Further Out Than You Thought

by Michaela Carter

She dialed his number. His machine answered after the first ring.

  “Dad,” she said to the tape recorder, “I got your call. Just wanted you to know I’m fine. And we’re leaving. We’re getting out of the city, so don’t worry. I’ll call you soon.” She hesitated. What the hell. “I love you, Dad,” she said, and hung up the phone.

  Leo sipped his tea at the kitchen table. “So we’re leaving, are we?”

  She opened the refrigerator and filled a few empty plastic bottles with the cold filtered water. “Morning,” she replied, as if she hadn’t heard the question. She was aiming at cheery, but she felt sick to her stomach. The refrigerator reeked. Old garlic? Onions? Tuna—maybe that was it. She swallowed, turned from him so he couldn’t see. She wasn’t going to run to the bathroom. Too obvious. What she needed were crackers. It was her mother’s standby remedy for nausea. Saltines—the kind with actual salt—and soda water. She remembered there being Saltines in a cupboard. On her tiptoes, she opened the cupboard door.

  Running from the light, the roaches scattered. She was sure these were the same roaches she’d relocated to the trash bin only hours before. She thought she could hear them cheering for Leo. Hey! Hey, it’s Leo! Friend to all! We salute you! Hey, Leo, brother, what’s for breakfast? They’d never leave. So long as Leo lived here, the roaches would, too. She saw the box of Saltines in the far back and extracted it. Inside was one sealed sleeve of crackers.

  She tore it open and ate one, washed it down with water. She felt better.

  Leo was still drinking his tea, observing her as if from a distance. Behind him, just to the right of his head, hung the crucifix, his crucifix. It framed him strangely. If he were in a comic strip, it was where his thought bubble would be. The brass Jesus, darkened with age, nailed to the wooden cross—what his mother had given him when he was twelve and he’d wanted more than anything to be a priest. My little saint, she’d called him. Il mio salvatore. How could she have known he’d end up thinking he was Jesus. It had hung on this wall since Gwen had known him. Odd place for it, she’d always thought, there by the kitchen table. Christ looking down at them as they ate, smoked, drank, and talked. His head drooping like a heavy flower. His body wounded and anchored, bound to the earth, and the spirit—up and gone. Free.

  “You’re making another flag, then?” she said.

  “I suppose.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Gwen—”

  “You’re not backing out now, are you? Covering your tracks?” She knew he wouldn’t get past the door, not if he were naked, and yet, she realized now, she wanted him to reach the threshold, maybe even put his hand on the doorknob, give it a turn. She wanted the chance to pull him from the brink, to save him from himself. It was all about timing. She wanted him to at least pretend he was going to follow through. If he didn’t act his part how could she play hers?

  “I feel,” he was saying, “I don’t know, different this morning.”

  “You haven’t smoked your morning bowl, that’s all. Let me pack it for you.” She broke a sticky green bud and pressed it into the metal cone, filled the bong with fresh water. “And maybe you don’t even need a new flag, hm? Why not use the bloody one? More symbolic.”

  “Tink,” he said. He stood, and took her face in his hands. He searched her eyes. “Tell me what’s going on. I look at you and it’s like I don’t know you anymore. Are you okay?”

  Was she okay? Why the hell was everyone asking?

  “Fine,” she said. “I’m fine.” But he stayed there. He didn’t budge.

  Faced with his intensity, his focus and quietude, this unaccounted-for presence, she wanted to bolt. She would get the rope, the handcuffs. She was on a roll. She wouldn’t give up her momentum. She turned her head, her whole body from him. She couldn’t look at him right now. Not like this. She’d break. She’d tell him everything. She flicked the espresso machine on, packed the grounds for a double, added water, and pulled the lever. A present from her father when she turned eighteen, it was already showing its age, and it moaned as it forced the water over the grounds. The smell reached down to her bones, her blood; it filled her.

  She made a double shot for Valiant, too. He needed it more than she did.

