Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  Vale said to him, sadly, “Bud. You’re not making sense.”

  Marvin glared at him, his hair stuck in whorls along his temples. “The hell I’m not.”

  They passed a string of cars on the shoulder—traffic slowed suddenly and Casper goosed the brakes hard. The inevitable, the now-expected: a smoke.

  This time it was a businessman with hilariously huge lapels and equally huge sideburns, feverishly looking at his watch, standing in the brambles beside a fence twenty yards off the freeway.

  “Someone’s late for the porn shoot,” Vale said.

  “Pull over,” Marvin rasped.

  “Marvin. You’re sick. We gotta get you home, buddy. You insisted on leaving the hospital, fine. But now we gotta get you home. Dicking around in the car is not ideal, okay?”

  “Stop the car.”

  Vale said, “You don’t have to get the life story of every ghost you see, buddy. That’s not your job. You don’t have to save everyone.”

  Marvin pressed the bottle of water against his forehead, glared at Vale with that one blazing blue eye.

  “Just pull the car over,” he said.

  3

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  BRIEF NOTES RE: SPECTER DETECTIVES OPENING CREDITS:

  AESTHETIC: Grainy, jittery camera work, grit on lens. Image: A cemetery in the daylight, bright green grass. Vacillate between hot colors and subdued sepias. Closeup of a weathered stone angel, backlit by the sun.

  Somber opening music—haunting—single cello or violin piece. Commission something? Casper demands guitars, says it’s the right sound “according to his guts,” but he has yet to prove himself a reliable source musically—especially if his choice of shirts is any indication. We’ll see.

  VO: “Los Angeles, California. Home of Hollywood’s extravagant entertainment industry, where fortunes are made and dreams come true. But that’s not all that makes up Los Angeles. Not anymore. Ghosts—visions and specters—now haunt the city. From the tallest high-rise and most decadent mansion to the seediest back alley, these apparitions have become as commonplace as celebrity sightings. Still, so many questions remain unanswered: Who are they? Who were they in life? Why are they here?

  “And most importantly, can we help them find their way home?”

  Casper actually has a good voice for narration. He might have something there. It’s a rough draft—especially just focusing on the Hollywood aspect of LA—but screw it. We can work loose and tighten it up later.

  • • •

  The sky above the parking lot of the Tip-Top glimmered with stars. It was night, and I could hear the crickets chirruping out in the grass. I stood in the parking lot and smelled earth, warmed asphalt, Vale’s cigarette. I felt better than I had earlier. We had passed through a late-summer rain and bright pools of reflected neon pocketed the ground here and there.

  Casper opened the car door for me and I put my feet on the pavement, looked toward the front window of the Tip-Top. I saw Janelle, the waitress, through the glass. And there was Casper’s brother, Gary, leaning across the counter for the sugar container, next to the line of old men.

  This all seemed like a lifetime ago, the last time we were here. I could hear Vale rooting around in the trunk, and when he came around to the door with my walker, I was weeping unceremoniously, sitting in the back seat with the door open. It hurt my stitches, crying like that. He and Casper looked down at me.

  “Marvin?”

  I laughed and rubbed tears away with my palm. I was embarrassed. “Sorry,” I said. Vale’s cigarette flared in the dark. He crouched down and his eyes were kind, and I thought, What, a few days sober and Vale’s not a shithead all of the sudden? If he lays some pearl of wisdom on me, I’ll put his eye out, the sanctimonious prick.

  But he just crouched there before me, nodding.

  “It’s cool,” he said. Not having a clue what he was talking about, of course. And yet, that was when I really started blubbering.

  “I just realized that I could die in there,” I said. Beyond the glass, the men in their cowboy hats sat lifting forkfuls of pie. Janelle poured more coffee for Gary, who looked out and saw us. He said something to Janelle and she turned our way and smiled.

  Casper said, “The meatloaf’s bad, Marvin, but it’s not that bad.”

  I laughed, a choked, strangled sound. “I just mean, I could die any second.”

  “Or in twenty years,” Vale said. “Thirty. I mean, you took two bullets pretty goddamned well, dude.”

