by Leah Stewart
No. Imagine another body.
This one tall, too, though not as tall. Slender, with a long neck and shoulders slightly rounded in, head cocked very slightly away from the person who’s talking. It’s Josie he’s describing. But me she looks right at, he thinks. He’s never articulated this before, but it’s true. Josie goes through the world at a defensive angle—not when she’s acting, of course, but the rest of the time. With him, she’s different. She turns her whole self toward him. She radiates.
And how would his body look running toward her? How would he look if he could catch her in his arms?
“I love you,” Josie says. He can see himself holding her. He can feel the weight of her. He can feel her heat.
We become what we imagine, said Aristotle. Please let that be true. A kind of madness, he said.
He’s going to get the knife. He’s going to get it now before he changes his mind. He gets to his feet. He bangs on the door. “Adan!”
Three.
Awake in the middle of the night, Charlie feels the weight of the knife in his pocket. While there was still light enough to see, he worked the knife against the chain, producing tiny flakes of silver, so small it seems to him a million of them will have to fall before he’s free. His heart caromed while he sawed, afraid that every sound he heard, and some he imagined, was someone coming to catch him. Every few minutes he scattered the flakes into the corners, burying them under gathered dust and dirt. Even now, in the quiet dark, he’s afraid of the door bursting open, of Denise frisking him, of her pleasure when she finds the knife. He needs a memory. He must resist using up the first time Josie told him she loved him. He needs to ration that one, keep it for emergencies. He needs something else, another time he was happy.
I love you, he thinks, and remembers the first time he heard it from a stranger. It was toward the end of the first season of Chef Alan. He still lived in West Hollywood. He was in a convenience store as only the West Coast could conceive it—one that sold organic vegan sandwiches and coffee made with four-stage-reverse-osmosis-filtered water. The place sells a breakfast sandwich he still craves sometimes—probably not healthy at all, but vegan, so he can tell himself it is. On that occasion, he was waiting for his order when he sensed someone’s gaze. He turned to look—he hadn’t yet learned to resist that urge, still has trouble resisting it, such a primal impulse, to look at the person who’s looking at you—and there was a woman gaping at him. She looked young, late teens or very early twenties. She wore glasses. On her face was such open awestruck admiration that he thought she had to be from out of town. “I love you,” she blurted.
“Oh.” He felt a rush of embarrassed pleasure and reddened in response. “Thank you.”
It’s a funny thing, how people will say I love you to a stranger more readily than to a person they actually know. What kind of love is it that can be offered up so freely? Who is it they love? Their love exists at the intersection of real and not real, like the performance that made them feel it.
“I really do love you,” she said. Her name was Katelyn and she was from Sacramento, visiting LA for the weekend with her parents. She had the very particular kind of fangirl crush on Charlie that comes from being the only one of her acquaintance insisting on his awesomeness. Most of her friends said Who? at first and now rolled their eyes when she mentioned his name. Most of them didn’t even watch his show. It was only on the internet that she could find like-minded worshippers bonding over their sense that, between his relative obscurity and their special ability to recognize his greatness, he belonged to them. And what a miracle that here he was in front of her! In this place she’d ducked into to grab a quick bite while her father refilled the medication he’d forgotten at the pharmacy next door! It was truly a fucking miracle! “I really love you,” she said again. It was vital to her that he believe it.
Charlie ducked his head, abashed, and murmured another thank-you. In the twenty or thirty seconds of silence that followed, during which she went on adoring him with her eyes, he realized that they might stand here together in this small enclosed space for the next ten minutes, or even longer as those artisanal vegan breakfast sandwiches take a long time to produce. Now what? Where do you go next in an interaction that starts with a declaration of love? She was his fan. He knew what it was to be a fan. Now here was his glimpse of what it is to have fans. It is to be apart. To be told you’re somewhat more than human and simultaneously desire and dread to disprove it. How can you love me when you don’t even know me? And yet I can see in your face that you do.
