She got calls from all over the valley, to the fancier parts of Indio, to Palm Desert, to Palm Springs, Indian Wells, Desert Hot Springs, off in the hills. We never went to Cathedral City. We lived there and didn’t want her to work where we went grocery shopping but pretty much never got calls from there anyway. We went to La Quinta, by the golf resorts, PGA West, called to the hotels but rarely went with no way to photograph the men, and too many cameras that didn’t belong to us that could photograph her, photograph me. Gated communities with their waterfalls and lighted xeriscapes, their tumbling plants and shooting fountains. She never gave her real name. The name she gave them would be sent to the guard house or she would be given a gate code and we would roll right in, without question. Sure, they had cameras, but so what? No one was complaining. They knew complaints would mean photos getting sent around.
I kept them all on a computer we had, every photo dropped in a folder with an address for a name. We never really knew names, not real names. No one knows anyone else if that’s the agreement, even now, even these days. Every day starts to feel that way, that you never really know anyone, even someone you live with.
It’s a cash business in a world of plastic people.
But we never went to Bermuda Dunes.
There’s something wrong with that place. It’s not a real town, it’s not a real anything. It’s an unincorporated island in the middle of the valley without any roads that go through. They pretend they are a town but it’s more like a fiefdom with its own security force instead of police. Some rich guy wanted to build the golf course of his dreams and named it after his favorite island getaway and the sand all around. Which, fine, whatever, there’s plenty of delusional assholes.
But he kept it completely private, completely isolated while surrounded by the other towns. Different electric company, different water company. They don’t even share sewage with the valley, every pipe leading straight down to septic tanks, seeping down through rock until they hit sand and then more sand, all of that water gurgling out while the shit builds. Centuries of drought and they throw their water away while everyone else struggles to clean it, filter it, pipe it back out, and Bermuda Dunes pisses it all away. But the golf course is green and the lawns are thick and the fountains at the gates gush twenty-four hours a day. The lords and ladies sit in their pools and suck on ice cubes while they flush all of their shit straight down and sit on it, float above it. When there is too much of it, some poor bastard with the worst job in the world sucks it all out, hauls it away.
The septic thing is terrible, sure, but is it really that different from the other communities? Yes. There are levels to the HOA there and the higher up you are, the more freedom you have. There are neighborhoods inside the neighborhood, low-income apartments and low-slung mansions, gates inside of gates. For some houses you need three separate codes and cards to get through. And all of it with private security that doesn’t give a shit about police because there aren’t any. The county sheriffs have jurisdiction in theory, but I’ve never seen one in there. Bermuda Dunes may as well be a private island, a banana republic, off the fucking map. And there’s only one way in and out for nonresidents. The traffic backs up for blocks with work trucks, nannies, deliveries, visitors, on and on. I didn’t ever want to go in there.
We had a year and a half of this built up. Then she gives me the address for the last stop of the day. I don’t know it, new client, and I don’t even know the street, so she tells me it’s in Bermuda Dunes.
“Fuck. Fuck that place. You should cancel.”
“The hell I should,” Mo said. “I looked up the street. It’s one of the big classic places. Sinatra shit. Deep-pocket money.”
“That’s even worse. Old money is drained down and low tips. They have no sense of what a dollar even is anymore. How old did they sound on the phone?”
“Not old.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Fifty, maybe. Hard to tell. Gravelly voice. You know. Hard to tell. When did you get so precious? When did you go back to giving a shit?”
It had gotten strange between us. Once it becomes routine to watch your girlfriend jerk off a guy while he sucks on her tit, something has gone really wrong. And I was certain she saw clients without me. I’d come home from a night out and she’d look far away from me while she was right next to me on the couch. Her silhouette looking blurry while we watched television. I didn’t say anything. I knew which variable could be dropped in our equation: I was the disposable one.
So I drove.
