The farewell speech.
Zooey winced.
Their knees bent, slouching away from the light. Her words rose like the last bubbles of breath from a drowning victim.
“What…How could you say that to her?”
Adrian pulled themselves together, stiffened up, commanded their chin to attention.
“I had to.” (Moves for the kitchen.) “This was wrong—you know very well it was wrong.” (Opens a Pop-Tarts sachet, moves toward the toaster.) “She’s infatuated and you’re enabling her. Someone had to slap some sense into her, so I did—without the actual slapping, by the way.”
(Inserts the Pop-Tarts into the slots, pushes down the lever. Then shoves their right hand into the slot, all the way down, scraping off the skin against the red-hot wire grill, and the left hand holds the right by the wrist, and the right arm wriggles and jolts while the left arm and shoulder and hip and leg lock it there and let the rest of the body shriek at the feeling of skin vaporizing into grilled-chicken smoke and the red flesh below simmering in its own blood for a whole second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, before a final jolt throws the toaster across the room, pulling the plug, and the whole body falls to the floor, gaping at their mutilated hand.)
(And then the unharmed left hand punches the skull into the floor.)
“How could you tell her that, you soulless monster?! She’s a child! She’s only a child!!”
(Adrian doesn’t answer, all his strength focused on dodging the left fist’s jabs while his own hand, in flesh and blood, lies palm-up on the floor twitching like a dying tarantula, and the feet fight each other, memories of the previous night still downloading for Zooey to see, now reaching Ursula’s last line before Adrian slammed the door with the glass panel and the fresh shiny vinyl letters: “Zooey does love you.”)
“NO, I DON’T!” Zooey yelled through both her and his tears. “I DON’T LOVE YOU! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU AND I HATE MYSELF, BECAUSE YOU DESERVE TO DIE ALONE AND I’LL BE STUCK HERE WITH YOU!!”
(But Adrian isn’t looking for excuses; he channels what little strength he still has to his elbow, the right one, as it pitifully tries to tug the whole body across the room, toward the desk, and Zooey’s left hand is clawing at his side of the face as his right one pulls the top drawer off the desk, and the case with the syringes comes tumbling out, and Adrian manages to grab a syringe and stab her shoulder down to the bone, and then another syringe, and then another, and another, until the left arm has gone numb, jerking in spasms like a wounded snake, and even then he stabs the last syringe again and again and again and again die die die until the shoulder cramps and the muscles beneath turn into jelly.)
(And then the cramp unexpectedly crawls up toward the neck, and for one sudden, terrifying second his windpipe is paralyzed, but then as though someone cut the noose it relaxes and his chest muscles liquefy and the cramp marches on to the right side of the body and flows into the arm, toward the elbow and the forearm and the charred, bloodied hand pining for it, begging it to smother its frenzied nerves, and finally the shock wave reaches the wrist and the thumb and splits into each of the four phalanxes up to the roasted fingertips and it disconnects all the alarms, every system inside the brain, every standby light, and the orange-brown eye looks in to check all systems are off and yields to the weight of its own eyelid and shuts down.)
(And Kimrean fades to black.)
10
The lightspill from the window was lime colored, as though the sun had been hitchhiking in the rain and splashed by mud from a pickup truck and then three rednecks had jumped off the truck and beat him and left him bleeding in the ditch, and the sun was really angry about the whole incident.
The first thing Kimrean felt, long before seeing it, was their right hand, bloodied and grill-marked and polka-dotted with patches of exposed flesh.
They scrambled up, hissing, shielding the wound from floating particles.
“Ow! Pain! Pain pain pain pain pain.”
With the help of what could pass for a clean piece of cloth, they improvised a bandage. There was not any liquor in the house (liquor having a life span of minutes whenever it entered the house), so they finally decided that their natural blood alcohol level would probably be enough to prevent infection. They swallowed a couple painkillers, washed them down with tap water, and finally scanned the tiger-striped office: living area, desk, chessboard.
