Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  It is silent and uses a title card that says OH NO.

  This card appears in every shot, as she, cloaked and hooded, throws herself onto beds and fainting couches and, in the end, off a tall building, holding an antique ceramic doll that shatters as it falls beside her.

  I have a revelation, and call Crispin.

  “I need to show you some things,” I say. “It’s important, I’ll come to you.”

  Remember how I wanted to mash Annabel’s work into the film? I had this idea, but got distracted — by her all dolled-up, by her thrilling ass, by a song on her lips, what, I do not recall — and forgot.

  This can’t possibly surprise you!

  I drive to Crispin’s with my highlighted copy of her screenplay and all of her videos on a USB — placed there, I am unreasonably proud to say, by me.

  He balks initially, then flips through her pages and jams the flash drive into his laptop.

  He watches, moving closer and closer to the screen.

  “She’s incredible,” he says, and I fall all over myself, assenting.

  * * *

  Back home, stronger, with some brandy navigating my system and happy plans, I take Annabel’s diary to the pool, sit on one of the cherry chaise longues, and open it at random.

  It is only a matter of minutes before I get the picture.

  “I missed my period.”

  “The stick turned pink.”

  “Not again.”

  There are long, tangled entries about her feelings, initially optimistic yet frightened, which are awful to read.

  I skip to the last entry:

  How can I raise a child with this person? I am so filled with feelings of betrayal, disgust, and pain. I knew he was damaged, but I always felt safe. Not anymore.

  Anyways, I would likely miscarry again.

  So I am having an abortion.

  Am I?

  Part of me wants a little part of him, the purest part of him, before he was ruined.

  I can barely leave Tubby behind.

  What to do, what to do.

  Whatever it is, it will not be with him.

  My only love.

  I thought he was going to change me.

  He almost did — it is hard to forget all the crackers he broke.

  She signs this with a torn heart; the writing is smudged and running.

  Oh no. Another baby, lost.

  I race around, pressing hot and cold washcloths to my heart and hyperventilating.

  Block my number, disguise my voice, and call her, lying outright: “This is your OB/GYN calling,” I say, and she says, “Yes?”

  Before she can hang up I say, really fast, “It’s my baby too, please don’t do it, please — ”

  “I wondered why my female doctor sounded like an old man,” she says. “Parnell, it’s done. Now please leave me be.”

  She hangs up, and I know it’s her body and her choice and everything, but I still tear through the house raging, tormented by the image of another of my children being cut away like an ugly, useless polyp and flicked into some medical-waste bin along with bloody gowns and gloves, dull scalpels, and wet paper masks.

  I will make the hell out of this movie, I decide.

  I summon all of my early training, then forget it. I will act from the inside out, excising memories, ideas, and feelings from the crypt I have sealed for most of my life.

  It begins with Darkling, in the field of poppies, rushing uphill.

  I show up for work ready and stay longer than anyone, burying myself in the character of a man who is unloved and cannot love, yet betrays his tenderness in every pearl he buttons when he dresses; in his careful combing of his wild, raven hair; in the way he holds his face to the moon sometimes, as if he is receiving a kiss.

  * * *

  The crackers I broke.

  Just one.

  Annabel and I are slow dancing to Link Wray’s “Run Chicken Run” at the Double Down Saloon in Las Vegas, the only time she ever accompanied me to my favorite retreat.

  She tells me she used to love dive bars, and reminds me that the sign above the entrance states it is “The Happiest Place on Earth.”

  Some drunk, a mystifying obese tatterdemalion with big blond surfer hair, approaches us.

  “I paid for this song,” he says. “I should get to dance with her.”

  I flash on my old terrors I don’t feel safe I don’t feel safe and try to escort Annabel off the floor, she a wildflower in a fitted white cocktail dress and heels, her hair scraped back with the tiara I sent her when she was working in New York, after which she sent back a riveting picture, a self-portrait taken with a timer —

  It is her, naked and insolent on a divan, a pink hyacinth in her hair; she is offering herself flowers wrapped in flowered paper, the rough string undone.