The entrance to Bermuda Dunes isn’t much different from all the others except how abrupt it feels, a sharp right turn into the gates. Some obscure provision about the point where Bermuda Dunes met La Quinta and Indio meant no one wanted to pay for a stoplight, so the four-way stop turns into a disaster about thirty times a day as everything backs up, waiting for the gate to let through guests and repair trucks and the endless chains of pool cleaners and landscapers.
Here’s a fun game: drive through the valley and count the beat-up white pickup trucks with a plug-in pool pump hanging off the bed, bungee strapped to a hand cart. And the wheels of the hand cart will be wrapped in duct tape. They clean the pools and sweat through the days, scrubbing down the walls with fifteen-foot extension poles because they aren’t allowed in the waters.
We were in line, the four-way stop lurching us in, when Mo leaned her seat all the way back, turned her back to me.
“What’s wrong?”
“I have a headache. All this stop and start.”
“Want to go home? You can cancel.” I was going to push on this point if she let me. Anything to not go in there.
“No. We are already here. I just need to rest my head.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay.”
We continued to slowly roll into Bermuda Dunes, in pieces, as though the gates were taking bites from a long chain, chewing, swallowing, biting again.
“Different name today.”
“What?” She had a new standard fake name for gates. They never check it at these things, just look for the name on the list and wave you through, maybe print up a ticket for the dashboard. Veronica Hayworth. She said it was an inside joke, but I never got it.
“Yeah, they check IDs here,” Mo said. “So it’s under your name.”
“Fuck. We should get out of here. This whole thing feels like shit.”
“Come on, baby. Let’s get paid.” She looked at me and said it, something she had stopped saying to me a long time ago: “Please.”
She said please but it didn’t feel right. Please always feels like a pulling, like they are in front of you, leading you. But this time felt like a shove from behind, a hand between the shoulder blades. I stumbled forward.
And the cars kept worming up, chunk by chunk.
When we finally came to the booth, the guy looked straight at the list, barely glanced up at me at all. I thought he was just slacking off but then realized he was watching me the whole time, on a computer monitor linked to a camera above the door, pointed straight at me.
“Name.” Not a question.
I told him.
He handed me a printed-out card with a bar code, my name, and the address we were heading to. “Put that on the dashboard.”
I thanked him, pulled forward, listened to my phone tell me what turns to take. Mo sat up, suddenly feeling much better.
“He didn’t ask for my ID.”
“What?”
“You said they check IDs here. He didn’t ask for mine.”
“Maybe he forgot,” Mo said.
“Maybe.”
“It’s busy. Probably trying to get people through faster.”
“Maybe.”
“What’s wrong?” Mo looked at me.
I could feel her eyes on me, my cheeks grew hot. “You know what’s wrong. I don’t like it. I don’t like this. I don’t like this place.”
“Pull ove
r.”
I did.
“Baby.” Mo hadn’t called me by anything other than my name in a long time. Then at the gate. Then this. I felt it in my chest but also between my shoulder blades. “It’s the last one of the day, baby. We are already here, already checked in.”
“So?”
“I hear you, baby. I do. Listen, just this one and then we go home. We can put on a movie. Make you feel good. Then I will take off all of tomorrow. Turn off the phone. Hell, if tonight pays out like it should, I’ll take the week off. We can drive out to someplace nice. Maybe the beach. Come on.”
A week on the beach. Calling me baby. Cocktails and bikinis. It sounded pretty good. I felt like I could become myself again.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
I finished the drive to the house. It was a nightmare for me. I glanced at the address on the card. It wasn’t the same one that Mo had told me. Blocks away. And a different street. Everything felt wrong. And that’s before I saw the house.
Most places out here are how you think of a house: front yard, house, fenced-in backyard. Most of Mo’s clients had pools out back, covered patios, which are good for me, they cut down on window glare, make it easier for me to get the shots. I can lie back on a pool lounger until the blinds open, get set up, take the pictures, and shoot them over to Mo.
