Death Valley

by Perly, Susan;

  “Jesus. Do not call me Vivi. That is my husband’s name for me. I do not even let Val call me Vivi. And nobody but me calls my Johnny J. What are you, educated slime?”

  “Harsh, ma’am, if I may say so. You are right about the surveillance, nice mission, surveil the subject up a mountain. What would you say if I told you he said it was okay, that he gave me the A-okay to call you that?”

  “Who? What? Call me what? Where? Who, why, what in the holy hell are you talking about, sonny?”

  “Your husband. Johnny Coma. J.”

  “You say J one more time you will be picking teeth out of your nostrils and that jaw will be so glass they’ll melt you down for sculpture.”

  “He gave me the five thou and said, ‘She likes to be called Vivi.’”

  “Bull. Total BS. I never heard such bull in my life. If you know my husband so damn well, which you do not, why did you not even blink an eyelash at him when we walked up the stairs here? I have had it with Crazytown, get me to Peaceful Acres, Lord, I am ready.”

  “Doesn’t that prove it? You didn’t say hello to me, and you had me half-naked as a prisoner in your room,” Andy said.

  “Is that your story?” Vivienne asked. He was getting weird, creepy. Was he really going to retail these lies? Others had. How modern to agree to photos and then to say the photographer forced you.

  “Oh excuse me. Not half-naked,” Andy said. “All naked. You forced me to take a shower with you, you threatened me and got me naked.” He liked how he must look when she got mad at him. Good enough to get her going. How she was getting that pre-aura look in her eyes, how she wanted to take his picture, how they were dancing in anticipation together.

  “Forced you?” she said. “A soldier? Look at me. I am not even five foot four, I weigh one twenty-five, I have small feet, look at my hands.” She knew she was vamping for time, situating herself in its small variations. “I forced you? A soldier, built, please.” She came over to him, took his hands, put her arms around his waist, held him back to admire him the way lovers do, admiring his body, then laid back and socked his jaw in the same spot again, harder. “Is that what you want? Because I am sure that is what you ordered off the woman-hating menu.”

  ANDY WAS IN the bathroom, looking in the mirror, holding a wet towel to his jaw. There were no face cloths in a motel this one star. His bone structure was at a slant, his perfect cheekbones receding. The swelling had come quickly on his lower jawline.

  Vivienne looked in the mirror. Her face looked like limestone, mixed with pink rhyolite, mosaicked with shine and bioturbation. The black lake on the left bubbled away like a birthmark branded by the birth of atomic power. The largest organ in her body had been compromised thoroughly, her skin, this organ of organs set on the outside of our bodies. There were peeling patches on either side of her nose, as if the skin were rice paper. The largest organ in your body turns to paper. Along the top rim of her lip, blisters had come up black, but now the black hard bubbles were shining green and spotted with yellow pus. She took a picture of herself: George W. Bush Loves Me.

  The two of them had gained an air in the last twenty-four hours of one of those couples you see when you travel, whose story you wonder about and invent. She – getting up there in years, but must have been pretty, even beautiful until recently – was it illness? Did he beat her, did she drink, time on the street, cancer? Her arms looked plague stricken, sarcoma ridden.

  His eyes were deep and spooky; he looked like bar fight central.

  It came on Vivienne like a thought photo: the pics she had taken of her and Andy in the Vegas hotel room? Those pictures could never be taken again. Health is a mirage we review in old photo albums. She had aged ten years and gone down the class-appearance ladder two notches overnight. She looked like a ruin, stark.

  Her visage and air in the mirror was rough, ferine. Andy looked like a beaten-up human with his pet creature.

  Her neck scar from the electric collar torture was there when she had met Andy. He had never asked her about it; she’d never told him the story. Yet he had stroked her neck when he called her his dove.

  “Your husband loves you,” he said. “He wants you to finish this book.”

  “Leave it alone already, you do not know him, you do not know me.”

  “He told me.” Andy picked up the wallet. He riffled the Benjamins, all fifty of the one hundred dollars bills. “He gave me this green.”

  “Baby, do not play me,” Vivienne said.

  “We were having a drink in Margaritaville, back in Vegas. I was having a quiet drink at the bar. He comes in, he sits at the bar and he orders food, I noticed that. People who come in and order food right away at a bar have ordered food at a bar before. I made him as travels a lot for work. He orders a Sam Adams, the coconut shrimp, the garlic mashed potatoes, sound like him?”

