by Keith Rosson
I smelled raw earth, burning tallow from the candles, meat, the animal tang of shit. A spider climbed up the ridged candle in front of me and crawled directly into the sputtering flame. Its tiny husk, shrunken and black, tumbled to the table.
Esme’s snoring did not lull me to sleep that night. The very night that the trajectory of my life had been set—I was an executioner’s son, and so would be an executioner—was also the night my world became unmoored. Who could sleep? I heard the skittering of rats in the dark, and the slumbering lexicon of my family on their mats next to me, the night murmurings of our animals. The bites of the fleas you never noticed until you suddenly did, all at once, to the point where it became maddening. At some point, sleep did come. I woke at one point to the pale dawn at the mouth of our hut. Little Riva clutched me for warmth. She seemed angelic in sleep despite the ring of grime around her mouth, her matted hair. I closed my eyes again.
Sometime later, my father kicked my foot and I opened my eyes. The light was brighter and I heard my mother at work near the hearth. On a normal day, my sisters and I would have long since done the milking, would have gathered wood, checked for frost in the garden. Yet this morning I had slept—my mother’s doing, I was sure. Give him a little more time. Let him rest.
The rain had gone but the morning was dew-heavy, the sky an iron gray. My mother kissed me and gave my father a look that at the time was unreadable but I now realize was couched between reproach and a resentful understanding. Esme started crying, and like a chorus, so began Riva and Jehanne. My mother ushered them inside.
We had two little mules to pull my father’s cart. Ancient, leather-tough creatures my sisters had named a dozen times over, something my father forbade—they were tools and nothing more. My sisters would whisper the names to each other and I thought Pierre and Nicolas! Graisse and Maigre! as we tethered them to their traces.
“Boy,” my father snapped. I hoisted myself into the cart; he clicked at the mules and slapped the reins and we started on our way. He reached beneath him and then pushed a woolen coat and leather gloves into my lap. “Put these on,” he said. He’d long since put on his own tunic.
I saw Alain Lelong, the widower who lived nearest us, as we left the village behind and rounded a bend in the road. He had once made me a wooden horse, when I was little, and sometimes made my sisters laugh with his impressions. Never when my father was near, of course, but his wife had died two years before and had bore him no children, and he was kinder to us than most. But as we rounded the curve in the road and he saw that I rode in the cart with my father, that the both of us wore tunics and gloves and were about our business, a cloud walked across his face. He said nothing as we passed him, only clicked the reins of his horse, his head cast down as if he had not seen us at all.
My father looked at me and sneered. Spat over the side of the cart. “Get used to it,” he said.
• • •
The next day I went to the Noise Control Office in City Hall, a windowless, single-room affair on the third floor, and smaller than my studio apartment. The officer who had signed off on Randy’s noise complaints, all nine of them, had a brilliant cap of white hair and a sandwich that he was just about to tuck into. It was like a wig, that hair, like a Q-Tip come to life. He coughed extensively, looked longingly at the sandwich on his desk, and insisted the documents were legal.
I laid a finger on the papers next to his sandwich. “You’ve signed all nine of these complaints. So apparently you’ve been there. What does the inside of my store look like?”
The guy sighed. “That’s not how this works, sir. The officers write the reports. I sign them.”
I said, “How much is Randy Noonan paying you to falsify city documents?” and some color crept into his cheeks.
He hoisted a thumb over his shoulder and blithely informed me that there were police right down the hall and I would be arrested if I didn’t leave immediately. Part of me was furious, but mostly I was just tired. Of everything. I tossed the papers on his sandwich and walked out.
An hour later, I stepped off the bus and the day’s grit covered me like a film. Eighty-second was sweltering. I was in front of the dry cleaners next to Julia’s office when my cell phone rang.
“How fucking eager are you to get capped, Marvin? Huh? Is that your intention with me?”
“Hey, Randy. How’s things?”
“The fuck is the matter with you? You go to Bud Keating’s office and try to strong-arm him? Are you kidding me with this? When he’s eating lunch?”
