Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  Praise for Smoke City

  “Smoke City kind of wrecked me, really, but in the best possible way. It’s a beautiful, heartfelt, resonant novel about all those things that mean to be human.”

  —CRAIG DAVIDSON, author of Cataract City

  “Riveting, ambitious, and incredibly well-crafted, Smoke City is unlike anything you’ve ever read or ever will read. Part ghost story, part journey, part apocalyptic thriller, Rosson has created a novel that is gloriously original, and echoes the work of many imaginative writers, from Kurt Vonnegut to Jonathan Lethem.”

  —JOE MENO, author of Hairstyles of the Damned

  “A surreal road novel about misfits on a journey to Southern California . . . An offbeat, strangely satisfying adventure through a land of (literal) ghosts.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “A brilliantly haunting tale of forgiveness and redemption even in the face of abject failure . . . Depravity and grace meet in a powerful, profound, and lavish banquet for the soul.”

  —FOREWORD REVIEWS, starred review

  “[A] story about hope, about love and about the essential decency of people . . . hugely satisfying . . . the literary quality of Keith Rosson’s writing is truly remarkable and, at times, quite breathtakingly beautiful.”

  —LINDA HEPWORTH, NUDGE-BOOK MAGAZINE, 5 stars

  “Rosson creates a fantasy where a very real world of human relationships filled with common concerns such as forgiveness or guilt mixes with fantastic elements in a seemingly matter-of-fact way, similar to the slipstream style of writers such as Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, or Jonathan Lethem.”

  —INDIEPICKS MAGAZINE

  ALSO BY KEITH ROSSON

  The Mercy of the Tide

  SMOKE CITY

  A NOVEL

  KEITH ROSSON

  SMOKE CITY. Copyright © 2018 by Keith Rosson.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For information, contact Meerkat Press at info@meerkatpress.com.

  ISBN-13 978-1-946154-16-3 (Hardcover)

  ISBN-13 978-1-946154-05-7 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916752

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Keith Rosson

  Book design by Tricia Reeks

  Author photo by Lindsay Beaumont

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published in the United States of America by

  Meerkat Press, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia

  www.meerkatpress.com

  This haste, this crush of the crowd, these hundreds of English menat-arms, this executioner—his name was Geoffroy Thérage—all for one young girl who in a high voice lamented and invoked God.

  —Régine Pernoud and Marie-Véronique Clin

  Joan of Arc: Her Story

  SMOKE CITY

  The first one appeared in May.

  It happened in a wind-scoured canyon in a stretch of national forest, forty miles east of San Diego. Dusk laid its reds and golds against the canyon walls as the sun hung above the tree line. There was no grand sense of ceremony, no change in the surroundings—the thing simply appeared. An eye-blink’s worth of time. Dim, but recognizable enough: a wavering form in the shape of a man.

  Details swam in the vapor. Here was a hand with creased knuckles, there a faded patch at a knee. A pale eye. A downturned mouth. Threadbare jeans, a long-sleeved shirt frayed at the collar and cuffs. The figure, the man, could have been thirty years old or twice that. From this century or the one before it. It faded and snapped to sharpness and faded again, everything the color of old newsprint. A pair of kestrels wheeled in the sky and the sun sank lower and drew long shadows on the ground.

  The figure staggered, gazing around at the terrain. As if lost. Afraid and bewildered, abandoned.

  And then it disappeared just as quickly. Vanished. Ten, fifteen seconds from beginning to end.

  The first one appeared in May, but nobody saw it, and then it was gone.

  The Quick And The Dead: Vale/Basquiat Show Wild Success at Edwin Tanazzi Gallery

  (Excerpt from American Artist, vol. 32, no. 2, Feb. 1989)

  Michael Vale—the young artist whose meteoric rise into the blue-chip art world has left many people with their jaws (and checkbooks) open—made history Friday night at the cavernous Edwin Tanazzi Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. The exhibition has allowed Vale, not yet twenty, to become the first living artist to garner equal representation in a two-person gallery show with the iconic and recently deceased painter Jean-Michel Basquiat.

  Despite the Tanazzi Gallery’s insistence that no more than two of Vale’s paintings could be purchased by any individual collector at the opening, his section of the show—thirty-two new paintings, some of them upward of fifteen feet in length—was sold out within the hour. Basquiat’s work was on loan from various collectors, as well as his estate—currently being overseen by his father, Gerald Basquiat, who is embroiled in several legal battles regarding ownership of many of the pieces being shown . . .

  • • •

  Controversial Artist Michael Vale Convicted of Public Drunkenness, Assault, Sentenced to Rehabilitation Center

  (Excerpt from Outside the Lines: A Journal of Outsider Art, no. 112, May 2008)

  In a textbook example of the tenuous nature of the art world, Michael Vale—who less than a decade ago was considered one of the most renowned contemporary artists in America, with early and mid-period canvasses still reaching six figures at auction—was sentenced to a 90-day treatment center in Portland, Oregon today. He was convicted last December of DUII and second degree assault after getting into a physical altercation with the driver of another vehicle involved in a collision.

