YOU KNOW THAT YOU COULD BE A MODEL? he wrote.
Naw I’m not a homo, Ryan wrote.
JUST SAYING. THERE’S TONS OF $$$ OUT THERE FOR A GUY THAT LOOKS LIKE YOU.
Ryan paused. Then: Real?
YEAH DUDE. YOU COULD BE DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW. LIVIN THE LIFE.
Yeah.
To bad I got school tho.
SUMMER JUST STARTED, DIDN’T IT? THREE MONTHS OF FREEDOM.
More like 2.
NOT MUCH TIME.
Nope.
BETTER MAKE THE MOST OF IT.
—
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Martin said, midway through their first video chat. His face filled the screen of Ryan’s MacBook. Dark-chocolate eyes. Tanned skin wrinkled in the soft spots: eyelids, neck. A broad, clean smile. At his edges were generic slices of room: dull white walls carved by vertical shadows, a black plastic floor lamp, a flat-screen TV. “Why don’t you let me see you?”
Fine needles pricked Ryan’s spine, climbing upward, groove to neck. “See me how?” he said.
“Stand up, stand back from the screen a little bit.”
“Like this?”
“That’s good. That’s good.”
Ryan waited for more. “This is fuckin’ weird, bro.”
“It feels that way at first. You’re doing great. Now just—”
“Yeah. I dunno.”
“You want to be a model, right? Start stacking those bills?”
“I guess.”
“Well, this is what models do. I pegged you for the kind of guy that could handle it. Was I wrong?”
Ryan shook his head. “Naw.”
“Awesome, man. I didn’t think so.” He paused. “Want to keep going?”
Ryan shrugged.
“Okay. Cool. Now, just go ahead and pop your shirt off. So I can make sure if you’d pass.”
“You want me to take off my shirt?”
“To see if the agency would take you. Standard stuff.”
Ryan hesitated.
“Look,” Martin said. “Let’s forget it. It’s not that big a deal. I don’t want you doing anything you’re not ready for.” He leaned back, hammocking his head in his hands, and his dark gaze flickered from the screen.
Ryan closed his eyes. He took a breath and released it. Then, swiftly, before he had a chance to change his mind, he pulled his T-shirt over his head and dropped it on the bedroom floor.
“Look at me,” Martin said.
Ryan looked.
The man’s face zoomed closer to the screen. There was the tiny square of light reflected in each iris. The pink bulbs in the corners of his eyes.
Ryan’s heart hurled itself against his ribs, a desperate prisoner. “What now?” he asked.
Martin grinned. Drew a slow circle with his finger on the air.
Ryan nodded. He clenched his fists to keep them still. Cleared his throat and started turning, looking back over his shoulder to see what Martin was seeing, his body small as a doll’s, glowing in the inset square in the corner of the screen.
Martin nodded, pleased. “Like I thought, man, you’re a natural,” he said. Almost whispered: “Man, that is so, so good.”
—
That night, stripped, Ryan locked the bathroom door and stepped into the crash of shower water. Slid the glass door shut behind him. Turned the tap till his feet screamed and steam billowed at his ankles. Gasped but kept it up as hot as he could stand it, arching under the furious stream till it soaked his hair, then closed his eyes and gaped his mouth, the hot water pooling in his lashes and gums.
He spat. Stepped back. Water drilled his chest. He pumped satiny soap into his palm. Lathered the soap over his torso, reloaded and scrubbed his pits, his belly button, the tapered trail of dark blond hair, and continued moving down.
Think of something normal.
Kim Kardashian. Mila Kunis. That what’s-her-name from Sports Illustrated, bikini model, stacked blonde—Kate Upton. He thought of all three at once. Caught his tongue between his teeth and saw them in the shower with him, bare and gleaming and bloodrushed and wet, running hands over his shoulders and lats and ass, one wrapping him up from behind, one nuzzling his neck, the third sinking slowly to her knees.
He knitted his eyebrows, fought to concentrate. He had to hold the scene in his head until it worked. But something kept intruding. A shadow in the corner of the room. A dark figure behind the fogless glass. A black, rapt gaze.
Ryan shuddered, came. He deleted every new message from Martin Cruz for two weeks.
