There is one thing, though, you know—that once you get money, there are certain things you’re expected to do.
With great power comes great responsibility.
You know who said that?
Spider-Man. That’s right. Spider-Man. My second favorite philosopher, next to Jesus.
I always listen to a man covered in cobwebs. Yeah.
Reminds me of Grandpa.
So, this didn’t really occur to me during my years of deprivation and struggle, but once you become a big-time celebrity, you’re expected to give back to the community and the world.
Like, you know how Bono, he’s gonna grow a potato for every person in Africa?
Or I assume that’s what he’s gonna do, seeing as how he’s an Irish fella and all.
Maybe he’s gonna take Africa out to the pub and get it stinkin’ drunk on Guinness so it forgets all its problems. That’d work, too.
I’ll be honest with you, I’m not really sure what he’s gonna do. I was watching his scraggly piehole flappin’ away on CNN in the waiting room at the car wash—my kids were gettin’ their weekly shower—and the subtitles were all messed up, so maybe I only got part of the story.
I do think Bono could afford a shave once in a while, though, don’t you?
“Bics for Bono,” that’s my new charity.
Some of these celebrities, man, some of their charities are really obscure.
Like, I saw Dustin Walker—yeah, the cat movie guy? Yeah, I saw he’s raising money for, like, rare neurological diseases? You know, people who got seriously messed-up brains?
I mean, that’s what he says he’s doing.
Personally, I think he’s just funding research to look into his brain and find why he ain’t funny no more.
He’s got to, say it with me:
Fix ’er uuuuuuuuuup!
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. That’s the thing about the catchphrase—you gotta spring it on people when they least expect it. Like a possum in a sack.
You shoulda seen the look on my son’s face when I opened that sack. Boy, you’d just about mess yourself.
I mean, he’s just six months old, so it’s the same expression he has on his face most of the time anyway, but I still thought it was pretty dang funny.
Yeah, father of the year, that’s ol’ Billy.
So after a lot of soul-searching and cogitating and twelve-packs of Miller Lite, I hit upon the underrepresented, underprivileged, underserviced group that will be the beneficiaries of my newfound largesse.
Are you ready? I don’t think you’re ready. Because I’m thinking outside the box here. The cause I’m gonna champion is:
Sluts.
Yeah, sluts. You’re laughing, but it’s true—they get no respect. None. Women don’t like ’em ’cause they steal all their men; men don’t like ’em either.
The next morning, I mean. After those five clinic visits. All that cream and penicillin.
But sluts provide a valuable public service, which is giving hope to millions of ugly-ass, underendowed men all over the world, that even they, too, may one day get laid. It’s hard being a man—no, it is. You ladies think we got it made, but we gotta pee standing up, just like everybody else.
What?
What’s that?
Oh, yeah, maybe that wasn’t the best analogy. Or metaphor.
I always get them two mixed up.
Sluts been giving so much for so long to so many people, after so many raspberry margaritas, that I think it is high time somebody gave something to them.
Repeatedly.
Night after night.
With gusto. And verve.
See, I don’t know why you’re laughing. This is important charity work I’m talkin’ about here. Show some goldang respect, y’hear?
What my charity is, see, is a not-for-profit to help them sluts at their most vulnerable, which is, statistically speaking, Saturday and Sunday mornings, when they wake up in the bed of whoever last night’s fella was and, somehow, they gotta make their way back home.
The proverbial walk of shame, yeah, you got it. I plan to make the walk of shame a thing of the past.
Like polio.
I am going to take my excess income and invest it in a fleet of refurbished ambulances that drive around town looking for sluts on their walks of shame, pick ’em up, provide them with the morning-after pill, hangover cure, antibiotics, replacement thongs, whatever else they may require, and then bring them sluts on home, drop ’em right at their doorstep with no cost to them personally and, more importantly, no judgment. None. We don’t do none of that “slut-shaming” I read about on the internet. No, no. We provide this service free of charge, no questions asked.
