Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  “You don’t present as I expected.”

  “Well, I could dress like a proper bodyguard, but that would just tell the world you’re someone worth robbing. Better if I look like no one in particular. They send us to classes to learn how to do that—the costume helps, but, if you’ll forgive my boasting, I can look like a nobody even in an excellent suit.” He sighs. “You sign up to be a soldier and end up doing amateur theatricals. It’s the story of my life.”

  Silence, for a while, as he slouches along beside her, for all the world like a sullen teenager, until, peering down at her from under his hood, he says, “I don’t mean to pry, but the précis was light on detail. May I ask if we’re expecting some particular kind of trouble?”

  “Kidnap,” she says. “I think there may have been an attempt,” and tells him what happened, disguising her fear.

  “That’s probably manageable,” he says. “And it might make you feel a little better to know that, while I’m here, I’ll fight to the last for you. There’s no true security in this world, but I’ll do everything in my power for you, and if things go bad and we’re going to die, then I’ll stand in front of you and die first.” He says this casually, like he’s explaining company policy, but his tacit conviction is more of a comfort than she’d have expected and in fact there are tears in her eyes.

  The silence is benign now, and she realizes that the tension was in her alone, that he’s comfortable being quiet with his principal. “How did you come by this level of commitment?” she asks.

  “Parthenon is very selective,” he says. “I’m under contract not to reveal the specifics, but early on in the selection process they test your dedication in the most revealing ways. And then, it’s a way of dealing with fear. We all have to die sometime, and I’ve chosen to put aside fear in the name of service. It seems like the only way to live with equanimity.”

  “You sound like a samurai.”

  “The job does require dedication, and a level of comfort with the nearness of death, but actually being a samurai? My god. With all the repression and the social rules and the obsession with caste it sounds even worse than being English.”

  Blocks later she has the feeling there’s something he’s wanted to say for a while and then he says, “Do you know who made the kidnap attempt, or do you think it was just speculators?”

  “I have no idea,” she says, then thinks of Cromwell, the strangeness around that gig, his latest attentions.

  “I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but it seems like you might have someone in mind,” he says. He seems to look for words, then says, “It’s evident that you’re a decent person, and you might not believe the viciousness you can find in the world. Even the gentlest people are sometimes obliged to take aggressive steps. I note that we will never have any interest in, or awareness of, your private business, beyond the minimum required to do the job, and that after the job’s done we forget everything, forever. I also note that we deal in definitive solutions, the details of which needn’t concern you.”

  It takes her a moment to realize that he’s offering to find her persecutors and kill them. “Wouldn’t that put you at risk?” she asks.

  “It’s a dangerous business. But if you mean legal risk, well, that can be finessed, especially if one is careful to respect the structure of things. But we’re certainly not going to let a client’s interests suffer because of a narrow-minded adherence to the letter of the law.” She’s surprised to find herself already inclining toward the view that the illegality of killing for hire is a burdensome technicality.

  “I honestly don’t know what’s happening. Even if anything’s happening. Actually, it doesn’t matter—the only person I have in mind is rich, like private-army rich. He’s out of my weight class in every way.”

  “This very rich person. Does he know you suspect him?”

  Thinks of the information seized from the reflections in his glasses. “I’d imagine not.”

  “Well, it would be expensive, taking care of that for you, but in these matters initiative is everything. You’d just get the one shot, but that’s often enough. Like I said, there’s no such thing as true security.”

  It’s heady—discreditably so—to think she has only to give the word and her enemy will be annihilated. (But of course Cromwell might not be her enemy, might in fact just be an exceptionally generous and possibly somewhat smitten client—all she knows for certain is that the coordinates from his laptop led her to the glyphs on the wall of the tunnel underground, and that there might possibly have been a kidnap attempt, though it might have been nothing, and if it was something might not have been him.) She says, “Let me get back to you on that.”

  Outside the Doric the doorman is dressed like some kind of Renaissance courtier, a monocle in one eye, and he regards them blankly for a moment until, presumably, the monocle’s facial recognition software identifies her as a guest, at which the massive glass doors swing open and the doorman ushers her in.

  The soldier pushes back his hood; his hair is copper in the foyer’s light. He’s rolled up his sleeves and she sees a list of names tattooed on his left forearm, some Anglo, some Indian. It occurs to her to ask him up for, as they say, a drink, and twenty years ago she’d have done it, but now it seems too socially complex and like it might strain his sense of correctness and it’s probably a cliché for a girl (a girl?) to have a crush on her bodyguard and in any case she wants to have a nap and be alone and maybe read before her dinner at Fantôme.

  “I never got your name,” she says.

  He smiles with his eyes, kisses her hand, walks away.

  20

  Fundamental Things Never Really Change

  Waiting in the rain at the checkpoint into the favelas Kern worries that the soldiers will frisk him and find the money in his pocket—more money than he’s ever seen in one place before—but they just wave him through.

  Inside, he says, “Lares’ place isn’t far” to the ghost, though others may think he’s talking to himself, another of the favela’s mad ones.

  Everyone hurries through the rain which gives him an excuse to hurry with them. His tension, which had diminished in the city, has returned; he clenches his fists in the pockets of his jacket.

