by John O'Brien
Momentarily confused, she asks, “Where have you been staying?”
He drops his fork. “With an old friend,” he tells her. “That is none of your affair.”
A hole appears in the fog, small and really only a logical tiptoe away. “You’ll need some money then,” she says.
He measures his anger. It is still very soon, and he has been away for a long time. “It is, after all, Sera, my money.”
“Yes, of course it is, Al,” she says as she rises to fetch it. “How much do you want?”
“All of it. I need some clothes and things. I will try to line up some things after I check into my suite, but it will take time, and we may have to work a bar tonight. Maybe you should work the street. I have been watching you. You have a place that you like. You can go there if I am busy.”
Clothes and things? She steps closer to him. One. Two.
Pressure. Al hates this scrutiny. It is not as it used to be, he thinks. Enough is enough. “What are you looking at,” he screams, slamming his fist on the table and causing his plate to rattle threateningly, but not overturn.
“Where’s all your jewelry, Al?” she asks, but by now she has guessed the answer, even before the emerald of his one remaining ring tears the still-bruised flesh of her cheek. She tumbles back against the refrigerator and crumples to the floor.
With surprisingly weak knees, Al sits down. He is trembling, and is disconcerted to find that it is not out of anger. He dare not rise to help her, but rather, sits at the table and watches her stillness. Indeed, they are both older.
Early in the evening as she prepares for whatever it is that Al will ask her to do, Sera once again finds herself on both sides of her mirror. In addition to a persistent headache, Al’s backhand imparted a message to her in the form of a laceration on her cheekbone. Over the last decade her flesh has taken enough abuse for her to know that this cut will never completely heal. There will be a small white scar here that will last until the day comes for it to disappear into the depths of a wrinkle, the first ever permanent infliction to be borne on her face. It establishes itself amidst her beauty even now, as the bruise beneath it, leftover from her misfortune with the three boys, labors confusedly at the final stages of healing.
But the scar is not the message; it is merely the messenger. Unlike the light, constant of speed as it paints and repaints the image before her, her thoughts are slowing, deteriorating as she sits by, the helpless spectator. Part of her wants to be detached, but a deeper, more elemental part cannot be. The fat man at the Hilton, though merely Al’s instrument, was a much harder trick than even the misdirected boys of earlier in the week. She can’t seem to fix this one, and she’s not sure that she even cares. There is a difference, but she doesn’t know what it is. Something is missing that was here before, but she doesn’t know what it is.
She cries—a privilege of being alone in her room—and a saline tear stings the cut of her cheek as it washes by, taking with it a partial coating of flesh-colored powder which she was hoping might help to hide the wound. Thus laden, the tear falls from her chin and onto her panties, where it is swallowed by black lace. All is well about this, for the panties might easily have been white lace, and the tear more of a provocation.
Fully dressed, Sera tires of the mirror and goes instead to the living room to wait for Al’s call. Here she turns on the television and watches not the screen, but the lambency it creates on an opposing wall. It is the stuff that dreams are made of, so with the volume off and the silence in the apartment unbroken by the phone, she falls asleep for the duration of the night.
“So now I have an excuse,” says Al to no one in particular. Sitting alone in his malfunctioning Mercedes on the shoulder of route 93/95, he is on the tail end of a temper tantrum and the calm in his own voice irks him. “I don’t need one!” he shouts, banging on the steering wheel. “I don’t need this excuse! What do I care of her waiting. It will build her character. She will not dare to disappoint me again!”
He is doubly frustrated because he can imagine no way to blame the failure of his car on Sera. He failed to phone her with instructions last night, though he had told her to wait for his call. Occupied with shopping yesterday evening, he was unable to arrange anything even at the bar of his hotel; then it was too late and he couldn’t bring himself to admit failure to her. He needs time. He needs his jewelry back too, and this was to be his early morning errand, followed by a triumphant return with fully dressed fingers to her apartment, until the Mercedes took a piece of fuel tank rust about the size of a small kidney stone into its filterless fuel line and tried passing it through a carburetor: no go. These matters of automotive arcana are of course inscrutable to Al, who knows only that he has been dealt yet another bust card, and that the rich deck of his youth is getting harder and harder to cut; especially now that he can almost taste it, after so many hard, private years.