Except for their phone numbers.
What?
You think I’m gonna let this precious opportunity to meet the next Mrs. The Contractor go to waste, you’re outta your goldang mind!
Fix ’er uuuuuuuuuuup!
—Billy the Contractor
Grand Ole Opry, Nashville, TN
April 12, 2010
I
TJ Martinez laughed despite the fact that he was horrified, not amused, by Zoe’s dying on the monitors in front of him.
He banged on the bar, but it wouldn’t move.
He laughed at that, too.
When he tried to look inside the jamb and discover where the bar was stuck inside the doorway, he started to laugh, too.
He started to feel light-headed and dizzy and staggered over to the bench to sit down, but his ass missed it and he crashed hard and painfully to the ground. And that caused him to erupt into a three-minute-long laughing jag that left his chest on fire.
It was becoming harder and harder to breathe. The whole situation reminded him of hanging out at the clubs with Dusty, and they’d get passed those small metal cylinders—what did you call them? whippets—to break open and snort and get all revved up before hitting the dance floor.
“Oh my,” he said, and his voice was high and squeaky, like he had just inhaled a balloon.
He looked at the air vents and saw the slats waving like they were a mirage, and he realized the room must be flooding with gas.
Nitrous oxide?
Also known as laughing gas?
“Oh, shit, it’s a trap,” he squeaked.
He looked on the monitor where Zoe lay, eyes wide, staring up at the camera. Was she looking at him? Was that possible?
“See you in just a bit,” he said, and then started laughing.
And laughing.
And laughing.
II
Two things happened more or less simultaneously, or at least that was how it appeared to those experiencing them in real time:
The lights went out, one by one, across the island.
And the laugh track started.
Steve Gordon stepped out of Zoe Schwartz’s room with the dog treats in his pocket, trying to follow the pat-pat-pat of her bare footfalls on the tile floors but not moving very quickly, presuming it was wise to give her space to calm down.
He was halfway down the wide sweep of finely carved balustrade when the whole house abruptly plunged into darkness, punctuated by a snorting, nasal chuckle.
Steve froze on the stairs, gripping the railing until his fingers were white, but no other sound came. He could sort of sense, in the air, the nonvocal anticipation of an audience waiting to let loose.
He thought he saw movement in the gallery coming toward him. Not wanting to take any chances fighting blind, he stepped sideways into the library. What little moonlight seeping into the gloom outlined the edge of one bookcase-turned-door, slightly ajar.
He crossed to the door and opened it, and the corpse that had been leaning against it keeled all the way out. Its skull, barely held together with uneven strips of skin, broke open and smeared the front of his shirt with blood and bits of bone and brain.
Cruel peals of delight reverberated against the walls, appropriate for an unexpected pratfall, the ul
timate slip-on-a-banana-peel response. Steve pushed the corpse away and stumbled back. The face was an inhuman cabbage of dark red splotches, but somewhere in his brain sparked the realization that its clothes had once been on Oliver Rees’s body.
His mind had no use for this information. It just wanted to get away, away, away from here. Already his throat was tightening, his stomach churning. He scrambled away blindly from one body and collided with another.
This one was upright, moving, warm. He whirled as the air above him exploded with diaphragm-borne guffaws and aw-no-he-didn’ts rolling like hurricane waters.
He grabbed the shoulders of the intruder and saw the wide, white eyes of Meredith Ladipo.
III
Meredith Ladipo?
“Don’t!” Steve said, backing up through the door she’d used to enter the room. “Don’t make me hurt you! I don’t want to!”
“Ha ha ha ha ha,” the walls said. “Ha ha ha ha ha ha.”
