‘I’m sorry,’ he groaned, to his own surprise, reaching back to stroke the sprawling arm of one of the clones. There was still the blunt irrefutability of that mass of brotherly flesh. Where would he dump them? Who was going to help him in the middle of the desert? He felt crushed; he closed his eyes and loosened his grip on the steering wheel, letting the vehicle drift beneath him. For a senseless stretch of minutes, he drove blind, Cosmo veering off the path and into untrammelled dirt. When he opened his eyes, they stung with fresh tears, as a splinter of sunlight made the windshield gleam. He took his foot off the gas completely, let Cosmo rock to a halt. He turned off the engine, leaned his sweaty forehead against the sun-heated wheel and muttered a word, halfway between can’t and shit, but posed as a question. The sky was large and stupid and didn’t answer.
Time passed, white. He rose from the wheel and blinked, lids cracking. What kind of so-called acting experience could possibly have prepared him? He was a semi-decent actor, a surfer; he liked to throw footballs and smoke bowls and read the odd Michael Crichton novel. You couldn’t prep for a role like this; method acting didn’t even come close. One body was doable, maybe, but three? And why three? Why not two, or five, or fifteen? He thought hard. Numbers held power – of this he was, at least, pretty sure. He’d done some reading on numerology, the power of naming. Even had a book on the topic, lost now, with a purple hardcover, that gave him a basic rundown of things he’d already known about himself: that the combination of letters in Matthew translated to the number nine, which meant he was good at following his feelings and emotions; that he was inspiring to others and was well-suited to co-operative work; that he was mostly tolerant of difference, with a broad-minded perspective and compassionate heart (if a bit idealistic); and that he was naturally suited to creative endeavours, to imagination and art. If he allowed himself to falter, he’d be pegged as aloof and insensitive, selfish and indifferent to other people’s problems.
From what he could remember, three was the pinnacle number, lorded over by the benevolent planet Jupiter, rich in symbolism of compassion, love and harmony. It was the Holy Trinity, the Golden Triangle and the highest good; it meant sacrifice and giving, Fame and Beauty and Happiness and Wealth, order and stability. LOVE itself, according to the number chart, equalled three. That there were three clones, according to numerology, could only mean good – if not absolutely terrifying – things. Matthew chewed on his cheek, thinking. Maybe there were three bodies because each was a third of his whole, just as 3 x 3 = 9. Maybe each was an equal portion of his psyche, or soul, or animus, or whatever. That they needed to be put back together. Or that he’d broken himself into pieces.
He turned up the volume on the CD player and rolled down the windows, letting the noise tear into the desert’s arrogant silence. He rubbed his face violently. ‘The desert was made for pilgrims,’ he muttered, or laughed: serious travellers stopping at holy shrines to make offerings, penance, prayers. Stages of a journey of transcendence. He was not a tourist in this waste, but a holy soul, a lover, stopping to reflect with each recovered token. Once again, he hit REC, his voice shaking.
‘This is all acting; I’m playing a role. I have three versions of myself in the back of the van. And maybe I’m picking up pieces of all the roles I’ve nailed … I mean, really nailed … because I’ve left too much heart, too much, like, love out there in the atmosphere. Too much of Matthew floating around the cosmos. Gotta pick up the pieces, recollect the parts of my soul. Feel like a million tiny pieces coming back together!’
This came as a surprise, the thought that his mood or depression was really a scattering, a feeling of being disassembled. Like he’d lost a sense of who he was and wanted to be, the Matthew of his imagination, the Matthew he was proud to be. He’d given it away to people, to agents and extras and advertisers. The media writers, the mooching groupies. He’d given a large chunk to Sandra, maybe the largest of all. There were far too many versions of himself floating disembodied in the ether, and now the blankness had responded, conjuring out of the expanse those dreadful visions of what he’d lost. He was a fool to think he was just using his head. The heart was always involved. Intimately. He nearly leapt from his seat.