She had a cell phone in her hand, he noticed, and yet she wasn’t asking to take a picture with him. She was too dumbstruck, maybe. Later, she might kick herself for not asking. If he suggested it, was that kindness or arrogance? Famous people complained about the picture taking—Alan Reed certainly complained, especially when it meant flashbulbs in a restaurant as he forked his dessert to his mouth—but Charlie had not yet been given an opportunity to complain. Surely Charlie didn’t have to preemptively disdain someone’s desire to capture his image, to fail to suggest it out of worry that it might seem presumptuous.
The next moment would become the best part of Katelyn’s story, the highlight of both her in-person anecdotes and her social media posts. “And then he asked, he actually asked, if I wanted to take a picture with him! Isn’t that so nice? He said if he’d met an actor he liked when he was my age he would’ve wanted a picture.”
The guy behind the cash register wielded the phone. You can still find the resulting photograph online if you’re willing to click through Google images for a while. Charlie with his arm around Katelyn’s shoulders, both of them grinning with a giddy, slightly unhinged happiness, behind them an array of organic power bars. Charlie found the photo himself once, in a fond nostalgic condition, wondering what had become of the girl he thought of as his first real fan. When he saw his expression in the photo, he cringed: his open pleasure in her adoration, his needy delight. He cringed at his own vulnerability and then felt a yearning protectiveness toward his younger self. So happy. So certain in that moment that what he had was enough.
He would trade every I love you he’s ever gotten from a stranger to hear it from Josie just one more time.
Four.
A day, or two, or three later, Charlie is absorbed in his steady, methodical sawing, the barely perceptible dent he’s made in one link of the chain, when he’s startled by the sound of the lock. He barely has time to conceal the knife and brush the shavings from his clothes before the door opens. Cleary he’s grown too accustomed to the risk he’s taking, stopped listening so hard. He’s sitting on the floor by the window, and trying to hide his panic, his careening heartbeat, he pretends to be staring out through the crack in the boards. He doesn’t turn as the door opens. He knows what he’ll see. Sometimes it’s worse to see the open door, the passageway behind it. But he doesn’t hear Adan’s usual, “Hello, Ben!” so after a moment, he turns, and the other woman is hesitating in the doorway, still, as always, in her uniform. His dullness vanishes. He feels a prickly alertness, a numbed limb awakening. “Where’s Adan?”
She shakes her head. Maybe she doesn’t speak English. She’s holding a tray. It takes him a moment to understand that on the tray is his lunch because Adan just brings a plate or a bowl and hands it to him, then pulls a fork or a spoon from his pocket and hands him that, too. She takes a step toward him. He puts his hand on the windowsill and hauls himself to his feet, and she stops a few feet away. She has the watchful frozen quality of a frightened animal. Is she afraid of him? The idea is startling. He supposes it makes sense. She’s a small woman, short and slight. He’s a tall, broad-shouldered man, chained like something dangerous. He holds both arms out toward her, moving slowly, a gesture meant to show he won’t hurt her, an offer to take the tray. She steps just close enough for him to grasp it. On the tray, a deep white bowl filled with rice and topped with a large piece of fish, five lyche
es stacked in a small green saucer, a napkin folded in a neat triangle to display a fork, a tall plastic tumbler of water with a single floating ice cube. And—most remarkable of all—a piece of chocolate-covered chocolate cake sealed in a bright red wrapper covered with bright yellow words. “Thank you,” he says, and is struck by the sincerity in his own voice.
Her eyes flick to his. She nods. She has greenish eyes, slightly asymmetrical; a dramatic nose; a small mouth that grows smaller when she’s thinking—or perhaps withdrawing is the better word. Slight as she is, she seems somehow to shrink still further when you look at her too long. Her hair is a contradiction: piled high on the back of her head, an explosion of dark brown curls.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Mystery,” she says.
“What am I supposed to call you then?”
She frowns. “Mystery.”
“You want me to call you Mystery.”
“Yes,” she says. “Because it is my name.”
