by Schow, Ryan
Ever.
After having my chest pried open, after having gasoline poured down a rubber hose straight into my heart, and after having a match put to that pond of gasoline inside me, it’s probably good that I’m sleeping at Netty’s, and living in an entirely different city.
The minute I push the blankets off my body, the cold, San Francisco morning hits me, sending my skin into a fit of goosebumps. My feet chill on the hardwood floor and when I get in the shower, what could have been an invigorating thirty minutes of bliss turns out to be fifteen minutes of hot water turned luke warm. I stand in what quickly becomes cold water for another few minutes just to punish myself for…whatever.
Then it is more cold floors, more goosebumps, more melancholy.
Forty minutes later, my hair is done, my makeup is light but done right, and I feel…not so cold. I’m also grateful for the break in between my nightmares. They’ve left puffiness around my eyes and a weighted sluggishness in this otherwise perfect, GMO body of mine.
When I put these tired eyes on the clock, it’s ten-thirty in the morning and Irenka is already gone. Off to plan some high-society swinger party for sure. I find Netty in the kitchen making a pot of coffee. Ah, the first signs of normal, I tell myself. The smell in the air, it’s heaven.
I find myself smiling, though I don’t know why. Then again, does it really matter?
“What?” Netty says.
“Coffee is this generation’s version of crack. I want a cup so bad right now.”
She pours me a cup and says, “From one addict to another.”
“This isn’t the cheap shit, is it?” I ask, before taking a sip. The last thing I need is to over-hype my own coffee experience. The letdown would be catastrophic.
“Not by a normal person’s standards.”
My first sip is in fact heaven. My body sighs. A junkie getting her fix, that’s me and my coffee.
“You want to do breakfast?” I ask.
“If you’re buying, sure, but if not, I’m going to cook some eggs. I’m unemployed in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I haven’t. That’s why I’m buying.”
She seems to perk up a bit, and I have the feeling she’s starving for some of her old indulgences. “Have you been to Zazie’s down on Cole?” she asks.
“No, but I hear it’s amazing.”
“I met the owner, Jennifer Piallat, at a gathering in Cole Valley a couple of months ago,” Netty says. “Whenever I have extra money, I eat there. Her pancakes are beyond words.”
“I can’t eat pancakes,” I say, thinking the last thing I need to do to this genetically synthesized body is fatten it up.
“Bullshit,” Netty says. “These pancakes you can most definitely eat. We’re not talking about bleached flour that clogs your colon and makes taking a dump feel like you’re giving birth out your asshole. We’re talking gingerbread pancakes. Think, bosc pears and lemon curd.”
I have to admit, it all sounds delicious. And I can’t help laughing at Netty’s PG-13 description of breakfast. It’s pretty funny hearing her swear, actually.
“Trust me,” she says with the biggest Netty-grin ever, “this is the orgasm your face has always wanted but never had.”
“Okay, potty mouth, I’m in.”
6
Twenty-five minutes later in my un-stolen, unmolested Audi, we’re walking in the front door of Zazie’s. Oh my God, the smell of the French restaurant is enough to make me rethink the meaning of life! Forget city life. Forget living on the go at near-light speed. The mouthwatering smell of chicken apple sausage hits my nose like roses for those willing to have a love affair with food. Right now what I want are eggs Florentine. A bowl of hot Irish oatmeal with raisins and walnuts and brown sugar. The biggest glass of freshly squeezed orange juice ever.
Looking around the quaint, rectangular shaped dining room, I’m seeing pancakes and French toast and egg scrambles and it makes me think about being fat again. Like it wouldn’t be so bad to be able to eat all this food on a regular basis, if only I could purge myself of the guilt. If anything, this is foreplay for my inner fat girl. Ugh.
“You bitch,” I whisper into Netty’s ear.
“I know, right?” she says, excited.
I want to cry. “This isn’t fair.”
“If you can imagine,” she says, “practically all of it is healthy.”
“Ha, right!”
“Inside or outside?” she says.
I’m taking in the décor: the pale yellow paint, the brick walls (practically a staple of any really good bay area restaurant) with its framed pictures of Zazie (the French film star and France’s version of Shirley Temple) and the wooden wine shelves. It’s warm inside, and the air smells so good I’m sure it’s fattening, too. Zazie’s: the gateway drug to obesity.
Mmmm.
At this point, I’m thinking: a pound here or there…I can afford it, so whatevs. Inside feels cozy, but outside looks beautiful, too. We’re talking about an enclosed garden-like setting, one that has you feeling far removed from the hustle and bustle of the city. It screams of tranquility and fresh air, but right now I’m trying to stay warm, so really, my mind is made up.
“Inside. It just seems, I don’t know, perfect. Don’t you think?”
“I do,” Netty says.
“So you say the gingerbread pancakes, huh?”
“Pick what you want,” she says. “It’s all to die for. Especially the Mexican scrambled eggs with chorizo, although, it’s gonna burn a bit when you crap.”
“Gross,” I say, inadvertently scrunching my nose.
“Just a warning. Then again, I’d have them again in a heartbeat because, holy cow, they’re worth every flaming turd.”
