Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  I said, “There’s no way it’s them.”

  “It’s them,” Casper said. “It’s them. Who else would it be? Look for signs, remember?”

  “What, specifically,” Vale said, pulling into the parking lot of a McDonald’s so that he could begin the arduous task of getting us across town, “are you guys talking about?”

  Down Santa Monica Boulevard we went, past what seemed like miles of boxy storefronts, fast food joints, tourist boutiques.

  Finally, finally, we slowed beside a squat stucco-roofed building, some kind of converted warehouse, that thronged with people sitting at tables out front, a knee-high fence lined around them. The street thrummed; so much movement, sound, lights on the periphery.

  What I was feeling, I couldn’t put into words. I had been so long imagining this, or something like it, that now that I was here I felt weighted down.

  It had been so long since I was afraid of something.

  Vale slowed past the building, stopped. “This is the place?”

  Casper craned his head to catch an address. “It must be. Wait, there’s the sign. Visions. Yeah, this is it.”

  The name of the venue brought a wry smile. Of course. The Curse, playful as ever.

  Someone behind us honked. Vale rolled his window down, motioned them to go around the van. “Parking’s gonna be a nightmare,” Vale said, lighting a cigarette. “You guys get out, I’ll find a spot.”

  • • •

  Even as strangers, or near-strangers, they all greeted us merrily enough—Casper had the ticket of youth as admission but there was no other way around it, the ridiculousness of it: Casper was wearing the same clothes he’d worn for days, and I was a balding old man with one eye. I could have been Casper’s father, his just-a-bit-off uncle. It was ridiculous.

  And yet there were smiles all around, the three of them clearly a little buzzed (I could picture Ananda getting brave enough to call Casper after a few drinks and some encouragement from her friends), and Lyla and the bodyguard, Louis, seemed entirely unaware or uncaring that I was brazenly staring at them. Night sounds continued to unspool around us—music, a car alarm, traffic, laughter from nearby tables. The tang of cigarette smoke hung like a veil in the air. Bass thundered inside the bar loud enough to vibrate the window glass. It was them. It was her.

  Louis was as imposing in real life. Hulking in a dark jacket, his face was more seamed in person, more worn. Older than he’d looked on-screen. Lyla’s face was thin, sculpted, with almond-shaped eyes that were wide and knowing and more than a little sly.

  Again, I felt that stirring of fear when introductions were made and I reached out to shake her hand—what was going to happen? Some starburst of recognition? Our interconnectedness spelled out for us in a flash of light?

  Her hand was cool, smooth.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said to me, and that was all.

  They made room for us at their table, and there I was, sitting down next to her.

  I still saw no Joan in Lyla. None at all. But what did that even mean? I’d never known Joan the Maid, never conversed with her. I’d simply been the instrument that ended her life. There’d been no knowing to begin with.

  A waitress came and Casper and I ordered beers. He couldn’t stop grinning. He kept glancing at me, his gaze heavy with meaning. All of your lives have brought you here, Marvin. What was it about Casper that made him so willing to believe my story? “You will not believe this,” he said, “but we just saw you on TV. Like, today.” The three of them leaned back—Lyla’s arm brushed against mine—and roared with laughter.

  Ananda pointed a finger at Lyla and Louis, cackling. “You’re never living it down. Reruns forever. Into the grave. Job interviews. Everywhere you go.” Louis grinned into his cocktail, shrugged those massive shoulders.

  Conversation among the four of them, someone laughed at a nearby table. I put my elbows on the table, leaned forward a bit. “Listen, um, Lyla? I was hoping to ask you something.”

  Lyla turned to me, smiling as she tapped a cigarette on the iron tabletop. She took a slow sip from her drink—it glowed blue under the lights, the edge of the glass rimed in sugar. She seemed more than a little drunk, her eyes glassy, unfocused.

  “What was your name again?”

  “Marvin.”

  “Hi, Marvin.”

  “Hi. Uh, it was about Joan, my question. I was just hoping you could answer something for me.”

  Lyla grinned at Ananda and looked back at me, lifting her chin as she blew a jet of smoke. “What do you want to know?”