‘Okay! I’m listening!’ he bellowed into the air, following up with a jackal-like laugh. ‘I hear you! I’m available!’ The wind made no answer. He listened to its breathy incoherence, sticking his head out the window like a panting dog. An insect flew into his mouth and squirmed against his throat; he swallowed. He imagined the relief in releasing his fear, his sorrow, his clutching attachment to trifling icons, karma and voodoo and spiritualism. Falling back into his seat, he tore the Smoking Indian from his rear-view, snapping the dental floss and whipping the brown figurine out the window. He’d rip out and discard all his paltry wards and possessions, offer them up to the void.
After all the tokens had been thrown away and his body was squelching with sweat, the sky was less of a pure, earnest blue; it was deeper and richer to the east. The sun was lower, glowing orange, the thin surrounding clouds swelling with blood. In a few hours there would be one of those dazzling desert sunsets he loved: the atmosphere thrown into indigo and violet, great bars of colour not unlike a punishing, sky-stretching rainbow. The heat had already broken.
He would have to make a decision. Something had to be done with the brothers. He reviewed his options, drinking mineral water thirstily. There was the path of covert disposal. Burial. Cremation. That was easiest; he had enough gasoline. Or, the strangest yet most sensible: drive to town and civilization, hand them over to some hospital’s forensic specialist, receive a ‘scientific’ explanation. This – the worldly, scientific solution – would require the most courage. Perhaps it was best. Hand off the bodies, get a sliver of a rationalization, rather than ditch the clones and leave all his pain and confusion in the unresponsive wild.
As he scanned the horizon, a small variation of light caught his eye. To the south and east was a distant, ground-level glimmer. He focused and looked. It was something metallic – the fierce rays of the sun’s passing lustre rebounding off a metal surface. The sudden thought of somebody, anybody, giving him a hand was too sweet and relieving to refuse. He was stupid to have left the road, to have followed a cloudy arrowhead. He should have rushed back to the I80 the minute he found the first body. He cranked the keys and gunned Cosmo toward the reflective surface.
The drive overland was rough, full of worry that the pile of Matthews would awaken. As he closed in, he spotted a rectangular cement structure painted a creamy yellow that made it partially blend into the landscape. The glint Matthew had followed was a bead of light reflecting off a wilted stretch of chain-link fence dangling from its connecting supports. In front of the building was a concrete, cubic block that sank into the earth. Another hotly reflective metal, which looked like a ventilation shaft, ran alongside the concrete. Cosmo bumped and jostled over the torturous ground. The main structure was two storeys, shot with perfectly square, glassless windows. It was dark inside. Someone had spray-painted a neon-green swath across the side, its original message lost to the wind’s persistence. The ground swelled up to meet the base, or camp, or facility; an abandoned workstation, probably commissioned by the government. Matthew was about to hit the brakes, discouraged, and head for the highway, when he saw someone sitting on the steps of the building’s vacant doorway.
The figure – a hiker, a tourist, whoever – was a calm drop of moisture in so much dryness, a salve to his cracked lips and the hot finger of heat poking the back of his skull. Matthew pressed the pedal and nosed through a gap in the diminished fence, four-wheel drive accelerating and sputtering uphill. Near the building’s looming shadow, he reached behind him and freed a wrinkled Longhorns T-shirt from beneath a stone-like ankle. He stopped the van, donned the shirt and stepped onto the soil, wearing a friendly smile, a you’re not gonna believe this, but expression. Maybe so-and-so would recognize him; celebrity could always help.
He loo
ked and then lost his breath. It was the worst kind of recognition: as if he’d been walking with his head down, his eyes full of sleep, counting his steps on some warm and even pavement of Los Angeles, and before he could be collected and witty and put together, she was there before him, nearly bumping into him. And of course ruining him, making him blush wildly, making him curse the luck that brought him like a homer toward her through the million chancing alleys of a metropolitan city. Making him feel that something spiritual had intervened to make them meet.
He stood a few feet before the cubic slab of concrete. Sandra rose from the stairs, brushing her jeans of what the wind carried. She wore a T-shirt he hadn’t seen before: an evergreen. She smiled at him across the fifty feet of soil, and the wind blew her hair into a straight line, pointing west. She looked skinnier than he remembered; he focused on her collarbone, the knobs of her wrists and hips, blinking as grit and dust cut across his bare, sunburnt face. Then she was walking toward him, the same slow stride.