Out through the clown lounge he stumbled, leered and wept over by grease-painted gargoyles. He stumbled through the playroom and fell out of the French doors in the direction of the pool, with the still-lit fire pit providing the only illumination as far as he could see. He fell on his knees and threw up into the top pool what little remained in his stomach. It was hardly more than ocher bile, but it drifted in a tendrily mass through the too-blue water like a unicellular organism grown to grotesquely impossible size.
His vomiting earned polite, go-along sympathy laughs. The kind you give your boss when he tells a bad joke but you still want to be employed; the kind that makes you feel less of the audience for having given it, and even less of yourself for eliciting it.
These mild chuckles he heard from the sliding glass door, from back inside the house, not that he needed any more persuasion not to go back there. Laboriously he stood up, one foot and then the other, and spit the remnants of the puke out of his mouth and into the pool.
He staggered around the side of the house to the edge of the cliff where the bouncy house stood. The inflated Dustin Walker danced on its gable in the moonlight as if in pagan ecstasy.
Another light burned in the distance, one he had to stare at for a good forty-five seconds to verify it was real and not some fear-crazed illusion.
IV
After Steve Gordon ran from her, Meredith Ladipo felt her way around the library; she discovered Oliver’s remains and backed away breathlessly to the stairs. She fled upstairs to her bedroom, intending to lock the door behind her and not come out again until dawn, but she discovered Dante Dupree sitting at her desk, illuminated only by the screen of her open laptop, rocking back and forth in her rolling chair.
“Oliver Rees is dead,” she said.
To her annoyance, the air quivered with closed-mouth chortling, ghost mockery from dark quarters. With a queasy feeling, she realized that the speakers must be here, along with the cameras, so anyone in the panic room could watch and listen to her sleeping, dressing, bathing, and doing God knows what else.
Dante looked at her when she spoke, his eyes heavy-lidded, and he moved his lips momentarily as if about to speak, then didn’t.
So she continued:
“It looks like another booby trap. There was a hidden staircase, it looks like, in the library, and, uh, when he opened I guess, from the inside, this sledgehammer, on a wall? Swung out and smashed him right in the face and, uh, it did not do his skull any favors. It does not look good. There’s a huge bloodstain on the wall, and, and…I don’t know that I’m ever going to recover. The hammer hit the wall so hard that the wooden handle, it shattered in half so…it’s no longer useful as a weapon and—could you please stop looking at me like that? I would really prefer it if you would stop looking at me like that. Whatever is the matter?”
“When were you going to tell us about this?” he asked.
Between his right thumb and index finger was a small pill bottle with a prescription label wrapped around it. He shook it like a baby’s rattle.
“I was never going to tell you about it,” Meredith said, stiffening. “It’s private. And you have no right to go through my things. Much less take prescription medicines which I need. I’ve been looking all over for them all day and I would ask you to give them here.” She reached for the bottle.
Dante didn’t move. “ ‘For anomic aphasia,’ ” he read off the side of the bottle. “I had to look it up on your dictionary program here.” He nodded at the laptop. “That’s quite a list of symptoms.”
He picked up a legal pad he had taken from the writers’ room and showed her what he had written. “Look right to you?”
She looked at the pad and looked back at him, speechless.
“ ‘Consistent inability to use or recognize words correctly, particularly nouns, proper nouns, and verbs.’ All that crazy stuff out of your mouth nobody understands—those aren’t, like, weird British words we don’t have in America. Those are super-special Meredith Ladipo words that absolutely nobody else on planet Earth uses, am I right?”
She started wringing her hands. “It’s a very rare neurological condition even on the anomia spectrum. Substitution aphasia, it’s called. I was born with a defect in my brain in the speech production center. Broca’s area? I know what the correct word is to use in any given instance, but my brain can’t find it. Instead it substitutes another. Especially under times of stress.”
“Stress,” Dante said. “Like, I don’t know, doing stand-up in front of a crowd? Or an improv game with five other people? No one believes in the indomitability of the human spirit as much as yours truly, but one might suspect that the inability to use words correctly is, I don’t know, a deal-breaker for someone claiming to want to be a comic. Using words, after all, is pretty much our entire fucking job description, unless you want to be the first black Marcel Marceau.”
