Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  “It is.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Should I buy a phone? Just go buy a phone somewhere? So we have the goddamned internet?”

  Casper spared a glance over his shoulder. “Do you actually know how to work one?”

  “What? It requires an engineering degree?”

  I printed some stills from the video. I watched the cursor vibrate on the computer screen. Vale took the pages from the printer, handed them to me: his hands were shaking again.

  We followed him on the freeway and when we exited—our little convoy of two—began passing through sections of the city where the luster had clearly faded. Vale would’ve known what part of town we were in. I didn’t ask. Faded trash lay flattened at the curb. Weeds tufted from slats of broken concrete. Banners in convenience store windows broadcast items in three or four different languages. Vendors set up tables on street corners, lining the sidewalk. Sunglasses, jeans, tourist t-shirts. We passed tattoo shops, discount jewelry stores. Pawn shops hawked guns and gold, electronics. Every window was grated.

  We parked, and Vale started walking into strip clubs with the stills, passing out twenties to hulking, monosyllabic bouncers, their necks pocked in steroid-induced acne. We followed, timidly. No luck anywhere, but I marveled at Vale’s ease. A bartender in a place called the Engine Room watched boxing on the TV over Vale’s shoulder. He had a stick and poke tattoo—KET—on his cheek and bounced a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. The dancers wouldn’t start for another half an hour, he said. Vale passed the bartender the picture with one hand and a twenty with the other, pushing them across the glossy wood. The man looked at the picture for a few seconds and pushed it back, pocketing the twenty. “That chick could be half the bitches in here.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, and he looked at me, eyes like pinpricks in black paper. Dead as anything. The toothpick stopped moving.

  “Thanks for your help,” Vale said, pushing me out the door.

  And on and on. Sun arcing across the sky. The city so massive we’d hardly dented it. Like flinging water at a skyscraper on fire.

  Tomorrow would be my last day at the latest. Or tonight, or right then. Any moment. What we were doing was idiotic; it spit in the face of odds and logic alike. But it also made room, I supposed, for grace, for something extraordinary to happen.

  I needed something extraordinary to happen.

  What else were we supposed to do?

  It was in a club on Pico, with the unfortunate name of Pud’s, that something did. It was five in the afternoon and a pair of women in thongs soaped each other from a bucket of suds on the stage. A line of men sat at the rack. The women laughed and blew bubbles at each other, stomped in a kiddie pool. Light refracted. The bass drum kicked me in the stomach. Casper tried not to stare; his jaw was practically hinged to his shirt collar.

  “I don’t know the chick,” the bouncer said, yelling and leaning toward Vale as he pocketed Vale’s money, “but this dude goes to my gym.”

  “Where’s the gym?” Vale yelled back.

  The bouncer cupped his hand behind his ear and said, “I can’t hear you, man.”

  I said, “He asked where that gym was.” The bouncer didn’t even look at me.

  Vale handed him another twenty.

  The bouncer shook his head, sad. “You’re mumbling,” he said. “Speak up a little.”

  “Christ,” Vale said, and handed him another twenty.

  “Wilshire and Wilton,” he said. “Ground floor. Dude’s always, like always, doing dead lifts. If you’ve got a beef with him, I’d be careful. He’s a monster.” He cast a glance over the three of us. “I mean, for you guys.”

  Rush hour. Bass strobed from open car windows as they zipped past us. Stunted trees rose listless and dry, moored on traffic islands. Whiffs of piss and burnt plastic. Sidewalks thronged with pedestrians, people at bus stops leaned wilting in the heat. We passed a ghost girl on the sidewalk, her hands over her face, and I watched a teenaged boy pretend to grab her by the hips and grind her from behind, his friends cawing rough laughter. She was gone before anyone could take a picture. We got back in the rental, Vale pulling out in front of us.

  The Maxxed Gym took up the ground floor of an office complex. White tower of a building. Parking was a nightmare, so we followed Vale into the garage and paid. Our footfalls echoed under the fluorescents. Dim and cool in there, cavernous.