“Right. Right!” shouted Zooey, stumbling back to her corner, fists up. “Okay, what were we fighting about again? I’m gonna kick your ass so far your turds will have jet lag.”
She completed a full spin around their axis—a full day on planet Kimrean.
“Adrian?”
She stopped. Then she described a full circle again, counterclockwise, without looking outside.
“Ade?”
(She stops, tilts her head.)
“Adie Adie Adie?” (Beat.) “Dickhead?”
Something cracked under her sole when she stepped forward. She lifted her foot. It had been a syringe.
She touched her left shoulder. The pain in her right hand had pushed the mildly annoying needlestings way to the back, but the spots where the syringes had stabbed her arm stood out in plain sight. Five, six, seven of them.
Her green eye glinted and nudged the brown one to follow.
“Oh, you poor thing—you never knew how to do drugs. You overdosed on Diarctorol!”
She hollered at the ceiling, stretching her arms like someone seizing a double bed all for themself.
“Ooooh, yeah, baby! This calls for celebration! (Takes a bottle of whiskey from the waste bin, confirms it’s empty enough to belong there, tosses it again.) Sleep tight, little boy. Mama will come home late tonight, oh yeah she will!”
She Hammer-timed all the way to the coat stand for her hat and waistcoat, put her business/party accessories on, and skipped back to the chessboard, where the remaining black pieces stood witness to the astonishing resurrection of their commander in chief.
“Ding-dong, motherfuckers. The witch is dead.” (Knocks down the white king; it crashes with an echoing boom among its jaw-dropped soldiers.) “And I didn’t need no He-Man this time. Tough luck, bro.”
She cavorted out, grabbed the door handle, smiling at the fresh shiny vinyl letters, and stopped.
“Oooh. Wait.”
(Right hand raised, because, you know—wait!)
“There was something else. A case. A mystery killer. ‘No reason. Only passion.’ A right-brainer. (Strikes out a word on an imaginary blackboard.) No executions. (Circles one.) Torture! He tortures the father. Kills his offspring. Offspring. ‘And all the girls say I’m pretty fly, for a rabbi.’ Ha! No, wait, that was Yankovic’s take. Another prime example of a cover improving on the original. This could be a theme for a mix tape! (Runs to the desk for paper and pencil, stops after two strides.) No, wait wait wait wait. Right-brainer. Someone irrational. Someone sadistic. Someone unbalanced, taking on the whole cartel. Not business. Personal. Someone aggravated. A casual victim. Collateral damage.”
She stared at the wall, arms akimbo, like a quantum physicist at a buzzing blackboard. Only the wall featured nothing but bullet holes.
(Scoff.) “Gosh, collateral damage from a drug cartel? That could be anyone. I mean, it could be—”
Every trace of a smirk left the building.
Outside the window, the universe stopped expanding.
“Holy Gandolfini.”
The left hand clutched the skull, tried to squeeze it. Inside, Matrix source code was spilling in an avalanche of data.
“Oh, fuckity-fuck. Ursula!”
She dashed outside and forgot to close the door.
The corpse of the white king rolled off the chessboard and fell to the floor as Zooey’s steps vanished down the stairwell.
* * *
�
��
Hotel Bohème was a ten-minute walk from A.Z.’s office or a three-minute sprint: Zooey ran all the way down Columbus Avenue, barely dodging the street musicians and tourists waiting for the trolley, and veered sharply into the narrow front door under the marquee. The air over the Bay Area was heavy with the apocalyptic gloom of any given Sunday evening.
She galloped up the red-carpeted stairs and hesitated on the landing, just long enough for a Michael Caine–type receptionist to pop out.
“Oh, Adrian! Is your friend in 210 staying another night?”
“No! She’s checking out!”
She ran up another flight of stairs and bounced off two corridor corners. The lock on room 210 stopped her for good; she pounded on the door.
“Ursula! Ursula! Ursula! Ursula! Ursula! Ursula! Ursula!”
