High Life

by Matthew Stokoe

  “Oh, please …”

  “Come on, you think this is all there is?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You don’t think there’s some kind of continuation?”

  “If you get on TV.”

  “Hey, it’s your night, but …”

  He looked down and busied himself with a vial of coke. We charged up and I talked a little faster.

  “I mean it. Only half a dozen people remember my father, right? It’s like he never existed. But someone like Dean Martin, say, is still here. It doesn’t matter if he’s dead, he’s still in his records and his movies. That’s life after death. That’s as close as you get.”

  “I wonder if Jerry sees it that way.”

  “Of course he does. Same thing’s going to happen to him.”

  Rex nodded like he was taking this in, but I knew he thought it was a pile of shit. After a moment he cleared his throat and stood up.

  “Got a gig, dude. You want another hit?”

  I felt a quick fizz of affection for him because I knew he’d like to argue with me but was holding back, despite the coke.

  Another snort and he split to service the wife of a director who was shooting nights over at Warner. We hugged at the door. I heard his Porsche start down on the street and the breathy clatter of its engine turned the salty night air hollow.

  The sound died quickly as he turned a corner somewhere out in the city, and with it went the illusion of his company. He’d been there, he’d heard about Karen, but it hadn’t gone very deep. Where were the questions about my long night being grilled down at headquarters, about the arrangements I’d made for her funeral, about all the other things that also hadn’t happened?

  The truth was that he could only care so much. He needed too much of himself for himself.

  Later, I walked around to an all-night Korean store for beer and food. On Main the restaurants glowed with indirect lighting—smooth interiors full of happy people spending money, drinking good wine, making plans for the future. Parked cars down both sides of the street looked shiny, looked like they belonged in three-car garages surrounded by exotically stocked gardens. It all made me feel outnumbered and vulnerable.

  Back in bed. I stared at the ceiling for a while then dialled a twenty-four-hour shoot-location service—recorded info on where in Los Angeles current productions would be filming over the next week. The trades reported an exodus of filmmaking from the Hollywood teat, out to places like Seattle and Canada, even to Fox Australia. But it was still easy to find several shoots a week within driving distance. A lot of these were TV cop/action series, or straight-to-video dross filmed out in the valley—but the big budgeters were there too, trying to find a new angle on the landmarks of the city.

  And that was why I phoned. Not because I had any interest in the mechanics of putting a movie together, but because I found it comforting that Willis and Travolta still occasionally walked the same unremarkable streets as me.

  Late at night, with enough pills, booze, and self-delusion I could turn this into a point of connection between us.

  I fell asleep with the phone against my ear, listening to its endless reassurances.

  Chapter Four

  Next morning I was slumped on the toilet feeling rough, working my way through a shit, when the door of the bathroom banged open and I met Ryan for the first time. He stood for a moment staring at me, like some kind of spree killer deciding whether or not to pull the trigger, then he flipped open his cop ID.

  “Wipe your ass.”

  It looked like I’d underestimated the investigative ability of the city of Los Angeles. I used a few sheets of paper, but I felt pretty exposed and didn’t really do much of a job. When I started to pull my pants up he stopped me.

  “That last wad was still dirty. You don’t want an itchy crack. Give it a decent scrub.”

  Right then I knew I had much more of a problem than just being found by the police. I’d drawn a member of the force who got off on what happened in toilets. I checked him out while I was making sure I was properly clean. He looked like a plump Bela Lugosi—pale skin, black suit, soft body, dark receding hair slicked straight back. I put him at an unhealthy fifty.

  “That looks a whole lot better. You know, it’s a good thing you’re not doing the whole ‘What’s this about Officer?’ business. I’d be insulted. What do you call your dick? Average? Or a bit under?”

  After that we went downstairs to a gray Plymouth and drove up to Monica.

  Weekend traffic made the boulevard busy. Sunlight bounced off windshields and fenders, hurting my eyes, making me wish for somewhere dark and silent to strain last night’s booze and pill sludge from my system. The air stank and it was too hot.