  “How do you guys do this? How do you handle this not knowing? I’ve never had to do this before. I don’t remember how to.”

  They looked at each other. Vale still didn’t understand the Curse, hadn’t been told, but the point remained the same, didn’t it?

  How do we live with the time we’re given?

  Casper looked back at me and shrugged. “It’s just life, Marvin. You just do it.”

  Vale frowned. Something had changed between us after he’d seen me speak to the ghost on the side of the freeway. After he’d seen it reach toward me. The flat relief in the thing’s—the man’s—eyes. A freedom there. Grace. The grace inherent in relief.

  “Marvin, you’re here now,” Vale said. He stood up, his knees popping. “The food sucks. They have severed animal heads in the bar. I don’t know if you knew that.” His cigarette sparked against the gravel and he ratcheted open my walker in front of me. “But you’re among friends, okay, and you’re still walking upright and taking solids. You’re winning. Anything beyond that is thinking too far ahead.”

  4

  Brophy was dying, and thus was on a great and varied number of medications—pills at mealtimes, upon waking, before he went to bed. He was a storing-house for dope: pills for nausea, for his low blood count, to fight the cancer itself. He kept a little pill organizer in his kitchen and, like clockwork, would forget to take his evening round until he’d already laid himself down to go to sleep, and then he’d promptly remember. So almost every night now, he’d get up and hobble into the kitchen, irritated and tired.

  Tonight was no different, except there was a smoke sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor.

  Brophy stood there with his heart shuddering beneath his ribs, one yellowed hand on the dimmer switch. The room chock full of electric light and streamlined, laden with modern appliances and all the other physical things, the trappings of modernity that he’d lusted after for so much of life, like a goddamned fool, and now this one other thing as well. Just a black-haired little spirit sitting there next to Brophy’s rarely-used Miele dishwasher. Just hanging out. Sitting there.

  The smoke’s elbows rested on his knees, his head was tucked down, his palms were pressed against his mouth—Brophy had done the same thing himself as a boy, usually during vastly inappropriate times, and he imagined in some spectral realm the kid was making one excellent farting noise. He almost smiled at the idea, and then the boy raised his head up and looked around and Brophy saw that: a) the kid was cross-eyed, and b) was missing the lower half of his jaw. Where it should be was simply a gored and ruined mess of bone and gristle, a flickering and wavering mess. If Brophy had to guess, he’d put him at seven or eight years old.

  “War dead, maybe?” Brophy said, hardly even hearing himself, and the smoke certainly gave no notice, simply curled his hands around his head, tucked his knees in, faded to an almost invisible level and then snapped to opacity like some signal finally coming through.

  And what had any of this meant? The last week? Hessler’s funeral, seeing Mike Vale. Vale coming back into his life after all of these years, what was that about? The showdown in the car? Brophy had been unable to avoid giving the guy one last dig at the memorial, lying when he said he never thought of him, never thought of the contract.

  He’d deserved the punch. He thought of Vale all the time. He had been waiting for the other shoe to drop for years. Waiting to get found out. Waiting to admit to himself that it had been the wrong thing. When Val
e had followed him onto the canyon road it had been like absolution had finally jackknifed his fear, finally taken it over.

  Vale had given him an out.

  He had so little time left, and what was owed?

  If a smoke appears and nobody pays attention to it, does it matter to the remnant at all? Does the person that sees it owe it anything at all?

  “I’m going to get my pills,” Brophy said, and of course the smoke said nothing, gave nothing away, just sat there rocking on his haunches. He walked around the thing, giving it a berth, and opened up his little pill kit on the counter—a thing so like a lady’s birth control organizer that he still felt a little weird about using it. Took out his pills, tried not to look at his own hand scooping them out, the knuckles like knobs of hewn wood, pronounced like that, the skin drum-tight and shiny and spotted.

  Somehow he had become an old man, sweet Christ. It happened without him knowing.

  Vale had released him. It was true. You sit with a bad move like that—even if it makes you rich, and God, that contract had made Brophy rich—and the fear of getting caught, of litigiousness, of retribution, of some karmic vengeance, it weighs on you. Your life stoops and buckles under the weight of it, conforms to that worry.

