor rubbed the side of his face, blocking his mouth, but whatever he said made the mustached man laugh.

  The doctor and the mustached man both moved toward the camera, their smiles nervous, and the mustached man reached out to it. There was a white flash as the image cut to a woman standing next to the baby on the table. The doctor stood next to her. Apparently the mustached man now held the camera. The woman, with long, straight brown hair, fidgeted nervously with her blouse as the doctor examined the baby. The baby kicked and put the stethoscope in its mouth, looked at the ceiling, the woman, the doctor, sometimes at nothing. The doctor weighed the baby, measured the baby, held the baby as a nurse came into the picture and took the child.

  Another cut and the image was closer and the doctor held a syringe with a needle and the nurse held the baby. In the background, over the doctor’s shoulder, stood the woman, holding her face in her hands. The doctor explained something to her, either ready to give a shot or take blood. The woman looked nervous.

  The doctor had the needle, and the baby was in the nurse’s arms, and she talked to the baby and the baby looked at the nurse and was excited and kicked as the doctor stepped forward, still looking at the woman, and the needle stuck straight through the baby’s fat leg.

  The doctor let go, and the syringe hung from the baby, pierced straight through, the shiny point visible through one side, the syringe on the other. The woman screamed and the doctor quickly grabbed the baby’s arm and the camera fell down. After another cut the image was of the baby, held by the nurse, and it was unclear who was behind the camera, but the doctor pulled
the syringe from the leg, plump and pink, and the baby had a fist in its mouth and didn’t react with pain or even interest, and looked at the camera and drooled as the fist left its mouth.

  The film jumped then to another room and another doctor. This time the camera seemed to be on a stand—the shot was very level and the image sharper. The baby sat on an examining table and two men in white coats stood nearby. The baby was naked and fat and happy. It held a teething ring in one hand and shook it happily.

  The camera moved to the left, toward a tray filled with pins and syringes. One of the men poured alcohol over the utensils, put on rubber gloves, and began to pull pins from the tray. The other man took hold of the baby’s arm and held it steady.

  I turned off the DVD.

  I watched my hands as they floated over the computer keyboard. The scars glowed in its blue light, even some that had faded, some I’d forgotten. An image, stuck on the doctor’s hands holding the baby’s arm still, floated in my eyes after I shut down the video player. I became aware of breathing behind me and looked over my shoulder into Bernie’s twisted mane.

  He blew a silent whistle. “It would suck to be that baby.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wonder what Mal was doing with that.”

  I thought I knew. Mal had protected me once again. He could have sold that video, or sent it to Michael or me or any of the news agencies, when I made my rounds on the talk shows. Instead, he’d sat on it, hidden it away in a box under useless research and pornography. He’d left it behind when he returned to New York. It was past; it hadn’t mattered, to him at least. And when I realized that, it began to matter less to me. It might be me, it might not. Mal had died with it in his head. The images wouldn’t leave me either, I knew, but he’d kept them where they belonged. What was I to do with them? Nothing could be done. Whomever that was, me or someone else, grown or gone on to other currents, it didn’t matter. I looked past Bernie and saw the knots and loops of electrical cords, the repeated patterns, unintentional, but one cord followed close, so close as to almost get it right, the path of one below it, though missing, just by a hair, the same route. This was me and Mal. He’d held on to the video, left it behind, knowing that all it might do was lead me to a place that had no resolution, that with it in my hands I could do nothing about it but watch and watch again. He’d died without sharing it, a form of protection.

  Which was absurd. I knew it. Mal had reasons for doing what he’d done, but to see him as protecting me at every step was both unfair to him and ridiculous. Mal’s research was as much about his need to see the birth of fame as it was about looking for me. He’d followed that path of self-creation to a fiery end. This film showed me no proof, nor did I have proof Mal had wanted to protect me. That didn’t matter. I could behave as if I did. I could behave however I liked. If I needed to find solace and protection in the video, if I needed to find permission to stop hauling up questions about my past, like luggage I neither owned nor cared for, then I would give those to myself. I could be as free of these questions as I wanted, and behave as if I either knew myself or didn’t. Either way, I thought, I would find out.

  Bernie had retreated to his bed and crackers. I stood and looked around the room. It suddenly felt rather cozy, and through the windows I could see the brightening sky. Dawn approached. Buildings outside glowed blue, subtly showing some inner light at the edges and even glimmering in their darkened windows, as if sleepers there released energy to the building and the building released it to the morning, somehow leaking what was normally held inside.