  I stayed quiet most of the way. If the police had found some sort of link between me and Karen I figured there wasn’t anything I could say that wouldn’t hurt me. I certainly couldn’t tell them I’d already seen her dead. That would have looked somewhat odd. By the time we hit Palisades Park, though, I was so tense I couldn’t help myself blurting:

  “Is this about Karen? My wife? I mean, she’s been gone like two weeks now. Did something happen to her?”

  Ryan turned his head and smiled at me.

  “That’s good, Jackie. I like that.”

  The morgue was on Euclid—a street that, unlike its parallel brothers, had a name rather than a number because it fell thirteenth off Wilshire Boulevard. Squat and gray it crouched between a dress wholesaler and an auto parts complex, like an animal hunched over food. On the grass verge out front a bunch of kids were doing something unpleasant to a dog.

  Ryan didn’t use the main entrance; instead he took me around the side of the building and down a concrete ramp to where the ambulances dropped their cargo. Into the basement.

  The place where they kept the bodies looked like a public toilet, all white tiles and hard strip lighting. Rows of square, stainless-steel panels with handles like old-fashioned refrigerators ran three high down opposing walls. It was all pretty much cold and unwelcoming, but I guess the meat on the shelves didn’t care.

  The room was empty, Ryan whistled for the help. I closed my eyes and listened to fluid move in pipes that crossed the ceiling. Poison being sucked out of dead people behind the panels, leaving them clean and de-stressed at last? There were other sounds too—the ticking of whatever gigantic refrigeration system stopped things going off down there, air blowing through a vent, a game-show-tuned TV blatting away through an open doorway at the end of the room.

  A fat Japanese guy carrying a clipboard and a can of Diet Pepsi ambled out to meet us looking back over his shoulder like he was missing a Mars landing. He wore glasses and his grubby white lab coat had a piece of dried noodle stuck to it. His black hair was plastered back in a Jack Lord style with something that made it shine.

  “BMW three series and a round trip to Florida for a family of four. Some people have all the luck. Never me. How you doing, Ryan?” He flicked a look at me. “This business today?”

  Ryan’s voice was hard, like he was steeling himself for something.

  “The girl they found in the park. Wednesday.”

  The Japanese face softened up and went sickly genuine. He made a small, nod-of-the-head kind of bow to me.

  “Oh, so sorry. You here to identify? Nobody figured, so she already autopsied.”

  “Jackie’s a tough guy, he can take it. Bring her out.”

  We all walked to a wall and the Japanese guy jerked a handle, swung open one of the steel panels, and rolled out a long drawer. TV hadn’t got it quite right. I’d been expecting the buffer of a white sheet, maybe just a peek at her face. What I got was a naked, uncovered Karen lying on something that looked like a thin air mattress with the edges turned up—to stop any collected body fluids leaking into the drawer.

  I glanced across at Ryan. His face had lost what little color it had and his breathing was strained.

  Karen looked different than she had in the park. She looked wor
se. Like I thought I’d seen, part of her left side had been removed—a curving strip a few inches wide that ran from the cut on the front of her belly to halfway around her back. The doctors had extended the main wound on her belly up into her chest to perform the postmortem. They’d also cut away the back of her head. I could tell because it lay too deep in the rubber of the mattress. As a result, the skin on her face was loose and her features were blurred. She wasn’t beautiful anymore, but it was her all right. The anchor points of the matrix were still there—the short blond hair, the pale anti-Californian skin, the pierced nipples and navel. Only now they looked like they’d been stuck on a side of beef, some sort of bizarre decoration that had lost its significance.

  I wondered, as Ryan and I stepped closer to the drawer, if proximity would release the emotions that had seemed so completely cauterized that night in the park. After all, a year together should have left me with at least some memories worth cherishing. But looking at that life-sized monster doll, all the times we’d spent together, all the fucking and the fighting, felt like a movie about someone else.

