by Keith Rosson
I ordered a beer, wondered if the cruiser had been for me, if Julia actually had called anyone. It seemed against her sense of propriety to lie. What purpose would it serve? The bartender set my beer down.
I took out my wallet and absently looked up at one of the televisions. When I did, my heart stuttered, galloped. Felt suddenly like it was about to burst through the fabric of my shirt.
“You okay, hon?” the bartender asked, frowning. Beside me the man rattled phlegm into his fist. She scowled at him. “Jesus wept, Bill, hit the john and cough it up if you have to. Sounds like you’re about to pull a lung.”
I pointed to the television. “Can you turn this up? Please?”
She turned up the volume from a remote under the bar and for a moment all of the men’s heads rose like flowers. The man next to me cleared his throat and spoke into his glass. “Trash,” he said. “Shows like this. Pure trash.”
“Oh hush your mouth, Bill,” the bartender said, leaning back and propping one elbow on the bar.
It was a talk show; a banner at the bottom of the screen said that it was called To the Point with Jesse Pamona. The title of this particular show was “Bad Girls Gone Really, Really Good.”
The host stood before her audience. They had just laughed at something she’d said. Then she said something else and the audience jeered, pumped their fists. Then it cut back to her guests.
A man and a woman. The man was a hulking, tanned monstrosity in a dark suit. His gelled hair was cropped close enough on the sides to see his pale scalp underneath, the little rivers of bunched veins at his temples. The woman was young, blonde, pretty. She wore a smartly-cut black business suit and a severe ponytail, very little makeup. Collagen lips and wide blue eyes.
The banner beneath her read: Lyla, 23. Adult Entertainer, Claims She’s Possessed by Joan of Arc.
“So,” Jesse Pamona said, panning to her audience once more before facing her guests, “who did you say you were again?”
The man leaned forward and tucked his chin in—he was clearly used to ducking down to speak to people. The marquee at the bottom of the screen read: Louis: Personal trainer/Joan of Arc’s “Chaperone?”
“Jesse, I’m just the bodyguard,” he said. This got a warm ripple of laughter from the audience.
“Oooookay,” Jesse purred, winking to the camera. Then she turned her attention to the woman. “And what about you, my dear? What is it you do for a living again?”
“Well, I used to be a dancer.” High-pitched voice, a little worn. Smoker. A knowing groan spread throughout the audience. The men at the bar chortled like trolls. My body seemed then a separate thing from my mind, my vision. I felt like I was looking out at myself, at some other Marvin Dietz looking at the television.
Jesse winked at Lyla. “A dancer dancer or a pole dancer? An adult dancer?”
Lyla squared her shoulders. “I was an adult entertainer, yes. Since these . . . realizations have come to light, all that’s changed. My whole life has changed.”
“Okay,” Jesse said again. “And when did these realizations take place again?”
“Three weeks ago.”
Jesse leaned forward, intimate. Two girlfriends sharing secrets. “And what happened exactly? Can you tell me, Lyla?”
A close-up of Lyla’s face then, and my hand tightened around my glass. I was looking for Joan’s face in hers somewhere, some hint of the same knowledge, some sliver of recognition of the woman I had seen on that overcast day in Rouen. I didn’t see it, but that didn’t mean anything, did it? What did I bear of Geoffroy these days? How much of that vessel remained in this one? How much did I really even remember of Joan as she’d actually been? Memory’s as faceted as a shattered mirror.
“It wasn’t gradual,” Lyla said. “It happened all at once.” She snapped her fingers. “Joan’s entire history, her entire life, came to me all at once.” She smiled bashfully. “I was shopping with my mom when it happened.”
“Joan’s life came to you all at once?”
“Yes.”
Again Jesse performed her half-twist to face her audience. Get a load of her, people. “So, you’re saying you’ve got, what, split personalities? That you’re simultaneously a—pardon the expression, but isn’t it true?—a stripper and a martyred saint? Is that what you’re telling us?”