Unfortunately it’s not really that loud in here, so the woman sitting at the table next to us leans over and says to Netty, “Are you talking about the Mexican scramble?”
“I am,” Netty says proudly.
She looks right at me, serious as can be for an older woman of maybe fifty or sixty, and she says, “Trust me, they’re worth it. The roasted peppers and white cheddar…simply divine.”
“I’m sold,” I say, thinking a Mexican breakfast followed by a hot evacuation sounds like just the right combo. It will be like old times. What I’m thinking is the nostalgia alone is worth indigestion and personal humiliation. Really though, I feel sorry for whatever bathroom I’m going to destroy.
Gross, I know, but seriously, whatthef*ckever.
When the waiter asks me what I want, I’m like, “I’ll take the Mexican scramble, extra spicy please, with lots of ice water.”
“That a girl,” the woman next to us says.
7
After an amazing breakfast that fails on every level to disappoint, Netty asks what I want to do and I’m like, “We need to find a costume shop. Someplace where they sell wigs and big sunglasses and stuff.”
“What for?” she says.
“Surveillance.”
“On?”
“Gerhard’s lab. That’s where I took Rebecca from. That’s where I’m going to start looking for her.”
“And what are you going to do about the crazy doctor if you see him?”
Damn. I left my tazer gun at home. My stomach drops, which weighs more than usual since it’s now holding breakfast. What was I thinking?
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
It takes me a minute to respond, then: “I don’t know. It’ll be strictly hands-off until I can assess the situation. Really at this point it’s just reconnaissance.”
The waiter brings us our bill, I smile big at him and tell him how much I love this place, the food and the service, and then I leave a generous tip and we head back to the Audi.
“Do you have your license?” I ask her. “I need to rent a car so you’ll have to take the Audi.”
“What?” she says, the look on her face incredulous. “Why?”
“Jesus, Netty, where are you? I told you, I’m doing surveillance and the Audi isn’t
exactly subtle.”
“No,” she says. “It’s not.”
“So do you have your license or not?” I say, starting the engine.
“Is this who you are anymore?” she asks, concern bleeding into her eyes and voice.
I look right at her, into those lovely eyes of hers, and I say, “You know this is who I am.”
“It just scares me sometimes, that’s all.”
“License?”
“Yes.”
“Good, let’s go get a van.”
“I thought we were renting a car.”
“Netty, no one in their right mind would kidnap someone in a car,” I say, even though I took Rebecca from Heim in the Audi just recently.
What I don’t say, however, and what Netty might eventually realize, is that I won’t be re-re-kidnapping Rebecca again, I’ll be taking the psychotic doctor, too. I’m going to see how that son of a bitch likes having his heart set on fire.
Scarred up and Sarging
1
The drive to Vegas was an exercise in the mundane. Brayden drove from one crappy town to the next only to leave it all behind for more desert. Talk about depressing. All he could think about was Abby.
After being kicked out of her house, after doing what they did together in Santa Monica and surviving what they survived, to be separated so quickly made him feel like an aborted fetus. His life felt like a sappy love novel where no one died, they were just devastated that someone hijacked their destiny.
Maybe he teared-up somewhere along the way. Like in the desert when he was sure he was all alone on the road. His helplessness, it was pernicious at best. Why did he have to like Abby so much? She started out as a goddamn swamp donkey for heaven’s sake!
But she wasn’t that…Savannah thing anymore. Hadn’t been that for awhile.
Almost all the way to Vegas, he tried remembering the beastly troll look of her when she first arrived, but he couldn’t dredge up a clear enough image. There was only the feeling of her once being this uninspiring slug. The feeling he had of her now was different. All he could see was her new face, her spectacular body, that look of steadfast determination in her expression. Who Abby had been—the subcutaneous eyesore known as Savannah Van Duyn—that girl was long gone.
This new version of her was an unattainable desire. A girl he couldn’t have. His first real crush, the one who would never be his. It sucked to admit that, but it was true. Painfully true. Brayden wasn’t ugly like he used to be, but he was no Damien. He was no Jake Teller. On a scale of one to ten, ten being so good looking girls went sterile just being near you, he was a four who became a seven. Barely. And Abby? She was a two who transformed into a ten. The very nature of her being a ten was him realizing tens don’t date sevens. Now she was realizing it, too.
Of course, Romeo and Titan—his pick-up artist friends and his mentors—would adamantly claim otherwise. That’s why he liked them. Their philosophies, their strategies, their success, it created space for hope. It made him feel like the impossible could be realized. But the life of a pick-up artist could be a lonely one: you never got attached, never settled down. You just pursued girls, hooked up and pursued some more. Like a bad cycle with no room for romance, no room for love to foster, to grow and to form something more meaningful. God he sounded like such a girl right now.
That didn’t make it unrealistic, though, did it?
Finding the one girl who could be everything was the dream, but the thing about serial dating was you become A.D.D. for the next new thing. You crave the chase. The lay. A player works the odds. Getting laid, it’s basically a numbers game.
Women are the conquest, but players don’t want a woman. They don’t want one person. They want women, as in more than one. As in many.