  The favela’s old men will shake their heads and fret about the drainage but he’s always loved the storms’ violence, the smell of wet concrete. The music of the water pouring from the ledges reminds him of the light well off his room, how in the monsoon it becomes a cistern, how he could hear its depth in the sound of rain hitting, a sound he’ll never hear again, though he could walk there in ten minutes. He tries to feel the force of that, but nothing comes, until he thinks of Kayla, though he’s sworn never to see her again, has made it his practice to keep her from his mind.

  A woman comes out of an alleyway, backlit, heavily pregnant, her soaked cotton shorts and tank top displaying her body’s metamorphosis. His first thought is that she, too, likes the rain and its cleanliness, but then he sees her staring eyes, her wide rictus grin, how she walks by without seeing him at all.

  He wonders how she managed to conceive, with her craziness all but palpable, and imagines a pack of boys running her down, their honor dissolved in the group’s euphoria. The image of her swollen breasts under the wet cloth stays with him, and he could do what the boys did, and no one would know, for she must be all alone, and he is afraid, then, for this impulse is someone else’s, and purely contemptible, and of course the ghost would know, and even if he is a predator—and he is, must be, and the world peopled only with victims—the noble, he reminds himself, do not prey on the weak. (In any case, she’d smell like cold, and despair, and as he pressed her down her black eyes would be windows onto nothing.)

  He stops, can’t bring himself to get moving again. He gathers his will and takes a few steps but his will fades, leaving him standing there, staring straight ahead. He thinks of Kayla, how she looked when she was sleeping, how she’d promised she’d always care for him. “Everythi
ng all right?” asks the ghost as he turns and heads for Red Cloud Street, where Kayla will be dancing in the Club Lazarus’s heat and shadows.

  * * *

  From a distance it looks like firelight flickering on the low cloud, and then Kern turns the corner into the glare of video. Thousands of screens are embedded in the walls, the lowest over the bars’ awnings, the highest lost in the rain, their light reflected in the puddles, the windows, the wet hair of passersby, and as he stares up into the screens the world falls away, leaving him floating among abstract planes of shifting light, a dream saccading without intent, but then the images, which have been form purely, resolve into the shapes of the bodies of women. They’re beautiful, the women, though their hair and makeup are dated (as are, more subtly, their breasts and musculature), because all the video is from archives of old porn, and he wonders why anyone bothers to make more, since the fundamental things never really change.

  A trio of marines jostle past, splashing water on his pants, bringing him back to the roar of the street’s arcades, the massage parlors’ jangling musics, the rain’s drumming. They’re out of uniform, but he knows them by their haircuts, their muscular bulk, and an aura that’s both lethal and puppyish. One of them calls back to him in a child’s Spanish, to apologize, or perhaps to mock him, but is laughing so hard he can barely speak, and Kern sees that they’re very drunk. Their training is said to be severe, but whatever they may be in battle, for now they’re just foolish, and loud, shouting over each other in the street, and their swagger reminds him to go quietly through the world. They’re the ones who die, mostly, in their country’s wars, they say, and he looks up again at all the ancient records of the beautiful, locked forever in their endless loops, and all these girls must be dead now, their ranked ghosts shining brightly overhead. He follows the marines into the crowd.

  Press and heat of bodies, smells of sweat, fried meat, beer, perfume and always the rain, all familiar, and in aggregate they feel like life itself. “Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s a terrible idea,” the ghost says. “Too many people, cameras, drones. You might as well be holding up a sign. You’re going to get your ass killed and I’m going to have to watch. Don’t mind me, though—I’ll just keep giving good advice while you throw your life away.” He ignores her, falls in behind a girl with vinyl boots buttoned to mid-thigh, tattooed serpents twining around her wrists and makeup done in black diagonals; he doesn’t know what her look is trying to say, but he suspects that she’s an artist, like so many who live on the favela’s periphery, and he knows that she’s a stripper, though he couldn’t say how he knows it, it’s just something he learned to recognize when he was with Kayla, and then, as though to confirm his intuition, the girl in the vinyl boots goes through the neon-outlined doors of Club Lazarus, where Kayla probably still works.

  A sense of threat puts him on the balls of his feet but it’s just the club’s bouncer, bald, massively built and frowning down at him; strong, but the type who thinks all the muscle will make him invincible—his face and his legs will be his weak points—and after a tenth of a second Kern is morally certain that his confidence is shallow—hit him once or twice and he’ll crumble.

  “Stop,” says the bouncer, holding out an open palm, trying to say it like a cop would. “If you’ve got money, let’s see it.” Kern smiles inwardly. “Otherwise, we’re full up.” There’s a tattoo on his palm, elaborate gothic lettering spelling Family.

  Then the bouncer’s face clears, and, amazed, he says, “I know you! You’re a fighter, right? I’ve seen you fight a dozen times. You move like the mantis, brother—you’re hard core. I should have recognized a warrior of your stature.” It’s kind of a joke but he also means it and Kern doesn’t know what to say so he says, “What’s that on your hands?”