  Vivienne was feeling antsy, alert.

  “We got to talking. He asked me if I would like to earn a couple thousand dollars doing some work for him. He called it a subcontract. I told him I was shipping out in the morning. He said perfect. He said, perfect.”

  “I heard you,” Vivienne said. She put her arms around Andy’s waist, tight, she put her head on his shoulder, she took a pic in the mirror. Tentatively titled, Betrayal, Panamint Springs Resort, Death Valley, California, December 31, 2006. She did not let go of Andy. He did not try and loosen her grip. She did not say, What else did he say?

  “I said I doubted I could get it done before the morning. He said, ‘Give it a whirl.’ Does that sound right, Give it a whirl? I said, ‘I think if I understand you correctly your woman will be mighty upset, sir.’ He said, ‘Chances are. Call me Johnny.’”

  Vivienne took her arms away from his waist. She walked to the bed, sat down, lazily scoping the outside through the lens of her camera, seeing nothing. Yeah, I heard you.

  “He said, ‘Two thousand now,’ and didn’t he up and hand me two thousand bucks right there at the Margaritaville bar. I’m listening to ‘Sea of Heartbreak’ so loud I could barely make out his proposition, and this guy I do not know from Adam is handing me cash on the barrelhead if I go sit in the coffee shop, in and out all afternoon, starting when he gives me the signal, and all I have to do is make sure the lady in the pink jacket makes me an offer to go upstairs with her.”

  “You make it sound dirty. You ungrateful little twerp. I ought to spank you.”

  “I won’t say no.” He had the upper hand so he was laughing, he could afford to. Power likes how things are cute and funny, little amusements are power’s shiv weather. She did not have to ask him to wipe that smirk off his face, she could do it for him. And then make him immortal in a photograph, beaten and smirkless.

  Johnny. Sure. He did love her, he did cherish her, he would do anything for her, he had told her multiple times there was no one like her. “My Johnny did that?” She was standing now. “Jojo hired you to what? Seduce me?”

  “To be present for you. To get in your way. To help you finish your book.”

  “That fucking fucker. That fucking control freak. I hope he is counting his balls, because in one minute he will not remember he has two.”

  She was out the door of room 15 and steaming her body down the scrub area past the washroom, around the corner right up to Johnny and Val’s table where she slid in beside Johnny on the bench, put her hands around his neck and did her move, the one that Marty Hirsch had taught her when she was a teenager: how to kill a man by crushing his hyoid bone. She expertly pressed in on the horseshoe-shaped hyoid, which supports the muscles of the tongue, finding it between Johnny’s chin and his thyroid cartilage. Johnny was choking, as Vivienne intended him to be choking. Talk now, my love. Talk now, my sweet, talk darkly, make plans to run my life, go ahead, control me. Talk now, writer. Give me a reading.

  Val watched, doing nothing.

  29

  THE NEW DRONES

  VIVIENNE FELT THE edges of the eatery fade to fog. She felt a disjunction in her arms, a flash flo
od of energy. She pressed down harder on her husband’s neck. The jugglers had arrived. Behold the re-entrance of the jugglers. Who mock your tidied-up soul. Who arrive in big military vehicles bringing blackouts to your existence. She was in a blackout inside a blackout. She had come back from shooting with conflict-zone eyes, and she had kept her same outward face, and that was the lie. Her unharmed face had been a cover. She came back, and she did not recognize her own thoughts. She seemed, on so many days, to be speaking the implanted words of somebody else. Yes. Somebody timid, too polite, not even shy really, worse. Genteel. Her coarse war-weathered voice seeped in the smoke of the celestial true began to squeak, to get lodged high in her windpipe. Every night she dreamed the same dream: she was down by a river washing a photographic print of its chemicals, the print was six feet by ten feet, many beautifully clothed women washed with her. Then in a sweat, she woke up, every morning, at the lucid edge. There was no river. She was bathing the photographic paper in the dust of an arroyo. Yet she cleaved to the vividness, the truth of the dreamscape. Days passed with her answering Johnny’s fan mail, sparing him so he could write, pretending to be him, flirting online with the ladies, feeling smug about how they crowed they knew him, but they had never known him, only his wife, the war photographer giving them e-thrills as her pastime.