And what could be more descriptive of his life than this car. Taken by him as payment of a should-have-been-forgotten debt from an aging Venezuelan drug wholesaler who had to flee Canada—-flee Canada!—and who found himself, on one unfortunate afternoon, in the same plasma clinic on Sunset Boulevard that was frequented by Al. Al left that clinic with a set of car keys and about as much legal ownership of the yellow Mercedes as the man from whom he had taken it had had. Earlier possessorship of the car is sketchy, but it is probable that the serial number had long since faded from any official silicon, which it certainly must have at one time occupied. Though it pained him to squander his blood money, Al could not bear to drive such an unclean car, but it was the true color of the Mercedes, as it emerged from the wet, fluorescent tunnel of Suds-N-Spray out into the daylight, that really caused him to stop and solemnly mourn the great black beasts of his long-gone wealth.
And the fall had been swift and certain, though Al could not in a million years explain what happened, or at least was not able to explain it to himself in six years. It could have been any or all of the myriad influences which converged on him virtually simultaneously. Sera left. Then two other girls left. Then Hollywood got super dry—no new girls, no old girls, nothing. Then he tried to move some drugs and got busted for the first time in his life. Then it seemed he got busted all the time, for anything. Then his attorney sued him, and all his property was seized. Then came the immigration problems from out of the blue. Then he was totally alone and had nothing.
After all the different things had happened, they looked to him, in his mind’s eye, more like just one big thing, something that he could overcome. So, rather than be not-Al, he stayed and did everything he knew to do to become Al again. But he couldn’t. Then he got old—again, all at once. Like a tumor, a thought had been growing, perennial and torpid, in the back of his mind. There was something that he had defeated long ago; it was away, in a different place, and for that reason, he thought, he could defeat it again. It had been a big thing in his life. Now it was greatly distant from his life, and it didn’t even know that he knew where it was.
A lesson that Al took away from Los Angeles is: do what must be done, so he gives up on retrieving his pawned jewelry today and starts off on foot down the road to a gas station which is visible in the distance and somehow looks expensive.
But the fact that he does this doesn’t change the way he feels about doing it. Al hates this, and the anger that rages inside his head is splenetic and bleak. He hates the fact that he is walking on the side of a desert highway so that he can overpay a disgusting American grease monkey to fix a hideous piss-colored wreck, all so he can go and humiliate himself in front of Sera—who has never been all that blind, he knows—by demanding more money with which he can secretly get his jewelry back from a pawnbroker! This is not what Gamal Fathi’s destiny is meant to be, and there can be little doubt that the blame should be placed on… on the evil American forces that have all along conspired to make his life a living hell, on the cesspool that is Los Angeles, on the faithless and disloyal women to whom he has offered only
kindness and protection. He wants for so little in comparison to those fattened corporate Americans who once came to him with their repellent requests and whose greed is limitless. Perhaps it is they who are responsible; perhaps it is everyone, for what non-collective power could paint his soul with so much acrimony, so much venom.
Sera has been awake for hours, watching the silent television, which as she slept drifted in and out of a three-hour test pattern. The absence of sound does little to alter the inanity of daytime TV, but this is not an observation that she is capable of making right now; it is far too irrelevant and would undermine her fascination in the image of a man soundlessly screaming as a superimposed $10,000 burns on his chest.