She had to wait almost a full second, pondering whether kicking down the door would put much of a strain on her friendship with the Michael Caine–type receptionist, before she heard the bolt click.
The door opened an inch, enough for Zooey to crash through, grab the child, and drag her like a football to the goal line.
“Ursy! I solved it! I think I solved it—maybe not for sure but let’s say ninety percent with a fifty percent error margin or something but you gotta come with me you’re in danger!”
Ursula processed the message, mentally adding the missing punctuation. She was wearing her second T-shirt and cradled a Kerouac book in her arms. The exiguous contents of her backpack and a couple shopping bags were spread over the quilt—paperbacks and enough soft drinks and snacks to kill a type-1 diabetic from long range. By the time Kimrean had taken in all those atmospheric details, the child was still reading into her eyes.
“Where’s Adrian?” she asked.
“Dead. Or sleeping. Maybe. Doesn’t matter. Come on, we gotta go.”
She grabbed her arm; Ursula gaped at the ugly, badly dressed burns.
“Oh my God, Zooey, your hand!”
“Not my hand, don’t worry; come on!”
She tugged again, but Ursula resisted. In fact, Zooey realized, Ursula did not seem overjoyed to see her. That was inconceivable.
“Is something wrong?”
The gap before the next line of dialogue immediately nodded: There is. A gossamer rustle from the bed canopy shushed down the room.
Ursula, an eleven-year-old in her own check-paid hotel room, lowered her head and said, “What do you care.”
San Francisco had somehow gone silent.
Zooey knelt down, craned to make eye contact. “Of course I care. How could I not care? You’re the femme fatale, remember?”
“No, I am not a femme fatale!” Ursula objected. “Adrian was right; I do nothing but wait around for my rescuer to save me, and then what? They’ll take my parents, I’ll have nothing left, but I guess it’s okay because somehow you and I will just live happily ever after?”
She allowed a gap for snarky replies, knowing that she would get none.
“I’m just the girl. A girl. And as soon as you solve the case you’ll discard me and forget all about me. You might as well drop me off now.”
Zooey listened intently, brain visibly accommodating to follow the logic of the argument.
ZOOEY: Couldn’t you just hold on a bit longer? ’Cause it’s gonna be tricky to replace you now that the third act started; I could always ask Demoines, but—
URSULA: No, I don’t want to be replaced!
ZOOEY: Then what do you want?!
“I just—” she false-started, and then she looked away, pressing Kerouac against her chest, and said, “I want a happy ending! I want to not be left on the curb by the end! I want to mean something to you, but I’m stuck in this role, and I hate being the girl!”
“Ursula, I am a girl!” Zooey proclaimed, pointing at herself, challenging anything in the room to contest her. “I am a girl, and I’m the detective! I have my office and my hat and my vinyl letters on the door, and I’m solving the shit out of this case! You can be anything you want—not the girl, not the femme fatale—anything! Besides, femme fatale is a bullshit cliché—it’s a plot device that male genre writers use to ultimately blame all the violence and conflict on some outside force, because somehow in their manly mind-set it’s more forgivable to make stupid decisions for the sake of a beautiful woman.”
Ursula almost felt the pain of that offhand slam.
“You never said that the other day.”
“I know,” Zooey admitted. “I would never tear down something while you like it.”
She closed up, one knee still on the carpet, lipless mouth in a sweet angle of a smile.
“Listen, I know you feel like a kite in a storm now. That’s not because you’re the girl, it’s because you’re a kid, and that’s what being a kid is. But it gets better. You will take the reins. You’ll write your own story. And I wouldn’t miss it for the world, okay? I’m not leaving you on the curb. I am hooked. I care.”
Ursula snorted, made sure not to sound weak when she ordered, “Promise.”
“I promise,” Zooey said, like it was the easiest dare in the world. “Right now I’m just trying to keep you alive long enough, okay?”
The hotel room held a respectful silence, and then waited to watch the kid’s reaction.