—
Martin Cruz persisted. He wrapped his gifts in brown paper. A baseball card, a video game. Modest treasures, small enough to hide. Then, one day:
“What is this?” Ryan’s mom said, pushing into his room with a brown paper package in her hand, the paper ripped open.
Ryan reached for it, but she pulled back. Cocked her head at the return address.
“Who do you know in Los Angeles?”
“No one,” he said. He grabbed at the package again.
“Oh, no,” she said, holding it against her chest. “You are going to tell me where this came from.”
“Jesus, Mom. The fuck should I know? I can’t like control who decides to send me stuff.”
“Ryan Michael Harbinger, you are going to tell me where this came from. Right. Now.”
“Lemme see it.”
She hesitated.
“Lemme think,” he said.
She handed him the package.
He pulled off the torn paper and tossed it to the floor. Opened the plain white box and reached inside.
A baseball glove. Not just any glove—the new Rawlings Primo. Four hundred dollars. Ryan had three or four gloves already, but this one was expensive to the touch, smooth and supple, saddle-brown Italian leather. Leather laces crisscrossed the fingers and the palm was trimmed in a complex and beautiful braid. He brought the glove to his face and inhaled it. That rich blend of cowhide and lanolin, that miraculous, delicious smell.
“Hello?” his mom said.
“Hold up.” Ryan worked his left hand into the glove. Slid his fingers and thumb into the tight, new grooves. He stretched his palm open and closed, the leather softly creaking. As soon as he broke it in, oiled and stretched it, it would fit perfectly. As if it were made for him. He needed to keep this. His mom was tapping her foot and Ryan stalled, turning the glove over to examine the logo embroidered on the wrist, cycling through lies he could tell her. He wished Nick were there. What would he say?
It came to him. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I forgot. I ordered it. It was, uh, eBay.”
She narrowed her eyes. “How did you pay for it?”
“Uh, Visa? PayPal?”
“Ryan. How many times do we have to have this conversation? That card is for food and emergencies only.”
“I needed a new glove. It was an emergency.”
She stood back and eyed him. “You know, when you do things like this, it makes me wonder whether you can handle this kind of responsibility.” This was an encouraging sign. She had been wondering whether he could handle the responsibility of a credit card for at least the last year and a half.
“Whatever,” Ryan said, shrugging.
“Or maybe we’ll just send this back,” she said. She plucked the white box off the floor and rifled through it. “Wait. What’s this?” She pulled out a small index card, blue, unlined. In black, boxy letters, anonymous as a ransom note, was written a single line:
A THING OF BEAUTY IS A JOY FOR EVER. —M.C.
“What is this?” she said. “Who’s M.C.?”
“How am I supposed to know? What, you think I asked for some creepy-ass card?”
She waited for more.
“Maybe it’s, like, his slogan or something,” Ryan said. “Anyway. I can’t return it. The guy said no refunds. If it bothers you that much, I’ll pay you back.”
She laughed. “With what money?”
“Look, I will, okay? Could you just fuckin�
�� chill?”
Ryan’s mom intruded on his life at every opportunity: logged into his Home Access account to check his homework and grades, typed his papers, emailed his teachers and tutors, made his excuses, selected his college (Pepperdine, where both she and her father before her had gone), colluded with his coaches, gossiped with the mothers of his friends and hookups, made his lunches and monitored his dinners, asked about his exercise, glimpsed him from the hallway as he slept. And the older he got, the more invasive her actions became, as if she could sense his shifting away from her and grew ever more desperate to pull him back. And yet, for all these efforts, she knew nothing. Knew nothing of the whirrings of his brain, the anger in his heart, the desire for he knew not what, or the knot at the floor of his stomach that had been there for as long as he could remember, telling him that something was not right.
At school, he folded up inside himself. He wailed on freshmen. Fucked with girls who worshipped him. Spit words at teachers. His boys, Nick and Flint, had known him so long they didn’t expect him to be any other way. “Man, don’t take it personal, that’s just Ryan,” they’d explain. They said this to show their loyalty and love, they didn’t know it felt like a life sentence.