  Gentle now, the bouncer shows his palm, saying, “This is my family,” and showing the other, equally tattooed palm, “and this is my pride. If I’m going to die I only have to close my hands and I can hold on to both of them.” The bouncer realizes something and there’s a moment of awkward silence which he tries to cover with a false heartiness, saying, “Oh, that’s right, Kayla’s your girl, isn’t she? Well, she’s working tonight, so why don’t you go on in.”

  A grim place during the day, the Lazarus at night is smoke and shadow and a few hot beams of light, and the music pulses through him. It feels a little like a dream, but of course it’s meant to—Kayla had explained how it’s essentially a machine for getting men to pay for worthless things. Blue light plays over the girl on the stage and as his eyes adjust he sees that the darkened room has more gangsters than usual, and he wonders if the house figures they’ll spend whatever they have on booze and girls, and never mind the fighting, or if that’s just how things are going now. He stands against the wall, out of the way, sees the waitress take him in, waver, dismiss him. On stage, the dancer, blinded, stares out across the tables and smiles emptily—he remembers that Kayla said they can’t see a damned thing, how it’s a kind of privacy. In the hard light he can see every hair and mole on her body, which, in its detail, is somehow inhuman, less like flesh than a map, and then the song ends and Kayla totters onto the stage in just her heels.

  She looks so thin. The motion of her hips is apparently ecstatic but he knows she’s bored and trying not to show it. He’s held those hips, seen that face transported, as someone has held all of them, he supposes, and in fact it’s nothing special—there were boys before him and there’ll have been boys since. In the blue glare she’s almost an abstraction, her flesh become spirit like the women on the screens, but then the spotlights narrow and find her tattoos of angels and serpents and houses burning down—she never would explain them, but had said they were a mirror of her life.

  * * *

  He waits in the alley by the staff door. “I’m guessing this is your girlfriend,” the ghost says. “Maybe someone you want to say goodbye to. I already told you how dumb this is so be sure she’s worth dying for.”

  He says nothing, hunching his shoulders as the rain runs down his neck. The ghost says, “Not that it’s really my business, but I knew a lot of girls like that in LA. Hearts of gold, supposedly, and all saving up for college, but from what I saw they’re mostly just wrapped up in their pain. Little honor, less sense, no thought for the future. But I’m sure this one is different.”

  “So how did you get locked up in a house?” he asks, trying to remember how long Kayla’s shifts are. He’s relieved that she hasn’t moved away—she used to say that the city was claustrophobic, that she’d come there to be free but it was suffocating her, that if she could ever get the money together she’d go north, maybe learn to breathe again. This had worried him, when they were together, until he’d realized that she quickly spent whatever she got, managing somehow to be even poorer than he was.

  “It’s a long story,” she says, and then falls silent, so he says, “Okay, what were you doing in LA in the first place?”

  “Starving, mostly. Trying to get a career worth advancing. Not a good time, though in retrospect I had a certain freedom. I stayed away from the drugs, but I hardly remember it at all.”

  “Tell me,” he says, so she won’t ask him questions.

  “I didn’t know a soul when I got there. I slept in my car the first month and washed up in the showers at the beach. I knew girls who had gone there before me but after a few emails they always vanished, even though I spent hours looking for them on the web. I met a lot of girls who’d gone there to be actresses but most were just pretty, with no skills at all, and they mostly ended up doing sex work, or worse—the violence was just getting bad, then, and people hadn’t gotten cautious. The ones who weren’t awful mostly had some kind of conservatory training, which I sure didn’t, but it didn’t matter, because I’d always had a talent for being someone else. When I had nowhere to go, which was most days, I’d go where people were, the bars and promenades and the lobbies of hotels, and sit there nursing a vodka, watching people, letting them blee
d into me.

  “It was just a trick of being open, like leaving a blank space inside me for their essences to fill. And once I had them I could impersonate them, in fact I almost had to, like what I’d seen had to work itself out. I tried to fool people, being someone I wasn’t, even when I didn’t look the part at all, and it almost always worked, because people would find a reason to let it work. They said it was spooky, like watching a shape-shifter. It wasn’t a good time. The only thing that made me happy was being someone else.”

  “Did you get anywhere?”

  “No. At least not at first. It was maddening. Part of it’s the place. At night you can see the lights in the big houses in the hills, and the life you want is right there, but might as well be in another country, and the people who have what you want are staring down from all the billboards. You keep trying, chasing down auditions in dismal industrial parks on the fringes of the city, and promises are made but every opening is illusory and their words have no substance. I got an agent, for a while, but he couldn’t do anything for me, or for anyone, in fact he was barely an agent at all, was trying to break in as hard as I was. His stock in trade was the impression of reality. There are real agents, but they don’t take calls or email from outsiders, and I’d never met one, or even met anyone who had, and it started to seem like they were just part of the mythology. It was like two cities, one within the other, and no bridge between them, but then I started to get little parts—third-tier Danish phone games and unfunded pilots for direct-to-web series—and I realized that in fact the cities are concentric, and innumerable, and as you advance inward from the periphery you get no closer to the core, and as hard as you try you always end up back in the bars, pretending to look at your phone while the essences accumulate.”