The Bermuda Dunes house was a nightmare. A walledoff place where most of the house is the wall itself, a home built like a fort, a residential Alamo. Each house sits in a hollow square, a sharp-edged circle with the pool in the middle and no backyard. Probably some midsixties idea about how to party, shutting out the world from seeing what a swinging shindig is all about, steel gates and decorative spikes on the walls. They feel like prisons, these places. And Bermuda Dunes is full of them.
“Fuck. I can’t even get a shot here.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no backyard. It’s a courtyard place. This is a bust.”
“Bust? There’s no cops here,” Mo said. “It’s the Dunes.”
“I mean busted. Like broken. It’s shot.”
Mo thought for a second and then spoke again. “I will leave the gate not quite closed when they let me in. You can get a shot from in the courtyard, right?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Depending how the rooms are laid out.”
“I’ll put him right where you want. In a good spot. Just be on the far side of the pool so he doesn’t see you.”
That’s exactly where I set up and waited for the blinds to open.
I didn’t need to hear anything while waiting and usually had on headphones, listened to music, waited. The music kept me awake—I worried I would fall asleep otherwise. I sat in a chair and waited. The pool was nice but old, cement with dinner plate–sized chunks of slate around the edges, a different color above and below the surface, decades of residue and grit above the surface, while the water, constantly stirred by the filters and pumps, kept the sides more or less clean. Maybe some algae here and there.
There’s algae growing in the desert. That’s how much money there is here, rich people with their oases.
The furniture was all old and sun-bleached, the fabric strained and stretching on the loungers, so eaten by the heat that the cloth was crumbling, turning to dust. Sit on those things and take half the chair with you in your clothes, and that’s if it doesn’t collapse under you. I sat at an old café set—metal table, metal chairs, painted aluminum.
The vertical blinds moved but didn’t open, swayed a little, like something had brushed by them. It seemed early to be picture time, but I hadn’t looked at what time we set up. Maybe this guy wasn’t pretending to even want a massage. My eyes caught something scattered and dark in a jangled line. They looked like paw prints. Maybe the guy had a dog. I hadn’t seen any other sign of one, no dog tried to escape out of the front door, didn’t hear barking when Mo rang the doorbell. Could have been a coyote running through. But how did they get in and out of there? Over those walls? I wondered how they knew not to drink the pool water, how to resist something so blue and sparkling, how they knew it would make them sick, dry them out the more they drank.
Who ever thought to name them blinds? Why not hides? Why not screens?
The blinds moved again but not gently, not in a careful breath; there was a hard crashing and it seemed like something was pressing up against them, they shook and then parted, and I saw what it was.
It was Mo.
Her face was pushed up against the glass, her dark hair spilled all around her and strings of it between the blades of the blinds.
I stood still for a second, shocked, paralyzed.
Replayed that sliver of time in my mind. Oh no. Oh no. I jumped up from the chair, knocked over the table and the camera flew into the air, dropped down into the pool. I heard it splash as I ran past, went to the sliding door but it wouldn’t open, tried the next one over, locked. I kicked at a brick planter against the wall with my heel and a loose brick came free. I grabbed the brick and threw it against the glass, which wobbled and shook but didn’t break. The blinds jangled again.
Picked the brick back up and threw it with everything I had into the glass, aiming for where the first throw had scuffed and scraped it. The brick sailed through the glass and continued into the house where I heard it clang into something and thunk onto the floor. The glass held its shape for a second and then fell down like water in a fountain, splashing down onto the floor.
I ran into the room, a kind of family den, pictures of a couple all over the walls, hiking in the mountains, in front of a small plane at the tiny private airport. No massage table. I looked down and saw Mo, lying facedown on the floor halfway into the room. Her dark hair swirled out around her. I couldn’t figure out for a second what was wrong with her outfit and then realized she wasn’t wearing the same clothes as when I’d dropped her off. Her shape seemed wrong. She was arched up and bent, a tiny broken bridge. But I was moving fast and couldn’t stop. I grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her over.