Hungry. She’s pretty sure that she ought to eat, but the kitchen isn’t holding much this morning. So… what? Yes, she generally goes out to the store at a time like this, but she dare not. Al would be very angry indeed if he called or came over and she wasn’t here. There’s an enormous distraction here. If she had enough money she could go play blackjack. But she really can’t leave. She can eat later. She could use a trick—go back to work. Al will find her something. On the television is a local commercial: the power company wants her and her family to know more about the Hoover Dam. She knows, she’s heard the copy many times this week. An aerial shot of a rushing river dissolves to a very still Lake Mead, then the dam, looking about seven hundred and twenty-six feet tall, if she remembers correctly. She should check her makeup. She goes to the bedroom and checks her makeup.
From the bedroom she hears—she forgot to lock the door—the sound of her front door opening.
“Sera.” Al’s voice booms from the other room.
“Al. I’m here in my bedroom, Al. I’m hungry.”
Taken aback for no apparent reason, Al stops, still in the other room, and cocks his head. Too many problems this morning, or maybe he’s just hungry too. Ultimately, after catching his own reflection in an oblique window, he smiles broadly at her tone. Probably best, he thinks, not even to mention his failure to call last night.
Entering her bedroom, he finds her at her mirror waiting expectantly, and says, “Then I shall buy you lunch. You will need your strength tonight. After lunch we will come back here and you can shower and dress… you look a little rumpled.”
“All right, Al. Let’s have lunch. Then I can shower and dress,” she says.
Not a bad little suite, this here at the Sahara. Or is it a big room? It’s sort of a sweetroom, strange American, Las Vegas, not-yet-or-no-longer-big-time type configuration. To Al, alone and waiting for Sera this late evening, it’s a guess crossed with a necessary compromise. Way back at his best there was too much money spent to prevent and too much worry about people laughing at him; nobody’s fool, he always suspected this, just to be on the safe side. After that, at his worst, there was no money to spend and people were definitely laughing at him. Now there’s a little money, he’s spending all of it, and nobody’s paying any attention to him. The sweetroom here at the Sahara—wet bar with executive wood-grain refrigerator, dining alcove, two bathroom sinks—is… okay.
Too, that long gone serendipity may be returning to him, for he was able to dig up a pretty good trick for Sera tonight. Not easy—after wasting time in three different bars he finally scored all the way down at the Sands, only to discover that the guy was staying right here at the Sahara—but it all worked out. She’s there now, just four floors down, with this guy and his wife. Classic work, almost like it used to be, especially when she showed up and the guy really did come up with a grand, once they got a look at her, hours ago.
He crosses the room and answers the door. Sera walks past him, sitting down primly at the foot of the bed.
“They tipped me another hundred,” she says. “They wanted my number, but I told them to talk to you.” She looks over at the television and seems a little disappointed to find it turned off. “Do you want it, the hundred I mean?”
Arms folded, he looms over her. Neither one of them realize that he looks only as threatening as an unhealthy man can look.
“How was the trick?” he asks, and with the question comes the realization, to him at least, that he is way out of practice.
Oddly, it is Sera who reflexively falls into a groove. The chat having always been part of the gig, she again has someone to chat to, and her speech flows more freely than it has since Al first made himself known to her. “Could have been worse,” she says. “They use a lot of gimmicks, some big stuff… I’m a little sore. Reminded me of those two dykes in Brentwood.” Looking up at him: “Remember? They always wanted me and Wendy.” She continues on his belated nod. “He of course spent half the time watching from the corner of the room. You should see how they are. They love themselves for doing this.” She looks down at the shag carpet, carefully. “You get her? I mean, did you pick up on her? She’s a junkie… made me watch her shoot up.”
Al doesn’t know how to respond to this, for he missed this observation, and he shouldn’t have. “You will need to work on the Strip tomorrow night. I have business all day. You like it best on the street. This will make you happy.”
The flow gone from her words, Sera nods and says, “Could I keep it, the hundred I mean? You know I’m always straight with you, Al.”