  How had she, the dirty dog of Saigon, come to feel so smug in her little art time cons? At night in the deeper part of the Earth’s molten core, the world asked for her, Baby Pink, Queen Moxie, like a lonely lover, asked why she had deserted the hot spots of the suffering world – the refugee camps, the war huts on a border, the hideouts embedded with guerillas – only to roam in stasis with the satisfied, as the corrosive grace of history marched on without her. Making art is stray dog work. Her gut was the rotgut truth of rough womanhood. The conflict peaks and the war-shredded jungles aligned her; why else was she alive? She was meant to be a wild witness. Johnny was trying to domesticate her. He was trying to steal her eyes!

  She pressed her fingers even harder on Johnny’s neck, putting her back into it now. He had set her up! She could feel ropes binding her eyes, making fluorescent green shine back into her retinas. Her eyelashes closed into the bindings. Light pink danced at the edges. Pounding hooves kicked up dust in her brain. She heard the clicks of shoeless feet. And this the jugglers did implement.

  In the green and pink blindness she saw her Original Child Eye spinning. Why be safe? Was she safe in El Salvador, when phone voices spoke of her death to come? Was she safe when Mrs. Coma put the electric screws to her neck, in Montevideo? Her life intention had roamed until it found her. She was meant to be a photographing mutt down at curb level, watching with x-ray eyes the aching pulse of the morphic planet and its distressed representatives walking. Let the horses’ hooves pound her. She would be the rough shepherd to their wildness.

  She felt the rope on her face fall away. The tight lime cotton fell away. The blackout was clearing. She had gone out to war to chase starlight, even in the darkest ditches. And to keep her home, Johnny had tried to be the puppet master of starlight, putting her together with Andy, as a one-time thing. But he was dealing with the girl from the North Country fair and the boy from the far West. Vivienne and Andy – starlight. Do not mess with starlight.

  “You set me up with Andy, my darling husband,” she said. “Tough titty. Those atoms fell for each other. Step back, puppeteer. The chemistry lives on without you.”

  And this she said, as the small metal buttons on her scalp grew into metal seed pods, a metal Medusa at Panamint Springs. The broken parts will rise, sprouting empress steel bulbs of glory, the broken brain will erupt as a rogue headdress, a radioactive tiara full of snapping eyes. She loosened her thumbs. She took her hands off Johnny’s neck.

  “Fuck your little names for me, Johnny,” Vivienne said. “Fuck our little love codes. Fuck your drawings, and you know what? Fuck your novels.”

  Johnny went back to sketching a cartoon woman with giant eyelashes on giant eyes, a big luscious mouth and fire hair. He was smiling.

  She picked up the plate with Johnny’s half-eaten burger and dropped it on the verandah floor. She poured the remains of his Corona on it. “Are you prepared to die?”

  “Oh please,” Johnny said, taking a slug of Val’s beer, a drag off of Val’s burning smoke. Val continued to say nothing.

  “And you,” Vivienne said, pointing at Val. “Do not blame me, because you’ve lived a life unloved. What did you expect? That a woman would live your life for you? Not me, brother. You. You. You fucking…American.”

  Val wasn’t listening to her. His mind was on the orange phone in his pocket, which held her voice and how it sounded when she was taken by someone who was her thrall. He did not want to hear the sound of the actual Vivienne speaking to him.

  She walked back to room 15. “Get your gun,” she said to Andy.

  “I have it here,” he said, patting his jacket.

  “Kill my husband. I’ll sit in the car,” she said. “You kill him, we’ll go to Lone Pine. Okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  ANDY WALKED OUT the red door of room number 15, headed in a straight line to the corner, rounded the bend, walked to the table where Val and Johnny sat and aimed his pistol with his arm straight out, his eye firm. The story the gun was following said that Andy San Diego shot the legendary writer Johnny Coma right in the heart, one late December day in ’06 at Panamint Springs in the desert.

  As Andy aimed his weapon, though, Vivienne’s eye was there first, at Johnny her beloved one and only, then at Val, and her arm pushed the pistol in Andy San Diego’s hand and, as Lady Luck would have it, the soldier shot the spy Val Gold. Vivienne pushed Andy’s arm, so the gun took aim at Val’s heart, instead. Val Gold held his heart and called, “Vivienne.”