  Sources close to the artist hardly seem surprised. “Mike’s really been going down a dark road for a while,” says Jacob Burfine, a gallery curator who showed Vale’s work when the two lived in Los Angeles. Years later, after both of them had moved to Portland, Burfine unsuccessfully attempted to arrange some exhibitions for Vale, despite the artist’s marked drop in status and sales. “It’s gotten to the point where he’s so volatile it’s hard to even talk to him sometimes. I don’t think he’s painted in years. Not that I can necessarily blame him, the way things have turned out. Hopefully this will make some kind of impact.”

  Vale was at one time married to mystery novelist Candice Hessler; Burfine and others say that Vale’s recklessness has intensified since their divorce. “He’s definitely stepped it up in the years since he and Candice split. Honestly, you hear the term ‘loose cannon,’ you think of Mike Vale. The fact that he doesn’t even own his own paintings anymore probably doesn’t help,” says Burfine, referring to Vale’s controversial decision to give exclusive rights and ownership to all work created before 1999 to his previous agent. The agent, Jared Brophy of the Brophy Agency in Los Angeles, claims that there was nothing disreputable or illegal about the contract, which gave him complete control over Vale’s entire catalog of work up to that year, including percentages of resale prices at auction. “There’s nothing hinky about it,” Brophy insists. “I was trying to help him out. Mike needed some money badly and I was becoming unimpressed with the quality of his newer work; it was losing its vitality, its rage. The early and mid-period work has this fantastic, kinetic edge, but he’d just been phoning it in for a while. I gave him
a flat fee, a very generous one, for contractual rights so he could pay off some debts. That’s it.” It’s believed that Vale’s paintings have fetched tens of millions of dollars since Brophy gained control over them, while Vale himself hasn’t had a show of new work in years. The contract—which many insiders believe is a questionable one at best and would most likely be overturned by a judge should it ever be brought to court—won’t be up for renewal for nearly another twenty years.

  We were unable to contact Vale regarding his sentencing, and his lawyer declined to comment. It’s unclear whether he will challenge the court’s verdict or enter the rehabilitation program . . .

  • • •

  Drunks Do the Darnedest Things (When They’re Totally Fucked Up): Has-Been Artist Turns Vigilante Against Evil, Evil Gallery Windows

  (Excerpt from the Portland Mercury, July 31, 2013)

  Looks like somebody can’t handle their liquor. Police reports obtained by the Mercury indicate that painterly has-been Mike Vale got all Bruce Lee down in the Pearl District on Monday night, kicking and punching out the display windows of seven galleries before being apprehended by police. After being discharged from St. Vincent’s for severe lacerations, he was arrested under a shitload of charges and taken to the drunk tank.

  The galleries, including Tobias Chang Fine Art, Green Light Go! and Visions, refused to press charges after Vale’s ex-wife, mystery writer Candice Hessler, paid for the damages. Vale’s still looking at possible county time for being wasted in public, and maybe even a felony charge for tussling with the cops.

  “In a way, I feel sorry for the guy,” Tobias Chang said of Vale, who at one time had regularly sold out exhibitions in New York, LA, Milan and Paris. “I mean, he was bigger than God at one point, in terms of the art world. I’d still even be interested in looking at any new work that he’s done, in spite of all this.”

  Yet it appears that Vale—who’s now employed at a car wash and can regularly be seen getting eighty-sixed from local bars—is less interested in painting and more interested in property damage. Stay classy, Mike!

  PART ONE

  MY FATHER’S COAT

  MONDAY

  1

  The years bled together. Each waking morning—or afternoon, truth be told, or evening—couched in a familiar bloom of panic. After that, after Vale realized where he was, who he was, came the rest: sickness, fear, assessment of damage, all of it stitched together with the fine red thread of guilt.

  Art & Artists had once called him a “relentless avatar of our contemporary, post-nuclear unease.”

  He woke to the alarm, studded in fresh bruises. New scabs on his knees and his teeth loose in his mouth. His lack of memory familiar in itself. Sunlight fell in the room in fierce, distinct bands.

  He stood shivering in the shower, the water lancing against him while lava, hot and malicious, compressed itself behind his optic nerves. This pulsing thunder in the skull, and moments from the Ace High the night before came to him slowly, like something spied through a fun house mirror. He bent over to pick up a sliver of soap and with his trembling hand batted a rust-dotted razor lying on the rim of the bathtub. The razor slid down the tub, luge-like, and Vale reached down for it, trying not to gag as dark spots burst like stars in his periphery. He stumbled and stepped on the razor. The crack of plastic, and thin threads of blood began to snake toward the drain. It was painless.

  “Oh, come on,” he croaked. “Shit’s sake.” He’d smoked nearly two packs of Camels the night before and sounded now like something pulled howling from a crypt. He tried to stand on his other foot to examine the cut and couldn’t manage it. He put his foot back down and stepped on the broken razor again, and now the floor of the tub was awash in an idiot’s Rorschach of red on white. He retched once and shut the water off, resigned to death—or at least collapse—at any second. The towel hanging from the back of the door reeked of mold, and he gagged against it and dropped it to the floor. He left bloody, shambling one-sided footprints to his bedroom.

