“Death has a certain finality to it—though you’ll find you won’t get much for two corpses.”
“You’d be surprised some of the people I know,” Arturo corrected. “But most importantly I’d be getting the satisfaction of knowing that I didn’t get fucked over by a cleft-assed faggot and his big-talking, empty-chested partner.”
M waited a while for the threat to spread to the far corners of the room. Then he asked, “Got a pen?”
“What?”
“A pen. Or a pencil. A writing instrument of any sort.”
“You planning on putting down a number? I told you, it’s not about money. Rollo and I have an arrangement.”
M stared at Arturo for a while, who sighed finally, looked over at his boy in the kitchen to make sure that someone was still paying attention, then went into a corner and got a ballpoint from a desk. He gave it to M, who, in the interim, had managed to find a cocktail napkin that had been hidden about his person. He doodled on it aimlessly, or seemingly so. “You ever kill a chicken, Arturo?”
“Only in the figurative sense.”
“Thing about chickens is that they don’t like being killed.”
“Clever creatures.”
“To a point. Anyway, if you’re by yourself, and you need to kill a chicken, there’s this little trick you can do: Hold their necks down and draw a line in the dirt.”
“And?”
“That’s all. The chicken goes numb when it sees it, insentient. That’s when you make with the butcher knife.”
“A fascinating digression into homesteading, but . . .”
“Nothing organic runs straight, you ever notice that?” M continued, attention focused on the picture he was drawing. “Crooked or curved or bent, but never straight. You show a chicken a straight line, you’re exposing it to a conception of reality that its mind has not evolved to comprehend. The resultant comatose state is a kindness, a blessing, a defense to avoid pondering matters that would otherwise break its machinery. Follow?”
“I follow.”
“People are no different. Do you understand how big the universe is, Arturo? Or that behind and inside and all around it is an infinite set of universes of the same scope? Or that there is something beyond that also, something that no human words could hope to express? What if there were a symbol that could transmit this understanding to you in one sudden and blinding flash, as the line does to the chicken? Which would flood your mind with revelations such as to blank the very canvas of your soul—not, like the chicken, for a few blissful seconds, but for the remainder of your life, a span that would surely seem an infinity to you, drifting endlessly between fragments of eternity?
“And what if,” M said, capping his pen and putting it onto the table and holding the cocktail napkin up, faced away from Arturo, “I just finished drawing that sign? Do you think you would want to look at that, Arturo? Do you think that you could avoid looking at it before your man puts two in my back? Do you think that whatever Rollo’s lost you is worth taking that sort of chance, with your kid crying in the next room?”
A girl, M could tell in the silence that took hold then, her wailing for a long moment the only sound that could be heard, apart from the hum of the refrigerator and the distant bleating of sirens.
“Is that what’s on the napkin?” Arturo asked.
“Could be.”
“Then how come you can look at it?” the gunhand asked.
“Maybe I’m lying,” M said, “or maybe I’m the sort of person who remains unfazed by the face of God. If I was the latter, I bet I could get to you before you managed anything with that cannon.”
Arturo’s sad, hard, heavy eyes stared at the coming conflict unblinking. “This is where we’re at with this?”
“It would seem to be the case.”
“He worth that much to you?”
“That would also seem to be the case.”
“Who’s going to make me whole?”
“I don’t know that anyone can do that for anyone,” M said sadly. “But if you contact the White Queen, she might see her way to peeling off a few bills.” Which would bring M’s compensation for the afternoon back down to nothing, but he hadn’t really supposed he would get through unscathed.
Arturo looked at his man in the kitchen. His man in the kitchen looked at M. Rollo looked at the wallpaper and smiled softly.
“Done,” Arturo said.
On the windowsill was one of those garish votary candles that you can buy in the Latino section of most grocery stores, except this one had a picture of Santa Muerte floating over a pile of decapitated skulls. M held the napkin over the flame, then blew the ashes softly out into the late afternoon.
• • •
When they got back to Rollo’s pad, what would become his going-away party was steadily building steam. The wispy blonde girl had called a dozen of her friends, brunettes and gingers and green-haired pixie-cut queens of hipsterdom. The smell of marijuana almost overpowered the synesthesic overflow of the bliss. Rollo gave greetings all around but bopped on past, up the stairs to his room, then out the fire escape. M followed in train. Out on the roof, the sun hadn’t quite yet given up the ghost, the last dim rays illuminating the concrete. Rollo slipped on his sunglasses. M rolled a cigarette and started to smoke it.
“What was on that napkin?” Rollo asked.
“A smiley face,” M said, which might have been the truth. “Where you going to go?”
Rollo shrugged. “San Francisco, maybe. Or Pondicherry. New York in the summer is the pits, anyway.”
“And when did you hear I was back in town?”
“A month ago.”
“She’s predictable, the queen. Likes to have problems taken care of but doesn’t like to dirty her hands. I guess you figured all you needed to do was get a little loud, make a little trouble, and she’d send me out to put things right.”
Rollo took the cigarette out of M’s mouth and shifted it into a smile. He spread his arms out to encompass the street below them and the horizon beyond that. “I missed you. Shit if I didn’t miss you. Do you remember that time with Janice, when we all took peyote and wandered around Central Park, and we met that couple that was about to break up, and Janice convinced them to get engaged?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think they went ahead with it?”