  So now here he was, with Baby Smoke, the Boy Without a Jaw, some casualty of horrible violence stuttering through the living world and curled like an apostrophe on his kitchen floor. Brophy standing there in his ridiculous silk pajamas like some decrepit, cancer-laden playboy.

  But this was the truth: death was in the neighborhood, and it was on roller skates. Zipping around, touching his neck as it passed. Playing with him. But Vale had freed him. There was that, at least. He’d been given the opportunity, the freedom, to correct that long-running error. He could make that right before he went.

  He turned on the tap and drank a glass of water with his pills. The night was an ink wash against the window. Brophy saw his own face dim and skull-like in the glass, and on the floor behind him, the smoke rocked itself again and again. Jawless and mute.

  Brophy sat the glass in the sink and snapped shut the lid on his pill organizer. He turned.

  “So, where you from? What kinda poor kid gets something like that happening to him? Huh?”

  And then, with the stiffness and slowness of a man that rarely moved in such a way, unnameable things in his lower back muttering in protest, he sat down cross-legged on the floor next to the smoke, the little boy. As consolingly as someone such as him could be, Brophy sat there on his kitchen floor and waited for the next thing to happen.

  OCTOBER

  1

  Vale stood beneath the awning of Fuel, sipping a cup of coffee and huffing cigarettes. Rainwater fell in jubilant strings from the awning and he watched people pass by with their umbrellas, chins tucked into their jackets against the rain. He felt a flare of melancholy so fierce he wanted to wrap his arms around the world. Rain, at least in the beginning of the season, always hurt him like this. Lovingly.

  “Cigarette?”

  He looked down and wasn’t surprised to see the man in the wheelchair again, his hands still shifting in his lap like errant pets. His teddy bear was gone, but the man himself was the same.

  Look for signs, Marvin was always saying, and there was something to be learned from that. Marvin seemed continually poised to tell him something, and Vale kept waiting. He’d be ready to hear it whenever Marvin decided he was willing. And in the meantime, Vale looked for signs. He could usually find them.

  Vale handed the man a cigarette and lit it for him as the man’s thrumming hands cupped themselves loosely around Vale’s own.

  The man squinted through the smoke. “Thanks, bud. How about ten bucks?”

  Vale laughed. “Give me a break.”

  The man cackled and pushed off. Still this odd amalgam, the Pearl District: a clutch of kids passed by wearing hairstyles that were embarrassing when Vale was young and yet had now become modern and fashionable. The world ate irony for breakfast. Disheveled kids who walked past—and looked like children to Vale—were in tech, finance, pulled in six-digit incomes. The world was moving on. For good or bad, its relentlessness was the one reliable thing.

  Behind him, he heard Fuel’s door being unlocked. He turned and saw a different assistant, an emaciated Asian kid in skintight black jeans and with purple highlights in his hair. He eyed Vale warily. Even with the scabs on his forehead healed to pink scars and his beard trimmed to something less animal-like, there was something ragged about Vale. There would always be something ragged about him.

  The kid opened the door a bit. “Help you?”

  “Is Jacob in?”

  “He’s working in the back. May I tell him who’s visiting?”

  Vale said his name and the kid’s eyes bulged.

  It didn’t take long for Burfine to come tearing ass from the back room, again dressed as if there were a fashion photographer somewhere gravely disappointed by his recent absence.

  “Mike, goddamn, so good to see you. This is great, so glad you’re here. How you doing? You look good! You look great!” Burfine rocked on his heels, ushered Vale inside, clapped him once on the shoulder.

  “I’m doing okay,” Vale said. He held his coffee in front of him, a minor shield. Almost two weeks sober now and he’d knuckled through some bad cravings. Tremors still wracked him sometimes. The sheen—that magical awe of simple sobriety—was wearing off somewhat, but still. This, compared to what it was like before? This was worthwhile. Scary as shit, but worth it.