  Johnny Coma’s best friend, Val, had been shot by one of his wife’s photographic subjects, a man she had not even known existed back east in Toronto on Christmas Day. Now, as they closed in on New Year’s Eve, Vivienne was taking off with him. Andy the soldier she met in the coffee shop, and her husband, Johnny, was sitting there with a look of fury. You changed.

  “Bye-bye, J,” Andy San Diego said. “I’m your wife’s man now, Mr. C.”

  Val was doubled over onto the table. Johnny said to Vivienne, “You do want war, don’t you, any other way.”

  Vivienne said, “Goodbye, Val,” as she pivoted on the stairs, and one-handed got off another shot of Val, of the waiter just coming out to the verandah, looking at her, looking at them, looking at her, another guy at the edge of the frame. What had just happened in this picture? The lady from table one was running away with the guy from table two.

  The waiter stood there with a Corona in each hand, and a box of Band-Aids in his mouth.

  VIVIENNE PINK AND Andy got in the white Honda and left, zooming up the incline to the badlands road. The time elapsed from when she said, “Kill my husband,” to when they drove off was three minutes, one hundred and eighty seconds. You could take one hundred and eighty thousand photographs and more in that time. Vivienne took one.

  Behind them the Panamint Range and the Panamint Valley moved back as they rode west along Highway 190 with the Argus Range on their left. On their right lay a gorge and Rainbow Canyon. Rimy snow, looking like the twin of desert salt, lay on the dark brown volcanic rock of the road where low purple hills carried the snow into the blue sky, and frozen snow danced down the volcanic badlands, melting below in the sun. They stopped at Father Crowley Point.

  At the outlook at Father Crowley, where the world was rough and empty, and there was no railing or any security down into the deep canyons, they got out of the car.

  She was not sure that she even liked him.

  On the edge of the canyon, a man sat. His head was wrapped in a long red shawl that blew in the wind, its long fringed tendrils lifting and falling. He was sitting with his legs stretched out in grey pants, ballooning below a rug he had wrapped around them to his waist aga
inst the cold. The rug, Vivienne could see as she came closer with her camera to her eye, was soft, velveteen, a type of rug she had seen plenty of in Baghdad in the souk and also in Herat, Afghanistan. It was woven in the traditional motif of one of the Turkmen tribes: a repeated animal like a llama in deep blues and orange-reds and brown-purples. The sun was bathing the rug as desert suns do. This was the natural process of what many rug dealers back East did, sent their rugs to the Southwest desert to have them laid out, to be bleached and reach that ancient Middle Eastern look in authenticity, what sun does to animal wool. The man saw Vivienne and Andy, he beckoned them come to him, he unwrapped the rug from his legs. It was about six feet by seven, an instant wilderness room shape and it was, instantly too, a place to sit, a table to put things on, a social space defined on the rock, a little floor lacking a roof, the floor, the table, the seats, as rugs carried on pack animals have always been. If it is cold in the desert you wrap the floor around you.

  They stood in a strange courtesy at the edge of a Death Valley cliff, a stranger in woven goods their improvised calm host.

  Vivienne watched erosion behind the man down in the striated folds of basin and range. She watched the opposite of photographic time, yet what she the photographer yearned for: the moment is short; the photograph forever.

  “My burro broke,” the man said. He lifted his red scarf from his head. His hair fell down in cascades of grey. He wore a long wool coat on his upper body, in a Southwestern motif of dark brown chevrons, woven arrows on tan wool with orange threading. Peculiarly and wonderfully, his lower-than-hip-length coat with wide lapels and his lap rug went together, the way a stylist might put together woven desert classics of different patterns but similar provenance and shades for a fashion shoot in which the photograph told a story the viewer was intrigued by. This man was the mystery narrative encapsulated in a melancholy composure with the tablelands setting off the wonderful textiles he wore. His grey dried hair was perfect, woven by disuse and bad grooming and the punishing dry air. Vivienne felt her hair, while looking at his, and a matted clump came off in her hand. Andy had his arm around her waist. Vivienne showed him the clump. He took it from her. It was the size of his palm. “You look like you’ve been scalped,” he said. “Let me see your head.”