  The gym may have literally taken up an acre. Grunts, the clanging of metal muted by air conditioning. Towels and spray bottles of antiseptic hung from pins every twenty feet. The cries of the room reminded me of various darkened chambers I had spent time in. We wandered as discreetly as possible—which was probably not very—but none of us found him.

  Vale showed the picture of the bodyguard to the girl at the front desk.

  “We’re just wondering if he works out here,” Vale said. “That’s all. Maybe you know his name?”

  The girl shrugged, Get Maxxed! in arching military stencil across her chest. She chewed gum, seemed wholly unconcerned with their appearance. “Lots of people come here. Like, hundreds a day.”

  “He dead lifts a lot. Heavy weights.”

  “Are you guys members?”

  “Well, we’re thinking about joining, that’s the thing.”

  “I just work here part-time,” she said.

  Vale leaned forward and tapped the photo, putting his elbows on the counter. He smiled. He did not look well. “Listen. I’m a producer. Okay? I’m working on a new fitness program for FitTV. You know it?”

  “I think so,” she said slowly, making it sound like a question. I could see her vacillating between wanting to believe his story and gazing directly at the truth—the scabby, dirty, unwashed truth—that was leaning across her desk. “Yeah.”

  “Great. So believe me when I say this guy is going to be very happy if you could help us out.”

  Behind us, someone said, “Hey, Katrina. How’s everything going here?”

  I turned and faced a man so frighteningly sculpted and huge he’d need to use his opposite arm to put his phone up to his ear. His vascular system laid out in stunning relief along his arms, into the slabs of his pecs. He looked like someone had an extra bag of suntanned muscle lying around and decided to put a little ponytail on it and make an extra person. A shirt marked SECURITY stretched tight across the mountain range of his tank top. Katrina pointed her pen at Vale and said, “These guys want me to give them a customer’s name, Levi. They say they’re TV producers.”

  Levi smiled. “I bet they are. Unfortunately, that’s not our policy, gentlemen.”

  Vale looked up at him—the guy had him by a few inches—and said, “It’s very important, Levi.”

  Levi laughed. His biceps jumped like little pets leaping for treats. He leaned down toward Vale and said very slowly, as if speaking to a child, “In five seconds I’m going to bend your arm up behind your back and walk you out the door. It will hurt very, very badly.”

  Vale put his hands up. “No need,” he said. “We’re fine. Thanks for your time.”

  The sun had crested the skyline, the sky awash in purples and blues. The howl and trundle of the city all around us. It was beautiful.

  I realized I didn’t want to go.

  I didn’t want to leave this time. I wanted to stay here, in this life.

  I was hanging on fiercely, as fiercely as I could, to the skin of the world.

  7

  They hit another half dozen strip clubs with no results and by then the sun had fallen. In order to save money—and as a gesture of good will toward Vale—they spent another hour returning the rental car and the three of them got back in the van.

  They ate at a Thai place in Santa Monica, unsure of what to do next. Vale stared longingly at the beer menu and drank glass after glass of water while Marvin kept sighing and leaning back in his chair. Gazed off into the distance, his eye unreadable behind his good lens. After dinner they stepped out into the warm night and p
aused: a ghost had appeared across the street.

  It was a man, on his knees on the sidewalk in front of a real estate office, his hands clutched together in front of his face. Even across the street in the dying light they saw he wore a robe torn and frayed at the hem.

  “Looks like a monk,” Casper said.

  “He looks homeless,” Vale said, and lit a cigarette.

  “Do you want to go talk to him, Marvin?”

  Vale looked between them. “Talk to him? What do you mean?”

  “One of them talked to Marvin. In the bathroom,” Casper said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s true,” Casper said. “You want to, Marvin?”

  They crossed the street. A small group of boys stood there as well, three or four of them, loose-limbed and fearless in the gloom, one of them straddling a bicycle that seemed too small for him. “Watch this,” he said, and rode his bike through the specter, skidding to a stop, turning around and doing it again. The other boys hooted, and then one of them stepped forward. “Can I help you with anything?” he said, in a quavering falsetto, the same words first spoken to the Bride, and then spun and delivered a sloppy, snapping kick at the ghost’s face.

