Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  In the parking lot of a gas station, I watched as Vale got out and pulled a beer from the bag beneath his seat and just stared at it, holding it in his hand.

  “Stop looking at me, Marvin, okay? I’m going to have a beer tonight, after I park the van. One beer.”

  “Whatever you say,” I said, my palms up. “No judgment, remember?”

  “Yeah, right.” He stormed over and set the sack down next to a garbage can. He went in to pay for the gas and came out with a two-liter jug of soda and a box of doughnuts. He set the stuff down in his seat, then pivoted on his heels and ran back and grabbed the sack of beer, shoved it back under his seat.

  “You okay, dude?” Casper called out from his spot waiting for the bathroom.

  Vale’s hands trembled. He lit a cigarette like he was mad at it and jammed his lighter in his pocket. His bandages were sweat-stained, grimy. “Shut the fuck up, Casper.”

  We hit Sacramento at rush hour, the sun falling bloody behind the skyline. We threaded our way through stop and go traffic, with Vale glaring and occasionally tracking a passing car with his middle finger jammed out the window.

  “That’s a good way to get shot these days,” I said.

  “Suck it,” Vale said. “Suck it.” I didn’t know if he was talking to me or another driver. Eventually we rolled our windows up; the city smelled inexplicably of burning plastic.

  It was full dark by the time we made it out of there, back to sere hills and billboards. I kept feeling these flurries, these constrictions in my chest: I have to find her. Lyla. Joan. Whatever her name is. Put your goddamned cigarettes and doughnuts down, Vale, and let’s move.

  Hours ticking down. But I kept it in check—he was doing okay, all things considered. He was growing on me, Vale.

  PART TWO

  ALL THE TUMBLING WORLD

  THURSDAY

  1

  He was the last bright and shining comet the art world would ever produce.

  He held root to majesty in a singular, fixed point in time.

  He had been a painter, maybe the last certifiable famous painter that America would give the world. His bullet ascended simultaneously with the death knell of the art inflation and excess of the 1980s. Still he survived, still he bloomed, even as the market itself took a shit. In an art movement so muddled and self-conscious and feasting on its own newfound sense of irony, its own self-awareness, he exploded.

  The critics saw it as his morality—and it was, but it was also his own ache for revelation, a need to admit to his guilt and rage and fear. Lust. Greed. All arrows were double-tipped: inward and outward. All of those canvasses laid waste to the excess and impiety and fecundity of man, of capitalism, of society. But they were, at their core, internal immolations of the self. And it was freedom, purging himself like that.

  His fame had partly been a matter of being in the right place at the right time—even Vale could admit that—but it was also the work. These huge, seething, allegorical things that he made. He was technically gifted, blessed with that innate eye.

  There was a period there, four or five years probably, where he painted every day, and the paintings were good. His life then had a joyous momentum to it, this rocket-fuel mixture of luck, ambition, guile and perseverance. Paintings sold as quickly as he signed his name on them. Ideas came to him loose and free-form, and he filled notebooks up with sketches. Critics begged for appointments to meet him so they could write fawning articles. Candice was his anchor, a steadying light guiding him through unfamiliar rooms.

  There was a time when the world bent toward him like a flower.

  God, he’d loved painting so much. He’d loved it. He’d seethed with that love. It had snapped off of him like electricity, that love.

  And then came the unraveling. Paris. Olivia. Brophy’s stupid contract, the cocaine, the stripper. MindyfromPratt, as he thought of her now, all one word like that.

  How do you pinpoint the beginnings of a cyclone, or measure the fallout of a man’s failings? What’s the first step in a downward spiral?

  The last time he’d seen Candice had been three months ago. Right before the first ghost sightings. She’d taken him to a restaurant in the Pearl, only a few blocks from where he had smashed all those gallery windows years before. It had been a sunny, crisp spring day and he’d been only mildly hungover. Summer peeking around the curtain.

  He’d passed the restaurant a hundred times before and never paid it a second glance, but Candice had called him up and invited him, and as recently as three months ago, he would have done anything for her except the things that would’ve helped him the most.

  He’d stepped inside and the maître d’ had seen him and smirked.

  Candice had been in town touring for another Janey book. She was one of those authors who would stay perpetually in the mid-level range of the New York Times bestseller lists; her books were read by millions of people and then generally forgotten about until the next one came along. They were pleasant and comfortable and well-written: the trials and tribulations of Janey Delancy, the reluctant PI with the tattered love life.

  He’d read the new book the night before—this one was titled Night’s Claws—and saw flashes of pure Candice in it, where she allowed her bravery as a writer to shine through the formula. Every one of her books cleaved him in half with heartache and he devoured them all.

  Candice had waited for him before being seated. “Jesus, Mike. Nice of you to get dressed up,” she said when she saw him.

  She looked amazing: She wore a dark suit with that red hair pinned up. An arc of black pearls traced her collarbone. Vale saw a hint of cleavage and looked away as lust reared up brutish inside him, a little surprising in its fierceness.

  It made him feel sad and old—not the lust itself, but the shame that came with it. The tremors had not been as bad that day but after they hugged, Vale kept his hands in his pockets. His feet felt like cold hunks of river rock. The waiter gave them menus, walked them to their table, professional again once he saw who Vale was with.