He knew then that he’d stumbled into fantasy – that at some point in the remote distance of the day, waking reality had slipped into dream. Why else were there bodies, identical triplets? Though he was lucid, the direction of the dream was out of his control. He would have to be brave and trust to feeling – like being on drugs, he thought – you had to let the flowers bloom unmolested, allow the petals to fall as they wished. He closed his eyes until he heard her scraping footsteps before him. Wake up, he told himself, but the world didn’t change. He opened his eyes and took in the full sight of her, standing two feet away.
‘Where are we?’ he asked after a beat, throat cracking with dryness.
‘What do you mean?’ Her voice was the same, but newer, like listening to a recording of his own.
‘Ah, hell,’ he said, pointlessly, catching a tone between baffled and bemused.
She kept smiling. The desert still, hushed, gathered around to watch them.
‘This is a bomb shelter,’ she said, as if amused by the word bomb. ‘Cold War relic, you know. Not many people know about it.’
‘You were waiting for me?’
‘Why not?’ She took a step forward. Matthew wanted to back away but his legs felt too heavy. Sandra curled a pinky finger around his, hanging loose and slack at his side. The finger sent a warm shock up his arm, through his neck, making him salivate. She was inches away and smelled of green things, of juice and fruit, citrus and lime. Beneath this airy smell there was the scent of rot somewhere. Her cheekbones were so defined they seemed chiselled from the ridges that surrounded them. He saw the small scar on her jaw that makeup and cameras typically covered up – a line he’d traced and retraced with his thumb, kissed. Her neck was dirty, but her sweat made long and clear lines in the soot.
‘How’d you get out here?’ he asked.
She looked in his eyes. Her brow knit in sympathy. ‘I got a ride.’
‘Ahh,’ he said. He found he was smiling, too, though nothing was well. His free hand went looking for hers, tugging at her fingers. ‘Ahh.’
‘Want to get started?’ she asked.
Matthew looked down, staring at her dusty sandals, the zipper of her jeans and her shirt’s hemline. He was nodding. She knew about the bodies, the brothers. It was like someone knowing your filthy secrets. She radiated knowing. He kept nodding, conscious of the work to do, but it didn’t feel right to waste what light they had by handling such ridiculous cargo. He’d driven out to the middle of nothing and found her here, after months of separation. They should be sitting together in the doorway, watching the sun descend and ravish the sky. They should be driving to Silver Creek, where there were motels and soap and clean sheets. L.A. waited for them in the west, the coffee shops and bars and restaurants where her dark eyes glowed in the dancing light of a candle. There were conversations left unfinished, the last word on every subject left hanging and deferred. He thought he was healing but the wound hadn’t even closed.
He wanted to remind her of a phone call he’d made a few weeks after their breakup. It was stagey, like an audition – he was channelling all the rainy regret of the season, drunk on Jim Beam and standing against the door to his bedroom, the phone cord wrapped around his fist. It was after two in the morning and he stood whispering into the receiver, reasoning with her, bargaining for a solution. Saying maybe they’d been too hasty. He didn’t want to start promoting The Newton Boys without someone out there waiting for him, someone who knew his secret weaknesses, someone to counsel and support him. He was drunk and weak, weaker than he’d ever felt, but she kept saying the same thing, like a chant: No, Matty, unwavering, despite his plea bargains, his careful arguments, his gambits and his begging. And when it was done, when there was nothing left to say and resentment rose against her tireless denials, her strength, he threw down the receiver and sunk into bed, exhausted and sick of himself. He wanted to remind her of that last conversation – how hard it was on him. He wanted to tell her that she’d never given him a second chance; that maybe if he’d gotten the reviews he deserved for Amistad, say, she would have acted differently. That maybe it was all about careers, in the end – their stupid, absurd careers sabotaging something so alive between them. He wanted to call her a bitch, an idiot for letting him go, cruel for blowing him off when he needed her most.