  Through it all, the ghost registered nothing, his form dissipating and tightening back into focus, a bad picture on a television correcting itself.

  Casper stepped toward the kid on the bike. “That’s enough. You guys need to get going now.”

  The boys seemed emboldened by their youth, the anonymity of the night, Casper’s own inherent weirdness. “Fuck you, dude,” the boy on the bike sneered. “They don’t even feel it. They don’t even know we’re here.”

  “You don’t know that,” Marvin said, and the ghost ratcheted its fogged and shaggy head toward him.

  “Oh,” it breathed among them, its voice like a sheet of glass being scoured with grit. It held its hands out toward Marvin. So obviously a look of recognition on its face, Vale realized. He remembered Candice standing in front of the doorway of her house earlier that day. The blazing sun above her, yet she held her hands out in front of her as if testing the confines of a darkened room. Gingerly navigating her way through the blackness. But this? This look on the specter’s face? This was recognition. This was what happened when someone turned the light on.

  “No way,” one of the boys said, each word drawn out slowly.

  Marvin got down on one knee—it took him a bit of work—and the real estate office’s neon CLOSED sign pooled like blood in the dark lens of his glasses.

  “English?” Marvin said. “Françaises?”

  “Nederlands.” Again, its voice sounded as if some vital interior machinery had grown ragged with misuse or carelessness. But the look of rapture, of relief, was obvious.

  “Oh my God,” the boy on the bike said, and pulled out his phone. He started filming. Marvin stayed there on his knee like a suitor as traffic began to slow and the apparition spoke tentatively at first, and then with a growing enthusiasm, a blooming intensity.

  “We met a Chinese lady in the bathroom,” Casper stage whispered next to Vale, who was suddenly struck with a moment of strange collusion: an inertia coupled with a dizzying wonder at the largeness of the world. The strange vastness of what a single moment could hold. He felt warmth on his lip and touched the back of his hand to his face and it came away bloody. Just a little.

  “Dude,” one of the boys said, “they’re speaking Dutch, man. I know it.”

  “How the hell do you know that, Garrett?” another one asked. “You failed Spanish twice.”

  “Because my grandma’s Dutch, shitneck.”

  They kept on. Marvin with his sweat stains in his shirt, his dusting of gray stubble, his shirt tucked into his khakis. That black lens. The ghost gesticulated, his voice the windy rattle of pebbles dropped in a glass jar. Marvin nodded, occasionally murmured something in response.

  “Two million views by tomorrow,” the boy filming said. “I guarantee it.” He looked at his friends and shook his head, grinning. “Dude just talked to a ghost in Smoke City, man.” Vale looked behind him. People were gathering. When he turned back, the ghost had seized Marvin’s wrists, seemed to be really holding them. The specter’s face seemed painted with wonder and loss in equal measure. And then it let go of Marvin, clasped its hands together as if in prayer, or gratitude, and then disappeared.

  “Just so you know, man,” called out the kid with the phone. “You just broke the internet.”

  Marvin walked between them, Vale and Casper gently pushing past the scrum of people that had formed. “Two million by tomorrow,” the kid cried out again somewhere behind them.

  “Let’s get Marvin out of here,” Casper said, putting an arm over his shoulder.

  “I’m okay, Casper,” Marvin said, his voice husky and drawn.

  “You should be milking this,” Vale said, holding his cast out as if to ward people off. “Footage for your show.”

  Casper shook his head as they crossed the street again. “No way. That was about to turn into a mob scene or something. Plus those kids were dicks.”

  “And you don’t have a camera.”

  “And I don’t have a camera.”

  Inside the van, Marvin sat in the passenger seat with his fist pressed against his mouth. Vale lit a cigarette and was a little surprised when Marvin said, “Can I have one of those?”