  She’d been cleaned with something antiseptic and the hospital stink masked whatever personal odor there might have been. I longed for a living smell, some olfactory mnemonic of close times—stale shit, dried piss, sweat, anything. The musk of her cunt would have been best. But it was all gone.

  I pressed a fingertip into the side of her breast. When I took it away the flesh was slow returning to shape. Ryan was staring at me. I didn’t know why he was acting so jitzed, but when our eyes locked I knew I was in deep shit. Because his had tears in them.

  The orderly shifted his bulk from one foot to the other, picking up on the tension.

  “She a pretty girl, this one. Must have looked very nice before this.”

  Ryan snapped out of the look of death he was giving me, dragged himself back to real time, and scanned the body.

  “Yeah, she was pretty all right.”

  When he started running his fingers gently over her pussy I thought the orderly would leap in, or at least shout some kind of outrage, but it didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest. Ryan carried on for a while, looking sadly at her face all the time. The orderly just watched. And I stood there and felt vaguely jealous, wishing I could touch her dead cunt too.

  Ryan took his hand away.

  “You’re quiet, Jackie. I brought Kleenex, you know.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Word at the station says someone cut out everything she had inside.”

  The Japanese guy flipped through some papers on his clipboard and started reading.

  “Twenty-three-centimeter vertical incision of a surgical nature. Intersecting lateral incision above the mons of eighteen centimeters. Excision of left abdominal wall between hip and lower ribs. Area of skin approximately eight centimeters square missing from the right shoulder blade. No other cuts or abrasions. All internal organs, except heart and lungs, removed.”

  “Sounds thorough, wouldn’t you say, Jackie? Let’s take a look.”

  Ryan nodded and the orderly wedged his things between Karen’s legs and peeled open the part of her wound that hung together above the hole in her side. The edges of the cuts were smooth and in cross section they carried the same striations of white fat and red muscle as meat in a butcher’s shop.

  “See?”

  He looked at me like I might not understand.

  “See? Empty.”

  It was true. Below the last rib there was very little left—no blue-gray pulp of intestines, no sticky lumps of offal, not even a pool of collected glit. Under the hard lights, a butterfly of pelvic bone shone whitely beneath a thin layer of tissue. There was no blood, everything was clean.

  Gutted like a fish and hosed out.

  Ryan shouldered the orderly out of the way, took hold of one of her arms, and pulled it across her body until she lifted enough for me to see her shoulder blade. It looked like someone had used a cheese-slice on her. A rough patch of skin was missing, right where her tattoo had been.

  The Japanese guy looked back toward the room where his TV waited.

  “Listen, guys, I got things to do. You wanna see anyone else?”

  Ryan shook his head.

  “Okay. Shut her up when you go. Make sure the handle clicks, or could get smelly.”

  He touched hands with Ryan and took his drink and clipboard out of the room, back to the TV noise. I heard him flipping channels, then things stabilized on Pamela Anderson’s voice. His Pepsi can had left a blotch of moisture on one of Karen’s thighs.

  I knew it was cinematically mandated that I show some sort of grief, so I hung my head and tried to look like I was struggling manfully with my emotions. Until Ryan told me not to bother, and we left.

  Out in the car we sat in silence while Ryan wheezed and sweated and eventually put a pill under his tongue. It worked so fast it must have been nitro. When he had himself fixed he slid his arm around my shoulders and squeezed the side of my neck.

  “What was today’s lesson? C’mon, I know you were paying attention. No? It was about me telling you something.”

  “Obviously that you found Karen and she’s dead.”

  “Oh, I didn’t need to tell you the dead part. You already knew.”

  I tried to protest, but he cut me off.

  “The way I feel right now it’d be safer not to shit me. Today’s lesson was about me telling you that I know.”

  “Know what?”

  Ryan took a breath, held it in, then let it out like he didn’t want it to get away from him.

