Finally, unsure of how to extricate herself from a conversation she cannot follow, Shelly forfeits, telling Angela the catchall phrase: “Está bien.” It’s fine.
“Disculpe,” she says, then climbs the narrow stairs back up to her unit.
She buys kibble and sardines. From her bathroom window, she tosses them down. The cat ignores the kibble, but he eats the little fish. It pleases her to watch him licking his whiskers.
Paul takes her to a bistro down the street. After some calamari, Paul notices an old-fashioned black butler statue by the bar — the kind of statue with exaggerated features, a cartoonish grin.
“We can never come back here,” he says.
“We can leave and finish dinner somewhere else.”
He shakes his head.
“I’d leave,” she says. “You can explain, but I can’t.”
“We’ll just not come back.”
When the waiter returns, she stares at Paul, willing him to complain, but he merely orders a burger. She bungles her order, and Paul just watches patiently.
“Can you help me?”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to say,” Paul says.
“I want it medium-well.”
Paul completes her order, and they eat the meal in relative silence, remarking occasionally upon the food, the greasy ham smothering the beef patties and the watery beer. “The fries,” Paul says, “are actually good.”
On the walk home, she can see her breath in the air. She tells him about Angela, how she couldn’t understand her.
“I think she was having a fight with a boyfriend,” she says. “I wonder if he’s why the cat has to stay outside.”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Paul says. “This isn’t Antarctica. The cat is going to be fine. It may not have the best life, but it isn’t going to die.”
He wraps his arm around her shoulders and adds, “I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”
It was a command. She clenches her teeth so hard the rest of the walk home that she gets a headache. She begins to wish that the cat would die, just to prove Paul wrong. Just to get rid of that smug assuredness he’s had since the move.
She has to ask Paul to help her buy Tylenol because the only pharmacy that’s still open is the kind that makes you take a number and wait on a caja to open, where you then explain to a pharmacist what you need, even if it’s just some cheap shampoo, because all the products are kept behind the counter. She asks for Tylenol, but all they have is generic acetaminophen in doses she doesn’t recognize.
“What’s it for?” Paul translates for the pharmacist.
“A bad headache,” Shelly says. “Really bad.”
After another round of translation, the pharmacist smiles sympathetically and pushes the box of pills her way.
The idea comes later, when she’s gathering water in her hands from the bathroom sink to swallow the white tablet. After she recognizes the thought for what it is, a violent, spiteful wish, she feels her breath catch with guilt. It’s just a thought, she tells herself. She doesn’t mean it.
But later that week, on a particularly cold night, she can hear the harsh, scraping yowls of the cat, and she wonders if it might not be a mercy. She edges out of the covers, careful not to disturb Paul, which is easy since he’s rammed his ears with wax plugs to drown out the bus stop, the bar, and the cat.
Through the window, she sees the cat lying on its side, its belly moving with quick breaths. She tells herself he must be hurting.
She uses the back of a spoon to press the tabs into a powder. After a few failures with skinny sardines, she finds the fatter fish and stuffs the powder into careful incisions.
The cat stands up for the treat, stiff-limbed, stretching. He licks it all up and keeps licking long after the last fish is gone.
Her regret is immediate. She thinks about warning Angela and giving the cat hydrogen peroxide to make it throw up, like they used to do with Atticus when he’d eat the unraveled thread of his stuffed toys. The dog would jerk his head rhythmically, then belch up a foaming ball of bright yarn. Then he’d sleep, at peace. She imagined how he’d felt — relieved, pleasantly empty, most likely.
But she doesn’t know the laws here. And she doesn’t know how to explain what she’s done, not in any language.
She sits in the kitchen all the next day, staring at her Spanish workbook without seeing it. She cannot help but hear the absence, the added piece of silence, despite the traffic and the people on the street outside.
When Paul comes home, she tells him, “I think the cat is dead.”
“The cat isn’t dead.” He drops his books on the table.
“Will you please check?” Something in her voice softens him.
She can hear Paul climb on top of the toilet and unlatch the window. He stays there awhile. She can imagine what he sees. The still whiteness. He’s watching, alert now, waiting for a sign of life.
SPORES
They met at Spook Fest, a film festival with a limited cult following. Betsey was one of the finalists with a short comedy about serial killers, and Mannie was a guest speaker on account of his having directed Mississippi Machete, a 1960s horror slasher that still made top-ten lists. She was thirty in a thrift store dress, and he was a craggy-featured septuagenarian wearing a brown cardigan that slouched over his broad, sloping shoulders.
Mannie sat in a plastic chair on the stage next to the moderator, a young guy with thick glasses and a leather vest.
“Can you tell me more about your relationship with Peter Minowitz?” the moderator asked.
Mannie jabbed his finger at the young man’s chest. “I won’t talk about that. I told you as much.”
Mannie stood, and the moderator waved for him to sit back down. “I’m sorry. I forgot — ”
“Like hell.”
“Please. Stay. We’ll just open it up for questions from the audience.”
Mannie held on to the arms of the chair, supporting himself as he deliberated, then finally slumped back into his seat. Silence descended. The two dozen audience members eyed each other, waiting for someone to speak.