  What did I want to know? This was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? What, after everything, did I want to know?

  Countless lives lived, all of them weighted in some measure of pointless heartbreak and hurt. Wandering lost down the backbone of six centuries, searching for meaning. For penance.

  And here’s Joan? Here’s Joan, drinking a blue cocktail, smoking a cigarette, drunk and happy, asking me what I want to know?

  I said, “Well, just . . . Is it real? About you and Joan of Arc? What you said on the show?”

  This moment. Spanned out the length of years. As soon as I spoke the words, I wished that I could live in that moment, that moment when she opened her mouth to speak but before things moved irrevocably one way or the other.

  Even that moment stretched out for eons would be better than what was to come.

  Because I could tell, as soon as I asked, what her answer would be. By the set of her jaw, the way her eyes quickly—just for a second—shifted away, some physical tell she had when reminded of a lie she'd told. I’d seen enough of them in my lives, those tells. I knew what she’d say as soon as my own words left my mouth.

  She tapped her cigarette into the red plastic ashtray and took a sip of her drink. “No,” she said brightly. Eager to talk about it. “No way.” I felt the bottom drop out from beneath me, this door beneath my heart that opened up, sent it tumbling down. “It was kind of a joke between me and Louis. To see if we could do it, you know? They put us up in an awesome hotel, comped us a bunch of free shit.” She shrugged. “I put it on my CV.”

  “Dude,” said Louis, chewing on a mouthful of ice, “it was hilarious.”

  9

  Richard wasn’t really watching TV. He was mostly just letting the light from the screen play across his eyes, letting its sound fill the empty room. He’d fired up a joint earlier that night, smoked little more than a few puffs before realizing it was probably a bad idea. He’d gone through the house afterward, a little high, and turned on all the lights and then sat in bed and tried to watch television. He stared at the joint resting on a saucer on his bedside table and finally unfolded himself from his bed, threw it into the toilet in the master bathroom.

  When he shuffled back into the bedroom, the program he’d been halfheartedly watching—a reality show in which a disparate group of longtime vegans had to competitively manage various barbecue and hamburger joints throughout the country—had cut to a news bulletin.

  All of the lights in the house burned. Every light in every room. He could not stop thinking of her, of course—was he expected to? Was there anything else to do? This would not change for a long time, this feeling—that Candice’s memory was like a barb hooked inside him, something his skin caught on every time he moved. He was just beginning to understand the great and wretched notion that you bring your dead and your love with you wherever you go. You carry it around inside like a stone in your mouth.

  He gazed at the TV, turned the volume up to a deafening level. It was a theater-worthy sound system that he wished would envelop him like the lights in the house did. The television reporter, her dark hair shellacked and unmoving, her lips bee-stung, said that the bottled water representative, the man who had filmed the Bride back at the beginning of summer, had committed suicide on the ninth green of the golf course in La Jolla, the very spot where he filmed her. He’d hopped the fence, shot himself.

  “A note was left,” the reporter sai
d, “but investigators are not divulging its nature or contents.” There was the familiar footage, again, of the Bride, her concentric circles on the grass, the jostling of the rep’s camera, and then a cut to the golf course at night and from a distance, murky in the dark, police walking among yellow evidence tape.

  Richard pressed his palms into his eyes and simply lived in it, lived in that moment, in that ache, because there was nothing, absolutely nothing else to do.

  10

  Lyla sat smiling in front of me as my hands went cold. As the bottom of the world dropped out from under me.

  “So . . . the whole thing was just made up?”

  Lyla shrugged. “I watched a documentary about Joan of Arc. That’s where I got the idea. Everybody knows that To the Point show is full of shit. Half the stuff we said, her assistants gave us scripts for.”

  “The whole thing was pretty much planned out,” Louis said. “Jessie Pamona was totally in on it.”

  “That whole show’s fake,” Lyla said. “It’s like wrestling or whatever. Totally made up.”

  Over Lyla’s shoulder, Louis smirked. “You thought, what? That she had, like, a split personality disorder with Joan of Arc, dude? Seriously?” He turned to Ananda. “Where do you find these guys, Andy?”