  Now it is framed and carried by me whenever I travel, to place on nightstands, tray tables in first class, various countertops and chair arms.

  But the drunk is insistent.

  “I’ll buy her off you,” he says. “What’s the going rate for an uppity n—”

  He cannot finish the sentence because he is drowning in his own blood. I am raving mad and ready to kill them all when the female bartender, shabby, sympathetic, manages to steer us outside.

  Annabel jumps him and chokes him further. “You fucker!” she screams. “You ruined it you ruined it — ”

  In the car she apologizes, because she is afraid. It sounds like the ambulance isn’t far off, so we floor it. No one saw anything, it turns out.

  “LOCAL MAN IN CRITICAL CONDITION,” I read online the next day, and feel an itch to kill the local man that I must extinguish. I do, by taking Annabel to Joshua Tree, where we hole up for days, where it is all sex on the half-hour, cactus milk and gin, meals in bed beneath a lovely rectangle of Xiang Xiu embroidery.

  We are two wild Xu Beihong horses rearing against a blood-orange sky.

  A stray kitten mews at our door late one night, battered, toothless, and missing an eye. “Oh my God, he’s been hurt by someone,” says Annabel, scooping him up. “What is wrong with people?”

  We rush to the twenty-four-hour GroMart to buy cat food and litter, then administer some some basic first aid.

  Annabel, who has named the kitten Tad, and I take him to a Washoe vet, who does what she can in surgery. He joins the family easily, curls up on the dash on the way home. When he mews, it is cool: he has a grill, sort of, a row of gold teeth that match his new, aureate glass eye.

  Tad never leaves Annabel’s side until the day he dies. We never learn why, but he fell away in her arms.

  We saw the Virgin Mother reach down and retrieve him. We did.

  “Do you like animals better than people?” asks the quiz, a quiz about mental illness that we both fail or pass, depending how you look at things.

  The other stories are in Vindicta, too many, too grim.

  I mean the evil that men, and the occasional woman, do.

  * * *

  When Sid fights for Gloriana, or “Glo,” I am fighting for Annabel, and so intently that the actress playing her — Carmen Hayward, a famous blonde known for the ethereal yet callous women she plays — falls desperately in love with me, and eventually has to be talked down by a therapist hired by the production company.

  Any time Sid fights, period, I am fighting too for this last chance: to be a meaningful actor, never to be a joke again.

  I fill each of his words with my crippling sadness, loneliness, and loss.

  Crispin is thrilled, and makes everyone else work harder and harder to keep up.

  One scene in which Sid, armed with a hatchet and a flame-thrower, collects money from a colossal gangster is leaked online for a full day. The scrutiny is intense and amazed.

  “I forgot Parnell Wilde, the great actor,” a promin
ent critic writes. “Seeing him in Deadly Nightshade has brought him, incandescently, back.”

  Reading these words makes me work even harder: no one will forget me again.

  We shoot until October, primarily in Los Angeles, where Sid has emigrated.

  Crispin discarded Kray’s frenetic opening, and gave the footage to Vivienne.

  The scene that now starts the film is all about Sid. It takes place in Las Vegas, and is a long, slightly slowed-down single shot of me walking into the Bellagio, wearing scuffed black Givenchy ankle boots, a black georgette shirt with old Irish lace lapels, and a ravishing black Prada suit our costume designer has expertly cut into a thousand pieces and put back together with loose red blanket stitches and safety pins.

  My hair is pulled back with a rubber band; curving tendrils escape and frame my face.

  Hands reach out to me, but I ignore them. Women offer their cheeks and — my idea — flowers begin to fall, languidly. There are just a few black roses, then more: flowers of every kind storm my passage to the front desk, where I stand, at last, in a field of fallen blooms, immaculate.