“I was just doing a little investigating,” I said innocently, feeling the loose skittering of emotions that always surged toward the ending of one of my lives: fury, resentment, bafflement. Hopelessness. Mostly fury, though. I was smiling into the phone.
“I got something you can investigate, Marvin. You hear me? It’s nine inches long and looks like a python, okay?”
I shook my head. “Jesus, Randy.”
“I’m not messing with you. I don’t mess around.”
“Right. Listen, I was thinking. How interested would the mayor be if I brought her proof of graft and corruption in the Bureau of City Services? That’s worth at least a little of the commissioner’s time. Don’t you think? That might put a damper on your plans, huh?”
Randy laughed. It sounded like sheets tearing. He said, “You can’t shake me down, Marvin. It’s cute, what you’re doing, and I almost respect it, but you need to take a step back and pull my dick out of your ear for a minute. You don’t have the guts required. You’re suffering from a severe lack of balls, is what I’m saying. So hire some movers and get a U-Haul and pull all those Charlie Manson eight-tracks out of your little store there. You got two days now. It’s not worth getting in a dick-swinging contest with me.”
“Good lord. Enough with the dicks, Randy.”
“You’ve lost,” he said. “You’ve already lost. And if you bother Bud Keating again, I will put you in a world of hurt without a second thought. It’ll be bad, Marvin.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. The best I could manage was, “Your mother would be so proud of you.”
In Julia’s waiting room my limbs were heavy and loose, like my bones were coming unhinged. Would my will even be in effect with Randy’s eviction hanging over me? And Jesus, if I was going to be dead in a week and rebirthed in some other corner of the planet, how much did I really want to give a shit? Was any of this even worth it? That was the one question that I could never get past: if every life was immediately followed by another one, who cared?
“It’s been a hell of a day, Julia,” I called out. I could see Adam’s drawing through the open doorway, and the idea of sinking into that couch again was a soothing one. Lie down and live with Joan for a while, wallow in the surf of my guilt. Even if it was the last time in the foreseeable future.
“All I want,” I said as I walked through the lobby and into her office, tracing the arm of the couch with the same adoration as a game show model, “is to just sit here for a minute. Can we do that? Before we start talking? I’d just like to sit.”
Julia was seated behind her desk, her hands clasped so tight her knuckles were white. She exhaled and said in a shaky voice, “Marvin, I’m sorry, but no.”
I stood there in an odd half-crouch over the couch. “No? Why are you sitting at your desk?”
“Marvin—”
“You never sit at your desk, Julia.”
She laid her hands flat on her desk and lifted her chin toward me. Her mouth was a thin line. “Marvin. I’ve arranged for a pair of officers to check you into a mental health facility. They are on their way. Nobody, and I mean this with total sincerity, nobody will hurt you.”
I could see a vein throbbing in Julia’s neck. I turned my head and looked at her with my good eye. I could feel an odd half-smile on my lips, rubbery and strange. “Say what?” I sat on the couch, felt the cushion cool against my palms.
She pushed hair out of her eyes with one hand, and then b
rought her hands back together on her desktop. “Marvin, I’m sorry if you feel that I betrayed your trust. I care about your welfare very much, and I believe you’re a danger to yourself. The perseverance of your delusion—and it is a delusion, Marvin—is dangerous.”
My chest felt loose and hot. I slowly stood up. “Are you . . . wait, are you kidding me with this?”
“I’m concerned for your safety. Please understand, this is based out of concern.”
I laughed, looked around the room. “I’m not pissed, necessarily. I don’t think I am. Disappointed, yeah. I’ve enjoyed my time here, talking to you.”
“Again, Marvin—”
“But listen, Julia. You listen to me. I have carved men from the inside out. Living men. Living people. To the point where it took days for them to die. Where I extended their pain. Where they had gratitude in their eyes by the time I laid their fucking heads on the block. Do you understand that?”
Julia licked her lips. “It’s clear that you’re hurting, Marvin. I believe that with everything fiber of my—”
“I burned her alive.”
“There are so many people that want to help you.”
Her eyes kept jumping to the doorway. I was scaring her.