  “Excuse me,” I said woodenly. “Really nice to meet you all.” I tapped the table with one finger as I stood. My smile was rigid, felt glued on. The night wheeled around me in a screaming palette of colors, a cavalcade of sound.

  “Hold on,” I heard Casper say. “Marvin, wait.”

  I could hear him murmuring apologies behind me. “Thanks, Ananda. Uh, I’m really sorry? We’ve just . . . that episode really affected him. It was really moving.” Ananda laughed, confused.

  “You’re leaving? Uh, it was nice to meet you?” she called back.

  “Yeah, sorry,” Casper said over his shoulder. “It’s weird, I know. I’ll call you.”

  “Don’t bother,” Ananda called back. I could hear Louis laugh.

  My legs were numb as I walked along the sidewalk. Just one foot, then the other.

  Up the block I saw Vale coming toward us. I put my head down, looked at the flattened trash, the cigarette butts, the capillaries of cracks running along the sidewalk.

  “What the hell?” Vale asked as I walked past him. “What happened?”

  If I could’ve spoken at that moment, I’d have told Vale that I’d been led to one person out of millions—the odds of it were still beyond belief, really—only to be shown that most brutal, intractable rule of the Curse:

  There is no reason why you are here.

  11

  Vale gently took Marvin by the elbow and led him off Santa Monica Boulevard after Marvin, his eyes downcast, ran into a drunk college kid in a t-shirt that read I’m Here About the Blowjob. The kid wanted to fight until he looked at Vale, who stared back from his ruined face as if he was already regretting the ruination he’d visit upon the kid.

  “It means the same to me either way,” Vale said sadly, shrugging his shoulders once.

  “Keep your friend in check,” the kid mumbled, turning around.

  Vale had parked a few blocks down a side street bracketed by apartment buildings. Palm trees shrouded the sidewalk, bent toward the street like thugs. No one spoke. Whatever the hell had happened with Marvin, he clearly needed space. The van sat in the dark beneath a stunted little tree, and they could hear the traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard behind them, but this street was relatively quiet. Vale heard two women laughing in one of the apartments above them, but the sound was far away and still in the air.

  Vale put his hand on Marvin’s shoulder. “You want to just go back to the motel?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Marvin said, leaning against the passenger door of the van.

  “Are you guys possibly interested in telling me what’s going on? Maybe?”

  “It’s a long story,” Casper said.

  “It’s not even worth telling,” Marvin said. He took his glasses off, pinched the bridge of his nose. His eye socket was wrinkled, sagging, the lid dropping over a hollow red pocket.

  Vale would never be sure who saw the man come from the mouth of the alley first, come from that small crooked lane between two apartment buildings. Certainly not Marvin, who still had his head tucked down, his glasses in his shirt pocket. It was Casper, most likely.

  In Vale’s periphery, Casper slowed down a step and Vale himself flinched: the man was big, hulking, and smelled terrible—even ten, fifteen feet away Vale caught the scent of him as he lurched from the mouth of an alley. Big, shrouded in grime, wearing a tight-fitting Lycra jacket and gray jeans with the knees blown out. Cheeks carved gaunt in the wan lamppost light.

  “And God will judge,” he thundered, and stopped in front of the three of them. The pale wounded glint of his eyes. Like a linebacker on hard times. “God will judge,” he said again, sounding heartbroken this time, and he unzipped his jacket and took a small pistol from the inside pocket and passed its barrel over the three of them. Seventeen million people around them and yet the street right then was silent as a morgue. Deathly still.

  Marvin looked up and put on his glasses and in a weary voice said, “Here it comes. You’re looking for me.” And the man settled the barrel back on him as if the matter had been decided, and he shot Marvin twice in the chest.

  PART THREE

  SMOKE CITY

  SUNDAY

  1

  BREAKING NEWS: Video of man interacting with ghost in “Smoke City” goes viral, receiving over two million views in twenty-four hours

  —CNN.com

  • • •

  The world flared and dimmed, and after some period of interminable darkness, I saw things within it.