  Burfine said, “Listen, Mike, I don’t want to jump the gun, but I think I found a buyer for Unraveling.” He laughed, shaking his head. “I mean, wow. People are very interested. This is exciting, man. I want to thank you again.”

  Vale’s jaw dropped. “You’re flipping it? You’re flipping that painting?”

  Burfine took a step back, stricken. “I mean—Yeah. I thought it was assumed—”

  “I’m messing with you,” Vale said. “Flip it. Make money. Good for you.”

  “Jesus, Mike.”

  Vale grinned into the mouth of his coffee cup. When he looked up at Burfine, he said, “Let’s do a show.”

  Burfine froze like that, still with that stricken grin on his face. “What’s that?”

  Vale took another sip of coffee and nodded. “I want to paint again. I want to do a show. Let’s do it.”

  “Really,” Burfine said.

  Jittery from the adrenaline dump, the fear of broaching him, of asking for help, Vale said, “I need a loan for supplies and a studio rental. You can take it out of sales. Let’s drum up a contract. In writing. I’ll give you exclusive representation in North America.”

  Burfine tilted his head, measured him. “You’re serious.”

  “I’m totally serious. North American representation. And I want the name of an entertainment lawyer here in town. Brophy and I are working things out.”

  “Really. You and Jared Brophy are working things out.”

  “We are,” Vale said. “So what do you say?”

  SIXTEEN MONTHS LATER

  1

  Specter Sightings Decrease for the First Time Since Initial Appearances, Reports CDC

  —The New York Times

  Interview excerpt from scifihorizon.com:

  SFH: So, Marvin, you’ve had a pretty amazing year. The first season of Specter Detectives was by far the highest-grossing show on the SyFy channel; they’ve signed on for another ten-episode season, and you’re purportedly in talks with some studios about a movie deal.

  MD: Casper and I are, yes. Everything’s still up in the air, but things seem to be moving along pretty well in that regard.

  SFH: And the ghosts still haven’t left Los Angeles, have they?

  MD: And we’re thrilled about that. (Laughter.) I’m kidding. But yeah, you’re right, they haven’t left. There’s been a marginal decrease, but that’s about it. We’ve made some big leaps on the show, I think, in regards to making contact with the spiri
ts, building a kind of baseline understanding. Hearing them, most importantly. But as a whole, no, they don’t seem to be going anywhere, at least not anywhere fast.

  SFH: Big leaps? I’d say that’s putting it mildly. The episode where the crying woman touches your face, or the man who lays down his sword? I’ve never seen anything like it. I totally teared up.

  MD: Me too. (Laughter.)

  SFH: It literally chilled me. Because they don’t acknowledge us, do they? They ignore the rest of us across the board, but you they react to. They communicate with you, Marvin. To the point where you’re now working with some research committees.

  MD: They react to me, you’re right. Maybe it’s the eyepatch! (Laughter.) But yeah, they do seem drawn to me. I feel very fortunate to be able to do this.

  SFH: I’ve wondered, Marvin, after watching the first season—just how many languages do you actually speak?

  MD: Um, eight? Seven of them pretty well. But I’m old, remember? (Laughter.) I’ve had a lot of time to practice.

  SFH: That’s amazing. Does it ever scare you, being able to talk to them?

  MD: No. It doesn’t scare me.

  SFH: Because you’ve had a lot more to worry about than a ghost, haven’t you? While in Los Angeles doing research for Specter Detectives, you were critically injured, isn’t that right?

  MD: That’s true. I was shot.

  SFH: What was that like?

  MD: Um, unfortunate? It hurt like hell? (Laughter.) Honestly, I don’t remember much of it. Bits and pieces. It took quite a while to recover. I still feel like I’m recovering, to tell you the truth.

  SFH: Well, you seem to be doing great. And on top of everything else, you’ve gained some notoriety around Hollywood for your philanthropic approach to things, isn’t that right?

  MD: I guess so. I’m not entirely comfortable talking about it.

  SFH: Because you made quite a bundle when the show was renewed for a second season, didn’t you? And you gave all that money away, right? To children’s cancer research, particularly the ward of the hospital you used to volunteer at in Oregon.