  Apart from the painting hanging above his bed (the sole Mike Vale original still in his possession), the fist-sized hole next to the light switch was the room’s only decoration. There was a dresser pitted with cigarette burns and topped with a constellation of empty beer bottles. An unmade bed ringed with dirty sheets. The alarm clock on the floor. Plastic blinds rattled against the open window.

  He dressed slowly and stepped to the kitchen. Flies dive-bombed bottles mounded in the sink, on the counters. The light on the answering machine was blinking. He pressed the Play button, already knowing who it would be—who else called him?—and there was Candice’s voice.

  “The only man in the country still using an answering machine,” she said. “Okay. This is me saying hi. Give me a ring when you discover, you know, fire and the wheel.” Her voice then became steeped in a cautious, thoughtful cadence, a measured quality he remembered more clearly from their marriage. “Richard and I should be heading up through there on tour for another Janey book soon. It’d be good to touch base, get dinner. Call me.”

  It was September, the last gasp of summer. The apartment was explosive with trapped heat. A swath of sunlight fell across the countertop. Just looking at that glare hurt his eyes, his entire body, made him feel as if rancid dishwater was shooting straight into his guts. A nameless sadness, the sadness, the exact opposite of the Moment and so much more insistent, tore through him like a torrent. Like a rip of lightning, there and gone, and Vale sobbed. Just once. One ragged, graceless gasp. Pathetic. He stood sweating over the answering machine, ashamed of himself.

  He was out the door five minutes later, blood wetting his sock, cold coffee and aspirin hammering a bitter waltz somewhere below his heart.

  Time had once called him “a shaman of America’s apocalyptic incantations, one who catalogs our fears and thrusts them back at us in a ferocious Day-Glo palette.”

  On his way to the bus stop Mike Vale, the shaman, the avatar—looking down in his shirt pocket for a cigarette—ran directly into a telephone pole, hard enough to give himself a nosebleed.

  2

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  There’s a grace inherent here. In writing things down. Like a confession signed, maybe. An admission. Nothing so lofty as a salve of the spirit, but at the very least it makes one feel a little better.

  My earliest memory is of being in the marketplace in Rouen with my parents. I was probably three or four years old. I was walking with my parents amongst the stalls as fast as I could manage, amazed not at the flood of people, but at how the mass of them, the tide of them, parted for us. Because I’d thought at the time that it was me, right? My mother holding my hand, I thought it was me that made the people part ways for us.

  I thought I was magic.

  I did not notice at the time (but can imagine now, all too well) my mother’s downcast gaze, the way we stepped hurriedly through the leering crowd. How we did not stop to look at the untold riches of food, the bolts of fabric, the tools for sale. Things we never saw in our own village. I didn’t notice how my father gripped my mother’s arm, nearly dragging her along, her belly huge and rounded as she was pregnant with my sister at the time.

  Three, four years old. I noticed the people parting for us, I remember that, but not the revulsion in their eyes, the contempt.

  I would realize later, of course, just what it was the townspeople had shied away from, had leered at: my father’s coat, and the stitched image of the sword on the back.

  The executioner’s mark.

  And as for Joan, those decades later?

  She was not loved unequivocally. She just wasn’t. At least not out loud. To do so was dangerous. But her victories, it was true, allowed some of us a rekindling of faith, a brief respite against death’s constant stutter of war and plague and occupation. The hope that God was watching over us all. The idea of it, that He believed in France’s sovereignty. That He might lift His face toward us again.

  And thus
ly the order of her execution may as well have been passed down from the very day of her capture. The moment she was seized there outside the walls of Compiègne, it should have been clear to all that she would be put to death.

  When Bishop Cauchon, toady of the English, bought her from the Burgundians after her capture, I knew the trial itself would be a hoax. A mockery. Yet I heard murmurings from serfs and landowners alike—from my darkened corner of the barroom, or on my way down the road to extract another bloody, weeping confession—and some of them hoped, prayed, that such a girl, who had served so obviously as the arm of God in the name of France, would not be allowed to die such a death. That God in His mercy would surely not allow such a thing. They prayed that Charles, their blessed King—after all Joan had done for him—would surely involve himself in the matter. That Burgundy would suddenly bend its allegiance like an arrow in the wind.

  But I knew, there in the dim hallways of the heart, that men simply do what they want to do. Men do their darkness and misdeeds and later claim guidance under the banner of God’s will.

  Shouldn’t I know that more than anyone? Didn’t I traffic in such matters?

  She would die and they would call it divinity, because that’s what people do.

  The trial was orchestrated by dozens of assessors and friars and clergymen, an ever-evolving assembly of men. The lot of them little more than castrated politicians hiding behind the guise of theology. English stormtroopers practically leaning over the benches with swords drawn throughout the entire sorry thing.

  And Cauchon, ah, you should have seen him. Christ, that man. So puffed up with wine and his own righteousness and the quaking fear of an English blade suddenly tickling his balls in bed some night. Terrified, but paid well for his work, too. He would later die inexplicably in his barber’s chair, and the vengeful part of me still hopes the barber was paid to bleed him. And that it hurt terribly.