Betsey hated public speaking. She hated crowds, and she hated addressing more than one person at a time. But she had a tickle in the back of her throat — it’d been festering for days — and now her lungs felt like they were burning and drowning at the same time. She burst into deep, wet coughs that echoed through the auditorium. She coughed until her sides cramped.
“Do you need water?” Mannie asked, gesturing from the stage to his own water bottle.
She shook her head, but Mannie passed the bottle to someone in the front row, and then the bottle was crowd-surfing its way back to her. She never shared drinks, but with all eyes on her, she felt she had to take a sip. She uncapped it and tried not to think about the moist rim, tried not to think about the likelihood of that being Mannie’s saliva.
“You okay?” Mannie said, his voice magnified by his clip-on microphone.
She nodded. Everyone kept staring, so she asked Mannie, “What do you think of the Mississippi Machete remake?”
“I was quite pleased,” he said. “The pacing is much quicker now, and they did a good job of adapting the narrative to current trends.” He offered a flat smile, his lips stretched taut across his yellow teeth.
After the panel, Betsey intercepted Mannie. “Thanks for the water.”
“I couldn’t let one of my fans die,” he said. “There are too few of you.”
“I just have crazy sinuses.” She gestured at her face. “Anyway, I think the remake is bullshit.” He nodded.
“Thank you.”
“They took the guy in the wheelchair out, and I thought that was such a stupid revision,” she said. “His dynamic with the other kids, the way they ostracized him, that was the heart of the movie, wasn’t it?”
“What do you do, Miss …?”
“Moser. Betsey Moser. I’m a screenwriter. Well, trying to be,” she said, offering her hand. His skin
was mushroom gray and crinkly.
“And what do you write?”
“Everything, anything. Horror.” She dug a disk out of her canvas messenger bag and offered it to him. “It has one of my screenplays and my short film on it. They’re screening the film tomorrow, but I’m sure you have better things to do.”
She said the last bit to be polite. She knew all his recent movies went straight to DVD.
“Thank you. I look forward to watching it,” he said.
He took the copy of her film and left the theater.
It was a month before she would see Mannie again. Turned out, she had a sinus infection. The doctors gave her antibiotics, and the antibiotics caused a chronic bacterial infection of Clostridium difficile that sent her into a fever and delivered stabbing cramps to her gut. She passed out in a grocery store, in the dairy section where she was stockpiling yogurt in desperate hopes of recovery. She awoke in the hospital. The doctors informed Betsey that the bacteria in her system could germinate into microscopic spores. When her roommate Sarah visited her, a distant smile splayed across her face, Betsey warned her — with many apologies — that their place would need to be doused in Lysol. The sheets, the bathroom, the towels, and the laundry. She regretted having to inform Sarah of the spores, a term that brought to mind sci-fi movies of the week. Sarah had fled her room with her hands over her nose and mouth.
Betsey and Sarah had been college roommates, and they had remained together despite Betsey’s antisocial preferences and Sarah’s controlling tendencies. Sarah demanded little in the way of companionship, which suited Betsey. They symmetrically split the fridge. They each had their own set of dishes, kept on separate shelves. They traded vacuuming and trash duties, which were completed on Friday and Monday of each week. They had a system, and Betsey appreciated the structure in her life.
After much morphine, that sweet heady syrup waltzing in her veins, and a couple days of antibiotics, Sarah drove Betsey to their rickety studio apartment. She deposited Betsey at the front door and told her that she had already moved out.
“You’re supposed to give two weeks’ notice,” Betsey said as she pulled at her plastic hospital bracelet.
“Harold is going to marry me,” Sarah said, maintaining a distance between them.
“When?”
“I’ll pay through the end of the month,” Sarah said, and then she climbed into her car and drove away.
Despite being stabilized, the illness still lingered in the following weeks. Betsey had been a sickly child, suffering month-long bouts of strep throat that alienated her from her classmates and left her paranoid of germs and touching hands and turning doorknobs, so her reluctant immune system did not surprise her. Betsey tried several rounds of antibiotics, probiotics, and prebiotics to cure her ailing gut, but nothing fixed her. Her bodily needs became so unreliable that she could not maintain her job as an administrative assistant. Technically, she was a full-time temp, but she had worked the same desk for nearly a year. She soon learned the crucial difference between a permanent employee of the production company and a temporary employee of the studio that housed the production company. Her boss sent her an email with only the subject line Come into my office and shut the door. He did not address her health as a reason. He relayed euphemisms and alluded to a new permanent hire from New York. She cleared out her desk and packed up her belongings. As she carried her things to the elevator, her plastic orchid drooped, its petals bobbing with each step like a white flag waving in the wake of her retreat.
She could barely meet her monthly rent. The threat of nausea or diarrhea would only allow her to enter the public realm when she had fasted for twenty-four hours. She remained at the studio as a part-time temp, drifting between different offices and departments. She could only manage working every third or fourth day, avoiding food in the surrounding hours. She looked for cheaper apartments, but with rent control, her lease was already a steal. She placed ads for roommates. Each person sensed the unsettling cleanness of the place — or perhaps witnessed the ubiquitous presence of disinfectant wipes, one dispenser for each surface — and left without taking an application.