“It’s your actual name? The name your parents gave you?”
“Why not?”
“Because . . .” he says, but then he just shrugs, too demoralized for explanations. He’s named Outlaw, after all, so why not Mystery? The name seems more appropriate for her than Outlaw does for him. It would be handy if people’s names actually told you who they were, as in a Dickens novel. He’d like that confirmation that his impressions of these people, on whom he’s helplessly dependent for survival, are correct. Denise he’d call Murderous.
The woman’s body language indicates she’s about to leave. “Wait,” he says, and she pauses. He wants time to study her. Look at that lunch she brought. No one else would feed him like that. He feels a faint ember of hope at the thought that maybe he’s right about her—she’s the reluctant one, the one who might be won over. “It’s a pretty name.” He lifts the tray a little. “Thank you so much for this.”
She nods again. “Do you need anything else?”
His mouth drops open. “I . . .” He needs so many things that he’s lost track of what they are. “Something to read? Could you bring me something to read?”
She considers. “In English?”
“Yes.”
“Magazines,” she says decisively.
“You could bring me magazines?”
“Yes.”
“That would be wonderful. You have no idea . . . I’ve been losing my mind without anything to do.”
She frowns. Should he not have said that? But, no, it’s a frown of sympathy. He thinks. She backs out of the room, locks the door behind her.
In the kitchen, Darius hears the sound of the door shutting. He’s been in a fog of confusion and misery all day. He watched without comment as Mystery arranged the tray with care, assuming she was acting out of the habit of service. He knows Denise would have reacted with scorn, snatched the bowl from the tray, taken the cake for herself, or tossed it to one of the boys as if she were giving a treat to a dog.
Mystery works as a housekeeper at the hotel resort. This is where he met her when he came to do some landscaping, and they struck up an odd, silence-filled friendship. He is a landscaper, not a gardener, no matter what other people think. More than keeping plants alive and well trimmed, he’s known for his ability to arrange a flower bed for maximum aesthetic pleasure. This is why the resort hired him, asked him to redo the beds out front, though they paid him only gardener’s wages. Darius’s original idea was to make trouble at the hotel—small persistent trouble that would drive away vacationers, a dead rat on the front walk, a leaky pipe, a dog turd floating in the pool. Darius recruited Mystery first out of a notion that he wanted an inside woman. But then his thoughts turned from sabotage to kidnapping, and he’s not yet been quite sure what to do with her. Mystery doesn’t seem especially devoted to either the cause or the actions he’s taken in support of it. Nor does she seem to object to cause or actions. Her reasons for participating are obscure to him; perhaps she has nothing better to do.
They are alone in the house today because Darius sent Denise and the boys to deliver a letter to the police describing the hostages—the ones at the other house and Ben Phillips, his prize American—and making his demands. He has no idea if this is the right thing to do. All he knows is that he has to do something. When he planned this, the hostages were theoretical. But now that they are real, he’s reminded at every moment how manifold are the difficulties of caring for them. The food that must be cooked, the rashes and sniffles that must be tended, the trouble and expense. And sometimes he feels a painful rush of sympathy for them, a sympathy that makes him angry because it makes him weak, and every time he feels weak, he looks up to find Denise watching. He doesn’t know if he wants to set them all free—kidnapped and kidnappers—or murder them all. He doesn’t know how much longer he can bear to be around Denise.
Back in his room, Charlie eats every bite of his lunch. His pleasure is so overwhelming that he forgets to make sure he’s hidden the silver flakes of the chain. He’s focused instead on the cake. He could save the cake for later, giving himself something to look forward to, but where would he put it? Inside his pocket it would get squashed. The only place in this room to keep something is on the shelf, and if he puts it there, he risks someone spotting the bright red wrapper. Adan might let him keep it, but Thomas and Denise certainly would not. Normally he avoids processed foods. In his old life, he wouldn’t have eaten the cake, not when he still had the luxury of choosing what was healthy, choosing what was worth the calories. The cake has the slightly chemical taste of packaged desserts, but he doesn’t care. He’s willing to believe it’s delicious. It’s sweet and it leaves chocolaty bits smushed against his teeth that he works off with his tongue. It reminds him of pleasure. When he’s done, he arranges the dirty dishes and the trash as neatly as he can on the tray, the lychee skins inside the bowl, the napkin on top in a neat little ball. The wrapper, licked clean, he slips into his pocket to save, for the bright red color and the memory of kindness.