Ryan’s mom didn’t speak, just watched him, and there was a shimmer in her eyes that made him wonder if she saw it now, could understand and possibly accept, not who he actually was but how little she actually knew. She seemed about to ask him something. But then Ryan’s little sister, Nell, ran into the room, snot-nosed and shrieking, and grabbed his mom around the waist. Ryan didn’t try to listen to her whines. She was hungry, she was hurt, she wanted, she did not have. The same old Nell routine.
As she was dragged off toward the kitchen, Ryan’s mother called over her shoulder, “One of these days, kid, we’re going to talk about that attitude of yours.”
—
He went back to the webcam. He just didn’t think about it. Whether it was weird or not. Whether he liked it and what it meant if he did.
At night he would open his laptop, peer into the webcam’s tiny eye. His body in the bedroom filled the small square in the corner of the screen. Amazing how his world could be compressed in this way—how small it was, how insignificant. Grinning, he tilted the screen until it cut off his head. Above the elastic line of the little-boy briefs his mom insisted on buying him, his torso, slim and tan from an early-summer surge at Stinson Beach, looked alien. It was like watching a stranger strut around a room that once was his.
His body fascinated. Martin’s greedy face filled the screen. His jaw and the broad banks of his smile. Although he’d said he was close to Ryan’s age, his eyes revealed him—he was in his thirties at least. Ryan didn’t care. If Martin was older, it was probably better. It meant he’d have more to give.
Ryan posed. Messing around at first and then working his body in earnest, stealing glances at the corner of the screen in order to see what the man was seeing, sweating slightly in his armpits and along the furred small of his back as he sought out the ideal angle of his beauty. His mother’s anxious presence pressed toward him through his locked bedroom door, but he knew she knew nothing of what was going on inside. No one did.
He did like it. He liked turning the lock on his mother, liked watching himself in the corner of the screen, liked the little presents Martin sent in unmarked envelopes. He even liked sneaking out to intercept the mailman at the curb, beating his mother to it, just in case.
Martin Cruz returned to watch him again and again. The truth was that he asked for hardly anything. He said he wanted to know what Ryan would be doing if he were all alone. That was the phrase he used, “all alone,” like he was talking to a child.
Then, one night:
“Have you ever been to the city?” Martin asked. “Are you ready to see what life’s like for a star?”
Los Angeles was six hours south. When Ryan’s family had driven to Disneyland three summers ago, he’d crowded into the backseat with his snoring sister and pressed his temple to the window as the I-5 landscape paled and dried, the sky’s precious Northern California blue gritting and bruising purple in a way that felt portentous and magic. As they descended into the city, he thrilled to its chaos and its ugliness, its dirty laces of streets, fast-food neon, power lines slashing the sunset like scars.
Ryan knew what Martin meant, what kinds of movies they made in the grim stucco cloister of Martin’s real hometown, Van Nuys (which he’d seen on Google Earth, his cursor tracing the bleached streets). The idea intrigued him. The cut would be swift and total. In this way, he would free himself from the perfect shackles of his life.
—
The strange, hot June ceded to a foggy July and a temperate August.
With his backpack hanging from one shoulder, Ryan walked to the Miller Avenue stop and boarded the bus to San Francisco. Planning the trip was easier than he’d expected: it turned out buses traveled the California spine each day, San Francisco to L.A.
As Ryan stepped onto the bus, the air conditioning blasted him with dry cold and the faint smell of rubbing alcohol. Mill Valley didn’t believe in air conditioning, nor need it, usually, so this smell took Ryan to lesser places rarely visited: a McDonald’s in Orlando, his grandfather’s condo in Seal Beach. The bus driver creaked the springs in his seat. Nodded in Ryan’s direction, fixing his eyes on the road ahead. Ryan’s heart picked up its pace. It was happening. He’d never traveled alone before, and it was incredible how he could just do this, get on a bus and go somewhere, flash his iPhone with an email that said someone had paid for him, some adult somewhere was responsible for this, take a seat and let this dull-eyed old stranger drive him out of his life.