Next to me, Bill mournfully said, “All the good ones are crazier than hell.” He ate some peanuts.
“It’s not really split personalities, Jesse. I don’t know how to explain it, honestly.” She paused. “I don’t really know how much I should tell you, honestly.”
Jesse frowned. Her audience frowned with her, on the verge of turning on Lyla. The bodyguard winced, sensing their polarity. “Why is that?” Jesse asked.
Lyla lifted her slim shoulders, defiant. “Because I was told to wait. I was in a dressing room and everything—her childhood, her voices, King Charles, the English soldiers, everything—came to me all at once, like a flood. I fell down, just freaking out, and a voice told me that I was supposed to wait. That more . . . that more would be revealed.” She paused, seemed ready to say more, and then shrugged. “I don’t know why I was chosen, but I believe there was a purpose for it.”
“Good God,” Bill said bitterly. He turned and looked at me with his bulbous reddened nose, his doomed and bloodshot eyes. He shook his head and raised a hand toward the bartender and said, “Darlin’, I’m gonna need another drink if I’m to partake in such otherworldly horseshit as this. Between blondie there and the supposed goddamned haints down in California, I’ve had just about enough of the whole sorry mess.”
“World’s a strange place, Bill,” the bartender said, putting another beer in front of him.
“Horseshit is what it is,” he said. “Horseshit or the devil at work.” He started coughing again.
6
Vale walked down Glisan with the sun in his eyes.
He was carrying twenty thousand dollars in a taped-up Nike shoebox.
He’d counted it twice in spite of Burfine’s insistence that it was all there. Brophy, much too late, had taught him to forevermore count the money and read the small print. While he waited for Burfine to return with the cash, his assistant had plied Vale with espressos and a kind of skittering deference, as if Vale was a half-tamed creature capable of a strange intelligence: a pit bull that did quadratic equations, something like that. Vale had no idea how Burfine had come up with that much cash so quickly, what kind of ungodly favors had been called in, and he didn’t give a shit.
He raised his face to the sun, the thunder in his skull loosening a bit with the caffeine, the movement. Sweating joggers in spandex ran by him, clots of hipsters in tight-fitting clothes smoking outside their condos, tech-industry people taking a break from their remote positions in Silicon Valley or wherever the hell they were from. Gutter punks peppered the curbs, spitting at people’s feet as they passed. Candice was a sadness rattling inside him that he had sloughed off for the time being. Just for now. Look at all of these people! There was so much goddamned relentless living going on around him!
He headed toward Burnside, that artery that divided the city north and south. The world around him was dense with movement, the glassed high-rises flinging knives of light back at him. There was a car dealership across the river, right at the foot of the bridge, and the plan was rough-hewn but at least present: buy the cheapest car they had and drive to Los Angeles. Point A to Point B. And then the thought came to him: would a legitimate dealership even sell him a car? With his rime of beard and jittery, tattooed hands? Stinking of last night’s booze and paying cash with a ring of blood-darkened gauze wrapped around his head? He looked like he’d busted out of a prison hospital.
He passed the twin golden lions that flanked Chinatown. The Rescue Mission was two blocks ahead, loose knots of homeless men and women camping out front. Old Town had the clearest demarcations: people sleeping with cardboard boxes folded over them, sleeping at the foot of luxury housing.
He passed a pair of legs jutting out from the sliding door of a green minivan parked at the curb, the rest of the man’s body lost in the gloom. He passed, and then looked back—it was as close to a hunch as Vale had ever felt in his life—and saw the words FOR SALE soaped in the rear window. ’98 CHRYSLER RUNS GOOD $2500. A phone number. Just like that.
He walked back to the van, where the shirtless man in black jeans, his long red hair wrapped in sweaty whorls around his neck, was in the process of lighting a cigarette.
“Hey,” Vale said, and the man jumped and hit his head on the roof of the van.
“Dang, guy,” the man hissed, rubbing the crown of his skull. There were no backseats; instead the back of the van held maybe another dozen cardboard boxes, a few folded blankets. A dress shirt and tie hung over the headrest of the passenger seat.