Dating to guys like Titan and Romeo meant two, maybe three encounters followed by gratuitous sex, followed by the giving of the consummate let down. When he was staying with them before, both during Christmas break awhile back and recently at the beginning of summer, their phones were ringing off the hook.
But he wasn’t like his friends. He didn’t need to get laid ninety-six times to feel whole. He could care less about the attention, or the reputation.
All he wanted was one: Abby.
So, when he finally pulled into Vegas at nearly ten o’clock, rather than joining up with Titan and Romeo, he checked into the Wynn hotel. Alone. He paid for a panoramic corner view room, then asked the front desk clerk—a twentysomething with a small chin beard and spiky hair—to have some sleeping pills delivered to his room.
When the kid started to object, Brayden slid him a twenty and said, “Seriously dude, the drive from San Francisco has me restless, and I don’t have the patience to hunt for a pharmacy this time of night. I’ll take whatever you have, really. At this point, I’m not terribly picky.”
2
The pills arrived with his luggage. After sleeping for like thirteen hours straight, he called his father and told him where he was staying.
“I haven’t heard from you for awhile now,” his father said.
Brayden’s voice bore the tone of depressed youth. “I’ve had a bad run of things.”
“You’re not gambling, are you?”
“No.”
“Do you need money?”
“I should get a job, but…”
“Why don’t you come and work with me for the rest of the summer. Eventually you’ll have to learn the business. Your time here, it won’t be for nothing.”
“I don’t know, dad. I’m just not in the right frame of mind for that.”
Brayden wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps about as much as he wanted to do ten inch lines of blow and watch midget porn in his mother’s underwear in front of a live television audience. Basically it wasn’t going to happen. And now? Right now he felt wasted from the sleeping pills and basically too depressed to do anything.
He father was a successful oil man, but he was also a giant among regular men. That made him seem so much bigger to a kid, especially Brayden. The brilliant thing about his father—who was uglier even than Brayden—was he managed to turn his ugliness into a superpower, something Brayden could never do. Around the man, Brayden felt weak. Apologetic. Like the very sight of him was Kryptonite to his father’s super-sized Texas strength.
Brayden’s father never really berated him for what was once physical weakness, or his excessive displeasure to the naked eye. His only transgression was trying to mold his son into the mini-me version of himself. It was this unreasonable nudging that caused Brayden to turn to computers.
Online you could be anyone. Any face on the internet, you could save and post it as your own. You could be handsome, popular, famous, infamous, cruel or unrelenting. You could steal other, more successful people’s accolades for yourself, plagiarize some long dead poet’s work and intersperse it into love notes to women in online chat rooms, even cut pictures of some dude’s gigantic rod and paste it on your own pelvis just to make yourself look absolutely HUGE. Online, Brayden could be the Wizard of Oz. It was like a dream compared to the reality of his father’s boring, boring offline life.
In his bedroom late at night, in the privacy of his room, subjected to only his own company and limited only by his outlandish imagination, Brayden discovered his own set of superpowers. The code he wrote and broke, the way he could penetrate even the most secure of firewalls, it was as if he were given some dark talent and all he needed to do to rule the world was refine it.
So he did.
Eventually he grew to be one of the most notorious hackers ever to rattle the cage that was the worldwide web. A feat he was particularly proud of. A feat he had to keep only to himself.
The only reason Brayden let himself get caught was to prove to his father he wasn’t a nobody. That in a different world, he was a giant, too.
Of course, he went and got himself arrested. He knew his father and their army of lawyers could get him off, but not without serious repercussions. He would soon
be in the employ of the FBI working for free to stop guys like him from breaking into systems like theirs.
Now the very thought of being on a computer startled his father. Made him worry for his son’s future. But for Brayden, it was only a matter of time.
“You’re not using, are you?” his father asked. First the questions of gambling, now this? No, he wasn’t using a computer. The first signs of panic, however, were already changing his father’s voice.
“No. No computers. It’s just…I went to stay with Abby for a few days and our friend Maggie, well, she sort of killed herself on account of being raped by this real piece of shit music executive.”
Silence. A breath.
“Wow,” his father said, like the idea of teen suicide was a novel one.
Brayden sat up in the oversized bed, skimmed his palms over what was becoming a shadow of newly grown hair, then used the room’s touch screen device to open the drapes. He had booked several nights in the panoramic corner room, using what credit was left on his card to pay the deposit. When he checked in last night, the first thing he did was open the windows and marvel at the lights of the Vegas strip. The nighttime views did something to him. Made him think he could be different. Someone new amongst the darkness and the lights and the anonymity of the city. But then he just fell into the bed, the sickness in his stomach an ever expanding force brought on by so many things gone wrong.
Now, with the phone to his ear, wearing only his boxers, he crawled out of bed and went to the window overlooking the daytime version of the strip.
What an ugly sprawl, he thought.
The words dry and hot came to mind. Everything looked dingy. You have to be a vampire to live here, he thought, because who in the fuck would want to be awake in this town during the day? Maybe he’d be that guy, that “vampire” who slept through the day only to go out and own the night. Maybe he’d live that life for awhile.