“No.”
“What ever happened to Janice? I haven’t seen her in forever.”
“She died.”
Rollo shrugged. This was not the first time someone told Rollo someone else was dead. Rollo was well practiced in surviving the misfortune of others. “Those were times, man. Those were times.”
“Yeah.”
Rollo took another puff off the smoke, then handed it back to M.
“You could have called me if you needed help,” M said.
“You wouldn’t have picked up.”
“And why might that be, do you wonder?”
“You don’t have as good a sense of humor as you used to?”
The thing about an addict, as anyone who has ever dealt with one knows, is that it becomes impossible to determine where exactly their instinct toward self-destruction becomes intertwined with a desperate need for attention, if they’re running into walls because they want you to help them up or because they’ve come to love the taste of blood.
“I’m sorry,” Rollo said. “You know I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it like this. It’s me, man, it’s me. You got the whole thing backward. I didn’t set you up to help me with Arturo. I set him up to help me with you. I knew you wouldn’t come if I called you, not after last time. What can I say? I’m fucked up.”
The addict’s lament—the addict and everyone who knows him. M didn’t seem angry, but then again M often didn’t seem like much one way or the other.
“Just come back downstairs. The band will be getting hot by now. We’ll sit out in the garden and get high and talk about the past. Hannah was staring at you earlier. I think you’ve g
ot an admirer.” He put one gloved hand on M’s shoulder. “Life is too damn short for grudges. Even immortals don’t have time for bitterness.”
And the mad thing was that M found himself seriously considering it, in the moment before he flicked his cigarette off the roof and watched it fall onto Broad Street. It would be a good time, he was certain. It was always a good time with Rollo. And that little piece of blonde sunshine was probably wearing a tight skirt, and M didn’t think very much convincing would be required to get her to take it off. And it would be like old times, and Rollo wasn’t the only one who could remember those fondly. And one has no choice in who one loves, not in the last instance. One does not love because doing so is prudent; one loves because it is ultimately the only thing powerful enough to offer distraction from what we see and what we are. Rollo with his kind eyes and his love for everything, who lied all the time but who was honest when it counted. M had missed him these last years and hadn’t realized how much until then.
But the difference between a man and a fool is that a man only makes a mistake once, or in any event not over and over again, ad infinitum. “Janice killed herself, you know.”
“Yeah?”
“A straight razor.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Rollo of the Laughing Eyes,” M said. “I gave you that nickname. Do you remember?”
“Yeah.”
“But the joke’s never on you, is it? It’s on me or it’s on Janice or it’s on one of those poor dumb kids downstairs, thinking it’s all a game until the bill comes due, discovering you aren’t around to pay it. What do you care, anyway? Just things to break, and there are always more of those.”
Rollo didn’t say anything for a long time, though when he turned back to M his eyes were a different color, and then he fell into a belly laugh, rich and full—laughter that slipped neatly and without warning into weeping or perhaps remained laughing, it was impossible for M to tell. And then Rollo removed one of his elbow-length gloves and then M lost track of things for a while.
It was like looking into a very bright light or hearing an explosion of sound or slipping into a drug-induced coma, though it wasn’t exactly like any of those, as M, who had experienced each, could attest. It was like having your brain wrapped up in heavy cotton. It was like losing seventy or eighty IQ points in the span between an instant. It was what happened when one got face-to-face with the raw mess of creation, when a physical thing was transitioning into the infinite, on the way but not there yet. The bliss was up to Rollo’s wrists and had turned his flesh into some strange amalgam of color and thought and light. Like glorious gangrene it would spread up to his elbows and his shoulders and into his trunk, and once it reached his heart there would no longer be anything in existence recognizable as Rollo of the Laughing Eyes, just one more demigod dashing through the ether, spinning eternally between realities. “Put them back on,” M was saying, on his knees, hands pressed fiercely against the side of his head, neither action providing much remedy. “Jesus Christ, put them back on.”
And then Rollo did, and the sun went away, and M was able to stand again, though doing so made him violently nauseous, and it took no small effort to keep from booting onto his shoes.
“Arturo’s been giving it to me free,” Rollo said. “After a while I noticed I couldn’t clean it off my fingertips, and then I realized I didn’t really want to. I’m not an addict anymore, M, not like you’d understand it. I’m the thing itself. I sweat bliss and I’ve started to piss it. I can’t eat anymore and I don’t need to. I can taste the currents in the air and the sweet-swelling joy coming from the party downstairs. I can taste your despair right now, like sour plum sake. That was the deal that we made: They’d give me all I wanted, as much and more, and then once the turn rolls around I’d let them bleed me a while.”
They were back again where they always were, with Rollo beyond reach of aid, with everything that M had wagered and sacrificed made pointless by the bottomless depths of his friend’s misery. “So you understand,” Rollo said, leaping up onto the low stone wall dividing the building from the empty air. “The joke is on me. The joke is always on me.”