Betsey took to reading message boards on the internet that revealed horrifying possibilities for her health. She learned that the spores could live on surfaces for months. They could float through the air. She could breathe them. Betsey read about a woman in her twenties who had been sick with the same bacteria for ten years. No antibiotic would kill it. She had to drop out of college and now lived with her parents. There was an online support group full of people like her, all desperate sufferers, all unemployed and half-starved and living like hermits.
In particular, she liked to read about Jane in Melbourne. Until recently, Jane had worked in advertising. She posted pictures of when she was an avid surfer, ripped abdominal muscles gleaming in the bright sun. Now she was largely debilitated by her illness, but she managed to work some as a technical writer. To Betsey, working from home sounded like a dream. Never facing public failure in an office. Never worrying about one’s health interfering with one’s earning potential. Wearing pajamas all day, every day.
She found a listing for Mannie in the phone book. He’s that unfamous, she thought. Or perhaps it was a different Mannie. She called, but the answering machine picked up with Mannie’s prerecorded raspy voice. “Sorry I’m not home right now. Please leave your name, your number, and please briefly describe why you are calling, and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Have a wonderful day. Goodbye.” Then there was a long fumbling, pause. “Where’s the button?” And then the answering machine beeped.
“Mannie, it’s Betsey, from the short-film fest. Betsey Mos — ”
The machine beeped again. Then an automated female voice said in monotone, “I’m sorry. The tape is full.”
Betsey tried Mannie twice a day for four days, but the answering machine was always full. Then, to her great surprise, Mannie called her back. He apologized for taking so long to clear out his messages and invited her over for tea.
Betsey suffered a great deal of anxiety whenever something strayed from her routine, so she left her downtown apartment two hours early in order to punctually arrive in Sherman Oaks.
Mannie lived in a small midcentury ranch house on the edge of the dying Los Angeles River. The dark, rotting wood of the shingles matched the splintered siding. Within, Betsey imagined a potbellied oven full of molten Hansel and Gretel. It had that vibe.
The door had a brass plaque at eye level featuring a lion-and-crown motif. After Betsey rang the doorbell, the plaque opened to reveal Mannie’s face peering through a grid.
He pulled the heavy door open and smiled. “Come on in.”
The house was full of horror paraphernalia, some of which she could recognize from his movies. A clown marionette hung from the ceiling, a skeleton hand from The Morgue Keeper served as a paperweight, and a zombie dummy sat in a club chair wearing a smoking jacket and clutching a pipe with its spindly finger bones. A series of framed Edward Gorey illustrations covered the walls of the foyer, and an open coffin — with a sheet of glass placed on top — served as a coffee table. Within, upon the worn satin fabric, a mummy lay supine with arms crossed over his linen-swathed chest.
A bronze teakettle and a plate of crustless sandwiches appeared to float above the mummy’s head. Mannie gestured for Betsey to sit on the wine-dark sofa.
“It’s oolong.” He held up the kettle.
“Is there caffeine in it?” she said. Her stomach could no longer handle any beverage that contained caffeine or alcohol.
“An infinitesimal amount.”
He poured the pale amber fluid into her blue teacup, and after a polite sip, she rested her saucer above the mummy’s kneecaps.
“I’ve always wondered,” she said, “why was Phantom your last theatrical release?”
“Peter Minowitz fucked me,” Mannie said.
This shocked Betsey, since Peter was the celebrated auteur of all the best children�
��s films from the ’80s.
“There are rules in the DGA that you can’t simultaneously direct a project,” Mannie said. “Minowitz wanted Phantom for himself. He wanted it bad, but he already was signed up for Alien Visitor, so I got it. But he was still the main creative producer on the project, so he kept interfering with my shot list and adjusting things here and there. One day, a journalist showed up while Peter was fiddling with my camera, and next thing I knew, all the press was telling the world that I was some sort of directorial beard, a joke, a stand-in. That Peter Minowitz was the real director.” He stared deeply into his teacup. “My next project was a TV movie. And then they were all VHS releases.”
Mannie pulled a manuscript from beside the couch and set it on the table. He poked the title page, and she saw that it was her own screenplay, “Ice Castle of Doom.”
“But this,” he said, “this makes me happy. I could do something with this.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Amazing. Those little ice boars? And the way they tunnel into the ice hotel and eat the oil moguls? It’s gold. And there’s a real market for those cheap CGI monsters.”
“I was thinking more Diego Torres. You know, like a haunting fable.”
“No one will green-light that. Not after that last one,” he said. “And really, you could cut the budget of this in half with a quick rewrite. I mean, does the Arctic research facility really need to blow up in the end?”
“I guess not.”
“So what I’m suggesting is how about you and I do a rewrite on this thing and shop it around?”
“I hate to go to this place in the conversation, but I could really use some money,” she said.
“I know a guy who could help on that front.”
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 7