  Vale lit one for him, handed it over. “Listen, can I ask? How did you do that back there? I thought they didn’t talk to people.” He felt strangely ebullient, light. He was sweating like mad. But for the most part, he felt good—and he realized with a start that he’d made it twenty-four hours without a drink. It had been years since that’d happened. His nosebleed was gone, just a tiny one.

  Marvin shrugged and rolled his window down. Night sounds filled the van: traffic like an ocean. “I don’t know.” His lens caught all of traceries of the city night: neon, streetlights, glows from the dashboard.

  “I mean, why you?”

  Marvin sighed and looked at his cigarette. He ran a hand across his stubble. “Because I’ve had a long and interesting life, Mike.”

  Vale laughed. “And a humble one, too.”

  “Ha,” Marvin said, staring at the glowing point of his cigarette. “You know, you’re not a terrible person when you’re sober.”

  Vale’s chest went loose. He felt like a teenager these days, so quick to anger or weep, sober or not. So at the mercy of the world. He felt himself go flush with simple, animal gratitude. He said quietly, “I think it’s a little too soon to tell for sure, you know what I mean? But thank you.”

  Casper, cross-legged in the back, had opened another box, was peering through it. His phone rang and he cast a bashful look around the van before answering it. “Hey, Ananda,” he said. “What’s up? How’s it going?”

  Vale jammed his cigarette in the ashtray and said, “Look, Marvin. I just wanted to tell you—I’ve got plenty of cash left. Enough, anyways. For gas and hotel rooms for a while. I don’t give a shit what happens to the money. I don’t care. I’m totally up for helping you guys out. Though I do think you might want to consider a more long-term approach if you and Ken Burns back there are going to try to make it in Hollywood. You know? It’s not really a ‘Let’s pop in for the weekend and get a TV deal’ sort of place.”

  A sad, rueful little smile on Marvin’s face. “Thanks, Mike. It’s appreciated. I wasn’t really planning on staying long.”

  “Oh, man, I’d love to hang out tonight,” Casper said, “but I’m, uh, kind of busy right now. What’re you guys doing?”

  Vale said from the front seat, “Who’s he talking to?”

  “He met a girl.”

  “Really.”

  “She cut his hair.”

  Vale laughed. “That’s awesome.”

  “Wait,” Casper said, “who’re you hanging out with?”

  They hit a red light and Vale said, “One amo
ng many of my questions, Marvin, is just how is it that you happen to know Dutch?”

  The light turned green and they passed beneath it and Marvin’s lens flared red and went as black as some dead star. “You know, you pick things up here and there. I was just in the right place. Just have to be available, right?” Speaking so quiet Vale could hardly hear him.

  “Wait,” Casper said. “Hold on. Our night’s just opened up, actually. We’d love to hang out. Yeah, totally. Is it cool if I bring my friends? Can you hold on a second while I grab a pen?” Vale eyed the rearview mirror and watched as Casper pressed his phone against his chest and leaned forward between their seats.

  “Holy shit, you guys. Holy shit. Ananda’s at a bar in West Hollywood. And guess what?”

  Vale, dutifully, said, “I don’t know, Casper. What?”

  “She’s getting drinks with her friends, Lyla and Louis, who she says were on TV last week.”

  8

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  All Manners in Which I Have Died, or at Least as Many as I Can Remember:

  (10+) Virus/disease

  (10+) Stabbing/disembowelment/hand-to-hand combat

  (5?) Gunshot wound/weaponized combat

  (5?) Drowning

  (5?) Blood disease/bone disease/cancer (some only assumed as such, as diagnoses varied from century to century and were frequently given vastly different names. They all, every last one of them, hurt indescribably.)

  (3) Fall from heights

  (3) Asphyxiation/smothering

  (3) Fire

  (2) Blunt trauma (beaten by mob, etc.)

  (1) Drug overdose

  (1) Hypothermia

  • • •

  Casper got the address from Ananda and Vale hung his head in mock defeat when he heard where it was located. He predicted we’d arrive, Saturday night traffic being what it was, in approximately three months. I was still stunned, thinking there must be some mistake. Some vast coincidence.

  “See you in a bit,” Casper said before he hung up.