“Sorry,” Vale said. “Is this your van?”
“Sure is,” the man said, looking him over. An incalculable look on his face, part shrewdness, part suspicion.
“Well,” Vale said, opening his shoebox. “I’m interested.”
7
From the journals of Marvin Deitz:
“Do not speak,” my father called out as we stepped into the chamber across the hall from the first man, from Luc. “Stand over there. No matter what you see, do not speak, and do not cry out.”
My father knew the intricacies of theater and the manner in which it related to confession. Half of the work was theater, really. The cultivation of fear, the steady distillation of terror. The meting out of it. The other half, of course, was finely ritualized violence and bloodshed. A distinct understanding of anatomy.
I would later come to understand just how malleable the body is, to darkly marvel at just how many variants for ruination there are. How there is finally a tipping point for every body, every shell we inhabit, before it allows its dim light to be extinguished. But also how strong the body is! How stubbornly capable of enduring punishment!
Compared to the man across the hall, this one was kingly. Pale, his hands cinched and shackled above his head, his legs tethered by irons on the floor. His body was sheathed in muscle, his belly a pronounced little bullethead of fat. There was a table in the center of the room, shackles on the wall for a half dozen more men, though he was the only prisoner. Luc, or someone, had cut his undershirt from him. It hung in rags around his waist, still tucked into his pants.
“You’re no stranger to the dinner table,” my father said absently. The man’s eyes followed him as he went to the wooden cabinet against one wall and, from there, removed an oilcloth bound with twine. He left the cabinet doors open. Dark instruments hung on pegs, their shapes dim, their purposes unfathomable. He placed the oilcloth on the table in the center of the room. Lamps sputtered and hissed.
“Can you see this?” my father asked. “Can you see me over here?” The man was silent.
My father undid the knot on the twine and slowly unrolled the cloth. Within came the dense clank of metal against metal.
And that was all it took; the man’s resolve gave way. “Please,” he breathed.
Another rat ran across my foot, heavy and warm. I kicked it away. For a moment, they both looked at me, and then my father’s eyes fell upon the man again.
“What is your name?”
“Simon. I’m a smithy in Provins. Please.”
My father still stood behind the table, his instruments spread out before him. “You have been accused of heresy, Simon,” he said.
“I know it. It’s a falsehood.”
“A falsehood?”
“It’s my neighbor, Andre Mauvoisin. He covets my wife, slandered my name to the priests. I am faithful to the Lord God.”
My father nodded, pensive. Seemed to consider it. “How do we prove this, Simon?”
“Isn’t my saying it enough? Please. If I were a heretic, would I be so quick to claim my allegiance to the Almighty?”
I knew my father was strong, but I had never before seen him move that fast. In a second he was in front of the man and held a rust-clotted spike in one hand and Simon’s jaw in the other, hard enough to wrest it open. Simon made an animal gargling sound and I heard his piss patter to the floor as my father lay the spike beneath one bulging eye. I began weeping.
“Simon of Provins,” my father said with great dark cheer, holding the point of that spike under the man’s madly wavering eye, “it’s the unfaithful ones, the godless ones, who will say anything to stop the turning of the screws. Stop crying, Geoffroy.” He said this last without turning his head.
The man burbled, wept. “Please—”
“The soul’s greatest gift, Simon: If you are guilty and confess your crimes, you shall be granted entrance to heaven. If you are innocent and it is a false confession and an unjust death? Your entrance is assured as well. Tidy, is it not?”
I slid against the wet wall. I drew my knees to my chest and buried my eyes there.
“The body is but a shell, Simon. Do you confess?”
“Please, I—”
When I looked up, my father was pressing the point of the spike delicately against the lid of Simon’s closed eye. He quivered against his chains. Even in the poor light I saw this. I was riveted, rooted to the floor.
“Simon of Provins, do you confess to the charges of heresy?”