She took a deep breath and spoke as slowly as she could. “That’s why I always wanted to be a comedian. They always know just the right words to use, and when to say them, and how high or how soft, how fast. How to not say anything and let the laughs build in the silence.
“When you have this condition, you feel like you’re just this big, clumsy hippopotamus in a world made of glass. You’re always bumping into things, knocking things over. Stand-ups are so graceful with their language. That was what I wanted for me.
“Dustin…Dustin believed in me. He thought I could overcome my disability. For someone like that, with his reputation, to give encouragement…hope? You have no idea what it meant to me.”
“Enough that you’d kill for him?” Dante said.
V
The wall of the cabana facing Steve Gordon was lit up like the marquee on a comedy club in classic Old Vegas fashion, each letter illuminated one after the other before the whole thing blinked together before going dark again and starting the letter-by-letter cycle once more:
S-T-E-V-E G-O-R-D-O-N
F-r-o-m T-V’s “W-h-a-t J-u-s-t H-a-p-p-e-n-e-d?”
O-n-e N-i-g-h-t O-n-l-y
Was it a trap? he thought.
Don’t be simple. Of course it was a trap. This whole island was a trap.
He walked toward the cabana without being conscious of having decided to do so. As he approached the small house, the laughter in the mansion receded to the background.
For that he was grateful.
VI
“I’ve never killed anyone in my whole life, or even thought about it,” Meredith Ladipo said. “I’m not that sort of blunderface—” She winced, like a needle skipping across a record. “I’m not that sort of person. I can’t believe Mr. Walker was either, really.”
“Then you haven’t been paying attention,” Dante said. “Or he sold you on a bunch of nonsense. But then it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”
“You’re talking shite.”
“Nah, nah. Not me. I’m a big fan of hope and encouragement, but it sounds like he was selling you a bill of goods in exchange for making you his mammy. Like he sai
d you could climb Mount Everest with a plastic fork and a pair of earmuffs.”
“No, no, you’re being excessively negative. It’s not as impossible as you’re making it seem. Substitution aphasia is manageable with a variety of treatments, like picture association…naming therapy…and drugs.”
“Drugs? Yeah, let’s talk about drugs. I found this in your bathroom when we were searching it earlier.” Dante returned his attention to the pill bottle label. “Draxamema…Draxamemapheti…I’m not even gonna try. All I care about is this list of side effects: Mood swings. Paranoid tendencies. Memory loss. Aggressive out-bursts. Manic and grandiose thinking.” He lowered the bottle and cocked a grin at Meredith. “Girl, there’s a whole side of you we haven’t even seen yet, isn’t there?”
“No,” Meredith said, her voice quavering.
“Dustin Walker didn’t meet you in no open mic in the West End, did he?”
“No,” Meredith said, then caught herself. “I mean…”
Dante leaned forward in his chair:
“Dustin Walker found you in his nuthouse, didn’t he?”
She wiped tears from her eyes. “I wish you wouldn’t use words like that. They’re very hurtful.”
“I swear I will cry myself to sleep tonight for using such insensitive language, I swear to the Lord above,” Dante said. “How about I say funny farm instead? Sounds like where they put our kind out to pasture. Dusty found you on one of the funny farms he gives money to as a tax write-off, and because you were a nice piece of ass, he made you his pet psycho.”
“No! You’re razzing it all around!”
“Am I now? Let me look at this file I found on this here computer—you really should password-protect your shit, girl; you never know what crazy motherfucker might come along and start rummaging through it—this Microsoft Word file marked ‘Dustin Speech.’ ”
“I was supposed to give a speech at the Dorothy Walker Clear-Mind Clinic in Calabasas. I used to go there for treatment after I moved to Southern California. He helped me keep my green card.”
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