Ryan scanned the dim corridor of the bus and headed down the aisle. It was the middle of the day, a week before the start of school, and the bus was sparsely populated. There were a couple of white guys with dreads and headphones, and behind them an old man sleeping, head dropped on his chest. The old lady beside him wore a flowery T-shirt with fluttery sleeves, opened one eye to follow Ryan as he passed but kept quiet, with her hands crossed placidly over her belly. Next there was a woman about his mom’s age but nothing like his mom: this one was buttoned into a cheap-looking suit, hair clamped back with plastic jaws, blue smears over her eyes. He thought she’d say something, start asking questions, but instead she nodded at him, smiled, ducked her head.
He passed her. Next there were four Hispanic guys spread across one row, talking to each other in indecipherable Spanish. (Ryan had gotten a B+ in Spanish 5-6 last year, but his repartee was limited to “Hola!” and “Qué pasa?” and “Por favor, Señora O’Shannahan, puedo ir al baño?”) The men glanced at Ryan as he walked between them, but then went back to their conversation. They weren’t interested. Only then did it become real to him, only then did he understand:
No one was going to stop him.
He chose an empty row. Set down his backpack, scooted down in the seat and plugged his earbuds in his ears. It was Flint’s favorite: Tyler, the Creator. (He thought of Flint, trapped now, awaiting his fate.) The beat pounded Ryan’s eardrums. The voice shuddered his heart and tightened his throat—that slow, thick bass, saying whatever the fuck it wanted.
The bus coughed and rumbled to life. His seat quivered beneath him. He rested his head on the scratchy fabric and turned to watch out the window as they pulled away from the curb and headed south on Miller Avenue. They passed the baseball field. His teammates were white stick figures warming up. It was like watching himself on that field, a dozen copies of the boy he’d always been.
The bus traveled out of that little green valley that had been his whole life, that small town circumscribed by mountain and bay and fortresses of ancient trees, and wound toward the freeway, out of the gentle fog and into the hard blue sky, the open expanse of the land. He didn’t really know what he was going to, but he didn’t care. The main thing was that he was going. Was this how Tristan Bloch had felt, he wondered, while on his journey to the bridg
e?
Ryan’s life was opening all around him, whirling and spinning, whispering into his ear all the things it was going to be. And who he was going to be in it:
Anyone.
Anything.
—
He was a prisoner of the heat. Sweating little rivers in his palms and through the hair curled at his temples, in his pits beneath the borrowed robe and in the crease of his ass beneath his briefs. Cream makeup spackled and suffocated the pores of his face. Two fans limply spun as he waited on the teenage-bedroom set that looked weirdly like his own but not—it was some adult’s best guess, a twin bed with a blue plaid blanket, a desk with a cardboard box painted to resemble an ancient computer, a hair-band poster hanging cockeyed on the wall. A bored-looking girl in sandals and shorts reflected light into his face with a silver screen. The cameraman crouched behind his blank machine. The director yawned in his chair. Only Martin, hovering in the darkness beyond, watched Ryan’s every move with a fierce attention that felt like love.
Beyond the camera was a fluorescent hallway leading out. Ryan squinted to see, but the girl kept flicking silver light into his eyes and he knew now that Out There was nothing but hot smog and noise. He took off his robe. His little-boy briefs embarrassed him, but Martin’s voice carried out of the gloom to tell him they were perfect, he was perfect, he was beautiful, special, there was no one in the world like him. His costar, steroid-bulked and buzz-cut, marched on set yelling into a cell phone, guzzling a Coke. When he saw Ryan, he hung up, hawked into his can.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
As Ryan sat on the edge of the bed, the costar kissed him. Ryan had thought about this but he wasn’t used to it, he was used to girls, the sweet, waxy taste of their lip gloss and gum, the way their soft lips faltered and nipped. The costar led with his jaw, his lips chapped with sharp crusts of skin, and he pushed until their teeth clanged and then forced his tongue inside. Ryan’s heart was kicking, a small caught animal inside his chest. He was backing away, or being pushed, and he was getting hard like he didn’t know he could and didn’t want to but it was too good and too bad and too fast to stop. The costar released Ryan’s face and the sudden light stunned and dizzied him as the costar moved down, pulling at the waistband of Ryan’s briefs. Ryan let him. He closed his eyes until out of the shadows Martin said, “Don’t.” So he opened them, and stared into the dark, gleaming tunnel of the lens.
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth Page 26