Jack Kerouac on the back of the book against Ursula’s chest breathed a little easier.
“Okay,” she whispered, drying the last tear. “Good.”
“Good,” Zooey said, standing back up. “Fine.”
She puffed out, glanced around the room, satisfied with her point.
And then she said, “Come on—my car is parked around the corner!” and clasped the off-guard kid’s wrist and pulled her off her feet and out of the room like a flying kite.
The book fell on the carpet and Jack Kerouac heard them disappear down the corridor, Ursula yelling, “Zooey, wait! You are driving?!”
* * *
—
She was driving indeed, since there was no guarantee that Ursula could do it any better and it was actually likely she would not reach the pedals, but the trip was fairly uneventful. Perhaps one or two little life-before-your-eyes flashes while Steve McQueening down Nob Hill, and during a couple shortcuts through roads under construction where there weren’t any workers anyway, but once they rushed through the last yellow lights out of the metro area, it was a smooth ride. Except for that tiny near-brush with that biker gang on the highway, of course, but that was really their fault for hogging all the lanes and for being such douchebags, as Zooey made sure to point out to each and every one of them while leaning out her window and replacing -bag with another suffix for each member. And that was pretty much it. It would be difficult to fit any more remarkable incidents into the thirty minutes it took Zooey to drive eighty miles, really.
It was still a long way to San Carnal when Zooey steered left like a heat-seeking ICBM, leaped off a curb that barely lifted the pony car six feet off the ground, and landed it onto the parking lot of a diner. The diner.
Zooey jumped out while Ursula, tangled in her seat belt, struggled to sit back upside up. Behind the diner’s double doors, the few truckers ruminating in front of their coffee didn’t have time to appreciate the dramatic fedoraed silhouette framed by the western sky; it strode in right away and confronted the violet-haired waitress who was mopping the floor.
“You, Frenchy! The girl you’re filling in for, where is she?”
The woman with the name Cecilia embroidered on her uniform didn’t seem to recognize her.
Zooey expanded: “I was here on Friday, asked you about the girl you’re replacing. You said the surgery had gone well. She was shot. A stray bullet through that window hit her in the boob—I’m seeing the darn in your uniform right now. Where is Cecilia?”
“Wh-what?” she stammered. “Who a
re you?”
“Yeah, that happened,” another waitress assisted from the counter. “One of the Lyon kids was here; they met with some Japanese gang outside and started shooting each other.” She pointed at the brand-new panoramic window.
“Where is she now?”
“I guess she’s still in the hospital.”
“Right,” Zooey said, asking over her shoulder on her way out, “Who responds to 911 calls from here—San Carnal Medical?”
“Yes, but she didn’t take an ambulance—what’s-her-name took her. Her girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?!”
“Yeah, she was here when it happened, saw the whole thing. She wouldn’t wait for the ambulance—carried Cecilia to her van and they drove off.”
“A flower delivery van?” Zooey guessed, turning back to the doors that Ursula was just coming through. “Thanks!”
And she snatched the child by the collar and tugged her back to the car.
* * *
—
Half an hour and seventeen serious violations later, the Camaro parked in front of the emergency entrance of San Carnal Medical Center on 12th Street under the Palm Expressway. This time around, Ursula was quick enough to jump out of the car, close both doors, and follow Zooey into the main building only ten seconds behind her. They raced past the waiting room filled with ghostly eyed citizens passing the evening there, all holding alien objects lodged inside their bodies or having accidentally run into bullets too fast, and Zooey flashed her badge in the general direction of the admissions desk.
“I’m looking for a patient, name Cecilia, came in Monday night with a bullet wound.”
The avian clerk put the glasses on her beak and started typing away with annoying meticulousness, but another girl who was just leaving the nurses’ station with a coat and handbag was faster. “Cecilia the redhead? Are you family?”
“Am I?” Zooey gaped, consulting with Ursula. “Wow, that would be some twist, wouldn’t it? Well, a little too forced maybe. Let’s say no.”
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