There was a knife sticking out of her chest, the lone pillar arching the bridge. Every alarm in my head was screaming but nothing was making sense. I shouted her name and heard her voice, a kind of involuntary yelp, but it wasn’t coming from her. It was down the hall. I looked at her face.
It wasn’t Mo.
Some other woman, in different clothes and with a different shape, just dark hair and a knife in her chest. I peered around the room and realized it was the same woman from the pictures on the walls, smiling in front of some Vegas fountain, pretending to hold up the Eiffel Tower, standing so as to trick the viewer into seeing something that wasn’t there, wasn’t true. I looked at the knife again. It was mine—how many times had I cooked with that knife? I had just the night before. Mo said she’d clean up.
The Bermuda Dunes security has sirens exactly like cop cars and they are always roaming around, looking for problems and excuses to flex as though they are real cops, like white blood cells, like vultures: clean up and tear apart. How were they already here? I hadn’t called, it had just happened. And then I knew. They were called before Mo’s face hit the glass and before I smashed it in.
I looked around and there was no place for me to go. Only one way out, straight through the front door, where security was already heading. I swept the room one more time, hoping a new door would magically appear, and there was Mo, standing and looking at me. She seemed a little sad but not very. Resolved.
“Sorry,” she said.
Then she was gone. I heard someone’s voice, a man’s. He was telling her to get in the car while she still could, get in the back, lie down. Then I heard him running out the front door. The sirens louder and louder.
I ran out of the broken window, leaped up and grabbed the edges of the wall, slicing my hands, pulled myself over and felt the terra-cotta spikes cut and scrape and pierce me as I went over, landed hard on the xeriscape rocks.
Those security guards got to me before I could stand back up, wit
h HOA-issued Tasers and privately owned pistols. They dragged me across the stones and into the street and I was thinking as they did so that I needed the real cops to get there, that they would follow some kind of rules. And then I was on the pavement and it was hot as hell and there was so much shouting and my body shaking from the fish-hook barbs of the Taser in my skin. Then I saw a boot and it took forever to come down and it went past my eyes and past my face and into my throat. And I knew I wasn’t leaving.
Because nothing gets piped back or returned in Bermuda Dunes. It all just sinks down underneath. That’s when I felt everything in me do what happens to everything here: drain down and disappear forever.
A CAREER SPENT DISAPPOINTING PEOPLE
BY TOD GOLDBERG
Indio
Three hours out of the hospital, his left foot too swollen for a shoe, Shane’s car breaks down. It’s July, a trillion degrees outside, Interstate 10 a gray ribbon of shit unspooling east out of Palm Springs toward Arizona. Not exactly where he wanted to go, but who the fuck wants to go to Arizona? It’s what was on the other side of Arizona that mattered to Shane, the chance that there might be another life in that direction. He never liked being on the coast. The one time he ever even tried to swim in the Pacific—back when he came out on vacation with his dad, so, over twenty years ago, half his lifetime now—he was gripped with the ungodly realization that unlike a pool, there were no sides. You were always in the deep end out there.
It was a feeling that stuck with him, even when he was in one of those towns in the San Fernando Valley that sounded like an escape route from an old western: North Hills … West Hills … Hidden Hills …
The Honda was the one damn thing Shane thought he could depend on. But as soon as he pulled out of the parking lot at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, the check engine light flashed on. A hundred thousand miles he put on that fucking car and not a single problem, and the one time he really needed it, it was telling him it couldn’t comply. He didn’t have the time—or the money—to swing by the mechanic, considering he’d left the hospital before the nurse had filled out the paperwork for the cops, which was a problem. Not as big a problem as staying would have been. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would have the cops trawling the city for him, especially since the wound did look self-inflected, since it was. Someone else holding his fucking hand while he shot himself with his own damn gun.
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