“Praise God, yes! Anything! Just—”
My father looked at me over his shoulder then, took the spike away as the man thrummed and sobbed against his bonds.
“See this, Geoffroy. Know it,” my father said. “No one protects us.”
He turned back to the man chained to the wall, and any number of terrible things happened after that.
• • •
My apartment above the record store was practically monk-like in its utility. After my life as Bill Creswell, I was tired of collecting things. The record store and its ceaseless accumulations, the volume of artifacts there, exhausted me sometimes. Here I had a bed and a dresser. Warped wooden floors that creaked with every step. A small writing desk with a lamp and a coffee cup full of pens.
I shoved handfuls of clothes and my journals into a duffel bag. The charger for my cell phone. I looked around and realized there was nothing more that I needed. I’d spent years here, years sleeping in this small room with its clanging pipes and finicky radiator.
I believed her. Lyla.
No, I wanted to believe her.
How Joan came to her like a shotgun blast—another’s lifetime opened upon her all at once. I could relate.
How often had I found myself hoping throughout the years? How diligently had I petitioned some mechanism of the holy world for an answer? And nothing had come of it, until now.
I went downstairs to the store. After five minutes on the laptop, I had the address of the Los Angeles studio where To the Point was filmed. Nothing on Lyla beyond the little I’d learned from the show. I resisted the urge to rifle through the dozens of YouTube clips of the show, to rewatch her episode. I was almost fearful of how excited I was.
I wrote a quick letter to Adam, outlining the fact that I’d left him the store, included the number of the lawyer who’d drafted the will for me. My day for grand gestures, apparently. I put the letter in an envelope and wrote his name on the front and left it on the counter. He had a key. If—when—I died, on my way to LA or otherwise, someone would find it. I hoped it was the right choice.
Half an hour later, I was on the southbound off-ramp of I-5, hot wind buffeting my clothes, my thumb held out. A dozen cars passed, maybe less, when a green minivan with a For Sale sign in one of the side windows slowed and pulled onto the soft shoulder ahead of me, hazards blinking. Simple as that. I dared to harbor the idea, just for a moment, that destiny—or something—was bending to accommodate me.
I ran, could actually feel the asphalt give a little in the heat. My eyeglasses threatened to slip off. I opened the passenger door and threw my bag on the floorboard.
The driver was bearded, wore an oversiz
ed pair of women’s sunglasses. A sweat-stained t-shirt, tattoos on his fingers. His head was ringed in a bloody, flesh-colored bandage.
“Heading south, chief?” he asked, ashing a cigarette. “Hop in. Let’s get to it.”
8
The caffeine from Chadwick’s espressos had faded. Vale was crashing. The sale had gone fine; the owner had claimed to have been going through a divorce, and the boxes, empty leftovers from his move. No back seats, but who would he need to be carting around? The man had scrawled a bill of sale on the back of envelope he’d taken from the glove box, Vale had paid him in cash, and that was that.
Meanwhile, he was already lamenting picking up this new guy, this portly old man with his duffel bag and weird eyeglasses. That good feeling he’d had managed to stay with him even as he’d driven home and quickly packed a backpack and gotten on the freeway; that sense that he was doing exactly what he should be. How often did that ever happen? When was the last time he’d felt that? It had lasted another ten miles or so down the freeway, enough for his passenger to throw a few bones of conversation Vale’s way and then to stop once he realized it just wasn’t going to happen. Vale was already drawing back into himself, thinking about Candice again.
Couched in the arms of his hangover, the day’s lasting heat, the wink and snarl of sunlight off the chrome of passing cars. Would he ever be able to feel something for more than ten minutes at a stretch?
His passenger stuck out a hand. “My name’s Marvin, by the way.”
“Hi, Marvin. Mike Vale.” Perfunctory. They shook without Vale taking his eyes from the road.
“I appreciate the ride.”
Vale shrugged. They drove in silence. Beyond town now. Office parks and auto dealerships and the start of farmlands, the visual stutter of mini-malls and outlet stores wedged among rolling hills.