“It’s nothing that a shrink with a hard-on for Klonopin and touch therapy is going to fix, Julia.”
“Marvin. Joan of Arc and Pierre Cauchon have been dead for six hundred years. I don’t know what this is about, but it’s not about them.”
I smiled, sad a little, at the way she clipped his name, brutalized it. Couch-On. That, and that she had called me out. We were truly done.
“But there’s no moving forward, Julia. There isn’t. I’ve been telling you that. There’s just the same goddamned thing endlessly repeated.”
I turned and walked out.
There was nothing left. I’d be dead soon enough—amid all my questioning, the surety of that still rocketed toward me like a bullet train—but I’d be damned if I’d spend my last days in a lockup of any kind.
I spared a glance back. Julia was standing now, still behind her desk. Watching me, her hands cinched together in front of her.
2
A second before the phone started ringing, Vale opened his eyes.
A thin scrum of watery sunlight fell across his hand, the hair on his knuckles edged in light. He blinked once and the phone began ringing. The only man in the city with a landline. His eyes settled on the hole in the wall above him and beside it, his last canvas. His head felt compressed in a strange, unfamiliar heat. It wasn’t pain exactly. A tightness.
The phone rang and rang.
He thought, Don’t answer that. Do anything but answer that.
He thought, Whatever that is, it’s nothing good.
He sat up and his pillow came with him. Dried blood cinched his face tight to the pillowcase from hairline to jaw. The shade rattled in a sparse breeze. The top third of his bedsheet was the color of rust. The phone kept ringing.
He hoisted his legs over the bed and leaned over, gagging between his splayed knees. He rose and walked down the hall, holding the pillow to his face, laughing a little at the ridiculousness.
He picked up the phone. “Hello?” he said, his throat paved in dry coals. The pillow was warm against his face, as if holding the summer’s heat. It hurt his head to keep his eyes open.
“Mike. It’s Richard.”
Vale’s legs threatened to give out: that watery, built-out-of-sticks feeling he used to get before an opening. He sank slowly to the kitchen floor, feeling bits of garbage sticking to the back of his legs. The room was hot. He sat there, the phone in one hand, the pillow still glued to his skull. He saw threads of dried blood scattered over his pale legs, dotting his underwear, driven into the creases at the bends in his arms and legs. He was covered in it.
“Hey, Richard,” he said brightly, fear skittering in him like oil in a pan, knowing even then, trying to disavow it even then, trying to keep the horror out of his voice. Richard was Candice’s husband and Vale heard everything in the man’s delivery. Just in saying his name. He knew what was coming. “I hope everything’s okay.”
A pause. “Mike, I have a moral obligation to tell you this,” Richard said, “if not a legal one.”
Vale rocked forward, peering down at his legs. “Okay, but Candy’s alright, right? Right, Richard? Did menopause strike early or something? She having a hot flash?” He let out a shaky laugh—so false he could practically see HA HA floating out of his mouth and shattering in the air—and the inside of his skull pulsed so fiercely that he nearly vomited. He and Candice talked like this. It had become the bedrock of their post-marriage relationship, how Vale bracketed his truths and fears within this cynicism, this sarcasm. Candice had matched him there, but she’d also been able to find him within it, the truths of him within that armor of speech. She had allowed him that weakness. But when he said it to Richard, it sounded jarring and fucked up, a dark mockery. The refrigerator kicked on next to him and he flinched.
“There was a . . . It was a clot, Mike. I guess. She’d been complaining of headaches recently . . . I don’t know.”
“Yeah,” Vale said hurriedly, stepping over Richard’s voice on the other end, “oh man, she would get some bad migraines when she was in school, sure.”
Outside, a car alarm started bleating. Richard was silent.
“So how bad is she? Is she going to be okay?”
The moment stretched out. “No,” Richard said. “She died yesterday, Mike.”
The blood caked in the whorls of his skin was as complicated as parchment, as the topography of riverbeds.