  Leo was talking and she only half heard. He was talking about eggs. Tiny red eggs in a nest. She was getting pieces of his dream. Like Sappho’s poems preserved in the mouths of mummified crocodiles, like those fragments that survived. Everything was tastier in pieces, more mysterious. There was all that white space around them. Room in which to doodle and drift, blanks you could fill in yourself. “Blood-orange,” she heard him say. “It was sky and water in one. I could breathe and swim through the tops of trees.”

  “Like a bird-fish,” she said, to show she was listening.

  Valiant, having changed from his robe into his riot-wear, joined them at the round wooden table littered with the ashtrays filled with ash, with the sketches of Leo as Zero the naked savior, and with the fruit too soft to eat—green shrunken apples and oranges collapsing in on themselves like dying stars.

  She and Valiant drank their coffee. Leo drank his tea and smoked, taking a break in the story of his dream to inhale, to hold the smoke in his lungs. He passed the bong that wasn’t a bong to Gwen who straightaway passed it to Valiant who packed it with fresh dope and smoked. It seemed to calm him, enough so that his hand was steady when he lit another cigarette.

  “You were on the edge of something,” Leo said to Gwen, and it was as if he’d reached into her chest, grabbed hold of her heart and squeezed. He’d always had this ability—to know just where she was, to intuit it.

  “A cliff. No,” he said. “It was a house. It was where we lived, but it was old, ancient, with these high walls. And you were on the edge of it. On the roof. And it was crumbling, the wall, the whole structure was falling, turning to a desert. You were alone, walking on the sand, and I was—” He laughed. “I was this mouse and you picked me up. You were so, so benevolent, Gwen. You were this gorgeous giant.”

  A wave of exhaustion washed over her. She didn’t want to be benevolent, nor did she care to be huge. Leo was talking and she closed her eyes, letting his voice mix with her need for sleep. She felt the kitchen sway, as though they were on a ship, a ship far out at sea. She opened her eyes. Leo was silent, and so was Valiant, everyone in their own world, all right here, at one table. There was mist around them, that rare morning light in which the sun’s rays, made visible by the smoke, had dust motes dancing inside them. Swirling. And it hit her. This moment wouldn’t return, not ever. Not the sun through the soft, burned Los Angeles air, through their torn window screen. Not the two scrubby faces she adored. Not the coffee steaming. 1992 would be gone before they knew it. It would be another year. And she’d be someone else. She’d be a mother, if she dared. And where would Valiant be? How much longer would he hold on—to the body he tried so hard to destroy—hold on to the flimsy sunlight and spare Los Angeles oxygen, so the tunes only he could hear might come through him and into the world? How much longer? And what of Leo? Would this be the end of her time with him? Would she drive off one night and never look back? Or would he stay in her life for years? He was all artist, sitting here in his white Thomas Jefferson shirt, maculate with drops of tea and blood and smudges of cannabis ash. Yes, with his ringlets loose to his shoulders, with his easy smile, he looked beautiful.

  The morning held in this lull a sense of possibility. The three of them could go where they liked. For now, they were due south. But they were free to change their course. They could head east, or west, or north. Anywhere, really. But for this instant in which there was quiet, in which there wasn’t any wind, only a pale yellow light surrounding, buoying, filling them, they were still. Suspended.

  “You know,” she said from deep inside the mist, her voice sounding far away, “we might as well tell you where we’re headed.”

  Twenty

  THE LIGHT MADE Leo look almost holy. As if the smoky rays were planned, all
part of the set of a film—Zero, Messiah for Our Troubled Times—a parody no doubt. And this, the scene in which Zero, the Los Angeles ascetic, complete with his beard, with his parched lips and the dark circles under his eyes, is overcome by his vision.

  She picked up Valiant’s camera and brought Leo’s dilated pupils into focus. And then her mind was far ahead, ten years or so, and she knew this was something she would remember, as she filled an album with images of the three of them, affixing the photos to the blank white pages with little black paper corners she’d have to lick and press into place.

  When a friend dies at a young age, leaving the world at a time when your life—the life you will come to feel is your real life—is just beginning, they take that other self, the person you were, with them. She imagined this would be the case with Valiant. He would take the old Gwen with him, on a trip from which neither would return. And something else would happen, too. Years in the future, when she’d look back and examine her life in segments, she would come to view this one in particular less with a sense of continuity than of transformation. The cocoon from which her butterfly emerged. But for her friend this time was his butterfly stage. Unless, perhaps, she could widen her gaze and look from a greater distance, at a range that included the unknowable, the dark side of the moon—that place he would disappear to.