23
* * *
An Offering to Moloch
It was around two in the afternoon on a hot August Saturday when M realized the rest of the people at the beach house were planning on using him as a human sacrifice. The mansion was a hundred rooms, easy, and perched on a stretch of rocky coast that M had earlier found picturesque, but that he would now admit might reasonably be described as ominous. Getting lost coming out of an upstairs bathroom, he had stumbled upon a large library and immediately grown suspicious, not because there was anything suspicious about it so much as because he did not think that most of the other people at the beach house could read. In evidence of this, the many hundreds of leather-bound tomes on the shelves inside were thick with dust, except, rather dramatically, for one—a copy of Goethe’s Faust. M might perhaps believe that one or the other of the guests could be literate, in the sense of occasionally flipping through a fashion magazine or a stereo manual, but he supposed the great German to be beyond them. And sure enough the book had been the trigger for a secret door: The stone fireplace at the other end of the room swung open to reveal a narrow spiraling staircase. The descent took him to the set of a Scandinavian death metal video—black stone facades and wall sconces and an altar with hand restraints stained with what was probably not ketchup. Above it, chiseled into the wall in Gothic script, was the name Moloch.
“Damn it,” M said.
M went outside, an operation that, given the scale of the premises, took him about fifteen minutes. Sedentary on the front roundabout was a fleet of cars, each costing more than open-heart surgery. M was a competent car thief under normal circumstances, but they were all of the hypermodern variant, which relied upon keypads or magnetic wands or retina scans or some such, and were too far out of his bailiwick to warrant an attempt.
“Damn it all to hell,” M said.
In retrospect, he had to admit, he should have seen it coming.
In matters of money, M had long felt one was best off having slightly less than one wanted, along with a solid supply of wealthy friends. This allowed one all the spiritual benefits of poverty while still occasionally offering the opportunity to visit Palm Beach or the Upper West Side. So M had made a point of being extra friendly when he met Spencer in a bar in the East Village a few nights earlier, even though M had not liked very much about him. Spencer was, for instance, wearing an ascot, which M did not think should be countenanced outside of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, and also he had dowsed himself in enough cologne to asphyxiate a horse. Spencer had been impressed by M’s vague patina of Brooklyn-hipster street cred, as well as the fact that M had a joint on him, in exchange for which Spencer insisted on buying the rest of the evening’s drinks, a balance of favors to which M was willing to abide. Three hours later and with a half-dozen cocktails in him, M was almost willing to admit that Spencer was not a vacuous, half-witted frat boy or, at least, if he was a vacuous, half-witted frat boy, that he was good-natured. And when Spencer asked M what he was doing this weekend and suggested that M come out to an acquaintance’s beach house, M thought that Spencer might even turn out to be one of those not-quite friends who nonetheless prove more useful than any number of people whose company he actually enjoyed.
That was Tuesday. Friday M climbed into a Bentley just south of the Holland Tunnel a few hours after noon. “Be careful getting in,” Spencer said. “The stitches in the leather were done by hand.”
It took them two hours to get out of Manhattan. Tourists shuffled past at ten or twenty times the pace they had managed, obliging Spencer in staring at his contraption with bug-eyed astonishment, like a rube touring a geek show. Spencer played techno music at a volume that cannot be generated from cars that cost less than a house. M slid down in his seat and hoped that no one he knew would walk past.
Interstate 49
5 was just as busy, bumper-to-bumper with six-figure husks of gleaming steel and tinted glass, an accumulated billion horses’ worth of power all held in stable, a fleet of rocket ships in a parking lot. M got out, smoked a cigarette, and walked around a while, the drivers glowering at him and the passengers sneering.
Back in the Bentley, Spencer was fiddling with the digital console, trying to get the navigation to work. “Built-in GPS,” he explained. “It can find a pimple on a porn star’s ass,” Spencer said.
“Good to know,” though privately M thought the fact that they could not move made direction-finding something of a moot point. Still, it was better than listening to Spencer talk, which he did any time he wasn’t playing with one of his gadgets, a steady flow of product placement and casual elitism that made M want to turn Menshevik, or at least throw a brick through the window of a Starbucks.
Eventually they started moving again, and with the top down, it was impossible to make out anything that Spencer was saying. To tell by his flapping mouth, like a figure on a muted plasma TV, Spencer didn’t realize that, and certainly M saw no point in enlightening him, just nodded along and enjoyed the scenery, which, it had to be admitted, was quite spectacular. M had never been this far out into the Hamptons, but he could see why the upper crust of the Big Apple had decided to make it their playground. Winding roads, looming vistas. It was almost enough to forgive the company.
When they arrived at Spencer’s friend’s estate a few hours after sundown, M was feeling all right about things, a state of mind reached with the copious use of marijuana. The rest of the party were in the back gardens grilling up thick hunks of steak and drinking gin like mother’s milk. They were the sort of people whom Spencer would be friends with. They had names like Brad and Britney and Ashleigh and Ashley. The men were in finance and the women were mostly married to or in the process of marrying a man in finance. Both sexes counted former All-American lacrosse stars among their number. They argued over whether this house was nicer than some of the other properties they or their families owned, but came to no conclusion. They seemed more banal than evil, but then again, the same was said of Eichmann.
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