  “Nice haircut. You must be an artist,” Candice said. An old joke of theirs.

  “You look beautiful,” he said honestly. “Very pretty.”

  They talked. He felt, as always, profoundly grateful for her company. He drank water and held her gaze and smiled in the right places. He gave very little of himself as they traveled across well-trod subjects, things previously cleared of emotional land mines through years of careful cultivation. She was his last friend, after all. There was Raph, but he and Raph were like conjoined twins connected by a barstool and a litany of bad ideas. No, there was only Candice. The waiter came and asked if they’d like to start with drinks. Vale weakened and ordered a Bloody Mary and a cup of coffee. Candice didn’t say a word but watched him with an eye that caught everything and always had.

  “So you’re still at the burrito place,” she said, unable to hide the tartness from her voice, as if she’d bitten into something mealy.

  “It’s a job,” he’d said. “I make rent.”

  She looked at him and Vale sighed and suddenly felt his throat swell up; crying jags rocked him with such ease these days, he was like a teenager. And then a woman was suddenly standing over Candice. Leaning over discreetly, respectfully, holding a copy of Night’s Claws, that foil cover showing a rose amid a scattering of bullets. Of course she was the biggest fan and could Candice possibly sign this? It would mean so much. The people around them stole glances.

  Candice was gracious and radiant. She pulled a pen from a suit pocket—prepared, he was sure—for such things.

  Their drinks came and the waiter took their order, and Vale ate a full meal for the first time in days and struggled to hold it down. Candice stirred a tiny spoonful of sugar into her coffee cup and then pointed the spoon at him. It was a gesture he was used to and again he felt that swelling in his chest, his throat. He knew what she was going to say before she said it because she always prefaced it with that pointing that she did. They knew each oth
er.

  She said, “Brophy.”

  “Stop,” he said, smiling, his palm held up.

  “I’m serious, Mike. That contract? That contract is illegal.”

  “Dee, forget about it.”

  “Do you know how much The Dissipation went for? Do you have any idea? Brophy just sold that to Keith Richards, okay? It made the Times.”

  “I don’t even remember which painting that is.”

  “I don’t even remember which painting that is,” she mocked, a vicious, mincing lilt. Vale laughed. She said, “It’s the one with the wolves on the ground and all the priests and businessmen and people, like, floating in the air, holding onto bundles of balloons. That one. Don’t be an asshole.”

  He remembered it. He’d probably done his best paintings those few years in LA while Candice was in school. Dissipation had been one of them. He’d been shit-faced drunk for the opening, of course—a solo show that Tanazzi and Brophy had worked out together. Thirty paintings. He’d thrown up on Cheech Marin’s shoes.

  Candice said, “Brophy sold that painting to Keith Richards for four hundred and eighty thousand dollars, Mike.”

  Vale shook his head and tilted his Bloody Mary back until the glass clicked against his teeth. “You know I don’t get any of that money,” he said around a mouthful of ice.

  “Let me get you a lawyer. Your stuff still sells, clearly. That contract is shit.”

  “Honestly, Dee. I’m really not interested.”

  Candice started to say to something and then pursed her lips. She looked to the left, the right, as if they were spies in some Cold War saga. She hissed, “How can you not be interested? How? What are you afraid of?”

  “Dee. Candice. Please.” Smiling, still trying to hold on to some semblance of conversation. Feeling the heat of shame crawl up his neck as he stared into his lap.

  “You make corn dogs for a living, and you probably suck at it. I can name half a dozen lawyers who would wreck him, Mike, I swear to God. Half a dozen off the top of my head.”

  “Do you always talk like the bad guys in your books?”

  She stared at him and then looked down at the table, took a breath. She opened her mouth to say something, closed it. Finally she said, “At least think about doing another show. I could give you a loan for supplies. Whatever. Get you an assistant part-time. I’d be happy to.”

  He sighed.

  “You’d make a killing easily,” she said, “enough to get back on your feet. Any gallery would be happy to have you.”

  “I’m not even close to ready for that.”

  She held out a hand. “Look at you, man. You’re not even eating.” She was near tears.

  Afterward, Mike walked her to her rental car. Candice offered to drive him home. He hugged her, held her perhaps a moment too long. The familiar press and weight of her body against his, the ghost of it. The drink had smoothed the edges of things but left his body crying out for more. She opened the car door and tried to hand him a hundred dollar bill. Mike took a step back.

  “Take it, you idiot,” she said, and shoved it into his shirt pocket.

  “This is enabling behavior,” he said, and there was a danger there of having said too much. He could see it on her face.

  “Call me when you get a life.” The same line she said every time they parted.

  It was the last time he saw her.

  2

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  I gathered years, lives. Sloughed off any steadfast notions of mortality. Both suicide and death by “exterior sources,” I discovered, bore the same result: rebirth and rebirth again. I was always disfigured in childhood some way, and always with my memories an anchor around me. Lives of virtue and lives of greed were met with the same results: I came back, heartsick and heavy with Geoffroy’s dismantlement and all that had followed. Do it enough times and you mold yourself to madness eventually—how else to accept it?