  I tweak the single pink rose in my lapel as I smash the bell for service, and all the sound and movement stop and then start again as six men rush to my assistance and the camera resumes its doting track of me striding to the elevator, where I pause and smile lazily at a pretty girl who, dizzy in my presence, falls to her haunches and drops her head between her legs.

  The elevator arrives and I step in. The screen turns to the gold of its doors, and the music starts: the guitar riff that drives open the Pistols’ “Something Else.”

  “Fuck, it’s all coming through,” Crispin says as we watch the rushes, and I nod, spellbound.

  I am unrecognizably attractive, as my terrible nature has, once more, cast a stronger spell than Annabel’s goodness.

  My Gloriana, who is seated beside me, whispers, “I can’t wait till our love scene.”

  “Fuck off,” I say. “I’m taken.”

  I will be. When Annabel sees me like this, she won’t be able to resist me, I think, trying to ignore another, more insistent, thought.

  She doesn’t care.

  * * *

  Late at night, I watch TV in bed, sightlessly.

  I so rarely used it before; Annabel and I had so much to do and say.

  I watch a Victoria’s Secret Angel fluttering around in an aqua teddy, garters, stockings, and tinted-to-match high heels.

  And wings, naturally.

  I had forgotten she was an Angel.

  And that one night I saw her ad in a bar.

  As I was admiring her, a young man beside me said, “Damn, I’d like to fuck that one’s face and skeet all over her.”

  I asked him to step outside and boxed his belly, kidneys, and face.

  I went home, still angry — angry about what he had said, and because I had done just that to my sweet girl the night before.

  * * *

  The wings are something else she left behind, possibly because I asked her to wear them to bed one too many times.

  I get up and take them out of her closet, breathing deeply — yes, the padded hangers are still redolent of her — and slip them on.

  Charles finds me in the darkened living room, in the wings and my white boxers, drinking a tumbler of whiskey.

  “You’ve got it bad,” he says.

  “I write her and write her, but it’s no good,” I say. “It’s over.”

  “Maybe you need to move on, to leave her be,” he says, perching beside me, his face pleated with concern.

  “Maybe I need to prove to her that I am the most def man alive,” I say. I had not realized I was so drunk.

  “Check it,” I say, spinning the dial on my docked iPod to LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” and shadowboxing vigorously.

  As the feathers fly and I rap “Don’t call it a comeback!” I flash back to the chicken ad and fall down flat.

  “Are you all right?” asks Charles, helping me to my feet.

  “I’m nervous,” I say, and he nods.

  “Of course you are,” he replies, and, taking my hand, leads me back to bed after gingerly unhooking my wings and brushing away all of the white fluff.

  I dream of the day Annabel saved me, how I thought of her as my last chance.

  I am out of chances, I think.

  “Do you want me?” I ask the vacancy beside me. I occupy the space, her space, while pleading, from my field of red flowers, that she not see me, not see me like this.

  * * *

  I never see pictures of her anymore. Her social media has dried up, barring the occasional Instagram video of a pug dog dancing — terrifically — to a wide variety of songs.

  She never includes captions beyond the names of the dances: Farruca, Mashed Potato, Watusi. Her web site is under construction, her Facebook and Twitter are dead, and after OH NO, her video sites sit unattended and voided of all of her earlier work. She is not modelling; her book is a critical success in an elite niche market, but there is no launch or media.

  She might as well be dead.

  I, on the other hand, appear everywhere. The advance heat for the film is considerable, and my new agent — fuck Jerry — a young Machiavel named Ash, balances smart puff pieces with impenetrable essays in film journals; exhaustive articles in the Times, the Guardian, Harper’s, and Tiger Beat — the last a short bit of erudition the elderly woman writer, masquerading as “Chase D. Hunter,” manages to slip past her editor by beginning the article as follows: “Parnell Wilde is staring at me with those big green eyes, carving me a new vadge hole.”