  I saw dust hovering in a string above a red clay road, the remnant of someone’s passage.

  I saw worn leather boots beneath a wooden bench.

  The crooked figure of one of my fathers as he gathered stones for a cairn for one of my mothers. Bees trundled among the wildflowers, the grass knee high, green as paint.

  I saw a loaf of bread dusted with flour.

  A rusty hacksaw gelled with drying blood, half its teeth broken.

  A fly perched on the lip of a milk jug.

  A little girl jumping rope.

  I smelled the earthy pong of a muddy field, yellowed bones pressed into its surface, a killing ground.

  I heard the fattened pause where the needle found the groove but the music had yet to start.

  I saw one of my sons, a boy centuries dead now, naked and laughing in a jeweled river, splashing his little fists against the skin of the water that ran headlong against his dusky knees. His teeth like little white stones in his mouth. I smelled the river, felt the breeze stir the hairs on my arms.

  I saw some faceless man lashed to a rafter and hung upside down. Blood unspooling from his hair as he screamed.

  A loaf of bread rimed in mold.

  A wooden puzzle of a blue dog sitting outside an orange house.

  The corpse of a seagull in the wet sand, lines of mites leaving its body like retreating soldiers.

  The mournful ache of a bow skating against a violin string.

  A thatched hut wearing a crown of flames.

  My husband in an officer’s hat.

  The heft of my wife’s breast against my hand.

  A thimble of ink spilled on a tablecloth.

  Cornmeal in a blue bowl.

  A chorus of rats skittering in the walls.

  A fogged window spattered with beaded rain.

  A dancing man on a stage.

  Joan’s body embraced in flame, crowned in a curtain of stinking smoke.

  Joan’s poor little cross laced in twine.

  And my father’s yellow coat there in the marketplace ahead of me as I rushed to keep up, the people parting and stepping aside for us.

  2

  Middle of the night sometime. Maybe even morning. Hours had passed. Sleep pulled at him. He wanted a
drink and felt like he shouldn’t want a drink right then but there it was regardless. Gnawing at him. He knew the sweating made him look guilty of something.

  “Mike, I’m just trying to understand,” the detective said. They were sitting across from each other, the pocked table between them. The detective had introduced himself by his first name, Dave, and had offered Vale coffee, a sandwich.

  Vale still had blood on his shirt, but good old Dave was acting like they’d gone to college together and spent the last two decades tipping a few back on Friday nights. Pals. But the cops had also separated him and Casper, and the fact was not lost on him: he was sitting in a room that held a table and two chairs and a window with one-way glass, and even Vale could see there was a camera mounted in the ceiling. He wasn’t handcuffed, but were there other cops watching his good buddy Dave interview him about Marvin’s shooting? Was he being recorded? Oh, probably. That all seemed very likely. That was worth betting on.

  Dave smiled and leaned back in his chair. He was maybe forty pounds overweight and had bright red patches of eczema lacing his hands. Vale watched as he reached a thumb into the cuff of his other shirtsleeve and scratched. Dave said, “It’s just a weird set of circumstances, Mike. We’re just trying to get to the bottom of it all. Unravel everything. For Mr. Deitz’s sake.”

  “There’s nothing to unravel. My friend got shot.”

  Dave nodded, rubbing his knuckles into his palm like some schoolyard tough about to throw a punch. He closed his eyes for a second—the relief of it. The eczema was bad.

  “You should see a dermatologist,” Vale said.

  Dave smiled again, but his eyes went cold. “We found his body a few blocks away. In an alleyway.”

  Vale started. “Who?”

  “The shooter. Guy named Donald Jarvis Smith. Suicided out, looks like.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. Forty years old. Marine. Honorably discharged twelve years back. PTSD, VA assistance was a mess. Spotty. History of mental illness, history of bouncing on and off meds. Got a pretty substantial record after his discharge. Got hardcore into a cult once the smokes started showing up. We found some cultist material on his person. Bunch of pamphlets. Guys like this fall through the cracks sometimes. Because the cracks can be a mile wide, you know?”