  Because you keep living and dying whether you accept it or not.

  It was my seventh or eighth way through the world when I simply stopped petitioning God for help. My continued lives and their accompanying disfigurements were their own strange response to that. After that I sought solace in confession, but a confession among the world of men. I began simply cataloging my regrets, like I’m doing now.

  By the seventh or eighth time, I’d gathered around me a basic understanding of how the Curse worked, the machinations of it. In one of those early lives I’d been born to brutal, solemn parents in a small village in Hungary (for a time my reincarnations were very heavily centered around Europe—the better to cycle me through a few dozen deaths by plague, famine and war, I imagined) and it was there that I told a village priest my tale. This marked the first time I’d spoken to a holy man since Father Lavendu.

  I was twelve years old and my father had inexplicably beaten me earlier that day, and I felt furious and trapped. After speaking to the Hungarian priest, he’d taken me by the arm and marched me home and repeated to my father my ludicrous tale, and my father had simply beaten me again. The priest, however, also told the magistrates and the local bishop, who sensed a whiff of dark magic about me and promptly gathered a mob.

  So there was that.

  At twelve years old they had me weighted with stones and drowned in the Tisza River for a warlock.

  Lesson learned and learned again: no one will save you.

  So what happens?

  You live and live and live again. You become a summation of your disparate histories. Terror comes in waves, bookended in mundanities. You grow to have fifty parents, a hundred siblings, a thousand lovers, enemies beyond number.

  All of these relationships cheapened and lessened by the sameness of it all, the machinelike quality of death and life.

  You heart breaks in the knowledge that all of your children through all of your years are now dry husks in the earth. Your heart is so used and careworn it becomes dry as straw, useless. Love wears you down like water on rock.

  Your name is Geoffroy Thérage and also Marvin Deitz. And in between that your name is Sa’am, Lila, Matilda Jean, Cristina, Pilar, Agu, Sachdev, Alfonse, Damiáo, Eliot, Matthew, Haru, Mohammed, Edward, Little Foot, Terrence, Bhumika, Stephen, Than, Gavan, Ula, Malik, Jose, Changpu, Arjana, Ata’haine, Stefan, Pedro, John, Pazit, Elizabeth, Jordan, Richard, Fethee, and more and more and more.

  All of these names trailing streaks of blood in the dust of your life—the knowledge of the loss that came before. You practically come out from every womb, out of every poor mother, already filling your lungs, trailing heartbreak behind you.

  Sometimes you do not live long enough to even become named, your life too short to be written on the backs of people’s tongues. Sometimes you have a name and try deliberately to forget it because it is just too sad to remember.

  There’s no gift in living when nothing you do can take such a gift away.

  • • •

  I woke from a dream in which Joan sacrificed herself by leaning her chest on a flaming sword and sinking down onto it, all the time imploring me with her dark and depthless gaze. The crowd crushed and pressed around us, jockeying for a look. I kept reaching for her and missing, again and again, all the while the crowd pressing behind me.

  I woke with the sheets lying tangled around my legs, the room stiflingly hot. The bed felt peppered in dirt, unclean. I could hear Casper quietly weeping on his own bed.

  “Casper. You okay?”

  He pulled in a ragged hitch of breath, sputtered it out.

  “Sorry for waking you up, Marvin.”

  I ran a hand down my face, heard the brittle rasp of stubble, Joan’s face still burned like an afterimage against my eyes. We were in some hotel room on I-5, still a good ways from Los Angeles. There would be some driving to be done tomorrow. I felt that moment of panic again: I had less than a week, just a few days, to find Lyla, to find some answers—if there were any at all. I could leave this life at any time.

  “You didn’t
wake me up,” I said. “What’s the matter? You alright?”

  He didn’t speak for a while. Then he said, sounding bashful, embarrassed, “I’m just worried. I don’t know what . . . I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. Gary said I’d never leave Roseburg if I didn’t have someone with me. That this was an opportunity and I should grab it.”

  “I still can’t believe you hid in the van. And that we didn’t see you.”

  “For real. I thought you guys would find me right away.”

  We lay there in our beds, the occasional pair of headlights sneaking under the curtain and roving across the wall as people pulled out of the parking lot.

  “You’ll be okay, Casper.”

  “I guess.” He coughed. “Sorry for making a big deal about it. I know I should be stoked.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not like Mike and I know each other, you know? All three of us are just stumbling forward. California, the Land of Opportunity, and all that.”

  “The Western nest of sin and fornication,” Casper quoted.

  I laughed. “Right.”

  “Those pamphlets are nuts,” he said. “The Transmittal Foundation or whatever it’s called.”

  “Yeah.”

  We were quiet a while. It was like any moment throughout time, two people bullshitting in the dark. The walls were thin enough that I heard Vale moan in his sleep in his own room, a haunted noise that ran a finger of ice down my spine.

  Quietly, Casper said, “I was just afraid to go by myself, Marvin.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’re with us. We’re all going to the same place.”

  It took me a long time to fall asleep, to get Joan’s face out of my mind. To get that picture of her spreading her arms and falling onto her sword to turn into something else.