‘I miss you so much,’ he found himself saying, staring at the patch of earth between her feet. He waited for her to answer, clutching her hands harder than he meant. The light was changing. Then he heard her say, ‘I know,’ and she slid her hands up past his wrists and over the back of his arms, letting him take her into an embrace, and upon feeling the heat of her body he found himself sobbing, loud and hard against the citrusy, rotten smell of her new T-shirt, smelling her hair and her sweat, arms pawing and clutching at the fabric around her back. He watched, felt himself doing this, surprised at the show. His snot and spit pooled on her shoulder. He held her as hard as he could, whispering, ‘Wake up, wake up,’ still convinced that this was all made of dreams and dust.
‘Please?’ he asked, choking on the l. He knew he shouldn’t have asked, knew it was useless. He pulled back.
Sandra shook her head, but not without kindness. ‘We should finish,’ she said firmly, withdrawing, gesturing toward Cosmo with her eyes.
Matthew wiped his nose, sniffing. ‘Ah, hell,’ he said again. The light was rich and fiery in her eyes. ‘So what are we doing?’ he asked.
‘There’s a place for them underground,’ she said, pushing her hair over her ears, which stood out gawky and endearing from the sides of her head. ‘Through here.’ She pointed at the rise of concrete beside the metal ventilation shaft. There was a steel door set into the pasty yellow material. Matthew walked to the door and placed his fingers against the cool of the latch. It swung out with a stiff yank, whining on ancient, rusted hinges. Beyond were five feet of white cement floor, then a flight of stairs sinking down into absolute black, ageless and still.
Sandra stepped into the foyer of the shelter and picked up a flashlight from the floor, setting the beam on the top step, illuminating the short flight of stairs, the limits of a room beyond. Then she turned back to Matthew, smiling again: that same sad, resolved smile.
We’ll do it together, he thought. We’ll carry the trio down the stairs, one at a time, and leave them there. It was senseless, meaningless, but it was a plan. Down beneath the soil, where his three sleeping triplets could hear the whispers of the earth, the insane god beneath their feet. Where they would rot unmolested. It was what she wanted, at any rate, and he’d always gone along with her notions.
So they began. Matthew held each twin around the chest while Sandra gripped its ankles. He went down backwards, shuffling on the stairs and disturbing clouds of choking dust. They grunted and sweated, wiping their foreheads with their T-shirts and steadying themselves in the foyer before inching down the stairs. The room at the bottom was large – much larger than he’d imagined. They laid the bodies evenly and with care: head to toe,
head to toe. She’d run up the stairs before him, meet him at the van, the wind rising now and then to make her flatten and rake at her hair. The sky’s pallet became awful, extraterrestrial. Jewelled stars and streaks of gases appeared in the east, growing a deeper and deeper blue. He unscrewed the caps on a pair of water bottles and they drank, gulping savagely. They’d made it to the final body, staring into the western skyline and wondering what sweet brute could have made a world so organized, so painful, so generous. ‘So beautiful,’ he said to her, not knowing what to say, exactly, but feeling as if he could say anything in the world, leaning one arm on Cosmo’s now radiant, sun-streaked door and gazing into the fading heat. And they returned to the long, back-breaking struggle, freighting the last body into its tomb.
After the Matthews were laid to rest, she ran up the stairs as before, but he didn’t follow. Lingering there in the cool grave, he walked a slow circle around the square room. He could barely see, save for what was caught in the flashlight’s patch of yellow. He looked at their sleeping faces, feeling the weight so heavy above him, the compact pounds of dirt and rock and cement, the fine filigree of dust that covered the world. He kneeled and took one of the heads in his hands, kissing it slow and on the brow, not knowing what he was doing, if this was right. It doesn’t matter, he thought. We make ourselves at every moment. Looking around the room, seeing this kinship of flesh, he sighed, knowing this was the last look. He was okay with that. They were copies, but not essential. They didn’t have his memories, his sense of humour, his heart. They could be buried, left in the dirt. He could forget.
He walked up the steps. Sandra stood halfway to the facility, hands in her pockets, staring into the boundless sky.
‘So, hey,’ he said, walking toward her. ‘I really don’t know what I’m saying. I guess I’m gonna go. It’s gonna get real cold out here. You’d better come with me in Cos.’
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