  “With me, Jackie, trying to see how far you can push things ain’t something you want to do.”

  He took his arm away and put the key in the ignition. I was sitting next to a frightening man and I was starting to get frightened.

  He dropped me at the corner of Santa Monica and Lincoln. We hadn’t spoken during the drive, but as I was getting out of the car he stopped me.

  “Jackie, the part of her shoulder that was fucked up, did she have a mark there? Something distinctive that might have been cut away for a reason?”

  It was a simple question. The answer was yes, that was where she’d had an Egyptian scarab inked into her skin. But I wasn’t going to tell Ryan that. He was too fucking odd. The pussy-stroking scene wasn’t any kind of forensic procedure I’d ever heard about.

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Sure about that, now?”

  “I think I’d know.”

  “Yeah, Jackie, you’d know.”

  He pulled away from the curb and left me standing there feeling like I should have said something different.

  I walked downhill to look at the sea. There were white-caps out beyond the breakers and the water looked uneasy. Even so, it seemed to me that underneath those waves the world would be a whole lot more peaceful than here on dry land. I spent a long time staring at them, then I took a cab back to Venice.

  The phone was ringing when I got in—Donut Haven wanting to know when I’d be back at work, sympathetically informing me that if it was any later than tomorrow I’d be fired. I broke the connection without answering. I wasn’t going back, ever. The rent was paid till the end of the month, and the month after that was a problem I’d worry about later.

  I ran a tape I’d rented on the way back—Jennifer Jason Leigh in Rush. I felt like watching cops get fucked up.

  Chapter Five

  Days passed. I’m not sure how many, they were all pretty much the same. Beer, junk food, pills. Sprawled on the bed, shades down but the windows open for air. I sweated and didn’t wash. I wanted to be dirty. I wanted to be caked in filth.

  In the kitchenette things rotted.

  Crushed cigarette packs and empty beer cans made walking around the place hazardous. But that was okay because I didn’t do it much. The bathroom thing was a drag, so mostly I leaned over the edge of the bed and pissed in a bottle. Once I took a shit in a plastic bag.

  The TV ran eighteen
hours a day, from the moment I could coordinate sufficiently to thumb the button in the morning, until the daily buildup of tranq and booze reached a level that interfered with vision.

  A couple of times, when it was dark and quiet, I went outside to check the car. Once, I got in and drank a beer and listened to the radio.

  I guess fugueing out this way was a reaction to something. Maybe a shrink could tell you. I put it down to my newly hatched rejection of the mainstream. And to something else a lot simpler to understand—fear. Fear that Karen’s death might bleed forward in time and fuck me up.

  I was already the object of Ryan’s attention. I had no idea where the whacko play at the morgue was going to lead, but even a best-case scenario was something I could do without. And I kept thinking about Karen’s tattoo. It hadn’t meant anything to me when she’d had it done. She’d come home with it one day a few months back, I’d had a look, made the usual comments, and that was that. She told me she’d had it done with a friend. What did I care? It was just another piece of body decoration.

  So it would have been easy enough to tell Ryan what had been on the missing square of skin. It would have been, so to speak, no skin off my nose. Just like I could have told him she’d recently had her kidney removed.

  But I hadn’t. And despite my gnawing three A.M. fears, I wasn’t going to. I was out of that world now. Out of the world where sniveling Joe Citizen did his best to be a good boy.

  Plus, as with already knowing she was dead, letting on about the other things now would only make me look more suspicious.

  * * *

  A market on Lincoln, evening coming down. I was out of the apartment for the first time in four days and I had no feeling about it. The paranoia I’d experienced on Main the night I stocked up at the Korean store had been replaced by a numbed insularity. I moved, but I didn’t feel the air against my skin. I heard the sounds of traffic and people, but they were filtered through some muting device that rendered them meaningless. The colors and angles and planes of the surrounding buildings were indecipherable. None of this bothered me. I wanted booze and food, I wasn’t thinking about much else.