  I said, “Would you have a car I could borrow?”

  Bernie shook his head. “Told you. Mal ruined it. Haven’t replaced it yet.”

  “Where did he do that?”

  “Northbound I-5, I think. Near the Indiana exit.”

  I stood at the center of the room, looking from the cords to the computer to Bernie, realizing I wanted none of Mal’s things, disk included, and held a hand up to Bernie. “Thanks for your help.”

  He nodded, his mouthful of crackers ending any reply. I stepped over the cords and what I saw now were tiny bits of broken bulbs, a shimmering dust that sprinkled the floor. I crossed to the door and left. The light in the hall was nonexistent and I groped my way down the stairs and back to the arch. Chump and his muscle had gone.

  Outside, the light fell short of Bernie’s room. I watched a few cars pass as my eyes adjusted and then realized that a cab sat parked in front of the building. I stooped to ask for a ride and found the driver was the same gray-haired man who’d brought me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He held up a brown bag. “You forgot your leftovers. Thought I might find you.”

  “Those aren’t my leftovers.”

  We both looked at the bag as if it might tell us who had left it. Finally he said, “Well, shit. Just trying to do the decent thing here.”

  Most decency is inexplicable, I realized. Mal had had his. This driver had his. I aspired to that level of confusion, of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

  “Can you give me a ride?”

  “Sure. Get in.”

  The driver probably should have argued with me when I told him to slow down and then stop in the breakdown lane of I-5. He puzzled me by not only doing so but doing so with a smile. The car swayed as an eighteen-wheeler passed within a foot of us, sucking the air away from the side of the car and forcing us to lean toward it for an instant before buffeting away. When the car fully settled I said, “I’ll be right back, but you don’t have to stay if you don’t feel safe.” He shrugged and I climbed out.

  Two hundred feet behind the car, chiseled into the cement wall that ran alongside the highway, black grooves and tire marks ran up the dirty white barricade. Something had slammed into it and then burned. Glass littered the ground, red and clear plastic shards sprinkled in, as well as long strips of aluminum. I ran my hands over the wall. I knelt and looked into the gouges. I felt the tire marks. Trucks hammered me with horns and rushing air. To my left shook the cab, stoic as a tombstone. I returned to it and climbed in.

  The driver was kind enough to not look at me for too long in the mirror. “You find what you need?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He swallowed. “You want some of this leftover food? It’s Chinese.”

  “No thanks. How about finding me a pay phone?”

  He didn’t start the car. Instead, he handed me his cell phone.

  I dialed Michael.

  After he woke himself up enough to realize it was me he said, “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Seeing the city.”

  “You absolutely blew off our meeting with the studio last night. They weren’t pleased, so I lied and said you were sick. When we see them today, make sure to look sick.”

  I didn’t say anything. I watched an airplane fly overhead and thought about the airport.

  Michael said, “The project you signed on to, it’s moving forward.”

  “Is this an about me or a with me?”

  “Both.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “Well, as I said, the contract covers all aspects of your story, known or unknown. They’ve looked into it, and your story remains unknown in a big way. No investigator found a thing about you. That’s theirs and ours. So they are running with a reality formula.”

  “In other words, making things up.”

  “Yep.”

  “But it won’t be true.”

  “True? It won’t be true or false, it will be ‘inspired by,’ and you should consider yourself lucky they don’t just grab you as the starting point and run away with it. You should be glad they want you in it at all. They could do some sort of special effects to make someone else into you.”

  “I should be glad they’ve cast me in my own story, which they are making up?”

  “Exactly.”

  I wondered how to react to this. I thought about how I might make it interesting to react
as if cameras were there, on the side of the road, behind a cabbie munching on someone’s leftover Chinese. It seemed appropriate, starting my performance right away.

  I said, “What if I can’t do this?”

  Michael wanted to get off the phone. “Listen, I don’t know why you should be upset. I got you money up front, regardless of whether they found facts or made stuff up. And they don’t have to use you, but they are. You came out on top.”

  “I’m on top.” I looked out the window. A trio of trucks sped past and the car filled with a roar as the air was sucked away. When the car settled I said, “So, at least they want me for my own movie.”

  Michael’s smile came through the phone. “That’s right. And you’re not the only one. They’re taking advantage of your current publicity.” A slight pause as he realized he’d have to steamroll over the fact that my publicity had come as a result of Mal’s death. “They’re looking for people who know you to be in it. It’s like they’ve taken reality television to an extreme, casting people from your actual life to play your friends in the film.”