Then he puts the tray in the center of the room and positions himself back by the window, cross-legged on the floor. He wants her to have to come inside the room for the tray because he hopes to get her to talk to him some more. He wants to be sure he doesn’t look threatening. If pressed, he’d have to admit he doesn’t have a plan exactly, but nevertheless he has the feeling of having a plan—he has an intention. He wants her to be on his side. What he will do if he succeeds in winning her over, he doesn’t know. Her sympathy will be like the knife: something he can use if he can figure out how. Having things he doesn’t know what to do with is better than having nothing.
When she comes back, he’s ready. “You are so kind” is the first thing he says. “That’s the best meal I’ve had since I came here.” She ducks her head, blushes a little, an invigorating, exhilarating sight. He presses on. “You don’t know how much I’ll appreciate those magazines.”
“I can get many magazines,” she says.
“Really? Which ones?”
“People, Us Weekly, Hello!”
Just last month Charlie was in Us Weekly, filling his car with gas, one hand lifted in a wave. He saw the photographer and waved. This was the kind of thing that drove Josie crazy. “But if I acknowledge they’re there, I have more control,” he insisted. No, she said. No, you don’t. “US Weekly,” he repeats. “Do you read it?”
She shrugs. “I read English only some.”
“You don’t look at the photos?”
She shrugs again. “I clean them up.”
“You clean them up? You work at a hotel? That’s why you wear the uniform?”
“Housekeeper,” she says. “At the big hotel.”
He nods. “Is it a good job?”
She cocks her head. “Yes. But they do not think so.” She jerks her head back toward the hall. “They hate the hotel.”
“Oh. Are they ac
tivists?”
“I don’t know that word.”
“Are they . . . political? No one has told me why I’m here.” He lets sorrow creep into his voice. “It’s hard not having any idea why things are happening to you.”
“That is how we all live,” she says.
Is that reproof in her voice? He redirects. “Is one of them your boyfriend?”
She shakes her head.
“Your brother? Your cousin?”
No and no.
“Do you believe in . . . what they believe in?”
“Sometimes yes,” she says. “Sometimes no.”
“Why do you work with them then?”
She purses her lips. “I choose to.”
Disheartened, Charlie sags back against the wall and asks nothing else. She waits a beat, then steps forward to get the tray. At that moment, Charlie’s eye falls on the dusting of silver shavings on the floor, and he looks up quickly to see that she sees them, too. He watches her eyes flick up to his own face, her expression wary. He holds himself very still. He thinks, I wonder where those came from, and he believes that he doesn’t know and hopes that this lack of knowledge is on his face. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. She proceeds to the door without a word but pauses there, looking back.
“I will bring you magazines,” she says.
When the lock clicks, Charlie moves to the door as quietly as he can and presses his ear to it. He hears no raised voices, no rapid feet. What does this mean? That she didn’t notice after all? That she didn’t draw any conclusions? Or that she really is some kind of double agent and she wants him to escape? He waits for something terrible to happen. A desperate longing grows inside him for a clock. Has he waited five minutes or ten? Ten or fifteen? Has he waited all night? Have six months gone by? Too demoralized even to stand, he crawls over to the shavings and scatters them into the corners of the room to mingle with dust and mouse droppings. He’ll have to put the knife back in the toilet tank. He can’t risk having it now. But he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself by asking for the bathroom just yet, so he’ll wait; he’ll wait as long as he can bear it, and then he’ll knock on the door and request his escort, and in the bathroom he’ll drop the knife back into the tank and watch it sink to the bottom.