Richard exhaled again, slow and trembling. “It was an aneurysm, I guess. By the time they got her to the hospital . . .” His voice trailed off again and Vale could almost see the vague, helpless shrug that accompanied it. On the other end of the line, Richard honked into a tissue. The forced intimacy of it, hearing that, felt somehow obscene.
The corners of his kitchen floor were edged in grime. He pulled the pillow away from his face slowly, felt the skin of his cheek pull taut. The pain was in his forehead, layered and brutal: bright and glass-like on top, dull and rhythmic underneath, in time with the cadence of his heartbeat. He flung the pillow away like some bloodied, maladroit tumor and felt the warmth of fresh blood creep down his face.
The memory came back to him then, running his head along the cement edge of the graveyard wall, and he shut his eyes as if he could keep the memory at bay.
“Mike? You okay?”
“Yeah,” his voice thick. “Sorry.” He tried to picture Richard in his sun-washed house in LA, a place he’d never stepped foot in. He pictured a lawn like a vicious emerald sea outside the windows, the haze of the city’s smog a brown, half-translucent band on the horizon. Richard, he imagined, would be in board shorts and a short-sleeved button-up. Sandals. Call it Douchebag Casual. Or would he be wearing a suit? The day after his wife died, making phone calls to ex-husbands, what would a smug, self-righteous entertainment lawyer wear?
Richard said, “It was a hemorrhage, an aneurysm . . . a fucking, I don’t know, a brain thing. I’m not getting a straight answer from any doctors. She was there one second and gone the next.” He let out a jagged little caw of laughter. “She died having lunch with Lisa Coletti, if you can believe that.”
“I have no fucking clue who Lisa Coletti is, Richard.”
A pause. “Her editor. She was eating lunch with her editor.”
“Okay.”
“I just . . .” Richard’s voice almost cracked then, and Vale opened his eyes. If Richard wept, it would signify something, some collusion with death, some finality. Some admittance. More than that, an intimacy between the two of them. There was no way Vale could handle that.
But he was saved—Richard cleared his throat and said, “I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, Mike. To put it bluntly. And I know it might be tough to get down here, with the airline situation being what it is. But the funera
l’s on Thursday and if you can make it down here, well, you’re welcome to.”
“Thursday?” Vale said.
“Yeah.”
“Down there?”
“Yeah. We’ll have the memorial at the house here. I know it’s not much time.” He paused. “Do you have the address?”
Vale touched his forehead. “Let me get a pen.” He stood up, feeling like he was on a ship, sea-wobbly like that, and took a pen from the coffee cup by the phone. He couldn’t find any paper and wrote the address on his hand. Richard started to give him directions and Vale cut him off. “I’ll find it.”
“Okay. Services start at two. With all the sightings and stuff, traffic has been insane. I’d get here as early as possible, just to make sure.”
A moment of silence between them then; a rerouting. Richard cleared his throat again. “Listen,” he said, quieter. “I don’t know how to say this other than to just come out with it. Okay? I don’t know what your situation is like this days, but no drinking please, Mike. Alright? This will be tough enough for all of us as it is.”
“Of course,” Vale said. “Yes.”
“I mean, she would definitely want you here, you know? She would.” His voice threatened to crack again and Vale said goodbye and hung up and gently unfolded himself onto the dirty kitchen floor. The sun fell across his white belly in one bright wing of light and his head throbbed like some dolorous animal. He could feel blood inching down his temple into his hair. There was no grief, not yet, only a sense of dark wonderment, a falling.
He stood some time later and walked gingerly to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. His forehead was a raw pocket of pinked flesh peppered with black bits of grit and gravel. The wound was still beading blood. Beneath his eyes was a red mask, blood in rusty spatters all down his pale chest. All over him.
3
The first smoke to actually be witnessed by people appeared on Sepulveda and West Centinela at 3:13 on a Thursday afternoon. First week in June, right in the heart of Los Angeles. Right there between the Howard Hughes Center and the foot-high Culver City letters in homage to the Hollywood sign. It was a rare afternoon of rain that day, and at a four-way intersection, with well over a dozen lanes of active traffic. The gutters ran and rain beaded on windshields, with fantails of water arcing beyond the wheels of vehicles.