  She understood that by the time she developed this roll of film and filled a scrapbook with the photos she was taking now, the Count would have been gone for years. And this day in her memory would be patchy. She would remember how they’d tied Leo up for the hell of it, everything a photo op. And after another bong rip or so, he was more than game. For him it was a relief to submit, to be bound and taken from the city—and from his plan—by force.

  In the frame, his chest was bare and wrapped with rope. He held the bloody flag in his hand and looked up into the rays, as if he could see the sun, could look straight at it, as if those rays had reached inside and subsumed him, and the sun could no longer burn the retinas of his eyes. She pressed the button, heard the shutter open and close. In the next shot, they were on their way. Leo’s chest was still tied with the rope, but now his wrists were cuffed and he was being led through the courtyard by Valiant. Fifi’s leash was hooked to the cuffs and Valiant gripped the other end of the leash, pulling Leo along. In his arm, Valiant held Fifi with a gesture that said she was his prisoner, too. He looked straight at the camera and sneered—an old Western, silent film, villainous sneer, the kind one pictures embellished by a handlebar mustache. It was a lark, a riff, a moment thieved and pocketed. But taking the photo, she noticed how the thin skin of his cheeks wrinkled too easily, and his features were too large for his face.

  Gwen looked for Barry, to photograph him, but he wasn’t patrolling the building, nor was he on his balcony. Walking away from the Cornell, she glanced back, and thought it seemed a little forlorn and vulnerable, a little lost without him.

  It felt as if, stealing into the city by first light, they were the only people left, the last of the Angelenos. Valiant stumbled along, the leash on his wrist, holding Fifi and the remainder of the six-pack. Leo, in his knickers and bare feet and handcuffs, was freed from himself and glad of it. And Gwen with the suitcase in one hand, the camera in the other, felt invisible, ghostly.

  Pink by pale pink, pink by gray, quietly the City of Angels watched them saunter up the sidewalk toward the car. Prone, Gwen thought, like a concubine, her smile showing no teeth.

  How many times had they walked down this street, the four of them? And yet this particular stroll felt different. She felt a vague, persistent heartache, as if this time was reaching its inevitable close—the end that had been there all along but had been hiding, waiting in the shadows of the theater’s wings for that final cue, to pull the rope, to make the curtain fall. And she knew she would remember the quality of the light, this light, and how, like diaphanous veils, it both concealed and revealed. The light was kind, and the neighborhood looked pretty in it. Too pretty. The way things look that are past—not passing, not going, but gone.

  When they reached Jin’s, which appeared to be open, the door flung wide to the day, Leo declared he was hungry. “Fine,” Valiant said. “I’ll stay out here.” And he opened a beer and settled on the curb with Fifi on his lap. Gwen took the leash, hesitating a moment before entering. Leo shuffled in after her. Behind the counter, Jin was watching the news. A few of yesterday’s donuts—a maple bar, a plain twist, and a bear claw—sat behind the glass of the donut display case. The donuts were sweating, beads of perspiration on their skin of frosting.

  “Morning, Jin,” said Leo with a grin that in the context of what had happened there the night before made him look if not insane then certainly naive, as if hailing from some remote island.

  Jin squinted his bloodshot eyes at Leo and turned up the volume on the TV.

  The L.A. Riots: Day Three. The whole world was watching. A woman leveled her gaze at the camera. Hundreds have been injured and thirty-three are dead or missing on the third day of what authorities now call the worst civil unrest in Los Angeles history.

  Just thinking about the fires made Gwen thirsty. She paid Jin for a couple gallon jugs of water. He gave Leo the donuts for free and poured Gwen a coffee, setting it in front of her with furtive, downcast eyes. He looked exhausted, his spirit as crumpled as his shirt. In his kind, soft voice he said he hoped the National Guard would make it to their neighborhood, hoped today would be better. But she could tell he didn’t believe it. He turned back to the TV. He didn’t ask what they were doing or seem at all surprised by the rope or the handcuffs or the leash on Leo instead of the dog. Had it been a normal day, she doubted he’d have asked. This was, after all, Los Angeles.