“Ah! It is a gift from Al,” he says with a benevolent grin. “It is yours. Buy yourself a present from Al.” He bows his head briefly—an old gesture she had forgotten—and begins to undress. “Now go shower for me, Sera. I have missed you tonight.”
She blinks, and walks with difficulty to the bathroom. But inexplicably, it is the throbbing cut on her cheek that is the greatest source of her pain by the time she reaches the sinks.
The bathroom door shut, Al turns his attention to the mirror and manipulates his hair, here and around, with an unbreakable Ace comb. On the dresser, reflected in the mirror-world, he reads the alphabetical mess on a confused promotional pamphlet: He hears the shower start up. He considers his jewelry: he should go and get it tomorrow.
Eventually returning to his bed, this time naked, Sera finds that her indifference has grown, her diffidence flagged, her acceptance become all-consuming, like a well-matured cancer. She takes him into her as if he were a trick; perhaps the biggest, baddest, god-trick of all time, but still a trick. He rocks on her, wrapped tightly in his own thoughts. She is a hollow doll, a million billion miles away from an orgasm. Al’s a vigorous lover, and she knows that this will go on for a long time; in fact, this all could go on forever.
She anticipated some pain, but now she finds that she can barely feel him. His penis, though quite large, is causing merely an imprecise pressure inside of her, like the willful abuse of a post-Novocain dentist’s drill. It’s new to her, this numbness. In all these years she’s always felt it, and she vaguely pines for the pain that summarized her dignity. He can’t hurt her now. He can—and will—do whatever he wants to her, but he can’t hurt her. Anyone can do anything to her; she couldn’t care less.
And now, the sun. Just the top of an orange disk visible through his open window, it always moves with unexpected swiftness at rise and set. Al has been waiting, watching for hours in the darkness of his room, and the Strip is remarkably silent and still.
He told Sera to leave at some time during the night—he can’t remember when—and came to this window, sat down and crossed his legs. His erection is still with him, looking out of place as men’s erections do and causing him great distress, throbbing and aching relentlessly. At first he was quite proud, pounding into her with no end in sight; he imagined her to be frightened, delighted, impressed. Then an hour passed, and he still was not delivered. In pain himself, he dare not even think of how she was holding up, and it was pure determination and fear of humiliation that drove him well into the next hour, when finally he rolled off of her and sent her away. He feels no excitement, no concupiscence, yet still his penis burns hard, threatening to split his skin. Afraid even to touch it, he tries to concentrate on the sun as a way
to distract his misery.
Years ago Gamal Fathi, a boy in Oman when that country was all but sealed off from the twentieth century by Sultan Said ibn Taimur, had a sister named Manal who fell ill with a mysterious sickness that drove her to her mattress with fever and shivers. After four days his father, a man of some limited wealth, went in search of medicine to the home of an aging European who was rumored to have such things. The quest, dangerous, very expensive, and of dubious legality, was successful to the degree that he returned with a clay pot of prescribed liquid before it was too late. Everyone had considered the journey to be impossible and rejoiced at the miraculous accomplishment, convinced that the will of Allah had been revealed to them. And because of this, their grief was that much more unbearable when, after drinking the medicine, Manal convulsed and died within the hour. Gamal felt tricked, his young mind unable to follow the logic of the purpose. His father set off to kill the man who sold him the medicine, and he never returned.
Al’s erection has at last died. A knock at his door startles him—odd for this hour of the morning. Pulling his pants on, he goes to answer it.
“Who is there?” he says, his hand on the knob, instinctively prepared to pull or push in an instant.
A young voice from the other side answers, “Service, Mr. Frisk. I have your breakfast. Shall I use my key?”
Disappointed by the apparent lack of intrigue, Al throws open the door with the intention of berating the boy for his mistake: “Why do you bother me!…,” but is stopped by the sight of the face, wide-eyed and whitened with fear, purely American, and as such, both bland and limitless. “You have the wrong room,” says Al, in a much subdued tone, a virtual whisper.