  I am photographed with famous actresses, models, and so on, but always state that I am “involved with a brilliant filmmaker” when asked.

  Maybe moved by this, or maybe drunk herself, Annabel calls me on the first of December, my birthday and the day before we wrap.

  I answer the phone in the kitchen, where Christine, gigantic now, is decorating my vanilla-fudge cake with white rosettes and bumping into the trailing strings of a galaxy of balloons.

  I run upstairs like a kid and throw myself on my bed.

  “Hi,” I say. “Hi, I’m so happy you called.”

  “Well, I miss you, I guess. And I know that you are being faithful — why, I’m not sure.”

  “I am!” I say. “I mean, discounting the call girl, because that was when I was mad at you, and I was so wrong, my God, and that disgusting woman who gave me the STD, but I’m clean now and — ”

  She has hung up.

  I go crazy, redialing her number until I get a mechanical message that my number has been blocked.

  I call throughout the night: with Christine’s phone, with Charles’s, with Rabi’s, Crispin’s, Dante’s, and Cotton’s — my party guests — but no dice.

  As we eat dinner, I tell everyone what happened and Crispin says, “Why did you tell her that?”

  “I blurted. I was so excited to hear her voice I couldn’t think straight. Besides, we didn’t like secrets.”

  “But secrets like you,” says Rabi — wisely or not, I don’t know.

  I am an actor: I feign happiness capably for the rest of the night. More people arrive and we listen to the band Charles has hired, an atrocious Nirvana cover act called Kurdt and the Kobains. The lead singer is a mean little woman with a black mullet wearing a flannel dress and Keds, who inserts cruel lyrics about our appearances into the songs.

  Still, we dance, and I blow out candles and make a wish and open my presents.

  Rabi’s is last.

  It is one of his photographs, beautifully framed in cherrywood: a large black and white shot of Annabel and me at the old apartment, eating Korean takeout on the lumpy bed in our pajamas.

  I hold it and stare; my heart speeds up.

  I am wearing a myeon, a glass noodle, as a mu
stache, and she is laughing, her head thrown back, her neck long and arched.

  Her hair is loose and messy, her eyes squinched.

  The room becomes ruthlessly quiet and I put down the picture and say, “Thank you. This is so thoughtful,” rubbing the heels of my hands into my eyes and concealing my tremors with a frenzied little dance move.

  “I fucked up,” Rabi says. “I thought it was sweet, but — ”

  “It is,” I say. “Sweet, so sweet. Would everyone please go? I’m so sorry, I am going to be ill.”

  I stay in the room as everyone leaves, moving faster when, holding the picture tightly and speaking to it, I start to retch.

  “I was hurting myself,” I say, as Christine stands somewhere in the shadows. “That woman, those women. There has never been anyone but you, why won’t you forgive me?”

  I hear my daughter crying and am startled.

  “Please leave,” I say. “And thank you. I can’t remember the last time anyone even mentioned my birthday.”

  She moves toward and then away from me, trembling.

  I look at the picture one last time, break it with my face, and throw it, savagely, into the fireplace.

  Walk upstairs quickly, animated with rage.

  Yes, there it is, the anger that I have struggled with my whole life, the anger that elbows aside feelings of pain, of weakness.

  I feel my face harden below its mask of blood and I hate her, how I hate her.

  The heartless bitch, I think. I intend to write this down and, after tossing my desk, find a pink envelope that once housed a card she gave me; it pictured two smooching turtles that say yum in weird, fucking adorable voices.

  I crumple the card, smooth it, throw it out the window, scramble around in the dark looking for it, and finally lay it gently across my ass, after falling face-first onto the bed.

  I dream of long, hunched shadows that glide behind me as I use a tawdry angel for target practice.

  “What are you afraid of?” she says, and I laugh.

  In Rabi’s picture, we are sitting right beside a mirror and, in it, we look just fine.