  Munching the donuts, his hands still in cuffs, Leo led Gwen and Valiant to where he’d parked the car, in the Jewish neighborhood with the houses that must have cost a million apiece, the little houses with high, pointy iron fences and bars on all the windows. The street was so quiet it might have been the dead of night, and it felt more like a set than a real neighborhood. As if the town had somehow shrunk, it seemed to exist just for them to leave it.

  Now Valiant took photos. He snapped a shot of Leo tied up in the backseat of the car, and one of Gwen as rescuer, untying him, unlocking the cuffs and, holding his head in her hands, trickling water from a plastic bottle into his mouth.

  Gwen threw the old suitcase into the trunk, and they were off. Leo sat in the backseat with Fifi on his lap, and Valiant in the passenger seat, reclining as far as it would recline, popped open another Bud. “Really?” Gwen said.

  “Breakfast of champions.” Valiant grinned and settled back, his dark glasses shielding him from the shock of the sun.

  “Just keep it down, okay?”

  With Gwen, as always, behind the wheel, they were driving and all the lights were green. It was fate. The city wanted them to leave.

  She rolled all the windows down, because the sky looked almost blue. But the air was parched. Her mouth was dry, and her eyes burned. She checked them in the side-view mirror. She looked stoned. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear, it said. But there are things that don’t appear in the mirror, things you can’t see. The smoke-smell, like a hangover, was there, just as the city for all its stillness was tense, holding its breath. Waiting for a wind to lift the anger and its residue, to send it. And she realized, she hadn’t, this morning, seen or heard a single bird.

  Up ahead a Humvee rolled down Pico slow enough to own it. On closer look, she saw it was crammed with boys in camo. White boys and black boys, she noticed, and a few of them brown. Before yesterday she wouldn’t have thought twice about skin color, but now she wondered how those black boys felt, riding into L.A. in uniform. With the white and the brown boys beside them, they were the face of the U.S. government, bringing order, the illusion of control. The boys were holding—she didn’t know what they were called—long, muscular black automatic weapons.

  “M16s,” Leo said.<
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  Valiant hadn’t moved for blocks, but now he crooked his head up. The Humvee was one lane over. He lowered his sunglasses on his nose, gazing over them at the boys, all golden in the sun, and so close. “My, my,” he said, his drowsy eyes dancing.

  The Humvee turned down Fairfax, and he lay back down, a grin on his face. “I had a marine once. It was on the beach. I’d dropped acid and I was wandering. Moonlit summer night. Somewhere in the middle of it all, he was over me on the sand. Jesus, he was a vision. He was something. Gone with the sun. Never did tell me his name.”

  She’d heard the story. The gorgeous marine he’d had on the beach. He was just out of high school, singing in the gay lounge in Laguna Beach under the pseudonym Johnny Fontaine, the character in The Godfather patterned after Sinatra. Those were the heydays, he’d told her.

  1981, 1982. Before.

  Before anyone realized, at least. They’d called it GRID back then, he’d said with a sad smile. Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, but it didn’t stop anybody. He could have picked it up anywhere. There was no way of knowing. He’d slept with so many men, men just passing through town, and that marine who might have been Jason of the Argo for all he knew.

  Alongside them, an ice cream truck played “La Cucaracha,” and she felt like they were already in Tijuana. The red, white, and blue bullet pops, Fudgesicles, sundae cones, the strawberry shortcake ice cream on a stick, Pink Panther and Tweety, even a plain old ice cream sandwich caught her eye. The side of the truck was filled with possibilities. And her stomach was growling. Food. Ice cream in particular. When had it sounded so good? They came to a stoplight.

  “Leo.” She pressed a five into his hand. “See if you can get his attention. I want anything. Get an ice cream sandwich, or the strawberry ice cream on a stick, anything.”

  “Oh, oh, I want, I want!” Valiant chanted. He was a child, clapping his hands. “I want a chocolate banana bullet.”